Bill Wyman

The funniest thing is that one of the things that the right wing in America does very, very well, and that Australia's, I think, tries to emulate sometimes is, boy, do they get on message.

And so amusingly enough, the message of this is not the dangers of guns or dangers of gun violence or the problems with mental health in America and people who have mental health problems getting access to guns.

None of that.

The issue, they said, is, oh, we need a ballroom.

We need to build the president's ballroom so that he'll be safe, which is, uh, sophistic on a whole bunch of levels.

And, um, but it is funny, some enterprising people online were sort of marshalling all the tweets of all these kind of

Republican tastemakers who were just totally in lockstep doing that.

So that's the main one you're going to see.

But what we're seeing now is them immediately take advantage saying, oh, we need to build this ridiculous ballroom in a space that he basically illegally tore down the east wing of the White House.

So it becomes pretty silly pretty quickly in America right now.

Well, that is another sobering question.

The complexities of violence in America are very asymmetric in a lot of ways.

Again, we don't really know because I'm sure the Secret Service could say, look, let us tell you how many near shootings Barack Obama, for example, or George Bush had to nearly endure.

Barack Obama just had a flood of attempted assassinations that were thwarted by them.

But it also does seem that political violence is escalating.

We had the Charlie Kirk assassination, which to my mind is even worse because it was successful in the sense like he was the figurehead of this big college student organization that seems to be a little bit impaired now since he's been gone.

Oh, my God.

There were a couple of politicians in Minnesota who were shot.

But I think we also have to lay some blame on the feet of Donald Trump and the right, whose rhetoric by any standard has gotten horrific over the past 10 years.

And things happen virtually every day that you can't even imagine.