Elon Musk has been on a bit of a "crash out" cycle lately, and it's only getting worse. Join me as I discuss the latest episode of the Elon crash out cycle, and why it's becoming more frequent.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.
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00:00:59.420All right. So Elon Musk has been on a bit of a crash out cycle. We saw the first one a little bit during the HB1 conflict over Christmas. And then the life cycle started to shorten a little bit. It seemed like every few months there was one thing or another that Elon got pretty emotional about and kind of split away from the Trump base on.
00:01:23.480And recently, we've seen another flare up. Now, when the first bill came out, when the big, beautiful bill came out, and it looked like Elon was not going to get many of the things that he wanted, including certain cuts, but very importantly, also the subsidies for his electric vehicle business.
00:01:41.280He had a real problem with that. He became very angry at Donald Trump, made a lot of accusation. There was a lot of heat. Now, eventually, Elon Musk realized, I think that that was a mistake. He walked back a number of those statements, especially the most egregious ones that he regretted going out and talking about them.
00:01:58.960But at the time, he threatened to primary any Republicans that ultimately would support this level of spending. Well, the big, beautiful bill has now passed through the Senate, and this has triggered Elon on another one of his tirades. I don't know why, because obviously the same issues that existed previously when he said he overstepped are still present in the current bill.
00:02:21.400But nevertheless, Elon declared his intention to start a new party, the America Party, which actually just sounds a lot like a Alice Cooper song. You're familiar with some of his earlier work. But he said he's going to start this new party, and it's going to be based on not spending too much money. It just kind of sounds like the Libertarians again. But for some reason, Elon thinks this one's going to be different. Join me to discuss the current Elon crash out is the Prudentialist. Thanks for coming on, man.
00:02:50.640Thanks for having me on, Oren. It seems like that half-life keeps rapidly decaying every time Elon wants to crash out over a particular issue. So yeah, thanks for having me on again.
00:03:01.200Absolutely. And yeah, this one was, again, very strange because he recognized earlier that he went too far. I understand his concerns with the budget. I'm not saying that those are completely invalid, obviously.
00:03:14.960But ultimately, Elon has struggled with this. He attacked Trump over it, but he did the mea culpa at the end, right? He said, okay, I realize I went too far with some of these issues, and I need to dial it back some and maybe trust that I don't understand every part of the political process.
00:03:31.860And yet here we are again in exactly the same situation. And I want to talk about a couple of things when it comes to this bill.
00:03:38.800Because again, from the outset, I recognize that this bill is not perfect. It's very far from perfect. In fact, there's a lot of pork in it.
00:03:47.840There's too much spending. There's not the cuts that ultimately a lot of fiscal hawks would like, especially the Libertarian portion of the right.
00:03:57.600And yet you're in the scenario where you have to make choices. And I don't like that you have to do that. We're famously not giant fans of democracy around these parts.
00:04:07.420But while the game is being played, these are the rules, right? You have to give, you have to take, you have to find your victories where you can.
00:04:14.300You have to get a sufficient coalition to move forward together. And that means you're going to have to give up certain things.
00:04:20.160And unfortunately, a number of those things are spending items. Americans love to get free money.
00:04:26.460Politicians love to get the power that comes when they are distributing their benefits, both to their donor class and to their constituents.
00:04:34.900Political power is, for better or for less in a democracy, mainly determined by your ability to give stuff to different groups.
00:04:41.740And this is something that has always been very difficult, I think, for Libertarians to grasp.
00:04:46.240But this becomes particularly difficult when it comes to the trade-offs of a bill like this.
00:04:52.440For you and me, deportations, border security are the issue.
00:04:56.660We're not single-issue voters, I don't think. I'll let you speak for yourself.
00:05:00.760But this is as close as it comes for us.
00:05:05.460Because if you change the demographic composition of the United States, you change the United States forever.
00:05:10.400Not just because of the culture, but also because of our political system, which grants popular sovereignty to the people who have been given citizenship.
00:05:18.460And so if you're allowing a bunch of people to come in, get birthright citizenship or naturalized, then eventually you're going to have this scenario where there's just too many voters who aren't really of original American founding stock and are going to want to change things in the direction of the countries they come from for their benefit.
00:05:49.820But we have an order of operations issue here, right?
00:05:52.120Like, if you want to change the way the country votes, you have to stop letting Democrats change who's in the country.
00:05:59.040And yet for the Libertarians, they have it backwards.
00:06:03.120They think that if they could just stop the spending, if they could just get the bill they want when it comes to spending, then all of a sudden everyone will just kind of vote for maybe closed borders for the Libertarians that want closed borders, though a number of them don't.
00:06:16.140And so you end up in this scenario where you're misallocating their priorities.
00:06:20.280And so you have guys with a Libertarian bit fighting over, like, how much debt greater Mexico will be in once it conquers the United States.
00:06:30.520And that's just kind of not the point at this moment.
00:06:33.580So I guess the question is, is there any hope that some of these guys will eventually understand that deportations, that controlling the population and who gets to vote, these things will actually help you with the budget in the long term if you just grasp the ramifications of what's going on with the voting process here?
00:06:52.880Well, I think that when it comes to our own congressional system, that if you are in a reliably safe gerrymandered seat, odds are you're not really going to have to worry about any potential political competition when you've got, you know, Congress averages, what, a 92 percent on average reelection rate.
00:07:12.960There are very few districts throughout the entire country that are considered competitive.
00:07:17.860There are like two districts in the state of Texas, for example, that are competitive.
00:07:21.720And Texas has, you know, several dozen at this point congressional seats in the House of Representatives.
00:07:28.460So, I mean, for Thomas Massey in Kentucky, this isn't particularly a problem for him or others that might be considered fiscal hawks as well.
00:07:35.000It's only really when you realize your political career is essentially over and perhaps a not so safe seat like that of former Representative Justin Amash up in Michigan that you kind of want to pull out and realize this isn't so much your concern because you're still going to get reelected.
00:07:49.720Or the odds of you getting reelected are very high and that you have a sizable support base, both with the donor class as well as people in the media sphere that want to echo your points or to strengthen you.
00:08:01.980You're not going to do it. And I mean, for people like Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, you have the world's richest man on your side alongside a lot of people on Twitter and other media platforms that are backing you up.
00:08:12.120So I don't think that they're really going to be concerned about the issue, although I would I hate doing this and I hate pointing out like my hypocrisy.
00:08:20.220But it is kind of important to realize that, you know, Thomas Massey and others had constantly voted to raise the debt ceiling under President Biden and under President Barack Obama and other administrations that they may not have been friendly with during previous times that the debt or spending legislation had been made.
00:08:37.980They have done good work on a variety of issues. I will respect Rand Paul and Thomas Massey endlessly when it came to the issue about unwarranted political surveillance on American citizens when it came to things dealing with, you know, FISA warrants and the National Security Agency.
00:08:53.620But on this issue, I think you and I both recognize the priority. I'm not a single voter or single issue voter, although sometimes I feel like I get close.
00:09:01.600But it is about immigration. It's about raising, you know, ICE in their budget from, you know, for upwards to forty three billion dollars, which it should be way more than that.
00:09:11.140But this is a step in the right direction. And everyone knows. And as this administration has echoed, this is a border bill.
00:09:17.680This is above all else about security, about border security and facilitating and expediting deportations.
00:09:25.080Everyone from Stephen Miller to Trump to Tom Homan had said this bill will allow us to actually do the thing that we were elected to do.
00:09:31.240And so to see this sort of theatrical part come from those in Congress, those who have a more fiscally conservative bent or those like with the Cato Institute and the libertarians raising issues about the finances.
00:09:43.860Yeah, those are legitimate issues. But at the end of the day, the concern about the debt doesn't matter if the United States functionally no longer exists in the Anglo-Protestant Republican tradition that it was founded on.
00:09:56.160Because once that goes away, the debt becomes the secondary issue because you functionally do not have a country anymore.
00:10:03.480It's so frustrating. It seems so short sighted and in some ways dishonest.
00:10:08.740And I'll be, you know, I've defended Thomas Massey several times to people to my right.
00:10:13.500You know, said, look, this is a guy who's principled. I don't agree with him on everything.
00:10:17.120But this is a guy who's fighting what he believes in. He's good on some some important issues.
00:10:21.300And so we need to find a way to, like, work with this guy and figure it out.
00:10:26.160But I really honestly this bill made me see Massey in a different light.
00:10:30.200And he came into my mentions, you know, and posted charts to try to show me I'm wrong.
00:10:36.080But but like you said, Massey has voted for spending in the past.
00:10:38.820He's voted for raising the debt ceiling in the past.
00:10:41.620It's not like in principle he will just never cast a vote for this stuff.
00:10:45.800And also, you know, both he and Rand Paul tried to say, oh, well, it's about the pork barrel.
00:10:51.280It's about these things. OK, I can go with that.
00:10:53.800But then both of these guys started finagling over the funding of ICE, right?
00:10:58.720Like finagling over the funding of the border wall.
00:11:01.400Well, we only need this many million dollars or this many billion dollars to solve the problem.
00:11:06.300We don't need, you know, this is 20 billion too much.
00:11:08.820It's 45 or 50 billion. We could do it for 20.
00:11:11.820Well, no, actually, we couldn't. We haven't done it at any point.
00:11:14.640So like sitting there and telling me that, you know, exactly the number at which we could get this job done seems pretty insane to me.
00:11:22.180Also, yes, I understand that seems like a large amount of money now.
00:11:26.420But think about the money you will save.
00:11:28.840Think about the money you will save by not having to educate the children of illegal immigrants.
00:11:33.200Think about the money you will save by not having to fund the health care of illegal immigrants, the food programs, the housing assistance, the small business loans.
00:11:41.380Think about all of the graft that illegal immigrants are able to obtain by coming into the United States and getting all these benefits.
00:11:48.380Think of the crime, the cost of housing, the safety of the roads.
00:11:54.480Think about all the things that will change when you are able to drive down illegal immigration, deport the worst offenders, and encourage self-deportation by so many of these people.
00:12:05.720There's just it's so short sighted to look at this and say, oh, well, I'm going to fight over the cost of enforcing the border.
00:12:14.380This just gives the lie to the idea that this is about the pork, right?
00:12:17.620If it was about the pork, you would have attacked the pork.
00:12:20.080But instead, you're directly saying the problem is the amount of money we're spending on border security.
00:12:24.220If there's one thing I actually want the government to take my money and do, it's defend the border with it.
00:12:29.980Now, I understand that every time the border, the government spends money, there's going to be a amount of waste in it, a large amount of waste in it.
00:13:35.300Other people can adopt it, but if you completely root out the people who founded the tradition, you will not have the tradition.
00:13:40.920And so this is, again, it just fails in every other area.
00:13:44.000It fails to recognize the savings you will receive by the deportations itself.
00:13:47.800It's arguing the actual thing that you want the government to do.
00:13:50.880And it's short-sighted not understanding the impact this is going to have on policy and voting going forward.
00:13:55.760It just fails in every area that libertarians pretend to care about.
00:13:59.560And yet they're just sitting there like, but I saw a number on the spreadsheet that said that the budget will go up or down.
00:14:05.360And so that's the only thing I'm capable of addressing.
00:14:08.160Yeah, and I think the other thing, too, when we're looking at this sort of short-term impulsiveness to virtue signal, sure, there is the congressional impetus to always have the virtue signaling or the flag waving done to raise money.
00:14:20.640That way you have a war chest available for the next election because, as you and I both know, and we're not the world's biggest democracy appreciators, but when your system of staying in power and the ability to implement policy changes virtually every two years, you have to do everything in your ability to enrich yourself now because you can't really think about the future.
00:14:40.120Because the electioneering cycle for fundraising and campaigning is probably going to end in probably the next few months.
00:14:48.000And then the cycle for fundraising and campaigning for primaries are about to begin.
00:14:52.080And this is very real for people like Elon Musk or for Thomas Massey because they're concerned.
00:14:56.840And I think even Donald Trump had put on Truth Social that he is going to happily have someone run against Thomas Massey and that they're going to win bigly or whatever.
00:15:05.940And so it does illustrate the political pressures here.
00:15:08.380I mean, we've talked about this before when we've discussed Nick Land on the show previously, where it's just, listen, in a democratic system, you don't know how long you're going to be in power.
00:15:18.020So you're going to do whatever policy you can to enrich yourself and enrich your guys because you may be out of office next time.
00:15:24.520This is why you see all these guys take these sort of principled positions saying like, well, if we do this, then Democrats can use this stuff against us or Republicans can use it in the future.
00:15:33.420You've seen that argued about the filibuster in the Senate or certain procedural rules in the House of Representatives or even with, you know, executive orders in the White House.
00:15:42.100And so for us, I think it behooves us to really recognize here that everyone's sort of playing for what gets the attention and what gets the media.
00:15:49.720And of course, this can disrupt the agenda that this administration is trying to do.
00:15:55.820I don't know if he is a guy who really does think about the long term future.
00:15:58.880But I know that he's got people in his administration that certainly do, Stephen Miller being one of them.
00:16:03.300And they are very much concerned that in the same way that you and I are, that if you fundamentally replace the people that are already here, America as a nation functionally ceases to exist, which means that, you know, you're going to have less competent, you know, this less competent people running at the head of government.
00:16:20.860And you're going to have basically the same kind of third world politics that these people try to escape from by immigrating here run the system.
00:16:28.760And I know damn well for a fact that if we look at various other fiscal crises throughout, you know, Central and South America or in North African or even African countries just in general, that once they hit a particular area of debt crisis and they don't have the power to back it up, then all of a sudden, like that country goes into economic ruin for generations.
00:16:47.560And so I think that it would behoove Mr. Massey and others to consider all this thinking, hmm, do I keep the ship afloat demographically to where I can solve these problems in the long term?
00:16:58.060Or do I stand on my principles and realize that getting the fiscal ship righted will become a virtual impossibility as you have more and more people in Congress and in the state and federal level celebrating the Independence Days of foreign countries like we saw yesterday with Ilhan Omar celebrating the 65th year of independence for Somalia, not, you know, celebrating the United States of America because she's not an American.
00:17:19.600So I think it really just becomes these clear problems is do you want to pass the greatest marshmallow test in political history or do you want the marshmallow now just to feel good for five seconds?
00:17:31.500Well, and that's the thing, right? So there was I forget the the idiot's name from Cato, but there's libertarian Cato guy, you know, on on Twitter saying, well, you know, winning would be nice, but principles are what matter, right?
00:17:45.000Like if it went over once in a while, that'd be nice and principle, but the principles are what matter. It's like, brother, if you do not have power, your principles don't do anything. Oh, great. I have principles abstractly somewhere.
00:17:56.960Okay, cool. But you never have power. So guess what? Those principles are never enacted in someone else's principles are. So it's not about me telling you, hey, don't have principles.
00:18:05.660The question is, do you care about those principles in a real and actionable way? Or are those principles just something you do to like stroke your ego when you know when you think everybody's watching?
00:18:15.960Do you actually want your agenda implemented? Do you want to take steps towards victory? Or is it all about standing there abstractly saying I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you, I'll never have an opportunity to see if any of this stuff gets realized, but no, theoretically, that, you know, should I ever have this victory?
00:18:31.340I don't know how to achieve, then all of these things will happen. Clearly, there's no path forward for most libertarians to realize what they're trying to achieve.
00:18:41.080But what you can see in this bill is some big wins, right? We get the border security, you get a big increase in border funding and border security for the wall, for ICE, enabling the deportations.
00:18:51.600Also, we see a tax on remittances. Now, sadly, it was neutered down to 1%. We would have we we originally had 3.5%, I believe, and then it was 5% to 3.5 to one.
00:19:04.840I thought I see I thought it started 3.5. And then Schmidt introduced the the amendment to bump it to five. And then it got negotiated back down to one. But either way, the order of operations is in is immaterial. The point is, it got dickered down to 1%, which is not enough, but it's a start, at least it exists now, right? It's a improvement over what existed before.
00:19:29.840And very importantly, there was a some confusion. I got confused, too, because there was a perfunctory vote on the floor. There's like basically this cosmetic vote, the show vote, to get all the Democrats to openly have to vote to keep illegal immigrants on Medicaid.
00:19:45.940And so they voted in order to say that this had to happen. But it was not actually removed from the bill. The portion of the bill that removed illegal immigrants from Medicaid was not removed.
00:20:01.160So as my understanding is, or at least according to Senator Eric Schmidt, the current incarnation of the bill that passed addresses the fact that 14 states plus Washington, D.C. basically allow illegal immigrants to get on Medicaid.
00:20:16.780The way that they have is you're not allowed to ask about immigration status for providing the health care. The new bill basically makes that impossible. So the blue states that we're doing this and we're getting Medicaid money to provide that health care now have to make the choice of if you want to keep paying for the illegal immigrants and their health care, you're going to need to pay that directly out of your pocket.
00:20:36.980So they're estimating that's about 1.4 million people off of Medicare. I don't know how much that saves you, but I'm going to guess it's in the neighborhood of several billion dollars that can easily recoup what you're trying to spend on border security.
00:20:54.080And so it's just there are wins in this bill. It's far from perfect. I wish there was a different system where we could just get everything we want. If you're interested in getting that system started, let me know.
00:21:04.840But otherwise, inside the system we currently had, this was a win and is heading towards solving a problem that is critical to solving more problems that libertarians actually care about down the line.
00:21:16.060And yet we just couldn't have the ability to understand that in the short term.
00:21:20.480Yeah, and this is the important thing here is that even people on the left had acknowledged this, which is it's a cold day in hell when someone on the left says something that I'm like, yeah, that's probably true.
00:21:33.140So where I think ironically, I think it was like Pete Buttigieg had said, it doesn't matter what side of the political spectrum you're on, there's going to be some ugly stuff in this bill.
00:21:40.840And he is correct. Like there's plenty of things in here for pork and whatnot that we're all going to find objectionable.
00:21:47.000And this is where I would agree with Thomas Massey and Rand Paul that these giant mega bill omnibus packages that we tend to debate in Congress are absolutely horrible because all that it does is that it allows you to grandstand on the one or two pet issues that you think are great, while this god awful piece of legislation that doesn't really do much for the American people usually gets passed.
00:22:08.980And I've said it before, like the five most honest minutes of congressional history I've ever seen in my lifetime was when former Senator Ben Sasse during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in the first Trump administration said that Congress has essentially adjudicated its power.
00:22:22.140It writes these shell pieces of legislation and tells the secretaries or the administrative bureaucrats in charge over in the executive branch to basically write the laws for themselves.
00:22:32.280And that becomes policy, which is why the Supreme Court is the politics of last resort in the United States of America.
00:22:38.340So for bills like this, yeah, there's going to be stuff in there that's ugly. There's going to be stuff in there that we don't like.
00:22:43.540But when it comes to making sure blue states have to pay out of pocket for their xenophilia and their love for illegal immigrants and other people who shouldn't be in this country, they should pay for that.
00:22:54.320And we should be disbarring services that are in place for American citizens due to their circumstances, either due to indigency or because of like medical conditions like end-stage renal disease.
00:23:05.020That should be for Americans only. It should not be paying for people who shouldn't be in this country to begin with who are criminal aliens.
00:23:12.160It's the same thing with, you know, massively increasing the size of our Customs and Border Patrol and everything when it comes to border security to billions of dollars.
00:23:22.440Like it could go up higher. The same thing with the remittance taxes.
00:23:24.880But for the fact that for the first time that in this administration, there's finally immovable pieces of legislation, actual law on the books, rather than just like five or six pieces of legislation that Congress has passed, some of them just being small amendments to things or the Lake and Riley Act, which is also good.
00:23:43.560But this Congress, controlled on both houses by Republicans, haven't delivered anything for this administration, haven't delivered anything for the American people, really does illustrate three things.
00:23:54.320One, that it doesn't matter that they're Republicans. They're not really on Trump's side or MAGA.
00:23:58.500They're still following the old ways of the establishment. They're happy to stay along with the unit party.
00:24:03.380And secondly, that, you know, all of this can easily be undone if a Democrat is to get into office or as we've been continuously seeing since Trump took office, the courts can easily just overstep and overbound through judicial tyranny and activism.
00:24:16.540So having something in the law be the best option we have to have anything, you know, put under the ink, put under the law books, actually concretized as policy out of this administration.
00:24:27.820Because if not, all we're going to do is watch Congress and watch the courts twiddle their thumbs and play administrative, you know, grab butt to make sure that this administration, the momentum of trying to restore American sovereignty does not happen.
00:24:41.860These people would happily sell life rafts and life preserve jackets as the Titanic sinks and not consider what they can do to, you know, either fix the ship or write it and instead just get rich selling, you know, the seats on the life raft to their friends and whatnot.
00:24:59.220Well, and so Elon comes out of this, right? And he's so disgusted with the spending and whatnot.
00:25:04.100He says, well, I'm going to make my own party, the America party.
00:25:07.780And, you know, we're going to have blackjack and hookers and like all this stuff.
00:25:11.160And so he starts, you know, talking about how he's going to primary these people, he's going to support people like Thomas Massey, and he's going to drive out all these corrupt Republicans that voted for the bill, and he's going to oppose all this stuff.
00:25:23.420And it just feels so delusional because, look, we already have this party.
00:25:27.460It's called the Libertarian Party, right?
00:25:29.260They save, they're going to save money.
00:25:40.640Every year we're promised this is going to be the year of the Libertarians.
00:25:44.360No matter how bad the candidates from the Republican, the Democratic Party are, somehow the Libertarian candidate is always more embarrassing.
00:25:51.960I don't know how they manage it, but they do it time after time after time.
00:25:55.760And I don't understand how Elon doesn't understand this, right?
00:26:01.040Like, I guess I do, right, because I've seen the Libertarian mind at work.
00:26:17.160And I think, you know, we've probably all seen this chart, but, you know, they have that, the grid of, you know, where voters are, and the Libertarian corner is completely bare.
00:26:25.900There's just no constituency for Libertarians.
00:26:29.280The socially liberal, fiscally conservative corner of the political map is just, it's completely cleared out.
00:27:02.080I'm not a fan of democracy either, but this is true across multiple forms of government, not just democracy.
00:27:09.560And if you don't have anything to offer people, if your stance is literally, we are the state and we will do nothing, then you literally have nothing to offer people politically.
00:27:19.160Because the purpose politically of the state is to do this redistribution shuffle.
00:27:25.000And so if you do not have something you can offer, be it, you know, a social conservatism, be it, you know, border security, be it, you know, the distribution to your supporters of some kind of financial benefit or jobs.
00:27:39.860If you have nothing to hand people, they will go to people who are handing them stuff.
00:27:43.880And Libertarian Party is explicitly not handing you stuff, which means it's explicitly bad at politics.
00:27:50.380Again, you may hate that truth about politics, but until you've got a plan to get rid of the state in perpetuity that isn't like a complete clown show, then this is going to be a reality of politics.
00:28:01.540And because the Libertarian Party can't acknowledge that, they can't win anything.
00:28:06.120And this is just as true for Elon if he starts a new party as it would be for the Libertarians, because it would be just as bad as the Libertarian Party when it comes to its lack of political constituency.
00:28:17.280But even worse, because it wouldn't have the infrastructure and everything else that at least the Libertarian Party has ballot access, all these practical things that have to be done if you want to be successful in the American political system.
00:28:28.540Again, you can hate everything about these truths, but they are truths like so don't don't throw some like empty.
00:28:35.080I've got principles thing at me. Like, how are you going to fix these problems specifically?
00:28:39.680And if you don't know how to fix those problems, then why are you pretending that this is going to be any different for you because you just what changed the name of the Libertarian Party?
00:28:49.300Yeah, and I want to go back maybe 32 years ago to the December 1993 Rothbard-Rockwell report where Rothbard writes and again, Murray Rothbard, probably one of the most towering giants of 20th century Libertarian thought, you know, he's absolutely correct.
00:29:09.040If you were to read his old articles, like the strategy for the right when he was campaigning for Pat Buchanan right before his death and had sort of given you this history of sort of what libertarianism had done in terms of conservatism.
00:29:22.460But he's writing against sort of like big government libertarianism or what he would call the modal libertarian.
00:29:27.060And I'm just going to read a little bit for you here.
00:29:58.600And you see that a lot, whether it's in the Cato Institute with that Alex Noritesh guy or whatever his, how to pronounce his last name, telling you, oh, well, you just hate these people or you don't actually have solutions to these things.
00:30:19.140Well, all that you're doing is expressing to me your own sort of like, well, I just want to make money or I just want to do whatever I think is right.
00:30:25.740And the actual conservative concerns about the power of the state against our natural, unbroken, unspoken, innate bonds between peoples or between what makes a nation a faith or a language.
00:30:38.040All of those things kind of get thrown out the window for the sake of making money, making power or not caring about it.
00:30:43.280We have people that consider themselves libertarians or conservatarians, whether it's Hannah Cox or others that will happily defend a gentleman who used to work for the Manhattan Institute transitioning for the sake of a sexual fetish and then say, well, this is conservative or that this is fine.
00:31:00.420Or even having the National Review defended the U.S. naval ship, you know, the Harvey Milk, like these are where we're at.
00:31:06.280And so, yes, I respect principles. I have a lot of things that I agree with Murray Rothbard and Lou Rockwell on their intellectual giants, far more intelligent than I probably ever will be in my life.
00:31:15.300But at the end of the day, the things that they warned about over 30 years ago has constituted a lot of the majority of libertarian politics today, which is tragic.
00:31:23.920So for the sake of this, like, let's have a third party or let's do something else.
00:31:28.280Well, Elon, let's see what you've supported over the last six months.
00:31:31.700You only supported Trump after he was almost assassinated, either by state forces or by those associated with the state in Butler, Pennsylvania.
00:31:39.040You have terrible political instincts when it comes to getting what you want and learning that you have tied yourself to a ship that you've kind of already burnt the bridge on when it comes to the Trump camp, because Democrats aren't going to welcome you back with open arms either.
00:31:52.640Democrats do not like apostates, because once you leave and then you try and come back and saying, oh, I was wrong and fooled.
00:31:59.180They usually just hang the prodigal son.
00:32:01.700They don't welcome him back with a feast of a fatted calf or anything like that.
00:32:05.980Your money will not save you if another Democrat gets into office.
00:32:09.140They will put you in jail or they will put you through the ringer of congressional investigation after another.
00:32:16.400You treat America like a sports team rather than a nation, which means you can trade people in and out for whatever country they need to come from.
00:32:23.520And most of your supporters online happen not to be American at all and tend to be foreign born investors and entrepreneurs living in the United States or elsewhere across the country.
00:32:32.940So for me, like, OK, cool, it's a less American version of Ross Perot, who raised very concerning issues about American government and its spending in the 1992 election, but nevertheless allowed Bill Clinton to take office.
00:32:51.760But our economy would be a lot better if we focused on the one most important issue about our sovereignty, which is deporting millions of people who should not be in this country to begin with.
00:33:00.560Then you can start addressing the most fundamental issues of our fiscal policy.
00:33:04.400But until we have a system that either restricts the franchise, therefore not everyone has to get a cutout or has to get Gibbs or whatever you want to call it, or we try and find a way to make this system work with what we have, which has been the ongoing way Congress has always made money, then until I see a probable solution on how to fix this that's realistic and attaining power, I don't see it happening.
00:33:28.180So for individuals like Musk who want a third party or a different way, I sympathize with the impulse because I don't really consider myself a Republican or a Democrat either.
00:33:39.180I kind of hold my nose and vote for Republican because at least that side is nominally anti-baby killing and kind of supports some of my interests, maybe, I don't know, 10% of the time over a party that outright hates me and wants to replace me.
00:33:52.700But Elon, you're no better at this either.
00:33:54.620And if I wanted to be cruel about it, I would say, oh, look, it's another gentleman with a Star Wars name telling me what I should do with my nation and my people.
00:34:02.680So I think that he should probably learn a lesson or two from Rothbard and Rockwell instead of posting ye olde Milton Friedman clips about the pencil and how it gets made with respects to free trade.
00:34:14.020A lot more political power and lessons he could learn from people like Rothbard, Rockwell, or even Nick Land.
00:34:20.080Yeah, and that's kind of, as you've made the joke many times, if only libertarians would greet libertarians and they would know the wisdom that's being passed down.
00:36:05.340You are monomaniacally focused on Mars for the most part.
00:36:09.660Why not just do that and leave the politics to the guy who's good at politics?
00:36:15.160Like, I think, you know, Nick basically said, are you really going to take all of your engineering talents, like your once-in-a-generation ability to produce this program that could take us to the stars and spend it on building a less effective libertarian party?
00:36:31.500Is that really the way that you're going to invest your time and your effort?
00:36:35.880Or are you just going to recognize that this is a losing battle?
00:36:38.640You're not going to get everything you want.
00:36:40.360And, ultimately, you're going to have to take a lump or two on your way to the stars.
00:36:58.880But, ultimately, Elon has to understand this.
00:37:00.980And so, I guess the question becomes, obviously, we know that the Libertarian Party has a lot of very just basic functional problems.
00:37:09.420The strategy, the way the politics is played.
00:37:11.620We know that there's a losing game here on a lot of levels.
00:37:14.760But the one X factor with Elon is, of course, his money.
00:37:18.280You know, whether you agree ultimately with the viability of this project or not, Elon Musk's ability to purchase Twitter and to fund Trump's campaign was instrumental to Donald Trump winning.
00:37:29.760I don't think that that means that Elon directly won the whole thing for Trump.
00:37:34.700You know, surviving a bullet, it was pretty, heroically, it was pretty big for this.
00:37:39.480But, ultimately, Elon was a big puzzle piece.
00:37:42.380I'm not going to downplay the role that he was involved in for this election.
00:37:46.820And so, the question is, could he take that money and, despite the deep problems with the Libertarian ideology, still create a credible threat that could pull a lot of support away from Trump at the end of the day?
00:38:02.880It's just that between American voters that are going to be participating in an election, all that it's going to do is open up a very small, concerned group of people that may or may not have the ability to vote in an election.
00:38:16.200And, instead, you know, just openly push that leverage even further that this is about America versus those that think that America, as you and I know it, should not exist.
00:38:28.140And, I think, for Elon Musk, this is about maybe a personal vendetta or a gripe.
00:38:32.860And, I would understand, like, hey, man, I put a lot of money behind you.
00:38:36.660And, don't get me wrong, like, the stuff that he did with the America PAC in the 24 election was smart.
00:38:41.820Like, we're going to pay people to help get others, like, registered to vote and to vote for Donald Trump.
00:38:46.760We're going to pay for buses to get people in there.
00:38:48.920And, I'm like, wow, someone is campaigning like a Democrat, which means they actually want to win.
00:38:54.300And, it's a shame that, you know, that goodwill and that relationship has been fizzled out over things inside this bill.
00:39:01.240When even Musk had said during the campaign trail on Joe Rogan, listen, if the Democrats win and, you know, get amnesty or whatever, you will never get a chance to have the country ever again.
00:39:11.740And, so, while this bill has a lot of things wrong with it, with it primarily being a border bill, that's the reason to support it.
00:39:18.080But, instead, we're getting to watch this epic blowout on Twitter over issues of, again, people primarily of foreign-born origin trying to support Musk and to support these fiscal positions.
00:39:29.840Tells me that, no, he's not really going to go anywhere with it.
00:39:32.060And, even if you did get a political party up and running, you are now going to encounter the same problem that the Greens, all these, like, traditional worker parties, all these, like, constitutional, you know, conservative parties and the libertarians have faced for years.
00:39:45.880Which is that the Republicans and Democrats will spend millions of dollars making sure that you cannot be on the ballot in every single state in the country.
00:39:53.580And, it'll be a miracle if the America party ends up being on the ballot during an election at all.
00:39:59.900And, if anything, you might get a write-in candidate.
00:40:02.240And, Musk can't even run for president anyways because he's not a natural-born U.S. citizen, even though he's over 35 and lives in the U.S.
00:40:08.740So, to me, it's like, okay, well, what's going to last longer?
00:40:11.800A cult of personality that has been around for decades as this, like, American chauvinistic 1980s, we're so back entrepreneur?
00:40:19.440Or, at the end of the day, kind of a Reddit left-leaning libertarian that has burnt most of his political bridges with very poor political instincts.
00:40:28.720And, I think we both know the answer to that one.
00:40:31.320Well, and it's also difficult to take him seriously on some level because he's like, well, I'm very worried about government spending.
00:40:39.580But, Trump has pointed repeatedly to the fact that Elon lost his subsidies in this bill.
00:40:45.020And, obviously, Elon is very heavily invested in the electronic or, rather, the electrical vehicle market, right?
00:40:54.260The alternative vehicles are a big, you know, moneymaker for him with Tesla and everything.
00:40:59.720This is what he's known for, for a large part.
00:41:02.500And, so, the fact that so many of those, you know, so many of his businesses, be it SpaceX or Tesla or all the, you know, Starlink, are, to some degree, reliant on government contracts is a pretty big deal.
00:41:17.240Like, Elon was more or less in bed with the American government in pretty much every venture he's involved in.
00:41:24.360Obviously, SpaceX is a direct replacement for NASA, which means the government has to pay him to make this happen.
00:41:30.940And, Starlink is used by all these different government organizations, a big defense contractor and other contracts for him.
00:41:39.520Obviously, the carve-out for electric vehicles was a big part of his success when it came to different aspects of Tesla.
00:41:46.740And, so, Elon Musk is not some guy who was allergic to government spending or government handouts previously.
00:41:53.440He, in fact, built his entire business model in several sectors on making money off the U.S. government.
00:42:00.920And, so, the idea that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Elon Musk is now this huge budget hawk, I'm having a hard time believing that.
00:42:09.340And, honestly, I think Trump's explanation, well, this is just you getting sour grapes over the fact that you didn't get this giant carve-out for government spending, I think is the actual problem.
00:42:19.340If Elon Musk didn't like government spending, he had several opportunities to reduce his involvement in increasing the American budget.
00:42:28.060And he, every time, chose to make money off of the American government and the American taxpayer.
00:42:33.300But now, all of a sudden, Elon's very concerned about this.
00:42:36.920And it just so happens to be, at the same time, he loses a critical carve-out that enabled his business to grow.
00:42:42.280In fact, I know several people in my personal life who are involved in some kind of aspect of alternative energy, electric, this kind of thing.
00:42:51.280They were getting the subsidies from the government because it was tied to Tesla.
00:42:55.420Those are gone, and now they're having serious business problems.
00:42:58.380So, does Elon Musk really care about the budget, or did Elon just lose a nice, favorable carve-out he was receiving, and all of a sudden, that's the explanation for why he is suddenly this huge fan of cutting the deficit and making sure that we're not spending too much money?
00:43:15.560Yeah, and I decided to just do a quick little look through his Twitter account during the time that, like, Barack Obama was in office, because he's been on Twitter since 2009.
00:43:27.560And not really anything mentioning here about the debt ceiling or government spending or anything like that, from what I can see.
00:43:35.400And so, it's particularly interesting about that.
00:43:39.640Like, so, for instance, if we were to look at, like, deficit spending or anything like that, these key words from, you know, let's say, all that time here.
00:43:46.360And really, all that I'm seeing about here is about testifying about the monopoly contract between Lockheed and Boeing or about the goal for unsubsidized solar power, you know, to be better and more efficient than, you know, fracking or anything like that.
00:44:00.340But, so far, nothing that would seem like he's really talking about these political issues back when things were going pretty under a large electric vehicle push under the Obama administration.
00:44:15.240So, it just illustrates to me that, you know, these are some really poorly executed political moves that are very transparent, very telegraphed.
00:44:23.100It's like baby's first boss fight in politics, and it's not a very strong one.
00:44:27.200And so, it's like, okay, this is where we're at.
00:44:33.600I don't think that Orin or I are going to object to saying, hey, deficit spending and this massive, like, crushing debt that America has passing on to its future generations is a good thing.
00:44:43.640Yeah, it definitely needs to be reined in under control.
00:44:46.260But I also want my children to grow up in a country where the language that they were raised in is still spoken in public or is not going to have to live under South Africanized conditions of armed guards at, you know, major stores or barred windows everywhere out of fear of break-in.
00:45:04.260And I think that that's the important thing to consider out of all of this is, do you want a country or do you want to just, you know, win on your principles?
00:45:11.420And you think that Elon Musk, being somebody who came from a country that is currently in very serious dire straits due to many of the assumptions that the Democrats make, would understand this.
00:45:43.760I think ultimately you're motivated more by the fact that you got snubbed by a guy who you supported when it came time to get your special carve-out than I am thinking that you're suddenly like this bastion of fiscal responsibility.
00:45:56.380I just have a hard time believing that.
00:45:58.680And ultimately, you know, the truth is Elon's probably going to forget about this.
00:46:04.460I don't think he's going to build a whole new party and fund all these candidates to oppose Republicans.
00:46:09.020I mean, I could be wrong, but I think ultimately he knows that that's not the path to go down or he'll get distracted by something else and will focus somewhere else.
00:46:19.020But I think it is worth paying attention because, again, he has had a massive impact on the political landscape just due to his funding and his ability to purchase online platforms.
00:46:29.080And you can't just ignore that when the world's richest man, one of the most influential people on the planet, says, well, I'm going to wage jihad against Donald Trump.
00:46:38.760Obviously, like I said, I don't think he'll eventually follow through with that.
00:46:42.080But it's worth recognizing that, you know, there's a motivation behind that.
00:46:46.020And it's probably not just currently principled at the end of the day.
00:46:49.440Well, we have several super chats here.
00:46:51.920We should probably get to the questions of the people.
00:46:54.240Well, but before we do, Mr. Prudentialist, where should people find your work?
00:46:57.500You can find me on YouTube, on Twitter, anywhere where you can find this lovely little amphibious profile picture.
00:47:03.300If you're a fan of my work, subscribestar.com slash the Prudentialist.
00:47:06.460I cover all sorts of things from digital media and its impact on modern day politics, as well as covering all sorts of political literature and understanding of American and also just Western history.
00:47:17.780If you're interested, I just recently had a show called Do You Even Read, where we covered this great book by Charles Norris Cochran called Christianity and Classical Culture from Augustus to Augustine.
00:47:28.520And we looked at, you know, just how the Roman state evolved under the adoption of Christianity and the bloody history behind that from both a pagan and Christian perspective.
00:47:37.080So that's the kind of thing that you're interested in.
00:47:39.080By all means, just go look for the frog.
00:48:20.520You have to think about what you're giving up in order to get what you need.
00:48:24.300And ultimately, the tradeoff here, I think, is pretty obvious as long as you are considering the ramifications of continued occupation of illegal immigrants in the United States.
00:48:34.940Yes, I understand that just spreadsheet-wise somewhere, you see the number go up and therefore bad.
00:48:41.780But you really have to think about the effects that each one of these things will achieve once they're implemented.
00:48:47.800And ultimately, driving down immigration also drives down spending.
00:49:35.080Elon has never posted about Jerome Powell.
00:49:37.440Yeah, again, very narrow observation of when he seems to care deeply about these issues.
00:49:44.880They seem to be directly tied to the benefit of him personally or his companies and less about abstract.
00:49:50.860I'm sure there are more principled libertarians who would have supported this either way.
00:49:56.360But the fact that they are boosting Elon, somebody who hasn't exactly, again, had a history of aversion to government spending, that reveals kind of their own mercenary quality.
00:50:07.300So ultimately, don't tell me how the conservatives are a personality cult of Trump if you're willing to jump on board with Elon the minute he makes noises that you like, even though his history is exactly the opposite.
00:50:21.640No Guard says, ideally, Elon would fund primaries against the Republicans who refuse to support border funding without trillions of pork rather than throwing the money away.
00:50:37.500So I am going to put specific pressure on Republicans who are insufficiently focused on border security or said that they wouldn't vote for it as long as they were not getting the pork that they wanted along with it.
00:51:16.100And you could at least address the issue while expressing your problems with the bill.
00:51:21.740And yet we didn't get anything from that.
00:51:23.480We just hear we get we get Rand Paul and Thomas Massey dickering over the cost of ICE when we should be cutting like literally anything else at this point.
00:51:32.860And it's important to note that Massey and Rand Paul are not very strong border hawks on anything either.
00:51:38.340And they've been pretty open about trying to work some kind of agreement when it comes to legal immigration in the past.
00:51:47.360Again, I know there are libertarians who are good on the border.
00:51:52.120But let's be honest, the libertarian party and even libertarians in general are not.
00:51:58.420There are even people who make noises about how you should have border security.
00:52:02.840Ultimately, they do not violent or they do not value it very highly and are willing to put it well down on the priority list and are willing to cut deals.
00:52:12.160Like you said, ultimately, Rand Paul and Thomas Massey are not for secured borders.
00:52:17.000They're more than willing to find a way, cut a deal.
00:52:20.320And this is just not what the bill was for.
00:52:25.140It's not what the American people were hoping from the Republican Party.
00:52:28.320And so pretending and trying to hold the whole thing hostage over it, I think, is just disingenuous.
00:52:34.840Bogo says, when you vote for deficit spending, you vote for the neoliberal patronage network.
00:52:39.440And, you know, obviously there's there is some truth to this.
00:52:42.880Right. The question is, to what extent?
00:52:45.580Right. Is all deficit spending, no matter what it's spent on, exactly the same?
00:52:50.400Is it always going to, you know, a bunch of college kids who would otherwise be unemployed if they didn't have gender studies degree?
00:52:58.340Sorry, but I think that's probably less true advice than it is when it comes to, you know, some kind of bureau of equity, you know, or diversity, inclusion, whatever.
00:53:07.180Right. Like, sorry, but ultimately, these are different things.
00:53:09.980I hear you ending fiscal response or having a more fiscally responsible program would end a lot of the patronage that goes to the left.
00:53:17.980Ultimately, I agree that that is a goal at the end of the day.
00:53:21.220But right now, if you want to achieve that goal, you've got to end the constant flow of Democratic voters into the United States.
00:53:29.080The only way to do that is to have border security.
00:53:31.840I know you don't like it, but that's the way it is.
00:53:34.120And I mean, this would be what I would, you know, this is what Doge really did a good job exposing and would hopefully cut is, listen, unless you're going to be willing to defund and absolutely destroy these patronage networks that almost exclusively go left wing, then there's really no point.
00:53:51.120Because if we still have it, then it's going to inevitably own, be owned by my enemies.
00:53:56.060There's a lot of stuff about patronage that I would love to see cut and reduced.
00:53:59.600But until there's a reasonable way to, like, turn that spigot off and we expel leftism in a Hans Herma Hoppe way of physical removal, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
00:54:13.380Mick A says, please support the Angel of America Amendment to turn the Mississippi Delta into a black reservation as the formal act of reparations.
00:54:22.840In turn, this nation recognizes the U.S. as the racial ratio of 1965.
00:54:30.520And then we have Chancey Hart, who says, I'm not surprised by Elon's act antics.
00:54:37.120He, him and Trump have nothing in common.
00:54:39.260And honestly, I think Mag is better off without his, this autist in a bad way.
00:54:45.680Again, I think ultimately that having the sway that the tech right brings, both financially and culturally and just influence wise across media and technology and all of these things is ultimately a boon for the United States.
00:55:01.300If you want to go to Mars, if you think ultimately that mankind's destiny is in the stars or that America is a frontier nation defined by its ability to conquer things and therefore needs a new frontier in space, then I think that actually Elon is critical at some level to the, you know, moving forward in the United States in a healthy direction.
00:55:20.540But he's got to, yeah, it's, again, it's like Nick Land said, your job is to get us to Mars.
00:55:26.320Trump's job is to make everything else work.
00:55:28.440You've got to, you've got to just trust that plan.
00:55:30.880Like you got, this is a case where you got to be a plan truster and not get stuck in the minutia.
00:55:39.940He's a genius in other ways, but this is just not where his skillset lies.
00:55:43.340And if he can't stop himself from throwing a tantrum every time he doesn't get exactly what he wants, then he's going to constantly be in the scenario where he's looking for a new outlet for a new political way to move forward and finding none.
00:55:56.200And in the meantime, as Prudential has pointed out, he's putting himself in very dangerous situation because the Democrats are not going to forget.
00:56:03.480They're not going to forget what he did and they are going to punish him.
00:56:05.980And so if he ends up splitting the Republican vote by funding some other party or just sits out and ultimately reduces the impact that the right has, he's only going to hurt himself because if the left comes back to power, that man is not going to stay out of jail or at the very least, he's not going to be in possession of his companies.
00:56:22.220And if he doesn't know that, then he is an idiot.
00:56:26.400All right, guys, we're going to, oh, nope, we got one more.
00:56:28.620Uh, Azra, uh, sorry, I got the district there.
00:56:48.300Unfortunately, I think the last part is true.
00:56:50.080The communists want to remove the present, the profit motive, you know, the greed of humanity and libertarians want to remove the state.
00:56:58.620And both are just realities of human nature.
00:57:00.340The state is as constant as pretty much everything except the family and religion and human existence.
00:57:06.500As long as humans have existed, there has been some kind of authority to social organization and it's not going anywhere.
00:57:13.860So pretending that you're going to kind of just solve all the problems by getting rid of this is as utopian as a, as utopian as any communist understanding of human nature.
00:57:24.780And at the end of the day, you know, those, those things are just hard, basic truths of reality, just like death and taxes or certainties in our American system.
00:57:32.780And it just reiterates what we had said earlier that, you know, government needs to be ran by effective government and political actors.
00:57:38.780Whereas for Musk, I will always praise him for sort of reinvigorating and embarrassing NASA for having a space program that doesn't make America as reliant on the Russians.
00:57:51.120But with regards to libertarianism, modern libertarianism has kind of gone the way in which Rockwell and Rothbard had decried and warned about over 30 years ago.
00:58:00.680And for, for us right now, the good things of libertarianism can easily be incorporated into a conservative or reactionary model of government.
00:58:14.320You're not going to escape hierarchy or organization.
00:58:16.780Things that have been innately part of mankind literally since the garden of Eden are not going away anytime soon.
00:58:23.880All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:58:27.340But as always, if you have not checked out Mr. Prudentialist's work, you should absolutely do so.
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