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So I hope you've been enjoying a bit of the deeper dives we've been doing here at the Midas Touch Network, a little bit of a pivot to the type of content that I think you've been seeing. And as I've said before, I'm not showing Donald Trump videos and I'm not playing his audio, but the threat he poses is very real. And I want to talk about an attack that he is currently engaged in attacking the veteran community. And I want to talk very specifically about what he's doing. I don't want to speak in kind of broad language. I want to really get into the nooks and crannies here. So Fred Wellman, who's on the Midas Touch Network and a veteran himself, here's what he writes. He goes, I'm concerned that this chatter, like Wall Street Journal op eds, Sean Hannity pieces, the Economist article, all talking about cutting veterans affairs and cutting veterans benefits, are really just trial balloons to what Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the VAC Ramaswamy are going to do to veterans in the veteran community. They're shaping the discussion. So anything short of cutting all of our benefits, health care and closing the VA is a compromise. And Fred Wellman says what this really means is that millions of veterans are going to be losing life saving benefits, being thrown into an unready civilian healthcare network, and homelessness spiking. I've been in politics long enough to see how this plays out. It's not good. A lot of the current homelessness problems comes from Ronald Reagan's policies as well, like this, basically throwing people onto the streets. Fred Wellman then says, look, to be perfectly clear, what I'm concerned about is all of this chatter from these op EDS that are basically conditioning people. Now here's an example of this. Here's the Economist headline. This is how they're framing it in kind of an academic pandemic way. I referred to it last night on the Midas Touch podcast as the banality of evil, a term that was used to describe what took place during the Nazi era. Here's what the Economist writes. American veterans now receive absurdly generous benefits. An enormous rise in disability payments may complicate debt reduction efforts. The banality of evil right there. Oh, veterans getting rich off of health care benefits, absurdly generous healthcare benefits. Oh, they're, they're live. Are they living in, in palaces with golden toilet bowls? Oh, no, that's Mar a Lago, that's Donald Trump, that's Elon Musk, that's them. Adam Kinzinger, a veteran, writes, this is an insane article. The vast majority of this increase is because we were exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's our generation's Agent Orange. As a burn pit veteran myself, the Economist is absolutely wrong here. My guess is there were no burn pit vets on the board that wrote this. Exactly. You know, I just don't get who these people are with the audacity. These people have to go after and attack our veterans to attack communities like this. And then it's just intellectualized through this banality of evil lens. Just to remind you over here, Trump's Project 2025 plan to dismantle veterans health care has different tiers. Four main ones that we should discuss. 1. Push veterans to a for profit system. Veterans get pushed out of the VA into for profit care and they will receive worse care. Increase the strain on VA facilities. VA care consistently outranks private care. Cut disability benefits. Millions of disabled veterans could lose critical benefits. Project 2025 seeks to lower the disability ratings to save money. Gut specialized care for veterans and specialized care like reproductive health care for women. That's going to be day one. Threaten to end all non service connected care from the VA which could affect millions of seniors and women veterans. And then the other category, as you hear my dog barking in the background, loyalty over expertise. Trump loyalists will replace experienced VA workers. Politicization will weaken veterans healthcare. And we've already seen, for example, with respect to the Navy, Donald Trump has appointed as the Secretary of Navy someone who's never been in the Navy. A hedge fund guy who's donated like close to $2 million to Donald Trump is now the Secretary of the Navy without any naval experience at all. All right, I want to take a look at the following. I just want you to see this article from the Economist. So you see, in my view, the banality and evil that's taking place and the type of conditioning that Trump and the media is doing to execute this plan. I want you to be knowledgeable so you can share this with veterans in your family because we need to push back against this. So this is the article from the Economist. It's called American Veterans now receive Absurdly generous benefits. An enormous rise in disability payments may complicate debt reduction efforts. Now I just wonder, do you ever see headlines like this from the Economist or the Wall Street Journal about billionaires getting corporate welfare that then allows them to buy 10 extra personal private jets for themselves? Is that absurdly beneficial? Benefits that the billionaires are getting are they getting absurd benefits. That's what's kind of absurd. And again, look, I'm a capitalist. I think that, you know, people can get wealthy, there could be rich people. You know, I'm not a. I just think it is important to not forget that 99% of Americans need to be looked after. I think it's important that we reflect upon the fact that housing is unaffordable for people. And meanwhile, you've got these billionaires getting tax cuts to allow them to buy up more beach houses, more million dollar whatever, and they already have enough. It's enough, you know, and they're getting the handouts to let them do it when we could be helping workers out. But that's just me.
