The David Knight Show - Thu Episode #2339: From Government Dependence to AI: The Death of Self-Reliance

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

────────────────────────────────────────[00:02:12]Trump Blocks Foreign Grid Components — Knight: Is He Declaring an Emergency or Creating One?He's blocking transformers we don't make domestically; specialized ones from Germany take years to replace; sabotaging the very infrastructure a real EMP would destroy.────────────────────────────────────────[00:12:08]Trump Threatens to Demolish the Kennedy Center After a Judge Blocked Him From Putting His Name on ItOnly Congress can rename it; spent $256 million reshaping it; wants to tear it down because he can't put his name above Kennedy's.────────────────────────────────────────[00:15:18]Mike Johnson: "It's All for Israel — They're Fighting for Their Very Existence"Knight: show me that in the Bible; dispensationalist Zionists are doing to Christ what Piss Christ did to the crucifix, except in the name of Christianity.────────────────────────────────────────[00:16:33]Trump Posts "Mission Accomplished" Meme for Iran War — Supporter Can't Name One War He StoppedAsked to name just one; she said, "If he says it, it's got to be true."; same pattern as Bush in 2003. ── Interview 1: Lawrence Reed — FEE / Born of Ideas ──────────────────────────────────────────[00:53:20]Nobody Spends Somebody Else's Money as Carefully as His Own — 40 Trillion Reasons It's TrueIf it's yours, you take care of it; nobody washes the rental car; government spending is the ultimate rental car economy; 40 trillion is the evidence.────────────────────────────────────────[00:55:03]Reed: The Debt Is No Longer a Future Problem — Interest Is Crowding Out AmmunitionA trillion a year in interest; if we're running out of ammunition in Iran, ask where the money went; past debt crowding out present security.────────────────────────────────────────[00:59:03]Was Jesus a Socialist? Reed: No Passage in the New Testament Endorses Government RedistributionIn Luke 12 he said, "Who made me a judge or divider over you?"; the Good Samaritan acted from his own free will — not by voting for a politician. ── Interview 2: James Walton — Prepper Broadcasting Network ──────────────────────────────────────────[01:24:22]The 100-Year Amnesia — Convenience Wiped Thousands of Years of Self-Reliance in One GenerationHerbal remedies, foraging, food preservation — common knowledge 100 years ago, gone by the 1980s; we traded thousands of years of ingenuity for Campbell's canned soup.────────────────────────────────────────[01:26:57]AI and GPS Are Doing to the Brain What Convenience Did to Self-Reliance SkillsLondon cabbies had a larger brain region from memorizing streets; it shrank when GPS replaced it; AI is running the same play, faster.────────────────────────────────────────[01:27:23]Modern Self-Reliance Starts Small — Chickens in the Backyard Changed EverythingProducing renewable protein in a city backyard; add one thing to two and you've increased by 50%; small steps are transformative because the bar is so low. ──────────────────────────────────────── Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to https://davidknight.gold/ for great deals on physical gold/silver For 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to https://trendsjournal.com/ and enter the code “KNIGHT” For high quality made in America products go to HomeSteadProducts.shop and use promo code “Knight” for 10% off your purchases Find out more about the show and where you can watch it at TheDavidKnightShow.com If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

Off. Of deceit. Telling the truth is a revolutionary act. It's the David Night Show. As the clock strikes 13, it's Friday the 28th of August. You're of Our Lord, 2006. Well, just when you thought that Trump had run out of things to wreck, he's come up with something new and crazy.

But today we're going to be talking also to the author Larry Reid, who is the founder of the McAnaw Center in Michigan, also the former president of Fee. And we're going to be talking about the seven principles of sound policy, Great Miss of the Great Depression, and his latest book out of eight books that he's written, Born of Ideas, How Principles, Faith, and Courage, Forged America. And we're going to be talking to James Walton of the Prepper Broadcasting Network.

And trust me, you're going to want to learn how to prep after you hear today's news. We'll be right back. I may recall a few years ago there was a lot of talk about EMP threats. And of course, that is just exploding a nuclear bomb at a high altitude, and it's not the explosion or the radiation, but it sends an electromagnetic pulse. They'll basically kill everything electronically. And so we had a lot of people talking about that, talking about the fact, the government's not doing anything about this. This is really pretty easy to do. And you can put a few devices in to arrest that power surge that's there

and protect some very expensive, very rare generators and transformers, many of which you don't even make in the United States. As a matter of fact, Gary Haven did a movie about it, and he incorporated some of us at Info Wars into it. I had a news broadcasting role in it. It's called Amerigden. It's a real threat. You just have heard, and I've played for you,

many clips of people like Jonathan Pollard in Israel who want to have a nuclear war, and he says, yeah, this is the way we do it. First, we do an EMP pulse against Iran, and then we come in with nukes or whatever we want to do. And yet, when you look at this, I just about fell out of my chair when I saw this. Trump blocks some foreign grid equipment as part of an emergency declaration. Is he declaring an emergency or is he creating an emergency? This is the dumbest of all of the dumb things this guy has done. Because one of the things we're talking about was what a long-term problem this would be if there's no protection.

on the grid. And so you've got some of these generators made only in Germany, and you have to wait for that to be, they don't have them sitting on the shelf. They're so incredibly specialized and expensive. So now he's going to basically put tariffs and blockades on foreign grid components. Think about what he's done. He has come after pretty much everything that's fundamental in our infrastructure, whether he's going after manufacturers by blocking their raw materials that they need. We just talked about yesterday, toilet paper, right? Creating an S-H-T-F scenario. It's going to hit the fan, right?

Can't get the lumber? They can't make the toilet paper here in America. They make the toilet paper, but they take the lumber from Canada. And we have this same type of thing happening for the defense industry, happening for cars, many other things. He blocks the raw materials, and then you can't make the product, or you make it at a non-competitive price. And then he's putting farmers and ranchers at a business left

and right, small businesses being put out of business, and the consumers are paying the price for all of this stuff. So now we have the executive order that Trump said, foreign supply of electrical equipment, quote, constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat. Does it really? Since when did that happen? A threat to national security. The order restricts the purchase and the installation of foreign made components for electrical

infrastructure if that equipment would pose a risk to grid. security. Well, you might say that this is fear and panic about what China is doing, but everything that China is doing, understand the American government is doing as well. And they want to be able to shut down your grid at will or shut down your car, any of this stuff. Nothing really has changed with us. And this is going to be this ham-fisted tactic to shut this stuff down. Again, it's as if Trump thinks that. that if he just builds a wall around the entire United States, that we are self-sufficient.

Nothing at all like that. As a matter of fact, we're going to talk about that when we talk to Larry Reed. Again, former president of Fee. The guy who founded Fee is Leonard Reed, no relation. He wrote iPinsel, which I've talked about so many times. But we're going to talk a little bit about that in Great Depression. The order which doesn't single out any country or specify any threats applies to a variety of infrastructure, including substations, transformers, inverters that are used, and renewable energy, battery, storage

systems, and generators. Remember, it's just a few years ago, actually. I think it might have been as long ago as 2013. He had some people with a coordinated attack on transformers. Came in with snipers and a guy who was signaling them and came in the wee hours of the morning and it only took them about a half hour to take out a lot of transformers and do it in a way that they wouldn't blow up, then they would quietly melt down.

So while Trump is out there picking fights with everybody in the world, he wants to make a fight with China, with Russia, with Iran, he wants to make a fight with the drug cartels, and then he wants to make sure that we can't replace the parts in the grid. Remember, on day one,

after he got sworn in, the very next day, he has the Stargate project in an Oval Office, and he starts out by saying, I told these guys that the grid's really old, it's not reliable,

so you better build, your own at your own factory. The implication is, I know it's old, I know it's unreliable, and we're not going to fix it. So you guys do your own power if you want things to happen, because I don't care about the rubs out there and fly over the country. He certainly doesn't care about us, does he? He's doing everything he can to destroy the society. As a matter of fact, there was a call-in show on C-SPAN. And if you watch C-SPAN, you know, they take callers from Republicans, from Democrats, from independents, and so forth. And across the spectrum. People were coming after Trump for his stupid tariffs.

So his escalating trade war with Canada was the focus of this. But of course, you can also talk about it in terms of food, in terms of ranchers. Or you can talk about what he is doing to make diesel and gasoline so expensive. He's just hobbling us and crippling us in one way after the other. Trump's escalating trade war with Canada took a beating from C-SPAN callers across the political spectrum Thursday, with Republicans and independents, a like venting over rising prices, failed negotiations, and the president's increasingly aggressive tariff threats. He threatens everybody. The unusually bipartisan barrage came as Trump intensified his attacks on Canada following the collapse of negotiations and threatened sweeping

new tariffs while branding America's northern neighbor, quote, entitled, unquote. And the, quote, most difficult and unreasonable country to negotiate with. Well, there's something that that we can all agree with in terms of bipartisanship. We have a bipartisan disgust of Trump and a bipartisan hatred of his surveillance data centers and of the flock network that he's rolling out. We should be able to put all this stuff together. And it doesn't even have anything to do with his repulsive personality. It is the data centers, the surveillance centers, the flock cameras, the tariffs that he's doing

that are crippling us economically. So one person said, I feel the same way the previous caller Doug in Canada feels about Trump. He is the biggest idiot ever. I just want you to know that and that it's just how I feel about it because of this trade war.

We lost in Iran and we're going to lose this trade war. What is his problem? Then a Republican caller from Tallahassee argued that Trump's aggressive tactics were no longer producing the results that they had during the first administration. well, I don't know that even was true. He said, I find it to be very disappointing that not even he seems to realize that he's just embarrassing himself.

He will not stop, and everything is expensive. Another caller from Florida, Ryan said that he had backed Trump in 2024, but he's reconsidering that decision. He said, honestly, I voted for Trump in 2024, but I'm starting to regret it. He's starting to regret it? I mean, I regretted it as far back as 2019. His policies are getting more and more draconian. I just don't like the whole direction where this is coming. In Virginia, Republican from Maryland went further.

Sorry, not in Virginia, but Virginia, Republican from Maryland went further, warning that tariffs on lumber would pile additional pressure on Americans are already struggling with housing and grocery costs. This man needs to be removed from office, said the Republican. And Congress is just not doing their job, confirming that she had been a Republican since she was 18. me too. Yeah, this kind of underscores why you need to implement the tariffs in a completely different way than how he's doing it if you want tariffs.

The industry by industry, import by import, because, you know, he's putting this tariff against Canada, which is affecting lumber, which presumably the U.S. market could grow to do that, but it takes years to grow trees. It's not going to have any strategy. Yeah, and this is going to be the on-again, off-again tariffs, which is simply going to add chaos to the market. There's no strategy to it. It's just tariff tantrums. But yeah, lumber really underscores it because you know, you would need several years to build up the lumber supply in the U.S. Well, the same thing is true of cattle, right? We have the lowest herd amount that we've ever had in America. And what he's doing is he's going to damage that even further. Because these guys are saying they need to have a stable and a building business.

model in order to build the herd, he's damaging that. As a matter of fact, this is an independent caller, Jack meanwhile, said Trump should be out of office and he should be put up for treason. It's just ridiculous. We're not liked by any nation anymore. The backlash came after Kenna withdrew from negotiations, of course, but that's just the least of these things, quite frankly. It's just the latest one, I should say, but they don't yet realize all the damage that Trump is doing. We haven't even seen the damage that he's doing to food and to the grid, which is just now starting, right? It's crazy what he's doing. And so he also threatened to rename Lake Ontario. He didn't threaten. He actually did it. And he wants to call it Lake America. Well, good luck with that. You can call it whatever you want,

but nobody else is really going to go. Just like they didn't change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, except on Google and except on some official, government papers. Same thing with the Department of Defense. They change it to the Department of War, but not officially. And so, you know, they just waste a lot of time changing letterheads and things like that. But the reality is that this guy is simply about his ego. There is no strategy to this.

It's not about making money. It's not about balancing the budget. And, of course, we don't want to have those kinds of taxes. We want to have cuts. And we want to have cuts in terms of regulation to be able to balance the budget. But there's no strategy at all. to it. He's not trying to even help a particular industry. He's got different ways to help his friends. And they've got their backroom deals that they're doing. The GOP needs to tell Trump, you're fired.

And if the GOP won't do it, we'll tell the GOP, you're fired. And so the latest ego trip that he's on here is he's been trying to put his name on the Kennedy Center for the longest time. He wants to put his name above John F. Kennedy's name. As a matter of fact, the law said that it would never be named anything else when they built it. And so you've had a judge who has shut that thing down. So Trump had a temper tantrum about that. He's threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center. So he's clearly, I think, this is a guy who is deranged and unfit for office. It's basically like saying, if I can't have my name on it, I'm going to destroy the entire building. And he's talking about doing that. And last year's one big beautiful bill act, Congress apportioned more than

$256 million for capital repair, restoration, maintenance, backlog, and security structures for the Kennedy Center. But in practice, that was largely consisted of reshaping the center in Trump's image and putting his name up above the Kennedy name. And just take a look at the cost. Here's a guy he doesn't care about costs of anything. He's just digging a bigger and bigger hole for us. Debt-wise, he already is responsible for a third of what the deficit is, because he does things like the Pentagon budget. After the aid to a record one trillion dollar budget, he immediately comes up and says, well, I want 50% more. After hitting a record, immediately comes back for 50% more. And the same thing when he hits 40 trillion dollars in debt. His first response is,

well, let's raise the debt ceiling by another 5 trillion. It's absolutely an unhinged, and insane. And so the 1964 law that created the Kennedy Center, the judge said it makes it crystal clear that the center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the board's unilateral say so. Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it. Well, as we look at the terrorists and we look at the damage that he's done to the ranchers. He is out there. The Ron War has driven U.S. farmers in the worst crisis that they've had in 40 years. And it is really just a humiliation tour for the GOP. You've got Mike Johnson. Just keep saying, you know, it's all for Israel. He just makes it

clear. It's all for Israel. Israel is a critical ally of ours. And I think most people understand the necessity of this funding. They're fighting for their very existence. They're the only stable democracy in the Middle East. I mean, of course, there's, for those of us who are believers, it's a biblical admonition to stand with Israel. We will. Give me a break. And they will prevail as long as they're...

You couldn't. And this is an important, very important symbolic gesture and a very important replenishment of their... Show us that in the Bible, Mike. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. I am so sick and tired of these people pissing on the Bible and pissing on Christ. This is worse than the National Endowment for the Arts. they paid a lot of money to an artist who had a jar of urine and he put a crucifix in it and he called

it piss Christ. Let me tell you, that's what these dispensationalist Zionists are doing. It's disgusting. I'm disgusted with these people. Nothing ever stops them in any of this. And of course, when we look at Trump, he's now pronounced that it is mission accomplished the war. You know where he did that? He did that. Remember when George W. Bush did that? And then we, uh, we went very long on that, a very long time these wars didn't, didn't end right away. Certainly it was not an admission accomplished. And yet, he's doing the same thing again. He put out a meme. And there he is with his scowl. So sick of this guy. Yeah, you're a tough guy, aren't you? That's one of the jokes that I heard, it was really funny. It was a guest host for Jimmy Kimmel.

And he was a guy who's, he's a singer, and he's got tons of ten. tattoos and he used to be like 500 pounds. And I forget what his name was. But anyway, he comes out and he does warm up and he says, you know, I've lost like 300 pounds. He goes, but President Trump is putting a lot of weight on. And he goes, he's getting close to the amount of weight that I lost. He said, think about it.

I lost an entire Trump. And I thought, if only we could do the same thing. Please give us your diet so we can get rid of this guy. I am so fed up with him. But if you look at this meme that he puts up there, there he is scowling. And on the left, he's got a picture. He's got airplanes flying and aircraft carriers in the background, American flag. He's got on the left, Georgia, Judge W. Bush, it says, mission not accomplished.

2001, 20 years in Afghanistan and the Iraq wars. Then he shows the Ayatollah on the right. And he says, mission accomplished, 2026. He's absolutely out of his mind. lives in a fantasy world. This guy is completely out of touch with reality. It truly is amazing. And so are his supporters. Trump is the greatest president? Absolutely. I mean, look, he's the greatest president of all time. I think absolutely he's the greatest president. I mean, look, he's brought all these wars to an end, eight wars in there, and he's protected our country from the root. What were the, what were the

eight wars? He stopped. I don't know them all offhand, but he stopped them over. Do we, do Do you know, can you name a couple? Tell him, Gail. Yeah, what were the wars that he stopped? Other countries, um, uh, la-la-da-da. Just one war that he stopped? Do you know any? Um, I can't think of one now.

He says it. He says it. But he does. But we can't name one. Can't name one. All right. Yeah, if he says it's got to be true. Explain the outfit to me.

Well, it's all. about gold for President Trump, this 250th anniversary of America's great birth. And I just wanted to wear the gold in his honor. He's fighting so hard for us. He loves gold, right? Yes, he does. Do you see the Oval Office? Not yet, but maybe someday. Have you seen pictures of it? There's like, it's so much gold there. Almost like, it's almost like too much gold, right? Yes. Yeah. It's like taggy. It was a Democrat at this point. I'd vote for anybody who would get rid of the property tax. So property tax is your number one issue. what about health care?

I could care less about health care. I haven't had health care in 20 years. I could care less about it. You haven't had health care in 20 years? No. Maybe that's why he's still alive. But again, you got Darlene can't explain that she doesn't want government run health care. That guy, of course, the Democrats, why he's asking about health care.

But she said, yeah, my mom and dad, would they get sick that's still going to work? And she died when I was 11, and my dad died a year later. And so the Democrats are just ripping her on that. look we need some kind of health care we don't necessarily need the medical garbage that we're getting but we certainly don't want government running health care well we're going to take a quick break and we're going to be right back with our guests and stay tuned we have some great information coming up for you the prepper broadcasting network and we're going to start with our author and a person who has founded and run several different think tanks we're going to come

back with larry reed we'll be right back stay with us You're listening to the David Knight Show. Joining us now is Lawrence Reed. He's a former president of Fee. And when I saw the two together, I immediately thought of Leonard Reed, wrote the famous op-ed piece, I guess you call it. I Pencil is a short exposition of economics and how it works.

And I've talked about that so many times as those of you who listen to the program know, going back to what happened with all the supply chain disruptions back in 2020. I've been talking about it even before that. But I thought, is there a connection there? Of course, they're spelled differently. One is R-E-E-D. That's our guest today. The other one is R-E-A-D. Now, Leonard Reed was the founder of FEE, and yet our guest has also founded the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Did I say that correctly? Yes, you do. We were just laughing about that off air because I called it the Mackinac Center.

And that's not the way it is pronounced, yeah. But I do know of it. I was able to go to a think tank convention, I guess, in mid-2000s, and they were very well represented there. And I had a lot of respect for what they were doing. I don't know if you were the ones who sponsored it or not, but one of my fondest memories of that, they had a party after hours for people who were there, and it was themed along the alcohol prohibition, and they had a speakeasy.

And the way that you would get in, the password to get in was I'm here for the ethanol subsidy. I thought that was a great idea. But yes, our guest has been a professor of economics. He has also been chair of the economics department as well. As I said, he founded the McAnaw Public Policy Center. And he was there for 21 years. And then he went on to fee and had a very successful. career there. He's been honored internationally. He's written over 2,000 articles. He's written

eight books. And he has a new book that has just come out. And we want to talk to him about that. And maybe some of his other books, if he's got time. The new book is the, from the Mayflower to the Bill of Rights. It's called Born of Ideas, how principles, faith, and courage forged America. I think that's exactly right. I think that is what forged America. So I'm very interested in to you about that. Thank you for joining us today. Hey, my pleasure, David. Thanks for having me and for mentioning the Foundation for Economic Education and our founder, Leonard Reed, whom I knew in the last seven years of his life. Yeah. Yeah, that's a great essay. So much to learn in that. Very well done.

I might let you know that the title of his, of course, as you pointed out, was I Pencil, but I have most recently written an updated version, and it's a very well. available on Amazon, but it's called iSmartphone. And it takes the same lessons and the same structure of Leonard's essay, but applies it to a smartphone. You need to send a copy of that to Trump. Maybe he'd read it, you know. That may be a story.

It would be an aha moment, wasn't it if he could read it? Yes, it would. And understand it. That's why I mention it all the time. When we look at the things that are happening now in terms of tariffs and other issues, and maybe we can get at that later on. But I want to talk to you. first about your book. You know, we have so many celebrations this year about the 250th

anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and it should be celebrated. Unfortunately, we don't follow it anymore, but we don't follow those principles anymore. But the bill writes, I often wonder if when it hits its anniversary, if there will be any celebration or mention even of it at all. What do you think? Well, I certainly hope there will be. Some of us are already doing some long-range planning to that effect. So there'll be an anniversary in 1787, which will mark the Constitution, and then 1791 would mark the anniversary of the adoption of the Bill of Rights. Well, let's hope that we still have something left of the Bill of Rights, at least normally,

by that time. It's rapidly disappearing, isn't it? Talk to us a little bit about your book. And, of course, the idea that character and principles and faith and courage were the things that forged this nation. We seem to be in a short supply of all those today, don't we? Yeah, yeah, we do. And we need to work on that.

But I think the American story from the colonial days through the adoption of the Constitution is truly remarkable. There was nothing like it in the rest of world history. For the first time, a nation was founded on the idea that human rights, the rights that each of us as individuals have, come not from the government, but rather from our creator. Yes. And that we are endowed by that creator with those rights.

And among them, as the Declaration said, are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That was incredibly radical in 1776. But John Adams, our second president and very active in the revolutionary effort, he pointed out that the revolution really didn't start in 1776 or even 75. when Lexington and Concord happened, it had been percolating in the hearts and minds of the colonists for many years. And what happened in 1776 was really the culmination of an intellectual and a religious revival in the country that put us on a path to found a nation based upon freedom.

Yes, yes. The Great Awakening had a lot to do with that, didn't it? Yes, it did. And if you haven't seen the movie that came out on Easter Sunday called a great awakening, I strongly recommend it. I think it's well. I haven't seen that. I'll have to look for that. Yeah. Oh, it's historically accurate. It is uplifting. It's just a magnificent film. I think the best of the year so far. And that's the key. You know, so many of us when we talk about, we have this term Christian nationalism bounced around. A lot of people mean a lot of different things about it.

When I talk about it, and when I talk about America being a Christian nation, it's because it was based on these fundamentally Christian ideas, that there's not some master race or chosen people ethnically, but that all men are created equal and that we have, should be held equal before government as well as before God. And so those are fundamentally Christian ideas. And that's really, you talk about it being radical back then. It's still radical today, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. And there's no denying that Christian ethics, the Christian message, the Christian message was profoundly influential at America's founding. I would hasten to add, though, that didn't mean that the founders created a theocratic state. That's right. They didn't even mean

that they were Christians necessarily, right? Yeah, that's the other thing that people will do. They'll nitpick that. And I said, no, it's really a reflection of where the culture was, wasn't it? Yeah. What they wanted was a society in which government was not involved in religion. And the last thing they wanted is for government to start. set up or establish a favored religion. So they believed in religious freedom, irrespective of how firmly their personal Christianity may have been. And they were, you know, they represented quite a spectrum. Yes, that's right. And a lot of that stuff was born out of experience, of course, that people had had. We're going to, as many people have said, experiences in expensive school,

but it's the only one of full will attend. So because we can't learn the history lessons that the things that they suffer that gave them such respect for due process and search warrants and all the rest of stuff, including religious liberty, because so many of them had been hectored and jailed and many other things happened to them because of a state-associated religion. And that was very fresh on their minds. You had different states that had set up an official state religion, but they did not want to have one that was going to be dictated to them from Washington. And so that was really the key thing.

They knew how that would be wielded against people who were Christians. Yeah, that's right. And in England back in those days, there was even a tax that everyone had to pay for the Church of England. And, you know, you may have had some disagreements with the Church of England, but you paid a tax for it anyway. And our founders said, enough of that. Let's keep a government out of religion. and they were right when they also noted that faith in God will likely thrive in the absence of government intervention. That's right. Absolutely did.

As a matter of fact, that's the thing that Thomas Jefferson is so proud of, the fact that he broke that connection between government and religion. And I remember when my sons were young, we used to go up to Williamsburg all the time. We lived in North Carolina. And they had an excellent reenactor who did Thomas Jefferson, and he would speak. And whenever we spoke about that, I spoke about religious liberty.

I would raise my hand and ask a question. I said, so do you see any connection between some states that have government-sponsored religion? I said, I may not be forced to send my kids to attend that, but I still have to pay for it, even though I disagree radically with what they're teaching. Yeah, yeah. And, well, you're right.

Even the colonies, right up to the moment of the Declaration of Independence, had some state recognized and subsidized churches. But the federal government that our founders created provided for no government involvement or subsidies of any particular faith. They thought that was a dangerous path to follow. So why can we take away from this today in terms of looking at the lessons of this? Of course, it's great to go back and look at great men. And as you point out, it was unprecedented what happened in the American Revolution.

typically when you have a revolution, it's kind of like the Who said, meet the new boss, same as the old boss, right? You wind up with a different group of mafia that's ruling over you. And that was another thing that was very Christian about the American Revolution, because the people who were the leaders of it did not seek to have that power. George Washington stepping down after two terms and so forth. They did not clutch that kind of power. And they think they really saw themselves as servants to the public,

which is another Christian principle that you don't lord. over people, but you become the greatest among you become the servant, right? Yeah. Even George III, the king of England, said that Washington was a great man. And why? Because when tempted by the offer of being a king, he turned it down. He turned it down twice, and he walked away from power after two terms as president. So he set a remarkably a really good example as our first president, just as he did as our commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Yes.

It's a shame that we've lost those lessons, isn't it? People who don't respect that, even when there's a law that is there, they tout about how they're going to overthrow that. We have come a long ways, haven't we? You can put your picture next to George Washington on a meme, but you're miles away from him in terms of your attitude toward government, right? And that's the main reason I wrote the book because I thought Americans needed a refresher in an easy-to-read, very accessible fashion, to once again hopefully become passionate

about the things that made America so exceptional right from the very beginning. That's great. Yeah, I imagine it's going to be very popular with homeschoolers. It sounds like exactly the type of thing we would have looked for when we were homeschooling our sons. Yeah, I think so. It is very accessible to anybody from probably junior high school age on. And you can read any one chapter and put it aside and pick it up later, skip around if you want.

Each chapter is a standalone, but it deals throughout with the key events, ideas, and personalities that made America what it is today. That's great, yes. And of course, it's available wherever books are sold, right? And again, the title... Amazon has it for sure. Okay, great. And the title is Born of Ideas. That's the main title.

Subtitle is how principals, faith, and courage forged America. So take a look for that. I think you'll enjoy reading that. I think it would be a great educational resource for you or for anyone, especially if you're homeschooling. But let's talk a little bit about some of your other books, because you've got eight books, and a couple of the titles really caught my eye here.

One of them is seven principles of sound policy. We haven't had too much of that lately, have we? What are your seven principles of sound policy? That was a booklet. Oh, okay. Or kind of an essay. But yeah, it's been very popular. The seven principles begin with one,

maybe the most important of them all. And it reads, free people are not equal. And equal people are not free. That's good. And they kind of shake your head at that. say what, I thought equality was a good thing. Well, it is, if you're talking about equality before the law, the law should be blind to things like your color, your place of origin, the income you have, that kind of thing.

It should be fair and impartial for everybody. But economic equality, which that first principle refers to, is a very different thing. It says that as long as people are free, they're not going to be equal economically. Why should should they be? We're not equal in terms of the talents that we have. We're not equal in terms of even putting our talents to their best uses. We're not equal in terms of how long and hard and smart we work. We're not equal in terms of what we save and what we spend and what we invest. There's any number of reasons of why unequal people will generate unequal incomes in a free marketplace. And that isn't something to be lamented, to the extent it reflects the differences in us all. It's something to be celebrated.

That's right. But it's the second half of it. Let me just inject into that and say, you know, that's one of the things whenever I looked at the French Revolution, see their slogan, liberty, equality. It's like, wait a minute. Yeah. I absolutely, totally agree with you. That's really well said.

That's very important for people understand. Oh, thank you. And if they're not sure of that first half of that first principle, the second half of it, really drives the point home. Equal people are not free. That's right. Here's what I mean by that. If you came to me and said,

Mr. Reed, I've just been from a country where everybody is equal economically, and no matter what they contribute to the marketplace, they're all making the same, the wages are the same, their material wealth is all the same. I would say in response that without knowing anything else about that place,

it has to be a very unfree place. How could you possibly make people equal economically? You'd have to tell everybody, don't excel. Don't be better than anybody else. Don't be there first with something the customers want. Don't be better at servicing your patrons. Don't invent or innovate or do anything ahead of anybody else. I mean, what kind of a society would that be?

It would be a society of stagnation. Yeah, it'd be Harrison Bergeron all over again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this is why, and every time I hear somebody refer to the common man in a very complimentary way, I say, you know, I know what you mean by that, but I think it's the uncommon among us to whom we owe the greatest debt of gratitude. And as a parent, I sure hope you're not telling your children, hey, work hard because someday maybe you can be common. You know, that's kind of child abuse to tell a child, you know, don't strive for. anything beyond the average, just blend in with a mob. And we should want our children to be uncommonly good, uncommonly generous, uncommonly talented, uncommonly focused on a strong work ethic.

I mean, it's the uncommon, like those who founded this country, that we should be most grateful for, not the mob. I agree. Yeah. When we look at things like universal basic income. Yeah. That's just communism. And it is so antithetical to human. nature. It would be so incredibly oppressive. You'll own nothing, but don't worry, we'll take care of you like a pet or something. So dehumanizing. Yeah. I have a chapter in the book. I think it's number two or three about the socialist experiment that the pilgrims employed for their first year or two. And that was by terms of the contract with their investors who thought they should do this to make the colony thrive. What they had to do was to put anything that they grew

anything that they produce into a common storehouse, and then it would be distributed equally to everybody. But within a couple of years, Governor Bradford, you can read his diary. He explains, he says, what happened was that a lot of people just became lazy, slackers. They slept in. They didn't show up in the fields to work because each of them felt that, hey, why should I work when I get just as much as the guy who does? And so they had to, facing starvation, they got rid of the socialist communalism.

that they tried at first. Yes. Yeah, that is a great motivator having a crisis with that, isn't it? But yeah, it is, you take away that incentive for people to actually work. And by human nature, people will just default to that. And I think that is really the fundamental flaw as well, you know, not only communism, but also the technocracy that they're trying to establish and impose. I think all of these things are just dehumanizing and degrading.

and we've seen how that operates and practice under communism. It's not even a theory. You know, you can take, I mention all the time, the fact that you have two countries, Germany and Korea, you split one of them up east and west, you split the other one up north and south. Same people, same talents, basically, you know, same pool of people.

And look at the difference when you just change the economic system between those two. Yeah, totally. Whenever I hear somebody talk like a socialist, I'm quick to tell them, hey, what's to keep you from doing that now? There's no law that says you can't go door to door in your neighborhood and ask each of your neighbors,

hey, can we just put all that we produce and all that we earn at our jobs into a storehouse and then equally distributed to each of us in the neighborhood? You can do that, but you wouldn't get any takers. That's why socialism ultimately must rely upon force because it's such a rotten idea that a few people will do it voluntarily for very long. You have to impose it on.

Well, you have had some people who have been foolish enough to try it in communes like the Oneida commune and other things like that. They typically failed. Yeah, every one of them. Yeah, we had more than 100 of them in the 19th century in America alone. None of them lasted even five years. So they kind of blamed the fact that the parents were not brought along. The kids were being miseducated by the parents. So they decided what we need is government school.

Yeah. And now we're looking for ways to help parents escape them. Yes, that's right. Well, your book is definitely needed, and so is the Southern one here as well. And I want to talk a little bit about was Jesus a socialist because we're seeing the rise of socialism so much so in the Democrat Party that even Democrats who have always considered to be a socialist, even they're concerned about it.

As I've said so many times, the Democrats of my youth today, are now become communists and the Republicans that now become socialist. This real leftward drift, I think, of central planning. I'm maybe not socialist, but maybe in the economic sense, fascist, in terms of combining government and business together. But I think what we're seeing is because of the obvious central planning aspects, and the planning is basically causing a redistribution, concentration of wealth of people who are connected politically.

And so that kind of open corruption, I think, is really paving the way for a lot of resistance of people who don't see the bigger economic picture, as you point out in your books. And they just look at this with resentment and with envy. And I think the current administration is really pushing us down the road to socialism in a big way in terms of a reaction to it, even if you ignore some of the aspects of government ownership of companies that Trump has done in a big way. Yeah. Yeah, as a believer in free market capitalism, I too oppose anyone using their political connections to get something at someone else's expense, to go after, to have government go after their competition, to freeze or rig the market, that kind of thing.

That's not free market capitalism. That's a kind of socialism in which government power is pushing people around and determining winners and losers and so forth. That's right. So true free market capitalism means government is a referee. It's a night watchman. It disciplines the misbehaving among us who threaten the lives of the property of others, but it otherwise doesn't rig the market by subsidizing or protecting anybody. So I'm against all that stuff too. Of course, now in the last week, as you and I are speaking here,

we've had tariffs come up big time. We've had the tariff wars. call him tariff tantrums because he does it when he's angry. But we've had that happening with Canada. And we also had Trump tacitly admitting that tariffs increased the price of products when you look at what's going on with the beef stuff. And of course, you know, many of us were talking about this till we were blue in the face that, of course, a tariff is a tax. And of course, it's going to be paid by the consumer. Talk a little bit about that. That's right. And it isn't always the best way to get the other side to

change their trade policy. Often it just leads to retaliation. Barriers go up on both sides, and as consumers, we pay the cost. So I'm a free trader, although I recognize that the world is not a fair place all the time. And I also recognize that unfairness isn't just something that foreigners do to us. We do it to them too, you know. That's right. In fact, one of the things in COVID, the years, we've really disadvantaged many farmers in poor countries in Africa. Why? Well, because we sometimes subsidize American grain, and other times we send it to those countries as foreign aid for free. Imagine you're a poor farmer in Zambia, in Africa, and you're trying to make a living, growing grain, and here comes a boatload of free American grain in the name of helping your people.

Well, that's just going to put you out of business. I guess the cattleman can relate to that. I think American cattlemen can relate to that this past week. I can see if that's going to happen. We should be very worried of imposing these costs on consumers because they usually backfire. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. And it is kind of interesting, the justification, the shifting justification for unilaterally imposed terrorists by the executive, which I think is an incredibly dangerous precedent.

But, of course, part of that has been, you know, when you talk one of your essays with the great myths of the Great Depression. Now, of course, one of these, I think, will probably be the impact of the Smoot-Hawley-Therfact. That many people would say that caused the Great Depression. Others would say it exacerbated. What do you think about that? Because now Trump is pulling that back up, and that is the basis of his attack against Canada. What do you think about the Smoot-Hawley-Ther-Fact and the impact that had the Great Depression?

Soon. Smooth Holly was very damaging. It raised tariffs to an all-time high and virtually closed the borders, stimulated an international trade war as foreign governments retaliated by raising their tariffs. This was in June of 1930 when President Hoover signed it into law. Now, you might think, well, we were already in depression in June of 1930. No, we weren't. We had a stock market crash the previous October. And by the spring, we had. had unemployment of about 8%. That's not a depression yet. That's a recession.

And the stock market had already regained half of the ground it had lost. So we might have had a recovery from that crash, except the downward slide accelerated when Hoover virtually closed the borders with Swood Hawley. So it took a recession and made it a depression within the year. I agree, yes. And so, you know, when we look at, I've argued that Trump is trying to make America Great Depression again. So what parallels could we see from the Great Depression and some of the myths that were

there about the Great Depression and apply that to today's environment that we have? We know the biggest myth, perhaps, about the Great Depression is that for some reason or somehow capitalism, freedom, free markets, you know, whatever you want to call it, that all of that is what caused the depression, and then government had to come in and do all sorts of things under both Hoover and Roosevelt to save us. Yes, that's the textbook.

Nothing could be further from the truth, the seeds of the Great Depression. I agree. That's what they tell you in the textbook. Yeah, exactly, and it's dreadfully wrong. The seeds of the Great Depression, yeah. The seeds of the Great Depression were sewn by a crazy monetary policy of the Federal Reserve from 19.

1924 until early 29, the Federal Reserve pumped up the money supply by some 66%. I mean, it fostered an unsustainable boom. Those of us who were around in the 2008 collapse will wonder if that's an echo. Yeah, it's like deja vu all over again, isn't it? So we had them. Exactly, like Yogi Beres said. But yeah, we had this crazy monetary. policy helping to fuel an unsustainable boom.

Now, we had good things happening. The Coolidge administration was cutting tax rates, which was a good and healthy thing to be doing. But the monetary policy was very inflationary. And then they didn't just quit doing that. Starting in 1929, the Federal Reserve completely reversed itself and began contracting the money supply. And they contracted it between 29 and 33 by about one third.

I mean, so the whole thing was like, you know, you run over a man with a truck, and then you decide that the way to help him out is to put it in reverse and backup over. It gets hit both ways. That's what monetary policy did. And then it was aggravated by Smoot-Hawley, and then all the interventions of Franklin Roosevelt that prolonged the depression by another seven years. Yes. And we're seeing so much of that now.

When we look at the whiplash effects of these tariffs, they're on again, they're off again. oh, it's 100% now it's down to 10% and so forth and so on. That is the thing that in and of itself would be destructive. Regardless of what the actual rates are, it's the constant changing of them. That is even more damaging, isn't it? Oh, that's right. Markets, business people hate uncertainty. Uncertainty is what keeps them on the sidelines.

Makes them think, well, gee, I can't take a risk and invest in a new plant or that expansion, hire a lot of people. if the future is so cloudy because of these crazy policies. And that's what we had through the Roosevelt years, a kind of constant uncertainty. President coming out who promised to cut taxes when he ran in 32, but instead Roosevelt will take tax rates to all-time highs. And then imposing all kinds of silly controls,

paying farmers not to grow crops, destroying crops that were perfectly healthy. and crazy other things that kept the Depression going until the end of World War II. Yes, I agree. You know, I skipped over. We started talking about liberty and equality. That was the first principle. You got seven principles. I didn't get to hear the other six.

Give us those a little bit quickly. I'd be remiss if we didn't do that. Okay, I'll run through them kind of quickly. And this is from memory because I wasn't expecting this, so I don't have it in front of me. But I think my second one was, what's yours you tend to take care of. What belongs to everybody or nobody falls apart. Yes.

Think about that. This is basically the principle of private property. If it's yours, you tend to take care of it because you have a vested interest in it. You don't trigger it away. Always there are exceptions, but as a rule, if it's yours, you take care of. When you rent a car, do you know anybody who ever rented a car and washed it when they returned it? I mean, it's not yours, but you wash your own car, but you don't wash the rental car. That's right.

Or take care of it. You drive it like it was stolen, right? Exactly. But you know, it's on this simple principle of private property that an economy can rise or fall. If you want to destroy an economy overnight, just take stuff from people to whom it belonged and give it to people that it doesn't belong to. and, you know, violate the principle of private property. Nobody takes care of somebody else's property as carefully as he takes care of his own.

That's right. In fact, that's another of the principles, although slightly restated. With regard to spending, one of the seven principles is nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. We've got 40 trillion reasons to show that that's true, don't we? Oh, my gosh, yeah. That is evidence of the truth of this particular principle that if it's somebody else's money, it just isn't spent with as much care as if it's yours. That's right.

And let's jump back over to the Depression thing again. One of the things that was not there during the Depression was this crushing debt, was there, that we have now. That's something is very different. Yeah. The debt did soar, especially during World War II. but as a percentage of gross domestic product, today's debt now is just about, if not already, slightly higher than it was at the height of World War II spending.

Just imagine where the debt would go if we had another major conflict in the world. Or another depression. I mean, we're not positioning ourselves very well to get through difficulties like that. Not when you go into such problems with a $40 trillion national debt. Yeah, that's right.

So, yeah. That in of itself is a crushing thing, and I think we're going to find out about that in just a couple of years. You've got a lot of people who are opining about that, Ray Dalio, and many others are talking about the death spiral of the dollar because of the debt spiral going up. Yeah. Well, you know, so many Americans think that the debt issue, though they may regard it as serious, they think it's a future problem. Maybe they'll be gone and their grandkids will have to mess with it. No, it's becoming a present problem quicker and faster every year because the interest on the debt is beginning to crowd out. Other spending, some of which is good, some is bad, but we're spending now a trillion dollars a year just to pay interest on the national debt.

So I see these stories in the paper about are we running out of ammunition in the war with Iran? And I'm thinking to myself, well, if we are, maybe the fact that, that we're spending a trillion of federal income just to pay interest on past spending, past debt. Maybe that's one of the reasons. So a nation can drown itself in its past debts and ignore current and future needs because too much money has to go to debt service. That's a serious issue we have to face. I agree. Yeah, I'm not really sure, you know, exactly what they're planning is, but I don't think it's anything good.

When you look at what their options are, we had the very beginning of the Trump administration. You had some noise come out from Doug Bergam, Secretary of the Interior, Lutnik, and Bessent, saying, you know, we've got a lot of assets in public lands, you know. So maybe they're just going to sell all that stuff off or tokenize it or something. I don't really know what they think they're doing. They don't seem to be concerned about it, actually, based on their actions. No, and in the past, when nations have gone through horrific financial crises, you see the same phenomenon. right up to the moment that, you know, the whole thing fell apart, you had politicians saying,

don't worry about it. Or like John Maynard Keynes, the British economists once said, in the long run, we're all dead anyway. And so is the dollar, right? That's right. Yeah, I know. I was raised on his macroeconomics nonsense. It never made any sense to me at all. I thought it was nonsense from the very beginning.

But, of course, now we got something even worse, the modern monetary theory, I call the magic money tree. That's a good way to refer to it. Yeah, the idea that you can just spend any quantity of money because you can just print it up and all will be well. And that is an abdication of fiscal sanity and responsibility. I agree. And we have people from both parties now saying,

you know, the real problem is we've just got to raise the debt ceiling. I've seen that from both Republicans and Democrat, Elizabeth Warren was saying, I've seen that from several Republicans as well. That's the only real issue we've got is we've got a debt ceiling. Let's just get rid of it. Yeah, and how many in Washington are coming up with a list of things we ought to be cutting? In fact, one of the two parties, you see a little bit of that in one party, but the other one just has a laundry list of multi-trillion dollar new spending,

as if we don't have a $40 trillion national debt. Nobody ever says, let's cut something dollar for dollar before we add to our spending. They just think it's so limitless. Oh, yeah. There's absolutely no way out of this except some kind of a strange default. But as you point out, everybody thinks everything is fine until the very end. It's like what Hemingway said, you know, has somebody really rich go bankrupt gradually, then suddenly. Yeah. That's the way it often happens, yeah. Let's talk a little bit about your book, was Jesus a socialist? Because, again, I've seen the, and I'm sure everybody has seen this as become an anecdote. We'd ask a lot of kids in school, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.

Did that come from the Bible? And they say, yeah, that's one of the Bible. Oh, my gosh. Not my Bible. Yeah. Lord helps those who help themselves type of thing, right? But, yeah, that's not in there either. But let's talk a little bit about was Jesus a socialist, and does he support that?

Yeah. You know, this question is really a current. one, its answer depends on a couple things. One, how you define socialism. And secondly, how well, how thoroughly, you've read the New Testament. I find that a lot of people who make the claim that Jesus was a socialist, would you ask them, well, give me some passages, you know, where he endorsed the central planning of an economy, or robbing Peter to pay Paul, or government ownership of the means of production? You know, they never have one to cite. socialism is not simply helping people.

I mean, I'm amazed at how many people think, oh, socialism, yeah, that means you're concerned about the poor, you're helping the needy. Well, there's more help for the needy and the poor under capitalism than they're ever under socialism, even our foreign aid programs, which I have a lot of problem with. If you look at them, the flow of funds is from capitalist countries to socialist ones. They're the ones that need to be bailed out all the time. They're the ones dig themselves out of poverty. But if you read the New Testament carefully, you will find that there is no passage whatever

where Jesus is endorsing the objectives of what we call socialism today. He never says turn that over to the government. Let me put this way. If you came today to a meeting and Jesus appeared and he said to you and to the whole group, Okay, you know I said some things about the poor. What did you do about it? And if you raised your hand and told him, oh, I voted for the politicians who said they'd take care of that. I can tell you that he would not be a happy camper.

He would say, what? Robbing Peter to pay poll? I said, you do something for the poor. Not throwing it off onto somebody else. But if you raised your hand and said, well, I volunteered at a soup kitchen. I think Jesus would say, good for you, if you raised your hand and said, well, I actually hired a lot of the poor people. I started a business. I invented and innovated, built a customer base, brought things from all over the world and made them affordable to people, including the poor.

I was an entrepreneur, in other words. I think Jesus would praise you for that. But this business of just turning it over to the politicians, he would have nothing to do with. He's not into outsourcing, is he? No, no, not at all. And there is a passage in Luke where he's approached by a man with a redistribution request. It's in Luke 12, 13 through 15. A man approaches him and says,

Master, speak to my brother, that he divideth the inheritance with me. And Jesus' response is very instructive. He did not say, oh, you didn't get any. equal share? Well, we'll have to look into that and equalize things a little bit. No, what he said was, man, who made me a judge or divider over you? Take him and beware of covetousness. In other words, here's the son of God saying, what? You want me to steal from somebody and give it to you? Who made me a judge or divider over you? That's not why I'm here. That's right. He told parables, about 40 of them, and at least three have some strong economic content,

like the parable of the Good Samaritan, where a man comes upon another man along the road who's been clearly beaten, robbed, he's in terrible shape. What does the Samaritan say? He does not say to the man, oh, well, it's got to be a social program for you, or I'll put a word in for you with the emperor when I get to Rome. No, he immediately pitched in with his own free will and his own resources and helped the man. He didn't pawn it off onto anybody. He didn't steal from anybody to help the guy.

He did it through his free will and from his own resources. If he did it any other way, you know, turned it over to the government or just went on his way, we wouldn't call him the good Samaritan today. We'd call him the good for nothing Samaritan. So in my book, I have a lot of examples like, that. Some people say, well, Jesus chased the money changers from the temple, so he must not have liked people who make money. Well, what a leap. Take note of where he was when he drove the money changers away. He wasn't in a bank. He wasn't in a marketplace. He was in God's house. That's right.

And there's good reason to believe from the Bible that these were people who were taking advantage of those who came to worship. Yes. If you showed up at a a funeral and started playing, you know, happy days or here again with your kazoo, somebody's going to ask you to leave. And that's what Jesus did. He said, get out of here. That's not, this is not the place for that. That's right.

Yeah, I believe that, you know, what I've heard is that they would have to have their currency in the local, they'd have to have the right currency. They couldn't use a foreign currency. And so they had these guys set up there, the money changers, were changing it for them making excessive profits out of that. That was the other aspect of it. You know, we see what Christ has to say about money. He does talk a lot about it, but he talks about things like make sure you don't covet it,

make sure you don't have envy for other people, make sure you don't steal it, make sure you don't love it, you know, all these types of things. And so those are all aspects of socialism, really, if you look at it, the envy, the covetousness, and the love of money, you don't have to have money to love it and to idolize it, do you? No, socialists love to say that it's capitalists who are, you know, so sold on money and so into money all the time. And yet they're the ones that are always saying, it's your money we got to take. I mean, money is all they're interested in. They're not interested in the spiritual or economic growth of the individual through his personal initiative.

They're just interested in what's in your bank account. And if it's more than they think you ought to have, no matter how. worthy you were in earning it, they want to take it. So they're the ones that are absorbed with money, but not their own. They're absorbed with yours. That's right. And, you know, when you were talking about the example of the Good Samaritan, how he took it onto himself to do something about it, that is a very Christian principle that Alexis de Tocqueville saw when he came to America. Coming to America from socialist France, he was absolutely amazed that instead of creating some kind of a committee or some kind of a bureaucracy that was going to supposedly take care of a

social issue, but the people in the communities would just come together and do it themselves. That was one of the key takeaways of his book that really struck me when I read it. And that is something that we've lost in America. The idea that we can take care of these things, the attitude that everybody has is like, well, I gave it the office, right? I gave with my income tax deduction. And so the government is going to take care of it. and I don't have to do anything about it.

You know, one of my very favorite presidents of the United States was Grover Cleveland. He was president twice in the 1880s and 90s, and he vetoed more bills than all the previous 21 presidents combined. They were often attempts to grab money through the political process. And one of his famous vetoes was of the Texas Seed Bill. it would have appropriated $10,000, which is maybe a couple million today, $10,000 for drought-stricken farmers in Texas. He vetoed it, and in his veto message, he said, though the people may support the government, it is not the duty of the government to support the people.

And he went on to say, in America, we've always relied upon the voluntary charity of our fellow citizens to meet such needs. It makes no sense to launder our money through a distant federal bureaucracy and be grateful for the little bit they send back. Well, the Louisville paper in Kentucky supported President Cleveland's veto, and they said, we will prove President Cleveland right. We will raise voluntarily and privately at least as much money for those Texas farmers as he vetoed in that federal appropriation. Well, they not only did so, they raised about 10 times what the federal government, just that one newspaper in Kentucky. So they proved him right that Americans are exceedingly generous if you haven't been ripping them off through the government for 40, 50, 60, 70 percent of our incomes. I agree. Yeah. When you look at it, something is very similar to what we've seen with the, I would say, the dependency and the incapacitation that a welfare state breeds, right? you kind of pacify people.

You make them dependent on the state. And that's really what we're seeing with the charitable stuff. You're eviscerating that spirit of trying to help somebody, just like with the welfare state. You eviscerate the spirit of wanting to succeed and to get ahead in terms of improving your station in life. Yeah, if you've ever visited a national park, you get the hint by some of the signs

that even the federal government knows the harm of dependency. I've seen signs in National Parks and say, don't feed the animals. It makes them dependent. But somehow it's different when it's humans. That's right. You're absolutely right. Yeah, I don't live too far from the Smoky Mountain National Park.

And, yeah, you're right. Those signs are everywhere. The other thing that's there is if you've got a predator like a bear or something's getting aggressive coming at you, what do you do? You yell and throw stuff at it. And I've always used that as an example of what, we should do with our government when it gets aggressive with us. Yell and nothing.

Don't feed yourself to it, but throw stuff at it and yell at it. So sometimes that works. Remember Henry David Thoreau had a great line back in the 19th century. He said, if I knew for certain that a man was coming to my home to do me good, I would run for my life. That's right. There's nobody more dangerous than somebody thinks he's a do-gooder, right? That's amazing.

Well, you have a wealth of information, a wealth of experience. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And I just want to tell people again, the name of the book is the, let's see, born of ideas, how principles, faith, and courage forged America. And it sounds like an excellent book is something everybody needs to see because we've lost sight of so many of those principles and the founding principles of our country. I think we can talk about the Declaration of Independence as an anniversary. I don't really recall anybody in government talking so much about the Declaration of Independence

that we've just celebrated so much to you. I haven't really seen them stand behind the principles of that. I know that who was it that was at the 150th anniversary. I think it was a Calvin Coolidge who did an excellent essay about that, if I remember correctly. But we don't have anybody like that in government anymore, do we? No, he was a great president. And he knew the importance of the day. Declaration, and I know the speech you're referring to. Coolidge was one of our best. Yeah. Yeah, it's

unfortunate that people don't really talk about the principles. And I always, every time I look at the Declaration of Independence, it is kind of burned into my memory how they had us memorize the first half of the paragraph, the opening paragraph. They don't want you to think about that part. Therefore, we institute governments to protect those rights. And when they become destructive, it is our right in duty to alter or to abolish that government. They very carefully did not want you to read or memorize that second part there of that first paragraph. That's right.

Do we have maybe 30 seconds to add another note about Calvin Coolidge? We got as much time as you want. Go ahead. Okay. Many Americans, when they think of him, they think of the nickname that he got, a silent cow because they think, well, he didn't talk very much. Well, it's true that in social. occasions, you know, receptions. He didn't care for that kind of stuff. He thought it was a lot of

senseless small talk. He didn't say much. But he still holds the record as the president among our 47 who had the most public news conferences. If he was talking in that kind of venue as president, he could talk up a storm. But famously, at one of the dinners that he didn't really enjoy or a reception. A woman named Dorothy Parker was sitting next to him, and she said, Mr. President, I have a bet with a friend that I can get you to say at least three words. And he famously looked at her and said, you lose. God bless Silent Cal.

Yeah, he had intelligence as well. That's a big part of it, knowing when not. to talk. That's right. We should, he would, he would have done much better, I think, with social media than our current president does with social media. Maybe he talks a little bit too much. But he also had grace and dignity and he was a kind man. I just can't say too many good things about Calvin Coolidge. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's sorely missed, I think, as we look at that in our current crop of politicians. It's unfortunately, you don't have anybody like that to even choose from anymore.

They're not on the menu, are they, or the ballot? No. No, and that's, that in itself is a testimony against big government. The bigger it gets, the more nasty it becomes, the more corrupt it is. All this money sloshing around, all these powers that it's exercising on behalf of some and against others. What you end up having is a lot of good people give up on it. And how many good people that you know would you love to see as a senator, but they won't run because it's a dirty business. So then you end up with the worst of both worlds,

big government run by bad people. That's right. And again, you know, when you look at the perversion of the rule of law, it no longer is a guardrail for government, but it now becomes a weapon in their hands to wield against other people. And I think that's one of the reasons people don't want to run for it as well. They know that they're going to get hit with massive lawfare or maybe even prison over some trumped up charges or something. So, It has become a very corrupt system. When I look at the amount of money that is coming out of Washington, I've said for the longest time,

these astronomical amounts of money that are being spent on the elections. And again, you want to know why our debt is increasing that much? It's because we've got people who are collecting so much money when they run for office. When you look at the amount of money that we have for these campaigns, that is, I think, one of the best metrics of corruption that we've got. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, for the socialists or the left, liberals, you know, on that spectrum, it's really a racket. I mean, they like to come off as,

well, we're the compassionate ones because we want to spend money on them. But you dig a little deeper and you'll find them an awful lot of them. They're not motivated so much by compassion as they are by getting reelected. This is the scam by which they buy votes with other people's money. That's right. It's amazing when you, when you're looking at. at how they hang on to office. I mean, we've had so many people of both parties who have hung on long past their point of senility where they can't, they don't know anything and their staff is running it. We've even got somebody now who's hanging on to office even after he's died. That reminds me of something Mark Twain said. You know, he didn't like very many politicians,

and there was one in particular that he did not like, who passed away. And then famously, Twain either wrote or said, quote, I did not attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter indicating that I approved of it. That's funny. I just saw something on social media. Somebody said, Mitch McConnell is the only vegetable recently that hasn't been recalled.

So I guess that's kind of where we are right now. These people love power so much, they hang on to it throughout their life and beyond, I guess. is what we're looking at. I think that's a staff that's hanging onto it from the beyond. But that's a sad state. Our founders, this is all these things we've discussed, David, our reasons why our founders said about government, keep it small. I agree. I agree. And again, as we were talking about at the very beginning, based on some foundational Christian principles about the nature of man, and one of those natures of man that they understood was the idea that power corrupt.

going back to Lord Acton. And so they understood human nature. We don't understand that. It's amazing to me, Larry, when we look at what is happening across Western civilization, that all the lessons in the last several centuries have now been forgotten or have been countered by government schools to the extent that people don't value free speech. They don't value the due process. They don't value equality before the law.

They don't value any of this stuff. And so, of course, it is rapidly evaporating. And I think that's a key thing. that your book could help people with. Well, I sure hope so, and I hope more parents would take notice of what their kids are learning in school and what they're not learning. That's right. So many times, I think it's the sins of omission that the public schools are more guilty

of even than sins of commission. It's what they don't call them. That's probably doing us more harm. That's right. Yes, I always thought it was important when we homeschooled to tell them, okay, this is what the schools will tell you. Now, here's what's really true. That's right.

So we would teach the controversy and tried to do that as much as we could. But I think that is something to keep in mind. And again, it is very important to understand the principles of how we got here. What made our civilization great? And the fact that when we lose these foundations, we are headed to the dustbin of history. I think that really is true. So again, your book, hopefully, it will raise some awareness. Certainly you have done that throughout your career at Fee and at McAnaw,

public policy. So I appreciate all the work that you've done. And good luck to you. I hope this book has heard around the world. I hope it's the next common sense. Thank you so much. Thank you, David. It's been great fun.

I appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Making sense common again. You're listening to the David Knight Show. All right, joining us now is James Walton, and he is with the Prepper Broadcasting Network. And I think it's always time to talk about prepping, but no time more so than right now, as we can see, a lot of problems on the horizon.

And let's talk a little bit first. Thank you. Welcome, James. Tell us a little bit about what the broadcasting network is and what you have there. Right. Yeah. So, first of all, thanks for having me on, sir. I appreciate the opportunity.

Sure. And the prepper broadcasting network is a, what are we at, 2026. So it's a, it's every bit of almost 20 years old now, podcast network that's the at, It's been in the shadows for many, many years, man. It was started by a guy named Glenn Martin in Idaho. And when he jumped out in 2018, I jumped in as owner.

And now we are a 15 host podcast network. We have, I mean, hosts from all over the country that do shows on preparedness, on guns, on prepping, on politics, on, you know, all kinds of different things. And I don't know if there's anything like it. out there to be quite honest with you. We're on daily. We do about four shows per day. I go live a lot on there myself. And we also have, like I said, we have about an 18 year old archive that pulls from just some of the prepping grates. We have interviews with all the sort of, you know, one second after authors, Wesley Rawls is of the world. A lot of the big name preppers from back

in the day. We have a whole collection of Rick Arles. Austin from Doomsday Preppers Podcasts. We got quite the archive and we run that older stuff on each weekday. We run sort of an archived show because we have themed days on the weekdays. But yeah, essentially tons of prepping and homesteading and self-reliance podcasts. And we also have an audio drama. And we even run some late night AM radio from back in the day too. Let's talk a little bit about that audio drama. Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure. So one of our hosts, Sarah Hathaway started a, wrote, rather, a nine-book series called The Changing Earth series. And it's basically the big earthquake that cracks the world in pieces. And everything that once worked doesn't work. You know what I mean? So the main natural disaster is the earthquake. But that is quickly followed by humans behaving badly. You know what I mean? in the worst possible ways. America is sort of reshuffling into tribal sort of a piece of the government trying to stay together, a military aspect, and of course a lot of sort of Raider-esque party. And we took that whole book series, well, she took that whole book series and adapted it to basically lines and an audio drama with sound effects in the whole nine yards, man. And we all voice parts in the audio drama.

So, you know, if you listen to this, like people who really listen to PBN a lot, they listen to the audio drama and they can go, oh, that's so and so and there's so and there's Jordan, there's James, there's Dave Jones, and they hear us all. That's great. I'll tell you something of the hosts, man, they got, they got some pretty interesting skills. They do Russian accents and they do, you know, sometimes it's hard to recognize their voices. But it's a great time. That's great. We're five seasons in. Well, you know, I think it's really important when we do dramas because, and of course the government does as well.

They do a lot of prepping of us for what they've got coming up. You know, they do a lot of. Yeah. So I think when we see something acted out, it has a different kind of effect than if we just tell you straight off like a didactic thing. Well, this is what this is and so forth. Or even with a documentary, you know, we start to put something together. If you do something in a dramatized way, it really does sink in differently to people.

So I think it's a pretty valuable thing. Let's talk a little bit about when you can. contact me. He said there's some issues. You know, we look at prepping. You refer to something as the 100-year amnesia. What do you mean by the 100-year amnesia? Yeah, so

when I got started prepping, I had no idea what I was doing with anything in terms of like manhood whatsoever. I was a father. I was a husband. Brand new father. We had a big nasty hurricane and that big nasty hurricane really kind of, oh man,

you know, it was one of those sort of aha moment. And after getting into prepping, you know, and doing things like splitting wood and shooting bows and arrows and learning about wild food and foraging and all that kind of stuff, herbal medicine, herbal remedies, all this stuff starts pouring in. I was a chef in a past life, so I already had sort of this tether to cooking and ancient cooking and that kind of stuff. It just came very apparent to me like, we forgot everything. How did we forget? The real question was, how did we forget so much so fast? Yeah. It was like we literally hit our head.

It was 100 years ago talking about herbal herbal remedies was like, oh, yeah. Like I got jars full of potions in the other room in case you get a headache, in case you get a chest cold, in case you get. And then by the time I'm born in the late 80s, nobody knew anything. I mean, even my grandmother had like a aloe plant in the window. and that was her extent of knowledge in terms of that stuff. So it really was sort of like this rush of convenience and comfort that just wiped our memories of what was probably what, thousands of years of ingenuity and understanding of the planet that we just gave up on for like Campbell's canned soup.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I think it's analogous of what's going on. So I just always refer to it as that, the 100-year amnesia. I agree. I think it's analogous to what's going on with AI right now. and where people see this going. It's very easy. If you make something easy,

it's like the welfare states, another analogy I would say. If you make things very easy for people, you can lure them into a very passive existence where they become helpless. And I think that is a big part of the design. And I think that's happening very rapidly. We see that happening with AI.

I mean, even to go back to some of the, you know, the fact that we got the maps on our phones that take us everywhere. They used to have kids. cabby drivers in London who would do the knowledge. And they would drive around on all these little short little streets that are constantly

changing names. Yeah. And they would memorize that. And they could actually see that a certain part of their brain got larger, physically larger because of that. And then it shranked when they stopped using that. And they just started using GPS devices on their phones. I think that's a big part of it.

Imagine if that was the whole goal, right? Yeah. Just to shrink the brain size down to something nice and manageable, less rebellious, you know. That's right. that's a frightening thought. Yeah, here's some fluoride and yeah, exactly. We'll take care of it for you.

That's right. Yeah, we're the product of that. Yeah, when we talk about self-reliance, what does that mean today? What is modern self-reliance? Well, you know, because of that, the cool thing about self-reliance, I think is because of what we just talked about,

like it doesn't take a lot to make a big change, right? Like, it doesn't take a lot to feel really self-reliant. one of the one of the biggest moves that we ever made we had to fight for this um but we when we started keeping chickens we live in richmond city okay when we started keeping chickens and i realized that we were producing a like a viable protein source in the backyard that was to some degree renewable you know what i mean some degree it was standing on its own two feet and it was produce we were producing that that source of protein and to me that was like okay now we're getting somewhere You know what I mean, now we are definitely getting somewhere because we got we got protein.

Before then it's, you know, it's all the freeze dried food and the, you know, rice and beans and that kind of stuff. But I think through power, I think through water, I think through food. Those three things to me really seem to be, well, you know what? And in food, I should also say the ability to cook from scratch. You know, I think that's another big one that people overlook in terms of self-reliance. Like that's a huge one. that I just took for granted for a long time because of my training. I just, you know, when you can do something and do it sort of at will,

it's one of those things you don't, you take it for granted. But you can really control your life just through having some control, not even a giant solar array and all the power that you need coming from the sun, but just having a backup plan for power, I think really speaks to self-reliance. When the power goes out, you're not all the sudden, you know, at the hands or at the feet of some. some power company or whatever else's situation.

It is a storm down power lines, all that. And I think we can make big strides as people today because we are so dependent already and we are like built into the dependence, you know. Yeah. And just a little bit is a huge change, right? If you've only got two things and you've had another one, you've increased by 50%. So that's an encouraging thing. It's a very empowering thing.

You get that feeling. And I know what you're talking about with the chickens. We went through that as well. we started having chickens and then Karen started a garden and it's like this is great you know and and the food is so much better too that was the other thing about it it's just so much better than anything most certainly yeah yeah there are there are definitely small changes that you can make in your life to be not only on the road to self-sufficiency but also to be able to you know one of the crazy things that's changed lately is the state of the news. Like the state of the news in and of itself

is a depression, you know, and I don't know if people have recognized it as much. I recognized it a lot because I used to spend all my time on prepper websites, like 10 years ago, always on prepper websites. The economy's falling. A pandemic is coming. War is coming. War is happening. the political world or civil unrest is coming, all this kind of stuff that used to really just be the core of prepper news. And now it's everybody's news. Yeah. And the big difference is I was prepping.

So I would get hit with this wave of news by choice, feel the anxiety, feel the rush, all that stuff. But I'd say, you know what? All right, but we got our food straightened out. We're working on our power. We're working on this, working on that. What the average person, I think, doesn't understand is, that they're getting helped it every single day by like basically doom or news.

Yeah, that's right. And the big difference is they're not taking any steps to mitigate it. I don't even know if they know how to mitigate it. I don't even if they know that they need to mitigate it. But I think it is having an effect on people. I do. I think the overall like zeitgeist has changed so much from what day-to-day news consumption does that people feel largely hopeless.

I mean, that's what I see, especially from a lot of young people. It's sort of like nothing works. It's all, you know, it's all coming down, which is really not the case. Yeah. But it's just the state of the news right now. Well, you know, it's the sort of thing when we look at something that is a bad trend. I think we have to talk about that. And we need to face up to it.

We don't want to just be Pollyanna and say, oh, everything's just fine. Don't worry about it. But at the same time, as you point out, there has to be some kind of sense that there is an outlet, that there is something that you can do about it. When I look at politics, I really don't see. any solutions out there. But that's one of the reasons why when I talk about the news, I also talk about Christ, because that is the ultimate prepping that we have, I think. But there are things, certainly, we never know what's going to happen in terms of a natural disaster, in terms of a

government-made disaster or some kind of a deliberate attack or plot by our government. So we should always be aware of that. And that should drive us to seek out solutions. One of the reasons why I wanted to have you on. I think it's important to have, to just not look at the problem only, but to try to find some solutions. And so there are some things that we can do on our own. And I think that's something that you're addressing there at the Pepper Broadcasting Network. I think that's really important. And, you know, nobody is out of, nobody's out of Target.

Like, everybody can have an effect from cities all the way to the most rural areas. Big misconception is always like, what am I going to do? I'm right here in the city. I'm in the suburbs or whatever the situation is. But the reality is little things go a long way. Anything is better than nothing. You know what I mean? And I think a lot of people get bogged down by the fact that they don't have much money or they don't have the time or they're not in the right place to prepare.

And then they find themselves basically not doing anything. No, there's storm hits, another inconvenience, another, you know, whatever the situation is. Because now, in all honesty, now it's easier to prepare than ever. There are so many companies. there are so many accessible preps that you know you could never get your hands on 10 years ago that are just there everywhere medical kits are better you can buy jackeries at best buy you know what i mean keep your lights on like a lot of stuff is really accessible Walmart even sells emergency food i think and i think it really helped in that sense the silver lining of everything happened in 2020 who saw things being locked down

supply chains being broken uh it made it real for a lot of people i think And so just like we see with homeschooling, there's been a big move towards homeschooling because people were able to see better what was actually happening in their child's classroom. We're also now looking at the insanity of what happened. And, of course, it's coming back again. I just saw an article about the fact that toilet paper is getting in short supply because of Trump's war against Canada. So I guess every time it comes in, it's the excrement hits the fan scenario, I guess, every time he comes in. We're out of toilet paper six years ago, and here we are, deja vu again.

Do you bring up a good point, though, you know, I think that one of the things that preppers get a bad name for is stockpiling. And I think we've got to rewrite the sort of the mentality around stockpiling, you know, because I don't think, I think there is a point where stockpiling gets crazy, but if there's stores that exist like Sam's Club and Costco that are frequented by Americans by the millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions, then like this is not stockpiling. This is just something that works.

You buy two cases of toilet paper for $25 each. You never think about it. You know what I mean? And then when one goes away, you buy another one to sit on top of the old one, or underneath of the old one. And it's just one of these things where, and this mentality is what keeps me from going in.

same. And I imagine a lot of people are on some kind of antidepressant because they're living one can at a time and reading headlines like that. Oh, here comes the toilet paper fistfights again. So I guess I better buy some toilet paper tonight, you know? Yeah, run out right now and get it. Yeah, exactly. And things like that can just be easily, just easily. You know, another thing that we keep on hand all the time is like the dreaded, fallate filled plastic bottles of water. know what I mean, we always have them. And despite them getting a bad name, because you know what, you know what's worse than plastic bottle of water, no water. Or, you know what I mean? Or you get a message like they did in Minnesota a couple weeks ago, which was the water system's been hacked, and we think

it might have been hacked by Iran who we're going to war with right now. Yeah. You know what I mean? And now you're looking at the tap going, well, okay, I guess we got to deal with that. We just have a long list of suspects, don't we? I mean, you know, when we see something going down, It's either incompetence or malevolence. And if it's malevolence, we've got a long list of usual suspects when you go down that list as well. That is a good point. Yeah, it's one of the things that Jack Lawson, who I've talked about me, talked too many times, Jack Lawson books. He talks about the fact, just get started, get a couple of cans, you know, for cheap and put them under your bed if you don't have a place to put up.

It's just taking that initial little bit of a step. But I think another important part of it is, you know, prepping in terms of like you're talking about, being able to, you know, grow vegetables or have chickens or something like. Prepping in terms of skills and prepping in terms of relationships, isn't it? Yeah. Well, now you're getting into, so the stockpile mitigation kind of fights against the day-to-day headlines, the day-to-day stresses of life, what I call the personal apocalypses that occur, right?

So you lose your job. Lost the job, honey, we're in trouble. But you know what? We got food because we've stored food. We've got, you know, other things, stockpiled people. paper goods, that kind of stuff. So we're not completely in the red right off the bat. We don't got to go out and drop $200, $300 this week on groceries and we don't have to. But then what you're talking about now, I look at as sort of the next step, which is the moment

you realize that prepping, homesteading, urban homesteading, really is what we're talking about, just creates a much better life. I mean, it's an improvement of your lifestyle. You know, there's not a person on earth that doesn't want to walk out. out back into a yard and clip basil and, you know, pick fresh fruits and vegetables and go to the chicken coop and grab their fresh eggs and come in the house and make breakfast, lunch, and dinner with it. And it's just, it's one of those things that's a no-brainer. But in all honesty, like, I think our community is one of the, the prepping and homesteading communities are the ones that really push people to this better life, which is kind of ironic. You know what I mean?

Like, we're the ones that do it and show people how to do it. it and tell people why they should do it. I agree. And unfortunately, it works better to scare them to death than to try to shake them and tell them, hey, it's going to be way cooler if you grow your own food and raise some chickens and have your own eggs. They don't want to hear that. You know what I mean?

They'd much rather tell me the world's coming to an end and then I'll grow a garden and then I'll plant some local trees that grow fruit consistently. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's right. That's the reality of it. I mean, it is an interesting thing, but motivating people's. You know, there's a parallel there, I think. And that is, you know, when I talk about homeschooling, again, it's another one of these things that

changes your life, but in a much better way. You know, you put a little bit of effort in, and now you've got a closer net family, you've got kids that you can talk to. I think, you know, in the same way that we look at homeschooling, I think the same thing that you're talking about there in terms of homesteading is something that really speaks to innate natural needs that we have. Yeah. Well, it all fits under that sort of self-reliant umbrella that I, I think it just really resonates with Americans. You know, I can't speak for other nationalities, but I think there's something innate about living in America,

especially if you're born and raised here, where it's like there's a rebellious nature in you and there's a self-reliant nature in you. You know, I don't know if it comes from the founding documents and the principles, but there's just something about it resonates. You know what I mean? The more you can do for yourself, it's hard to get over the hump because you live you're you're sort of based in the comfort

and convenience of modern society but when you get over that hump you feel a feeling of like this is what I'm supposed to do you know what I mean like I remember splitting wood for the first time like you split wood with an axe and you're like immediately connected to something it's lost you know what I mean you're like this is a thing that we're supposed to do like we shouldn't have gave this up for a heat pump I mean the heat pump's great we have one of those too Yeah. There's something about it. You know, first time I shot like a re-served bow was the same feeling.

It was like, oh, man, why am, why do we stop doing this? You know, this is weird, weird things that we just stopped doing that to your point, you know, the homeschooling. Same thing. That's the way it was done, you know, in America, especially in the West. Like, you've got schooled by mom or your siblings. So I think touching them wires is more powerful than we give a credit. I agree. You know, always used to look at the, the, the Amishness, like,

what in the world are they doing? I just didn't get it. But now I get it. You know, I understand what they were doing. They cut it off at a certain period of time, not because they thought that it was some kind of demonic thing to have this device or that device. They were very deliberate in terms of what they did in trying to make sure that they did not become dependent on the outside world and become captured by the outside world. They want to have that kind of self-reliance where they could build the things themselves, grow the things themselves, and have everything they needed within their community. It's not that one person has to do everything, but they create a community that was going to be self-sufficient because they could see where things were headed. They could see

it way before I could see it. Yeah, yeah, I think it has a lot to do with that. I also think it has to do with like a stasis, like a literal human homeostasis. Like this is, there are certain things you can't pull from, take away from the human, or else you wind up with whatever massive percentage of the population is on antidepressant drugs. You know what I mean? I agree. Because I just think, you know, gender-related duties, they really fulfill you. You know, women get fulfilled by doing women things.

Men get fulfilled by doing traditional men things. And when the society or, I don't know what I mean, I'm not, I'm a fan of capitalism, but when capitalism winds up taking all the things that men are supposed to do and does it for them, it has an effect. You know what I mean? The world of too much comfort and convention. has an effect. And it takes something away from people that they need. Yeah, I've interviewed David Bonson several times. He's got a book talking about the value of work and the fact that God created us

to do work. I mean, work got more difficult after the fall, but we were created to do that. And so I think that is a key part of the innate desire to do these types of things. And why it feels fulfilling when we learn how to do them or when we engage in doing them. The passivity that is being pushed to us very, very rapidly. I think we're getting to the point now because things are changing so quickly. It's becoming kind of a lot more obvious to people how this stuff is taking us down. When you look at the massive advance and AI and how it is designed to take away so many different aspects and how it's taking away right now taking away creative jobs from people, but they aspire to pretty much take everything away from everybody and they're open about it.

And so when you look at that and you see how it makes people passive, you see that if you use this stuff, you don't get any sense of accomplishment when you do it. I mean, it can do when the types, when I do artwork and things like that, it does a much better job of fixing my photos than I could do in Photoshop in a very long time. But it's just not satisfying. Actually, the poor quality stuff that I used to do was much more satisfying than if I give it to AI and just say, remove that person over there on the right. You know, it just does it automatically for me and fills in a background. That's not a satisfying thing. You know, there's only so much that you can get from the end result. The process is a big part of it, I think.

And when you look at the kids and other people getting drawn into this thing and kind of an AI psychosis, I think that's just another example of this. It's kind of a mental illness after we stop working with our hands and producing and fixing things, right? 100%. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. You're given 24 hours and your body affords you a certain amount of energy to deal with that 24 hours. You know, if you sit at a desk all day and you don't work out and you don't do any work with your hands and feet, of course you're insane by the end of the day. You know what I mean?

It's like you're overflowing with some kind of energy that's created by your mind and body and no outlet. You know, we have four dogs, two boys and four dogs. Our house is basically like a, not a sorority. What's the opposite? Fraternity. My wife is a hockey player. It's like Animal House, right? It is like Animal House.

Literally. You've got four dogs. They're going to keep you busy and keep you moving, I'm sure. But, you know, if they're all pit bulls too, we love pit bulls. So like if you have a pit bull and you sit him on the couch all day, he'll be a menace by the end of the day. You know what I mean? And when I see people lashing out outside, I just see the same thing.

Same with our border collie. We've got a border collie. And you keep him busy. He's a great dog. He's very smart. But if you don't keep him busy, the devil has work for idle hands. Yeah. And he'll get in all kinds of, they get very destructive.

Yeah. When I see a purple-haired woman out there with a nose ring screaming at the ice or at a police officer at a justice person walking by trying to have you on a date, it's exactly what I see. Yeah. I see somebody who needs more stuff to do. You know what I mean? You got too much energy in there. You were put on this earth to do something other than scream at people as they walk by. And you're not doing it.

You know what I mean? And these are the repercussions and not meeting, you know, living to your fullest. I agree. Absolutely. And you can find that fullest in prepping. You really can. I mean, I think we have a lot of men listeners, but we have a lot of women listeners also. And they find a level of fulfillment in this stuff that is really surprising.

And in fact, in 2020, I saw the intuition of. women really take off. I mean, they were the first into the breach, it felt like to me, who were reaching out by an email and were like, I don't like the way this is going, James. This is like my husband seems to think it's going to blow over. I'm really nervous about it type of thing. And I saw a lot of that. I saw even my own wife who was, you know, married to me, but even she hurt his hair's sort of prickled up and she was talking to me about it and like, what are we going to do with this and this and this? So it was really interesting to see that. that sort of, you know, aspect of women that you can only cover up so much.

All this stuff you can only cover up so much with comfort and convenience. You know, and before long, things get bad enough and it all comes back out. And I think, you know, I think we're in some ways we're there. And I think it's also, you know, being able, as you pointed out, being able to cook from scratch, you know, you can't just go get stuff off the grocery shelf. And now people have an awareness of just how unhealthy the stuff you grab off. the grocery self is because they put in all kinds of adulterants in order to make the food move through the machines better. I mean, so you wind up eating the lubricants and all the rest of the stuff that's there as well, not just the original food that was there. They really adulterate it

over and over again. So there's an incentive now, you know, for people to find their own natural ingredients out there, make their own bread in some ways. And sometimes you want to make your own bread because you don't want the glyphosate that's being put into it, right? So, you're looking for different alternatives and you can't find them off the shelves. If you do find that kind of stuff, it's prohibitively expensive. So it's better to just do that kind of thing on your own and scratch. And I know that's the case with my wife. She's getting really interested in a lot of these healthier alternatives that you have to make for yourself.

Yeah. It's a way to go. It's a skill for everyone. You know what I mean? I know I just talked about gender-based duties or whatever, but cooking really is. It's one of those things like filing taxes and budgeting that it really should be built into the school system because every person should know how to cook for himself. You got to eat three times a day. Like the idea that you have to eat arguably two or three times a day.

And nobody like how many people start their life as an 18 year old to know how to cook anything. That's right. You know what I mean? They have no idea how to cook food. Men are like, oh, I hope I meet a woman who can cook. Dude, what if you don't? Like, what's your long-term plan here? You know, it's just, it's one of those things that can really,

it can really set you on fire with self-reliance because all of a sudden you realize, even if I don't have a garden, I can go to a farmer's market, I can go to a local butcher. I can get the best ingredients money can buy and cook whatever I want to cook every night of the week. And I also save tremendous amounts of money by not eating Chipotle all the time. which costs, you know, $60 for a family of four for rice and cheats. Yeah, it's amazing now. What's happened to the price of fast food?

And, you know, we see what is happening now with Trump in terms of tariffs. I mean, this stuff broke last week. And as everybody's taking a look at it, the longer you look at it, the worse it looks. Because we're not only harming the farmers who have the way to make this work in the long term. And it's the antithesis of everything that Trump. has been saying he wants to do, right? He wants to put up walls and tariffs at the border to make sure that we are somehow completely self-sufficient within the political borders of the United States. And yet what he's doing to the farmers and the ranchers is exactly

the opposite. I mean, he's just hollowing them out. And his own imports are really an admission of that, I think. But people are concerned about it. Yeah, the imported beef situation you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. And as people are looking at some of the stuff that's been coming in, they just had a massive recall in the last couple of months of beef from Argentina, both in the United States and in China. Are these reliable, safe sources of food? Why can't I go down to my neighbors who have cows and why can't they feed and finish their cows and slaughter their cows? The government comes after you when you do that. I mean, we saw that happen with Amos Miller, the Amish farmer who was up there. And there's

absolutely no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to do that type of thing. All that is is regulation. And I think that, I think, well, I hope that someone in his administration is going to get his in his ear and let him know that. I mean, it could literally be ignorance because, I mean, you're only one guy. You can only know so much about any. That dude knows a lot about a lot. But I don't, you know, he's definitely not a pro-regulation president from what I've seen.

So I could see if someone tells him what the real deal is, what's really going on, we could really cut the cost, which is getting around the government regulation that doesn't allow farmers to butcher their own meat and sell it. It's got to go through a packing facility or I don't know what exactly it is, but it has to go away and come back. You know what I mean? And you've got to pay for that. So then I got to pay for that and you got to pay for that. And the Rangers have been saying that that is, you know, they're taking the lion's share of the profit, you know, when they do that. it would be far more efficient if we could have our food that is locally grown and processed locally. There's absolutely no reason why they need to prop up these quasi-monoplies, you know,

oligarchies or whatever, but that's exactly what they're doing. And when I look at Trump, it seems like, you know, he'll talk about regulation, but really what he's looking at, I think. When we look at Doge and things like that, you have a reduction in the number of employees that are there, but you're not really reducing the regulations that are there. And if you keep those regulations in place, what I think they're expecting to do is to have a system of surveillance and automated enforcement where they can still keep those regulations there. But they just have fewer employees that they have. That's just my take on it, what I think is happening with it. I don't really see a sense that they want to free us up.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's a weird thing because one of the areas with Trump that always makes me nervous is the bottom line investment in the country. and this number that he seems really excited about talking about growing all the time, though we never see the fruits of whatever that number trillion dollars it is. In first year, I think he was touting like we had $12 trillion in investments or something along those lines into the country or 19 or I don't know what we did with it. Yeah. But I do know that most of it was AI, right, or a big chunk of it was probably war in AI if I had to guess.

And I don't know why it didn't go towards the. $40 trillion debt. I don't know what it went towards. Yeah, that's what's really growing. Yeah. The debt and the spending are growing, but not so much the jobs or the incomes, I think. Yeah. That's what makes me worry about things like what you're talking about with a growing surveillance state because you get a company like flock in the president's ear and say, oh, yeah, we can cut all kinds of employees and just put our flock cameras up everywhere and we'll have eyes on everything that's going on. Don't you worry? That's right. Yeah. Send out a drone to arrest people, right? armed drone. And I think that is coming. I mean, they're weaponizing and practicing that at the

border. And of course, that's just going to continue to move in as they're in Atlanta, you know. Oh, yeah. Big time in Atlanta. That's where they're. I'm pretty sure they're remote, right? They're remote-controlled dog robots patrolling Atlanta, Georgia. And that's where a flock came from. So, you know, their headquarters. I don't know. A weird place, huh? Is that that Georgia is like a weird? I feel like there's a portal open in Georgia. Evil's just pouring out somewhere in that place. Maybe it's Georgia Tech. I don't know.

I was going to go to Georgia Tech at one point in time. I feel like 20 years ago, I was like, we might need to move to Georgia. That is the place. And now I'm like, oh, my God. Well, I used to feel the same way about North Carolina, too, though. North Carolina seems to be crazy as of late. Yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, I've spent most of my life in North Carolina.

We're in Tennessee now. But North Carolina was always this back and forth with Democrats typically in control, but with a Republican insurgents that was there. But they've had some really crazy stuff happening there. But when you look at Atlanta, the guy who created Flock, he's not that old. I mean, he's in his late 30s. And he and some buddies from Georgia Tech. And the crime was pretty bad in the inner city, they said.

So they started coming up with some tech solutions. That's his story as to why they did that. But, yeah, it's not the path that I want to see America go on. And it is really, we've seen with the approach that, and this has really been a bipartisan approach. I mean, certainly Biden used lawfare against Trump. And now he is returning the favor to all those different people. And when you look at what he did with the guy who's now his director of national intelligence, he used him to ferret out information from individuals.

And I'm not supporting these individuals or anything that they did. What concerns me is the idea that you can use AI to go back. I can audit people. You can say, bring me the man, and I'll find the crime. That's a very dangerous thing. Yeah, that's communist ideology, unfortunately. That's right. Yeah, because we're all guilty at some point, right?

I mean, depending on who's behind the controls. That's right. Well, yeah, there was a guy who wrote a book a few years ago. His name was Harvey Silverglade, and it was three felonies a day. He said the laws become so complex that most people don't know that they're committing, on average, about three felonies a day. And we look at the things that they charge people for as felonies. I think he's spot on, actually.

Yeah, I could see it. Yeah, I don't think that's an exaggeration. I can definitely see it. I think that the, you know, the, if anything like a revolution is to occur in the country, then, you know, food, water, power. You better have some stability in those categories. You know what I mean? That's another aspect of prepping.

It's any big change, any sea change, moment where protest is necessary and, you know, distribution is cut off. Another thing that's necessary is being able to self-sustain, you know, it's just one of those things. And there isn't a rebellious nature in the people of the United States, and they are only going to take so much. But without that base level preparedness, like, you can only hold out so long. Let me ask you about, yeah, let me ask you about generators and things on it. Because for me, I see that, and it's one of the issues in terms of fuel. And of course,

a lot of people talk about diesel and the fact that it's so much simpler fuel and you can kind of approximate it, I guess, with certain household items, unlike gasoline. Of course, when I looked at it in terms of a converting diesel car that we had a few years ago, there was some really hazardous chemicals

that you're not going to have sitting around on the shelf that you would also need to add to your diesel. I forget what it was, maybe benzene or something like that. But do you cover that on your, prepper broadcasting. I mean, what are people talking about with fuel? Is it mainly just kind of focusing on solar and wind as a power supply? I mean, there are methods that you can store gasoline for up to a year.

I think if you had concerns about long-term fuel storage, that you would create a system probably a month. One of the best ways to do it is to create a month-to-month system based on five-gallon gas cans or something along those lines, right? You have the can, you have the tape with the month on it, and you fill up 12 of them. And then you keep them, you know, obviously you use up what you use for the month for the generator, for whatever things you want to use. If you're planning on empowering a car, you're going to need much bigger containers, you know, fueling the vehicle for a year. But you can definitely keep a generator running with that backup gas.

And if you have to bleed, the thing about having the 12 cans is if you have to bleed into the next month to get through a disease. disaster or subsequent months, then you have that on hand. But it can also help you with rotation. Now, you have to put a product in there like a stay bill that you stir into the gasoline. It's cheap, but you start into the gasoline, and it keeps oxidation from killing it, basically. You know, within six months to a year's time, it'll be much less effective if you don't use the stay bill in it. So you can manage fuel in that way. There's a lot of generators nowadays, though, that are, they're like three fuel generators.

You know, so you can use propane, you can use kerosene, you can use diesel, you can use gas. What's another one? Proputane, right? There are generators that take multi-fuel now, which I think is really cool because then it gives you some options. You know what I mean? You can have 20-pound propane cans that you have for your grill that you can use to also keep the lights on things like that. So there's a lot of options out there. I mean, the larger solar batteries, the larger basically just big batteries,

attached to solar panels, they're incredibly effective for short-term power outage. I mean, really, really effective at turning lights on, turning TVs, routers on, bringing some level of normalcy back to the household while you wait to find out, all right, is this a four-hour problem, a 12-hour problem, a 12-day problem, you know? Yeah, we've been in this situation. We were without power for several days in North Carolina when a hurricane came through there. I wasn't really too worried about it because I'd grown up in Florida. We had hurricanes that happened all the time, but the soil is so different. And North Carolina, it rained for a very long time.

We didn't have a lot of wind by the time we got there, but the soil was different, and it didn't absorb all of that water like it does in Florida. And so what happened, we started having trees that have been around for over a century, start falling in different places, taking down power lines. And it was really a domino effect, if you want to put it that way.

And we were out for about a week, I guess, at that point in time. That was a difficult time. But the guy who's doing the, who's doing the recording today, Lance is, he was looking into, what was it, wood gasification that you were looking to do? We had a listener who sent us a book about that. I really appreciate that. It got him interested in looking into it. In terms of fuel, it's going to keep your car going for a long time. You can actually run it on wood. It's not one of these things. So you can go out and get your fulfillment in terms of chopping and splitting wood. And then you can actually

with the right adaptations, you can run a car on that type of thing. It's pretty cool. Yeah, we had a guy who was trying to build a methane system for something similar. I'm nervous of that stuff personally. Yeah.

I'm not type A enough. I'm not type A. I'll blow myself up. You know what I mean? I'll make a mistake. So the gas thing is always no. Gasoline I can handle. Put a date on it, put a label on it.

That's good. That's clear. You can't mess that up too much. But, yeah. But there are, I mean, if you're willing to go head over heels in certain aspects of prepping, like you can get really self-sufficient, you know. I tend to stay away from that stuff just because I want people to feel like it's accessible. You know what I mean?

You don't have to be a scientist to keep the lights on. So when you do cover stuff, I mean, you've got all these different hosts. Do they have different specialties, for example? I mean, some of them kind of focused on food or what? Yeah, I mean, everybody has, everybody has, everybody's very capable, like all around very capable. But, you know, Jordan is really sort of the master of the fiber work. She does a show called Phoenix Survival and she knows how to turn fur into clothing. She can do it.

She does it. She teaches people how to do it every year at Prepper Camp. And, you know, that would be her kind of takeaway. We have a guy on the network. You guys would probably love to interview him. His name's Dave Jones, the NBC guy. And he's a nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare major from the Army retired, who, you know, you know what he knows about. So he's great.

Sarah Half the way, the book, the author, you know, I think her superpower is not actually her writing. I think it's her self-defense. She has a really story past in martial arts and a real past. for kidnapping and human trafficking, and she combines those two things. Stopping those things. Yeah, using one to stop the other, and it's really powerful. So, yeah, I mean, across the board, you know, I'd say that each host is really capable

in terms of all the categories of preparedness and homesteading, but some of them do have specialties, you know, for sure. Well, that sounds very interesting. And again, it is the Prepper Broadcasting. It's not network, but it's Pepper Broadcasting.com. That's the website, yes, sir, Preparbroadcasting.com. We're also on iTunes, Spotify. Actually, Spotify is giving us a little trouble right now, but we will be on Spotify.

We will be updating. We have tons of shows on Spotify, but we're just not updating right now. Spotify is the only podcast place that has banned me, and they banned me a long time ago. Oh, really? Yeah, I got banned during the COVID stuff. I was telling people, I was telling people the truth. Yeah. Oh, I know.

We got thrown off YouTube for the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Me too. Yeah. Once for COVID and once for the 2020 elections, they were not happy with that. That's right. You know how it goes.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're Prepper Broadcasting Network. Just search it. But if you want to go direct to the website, we're all the podcasts update every day, that's prepper broadcasting.com. That's great. Well, James is great talking to you. Sounds like a great network and a great resources.

out there. And as you said, there is so much negative news. We don't want to just turn a blind eye to it. We don't want to be foolish about it. But we don't want to fixate on it either and not have a solution and to be productive about that. So I think it's where your network comes in. Sounds like a great service. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us your perspective on that. And it's another great resource for people look at it. Prepperbroadcasting.com. The common man. They created common core at dumb down our children. They created common past to track and control us. Their commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future.

They see the common man is simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has worth and dignity created in the image of God. That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation. deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It's time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you'll find at the Davidnightshow.com.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can't support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. The Davidnight Show.com.