This week on Thought Crime, we discuss the dangers of Big Brother, Elon vs. the ADL, the NFL, and the populism debate. What do we stand for? What are we against? And who are we for?
00:03:33.840I don't think it was on Liberty Safe's bingo card that they would get boycotted.
00:03:38.980Jack, what's going on with Liberty Safe?
00:03:40.400Go through all the facts for the uninitiated in our audience.
00:03:42.740Right, so I'll throw something out, just an interesting observation based on what you said before I go through the recap.
00:03:48.240But the interesting observation is, remember, from Liberty Safe's perspective, somebody at the company, probably not even the CEO, answered a phone call from the FBI, was asked to provide a passcode.
00:04:00.280They followed their protocol, provided the passcode, and they went on with the rest of their day.
00:04:07.220They had no idea that the Kirk Poso sword of Damocles was about to fall down on them because they didn't even pay attention.
00:04:16.620They actually said in their statement, right, in the statement, okay, now I'll go back.
00:04:20.980So they provided a passcode to the FBI for a January 6th defendant where they allude to possibly have being served with a warrant, though there's no actual information as to whether or not the safe was included in the warrant.
00:04:38.080It just says they were called and that they have a policy regarding warrants, but it doesn't actually say.
00:04:46.000It doesn't actually say that there's any specific mention of the gun safe in Liberty Safe, their gun safes that have marketed towards conservatives, Second Amendment activists, for a very, very long time.
00:05:02.020Okay, so in the statement, they also mentioned we didn't have all the facts of the investigation, which is like, okay, so you said you were contacted by the feds and you didn't even think to push back or ask any basic questions as to what was going on.
00:05:20.640You immediately gave over the passcode to the safe, which is essentially a manufacturer's code that has access to everyone's gun safe.
00:05:31.460This is something that would go in for electronic, obviously not mechanical locks.
00:05:36.620So every gun safe that Liberty Safe owns, essentially this means they can be opened with a phone call.
00:05:43.640So if you have a phone call and you repeat the magical incantation, you say the right things over the phone, and I got into it with people on Twitter today, them saying, oh, that would never happen to me.
00:05:55.200I said, okay, what if you call up and I've got all the information about your safe, and I'm not you, and I asked them to give me the code, and I'm, you know, I'm some teenager, and I know mom and dad, where mom and dad keep the receipts.
00:06:20.800There's this footage of the cars, I think, at his home, and then this one with the Fed boys, who, it seems at a strip mall that they found him, right, Jack?
00:06:36.920It's two separate things we're talking about.
00:06:38.240Obviously, the gun safe is not at the strip mall.
00:06:40.440So they arrested him, which, by the way, not a pre-dawn raid.
00:06:44.040So I guess we've got to give the FBI a little bit of credit here because they did conduct a pre-dawn raid in Utah against this 300-pound, 75-year-old man who was posting Biden names.
00:06:55.720They didn't make him abandon his baby inside the house while they, like, frog-marched, you know, everyone out.
00:07:05.340I mean, they didn't give him the David Koresh treatment on this one.
00:07:08.560You know, they actually picked him up in what I would seem, it seems to me, or at least as a very safe manner there on the street, even though they rolled in, like, I mean, look at the way they're tactically, just for the podcast audience.
00:07:21.580Who do you think you are, FBI, rolling in like that?
00:07:24.480Yes, he's Osama bin Laden, flak jackets and M4s with lasers and scopes on them.
00:07:32.180Like, it's just like some guy at a CVS.
00:07:35.820No, it's a show of strength intentionally is what it is.
00:07:56.300And they've been battling for years with the FBI over what they, you know, when they get warrants, they say, we don't need to go along with all of these warrants.
00:08:04.080You know, we believe our phones should be secure for the people who buy them.
00:08:07.900And we're going to push back on these unless they're very legitimate.
00:08:11.260So they've been fighting for years over, you know, the government wants them to build a back door into all of their phones that the federal government can basically just pop it open, take everyone's stuff off.
00:08:21.540And Apple's been suing over this, you know, to not have to do this for years and years.
00:08:25.680And then Apple's not a conservative company.
00:08:28.180They don't pander to conservatives at all.
00:08:29.940A lot of us have, you know, a lot of issues with Apple.
00:08:31.800And yet they still have this kind of old 90s liberal defiance of authority that is playing, you know, to the public's advantage in this case, whereas this company that spent years catering supposedly to conservatives just folds like a house of cards.
00:08:47.600But at the same time, I think I am a little more sympathetic than a lot of people here in that I don't think I see like a big anti-conservative agenda.
00:08:55.460I think this is a case where a company, possibly even a low-level person at the company, didn't really understand how norms and expectations on the right have evolved so that we are more suspicious of government investigations like this.
00:09:33.020And I agree, but I don't think it's probably necessarily something where it's like they were written in policy.
00:09:39.220They're like, the next time the FBI shows up, we're going to hand everything over.
00:09:41.820But if you don't have people at the top who answer these questions rapidly and are not people who actually care about the customer base, which I don't think the gentleman who runs this company now that runs this investment firm really actually cares about conservatives.
00:10:00.240Because we know that because his partners and he collectively have spent over $400,000 the last 10 cycles on Democrats.
00:10:10.340And so there's a lesson in here, which is, hey, if you're a conservative, you built a company that you want to be proud of and you want to see continue on even after you sell it.
00:10:18.420And that you can go, wow, I'm glad they agreed to keep having Glenn Beck be my, you know, sponsor or my voice that tells everybody about how great my safe is.
00:10:28.660You better not sell it to people who are libs.
00:10:31.740And we should highlight the scale of this.
00:10:34.900You know, we checked out their data, you know, who they were bought by this company, Monomoy Capital, I think is the name of it.
00:10:41.980That was the first problem because Monomoy is in Massachusetts.
00:15:58.080But give people the option when you purchase.
00:16:01.320So right there, and then it says customers take control, et cetera, et cetera, and then blah, blah, blah.
00:16:05.860And it doesn't say it, but basically the whole thing is Poso and Kirk are right.
00:16:09.180Jack, I think part of the outrage of this whole thing was people realized for the first time that there was a database with someone that they can't trust that literally has everyone's codes in it.
00:16:23.100Which, by the way, it's a de facto gun registry of conservatives.
00:16:26.400Yeah, it's a de facto gun registry, but that liberals run it, and it's in Utah, and you can't trust a lot of people in Utah.
00:16:35.500I mean, look at the governor, for crying out loud.
00:22:32.360There was a tweet yesterday that when Trump returns to office, he's going to turn Mar-a-Lago into a political prison like La Cathedral that Pablo Escobar had.
00:22:42.900And then he'll just go down and view members of the deep state there.
00:23:07.660Honestly, they're a bunch of racketeers.
00:23:08.740Yeah, well, she met with this racketeer last week, caused a lot of people to worry, like, oh, they're going to roll out a new censorship regime and, you know, buddy-buddy with them.
00:23:18.300Instead, ban the ADL, started to trend big time on Twitter.
00:23:21.580I think there were over 130,000 tweets for it, last I checked.
00:23:24.640And then what really got crazy is Elon Musk got involved in it, and he started replying to all these people bashing the ADL, being like, oh, this is very interesting, all those tweets replies that he does.
00:23:36.700And now he says that he's blaming the ADL's attacks on Twitter slash X for causing the company to not have its advertisers back, causing it to lose value.
00:23:45.900And he's saying he's going to sue it for billions of dollars in defamation damages.
00:27:46.940And so it's essentially the same kind of logic that you're taking yourself out.
00:27:53.760Like if I were to say, oh, you're just attacking somebody for being Polish.
00:27:57.100You're attacking somebody for being what?
00:27:58.400But it's refusing to take any kind of criticism, refusing to take any kind of situation and playing it into your race, your ethnicity, your religion.
00:28:09.440This is the same type of thing that you see out of critical race theory, by the way.
00:28:13.220In critical race theory videos, I remember I was watching one.
00:28:16.800This video is some documentary about critical race theory and everyday racism, right?
00:28:23.080And there was literally a situation where a woman was recounting almost exactly what Uncle Leo said.
00:28:30.420She said, well, you know, I was at a, this is a couple of years ago, but, you know, I was at a checkout line and I had to get paid with a check.
00:28:39.920And the customer, you know, the clerk who was working with everybody, checking us out, said to see my ID.
00:28:46.000She has to see my ID when I gave a check.
00:28:48.580But I was there with my sister, who's lighter skinned than me, and she didn't have to show her ID.
00:28:54.140And then they went on talking a little bit in the interview.
00:28:56.060And she says, well, you know, I don't usually shop there.
00:29:13.100You can, you can turn anything into race.
00:29:14.880And what's amazing, though, is if you actually look at that clip, Charlie, go back with Jonathan Greenblatt and Aaron Sorkin, that Jonathan Greenblatt comes very, very close, right up to the line, I would say, of declaring Aaron Sorkin, who is Jewish.
00:29:39.120Yeah, so it's just there's so much history that, you know, one thing that's very promising about this feud between Musk and the ADL is now, like, you can just highlight a lot of, like, the ADL's been doing this stuff for a long time.
00:29:51.860So Nate Hockman, he's a guy on Twitter.
00:29:57.700And he has, for over a decade, the ADL used undercover spies to conduct a vast, coordinated, and potentially illegal campaign of espionage against the John Birch Society.
00:30:07.980So that was a right-wing, anti-communist society in the Cold War.
00:30:25.300So they just had people infiltrating the John Birch Society.
00:30:28.460And they were doing things like they would essentially engineer, like, fake John Birch Society meetings so that some major figure would show up that they wanted to get interviewed.
00:30:42.200I think they might have been tapping phones.
00:30:43.860So a lot of it was stuff that either got banned after it happened or was probably illegal at the time.
00:30:50.340And they were just doing this for years on end to, you know, for the purposes of they thought the John Birch Society, you know, was against their ideological interests.
00:30:58.780And they would do this to delegitimize public figures by tying them to the John Birch Society or by, you know, linking them with it.
00:31:05.700And then the other thing here, another tweet I have is from Michael Schellenberger.
00:31:09.300He's one of those guys who was getting the Twitter files.
00:31:11.180And he just highlighted this story from 1993, so 30 years ago, where California police discovered that ADL was operating what the Los Angeles Times called a nationwide intelligence network that kept files, quote, on more than 950 political groups, newspapers, and labor unions, and as many as 12,000 people.
00:31:31.620This wasn't just things like white nationalist groups.
00:31:34.500It was also Greenpeace, United Farm Workers, Institute for Palestine Studies, ACT UP, Association of Vietnam Veterans, and the Japanese Americans Citizens League.
00:31:44.420Much of this information was obtained illegally from law enforcement.
00:31:47.980And they eventually managed to avoid prosecution by donating $75,000 to anti-hate programs in San Francisco.
00:31:56.780Like, there was evidence that they had sold information about anti-apartheid protest groups to the South African government, which, you know, before apartheid fell.
00:33:53.240Morris Deese was this direct male kingpin.
00:33:55.360And he'd send these things where it's, like, you know, the Fourth Reich is coming, and it's in America, and they're going to reopen Auschwitz and kill all of you.
00:34:16.740What I would say, and, you know, is, look, I'm going to do that whole stereotypical thing of, like, I've got a lot of Orthodox Jewish friends.
00:35:21.240And maybe you could actually come to an agreement on something instead of going in for these pressure campaigns and these crazy emotional – and I get it.
00:36:40.760The numbers 1 to 11, 109, 110, 12, 13, 13, 52, 13, 90, 14, 14, 22, 23, 18, 21, 2, 12, 2, 11, 23, 23, 16, 28, 3, 11, 3, 18, 33, 6, 38, 43, 5, 11, 7, 3, 7, 83, and 88 are all hate symbols.
00:37:03.140So there was a situation, by the way, a couple weeks ago, Charlie, I know you remember this, where RFK Jr. tweeted something about the Secret Service.
00:37:12.960And people were actually claiming that because of the numbers in his tweet, it was a secretly coded hate message.
00:38:06.880And so they basically, they figured out that one of the great expenditures, one of the most effective expenditures on the left, is to give money to these organizations, primarily the SPLC and the ADL.
00:38:17.540So the ADL has really, they have figured out that social media is going to be their thing, that they're going to lobby the social media companies saying anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism, anti-Semitism.
00:38:28.420The SPLC, their big thing is credit card processing, right, Jack?
00:38:36.440I mean, ADL has an agreement with PayPal, which, by the way, obviously ties into an interesting Elon backstory, because, of course, Elon comes directly from what they call the PayPal mafia.
00:38:47.680This is also where Peter Thiel comes from.
00:38:48.720Yeah, David Sachs, Peter Thiel, all that.
00:38:51.400There's also a huge line here where a lot of this organization from the ADL was originally bankrolled by the Pierre Omidyar and the Omidyari Network.
00:39:01.280So the Omidyar Network, funded by him and a lot of the groups that went into this stop hate for profit, stop profiting from hate campaign, originally to pressure advertisers, which was done on Facebook originally.
00:39:16.560Zuck, of course, cocked immediately on this.
00:39:19.380Elon is the one actually fighting back.
00:39:21.260A lot of the organizations are also funded by Pierre Omidyar.
00:39:31.980eBay buys PayPal $1.5 billion and really is the one that launched the PayPal mafia.
00:39:38.180So there's a lot of history here, a lot of background, and what you're actually seeing on a higher level, if you look at it that way, isn't necessarily, Charlie, like the issues that you and I are talking about on the surface level here.
00:39:51.880There's actually a much higher level at the overstate level where it's a massive oligarch fight, massive billionaire fight.
00:39:57.960So, Blake, talk about what you just said in the chat.
00:40:00.320So the distinction is somewhat just off my memory of how it goes, but SPLC's big talent is they are, you know, they're all about we track hate groups.
00:40:14.540There's 15 white supremacist groups in Arizona or whatever.
00:40:17.680They were kicked out of Twitter's trust council even under Jack Dorsey.
00:40:20.460And so there's a lot of two kind of – so it's sort of this, like, you know, two-fifths where what SPLC will do is they'll be the ones who say you're a hate group, you're a hate figure.
00:40:31.140So either your organization or your specific person.
00:40:33.840And then ADL is the one who seemed to have more experience in leveraging that into you get banned from Twitter, you get, you know, you get no advertisers.
00:40:42.420They're kind of good at that institutional manipulation.
00:40:45.380SPLC, at least until a few years ago, had much more of that standing of being like, oh, well, they're experts on hate.
00:40:52.180You know, they track these hate groups.
00:40:53.940They're the ones who say hate incidents across America are up 45% because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all of that.
00:41:00.740And they've also gotten spectacularly rich off that.
00:41:03.140I think – in fact, they got – I think they got their endowment up to, like, $700 million.
00:51:10.280The last conversation that I had had with Donald Young, he had actually come clean and said that he had been asked to call me and that his job was to get as much information from me.
00:51:23.500As far as who I had spoken to, who I had given any information to, uh, and to get that to them.
00:51:31.120Uh, he had told me to be careful, to watch myself and to understand that the Barack Obama campaign was not in any way, shape or form going to acknowledge anything or come out about anything.
00:51:45.440And he had made it clear that he had known Barack for quite some time and had had an intimate relationship with Barack for quite some time.
00:52:21.040We're going to suppose that this one might've been that the Obama campaign, which didn't kill Larry Sinclair, despite him having sex with Larry Sinclair.
00:52:34.880I'll admit, I, I find that one a little dubious.
00:52:39.900You know, I don't, I just like Obama in a lot of ways, but I, I don't think his campaign was going around icing people before the 08 election.
00:52:48.120For one, I think Hillary Clinton probably would have, would have pointed that out.
00:52:53.900There, there, she was incompetent, but I think they would have tried.
00:52:57.920So the question is, Jack, is Barack Obama a gay coke head?
00:53:01.240I mean, at this point, it seems like we've got a lot of evidence coming forward.
00:53:09.800And like I said before, I think that a message is clearly being sent to the Obama camp, the Obama family right now, whether it's from the Chicago machine or you got to understand that the Democrats operate, they are a machine of machines, a mafia of mafias, if you will.
00:53:29.120And so the Biden side of things was just sort of a, you know, they have no actual power, right?
00:58:10.360So, but, but Jack, should this story matter?
00:58:13.960Well, I think it should matter for a lot of reasons, Charlie.
00:58:16.100I mean, when it's, I said to somebody who was involved with the interview the other day when we were chatting about it.
00:58:22.260And I said, you know, it's amazing to me that the media will force feed us, you know, Donald Trump's second cousin's, IT staffers, you know, roommate.
00:58:32.660And all of a sudden he's being charged over this.
00:58:34.660And we know all of these basic facts about Trump's life, his family, his extended family are turning them into stuff.
00:58:40.220But when it comes to a guy who's Barack Obama, who was president for twice as long as Trump was, right, you could ask any American basic facts about him and they just don't know, right?
00:58:50.380There's this huge black hole about Barack Obama's past that has always been there and has never really been open.
00:59:00.200And so I do think that we should actually ask questions about who our leaders are, how they got there, and how we as a country got to where we are.
00:59:08.740Yeah, I mean, they pulled up, you know, behind the scenes tape of Donald Trump.
00:59:14.600They probably listened to thousands and thousands of hours of Donald Trump on camera for decades.
00:59:22.080But, like, again, like, I was just pulling up in there, like, does anybody ever talk about, you know, Brock's Columbia roommate who happens to be gay and, like, is in hiding in Seattle that never wants to talk to the, you know, to the press?
00:59:35.880You know, there's all this stuff, like, I mean, it is.
00:59:38.900Whoa, is that you on the screen there, Tyler?
00:59:43.940Tyler, I didn't know you were, tell us about your, what was it like being roommates with Barack Obama?
00:59:49.480Or, as in 79, down low, down low Barry.
00:59:53.900Well, see, since the first day I was in the movement, in the conservative movement, people in Chicago would be like, you know, Barack Obama's part of the down low gang.
01:02:00.920And, you know, so it will endure because it is funny.
01:02:03.460I mean, the one thing that I will say that it reminds me of is that, so Obama admitted in his memoir that he smoked like a pack of cigarettes a day when he was in the White House.
01:02:18.380And yet, you can barely find any photos of him.
01:02:22.740And we all know the White House is one of the most heavily, needily photographed areas in the entire country.
01:02:29.980Yet, there's hardly any photos of this.
01:02:32.140And so, this was a secret that the Washington press, the White House, correspondents, et cetera, et cetera, were all in on for eight years.
01:02:43.820That people would go around and, you know, I remember from covering the White House when I was there in the Trump years, that you would just, you would see the president.
01:02:54.220So, you'd see him around all the time.
01:02:55.800The idea that this guy could hide smoking and the media just wouldn't take photos of it and kept it a secret for eight years leads me to believe that, yes, there are lots of things that they would be willing to hide to protect their guys.
01:03:10.360Does it, is this, is this something that matters?
01:03:12.880In a weird way, I think the answer is no, and it's not, like, because, it's because, like, the entire Obama presidency is actually a black hole.
01:03:20.900There's another guy on Twitter, Paul Scalas, the Lindy Man guy.
01:03:33.180It's just, his entire presidency is just sort of this, like, compared to Bush before him, compared to Trump afterwards, compared even to Biden.
01:03:40.180It's just, like, the whole thing never happened.
01:03:42.040Like, the movies that came out then barely matter.
01:03:44.400The websites that were big then are, like, all defunct now.
01:03:47.700Like, there's no, there's no aesthetic changes whatsoever.
01:03:51.260That's the biggest, the biggest difference is in the effect it had on race relations.
01:03:55.360Well, he had Obamacare, Kagan, and Sotomayor would be his legacy.
01:03:59.420Yeah, and, like, the great awokening happens in his second term.
01:05:49.880I disagree with you guys on the legacy of Barack Obama.
01:05:54.540I think the greatest legacy that he has is guys like Eric Holder who went on.
01:05:59.800I mean, the guys that actually have puppeteered this country now and have made such negative impact.
01:06:05.860And never forget, Eric Holder was originally put in by Ronald Reagan.
01:06:10.360So, you know, if there's one thing that I actually am very negative about Ronald Reagan about is that you just, you can't put anyone.
01:06:21.500This is why the conservative movement has to do.
01:06:23.980Well, I'm just saying if there's one thing that I think has been the biggest negative impact on the country, Eric Holder came straight out of the Obama administration trying to manipulate our entire country.
01:06:58.820Oh, I was going to say that, Tyler, that could you imagine if we had the power of Google like 2014, 2013 back?
01:07:07.980Do you guys remember how good Google and YouTube search algorithms used to be where you could actually – you could just type in whatever you want and boom, you would get the information and you would even find information that was relevant to what you actually wanted.
01:07:20.980This is before all the force algorithms and the SEO and the advertising changed everything.
01:07:27.080You could find whatever you want on Eric Holder.
01:07:29.100It was an actual free Internet that existed for this like brief shining moment.
01:07:35.540And now for anybody who's coming in in the TikTok era or the X era, they have no idea what they missed out on because the Internet actually used to be amazing.
01:07:45.840And by the way, it's because of groups like the ADL, like the SPLC, like other people that have taken it away from us.
01:07:52.740And I just want to say this with a piggyback on that.
01:07:56.520Guys like Eric Holder, they curate every single sentence that's on the Internet about the guy.
01:09:27.620And, I mean, the Biden administration is overwhelmingly a bunch of Obama reduxes, as you'd expect.
01:09:33.480But we do have one positive thing, which is –
01:09:36.900It's like the sloppy seconds of Obama.
01:09:38.720He nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.
01:09:41.520And I think the experience of sharing a court with Sonia Sotomayor for 15 years is probably a pretty big factor in why the Supreme Court did just strike down affirmative action in a lot of America's colleges this last summer.
01:09:54.720So we could have positive outcomes from the Obama personnel legacy, too.
01:09:59.220But definitely – I mean, Valerie Jarrett, who is – she's a hard worker.
01:10:03.200She was there from day one to the last day of the administration.
01:15:52.280I said, you know, we could talk more about this against Brexit.
01:15:55.380But and they and they villainize this term populism, which the left and the right both use, which just means that we're going to listen to the people.
01:16:15.100Anti-foreign wars, anti-bringing in plastic, anti-keeping borders open.
01:16:19.340And like you don't even you don't even need to call it like populism if you don't want to.
01:16:22.840It's so much of it is just a tonal thing of like, hey, guys, I've been around for a long time.
01:16:27.300And I'm tired of a Republican Party that essentially has ceded all moral high ground to the left in terms of what they're allowed to think and what they're allowed to say.
01:16:36.260And then also just like keeps shooting itself in the foot by like, oh, let's blow.
01:16:40.040Let's blow up another Middle Eastern country again.
01:16:42.000And, you know, suddenly like that, that fake conservative ideology went on the outs.
01:16:48.660And so now Mike Pence has to try it out.
01:16:53.360So Charlie, like you're in the biz, right?
01:16:56.520But isn't it interesting, though, how the way the term populism has really taken off in the last, I don't know, seven, eight years or so, as opposed to the word conservatism, because it's really become.
01:17:09.300And, you know, and Blake, I get what you're saying is you don't necessarily it doesn't fit necessarily the textbook definition of populism, but it describes the difference and the distinction between whatever MAGA is and whatever came before.
01:17:25.220And Charlie, do you have you seen that use of the term inside the party that way?
01:17:29.860Yeah, it's there's I'd say this the rank and the rank and file don't mind the term populism.
01:17:36.400A lot of think tank people and some donors really don't like it.
01:18:30.720And then they start talking on the wrong side of it.
01:18:32.780And they were talking about populism, which, again, a lot of these guys on that side start talking about populism, about a niche thing.
01:18:39.580And the way that I look at populist philosophy, and this is just me, but the idea, trying to turn into a philosophy, is that it just fills in all the gaps of the ideology.
01:18:50.940It fills in the things that people don't talk about.
01:18:53.340Everything that Mike Pence is talking about, we agree with like 99% of the things he's talking about.
01:19:00.320His issue is that these populist ideas, right, have taken precedent over the boring, archaic, non-needle-moving stuff that has allowed our country to slip.
01:19:12.480And so it's very simple, which is that, guys, Mike, we agree on almost everything.
01:19:17.440You're just boring, and you're not focusing on all these other ideas that matter, that have moved past, that are redefining, that are remolding, recrafting the conservative movement.
01:19:28.320And we can embrace some of these ideas and move the party forward.
01:19:32.320It's not changing anything about what we believe and most of the things that we agree on.
01:19:36.880But, you know, being anti-war makes a ton of sense.
01:19:40.400You know, that was a populist idea in the 70s by a lot of conservatives that came out of the 60s that helped shape everything that laid the foundation for the Reagan revolution that he loves to talk about.
01:19:53.520If it wasn't for those populist ideas, Reagan never would have become president and never would have had the chance to appoint Eric Holder.
01:20:01.880So, Blake, you have a thought on this?
01:20:03.560Well, so now I got some positive comments in the chat, so now I have to go into the normie mode that'll make them all hate me.
01:20:08.140And I do think there are hazards to populism.
01:20:37.320I think that would be a disastrous mistake.
01:20:39.380I think all of us would agree on that.
01:20:42.460Something like the national, like, you know, when we froze all of the rents nationwide during COVID and kept, you know, there was a lot of pressure to keep doing that.
01:22:20.040And though at the same time, I – like I said before, I just don't think that we're necessarily following the textbook definition of populism.
01:22:28.600Because – okay, so the populist movement right now, the populist energy, put it this way.
01:22:32.220There's populist energy in the left and there's populist energy in the right.
01:22:35.120There's also populist energy that's kind of in the center, like your Glenn Greenwald, your Michael Schellenbergers, a bunch of these people that just kind of – Joe Rogan to an extent – that just kind of populate this center that aren't necessarily part of either side.
01:22:47.780So when I'm talking about this populist movement that's actually – and Charlie, you've talked about this a million times, this realignment that's going on in the country, you could be an RFK supporter and like consider yourself a liberal maybe.
01:23:01.440But you're also against the big pharma companies and you're against mandates and you're against the Intel corporations and you're anti-war.
01:23:09.900And yet the Democrat Party doesn't represent you and elements of the Republican Party don't represent you because they have formed a two-party duopoly within Washington, D.C.
01:23:18.600And lots of people across the spectrum can see this.
01:23:21.920And so it does work for a – for just tactical purposes because we need a name to call that.
01:23:30.000And I would say there's populist right, there's populist center, and populist left.
01:23:33.820And I think that's the middle where we can all mix because we do need some nomenclature so we can figure out how to make our way forward.
01:23:41.520And we can argue about whether or not we fit the doctrinaire version of it.
01:23:44.580What populism also does is it forces the institutional conservative intelligentsia to prove their points.
01:23:51.920And Trump, to his great credit, did this on three major issues.
01:23:55.640People were complaining and they were saying, hey, like all of our factories are closed.
01:24:00.640And they were never given an opportunity to really voice that concern because we were told that, okay, no, all the think tanks, the experts agree, it's good to send all of our stuff overseas.
01:24:10.200Trump was like, no, actually, have a seat at the table.
01:24:26.860Not, you know, overreaching against our principles, but also not being afraid to say, is there a time to use prudence to accomplish an aim or an objective or a goal?
01:24:37.320I mean, for example, should we break up big tech?
01:24:49.840Because his corporate donors don't like what populists want, which more than anything else, the through line of populism is a protection of the middle class.
01:25:00.480You're right with your concerns, Blake, but what they want more than anything else is a restoration and a preservation of the American middle class.
01:25:07.880Tyler, what were your thoughts on that?
01:25:10.420Yeah, I mean, I just think about how the founding fathers were populists.
01:25:16.640And they didn't start that way, right?
01:25:42.300And it was because they listened to the little guy.
01:25:44.860And they started talking about things that put their lives in danger.
01:25:49.100And, you know, that's really the story of a lot of, you know, I think human civilization that have done great things that have built Western civilization,
01:25:58.260is that it's been listening to the people and standing up for the individual.
01:27:19.900I mean, I think the best way of squaring it is I wish we had a conservative movement that was more populist towards its populist faction of
01:27:27.600conservatism, which is really what it was.
01:27:30.700You know, if you pander too much to overall populism, you're going to get...
01:27:47.360That's literally looking at the destruction of something beautiful because you want to hide behind your, quote-unquote, principle.
01:27:52.040Well, the better example, I think, of like a principle within the conservative movement that's not necessarily always popular, that's not a populist position,
01:28:00.500has always been the pro-life stance of the conservative movement.
01:28:03.620So in the Republican Party, in the platform, being pro-life has been there for a long time.
01:28:08.320I don't know exactly how long, but it's been a really long time.