Tom Luongo: "Too Many Critics, Not Enough Builders"
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Ebert always felt to me like a skinless critic, a guy without any skin in the game who just needed to resolve his mommy issues in public as a film critic. And then Gene Siskel, on the other hand, was always so much more generous to what the filmmakers were trying to achieve and in his way would critique the film from the artist's perspective. Yeah.

And I think we have too many critics in the libertarian space and not enough builders. I got it in my head. I got it in my feet. I got it in my bones. I got it in my...

Hot Neighbor's Choice! Well, we're excited to have our friend today, this morning, Tom Longo. How you doing, sir?

I'm doing well, Dave. A lively pre-show discussion about the world, but actually, it's all good. How are you doing? I'm doing great, and I wanted to just kick off with this thought. I saw that you recently did a talk at the Cornerstone Forum in Canada. Could you tell us a little bit about how that went and what it was all about? Sure.

Sure. Cornerstone is a brainchild of Scott. Sorry, Sean Newman, the Sean Newman podcast. If you have not listened to Sean's podcast, I think you should. And I mean, every week it could be hockey. It could be Canadian politics. It could be myself and Alex Cranor. You never know what's going to happen on Sean's show. He's just he does. He does really great work. And Cornerstone is a collection of the people that he just thinks are interesting and

And it's kind of an outgrowth of him having like –

bringing people up to Northern Alberta to have conversations. So he brought Alex and I up there a couple of years ago, Alex Craner and I, and we did just a sit down with a dinner and we did two hour conversation. And then he's like, you know, maybe we should do this into an all day event. And then what wound up happening eventually is that he, you know, just assembled a whole bunch of speakers with some round tables and discuss a variety of different things about where we are in the state and in the state of play.

This year, we happened to talk a lot about Albertan separatism because it's obviously that's where we are. We were in a Calgary. There were 650 people or so in attendance. Now, when I go to Cornerstone, I look at it and I realize that the...

the big thing is to always like walk away with the big picture in mind. Like, where are we in a, in a, it what's our goal of the day? Like last year, when I went up there, I want, I talked about it from the standpoint of, you know, this is a whole bunch of parents in the room, couple of this, some kids in the room, but we've got a whole bunch of parents here trying to figure out what's going to happen over the next four or five years. How are we going to prepare our kids for the, we, with the chaos that we know is coming and what should our attitude towards that be? Um,

Um, and this year I took it a little, I took it a little bit further in saying, you know, we have very important choices in front of us, but we are not passive observers of the universe. I very much, if I have any kind of, you know, cosmology, I'm, uh, it's close to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, understanding that the, um, um, that our ability to observe, um,

processes in the universe affect the outcome of how the universe is going to eventually resolve itself. I think that's a very important part of the way the world operates. And it's right there in trying to solve for health or trying to solve for the helium atom in the Schrodinger equation. It's not hard. This is like the second thing you learn in quantum mechanics.

is the first thing you learn is that quantum tunneling is real and that sometimes electrons are outside the universe. And the second time, and the second problem you solve is, oh, by the way, you can't solve it using vector math. Like, uh-oh, now what? And so it changes your view of how the universe operates. And it implies that we have an active role in how the universe is going to

to resolve itself. Now, that doesn't sound, when you break it down into brass tacks like that, it doesn't sound that momentous, but

We now know it's true. It's not a clockwork universe, right? It's not a Newtonian clockwork universe where if you know all of the, if you know everything about a particular, you know, physical process, right? This is why statics works. This is why engineering works. At the macro level that, you know, this microphone, our bodies, the wall behind me, that's all in the macro level.

Newtonian world, that's all perfectly predictable. If you know all the variables, you know, the heat and the temperature and this and that and everything else, you can predict what's going to happen with a billiard shot or, you know, a guy trying to hit a baseball or whatever. And you can literally calculate it all quantum mechanics. You can only ever deal in probabilities. And because you're always dealing in probabilities and you're

you know, at the real, at the interface of contact between two particles, it means that those particles have a choice and observing what choice, observing a thing becomes reality. And so we choose to, we choose the realities that we inhabit by where we put our focus.

And so if we focus on X, we get X. If we focus on Y, we're more likely to get Y. Not get X, but more likely to get X versus more likely to get Y. And, you know, my argument at Cornerstone today was that we chose to live in a world where Donald Trump just lived at Butler, Pennsylvania, as opposed to

got his head blown off on CNN. Do you think that was the secret sauce, so to speak, of the culture that had the greatest period of wealth creation in America, you know, the late 1800s into the early 1900s, where we have this, you know, where Napoleon Hill, that think and grow rich guy comes out and he interviews supposedly Henry Ford and Rockefeller and Vanderbilt, and he was looking for what the

that they all had and their great success, and he found that they were always thinking positively. It's what they call cosmic habit force. He's what he called it. It was birthed into what is now the secret and all this kind of woo-woo stuff, where it's a little bit wacky, but there's always something true to this, right? And it seems like, was that the mentality that was really pervasive with successful industrialists, a positive can-do spirit? Is that why they had so much success

innovation back then? Was it just a cultural difference? This is something Peter Thiel, by the way, investigates a lot in his work. Yeah, no, I would argue that we've never really lost it. What we've done is we've had to actually work that much harder because we live in the context. We're trying to innovate in the context of an oppressive managerial state to invoke James Burnham, that we have communists literally trying to stop us from innovating because they don't understand how to deal with the deflation of technology.

And so their entire mindset is to slow this down. It's to beat people over the head with the prevention principle of modern leftists, right? Like the classic, oh, we don't know what the effect of this new technology is. We have to study it all first before we can deploy it. Like, well, then we'll never deploy it.

And I think that we have a lot of that. And it's like Mike Rowe, right? Mike Rowe, it's like Mike Rowe's argument about safety third. Like if you know who Mike Rowe is. Yeah, yeah. He always talks about like, well, safety third. It's not safe. We live in a, we live, the managerial state wants us to live in a safety first culture because then those that promote safety are the ones that get to control how society evolves and the rate at which society evolves. They want to control the ladle divvying up the gravy. Yeah.

They want to control everything, control the language, the this, all your actions. They want you to, you know, they want all of that. And they believe that they have the right to do that. Even like the other day, I was listening to a statement from Katenji Brown Jackson. I've talked about this in other contexts. One of the great legal minds of our time, right? Well, yeah, because she believes in French administrative law and not in what's common law.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, she went out there the other day and trying to justify all these ridiculous judicial injunctions against Trump's plan, all of his actions, tariffs, this, that, all of this stuff, deportations, all of this. And basically, she kept saying what she said was, don't you want the courts to enjoin?

the people to enjoin the courts to then have the Supreme Court fast track these decisions so we know what the president's powers are. I'm like, excuse me, but that's not the way the separation of powers works. That's a French administrative law argument where we now have to codify every wrinkle, right?

in, you know, our potential, you know, well, is it like this? Is it 72 hours or 24 hours? We have to write that down in law. That's French administrative law. English common law, there are three crimes, fraud, you know, fraud, murder, and theft. Like, and they're all basically theft. If you argue from a libertarian's perspective, theft of life, theft of property, theft of identity, right? Not, these are very simple crimes.

very simple concepts. We don't need that. We have a separation of powers in the Constitution. And what she wants to do is ensure that the judiciary has the supremacy clause over the executive. That's not the way our Constitution works, folks. Never has, never will. And what they're doing is greenlighting all of this nonsense and then trying to

create a false logical construct or a logical construct based on a faulty premise, right? This is classic logic. The initial premise is wrong, is false. The judiciary has the ability to restrain the executive in executing his executive powers, right? That's wrong. And then after that, create a whole bunch of statements that are true after that. And then just keep, never let you get back to the original faulty premise, right?

This is everywhere in our politics, okay? Everywhere. And this is where I get angry with libertarians because most of them are left brain dominant, as you and I were discussing before we got on the air. So let's think about this. So let's just play this out. So why are they all running around

screaming that Thomas Massey is the only good guy in all of Congress because Massey's trying to hold the line against the big beautiful bill, the budget reconciliation bill. This is the important word, budget reconciliation. Stephen Miller reminds everybody the other day that under budget reconciliation, only mandatory spending can be dealt with.

Yeah, we all want to see the budget balance. We all want to see $1.3 to $1.7 trillion worth of spending cut from the budget. But we can't do that under a budget reconciliation bill because we can't cut $1.3 trillion from mandatory spending.

Not at this point, not without having gone through chapter and verse to find out where all the fraud, waste, and abuse is. We've identified some of it. It also means that we can't codify Doge into law because that's part of what would happen under a rescission bill, right? Under the rescission process, which is a different process. So people like Massey and Rand Paul and others are all lying through their teeth about this bill. And they're all feeding...

easy wins to shitbag Republicans in the GOP, the GOP establishment to be against Trump. Why? And I'll tell you why. Because what they really want is for Trump to sign off on Germany and France and the European Union escalating the war in Ukraine and or the war against Palestinians in Gaza on the behalf of Israel in order. That's what they want. If Trump were to tomorrow come out and say,

I'll send her the $20 billion to Ukraine. They would all vote for the bill. Every goddamn one of them.

And so you have to realize that sometimes not Nancy and ran on, on the war issue, right? They would still, but you're saying the establishment ones, they're giving cover for the establishment. You're giving, you're, you're actually running. You're actually, when you don't realize you're actually acting like a useful idiot for the very people you profess to be fighting and who hate whom you hate. And I have seen this a thousand times over the last three years, certainly since,

I started going down the rabbit hole about the Fed, trying to destroy the Eurodollar system, to break City of London, to break the European colonial banking system and all that. Once I understood that that's what I thought he was trying to do and then watched it play out from that perspective and watched their reactions to this, that's when I'm like, oh,

I must be right about this. Then I get confirmation from heavy hitters that are close to the Fed that that is exactly what they're trying to do. The politics work, all the political fights work out to the Fed's advantage and they're

We should be cheering this because we're sitting here at four and a half percent cost of money to slow the growth of credit, to slow the growth of M2, to slow the growth of all of these things that libertarians complain about all the time, to slow the growth in the quantity of money. Matter of fact, until like last week, M2 has been falling and went negative. Like M2 year over year is negative. By the way, M2 has fallen for like two years straight.

And the growth rate has been, you know, the growth rate's been negative. And then the numbers are like, I don't know, M2's back down to numbers that it was at pre-COVID. Like they've stripped all that out of, they've stripped all that froth out of the markets.

So, I mean, what I'm getting at here is that these systems are complicated and we can't just live in our heads because we have these very simple precepts about what we think we should do. Martin Armstrong is not wrong when he chides Austrians and libertarians for... And I told Martin this when I was up in Calgary because I met Martin and we had a long discussion about this. I said, Martin, you're not wrong about your criticism of them, which is what, in the quantity theory of money, we only...

Australians only like to talk about the money supply. They never want to talk about the demand for money. The demand for money is equally important. And interestingly enough, what I said to him is what's really funny is if you go to the Wikipedia page on the quantity theory of money, you'll see that that exact quantity

criticism of the quantity theory of money and of most people's arguments from that perspective was put down by Ludwig von Mises himself, who said, yes, we have to worry about, we have to keep the effect, we have to be balanced in our criticism of

you know, of the QTM from both the supply side and the demand side. And what I would argue is that it's very easy to get lost in. And I used to be there. Like, don't get me wrong. I used to be there. There's a reason why the thing's called gold goats and guns. I am not stupid. I get the problem. I, I,

which is that the focus only on the supply side of the money problem is to ignore the demand side and then therefore lose all of the real world context of why did we demand that money? And that's a question that, that's an uncomfortable question that most, that frankly, most libertarians and most Austrians don't want to address. And when they do address it, invariably they run, they get, if they're intellectually honest, and I've met a few of them and I like a few of them,

still even after how badly i was treated by the mises institute that you were treated what's that you were treated very nasty yeah i was so i was treated very badly and um

And that's fine. It is what it is. I can't control what other people do. I can not be happy about it, but I'm going to move on at the end of the day. But I have to remind everybody that that happened and that I'm not grinding an ax here. These are criticisms that I have had since before I ever stepped in front of a microphone and a camera.

I used to be screaming at the world in my private laboratory in Seward, Florida, you know, running, running experiments and beakers like dudes. You guys have no idea. My, the, the, the, Walter White from screaming at the world of my lab, this guy had been Walter White. Absolutely. So I actually wrote an entire issue of, um, of, of,

of Resolute Wealth with the former newsletter I used to write for Newsmax talking about this. In a former life, I used to be a chemist. I just finished watching Breaking Bad. And at one point, I wanted to be, I could have easily been Walter White, right? I think I led the article off of, if you ever watch the show Burn Notice, it starts off with, my name is Michael West and I used to be a spy. Well, my name is Tom Longo and I used to be a chemist. I also used to be much less, I used to be much more of a sociopath.

To be honest. Was it SOFR that stopped you from going down the Walter White path if it wasn't for the- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It really was at some point. I finally just kind of looked up. Actually, it was libertarianism. Yeah. Like, I'll be honest with you. I-

And that's what started to help me really gain a sense of morality. I mean, I grew up in a Catholic household with an ex-nun mom who was crazy. So I had morality all over my life. But my 20s were a very dark time.

Like, you know, I'm not going to sit here and profess that I was a good man. I'm not saying that I was like a thief and all that. I just wasn't a good guy. Like, you know, I wasn't somebody that a lot of people really wanted to hang out with. Fair enough. I mean, not to say that I am today at 57. Who the fuck knows? I don't care. But my point is, is that...

You know, what happened, you know, for me was that I was able to get a framework of what a moral society can look like and how it could look. But that in my head, and I was able to use that to create a philosophical center. But that does not mean that that philosophical center.

has to be made manifest at every turn in every way. When I, when I interface with the political world, which is where I have to deal with other humans who have different

One, perspectives that I do, not perspectives that I do. Two, different incentives that I do, yada, yada, yada. So at the end of the day, we have to kind of... How important is it to have that philosophical center at the core? Very important. Very important, right? Would you say Trump has that philosophical center? Obviously not the same to the degree that maybe you did or developed, right? No, I don't know what he has. I think he's a man... I think Donald Trump is a man in flux, right?

I'll be honest without a philosophical center. So, so that's why I don't know that. I don't know about that. I think his philosophical center. Well, okay. I think Donald Trump at, at his core is the eighties America. I think that, I think, I think the public version of Donald Trump that he likes to portray to the world and that people like to hang, hang their hat on. I don't think it's the real Donald Trump.

Yeah. I just don't. I see what he's doing. And then I see what he says. And those two things, those two people are completely different. Hell, Bill Marcus came out and said that the other day. Why is it that I can't see the guy that I met the other day on the television? I'm like, because that guy isn't a good president. That's why. Got news for you, Bill.

It's the world you live in. So you either, if you met the man and you trust him, then, and I have a very simple heuristic in politics. You know where a person is, what side they're on, by who his enemies are, not by who his friends are. That's also, that's a good heuristic as well, but note who his enemies are and who are Trump's enemies. Literally at this point, everyone.

And what's been going on since July 14th, in my mind, Dave, is that since the day after Butler, when he survived and he was supposed to, they were in, you know, his enemies have been in scramble mode to go, okay, that what's going to happen now is the country is going to come behind him in a way that we've not, we've not been able to prep for. And now we have to start cleaving off his support little by little. We have to start chipping away at it. And that's called martyrs energy.

You know, that's the greatest power in the Western world is to have that energy behind you. There's nothing. I agree. I agree. I agree. You're absolutely correct. So who are the easiest people to cleave off of him?

The free market libertarian types like that? The free market libertarians. Why? Because they never really believed in him in the first place. They were skeptical because he had a lot of deficits in the last administration that he had, right? Of course he did. Of course. And up until that moment, I still had a tremendous number of questions about Donald Trump, and I still do. The free market libertarians, the hardcore libertarians, are the easiest ones to pull off because they're skeptics about everything. Because the truth of the matter is,

And this is going to be hard for a lot of people to listen to. And they're probably going to be very angry. And there's gonna be a lot of angry comments after this, after that are going to hit after the statement ready, when you have oppositional defiance disorder, you can only be a critic and critics have no skin in the game. I was talking with somebody yesterday about this. I was talking to my therapist actually about this yesterday, to be honest with you, because my life has been defined by my, a war between critics and,

and creators. I am both a critic and a creator. And I'm not just here in this space, but as you led off at the beginning of this podcast, in my 20s, I spent all of my time outside of the chemistry department in the English department

nearly getting a double major and writing poetry and, and, and, and reading and writing fiction and everything else. It's what I, it's why invariably it's why I eventually I became a writer. I just happened to write about politics and culture and finance, but you know, it's not the path I was ever thought I would choose. Right. But it's the path that I wound up on. Okay. So, um,

And that war between the critic and the artist is a very important one because critics who are artists invariably are constructive. Notice Justine Bateman's rise to Twitter celebrity because she's both a critic and an artist and her criticisms are constructive.

And because they're constructive and the writing is so beautifully crafted, she's effective in pointing out what's wrong with this particular thing, be it a TikTok video or whatever. And the medium becomes the message, becomes the method, becomes the, it's really beautifully done. And I was like, oh my, you're, you're an auto follow simply because you're now you're, you're, you're just an absolute badass. Like, and yeah,

But she's a critic with skin in the game because she cares about the art form that she's commenting on. And so...

When I note, I, you know, I was said to my therapist yesterday, I was always a fan of Gene Siskel more than Roger Ebert. For those of you who don't, you know, those are well, Ebert always felt to me like a skinless critic, a guy without any skin in the game who just needed to like resolve his mommy issues.

in public as a film critic. And then Gene Siskel, on the other hand, was always so much more generous to what the filmmakers were trying to achieve and then would, and in his way would, would, would critique the film from the artist's perspective. Yeah. Right. And I think we have too many critics. I think we have too many critics in the libertarian space and not enough builders. And it's, and the truth of the matter is it's right there in front of you when, when,

They can't get elected to public office. They can't actually really affect the cultural zeitgeist. Invariably, they're easily used as a useful idiot because of that oppositional defiance disorder tendency to look at whatever's happening and try and find the fault with it, which at times is an incredibly powerful heuristic.

It's an incredibly powerful tool, analytic tool, but it can't be your only tool in the toolbox. That's exactly the conversation I had earlier this week with Robert Malone. You know him, Dr. Robert Malone? And we were talking about the Make America Healthy Again space, how there's just constant infighting over every little thing. And we were talking about the balance between not being a sycophant

who's just trust the plan about Trump and everything he does and Bobby Kennedy, but at the same time, letting people cook with what they got, you know what I mean? And not being an absolutist that I can snap my fingers and this will all be absolutely finished tomorrow. I mean, obviously, if you're swimming in the sharks of Pfizer and all these people, you're not going to just be able to turn the tables over tomorrow unless you have some kind of a

dictatorial takeover or something. I mean, that's just not happening. And do we want that? Yeah. Well, of course we don't want that. And so we have to start thinking about, you know, I hate to remind everybody, but politics is, you know, the art of the possible. And I'm not, again, I don't, what I say is our job as people, I was making this argument actually to my Albertan friends about how they should craft their politics.

bid for freedom from Ottawa. I said, there's a lot of questions surrounding Daniel Smith, the premier in Ottawa.

A lot of people are worried that she's been compromised when she got into power. Is she a Pied Piper? Is she this? Right. A lot of that. And I'm talking to people in Alberta politics who are close to the center of the opposition movement to Ottawa in Alberta politics, the people who put Danielle Smith in power. Okay. These are some of the people who are at cornerstone. So anyway, some of the people help make it reality.

And because Sean was one of the first people to interview Daniel Smith before she won. So he's got that, you know, he's got that, that weight. Like he helped bring her to, to, to give her a platform.

So what I've said was, you know, you guys have to make a, at the, at the grassroots level, what you guys have to do is create a political milieu where Daniel Smith can't betray you. If you have worries about her and if she is, and if your worries are unfounded, then the more, then you win, win. I,

Either you push her to do the things she doesn't really want to do, or if she does want to do what you want her to do, you've given her even more energy to get done what needs to get done faster. So you can only win here by supporting her and taking your shot because you don't have time to find another champion. If you want to know what having false champions looks like,

Just go look at Nigel Farage and Brexit. Yeah. We've been arguing with Brexit over Brexit for 10 years, just like the EU wants everybody to argue about it because that's what they've been targeting the entire time. Yeah.

Boris Johnson was there. Nigel Farage steps down from the reform part or from UKIP after Brexit gets done. They fight about it for three years with Theresa May. Then we get the false prophet of Boris Johnson who delivers Brexit, but not

really and then we fight and then and then they just chip away at brexit for five years chip away at the tories for five years put up rishi sunak who's city of london and davos through and through we then and then we remove him we move him out and then we get here starmer it the whole thing was designed to destroy the british people's faith in their own independence and

and put them right back where they were before in May of June, 2016, a month before the Brexit vote. That was the goal. They've accomplished it brilliantly. I got news for Albertans. They're going to do the same goddamn thing to you. You have to see that game plan for what it is and then take steps to stop it. And by the way, folks, they're doing the same thing to Trump. And

Your natural instinct to not trust politicians because their lips are moving. Well, in the case of Donald Trump, you shouldn't. You should only assess him by his, in the end, by his actions. And from my perspective, given all of the nuance of the geopolitical and domestic political realities, three seats in the House, two seats, the fake majority in the Senate, three

You know, everything happening in Ukraine, what the state of the financial markets, the funding cliff wall, the deficit to this and that, all these things. Trump is still standing and still implementing like 75 to 80 percent of his entire agenda.

And is this bill, is this budget reconciliation bill? This is the ultimate answer. Is it a good bill from libertarians? No, it's not. Of course not. Is it the best we're going to get? Yes. Well, close to the best we're going to get. Maybe there's some room to make it better. Okay, here's the thing. What are we going to get for that?

What are we going to get from that, from a Pareto perspective? What are we going to get? Are we going to fight for another 1% improvement of the bill for six weeks? You know what the cost of that in political capital is? Very, very high. That's like a third-order Pareto effect. We're going to get a 1% increase or a 1.5% increase in the efficacy of this bill for another 80% more political capital. Do we want to spend that 80%?

This is the whole argument about no trial. This is like zero tolerance libertarians and fiscal conservatives are being used to destroy the opportunity that we have in front of us to fundamentally alter the trajectory of the American government. It's hard for people to culturally see that because the male instinct is,

You know, is to be no. Let's say no. We need to have boundaries. You know, we don't have unlimited just spending sprees and we're going to the mall every day. You know what I mean? So it's so hard to counterintuitively go against all that and be like, you know, let's just let's just get in our know on this. You know, here's the thing. This bill actually cuts spending on balance. It cuts spending.

it doesn't doesn't and the cbo is lying as steven miller's pointed out multiple times that the cbo started its budget baseline deficit baseline based on the idea that the old tax rates would go into effect yeah and then double counted and then counted the tax cuts as a deficit increase that's they did that on purpose

Okay? Because they're mad about the Ukrainian war and all that. Well, because the CBO is a bunch of friggin' managerial state leftists. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. And I said this to Clinton Russell the other day on Twitter. I wouldn't name names if I didn't actually posit this question directly to Clint. And I like Clint, but on the show, he's been very nice to me. He's one of the few libertarians I can have a really solid conversation with because Clint's been in the trenches of the financial network, of the financial system. So he understands this. Same thing with Caitlin Long. And I said, when this first, and everybody starts screaming about the deficit and this bill, I'm like,

Hold on. So the very people who say, who coined the phrase, you know, a politician is lying when his lips are moving. Now, all of a sudden, believe and all government statistics are lies. Now, all of a sudden, want to selectively believe the Congressional Budget Office numbers in order to support their argument that Trump is not doing what they what they want them to do.

They want him to do. Excuse me, can I ask that question? Why would you do that? Why would you believe the CBO here at all? And then two days later, Miller comes out with a big, huge explanation of what's possible under budget reconciliation Senate rules.

And what should be done under rescission rules. Now, interestingly enough, I'll give Thomas Massey a little bit of credit. He's not, he is now I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm with Trump on why I'm done. I don't give a shit anymore. I don't care. He's not the second. You don't want them out of there.

No, I don't. I just, well, maybe. Well, who's going to play his role in 10 years? Who cares? He's not the second coming of Ron Paul. Because if Ron Paul had ever actually been in power, do you think Ron Paul would have done 95% of the things that he said he was going to do? No, because Ron is a doctor. And the first thing he, and he coined the phrase libertarian, Hippocratic oath.

First, you do no harm. You make good on all the promises to the American people, but you can't afford them. That was the shocking thing when I brought Ron Paul into the Doge conversation with Elon is how conservative he was in his feedback to Elon. He was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, go slow. And I remember thinking, this is weird. How did Ron become the more...

you know it was just you're right but i've always this is why this is why i love ron paul and um i understand ron's perspective because he made that argument very clearly because he understands politics yeah because he was there for years and what i'm trying to say about massey is when massey got something right the other day when he said look where are the recisions in this bill i'm like

Did you not learn the rules? Dude, the Senate, the rescission process is different.

It doesn't happen under this bill. This is a reconciliation bill. It has these rules, mandatory spending only. What's the word I'm looking for? Discretionary spending happens under the rescission process. Rand Paul, I know, knows this. So he's grandstanding as well. Okay? Like, there's a real worry, I feel, that Kentucky voters are going to throw them all out.

Because of Mitch McConnell. And then and now they're setting themselves up and they're trying to shore up their base as the fiscal hawks. I'm like, I'm sorry. Like at this point, guys, we need to get this done because Trump needs. And there's another point here, I think, that everybody's missing between now and the midterms. Once this bill is done, Trump doesn't need Congress anymore.

Doesn't need him. He's got no cabinet positions to get appointed. He can just get on with shoring up the border, going after the judiciary, and shoring up the attack on the presidency, the executive branch by the judiciary, and get the tax cuts implemented, get his other aspects of his fiscal program in place, get the sovereign wealth grant created, get all the Bitcoin reserve, all the other stuff that needs to get done.

He doesn't need Congress. So, of course, if you're Davos, if you're the bad guys, what would you do when Congress and the slim majorities he has in Congress and this bill is there? This is where they have to defend. OK, what would you do? You would stop this bill from passing for as long as possible.

I've talked to Martin Armstrong about this. He's he's talked about this publicly as well. He said, look, they are convinced in Brussels and London and Davos that all they have to do is do what they did the first time is put obstacles in front of Trump, wait him out, get back on track in twenty twenty eight.

That's what they're playing for. That's the way they're playing the war in Ukraine right now. That's the way they're playing all of these things. They really do believe that they can just destroy the United States. They're still on tap to destroy the United States in the long run. That is their goal. So understand that extend and pretend slash spray and pray. Extend and pretend that you're in opposition to Trump and spray and pray with every idea that you can stop the world with and just flood the zone with a bunch of

patent horse shit yeah that's unconstitutional that will have to wind its way through the courts which shouldn't even need to wait when this way through the courts it should just be i'm doing this because i'm the executive and i have the power nuts to you but what trump is trying to do is and i i can see the plan here he understands that he has the power he will use that power if he needs to because he's already done it but what he's doing is he's

taking back executive power that was ceded by previous executives to the judiciary and to Congress. And he has to do so by turning public opinion against them in the short term. So they have to, he has to allow them to do this kind of stupid crap. He can't afford that from his members of his own party, which is where his full-throated,

opposition to people like Massey and people like Paul comes from. It's, I need a win here in order to get all these other wins done. It's not a plan, folks. It looks like chaos, but in effect, there's a strategy in play. And when you see and when you accept the fact or even trust that the guy's doing this, and not just him, but all the people around him,

are taking on the most powerful people who have ever walked the face of the earth. These are people that have been entrenched in power for 500 years. He is trying to undo 500 years of human colonization, going back to the Venetian banks. Okay. Like this is what he's taking on. He's taking on the crown. He's taking on the Venetian banks. He's taking on the old Dutch deep state. He's taking on the, he's taking on Rome and the Vatican. He's taking all those people. And he's,

it's pretty clear that he's winning on a lot of fronts so spurging out and you know calling me the pro-trump tariff guy is obnoxious because that's not the world we live in that's the world you live in up here and i'm like i'm not there i'm like and what do you got to lose by jumping on the fucking team for what you oh what's the worst thing gonna happen you'd be like oh he failed

What you'll tell yourself is that he was, well, to make it the coat thing to do the, do the cope. He'll go, you'll go, oh, well, he was never really that guy in the first place. Or he actually always worked for the deep state in the first place. That's a cope dudes. That's a cope. They tried to fucking kill it. Okay. They set it up on national television, but the only time that CNN covered rally was Butler, Pennsylvania.

They had a guy there with a high-speed camera to make sure that they got the Zubruder film version of it so they could show it in slow motion. That's true. I remember that CNN never covered any of his rallies at that time. The whole thing was a massive set. Yeah.

Why isn't he arresting those people? Like, why isn't he just arresting whoever was, you know, getting used to NSA. As I say, it's a terrorist threat. Listen to who's talking to that CNN crew. You know what I mean? Like, why can't that just that? I think that's why people want to believe in him more because they want to see that.

There's a real teeth to this stuff. Like you said, you, the one thing you've been disappointed is the, the, the lack of arrests. And now you got Dan Bongino, Dan, Dan Bongino over there saying, you know, you know, there's one, there's only one shooter. It's okay. I looked at everything. And then Epstein is everything's okay. I'm actually, okay, wait, I'm on, I'm on the, I'm, I'm, I'm, I buy the single shooter. You're a Bongino guy.

No, I'm not a Bongino guy. I believe for months that it was a single shooter. I went down the rabbit holes of multiple shooters. I went down the rabbit holes. I meant to say that the way, not the single shooter, but he said that it was just an acting alone guy. Come on, that's ridiculous. No, he wasn't acting alone. But at the same time, if you look at the body language of both those guys, those guys are like going through massive struggle sessions. They're clearly being paraded out there as sacrifices. Sacrifices.

Because they have to protect some other even worse secret while they try and get a fucking case together on something else. This is literally the tip of the iceberg. Okay. Why is James Comey's daughter prosecuting the Diddy case? Yeah. So she can queer the case exactly the same way she did with Darlene Maxwell. You put Darlene Maxwell in jail and you protect everybody else. Well, they're doing the same thing with Diddy.

Okay? Like, these people still have a lot of power, folks. Do you think Trump will get any deal to get some information out of them or something, or no? I don't know. I mean, like, at this point, like, I don't know. This is where the limit of my understanding and my knowledge and my speculation ends. It stops at the Diddy Parties. That's where Tom says no. Not even the Diddy Party. It stops at this level of why the Epstein tapes, why Epstein killed himself, why this. Like, start asking yourself the questions.

The simple, basic, everyday questions. Why are they trying to undermine your faith in Donald Trump? Why don't you turn that around and ask yourself the question, why are you being targeted to be gaslit by the same morons that gaslit you into believing that the dollar was going to crash when it was 65% of the world's trades in dollars?

Like the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not proving that he didn't exist. It was that the dollar was going to fail in 2008. And we're still downstream of this. We still have people literally every day getting up and arguing with me that the dollar's going to fail. I'm like, keep coping harder, folks. But it settles a higher percentage of trade today than it ever has because the euro has collapsed and the yuan is not –

picking up that slack at any rate. And if the yuan does pick up that slack, do you think the Chinese aren't going to have to go through a massive, and I mean massive, multi-order of magnitude expansion and inflation of the yuan in order to liquefy international trade? Again, demand for money, supply of money. The quantity theory of money has two sides. The reason the dollar has lost 97% of its purchasing value over time is

is because we needed greater monetary resolution and there was greater demand for it because it was the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry. Moreover, the real criticism is not that, it is how much did they get paid in seniorage to run that gig?

That inflation. That's the question you should be asking. That's what you should be angry about. That's what Trump is trying to reverse with the tariffs and the and the reentering of capital and the changing the way we we do revenue. We can explain more about senior age and how that works, what that is. Well, it's very simple, right? It's senior age is that it's in the Constitution. I'm not even I'm not even like arguing that it's like we're going to print money.

I don't care if it's gold coins or it's this or anything. Even gold miners. Gold miners pull the gold out of the ground. They have nuggets. They purify. Then you got to spend some money purifying the nuggets. They pull it out of the ground for 500 bucks an ounce. Let's just pick a number. Then it costs a couple hundred dollars an ounce to purify it.

That costs another couple hundred dollars an ounce to do X, Y, and Z. And eventually, and I'm going to use some numbers here. Eventually, the price of gold that you have to buy that gold coin from in order to use it as money costs you $3,300. The gold miner makes, after all, all unsustaining cash costs, depending on the quality of the asset, makes between 3% and 12%. And the guy who made the coin, the mint, he has to take

three to 8%. Doesn't he? Otherwise he doesn't have a business. That's called seniorage. If the government does it, the government gets paid. And that's another, it's a source of revenue. The government prints money. So in that respect, and they get paid a big for it, or, and this is, you could argue, this is, this is a, um, a regression, um,

in terms of property rights and this and all that stuff that libertarians like to argue about. I'm not, again, I'm not making the argument that the system is better. Or you could issue a treasury bond that pays 4%. Like at the end of the day, you're going to pay, and the treasury bond pays 4%. And if you want access to the dollars, i.e. you want to buy a car loan, you're going to pay more than 4%. And depending on the supply and depending on the balance of the quantity theory of money, the supply and the demand for money, you're going to pay either 4%,

In weak conditions, you're going to pay closer to the treasury bond rate, the call rate for the money on the loan, or you're going to pay more because the demand for money is high. If the demand for money is low, you're going to pay 5% on a car loan. If the demand for money is high, you're going to pay 8%. Now, start quantifying the demand side of the equation. That comes into a lot of, there's a lot of reasons why. There's a lot of things that go into the demand side of the equation. And a lot of them, most people don't understand. Hell, I barely understand half of them.

And I've devoted the last four years of my life trying to understand all of these things. Most bond traders, most sofa strip traders, most basis traders, these guys don't understand all of the point, and certainly the central bankers don't. So no argument that the Federal Reserve has the Hayek problem of the pretense of knowledge and all of that. That's all there. But this is the system we have today.

I think that system is immoral. I think that system is disgusting. I think it's wrong because it, I will say, most probably maximizes the amount that we pay to get access to money as opposed to minimizing it, which is what the free market would do. So when I look at everything that's been happening and what I see the Trump administration trying to reverse is

And what I saw under the Obama administration, under the Biden-Hunter, and even previously, what I saw was codifying making that cost higher and higher and higher. That we didn't have, as Americans, didn't have the ability to defend the price of par, the par value of the dollar.

for our benefit, even though it's our currency. No, no, no. Who was setting the par value for the dollar from about the mid-1950s till 2021? The Eurodollar system, otherwise known as the European banks and City of London banks. They were setting the price of par for the dollar. And every time they got in trouble, we had to pay the price. We had to bail the world out.

And the Fed was honestly, and you could make the argument, and this is the part where I get really frustrated. You couldn't make the argument, and it's a pretty powerful one that the Fed had no other choice. And our banking class on Wall Street and the banksters, they had no choice either.

fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders and to their business is this is the investing environment. This is the banking environment. These are the rules they saddled us with. This is what we have to do to make money.

What are we supposed to do? We can't do net interest margin at the zero bound for 13 years. We have to go play around in the casinos of CDOs and MBSs and credit default swaps and derivatives and all this shit. And you've got City of London was always the one out there suppressing the price of gold through the LBMA. But guess who was the scapegoat? The COMEX, the Fed,

Maybe under Geithner and Bernanke and Yellen, absolutely. But under Powell? Under Powell, since Powell came to power, gold has gone from $1,200 an ounce to $3,300. How are you going to argue that Jerome Powell hasn't been the best thing imaginable for gold? And he's been the tightest Federal Reserve chairman since Paul Volcker. Yeah.

Like, these are the conversations I want to have with people who profess to be Austrians and libertarians. Because we're the best equipped to make these arguments soundly and then craft solutions to these problems. This is all I said to the Mises Institute back in October. And they took the mic because they like their book club, just like libertarians like their hobby.

It's not a political movement. Picanones is correct. It's a hobby, which is why I don't want to get into three-way conversations with people like this. Because what's the point? You're on Mars. I'm in the swamp. And we're just going to talk past each other. I talk past these people every day on Twitter.

And I'm not interested in that anymore. I would like to be, but it's not a good world. Do I believe that we can eventually get to a fairer system? Yes. And I believe that what's happening right now is the absolutely necessary first step. Even Tom and Sol came out the other day and said, Trump's not wrong. I mean, Trump, it seems to be working. Inflation's not coming back. PCE deflator came out today. The Fed's favorite metric came out yesterday.

Missed expectations. Supposed to come in at 2.6%. Came in at 2.5%. The internals were even worse. So the argument now is going to be very difficult for Powell to hold on to 4.5% on the Fed funds rate. And trust me, I want him to hold on to 4.5% for the Fed funds rate because I want him to bankrupt Europe before he starts cutting rates again. What are the concerns that J.D. Vance...

is not who people hope he is in terms of being America first and all that. And that, you know, he gets a movie deal. He looks kind of to some people, he looks like another test tube, you know, Manchurian guy that was created in a lab kind of thing. If he is a designated like air potentially. And if that goes according to where it looks, it could go, uh,

You know, like what happens? I mean, I just is again, how contingent is this working out based on, you know, the next Trump guy, you know, keeping the ball rolling the way Trump's doing. It's very contingent. Like this is not a one. This is not a one. So what if Vance is a traitor? What if he's another Mike? What if?

So does that throw everything away? The question is, is he another Obama? I love the fact that Vance has been on the scene for six months or eight months. And from the moment he was picked, from the moment he was picked, this started. And I got up and I'm like, I look at that stuff at this point. I'm like, oh, my fucking God. You guys just like, do you want to believe every bullshit story that MI6 puts in front of you?

Like, cause this is British propaganda, like one-on-one. So they're trying to, you're saying the British propaganda method is to make him look like the next Obama. Of course. But who did the movie deal though? I mean, is that not, you know what I mean?

What movie do you mean? Like of his book? Yeah. I mean, didn't he look like he came out of a test tube with that? You don't usually get that if you're like a game changer is going to take on the European power establishment. You get a book deal, bestselling thing. You get a movie. Glenn Close. It's like, what the heck? Or that was a bribe or that was a bribe. And that bribe failed. They've tried to bribe Donald Trump a thousand times. It doesn't work.

like like but he was he was a nobody before 2014 or 2013 or whatever of course i i get it i is he that guy it's possible i'm not i'm not like i'm not discounting the possibility completely what i'm saying is you have to do both is it where am i on this i don't know 85 15

that he's who he looks like. But I have bigger problems with his Indian wife. I'll be honest. I've got bigger problems there. The problem that I actually have is in the bigger picture is Vance as a forward agent of little tech. Now, let's run that scenario all the way out. Until I see otherwise...

I am in agreement with PQ on this. These people are the next want to make want to make themselves into the next oligarch class. I'm going to accept it. That's true. Let's accept that as true. I know that that wrangles the hair and back hair of every libertarian. That's that triggers their oppositional defiance disorder. We have to get rid of these oligarchs and replace them with nothing. Yes. Is that possible? Probably not.

So then the question you have to ask yourself is once you, you know, exceed to reality, as opposed to I'm not saying don't fight them. I'm not saying don't fight for a better reality. I'm saying this is the most likely outcome. Then you have to ask yourself the question, dig into who they are. Are they hostile to the human race or are they indifferent? Are they hostile to our existence? Are they trying to run a depopulation agenda on us or are they indifferent? Yeah.

Or do they see the same exact things that Davos sees, which is technology and AI obviating the need for 9 billion human beings? Well, how are we going to feed these people? What do we have to do? How are we going to save off the massive deflationary wave that's staring us in the face? What are we going to do? What if we can run the planet just as efficiently today with 3 billion people as opposed to 7.5?

I don't know what that looks like, Dave. I'm not, and I'm not, so Davos, a bunch of power mad vampires and pedophiles and evil, disgusting fucking demons will say, well, just kill all the excess people. What if these, the other guys, the Curtis Jarvis and the Peter Thiel's and the Amos and the rest of them are all like, no, we have to come up with a better solution to that because we can't kill all these people because that's just fucking horrific.

And what if they're attempting to set up an oligarchy that actually helps preserve as much of humanity as possible? This is a pure speculation on my part. Elon wants lots of kids. Yeah, ask yourself the question. I'm just saying, I need you to honestly look inside yourself and start asking those questions because you do that and you start not listening to Whitney Webb.

Who is like, oh my God, they're going to do the exact same thing. The doubles. Okay. That's nice. That's one possible path. And it sells a lot of subscriptions. But is it real? Is it really who these people are? Do you really want to equate them with Klaus Schwab and Jacob Rothschild and Tony Blair? Really? Yeah.

I had Curtis Yarvin. I don't know enough about Curtis Yarvin. I've had him on a few times. The one thing I remember is don't get medical advice from him. He was really big on those COVID shots, and I was trying to tell him probably not a good idea. Maybe he's – He referred to ivermectin when I promoted it as – I didn't even promote that. I was talking about azithromycin. He called that –

folk medicine or something. That didn't work out too well. So we don't want those people who think they're geniuses to have any control, but yeah, you know, it is what it is. Unfortunately, what are we going to do? We might wind up, look, did anybody want Donald Trump as their friend general in this war?

I mean, seriously, I didn't. I didn't jump any day over Curtis Yarvin for it. Agreed completely. The man clearly loves children, clearly loves his family, clearly all of those things. I agree completely. Do I want Curtis Yarvin any more than I want fucking Yuval Harari? No. Okay.

I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know. I remember there was an article Peter Thiel wrote where he talked about could planet Earth have 50 billion people? Like, let's prepare for a future where 50 billion people are here. So that's a positive sign. I just hope that J.D. Vance has that same pro-human mentality and sticks with it because we don't have any...

We don't want to have any, you know, shenanigans. No, we don't want any more depopulations running around. I want to ask you another thing I don't think I've asked you about before is the border, you know, because there's, you know, he's getting, you know, Trump's getting, you know, blocked at these different legal situations. And a lot of his supporters are saying, look, man, the numbers are not anywhere near where they need to be to get these 20 million plus people out of here.

And so there's this thought that, well, he's either going to have to take real strong executive power and cross the Rubicon and start deporting these people in an executive kind of grab of power, or we're going to be run over by, you know, this mass transformation of the electorate. Agreed. It is a really big, big problem. I have good news. I'm literally looking at my inbox from zero hedge Supreme court. Let's Trump strip 500,000 migrants of legal status.

yeah it's a good start yeah uh i mean there you go like so what's interesting is um how again it's a good start like what the biden administration did on the way out the door i'm sorry the biden junta to call it an administration is not accurate and i i do do strive to be accurate with my language even when i'm swearing um the um

um what they did was insane what jennifer granholm did as you know epa secretary on her way out the door uh or their energy secretary 93 billion dollars shoveled out the door in 47 days more than has been shoveled out the door in 15 years the woman should literally be clapped in irons and you know i i can't advocate for violence i'm not allowed so um like you know that's thievery

And that that's just blatant thievery. The money needs to be clawed back. She needs to be put in jail. She needs to be stripped of all of her wealth, like all of her assets. Like I'm at the point now where all these people need to have all their assets stripped. I'm not libertarian when it comes to this stuff. Well, I am. I just happen to really believe in libertarian justice theory. Yeah. And I put two eyes on a little bit of scary. And as a matter of fact, for these frigging people, I believe in an eye for three or four eyes.

I believe in an eye for two eyes, their gonads, the left cheek of their ass, the whole thing. I want it all because they won't get it because the depth of the inhumanity of the people that we're dealing with, they need to feel it in such a way that their children will never even consider if not have their... Seriously, we're at that moment. We're at the kind of Genghis Khan moment. They are daring us to not be...

be who we need to be we are morally justified to wind every one of these people up against the wall as traitors and shoot them we are morally justified for this they are all thieves and murderers and in every way every war you can lay at their feet every dead gazon that's been bombed by the israelis every dead ukrainian in a ditch every american dead fentanyl every everybody

Like the reason why I'm so goddamn passionate about the myopia of libertarians and the alt media space is because they're not getting what needs to be done. You have to think strategically here and you have to be ruthless because that's who you're dealing with.

But what would the media... You can make your peace with God after you're finished. What would they... Just to be literal about it, what would the alternative media or libertarian space do to accelerate justice? They would do what I suggested at the beginning with Daniel Smith in Alberta. They would give Trump... Create the culture. They would give Trump the political will to...

And subsume for a little while, subsume your skepticism, be generous and say, this is, it's not just what I want. I know that's what they're saying. Like I can hear the, I can hear the cat calls right now. Well, we're saying we want to rest. So we want this and we want this and we want that. Yes. And that procedure takes time.

You can't say if you're Pam Bondi, if you're Kash Patel, if you're any of these people, you as prosecutors, you cannot queer the jury pool. You can't with leaks or with giving us what we need to feel secure that our champions are on the right path. They can't do that. If they do that, they will never get a conviction.

Jim Comey will walk and Hillary Clinton will walk in a court of law. And because at that point, you'll be bound by those rules with judges and jury pools that will be biased against doing that. So that's all you're going to get. You're going to get more diddy show trials. Do you want that? Or do you want these people swinging from lampposts? In order to get them swinging from lampposts, those cases have to be airtight.

And the way they are investigated, indicted, and prosecuted has to be airtight. And you've got to get one. The minute you get the first one, everybody else will run screaming. What I'm seeing already is the number of things that are coming out

the number of whistleblowers that are coming forward, the number of things that are hitting the tape tells me that anybody who has run cover for these people, people are cutting deals. The pressure's real, but political time is far slower than any other time. I'll give my friend Alexander Mercurius the...

uh the the win on this one he's absolutely right it's like political time is judicial time is is is slower than political time political time is slower than financial time you know and cultural time so you've got like all these mismatches in terms of time preference and how these systems operate how do we get them to resonate yes how do we get them to resonate that's the question you're

I don't know. I need everybody to level up. I need everybody to grow up a little bit. It's time. It's time to put your cynicism aside. In other words, the vibe shift is a real phenomenon that has to have its affection. It has to work. That's kind of what you're getting at. It has to work. The focus. You quote that Qui-Gon Jinn quote. What was it you said in your speech? Your focus determines your reality. Oh.

I quoted this. I started my speech off with it. So where do people beam their focus? Not to be silly about it, but where do people beam their focus? You put your focus into trying to figure out where we're winning. Yeah. That's what you're saying, being positive. It's a positive mindset. You have to be in the mindset of, look, we could easily live in one of the 30 million or infinite...

parallel universes where donald trump got his head blown off i think people are just so they're so blasted out with getting their hopes up you know and and they yeah and they see and they see they see how israel seems to be running the show more than trump on a lot of you know christy gnomes going off to memorial day you know to celebrate the fallen in israel and all it's so humiliating people are sick of that they're just sick of it you know

Well, they are, but at the same time, you don't think that that shit is like being put in front of you by agents who were supposedly your fucking friends and then promoted by algorithm. The whole thing is like a big frigging psyop at a certain level. What you have to say is, did Trump struggle session Netanyahu twice when he was in the White House? Yeah.

Yes. Is that more important than Kristi Noem, like, genuflecting at the fucking whaling wall? Yes! By an order... Or did we bomb Iran yet? No! So, shut the fuck up and stop... and stop larping as political analysts and stop...

reacting to chum. It's just fucking chum. It's everywhere. Stop it. Go pet your fucking dog. I go to the Christian home at the frigging whaling home. I went out and petted my dog. I didn't care. I don't even like her as frigging...

As Homeland Security Secretary, every time I look at her friggin' Botox lips, I'm like, oh my God! She creeps me out. I don't like the way... Well, that's the kind of stuff, though, that... I mean, look, I'm just trying to say, to be honest to the critique, when they see someone pick someone dumb like that to run Homeland Security, and they see that...

that embarrassing person go out and go to these foreign places mocking. I mean, it's just a mockery of sovereignty. Why can't Trump be like, don't do that. Just don't do that. You're going to be here with me. We're going to have our share. And you know that, and you know why, because at some level he has to play to the Israeli lobby in order to get shit done in Congress because they haven't passed the goddamn bill yet. Yeah. Yeah. Because the bill passed two 15 to two 14. Now here I have some good news.

I'll say this. If the Senate comes back and says, look, we need these changes that actually increase the spending cuts, I don't know, some nominal amount, say another $20 billion a year or $30 billion a year or whatever, it's going to make it a lot easier for Thomas Massey to say yes. It's going to make it a lot harder for him to say no. It's going to make it easier for the bill to go back to the House and be passed with a higher majority. It passed with one vote.

It's going to be very hard for the fiscal conservatives after they get a couple more wins under their belt, which they'll be able to take back to their constituents when they go to the primary season because they're all worried about getting primary next fall, next spring. Here's the thing. What libertarians don't understand is that they're not politically powerful, but they are in their own world. They think they are. Trump's approval rating is higher than it's been in any time in his presidency in the past.

The people want this stuff done. He is trying to get us out of the war in Ukraine. He's trying to do so in such a way that he marginalizes and shuts the neocons up domestically forever. I saw a thing the other day, 57% of GOP voters in South Carolina are ready to primary out Lindsey freaking Graham. So Lindsey, if he wants another term,

So one of two options here. If Lindsey wants another term, he'll play ball. If he doesn't want another term, he's going to go scorched earth because he's got nothing left to lose because he's not going for reelection. So what do you hate more? A Lindsey Graham trying to get reelected that you can use or a Lindsey Graham who's just desperately trying to keep his peccadilloes out of the... And then you have to ask, then the next question, and this is how hard this stuff is. We're dealing with Lindsey Graham. Now multiply that by...

by 20 swing votes in the House and Senate. And what does Lindsey Graham do? Who controls the middle envelopes on Lindsey Graham's desk? Who controls that? Who controls Lindsey Graham's middle envelope quotient? Does that make you? I don't know. Not Dave Bongino. Every day I wake up and I wonder. Yeah. Not Cash Patel. You can see it in his eyes. He's...

He looks just like, you know, them school shooters. He's like, what the hell? Why do you think they're getting out of the Hoover building? They're not getting out of the Hoover building. It was just falling down. They're getting out of it because they can't sweep all the fucking bugs out of it. It's not secure. Cash does not look and say he's just, whew, man. I don't envy these people. You know, it's a tough job. I mean, well, yeah.

I mean, they might not even be good at this. The best they may be able to do. I will leave everybody. I think we should probably wrap this up. What I'll leave everybody is this. Three years ago, or roughly three years ago, when Georgia Maloney came to power in Italy, she had to eat a lot of bad decisions because the Italian deep state worked overtime to try and get rid of her. She had to

Give lip service to backing the war in Ukraine. She had to give lip service to they increased the immigration on her and there was nothing she could do about it. She had to let that happen. She took blow after blow after blow after blow.

And in my community, I heard it. I heard it in the alternative media space. She's a disappointment. She was a fake populist. I heard it all. Everything you're hearing about Trump, everything you're hearing about Patel or whatever, that same oppressive media blitz, Maloney survived it.

surviving in power with two traitors, with two really dangerous coalition partners, no less. And in Italy is the victory. Surviving until Trump comes to power is the victory. Sometimes just holding things in place is the victory. And then you run out their ability to fight you. This is what Putin is doing in Ukraine to NATO.

he's been doing it for three three a little over three years now he's been doing it masterfully and he's rebuilt the russian military and the russian economy at the same time yeah not perfectly but as best as you can under the circumstances so what i would say is use georgia maloney as your as your guide surviving

is the victory here. If you get more than that, I know everybody wants more than that. Everybody, I know everybody thinks that we have less time than you think we have and yada, yada, yada. But I'm telling you, we're going to do this again and say late July or August, most likely, Dave, is what I'll say. A lot of things come to head in July. Ukraine's going to run out of U.S. aid by the end of June. The EU is going to probably be staring at a 50% tariff in July 9th. We have the funding wall

The Janet Yellen rollover wall we have to deal with this summer. A lot of money. All that needs to be done and the bill and the budget reconciliation bill. All these things need to get done. And if they all get done and we don't get into a war with Iran, Trump could cut a deal with Iran tomorrow. What's he waiting for on that? It gets down to these are very complicated things. Yeah.

It's, it's, I think the part of the, the it's, it's selling it. Yeah. It's the process of trying to sell it. It's good. It's it's, he has to sell, allow Israel to survive and get rid of Netanyahu. He has now cleaved Netanyahu off from Israel's fate. His goal, Israel survives. That's his goal. Doesn't matter if you like it or not. That's his goal. We can debate the pros and cons of that, but what has to happen here is Netanyahu needs to go.

Will he do a Kim Jong-un moment with Iran eventually? Yeah, just like the object of me and shake hands or something. I think he should. That'd be cool. You never hear about North Korea, by the way.

It's interesting. It's a positive thing, right? Yeah, you do. Yeah, they're fighting for the Russians in Ukraine, which is mostly... You don't ever hear Trump or anybody worried about them being mischievous anymore. I mean, yeah. No, you don't. You know why? Because they've already mostly agreed to a deal with Iran. Remember, Iran and North Korea are linked at the hip in that North Korea has the warhead, and Iran has the ballistic missile technology. They

They have mutually outsourced two halves of a nuclear missile, ballistic missile to each other. Yeah. So now let's go back to when Trump was, you brought up, let's go back to when Trump went to North Korea and John Bolton tried to sabotage. Well, why did John Bolton sabotage talks with North Korea? Because city of London and Davos need to have North Korea as a boogeyman for the entire Pacific rim. Yeah. Without North Korea,

and or Taiwan, you have no pressure point that you can create chaos with. I know you don't get into the Christian anthropology, the mimetic theory part of this, and I'll leave it with this, and I want you to promote. I do a little bit. Yeah, but just, you know, it's not your usual, but I would say the greatest strength that Trump has to that point you just made is his ability to touch the leper.

You know, he has this ability to go to these scapegoats, Putin and, you know, Kim Jong-un and maybe Iran now and some of these folks in the Middle East. And even here domestically, he's able to touch the leper of the wildcats.

white nationalist or creeper or freak or something that's supposed to be, that was supposed to be the designated domestic scapegoat. He touches these scapegoats and he says, this is what you call unclean. I say is clean. It's okay. We can, we can make a deal with Russia. We can make trade deals with Russia. We can make trade deals with Iran. And I love that. That's the most Christian, like anthropological part about what Trump does and hopefully, hopefully succeed. Yeah.

No, I think you're, Dave, it's a brilliant point. Thank you for bringing it up because notice how their response is always, you can't talk to Putin. He's a dictator. You can't talk to Kim Jong-un. He's literally flat top Hitler. I don't know. I get what I mean. Like slow bite Hitler. I, you know, you can't, you can't do that. That's beyond the pale. Why not? I can have a conversation with anybody.

Why can't I have a conversation with anybody? Why aren't we talking to our neighbors? Why aren't we talking to our enemies? How you talk, talking to your enemies is how you come to an agreement with your enemies of what they want, you want. And believe me, I've seen these, I've been looking at this stuff for months and I can tell you the deals are already mostly done. The question is, how do you sell them politically? And again, getting the bill, the budget bill through Congress is the,

sticking point. Once that's done, go back to what I said earlier. You don't need Congress anymore. Now we can untie all these geopolitical Gordian knots. So it doesn't matter if the bill is not perfect. It doesn't matter if the deficit is going to go up a little bit over 10 years. We could have Biden. The country would already be dead. We could have Kamala Harris. The country would already be dead. So I can slow down and turn the battleship around while I fix all these other things because you know what that's going to do?

It's going to bring a lot of our troops home. It's going to defund all these bases. It's going to cut all that spending on the maintenance and the materiel and the men and the salaries and the pensions and this and that and all that crap. It's an immense amount of money. And that money can be spent at home on national defense as opposed to national offense or, sorry, globalist offense. None of that was ever in our interest. It was always in the city of London, Davos.

Dutch, Venetian, Vatican, those guys. You've got to realize that stuff, folks. I did a really good podcast with Ian Burlingame where he went over the historical context of the Dutch takeover of the British crown and what it means to be English versus what it means to be British. That's pretty vicious, isn't it? Yeah.

And we are the inheritors of English society. Yeah. The common law, the Magna Carta of, you know, of, of, of, of individual sovereignty, which we then married with native American individualist doctrines. And we got the constitution and the constitution is a fucking miracle. Pre 1913 as a founding document for a country. And, and,

I know that, you know, rankles all the anarcho-libertarians in the audience and oh, fucking oh well. Like, I'm an anarchist in here and in here. I'm telling you the thing that libertarians need because...

I've never been a libertarian, but I'm friends with a lot of them is they need an anthropology to situate the evolution of human society as this abstract thing. My friend and partner in Gold, Goats, and Guns, Dexter White would say, fucking libertarians need an ethos. Because until you have an ethos, you can't have a telos. Right. You can't if you don't know what you are. Yeah.

Then you cannot build anything into reality. And the reality of libertarianism over the last 50 years has been having built almost nothing. There's economics. Oh, by the way, that is a very similar, and I hate to say this, is a very similar criticism at your level at post-Talmudic Judaism or actually pre-Talmudic Judaism. What have they actually built? Yeah.

Does the economics as a field need to die or does it need to evolve into something else or does Austria need to be updated? What needs to happen in the intellectuals? The Austrians need to focus their lens on the realities of the world that we live

inhabit not the world, not the simplified version of the world that they have in their heads. Can that be fixed? They have, that can be, that's absolutely theoretically, or does it just have to be fixed culturally or whatever? You know what I mean? Like, I don't, I don't, I don't know. What I know is what I know is that, you know, I had long discussions with Bob Murphy about a lot of these things when I was, you know,

both on his podcast and we had some discussions when I was at Hilton had Bob gets it because Bob's now in the real world. Like Bob gets it. I fully believe that Bob is one of those guys that gets it. Someone like Caitlin Long coming from a banking background, she gets it. I interface with people all the time who are libertarians philosophically working in high finance and working in the fucking basis trades and like all of this, like this really high level

highly technical stuff that 90% of the 95% of the people in the world don't even know exist. 99% of the people don't even know exists. Yeah. They might know the word derivative and they have no idea what that actually means. What I'm telling you is that those people are there. They're embedded at banks. They're, they're, they're working. They're at family offices and hedge funds. They run like they run, they run, you know, risk compliance divisions at banks, all sorts of stuff. They're there.

They know they have the specific knowledge and understanding in their little corner of the, of the financial world of where the deficits are, where the strengths and the deficits are. Yeah.

and all i've been like we should be com coming together and i know that they are all absolutely 100 completely on board with everything that trump is doing and percent are doing i can tell you this i find out i've talked to dozens of people about this behind the scenes you know these are people you'll never know their names

Like you'll never meet them in public. They operate. They're either patrons of mine or they're, you know, or they're people who've been inspired by the stuff that I talk about to come to me and explain this stuff to me. I get my Twitter. You should see my Twitter. Folks, you would just, you would be amazed at the crap that you, that I, that I get on a daily that people offer to me, the insights that they offer to me about what's actually happening out there. Corners of the market that I need to look into that I haven't seen that I haven't considered yet.

Or, oh, by the way, you said this the other day, here's some supporting data for that in this completely different realm. Like when I say the Bank of England is in trouble, when the ECB is in trouble, when the Bundesbank is in trouble, when they're all fighting, when they're all trying to figure out what the fuck to do, I'm telling you, we have them on the ropes and we just have to like,

Just watch it play out. And we need to give Trump the time and the space he needs to get this done. And if it means sucking up a bad budget reconciliation bill, that's light years ahead of any other budget reconciliation bill we've had in recent memory, like take the fucking single.

And let Willie Randolph come to the plate and try and work out a walk. Let's get guys on first and second with one out down by one or down by five. It's the middle of the eighth. We're down by five. I got a guy on first. Just hit a single.

Let's put Willie Randolph in, you know, he's on deck. We're coming into the murderer's row. You know, do the thing. 1978 Yankees, do the thing. How are you going to get five? How are you going to get hit? How are you going to get five runs, manufacture five runs or six runs over five outs? That's where we are. You know, that's the thing, and I want to leave it here and let you plug your work because we want to follow what you're doing next. I think what makes you different is that you are kind of like, you know, what I would call a renaissance man or a polymath because you've got

You've got your background in, you know, was it chemical engineering, you know? It was chemistry. Chemistry. And you've got your background with, you know, I didn't know until today that you're a poet, you know, write poetry. And that's the kind of folks that we had at the founding of our nation, you know, people who had that kind of big picture systems thinking approach. Systems thinkers are not ideologues.

System thinkers can go around and they can play on a different, you know, I mean, what they say, chess or whatever, instead of checkers of an ideological map that you're, you're in prison too. And that's, what's important is, is to have those kinds of free thinkers, the artists, the makers, uh,

start kind of showing up and that's, I'm, I'm glad that you're doing what you're doing. Cause you know, you are coming to the table with that kind of framework, which I think is necessary to break people out of that kind of what I would say, the problem of our culture is this specialist college siloing of everything, you know, it's like, okay, I'm doing this and then I'm doing that. And that's just not going to work. I had the systems thinking approach. So Tom, where can we follow what you're going to do next? And what's, what you got cooking? Yeah.

You can go over to TomLongo.me where the newsletters get uploaded. If you want to subscribe to the Patreon, the public podcast gets cross-posted there as well on a regular basis. You can follow me on Twitter.

slash x at tfl 1728 uh and then you know everything else after that is literally just that and i you know i still write and i write for newsmax every month as well at the ultimate wealth report so oh by the way you got now you can do gold and silver at legal tinder in florida now so we can uh that is true and you're a prime you'll pry my gold and silver from my cold dead hands before i pay my taxes with it come on

I'm not dumb. I still believe in Gresham's law. I'm not, I haven't, I haven't given up all my libertarian PPs. Are you kidding me? Like gold, my silver, my, I'm not going to steak and shake either. No matter how good their fries are fried in tallow and paying Bitcoin either. Like I'm not doing it. Like hold on to all of it. Now I'm going to pay in dollars because I believe in, I believe in Gresham's law and I don't have enough savings. Like, like everybody else. So there you go. Yeah.

All right. Take care. Thank you, Tom. Appreciate your time. Thank you, Dave. It was a lovely talk. A lot of fun. And have a great weekend. You too. The record shows that you can do

I took the boat.