KMO Show episode number 25 December 1st 2024.
Hey everybody, KMO here and what I have for you today is a conversation with my friend Kevin Lynn.
He's somebody I know from my peak oil days. In fact, I first met him when he invited me to come
down to Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he lives where he was putting on an event where he had
invited John Michael Greer, James Howard Kunstler, Dimitri Orlov, Chris Martinson, who else? Some
other peak oil people to basically put on an event and I got to interview all those guys in a room.
There's a video where I asked them about the potential for shifting from an internal combustion
private ownership based model of transportation to one where there are fleets of autonomous
electric vehicles and none of them were bullish on that prospect. It's a fun video. I think it's
from 2016 which is when I first met Kevin Lin face to face. He'd been listening to my podcast,
the C-Realm podcast, for I don't know how long but long enough to know that I was associated
with that scene and if he was putting on an event he'd like to have me there. But since then we've
done quite a bit of work together and in fact it was Kevin's organization that paid me to develop
the GEBB webcomic and I got to do some traveling in association with that. I went to the EarthX
convention in Dallas, Texas twice and once out to Los Angeles for Politicon 2019. So Kevin was a big
Trump supporter and here is my conversation with him, my first recorded conversation with him
after the 2024 election. And we are rolling KMO. All right, hey Kevin, it is good to see you.
KMO, always a pleasure. It's been too long. How are you doing? I've been sick. I just took a bunch
of cough medicines so hopefully that'll kick in and I won't be coughing a lot. Ah okay, okay.
If I do cough. You sound a little nasally. Oh yeah. There's the first cough. Okay.
But as you know I am excited about recent developments in artificial intelligence
and I have invited my favorite chat bot, Claude of Anthropic AI, who knows about you.
Yeah in fact I appreciate you because you're the one who introduced me to Claude and I
just kind of use it for grammar, things like that. I haven't gotten as involved in it as you have.
Kind of like using a like an AK-47 to prop the door open. Yeah pretty much. Yeah exactly.
It can do that. Well anyway, I invited Claude to introduce our conversation here and to throw out
the first question so I'm going to read Claude's suggestion. Claude writes, welcome to the KMO show.
Today's guest is Kevin Lin, a self-described lapsed Republican, unrepentant paroist, failed green,
frustrated Democrat, and now independent. KMO and Kevin first connected through the peak oil
community where they explored questions of societal complexity and system adaptation.
Kevin brings a unique perspective shaped by his varied career from army officer serving in the US,
Europe, and Asia to senior positions at major accounting firms to his current role as executive
director of the Institute for Sound Public Policy. Both Kevin and KMO follow the work of Rudyard
Lynch whose analysis of historical crisis patterns suggests we're entering a period of
institutional stress more akin to the 30 years war than a total war scenario. The 2024 election
has produced some remarkable outcomes. Trump's decisive victory, the establishment's failed
attempts to prevent it, and the emergence of a new political coalition crossing traditional
ideological lines. Yet Lynch's framework suggests this might represent not a resolution but a stage
in a longer process of system reorganization. Kevin, given your experience organizing political
groups across multiple states and parties, what do you make of these new coalitions forming around
Trump's victory, particularly the involvement of figures like RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard?
Wow, actually I'm intimidated to be quite honest with Claude's prowess when it comes to one,
knowing who I am and being able to put that together so succinctly. And I think it's a great
question because, you know, it's funny. I got exposed to Rudyard Lynch. I'm reading right now
Peter Wilson's book, The 30 Years War, and I really recommend it. I mean, it's a thick
tome. It's hard to get through, but it's real. The 30 Years War is amazingly complex, and there are
eras of it. It went from, as Rudyard pointed out, from 1618 to 1648, and it absolutely decimated the
German Holy Roman Empire states, and everyone was involved. It really was a total war on a
continental basis where you had, at any one time, you had all the, I mean, the principalities in
the German states involved. You had the Swedes involved, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
France, you know, and England in a lesser role, more supportive of different players. But,
and Spain, of course, very much involved. And then all these interlocking relationships. But before
the 30 Years War, there were a lot of run-ups to it. And I know Rudyard is probably spot on in many
respects when it comes to saying, you know, we should be looking at the 30 Years War, not necessarily
the American Civil War or the American Revolution, for guide stars in looking at what could happen.
But I think we even need to go a step back further to the French Counter-Reformation,
which took place in the later 16th century, that period between the 1550s and late 1500s.
And I think everyone should probably read if you haven't, I'll pull it down. But become familiar
with Montaigne, and because he was very much a player in this period. And I put up a quote of his
on my personal X-page, and it reads something in effect of,
the problem with Civil War is it makes us all sentinels in our own homes. Because I recall
reading a biography on him, and he was talking about there was a point in his life where he was
the mayor of a small city, and on weekends, he would go horseback riding, you ride horseback to
his estate. And his fear was to be encountered, he would come on a crossroad, and there'd be
Uginots, Protestants guarding it, and he was a known Roman Catholic, and they might kill him.
And you know, I have a friend who were about the same age, and she grew up in Beirut in the 80s
during the Civil War there. And she would tell the story, I mean, there's a reason the poor woman
has PTSD, highly functioning, but her father would drive her up to a barricade, and she would
literally have to dodge snipers on the way to school. And life kind of goes on, as I think
Rudyard aptly points out, if not in this podcast, but in another one where, you know, life just kind
of goes on in a Civil War, and I think we can find ourselves there. And even though I think
there, if, I think if the Trump administration, and I love the fact, I had been saying for two
years that he needed to reach out and make R.F.K. his running mate. So in, I believe it was August
when he brought R.F.K. on stage with him, and R.F.K. you know, ended his run for office and his
support for the Trump campaign. I mean, that was significant. That brought in voters that Trump
would not have had. And I know several in California that I knew when I was part of the
progressive movement in California and on the executive board of the California Democratic
Party, and not a one of them would have voted, been brought in to vote for Trump had it not been for
R.F.K. So I think he might have been responsible for, you know, one, 1.5, maybe as many as two
percentage points. And it was a brilliant coalition. I mean, the, I mean, it was an amazing
end run around the establishment to do that and just brilliant. And, you know, one thing about
Trump that I had noticed in my one instance where I spent an afternoon with him back in 2020, is
that I think he's a really bright guy, but where he's head and shoulders above most people is
in EQ, that emotional quotient, that ability to read people in the times and timing like Joe
Rogan had pointed out, he's a good comedian because he has a good sense of comic timing. And he
understands that. So can he evoke the right animal spirits, bringing the right people together?
I don't know. Ed Doud had mentioned recently that, you know, he's inheriting a turd of an economy.
And I think Rudyard in that, that 23 minute podcast with Dad Saves America, I think that was
it. I was the interviewer. Yes. He rightly points out that, you know, politics and feelings aren't
why people go to war, you know, so do civil war. It's because their backs are literally against
the financial world. And, you know, when you have nothing left to lose, you just lose it.
You look at the 30 years war, and much of the part of it where it was very much about,
you know, it got religious. A lot of the underpinnings of that were economic. I mean,
the German states were being just annihilated by the papacy. You know, you had the
selling of indulgences, the selling of papal offices and their ability to escape taxation by
the local German, you know, the German principalities. It was bankrupting and the people, that's,
you know, that was a big reason why a lot of people were turning away from the Catholic Church
and didn't trust it. And a lot of the reasons for the actual warfare itself. I mean, again,
much like today, I don't think people really grasp how hard wage earners have it in America today.
You know, I think our mutual friend, John Michael Greer, did an amazing job when he penned an article
in January of 2016, because he was talking about why he said at that time, President, you know,
Trump will win the presidency in 2016. And he said, he's the only one speaking to class warfare.
And that's what's throwing everyone under the bus. And it's systemic. I mean, well, I'll leave it
there. But I think Greer is spot on that we are on our way to civil war. And the economic underpinnings
are there. He was talking about, you know, these inflationary cycles that touched off a lot of the
civil wars. Those are here. And we've been able to gloss over it all with financialization. But I
don't think we're going to be able to do that for much longer. KMO. So my substack is called Gen X
science fiction and futurism. I was born in 1968. And I definitely identify with my generational
cohort of Gen X. You are a few years older. What is your generational cohort affiliation? Yeah, I'm
technically a boomer, I think. I'm in my 60s. And it's funny. And what I you know, what I found,
and I don't know if you were as amazed by Rudyard as I was to think that someone so young could
possess so much knowledge, and have the ability to do critical thinking because you there's this
quote from Henry Ford, and it goes like this, he goes, never trust anything anyone says who's
under the age of 40. Unfortunately, boomers, I think there's a huge blind spot with us in that.
And I'm fortunate I have Xers and Z's working for me right now. Actually millennials and Z's
working for me and they have been able to guide me and help expose my blind spots and I think
help make us more effective. And I don't necessarily want to bring more on, you know, but I want to
make sure those people are resourced and doing the things that they feel they need to do because
it's really helping us as an organization to have those insights that someone like myself
am pretty much blind to. So it's definitely there's a generational aspect in there. And I'd be curious,
how do you know, so I'm saying that that's my view in terms of how I think I'm blinded to what's
going on and the damage that's been done. But then again, in my history, I've always advocated for
these younger generations. I was a, I'm an unrepentant parois, a parole supporter, and I
worked for a man, he ran for president in 1992. You know, he was fighting these free trade,
quote unquote free trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Eurogray
rounds of the General Agreement on taxes and tariffs, and the World Trade Organization that
just wholesale sent millions and millions of good manufacturing jobs overseas, but also
wiped out whole towns because there's all these ancillary businesses and concerns
that go along with these manufacturing jobs. And they would use this, they would gaslight us by
saying, oh, there's jobs, these jobs don't have an economic right to exist. And they keep doing it
because they said learn to code. Well, then they outsourced and offshored all the good coding jobs
and everything, you know, they brought in, they heavily abused the H1, they were actually was,
it's working the way it's designed to, which is bring in a whole stream of white collar
professional workers to displace the expensive, expendable and undeserving American white collar
workers who are now competing for jobs at Starbucks and Walmart because they cannot find work in their
fields. And I'm curious too about, I also think, again, getting that's the inflation aspect, but
what makes this, I think, exceptionally scary, a moment where we really could lose it all is
there's just for the last 30 years been this lack of, not just, you can see it when you walk outside,
the lack of investment in physical infrastructure across the country, you know, China, who in,
when Nixon went over there in the early 70s, you know, the mode of transportation were bicycles,
and now they have super fast trains going all over the country and brand new cities. So all that money
has been sucked away from the infrastructure of America, but also the lack of investment in human
capital. Our schools are an absolute mess. Now granted, there are great school jurisdictions out
there, like if you go to Los Angeles and you look at LA Unified School District on the whole, it's
brilliant. No, no, it sucks, I'm sorry, but you go to La Cunha, and one other place, and it's a really
awesome school district, but for the most part, generally speaking, absolute dog shit, and you
know, I live in the city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the public schools here are absolute garbage
in terms of producing people that are highly competitive and need to be competitive in a,
in the 21st century, and we've been let down largely because of the influence of the
the influence of, you know, those organizations that have a vested interest in maintaining power
and not giving it up, and lack of investment in the trades. You know, you can't find, you can't keep
technicians or find a good plumber, good mechanic, a good, you know, tradesman, you know, in
construction because, you know, the unions weren't investing in that next generation coming up,
so I think all these combined to really put this generate, these younger generations,
their backs are against the wall, and the wage earners who don't have access to health care and
things like that are particularly vulnerable, and the reason Trump was able to garner so much vote
and enthusiasm, I mean, you go to, have you, did you go to any of his rallies, KMO? I've never been
to a Trump rally. Well worth going because it's almost a religious experience. I mean, one,
you're around great people, I thought, and people were genuinely excited. They traveled miles to be
there. Even if he spoke for just an hour, you know, they'd wait in line, like here in the city of
Lancaster when he spoke here, a buddy of mine was getting off a night shift, and he was going to
come over and just hang out, crash here, we'd go down at about 11 because Trump would be speaking
at five, and we'd wait till they opened the doors at two, and he'd just gone down to look it out at
9 30 a.m. I got a call and I said, look, I'm in line because people are lined up 9 30 a.m. to hear
him speak at five. I mean, that tells you just, and it's not like they think of him as a god because
Trump voters, you know, they booed him, you know, when he spoke about the the vax, the jab and
everything. They're very opposed to that. They're not like brainwashed or anything, but they realize
that, you know, they might have just one opportunity to get back in the saddle, and it's Trump, and you
know, they came out and supported him for that. Does that help, Lancaster? Kind of set the...
Oh, I mean, you answered several questions I didn't ask, but that's all right. I ask about the
generational cohort thing because I know that you are familiar with the framework laid out by
Strauss and Howe and their generational theory, and, you know, the phrase the fourth turning
means something to you, and I just wonder how much in the forefront of your thinking, you know,
that timeline is in terms of we are coming into a period of intense crisis, and on the other side
will be, you know, the new spring, the new awakening, new good times, but we have a really
rough period to get through before we get there. Yeah, I think everyone should be familiar with the
concept. I first got, you know, look, we're looking at generational issues. I, when I was at this small
military college called Kemper in Missouri, there was an old woman, Ruthie Roberts, who taught
accounting and economics, and she had been there since shortly after World War II, and she loved
her boys, and, you know, she taught about a Russian economist. His name was Kondratiev, and he had come
up with this principle that, look, when you look at innovation, the economics, it's almost like it's
the life of a long-lived human being, like roughly 75 years, and then you had people like Harry Dent
who came along and, you know, applied prices and markets to that, where you could say, look, I can
tell you when a generation will buy the most potato chips, and he would also say, look, you know, the
Great Depression was caused when the Henry Ford generation began to retire, and they stopped buying
the cars, the college educations, and so that started the Great Depression, and then when the
Bob Hope generation went through a similar thing, you know, the 70s, we had a serious recession,
and he had predicted a couple things early, and which is why I, you know, became an adherent of
his. He had said that this, in the 80s, you might recall there were all these books like Japan is
number one, you know, the Japanese were eating our lunch in terms of, you know, building better products,
selling on a global basis, and the fear was, you know, they would be number one, America number two,
and, you know, but he predicted they were going to fall off a demographic cliff, and that the U.S.
is going to go through this resurgence in the 90s, and that's exactly how it all played out, and he
predicted right around 2008 when the critical mass of boomers would start to retire and pull in,
and that's pretty much we had, you know, the Great Recession of 2008, and the Great, what do they call
it, the Great Financial Recession, or something like that, GFR, I think, and, you know, people like me
in 2006, we kind of saw it coming, and for me, I got out of equities, I got back into doing commercial
property tax, which is where you wanted to be when the commercial real estate market tanked.
It's a good way to make money, but so the, and then Strauss and Howe came along, and they
put these political templates over this generational thing, and they took that that period of a long
life human being and cut it into four sections, so they call turnings, first, second, third, and fourth,
and that fourth turning is the dangerous one, you know, you go back 80, 85 years, where are we,
we're at, you know, in economic stagnation, world on the precipice of total war, go back 80, 85 years
before that, the American Civil War, 80, 85 years before that, the American Revolution, and, you know,
wars of Spanish succession, so I think there's something to this, and the question is, can you,
is being forewarned enabling you to be forearmed, or are these forces so great, you know, and that's
where I'm hoping the Trump administration, given their overall openness to new ideas, and, you know,
bringing in cabinet members that aren't all of them, you know, the quite the status quo,
establishment types, younger, you know, they might be able to seize the moment, and
you know, apply some of this knowledge and say, wait a minute, it's time to back off, because,
you know, you can't talk nuclear war in a fourth turning, because someone is going to pop a nuke,
and it could be bad for all of us, it could lead to actual total war, now is the time to be prudent
and hold back, so that's what I'm kind of hoping to see, and that's the importance, I think, of,
you know, a book like The Fourth Turning, and that concept of how, you know, generations kind of work
in certain program modes, and how we might be able to avoid pitfalls that might accompany that.
Well, speaking of Rudyard Lynch, he does reference The Fourth Turning quite a bit in his
videos and in his interviews and things. He also talks about the Clio dynamics of the
Peter Turchin, which is a very data intensive, basically historical analysis and model for
projecting, or you know, or forecasting, and Peter Turchin's models also have this decade as being
one of great turmoil, followed by a new prosperity. I also follow the work of geopolitical
analyst George Friedman, who, you know, he wrote a book. I read his, the Next 70 Years.
He's got a lot of books with similar titles, but his most recent one, gosh, what's it called?
Do you recall, he had a consulting firm in the 90s? Stratfor. Stratfor, that's it, yes, yes.
Anyway, his model basically, it's not so much a model that is as refined as, say, Peter Turchin's,
but he is also, you know, via this data analysis and historical analysis predicting the 2020s
are going to be a time of great turmoil as well. But again, followed by, you know, a new period of,
I guess, nationalistic esprit de corps, you know, which sounds, if you say nationalistic for half the
people listening, you know, that's just equivalent to Nazi, but, you know, a people living in a place
with a shared history, a shared language, a shared perspective, feeling solidarity with one another
and cooperating in a way that, you know, more disparate collections of people cannot cooperate
and find common ground, and that is a recipe for prosperity. Yeah, oh, absolutely. You know, another
mutual friend of ours, James Howard Kunstler, would speak a lot to that, you know, when you,
you know, if you have the hard times coming, you kind of want everyone operating in the same
framework, this, you know, shared values, you know, and, you know, the problem with, and which is why
I focus so much on immigration is, you know, when my mother came here in 1952, immigration was
restrictive, well regulated, and it was somewhat rare, and everyone won. Immigrants weren't being
exploited. They weren't, you know, they weren't endangering, you know, the productive classes
here in the U.S. as they had been prior to 1924 when it was pretty much unbridled, but
you add to this where we have had so much immigration, where we don't have these shared
values, and, you know, where maybe someone is thinking, all right, I got to do what's best for
the country, but, you know, and I'm applying something of a, a, something that's, you know,
a soldier's loyalty to one's country as opposed to kind of a merchant
point of view where it's like, okay, what's in this for me? And then if you add to the fact that,
well, if things go sour here in America, I can always return to my old country of origin,
and, you know, these are big problems because these hard times really are going to require
us to work together, and if we don't have that sense of community, like I was speaking to an
immigrant who was working checkout in a grocery store I was at over the weekend, or this weekend
actually yesterday, and he was trying to talk his wife into moving to Germany because he said,
wow, you know, we don't know anyone here. No one seems to, it's hard to get around. You got to work
all the time, and, you know, I just, it's time for me to, as to maybe move back to, you know, we want
to go to another country as opposed to the one where they were from, and that just means again,
culturally, you know, a lot of new arrivals are simply outside, you know, social networks that
could be mobilized to bring the country together, and, you know, and then you add to what's been
going on the last four years, KMO, this absolute invasion through the southern border where we
might have added as many as 10 million, 11 million people, and many of them of military age, none of
them with any set loyalty or aspiration to be loyal or fit in culturally in this country,
and, you know, we have a real recipe for danger, and you add the hard economic times are coming.
We could, you know, I'm sure in 1854, you had people that kind of were open to the notion that
we could be approaching civil war, but I think most of the country probably thought, ah, no way,
you know, yes, we have big issues, there's problems in Kansas, and, you know, there, you know,
you know, there, you know, we want to, there's a group that wants to end slavery, there's a group
that wants to keep it at all costs, and no one really probably thought we were actually going to
get into an amazingly bloody conflaguration that was the American Civil War, and that could be
the issue here, because to me, you know, again, going back to my, you'd meant, Claude had mentioned
my experience as a military officer, but in the mid to late 80s, I was, for instance, at one point,
the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe's terrorism analyst, hunted groups like a Bunin Dao, Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, and read everything I could on insurgency
and counterinsurgency, and I, that part of me is telling me we could see a big preoccupation in
America going forward in the, in the hard time, if we end up in very hard economic times, pretty
much fighting a counterinsurgency here as well, because we could very well have operatives in the
country that don't have America's best interests, in fact, our malevolent forces here. I think if,
let's just say, since we brought in people from 152 companies, countries over the last four years,
let's just say you're running clandestine ops for a small third world country, and, you know,
until, you know, government, and you're thinking, how can I damage America? And we don't have any
resources, well, I can get 10 guys that we've trained, get them to go through the southern
border, and then get them to set up shop in America and have them be, um, uh, you know,
uh, sleeper cells until they are told to come and, you know, do damage, like things like maybe
blow up a railroad, uh, bridge, uh, maybe, uh, blow up a, a water treatment plant, things like
this, things that could seriously irritate us and force us to devote a lot of resources
to something we ought not to be doing. There, there was no need to even contemplate doing
before the Biden administration. You do, um, you have a lot more to do with
X, formerly Twitter, than I do. I have an account there, but I basically just post links to my
Substack pieces. Uh, but I do want to go over to Substack here. I'm going to read just a little
bit from the Kucinich report. This is Dennis Kucinich's Substack account. Okay. And Dennis
Kucinich writes, our government is planning a big draft, conscripting millions of young Americans
for an even bigger war. I call your attention to a democratic amendment to the National Defense
Authorization Act, which was slipped into the almost trillion dollar Pentagon war spending bill
by voice vote in the house armed services committee. The democratic amendments to HR 8070,
the National Defense Authorization Act reads section 531, selective service system, automatic
registration section three, except as otherwise provided in this title, every male citizen of the
United States and other male person residing in the United States between the ages of 18 and 26
shall be automatically registered under this act by the director of the selective service system.
So I'll stop reading there and just say, you know, when I turned 18, I went to the post office and
I registered for the draft. Uh, this, this new methodology eliminates that everybody is being
registered for the draft automatically. And Dennis Kucinich paints this as, you know, the establishment
preparing for war. Yeah. I mean, this establishment doesn't care about human life. We are a commodity.
I mean, look at the Ukraine war over a million Ukraine deaths, uh, probably easily 500,000 more
Russian deaths. And for what, uh, to launder a lot of money, uh, they just don't care about us. Now,
interesting thing about Dennis Kucinich talk about, again, this new political, uh, environment that's
being created. So I was attending CPAC last year. Uh, no, it was early, very early this year. Right.
It was early in 2024 and it's a Friday night. I'm at the bar with some friends and I look and in walks
Elizabeth and Dennis Kucinich. Okay. Dennis Kucinich, the founder of progressive Democrats
of America. And, you know, at that time I was, you know, Howard Dean had formed democracy for America.
They were both had both run the 2004 presidential race as progressives. We call big P progressives,
not to be confused with those for progressive today. And I was actually running as a volunteer,
the Pasadena democracy for America chapter. So I would come in contact with the progressive
Dems of Los Angeles a lot at Kucinich group. And I met Elizabeth once at a e-board meeting of the
democratic party. And I'm like, what are you guys doing here? I'm like, what are you doing here?
We're here at the Republican, you know, this is a big CPAC, the big rep, you know, right wing, uh,
conservative, uh, event. And, you know, uh, Dennis at the time is running as an independent in his
old, um, congressional district. Sadly didn't get it, but you know, his views are very much that of
RFK, Donald Trump right now, America first. Uh, what's great about Dennis, uh, is that he's really
on immigration, but he was always against NAFTA, GATT, WTO, all of these, um, trade arrangements
that put America last. Uh, unfortunately he didn't win that, uh, run as an independent. The Dem who,
uh, was running for reelection was able to maintain his seat against a Republican challenger
and Dennis Kucinich. Uh, but that kind of, it's funny you brought Dennis Kucinich up because he
is, uh, typical now of what's happening with people that I think are not necessarily concerned
about being a, you know, a progressive or a liberal or a conservative or a Republican or
Democrat, you know, they're finding like I am their way in this political culture to where
we can push, uh, a more America first agenda. So, but yeah, that's really interesting. And again,
I think it, it speaks to the fact that, uh, there isn't that, you know, again, the expectation is
that young men themselves would not go down to the post office and register. It's now, it's just,
it's going to happen to you. It's almost like you've gone from the, the masculine to the feminine
when it comes to war. Well, I, I could pursue that rabbit, but it would involve talking about
somebody who has not agreed to be talked about and who's not necessarily a public figure, but
I'm referencing a recent conversation. Um, there's a guy named Steve Crackauer who does not publish
to Substack often, but I read his most recent piece today and he was talking about the election
and he pointed out that, you know, Kamala Harris, uh, who was not selected via a Democratic primary
process, but who was just appointed to, you know, be Biden's successor, uh, that she not only accepted
the endorsement of Dick Cheney and Lynn Cheney, but really leaned into it, leaned into it hard,
took Lynn Cheney on the campaign trail with her while Donald Trump has surrounded himself with
Democrats or former Democrats, you know, who have left a sinking ship, you know, most notably Tulsi
Gabbard and RFK, you know, Trump himself is a former Democrat. I imagine that, uh, Elon Musk,
while maybe not particularly political, you know, prior to the last, say five or 10 years,
we've been a Democrat, you know, if he cared at all. Uh, but Crackauer's point was that
the Cheneys are definitely the establishment and people like, you know, Tulsi Gabbard,
you know, Tulsi Gabbard and, uh, Robert Kennedy Jr., uh, they are, you know, sort of fringe
characters and they're, they're, they do not read as establishment. You know, you could make an
argument that they, they have establishment ties, but to the electorate, they read as
anti-establishment. And this, the selection showed that people are just done with the
establishment, you know, they, they are not interested except in a few, you know, little
blue holdout regions. But if you look at the electoral map, that's just not much of the country.
So I'll let you take it from there. Not physically much of the country. Uh,
yeah, it's, it's, it's the large civic centers and you would think too that has to be slipping
because, you know, I live an hour and a half drive from Philadelphia and I mean, it's a city with a
lot of problems run by Democrats. Um, even in my small city, that's now run by, that's run by
Democrats. It's, you know, we see, I see the beginnings of the same shakedown that happened
in San Francisco where, you know, where 20 years ago, the budget was one fifth of what it is today
and they had not nearly the issues of homelessness and so many other things, but they pump all this
money into their NGO, this NGO community of friends who are able to get out the vote for them
and keep them in office. And unfortunately, and no NGO exists to, uh, uh, work itself out of business.
So all the issues that these NGOs are, you know, supposedly ostensibly trying to fix, they have no
no ultimate interest in actual fixing. Yeah. The, the first priority for any organization is to
perpetuate itself. Yes. Yeah. You know, an interesting thing, even in my, uh, situation,
uh, in August 3rd, 2020, we met with president Trump, you know, to very specifically
keep 200 information technology jobs at the Tennessee Valley authority from being offshore
to H1, initially outsourced to H1B visa dependent companies like Capgemini and then eventually
offshore to low rent countries. Uh, president Trump, uh, fired the chairman and one of the
directors who hired the CEO of TVA TV, uh, the CEO rescinded his decision to outsource those jobs
was a big victory. Now you would think that if you're a small organization like ours punching
way above their dollar weight, I mean, I was the, it was great. Even the Jacobin was like, why are
these guys saving union jobs and not us? And you would think that that would have led to
a lot more sources of, uh, of grants and donations from people that, you know, were down with our
movement. It led to just the opposite. Uh, one very large funder, uh, divorced himself completely
from us, you know, uh, because he had met with Trump. Yeah. He had Trumped, he, I personally had
Trump derangement syndrome really bad, but regardless, like I try to make the case, it
doesn't matter. You said, look, you know, you support us because we are mitigating the impact
of unbridled immigration and helping working American men and women. We scored the biggest
victory in 40 years on this front. And, uh, yeah. And I just found funding cut across the board.
Uh, so it gets back. Is there truth to this that ultimately at the end of the day, no one wants to
see if you're involved in this NGO complex, I call it the NGO industrial complex. Uh, you want to see
your bread and butter being taken away from you. It's, and you kind of, you can, you can
look at what happened with gay marriage. Um, you know, a lot of people like me that didn't
necessarily support it became supportive of it, but no one shut down shop. All these organizations
went on to the next thing. It's like, okay, now we need to, uh, make if you're gay or they, they
increased the scope to LGBTQ and the whole, you know, alphabet soup of things to, you know,
transgenderism. And then it's like, oh no, we need privilege over you guys. Cause we were this class
that was ostracized and you know, now that, you know, now we need to come back and get way back,
not just back to good, not to good, but we need privilege. Uh, so it never seems to stop. They
never, no one, you know, I would love KMO right now to, you know, say mission accomplished, mission
accomplished, uh, turn the key in the door for the last time and shut this operation down. Cause we
had won. Uh, but I think most people again, who are in, as you mentioned in this NGO, uh,
nonprofit world don't see it that way.
You know, you've mentioned several of our mutual acquaintances over the course of this conversation.
Uh, there's another one I'd like to bring in and he is a very active presence on substance
stack. And that is Steve lamb. Who is, who is Steve lamb? All right. Steve lamb and I became
really good friends. Um, when I was living in Pasadena, well, I was living in Alth, well,
Pasadena, California initially. Then I moved up to Alta Dena where Steve, uh, was a town councilman.
He's a, he's not an architect, but he's, um, he does, uh, building design. So he's not like a
licensed architect, but he does a lot of, you know, work in that area. And he was a council,
town councilman of a sleepy little, uh, town called Alta Dena in California, uh, for 24 years.
And when I had taken over Pasadena democracy for America, I'd mentioned Howard Dean and,
you know, he created from Dean for America, became democracy for America and the Pasadena
chapter eventually came according to Howard Dean's brother, Jim, uh, the most effective
organization, west of the Mississippi for them. But early on I had said, okay, we're going to do
a visioning meeting, bring all the activists together and say, okay, where are we going,
you know, with this organization and it was where it was going. You know, Steve was up talking
and he's saying, look, we got to push out these corporate Dems. We got to get back to grassroots
activism where we're responding to the needs of the people, not just the people, but things that
actually make good economic sense here in the community, get rid of all these NGOs that have
latched on to, uh, you know, and we had, there were a number of them, even, you know, religious
ones that had just kind of latched onto the democratic party and we're running things.
We were all Democrats and progressive Democrats. So during one of the breaks, uh, some of the old
establishment guys in the Pasadena area were there and, you know, they looked at like on me,
like I was the bright shining young star that was gonna, you know, they would just, what do you
want? You know, here's your path forward in the democratic party. And so, you know, I think
that's where we're going. And if you don't like it, you can go. And so that began Steve Lamb
and my collaboration years ago. So Steve has always been kind of a Mustang, you know,
and he's been a great leader in the Democratic party. And so, you know, he's been a great leader
in the Democratic party. And so, you know, he's been a great leader in the Democratic party.
And so, you know, he's been a great leader in the Democratic party. And so, you know, Steve has
always been kind of a Mustang, you know, out there in California politics and fifth generation,
California. And so, you know, when you've been around for generations, you know, there's a lot
that just comes down verbally from prior generations to you that you know about things and, you know,
at the local, county, state level, you know, you can apply a sniff test to it and go, no, no, no,
that doesn't make sense. You know, I know how it happened. I know where some of the bodies are
buried kind of thing. Well, how would you describe Steve Lamb's political orientation, say, 10 years
ago? 10 years ago, I know exactly where it was. And I'll give you a great example. So when our
Pasadena Democracy for America had come into real prominence, I mean, we were a political power in
the San Gabriel Valley as a totally volunteer organization. But even Republicans would come
to us looking for our endorsement because they're like, we know you guys, you have a reputation of
being, you know, you know, pretty fair. And, you know, you're pretty upfront with what you want to
accomplish. And, you know, will you at least let me speak to your group, you know? And so that was
kind of the orientation. So we were, and I know Steve was, you know, you know, understood that
the Democratic Party, certainly in California, were a bunch of corrupt apparatchiks. And it was
a bunch of people that would just glom on and use it to do what they want to do. And they would just
gaslight anyone who would say anything different. So that's kind of where he was 10 years ago.
And where is he now?
Good question. Where is he now? Well, right now, he's now the chairman of my organization
because he had come on several years ago to help us out on our board. And I would say he's,
you know, he really is kind of of an America first mindset who is, you know, understands where a lot
of the corruption is, whether it's MK Ultra, you know, looking at, you know, a lot of these conspiracy
theories has actually done a lot of study on the assassination of Robert Kennedy, you know, RFK's
father. And so, yeah, I mean, that's kind of where I see him today.
Well, he is a vociferous Trump supporter. And, you know, he posted two, three, four times a week,
sometimes, you know, long, very eloquent and erudite essays, basically talking about why,
you know, that regardless of Trump's faults, the Democratic Party establishment was simply
unendurable, unacceptable. You know, it had to be defeated and deposed. I mentioned this because,
you know, like you, I mean, you're a former Democrat and Trump is surrounded by former
Democrats, but people who have been pushed out, like, you know, Bernie Sanders in 2016, he ran
a left leaning populist campaign and the Democratic establishment moved heaven and earth to smear him
and marginalize him, you know, call him a sexist and a racist and, you know, all the usual stuff.
And, you know, basically burned half of their own field, you know, in order to keep the populist
down. And that's just driven so many people out. So now, you know, the electoral results
basically, you know, demonstrate the country is not having it. You know, the majority of the
population. All right. So that was most of the conversation with Kevin Lin. I am going to save
not the last half, more like the last quarter for the paying audience on the C. Rome Vaults
podcast and Behind the Paywall on Substack. All right. Thanks so much for listening.
I will talk to you again. Stay well.