Hard Facts for a Hard Time w/ Mark Mitchell: The J. Burden Show Ep. 397

Get the facts, be drink a where physic drinker where dot e meaning a live man like this man letting butterfly, flapping his wing, big down in on the forest.

what sort of motivated you to look into this? And I guess I should be a podcaster and lead with this if you could. You know, where are you coming from?

people like chocolate or vanilla ice cream better? And somebody said, oh, I don't know, we'll ask them, and then the news thought that was interesting. But now what I pull on is like civil war, the death of the American dream, political violence, the weaponization of the justice system. And I find looking around that really nobody else is talking about those things, and that's because they've all been captured by a system that essentially wants to tell people what to

think and not actually ask them. And that's why we wound up on the CIA's Naughty List and why you know, you're not allowed to ask questions about election integrity or vaccines or any of that stuff. And so so luckily with Twitter and you know, we've been pretty loud and vocal anti establishment voices because I think we can all look around and say, you know, this isn't Red team

Blue team anymore. Like we're fundamentally not being represented in a way that feels like we're running towards a cliff.

but the concerns were entirely different. Like the word socialism was sort of this like dim mock right the death touch, and look, I'm by no means a socialist at all. But it's interesting that that term rights sort of a disqualifying feature for your political career. And when I say disqualifying, I mean clearly it isn't from Mamdani. He will be

in office, but that stink has sort of faded. And I think that that is an interesting signifier of something more broad, which is this kind of you could call it almost like a civic religion, these sort of you know, moral precepts of what is and is not acceptable as

fully and totally collapsed. And maybe it hit the right a little after it hit the left, but it is creating this sort of situation where it's almost impossible to talk across that divide for reasons like that it's sort of this thought terminating word like a socialist or you know, there are others right to attack people on the right, but it is this sort of interesting moment of fracture where the kind of previous political order, their terms no longer apply. If you see what I'm getting at.

study history, I certainly don't. There is a book called The Fourth Turning that was recommended to me by Steve Bannon, who actually fifteen years ago wrote a movie about this, produced a movie, and he's very precient on many things, and this was one of them. Because when I read the book, I'm like, oh, this is kind of interesting. And then increasingly, just over the last year or two, I've seen more and more signs of this impending shift

coming in my polling. And I think the most obvious example recently is people's opinions on Israel, but I could point to a ton of other examples too, and one of them like referring to the Mandami situation is to domestic versus foreign terrorism. And so it's like, Okay, Islam's a religion, like whatever. There's a lot of religions, but then okay, there's also this thing called islamis Islamic terrorism. And so when you look at Mamdani, he's got a

really high favorability rating with under forty voters. Like the young people like him. The old people are like going, oh my god, socialism, that's terrible. And the young people like don't care. They just don't. And the older people are saying, oh, but he's going to be a Muslim terrorist, and they're like, no, he's not. I listened to him. He sounds authentic to me. And in the polling, I forget the numbers. I think younger people are more concerned

about domestic terrorism. I just posted it this morning. But essentially they're like forty points apart younger people versus older people. Older people are overwhelmingly concerned with foreign terrorism because they've heard all this stuff. You know this, you know, we got to fight him over there, neo conservatives, George W.

Bush kind of stuff. And so what I think happens and I think one of the things is going on too, is that people like to push values, and I think that when times get tough, values are pulled, and so people are saying, like, no, those values you're pushing on

me don't work anymore. Vacuum needs to be filled. I like this better, and I think we're seeing that, and the Fourth Turning tells us this is happening, because the fourth turning crisis is that happen every eighty to one hundred years, are precipitated by a massive collapse and institutional trust because the old values mean nothing and have failed. And so increasingly you're going to see these older boomer values because boomers mostly built the system we're living in.

They're sixty percent of federal elected representatives, and that's going to flip really soon. And boomers are saying things like, again, we have to fight them over there instead of over here. Pre market capitalism works, you just have to work harder. Israel is our greatest ally. We need NATO in order to fight against Russia, and increasingly the youth are just going to rebel against that because it doesn't work anymore.

Conservatism itself is kind of a failed set of luxury beliefs, because what is it even conserved certainly not free market capitalism. And when you ask the under forty voters like do you like capitalism or socialism? They say capitalism better. But then even the conservative under forty voters, if you say, okay, well how about this socialistic thing like well, free distribution, even the conservatives like, oh yeah, okay, we kind of

need that right now. So you have this No, I mean there is a very straightforward, one dimensional political axis right versus left. It doesn't work anymore. Increasingly we have the horseshoe of politics where right and far right and far left are meeting towards focusing on the failed system that doesn't work for everybody anymore. And that's why you

see things like JD. Vance polling very well because he talks like economic populist and he gets beaten by Bernie Sanders, and the way those two people talk on certain things are not very far apart. It all just comes down to like, well, how are we going to fix it? So I think that's really what's going to define politics over the next couple of years, which is increasingly people are rebelling against the people in power, and the youth are going to win is just a matter of time.

If they're fifteen percent of Congress right now, that's gonna and boomers are sixty that's going to completely reverse in like ten years.

or six years. You probably know better than I. But the point at which we read fifty percent baby boom or mortality now, obviously, the way mortality tables work, it goes quickly, even in an era of you know, modern medicine, right, And I think that that that eighty year you could have like fourth turning. I think a large part of

it as well. And this is something I've seen both on the left and the right, is that there's a large number of people who don't have the buy in necessary to assume the traditional conservative position of status quo defender. Because when you have young men who you know are for any number of reasons, you know, there's been a peace out and compact about this, but we're you know, locked out, you know to traditional ways of accumulating money

and status. And then also just due to you know a combination of inflation and you know, high asset values, becomes very difficult to become a property holder, to have a stake in society. Literally, well you're going to see people sort of throw up their hands and say, well, let's turn the table, like, let's just set this back

to zero. I stand proportionally a better chance. And I'm glad you mentioned domestic terror because you know, I've been kind of look, I sort of came into my you know, political awareness during you know, the first Trump term, when you know, left wing political violence sort of re emerge, and so for effectively my entire adult life, you have

seen this sort of worrying spiral of violence. The one that I always mentioned that no one ever talks about is those you know, twelve guys who set up an L shaped ambush outside of an ice facility where it's like, okay, they weren't successful. You know, it's not like there's a

huge body count. But you look at that and you're like, okay, well that's there's twelve guys with some semblance of organization, that's way more than admittedly tragic cases where you know, some guy reads Catcher in the Rye and decides to go,

you know, take a scalp or something. And I think that as you and I, you know, maybe this is kind of left wing or you know, socialist messaging, as we could say, but when you have that sort of dispossession, when you have people who don't really have a lot to lose, you know, they don't have a mortgage that would go unpaid if they're in jail, or you know a wife who would go you know, hungry, well that those sort of drastic actions are incentivized, or at least

less disincentivized. And I think that that's one of those things that I feel very frustrated talking to conservatives because it's like one, like, you know, what happens now, Like they shot one of your guys literally in four K video, they tried to shoot Trump twice, Like you know, where

do you think this goes? And if you don't provide those people one a sort of harsh deterrent which has been lacking, and two, to be honest, something else to do, you know, something constructive to do, Like where do you think this political violence goes because it doesn't just stop because you're upset about it.

it's the numbers say that this is coming. Forty three percent of America thinks the Civil War revolution is coming in the next few years. It's a majority. I think the number was fifty six percent of under forty voters. That's not good. Number one concern right now in America is political violence. Ninety percent of people are concerned about that.

That's more than inflation. I mean, it's just sick. They're over A majority of people thought that there was going to be a violent reaction to the twenty twenty four election, including leftists who think it's more likely that the right is going to pop off because of the January sixth psychological operation. That's never been healed, like where the hell

is our jan six Commission? And I've been really outspoken about this because I think that the Republican Party is just completely mia like not fighting this, just a wall. I've been posting like the Shiel laboof, like just do this mean? Like what are you talking about? Why isn't anything happening? And I think the under forty voter also

is most fixated on systematic reform. I've called it burn it down politics, and that sounds pretty inflammatory, nice pun, but I mean they want to replace a failed, unethical system with something that gets back to, in my opinion, core ethics of fairness and justice and honesty. And that's I think that that's the key to the under forty, the Zoomer and the millennial politics is they just want fairness, Like why doesn't this system just work? They want a

restoration of integrity. And that's a pretty strong body politic, you know what I mean. Like, if you're an objective thinker, it's pretty easy to look at any policy and say like, no, that's stupid. We shouldn't be doing this transfer payment. No, we should get these people the hell out of the country because it's not better objectively, we have stats, and even the ones on the left like kind kind of

talk like that. And so the problem I see here is that like Trump captured the youth zeitgeist, he got literally shot right right he got into power on retribution and building a golden age for America and draining the swamp, and he's literally delivered nothing on that. It's like he's the biggest person in America who forgot that he got shot. And I understand that's there's limitations. I understand that it's tough to arrest these people and get it to stick.

But I think the way and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but zoomers want people arrested. And when they were happiest with Trump, it was during the peak Doge. You could literally go to Google search trends and type in doge and when it peaked on the last week of February, goes straight through as musse and reports dot com and look at Trump's under forty

approval rating. It was sixty percent. And so every Republican in DC should have been like morally bound to understand why they finally did something that wasn't retarded and why the youth vote actually like Republicans for once, and they

didn't care. They shut the doge down. And this was the same week Donald Trump is quoting Napoleon Bonaparte, And I mean, I just have poll after poll after poll first that shows that life is terrible for the under forty voters in a way that even you, like I don't know if you want to get into or not, like very much understated. This societalric is basically, the social contract's gone for the under forty. It's just gone. And

I was, I'm forty five. I saw the whole thing fall apart, Like I had my career stolen from me by the HEB program that got passing the law into nineteen ninety. So this touches me too. But it's like if you're in power and you were given a mandate and that mandate has brutally reformed the government because everybody needs it. They're begging you. Only thirty percent trust the federal government. And then the reality is, well, the system doesn't work. We're never going to get any of these

people arrested. They like, Comy's going to get off Scott free and that was just one arrest. Then I kind of think that you have an ethical obligation to get like, burn that system down, be an accelerationist arrest all these people, get the evidence out, and then fine, they're going to skate. I mean, there's an aspect of the processes, the punishment. But if our justice system is that gone, if the wealthy and strong and powerful people who rule us are unaccountable,

why are we allowing this to persist? And I don't know, tell me if that you think that resonates with how younger voting no?

marketable field. And now what, I'm poorer than my parents and grandparents were at this stage, an ever greater portion of my take home income is taken for sort of the basic parts of life. And so the floor where you can start saving, where you can start building, is incredibly high. Now, look that depends on where you live obviously, cost of living, but that's an incredibly common refrain, right this feeling, I'm like, wait a minute, like I did

what you told me to do. And now, as I'm sure you know, the data on job placement for new graduates is abysmal, particularly in STEM, particularly in these fields have been hit by H one b's. And then when someone says, well, the real issue is always you know, mass immig or sorry, illegal immigration, but if it's legal, it's fine conversation I had yesterday, you know, just personally, and you're like, well, okay, for you, it is right. These people, if they're here legally, are basically going to

be your servants into retirement. But for me, now I'm competing against someone who gets deported if they quit their job and works for sixty cents on the dollar. And you know, due to a degree mill program in places like India, on paper has more qualifications and more years of work experience. Again, I say on paper, and so

look like I spoke to uh Peruvian bowl. You know another guy, my a truly talented financial analyst unrelated, did not prep him for this is just something we were talking about mostly it was about housing prices, but I just asked him, I was like, hey, man, how many jobs have you applied for? His answer was six hundred.

Mine is about that. I know guys who are you know, even well into gen X, who are sitting at you know, four digits, And it's this feeling sure, yeah, exactly, and it's you know, you can have a great resume, you can have work experience, and you're just sitting there like what the heck? Like I'm doing what I'm supposed to. I'm trying to get a job. I'm not trying to sponge up welfare. But at every stage it feels as

if the game is rigged. And so, okay, sure is the individually correct answer to with your amount of power, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, one hundred percent?

tiers below what I should be. And you take that forward into hiring, you take that forward and everything, and I think you have an explanation on two levels. One why many particularly young men are basically saying like, well, screw this, who's going to fix it? I don't care how? And also, sadly, sadly, depending on your perscriptive, this is

the rebirth of identity politics. Right, you have created a definite group of people who are unified by some immutable characteristic that's coming back to one way or another.

Only twenty seven percent say today's children will be better off than their parents. Only like thirty five percent say they're better off than they were four years ago. Economic confidence is plunging. I have a sixteen percent under a thirty unemployment rate. I have fifty two percent under thirty voters say it's not possible for everyone who wants to find work to find a job. I have an over thirty percent of people under forty admitting that they've been

diagnosed with a mental condition. I have horrifying polls on dating. I have like forty percent of gen Z thinks they're never going to be able to buy a house. Like I could just go on and on and on. And that's before even looking at any economic statistics at all, which are also horrifying. The forty year first time home buyer price age. I brought that up at the White House. Donald Trump was like, what are we what are we

talking about here? People love the home, high home values, and so when the people who govern us have absolutely no idea that the real problem is that the social contract has failed. And I think why young men looking at that is because we are fighting war against entrenched interests that want the current status quo to continue, even though it's marching us down a path it's going to

end violently. That's where this goes. You know, we'll probably have hyperinflation, We'll probably But like the wealth concentration, that's a problem. The corporatism, Like going after these corporations that are just concentrating power. There's no creative destruction anymore. These

people just paper over retarded decisions. With the stock market and with bernanke Bucks, like everything is literally corrupt, and you're gonna have these massive corporations that act as like quasi like like global like like countries basically, and Amazon might as well be a country, right, it's unaccountable to the US government who's been captured by it. And the problem is is that we have a system of basically global welfare. We were propping up China with manufacturing jobs.

We're propping up India with manufacturing and offshort labor. We're sending all the US aid to like Africa. We're backstopping the military defense of Western Europe because these people have an expansionist like pushed to want to take over Eurasia, like every single person. Like we're literally subsidizing all of South America with the freaking drug trade and it's all coming from the middle class taxpayer and the music stopping. And I think young men just fundamentally know that they're

being called to action on this. And I'll tell you that, like the corporate situation is even more diabolical. So, like I said, thousands and thousands of applications, but I was able to see in real time. I have a weird career. I was like Navy, then like banking, then I went and got my MBA. Then I was VC, then I was in like tech companies. My last job as a

Walmart corporate, I saw the HEB abuse. It's ten times worse than anybody says, but I saw in real time as the actual return rates all my applications diminished over a ten year period. Now, could I get a job, Like, could I go network to the C suite and like kiss somebody's rear?

And that's even worse because over sixty percent of Walmart engineering, for instance, is Indian foreign national. But this is the part that tells me that young men need to really step up because the corporations who are one of the reasons that we've been so economically and competitively successful our ability to innovate and create amazing products that the world wants. So this is one of the vignettes that they were covering in this article. And I think this was, Oh,

this was journalism. That was the third, and this was about a guy that works in journalism. Andrew, for his part, was unable to adopt the performative ally ship that had become expected in the newspaper. I always thought that I was an effeminate nerd growing up, but my way of expressing myself now puts me on the most masculine end

of men in the media. I started to pick up on the fact that there wasn't much room for people who even speak in my timbre, and what does that mean, well, it's why I wasn't really wanted to Walmart Corporate either, because I would get in and my job wasn't about fluffing my resume and kissing my boss's rear and hugging it out with other teams, you know, patting ourselves on the back for saving ground people all over the world or whatever. Right, I would say, well, look, your team's

screwing up. You messed up one hundred thousand customer experiences. Why isn't that fixed yesterday? And when are you gonna fix it? Why didn't you put that on the roadmap already? And how many times are'm gonna have to follow up with you? You retard, like that's what should happen in a corporation or any mission seeking organization that is trying to service shareholder value or you know, defend the United

States of America or whatever that be, right. And so my big concern is that it's all going to fall apart because I mean, just look at look at what Cracker Barrel did. That's gonna happen in every corporation and every academic and just in the military, maybe even judiciary. It's all performative, fake decision making. Based on optics and feelings, and it has to end to where we are literally going to get picked apart by the rest of the world.

things were not going well. And you know, he prepares the report, sends it off to his boss, and then you know, two or three weeks later, when he's in the meeting, it has been recast. And this phrase, which I've heard now echoed elsewhere, well we're not doing we're not doing well, but we are doing good, was sort of the way to spin it. The idea that the mission is not necessarily what it says on the tin right to be a X y Z company to service those sort of needs, but it's too kind of service.

This broader, ill defined good. You know, that is sort of, as you've said, completely and totally performative. And look if that's one company, even if it's in a small market where it's important. If it goes away, something will replace it. But when that becomes every company all at once, you're sort of starting to look at this and you're saying, well, like,

where does this go? Because you're creating this bizarre situation where you have this sort of untapped talent pool people who are capable and competent who are doing something now they might not be doing something particularly productive. In fact, I think this is a large part of the reason you've seen the growth of like social media influencers, as it is a way you can make money. You know,

it is a you know, rough meritocracy. And look, like I realized the irony of making this point on you know, a podcast that I have, but like that is individually rational, But then you have that person not doing something actually productive in the system that makes the world better, not producing something, And so it's this brain drain. And that's

even assuming it's something relatively innocuous. But you are both harvesting out, you know, the sort of IQ and the sort of functionality out of existing institutions, pushing it to the outside and giving those people no direction. To me that seems fundamentally unstable, even setting aside the sort of national concerns you mentioned earlier, which is other countries are not making this mistake.

rid of them. Now we have doors falling off Boeing planes, Right, we have government that just is absolutely incapable of doing anything, like even the military too. Right, nobody's been fired for that crisis in Afghanistan. How does that even happen? I think you'll just look at every industry everywhere, and there's a lack of integrity and objective decision making. And not only that, it's like, okay, we've robbed people's agency because we have supported a system that concentrates power. So you

can't open up a retail store. You're competing against Amazon because the government refuses to go after anti competitive behavior with them, AI is going to increasingly be a problem. And I'm sorry, but the right has to have an answer for this, or even the conservative youth, they say when you ask them, well, if AI takes away jobs, are we just going to have to go to universal basic income? And everybody says yes, And I think even

Elon is talking about that right now. And I think that's a horrible decision because of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. How are people going to self actualize if there's no tangible way to prove that through hard work you can achieve more? Are we just going to give up on that as humans? And if the answer is no, then the conservative movement has to understand that we need drastic, rapid, systematic reform. We need independent government that's willing to go

after these corporations. We need to have the ability to see, like things that suck fail, and Donald Trump's not that person. I've gotten a lot of dms from disaffected three time MAGA voters who are not Republicans, who are like burning their hats and fifty five gallon drums out back, and one of them said, I thought Trump was going to be our Franco. But I guess I'm going to have

to keep waiting because, for instance, the Chinese students. We have Chinese students like stealing bio weapons and sending IP back and probably half of them are CCP agents. Then they're propping up places like Brown University has a lot of Chinese believe it or not, students on visa. And there's these Marxist organizations where conservatives are dying and not getting accepted and it's just harfying, like literally everything has

been broken and there's there's no systematic fix. And so when you have a situation like this that's untenable again, a vacuum is gonna get filled and if it has to get bloody, that's probably where it's going to go. But we can't dollars marching to financial ruin. And it's almost looking at Trump as like he's like, we're in such a dangerous situation because he keeps pushing the Overton

window right, the Overton window. Your audience probably is familiar with the concept, but the Left is good at systematically using like uniform talking points and non government organizations and marketing to unify on a message they have very powerful online hive minds in order to continuously move everything more left and radical, and the right doesn't have any counter manning forces. There's no opposite, equal and opposite push on

the Overton window. Now influencers and Twitter are kind of filling that void a little bit, and then Trump just posting random stuff on true social But when you push the Overton window right, and yet there's no political weight or backing to any of this, that creates an issue too, because these radical people are going to get increasingly increasingly desperate to prevent the sliding ubiquitously to the left. So Trump's out there tweeting about Heartseller like that's a really

big deal. His State Department is talking about the death of the West in Europe and the kinds of things that they said and that release that they came out, like these are things that matter and are going to make a really big deal when continuously they find people find that they can't vote for that in the Republican Party. And yet when you vote for the left now it is going to be a vote for democratic socialism. They know that their political movement, even though it seems fragmented

and it's full of really bad national political figures. They have piled in behind democratic socialism. There aren't really moderate Democrats anymore in the party, like in a meaningful way. They'll lose because they have a nice little system of carrots and sticks that you know, reinforce people staying in line. And the Republican Party is still just it's just anchored in this performative conservatism that's good for big business and

big business one like, this is the problem here. There's a corporate oligarchy that has captured the Democrat and the Republican Party. You call it corporatism, call it like neo global, homo corporatists, Like, I don't even know the word for it, but it's perverse, and I think everybody fundamentally understands under forty.

I get think of an example, when you know a teacher basically you know, pulled the room of you know, thirty kids and said, oh, you know, would you prefer you know, would you prefer And this is kind of funny to think about now Hillary Clinton or you know, a right wing dictator. Now admittedly right some people are doing that to create a reaction, of course, but it was I mean, I think there was one or two exceptions who said, no, we'd prefer this kind of you know,

baseline neoliberalism. So one, if you could, could you talk about, you know, in the face of these you know, sort of dramatic challenges facing the nation and facing younger demographics, where do we look on issues like democracy? Because I remember one of the things you you brought up that I thought was interesting is the relatively high number of people who were all right with the idea of an AI dictatorship for whatever that is. And so if you could, could you speak to that trend as well?

you're getting responses that don't really make sense. And then when you ask questions about things like this, which political party is the biggest threat of dictatorship or tyranny coming from Republican or Democrat party, Well you basically just get an exact even split, and it's like it's Mets versus Yankees. Well, my team's not going to do what your team is. So like, there's those kind of trends that make it tough.

But what illustrating these things with sort of like ridiculous obtuse questions where you're like, oh man, people believe that has been very powerful and so again, and so you have Doge being extremely powerful popular with voters under forty, that was a big one. Then you have we asked everybody if you agreed or disagreed that he who saves his country violates no laws, and under forty is agreed with that most I think it was fifty six or fifty seven percent. It was almost like three to one.

I think. Then we've asked about arrests. Under forty voters want arrests more than anybody the AI question, and that was weird. It was the conservatives under forty. It wasn't the liberals at all. And the question was like, hey, AI is getting more advanced and people are frustrated that our government is less capable of making the decisions that we need or something like that, would you support giving control of governance and legislative ability to and advanced AI?

And it was fifty five to forty among under forty conservatives, a pretty strong signal. And then you see things again and I think that this would be the same with democracy. Is that okay? Well, which is better free market capitalism or socialism? And people say the right answer, They say free market capitalism. I think it would be like probably about seventy to twenty roughly off the top of my

head with under forties. But then it's like, okay, well, you take the Trump voter under forty and you ask them, well, would you support or oppose nationalizing major industries like healthcare, tech, and energy? And like three corners of them of Trump voters say yeah, of course, why wouldn't we do that, like we should have done that yesterday? Would you support or oppose a program that confiscates excess wealth like second houses and boats from older people to help first time

home buyers. It's like fifty I think that was fifty six percent of Trump voters under forty. So these people are not They're just they don't act conservative. It doesn't even matter what they say or not. So when you hear these things like oh, gen Z is more conservative than any generation, Like by what measure? They want you arrested, Like that's canservative, I guess like they're ready to. We

had a skynet question. We literally said, would you support giving control of the world's militaries to an advanced AI in order to reduce the number of people killed in war? And conservatives under forty it was forty ninety percent, And of course the liberals are like, no, like you shouldn't do that. That's a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't literally like literally launch Skynet. And so I think there's this aspect of the like they want brutal reform and they

want it yesterday. The arrests, ignoring the judges and peaching the judges. Yeah, they're and they're not going to get it, and this like this was their best chance. And so my advice to Donald Trump was like, this isn't enough. You can't do a mission accomplished and say that we fix the economy when fifty percent of all retail sales is the top ten percent of income earners and people have to work twenty two years to buy a house, and uh, we give all our jobs to India. Like

what the system is? It doesn't work. It's like the most precient thing ever written was apparently Atlas Shrug because we literally Gen z and Millennials are basically hank reared, like they're trying their best. They know the path. It's not just like they listen to the boomers dutifully. It's like like, no, like this PAS has been laid out, I'm gonna follow it because it's the right thing to do.

I'm trying to support the social contract and not only provide for a family, but provide for the rest of the world because that's what the American taxpayer does. The rest of the world is a freaking dead beat, and we got to cut them off because we're like, literally, I mean it's gonna get dark here. You know. We got Western Europe that wants to build a fourth Reich

and get in a war with Russia. You have I know that's going to be increasingly embolden as its economy starts to fall apart and it needs to take drastic action. You have South America, who's probably been influencing so much of what we see behind the scenes, and now they have a naval flotilla surrounding them, like you have India, who's an ascendant economic force and essentially owns the engineering departments of every one of our fortune one hundred companies

like there. I look at this situation and I wonder what the path out is. But if it, if you don't, if we don't break from the path, now it's gonna get really bit.

And if the answer is, well, you know, will restrict access to labor, okay, that's one answer, or you can get you know, restrict to how much capital we can have. And I think conservatives look at those two options and say, well, I'm much more comfortable with one than the other. But if you don't choose, you're probably going to get both, or alternately, this thing becomes so unwieldy that it just descends into Brazilification. But fundamentally, staying in the middle is

not an option. Just freezing this forever, because as you said, the demographic can can tend. The demographic trend excuse me, of the baby boomer generation passing away is going to push the country into the hands of the youth. We understand the relative voting patterns here, and so I've especially frustrated with older conservatives because it's like, look like, is the answer quite simply, you know, frozen corporate conservatism for as long as we can hold onto power, and then

whatever happens after I die is indeterminate. Is that what you want? Because that doesn't seem to be a particularly conservative idea idea conceptually, I guess, but also right, you've got to understand that, you know, if you're one of the last guys there, things will be fairly unpleasant for you. You know, we've already seen this with the rhetoric towards the Trump administration, like Pete Hegseth has been threatened with you know, being sent towards the Hague, right, yeah, let

alone the political violence. So like, even from sheer personal preservation, you'd assume that people would understand that there is a lot of anger here.

overweight with heart disease? And I look at the Republican Party and I think it's basically that, you know, everything that comes out of their mouth's a bunch of bs about how they're going to start a couch to five K program maybe someday but it's like, dude, you just got to stop eating. It's not hard. People do this all the time, but it's like the political will is not there. And the reason I'm successful at my job

as actually I'm not a DC insider. I came from outside of politics, and the polling ask actually wasn't that hard if you're not trying to, like basically shill for a broken system. And I go down there and I visit and I talk to Republicans and I'm just not it's not working. I talk to a Republican congressman on the hill, and I think a lot more of them

are principled than you would think. And obviously they have ties to big interests and they're going to make decisions that are in the best interest of those people first, obviously, but they will push back again these problems. But there's no force or weight or strategy or unity. There's no system saying well, this is what conservative means, and we

have to do this right now. And so Trump has filled that vacuum with MAGA, which increasingly appears to be just whatever the hell Trump wakes up and thinks about on a daily basis, depending on who he talks to and Unfortunately right now who he's talking to is Lindsay Graham, Sean Hannity, Larry Ellison, and Miriam Maidleson. And so that's

the kind of governance we're getting. And the problem is it's getting way too late in the hour for freaking Miriam Madelson and Sean Hannity to be the president of the United States. And so that's the problem. I went to the RNC again, nice people. Joe Gruders is new there. He seemed kind of cool. But when I talked to the political and communications directors there and then seeing them interact with their grassroots, it was just like, hey, we got the right message, we just got to vote harder.

It's like you're going to lose. Then I talked to grassroots organizations and they say, oh, there's so many grifters. All this money he goes to, like people like Scott Presler and he comes in and just takes credit and leaves, and no money's going to the people who actually knock on doors. And then they look at the state and local Republican parties and it's like, oh, these people stand for nothing. All they try and do is get their establishment people to run. All it is is an elaborate

donor harvesting scheme. And you got to respect the left for this. I mean, one of the grassroots people I work with said, well, at least with Democrats, if you give them a dollar, like ninety seven percent of it is actually going to go to buy votes and to like advertise and to go towards the actual you know, cause if you give like buck to Republicans, half of

it's just going to go in consulting pockets. In fact, they will make up like fake things to spend money on just for the donor kickbacks, and so it literally stands for nothing. And what you're seeing too now is that there's basically an anti America first coup within the party. And I thought that they would wait until after the midterms, but they it was so bold, it happened so fast.

The second Trump slipped up a little bit, they completely reasserted themselves and you saw it back and like right after the Tucker Nick Fuentes interview, people were trying to push Ronda Santis again on the internet and they're going after JD. I think that going after Tucker was sort of like a tangential way to try to attack JD. Like they were going after the head of the Heritage Foundation because of basically two words he said, and he was one of the first MAGA guys, like the idea

that the Heritage Foundation this blows my mind. So you can see some people are trying and Washington, DC is resisting every iota change. The guy that they're trying to oust from the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, who called some people a venomous coalition, actually got on stage two days

ago and said the word corporatism. I can't over emphasize how profoundly bold that is, because my experience with all the think tanks is that Republican policy is literally just there to do as little as possible that they're able to get away with while keeping the major corporations happy. And like, that's literally it. That's the game. That's what all the money on the right in Washington, DC goes to.

And you're starting to like, see, you know, I talked to the John Burds Society guy there and fest and like, Okay, yeah, he's saying the right things. They're starting to wake up, but it's just so hopeless. And I was like, really anti elon America party just six months ago. I was pulling on it, and I said, no, it's going to siphon. It's going to siphon votes from the Republicans. It's going to make the Democrats win. Now, I think it's time they just need to put a bullet in this beast.

They need to fund the American Party, burn down the Republican Party. We're probably gonna everything's going to be censored. They're going to throw us into camps. But it's like, let's just rip the band aid off. I hate to be nihilistic, but the Republican Party just is not structurally capable of competing against them pending wave of and the bar so low. Their leaders are terrible. AOC is going to be the president because and JD should beat the

hell out of her. But the Republicans have. The Republicans right now are watching Turning Point and being like, hey, that's our future, and it's like, Okay, it's one political organization, but what about your entire game. Did the year to date, just in the first three quarters, Act Blue, the criminal organization Act Blue allegedly raised one point three billion dollars.

It's on track to do almost two billion this year, and it's going to have probably about three and a half billion by the time the midterms roll around, and they this thing could have been under investigation five years ago and it's just not. And so it's like they're going to impeach Trump. There's going to be an anti corruption investigation into every single one of its combinet heads. They're going to have an Epstein commission on the very first day, and we're to whitewash all the Democrat stuff

out of the Epstein file. They're gonna have commission after commission. They're gonna have like hoaxes. They're gonna probably try to shut down Twitter like it. I mean, the writing is on the wall. So I mean, this is the big year. Are we going to really go into the mid terms without a single person being arrested? I'm giving Pambondi another two months.

going for those kind of body blows. We were going after usaid all of these funding networks, the things that would prevent what this backlash which is likely to come. And then very quickly it seems as if all that momentum died. And even in the face of you, as we both said, many of these people going to jail. I mean, look like Trump and his entire family, even down to Baron, who's nineteen, can't get a bank account. Like you think that they're going to be nicer this

time around. And again there's this great phrase I've stole from one of my buddies, bog Beef, where he talks about the Republicans as you know, the Washing Washington generals of politics. Right, they've just existed as an organization to get stunted on so that they can, you know, theatrically allow the Democrats to win, because it seems as if

the stated and revealed preference don't line up. The stated preference is to be a real political party for conservative values and all this, but what they actually do, their revealed preference is exactly what you've said, it is entirely based off of the system of donors and consultants who basically view every Republican administration as a way to harvest and effectively, the Democrats get to rule and the Republicans get to collect a danegeld whatever you want to call

it from fly over America, and look, that system works for you, assuming the country works, assuming that the economic engine was drive. All of this hits that bare minimum threshold to keep running. But ultimately you're adding drag. You're adding drag, You're adding drag, and so like, look like if you start your car, unscrew the oil cap and like put in like a few grains of sand. It's

not good for it, but it's probably fine. But at the point where you've got a funnel the pouchful of miracle grow dumping it down into the engine, it's like, well, guess what, bud, that doesn't work anymore, both on the level of sheer voters and also the fact that, like, if you don't have an economy, you don't get to

collect money anymore. And the thing that I find so frustrating in this is that I incorrectly bet on simple I guess you could say selfishness incorrectly bet that you know, the freight train ten yards down the track would be more interesting than the penny, you know, sitting in between the rails. And apparently, no, apparently they will quite literally

cut off their nose to spite their face. I have a someone unfinished essay on exactly this topic called the you know, the Republican Samson option, because it's sort of this thing of like, well, rather than let this party change, I will destroy it. I will I will keep my sort of control over this hill of ash. And I'm glad you brought up JD and Tucker because to me, this is something I found really interesting where you could sort of see it coming that it was first, you know,

Nick found has the nick one has to Tucker. Then it was nick one has to Tucker to JD. Van's and now we've just discarded all of the other things, and it's just JD. Van. You've seen this with you know, this sort of discussion about the so called woke right, where they're very cynically trying to say, oh, you know, now the right has become just as woke as the left,

obviously completely torturing that term. But it's so baffling to me, because the alternative is this sort of John McCain style republicanism, which, like, look, man, that didn't work in two thousand and eight, it is no longer two thousand and eight. And so the idea, and we saw this in Virginia right where I live, you know, where we can just you know, do something, you know, run the old playbook again and act surprised when you lose by you know, a historic margin. And look,

one state isn't the end of the world. It is someone who lives here. I'd be really much happier if it weren't about to flip blue. But at the same time, as you've said, the fundraising, the public sentiment, even just the apathy among conservative voters. Look, twenty sex is going to be a bloodbath. And it's also important to recognize that that coup you were talking about, the way that it will be cast is that this is a repudiation of all of the populist elements of the republican platform.

That's what the real problem was the problem is that we went to we went too far, and we need to tack back to the center. And we all know what tacking back to the center means. It doesn't mean actually centrist policies in any way, even if that were a desirable thing, but it means more big business, more donors, and will create a death spiral because who will vote for that?

very intolerant of like theft from the system. You can call that economic theft, you can call it like government grift. And people who have zero trust and authority are in a quadrant I call burn it down, where they think the system they don't trust anybody to fix it, and they think the system is screwed. And I think that that's like most people, sixty sixty five percent of Americans. It's why Donald Trump was able to get and a lot of them are low propensity voters who would support

a movement that could actually do this. And then I think Republicans right now are in high authority trust because they are the authority and they certainly are tolerating the grift right now. So you have Republicans and their base in two totally separate parts of the quadrant. Now I think in the other two quadrants you kind of have the Democrat side. So you have these people who have a lot of authority trust, but then they're not tolerating

the way the system's working, the grift tolerance. And those are people who are like, well, elites need to run this, but I don't like their elites. Pete HEGXEF makes me cringe. I think Pete Booter Judge could do a better job, right And then you and so I think that's most of your Democrat voters and obviously they're retarded. And then in the lower right you have low authority trust, but they love the grift and that's like, that's your core kami in the Democrat Party. That's like AOC. They don't

mean that stuff they're talking about. They just want to take the system back over so that they can continue to plunder. And like, I think that that's where it is, and you're like, I don't know if blood bass the right term. It's actually kind of surprising how close the polling is, and so I think for the major elections will be surprised that Republicans actually do better than maybe even the polling says. But there's a million miles between

now and then. There is demoralization, certainly, but we're also I think, going to see increasingly insane's stuff out of the Democrats, which means that we might be more locked into like a really tight race where people are fighting over individual seats because it's only Democrat plus three in

the generic ballot, which means basically a toss up. And then the map, you know, who knows whether Jerry Mannering situation is going to be, So that could be bad unless they arrest Act Blue and put paper ballots in place. And it's like a lot of like possible exogenous changes that could fix things. But like again, I think the bar is real low, and they brought me to the White House and I laid out a very clear plan,

like I don't think this is hopeless at all. It's very very very easy, in my opinion, how you would fix this. But the problem is, I think that the Trump administration is just not capable of it. And the advice was very simple. It's like, sir, your approval rating is kind of okay, but the Republican Party is just

seen as completely feckless and incompetent. And so you, in my opinion, instead of saying, well, we're already here, there's golden age because I brought down egg prices, that he should acknowledge act the actual scope of the true failures of the system, call out the corporatism, call out the oligarchy. Tell Americans that you're going to restore economic capability to younger voters and work with the Republican Party to lay

out a long term strategy. What that looks like, a contract for America, economic populism, restore American dream for the young voters. That's prong one, and Prong two is brutal and visible government reform. You have to walk people through cleansing each government agency. Because the polling shows that like over eighty percent of Trump voters think the FBI and the CIA and other agencies still in need major reform.

So like Cash Bongin or Dan bongino in Cash tweeting about the stuff they did in the FBI, it's inadequate. The system got so bad that people need to see tears. And so this is such a big fix that it's going to take more than a year. He won't be able to accomplish that mission. He won't be able to deliver the Golden Age to America. I said that he

should show them a golden path. You could call it the fight Fight Fight plan for America and just get just say what you're gonna get done between now and November and give people a reason to vote for Republicans and like nothing, and it's it's I'm starting to get really black pilled because I was I was looking and Trump's talked more publicly about Miriam Maidelson than he's talked about under forty voters being able to buy houses.

they were not following Project twenty twenty five. Let's just put it that way, right. And one of the reasons I think the beginning of the year felt so successful is because the executive orders were good and they were bold, but also because Elon was laying out a lot of air cover. And what happens is, in my opinion, if you throw out enough positive stuff. I had to say the word vibe. But the vibe is such that people will overlook any of the small failings. So take that

Rob Reiner tweet. If he had done that in February, everybody would have been like, I don't care. Look at all the people in Washington, DC trying to get criminal defense attorneys, you know, like that's what would have happened. But now it's like, why did he tweet that this is terrible? Why are the wheels falling off? And so the problem is is that they got rid of Doge

like on purpose. And I don't know if it was a Trump decision or that Elon freaked out about the way that Congress was treating him, but I very much think that they the one big beautiful bill I think was a Republican like Trump knows they can't get anything through.

He needs legislation. He can't write the bill himself. It's probably have been it was probably being written four years ago, just waiting for Republicans to get back into office, right, and it's all these favors and gimme dats and backscratching, and so they that was a Republican DC piece of garbage. And I think that they did as much as they could to make it look like Trump's stuff, but it certainly was never going to have any of the Doge

thing in it. And I think Elon freaked out and they're like, Okay, can fine screw you, get away from me. We don't need you. And I also think probably right out of the gate, the Israel backers for Trump were very very same thing. They've been waiting for four years. We need action. We now all of a sudden, the Enrichmond is so is too high. The irishment's too high. And I think that Trump told Bbe probably behind the scenes. I'm just guessing to like, you know, back off, like dude,

pump the brakes a little bit. I need the Republican bill through. And then what happened is the second the writing was on the wall, the r got kicked and it looked like the one big beautiful bill was going to pass. Then it's time to bomb. I ran. So you have all of these special interests in all their monetary things and all their punch lists, and there was never a punch list for the American people. There just wasn't. I mean, like the executive orders were it, and there

aren't any anymore. And so what's the plan. And so the Republican inability to acknowledge the root cause of what's afflicting America is, in my opinion, the biggest dereliction of duty. Because we know the left is insane. So if they're not going to do it, who's going to do it? Who's supposed to be the responsible, objective, pragmatic task the task masters that say no instead of democratic socialism, which will probably suck, here's your viable alternative. And we see

over and over again. They literally can't. So the healthcare situation is a perfect example. Obamacare happened. We knew it was going to suck. They ran on repealing Obamacare, they never did it. They fund raised off the repealing Obamacare, they never did it. And so we know we have these subsidies coming, we know it's going to be a fight. They have months to deal with it. They spend hundreds of millions a year on conservative think tanks on health policy.

We have a lot of big brains working on that. And the Republican solution to healthcare is Trump negotiating an MFN which will probably reduce healthcare prices three percent healthcare expenditures, but healthcare expenditures the government subsidized portion of healthcare expenditures like ten percent of our GDP or something ridiculous like that. So we're talking about a very very very small amount.

And then the Republican legislative advent like response, because these subsidies are a wealth transfer, right, they tax people and then they give those taxes to other people. Well, the Republican answer was also a wealth transfer. It's like, okay, we're still going to tax people and give it to other people, but instead of putting that money directly attached to your plan in the marketplace, We're just going to dump it in a bank account that's held at JP Morgan.

Like that was the responsible sides answer healthcare costs, And it's like what about, No, we got to fire the entire managerial class that's strangling healthcare. We got to break up the regulatory capture. We have to hold these companies accountable for killing people so that they actually have studies that show efficacy and safety, like correctly, right, Like all of these things that we know that you were if you or I were Franco in charge of the entire

healthcare industry, Like I could fix that problem. It's not that hard. You don't need to be I don't think you really need to be a policy wonk to know that. Like we probably shouldn't throttle the supply of doctors, Like that's probably a bad idea. And maybe everything doesn't need to be a super expensive pharmaceutical drug that is barely

effective at all. Like the number on REMS desi vieer is like, wow, the polling we poll on REMS desiviere, which costs I don't know, twenty thirty forty thousand it was rushed through, it never had really safety trials, so to speak, and the efficacy was never that high. I think, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but of the people who said they had a person die in the hospital of COVID, people thought that hospital protocols were complicit forty seven percent to thirty six percent. So

America knows it. It's like these pharmaceutical companies kill people, and uh, we're like nothing, not even an acknowledgment. Like I guess it's good we're not gonna have red dye number forty or whatever, but but we're all gonna feel we're all going to die because we're fighting a civil war because healthcare took about twenty trillion of our thirty eight trillion, Like you know what I mean.

same thing. Like, one of the few areas of growth, particularly in like flyover America is medical systems, right, is you know, whether you go to you know, hospice, which is one of the few areas that a lot of hospital changes make money. And like, if you know a little bit about this, I you know, worked in this industry. But effectively, the combination of retirement homes and hospice are explicitly designed to reduce your income, your net worth to zero by the end of your life, to completely take

that from your family redistribute it to that system. At which point it's like, well, even if people don't know that particularly, they see it. They see that, you know, Grandma died penniless. They see that, you know, an entire generation of wealth just got absorbed into.

we running a hard test on you? Like, I don't want to be rude here, but like we know the prognosis, and then between that and knowing other people who worked in that industry, you see that Like I can't say that, but there are there have been instances where a medical group connected to a hospital will get in trouble for fraud. And admittedly this is caught within the system, but it's oftentimes not particularly in areas like oncology and hospice, where they are deliberately Okay, what do you.

But he was talking about the fact that you know, healthcare has sort of reached this point where even in his wealthy San Francisco bubble, large portions of people are simply making a bet, simply saying, well, I can't afford this, so I'll just roll the dice and hope that nothing happens.

middle finger on the way out. And already healthcare is

like the biggest employer in almost every state now. But what blows my mind is, like, look back at the absolute state of Americans, like building the freaking you know kind of railroad, right, like freaking terraforming the West, the wilderness, and like I look at pictures of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of eighteen ninety three and just look at it and say that that was America, like that Ferris wheel they built, like those vast Greco Roman columns, this amazing

thing they put together in like six months, and whatever it is. And now we're saying, as Americans, we can't step into the healthcare industry and immediately spot the misalignment of pricing incentives that are causing this. Why do we not?

Why why can we send a man on the moon but we can't immediately say, well, wait a minute, they can order all these expensive tests whenever they want, and we have we have have Medicare codes for things that aren't going to change anybody's life, but it's the gold standard because somebody took like a bribe. Is this really what's gonna kill us? And it is. If we had

capped I had rock run this. If we had capped Medicare and Medicaid at a percent of GDP in nineteen seventy and just kept it there, then we would have I think it was twenty one trillion less in debt, might have been nineteen Sorry, correct me if I'm wrong. So I like, that's it. The dollar is gonna die.

The American you know, reserve currency status is eventually going to go away, and it was because we promised too much healthcare to people that didn't even work, so that doctors could drive Mercedes.

from my wife that I need to go. But this was a fascinating discussion. And dude, where can people find you and find your work?

Twitter and see wonderful takes like that. Our main account is ras must and Underscore Pole and we have a YouTube video as well where we go into the numbers and talk about polling and what it means and where we're going, which is pretty wild right now, so I hope to see people there, ras Must and Underscore Pole on YouTube as well.