So what is the GOP to do with their midterms, with their future, with a president who is fading but won't seem to let go of his grip upon them?

Yeah, you're you're really watching that, you know, degeneration of the entire political party.

in a similar way to how Trump has just basically made the United States into this erratic beast that's just like sort of lashing around like a steer that got into the silage and is now drunk and just sort of ramming into stuff and breaking things for no reason.

Yeah.

The, you know, Republicans, if they were capable of rational thought and had any sort of dignity or self-respect, would be like, listen, we got to do something about this guy.

He's not good for the American people.

He's not good for our party.

I hope so,

So do they have problems with her, do you think?

I would bet that if she wins the primary, they will endorse her.

I think it's just that she hasn't been on their radar very much.

And she doesn't quite have the same experience of being a working politician that somebody like Zoran Mamdani maybe had.

Or certainly AOC at this point has been in office for nearly a decade.

And she's quite young.

And she does have the usual... you know, now very commonplace Twitter history of endorsing like goofy sounding stuff.

The skeletons they have aren't even in the closet.

But do you have a race that you completed that, that when you think back, you're more proud of than any other race?

I do.

Um, so we all have goals going into a race, right? Like we all have like an AB and a seagull and the exact date, but this is a looped course and I've ran the a hundred mile distance there.

four times previously.

So I decided to step up and do a 48 hour race and I had, you know, you got 48 hours to do it and I'm not the fastest hundred mile runner.

And I think my fastest is just like low 20 hours or something.

So I'm like, I'm like, okay, I can do, I should be able to do 150 miles.

Oh my gosh,

Why have we been so sheltered from the impact so far?

Yeah, I mean, that's something that one should probably emphasize more than I did in my article, which is that a lot of countries are in very severe problems by now.

You know, in Malaysia and Singapore and Vietnam, you know, they're having to ration gasoline and diesel.

You know, there's a shortage of cooking fuel.

Propane is used for cooking all over Asia, particularly in Pakistan.

And so, yeah, those countries in Asia where, you know, 80 percent of the oil from the Strait of Hormuz, you know, went to Asia.

They are feeling it the most in the United States is probably insulated more than almost any other country, maybe Canada to some degree.

Where would we expect to see that happen first?

Am I nuts? I say w- where-

That probably falls...

There, there's polls on this, and it, it...

I think I saw one that registers at, like, 68% disapproval.

Uh, I, I mean, it's the kind of thing, and this is a long tradition in Republican politics, where, uh, it's so crazy that if you describe it to sort of normal people who aren't politics obsessives, they don't believe you that this is what, uh, you know, Republicans would do.

But it's, it's not that different from a lot of fascist movements going in the past, you know? Uh, uh, Adolf Hitler had a, a, a, an award made for people who participated in the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923.

Uh, [laughs] you know, th- this is, wha... uh, uh, the, it's, it's, it's in keeping with, uh, you know, how you want to reward the type of behavior that Trump wants to reward, um, namely violent insurrection against democracy.

Yeah

Just give me your read, first of all, about what they did.

Yeah, they legislated from the bench, I think, is how the conservatives would have said in ages past.

You know, this is a section of the Voting Rights Act, which I believe it was modified in 2006 by the vote in the Senate was 98 to 0, if I'm remembering correctly.

And the Voting Rights Act, of course, it starts at the beginning of it, references the 15th Amendment, which unquestionably authorizes the type of stuff that the Voting Rights Act authorizes.

And one of those, you know, was the creation of minority minority districts, a requirement that certain states had to create minority majority minority districts to ensure that the people who had been historically disenfranchised by Jim Crow tyranny could have effective political representation.

Basically that black people in the South could elect someone who looked like them to ensure that they weren't just being pushed around by Republicans or back in the days before the Civil Rights Act, they were Democrats, but white racist conservatives who would dominate them and exploit them.

That was what they were trying to do with the Voting Rights Act and they've just deleted it by abusing the power they have seized for themselves through judicial review.

So give me your read of the scrambling since this decision was let.

But certainly in the early days of this iteration of, of the Majority Report, talking about, um, antitrust.

Yeah.

So, you know, Matt, uh, you know, who, who I respect a lot and I, I, I consider, you know, a good friend of mine, um, he is coming at it from a little bit of a different angle from me.

So he's talking about this book, uh, Cornered.

I think it was written by Lynn in, in 2010.

And, you know, the, the book makes some good points, uh, you know, about how consolidation can cause, you know, problems in the, in the marketplace.

Um, but I do think, you know, b- one of Bruenig's points is well-taken, in the sense that I think that, uh, Lynn and some of the antitrust crew, they tend to think that you can get everything that you, uh, you know, wanna get politically with just antitrust, kind of overstate the case a little bit.

All right, so, uh, Ryan, my point being that, um, socialists often, or I should say, uh, antitrust folks, uh, often have a similar problem with a government monopoly, uh, in, in instances, um, and so, uh, the idea that, um, markets are important, uh, whether it's in a socialist or a capitalist economy, or some type of mix, uh, for that matter, they function much better is your argument under the auspices of antitrust.