Latest / The Junto Podcast / E69: Republican Contradictions - Liberty Talk, Power Grabs
Transcript
- 0:10Hello, America. Welcome to the Junto podcast, where we promote the practical
- 0:14applications of critical thinking and bold creativity.
- 0:18I'm your host, Edgar Mills. Thank you for.
- 0:29Hello, America. Welcome back to what I think is episode 69.
- 0:36Yep. So, in light of my last episode, a friend,
- 0:44pointed out that, hey, maybe you are to think about bringing up some conservative
- 0:48Republican contradictions.
- 0:51And, hey, that was already on deck. Right? That was already on deck.
- 0:59You know, classifying myself politically, you guys know I'm a libertarian,
- 1:04that's where I live politically, but I mean,
- 1:11if I had to say I lean one way or the other, I do lean a little more conservative
- 1:15than progressive there, but that doesn't mean the Republicans are blameless.
- 1:23We're talking about contradictions and hypocrisy We're not talking about who's
- 1:27right, wrong, or otherwise necessarily We're just talking about contradictions,
- 1:33And Republicans are not short of contradiction,
- 1:40So, let's get to it Well, their stated platform is limited government Fiscal
- 1:47responsibility They claim to care about individual liberty.
- 1:56They do stand on solid, strong defense structure, defense apparatus.
- 2:04And they say they stand on free markets.
- 2:10Well, those ideals seem to diverge in practice a little bit.
- 2:17And we can talk about stuff as obvious as the 2024, Trump's 2024 campaign.
- 2:25If you guys remember, man, they were leaning heavily on libertarian rhetoric.
- 2:31I mean, they were using libertarian talking points.
- 2:36They were befriending libertarians.
- 2:40And I mean like skeptical of, you heard the word deep state about a million
- 2:46times and surveillance state and the intelligence apparatus.
- 2:52So the Trump campaign was running on like, hey, we're very skeptical of these things.
- 2:59No new wars.
- 3:02Because that's a libertarian thing, right? Non-aggression principle.
- 3:06Libertarians don't want any wars overseas.
- 3:09If we've got to fight war on American soil, yeah, and then you can talk about nuance, right?
- 3:15We fight overseas so we don't have to fight at home and that kind of thing.
- 3:18But that's here and there.
- 3:21They introduced shortly after that campaign the Doge Department of Governmental Efficiency.
- 3:29I was fully on board with that. Oh, man, was I.
- 3:33Anyway, and you see what happened post-election, right?
- 3:38So we're not going to belabor that. We'll get into the details,
- 3:41but we all know that election campaign rhetoric is, everybody accepts it.
- 3:49Everybody knows and accepts that
- 3:51what is said in a campaign is not what's going to happen in real life.
- 3:56And it's too bad that we've accepted it.
- 4:00Really, it's too bad. Anyway.
- 4:04So, number one and most important to me, all right, I've mentioned these guys on here a few times.
- 4:12Banish Big Brother is a podcast, and it's a libertarian, for sure,
- 4:18libertarian podcast, but Zach and Elizabeth...
- 4:24Who operate that podcast are very knowledgeable and they do the research and
- 4:30they're very passionate about mass surveillance, state surveillance on the people.
- 4:39So the conservatives, the Republicans who were criticizing the deep state and
- 4:47the deep state abuses and,
- 4:51abuse of the Fourth Amendment, which all the surveillance is exactly an abuse
- 4:56of the Fourth Amendment for sure.
- 4:59And they talked all about the skepticism of these things. Well,
- 5:04let's look back in time just a little bit.
- 5:07But September 11, 2001 was a tragic, tragic event in U.S. history.
- 5:15Twin Towers were destroyed. 3,000 plus human beings were killed.
- 5:23What immediately followed that? Immediately followed that. Yeah, the Patriot Act.
- 5:30And that opened the floodgate for surveillance authorities and the FISA process
- 5:40and all that stuff, wide open, unchecked.
- 5:46And here we are in 2026 And still 25 years A quarter century later,
- 5:55There's still all these FISA, Section 702 Blah blah blah And they keep reauthorizing,
- 6:04Congress keeps reauthorizing Well who's in charge Of the government right now,
- 6:11The Republicans are in charge Of the government right now.
- 6:16But never mind that, it has bipartisan backing, right? The FISA warrants have vast bipartisan.
- 6:25The government, whatever red or blue, they want the power over you and they
- 6:29want to be able to spy on you for whatever reason.
- 6:35So, you know, in Donald Trump's first term, look, I don't care what you think about Donald Trump.
- 6:44The Obama administration did him wrong and the Biden administration did him wrong.
- 6:48No doubt about it. Whether you like the guy or not, what do you think?
- 6:52He's a pompous ass car salesman, used car salesman or not.
- 6:57They abused powers to try and set that guy up for various reasons, for any reason.
- 7:04And so Trump criticized it for being used against him. And then here we are now.
- 7:12He himself was pushing for a clean reauthorization of the 702,
- 7:17the FISA, Section 702, with minimal, if any, new restrictions.
- 7:24And they keep building up the intelligence gathering apparatus.
- 7:28And I'll drop Palantir to immigrate into law enforcement.
- 7:35Palantir, as I knew it, was a tool for synthesizing intelligence on a battlefield.
- 7:43So it just enables further abuse by the government.
- 7:47So the contradiction, what are the contradictions? Well, we'll see.
- 7:53Anyway, all the government speaks in rhetoric anyway, right?
- 7:58And you don't hear many people, with the exception of the libertarian-leaning,
- 8:04guys, talk about individual liberty in government.
- 8:11Now, I know and respect people, well, kind of on both sides,
- 8:15less so the Democrat, but...
- 8:19The guys who talk about individual liberty in Congress and Senate,
- 8:24Thomas Massey and Rand Paul, Justin Amash back in the day,
- 8:30those guys are shit on by both sides of the aisle because they don't back all
- 8:38this expansive intelligence gathering stuff.
- 8:43And they'll sell it under the guise of terrorism and foreign invasions and whatnot. Whatever, man.
- 8:53So when surveillance targets the conservatives for political and campaign purposes, it's bad.
- 9:00And then when in office, suddenly it's okay. It's good.
- 9:07And you know what the conservatives love to say? And this burns me,
- 9:12it burns me, it burns me up.
- 9:15If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
- 9:20Is that the bar for privacy? Well, if you're doing nothing wrong,
- 9:24you have nothing to worry about. Oh, man.
- 9:29So, again, there are libertarian-leaning Republicans or semi-conservatives out
- 9:34there who put emphasis on privacy and government restraint.
- 9:40Government controls, not individual controls.
- 9:45But all this stuff is always sold under the guise of national security, always.
- 9:52And even individuals, right, non-governmental people, right-wing activist types,
- 9:59they're not as loud and vocal as the left-wing activist types,
- 10:03and for different reasons.
- 10:06But they, well, sure, they support the military, but they kind of align with
- 10:14some of these hyper-conservative sort of think tank types as well. And.
- 10:21They think that they're being hyper-intellectual when they advocate for these
- 10:27intelligence gathering tools without putting any real solid parameters on them.
- 10:38So, are they hypocrites or they just don't care? They want to live in a controlled state.
- 10:43I don't know, man. Now, I always bust balls on the left.
- 10:47You know, one of the things that lefties love to say, they say,
- 10:51oh, it's going to become handmaid's tale with the hyper-conservative Christian types taking over.
- 11:00And I tell them that they're so full of it when they say that.
- 11:03But there are some right-wing activists out there.
- 11:08The surveillance, that's the tool. That's the tool to further the control.
- 11:17They can watch you and hear you no matter what, no matter where,
- 11:22and recall anything they want.
- 11:26That's where it is right there. The left loves it too, by the way.
- 11:30Yeah, they do. We're talking about the right.
- 11:34So on mass surveillance and surveillance apparatus and intelligence apparatus,
- 11:39I think the conservatives, generally speaking, are hypocrites, hypocrites.
- 11:45Yeah. And if you're a conservative, if you're a tried and true Republican, hit me up on that.
- 11:52And because it's not that the technology exists, I don't oppose the technology existing.
- 12:00I oppose the willingness to use it Not in accordance with the Constitution Well,
- 12:08it's technology, it's different The Constitution doesn't really want to bullshit,
- 12:13At least it's an obvious Fourth Amendment issue If not multiple others Alright,
- 12:21what's next for the conservatives?
- 12:23The things the conservatives love a lot Well, foreign policy in general And
- 12:30specifically, what we hear in the 2024 campaign, I think he said, no new wars.
- 12:37You remember George H.W. Bush?
- 12:41Was it George H.W. Bush that said, no new taxes? Did we get new taxes?
- 12:47No new wars. Did we get a new war?
- 12:53These days, look, George Orwell, man, you know, it's so almost cliche to refer
- 12:59to George Orwell, but 1984,
- 13:05was, you know, it, it could have been called 2001 or 2020 or whatever.
- 13:14It's all happening. Everything in that book is happening.
- 13:19It's happening piecemeal from different factions but it's happening,
- 13:25and what did George Orwell say wars weren't meant to be won they were meant
- 13:32to be perpetual in a perpetual state of war,
- 13:38the conservatives seemed to love it hey man our troops I'm all for them I love
- 13:44our troops I was a troop Uh,
- 13:49all we do is send troops to go die for.
- 13:56Not only political causes, man, but I think, I think the, the,
- 13:59the, the problem is, is we don't get the full read in on why we're doing the things we're doing.
- 14:07So the troops who go and fight for the bigger cause don't get the honest assessment
- 14:13of what the bigger cause is.
- 14:15Therefore they can't. make an informed decision on whether or not they choose
- 14:21to go fight for that cause.
- 14:24That's what I think is happening these days.
- 14:28So, yeah, the Republicans say, oh, forever wars, get us out of the war.
- 14:33They talk about the financial cost of war.
- 14:39But then we get in there and it's bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,
- 14:42bomb. Those bombs have a price tag attached to them, folks.
- 14:46And every life, never mind the moral factor of a life being lost.
- 14:53Now, look, I'm a patriot. I'm an American. And I don't think one single American
- 15:00life is worth 10,000 Iranian lives.
- 15:04That's just on a war scale.
- 15:09Correction, 10,000 Iranian lives aren't worth one American life when it comes to war.
- 15:16There are so many different ways to do a thing. There are so many different
- 15:20ways to accomplish a thing.
- 15:23And the shock and awe and the big giant bombs and everything and then you hear
- 15:28conservatives what will they say well just blow the country off the map.
- 15:36Yeah that might do it that might do it but it also might just create 8 million
- 15:46more problems bigger problems,
- 15:50now you can say well that's That's exerting our American strength and showing
- 15:57our dominance in the world.
- 15:59We are dominant in the world, that's true. And if we erase the moral factors
- 16:06of decimating an entire population and turning Iran into a glass factory.
- 16:17Okay. But then, I mean, at that point, the rhetoric from the left about mass
- 16:23murder and genocide kind of becomes true.
- 16:26It's instant genocide. You drop a giant nuke right in the middle of Iran.
- 16:32Anyway, my point is this. There's a lot of ways to do a thing.
- 16:36There's surgical ways to do things.
- 16:38The U.S. military and intelligence apparatus has some of the most highly trained dudes on the planet.
- 16:46And believe it or not, there's some highly strategic thinkers and smart,
- 16:51smart, smart dudes and women who have the capacity to solve complex problems.
- 17:01But it's always politics, man, always politics that is the obstacle. Conservatives love it.
- 17:09Yeah, conservatives love it.
- 17:12They say they hate intervention into foreign issues.
- 17:17But what happened? Well, let's see.
- 17:21When George W. Bush was in office, they specifically, even word for word,
- 17:27said that they opposed nation building.
- 17:33That's all we did for 20 years.
- 17:39Oh, man.
- 17:44How many billions of dollars, possibly trillions, if you look at Afghanistan
- 17:49and Iraq together over the course of 20 years?
- 17:52How many trillions of dollars are just poured into what?
- 17:59Okay, well, what is Afghanistan now?
- 18:04Yeah, man. Well, in 2024 campaign, again, he criticized heavily.
- 18:10Trump criticized heavily the entanglements and the way that the withdrawal from
- 18:16Afghanistan happened, by the way, which, by the way, should be a criminal.
- 18:23It should be tried and everybody involved in it should be tried as criminals.
- 18:28The way that happened was all wrong. and I'm not a strategic thinker and I'm
- 18:34telling you that was all wrong.
- 18:38And if you don't believe it, and I've always said, Hey man, if it was me,
- 18:41I'll just take my ball and go home.
- 18:43Not frigging literally, right? You got to phase that stuff out.
- 18:47The vacuum. Well, anyway, what's happened is the vacuum that happened and it's worth criticizing.
- 18:54So when you're on a campaign trail and you're criticizing it and it's good and
- 18:57right. But then what happens?
- 19:00You get off the campaign trail. You get elected and then you start doing.
- 19:09Start considering the needs of other countries alongside or above your own and
- 19:15start going into operations against other various countries for various reasons
- 19:21to support various people.
- 19:24And then you start talking about peace through strength, and that's sort of
- 19:28right, but easily abused.
- 19:33And then it costs. Every military action costs, costs, costs, costs. And who pays it?
- 19:41Well, the government, for some reason, thinks that we owe them money, the government.
- 19:47And I'll go back to the old school taxation and theft.
- 19:51We pay for everything the government does, the government provides.
- 19:58We pay for the military. We pay for every single bomb, every JDAM,
- 20:03every hellfire, every 7-6-2 by 5-1 round. We pay for.
- 20:12So promises, the libertarian-esque promises to restrain our spending and our
- 20:19foreign policy and focus domestically, right?
- 20:23We got homeless veterans and this and that.
- 20:27And meanwhile, we're sending billions of dollars to every country on the planet
- 20:31just about to include countries that hate us, literally.
- 20:37That's what's going on. And conservatives will criticize the foreign aid,
- 20:43but then they will praise the influence.
- 20:48Well, you don't get influence just through firepower.
- 20:52You don't get influence just through firepower. You got to buy the influence.
- 21:00It's a very mafioso sort of cycle there.
- 21:04And then the money and then the influence that we are attempting to buy,
- 21:07we ain't getting very much influence with it.
- 21:11And clearly, just like on the left where there's multiple factions that have
- 21:15different thoughts about different things, so on the right.
- 21:21The neocons out there, they love foreign intervention. They love to get in the mix.
- 21:26The CIA loves getting up in other countries' business and trying to export democracy,
- 21:34or controllable political figures, really, is what I think.
- 21:38They love it. And there's neocons. They love it.
- 21:43Then you got your populists, though, who prioritize America first, right?
- 21:49And never mind the slogan, America first or MAGA or whatever.
- 21:53Never mind that. I'm not talking about that shit.
- 21:56America first policies, that should be the standard.
- 22:01How does this affect us first? Not how does it affect someone else?
- 22:06And then what famously though, within the conservative ranks,
- 22:11within the Republican ranks, what happens is, is you have these conservative type think tanks.
- 22:19It kind of happens on the left, too, but in a different way.
- 22:21But you have these conservative-type think tanks, and then those people,
- 22:26eventually, they'll start holding cabinet positions.
- 22:30And they're the advisors who are pushing all these bizarro policies,
- 22:36whether they're interventionists or what.
- 22:39And that's how you got Dick Cheney and Kellogg Brown and Root.
- 22:47Everything from dropping bombs
- 22:48to cleaning shitters and, and war zones and making all the money off it.
- 22:55So private activists, they, they can wiggle their way to, to have influence and they do often.
- 23:05And also those private activists, that probably comes with money,
- 23:07right? They, they make these political action committees first to be able to,
- 23:13collect up a bunch of money, and then they buy their way into a cabinet position.
- 23:19This is the Republican way.
- 23:22What else? I always say that Republicans and Democrats are, and not me only,
- 23:27I mean, it's a popular phrase out there, that they're two sides of the same coin,
- 23:33or that they are the right and left feather of the same bird.
- 23:38Well, allegedly, Republicans promote the free market and,
- 23:45limited intervention, government intervention over these like protectionist
- 23:52sort of tariffs and stuff like that.
- 23:56That's good. I'm a free market man. I'm laissez-faire capitalism,
- 24:00minimal government oversight, minimal government interference with the free market.
- 24:07I think the market is a natural thing.
- 24:12And what comes from the market unmolested, what comes from the market when it
- 24:17is unmolested is natural and correct.
- 24:21That's what I think.
- 24:23But once in control.
- 24:26The game is to keep control. So now we start subsidizing this or putting tariffs
- 24:35on that, and it doesn't let the free market.
- 24:39Now, look, you can argue that we are in an unfair battlefield here because places
- 24:46like China I don't play by the same rules that we do.
- 24:50But I can tell you this, the majority of those rules are self-imposed.
- 24:55So, yeah, I'd say generally speaking that was, and the Republicans kind of held
- 24:59to that for a long time. But,
- 25:03since 2000, since the 2000s, no. Nope.
- 25:10They start using tariffs heavily, not just as leverage, you know what I mean?
- 25:16Not just, but as tools to try to control and stay on top.
- 25:23And what do all those things do? It just drives up the cost of everything we
- 25:27consume as the little people.
- 25:31For the contradiction, the broader contradiction is if you are conservative
- 25:38and because you're guys in charge, you think tariffs and regulations are good.
- 25:46Contradiction with yourself. Pure free market principles do not have government interference.
- 25:53Government does not pick winners and losers.
- 25:56Tariffs raise costs. That's the way it is.
- 26:01Now, whether or not you're willing collectively, all right, well,
- 26:05first of all, there is no collective. You don't speak for me and I don't speak for you.
- 26:09So let's get that square.
- 26:13However, some people may be willing to accept a higher cost of gas or food,
- 26:21or homes because it costs more to build, because there's tariffs on things that,
- 26:28now the price of everything has gone up.
- 26:31But those tariffs kind of go along with kind of centralized planning and centralized
- 26:36control versus a decentralized free market. It's a contradiction.
- 26:42Now people love to invoke Reagan I do too I mean at least he was.
- 26:49Mostly about free trade and against sort of protectionism.
- 26:56And then you got the supporters, the people out there.
- 27:01So the MAGA red hat populist sort of factions, yeah, they want to prioritize
- 27:08American made this and that. And I do too. I think that's good.
- 27:14But they want to do it via protectionists.
- 27:19If our factories can't compete in a free market, then we've got to impose artificial
- 27:26means onto them to help them stay competitive.
- 27:31That's not the free market. Anyway, so, yeah, I'm not an economist.
- 27:38Clearly, I can barely do math. But you can't have your cake and eat it,
- 27:44too. It can't be both ways.
- 27:47We can't have American made and America first and then call ourselves a free market.
- 27:53I made a comment on a post the other day about cronyism versus capitalism.
- 27:59And everything that the progressive left bemoans about capitalists, it all requires...
- 28:09A government component. I can be a capitalist and not have any influence whatsoever.
- 28:18And then I can go bribe a politician to make policy favorable to me.
- 28:24And then boom, there it is. Well, it took that politician making policy,
- 28:30right? It took that for my, he could have just turned me away.
- 28:35So it's not capitalism. It's not even capitalists who are ambitious.
- 28:41It's government, people who decide what goes on, policy gets written.
- 28:46It's those people with weak constitutions and weak integrity that are willing
- 28:51to play along, to get favor, to get votes, that kind of thing. Crony, cronyism.
- 28:59That's what all the progressives are bemoaning. They just don't want to call it by what it is.
- 29:04They want to call it capitalism. Late-stage capitalism is failing. Bullshit.
- 29:10Shit, where am I at? Late-stage capitalism.
- 29:17What is late-stage socialism? Damn, I'm talking about conservatives and suddenly
- 29:21I'm over here jamming on progressives.
- 29:25I can't help it.
- 29:28So all that stuff goes along with limited government, right? Limited bureaucracy.
- 29:34That's what the conservatives say they want. Limited government, limited bureaucracy.
- 29:39But the institutional realities are not that. That's not what they produce.
- 29:45They were all very skeptical. They came up with Doge. One of the best ideas
- 29:49in government ever. Department of Governmental Efficiency.
- 29:54A small surgical team of humans to audit every government three-letter agency and sub-agency.
- 30:06From the White House all the way down and cut the fat could have saved probably trillions of dollars.
- 30:16It was such an awesome campaign promise.
- 30:21And it started working, but they cut it away.
- 30:25Unnecessary regulations, waste fraud and abuse, foreign aid.
- 30:33That was good. That's what they told us they wanted.
- 30:37That's what the Republicans said. What about that fiscal restraint?
- 30:42Where are we at on that fiscal restraint? has anybody audited the fed lately,
- 30:48somebody audited the irs lately and made any meaningful action taking any meaningful
- 30:54action against the fraud waste and abuse or incompetence,
- 30:59that should be added in fraud waste abuse,
- 31:03we won't call it incompetence fraud waste abuse negligence,
- 31:08that's what it should be the office you don't want to doge because it's got
- 31:13a connection with Elon Musk, the Office of Fraud, Waste, Abuse,
- 31:18and Negligence. That's what we need.
- 31:22But they went the opposite. They went the opposite.
- 31:27Spending more money more money they reduce any any of these what's called entitlements,
- 31:33they haven't reduced any long-term sort of bureaucracy,
- 31:39they just back the business as usual that's what they do so what does that mean
- 31:44is the machine stronger than the people running it,
- 31:47you just got to hop in right along do your insider trading so you can get your net worth up,
- 31:5550, 100 million and then ride it until the ride's over then you go off and write
- 32:03a book and do speaking tours at liberal colleges.
- 32:11Money. So data collection, well, the data centers are the hot topic, right?
- 32:18But those data centers go along to support a data collection.
- 32:24So for all the people who hate on data centers, there's a deeper reason.
- 32:27It's not just that it costs, runs our power bill up and our water bill,
- 32:32like probably that for sure.
- 32:35But all those data collection centers, if they're collecting on 360-plus million
- 32:41human beings, you've got to have someplace to put all that.
- 32:46The right, the right wing, that's what's going on with the right.
- 32:50That's what's going on with the right. Now, I'm notably not speaking about Christians, and why?
- 32:58First of all, for whatever you out there who are non-religious or non-political,
- 33:04And especially for those of you who are leftist, progressive,
- 33:09hyper-LGBTQIA+.
- 33:16Whatever it is, not all Christians are goddang Republicans.
- 33:23Now, by definition, all Christians ought to be conservative,
- 33:28but there's a difference between Republican and conservative.
- 33:32Republicans claim that they support family values, and that may be sort of generally
- 33:39true, but policy-wise, you don't really see that.
- 33:48All Christians are Republicans. There are, and it blows my mind.
- 33:52In fact, my Aunt Arlene is a Democrat, and I love her dearly.
- 33:59And she's one of the smartest women I know and talented and caring.
- 34:07But she's a Democrat. Okay, well. And she's a Christian and has been all her
- 34:13life, as far as I all my life.
- 34:18So you can't conflate the two don't don't conflate the two if you are you're
- 34:23not being a critical thinker,
- 34:25so don't they're handmaid's tale that ain't going to happen you know where that's
- 34:30going to happen handmaid's tale that's going to happen from the left but it's
- 34:34going to be polar opposite from,
- 34:37your little concubine, you know, handmade wife, uh,
- 34:43baby factory. It's going to be the opposite of that.
- 34:46It's, uh, I don't even want to go into that.
- 34:52So all this anti-overreach, minimal government efficiency in government, all the,
- 35:00all that messaging sort of brought
- 35:03conservatives together behind that message, and it did effectively.
- 35:08I mean, Trump won, probably despite ongoing campaign fraud, or not campaign
- 35:16fraud, election fraud, but governing, actually physically governing, doing the job.
- 35:26There's a certain functionality required for these institutions.
- 35:32Security has got to, that's always a thing, no matter what your,
- 35:36what brand, no matter what your security is a thing, it's necessary.
- 35:41Border enforcement is a thing. It's necessary. What do you think it's necessary or not?
- 35:48It's necessary. We need to know who's coming and going in this country.
- 35:51How you do it, that's another episode.
- 35:56But whatever services the government claims to provide, the government doesn't provide a service.
- 36:01It facilitates a service that you pay for.
- 36:05But for that to happen functionally, you know, conservatives have got to,
- 36:11yeah, they've got to compromise their whatever their rhetoric was.
- 36:14They've got to compromise it.
- 36:16And not only do they compromise it, oh, boy, do they. They expand it.
- 36:22Because when you're in charge, man, you want to expand, expand, expand.
- 36:25Build an apparatus that supports your staying in power.
- 36:31And your hard-right activists, the activists out, not the politicians,
- 36:34the hard-right activists out there, arguably most of those are like government agencies anyway.
- 36:42Most of them are, I suspect.
- 36:45But they use those to interject, just like the progressives have paid agitators,
- 36:52which are probably government agencies also.
- 36:56The hard right has paid agitators, but they're on the government employment list there.
- 37:05And they push the anti-establishment rhetoric and all that stuff to challenge
- 37:10incumbents that they're trying to get out or whatever.
- 37:13And they talk about challenging the bureaucracy. They say they don't want the bureaucracy.
- 37:18And then once they're in power, man, once their guy's in power, mom's the word.
- 37:26Practical need to keep the beast alive, the beast, the government beast,
- 37:33a.k.a. the self-licking ice cream.
- 37:36It exists to exist.
- 37:39It doesn't do anything very positive when it comes to individual liberty.
- 37:46So these little contradictions, mainly I was on the government mostly there,
- 37:52and all variants of these down to private, personal levels, these are longstanding,
- 38:00and they flow, and they ebb, and they change a little.
- 38:04And I'm only really talking since 2000, you know, but even prior to that,
- 38:10I think politics has always been greasy.
- 38:13But I think since 2000 or so for the past 20, 25, 30 years or so.
- 38:22It's changing for the worse is what I think the government is. It's growing for sure.
- 38:28If we do an analysis of the size of the government now versus 1996,
- 38:34it's probably pretty significant.
- 38:35If we look at numbers of budgets and whatnot from 1996 to now,
- 38:40it's probably pretty significant.
- 38:45So they're not new. They're just getting exacerbated.
- 38:50Like all things, they're getting exacerbated, even due to social media, even in politics.
- 38:58You got Cortez all over the social medias running or suck.
- 39:07So never mind campaign probably. Yeah, campaign.
- 39:12The world's complex. The threats exist. All the things exist.
- 39:19Not that I necessarily, just like on the left, I don't disagree that poor people should be fed.
- 39:28I don't disagree that poor people should be housed. Homeless people should be housed.
- 39:35I don't disagree that sick people should be tended to medically.
- 39:40I just disagree that it should be the government initiating it and paying for it.
- 39:45And that's the same with all these right-wing governmental surveillance programs.
- 39:53Now, most, well, not most, a lot of the overreach is within the intelligence
- 39:59and military apparatus. And no, of course, we don't have,
- 40:04excuse me, we don't have a private version of that. Even though every state
- 40:09should have a private militia, I believe.
- 40:12There's not a private version of that. So it's easy to use that,
- 40:18for the overreach. So it's easy to say things.
- 40:23It's easy to speak in ideals. And then it turns out it's not so easy to back that up. Well,
- 40:34it's easy enough to back it up if you have the integrity to back it up.
- 40:39I say that the majority of politicians lack that integrity.
- 40:46The realities of governing, yeah, for sure, are probably, I don't want to say
- 40:53overwhelming, but they're probably, the realities of governing is probably pretty tough.
- 40:59And I'm not giving any free pass on anybody. They go into politics, what do you expect?
- 41:04I mean, don't expect hard things not to be hard.
- 41:08So mainly we're talking about the right and their sort of.
- 41:15Neocon, war hawk interventionists versus kind of nationalism,
- 41:21America first, protectionism versus free trade. So even then,
- 41:28it's all contradictory.
- 41:31It's all contradictory. Both parties have these contradictions, politically speaking.
- 41:38Like I said, you don't even have to designate red or blue.
- 41:44You just talk political parties, and you can say all these things,
- 41:50and it would be accurate, especially when it comes to campaign promises versus reality.
- 41:57So that's where I was at. That's where I was at on the conservative contradictions.
- 42:02I didn't want to go into life, right? We can talk about abortion and stuff like that on another episode.
- 42:11Because that's—.
- 42:14A Republican platform, right? Anti-abortion, but there's a lot of nuance there that doesn't bear this.
- 42:21And so as I'm going on here, I got a whole series of contradictions that I'm
- 42:30going to post periodically.
- 42:31Now I'm trying not to go dark. I'm going to try not to go too dark all the time,
- 42:37even though it seems to go that way sometimes.
- 42:40However, if you got a topic, right? If you got beef, or if you think incorrect
- 42:46or partially correct, or I got something completely wrong or backwards, do hit me up.
- 42:52Edgar Mills at thejuntopodcast.com.
- 42:55I'm happy to analyze myself.
- 42:58Yeah, I'm happy to take in new information, analyze it, and determine whether
- 43:02or not I need to change my mind or not, or make a retraction.
- 43:08Even though I'm not an official news outlet, I don't think that's necessary.
- 43:13This is just my opinions, folks. Just my opinions. So anyway,
- 43:18thank you all for listening to this.
- 43:21I hope it satisfied some of you who get mad at me for going hard right libertarianish.
- 43:28I'm definitely not hard right, I guess. I don't know.
- 43:32All right, folks. OspreyshootingSolutions.com. Man, we got a lot of stuff between
- 43:38now and the end of October, please check it out.
- 43:41Coming first, we have a pistol workshop. I want to say August 8th.
- 43:46Coming next, we have a wild card day, and that is August 22nd.
- 43:55September 12th, we have another armed self-defense force-on-force scenario-based,
- 44:02training course, and that's always a very good one. That's a good one.
- 44:07And then October's full of competitions and there's a dynamic everyday carry course.
- 44:13All right. So give it a listen and please give to the Help a Homie Fund.