Is Elon Musk the Co-President？ ｜ Guest： J. Burden ｜ 12⧸20⧸24
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Summary
On today's show, host Oren Vranova is joined by podcaster and writer Jay Burton to discuss the latest in the ongoing saga of the ongoing government shutdown and the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk to get his voice heard in Congress.
Transcript
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When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners,
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I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
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Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
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I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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Even a lot of Republican congressmen have lost their minds because Elon Musk is using his platform
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to kind of derail the pork process in Congress.
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Legislators had been getting ready to pass this massive continuing resolution.
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1,500-page bill did way more than just the continuing resolution, obviously, all kinds of funding, all kinds of pork.
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And Elon Musk, who has been promising, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, to use the Doge department to cut all of this waste,
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decided to take the hammer out early and used a social media campaign to bully these guys into changing what they were doing.
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And now we're hearing all this about, you know, billionaires.
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How can you believe billionaires impact Congress, impact legislation?
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Wrong kind of billionaires, I guess, this time.
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You know, every year we have these stupid satanic altars built in these different state houses
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because they are trying to exploit freedom of religion and the understanding here.
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Joining me to discuss both of these issues is a podcaster and writer.
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Yeah, thank you so much for having me on, Aaron.
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And, of course, I appreciate you have the festive avatar here.
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Yeah, I made about half a dozen of these in Photoshop two years ago for every holiday,
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including Kwanzaa, because we're, you know, we're very aggressive here.
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Well, we'll dive into everything here in a second.
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So, like I said, we had this large continuing resolution for people who don't know.
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We don't really do the budget process properly because nothing about our government actually
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And so we end up with a lot of these continuing resolutions that just kind of move spending
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And in theory, a continuing resolution is just supposed to keep spending where it is.
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It says, okay, we're going to do another year or another few months of this level of spending
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until we do the real budget, which we rarely, if ever, actually get around to doing.
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However, the way that this worked was that both Republicans and Democrats basically waited
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to the last possible minute when there was only like two days left to actually get this done.
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And then they decided to cram a massive amount of pork into this.
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Again, 15,000 pages, way above all kinds of funding from, you know, rebuilding bridges
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and school stadiums, you know, things that might sound important, like disaster relief to
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things that are absolutely absurd, like funding, you know, college students in Egypt, more money
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for Ukraine, all of this stuff smashed in there.
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And we had Elon Musk recognize what was going on, said, this is insane.
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You know, he and Donald Trump both getting on, Elon on Twitter, Trump on truth, Trump, just
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But anyway, you know, they're both on there wielding the power of social media and they start
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Elon gets to the point where he starts threatening to go after and primary any Republican who
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And you see the panic in the eyes of the Republican caucus.
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They recognize that this is becoming very unpopular.
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And Mike Johnson kind of does a head fake and we get a better bill.
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And we see the left just lose their mind, right?
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And then Elon Musk, this unelected billionaire, got in here and completely destroyed our plans.
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The media is saying Elon is the virtual co-president.
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This is just an oligarchy where the rich are in charge.
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Jay Burton, is this the first time that rich people have affected policy in the United States
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It's the first time in a long, long while that has made the liberal elite squeamish.
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And let's be honest, that's what really matters.
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What's interesting is this doesn't this isn't just happening in the U.S.
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A similar fight has been brewing with Keir Starmer's U.K. government, right?
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Musk has kind of sent invoice invoice to to the leader of the Reform Party, which is kind
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of like a an alternative to the conservatives right to their right headed up by Nigel Farage.
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And almost immediately, you have the whole U.K. press, the whole U.K. government coming
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out and saying, you know, foreign billionaires can't buy our elections.
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Now, obviously, those people didn't care when people like George Soros were doing the exact
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But when it's an enemy, it's a very real problem.
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You have people like, you know, Mike Bloomberg, right, who was not particularly successful,
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I mean, really, you know, you could reach into a hat and pull out dozens of billionaires
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who have thrown their weight around in order to get Democratic, you know, Democratic policy
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Mark Zuckerberg famously buying large amounts of the electoral machinery and censoring his
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Facebook platform specifically to do these things.
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Yeah, you may remember someone with a memory more than two or three years long when Twitter
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itself, right, was weighing in very heavily on elections.
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Obviously, rich men have always had power in politics.
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But what is interesting is for the first time in a, I mean, really, as long as I can think,
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someone who is at least in some way at odds with the deep state has an incredible amount
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And I think that's what makes, you know, the Musk-Trump relationship so interesting.
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Like, you know, we have, you know, getting into the Spanish-American War, right?
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Yellow journalism, you can just buy newspapers and use them to bully politicians through public
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The idea that this is some kind of unprecedented maneuver is just absolutely insane.
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Like, of course, you have these billionaires who have wildly altered American politics.
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But it's very obvious that this is not some unique situation that Elon Musk has not somehow
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breached some norm that we've just never crossed before.
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And the fact that the media is reacting in this way, like you said, really points to that
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They've been using all – they've been very, very cozy with capital these last few years.
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The left, which has spent all of its time railing about the injustices of, you know,
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and the need for redistribution and how can people make obscene profits and all these
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things, they didn't care for a very long time about that because a lot of capital was
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And you're right that Elon Musk's influence is not just felt here in the United States.
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Like you said, we've got the UK where that's a big deal.
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And then recently, Elon Musk just said that the AFD in Germany is the only party that
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can save Germany from what is happening there right now.
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Now, tragically, and we don't know too much right now, I'm going on kind of a three-day
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rule on this before I kind of make any big announcements or, you know, do an episode on
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But we just had a car drive into a crowd in a Christmas festival in Germany.
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This sounds very familiar because it happens far too often.
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And, you know, we, again, we don't know anything, but from previous attacks and from just the
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political realities in that area, it seems very likely that this was yet another attack
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specifically targeting Christians and Christian cultures.
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This is a scenario where Elon Musk mentions that the AFD, the right, the, a lot of people
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call it the far right party, but it's just the only kind of right wing party in Germany
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really, uh, which has, uh, you know, as the possible savior of that country.
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So this is a situation where Musk is obviously using a platform, not just his money, but more
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importantly, the ability that he has to kind of move the public opinion through, uh, Twitter
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and through his, you know, at least in the United States, his ability to threaten to
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support, uh, you know, primary challenges in these different areas.
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Musk is very obviously pushing against a lot of these left wing, uh, parties that were
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really looking for censorship, especially, uh, this is very important to him.
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He has more power in the United States because he has a tighter relationship with Donald Trump
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And obviously he is a U S citizen, so much more power to wield in that area.
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But you're right to say that this is something that he's doing across multiple, uh, different
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And for pretty obvious reasons, when you see the disaster happening in Germany right
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You and I have spoken multiple times about one of the classic mistakes conservatives make,
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Find something that isn't fair and point it out and say, ha ha, we win.
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The left doesn't care what you think about them, right.
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And so in a case like this, is it true by the, the kind of like most liberal interpretation
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that Elon Musk is turning his money into political power?
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That is completely true, but that's just simply how politics works, right?
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Your only option is to throw away that mechanism and let your enemies use it, right.
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Which isn't particularly helpful in actually getting what you want done.
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I think your point about free speeches is an apt one, right?
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Because we've seen this kind of like techno globalist style elite really fall in love with
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You know, when I was younger, I remember, you know, the era when, when WikiLeaks was, you
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know, the voice of the people, you know, showing us the, the worst excesses of the George
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Bush regime, but a few years pass, all of a sudden, Obama starts to get a little bit
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squirrely, starts, you know, throwing some dissidents in jail, a few more years pass and
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WikiLeaks isn't all of a sudden magically transformed into a, you know, an agent of the evil empire
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That, that free speech that they used much like these billionaires, it was never a principle,
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And so when I look at someone like Musk, you know, he doesn't seem to me to be the
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In some ways, he seems, you know, quite ideologically attached to kind of certain liberal beliefs,
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one of which is, you know, belief in free speech.
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And obviously that really helped Trump out in this election.
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The way that news was expressed was much, much more on X because it was a free platform.
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And certainly, right, like Trump was, was sort of buoyed into power by this like great
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And, you know, maybe you, you lost a couple of accounts, but all of a sudden, you know,
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not only did Musk, you know, keep people from getting banned, but he paid people, you
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know, with the monetization features on X and all of a sudden, right, when you have people
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with dissident opinions, getting checks from Uncle Elon, even if they're small checks, well,
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And so I think that really this is sort of a, it's a hopeful thing, right?
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I'm not saying Musk agrees entirely with me or with you or, you know, any of our guys,
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so to speak, but it's a major sea change in politics.
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Now, one of the interesting things is, well, how does Trump react to this, right?
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Because it's at least sort of mathematically possible for Trump to say, well, Elon, thanks
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Elon wasted his money, Trump coasted into office.
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But I don't see that as being likely because, you know, say what you will about the man, Trump
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has a very strong sense of both personal loyalty and personal betrayal.
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I think if we're recognizing that Elon Musk got him the election and by extension, kept
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him out of jail, he's probably noticed that as well.
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So I think one of the other interesting dynamics into this is all of a sudden there is a new
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interest group in the Republican Party, Elon Musk and his friends.
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And that means there's another group at the table for any sort of discussion.
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And when we compare that to, shall we say, legacy interests in American right-wing politics,
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right, there were sort of a very few number of interest groups and people like you and
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I who have, shall we say, very conservative beliefs, we got left out in the cold.
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Well, all of a sudden there's one more person, right?
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There's one more person who is, again, not entirely our friend, but has been, you know, making
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what I would consider positive statements about, you know, the human birth rate.
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Musk recently came out and said, you know, I don't believe in God, but I do think that
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Christianity is the right way to order a society.
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And again, it's not the ultimate win, but it's sure a step towards it.
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It is very strange that a guy, you know, again, both Trump and Elon are obviously not,
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you know, the upstanding representation of kind of the Christian man, for sure.
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Maybe Trump believes in God, I believe he does, but neither of these guys are going to be,
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you know, deacons at the local church, let's put it that way, given kind of their track record.
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However, both of these guys are doing more for Christians and conservatives than any of the
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people who actually profess these beliefs, right?
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We've had like Mitt Romney's and we've had, you know, Mike Pence's, guys who are supposed to have
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the personal lives, are supposed to have the values that Christian conservatives put forward,
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They sold these people out over and over again.
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The support that was given to them because they profess these values and even live these lifestyles
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in both those cases, for the most part, didn't ever translate into any wins, any political reality
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And now you have two guys who are very far away from those lifestyles and the, you know,
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But the fact, the simple fact that they acknowledge that these are the right ways to do things,
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this is the right way to live, this is the right way to order society,
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and they're actually willing to use some kind of power, they actually prioritize that over
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a war in Ukraine or something, means that they are securing more victories for the people
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who believe those things and want to live their lives that way than the people who necessarily
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were theoretically closer to that in their actual lived experience.
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And I think it's really important also that Elon is using a very particular dynamic, right?
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Oswald Spengler talks a lot about money power and how in a democracy, money power is really
00:18:46.600
And that kind of late civilization, it is culture and money power that actually drive these things
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And we're seeing this in the kind of showdown of the billionaires, right?
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We have one billionaire, Trump, and we have a much larger billionaire, Elon, and the large
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network of people, the PayPal mafia, as Kingpild has described them when he came on the show,
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this kind of large group of Silicon Valley billionaires.
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And they are wielding large amounts of power, obviously, through that money.
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So the question is not, will we have billionaires in power, right?
00:19:30.820
And the way that Elon is wielding that power is particularly interesting because again, nothing
00:19:37.240
new about money in politics, especially democracy, late stage democracy.
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However, he is using his platform to get to the people.
00:19:47.580
Well, many of his posts after this bill were defeated were about, you know, your voice has
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He is in many ways using, presenting himself as a Caesar, right?
00:20:02.760
A Caesar figure is one that calls on the power of the people to defeat the oligarchic class.
00:20:09.380
So even though he himself would be labeled accurately, I believe, as an oligarch, he is using kind
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of the Caesarean tactics that are supposed to come at the late stage of this cycle of civilization,
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but he's using them with money instead of, you know, he's not, he's not getting his own army.
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He's not leading a revolution against the money elites in that sense, but he is using the tools
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of the new age, social media, these things in a very Caesar-like manner.
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However, I mean, he's kind of co-consul, right?
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In a way, it feels a little bit like he has this kind of co-consul status, but he's doing it
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like outside and using this very Caesarean tactic to use the power of the people and the
00:20:56.060
I mean, we wouldn't know what was in the bill if AI didn't exist, right?
00:20:59.900
This was one of the huge problems with spending bills previous to this.
00:21:07.160
Reporters don't do their job, obviously, and none of these watchdog organizations have
00:21:10.740
enough staffers, you know, to go through this kind of bill.
00:21:13.320
I mean, the legislators don't know what's in the bill the vast majority of the time, but
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with AI, you can find out in a very short amount of time what's actually in there.
00:21:21.320
And so he's using all these different tools and this leverage with the people to create a
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very different dynamic that existed before Trump was in office.
00:21:29.900
We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:21:41.540
Fast free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
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Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on EquipFlight.
00:22:03.340
And I think your point about the different eras of civilization, the stages in its cycle
00:22:11.760
Because, you know, people with a more reactionary bent have a longing for these kind of earlier,
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one might say, healthier stages of civilization.
00:22:21.000
The problem is, right, you are a product of your times.
00:22:26.000
You couldn't, you can't really force yourself to think, you know, like a medieval, right?
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You can try, you can certainly glean things from them, but fundamentally, that is a different
00:22:38.300
You know, similarly, right, there's a lot of talk about, you know, Caesarism.
00:22:44.280
You know, that this is the kind of civilizational, you know, winter, right?
00:22:47.400
Some might say, but also with comes that, right, we shouldn't necessarily assume that
00:22:52.160
a Caesar will be like, you know, the guy named Julius, right?
00:22:58.680
And so, you know, if you look at the original triumvirate, obviously, all three men had different
00:23:03.160
backgrounds, but fundamentally, what were they?
00:23:07.760
That was the way you acued social standing in, you know, the empire, right?
00:23:12.940
I guess it wasn't the empire then, but you know what I mean, right?
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In Roman society, whereas now, right, there's a lot less prestige attached to, one, government
00:23:23.480
So if you're one of these truly exceptional individuals, right?
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If you're one of these, you know, top 0.001% who are the kind of like ultra elite, where
00:23:35.300
I'm sorry, obviously, there are some who do, but if you do go into the military, you're probably
00:23:39.440
not going to make it to a general for, you know, any number of policy reasons.
00:23:47.560
You know, even before that, right, you have someone like Donald Trump, you become, you
00:23:53.020
And so, again, it's no shock that these sort of people are forming our sort of new triumvirate,
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I realize it's a triumvirate with only two people.
00:24:03.020
But, you know, for the sake of discussion, right, if we're talking back to Caesar.
00:24:06.680
Anyway, do you see what I'm getting at there, Aaron?
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If you were going to concentrate power, in what form would you concentrate it in previous
00:24:24.680
Today, it really is fundamentally not just money, though money is obviously clearly important,
00:24:31.100
The ability in the age of the mass man, the ability to activate the mass man is what matters.
00:24:36.620
So propaganda, you know, the fact that Trump is not just a billionaire, right?
00:24:50.220
He knows how to change public opinion and change perception of himself and others.
00:24:56.220
His most powerful ability is his ability to steal a news cycle, right?
00:25:00.700
That's what really disrupted the media, the establishment in his first presidency, was his
00:25:07.160
ability to change a news cycle in the way that no Republican president previously had
00:25:13.000
And so both of these men are not just wielding money, though they are absolutely wielding
00:25:21.640
They know how to manipulate it in a way that just did not exist previously.
00:25:25.040
And these become the most important assets in a way that, you know, military might and
00:25:32.800
It's great to have a legion, but in kind of the modern world, you can summon a legion when
00:25:38.500
you have a social media platform or when you have, you know, a Q rating that's as high as
00:25:43.700
Trump's, like these are very different skill sets, but they still have the same political
00:25:48.560
impact because they are the things that our society has organized itself around in prestige.
00:25:56.700
But like you point out, everyone is a product of their age.
00:25:59.800
Children of late winter, as academic agent is fond of saying, cannot be the children of
00:26:05.440
And so in this moment, these are the skill sets that truly drive power in the United States.
00:26:11.280
And it's no mistake that one man formally elected into the government, one man outside of
00:26:17.320
it able to act with the power of somebody who has that kind of platform at his beck and
00:26:22.000
call these really create a team that allows you to, again, see instantly what's going
00:26:28.500
Like I said, AI allowed them to go through this bill much faster than would have been
00:26:36.340
The original bill was just filled with all kinds of ridiculous stuff.
00:26:40.380
And importantly, the one that really got people, the thing that I've even seen a lot
00:26:43.920
of leftists super angry about is that it had a raise for Congress in it.
00:26:48.300
It had representatives getting a raise in the bill.
00:26:51.700
A lot of them, you saw guys like Dan Crenshaw saying, oh, well, we deserve it.
00:26:56.060
You know, housing is expensive in Washington, D.C.
00:26:58.820
The guy's a millionaire now because of his stock trading.
00:27:02.500
But watching these rich, powerful people complain about housing prices and how much they need to
00:27:10.540
get a raise inside of, you know, sneak that into this continuing resolution while there's a housing
00:27:17.860
crisis in the United States, while people cannot afford houses as it is right now, was just too
00:27:27.660
You know, watching these people who are doing nothing to help the average guy who cannot afford
00:27:32.880
a home, people in their 20s, even their 30s, desperately trying to buy their first home, can't
00:27:39.540
But oh, poor Congress, they can't afford their second house in Washington, D.C.
00:27:51.440
He started screaming at the cat turd guy on Twitter.
00:27:55.160
I mean, just just lost his mind over this really unmasking how deranged these people are and
00:28:02.380
And they're willing to tie all this stuff to funding for the military and cancer research
00:28:06.920
and say, oh, you don't want to fund cancer research.
00:28:10.720
Well, no, you know, you're you're obviously tying this together.
00:28:13.700
You're holding this hostage so you can get a raise.
00:28:19.900
It is honestly amazing, you know, being a guy in the military for, you know, a number
00:28:27.640
of years, you can just show up to Washington and, you know, become an incredibly gifted
00:28:36.240
What a strange skill to acquire the minute you become elected.
00:28:40.480
You'd figure if that's all it took, more of these combat vets would be, you know.
00:28:43.980
Well, that's, you know, they teach you that in SEAL training, you know, like.
00:28:47.660
You go through the hell week and then at the end, they're like, by the way, this is
00:28:55.700
Step two is to, you know, how to how to massively outperform the S&P 500.
00:29:03.080
But in all seriousness, I want to go back just a step to talk about what you said about,
00:29:08.100
you know, the incredible technical skill of these men.
00:29:11.500
You know, I mentioned earlier that the, you know, that, you know, Caesar, obviously, and then
00:29:19.100
And, you know, obviously that's a very kinetic form of warfare.
00:29:22.080
But if you ever heard of, you know, fifth generation warfare, which is this idea of, you
00:29:26.460
know, battles fought, not physically, but in the kind of mimetic sphere, right?
00:29:31.160
This is where terms that you've probably heard from your, you know, lefty friends and family,
00:29:35.100
like disinformation and misinformation come from.
00:29:37.740
And, you know, while those terms are certainly abused, there is something to be said that,
00:29:47.140
And so the people who are able to, you know, command those are very close to, you know,
00:29:53.360
generals of, you know, fifth generation warfare.
00:30:00.300
When the battlefield fundamentally changes, when something radically changes the way in
00:30:06.200
which all kinds of combat are done, then you're going to see this kind of shift.
00:30:11.060
Obviously, there are still real wars taking place.
00:30:14.760
But even if you look at the Russian-Ukraine war happening, it was so, it's still to this
00:30:19.960
day almost impossible to get like a straight answer of who's winning that war, what is happening.
00:30:25.380
Obviously, at this point, it's Russia, but for a very long time, it was almost impossible
00:30:29.140
to get kind of any real grasp of the conditions on the ground because the propaganda coming
00:30:37.680
There was no way to really gather what was happening.
00:30:41.720
And, you know, you take that principle and you bring it into kind of, you know, the non-active
00:30:47.600
combat situation where we are constantly in this disintermediated space because the media
00:30:54.400
stranglehold has been broken and you're not sure who to believe and what to do.
00:31:03.540
He's able to cut through much of this, cut through the media.
00:31:06.900
Obviously, Donald Trump and his ability to make an in-run around the media.
00:31:10.680
These are generals with very different tactics and they are able to make a very substantive
00:31:18.560
Now, interestingly, I don't want to get into the nitty gritty of the bills.
00:31:22.980
Obviously, people are going to, there are people who are much better at that.
00:31:26.460
But an interesting thing that has changed in this new bill, the new bill is much shorter.
00:31:34.780
It keeps some of the biggest spending, but those were the things that people were most worried
00:31:39.900
Again, the disaster relief and the farm bill, these kind of things.
00:31:43.840
But the thing that they've added is the debt ceiling.
00:31:49.960
They want to increase the debt ceiling or you'll waive it off for two years.
00:31:55.580
And I think Trump's even talking about longer, but at least two years.
00:31:59.740
Now, on one hand, this basically takes it off the table for Trump.
00:32:05.980
It doesn't become a constant hindrance to him, especially because Trump has never been a
00:32:14.240
And so that's kind of, you know, maybe he wants to build walls.
00:32:21.360
He's not a guy who's necessarily adverse to spending in principle.
00:32:24.360
The fiscal conservative is mainly comes in, you know, not starting a new war, those kind
00:32:29.560
But he doesn't have a principal problem in spending money on the country itself.
00:32:34.440
On the other hand, these are people who have been complaining about inflation, right?
00:32:41.860
Part of the housing problem is the inflationary bubble that is occurring.
00:32:47.640
And so if you're going to take the debt ceiling off the table for a few years, you're pretty
00:32:51.120
much going to guarantee an increase in inflation.
00:32:57.480
That's going to be good for the mystical GDP Wall Street economy.
00:33:01.680
But it's not going to help the average American.
00:33:04.200
And so there's an interesting scenario there where, you know, it does give Trump a kind
00:33:12.040
But, you know, realistically, it's not exactly the fiscal scenario that he promised.
00:33:20.980
I mean, obviously, there are a certain number of things that, you know, I quite agree with
00:33:27.000
I think he's definitely better than, you know, any reasonable alternative we could be expected.
00:33:33.540
Trump is not a conservative in any meaningful way, right?
00:33:37.640
You mentioned the fact that he's, you know, unlikely to be particularly religious.
00:33:42.420
It turns out Trump is actually the only, only the second president ever in history to change
00:33:50.840
He, he kicked himself out of the Presbyterian church, USA, which I think both of them were
00:34:05.520
But, right, we have to accept that, you know, fundamentally, we were not given, you know,
00:34:12.080
You know, you and I can, can hypothesize about the, you know, the very real damage that Trump's
00:34:16.260
spending policy will, will have, you know, that's, that's likely to be true.
00:34:19.160
Although I'll be perfectly honest, I know next to nothing about the economy.
00:34:23.660
But at the same time, right, we've got to grade it on the scale of what else could have
00:34:29.760
And I cannot imagine a world in which, you know, President Kamala Harris, you know, heaven
00:34:35.840
forbid it, where she would have been more fiscally responsible.
00:34:39.460
And that doesn't mean that you let him off the hook.
00:34:41.000
It doesn't mean that you get the Republicans everything.
00:34:43.660
But again, right, we were presented a binary, right?
00:34:51.760
Yeah, I saw, I saw Steve Dace make the point on Twitter that, you know, the debt ceiling
00:35:03.660
This is something that gets raised all the time.
00:35:09.920
But, you know, that is a momentum that there's a gradient to American politics that for better
00:35:15.820
or worse, this is an inevitability to some degree.
00:35:28.440
My second priority is ending foreign wars, right?
00:35:33.820
I know that Trump is much better on these issues, right?
00:35:38.880
He's not going to be perfect, but he's going to be vastly better.
00:35:42.160
If there's one thing we've seen consistently promised, even up into this point from Trump,
00:35:47.520
and he's not really known for his consistency, the one thing he has promised is mass deportations.
00:35:54.320
I'm not saying that, you know, this is going to be 100% happening.
00:35:57.340
But it is far more likely under him than it would have been under Kamala Harris or, let's
00:36:02.100
be honest, pretty much any Republican either, any other Republican.
00:36:06.340
And so this is a scenario where, you know, would I like to see spending curtailed?
00:36:13.620
Would I like to see inflation brought under control?
00:36:17.300
But is it my top priority if he's making room space to maneuver on those other issues by
00:36:29.400
This doesn't mean I don't say call out when something's wrong.
00:36:32.320
I'm not saying you can't disagree with Donald Trump or point out when he fails or any of
00:36:36.280
I'm not the guy who says you've got to just, you know, put your blinders on and, you know,
00:36:42.260
But I am saying I'm not going to stand here and pretend like he's going to be worse than
00:36:51.160
And I'm also not going to assume that every time he doesn't do exactly what some portion
00:36:57.420
of the conservative movement wants him to do, that means that he's just betrayed us and
00:37:01.720
it's all over and we should have gone, you know, somewhere else.
00:37:06.820
So I would have preferred to see an actual clean continuing resolution brought about.
00:37:13.680
You know, the real true clean CR seems like it's going to be a myth.
00:37:20.240
But the way legislation is supposed to get done in the United States is you pass a bill
00:37:28.060
You don't you don't make the omnibus and hold everybody spending hostage and say either
00:37:32.860
you, you know, fund my DEI zoo or my, you know, education for seven year olds in, you know,
00:37:41.380
the all the possible gender options or, you know, you're you're stopping the troops like
00:37:47.180
that you're you're starving the troops and denying disaster relief and cancer research
00:37:51.140
like these things should not be bundled together.
00:37:54.040
But obviously, that's probably not going to change overnight.
00:38:00.380
But, you know, this is not the show in which I'm going to sell you the political illusion
00:38:04.980
that, like, we're suddenly going to make the Constitution work exactly the way it was
00:38:09.320
Like, that's that's just probably not going to happen in one fell swoop here.
00:38:19.820
You know, I'm not anticipating Trump fixes everything.
00:38:23.280
And a big part of the reason for that is, look, you know, like everything else, politics is
00:38:32.180
There is scarcity, at least in the case of the U.S. government.
00:38:34.660
There seems to be no scarcity for just inventing money out of nowhere.
00:38:42.280
You can't make everyone do everything all the time.
00:38:46.140
Even dictators, Stalin, weren't able to do this.
00:38:50.180
And so if you look at, well, OK, what was Trump's mandate?
00:38:56.020
Well, I mean, certainly there was a part of it that people were really, really sick of
00:39:05.820
As you mentioned, it was getting out of foreign conflicts like Ukraine and then also safety
00:39:12.980
Crime is, despite what you may read in certain sources, way, way up.
00:39:21.480
And so when you look at like, OK, what are your priorities?
00:39:24.100
If you have a limited supply of political capital, where do you use it on?
00:39:28.760
Well, those are much higher up the list than fiscal conservatism.
00:39:32.940
Not only for any Republican in the same situation, one would hope, but also Trump in particular.
00:39:40.420
This has never been an issue he's particularly cared about.
00:39:43.480
You know, he's really not, like I said, much of a conservative at all.
00:39:47.200
But what he does have that's different from other Republicans is, like I said earlier,
00:39:52.280
he has a strong sense of, you know, personal loyalty and betrayal.
00:40:05.160
But, you know, the reason people like him is because they see him as representing them.
00:40:11.860
Like he said multiple times, the reason they're coming after me is because I represent you.
00:40:16.620
And I think that, you know, if you look at his base, certainly there will be people who are fired up about this.
00:40:22.500
But I'd imagine not as much as they're fired up about, you know, the border or the kind of very real security threats Americans are facing.
00:40:30.080
Yeah, and it's not like these things aren't related, right?
00:40:33.920
If you close the border, then you can actually get your fiscal house in order because you don't have tens of millions of people who aren't supposed to be here,
00:40:42.220
who are on all kinds of programs, who are messing with your health care system, your education system, stressing your infrastructure.
00:40:50.800
You know, there's a large amount of savings to be had there.
00:40:53.880
The same is true when it comes to foreign policy, right?
00:40:56.300
If you're not constantly involving yourself in foreign conflicts, the amount of money that you can save there is astronomical.
00:41:04.320
I mean, how many hundreds of billions of dollars have we sent to Ukraine at this point, right?
00:41:08.220
Just ending that is a fiscal conservative issue.
00:41:13.100
So it's not like you can't have both of these things to some degree, but you might not be putting the debt ceiling as your highest priority.
00:41:21.540
Again, that doesn't mean that ultimately the goal shouldn't be to fix these things.
00:41:26.480
But, you know, working your way down the order of operations, like you said, you know, safety, border, you know, foreign conflict.
00:41:33.140
These are the things that matter much more to the people of the United States.
00:41:37.660
Fixing those to the degree that you can also has a high impact on the economy and on the debt.
00:41:46.620
And so that it makes more sense to save your political capital and focus it there.
00:41:51.000
Also, just the amount of, you know, influence that is tied up in those things is so high.
00:41:57.160
You know, being able to cut those gives you more power to then wield in other areas, right?
00:42:01.500
Once you win victories in those areas, the momentum that you have, the amount of power that you wrangle back makes a significant difference.
00:42:08.480
The other thing that we wanted to talk about today was the instance of satanic altars in these different state houses.
00:42:22.380
We had the one in Iowa and the great heroic Michael Cassidy, who may or may not deserve a statue,
00:42:30.820
was, you know, able to, you know, physically remove that blasphemy from his state capital.
00:42:40.040
And this year we had one in New Hampshire, which was erected and then mysteriously knocked down.
00:42:48.200
I can speak to the whereabouts of Michael Cassidy if necessary, you know.
00:42:51.680
And then it was put back up by, you know, these LARPing, Atheist, Satan, Worshipping, whatever, guys.
00:43:08.600
One was erected, but then, you know, was eventually removed.
00:43:14.320
Last year, like, this was a big talking point, especially American conservatives.
00:43:18.760
You know, the fact that someone had knocked down this satanic display in the state house.
00:43:26.580
A lot of conservative commentators were like, oh, this is a disruption of law and order.
00:43:33.640
It was a huge blow up and debate across the thing.
00:43:36.100
This time, you know, this altar gets taken out twice in New Hampshire.
00:43:58.240
I was saying this is what other commentators, 100%.
00:44:04.200
If you call it community policing, it's completely okay, right?
00:44:08.360
But in all seriousness, right, this is actually an interesting front in the culture war.
00:44:12.880
Because this hasn't been getting a lot of play, but there's been a tit for tat going on, right?
00:44:17.980
You had a small town in Texas where a group of Satanists got together and lobbied the government to get rid of a nativity scene set out in front of the courthouse.
00:44:29.860
There seems to be sort of a concerted push by Satanists.
00:44:36.640
I mean very, very cringe Redditors who have started the Temple of Satan, not the Church of Satan.
00:44:44.940
But they seem to be basically making a push to make life difficult for Christians, right?
00:44:52.040
You may have read about this so-called H.A.L.E. program, right, which is a program launched in Ohio schools to basically say, well, if Christians can offer sort of Sunday school programs or after school church programs, then so can we, right?
00:45:03.960
And that really kind of shows an interesting part, both about the psychology of Satanists, but also the left writ large, because these groups of Satanists don't tend to be what they call like religious Satanists.
00:45:17.060
Now, admittedly, even an ironic Satanist is ultimately serving his ends.
00:45:25.260
But they view themselves as basically turbo atheists, right?
00:45:29.360
Their whole existence is centered around making their parents mad, right?
00:45:35.160
My dad made me wake up and go to church every Sunday morning, so I'm going to be everything he hates.
00:45:40.320
But there's this desire to take anything that is kind of good and wholesome and connected with either conservative America or the church and to denigrate it in any way possible.
00:45:50.380
And this is something we've seen the left do over and over and over again, right?
00:45:56.160
They have to ruin what you have, ruin what you like.
00:45:59.620
You may remember, right, when the statue of Robert E. Lee from Richmond was melted down, or Charlottesville, right?
00:46:09.960
And that's because, which, interestingly enough, is a very satanic way to view the world, right?
00:46:14.880
That in order for them to win, you have to lose.
00:46:18.440
And it really is just kind of a whole worldview centered on negation and destruction.
00:46:36.260
To take what is, you know, by all accounts, right, the second holiest day of the year and put a symbol of everything that is antithetical to Christ and to Christians on it.
00:46:45.340
And I think that that attitude of, you know, just kind of like wanton destruction is one you can see in many places as well.
00:46:56.340
You know, this is obviously something that is, there's no sincere religious belief there.
00:47:01.280
This is just a hack in, you know, in kind of the current interpretation of the legal code to kind of spit in the eye of Christians.
00:47:12.780
They want to insult them, you know, this kind of thing.
00:47:16.240
And, you know, I think it's really important for Christians to recognize and for the larger populace to recognize that, of course, this is never what the founders met by, you know, freedom of religion.
00:47:28.780
The idea of, if you had told anyone who was framing the Constitution that ultimately the First Amendment would be interpreted for the, you know, satanic altars to be built on Christmas inside the houses of the state, they would have probably physically removed you from the situation.
00:47:51.100
And this is not something that was ever intended.
00:47:53.680
And we need to recognize, and, you know, I think more and more people are waking up to this, that there has to be the understanding that America is a Christian nation and that Christianity needs to be granted preference.
00:48:06.320
That doesn't mean that you can't have alternate religions, you know, practiced in, you know, their private places of worship.
00:48:13.380
But in the public square, America is a Christian nation, and we should not be allowing interpretations of our protections that disabuse us of that notion, that allow for some kind of legal exploit to insult the vast majority of the country.
00:48:28.720
While, you know, Christian observance has gone down, you know, religious observance in general has gone down, and specifically Christian observance in the United States, the United States is still a much more Christian country than pretty much all other advanced First World countries are.
00:48:45.520
The overwhelming majority of Americans identify as Christian in some capacity, even if they aren't regularly attending church.
00:48:55.380
And so there's really no reason not to acknowledge that in our culture and in the way that we conduct ourselves.
00:49:01.500
Again, that doesn't mean you have to, you know, force down onto everyone public affirmations of Christ as king, though he absolutely is.
00:49:09.320
But it does mean that you should be recognizing that there's absolutely nothing incompatible with the values of the United States, with the founders and the Constitution and everything else that conservatives love, that in any way prohibits you from preferring, you know, religious displays in the United States that are Christian.
00:49:30.360
And the fact that, you know, the attempt to erect these altars, you know, these displays in, you know, that are satanic in nature, the fact that they are regularly getting knocked down, and that this seems to be not a huge issue for people, I think that's ultimately a positive development.
00:49:48.400
As you said, you know, there's a certain level of justice that should be, you know, recognized in that, whether or not it's done completely through the legal system or not.
00:49:58.600
And it's a good thing, ultimately, that, you know, this is something that is not being allowed in many of these houses anymore.
00:50:05.380
They're not, this is not getting, this is not continuing.
00:50:10.820
Well, and I think there's a through line between both of these stories, right?
00:50:15.900
Both the, shall we say, public consensus to smash balls, if you will.
00:50:20.880
And then also, you know, a great number of conservatives who have made peace with the idea that their interests are perhaps better represented by people who aren't exactly like them, right?
00:50:31.260
By people who don't present as particularly conservative in their personal lives.
00:50:34.780
And that's basically the realization that this is not a fair game, right?
00:50:40.240
That the Robert's rules of order that our enemies impose on us are not mutually respected.
00:50:46.160
And so, you know, the idea that you can simply, you know, exist exclusively by the written rules, you know, do exactly what you are, quote unquote, supposed to do what you're taught in civics class.
00:51:00.860
Yes, I would much rather live in a society where everyone lived by the same shared code of conduct, right?
00:51:07.460
Where there was a moral unity among the population.
00:51:10.320
But the problem is, that's been dead for a long time.
00:51:13.120
That's been dead for my entire life, for your entire life.
00:51:16.480
Let's be honest, probably at least my grandparents' entire life, right?
00:51:20.240
And so pretending as if that's still the case is ultimately foolish.
00:51:30.160
If you have the opportunity to do something, you should.
00:51:43.820
All right, guys, we're going to head over to the questions of the people.
00:51:47.520
But before we do, Mr. Burden, is there anywhere you want people to go?
00:51:53.080
So my primary output is the Jay Burden Show, which is available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, now Rumble, anywhere you want to listen to podcasts.
00:52:01.460
What I do there is I host an interview show twice a week.
00:52:04.260
I've had Auron on a number of times, as well as some great guests he regularly features.
00:52:14.060
Make sure that if you are not watching the Jay Burden Show, you are fixing that right now.
00:52:22.320
The Jay Burden, the Jay Auron Burden Tire Show is my favorite crossover.
00:52:28.060
Sorry, Prudentialist, you've been bumped to number two.
00:52:30.580
Oh, we love all of our excellent recurring guests here.
00:52:34.260
But yes, always great to see Mr. Burden and his Beaver Gang show up.
00:52:43.200
Say what you will about the first American triumvirate, but everyone in it is Crassus.
00:52:50.500
I was going to get to the Crassus joke when you were saying everyone's a general.
00:52:54.480
It's like, yeah, but man, Crassus is like general plus Elon Musk.
00:53:05.480
Noticing an ironic cross-section among those just learning about billionaires in politics
00:53:11.320
and those afraid of losing the Department of Education.
00:53:32.440
Yeah, your PayPal mafia theory has obviously borne itself out very well,
00:53:40.220
And we are seeing it play out in real time here.
00:53:45.860
King Piltzels also has his own show, so you can check out his insights there.
00:53:50.020
And then we have Charlemagne who says, There's an easy solution to this co-president situation.
00:53:56.240
Trump and Musk can just get gay married, and then Musk can legally be co-president.
00:54:00.420
Yeah, well, I mean, given that Jill Biden has, you know, theoretically been, you know,
00:54:05.140
kind of the acting president in many ways during the Biden administration,
00:54:11.060
The Wall Street Journal just finally did the piece where, like, all of the Biden staffers were admitting,
00:54:17.460
We've been running the whole thing the whole time.
00:54:19.200
Like, yeah, you might as well, you know, just, yeah, get that marriage going,
00:54:22.840
and then he, too, can wield all the power inside the White House when, you know, Trump's an old guy.
00:54:27.420
You know, maybe he'll start, you know, forgetting everything in a year or two,
00:54:33.400
That's a wild concept for sort of like a madcap comedy.
00:54:37.980
Two college roommates, you know, 50 years later, one of them becomes president,
00:54:42.540
so they get, like, a fake marriage certificate so they can rule the country.
00:54:51.760
It's him and Kevin James, and they, like, get fake gay married for the, you know,
00:54:58.000
Like, basically the same premise, but for the president of the United States.
00:55:05.540
Yeah, if any of the, you know, any of the, you know, conservative movie studios or outlets are interested,
00:55:14.540
We'll get you, Charlemagne will get a script going.
00:55:20.980
Well, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:55:23.500
This is going to, this is the last scheduled production of the year.
00:55:27.180
I'll probably have the cozy kind of Christmas spectacular that we tend to do after Christmas,
00:55:33.600
but just want to say to everybody, a very Merry Christmas.
00:55:43.880
The podcast is well over a million, you know, downloads just on itself, not even counting YouTube
00:55:50.440
and Rumble and Twitter and everybody watching over there.
00:55:55.280
The audio book should be coming out this week as well.
00:56:03.380
So many of you have been around since the beginning of the channel.
00:56:06.440
It's just an honor to still be doing this and to have you guys around.
00:56:09.560
So just want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, a happy other holidays, you know, New Year
00:56:15.700
And ultimately just, just really blessed by all of you sticking around and continuing
00:56:24.840
Of course, if it's your first time on the channel, you just happened to stumble around on the
00:56:28.320
last show of the year, then you can go ahead and subscribe.
00:56:32.080
Make sure you turn on the notifications, the bell, all that stuff.
00:56:36.920
If you want to get the broadcast as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show
00:56:42.820
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00:56:46.260
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