The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class―and How to Rescue Our Future (The Thom Hartmann Hidden History Series) by Thom Hartmann

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class―and How to Rescue Our Future (The Thom Hartmann Hidden History Series) by Thom Hartmann Amazon.com America’s most popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author explores the fall of the American Dream and the steps we can take to bring it back. The widening wealth gap is all too familiar to many Millennials and GenZers, especially when home ownership and the lack of debt seem like faraway fantasies. And it’s no surprise when they only hold about 4.6% of the country’s wealth while Boomers held 22% at around the same age. So what happened to the promise of the American Dream? In this new, final entry of his celebrated Hidden History Series, Thom Hartmann uncovers the rise of the American middle class through the progressive policies of FDR, through to its downfall with the increasing privatization and economic deregulations of the Reagan era. He also explores potential solutions including: Wealth and inheritance taxes to lessen economic inequality Supporting unions through increasing labor rights Renationalizing public spaces and transportation The American Dream often remains just a dream for many, but this book highlights what needs to be done to take it back and help make it a reality for us all.About the author Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 25 books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. Hartmann is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) and former Executive Director of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children. He has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years. Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Thom's book "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" to make the movie "The 11th Hour" (in which Thom appears), and a series of environmental videos narrated by Hartmann and DiCaprio, available at Green World Rising. Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the most important progressive talk show host in America for the past decade, and for three of the past five years the #1 most important progressive host, in their “Heavy Hundred” ranking. His radio show is syndicated on for-profit radio stations nationwide by WYD Media, on non-profit and community stations nationwide by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio, on cable systems nationwide by Cable Radio Network (CRN) and Free Speech TV, on its own YouTube channel, via subscription podcasts, worldwide through the US American Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann App in the App Store. The radio show is also simulcast as TV in realtime into nearly 60 million US and Canadian homes by the Free Speech TV Network on Dish Net...

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com. Then welcome to the big show as always. We got the buttons in the wrong place today.

Welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Voss Show has been around for 16 years and over 2,000 episodes. And we're joined by our most frequent guest, Tom Hartman today. He's going to be talking about his latest, hottest book that's just flying off the shelves and everything that goes into it. It comes out October 8th, 2024. It's called The Hidden History of the American Dream, The Demise of the Middle Class, and How to Rescue Our Future. It's part of the Tom Hartman Hidden History Series,

so that we can all learn about stuff and everything else. Tom Hartman is the four-time Project Censored award-winning New York Times best-selling author of over 25-plus books currently in print and over a dozen languages in five continents. He's known internationally as a speaker on culture and communications, an author, and innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. He has, of course, got a wonderful radio show that he runs. We'll get into some of the details of that. Welcome to the show, Tom. How are you?

Hey, Chris. Thanks for having me back. I'm great. I hope you are. I am excellent. It's wonderful to have you back as well. Thanks for always joining the show and being, you're our most frequent guest. We're going to have to come up with like an SNL type robe or something that we give

away on the show for the most frequent guests. So give us your plugs in your radio show, your YouTube channel, and.coms, wherever people can find you on the interwebs. The main website for the show is tom.tv, t-h-o-m.tv. The main website, the website where I write an article every day and it's free, is hartmanreport.com, Hartman with two N's.

And tomhartman.com is kind of a legacy website, but it's still there and it's got a lot of good information on it so and you do a how often do you do your radio show do you do daily three hours a day five days a week we're on sirius xm and commercial stations and pacifica stations all around the country and we're also streamed live on free speech tv and i love your show because you get you get into the deets, the details. The deets is the kids say them. The details and you break everything down and you

do it in such an amazing way. And then of course you guys have this great newsletter that comes out that has like, it's probably the richest newsletter when it comes to links and references, facts. That's his stack, yeah. Yeah, it's great. Your newest book that you have out, let's talk about that and what's inside of it.

Give us a 30,000 overview of that, if you would, please. The book is titled The Hidden History of the American Dream, and it really tracks what the American Dream is, how it came about, where it came from, what happened to it, and how we can get it back. I think that you could argue that the seeds of this were planted around the time of the American Revolution. Adam Smith wrote a book called Wealth of Nations, which everybody knows about, but his more important book in my mind was A Theory of Moral Sentiments. And that book, he basically argued that government can and in fact should intervene in the marketplace to support the general welfare, as opposed to an unregulated capitalist marketplace where basically the rich just get richer and richer and richer.

And you end up with the kind of society that Charles Dickens wrote about in most of his novels, where you have 1% at the very top who own about 90% of all the wealth. Then you have a 3% or 4% or 5% middle class, which is doctors, lawyers, and shopkeepers. And like Ebenezer Scrooge in Christmas Carol, who's actually owned a small business. It was so small, he only had one employee. He was the middle class. And then the bottom 95% are the Bob Cratchits, the desperately poor, who can't even care for their own tiny Tims. They're kids. Yeah. They eat bread. Right. So Smith said you could fix this, you know, with government intervention in the marketplace. We didn't really try that until 1933 when Franklin Roosevelt came into office. About 15% of us were in the middle class.

And he said that he wanted to set out to bring more than half of America into the middle class. And so we got unemployment insurance and a minimum wage and the right to unionize and social security and, you know, all these programs of the New Deal that actually did that. When Reagan came into office in 1981, two-thirds of us were in the middle class. Reagan then set out to reduce the size of the middle class, and there's a fascinating backstory to that. And it was quite successful. We're down to now to around 43% of Americans are in the middle class. And now it takes 2.3 salaries to accomplish a middle class lifestyle that you could have accomplished in 1981 with a single paycheck. And the other point that I opened the book with is that when I was, I'm a boomer, when my generation was in our 30s,

we controlled 21% of the nation's wealth. The generation that is currently in its 30s, the millennials and zeers, control only 4.6% of the nation's wealth. And that's the direct result of 43 years of Reagan's policies. Yeah. The trickle-down economics. I'm still waiting for my check. This is a joke I've been doing for a lot of years. Exactly. The fact that I predicted watching the middle class start to fade 20, 30 years ago.

I remember reading articles 20, 30 years ago where the boomers, they'd amassed a lot of real estate wealth, investment wealth, and as their Gen Xer, I think, children started inheriting some of it, you know, they were liquidating those assets and, you know, buying rims and cars and stuff. And you wrote a lot about this in your book, The Hidden History of Neoliberalism, How Reaganism Gutted America. I remember we talked about that. Yeah, that's kind of the backstory to it. That's the whole story of why Reagan set out to destroy the middle class but you know this

this book is how and how we can reverse it yeah there was an article on december 17 2020 on cbs news.com 50 years of tax cuts for the rich failed to trickle down and economists have gone through and done yeah i guess that check isn't coming from ronald reagan no it was it was a lie and they knew it was a lie it was just you know they just wanted to give a giant tax cut to their billionaire buddies yeah and i mean that was part of you know that's part of what probably what grew out of the great southern strategy and the flipping of of the unions to the democrats and all that sort of thing wasn't it they were trying it was it was also jude winansky's to Two Santa Claus theory, if you're familiar with that. No, tell us, please. Okay. In 1978, Jude Winooski was a Republican strategist, and he proposed this in the pages of the Wall Street

Journal. And what he said was, ever since the 1930s, Democrats have been thought of as Santa Claus. They brought us unions and unemployment insurance and all these wonderful things, Medicare, et cetera. And Republicans these wonderful things, Medicare, etc. And Republicans have always said, no, Republicans didn't want Social Security. They didn't want Medicare, etc., etc. And so he said, the GOP has always been seen as Scrooge, and the Democrats have always been seen as Santa. So what we have to do, we Republicans, is we have to do two steps. Number one, we have to become Santa. We have to figure out how to become Santa Claus. And number two, we have to force the Democrats to shoot their Santa in the face. And his strategy for this was, and keep in mind, this is 1977. He said, the next time a Republican becomes president,

now we have been steadily paying down the national debt. When we ended World War II, our debt was 132% of GDP, which is about where it is right now. Massive national debt. And four presidents paid that down to the point where when Reagan came into office, our national debt was only $800 billion, not even $1 trillion. We were on the course of paying off the entire national debt within the next five years. And so anyhow, what Jude Winniski said is, when a Republican, the next time a Republican comes into office, spend money like a drunken sailor. Just pour as much money into the economy as you can from the government coffers, do deficit spending, run up the debt, and that will have

a couple of effects. Number one, it'll stimulate the economy and everybody for years and years will say, holy cow, that guy had a great economy. And number two, by throwing the nation into debt, you set it up so that when the inevitable Democratic president comes along, you can yell and scream about the national debt and force the Democrats to shoot Santa Claus, to dial back on their welfare programs, to cut back on Social Security and Medicare and defund their own programs. And every Republican president since Reagan has followed that, which is why you have a $35 trillion national debt. 100% of our national debt can be attributed to the policies of three Republican presidencies.

Wow. You know, Reagan, Bush, and Trump. If you just look at the tax cuts from those three guys, that's $35 trillion right there. Not to mention the excessive spending that they engaged in. You know, the two Santa Claus there is alive and well. Plus, some of those are inflation and most of that is inflationary too i mean right now we might we might end up losing election because of trump's tax policies uh to go back to him again which i imagine he'll

run up the debt again for his billionaire his elon musk buddy but yeah it's it's inflationary and so everyone sits around and complains about inflation right now under the biden administration which you know a large part comes from covid and the spending we did there but also from the trump cuts i mean there are larger tax cuts they were never got never got an inflation below 4.1 percent in his entire eight years and everybody's whining and complaining i mean inflation right now is a 2.7 percent and they're going oh my god reagan did so good and this is you know come on give me a break it's interesting i'm always gonna i'm gonna look up that would you what is it called again the ghosts to santa claus theory if you just plug my name and two santa clauses into any search engine you'll you'll be i've written about it many times all right that explains what that was because i

kept waiting for you to send me a present at Christmas. Oh, here we go again. That's what that was. I'm like, why has Tom forsaken me at Christmas? There you are. Yeah. Did you get what I said? Just plug two Santa Clauses and my name into any search engine.

It'll pop right up. I've written about it. That's why I always assumed it was you that was going to send me a present. But now I understand it was Republicans and all that. So, Tom, you tell us how we can rescue our future. How can we save ourselves from ourselves? It's not like we don't know how to do this because we did it before. I mean, you know, like I said, when FDR came into office, 15% of us were in the middle class. And when Reagan came into office and took a meat axe to the middle class, it was 66% of us, 65% of us.

So all we have to do is bring back those policies, you know, end free trade, go back to a relatively protectionist trade policy, bring our factories and our jobs back home, number one. Number two, raise the top tax rate on the morbidly rich back up well above 50%, at least 74%, in my opinion. And number three, raise the tax rate on profitable corporations, the top tax bracket, back up to 50%, which is where it was when Reagan came into office. It was 51%. And maybe get rid of some of that offshoring that they do, you know, like Apple having five quarters. Get rid of free trade, you know, and the offshoring. And this is the one thing that Trump has right, is that, you know and and beyond and this is this is the one thing that trump has right is that you know tariffs are a big part of that and and interestingly

as much as democrats are running around bashing him for his trade pot his tariff policies biden has imposed numerous tariffs in the last three and a half years and and and kept most of trump's tariffs because tariffs work so it's just that Trump did it stupidly. You don't just throw a bunch of real high tariffs out and just slap them around. I mean, that just starts trade wars. You do it carefully. You do it thoughtfully. You do it step by step.

You do it in a way that is designed to last 20, 30 years so that when people build a factory in the United States, they know that that's going to last. The tariffs are still going to be there to protect them so there's that we need to bring back unionization and we need to raise the minimum wage at least 15 bucks an hour yeah it seems like it's getting there i mean i'm seeing some crazy payouts of what things are per hour now that people but every every red state or virtually every red state is still still at 725 oh really wow yeah that's crazy now trump's pushed a new tariff plan what are your thoughts on that you know like i said i'm

in favor of tariffs but i'm not in favor of the way that trump's does them he he's talking about you know 20 tariff right across the board on everything and 100 tariff something again tariffs like all taxes have taxes, have two purposes. One is to raise revenue, but the other is to influence behavior. And with tariffs, 90% of the effort is to influence behavior. And the behavior, of course, is to get companies to shut down their factories in China or stop buying from Chinese manufacturers and start building factories in the United States and making things here. And for that, you have to know that the tariff is going to be around for a couple of decades so you can recoup the investment in your new factory, which means that you really want to have a national discussion about it. You want to create a consensus. You

want to get everybody on the same page. Tariffs have been a big part of our national conversation from the founding of the republic, the first tariffs were put into place by the by the george washington administration substantial tariffs really big tariffs actually and and in fact the 100 of the cost of the federal government was paid for by tariff revenue from the revolutionary war or the time of the revolution all the way up to the civil war it was two-thirds from the civil war to World War I, and it was a third from World War I to World War II. And it was after World War II that we started dialing back on tariffs, and then in a big way with Reagan. I mean, you know, Reagan, the Reagan administration negotiated NAFTA and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, GATT, which led to the World Trade Organization, the WTO. So I would just reverse all that, but I would do it carefully,

methodically, thoughtfully, basically the way Biden's doing it right now. You know, it's funny people complain about inflation, but then, I mean, it sounds like if Trump were to win the election, it would definitely lead to more inflation for prices that consumers are going to get. Even the gop even gop's ran paul says you know shoppers american shoppers are going to bear the brunt of trump's tariffs if he gets re-elected yeah if you if you impose a it's functionally a sales tax and if you impose a large sudden sales tax you will produce inflation there's there's no way around that it'll take a couple years to wring it out of the system so all the people complaining about inflation will get more inflation by voting for Trump.

Good job, people. Way to go. You can't pick stupid. Yeah, these people are just geniuses, aren't they? Oh, God. We were supposed to, I think the original idea behind the Federalist Papers, the Madison's Federalist Papers, was that we were supposed to send our brightest and our smartest people to Congress. Wasn't that originally? Yeah. Hamilton wrote about that. And I think federalist 56 was the one where he said that the electoral

college would guarantee that we would never have a scoundrel as a president, men of low moral character. Wow. And look how far we've come. So speaking of that, we are two weeks away from the election. If you're watching this YouTube video like five, 10 years from now, like people do, please don't write me on the comments that it's not that time right now. But it's two weeks before the 2024 presidential election. We just had Alan Litchman on the show. He's the famous guy you see all over TV making the 13 key prediction. He seems to think that Vice President Harris is going to win. You want to air your thoughts on who's going to win the election here in two weeks? I hope she wins because if she doesn't, we're going to be a very

different kind of country from now. We will no longer be the United States of America. We will probably be in a civil war. And, you know, people like you and me, Chris, will probably be in internment camps. I mean, it took Hitler. He was sworn in on January 30th, 1933. And by the first week of March, he had built Dachau. And it was solely for political prisoners. I mean, it was just for his enemy within. It was mostly, there were members of parliament, of the German parliament, leaders of trade unions, but mostly newspaper publishers and editors and commentators who had spoken poorly of Hitler. Oh, yeah.

That's who he went after first. I mean, you know, it wasn't first he went after the Jews. The Jews came much later. And he's using that same language. You know, my enemies, I tend to persecute my enemies. I want to be an authority. He wants to go after Adam Schiff. He wants to put Mark Milley in front of a firing squad.

Yeah. Wow. And even John Kelly warned that Trump would rule like a dictator and that's his chief of staff. I mean, there's a picture that there's a picture that a few that I think MSNBC has out of all of the administration officials that worked under Trump that have called him a danger to American democracy. And it's a huge, it's a huge shot of a lot of pictures. Yeah. And John Kelly was not some bleeding heart liberal. He was the guy who

implemented the child separation policy down at the Southern border. He was the director of Homeland Security at the time. Then he became, I don't recall the order, but he was also for two years Trump's chief of staff. He was one of the men closest to Trump. And then after he left government, he joined the board of directors of the private prison company that ran the facilities where they were keeping the children that had been torn from their parents. So this guy is no bleeding-heart liberal. He just doesn't want a fascist running the country. Did you ever think you'd see Dick Cheney coming out for a Democratic president? No.

Was that on your bingo card? Never occurred to me. Never occurred to you? It's a... Vader, Mr. Halliburton, no contracts to... I know. I know. I'm wondering why George W. Bush hasn, and I'm guessing that he's afraid.

I think most of the Republicans who are not speaking out are not speaking out because they're afraid that the chance Trump will win and he'll come after them next. And they're enough of a student of history to know that it really could happen here. W. has claimed that he's not into politics anymore he's mostly paying right avoiding being seasoned in international companies for possibly sliding into dementia or something like that i don't know i voted for him in his first term and i'm pretty sure he started then really or was the drinking yeah i was a republican and voted for w and then i was so embarrassed and by him i'm i for some reason i'm a weird person where if i vote for someone i hold them accountable and i hate half of what they do and love half what they do like i i voted for w and

did that 9-11 really changed me and woke me up to what was going on in the world and made me go, people hate us? Why? And started learning stuff. And then I started, you know, the religious part of W. Bush. I think when he banned testing on fetuses or whatever it was to where you couldn't test them for medical purposes. You used them for medical purposes. I was like, I'm out. And it was clear that religion was running that administration

as well as Dick Cheney just doing whatever. I call it the presidential. I call it the President Dick Cheney administration, really. Yeah. W was the guy who brought the religious freaks into the Reagan administration. He was the guy. He brokered that deal between Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan. Yeah.

Then we had the Tea Party, and which led us down the road to Trump. It's just a slippery slope that we've been on. What are your thoughts on, you know, I mean, we could all sleep nicely thinking Kamala Harris is going to win, Vice President Kamala Harris is going to win. There's the prospect of another January 6, 2.0. What are your thoughts on that?

I think it's probable that there will be some protests, shall we say, in some of the states, particularly around some of the county facilities. I don't think they're going to get very far. I think with the possible exception of Georgia, which has a Republican governor, I think pretty much all the other swing states have Democratic governors. I'm not so concerned about that. My concern is that they're going to manufacture some sort of a legal excuse to get this before the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court could declare that there's enough problems with the election that they're going to throw it to the House of Representatives under the 12th Amendment, in which case each state gets one vote. And there are 27 states controlled by Republicans. It would be 27 to 23 in favor of Trump.

Then Trump becomes president. There's a lot of precedent for that. I mean, it's how Thomas Jefferson became president. It's how John Quincy Adams became president. I did not know that. This is why we have you on the show. You are the central knowledge base for everything, Tom. So maybe not another January 6th where it's at the Capitol, but maybe in local. No. I think it'll happen in the states, and I think it's going to happen around accounting the vote.

They're all in on on claiming voter fraud i mean you know this is this is why the republicans when they controlled pennsylvania in 2020 passed a law saying that you can't even open the ballots to count them the mail-in ballots until after the election is over guaranteeing that the that the largest swing state in the country, Pennsylvania, which is probably what it's going to come down to, Pennsylvania is going to be like Florida in 2000, guaranteeing that we won't know the results until at least Wednesday and probably Thursday.

And the Republicans did this intentionally because they are looking to set up an excuse to bring in the Supreme Court and to cause people to question the outcome of the election. If you can't win on good ideas, just try and seize power. Yeah, just cheat. You know, I was really surprised she didn't, Vice President Harris, she didn't announce

Joe Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, as a candidate. Yeah, I was too. You know, you really, in fact, I was betting. I was predicting it. And so I look stupid. But, you know, and Tim Walsh is a wonderful gentleman, Governor Tim Walsh. I think he's a great guy. But, you know, Josh is so much more slicker. He's almost like Newman or the California governor.

I don't know why I'm having trouble with names today. The brain is going, clearly. You just spaced it out of my head, too. Gavin Newsom. Gavin Newsom. And he's so slick, and when you watch the vice president debate, which I don't think changed anyone's minds, you know, I mean, Tim's a down-to-earth, you know, he's a good guy.

But maybe somebody slicker would have been better. And I'm thinking if Harrissylvania or loses the election at two pennsylvania flipping to trump that may be one of the things you know like hillary clinton you got to go walk in the woods and think about shit like why you didn't go to wisconsin once or something yeah maybe she should have put josh shapiro i don't know if you have any thoughts on that i mean i don't know you know what i what i heard from people who were kind of on the inside, who would not talk publicly, but were willing to talk to me, was that Josh Shapiro was just a little too ambitious. That this was a guy who wanted to be president someday. And what Kamala Harris wanted was really a teammate rather than a competitor. And I can understand that. I mean, it makes a lot of sense.

So we know he's running against her in 2028 if everything works out well. Could be. It will be interesting. And it's kind of funny. It seems like there's some decline going on with Trump here at the last fucking second. Evidently, he's been canceling stuff. Yeah. I mean, what an irony if he gets an office and he really hits the wall. The billionaires who are behind him, they don't want Trump in the White House.

I mean, they don't really give a rat's ass about Trump or not Trump, other than they know that he's unstable and unpredictable, and he could do things that would really harm their business interests, even inadvertently. They want J.D. Vance. And J.D. Vance is the wholly owned creation of a handful of right-wing billionaires immigrant right-wing billionaires at that and so i'm expecting that either if trump wins either he will be essentially a figurehead you know they'll prop him up every now and then in front of a teleprompter like they do with Reagan. I mean, we now know that Reagan was full-blown Alzheimer's by 1985. And so he was,

basically, George Herbert Walker Bush was running the country for the last three years of the Reagan administration. And so either they'll do that, or if J.D. Vance really wants to pull the strings, he'll invoke the Fifth Amendment and say, you know, the president is no longer capable of running the country, get the cabinet to vote with him, and boom, we're off to the races. J.D. Vance is president. And if he does that, it'll probably be in the third year of his presidency, because then you can serve a maximum of either two terms or ten years under the amendment. I forget which amendment it was,

but two terms to the president. And so if he waits until the third year, then I'll have the third and fourth year of this presidency, and then he can get elected to a four-year term, and then he can get re-elected to a second four-year term, serving a total of 10 years. And he's only in his, what, 40s now, I think?

Yeah, he's pretty young. He's still got that goth look going on. Yeah, he's only in his what 40s now i think yeah he's pretty young yeah he's still got that goth look going on yeah i love wearing eyeliner yeah i love how we're electing two people from a party that claim to hate lgbtq and transitional people and and what do they call them that where they do the school they do the reading i i'm just losing all sorts of references today. But basically, you know, we have two of these guys that wear makeup. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Tim, Tim, or I mean, J.D. is wearing eyeliner,

and Trump puts on a pancake crap on his face that, you know, it's almost like he's blackface. You've got two guys that wear makeup, and they hate LGBTQ people. Yeah. They're just like, what? What's going on there? What else is going to plug you about? I had you, yeah, Alan Lichtman was on the show. You're the second person to confirm that JD Vance is probably the future of the party. And I forget the billionaire behind him in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel. Yeah. And he's just an acolyte of Peter Thiel. It's amazing how Peter Thiel has just built him and installed him.

Yeah. Thiel put what, was it 12 million I think into his race in Ohio and basically bought the election for him. Yeah. And built his career for him so that he could get into the White House. Yeah. Instead of. Yeah.

And with books like yours that tell people how it is and what's going on and stuff. I mean, we need to realize that the future of where we're at is if we don't change it, and then as you say, how to rescue our future, we're going to end up farther into an oligarchy than ever before. I think. Yeah, I agree. I agree. In fact, didn't you do a book on oligarchy?

I did. And you and I discussed it. Yeah, and you were on the show. This is your sixth appearance on the show. You've got so many books. I'm just assuming you've written about everything. Not quite. So, Tom, give us your final thoughts as we go out on the show on the book,

where people can pick it up, and your dot-coms and plugs and all that good stuff. The book is The Hidden History of the American Dream. You can find it anywhere, you know, a local bookstore, online, whatever. And it's out now. And my websites are TomHartman.com, HartmanReport.com, and Tom.TV. And the books he has in the Hidden History series, they're very kind of thin and easy to read. They're quick read.

You can get right to the data. They get right to the point. And so I love the little books you put out there, Tom. great for the reading and stuff and people should always check out your show your show is just brilliant that you put on i'm jealous whenever when i grow up i want to be you thank you chris on our little podcast here thank you tom for being on the show again thanks about us for tuning in go to goodreads.com for just chris fos linkedin.com for just chris facebook.com forces chris fuss and chris fos on the tick Christmas on the TikTok, Christmas 1, I think it is. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. That should have a sound.