Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the 234th episode of the Atlas Society Ask. I'm Lawrence Olivo, Senior Project Manager here at the Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit organization introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun and creative ways like animated videos and graphic novels. Today, our CEO Jennifer Grossman has the week off, but I'm excited to have joined with me today Atlas Society senior fellow Robert Tracynski, along with our student programs manager, Abby Perry for a special sort of, of retroactive 2024 year in review. So as always, if you have questions, please put them in the comments, whether you're on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X. And we'll try to get to the many as we can near the end. But to start things off, I'll pass things over to Rob. Thank you both for joining me.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Thanks, Lawrence. Yeah, so the plan here is we're going to do a year in review of various news stories that happened over the over 2024, tee us up for what's going to happen and what the things we're going to look for in 2025. Obviously the, the top thing on the list is the re election or the election again for a second time. It's, it's, it's weird, seems weird to call it a reelection because he wasn't actually in office, but he was in office four years ago. So the election for a second time of Donald Trump, against everybody's expectation, including, by the way, including my own, because, yeah, there's so many things he's done, there's so many unpopular things he's done and said. And in a way what surprised me about this is, you know, the more unpopular things he said, the more things you thought would really be offensive, like the more his base seemed to love him this year. And so just one example of that, that I, that I noticed that that was really sort of, I think in retrospect, the turning point. At the time, it wasn't clear to me, but in retrospect, it was a turning point. And this is in his one and only debate with Kamala Harris where he, it looked like he was sort of goaded into lack of message discipline and went off on this rant about how Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating cats and dogs. And no, the first thing to say is they're not eating cats and dogs. There's no evidence any of this was ever happening. It was this sort of online hysteria that made its way through the online rumor mill, you know, through, through Twitter. I won't, I refuse to call it X through Twitter. And up into the Trump campaign. And then Donald Trump goes and blurts it out in this debate, this thing about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs. That's how horrible this is. And everybody, you know, all the people who follow the news and know that this is story is not remotely true. We were all thinking, oh, what a horrible gaffe. He really blew it. He, he, he lost his message discipline. He let Kamala Harris goad him. And then he, he said this stuff, this completely blatantly not true. It's a hysterical fear mongering about immigrants. But then the thing I notice is we thought that's it. You know, he's gonna, this is gonna be a disaster for him. And his own people, by the way, kind of had this approach, oh, this is a terrible disaster. And then I noticed, you know, in the week or two afterwards, his poll numbers went up, not down. Now her numbers went up because she did a good, had a good, surprisingly good debate performance, but his numbers also went up. And that was, in retrospect, I think that was sort of the turning point. Realizing voters aren't looking for what I think voters would be looking for. There's something else and that this sort of hysterical fear of immigrants and this almost hysterical negativism about America. You know, he, Trump keeps saying we're like a third world country and the economy is terrible, even while it's actually not terrible.
All this stuff that this was resonating with enough voters to potentially put him over the top. And that's exactly what happened. He got just under, just a hair under 50% of the vote more than he got percentage wise last time or, you know, any of the previous two times he ran. So this is the big surprise now to me that the, the news here isn't so much Donald Trump being reelected because presidents have limited power. They rarely get even a small portion of their agenda that they state going in. They rarely get to do even a small portion of it. Except that in this case, the thing that happened this year that I think is more important than the election, and that sort of sets the context for the election, is what I would call as the, the guardrails being knocked down. So we're getting Trump this time, we're getting Trump without the guardrails. And that's in two respects. One is that we know from, you know, people say, oh, his first term, you know, we didn't get do, it wasn't all that bad. He didn't do that much. We could argue about that one way or the other. But one of the things that happened in Trump's first term is he had a lot of people that he, he sort of came in as an unknown quantity and he knew that. And so he appointed a lot of people who are respected figures, respected and established people with, with, with strong reputations and people who were essentially part of the establishment, if you can call it that. Now, the establishment is a very nebulous term, which is why I'm putting in air, in air quotes, basically. It tend to often, often means, it means anybody whose name I recognize and I don't like is the establishment. But he picked people like General James Mattis as his and HR McMaster. And, uh, a lot of, you know, really picked treasury secretaries who were, you know, big names and for working CEOs of big corporations. They were people who were known and established and respected. And as a result of that, Mark, General Kelly is the other one who became his chief of staff for a while. And he picked people who were sort of there to put the brakes on the crazy idea department, right, Because Trump would come up with, he tweets something out, a crazy idea, and he'd get all excited about it and they'd be the one saying, well, no, constitutionally, legally you can't do that. And here are the problems with it, and here are the negative consequences. And it. Now, from Trump's perspective, he viewed that as, oh, this is watering down his agenda. This is the deep state trying to stop me. Now, I found a fascinating study about this, that where somebody looked at that and said, well, actually it wasn't the deep state, deep state that stopped Trump. It was. Or that that, that diluted his agenda. It was the shallow state. It was his own appointees. You know, it wasn't some unappointed people in the bureaucracy, these shadowy figures behind the scenes. It was his own appointees, people he put to positions like chief of staff, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Treasury, et cetera, but who viewed themselves as being sort of the reasonable people who were going to, you know, when Trump had a crazy idea, they weren't just going to salute and say, yes, sir. They were going to, you know, subject it to analysis. And they were going to, if it was unconstitutional, they would warn against the legal problems. So this is, these are all the things that happened. That is this first chairman office. And what he's shown us so far by his, the people he's decided to appoint to various high level cabinet positions, he's shown that that's not going to happen this time. He's going to appoint the people who are Just as crazy as him. Who, who will, who will go with the people who will, who will go with, hear the crazy ideas from him and they'll go with it. And especially people who are loyalists to him. People like, well, Matt Gates was the one that, who was dropped out, but one of the people he tried to put in a Department of Justice. But there's Matt Gates and Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard and people like that who are very much outside the mainstream. And of course, we're not even mentioning RFK Jr.
Putting him at Health and Human Services. So he's basically already indicated to us, I'm going to take the people who are not establishment, people who are anti establishment, you're going to tear everything down. And people who are going to be loyal first of first and foremost, above all to me and, you know, their, their loyalty to the Constitution, to legalities, their attempt to try to sort of rein in things to make them more reasonable. I'm going to resist that. So we're going to get Trump without those guardrails. But then the second thing I reason, I say that is we're getting Trump without guardrails is because of a couple of Supreme Court rulings that happened this year. One was on the 14th amendment. You know, the section three of the 14th amendment says if anyone who's engaged in insurrection against the United States is ineligible to run for office. This was put in after the Civil War to keep basically former Confederates leaders, keep them out of federal office.
But of course, this was applied to, to Trump because of January 6, 2021, the, the, the, the riot at the Capitol in which he played a role. So now if the Supreme Court had ruled against the, with the Supreme Court ruling, it's always how they rule and why they rule is important. And if they had ruled against him saying, well, we're not really sure he engaged in insurrection, that would be one thing. What they did instead is this, we're not really sure how you could even apply this clause. We think Congress had to pass extra legislation. So, so nobody could enforce this essentially was the upshot of it. So in effect, they, they wrote the Section 3 of the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution. They made it a dead letter. So it made it something unenforceable. Then the second thing, the second ruling, big ruling this year was on presidential immunity. And I think this is the, really, this is the craziest Supreme Court ruling I've seen in a long time. Because you think it's a no brainer that of course, presidents aren't immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office because, you know, we have a, we have an elected president, not a king. But that's exactly what they ruled. And the crazy part about the ruling is they said Supreme Court ruled that they divided. You know, the president has his core constitutional responsibilities. And then things that are outside the core and then things that are not, you know, that are purely political or personal, they said, well, he's, he's liable, things are purely political, purely, purely about campaigning or personal activity that he's liable for. He can be prosecuted. But they gave a specific, a special immunity for anything having to do with his core functions. And that, to me is the crazy part, because it's especially in his core functions as president that he has the most power and therefore the most need to have that power checked by the potential threat of prosecution. So, for example, one of the things that, if you look at the ruling, you know, if, if he literally straight up took a bribe in order to pardon someone, right? So I'm going to sell pardons. I got to take a bribe from somebody in order to, in order to issue a presidential pardon. The presidential pardon is in his core responsibility. So he basically be immune from taking a straight up bribe for being prosecuted for that. So it's kind of a crazy ruling. And the thing about that, that makes it even worse is that in the oral arguments about this, now, this case was on a lower level court below the Supreme Court.
There was, there were oral arguments and they, that court ruled against him that he, he doesn't have immunity. And one of the key things in the, in the, the testimony, the oral arguments, there was one of the justices asked, well, look, if, if the president ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival, would he be able to be prosecuted for that? Would he have immunity for that? And the Trump team, basically, the Trump lawyers basically argued, yes, he would have immunity. And that was the sort of the turning point in those arguments in which they, they ruled, no, he doesn't have immunity, because it was clear that you can't just let a president have so much power that he could order somebody to be assassinated. And the Supreme Court went the other way. They basically said, yes, he does have immunity. And they didn't really even address that issue of what I call the SEAL Team Six theory of executive power.
And I want to end with that. You have that observation that why I think this is even more important than the election is these rulings would be bad even if Trump didn't get back into office. I fear Trump might abuse his power, but I fear any president would abuse his power. Right. So we have some. And basically, because Trump pushed things to a point where you had to have these cases come through about presidential immunity and about being able to gauge an insurrection and still run for office, he broke these cases, broke certain things in the Constitution that are guardrails against any president. And they broke them in order so that they broke him. They broke them basically on behalf of Trump in these cases, but they broke them for Trump and for any future president who might come along. And I think that's. That. That's the thing I found worrying about this year.
[00:12:43] Speaker C: All right, well, I kind of wanted to. Man, there was a lot to cover there. So I'm trying to take notes. I want to kind of go back to where you started with the election, because I, you know, being a young person, I focused a lot on following social media, the impact of social media and some of the interesting changes to Trump's base. So you had mentioned, well, Trump's base, you know, they really liked the, the sort of, sort of hyperbolic statements that he made and that that wasn't good. But I mean, if we look at, you know, the, the exit polls and the numbers, you know, for the voters we had, 89% of counties in the United States shifted, Right. So you hear conservatives now saying, well, Donald Trump has a mandate. He won the popular vote, something that a Republican president, presidential candidate hasn't done in a very long time. On top of that, young voters were just not as excited for Kamala Harris as the Democrats could have hoped they would be. I think they thought because she was younger than Joe Biden that they would just come out in arms for her because she was diverse, and they just didn't. So, I mean, young voters were still plus four for Harris, but they came out in much fewer numbers than they did for Biden. So young women were still plus 17 for Harris, but young and young men were plus 14 for Trump. And that's been another huge shift we've seen is as young women continue to go further left, young men have been going much further, Right. So now we're seeing a lot of young men, 63%, coming out and voting for Donald Trump. But then Trump's base changed a lot as well. You know, the, the line of the Democrat Party used to be, oh, it's all the uneducated redneck, hillbilly, all the pejoratives that they could, they could use to talk about working class people that voted for Trump. And of course, that's a kind of unpopular thing for, you know, the intellectual class to do to the working class as well. It's all of you, no good, uneducated people that would vote for Trump. But now in this election, in 2024, we're seeing that, you know, Kamala Harris, you know, the Democrats have always had at least 60% support from young voters since 2008, since Obama. But Harris didn't meet that threshold. She had about 54%. And Donald Trump up three in every 10 black men voted for Trump. About half of young Latino men voted for Trump. So this idea that it's all, you know, the immigrant hating white men voting for Trump while a lot of immigrants voted for Trump for Trump. And a lot of the social media content coming out from young Latinos was left. We're tired of being told that we have to vote for Democrat. Our values may not be in line with that. And we're also tired of being sold a false, you know, bill of sales. And some of the, like the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics, when they did their, you know, polls on young people, there were a couple of things that they were really concerned about. Obviously the economy. And people said ahead of the election that the economy was going to play a huge role. It always does. But I think the Harris campaign thought, thought that social issues were the big factor for young people and sort of underestimated the effect the economy is having on young people. I mean, a lot of young people graduating from college, struggling to get jobs, struggling to find affordable rent. And so these, you know, the Kennedy center, they were quoted saying, you know, a lot of young people have been telling us that the Democrat Party has not followed through on their promises. They didn't follow through under the Biden administration. Kamala Harris said there was a really, you know, famous ad, it ran all the time here in Michigan, at least where they asked Kamala, like, would you change anything that Joe Biden did? And she said, nothing comes to mind. And they played that over and over again. And I think that type of thing, it has an impact. And I think another thing that had an impact, something that Democrats fumbled and want to talk about kind of, you know, crazies on the right. But there was this crazy thing where all of the, you know, your Democrat mainstream media talking heads were saying, joe Biden is fine. Joe Biden is completely fine. For months and months and months. He is sharper in meetings than he has ever been. And they were saying this even as on social media. It was just constant viral content of Joe Biden being clearly not, well, mentally and not. And to finish on that point real quick, I mean, after all of that and then finally his disastrous performance in the debate, like, oh, well, we admit that he wasn't fine. And for young people, something that is really shifting in social media culture is young people are the sort of polished politician. It doesn't come off as well as these sort of irreverent and what young people would consider genuine or candid moments. And so to, to realize that they had been so thoroughly lied to and to see that the lying was still happening at the same time that all these clips of Biden were going viral, I think Democrats lost a lot of credibility with young people on the Joe Biden issue. And then they kind of, you know, they kind of made their own bed, dug their own grave in a way because they waited so long to replace Biden, they didn't have a primary, they shoehorned Kamala in. Of course, Biden kind of did that himself. And it didn't end up paying off, I think, the way that they hoped it would.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: So now, anyway, sorry, there's, there's, there's a lot there. So one of the things I want to point out though is that when you ask people about, here's what I'm concerned about, the one that astonishes you, people saying, I'm concerned about the economy. Because the economy was actually quite good. Now you could say, oh, what about inflation? Well, inflation spiked for like a year, a year or so after right at the end of the pandemic, as we're coming out of the pandemic, but it's gone down since then. So if you look at every measure of the economy, the economy is actually doing quite good, quite well. And you know, if you look at like, wages are up, unemployment is at historic lows. So, you know, I know that young people will say, oh, I got a college, I'm struggling to get a job. Well, you know, you're doing so in an extremely low. I graduated in 1991 at the Tail end of a recession. I had friends who got engineering degrees from well regarded universities who couldn't get jobs. I mean, it was a bad time to be coming out of, coming out and looking for a job. This is nothing like that. So part of it is, you know, I think young people tend to attribute this. There's a whole online thing of. So you see this a lot in the left, on the right as well, but on the left you see this. It's like, oh, this is how terrible capitalism is. And they'll describe things and like they're going through. I'm like, that's just called being in your 20s, right? You're out of college, you're out on your own, you're getting an entry level job that doesn't pay very much and there's a lot of stuff you'd like to buy that you can't afford. Well, that's what being in your early to mid-20s is like. That's just a normal condition of life. It's not capitalism that caused it. It's, it's, it's the, it's, it's the, it's just, it's the stage of life you're at. So one of the things I found interesting about this year, they talked about this as what they called the, the, the, the vibe session. So this is the idea that people thought the economy was absolutely terrible at a time when it was actually better than normal because that really where they were upset about, they, they were discontent about something else. Now one of the things I do want to point out that's behind this is that Joe Biden has never been a particularly terrible popular or love widely loved politician. Right. So he, when he won in 2020, it was because people were more discontented with Trump than they were in love with Joe Biden. They were so like, well, I guess Joe, yeah, sure, why not?
You know, as they were voting for him because they're really voting against Trump and the Democrats never really quite adjusted to that.
And I think one of the things that happened that I found interesting about the election this year is they, they did, they, they couldn't run on the economy. Even though, like I said, object by any objective measure. The economy was so, was actually pretty good. But you can't tell people that if they think it's bad. If people think the economy is bad, even if they're wrong, if you try to correct them, they'll hate you for it. Right.
[00:20:20] Speaker C: Part of the issue with some of the statistics on the economy was to say, oh, the economy rebounded so well under Joe Biden. Well, it was rebounding after everybody was under lockdown. So people didn't. And I think for young people, what they were saying is, well, people keep telling me the economy is really good. And you would hear these commentators on the mainstream media, they were saying economy is actually really good. But then people were saying, well, my grocery, grocery prices are twice what they were. And you know, because a lot of us order groceries online now, you could go back to 20, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, look at your grocery bill for the same items and Compare it to 2024 and it's astronomical. And so then what was going viral on TikTok and you could say, well, TikTok's not reality, but this is also where people are. So certainly what's going viral on TikTok was literally hundreds of videos of people just my grocery bill in 2017, my grocery bill today. You're telling me inflation is down. I think the numbers are lying. So then there was, and you might call it a conspiracy, but whatever it was, people are, these numbers aren't real. These numbers aren't. They are not, you know, indicative. And it's not just, I think people coming out of college, I do think what you're saying about young 20 year olds coming out of college and expecting to live, you know, if they're, you know, in their parents basement still is, is true. But I think there were a lot of people, young people with families, people who were working really hard who are facing, you know, the huge regulation state in business. And that is something that Trump has done really well on. I mean, when they asked Latinos like, why Trump, they were like, well, I think he's gonna, you know, cut regulations for small businesses. And I work for small, I don't want to lose my job. So you're hearing that at least in people's minds, Donald Trump was going to be good for small business. He's going to be good for, you know, prices for inflation.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: But my view on this discuss, I follow these issues very, very closely and look at the actual policies as a lot of people were imputing into to Trump policies that he doesn't stand for. So for example, you talk about people being upset that they can't afford rent and they can't afford housing. Kamala Harris is the only one in this campaign who actually was campaigning on a plan that would increase the supply of housing. I see she was trying to campaign on and it surprised me. It was like, this is something that I think is interesting is that one of my top stories for this year, it's sort of below the presidential election thing was, and it's something I've been tracking for a number of years, is the rise of what's called the YIMBYs. Right? So you have the NIMBYs, you know, these people. NIMBY is the old acronym for not in my backyard. And this is the old thing that, you know, anytime you want to build something, there's somebody who says, oh, but that's going to cast shade on my garden or that's going to change the character of the neighborhood, they come up with a reason. And there are so many regulations now on the local level that they have all these zoning and land use regulations that they have the ability to stop any project from being built. And this is the primary driver of high rents. And places that have fewer regulations, for example, do not have especially expensive real estate. Actually, the great, great, great thing that's happened in the last year or two couple of years is the city of Minneapolis in Minnesota a couple of years ago underwent this whole experiment they had in changing their land use regulations and allowing a lot more apartments to be built. And I was just up in Minneapolis in the last couple weeks and you drive around and there's all this new housing, all this new, all these new apartment buildings everywhere in Minneapolis. And the result is that rent, while rents are going up everywhere else in the country, they're going down in Minneapolis. So this is great sort of proof of concept. So Kamala Harris was sort of kind of running on that proposal. But that's the sort of thing where people, I think part of it is that people are discontented with the establishment, but they don't know what they want to vote for as the alternative. And they often impute onto Trump, oh well, he's different from them, so therefore he's going to do what I want.
[00:24:02] Speaker C: Right. Well, but certainly it doesn't help that the high rent in these cities, you know, the places that we see the highest rent. When you talk about Boston, New York, these are typically Democrat run cities. So people are looking at these and they're not going to say, oh well, the Yimbys, the pro growth movement is coming from the right. Especially when you see on the left the attack of sort of, you know, tech that decides it doesn't want to be left anymore. Anybody who wants to divorce itself from the left is no longer good. You know, their business isn't good. We want to make sure that Elon Musk can't own X. We want to put all of these, you know, stamps down on progress. And that's another problem I get a little bit. I read your article on the Yimbys and I would like to go more into that on your thoughts on it. Because what I see just, you know, day to day, for instance, my friend group in college which was very far left, they hated corporations, they hated business, they almost hated people. It was like humans, you know, you'll say humans are the problem. We are the disease that became very common to say during COVID as well. Whereas on the right you would see these young Entrepreneurs, these, you know, we want to be in tech where, you know, unlike these former establishment conservatives that were always very, you know, oh, we're scared of tech and we're scared of, you know, all of that that seemed to be going away with your younger right move and I think that seemed to be something that was really positive to me was that your old establishment right politicians who were scared of all of that were sort of going away in a youth movement that was very positive on tech and progress was moving in. And I, and I think they intend to change the party to be more pro, you know, techno optimism, if you will. So I'm, you know, I would like to hear your thoughts on like the yimbys, you know, the left and where that all aligns.
[00:25:36] Speaker B: Well, okay, so the YIMBY is different from techno optimism, but also it's something that is actually the YIMBY movement originated among young left leaning people in young urban left leaning people. And actually it's one of the reasons why I find this to be such an interesting movement. It is something that is sort of at right angles to the usual partisan battles we have here. Now I've been finding that what's going on with the right is it's far more, much, much, much more focused on, on culture war issues now than, than on economic issues. And I think that explains to me some of this sense that, oh, the economy is terrible now, by the way, you can actually look at the statistics. The statistics are not made up. Right? So the people are not making up the statistics. I think part of what's going on is we have social media. So in social media it's very easy for somebody to present this sort of partial picture of things and people will get swayed by that. And no, there's real aspects to it, but you're focusing on one side of it. You see what I mean?
[00:26:35] Speaker C: Yeah, but they can do that with statistics too. We know that nitpicking statistics, taking them out of context and presenting them is something that, you know, both parties do all the time.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: But for example, I mean, you know, unemployment being below 4%, I, I've been around long enough. I, that is a major, major, major difference. Unemployment being incredibly low by historical standards or the fact that, you know, the US grew faster coming out of the recession than every other major out of, out of the, had a very mild, surprisingly mild dip during COVID and then grew faster out of that than anybody any other major industrialized country and had lower inflation than most European countries.
[00:27:13] Speaker C: Well, the unemployment was almost that low under Trump's. First term before COVID But that's something that can be get, you know, thrown out of the picture again.
[00:27:22] Speaker B: But I'm saying is if you were arguing that Briden was a disaster, you would say, oh, well, then we shouldn't have, we shouldn't have recovered from COVID very well because of his terrible policies. Now, I think what they did is what the Democrats did and they could have helped themselves that they'd been more honest about this or if they'd realized this, if they could have said, look, we did a whole, and this is a bipartisan thing, you know, we had a whole bipartisan proposal policy during, during coming out of COVID that we were going to spend huge amounts of money, trillions of dollars of government stimulus to, to offset the effects of COVID on, and the shutdowns and the COVID in general as a depressant on the economy. We're going to spend huge amounts of money in a stimulus. And they, if they had said, honestly, look, we expect that the price for that is going to be we're going to have some inflation as we come out of it, but we're going to try to reduce that and minimize that as much as possible. Now, they didn't say that. What they said was, and this is the Democrats have all sorts of problems on this economically. Right. So one of the things they had is they had people going around this was this school called modern monetary theory, which is I sort of think of as medieval monetary theory because it's nothing modern about it. But this modern monetary theory is thinking, no, we can print as much money as we like. It will cause inflation. It's not going to be a problem. Don't worry about it. And it was this very fringe, there's like 2% of economists who actually believe this. But, but those people had, you know, got this outsized voice in the Democratic Party, by the way, just in the same way that there's, there's, we'll get to this in a second. But there's like 2% of economists that think massive terrorists are a good idea. And they have this outsized voice on the right. But on the, on the left, you had this 2% of economists who thought, we can spend as much on Monday as we like, we don't have to worry about inflation. And then, of course, they found out, no, you do have to worry about inflation. It might be delayed, but it will hit. And I think Democrats have to like, relearn every 40 years or so that the American people hate inflation like poison. And that's kind of thing I think is interesting psychologically, because if you look again, you look at the numbers and the numbers aren't made up. I look, I follow the numbers, you know, in a consistent way that people are actually better off. Now, even, you know, now inflation hits some things more than others, so there might be, you can't, there are certain things like groceries that are hot, higher than, and, and don't go back down and that are, they're going to be somewhat worse. But on the whole, people are making more money now than they were, even accounting for inflation.
But inflation has this particular psychological impact. And it has that impact because like you said, you could look at how much you were spending on groceries this year versus how much you're spending last year. And even if overall you're better off, there are certain things that you see every day that, that wrangle you. And, and one thing I found, for example, I wrote about this a while back that in this fall I took my kids to a apple harvest festival we have locally that we go to every year. And, you know, I usually say, okay, I get, you know, a couple hundred bucks. I usually have to take cash because it's at this remote location where they, you can't always use a card because you're, you know, you're, you're out in the hinterland.
So I took a certain amount of cash and usually amount of amount of cash. That's, that's, that's, that's normally more than adequate for what I was doing. And last year it was a little tight with that amount. And then this year I was like, well, no, I had to, I need a little bit more money above that, you know, to do all the different things we were doing there and buy all the things we normally buy. So that's the thing where you keep getting these reminders of inflation, right? You know, deflation peaked in 2021, 2022. And it sort of leveled, went down since then. But, you know, here we are two years later, two and a half years later, you still get these constant reminders of, oh, this thing out there is more expensive than it used to be. So one thing that we needed a reminder of, and especially Democrats needed a reminder of this, was inflation has this particular psychological impact that's, you know, that's particularly strong compared to any other economic indicator. And that's, you know, because, because it has that constant reminder.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: Well, I was gonna say kind of using that as a segue into we want to talk about immigration next, you know, something that I think was really powerful with young people. And I'm kind of using that as a framework. I have like multiple Twitter accounts. I can try to see like one that's really political, one that's not so, you know, because you can get really bogged down in sort of confirmation bias one way or the other. But one thing that seems sort of, I want to say, ubiquitous across young people, whether it was the left or the right, is young people were not happy to find out that it didn't matter what dis disasters the American people were going through. It seemed that our government was willing to hand out billions and billions of dollars repeatedly without, you know, asking the American people to, you know, foreign governments for foreign wars. And this seemed to be something where you again saw a shift on the right, where, you know, the right used to be the party of war. We're always going to go to defend our allies. And now young people have really pushed back on that. And now you see you've got your mainstream left and right, your rhinos who are still very, you know, kind of in line on that. And your young right and your young left both now, albeit on sort of different war fronts, if you want to say, are very anti, you know, sending lots of foreign aid over to foreign countries or God.
[00:32:30] Speaker B: So foreign wars and push back on.
[00:32:34] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, sorry, I was just trying.
[00:32:35] Speaker B: To push back because one of the themes that's coming out here is young people had this impression. Young people were wrong. Okay. And that's what bugs me about this, is this thing of y'all young people had this impression. Oftentimes those things are based on. And I spend time online so I see this oftentimes those things based on extreme ignorance. And a lot of people, one of the things I found this year is a lot of people were really, really upset about things that they didn't understand and didn't know the solution to and voted for something that was the opposite of the solution. So, for example, let's take inflation, right? Prices, grocery prices are going up. Donald Trump has been promising mass deportations. Right. So what is the effect of mass deportations going to be on inflation? Well, it's going to make prices go up and it's specifically going to make grocery prices go up. So I just did a, I just finished an article, it's going to be published soon on agricultural technology, basically automation and agriculture. And one of the things I found out there is the central reason why people are. John Deere is working on a self driving tractor that's going to be coming out available this Year. And one of the reasons there's such a panic to get this automation agriculture out is that there's a vast shortage, a labor shortage in agriculture.
[00:33:46] Speaker C: Well, there's certainly that's also kind of the argument don't deport our slaves. We need them to do our lowest jobs. I mean, and that.
[00:33:52] Speaker B: But these are immigrants. Slaves. Who's being enslaved, Abby? Well, I mean, this is what I'm talking about, Abby. It's going to shake you by the lapels on this agricultural community.
[00:34:04] Speaker C: And we have a lot of migrant workers here. And one of the issues that people have been rallying for in these communities is fair pay for migrant workers. And what happens is they do not receive fair Pay, even the H1B visa workers.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Well, but wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Abby, Abby, Abby, the Trump policy is deportation. It's not fair pay. Fair pay for migrant workers is a totally different policy that let's deport them. So let me, let me complete this thought though, because I'm talking about the.
[00:34:29] Speaker C: Effect illegal immigrants are the easily exploitable labor. And Democrats are saying we need that easily exploitable labor here. And big agriculture is saying we need that easily exploitable labor here so that we can pay them low enough to make money on our produce. Produce. That's not, I mean, a solution is not okay.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: But, but then how does that. Abby, Abby, Abby, Abby.
[00:34:48] Speaker C: We need legal immigrants to inflation.
[00:34:50] Speaker B: How does that connect to inflation? What's going to happen if you deport the immigrants and you pay more to domestic laborers, immigrants?
[00:34:58] Speaker C: So you're still going to have your H1B visa workers. You're not deporting legal immigrants. And Trump has.
[00:35:04] Speaker B: Hold on, hold on. If you deport a bunch of immigrant laborers in the farm industry, in the agriculture industry, what is going to happen to grocery prices, Abby, if you deport.
[00:35:16] Speaker C: A bunch of people who are being for less than.
[00:35:19] Speaker B: Give an answer to the question, Abby, are prices going to go up?
[00:35:23] Speaker C: I should want people to be exploited to make less than minimum wage grocery.
[00:35:27] Speaker B: Prices to go up or down.
[00:35:30] Speaker C: I want them to go down, but not on the guys that I need.
[00:35:34] Speaker B: Asking you to think rationally about the.
[00:35:36] Speaker C: Economically about it. I was. I'm thinking very rationally about it. I do not need an illegal immigrant who has to under an exploited labor practice, work for less than minimum wage for my grocery prices to be low. And if that is, if that is the sort of tangent. If that's what has to happen.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: But, but you were saying. But wait, wait, Abby, I'm trying to get connect this because you were just saying higher grocery prices were a major driver of this election and now you're saying you're in favor of a policy that will cause. That you don't care about grocery prices being low. You're in favor of policy that will cause grocery prices to go up. This is the point I'm making about how young people are thinking about this election.
[00:36:15] Speaker C: But why would you want young people to, why would you want to put them in a position where, oh, you can only care about grocery prices? I'm fair labor and legal immigration.
[00:36:23] Speaker B: You know, I'm not saying that, I'm not saying that. You were the one who were saying that. Hold up, this is degrading a little bit. So I want to make this point.
If your position is we're fine with grocery prices going up, but, and as long. But we want to get rid of the, we want to deport illegal immigrants. That's one thing that, that's a position to have. That's not a position to have. If you also make a big deal about Biden was terrible because grocery prices went up. Right. So you have to make these decisions. The world is full of trade offs that you have to make. Right. You have to make if you want one thing that means it's going to have an effect on something else. And I think a lot of people had this inchoate sense of I'm upset about this, I'm upset about that. Therefore I'm going to vote for the guy who's going to break things apart and not thinking about, well, will these policies actually result in the, in, in, in an opposite of the result that I'm upset about?
[00:37:17] Speaker C: Well, listen, my husband works in the agricultural industry. He, they hire H1B visa workers. I mean they have tons of them all summer long.
[00:37:24] Speaker B: I thought it was H2B for Viagra culture, but that's wrong about that.
[00:37:27] Speaker C: Yeah, they're, it's kind of complicated the way that it works, bringing them in. But these, these workers, they're not in favor of illegal immigration either. They're not in favor. And, and to be fair, the plants, the plants that are processing our food, they're working very hard to get rid of the, you know, exploitative labor practices that have been happening in the agricultural industry. And there has been a lot of, of headway on that. And so to say that, well, Americans are either going to care about low grocery prices or they're going to be okay with illegal immigrants working so that they can, I mean you're putting people in sort of a no win situation.
[00:38:04] Speaker B: Well, how about, how about legal immigrants, Abby? Well, yes, legal immigrants, but do if so if we need more agriculture. So the process going on here is that, is that basically young people are leaving. They're not, they're not staying on the farm, they're going into the cities and getting jobs, better pay, better hours, better conditions in general. So what's happening is we've been making up the difference with immigrant labor and money. Some of it's legal immigrant labor and some of it's illegal immigrant labor. And sometimes people don't ask questions. I'm familiar with the construction industry where there's often like, you know, don't, don't ask such and such a person to, don't, you know, there's certain guys who are working on the, on the site where you don't ask too quickly, too closely about their immigration status because they do good work and they're reliable and you want to keep them so minimum wage.
But here's the, but here's and a lot of these people are making minimum wage or above minimum wage. They, you know, they're skilled workers. But the thing about this is that if we wanted to keep some of these industries going where there is a labor shortage, then you would think you'd want to have more legal immigrants. And right now so over the, over the break, we just had a whole thing where there was a campaign from Trump supporters on the right against H1B workers. Now, these are the H1B is the technology, primarily the educated technology workers. But there is a, an anti immigrant movement that's not just against illegal immigration, but against all immigration. And also I think we have to take the reality that legal immigration is extremely difficult. Right.
[00:39:38] Speaker C: So we've, if Biden and the Democrats hadn't allowed so much free flow of illegal immigration that has made Americans feel very overwhelmed that there would be such a pushback on immigration. I'm not saying it's rational to have a pushback on legal immigration or high skilled workers.
[00:39:52] Speaker B: We have, we have, we've had excessively low quant levels of immigration compared to illegal immigration.
[00:39:58] Speaker C: Board Illegal border Illegal.
[00:40:00] Speaker B: Illegal. I mean, most actually, you know what the most, most illegal immigrants. Here's a great statistic about this. We're going to get into a whole argument set of your review. We're going to talk about immigration.
[00:40:08] Speaker C: We can move on.
[00:40:09] Speaker B: Most illegal immigrants are people who oversee their visas.
So it's, and by the way, the Biden administration deported many, many people, huge numbers of people. They deported them at the border. But most illegal Immigrants in America are people who came on a visa and then overstayed it. So there were people who were let in for some legitimate purpose, education, whatever, guest workers, whatever.
[00:40:32] Speaker C: The statistics on illegal border crossings or the influx of border crossings under Joe Biden are not true is what you're saying.
[00:40:38] Speaker B: I mean, the influx, there's, there's, there's been illegal border. There should be a huge cratering of them during the, during COVID that there was very, very historically low levels, and then there was a rebound. But, you know, that happens under Trump, too. The reason why there are lots of illegal border crossings is because we have a system that greatly restricts legal immigration and makes legal immigration extremely difficult. And then, of course, there's a huge economic incentive on both sides in terms of companies in America needing workers and workers from other countries wanting to come here. Tremendous incentives. So then you create this system where illegal immigration, I always say illegal immigration is our immigration system right now, because we created a system where it's impossible next, it's very difficult to come here legally. I have an old friend who's, who just moved back here from China after being. For many years, and he's moved back with his son and his wife is still in China and he's married to her. This is his wife. You'd think, okay, they'd have a bit easier chance getting in. She's in limbo. And he's like, you know, taking care of their son by, by himself because his, he can't get his wife to come over from China because of the immigration system that's so backlogged and so bureaucratic.
[00:41:45] Speaker C: A lot of left and right, you know, pro immigration. I think you get a lot of people to agree on that, that there needs to be a reform of the legal immigration system, I don't think, but.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: That, but this is what I'm getting to with this election, though, which is that they rant. But a lot of people, those people on the right who say, oh, I wouldn't mind so much immigration. I think that's actually true. There's some of them, but they voted for a guy who's. Whose popularity went up when he stoked up in irrational hysteria about immigrants eating cats and dogs, right? So this is this weird disconnect I'm seeing in the voters, Abby. And that's how I'm getting to that. That's one of the things I want to get to about this year is either weird disconnect where people are so mad at the establishment. There's a meme that goes around online, which is somebody says, I'm angry. And somebody says, well, here's a solution. Offers him a folder and he lights the folder and fires is, I don't want a solution, I want to be angry.
That kind of, that sums up a lot of this year to me, which is people would say, oh, housing is expensive. And somebody said, oh, well, we got this YIMBY thing. Yes, in my backyard. We're going to build more. I have a solution. No, I don't want a solution. I want to be angry. Or you know, we have illegal immigration.
Well, okay, we can, we could, we could. People didn't sit down and have symposiums about what's a rational immigration policy. They were just angry or grocery prices are up. Well, you know, that's the, well, that's the trade off for the stimulus that helped the economy rebound from the, from the pandemic. So maybe, you know, that was a bipartisan thing, all that stimulus money.
So, you know, people didn't sit down and think, well, what is the cause of inflation going up? They just said, I'm angry. And, and I think this helps me steer it to one of my other big stories of the year, which is I. Somebody I think is Noah. No, Matt Iglesias, the blogger who called it the crank realignment and that is that all the anti vax people and you know, the people who think vaccines are terrible for you. This used to be this like Marin County Southern California hippie mom kind of thing and it was associated with the left and then all those people sort of like decamped over to the right. And now you have RFK Jr. Who's one of the chief anti vaxxers being proposed as chair of Health, Health and Human Services.
[00:44:04] Speaker C: What I saw though, interesting, I want to know if you saw this with some of these people on the right who used to be these, these California moms who used to be really crunchy as you would call it, and also anti vaxxer. Is that when Covid happened and if they were sort of aligning with the left's position on Covid and a little bit of the sort of extreme fear mongering on that, that they sort of abandoned a lot of their positions on health. I see this anecdotally and then you see it in media as well. They went from being very health conscious to now you're, you're, you see people on the right sort of awakening a health conscious when they used to be like, you know, McDonald's fast food fries, you know, and now you see on the left that these people are like, well, no, I. I will take all of the medical intervention and I will, you know, be very, you know, everything. I'm not concerned about what's in our food, and I'm not. So there almost seems to be a realignment on both sides, as if the extremity of the situation had.
[00:44:52] Speaker B: Oh, Abby's frozen, everyone. There we go. I think you're. You're back. Oh, well, but take. Take RFK Jr. For example, because there's no doubt that RFK Jr. Was a guy on the. On the left. You know, he's from the Kennedy family. He's an environmentalist. He's. He's been a pretty far left guy his entire life and went over to the right. So what happened during COVID partly is that. How would I put it? That pandemic response became coded by.
So part of what's going on here is we're experiencing the effects of things that happened four years ago that are just having their impact now. So one of the things that happened during the pandemic four years ago is that the response to the pandemic became partisan coded. That there was a right wing response and a left wing response, which in a way makes no sense because it's a medical situ. The questions are medical and scientific, but, you know, the. The idea that, oh, Covid is all overblown. It's just the flu. They're lying to you. There's a pandemic. It's a conspiracy, and vaccines are. And the vaccines are bad. This became a right wing coded thing. And so what's happening is a bunch of people from the left and then the left in response to that, because negative partisanship is always an impact, the left became more, you know, we're in favor of establishment science.
[00:46:09] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:46:09] Speaker B: One thing I think that's happening, they're.
[00:46:11] Speaker C: Sort of over, you know, oh, there's. There's no lab leak, which now it's like, oh, there was prob. A lab, like, no, myocarditis. And then it became to the point where some of those conspiracies have proven themselves out.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: You know how Yale myocarditis is not the lab leak. We still don't know. People get very, very confident about this. We still don't know. Myocarditis. Myocarditis. Yes. Myocarditis was known from the beginning to be a possible side effect of the. Of. Of the. Of the vaccine, but at far, far, far lower levels than myocarditis as an effect of COVID itself. Covid actually does horrible things to the heart.
[00:46:47] Speaker C: Research has come out to say it was much higher, especially in young men from the vaccine than was previously reported or than was honestly you know, when people were saying it's very high when you receive the vaccine, it might be.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: It might be higher than previously reported. But the point is that when you look at the cardiac effects of COVID itself, it is far, far, far worse. Covid by the way is kind of misunderstood. It's a, is seen as a respiratory infection but it actually hits the brain, it hits the heart. It does, it hits all sorts of systems in the body. As terrible it is, it is a seriously bad disease as terrible effects over the long term. So again the myocarditis thing, I've been following that from the beginning. And from the beginning the thing that was, that was said about that is that there was a very small, there was a relatively small level of myocarditis and even with you could upgrade it a little bit, but it's still relatively small level of myocarditis but that the effects, the cardiac effects of getting disease is much, much higher, which makes the case for the vaccine. But look, I just posted today, just a couple hours ago, I did a review of COVID policy and, and what we know about COVID now with like it's a kind of interesting thing because it's a. Amash Adalja is a top infectious disease guy, epidemiologist and I interviewed him like in March 12, 2020.
[00:48:06] Speaker C: So.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Right. Like there's, I remember specifically was the day I found out the kids school was being shut down for a while. So it was like the very point at which the pandemic kind of hit in the US and we had all these policies. So I interviewed about him about that then and we did sort of a follow up and basically what we found, what, what my, the overall impression is the experts were wrong about a number of things. And if you go back to that interview, I talked to him in 2020, he said, you know, this is a new virus. We don't, there's a lot we don't know about it. Right. So of course they're going to be wrong. But if you look at it, what happened is the experts were wrong about a number of things. But then you had a whole industry that arose to say oh the experts are completely wrong about everything and here's why you shouldn't take the vaccine and here's why you shouldn't do this, this such anti establishment approach. And they were wrong about 10 times as many things. Yeah, but because they Aren't part of, you know, they're not peer reviewed. They're not part of the establishment. They never had to face any accountability for it.
[00:49:02] Speaker C: Well, and without arguing that, when I want to talk about, you know, again, we talk about like perceptions, you know, and the perception of experts went down a lot. And I would say that as you talk about this crank realignment, and I think in there you talked a little bit about Democrats coming to be more in favor of the establishment having to defend the institutions. All of a sudden that became a little bit less popular because there was such a, a disavowing of the experts. And I think that could have hurt the Democrats as well. Just a sort of observational point.
[00:49:31] Speaker B: Oh, no, I think it absolutely. No, it absolutely did hurt the Democrats. So I think the, the wider thing going on behind all of this is that there is, we are in a, an anti establishment era. And I think we've actually been an anti establishment era for a long time, which is, you know, really going back 60 years. You know, 2000 was it, 1964 was the free speech movement and the student protests in Berkeley. That was sort of the beginning of the, the, the hippie movement and the counterculture and all of that. So we've been in this anti establishment era for about 60 years now where, you know, anything that's the establishment, anything that is the experts, and that, that's all bad, and we have to tear it down.
[00:50:09] Speaker C: And on the point, though, oh, sorry, I just got to ask you a question. So you choose to answer it or keep going, if any more interesting. What would you think about free speech, the realignment there? It used to be the left, and I believe even rfk, who I know you're not a fan of, but he's talked about this. It used to be the left that was pre free speech. That used to be their thing. And now you're seeing the tech censorship that you can't say what hurts my feelings.
[00:50:30] Speaker B: Well, okay, but wait a minute. But, but, but Elon Musk just. Elon Musk just nuked a bunch of Twitter accounts of people who are criticizing him over H1B. No, I just wrote a pocket guide to free speech for analysis idea. And one of the things I want to throw in there that you should apply to every, every, every argument about free speech is the general rule is free speech for me, but not for thee.
[00:50:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:50:51] Speaker B: So there was a lot of people during the pandemic who said, who squawked a lot of free speech. I'm being infringed. Upon because they were saying, you know, anti establishment views on the science even. And oftentimes they were quite wrong. But of course they have a right to say, even if they're wrong, they have a right to say it. But then what happens is invariably when those people get in a position of authority, they decide that they get to be the ones to, to, to suppress the free speech of everybody else. So it's always free speech for me, but not for the.
[00:51:20] Speaker C: I completely agree on that. But from again, like looking at this perception of young people, for the young people who are saying, well, I, for instance, we got a school in my community. It was, they signed a petition, they said, I don't want to play with a boy on my volleyball team, on the girls volleyball team. Well, they were heavily censored. They were, they were. Got in trouble at school. They had to take remedial training. This happened to a lot of people that I knew in college. You'd say the wrong things on my campus. They tried to have a bias response response team which was supposed to like overhear your conversations and report you to the university and then you were going to have to go to remedial bias training, that type of thing.
[00:51:51] Speaker B: Oh yeah. I mean there's a, there's a lot of that. So no, I'm not. So I'm just saying there's a lot of stuff like that that people are reacting against. But here's why I want to get to RFK Jr because RFK Jr is a guy who has a long history of being completely wrong on these issues. So for example, there's a story people should look up about how he, he went to Samoa a couple of years back to argue advocate against vaccines. And so, and their consequence of that, him and several other people arguing against vaccines at Samoa, there was a massive measles outbreak. And the phrase that always sticks in my mind from the reports, there was rows of tiny coffins. So there was a. Literally there were hundreds of small children who died from this measles outbreak because people in Samoa stopped vaccinating. So here's a guy who's been wrong, you know, disastrously, horribly wrong with horrible consequences. People are mad at the establishment because, oh, they were wrong about some things about COVID or we didn't like the lockdowns or whatever. But instead of then going to, well, what's the proper solution? What's a rational answer to that? They say, no, let's go with this guy who's been, you know, who's also been disastrously crazy and wrong about this issue. And so that's why I see the problem with this. We're in this anti establishment era. And I think what's different right now is for most of my life, the left has been the anti establishment. Tear it all down, you know, the hippie types. And we've been able to count on the right to say, oh, no, institutions are important and continuity is important and being serious and sober is important. And what's happened really in the Trump era and starting about 2000. Well, really, I think it's time with the Tea Party movement, in retrospect, I didn't really, it wasn't a major part of that. It wasn't as obvious at the time.
[00:53:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:53:36] Speaker B: Is that the right has then become just as anti establishment as, you know, I, I, the term I use is hippies of the right. You know, they've become just as anti establishment as the hippie movement was 60 years ago in the idea of, you know, we're not here to reform the institutions. We're not here to have something safe, more, more rational and sober and thought out. We're here to tear everything down. And I think that's why I said there's this mismatch now. That's why I see this mismatch where people are complaining, oh, prices are too high, and they say, oh, but we have to clamp down on illegal immigration and put tariffs on and things that are obviously going to lead to higher prices.
[00:54:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Or, you know, there's this problem that we're mad about, but instead of looking for a solution, we're going to go with the guy with the sledgehammer who's going to break things. And I think that's, that's the problem. I see. And that's the, I guess the big trend of that, that realignment of anti institutionalism and anti establishment becoming the cause of the right.
[00:54:33] Speaker C: Right. Well, but I think when you see that happen, you will see young people gravitate towards that because just like young people always want to be a part of the counterculture, they always got to push back against the man. And if the man is now seen as the, you know, institutionalist left, they're going to be a part of this anti establishment. Right. And I think that was sort of a last, last point I had was to right or wrong, Trump sort of irreverence actually appealed to young people in this sort of age where irreverence is now the counter culture. You know, being, I mean, being irreverent has always been a bit of a counterculture. But being, you know, not, you know, PC is now definitely become a huge way.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: Except I would say it's actually the mainstream of the culture right now, because we're in. Okay, here's the thing we switched out. I don't know if you've ever watched Game of Thrones. I don't care for it. I've watched some of it. But Game of Thrones was very specifically created as sort of an anti. Tolkien. Right. In Tolkien, it was the counterculture Tolkien. It was. In Tolkien, everybody's noble. All the heroes are noble and brave and. And, you know, the Gandalf and Aragorn, they're all these.
That's too simplistic. We want a grittier view of the world in which everybody's rotten. And basically, that's what Game of Thrones is. It's a cynical. It's a cynical take on Tolkien.
[00:55:43] Speaker C: Yeah. And all the good guys have to die. I really do hate that trend that we see in media. It was, God, all the good guys have to die in the end, or I haven't made a really edgy film.
[00:55:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:55:53] Speaker C: And.
[00:55:53] Speaker B: And, and so I think what we're happening is right now was we're in Game of Thrones politics, which is that the mainstream of the culture came. All the prestige TV stuff is like the hero is some. Somebody wrote an interesting thing about how, you know, a lot of people who are making the case for Trump. Somebody compared him to Tony Soprano. He's like. You realize that Tony Soprano isn't a hero, right? He's the main character of the Sopranos. He's not a hero. He's a bad person. He says he's a psychopath. He's not somebody we want to put in office. But it's almost like by making. By having this sort of. And this is all the prestige TV stuff was this. So this is the mainstream of the culture now. Is this sort of anti establishment, anti institutional. Let's. Let's focus on having the bad guys be the good guys ways, essentially, or be the protagonists. And I think that has become the mainstream of the culture. And that's why we're seeing it then be kind of adopted by.
By the. By. By the. By the right. And also we're seeing young people thinking they're being edgy and countercultural by jumping on to something that's been happening in the culture for like 30 years now. Right. So that's. Sorry I get a rag on you, on people, because I'm an old person and I've been through this cycle several times before. So I, I watched all the old hippies become yuppies. And so, you know, the thing, and part of what's going on is I think that we're at, and this will set us up for 20, 25, which is, I think what we're going to see is a bunch of this. You know, the institutions are bad, the establishment is bad. Let's tear it all down. Let's all take a hammer to it and, and, and burn it all down.
We're going to see the consequences of that come. And I think what you're going to see is you're going to see people turn back again from that. There's going to be a backlash against the backlash, as there always is, because in some of these cases people. Yeah, well, you're going to depend. It's not just a natural pendulum swing. It's also, we're going to tear down a lot of things we shouldn't have torn down. And people are going to say, oh, maybe that wasn't a good idea after all, and maybe we should build it back up again. So I'm sort of thinking, and I'm, so I'm thinking that what we're going to have to do is go back to I, I'm arguing in favor of what I call liberal institutionalism. And by liberal I mean, you know, pro freedom, not liberal in the sense of, you know, 20th century liberalism or I mean political correctness or wokeness. You know, this sort of censorship that was never liberalism, that was illiberalism in the proper term. And, and actually a lot of those far left people, nobody hates more liberals in the old fence that, you know, the center left liberals, nobody hates liberals more than those people.
But I mean, we need liberal institutionalism in two senses. One is that we need to go back to like not tearing down the institutions, but rebuilding them and reforming them and making them function properly. And then it has to be liberal institutions, they have to be institutions that are not driven by groupthink or by. You will get canceled if you, if you disagree with something, if you have a reasonable disagreement. So they have to be, you have to have, we have to rebuild the institutions in a way that they can, they can handle dissent and respond to dissent and, and, and adjust properly. But that the solution isn't just to tear everything.
[00:59:02] Speaker C: But do you see that there could be a positive, potentially coalition between liberals on the right who are not trying to tear everything down? I don't know if you've seen this new thing where people really coming hard against the woke Right. And then liberals on the left who are a little bit scared of how far some people have taken it. You think there could be this positive coalition?
[00:59:19] Speaker B: Well, I'm, I'm hoping. Actually, I've been looking for a real. I think we're actually about a third of the way through a political realignment.
And so what's happened is. And I say a third of the way because what's happened is the Republican Party has changed in some very dramatic ways. I think some people, you know, not everybody in the, in the Republican Party has changed. Some people are still the old, you know, they're trying to still be the old Reaganites, but the Republican Party has changed, but the Democratic Party is still trying to figure out how they're going to change in response to that. And so that's like the next stage. And then everything else has to sort of readjust itself around that. And lots of things, you know, it's interesting that lots of things in the culture get associated with certain partisan loyalties. And then as things get shaken up, a lot of those things will get, you know, the partisan loyalties will change. So I, what I, I mean, sort of the, the worst possible, worst case scenario is the illiberal right and the illiberal liberal left realize there's not that much difference between them and they all have a love fest and they get together, you know, and so you have like the nationalists, religious nationalist types, the, the Christian, Christian nationalists on the right who want to control everything, get together with the far left and they're trying to do this. By the way, there's a whole publications that are organized to try to do this and they get together with the far. Communists and that. You get. The communists and the religious nuts get together and they form a new coalition.
The pet. The best case scenario is the sort of liberal pro free speech, the sort of Steven Pinker type of pro free speech liberal on the center left and the classical liberals on the right. They all get together and form a new coalition. That's the best case scenario. But, you know, like I said, we're a third of the way through. We're going to see a lot of this work out as this year progresses.
[01:01:01] Speaker C: I agree. Well, I think we can both agree on that. So I'm happy to end on a positive note agreeing on that. That so great.
[01:01:08] Speaker A: Well, Abby, Rob, thank you both so much for taking the time to do this, talking about the year behind and then a little bit of what might be seen in the future. I know there were a lot of questions that came in I saw on YouTube apologize. We couldn't get to them all. I hope some of your questions were answered, I think partially through the conversation. But if you liked this type of content, we encourage you to go to our website, check out the rest of our content and follow these people on their respective platforms. Rob, you've got your sub stacks and other and your various outlets as well. So there's a lot of places you can follow up to ask further questions. Or check out Abby with our Instagram takeovers on the Atlas Society Instagram account. So lots of places to follow up. And again, for those of you who enjoy watching Atlas Society ask, be sure to join us again next week because CEO Jennifer Grossman, she'll be back and she's going to be sitting down for a conversation with Hannah Cox of Based Politics. They're going to have an interesting conversation about declining birth rates in the west and along with some recent talks about when it comes to the union protests that were happening near the end of 2024. So again, Abby, Rob, thank you for doing this. We'll see you all next time.
[01:02:26] Speaker B: Thanks a lot, everyone.
