I always tell people murderers are not born, they're bred.
And when we teach our kids by not teaching them, they're gonna,
they're gonna revert to the lowest mean, which is violence.
Doug Noel founded the Prison of Peace Project.
Noel teaches hardcore inmates how to deescalate an angry emotional person
in 90 seconds or less.
It's a skill that we could all benefit from learning in this era of violence.
Hello, this is Robert Riggs, taking the Inside the Crime Scene tape.
In this episode of the True Crime Reporter podcast.
Besides telling interesting crime stories,
it is also my mission to educate unless you've been living under a rock.
You know, we live in an epidemic of violence, school shootings,
mass shootings at malls and public places, road rage, murders,
senseless violent acts,
and as I've reported outlaw motorcycle gangs shooting each other in
broad daylight on interstate highways.
Some days I think the world has gone crazy.
Doug Noel is here to explain the causes and offer a solution that's working in
prisons.
The California lawyer felt a calling in 2010 to create the Prison of Peace
Project at the Valley State Prison for women in Cilla, California,
the largest women's prison in the world. Here's my interview, Doug Noll.
Doug Noel, from your experience,
give us an impression or try to understanding of why there is so
much anger in society these days of be it road rage,
you name it.
Well, Robert, I think there are, uh,
a number of significant factors that are causing all of this.
The first is that we have politicians who are getting elected based
on fear, and by stirring up anger,
by getting people so enraged at each other that they collect votes and money.
We don't have many politicians who are providing role models for how to handle
disagreements.
And so people are going to be naturally inclined to follow people who lead them
into the darkness because they feel good in the darkness. So that's number one.
Number two, people, and I think the pandemic accelerated this have learned,
have lost the ability to learn how to listen to each other.
And when we stop listening to each other, we st we start hating each other.
So that's a huge problem. Three,
I think that our educational system has gone into serious decline over the last
three decades, and frankly,
people just are not as well educated as they were 30 years ago.
And when there is ignorance,
there tends to be a reversion in thinking and discerning truth from
fal and tending to go tribal.
So I think all of these factors combined have led to this
polarization and anger and rage that we're now witnessing.
I see people, I've in Dallas, but it's going around the country,
getting out in traffic over some of the slightest, um,
thing and having gunfights, right?
It's something you've only expected in the past that gang bangers might do in
trafficking.
Right? And what's going on is as a,
as a result of all of these three factors that I'm talking about,
people have a reduced sense of identity.
And when they feel that their identity is threatened or disrespected
and they don't have good emotional competency,
they're going to react like six year olds.
The problem is that now they have weapons and
regardless of your stance on weapons, human beings,
I've got a long talk about this, but human,
human beings used to not be able to kill each other. I mean,
a thousand years ago, or uh, say 10,000 years ago,
if you wanted to kill somebody,
you had to sneak up on 'em while they were asleep and smash 'em with a rock.
That took a lot of work. And so human beings never evolved.
The biological restraint that every other species on the planet has,
there is very little intra species killing going on.
Wolves don't kill wolves. Coyotes don't kill coyotes.
Only humans kill humans. And part of that is evolutionary biology.
We don't have fangs. We don't have claws. We,
so we never developed the biological restraints that exist with other species
of animals. And as we, our, we, our technology developed,
we have found really more and more ways to kill each other,
more efficiently.
And there's no biological restraint that keeps us from doing that unless they're
societal restraints. And right now with the,
with the polarization and politics, basically the guardrails have come off.
And so people think that it's okay to act out and to to succumb to their
rage and basically kill each other.
You know, there's this phrase that I, I've seen,
it seems like it's caught fire in the vernacular of you disrespected me.
My wife is a school teacher. She hears it constantly,
particularly from the boys at the middle school level.
Mm-hmm. .
That's something I used to kind of just hear in prison. Where,
how has this exploded?
Well, like I said,
I think that it's a combination of no role models for people to follow
low educational levels that people aren't being taught well in school.
And so they tend to be ignorant and people are not listening to each other.
And you couple that with
no tools to handle conflict because they can't listen and they haven't learned
how to negotiate and they haven't learned how to deal with their differences.
They're gonna revert back to primal behavioral programming, which is violence.
And because there's no limitation on the amount of violence that we can impose
on each other, people get killed and they get,
kids get fed of all of this violence all the time on the internet and through
the media and through film. And so they be,
begin to believe that the only solution to a inter interpersonal problem or a
conflict is through violence. And that's what they learn.
I always tell people, murderers are not born, they're bred.
And when we teach our kids by not teaching them, they're gonna,
they're gonna revert to the lowest mean, which is violence.
And you're trying to teach this in the prison system where, you know,
my experience has been in, in Texas in the past, it,
it could be a very violent, violent place if you didn't keep 'em separated.
What are, what are you, what are you teaching there that's working.
In the Prison of Peace Project, which is now around the world? We teach
long-term and life inmates how to become peacemakers and mediators
to stop prison violence.
And we do this to a very rigorous curriculum that my co-founder,
loyal Coffer and I have developed over now it's going on 14 years
based on our experience as professional peacemakers and mediators
and our study of human conflict.
And we have successfully delo deployed this program across the United States,
primarily in California, but also in other states and in Europe.
And as long as we have the support of the prison authorities,
we have seen dramatic decreases in yard violence on the
yards where we have taught prison of peace.
And the very first skill that we teach is a listening skill that allows you
to, to calm any angry person in 90 seconds or less.
That's the foundation of our program. Alright, well,
the story is that I'm a lawyer. I was a hardcore trial lawyer,
civil trial lawyer, not criminal lawyer, civil trial lawyer for 22 years.
Through a series of events that I won't bore you with,
I decided that I couldn't be a trial lawyer anymore,
and I went back to school and earned my master's degree in peacemaking and
complex studies. And I left the practice of law in 2000 to become a peacemaker.
One of the things that I did not learn was how to call an angry person. And,
but I had been studying neuroscience for years because I understood that all
conflict and peace originates in the human brain.
So I was in a very difficult conflict in 2005,
and I had no idea how to help these people get outta their conflict and find
peace. And the thought came to me, it was really an epiphany,
listen to the emotions,
and when I have them start listening to the emotions of each other and not their
words, it,
it was miraculous within a couple of hours,
they had not only settled the case, this happened to be a divorce couple.
They got out,
they got up and left the room holding hands and having lunch with each other.
And at the beginning of the process, if there had been knives on the table,
there would've been blood on the floor, literally. So I knew what I'd done,
I couldn't believe it. I started testing it in other conflicts,
and I got the same results. Then in 2007, Matthew Lieberman,
a neuroscientist at U C L A,
released a brain scanning study that showed what happens in the brain when you
engage in this process called ethic labeling.
And what his brain scanning studies show is when you label somebody's emotions,
when you tell them actually what they are feeling,
the emotional centers of the brain are inhibited. And at the same time,
the executive function of the brain in the right ventral lateral prefrontal
cortex is activated.
And the process literally takes 90 seconds and you can take any
raging in insanely mad person and calm them down in a
minute and a half.
And once I had the science to explain the experience that I I had,
I started refining the skills until is where it is today.
And in fact, the, the acid test is what we in the President Peace Project,
as I said,
the foundational skill we teach our inmates on the very first day of the program
is how to listen to and reflect somebody else's emotions. And it's very simple.
Ignore the words, read the emotions,
reflect back the emotions with a use statement. When you master that skill,
you will never have a fight or argument again in your life,
no matter who you are,
whether you're a convicted murderer or just person out on the street.
Are there physical cues they're trying to, to read?
Can you enlighten me a little more here?
The first thing you wanna do is ignore the words,
because if you listen to the words, you're going to get triggered.
So we don't wanna get triggered when somebody's spitting it in our face
screaming at us. So we just, just make it white noise.
Then the second step is to learn how to read emotions.
And our brains are hardwired to do this through evolu.
There's a whole set of information around evolutionary biology,
about how we develop the ability to read emotions.
94% of all human communication is nonverbal only,
only 6%, 7% is involving words.
So we can afford to not listen to the words for 90 seconds
and just listen to the emotions.
And there's a technique for learning how to do that.
And then we reflect the emotional experience that the person is having
by simply telling them what they're feeling. So I would say, Robert, man,
you are really pissed off. You're angry, you're frustrated,
you feel completely disrespected. You feel ignored and not heard.
You feel like you're being treated unfairly,
and you're completely unappreciated and unsupported,
and you're worried and concerned and anxious,
and you're sad because nobody's connecting to you and you feel unhappy and
upset. And Robert,
you feel really abandoned and all alone and rejected and completely betrayed,
and you feel unloved and unlovable.
Just doing that causes the emotional centers of the brain to inhibit
and the right event, lateral prefrontal cortex to activate.
You'll get four autonomic responses.
You're gonna be looking for a nodding of the head yes, up and down,
A verbal response like yeah, a dropping of the shoulders and a sigh of relief,
all involuntary unconscious relaxation responses that show that the brain is
com being completely calmed.
And then that point in time you can engage in whatever you need to engage in.
Maybe it's problem solving, maybe it's negotiation, maybe it's nothing at all.
Maybe it's apology. It really depends on the context and the circumstance.
But at that point in time, that person feels deeply listened to and validated.
I call it listening another person into existence. And we have watched,
we have, well, not watched, we have heard stories of our students,
incarcerated students stopping gang rights in violent prisons using
these skills. Extremely powerful. I'll also say this, of the 800,
we have 800 of our incarcerated students who have been released on parole in
California in the last 14 years. Not one of them is re-offended,
zero recidivism. And the reason is,
when you learn these skills, you change who you are as a human being.
One of the things I've noticed in my time inside prison talking to inmates was
there was many of, they're missing a cognitive skills.
They don't even seem to be aware that there's a consequence for their actions.
Do you address this kind of thing as well?
We do, but we're very careful not to judge or criticize
or condemn our students. In fact,
in many cases we don't even know why they're in prison. We,
and we really don't wanna know, right? We just take the people where they're at,
they learn themselves the skills,
the cognitive skills that allow them to change and transform as human beings.
Because one of the one in the more advanced training,
one of the things that we talk about is how do you morally reengage somebody
who's morally disengaged? And that come,
that came out of a chapter in my third book, lucid Peace,
where I talk about how do you mediate evil?
So when we teach them that and we teach them self-reflection,
and we teach them how to emotionally self-regulate all part of the training we
engage in,
they go through a growth process and they come to realize all of the problems
that they had in their past lives that led them into prison in the first place.
There's not one person who's in prison who is not deeply emotionally abused.
And they start recognizing that, and they get,
and as they recognize it on their own, they start then processing it.
And then as they become peacemakers and mediators,
they start seeing the same behaviors and patterns in their peers
on a prison yard.
And now they have the tools to start addressing it and helping other people
resolve conflict without violence. And that changes them inside themselves.
You're teaching kind of face-to-face skills. What about when people are in cars,
something is with that barrier between them and they're reacting.
I mean, I, I tell my friends, look, practice stoicism,
you know, just ignore it. just, it really is so small,
somebody cut you off. So what.
So what happens when we're cut off is that that can be an
emotional trigger.
And the emotional trigger was programmed into us probably in childhood,
probably by being not well connected to our parents being disrespected.
And so our knee-jerk reaction is rage because that's a protective
mechanism we learned as children.
And if we don't take the time to recognize our
triggers and get rid of them reprogram ourselves, then we're,
we're totally at the mercy of our unconscious
scripts that were developed by us to protect us in childhood.
But we're never unpro deprogrammed in adulthood,
and now we're adults and we have some agency and
we're just,
we're basically walking time bombs unless we take the time to
learn how to reprogram ourselves.
One of the things we do with our incarcerated students is we spend a whole day
teaching them about triggers and how to deprogram their own triggers so that
we're, they're, when they're mediating a an intense conflict,
they don't get sucked into the conflict vortex. They can remain out of it calm,
cool, and compassionate.
And they can also understand why the conflict arose in the first place,
because they can see the triggering effects of various behaviors that happen
not only in prison, but outside of prison.
So it's a skill that has to be developed. And as I said earlier,
these skills are not taught.
Educators in fact are completely uninterested in teaching these skills.
And these skills are not taught in families because families don't know what
they're doing. Uh,
there was a great psychologist and therapist back in the 1970s
and early eighties, a woman by the name of Virginia Satir,
very famous in her time, and she, she made the quote,
94% of all families are emotionally dysfunctional.
And then somebody on her heels said, and the other 6% are lying.
And it is true. Our families are emotionally dysfunctional.
And so part of the problem we have is that we have this idea of the nuclear
family and everything wholly comes outta the family when in fact,
nothing holy comes out of the family.
Most families abuse their children, they don't even know they're doing it.
And they create this vicious intergenerational cycle of,
from the extreme with people who end up in prison to just being ordinarily
dysfunctional. And in between the, the kind of things we see with road rage,
that's all based on childhood programming that occurs because parents themselves
are emotionally incompetent. Not that they're at fault for that,
it's just they were never trained any better than their parents.
And they pass on the same thing generation to generation.
And we can break the cycle.
And so it's not just a behavior, it's suddenly emerges in adulthood.
It's been cooking and percolating.
That's right. And it's,
it's aggravated when you've got open carry laws and people can be in their truck
or their car and pull a pistol off the seat and p take it and shoot somebody on
impulse,
you have low impulse control because you're not well educated because you
haven't developed yourself emotionally.
You're emotionally incompetent and you have the ability to act on impulse with
violence. You pull the gun up and shoot somebody.
And that's how we get to where we are today.
You know, I know, uh, criminal prosecutors here that they can carry,
but they don't because they're like, you know,
I don't want something in traffic or risk temper or something. So they don't.
Well, prosecutors are well educated people. They're lawyers and, but that,
that's not like everybody else. I mean,
imagine somebody who's got barely has a high school education and didn't even do
well in high school, has got us a,
a weak male identity because they're kind of going nowhere with their lives
and they bolster their identity by being macho and masculine.
And they gotta prove themselves all the time that they're tough and mean,
and they're actually not tough and mean they're actually weak and they don't
have any strong skills.
So that gun there is the way that they can prove to everybody else that, look,
don't mess with me, or I'll shoo you. And that's,
that's a mentality that's growing and growing and growing and it's sick and it's
wrong. And it's a complete failure of our society and a complete failure of our
political system and a complete failure of our educational system
Biologically,
we are not prepared to inhibit our own worst impulses.
And without gun control,
we will exercise no impulse control and start shooting people.
And that's why you're seeing all of this going on. There's no impulse control.
People aren't even, they're not thinking about the consequence.
Prison is not a deterrent to these people.
Crime is not a deterrent to these people. They're not even thinking about it.
They just get enraged. They pull up the gun, they shoot,
and of course they have to pay consequences if they're caught.
But I can guarantee you that a jail time or prison time was not
processing through their head when they got angry and acted out of impulse.
Do you see this psychology as a factor in the, uh,
we so many mass shootings today? Absolutely. Young men?
Well, the thing that's interesting about,
one of the things that's really interesting about the mass shootings is there's
been some really strong neuroscience at looking at the brains of
these mass murders with brain scans and PET scans,
all the different kinds of scanning technology,
and they all show the same kind of physiological
deficiencies. I mean,
it's amazing to look at the brain of a gunman,
young gunman, look at that brain compared to a normal brain,
and then compare the gunman's brain to other gunman's brains,
and they all show the same deficiencies.
So it is a function of brain deficiency. You can call it mental illness.
I don't like that term,
but there are physiological differences between mass murderers and other people.
And there are physiological similarities between mass murderers.
You see the same kind of,
the same kind of brain structure in mass murderers across the board,
which is really fascinating. So again, this is, this is all predictable.
And in fact,
there's science right now that allows us to predict whether a two year old can
potentially become a mass murderer in 10 or 15 years.
People don't want that science because, you know, obviously we don't,
we don't wanna be judging two year olds as to whether or not they're gonna be a
mass murder or not. But it's that predictable.
Well, it would tell us about how to nurture them.
Exactly. But again, I mean,
there are too many people in this country who think that that's socialism to go
in or, you know, the,
the government has no business in working with families that are dysfunctional
because they assume, they don't assume that's families are dysfunctional,
they assume families are functional when they're not.
Do you see this issue of among women as well?
Yes, but not as much. I mean, I've worked in the largest,
most violent women's prison in the world. That's, that's where we started.
And you, you see that it's the same behaviors. They're just not women and
for, for a lot of different reasons.
They're just not quite as many women who succumb to this kind of impulse
as men do. And I think that's cultural.
Well, where do you hope that the project will go? Well.
The prison project is gonna be expanding. We're already, like,
we're in 15 California prisons, prisons in Connecticut.
We've got 15 prisons in Greece, a prison in northern Italy.
We're gonna have a startup in Denmark over the pandemic.
We videotaped the entire curriculum, we filmed it with a Hollywood film crew,
so now we're able to subtitle it and offer the curriculum anywhere in the world.
This year we are testing the deployment of this
curriculum, uh,
in California prisons to figure out what are the best ways to deploy this.
In the next year. We're gonna be, um,
hoping that it will be deployed not only across the United States in
prisons in each jurisdiction, but also, uh, around the world.
And so we hope that, you know,
sometime in the not so distant future prison of peace will be a staple of,
of every penal institution.
And are you a nonprofit?
We're a nonprofit. 5 0 1 C three. Yes.
So you're not taking money from these states?
We get grants. Uh,
we're primarily funded in California by the Department of Re Rehabilitation and
Correct, uh, the department Corrections and Rehabilitation. We have had,
we've also been privately funded by some family, family funds. Mm-hmm.
, uh, our Connecticut project is funded by a family foundation,
significant amounts of money. And so, you know,
we've been able to do a lot with a little, and that's, that's how we operate.
Well, our prison system used to be called T D c,
Texas Department of Corrections. I have to tell you,
I really never saw anything rehabilitative or corrective about it.
Do you see any systems out there that are.
Not in the United States?
The United States has a weirdly strong desire for retributive
justice.
What's interesting about retributive justice is the victims never feel like
they're getting justice. Um, if you watch, for example, if you watch a,
a video interview of a victim survivor who has watched the execution
of a murderer who killed a family member, you will never see the mepi Skippy,
happy, joyous. It's always somber. And they'll always say platitudes like,
well, Carol can sleep in peace knowing that justice has been given by the
execution of this evil person.
But when the victim survivor is saying that they are not happy,
and there is no justice in retributive justice,
especially when the state is the victim state of Texas versus
state of California versus mm-hmm ,
the true victims never really get justice. So that's the first big problem.
The second is that unlike almost every other country in the world,
the United States has the death penalty and, and has life sentences.
I think in Europe, if I'm not mistaken,
the longest sentence that anybody could ever serve in Europe for any crime is 25
years. And there is no death sentence.
It's a completely different way of looking at the societal problem of crime.
And I think we we're long overdue for rethinking our approach to crime and
criminal behavior here in the United States.
I'll just say this for my conservative friends, I'm an independent,
I'm not Republican, I'm not Democrat,
but just so you can understand the magnitude of the problem here in California,
we spend as much money on prisons as we spend on our entire higher educational
system, 15 to $17 billion a year. Where's the sense in that.
What would justice look like for a victim taking your approach?
I, in my experience,
having mediated over 150 or 200 criminal cases between victims
and offenders,
what I have experienced is that when victims feel like they've been heard
and listened to,
and offenders have truly listened to the impact of their
offense and harm and injury on the victim,
that's when we begin to see healing occur.
And that's the only time I've seen people feel like they really
have had some justice. They've been heard, they've been listened to,
they've been dealt with respectfully, and their voice mattered.
That does not happen in the litigated retributive justice system.
Well, and you know,
we have changes in law here we're it's sentencing the victim's,
the victim's family can speak out, but it's usually full of anger. And frankly,
the the convicted the offenders got a who cares screw you of attitude
as well.
Well, that's right because, and the part of,
part of the problem with our system, I mean, it, it, it creates the,
our system creates a really interesting dichotomy or conflict because on the
one hand, to invoke constitutional rights, you have to say not guilty.
Now that forces the burden of proof onto the state to prove the crime beyond a
reasonable doubt. But at the same time, it forces an offender to lie.
And so now they are living this lie, I'm not guilty, I'm not guilty,
I'm not guilty. And, and so now they can't possibly take responsibility mm-hmm.
for a crime mm-hmm. because they've been told, say,
you're not guilty.
And I recognize the importance of our constitutional rights,
but I also recognize the social problem of not being allowed to take
accountability and, and,
and make reparations for a crime.
And it's a big problem and not an easy one to solve. I'm not gonna solve it.
Oh no. Personally,
I've always felt that the prison system is Texas is one giant
monument to failure of the education system here.
I would, I would agree with that.
And I would add that's also a failure of how we,
how we help families grow children.
You know, if we taught parents how to be emotional coaches for their children
and every parent learned how to listen to their children and learned how to
become an emotional coach for both themselves, the parents,
and also for their children, we wouldn't have prisons in 20 years.
What are the chances of this eventually being taught in,
in the public school system.
Right now? Slim next to zero?
And the reason for that is because our educational system is based on the myth
of rationality.
It's based on the idea that what separates us human beings from other species of
animals is rational thinking. And it's a myth.
There is no science to support that we are not rational beings. In fact,
there is no such thing as rationality.
I teach a graduate course at Pepperdine University called decision making under
stress and uncertainty.
And the first thing I ask my graduate students to do is define rationality.
And none of them can do it. And the reason is,
there is no definition of rationality that works, none, zero.
What neuroscience is teaching us is that we are emotional beings.
What separates us from all other species is emotions.
We are the only species on the planet with emotions.
No other, no other species have emotions. They have affect,
which is something different than emotion. All emotion is based on affect,
but only we have emotions. Every decision we make is an emotional decision.
And in fact,
that decision is made 750 milliseconds before we're even aware that we've made
the decision,
which is getting into some really interesting discussions around whether or not
we actually operate under free will. And there are many, many,
many neuroscientists who say, no, there is no such thing as free will.
So these are all really interesting concepts that have profound implications in
law and policy and government.
But the fact of the matter is that because educators are based on rational
thinking or so-called rational thinking,
and not on emotions and not on neuroscience, they're loathed to change.
And so they're not going to change.
How do you recommend that individual person in a situation kinda step back and
not let the emotions overtake them?
Learn how to label your own emotions. So before I labeled you,
Robert, if I were to sit and I am,
when we get into situations where we're going, we're triggered,
we immediately take a breath and say, well,
let me just give you an example and this is how I cured some of my triggers.
Imagine that you're in a parking lot and it's pouring rain and it's
December 24th and you've gotta run into the mall and grab one last gift.
And you've been waiting to get into this, a parking stall,
somebody pulls out and you're about to pull in.
And some guy in his big dually pickup truck with a big gun rack and guns on the
back pulls in in front of you. He sees you waiting there.
He knows you've been waiting,
but he pulls in and just takes the spot violating all social norms around
queuing and waiting and being patient and waiting your turn. Alright?
There are a couple of different ways that you can handle that.
One is to get really pissed off, but the other is to say,
God dang it, I am so angry and pissed off at this guy.
What a complete jerk. I feel completely disrespected.
I feel completely ignored.
I feel like I'm nothing in front of this guy and I'm really, really angry.
In fact,
I'm enraged and I'm anxious 'cause I gotta get in the store and it's
five o'clock on Christmas Eve and I gotta get home.
And so I'm feeling a lot of time pressure and I'm a
little embarrassed about all of this.
And I'm sad because this guy obviously must be living a miserable life
for him to have to hog in front of everybody else. He's clearly suffering.
So I can have compassion for him and it's okay that he took the spot because
he has a life of misery and I have life of joy.
Okay.
And that's how you do it just like that. Yeah.
Makes sense.
It works. I mean, I've got the neuroscience to prove it.
Well. I'm like,
it's not worth it getting out in a gun battle and ending up in jail either.
I know what jail, I know what prison looks like.
. It never is. Mm-hmm. , it never is.
But we need to do a better job of teaching people emotional self-control,
and that's not something we're talking about.
Can you recommend for the audience any books they can read for the lay person?
My.
Fourth book came out in 2017, Simon and Schuster.
It's called Deescalate,
how to Calm an Angry Person in 90 Seconds or Less.
You can get it on Amazon for 13 bucks. It's audio and printed.
I've seen it on the book stands and I never bought it. I'm sorry. Yeah,
but I am now.
That's Yeah, it's in five different languages. So if you don't speak English,
you can probably find a language that you can, can speak.
Well, I want my kids to read it and I need to get my,
my wife needs to get it in front of her students. That's right.
Because there is something going on out there that hasn't been going.
On. That's, that's right. If you, if people are interested in learning more,
I've got a lot of YouTube videos up.
But the one video that will really show you,
especially how to work with children is called How to Calm an Angry Child In 30
Seconds. And just put Google that,
how to Calm an Angry Child in 30 seconds.
And that little 10 minute video will show you everything you need to know. Okay.
About how to read and, and calm an angry child.
Doug. No, that's the last word.
Thank you so much for coming out and we'll put links to your book and resources
in the, uh, podcast. And feel free to reach out to us anytime. Thank.
You, Robert.
In closing, here's my reporter's recap and reflections.
A recurring theme in my past stories has been the impact of the lockdown on
people's emotions during the Covid Pandemic. Plus,
there's the loss of civility in American politics.
As you may know from a previous episode,
I worked as a congressional staffer in the early 1970s and later in the
1980s,
I covered the administration of President Ronald Reagan and Congress as a
reporter. Today,
those institutions look like an alien from outer space. To me,
you can't insult people and then expect them to vote for your legislation.
Politics used to be the art of compromise, but now it's a blood sport.
I can tell you this,
having worked on a defense committee with a top secret security clearance,
and as a reporter covering wars and national security,
our adversaries love what's happening to our democracy,
and they are chipping away at it because at the end of the day,
they want our wealth, they want our stuff.
Are we going to just give it all away?
You've been listening to the True Crime Reporter podcast. Stay true,
stay safe, and stay tuned for more stories from inside the crime.
Scene tape. This is Robert Riggs reporting.