Peak Prosperity - Reclaiming the Presidency: A Fight for Freedom

Episode Date: February 13, 2025

Special guest Jeffrey Tucker joins Chris to discuss corruption, executive power, and the fight to restore democracy.

The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello everyone and welcome to this Signal Hour podcast. I am here, of course, with the ever lovely better half of this whole arrangement here. Hello, everybody. So good to see you. And we're here together with everybody.

And remember, Signal Hour is where we try and make sense out of the nonsense. It has been an unbelievable flood to try and stay on top of everything. Nick and Evie and I, if we're away from our phones or twitter for an hour we're already behind the curve um and uh just as even we were in the pre-studio here waiting for this live to start nick was hitting me with another big piece of information apparently news guard that fact checking we got fact checked we got news guarded several times during covid and afterwards and apparently they're getting looked into now and they've already been dropped by a few big clients.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of scoundrels. That whole fact-checking arrangement, all those fact-checkers, Evie? Nonsense. Oh, it's nonsense. You remember, this was possibly the worst. My lowest moment was watching Pierre Corey get fact-checked by AP,

and the AP fact-checker was Beatrice Dupley, whose prior job did fact-checking the preeminent pulmonary doctor on the subject of ivermectin. Her prior job was she was an editor at Teen Vogue. I kid you not. Oh, it's crazy. It got so bad. So we're going to be discussing that. We're going to be discussing how the alarm, the blob is alarmed now and they're fighting back. We're going to have Jeffrey Tucker coming on in just about 10, 15 minutes here of the Brownstone

Institute. And boy, he's just been amazing tracking all of this stuff. You know, Jeffrey. Oh, he's wonderful. He's great at helping us understand what's what's going on. He's a really good thinker. So really articulate and he's a great public presenter. Oh, indeed. We get the privilege of spending time with him and getting to hear his takes on things privately. Yeah. Brownstone Institute. It's incredible. Yeah, it is. It is. That gold really picks up on me. Turn this over to you. I don't need it for right now. All right. So let's get right to it. This is this is. Yeah. Alan, you are not kidding. Oh, really? You're going to make me blush with stuff like that.

Yes. And we'll put the camera on when you blush. You're in trouble later with me. OK, I hope so. All right. So let's let's get right to it. We are going to be talking about this stuff today that the blob is deeply alarmed and they are beginning to fight back. And of course, we'll be bringing Jeffrey Tucker on in just a few minutes. But let me set the stage first before we go there. First, this is the theme that they've been running. The they in the story is is the alarmed blob. And it's mostly Democrats.

But of course, there are some rhino Republicans in there as well. And one of their key refrains has been this, which is nobody voted for Elon Musk. So they thought this had some kind of currency, Evie. You know, they're like, oh, you know, oh, no, nobody voted. Nobody voted for Elon. Right. That old thing. Nobody voted for him. You know, so let's let's go. Let's go there real quick. Let's tune in now and listen to one of my least favorite people. I listened to her. So now you do, too. I apologize in advance. Maxine Waters, California. Hello, everybody. We have convened here in the right place the treasury department we have got to tell elon

musk nobody elected your ass nobody told you you could get all of our private information all right that's all i can say okay so so evie this whole idea that uh nobody voted for elon they think this is a talking point. Apparently it resonates in their tribe. Okay. Okay. And they think this is some kind of a dunk. All right.

So let's just tour what this actually means. How about this? Elon, we should note, won the same number of Democratic presidential primaries. That's great. As Kamala Harris did. Okay. Indeed he did. Let's continue continue here's the i didn't elect him either starter pack um that's great look at all these superstars

wef klaus schwab noah uval holly uh larry fink oh oh it's just gross. So this is who we voted for. OK, this is exactly. I love that. This is exactly who and what I voted for. I knew I was voting for these people right up front. There was no surprise whatsoever. So let's listen to Trump on the campaign trail. This is exactly what he said.

A suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement. That's nice. Smart guy. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. Very, very much appreciated. I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. We need to do it.

Was that unclear to you, what he just said there? No. Maxine Waters is very disappointed. She wasn't listening at all. Nobody was listening. Remember, they barely covered his rallies, and when they did it happened to be the one in pennsylvania and butler oh right like just magically all the main media showed up for that one and the new york times photographer with a very little suss i hope we get some some insights

into that i hope so too with some actual investigation but brent share had posted this clip and said you know this nobody voted for elon musk line would have been more effective if he was some sort of secret weapon Trump unveiled after being elected. He literally campaigned in Pennsylvania every day in October with Elon saying he wanted to run Doge and then people voted for it. And boy, did we. We voted good and hard. This is the results. And the Democrats are trying to act as if Trump is some fringe thing who's just sort of come along and is doing these crazy things that nobody anticipated. They've forgotten that this was the actual result. And I understand how they could forget this because this happened like three months ago and they have the memories of goldfish, apparently.

OK, now we just have to make sense of all of this right now. And I can't think of anybody better to help us do this than Jeffrey Tucker. If you don't know who he is, you should. He is the head of the Brownstone Institute. He's an author, a publisher. He's got books. He writes columns. But Brownstone, if you don't know, and you should, Brownstone pushes out some and publishes some of the very best commentary about everything related to COVID and what's going on in the nation and what's happening out in the world across all sorts of different dimensions. Yes, Evie. He also is really wonderful at connecting people and networking among individuals.

Like he's called together some of the most interesting gatherings with all sorts of bright minds. And then he creates a place for those individuals to have their voices and to write online and to bring their gifts to the world, which I really appreciate. Punches the Institute has done just tremendous work. So with all that, Jeffrey Tucker, so glad to have you here today. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for your introduction. Well, let's, let's, um, listen, I get to do fun things like this and, um, put these little things up, which, uh, browse do web saying here, I'm trolling the comments as they come. Jeffrey is a superstar. I agree. And there are a lot of heroes going on out there right now in the world. So, Jeffrey, you know what I want to start

with? I want to start with this. So let me just supersize that so you can maybe see that in here. I'll tell you what, I'm going to do it like this. Nope, wrong one. Let me try again. Nope, I'm working these levers now. So, Jeffrey, you put a tweet out. This comes out on February 10th. Right. You have 15 million views on this one, which is just unbelievable. Right. Because you said, pay attention to what has happened over the last day. own subjective judgment and using all their power have written pieces of paper that overruled the wishes of 74.2 million americans who i just showed on the big map right um who have expressed their will concerning the shape of the regime that rules them instead they say permanent bureaucrats should rule all without any say from the voters who pay all the bills this is called tyranny and by the way elon retweeted that one for another 14 million views on top of that. Just astonishing.

So take us through that line of thinking. What is happening here? Well, probably these are the most important days in the history of our country since Andrew Jackson, maybe even since Thomas Jefferson in 1800, maybe ever. We have a president who's trying to take charge of the executive branch, which sounds like that should be just the way things are, but actually they haven't been that way in at least 100 years. And the chief executive is trying to exert executive power over executive agencies. And now you have the entire establishment, the media, the judiciary, the corporate establishment, everybody's panicked about this. In other words, the racket is in the process of being exposed.

And you have an administration exercising genuine moral courage to try to bring back the Constitution. And critically, in a very interesting way here, Chris, Trump is not trying to gain more power. He's not being like a despot or an authoritarian. He's trying to reduce the power of executive agencies. He's trying to abolish the agencies, give Americans back their rights. And the judiciary is saying, oh, don continuing to, you know, to want administrative state dictatorship like we saw during COVID and so on. And it's an amazing thing to watch, you know, hour by hour, minute by minute, this struggle take place. I'm sure you saw this a couple of days ago. Five former secretaries of the Treasury wrote an article for the New York Times. I'm sure you saw it. This. You tweeted this too. This is astonishing.

Yeah. Really, as dark as my worldview is, as cynical as I am, I never imagined this to be the case. But these five former secretaries of treasury said in this article that since 1946, no one but a small group of career bureaucrats have had access to the payment systems of the federal government. So for 80 years, I don't know what that means, but it suggests to me that for 80 years, all the elected presidents and members of Congress and everybody else have been marionettes dancing around pretending to be in charge, but they've never been in charge. Only the administrative state has been in charge since 1946. The holiest of holies was breached the other day by Doge, and they began to look at payment systems. And the entire world freaked out about it. how government works, but apparently I don't. Because when the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal headlined that, you know, a big, you know, boldface type Doge has entered the

treasury, I thought, why is this news? I mean, doesn't the elected government get to look at the books? Isn't this just something that we do? Yes, Congress allocates money, but the executive is seemingly in charge. The Constitution says, in fact, that they shall do a complete accounting of the books. Unfortunately, they were a little vague. They said from time to time in the Constitution, but the sentiment was there, a complete accounting. Yeah. Yeah. That apparently has not happened since 1946. So, you know, the word on the street is that 25% of the federal budget goes to waste, fraud and abuse. But how do we know that? It could be, is it 40%? Is it 60%? Is it 80%? We don't actually know. the very first time since World War II, we've had independent people actually look at the books for the very first time. They didn't change anything. They had read-only access. But that enough was a scandal to send the entire U.S. establishment into panic mode. So, you know,

Chris, I think what's being revealed here is actually dire. I's a shocking situation. 80 years of no accountability, 80 years of no audits, 80 years in which the people we thought were in charge were never actually in charge. The only question I have is how magnificent is the fraud? Not was there fraud? Did 80 years of unelected civil bureaucrats who had no oversight or accountability or audits? The only question is, how much fraud did they perpetrate? We don't know, but it's going to be huge. And it would be nice to find out. But judges have intervened and said, I'm sorry, you can't do this.

You know, I mean, the Constitution says the president is head of the executive branch. You're not head of the executive branch if you don't have access to the engine room, the beating heart of any institution, which is the accounting books. You know this. You've been in business. The person who can look at the accounting is the person in charge. And the person who assigns the people who look at the accounting is the person in charge. If nobody, if no president has ever looked at the books before, No secretary of the treasury. And that's what these guys said. We've never had access. That's what they said in the New York Times. We've never had access to this.

It's only career bureaucrats who do that. This is a scandal of the ages, really. It really is. So you put this chart up and it's a little small, so I'll talk people through it. But you have the three branches, the legislative, the executive in the center and the judicial. And I've taken the liberty of making everything that falls under the executive yellow. So you can just sort of like blur your eyes and get the sense that maybe the judicial branch doesn't oversee all these departments, all these independent sub agencies, all of these sub administrations. That's all under the executive

branch. That's how I thought it worked at any rate. Well, and that chart comes from the U.S. government manual published by the government printing office. That is the one that's distributed to the public for many years. That's just the way government is. And of course, it's all distorted, right? We should have three equal branches, not an executive department that is basically the government and everybody else just hanging around on the outset. But Trump is trying to fix this. He's trying to rebalance the government. And the judiciary is now weighing in on behalf of all the independent agencies saying, oh, you have power over the president. But here's the thing, Chris, the president is held responsible for whatever they do. You remember in COVID, and you and I

were ferocious against Trump because the CDC was saying, oh, you should have mail-in ballots, you should have plexiglass, you should socially distance, everybody should get a shot. And we were blaming Trump for this. Well, rightly so, I guess. In the same sense, you blame the CEO for whatever a company does, right? I mean, he's the guy who takes ultimate responsibility. So now he comes back at a second term. He's like, okay, you want to blame me? I'm going to take responsibility. I'm going to run these agencies. There's too many employees, too much spending, too much fraud, too much waste, and trying to get into the treasury and look at what's going on. And now we have the federal judge saying, no, you can't do that. You don't

understand. We don't have a democracy. We have an administrative state. That's what rules everything. And you're supposed to just cut ribbons and pretend and, you know, parade around on stage and write your autobiography and get a library afterwards. And save all of that. Apparently since 1946. We didn't know this, but that's the situation. So yeah, these are historical moments. I mean, we've got a president who actually believes in the Constitution. That's what's really happening here. Jeffrey, I have a question for you. So

what do you make of all the protesting that everybody's doing? I mean, the judges, the general public, the media. I mean, what does it say about our knowledge of our government and civics that they believe that they can override this decision? Or what does it say about them and what their intentions are? I think what we have here is a multiple tens of trillion dollar scam that's been going on for many, many decades and only now being revealed. And they're all in the take. I don't know how else to describe it. I mean, it seems incomprehensible and shocking that since the time we were born, it's all been a racket.

That seems to be what's going on here. You know, I don't know what else to explain it. And then you have all these people protesting, oh, don't give it to my paycheck. Don't give it to my agency. You can't be allowed to fire anybody. Well, do we have a president or don't we? You know, and again, I can't emphasize this enough. People say Trump is behaving like a dictator, like an authoritarian. Well, it's an odd authoritarian who wants the agencies. So we need to get this clear. We are trying to restrict the power of the agencies. And people say, oh, you're being a dictator. Wait, no. I'm trying to end the tyranny that's all over you. And now, I mean, things are going so well, I would say. And, you know, I think all of COVID has made us all dark and dreary and unwilling to recognize progress. But the DOJ is now auditing the TSA to ask, why are you demanding facial recognition technology at the airports?

You know, we don't want to live in a surveillance state. This is outrageous. Oh, that's great. Yeah. So the DOJ is going. So this is very important because some people point to the presence of Peter Thiel and Palantir and their role in digital surveillance during COVID and say, oh, what Elon Musk is really trying to do is commoditize everybody's data, right, with AI and surveillance.

Okay, well, that's a fine concern. And I think we should be concerned about that. You know, like, I don't want to be naive. But when I see things like this, it makes me feel like the Trump administration is on balance on the right side. I mean, they're trying to dial back the surveillance state, trying to reverse the role of the World Economic Forum and so on. But it's a Herculean effort to do this. And they're facing pushback from academia, from media, from corporations, from digital tech, from everybody who's heavily invested in tyranny and mass pillaging. Everybody's benefiting from it.

So we've got a revolution taking place right now. And I think, you know, I can say at this moment, you know, as of this interview, the Trump administration seems to be on the right side of things. Well, indeed, they do. And Jeffrey, I'm a quick learner and I can drink from a fire hose, but this is like six fire hoses. You know, I'm sure by the time this interview is over, you and I will have missed something groundbreaking and important, right?

But it's astonishing the speed I have to pinch myself at how great it is and reminding myself what are we, 19 days into this whole thing? Something like that. myself at how great it is and reminding myself that what are we 19 days into this whole thing and i wrote an article after the 10 days and said this is the new 10 days that shook the world we have an actual elected government that is behaving um as an elected government on behalf of the people i mean we've not apparently seen that in maybe a century. I don't know. Maybe Calvin Coolidge was the last president who took his job seriously. I'm not entirely sure. But according to five secretaries of Treasury, no president since the end of World War II has had access to the books, meaning that every government has been a fake. I mean, that's an incredible realization.

It's just unbelievable. This is the first one acting like a leader in my lifetime, for sure. Yeah. And, you know, I don't think we have to be fanboys of Trump or Moss or anything else, but we need to have good judgment and observe what's happening and realize the raucous times in which we live.

I mean, we really are living in the greatest upheaval and the history of the modern West, essentially, because you know what happens in the U S I think it's going to spill out to Europe and Canada and Latin America and everywhere else in the world. So, you know, this is these are revolutionary times. They are. And part of the revolution. Look, it had to happen. I was super bummed out for many years coming up to this point because I knew we had a math problem. It wasn't anything personal. It transcended administrations. Our debt and our national income were just screaming apart from

each other. And someday that was going to break. Now, whether Trump and Elon spark that, okay, but there's a chance now because what we learned from Joseph Tainter, who has this whole complex theory of complexity, which is that civilizations rise to a point of complexity and then their efforts become negative and they roam and empire themselves into the dirt. So we were getting there and AI is the only chance we have to really streamline these things. So 2.2 million government workers, I'm going to guess 2 million of them, administrate. They make sure that the rules and regulations and forms all line up and that things go where they're supposed to, and that can all be handled by AI now. So you get J.D. Vance, he goes over, Ursula von der Leyen, they're in the EU looking very cranky, and he says, look, it's a new world. It's coming. We're going to embrace it. Europe's going to fight it. And they're going to

just get toasted because we're going to actually have government efficiency using technology to help us get past the human hurdle. Our software and hardware and wetware is just not up to the task of administrating something this big and blobby. So that's, you know, without leaving the corruption aside, we had to do this anyway, or we were going. So that's, you know, without leaving the corruption aside, we had to do this anyway or we were going to crash and burn. You know, that's how I kind of see it at this point. Yeah. We needed a revolution of some sort.

We needed our own 1989, you know, or 1776. Yeah. And we didn't know how it was going to flesh itself out. And one of the reasons we didn't know is because we were unaware of the extent to which Trump personally was willing to exercise moral courage. is implausibly effective and can burn through establishments and cause empires to fall. It's kind of a hidden power, hidden spiritual power. And after the assassination attempt on Trump, he just said, OK, that's it. And all the lawfare said, all right, that's it. We're going to we're going to clean this place up.

And he he arrived in the second term four years later, loaded for bear and ready to take it on. It's like, what is my life worth? I'm going to I'm going to bring back American freedom. That seems to be truly what's happening. And we don't know how it's going to pan out. I mean, I'm a little, sometimes you're probably in the same situation. Sometimes I'm optimistic. And then I get, you know, I read another piece of news and I think, oh, he'll never win, you know? And then an hour later, I think, well, wait a minute, we're making progress, you know? I guess that's what it's like to live in the middle of a revolution.

And we're all in the peanut gallery in some sense. Yeah. Watching all this unfold. But it's fascinating because I've asked the question for many years, what would the revolution look like if that actually came here? And I think we're starting to see what this does look like. And we never even imagined six months ago, you know, what this would look like. And here we are in the middle of it, you know, watching. Let's be honest. Six months ago, we were still having to pretend on some level socially that Biden wasn't mentally incompetent.

You remember that so long ago? I remember. But but Bridgette Fittesia on Twitter on X said an unelected shadow government just ran this country for four years while they hid the fact that the elected president was barely functioning and shamed Americans for pointing it out. And it was so bad that people overwhelmingly voted for Trump and the Democrats still don't. She's not about that. But I think and she's she's very insightful, actually. But it's even worse than what she says. I think the shadow government has run everything since again, since 1946 to varying degrees.

But I say that mainly based on this article in the New York Times by the five former secretaries of the treasury and based on my own business experience which is that you know if you can't if you don't have access to the books there's a name for you you're an employee okay yep you're not the employer you're the employee and I've been at institutions where I made a lot of decisions. I organized conferences. I published books. I hired people and fired people, but I didn't have access to the books. And what that means is that I'm not really in charge.

Right. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with being an employee. But under the democratic form of government, we like to think that the people for whom we vote are actually in charge. And apparently that has never really been true. They've been given tasks. We are glad to celebrate them and pretend as if they're in charge, but they've not actually been in charge for a very long time. Well, they said the quiet part out loud here, Jeffrey.

This is really astonishing to me. They said it here in green. They said one, one of these civil servants has been appointed fiscal assistant secretary, a post that for the prior eight decades had been reserved exclusively for civil servants to ensure impartiality and public confidence in the handling and payment of federal funds i know you know what gives you know what gives public confidence when the public can see the books transparency that's what gives god that that's the only thing how do you how do you make sense of this like why did they write that article i i they're they're either

they're either really really tone deaf or they're not as smart as they look or both. You're not supposed to say that out loud. They did. I cannot believe, and they say in there, we're taking the unusual step of writing this article to explain things the way things work. And what they said was an elite, unelected elite is in charge. You don't get it.

You don't get it. Wow. Unelected elite has been running everything since the end of World War II. And it's not up to you or the voters to determine. And we, as former secretaries of the treasury, never actually saw the books. We were all just pretending the entire time. And they said, let's go on with the system forever. Yes. Pay no attention to this wealth gap chart that shows this elite class rising away from everybody else as if they were on one of Elon Musk's rockets. 200,000 to 30 million in three years or whatever. Samantha Powers.

They're just all such good entrepreneurs. That's what it is. It must be his amazing thing. I don't know. My position is essentially like if you believe in administrative state despotism, tyranny, and unelected professionals totally ruling the world, just tell us. We can have that debate. You think that's the best system of government, feudalism, Caesarism, technocracy? You like that system? You think it's good? Let's have that debate. But in America, we pretend anyway to believe in a constitution, and we pretend as if the people are in charge. All right.

If we're going to pretend that, let's at least try that system. You know, let's just try it out and see how it works. Yeah. As I like to say, before we export democracy, maybe we should give it a spin for ourselves. Hey, so quite the week for you to Elon picking up your tone a second time on February 10th, saying this. You said the Supreme Court is going to have to rule soon if there can be an actual president elected by the people or if this whole thing is just kayfabe if it's just a fake veneer covering a permanent government yeah maybe we should have that conversation let's let's have it but um yeah it's gonna have to come down to the supreme court i'm afraid because these these

federal judges who are appointed um are just writing pieces of paper going no you can't do that no you can't do that you No, you can't do that. You know, these agencies are independent. They can do whatever they want. You have to spend the money. Whatever they do, you're going to take responsibility for their actions, but you can't control them. OK, that's that's what the judges are saying. And the Trump administration is being told they have to obey this stuff. And they put on hold there because, you know, when they when they took charge, it was so brilliant. They moved in very quickly and they said no more spending, no more regulations, no more. We're going to fire a bunch of people, no more hires.

You know, the president's in charge. And yeah. And so that has provoked what the national media right now is saying a constitutional crisis oh my god we've got a president who thinks he's in charge of the executive branch what are we gonna do this is the crisis right so i think we're going to have to have a supreme court and it's implausible. Because, you know, you look at whatever it is, Article 1, Section 2, it says the president is the chief executive and in charge of the executive branch. It's very clear the Supreme Court shouldn't have to rule on this.

But I'm afraid they're going to have to, you know, because because they're going to have to overrule all these judges. So back on track. We have a number of troublesome issues in the country. But these these activists, these people who felt so entitled or they wandered off the mental reservation far enough that they've lost the plot. Here's a fractal representation of that. Speaking of activist judges. So about a year ago, an activist judge in Delaware decided to wear her morals on her sleeve and said, you shareholders, you can't reward Musk that way. And she stripped away his pay. Right. Which was and, you know, some whether you decide it's obscene or not, the shareholders voted for it and then paid three hundred and thirty three million dollars to the lawyers who brought the thing. And everybody clapped their hands because great social justice had been achieved.

Next thing you know, all these companies are leaving Delaware. That was their little honeypot. And it's going to her decision could cost the voters and citizens and taxpayers of Delaware a billion dollars. Now, should a judge with their social activism be able to ruin all of the people of her state or country in this case? I mean, how do you interpret that? Yeah, that was a very interesting one. And I never thought I would live to see the day when corporations would leave Delaware.

I mean, that was the one sort of competitive advantage they had was in corporate registrations. And now everybody's bailing out of it. And we're seeing this huge shift of capital out of blue states towards red states. That's going on right now. So Texas and Florida and all the rest of the red states are attracting the new corporate registrations and attracting the capital and the residents, too. So the blue states have to get their act together, you know, fast or else they're all just going to die. And I speak as a blue stater, you know, myself.

You know, it's very scary. They're going to have to figure this out. But fortunately for us, capital moves and people can choose. So things are shifting very fast and they have to get their act together. But I don't know, you know, we've all asked this question, you know, how is it that civilizations die? And I think we are trying to see the answer, right? An elite ruling class seizes control of all the commanding heights and rigs the system to steal all the money. If it's not nailed down, they steal. And that's what's going on right now with the American ruling class.

And we've got now a president who's pushing back on this. And the struggle is titanic. Look at this. So he just tweeted this this morning. He said, Doge has found massive amounts of fraud and waste, incompetence and abuse. But even knowing this, a highly political activist judge wants us to immediately make payment anyway. In other words, pay even though you know the payment was fraudulently requested to be made. Doge caught them.

The judge just doesn't care. Yeah, that's so interesting. So Trump is approaching all this as a businessman. And we all knew that this was his thinking, right? He's taken over many businesses. He started many businesses. But when you're in charge, you're in charge, right? And in particular, you're in charge of the money. And that's why he's always presumed. So when he

became president the first time, that's what he did, right? He would tweet out orders and say, well, I'm CEO. And it turned out everybody's ignoring him, you know. And so he had four years to think about this. And he came back and said, all right, this time I'm really going to be in charge. So now he's facing the judiciary. But I tell you, something very interesting happened yesterday where Mike Johnson, who I'm not a huge fan of him, but he seems malleable and pliable in some way, has said very clearly that he supports Trump, supports his agenda. And so what that means is that we have the executive and we have the House and we have the Senate. The Senate just voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard, National Intelligence Director.

They're going to, yeah, it just happened. And maybe this late afternoon or tomorrow, they're going to, yeah, it just happened. And maybe this late afternoon or tomorrow, they're going to confirm RFK. And they're going to bring in all their employees. And so we've got our people fanned out into all the agencies now. And it seems like Trump is genuinely taking charge. And from his point of view, he sees it, I think, very reasonably, the president should be the president of the executive branch, right? I mean, that seems like what he believes should happen. And apparently that hasn't been true for all of our lives, you know, going back many, many generations. And he's the first one and has provoked a genuine crisis.

And again, this is not behaving as an authoritarian or a dictator. It's just the reverse. He's trying to give Americans back their freedom. People who are against that are heavily invested in the current despotism and technocracy and administrative state overlordism. And they wanted to continue. That's the essential struggle right now in America between the elected and the unelected. That's it. Oh, Evie, go ahead. just appreciating how uh if elon if elon musk had not purchased twitter that we wouldn't have real time kind of play-by-plays or transparency really about this whole process um i'm really appreciating

that we actually do indeed have an area where we have free speech um but to that same same end i'm concerned and i'm sure uh i'm curious what you think about this. I'm concerned about how they're whipping the public up the legacy media by turning this into some gigantic travesty and really pitting us against each other, you know, left versus right. Yeah, I think that's it's kind of inevitable. And I don't think left versus right really explains the issue. It really is. I think all that's a bit of an illusion. It really is an issue of the permanent administrative state class versus the rights of the people to live a normal life, really.

And by the way, I have to agree with you what you said about Elon's taking over of Twitter and turning it into X because that became a free speech platform. And that's why he did it. He did it not for money, but because he wanted, he thought we needed free speech. And free speech has been the source of our emancipation. I don't know what we would do without it. I have friends of mine who are always putting it on Elon. I kind of get tired of it, actually. It's like, where's your gratitude?

This guy spent a lot of money on a useless, worthless Fed platform and liberated it, and it's allowed us to reach the public. And arguably, that's what allowed us to win the election, us, Trump to win the election. And that's what's the source of this revolution. So I get tired of people putting him down. I have to say I'm a supporter. And you have to go back and remember that he was the only real uh corporate leader in america who openly objected to the lockdowns he pulled his company out of california he said he would not forcibly vaccinate his employees he wanted to give them a choice um and and he said he would stay on the factory floor rather than shut it down.

And so when there's a hero in our midst, why not just celebrate that? I don't get it, really. Yeah, it took somebody from South Africa to come over and teach us about democracy and free speech. And the other thing is he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. I mean, he was a product of a single mom. You know, his mom's a very sweet lady, very nice person. And, you know, in the midst of a family upheaval, she moved to Canada. And she and her two children slept out of their car for a very long time.

I mean, these were poor people, you know? So Elon's just gifted and passionate and principled. And, you know, is he a perfect human being? No. And I'm not looking for saints, you know, anymore, really. But has he been ferocious on the topics about which I care? Absolutely. Yeah. And I very much appreciate that. I agree. You know, to connect that, you mentioned what Elon's been up to in the vaccine mandates and how he pushed back against that because he believed in choice. And you mentioned Mike Johnson. I just got to play this. I was going to save this for later in the show. But to me, this is potentially one of the most unusual moments in history here. And let me see if I can pull this up. No, wrong one. Does this

one do it? None of those do it for me. I'm still trying to figure out how to get this. We can listen in close enough. You don't have to see his lips moving. Listen to this. As I said last week, the Democratic Party is in a completely different place right now. There's no identified leader of the party. They don't have a clear vision. They seem rudderless. In hopes of finding themselves, they've latched onto this new shiny object called the rule of law. We'd like to welcome them to the concept. It would be admirable if they hadn't spent the last four years with their heads buried in the sand while Biden literally trampled over the rule of law with no objection. In fact, many Democrats cheered that lawlessness, like when the Biden administration unconstitutionally forced the middle class to pay the student loans of doctors and lawyers, when they illegally mandated that private companies

implement vaccine requirements, when they radically rewrote Title IX to undermine women's rights. Those things were actually illegal. And the Democrats... Okay, okay, okay. We just had for the first time that I'm aware of, the illegality of vaccine mandates uttered on the congressional floor. Interesting. Common knowledge. I missed that. Isn't that a big moment? Yeah. And you and I both know this, and we all know this. The COVID experience is the driving revolutionary moment for the American people. I mean, they locked us in our homes. They shut down our churches. They closed our

businesses. They banned weddings and funerals, closed the public parks, and the schools destroyed our children. And they said, don't worry about it. We've got a new potion for you. And you're going to be required to take it, even if you have antibodies. And then the potion made everybody sick. Not everybody, but a lot of people sick and killed a lot of people. So under those conditions, there's going to be a reaction. So I really think in the broad scheme of things, the COVID response was in a way the thing that provoked this revolutionary moment and has caused the governments to fall. Exactly as Henry Kissinger predicted in April of 2020, he said, you know, if this doesn't work, governments will fall and the world will be on fire. Okay. Well, the world's on fire. It didn't work. And here we are, you know? So he was right about that. Then he died,

but he was right about that. Yeah. Well, so what's fascinating to the other side of that is that it's like a beach ball has been held underwater for too long. And now when people see this graft, right, to find out Samantha Powers is suddenly worth 30 too long. And now when people see this graft, right, to find out Samantha Powers is suddenly worth 30 million somehow. And and once you start looking at that, you find that all of them seem to be worth multi tens of millions of dollars, right, on hundred thousand dollar, two hundred thousand dollar paychecks. And so we all have questions, of course, right? The anger people feel because we've been getting immiserated and throttled and taxed and you know it's just been awful out here they're all liars you know the samantha power wrote again i read

the new york times i shouldn't but she wrote a big op-ed you know after the us aid was shut down oh the children are gonna to starve. Everybody's going to be sick. USAID. And it was a day later we find out that she's rich, you know, a scam artist, you know, a racketeer. Of course, you know. She's married to Cass Sunstein, one of my least favorite people in the whole world, right? Do you know who he is? Yeah, yeah. What did you say about her relationship to him she's married to him really yes that's a husband-wife power duo

i see things snapping into focus isn't it just so cartoonish it's just yes it it it's, it's like an episode of Scooby-Doo really. Pull the mask off. Chris, I want to talk to you about something though, that has me concerned. You know, we have to think about all the ways in which this whole revolution could be subverted or counterrevolution or whatever you want to call it. And I wrote an article this morning that came out. I was so glad I wrote it over the weekend. It came out from Epoch Times.

Like three million people, whatever, about the bird flu plot. And we can go into that. I think this is actually very serious. Well, let's do this because you wrote here on February 10th. Big day for you. You had a great day on February 10th. You're up late or up early. You said, note to Donald Trump, in the coming weeks and months, someone with profound knowledge of infectious disease will come to you with classified information.

An especially virulent strain of bird flu has been found that will require mass testing of animals to keep it from spreading to humans for whom it has a possible 50 fatality rate the good news he will explain is that there's a vaccine to address the problem strong suggestion fire this person get a second opinion and wouldn't you know it the next day the cdc issued a bulletin requiring hospitals to test for h5n1 probably i'm going to guess go out on a limb with a PCR test with a cycle threshold of 40, guaranteeing full-blown false positives, necessitating a very muscular response. The CDC wrote that instruction on January 16th, and they did not release it until about a week later. And this goes, this is in combination with Hochul in New York shutting down chicken markets and the Health Department of Georgia

shutting down auction markets for poultry and so on. And then we had this extraordinary thing where a guy named, by the name gerald parker was appointed uh to head the office of pandemic planning and response at the white house i thought that was uh-huh okay here's the thing so parker is a bird flu right? And a vaccine guy and a bio, you know, he's Fauci, many, many me's. Yeah. Right. And so the national media was reporting that he was headed, he was the head of OPR, right? And I thought, well, that's strange because the White House has not announced that. So I wrote the reporter. I said, you know, it's kind of peculiar. You would say

that he was the head of OPR, but you didn't quote anybody with the White House. All you quoted was officials, health officials. So he writes me back, God bless him, Alexander Till or something like that. I forget his name. Writes me back and says, well, I can't tell you who told me. I said, but have you gotten confirmation from the White House or Texas A&M? No, I reached out to them. They would not confirm this. I said, well, how do you know it's true? He said, well, health officials told me that.

And so then I started this middle school game of 20 questions. I said, was it Scott Gottlieb? He said, oh, no, it wasn't Scott Gottlieb. Okay. Was it Ralph Baricato? Who told you this? And so i'm on a call yesterday with uh frank gaffney and where they had this guy named i forget his name but he was a colleague of jared parker and this guy was yammering on like oh jared parker's jared parker's a wonderful man you know a great man it's not fci. He's a tremendous guy, and he'll make a great head of Oprah. And they said, okay, now we're going to introduce Robert Malone.

So Malone gets on there and goes, you know, I have my doubts this is even true. I'm not sure that Gerald Parker has actually been appointed to anything. I think this may be just entirely a psyop, actually. The Zoom call proceeded as if he'd never said that. Pretending like Robert Malone didn't just call a fake on this entire thing.

I called him up afterwards and said, Robert, you are a great hero. I can't believe this just happened. I can't believe you just called them all liars. You just dropped that right in the punch bowl. And they kept drinking lunch. They pretended like it didn't happen. So here we are on, this announcement was made on Monday. Here it is wednesday and we still have no

confirmation that in fact gerald parker was headed was tagged by the white house to head the office of pandemic planning and response nor do we know if there even is a white house office of pandemic planning and response We don't know. Yeah. So this is how crazy the situation is, right? We don't actually have any confirmations of any of this stuff. And the one guy who reported this is now texting me with me going, I can't tell you to tell me that. So, OK, back to the let me get let me see if we can get to the source of what I'm concerned about. What do you think they're going to have to do something?

The snake is going to have to bite back. Right. They will not just let their sinecures go quietly into the good night. It's just not much social status and money to to let slip away gravy train. So what how do they do this? Do they just try and chew them apart with lawfare like last time? Do they try and put birds in water? So here's why I say it. I don't know.

I'll mention these two things because I don't know what the third thing is. But the first thing is the bird flu. I think they're going to pull that racket. They're going to mandate testing of all the chickens and the cows and the flying beasts and whatever and discover there's bird flu everywhere thanks to their PCR tests, and then shut down the chicken markets, drive up the price of everything. They're going to starve us, make us eat crickets.

And then they're going to come for our house pets, right? They're going to say, oh, well, your dog or your cat needs to be tested for bird flu because it can leap. Yeah, and those will be anal swabs, and it's going to be a very unhappy moment for everybody. Yeah, yeah. So this is what they're planning. I don't believe that Trump's going to go along with it, but this is what they're planning. So that's one hand.

On the other hand, we've got the other racket. They've got a card file, like how do we control bad presidents. The second card in the card file is the Great Depression, the inflation. And so if you look at the messaging around inflation this morning, it reveals everything, right? So suddenly the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and Yahoo News and everything, oh, inflation's hot. It's terrible. Inflation's terrible. This is the worst inflation ever. This complicates the Trump administration. They're dealing with terrible. It's very high. Okay. They finally acknowledged it.

Yeah. You said it. So for three years, we've dealt with raging inflation. And every single headline, every single month when the CPI is released is inflation is cooling. Inflation is going away. Inflation is transitory. It's not that bad. It's not as bad as it was. It's beat expectations. It's really quite wonderful. I'm looking at this going, this is not true. They're lying to you. So for the last month, if you look at Truflation, which is one of my favorite sites, they measure – I love it too.

That's great. Ever since the inauguration, inflation's been down. It's down to 2.1%, which is great. I mean, it's not great, but it's better than it has been for 12 months. And we know this because this is verified data. So, and basically since the inauguration, I think this is a reflection of change to velocity. It's a reflection of a lot of things. But anyway, inflation is less of a problem now than it's been a year.

And the BLS comes out this morning going, ah, inflation's raging hot. It's 3%. It's terrible. And the news media is screaming about this. OK, so this is all psyops. I'm telling the news media is screaming about this. Okay. So this is all psyops. I'm telling you, this is all a lie. Yeah. And we're being manipulated.

I predicted this back in November. I said, I promise you, in February, inflation is going to return. And sure enough, that's exactly what it's not. Not really. But the messaging around it is coming back. So I think this is the new the new thing. The news media for the next six months is going to be claiming the economy to be in terrible shape. Inflation is raging.

There's a recession impending and so on. This is where we are. Could some of this be snapback though? So with a new sheriff in town, suddenly the FBI found 14,000 pages of JFK files that had been missing since 1992. The BLS suddenly discovered that they'd overstated jobs by

800,000, 900,000. Maybe inflation's hotter than we thought. Are we not just attempting to get back to... Is this CYA? Is this bureaucratic CYA? I think things have been worse than they've been telling us. My own data mongers have said that we've never really left recession since 2020, and we might be entering into recovery. So at this very moment, we can expect the national media to say, oh, the great Biden recovery is now turning to the Trump depression. That's what's going to happen.

And it frustrates me because I don't know how you were against this messaging. It's crazy. And the number of psyops that are out there are just out of control. It makes us all nuts. That's why our hearts are beating so fast and we're getting ahead of the message. It's a crazy world we're living in right now. So Trump could be presiding over the greatest recovery in human history. The national media will describe it as the second great depression, for sure. Yeah. And they're going to further erode the trust. You know, I feel like that's what's happening right now is that the trust in government, the trust in our systems and, you know, the agreements that we have had with each other, presumably for a very long time, are starting to be undermined in this fourth turning. And I feel like the media could very well push us over the

edge of that by chipping away at how, you know, they'll bring upon us the very thing that, you know, we're worried about, which is a recession. You know, if they quack about it enough. I was on a phone call this morning with a normie and she said to me, oh, I see inflation's terrible. That's because of Trump's tariffs. And I said, well, that's strange because we haven't actually had any new tariffs yet. I mean, they've been threatened, but we don't have any. So how could that Trump's tariffs be causing inflation? You know, that doesn't make any sense.

So here we are. That was an January reading, which last I checked, he took office the 21st. So here we are. And here we are. Well, but to Evie's question point, I have a sense that a lot of what we're seeing is not organic. OK, it's a hypothesis, but I think that so it's been astonishing to me. So, Jeffrey, we went from Reddit sort of being unhappy about Trump to deciding that his the Doge kids who are working needed to be guillotined. Right. With no intervening usual emotional territory. They didn't go from they didn't even know what a USAID was the week prior. And now they want to behead people for peering into it.

Right. And there was you. We didn't go through the usual steps of being concerned, becoming resentful, getting a little mad. They went straight to death, right? And so I'm wondering how much of that is actually real people and how much of that is color revolution, NGO bots that are out there to create the appearance and nudge the Overton window to suggest

that maybe it's okay to be murderously angry. And some people will, you know, that's stochastic terrorism. If you do that enough, somebody will bite on that bait eventually. So I don't, I wonder, I, this has a non-organic deal to me. And I would like to propose very publicly here that if we discover that there have been NGOs or geos specifically attempting to foment violence inside this country, I would suggest that the history of the world without some level of resistance and upheaval. And that is truly where we are right now. We need to pay very, very close attention to who's messaging what and where their loyalties are, because this is not going to be easy. This is going to go on for years, really.

Yeah. If what seems to be true is in fact true, that nobody's had any oversight to the federal government for 80 years, you know? Yeah. We are looking at something incredible. The things we're going to find out will will shock you I mean shock me I'm shocked and I'm pretty dark and cynical I expect the worst no it's worse than anything I ever imagined so yeah there's a lot of people invested

in the status quo and they're gonna use extreme extreme methods to preserve it, really. Can I just say, and I do have to go to another interview, but I want to give a shout out in some sense to the spiritual courage of the people who are willing to take this on, the RFKs, the Jay Bhattacharyas, the Tulsi Gabbards, the Cash Metals, and Donald Trump himself, and Elon Musk,

and the kids at Doge, and so on. There's really nothing in this for them, you know? Like, where's the material advantage? All they do is get attacked. Their lives are at risk. They all had better things to do than to do this they could

just retire in the florida sun um none of them had to do this why are they doing it uh it's because they love this country and they love the idea of human liberty and they want to give power back to the people. That's my read on all these people, actually. I can't think of a single exception here. You know, on down, Trump and so on. And, you know, what that tells us is something very, very important. It's about the importance of moral conviction and spiritual power and that sort of inner ferocity that believes in truth and justice and doing the right thing and making your life count for something. I love that. I love that, Jeffrey. That's just awesome. So good. uh, dot org. And you will find all kinds of great stuff there. If you don't know about the Brownstone Institute, you'll find Jeffrey's writings there. You'll find an amazing collection of other authors there as well.

Um, and his book life after lockdown, highly worth it. Uh, Jeffrey, what else should we say about where people can follow you? I do write for Epoch every day, as implausible as that sounds.

I do. Um, they run an article by me every day because you know you have to like it's not enough right we could all be writing three or four times a day but anyways every day epox been doing a good job covering all this stuff it's my my favorite uh newspaper so and and i get i don't know if you get the physical version but i i get the physical version um arrives every week in my mailbox. It makes me happy.

It reminds me of my childhood. No, I still get the Wall Street Journal physical. I should swap that out. Yeah, because all we do is use it for making fires. I've come to this point in age of life where I feel like propaganda should be free. I should be for that. You'll enjoy it e-book. I feel like just subscribing for you because it's a lot of fun. They have household

stuff and health stuff. It's really a paper near and dear to my heart. Diet stuff. Well, I subscribe online, but I hadn't thought about the physical version. The physical version is fun. It's fun for me because I get it and open it up. Of course, what do I do? I for me because I get it and, you know, open it up.

Of course, what do I do? I look at the opinion section, look at my article. Oh, look, I'm famous. And my mom likes it, too. Oh, there it is. I don't know. I'm you know, and we all toggle between despair and and and and hope, really. But these days, I'm starting to get used to the idea of hope. I'm feeling it more and more. Yes. Yes.

It's exciting. There's a path. There's a non-zero chance that this could turn out better than I thought. Yeah. Maybe that's right. Whereas we didn't dodge a bullet with Kamala and her crew. We dodged a tank shell. Well, you know, when I think about Kamala, I had a strong intuition and based on a number of things that the brownstone.org domain would be seized after the inauguration.

I was pretty sure of it, actually. I don't have proof of that, but I had an intuition of that. So I think we're on the verge of, of something truly, truly terrible. So I can't forget that. I can't forget those days. And I'm, I'm just feeling really grateful. You're like, whatever happens now, I'm really grateful. As you say that we dodged a tank, you know? Yep. Yep. Indeed. Well, Jeffrey,

thank you so much for all your work in the world and your time today. And we'll do this again sometime, but thank you so much for being here today. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you both. All right. All right. Now we're back. So we just got a few more things to cover here today and then Evie's got something to read. And Jeffreyffrey he's he's just great what a great guy uh and by the way if you ever see him on a stage or emceeing his events if you ever have a chance to go to a brownstone event there was one in pittsburgh we went to

their gala um people could have gone you should you should attend it's a lot of fun um and so jeffrey brings a lot of a lot of suave to the whole affair and it's uh it's just it's a great meeting of the minds but it's it's how things should be people coming together and openly discussing real things right and by the way i don't have i am so bored now evie and i talk about this all the time that um being around normies as uh jeffrey just called them or the NPCs. It's really boring. Or stressful, depending on who it is. I find it a little stressful. Even stressful, but they have no context or their information. Remember at this party and this woman was like, oh, but, you know, now, you know, Trump has the, you know, those Mexican tariffs are really going to be bad.

I was like, that was so last week. Like those those aren't even a thing anymore you know so anyway living in the past if that's what you get if you're just part of the part of the thing but hey evie yeah what you got you gotta have to pinch me because every single day this kind of stuff's popping up now oh yeah that's awesome That makes me so happy. That would be great because they're taking federal funds, but they clearly have a position. They're not public radio. It's not fax. It's not news. National propaganda radio. I shouldn't pay for my own propaganda. You shouldn't. I don't want to. I mean, it's sad. I used to listen to them a long time ago.

I'm sure some of our listeners did, too. Like, I grew up hearing it in the background. Yep. So a couple other things I want to touch on real quickly here. One is this. So somebody put out, I like this. I took a screen grab. You want me to read it for you?

Yeah. The biggest scam in life. Paying taxes on money you make You make taxes on money you spend and taxes on things you own that you already paid taxes on with already taxed money. Yeah. Ain't that the truth? Now, this has been true since 1971, August 15th. That's where everything went off the rails. And so we are now having real fundamental conversations again about things. Right. So we can say things like Trump's just like, maybe we shouldn't have a penny, you know, and let's get rid of that. Right. And we're like, oh, maybe we shouldn't. You know, we're just going to cut off funding to South Africa if they're going to like just be

racially abusing people there or whatever. So we can talk about real things again. Trump was the one who signed with surrounded by beaming girls all behind him, keeping men out of women's sports. Right. So we have this return to sanity. And one of the things that was truly insane was coming off the gold standard meant we could start running perpetual deficits. And over time, Washington learned famously quoted by Dick Cheney, deficits don't matter, right? That they could just continually run more and more deficits as if it didn't matter. But the taxes you pay on April 15th and the taxes you pay every time you put a gallon of gas in or renew your license or try to go fishing or anything, right?

Those are on top of the biggest tax of them all, which is the inflation tax. So the inflation tax is actually the really big thing. That abomination got kicked off in August 15th because we had no more tethering to gold or anything. Right. Yeah. WTF happened in 1971. These great young, a couple of guys, maybe it's more people now. But when I saw that website last was a couple of dudes and they're asking that question.

What, what, what do you have happened in 71? And you put all the, all of our economic charts go bonkers in 1971. Okay. Oh, great. So we might get back to sound money. Right. So we've been talking about this. That would be great. Oh, I know.

I don't know what that even means. I haven't been alive for any of it so far. Our current money system is a fraudulent abomination, okay? And it's fraudulent because what the money system allows is for a certain class of people to type money out of thin air, unaudited, and give it away to their friends and families and then some of it trickles down but by the time it does eggs are eight bucks a dozen right so so that doesn't work for the average person so it's been a raccoony little corrupty graft thing

and we have not had an audit of fort knox's gold and we have not had an audit of the federal reserve ever that's the public money oh no it'd be an affront to our impartiality if you audited us weird that doesn't make any sense that's like i mean the banks obviously have to keep meticulous records we have to keep meticulous records if you're off you overdraw you get charged some ridiculous fee in your checking account if you go over by just a tiny bit. That's unfair. Well, this is the abomination, right? So the Democratic Congress, but with a bunch of rhino Republicans.

So this is really it's full service pox on both houses moment here. But, you know, remember, like as we were coming into the last bits of 2024, 87,000 IRS agents, Venmo transactions up to $600 or more. You have to track every piece of it. We had the Corporate Transparency Act, the CTA, where every single LLC had to file paperwork with FinCEN because they were worried about money laundering. And it turns out- Projection. Projection. Because all of those things were things that Washington was doing, but they wanted to punish us for their crimes. That's what just got exposed. OK, but excitingly.

I've heard now no less than three times, more than three times from three people from reputable sources, from Elon and from Scott Besant. This idea that maybe they get rid of taxes. Income taxes. Income taxes. Yeah. So it gets replaced with a national consumption tax. Okay. And I like the idea of a consumption tax. Because here's what happens with a consumption tax.

I decide if I want to pay for a car. Okay, now it has a 20% consumption tax on it. It costs 20% more. But I decide if I want to do that. So it's when you purchase things that you would pay that not just off the top of your yeah just because you worked just because you worked we're going to take half of that right which is about what they take that makes sense yeah i like that idea so then you decide am i consuming or saving that should be the the big lever that you get to

pull as a household what am i doing here right right and then saving money actually does like it's been kind of an oxymoron like people that had money in their savings accounts for the last couple decades didn't earn anything right so this might even that out a little bit well it totally it's so it if incentives shape outcomes which they do it puts the incentive back where it belongs yeah which. Which is with you. You decide, do you want to save or spend? Right. You make that decision. Right. That's the simplest choice. But you don't have that choice because the government taxes you and then overspends anyway, which is a hidden tax, too. Right. Which is causes inflation. Which forces you when you

do save to have to take extraordinary risks because you have to now have your savings grow faster than inflation. And then when your savings do grow because of inflation, right, because you have investments that grew like your house became worth more, then when you do sell it, the government doesn't inflation adjust that. They just take all of that growth in value from you, but it wasn't growth in value. So at a minimum, we ought to have an inflation adjustment on investments, right? So if I bought a house last year and sold it for a million more dollars this year, okay, you could say that's gains, right? Because we only get to inflation adjusted by 4%. But if I bought that house, my grandfather bought that house in 1910, right? And sold it for a million dollars, it probably has about 8 cents of gains left on it, right?

There is no gains, right? Yeah. Well, and I think for a lot of people that are struggling right now in terms of paying their mortgage and all that, it's when they're valuing their homes at a ridiculous price and then assessing them at that value and then taxing them on that. And then they can't afford to keep their property and they'd have to sell it to be able to pay the taxes. Like, it's just this. What a mess. It's a. What a mess. So with house, with real estate taxes, they're tax just this, what a mess. It's a, what a mess. So with house,

with real estate taxes are taxing you on unrealized gains. Now, when they mentioned taxing unrealized gains on say Bitcoin or stocks, there's this huge cry, hue and cry, and oh, that would be so unfair and totally unacceptable. But why is it acceptable to pay an unrealized gain on your house? Every year they come out around here in Massachusetts. They revalue them to market rates and then charge you that. Right. That's a tax on unrealized gains. Of course, it's grotesque. It really is.

The whole thing is just really grotesque. Somebody was saying money keeps you a slave. But I would say it's the love of money. No. Well, our system of money to be clear is is a form of slavery because it it is debt-based money that they print out of thin air and give to you it's just it is so so when we get to this concept here you know you you work you have to pay taxes on that and then when you spend it and then on the things you bought you still have

to pay taxes on those right we pay excise taxes on our cars right if i bought my car and paid tax and i sell it to you i pay you have to pay a tax on you could sell it back to me i have to pay a tax on that and then i can sell it back to you and you never pay a tax on that every time there's a transaction they take a little off the top it's it's a freaking mob it's no bueno so so the second thing that's really amazing and the reason i tied this back to the gold standard august 15th because this is astonishing and we're talking about this back at peak prosperity a lot right now there's some okay if you don't know there's been an enormous thing going on with gold, gold movement coming from London, 500 tons just in the first month of January. The price, the lease rate, something's happening in the world of gold. And there are

several theories, but one of them is that we're about to get an audit of Fort Knox. I'm going to talk about that with Paul Kiker this week on our Finance U. We're talking about it at peak prosperity all the time. That would be a five popcorn alert if it turns out we're talking about it at peak prosperity all the time if we got let me just that would be a five popcorn alert if it turns out we're gonna audit fort knox because i will guarantee you that what's supposed to be there ain't there i i just i know that you know how i know that because they've worked extra double triple hard to make sure that we don't audit it right oh it would be so hard i mean yeah it's so terrible you have to count and write it down it's terrible i mean i don't know how you would ever do that right it's like the cheating x or this the person who's being like totally sketchy and they

don't want you to look at their totally sketchy on the phone like oh no you trust me right it's terrible um so if that happens all like decades corrupt, scammy stuff comes to an end. And so that could explain what we're seeing there. That's astonishing. But if we did, if so, here's what I think might happen. Get your popcorn ready. If we go back to something where they say, look, we want to put trust back into our treasury market. Scott Besant says, I've studied this.

He's a big student of history. He's the new treasury secretary. He might say something. What's that? If they let him. If they let him. But he might do something extraordinary by saying, well, we have these bonds. You could buy treasury bonds.

They're backed by this thing called a Federal Reserve note. Right. And again, you all know this, but some people don't. The Federal Reserve isn't actually a federal entity. It's a government-sponsored enterprise. It's an NGO. It's kind of like an NGO, but it actually is a private company and it's held private capital stock that's held by banks, not you or me. We have no capital stock in the Federal Reserve, yet they've been entrusted with printing up these things called Federal Reserve notes. So the Treasury might say say we got two types of bonds now.

One denominated in Federal Reserve notes. We'll pay it back in those firms. We'll call them ferns. Right. Federal Reserve notes, ferns. We have these other ones. They're actually backed by gold so that if you choose at some point in the future, you decide, do you want to get paid in grams or ounces of gold, depending on how much you bought? Or would you rather get ferns back?

So you would operate as a demand note with a gold backing. If he did that, you would watch an extraordinary change happen in behavior sets. It would be huge. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but it's like that would be an exciting thing if it did. Oh, that would be. Wow. It's a possibility. And if they talk about getting rid of the income tax, the next thing after that, we have to get rid of the property tax to property taxes are wrong. They're immoral. They're an abomination. And I know it's a crazy thought, but I'll have a whole episode sometime. We'll unpack that. I'll bring my friend Mitch Vexler on.

He'll explain the whole thing. It's a bigger scam than you thought. I mean, if you conspiracy theorist, you. I don't have any conspiracies left. They're all facts now. Sorry. They're just all facts. I know.

That's how that is. All right. So we're going to wrap this up. Evie, you want to bring us home on this whole thing? You got something to read us. This is a famous poem, is it not? No. Just kidding.

I love this. I don't actually know who this is. I've sourced it further. So it's questionable where it came from? This author unknown is how we have to leave this. All right. All right. That's fair.

Excuse me. All right. Let's settle in for a second. I think this is just perfect for these times. The most terrifying force of death comes from the hands of men who wanted to be left alone. They try so very hard to mind their own business and provide for themselves and those they love. They resist every impulse to fight back, knowing that forced and permanent change of life that will come from it. They know that the moment they fight back, their lives as they have lived them are over. The moment the men who wanted to be left alone are forced to fight back, it is a form of suicide. They are literally killing off who they used to be, which is why, when forced to take up violence, these men who wanted to be left

alone fight with unholy vengeance against those who murdered their former lives. They fight with raw hate in a drive that cannot be fathomed by those who are merely play acting at politics and terror true terror will arrive at these people's door and they will cry scream and beg for mercy but it will fall upon deaf ears of the men who just wanted to be left alone and that's where we are is it not it does feel that way all right well but in the meantime have a great yes have a great rest of your day thank you everybody for being here it's been a real pleasure thank you for all the comments and um we'll be back again every wednesday at one o'clock and of course if you want to get more content like this you just didn't get enough uh peak

prosperity.com we have tons of content going on there uh we've got you name it we got market commentary on sundays by day fair text i've got a new thing called the fat pipe where i leave my droppings of all the things i couldn't squeeze into shows like this so that's sort of my my daily summary or twice weekly whatever the cadence is we're working it out and I know I called it droppings on purpose. And we have my scouting reports, which come out Mondays and Fridays as well, which go deeper into all of these things. So if that appeals to you, guess what? That's what you come for, but you'll end up staying for the tribe.

We have really smart, intelligent people chewing through all of this stuff. Just like Jeffrey said, we're here to make a difference. And we're here to count. And we're here to stand tall. and we're here to count and we're here to stand tall and we're here to have integrity and we're here to make the most of this so that we can leave behind a better world for those who follow. So with that,

thanks very much for being here today. Really appreciate everybody being here. Thanks so much for spending your afternoon with us and take good care of yourselves and those you love. Indeed.