RadixJournal - Richard Spencer - Why 2K?

Dec. 31, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer

01:29:41

Why 2K?

Brad Griffin joins Richard Spencer to discuss the battle over the $2,000 "stimulus" package, the future of Trump in the GOP, and why we must always Trust The Plan, even if we have no idea what it is. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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	Did you have a Merry Christmas?
	Very, very, very Merry Christmas.
	Watched It's a Wonderful Life.
	It was a great movie.
	Just chilled and relaxed.
	How about you?
	Similar.
	You know, I've never actually seen It's a Wonderful Life.
	Although I like Jimmy Stewart.
	And his Hitchcock films are some of my favorites.
	And I like his films with John Ford as well, but I've not seen It's a Wonderful Life.
	I should see that.
	It's kind of a rite of passage for this time of year.
	So it was a very good Christmas for many people.
	It's a very good Christmas for the Kushner family.
	They have received major pardons, and I'm sure they're happy about that.
	Were you pardoned, Brad?
	No, no.
	No, I didn't get a pardon like Charles Kushner did.
	Well, if you had stuck shilling for Trump, you could have had that.
	You wouldn't be facing jail time as you are now.
	Should have considered that.
	Yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	I almost forgot.
	Unfortunately, I didn't get the $2,000 for Christmas the Jew.
	I did not receive that either.
	That seems to still be in limbo.
	What about $600?
	Did you get the $600 either?
	I did get that, yes.
	Oh, you did?
	It helped, sure.
	I asked them to deliver it to me in ones so that it would be perfect for going to a strip club.
	No, just kidding.
	$1 a day until you get all $600.
	Yeah.
	Well, I guess we can talk about this.
	This $2,000 check business, because I think it's actually quite telling about where we are in general, and I think it's also quite telling about where the Trump administration is or was.
	So, up north, our brothers to the north, Canadians, have, at least to my understanding...
	Been receiving two grand a week in effectively emergency universal basic income.
	And that has been happening since the late spring, when, you know, across the world, coronavirus was declared a national emergency.
	Now, Trump as well declared it a national emergency after engaging in some of the worst mixed messaging I think I've ever seen.
	Where he declared it was a hoax, and then it was the Democrats' plot, and then it's not a big deal, we're going to be okay, and then 48 hours later, it's a national emergency.
	I mean, we've already gone over this, we don't have to do it again, but it was botched beyond belief.
	But other countries seem to have recognized that this is a real thing.
	It clearly is not as bad as some people might have prognosticated, say, in We're not all going to die.
	We're going to survive this thing.
	But it actually is bad.
	It's bad for individuals.
	It's certainly very bad for small businesses, particularly small businesses that are retail-based or restaurants or so on.
	And there has been, I should say, a lot of hypocrisy going on where basically big industries have gotten sweetheart deals and the little guys have gotten.
	And that is extremely unfair.
	There's actually a recent case that kind of blew up of this woman who created an outdoor dining environment.
	And in order to save her business, which is, you know, she made investments and she's following rules and so on.
	And that was nixed.
	And the Hollywood film industry, however, is able to do effectively the same thing.
	That is eat in tents.
	But of course, the Hollywood film industry is a multi-billion dollar industry.
	She's just one restaurant.
	So that was, you know, you hear stuff like this, and you definitely feel for these people.
	And you kind of, I have to say, you kind of have a little bit of sympathy for the no lockdown movement, because, you know, if you're going to declare this as a national emergency, it has to be enforced fairly.
	But I'm rambling, of course, in terms of coronavirus.
	There needed to be something.
	If this is a national emergency and we're going to take this seriously, then there has to be some kind of emergency payment.
	And on top of this, due to Andrew Yang primarily...
	And in fact, weirdly, due to the alt-right, at least to a small degree, UBI is in the ether.
	It's something that we were promoting.
	There was a kind of yang-yang thing going on.
	But it's seemingly an idea whose time has come.
	And in particular with coronavirus, it's just the easy, simple solution that doesn't create acrimony like bailing out businesses does.
	If you have a little restaurant, you don't have a lobbying firm in Washington, D.C. If you are American Airlines or MGM Studios, then you do.
	And so you are not going to get the deals that they do.
	It is just inherently unfair.
	Whereas emergency payments to individuals...
	You know, on top of, say, some no interest loans to small businesses or something.
	This just makes sense.
	This is what should be done.
	This can be done.
	I mean, it costs a lot of money.
	To give out that amount of cash is going to cost, you know, half a trillion.
	But the fact is, they are spending that level anyway.
	And it's just such an amazing opportunity.
	A, for Trump to prove that he's a populist, which he's kind of doing by, you know, nixing it and so on.
	It's an amazing opportunity to rethink the welfare state, which hasn't changed since the mid-1960s.
	And it's just what should be done in an emergency.
	And, of course, they just can't do it, can they?
	No, no, no, they can't.
	I think we started with Canada.
	I've heard that Canada has been getting $2,000 a month.
	I've seen Canadians say that some of that is loans or something and they have to pay it back.
	Overall, the general picture is that in almost every other industrialized country in the world, whether it's Japan or France or Germany, the government has been We're subsidizing wages to get people through this crisis.
	Now, that hasn't happened in the United States.
	We passed the CARES Act.
	I forget the exact number.
	It was in the trillions when it was passed, I think in late March.
	Everybody got the one-time stimulus payment of $1,200.
	That's when we were doing the lockdowns.
	And it was, America was an absolute mess because you had, these lockdowns are like on a state-by-state basis.
	There were some states that, you know, never even, there were some states, if I remember correctly, never even did a lockdown.
	There were some states that did severe lockdowns.
	There were some states like Alabama where we had a lockdown, but not really, as I would call it, which lasted for about a month and was absolutely pointless.
	It didn't get rid of the virus.
	And the lockdowns, I mean, I was kind of supportive of the lockdowns because the lockdowns had worked in China.
	In China, something like the virus really didn't get out of Wuhan.
	As soon as it got out of Wuhan, they did these lockdowns in these cities and it crushed the virus.
	And they did that, I think, in Australia and New Zealand where they close up the borders.
	We're very serious about it.
	I mean, there were some countries that were very serious about it, like China.
	They got rid of the virus.
	Yeah.
	And 4,000 people died.
	New Zealand and Australia, a little bit different because of the island nature of the countries.
	And obviously, international travel is...
	Although it is taking place to some degree, it's pretty much at a standstill, or it's greatly reduced.
	But yeah, you're right.
	It's the thing that no one wants to talk about.
	And if you don't want to talk about China because you're one of these people who thinks that you can't trust any number out of China, any image you see coming out of China must be fake or something.
	I'm not like that.
	I have the proper skepticism towards all government statistics.
	The Korea and Japan, which have similar populations, similar cultures, certainly not quite the state power, but similar.
	Again, kind of political cultures also have fared quite well throughout this process.
	And I think it demonstrates something very important about the West.
	Now, I mean, obviously, some of the...
	Rumors and some of the images that I saw coming out of China were of the brutal variety.
	There's the infamous one of apparently someone getting soldered into their apartment or something like this.
	I don't know if that's true.
	I don't know if that is Western freak out.
	But there are other things that can be done.
	I saw plenty of images of...
	Government actions that were very severe, you could say, but by no means inhumane or Stalinistic or whatever adjective you want to choose.
	Just taking people's temperature before they get on the bus.
	What seemed to be a state-mandated program of segregating people while dining.
	It's one of those things where it's like, do you want to take the medicine now or later?
	Do you want to have a...
	12-month disaster?
	Or do you want to have three really uncomfortable months?
	And we just couldn't do it in the West due to culture, due to the political system and the fact that this is so divided and there isn't just one central authority.
	This would also have been an amazing opportunity to get over that.
	I mean, I don't think that Montana should be treated the same way that New York City is.
	Obviously, they are...
	We do seem to have a need for a central authority that can simply make decisions immediately and that aren't dependent upon local politics or all that kind of regional stuff, which just gets in the way of sound decision-making.
	I'm sorry, this will rustle the jimmies of many a conservative, but sorry, guys.
	This is how...
	Things have been operating in advanced societies for some time now.
	We've seen that some countries handled this, just aced it.
	A good example, which is not an island country, would be Vietnam.
	It never had much of an impact at all in Vietnam.
	I think a dozen people died last time I checked.
	I don't know if that's changed.
	But if you look at where the most people have died, it's...
	You would consider, okay, India, for example, a third world country.
	You would consider Brazil a third world country.
	And then the United States, like far out in the head, over 300,000.
	The policy we had made, I mean, I don't understand it.
	What were you doing?
	I mean, in Wuhan, they had a, okay, the virus emerged in Wuhan and China.
	It got bad there.
	It was only bad for even, they did a severe lockdown.
	It was contained mostly in one city.
	It got bad for one month, and then China was clear and was fine.
	It's been fine to this day.
	In some countries, I know it's getting bad in Europe again.
	I think they're doing second lockdowns in Britain and places like that.
	I haven't really followed it.
	We were originally talking about, you know, the lockdowns didn't make any sense because we never had our heart in it to begin with.
	I mean, we had an absolutely insane policy that made no sense.
	The spending we did and our response to it made no sense.
	The only thing that seems to have worked is, as far as the American response to the virus goes, is I guess they got two vaccines now before any other countries.
	Yeah, that is interesting that that is what worked, or seems to have worked fairly well, is the production of vaccines.
	But in terms of actually addressing the virus, it was a disaster.
	I think it's, you know, a lot of things are about framing.
	And I think it's telling that they called this whole thing a stimulus check.
	And I think in some ways it's one of those things where, you know, I use this metaphor a lot.
	It's when you make a really boneheaded move, like on your first move of a chess game, it's almost like you just can't win, you know, if you just screw it up at the beginning.
	And I think in some ways they did this as well.
	They screwed it up right at the beginning.
	It's not a stimulus check.
	You're not stimulating.
	The economy.
	They stimulate the economy by pumping credit in it through the Federal Reserve.
	Actually, I have a bit of a hot take on this.
	It might surprise some people.
	So we should hit the talk about the kind of implications of UBI and stuff.
	You're not stimulating...
	Let's put it back around to the money.
	Okay, well, let me finish this.
	Oh, yeah, I'll get there.
	You're not stimulating the economy.
	This is an emergency payment to help people survive.
	This is not like we want the stock market to go up.
	This is about people surviving.
	And if they had framed it in that manner from the very beginning, I think we would be in a different place.
	And I think you could also say that the reason they can't think in this direction, they can only think in terms of stimulation of the economy.
	They want to go tickle the economy in the belly and it's going to start.
	You know, giggling and laughing.
	Pardon the metaphor.
	But that's the way they imagine it.
	They don't imagine it as, you know, there's a pandemic, a natural disaster that really is out of everyone's control.
	You can blame China until the cows go home.
	Let's just be brutally frank here.
	Pandemics come every so often.
	into the world and they spread like wildfire.
	Even in the Middle Ages and ancient world, pandemics went global.
	They're certainly going to go global.
	Now, with the amount of travel, let's just accept this fact that a bad thing happened and let's take care of people and call it a survival check or call it basic income and just simply give it to them.
	And if Trump was a real populist, not even a populist, you don't even have to be a populist.
	If Trump was a statesman of some order, he would have done this.
	And he could have done it through executive action with the Social Security Administration, by the way.
	No, I didn't know that.
	I've heard liberals make this argument.
	There are ways of doing this, of making emergency payments like this.
	Would anyone really oppose him?
	This gets back to my hobby horse of why Trump...
	Again, made all of these errors so early and should have been able to think outside of the box.
	If he did an emergency order to the Medicare administration and said, we actually have Medicare for all during this emergency, would that be opposed by a liberal Congress?
	Would they be like, oh, you know, Donald, we need to resist Bonnell Drumpf or whatever?
	No, they would have gone along with it.
	And it would have been wildly popular.
	I mean, we've seen clearly what the problem was.
	Now, my understanding of the stimulus checks is that Trump, I mean, initially was kind of for that.
	Even early on, when the idea, when it was first floated, he was like, yeah, let's do this.
	And they actually got out the $1,200 stimulus check.
	And from what I've heard is that Trump is at least...
	His position on checks has been kind of favorable toward it this entire time.
	And Mnuchin or whatever was pro-check, pro-deliver the bag.
	Yeah, he was the one who got the bag out.
	He deserves praise for that the first time.
	But the problem is that when all this happened, first of all, the Republican donors didn't want to deal with it, so they told Trump to...
	They were the ones who told Trump, think of it as the flu, just ride it out.
	That was their position.
	And I remember, because I watched it clearly, all through late January, all throughout February, it was all about the stock market.
	It was endless stock market cheerleading.
	I think Trump went to India in February, and the line on Fox News was, Coronavirus is a joke.
	Not one person has died.
	It's completely contained, sealed airtight.
	And then there was no response to it.
	Even though people started dying from it in early March, the thing that really set off the reaction to it is when the market dropped.
	As soon as the markets got in trouble in early March, when the market started tanking, the alarms went off.
	I mean, when we saw the market drop, I think it was almost to $30,000.
	It went down to $18,000, the Dow did.
	I mean, and you saw Congress, suddenly Congress wasn't polarized anymore.
	It swung into action, and the deficit hawks swung into action.
	And they passed the CARES Act, which was like some kind of, I mean, it wasn't just the CARES Act that was passed.
	And that was like, I forget, it was in the $2 trillion or something like that.
	And the stimulus checks were overall a small part of that.
	There was, I mean, all the stuff that was in there that was just bailout, porks, you know, all kinds of stuff like that.
	But, I mean, as soon as the markets dropped, they swung into action to save the market, to turn the market around.
	And once, I mean, and their concern, did you notice how their concern, like, as soon as the markets turned around and started going back up towards?
	30,000, they're concerned about the virus just diminished and diminished and diminished from that point.
	As the death toll was soaring.
	Yes, but the vaccines are coming online.
	And also, a stock market by its very nature is future-oriented.
	So you're buying into the future.
	You're not buying into the now or the past.
	And so they basically, this is what they thought, which is that, yeah, a ton of old people are going to die.
	Small businesses are going to go under, but, you know, well, we're buying into Amazon and so on.
	So that's okay.
	And, yeah, there's just this total...
	You know, total disconnect between people's lives and the stock market.
	And also, as we've seen, the stock market is not this democratic institution that has been promoted by Republicans where, you know, everyone's bought into it or so on.
	No, fewer and fewer people are buying into it.
	Secondly, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury are able to just generate I'm going to be a bit contrarian on this one, actually.
	I can talk about that a little bit later.
	Nevertheless, they created trillions.
	There was some statistic that is mind-boggling.
	99% of the dollar.
	I mean, the real story in response to coronavirus, aside from hundreds of thousands of people dying, was what the Fed was doing when the market got in trouble back in March.
	Not somebody who wants to care, but the Fed was just dumping...
	How many trillions of dollars did it add to its balance sheet?
	I forgot.
	It's unfathomable.
	Yeah, it doesn't matter.
	Well, because it doesn't enter the economy.
	It's not, I mean, Ben Bernanke infamously said, if we ever have a serious slowdown, we can throw money out of helicopters.
	Whether he meant that literally remains to be seen, he actually might have.
	But his idea is that if you have this dramatic decrease in asset wealth and then you have a dramatic slowdown in the velocity of money, you can just throw money to people and they'll just start spending it.
	But again, what they're doing is they're creating credit.
	They're creating digits that fortify the bank.
	And they are really literally creating digits.
	They're not even having to print it.
	I mean, certainly no one's spending it.
	They're basically fortifying these investment institutions so that they won't collapse.
	And I think they perceive, rightly to a degree, that animal spirits, if there's a really strong collapse in the stock market, that people just kind of lose their minds.
	And that they want to fortify that to kind of give people the sense that everything's fine.
	The economy was, I mean, the economy, I mean, I remember in March and April seemed like it was falling off a cliff with like, remember the gigantic unemployment numbers that shot up to like 20% or something like that?
	I think it's down, if I'm not mistaken, I think it's down to like, down like 6% or something now.
	I think I've heard that number floated around.
	But like, I mean, far from destroying the economy, I mean, whatever they did with the stimulus check, you know, helped.
	It didn't, like, cause, like, I mean, the deficit didn't collapse, you know, it wasn't, like, run away.
	All these arguments get trotted out, right?
	The stimulus checks they sent out the first time, $1,200 one, you know, it helped steer the economy.
	There was an amazing statistic of, like, debt reduction.
	It's extremely popular.
	People just have, like, if you have a...
	I mean, we're talking about people who were just getting by.
	You have $1,000 of credit card debt or whatever.
	You can't use that credit card.
	You can't get yourself out of an emergency.
	You can't get your car fixed if it breaks down.
	You can't do all this stuff.
	That $1,200 is actually really helpful.
	Right.
	Yeah, and it was extremely helpful.
	I mean, everything I've seen on the effect of the stimulus check was positive.
	It helped people rebuild their savings.
	It increased their well-being.
	It helped get them through the crisis, helped people, like I said, replenish their savings.
	Nothing but positive effects.
	The stimulus check was only a small part of the CARES Act, and it was extremely popular.
	Do you remember back in the Democratic primary when me and you were supporting it, and you were supporting it before Yang came on the same years ago, even before Trump was around?
	Yeah.
	UBI.
	And I supported it too because UBI was part of Huey Long's share the wealth platform back in the Depression that never went anywhere.
	Did he originate in UBI?
	I think, yeah, Huey wanted universal basic income, and he also wanted universal maximum.
	He also wanted universal maximum income, which was a cap on wealth and a UBI to redistribute it to increase people's well-being, not have extreme poverty, not have extreme wealth.
	The concept of UBI has been around since the Depression.
	Huey Long favored it.
	Yeah, he got assassinated for supporting these radical ideas like a wealth cap and UBI and free college and all this stuff that is touted today by progressives.
	But anyway, where is it going with this?
	Yeah, so Yang ran on this, and if you remember the Democratic primary, he was attacked by all the socialists because UBI was considered counter-revolutionary and was going to save capitalism.
	And Bernie and that crowd hated the idea.
	They wanted people to have a guaranteed job.
	And now you fast forward to 2020 and Bernie and the Progressive Caucus are out there calling for a $2,000 UBI that's recurring and retroactive.
	It dates back until...
	It dates back to March, and the Democrats in Georgia are hammering Loeffler and Perdue on these $2,000 checks.
	And so what happened was, is that they sent out that first stimulus check, and it was extremely popular, and it moved the politics on the issue.
	I've seen a poll that came out from the Pew Research Center, and I believe 60% of Democrats now support UBI, and it's got 45%.
	The people who are on Social Security don't like UBI.
	The only people who don't like national healthcare are the people on Medicare.
	It's a real funny thing.
	Yeah.
	So, I mean, you saw what happened.
	Like after they passed the CARES Act, the idea of stimulus checks and this, you know, I remember telling my wife, okay, they're sending out the second stimulus check in August.
	They're going to pass.
	And it went nowhere.
	And all this went nowhere for like six, eight months.
	And it went nowhere all the way down until the idea of sending out a second stimulus check.
	Well, I take that back.
	There was clearly an election battle going on there.
	Yeah, there was the election battle, and it was churning through Congress, and the whole thing turned into this massive giveaway where Israel gets millions.
	There were some issues there, like the Democrats wanted a big bailout for Democrat states and cities, and the Republicans opposed that.
	And Pelosi didn't want to get Trump.
	Trump, I think, supported the whole time sending out a second stimulus check.
	But Pelosi didn't want Trump to get credit for sending out a second stimulus check and blocked it.
	And the Republicans, of course, and this is the real issue, the true conservatives, the deficit hulk, the ridiculous fiscal cons, were absolutely adamantly opposed to the idea of sending out any kind of second check.
	It went nowhere all the way down until, I want to say, two weeks ago when McConnell realized that Ossoff and Warnock, their radical liberal Raphael Warnock, was killing Woffler and Perdue, beating them over the head.
	Because, I mean, if you look at their Twitter feeds, you look at their ads, all they're talking about is sending out stimulus checks, $2,000.
	No, I'm sorry, it was $1,200.
	They were campaigning on that.
	And McConnell promised Loeffler and Perdue that they would pass the second stimulus package before Christmas and throw a bone in there like something the fiscal conservatives could live with like $600.
	And that's what happened.
	And when was it?
	It was before Christmas when the word got out that they were going to do this pathetic $600.
	Sanders and Josh Hawley introduced that standalone $1,200 stimulus check bill.
	And then Senator Ron Johnson got on his plane from Wisconsin and flew all the way back to D.C. and personally took to the Senate floor and shot the idea down twice on the same day.
	I was so furious.
	He's like, oh, we can't send out a second stimulus check or we can't have a $1,200 check because of my budget deficit.
	After he voted the previous week for the $740 billion 2021 defense bill.
	And he's like, no, we can't afford it.
	Well, the difference – it turns out, and I saw an article on Breitbart, the difference between sending out the $600 stimulus check… And sending out the $1,200 stimulus check amounted to something like $50 billion out of the $900 billion bill.
	So it's transparently fake, right?
	You're telling me the whole issue over sending out just a $1,200 stimulus check is $53 billion and you just voted for $741 billion.
	The Israel Security Authorization Act was part of that.
	And that gave a stimulus to Israel for something like eight years.
	And Ukraine got some Pakistani women's empowerment initiative.
	Here's the bottom line, and this is the reason why the Republicans don't want to support this.
	They don't want the working class to get used to this idea that, you know, to have like a universal basic income.
	Because, you know, their ability to, you know, if it was, suppose it was a thousand or two thousand dollar checks sent out every month, that would give people options.
	It would, you know, it would give them leverage.
	You know, people could choose whether to take these crappy wages.
	It would be a lot harder to boss the ordinary man around.
	So they're just totally opposed to this idea of doing everything they can to kill it.
	Also, let me continue.
	So Trump is in a foul mood because the Senate Republicans led by McConnell have thrown him under the bus.
	So this idea of Trump supporting $2,000 checks is totally about getting revenge on McConnell.
	Throughout the whole budget negotiations, Trump was completely absent from it, didn't pay any attention to it at all.
	It was only when he realized that McConnell and his crowd were going to throw him under the bus that he came out with, you know, I support $2,000.
	Just to screw McConnell.
	This is where you're too clever by half.
	Sometimes you have to be really Dumb to be really smart.
	Or really smart to be really dumb.
	And what I mean by that is that you play all these political games.
	He could have won.
	If he had spoken the truth about coronavirus and demonstrated some sort of sympathy towards people suffering.
	I'm talking photo ops here.
	If he had simply done that.
	And he had basically said, this is an emergency.
	I am using emergency powers with existing institutions to radically expand Medicare, use the Social Security Administration, or I'm just going to ram through this bill through Congress.
	You Democrats say you want this.
	Well, I am supporting it.
	Let's vote it.
	If he had done this just really simple stuff, he could have easily won the election.
	Oh, definitely.
	And it's like, do you want to play games and seek revenge and be tricky and support it and then be against it and then yell on Twitter about how you want 2000 and the Congress is the problem and you're mad at Mitch?
	Do you want to do all that crap or do you want to actually win?
	Because sometimes to win, you have to be dumber.
	Like, don't play games.
	Just do simple stuff.
	These are the people who actually vote for you.
	Just give them stuff, and they'll vote for you again.
	It's really simple.
	Yeah, I mean, this is like ancient Greek.
	If he wanted to win by a landslide, I mean, the Democrats are two different parties.
	There's the working class wing, which is largely white, Hispanic, black.
	That's the redistributionist Bernie Sanders wing, and what they fundamentally are is they're lower-income people who favor wealth redistribution.
	And then the other wing of the Democratic Party is the – what is it?
	The Democrat, independent, liberal elites, the white professional liberal class, the woke people, the woke professionals.
	Yes.
	Who are motivated by all these social issues.
	Yes.
	So it's two different things.
	So Trump could And there's the POC wing.
	I think there's three parts of the party.
	I think there's the people of color coalition, which is all about them being in power and gaining stuff.
	You know, stuff like that.
	And then there's the, like, Bernie wing, which are either seriously working class people or kind of their intellectual class on top of them, which might have similar incomes, to be honest.
	And then there's the kind of corporate liberal Hillary wing.
	Yeah, you could break it down.
	Like Pew does.
	We've talked about this in the past.
	Like, if you break down the right, you break down to the left.
	There's four different groups on the left, basically, and there's four different groups.
	On the right.
	Or like you say, the true cons, the social America first conservatives, paleocons, then the alt-white, and then the ethno-nationalist, populist, alt-right, racist crowd, whatever you want to call them.
	And then on the left, you got the, I think Q breaks it down, the diverse and devout Democrats, which is mainly older black religious types.
	You got the disaffected Democrats, which is the Bernie crowd, the corporate – the opportunity Democrats, which is the corporate Democrats, and the solid liberals, which is all the professional young modernist types.
	So yeah, so I mean if Trump really wanted to divide the Democrats, he could have came out – it's clear what the path is.
	He could have come out and said, I favor some kind of universal health care and modest – A modest wealth redistribution.
	So he could have supported some kind of UBI, but that's like – to the true con – the problem is that the true con wing in Congress, that's like harassing.
	There's no way.
	It's because of all this abstract libertarian nonsense.
	I mean he could have easily won, and it's not just – and we should – We should emphasize it's not just Trump here.
	I mean, the Republicans as a party are at a serious disadvantage.
	How many times in a row have they lost the popular vote?
	I forget.
	It's like seven of the last eight or something.
	It's actually remarkable.
	Right, right.
	So it's not just the Trump problem.
	Yeah, it was 2004 the last time a Republican just clearly won the popular vote, George W. Bush.
	Yeah, it's because of their conservative libertarian agenda.
	I mean, on so many different issues, a lot of people know white guilt, for example, like to racialize everything.
	But in fact, it's really mainly about issues like income inequality, health care, education costs.
	Those are the kind of things that motivate.
	Huge numbers of people.
	And if you just moved on those issues, then you could solve your political problem.
	They don't want to do that.
	They want to go down $600.
	They want to go down on that.
	And it is a combination of ideology, this weird moralism, but then also the hard...
	Incentive-based structure of we don't want to just be paying all these workers because they might choose to not work.
	You're going to have to pay them more to make them work if they can count on a basic income.
	You wanted to jump in?
	Oh, yeah.
	I haven't seen the pupil, but I don't know if it's included in it.
	But in my experience, it seems that kind of like the redistribution is...
	The Bernie wing of the Democrats.
	I would have guessed that they had a higher income on average than just like the loyalist Democrat.
	They might.
	I'm thinking of...
	All of the people surrounding the Bernie campaign.
	I mean, you have actual working class people.
	You have a lot of people who are freelance journalists or something.
	And they are living in some tiny little apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
	I don't think they're making big bank.
	I think there probably are some elite champagne socialists out there.
	But there is an authentic...
	You know, working class intellectual who is not a millionaire.
	That might also be the case of what you said with the, you know, the freelance journalist type.
	It might just be kind of deceiving because of how class kind of is these days.
	Like, you have a higher status as a, you know, a blogger who lives in Brooklyn or something.
	Yeah, well, class is...
	Than a tradesman who makes twice as much as you.
	Yeah, I mean, there's like a plumber...
	In Kalispell, Montana, who's making bank and has a house and kids or whatever, but he is kind of working class at some level.
	Because class is cultural and it's aesthetic as well.
	I mean, there's just something about him that he is a lot closer to the guy working at the gas station than he is to someone who's also making his same income, who is a literature professor at Middlebury or whatever.
	Yeah, in America.
	Yeah, they're not the same class, and they perceive themselves as having extremely different interests.
	I wonder what the IQ distribution would be for different factions of the Democrats.
	I would assume the Bernie crowd might be on the higher end.
	Either the Bernie crowd or the corporate Democrats.
	The Hillary Democrats are probably highly entailed.
	They're probably the 115 unbearable midwit type who has a corporate job and lives in a little apartment in Northern Virginia or something and is calling the police on her black neighbors constantly.
	That's your typical Hillary voter.
	The true Karen corporate Democrat.
	I guess, yeah.
	I guess the corporate Democrat would have a flatter curve and the Bernie supporter would be weighted more on both ends.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But anyway, this is what I would say to bring the conversation back to the stimulus check is that what Trump has done in terms of contesting the election and what has also been done for him is Remarkable and shocking.
	It's something that I did not imagine was possible, and it clearly is.
	They have raised a quarter of a billion dollars on legal defense.
	I mean, it might even be higher at this point.
	They have raised even all these little people who are operating on his behalf in terms of Stop the Steal, whatever.
	How much money has Ali taken in?
	Probably a lot.
	These people have taken to the streets.
	They're doing stuff.
	I never thought this kind of stuff was possible.
	So clearly, however you and I might be critical and checked out of MAGA, whatever, there is something there.
	It's real.
	It is a power block.
	It's people willing to take to the streets, people willing to even brave Antifa, so on.
	And yet, it's always about Trump.
	It's never about anything else.
	So, like, again, I do like hypothetical histories, alternative histories, in the sense of, like, the last time we talked, what if Trump had done something very different?
	What if Trump had said to Paul Ryan, get lost, buddy?
	You're not my friend.
	I don't trust you.
	I'm working with Chuck and Nancy on an infrastructure bill that will include the wall.
	You know, what if he had done these things?
	You know, these are hypotheticals.
	They're aspirational.
	Okay, they're clearly possible.
	You can do other things.
	Other things are possible.
	You don't have to just do what everyone else has done.
	And also, in terms of this stuff, what if Trump had taken coronavirus seriously?
	And if the Democrats, if Chuck and Nancy were resisting him for whatever reason, just out of Trump derangement syndrome or what have you.
	And some of these working class MAGA people had taken to the streets and said, we need relief now.
	We need an emergency payment.
	We need an emergency loan for small businesses.
	We actually want a new...
	We want to build back better, like the Democrats say.
	We want a different economy in the future where we're not dependent upon Amazon and Walmart and all that kind of stuff.
	We want a more small business.
	What if they had done that?
	What if they had actually used all of that power that is real, that's authentic as well, that people will get on a Southwest flight and travel across the country to go to one of these rallies?
	They will spend their own money and time and they'll risk their lives, sort of, in terms of braving Antifa.
	This is real.
	What if they had actually done this to get something?
	As opposed to endlessly doing this crap for Trump.
	And with the Stop the Steal stuff, you're just like, guys, this is not going to happen.
	You are investing billions.
	When you add it all up, it's billions of dollars of time and donations and money and effort and whatever.
	You're putting billions towards something that is not happening in this.
	Like, this is impossible.
	This is ridiculous.
	You're looking like fools.
	And yet they have all of that energy that could be directed towards something that could actually help them.
	I mean, it is really heartbreaking.
	It's truly sad.
	I mean, if you just looked back at all our criticisms of Trump over the last four years, every one of them, pretty much every one of them was on target.
	Remember when we first started criticizing him for hiring people like Gary Cohn and having Ryan's staff, the administration?
	And then, of course, when we were loudly complaining about attacking Syria and then, of course, moving on Paul Ryan's agenda.
	I mean, I was criticizing him.
	I was blackmailing people.
	I was like, look, he's about to advance Paul Ryan's agenda.
	It's going to get...
	That's going to be the thing he's going to dive into.
	He's going to waste his political capital on it.
	He's going to lose his populist image.
	All those things came true.
	We can imagine a different Trump who wasn't Trump.
	The coronavirus was an absolute golden opportunity for him to advance his national populist agenda.
	He did use some of it to temporarily suspend immigration.
	He did have some temporary success on that front.
	You know, just executive order stuff.
	But I mean, he could have rolled out like, I'm going to defend America against this virus.
	We need to seal up the borders and stop these flights.
	He tried to do that with China.
	It was too late.
	The virus had already gotten out to Europe.
	But instead of having this cranky, you know, libertarian, you know, nonsense that they degenerated into, he could have absolutely seized, you know, The opportunity to advance himself, but he chose not to.
	He was more focused on the stock market, wanted to run on this conservative strategy he had already set up for 2020.
	There were so many blown opportunities there.
	And finally, at the very end of the day, as we saw with what's going on with the stock and the Amnats and all that, It became totally about him, right?
	His movement became totally, 100% about him.
	Even in this battle over the stimulus check, he could have been out there hammering Mitch McConnell for months to send people $2,000.
	Instead, he completely ignored the negotiations.
	And then finally, only when he realized that the Republican senators were going to throw him under the bus, did he turn on them.
	If he had decoupled from them, like, years ago, he wouldn't even be in this position.
	But, I mean...
	Yeah.
	Wait till you've got 20 days left, 20, 25 days left of your term to figure out, like, what you should have figured out, like, five years ago.
	So...
	Well, I mean...
	You could have asked us.
	I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's actually...
	Yeah, instead of...
	He could have asked this.
	He could have asked anybody on Twitter, how do I win?
	Instead, he listened to people like Brad Parscale, who spent a billion dollars to lose, right?
	Chasing phantom voters in places like America.
	Chasing phantom voters and spending millions on Super Bowl advertisements about black criminals released early.
	No, that was really, really great job there, Brad.
	Yeah, if he wanted to win the black vote, if he wanted to win the black vote, here's very simple.
	I mean, you see all the reaction to it after he comes out for $2,000.
	But recount them votes, man.
	It was fraud.
	It was fraud.
	Recount them votes, right?
	Well, I kind of don't have any criticism of that, though.
	You know?
	Like, I get it.
	You know?
	I mean, there's...
	They're acting in their immediate self-interest.
	The way you win, you beat the Democrats, is you divide the party between the redistributionist wing and the professional class wing.
	You let them run totally on the basis of these insane social issues that they care so much about.
	But the Republican Party, that's the problem.
	I posted this video from Orrin Cass last night, and I follow all these people.
	And what their fundamental problem is is that the Republican Party does not want to embrace economic populism.
	And if it did, it wouldn't be fighting to the death of this $600 stimulus check.
	Really, I mean that was their optics.
	They came and shot down the $2,000 stimulus check on Christmas Eve, right?
	Yeah.
	Because they're so wedded to this antiquated ideology.
	But they could easily win.
	There's a path for them to win.
	They just got to – I mean – And this is at least where we are now.
	I don't know if it's always been this way.
	Maybe it has.
	But there is this strange way in which the two-party system is kind of inherently contradictory.
	And that inherent contradiction almost gives it its tension or something that keeps it going.
	And so you'll see this from Charlie Kirk.
	You'll see this from Marco Rubio, people whom you would not expect to see it from, where they're saying outright, this is a workers' party and we are skeptical of corporations.
	They're probably not going to say wealth redistribution, but they're going to say we're skeptical of corporate power.
	And then you have the Democratic Party, which...
	It's been this dramatic flip since the Clinton period where Clinton won 70% of working class whites.
	Now, by 2016, Trump is winning 70% of working class whites.
	And you have this strong flow of people with education, professional careers, and wealth flowing into the Democratic Party.
	So you have this contradictory...
	Cocktail.
	I don't know how to describe it, but it's almost like it's almost necessary in some way.
	That's what gives the two-party system its tension, which is you have this working-class party that will never actually do anything for its voters, and then you have this weird quasi-working-class party made up of highly educated suburban professionals.
	It's just bizarre.
	But I don't know.
	Maybe these tensions have kind of always been in the political structure.
	But at this point, it is highly contradictory, almost fascinatingly so.
	Yeah, I mean, things are kind of, I think, you know, the polarization might be over.
	Polarization is terrible.
	We agree on that because it polarizes our politics towards two extremes, both of which are awful, right?
	The true con, libertarian, you know, Charlie Kirk crowd.
	They're the ones on the right who benefit from all the polarization.
	And on the left, it's the insane cultural liberals.
	They're the ones who benefit from it.
	Whereas people in the middle, and we saw this, this is one thing we learned from the Yang gang experiment.
	And that when we were supporting Yang, we were seeing all these people who were, you know...
	Democrats, and we had, like, no problem with them because everybody agreed on $1,000.
	Yeah.
	That broke through the polarization, that $1,000 thing.
	And, you know what I'm saying?
	Yeah.
	I mean, like, something like...
	And Trump could do it as well.
	If Trump, as going to your general strategy, if Trump...
	He takes the issues of the working class Bernie wing and actually pursues them.
	There's this weird way that he transcends polarization.
	And if you can transcend polarization, you can actually be a dominant party.
	I mean, I think this will kind of get us into what we'll talk about next, which is predictions, or maybe not predictions, just kind of a forecast, your view of what's happening in 2021.
	I mean, my view, which I laid out in an article I wrote in November, it's that the Democrats are in this weird position where, in terms of demographics and in terms of winning over very important constituencies like suburban professionals, wealthy people, they are hegemonic.
	They have an ability to dominate if they want to.
	But they can't.
	Because they're not willing to actually pursue those things that transcend polarization, and they keep pursuing the crap that just makes polarization more intense and makes everyone want to puke.
	Even Joe Biden, grandfather Joe, you know, he doesn't offend anyone, he's a good old boy, whatever you want to say.
	Already starting.
	Yeah.
	And even he goes to some, you know, CNN town hall and says, it's so great that your son is a girl now, you know, embracing this transgender.
	The stuff that just makes people puke, makes them violently angry, in fact, and just increases polarization and therefore increases the just fundamental fakeness of the system.
	And that fakeness is that nothing actually changes, but we get...
	And more and more angry.
	So we're living in this residue or just legacy of the welfare state.
	It's not actually changing.
	It's not like when George Bush came in, we were like a free market capitalist.
	No, it was still the Great Society.
	None of this stuff changes.
	Things change culturally.
	And they change in corporations and so on.
	Fundamental brass tacks, rubber-hitting-the-road politics does not change, yet everyone gets more extreme and more hatred of each other grows.
	And I understand how you want to lean into this and own the libs or own...
	Drink conservative tears or whatever.
	I get it.
	That's not how you win.
	That gives immediate satisfaction.
	It's not a real strategy.
	And it's a losing strategy even for Democrats who have the ability to throw away their own hegemonic opportunity, which I think they clearly have.
	Yeah.
	One thing I've been experimenting around with lately and increasingly so.
	Is, you know, after, you know, studying all this, looking at all these surveys, and just experience dealing with the Yang Gang and stuff like that, is, you know, there's a possibility there for, you know, we've been so, how would you say it, the pro-white movement has been coupled to, linked to conservatives for so long, and have gotten absolutely nowhere after 50 years.
	But I would like to imagine a pro-white politics that is, you know, At least doesn't make all these identity issues toxic, but is also redistributionist.
	Because if we had a redistributionist message, that would split our opposition.
	You can call me a racist or whatever, but I want to give you $2,000.
	How angry are you going to be with me?
	How racist am I if I'm sending you a check to the post office?
	I agree that we need to get rid of the billionaires.
	Get rid of all of them.
	I'm ready to work for you to do that.
	White populism, I think that's the way forward.
	I think that I am not quite the populist, the kingfish Louisiana socialist that you are, but I would say this, and I could probably I think this
	is kind of my general forecast.
	Biden is going to have an unhappy presidency.
	I think everyone is getting ready for Grandpa Joe to just be this benign white guy who's not Trump and doesn't tweet and is caring and normal and things like that.
	And I think they'll have that for a couple of weeks.
	But the fact is, I do think that this is going to be unhappy because he's rhetorically trying to transcend polarization, but he's unwilling to transcend it in a level of policy.
	I mean, you can kind of hear him.
	There is this leaked audio tape, which is one of the most ridiculous things I ever heard, where he said...
	You know, I'm the guy.
	I was willing to do the impossible.
	What everyone told me I shouldn't do.
	And that is run a campaign based on Charlottesville.
	No one ever had that.
	No one ever had that idea before him.
	It's just such a, like, beyond meaningless as an issue.
	You can already see.
	Yeah, you can already see.
	Go ahead.
	You can already see Joe setting up the...
	Joe setting up the...
	Disillusionment for the redistributionist crowd.
	First of all, he said that, I don't actually know if I can actually forgive that $50,000 student loan debt.
	I don't know if I can actually do that.
	I don't know if I actually have the power to do that.
	He made that remark just before Christmas, and it didn't get much attention, but it was significant.
	And then also, he's hammering Trump for sticking to this $2,000 issue.
	Go ahead and sign the bill.
	Have you noticed that Kamala and Joe aren't out there hammering for $2,000?
	No.
	They're strangely quiet about it.
	You can see them backing away from these redistributionist policies that are popular with their own base.
	Setting up their own base to be black-pilled and disappointed.
	Opportunity for us, I think.
	Yeah, it is because you need your base.
	You can't just...
	You can't have a major part of your base blackpilled and angry.
	And then on the secondary level, as we've been talking about, these are the ways to transcend polarization.
	And I do, this is a general forecast, a very unhappy presidency for Joe Biden.
	A. B. I just think the cat is out of the bag in terms of actual spending.
	The Republicans could get away.
	You know, decades ago of basically saying things like, you know, in the Reagan era, they're blowing out budgets, huge amount of debt increase, but it's like, ah, it's all Tip O 'Neill's fault.
	And we're trying to lower taxes.
	And, you know, this is our, we have an ideal of balanced budgets, but we're not quite there yet.
	And we would be without the liberals or whatever bullshit they would say.
	And they could kind of get away with that.
	But I don't think they can anymore.
	You just can't plausibly.
	Present yourself as we actually care about balanced budgets.
	Let me...
	Let me go back and address something we've discussed on previous episodes.
	Prediction for violence.
	Surprisingly, things are quiet, and it doesn't look like there's going to be any kind of violence.
	Things are kind of simmering down.
	Well, I mean, this Trump thing, his base still thinks he's going to win somehow by a miracle.
	I don't understand it, but it seems to...
	The possibility of violence seems to be decreasing.
	And another thing we haven't seen is, you know, we were kind of, some of us were speculating that after the election, we would see the launch of like Holley 2024 and all these, you know, maybe Tucker 2024.
	And we would see the Amnats, we would see the Amnats, you know, switching gears to their, you know, Holley 2024.
	And that hasn't happened.
	They've been doing the Stop the Steal grift.
	I don't know what they're going to do after it.
	I thought they would be ended with Trump, but I was obviously wrong.
	No, maybe they're going to hang on to Trump.
	Do you think they go into zombie Trumpism and hang on?
	They might.
	I think there's going to be a weird situation where Trump is...
	I don't think there's going to be an actual...
	Great schism, but I think there will be a weird situation where there'll be almost like the Trump White House in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
	Yeah, I'm still here.
	There'll be this Trump White House in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
	And I see a lot of the alt-white even moving to Florida.
	I don't know how long that can last.
	I don't know.
	This is a good question.
	I don't have a firm prediction on this because I just don't know whether they can actually change horses or whether they just can't do anything without Trump.
	I've said, and I stand by this.
	One of the things, you know, MAGA exists without Trump.
	Trump lost the election and we had acceleration in that sense.
	And it seems to have accelerated people into these delusional fantasy worlds The whole thing was stolen, right?
	Yeah.
	You were making a very good point about the decline in violence.
	And I can remember these conversations that were had in the alt-right in late 2016 and early 2017 when everyone was talking about how the left is out of control and...
	We need Trump in there because he gives us time away from the left for just another four years to kind of organize ourselves.
	And then basically, you know, but demographics are destiny, so we can't hold this tide back forever, but we should for a couple years organize, and then it will be just an all-out onslaught on...
	And conservatives in general and Republicans or whatever.
	And I think much like other predictions that I hear among the alt-right, really the exact opposite seems to have taken place.
	And there was this outright just onslaught of deplatforming, attacks, doxing, and even physical attacks.
	Throughout the Trump era, and this seemed to have, even though I was able to extricate myself from it, this seems to have reached a crescendo in Portland and Seattle and Chicago and so on at the end or the midway to end point of 2020 where we were having just riots on the street.
	And even though it was about BLM and George Floyd, it was kind of ultimately about Trump.
	It was ultimately about that initial trauma of Trump.
	I don't know.
	These seem to be declining precipitously.
	There have been some fights going on between Proud Boys and Antifa.
	But I think it's on the way down.
	I think we've actually probably seen the peak of violence.
	Unless I'm...
	Unless I'm wrong, unless things heat up when the summer comes, I think it's going to decline.
	And I think the dynamic is going to change in the next four years as well.
	And it's going to actually, a lot of these things are going to be directed against Joe Biden, much like LBJ felt the full...
	Things were, I mean, before the election, things were like so, so tense.
	Like, I mean...
	It felt like violence could break out at any minute, but now with the Stop the Steal thing, it's just like a farce.
	With Sidney Powell and all these people, it strangely declined into a farce.
	Maybe it's because we're in winter now, and all kinds of street activism and all kinds of stuff like that always goes down during winter because it's cold outside.
	I don't know, but it just seems like the possibility of...
	Any kind of serious violence breaking out has declined.
	And also, to address another point there about the alt-right and its predictions, you know, we've got to buy ourselves time and all this stuff.
	There's one character I don't know if you saw.
	Do you know who Jason Cohn is?
	Oh, of course.
	I've known him for a while.
	Yes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Did you see he was so upset about you voting for Biden?
	Richard Spencer is going to be raped in prison or something extreme.
	And in fact, I would only have myself to blame.
	Only have yourself.
	Right.
	We shouldn't even blame the rapist.
	I mean, that just goes to show, I mean, this is, I mean, no white guilt.
	And I did an episode responding to him.
	And this is, you know, a classic example of, okay, of, you know, complete and total polarization.
	Propping up the true con, libertarian sort of right.
	And they don't have any kind of white identity.
	I mean, they tell you this themselves.
	We don't have a white identity.
	We don't have any kind of cultural identity.
	All we believe in is classical liberalism and free market capitalism.
	We believe in socialism.
	That's who's empowered by polarization.
	And when those people control the right, they make sure all of us, our lives are miserable.
	All we're doing is empowering most people.
	Where was it going with this?
	I'm not even sure people like No White Guilt have a strong sense of identity.
	I think they're actually very similar to the Republicans, who they will criticize.
	Because I've seen some clips of these.
	Okay, go ahead.
	In a very punchy fashion and that you want to kind of boil things down sometimes.
	I'll grant that it's due to some extent.
	But I find it kind of interesting with all these people who get obsessed with stuff where they seem to kind of lack any kind of identity or critical faculty themselves.
	Like, what this is about is some unfairness towards white people.
	And that they're just all these mean demons out there, and they're being mean to us.
	And this is what we need to focus on endlessly.
	And I think that that kind of thing can be somewhat motivating, but that's never really been what I've been about.
	And I think it's actually kind of not motivating at some level.
	Nationalists of a previous era, it wasn't so much, I mean, it was to some degree, but it wasn't all about, oh, we've been treated unfairly and we have rights and whatever.
	It was about, we are a people.
	We're going to create ourselves of a people and we have a special mission on this earth to do good.
	I don't know.
	I find these types of people who, again, claim to be anti-Republican and very critical of the conservative movement, but they end up supporting them avidly, and they will attack anyone who is against them.
	So they are effectively Republicans.
	I mean, you can claim that you don't like Mitch McConnell.
	I'm a dissident.
	Or I'm a dissident or whatever.
	I'm a dissident Republican.
	Whenever you're a Republican, it's an absurd formulation of all time.
	But when you will ultimately support them at the end of the day and attack anyone who questions them, you are a Republican.
	You know?
	Like, you can claim you're not a Christian, but if you go to church every Sunday and, you know, take the Eucharist and pray every night, like, you're a Christian!
	In fact, like, I don't see the...
	It's kind of this distinction without a difference.
	Like, I'm not a drug user.
	I just use meth or whatever.
	It's like, what?
	They have this weird self-con...
	They have this...
	The dissident riot, as they call themselves, have this weird self-conception where...
	You know, I'm a serious political dissident.
	By the way, you have to vote for Republicans in every election.
	I don't like mainstream conservatism, but make sure you vote for it in every single election.
	And these people for 50 years, I mean, it's three generations now, all the way since the 1970s, have been coupled to mainstream conservatism in this futile rounds of backlash politics, which has gone on for 50 years.
	I've been involved for 20 years.
	And in that span, in 20 years, all it has been is endless rounds of backlash politics.
	And then ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, turning out for Republicans and turning out for conservatives.
	And they had this self-conception where all the normies are conservatives and we just need to blend in with them and appeal to them.
	And it's gotten us absolutely nowhere.
	I mean, for four years we had Trump—I mean, what was Trump for four years?
	He was—I mean, think of it as a gigantic lightning rod on top of the White House with, like, him as a hot air balloon circling the White House.
	And just, like, constant light, you know, constant nothing but four years of lightning strikes because, you know, he's perceived by half the country as a—he's perceived as a fascist, a Nazi, a white supremacist, a racist.
	So we—so— It's like an endless thunderstorm of lightning strikes.
	We're absorbing all the costs of having a guy in there who's perceived as a white supremacist.
	And meanwhile, he's delivering Paul Ryan's agenda.
	We have no benefits for this.
	And so as I pointed out in my stream reply to no white guilt, actually what happened is that we increased white guilt.
	We had the political correctness and social justice warriors mutated into a wokeness, and it just spiraled out of control.
	It didn't solve the problem, which is our political marginalization, and it made anti-whiteness more widespread and extreme than it had been four years ago.
	So literally it was a huge own goal.
	Well, there's I have some nuanced...
	Disagreements with what you just said, but I don't disagree with you fundamentally in the sense that by any measure, anti-whiteness, if we want to talk about it like that, has increased.
	By any measure.
	Like, it is, in fact, more explicit now.
	And you can find people, more people who aren't just saying, oh, I want fairness or whatever.
	No, they want an end to white supremacy.
	They want to end this.
	This has increased.
	The levels of even things that aren't exactly racial but are kind of adjacent to that, like the trannyism and so on.
	This is all just blown up over the past.
	Four to five years.
	And to ways that are unimaginable.
	Like in 2013, did you really think that we would be, that presidential candidates would be applauding seven-year-old transgender children?
	I mean, that is so bizarre.
	And yet, here we are.
	Do you remember when Antifa used to be like the six guys outside of the conference?
	Oh, yeah.
	Or MPI, they would shoot cheese whiz at us or whatever.
	It was just some stupid thing that we just laughed at.
	No one cared.
	No one was afraid of them.
	The Trump era was the best thing that ever happened.
	By far, the best thing that ever happened to our enemies.
	And it was crippling for us.
	I mean, like...
	We're going to do a show tomorrow on what the plan was.
	We're going to reveal what the plan was all along at the end of four years.
	I can't wait to learn.
	Tomorrow evening, we're going to reveal what the plan was.
	One thing that occurs to me...
	If you wanted to make white identity more acceptable, why not back the redistributionist?
	Exactly.
	That would detoxify, shake up things and detoxify things.
	Who hates C.B. Long?
	Who hates a guy who wants to get rid of the billionaires?
	You know, increase your income.
	Nobody.
	Or, I mean, you could say, I'm a racist, I guess I'm a mild one.
	I don't want to give you $2,000.
	Anyway, that's where I think we should head instead of backing the conservatives, you know, back to redistributionists.
	Well, yeah, I agree with you.
	And as I said, whether we want to do that or not is actually irrelevant because I think this cat is out of the bag and it's on the loose.
	And this is where politics is actually going to clearly be.
	I think it actually does spell a pretty precipitous decline for the American experiment, to be honest.
	When we actually get to this point, I don't think that is actually telling that.
	The American empire is expanding and American power is growing.
	I do think it is actually kind of a later stage of it.
	It's a conversation for another time, but I do hold this.
	I also believe that we're...
	I was mentioning this to some supporters, and again, I hate that I'm now almost sounding like a libertarian, but the thing about money creation is that if you are just...
	Creating funny money in the ether.
	Granted, it is totally unfair.
	People who are well-connected to the financial system are getting first dibs.
	They're using it in their own ways.
	They're leveraging it.
	They're investing with it, whatever.
	They're benefiting from this massive inflationary expansion.
	That being said, because it doesn't trickle down, in fact...
	We don't see runaway inflation.
	So we don't see the price of cars just dramatically increasing or grocery store prices increasing.
	Now, we do see inflation on the street level to a degree, but it's manageable and it's not just debilitating.
	I've been hearing that for 20 years.
	Well, look, in the sense of inflation fears, like conservatives talking about inflation fears?
	Okay, fair enough.
	That's why I pre-apologize for sounding like a libertarian.
	But this is what I will say, is that the cat is out of the bag in terms of checks going into the mail.
	People want that now.
	They're not going to put up with anything.
	They're not going to put up with another 2009-style bailing out the banks.
	That is not happening anymore.
	People want money, and they're hurting, and the whole middle-class dream is evaporating.
	When you actually start putting checks in the mail, and the rubber hits the road, and all of that credit that gets created starts being used on everyday items, it will create inflation.
	And so I think it's actually now becoming a bit of a concern, whereas previously it was a phantasm.
	That's my argument.
	And you can disagree with it, because I agree with you that, like, you know, Lou Rockwell has been saying this since 25. We should still support the checks and stuff, whether or not it causes the inflation.
	Like, that seems like a win-win.
	I agree.
	Yeah, I mean, we're $27 trillion in that, and I think in my lifetime I've seen 1,200 of it.
	It seems like, you know, I don't know, my little $1,200 is what really got us $27 trillion.
	Yeah, so we cover everything?
	My headphones ran out of power there.
	Well, let's do this.
	Do you have any wild prediction for 2021?
	I think things are kind of up in the air.
	Kind of in a mood where I want to hang back.
	Do you think this decoupling of Trump from the GOP establishment, Mitch McConnell types, the divorce that's been four or five years coming, how does that play out going forward in 2021 and 2022?
	Does Trump just exist to make life hell for...
	I don't think Trump will go away.
	I mean, we have all these other presidents that kind of walk off the scene.
	I mean, George W. Bush kind of vanished at the end of his failed second term.
	LBJ went back to his ranch and died.
	And presidents just kind of fade.
	I just can't see Trump fading.
	And whether it's Trump TV, whether it's just never ending the campaign and running in 2024, I don't think he will fade.
	I would also stand by my statement that MAGA as this kind of right-wing populist, conservative, mostly white, implicitly white thing, I think that existed before Trump and it will exist even after Trump.
	So I don't think Trump is going away.
	And I don't know.
	I could say this.
	This is kind of how I'm feeling right now.
	And I'd have to think about this a little bit more.
	I don't think Trump's going away, and I think he'll just run again.
	I do, too.
	In fact, I think we might be seeing the earliest indications that Trump might learn something from his loss.
	Coming out, I mean, he vetoed the defense bill over Confederate monuments and tech censorship, and he came out for the $2,000 checks.
	Do you think it might have, like, trickled up to him that, I mean, you know, by backing off from this populism stuff was the reason why it lost?
	Well, also, populism's easy when you're not in power.
	So, you know, you can say all sorts of bullcrap when the donors...
	When the donors aren't threatening to put a dead prostitute in the trunk of your car, you can just say all sorts of stuff.
	So I can see him kind of returning to 2016 rhetoric.
	I don't know.
	If I were to guess, though, I think he would kind of continue to double down into what MAGA has become, which is a...
	You know, kind of lunatic conspiracy theorist crank movement.
	And I think that's kind of where he'll have his home, because he will not be accepted.
	Remember, George W. Bush, even though, like, liberals, and you can remember this, and I can remember this as well, liberals were like, ah, you know, we should put this guy in trial, and he's a war criminal, and should be in jail, and all this kind of stuff.
	They ultimately got around to celebrating him.
	And Ellen, you know, what did they go to a Dallas Cowboys game together or something like this?
	You know, it's like they kind of work their ways into treating them as elder statesmen.
	I think that is just simply impossible with Trump.
	And I think Trump is willing to leave the scene.
	So doing something, I mean, there was a rumor I just saw of like the apprentice coming back.
	I mean, he's going to, Something to remain political until this day.
	I can really see him launching a campaign in early 2021.
	You think he gets banned from Twitter next month?
	Absolutely.
	That's a pretty easy call.
	You know, but Twitter needs to be a little bit contrarian here.
	I mean, Twitter...
	Twitter exists because of, like, mindshare and engagement.
	And maybe if they ban them, they should be careful what they wish for.
	Maybe get shadow banned.
	Yeah, because you need the freakout.
	These so-called technology companies aren't actually that technological.
	You need a lot of people maintaining these big platforms and what have you.
	It's not like these people are creating massive breakthroughs on a daily basis.
	They're splitting the atom.
	They might.
	You've created a new retweet function or you've expanded from 140 to 280 characters or whatever.
	They're not really a technological company.
	It's much like Uber is not a technology company.
	Uber just is a cab company, a gypsy cab company that uses existing...
	Automobiles and your iPhone, which is existing, and server space, which is existing, and just kind of puts this cocktail together and serves it to you.
	These tech companies aren't making innovations.
	They live on attention.
	And the idea of them just banning Trump or whatever, I don't know.
	I'm not as positive as other people.
	I think they might grasp that they need that outrage machine.
	He seems focused on McConnell right now, so it might keep him around to stir up trouble in the Republican Party.
	Yeah.
	He might become an asset.
	He might become an asset for them in exile, getting his revenge on Mitch.
	Yeah.
	But I could see him.
	I don't think he's going to do The Apprentice.
	It's hard to take a step back.
	And I would...
	I would predict a pretty imminent 2024 thing.
	He also sees these up-and-comers who rode his wake into a degree of fame like Holly and Cotton.
	I mean, he wants that for himself.
	Yeah, yeah.
	He'll suffocate Holly 2024.
	Looks like that's what's going to happen.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And Trump will remain a kind of image of what populism could be or something, which is kind of why we supported him in 2016.
	We didn't quite know what he wanted to do, and he would be contradictory, but it was just this taking a flyer on something that had so much potential and hope, and maybe a little chaos.
	He was going to just shake everything up, and you couldn't predict him.
	You know, couldn't control him.
	And I think he can still kind of exist like that for people who aren't very serious.
	You know, he can kind of still exist like that for a lot of the old white.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So Sronovich didn't retire, as he promised.
	So we'll see what happens.
	And Ali didn't die.
	Oh, yeah.
	These old white people are just liars.
	Like, Ali promised to die.
	Did you know that Ali was the guy who was trying to steal the delegates for Cruz back at the Republican convention?
	Are you serious?
	I forgot about that.
	One of our friends reminded us of that on Twitter not too long ago.
	I made a note of that.
	I was like, really?
	So he was the guy who was working for Cruz to steal the delegates at the Republican convention.
	Before he rebranded.
	Before all the, you know, the Cruz crowd like Nick Fuentes and all them rebranded as Trump's biggest supporters.
	So we'll see what happens.
	They're always playing these little games that don't really have any potential to work out.
	But they're just nasty bunch of people.
	Anything else?
	Anything else to cover?
	I think we can put a bookmark in it.
	Yeah, that's a long thing.
	Also, stay tuned.
	Tomorrow we're going to reveal the plan.
	Do you stream somewhere?
	You mentioned you're going to reveal the plan.
	It's going to be on Matt's stream.
	We're going to discuss the plan.
	I'll send it to you after the show.
	Okay.
	Well, I am very interested in learning what the plan was.
	Or is.
	Yeah, it's very interesting.
	I mean, I've always trusted it.

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