Trae Stephens

speaker

555 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2025 last heard 31 Jul

Trae Stephens’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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You know, it's not like a super contrarian idea, actually.

Like there are a bunch of countries across the world that have some version of mandatory civil service.

In fact, we have aspects of this inside of our own society.

If you think about things like jury duty or being subpoenaed for court or there are instances throughout the last decade.

even 50 years where people were called into service to do things like road construction and maintenance.

So I understand there are all sorts of questions that you would have about the 13th Amendment.

I am not in a position to adjudicate those complicated constitutional issues, but I think that there's something really

important about ensuring a sense of civil duty into our next generation.

And I don't think that needs to be in the military service.

I think it could just as easily be like going and working as a clerk at a county, you know, courthouse.

There's all sorts of things that we can do to pull people in and have this feeling of shared progress that

we all owe a responsibility towards.

And I think if you were to go to Singapore or to Israel and ask them like, is this a societal good or has this been a disaster?

Is it forced labor?

Is it involuntary servitude?

I think they would all say, no, this is actually pretty great.

It was a difficult thing that I did, and I'm glad that I did.

I learned a lot.

I met a lot of people that are still part of my life today.

And I think that it would be wise for Americans to take a hard look at ourselves and say, is what we're doing right now working?

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