Tucker Carlson, and a small group including Marjorie-Taylor Greene (MTG - yeah!), have released what amounts to a manifesto of MAGA 2.0.
This is a cherry-picking of Carlson's speech based on the transcript in the link.
You may not agree with any or all of it but you have to admit that it's a piece of work that should be read and thought about.
It's no good smearing Carlson with labels like 'right-wing' or 'fundamentalist Christian' or 'conspiracy theorist'.
If you don't think any of the points he makes are worth thinking about because of some label then maybe you need to examine your own thinking and come up with something equally as substantial in rebuttal.
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It's Time to Save America
It's great to see real American strengths - rebellion, common sense and optimism - emerge again from the swamp the country has slipped into.
The Purpose of a System
The point of any system is to protect the interests of the people it serves and governs. It’s just the nature of it. So what’s a preacher’s job? It’s to minister to the souls of his congregants. What’s a president’s job? It’s to look out for, to protect the interests of his citizens. Really, really simple. It’s inherent to the definition.
So it’s been obvious for a while now that our system is not working as intended, because the people in charge of it seem to be looking out exclusively, but mostly for their own interests. And you see that all around you.
It used to be that the President waited until he was replaced before turning his position into a business - the business of after-dinner speaking, book deals, and board/advisory positions. Trump has brought all this into focus as he has not waited until he is no longer President to further his business interests but just steamed ahead to take advantage of his position and ensure the wealth of his extended family blowing away the, by comparison, tawdry efforts by Biden on behalf of his son in Ukraine.
The Epstein Class and Systemic Corruption
But something different has happened to our system, and it’s obvious recently. So it’s one thing to have a system run by people who are looking out for their own best interest and not yours. Again, we’ve had that. It’s another to have a system that’s totally incapable of responding to reality, that is basically paralyzed. And unfortunately, ominously, that’s the system that we now have.
Epstein was a depraved individual but many people failed to recognise or care about that including his madam Ghislaine Maxwell and many others who came into his orbit. Epstein is the poster-child of the lack of decency that Carlson talks about later. But are the Silicon Valley oligarchs really that much better? Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was recently judged to be a 'public nuisance' and Palantir's software is benefitting from record revenues as a result of being directly responsible for killing Russians in the Ukraine conflict.
https://news.sky.com/story/meta-ordered-to-pay-almost-1bn-over-child-safety-failings-13570556
https://fortune.com/2026/08/03/palantir-earnings-guidance-beat-revenue-profit-ai-demand/
The Two Greatest Threats: Nuclear War and AI
And we know that because the two greatest threats arguably in all recorded history — and those would be nuclear war and AI — are looming right in front of us. And no one in our society in a position of authority seems capable of responding at all, or even really acknowledging that this is happening. It’s like they’re frozen, staring at the tree that approaches the windshield at 70 miles an hour. It really does feel that way. And if you listen carefully, that is where we are.
Carlson has no time for climate-change is his manifesto or biological warfare (see Annie Jacobsen's latest book). He also fails to mention the attempts by the USA to maintain its global hegemony, especially in relation to China and Russia. But his later comments in relation to AI and mass migration are spot-on.
The End of an Era
And so it’s worth thinking about what comes next. Something, assuming we’re all here — and you have to assume that, you certainly want to. And even if it’s not true, you still have to plan for it, because we don’t know. So something’s coming next, something will replace the system.
The highest hope is that that replacement, whatever does come next, will be the result of an incremental process that people have time to metabolize and buy into, approve of, that we don’t get an abrupt change. Because abrupt changes of political leadership are, well, they’re called revolutions. And they’re not typically an improvement over what they’re replacing. And they have their own downsides in any case.
In the past, revolutions - in America, England, France and Russia for example - were essentially to overthrow subservience to monarchies that no longer served a purpose. But today there is no monarchy to overthrow only a system and that is much harder to do - you can't just chop its head off. Again Carlson does not mention that perhaps the era that is ending is that of US hegemony after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 followed by the rise of China as a world power.
Political Changes and the Two-Party System
And once again, just to restate the obvious, because you can’t state the obvious enough — if Trump’s opponents really opposed what he was doing, well then we would have people in the streets, famously. And the party whose whole self-understanding is people taking to the streets and marching for this, that, or the other thing, especially peace, would be marching for peace and against this war. But they’re not. And why aren’t they? Because they’re not against it, that’s why.
Remember the nationwide Vietnam war demonstrations? The reason people are not marching in the same way over Gaza or Iran or Ukraine is because they are not invested in these wars. The fighting is being done by proxies or without any American troops being killed on the ground. They are out-of-sight, out-of-mind wars with someone else's children being killed.
Both Parties Are Aligned Against the Population
But as noted, not only do the people in charge not care what you want, they’re actively hostile to what you want. And the fact that you want it is evidence to them that it’s illegitimate. “Well, you shouldn’t want that. You entitled little kid. What are you, a college student?” The ones who aren’t going to have jobs, thanks to the AI they’re all invested in. I mean, you see this — it’s all too disconnected to continue.
AI will be the ultimate control mechanism, which is why no government is doing anything meaningful to stop it. This is a job for the UN but unfortunately non-one takes the UN seriously now as international law has collapsed and it's every nation for itself.
The Case for a Third Party
Because when you hear people say, “Well, there’s no political solution to this,” well, of course you’re rooting for a political solution, because the alternative is something kinetic, as they say, and you don’t want that. You don’t want violence of any kind. But you also know that there are no political solutions to anything really, in any system. Because the society behaves, consistent over time, with the values and concerns of the people who live there.
Which is to say, if you want to change human behavior, passing laws against it doesn’t get you there.
It's also worth reading Caitlin Johnstone's post here: "I'm Not Political" Just Means "I Support The Status Quo"
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/im-not-political-just-means-i-support
What Real Change Requires
So in other words, if you want to change a society, yeah, you definitely need more options on the ballot. You definitely, definitely need leaders who want to serve the citizens of the country because they care about the citizens of the country. And of course, service follows caring. If you love someone, you want to serve that person, obviously.
But more than anything, you need a population that has clear goals, that knows what the program should be. “Don’t give the finger to old ladies in a crosswalk, just don’t do that” — we all agree. You need a consensus on what we’re doing here. What is the whole point of this? That’s what you need to start.
And it turns out if you have that consensus, a lot of problems get solved over time, not immediately. Some problems are, if not intractable, very complex. But if you get the fundamentals right, they tend to get better over time. And if you don’t, they inexorably get worse — that we know.
And so any effort to fix America’s systemic problems with technocratic solutions is by definition doomed to fail, because it doesn’t address how you got here in the first place.
More choices at the ballot box are not confusing they are healthy - not stuffing the ballot with bonkers candidates - but viable candidates with a published manifesto. And if this leads to tie breaks then second and third ballots are also healthy if subject to minimum voting levels to ensure that reduced turnouts do not make a vote unrepresentative.
How Did We Get Here?
So how did we wind up with trillions of dollars in debt? Trillions and trillions, unpayable debt. Well, because we kept electing people who added to it, including the current occupant of the White House. Now why did we do that?
The USA is by far the world's biggest debtor and what happens if it defaults? Nobody really knows. The only real reason to buy debt is to have leverage. But in the event of a US default no-one will have leverage so why countries like China want to hold on to so much US debt is a mystery to FNN. The USA is the biggest south-sea bubble ever.
The Foundation of a Better America
The most important thing you can do is tell the truth out loud, always. The words are the most important thing. They’re not the whole solution, but they’re the beginning of the change. Tell the truth out loud. Say what is true.
This is why censorship of individuals and 'disinformation' channels is simply nonsense. These practices do not serve the purpose of establishing the truth, only to conceal it by reducing perspective. In the EU, Carlson would be sanctioned for these views as they are in complete contradiction to official narratives. MAGA 2.0 is in danger of becoming the RT of America, sanctioned because of what it is rather than what it says or does.
America Should Be Fair
And the very first thing America should be is fair. America should be fair. Now not only should America be fair, America was created to be fair. That’s the entire point of America. Well, it never has been fair. Yeah. Well, okay. But that doesn’t change the fact that that has always been the goal. And when you stop trying to find the goal, you have no hope of ever achieving it.
Is it fair to stop illegal immigrants from wanting a better life in the USA and their piece of the American dream? Well yes it is if this impacts the ability of the people already there to gain their own better life and share of the American dream. See the comments on AI and migration below.
America Should Be Sovereign
The second thing that you need America to be is sovereign. What does sovereign mean? Sovereign means free from outside influence, the right to make decisions on your nation’s behalf or your own behalf without being told what to do. Sovereignty is a synonym for freedom. The opposite of sovereignty is slavery, where you have no choice.
It's easy to forget that sovereignty is not essentially to do with the divine right of Kings but with nations and individuals. Countries unduly influenced by outside parties - like the USA is by Israel - essentially become proxies for these outside influencers, reducing their own sovereignty.
Debt as a Form of Slavery
Debt is a form of slavery. And our leaders are so invested in it that they’ll attack you for noting it, but it’s true, and everybody knows it’s true. And so it’s important to say that the goal is sovereignty. No more foreign lobbyists. None. No more control of the agencies by industry, none.
And no more government promotion of debt to high interest money lenders. It’s all of a piece.
Debt is the modern form of slavery but for most people it is almost impossible to escape. We no longer have Dicken's debtors prisons but in reality debt is a virtual prison, its just that the walls and cages are less obvious. The rise of 'credit scores' is just another form of iron-manacle to restrict what people in debt can do with their lives.
A Productive Nation
Third, productive. A decent country is productive. Productive means that you make things worth having from which you derive joy, that improve the lives of other people, or that just are inherently beautiful.
There was a thing called art at one point that was appreciated because it was beautiful. And that’s the only reason it was appreciated. It didn’t do anything, but it uplifted people’s spirits and that was considered a worthy end in itself. All these assumptions have kind of been erased over the past century in stages. And certainly in the last twenty years, the idea that it is your duty and pleasure to produce something worth having has kind of been lost and been replaced by the idea that the point of work is to make money to pay for all these things, mostly to pay interest on all these things. It’s part of the debt cycle.
Lessons from the Cold War
At the height of the Cold War, let’s say in the 1970s, what was the Soviet Union famous for? Now, of course, they had a larger nuclear arsenal than ours. They controlled a greater landmass than ours. It was enormous. But the one thing they didn’t do that we did do was produce beautiful, useful, well made things. American craftsmanship was probably close to its peak. Certainly its reputation for craftsmanship was at its peak.
And the Soviet Union meanwhile churned out crap. You didn’t want a Soviet car. It ran on like kerosene and broke down at red lights. It was a joke because the system was a joke. And we knew the system was a joke because of what they made.
So what do you say about a system that makes money lending and real estate speculation and flock cameras and Tomahawk missiles? That’s it? That’s what a great nation makes? It’s shameful and very hard to fix, by the way.
There's no doubt that the Soviet Union churned out a lot of crap but it also managed to open up space and is still a leading provider of the Soyuz rockets that take astronauts to the ISS. This was a source of great pride to the Soviet people and gave them a shred of hope despite the food and consumer goods shortages, awful housing and rural poverty. The USA also churned out some crap of its own like gas-guzzling cars built like tanks that cruised the interstates but the consumer lifestyle literally become a way of life in the USA where the main leisure activity is visiting malls and fast-food restaurants.
America’s Greatest Resource: The Land
What do you do about it? Well, re-industrializing is hard. One place you could start is with our natural resources, the greatest of which is called farmland. America has the greatest, most productive farmland in the world. What does that produce? Well, food. Why do we need food? Well, to survive. That’s not a small thing. That’s not an ancillary fact about America. That’s the core fact about America.
And so if you reoriented your mind around reality, you would conclude that the Great Plains are way more important than BlackRock, and no, BlackRock shouldn’t own the Great Plains. On a basic level, they’re more important. You can’t live without them and they could be great.
Unfortunately, the financialisation of the USA means that BlackRock and many like it, are considered to be more important than the Great Plains, over which cattle-barons fought illegal wars with independent ranchers in the 19th century for control of the 'open range' (after dispossessing it from the native Americans and slaughtering all the buffalo so their cattle could graze and any rebellious Indians would starve).
The Beauty of America
Home ownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value.
And that leads to the next thing that America always has and should continue to be, which is beautiful. If you were to have left The United States, I don’t know, forty years ago, 1986, and you went somewhere far away, I don’t know, Uzbekistan, and you came back, probably the first thing you would notice other than it’s way more crowded than it was forty years ago is that it’s less attractive than it was forty years ago.
You don't have to be from Uzbekistan to notice this. Anyone who lived in the USA before the Millennium must have noticed this.
Beauty, Health, and the Decline of American Society
There was a reason this happened. It wasn’t like urban planners and architects woke up one morning and said, “I don’t know, a concrete FBI building is just prettier than the one it replaced.” No, of course, what they knew was ugly. That was the point. And what was the point of that?
Who knows? Probably not even worth speculating. All that’s worth saying is being around beautiful things makes you a better person and it’s within your control. It’s certainly within your list of demands and it should be near the top of that list. And that would include, by the way, cleanliness.
You can say all you like about autocracies but one thing they do is keep places clean. Of course there are shitholes in every country but it would hard to call either Moscow or Bejing 'dirty' in the conventional sense.
Cleanliness, Order, and the Demand for Dignity
There’s something about calls for cleanliness that set certain people on edge. Like only Nazis care about cleanliness. Really? Travel around the world. It used to be that when you travel to a country like Pakistan, for example, they would say, “Want to come to The United States. Why? Because it’s clean.”
People understand that cleanliness is better than filth. And if you allow your city to become covered in graffiti or let people crap on the sidewalk or don’t pick up the trash, that’s bad. In fact, it’s a sign that things are falling apart, and maybe that’s a sign that you want to send. Not clear why you’d want to send that. But it’s bad for the people who live there, not just on public health grounds, not just because it spreads disease, because it’s bad for their souls. That’s why you make your bed in the morning.
And in case you wonder, yes, people do crap on the sidewalk in the USA. FNN has seen it and smelled it in the center of downtown San Francisco. Unfortunately for these people, their bed is a blanket on the sidewalk. It really is beyond belief that a country like the USA cannot come up with a creative solution to solve its homeless and van-living problem.
The Case for Health — Physical, Mental, and Spiritual
The next thing that America needs to be, in this we’re saying so out loud, is healthy. And that means that we’re physically healthy, but also spiritually healthy, clear eyed and bright. It’s not shameful to want that. There was a time when health was taken for granted as a goal when being physically robust and mentally alert were kind of expected. And of course not everyone met those standards, very much including me, but those were the standards.
Spritual health has gone in many places, not just the USA. Apparently the young are experiencing much higher levels of mental-health issues that in the past. And it can't all be down to rejection of God and religion. That surely impacts some people but not all. Some other malaise is at play. Obsession with phones and addiction to social media and vacuous 'influencers' may also be major contributing factors.
The Pharmaceutical Fog
And to give in to the assumption that, well, there are some things that are just really tough, so tough that you need to be addled in some way by a pharma product. Weed, you seem to unrelax with weed or alcohol or whatever, but not just that. In fact, those are hardly the most insidious because they’re the most obvious. Drunk people are easy to spot. Weed smells.
Benzodiazepines are totally hidden and the effects aren’t obvious either. And they’re prescribed up and down for everything, flying on airplanes, going to meetings. So are amphetamines, taking tests. There’s almost no natural human activity in The United States that doesn’t seem to require a pharma product, whether it’s having sex or going to sleep, the most basic functions of all, all require pharma products.
As usual it's all about money. Addiction pays - at every stage of the supply chain: salesmen, doctors, influencers. Sure lives can be prolonged and made better. No-one is disputing that but the dark side of big-pharma is addiction and misery. Drug addicts are not just people who shoot-up in the toilet. They are virtually everybody.
Reclaiming Health as a National Goal
And so how do you fix it? Again, by saying once again, it’s not good. Health is the goal. And the closer you are to natural design, the closer you are to health. You weren’t made for this stuff. And just because someone tells you you’ve got this new life enhancing thing doesn’t mean it’s actually life enhancing. It may be new, but it definitely doesn’t mean it’s better.
And so as you think about this and assess it, I mean, this is all obvious stuff, but you begin to realize that we’ve been manipulated as citizens, but mostly as consumers. And if you wake up and your main role in a society is as a consumer, it’s a problem because you’re diminished by nature. Citizens have rights, you treat them with respect. Consumers are pawns to be manipulated. And so it’s important to note that we have been manipulated and that health is the goal.
A healthy society is a goal. You go to an airport or Walmart and lots of people are fat and tattooed and kind of depressed looking. And you think, well, which came first? Are you fat and tattooed because you’re depressed or are you depressed because you’re fat and tattooed? It’s possible it’s the latter. Living with self respect improves you and everyone around you. And no one loves us enough to say that.
Instead, they’re like, “Be you. You’re wearing your pajamas with face tattoos at Walmart, and that’s okay.” But it’s not okay. And you know it’s not okay, and no one thinks that’s actually okay. And anyone telling you it is okay doesn’t love you. In fact, probably just the opposite.
Freedom of choice and identity have become the ivy that is killing the tree of society. Once planted, it's hard to stop.
The Problem of Government Lying and Classification
Another thing you’d like America to be is honest. Honest. Lying, which is part of the human condition, of course we all lie, hopefully less than we want, but lying is bad. And it’s always bad. It’s one of those universal principles referenced earlier that never changes.
It is always bad to lie. You may have excuses for it and they may be valid or sound valid, but it’s never a good thing. And you can never tolerate it, at least officially. We always have to say it is wrong to lie. And that has to be expressed, by the way, in the legal code.
So if it’s a crime to lie to the government, which it is, you can’t lie to a federal agent, lots of people have gone to jail for it, Martha Stewart famously, then it has to be a crime for the federal government to lie to you. But is it a crime for the federal government to lie to you? No. In fact, it’s encouraged. Every sting operation, every elaborate FBI scheme is based on lying.
Is it a safe country? Do you feel safe? Is there less fraud? Of course not. Doesn’t work.
The system is rigged just like a 'bent' roulette table. The house always wins. The punters are just suckers. We have become suckers for government lies. And if they can do it, why not us? Another form of social ivy.
The Double Standard of Lying
Well, of course, it’s all of ours. Lying is bad. And unless you continue to say that, it’s in fact, it’s an unacceptable disqualifying sin in a leader. If you found out your spouse was lying to you, “Where were you last week?” “I was on a business trip,” but actually you’re in Barbados.
That will significantly affect your relationship. But for some reason, when our leaders tell obvious lies to us, it’s about the Iran nuclear program. No. Really, it’s the Iran nuclear program. Nothing to do with the Iran nuclear program, which you told us you eliminated last summer.
So clearly you’re lying. That’s the moment at which we should stop and say, not accepting this. We are not continuing in this conversation until you admit you were lying and tell me why. In the same way, if you caught your spouse lying about pretending to be in Scottsdale, but was in fact in Barbados, you would say, I’m not going to let this pass. Like, what were you doing in Barbados?
The channelling of information into defined narratives, the sanctioning of 'disinformation', the social media feed and follower 'bubbles' are all in service of this kind of lying that relies on no-one joining the dots due to incomplete information.
Classification: The Government’s Tool for Secrecy
And the main place in a relationship with the federal and state government that can change is on classification. So what is classification?
Classification is the lie that the majority of the big things government is doing are too important to tell you about. You’re not allowed to know because if you knew somehow we would all be less safe. Well, that’s a lie. And of course the main reason that over a billion federal documents are classified is in order to give the people running the government the ability to do whatever they want, including enrich themselves, steal, defraud your money and strip you of the right to do anything about it because you don’t know what’s happening. So this is noted by all normal people at all times.
Evil thrives in darkness and sunlight famously is what? The disinfectant, but there’s no effort to disinfect our rulers. And instead, they have constructed a, not overstatement, to say a Byzantine system of classification rules with one goal in mind, not to keep us safe or to end the Iranian nuclear program or to fight Hamas, but to allow them to behave with shameless corruption under double standards that secrecy affords them. That is the truth. And that’s why sixty-three years after our president was murdered in Dallas, we can’t know all the available facts about that murder.
Classification is the Wizard of Oz curtain. If we were allowed to look behind it we would see the wizard is just a tawdry bunch of power-mad manipulators frantically pulling strings to try to hide or alter reality.
The Conspiracy Theory Trap
And this may be a kind of trap that the rest of us fall into. Something will happen, a history-changing event like 9/11. And parts of it will seem self-evidently obvious like what happened, planes flew into buildings, but some of it like Building 7, which collapsed for still no explicable reason, are totally confusing. Twenty-five years later, like what was that? And so people ask those questions because why wouldn’t they? Anyone who’s awake looks at that and says, that’s weird.
And then that person is screamed at as a conspiracy theorist, a wacko, “You’re an anti-Semite, you must be a Nazi if you have questions about Building 7.” Okay, well, there’s a very fast way to settle that debate and it’s by declassifying the documents that might shed light, factual light on what actually happened, but that never enters the mind of either side. The people asking questions slandered as conspiracy theorists just grumble to themselves and the people who are continuing to hide the truth, assuming there’s a different truth, just sort of keep on doing it.
Conspiracy theories are simply a means to the truth. Most will be wrong but the few that are not will help you to get to and understand the truth. That's why they are valuable and the people who promote them are not nuts they just have a different view from the current mainstream view.
The Importance of Optimism
The next thing you’d like America to be, we should demand that America is, is optimistic. Now why optimistic? People misunderstand the term. Optimism is not simply the product of an act of will. “I’m choosing to be optimistic today. I’m going to be in a sunny mood regardless. I’m choosing to be happy.” You can do that and you should do that if you can. But optimism is also the product of systems. The way things are structured either encourages optimism or it guarantees pessimism.
Why are people optimistic? Well, because of course they’re hoping for a better future, but why are they thinking about the future at all? Now put them in stark contrast to our leaders who given their ages don’t have much of a future chronologically. People are thinking about the future, making plans for the future, expecting something better in the future, protecting against the possibility of something worse in the future, but they are living ahead of themselves. They’re thinking about a time when they won’t be here.
Why are they doing that? Because they have children. It’s really simple. Because they have children. Countries that place value on children, and not just like little kids running around playing, but generations of think in terms of what might exist after I’m gone that are rooted in some sort of historical continuity.
“I came from here. My descendants will be here.” People who think in those terms are by definition optimistic.
Optimism is an essential American trait and it is facing an existential crisis because all the time we are being told about a future that is 'threatened' by various parties that the MSM wants us to fear in order to service some other agenda (e.g. re-militarisation in Europe).
Short-Term Thinking and Its Consequences
But the first thing you notice about the people who run our country and increasingly some of the people in positions of authority throughout the country and positions of economic authority for sure, is that they have no time horizon. It’s about the next quarter. They’re day traders basically. And there’s a lot about the finance economy that encourages that kind of thinking, thinking from earnings report to earnings report, because it’s thinking based on what a share price reflects. It’s not to say that’s insignificant. It is significant to some extent, but it’s not the basis upon which you build a society because it’s too limited. It’s too here and now.
If enough people in positions of authority start to think like that, what do you get? Well, you get what you have now. You have looting where people actually don’t believe that any of this will exist tomorrow. And so they get a New Zealand passport and they try to grab as much as they can while they can. And that’s literally happening right now.
Unfortunately, the promise of the real promise of cryptocurrency has been hijacked to some extent by people just like that. It’s a pump and dump scheme, of course. Talk it up, take the cash and run. So you only behave like that, not simply because you’re a bad person, but because your time horizon is so short. It doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow.
Again, you can say what you like about the autocratic rulers of China, but these people definitely take the long view. You have to with their population and the scale of problems they have to solve. You don't raise people out of poverty or build a national high speed rail network with stations as big as airports in a few quarters. It takes years, decades to accomplish these things.
America used to understand these kinds of achievements - the coast-to-coast railroad and the Interstate highway system for example - but now these are just ancient history.
Children, Family, and the Future of America
So a lot of the debates about birth rate and family either get hopelessly abstract, like “We need to be at replacement rate or else we won’t exist.” That’s too hard to conceive of. Or they’re too tinged by some specific moral code. I certainly feel that way as a Christian, all kinds of views on the family as a Christian that are completely heartfelt, but they don’t necessarily apply to everybody because not everyone has my religious views. What does apply to everybody is the way you think about yourself in relation to what came before and what comes next after you. And the only thing that roots you to that kind of thinking is having kids.
And that’s never really been apparent until a lot of the people in charge stopped having kids or got so old that there doesn’t matter what their kids do because their kids are in their fifties. It only became apparent in its absence. A country that doesn’t place children at the center of its concerns ignores the future. A country that doesn’t care about kids doesn’t care about the future.
And this future is not about the Disney/Pixar like children of the relentless movies and cartoons that today's children consume on a daily basis. Children that don't walk alone to school, don't kick a ball around in the street or can be deprived of their phone for 5 minutes. Fake children that look a certain way that real children want to emulate because that's what today's 'role-models' look like.
A Global Perspective on Children and Society
So it’s important to know that there haven’t been many societies like ours in this way. And even now, if you travel ever outside of our borders, one of the very first things you notice, there are little kids everywhere. Because people in a healthy society have children, not out of a religious obligation or a sentimental attachment to children, but because that is the biological imperative of every person. That’s like the main thing you do as you’re alive is reproduce. And it’s really only in The United States and Western Europe and Canada and Australia that it’s somehow obscene to say that out loud. It’s considered weird or dirty, like you’re an Amish person or want to strip women of their rights or something. You’re a freak if you think that.
“Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” No, normal people around the world care about their kids most, have as many kids as they can, take great joy in their children because they know what all people have always known, which is that is the main source of pleasure and achievement and joy in this life. And in the end, those are the strongest ties that you’ll have as a human being.
Teaching the Next Generation: Wisdom, Not Just Education
Now if you were to put children at the center of your thinking, which is to say the future at the center of your thinking about the present, which you should always do, mindful of the past, aware of the present, but thinking about the future, which is to say consequences, one of the first things you’d want to do is teach your children something of use in order to participate meaningfully in the future in order to help them. And what would you want to do to your kids?
Educate them? Obviously not. You’d want to make them wise. So wisdom is the goal. Living in a wise country is the goal.
Now how is it different from education? Well, education is what we have. Education is a credentialing system whereby some tax exempt institution issues you a document showing that you have been “educated.” And lost in that process is any real check on whether you have an education, whether you know anything or understand anything of great value. And increasingly, with some exceptions, but increasingly it is obvious to everybody that that system is completely broken.
Many people have tried their best to move away from the credentialing system (e.g. by home-schooling) but they always fail because the current system is one of control and standardisation. Even Universities today have lost their mojo as they have been toppled by woke agendas and the appointment of dubious 'professors' to virtue signal their adherence to these agendas.
The Failure of Educational Fads
So there’s that. But the main thing you have to teach the next generation to understand are the things that don’t change. And you know this because any attempt to follow some tech fad has proven hilariously and disastrously a failure.
So there was a push fifteen years ago when the tablet came out, the iPad — every kid has to have an iPad to learn on the iPad. And of course, the results came in within the decade, and they were totally predictable, that kids who spend too much time on iPads are actually way dumber and less informed than those who read books. But none of the educrats who pushed that and demanded money to do it ever apologized or even acknowledged that it was wrong.
Just like every educational fad — new math. I mean, this goes back sixty years. “We’re going to do it a totally different revolutionary way. And your kids without really working hard are going to learn a ton.” And of course every successive generation has become more and more ignorant, and the internet has accelerated that.
And this all without education being taken over by AI along with parenting handed over to AI via 'personalized podcasts'.
Returning to Eternal Truths: Human Nature
So it might be worth just returning to the eternal goal, instead of acquiring ephemeral knowledge, instead of trying to figure out how to code, it might be worth teaching your children about the things that don’t change, like human nature.
Human nature is unchanging. The behavior of people in, say, the Book of Chronicles, written three thousand years ago, is totally recognizable to us. Hammurabi’s code, the first written law, addresses the way people behave on the basis of the way people still behave now thousands of years later, which is another way of saying these, despite what they may have told you, are facts about people that have not changed in thousands of years, and even with Neuralink are unlikely to change in the future.
And so why not explain them to children so that they can have the benefit of wisdom, so they can understand the world around them and make good decisions on the basis of what they see? Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?
Well, because there’s an entire lobby, a well-funded lobby, sixty years old, designed to prevent any of us from telling the truth to kids about the way people are. And don’t want to be divisive and name it, but basically the entire education establishment, and it’s one of the best funded establishments in America, exists to lie to kids, to your kids, to their students, about the way people are.
Decency: A Core American Value Under Attack
The second to last thing America should be is decent. Decent, pro-human, in favor of people, putting the needs of other people before the needs of, say, systems or machines or abstract concepts. Decency, caring about individuals. That’s always been obvious that The United States was a decent country.
There’s no other country on earth where you can break down and ask directions and get them quicker from a larger group of eager-to-help strangers. There’s no country that loves dogs more. There’s no country that’s sweeter in some ways than The United States.
But in recent years, decency has been under attack, and not just sexual decency, the decency police, but human decency, kindness, regard for others. When you see your secretary of war jumping around like a deranged bloodthirsty monkey calling for the murder of innocents, and no one says anything about it, then you know we’ve taken a path that nobody can be proud of.
The Epstein class mentioned above is the proof that decency is no longer a virtue but something to give the finger to. The UK has the same problem with its 'grooming' i.e. rape gangs. Decent people don't do these things. It has nothing to do with race or religion, decency is above all that.
Genocide, Accountability, and the Standard of Decency
And when another country commits genocide against a population, kills tens of thousands of children, as our closest ally has, as countries tend to do, by the way, it’s a recurring theme in history. Israel’s not the only country that’s committed genocide and neither is Nazi Germany. It’s happened a lot. But when that does happen, we’re not going to pay for it, because it’s disgusting. It’s not hard to say that. In fact, it’s a relief to say that because everybody knows it.
And if you blow up a girl’s school, you’re going to say, “I’m sorry, we did that. In fact, we’ll pay you restitution,” because no child, no school girl deserves to get blown up by a Tomahawk missile or double tapped. And if we did it, or the Iranians did it, or Israel did it, or Sri Lanka did it, it doesn’t matter. It’s always wrong. And we uphold that standard not simply because we care about pupils at a girl’s school in Iran, but because we’re above that kind of behavior.
We won’t tolerate a secretary of war. And if we have a secretary of war, we’re sure not going to tolerate him jumping around like a hyena talking about murdering people. Not because we dislike him, we don’t, but because it’s our country and we’re better than that. And other people may behave that way, but they’re savages and that’s why they’re not us.
'We apologize and we'll do our best to make it right' is not a phrase you hear from many or any governments these days. Saying sorry, at all levels, has become inextricably linked to a 'climbdown' and that is not acceptable in today's world. Sorry is an admission of sin and no-one wants to be thought of as a sinner. News sources seldom apologize for fake news in the headline way they first reported it, if at all.
Decency in Domestic Policy: The Tax Code
So if you have a tax code, for example, just to name one example. If you have a tax code that taxes wage earners at more than twice the percentage it taxes investors, what are you saying? Well, you’re saying it’s twice as virtuous to invest money or to inherit money and keep it in the markets as it is to go to work in the morning. Really? Of course, that’s what you’re saying.
The Indecency of an Unjust Tax Code
Because any tax code penalizes the impious acts, the bad things, the vices, cigarettes cost $18 a pack because we’re against smoking. So if being an ordinary wage earner driving in from the suburbs to make $80,000 a year, if that’s taxed at twice the rate of being a private equity baron, what are we saying? That it’s twice as virtuous to be a private equity baron and to inherit money or to invest. Well, that’s not only distorted, it’s indecent, it’s disgusting. And why is it disgusting?
Because it takes no account of the welfare of your own citizens. It’s literally indecent. And if you keep it up, even if you don’t have a revolution, even if they don’t storm the Bastille over it, which they probably won’t because most people don’t even know it’s happening, though they have a sense that this is out of whack. But if you keep that up over time, nobody believes in the project. You can’t believe in something you have no respect for.
Taxation is another way the government quietly controls how taxpayers spend their money. It is what is now called a 'nudge' system, nudging us towards the behaviour that is the goal of the tax codes. A real taxation system would reward things that matter- like saving towards your care in old age - while penalizing those that don't.
The Case for National Unity
And the last thing, and maybe the most important thing that this country needs to be, is united. It needs to be a nation and Americans need to be a people. By definition, it can’t continue without that. It’s too big. No country can continue without a sense of itself as a nation and countries that fall didn’t.
That’s why they fell. And it’s not easy because this nation doesn’t have a working majority of almost anything, not a race, not a religion, ethnic background, history, culture. And if it continues along that path, of course it will break up. You will find parts of the country simply have nothing in common with other parts of the country. So why would the interstate highway system continue?
Unfortunately those who support mass migration for diversity and humanitarian reasons are not interested in unity but disunity and the disintegration of indigenous cultures that are blamed for past 'sins' like colonialism and slavery to justify their 'punishment' today.
Stopping Mass Migration
And the very first is stop mass migration into The United States because at this point, there is no justification for it. And no, that’s not a racist position. It’s the position of a lot of non-white voters in The United States, but it’s also a very common sense position for two reasons.
One, there’s been too much. It hasn’t been justified by our economic needs, actually. There hasn’t been a desperate need for labor and that’s why we brought in 50 million people from other countries. That’s not true. An awful lot of Americans will be looking for jobs soon. So that’s not real.
And for another, it’s been too fast. And even if every person who’s come into The United States over the last sixty years was an amazing person, a lot of them are amazing people, it would still be change at a pace that people are not wired to metabolize. People cannot deal with this pace of change. It makes them crazy and it uproots them. It makes them feel no connection to their neighbors or to their nation, which is not a small thing because when the country comes under pressure, if it defaults on its debt, for example, and there’s nothing holding the people together, they will come apart.
So it’s a national security question really that you have some kind of national cohesion, some sort of shared culture and culture is not race. It can sometimes flow out of identity, but it doesn’t need to. Culture is a shared set of assumptions that holds a big group of people together.
The AI Factor
And the second reason you can’t have any more immigration of any kind is because of AI. So you can’t simultaneously say we’re going to eliminate a third of all American jobs the next five years, but we need a lot more people coming into this country for work. Doesn’t even make any sense at all. And so it’s not an attack on any other country or group when you say, “I’m sorry, we don’t know what’s going to happen in this country. We’re going to have 100 million people without work.”
Probably not a great time to bring in new people. In fact, it would be crazy to bring in new people and it wouldn’t be good for those people either, but that’s not ever the point. The point of running a nation is to protect that nation and the people who live there. So there’s no justification for any immigration into The United States of any kind until we understand the effects of AI.
This is a really important point. Why does any society need all these immigrants to fill jobs that will disappear in the near future or for them to become another underclass enslaved to people-traffickers? This is just adding another future social and financial burden to already indebted national financial systems.
Fixing the Immigration System
So how do you fix the immigration system right now? Well, one thing that no one’s tried yet is just take tax dollars and send them to American citizens instead of to people who aren’t American citizens. It’s really, really simple. And no, it’s not racist or mean to say to people, “If you come to our country for a better life, more promises or whatever you say you’re here for, and maybe you are here for those reasons, we’re not going to subsidize you while you’re here.” Why would we? Does The United States have an obligation to pay welfare benefits to the rest of the world? And if so, where does that obligation come from? And of course the answer is no.
And it was a little more confusing ten years ago when most Americans felt they lived in the richest country in the history of the world and that prosperity would never end. But now that it’s very obvious that The US is at its absolute limit in what it can pay for, that it’s basically spent all of its money running around the world creating chaos, there is no justification for spending $1 on anyone who comes to this country illegally, not one.
There is also no justification for spending $1 on anyone who commits serious anti-social crimes like rape and murder. What this kind of crime really says is: I don't care about the social norms of the society I live in. So why should that same society care about you?
The Importance of a Common Language
And the second thing you would do if you wanted to truly unite the country would be to pick a language and that language is English. There is no fact of a culture more important than the language that people speak. In some ways, language is culture. It is the thing people from different backgrounds and yes, religions and races share. They’re united in a language. They read the same books. Language shapes the way that you think.
So people who think in a language think a certain way. If you haven’t traveled a lot, maybe you don’t know that. But when you go to countries, if you go to Finland or Hungary, countries in which a total of 15 million people globally speak between those two countries, you’ll notice people think a little bit differently. So language unites. But one thing we know for certain is that different languages divide dramatically.
That is always true. It was true in the Roman Empire and it’s true now. It’s true in Canada. It’s true in Belgium. It’s true everywhere.
And so if you were serious about holding your country together, and keep in mind that if the country doesn’t hold together, then it breaks apart and that implies violence, also known as civil war, so the stakes couldn’t be higher. If you were serious about holding your country together, you’d be serious above all about making certain that everyone in your country spoke the same language. And why wouldn’t you? Because you were intimidated because somebody calls you racist? Really?
Tricky. While the UK government encourages minority languages like Gaelic and Welsh, the same government pledges never-ending to support to Ukraine where they have imposed language laws aimed at eradicating Russian and forcing everyone to speak and write in Ukrainian. If it's not OK for the people of Scotland and Wales to be forced to speak and write English then why is is it acceptable for Russian-speakers in Ukraine to be forced to speak Ukrainian?
Addressing the Trend Before It’s Too Late
But the point is if we don’t do that, then the current trend will continue. And if it’s clear what the current trend is, whether it’s toward nuclear war, replacement by machines in the AI development, or in the case of America breaking apart into components, the trend if unaddressed, is really, really clear. That’s where we’re going.
What It Means to Be American
So if you’re going to fix it and rebuild this country and turn it into a place that the grandchildren you hopefully will have can inherit and thrive, you’re going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity. What does it mean to be an American? But it’s fixable. You just have to try.
And we will be trying. And we’ll tell you as we continue to do that. Thanks for listening.
We spend far to much time obsessing about our individual 'me' identity rather than about our social/national 'we' identity. And in the end we will all pay for that obsession.