Top 3 milestones for conservatism in the last decade

And then we would be basically needing Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and John Roberts on every decision. Which, look, John Roberts is 50-50 at best. We live with an embarrassment of riches on the Supreme Court, and we don't think about it could have been Merrick Garland instead of Neil Gorsuch. A lesser majority leader, someone with a weaker spine, would not have done that. And I think for the conservative movement, the sea change from Merrick Garland to Neil Gorsuch and the framing of the 2016 election, I don't think you can possibly overstate the impact that has had on the conservative movement in the last 10 years. Number two, the number two best thing that has happened to the conservative movement in the last decade. And I know some of you are going to like be shocked at this answer was COVID. Now, let me tell you a little bit about it. First of all, there is what COVID did, and then there was the reaction to COVID. I know most people are like, oh, COVID was terrible. We couldn't go anywhere. We couldn't do anything. You know how many people their lives got better during or after COVID? And I know, I know, I'm here and say, you, oh, I, but people died. Yeah, people died. I understand that. People die every year for the flu, and I don't pick that as my number two things. But think about this. Our entire culture went very insular. Families reconnected again. I know for a lot of people I've talked to, they're like, it allowed me to refocus on what my goals were. We'd gotten so busy with travel baseball and all of these school activities and we were just running in circles. And all of a sudden, we had time to just sit and reflect and be a family again. It allowed us to figure out who our real friends were. It allows us to get projects done around the house or to get in shape. You know how many people got in physically better shape during COVID? Because suddenly they're like, man, we got nothing else to do. I mean, the amount of gyms that got sold and people that started working out at home, it led to the growth of like a whole culture of people being like, oh, I can lose this weight now. And I know something like, oh, that was a terrible thing. I actually think it was pretty good. But the real reason I pick COVID as number two. is that it was a wake-up call to those on the right to see what happened. You know, for a long time leading up to 2020, we on the right were just like, oh, well, the federal government's terrible and, you know, all the, that's our enemy. And we got to be for guns and we got to be for pro-life stuff and that's it. And COVID was a shock and awe campaign of the conservative movement that the extensive creep, the mission creep of the left. could be done by state governments, by local governments, by school districts, by a variety of different things. And, you know, look, the 2021 year was terrible. They were shutting down churches and stuff like that. But it allowed us, it gave us sort of an eye-opening look at the dangers of out-of-control government on all levels of our society.

health departments or or city councils or county executives would be like you know well we just have to shut the schools down forever i mean we talk about this whole generation of kids that lost out on a year of school essentially it was predominantly worse in the states the longer they kept the school slow and so it gives us real-time data to look through and be like oh well it's pretty clear that that was a horrible decision It also changed the way, you know, we had these crazy rules and we just accepted them. They mean like, oh, well, you got to walk one way down this aisle and the other way down the next aisle, which had no bearing in reality. We saw the extensive power of the National Institute of Health and CDC and all that. And it allowed us say, oh, we need to check these organizations. We just stop them from doing something. I view COVID as a total wake-up call to those on the right. A group of people that can say, oh, we for decades missed all of this slow build on the left. And now we've seen it. Now we've seen what they're going to do with it. And we need to stop it. And I would argue objectively, we have undone pretty much every rule from COVID that we saw that was damaging, whether it's churches can't meet in person, employers can mandate the shot, everybody has to wear masks, you got to, you know, six feet distant, all of the crazy, crazy stuff, it's all gone. We have undone every single, there's nobody today that's advocating, oh, we should do school at home. That seemed to work real well. Nobody. There's nobody like, oh, we should shut down business and not let anybody go. Nobody's doing that. We have legitimately undone every part of that, but also allows us now whenever you see something that pops up in the news that looks like a COVID-era regulation, everybody immediately responds in an intense negative way. And I don't think, I don't think the Republican Party conservatives were thinking about that prior to 2020. So look, I know that COVID had its bad things, obviously. But I think candidly, the way it brought families back together and the way it changed the way conservatives look at local governments with more suspicion now, I think is a very beneficial thing to the conservative movement. The number one thing is having to the conservative movement over the past 10 years. And I know you are going to think this is controversial, but it's the election of President Trump. And I know I don't like the war in Iran. I don't like, I didn't like the fact that he had Anthony Fauci in the role during COVID. I don't like any of that stuff. I totally. But I don't think there's anybody that you can look at that has done more things to advance the conservative agenda than Donald Trump. And it's not just, look, he had a big tax cut his first term, big tax cut his second term. Yep, so did George W. Bush show to Roder Wrigan. That's sort of a staple of every Republican president. But let's go beyond that. Think about what Donald Trump has done to the bureaucracy. We are at our, what, our lowest level of federal government workers in like 40 years. Bush never cut employees. In fact, he criticized governor immensely.

Reagan never cut up place to criticize the government immensely. You don't have to go back to Nixon or maybe Eisenhower to see somebody that looked at shrinking the federal workforce. Look at the judges. The judges that Donald Trump has appointed by and large have been some of the most conservative, philosophical, textualist and originals that we've seen in the country's history. Bush had, you know, Republican judges. Reagan, kind of a mixed bag. I mean, and you look at their Supreme Court picks. I mean, Bush gave us a leader who was great and John Roberts, who's milk toast. But Reagan, we had some bad ones during Reagan. I mean, who was the guy from New Hampshire that was a suitor, who's Republicans, Supreme Court Justice in New Hampshire, out of the court, hardcore live, terrible pick. So the record on judges is far better with Trump than it was with Bush or with Reagan. And then you add in all of the other, the executive orders. I mean, Donald Trump undid the executive order almost every Biden era regulation that existed. He undid did Obamacare by removing the individual mandate. Other than the war in Iran, and I get it. I don't like that one either. He has done more things on foreign policy to bring peace around the world than any president in our lifetime. Now, I don't agree with the war on Iran, and I think that's outside of the traditional Trump doctrines, which is why I find it so confusing. But I would argue that, that, I mean, look, he gave us the judges that overturned Roe v. Wade. He gave us the judge, every conservative decision that comes down now, he gives us the judge to do it. His solicitor general now, John Sauer, who went what, like 16 and 1 in the last term, his report, they take stuff on every big conservative case and they win in front of the judges they pick. We have fundamentally transformed the judicial branch from very liberal to definitely lean conservative because of his selections. And on top of that, we've transformed the republic or the system government. We now have Republican House, Republican Senate, Republican president. We had met, I mean, again, you go back to probably Bush's first term. I don't think you ever had that in the second term. But what did he do? One tax cut, and then we just did global war on terror, and that's it. Under Trump, we've done a variety of different things. And specifically, he's utilized the executive order and executive actions far more than George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan did. But I would argue that Donald Trump has done more to advance the conservative agenda, and certainly with the help of a lot of his senators and certainly his cabinet. I mean, if you look at some of the cabinet officials, he's named, they've been fantastic. But I would say in even some of the stuff that conservatives don't like, like tariffs. If you look at it, Donald Trump used tariffs at his first term, not as much the second term, but his first term. Then Biden was like, well, I'm not even going to get rid of those tariffs. And then you look at the second term, I know some people don't like the tariffs. I actually think they've been helpful. We are lowering our trade deficits. And we are, you're starting to see the growth again in manufacturing jobs in the United States. For the first time in my lifetime, you're, you're actually getting net.

positive number of manufacturing jobs growth. And that's a lot because of the big beautiful bill that Trump passed last year that incentivized private corporations to reinvest in American growth, whether it's manufacturing, whatever industry it is. But you're starting to see that the result of that as particularly in the Midwest, in the Rust Belt states, you're seeing those manufacturing jobs start to resure back in the United States of America. So that's my list. The decision to block the Supreme Court back in 2016, COVID-2020, and the election of Donald Trump. And really, I would argue, the zenith of that was the first two years, first year of Donald Trump's second term. But I would argue that portions have happened within both terms that Republicans and conservatives should stand up and be grateful for. And to a greater extent than any past president in my recollection that we've had, certainly since I've been alive. All right. We are going to come back. We got more to go to the show. I'm Elijah Har and this is KWTO.