#821 - Tulsi Gabbard - Who Actually Runs The US Government? 01:56:56

What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Tulsi Gabbard. She's a politician, military veteran, and former United States representative. Our elected officials are supposed to be in charge of the country that we live in, but the more that we learn about the inner workings of government, the less that seems to be true. So who is really running the show, and what will the future of America look like for those who truly hold the power?

Expect to learn what Joe Biden is actually like behind the scenes, why RFK Jr.'s campaign didn't succeed, the reason that Elon Musk's X platform was so important during Trump's assassination attempt, the truth behind Project 2025, Tulsi's thoughts on Kamala Harris as presidential candidate, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Tulsi Gabbard. TULSI GABBARD

Who actually runs the government in your experience? Not who you think it is. And in many cases, especially recently, the troubling part about all this is it's not even people who we vote for. When you look at what happened when President Biden had that

infamous debate with President Trump, it exposed the reality that many of us have known for a long time, which is that President Biden has not been the guy calling the shots. He has not been the guy making the decisions, nor has it been Kamala Harris, for that matter, nor will it be if she is elected president. It is this cabal of, you know, the Democrat elite, the woke warmongers made up of the

and Barack Obama and Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan and people who are in the military industrial complex, people who profit from us being in a constant state of war. It is those in the administrative state, in the national security state, who derive more authorities and ability to take away our liberty when we are in a heightened state of crisis or war.

It is their friends and billionaires and people in media who all derive their power from being able to have a figurehead that essentially they can control. And the most troubling part about it, there's so many things wrong with this, of course, but really at the most fundamental level, you look at

you know, our country is the oldest democracy in the world, but the reality of a truly functioning and thriving democracy that has brought to life the vision that our founders had for us, that we really have a government of, by, and for the people, and that we have the ability and responsibility for that matter to ensure that the government we have only exists with the consent of the governed,

that becomes very hard to do to hold people accountable when the person that you voted for is certainly not the one making the decisions. How long has that been the case? Was it ever the case that the president ran the country? When was the inflection point? I don't know that there's one specific. I mean, there has been, you know, as personalities come in and shift here and there, I would say the answer to that has probably changed. But it

in the election that we are facing here very shortly in the United States, it's our opportunity to hit the reset button. And, you know, however people feel about the choices and the options that we have, and they've changed a little bit recently, but really it's only the faces that have changed. The stakes have not changed. And the choices between

the Democrat elite. And I've been saying this for months, like, hey, guys, don't because it's like, oh, is Biden going to stay or is he going to go? And who's going to replace him? Is it Gavin? Is it all of these different theories they make for good chatter, I guess, on cable news. But I've been telling people all along, don't be distracted. You know, you take one horse out, you put another horse in. You've got the same people who are running the show. And it is it is between the Democrat elite will be Kamala Harris on the ballot and

And and the those calling the shots behind the scenes continuing to remain in power versus Donald Trump, who has a record of I mean, the reason why they're doing all they can to destroy him is because he won't bend the knee.

to this Washington establishment, which is made up of people in both political parties, by the way. What makes you think that a Trump presidency would be any more inoculated against this nefarious behind-the-scenes control than the one that we have at the moment? Surely you're just...

If the people out front don't make any difference because it's people behind the scenes that are changing, then what makes Trump any better than what we've got at the moment? It's not that anyone who's put out front doesn't make a difference. It is specific to in this in this world that we're living in now, specific to President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. And

And and the reason why they've been doing all they can to try to keep Trump off the ballot in over 32 states, all of the court cases and lawsuits and everything that the media is thrown at him. The reason why they're doing that is because you may agree or disagree with his decisions or his policies or the way that he talks about things. But he is he is not beholden to those same.

And so, you know, he's he's not going in and saying, oh, gosh, well, I got to do what this person says. I got to do what that person says. I think oftentimes even his own staff doesn't know what decision he's going to make.

or what position he'll put forward. And that is, to me, that's the clear choice. You have a choice between those who believe that government knows better for us than we do, that their power is more important than our freedom, that their power in many cases derives from being in a constant state of war that undermines our national security,

versus Trump who has the ability to and frankly the backbone to say yeah no I'm not going to go down that road or we're going to take a different path or we shouldn't be an unnecessary counterproductive regime change wars we should focus on investing in our country and try to work towards a future of peace and freedom and prosperity. If that's correct if it is the case that this

limp, flaccid Democratic Party has permitted people behind the scenes to come and basically run, puppeteer people that are out front. That's happened very quickly because it was not that long ago that we had the very guy that you're saying will sanitize this thing in office. So is it going to then take a long time for that to be cleaned up? And also, I'm

How do we know that some of this didn't already exist? It did already exist. Okay. It did already exist. Because the party elite itself has been very powerful for a long time. So that hasn't come around very quickly. And, you know, I think one of the...

when President Trump was elected last time was, and he's talked about this himself, he came in and, you know, he never worked in Washington before and he had a bunch, ended up with a bunch of people around him who were a part of this establishment, this Washington establishment. Do you think he didn't really have that much of a plan? Do you think it was a surprise to him that he got in in some ways? I don't know for sure, but it certainly seemed that way. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, I mean, there and there were and it was interesting because the conversations that I'm hearing coming from even establishment Republicans right now are very similar to the ones that I heard in 2016 when Trump was elected, which was OK, like.

We got to we got to like balance the scales in their words by surrounding Trump with people who hold completely opposing views than he does to try to mitigate what they view as the quote unquote threat that he poses to not the country. Who is it that's saying that we need to surround him?

Oh, I mean, there's it's basically like the neocon warmongers, even within the Republican Party. So what do they see is the position he holds that they're trying to count about that he and he's been pretty vocal about this. Like he's like, no, we're not going to wage more stupid wars. And we're going to put America first in his words. And we will achieve that through by peace through strength. Yeah.

Who wants war and why? They would be shocked by how many people do. And they won't say, I want war, or I like to see more people dead, of course. You know, they won't use those words. But there are politicians who are beholden to the big defense contractors who are making billions and trillions of dollars today.

And they are their political donors and their supporters and their friends. And ultimately, it's those politicians whose knee-jerk reaction to any challenge or situation in the world, instead of choosing diplomacy and seeing war as the last resort once you've exhausted all other means, understanding how costly it is both in lives and

And in taxpayer dollars, it's just, hey, we got to go and punish this bad guy, topple this regime, you know, wage this modern modern day siege through economic sanctions and warfare, all of the tools that they have at their disposal without thinking through what the cost and consequences of those actions and policies are. Presumably on the ground and also economically, domestically, too. Both. Yeah.

It seems these people...

The vast majority of Americans, regardless of political party, are sick and tired of this. So their view is not reflective. They're not just like, oh, well, this is what the quote unquote people want. It is ultimately, it goes back to this kind of cabal of power that they're trying to hold on to. Do you think that those people, I struggle to find or meet people that are genuinely evil. There's people that have got goals and then they're kind of, um,

risky and frivolous on route toward getting those goals. And you think, ah, this is just collateral damage. Who really cares? I'm getting my backhand up from Raytheon or whoever the fuck. It seems surprising to me that someone would think I want to go to war. So do you think that these people that are pushing for it genuinely believe that it's in the best interests of the country? Have they been able to gaslight themselves? This Stockholm syndrome from whoever is sort of continuing to fund them?

Or is it something a little bit more malicious? Are they actually sort of trying to land grab or this sort of odd power game that I imagine it feels powerful for you to be America and for you to have a foothold here and have a foothold there? Have you got any idea what kind of motivates these people? I think they tell themselves whatever they need to tell themselves to sleep at night. But as someone who's been, you know, I still serve in the army today. I've been deployed to war zones in different parts of the world.

seeing and experiencing firsthand the harsh ugliness and realities of war and the costs. The people who are so quick to go to war and see that as the first response rather than the last, number one, they don't have any excuse. I don't believe everybody should, it's mandatory to serve them. I don't advocate for that. But if you are in a position to make these decisions about war and peace,

you need to be very responsible and do your due diligence to actually truly understand what the consequences of those decisions will be. Might be worth a quick visit to the front lines, maybe. They do those all the time for photo ops. I saw this while I was deployed, and I've seen a bunch even when I was in Congress for eight years where, you know, they'll go and they'll do like, we'll stop here in this war zone for 12 hours and hop off the

the private plane and take some quick photos and, you know, wear your flak vest and the helmet.

um you know for the picture but it's you know it's visually impressive but like realistically unimpressed yeah i mean it looks really goofy to me but you know for them it tells a good perhaps pick apart where they are i've heard those like i've been to iraq 27 times it's like okay like the air-conditioned jet wasn't and yet and yet even those who are saying this are some of the very same people who are saying like we should just go bomb this country to smithereens

Like, okay, like there's maybe a really problem, a real big problem that we're dealing with here.

But is that really the right answer? Is that the best answer? What happens as the second and third and fourth order of effects after we do what you're proposing? What will the costs and consequences be, again, in human lives and economy and in all of these other ramifications that a responsible leader should be considering before you go and advocate for such a serious thing? So it seems like...

you've got democratic party, not happy with Trump generally, uh, some factions of the Republican party, not happy with Trump. So it seems like, you know, Nikki Haley, you know, just to put a name to Nikki Haley is, is one of kind of the, the figureheads of that faction within the Republican party. Hmm. So Nikki Haley is driving forward this neocon. Yeah, very much so. Warmongering. Yeah. How come she's still there? Because there are people with a lot of money, uh,

Who make money from that position or supporting that position? And they see, again, I don't know what they tell themselves to be able to sleep at night and be comfortable with what they're doing. But they have convinced themselves that this is the way things should be. That's what makes me think that it is...

um self-conviction as opposed or self-conviction as opposed to uh leading this sort of double life where you know that it's wrong and then you go out front because the level of certainty that you need to be able to step out in front of the camera we should do this we need to do that you go home and you drink yourself into a hole because there would be for me the you know just straight up

multiple personality disorder that I'd have to go through would break my brain in half. I don't think that... Because you're a good person. Well, other people would disagree. But yeah, I know what you mean. Like, it's just... But it's like, okay, well, I get what you're driving at. And, you know, like, okay, well, how do you define someone who was evil or driven by evil intent? I would argue that even if there's not like some Jekyll and Hyde situation going on

Right.

and to assert her position and prove that she is a truly strong and powerful commander-in-chief of the United States of America's military.

And what better way to do that, what more effective way to do that than to actually use our military and go out and, you know, commit an act of war. So that sort of need to prove yourself makes you quite easy to manipulate in some ways. It makes you fragile. Yes, especially when you have so many interests. And this is not new. This is, you know, you heard Eisenhower warn about the military industrial complex and their influence and their cozy relationship with members of Congress.

You go back to President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby Kennedy, who were battling against even four-star generals and civilians who were beating the war drum, saying, go to war, go to war, go to war, you know, it's a lot of people.

President Kennedy's compelling speech at American University about peace and the hard work that it takes towards peace was the pushback against that. And that doesn't only exist today. It's far more powerful today than even it was back then. Going back to what you mentioned before, which was the...

The fact that everybody knew behind the scenes, but nobody was talking about out front, which was the declining mental health of Biden. Yeah. Just how widespread was that internally, do you think? I mean, it was impossible to ignore. But if you compartmentalize him, keep him away, we don't let him out front, that's a cheap fake edit, that's a whatever. I think that's the challenge, though, is even as they did all of that,

um it wasn't enough to try to hide his his you know both physical and mental decline um you know i i was with him on the debate stage in in 2020 when i was running for president and i've known joe biden for a very long time as friends with his son who also served in the army national guard and

You know, people say have asked me, like, did you see signs of this back in 2020? No. I mean, it was the same Joe Biden that that I'd known for for many, many years.

And I think recently someone did a side by side of of his performance on the debate stage in 2020 versus now and how significant that difference is. So I, you know, even hearing Kamala Harris and the people around him and, you know, Morning Joe on MSNBC, you know, he's never been sharper and he's in the best form he's ever been in his life. Like,

Anybody who knows him now and certainly has known him over the years knew that that was all crap. We've all seen those photos of before term and after term. I mean, even Obama, who entered as this sort of vibrant, handsome black guy, and he comes out and you go, that's two decades in eight years. Congratulations. That's a cool job. Yep, of course it is. Every president, every president that served. So obviously...

when you're in your late 70s, just imagine the toll. Ruthless. So this is something about to make one of the most unpopular cases that the internet's going to hear this year. Every time that I've seen this sort of conversation

commentary around Biden's decline, it's made me feel sad. It's made me feel uncomfortable as I watch this. And for two reasons. First one is the one that everybody kind of agrees with, which is it's an older man who's sort of being forced by this organization to be the tip of the spear when he's evidently not capable of doing it and blah, blah, blah. But the other side is this is the twilight of his career. And people remember the thing that you left them with. Their lasting impression is often the one that kind of continues through. And, you know, you've got

you

you can make whatever criticisms you want about what he's actually done or said throughout his career. I don't really know that much, but I know the way that people socially interpret signals from others. And to think that you've got this guy, how long has he been like five decades or something? He's been in it forever. I think he was the youngest us Senator ever elected when he got elected to the us Senate. Right. And now he's the oldest president ever. This guy's like the parentheses of us government. Yes. Right. You know, the alpha and the fucking Omega. Yeah. And, um,

to think, you know, doesn't matter what you say, that was a very, very long career.

culminating and you getting to the pinnacle of this. And that being this sort of really awful lingering aftertaste that everybody gets, oh, yeah, that makes me sad. That makes me feel sad for somebody. I don't think that's unpopular at all. I think it's just, I mean, as humans who have empathy. Not much of that in political discourse. Sadly not. And that's been, I think that has been one of the sad things that I've seen is, you know, all of the different

Clips and the footage that's out there that gets replayed over and over and over again and and just the the mocking and the ridicule. It is it is unfortunate that that that is where today's political discourse has gotten rather than just recognizing exactly what you've said like this is it is sad to see.

any person in this state, especially on a global stage. The thing is, I mean, you know, Joe Biden's run for president a few times before he got elected. It's what he's always wanted. This is the pinnacle of what he has always wanted to be, to achieve that title, to be the president of the United States.

And so, you know, ultimately he's the guy who made the decision to run. I have no doubt in my mind that he firmly, firmly, even against other people, maybe telling him he shouldn't run for reelection. Uh, Joe Biden is well known to be a very stubborn man, a very stubborn man. So the fact that he chose to run, he chose to stay and he chose to run for reelection, uh,

I know there are people around him who benefited from him staying, but that was his decision. That's why so few people are going to give him any sympathy for what's happened. Because you go, you already know that you're in decline. You already know. And if this is true, if it is the case that he wants to run it, it's not Jill, you know, marionetting him behind the scenes or whatever, that he is...

continuing even now, you know, and then you actually get yourself into a much more awful conversation, which is, is he cognizant of exactly what he's potentially trying to sign himself up for? Like, are we talking about, you know, someone who's really, really detached? I have no idea. But yeah, I mean, what a, what an absolute, it, the fact that

The Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, Jill Biden story makes Trump's reality TV campaign actually just look like one smooth arc between it all. You know, stuff behind the scenes and stories and what's going on in Ukraine and there's this deal and there was a backhander and all of these photos and there was a laptop thing. You know, like this country is...

Like, this country's crazy. And the worst thing, I mean, all of this is deeply troubling, but when you really look at it, who...

you know, who, who's forgotten along the way in this whole narrative, you know, it's, it's the everyday working man and woman who's struggling to get by. It's, you know, the fact that we have more and more kids graduating from high school, functionally illiterate, a failing education system that you, you, you know, open borders and everything that's happening because of that, the, the, the real issues that, that are actually affecting everyday Americans lives are too often lost. Um,

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Modern wisdom. Well, there's lots of stuff to distract us from it. If there were fewer stories to talk about, we wouldn't be talking about them. So yeah, is it the chicken or the egg? I think one of the most interesting things, you were vice president of the DNC and then 11 years later spoke at CPAC, still as a Democrat. Slightly non-typical trajectory. My whole life has been non-typical. Can you explain that art? Yeah, yeah. Um...

I've always been a very fiercely independent-minded person. Even in, you know, I served as a state representative in Hawaii for one term. I served as a

member of the Honolulu City Council, had a district with over about 100,000 people and dealing with literally things like potholes and sewers and parks and public safety. And then I served in Congress for eight years. And throughout that entire period, I was a Democrat and always a very independent-minded one.

I was asked to serve as vice chair of the DNC roughly two weeks after I was sworn in as a member of Congress. The freshest of freshmen. Yes.

And literally when I got the call, it was an evening, I was sitting in the back. I'm pretty sure there was Uber back then. I don't know. I was sitting in the back of a taxi or something. And I got a call saying, would you serve as vice chair of the DNC? And my response literally was like, what is a vice chair of the DNC? What are you really asking me? What do you want me to do? But I agreed to do it. I believe in taking advantage of opportunities and seeing, hey, how and where can I make a positive impact?

And ended up resigning from that position in 2016 when I saw a couple of pretty problematic things in that election. Number one, how completely not only the chairwoman of the Democratic Party at that time was rigging the primaries for Hillary Clinton and against any other candidate, but

And how both in the party as well as across the mainstream media, they were universally touting Hillary Clinton as the most qualified person ever to run for president in our nation's history. And no one qualified that with, they read off her litany of titles.

But they never qualified it with her actual record. What did she do in these? Yeah, she has had a lot of fancy titles in her life. But what did she actually do when she was in these positions? And again, as a soldier, as an American, I felt it was my responsibility to try to speak the truth about

her record. She is the queen of warmongers. There's never been a war that she hasn't liked and hasn't advocated for, been the architect of in all of these different positions. So I resigned as vice chair. You're not supposed to take sides as an officer of the party.

even though people clearly were. I resigned as vice chair of the DNC. I endorsed Bernie Sanders at that time, specifically around this singular issue of war and peace and foreign policy, seeing how starkly different Hillary and Bernie were on that issue and used that platform as an opportunity to be a voice of truth. So at least Democrat voters would know who they were voting for and what kind of president and commander in chief they would be.

If you go from that election in 2016 to I think it was 2022 that I yeah, it was I think the summer of 2022 that I spoke at CPAC, the message that I delivered there was.

would have been very similar to a message I would have delivered in 2016 about freedom, about civil liberties, and about ensuring our security and keeping us out of counterproductive, costly regime change wars.

It's funny because the organizers of CPAC at that time, they were too afraid to call me directly to invite me. So they went through a friend who tested the waters, like, would you be open? I was like, yeah, sure. I'll go talk to anybody. Why not? I had some Republican friends of mine even after I said yes, call me and say like, what are you doing? Like, I won't even go and speak at that.

When I got there, the organizers and I was about to go out and speak, they're like, we're going to walk you on the stage. It's like, I can walk. I'm good. Like, well, we just don't know what I was like, are you afraid people are going to throw food at me or what? Like, maybe we really don't know. It's a lively crowd.

Uh, but, uh, so anyway, they walked me out and I gave my speech and I got a standing applause and, uh, afterward went out and just was kind of walking around and talking to people. And I was really moved by how many people, some strong Trump supporters, other, you know, wearing the red hat and everything and others, I don't know, maybe not, I don't know, but, uh, just people saying that the message I delivered was very unifying and one that, um, resonates with

With everybody, regardless of your political leanings or should resonate with everyone, regardless of your political leanings or affiliation. And you were a Democrat still at this time. Yeah, I was. I ended up I ended up leaving the Democrat and announcing my departure from the Democratic Party later that year. But it wasn't something that I, you know.

even was planning at that time that I gave that speech. Why do you think that you are so popular with conservatives given Bernie as far left as left goes only a couple of minutes ago to CPAC standing round of applause? What is it? I think it's because the, well, first of all, going back to 2016,

After Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton in that election, there were a lot of Bernie supporters that voted for Donald Trump. People who were driven by a more populist message of working people and peace and investing in our communities and our societies and so forth.

You know, I think that the Democratic Party has gone so far away from its roots to the point now where, you know, someone like me, if I say I love my country and.

We should defend the right to free speech for everyone. We should uphold the Constitution. We should ensure we actually do have a true thriving democracy that you may say something that I I find to be abhorrent. I will defend your right to say that.

These are all things that are completely unpopular in today's Democratic Party. And that is something that has radically changed. And I think a lot of it started in 2016 when Trump got elected, that the Democratic Party took a rapid shift away from the party that I joined over 20 years ago. It's unrecognizable today. How does that explain your particular sort of...

acceptance and attraction of conservative people. Because the thing that I think the Republican Party or conservatives, maybe not the Republican Party as a whole, but I would say those who call themselves conservatives, are very much rooted in those fundamental principles of the Constitution and freedom and limited government and go live your own life that once existed in

as kind of those traditional liberal values in the democratic party. And so you'll, I'll, I hear conservatives all the time saying, you know, we miss those traditional liberal values that president John F. Kennedy held and imagine how quickly he would be drummed out of the democratic party of today. Uh,

for the things that he stood for. And so, you know, I think it goes back to the basics. It goes back to the foundations. It goes back to the Constitution and how conservatives are very much rooted in that. Whereas the Democratic Party has not only gone so far away from it, you're seeing now the news of the day as we're sitting here is how President Biden and Kamala Harris and the Democrats are trying to reshape

the third co-equal branch of government in the Supreme Court and to exert control over it. What is that? I don't understand. We have the executive branch, which is the presidency, the president leads, and all the federal agencies that fall under the executive. You have the legislative branch, which is Congress, House, and the Senate. And then the third co-equal branch is the judicial system, the pinnacle of which is the Supreme Court.

Democrats don't like a lot of the decisions that are coming out of this Supreme Court lately. One of which, by the way, was a unanimous decision came a few months ago saying, no, no state is allowed to remove President Trump or any candidate from a ballot. That needs to be decided by the American people. The Democrats hated that decision. They are trying to institute term limits. I think it was...

I don't know, it was 14 years or 16 years or something like that. They're putting out there. Uh, and there, there are like five different things that the Democrats want to put in place. That would be that a 14 or 16 year term limit is like, just speaks to how long these people are in like, Oh my God, we can't have it only 14 years. What am I going to do in my late nineties? You know? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, you, you have some judges who've been appointed in their late forties. Um,

I think the underlying issue here is you know, we know, that if the Supreme Court was more aligned with decisions and policies that the Democrat elite support, they would not be introducing any of these quote-unquote reforms. And it just, again, it goes back to the Constitution and the legislative branch and executive branch trying to

exert power and control over this system that exists to serve as a check on balance. So no single one of these overextends itself to the other. And you're an independent now. Yes. Why did RFK not get the momentum that he should have done? He's an independent. I'm aware that that covers a broad range of sins. But

What did you make of his campaign? Why did he not catch perhaps the wins that people were thinking he might do? I think there's probably a lot. I think there's a lot of reasons that go into it. The fact that he started running for president in the Democratic primary. I mean, he is he is I don't know, actually, if he still calls himself a Democrat or not. I actually don't know that. I know he's running as an independent candidate.

But like Bernie is an independent who ran as a Democrat. So whatever. These are labels. But, you know, he he switched strategies pretty late in the game. Number one. Number two, you know.

The two party system is completely bought in and trying to prevent a viable third party from challenging either one of them. We've seen that play out already. So in order to, you know, obviously we haven't seen it done successfully in our country, but in order to even have a shot at it.

In my view, you would have had to have started and had a very strong strategy to do that much longer before he did have a lot more money. You'd need a ton of money because you're not only battling the Republican Party and the Democrat Party, you're battling the entire mainstream media machine and having to, you got to have the money to be able to break through all of that.

Uh, it's, I mean, it's, it's a huge feat and it's, it's a huge task and what to speak of getting on the ballot. Um, RFK is not on, he's not on the ballot in all 50 states. I don't know what his current count is, but even states that had previously accepted, uh, his signatures and have said, okay, you're going to be on the ballot. He's fighting legal challenges and lawsuits in many of those states, uh,

When are those going to be resolved? I don't know. It's a very tough, it's a tough situation. Yeah. Talking of those sort of swings and moves, it does, I think, create just confusion. You know, people like an easy sort of simple narrative and to, why were you and what were you doing before and what's actually going on? Right. So-

Given that you've had sort of some pretty big swings over the last decade or so, how do people know that that is coming from a place of principles and motivation and not a desire for power and just more attention? My foundation and principles haven't shifted. They have always been rooted in

They have always been rooted in, for me, the reason why I ran is, you know, how can I best be of service to the American people? And rooted in those principles of freedom and liberty, peace and security. And, you know, my challenging, even leaders of my own party, President Obama was the president. He had just gotten reelected the year that I was elected to Congress. He was the president from my home state of Hawaii originally.

And, you know, I think the first example or sign to the leaders of the Democratic Party when I was elected to Congress that I wasn't just going to be a follower, toe the party line, you know.

go along, get along, that whole thing. It came within the first six months of my being in Congress when President Obama said he was going to come seek authorization from Congress to go and start a new regime change war in Syria. I was sitting on the Foreign Affairs Committee and did all my due diligence and briefings and hearings and all of these things.

and ultimately concluded that this would be a very bad idea that could end up in disaster, and said so publicly. I mean, this was why I ran for Congress, to actually be in a position to at least influence, impact, or make those decisions to prevent us from making those costly mistakes of the past that had taken the lives of people that I served with.

Immediately upon I was first Democrat, first Democrat to speak out against President Obama's request and within 24 hours got a call from the White House not saying, hey, Tulsi, can you just explain to us like what's your thought process? Why are why are you coming out in such strong opposition? What what are we not sharing that you've whatever? There was none of that. It was just how dare you go against your president, period.

Why are you not a team player, essentially? And it was a betrayal of the party. They viewed it as a betrayal of the party and a betrayal of President Obama rather than seeing it for what it was, which was a very serious disagreement on the policy that he was putting forward. Very tribal internally. Very much so. Do you miss it?

Which part? All the, well, I don't know what the daily routine of...

You know, when I was there, I passed my first piece of legislation very quickly as a freshman Democrat in a Republican-controlled Congress, because at that time, you could still build relationships and get things done, actually solve problems. That's a rare, very rare thing to see these days. Why?

I think that there are many people who are just not interested in it. They're more interested in the talking point or fighting the so-called fight instead of saying, hey, you know, let's figure this out and put our heads together. There are some who are afraid of being criticized for working with someone from the other party.

There's a lot of different factors. Downstream from a lot of this tribalism again, this sort of inability or unpreparedness. And at its core, what does it come down to? It comes down to people who are putting their own self-interest or their political interest ahead of the interest of the country and the American people, which is really like that's the whole reason why you should be there. And so for those reasons, I don't miss it.

What I do miss, and there's been a couple of situations over this past, you know, little, almost four years since I've left, is...

The withdrawal from Afghanistan and the disastrous and tragic fires that happened in Maui and Hawaii, in those two situations, as I saw either inaction or lack of true accountability, I thought, man, if I could only be on that Armed Services Committee questioning...

those general officers and the Secretary of Defense about all that they did wrong in that withdrawal and the fact that even still there hasn't been any kind of true accountability or oversight over the multiple layers of failures that occurred for people who I served when I was in Congress for eight years in Hawaii. It seems like the

of everything is ramping up at the moment, whether it's the sort of vitriol and tribalism that's happening internally, whether it's the inflammatory rhetoric of just normal people online, whether it's the pace that memes move. Just think for a second that in the last six weeks, we went from hawk to a girl to...

Which there's been this weird intersection between the hawk to a girl and political memes, by the way. Oh, yeah. It's one and the same. Straight into the Biden senile look at the debate thing. Straight into Trump gets shot in the ear. Straight back into J.D. Vance. Into Biden steps down Kamala now. And now, by the way, the latest one of today and yesterday is...

If you type in Donald Trump assassination attempt, nothing comes up in the Google algorithm. Yeah, they put out a statement. I think they put out a statement about that. Oh, the AI had mislabeled something and mischaracterized something like that. I don't know whether that was Gemini re-racing the founding fathers. There was that...

Did you see Trump talking about how Christians will never have to vote again? I saw a clip. I didn't see the speech or the context, but I saw a clip. Okay, so there is a section of a Trump speech where he says, in four years, you don't have to vote again.

And many, many clips stop there. The next sentence is, we'll have it fixed so good you won't have to vote again. So, you know, in a world of cheap fakes and stuff like that. But it just seems to me that... On top of that as well, we also had...

Who's the guy that called out Elon Musk recently? It was Gavin Newsom said that he wanted legislation to stop AI manipulated speech going on. I go, well, like if selective editing is able to achieve the same outcome, is there something that's particularly special about chopping together words that somebody did say versus actually creating from an AI GPT something that somebody didn't say? It's just...

It doesn't surprise me that the general public are becoming kind of despondent. And I think one of the things that you get is not

people really being convinced by any one narrative, but just sort of holding their hands up and going, "I just don't trust anything now. I'm just confused and kind of a bit nihilistic and I'm disengaged." And I think that you're seeing, especially I know that this is the fact, young men, specifically Gen Z men, are more likely to say that no particular political

our pursuit, no particular political issue is of great importance to them than ever before. So they're just very, very sort of stepped back. We're also, this is coinciding with a movement away from left-leaning beliefs amongst men that are Gen Z as well. Um, I had, uh, the guy that did the original research on that and did the original analysis of all of the data. I had him come on the show. Fascinating, fascinating luck. But, um,

I think part, so I have a few thoughts on some of the things that you're saying. First of all, you really cannot blame people for feeling that way. I completely, completely understand it. I feel that way sometimes. And I, you know, every day is just, you know, having to

To look at look at all of this stuff that's going on. I think it's a positive step for people to be generally distrusting of everything that they're being everything that's being thrown at them. I think that is actually a positive step versus people blindly believing like, oh, I saw this on TV. Therefore, it must be true, even though that still happens.

the more we have people knowing that they have to be critical thinkers and exercise some kind of analysis, whatever they're being told by whatever side is a positive step. You know, the, the thing about, uh, Gen Z men in particular, not finding resonance with any political issue. I think this is where there's, there's work that has to be done, uh,

To, I mean, you know, I have a lot of friends who are like, I hate politics. I don't want to have anything to do with politics. But there's for some reason a disconnect between...

quote-unquote politics versus the things that affect you in your everyday life that actually are very much directly connected to what kind of people we are electing into office, either by voting for or against, or by just staying home. Staying home and not voting is a political action in and of itself. And so, of course, at the basic level, it's taxes. At the basic level, it's

the health and well-being of our communities and our schools. You know, a lot of parents and families have been activated over these last few years around the whole, you know, boys playing against girls in girls' sports. You see that there's two boxes in the Olympics. I saw that this morning. Unreal. Unreal. Exhibit A.

It's just, look, I think... And anyone who has an open mind can see that insanity for what it is. I think that it's going to take a little bit of time to overcome the conceptual inertia of, what, there's people that are biologically male competing in female sports? That's strange. Like, oh...

oh God, right. Okay. Like actually legislating against this across each different sporting body is going to take a long time and that's just going to play catch up. But if there was a frontline, if there was a vanguard of sports, it would be the ones that involve punching each other in the face. You would think. Like that, that should be, you know, I mean, swimming, swimming did the thing at 13 years old, whatever it is, uh, medians stage three. If you get past whatever, something of puberty, you can't do it. I'm like, right. Okay. Well that, but,

Yes, good to get all sports on board with that. But let's prioritize the one where you punch each other with your hands. Yeah. Like that seems like... And yeah, these two athletes failed gender tests, I think it was called, or sex tests, only within the last couple of years. And then because the...

IOC don't abide by the same type of testing protocol or the same procedures. I saw one of them fuck up a girl earlier on today. Yeah. And something like that, especially in this age of even the corporate cancel culture, something like that will only change if enough people

actually speak up and criticize it and call it out for what it is and how dangerous it

It actually is. I think the change that we saw in swimming happened specifically because of that. There were female swimmers who were the tip of the spear and who are the tip of the spear in actually vocalizing it in order to force that change. Traveling should be about the journey, not the chaos of packing, which is why I am a massive fan of nomadic.

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Modern wisdom. Talk to me about this. It's speaking of media and kind of the pace that all of this stuff moves at. Talk to me about this TikTok bill. Um...

At its core, it was being sold as a lot of things. Obviously, it passed the House and the Senate with bipartisan support. It's been signed into law by President Biden. So it is now law of the land. At its core, the thing that you would have only heard people like Ron Paul say or Thomas Massey in the House of Representatives or Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate is

is actually something that even the ACLU was focused on, which is at its core, it is an anti-free speech bill. And anytime you give the government the power, in this case, the president of the United States, the power to decide whether

what platform you and I are allowed to both exercise our right to free speech on and what platforms we are allowed to gather information from. At its core, that's a violation of free speech. The other issue that was tied to the usual, you know, usually the most egregious violations of our liberties occur in the name of

national security, keeping us safe. Patriot tactics type. Correct. And this was no different. And Ron Paul...

as usual, was very powerful and very correct on this and his statement that this was the most egregious violation of civil liberties since the Patriot Act was passed. But basically, in a nutshell, again, I didn't hear the proponents for this legislation naturally didn't highlight this provision that was in the bill. It's a very small provision, but it basically says that

The president of the United States alone has the power to designate a firm or a business as being, and this is not the exact verbiage, but basically an agent of a foreign adversary, period. And while there are a few different examples of countries that they are calling out as foreign adversaries, in theory, let's say President Biden is there,

Elon Musk and X are the only platform that are not playing ball with with the White House and and taking their direction on who they want censored or what words or phrases or narratives they want censored. In theory, let's say President Biden says, OK, well, Elon Musk is doing business with this country.

that we deem as a foreign adversary and has, I think, I don't know what the percentage of the business interest was, but it was a quite low bar. And therefore, his platform needs to be shut down because I, as president, deem his association, I deem him to be an agent of a foreign adversary, period.

There's no way to appeal that. There's no recourse from that for a guy like Elon Musk, for example. And obviously, he's the most prominent example now and something that he even spoke out about in warning about the consequences of this legislation.

And those are the two primary major problems with that legislation that, again, go back to the fundamentals and the foundations. And very often it's like, oh, well, we need to protect kids or we need to protect people from disinformation. We need to protect our security and all of these arguments that were at the forefront of those who are proponents of this bill, again, from both sides. But, you know, even those who had good intentions, you know,

If you're not making those decisions that are rooted in these fundamental freedoms that make us who we are in this country and that that that are the pillars of the founding of our country. This is how we continually find ourselves in positions, just as with the Patriot Act. Again, many people with good intentions voted for that.

But we find ourselves in these situations where increasingly our freedoms and liberties are taken away and very often in the name of, well, we have to do this to protect you, that we find ourselves in a place where

We are not in the free country that we thought we had. TikTok's very dangerous, I think, and a lot of people have problems with it. I'm not a fan of it. I think that it's almost certainly trying to craft a narrative that makes people in the West hate the West. I know that there is a Chinese sort of kale version of it that's restricted at certain times, and the sort of stuff that's pushed through the algorithm isn't shown in the same kind of a way.

So given the fact that you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, which is we have foreign power that definitely does not have the West's interests at heart, owning the fastest growing social media, which most young people use and get their news from and get their insights from and all of the rest of it. Data, facial mapping, micro expression detection to really, really ramp up the limbic hijack of how this algorithm works. You have all of that, which presumably you're not that much of a fan of, like

like in and of itself, even though you might support it principally. And then you have the other side, which is this bill, which contravenes and sets precedents that you're worried about. What do you... I choose freedom. I choose freedom. Because then where do you draw the line? If you have a government that says you are only allowed to get information from these sources and not any other sources, then...

They are taking away our free will and our own faculty to get information for ourselves and make decisions for ourselves. So in this environment of information warfare, I mean, the answer is to...

speech in situations that you don't like is always more speech. Anytime, anytime, because, okay, well, today they're talking about TikTok in China. What is it going to be tomorrow? What country or what entity or what platform or what business is it going to be tomorrow? I understand how it's a difficult precedent. I think that we have such a unique pipeline at the moment of saying that, you know, countering

bad speech with good speech is a good idea, but when particular types of speech get algorithmically suppressed, that leads to a world in which the good speech is essentially non-existent speech. Which again goes back to, okay, so we have X as the one social media platform that is not playing that game. This legislation has put the power into the hands of the president,

Right.

But in every situation that we've seen, there are people in positions of power in our own government here in the United States who choose to do the wrong thing and weaponize those authorities that have been put into law to serve their own political interests, to serve their own financial interests, to serve their own interests of remaining in power, and ultimately in doing so, taking away power.

our freedom. What would you do? Let's say that this didn't get passed, repealed, whatever. There are a lot of people that have concerns about TikTok, especially parents and what it's doing to their kids. What would you suggest? Have you got any suggestions? Okay, we don't do this. People do have to, or they're going to be exposed to it. I think that the comparison with X is kind of fair, but on the other side,

Anybody that's looked at X and looked at TikTok knows one of them is way harder to swipe off. And it's TikTok. It's this permanent, endless feed of stuff. And it's all designed. And that's where, and this is, and this is one where I think there, there was, and there still is there, there should be opportunity, uh, to get bipartisan support in dealing with, um, all of these different social media companies, uh,

that ultimately are all finding ways to profit off of our attention and selling our attention and interest to improve their bottom line. And kids often, and there's been multiple studies done about how this is affecting them, the social dilemma problem.

It was very, very powerful. And so I think there is an opportunity to look there, especially as we look at how these algorithms and these platforms are affecting young people and kids.

I don't know what exactly that looks like in the end, but that's a very real conversation I think that can and should be had, both from the standpoint of how this impacts kids and also just from the standpoint of basic privacy. That if I'm going to go and use a social media platform, I should have the right to know how my information and my attention and the things that I'm choosing to spend time looking at is being monetized.

And frankly, like how even an American company is taking that information and selling it to the highest bidder of any other country in the world that may or may not have our nation's best interest at heart. It's such a difficult one because, you know, I can see, I really can see both sides. And it seems like I think a lot of people maybe sort of

center right, you know, kind of working class. I don't like what my kids are being fed on this Chinese social media thing. And I also don't like increased state ability to stop me. So they're kind of like, yeah, split their brain in half. But I think, again, this is where this is where also I think it's important to have as as

A central point of this conversation, especially as it comes to kids, is like government shouldn't be the end-all be-all answer. And I know there are parents who are working with exactly. And some parents are taking action and working with their schools and, you know, taking phones away from kids while they're at school. But ultimately, it's like, OK, if you're a parent...

You've placed this phone into the hands of your child and there's responsibility that goes with those decisions. It would be so interesting to see a full phone ban in schools. I know that there's certain schools that are sort of putting that out now that basically you cross the threshold. Maybe it has to go into a locker or once you get past a particular threshold or whatever. But yeah, I mean...

I'm just so glad. It would make a huge difference. Well, I mean, the difference is, or the choice at the moment apparently is between kids either using their phones or vaping. There's like no vaping in class signs because that's apparently a sufficiently big deal that it needs to be legislated by the schools. So odd. So here's the other thing, and I've been thinking about this quite a lot, especially given that everyone's over the fact that the...

X, the former president got shot in the head only three weeks ago, shot in the head by an actual gun with an actual bullet in it. Um,

during that time was it was the first time the town square and it's very important for people to have this opportunity and free speech and blah blah and I was like yeah I know but there's other areas that you can get your information and that was one day where I thought oh this serves the most unique purpose because I wasn't going to Instagram I wasn't going to Facebook I wasn't going to get it on threads I wasn't going to get it on TikTok I was for a

eight hours checking every 20 minutes on X to find out what had happened. And that was the place that I went. Okay. That's that it, it serves a very unique purpose in that way. And even in this specific example, uh, that was where I first saw and learned about it. And it came from videos that, you know, iPhone videos that people were posting, um, and seeing how that information was, was, um,

relayed in real time and how different it was from the headlines, the very first headlines that we saw coming out of, you know, CNN, MSNBC, even AP and a lot of these mainstream news outlets. You know, it was it was so stark to see the difference between like, clearly, if you have if you have heard shots fired before, like,

Like, I know that sound. And as soon as I saw a video with sound, it's like, oh, multiple shots fired. And then to flip over to CNN and be like, President Trump fell to the ground.

And popping sounds were heard. It took several hours before they would even issue one headline that said, you know, there was an assassination attempt or even just that there were shots fired at a Trump rally. What's the so I understand that that that was the headline.

Some people would say the prudence during a time when you're uncertain, not wanting to cause too much public panic, all the rest of it would maybe be a good strategy. What is the... Why would they do that? Yeah, what's the straw man case for it? Or what's the nefarious case for why they would... Trying to make Trump look silly at a time where...

The the Fox News had been making Biden look silly for falling down on a stage and and drawing some kind of parallel to make Trump look weak. But it's so short sighted. I mean, I agree. My God, I agree. Because you're going to have to change the headline at some point. And you know that Jack Posobiec or someone else is going to screenshot it and put it. Here's the interesting, though. The interesting thing, though, is you saw that happening yesterday.

just after the shooting occurred and for several hours after.

And then you see Christopher Wray, the FBI director in front of Congress, saying, well, we still, the other day, we still don't know if he was actually hit by a bullet or maybe it could have been a glass shard or maybe it could have been shrapnel or it could have been this or that. And this was just like in the last 72 hours, several days after the shooting had occurred, everyone agreed that the shots were fired. Unfortunately, someone was killed, others seriously injured.

You know, how incredibly irresponsible it was for the director of the FBI. All he had to if he if he still wasn't sure at this point, which I find shockingly hard to believe, right?

Why wouldn't he just say, you know, I can't comment on this or we are still investigating this or whatever the case may be. I think that these things, this was not an unforced error on his part. It was an attempt to cast doubt on President Trump's integrity and to make light of the seriousness of what had just occurred. Because the difference between...

actually being hit by a bullet and being hit by a piece of glass that was first hit by a bullet meant to hit you is symbolically... Well, you look at the narratives, right? You look at... Well, President Trump in his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, I believe he said something like, I took a bullet for democracy. Something along those lines. And it was after...

Several days after that, that you have the director of the FBI and many others, by the way, in MSNBC and Joy Reid, she's like, well, we still don't know if he was actually shot. Calling into question and making it appear that this was some, it was fueling something that I saw a dramatically high number of people.

of Democrats, I don't know, it was like 30 something percent believe that President Trump staged the whole thing. So it all feeds into that. I think we're sufficiently far away from the blast radius of that event for me to put up like my, this is even more of an unpopular opinion. Okay. Right. Okay. The internet's not mad at me enough already. So

about a third of Democrats did or still do believe that this was staged, that it was kind of a false flag type event in order to bolster Trump's machismo and his positive standing with the electorate and everybody that got to see that. One of the ironic things, a more critical person than me might say, is that

Odd for people on the right to have a problem with knee-jerk conspiracy theories around presidential assassinations.

Because there has been a little bit of a culture, some would say, over large events like that, maybe being knee-jerked by people on the right to say, well, how do we know that this was actually the case and so on and so forth? So the pearl clutching that I saw, how could you? He was shot in the ear by a crazy incel with a gun. How could you say that? I thought...

Hey, look, I don't think that that should ever be the thing that's said, but it does feel a little bit rich coming from the side that quite often is a little bit fast and loose with throwing conspiracy theories at, whether it's the basement of a pizza company that's holding children hostage or, you know, pick your favorite one of choice. It did seem a little... I found that interesting, the sort of like, ah, and you go, ah, I think...

Maybe we've switched. Yeah, I understand the point. The exception I would make to that is, you know, one turn of a head and we would be talking about the now deceased President Trump. It's as close as you can get. And the seriousness of...

what obviously played out oh yeah i mean it was and that that that's you know and i get it yeah there there are theories about everything under the sun these days this this one is one that i believe you know sufficiently cut and dry that well it's sufficiently cut and dry but also is one and and you know you you you heard people from across the spectrum and democrats and republicans talking about the seriousness of this and

you know that's a whole other conversation about people who are increasing um increasingly divisive and violent rhetoric now saying there's no place for political violence and so that's that's a whole other thing but in these moments even if this i mean look if this had happened to president biden there should have been the same immediate response of of recognizing the seriousness of of

of what had occurred. Thoughts and prayers for literally Hitler is an interesting juxtaposition. That is an interesting point. Thoughts and prayers for literally today. I hadn't thought of that. For literally Hitler yesterday. For the guy that they called Hitler yesterday.

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Phenomenal. So you can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door and get 20% off your first order by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to mauinuivenison.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's M-A-U-I-N-U-I venison.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Can we just try and imagine for a second what would have happened had Trump's head been

one centimeter, maybe an inch to the left, because that would have been the most, by far the best videoed assassination in history. There's never been any, you look at how many Zapruder film type thing you have of JFK, absolutely not. No, I mean, iPhone cameras everywhere in every direction. And what do you think would have happened if Trump had actually been hit? I don't know.

I don't know. And I think in this environment, you know, I know that I would like to have what I would like. I would like to have seen it in the sense of a coming together as Americans after such a tragic situation. But it's honestly, it's hard to say. It's hard to say.

And we're just on with whatever the next meme is now. You know, people have moved on. It blows my mind how quickly people have moved on from the fact that Trump got shot in the head.

And it's just new. We're all coconut pilled. It's coconut season. You know, like, don't worry. You've got a few new zingers here that I have not heard. That's a good one. Coconut pilled? Yeah. I'm tapped into the Gen Z. I'm assuming that's a connection to Kamala Harris and the coconuts. Correct. Okay. Yeah, it's called being coconut pilled. Is this a thing now? Apparently, I don't know.

There was that thing, Charlie XCX, something about Brat Summer. Yeah, I did see that one. I don't know what Brat means. I still don't know what it means. But... It's supposedly good. Like cool. Yeah. She's like cool. Yeah. I mean, anyone that's ever seen that woman's... And it's green. Everything has to be green. Why? If you're Brat. Okay. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it just... The pace is absurd. At the start of this year, Rogan mentioned, he said sort of a...

basically prepare yourself for the next this is the first time that i've been at this level leading up to a presidential uh election right in the belly of the beast fuck me i mean this is you want to talk about front lines this is the front lines right here doing two emergency episodes back to back that was doing the front lines so one of the other things that we saw you know uh was

Was it divine intervention that sort of saved Trump? Was it something else that was going on? Certainly an interesting angle, I think, to the political discourse at the moment is the strained relationship that people on the left have with God and faith and this almost antagonistic relationship with religion and certain religions. What do you make of that? How do you sort of...

I have a whole chapter in my book on this, exactly. And in that, you know, I talk about how and refer to, once again, the history of the Democratic Party and how

It really has grown as of late, where it was once a party that there was no aversion to mention of God. And this was the party that I joined. It was a more inclusive party. I welcomed people from all different religious backgrounds and faiths and different beliefs.

To now fast forward to an end, it was something that happened over time. I mean, Jimmy Carter was an evangelical Christian. And even when he was elected president, there were some people around him who were just like, oh, I don't know if this is like too much. And this is something that has increased over time to where...

in the last democratic convention that was held obviously was held virtually uh during the whole covid thing uh but even um saying the pledge of allegiance they made a big show of eliminating uh saying one nation awkward silence refused to say under god i didn't know that even as they said the pledge of allegiance interesting over zoom um so

you know, seeing, seeing, uh, how today's democratic party, uh, is, you know, they, they are targeting Catholics and Christians primarily. Um,

Trying to eliminate like God really any mention of God from from every facet of public life You had Kamala Harris when she was a senator on the Judiciary Committee Going after and attacking and ultimately opposing nominee for a judgeship Specifically because he was an observant and devout Catholic and a member of the Knights of Columbus You look is that?

The Knights of Columbus. It is an all-male organization based

I don't think it's like, it's not governed. I don't know if it's governed by the Catholic church, but it is a Catholic organization. Knights of Columbus. And, uh, it does sound way cooler than me and my friends, but it's, it's a community. It's a community like service oriented organization. They, you know, they go and do good things in the community essentially, but, but it is centered around a very, um, a Catholic system. Give it a less intimidating name. It sounds Masonic and dangerous and spooky. Yeah.

Um, they did the same thing with Amy Coney Barrett, who's now in the Supreme Court, uh, with, uh, now, um, since passed away. But Senator Dianne Feinstein warned against her when she went for confirmation before the same Judiciary Committee saying, you know, I'm concerned the dogma lives loudly within you. All of these things going against our Constitution, which says there shall be no religious test to serve in any public office. Period. Um...

And it's just, it unfortunately, it goes against kind of the whole concept of freedom of religion. Where you can have your beliefs, you can be atheist, agnostic, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, whatever, whatever, you know, your choice is. That is literally the concept of freedom. It's not that you're not allowed to practice your religion in public and it's got to be just a private thing. You can do what you want. Yeah.

Where's this come from? Is this a contamination zone from trying to maybe upend some of the history of the United States? Is it that the love of country and patriotism is right-coded and so is maybe religious participation right-coded? And if we're not that, then it means that we're the other. I don't understand, given that there's so many Americans who are religiously

religious christian it just seems like you're shooting yourself in the foot and the face why why would you a lot of the things that they're pushing fall into that category because because they don't make sense and and they're so insanely radical that um that there are very negative consequences to those policies just at a basic human level we talked about some of them already

You know, ultimately at its heart, and again, I don't find any logic or rationale to the actual reasonings that they're giving, but at its heart, when you have a party that is controlled by people who don't believe in objective truth, that there are, for example, that there are biological differences between men and women, that they want to be the authority that tells us what is true and what is not true.

They want to be the authority that tells us what is acceptable information, what is not, you know, misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, violence speech, acceptable speech, whatever the case may be. They see themselves as that authority and they recognize that those who believe in a higher power, whatever that may be, are not going to buy into them being

Mm-hmm.

as not being willing to bend the knee to the power of the Democrat elite and the positions that they hold in our government. So there's a story about William Tyndale, who was a scholar and linguist. He was the first person to translate the Bible into common English from the original Hebrew and Greek.

And what you had when you went to mass was a conduit between you and the priest. So if you as a common, me and you are common peasants, and we go on Sunday to church service, our relationship with God is mediated through the priest. And because the Bible is not written in the common language, we have to go. So they've kind of,

centralized power in this one forcing point in the middle, which is the one person that can actually read it. And that William Tyndale was persecuted for doing that.

Because then the relationship had become completely decentralized. It was totally accessible to everybody. And it doesn't feel too, if what you're saying is right, it doesn't feel like that's too dissimilar. That, you know, if you are able to get your meaning and your trust from somebody... Through a direct personal relationship with God versus... That is not daddy government. Yeah. Then maybe you don't need us so much. And...

It's so like, if this stuff's true and I'm too green behind the ears in this country to actually be able to sort of contextualize much of it, it's so unsophisticated and infantile. Like it's so like unimpressive that, you know, the people that run the forefront of culture, the country that's behind the economic engine and all the rest of this stuff, America coughs, everyone else catches a cold, all of this, that these people are like,

actually really unsophisticated and stupid and they don't understand second or third order consequences. They're not even trying.

How, which makes it even worse in my view. Right. You know, if you've got someone who's, who's make, exactly to like eat, like just try, do the work, try to figure this out. And look, you're, we're all human. You might make a mistake. You might make a wrong decision. Got it. But these are people who aren't even, they don't care enough. And this is, this is the most disheartening and the most dangerous part. They don't even care enough to,

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I find it oddly actually quite reassuring that the bar is set so low to kind of clean house. Now, I know that the dynamics that are in there and the incentives are much stronger than the individuals. And you sort of take the whole reason that this system works is that you pluck one person out, plug another in, and the incentives warp what would be a maybe honest, competent person into a useless liar. Like, I get that.

But I do get the sense that it is salvageable. Maybe this is just my sort of blind white pill Michael Malice hope here. But I do. I just think, God, look at how useless these people are. And that's one of the enlightening things I think I've realized over the last three years is I've

climbed up through the echelon of being degenerate micro niche influencer to wherever I am now and been exposed to people that you know really rich or powerful or highly regarded or whatever and realize that it's actually idiots all the way up no one really knows what they're doing that much there's people that are doing it with goodwill and and uh potential and trying to do their best but everybody's figuring it out as they go along for the most part hopefully not in the army but

That's reassuring to me because I think, oh God, well, you know, I have friends that are, I think would make unbelievable heads of state or they could be a leader of a great business or do whatever. And you think, oh, but who are they to be able to compete with it? And you go, well, actually I can compare them like for like, there isn't a secret source hiding behind. And the veil kind of falls from your eyes a little bit. I've got this idea called a yogurt lid moment that a friend taught me about. So

A friend was interviewing a famous atheist in the UK, and as his camera guy is setting all of the different bits and pieces up, the guy that he's speaking to says, I'm a little bit hungry. Would you mind if I went and got a yogurt? He said, it's your house, your yogurt. Please crack on. So my friend's still there, sort of revering this unbelievable titan of podcasting and speaking in literature and stuff. And he goes over and watches this guy get a yogurt out of the fridge. He comes back down and he sits down.

takes the lid off the yogurt, looks at it and then licks the lid of the yogurt. He's like, in that moment, the veils fell from my eyes and I saw him for who he truly was. So we talk about a yogurt lid moment, which is when you kind of see the fallibility and normalness of someone that you used to think was godly. And I think that basically the last two

and a half years for me has just been a permanent conveyor belt of yogurt lid moment as I've gone like okay well I mean still very impressive but not untouchable still very impressive but not infallible still very impressive but not always perfect yeah I agree and this is and should be a cause for hope no all is not lost absolutely not recognizing that fact of what you've just laid out and when people come and tell me like hey you know

I want to run for office or I really want to, I see what's wrong and I want to find a way to be a part of the solution. But either saying, I don't know how or saying what you're saying. Like, it just seems impossible. Like, I'm not them. I didn't come up through Yale or Harvard or some fancy Ivy League. I don't have money. I'm not like, I haven't, you know, served in office for 20 years. Like, I don't have what they have. And,

And my answer to them is always the same, which is the most important quality, the most important qualification that any of us should seek from someone who wants to serve in public office is your motivation and the principles and sense of purpose that you are grounded in. You may be...

You know, a stay at home mom, you may be a small business owner, you may be a high school teacher, you may be, you know, a multi billionaire, you know, CEO of a major startup, what or anything in between.

What matters, every one of these experiences are lived experiences of people across country. Maybe the multi-billionaire CEO is a little more rare, but ultimately in business or education or healthcare or all sectors of our society, the one thing that matters is are you motivated by this singular sense of purpose to serve?

to do what is necessary to get the information, to be that independent critical thinker, to make the best decision you can possibly make towards that end of solving problems that serve the interests of your community, the state or country. And that the barriers to access that you believe are there aren't actually, like you said, there's not some magical checklist that one must go down and check before they're allowed to run for office. And that's the beauty of the vision that our founders had for our country.

that, you know, look at the qualifications. What are the qualifications to run for president? Be a citizen of the United States and be 35 years old. That's it. You don't have to have a college degree. You don't have to be a multimillionaire. Those are the qualifications. And this is where, okay, well, the barriers to access that are real that exist is you have, as I saw and experienced in 2020, well, the media...

And mainstream media worked very closely with the Democrat Party leadership and they pick and choose which candidates they want to feature and what are the narratives and all of that. And so, yeah, OK, well, these are realities you got to fight against. But this is the beauty of an increasingly, you know, small D democratized system.

System of information and access to information that even as, as again, going back to more people are just becoming critical thinkers and more cynical of the information they're getting off of the traditional legacy platforms. And you have.

many people turning to podcasts like yours and Rogan's and, you know, so many others to just listen and to learn and to kind of satisfy that curiosity so that they can make better informed decisions. And that right there is the answer to like, okay, well, what do we do in this situation that we are in? Number one, get informed. Number two, make sure that you vote.

Make sure that you vote. Almost half the country still doesn't vote in these most important elections. And again, it's people like, oh, well, it won't make a difference. Well, if you don't vote, it certainly won't make a difference. But that is the only way that we can bring about the kind of change that we need to see at the Board of Education in your local community, you know, with your mayor or your state representative or your governor, your member of Congress, senator and the president of the United States. That's it.

So if you don't like what's happening now, uh,

We have to fulfill the responsibility that comes with being citizens of the United States of America and bring about that change in our leadership that we want to see. Do you know how it works in Australia with elections? Are you mandated to vote? I think it's an obligation for you to vote. I believe that's true. What do you think about that as a policy? I don't think that it would result in a better outcome.

You mean a more accurate representation of the populace? Correct. If you're forced, and I don't know what the penalty is there if you don't vote. I think you can go in and I think you can even sort of scan and put an X like off the side of a box. You can sort of just, you know, graffiti the piece of paper and submit it. But I think you have to go in. Yeah. I'm going to get torn apart by this. I'm a big believer in free will. And, yeah.

And making the case for why you should care enough, even about just yourself and your home and your livelihood and how much taxes you pay and your healthcare, even if you don't care about anybody else in the world, at least care enough about yourself to get informed and be a part of the solution. Wouldn't it be fascinating to see what it would do? I'd love to be able to just run another universe in which we have whatever the

result in November is, and then you do another one where you had to get all 335 million Americans to go and do that. I would love to know, because it's kind of like YouTube comment sections in a way. You don't know what it is that compels people to comment, and not everybody comments the same thing. Lots of people comment opposite things, and they have arguments in diametrically opposed ways.

but there is a single motivator or there are multiple motivators that bring together all commenters. - Sure. - Right? Even if they hold differing points of view. - Sure. - So there are some threads. You've picked a cohort out of a bigger group and okay, what's in this sample? I would be so interesting to just see what we're missing. - Yeah. - How many people vote, like 100 million? How many votes do we get overall?

I think it's a little bit more than that. I think it hovers around 50%. Sometimes it's 55%, sometimes it's a little bit less, but I think it hovers around half. So fascinating. I think it hovers around half of registered voters.

Not all eligible voters. That number would be significantly higher than those that actually turn out to vote. The concern that I have is if people aren't self-motivated enough now just to get out and vote and you mandate it...

Flippant, just a put an X anywhere. I'll go and throw the X on the cardboard box. You know what I mean? Maybe I could be proved wrong by an example in another country, but to me, that motivation has to come from within if you want a different outcome that can only come about with a more informed voter. Rory Sutherland had this response. I was talking to him. He's a behavioral economist, amazing advertiser, phenomenal mind.

and I was talking to him in the wake of the stipulated last election, the debated whether or not it was accurate or not. And I said, "Well, look, we've got blockchain technology now. We could do all of this stuff on chain. It could be in a ledger that is never manipulated and blah, blah, blah." Because he's very pro-technology, I thought he would be all up for it. And he says, "I think when deciding the future leader of your country

It's the sort of choice that requires a fucking walk. Like his point was that it's the sort of thing. So the vote's not enough. You have to make the physical effort to walk in the room. He thinks that it's the sort of thing where you need to go to the local tennis court, which is, you know, 15 minutes away.

It needs a fucking walk was his. I thought, actually, that's a really, that's a genuinely good insight. You know, the line, I've seen these lines. These lines are insane. You know, to go and do it, you pay a high price. Time, there's nothing more valuable than time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think just going back to what you were saying before about the, um,

credentials and competence of the people in power and lack thereof. I think that's why people have such a bad taste in their mouth about the fast track person who was legacy, graduated, applied into some

fancy university and then kind of gets nepotism into whatever area of government because there is this sense deep down everybody has that that space of a credentialed incompetent person with poor morals has taken the spot of an uncredentialed competent person who would do the right thing and it does seem a little bit strange to me that a lot of the people in power are kind of out front about how

how much they really, really care about, you know, equity and really wanting everybody to have the same chance. Meanwhile, I go, well, you're shit at your job. I can see that you're shit at your job. So if you cared that much, leave for someone better to come in. Oh, hang on. No, it's sort of rules for thee and not for me.

It does seem oddly ironic. It's completely true. And I think this is becoming even more and more highlighted and the, you know, sunshine is forcing the exposure of this truth. There's nowhere to hide now. You know, they cancelled going back to, you know, Bobby Kennedy and I think Dean Phillips was on your show. He's been on this podcast, yep.

The fact that even in a Democratic primary, they wouldn't allow other candidates simply to go out and say, hey, here's why I feel I am better qualified or will do a better job than Joe Biden can do in this reelection campaign. And that's where, you know, there's been a lot of noise, you know, on Fox News and some of these other platforms.

platforms like, oh, you know, it's a Kamala Harris coronation. Like, yeah, it is. But why are you surprised? Because they've been doing this for a long time. This goes back to, again, 2016 with Hillary Clinton. And then in 2020, we experienced the same thing. And then in 2024, here we are again, the same thing over and over again. This is not some shocking situation that

all of a sudden they are rolling out the red carpet for the candidate of their choosing. I wonder whether because each time that a election comes around, the level of

visibility, not necessarily transparency, but certainly exposure increases more and more and more as people are more online. There's a new social media. I don't think TikTok was even around. It would have been musically back in 2016. It would have been the sort of proto TikTok thing, the ByteDance, the Chinese parent company owned. So, you know, you have a changing media landscape, which brings with it this real pivot of visibility, technology, access to the internet, so on and so forth.

So I wonder if each time that the same thing occurs, it is displayed so much more transparently, so much more plainly, that it almost feels novel. You go, how could this happen? You go, it happened before. That's a fair point. You failed to sort of map the mode of delivery. Yeah, the delivery mechanism has changed so much that it actually feels different. And how...

all pervasive that method of delivery has become. Fucking everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing that I guess intersects something you're interested in, something that I've thought about a lot recently, which is this sort of derogation of family, family unit, that seems to be a big deal, which is even more surprising than the religious thing to me. What do you make of the

criticizing of family culture, the nuclear family at the moment? It comes from the same place in the government taking control over raising of children or decisions that parents should be making for their kids. And ultimately, again, them wanting to be the ones who are dictating to

us either, you know, how we live our lives, the things that we are not allowed to do. And specifically, obviously, there are a lot of different examples when it comes to parents and families, even at the basic level of education. I was homeschooled all the way through high school. And this was a choice that my parents made with us. It was

way back in the day before homeschool was, was as popularized as it is today. There's a lot more resources and opportunities available for kids these days. But, uh, even, even, you know, poll after poll after poll shows that approximately like an increasing number, but these days it's about 75 to 80% of parents across all party lines, all racial lines, uh,

support parents right to choose how they want what kind of education is best for their kids whether it be you know homeschool or charter school or private school or religious school or public school

Parents should simply have the right to choose what mode of education will work best for their kids. And yet this is a pillar of the Democratic Party to oppose that. And so, you know, there's a whole lot of...

rhetoric that they throw at this decision. But ultimately, when you look at that decision, you look at Gavin Newsom's recent law that he signed in in California saying that the government will decide, you know, if your child wants to go through some kind of, you know, they call it gender affirming care. I would call it, you know,

gender mutilation surgery or child mutilation surgery, that the parents don't even get to have a say in that in the state of California anymore. It comes from that same place that we were talking about when you're talking about God. It comes down to people really believing that they, and I know that they really do believe that they really believe that they know what's best for these kids more than their own parents do. And they're willing to not just believe that, but turn that into law and,

And what comes with the passage of a law? It's the power of enforcement of that law. And one of the ways that in this example, they're enforcing it is threatening parents that if you don't follow this law, we're going to take your child away from you. It seems absurd that any parent would support this. I agree. Any parent that says...

I trust the government to marshal and guardian my child more than I trust me to. I understand in some ways if you are so young that you haven't had kids or you decided or bad lucked out of not being able to have them, that you're kind of stood on the sidelines hurling abuse at players on a pitch. So you've got no skin in the game. Any parent that says, yeah, yeah, yeah, the government should be able to tell me

what to do with my children. I don't have kids yet, but I imagine when that system comes online, you know, wow, a very fierce level of defense, I think, over your household. Yeah, I would say so. But that framing, in my experience, is not what goes through their mind. What goes through their mind is, well,

I am a good parent and I know how to raise my child. And that aligns with, you know, if my child, you know, my little boy says, well, I'm actually a girl, then of course I will do the right thing and make sure that that child goes through that quote unquote gender affirming care irreversible surgery at the age of three or five or 10 or whatever it is.

We need the government to protect these kids from those bad parents who aren't raising their children properly and who are causing harm to their children because they are not pushing their children towards these irreversible surgeries. So again, it goes back to that mindset of, well, we need to protect kids.

from these horrible parents who clearly don't care about them and that that should be the role of government. Very true.

Very strange and very scary. It is. So we spoke earlier on about how maybe in 2016 it came as a shock to everybody, not least Donald Trump, that he became president and maybe didn't quite have as much stuff set up and ready to go to be able to really hit the ground running. Project 2025. Yeah.

How much truth's in this? What is it? Is it the boogeyman that everybody's saying it is? I've seen a little bit of it. Apparently it's nearly a thousand pages and basically nobody's ever read it. I haven't either. So I'm not, I don't, I don't have much to say on this because I haven't read it. Okay. And I won't talk about something that I don't, that I don't know much about. You've got a thousand pages to get through. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

What I've I guess I guess what I can comment on is just the response that I've seen. And so I've heard from, you know, President Trump made his own statement on it. He's kind of he's like, I don't know what's in there. Like, I don't have anything to do with this. I don't you know, I he made his statement on it. I have heard from people who have read it and conservatives who say, yeah.

This reflects my values and my views, and the media is completely pushing a narrative that is not true, that it's 100% false. On the Democrat side, you see it being used and weaponized to foment fear that if you vote for Trump, this is the game plan, and this is what's going to be executed, and it's going to take away women's right to vote and all this other stuff.

People who are interested in it should read it and make up their own minds for themselves, ultimately. I'm sure they'll be thrilled. I would just say don't be a critical thinker. If you want to know more about Project 2025, I'm pretty sure it's probably online. You can probably read it for yourself or at least search through it and see the things that you care about.

Do you find it difficult when you're presented with stories and narratives to be impartial when looking at what conservatives and Democrats are saying about it? Because it's

it's kind of a little bit like just leaving a football team that you've been with your entire life or getting out of a relationship or something with someone. You're naturally going to have a little bit more kind of vitriol toward the person, the group that you used to be a part of. Do you see that in yourself? Do you see? No, because what we're talking about now is what I've, what I did throughout all of my time in Congress. You know, I, I knew enough to know not to accept anything at face value and,

And even through, you know, the staff, my congressional staff, every day that we had votes, you know, the Democrats put out like, here's...

the vote recommendation list. Here's the bills that we're voting on. Democrats, we recommend that you vote yes on this and no on that. And then Republicans put out the exact same. They put out their own version of that sheet of paper. Every single day there's votes telling Republicans you should vote yes on this and vote no on that. And so what I would do is have my staff

gather both for me so I could take a look at what are these guys saying and what are those guys saying and too often they were it was like you would you would think they were voting on two different pieces of legislation and so it just required more work to actually look into what what is this legislation actually going to do and so

This is something that I've done for a very long time, and it's something that I still do in not taking what people who represent one side or another are saying at face value, but actually going and doing my best to try to find, okay, where are the facts buried in this narrative and the spin that's coming from this side or the spin that may be coming from that side? Yeah.

before I make my own, draw my own conclusion or make my own statement on it. What do you think of Kamala? You bodied her only a couple of years ago. What do you think of her? The same thing that I thought of her back then is she, and this was what I warned people against in 2019, is she is incapable and unfit to be president and commander-in-chief.

She would be very dangerous in that position, not only because she will be easily manipulated and controlled by those unelected powers that be that we talked about, but also, as we discussed, would immediately feel like she needs to exert and show strength and that that would come at an incredibly high cost for

our men and women, my brothers and sisters in uniform to our country and quite frankly to the world, especially given the situation that we are facing today where we're on the brink of war with Russia and China, Iran, North Korea, just to name a few. Oh, and also, by the way, we are closer to the brink of nuclear war now than ever before, certainly in our lifetimes. And so in any one of these examples, it takes one spark to

for any one of these situations to quite literally blow up. She has demonstrated through her time as vice president, through her time as U.S. senator, through her time as the attorney general in California, district attorney of San Francisco, in every opportunity, every position that she held where she had the opportunity to put the interests of the people she was supposed to be serving first first.

she put her own political interests first and clearly does not believe in the Constitution and fundamental freedom. So she's not alone in this, obviously, but she is now, not officially, but will be very soon, the Democratic nominee for president. And we as voters should not allow the

political, like, food fight that's going to go on to get in the way of actually knowing the facts of her record and her failed record and how dangerous she would be in that position. Is she smart? I would not say so. I don't know if smart's the right word. Intelligent? No. She is a very calculating person.

And so perhaps smart in her calculations that have gotten her to this point. If there is a big problem with the potential of Kamala being the Democratic nominee, you can wave a wand, you could be God. Who would you want to see instead? Well, I run for president on the Democratic ticket. And who would you put as a VP? I don't, and I'm speaking in today's context. I don't know. And here's why.

The Democratic Party is vastly different even today than it was four years ago, vastly different four years from eight years and so on. But the fact that not a single Democrat in the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate, not a single one has had the courage to stand up and call out the insanity of this whole thing.

you know, boys can be girls if they say they're girls. Not a single one. Not a single one stood up against Joe Biden's and his administration's complete destruction of Title IX, which is the law that says women and girls should have a level playing field in education and sports with boys and men. Period. It's been in place over 50 years, something Democrats celebrated for decades. Completely obliterated now to the point where you have

sports girls sports teams half of them are biological boys in high school and middle school not a single one democrat leader in the house or senate in washington dc has had the courage to stand up and say this is wrong and you're hurting women and girls by doing this so it's hard for me to pick someone up out of those who exist in the country i can't think of a democrat governor of a state

That's had the courage to stand up and say this. So I don't have an answer for you because we are at a time where I don't I personally don't think that every one of them really believes that this is the right thing to do. Sufficiently cowardly to go along with it. Exactly. And so what kind of leadership is kind of leadership is that it's not.

It's the opposite. They're followers and worse yet, care more about their political positioning that they're willing to remain silent in something that is like just the most fundamentally, objectively true thing that exists. Yeah, that is not exactly a glowing comment on the squad that you've got to pick from. No.

The literal squad and the broader squad. Correct. That is correct. What are you going to do over the next foreseeable future? Have you got plans? What are you thinking of working on? I want to be in a position of impact. That's always been. I've never seen my involvement in politics as a quote-unquote career. And my...

I chose very early on in life to follow a path of service. And it's taken me both into politics and out of politics at different times. I don't know exactly what's next. For these next few months, I'm going to continue to try to be a voice of truth and facts and common sense and help inspire, hopefully inspire more people to recognize the power that we have through our own votes to help course correct in our country and

reset and get us back on track rooted in those foundational principles of our country's founding. What happens beyond, I don't exactly know, but I will continue to try to find those places where I feel I can best be of service and make that maximum impact. Heck yeah. Let's bring this one home. Tulsi, I really appreciate you. Thank you for being here. Great to finally meet you. And you. Thank you.

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