Funding Protests?

Hey, congratulations on your new truck. Thank you. Listen, so essentially what Steve from Westbrook has said is that the rules only apply to people who believe differently than he does. Yeah, more or less, yeah, I suppose. And I love the fact that they're embracing the working class platinum. He is not working class. He's not of them. No, but he looks like it. He looks. He feels like it. And that's the thing that bugs me about all this is the like it's like it's like the vibes kind of argument yet again. It's like I have a story in my list this morning. Scott from Old Richard Beach about the Democrats' plans for 2028 and running somebody for the White House. This is in Axios. Apparently, top Democrats are quietly debating a fraught question, whether the party's best bet for winning back the presidency in 2028 is to nominate a man, perhaps a straight white Christian man. And this is all about the politics of the moment, right? They want to basically create tokens. And then they believe in the tokens. So for somebody like Graham Platner, it's guy, bearded, masculine, you know, a lot of that masculine energy we've been missing lately. And working class, he wears jeans. He looks dirty. He must be an oyster man, et cetera. And so they just lean into this notion that somehow this sion of wealth, which is what he is, is somehow one of us. And hilarious too because nobody in the Democratic Party is working class anymore. So one of us is actually one of them. I just throwing that out there. But it's all about the, it's all about the token, right? It's like we've got to appear to convince the rubs to vote for us. We have to appear to be more like them. So let's go find someone who looks like it and sounds like it. And then just like like elevate them up and hopefully it works. We'll see. That's what they're trying to do. Where has communism worked? Absolutely nowhere. Thank you. Have a great day. You're welcome. I'm happy to answer that question. Anytime anybody asks, thanks God. Appreciate it. But it's never been tried the right way. They've never done it the way that it's intended to be done. They've always had, you know, a dictator's taken over and perverted the social experiment that is communism. It never would devolve into this if we just did it right. And... You, I think, no, given the pitch of my voice, how stupid I consider that argument to me. What most, I think, hardcore socialists and communists really believe is that if I was in charge, if I was the one directing it, then it would be good. And I, you know, honestly, I'm so cynical about all this at this point that I also believe that most of them know it isn't good, but it's a pathway to power because it's populist, right? The socialism is one of the most populous political ideologies that has ever existed. It's basically telling a large group of people that they have some sort of external tormentor.

and that if they just banded together and stole all their stuff, redistributed wealth so that everybody was equal, we would all be happy, productive, and life would be better. And it's a very, it's a siren call, my friends. It's a siren call. It's not true, but it sounds great. And if that's the case, a lot of people are going to fall for it, and they do. It doesn't matter how many times we run the experiment and fail. It's always going to be something that people are like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. Let's do that. Which is disappointing. Let's go to Dave from Hollis. Dave, how are you? Good morning, Matt. Morning. Two things real quick. So the first thing, if your life existence is controlled by who you identify with because you're paying attention for 30 seconds and they're like me, so I'm going to vote for that token. How sad is civilization? Pretty sad. Pretty sad. Yeah, but that is most politics. And I'm not going to absolve the right on this, too, because there's a hell of a lot of that on the right. But it's a disappointing fact of life, that that's what most politics is. That was a general statement, and that literally is everyone, right? It is right and left. It is. The other, the real reason I called, even though I was very interested in this conversation, why can't we control the straight of Hormuz? We have the biggest and baddest of everything. in the world. Why can't we control that small piece of water and just do what we want? Can you explain that to me? I certainly can. No, I certainly can. The answer is because we cannot prevent the thing that would really grind most shipping to a halt. And that is the combination of insurance coverage failing. I mean, the boats that are going to be going through hormones and ordinarily do go through hormones. I mean, I don't think people have a full appreciation for how. large, expensive, those ships are, and how long they take to produce and create. So if one were to be, I don't know, destroyed, sunk, et cetera, replacing it would take a billion years. It takes a long time to make those. And they're enormously expensive. So if you are a company that owns it, Having a ship like that damaged and having to put yourself on the hook for millions of dollars of repairs and whatnot is a very high risk. The problem is that you can secure the water, you can even sweep for the mines, but the drones. The drones in particular are a huge problem for them there because they're able to be launched from... frankly, more or less secret locations. They are small. They are hard to intercept and shoot down. And they can wreak havoc on any boat that goes there. And frankly, just the risk of it. You know, even if they missed, right? It's like, oh, man, they almost got us. That fear in the companies that would be using those shipping lanes has basically told them, we ain't doing it until we feel secure in actually traveling through Hormuz.

It's that combination of insurance and the still to this day difficult to control against almost asymmetrical warfare kind of operation with these very cheap to produce and very plentiful drones, which by the way now are also being shipped into Iran by Russia, which makes me once again chuckle at the whole Vladimir Putin thing. It's like right now, Trump is doing a thing in Iran. Vladimir Putin is directly opposing it and aiding the Iranian regime because it is a major geopolitical ally in the region and they don't want that regime to fall. So they are propping it up. Here, have some drones. That is a big part of this. It is a huge part of it. Now, could they do something to stop that? Yes. Question then becomes, and here's the third part, are you willing to do what's necessary in order to stop it? Because let's just call a spade a spade. If they invaded with troops and they pushed inland and secured land and got in far enough that they could make sure that the coast could no longer be threatened because they had secured and locked down those areas militarily, yeah, then they could reopen it. But the administration has to consider, do you want to do boots on the ground? And do you want to do a full invasion? Because so far, the answer to that's been no. The closest thing is the consideration of taking Carg Island. But that seems to be, if they do it, a limited operation with a very specific goal for a plot of land. that they wish to control and that's it. Invading Iran is not part of that list. So that's one of the issues, I would say. Rick is with us now, though. Rick, how are you? Hey, fine, Matt. How are you? Fabulous. What I wanted to say is... You know, everybody tries to pretend that socialism is legitimate and all this. But did anybody ever look at the fact that it's a criminal enterprise? One group of people steal the money of another group of people in the name of the people, but they are still committing theft because if those people resist, they get... taking care of. Well, that's the major flaw of socialism in my book is that it requires force to enforce. If you ever had a free society, socialism would melt away because people would ultimately be making decisions in their own self-interest rather than for the collective good. And when they do that, if you were going to enforce this flat society with no hierarchy and no winners and losers and no success and failure and whatnot, then you would have to do it at the point of a gun. And that's always where it devolves to. And that's called communism, the morbidly diseased child of socialism. And the thing is about all of this.

is that the communist socialists have killed more people than the Nazis ever could have. Consider them now, 70 million, I mean, alone, and of course Stalin was a hero too. Why people swallow this? I mean, they all call Trump a Nazi. Why doesn't he call them communists, which they are? I just don't know. I think he doesn't do it because in this, sadly, in this modern era, that doesn't have the same connotation of bad as, you know, it probably should. Honestly, I mean, I think that's the real trick here is that you call someone, and thanks for the Calderick, you call somebody a socialist or a communist. It's been overused so much, and I actually blame the political right in the United States for this. I really actually do. They have so overused the label of socialists because it carried punch back in the post-World War II era. especially when you got into like the 80s and the 90s and what. Socialism was a dirty word. And so if you said you are a socialist to someone, it was a way of basically spooking people out of being supportive of them. So they used it for basically any Democrat who ever said something they didn't like. And so now the distinction between what actual communism is and what actual socialism is and why it's bad. And now that it's actually showing itself for real in this country, When you see that kind of thing happen, but the country at large has been desensitized to how bad it is because people who really weren't were called it for a long time. I mean, I have plenty of criticisms about my friends on the left, you know, from Al Gore all the way to today, right? But. For most of the post-World War II era, actual socialism in the United States, in terms of elected Democrats that were actually making proposals for stuff that was socialistic, was rather limited. Rather limited. And I think a lot of this comes down to a misunderstanding of what socialism is and even is. Socialism is communal ownership. That is the hallmark of it. It is basically the community owning the means of production. And in so doing, running it in an egalitarian way. Now, is it a generous welfare state, a socialistic redistribution scheme? You can say it is. You can say it is, but I would tell you that the Nordic countries that people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hold up as these hallmarks of socialist experiments that have been very successful. are very, very much not socialist. They have private enterprise, private ownership, private property rights. They have capitalistic markets. They have capitalistic functioning markets too with, you know, actually not that many interventions in the market, believe it or not, but they have a generous welfare state. They tax high and they do redistribute. So that is a cousin of it. I will not, you know, don't misunderstand me. It's a cousin of it. But it's not the same thing.

Because what we're seeing today in America is much more dangerous, much more dangerous than that.