Forget Capitalism vs Socialism: The American System is Back

[00:00:00]Welcome to boot camp number 12. It has been quite an extraordinary 10 days since our last boot camp. Both from the standpoint of President Trump really flexing his muscle as we saw in the Texas runoff between Paxton and Cornin.

[00:00:19]That's a certain political side of the president demonstrating what the agenda must be for the midterm elections, which is his economic revolution and strategic revolution, not some laundry list of conservative platitudes that have too often dominated the way campaigns are run. people who are voting for Trump's candidates, the ones where he's really coming out big time and endorsing like Bill Paxton, like Galin in Kentucky and others. What people are voting for is they are voting to continue Donald Trump's revolution, especially in these congressional and Senate races where the outcome of these races is directly tied to whether or not President Trump is going to be able to continue to legislate after the midterm elections.

[00:01:14]So, that's the one side of it. The other side of it is this administration, I think, beginning to sharpen very very powerfully the kind of messaging that we have to get across to the population in the midterms. There's the question of political power, but there's also what we've been very much focused on, of course, which is how do you message the fact that this is an economic revolution? This is not a laundry list of policies. This is not even something you can demonstrate with great statistics because some of the statistics are great and we've talked about them. What we're really dealing with is nothing short of replacing one system with another system. And when you do that, everything within that system, the relationships, the definition of things, it actually begins to change.

[00:02:10]And I think that over the course of the past 10 days, there's been a tremendous step forward in terms of how at least for the organizers to understand for themselves the fact that this is a new system that this administration is pursuing and then for us as organizers to try and figure out how we're going to then communicate that to people who are still stuck in that old system. So, I want to give people a sense of what we're going to be doing in tonight's boot camp. I'm going to go through a short review of this extraordinary speech that Scott Bessant gave last Friday at the Reagan Economic Forum.

[00:02:52]I'll touched on it briefly in my Saturday update, but I want to actually take the opportunity of this more relaxed setting to discuss it with a little bit more substantive because I think there are really very important sections in there. And I think that if people figure out how to use those sections to be conversation starters with people again who are stuck in the old system and think that that's the way the world is. Either they like it or they don't like it or they're mad at it or they've surrendered to it. But our challenge all along is to get people out of that imperial system where people are victims and losers and consumers and put them back to being an American which is to be a producer who's got a certain command over the direction of their lives as long as they work hard and work right. Scott Bessant gave us some very very powerful tools to do that. So, that's the first thing I'm going to go through. But then we're going to get a report from Texas. One of our Texas friends better be ready to go. Sort of an on the ground report of the implications of Ken Paxton's wamping of John Cornin on the runoff last week. I don't know how many of you watched Scott Bessent's speech at the Reagan Economic Forum. I recommend you either watch it or you read it. The whole thing is on YouTube and the speech itself is in the treasury and it really is a powerhouse. I think people are familiar with the fact that Jameson Greer gave quite a speech at Davos where he resurrected the American system by name put the name Alexander Hamilton as the author out there and that obviously had a tremendous effect. I'm sure it shook up the gathered would-be gods on Mount Olympus who were there at Davos because he basically was saying the American system is the gift of fire and I'm giving it back to the American people and the rest of you and we're going to bring down your crazy imperial system. He wasn't quite as blunt as that. Howard Lutnik was pretty blunt when he said you you guys are all globalists and it's a failure and we're here to tell you that. Jameson Greer kind of put the meat on it. But I think for a US Treasury Secretary to give the kind of speech that Scott Bessant gave last week is unprecedented in my lifetime, probably unprecedented in over a hundred years. And I'll leave it to our historian friend Bob Ingram maybe to figure out when the last time we had a Treasury Secretary. I don't know if you have to go all the way back to Alexander Hamilton. maybe you do to actually put some of these basic principles forward.

[00:05:37]So, I've excerpted a couple of sections from the speech and I'm going to run through them relatively quickly. This is from the very opening of the speech. He said, "The truth is that for too long America had been asleep." That was the title. We mistook comfort for strength.

[00:05:55]We treated efficiency as a substitute for resilience and consumption as a measure of prosperity. We told ourselves that so long as goods were cheaper overseas, it didn't matter whether factories went dark in Michigan, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, we assumed supply chains would always function smoothly, adversaries would always behave responsibly, and the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities.

[00:06:22]And then about a paragraph later, he said, "We assumed the rules-based system would discipline," and he's referencing the behaviors of the markets and our adversaries and so on. We assumed the rules-based system would discipline these behaviors only to find that it accommodated them.

[00:06:42]Now, there is a lot packed into those paragraphs. I'm going to get back to the consumption question when we look at another quote in a minute, but I think the two bombshells in there are his comment about how we assumed that the invisible hand would correct vulnerabilities and we assumed the rules-based system would discipline the bad behaviors of other countries only to find out that it accommodated them. Now, I can't stress how important I think that is because he is putting the name on what Marco Rubio did when Rubio spoke in Munich about two months ago, I guess maybe it was February or March, where Rubio said the de-industrialization of the United States was a deliberate policy choice. And we're going to get back to that again. But what Bessant here is doing is labeling the nature of some of those deliberate policy choices.

[00:07:45]Now take the whole question of the rules-based system. of people who have been following Barbara and I on YouTube, and I suspect most of you have, we've talked about how the British are now coming out of the closet and admitting that they were the ones that set up the rules-based post-war system, that they, despite the fact that they're a small country with a small military and a terrible economy internally, that they've benefited very nicely from the rules-based system. And of course, that's because Britain happens to be the home of the city of London and the concentration of financial and other kinds of economic power that represent what people call the globalist system, but what really is an extension of the very same British imperial system that we fought the American Revolution against. And the British have also, this has been in forums in Chattam House and the House of Lords report that came out a couple months ago, blatantly admitting, "We benefited from the rules-based order. We set up the rules-based order. We suck the United States into the rules-based order." They didn't use that verb. But as long as the United States was part of the special relationship, the rules-based order worked nicely. As one member of the House of Lords said, the rules-based order only works if it's enforced. And the only country that can enforce it is the United States. This administration has been saying pretty clearly with the national security strategy, the national defense strategy, Lutnik's speech, career speech, and others that this rules-based order is over. Of course, from the other side, Prime Minister Mark Carney has been the poster boy for saying it's over. It's ruptured.

[00:09:30]Nostalgia doesn't work. But Donald Trump broke it and we're not going to be able to put it back together again. But here is Bessant and again this is very very important saying we thought it would help us only to find out it accommodated the behaviors which gutted our industries and destroyed our supply chain and destroyed our economic independence. Again, I don't know when there's been a US official who has taken the question of the invisible hand of Adam Smith and said, "No, it doesn't really work." So, that's one section that I wanted to highlight. The next section is more of a discussion of what the destruction actually looked like. He makes the point there were people who warned us. He said workers warned us, military planners warned us, manufacturers warned us. what free trade and outsourcing was going to do. But our political class preferred the comfort of old formulas. Cheaper was always better.

[00:10:33]Offshoring was inevitable. Industrial policy was unfashionable. Well, it was worse than unfashionable. There's a whole school of thought that says industrial policy is essentially socialism. And strategic dependence was acceptable so long as the cost remained invisible. Beneath every one of those mistakes lay a more basic failure in our philosophy. In reducing economics to consumption, we forgot production. We measured abundance at the checkout counter rather than the factory gate.

[00:11:06]And those last two sentences are extremely extremely important because again without him putting the label of American system on it as Jameson Greer did, he's essentially describing one of the fundamental differences between a country which is under the British imperial system and a country which is economically sovereign. Because this whole question of reducing economics to consumption where it's just a question of can I buy this stuff cheap? We don't have to produce it here. We just need to be able to buy it cheap, which means you're at the mercy of whoever is controlling international currency, international trade, international investment, and so on. This whole question of the shift of the United States from a producing society, which we were in the 50s and the 60s, but it began to atrophy in the 70s, and we were gutted in the 80s and the 90s, right up to this point, where we reduced economics to consumption. And that's how the whole fraud of free trade was sold to the people who swallowed it.

[00:12:09]Obviously, not everybody did, but enough did. And especially in the political class, it all is based on your shortterm, can I get it cheap today? As opposed to what is this actually doing to our economy? And I think that bottom line just needs to be emlazed. We measured abundance at the checkout counter rather than the factory gate.

[00:12:30]Remember this is a Treasury Secretary we're talking about, not a labor secretary, not a commerce secretary. So then he gets again to another fundamental principle. Somewhere along the way, we lost sight of a foundational principle that previous generations understood instinctively. Well, I'd add therein lies a bit of a problem. It can't be instinctive any longer. people have to be much much more conscious of these principles which is one of the things our boot camps are trying to do and he continued in terms of the foundational principle economic security is national security for a nation that cannot manufacture mine ship or refine its needs gradually seeds its strength and sovereignty to others. Go back to the idea that this is a deliberate policy. This was the policy that the World Economic Forum had in mind in 1979 when they started this process by taking the dollar off the gold reserve standard and everything NAFTA 2008 blowout which has happened ever since. And then he's got a couple of sections in here which really do capture at least the fundamentals if not all of the deeper principles although I think he gets pretty close of Hamilton's conception of what has to be the driving metric of your society. He said, "A country cannot outsource its industrial commons, ignore strategic concentration and expect to remain secure for manufacturing is more than output on a balance sheet." Again, very important, powerful statement. It's not about the money. It is a reservoir of practical capability. engineers and welders, tool and die makers, and logistics networks, plant managers, and workers who know how to solve problems on the factory floor, which is so important. AI can be used as a tool. If a robot can lift up some huge thing and some worker doesn't have to blow out his discs doing it, that's fine. But when it comes to problem solving, it is going to be the people intimately engaged in the production process who solve the problems and come up with the creative new ideas that can never be replaced.

[00:14:51]And this is a reflection of that. And then here's another important line.

[00:14:56]Secure supply chains matter as much as stock indices. Well, one place where I finally disagree a little bit with Scott Besson. It's more important than stock indices, but we'll let it stand. And then this last line here that productive capacity is power. For all of you who have read Alexander Hamilton's report on manufacturers or at least read some of our pamphlets which cover it and have seen the most important economic statement in there, a foundational statement where he says the wealth of a nation is the productive powers of labor. It's the human mind able to intervene into nature to improve it, to build and invent. Bessant kind of channels that where he says, "Of course, America still holds enormous advantages.

[00:15:46]Among them, the world's deepest capital markets, extraordinary innovators, abundant energy potential, leading universities, an unmatched entrepreneurial culture, and workers who can outbuild and out compete anyone so long as the playing field is fair. And he then says, "All we needed was a government willing to declare that as decline is a choice." Again, similar to what Marco Rubio said, "Renewal can be one, too." And obviously, that's what this administration is doing. And then the last slide I want to share, I think this is a great line where he talks about what we need. A financial system aligned with national purpose, not national purpose being sacrificed on the altar of a financial system. Trading partnerships that reinforce rather than undermine our security relationships.

[00:16:41]And then he concludes toward the end of this speech and it's going to be the last slide that I share with you.

[00:16:47]Indeed, the strength of this republic lies not in denying that the old consensus failed. Instead, we must restore resilience where complacency took hold, rebuild capacity where dependence took root, and above all, recover the confidence to believe a nation that knows how to build, invent, and produce and lead is never destined for decline. Again, I think the whole speech is really quite extraordinary, but these, I think, are the highlights of it. And to me, they show that this administration is getting more laserlike in terms of what needs to be communicated as we go into this midterm election. Because as we've discussed on many of these boot camps, the organizing challenge in many cases is changing somebody's identity. Changing them from feeling like they're a victim or as Bessant says, a loser. The Democrats try and compensate the losers. or just a consumer in a system which is controlled by money and you don't have any and therefore you're screwed. That is what drives so many people who fall into whether it's TDS or just apathy or whether they have TDS or not. They think they're Democrats. I constantly stress that it is as much the question of what their identity is than it is any amount of facts that you can throw at them. So I just wanted to use the Vesscent speech as a kind of pedagogical exercise in terms of taking the ideas that we've developed in these boot camps and showing how the top administration spokesman is now starting to channel that so that people might be able to think about how to do that. I want to leave my opening remarks there because I do want to get to the other reports that we have. So there is Evelyn. Okay, here comes Texas. Hello. Hi. So, we had a Trump revolution down here in Texas on the 26th, which was our Republican runoffs. President Trump endorsed four candidates. The one that got the lowest vote got 58% of the vote. The rest got two to one, including Ken Paxton, who was the key fight, of course, because he was taking on a sitting senator who had been in for four terms and who was backed by the entire Republican leadership of the US Senate. And people came out, MAGA voters, massively because we had more voting in this runoff election than any in history in Texas.

[00:19:24]And the MAGA voters came out and said, "This is who we want." Now, it's interesting because Ken Paxton, who has been a loyal Trump supporter, he was one of two politicians back in 2023, who was at the announcement of Trump's 2024 campaign. Everybody else had deserted Trump except for two people, one of whom was Paxton. Now, he was asked on Maria Bartomo, he was on her show on Sunday, and he was asked, "Well, what message do you think this sent to the Republican senators?" and he said, "I think the message was we have to listen to and follow President Trump. He's the leader of our party. He's the one that's putting out policies that everybody who's a Republican wants to get through, and that's what we should be doing." He attacked the Bush machine. See, Ken Paxton in 2022 had to run against George P. Bush, the last Bush in public office in the United States of America in a runoff for the Republican nomination for attorney general of Texas and he beat him and said this is the end of the Bush dynasty. Well, not quite, but I think it is now. And when he was asked by Maria Barto Romo about all these attacks on him because Paxton is called the most corrupt politician in the country and he had various cases of corruption and this and that against him and he was impeached and all of this he said well that was all pushed by Carl Rove and people may remember Carl Rove was once known as Bush's brain. So this is the Bush apparatus. Finally, he said, "Look, accusations don't mean anything. They have to actually be able to convict you." And in my case, and in the case of President Trump, they weren't able to convict us. So, we're going to go defeat this guy. They have various names for Terico, Loi Tom, and I don't remember all the various ones, but this guy is a nutcase who should be able to be defeated despite all the stuff you're hearing in the news about how he's winning the election. I don't think so.

[00:21:34]The same polls that are going tell you that Karico, the Democrat, is going to win the election are the same ones that said it was going to be a close race between Cornin and Paxton. So, it's a lot of fun down here. Evelyn, why don't you update people on our friend Alex Hail's race since Alex has been on a couple of our boot camps.

[00:21:56]>> Alex Hail, this young man, 27 years old, who founded the Alexander Hamilton Club at his college, Baylor University, who decided to run for Congress after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. He said, "I have to do more." And he also won the runoff by about two to one. He's in a tough district. It's a district that was put together to help the Democrats be able to win one district in this area.

[00:22:25]But he got a tremendous response and I was doorbelling for him. When people heard about him, who he was, 27 years old, what he stood for, they were like, "My god, I haven't heard about this guy, but I'm totally excited." So, should be a fun race. Let me jump down to Mark.

[00:22:44]get another quick report from Mark. Go ahead.

[00:22:47]>> How are you doing?

[00:22:48]>> Good.

[00:22:48]>> I want to thank you very much. You sent a box of the free leaflets to me. We will be using that in our upcoming event season. We have 15 to 17 different events we will be doing here in Plaster County. We have an 8 foot by 18 ft trailer that we do these events at. It's a community outreach event that we do.

[00:23:08]We do fairs festivals.

[00:23:10]>> Well, Mark, you got to tell people what state you're in just so they know how brave you are.

[00:23:14]>> Oh, I'm in California.

[00:23:15]>> There you go.

[00:23:16]>> We have these leaflets and like I said, we do about 15 to 17 different events.

[00:23:21]People when they see our trailer, we have people five to seven people deep at our trailer just saying, gosh, we're so glad to see you. We're so glad there's Republicans here. Plaster County and Northern California is still quite red.

[00:23:35]I'm on the executive committee for the Plaster County Republican Party. I'm in charge of the events. So, we have a lot of events coming up and I really want to thank you for those flyers. They are going to really, really, really help us get the word out about Prometheian Action. I want to thank those people in Texas for providing those to us. We They will be well used. We need to educate as many people as we can about Prometheian action and what President Trump is trying to do to save America from the oligarchs.

[00:24:00]>> Amen. Thank you, Mark. All right, everybody. a far-ranging call. Really great. Lots of activity. When we come back in two weeks, we're going to have some fun reports. The Texas State Republican Convention is the weekend of the 12th, 13th, and 14th. The North Carolina convention is that same weekend. We are going to be in force at both of those. And we should have some fun reports. And I'm sure President Trump and his team will give us something else to talk about too between now and then. So, thanks for joining us and we will see you in two weeks.