2070 Paradigm Shift w/ Buck Johnson: The J. Burden Show Ep. 470

go ahead, sorry, go ahead, in all seriousness. Uh, I'm primarily interested in talking with you about about spiritual warfare and kind of the changing face of Christianity in America because they're kind of two things that happened over the last couple of weeks, and I think we're more significant than initially appeared. The first is this sort of you know, chensy Ai generated image of you know, Trump as Jesus.

Kind of maybe he said he was trying to look like a doctor, but it looks like, you know, Jesus healing the sick, where he's you know, reaching down on you know, a sick man. There's sort of a bizarre supernatural figures in the clouds behind him, you know, golden light,

the whole thing. And then somewhat later, a picture of an IDF soldier in Lebanon the sledgehammer smashing the head of a desecrated statue of Jesus on the cross right, And obviously both of these were sort of strikes against the American Christian community and they reacted very very negatively, and Trump in the Iran War, which is very much tied to him and his image, have been coming less

and popular. And I thought it was interesting because in the American evangelical world, Trump is very very popular and remains more popular than most other presidents. But these two instances back to back produced to see change. There were a lot of people who were very very unhappy with them and cited those as their exit moment, like I'm done, I can't go past things. And you could look at that cynically and say, those are people looking for an

excuse that may or may not have been true. But I do think it's interesting that this comes after, you know, feuding with the Pope. Neither you were, I as Catholic, but still the kind of antipathy building between you know, the president and the Christian community, and so buck all

of that preamble aside. I'm kind of curious to get your perspective on this because this has been a live issue, particularly with the nomination of you know, Paula White as the She's the White House Faith something I can't remember.

really curious, like, what are you seeing in this? Do you think that there's some kind of breakdown between America's religious community as broad as that could be defined as and then Donald Trump?

American Easter. Not coincidentally, I would say. The image of him that he put out the following week was of course Orthodox Easter, so he managed to hit both Easters with something basically taboo. I would say anti Christian to say the least. And so it seems to me the Boomers, I mean, I don't know many of them, so the ones I do know still seem to like him. I'd love to enter a conversation with them and what their

exact thoughts on what happened there where. My mom said via text, Honey, I think at least he's a intellectual Christian, which was one of the most Protestant phrases I've ever heard in my life. Thought, what is that? Isn't that what you are? But anyway, and then of course the younger people your age up to my age and a little bit older, i'd say zoomers through gen X, who are on the right politically and have some sort of Christian foundation, we seem to be the ones that were

more like, Okay, this is enough. And the war, the backdrop of the war certainly makes that easier for us to see. And the control that I feel that he that Net and Yahoo has over him, I think that he's scared of Net and Yahoo, and so I think that sort of tips the things in the in a direction that people like us don't like. And it's interesting that he would have Paula White as his spiritual advisor, if you will. I don't think he particularly cares about

Christianity at all. And he's a showman. What does he do for his spiritual advisor? Hires a show woman? You know, that's basically what she is, flopping on stage and being over the top loud, and it, you know, seems fake obviously, and so tied up in all of this. If you're an actual Christian watching this all happen, yeah, I mean, it starts to turn you off. And except for the people I know, there's some that are, well, no, you

don't really know what he's doing. It's X Y Z over here something something city of London or some insurance thing that he's trying to figure out. But those people never address the actual control by Israel and the war and then his slight against Christ and I've not seen that from that camp yet. And so yeah, we're left with this now infamous civil war on the riot. And of course it's funny when like the mainstream right calls people like Tucker Carlson woke, right or something like this. Odd.

You know, they're inverting they're inverting reality there because there's one being woke. We all see that. So it's just a funny hodgepodge of all these things happening, and all within a year. Like when he was elected, I was pretty all in. I was excited. I thought sort of the people that he was bringing in with him, the people that supported him, Tucker Carlson, Telsea Gabbert, RFK, sort of an interesting mix of people, and I was like, Wow,

this is actually going to be something positive. I've never seen this in my life. Well, first of all, no one I've ever voted for one before, so that was kind of a unique experience for me. And then this happens, and I'm like, I guess why did I get my hopes up like this? When this was, on one hand, somewhat predictable, or at least if you were skeptical of Trump movement, you could think, well, this, it could go this direction. I'm worried about that, and here we are. So yeah, it's odd.

You don't actually get anything out of it, right, Like, Joe Biden's technically a Catholic, despite the fact that he is, by his own admission, a member of the Masons, which again I'm not Catholic, but I've been reliably informed that's a problem.

You know, the David French is the kind of Christianity today subset. We're saying things like, how don't these people know that Donald Trump has committed adultery, that he said something about when you're rich women, let you build the phrase out, and and I actually think that that support was rational, right, basically saying like, look, none of these guys in politics actually have any alignment with my values whatsoever. So if that's off the table, I might as well

get something. And to be fair, but Christian America did get some wins. We got ro versus Wight overturned, which right, fair enough, it's much better that I think either you or I ever would have expected. So I get that, and I think that almost nobody except for the most kind of diehard Trump fans, ever thought he was particularly devout. Right, Like, sure, he said he was a Presbyterian. Now I think he

says he's non denominational. But like, come on, guys, you know, I don't want to be rude to a man I've never met, but he doesn't strike me as someone who's particularly devout. And so you could look at that, and many did and say, oh, that's hypocrisy. I don't think so.

I think that's sort of rational self interest. But it was always predicated on well getting something out of it, right, getting something for your support, where it's like, okay, we've given up the kind of you know, professed piety, we've given up the picture of the wife and kids in front of a beautiful church. But at least we got something. But once that went away, once you're not really getting anything for it, it's sort of like, well, what's the

point of this exercise? And I think that the And I'm glad you brought up the timing, because had actually forgotten. Both of those happened on Easter in a vacuum. Again, I don't think those would be particularly notable. I would object to them, You would object to them, but in the grand scheme of things, those are relatively minor events.

But forming this sort of pattern where it feels as if, wait a minute, the ostensible majority faith in America is consistently being demeaned and disrespected by again, ostensibly the party of Christianity, the one supported by the most religious you know, Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox You know why why you're not is there not even that fig leaf of respect? And the war, this kind of image of the war of this idf soldier, you know, smashing this this picture of Christ was incredibly

evocative because growing up in rural America. I know you're from you know, from Texas, I'm from the American South. Everything was sort of sold to you in terms of Islam is the enemy, right, that we have to go over there because they hate Christians, they want to blow up churches, and look, I don't like Muslims. I don't

want them in my country. But if that's the claim, if that's the justification, if that's the reason why many people in my family feel this allegiance to the state of Israel, it's because they're helping us in this fight against our eternal enemy, or Israel is a safe place for Christians. And then you see this image of an IDF soldier triumphantly smashing, you know, an image of Christ, and you're like, wait a minute, I thought you guys

were fighting Muslims. I thought that was the problem. And okay, you know what, I understand wars or chaotic things. There's certainly been American soldiers who've done bad things. But when the immediate response is one it's real and you're like, oh, okay, well, I guess you guys are just admitting that that's I'll be honest, more honesty than I expect, but okay, credit where credits due. But then you see this sort of full court press from the kind of owned Zionist influencers.

You're saying like, oh, we've repaired it, We've replaced it. And then this image of across and then even the most minor amount of digging into this, you're like, wait a minute, this is a picture of a cross, but it's not where the old one was. This is just in someone's backyard. And then somewhat later, Italian peacekeepers actually do replace right, and you look at it and you're like, wait a minute. I thought you said that this was something you took seriously, cared about this, that the guy

was being punished, and that you had replaced it. When it turns out that that's not true. What you were really concerned about was the media backlash, that this was not apparently a real problem for you, It was only a pr problem You couldn't You're like, well, I thought you were our greatest ally. I thought that we were co belligerents. And when I say that, Buck, I don't literally mean me right, But you know that was the

sort of common understanding of it. And so when it comes at the tale of this kind of series of slights and insults and all of this political capital, all of this actual capital, is being used to fund this war. And apparently, even during a ceasefire when apparently we had this deal where weren't going to fight anymore, Christians are still being oppressed in Lebanon. It's like we look man like, I thought you were our guy. I thought that was

what was happening here. And so I think that that disillusion is much much more than simply you know, Trump said the F word, or Trump doesn't go to church, right, it's kind of this wider disillusionment. But anyway, Buck, I've been talking for a while throw back to you.

true to some extent. But these things, when you're touching on issues of faith, it's the most important thing in the entire existence that we have is our faith in Christ. And now you're sort of insulting that if you will, and doing it sort of out and like he does everything, he's not hiding it, and so yeah, you just start to wander. I do start to go. Okay, it goes from Okay, don't like this. I think he's lying about this. Now I feel a little bit duped on this too. Okay, now,

I can't support this. This has been a line. And I actually did a message of repentance on my episode with there at the beginning, because if you endorse someone, even implicitly on a public platform, which I did, and it was never like, hey, guys, vote for Trump, but it was obvious what I preferred, and I did political episodes and I at least implicitly softly endorsed him. Well, now he's doing all these things, and I can't have someone going well, I thought you were Orthodox, and look

who you support it. And that's not really the reason I did it. I did it because I wanted repentance in my own heart, because I started thinking, well, you are Orthodox, and look what he's doing. Do you want your reputation or your belief system or you sort of tie to these actions? And the answer is no, I can't do that, and so I did put a message

of repentance out on that episode. And I've heard some people too, knocking people like Tucker or or those like myself that well, oh, now you're saying you don't like him, and it's like, right, yeah, because I've seen things that he's done and I'm changing my mind based on current actions. I applaud Tucker, you would have never seen you never

have seen let's say, during the Bush years. Could you imagine if Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly came out and said, all right, I can't do this anymore Bush has over stepped over, Or during the Obama years, if let's say Morning Joe or Rachel Maddow, all right, Obama's bombing all these countries. This is not hope and change. I'm out. No one does that. And so it's interesting now that people with principles are doing it. With Donald Trump, you

get this like, oh, now you don't like him. It's like, yeah, correct, now I don't because I've seen what he's doing, what he's saying who is controlled by and he's spitting in the face of Christianity while doing other things geopolitically that I'm also against, and having people like Mike Huckabee go on The Tucker Carlson Show and basically promote Christian Zionism, which is heretical obviously, and so these all line up that. Of course, yeah, Paula White like we mentioned, and it's like, Okay,

this is a mess. I don't know what's going on here. Who's in control of who if someone's making there's some of these things that Trump does, and certainly members of his cabinet, it feels like they're hostage videos. And so you know, there's always people above the people that you think it's. Maybe it's not net and Yahoo, but it's

something above him. And then at some point it's all spiritual, like you're saying in the Spiritual Warfare, it's powers and principalities as we know it says in Ephesian six twelve and six thirteen. So yeah, that's when people like myself and yourself and many of us under sixty start to go, Okay, I'm not being fooled by this anymore, and I think I'm out.

But point is, what happened is that the Pope, I think about two three weeks ago, puts out this kind of statement about war, shouldn't do wars, which, all right, you or I might disagree with, but relatively in offensive position. You know, might be naive, we might disagree with it, but whatever, you know, the Pope has done it before. You know, even back in the Inquisition, you know they're burning people in the Catholic heart is like, hey, don't do that, Okay, maybe they whatever. Point is a long

tradition of asking for mercy, asking for clemency, whatever. So of course Trump goes into a rage, starts fighting with the Pope on Twitter or on sorry tooth social which is kind of a funny thing. And I just want to clarify, I'm not I don't have this sort of moral revulsion to Trump saying crazy stuff that a lot of people do, Like it doesn't really bother me, right, Like, I'm not morally offended by that.

I think we all do. From that perspective. We may well be right wing, we may well be supporters or you know, in opposition to President Trump and his administration, but fundamentally that is a secondary concern too, relationship to God. That's sort of how it works. And when that comes through the kind of commentariat again, it's like, well, wait a minute, I thought you were x y Z. I

thought that was something that you cared about. And look, I understand, like we've all gotten caught up in politics. It's my job, it's your job to like it happens. I get that, and I'm not trying to, you know,

hang anyone individually out to dry. But again it's this attitude repeated over and over again that you owe me this, you owe me your undying support forever, and fundamentally, like politics is a quid pro quo, and I took a lot of heat very early for saying something that I think was true, which is that I had extended a certain amount of loyalty to Trump four row versus weight.

I felt as if you know what, this was a big give and on the back end, fair enough, like I'll there's some loyalty in that, and that's more than any nominal Republican has given me basically my entire life. And so there was some capital there. There was some money to burn down. And you know what if it had been one or two things, you know, maybe dinged me from a you know, if I had you know, ten dollars of political currency back down to an eight

or a five, fair enough. But at a certain point, right, those those debits start piling up there. I don't know anything about accounting, right, those negative balances start piling up, and it's like, look, man, like we're not married, right. I didn't sign. I didn't sign a document that said like till death to his part. This was conditional. And so for any political figure, there is a point at

which it's like I'm done. And that doesn't mean I automatically endorse, you know, Kamala Harris or I automatically endorse the Ayatola probably wouldn't like him much anyway. I've been reliably informed that he's gay, at least according to the

Free Press. And so it's like this this extremely black or white thinking, which I think is used tactically, Yes, it just doesn't it doesn't work at least on me and I think on the audience, because it's like, look like we saw this before, we saw this kind of like extreme black or white. You know, if you're not with us, you're against us, literally in the early two thousands, and then again through kind of the pandemic and through all of that. And the reason I'm walking away, so

to speak, is not because I've gotten soft. It's not because I think, wait, actually, we do need race riots every four years, we do need trans kids. It's like, no, I cared about that more than you. In particular, I cared about that more than anyone politician. And so look like the idea that you know, it's sort of an eternally binding contract that there's nothing that can be done that you know, straine that relationship is just not true.

Clearly it's not true. And I think a lot of the narrative around that like, oh, it's you know, you traders. You you are the ones that are responsible for whatever the current political setback is. I think is really really insidious because it is insulating the people making decisions for any consequences. It's not that I made a bad choice and I was punished for it, people stayed home or people didn't do it. It's that you didn't love me enough. That's what you need to do to fix this, not

that I need to earn it. And look, politicians they do that. I'm not, you know, expecting them to ask differently, but also like, sorry, Bud, you know, I'm not Charlie Brown. The third time you pull the football, maybe I'm not going to run up on it again.

get to change when they realize that's what's happening. It's almost like there's been moments where I think is someone trying to purposefully sink jd Vance's chances at being the next man up here because they're putting him in a really strange situation and a lot of the you know, then they come out with the podcasters their second third rate,

they're low IQ and all of these things. Well, then why do you go on all of these shows leading up to the election because you knew that's where a large voting block that would support you where we're at. And now once they win these excuse me, once they lose these mid terms, I mean, I can't help but think that the people like the Laura Lomers and the Mark Levinz, the Dan Bongino's are gonna come out and say this was default of Tucker, Alex Jones, Megan Kelly,

Candice Owens. And it's like, well, I thought that those people weren't important. Now they're going to be the cause of what causes this collapse rather than it's really not conservative. If you're if you're running on a philosophy of personal responsibility and liberty and religious freedom and these things, well then you wouldn't look at someone doing bad and go you've got to support that no matter what, because where's

your personal responsibility at at that point? It doesn't there's nothing conservative about I'm backing a person no matter what he does to me, no matter how many it's like the battered wife syndrome, Like, don't arrest him. He's got he loves me sometimes while she's got black eyes. No, people don't do that anymore. Enough of them are not going to do that where I think it's going to sink them in the midterms. Doesn't seem like he cares about that almost. It's almost like a self destruction, self

imposed destruction coming out. And yeah, Nixon used that, and when he was winning the vote in the South, he knew he was going to get the conservative vote in the South, so they didn't have to focus on any of the concerns that those men and women had because, well, we're going to get their vote no matter what. And I think we're sort of in an era beyond that. I think obviously the decentralization of media helps that a lot too, And we don't have just three voices giving

us the narrative of the day. Now we can go find it anywhere, and you can find alternatives, of course, and people are listening to those, and this sort of old school, antiquated mentality of listening to Mark Levin or listen and a Sean Hannity and just go with whatever they say. That's out that's out the window now. And so I think it's a it's a failure on the

end of the administration to sort of realize that. But I think there's such a hubris and sort of narcissistic positions they're taking in the administration that it's like they can't see it. The ones at the very top. I think. I do think people like JD. Vans are like, crap, this isn't going to go well, but what are you going to do?

is use setbacks. And this was before the war started, so we didn't really know what those setbacks were going to come from. As an opportunity to go after the woke right, the woke right, which is just the same as you know, the woke left. Of course right, it says the same word in it. And what's the matter with the woke right, Well, they're too right right, they care too much about abortion, they care too much about you know, Christianity, they're they're too mean, they're too racist.

And what their line will be is that those people have you know, made the right wing toxic. They've they've driven off people. And so what we need to do is we need another Mitt Romney. We need to track back to center. We need to do the things we used to do and effectively fold MAGA right back into

the two thousand and six GOP. And I was completely and totally right this obsession with podcasters right, which is oddly this sort of mirror image of what we saw during the Biden era, when you know, Joe Rogan was the big kind of like hate figure. Is what it really is is that decentralization. It's the people are allowed to say things we don't like in a way we

can't directly control. And so what we need to poison that, well, we need to say those are the reason that you're losing, you're losing, not because we can't fulfill our promises, not because we're ineffectual, not because we're doing things that are just plain stupid ideas, but it's because you want too much,

you're asking for too much. You need to accept nothing, or else you're going to keep losing and also get nothing, which, when you phrase it like that, isn't the best pitch line, but it's the one they're going with, and that's been

in my mind completely and totally vindicated. The Samson option, of course, is the idea that effectively it's sort of a mutual suicide packed, right, they will blow themselves up in effect to keep there from being any chance of a non Zionist right in power, which I think has

basically just happened. And the thing that's so just completely and totally aggravating about this is that all of this political power has been squandered, wasted, right, this golden opportunity, both after the assassination of Kirk the attempted assassination of Trump, and it's been frittered away into, to be honest, stupid policies, right foreign wars the like which we just barely got

out of that didn't get us anything. Sure, they may have made a certain pundits, certain you know, you know consultants in Arlington, very wealthy, but fundamentally they didn't work, they didn't accomplish anything. And so when you have an opportunity this movement that was largely birthed in opposition to stupid foreign wars, to this kind of insane you know, Zionism, and to see it folded back in so quickly, I

sent I think I said this to Scott Horton. I basically was like, I'm pretty sure time is a flat circle, right, that we're right back in two thousand and six all over again, that nothing has changed, And of course I was being glib. A lot has changed, like look at the as you mentioned, the media landscape, but it is one of those things where it's like, I'm sorry, I'm not gonna let you morally blackmail me for refusing to sign off on that, because look, I'm not morally opposed

to war. Like I didn't really have any problems with going to get Maduro, even if the reason was stupid. It's like whatever, it's how, it's how countries do things. Okay, sure I don't think he is literally sponsoring narco terrorism, but like whatever. It's how politics is a game of you know, red tooth and claw. It's it's not a pleasant thing. I get that. But when you run as a nativist, you run saying like this is America first,

it's for you. When you say like, we're going to take care of these like long running, festering issues, whether it's you know, the transition of children, the you know, wave of anti Christian violence we saw after the Dobbs decision, where I mean my pastor had his tires slashed and mirrors broken off his car. You're like, okay, Like fair enough, let's do that. That's the promise. And I understand, you know, men are corrupt. Politics doesn't work how it's supposed to.

But to see all of that burned for the sake of Israel and then have those same people lecture you for your lack of loyalty, I guess is to be honest, it's kind of insulting. And on the generational side, this is something you and I have spoken about a couple times. There have been a couple interesting reversals right, which is one, Trump is now unpopular with white, non college educated voters for the first time ever, unpopular with men under thirty.

And the other interesting thing is that Israel is extremely unpopular with even Republicans under I think was the breakpoint on that particular one. There was an interesting moment in an episode called I Believe It's called Can New York City Survive Mumdani's Policies? By Ben Shapiro, where he, yeah, he's a bit of an aggravating fellow, magnificent eyebrows. I'll give him that, yeah, but the in all seriousness, right, he basically says, so coming from him, fifty three percent

of Republicans under fifty are Holocaust deniers. WHOA, Okay, that's strong. Where he got that number, Who knows, I believe for the Manhattan Institute. Take whatever his definition of that term is, and also whatever definition the Manhattan Institute is. So I don't literally think that's true, but it's an interesting directional,

directional signal. So if we can take disapproval of Israel's basically a proxy for disapproval of the US government, because let's be honest, that's kind of the same thing, right, Just we see this this growing mass of people who are incredibly disillusioned, incredibly upset with the way things are going, and apparently there's no way for them to resolve those issues. They got their guy in, nothing happened. They try to get a job at Heritage, they get fired for not

going to ship at dinner. The purge that we've seen through all of conservative media, whether it's you know, Heritage, other institutions, the young Republicans, I don't know where that energy goes. Like it seems like there's this incredible from you know, whether it's decentralized media or just the fact that it's become harder and harder to kind of cover these things up. I don't understand where that that anger goes towards, Where that unhappiness goes towards. And we've seen men doing things.

what I'm getting at Buck? It just feels as if there's some there's this sort of mass of anger and disillusion with no acceptable I guess kind of you know, release valve.

the Trump train. A couple of years ago, he got an offer in the mail for what was that main neocon magazine. I cannot think of it off the top of my head, but the biggest one that we all know, Nation National Review. It was that, and he said he wrote he instead of just throwing the offer away, he writes on it, I'm a Trumper America first man, I don't want your Neocon trash and mailed it back to them. And so that's something that never would have happened without

Donald Trump. And that was a large wave of people and then, of course the COVID stuff woke a lot of people up the fact that media has been so decentralized. There's guys everyone on my fire crew at work, they're all thirty two, one girl and three guys. People that were not political at all now are coming and to me because they know sort of what I do outside of work. Hey, did you hear about this conspiracy? And then the Epstein stuff and then Pizzagate stuff, And then

what do you think Israel is so powerful for? Doesn't it seem like they control our government? These are people that had no interest in politics. They're again thirty two years old, and now all of a sudden, that's that's a very common Those are very common discussion points at my fire station, which is just way different. And of course the vaccine and mask and the COVID years, this is all like out in the open with people that are in their thirties now and certainly in the gen

X category that I run with too. And you can't it's too late. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. And so when they start to default these the people in charge starts a default to this sort of antiquated zionistic generically Republican way of governing. Well, it's too late to do that anymore. And it's just it's funny that Trump's doing it, and he can't really do it with public support because of people like himself woke

too many people up. And so you can go anytime you see posts on X from Lumer or Shapiro or or Ted Cruz, goodness, just go look under there. And I can. I've made this sort of habit of writing. I don't even have to read the comments to know you're not going to do well because Mark Levin go look under his You know everything they write. They're so largely and grossly unpopular, and it's like they're trying to seek Donald Trump's administration or something like that, Like there's

some other nefarious underlying reason like that. They're all like, we love you Donald. Don't listen to Alex Jones and Candice Owens. And it's funny too. There's like moments in time, I think where people are placed in certain positions because they're needed. I do think despite what Jordan Peterson's subsequent become, he was a very important figure to wake a lot

of young men up to certain things. A lot of them woke up to Christianity because of him, and then he sort of was like an entry point, and now we've moved beyond him. Donald Trump was the same sort of figure. He woke a lot of people up, a lot of people on the right that were older, said oh, I can be against these wars that have been destroying the economy and things in America and certainly over the countries overseas, and I can sound like I'm tough and

not like a whiny liberal. And so he was placed in a moment in time he was necessary, certainly to push back against what would have been the devil herself in Hillary Clinton winning something. And now it feels like, Okay, you were important for a moment of time. We've moved on and now on to next. I don't know what next is going to be, because that energies you can't go It doesn't go away. My priest once told me I was asking him about what we call the passions Orthodoxy.

Catholics might call it the deadly sins or something, when someone's struggling with something and you counsel them, How do you like stamp that out? And he said, we don't stamp it out. We redirect the energy into something else. The energy is going to be there no matter what. It will find an outlet. We don't want the outlet outlet to be x y, you know, pornography or alcoholism or you know, prostitution or something. So we redirect the

energy into something virtuous and within the church. That's sort of what's going to happen.

category just in a few years. If you would have said, you know, four years ago, hey, national support for Israel's going to swing from plus fifty to negative something, I think, what happened? What's going to happen in the next few years, because that's drastic. Yet here we are. It's such a wild time to be alive, such a wild timeline. I also predict whoever wants to win, maybe in the Democratic Party, but certainly in the Republican Party national offices or big offices.

You're going to have to denounce Israel. You're not going to be able to be sort of in the middle on it, because we don't trust you. If you're in the middle on it, you're going to have to specifically come out explicitly against Israel if you want to win. Otherwise, I don't think you've got a shot.

We can imagine this is sort of the Overton window what's allowable, And he basically makes the argument that this is, to be honest, a slightly biological function, that effectively a paradigm exists, it answers questions at the time, and then it sort of decays for years afterwards until such a point where it becomes untenable, the people who believed in it were raised and it sort of die and a

new paradigm exists. And I think that people mistakenly viewed Trump as a new paradigm instead of, in my mind, the kind of final gasps of one, because fundamentally, like I look at Trump and he's kind of just like w E. Bill Clinton functionally, you know, like he's outrageous, he says crazy stuff. You know, he's got the big hair, the big personality, but any individual issue isn't really that

crazy that outside of what is normal. And both on the right and the left, you're seeing a rejection of the current paradigm, whether you want to call it the neo conservative, neoliberal, whatever, the post sixty four version of America is. I realize those terms don't necessarily apply in that entire time span, but give me some leway on this. I'm cooking, as the kids saying so. On the left,

of course, we saw this early with socialism. Right, that went from being a scary bad word you couldn't talk about to you is something you can get on well designed merchandise from the zor on Mamdani merch star. It's something that for people under a certain age carries no weight whatsoever. I think I was eating with, you know, one of my wife's friends, who's probably fifty something, you know kids our age. Husband's actually a wild a wild firefighter,

which is weird coincidence. But the point is when he's off somewhere, she's home and we, you know, invite her over for dinner. She hasn't got monels to do, and we're talking to her, and she's a very smart woman, very well read, and she couldn't wrap her head around the fact that socialism had entered common parlance. Again, it wasn't scary because when she grew up that was synonymous with the devil. It was totally beyond the pale where look, I don't like socialism, you know, I went through the

same Austrian phace that a lot of guys did. But like if I met a socialist, I wouldn't feel like I met a child molester. You know. It's not like I had to wash my hand after shaking it, and I might because socialists don't shower much, but you know what I mean. And so I think they were first to the punch with that kind of full not full, but partial kind of dispensing of a previous set of values, and I think what we're seeing on the right is

a very similar thing. You see this generationally as well. There's been a huge uproar, primarily in the UK because the UK got hit by feminism in the same way that we did by racism, if that makes sense. Like it's sort of a similarly psychral concept on both sides of the Atlantic. But you see all of these horrific or horrified excuse me, think pieces about the rise of Andrew Tate, the rise of the tradwife, new worrying statistics that a higher percentage of women ever think they should

obey their husbands. And of course these are relatively minor changes. Sixteen percent of women saying they should always obey their husband is not a majority by any means, but it is three times the rate of baby boomer women who say the same thing. They're like, okay, that's a paradigm shift. It's a radically different way of thinking, and on both

the right and the left. The right we don't really need to talk about because it's what you and I are doing, Buck, It's all of our friends, all of our associates, a bunch of other people we don't even like, but are similarly rejecting. I guess you could say, like the right wing paradigm of Ronald Reagan, the mold that every politician has sort of existed in.

box can't contain what needs to happen. And so in my mind, what's really seeing is sort of an organization for the next round of the game, right, who are going to be, what are the sides going to be? Who's going to set the next paradigm? Because I think your point about Donald Trump being the man for the moment, not the man for this moment, I think is quite accurate, and I think there were chances where he could have. You know, there's a version of January sixth that's very,

very different. There's a version of Butler Pa. There's a version of the Charlie Kirk assassination, which are very different, and maybe he could have made that transition and become the man who set the rules for a new era. But seemingly whatever this round is is coming to a close.

Paradigm is dying, and clearly like at the point where you have the most popular podcaster, by extension of the most popular media figure in America saying things that you know, fifteen years ago would have gotten you completely and totally deplatformed about I don't know, a certain nation in the Middle East. You're like, Okay, something is shifted, something has moved, This is moving out of it's moving into the realm of the scientific right to kind of crib a line

from Kun there. And so to me, that's what I sort of feel like we're seeing, we're seeing the emergence of a new political framework. And look, there's entirely possible that, you know, whatever our side is, we don't win this and we just get like Brazilian communism for sixty years,

which sounds really really awful. That's a possibility. But I think that this kind of like gay neoliberal globalism, whether right or left flavored, and my mind is dead like on the on the front of globalism, is just physically not going to be possible anymore. Right, the straight up hooror moves is closed, whether we want it to be or not. Like that that changes the state of play.

And so I don't know, maybe that's an overly theoretical way to look at it, but it does feel like we actually are going through a real paradigm shift, and what we're seeing with this generational divide is simply who will be left with a decaying sort of model of

the world and who moves on. And look, that doesn't mean that people in an old paradigm don't still have lots of money, don't still have lots of power, But I think that it will be sort of like you know, the the old right after FDRs in power, where like you look at tafts like presidential priorities, and like who cares about this at all? It's not relevant to how the system is. It becomes something completely and totally past itself by date. And so that sort of feels like

what we're going through now. At the same time, as I said earlier, there's an immense amount of polarization. You know, there is both a far left and a far right, but there seems to be no life left in really the kind of like old model of politics. And ironically enough, these insane Zionists are making that problem worse by kicking out anyone under thirty. You know, has happened to heritage, that happened at you know, the young Republicans, College Republicans.

I don't know. Sorry, it's been a long diatribe for me, but I'm curious to get your thoughts.

he managed to keep somewhat of a high profile. But yeah, certainly Paul Gottfried and you know, we ended up I'm trying to think of the fellow that was going to be in the Ronald Reagan administration and they had sort of a coup against him because he liked the South or something like this, and we ended up with Bill Bennett, who was a lifelong just turd in the punch bowl basically, And so they tried that back then, and it worked

because again everything was more centralized as far as media outlets, and there was a lot of gatekeepers, and that sort of time is gone, and so this seemed more like a cartoon version of that the purge when Trump fires out that truth social post about the podcasters and it's like, yeah, but you can't kick those people out. I mean, you can kick him out of the administration. I suppose heritage,

but like again, Tucker's audience is Tucker's audience. Candice, Alex, Joe Rogan to some extent, Theo Vaughn to some extent, a lot of people who's listeners were carrying the MAGA movement to for a short period of time. They don't just go away. And so it does feel like there's this new paradigm shift. And it's interesting. I think you were saying how Trump could have done such and such and could have. I guess in theory he still could.

There's two more years, but it seemed like the next man up to actually challenge this sort of neo conservative, neoliberal paradigm could have been Charlie Kirk. And I would have never thought that I wasn't a hater by any means, but I just wasn't. I didn't follow him particularly, I just knew who he was and sort of knew his stick.

Then you start hearing things post death on Charlie Kirk, the text that he was sending people like Candas and Tucker's story about how after he went to this retreat where all the Zionists were basically threatening him, he goes to Tucker's cabin or whatever in Maine and sort of events and says like these guys are scaring me, and it's like, oh, and then he dies. Now, I won't paint a conspiracy. I don't know who did what, who

controlled what. I'm not going to get canvass Olwen's on us here and start trotting out theories, but sure is weird coincidence. It's like, I'm not going to come out and say that something other than the mainstream story is what we've been told is has happened. But it's if you were to paint it as line up some facts, and you certainly could draw a picture that looked like

something other than what they're telling has happened happened. Same thing with Butler pa even why is it shut down all of a sudden, like you don't want to dig any further into that. If you're the head of the government and the assassination, the temp was on you, No, that's you know, wash our hands of that. That's interesting. But yet the guy that shot Adam over the weekend in the press Corps event, like we know everything about him in a day, and we've got his manifest and

where he went to school. All these things come out. That's interesting. Why can't we find that about Charlie Kirk's person. Why can't we find that about the Butler Pa person, even the guy and down in Florida that made the attempt. So there's a lot of things. When you leave things unanswered, you create room for conspiracy theories, and then the conspiracy theories come out and then we all get shouted down

like we're insane or something. And it's like these wouldn't exist if you would just come out with pictures, factual evidence of everything and tell us what went down. So that's been troubling. But yeah, it feels like they've tried this new purge and it's just again, the toothpaste is out of the tube. You can't put this stuff back in.

The anger is still there, the angst the energy bubbling right there under the surface on the right, and it feels like Israel also knew this is our last sort of chance to do this greater Israel pride that's been being pushed for decades now. And I was a General Wesley Clark that came out where he said that he saw the list of the seven countries or whatever. Well, now it's taken much longer than the timeline that they were he was giving us initially. But it's like, finally,

it's our last chance we can do this. And that's sort of what's going on now. And I don't know again if they're threatening Trump or what they've gone on him, what's happening there. It appears something's happening. And I would almost give him grace. If the threats are on his family and he's doing this, maybe I have empathy for that. If they're on him and he's doing this, not as much empathy. You know, be a man, be a martyr.

You're eighty years old, stand up for what's right and make it your last gasp to save the union that you so lovingly speak about and we're supposed to put first. And now it's just a big mess and again. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious to see where things happen so fast. You alluded to this early. I probably can't even fathom what things are going to be like by twenty twenty eight.

Who knows what will have happened, how many more attempts on people's lives or have well, how many major media figures will have a lot of attempts on their lives. I don't know where we're going to be at financially, as far as the economy goes, What Israel's going to look like, what Iran's going to look like, what Lebanon is going to look like. I can't even imagine it, but I suspect it will be quite different than where we're speaking at on things right now.

really know where this goes. We don't really know where this develops, and so to to sort of neutralize yourself before you even see the next hand of cards, in my mind is is short sighted. I'll put it that way. I was joking about, you know, the fact that the last twenty years, if just one giant loop, you know that we're back, you know, war in the Middle East.

Their country music is back on the radio and they've got you know, white kids from Alabama and recruiting ads, and Okay, on a certain superficial cynical level, that's true, but it does feel like first as tragedy, then as farce, where it's like the tenor in the tone has shifted

so dramatically. This war is so unpopular. And you were talking about your you know, your co work, right, the guys on your team, And I think about this like, I'll invite people over a couple times a month, whatever, if there's a decent UFC fight on nothing major, just

a few guys sitting around in my basement. And the amount of what some would say casual anti Semitism that's passed around as jokes where it's like, oh, you know, some guys you know, didn't send in the Venmo request for the beer run, and it's oh, Rabbi blank and oh, you know, do you need to give that to BB? And these are guys who aren't I don't know what I do, or they might know what I do. They don't care. There's normal guys. And I don't understand how

this system as it exists. It can bend on a lot of things, it can absorb a lot of things, but that commitment is so close to the center of what the purpose of this government is. I don't think it can absorb that, and so seemingly according to you know, Republican officials all across you know, the US, they're going to try and make it illegal. Right, we have sweeping anti semitism laws. And we understand, right when we say

anti Semitism, we don't mean crystal knocked. We mean not particularly liking one bb Netanya who sends one of his soldiers to desecrate a statue of Jesus. Right, we understand what we mean when you say that. I don't understand how the system folds that sentiment in because they clearly made an attempt at the raw raw America. You know, here's here's a kill cam of us blowing up an unarmed Iranian ship. And I'll be honest, man, Personally, I don't care about Iranian shipping. It doesn't keep me up

at night. But it's clear that that isn't for me. It's clear that whatever this thing is, this paradigm doesn't work for me or guys like me. And so it's not out of some you know, blind loyalty to the Ayahtola. I'm not getting paid by the Chai cooms. I'm not getting paid by Katar, although if any parties I have named are interested, gotta link in the description, you know, I'm not opposed to it. But in all seriousness, right, the ability to spin a narrative is completely and totally broken.

And in my mind, the ability to spin a narrative really broke during the Biden advent. You know, when we're the infamous you know speech where he's you know, flanked with marines, the red light, all that kind of stuff, you know, threatening bombing Americans. It's like it felt like that was a definitive off the rails moment, where the idea that we were going to go back to normal Obama or normal Bill Clinton or normal. It was just

not on the table. And yeah, I don't necessarily think things are going to be particularly pleasant by certain metrics, but it is interesting and if nothing else, I'm quite convinced that this paradigm, this Overton window is rapidly breaking down, if for no other reason than the fact that our country is more is less and less American, and quite simply Somali's do not care about any of this stuff.

And in another deep irony, right, it does seem as if they've sort of done this to themselves that if they had been willing to just let certain things slide define day however you will, that it would have been, you know, the kind of we could have kept politics running on that eternal narrow band of you know, the five by eight index card of allowable opinions, as one guy once said, But they wanted more, they wanted more quick,

and that ended up breaking the whole thing down. Buck, this has been a ton of fun, man, We've got to talk more often. It's been too long.

ad free. I know the ads are annoying, but you boys got to pay a mortgage somehow, Well you do so on Patreon, substack or gum road youso check out our sponsor, Fox and Son's Coffee. I was really mad because I thought I was out of coffee, but it turns out no, I had just misplaced my Fox and Sons coffee in the fridge. And let me tell you, it's pretty good. I was glad to have found it. Buck, as I'm sure you're aware. It feels like the real dividing line of if you were an adult or not

is if you have a giant freezer. Like that's the point where it's like kind of like you made it. You know, you made it, and I got one yes buying in bulk, you know, yes, yeah yeah. But point is I did lose my coffee in there under like a pile of millet flour or whatever my wife had in there. So the point is highly recommend it. It's good stuff. You should check it out again. Buck, It's great speaking to you and everyone at home. Keep your head up. Well, I can't last forever. Good Night,