00:00:52.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:58.000You have a unique approach to how you think about some of the problems the country faces.
00:02:02.000Yeah, so I started blogging about this stuff about 15 years ago, and I sort of grew up as a very normal kind of blue state American, really.
00:02:11.000Actually, my dad was in the Foreign Service, which is kind of the elite of the deep state.
00:02:15.000So you might say that I grew up inside the deep state, and after a while, I sort of stopped believing in it.
00:02:20.000And then I kind of tried to believe in some of these alternatives to it.
00:02:25.000And it's sort of, I came to the conclusion that there's really a lot of fakeness there on both sides.
00:02:31.000And maybe to a certain extent, you're watching the Harlem Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.
00:02:37.000And so what do we do about the Washington Generals is the most important question, I think, in the world today.
00:03:14.000And what you mean, what oligarchy means is the rule of the administrators, the rule of the experts, the rule of the Fauci's.
00:03:21.000That's the sort of, you know, Fauci is more invulnerable.
00:03:25.000He retired recently, but, you know, his job tenure was considerably safer than George III's.
00:03:32.000And, you know, if somebody passed a law saying we're not going to have gain of function research and Fauci and his friends want gain of function research, that's not going to stick.
00:03:41.000And so you're looking at absolute power here.
00:03:45.000It's very important to sort of recognize the power of all governments is absolute.
00:03:51.000The question is how power is spread around that oligarchy.
00:03:56.000And what you have is these little pieces of absolute power in the hands of the Fauci's.
00:04:02.000And sort of for every kind of policy area, there's someone like Fauci, there's someone in the academic community, someone in the New York Times who basically has a lock on that policy.
00:04:15.000And what we've seen is that those policies get more and more deranged until we had this incredible pandemic that they basically literally went out and invented to basically get more grants.
00:04:28.000And realizing the sort of just one example of the rule of these people and how sort of Soviet it's become, COVID was like Chernobyl, but like killing 100,000 more people times as many people.
00:04:47.000And I guess one of the positives is that people now have a face and a name where they can now see the face of the quote-unquote deep state Fauci.
00:04:57.000But the point you're making is there's hundreds of these operatives.
00:04:59.000There's hundreds of these operatives, and it's the structure that they're in that is actually often people sort of think that it's these people's ideology that is sort of the cause of just the craziness of their decisions.
00:05:15.000I would say that actually the structure is the cause of the ideology.
00:05:20.000That progressivism is something that you're going to get inherently out of any system of oligarchical rule.
00:05:26.000Is the design of the American system, does it lend itself to inevitable oligarchy?
00:05:32.000There have been many American systems historically.
00:05:35.000When you look at, there's something they do in France where they number the republics.
00:05:39.000They have the first, second, third, you know, around the Fifth Republic, I think.
00:05:43.000In the U.S., basically, we see the present system of government really dates to Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
00:05:52.000And whatever happened before that is basically ancient history.
00:06:58.000What we have, what we call the administrative state, as academics say, or deep state, as we like to say on TV, is essentially FDR's personal administration without its head.
00:07:10.000So FDR was really operating, not quite as a dictator, but really almost as a dictator.
00:07:15.000He was certainly a dictator in foreign policy.
00:07:27.000But he was basically in charge of the federal government.
00:07:30.000And essentially, and the way he was in charge of the federal government, he created many, many new agencies in DC, the so-called alphabet soup.
00:07:40.000He used every lever he could, many of them very informal levers, to take over the old agencies.
00:07:47.000And then when he dies, he's replaced by Harry Truman, who's basically a nobody.
00:07:52.000And what happens is all the power that he'd held in his hands sort of goes down into this administrative state that he created.
00:08:00.000That's an interesting, I've never heard that theory before.
00:08:02.000So you're saying that it was almost a fracturing and it went down all these separate tributaries.
00:08:07.000And so when FDR broke, the power center decentralized within the B.
00:08:11.000And it never has been able to consolidate.
00:08:13.000It never has been able to consolidate because nobody, especially, I think personally, the theory and it's impossible to prove is that FDR, certainly in 44 when he runs for election, knows he's dying.
00:08:24.000The American people don't even know he's in a wheelchair.
00:10:56.000And, you know, the thing that really, you know, in all of my like historical research is one of the things that struck me most is there's a classic book called The Making the President 1960 by T.E. White, T.H. White, T.H. White, I think.
00:11:10.000And he's talking to someone who, you know, is part of the Kennedy machine.
00:11:15.000And we remember Kennedy as this era of like the new frontier, this bright optimism.
00:11:20.000At least Libbs remember Kennedy that way.
00:11:22.000And he's talking to one of these people, and then he talks to like a New Dealer.
00:11:27.000And the New Dealer is just like after the New Deal, like everything is bland, everything is boring, everything is dead, right?
00:11:32.000You know, and like the distance from the new frontier to now, if you're working and you're like, like you had all these people come in in the Obama era who'd all like watch the West Wing and they all wanted to like West Wing it.
00:11:43.000Yeah, they were LARPing as West wingers.
00:11:46.000So Curtis, the only other president I would ask you about that tried to combine the distillation of power was Nixon.
00:12:25.000And Nixon's idea is that he's going to come in.
00:12:28.000He's going to be the president of the silent majority.
00:12:32.000He's going to take all this like crazy, hippie stuff, and he's going to show Americans how a government that works works.
00:12:39.000He's going to take over Washington, run it like a grown-up, and do all this grown-up stuff.
00:12:45.000The problem is that in order to take over Washington and run it like a grown-up, basically, you know, so Nixon, for example, in 68, Cronkite declares the Vietnam War is lost.
00:14:46.000So the other, the only other, I know this is from the right, but the only other person that attempted that was the closest thing was Dick Cheney in Bush.
00:14:54.000Is this not maybe over some pieces of the national security state?
00:14:58.000Yeah, over some pieces of the national security state.
00:15:01.000And so you see sort of the national security state, definitely like the Iraq War and that stuff was sort of the last gasp of a DOD that thought differently from the State Department.
00:15:13.000Nowadays, it's all state all the time.
00:15:15.000You know, I mean, state didn't want the Iraq invasion, right?
00:15:18.000You know, and so you see, like, when you look at people who survive from sort of the Nixon period with the Nixon mindset into today, into the Trump administration, you're looking at guys like John Bolton or William Barr.
00:16:17.000You've heard about and thought about and talked about it and maybe even prayed about it.
00:16:21.000But right now is the time to do something about it.
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00:17:06.000Yeah, Barr is not like, we're going to clean out DOJ, you know, can't basically like clean out DOJ and basically sort of stop this incredible kind of lawfare against the executive branch from the executive branch.
00:17:19.000He's just like, okay, we're not going to do this anymore and we're going to make DOJ work on behalf of the American people.
00:17:25.000And like the time for that is really over.
00:17:28.000Like you just can't like you can't imagine doing that.
00:17:31.000You know, you don't have the power to do that in so many ways.
00:17:35.000And you're not, you're basically not doing what the American people asked you to do when they elected Trump.
00:17:41.000So I want to get to this other baseline conversation, then we can get to the more current.
00:17:46.000Can you explain to our audience then who calls the shots, who's in charge?
00:18:02.000The question is almost an error because you're basically looking for like who's in charge.
00:18:07.000And the closer you get to like talking to the center, talking to the people who really matter, they're just like, oh my God, no one is in charge.
00:18:16.000Well, so that's what's important because I'm not faulting anyone that believes this because there's some truth to it.
00:18:21.000But there is this Wizard of Oz type belief that there's someone just calling shots.
00:18:27.000And it's Barack Obama from Martha's Vineyard and says, investigate, indict.
00:18:32.000Yeah, and there are pieces of that, I'm sure.
00:18:34.000But the bureaucracy operates completely differently than that.
00:18:37.000It operates completely differently from that because the whole thing, the bureaucracy is like, basically, the fundamental problem, if I had to say one thing to your audience of patriots, like that I wanted them to remember that, you know, it's not when they say democracy, they mean oligarchy.
00:18:57.000The second thing to say, and I love going around to saying this, people that are really in the loop and in deep in DC, because I've never heard anyone disagree with this.
00:19:12.000It's almost like a legislative judicial branch in some ways.
00:19:15.000And the way, because when you look at the so-called executive branch, what you see is that the personnel, the policy, and the budget of this are set by the Congress, which is a completely non-democratic and non-political, you know, the Congress is a buffer against politicizing the deep state, which means democratizing the deep state.
00:19:39.000And so if you look at the influence that the president has on the executive branch, basically, what is an executive order?
00:19:48.000There's really not terribly big difference between an EO and a tweet.
00:19:53.000And the ability to, like, you know, even by, you know, you have this org chart that looks like the org chart of a private company in which basically control flows from the top down, but it's completely illusory.
00:20:07.000And if you stack that whole system with like patriotic Americans, and you support, which unfortunately was not really done in the last administration, but there's something called the plumb book, do you know the Trump plumb?
00:20:20.000Of course, the 5,000 positions and the 5,000 positions that Trump gets to appoint, right?
00:20:27.000And you basically put 5,000, I don't know where you'd find these people, but you put 5,000 really, really capable, you know, people who really see the world the way you do, Charlie.
00:20:38.000And want to work for the federal government.
00:20:39.000And you want to work for the federal government.
00:20:41.000If you take these imaginary people and put them in and make them exist somehow and put them, you know, my friend Sir Rob Sharma is trying very hard to do.
00:20:51.000But the thing is, you know, here's what's going to happen.
00:20:53.000They are basically going to parachute in there.
00:20:56.000They're going to find that they have no way to constrain the permanent staff who nominally work for them.
00:21:04.000And every one of these people is going to be offered a choice.
00:21:07.000First of all, either you turn coat immediately, you become a traitor, or we are going to destroy your professional life.
00:21:15.000We are going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills because this lawfare industry that we're seeing is just ramping up.
00:21:22.000We're going to saddle you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
00:21:25.000You will never have a career in this space at all again.
00:21:31.000And like, we're going to do everything to destroy you personally, but certainly professionally.
00:21:36.000Or you can just turn coat and maybe after four years, we'll trust you and you can get some jobs.
00:21:41.000You can kind of burrow into the bureaucracy.
00:21:42.000I have heard this story hundreds of times of people that go into the bureaucracy and they are confronted.
00:21:50.000And if they choose incorrectly, within a month, hell is unleashed upon them.
00:21:56.000And I can tell you, whether it be in housing and urban development or whether it be in the Department of Interior, it is systemic across the board, right?
00:22:04.000There is not an inch of turf that they will concede, not anywhere.
00:22:09.000And it was as bad, Curtis, and I want to get into this.
00:22:13.000Trump would say, I want to do A, and the bureaucrats would say, huh?
00:22:42.000Yeah, the truth, the truth, the truth.
00:22:45.000And I think that I feel like Americans are really like one of the things that conservatism, American conservatism sort of may not be quite there yet, but like it's waking up a lot.
00:23:15.000And then you, you know, like even the freaking omnibus bills, like, you know, it's so, it has no resemblance to, you know, Congress isn't even a parliamentary body.
00:23:26.000Like it's not, you know, it's not a talking shop.
00:23:29.000People don't actually like debate there.
00:23:30.000It's this bizarre system of committees, right?
00:23:34.000You know, and so, you know, the idea that like you're, you know, like if you could bring the founders back and basically show them DC as it is today, they would just be like, what does this even have to do with the thing we created?
00:23:48.000Like, how are you basically using these 18th century documents to justify this?
00:23:53.000Well, that's the tragedy, is that they don't need to rewrite the Constitution.
00:24:33.000I would say that that was a minor founding compared to the founding of the 1930s.
00:24:37.000But the modern elites honor that one more than 1776 or 1786 is sort of unrecognizable from this world.
00:24:50.000And so, you know, like, I guess I would say that, you know, stepping way, way back and looking at kind of the grand sweep of American history, I would say one of the most brilliant things, you know, actually, like, you know, the founding generation is sort of very different from the abstractions that people see.
00:25:12.000These are real people with real flaws and real, you know, in a real situation.
00:25:17.000And yet, you know, they were brilliant.
00:25:24.000And one of the things they did in the Constitution that was kind of a work of genius that I think we can really learn from is they never specified which of the three branches is in charge.
00:25:42.000That was part of the brilliance because basically what that allowed to have happen, you know, as Aristotle described, you know, 2,500 years ago, there are three sort of forms of government and modes of power.
00:25:56.000These are democracy, the rule of the many, oligarchy, the rule of the few, and monarchy, the rule of the one.
00:26:03.000And what we see in American history is about every 75 or 80 years, sort of like the San Andreas Fault, you basically get a presidential government.
00:26:14.000Your government goes from being, you know, sort of the rule of the many is pretty hard to pull off these days.
00:26:21.000The rule of the few is pretty normal in this system.
00:26:24.000That breaks down and you get a president like Washington or Lincoln or FDR who is really personally in charge of the federal government in the way that Elon Musk is in charge of SpaceX.
00:26:40.000That's a great analogy because I'm reading the Walter Isaacson book on Elon.
00:26:44.000He is the closest thing to, and I don't mean this pejoratively, he is a dictator over those companies.
00:26:52.000What he says goes, and he is the arbiter of what success is and what is not.
00:26:57.000And when you look at how everything that works in our world works, whether it's a restaurant with a chef, whether it's a movie with a director, whether it's a company with a CEO, you see this pattern sort of repeated everywhere where you basically put one person in charge, you make him or her accountable, but you don't let anyone micromanage that.
00:27:20.000And basically, authorities flows from the top down.
00:27:24.000So in Washington, there's a saying that personnel is policy.
00:27:28.000And so, you know, whereas so if you want some policy to run, get the right people in charge.
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00:28:45.000Great example is the first, the Falcon rocket that Elon Musk sent out, did it with a ragtag team of 500 people on the fourth attempt to the competitor, NASA, or even Boeing's division that was working with NASA, 50,000 employees, and they couldn't get it.
00:29:21.000He's like, I want this procedure to let my friends do gain of function research and get more grants.
00:29:26.000So how can I make this come out to say, oh, my friends and, you know, a Duke in China are going to go and find all the bad coronaviruses and mutate them to make them more dangerous.
00:29:36.000And that's literally how we got COVID, right?
00:29:38.000You know, and so you have all of these process-based systems.
00:29:42.000Everyone is covering their ass at all times.
00:29:45.000There's no accountability in a process-based system.
00:29:48.000No one can ever be held personally accountable.
00:29:50.000Who's been held personally accountable for COVID?
00:29:57.000That's a bitter pill to swallow, right?
00:29:59.000And so, but the thing is, here's the important thing.
00:30:01.000When you're a libertarian, you basically think of this like, oh, you know, the private sector, which is operating on libertarian principles, is good.
00:33:18.000Basically, if it wasn't for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't have that laptop.
00:33:21.000No, I mean, so here's your historical genius.
00:33:25.000And is history defined by a small group of mostly men, sometimes women, of quote-unquote useful jerks that assume power and do the impossible?
00:33:40.000And the thing is, and when you're looking for, I wouldn't say the, you know, enormous power has come out of collectives in various ways.
00:33:48.000Enormous power has come out of the masses.
00:33:52.000The problem is the masses, like, and this sort of goes back to this sort of essential kind of thing, there's a kind of rock, scissors, paper thing going on with democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy.
00:34:03.000And one of the things that we have to cope with in the real world today, if you go back to the 18th century and you look at sort of why America became a democracy, then you're looking at, you know, this nation, especially in like Massachusetts where all this kicks off, you're looking at this nation of incredibly virtuous people.
00:34:40.000Like, these are, you know, this is a world in which, I mean, even more than 1776, America, did you know that there was a color revolution in America in 1689?
00:34:55.000When James II is overthrown by a Dutch invasion in England, James II, who, of course, is basically, he's not quite a Catholic.
00:35:04.000Well, he is a Catholic, actually, but he's not governing as a Catholic.
00:35:08.000But, you know, he's on the cavalier side of the roundhead-cavalier divide.
00:35:12.000And of course, Massachusetts is this kind of like roundhead, you know, colony, right?
00:35:18.000And so he creates this thing called the Dominion of New England, where they're, you know, they're going to put bishops in America or whatever.
00:35:23.000He's overthrown by this like Dutch invasion.
00:35:26.000As soon as they hear the news about it in Boston, they just arrest the government instantly and restore their old kind of religious dictatorship form of.
00:35:36.000And the thing is, basically, the important lesson for today is a lot of people think, if you remember the Tea Party, do you remember the Tea Party?
00:36:07.000Because basically what it did was, you know, the Tea Party was people are like, this is America.
00:36:13.000If the people, the good salt of the earth, patriotic people in America just like all get tired of their government at the same time, something's going to happen.
00:36:23.000And what they discovered is that nothing happens.
00:36:25.000And that's a really important lesson is that if you get a lot of people together, nothing happens.
00:36:30.000Whereas if you look at people in Massachusetts in 1689, these are like, from today's perspective, not only are they incredibly virtuous and civic, they're also incredibly violent and energetic.
00:36:44.000And that is a weird combination that doesn't exist today at all.
00:37:10.000And isn't that the question that is in front of us as a society, which is who gets power, who's in charge, and who's going to lead us out of this mess?
00:37:17.000And I guess the options in front of us is, well, we keep on doing what we're doing.
00:37:22.000Are you suggesting an Elon Musk-ish character as president?
00:37:26.000I think there's no, I think there's sort of two ways.
00:37:32.000But I think there's two ways that that can roll.
00:37:35.000I think, you know, we're, of course, in the situation that we're in, and we're not looking at anything but Trump versus Biden in 2025.
00:37:45.000And I'm very conflicted, actually, about this election because having Biden in the White House, you know, this sort of shambling husk of a man, really, like, and my God, think about how much he's going to degenerate over the next four years.
00:38:00.000Like, you know, like, I mean, in 2020, I was talking to someone who had worked for Biden, and his feeling was that Biden in 2020 was too old.
00:38:23.000And the reality is Washington doesn't need the White House.
00:38:27.000You could have no White House at all, no president at all.
00:38:30.000The executive branch would work even better.
00:38:33.000Sometimes it's true it sort of sends like decisions up and they land on the president's desk and they give him three boxes to check and he's supposed to check the middle one and he checks the middle one, right?
00:39:11.000And the thing is, what I would recommend for Donald Trump is I don't think Donald Trump really, you know, like when he was a CEO in the private sector, the Trump organization was never bigger than like 20 or 30 people.
00:39:25.000It was a family office and it was a license, a brand licensing organization, and they licensed that brand.
00:39:31.000Trump has so many sort of attributes of kingliness.
00:39:35.000He's like, has he has this quality in Arabic that's called Baraka, like the quality of a king, right?
00:39:41.000What Trump is not good at is drilling down detailed management, like going, staying on top of things, having a long attention span, being Elon Musk.
00:40:01.000And if he was able to see himself as chairman of the board and to basically go out and say, hey, I'm going to go wherever you find these Elon Musks of today, I'm going to go and basically say, you know what?
00:40:16.000Hey, you know, someone, I'm not going to mention any names, but I'm sure there's 100 people in Silicon Valley that could do this job and basically say, you're going to basically shut down this fake executive branch that we have and create a new government.
00:41:09.000And, you know, and so, you know, the thing is, and like you have all of these patriotic Americans out there, and they're voting sort of based on this emotional belief.
00:41:19.000They really think they're electing the CEO of America.
00:41:22.000They talk as if they're electing the CEO of America.
00:41:26.000If there is an opportunity to get this done, it's the only vector to get it done is through Trump.
00:41:31.000When you look at the current plans that are being made for the next Trump administration, they're sort of, you know, I know some of these people.
00:42:05.000Because you have a whole laundry list of creative ideas.
00:42:08.000So basically, you know, when you're filling that role, you have to, you know, understand and you have to tell the American people very straightforwardly and honestly, ideally before the election, although FDR didn't do it before the election.
00:42:21.000FDR did it after the election, but it was a different world.
00:42:25.000You have to tell the American people before the election, hey, look, if you're going to vote for me, you got to understand that as president, I'm just going to run the country for the next four years.
00:42:37.000And I'm going to treat the other two branches of government as advisory because this is the only way to restore the executive branch from its present Babylonian captivity.
00:43:18.000And, you know, I have a funny story, which is when Trump was originally elected, I was like, oh my God, this is happening, but it's just way too soon.
00:46:14.000It was a job application to Zara Borgia, you know and like hey, here's all the stuff I know, here's all the stuff I know right, you know and and, and.
00:46:21.000So the thing is that basically, here's the key, in a way, is that when people vote in a presidential election, they're sort of thinking themselves in this kind of Norman Rockwell sense, like I care about this issue, I care about that issue and i'm like hiring this guy and he's gonna work for me in this office, and to realize that basically no, you have to do something much more daring than that.
00:46:46.000You have to basically, for your vote to be powerful, you have to give away all of that power and you have to say, when I vote for president in this 2024 election, basically i'm voting for whoever wins, for my guy to have all the power.
00:47:04.000I don't want to be like, you know, i'm voting for you to do this and voting for you to do that, i'm voting for you to close the border.
00:47:12.000I mean because I mean part of me, i'll be honest is like, but don't we have separation of power.
00:47:16.000I know, I know, I know you want to basically like To cling to sort of all of these things, but the thing is, all of these things are basically, these are things, frankly, Charlie, the Democrats don't believe in any of these things at all.
00:47:28.000They don't believe in the rule of law.
00:47:34.000And the thing is, basically, the problem has come, the point has come where we have to choose between these old and very beautiful ideas and our country.
00:47:45.000And if we choose the ideals over our country, our country is going to cease to exist.
00:47:49.000Because here's what's going to happen.
00:47:51.000Can I describe what's going to happen, where we're going to be if we go continue on this course in 2050?
00:47:57.000We now have about 5 million people a year pouring over the border.
00:48:01.000We have everyone who is part of America's governing class, you know, believing, you'll see it written all over the place in San Francisco, nun gunda persones eligal.
00:48:13.000You know, and like it's really hard, if you think about it, to defend the idea that your human rights as a human being should depend on the GPS coordinates where your mother squeezed you out.
00:48:24.000That's a pretty tough position to defend at Harvard or Yale or whatever.
00:48:29.000It's only a matter of time before we see basically an American, we already have seen it de facto, essentially an American Edict of Caracalla, where it's basically decided that everyone in the world is an American.
00:48:41.000And once everyone is in the world is an American.
00:48:46.000And you're not going to see 5 million people coming over the border every year.
00:48:49.000You're going to see 50 million people.
00:48:52.000You're going to see basically, you know, I mean, if you did a census in Africa and you said how many Africans would like to come to the U.S., you're looking at a numbers that are more like 500 million.
00:49:04.000And basically, once that happens, the country you know no longer exists.
00:49:08.000And the country that you live in is a country that looks a lot like South Africa today.
00:49:17.000And so, you know, the thing is that basically, if you're choosing between that and your separation of powers and your, you know, all of these things that were basically long ago captured by these progressives and have been worn as basically a skin suit by them for many, many years.
00:49:38.000Y'all are familiar with the skin suit technique.
00:49:41.000So basically, it's a beautiful analogy.
00:49:44.000You take over, you capture this institution and then wear the skin, and you're just like, you know, basically a wolf in sheep's clothing.
00:49:52.000And, you know, you sound like you're making these ba noises, but all you're saying is come here and get eaten.
00:49:58.000And so the thing is to recognize that that happened, and it didn't happen recently.
00:50:02.000That's the whole 20th century is this happening.
00:50:06.000It's really the whole 20th century is this movement of basically elites recapturing the state from politicians.
00:50:14.000That is the story of 20th century America.
00:50:18.000And so when you try to roll that back and say, okay, we're going to give the power back to the people, you basically have to recognize the truth of what John Adams said when he said, our Constitution For a moral and religious is made only for a morally inadequate person.
00:50:35.000It's wholly inadequate for any other, and power will go through it like a whale through a net.
00:50:40.000And so the problem, the whale analogy, basically, if you go back to your sort of triangle of democracy, oligarchy, monarchy.
00:50:52.000What you basically see is that patriotic Americans are a little bit stuck because they're basically trying to put the whale back in the net.
00:50:59.000The problem is the net has grown a lot weaker.
00:51:03.000And so the stock of popular energy, of popular virtue, civic virtue, you know, we sort of saw on January 6th this like, I'm not saying January 6th was this great act of evil or anything, but it was also, I mean, I think it was kind of a joke in a way because we saw basically that was what happens when you try to do 18th century politics with the 21st century population.
00:51:26.000And, you know, they got to the Senate floor and then did they organize, reorganize the Senate and start issuing decrees and taking over the military.
00:51:35.000And no, he had a guy with quarantines in his helmet, right?
00:51:38.000You know, but like when you picture what people in like the 17th century and like 1689 in Boston that would do, it would be over right there.
00:51:46.000And so the thing is when you're trying to organize that popular energy into sort of the people acting over the government, you've got to realize that the strength just isn't there.
00:51:57.000And that's why essentially all of these attempts to sort of use democracy to fight oligarchy without going the other direction on the clock and saying, no, what you essentially need to do is you need to use all of the power that you have left in democracy in one moment, at one time, in one direction, to kick the thing back over into monarchy.
00:52:21.000And, you know, you basically say, and you just, this whole idea on the American right of like, we're going to start by restoring the virtue of the American people.
00:52:32.000And first we're going to make a virtuous people, and then the virtuous people are going to be, you know, strike back.
00:52:37.000Meanwhile, you're basically being outnumbered by the entire population of Nigeria while you're trying to create these virtues, right?
00:52:43.000You know, and it's just, it's just impossible.
00:52:47.000And so the thing is, basically, that's the terrible choice facing Americans.
00:52:52.000You have to basically lay down all of these ideals that have been stolen and been corrupted and say, no, actually, it was an amazing experiment.
00:54:05.000And it's hard to decide which of these things is worse.
00:54:10.000Because basically, sort of the Republicans are telling you the truth, but they're also telling you that this thing that is not going to come within three or four orders of magnitude of working is going to work.
00:54:23.000And so in a way, they're still kind of lulling you to sleep about how bad the situation is and what has to be done.
00:54:31.000Here's the other thing, is that when people think about dramatic changes in power, they think about violence.
00:54:38.000Because in the 20th century, you saw a lot of political violence.
00:55:05.000He just has to carry the kitchen sink in the front door, right?
00:55:08.000And so it's actually just this like, it's, you know, all of this, you'll see these Democratic caricatures of what, you know, the Democrats are always telling, you know, basically they're saying you're going to do the things you're not going to do.
00:55:25.000And they basically get you to promise to do the things you're not going to do, but you should do.
00:55:30.000And so there's sort of all of these fantasies about Trump becoming a dictator or whatever.
00:55:36.000And they're just cartoonish and sort of completely off base.
00:55:39.000And I'll tell you one other thing that you may not really like either.
00:55:43.000If someone does this, he can't do it on behalf of only one side of the American people.
00:55:49.000He has to say to the blue state people too, hey, I'm going to govern you in a way that suits you.
00:55:56.000Like your life is actually going to become more progressive out there just at the same time as all those red state people, you know, don't have to worry about the schools turning their kids trans.
00:56:13.000But, you know, we can't basically fight for these institutions at all.
00:56:18.000There has to be a sort of, you know, at a cultural level, there has to be a kind of institutional divorce.
00:56:23.000And that divorce can be a peaceful, friendly kind of divorce within the same nation.
00:56:29.000So to use first principles, and then I want to just challenge a couple of the other things you said, is you say, if we don't embrace this, right, go towards some form of a monarchy, then we're going to have 50 million people coming in.
00:56:45.000Can you strengthen how certain you are?
00:56:48.000Build out why you're so certain about that.
00:57:03.000If you went back to Americans of 1950 and you showed them the America of today, they'd be like, oh my God, how did we get here?
00:57:11.000And the reality is that you don't have these decisions already the decision to basically sort of tolerate this massive illegality.
00:57:23.000I mean, Charlie, for example, when you're going around passing laws, did you know that RICO explicitly applies to facilitating illegal immigration?
00:57:33.000You could have RICO prosecutions like the size of God.
00:57:37.000Like, you know, you could prosecute all of these like Volags, all the people that are, you know, certainly all the people, you know, at ICE that are, you know, basically breaking the law, you know, but you don't have the infrastructure to do that.
00:57:50.000Who's going to run those prosecutions?
00:57:51.000What judges are you going to put that in front of?
00:57:54.000And so the thing is that it's actually really straightforward for people to make these decisions.
00:57:59.000Right now, you know, as you know, the state of Texas is asking the Supreme Court to basically force Texas to not protect its state border.
00:58:07.000Like, again, like, this is really just getting started.
00:58:10.000So I guess I'm totally on board with the energetic executive, someone who runs the country like Tesla or SpaceX.
00:58:30.000I don't think anyone needs to be hung up by their heels in the Ritz.
00:58:34.000You know, I would say actually the leader, you know, I did a funny thing about a year ago is that I went on the Young Turks, if you know the Young Turks, with Jenk Uger, and had a very friendly conversation in a way because we talked about Ataturk, who is the basically, you know, the man who created modern Turkey.
00:58:53.000And Ataturk, you know, who is not, didn't have any death camps or anything like that, not a violent guy.
00:58:59.000Ataturk had so much power, he changed the alphabet that Turks used.
00:59:05.000He changed the clothes that they wore.
00:59:07.000He basically dragged the modern empire, the Ottoman Empire, into the modern world.
00:59:13.000And by the way, Cenk, who's a huge progressive, obviously is all about Ataturk.
00:59:18.000FDR didn't quite have the level of power that we're talking about, but close.
00:59:24.000American progressives are all about FDR.
00:59:27.000You say to them, we're going to have another FDR.
00:59:46.000I think that, you know, when you're ultimately looking at systems that are sort of monarchical, you really have to rest, you have to put your sort of moral confidence in one person.
00:59:58.000And if you think about it, you know, think about like the Fortune 500.
01:00:01.000That's a huge ask for a country that our myth, our story, is rebelling against.
01:00:06.000It's a huge, it's a huge ask, and yet, you know, we live in the most ironic America in history.
01:00:12.000We live in an America that is actually sort of ready to like break frames and rebel against old ideas.
01:00:19.000And the thing is, you know, there's, you know, Charlie, there's 500 companies in the Fortune 500.
01:00:44.000But the thing is, you know, the idea, you know, of like, we're going to basically put our trust in this one person instead of this horrific machine that is doing these just obviously insane things.
01:00:57.000It's really, it's a scary call, a little bit, but it's not as scary as keeping with what we're doing.
01:01:03.000So that, just to kind of make sure I understand the argument, the binary that you've put forward is current trajectory is more of the same, even worse.
01:01:29.000Yeah, and let me make this, let me sort of ground this in American history a little bit because, you know, there are really two American revolutions.
01:01:36.000There's one in 1775 and 1776, and there's another one in 1789.
01:01:43.000There's actually the Constitution is a reactionary coup against the Articles of Confederation.
01:01:50.000And if you ask anyone, even educated people about the Articles of Confederation period, the only thing they know is that it existed.
01:01:57.000They don't know anything about the personalities, the events, whatever.
01:02:01.000It's been almost entirely airbrushed out of history.
01:02:04.000It's been airbrushed out of history because it was, if I can use this word on your show, a shit show.
01:02:19.000That was what after basically seeing like, you know, 12 years of like turbulent Massachusetts style like Tea Party 1.0, tarring and feathering mob politics without even the British to be opposed to.
01:02:37.000The founding, you know, the sort of, you know, the true like founding of this republic was like, we're going to create something that's really, I think, the ideal form of government, which is an accountable monarchy.
01:02:49.000Which is also the way these companies work.
01:04:11.000And so you have to establish something that basically I think you can learn a lot from the corporate model, which sort of works so well as a model of the accountable king.
01:04:23.000You need some kind of board-like thing.
01:04:25.000It's a little harder to do at the sovereign level.
01:04:28.000I have some designs for that, but I don't want to dive way, way too deep into utter nerdery here.
01:04:34.000Yeah, so is it the system that the found, so is one of your hypotheses being, since Adams and others would say you need the raw material of moral and religious people, therefore the Constitution, since we do not have a moral and religious people and we kind of have this mishmash of different everything, therefore it's very hard to keep the Constitutional.
01:05:13.000And one of the things that FDR says is he says, our Constitution is such a good document that basically we can change the way it's interpreted and we can get anywhere with that.
01:05:24.000And so when you look at the Constitution and you note that it says the president is the chief executive of the executive branch, it doesn't say the legislative branch should be running the executive branch.
01:05:35.000It doesn't say the judiciary branch should be running the executive branch.
01:05:39.000It kind of leaves all of that hanging.
01:05:41.000And because it leaves all of that hanging, you can look at this document, the Constitution, and you can say, we're just applying this in a slightly different way.
01:05:49.000And we're taking this branch that has become effectively subordinate.
01:05:53.000And we're applying, I forget which is the Federalist paper where Alexander Hamilton talks about...
01:06:07.000And like, you know, and so you just sort of need to kind of rotate the Constitution a little bit, and you're still interpreting it sort of very, very clearly, but you're putting the president back in charge of the federal government.
01:06:25.000Do you hope that the Constitution has staying power and that Americans aren't as depraved as they seem?
01:06:31.000Meaning that the structure can be a little bit revived and that we don't have, because you know, once you go in this direction, it's not going back.
01:06:40.000It's just there's so many other you're going to a different place.
01:06:44.000Because, for example, you know, in the book Good to Great, which is all about corporate turning around, you know, five million copies sold, they talk about, look, as soon as an energetic, charismatic, visionary genius CEO leaves, there was this Florida-based competitor to Walgreens that were pharmacies.
01:07:25.000And so the thing is, you need the accountability part of that accountable monarchy.
01:07:29.000But the thing is, when you're in the process of performing that transition, it's so delicate that you basically say, I have to trust this one person and I have to trust this one person to establish that accountability system and to make that work.
01:07:44.000However, is basically, I mean, a presidential election is a form of that kind of accountability.
01:07:51.000And so you need something that, you know, the idea that basically, you know, the founders were sort of building a machine of government that would last for the ages and govern this incredible continent for the ages.
01:08:04.000I don't believe that dream is dead at all.
01:08:07.000So let me ask you, you alluded to this, and you said every 80 years, we kind of have this super president.
01:08:12.000It's like the San Andreas fault breaking.
01:08:15.000So then is it a question, is basically what you're saying is that it's either the right or the left that's going to claim that.
01:08:21.000I think that it's very hard for the left because the thing is the left has a sort of crabs in a bucket thing where it sort of pulls apart like, you know, to be a leftist, you know, means you're friends with all the little Fauci or whatever.
01:08:35.000So to kind of stab them in the, I mean, it would take a really, really amazing crisis for that to happen.
01:08:40.000Whereas, you know, like a Gavin Newsom.
01:08:42.000Yeah, I don't think, I don't think he could do it.
01:08:45.000I think that Barack Obama even, there were little places where Barack Obama like differed from, you know, the blob, as his guys called it, in the State Department.
01:08:55.000Barack Obama, who, you know, has no ideological conflicts with these people, you know, couldn't really direct them to do his will.
01:09:03.000So the traditional pushback that you'll receive is, hey, we need the courts to disassemble the deep state.
01:09:27.000And so you basically see these sort of little conservative judgments.
01:09:31.000You just saw one on affirmative action in colleges, right?
01:09:34.000The court is like, no, actually, you shouldn't do this.
01:09:37.000Well, how is that going to be followed up?
01:09:39.000Is that going to be followed up by a giant army of lawsuits ensuring that basically Harvard doesn't have its thumb on the scale for one race or its thumb against another?
01:09:49.000They'll keep doing it with minor adjustments, and they'll say, oops, sorry.
01:10:09.000So the question of how we get back to having it, like pretending that we have it, that's not a good way to get something you don't have, is to pretend that you have it.
01:10:18.000And so, you know, when you look at especially like all of this lawfare, I mean, I was just reading this amazing Twitter thread where, you know, the Democrats, if they sort of lost the count, I don't want to say lost the election because it's a count.
01:10:31.000If they lost the count in 2020, they were going to do all of the things times 10 that Trump tried to do a little bit and now everyone is getting prosecuted for.
01:10:44.000They were going to do all those things with the masses in the streets, lawfare, alternate electors.
01:11:38.000You know, well, you know, if you take reactionary as a political slur, which I sort of used it like gay people use queer, I'm like, I'm going to come out and say I'm a reactionary.
01:11:47.000And I'm a neoreactionary really because I don't actually have a heritage of like, I'm not a traditional American.
01:11:54.000I'm basically an American Jewish communist, essentially.
01:11:57.000And so I don't have any cultural ties at all to the American right.
01:12:03.000And so I'm just, I'm a traitor to my class, right?
01:12:06.000I'm just like, I'm like, I'm defecting against these, like, this horrible thing that like rule by people like me has become.
01:12:14.000Like, you know, and so the thing is that basically I would say something, you know, that a great political leader from about 100 years ago once said that, you know, the task of the statesman is to take what is good about the past and learn from it and help to use and help to use build the future with it.
01:12:45.000You know, we can be like our best selves.
01:12:48.000And the thing is, I'm really confident that with a government that isn't trying to destroy the country, like it's an embarrassment, frankly, that we have trouble competing with China.
01:12:58.000The West has never had trouble competing with the East before, except when the West is really deeply sick.
01:13:05.000You know, this country with a government that works is going to blow China out of the water.
01:13:12.000The number of amazing Americans that still exist in this country.
01:13:15.000You know, when you basically, they just need the right structure.
01:13:19.000And what gives me hope also is that basically, you know, Americans have been getting much less violent and virtuous over time.
01:13:27.000And so, you know, political systems that rely on them to be like virtuous and violent at the same time, that's a concept that people can't even really parse today.
01:13:36.000But Americans have also been getting more sophisticated, more ironic.
01:13:41.000You know, every movie you see, every like Super Bowl commercial is a joke, whatever.
01:13:46.000And so they're very, very good at breaking out of mental frames.
01:13:51.000They're very, very good at like breaking their assumptions, at breaking out of Plato's cave, at saying, wow, what if this system was all a joke?
01:13:59.000What if these ideals don't mean anything?
01:14:01.000What if all these institutions I was taught to respect and love are just like basically really bad people wearing a skin suit?
01:14:08.000That's more accessible to Americans than it ever has been.
01:15:04.000And there's, I mean, how ironic is Donald Trump?
01:15:07.000He's tremendously, his powers of irony are immense.
01:15:10.000And that's the thing that he has that Ron DeSanctimonious doesn't have, you know, and like he has, you know, and that feeling of like he's simultaneously incredibly ironic and incredibly sincere.
01:15:23.000And that's the kind of flavor that it takes to sort of get P to get people to realize that they can do what needs to be done.
01:15:42.000For deeper political theory, but still very, very readable.
01:15:46.000I love, there's a book by James Burnham called The Machiavelli.
01:15:51.000Not Suicide of the West, not the Managerial Revolution.
01:15:54.000Those are both fine books, but his masterpiece is called The Machiavellians, and it was written in 1940.
01:16:00.000And it's amazing because what the Machiavellians is all about is basically casting aside these illusions and sort of doing what Confucius said, which is to call everything by its true name.
01:16:13.000And if you can call everything by its true name, you can realize that we don't have an executive branch.
01:16:45.000What I really love is this idea, first and foremost, of challenging our presumptions, but this idea of an energetic executive, I really love.
01:16:54.000I'm still going to be the stickler for the U.S. Constitution.