Podcast Host (34:28)
You're all stuck with me for the rest of the show. Which of course is exactly how I like it, how I want it. But I do have some thoughts that I want to pick up on. And I'm planning to pick up on anyway. From my conversation with the one and only Victor Davis Hanson and sort of going off of what we discussed about JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy's conclusions coming out of the last 24 hours, basically saying affordability, affordability, affordability. Just before we went to air here a couple of hours ago, Donald Trump said there's this new word affordability. And obviously the Republican Party right now is coalescing around this, this consensus that affordability has to be the centerpiece of their campaign efforts going forward. Now we're just talking about the politics of this and the messaging right now, right? This is the, even to get to the substance which you do have to deliver on as well. But you know, for, for moral reasons and political reasons. But that wasn't really even there in the messaging as sharply focused as it should have been in certainly in Virginia where I was last night covering the victory party turned concession speech. And you know, I think it showed up Cuomo is not a Republican, but I think it certainly showed up in his this very establishment oriented response to Mamdani, which they were, you know, pretty, they were pretty bullish on their odds of beating Mamdani. They were pretty confident about Cuomo. They continued to pour money into Cuomo's campaign. He got endorsements and it didn't work. It didn't work. Vivek says it has something to do with identity politics. JD Vance says it has something to do with infighting in addition to this question of affordability being front and center. And I think I want to just pick up on, on that point about priorities because if you are a political candidate, campaign or party, you should have priorities that allow you to appeal in a way that wins elections. And if you are a movement, let's say you're part of the broader left or the broader right, you don't necessarily have to get elected. Right. If you are at maybe you know where I'm going with this, I a think tank, for example, or a nonprofit or an outside interest group, you might not have to win elections, but you do have to win hearts and minds. You do have to win in the battle of ideas. In fact, a lot of that is part of your job if you work at a think tank or a non profit. And I thought this City Journal piece by Chris Ruffo put the Heritage foundation, slash Tucker Carlson, slash Groiper, whatever, Nick Fuentes, whatever controversy in good perspective. And I just want to highlight a little bit of what I liked about what Rufo wrote. His piece was titled what Everybody Misses about Nick Fuentes. And I think it's without getting into everything Fuentes, I think he makes a good point when he says, quote, the right wing case against Fuentes should be focused focus on actions and outcomes. Fuentes divides the right, taps into the left wing fantasy about conservatives as Nazis, rails against President Trump and Vice President J.D. vance and does not lead young men toward a better life. The incentives for Fuentes and the incentives for the right are completely opposed. If he wins, conservatives lose. This is a major test for the right and one it must win. Arguing with the Nazism versus anti Nazism versus frame misses the point. Even if one side is correct on the merits, we need to rely on cool analysis instead of heated reaction. Instead of feeding the Fentis Fuentes phenomenon, we should point the public in a constructive direction and marginalize those who would sabotage the conservative cause. And this isn't just in response to Fuentes. It's in response to us now being on week two of a controversy over Kevin Roberts putting out a video with his opinion on Tucker Carlson hosting Nick Fuentes. Like we're multiple layers into the Fuentes controversy at this point. And actually today, just a couple of hours ago, Eliana Johnson got over the Free Beacon a leaked full video of an emotional tear filled Heritage foundation town hall that took place today. And again, this was leaked. It was after everyone at the Heritage foundation sat in that room and asked what was going to be done about the leaking, why people were leaking. Senior people at Heritage said do not leak. Resign if you feel like you need to leak, but do not leak. And then in that very video, that very video where they're telling people not to leak, of course it gets leaked and we could do a five hour show, truly we could do a five hour show litigating everything that's happened over the course of the last week since Tucker Carlson sat down with Nick Fuentes and everything exploded. But that has been, you know, that has been digested so many times and it's still going on and there's still part of this new cycle is is yet to come. I thought in light of what happened in the election, I mean I just responded to Rufo and X and said I agree and wanted to add health care costs are about to get higher. We're seeing people plugging in there or looking at on the exchange right now. Exchange is open, enrollment is and finding massive sticker shock with price hikes on health care costs. But health care costs are already extremely high. Republicans barely ever talk about health care costs. It's because it's hard to find a conservative consensus on what the Republican health care plan should look like. Nobody's saying that's easy, but it is one of the primary concerns of your average voter and it has been for years, since before Obamacare, which obviously has made health care less affordable over its time. But let me keep going here. Healthcare costs are about to get higher. Veterans are driving door dash to pay their bills during the shutdown. It's absolutely true. Media reports about that heartbreaking and infuriating SNAP benefits are on the line right now. Don't need to litigate the wisdom of our current SNAP program. Needless to say, I disagree with our current SNAP program. But there are, we can all agree, people who genuinely rely about rely on it. And beef prices are up 50%. And as we all know, where interest rates are right now, young people can't afford homes. Swing voters then are dipping into the news cycle to see another week of conservatives acting like a story about a man most normal people couldn't name who leads a think tank most normal people could not name is one of the most important things happening in the world. So obviously it's important to the right. It's worth talking about. I don't disagree with any of that, but the level of conversation and concern on social media, I think reflects the volume of the focus internally. Even as I've had conversations with folks over the last couple of weeks, sometimes it's hard to avoid because things keep getting leaked. And when something gets leaked, it has to be addressed and it causes more drama and more drama and more drama. So, you know, I don't work at one of these think tanks or nonprofits. It's my job to sit back here and analyze it as somebody in the the media. And it is just objectively true. The people who are leaking are making their own situation worse every single day. The people who continue to talk about saving Kevin Roberts like it is an existential threat to America. Kevin Roberts is the president of Heritage foundation, which I have to explain as somebody broadcasting right now, because not everybody even who's tuning in to a political talk show knows who Kevin Roberts is like. It's just, it's really in the scheme of things that weighs on the average voter's mind every single single day. Not up there right now. And it's not improving the lives of average Americans. It's not. And Trump understood that was a problem the left faced in 2016. People who want to support Donald Trump might need to internalize that lesson a little bit better. When Trump was talking about getting people to the polls in the last couple of days, telling them all caps, true socials, he was Talking about energy costs. Seriously, if you look at his true socials over the last couple of days, saying, go and vote for Republicans. Democrats are going to make energy unaffordable. He's talking about material conditions that affect voting patterns. As Victor Davis Hansen told us earlier in the show, the economy dominates the decision of swing voters and voters in general. And being in touch with that is important. It's not to say any of these other conversations shouldn't happen. It's not to say that anyone is. Is wrong to be upset about something in one direction or the other. But how absurd is it for a movement, the conservative movement, that's focused on, or that should be focused on what, improving the lives of the average American through, as we believe, on the right, conservative values. Right. We believe conservative values are what will improve the life of the average American. It's not that hard of a sort of project or motivation to understand there are all kinds of ways people can disagree with and that even on this very issue. Even on this very issue. But how ridiculous is it during a government shutdown when there are people. I'm not saying the think tanks can do anything about the government shutdown, although there's some argument that they could do this, that or the other thing. But it's astounding, astounding how much attention has been paid to one issue over again, improving the lives of the average American. That doesn't just mean materially. People could talk about, like socially, in ways that are material, in ways I would talk about. You know, I think marriage is something that has a grave effect on the material condition of people, especially people that you're trying to win over in this entire conversation. Housing people's ability to afford houses. What is sending people's resentment to be channeled into the fringes of, you know, Gruperland or whatever the hell else, or the fringes of Mamdanism. It's their material conditions which oftentimes manifest in spiritual sicknesses. I think they're intense spiritual sicknesses. And if I have to do the chicken or the egg, I think the. The spiritual comes first. I mean, there are studies of. I mean, I mentioned these a lot. I always am surprised more people don't talk about this. There's literally studies of indigenous tribes that have barely been touched by the modern world. And if you measure happiness, it's predicated on some pretty obvious conditions. Loneliness, you know, if you have good social ties, if your basic sort of maslow hierarchy of needs are being met. So that includes health care. But that's what makes People say that's what makes people report outside of the modern world, people who are, you know, living without that kind of different material climate that we live in in 2025. There's studies on this, and that's what we find. So that's where I come down on, like, great chicken or the egg debate. Whether it's, you know, economic or social, I think it is first and foremost social. But. But it doesn't mean it doesn't go the other way around too, because it does, and we know that, and it's obvious. And again, that doesn't mean people who are experiencing, you know, ravages of a poorly structured, distorted, perverted economy can't find ways to be truly content and fulfilled. But the project of the conservative movement should be to help people live fulfilling lives. And for too many Americans right now, the entire conservative movement and actually the liberal movement right now are sort of agreed that the goal is to assuage that. And man, the volume of conversation about, you know, there's. I wouldn't have told anybody to turn the volume down, you know, after a couple of days or after, you know, 24 or 48 hours in that time frame. But afterwards, week two, week two, really, we're still doing this. You know, people, you have all kinds of resources, whether it's a platform or monetary resources or infrastructure that is a combination of both of those things. You should show the public, first of all, you should care about what the public cares about and needs, and you should show the public that you care about it too, and you should allocate your resources appropriately. But, you know, we talk about social media all the time here. It's completely distorts people who are operating in good faith, completely distorts our incentives and the way that we discuss. The way that we discuss these things, because when there's that blank screen sitting in front of you saying, here, let me go on, what does it say on X? Does it say what it used to say? Yeah, it says, what's happening? You go on X, it says, what's happening. You get that blank message, right? When you log onto the feed, it's not just showing you other people's tweets, it's trying to seduce you into posting. And it does that also with the incentive system of likes and retweets. Again, this is all made to look like a video game. Notifications, as Tristan Neres has talks about, are red because it's meant to trigger a response that the color red just biologically triggers in human beings. And it gets you Completely hooked on the dopamine triggers is a race to the bottom of the, the brainstem to quote Tristan again. And that is, it's if, if you're aware of it, which everybody is at this point, it's just astounding the degree to which people know it and don't then change. And what does that speak to an addiction? And it's just about everybody who spends a lot of time on X, just about everybody in media and professional politics and people who are sort of hardcore followers of media and engagers with media and professional politics. We're all in that every day. And if you're, if you're not just aggressively, relentlessly trying to pop that bubble and check yourself, it can lead down some really unfortunate roads. So on that note, let's go ahead and roll this clip of Mikey Sherrill, who is the next governor of New Jersey who defeated the Republican. And I want to just roll this clip of how Cheryl was campaigning in the waning days of the election. I am fighting for you. I'm fighting for affordability. I'm fighting to get your costs down. I'm declaring a state of emergency on day one, freezing utility rate hikes. I said last night, I said, you know what, I'm not playing right. I'm not doing a 10 year study. I'm not a strongly worded letter. I'm not going to convene a group. I'm declaring a state of emergency to drive your costs down. And that's just where it starts. Because as I'm looking to the budget, I'm increasing that first time home budget buyers program so you can get your foot in the door, try to build your family's generational wealth. I'm taking on those landlords who are colluding to drive up your rental prices. Will my opponent do that? No. His biggest donor is one of those guys that's being investigated right now. Okay, so see what she did right at the end, she talked about corruption, right. But tied it back to the question of affordability. And, and God forbid I were to ever become a political consultant. That would not be my chosen path in life. And I am fully aware that I'm Monday morning quarterbacking the hell out of this. But, but I was covering the Virginia race again last night at the Sears victory party turned concession speech. And that campaign, you know, Abigail Spanberger did some of the, was running ads on Sears Christian position on marriage, marriage equality as Spanberger I think mentioned. But Sears was talking a lot about culture war issues and I made a documentary back When I worked at the Federalist on the parents of Loudoun county, the amazing, inspiring parents of Loudoun County, Virginia, which actually is the wealthiest county in the country, who fought back, many of whom were not wealthy middle class people who had voted for Obama, whatever else, fought back during COVID on Covid restrictions. They fought back on the CRT they were seeing during Zoom lessons. They could hear what the teachers were talking about. The insane gender policies that had taken over locker rooms and bathrooms in Loudoun County, Virginia. Spamberger increased the vote share for Democrats in a place like Loudoun County, Virginia. What that tells me is a lot of those parents who may have seen Republicans talking about winsome Earle Sears as sort of the future of Trumpism without Trump, you know, what is, what does the Republican Party, what does the conservative movement look like after Trump when you have to have MAGA without Trump to keep the MAGA coalition as people have analyzed, Winston Sears was seen as somebody because Youngkin, I think, has proven himself to be someone who could step into those shoes and chart this new course. But part of the lesson here is that what looked like the future of politics during peak woke is it's, it's different now, right? And so that doesn't mean you can't talk about boys playing in girls sports. You should, you must talk about that. That is correct. And it does matter to everyday people. It matters to working class girls who lose scholarships in track and field, for example, or swimming, which they have poured all of their effort into and end up losing, for example, scholarships because they're not finishing in the races as high up as they would or otherwise. It matters to parents who don't have all of the money in the world to have the best nannies who can monitor every second of their child's life for not that that's a good thing, but you know what I'm saying? It matters. It matters. It matters. It matters. It matters to people who are disproportionately working class, who live in communities with low levels of civil society, as Charles Murray, Robert Putnam and Tim Carney have written about. That is a class issue. So yes, it matters and it should be talked about, but it should be talked about in a way that is framed on people's material conditions. You should say you should tie it back to the same clueless, out of touch elites pushing these wacky policies that are impoverishing you, that are creating a new feudalism that are dividing us. Bernie Sanders has tried that line before when he's asked about sports and many sort of Democratic Socialists have in the past asked about general LGBT issues. It's an elite distraction, and in some ways it absolutely is. I don't disagree with that. Of course. In some ways, it absolutely is an elite distraction. But when you're campaigning, you have to make the case, first of all, not that it's just an elite distraction. Bernie Sanders can say that he has to take the next step and say, well, it's wrong, right? Like, that's the basic litmus test. If you can't say men should be playing, if you can say boys shouldn't be playing a girls sports, voters are automatically going to be like, who? That's a little weird. Wonder what's going on there. But if you're not able as the right to capitalize and say, this is part of the same broader project, you can lose voters who, you know, Mamdani won 55% of people, or I'm sorry, Mamdani won easily. People who said cost of living was their biggest. This is according to exit polls. I think this was NBC. Cost of living was the biggest reason they voted. He did not win on crime or immigration. That was a top issue facing New York City. When people were asked that, he said, or if you said cost of living, then you said, then you voted for Mamdani. He won those voters and he lost people who said crime and immigration, the voters. He won cost of living, 55% of the electorate. 55% of the electorate. So my argument is not just that it is a political winner, but that it is morally right to see all of this as sort of part of the same picture. And where Zuramdani and I depart wildly, of course, is on the role of the state. And I think, you know, there are a lot of statists. I think this is a huge flaw in the current sort of democratic socialist worldview, which is that statism is tied together with the kind of elite plan to curtail speech. Some of these cultural war questions come from the sort of statist they would probably identify as democratic, socialist, but arguably Marxist efforts to knit together a global society where control is vested in the hands of very few. And that's an argument that the right can make. It's an argument the right can make. You know, you don't want to see people making it cynically and then ignoring it because their donors tell them to. And that's obviously a possibility. But not even making the argument, I think is telling, revealing, and quite a mistake in and of itself. Wow, I really can ramble when I have something to say. Let me go ahead. And we're going to talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Morning show in just one moment. So stay tuned for that. Before we get to that though, you know that I love Vandy Crisps. 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