David Brooks has a piece on the cover of The Atlantic this week talking about the death of the "meritocracy" and why it's time to go back to a system of technocratic rule over the whole country, not just a few people who are better than the rest at getting ahead. I think we can all agree that this is not a good thing, but it's also a symptom of a larger problem, which is that David Brooks doesn't understand what a meritocracy actually is, and very few people seem to actually do. In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake, and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent. And so as we'll see, what we are watching right now, and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America, is the transformation of meritocracy, the idea that anyone could get ahead in a system ruled by a technocratic elite who are attempting to reconstruct their society. David Brooks is a tinkerer. He wants to better manage the problems of a managed system, because he wants to make it a better managed system. And he's making it so managed that he doesn't actually solve the problems he's actually wants to solve them. And that's why he's not a meritocrat, he's a technocrat, and that's what we need to be worried about, because that's the end of the meritocratic order we've had for a long, long time. and we're going to need a system that's better than what we veered off into technocracy in order to live up to our potential in the past and become a better version of what we actually have in the 21st century a better, better, more productive, more like a better democracy . or better than we used to have a meritocratic system. . . . and it's not going to get better, is it? that's a problem we're all going to have to deal with, right? - Tom? ... or is it ? - What are you waiting for? ? - What do you think of this episode? - Tom Bilyea What are your thoughts on the future of the American meritocracy? - tweet me on this one? - Tweet Me! to let me know what you thought of this one, and do you have any thoughts on what you would like to see in the next episode?
00:00:21.000And all of this sort of reactivity in politics is leading to a bit of introspection on the part of people who backed Kamala Harris, people who hate Donald Trump.
00:00:29.000And what that's resulting in is a wide variety of theories as to why exactly Democrats have lost their way, why the left has lost its way in the United States.
00:00:38.000One of the biggest theories going right now is being brought out by David Brooks.
00:00:42.000David Brooks is, of course, a former pseudo-conservative columnist for the New York Times.
00:01:57.000He is somebody who believes that as an expert, he can set up a system that is going to rule over hundreds of millions of people.
00:02:02.000And this is the actual plague of Western civilization over the course of the last century and a half.
00:02:08.000The movement from evolutionary structures of government and markets and toward a technocracy.
00:02:13.000A group of people, a self-appointed coterie of elites are going to fix all of your problems.
00:02:17.000And so as we'll see, what David Brooks is doing in this essay, and I think it's really important because he does point out what he sees as some problems with the so-called meritocracy.
00:02:26.000But the biggest problem is that he does not understand what a true meritocracy actually is.
00:02:31.000And very few people, it seems, actually do.
00:02:34.000In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent.
00:02:39.000So this happens very often, for example, with capitalism.
00:02:42.0002007-2008, there's a massive market crisis.
00:02:45.000That market crisis is not driven by free markets per se.
00:02:48.000It's driven by government tinkering with free markets.
00:02:51.000driven, for example, by the subprime mortgages pushed by the federal government under Bill Clinton, the attempt to spread home ownership throughout the society through technocratic tinkering.
00:03:00.000And then when everything falls down, the free markets and capitalism get blamed.
00:03:04.000The same thing is sort of happening here with meritocracy.
00:03:06.000So in my view, and traditionally, meritocracy simply means something that should be good for everyone, which is people of merit rise to the top of a system that is better than So for example, aristocracy, which is you are born into rule, or oligopoly, in which you essentially have a group of people who maintain their particular rule through corruption.
00:03:30.000Well, what we are watching right now and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America is the transformation of meritocracy, the idea that anyone could get ahead if they had merit, into a technocracy ruled by an elite who are attempting to reconstruct the entire society in their image.
00:03:44.000So for David Brooks, he isn't actually solving the problems of meritocracy.
00:03:48.000He's making it worse because he is a tinkerer.
00:03:50.000He wants to better manage the so-called better managed system.
00:03:53.000As I say, it turns out that systems in the United States, particularly organically evolved to maximize actual merit.
00:04:00.000And then at the beginning of the 20th century with the progressive movement, we decided that wasn't enough.
00:04:28.000If you innovate, you're going to get richer.
00:04:30.000If you are productive, you're going to get richer.
00:04:32.000This is the sort of merit that free markets actually incentivize.
00:04:36.000Communitarian church systems maximize virtue and social bondedness.
00:04:39.000So if you live within a community with a strong church or synagogue or mosque, the people who tend to do best in those systems are the people who are the most virtuous and create the most social fabric.
00:04:51.000Government is a substitute for neither of those things.
00:04:54.000Managed systems are a substitute for neither of those things.
00:04:57.000This is one of the reasons why colleges have collapsed in the United States.
00:05:00.000So colleges originally were supposed to feature and innovate productivity and virtue.
00:05:05.000The idea was to create good citizens who are good at things.
00:05:08.000So for example, the purpose of Columbia University When it was founded in 1754, it was founded as King's College.
00:05:16.000According to its first president, William Samuel Johnson, he wrote,"...the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God and Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and a willing mind, and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends,
00:05:35.000ornaments to their country, and useful to the public weal in their generations." So, in short, these people were not being made to reshape the society.
00:05:47.000Columbia University was designed to teach eternal truths, to pursue knowledge of nature and nature's God, to create good citizens and good men, to feed into things like free markets and property rights, to feed into things like good membership in community.
00:06:02.000Well, now, of course, Columbia exists not to teach either productivity or godliness, but to teach an elite set of values that confers membership on a self-appointed aristocracy.
00:06:11.000And that is the David Brooks problem, is that the thing that he's railing against, the thing that he's recognizing, which is the failure of the so-called meritocracy, he's not wrong about it.
00:06:22.000It's the failure of a technocracy that's been established over the course of the last century and a half, and that has failed the American people.
00:06:29.000So, David Brooks' essay in The Atlantic, I'm going to quote extensively from it.
00:06:33.000I want to critique it because I think it's very important.
00:06:35.000I think that, again, a bait and switch is being attempted here, and it's a dangerous bait and switch.
00:06:41.000Because the solutions that David Brooks suggests basically maintain that the same elites who have screwed things up ought to maintain control of the system.
00:06:50.000So he writes about his idea, which is that there is a shift in how the meritocracy worked happening around the turn of the mid-century in the United States in the 20th century, 1950 to 1960, essentially.
00:07:04.000He's talking about James Conant, who was the president of Harvard.
00:07:06.000He says, Eventually, Conant's vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life.
00:07:34.000If you control the choke points of social mobility, you control the nation's culture.
00:07:38.000If you change the criteria for admissions at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you change the nation's social ideal.
00:07:43.000Okay, so the basic idea that he is promoting here is that a sort of test-based meritocracy at the universities is the big problem.
00:07:50.000Now, what that replaced, of course, was the idea that if you had a brother or a dad who went to Harvard, you went to Harvard too.
00:07:55.000And so what Conan pushed was the idea that instead, if you're a poor kid who did well on your SATs, you should be able to go to Harvard.
00:08:07.000Well, David Brooks is suggesting that actually we set up a sort of replacement meritocracy that is based on intellect, and that's the problem.
00:08:18.000Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media, or high finance work better now than in the mid-20th century?
00:08:24.000We can scorn the smug wasp bluebloods from Groton and Choate, and certainly their era's retrograde views of race and gender, but their leadership helped produce the progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan NATO, and the post-war Pax Americana.
00:08:36.000After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.
00:08:47.000Okay, so, first of all, you can see the category error right away.
00:08:50.000He says that the break happened in the mid-20th century, and that up until the mid-20th century, everything was hunky-dory.
00:08:55.000But half of the things that he mentions before the mid-20th century are things that are not exactly great.
00:09:00.000So, for example, the progressive movement in the United States, which has generated an outsized Extraordinarily large bureaucracy in American government has been really bad.
00:09:09.000And what you're watching right now is a reaction directly to that because it wasn't a meritocracy.
00:09:14.000The break, as it turns out, in American life was not in 1950.
00:09:19.000The break happened in American life with the substitution of an expert elite in favor of the American people, in favor of those organic systems that I was talking about, of free market and church communitarianism.
00:09:30.000The substitution of this top-down system, it was attempted for a century and a half, and its thorough failure in 2020, basically, has led to what we are currently seeing.
00:09:41.000So again, the things he lists off as sort of wonders are the progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II.
00:09:47.000Victory in World War II, by the way, would not have been a simple, you can't just chalk that up to the so-called smug wasp of blue blood from Groton and Choate.
00:09:57.000There's very little of that sort of elitism in the victory in World War II.
00:10:03.000The victory in World War II was the most proletariat war in American history.
00:10:07.000It was literally a draft of the entire male population of the United States.
00:10:10.000and then he attributes to them the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the post-war Pax Americana It's a lot easier to attribute that to the circumstances of the post-World War II era than it is to attribute that to the expertise of the people who are leading the charge.
00:10:24.000Well, folks, it is terrifying that a self-appointed elite Moral elite are ruling the country.
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00:12:34.000Promo code SHAPIRO. So then he discusses what he thinks are the sins of the meritocracy.
00:12:39.000And again, the reason I'm pointing this out is because there's an attempt by so many members of the elite who have blown it to maintain their control by saying they're going to fix it.
00:12:48.000You cannot let them fix it because they blew it.
00:13:20.000Any top-down system is going to do that.
00:13:22.000It's going to work to feature people who wants to fit into the system.
00:13:26.000This has been true since the days of ancient Chinese bureaucracy, where you'd actually have bureaucratic tests that were designed to shuffle people into the upper systems of management.
00:13:35.000Whatever the system needs is what the system gets.
00:13:38.000But we've tried to fix the overrating of technocratic and bureaucratic intelligence by saying that everyone should go to college.
00:13:47.000The problem is not elitism in this sense.
00:13:50.000The problem is the attempt to extend technocratic, bureaucratic intelligence across the entirety of the American body politic.
00:13:58.000So it's important that a kid who got 1100 on his SATs not go into sort of manual labor of some sort, not go into woodworking or go into plumbing or go into fracking, but that that kid instead go to a college and become qualified to be a middle manager at a government agency somewhere.
00:14:16.000Now, markets wouldn't make that mistake.
00:14:18.000In a free market system, you would not be able to get a loan.
00:14:21.000If you were a 1100 SAT student attempting to go to college to study lesbian dance theory, you would not be able to obtain a loan.
00:14:28.000We constructed entire technocratic systems that were designed to funnel more people into this broken system.
00:14:35.000The free markets are an amazing way to evaluate, not for intelligence, but for productivity and efficacy.
00:14:42.000Again, you don't have to be particularly smart in America to get ahead in America.
00:14:46.000As it turns out, you actually just have to be fairly good at the job that you are good at.
00:14:50.000This is the benefit of comparative advantage in free markets.
00:14:53.000Comparative advantage suggests that people with very high IQ should do things that require very high IQ. And people who have mid-level IQ should do things effectively that are required of people who have a mid-level IQ. And then they trade with one another and both of them are richer for it.
00:15:07.000This is the reason why plumbers can make a lot of money in the United States.
00:15:11.000Because free markets, again, maximize that which you are good at.
00:15:16.000A comparative advantage, one of the great discoveries of mankind.
00:15:20.000Okay, but that is the thing that our system does not feature.
00:15:23.000He says the second problem with the so-called meritocracy is that success in school is not the same as success in life.
00:15:29.000He says success in school is about jumping through the hoops adults put in front of you.
00:15:32.000Success in life can involve charting your own course.
00:15:38.000He keeps forgetting that it's not something that requires David Brooks to come in and tinker.
00:15:42.000If you really want people to rise based on things like agility, as we'll see, what you need is a system that features agility.
00:15:52.000And the system, for some people, does feature agility.
00:15:55.000So, for example, if you take a look at our business here, our business was founded by a Harvard Law graduate and two guys who did not graduate college.
00:16:05.000And we are a very large business at this point with 300 employees or so.
00:16:09.000Because of the free market, not because of the system that David Brooks wants to construct.
00:16:14.000Then he says, the problem with the meritocracy is that the game is rigged.
00:16:17.000He says the meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability.
00:16:19.000What it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are.
00:16:22.000As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college admissions arms race.
00:16:47.000In a 2014 New York Times article titled From Rags to Riches, for example, Washington University professor of social welfare Mark Rank talked about income mobility in the United States.
00:17:00.000After a 44-year study of longitudinal data regarding individuals aged 25 to 60 to see how Americans moved up and down the income spectrum, it turns out 12% of Americans will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year.
00:17:15.00039% of Americans, of all Americans, will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution.
00:17:20.000Over half, 56%, will find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year in income distribution.
00:17:25.000And 73% will spend a year in the top 20% of the income distribution.
00:17:31.000So again, the idea that they have like a stagnant 1% that is ruling the roost over everybody else, that is not true.
00:17:37.000People can rise and fall in a free market system based on their own merit.
00:17:41.000But he keeps forgetting that the free market system has to be left alone.
00:17:45.000And so he says, quote, the meritocracy has created an American caste system.
00:17:50.000And he says that that is the fourth problem, this caste system.
00:17:53.000He says, quote, After decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well-educated from the less well-educated.
00:17:59.000The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation.
00:18:01.000Segregate your family into a fancy school district.
00:18:03.000If you're a valedictorian in Ohio, don't go to Ohio State.
00:18:06.000Go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.
00:18:09.000But again, that's actually not the problem.
00:18:13.000It's linked to the fifth problem that he notices.
00:18:16.000Quote, he says, the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite.
00:18:20.000He says, the meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards.
00:18:23.000Its gatekeepers, educators, corporate recruiters, workplace supervisors impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young.
00:18:29.000Students are trained to be good hurdle clearers.
00:18:31.000We shower them with disapproval or approval depending on how they measure up on any given day.
00:18:36.000Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next.
00:18:44.000Okay, the reality is not that our students are petrified of losing out in the sort of college admissions game.
00:18:50.000The reality is that, again, the false meritocracy, the technocracy that's been created, leads people who succeed there to believe that they are members of a higher moral caste.
00:19:01.000That they have a different set of values.
00:19:04.000That if you put she, her in your pronouns in your bio, this makes you part of the coterie of the elite who ought to rule society.
00:19:11.000The fake meritocracy that David Brooks is talking about has created an American case system, but not economically, culturally.
00:19:18.000It's people who get together in cloistered areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, and they believe that they are morally superior to all the people around them.
00:19:28.000So what he is talking about here is, again, a category error.
00:19:35.000He says in the end, what we should be doing if we want to fix the problems of what he calls the meritocracy is redefining merit to include curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence and agility.
00:19:44.000And he says if the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid with the tiny exclusive peak at the top.
00:19:51.000It would look like a mountain range with many peaks.
00:19:53.000Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment, making cultural cohesion more likely.
00:20:04.000It was called a thing that if you left it alone, then the meritocracy would not be the problem.
00:20:09.000The problem in the United States, as always, is that we don't have a true meritocracy anymore because people who believe that they're smarter than everyone else constructed a system and then shoved people into that system.
00:20:19.000And it turns out they suck at everything.
00:20:20.000It turns out that these people created a value system all their own because in order to ignore free markets and communitarian churches, which was the balance in American life, free markets representing rights, communitarian churches representing duty.
00:20:32.000That if you ignore that balance, if you destroy that balance, if you upset the apple cart in the name of a utopian social scheme, what you end up doing is screwing everything up.
00:20:42.000That the give and take of free markets makes for better products, better productivity, better innovation.
00:20:49.000And that communitarian churches mean that the wealth flows downward too.
00:20:54.000Not just because free markets mean that everybody's boat rises with the rising waters, but also because in a communitarian church, we all have the same sort of orientation.
00:21:03.000That local communities and social fabric actually matter.
00:21:07.000Now they're trying to fix it from the top down.
00:21:10.000And the problem is that once you create an elite coterie of people who believe that they are at the top of the meritocracy based on their membership in this sort of moral top tier, their policies stink because they're totally disconnected from the rest of the American people.
00:21:28.000What we are watching right now is the revenge of the normies.
00:21:31.000It's the revenge of things like evolutionary free markets where people like Elon Musk, a no name from South Africa, can become the richest person on planet Earth.
00:21:40.000What they're looking for is a return to a system of morality where people actually know what it's like to raise a normal child in a normal situation with a normal family, as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest that we should be totally morally apathetic about how families are raised or how children as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest Okay, that day is over because the coterie of the merits, the fake meritocracy, the technocracy failed.
00:22:06.000And that is why you're getting the revenge of the Trump administration.
00:22:09.000That's why you're getting picks from the outside to wreck administrative agencies.
00:22:14.000It's not that the meritocracy was improperly screwed around with in 1950, 1960 with the university system.
00:22:22.000It's that a moral case was created at the top of American society that was willing to rule everybody, and we don't like it, and it's wrong.
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00:25:05.000To take just the most obvious example over the course of the last couple of weeks.
00:25:09.000In New York City, according to the New York Post, a blood-covered lunatic toting two knives trekked across Manhattan in a savage broad daylight stabbing spree that left a woman and two men dead Monday, according to the cops.
00:25:21.000The sick suspected stabber, a mentally ill homeless man with eight past arrests in New York City alone, was stopped by a hero cop thanks to the help of good Samaritans, including a cab driver and a British tourist, said NYPD Chief of Detectives Joe Kenny and police sources.
00:25:34.000Ramon Rivera, 51, was identified by sources as the person of interest in custody, seen with a long beard and unwieldy hair in a grizzled mugshot obtained by the Post.
00:25:42.000Police have no other suspect in this fate of unprovoked, random attacks, said Mayor Adams.
00:25:46.000He said, today we have three innocent New Yorkers just going about their lives who are the victim of a terrible, terrible assault.
00:25:50.000It's a clear example of the criminal justice system, mental health system that continues to fail New Yorkers.
00:25:57.000The technocracy, not a meritocracy, a technocracy of people who believe that they have a morally superior view of the universe, in which the mentally ill ought to be able to walk the streets, in which if you defend against attackers on a subway, you are tried for manslaughter.
00:26:12.000That's happening currently right now in New York.
00:26:14.000You want to know why this sort of stuff is happening?
00:26:16.000Because no one steps in between killers and their victims.
00:26:20.000Because if they do, they might be prosecuted by precisely these idiotic technocrats.
00:26:26.000That is why when people look at situations like this, they say, this is so easy to stop.
00:26:29.000Like in any normal society, this would be stopped forthwith.
00:26:33.000The sort of evolutionary basis of all society and government is to stop the killer from attacking the innocent.
00:26:39.000That is why the government generally has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force because you don't want people revenge killing one another.
00:26:45.000And so the idea is the basic bargain is you give up some of your rights so that the government will defend you against the crazy guy in the street who's going to stab you.
00:26:53.000One right you don't give up, by the way, is the right of self-defense.
00:26:55.000But in New York City, you can give that up because if you're Daniel Penny, you go to trial on the basis of defending others.
00:27:01.000You wonder why there's a backlash against the technocrats?
00:27:04.000Because they designed an unworkable system.
00:27:06.000It's the technocrats who designed a system that said that we have to open our southern border wide and allowing 10 million people from who knows where with values that we don't understand or know.
00:27:16.000And those people have to be let in in the name of social justice.
00:27:20.000And the backlash is coming in the form of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.
00:27:26.000Tom Homan, who's the Bulldog Borders are, who's going to be appointed by President Trump.
00:27:29.000He talked yesterday about how excited he was to get started on the job.
00:27:34.000Since I've been announced, Lawrence, I've gotten thousands of soldiers that just recently left the military.
00:28:03.000He says, when it comes to America cracking down on illegal immigration, we're going to focus on public safety and national security threats first, which, of course, is the way I think most Americans would like to do it.
00:28:14.000Out of the gate, we're going to focus on public safety threats and national security threats first.
00:28:20.000And fugitives, those who crossed the border illegally, had great due process, had great taxpayer expense, were ordered removed by an immigration judge and didn't leave.
00:28:39.000J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire scion, governor of Illinois, a person who literally was born into gigantic levels of wealth.
00:28:49.000He's a perfect example of the anti-meritocracy.
00:28:51.000J.B. Pritzker, he says that he's deeply concerned about Donald Trump's illegal immigration plan.
00:28:57.000We, of course, are deeply concerned about the President of the United States calling out military inside the United States, where people are peaceful, even if there may be people who are undocumented.
00:29:10.000But the idea of calling out the army into the domestic confines of the United States seems uncalled for and may, in fact, be unconstitutional and illegal.
00:29:24.000Again, the fact that he is trying to use the tools of government to stop the government from doing the thing the government was literally appointed to do is pretty incredible.
00:29:34.000According to Axios, civil liberties advocates worried about President Trump's plan for mass deportations are suing the federal government to get information on how authorities could rapidly remove people from the United States.
00:29:44.000They are seeking records on how ICE air operations could be expanded to carry out a deportation and detention program that could ensnare millions of undocumented immigrants.
00:29:54.000The ACLU lawsuit comes after Trump confirmed Monday he's planning to declare a national emergency and use the US military to carry out mass deportations.
00:30:01.000Civil liberties advocates are demanding that ICE immediately turn over the requested records, including all ICE contracts and records regarding air transportation to execute removals, presumably to help people avoid these actual mass deportations that Donald Trump is planning.
00:30:15.000This is the moral system of this elite, the self-appointed elite.
00:30:26.000What happens to a mayor or a local police department chief that is under Democratic leadership that obstructs ICE in your federal agents that are helping get these deportations?
00:30:40.000Well, first of all, if they want to help us get the hell out of the way, we're going to do it.
00:30:43.000If I got sent twice the amount of resources to that city, that's what we're going to do.
00:30:47.000If they were to give us access to the jail, that would mean less agents in the community.
00:30:51.000For them pushing back and not letting us in the jail, it just means more agents are going to be in the community, so they're hurting themselves.
00:31:12.000Good for Tom Homan and good for the Trump administration.
00:31:14.000Again, this is the revenge of the normies.
00:31:16.000Speaking of which, over in the House, for some reason, it has become an issue of hot contention whether men should be allowed to use women's restrooms.
00:31:25.000So yesterday, Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from using women's restrooms at the U.S. Capitol.
00:31:32.000She told Fox News Digital, quote, Now, this is being treated as Democrats as some sort of grave violation of civil rights.
00:31:46.000Because, of course, Democrats just saw fit to elect a person named Sarah McBride, whose actual name is, I believe, Tim McBride from Delaware, who is a transgender woman and now insists on being able to use the women's restroom.
00:31:59.000Now, House Republicans have previously changed rules on their side of Congress, so this would not be a giant shock.
00:32:06.000Of course, Democrats are freaking out about all this.
00:33:08.000That said, I also believe, that's what Scripture teaches, what I just said, but I also believe that we treat everybody with dignity, and so we can do and believe all those things at the same time, and I wanted to make that clear for everybody because there's lots of questions, but that's where I stand.
00:33:24.000I've stood there my whole life, and those are facts.
00:33:26.000Again, the fact that even this has to be said is amazing.
00:33:30.000The revenge of the normies is upon us, and it is a rebellion against 100 years of bad administrative governance led by a coterie of people like David Brooks who think that they can tinker around with the system instead of letting the evolutionary processes of free markets and churches take care of the vast majority of the American people.
00:33:46.000Well, Democrats have filled all sorts of offices with terrible people, but you can't afford to do the same.
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00:34:53.000Also, believe it or not, Thanksgiving is eight days away and at the DailyWire, we're getting you ready for that conversation with those members of the family.
00:35:00.000The out with her unhinged Facebook post complaining about Trump's laureate's return as the 47th president.
00:35:05.000The cousin proudly rocking his vintage white dudes for Kamala t-shirt.
00:35:08.000Get the facts that'll leave your left-wing relatives nervously reaching for the gravy boat.
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00:35:31.000Meanwhile, Democrats are completely panicked about what's to come.
00:35:34.000It truly is amazing because the truth is, again, that the systems of government that were set up by the founders are really robust.
00:35:40.000There are checks and balances in those systems.
00:35:42.000And it turns out that it was the progressive movement that decided to maximize power at the federal level.
00:35:47.000And now Democrats are freaked out that that federal power may be used against the things that they want.
00:35:52.000So, for example, Ezra Klein and Anne Applebaum Made fools of themselves yesterday on Ezra Klein's podcast talking about the apocalypse essentially being here.
00:36:00.000Again, this is sad because Anne Applebaum used to be a really useful author.
00:36:03.000Her book on the gulags in the Soviet Union is really fantastic.
00:36:06.000But here they are really scaremongering over the future of the country under Donald Trump.
00:36:12.000Somebody was saying to me the other day that when I'm back on Twitter, they know things are really bad.
00:36:17.000And that's how I feel about having you on this show, that when you're back on the show, things are really quite bad.
00:36:22.000I'm sorry to have put you into a horseman of the apocalypse bucket, but here you are.
00:36:31.000It's a condemnation of the space we find ourselves in.
00:36:35.000But again, the fact that they are talking about the apocalypse is pretty much the whole thing.
00:36:39.000And Applebaum and Ezra Klein, they're suggesting that Donald Trump is going to make dictatorial, fascistic moves to take over the auspices of American government.
00:36:46.000Now, again, they had no problem when it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden doing it.
00:36:49.000When it's Donald Trump coming back around, they do have a problem.
00:36:54.000There's open debate inside the Trump administration about pretty much everything.
00:36:57.000And there are checks and balances that remain in the system.
00:36:59.000And those checks and balances remain robust.
00:37:02.000So, for example, Democrats right now are panicking over RFK Jr. possibly taking over health and human services.
00:37:07.000First of all, I find that completely odd because much of RFK Jr.'s agenda was actually Democratic technocratic talking points.
00:37:14.000So a lot of the MAHA agenda, make America healthy again agenda, which is about banning particular ingredients, is the kind of stuff that Democrats used to champion when it was Michael Bloomberg in New York City attempting to stop you from getting a big gulp.
00:37:28.000But apparently, they're really worried that he's going to thwart, for example, vaccination efforts and all the rest.
00:37:34.000As the Wall Street Journal points out, no, that's not exactly how the system works.
00:37:37.000Quote, Kennedy's plans, should it be confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Human Services, are far from sure to be realized.
00:37:43.000Already, early signs of potential division within Trump's team have emerged.
00:37:46.000Kennedy is pushing for the FDA to be tougher on big pharma, while Vivek Ramaswamy argued last week on X, the FDA is too restrictive, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation.
00:37:55.000The market is bracing for backbreaking measures, targeting big pharma while seemingly forgetting it was Joe Biden who signed a law empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly.
00:38:04.000Furthermore, the Trump first term suggests that investors shouldn't expect drastic changes in healthcare largely because reforms are complex and involve trade-offs.
00:38:15.000were to limit the approval of a certain drug or lobby against Medicare coverage of GLP-1s for obesity, it could upset swaths of the public.
00:38:23.000Instead, President Trump might steer Kennedy toward focusing on areas like nutrition rather than drug approval.
00:38:29.000has suggested he's going to issue a lot of advisory opinions rather than simple mandates from the top of the government.
00:38:34.000Which, by the way, is probably the best way to do the government at the federal level.
00:38:38.000But the media are totally disconnected from the public.
00:38:41.000And Joe Scarborough is experiencing that in real time.
00:38:43.000So as we talked about yesterday on the show, Joe and Mika went on bended knee to Donald Trump to rehash their relationship and sort of hit that restart button, Vladimir Putin style.
00:38:53.000And it turns out he got a lot of blowback for that.
00:38:56.000A lot of people very angry with Joe and Mika for meeting with Trump because they have betrayed the cause that they suggested that they were leading.
00:39:04.000And so here's Scarborough saying, it turns out a lot of people on the left are disconnected.
00:39:59.000Again, the complete disconnect between the members of the media who are, again, their own self-appointed moral elite and the rest of the public.
00:40:08.000Mike Barnacle was on MSNBC asking how they make themselves relevant again.
00:40:11.000The answer is, it's very difficult for you to do so because you separated yourself off from the American public, not the other way around.
00:40:17.000I don't know how we make ourselves relevant again because we can't compete with 20-second snippets on an iPhone walking up the streets, getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you're walking under the crowd with coffee in one hand and your phone in the other.
00:40:38.000Well, I mean, the way that you catch up with that is to be honest in your coverage.
00:40:41.000But again, I think that's kind of hard for you to do, which is one of the reasons why Comcast is now greenlighting a $7 billion spinoff of their cable channels.
00:40:49.000Yes, that includes MSNBC. So these channels have been falling flat.
00:40:57.000I mean, our ratings on this show are way higher than pretty much anything on MSNBC. MSNBC is a collapsing content distributor.
00:41:06.000Honestly, the only thing that can be done with MSNBC is to sell it to somebody who actually knows what the hell they're doing and who has not disconnected themselves from the American people.
00:41:15.000Meanwhile, speaking of a bit of a disconnect, I'm seeing a lot of panic these days about the possibility that Russia is just going to go nuclear and start nuking everybody.
00:41:22.000I've been hearing this for nigh on two years at this point.
00:41:25.000The answer, as Russia has shown, is that they're not going to nuke anybody over territorial incursions into small areas of Russia in an intractable war situation with Ukraine.
00:41:38.000Vladimir Putin is he understands enough to know that a full scale nuclear conflagration over a bit of territorial incursion or firing a couple of missiles at North Korean troops in Russia would not be in his interest, particularly given the fact that Donald Trump is, in fact, looking for an off ramp.
00:41:55.000At this point, they're seeing an enormous amount of outsized panic over this.
00:41:59.000Many people have been worrying about World War Three for a while here.
00:42:02.000It turns out that you keep worrying about World War Three and it's never true.
00:42:05.000Maybe the theory is that one time you're right.
00:42:09.000But so far, it's not been close to true.
00:42:12.000Nonetheless, Putin knows with whom he is playing, and so he's been publicly signaling that he's going to up the ante.
00:42:17.000According to CNN, President Putin has updated Russia's nuclear doctrine two days after his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden granted Ukraine permission to strike targets deep inside Russia with American-made weapons.
00:42:26.000Under the updated doctrine, Moscow will consider aggression from any non-nuclear state with the participation of a nuclear country a joint attack on Russia.
00:42:36.000The Kremlin began this fresh round of nuclear saber rattling on Tuesday saying the revised military doctrine would in theory lower the bar to first use of military weapons.
00:42:44.000In a phone call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov noted the changes mean that, quote, the Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression using conventional weapons against it or the Republic of Belarus.
00:42:56.000So the revised doctrine apparently is now that if you have a state like Ukraine that is backed by any NATO member that has nuclear weapons, that the Russian Federation may consider using nuclear weapons first use.
00:43:13.000They're publicly signaling that because they understand that by signaling that they might be able to get the United States to back off.
00:43:19.000But the sort of outsized panic, you see World War III trending on Twitter.
00:43:23.000I promise you, the Twitter foreign policy analysts who are determined that World War III is going to happen because suddenly Ukraine can fire a missile at North Korean troops that are entering Ukraine.
00:43:38.000I'm just saying, if it does, then I will be very shocked.
00:43:42.000Now, does that mean that we should take the risk blithely?
00:43:44.000Of course not, which is why you look for an off-ramp.
00:43:47.000But the notion that we should all be quivering in our boots when Vladimir Putin's saber rattles, that's a bad way to do foreign policy, especially given the fact that Russia has been spreading its tentacles as a nuclear-backed power literally all over the world, from Africa to the Middle East.
00:44:02.000According to the Wall Street Journal, as Israel advances its invasion of southern Lebanon, troops are finding large troves of Russian weapons, confirming long-standing suspicions in Israel that Hezbollah is enhancing its fighting capacity with the help of sophisticated Russian arms.
00:44:14.000And of course, it was Russia that had shipped in a bunch of anti-aircraft defenses to Iran that Israel then blew up in the last round of fighting.
00:44:23.000The Russian government and Syrian foreign ministry did not return requests for comment.
00:44:27.000Israel's foreign minister, Gidon Tsar, highlighted Russia's leverage over the militant group when he said recently Israel hopes Russia will help enforce any agreement to disarm Hezbollah by preventing weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon.
00:44:37.000He said the Russians are present in Syria.
00:44:39.000If they agree with the principle, they can contribute to achieving its objective effectively.
00:44:43.000So again, Vladimir Putin has a very strong interest in saber-rattling over Ukraine in the hopes that this will leverage him a better deal.
00:44:50.000He is going to end up retaining large swaths of the Donbas in Crimea.
00:44:53.000This is already a foregone conclusion.
00:44:54.000The only question is what sort of security guarantees will be given to Ukraine to dissuade a further Russian invasion in the future.
00:45:02.000But people should not be, I think, unduly concerned about Russia saying they're going to nuke everybody.
00:45:09.000They've been saying this for nigh on 80 years at this point.
00:45:13.000Since they gained nuclear weapons in the early 50s, they've been doing this.
00:45:16.000So I would be shocked to take any of this particularly seriously, at least more seriously than is necessary in order to achieve some sort of off-ramp here.
00:45:25.000Joining us online is my friend Gary Sinise.
00:45:27.000Of course, you know him from Forrest Gump among a wide variety of other works.
00:46:11.000So in 2018, my wife had been diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer and we were going through, she had had surgery and then she had her first chemo treatment in, I think it was probably about Blue, August of 2018.
00:46:35.000I mean, I had to take her to the emergency room.
00:46:37.000It was so bad that we had to check her in to the hospital.
00:46:41.000And that first treatment really knocked her socks off.
00:46:45.000So I got her home and we were sitting in our backyard and we were discussing with another person what we were going to do with the next treatment, how we were going to get through it because the first one was so difficult.
00:47:00.000And earlier that day, our son had been having a lot of pain in his tailbone for a couple of years.
00:47:11.000They thought it was a bruised tailbone from a bicycle accident where he slammed on the brakes too hard and jammed his tailbone into the seat.
00:47:19.000They thought maybe it was related to that.
00:47:31.000And so Moira had had, my wife, had had several spine surgeries and I called her spinal doctor and said, can you see Mac and just see if, you know, what's going on?
00:47:43.000And so I'm sitting there with Moira in the backyard and we're discussing her next chemo treatment.
00:47:48.000I get a call from the surgeon who sent Mac to the CT scanner and he called me and he said, Mac has a tumor.
00:47:55.000And the tumor was wrapped around his sacrum.
00:48:42.000They get everything, and it's out, and it's gone.
00:48:45.000But 30% of the time, it comes back, and that's That's what happened to us in May of 2019.
00:48:50.000We found out that Max Cancer had come back.
00:48:54.000So that began a chemo and radiation fight there as the cancer started to spread.
00:49:03.000several surgeries to remove more tumors off the spine, several radiation treatments, several drugs to try to fight it because there are no drugs developed for chordoma.
00:49:16.000So they just throw whatever they can find and they throw it at it.
00:49:21.000Over the course of the next four years, he would try 25 different drugs.
00:49:26.000He was a drummer, Ben, an excellent, excellent drummer.
00:49:30.000He played with my band sometimes and he went to USC music school, Thornton School of Music, where he went from just simply drumming to composing and songwriting and conducting and he wanted to write music for film and And all of that,
00:49:50.000when the cancer really got difficult for him, he was paralyzed from the chest down, he couldn't play drums anymore, had to really put music away because he was fighting cancer.
00:50:03.000But then last year, Probably February of 2023 last year.
00:50:09.000He said to me, Dad, there's a piece of music that I wrote in college that I never finished, and I think I'd like to try to finish it.
00:50:17.000And Mac hadn't been doing any music for quite a while because he'd been fighting cancer.
00:50:22.000And I got him together with some of my band members.
00:50:52.000We had round-the-clock nursing care for him.
00:50:55.000But in the meantime, he was trying to flesh out this new piece of music And then on July 17th, last year, 2023, we went in the studio and I heard this piece of music for the first time and was floored.
00:51:44.000It went to press and the vinyl was being pressed.
00:51:47.000Unfortunately, he never got to see the vinyl completed, but he heard all the music.
00:51:53.000And then after he died, Ben, I just started going through his files and I found all this additional music that he had written that I had never heard.
00:52:33.000And as Mac wanted, all the proceeds from the first record went to the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:52:39.000And with the second record, we're doing the same thing for Mac.
00:52:43.000All the proceeds will go to help the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:52:46.000He worked for the foundation starting in 2017, but he had to step away for the cancer fight.
00:52:53.000Obviously, he's an amazingly talented person and the music is just wonderful.
00:52:57.000The double vinyl album is 17 original compositions, two covers, 19 total tracks.
00:53:02.000And it really is an amazing accomplishment, both by him and then obviously by you and the team that put this together.
00:53:07.000Because what did you have to work with?
00:53:09.000You say that you found new tunes by him.
00:53:11.000In what sort of state did you find these tunes?
00:53:14.000Well, let me start with the music that I asked him to write for the Gary Sinise Foundation.
00:53:19.000So Mac was very, very creative, very talented.
00:53:23.000But, you know, he's working for a non-profit, so we can't hire an orchestra to go in and record all the music for these documentaries.
00:53:32.000So Mac would do it on his computer with all his samples and all his patches, you know, the cellos and the The strings and the horns and the drums and everything like that.
00:53:42.000He created it all on his computer and wrote all this music.
00:53:47.000There's a documentary about my sort of journey with all the military support and everything.
00:53:53.000And it kind of tracks the history of all that going back to the 80s.
00:53:57.000And the documentary is called Always Do a Little More.
00:54:02.000And so Mac wrote about 75% of the music for that on his computer.
00:54:07.000And he's got all the strings, he's got everything.
00:54:09.000It sounds like an orchestra, but it's not.
00:54:13.000So I found all that music again, and some additional music that he wrote for the foundation that I'd never heard because it was never used.
00:54:20.000But beautiful, beautiful stuff, all done on the computer.
00:54:43.000They teamed up on Resurrection and Revival Part 1.
00:54:48.000And Oliver kind of took, you know, all this music for part two, transposed it, got it off the computer, transposed it, you know, wrote it out so that we could have it played by a live orchestra.
00:55:02.000And last summer, in July and August, we went into the studio and recorded all this orchestral music that Mac wrote.
00:55:39.000And I don't think he ever envisioned that music coming to life with a live orchestra, but we brought it to life last summer with a live orchestra.
00:55:48.000And then there were all this other music going all the way back to his USC days, Ben.
00:55:53.000I mean, there were recordings that he made at USC where he's drumming, and he's drumming on songs that he was writing for class.
00:56:03.000They were in music theory class, composition class, all that stuff, and their assignments were to go off and make music.
00:56:10.000And they have some great studios at USC and all that.
00:56:13.000So I found all these recordings that I had never heard before because he wrote them, you know, when he was a sophomore and junior in college and then just tucked the music away.
00:56:24.000So I found it and I started listening to it and I was just knocked out by what I was finding.
00:56:32.000Then I found charts that he had written.
00:59:11.000So I said, well, we're going to put it on the second record.
00:59:14.000So that's the other cover, Home on the Range and Nature Boy, and then all the rest, 17 compositions, all original, from jazz to orchestral to rock.
00:59:27.000It's a beautiful, fun record with each side having its own unique kind of characteristic.
00:59:34.000Folks, it's a wonderful piece of work.
00:59:36.000Obviously, it's a tremendous tribute to Mac, and all the proceeds of the record sales go to the Gary Sinise Foundation, which honors veterans and first responders and their families and people that are doing amazing work over at the Gary Sinise Foundation, have been doing for years.
00:59:49.000Gary, thanks for the album, and I'm excited that so many people are going to be able to hear Mac's music.