The Darrell McClain show
Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one Planet; nobody's leaving so let’s reason together!! Darrell, McClain is a Military veteran with an abnormal interest in politics, economics, religion, philosophy, science, and literature. He was born and raised in Jacksonville FL, and went to Edward H white High School where he wrestled Under Coach Jermy Smith and The Late Brian Gilbert. He was a team wrestling captain, District champion, and an NHSCA All-American in freestyle Wrestling. He received a wrestling scholarship from Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. After a short period, he decided he no longer wanted to cut weight which effectively ended his college wrestling journey. Darrell Mcclain is an Ordained Pastor under The Universal Life Church and is still in good standing, he's a Believer in The Doctrines of Grace Also Known as Calvinism. He joined the United States Navy in 2008 and was A Master At Arms (military police officer) He was awarded several awards while on active duty including an expeditionary combat medal, a Global War on Terror medal, a National Defense Medal, a Korean defense medal, and multiple Navy achievement medals. While In the Navy he was also the assistant wrestling coach at Robert E Lee High School. He's a Brown Belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under six six-degree black belt Gustavo Machado, Darrell Trains At Gustavo Machado Norfolk under the 3rd-degree black belt, and Former Marine Professor Mark Sausser. He went to school for psychology at American Military University and for criminal justice at ECPI University.
The Darrell McClain show
The Democracy Deception: How Biden's Cognitive Cover-Up Changed American Politics
Democracy hinges on transparency, but what happens when those in power deliberately withhold crucial information? This episode delves into the explosive allegations that President Biden's team orchestrated a cover-up of his cognitive decline—a revelation that casts a shadow over the integrity of American governance.
Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson's newly released book "Original Sin" presents compelling evidence that Biden's inner circle knowingly concealed his deteriorating mental state from voters. The most troubling aspect? This apparent deception occurred in our hyper-connected digital age, where presidential actions face constant scrutiny. How could something so significant remain effectively hidden? The answer reveals uncomfortable truths about institutional power, media complicity, and political expediency trumping democratic principles.
The episode explores historical precedents of presidential health cover-ups, from Woodrow Wilson's incapacitation to Ronald Reagan's later-diagnosed Alzheimer's. But Biden's case stands apart—occurring in an era of unprecedented information access yet still managed through coordinated efforts. The recent revelation about Biden's "aggressive prostate cancer" adds another disturbing layer to what voters weren't told. As one commentator poignantly notes, "They lied to the American people...all for power."
Beyond presidential health, we examine how financial interests shape everything from tax policy to foreign affairs. Senator Bernie Sanders' candid admission that "money" prevents politicians from speaking honestly about controversial issues like Gaza reflects a broader crisis in representation. When public opinion consistently fails to translate into policy despite overwhelming support, we must question who truly governs.
This thought-provoking episode challenges us to consider the disconnect between democratic ideals and political reality. When powerful figures can manipulate narratives and silence dissent through financial leverage, what recourse do ordinary citizens have? As one guest laments, "Sometimes what we want doesn't matter." In these challenging times, independent voices speaking truth become more essential than ever.
Join the conversation and help us continue providing independent perspectives that look beyond partisan divisions. Your support makes it possible for us to remain a voice of reason in increasingly tribal times.
Welcome to the Darrell McLean Show. I'm your host, darrell McLean. Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one planet. Nobody is leaving, so let us reason together.
Speaker 1:A very interesting week in the United States, in particular in American politics, and in this case many of the week's headlines are not likely to be dominated by the current president of the United States, donald John Trump, but by his predecessor in office, president Joseph Biden. The big headlines are going to have to do with what at least some major journalists are calling was nothing less than a cover up. That then President Biden had to withdraw from the race, and he did so even at the Republican National Convention, in such a way that, when Kamala Harris became the standard bearer for the Democratic Party, having served as Biden's vice president, the fact is, if we look at it in retrospect, her candidacy was more than likely probably doomed from the start. The fact is, if we look at it in retrospect, her candidacy was more than likely probably doomed from the start. The big question here is who to blame, and those around Kamala Harris clearly blame Joe Biden, and those around the former president Joe Biden appears to include Joe Biden himself blame Kamala Harris, or at least they say that Biden had been at the top of the ticket that he still believes he could have won. I think in the view of most Americans, that assumption is pretty much for to be a direct term. It's pretty much insane. But the former president is sticking to his argument and he did so even in recent days when appearing on news programs like the popular show the View.
Speaker 1:The Financial Times is one of the most authoritative and influential newspapers in Europe and that paper has responded to this controversy by pointing to the former president's appearance on the View and describing what the president is struggling to say his claims of cognitive lapse are wrong. And then the papers adds, before wandering off the topic, and then these words his wife Jill quickly intervened. Well, whether the Bidens realized it or not in doing so, especially in that way, is to say that the president saying he was not cognitively impaired and then demonstrating cognitive impairment on the view, and then his wife interrupting saying more or less, we're going to move on. The Financial Times just makes it clear that they have played right into the script of their critics, who have been saying that the former president did indeed get deeper and deeper into a process of cognitive decline and that he denied it and, perhaps even more energetically, his wife denied it. They played right to the script specifically off of a book to be released today entitled Original Sin President Biden's Decline, its Cover-Up and Its Disastrous Choice to run again. The book is written by CNN's Jake Tapper and is co-author of Axios supporter, alex Thompson. As the Financial Times says, the book alleges that his team and that means President Biden's team deliberately concealed the president's decline.
Speaker 1:Now, in world terms, there are some big issues to consider here. For one thing, it's simply astounding. You would think that in the year of 2025, we could talk about something like this in recent American history. In the digital age, with constant news, with every public appearance of presidents to minute investigations, how is it that something like that could happen? And you'll notice that Jack Tapper and Alex Thompson's book makes a very bold accusation. They use the term cover-up in the title of the book. Now, you might say, on one hand, well, that's probably a very good way to sell books and that's a very good way to get attention, and no doubt if you said that, you would be correct. But there are journalists. These two people are serious journalists and they have to back it up with something and they have to back it up with a great deal of investigative reporting, including hundreds of interviews with persons who had inside knowledge at the time, and they make it very explicit accusations that members of the President Biden's inner circle had conspired to conceal from the public what they all knew and frankly knew increasingly virtually every passing day and that was the president's.
Speaker 1:Biden was struggling with a very, very deep decline cognitively. So I go back to the fact that it is seemingly inconceivable that people would believe that there could be such a coverup that would be effective at this point in United States history, with technology, with the constant media coverage, all the rest, then, when it politically stakes are involved, we're talking about the most powerful elective office in the world, arguably the most powerful political office in the world. You could even argue that in real terms, it is the most powerful political office that has ever existed in the terms of it is the most powerful political office that has ever existed in the terms of human political scale. But looking at this, the fact is that the humiliation of the entire nation clearly did this, did actually take place. Now, when you look at this and you recognize that, you have to talk about us, you have to talk about us, and when I say us, I mean the American people.
Speaker 1:On one hand, did the American people think Joe Biden was suffering from cognitive decline? That's a question. The fact is, the polls were indicating a clear majority of Americans believed that for a very long time, long before the president announced that he was going to be running for re-election, certainly long before he withdrew from the race after the disastrous debate. But we also see that the American people basically did allow the disaster to happen and putting it into an American people, in these terms, I'm not going to go back to 2024. In these terms, I'm not going to go back to 2024. I'm not even going to go back to 2023 or 2021 or 2022. I'm going to go back to the year of 2020. Most importantly, it was the year 2020 that Joe Biden was elected president of the United States, and the point I want to make is that there were ample, ample evidence at the time that this was a very aged man, aged in more ways than one. It's not just a matter of chronological age, but when I say he's aged in 2020, it had to do with one's actual functional age and in that sense, it became very clear in the context of the 2020 campaign that Joe Biden wasn't even the Joe Biden of before.
Speaker 1:I regularly used to talk about on this show that if you went back and looked at the debate between Joe Biden and then the intellectual darling of the Republican Party, paul Ryan, you saw a very different Joe Biden Witty, sharp, funny. It was a very deep display of his knowledge on topics, laughing at Paul Ryan at certain times, so much that when the analysis got done on the debate the next day, the conservative media was obsessed with oh, it was like Biden talked down to Paul Ryan and da-da-da-da, and it was like no, it was Joe Biden decided to give him a good spanking and go back and look at that debate and then look at the Joe Biden of 2020 and you'll see what I'm talking about. Now at this point, there's a very interesting argument has appeared in recent days by a guy by the name of Barton Swan, and he's one of the opinion writers at the Wall Street Journal and he says well, let me just quote him here the argument in the press about when it became clear that Joe Biden wasn't up to the job Was it in 2023 or was it as early as 2021? Makes me laugh. Swan continues I witnessed President Biden's fertility during the 2020 primary and I wrote about it. The article also comes with a link. You can go. Look at the article that, indeed, barton Swan wrote back in 2020. Indeed, it was published in the Wall Street Journal on February, the 27th of 2020, with a pretty clear descriptive language.
Speaker 1:Barton Swan says it was evident then and he's making the argument then that the presidential candidate and former vice president eventually the Democratic nominee was mentally impaired and, frankly, worn out. Writing about a campaign event in South Carolina in 2020, barton Swan wrote that night he meaning Biden spoke at a rally at the College of Charlestown and appeared to get himself through it by sheer force of will. His campaign had set up a teleprompter, unusual for a routine stump speech, but Mr Biden chose not to use it. Instead, he hobbled around the stage stiff-kneed. He ran his sentences together, he shot remarks at a naturally high pitch without pausing for applause. Here's the deal he kept bellowing as if someone were interrupting him. With a fairly short amount of time, joe Biden was then elected president of the United States in November of 2020.
Speaker 1:Shortly thereafter, it became very clear to the American people that something was wrong and, by the way, one of the cues in all of this was the former president's constant statement and reliance on the statement. I should say here's the deal. It's very interesting that Barton Swan even identified that phrase back in 2020. It would certainly seem that a big question right now is how the Democratic Party actually allowed this to happen. How did the most important leaders in the Democratic Party had to know that they were dealing with? How did they let this happen?
Speaker 1:The obvious bottom line in all of that offered by the new book and also by a great deal of conversation right now is the national media, even in the political class. The obvious answer is the Democrats thought it was the only way they could win, the only way they could defeat Donald Trump for the election to what would have been a second term in 2020. They were also maneuvers behind the scenes to get other major Democratic candidates to back out, believing that Joe Biden had the best chance of building a presidential base, state by state electoral college, that might lead him to a win. And of course that fact he did win. And of course we get into that politics. And that was when Barack Obama famously called everybody, from Pete Buttigieg to Amy Klobuchar, telling them to back out of the race and all endorse Joe Biden because Barack Obama was afraid of the rise of Bernie Sanders. Very, very interesting details when you look into it.
Speaker 1:But looking back at the Biden's win in 2020, there's one big factor that comes into very clear focus, and that is under the conditions of the COVID pandemic. The reality is that President Biden, then Vice President Biden, running for the presidency, he really didn't appear much in public. It wasn't a traditional presidential campaign and that's because he ran most of his campaign. If you go look at it, he ran most of the campaign from a basement of his house in Delaware, and so the American people really didn't have the exposure that would normally have in the case with any major party candidate, certainly a major party nominee running in a general election as a presidential candidate.
Speaker 1:Look at the situation in 2024, you have to just scratch your head and wonder again how did the leadership and the Democratic Party allow the train wreck to happen?
Speaker 1:They had to know the situation related to the president.
Speaker 1:They had to know the president's mental decline. That mental decline, of course, became nothing less than a politically catastrophic, and we can only be thankful for what we know, that it didn't lead to any kind of national security disasters of some kind and it didn't lead to a international crisis of some kind. But there are huge questions, especially related to the term cover-up who was behind the cover-up, who was doing the covering? In this case, it really comes down to two central categories, and that has to do with those who are very close political associates of the former president and then members of his own family, at some of the closest age of the president. The fact is that we now know, as it is documented in this book and in other books that are forthcoming, very clear investigative reports it is abundantly clear that they were trying to compensate for the president's weaknesses by even scheduling his day and disallowing much activity to preserve the president for very few public appearances, for very few public appearances he had and then tried to limit the damages in the ones that he did have.
Speaker 1:Now. It was also rumored that they were considering whether or not the former president then the president of the United States would require to routinely use a wheelchair just to be able to get about, to routinely use a wheelchair just to be able to get about. Taper and Thomas make the argument that the Democrats indicated that they didn't want the move to that stage until after the 2024 election. I guess the reason for that would be obvious, but the moral impulse behind that becomes obvious the fact that they were really. It was some kind of conspiracy. Our cover-up becomes patently, patently, sadly clear. It is also obvious that there's and there's no other word for it that the former first lady, Jill Biden, was actively involved in this and, as a matter of fact, you look at some of the media appearances, particularly when the president and then the first lady appeared together, it is really clear that she was trying to block and she was trying to basically limit the damage. She was trying to control some interviews and that came down even to the appearance on the View just a few days ago.
Speaker 1:Now, the history of presidential ages and issues and overhauls should raise big questions for America. Well, so let's just try to dig through this in different terms, and I do think about it in the larger political background here, and you can think about at least two presidents for which this would have been a kind of related issue. The first of them would be President Woodrow Wilson, and the last couple of years of his presidency it became very clear that he was physically impaired by what has been described as a massive stroke and some historians even say perhaps a massive series of different strokes. The president's impaired health was so clear that as close as advisors but once again there's evidence that those advisors covered it up there is, of course and that's been around for decades Now, you could say almost a century now there were those who were making the accusations.
Speaker 1:The president's second wife was operating basically as president, in some cases making decisions and probably even signing documents, because it became clear to others that President Wilson was in no mental or physical condition to actually do either. It is important to note that at least major Democratic figures made it clear that President Wilson or the Wilsons that they would not be party to support him for the run that would have been then his third term. The Democrats went on to not let the president run. They went on to lose that election. Warren and Harding won the election and then yet to fast forward. The second situation that certainly comes to mind after that, and here we have to talk about the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
Speaker 1:When Ronald Reagan was elected to president in 1980, he was already 69 years old. He was the oldest person elected president of the United States. Remember, ronald Reagan served two terms, quite effectively, and by the time he finished his second term he was 77 years old. Now the interesting thing is that at the point there was a very little speculation about any kind of problem with the mental acuity or intellectual ability, cognitive status when it came to president reagan. In retrospect there were some halting moments and it made it clear that the president who had seemed to defy age for so long was succumbing to, at least in some part to it, to the inevitable. Ronald reagan at 77 did not look like the Ronald Reagan at 69. That is largely escapable, and it's explainable as well simply by the realities of what it takes to act to be president. As with any president, reagan was surrounded by a very loyal circle and advisors, but when it was mentioned President Biden in modern age, there was so much media coverage If there had been any real questions about the loss of cognitive ability, there was years, and he began at 69 and ended at 77. That was considered to be something like as unusual not to be repeated again. And then, of course, the landscape was also changed in August of 1994, six years after leaving office, when the famously President Reagan wrote an open letter to the nation and in that letter President Reagan was announcing, basically that he was withdrawing from public life because he had received a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease. It's a horrifying disease. It's a very, very powerful enemy. And President Reagan, shortly after acknowledging the diagnosis, began to show signs of falling deeper, deeper into the stages, moving deeper to the stages of Alzheimer's disease. By that time he didn't make any real public appearances and by the time he died it was very clear that he had very severe cognitive decline for those final years. But at that point he was a former president, he was not the president of the United States, he was not running for reelection in 1988. He is retired from public life, and so the period between 1988 and 1994 was a period in which the former president was still very much a public figure. But those around him began to say it is very clear that he is suffering from some kind of cognitive decline. The rather shortly thereafter came the announcement the former presidents of the diagnosis. Now it is simply scary to imagine what would have happened in the context of the Cold War, particularly if Ronald Reagan had actually suffered from cognitive decline during the time he was in the White House, but we're talking about a situation that might well have been the reality in Joe Biden's administration of four years, between 2021 and January of 2025. We also have to note that the current president of the United States, donald John Trump, is now 78 years old. Just a matter of weeks from now, the president will be 79 years old. By the time he finishes his second term, he would be 82 years old and, frankly speaking, that's old.
Speaker 1:There are those wondering right now and that includes political scientists, academic types as well as political types who are wondering if the presidency but if not just the presidency American politics is turning something into a geriatric war. There are those in the Democratic Party right now who feel like the situation is so acute that they need to intervene, and so you got a fight inside the Democratic Party leadership right now about what to do with the reality of really age. Senators and others in Congress who are younger Democrats are holding them back, holding the party back from success and making the party more, as we will say, vulnerable, and the oldest United States senator present is a guy by the name of Charles Grassley, a Republican Senator of the state of Iowa. He is currently the oldest serving United States Senator. He, by the way, for the matter of record, he is 91 years old. He is headed towards being 92 within just a matter of months Now.
Speaker 1:In another term, here from the spiritual worldview, biblical worldview, theological worldview, we're taught to honor our elders, but it also includes a need for healthy succession. All that to say, we're in a a strange season of American political climate and we have to understand from a certain perspective, in a country built on Judeo-Christian religious practices, we understand that biblically there's a certain respect that is supposed to come due to age. For example, in the Old Testament and the New Testament, even with the use of the term like elders, it is clear that there's a special type of respect, a special honor that is due when you say the word elder and you're talking about an older leader. It is certainly not an accident that in many cultures, senior leaders in politics and in culture often refer to as elders of the community. So it's not just a term that is used inside of the church, it is a term that is uh, um, they think it's just, it's illogical, uh, but we also know it when it comes to age, is very clear about the effects that happen when we're aging.
Speaker 1:When it comes to someone like the prophet moses, by the time moses died it is pointed out that he was very old but his vigor was unabated. But his eyesight was undimmed. But that statement makes sense only because it was remarkable that the age of his vision was undimmed and his vigor was unabated. The implication here is that the normal human being at advanced age is not so clear of sight and perhaps not so clear of mind. And it is not a lack of clarity, it is just a very different life stage. And so there is one problem, and that's made very clear when it comes to some internal debates among Democrats right now how in the world can you have someone in their eighth or ninth decade of life really have much of a clue about what politics and what arguments are going to work when it comes to younger voters, which, after all, are the future of the party, if the party is to have a future? Frankly, it is going to be very interesting to see how american voters respond to the issue of age moving forward. One thing for certain is those who are resisting retirement looking at some kind of advanced age they're not going to be able to resist forever. Some realities just aren't up for a vote. I want to think about Dianne Feinstein here, who everybody pretended was perfectly fine, even though you were getting reports that everything you have to read about her daughter basically getting control of everything. Because the late Dianne Feinstein could function and she stayed in power until she actually died died in the seat Ruth Bader Ginsburg would obviously be an example and died in power. And because she died in power, barack Obama didn't get to appoint her replacement, etc. And instead President Trump got to appoint a replacement with Amy Coney Barrett.
Speaker 1:I do want to repeat this biblical worldview and how much it's supposed to give us respect and honor to those who have earned it by age. But there's also a sense in which is we have to be responsible, that there are handoffs from generation to generation and that age hasn't demonstrated much wisdom. When we see like the Apostle Paul, for example, we see his exhortations to Timothy, also in his relationship with Titus, it becomes very clear that the passing on of faith intact, that faith once for all delivered to the saints, means we are supposed to understand all of this with a much higher sense of urgency and priority. But all of this in conversation right now because of the political context of a big question as to who knew when and what. When knowing, when it comes to the four years of our aging presidents, especially Joe Biden, it is not a pretty picture who are now coming out in public making these statements that they're the people who, in one extent or another, also should have known when it was happening.
Speaker 1:We are talking about major media figures here who had a lot of access to the president of the United States and certainly they had to have known something. But of course, right now the question is who is going to take the fall for all of this? It is very interesting to see a series of articles and arguments, for instance in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other papers, where you see Democrats try to say there is one person responsible for this and that one person is your former president, joe Biden. But I would say Joe Biden didn't make himself president of the United States. He did not make himself the Democratic Party nominee, nor did his wife, for that matter. They're certainly part of the equation, but that was a process undertaken by the Democratic Party establishment and it was a decision actually made by voters in 2020.
Speaker 1:No doubt this is going to be a subject and a matter of public debate and probably for a good series of bestselling books, but it raises a host of deeper issues that are far larger than an election and, ultimately, even larger than the presidency. So, look, it gets a lot worse than that. While I was preparing for this segment, it actually came out with some even more awful news, with some even more awful news. President Joe Biden they've announced the president has an aggressive form, an aggressive form of prostate cancer. I will talk more about that in the upcoming days because I want the real stories to come out so we can have some real analysis. But I'm going to go to a little clip from our sister show, overopinionated, with Josh Scott, when he kind of gets into the flavor of how I feel about it, which is, I believe they lied to you.
Speaker 4:Scott. Host of Overopinionated. Well, the news has been out. It broke this weekend that President Joe Biden has stage four prostate cancer. I hate that for him. I pray for him. I pray for his salvation and encourage all Americans Republican, democrat, whatever to pray for him. I pray for his salvation and encourage all Americans Republican, democrat, whatever to pray for him. I do. I really do. With that being said, I'm also very angry. I'm angry at the media for lying. I'm angry at the DNC the Democrats for lying. I'm angry at the Bidens.
Speaker 4:It came out that he's known about this, for he's more than likely has known about this for years. They may deny that, but this type of cancer, you know about this for quite a while. There's doctors that said he knew about this. He had to know about this before his presidency, that this couldn't have happened within the last 100 to 200 days. He's had this cancer for a long time. And to think they lied about his mental health and his physical health. They lied to us. They lied to the American people. The media lied to you when Joe Scarborough said that this was the finest Joe Biden he's ever seen, he lied to you. The media lied to you. The Democrats lied to you. The Bidens lied to you All for power, all to beat Trump in 2020. Well, they did. They beat Trump in 2020, no matter if the election was legitimate or not. But now Trump is back. So maybe this bit them in the butt. Maybe karma came back to haunt them.
Speaker 4:With that being said, you can be upset, you can be mad about them lying to you. You can be upset, you can be mad about them lying to you, and you can still have a heart and hate that this has happened to a human being made in God's image. They're not mutually exclusive. I'm very angry. I'm also sad when anyone gets cancer. He's my fellow human being, he's made in God's image and I am praying for him. I want us all to. But Americans, stay alert. The news media, the left-wing media, is not your friend. I'm not saying everything they say is fake, because most of the time that's not true. Most of the time it's real news, but it's opinionated. There's not many Walter Comcuts anymore. What I'm more afraid of is what they keep from us than what they make up.
Speaker 1:Have a good day, everyone All right. So again, that was our friend Josh Scott from Oprah Opinionated, and I would just add to that a bit. It is one. Josh is more calm than I am, temperamentally. I'm actually, yeah, need some help. I'm actually, yeah, Need some help. I shall just say, but it is the way the media frames things that they try to convince you in the framing of the question or the framing of the story that they are using To pervert your opinion On the issue. Um, and I'll just, I'll just leave it right there. This is why we have to support Independent media, and when I mean independent media, I mean independent media, independent thought. There are independent media, and when I mean independent media, I mean independent media, independent thought. They are. They are independent media sources where they're independent in a sense. They're not on fox news, msnbc, abc, csnbc, but they, they parent the talking points of the state, etc. Etc. And the only thing independent is that they are independently working for themselves, and we have to kind of know those differences.
Speaker 1:I do buy a lot of print media subscriptions and I'm reading all this stuff a lot and I have to, when I'm reading it, decide what I'm going to deliver to the general public because of the way that this frame is so clearly biased in one way or the other in saying that there is a source and no, I'm not paid by them, it's just something I use and it is called ground news, and ground news will present a story and it will also show you how the story is slanted on the right, left, middle libertarian, et cetera.
Speaker 1:It will show you how the right-wing media is reporting on it, how the left-wing media is reporting on it, yada, yada, yada. And I do think, if you're trying to weed through all of this stuff, ground news is a good source. Through all of this stuff, ground News is a good source. So I'm going to go to a rather decent segment on the real history of our oligarchs, the tax code. It's going to be a series coming out that I'm going to watch. We're going to go to our paid media that I pay for breaking points and listen to this. A great expose from this is crystal ball on breaking points, and it's also Emily as well, and so check this out is this, is this is a pretty good and they're gonna talk about this tax bill and as well so, guys, trump's big, beautiful bill passed a clear, cleared an important hurdle in the house.
Speaker 5:They can put this up on the screen the tax and immigration bill clears hurdle after late-night vote. It had previously failed in committee in a late vote. It was able to pass after some Republican dissenters just voted present so it could make it out of committee. All of that is a long way of saying. This bill still has a long way to go before it actually is effectuated into law. But at the center of this bill is a big old tax cut for the rich, doubling down on Trump's key priority and accomplishment from his first administration. So joining us now to discuss how the Republican Party became this anti-tax juggernaut is Arjun Singh with Lever News, and you guys have a new podcast series out called Tax Revolt, which tracks the history of the anti-tax movement. So great to see you, Arjun.
Speaker 6:Yes, thank you for having me.
Speaker 5:Yeah, of course. So we can put E2 up on the screen. That's just the logo, so you guys can see here's Tax Revolt. We've got four part series and let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of the trailer and set this up for everybody. All taxes are bad.
Speaker 3:The power to tax is the power to destroy. Some are worse than others.
Speaker 4:We have a new revolution against the tax tax. Tax spend, spend, spend.
Speaker 7:The mindset of diehard tax cutters has dominated politics since the 1980s and today cutting taxes is practically a religious mandate in conservative politics and government agencies like the IRS are partisan battlegrounds.
Speaker 5:The dream in America is not to make the rich poor, the dream is to make the poor rich. The era of big government is over, don't hurt the top.
Speaker 6:And if you're gonna fight rich people, you're gonna lose.
Speaker 5:From the landmark California tax revolt to Trump's latest push to cut taxes for the rich. This movement claimed to fight for the average American, but really deepened inequality and helped the rich get richer.
Speaker 6:This is the story of how a small but powerful movement reshaped our economy, weakened our democracy and left the government scrambling to serve the people it was meant to protect.
Speaker 5:But that's not the way the world is. Guys. Do you want to sit there and scream and holler and hate rich people and lose every election.
Speaker 3:It is time for a wealth tax in America. You'll lose everything If you don't lose the election. You'll lose the country.
Speaker 5:So I like the description there of tax cutting as an almost religious mandate.
Speaker 6:Yes.
Speaker 5:Because at this point you have a broad national coalition, really quite bipartisan at the grassroots level, in favor of taxing the rich more, and yet you still have the Republican Party going in the polar opposite direction.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and one of the funny things that we actually talk about in the series is that when you get to the 1980s, when Reaganomics is becoming very popular, democrats vote for Reagan's bills, tip O'Neill's, speaker of the House. Reagan's got these Democratic legislatures, and part of the reason the Democrats are on board with it is they hear from their own constituents how upsetting it is to see how easy it is to game the tax code. They're saying that our rich friends who have fancy accountants can do all these loopholes. The tax code is so complex. Now why don't we get any relief just because we have to pay our taxes like suckers?
Speaker 6:And the Democratic response was you're right, the tax code is too easy to game and so we'll bring down your tax rates. And they tried to, you know, fix some of the loopholes. But, as we know, through history, the winners of all of that was the business community and corporate interests, who managed to bring everybody's taxes down and also take their taxes down to the point that some billionaires don't even pay taxes. They pay negative taxes. They earn from government subsidies Unbelievable.
Speaker 7:Let's keep pulling at this threat of religion actually, because this is what on the right we're seeing. What on the right is the fading of what's called the fusionism, which is the three-legged stools. Frank Meyer, the whole thing basically is it combines limited government social conservatism and neoconservatism and that's completely falling apart at this moment. Maybe it'll reconstruct, but at this point it's really difficult for the Republican Party to maintain that coalition. So as you went back through history, can you maybe tell us a little bit about what it was like as the Milton Friedman wing coalesced with the social conservatives and the neoconservatives? It's such an interesting marriage, especially between neoconservatives and Milton Friedman types, because the Reagan era saw massive spending on defense and at the same time there was this mandate for tax cuts. It's sort of similar to what we see people talking about, right now, absolutely.
Speaker 6:I'm so glad that you distilled that like that, because that is one of the most fascinating things that I came out from the series is that the republican coalition is kind of a frankenstein monster of different groups that have made alliances with each other but when it comes down to it, do end up being on different ends of the issues. So when we start in the 1970s, you have the post watergate era and you have stagflation happening, high uninflated, high unemployment and high on and high inflation.
Speaker 2:I keep wanting to say uninflation which I think is what everybody wishes was happening.
Speaker 6:But no, you had stagflation, which was the worst of the worst, and so you had an economic crisis. You had people actually seeing real pain paying their taxes because their money was getting cheaper and cheaper by the day, and what you see entering that is different groups of conservatives trying to take advantage of that. So you have the people from the business community who say, listen, let's just knock down the whole tax code. Free market capitalism. You know, this is the way everyone's going to prosper. That would be kind of like the art laughers who we heard in the trailer just now the godfathers. Supply side economics.
Speaker 6:You know, we'll take them at kind of face value, that if this is what they believe, they believe that low taxation will lead to so much prosperity you don't really need a government to play the role of an administrative state. Those people find alliances with another group of conservatives who are seeing integration happening, who are seeing changing social values and they're seeing a Democratic Party in a government that they feel is becoming too tolerant of women and minorities and that a lot of the white working class people are being left behind. And in our first episode we talk about Howard Jarvis in California in 1978. He gets this ballot proposition on there that says let's just cap the property tax. And he messages both of those things. Isn't the government bloated? Aren't the bureaucrats overpaid? Aren't your taxes too high? And he would also say to certain people should your taxes pay for school integration? Should your taxes pay for a social educational system that is slowly moving away from you? And he merges these two things together and we talk about Newt Gingrich the same year, 1978. That's when he wins his election to Congress. He sees the potency of the practicality of telling people you don't have to pay as much anymore. A lot of people vibe with that message, but he sees an undercurrent of people who are starting to view the federal government as something that they should be opposed to, that's an enemy to them.
Speaker 6:In the 1970s, jimmy Carter's IRS was withholding tax exempt status from schools that refused to integrate, violating court orders. In this period 1978, gingrich, but also people like Howard Jarvis in California that started the anti-IRS movement, which they said the tax collectors are a tool of an ideologically driven government. Your taxes going to them is helping an ideological battle, not just funding kind of the base social services that were pretty popular and that a lot of Republicans agreed with too. Because, like you said, republicans like George Herbert, walker Bush and Ronald Reagan wanted strong military, they wanted more spending on the defense, so they wanted government to do things. They just didn't like the intrusion of government on the tax code, certainly taking big businesses profits, and so that's kind of what the series leads up to.
Speaker 6:And by the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich gets into office, the movement of conservatives has become so fractured that the Pat Buchanan hard proto-Trump conservatives. Now they have a lot more influence over this party and they're saying Ronald Reagan's too moderate because he compromised with Democrats and George Bush is, of course, way too moderate because he would even consider raising taxes. And they see Newt Gingrich shut down the government and they say this is what we're all about aggression, hostility. And the movement takes a hard turn to the right right there. And it's not to say that the entire Republican Party believes like this. I think that the Republican Civil War is still happening right now.
Speaker 6:But that is how this tax issue then morphs into what we see right now, which is you have whole anti-government forces, people who saw Waco and Oklahoma City, saying you know what? The government is taking away our rights and it is a frightening force. And if our taxes defund the government, more power to that. And that's, by the way, grover Norquist who we interviewed in our last episode. Yeah, he's that faction of the conservative movement. Art Laffer, who we heard in the trailer, is the other side, which he says low taxes equals prosperity. But he'll message all these kind of pro-government values.
Speaker 5:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 6:Yeah.
Speaker 7:No coincidence, by the way, that happened during the fall of the Soviet Union. Just that time in the early 90s. Yeah, that's a fantastic point.
Speaker 5:And so sort of bring us to today. I mean, on the one hand, again this $4 trillion tax cut for the rich, centerpiece of the Trump agenda. He sort of floated like, oh, maybe I won't cut taxes as much on the millionaires, but then he backed off of that immediately when it became clear that he'd actually have to exert some pressure to get that to happen. He wasn't all that interested in doing it to start with.
Speaker 5:On the other hand you know, in the time period that you're covering they really were on the offense. They felt very confident in their messaging. Now you can see from Steve Bannon and others that they realize they're going to really position themselves as this populist party.
Speaker 2:This is a little bit of a problem for them.
Speaker 5:They're at odds with their own voters, let alone the national conversation. So where is the anti-tax movement today?
Speaker 6:I think the anti-tax movement is still very powerful because of things like Elon Musk and Doge, and that is that they are taking the rhetoric that the government's a hostile action and dialing it up to 11. And, as we talked about in the series, when you message that rhetoric in an era where people are already dissatisfied with their government, they feel let down by it and they're frustrated, you can get people who initially were pro-government agreeing with you that the government is doing negative things.
Speaker 5:I think the biggest DEI is a big part of that. Dei is a big.
Speaker 1:Oh man, I think this series is going to be great. I think this series is going to be great because it is about messaging and framing what I said in the media piece earlier. But it is true. I tell people when I have these conversations the government is not good or bad. The government is not either immoral or benevolent. The government is amoral. It has no real values because the government, in theory and practice, is people who voted, and I know people like this. I know people personally who voted for George Herbert Walker Bush, herbert Walker Bush, and then they voted for Bill Clinton. I know people who voted for Bill Clinton and then voted for George W Bush. I know people who voted for George W Bush, then voted for Barack Obama, voted for Donald Trump, voted for Joe Biden and then voted for Trump again. I literally myself know people who voted for Bush, trump, obama, biden, trump. And then, when you talk to those people, you know who they bring up often Trump, obama, biden, trump. And then, when you talk to those people, you know who they bring up often Libertarian Ron Paul. That's the nuance of is a human being. So a lot of times when the government does things, it is bad in the part of your existence, in the part of your essence, that thinks that thing government doing, government doing bad. So then of course, somebody who is a idealist or ideologue will say all things government do bad. So you should.
Speaker 1:As the uh, great communicator, ron Reagan, one of the presidents, you know, reagan had his problems, yada, yada yada. One of the presidents who had the most clear and concise and beautiful speaking voices just as far as his ability to deliver a message. Ronald Reagan is up there as a great and he was called the great communicator. Now FDR had some really impressive communication skills, but he was kind of a class traitor, you know what I mean. So you have both of these things. Ronald Reagan famously said I want the government so small. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. Ronald Reagan once said I want the government so, so small. No, I'm sorry, that's not true. Ronald Reagan once said the most scariest words in the English language is hello, I'm here for the government and I'm, I'm from the government and I'm here to help Grover Norquist, who he talked about. He just mentioned. His famous words were I want the government to be so small I can draw it in a bathtub, you know.
Speaker 1:And then when you see things like your government implicit, implicit in what we see is either genocide or ethnic cleansing or whatever the hell you want to call what's happening in Israel right now. It's very difficult to think to be on the socialist left or anywhere over there saying we should just give the government more of your money. Because now you go to the Noam Chomsky thing and he says, yeah, yeah, with my tax dollars, with my complicit agreement, because I am paying for it and I'm not saying anything about it. And and now I, I see why this has such an appeal. And of course I I like when they you know I'm, I'm a disgruntled ex-Republican, as I like to tell people sometimes. You know, I did the thing. I didn't have the audacity of hope, I didn't have the change we've been waiting for, any of that stuff. I didn't believe in hope and change when Mitt.
Speaker 1:Romney ran against Barack Obama. You know, I thought both of these people seemed to be intelligent, but when Obama ran against George Bush, I voted for George Bush. I came later to understand the weight of my vote and regret the vote. I'm sorry. When George Bush ran against John Kerry, I voted for George Bush against John Kerry. And when Obama ran against John McCain, I voted for George Bush against John Kerry. And when Obama ran against John McCain, I voted for John McCain. And when Obama ran against Mitt Romney, I voted for Obama, not because I thought Mitt Romney was an inherently bad person.
Speaker 1:It was because I was a big fan and I still am a big fan of former Speaker of the House, newt Gingrich, and Newt Gingrich put out this documentary when Bain Comes to Town and he thoroughly took down the practices that Mitt Romney had his company had inflicted on, you know, on businesses. And yet Mitt Romney fought back and et cetera, et cetera, and I thought, man, this guy's very successful, but these business practices are something that I'm becoming very skeptical of.
Speaker 1:Maybe, it's not about Democrats and Republicans. Maybe it is about money and corporate influence, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1:And even though Newt Gingrich lost and didn't get the nomination. I started to look at rampant money and power, as it was maybe corrosive, and then I thought about that guy, that guy that is known as a class traitor. What was his name? Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who even said you will have a country of either organized money or organized mob, and he gave that famous speech. They are aligned against, as if their hatred for me and I welcome their hatred and I realized this thing is much deeper than you think. Just just a thought. Let's get back to this, and I am going to watch or listen to this series. Watch or listen, I don't know if it's audio or if it's video, but anyway part of that.
Speaker 6:I think the big thing that the Steve Bannon thing is trying to do is he's trying to mimic more language of the progressive left and the left wing and hoping that left wing allies will also say, hey, isn't this the future? We should be. No taxation on.
Speaker 1:And I'm sorry, I listen to Steve Bannon's the War Room. When it comes to the Republican side of the argument that I think is correct, I definitely am on the side of the Steve Bannon's of the party.
Speaker 6:But he else, but putting some taxes on the wealthy, and I think that the anti-tax movement is realizing the Republican Party was never a good vehicle if that was the kind of politics that you wanted to espouse.
Speaker 6:The more progressive Bernie Sanders style of politics vibes a little bit more with that. So the anti-tax movement is still clearly very strong because Trump himself got scared by his own statement of putting taxes on multimillionaires and I think the quickness with which he kind of pulled that back and even his Trump, his true social post, where he was like I'll put the taxes on there, but if they don't want to, I'll still be okay with it it might be a good idea. You can see his hesitancy and how powerful the entrenched interests that run the party really are and that's the struggle for the Trump administration. He's tried to tilt his base towards the populist working class base, which was the Democratic base for a long time, and he's seeing why Democrats politically found favor with him to raise taxes on the wealthy. That was their base. So that's the base he wants to have, but the party is still dictated by the entrenched corporate interests. Yeah, I mean that's the problem for Grover. He spent decades.
Speaker 7:He spent decades on this like anti-tax.
Speaker 2:you know hard line yeah, crusade and he bullied everyone into signing it.
Speaker 7:Well, I shouldn't say bullied, I mean, everyone was doing it willingly doing it willingly.
Speaker 6:He was quite the bully, though from what it sounds like.
Speaker 7:Oh yeah, he could be a bully, but when they have an opportunity to do a big tax bill in 2017, and Paul Ryan's saying we're going to get your taxes down to a postcard, it's going to look like something like a flat tax. Well, that never happens because the corporate interests need there to be significant tax rates still to fund defense spending, to fund all that other corporate welfare, and that's what Grover Norquist and the anti-tax crusaders, who genuinely do believe in limited government and extremely limited taxes. They've ended up sort of being the vehicle for corporate interests to continue the welfare spigot.
Speaker 6:Yeah, the flat tax debate is really interesting to me because you know, I will say that when I sat down with Grover Norquist, there are people on the anti-tax side who seem to genuinely believe just a complicated tax code is bad. Yeah, that's right. It will lead to people gaming the system, which it completely has, and it's unfair to people who don't have the means or the knowledge base to understand what all the complicated tax code means. And I think that's why tax cutting, a flat tax, became a really salient message, which is that if you're trying to live your life, you have your full-time job, you have your family, and if someone says to you, do you just want to pay a simple tax code and know that the code is fair, that your neighbor, who's an accountant, who knows the system, is paying less just because they have that knowledge base, that's a really powerful message.
Speaker 6:But again, the flat rate cutters, and a lot of them, like to talk about Ronald Reagan. They're like Ronald Reagan was our hero, he was going to do that, but you know everybody else made the tax code more complicated. Well, the story of Republican politics and you know, arguably Democratic politics too is that the powerful interests, whenever you offer a tax cut, are going to be able to find what they can do. They used to call the hallway outside of the Senate budget writing room in the 80s Gucci Gulch, because Bob Dole came out and he saw all the tax lobbyists wearing Gucci shoes and suits and he would say it's Gucci to Gucci in the hallway.
Speaker 5:Gucci to Gucci.
Speaker 6:Yeah, and that's who wrote the 1986 tax cut bill. There you go.
Speaker 5:That says it all right there. Tell people where they can find the series and take a listen so you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 6:Our website is levernewscom and if you search Tax Revolt in your podcast players and Lever Time, you will find our podcast.
Speaker 1:So I will put that in the show notes because I'm going to follow along. I find this stuff interesting and I hope you find it interesting too. How I'm going to end the show today is something that I found very powerful but also very sad, and I gotta admit that there's a podcaster, and he's just a normal guy, someone in the bro sphere, and his name is Theo Bond. He's kind of like your typical just want to laugh, just want to have a good time type of person, and he's been being influenced by some people that have been making him have to notice Israel and Palestine.
Speaker 1:Okay, and just to hear him in his real self talk about this issue and when I say not only talk about it, hit this clear tone, it touched my heart. And what he says at the end of this it was was powerful, shocking and telling, was powerful, shocking and telling. And then I'm going to juxtapose that to something else that the senator from Vermont, bernie Sanders, says when he is on with Stephen Colbert. And now it has gotten so, so blatantly obvious that when Bernie Sanders says it on the main line of mainline shows, it gets a clap. So let's go to Theo Vaughn right now and we'll jump to the clip of Bernie Sanders, and then we'll see you on the next episode while we're alive, here, in front of our, in front of our lives, and I don't.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I feel like I should say something. I'm not a geologist or geographer or anything like that, you know. So I don't know a lot of the. Some of it I do know, though, like I know the basics of the issues over there, but for me it's just like how I feel, like you see all these photos of people, just children, women, people, body parts, just people like putting their kids back together, and I just can't believe that we're watching that and that more isn't said about it.
Speaker 2:And so I'm not saying anyone else needs to say anything, but I think I'm just that more isn't said about it by me, so I just I want to be more isn't said about it by me, so I just, uh, I want to be able to speak up about that that I think we're watching, probably, like you know, one of the sickest things that's ever happened, and uh and I'm sorry if I've kind of haven't said about it, I've tried to talk about it and learn about it, um, but I don't know, maybe I just want to, I just want to say something. I don't even know what to do, you know, and it's crazy because our country is also complicit in in. You know, it's in in. It has been for a long time and and it's just kind of interesting because then you just realize, oh well, I'm just a yeah, I'm a member of this country, but I'm just what we want. Sometimes doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:I found that last part to be almost heartbreaking, because ain't that the truth? Ain't that the truth? Ain't that the truth? I'll look at these polls sometimes. 67% of Americans agree on this. 69% of Americans agree on this. 58% of Americans agree on this. 57% agree on this. 52% agree on this.
Speaker 1:And I will go look and it's not getting done. And then I try to do that thing that I do, that most people in psychology fields do where you go try to not take it personal and you look at the analysis of it and you try to intellectualize it and it's like oh, it's always the same group of people, so it's a very small number. The hundred people are on the side of the disagree and those hundred people they have the resources, did not just disagree but to put their capital towards their disagreement and it makes you feel sometimes so beat down and so helpless. And so I really did feel that. Say sometimes what you want, it just doesn't matter. You can be right on all the things, you can have read all the books, you can have looked at all the articles and done all the research and know all the right theoreticians, and it just doesn't matter sometimes and you just have to keep fighting and failing and falling down and standing up and trying to do better and pass on the knowledge and pass on the torch and fight for some principle that you knew was right 20 years ago, that somebody's going to figure out was right in 30 years, and finally do the right thing and then somehow not be frustrated with the fact that you knew it was right 30 years ago you knew it was right and not get cynical enough that you know that they also knew it was right, but for political expediency they didn't do it, or because they were paid they didn't do it.
Speaker 1:It. Uh, I felt it, because sometimes it becomes so frustrating you have to turn away and then other times you have to re-engage because you don't want to get maladjusted to injustice. The essence of truth, the essence of truth and the essence of love is to allow suffering to speak. Justice. Justice is what love looks like in public, just like tenderness and vulnerability is what love looks like in private. So it was a very beautiful moment from Theo, just a normal person who was powerless to stop what's going on, but he's using the one power that he does have, that he still has at this moment, which is his voice, and I'm very thankful that somebody at his level his platform would say something about the suffering of the least of these.
Speaker 1:So last segment, senator Bernie Sanders was on Stephen Colbert peak television and somewhat touched on this issue in a different way, and he talked about why things don't happen. And it's not beat up on Democrats' day, but he's talking about the elephant in the room, the money in politics.
Speaker 3:But on the Democratic side, this is what we've got to deal with. I happen to believe that what is going on in Gaza right now is horrific, that we are seeing children right now, as we speak, starving to death, massive malnutrition. Your fellow Vermonter, ben of Ben Jerry's, was actually at one of the hearings I believe you were at yesterday and was dragged out when he was making that protest. But why do you think more Democrats are not speaking up on that issue? Money, of course. If you speak up on that issue, you'll have super PACs like AIPAC going after you, the same way Elon Musk goes after Republicans.
Speaker 1:There you have it. Elon AIPAC. They're just lobbyists in the most sense. One thing they use to lobby is not what I have, which is just my voice. They have a couple of million. When Elon comes to Elon, billions of dollars to make sure their voice over influences what policy makers get to hear. Thank you for tuning in and we'll see you on the next episode.