Tangle - INTERVIEW: Brad Polumbo, founder of BASED Politics.

Episode Date: February 6, 2022

Brad Polumbo is a policy correspondent with Foundation for Economic Education (also known as FEE), a contributor at The Washington Examiner and the co-founder of a new conservative news website called BASED Politics. I’m also proud to say he is a regular reader of the Tangle newsletter and was one of our original supporters in the media space.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. My name is Isaac Saul. I am your host. And on today's episode, I am sitting down with Brad Palumbo. Brad is a policy correspondent with the Foundation for Economic Education, also known as FEE. He is a contributor at the Washington Examiner, and he is also a newly minted co-founder of a conservative news media website called Based Politics. I'm proud to say as well that Brad is a regular reader of the Tangle newsletter and was one of our original supporters in the media space. Brad, thank you so much for tuning in or coming on,

hanging out, chopping it up, all that good stuff. I'm excited to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's gonna be weird because I listen to this podcast pretty regularly and it's gonna pop up in my feed and I'm gonna be like, oh, who's that handsome devil? That's right, man. That is exactly right. So there are so many places we could start. We have actually spoken before on your podcast, which I'll be sure to share in the episode description about a piece I wrote last year. And we covered a lot there. But I think maybe the easiest place to jump off is just a little bit about you. I'd love to hear how you got into politics and writing about politics and just your backstory a bit.

Yeah, I think I have kind of an interesting story. So I think I flashback to my teenage years. I had a pretty rough home life. I was actually kicked out of my house during senior year of high school. And then I ended up going to UMass Amherst. So I'm from Massachusetts and Rhode Island, grew up in New England. And I essentially was just looking for like, what's my state school? Where can I get the scholarship? What's going to be the least expensive option? Yada, yada. And so I ended up going to UMass Amherst with a scholarship to the Honors College. I knew I wanted to study economics, but I wasn't very political. Now, if I'd known anything about politics or economics at that point, I would have known

that UMass Amherst actually has the sole distinction of being the only openly Marxist, not as a pejorative, like they would call themselves that economics department in the US. There's a lot more in like Europe, but in the US, they're almost all Keynesian or progressive economists, but not like full Marxists. Actually, UMass is known for being a Marxist economics department. And then the student body is very far left in terms of a lot of the campus is kind of apolitical, but then there's like 20% who is very kind of social justice warrior oriented and who basically runs stuff on the campus. So essentially I was dropped into a very far left bubble, both in terms of my classes and the economics I was learning and also the social atmosphere. And it kind of sent me, honestly, far to the other way.

And then over time, as I kind of read more, I think I and I was never into this was all when Trump was running in the primaries. I was never interested in Trump, always put off by him. And I think over the time, I've simultaneously become more radical and more moderate in terms of having more grounded kind of libertarian, small government, free market policy positions, yet also much more disillusioned with conservative media, with the Republican Party, and the toxicity that's associated with all of that, with Trump, and also kind of as a person, I think at least over the last year or two, really disillusioned with the culture war and the mudslinging and the toxicity. And that's why my title you mentioned is policy correspondent. What I really like to write about

is policy, whether it's student debt, whether it's the national debt, whether it's taxes, whether it's gun policy. It's like, I want to fight. I was born for the storm, right? Like I get all sorts of hate and comments. I'm sure you do too. But I want to debate about the ideas and the policies. And I'm really sick of the ad hominem and the culture war mudslinging. I'm not perfect. So you'll find me still doing some of it, I'm sure if you if you comb, but I try I've tried really hard to move away from that. And so that's kind of where I am now and what I focused. But I guess so I got pushed farther to the right. And then I've kind of came a little more centrist, but also more libertarian, a little just outside of the spectrum. But now that's what I do. I cover policy developments

from an opinion perspective. I'm not an objective journalist, but I would consider myself a journalist and I do TV appearances. I'm on Fox Business semi-regularly, write for Newsweek, National Review, a bunch of places, columnist for the Washington Examiner. And that's what I do all day is run my mouth, including on podcasts like this. So the reason that I'm bringing you on today is that you are starting a new media company called Base Politics. And there's a lot of stuff in this launch for you guys that I'm interested to chat about, because I think what you're doing is pretty unique in a few different ways. But it seems like you are trying to carve out a very specific niche audience on the right. And I'm wondering if you could just start off by telling me about why you're doing this.

I mean, why another conservative media organization? What are you guys hoping to do? There's obviously a lot of them out there, and it seems like you're trying to target a very specific kind of reader or listener. Yeah, I think we have to start with what base politics is not, because the reason that my co-founder Hannah Cox and I are founding this and launching this project is because we look at the state of conservative media and we see it leaving a lot to be desired. So many conservative media outlets are constantly concerned with over the

top culture war. Look what a celebrity tweeted or look what these tweets are. This is what the left thinks. I talked about this recently about a good example of this. A microcosm of it is the pregnant man emoji. Now, look, I'll be honest. I think the idea of a pregnant man emoji is very silly and dumb, but I'm not really that bothered by it. It's just an emoji, like whatever. Now, every conservative media outlet, or not everyone, but a lot of them had like frothing headlines about woke culture destroying America, right? You had Tucker Carlson dedicated, he has like three million viewers a night. He dedicated a whole segment to a pregnant man emoji in a random batch released by an Apple developer. I'm like, sir, you are triggered by a pregnant man emoji.

I am triggered by the nation going 30 trillion dollars in debt this week. I am upset about like policies that affect people's livelihoods and their lives. I am upset about like policies that affect people's livelihoods and their lives. We care. Our base politics were really into small government criminal justice reform because the government literally puts people in cages all the time for things that shouldn't be illegal. And so I think the number one thing is that conservative media right now is not very principled. And I think it has its priorities not straight. They focus way too much on tribalistic culture war stuff.

And then also they're not principled in terms of whatever their vision of conservatism is. It's like all of a sudden they care about deficits again. Now, we've been talking about that. You can go back to the Trump presidency and find me talking about spending and deficits in dozens of published articles. and find me talking about spending and deficits in dozens of published articles. All of a sudden, many conservative Fox hosts or everything are against free trade, right? A minute ago, they were all about free trade. They are unfortunately increasingly unmoored from principle. And so what we want to do is our principles are a certain type of conservatism, what I would call liberty conservatism with a libertarian flair. It's not

anarchist, but we believe in individual liberty, free market capitalism, the constitution, limited government. We're not here for this populist, big government, right-wing nonsense that people like Josh Hawley want to push. So that's one thing we want to rib up. Then we also just want principled conservative media, which isn't what we have. And then the other aspect of it is generational. Most conservative media right now is targeted to what we have. And then the other aspect of it is generational. Most conservative media right now is targeted to baby boomers. And I'm not even saying that as a critique, although I could say it as a critique. I'm simply asserting as a statement of fact, whereas Hannah and I are both interested in targeting Gen Z and millennials. And that's why

what we're doing isn't an old fashioned right now, we're mostly doing articles, but we're going to be doing YouTube podcasts, TikTok, a ton of TikTok. It's going to be a next generation multimedia company more than it's going to be like an old fashioned conservative news website. So those are our two main goals to do differently. One of the things that caught my eye is that you guys are a nonprofit. I think that's interesting because other places, other news outlets have gone that route. It was something I considered when I launched Tangle. There are some pros and cons to it as I understand it. But I'm interested to hear from you why you guys decided to go the nonprofit route and what you're hoping to get out of that.

Well, I can tell you the principled reasons and there are some, and I can also tell you the pragmatic reasons and there are some. For one, any money we make as a for-profit has to be double taxed, whereas we only have to pay taxes once as a nonprofit. So it's like, as a nonprofit, we have negative revenue right now. We're like hustling and putting our own money in, but eventually we hope to make some money off the work that we're doing. If we pay ourselves, all we have to do is pay income tax like a normal person. If you start a for-profit company, you would have to pay yourself on both sides, be taxed, like the employer taxes, the payroll and everything, and the personal income taxes and payroll taxes.

So it's just financially, that creates a real headache and challenge for a startup or a small business. So that kind of pushed us there. But also, I've worked at a for-profit publication in the past, a conservative publication. And it's just the incentives are not great, right? They constantly push you towards spamming your website with and we're still working on the balance of ads and other things that will get better over time on our website but we will never have autoplay videos i there's nothing that bothers me more when you open an article and videos stop start playing or full play page advertising pop-ups come up but unfortunately

the numbers of that is like those pay so much better than just like regular website ads. And when you are a for profit website, it's really hard to not run those and keep a profit. It's also incentivizes you constantly towards quicker, faster, shorter articles with more inflammatory headlines and more clickbait and all the time. And I think, honestly, quality and profit don't necessarily go hand in hand when it comes to media, which is one of the least libertarian things you'll find me out here saying. On the nonprofit side, there's some challenges as well. But I think we looked at models like the Reason Foundation that publishes Reason Magazine, like the Daily Caller News Foundation that publishes

their hard news side of things. And we saw that they do better quality work. They're a little more removed from the pressures and incentives of constantly chasing profit and clicks and ad revenue. But it has its downsides, of course, but those are the two main reasons that we went with the nonprofit model. Yeah. I mean, one of my big pushes with Tangle has been to not run ads in the newsletter. We're actually starting to experiment ads with the podcast, which people who are listening to this right now are going to hear me run an ad for Anchor, which is the platform I use to publish the podcast. But especially with written content, I've found that the incentive structure at for-profit media companies, especially with advertisements, can create some really ugly motivations. And it's part of the reason that I personally went

entirely the subscription and donation route. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I guess related to this sort of moral ethical ground that you guys are staking out, you have an ethics page on your website that I found pretty interesting and you sent over to me to look at, which I was really happy you did because I think it's just a fascinating experiment and kind of how to build a media brand and what kinds of, you know, people you want to attract. There are only seven items on this ethics page. So I'm actually going to read them really quick for our audience. It's a work in progress, by the way. Yeah, that's all right. I think it's pretty good though. And I want to read them and then we can

chat about it a little bit. So number one is to disclose donors and other partnerships or related content. This is just a transparency pledge. Number two is keep it clean. Don't use foul or off-putting profane language. Slang and pop culture references are okay. Number three is attack ideas, not people. Avoid ad hominem attacks whenever possible. Number four is clearly distinguish between straight news and commentary. So just including labels on articles.

Number five is be transparent about corrections and changes. Alert readers to significant substantive changes made to articles after publication. This is something I really respect. I have the corrections at the top of the Tangle newsletter. Number six is source extensively and double check facts and statistics. And number seven is avoid being blindly partisan or tribal. Call out bad policies and failed ideas in either party and give credit to elected officials when due, regardless of party affiliation, which I really love.

Why do you think this was necessary? I mean, why did you want to put together this page? Not a lot of news organizations do this. Well, I think that's why, right? I think one of the, right? I think one of the things we're witnessing with people like you and Tangle and on a maybe slightly bigger scale, people like Barry Weiss and Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, is that people are becoming increasingly distrustful of media institutions. And that's often maligned on the left in terms of

like the New York Times and CNN and the media, but also true for conservative media too. People increasingly follow individuals that they like and trust, unless they're more skeptical of institutions and brands. And I think a lot of that is because these places haven't been transparent and they haven't followed those kinds of things. And so I think we just want to level with people and let them know what they're going to get from us. Because we're not doing, we'll have some, what's it called, like wire reporting and other stuff. But for the most part, we're going to be doing opinion content. The tags on that are actually down on the website right now.

But that's being fixed. Articles will be labeled clearly as opinion. So people know what they're getting. And then we're sick of the partisanship. Like we've run articles just in our first three weeks, we've already had over 150,000 viewers on the website, but we've run several articles promoting Democrats for different ideas that we agree with, including Tulsi Gabbard, including one article agreeing with something President Biden is doing, even though we've published five or six criticizing something he's doing.

It's important to me. We've also released several articles directly criticizing GOP politicians. So it's important to me to have a publication that is principled and we know what we stand for. But we're not like Team Red. We're not just here to shill for a party and attack the other because lots of people are already doing that. And I don't think it's very interesting. I don't think it's very ethical. And I don't think it's what the disillusioned masses actually want. They want individuals who they feel are just straight and transparent with them, not always unbiased and not non-ideological or non-partisan necessarily. I mean, we definitely lean Republican, but we're not going to be GOP talking heads. And so much of the conservative media, it's like, and also I would say CNN and

MSNBC, it's like the Democrats send out their talking points that day. And that's what the CNN and MSNBC hosts are saying. And then, you know, the GOP sends out their talking points. And I'm saying that like metaphorically, but also in some cases, literally. And so that's just not what we want to do. We view ourselves as like independent, not in the sense of non-ideological or non-partisan, but just in the sense of that not on anybody's team. So that's why we wanted to do those things. One of the things that I think is really interesting is sort of what you just touched on there, that you guys are avoiding this sort of blind tribalism, but you're also being unabashedly ideological. And I'm wondering about your vision for the impact you're going to have. Is your hope that you sort of bring in more people to this ideological viewpoint that you have? I mean, do you want to, you know, you talk about TikTok, obviously, in my opinion, it's obvious that

the conservatives in America are losing the next generation. I think, you know, the under 30 generation in America is overwhelmingly liberal. And as the teenagers who are alive today age into voting, I think it's going to create some real problems for the Republican Party. Are you thinking long term about like, we need to win over some of those voters? And that's a goal for you by creating a news outlet that is sort of making its case to why your ideas are the best for America? Yeah, we have two goals. One is more short term and one is more long term. And you just touched on the longer term. The shorter term goal is that we view the future of the right right now in the post Trump or hopefully post Trump era as a jump ball.

The 2024 GOP primary, I think, is going to be a fundamental time for choosing as to whether the GOP is going to, at least for the next 10 years or whatever, become a populist, nationalist, European-style conservative party, which I would find deeply disturbing and really hope does not happen, or whether it will go in the direction of somebody who is more like a Reagan conservative, or at least still holds the values of limited government and the constitution and individual liberty, rather than people like Josh Hawley or Tucker Carlson, who we seek to not attack as individuals, but to attack their ideas and their vision for the right, because they want to take the right in an authoritarian direction, in my view,

in terms of seizing the government, expanding government power, compromising on our rights and liberties to own the left, right? One of the things that I constantly am pushing back on is this idea that we should scrap the First Amendment to crush wokeness. Like, I'm not into most of wokeness, but the First Amendment does more to protect conservatives, Christians, libertarians, any minority view. It's so short-sighted to me what a lot of these people want to do. And they're also turning their backs on things that I think are the very good parts of the Republican platform historically, like free trade,

like free market capitalism, not that they have always lived up to it. And so part of what we want to do is amplify the kind of Republicans that we think are doing what is right and advance the right kind of ideology for the right, and then criticize those who aren't. And that's with a view to the 2024 primary in particular, and just the kind of next few years, the GOP's conversation about what party is it going to be? What are its principles? And then in the bigger picture, it's about amplifying and providing this message in a

way that is just so out there for young people, for the next generation. Hannah and I, she's a millennial. I'm technically Gen Z. And we have large social media audiences are somewhat large, right? And we have the demographics on them. And there's so much younger than your typical Fox News broadcast. There's so much younger than the readership of Breitbart or the Wall Street Journal even. And so we have an ability to do that. The two of us have reached millions on TikTok. And so that's part of it as well. And the longer picture as a nonprofit, our formation is about spreading ideas and educating the ideas that we believe in. And so we're doing that with a vision

of next generation model, not focused on appealing to baby boomers or whatever, but also into the what will come next. It's interesting to me that you view the 2024 primary as jump ball. I think most of the polls I've seen, you know, aside from a few recently showing DeSantis closing some ground on Trump, have pretty much shown Trump dominating the field in a Republican primary. Why do you think it's a jump ball? What are you seeing out there that gives you the feeling like, you know, this is no sure thing for him? I mean, what were the polls saying two years before the 2016 election? Right? That's true. Yeah, yeah. 100% polls in 2018, even about the 2020 before COVID happened? So I'm focused on policy. So I'm not as into polling and politics and elections and outcomes in that sense.

But I've always been just deeply, deeply skeptical of polling this far in advance, because frankly, like the front running candidates probably are not even in the picture yet. I mean, Jeb Bush was like wild in a way, the favorite, right? Jeb. So just I think it's way too early to tell. And let me be clear, I'm not wishing I don't wish ill health on anybody. But to me, it's an open question. I mean, will Donald Trump make it to 2024? Will Joe Biden make it to 2024?

To be clear, I'm hoping they both do i wish them both good health but this is part of the problem with having a people pushing 80 in office well that's one of my hot takes i think we need a maximum age on the presidency um but we don't know who the candidates are going to be and also i would say somebody like ran paul who love him or hate him, is very committed to some principles of small government, of free market capitalism, of individual liberty. He has nothing in common with somebody like Josh Hawley, yet they are both viewed as wildly popular with the Republican base. They both poll incredibly well with Trump supporters, with the average Republican. Their endorsements are coveted by different people.

And so in that sense, I think somebody like him could run in 2024 and provide a very different vision of what a Trumpy, but really actually the principles are much more classic could look like. I also think Ron DeSantis, we don't really know what he's going to be because right now he's kind of in the middle of the populists and the liberty folks. He's somewhere in the middle on some things. He's super liberty oriented, like a lot of anti-COVID restrictions. On other things, he's kind of big government, like trying to regulate big tech and doesn't care about the First Amendment on that and other things that I disagree with. We could see where

is he going to end up? All of that I do think is a jump ball. And whether Trump's in it or not, I think it's so far away to tell. I also, I will say he has just gotten even more unhinged and crazy since he left office. So it's probably a blessing for him that he doesn't have Twitter. He'd be doing himself even more damage. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm actually running a story. So we're doing this interview on Thursday afternoon, and I'm publishing a subscribers only post tomorrow about what Biden could do to improve his approval rating, you know, over the next few months. And I posed the question on Twitter. And one of my favorite responses was basically that

he could pressure Twitter into allowing Trump back onto the platform because that would basically save his presidency, which I think, honestly, I know it's kind of a cheeky response, but there's some truth to it. I mean, having him in the public sort of, you know, releasing some of the statements he's been releasing, I think would do pretty serious damage to the party as a whole. I'm curious, you know, we just sort of glossed over it a little bit about the leftward leaning nature of younger Americans and people who are Gen Z like you. Why do you think left and liberal leaning politics are more popular with younger voters right now? What's behind that? Well, to some extent, they always have been, to be clear. But it is more acute now than ever. It's always been the case that generations get more conservative as they grow up. I think they are more acute on some issues, though,

actually, like Gen Z on some issues, like is weirdly more pro-gun than the public, weirdly more pro-life than the public in some polls. That's actually one of my, sorry to interrupt you, but that is one of my big predictions for the future of politics is that I think pro-life politics are going to swing back and like anti-abortion politics are going to become more popular in the next 20 or 30 years. And I think the younger generation is actually a pretty winnable group on that issue. Which no one saw coming. I know. Yeah. So but in general, absolutely. Like they, they love AOC, they love Bernie. I'm on TikTok. And so there's like a lot

of straight up communists on TikTok, who literally are like tankies, right? They're like, they've got their communist manifesto, and people love them right on there. And then it's just, it's very left leaning. I think there's some, a whole bunch of reasons for that, honestly. One, I would say education is the U.S. system of education. I think we can all agree is lacking. I don't think we have enough civics education. I don't think we have nearly enough economics education. The public as a whole is so ill-informed about how our political system works and how our economy works. And so there's really wide-held beliefs, even on something like student debt cancellation, which I strongly oppose. But we can have a policy debate about it.

But young people seem to think oftentimes that the government can just make the debt go away, right? It just goes away if they just cancel it. Oh, well, then they don't even understand that anything has a trade-off, right? That that then is subtracted from the federal budget because that is an outstanding balance item that taxpayers have loaned out. So it's equivalent on the budget side of spending and taxing more or running up bigger deficit. It has a trade-off. This is one of the first things you learn in economics. Life is all about trade-offs because scarcity exists. I think a lot of young people don't realize that. And then it's very easy to get caught up in

promises about free everything. I also think that the right doesn't speak to young people. It focuses on boomer issues. It doesn't offer solutions on things young people care about. And then also, unfortunately, I think like the damage that somebody like Donald Trump did just in the standing of how the Republicans and the right are viewed, it was kind of a short term devil's bargain, right? Like this guy can get us the White House and we can get our judges or, and I love Neil Gorsuch to be clear. I'm a simp. I also think he is very handsome. But he did so much damage in the minds of young people. Like they will forever view rightly or

wrongly the GOP as racist, sexist, xenophobic, everything, because they went along with this guy. And so I think that a lot of young people who would have been much more susceptible to right leaning ideas, and now are like Joe Rogan, quiet Joe Rogan, Biden voters, right, are lost now because they've been turned off by the right and it's boomer politics. It's like outdated kind of hostility on different issues. And so I think they're. It's like outdated kind of hostility on different issues. And so I think they're not lost beyond all hope, but I think that's why they're so far behind. You know, I, like you, I'm not one for identity politics. And I know that your bread and butter is a lot of these economics issues. I actually want to talk to you a little bit about

student loans, because that's relevant to my story tomorrow. But I do think it's noteworthy that you are a pretty ardent conservative and also a gay man. And I see you pretty regularly on Twitter sort of mixing it up with folks on the right when you're seeing homophobic stuff online. I'm interested in what it's been like for you being a gay man and a conservative i think you know 30 40 years ago it was much more of an anomaly than it is now but um yeah i'm interested like how that experience has been what kind of stuff you run into sort of navigating those lanes yeah i'm somewhere i have i think i have an interesting perspective on this my bread and butter is policy issues but i literally have the rainbow emoji in my bio for a reason, right? Because while I'm generally

not into most wokeness or woke ideas, there's a little piece of truth in the idea that representation matters. And I have received hundreds, people much bigger than me, like Guy Benson, who I know have received thousands of messages from gay people who say, wow, I'm so thankful we have somebody like you. I saw you on TV or I read your wow, I'm so thankful we have somebody like you. I saw you on TV or I read your article and I'm like, there's somebody, some finally a gay person who thinks like I think, or we aren't all, you know, left of center and they feel represented in a way that matters. And so I've actually, that's something where like, in terms of, I guess I would have had a very, maybe naive view of like, oh, colorblind race doesn't matter

or anything. And I'm like, okay, maybe we do need some racial diversity and representation in the GOP. Maybe there's something to be said for that. And the same thing with LGBT. Now that I don't believe in outright, like President Biden declaring, I'm only looking at this race for this position. But I have more of a middle ground on something like that. And I think that's because of my experience. But to your original question, I think we have to separate Twitter and the internet from real life. If you look at polling, like 60 plus percent of Republicans support anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people. Close to 50% support gay marriage. There really has been a sea change. And I've seen it all around me in DC and New York City, but also when I go out to places like rural Michigan or

across the country, people just have in many cases evolved outside of the religious right. But even there, I mean, and this has got us into a whole nother issue, but I'm sure you know that the new culture hot button war is really trans issues. And I would say I meet so many people on the right who I would describe as pro-gay or gay ambivalent and deeply trans skeptical, which is a whole fascinating thing we can get into. I have lots of conflicting thoughts and feelings about all of those issues. But I would just say in a lot of ways it has moved on. But at the same time, there's like this, I refuse to do the grifter thing where I brand myself that gay Republican and then say the lefts are the real homophobes or whatever.

And like, don't talk about the fact like these feuds to give people an example, these feuds I get into, right? Like Trump's former legal advisor, Jenna Ellis, before she went full crazy election denier, which I feel vindicated me, I got into a very public fight with her because she defended the Supreme court decision. Um, or she, I'm sorry, she opposes the Supreme court decision that struck down anti-sodomy laws. And I called her out for this. I'm like, this is not President Trump's position. He is super ambivalent on these issues. But also, this is not a pro-Constitution, pro-individual liberty, pro-freedom position, right? This is like Michael Bloomberg's nanny state times 10 with a separation of church and state violation thrown in for good measure.

And so that kind of thing, I'm willing to fight and clash with these people, people like there's certain like trad, social con, conservative commentators who just have these, what I would describe as very callous and lacking empathy and compassion takes on LGBT issues. And so I'm out there pushing back on these things, but I've also viciously, honestly, been pretty viciously treated by the LGBT left. All the LGBT media websites have written lots of hit pieces with me about me. I was actually thrown off a game

or pushed out of technically a gay man's soccer league, because they said that my views endangered hypothetical transgender members of the team that were to possibly join in the future. Because I had said, I don't believe that children should medically transition. I'm okay with social transition, but I don't believe in irreversible, potentially irreversible changes for minors. Anyway, I hope I didn't totally go off the rails there, but I think offline in real life and with conservatives under 40, it is very much a non-issue. With the religious right and boomers, it can still be an issue sometimes, particularly because I'm not willing

to be like a cringe token person who never talks about right-wing homophobia and only just bashes the left and has a blind eye to any problems. If you do that, you'll get along just fine. But I don't believe in that and I won't sell myself out like that. Something I really appreciate both about you and Guy obviously who is you know maybe the most visible gay conservative in the country right now who just you know genuinely doesn't make it part

of like his shtick or his act or anything even though i imagine there would be a lot of you know talk about poor incentives and stuff a lot of profit and attention there to be somebody who's just constantly railing the left about certain positions on, you know, LGBT issues or something from the perspective of a gay man. So, you know, it's interesting to hear you talk about it. I mean, I, you know, that's something I don't have a great, I think how you put it is basically how I would suspect it was that, you know, the religious right is sort of this last piece that's still evolving on the issue. But it's fascinating. And I should mention the alt-right and the Gropers.

They, yeah, they come for me all the time. But these are, these are small subsets of the right. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. I do want to get into this student loan thing and make sure that we touch on it because I know this is actually sort of a bread and butter kind of policy question for you. policy question for you. We're probably going to release this podcast almost certainly after my newsletter goes out tomorrow. So it won't be a spoiler to say that one of the three things that I am suggesting President Biden do in order to improve his approval ratings is follow through on his pledge to cancel $10,000 of student loan debt for certain borrowers. I say explicitly in the newsletter that these are not positions I'm taking because I believe in the policies. This is just, you know, the hypothetical question I was asked was if the Biden administration hired me in order to guide his approval ratings

back to 50 percent, what would I suggest that he do? And this is one of the suggestions that I'm planning to make in the newsletter tomorrow. So I'd love to hear from you. You know, why do you think this is a bad idea? What's the threat? Why should Americans be concerned about a policy proposal like this? Yeah, so I like I can't necessarily speak to the politics of it. I'm not like a political consultant or anything.

So I can't tell you if it would help him get reelected or it'd help him in 2022. Maybe it would. What I can tell you is I'm not going to get into the legal questions of whether he could do it via executive order or he would need Congress. Let's set that aside and just talk about the merits. Though I'm deeply skeptical he could do it via executive order. The merits of it though, the reason not to do it is because any dollar, and so to cancel student debt, in air quotes years because of the way that federal finances work, because those are outstanding assets or on the balance sheet for the federal government to just wipe them off changes the overall equation. So there's a trade-off. And student debt cancellation only helps people who went to college. And those people are not the ones struggling right now. It is the working class

and the working poor who have been devastated by the last two years and who are hit the hardest by inflation. Actually, student debt cancellation is a deeply regressive policy. The 10,000 one, I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but total student debt cancellation would give six times more benefit to the top 20% of income earners than the bottom 20%, according to one University of Chicago study. And pretty much everyone, even like Brookings and Urban Institute generally agrees that student debt cancellation is highly regressive. And so the merits of spending limited taxpayer resources on something that largely benefits, not the rich, not like millionaires, but the third of society, only one in three adults over age 25 has a college degree.

And they tend to be a much more affluent group. That's why people go to college. Why we would be spending limited resources helping them out right now instead of on something else. That's why what I don't see on the merits. You know, I think one of the simple arguments that resonates with me, I'll be honest, I'm actually kind of, I guess I'm sort of torn on this issue. I mean, I had student debt. I paid it off. I'm not one of those people who's like, I'd be, you know, I paid my student debt off.

I want my money back if everyone else can get it back. Like, I'm interested in the question that you're proposing, which is on the merits, is this a good policy for the country or not? And if it is, then I'd support it. And if it isn't, then I wouldn't, you know, I don't want to just get some kind of like feel good social win. I want something that's going to help the economy.

It's going to help people who are struggling, like you say. It seems to me like if you're somebody who's paying three or four hundred dollars a month into a student loan and you have that pause like we've had in the last year or two, then you're going to have more spending power in the market. I mean, aren't there advantages to that in the economy for somebody who is basically getting a few hundred dollars shaved off their rent every month? That seems like something that could be good. Well, actually, this is really interesting. A center left group, or I guess centrist group, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, analyzed student debt cancellation to address the question of would it be stimulus,

like Elizabeth Warren and some other people like to say. And they said, no, it wouldn't, because you're spending a lot of money relatively, and then you're freeing up a very small amount of expenditure per month, and then it's spaced out over a lot of time, where something like a stimulus check gives you a lump sum now that you go out and spend. So there's reason to be skeptical of that, but that's kind of even within a progressive framework. I would say that that screams to me of the broken window fallacy of that the $300 you're freeing up for this person have to come from somewhere else. And the most likely solution is that they're added to the national debt. And then that has a crowding out effect where there's less

private investment into the economy because there's a limited pool of capital. The more that gets taken up by government debt, the less there is for private sector investment. It's a widely documented economic phenomena. So that $300 you're freeing up a month over 10 years or whatever it may be is not being invested into jobs in the economy somewhere else, right? Every dollar that goes somewhere has to come directly or indirectly from somewhere else because the government isn't Santa Claus. That's one thing that I like to just push back on. Everything has a trade-off. So it's not just would it help? Sure, it would help, but we have to weigh that against the consequences of what are we not doing? What are we not getting? I mean, Biden,

with Congress, could take that same amount of money and cut everybody's payroll tax by the equivalent amount. The payroll tax is a highly regressive tax that taxes jobs. When you tax something, you get less of it, right? Cigarette smoking, you tax it, you get less smoking. When you tax something, you get less of it, right? Cigarette smoking, you tax it, you get less smoking. You could give every worker a raise in America tomorrow of 5% or 2% or whatever by cutting payroll tax. And that's a actually regressive tax. So you would be helping poorer people more than richer people because richer people make

less of their money through payroll style income and more through like investments and stocks and that kind of thing. So it's what is the alternative? We can't just look what that kind of thing. So it's what, what is the alternative? We can't just look what it helps some people. Sure it would, but everything helps somebody and has a trade off somewhere else. I think, you know, there's a general consensus that the current economy that we're living in is weak and scary and also maybe improving. And, you know, you can really cherry pick numbers right now in a way to paint any kind of picture you want. You can go to the unemployment numbers, you can

go to the jobs growth, you can go to the GDP, and you can paint the picture of this really robust recovery. And then you can go to, you know, real wages after inflation, the cost of a dozen eggs, and paint this picture of, you know, a country that's sort of in peril. I'm wondering how you see things right now and what you hope to see from this administration over the next few years to address some of the issues that we're facing. Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. If I wanted to, I could cite a bunch of economic stats to make it sound like the economy is absolutely terrible and Biden's destroying the country. But like we just saw very strong GDP growth numbers. Now, Biden would look at those and say, look what an amazing job we're doing. But to some extent, that's a recovery effect. And also, that doesn't talk about things like inflation, right? Like you mentioned, wages are going down. What matters is not the number on your paycheck

that has nominally increased two or 3%. I'll use myself as an example. And the data does bear that South. This is across the board. I got a 3% raise, but inflation is 7%. So I got a pay cut in what matters, my purchasing power. And that is true across the board for the average

American worker. They're seeing real wage decreases once you consider inflation. Sure, economic growth is up. The unemployment rate is very low. I don't like to give presidents, Biden or Trump credit because it's about a million things. But unfortunately, we do give them credit or blame. So sure, I'll give Biden credit. We have a very low unemployment rate, though I will note it's low and back to pre-pandemic levels in most red states, and it's still higher and above pre-pandemic levels in most blue states. And that's interesting to discuss as well. And we have strong GDP growth, but we also have a real labor force problem.

The unemployment rate only counts people who are seeking work. And millions and millions of Americans have dropped out of the labor force and aren't coming back. That's why we have such a low unemployment rate, but a massive labor shortage. And typically you would be seeing these jobs be filled, but we have millions of unfilled jobs, millions more than we have unemployed people. And that's because so many people are on the sidelines. They're out of the labor force, particularly women. I think are like mostly open now, but for a long time, weren't a lot of these schools have policies where it's like one kid test positive and you're all remote for two weeks. We still have a lot of ways in which life is disrupted and people can't fully re emerge into the labor force. So I'm concerned about the economy. I wouldn't say it's dire. I wouldn't say it's terrible, but I also don't buy the Biden administration's rosy spin. I also love this statistic. I went back and looked at what President Biden promised.

If we passed his American rescue plan, we would get, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but we would get X amount of jobs in 2021 created. And now we have the real numbers and it's many millions of jobs shorter than what he promised. And it's actually lower than what they projected if they didn't spend the stimulus at all. So I find that funny, but it doesn't mean the economy is terrible. It is absolutely, like you said, very mixed bag and cherry pickable. Before we let you go, we're running up on our time here, but I'm interested. I mean, the position you're sitting in, you're this conservative libertarian guy. We're a year into this Biden presidency. You are creating your own nonprofit news organization to, you know, capture some of the minds of the youth here and bring them back from the left and help shape some of the 2024 Republican primary races and sort of win this liberty versus populism battle. We've got three years left of this president, you know, God willing, his health and everything lasts. What do you hope to see? I mean, what are some maybe realistic one or two items that you

could see this administration pursuing that you are really kind of crossing your fingers for as somebody sitting in the chair that you're sitting in? Well, I'll give you my right wing answer, which is I would like to see the Reds take over one house of Congress, at least, so we don't get any more terrible, massive spending bills. But then on the other hand, I'd like to see President Biden give us that criminal justice reform he promised. He put all these things, decriminalized marijuana. Representative Nancy Mace has a bill on the right, a Republican who I love, to do that. Why isn't he calling her up and they're doing a bipartisan decriminalized marijuana at the federal level, let every state make their own rules. Let's see you do that. Let's see you end the federal death

penalty like you promised. He did a whole reduce incarceration, mass incarceration. He did a whole laundry list of criminal justice reform promises. And we just published an article on this at Base Politics by Hannah saying, well, he hasn't done any of them. Like he still could, right? It's only a year in, but that's something where most of the public agrees. So I would like to see him do criminal justice reform because that's something where he could get bipartisan buy-in and the public supports that. Brad Plumbo, thank you so much for the time. If people want to keep up with you and check out your work and this new news organization you're building, where's the best place to do that? So the website is just based

dash politics.com, but also our podcast twice a week is just search based politics wherever you listen to your podcast and to your Tangle news. And then we're on social media, of course, Brad Palumbo, P-O-L-U-M-B-O. But yeah, the website and the podcast based-politics.com or the based politics podcast feed. Awesome. Brad, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate you coming on and we'll do it again sometime soon.

Thanks so much. And keep up the good work at Tangle. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova,

who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. you