Doomerism and the fight for MAGA | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the peak calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. I want to give a shout-out to the Carolina Panthers for once again reminding me what it's like to be a Panther fan. After the previous week's romp over the Atlanta Falcons, I had forgotten what it is like to be a Panther fan. But I was reminded yesterday again what it's like to watch a game and have to watch it until the very, very end because they give you the chance. They give you a little bit of hope that they're going to win, and then they just throw it all away and lose it. So thank you for that reminder. I appreciate that. Go Panthers. Do you remember when I said, and I've said this on numerous occasions, so hopefully you've heard me say it at some point in the past, but I said that there's going to be a fight between over the control of MAGA post Trump. Okay. And so I, I said this right after Trump won, because as soon as he won, it was like, okay, he's going to have, you know, a year and a half to do whatever he wants to do. And then he's going to sort of get into the lame duck season, especially if they lose the midterms, the Republicans lose the midterms, which historically that is the case. The party that controls the white house, usually in modern history loses seats. I believe the only time in recent history was when, um, Bush, George W. Bush did not lose in his first midterm, but that was mainly because of the, uh, the effects of nine 11. So I. Don't, uh, I, I don't have, you know, any, I don't have, I'm under no illusion that, uh, that Democrats are more likely to win than Republicans. That's the historical trend. Can that change? Sure. As I mentioned, we just, there are examples of this happening before. Could it happen now? It could, I'm not going to make any predictions on this because I don't know. And here's the, the other thing is nobody knows. That's, that's why we hold elections. It's why you play the game. Right. You can have all of the odds makers saying you're the favorite or you're the underdog. But then you play the game and you play the game. And sometimes, yeah, the favorite wins and the underdog loses. But sometimes the underdog wins and the favorite loses. That's why they play the game. It's why they hold elections. But I've been saying this from the beginning, that there's going to be a fight because Trump cannot run again. There's going to be this fight over who controls the MAGA coalition. And you've got all of these different groups inside that coalition that are going to be vying for as big of a piece of the pie as they can get, right? And that's politicians. That's also media people. It's influencers on, you know, the social media stuff. consultant class, right? All of these different cottage industries that all surround politics, right? They're all going to be trying to secure a chunk. And if they can get a big enough chunk, then they get to be in control, right? That's the idea. And I've talked about various factions inside MAGA that I think are, you know, that are, in my opinion, it's pretty obvious that they are trying very hard to become the standard bearer, right? So that's what we are seeing right now. And the doomerism, which I have been talking about for a while now, this is part of that fight, okay? Because fear sells, right? Negativity sells. And so... This explains why, in not every case, but in a lot of cases, why you have people on the quote-unquote right, people who were part of the MAGA coalition but never really actually cared about MAGA or cared about policy or anything like that. They're just in it for the power, and you get that in both parties. You get that whenever any party is ascendant, when they've got power. You have people that don't care about the philosophy. They just care about the power, okay? And so they know that selling you doomerism, which is basically just the end state of pessimism, right? You start off as a pessimist. You're like, oh, no, nothing's going to change. Oh, no, the worst could happen, right? This pessimism, that then turns into cynicism, right? sort of a default position ascribing the worst motives of everybody all the time, right? And whatever thing that you're seeing, whatever news story or issue, you just immediately go to, I'm not saying you, I'm talking in the King's you, if you will, right? You're immediately going to like the most nefarious conspiratorial way of thinking about something absent any actual evidence. So pessimism yields to cynicism. The cynicism then turns into doomerism, which is basically nihilism. All is lost anyway. Why bother? Okay? This is what I've been trying to push back on. And in fact, I just saw this come across the Twitter machine from an account called The Drunk Republican who highlights, and I've highlighted some of these issues as well a couple weeks ago, some of the wins. And it's like, there are people on the right... that either are incapable or they refuse to accept any kind of a win and to celebrate the wins. That's not to say the work is over. It's not to say you can stop caring and all of that. It's, it's not, it's, it's just a failure to recognize that you got something. And I understand being a Republican for 30 years means that you're not accustomed to seeing a lot of wins. I understand. I get that. Um, But you got a secure border. Did you think that would happen? USAID scrapped. Did you think that would happen? Lowest crime rates. We've got crime at the lowest level in like 150 years or something. We've had mass deportations along with self-deportations. Estimates are somewhere around 3 million in a year, year and a half. For the first time in 50 years, negative net migration. Right. The job numbers are good. DEI has you know, they're still purging this DEI. I have no doubt it'll come back. But that's a reason why you don't give up is because if you give up all of these things that I just mentioned, they all come back. Right. Woke is not dead. The red green alliance like that's not dead. They are still working to do those things that they were trying to do four years ago. They're going to bring them all back. That's what they are promising their people. He says, you can be opposed to the Iran war, but there's no denying Trump is on a generational run. The second term is the most productive of my lifetime, possibly ever. Yes, stuff is still expensive, but we are getting a lot for it. And this is really the only thing that I hear people complaining about on the right. They focus on the gas prices. And they blame it all on the Iran war. For some reason, they don't recognize the impact on the global markets when Ukraine is drone-striking Russian oil facilities and vice versa. So that has an impact as well. Did you know, by the way, Saudi Arabia is now pumping almost as much as they were pumping before the war? They're exporting that stuff out through their pipelines. So the. Oil-producing nations in the Middle East, they are largely recovered. What's happening is Iran is not able to get its stuff out. So keep that in mind. But this is the argument I hear. It's all about the gas prices. And I get it. I pay gas prices. I don't like the high gas prices either. But I don't find the answer to be, let's turn over the government to the people who are opposed to fossil fuels and want gas prices to be high. That is completely irrational to me. It's illogical. It's illogical to Kurt Schlichter as well, writing at townhall.com. I'll tell you what he had to say in a moment. 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Go to createavideo.com or visit them in Mint Hill just off I-485. Your photos and videos are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you. And they will tell others to come who you are. Visit createavideo.com. From the text line, Mike says, good afternoon, Pete. Hey, I know, I know, I know how the elections are going to turn out. I'm not going to tell you right now because that would ruin the surprise for you. I'll let you know how the elections, or sorry, I'll let you know after the elections that I was right about my picks. I like it, Mike. Yeah, don't ruin the surprise for me. So just put me down for $ 100 on whatever the online betting you're going to be doing. So just put me down for $ 100. Just front me the $ 100 there. Because I totally trust your picks that you'll be right. But I won't know what your picks were until afterwards. And then I'll expect my payoff. Love your show. Thanks for what you do. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate that. And John points out that the NFC South has won a collective three out of 12 games this But the one win that the Panthers have is enough to be in a three-way tie for first. So that's it. Yeah, we are tied for first, baby. With one win and two losses. We are awesome. All right. And Kevin says, I'm doing my part to tell everyone exactly the thoughts you're expressing. I'm not standing on the street corner screaming like the No Kings nuts. but I'm trying from what I'm seeing. It's not so much that prices are high. It's that our government continues to say how great things are. Comments like the stock market keeps making all time highs and the economy has never been better. It's the total lack of acknowledgement that many people are struggling. It is the exact same tack Biden did with the economy. The see this chart, stupid. The economy is awesome. Um, yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing is like, what's the old line? A recession is when my neighbor loses his job. A depression is when I lose my job. So whatever they're feeling or thinking about the economy, it's true to them. And when we saw four years of the kind of inflation spike that we had under Biden, those prices don't come back down, right? However, when you look at the economic data, The economic data is all trending in a beneficial direction or is good. So, like, how do you convince somebody that's been told the economy is terrible that it's not? Now, your personal situation may not be awesome. You may be struggling. But people don't want to hear what the response to that is. They don't want to believe that they have agency over some of this stuff. And some of the stuff they don't, to be fair, like, again, all of the sectors, I've outlined this many times, right? The sectors that have the most government intervention, those sectors have the highest prices and most limited choices. That's what government brings you. That's what socialism and command control economies, that's what they bring you. And as Democrats took over healthcare, right, more and more so with Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid expansion, all of these programs, right? Yes, you're seeing higher prices. The answer is not to give them more control again. I don't know why you would, again, to me, it makes no rational sense why you would reward the people who did this with more power to do more of the thing that made things unaffordable for you. If you thought that 16 months of Trump and a two-seat majority, whatever it is in the House, and a slim majority in the Senate, not enough to override or get past any filibusters, if you thought that this was going to be some massive sea change, how did the left succeed in all of these areas? Do you think they did it all at once? There's a reason why it's called the Long March through the institutions. And I know that we lack the attention span and the patience today as Americans. I understand that. And I know like I'm sounding like a old fuddy-duddy over here talking about having to stay the course, be patient. You got to keep doing the work, not to sound all woke on you, but that's the way you actually affect change. You think about how long it has taken for some of these Supreme Court decisions that we have now had that are already altering the course of our federal government, right? We have had some massive gains thanks to the Supreme Court justices that were put in by Trump. Does that mean we've won every single case? No. Does it mean that we've won a lot of them? Absolutely. And won some big ones. We've not won all of them. But the answer there is like, well, we didn't go, you know, a hundred percent victory here. So therefore we need to teach these Republicans a lesson and turn it over to the commies. Like again, like that doesn't make any sense to me. All right. I will get to the Kurt Schlichter piece. And he takes a bit of a more combative approach, shall we say, than I have taken. I'm trying, I'm trying that the, The kid glove approach. He is more of a bare knuckle kind of approach. All right, real quick. Every government number gets revised, right? Every projection gets walked back. Gold does not file corrections like GovCo. Revelation Gold Group helps families hold physical gold and silver, including in a tax advantaged gold IRA. It's real. It's in your name. And 10 minutes tells you if your retirement account qualifies. If you want to learn more, go to calendarmetals.com. That's calendarmetals.com. There is a link in the podcast description. Or if you want to talk to somebody, you can call 888-465-3049. All right. From the text line, Ian says, thank you kindly for stating my case for GOP midterm success. The electorate generally understands why gas prices are high and supports current efforts to remedy the situation in the Hormuz Straits. And the electorate is hugely sick of Democrats' lunacy and is fully aware their policies would shoot gas prices to the moon. This midterm will not follow conventional tendencies. That is a prediction. I do not make them, so I don't know. But we'll see if Ian's correct. All right, let me get to this piece from retired Colonel Kurt Schlichter over at townhall.com. He says every election cycle, we hear the same stupid spiel from a certain band of pseudo conservative quitters. And their spiel goes like this. Oh no, I'm not getting my way. I've got no reason to vote. I'm not going to vote. The Republicans aren't conservative enough. So I'm just going to let the communist pervert Democrats win. Wham, wham, wham. Like I said, Hey, he's a bit more abrasive, uh, in these assessments than I am. But he says, I don't know whether this is tactical stupidity or a cry for attention. Maybe it's both, but it is exhausting. You never win by losing. Like it's an obvious thing that he just said there, but I feel like it needs to be stated again for some folks. You don't win by losing. Okay. You don't get the stuff you want by not participating. One other thing. For all the people who voted for Trump and expected everything to be fixed in, I guess, a year, because that's kind of what it seems like the expectation was, you voted for him for a four-year term. So why would you hamstring him for the second half of it? It seems like you vote for him and the agenda and what he wants to do. You're buying into that. And what happened to the whole trust the plan, folks? So why would you sit out so then the second half of his term is completely useless? Why would you do that? Why wouldn't you try to strengthen him so he can get as much of this stuff done in the remaining time he's got? Back to the piece here. But Kurt, we've got to teach the Republicans a lesson. I hear the cry. I've heard it myself here on this show. And he says, yeah, we do. Do you think the Republicans haven't learned anything? And then he proceeds to run through a list like John Cornyn, Bill Cassidy, Thomas Massey, or how about our own Tom Tillis? He writes, Tillis didn't even bother running because he knew he'd get drop kicked into oblivion in the North Carolina primaries. He goes on to say the fact is we are getting rid of the dead weight. We are making progress. The Republicans are learning their lesson. That's what the primaries are for. That's what the primaries have done. But what the general election is for is stopping the communists. This is when it counts. Later on, he says, I can't deal with people who are so dumb or disingenuous that that they would actually argue that we must protest the Republicans not being conservative and populist enough by electing a bunch of perverted communist weirdos who want to castrate kids, throw open the penitentiaries, invite in the entire third world, and persecute anybody to the right of Alexandra Akazokotes. Burn it all down? Well, that's our house. We got all three branches of government. Did we get everything we wanted from Congress? No. And you know what? We are never going to get everything we want from Congress. Period. We are never going to get everything we want from any institution. Because we are adults, well, at least some of us, because we are adults, we understand you don't always get what you want. But sometimes I've heard you get what you need, but you don't always get what you want. That's why you keep fighting. How long did it take to overturn Roe v. Wade? 50 years. That's a long march. This is what the left has been engaged in. This has been their project for 70 years. It's gotten worse. It's so noticeable now. They're out there flying their freak flags out and proud. But they didn't get here overnight. They've been doing the work for the revolution for 70 years. That's how long it takes to effect change. But, Schlichter points out, we have gotten a lot. He points out the border is closed. What kind of idiot would think it's a great idea to give power to the people who want to open the borders in order to protest Donald Trump not deporting quite enough illegal aliens so far? Once again, see, I've been asking this question too. Like, this doesn't make any rational sense. Unless, of course, your brand is doomerism. If that is how you get your income or your influence or both by selling doomerism in order to carve out a chunk of the MAGA coalition that may be more, you know, predispositioned to pessimism or cynicism or doomerism and nihilism. Like, if that's the crowd that you're trying to harness in order to keep your clicks up, in order to keep your view count high so you keep generating an income off of YouTube, well, then I guess that makes sense. But if you're actually caring about effecting change and doing what we are obligated to do as American citizens engaged in a project of self-governance, right? To pay attention to what's going on, to policy, right? To pay attention to the functioning of the government, to then get involved and self-govern. We understand that this takes time. that the process is specifically designed to slow things down so this way you don't have these wild swings of governing and policies, right? Because if you have these wild swings, then that means you could end up with Democrats in charge and pushing into effect all sorts of policies that are antithetical to our system. So I don't, like I've said for years, I'm okay with gridlock in D.C. because it means they're not doing bad stuff too. But that also means it takes more time to do the good stuff, right? Things that we want. But again, like I don't understand the rationale behind that you're saying, oh, I wanted more deportations faster, and because you didn't get as many as quickly as you wanted, therefore, let's turn the power over to the people that want to open the borders. That doesn't make any sense. You're mad about gas prices, okay? He says, do you think the party that hates fossil fuels, that wants us riding buses with homicidal hobos or peddling bicycles like ponytail gender studies teaching assistants, do you think they're going to make for lower gas prices? They're going to shut down the entire petroleum industry. They blocked pipelines. They tried to kill fracking. They did a darn good job of stopping nuclear production. Do you think that's going to make gas cheaper, Einstein? Spoiler, it doesn't. Putting them in power is not going to make things cheaper. Just because they're telling you they want to make things cheaper doesn't mean they're going to make things cheaper. You know how I know? Because they've never done anything to make anything cheaper. All the stuff they do makes everything more expensive. All of their policies. And this is on the record. This is of historical record. You can look at the policies and see the outcomes. I am your white pill. I try to be. I'm trying to be your white pill in a world of black pilling doomerism. Let me see here. Oh, let me jump over here and get Travis on. Hello, Travis. Welcome to the program. Hey, Pete. Hey. With Donald Trump being president, shouldn't it be a gold pill? Oh, that's fair. That's fair. Oh, sorry. I'll give it to you. I was thinking, I think this really struck me Saturday, so two days ago, that the way it feels in the Republican Party right now reminds me of 2007. Remember, Linda Davey was the chairwoman. for the state of North Carolina Republican Party. And she couldn't get traditional donors on the phone. People were deflated. The energy was low. I've been to a couple of events recently where it's the same thing. Turnouts down, energy's down. And then 2008 happened. Elizabeth Dole lost her seat. Obama became president. And overnight, I saw the energy start to change. And then ultimately, 2010, we had the Tea Party election. I don't know that there's any way that we could have turned it around in 2007 slash 2008, and I don't know that there's any way we can turn it around now. Maybe if we don't want to wait for the Democrats to win and have that Obama Tea Party moment again, maybe messaging is the issue, because when I've called into you in the past, it's always been trying to guess what Trump's doing. what is his plan with oil? What is it like? Why, why the tariffs? What's the goal? So maybe articulation could help, but I just don't know that there's anything you can do outside of just the natural flow of what happened 2007, 2008, 2009. I mean, that's just what has to happen. Yeah. I mean, look, I, the 2008, 2009 elections had come off. I mean, you had had, you know, George W. Bush in there for two terms and, Right. Yeah. The Iraq war, the Afghanistan war. People were exhausted by all of that. And then Obama was a unique political figure and he ran as a blank slate candidate and he ran with this unifying message and he was running against John McCain. Right. So there were a lot of reasons why Republicans were deflated. I don't see it now as I don't see the reason to be deflated. And I say this as somebody, like, I've not been a Trump supporter. Like, I haven't been banging the drum for Donald Trump. I didn't vote for him the first two times he ran. I voted for him last time. Well, you will agree that he plays 12-D chess, right? I do not. I don't I don't like. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've not seen evidence of that. I think I think he is a chaos agent. I think there are things that he's trying to do and he's not telling us what those things are. I recognize also that he's constantly throwing out all of these things that that create the chaos and the messaging is not consistent. All of that. I agree with all of that. But here's the thing. I've known that for a decade. The people like I don't understand why it's taken people 10 years to figure out this is Donald Trump. I figured him out pretty early on. So, like, I don't understand why people pretend not to understand this is how Trump governs. You know, I think the deflation is a little bit like Pat McCrory, where people like to point to the I-77 toll lane as the reason he lost. I think there's a lot of little reasons he lost, like the fishermen on the coast were mad about some of the things he did out there. Some people in the mountains were mad. You know, a lot of little things. Trump, our polls, not just for Trump, I say Trump, but I mean... Republicans in the House. Polls were already starting to go downhill when the ICE videos were all over the news, right? And then oil. And people were already mad that some of the scandals that talking heads have been talking about for decades... didn't seem to make the momentum. So I think it's a lot of little things and maybe this is part of it, you know, with Trump coming in so hot and heavy, so fast, maybe it didn't take two terms. You know, he, he, he squeezed so much into such a short time that, you know, maybe he got two terms worth of Bush angst into one term of Trump angst. I don't know. Yeah, maybe. I mean, in three, he ran three different times, so that's possible. Travis, I appreciate the call, man. All right. Thank you. All right. Thanks. Take care. All right. Let me get to this, um, the last piece of this Kurt Schlichter piece. He says, choosing defeat is not the best path to victory. Choosing defeat is not the best path to victory. But cycle after cycle, we get the same loud, stupid people on social media who stand up and advocate failure as the key to success. You can't argue with an idiot because he's an idiot. And you can't argue with somebody whose purpose is only to draw attention to himself. I don't want to put these people in the spotlight. They're political narcissists who want us to beg them for their support. There are demoralized Republicans out there, so there's a market for dooming. It's easier to exploit them than to energize them. That is true. It is far easier to exploit the people who are already in the doomer loop than it is to inspire them and energize them. He says, this is the time for doing what you have to do to win in the long run. No, gritting your teeth and marching forward doesn't provide the giddy emotional satisfaction of a temper tantrum. That's true. But then again, adults aren't out for emotional satisfaction. They are out for victory. And the only way we're going to have any chance of winning our country back is by defeating the communists who want to destroy what's left of it. And I agree with Kurt Schlichter. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to the Pete calendar show.com again, Thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.