Mark, welcome back to the show.
Yeah, great to be here. It's been a long time.
It's been a long time. Almost exactly nine months.
And a lot has changed since then. Last time you were on this show,
you were still the independent voice inside Rasmussen.
And since then, you've started the Honest Poll.
Things have changed. And I think the story behind your departure
from Rasmussen and starting the Honest Poll is a good place to start here.
Yeah, sure. And what's cool, too, is that we were talking last time right after I went to the White House.
And in that trip, I literally said, like, sir, you're going to lose the midterm elections unless you do this.
And he didn't do this. And so now it looks like they're going to lose the midterm elections.
And this was economic populism and visible reform in the government.
And it's like, yeah, you could do Iran, too, but give the people what they wanted.
And we're not really getting it. We're literally just getting basically Iran.
And you can argue about all these other things that Trump's doing.
And yeah, he's probably he's making progress on a lot of this stuff, but it's leadership and it's about how he's communicating it.
And he's just like not doing it well.
So if people aren't familiar with me or with polling, the way it's supposed to work in the way that George Gallup created the industry is that he thought that because of how big the country was and how diverse the people were, when you send elected representatives to D.C., the people don't get represented.
And so they need an advocate, somebody who measures what the people think and tells the people in D.C. that they're doing it wrong.
And what really has happened is pretty much everybody in the polling industry has either been co-opted by large left wing media conglomerates or by academia or by dark money leftist NGOs on the left or on the right.
what happens is a lot of these people will fix the numbers in order to get a paycheck,
to give large organizations, for instance, like the American Beverage Association,
the numbers that they need to show, for instance, that Americans do like sugary beverages on snap.
And obviously, the idea is preposterous. I went into the field and found the exact opposite,
but I didn't get paid $2 million for that. And so independent means I'm not taking money from
either side. And I can be political, but I'm trying to do it to represent the American people.
And Trump's 2024 agenda objectively hid most of what people wanted. And people think they're not
getting it right now. And so when that, in my opinion, was endangered for the people, what they
had voted for, I'm going to be very vocal because, hey, we have this huge coalition. Everybody wanted
these mass deportations. They want a middle-class, wage-focused economy. They don't want ridiculous
ridiculous nosebleed grocery and house prices stay on that target. And they didn't. And so I
got very loud and vocal. And long story short, inside Rasmussen, they had made a new friend,
a couple of friends. There was a polling conglomerate that we built. That polling conglomerate
has its foot very deeply in the political action committee business on the right.
And in that business, if you want to check from a Trump-friendly donor or from somebody
affiliated with the RNC, you can't criticize Trump. It's not good. They don't want that.
And so I was told that my criticism of Trump was hurting the business. And quite frankly,
I don't care. I'm here for the people. And so I was silenced for a few months. And so I worked on
my new business. And so as of two months ago, I left Rasmussen Reports and founded the Honest
Poll. When I was ready just to put a cherry on top, I went back on Twitter and Carolyn Levitt
had said something stupid. So I'm like, I forget what it was. So I went out and
criticize Trump again visibly. And they literally like fired me for criticizing Trump. So that is
one of the biggest names in independent polling who currently doesn't even have a pollster. And,
you know, the moolah, I guess, was more important to them. Yeah, it's insane how
partisan politics can affect every corner of the economy. And I think polling,
trying to be this sober, nonpartisan vehicle for people to get actual signal is one of the last bastions.
And so good on you for not caving to the money grab and starting the honest poll.
What is the plan with the honest poll?
I mean, literally just what I was doing before.
We're going to do probably monthly tracking polls to start,
and there's going to be a lot of good sentiment stuff in there.
And usually most of these pollsters won't do sentiment work because they don't care
like what the people think, unless that they're getting a paycheck to misrepresent it.
Or when they're trying to, you know, what happens on the right a lot is that just like
a hooker on the street, they try and wear a really short skirt to show that they can
do some good tricks.
And so when the Iran strike started, you saw a lot of right wing pollsters come out and
basically do push poll questions to show that the strike was popular.
Well if you just ask the question straight up should we strike Iran or not It is not popular It was like 37 but nobody would do that right And that Or Trump wouldn listen to a mainstream media pollster who actually doing the legitimate question He wants to hear
it from insider advantage. And they'll pad the question with like, hey, Trump's going to take
out the Ayatollah and get rid of all of Iran's nuclear programs with a wave of magic wand. Do
you support or oppose? It's like, what do you think people are going to say? But that's not
helpful. And so I don't know what happened behind closed doors with Trump and the Iran strike. I can
only conjecture that it was probably people like Lindsey Graham who were very close to him. When I
went to talk to Trump in November for 45 minutes about how he should win the midterms, he spent 15
minutes of it talking about Lindsey Graham. So I think he was a very influential character there,
but he was obviously selectively being shown polling to paint a bad picture like, hey, you'll
be a hero if you take out the nuclear program. And it's like, yeah, people don't like Iranians
to have a nuke, yet it ranks number 30 on their list of priorities. And so when you take their
number one priority and put it on the back burner and then take number 30 and spend the most important
part of your presidency on it, obviously there's going to be a strong reaction.
Yeah. And speaking of top priorities that are actually on the minds of American citizens,
I think it's squarely the economy, inflation, jobs, immigration.
I mean, that's just reading the Twitter sentiment.
It seems.
Well, institutional trust is one that people don't talk about, but was pretty high because
we got Trump 2024 because of a lot of statist overreach under the Biden administration.
And we can't forget that our elections are retarded.
Our federal government doesn't represent the people.
We're an occupied nation.
And I think in some fundamental way, people understand that because with questions like, are you more concerned about foreign or domestic terrorism?
They're more concerned about domestic terrorism.
72% of America thinks we're living in a police state.
So it's like, you know, this elite worship, golden age, Dow's 50,000.
People are going to see through.
They don't buy that anymore because it's existential now.
Yeah.
I mean, you see the big backlash with flock cameras now and the push to ensure that they get widely installed and distributed throughout the country.
And they're not reliable at all.
Since we last talked, I think Nick Shirley's investigative journalism and many others.
Shout out to Steve Robinson, the main wire up in Maine, highlighting the Medicare fraud that is rampant throughout the country.
and you look at the AI wave too.
I think that's a very nuanced discussion.
I'm actually involved in some companies
helping bring data centers to the United States
and there is a lot of misinformation around it,
but the narrative is, it's a strong narrative
because people say, hey, you have Dario Amodi
and Sam Altman saying we're going to take all the jobs
and we're going to become the richest men in the world
And at the same time, you have the administration pushing forward with that, which I think they should.
I think the narrative needs to change.
But then on top of that, like prioritizing Iran, nuking the oil markets headed in the summer.
Which we haven't even really seen.
No, it's going to get wild.
Well, and that's in the other. Just to end on a callback to the last time we talked, you said if Trump doesn't do these things, you're going to see socialism rise in the United States.
And we've seen Mondawmi and we've seen all these Democratic socialists winning primaries across the country.
And it seems like Gen Z is stuck between a rock and a hard place and saying, well, we thought Trump was going to be anti-foreign wars and pro-economy, really secure the border.
and focus on the domestic economy. And that doesn't seem to be where the focus is. And
therefore, socialism is on the rise here. Yeah. 100%, we're going to see a lot of political
turmoil. And it's so predictable because the Republican Party not only is incapable of
understanding the change that's coming, they are directly incentivized not to. And so on the
Republican Party power is mostly about controlling the allocation of donor bucks. And so if you're
one of these people high up at a political action committee and you know people who know people,
or you can get no bid contracts, or you can get Trump a pardon, it's all about selling this access,
monetizing your position. And so any change to the status quo is dangerous to these people's
bottom line, right? So if you say to them, like, listen, the young people are not really ideological.
So if you just pound your chest about capitalism and conservatism, they're just going to ignore you because it's stupid and they know it's failed.
I've been saying this for probably years now, and it's like that's what they're doing now.
So it's like they came in on a massive populist wave, a reformed massive populist.
And let be very clear with a mandate for austerity Like that pretty ridiculous Like people wanted to see the deficit cut That is wild And it like okay you had Doge maybe all of the Republicans in DC didn
vote for it or want Doge, but you had it. And it was the most popular thing Republicans had ever
done with under 40 voters. Trump had like a 60% approval rating because of Doge. And Doge could
have come in and cut a trillion out of the deficit, and it mostly would have been fraud.
And they got sent packing, and it's because they endangered the Republican status quo in
Washington, D.C. There were a lot of corporations that were getting these no-bid contracts or
profiting off of Medicare waste or all of these things. And these people
own these senators. They own these senators and congressmen. Pharma's got money into everybody.
APAC's got money into everybody. That's just how it works. And so they would rather lose
and then draw a perimeter around the parts of the party they want to keep.
And that's what they're doing right now.
So and you can see like these people who are probably just apparatchiks for intel or for foreign interests or like just take a Nancy Mace.
So she seems based when you hear what she talks about.
But if you follow what she does, she just takes one issue and just pounds on it.
So during the Biden administration, she was just pounding on the trans issue.
And it's like, OK, fine. Is that our biggest problem?
Like, no, but fine. We get it. Right.
And so now what is she pounding on?
She's like, well, we all have to hate Muslims.
They're terrible.
Let's kill them all.
Let's get them all out of the country.
And it's like, for God's sakes, are we really going to regress back to the party of George W. Bush?
Is that like where the conservative movement that was populist just two years ago?
Remember, like Dearborn Muslims, like in part voted for Trump and helped him get over the finish line.
Like, are we going to forget Muslims for Trump?
And it's like, fine.
I don't like radical Islam.
Americans are afraid of radical Islam.
But are you a constitutional conservative? Because if they're a citizen, they have natural light rights from God. You know what I mean? So like, what are we even doing here? They don't care. They'll talk about conservatism. They're not conservative, conservative. They're like neo-conservative, which is an entirely different thing. And that's what I guess the Republican Party right now is throwing a temper tantrum to force everybody on the Internet as part of this broad coalition.
like Trump got a lot of under 40 socialist votes. He did. And so now they're saying,
well, socialists all want to put you into a ditch. And the under 40 socialist Trump voters like,
like, like, no, I just want to be able to afford food and get a job and you give my job to Indians.
So that's what's going to happen is like Republicans are trying to lose beautifully
right now so that they can wrestle control of the party back from essentially not even Trump anymore,
just the people that gave the Republicans the biggest coalition they've ever had.
And they're doing it by just this massive circular firing squad.
You know, I come up on Twitter every day and it's like, oh, look, another podcaster from
podcast, Kasistan getting money from Qatar.
It's like, you know, like it's not a winning message.
It's just.
Do you want to clear the air here?
Are you getting money from Qatar?
No, I'm getting money from no one.
I have to go out and kill what I eat or eat what I kill right now.
So, no, you know, and when I'm up and running, most of my money will be coming from people through like subscriptions and YouTube and stuff like that.
So awesome.
Well, I mean, to your point about austerity, people welcoming it.
I was one of those people and I still welcome it.
And then you juxtapose that with the Treasury's July statement where it had a $334 billion in receipts, $766.3 in outlays and a $432.3 billion deficit.
National debt is about to cross $40 trillion.
I think officially, officially now, like on a trailing 12-month basis, interest expense on the debt surpasses health care and defense spending.
And this is a runaway train that, again, to your point, austerity is what people wanted.
And I think a lot of Americans intuitively understand that this runaway debt train is having some consequence on the price of goods at the end of the day, combined with the immigration and the H-1B stuff.
And they're not seeing anything done about it.
Yeah.
No, 100%.
I like high interest rates in a balanced economy where we have a relatively compressed wealth equality curve so people can save money and earn interest and stuff like that.
But when you have to finance $40 trillion in debt with a 10-year treasury approaching 5% and when we have a repressive housing market because mortgage rates are astronomical, it's like we're not – like there's – like I don't – I mean maybe –
like there's two ways out of this essentially is hyperinflation or we just like absolutely get
completely crushed and it's like okay we're going to add another 500 billion to the annual
deficit to expand defense spending uh one can argue if that's reactive to the iran strike that
we were woefully unprepared for or whether it's forward looking for when the democrat bolsheviks
get in charge to expand their expansionist you know NATO war against Russia It like we the pendulum is swinging towards war is what it looks like And we can all throw temper tantrums but right now we don control the government
and that's what the government seems to want. People seem to agree that re-industrialization
is better for America. Well, that's a good way to get it. Our debt burden is too high. Well,
That's a good way to get it. You know, they have been sort of like improving the ability of the government to call up the draft.
So, you know, like we did changes to the draft over a year before Pearl Harbor was bombed.
So we saw World War Two coming and we're preparing for it, essentially.
And I don't know, like I don't want to be conspiratorial, but I look at the way that NATO people have been talking about.
And here's the other thing. Like, does NATO even stand for anything anymore? Who knows? So a lot of change coming.
Not only that, but bringing the AI subject back into this, I mean, it is pretty clear that the Trump administration has made it a matter of national security and really pitted the United States versus China.
You have this frontier closed-source model in the United States.
You have that race, and then you have the open-weight model out of China in that race.
And it seems pretty clear that the scene is being set for a confrontation with China over AI, among other things.
That won't be good.
I mean, there are nuclear power with ICBM capability.
And we're a lot less better off than we were a year ago to actually engage with them.
And I think we've just learned that our entire military doctrine doesn't really work, right?
Like in this new environment, we've put a lot of money and thought and time into building these massive platforms that are very difficult to defend from low-cost munitions that China is very well equipped to manufacture a bunch of, and we are not.
Yeah, we've fully transitioned into the age of the sovereign individual where the leverage on power has completely shifted towards those low-cost munitions, particularly drone warfare.
I don't think the American public is aware of just how drastically modern warfare has shifted in the last two years with drones specifically.
Yeah.
Listen, America is hard to invade.
But if I was forced to pick which amphibious vehicle to be on as part of an amphibious landing, I would probably prefer to be on a Chinese landing ship going after America and not vice versa.
But you know what I mean?
I'm just saying, like, just based on the strategic forethought and the I mean, they're going to like, how can I mean, they're part of the reason I ran is doing well.
Are they not like this is the.
They've been preparing for war against America for a long time, and they're using real-time satellite intel, and they're sharing targets, and they're probably sharing technology as well.
And we just give ours to everybody else.
Yeah.
Well, talking about midterms, what is the state of these races across the country right now?
How's it looking?
So I would say the bookends right now for the national House popular vote.
The last time I did the generic ballot was like really right after they got that deal with Iran and right around July 4th.
So I think it was a high.
It was Democrat plus four.
I think a case could be made back then.
It should have probably been about Democrat plus six.
And then if you look at like Rich Barris and Emerson, and I'll be doing another one soon.
If you look at good pollsters like Rich Barris and Emerson, they have something more like Democrat plus 10 or plus 11.
And so those are, I think, the bookends.
And if you compare it to other races like 2018, it's kind of similar.
Now, maybe the race will tighten or maybe it's not, and we can talk about cases of why that might happen.
But this feels very similar to like a 2006 where he had a second-term Republican president mired in an unpopular war.
And a case could be made that this war is less popular than 2003 was.
Now, obviously, everybody hated Bush by 2008, but they asked for that war.
They wanted that war.
America wanted that war, and they did not want this one.
So it's like you layer that on top of just the historical trend that Democrats should pick up both houses looking at 70%, 80% of the last races where the opposite party was in power.
It looks like a pretty good chance at a Democrat house pickup, and the betting markets agree at about 85% Dem pickup.
So now there's a lot of stuff, again, a lot of things that could happen. There are positive or
negative exogenous shocks. We can have the best economic numbers we've ever seen over the next
two or three months. I think that's an uphill fight. Like, I don't think that's going to happen.
Like people would need to feel the economy getting better. It's not going to happen. We would need
the biggest like 40 chess, big brain exit from Iran. I don't think that's going to happen. You could
Say, all right, well, maybe Iran strikes America.
I don't think they're stupid enough to do that.
Maybe there's a false flag or a Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Like maybe, maybe the Democrats do something like stupid, but I don't think they're going
to.
And so I also, everybody says, oh, look, the RNC is out raising the DNC.
And it's like, okay, but you guys forget they put most of their money through Act Blue.
So they're going to have a huge war chest.
So it's like the best case scenario, I think, for Republicans is because of these changes to the electoral map is that these seats are more entrenched than they usually are and that they could limit any loss and maybe eke out a slight majority.
I think that's probably the best reasonable case scenario.
The worst case scenario is like a 2006 where the Republicans lose like 30 seats.
And it could be worse than that by the time we get there, because as you and I both know, this Iran thing is only getting worse.
And Iran has every incentive to make it worse between now and November.
Because not only does Trump have an election, but PP Netanyahu has an election.
You better believe they want that guy gone.
So and then on the Senate, you know, it's like I care.
Everybody's going to focus on these Senate races.
And at the end of the day, the Republicans don't even have the Senate now.
So it's like, why are we even talking about this?
Right.
You know, OK, maybe they eke out a one seat majority, but they're not going to get any
legislation through in the 120th Congress.
So like Trump's time as a influential leader of America is on the decline.
I think by November it'll be like, OK, it's not as worse.
It's not as bad as it could have been.
Maybe we wish we had done better, but Trump's done.
Like his political capital will be over.
Democrats will have Congress and will probably be picking apart his administration with show
trials over the egregious things that are happening, pardon sales and antitrust and
no bid contracts.
They have a lot of that.
They've been preparing for this.
They've been watching the Trump administration very closely.
And it's like if you go work in the Trump administration, you have to know that the Democrats will come after you and the Republicans are not coming after the Democrats.
So weird things that you would expect to – like you would expect to see at this point in Trump's term more turnover, people leaving, people burned out, new people coming in.
And they're not. And I cynically conjecture that it's like, OK, they have to stick around for the pardons like it. It might get that bad. So it's like we started the conversation. It's going to get wild. I just I like I don't. People can call me a doomer, but I don't see any like what is going to motivate this broad coalition of people that Trump built because the Republican like Mitt Romney voter is not big enough to compete with your Democrats.
Democrat electorate now, who obviously a lot of it is just ballot harvested mail-in ballots, obviously.
But again, we didn't go after that.
And they turn out.
They will turn out 70, 80, 90 percent of their presidential turnout.
Republicans will get a much smaller number, as we've seen in all these special elections.
Yeah, it's – it seems like they've been too slow to act on this.
I mean, I think there was clips going around the CNN polling guy or their election night analysts.
And he was exacerbated because I think he realized at real time that there was like mail in ballot harvesting going on.
We saw the California Merrill or the Los Angeles Merrill race with Spencer Pratt.
Seems like he's posturing that maybe there is some legal action in motion.
But then you have things like the Maha mandate that the Trump administration had.
Like they did do the reduced vaccine schedule thing last week, which I was very happy to see.
But again, and who knows, like you always hear that it's really hard to get things done in D.C.
and it moves very slow.
But I think considering everything you just said, like moving slow is not an option if you want to secure the House.
This was a tenuous toehold that the Trump MAGA coalition had over American politics.
It should have been – they treated it – I'm trying to use an analogy.
They treated it like a marriage with the American people when in reality it was just a first date.
The people didn't even really want that much.
They just needed it.
They're like, oh, my friend guilted me into this or whatever.
It's like, oh, I had a really bad date with Biden, so I'll try this other guy.
And it's been a bad first date.
And it's like we America, again, is making votes of existential need in 2024.
Not the same thing as 2016.
2016 is like, oh, I'm sick of this retarded two party politics.
It doesn't serve us.
Let's just try an outsider and see what happens.
Like that was 2016 because they didn't like Hillary Clinton was just more of the same.
Right.
2024 is dear God.
We need somebody to fix it.
And all we have is Donald Trump.
Get in there and fix it.
And so I don want to set the bar Again a lot of this is about messaging Yes he can come in and snap his fingers and deport 10 million people But it is a again a wartime economic and political wartime
And a wartime leader is very different than a peacetime leader.
A wartime leader has to come in and have like laser focused strategic vision on who the enemy is, what the battlefield is and how that battle is being fought.
and Trump has just objectively not been doing that. Oh, I love the Dow's at 50,000. We're in
a golden age. Don't talk to me about affordability. We need 600,000 Chinese visas.
And what's wrong with the H1Bs? We don't have American talent here. Just like stuff like that,
50 year mortgages. And it's like, we're going to like destroy a civilization tonight. And it's like,
all of this is just, and like, maybe like, I don't think he's the same Trump as 2016. I think
2016, Trump would have been like, you know, he was a little bit better at his Twitter game back.
He was a king of Twitter.
Like he understood interaction with people and the feedback loop.
And this is just like slop.
And it's like, again, you can't go on your first date and just like without slop like that.
You know, it's like that's and that's what it is.
And America is reacting exactly like you'd expect.
And the polling shows it.
I mean, we had 50 percent.
We asked the question, has Trump kept his promises more or less than recent presidents?
And only 33 percent said more.
50 percent said less.
So that's a pretty resounding defeat there.
But do I have that right?
50 percent less, 33 percent more.
So only one in three Americans are like, yep, Trump has fulfilled his promises.
And again, obviously, you can't fix it all.
But it's like how you talk about our problems and how you frame everything.
And we could have done Iran with no problems if we had been like focused on increasing wages, talking about reducing legal and illegal immigration as a means to increase job availability.
And this is why I love what Tucker is doing.
So like in retrospect, it would seem that a lot of the things that Trump ran on didn't really have a moral core.
So for instance, why are we going to mass deport everybody?
Is it because we're racist or is it because of rule of law or fairness or is it because we're putting American workers first?
Like what's the moral or the value behind why we have this policy?
And the voters said, well, Trump wants to deport everybody because he cares about us and he wants us to have jobs and wages.
And then when Trump comes out and says, well, some of these illegals work pretty hard, everybody is like, well, wait, there's a disconnect.
Like he did this for a different reason than we thought.
And then what you're left with is he probably just said it to get elected.
And so, I mean, look, again, his numbers might come up a little bit.
Republicans might perform better than people expect, but they've been underperforming the polling in every race, including the primaries.
The turnout for Republicans is super low.
It's off the charts for Democrats.
So the most likely scenario is a pretty big loss.
And, you know, people like us have been screaming about this for over a year now.
And there's been no change.
Yeah.
And I think you've been beating the drum on X and other platforms, too, about how they can fix the narrative.
I think you just said it with the moral case for immigration policy specifically.
But other things I think you've been passionate about are like fair capitalism, square deal now.
Like, what does that look like?
What do you think the American people want on the economic side?
What would a platform that could win actually sound like?
They want a champion who will make America more fair. And so we can talk about the American dream and what that means. But one of the biggest questions I've been tracking is that only 35% of Americans say today's children will be better off than their parents.
So this aspect of opportunity and upward mobility is really what America has offered, and it's gone.
It's objectively gone for most people, especially young people, and everybody knows it.
And at the same time, you have this frustration and anger at the system.
72% of Americans are angry at the level of waste, fraud, and abuse.
Over 70% think politicians are profiting ill-gotten gains from their positions.
And then what nobody talks about is you also have a very, very anti-corporate view where over 80% think that big tech needs to be reined in because of their excess, stuff like that.
And the under-40 voters specifically, even though – and again, people say, oh, socialism is popular.
Well, socialism is becoming more popular and socialism wins with under-40 voters now, but it's still not popular.
It's still only in the 40s.
and everybody acknowledges that we do have a capitalistic system. So I think they want
capitalism to work, but it's like under both parties, it clearly doesn't. And there's this
aspect of oligarchy. Now people don't know what an oligarchy is, but I think what we're seeing is
just subtextually they understand they getting screwed by the system And those questions have strong majorities Like it was a 65 67 something like that Percent of the under 40 voters think that the economy is unfair to young people and only like 20 30 disagree So it
over two to one, right? So these are very strong majorities. And again, they overwhelmingly
support socialistic policies, like nationalizing major industries. That's like a three out of four
position for under 40 Trump voters. And excess wealth confiscation, that's almost 60% position
of under 40 Trump voters. So you look at this, what we really have is this boomer capitalism,
Reaganomics, trickle down, let's cut the capital gains tax and let's cut corporate taxes,
is, and maybe you'll get some scraps. And the problem is that this plutocracy, this oligarchy
has become so entrenched on both parties that Americans aren't feeling that. They're not getting
that anymore. With the inflation, they're just absolutely getting crushed in this K-shaped
economy. And they'll selectively pick a good economic number without looking at the fact that
consumer confidence is like the lowest it's been in decades. Because nobody wants to address the
fact that the system is failing people and the people are screaming that the system is failing
them. And so again, I think like the, none of what we're dealing with is new. I mean,
they had the Gilded Age, they had a big problem with monopolies in the late 1800s.
And then you had people like Teddy Roosevelt come in with very progressive economic policies.
He was a capitalist. He wasn't a socialist, but he wanted capitalism to work for everybody.
And so he would go after these businesses and break up these monopolies and call them out.
And Trump invites him over to Mar Lago to wine and dine.
Like Zuckerberg stole your election, bro.
And the first thing you did after you got inaugurated was invite him over to your house and wine and dine him.
Like what are the American people even supposed to do with that?
Because they knew Zuckerberg.
They didn't like Zuckerberg.
It was like almost 80 to 20.
They were against Zuckerberg specifically putting money into elections.
So, you know, I've heard Trump talk about how he wants to be on Mount Rushmore.
But Teddy Roosevelt is there for a reason.
this because he acknowledged that there was a problem that the American people were suffering.
And it was only just because the system wasn't fair to them. And he tried to make it more fair
to them. And part of the stuff he did, part of the stuff that FDR did, obviously World War II and us
being again, becoming a major industrial player, like obviously that had a part to do with it.
But most conservatives will remember the 50s, 60s, and 70s fondly, especially for the like
ability for a single income janitor to have a house and five kids, right? And live a comfortable
life. But it's like, you can't forget that we had like a 90% upper income tax bracket.
You know what I mean? Like we were confiscating wealth from billionaires then when we were
supporting unions and had very pro worker policies. And our system is now incapable of that. Like we
had a chance. We can't do it.
And so somebody's going to. And I hope it's JD.
He talks like that. But whoever
does this is going to be going up against
just the absolute... I mean, we're
pretty close to this
state corporate fascism.
We're getting there. It's there.
You said oligarchy. It's like corporate
socialism.
You have the Trump administration taking equity
stakes in a bunch of these companies
and people like rah-rah, re-industrialization
support. It's like, no.
Like this is – I mean that's how Mussolini defied fascism was the combination of corporate and state power working tightly together.
And I don't think Trump is a – like I think the idea that Trump is a fascist is like a weak meme.
I just think the system is set up and has sort of embedded – like I tweeted this out the other day because people were complaining.
there was some socialists like he sent a tweet out of a headline about health care like 95 percent
of american males don't go to the doctor um more than once every five years because it's too
expensive he's like what stage of capitalism is this it's like that's not capitalism that is
corporate fascism where health care is the most heavily subsidized industry in the country and
it's expensive because it has socialist tendencies and there's this complete misunderstanding of
The fact that we don't live in a capitalist society and haven't for a while, there are capitalist sort of variables and aspects of the economy that we live in.
You can go spin up an LLC.
You have an idea.
You start a business.
You can do that.
But once you get to economies of scale, like the bailout culture and the favoritism that exists is very socialist.
And it's very clear to me, but the American public doesn't understand this.
We need people that are really pushing the edge of thought in D.C.
And unfortunately, like I said, all the money goes towards maintaining the status quo.
Like, for instance, I don't think we should have publicly traded equities.
I just don't.
I think it's very bad.
It's very short-sighted.
It drives a lot of risk like you know risk behavior It incentivizes corporations to do really stupid things like the whole cracker barrel redesign they did was you know financialization essentially they need
they wanted to borrow a bunch of money and, uh, and one of the, they like destroyed the business.
Right. And it's like, okay, well, if that was a privately held company with people who had a
long-term view, they wouldn't have completely destroyed their brand image and piss off all
their customers like that. And I think that happens in financial services. I think it happens in
Like literally every industry, they're basically got to get that stock bump like this quarter.
We're probably past that now because everybody's stock just goes up.
But like we have this disgusting melange of all this stuff, corporate socialism, socialized losses.
There is some fascism.
Like, you know, people like you said, people call Trump a fascist.
It's lazy.
But like, let's not forget that under Trump, we shut down all the small businesses in America and then worshiped Walmart.
Like what?
Right.
And that was very brutal.
Like a lot of people lost their jobs from small employers.
It was a tough time.
And objectively, because of all the asset money that got put into the industry, those big corporations all did much, much, much better.
And we've continued to see wage stagnation since then.
And obviously, the foreign-born worker population did a lot better post-COVID.
So it's just – it's our enemy, and nobody is willing to call that out because they need the donor bucks.
Even on the Democrat side, they love big corporations.
Yeah, it's disgusting.
I mean you were talking about like 1950s, 60s America, and that's another meme that's emerged over the years.
But I think it reemerged over the last week, which is wages priced in gold for 1950s minimum wage workers.
and they're making more than like a middle-class American today in purchasing power.
Yeah.
But we all know this is the case though.
It's because the people still live in our communities.
Like you could like drop out of high school and get a salaried job as a janitor with benefits
and then retire and live in the same town with a house and like a single income.
Like it was possible.
Like people did that.
And now it's like, okay, well, you're going to be cleaning houses as a gig worker competing with illegals and barely being able to afford rent in a single bedroom apartment, and you certainly don't have healthcare.
That's the same person.
And I mean, the last time you were on, too, you welcome the idea of a controlled demolition of the housing market.
And I don't think a manufacturer controlled demolition is the way things went.
But if you look at the divergence between houses that are for sale and houses that are being bought right now, it's the largest ever.
And so you do have this situation where I think boomers or many who have houses right now are trying to sell, and they simply can't because interest rates and the prices are still high.
So nine months after our last discussion, it seems like something has to come to a head there because that divergence can't persist forever.
It's like prices either have to come down or you have to lower the interest rates drastically.
I personally think recessions are healthy. And it's like when we have a deflationary birth rate, then the idea that our economy is going to continue to be inflationary is kind of retarded.
It's not going to go up 5% every year when we are producing less people. I mean, productivity only takes it so far, right? I'm pretty sure our productivity has been flat for 10 years or whatever.
AIs, I don't think, making it better, right? And so it's like the corporate press who wants
stocks and the line to go up use recession as a dangerous boogeyman, bad word. And so it justifies
bipartisan rescue bills to prevent recession or to recover from recession. And all of that is
socialistic spending and transfer payments. It's all socialism. And it's like probably at this
point, the most dangerous thing is if we don't have a recession and people might scratch their
heads, but it's like, again, the specter of not being able to service our own debt
and losing reserve status, currency status as the dollar, right? Like these are existential
problems that will turn us into the Weimar Republic. And again, I'm not an economist,
but like, where are these conversations? Like, why are people not talking about this?
They're only, they're only having a Bitcoin podcast, unfortunately.
Yeah, I'm old enough to remember when capitalists used to talk about things like creative destruction.
You know what I mean?
And it's like, no, we can't – like those corporate loans, they can't go bust.
Well, it's because they're like leveraged 50x and buried in all these like off-balance sheet complex securitized products and crap like that.
And the whole thing is going to come tumbling down like a house of cards.
I guarantee you, if you just go ask Grok, is our global financial system more leveraged
and at bigger risk of a systemic financial collapse than in 2007 or not? It'll probably
say yes. You know what I mean? These problems have not gone away. They've gotten worse
because now our entire stock market's like 10 companies, right? And it's like every
but he's leveraged to the hilt.
And it's all been like a rent-seeking grift.
And that's not capitalism.
Like you said, capitalism is a doctor in your town
that comes to your house and you pay him cash.
And he renders services.
That's capitalism.
Not like a private equity-backed roll-up of chain store,
like urgent care centers
because you can't afford a real doctor.
Like that's not capitalism.
No.
And it's scary.
because you mentioned like midterms like the house could go to democrats likely will go to
democrats and then they'll start the the trial shows and that's the most frustrating thing about
the the fumble that has been the trump administration as it pertains to domestic
economic and immigration policy is i do not want to see this happen i wish we could be
focusing on the things i just mentioned but if we're just being objective it like we see we saw
it in the bitcoin and crypto industry like the meme coin stuff it's like why are you doing this
you had a mandate to clean things up and out of the gate the night of the inauguration you're
launching a meme coin like what the is going on are you aware of what went on in antitrust
no oh wait till i tell you this one so again looking back and listen i was personally a trump
guy. Like I spent hours trying to get this retard elected, you know, back on the Donald and again,
because he objectively was an outsider with the right policies. And I wanted to see that work.
Right. And he left me, not vice versa. And I'm allowed to have personal biases because I don't
pretend that pollsters shouldn't have them. I just try and separate my numbers from them. Right. And
I think my track record speed for itself. In the first Trump administration, it was like, okay,
we know he's not a Russian asset. Like, what are you doing guys? Come on, Hillary. There's,
this is hubris. Right. And then I was like, okay, well, the Zelensky call. And it's like, okay,
now this is really retarded. Like you're showing us Democrats are insane and this isn't helping
things. And I guess it got them their ends of like handicapping the Trump administration somewhat,
but his approval rating was pretty high when they were impeaching him for the Ukrainian call.
So and then when they went after him criminally, his that's what sealed him as the Republican nominee for 2024.
Like it made him more popular. Right. So even if they're not sane, they could learn from their past excesses and moderate and not be like crazy.
Like that is something that Democrats really could do. Now, right now, what they're doing is stealing primary elections away from socialists so that they can continue to have an establishment.
an APAC person in. That's what's happening right now. So that's kind of insane. But when they come
out, and probably it'll be next month in September. I know Ro Khanna has been working a lot on this.
I know other Democrat offices have been putting these cases together. There's real stuff here.
We all see the smoke. There is fire. And one of the most egregious ones is what happened in
antitrust. And it's like, okay, I can't point to you the exact UCC code that makes this a federal
offense, but it looks egregiously bad. So the antitrust person, and we actually had a pretty
good one under Biden, but we got a new one, Gail Slater. I know her. She's a really nice lady.
And she also cares about the American people and said, okay, in this job, I'm going to put the
American people first. Corporations have too much power. And so we're going to do what antitrust is
supposed to do, which is break up monopolies and sue the hell out of these companies.
and they started these lawsuits.
And one of the lawsuits they went after was to prevent Live Nation from buying up new,
you know, ticket master venues or whatever.
Right.
And so this is like a real circumstance where people go to concerts and they have to pay
200 bucks for a ticket.
And it's literally because there's a monopoly.
It would be very popular if they broke this up.
And they were going to.
And because it was egregious again, and it would have been a very popular win.
so Mike Davis allegedly gets hired as a lobbyist for live nation gets paid 300,000 a month as a
retainer gets a $1 million success fee. There's video documentation on this already on YouTube,
but I assume that it's going to be in like ads and stuff and gets her fired. And not only gets
her fired, gets like her office raided by police within the DOJ. And there were other cases too,
that just, there was like a Hewlett Packard acquisition. They, they sued to stop it.
And they immediately like just got overturned because like Kellyanne Conway was taking a
million dollars. Like it, like this is just what happens. The Republican lobbyist takes a big check
and goes and screws over the American people behind closed doors. It's literally the exact
same like guy with a monocle in a smoke filled cigar room, right out of the political cartoons
of 1905.
Like, that's exactly what's happening in the Trump administration.
So you know at the end of the day I would have loved for the Trump administration to hold the people who violated law in the Biden administration criminally accountable or at the very least fire them Like where was the frog march of the people out of the FBI who spied on all those moms in the school boards
Like, we never saw one. Maybe it happened or not, but it's like, if you don't see it,
it didn't happen. You don't get credit for it. And so Trump has held nobody accountable.
And I guess if the Democrats are going to come back in office and hold criminals accountable, like this time around, I'm not going to pretend that it's some affront to democracy.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's like, well, like you guys got yourself to blame for this one.
And and again, like just the level of hubris and openness with which this is happening is is bad.
And there's like another one with it'll be a story in the Wall Street Journal.
But let's just say I was part of a polling engagement where somebody paid a lot of money to right leaning pollsters to convince Trump to scale back deportations and support an amnesty deal.
And it was, in my opinion, the most effective thing that made him change his mind.
And I didn't do it willingly, but like that story is going to come out to like there's a lot of things like that.
so again it's just so unfortunate and egregious again the the crypto the meme coin stuff is
something that i'm closest to and it's like what why completely unnecessary like just you're already
a multi-billionaire when you get out of office your family's going to be set like why do this
while you're in the halls of power and to your point like i'm not going to be like this is a
political witch hunt. Like it's objectively corrupt to a certain extent. And to your,
to your point about like perp walking people, like again, just the, the speed with which you're
moving or the lack of speed with which you're moving. And we did have a good step in that
direction with the, the, the indictment of the woman from where was it? The SPLC or SLPC,
Southern Poverty Law Center. Yeah. Like nobody really knows who that is. You know what I mean?
Like this needed to be like Brennan.
It needed to be Ray.
It probably needed to be whoever signed the auto pen pardons.
It needed to be my Orcas.
And of course they're not going to go after my Orcas and we all know why.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like this is where we're at.
Like it's, it's, and I, you know, I don't know if a lot of people knew this, but the
house oversight committee did not a lot, but it did go after the auto pen parts.
Right.
And I'm pretty sure that they made criminal referrals to the DOJ and that the DOJ chose not to pursue these people.
One can only, you know, conjecture why.
It's because they don't want to undermine the massive overreach of pardons that the Biden administration did.
They don't want to, you know, kill the goose with the golden egg.
So, I mean, like, that's what I'm guessing.
So, again, I mean, it's just not what America wanted.
And I don't know, like you can't pump out like Reaganomics and Muslim hate and dehumanize the socialists enough for me to forget the fact that this was the best chance America had, the best coalition America ever had for financial austerity, for government reform, for economic populism, for reigning in the excess of large corporations, for reindustrializing America.
and it's like at the end of this whole endeavor, it will have been essentially for naught.
In fact, we're not only that. I mean, I think if we play what's going on in Iran to out to its most
likely conclusion, we will have seriously degraded our capabilities to deploy force around the world.
and certainly everybody's view of how powerful we are as a military
has been seriously undermined.
Hey, look again, I'm not trying to make everybody drink,
but it's like, tell me I'm wrong.
No, I mean, it's hard.
It's hard to refute those points.
And that's what I got sort of staring out into into the sky here on my back porch is like, where do we go from here?
Like Democrats take over. Do we get a wave of socialist taking hold?
And how long is it going to take to untangle that Gordian knot of terrible policy decisions that just accelerate us towards Weimar?
Or is it J.D. 28 or somebody like J.D. the only hope to actually revert course?
Well, let's find, let's find something optimistic to talk about. Okay. So first off,
no matter what happens, America will continue for the likely, like near future. Okay. We still have
a country and you know I can say the economy is going to get a lot better but it like the debt will probably not go up much faster than it already has under this Trump administration Like the exponential curve is not going to increase by a factor
It will stay on its current trajectory.
So we got time to figure this out.
And we have two very entrenched establishments.
And like we said, they're both very corporate, oligarchy, plutocratic, whatever you want to call them.
And they both like have aligned interests in many things and work together.
They look out for one particular country in the Middle East.
They and they want you divided.
And I think very honestly that the idea that the constitutional right has of being like racist and undermining people based on.
Things like, you know, like I don't want the people from Somalia to come over here.
But if they went through our process and they are a U.S. citizen, we have to assimilate them.
We can't say they all have to go back.
You know what I mean?
Like we're not like at the same place that the U.K. is yet.
OK, so like if you can't call yourself a constitutional conservative and say that radical Islam is our biggest threat and all Muslims have to leave America, we were founded on like freedom of religion.
Right. It's like literally why we exist as a country.
Right. And on the left, they, you know,
they dehumanize the right and they say that they're Nazi fascists and they do the LGBT stuff
so that the right can attack each other over cultural war issues. And it's been very effective
keeping these people divided and not realizing the extent to which the Democrat and Republican
establishment are tied together. And again, I'm not saying it's all about Israel, but that is the
most obvious Venn diagram overlap, right? So if you take establishment Democrats and establishment
Republicans, they are aligned on that issue. And they're also aligned on blowing up Russia,
right? It's really like military industrial complex slash foreign interventionism. It's
neoconservatism, right? That's what unites these people. Those people are getting old and dying.
And they're also losing the plot and the internet's getting better. And they're losing their grip on
their ability to keep these people divided because that's how they succeed. And we see it right now.
Wow. You know, Hasbara got 730 million allocated to it this year. I'm sure some of Chris Lasavita's Republican Political Action Committee have AstroTurf out there. And they're literally doing it right now. All the left wants to kill you. Don't you remember Charlie Kirk? And it's like, come on, guys. It's not all the left. Yes, the left has some violent people, but they also think the right is violent because they stormed the Capitol building. Right.
So I'm most optimistic that the young people are unideological enough that they can see through these neoconservative division tricks and form a youth coalition that is focused on national populism.
I think that's possible.
And you're starting to see people try.
This thing that Tucker did, I don't – like he's not getting funded from Qatar, right?
Like if you've just bought his borrowed talking point, if you think he's funded from Qatar.
Now, whether his track record is great or whether he should have talked to Hunter Biden, like valid questions.
But what he did with his 10 points was very important because what it does is it signals common ground and collaboration.
And I happened to watch the way that the Young Turks covered what Tucker did.
And there was olive branches there.
So this is possible.
And all we need to do is for people to say, like, at the end of the day, we really all are American.
That's what a nationalistic populist platform would do.
It would find common ground and unite us to building a better country.
How does that country get better?
Well, it's not like the AI data centers.
Maybe that's number 52, right?
But it's like people should be able to afford food here.
They should have livelihoods.
And the government should work for them.
And incidentally, what's great, like I said, is under 40 socialists voted for Trump. These people are also very interested in fairness. They think the people that did things that were wrong should be arrested more so than the boomers.
Like we asked if people who did the auto pen thing should be arrested and it was like over 60% of young people and it was like down in the 40s or something.
I forget what it was, but it was lower with older people.
Like these people want to – they liked blowing up narco boats.
They're like, yep, that's defending America.
Blow them up.
So these people also have even some autocratic tendencies.
So there's a chance that whatever this is is going to color fast and loose with the Constitution.
And it's up for grabs right now.
It really is.
And like, this isn't a small amount of people.
We're talking about 20, 30, 40 million, like whatever this coalition is going to be.
That's enough for an independent to maybe not win, but at least take out one of the other parties.
So you could see a Ross Perot spoiler And I think like JD also gets all this stuff He is the only populist that the only true populist that I aware of You know Bernie talks the right way about some things but he he an establishment creature
But he's in like the hardest spot he could possibly be in because he's still attached to Trump.
Trump's not going to really have much in the way of coattails, I think.
And the establishment Republicans hate him because he's not a Zionist and they're going to do everything in their power to try and take him out.
Not only that, but for the corporate reasons, for the fact that he actually is a populist.
So it's like he's got a really uphill fight and he's the best guy that I personally think we have right now to get America this national populist platform.
I think it needs and it asks for.
so it's like okay maybe it's jd maybe it's aoc maybe the establishment succeeds in getting rubio
in there rubio will almost certainly lose and aoc will probably just be like a laughing stock
retarded president that just does biden stuff right so uh so it's like pray for an outsider
like that's really what it is yeah ah it's such a clown show yeah it is uh it makes you want to
focus on local politics just like get down to the county city state level just focus there yeah yeah
yeah because when you think of the debt i i think i said this last year when you're on um
I'm an economic populist
nationalist myself too.
And I think it all comes back to the money.
I literally think the core of all these problems
and both parties would never agree to do this.
And that's why I'm such a strong advocate for Bitcoin
because it's a sly roundabout way
that Hayek described in the 80s
to take money out of the control of governments
and central banks.
Like you can't fix any of these problems
because they're all spending problems
at the end of the day.
They're all favoritism problems
that are enabled by the ability to issue debt
one time without any thought of replications
or opportunity cost,
because the Fed will always be there to monetize that debt.
Like until you take away their ability
to just print money and throw it at all this bullshit
and enable this crony oligarchic corporate fascism,
whatever we want to call it, it is what it is.
Yeah.
I think it all comes back to the money.
And from an economics perspective,
the only way out is debasement. And that is what is causing everybody to really feel the pains of
financial strife via higher prices. And they think it's Trump, corporate favoritism, or the
socialist and the doling out of subsidies and entitlements. And it's all of it. And it all
stems from literally the money. The most important tool we use as humans, how do you
express value and coordinate economic activity. It's money. And if the money's broken,
your political and economic system is going to be too.
Yeah. So the fourth turning tells us that the pendulum swings back on things like morals,
values, and integrity. And then ultimately what we hear is systemic failure of integrity.
And all of these institutions have been built on ideals that were very popular with the boomer
generation instilled post-World War II and mean nothing now, especially to the younger people.
And they want a fair values-driven economy where people are held accountable for being criminals
and where there's justice. And that has a lot less to do with things like liberalism and socialism.
And also what's kind of wild is that whether or not they support things like flooding the country
with illegals or they support like the LGBT stuff, like there's this libertarian, classical
liberal idea of like, okay, they're a citizen and we're a country.
You know what I mean?
Like the, like, I really do think that the more racist anti-human parts of the conservative
are coming from the older generations that just love to go over and bomb brown people.
And it's like, okay, well, if you're, if you're a constitutional conservative Christian,
Persians have natural rights from God too. You know what I mean? It's like, no, we got,
oh, we just got a glass, the whole country. Like, really? That's your position because you just made
yourself look insane and you're going to try and win an election with that being a core fundamental
belief. Like that's not wise because the young people don't like that. That turns them off.
Most of them. Right. And yet at the same time, they're fine with deporting everybody. It's like,
that's not fair. They shouldn't be here. Get them the hell out. Right. So, but they also don't want
to see like ice goose stepping around neighborhoods, shooting people in the face with tear gas. Cause
that's not American. And, and so like they have finer sensibilities in my opinion about like what
the future should look like and they're going to get political power. And it's like, you look at
where we're at objectively.
As a country, it's not a surprise we're here.
Many countries, many empires have been in this particular circumstance.
But it's just like you can never predict how it's going to play out.
It could be a long, slow decline like Rome, and we just – people stop repairing the roads, and then feet thumbs pop up.
I don't know.
It could be a massive civil war.
It could be total global war, and the establishments will externalize our enemy.
That could actually get us out of this, right?
I don't know if the young people would sign up to fight and die for it and how well conscription would go over now.
Like, I don't know.
Or these people could just like get a really good outsider who's astute enough leader to find very easy to find common ground.
It's very easy to find common ground.
And it's like, hey, like, guys, just shut up about the training stuff.
We're going to get rid of the under.
We're going to get rid of the sex change for minors.
will give you your parental rights, but it's just let them be retarded. You know what I mean? Like,
like there are common grounds on things like this. Somebody could easily do that. It's like,
no Reddit, stop talking about killing your political enemies, you know, bring the CEO in,
give him an earful, tell him he's under investigation, like whatever you have to do,
let's tone this down. And, uh, you know, like the entrenched deep state, the corporate interests,
the foreign interests are not going to want that to happen.
Is Spencer Pratt a dark horse outsider in your mind?
Uh,
I don't know.
Like he,
he caught,
he caught a lot of people.
He was doing the right thing in the LA race.
Yeah.
Whoever this person is has to be very impressive.
Like that's the problem.
You know what I mean?
Like the bar is so high,
uh,
you know,
just because like,
like one Teddy Roosevelt speech he makes will get printed in every
newspaper.
And nobody ever sees what he does 99% of the rest of the time.
You know what I mean?
Like now it's like you're going to – it's like Al-Sayed.
Again, I don't want a Democrat socialist to win, but it's like Blues Brothers, dude.
You know what I mean?
Blues Clues.
What did I say?
Blues Brothers?
Yeah, Blues Clues.
Like what are we doing here?
It's a clown show.
It's embarrassing to be – it almost is like we're in the humiliation ritual of some satanic.
a cult or something like that and uh yeah we're like a socialist overtaking the color revolution
just humiliation um but to your point about this younger coalition what's their propensity
to to actually get out and vote is that is that increasing will they actually show up
or they just talk about online uh i mean there there is certainly going to be less of a turnout
out. And the problem is, is it's like, okay, you look back 20 years ago and it's just a totally
different set of young people. And it was a totally different politics. There was a lot more
cultural conservatism and a lot of, you know, like just very different. Right. And so the most
recent example we have is a 2024 presidential election cycle where a lot of new voters came
out for the first time and where there were a lot of crossover Democrats and independents.
So we have this one data point of a 77 million Republican electorate or a presidential cycle But we do not yet have a very good data point of a 77 million Republican electorate or a presidential cycle but we do not yet have a very good data point or like
yes, 2022 was higher turnout than normal, but it was still like very old.
You know what I mean? Like, and it wasn't the same, you know,
people hadn't decided on Trump yet. He was like kind of a non-entity.
Like he wasn't really doing much in 2022 other than getting rated.
In Mar-a-Lago, I think happened that year. And Biden was being awfully retarded, but the Democrats got a wave on the Dobbs decision.
Like that's – the Republicans were up a lot and then that tightened it down to I think a three-point race at the end.
But what we're seeing in all these special elections is that all those people that came out for the first time for Trump are just not coming back out.
And so whether that's because of the youth propensity or lack thereof to come vote, I think it's more of like the youth propensity to not want to put up with, like you say, humiliation rituals.
Right. I think that's really what's going on.
And like I have no case to be made for a higher than expected Republican turnout.
Like I just don't see how that even happens because they've literally underperformed every polling.
And even in these primaries where it's like, you know, you got a bunch of people to show up for Galrine.
It's like, OK, well, how much of that was harvested and unrepeatable at a national scale?
His turnout was like all boomers.
You know, like it's it's not going to be this nationwide groundswell of young people that are afraid.
So they're not afraid of the socialists.
They're not.
I think a lot of people here defund the police and it just goes over the head, not because they don't hate.
the idea, but it's like, they don't think they're serious about it. And we, and it's like, well,
how can, how can that be? That's crazy. It was like, think about the kind of things that people
had to forget about Trump to vote for him. Right. It's like, it's pretty equivalent, right?
They had to, they had to hold their nose and choke down January 6th. And I think January 6th
obviously was a fed off. It was a psychological operation, but a lot of people don't think that
they think that Trump tried to overthrow the government. And then a lot of those people still
voted for him yeah so i mean january 6th was fed up and in my opinion if you just like look at the
people walking around the capitol building so okay yeah i think we got up to about 57 percent of
america agreed that it was the federal federal agents were involved in the january 6th riot yeah
yeah so a lot of people had their eyes open yeah but then you had like a quarter of republicans say
that it was the biggest threat to democracy since the civil war so it's like yeah it was all again
clown show, humiliation ritual.
All right.
We're approaching
midterms. Let's just
maybe the last thing to touch on. What do
you think are the most important
races or topics that
people should be paying attention to?
I'm just worried about
what happens with this conflict in the Middle East
between now and November because we've probably never
been in a bigger window for
a suspected false flag. And I hate
to sound conspiratorial.
But it's true.
It's not conspiratorial.
We got to stop.
We have to stop.
What's the word I'm like?
Disclaiming I hate to sound It because it objectively true These false flags exist They have existed throughout history And we are in the window for the biggest you know the benefit
The risk-benefit analysis is probably the best calculus it's been for a long time for one of those to happen.
And hopefully it doesn't.
And the same thing, like I just think like really what we're going to do is we're going to tick along until November and nothing's going to change.
Like Trump's going to put out some positive economic numbers.
The Democrats are going to put out some negative ones.
Everybody's going to run a bunch of ads and everybody's going to be harvesting a bunch of mail-in ballots.
And I don't know what's going on with the machines.
I don't know who controls them now.
It's going to be very unpredictable.
There's probably going to be a huge polling miss because how can you even predict what's going to go on?
But it's like what I don't know yet is how effective the Democrats will be with whatever this anti-corruption advertisement and theatrics they do because they've been very quiet.
And there hasn't been a lot of overt Trump hatred, and they just let him cook.
So we'll see what that looks like, and it could be wild.
Maybe it won't do anything.
But it's like if we tick along until November and the polling stays about the same, I do think Republicans will underperform the Democrat plus eight real clear politics aggregate right now in House popular vote level by a point or two.
I think that's based on what all has happened with all the special elections.
And what we're looking at then is how accurate were the estimates of how many seats that people have picked up in redistricting because all of that was based on 2024.
And so if you really have what that would be is like if Democrats pulled a plus 10 House popular vote, that's like almost a 12 point swing from where we were in 2024.
And so when people say the House is entrenched or the Republicans are picking up seats, it's not in an environment with a 12 point swing.
And so what you might see is like there's this trough where the House doesn't really move that much if we stay within this range.
You get outside of it, the Democrats are just going to be picking up seats that people didn't expect.
And who knows who they are, you know, because in some of these districts, it's only going to be a five point swing and others is going to be a 17 point swing.
You look at like the Watley race that's going on in North Carolina and he's underperforming Trump by 17 points in the latest poll that I saw.
Like, you know, like that's that's not good.
Like, and so I don't know, I think you see potentially like, like Texas is in play.
It absolutely a hundred percent is in play.
And it only comes down to electioneering at the state.
Like it really does because the polling is tight, like a couple of points apart.
And that's not where it should be when Trump won by like 13 points in Texas.
Right.
And then Ohio, like I think Vivek's in danger, a hundred percent Iowa.
so
but again
if it's not a
57 to 43 Republican
lead in the Senate they're not going to get any legislation
through anyways so
I don't think the Senate matters
we're just going to wake up
to a very close House race
or Democrats just like ran the board I do want to note before we wrap up here it is insane that bout harvesting and rigged elections are just expected now
Yeah.
It was taboo in 2020.
Six years later, 2026, it is basically accepted as a fact of how the system works.
Yeah.
You know, Michigan, look at Al Syed, right?
He underperformed the polling by nine points.
There were good pollsters like Emerson who had him up 14, I think.
Emerson had him.
And then, of course, Trump comes out the same the next morning and says he only won because he cheated.
And it's like, no, bro.
The black precincts in Detroit were stuffing ballots.
and because he doesn't have the SEIU behind him or whatever it is, because he doesn't have the
political organizations that bus people from neighboring states, because he doesn't have
the people in vans that go around to nursing homes with blank mail-in ballots or write these mail-in
ballots in a warehouse somewhere, again, with SEIU workers or something. The anti-establishment
people don't have that capability. And I think they, it's impossible to know how much. And
obviously some of it was a mismatch in capabilities from an advertising perspective. And I don't know
how good of a campaign he ran, but there was some cheating guaranteed. There was some cheating and
who cheated. They wanted to keep the APAC candidate in. That's really what it was. They paid $70
million for Haley Stevens. And then they would have had an APAC candidate on both sides of that
race. And why? Like Trump freaked out on True Socially, came out the next day. It was one of
the only races he talked about, right? And it's like, well, like, why is that? Well, the AIPAC
lost a Senate seat. That's what it is. You know what I mean? Like, not in the general, in the
primary, like, because everybody can say like, and there was a poll that put Rogers out four points.
I think he loses. Rogers lost when Trump was on the ballot. So, you know, I think that four point
was an outlier, but we'll see. Maybe people don't really, maybe they'll really vote against
a Muslim socialist, but I don't think so. I don't know. We'll see. And hopefully,
we don't wait nine months to do it. Maybe we'll catch up after the midterms. I'm sure you're going
to be busy the next couple of months. But really appreciate you coming on. Congrats on starting
the Honest Poll, doing it with integrity. It's lacking these days, so I really appreciate that
you're putting an effort to,
to preserve your integrity and do things the right way.
That's what I'm here for.
It's my goal.
If I ever lose my integrity,
I'll shut down.
So where,
where can we send people to learn more?
So we have a landing page at the honest poll.com.
Please sign up for free sub stack notifications.
And the second I get this YouTube thing straightened out,
we'll have the YouTube channel back up and we'll be putting out,
you know,
we're really going to get our content honed into higher value stuff,
like understanding public sentiment and how it drives like behind the
narratives.
Because again,
almost everything we see now is establishment Kabuki theater and there's
nobody like really nailing that.
And so on Twitter,
it's at honest pollster as well.
So people check me out.
I got a lot of hot takes.
Go check it out.
Great.
Follow Mark.
It's always a pleasure,
sir.
Thank you.
Thanks Marty.
Peace.
Love freaks.
Okay.