Inside the GOP’s Honesty Crisis: DEI for Idiots

[0:05] A recent PragerU video equates public health orders with the pogroms of Stalin. LifeWise Academy violates a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1952, and the Trumpstein Republicans are the best at lying and hiring the stupidest people. It’s like DEI for idiots. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, Progressive Viewpoint on Topics of the Day.

[1:00] As many of you are aware, I recently did an episode where I debunked a video series by Dennis Prager. He runs the PragerU conservative website, Christian Nationalist website, that pretends to be an educational website. And it’s not. It’s a propaganda website. And so I get their newsletter and so they, you know, I find out about different, they’re known for their five-minute videos. Basically, it’s like the cliff notes of conservatism where they go after certain, what they consider left-leaning or left-skewed views on the world and then try to give you the correct view or their view. So this morning, I opened up my inbox and get this link for this video. The title is, Why Do Smart People Believe Lies? And I thought that that was a very interesting thing. The person that is the narrator and appears on camera is a guy named Buck Sexton. That’s his real name, believe it or not. Well, that’s his professional name.

[2:23] His uh born name his actual name is james buckman sexton but he wants everybody to call him buck sexton.

[2:34] And I don’t know about you, but I do not subscribe to calling people by names that they want to be called by. So we’ll call him James.

[2:44] Anyway, he purports to have been an analyst for the CIA and did field work, worked in the anti-terrorism field against al-Qaeda and against Iraq, during the early 2000s. And, of course, he uses that history, his resume, to infuse this video that he narrates. And he wrote a book, too, about it as well, about manipulation, different manipulation things that people use to get other people to accept totalitarian regimes, which is kind of ironic considering the Trump administration. But anyway, so he leans on this that he was a CIA analyst. But what he doesn’t tell the listener is that he’s a conservative talk show host now. He is not a CIA analyst. So you have to ask yourself, if he’s a CIA analyst, how do I know what he’s telling me now is on the up and up, right? Because the CIA is known for lying. A pretty good line in political context. So how do I know that he’s being honest with people? We don’t know. But yet he wants you to think he is.

[4:11] But what I want to do, and I could debunk this whole video, and I might. I might debunk this whole video and probably offer it up on my sub stack sometime in a couple weeks. But I did want to play this one segment where he’s talking about a manipulation, manipulating idea that he’s familiar with. It’s called conditioning. And this is where you get people to do things that they normally wouldn’t do by conditioning them. For a realistic example, what I’ll say is the clickbait on social media. You’ve seen this. It’s like outrage. Like somebody will put something really extreme saying, oh, look at this. And let’s get outraged. And you click on it and you get outraged. Aged. You’re being conditioned, okay? It’s pretty simple to see that.

[5:13] So I’m going to play this clip. It’s probably about a minute, minute and a half clip of him talking about conditioning. And then we’ll come

[5:20] back and I’ll make a comment about it. But before we’re too quick to judge the Russians or the Germans or the Chinese, consider that it was only a few years ago that Americans were reporting their neighbors to the police for not wearing a mask outside. You may know some of these people. You may have been one yourself. How does this happen? How do we explain smart people convincing themselves that evil is righteous? As a former CIA analyst, I’ve given this question a lot of thought. In my book, Manufacturing Delusion, I examine how tyrants manipulate entire populations by using specific mind control techniques. I’ll describe a few of them here so you can recognize them and, hopefully, protect yourself. First, conditioning. Any training or programming that pushes you to react in a predetermined way. It works on dogs, and it works on humans, too. For example, during COVID, social distancing was a conditioning tool. We were told that being in close proximity to another human being represented a mortal threat. Thus, we had to get no closer than six feet to another person. Millions of people went along. And what did we find out later? There was no scientific basis for it. It was just made up to keep us in line, literally.

[6:37] All right, so what he uses as an example of conditioning, there was two examples that he gives.

[6:45] One is people calling the cops on other people who did not wear masks outside during the pandemic. And probably what this refers to is that many locations, many states, cities, municipalities had mask mandates during the pandemic. Basically, in order for you to enter an indoor place, you had to wear a mask. If you wanted to be in certain areas, you had to wear a mask. And these were rules established to protect the health of the community. See, he doesn’t talk about that, but that was why this rule was there. And so when I checked on this, there was some people that called 911 and non-emergency numbers to report people not wearing masks or violating the mask mandates. In general, the police departments didn’t do anything about it. They said they were not the mask police. So right there, that first example that Buck Sexton gives isn’t really true. It’s a hyperbole.

[7:57] Then the second example he uses in conditioning is he talks about how people were asked to stand six feet apart, to try to prevent catching any droplets from people exhaling the virus. And then he said, come to find out that there was no scientific basis on that. And again, these were rules that were instituted during the pandemic to try to protect the health of people. And then again, this is very easy to look up. This information is very easy to look up because this was one of the primary things that we had going on during the pandemic was a lot of this stuff. And so it got got taken. They took a look at it. And so there was a fact check that was done by NPR back in 2024, June of 2024. And it says Corona’s coronavirus FAQ is the six foot rule debunked. Or does distance still protect you? And it says here, we all remember those early days of the pandemic. I used to run with a mask on outdoors and no one in sight. Imagine my relief to learn that outdoor air effectively disperses pathogens. I wiped off groceries in case they were contaminated. Experts now say it’s reasonable to just wash your hands thoroughly after touching stuff. And I tried to stay six feet away from everyone in public. That’s what the CDC said back in 2020.

[9:26] Then it says here in the next paragraph, then in the newly released transcript of a congressional hearing from earlier this year, as 2024, Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that the six-foot rule sort of just appeared and wasn’t based on any data.

[9:44] So it says here, those who never liked the idea of physical distancing were thrilled. Aha, the CDC was wrong.

[9:52] But here’s what is the facts. The fact is that distancing yourself from others who could be contagious with COVID-19 did help. It lowered the risk, just like wearing a mask of some type. You know, because this was a thing that I debated a conservative friend of mine with over and over again. He said, but masks don’t help. They actually make you sick, da-da-da-da-da. And what it was is the mask, depending on what mask you had, depended on what kind of protection you had. So the best mask to have was one of those N95 ones that filtered the air. Because it would catch these droplets that had the virus in them. If you had just like a paper mask like they had in medical clinics, that is less protective. It’s still better than nothing, but it’s not going to protect you 100% or even 90%. Probably more like 70% protection. The same with distancing. Everybody knows, it’s common sense, that if somebody is sick, is visibly sick, you don’t stand next to them.

[11:19] Because then you’ll get sick. It says here, why distance still matters. Here’s the thing, even with this revised understanding of the spread of COVID, the closer you are to the person with COVID, the higher your risk of catching it. As you get further away from the infected person, aerosols become more diluted, so the chance of inhaling particles usually goes down with distance, says Marr. As an analogy, this is important, listen to this. As an analogy, Marr suggests you think about cigarette smoke.

[11:50] Smaller COVID particles behave like cigarette smoke. If you’re close to someone who has just exhaled a big puff of smoke, you’re exposed to more than if you’re further away. The further away you get, the better. And it says here in the last example, need more convincing in a study of COVID transmission on a plane from one infected passenger in business class. Those who caught the virus were also seated in business class. The study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases in 2020 reports, we found a clear association between sitting in close proximity to case one and risk for infection. And so let’s sum up with a quote from Lahr. Distance matters, but there’s nothing magical about six feet. So the CIA analyst supposedly is a smart guy. This Buck Sexton is supposedly a smart guy. And he’s manipulating the listeners to this video by claiming that the six foot, social distancing was totally made up. And it wasn’t totally made up. the distancing part was not. The distance was arbitrary.

[13:05] That’s a scientific term, arbitrary. That means there was no concrete evidence to back it up, but there was enough circumstantial evidence to say that it would be better than nothing, better than a cloth mask if you were six feet or more away.

[13:26] The World Health Organization at the time said three feet away was good. Any distance is really better than standing next to somebody. So I just want these Prager guys, man, they just they manipulate this stuff in this video. I’m serious. I’m probably going to. Well, the link will be up in the show notes to the full video. But, you know, he really there’s really a conservative bent on this. One of the other points was that Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020 were not held accountable like the January 6th people were.

[14:11] And that was laughable because the riots were totally different. The BLM riots, if there was any violence, was instigated by the police, against the police. The violence was against the police and the power structure. And on January 6th, you had a bunch of people, a bunch of sore losers that wanted to overturn a federal election. It’s called sedition. And treason. So, of course, they should be held more accountable than people exercising their First Amendment right to protest. So Buck Sexton, he has some good points about manipulation and why smart people believe lies, but all the examples that he uses are biased towards a conservative viewpoint. You can easily substitute examples from a left side viewpoint and still be correct.

[15:29] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[15:49] I’m sure I’m probably one of the last people that are still on Facebook, but I have a humanist group that I run, that I founded and run, and so I need to have a presence on Facebook, and I enjoy it. It’s been a long story. I’m not going to get into the story here about my relationship with Facebook. I know it’s not for everybody. Some people, it really triggers their anxiety and things like that. But, you know, teach their own anyway. So I’m on the other day. I’m reading my feed, my logarithm feed and had a post come by. And it was a info booth from LifeWise Academy.

[16:39] It had a sign up and they had a table with the with the handouts and the people with their nice little red shirts on. and everything. And it was at the Rossford, Ohio, junior and senior high school open house in the building. That concerned me. And I’ll tell you why. Some people are thinking, no, that’s, you know, you’re just making a big deal out of nothing. When a school allows an outside group to set up an info table at one of their events. They are creating, an open forum, right? And so in most cases, yes, if they allow one group, they have to allow everybody. Now in these images, I will be honest, and I did not see signs of another outside group at this event. I’m not saying there wasn’t any, there could be, because the Rossford, they kind to have a relatively new building. And so it could be that they had other outside groups that were, you know, they spread everybody out. Well, LifeWise Academy is not a school group. They’re not associated with the school. They are a religious group. And what they do, in case you don’t know, is they.

[18:05] Entice children to leave the school during the school day and to have a Bible school class for 20, 30 minutes before going back to school, and trying to entice more children to come in. I have an interview with a person that founded Respect Our School website, and it’s an extended interview, almost an hour and 20 minutes, and now be coming up here in a few weeks, a couple weeks, probably sometime in September. Supreme Court decision that governs release time religious instruction classes. It’s Zorich v. Clausen from 1952. And here in Ohio, the state law mirrors that court decision, and it has some conditions for it to be legal. It has to be off campus. Parents have to give permission for their child to attend. You cannot spend any taxpayer money on it.

[19:13] And the other thing, and this is where this open house thing comes in, the school is not allowed to promote or discourage the program. So they can’t say, hey, kids, sign up. And they can’t say, hey, kids, don’t go, you know, because the school has to be neutral. Now, the LifeWise people, they don’t like this because that’s how they get kids to go is they have other kids entice these kids to come with trinkets and.

[19:47] Toys and things like that and food. And so they want to be able to post flyers and have these info tables at the open houses. But they are a religious group promoting a release time religious instruction class. So they have to abide by the rules set by that court decision. And some of these LifeWise groups are going around with a letter from Alliance Defending Freedom or First Liberty or, one of those fascist law firms that force religion into public schools saying that if, a school has an open house, and they have any secular groups, they have to allow LifeWise. And that is not true. LifeWise is a different type of organization. It is a separate organization. It is a religious organization that is entirely different than the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts, Campfire, the Chess Club.

[20:54] Unicycle Riders Club, or things like that. Now, there are things about allowing clubs, different clubs, different viewpoints to be clubs in your school, like you have an LGBT club and a Turning Point USA club, why, I don’t know. But that is student-led clubs. That’s not LifeWise Academy. Again, LifeWise Academy is a release time religious instruction program that is not affiliated with the school that they are inside of, where they’re working with a school district to entice children to come to a Bible school. It’s a totally separate thing. It’s not the same thing as Girl Scouts or Campfire. And unfortunately, the right-wingers are using.

[21:55] These other laws that cover other groups to, again, force these people in. And so because I did not see another group, and at the time I’m recording this, I had sent an email to the principal of this high school to find out what other groups attended.

[22:18] Now, if he comes back and he says, well, we had this group and this group and this group that also were not school related, not affiliated with the school.

[22:29] Then the LifeWise group does have a tiny bit of a leg to stand on. And so the school district, even though they know that it’s wrong, won’t fight it because they don’t like lawsuits. School districts do not like lawsuits. That’s why groups like FFRF and Americans United and the AHA, American Humanist Association, that’s why they’ve been successful over the years, of trying to protect real religious liberty is they’ll send a strongly worded letter to a school district, threaten a lawsuit.

[23:07] And then the school district will change their behavior because they don’t want a lawsuit because that costs money. It costs taxpayer money and they don’t want that. And so that’s where we, so these right-wingers, these fascist groups like LifeWise, they’re using that concept to get their way, even though it contrives the Zorach v. Clausen decision and other decisions regarding religion in the schools. And so just to sum up and to be clear that if your school is having an open house, and you find out that LifeWise Academy wants to set up a booth to recruit kids to come to school, to their Bible class, be sure to inform your school district that that is not allowed according to the Supreme Court law.

[24:04] And the Supreme Court decision takes precedence over any local ordinance or state law, because I know there’s some state laws that they’ve been working, trying to get, installed where it would allow that to happen, where they could just come into school and recruit. They are not allowed to come into school to recruit. They can’t make any announcements. They can’t hand out any flyers. They can’t have flyers put in backpacks because a lot of schools, they do that. They put different kinds of flyers and things in kids’ backpacks to take home. They’re not allowed to do any of that. The school is not allowed to collect forms for LifeWise. We have had instances where schools were calling up students who didn’t attend or were contacting students who weren’t attending LifeWise to find out why they weren’t attending LifeWise. The schools are not allowed to do that. Again, The school has to have a totally neutral, hands-off relationship with LifeWise. They can’t.

[25:20] Depending on your state law, because this is where state law comes in, if the state law allows school districts to not allow LifeWise to come in, then they can. Because according to the Zora H.P. Clausen, what it does is it made it constitutional for students to leave school to go to a Bible class or other religious instruction. That’s all it did. It did not require school districts to provide that program or to support that program. And then specifically in the language of the decision, it says that school personnel, and school resources and taxpayer dollars cannot be used to support release time religious instruction classes.

[26:12] So I’m going to keep up on this Rossford thing and try to find out what’s going on and try to get that to make the school district aware of the problem, that they created by allowing LifeWise to set up a booth. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either complement a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets at secularleft.substack.com. And it is totally free.

[26:59] I think that Republicans, in general, are the best. They are the best party, the best people in America right now, Republicans, for lying, manipulating, and corruption. They are the best. Hands down, the best ever in American history. They are the best. And so you have the Trump administration. You know, Trump himself, he lies with impunity. He’s the most corrupt president ever. I mean, he makes he makes Richard Nixon look like a Boy Scout. That’s how awful Donald Trump is. And so then you’ve got his sycophants that are cabinet members, like Scott Bessett at the Treasury Department and Brooke Rollins in the Agricultural Department. Both of them are just worthless, incompetent, ignorant. They just say the most ignorant things. And then you have people like Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, who just lets Trump do whatever he wants because he agrees with him because it fits his Christian nationalist agenda.

[28:21] Even though Trump is an atheist and doesn’t go to church and has never read the Bible, doesn’t believe in it, he only believes in money. Mike Johnson just lets him do what he wants because he gets to do what he wants with the Christian nationalism.

[28:42] So I got a couple audio clips, about three audio clips from Besant and Brooks Rollins and Mike Johnson, and I want to comment on them. So the first one we got here is Scott Besant. He’s the Treasury Secretary. And he says the most dumbest thing I’ve ever heard a Secretary of Treasury say. Because these guys, a Secretary of the Treasury generally should be somebody that knows how the economy works. They don’t have to be an economist, but they should at least have a college education where they know how it works. You can know positively that Scott Bessett does not know how the economy works just by him opening his mouth. So here he is in a recent interview. Communities, when you get, and, you know, we don’t know what it was. Was it 10? Was it 15? Was it 25 million illegals? There’s no new housing stock. So, you know, you saw rents go through the roof. And now the people don’t want to admit it, but there are academic studies that show where ICE goes, rents go down. That’s exactly right. Rents go down. Let me get this straight, Scott. If we get rid of all the illegal immigrants, housing prices will go down. There is absolutely no evidence for that.

[30:03] In fact, a TV station in San Diego debunked the idea that ICE moving in caused rents to go down. And the main reason why we have such a bad affordable housing issue in this country is we have a lot, of these private equity firms that have bought up a lot of the housing stock in this country, like gobs of housing stock. And they rent it out at exorbitant prices and price people out of being able to rent it or being even able to buy it. They take it off the market. So when they take it off the market and there’s no stock, then the prices of existing housing goes up.

[30:56] That’s the main driver of housing costs in the United States today, not illegal immigrants. The fact that he says, well, how many illegal immigrants? 11 million, 20 million, 25 million? I mean, there is not, there’s maybe 9 to 10 million, undocumented people that have been in this country. Many more have been removed and deported, but you haven’t seen prices go down.

[31:25] You know, they also blame illegal immigration for grocery prices, which is not true. Basically, they’re just looking for a scapegoat. So the next clip I want to play is Brooke Rollins. She is the secretary of agriculture. Again, she is somebody that she does not know how agriculture works, how the economy works. And she just says she just pulls crap out of her ass and she just says it.

[31:55] And so here’s this clip from her recent interview. I think she was on one of the Sunday morning chat shows here in the United States. Previously, no data was shared. We had no idea where the taxpayer dollars were spent. Just one red state, the recent dump of data. We found SNAP recipients had more than 2,000 Tesla owners, 200 Alfa Romeo owners, more than 144 that were receiving food stamps were driving Porsches. Again, this is the data dumps we’re getting because that we before we had no accountability on any of these programs. We now are requiring accountability. The blue states are suing us. They don’t want to share the data. And can you imagine this was a red state where there is actually some taxpayer accountability? Imagine what’s happening in the blue states if that’s happening in the red states. Well, first of all, you know, I checked into what she chart, what the claims that she’s making that, that, you know, 14,000 something, 20,000 people in some random red state drove luxury automobiles. That is not an indication of fraud, for one thing.

[33:09] Some states do count your personal property against you when determining whether or not you’re eligible for food stamps. Again, it’s left up to the states to determine eligibility for the most part. The reason why she complains about not getting any data is because a lot of that data is collected by the states. The cumulative or the aggregate data is shared with the federal government. But, you know, that is something that they’ve done in recent years as they’ve moved more of the administration. Well, the administration is always with the states. They give the states X amount of dollars a year that they request.

[33:57] That’s like they did an executive order. Trump did one of his stupid executive orders where you couldn’t buy soda pop or something like that or candy or something with food stamps. That’s not going to affect anybody because if the state has a different order, they’ll do it differently. Here in Ohio, the state legislature recently changed the rules and it’s going to prohibit the purchase of soda pop with food stamps starting October the 1st. Because basically anything that is food, you can buy with food stamps. OK. And in some state and then we had a there was a conservative that was complaining about food stamps being used at a fast food place, buying hamburgers and french fries. And in some states, such as California that I know of, if you live in a food desert where you do not have a grocery store within a reasonable distance, they do allow you to use food stamps at a fast food restaurant. And this is going to go, we’re going to talk about this, get into this. I don’t want to get in it today about controlling the choices of poor people receiving public assistance gets to be at ridiculous levels.

[35:22] But her specific claim about these luxury cars, though, that still is not indicative of fraud because you can have somebody who owns a Tesla who lost their job.

[35:36] And can’t find another one who owned their car outright because not everybody, who owns a Tesla would be making payments on it because it’s a very expensive car. Same with a Porsche and all that stuff. If you can afford to pay and have a Porsche or, a Bentley or whatever cars that she was mentioning, those top luxury cars, most of the time you’re going to have paid for them outright. You’re not going to have a loan most of the time. But you could lose your job and not be able to find another one, and you need help, and you could qualify for food stamps in those states that don’t count your personal assets against you. I think Ohio might be one of those places where it doesn’t matter the value of your car or anything like that.

[36:30] And I don’t think you should have to sell your property in order to get public assistance. It’s just ridiculous. us. And the main point, and I’ve shared this point in many different blog posts before this was a podcast and in podcast episodes, SNAP, food stamps, has one of the lowest fraud rates of a federal program in the entire federal government. It’s like 1% fraud. And usually the fraud isn’t the people receiving the food stamps. The fraud is the vendors that accept food stamps. Over 98% of recipients are fully eligible and use the benefits as intended to buy food. Recent federal program integrity reviews and data matching have also flagged potential discrepancies or duplicate enrollments in some states, though experts note these metrics often mix administrative backlogs with actual illegal intent. And that is from the civileats.com website. You know, the big, the big thing, um, when I was in, living in Columbus in the 90s, they had this task force, local law enforcement, worked with the department of agriculture to identify these carryouts that were selling.

[37:52] Contraband like liquor and cigarettes for food stamps. And what they would do is they would have these food items on a shelf and they would, the people would pretend to buy these food items and they would run that through the food stamp system.

[38:12] The carryout owner would get some of that money and then give a portion of it to the person. And then they would buy liquor, cigarettes or whatever. So they were cracking down on that. That is, if you want to see fraud in SNAP, that is the biggest fraud, is vendors frauding the system, trying to get money, food stamp reimbursement that they’re not eligible for. That is the biggest driver of fraud, not the people receiving food stamps. People try to protect these. We just recently here in Ohio, they changed how the, because we have EBT cards, the cards, the credit card, you know, the debit card like stuff. They just changed it recently to where they put extra security on it because people were getting their food stamps stolen from criminals who were scanning their cards, like they scanned credit cards at gas pumps where they compromised the card reader. Criminals were doing the same thing with people’s food stamps, and now they’ve had to put extra security on.

[39:28] So there isn’t a widespread fraud problem in food stamps. And the fact that this unnamed red state, and they haven’t offered any actual evidence of this, just because they have people driving Teslas, it doesn’t mean anything.

[39:45] It’s just trying to manipulate people to think that that poor people getting food stamps is the problem. And it’s not. It’s the billionaires like Elon Musk, who’s trying to buy elections. They are the problem. And then finally, I want to play this clip. This is Mike Johnson. I think this was a Sunday show to being interviewed about. All the good things that Republicans have done for this country. I agree.

[40:12] And that brighter times are on horizon, I guess, is his thing. If you’re a young person watching this and you’re disenchanted and you can’t afford a home and you’re having trouble with health care and you feel failed by the economy, what is the Republican alternative to the socialist, which might be alluring to someone who doesn’t have the education about its failure?

[40:34] Well, the answer is not turn everything over to the government because that never works. That drives prices up. It leads to famine. It leads to human suffering. And poverty for everyone. The answer is limited government and individual freedom and the rule of law, the things that the Republicans have been fighting for. Now, we put in this Congress, we put into place all the economic conditions to let the economy take off like a rocket. And beginning in the first quarter of this year, that’s what was happening. And then we got into the conflict with Iran. Now, that’s going to be settling out soon. That will help gas prices and grocery prices stay down to planet Earth because of the transport cost and all that related to fuel and the price of oil and gas. That’s the big headwind we have right now. But we have done what we said. We fulfilled our promises. We cut taxes on tips and overtime and Social Security. We infused our legislation, like the big, beautiful bill, the working families tax cut, with pro-growth policies for those who create jobs and provide the pathway out of poverty for more people. That’s the American system. And we are going to get back to that and we’ll continue to work on it to make the cost of living more affordable for everybody. But it is the Republican party that presents the policies, not just talk, but the action to make that happen. The Democrats and the big government Marxist want exactly the opposite. It will be this destruction and the ruin of our economy and our country. We cannot allow that to happen.

[41:53] Well, first of all, the thing that I want to point out is he’s like, you know, we were doing this great thing. It was cooking along. And then we had this little kerfuffle, this little excursion with Iran. Yeah.

[42:08] You know, like it was Iran’s fault. It wasn’t Iran’s fault. It was the orange menace’s fault for getting into a war he can’t win against Iran. And the reason why he won’t win this war is because he’s trying to, he listened to Whiskey Pete and thinking that they could do it just by air power alone. And if you talk to anybody who’s ever fought a war or military action in the Middle East or anywhere, knows that you cannot win a war on air power alone. You actually have to put boots on the ground and take objectives to win a war.

[42:51] And it was like that in Vietnam. Vietnam, they tried mass carpet bombings of the North Vietnamese, didn’t stop them, didn’t make them quit. But it just made them even more pissed off and they continued the war. So that never works. The other thing that John is talking about is tax cuts. Tax cuts will make everything all better. Prices will go down and once we get this war over, prices will go down and people will be great. You know what also doesn’t work to improve the economy? Tax cuts. And there is ample data to show trickle-down economics does not work, has not worked for 50 years when it started with Ronald Reagan. There’s ample, ample things that it does not improve inequality. Wealth inequality is the biggest problem we have right now in this country besides prices.

[43:56] That the gap between the wealthiest people and the poorest people has never been wider. And tax cuts for the wealthy does not narrow that gap. It does not trickle down. Because if you cut the taxes on the wealthiest, what they do is they sock their money away somewhere. They either buy more stocks and bonds. Or if it’s a corporation, they buy back their stocks. Or they move the money offshore like Apple’s done in the past. They’ve moved trillions of dollars into offshore banks so they don’t have to pay taxes on it. The only time we’ve ever seen wealth inequality narrow is when people, regular people, got help from the government in the form of either payouts or tax cuts or whatever. If you cut their tax, because the people in the bottom 50% of the socioeconomic brackets, their wages have stagnated, their taxes have stayed the same or gone up, while the people, the richest people have seen their tax obligations crater, get smaller. And this has been going on for several years since Trump’s first term, and we still have the inequality that we have today.

[45:25] You know, it kind of reminds me of the Ohio GOP playbook for this election, this midterm election. You know, they’ve controlled the state of Ohio since 2011. They’ve controlled the governor, the statehouse. They have a super majority in the statehouse, and they control all the state offices. And what are they saying for the midterms? They’re saying, elect us so we can fix what’s broken.

[45:52] And the national GOP does that too. Like Brooke Rollins and Bessett, they keep trying to blame President Obama and President Biden for the economic woes that Trump caused. Trump’s been in office 18, 19 months. You would think that he would be held accountable for the economy. Well, he’s being held accountable, but his sycophants don’t think he should be held accountable, that it’s Joe Biden’s fault. And that’s simply not true. But we do know that trickle-down economics does not work, has not worked, will not work. And we need to stop doing that. We need to start taxing the rich. They can afford it. And it would help a whole hell of a lot more than more tax cuts and more lying from the GOP.

[46:57] Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using the Amplify Studio. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.shop. See you next time.