Speaker 1: What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for
your support. So, last hour I was talking about this guy,
Graham Platner. Oh, there was one other, one other thing
about this Democrat running for US Senate in Maine. There
was one other thing that has now come out about him.
There's just been this veritable poop storm or actually nor'easter
of oppo research getting dumped on this guy. And it
all happened after Janet Mills entered the race. She's the
Democrat governor. There's a primary, and when she entered, all
this stuff started coming out about Graham Platner, all these
posts he made and the Nazi tattoo that he had
on his chest, and like all of this bad stuff, right,
there was one other, one other thing that kind of
this one might hurt. I think I think Democrats will
go along with the Nazi tattoo. They'll go along with
the I mean because he's you know, talking to anti Israel,
so like, I think that's on brand. I think they'll
go along with that. And he did make all those
nasty comments about the LGBTQ plus two I A community
and such, But I think they'll chalk that up to
youthful indiscretions from low those many four years ago. I
think that they will. They'll look past all of this
other stuff because he's all about the fighting of the fascists.
They'll look past his time as a blackwater mercenary. They'll
they'll pass all of this stuff. But this one might sting. This,
this might be a problem. Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner,
the self described working class manor terrible name for anyway,
attended an elite boarding school in Connecticut that costs upwards
of seventy five thousand dollars a year. Quite the working
class dude, I'm kidding. Actually, this will not be disqualifying
at all. He once described himself as a communist, described
himself in his campaign launch video as a working class
manor He does not appear to have lasted long at
the Hotchkiss School to very elite school he was. Then
in two thousand and two, there was a piece published
in the Ellsworth American that lists him as one of
four students in Sullivan, Maine who made a four hour
or sorry, made a one hour long commute to John
Baptist Memorial High School in Bangor, Maine, a more cost
friendly private school. Platner is identified as a junior who's
accustomed to the commute after three years. He said, what
I like best is just the education. Being a private school,
you get much more attention. The uh tuition there is
about twelve thousand dollars per year in today's dollars. He
apparently made a mark at John Baptist, winning an award
for most likely to start a Revolution not a joke.
A yearbook photo shows a young Platner holding a piece
of paper calling to free Chechnya, Kosovo and Palestine. Platner
also wrote an op ed for the Bangor Daily News
that equated Post nine to eleven terrorist groups with freedom
fighters and lamented that every terrorist is portrayed as evil
in the media. Um His enrollment there stands in start
contrast to the mainstream media's working class portrayal of Platner,
who before becoming an oyster farmer and he worked at
the State Department as a contractor in Afghanistan for Constellis,
formerly known as Blackwater. I thought they changed their name
to G x E. Didn't they change their name to
x E like G or something? But then I don't know,
maybe they had to change that because everybody was adopting
in as a pronoun Maybe he referred to himself at
one point as an Antifa soldier. Oh sorry, Antifa super soldier,
which was also as a communist. Now he he's also
a theater kid, which is also on brand. Yeah, he
apparently everybody loved them. In his role in Oliver Twist
as the artful Dodger in Oliver, he also did Civil
War re enacting and his mom hired a seamstress to
make his outfit. So there you go. No, I don't
think going to a private school is going to deter
Democrats from voting for him. That is sort of what
they like. It's like, you know, we will condemn all
of these other people to public schools and will say
you hate children if you don't support the public schools.
But we're not saying our kids to public schools. Right
over at Politico, Jonathan Martin had a piece headline, Democrats
keep falling for political fantasies? When will they learn? Will
Democrats ever learn to stop swooning? And I will answer
this question and the answer is no, No, because the
base is too emotions driven. Right. This goes back to
the old line that Bill Clinton said, Republicans fall in line,
Democrats fall in love. That's how you end up with
people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. We've seen this
play out with what's her face, Amy McGrath, right when
she entered the race in Kentucky and they're like, she's
totally gonna beat Mitch McConnell or Stacy Abrams or Robert
Francis O'Rourke aka betto Right. There's another guy now down
in Texas, James Tallerico. That's another one. And this guy
in Maine Platner, is another example of it. He says,
it goes something like this political outsider or mostly a
new name, mounts a statewide campaign with online video that
leans heavily on compelling by a biography or powerful oratory.
Out of state liberal hobbyists then quickly fall in love
with this guy. Because they're out of state, they don't
know who he is, but they've seen his TikTok videos
like Baby Jesus aka Jeff Jackson here in North Carolina,
and so then they just started pouring all this money
into this guy. Journalists then rushed to profile the latest
heart throb before inevitable disappointment when the candidate loses or
becomes another John Fetterman. Once his Democratic rival Janet Mills
entered the race, we saw all of this OPO research right,
and there is more to come, says Jonathan Martin. He says,
I am told by sources very familiar with the Platiner
opposition file who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Some
of it is going to be even more localized, which
will make for ready made targeted mailers and digital ads.
I have learned, for example, that in twenty twenty, Platner
went online and called the Hancock County Sheriff's office a
den of overweight pansy and said quote cops are opportunistic cowards.
That is not going to slow Platner's apologists, however, not
going to happen the left wingers, so enamored with his
politics have rushed to offer him the sort of grace
that they would never bestow on a more moderate candidate,
let alone a Republican. Collins. Susan Collins running for reelection
could be endangered. She could lose this race. She could
lose it to Janet Mills or Graham Platner. He says.
The eagerness of Democrats to oust her and the lack
of enthusiasm from mega Republicans who stay home when there's
no presidential race that has Donald Trump on the ballot
may prove too much for the five term incumbent to overcome,
But he says is it too much to ask though,
for Democrats to be a little more clear about winning elections.
The point is not to find a savior. It's to
get closer to fifty one votes in the US Senate.
People need to act like discerning shoppers, not fanboys. This
is why I say, do not fall in love with
the politician. Okay, they're human beings. They're going to let
you down, they are going to disappoint you in some way.
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So Democrats just can't help falling in love with particular candidates.
They just can't help themselves. And I know what the
Democrats and the lefties that are listening to the show
and they do listen to the show, and I thank
you for listening to the show, but they will say
what about Trump? Because what about ism is the only
thing that passes for argument. Nowadays. We don't talk principles,
we talk what about ism? And when somebody throws out
of what about ism, the other guy throws up another
what about ism? And then you just yelled back and
forth about what about? What about? What about? What about? Okay,
so what about Donald Trump? Yeah? Hey, you know what
I said. I have been saying this for a decade
that people have fallen in love with Donald Trump. That
is a form of Trump derangement syndrome. I have been
saying this for a decade. There are people that think
Donald Trump can do no wrong, and they are just
as bad in my mind as the people who think
Trump can do no right. You've turned Trump into some
sort of a caricature of a human being, a human
being who makes mistakes, is fallible, He's not perfect, right,
And I noted the similarities when people on the left
or even Republicans that didn't like Donald Trump, and they would,
you know, criticize Donald Trump and say like, oh, this
is some you know, unique phenomenon that we have never
seen before. It's a cult of personality. And I would
always point out Barack Obama, What about Barack Obama. I
noticed the same things going on when Democrats were chanting
in stadiums filled with seventy eighty thousand people Obama Obama, right,
it's kind of unsettling. It was. I'm not going to
draw a comparison here with Nazism, but when you get
that many people screaming somebody's name in a chant like that,
it's kind of hard to not think cult of personality,
you know, so don't fall in love with politicians, but
Democrats have a hard time with this, particularly the further
left you get, you know, more centrist kind of leaning people,
more moderate people on both parties, in both parties, they
tend not to fall in love with these elected leaders.
But Democrats like this goes back to like JFK. Right,
They just they elevate some of these candid it's to
just ridiculous heights. And that's a lot of what we're
seeing with this uh socialist up in New York City.
Zoron Mamdani Mamdani, Ma'm donny. This is from a piece
over at the Washington Examiner. And editorial talking about the
socialist future of the Democrat Party. It's here, it is here. Okay,
you got Mam Donna, you got a Kazu Coatez, you
got Bernie Sanders, you got this guy Platiner up in Maine. Right,
they are running Uh, they're not running away from the
socialist tag. Right, The editors say, what these three Sanders,
A Kazu Cortez and Mamdani have recognized for years, and
what establishment Democrats are now starting to realize as well,
is that if the Democrat Party is to have a future,
it will be socialist. It is moving rapidly towards rejecting
markets and the free choices that are the lifeblood are
their lifeblood, and instead embracing outright government control of the
economy and much else. Poll results support this shift. According
to Gallup, sixty six percent of Democrats have a positive
view of socialism and a negative view of capitalism. That
is an all time high. As recently as twenty ten,
a majority of Democrats actually preferred capitalism to socialism, but
those days are gone. Other polling reveals that it is
the youngest Democrats, those under thirty, who most support socialism.
This is by the way, the result of the long
march through the institutions. One of those institutions K twelve education,
you know, and when people like me were pointing this
stuff out, like what are we teaching these kids? We're
obviously not how to read and do arithmetic. No, we're
teaching them to be activists. We're teaching them that their
country is inherently terrible and everything needs to be torn
down and rebuilt, give government more power. Neil Boortz, the
libertarian talk show host, he used to talk about this
thirty years ago. He would say, Look, if you went
to a Catholic school, do you think you would be
learning that Catholicism is terrible? Of course not. Well, if
you go to a government school, what do you think
you're learning there? The Democrat's future is socialist. There is
no denying it. At this point. The only question is
whether the party is going to finally fall into that
pit of tyranny and wealth destruction, and judging by Mamdani's
primary win, along with the endorsements that he has picked
up by guys like Chris van Holland, US Senator and
Kathy Hockel, Governor of New York, like that future appears
to be now Democrat elites have given up fighting against
their socialist base. The socialists are taking over, and we'll
see how it works out for them, and of course
the poor New Yorkers who look like they're about to
get socialism in the neck. Which brings me to a
piece over at City Journal by Martin Gurry, a former
CIA analyst and the author of a book called The
Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in
the New Millennium. And he walks through it's a very
lengthy piece. I'm just going to give you some of
the highlights here, but he walks through a thought experiment, like,
let's suppose that socialism comes to New York City, right,
whether it's Mom, Donnie or not, but we can use
him as the sort of thought experiment mayor here. So
socialism arrives in New York City, and it's here for
the long term. And if you know, the editors at
the Washington Examiner are correct, like this is now what
the Democrat Party is. They will be the Democrats socialists.
And so they the Democrats right now control New York City,
they control New York State. Right, So let's assume that
this is a long term thing. So what is life
going to look like under a leadership that is totally
committed to this socialist vision? What follows in this thought
experiment is a tale told in the future tense, an
attempt to imagine how the unconstrained vision of socialism might
play out in an unconstrained New York. He says, this
is not prophecy, right, it's speculative, it's fiction. No actual,
actual socialists were harmed in the making of this experiment either, Okay,
So to start with the experiment, we have to define,
like the basic question of what is socialism really? Okay, well,
how about we look at the constitution of the Democratic
Socialists of America. We'll use their definition. All right. If
you're listening to this show, you know I try to
keep up with all sorts of current events, and I
know you do too, And you've probably heard me say
get your news from multiple sources. Why, Well, because it's
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my podcast, but it also supports ground News as they
make the media landscape more transparent. Piece by Martin Gurry,
former CIA analyst, author of The Revolt of the Public
and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. This
is published at City Journal called Socialism with a New
York Face, and it's a thought experiment of an unconstrained
socialist utopia that takes root in New York City. And
the Democrats are you know, they would like to advance
this idea. We're going to give it a shot. I
guess up in New York. So we'll see what happens.
So let's walk through, Like, first off, what is socialism?
So for purposes of this thought experiment, we'll go to
the Democratic Socialists of America and their constitution. They define
it as quote, a humane social order based on popular
control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism,
racial equality, and non oppressive relationships. Okay, that's their definition
of socialism. The weightiest words here are equitable in planning. See,
every form of socialism known to history has fixated on
absolute equality as the political end as the goal. Right,
it is achieved. So the thinking goes through scientific planning
and enforced by the rational application of state power. A
new planning body would have to be created, because they
always are created, staffed by experts and technocrats and such.
So let's give it a name like the Central Planning
of Thing Already or CPA. Okay, So almost immediately we
run into a contradiction here. See, socialism promises to place
resources under popular control. That's what they say in their definition,
a social order based on popular control of resources and production,
as well as economic planning, equitable distribution, and then feminism,
racial equality, non oppressive relationships. Okay, which is, look, we're
just taking all of that at face value because I
could play the rim shot on every single one of those. Okay,
but like this is the point of the thought experiment.
We're gon we're going to follow their line of thinking. Okay,
But the contradiction arises immediately because there's this promise to
put the resources and production under quote unquote popular control,
so that, for example, tenants rather than landlord wards, take
charge of the buildings that they occupy. However, implementing a
planned economy requires concentrating immen's power in the hands of
a small group of government specialists. That's the central planning
authority of the CPA. These are the experts, the bureaucrats, technocrats, right,
they got it all figured out, much like in the
Soviet Union, where they would you know, issue their quotas
for production. It's a famous story about the production of
nails and they sent, you know, sent out the quota
this year, you got to produce this amount of nails,
and the factories produced that number of nails, and they
did it in like a month because the bureaucrat technocrat
crowd didn't know actually how many nails would be needed.
Whereas in a free market system, the demand for nails
would send signal to the producers of the nails, we
need to make more nails, right because a small cadre
of technocrats far away in the capital are never going
to be smarter than the free market. Because you and
me and all of us together, we are all the
free market. We are all making these decisions of what
we want, how much we'll pay for it. Are we
willing to delay the purchase or do we make the
purchase now? Like all of these factor into the decisions,
trillions of factors in any given moment. There's no way
a group of people in a central planning authority can
replicate that. It's impossible. They cannot do it. It's a
fatal flaw of socialism. Okay, So that in the nail story,
when they made all of the nails and then they
hit their quota and then they're just kind of lounged
around for a long time, and then they went and
built They made the biggest nail. They made like some
I don't know, fourteen ton nail because they had nothing
else to do. So it has made a really big nail. Anyway,
The two approaches here are incompatible. The contradiction is an
intellectual phantom that vanishes in a puff of smoke on
first contact with reality. The public quote unquote is an
amorphous entity. It is incapable of actually organizing anything. Okay.
Socialism has always been a top down system in which
a you know, far seeing vanguard brain trust, acting on
the public's behalf, commands the resources needed to achieve the
proper degree of equality. We'll decide for you. We are
smarter than you. Oh but it's popular control. Yeah, yeah, no,
it's not really. You can yeah, sure, you want that
little shop. You can run the shop, but we're gonna
tell you what to sell and how much to sell
it for. The mayor and his planners will embody this
new class of visionary leaders. Their mandates will fill the
vacuum left by the abolition of the private economy. Tenants
who once dreamed of ownership will find that they have
traded their landlord for a political commissar. The CPA will
the Central Planning Authority, will set out to control the
means of production. It's the first commandment of socialism, but
the means will quickly overwhelm the ends. See, you can't
control New York's material resources without also controlling the direction
of people's private lives. This is why it's tyrannical. It
is inherently counter to freedom. It is counter to human nature.
Individual goals and plans must be suppressed. Individualism is hateful
to the socialist because it breaths inequality. So if you
dreamed of opening a little bodega in Washington Heights, the
mayor will say no. Now, if you already own one,
you'll be made essentially an employee of the authority. The
economic logic of socialism tends towards the dictatorship of the
new class. That dictatorship, in turn rejects fixed rules, standards,
and norms, because, after all, different people have to be
treated differently in order to achieve the equal outcomes. Right
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that'll last a lifetime. Again. This is from City Journal
by Martin Gurriy, talking about what New York City would
look like if it went socialist right like and they
were unconstrained in their unconstrained vision. It's a thought experiment.
So he's talking about the economic illogic of socialism tends
towards dictatorship. And he says socialists do love redistribution. But
how in a planned economy is the wealth created to
pay for all the free stuff? How do you create wealth?
Socialists exhibit a remarkable indifference to the supply side of
the economy. Right, They're all in on the demand side. Oh,
you want this, here you go, you want that, Here
you go, you want that, here you go, never thinking
how do we make this stuff to give to people? Right?
They seem to assume also that production will continue as before,
except even better. Right, workers will now be liberated from
drudgery and placed in charge of their own shops. They
will feel in fire to boost both the quantity and
quality of their output, thereby growing the city's wealth. Except
that assumption rests on a fallacy. Control of the economy
will not lie with the workers. It will lie with
the planners, because that is always the case. So production
quotas will be assigned by the CPA, much like teachers
assign homework. So you end up with drudgery persisting, and
when salaries are all equalized across the board, then productivity plummets.
Every instance of socialism in practice has cannibalized the capitalist
economy down to the bone until a crisis hits. Declining
productivity means fewer goods and services on offer. Price controls
then ensure that the entire population is chasing a shrinking
supply of goods. So the question becomes how to plan
for equality in an economy that is rapidly shrinking? What
do socialists do well? We have historical examples from post
war Britain to present day Cuba. The socialist answer to
this question of how do you plan for equality in
an economy that's rapidly shrinking? The answer is always the same.
The ration card rations always the same. The attractive idealists,
by the way, and then he goes through he talks
about like violence occurring in all of that stuff. I'm
gonna skip ahead in this thought experiment, though. He says,
the attractive idealists who won power like Zoron Mamdani, they
will be devoured by those who know how to wield
the power. See, and that is also historically true, right,
the idealists that you know, talk a good game or
photogenic flash that smile at you, charismatic. Yeah, they get
they get pushed to the side, and I pushed to
the side, I mean, you know, imprisoned or murdered, and
so they get kicked out. Once the power is consolidated,
then the most ruthless, psychopathic types take over the city's
information campaigns. Then will you know, discard the capitalist fetish
that separates truth from falsehood? Which I thought was a
fantastic line. It's one of those things. See, lies in
a free market are surfaced and the liars are punished.
That's what a free market does. People realize, oh my gosh,
this product is crap. They leave reviews on Amazon, and
then nobody buys their stuff because it's some knockoff or whatever.
It doesn't work, and then that that product is no
longer offered. See, but if you got the central plan
authority dictating this stuff, you got limited supply. Well, now
they're information campaigns. You can't communicate that you're making inferior
quality things, so now you have to suppress truth. It's
always a part of the socialist experiment as well, because
their ideology has failed consistently in the past, socialists have
perfected the art of what have they perfected as signing blame.
Even in a scarcity economy, they can produce an endless
supply of scapegoats. It really is what socialists excel at,
because when their plans don't work, they blame external actors,
foreign saboteurs. And then when the plans don't work even
more for a longer period of time, then they start
blaming you. They start blaming their own people, and cruder,
more easily hated stereotype is going to be needed to target.
Of course, that could only mean the Jews. Of course,
you got to go after the Jews, So that's probably
going to be coming down the pike. Socialism has followed
a predictable history, historical trajectory, and the pronouncements of the
Democratic Socialists cling monotonly monotonously to those of the old
time religion. That's what we're seeing. I don't think New
Yorkers are going to be able to get off of
this course. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
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