Derek (16:08)
So I saw a few awkward things like that. I was in the room, actually, for that one. And it. It's interesting because I've noticed a few of the speakers, including that gentleman there who's the head of cpac, having to kind of, like, pump up the crowd. And again, maybe it's because there's less people there than they typically expect. Like, come on, I can't hear you. Like, make some noise or just trying to, like, amp up the energy. I will say that Bannon probably had the biggest crowd that I've seen there and. Or yesterday, Nick Shirley, that. That young YouTuber was there, and then a bunch of people were all, you know, pumped over him. But other than that, yeah, it's been. It's been awkward to. To see. To see that kind of thing. I Hadn't really known that the clip was out there already. But yeah, there, there's definitely some, some interesting energy. You know, one talk that I will say that I'll give credit to, I don't really follow this guy. I think his name's Brandon Straka. The Walk Away movement, this guy was. Yeah, he was. He got a lot of attention, like, like a lot of folks for switching sides. Let's say he used to be a Democrat and then he kind of woke up in court. This is his story. He's like, I woke up, the radical left woke, blah, blah, and I joined, you know, the Trump movement. And so he started the walk away movement. And his speech, though, was interesting because he was one of the, of a couple people saying, look, don't make me walk away from the Republican movement now, because now it seems like we have to all have the same opinion and we can't have different differences of opinion about Iran or about Israel. And so it was interesting because I don't know where he falls in these issues, but he was saying when he was attacked by the left that two people that were supportive of him were Mark Levin and Tucker Carlson. And he's like, but now I'm being asked to choose between which of these gentlemen I should follow. And if I follow this one, then I'm a radical Zionist. And if I follow this one, I don't particularly trust either of the people he mentioned. But I just thought that it was interesting that it was being mentioned that, hey, we shouldn't necessarily all have to agree on everything to be a part of this coalition, because I think that is a lot of what CPAC is trying to push right now, from what I can see, which is we need to beat the Democrats in the midterms. So stop, you know, debating Trump's policies or who cares about Iran or this and that. Like, we need to stick together, which is just the same thing that Democrats and all the politicians have always tried to do is don't be a principal person, don't challenge things, don't rock the boat. Or if you do so do it after the election, then you could, you know, have principles and values and stuff like that. But for right now, we need to be a unified front. And again, I mean, just to what I was sharing earlier, this is why I think politics has failed, because it expects people to give up any principles that they might hold. And in fact, maybe this gentleman, Brandon Shocker, was saying, like, you know, I left the. The left or the left left me, however you want to think about that because the principles I held, that I thought they believed in were no longer relevant. And now I found my new home over here. But it kind of seemed like now he's starting to rethink that of like, okay, now you guys are just turning into the mirror image of the same thing that I thought I was getting away from. That's politics for you, though, is that both sides are going to expect you to have loyalty and to not be a critical thinker, to not question, to not challenge. And you got to back the candidate, whether it's Biden, whether it's Trump, whether it's Clinton, whatever. That is how they play the game. And so I'm just really hoping that so many people, especially in this audience here, who woke up to the left during COVID and Biden and the Democrats or however you want to term that, because I know the left, Democrats aren't really left. But you know that general blob, right. If you woke up to what they're doing that and then you went to Trump and the RFK coalition and Tulsi and all this stuff thinking that it was something different. Hopefully. Now you don't think the answer is just to go back to the other side, Because I see people posting that it's like, we got to make sure the Republicans lose now because we have to stick it to them because they're breaking so many promises. Well, the system and the people who run the system, the oligarchs, the people behind the pyramid power, they don't care if you vote for either of those parties. It's not going to hurt them any if you just rush back to the other side and let that pendulum swing back to the other way, where all of a sudden people think the populist movement is now going to be within the Democrat Party or something like that, or even thinking that staying faithful to Trump and, and, and the Republican Party, that you're somehow going to get what you, you think you're getting for. I mean, I think we're seeing all over the, the spectrum the amount of promises that have been broken by Trump and his different cabinet appointments. You know, that if, if, if any of them had spine, not that I necessarily believe or, you know, trust Joe Kent either. I mean, I just don't trust any of these people. But if any of them did have a spine, they would be resigning themselves as well. They would have been resigning long ago. For you would see Kennedy resigning when the glyphosate executive order happened. You would see Tulsi resigning for Iran war. All these Sort of things. But the fact that these people stay silent, to me, silence, it really is compliance in this case because some people say, well, they're just trying to navigate, you know, you don't understand politics. This is how they have to play the game. Either because they're trying to think of their political career in the future, which is like, okay, so if they just care about their own political career and not the principles that they told you they were running on in the first place or that they were, what's the point? What is the point? You know, and so I just really hope we don't see the same thing back and forth. Okay, it's the midterms, let's punish the Republicans by voting for the Democrats and we're going to see what they do. And you know, it's just people need to really understand. And again, this, it is something that can be overwhelming. But these oligarchs, these families, these institutions have control of both sides of the system. The technocrats do. Trump is working hand in glove with the technocrats, with the Peter Thiel's and Alex Karps and the David Sacks and the Howard Lutnicks and all these different folks. And there, as I've been reporting, that the last American vagabond for a couple years now, I mean, numerous people in Trump's cabinet are either steering committee members like Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, who many of his people work for or have worked for the past, are members of the Bilderberg Group or attendees of the Bilderberg Group, or members of the Council on Foreign Relations or the World Economic Forum. The groups that you thought you were fighting, those are the same people that are working with Trump in his cabinet and as advisors. And so we just really need to recognize that this isn't, this isn't the answer. So needless to say, for me at cpac, it's been a little frustrating. I'm doing my best to just keep my non biased journalist hat on and not scream and shout at all this stuff, but it is challenging.