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Aug. 31, 2024 - Info Warrior - Jason Bermas
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We DISAGREE ON A LOT!!! And That's Ok!!!
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Thank you.
We've got a great show lined up for you today.
We've got Joel B. Pollack, the author of The Agenda, what Trump should do in his first hundred days.
buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness.
And we are now joined by Joel B. Pollack.
Joel, thank you so much for joining us.
Now, you are the author of the upcoming book, The Agenda, what Trump should do in his first 100 days.
Before we get there, why did you choose this subject matter and what's your background?
Well, many of you know me as the senior editor-at-large at Breitbart News.
I've been at Breitbart since 2011, so 13 and a half years, basically.
I worked with Andrew Breitbart closely until he passed away.
And I'm also a former Republican congressional candidate.
I ran in my old home district in Illinois, northern suburbs of Illinois.
I went to Harvard Law School.
Before that I was a political speech writer and a freelance journalist.
I worked actually in South Africa and had a political conversion that really started there from left to right.
I was actually born in South Africa but my parents immigrated here when I was a baby so I grew up completely American in Chicago and was very interested in South Africa.
I had a scholarship to study there from the Rotary Foundation and it was really an incredible experience because I had been to Harvard as an undergraduate. I went to South
Africa full of the nectar of left-wing utopia, and what I experienced there really changed my
worldview. You know, if you approach politics and sociology or public policy as a science, you
have to look at the results of social experiments, of policy experiments.
And if your hypothesis is not reflected in the results, you have to change your hypothesis.
You have to change your theory.
And that's how I approached politics.
I believed that left-wing policies would make people better off and more equal.
And while they got the more equal part right, What I realized was left-wing policies make everybody equally poorer.
They don't actually benefit the poor.
What time frame were you in South Africa?
I'm sorry to interrupt.
That's a great question.
I arrived in January 2000, right after the turn of the millennium.
And President Thabo Mbeki had just taken office.
He was the second president in the new democratic era after Nelson Mandela.
And Mbeki He came into office with this crackpot theory that AIDS wasn't a disease caused by a virus.
Remember, AIDS was and remains rampant in Southern Africa.
It wasn't caused by a virus, it was caused by economic inequality.
So he tried to turn a medical problem, a pandemic, into a Marxist idea, or to graft his Marxist framework onto what was a medical problem, a public health issue.
And in his mind, the way to treat AIDS, which was an immune deficiency, not a disease in his version of events, was through massive economic redistribution.
So it wasn't through medicine, it wasn't through contraception, it wasn't through sexual abstinence, public education, it was through Massive redistribution of wealth, not just within South Africa, but from the first world to the third world.
And he enforced this view by prohibiting doctors from prescribing certain medications that guaranteed that pregnant mothers with HIV wouldn't pass it to their newborn infants.
And hundreds of thousands of people were needlessly infected with HIV.
Innocent people.
We're talking infants, right?
Not people who've engaged in risky behaviors as adults.
I watched all that happen, and it started to shock me, the degree of denial.
And then, halfway through that first year, the Second Intifada broke out in the Middle East.
I write a lot about the Middle East.
I have extensive knowledge about Israel, and I spent some time studying there as well.
And South Africa, unlike the rest of the democratic world at the time, sided with the Palestinian terrorists and not with the democratic Israelis.
And that was new for me, because I'd grown up in the United States, where even if you were on the left, you tended to support Israel.
That's changed now, of course.
America's become much more like South Africa, at least on the left.
But I found myself defending Israel and alliance with Israel in public debates in South Africa, and I found myself encountering government ministers for whom the facts meant absolutely nothing.
It was my first experience of a fact-free environment, or where you could present people with the facts And they would simply deny that they were relevant or important in any way.
They denied that truth mattered.
So that was also a shock to me.
And over time, as I began writing more and eventually I was hired as a political speech writer by the opposition party in South Africa, I began to see that a lot of my core values no longer put me on the left.
If you believe that judging people by their race is unacceptable, then you can't be on the left.
The left embraces the idea that our identities, our destinies, are determined by our skin color, by the circumstances of our birth, and to me that's just unacceptable.
So I began to reconsider my political allegiances.
And I had been told my whole life growing up that if you are a Republican, then you're a racist, sexist, greedy.
And I said, look, I may have many flaws, but I don't think I'm any of those things.
And I guess I'm going to start voting Republican.
And that's the experience that really put me on a conservative path.
I really refined it when I was in law school, because when I came back to the United States,
I went to Harvard Law School, and I still thought of myself as maybe a centrist Democrat.
What I didn't realize was that during the period of the Iraq War, so I was in South Africa from 2000
to 2006, almost seven years.
And during the period of the Iraq War, the Democratic Party had become radicalized.
It was radicalized by the progressive left that took over the internet, which was then a new medium
for political organizing and for political commentary.
And the left ensured that Howard Dean took over the Democratic National Committee,
and that the Democratic Party was no longer a party.
There were campaigns against centrist Democrats like Joe Lieberman in Connecticut when they threw Joe Lieberman out and he had to campaign as an independent to keep his Senate seat.
That was really the final moment for me because I really thought of myself as a Joe Lieberman Democrat at that stage.
Liberal on social issues.
Hawkish on national security, pro-Israel and so forth.
And when they rejected Joe Lieberman, that for me was the end.
So let me just stop you there for a second, because there's a lot to go over.
I mean, very interesting stuff, especially when we talk about that time period, because first of all, I've been politically homeless for decades.
I really hate both sides.
I really, you know, I got to be honest with you.
For instance, Well, let's talk about it.
You know, I'm 45.
Obviously, when I was a kid... You don't look 45.
Well, I just turned 45 a couple weeks ago, sir.
I'm 47.
I look a lot older than you.
Maybe just today.
I haven't shaved in a while.
Well, let me just assure you, we've had very different life experiences for the start, and I always like to hear those things.
I would say, you know, growing up, right?
Bush was never really appealing.
I'm talking about Bush 1.
When Bill Clinton came in, this is when we got more than like three or four channels.
All of a sudden there was like 12 of these dudes playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall.
All of a sudden, economic times are pretty good by the end of the 90s.
I mean, I remember Under a Dollar Gas, Promises.
You know, I was going to school for the time for computer graphics.
Easy six-figure jobs, etc, etc.
So it felt pretty good for somebody in their teens, into their 20s.
The only scandal we had was Monica Lewinsky, right?
So I definitely leaned left during that time period.
Now, once we get into the Bush era, I'm an anti-war guy.
You know, I very quickly did not like what was happening in the Middle East.
A lot of people didn't love Bush too, right?
I was definitely amongst them.
I wasn't evil Republicans, great Democrats, but for instance when you talk about the left at the time, I was more of a Kucinich guy.
I still have a lot of respect for Dennis Kucinich.
You know, I felt like I was along those lines.
You mentioned Howard Dean.
I still remember the 2004 presidential election where Dean was really the frontrunner in that party in the beginning and he was winning primaries and then all of a sudden the media made a big hubbub of, we're going here!
And then John Kerry just magically, poof, is now the frontrunner in that party and I would argue A guy like Kerry, through that election, he won that 2004 election.
We talk about election rigging.
I remember the hanging chads of 2000 into the voting machines of 2004.
I've hated those machines and that system and the inability to audit them for decades, right?
But you look at somebody like Kerry, who's a career politician, I would argue that he ran much more of the foreign policy than Joe Biden did the last four years.
I mean, that's pretty obvious.
I think to some extent there's a party establishment that transcends both parties.
in a sense when we progress down that line?
Because like you said, Dean later, kind of for not throwing a hubbub about 2004, what
happened to him, he kind of becomes the leader of the party and even radicalized more over
those years.
I think to some extent there's a party establishment that transcends both parties.
You can call it a unit party, but if it existed once, it's starting to fall apart because
I think that the Republican portion of the establishment has started to realize that
it's not safe if it collaborates with the Democratic side.
Thanks.
People like Ari Fleischer, for example, who was part of the George W. Bush administration.
Oh, I know.
Who was perhaps skeptical of Trump in the early years.
He's now realized that the media are so poisoned against anything right of center or even anything insufficiently left of center that it's toxic in Washington, even for people like him.
So I think that there are permanent interests in Washington that try to steer things their way.
There's no doubt.
But I do think that at least part of the establishment has woken up to the threat that Kamala Harris and the progressive left pose not just to them but to the country.
But let me give you a little bit of background since we're roughly the same age about my experience that same period.
So I grew up in a liberal suburb of Chicago and we were probably Unique in that we didn't think Ronald Reagan was that great.
I remember the kids in my second grade class being upset that Walter Mondale lost in 1984.
In 1988, we were for Dukakis and then Bush won.
And certainly within the Jewish community, there was a lot of mistrust of George H.W.
Bush, although he always reminded me of my grandmother.
I can't exactly explain why.
Probably physically built that way, right?
Yeah, they were from that same War time generation.
I never really liked him.
People respected him but he was hostile to Israel because he was listening to voices like James Baker who said that the United States has a fundamental interest in oil in the Middle East.
Israel doesn't have oil, but the Arab states have oil, so we have to side with the Arab states.
And that's why he went in full bore in the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm and all that.
I was fully behind the United States winning that war.
I'm not an anti-war person.
I do believe that when we go to war, we've got to win it.
And I was supportive of Bush in that effort as young as I was.
Then 1992 came around and I never liked Bill Clinton.
I always thought there was something dishonest about this guy, and so I was a Perot guy.
I remember in my AP economics class, I took AP economics as a sophomore,
and the teacher was incredulous that two of us had voted for Perot in sort of the mock election.
Well, let's talk about Perot then.
We gotta take a break because I think this is a totally interesting subject matter.
Haven't even gotten to Trump and his policies in the first hundred days.
I promise you we will because I do think that you're right that there has been a breakup of that party and largely that is the Trump phenomenon.
I don't know if the rhetoric always lives up to the policy in that first term but we're going to talk about all of it.
Really great conversation right now with Joel B Pollack.
We're going to take a break, we're going to come back, and we're going to discuss more of this, starting with Ross Perot, because I think that's an interesting factor, especially with RFK Jr.
in this race as a viable third-party candidate to get 5-plus percent of the vote.
We'll be back with more Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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And we are back.
We are with Joel B. Pollack.
He is the author of The Agenda, What Trump Should Do in His First Hundred Days.
Comes out in a couple weeks.
Perot, I remember that election.
I was still a little guy.
I think I was in fifth grade at the time.
Now, at the time, I was living in, well, they call it upstate New York, but really just above the city.
We're talking about Dutchess County, about 45 minutes out from there.
So probably a little bit liberal, you know, in New York.
A lot of my teachers straight up voted for Perot and we were having the mock elections and the debates and there was a feeling like third party could penetrate.
And one of the reasons that people gravitated towards Perot is because he was saying common sense things and he was a successful businessman.
He was the first guy really exposing the two-party kind of donor type system.
You know, I've had Roger Stone on my program, met Roger in person many times.
That's the guy that started modern day lobbying.
You know, and when I've said, Roger, don't we need to stop that?
He's like, money is speech.
And I'm like, well, I disagree, Roger.
What are your thoughts?
Nice to say if you're getting the money, but yeah, look, Perot was a challenge to the establishment.
He also, and this I think was his enduring contribution, or at least it lasted about a decade.
He also brought up the budget deficit as a serious national issue.
And there's no way Bill Clinton and the Republicans in Congress would ever have made balancing the budget a
priority if it hadn't been for Perot.
So Perot made that an issue, and by the end of the decade, there were budget surpluses in Washington.
I voted against George W. Bush in 2000, largely because he was campaigning on a tax cut
that I thought wasn't necessary.
I wanted to use the surplus to pay down the national debt.
I thought Gore was right on that.
I didn't particularly like Al Gore, but I liked Joe Lieberman, as I mentioned.
And for me, I cared about spending and about the budget.
It's a national security issue for me.
We can't fight wars if we can't pay for them.
So I voted for Gore, but when Bush won I wasn't heartbroken or anything like that.
I mean, he hadn't said or done anything crazy.
And when 9-11 came around, I was completely on board.
A lot of my friends who had previously been Democrats became Republicans when they saw how Democrats reacted to 9-11.
Many Democrats were very patriotic and so forth, but the left said this was America's fault, we're treating Muslims so badly, they couldn't exactly say how or where, but this was America's comeuppance.
It was almost Freudian, like there was this kind of edible complex they were resolving by opposing the United States.
And for those of us with a lot of exposure to the far left, It was just enough, and that was part of my transition as well.
I was already questioning my left-wing views and I started to move more to the right, and that was also happening at the time of the Second Intifada and so forth.
2004, I voted for Kerry because I thought he would be more successful in achieving some of the diplomatic things that Bush also wanted to achieve, but I felt Bush had isolated a lot of people.
Looking back on the Iraq war, I didn't have particularly strong feelings about it.
Again, I was out of the country and I was deeply engaged in trying to understand South Africa and South African politics.
I'd just been hired as a speechwriter.
So it wasn't front and center for me.
I remember being vaguely frustrated that we were going after Iraq.
It didn't really make sense to me.
I remember writing to my parents or telling my parents something like,
we're only doing this because we can. I mean, Iraq is a more convenient, easier target. But
the greater regional threat, as I said at the time, which was obvious to anybody with eyes,
was Iran. Iran is a much greater regional threat. We're not going after Iran because it would mean
a real tough war. We're going after Iraq. And nevertheless, once Saddam Hussein was defiant
at the United Nations and all the usual bad guys were behaving their worst, I was supportive of
war effort.
I'm almost always supportive of American troops when they're overseas.
I even supported Obama when he said he was going to go into action against Libya.
And then I was bitterly disappointed when he repeated all the mistakes of the Iraq war.
No plan for post-war Libya.
No real authority, no responsibility.
I mean, he botched the war in Libya the way that Bush botched the war in Iraq, which had been the whole basis for Obama's insurgent campaign in 2008.
Well, let me just interject there because now we're into 2008 territory.
Right.
We've been going over the last 20 years.
A political theater guys just really briefly in the presidential room.
So I want to talk about that really quick because I am on the opposite edge of the spectrum.
But I do remember the 2008 Democratic debates in particular.
First, I want to get, you know, kind of go back to 9-11 because people like Biden were
very hawkish on that war.
He was up in front of the Senate.
He backed almost everything the Bush policy had to say.
Now in 2008, one of the things that I thought, again, that would, you know, by then I was
over the two-party system, but I'm still watching this stuff like a hawk, and every single person
up there, and this was a big, big, big variety.
I mean, you had Hill Dog.
You had the Barack star.
You had John Edwards, who they were pushing at the time.
I mentioned Dennis Kucinich.
Biden was up there.
You also had Mike Revelle, another anti-war guy.
Every single person, top to bottom, including Barack and Hillary, said they were going to close Guantanamo Bay.
And at the time, we also had the Abu Ghraib scandal.
And I'm a guy that's not a big fan of black sites.
That was a talking point of the left in 2008.
Obviously, that's never come to fruition.
We're in 2024.
We're working on past 15 years of those places.
To me, so many of these promises that we get are so disingenuous.
Even the idea of hope and change at that point with Barack Obama.
I had seen a guy that was propped up in 2004 at the DNC, hadn't won a national election, right? He was a
state senator.
That was his big coming out party as a senator. He serves basically half a term in the Senate,
says he's going to become the president, and though he's not exactly fast-tracked
because there is that competition with Hillary, he's fast-tracked in all the media.
I mean, thoughts?
Obama is complicated.
Let's talk first of all about the policy aspect of this.
So, you're right.
All of the Democrats were in those debates promising to close Guantanamo Bay and all this.
That's because they're all idiots.
They're all really stupid.
No, they're really, really dumb on foreign policy.
Democrats are terrible on foreign policy.
To them, foreign policy is just an extension of domestic policy.
You can see it in their enthusiasm over the war in Ukraine.
They appeased Russia for years.
There was the Hillary reset button.
There was Obama falling over himself to give Putin concessions on nuclear treaties.
For the first six years of the Obama administration, they did everything they could to flatter Putin, to help him.
Even the first year of the Biden administration, he was having summits in Geneva with Putin.
He canceled the Nord Stream 2 sanctions that Trump put on.
They don't They don't know how to run a foreign policy.
The reason they're so enthusiastic about it, and here I agree with Tucker Carlson who I often disagree with on foreign policy, but the reason they care so much about it is they see Putin as Trump.
So they want to punish Putin for, as they see it, backing Trump in 2016.
They hate Putin and that's why.
They're so enthusiastic in their support of Ukraine.
They didn't care about Ukraine in 2008 when John McCain was talking about it after Russia invaded Georgia.
They didn't care about Ukraine in 2014 when Putin took over Crimea.
They didn't care about Ukraine in 2021 when Biden took office.
They just don't care.
And then Biden falls down on the job, literally and figuratively, and Putin invades.
And now suddenly they make it about domestic politics.
But, you know, let me go back to that 2008 election.
Talking about the foreign policy aspect first.
I liked John McCain.
I'd always liked John McCain because I was a Democrat and, you know, you tend to like people from the other party criticize that party.
So I liked McCain because he criticized Republicans.
But I actually grew in my respect for him.
And although later I would lose some respect for him due to his conduct about Trump.
I thought he had the right policy on Iraq in 2007, 2008, which was you don't pull out
of Iraq precipitously.
You secure the country by sending the right number of troops that you should have sent
in the first place.
And you do the surge.
And he was right.
Eventually, Obama had to accept it.
And McCain was right.
Iraq was stable by the time Obama took office because Bush adopted the McCain policy of surging troops to Iraq.
Whatever the long-term future of Iraq was, in the short to medium term, McCain was absolutely right.
And the reason he won the nomination in 2008 on the Republican side was that he was consistent in that position.
And I think Republican voters respect tenacity and commitment.
And that's what he had.
When nobody else, everyone else is running away from Iraq and McCain's like, no, you've got to stick it out.
And look, with Obama, I'm from Illinois originally.
I voted for him for Senator in 2004, and I was enthusiastic about him until I saw his performance in office.
And then I realized he was one of these finger-in-the-wind politicians, a deep, deep, hardcore leftist at the core of it all, but also just totally insincere.
And so what you experienced, being told one thing and then having another thing happen, I mean, I saw that happening already.
I thought maybe Obama might be good in that he might bring some new people into Washington, you know, fresh faces.
Well, that was a big mistake.
Rahm Emanuel?
I mean, the people he brought in were as gangster as can be!
Yeah, so Obama came in and, you know, for me that was a really important election.
It was the first time I ever campaigned for a Republican candidate.
And I saw Obama representing a lot of the terrible ideas that I had been exposed to in South Africa.
of racial redistribution, of fundamentally transforming a society.
You know, you don't need that.
Human beings have a God-given potential to do so much for themselves that if you simply take the obstacles out of their way and allow them to succeed, they'll do so.
I mean, that's what happened in South Africa after the end of apartheid.
So many black people advanced because they were finally able to do so.
They didn't need affirmative action.
They just needed to get discrimination out of the way.
But then the government imposed such strict affirmative action policies that the country began losing skilled white and mixed race people to emigration.
So now you have a situation in South Africa where they don't have enough engineers to keep the lights on, for example, and the people who are hurt by that are the black population, who are the majority, who depend on those services, whether private or public.
We're seeing the same thing in this country, unfortunately, this kind of rush to wokeness, and it started with Obama, and it's continuing through his influence in the Democratic Party, which is far beyond his direct puppeteering.
The ideas he brought into the mainstream are going to be with us for a while, and it's not going to be easy to defeat them, but we have to fight them.
Well, I would agree that he, you know, again, there are varying levels of puppets, but this guy was a total creation.
I mean, his name was Barry Sotero throughout his high school career.
You know, you see the fast tracking of him.
You saw how they brought in Shepard Fairey, the famous artist, that campaign.
He's literally on the cover of the Rolling Stone as God.
You remember that cover?
I remember going through the malls.
that still, you know, existed in that time period and you couldn't go through like an urban store or whatever without seeing just basic shirts with him.
Not for a president, but very stylish.
That was a very slick campaign and, you know, I regard his presidency really as the second Bush II era.
I mean, there wasn't much different on policy other than obviously a lot of the leftist stuff got through with health care, Obamacare, etc.
the mobilization towards more socialism. But again, I saw a lot of that coming through the
back door of authoritarianism under Bush. And, you know, like for instance, you look at something
like Homeland Security that doesn't exist before 9-11. Well, the Border Patrol had its problems
prior to it being absorbed, but it's only gotten worse under Homeland Security.
And now Homeland Security has flipped the script almost completely from the idea of foreign terrorism to what, domestic terrorism, conservatives, etc.
And again, that process, you look, in about 2008 or 2009, I remember that first MIAC report leak from the Fusion Centers, this one I believe out of Missouri, that was integrating with Homeland Security.
And even then, it was Ron Paul supporters, It was the Gadsden flag, it was the live free or die people, etc.
So, you know, now we look 16 years and now thought crimes are a real thing.
You can hate Enrique Torrio, you can hate the Proud Boys.
He wasn't in D.C.
on January 6th.
You can think whatever you want of that.
He's doing 20 years for not being there.
To me, that is a thought crime.
So, yeah, go ahead.
One of the things I talk about in my new book, The Agenda, what Trump should do in his first hundred days is releasing political prisoners, especially nonviolent political prisoners, from prison.
It's one of the first priorities.
In fact, the first chapter I have in the book is called Rule of Law.
To me, that's the most fundamental thing.
And it comes before the border, it comes before the economy, although the border is number two and the economy is number three.
But rule of law, you've got to release people who did not do anything violent on January 6th.
You've got to release grandma who happened to be walking across the lawn on the west side of the Capitol, who thought this was part of the rally, or people who walked through open doors into the Capitol because they were being propped open by police.
There has been a vicious attempt to criminalize dissent in this country, and the pursuit of Donald Trump is part of that.
But it isn't just Donald Trump.
It's a whole range of people.
It's the meme makers, people who made jokes, who are now convicted because of their free speech.
This Biden administration has pursued its political opponents in a third world manner in the same way that the FBI, CIA and others pursued Trump with a phony Russia collusion story for four years.
We got to take a break.
This is a good part to break off because I want to delve deeper.
into those persecutions and prosecutions via thought crimes and I think what he has to do
to step up because you just named a bunch of the three-letter agencies but I would argue it's beyond
just those three-letter agencies. For instance, I mentioned Homeland Security and fusion centers.
Are you aware of the signature reduction program? No.
All right, we'll start with that when we come back, folks.
It is Making Sense of the Madness.
We're with Joel B. Pollack.
The book is Trump, What He Should Do in the First 100 Days of the Agenda.
Check it out.
We'll be back after this.
Sounds rolling.
All three cameras, we're good.
Is there any regrets that you have in life?
I should sit here and say, yeah, I got a lot of regrets.
But when I look back on my life, and I understand the lives that were lost, I mean, I'm sitting here with them.
And I can tell my story.
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And we are back, and I'm going to try to just pull this up live, kinda, while we're talking about it.
experience.
And we are back and I'm going to try to just pull this up live, kind of while we're talking
about it.
So when I talk about this, I think it's really important because this is three years old.
And I talked to Arkin behind the scenes just before the Ukrainian invasion.
Now, Arkin did a really good piece also last year on the Department of Homeland Security, January 6th, the reversal in here.
But let me just read you the first paragraph here.
And this is a really extensive article.
We'll hit a couple of points.
The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade.
All right.
And again, this is three years old.
So now we're talking about almost 15 years old.
Some 60,000 people now belong to the secret army, many working under masked identities in low profile, all part of a broad program called signature reduction.
The force more than 10 times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniform and under
civilian cover, in real life and online.
So these are the Russian bots basically. Sometimes hiving in private businesses and consultancies,
some of them household name companies. Now, I would argue obviously big tech companies,
military industrial complex companies, Forbes 500, but let's go down a little bit.
So number one, signature reduction is an art form.
It's not an official word.
Right there is one of the tools when they go in person.
Now, you think you're looking at a hand, okay?
But what you're actually looking at is a manufactured silicone sleeve developed by DARPA to evade fingerprinting, create fake identities.
They can put whatever biometrics they want on it, okay?
And it emits human oils.
When they want to go full bore, they do like the full prosthetics.
Now, One of the issues I have with this, obviously, is this is a program that's never been audited.
It's operating on domestic soil.
And we could talk about the Twitter files and the collusion during COVID-1984 and all these big tech companies.
This has not been addressed.
And, you know, when you have this type of inability to audit the system, as we really have over the last several decades, I would argue the last time we were ever able to really go after what they call the deep state, etc., it's Iran-Contra.
Uh, where even then, you know, you got some slaps on the wrists, later people will pardon, people like Oliver North got book deals and talk shows, right?
How do you fix that?
Like Vivek Ramaswamy, for instance, one of the things I liked was he talked about on day one, we're going to cut these bureaucracies in half.
I think that's a great idea based on social security numbers.
He says, everything's not going to shut down.
And then you have to bring them back into what I would argue is a constitutional republic of checks and balances, where there is some threat of, you know, again, Trump to me is the best president in my lifetime.
Far from perfect, right?
And I feel like they went after him criminally because he's the one guy that committed the least war crimes.
And his biggest crime was telling the truth about the system and trying to reform it.
So I know I rambled on in that intro, but what are your thoughts?
I mean, look at the example, for instance, of free speech, right?
You can love or hate Alex Jones.
As soon as Alex Jones was deplatformed across the board, right?
Trump should have stepped in and said, look, that's it.
That's the final straw.
You're protection from being sued because you are absolutely publishers.
You know, you're editing these things.
You're, you're, they all have the algorithms.
You can now be sued.
That would change the game.
What happened?
He didn't do that.
And on the eve of an election that I and many believe were stolen, he was censored by those same media companies.
Go ahead.
Right.
Well, he couldn't change the law on his own, but you're right that Alex Jones was the canary in the coal mine.
And it's important to remember the context in which he was deplatformed.
It wasn't over what he said over Sandy Hook.
He was sued for that.
But he was deplatformed because he confronted CNN's Oliver Darcy in the halls of Congress.
And I would argue he got too close to Jack Dorsey that same day and Dorsey didn't like it.
He was in the halls of Congress.
I remember he was with Rubio that day.
Continue, go ahead.
Well, look, I wouldn't have approached Darcy that way.
It's not my style, but there was nothing illegal or unlawful about it.
And Darcy claimed that he was being bullied by Alex Jones.
Darcy is a professional bully.
Like most bullies, he's actually a weak person, but he hides behind the CNN logo to go after companies and try to remove their advertisers.
The typical model used to be run by BuzzFeed.
This was their Playbook, but they did it.
CNN does it.
You find someone who says something offensive and then you go to all the advertisers and say, as if you're just asking journalistic questions, so-and-so said this on such and such a platform.
Are you planning to withdraw your advertising from this platform?
As if it's a story, but it's actually a pressure campaign.
And that's what Darcy did and does at CNN.
And Jones confronted him about it, and look, I can understand Darcy being uncomfortable.
I don't think that, again, I would have done it the way Alex Jones did it, but Jones was described as a bully, but in fact he was confronting a bully.
Again, it didn't make the way he did it right, but that should have... It was entertaining!
That deplatforming should have been a rallying cry for all the people who said for so many years, you know, misquoting Voltaire.
You know, disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to your death the right to say it.
Well, there was certainly nobody doing that.
You could count on one hand the number of people who actually live up to that principle.
You know, Glenn Greenwald, who I don't agree with.
Alan Dershowitz, who I usually agree with.
You know, maybe a couple other people.
That's it.
Those are the only people who go to the mat for freedom of speech in this country.
Well, I think there's a few others, but at the same time... Well, Vivek Ramani is one of them.
Again, I don't agree with him.
Well, I'll say this.
I am a free speech absolutist.
Again, I want people to show who they are.
I'm sick of these terms like Dog was.
If you don't like somebody, have a real discussion.
And plus, I can tell we disagree on a lot.
We're having a civil discussion here.
That's something that's lost in this country.
If you look at Breitbart's coverage of the Republican National Convention, I saw Cenk Uygur there from The Young Turks, which is a far left-wing show on YouTube, and I invited him immediately to come over because He's always willing to talk and he's an authentic voice on the left.
And you can have a civil discussion with someone like that.
You don't have to nitpick every point of disagreement because that's not how you have a conversation that goes anywhere, but you can still have a civil discussion and learn about each other's perspective.
So, you know, I agree with you.
And look, I think to go back to my book, one of the things I don't want to give away the whole book.
I mean, I have over 200 recommendations in it, but one of them is, The heads of all of these three-letter agencies, the NSA, the FBI, CIA, they all need to be fired.
We need complete housecleaning at these agencies.
There's never been a reckoning.
I mean, look what happened recently.
The Biden administration paid out millions of dollars to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were conniving to overturn the 2016 Democratic election.
But that's just one example.
Let's just stop there.
Because again, that's the problem I'm talking about.
Yeah.
Those people should be in prison for treason.
That's what they did.
They committed treason in this country.
There's been treasonous activity within the realms, not only of those three letter agencies and bureaucracies, but their subsidiaries for some time now.
So, you know, the FBI who falsified an email, he actually went in and changed the text.
To try to get the FISA court successfully to approve a warrant to spy on Carter Page and the Trump campaign.
And he got a slap on the wrist and no real punishment, no jail time.
And that's something that if you and I had done it, if we had committed fraud in that way, we would be in prison for years, years, especially if it were part of a quote unquote plot to overthrow the government, which I don't think January 6th was by the way, but which the Russia collusion, conspiracy theory certainly was. They certainly hoped to
get rid of Trump that way. And, you know, it's absurd. And when I saw Strzok testify in front of
Congress and smirk the entire time, I sat down and wrote a column that Breitbart published
called Abolish the FBI. And I said, look, we need the functions of the FBI. But we basically
have to get rid of this agency and build it from the ground up, because obviously, it goes
further than Jimmy Comey. It continues significantly down the chain. And it's just not going to be
cured by the agency itself.
And of course, under Christopher Wray, it hasn't been.
So, let's talk about one of the things that I think is really important and even Trump has discussed.
Bannon has also discussed this, who's in prison right now.
Again, you can hate Steve Bannon, he's there as a political prisoner.
Same thing happened to Navarro.
These are unprecedented times.
Trump has now said he's going to declassify the JFK documents fully.
Said that last time, okay?
I was one of those guys, literally woke up in the morning, couldn't wait.
I remember the first dump happened late afternoon, evening, got those, was disappointed it didn't come.
Really disappointed it didn't happen.
He says they're all coming this time.
Bannon has said RFK, MLK, all that's coming as well, okay?
He even said the Epstein documents.
Trump has said he's going to do the 9-11 documents.
He's been a little hesitant on the Epstein documents.
I think that's obvious because he did have a personal relationship with Epstein.
You know, also wished Ghislaine Maxwell well after she was arrested, etc.
I think there's the hesitancy.
I'm not accusing him of doing anything sexually nefarious, etc.
I want that.
You talk about how do you get the American people to really mobilize, maybe politically, to get rid of those agencies and replace them with something that's constitutional.
Show them the documents.
Now, will we get them?
Will they be unaltered?
I have no idea.
He didn't deliver the JFK documents, you know, from the 60s and 70s.
And let's be honest, to me that was a big issue because I don't know how you quote-unquote take on the deep state if you can't show who the deep state is 60 years ago.
Yeah, well I think he's going to be emboldened this time if he wins and returns to office.
I think he's been the target now of so much abuse and prosecution.
And the assassination attempt?
I don't think that we know that it was any kind of deliberate plot, but the more we find out about it, the more there's a case to answer about the gross negligence, at the very least.
It has to be explained.
Or how does a kid who's 20 years old literally have almost no digital footprint?
I mean, that's another big issue.
But continue.
No, no, it's insane.
And it needs to be explained.
Thank God Trump was only grazed by the bullet.
To me, by the way, it's completely ridiculous that we're not seeing a huge pressure campaign to go after all of the left-wing pundits and all of the Democratic politicians who use that kind of eliminationist rhetoric on television and on social media for months about how Trump's a danger to democracy and our lives are at stake and all that stuff.
Conservatives have been on the receiving end of all kind of abuse and investigation and purges for simply questioning election results and yet you have an assassination attempt which I still believe was enabled by a hateful political climate.
There's been no repercussions.
Nobody fired.
Nobody apologizing.
Nobody doing anything about toning down the rhetoric.
Well let me just say this.
Some of those people have doubled down.
Now I'm not for any kind of criminal prosecution.
I don't like their rhetoric either.
Let's be honest, had that been anyone else, number one, every single news agency, any other president or former president, they would have set up shop there, it would have been a 24-hour media cycle, and it would have been on the cover of every print publication in the nation.
And that was not the case.
Instead, it was toned down.
Now, I guarantee you, That bullet is an inch over, goes through his brain on national television.
That is the case right there.
I mean, that's the difference of the media right now.
It's horrible.
Listen, I think we've had a compromised media for a very, very long time.
But this idea of the rhetoric, they flip the script so hard on people like Trump.
I mean, I think in the week that he was shot at, the New Republic had him on the cover as an amalgamation of Hitler once more.
Right, right.
You would have thought after the debate, you know, after people getting behind him in places
like New York City, etc., after pop culture flipping a little bit with people like 50
Cent and Amber Rose coming along, they weren't going to double down on the, they've tripled
down on the Nazi stuff.
Yeah, and they've engaged in a completely unprecedented propaganda campaign on behalf
of Kamala Harris to completely obscure her record, talk about how wonderful she is.
They are just completely shameless.
And you know, the thing about Kamala Harris, if we can switch gears to that for a second,
is I watched her campaign up close.
I followed her on the campaign trail.
My last major book, Red November, was about the Democratic primary in 2020.
Thank you.
There were a lot of people who wanted to like Kamala Harris, who came to her events and her rallies and would pack the buildings, and who left disappointed.
She was a terrible campaigner.
She doesn't connect to people.
She has terrible positions on policy issues.
She can't explain why she believes in what she believes.
She flip-flops constantly.
I loved our California Senator Lafonza Butler going on CNN and saying, well, that's because she's human and because our country changes day to day.
So why wouldn't you have a different policy day in and day out?
Well, you know, maybe that's good.
Democrats voting on policy. Republicans reject that and hopefully most Americans will reject
that as well. You need a president who stands for something even if it's not necessarily what you
agree with and I think she's very much a media creation.
She's a party creation.
She never won a primary vote.
She's never achieved anything at all.
You can look at her entire career.
There's not one accomplishment other than getting appointed or getting elected.
I mean, if I could just interrupt, I mean, she's another example of not only a media push, but a social climber that literally slept her way to the top.
I mean, Willie Brown is still out there at 90 years old pandering for saying that she should be the president right now.
And look, I know all those people that want to invoke the 25th Amendment.
If we were going to do that, you need to do that day one.
This guy had dementia from day one.
I don't want to give this woman any validation as the President of the United States, especially if something major were to happen, not only in this country but across the world, that again further legitimized her presidency and maybe even created the illusion she could beat Trump.
Uh, that being said, I mean, I watched, I mean, I wasn't on the trail with her, but I watched all those debates.
She was horrible in them.
She got trounced by people like Tulsi Gabbard, etc.
She couldn't get 3%.
She was one of the first people out.
In fact, one of the most nightmarish aspects of that is I thought to myself, Man, what if they sell a Cory Booker, Kamala Harris ticket or vice versa?
Those are some of the two of the most insincere people in politics that are based in identity politics, etc.
So, I mean... You just reminded me, by the way, in the bin room during one of the debates, there was a drag queen who got press access and a very large man dressed as a woman, not transgender, drag queen, was part of his act.
His stage name was Pissy Miles.
Pissy Miles was his stage name.
I have a photograph.
I'm going to put this out on social media later now that I remember it.
I have a photograph of Pissy Miles interviewing Kamala Harris, and she's taking it very seriously.
And I find it funny only because she and the campaign are calling JD Vance weird.
But you look at the kind of things she does and says and the people with whom she interacts, it's the definition of weird.
And again, you mentioned Willie Brown.
I don't care that she slept with Willie Brown.
I think, you know, if you get into politics because of a personal relationship, It might be a little unsavory, but if you can do the job, people aren't going to care.
But the thing is, she's never done a good job.
That's my point!
Listen, I'm a meritocracy guy, and I know how things work.
But every time I watch that woman, she can't come off genuine in a I don't know about you, but I have to have that cup of coffee in the morning.
And Kingdom Cup is mold free.
Seriously, she seems awful in that.
Listen, we got to take one last break.
The book is The Agenda, What Trump Should Do in His First Hundred Days.
We'll be back with the final segment of Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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And we are back with Joel B. Pollack, a spirited discussion about Trump and beyond, really, all sorts of policy.
You know, we've talked about the book a lot.
Let's talk about the other canary in the coal mine.
Number one, the guy's got to get elected.
Okay?
I don't think we have free and fair elections.
We discussed the machines.
You know, you mentioned Baker.
I remember the Baker-Carter Commission back in the day.
Everybody talks about the mail-in ballots.
Yeah, that's a huge problem.
They also talked about auditing the machines.
And I remember that because you can go to C-SPAN, you can see them talk about it twice.
And Jimmy Carter talks about it, but he says a 3% audit.
Now, I want that to sink in for people.
We don't have a 3% audit today.
I would argue I'd want much more than a 3% audit.
I think we could handle a 100% audit, you know, as Americans with AI at this point.
I think we could do it at a caveman level.
But we got to get them in there.
And the polls already flipped once the zombie debate was over, and now Kamala's the second coming, and it's so even.
Again, I don't trust the media narratives.
But let's say he does get there.
I think there's also the issue of getting him to January and sworn in.
And then that's where the real battle begins, right?
That's what we're talking about in the book.
So what is your thought in that time period that we're going through right now in the run-up to the election?
And then he gets in, but we gotta swear him in.
Well, obviously he's going to be at risk from now until January 2025.
And the motivation behind the book was when I watched the Manhattan trial court return a guilty verdict against Trump for these ridiculous charges.
And by the way, it's unlawful to have non-disclosure agreements about personal relationships.
And Kamala Harris should be prosecuted because her Senate office doled out Uh, $1.1 million in settlements in sexual harassment claims while she was in office.
And then of course the Doug Emhoff story.
We don't know yet if the nanny that he had an affair with was paid to be quiet, but if she was paid to be quiet and they didn't declare it as a campaign expense, then they should be prosecuted the same way Trump was prosecuted, especially as the nanny lives in New York.
But anyway, I was watching this total miscarriage of justice and I, I thought, you know, I need to do something positive with this frustration I'm feeling, with this anger.
I can't be stuck in this position of feeling negative.
Let me look forward to January 2025 and try to imagine what it is going to be like if and when Trump becomes president.
The thought I had immediately was that the story on day one of the second Trump administration is going to be that he's a lame duck president.
They're going to say that it doesn't matter what he does for four years because he can't run again, he's powerless, and let's talk about the candidates for 2028 because there's going to be an open seat in 2028 and the media are going to want to just Gloss over the Trump presidency as if it isn't going to happen and it doesn't matter.
So he's got to come in there with a set of executive orders, executive actions, policy changes that he can implement on day one.
Now in the past, they've taken pride in signing 10 executive orders, 12 executive orders on the first day.
I've got 224 suggestions in this book that they could implement right away.
And you know, the left is going to challenge them.
They're going to sue the Trump administration in friendly forums.
They're going to go to Hawaii to file federal suits, for example, to get nationwide injunctions against this or that.
Well, you're going to have to file 224 lawsuits because this is a monumental list.
He can do it all, right?
They can spend the transition period that you talked about.
Drafting these executive orders, drafting these policies, the precise language and everything.
He walks into the Oval Office, he signs all of these things into order, into law, and boom, he's already transformed the United States government in a positive way, in a constitutional way.
And I think that's what he has to do.
He has to start with a bang.
Otherwise, he's going to get all sorts of... With the Republican Congress, let's say Republicans win the House and the Senate.
He has learned from the past that that's no guarantee of action.
You know, you can have all these wonderful things in your policy platform, like Republicans wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare, but it didn't help when the rubber hit the road.
Because the Republican leaders don't have the courage to follow through.
So I am not one who's particularly fond of executive power, but I said, let's see what Trump can do, what he can promise people he can do on the first day.
This is what a Trump presidency can do.
And it turns out there's a lot.
First of all, there are Biden policies he can reverse, like transgenderism in sports, for example.
I mean, that's pretty easy to reverse.
But there are also things that he can do proactively.
using his executive authority to address a variety of issues from the border to inflation to foreign policy and I outline all of those here.
So I think that transition is very important.
It needs to be a time of preparation for a huge opening.
He has to open bigger than any president has opened in American history on day one, January 20th, 2025.
What would you like to leave the audience with and where can they get the book?
You can get the book at Amazon.com.
It's out from War Room Publications.
And you mentioned Steve Bannon earlier.
Steve Bannon, the forward.
I didn't ask him to do it.
He stepped forward and he wrote the forward for this book.
It was, in fact, the last thing he wrote before he went to prison.
So if you want to see what Steve Bannon's parting thoughts were before going to prison, as I agree with you, as a political prisoner, here they are in the forward to this book. And look, I
think this will make people feel better.
The reaction I've had from people who've read the book and reviewed the book has been that it made
them feel so optimistic about the future because it really takes you out of the present to and fro
of politics and who's up and who's down in the polls. And it gives you concrete things to think
This is what the future could look like.
So people find it very optimistic and uplifting, even though it is a fairly straightforward policy.
And I think people will enjoy it, and they'll enjoy reading it.
And it's not Project 2025, and it's not the Republican platform.
It's none of those things.
It's completely independent.
I didn't consult with the Trump campaign about it.
It's my own thoughts as someone who generally is supportive of Trump's policies.
I think people will enjoy it.
Joel, a pleasure to have you on.
Good luck with the book.
Folks, another show in the bag.
Remember, this guy is not about left or right.
It is always about right and wrong.
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