The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - MedShare Donation + What Do Hurricanes and Political Factions Have in Common? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Click here to join Patreon and help us donate to MedShare: https://bit.ly/medsharepatreon Already joined the Patreon? You can also donate directly to MedShare here: https://www.medshare.org/ I know everyone wants constant updates on the upcoming US election, and if you haven't figured this out by now, that's not really my shtick. However, I will offer a couple factors that could influence the outcome of this election. Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/medshare-donation-what-do-hurricanes-and-political-factions-have-in-common

Hey everyone, Peter Zion here. If you are seeing this, you are about to view a free current affairs video despite not having signed up for my subscription service on Patreon. And the reason for this generosity is quite simple. I'm trying to bribe you. There are a lot of people in Western North Carolina, Northern Georgia, and most recently in Florida, that are suffering from various hurricanes, and they need all the help they can get. So anyone who signs up for my subscription service before the end of the month of our October, I will give every cent that I would have earned from those subscriptions for all of October, all of November, and all of December to a medical charity called MedShare. MedShare steps in to help people in their communities when for no fault of their own, they've lost the ability

to temporarily look out for themselves. Now, if you've been following me for a while, you know that I strongly support MedShare's projects in Ukraine, but at this point, there are needs closer to home. So again, anyone who signs up in the month of October, every cent that I would have gotten between now and the end of the year is going straight to MedShare. MedShare's headquarters are in Atlanta. They had the foresight to pre-position equipment and personnel before both Hurricane Helene and more recently Hurricane Milton. And they're already providing a combination of medevac, medical assistance, equipment assistance in order to help everyone in all of the affected areas. So please, please sign up. Every cent will go to them.

And if you don't want to sign up, you know, consider just giving them an independent donation just cuts. Okay, that's it for me. On with the video. Everybody, Peter Zine here coming to you from Washington, D.C. That is the Rose Garden behind me at the White House. And, of course, there's a new layer of security that wasn't here last time I was here, so you can't see anything. So instead, we're going to put the Treasury Department around at least it's a, you know, pretty building. Anyway, a lot of you've been asking me to give you an update on my assessment for the election,

and I'm just not going to do that. I gave my assessment two years ago. It was based on structural factors. The structural factors haven't changed. And if you want to blow by blow of what's going on, precinct by precinct, I am not the guy to do the hot tigs. But I will tell you two things. One on a micro fact that is likely to impact this election.

And the second one is on the broader trend that will affect future elections. So first, the micro effect. When Hurricane Helene rushed in from the Gulf, it did something that most hurricanes do. didn't do. And it can maintain significant strength even when it was a couple hundred miles inland. So normally when you have a storm surge and the tornadoes and the wind and the rain, you devastate an area of the coast. And then when it's time to pick up the pieces and repair the damage, the first thing you do is get the interstate corridors back up and running and then move on to the secondary roads.

And most coastal regions, particularly in the Gulf, are pretty flat. So that's not too hard to do. The devastation can be immense, but once you get the road arteries back up and running, things aren't so bad. But when you move inland and you start hitting the Appalachians, you're in a different situation. It's not flat. You don't have a grid network for roads

where they're all over. You have very specific roads following very specific corridors. And if you dump two feet of rain in those zones, the rain washes off the mountains, gets into the streams, river levels can raise by 20, 30 feet or more and wash everything away.

And that is exactly what happened in northern Georgia and western North Carolina. Now, in both cases, we were looking at years before the physical infrastructure is repaired and probably more than another month before you get a reasonable damage assessment. And why that matters to this election specifically is that Northern Georgia and Western North Carolina are among the reddest of the red areas in the country, and both North Carolina and Georgia are swing states this time around. So the idea that you can have several million voters and have a few hundred thousand that for whatever reason can't vote because of physical infrastructure

conditions in races where just a 10,000 votes might separate the winner from the loser, and you can see how that can tilt the election pretty easily. The second thing that's longer term is what's going on with organized labor in the business community, because right now neither of those factors are part of either major party. Donald Trump pushed the business community out of his coalition for being, from his point of view, unnecessarily disloyal. And the unions are kind of in flux between the Democrats and the Republic because they have kind of a foot in both camps but are not really committed one way or the other. If you remember, the Teamsters president, a big union in the United States, actually endorsed Trump

live on stage at the Republican National Convention. And in the most recent court strike, the Biden administration refused to do a trust-busting action against the unions in an attempt to draw the unions back into the Democratic coalition. Anyway, both factions are very much in play. and this has never happened before in human history. Because these two factions, their arguments, their compromises, that is American economic policy. And the idea that one, it wouldn't be part of one coalition or other is strange, but both at the same time, no, not reasonable, not sustainable. And if you look at either the Trump administration or the Biden administration and wonder why their economic policy seems bad shit crazy, that's why. The people who have traditionally done the math as part of economic policy formation are not in the room.

Now, this is, like I said, not sustainable. Sooner or later, one or both of these factions is going to either rejoin one or both of these coalitions or form their own, and we will have a re-organization of American politics. Now, there's nothing about this that is odd. We've done this five times in American history already. This will be their sixth re-organization, and it will form what will be known as the seventh-party structure. But until that happens, both of these factions, arguably historically, the most powerful factions on both sides are in play. The business community has always been the backbone of the Republican coalition.

And organized labor has always been the backbone of the Democratic coalition, or at least since the last reorganization. So this will not last. But until such time as these factions are back as part of the political process, they are functionally swing voters. And that makes this election a lot more volatile. than it would have otherwise been. Okay, that's it for now.