All the Narratives are Collapsing - In The Tank #484
Download MP3We are live. Welcome to the show, everybody. Alright. So those so called experts are still backpedaling and trying to reframe the history of the COVID fiasco. None of us here are falling for it.
Linnea Lueken:Rand Paul insists that Trump's labor secretary pick should not be confirmed if she supports the pro act, And, vice president Vance insults multiple European countries that tell by telling them that they should act like democracies if they claim to be democracies. And we're going to have an update on Doge and more corrupt spending that they have uncovered. We are going to talk about all of this in episode 484 of the In the Tank podcast. Alright. Well, I guess we didn't have a thing after the cold open, so here we are.
Linnea Lueken:Welcome to the In the Tank podcast. I'm Linnea Lukin. Today as usual, we have Jim Likely, vice president of the Heartland Institute. Jim, how are you?
Jim Lakely:I am doing just great. I'm doing better than Andy Singer, our producer extraordinaire, who hit the wrong, video for the beginning of the thing, and they're supposed to be like, the little inside baseball is supposed to be, there's a there's a video that plays right at the beginning, gives people a little bit more time to get into the beginning of the show, and then there's the cold open done beautifully by Linnea. And then the theme, video is supposed to drop, which I put that wonderful, little clip from, Dumb and Dumber, one of my favorite movies, and talking about what Doge is gonna actually find when they go to Fort Knox to audit all the gold there. And so it was supposed to all be set up in this great comedic way, and Andy screwed it up. Now Andy was that we there was rumors.
Jim Lakely:We had talked about this, Andy, that you might have actually been able to show your face and speak on the program. You are now back on probation. It'll be at least three months until you even sniff being on the air again. So well done, my friend. Well done.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, it's alright. We can't be too hard on them. No. K. We also have, Chris Talgo, editorial director at the Heartland Institute and also socialism research fellow.
Linnea Lueken:Chris, how are you?
Chris Talgo:Well, I'm doing good. Today was the official opening of, spring training for baseball, so that's great. I I think I can finally see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel here. You know, if you look in the background here, it might look nice and sunny here in Chicago, but it is freezing. This has been a terrible week, and I think we are almost finally at the end of it.
Chris Talgo:So that's great news for
Jim Lakely:me.
Linnea Lueken:Nice. Yeah. I'm getting into, pollen season pretty soon here myself, which is, a very terrible time as well. Alright. Well, before we get started, as always, everybody, if you wanna support the show, you can go to heartland.org/inthetank and donate there.
Linnea Lueken:Since YouTube doesn't let us, mono be demonetized, because we talk about things they don't like, that's pretty much the only way that you can get, us a little bit of help there. Please also click the thumbs up, to like the video and remember that sharing it helps to break through some of that suppression. Even just leaving a comment also helps. If you're an audio listener, you can help us out by leaving a nice review. Thank you everybody for being here.
Linnea Lueken:Today, we're actually introducing a new segment. I'm not sure if we have graphics for it yet, but our producer, Andy, pitched to us last week this idea that I thought was a great idea. And that segment is called Unhinged, where we will treat you all to a selection of crazy stuff that people are saying online. And what better place to start than Reddit? So, this week on the subreddit are out of the loop, user Corey s p asks, what is up with all of these government department heads stepping down after being approached by Doge?
Linnea Lueken:Why aren't these department leaders standing their ground and refusing to let Musk tamper with things he's not even authorized to tamper with? Hell, they're not even just granting him access. They're just abandoning their posts altogether. Why? My fear is that he's been doing mafia stuff, threatening to have their families killed, blackmailing them with sensitive information and more because this isn't normal.
Linnea Lueken:I hope that isn't what hap what is happening, but it's really the only thing I can think of that makes sense. Alright, guys. So the question I have is, is this a deranged adult, or is this a 15 year old who needs a break from lefty social media?
Chris Talgo:Well, you know what? You know, you know what stands out to me is how he makes this assertion based on zero evidence. Where is the evidence? I mean, if there was, like, you know, a video of, Musk, you know, like, talking like a mobster, you know, with the the head of, Social Security, I could see this, but there's nothing like that. So this is just more the same.
Chris Talgo:It is you know, the the hyperbole just never ends, and it's all based on nonsense. There's there's obviously, there is zero credibility to this report. And, really, what's going on here is these people are stepping down because they are being, you know, put on the hot seat, and they're having to answer some really tough questions that they don't have the answers to. So good. Great.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Exactly. And, Jim, did you have anything there? I mean, most of the the good thing is, for once, most of the, comments under here are kind of trying to moderate this person. There aren't too many people claiming that, yeah, it's definitely mob tactics going on.
Linnea Lueken:You know, Elon Musk is going in there with a baseball bat covered in barbed wire like fucking them.
Jim Lakely:That's where the Walking Dead reference there. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:That they're gonna lose their kneecaps if they don't, obey. So I I, most of them are saying, well, you know, they don't wanna be involved in, Musk's operation. The only way for them to not be involved is to leave. So, anyway, so I thought you guys would enjoy seeing that as a little treat. We're gonna try to make this segment a regular thing.
Linnea Lueken:So
Jim Lakely:I would just I would just add to that. I mean, he is you could say he is using mafia tactics a little bit. He's not, of course, threatening to kill anyone's family like these deranged nut jobs on Reddit, are are claiming here. And in fact, this is a very tame we wanna, you know, we wanna ease you guys into this sort of stuff with unhinged. So this is there's a lot more stuff out there.
Jim Lakely:I think maybe we didn't pick it because just putting it on screen would probably, get this video, taken down by YouTube, let alone, you know,
Linnea Lueken:be Yeah. We can't we can't show some of the stuff that they say on Reddit about Trump and Musk and stuff.
Jim Lakely:Right. Right. Right. But what there's a there's a phrase I've been trying to pull it together in my head, and I can't quite get there. But, something to the to the effect that if you've been privileged your whole life, you know, fairness looks like oppression.
Jim Lakely:Right? And so if you're a government agency and you've been running a muck your entire professional life, a smidgen of accountability brought to you seems like the mafia, threatening your family and trying to knock your kneecaps out with a baseball bat. So, all of these sorts of reactions, I think, is is good. It's healthy. It means that, for the first time in our lives, we are seeing in real time transparency and sunlight brought to our government.
Jim Lakely:And finally, some accountability is being, doled out. And, you know, it's it's it's reminding me you you see all these reports of people resigning from their positions of power in government. And, again, that's all to the good. It's like when they asked Donald Trump, well, you can't possibly deport all 20,000,000 alleged illegal immigrants in United States, can you? And and he says, well, we'll try, of course.
Jim Lakely:But the what happens is that people self deport. And we have seen at the southern border that the number of apprehensions, of people trying to get into the country illegally has fallen by, like, 97% or something like that. And the reason that is is because so many fewer people are even trying to get into this country illegally. Instead of, you know, 5,000 apprehensions at the border in a month, which was common in the last year of the Biden administration, that's down to, like, a hundred or 48, and that's because the policy is what straightens this stuff out. And in this case, when it comes to Doge and exposing and rooting out corruption and, you know, and and dirty dealing in our government, just exposing it to the light, putting it on on the Doge website, tweeting about it constantly, and exposing the public to what's really going on in our government, you're seeing people in our own government starting to, well, self deport.
Jim Lakely:A lot I think there's gonna be many thousands of federal employees who wish they took the good deal that they had in the first, you know, in the first month of the Trump administration where they could resign, get eight months severance to get on with their lives. There's gonna be a lot of buyer's remorse, or I should say, I didn't buy it, and I have remorse in our federal, bureaucracy.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Absolutely. Okay. I'm gonna get us on to our first main topic today, which is that the experts are still backpedaling, still after all this time, still backpedaling on COVID. A recent tweet by attorney Laura Powell highlights a video recorded by Deborah Birx, who is Trump's White House coronavirus response coordinator, in which she states that the error, I guess, that the public health officials made was not explaining that the COVID vaccines were not like childhood vaccinations and that they don't prevent anyone from getting the disease.
Linnea Lueken:Although I I recall they did a whole lot more than just not explain it that way. They did they did a lot of affirmative, you will not get sick if you, are given these vaccines type of claims. So I don't wanna spend too much time here. We're gonna play the video, and then, Jim, I know you're really worked up over this one, so I'll give the, floor for your rant after we play the
Speaker 4:clip. Done wrong in public health is we didn't explain that COVID vaccines were nothing like the childhood vaccines and that the childhood vaccines, like many of the diseases, you get it once, you don't get it again, And this is getting the children to have that disease without getting the deadly consequences. That is not what the COVID vaccine was designed to do. It wasn't designed to prevent against infection.
Chris Talgo:Wow. Wow.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, what we we didn't have time, I guess, to pull together. They're easy to find. You can just do it on x yourself. The videos of Fauci and Birx and, Walensky, is that her name, from the CDC?
Jim Lakely:Mhmm. And all of these government officials, plus Rachel Maddow and all these media people, all saying that if you get the if you get the shot, you won't get the disease. You won't be a carrier of the virus anymore, and that everybody everybody has to get the shot in order to keep all of us safe. People forget that Joe Biden and the Supreme Court stopped him, but Joe Biden was going to make it mandatory that every business that has 100 or more employees has to require all of their employees to get the shot. People, nurses, people on the front lines, the people that we used to bang, you know, at least in, in in Great Britain, I think at 07:00 every night, they would bang pots and pans outside their their windows to celebrate the frontline medical personnel that were keeping us safe and saving lives.
Jim Lakely:Well, very quickly, it turned into, well, if you're a nurse or a doctor and don't get the jab, you're fired. Thousands of our military veterans, in the military, people who were there for twenty years or more, didn't wanna get an experimental treatment against a disease that they would easily survive, and they were kicked out of the military. This is gaslighting extraordinaire. And for the and for Burks to be the one saying this, Deborah Burks to be the one saying this, who wrote a book in which she admitted that she lied to Donald Trump in order to, advance this fault what she now says was an unnecessary agenda of getting everybody, shots. From what she just said right there, and we've had, on a podcast in the past, we had Jay Bhattacharya, talking about this.
Jim Lakely:He was the the person who's, birthed the Great Barrington Declaration, which said and he spoke at our our benefit dinner actually in September here in Chicago. And the Great Barrington Declaration said, in essence, only give the the this experimental treatment that we call a vaccine to the most vulnerable and let everybody else move on with their lives. Deborah Birx would now be a signatory to the Great Barrington Declaration. And let's also remember that the doctors and the people who supported that document had their careers ruined. And for Deborah Birx to come out now and say, oh, yeah.
Jim Lakely:This that that all of you people that said this about about the COVID vaccines back when it mattered and took risks to do so, you were right all along. No. No. You don't get to freaking do oh my god. I almost swore.
Jim Lakely:I almost used the bad word. You don't get to do that. You do not get to do that. For for you to be on any media outlet and being allowed to say that instead of being you know, it should be like that scene in, you know well, not exactly like that scene in Game of Thrones. She Game of Thrones.
Jim Lakely:She should be walking through the through the, public square, and there should be people ringing bells yelling shame on Deborah Birx for this sort of stuff. You do not get to now say you were right all along. And this this yeah. This does trigger me, Linea, because every time we talk about COVID, I start to get a little bit worked up. And, you know, we do this every few months or so.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, this is this is insane. And let's also remember why and I'll give it over to Chris.
Chris Talgo:I'm gonna
Jim Lakely:calm down. Let's also remember why there was all of this COVID panic and lockdowns and all of this sort of stuff. It was to get Donald Trump out of office. If you don't have, a complete entire societal panic over a pandemic, you don't get to have universal mail in voting. You don't get to have tell people that they can't possibly go to vote in person.
Jim Lakely:It's too dangerous. You get to shut down people's, businesses and entire lives and then point the finger at Donald Trump for being as being to blame. And so all of this was nefarious. And so, no, Deborah Birx, you do not get to come out now and say the obvious truth with a freaking smile on your face and not have somebody push back. There you go.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Yeah. There it is.
Jim Lakely:Shame. Shame. Shame.
Linnea Lueken:Well, yeah. I mean, it's it's pretty incredible. And and now, you know, of course, the the narrative has changed too. Well, we never said that, you know, you had to get the vaccine. You know, you only would lose your job if you didn't.
Linnea Lueken:You know? And it's it's it was it was a terrible situation. I mean, it's part of the reason why I don't work at the last job that I used to work anymore is because I was told basically that, I would not be it's not that they were gonna fire me if I didn't get the vaccine, but they weren't gonna send me out on jobs anymore, which is where you get paid. So I would just be in limbo, basically. So that was pretty much terrible.
Linnea Lueken:I I it's part of the reason why I quit. So, Chris, do you have anything that you wanted to add to this topic? Because I wanted to spend short period of time on it because we've got some bigger ones coming up. But
Chris Talgo:No. No. No. It's fine. Just a couple of things.
Chris Talgo:I mean, Jim covered a lot of ground there. I just wanna go back and just make sure everyone is well aware that in 2020, during the early days of COVID nineteen, Fauci, Burks, and a bunch of other people were just raising the alarm bells saying this is, you know, the worst thing ever. We gotta shut down all the schools. We gotta shut down all the businesses. Even while that was happening, there were still so many instances of Lori Lightfoot, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, you know, flagrantly, you know, flaunting those rules.
Chris Talgo:So they knew in real time that this was not nearly as, you know, you know, devastating as they tried to make it out to be. There's that. Then there was when the vaccines or so called vaccines came out, and the CDC shortly after changed the definition of a vaccine on its website. I wrote multiple op eds about this because this just shocked me to death. How they just, you know, you know, just, you know, nonchalantly changed the definition of a vaccine to imparting from imparting immunity, meaning once you take the vaccine, you are in the clear for, you know, forever to, you know, like, helps antibodies or or some, you know, weird weird language like that.
Chris Talgo:So there's that. You know? They knew that they were, you know, lying through their teeth the entire time. It was also an emergency youth authorization, which means that those drug companies are, you know, never gonna be held liable for all the, health consequences, you know, that we now know has happened as a, you know, result of the, COVID vac you know, so called vaccines. But just there is one other thing that I really wanna stress here.
Chris Talgo:Twenty twenty five. We're four years, five years out from, the the COVID nineteen pandemic. An entire generation of children are still struggling because of it. Reading scores, math scores, science scores, ELA scores are all down. I don't know as a former teacher if they're you're ever gonna be able to make that up because we just erased two years of education from these kids when they needed it most.
Chris Talgo:There's also other psychological and mental, you know, health toll that it's taken on those kids. What about other people that also lost their businesses that were never able to restart their businesses, relaunch them? You know? Like, these are the these are the long term consequences that, you know, stupid policymakers like Anthony Fauci to do not even try to do a cost benefit analysis and just say, well, you know what? We want everyone to stay at home for more than a year, and we don't care about the, the the collateral damage that that's gonna, you know, cause.
Chris Talgo:And that just drove me insane while it was happening. And I kept saying, guys, wait wait till a couple of years later when we're seeing all the consequences of this, the unintended consequences. People not wanting to go to work anymore, just all this kind of stuff. Guess what? That all could have been prevented, and it could have been prevented had people like Deborah Birx, Fauci, and others just been honest in the first place.
Chris Talgo:But like Jim said, of course, they had a political agenda. The mainstream media was, you know, playing right along as as always, hyping this thing up to death. And you know what? It's really sad because in ten years, I think we're gonna look back at this and say, we overreacted. This was a huge mistake.
Chris Talgo:And for the children that were, you know, in school or not in school, I should say, during, 2020, '20 '20 '1, you're you're never gonna make that up. You're never. There are they are gonna be permanently scarred from this. So thank you so much for, you know, Deborah Birx for, you know, admitting couple years after the fact that, you know, it actually you were full of, you know, what, the whole time.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And I know we wanna move on, Linnea, but I just just one last thing. I mean I mean, the thing that gets me really triggered on this is that there's been no accountability, for those who who lied and wrongly, you know, locked down the whole world. You know, they weren't just mistaken about this stuff in a in a novel coronavirus and a and a global crisis that nobody had ever seen before. They willingly and consciously lied and took and instituted policies that were completely not necessary and destroyed, people's lives, people's psyches, and there's been zero accountability to anybody who did this stuff to us.
Jim Lakely:And until there is, I don't wanna see Deborah Birx on TV. I don't wanna see her given a book contract. I don't wanna see Anthony Fauci anywhere until they are held accountable for these lies. And so but nobody seems to wanna hold them accountable. They just get to go on with their lives as if nothing happened and as if and they get to pretend that they had our best interest in mind when they obviously did not.
Jim Lakely:That is proven to be false.
Chris Talgo:Sorry, Lene. Just one more thing. And, you know, because Jim Jim, you know, because because Jim brings up so many good points here. Anthony Fauci made millions of dollars through his book deal, through his Net Geo documentary, and all these things. Anthony Fauci is is a criminal.
Chris Talgo:Anthony Fauci, you know, is responsible for this because he gave money to EcoHealth Alliance for gain of function research in Wuhan. Like, we all know that, but he got a pardon, so he's off the hook. So great.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. No. It's it's very, very, very infuriating. I mean, so many lives were ruined. It's yeah.
Linnea Lueken:I mean, how much more can we say about it? So I'm a in a in a radical shift of pace. And, and, Chris, I'm gonna go to you on a lot of this because I think you've written about this in some in some cases, and I know Hartland's been banging the drum on this issue for a long time. So Rand Paul says that he is not going to support Lori Chavez de Ramer unless she says that she no longer supports the Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021. Breitbart reports that senator Paul said it would override all the right to work state laws and result in a transformation that would be such an assault on freedom of choice for employees.
Linnea Lueken:You can't imagine. Paul explained that 28 states have right to work laws, and when one compares the economics, unemployment, economic growth, and other factors, the right to work states are killing it. Most of these are throughout the South. Kentucky became one about five years ago, but there's at least 28 states, maybe a few more, that are right to work. And, basically, just as just as you don't have compulsory union dues, you can still have unions.
Linnea Lueken:You can still do collective bargaining. You just can't force people out of the workplace if they don't want to pay dues for political reasons. This is pretty dramatic, and I have not opposed any of Trump's nominees. But, you know, I lead the effort for a national law, and I've been a big supporter of the state laws, been close to the right to work movement for a decade or more. And so I can't in good conscience support her since she supported the pro act, he said, noting that he plans to ask her at Thursday's hearing if she's willing to renounce her support of it.
Linnea Lueken:So as I said, the Heartland Institute has been a strong proponent of right to work. And, Chris, you were a teacher in my neck of the woods for a long time, so you have a lot of experience with unions, especially teachers' unions. So is Rand being dramatic?
Chris Talgo:No. No. So, you know, this is one of the few picks for Trump's cabinet that I disagree with him on because of this issue alone. So when I was, teaching in Illinois, I was actually a substitute teacher. I was not full time yet.
Chris Talgo:I had my teacher's license and all that kind of stuff, but I had to pay union dues even as a substitute, and I made pay almost nothing. I mean, it was, like, $20, I think, like, per class, you know, like, per period or something ridiculous like that. Yet I was forced to pay union dues, not only from all my my earnings, but also just, you know, from my biweekly paycheck. Just I just give them money. Even though they didn't represent me, they did nothing for me.
Chris Talgo:So that that's part of the reason why I did move to South Carolina. South Carolina is right to work state. Immediately, you know, we were told you don't have to join this teacher union. Almost none of us did at the school. I think very like, maybe only a couple handful did.
Chris Talgo:And you know what? It was much better. It's much better because you have more freedom. You don't have to you don't have to, you know, go through all the, the the the union, you know, paperwork and just, like, all the bureaucracy involved with it. The unions don't really even do that much for for teachers nowadays.
Chris Talgo:You know? It's much more about the union protecting themselves and making sure that membership is as big as possible so that they get more union dues. That's really what it's about. I think the right, the right to work states obviously are on the right side of this issue. I would not be in favor of a law that basically bans right to work states.
Chris Talgo:And last time I checked, here in Illinois, the Janus decision basically made this a moot point that, no, you cannot be forced to join a union. You can't be compelled to. But, apparently, for some weird reason, this, nominee thinks that that would be a good thing. I I just I am completely opposed to it.
Linnea Lueken:Right. It's, it's it's interesting. You know, Rand Rand actually has commented on pretty much everything that we're gonna talk about today, so he might keep coming up as we're talking about it. But, you know, he's he's always been, again, one of those, you know, kind of firebrand characters in the senate who is very strong on these issues. You know, and and as I said before, the Heartland Institute, we have all sorts of white papers and all, sorts of research on right to work and the way that it helps the economy of any state that it's been passed in.
Linnea Lueken:There are some states that withdrew it and immediately began to see, detriments from withdrawing from right to work.
Chris Talgo:Lenny, can I just add one one more quick thing? Jim, you know, don't wanna step on your, you know, your time here. But just real quick. So, you know, as a as someone who taught American history and who knows a lot about American history, unions were needed in the, you know, late eighteen hundreds when, companies could take advantage of workers. I think that is just, you know, that is that is historically accurate here.
Chris Talgo:Right. But now in 2020, the tables have turned so much in the other direction that I think people don't need they don't want unions. So we actually want the the, you know, the freedom to choose. And if you wanna be in a union, that's fine. No one's saying you can't, but it's that force.
Chris Talgo:It's the use of coercion saying, no. You have to, you know, even if it's against your will. That's what really starting to, you know, make people question this thing. Like, if it's so if it's so good, it should just be something that you want to do. It shouldn't be forced upon you.
Chris Talgo:You know? It's funny how they're trying to force people in unions just like they tried to force people to take the vaccines or so called vaccines, which makes me think, like, why? Why do they have to, you know, succumb to to that?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. And I mean, Trump's had, you know, union support, depending on the union. Obviously, probably not the teachers unions, but I think the Teamsters and a couple other organizations have come out in support of Trump. Jim, do you think do you worry that that will influence the Trump administration to, pick up stuff like the pro act again? I think it went to the Senate and then just, like, sat there forever.
Linnea Lueken:It it really hasn't moved, since then.
Jim Lakely:I I would think not. I I don't think Donald Trump needs to support the pro act in order to retain his appeal to blue collar workers in places like, you know, West Virginia and Michigan and Indiana and places like that. But but, look, right to work laws did not were not created in a vacuum. They were they right to work laws passed in many states because there were laws before that that compelled people to join unions as a condition of of employment in all sorts of different industries or or companies, what have you. And so, you know, that's why they existed because, you know, nobody should be compelled to to join a union and have, frankly, have their wages docked to that union, without their consent.
Jim Lakely:That shouldn't be a condition of employment. That's why right to work laws, you know, proliferated state for state. And I am, of course, as a you know, we're a libertarian conservative think tank. And as a conservative and libertarian myself, I I am not big on compelling anyone to do anything. All relationships should be voluntary on both both sides of the transaction.
Jim Lakely:Compel, you know, compelling someone to take action is not, you know, a good moral stand in my opinion. I will make one exception when it comes to, unionizing, and that is I think it should I would be okay with the law saying that public employees are forbidden from forming unions. And that is because in those sorts of circumstances, it is it is, a negotiation among a public service, or a public employee union and its employer are basically people sitting on the same side of the table and just negotiating how much of our tax money they're going to take in order to, make sure everybody is happy. That is not ethical. That is not right.
Jim Lakely:And we, the people who are paying the salaries and the benefits for these public employees, do not get a seat at that table. So unless somehow that can happen, I don't think it's it's a good idea to have public employee unions. And in fact, a hero of the Democratic Party and the left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned that it would be a disaster if public, employees were allowed to unionize, and that's what we have today. The the largest, most powerful one of the largest, most powerful political forces in our country, these days is the public sector, you know, the public employee unions, be their teachers or others or others that are paid by taxpayers. That union membership in the private sector has been going down over the last several decades, and that's because, that it's not needed that there is sufficient, power on the side of the employer and the employees into to negotiate and make sure that everybody is happy.
Jim Lakely:So, again, as as Chris said, there was a reason, you know, unionization of of, say, coal miners and, steel workers made a lot of sense in the late nineteenth and early maybe through the mid twentieth century, but it has long outlived its usefulness. And the idea that you need a federal law to allow people to organize is, there there's actually no justification for that at all in the in the, in our economy.
Chris Talgo:You know, Lynette, one other thing. I think you mentioned that, you know, Trump got a big portion of the union vote, which is true, but I don't think they they voted for Trump based on him possibly, you know, endorsing the the pro act. I think they voted for him because of his common sense policies about regulations, letting, you know, letting us actually build things here, bringing manufacturing back. That's why they they voted for Trump. It's not it I think it had very little to do with the union aspect of things, more about, hey.
Chris Talgo:This guy actually is on our side. He doesn't wanna inhibit our professions like the Biden administration, you know, did time and time again. He actually, you know, is America First. He cares about the American worker, and that that is why he got so much support from blue collar union workers.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I think you're absolutely right. It's yeah. Abel Windsor in our comment section made a good point where she said about half of union members in The United States today are government workers. I agree with Jim on that point.
Linnea Lueken:That's ridiculous. You should not be able to unionize as a government employee. It's, definitely a conflict of interest there.
Chris Talgo:Well, especially when they funnel a lot of that funding to Democrat, you know, campaigns too. Yeah. So, I mean, it's I mean, it is it is so corrupt. You know, Illinois has been that's been happening for decades where the Illinois teachers, unions, you know, shovel money to, Democrats in the state house, and then they get all these, you know, these generous pay packages. They get all of this stuff.
Chris Talgo:So, I mean, it's a conflict of interest.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, I mean, I think we could probably, spend an entire episode, and maybe we will spend an entire episode someday just talking about the Illinois teachers unions because they, I mean, they basically run the state. Right? It's it's the biggest racket, besides maybe the the, you know, alcohol distributors racket.
Chris Talgo:Well well, just, you know, I'm I'm I'm sorry. I know I kinda keep going back here, but going back to the pandemic, remember that Randy Weingarten and some of the teachers' unions were the ones who were coordinating the guidance with the CDC. Like, how corrupt is that too? These have people have no medical, no, you know, no health care, you know, expertise. Yet they were saying, well, we can't go back to work.
Chris Talgo:We can't do this. And I remember how ridiculous it got even you know, this was obviously during George Floyd riots and all that stuff. They were they were saying, we want, you know, free housing. We want, you know, all this. And it was like, what do you like, what are you doing here?
Chris Talgo:This has nothing to do with education. It has nothing to do with students. That is one thing that I learned from my time in the, you know, state of Illinois working in the Illinois teachers union. It's not about the students at all. It's all about trying to get as much money to the union coffers as possible so that they can spend it on political, you know, like lobbying and stuff.
Linnea Lueken:Right. Definitely. I I remember when I was in high school, I went for the audience. I went to high school in Illinois. And I remember, my American history teacher, like, the first day of class, he pointed at the stack of textbooks, on the countertop, and he told us we're not gonna use those textbooks.
Linnea Lueken:The union said, the union requires that we use this textbook. I'm not using it. We're gonna use it for definitions or something, and then we're never gonna look at it again. So don't bother taking those pieces of garbage out of here. That was, like, the best opening day of any of my classes ever.
Linnea Lueken:You think I was so mad about having to be in the union? Alright, you guys. Speaking of corruption and people getting called out for their corruption, this is a topic that I have been very excited to cover because I just think it's terrific. Vance really took European leaders to task last week, especially German leaders in Munich, last week in the speech given at the Munich Security Conference. We have a clip for you guys.
Linnea Lueken:But before we get to that, I want to read a little bit from this BBC article to kinda tee it up because all the elites in Europe are extremely offended by Vance's chutzpah here. Their tone is, how dare he call us out? So from the BBC, we have, it had been expected that Vance would use his speech at the Munich Security Conference to address possible talks to end the war in Ukraine. Instead, he spent the majority accusing European governments, including The UK's, of retreating from their values and ignoring voter concerns on migration and free speech. The address was met by silence in the hall and later denounced by several politicians at the conference.
Linnea Lueken:German defense minister Boris Pistorius said it was not acceptable. How dare he? My goodness. I hope they had some smelling salts at that conference because, boy, it sounds like they had a really bad time. So what exactly did Vance say in his own words to get them into such a tizzy?
Linnea Lueken:We have a couple of video clips here, if you guys wanna queue those up for us.
Speaker 5:And I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions, and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together is one of our own making. If you're running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected president Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens.
Speaker 5:If you're going to enjoy competitive economies, if you're going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things, and of course we know that very well in America. You cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that's the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like who gets to be a part of our shared society.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. We have we have we have two other clips here. One one on Vance, like, I labeled advanced religion and Vance new sheriff in town. You know, we can play those.
Jim Lakely:Let me just let me I heard this speech or I I watched it after afterwards. I saw x was just going abuzz, commenting on this. It was amazing. And then if you actually listen to the speech and it's quite short, it's about fourteen, fifteen minutes long and in total And I listened to it and watched it. And and like you said, Linnea, it's like, you know, he got almost no applause.
Jim Lakely:There were several applause lines in there for people who value freedom, and there was very little applause. Even had a couple jokes in there that nobody laughed at. It was like I started to feel bad for him. It's like, they need to make this like the Golden Globes, and they all have to be sitting at tables, and you just, you know, get everybody, you know, some drinks or something, loosen them up so that the, so that maybe his his speech would get a little bit more of a welcome reception. But in my opinion, that fifteen minutes by JD Vance was the best speech an American president or vice president has given to Europe since Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate when he said tear down this wall.
Jim Lakely:It was a challenge to the Western basically, Western Europe to look. We have spent trillions of dollars, sacrificed millions of lives, to to secure your freedom there in Europe and to protect it all through the cold war. And now we look over there, and you're putting people in jail for praying, within, too close to, an abortion clinic. You're putting people in jail in Germany for insulting someone online or sharing a meme that you that you deem racist. Why should America and that this was the mess and that's why they weren't clapping, and they had very glum looks on their faces in that in in his in his speech is because the larger question he was asking or challenging them with was, why should America continue to support your societies?
Jim Lakely:You spend almost nothing on your own defense. Why should we continue basically subsidizing societies that have no value whatsoever on any free speech values? That they don't they don't have they don't even you don't even respect their own elections. He mentioned in his speech on how Romania had an election, and the elites didn't like it, so they just canceled the results of the election. Why should America continue to support, a Western Europe that has no adherence to basic fundamental human rights like free speech, freedom of assembly, and respect for the for the, the selections of voters when they go to the voting booth.
Linnea Lueken:Oh, yeah. It was very telling when they give those, shots of the audience there and, you know, all these guys are, like, I don't know, like shrinking in their seats before Vance. They all look very dour. They're not having a good time. You know, and like I said at the beginning of the show, Vance is basically telling them you don't get to criticize us and you don't get to call yourselves, you know, these great bastions of democracy when you're not acting particularly like a democracy.
Linnea Lueken:You are he gives a couple of examples. I don't know if the clips that we have, bring those examples up specifically, where he is discussing, free speech. Well, there's something weird going on with my camera here. Not sure what that's about. Where there are a bunch of, you know, free speech violations that have gone on in, The United Kingdom and in Germany.
Linnea Lueken:And to be clear, you know, they don't have free speech enshrined in their constitutions the way that we have in ours. And I'm not saying that, you know, every country has to have a constitution just like ours. Every country has to, you know, follow the same exact regulations, the same exact everything. But if you're going to be telling people that that you're a freedom loving country, that you are especially when it comes to The UK, which is the country that we got our idea, our conception of free speech from in the first place, and you are to start clamping down on people who, you know, just oppose mass migration publicly or who are just praying outside of an abortion clinic and not even, you know, harassing anybody, It's, it's disgusting. You don't get to do that and then have America kiss up to you like you're a bunch of, I don't know, you know, our betters in some way because you obviously aren't.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, we can play let's we can play, Andy, maybe play the advanced religion, labeled video here and then set up I think that would set up Chris nicely.
Speaker 5:And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends The United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Connor, a 51 year old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes. Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. And after British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved.
Speaker 5:Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within two hundred meters of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution. Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so called safe access zones. Warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Speaker 5:Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime. In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
Linnea Lueken:Very well said. He's he's just he's just killing it. I want to bring up this article from the postmillennial. After Vance gave this speech, Cheryl Atkinson on sixty Minutes hosted a couple of German diplomats to talk about their, you know, criminal penalties for social media posts. The postmillennial reports that German officials laughed as they talked about confiscating people's phones and laptops over social media posts, joked about excessive fines and said free speech needs boundaries, and advocated for criminal charges against the citizen who calls a politician a dick in a social media post.
Linnea Lueken:It's you know, now you can't even tell your, tell your representatives what you think about them in Germany. Germans are stereotypically not known for being particularly warm, so I I feel like they're gonna catch a lot of, people with this trap here. What do you say, Chris? You're smiling.
Chris Talgo:Yeah. Well, you know, my mom's from Germany, so I get
Jim Lakely:I I
Chris Talgo:I get all those
Linnea Lueken:I have a lot of German love
Chris Talgo:coming up. Of course. Of course. Yeah. You know?
Chris Talgo:I mean, we are who we are. Okay. Just a couple of things I wanna talk about here. So let's contrast JD Vance's speech at the at the Munich Security Summit with, vice president Kamal Harris's speech there right before Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine. So I think there's a just such a stark contrast between the tone of the old administration and the tone of the new administration.
Chris Talgo:Obviously, I favor the tone of the new administration way more. And then on the whole, like, Europe thing. So, I've read a lot of Mark Stein's books, and Mark Stein was talking about the collapse of Europe, the suicide of Europe decades ago. And he was spot on. And I remember everyone saying, oh, he's just, you know, he's he's just, you know, being so hyperbolic.
Chris Talgo:No. He was totally right. And you know what this really goes back to? This goes back to when Europe just started doing the open borders thing and just letting all these people flood into their country, and then they started to say, well, you know what? We've done all these bad things in the past, you know, colonialism of two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years ago.
Chris Talgo:So now we're gonna right those wrongs. And you know what? That just never works. And what's happened now is almost you know, it's it's it's it's so strange. It's like Germany is backsliding back into the days of the Kaiser where you've got these elites who just run the country and you cannot question them.
Chris Talgo:You know? Like, what what is going on here? So there's that happening. But at the same time, across Europe, we're seeing, you know, these these rise of populous leaders. So that gives me a lot of, you know, confidence in the future.
Chris Talgo:And Germany is gonna be having an election pretty soon. And guess what they did to their, their prime minister? They ousted him. He's, you know, a a liberal prime minister. They said no more no more of this stuff.
Chris Talgo:We don't we don't we don't like this this government. And all over the news, they always talk about AFD. It's called alternative for Deutschland. And and, oh, they're Nazis. They're neo Nazis.
Chris Talgo:No. They're not. Not even close to neo Nazis. What they are is the Trump version of make Germany, you know, great again or Germany First. What they're saying is, you know what?
Chris Talgo:We should put our citizens first, which makes total sense. You know, we should have common sense policies in terms of, energy. You know, we shouldn't be relying on Russia to buy natural gas. We wanna actually buy it from America, and we should sell it to them. So So these are just common sense things that I think are finally, coming to the forefront here, and this conversation is long overdue.
Chris Talgo:And, you know, if, you know, if Europe wants to maintain its stance in the world as a as a powerful, you know, player, it's gonna have to get on board with this. So I think that that is I think that, you know, what we saw in with Brexit, you know, just before Trump was elected, Trump, you know, and then we've seen, you know, these, leaders rise to prominence, in Europe who are kind of spouting the same sort of, you know, policies. I think that that is the future of Europe. And I think that that the, the far left, you know, in Germany and France and all these other countries are just scared out of their minds because, you know what, they've realized that the people finally have had enough of the stupid climate policies, the stupid agriculture policies, and, you know, just the the lack of freedom. So I think that this is gonna be the beginning of the end for Europe's, you know, descent back into the dark ages.
Chris Talgo:And I I really I really hope that Germany and France, Italy, and all these countries realize that it doesn't have to be this way. They can and should provide for their citizens first and foremost, and they can and should do what's best for their country. So that's that that's that's my my hope here.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Vance's favorite, Margaret Brennan, on Face the Nation recently made the very bizarre claim
Chris Talgo:Oh, yeah.
Linnea Lueken:That, Nazi the the Holocaust occurred because, the Nazis weaponized free speech, which is a bizarre twist
Chris Talgo:on It's it's not it's not it's not bizarre. Let it that that that's being way too generous to her. That is just flat out, like, so wrong. It's not even close. There was no freedom of speech in Nazi Germany.
Chris Talgo:Go read socials at a glance. We did a chapter on Nazi Germany. There was literally zero freedom of speech there.
Linnea Lueken:And not just and it's not just that the the Nazis came in and clamped down on all this free speech that the Weimar Republic previously had. The Weimar's were also viciously clamping down. You know, it turns out, you know, I'm not defending Nazism or anything, obviously, here, but they clamped down hard on Nazi party content before the Nazis came to power. And, obviously, clamping down on that free speech did not work out for them one bit. Not one bit at all.
Linnea Lueken:It ended up being a an awful, awful situation. And that's such a understatement that it's almost ridiculous to even say. So, you know, Germany just can't learn. They just
Chris Talgo:Well, you know, I I and and and and wasn't that what World War two is all about? And, Jim, tell me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't it Churchill who said, and I I think it was Churchill, I might disagree strongly with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. I mean, wasn't that what the entire war was about? You know?
Jim Lakely:Yeah. And that actually, JD Vance said that. He he quoted that quote in his speech, this week or yeah. Was it this week? Yeah.
Jim Lakely:This week or last week, to Europe. Look. As I mentioned before, we can move on to our last topic here. But, you know, as I mentioned before, The United States has sacrificed quite a bit in blood and treasure to make Europe and the world safe for democracy. All of these bureaucrats in Europe, go on and on.
Jim Lakely:They use the word democracy, democracy this, democracy that. We have to restrict speech to protect our democracy. And, apparently, they also have to cancel or nullify elections to, quote, unquote, protect democracy. And I I was I was trying to imagine what this speech would have been like if, say, Kamala Harris went there or or, or I guess, who was who was her running mate? I don't even remember.
Jim Lakely:I'm being caught as And Tim Walls. Oh, yes. Right. Tim Walls go there and gives a speech like this. Or, frankly, even Barack Obama going there and giving it giving this address.
Jim Lakely:JD Vance, this was again, as I said, I think this is the best speech a, a high level United States government official has given to Europe since, I think it was 1987 Reagan's tear down this wall speech in Germany. But JD Vance pointed out, you know, kinda like the emperor has no clothes. You you can't be saying that you wanna protect your democracy when you are shutting down the voices of the people and not accepting their expression of democracy. If it if it means anything at all, you have to respect the voice and the and the vote of the people, and Europe is not doing either of those things in any any real way. We're going to see.
Jim Lakely:I think German Germany's Election is this week. We will see if AFD, you know, has a sweeping victory, which is probably to be expected, especially if they heard JD Vance's speech and saw the reaction of their own country, to to this call for freedom and democracy to rule in Europe and not the elites. And that's what's happened here in this country is that the American people and that's why JD Vance is the perfect vessel for this kind of message. The American people also want their government and their country back from the elites who think they are not accountable at all to the to the voice of the people. Free speech crackdowns have happened in this country, and they're gonna be less so now that we have a a different, president in the White House now.
Jim Lakely:But, you know, we will see. And the smugness on the faces and the and the absolute inability to listen to what is being said, by by JD Vance and to take it to heart that you can't protect democracy when you disrespect and even put in jail the people who oppose your rule. That's what democracy is. It's the people choosing the direction of their country and the leaders to implement that direction. And if you're not going to, uphold that, why the hell is America continually defending you when you don't defend even the most basic human values in a in a Western, you know, democratic free society?
Chris Talgo:You know, I I I watched that segment where they talked about the the German police going in and raiding the guy's apartment who posted a meme or something on on social media. The German police went in there with a SWAT team, and, it was just ins it was just so, like, insane how how much force they were using, how many resources they're using for a guy who posted a meme on social media and is just wow. You know, that is that is really scary stuff.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I mean and that's it's obviously, you know, the they didn't do that for him. They did that for everybody else in Germany watching. Right? So they know, you know, this is coming for you.
Linnea Lueken:We're this is how serious we are about you posting a stupid meme on social media or saying something mean about a politician on social media. Those those coward politicians. Christine Laurel in our comment section here makes a good point. She says restricting free speech is a means of thwarting people's attempt to organize against tyranny. And I think that's exactly right.
Linnea Lueken:And I think that's actively what The UK is doing and what Germany is doing. They are, you know, restricting people's ability to complain about the state of their country. And it's, it's very, very bad, especially when you are a country that is, sensibly some kind of a democracy or or, like, men are what what what would it be like?
Jim Lakely:Well well,
Chris Talgo:you know, but just just just real quick, it's so much more difficult for them to do it in today's day and age because there's so much more open communication. So back in the nineteen thirties, if Stalin wanted to say, hey. I wanna all these people to shut up. It was a lot easier. Okay?
Chris Talgo:But now with the Internet, with social media, someone can go in their basement and and, you know, spread a message to billions of people by just clicking one button. So it's gonna be, I think, a lot more difficult to them, and they're gonna have to get a lot more heavy handed even than Stalin did where they would go in and know if you had a newspaper that they didn't approve of. They burned down your little, like, you know, newspaper press. But nowadays, what are they gonna do? Go and and take everyone's cell phones?
Chris Talgo:So I don't think this is gonna play out well for them. I don't think they even really have have thought that far ahead because trying to stifle free speech in 2025 is nearly impossible.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I mean and those Germans were were bragging about taking people's phones away and taking people's Internet access away and stuff.
Chris Talgo:But then they act but then they act as if that person cannot Internet. I mean, what are they gonna put him in, like, some sort of, you know, cell with, like, no access to, like, any communication methods whatsoever?
Jim Lakely:Did they do a Faraday cage? Does that all
Linnea Lueken:those work? Yeah. Put him in
Chris Talgo:the basement of Neuschwanstein Castle and just throw away the key. You know? I mean, is that is that what it's gonna come to?
Linnea Lueken:That's it. Shut them up. Alright. So so Germany and and The UK and many other countries in Europe are very much lost. Their their countrymen do not feel that they are being represented by their government.
Linnea Lueken:And, the same kind of thing, not quite to the same extent when it comes to the free speech issue, but the same kind of thing has been going on in The United States for a long time. Our government has spent our money in ways that most people are not even aware of. And lately, Doge has been kind of doing a little a little auditing, and they have found things that are, let's say, not ideal. Doge is working currently at breakneck speed to unveil a lot of the mischief our government has been getting up to. We discussed this particular issue last week in climate realism, but I wanna highlight this one again from the Washington Free Beacon.
Linnea Lueken:DOGE finds $2,000,000,000 in taxpayer funds earmarked for a Stacey Abrams linked group. Doge discovered 2,000,000,000 in taxpayer funds set aside for a fledgling nonprofit linked to perennial Georgia Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams. The Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration awarded Power Forward Communities the grant in April 2024 as part of the agency's greenhouse gas reduction fund program. Power Forward Communities received the green energy grant despite the fact that it was founded months earlier in late twenty twenty three and never managed anywhere near the grant's dollar figure. It reported just a hundred dollars in total revenue during its first three months in operation according to latest tax filings.
Linnea Lueken:PowerForward Communities was established in October 2023 as a coalition of groups led by Rewiring America, a left wing group that advocates for electrification policies and the transition away from fossil fuel dependence. Abrams, who serves as a rewiring America's senior council, said at the time that she was thrilled to be part of the power forward communities coalition. So, this group, pretty obviously, was just created specifically to get in on that funding that was being passed out. Billions of dollars awarded to a fresh new, NGO is fascinating fascinating behavior. Jim, I think you had comments on this last week if you wanna, go over those again.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, this this is this is, you know, I've I've made this analogy on a couple other shows, but, you know, we've never been able to invent a perpetual motion machine, but we've managed to invent a perpetual money machine that just goes round and round for out of our pockets, to government bureaucrats who then give it to the NGOs, who then give themselves lavish salaries and then kick back a little bit to the politicians who who authorize more money out of our pockets and round and round and round it goes forever and without any oversight. I mean, the Heartland Institute, we are a nonprofit. We are not you know, I guess, we would be technically you could technically classify us as an NGO or a nongovernmental organization, and we are fully a nongovernmental organization. In forty years, we have never taken one thin dime of government money ever, and we we never would because that's against our principles.
Jim Lakely:And yet you see these outfits. What the hell does Stacey Abrams know about powering you know, about about the energy industry? Nothing is the answer. And how can an organization that was set up on Tuesday, then on Thursday get 20 you know, $2,000,000,000 in its coffers to then distribute for whatever it is that they do with absolutely zero oversight? They don't have to report to any board of directors or to the taxpayers or to anybody.
Jim Lakely:And so what you have in fact, you know, we we've talked about this on several shows, both this one here on Thursdays at at, 1PM eastern time and on the Climate Realism Show every Friday at 1PM eastern time about how that, you know, Project Veritas did their little, you know, honey trap, hidden camera, journalism in which the guy said it was like throwing gold bars off the Titanic and how much the EPA was trying to shovel out to organizations like Stacey Abrams here, to get as much money out as possible. What people kind of forget about that interview is he also said, although that was a great takeaway quote, he also said a lot of us here are kinda scared that we're gonna get fired. So we're already starting to leave. Where are they leaving to? The very NGOs at which they're shoveling all of this money to so that they can get get even higher payer paying jobs at these, you know, basically, do no work, have no accountability NGOs that are swimming in millions and sometimes billions of dollars of our money.
Jim Lakely:And so, again, it's just this it it's so corrupt. And Doge, we could we must we have to have a Doge and government spending update. That's gonna be the fourth segment on this show for a long, long time because more stuff like this keeps coming out. But Stacey Abrams has no business, being even involved in an organization like this. She has no expertise, yet, she expected to be able to distribute $2,000,000,000.
Jim Lakely:Where does that go? To other friends and relatives and other people who set up another five zero one c three that doesn't actually do anything except collect our money and, and and have nice nice fat bank accounts. This this corruption that's being exposed here by Doge, if if if Donald Trump actually does nothing else as president and Elon Musk does nothing else in actual public service, not what people call public service these days, which again is just filling their pockets with our money, he will have accomplished and done more good for this country than than the last six Republican presidents, and Republican congresses could even dream of doing because the sunlight is the disinfectant here, and people are are pissed. I'm pissed. More people should be pissed, and more new corruption like this comes out every day.
Jim Lakely:And the good news is, guys, Kash Patel was was approved as the director of the FBI today, this morning. And so guess who gets to investigate all of this corruption and criminal activity? Kash Patel, who has been, vilified and attacked and almost had his life ruined. He's probably lucky he isn't he wasn't put in jail in the last administration. And now he can start, sending the FBI out there.
Jim Lakely:Now there was a great interview I think he gave on maybe it was a Sean Ryan podcast or something else, and he said he would shut he would shut down the headquarters, the J Hoover Building, shut down the headquarters and turn it into a museum of the deep state. And then tell all FBI agents that are that are in that office, go out there and be cops. You know, you're cops. Go out there and be cops. Well, now he could tell them to go out there and be cops and investigate this obvious corruption that with that has been hidden from the American people for far, far too long.
Linnea Lueken:Well, Jim, you know, that that's all that's all well and good. But you've gotten one you've forgotten one very important thing, and that is that, you know, Stacey Abrams is, after all, president of Earth. So she,
Chris Talgo:Well, she's also the governor of Georgia last time. Yeah.
Linnea Lueken:She's the governor of Georgia, and she's also the president of the entire planet. So
Jim Lakely:That's right. That's the Star Trek Discovery reference.
Linnea Lueken:She yeah. That is. She gets to have, all the money that she wants.
Chris Talgo:Also a novelist. Did you know that?
Linnea Lueken:Oh, wow. No. I didn't
Chris Talgo:know that. She writes she writes romance novels.
Linnea Lueken:Well, another interesting thing that we discovered, through Doge is that, apparently, vampires are collecting Social Security. It's fascinating. They they came up with and and Luke pointed this out in the comments here. He said, do you have any updates on the, Social Security for people over 15 years old? I see reports saying that this is just a clerical error, but the same age number or but the age numbers that Musk's team reported said there are many more ages.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. They were going up to 300 years old, I think, in the Social Security information there. Do you guys have any I I actually didn't look too far into this besides glancing over, that chart that Elon posted and saying, yeah, that sounds about right. And then moving on, which is a terrible, terrible thing to be not surprised by. Right?
Linnea Lueken:The idea that, somewhere in the payroll, there's people, you know, there's there's mystery people that were never declared dead, for the purposes of Social Security or
Jim Lakely:or
Linnea Lueken:checks going out. I mean Of course.
Chris Talgo:Yeah. That's that's I mean, of course. So so so far, Doge has saved $55,000,000,000 in one month, and they've only gone through a couple agencies so far. USAID, IRS, a little bit with the Department of Education. They haven't even gotten to Department of Defense.
Chris Talgo:They haven't gotten to HUD yet. There are a lot of there's a lot more, fat that they're gonna find here. I saw an interview with Howard Lutnick, last night, and Howard Lutnick is the commerce secretary. And Howard Lutnick was saying this. In Donald Trump's, you know, second term, the plan is to balance the budget.
Chris Talgo:And when I heard that, it just my head was like, are you kidding me? How are you gonna do that? And he said, here's here's the plan. First of all, they are going to cut probably a trillion dollars in wasteful spending after the entire Doge eighteen month, project is over. $1,000,000,000,000.
Chris Talgo:That includes a ton of Medicaid fraud, a ton of Medicare fraud, and a ton of Social Security fraud. If they can lop 1,000,000,000,000 off of our, annual budget and in and they can also raise a bunch of money with their tariffs. Howard Lutnick was saying, you know what we could do? We could completely get rid of the IRS, and there would be no more income taxes. Mhmm.
Chris Talgo:Zero income tax. We would have a balanced budget. We would make our money like we used to under, you know, under, you know, presidents McKinley and Roosevelt and all these other people before. Remember, we didn't even have an income tax until the nineteen twenties. There was no income tax.
Chris Talgo:It was actually against constitution. We had to pass an amendment for the government to, do that. So I just I'm I'm imagining a time maybe in 2030 or so when the IRS doesn't even really even exist anymore. The United States pays for, you know, its spending through tariffs, and we have a much leaner government that would cause an economic boom like nothing we've ever even come close to seeing before. The the the amount of money that the government, you know, would would raise even in the meantime after these, tax, you know, tax cuts go through again would be
Linnea Lueken:Whoops.
Jim Lakely:Nope. Chris got lost there. Uh-oh. You're on you're muted, Chris, for some reason.
Linnea Lueken:We just, yeah, we just can't have nice things today. Yeah. Chris, you're still muted.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. You're still muted for some reason.
Linnea Lueken:If it's your, mic went out.
Jim Lakely:Maybe the mic went out. Yeah. But it just says mute. Anyway, I I would just I would just add to what Chris Chris was saying there. It's it's like, what what's what's important?
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Can we balance the budget? I think we can. I I think it's probably going to be just the first pass through by Doge will find a trillion dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse. Trump and Elon were on they were interviewed by Hannity the other day.
Jim Lakely:I didn't see the whole interview. But, you know, Trump said that, no. We're not going to touch Social Security. We're not going to touch Medicaid and Medicare. And I saw some fiscal conservatives on x saying, well, if you're not gonna touch those things, we're never gonna balance the budget anyway.
Jim Lakely:We're never gonna stop, you know, increasing our national debt year after year. And, you know, okay. You say that. But if one third if if one third is the floor of fraud and and misallocated payments in in in entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, then that goes a long, long way to fixing it without making sure that the people who have earned and deserve those benefits still receive them. We're we're we're what I love about what's going on right now is that we are well past now.
Jim Lakely:The kinds of arguments I've heard coming out of Washington and from Republican members of Congress for years and years and years. It's that, you know, you can't, you know, cut waste, fraud, and abuse your way to anything close to a balanced budget. Well, we haven't ever really even tried. Literally, this is the first time any real effort has ever been made to make sure that the money going out of the treasury is going where it's supposed to go instead of being basically a money laundering untraceable cash reserve for the the worst people in the world. Right.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. I mean, Elon Musk even said that when he went to, you know, when he went to treasury and they actually finally allowed him in and his and his Doge, people went to work, they found that so much of the spending that goes out of the treasury and and they've never denied any payment request, by the way. It always gets made. But there was no system to track where that money went. And so he's implemented a tracking system, which every, you know, competent government should have.
Jim Lakely:And, again, American people were were amazed. Seriously? We don't even know where the money's going? And so just these basic reforms, it's been barely thirty days, guys, and look how much more accountability we have in our government today. And as Chris pointed out, you know, if if some of these reforms and they're pretty radical, but I love them.
Jim Lakely:If they actually go into if they're implemented into policy, and congress needs to get off their ass and put these things into law, by the way. But we will have economic growth that would be enormous, and that would increase revenue into the treasury through our economic activity, not by taking money directly out of our pockets. And that, with some spending restraint, would balance the budget and, actually, maybe for the first time in our entire lives, see the national debt go down a little bit instead of always increasing. What is it now? Is it $9,000,000,000,000 or no.
Jim Lakely:I'm sorry. $37,000,000,000,000?
Chris Talgo:30 7 trillion. My my specs. Thank god. Just just so just real quick, I just wanted to say. So, yeah, we are now, our GDP to debt ratio is a %.
Chris Talgo:That has not happened since World War two. This is getting really serious. I remember literally back in 02/2006, '2 thousand '7, '2 thousand '8 when we were talking about a debt bomb and Paul Ryan, who I highly respect at the time, was talking about. We have a debt bomb on our hands. And even Obama was saying, hey.
Chris Talgo:We gotta stop using the nation's credit card. We have for you know, Republican and Democrats have been, you know, guilty of doing this. It's so easy to just, you know, say, just let it be. Let it be status quo. But now we're gonna go in here.
Chris Talgo:We're gonna take a look and see where this money is actually going to. And I think one of the best things that I've heard in the past couple days is they're talking about Doge dividend checks.
Speaker 5:Mhmm.
Chris Talgo:So if Doge can can can, you know, slash, I don't know, maybe, you know, couple hundred billion this year alone, and they say, you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna spend maybe, I don't know, 20% of that, you know, paying off the the debt. But then you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna give Americans back a ball out of that because that was their money in the first place. That, I think, would be a political winner, and it's I just I can't even begin to imagine how popular that would be.
Chris Talgo:And that would be so different from the stimulus checks that were sent out during COVID because that would be saying, hey. You've been giving the government thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars every year in your working life, and we have just spent it on stupid stuff. We've blown it. We haven't even kept track of it. We're gonna stop doing that now, and we're gonna start giving you a little bit of that back.
Chris Talgo:The American people would welcome that with open arms.
Linnea Lueken:Yes. Let me you've just given me a great transition into, this section here about, the from Forbes. The article is titled, Will You Get Musk's Doge Dividend via a $5,000 stimulus check? And like you said, I think it's a false direction to be calling it a stimulus check.
Chris Talgo:It's not a stimulus check. Right? It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate.
Jim Lakely:It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate.
Jim Lakely:It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate. It's a rebate.
Jim Lakely:It's a rebate. It's a rebate.
Chris Talgo:It's a rebate. You
Linnea Lueken:In a recent social media exchange, Elon Musk, head of the Department of Government Efficiency, hinted at the possibility of issuing $5,000 checks to American taxpayers, a concept dubbed the Dow Doge dividend. This proposal originated from investment firm CEO and DOGE adviser, James Fishback, suggests allocating 20% of DOGE's projective savings into distributing it to tax paying households. Forbes does point out some of the issues that they see with it. They say, first, congressional approval. They would need to, pass legislative authorization, in order to distribute funds like that.
Linnea Lueken:This person says, economic implications would exacerbate inflationary pressures. I'm not entirely convinced that that would be the case here.
Chris Talgo:They're not printing more money than why.
Jim Lakely:I mean, I
Linnea Lueken:extra money being
Chris Talgo:sent out. They're not they're not hitting the, you know, the money the the the money button at the Federal Reserve. This this already exists. So they're just saying we were gonna spend it on such and such, which would have been wasteful, but we're just gonna give it back to you so you can go and spend it better because you know what is best you know, the best way to spend your own money. There's one one other thing I would like to say about this.
Chris Talgo:Most, we shouldn't say most, but a large percentage of Americans don't pay 1p in federal income taxes. Not one penny. So I think that these dividend checks should go to the people who actually do have skin in the game and actually do pay more than 5 k per year in taxes. You know, Mitt Romney said it back in 2012 that where, you know, 48, 40 nine percent of the people get more than they give to the government. You know, we're even worse than that now in 2025.
Chris Talgo:So we need to, I think, get people to have more skin in the game. And, you know, for the for a lot of, Americans, they don't they don't pay anything in in federal income taxes. They pay nothing. You know? They they actually get money back.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Let me
Jim Lakely:let me just add this. This would be the smartest political thing, move any of us have ever seen in our entire lives, and I'll tell you why. And it's because we are already seeing they're I don't think they're very effective, but we're already seeing, the main the legacy corrupt legacy media giving us these sob stories of these, you know, federal bureaucrats who thought they had literally and they even quoted saying this. They thought they had endless job security, that they would never never be fired, that they would ever be held accountable, that there's really no way to ever get them out of government, and that they're public servants. And so they're working for us, and they've, you know, they've sacrificed so much, but they had job security.
Jim Lakely:And so sob story after sob story, which, you know, I don't think works certainly doesn't work on me and probably most of the listeners of this podcast, but you really wanna put the to put to bed the even, you know, small chance such, such media propaganda could work to slow down the Doge train, give everybody a rebate, even people, Chris, who didn't pay any income taxes. It then you would see you you can't do this sort of let's call it what it is. This radical policy without the support of the American people. The way you keep that is to let us get a rebate on the wasted money, that has been stolen from us and wasted. And not just wasted, but wasted in corrupt ways.
Jim Lakely:Wasted in ways that that enrich people who offer no service and no value to society, but really are only in this for the grift, the legitimate grift and the the stealing of our money. All these NGOs, I just we're gonna keep seeing it day after day after day. But if you wanna make sure that the political momentum continues for this very necessary cleaning out of all the corruption in our government, you gotta give people Doge dividends. It was it's a brilliant idea rolled out at the perfect time, and we'll see, you know, we'll see how the details work out, but I think it should happen. You know?
Linnea Lueken:I would love to see I would love to see this compared with a a significant drawdown at least, if not a total elimination of income tax. Right? Like, they look at this and they say, actually, we don't need to be doing this to you guys at all. I mean, it getting rid of the income tax would not make inflation worse, would it?
Chris Talgo:No. Of course
Linnea Lueken:not. So so why would giving people tax rebates make inflation worse? I don't understand that line of thinking. Maybe I'm missing something.
Chris Talgo:There there's one other aspect of the story, and that is that some, local judges are stopping some of these Doge actions. But from what I've seen so far, it looks like the Supreme Court will take this up because what the Democrats always do, they, you know, they shop for a friendly judge in Rhode Island or in, you know, Portland or Washington state or wherever, and they say this this local judge is gonna make an injunction for the entire country, which that is not the way our legal system is supposed to operate. So they have, you know, these judges have, thrown some wrenches in the Doge machine, but I'm pretty confident from everything that I've seen, heard, constitutional, you know, scholars say, this is totally constitutional. The judges are acting way out of line here, and the Supreme Court, will most likely take this up soon and say, no. Actually, this is a this is a completely legitimate, act on behalf of, on behalf of the president and the executive, you know, branch here.
Chris Talgo:Because these Yeah. The the the president, at the end of the day, has authority over the executive branch. And it seems that these judges are saying, no. We don't want you to do this, so we're gonna just prevent you from doing it. But those judges don't have that power.
Chris Talgo:So that's something that I think is gonna really, you know, come out in the next, probably couple months.
Linnea Lueken:Right. And when when we do get to trying to push for, the stuff that Doge has pointed out to actually get, placed before the legislature to permanently remove a lot of these, spending areas from our, well, our budget. It's gonna be a major mask off moment, I think. Not that we haven't already had it based on the, the keening whales of a whole bunch of different legislators who just so happen to have USAID connections or something like that. We're gonna see a lot of people who we trusted were, you know, fairly good conservatives or Republicans, probably vote against putting in these spending cuts.
Linnea Lueken:Right now, there is a spending bill going forward. I believe that is, as Rand Paul points out on on his ex accounts, not actually going to decrease spending. It's actually increasing spending once again. So, many of our, supposed friends in the legislature are not actually on our side, and it's gonna be time to hold these guys accountable for this stuff because there's no excuse anymore. Like Jim pointed out, you know, we've been talking about, looking at wasteful spending, for decades and decades and decades, and they've never even looked into they've never even tried.
Linnea Lueken:They've never even come close to trying to do something like what Trump is doing.
Chris Talgo:President president Trump has haven't been having a lot of news conferences about this. And one of the things that he brings up is how often, someone gets a federal contract for maybe five months, maybe a year, maybe three years. And for some reason, that contract just ends up getting, you know, reestablished again and again, and the checks just keep on coming. There's no incentive for that person, obviously, to go to treasure and say, hey. Stop spending you know, stop sending me this money.
Chris Talgo:So So what we need to do is we need to go to the source of the problem. The source of the problem is the treasury department, as Elon Musk said. And, a judge said that he could even have access to these to these records. He even said that the judge even said that Scott Pesce, the new treasury secretary, couldn't even look at him. And Scott Pesce saying, you know, of course, I can.
Chris Talgo:So, you know, there are gonna be these little, like, legal, you know, fights and little dramas here and there. But, what what, you know, what really, Elon Musk is trying to get to the bottom of is why is our, treasury, spending system just sending, checks out with with with no information attached to it? It should not be that way, obviously. A lot of this also has to do with government systems that are from the nineteen sixties or, you know, that were the retirement cave and all this kind of stuff. Come on.
Chris Talgo:We can do better than this, everybody. So that thing that's you know, this is called revenge of the nerds. And Yeah. And Doge and Elon Musk are actually, you know, going in there and cleaning house and using their their, you know, AI and their, you know, calculators and just showing the people this is the math. The math speaks for itself.
Chris Talgo:You
Linnea Lueken:know? Yep. Absolutely. No more government cheese caves. We're done with that.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. Well, I think, Jim, unless there's something you wanna add, that's about the time we have for this, episode today, unfortunately. So thank you everybody for tuning in. We are live every single week on Thursdays at noon central on Rumble, Twitter, x, YouTube, Facebook, all over those places. For audio listeners, please rate us well on whatever service you're using and leave us a nice review.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you so much to all of our usual panelists. Jim. Jim, what's up with you today? What else, do you have to plug?
Jim Lakely:Just follow me on x at j lakeley. Follow the Heartland Institute on x at heartland inst, and always visit heartland.org.
Linnea Lueken:And, Chris, what do you got?
Chris Talgo:Same thing that Jim said.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. Well, that was really fun. Good job, guys. Thank you, everybody. We will see you again next week.
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