This is the first in a series of podcasts probing the question “Is it too late?” for the U.S. to be turned off of the poorer, diseased, bankrupted, morally adrift path it’s currently on and back toward freedom and prosperity.
A new episode will drop right here at Peak Prosperity every Wednesday at 9:00 a.m.
I have already interviewed Joe Kent (who will lead the series off), Clayton Morris, Jim Erdman, and Richard Werner. We’re working to finalize Tucker Carlson (who has agreed, but is very busy, as you can imagine).
Many people, myself included, feel like the United States is headed in the wrong direction. As in, disastrously wrong. I wonder what kind of a world we are leaving for future generations…
There is a lot of data to support the idea of the USA being in decline, but just on an intuitive basis, I also have a gnawing feeling that something has already gone terribly wrong and something worse is on the way. For observant, curious people, these are dark times. For people of good character and integrity, we’re tired of it, and we want it to change.
I’m starting this podcast series to ask and answer the question: WHAT has happened to my government? HOW are decisions being made, and WHO is actually making them?
It’s completely obvious that the wishes of the voters have no impact at all; Washington DC has made it abundantly clear that what the electorate wants or doesn’t want plays NO ROLE in shaping the laws that get passed.
A recent Princeton study analyzed over 20 years of voting and polling data to ask that very question: Does the U.S. government actually represent the people?
What they found was that the number of Americans expressing a desire for OR against any particular law had such a minuscule impact on the outcome that it couldn’t be statistically differentiated from zero.
They wrote that American voters have “a minuscule, near zero, statistically insignificant impact on public policy.”
The ideal line on a chart of Congressional representation would be a 45-degree slope from left to right where the left end of the axis is 0% public support, and the right side is 100% support.
The reality is that any particular piece of legislation has a 30% chance of being passed completely independent of and without any regard for the actual level of public support or opposition.
(Source)
So, it’s not the people of this country who are being represented. Which begs the question of whose interests ARE being represented? The answer is that the wishes of corporations, especially big Tech, and Israel’s wants and needs are what Congress responds to the most.
The obvious questions that emerge from this observation are, “Does a political solution even remain?” and “If the will of the people has no bearing, then what’s the point of voting?”
More demoralizing is the fact that electronic voting machines are unbelievably insecure and vulnerable to easy hacking, and mail-in ballots have been abused over and over again. Thus, elections in the US are completely insecure, have been for a long while, and neither party makes any real fuss about the situation.
Conclusion: “They” like it that way. Both parties. If they didn’t, they’d change the system back to paper ballots limited to properly identified US citizens.
One mark of the Fourth Turning, the theory of decadal societal rhythms put forth by Strauss and Howe, is the loss of faith in institutions. The Fourth Turning is the era of crisis. It is marked by war, decline, and hardship.
Beyond the profound loss of faith in our political parties, many Americans have lost faith in the Justice system for failing to prosecute the Epstein perpetrators and turning violent criminals back out on the streets to terrorize communities and ordinary citizens.
Those actions are the hallmarks of what is called “Anarcho-Tyranny.”
How accurate is that? Anarcho-Tyranny is obviously part of our current landscape.
As of today, not a single Epstein client, be they private citizens or public politicians who violated our children – virtually all of them white, by the way – has been charged – not one -and virtually none of them have even been brought in for questioning.
A polite and prosperous society must maintain both the appearance and the reality of equal treatment under the law. As soon as it becomes common knowledge – which is when everybody knows that everybody knows something – that the law is a cudgel only used against the weak and the poor, that’s when respect for the law breaks down. And when that happens, we are now living in a low-trust society necessitating bars across the windows, developing home invasion counter-planning, packages stolen off our porches and bikes out of our front yards, with kidnappings and rapes a common part of an increasingly miserable life.
Who wants to live like that? I certainly don’t; you don’t – nobody does – and that’s why I am producing this series. I cling to the hope that we can change direction before it’s too late
Wait, that’s not quite right. Somebody does want these outcomes because they keep shoving us along down this path. Intentionally. Purposely.
We’re going to explore and hopefully expose who these people are and discover what their true aims are. Whatever those are, we can be certain that they do not seek to make our country a better place.
Consider the Covid era. The erosion of trust in our government and private medical and health institutions was nothing short of catastrophic. And rightly so.
During Covid, we learned that public health authorities had a lot more interest in claiming authoritarian powers than helping to save lives and end the pandemic. Shockingly, hospitals eagerly implemented ICU protocols using ventilators and remdesivir that had an 85% kill rate when ample evidence existed that early treatment with off-patent drugs worked far better.
They kept loved ones out of the ICU kill zones so that they couldn’t be there for their loved ones passing. But allowed riots to unfold in the streets. Again, this is the most vile expression of Tyranny I can imagine.
Toby Rogers, one of our most fearless fighters of medical tyranny, wrote this on X about the Covid debacle:
To that list drawn up by Toby in 2024, we can now add many more such acts of crimes against humanity, but what’s the point? This list is damning enough as it stands.
During COVID I lost an enormous amount of respect, possibly all of it, for colleges and universities that forced strict vaccine mandates on matriculating and returning students. Harvard was among the worst, as they allowed their own staff to duck the requirement, putting all of the risks upon the young and the healthy. This was a complete pervasion of not just logic – it made no sense at all logically; a shot that didn’t stop transmission did nothing to make the staff actually safer, but DID expose the kids to myocarditis and cancer risks as well as immune dysfunctions – but also a complete inversion of the most sacred of all social contracts; the adults are there to protect the young, not the other way around.
How did we go so far adrift? And so suddenly?
The same failure of logic and common decency applied to shutting down schools because of COVID and even forcing young children to wear masks for their online sessions. You could not get a more drastic image of this than the smiling educational leadership of New York State – that’s Governor Hochul, in the middle – beaming mask-free as they hover over young children who are masked up.
Again, that’s a complete perversion of the social contract. Making the children pay the price of deferring their growth and education, taking shots that for them were all risk and no benefit, and masking them up so that the older people surrounding them could manufacture a false sense of security for themselves.
What kind of a culture sacrifices the literal development of its children so the olders (not elders, just older) can bask in a false sense of security? Not a healthy one, that’s for sure.
Just as bad, we now see how universities and colleges have become places of deep indoctrination. Students, women particularly, often exit their college years with their heads full of abstract ideas about “equity” and “racial privilege” that are really all some version of seeing the world entirely through the lens of victimology.
These ideas do not improve anybody’s life at the individual or at the macro levels.
A powerful piece of framing comes to us from an article written by New Zealand psychiatrist John Schumaker in The New Internationalist in 2016.
He writes:
“Our descent into the Age of Depression seems unstoppable. Three decades ago, the average age for the first onset of depression was 30. Today it is 14. Researchers such as Stephen Izard at Duke University point out that the rate of depression in Western industrialized societies is doubling with each successive generational cohort. At this pace, over 50 per cent of our younger generation, aged 18-29, will succumb to it by middle age. Extrapolating one generation further, we arrive at the dire conclusion that virtually everyone will fall prey to depression.”
But often what befalls these young people is not depression; it’s something that’s entirely resistant to talk therapy or chemical interventions. It’s demoralization.
Dr. Shumaker’s description:
“Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment. The world loses its credibility, and former beliefs and convictions dissolve into doubt, uncertainty and loss of direction. Frustration, anger and bitterness are usual accompaniments, as well as an underlying sense of being part of a lost cause or losing battle. The label ‘existential depression’ is not appropriate since, unlike most forms of depression, demoralization is a realistic response to the circumstances impinging on the person’s life.”
I think it’s safe to say that being convinced by your elders that you should be ashamed because you have a certain skin color, or are a certain gender, things about which you had no say when you were conceived and born, is wildly disorienting.
The people who are engaged in this are monsters in every sense of the word- and they hold considerable power within our key institutions.
Again, any society that self-shames and cognitively disorients its children is a culture headed toward failure. So how do we arrest this? Can it be saved?
As our nation approaches and then gallops straight past $40 trillion in debt, and at least $150 trillion – or more – of underfunded liabilities such as Medicare and Social Security, it’s clear that our economic future has been savaged and may not be recoverable.
On this point, legendary investor Ray Dalio says that we’re already “Past the point of no return.
At the risk of making this a too-lengthy diatribe, let me list off a few other things which U.S. citizens overwhelmingly want, but we are not getting.
People overwhelmingly want proof of citizenship for voting. We want Congressional term limits AND age limits, and we want to be left free to raise our children as we see fit. We want our government to serve the interests of its people and to put America first. We want our money to stay home and fix our crumbling infrastructure. We want our children to have a peaceful, prosperous future to step into.
People also overwhelmingly didn’t want and still don’t want anything to do with the war in Iran, NOBODY wants Flock corporate surveillance cameras (and I mean nobody), we do not want massive fiscal deficits and the inflation they cause, we do not want Congress trading stocks in the companies over which they have oversight and spending authority, and we do not want high level people to constantly evade legal consequences for their crimes, especially heinous sex crimes involving children.
You could be forgiven for thinking that DC reliably and habitually delivers the exact opposite of what people actually want or don’t want.
What Can We Do?
So, back to the main question. Is there something – anything – that can be done at the ballot box that could right the ship of state? Is there a political solution that remains? My aim here is to state as strongly as I can that we’re going to have to do something before we have to DO something.
My personal opinion is that the two main political parties have become one uniparty and that they are beyond reform.
In this series we’re going to be exploring this question from a variety of angles, all of them either rational, deductive, or spiritual. We’ll explore this with politicians, economists and warriors. We’ll look at it from political, fiscal, technological, military, economic, and even spiritual angles.
Whoa! That last thing is not something I would have said five years ago…but now? I’m wide open to the idea that we’re locked in a struggle between good and evil. That more or less fits everything I’ve mentioned under a single unifying concept. Good likes to build, nurture, and improve. Evil likes to destroy, degrade, demoralize and cause disease and death.
So, have we passed the point of no return, or is there something positive we can do? This is really the oldest question in human behavior. Will we change because of pain, or can we change by insight? Make no mistake, the pain route is by far the path most often taken.
But we can also change, if we want, by insight. That’s been my mission at Peak Prosperity for the past 25 years – surfacing and presenting information in such a way as to enable people to change their lives through the process of insight before the pain of crisis forces change upon them.
It all begins with building awareness, providing context, sticking to the truth as much as possible, and finally with insight.
And that’s what this podcast series is about. Asking if it’s too late to avoid serious pain. If it’s not, then what steps can and should each of us take to build buffers that can shield us from the worst of it? If it is possible to avoid that pain, what do we have to do to bring that about? Is it voting reform that could enable a third party? Is it pressing for consequences for the powerful? Is it strict term limits on Congress? All of the above and more?
If no peaceful options are available, then we’re left with JFK’s warning that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
I sincerely want peaceful change. We’re going to see if we can figure this out together. Positive change always begins with awareness and open debate.
Join me and my incredible line-up of guests as we explore how to create a world worth inheriting.
Timestamps
00:00 The United States Is Headed In The Wrong Direction
01:08 Does The Government Actually Represent The People?
02:32 Whose Interests Does Congress Serve?
03:04 Can We Still Vote Our Way Out?
03:40 The Rise Of Anarcho Tyranny
05:00 When The Law Becomes A Cudgel
06:15 How A Low Trust Society Emerges
07:19 The Erosion Of Trust During COVID
09:45 The Generational Betrayal Of Our Children
11:55 How Young People Became Demoralized
14:18 Are We Past The Point Of No Return?
16:32 Is There Still A Political Solution?
17:40 Can We Change Through Insight Instead Of Pain?
18:59 Finding A Peaceful Way Forward
by richcabot 
