Ep. 2089 - The COLLAPSE Of The Elitists

Well, folks, if there's one thing common to President Trump's cabinet picks, it is Newton's third law of motion. So Newton's third law of motion suggests that for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. The same thing is true in politics. If you corrupt the DOJ, then President Trump is going to unleash mad gates on you. If you corrupt HHS, he's going to unleash Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on you. And all of this sort of reactivity in politics is leading to a bit of introspection on the part of people who backed Kamala Harris, people who hate Donald Trump.

And what that's resulting in is a wide variety of theories as to why exactly Democrats have lost their way, why the left has lost its way in the United States. One of the biggest theories going right now is being brought out by David Brooks. David Brooks is, of course, a former pseudo-conservative columnist for The New York Times. Then he turned toward the left. He famously suggested that he liked Barack Obama because he liked the crease of his pants or some such nonsense. But he's also been responsible for some sort of interesting social theories.

He talked for a long time about the Bobo generation and Sir Bohemian generation that formed its own morality. He's sort of an interesting writer. Well, he has a big piece on the cover of the Atlantic this week talking about the death of the meritocracy. And his basic suggestion is that one of the reasons you're seeing outsiders like Donald Trump or RF Kennedy Jr. or Matt Gaetz or wide variety of the figures that you are seeing.

in positions of power is as a response to the failures of the so-called meritocracy. And as we'll discuss, I think this is because David Brooks has a perverse view of what meritocracy actually is. David Brooks is not a meritocrat. He's not somebody who believes that people who have merit ought to rise to the top, sort of naturally, that there's an evolutionary process by which people rise to the top. Instead, he is, like many members of the traditional left, a technocrat. He is somebody who's trying to construct systems

in order to make the world a better place. He's not going to live with the evolved systems of say free markets and free government instead he is a tinkerer he is somebody who believes that as an expert he can set up a system that is going to rule over hundreds of millions of people and this is the actual plague of western civilization over the course of the last century and a half the movement.

from evolutionary structures of government and markets and toward a technocracy, a group of people, a self-appointed coterie of elites are going to fix all of your problems. And so as we'll see, what David Brooks is doing in this essay, and it's really important because he does point out what he sees as some problems with the so-called meritocracy. But the biggest problem is that he does not understand what a true meritocracy actually is. And very few people, it seems, actually do.

In politics, the easiest thing to do is you make a mistake and then you attribute it to the philosophy of your opponent. This happens very often, for example, with capitalism. 2007, 2008, there's a massive market crisis. That market crisis is not driven by free markets per se. It's driven by government tinkering with free markets. It's driven, for example.

by the sub-prime mortgages pushed by the federal government under Bill Clinton, the attempt to spread home ownership throughout the society through technocratic tinkering. And then when everything falls down, the free markets and capitalism get blamed. The same thing is sort of happening here with meritocracy. So in my view, and traditionally, meritocracy simply means something that should be good for everyone, which is people of merit rise to the top of a system.

That is better than any of the alternatives. So, for example, aristocracy, which is you are born into rule, or oligopoly, in which you essentially have a group of people who maintain their particular rule through corruption.

Well, what we are watching right now and what we've watched over the course of the last century and a half in America is the transformation of meritocracy, the idea that anyone could get ahead if they had merit into a technocracy rule by an elite who are attempting to reconstruct the entire society in their image. So for David Brooks, he isn't actually solving the problems of meritocracy. He's making it worse because he is a tinkerer. He wants to better manage the so-called better managed system.

As I say, it turns out that systems in the United States particularly organically evolved to maximize actual merit. And then at the beginning of the 20th century with the progressive movement, we decided that wasn't enough. Free markets were bad. Churches were a problem. All of these sort of natural institutions of life were in positions on the elites who were going to create a better managed system.

Here's the thing, free markets, which are in fact a natural outgrowth of a basic concept of private property, maximize both productivity and innovation.

and free markets. They game for that. That is what they incentivize. If you innovate, you're going to get richer. If you are productive, you're going to get richer. This is the sort of merit that free markets actually incentivize. Communitarian church systems maximize virtue and social bondliness. So if you live within a community with a strong church or synagogue or mosque, the people who tend to do best in those systems are the people who are the most virtuous and who create the most social fabric.

Government is a substitute for neither of those things. Managed systems are a substitute for neither of those things. This is one of the reasons why colleges have collapsed in the United States. So colleges originally were supposed to feature and innovate productivity and virtue. The idea was to create good citizens who were good at things. So, for example, the purpose of Columbia University

When it was founded in 1754, it was founded as King's College. According to its first president, and in William Samuel Johnson, he wrote, quote, the chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness and righteousness of life with a perfect heart and a willing mind, and to train them up in all virtuous habits and also to useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends, ornaments to their country and useful to the public wheel in their generations.

that they may be qualified to make orderly, intractable members of this society. So in short, these people are not being made to reshape the society. Columbia University was designed to teach eternal truths to pursue knowledge of nature and nature's God, to create good citizens and good men, to feed into things like free markets and property rights.

to feed into things like good membership in community. Well, now, of course, Columbia exists not to teach either productivity or godliness, but to teach an elite set of values that confers membership on a self-appointed aristocracy. And that is the David Brooks problem, is that the thing that he's railing against, the thing that he's recognizing, which is the failure of the so-called meritocracy,

He's not wrong about it. It's just that he's mislabeling. It's not the failure of meritocracy. It's the failure of a technocracy that's been established over the course of the last century and a half and that has failed the American people. So David Brooks is essay in the Atlantic. I'm going to quote extensively from it. I want to critique it because I think it's very important. I think that again, a bait and switch is being attempted here and it's a dangerous bait and switch.

because the solutions that David Brooks suggests basically maintain that the same elite to have screwed things up ought to maintain control of the system. And that's the problem. So he writes about his idea, which is that there was a shift in how the meritocracy worked happening around the turn of the mid century in the United States in the 20th century, 1950 to 1960, essentially.

He's talking about James Conan, who was the president of Harvard, and he says, in trying to construct a society that maximized a talent, James Conan and his peers were governed by the common assumptions of the era. Intelligence that highest human trait can be measured by standardized tests and the ability to do well in school from ages 15 to 18. Universities should serve as society's primary sorting system, segregating the smart from the not smart. Intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, so sorting by intelligence will yield a broad-based leadership class.

Eventually, Conan's vision triumphed and helped comprehensively refashion American life. If you control the choke points of social mobility, you control the nation's culture. If you change the criteria for admissions at places like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you change the nation's social ideal. So the basic idea that he is promoting here is that a sort of test-based meritocracy at the universities is the big problem.

Now, what that replaced, of course, was the idea that if you had a brother or a dad who went to Harvard, you went to Harvard, too. And so a Conan push was the idea that instead, if you were a poor kid who did well in your SATs, you should be able to go to Harvard. That isn't a bad thing. Hey, that isn't a bad thing.

So what's the problem? Well, David Brooks is suggesting that actually we set up a sort of replacement meritocracy that is based on intellect and that's the problem. Would we necessarily say that government, civic life, the media or high finance work better now than in the mid 20th century?

We can score in this mug wasp of blue bloods from groten and chose, and certainly their era's retrograde views of race and gender, but their leadership to help produce the progressive movement, the New Deal, victory in World War II, the Marshall Plan NATO, and the post-war Pax Americana. After the meritocrats took over in the 1960s, we got quagmires in Vietnam and Afghanistan, needless carnage in Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the toxic rise of social media, and our current age of political dysfunction.

Okay, so first of all, you can see the category error right away, right? He says that the break happen in the mid 20th century and that up until the mid 20th century, everything was hunky dory. But half of the things that he mentions before the mid 20th century are things that are not exactly great. So for example, the progressive movement in the United States.

which is generated in outsized, extraordinarily large bureaucracy in American government has been really bad. And what you're watching right now is a reaction directly to that because it wasn't a meritocracy. The break as it turns out in American life was not in 1950. The break was in 1900. The break happened in American life with the substitution of an expert elite in favor of the American people in favor of those organic systems that I was talking about, a free market and church communitarianism.

The substitution of this top-down system, it was attempted for a century and a half, and its thorough failure in 2020, basically, has led to what we are currently seeing. Again, the things he lists off as sort of wonders are the progressive movement, the New Deal, Victorian World War II. Victorian World War II, by the way, would not have been

a simple, you can't just chalk that up to the so-called smug wasp of blue blood from Groton and Choate. There's very little of that sort of elitism in the victory in World War II. The victory in World War II was the most proletariat war in American history. It was literally a draft of the entire male population of the United States.

And then he attributes to them the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the postwar Pax Americana. Yeah, it's a lot easier to attribute that to, you know, the circumstances of the post World War II era than it is to attribute that to the expertise of the people who are leading the charge. Well, folks, it is terrifying that a self-appointed elite, moral elite are ruling the country, but that is coming to an end. But there is something else that should terrify any conservative in America right now as we speak.

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And so then he discusses what he thinks are the sins of the meritocracy. And again, the reason I'm pointing this out is because there's an attempt by so many members of the elite who have blown it to maintain their control by saying they're going to fix it. You cannot let them fix it because they blew it. And even their diagnosis is wrong. So David Brooks gives what he thinks are six sins of the meritocracy. Sin number one is he says, the system overates intelligence.

He says, quote, the bottom line is that if you give somebody a standardized test from their 13 or 18, you'll learn something important about them, but not necessarily whether they will flourish in life, nor necessarily whether they will contribute usefully to society's greater good. Intelligence is not the same as effectiveness. Okay. He is right that the system does overwrite one type of intelligence, technocratic bureaucratic intelligence.

Okay, that is true. Any top-down system is going to do that. It's going to work to feature people who wants to fit into the system. This has been true since the days of ancient Chinese bureaucracy, where you'd actually have bureaucratic tests that were designed to shuffle people into the upper systems of management. Whatever the system needs is what the system gets. Okay, but we've tried to fix the overriding of technocratic, bureaucratic intelligence by saying that everyone should go to college.

The problem is not elitism in this sense. The problem is the attempt to extend technocratic, bureaucratic intelligence across the entirety of the American body politic. So it's important that a kid who got 1,100 on his SATs not go into sort of manual labor of some sort, not going to woodworking or going to plumbing or going to fracking, but that that kid instead go to a college and become qualified to be a middle manager at a government agency somewhere. That's the problem.

Now, markets wouldn't make that mistake. In a free market system, you would not be able to get a loan. If you were a love and 100 SAT student attempting to go to college to study lesbian dance theory, you would not be able to obtain a loan. We constructed entire technocratic systems that were designed to funnel more people into this broken system. The free markets are an amazing way to evaluate, not for intelligence, but for productivity and efficacy. Again, you don't have to be particularly smart in America to get ahead in America.

As it turns out, you actually just have to be fairly good at the job that you are good at. This is the benefit of comparative advantage in free markets. Comparative advantage suggests that people with very high IQ should do things that require very high IQ. And people who have mid-level IQ should do things effectively that are required of people who have a mid-level IQ. And then they trade with one another and both of them are richer for it. This is the reason why plumbers can make a lot of money in the United States because free markets, again, maximize that which you are good at.

A comparative advantage, one of the great discoveries of mankind. Okay, but that is the thing that our system does not feature.

He says the second problem with the so-called meritocracy is that success in school is not the same as success in life. He says success in school is about jumping through the hoops adults put in front of you. Success in life can involve charting your own course. Again, that is true, but markets solve for that. And he keeps forgetting markets. He keeps forgetting that it's not something that requires David Brooks to come in and tinker. If you really want people to rise based on things like agility, as we'll see, what you need is a system that features agility.

And the system for some people does feature agility. So for example, if you take a look at our business here, our business was founded by a Harvard Law graduate and two guys who did not graduate college. And we are a very large business at this point with 300 employees or so because of the free market, not because of the system that David Brooks wants to construct.

Then he says, the problem with the meritocracy is that the game is rigged. It says the meritocracy was supposed to sort people by innate ability. What it really does is sort people according to how rich their parents are. As the meritocracy has matured, affluent parents have invested massively in their children so they can win in the college admissions arms race. Well, here's the problem again. Why is the college admissions arms race the thing that matters most?

And the answer is, realistically speaking, in a free market system, it isn't. And one of the great laws that people tell about economics in the United States is that there's no income mobility. Everybody sort of stuck where they started. That isn't true. It just isn't true. In a 2014 New York Times article titled From Rags to Riches, for example, Washington University Professor of Social Welfare, Mark Rank, talked about income mobility in the United States. And here's what he found.

After a 44-year study of longitudinal data regarding individuals aged 25 to 60 to see how Americans moved up and down the income spectrum, it turns out 12% of Americans will find themselves in the top 1% of the income distribution for at least one year.

39% of Americans of all Americans will spend a year in the top 5% of the income distribution. Over half, 56% will find themselves in the top 10% for at least one year in income distribution, and 73% will spend a year in the top 20% of the income distribution.

So again, the idea that they have like a stagnant 1% that is ruling the roost over everybody else, that is not true, people can rise and fall in a free market system based on their own merit. But he keeps forgetting that the free market system has to be left alone. And so he says, quote, the meritocracy has created an American case system.

And he says that that is the fourth problem, this case system. He says, quote, after decades of cognitive segregation, a chasm divides the well educated from the less well educated. The whole meritocracy is a system of segregation, segregate your family into a fancy school district. If you're a valedictorian in Ohio, don't go to Ohio State, go to one of the coastal elite schools where all the smart rich kids are.

But again, that's actually not the problem. That's actually not the problem. It's linked to the fifth, the fifth problem that he notices, quote, he says, the meritocracy has damaged the psyches of the American elite. He says, the meritocracy is a gigantic system of extrinsic rewards. It's gatekeepers, educators, corporate recruiters, workplace supervisors, impose a series of assessments and hurdles upon the young. Students are trained to be good hurdle cleaners. We shower them with disapproval or approval, depending on how they measure up on any given day.

Students learn to ride an emotional roller coaster congratulating themselves for clearing a hurdle one day and demoralized by their failure the next. But again, that's actually wrong. Okay, the reality is not that our students are petrified of losing out in the sort of college admissions game. The reality is that again, the false meritocracy, the technocracy that's been created leaves people who succeed there to believe that they are members of a higher moral cast.

They have a different set of values that if you put she-her in your pronouns in your bio, this makes you part of the coterie of the elite who ought to rule society. The fake meritocracy that David Brooks is talking about has created an American case system, but not economically, culturally. It's people who get together in cloistered areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and Chicago, and they believe that they are morally superior to all the people around them.

So what he is talking about here is, again, a category error. He is making a large-scale mistake. He says, in the end, that what we should be doing, if we want to fix the problems of what he calls the meritocracy, is redefining merit to include curiosity, a sense of drive and mission, social intelligence, and agility.

And he says, if the meritocracy had more channels, society would no longer look like a pyramid with the tiny exclusive peak at the top. It would look like a mountain range with many peaks. Status and recognition in such a society would be more broadly distributed, diminishing populist resentment, making cultural cohesion more likely. Yes, that's true. It was called the free market. It was called the free market. It was called a thing that if you left it alone,

then the meritocracy would not be the problem. The problem in the United States as always is that we don't have a true meritocracy anymore because people who believe that they're smarter than everyone else constructed a system and then shoved people into that system and it turns out they suck at everything. It turns out that these people created a value system all their own because in order to ignore free markets and communitarian churches, which was the balance in American life free markets representing rights, communitarian churches representing duty.

that if you ignore that balance, if you destroy that balance, if you upset the apple cart in the name of utopian social scheme, what you end up doing is screwing everything up. At the give and take of free markets makes for better products, better productivity, better innovation. Smarter people, actually.

and that communitarian churches mean that the wealth flows downward too, not just because free markets mean that everybody's boat rises with the rising waters, but also because in a communitarian church, we all have the same sort of orientation that local communities and social fabric actually matter. They upset all of this from top down. Now, they're trying to fix it from the top down.

And the problem is that once you create an elite coterie of people who believe that they are at the top of the meritocracy based on their membership in this sort of moral top tier, their policies stink because they're totally disconnected from the rest of the American people. And then the rubber hits the road. And that's what we've been seeing. What we are watching right now is the revenge of the normies. It's the revenge of things like evolutionary free markets where people like Elon Musk, a no name from South Africa,

can become the richest person on planet Earth. What they're looking for is a return to a system of morality where people actually know what it's like to raise a normal child in a normal situation with a normal family, as opposed to the bizarre social values of this elite that suggest that we should be totally morally apathetic about how families are raised or how children are created.

Okay, that day is over because the coterie of the merit, the fake meritocracy, the technocracy failed. And that is why you're getting the revenge of the Trump administration. That's why you're getting picks from the outside to wreck administrative agencies, because you blew it, because you blew it. It's not that the meritocracy.

was improperly screwed around with in 1950, 1960 with the university system. It's that a moral case was created at the top of American society that was willing to rule everybody and we don't like it and it's wrong. And that didn't start in 1950. That started again with the progressive movement around the turn of the 20th century. And we're seeing the effects of it right now. All of it is bearing its fruit.

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comes and bites you. So don't do it. Instead, head over to Bambi.com type in Ben Shapiro to get started. It takes a while for bad theory to hit the streets. A bad theory has hit the streets.

to take just the most obvious example over the course of the last couple weeks. In New York City, according to the New York Post, a blood-covered lunatic toting two knives trucked across Manhattan in a savage, broad daylight stabbing spree that left a woman and two men dead Monday according to the cops. The sick, suspected stabber, a mentally ill homeless man with eight past arrests in New York City alone, was stopped by a hero cop thanks to the help of good Samaritans, including a cab driver and a British tourist, said NYPD chief of detectives, Joe Kenney and police sources.

Ramon Rivera, 51, was identified by sources as the person of interest in custody, seen with a long beard and unwieldy hair in a grizzled monk shot obtained by the post. Police have no other suspect in the spate of unprovoked, random attacks, said Mayor Adams.

He said, today we have three innocent New Yorkers just going about their lives where the victim of a terrible, terrible assault is a clear example of the criminal justice system, mental health system that continues to fail New Yorkers. Who designed that system? The technocracy, not a meritocracy, a technocracy of people who believe that they have a morally superior view of the universe in which the mentally ill ought to be able to walk the streets, in which if you defend against attackers on a subway, you are tried for manslaughter. That's happening currently right now in New York.

You want to know why this sort of stuff is happening? Because no one steps in between killers and their victims. Because if they do, they might be prosecuted by precisely these idiotic technocrats. That is why when people look at situations like this, they say, this is so easy to stop. Like in any normal society, this would be stopped, forth with.

The sort of evolutionary basis of all society and government is to stop the killer from attacking the innocent. That is why the government generally has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force because you don't want people revenge killing one another. And so the idea is the basic bargain is you give up some of your rights so that the government will defend you against the crazy guy in the street who's going to stab you. One right you don't give up, by the way, is the right of self-defense. But in New York City, you can give that up because if you're Daniel Penny, you go to trial on the basis of defending others.

You wonder why there's a backlash against the technocrats because they designed an unworkable system. It's the technocrats who designed a system that said that we have to open our southern border wide and allowing 10 million people from who knows where with values that we don't understand or know. And those people have to be let in in the name of social justice. And the backlash is coming in the form of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.

Tom Holman, who's the bulldog border czar who's going to be appointed by President Trump. He talked yesterday about how excited he was to get started on the job.

Since I've been announced, Lawrence, I've gotten thousands of soldiers that just recently left the military. They want to join forces. Police officers that retired want to join forces, but retired board choices, retired ICEs that want to come back. Retirement from board patrol, that paperwork is pulled back. There's a lot of excitement to do this job for the President of the United States. So again, he has read about that. There's a lot of excitement about it. And he says, what is commonsensical?

This is when it comes to America cracking down on illegal immigration. We're going to focus on public safety and national security threats first, which of course is the way I think most Americans would like to do it. The president's been clear. We're going to, out of the gate, we're going to focus on public safety threats and national security threats first. Infuses, if those who cross the border legally, had great due process, a great tax fair of stance, were ordered removed by an immigration judge and didn't leave. They're also a priority.

Okay, so again, this is the way that I think most people want this done. And you know what Democrats are doing? Technocratic Democrats and blue states, you know what they're doing? They're resisting. They're resisting. JB Pritzker in the billionaire scion, governor of Illinois, a person who literally was born into gigantic levels of wealth, right? He's a perfect example of the anti-meritocracy. JB Pritzker, he says that he's deeply concerned about Donald Trump's illegal immigration plan.

We, of course, are deeply concerned about the President of the United States calling out military inside the United States, where people are peaceful, even if there may be people who are undocumented, but the idea of calling out the army into the domestic confines of the United States seems uncalled for and may in fact be unconstitutional and illegal.

Again, the fact that he's trying to use the tools of government to stop the government from doing the thing, the government was literally appointed to do is pretty incredible. The ACLU is doing the same thing. According to Axios, civil liberties advocates worried about President Trump's plan for mass deportations are suing the federal government to get information on how authorities could rapidly remove people from the United States. They're seeking records on how ICE air operations could be expanded to carry out a deportation and detention program that could ensnare millions of undocumented immigrants.

The ACLU lawsuit comes after Trump confirmed Monday he's planning to declare national emergency and use the US military to carry out massive deportations. Civil Liberties advocates are demanding that ICE immediately turn over the requested records, including all ICE contracts and records regarding air transportation to execute removals, presumably to help people avoid these actual mass deportations that Donald Trump is planning.

This is the moral system of this elite, the self-appointed elite. And the revenge is here against it. Here's Tom Holman, Morning Blue Cities. Don't cross the line. Don't disobey federal law, don't do it. What happens to mayor or local police department chief that is under Democratic leadership, that obstructs ICE in your federal agents that are helping get these deportations of what happens to them?

Well, first of all, they don't want to help us get the hell out of the way if we're going to do it. If I got sent twice a month of resources to that city, that's what we're going to do. If they would give us access to the jail, that would mean less agents to the community. For them, pushing back and not letting us in the jail, it just means more agents are going to be in the community, so they're hurting themselves. Finally, I'll say this. They need to educate themselves. They need to review this.

Title 8, United States Coast, 1324, Triple I. Read about that and don't cross that line because it is a felony to harbor and conceal an illegal alien from life. Read the statute, don't cross that line. Good for town home and good for the Trump administration. Again, this is the revenge of the normies, speaking of which over in the house, for some reason, it has become an issue of hot contention, whether men should be allowed to use women's restrooms.

So yesterday, Representative Nancy Mase of South Carolina introduced a resolution to ban transgender women from using women's restrooms at the U.S. Capitol. She told Fox News Digital, quote, the sanctity of protecting women and standing up against the left systemic erasure of biological women starts here in the nation's Capitol. Now, this is being treated as Democrats as some sort of grave violation of civil rights.

Because of course, Democrats just saw fit to elect a person named Sarah McBride, whose actual name is, I believe, Tim McBride from Delaware, who is a transgender woman, which is to see a man who dresses up as a woman and pretends to be a woman and believes he is a woman in some sort of way. And now insists on being able to use the women's restroom. Now, House Republicans have previously changed rules on their side of Congress. So this would not be a giant shock.

Of course, Democrats are freaking out about all of this there suggesting it's discriminatory. It is precisely this viewpoint that led to electoral defeat for them. It turns out that when you tell the American people dumb things like a boy can be a girl, Americans don't like that particularly much.

Americans rebel against that. Again, that self-appointed bubble of elite who have decided their own moral system, they are totally disconnected from Americans. Speaker Mike Johnson said the obvious yesterday, the fact that this stuff even has to be said on the floor of Congress or in the congressional house is totally insane. But that is where we are in American life. Again, thanks to not the meritocrats and not the fake meritocrats, thanks to the technocratic elite.

This one make a statement for all of you here and be very clear. I was asked a question this morning at the leadership gaggle and I rejected the premise because the answer is so obvious.

For anybody who doesn't know my well-established record on this issue, let me be unequivocally clear. A man is a man, and a woman is a woman, and a man cannot become a woman. That said, I also believe, that's what's good for teachers, what I just said, but I also believe that we treat everybody with dignity, and so we can do and believe all those things at the same time, and I wanted to make that clear for everybody because there's lots of questions, but that's where I stand. I've stood there in my whole life, and those are facts.

Again, the fact that even this has to be said is amazing. The revenge of the normies is upon us and it is a rebellion against a hundred years of bad administrative governance led by a coterie of people like David Brooks who think that they can tinker around with the system instead of letting the evolutionary processes of free markets and churches take care of the vast majority of the American people.

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Join today at dailywire.com slash subscribe. Meanwhile, Democrats are completely panicked about what's to come. It truly is amazing because the truth is, again, that the systems of government that were set up by the founders are really robust. There are checks and balances in those systems. And it turns out that it was the progressive movement that decided to maximize power at the federal level, and now Democrats are freaked out that that federal power may be used against the things that they want. So, for example, Ezra Klein and Ann Applebaum,

made fools of themselves yesterday on Ezra Klein's podcast, talking about the apocalypse, essentially being here. Again, this is sad because Ann Applebaum used to be a really useful author. Her book on the blogs and the Soviet Union is really fantastic. But here they are really scaremongering over the future of the country under Donald Trump.

Somebody was saying to me the other day that when I'm back on Twitter, they know things are really bad. And that's how I feel about having you on this show. When you're back on the show, things are really quite bad. I'm sorry to have put you into a horseman of the apocalypse bucket, but here you are. Thanks for that. Is it a backhanded compliment? I'm not sure. It's a condemnation of the space we find ourselves in.

But again, the fact that they are talking about the apocalypse is pretty much the whole thing, right? Ann Applebaum and Ezra Klein, they're suggesting that Donald Trump is going to make dictatorial, fascistic moves to take over the auspices of American government. Now, again, they had no problem when it was Barack Obama or Joe Biden doing it. When it's Donald Trump coming back around, they do have a problem, but here is the thing. There's open debate inside the Trump administration about pretty much everything.

And there are checks and balances that remain in the system, and those checks and balances remain robust. So, for example, Democrats right now are panicking over RFK Jr. possibly taking over health and human services. First of all, I find that completely odd because much of RFK Jr.'s agenda was actually Democratic technocratic talking points. Okay, so a lot of the Maha agenda, make America healthy again agenda, which is about banning particular ingredients.

is the kind of stuff that Democrats used to champion when it was Michael Bloomberg in New York City attempting to stop you from getting a big goal.

Okay, but apparently, they're really worried that he's going to thwart, for example, vaccination efforts and all the rest. As the Wall Street Journal points out, no, that's not exactly how the system works. Quote, Kennedy's plans should be confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Human Services are far from sure to be realized. Already, early signs of potential division within Trump's team have emerged. Kennedy is pushing for the FDA to be tougher on big pharma while the vacant Rama Swami argued last week on X, the FDA is too restrictive, creating unnecessary barriers to innovation.

The market is bracing for backbreaking measures targeting big pharma while seemingly forgetting it was Joe Biden who signed a law empowering Medicare to negotiate drug prices directly. Furthermore,

The Trump first term suggests that investors shouldn't expect drastic changes in healthcare largely because reforms are complex and involve trade-offs. So, for example, if RFK Jr. were to limit the approval of a certain drug or lobbying against Medicare coverage of GLP-1s for obesity, it could upset swaths of the public. Instead, President Trump might steer Kennedy toward focusing on areas like nutrition rather than drug approval. Already, by the way, RFK Jr. has suggested he's going to issue a lot of advisory opinions rather than simple mandates from the top of the government.

which by the way, is probably the best way to do the government at the federal level. But the media are totally disconnected from the public. And Joe Scarborough is experiencing that in real time. So as we talked about yesterday on the show, Joe and Mika went on bend in need for Donald Trump to rehash their relationship and sort of hit that restart button, Vladimir Putin style. And it turns out he got a lot of blowback for that. A lot of people very angry with Joe and Mika for meeting with Trump because they have betrayed the cause that they suggested that they were leading.

And so here is Scarborough saying it turns out a lot of people on the left are disconnected. Yeah, you think? You think?

yesterday saw for the first time and what a massive disconnect there was between social media and the real world because we were flooded with phone calls from people all day literally around the world the very positive very supportive is going on to send what you do to the extent that said etcetera but once in a while we get a tax return from the old man i hope you don't know okay and i call him back and i go

Eddie Gladys went up and we go, Eddie, are you on Twitter? And he goes, I am. I go, I'm not. So we've had a good day. Meek, it's just had a wonderful event. And it's fantastic. Uh, we're, we're, we're going to do all of us are going to do the best we can do. And we're all working towards a better America. Take it day by day, day by day, day by day. Oh my goodness. Well, why, why the long faces then?

Again, they complete disconnect between the members of the media who are, again, their own self-appointed moral elite and the rest of the public. That disconnect is very real. Mike Barnacle was on MSNBC asking how they make themselves relevant again. The answer is, it's very difficult for you to do so because you separated yourself off from the American public, not the other way around.

I don't know how they make themselves, how we make ourselves relevant again, because we can't compete with 20-second snippets on an iPhone, walking up the street, getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you're walking them into the crowd with coffee in one hand and your phone in the other. I don't know how we catch up to that.

Well, I mean, the way that you catch up with that is to be honest in your coverage. But again, I think that's kind of hard for you to do, which is one of the reasons why Comcast is now greenlighting a $7 billion spinoff of their cable channels. Yes, that includes MSNBC. So these channels have been falling flat. MSNBC's ratings are in the toilet. I mean, our ratings on the show are way higher than pretty much anything on MSNBC. MSNBC is a collapsing content distributor.

Honestly, the only thing that can be done with MSNBC is to sell it to somebody who actually knows what the hell they're doing and who has not disconnected themselves from the American people. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, speaking of a bit of a disconnect, I'm seeing a lot of panic these days about the possibility that Russia is just going to go nuclear and start nuking everybody. I've been hearing this for Nyan two years at this point. The answer, as Russia has shown, is that they are not going to nuke anybody over territorial incursions into small areas of Russia.

in an intractable war situation with Ukraine. Russia is not stupid enough. Vladimir Putin understands enough to know that a full-scale nuclear conflagration over a bit of territorial incursion or firing a couple of missiles at North Korean troops in Russia

would not be in his interest, particularly given the fact that Donald Trump is in fact looking for an off-ramp at this point. So you're seeing an enormous amount of the outsized panic over this. Many people have been warning about World War 3 for a while here. Now it turns out that you keep worrying about World War 3 and it's never true.

Maybe the theory is that one time you're right, maybe, but so far it's not been close to Drew. Nonetheless, Putin knows with whom he is playing. And so he's been publicly signaling that he's going to up the ante. According to CNN, President Putin has updated Russia's nuclear doctrine two days after his U.S. counterpart Joe Biden granted Ukraine permission to strike targets deep inside Russia with American-made weapons. Under the updated doctrine, Moscow will consider aggression from any non-nuclear state with the participation of a nuclear country, a joint attack on Russia.

The Kremlin began this fresh round of nuclear saber rattling on Tuesday, saying the revised military doctrine would in theory lower the bar to first use of military weapons.

In a phone call with reporters, Kremlin spokesperson to meet three Pescov noted the changes mean that, quote, the Russian Federation reserves the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression using conventional weapons against it or the Republic of Belarus. So the revised doctrine apparently is now that if you have a state like Ukraine that is backed by any NATO member that has nuclear weapons, that the Russian Federation may consider using nuclear weapons first use. They're not going to do that. Okay, let's be real about this. They're not going to do that.

They're publicly signaling that because they understand that by signaling that, they might be able to get the United States to back off. But the sort of outsized panic, you see World War III trending on Twitter. I promise you, the Twitter foreign policy analysts who are determined that World War III is going to happen because suddenly Ukraine can fire a missile at North Korean troops that are entering Ukraine.

Like really, that is not true, okay? It's not real, it's not going to happen. I'm just saying, if it does, then I will be very shocked, shall we? No, does that mean that we should take the risk of blithely? Of course not, which is why you look for an off-ramp. But the notion that we should all be quivering in our boots when Vladimir Putin's saber rattles, that's a bad way to do foreign policy, especially given the fact that Russia has been spreading its tentacles as a nuclear back power, literally all over the world, from Africa to the Middle East.

According to the Wall Street Journal, as Israel advances its invasion of southern Lebanon, troops are finding large troves of Russian weapons, confirming longstanding suspicions in Israel that Hezbollah is enhancing its fighting capacity with the help of sophisticated Russian arms. And of course, it was Russia that had shipped in a bunch of anti-aircraft defenses to Iran that Israel then blew up in the last round of fighting. The Russian government in Syrian foreign ministry did not return requests for comment.

Israel's foreign minister, Gidon Tsar, highlighted Russia's leverage over the militant group when he said recently Israel hopes Russia will help enforce any agreement to disarm Hezbollah by preventing weapons smuggling from Syria to Lebanon. He said the Russians are present in Syria. If they agree with the principle, they can contribute to achieving its objective effectively. So again, Vladimir Putin has a very strong interest in saber rattling over Ukraine in the hopes that this will leverage him a better deal.

He is going to end up retaining large swaths of the Don Bass and Crimea. This is already a foregone conclusion. The only question is what sort of security guarantees will be given to Ukraine to dissuade a further Russian invasion in the future. But people should not be, I think, unduly concerned about Russia saying they're going to nuke everybody. They've been saying this for nigh on 80 years at this point.

since they get nuclear weapons in the early 50s, they've been doing this. So I would be shocked to take any of this particularly seriously, at least more seriously, than is necessary in order to achieve some sort of off-ramp here. A joining us online is my friend Gary Sinise. Of course, you know him from Forrest Gump among a wide variety of other works. He has a brand new album out. When I say he, I really mean it's an album that he created on behalf of his son, Mac.

who's an amazing person. Mac passed away just a little bit earlier this year. And this album is an amazing accomplishment. First of all, it's Max Music. It's a vinyl recording called Maxanese Resurrection and Revival. It's a two part vinyl recording. It really is tremendous. Gary, thanks so much for joining the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me, Ben. So for those who don't know Max story, why can't you tell Max story and how you came about doing this project?

Well, yes, thanks for giving me the time. So in 2018, my wife had been diagnosed with stage three breast cancer and we were going through, she had had surgery and then she had her first chemo treatment and I think it was probably about

through August of 2018. And it really rocked her. I mean, I had to take her to the emergency room. It was so bad that we had to check her in to the hospital. And that first treatment really knocked her socks off.

So I got her home and we were sitting in our backyard and we were discussing with another person what we were going to do with the next treatment, how we were going to get through it because the first one was so difficult. And earlier that day our son had been having a lot of pain in his tailbone for a couple of years.

And he had seen some doctors. They thought it was a bruised tailbone from a bicycle accident where he slammed on the brakes too hard and jammed his tailbone into the seat that thought maybe it was related to that. There was an x-ray that was done. Really didn't show anything.

But he was having so much trouble. He was just terribly uncomfortable, couldn't even sleep. And so Moira had had my wife and had several spine surgeries. And I called her spinal doctor and said, can you see Mac and just see if, you know, what's going on? And so I'm sitting there with Moira in the backyard and we're discussing her next chemo treatment. And I get a call from the surgeon who sent Mac to the CT scanner. And he called me and he said, Mac has a tumor.

And the tumor was wrapped around his sacrum. It was about the size of an orange. And I immediately jumped in the car and went down to meet Mac, the doctor, Adam in the CT scanner, and then he sent him to the MRI machine. And I went to meet Mac at the MRI and then went back to the doctor's office and he showed us the tumor. And it was literally been, I mean, it was this big wrapped around his sacrum.

And the doctor suspected it was a tumor called Cordoma. It's a very, very rare cancer. Maybe 300 people in the US per year are diagnosed with Cordoma. Quite often, 70% of the time they can remove the tumor off the spine and cure it. It's gone. They get everything and it's out and it's gone. But 30% of the time it comes back and that's

That's what happened to us in May of 2019. We found out that Max Cancer had come back. So that began a chemo and radiation fight there. As the cancer started to spread, several surgeries to remove more tumors off the spine, several radiation treatments.

Um, several drugs to try to fight it because there are no drugs developed for a Cordoma. So they just throw whatever they can find and they throw it at it. And over the course of the next four years, he would try 25 different drugs.

He was a drummer band, an excellent, excellent drummer. He played with my band sometimes, and he went to USC Music School, Thornton School of Music, where he went from just simply drumming to composing and songwriting and conducting, and he wanted to write music for film and

And all of that, when the cancer really got difficult for him, he was paralyzed from the chest down. He couldn't play drums anymore. Had to really put music away because he was fighting cancer. But then last year, probably February of 2023 last year, he said to me, dad, there was this, there's a piece of music that I wrote in college that I never finished. And I think I'd like to try to finish it. And Mac hadn't been doing any music

for quite a while because he'd been fighting cancer. And I got him together with some of my band members. They started helping flesh it out. It's a piece called Arctic Circles.

They went into the studio summer of July of 2023 and recorded this amazing piece of music with an orchestra. I had never heard any of it been. He was working on it with a buddy of his from college, Oliver Schnae, and they were kind of doing it secretly last year. He was in a hospital bed. We had round-the-clock nursing care for him. But in the meantime, he was trying to flesh out this new piece of music.

And then on July 17th last year, 2023, we went in the studio and I heard this piece of music for the first time and was floored. There's a Maxanese YouTube. There's a video of Arctic circles on that YouTube channel. And you can see I'm in the video just like weeping and sobbing because it was so amazingly beautiful. And that began a journey for Mac where he wanted to create an entire album of music. So that's where resurrection and revival came from.

He finished the album just weeks before he died. He died January 5th of this year. And just weeks before he died, he completed the music. All the music was recorded. It went to press and the vinyl was being pressed. Unfortunately, he never got to see the vinyl completed, but he heard all the music.

And then after he died then, I just started going through his files and I found all this additional music that he had written that I had never heard. A lot of it I'd never heard. Some of it I had because he wrote it for the Gary Sinise Foundation to use in our videos. But most of it I hadn't heard before. He just wrote it and tucked it away. And so I thought, I'm not going to let this music just sit on his laptop.

So I went to work on Resurrection and Revival Part 2, and that was just released on the Gary Sunnis Foundation website last week. It's a double album. There's so much music on it. It's amazing. And we're selling it. And as Mac wanted, all the proceeds from the first record went to the Gary Sunnis Foundation.

And with the second record, we're doing the same thing for Mac. All the proceeds will go to help the Gary Sinise Foundation. He worked for the Foundation starting in 2017, but he had to step away for the cancer fight.

Obviously he's an amazingly talented person and the music is just wonderful. The double vinyl album is 17 original compositions, two covers, 19 total tracks and it really is an amazing accomplishment both by him and then obviously by you and the team that put this together because what did you have to work with? You say that you found new tunes by him in what sort of state did you find these tunes?

Well, let me, let me start with the music that I asked him to write for the Gary Sinise Foundation. So Mac was very, very creative, very talented. But, you know, he's working for a nonprofit so we can't hire an orchestra to go in and record all the music for this, for these documentary. So Mac would do it on his computer with all his samples and all his patches, you know, the cellos and the strings and the horns and the drums and everything like that. He created it all on his computer.

and wrote all this music. There's a documentary about my sort of journey with all the military support and everything, and it kind of tracks the history of all that going back to the 80s. And the documentary is called Always Do A Little More.

And so Mac wrote about 75% of the music for that on his computer. And he's got all the strings. He's got everything. It sounds like an orchestra, but it's not. It's all done on samples. So I found all that music again and some additional music that he wrote for the foundation that I'd never heard because it was never used. But beautiful, beautiful stuff, all done on the computer.

The horns, everything. I mean, it sounds like an orchestra playing it, but it's Mac doing it on his computer. So we took all that music and I called up his buddy who worked with him on the first record. His name is Oliver Schnae. He was a composer pal from USC Music School. They were buddies. They teamed up on Resurrection and Revival part one.

And Oliver kind of took all this music for part two, transposed it, got it off the computer, transposed it, wrote it out so that we could have it played by a live orchestra. And last summer, in July and August, we went into the studio and recorded all this orchestral music that Mac wrote. He wanted to write for film. That's what he really wanted to do, I think.

He loved drumming and everything, but he wasn't satisfied to just be a drummer. He wanted to be a film composer. He loved, you know, John Williams and James Newton Howard and James Horner and, I mean, just scores of great, great film composers that he loved, Hans Zimmer and all that. And, you know, he wanted, that's what he wanted to do. So he was writing for the foundation.

And I don't think he ever envisioned that music coming to life with live orchestra, but we brought it to life Last summer with a live orchestra and then there were all this other music going all the way back to his USC days Ben I mean there were recordings that he made at USC where he's drumming and he's and he's drumming on songs that he was writing for class and

I mean, they had the right songs. They were, you know, music theory class, composition class, all that stuff, and their assignments were to go off and make music.

and they have some great studios at USC and all that. So I found all these recordings that I had never heard before because he wrote them, you know, when he was a sophomore and a junior in college and then just tucked the music away. So I found it and I started listening to it and I was just knocked out by what I was finding. Then I found charts that he had written.

for big band jazz tunes. I mean, Mac had never been like a big jazzer, but all of a sudden I find this big band jazz tune. I gave it to my piano player. I said, you know, play this for me. And so he got the band, he did a little arrangement, got the band to play it. And it's just a swing and great tune. It's called Sweep, Sweeping. And it's on Maxinese YouTube. There's a video of that, as well as videos of some of the other things. But 19 compositions later,

as I said as you as you said there are two covers one is nature boy remember that that can go a classic nature boy Mac does a version of that where he does all the all the instruments plays all the instruments and sings and did his own arrangement

And all of that and then there's another there's one other cover of the old American classic home on the range So on the first record Mac plays harmonica his mom suggested he get a harmonica because he couldn't play drums anymore His his right hand was paralyzed kind of he he could move his arm up and down But the fingers he couldn't move on his on his right hand on his left

arm. There was a tumor up here in the shoulder, so it fractured his shoulder. So he couldn't lift his arm up, but he had the fingers on his left hand. So he had one arm over here and fingers over here.

He could, his mom suggested he get a harmonica and sit in the hospital bed and play the harmonica. So he taught himself harmonica. So on the first record, he plays Amazing Grace on harmonica. He plays Shenandoah. It's an, there's an amazing video, Ben, of Mac playing Shenandoah with this orchestra. And it's really a knockout. He plays the Star Spangled Banner.

on harmonica. He plays another one called Turalura Lura, and that was a song that his mother used to sing to him when he was little. And she says she also sang one called Red River Valley. Remember that one?

uh... and so mac plays harmonica and red river valley and tour allure allure and all these songs well there was one recording or home in the range that was not used on the first record and all of her had that recording all of her recorded in

So I said, well, let's complete the arrangement. Mack and Oliver had worked on an arrangement. It just didn't make the first record. So I said, well, we're going to put it on the second record. So that's the other cover, home on the range, a nature boy. And then all the rest, 17 compositions, all original, from jazz to orchestral to rock. I mean, it's all over the map. It's really a beautiful, fun record with each side having its own unique kind of characteristic.

Folks, it's a wonderful piece of work. Obviously, it's a tremendous tribute to Mac and all the proceeds of the record sales go to the Gary Sinise Foundation, which honors veterans and first responders and their families and people who need to do an amazing work over at the Gary Sinise Foundation have been doing for years. Gary, thanks for the album. And I'm excited that so many people are going to be able to hear Mac's music.

Thanks Ben the first record resurrection and revival that's on digital so you can download it you can order the vinyl at Gary sneeze foundation.org the digital for resurrection and revival part two will be out just after the first of the year. Amazing so folks go check it out Gary thanks so much for the time really appreciate it. I sure appreciate it Ben have a safe trip.

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