923: How COVID Changed American Politics Forever | The Real Story Behind 2024

Brian Nichols  0:03  
The government's response to the COVID 19 pandemic not only destroyed public's trust in these quote, unquote, institutions of public health, but also set the groundwork for a complete restructure and realignment of the American electorate. How did we get here and where are we headed? Yeah, let's talk about that. Instead of focusing on winning arguments, we're teaching the basic fundamentals of sales and marketing and how we can use them to win in the world of politics, teaching you how to meet people where they're at on the issues they care about. Welcome to the Brian Nichols show. Well, hey there, folks, Brian Nichols here on another fun filled episode of The Brian Nichols show, joining you, as always, from our lovely cardio miracle Studios here in eastern Indiana. Folks. If you're looking for the best heart health supplement in the world, stick around. We're gonna talk about that later on today, also the Brian Nichols show, powered by our phenomenal sponsors over at amp America. And actually, it's funny, amp America is a piece of the puzzle as we go ahead and talk about today's topic of discussion, how the COVID 19 pandemic, yes, not only destroyed the public's trust in these quote, unquote institutions of public health, but also how the COVID 19 pandemic and the government's response also completely shaped the electorate in a different direction than where we've been heading for the past few decades and where we're headed going forward. So let's talk about this first. I just want to first address the elephant in the room that is COVID changed everything. When I talk to folks from all over the political spectrum, left, right, center, there really seems to be a realignment on all sides of the aisle, particularly focusing on 2020 and going forward to today. And what happened during 2020 Well, obviously, the COVID 19 virus spread globally. It was all over the world. But then the government responses to the COVID 19 pandemic, and this led to a lot of question marks, right? So let's go back and let's put ourselves in the shoes of March 2020, a lot of uncertainty, right? A lot of fear, a lot of concerns, and across the board, Republican, Independent, Democrat, it didn't really matter, everybody was more or less in the same starting off point. And with that, I think the the original claim from the public health institutions of the two weeks to slow the spread, that kind of that was accepted, right? And unless, just again, put ourselves back in that, that situation, if you're told, hey, just two weeks time out, right? I think a lot of folks were kind of like, okay, two weeks, whatever. Two weeks to slow the spread very quickly turned into two plus years to re reform our entire public health and and government bodies. That right there speaks to where I think a lot of people also started to get frustrated, right? Because we went from two weeks to slow the spread now to it turned into this massive, massive government overreach. You have all of a sudden businesses being shut down, prolonged lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates. And while these policies originally were promoted as a means to help with public health. They very quickly turned into a means to control people, right as a means to punish people for not, quote, unquote, taking the virus seriously. So this then turns into people not only getting curious and downright questioning of the government's motives, but then when they do start asking questions, watching their personal freedoms completely ripped away, and then, oh, by the way, you go to the grocery store and everything's a million times more expensive. Okay, maybe not a million times more expensive, but the ensuing inflation, not just from the consequences of government action or inaction, but also with the policies put forth, with stimulus checks and stuff going right to people's right into people's bank accounts, going right to businesses, right had a very real and very, I would say, for some folks, unexpected outcome, a consequence of these policies. Now, if you're more in the libertarian side of things, and you're more in the economic right side of things. This was not a shock. We know when government starts to artificially pump money into economies, what's the inevitable outcome, inflation. And now you're seeing folks post 2020 really start to realize, oh, wow, the government just spending money to fix problems really didn't do what they said it was going to do. And then let's look at parents right who are some other folks that were impacted and maybe radicalized during this time frame was parents who watched as schools were shut down, kids forced to go home and learn from home, and then parents sitting in the same room. When their kids were on their zoom classes, hearing the gobbly gook that kids were being force fed, and parents starting to question, what are my kids learning? Or are my kids learning when they go to these these public institutions of in this case, right? Are they institutions of education, or are they institutions of indoctrination, and that is where a lot of parents started to to get, I would say, frustrated, and start to ask more and more questions and push back. And then you, you bundle all of this with you go back even before COVID, right? The the me too, movements, the the progressive creep more and more of ideologies into our accepted three by five allowable opinion cards, right? Like that, right? There is where a lot of folks also were starting to to get frustrated being told that you you can't talk about certain things in a certain way because it doesn't fit the culturally progressive narrative of the day. And more and more folks saying, I'm sorry, no, I should be able to ask questions. I should not be told I can't, I can't question things, and that me questioning things makes me name, name the ISM right. You're racist, you're sexist, you're homophobic, just by questioning the cultural narratives being promoted predominantly by our friends on the left, and then you couple all of this, right, all bundled together, as I said. But now add in the the dying of the traditional corporate media and the the birth of and really the growing of the alternative media spaces, because what happened during COVID was a lot of these entities out there who would be on Facebook or YouTube or before Elon Musk owned Twitter, Twitter, right like all these entities were silencing dissent, they were silencing voices offering different opinions that didn't go along with the mainstream narrative. And that right there also leads to a lot of distrust. People were getting tired of saying, Hey, I have a difference of opinion. I want to share it, and have, you know, an important role in this very important public discussion we're all having at the same time, only to have the the powers that be say, No, I'm sorry. Your voice is too dangerous. It's too radical to have a seat at the table. Lots of folks saw that, and they got pissed off, and rightfully so. And that led to alternative media sources starting to creep up. And then it led to folks like Elon Musk going forward and purchasing Twitter, right in this case, for $44 billion giving now an equal c at the table for folks. So you look at that, and then I would also rewind a little bit, because we thought, I say we I thought specifically here on the show that 2022 was going to be kind of the moment that the Democrats, the left, the progressives, they were going to face the consequences of pushing things too far. And I was wrong. Um, the the 2022 red wave didn't materialize, like, like we thought. And then the question comes, Well, why all these things that led to 2020, fours outcome? I would say we're we're all there, if not as important as they are today, if not more important because we're living through the actual outcomes of these very draconian, draconian, draconian, there we go. I was like, I can say that word draconian policies,

but you look at what happened, right? I would say Donald Trump. There was still a lot of question marks around Donald Trump, specifically in the way that Donald Trump's end of his presidency was framed by the corporate media. You had the January 6 narrative. You had Joe Biden and the Democrats leading with this whole, you know, the the adults are back in charge. Narrative inflation, while it was starting to hit, it really hadn't hit as badly as it had had been expected, and frankly, what we did experience shortly thereafter. So again, this, this 2022, red wave that a lot of us thought was going to hit, it was just two years behind. Also, we got to look at what happened between 2022 and 2024 and if we really dig deep, right? First of all, the economy never really recovered, right? It was one of those things where you would have Biden on stage saying, the economy is not bad, but then parents and just your average Joes going to the grocery store and saying, I can't afford this stuff to feed my family, right? Or just going to name your favorite big box store and watching the prices exponentially creep upwards and upwards and upwards. That plus the fact that all of a sudden you see crime rates increasing in big cities while gas lighting on the behalf of the left saying, Well, no, it's not crimes actually going down. Oh, that's because you weren't reporting your crime figures to the FBI. Okay, so you're gaslighting a lot of folks in these urban areas who, by the way, have been governed by Democrats for generations, in many cases, and a lot of the folks living in the. Blue cities are they themselves, tried and true Democrats. So you're gaslighting your own constituents, who are seeing very real problems before them, but being told they're bad people for raising them up or sorry. No, you're just you're imagining this. You're actually experiencing a great recovery and from an economic standpoint, and actually, your neighborhoods are safer than ever before. You couple that and then go towards the push for governments to close schools. Right? You have Randy Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers working hand in hand with government entities to continually force schools to be closed despite the fact that we were going forward into a world where we had COVID vaccines for what they are worth. You had the COVID vaccine so you could take it if you were concerned about getting COVID, or if you were concerned about spreading COVID, per the narrative that was accepted at that time by the public health agencies. Well, take CO take the COVID shot. You won't give COVID, right, which we all learn ended up not being true. Hopefully I don't get Newt for saying what is literal scientific, accepted fact nowadays. Excuse me, but what we shall see, I guess, so that's something right there. You look at the shift in 2022 to 2024 a very large tipping point, I would say, due to two years of gas lighting and finally, catching up to our friends on the left and the Democrats. Also, let's just look at who the President was. That's Joe Biden. Joe Biden went into the White House with with this, this expectation that the adults were back in charge, right? That was the narrative around the Joe Biden campaign. And also, Joe Biden ran as a transition candidate, where he wasn't going to be the candidate for this term, and then going to the next term, he was going to do four years he was getting old, right? And he was going to help put put America back on track. But then you look at it, really, all started with the removal of troops from Afghanistan. And that's not a debate on whether or not we should have. I think a lot of folks listening in this audience agree that it was time to get troops out of Afghanistan, but it was the manner in which she did so. And you watch as you have literal human beings falling from airplanes as the planes are leaving Afghanistan, going back to the United States. And you see Afghani men who were trying to, I don't know what they thought they were going to accomplish, but trying to get onto those airplanes to get out to get out, literally falling out of the sky from wheel wells and seeing the billions of dollars of equipment and infrastructure left behind. Coupling that with you have the increase in funding to Ukraine. Meanwhile, your average every dome, every doe, everyday American sitting there not being able to pay bills. Oh, couple that with the just wild and weird natural disasters, slash, just disasters happening right here in the good old US of A the train derailments in East Palestine, Ohio. You have the issues with the Maui wildfi fires over in Hawaii. You have now the the hurricanes hitting the southeast and the government's response or lack thereof. This all snowballed into a really big black eye for Joe Biden, and then that's not even discussing the fact that it was quite obvious he was turning into a very old, senile, dementia ridden candidate and president, which when we go to the Joe Biden versus Donald Trump debate was on display for millions of Americans who had been gas lit by the corporate media for for years at this point, saying No, Joe Biden is fit. He's strong behind closed doors. He can engage in amazing political conversations and policy discussions with leaders across the board behind closed doors, right? It's now you see him on camera right. It's only behind closed doors that Joe Biden was amazing and was able to string together coherent sentences this narrative, right? And again, going back to the gas lighting of the American populace. Then you go into what the Republicans learn right over the two year period where the red wave was supposed to happen and where it didn't. And I would say the Republicans did a really good job at starting to refine their messaging. Now I also forgot to mention one of the other big thorns in the side to Republicans in 2022 was Roe v Wade going away. That was due to Donald Trump's Supreme Court justices he appointed, but with abortion becoming a very strong topic of conversation during that 2022 midterm election, and it really did help propel a lot of Democrats into office that I don't think would have had such a strong chance, were it not for the abortion issue. But fast forward to 2024 Republicans have now diffused the abortion issue. Donald Trump saying, No, I'm not going to do a national ban on abortion, and as a matter of fact, we're gonna make this a states issue, right? So if you live in Colorado, you live in California, you live in New York, and you want to have all the abortions you you can, I guess that's that's the way it's gonna be. You can in those states, right? Because it's a state issue. But if you live in states like Texas, or you live in states like Indiana, or name the red state, here four. Florida, there might be more restrictions, right? So all of a sudden the the national conversation around abortion was diffused. And then you go back to, well, what else can Democrats really leverage as you know, a talking point, a messaging strategy. Well, the DEI stuff, the woke insanity that's kind of going away. People aren't they're not buying that anymore. And then you look at, well, how do we compare and contrast Joe Biden versus Trump? And this is where, again, the gas lending can only go so far, because people, while they do have short memories, it's not that short. Joe Biden has been president for at this point. Now, we're going on four years, but at that point in time, in 2022 you know, he'd been president for two years, and Donald Trump was President two years prior, and had been president for four years. So we had the ability to compare and contrast. And when you ask your average person, were you better in 2019 versus where you are to today? Overwhelmingly, that's the confirmation that people would say, yes, my life was better in 2019 than it was where it is today. And that's almost a direct result and outcome of government policies, especially during the COVID pandemic, and the ensuing, I guess, the ensuing narrative that the Democrats ran with under a Joe Biden presidency, thinking that now, that, since the adults are in charge, that we pretty much have the ability to do what we want. So we're going to leverage these, these big bureaucracies that go after our political opponents. And then, meanwhile, Republicans did the right thing. They just started pointing at the Democrats and saying, Do you want more of this? Do you want four more years of this? And by the way, do you remember what life was like back before you had all of this. And resoundingly, a lot of people said, as a matter of fact, yes, I'm tired of the the crime seeping into my neighborhoods. I'm tired of watching my prices for goods and services continue to skyrocket more and more with just more and more inflation and government spending. I'm tired of watching my gas prices and my energy costs skyrocket While America continues to not invest in American infrastructure and energy, but rather invest outside or send billions of dollars to countries overseas, like Ukraine or Israel for that example, for that matter, and also parents getting pissed off that their kids are being kept home when They should be able to go to school and learn in person. Because, guess what? COVID is not a threat to kids by and large. The data speaks for itself. You add all of this, and then we go to 2024 what were Democrats voting for? Anything like, What? What? What? If you were a Democrat. And by the way, I know there's a lot of Democrats who actually listen to this show, um, and I appreciate you listening to the show, but I'm asking you sincerely, what were you running for in 2024

I know you. I know what you were running against, right? You were running against Trump. You were running against Republicans. You You were running against a lot of stuff. But it's one thing to be against something. It's another entirely different thing to be for something. And Donald Trump was for a lot of things, right? He was for American energy independence. He brought in folks like Elon Musk, the vague gram of Swami, Ron Paul R of k Jr, Tulsi Gabbard, the list goes on and on, of people from very unique and distinct coalitions, but those coalitions were often built around things that they were trying to accomplish, right? Make America healthy again, trying to get the FDA out of the way, of giving the green light and, frankly, stopping a lot of these very important topics to be discussed, right, like red dye 40 in our foods, or what is actually in the vaccines that we are giving our kids all the time. You know, when they're going through their their vaccine schedules, and the numbers of vaccines continue to add up more and more and more. There's just, there's a lot of question marks right there, right? And people saying, Hey, I should be able to ask questions. You have people like Elon Musk saying, freedom of speech is paramount, right? We need to be able to have an open dialog. So let me buy Twitter and open the dialog so people can actually feel they can voice their opinions without fear of censorship, and also just addressing the elephant in the room that we are in say entirely and inherently as a government, inefficient at our spending, we spend like drunken sailors as a government, and we can't keep doing that. We're 36 ish trillion dollars in debt. The number doesn't even feel real, because I remember on a campaign I worked in 2012 we were afraid of the debt being $12 trillion right? So you've seen the debt continue to increase at an exponential rate, and all of a sudden it turns into a lot of folks on the right saying, Hey, we got to go out and vote for new policies right, and not even just the right folks across the board saying what we're doing isn't working. And as a matter of fact, it's not only not working, we're seeing that the folks. Folks who are in power know it's not working, and they continue to gaslight us and telling us it does work, and we just need to trust the system, trust the experts right. Continue to just defer to the institutions of higher knowledge, right, and with that trust, right? Just just implore your your elected officials, or rather, employ yourself, to give yourself to the elected officials, and what they're telling you is going to be okay. So you have all this, this enthusiasm gap from the folks on the left versus the folks on the right. The folks on the left weren't really voting for anything, if anything, they were voting against a Donald Trump. Maybe you could make the argument they were voting for abortion, but good luck bringing that into an American electorate where abortion, by the way, even for women, is not the number one issue across the board. Believe it or not, a lot of women, especially women in committed relationships, abortion does not become a top three, top five issue. You know it does, though, being able to pay the bills, being able to make sure your kids get a good education, being able to make sure you can go to work to support your family, those things absolutely matter. And abortion, when it became the number one argument for Democrats, it fell flat. So we have all of these, these issues. And then let's talk about COVID being that catalyst for change, right? I mentioned COVID At the beginning of this episode. COVID was the reason for 2024 and it goes down to really five main areas. Number one, the government overreach during COVID. We watched firsthand as government started to take these massive, massive steps forward, whether it was trying to grant emergency powers to Governor's massive federal spending programs like the stimulus checks or the PPP loans you had, you had folks who they felt that, you know, hey, maybe, maybe we can deal with this two week to slow the spread thing, and it turned into an entire behemoth of a government policy stepping on the rights and infringing on the rights of millions of Americans, regardless of where they live. That right there was an immediate, immediate red flag for a lot of folks, and again, was a catalyst for people saying, we need something different in 2024 also we look at the progressive policies of the Democrats. They used COVID as an opportunity to continuously push forward progressive policies that might have otherwise faced normal resistance, right? Or rather resistance in normal circumstances. Because if you look at what was pushed forward, it was expanded unemployment benefits, rent moratoriums, student loan forgiveness efforts, even though most of those were ultimately blocked, increase in health care spendings through Medicare expansions. All these things were argued during COVID as being necessities to keep things rolling. But if you look at them objectively, they were just policy prescriptions that normally would be progressive wet dreams now just being ushered in under the guise of, well, we have to do something. And again, the danger of do something politics. And yes, a lot of these spending programs were directly leading to inflation. So while we have Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting there saying that we're going to pass the inflation Reduction Act, that, in turn, was one of the direct reasons that inflation continued to increase at such a high rate. You couple that with the stimulus checks. You couple that with the economic lockdowns. You couple that with the folks being forced away from their jobs. I mean, if you were a nurse and you refuse to get the COVID Vax, losing your livelihoods, if you were a business and you weren't towing the line about forcing people to wear masks coming into your restaurant, well, sorry, we're going to shut you down because you're supposed to be an establishment feeding food to people and and you're not making them wear masks. Make it make sense. Um, that, plus then you go into the public health versus personal freedom debate, being told you need to get your vaccines in order to be a member of of polite society, that if you go out and you don't wear a mask that you're a bad person and you hate grandma if you don't follow the stupid little arrows on the floor of the grocery store, that you're a super spreader. Right? This narrative, and by the way, hilarious when you have folks usually on the left arguing, my body my choice, as we were just talking about with the abortion issue now, saying your body, my choice, I need you to get vaccinated, and that doesn't even go into the conversation around the vaccine. Does it work? Does it not work? Let's have a debate. Oh, sorry, no, we can't have that debate. If you try to have that debate, we're going to censor you. We're going to silence you. We're going to use our institutions to go after you, whether you are a dude yelling at a microphone on your computer at home, or if you are a Stanford scientist who's been dealing with this stuff in the world of epidemiology and biology for your entire career, doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We're going to silence you. We're going to censor you because you're a bad person, because you're a bad person, because you are questioning. The science, you are questioning the experts. Because, as Dr Fauci said, Right? Just by questioning me, you are, you're questioning the very foundation of science itself, right? So when you are questioning me, you're questioning the science. It's a little dystopian. And by a little dystopian, I mean a lot of dystopian. And then also, what did this lead to, right? And this is where we're going to put a nice bow on this conversation. What did this all lead to? This led to unprecedented distrust in government and in our institutions. So while you have the Democrats going into the 2024 election just leading with trust the experts, trust the institutions. Oh, and by the way, ignore all the gas lighting we've done over the past four years. Longer than that, eight years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Just ignore the lies we've been telling for generations at this point. Right? This is where your average person finally, right, stood up and said, Nope, I'm done. I'm done. And I really think that the Joe Biden debate was one of those ultimate like getting people out of the what's it called the Stockholm Syndrome, right? Like helping just snap him out of it, because you you had been told if you were just watching MSNBC or CNN or ABC or CBS for for years, right? You were told that Joe Biden was he was coherent. He was having these, you know, great policy debates behind the scenes. And you were told to trust, to trust us in the corporate media, if you're Joe Scarborough, right, sitting there every day with with Mika Brzezinski parroting whatever narrative you need to parent. You gotta trust it, right? I talk to Joe Biden all the time. He's one of the smartest people I ever talked to. He's smart as a whip. And then for people to see Joe Biden on on that debate stage with no media fluff, no media spin, just raw Joe Biden as himself. And your average person saw that. And I remember watching Twitter when this all happened, because I was curious seeing folks of all political persuasions, right, moderates, independents, athletes, like, just like, it didn't matter if they were in the world of politics or not, people saying, oh no. Or like, if you were a lefty, saying, Oh, I feel so bad for Joe Biden. This

makes me so uncomfortable. Or athletes saying, this, dude, make brain is mashed potatoes, right? Like that, right? There was the moment that they couldn't pretend anymore. And I think we go back to COVID. It was easy for governments and it was easy for the corporate media, it was easy for the institutions of public health and all these big bureaucracies to create the perception that you got to trust us. Shits hitting the fan right now. Trust the experts. Okay, I'll do it for two weeks. We're going to do it more than two weeks, maybe two months, maybe two quarters, maybe two years, two decades. There are folks out there, by the way, 100% guaranteed they would still be promoting lockdowns, forced vaccinations, forced mask mandates, all that stuff, right? Vaccine passports. They would be pushing for that today if they had the opportunity, but you had this narrative and all these different narratives all at once, right? And each one being led with gas lighting, and then all of a sudden, you just have the most transparently uncomfortable situation where Joe Biden is on that debate stage, and there's nothing hiding who he was, where he was, and what state he was in, that, for so many folks, was the ultimate radicalizing, radicalizing instance. Because now, now these folks have to take a step back and say, Okay, I know for a fact they were lying and gaslighting me about this. What else are they gaslighting me about? And that is where so many people started to say, All right, I'm done. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of of voting for people who are comfortably, excuse me, comfortably lying to me, to my face every day, right? And I mean even going up to the election right, like the day of the election, you've had people across the Democratic Party, across the corporate media, across these institutions, calling Donald Trump, Hitler, saying he's a fascist, like, it's the end of democracy, and then as soon as the election's over, Yep, he's good, we're fine. What even, even, even dudes like Charlamagne, the God who he was leading with the whole like, Trump's a fascist and a threat to our. Democracy weeks before the election, afterwards, saying, you know, I said that stuff, but I was just doing it because I saw all the other Democrats doing it, and now they're not doing it. Well, that's weird. Why? Because? Because it wasn't real, right? And this is the part I don't know if Democrats and, and I'm just going to say Democrats, progressive, the left in general, right? I don't know if they get this yet. Some of them do, but a lot of them don't, because what happened was, for years, they were able to just gaslight, they were able to just lie, they were able to make things more than they were. But that only works for so long, and as people have access to the internet more and more. And as you suddenly had folks like Elon Musk helping even the playing fields from a discussion standpoint, which, by the way, great, great segment over on CNN. By the way, can't believe I'm saying that, but they were showing the breakdown from where Twitter was in terms of bias to where it is today. Before the Elon Musk takeover, it was like a 65 like 35 split of Democrat narratives and being allowed in the platform and Republicans 6535 split. That number now is 4847 Democrat leaning, 4847 right? So all of a sudden people having an equal foot at the seat at the table, having the ability to have a dialog, having the ability to actually talk about this stuff and ask questions without fear of censorship, start to realize, Oh, I'm not alone, right? I'm asking questions, but I'm afraid to verbalize these questions out loud. So I don't want to get nuked, right? I don't want to be deleted from polite society. Oh, now I have a platform where I can voice my concerns, and by the way, it's giving other people permission to do the same. Right? This is where the COVID 19 pandemic and the government reaction ultimately led to the 2024, outcome. You can't gaslight people. You can't just outright lie to people, to their faces and not expect some type of backlash and and what I'm seeing after this election is that the Democratic Party, the progressives, the the bureaucratic institutions, they haven't learned a thing. I mean, some folks again, some folks, they have chank yuger going on Twitter and having a dialog with Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr about helping reform the Pentagon. That's that's where he's at right, and he's actually having a seat at the table to look at very real problems that we can now start to address with real solutions. But this gaslighting of you the Ukraine war. We need to go fight the Ukrainian war. On, on, you know, a full fledged front. We have to go and support our public health institutions across the board, no questions asked, and support our big pharma overlords, right? We have to be able to go through and eliminate the the scary narratives that go against our accepted, comfortable narratives that's done, and so many people going forward have seen past the bullshit. And what do we talk about in sales? Right? Once you see it, you can't unsee it. So now millions of folks have seen it, and they're not going to unsee it. And unless the Republicans, and again, there's a big asterisk here, right? Unless they royally f up, which they could. I don't see how this flips back to the other side if the republican party decides that they're going to start, you know, a million new foreign wars that they're going to, you know, leverage the the institution, the bureaucratic institutions, against the American public, just arbitrarily on a whim. Like, yeah, that would definitely push people away. But like, the whole narrative of, like, this is the threat to democracy administration that you know dei is, is, you know, it's the best way to go, and anybody arguing against it is, is named the the you know, ism or ist. You know, they're racist, you're homophobic, you're trans folks, go through the list, right? This is where people are just like, okay, whatever. I know I'm not. You're gonna just keep saying because it's a weapon, right? I get it. You like to use words as weapon. I'm gonna use the truth as a weapon. And that's where they can't fight back, because they are now realizing that the gas lighting doesn't work. That's why you're seeing folks like Joe Scarborough and Mike Rosinski previously mentioned right how now they're saying, Well, we haven't talked to Donald Trump in four years, and we've been calling him a fascist and Hitler and all that kind of stuff for the past 10 years. Maybe we should talk to him. Maybe we should, I don't know, reach out of our bubble and start to communicate with people who disagree. People who disagree with us. I know what a wild idea, but you're seeing that the old playbook from our friends on the progressive left, it doesn't work anymore, and the outcome from the 2024 election is the most. Like perfect example of what happens when one side is just constantly gaslighting and leading with trying to destroy freedoms versus leading with creating freedom right, creating liberty, creating opportunity. And Democrats unknowingly, and I think unwittingly helped create radicalized coalitions of people who normally wouldn't necessarily be motivated to vote right, like you have your make America healthy folks, the crunchy moms that the vaccine, skeptical folks, they're they're now mobilized and voting against the Democratic Party, progressive establishment, you have your parents, right? And talk about, like one of the most underutilized, but man, most effective demographics of a voting block to go after, go after parents, right? Parents, they showed up in 2024 you go after all the people who were living in these progressive cities. And by the way, one of the, like, less talked about outcomes of this election, but definitely should be looked at a lot of these big blue cities, they weren't that blue. Like, yes, they were blue, but they weren't as blue. They a lot of a lot of red, and a lot of like that, that, uh, like, soft red creeping in, and a lot more light blue, right? Or light light blue versus the dark blues. When you're looking at the breakdown of the democratic power structures versus Republican power structures, you go from the 2020 map to the 2024 map. It's a very different map across the board, there's that one segment where Jake tappers, I forget the guy on CNN, like their voting guy, and they're going through county by county. And Jake Tapper goes, well, can you show me like a couple counties where Kamala did better this election than Joe Biden, 00, right? All the counties Kamala did worse. And that right there speaks to more and more people saying, I'm done, whether I live in the rural areas or I'm in a big blue city, if you are being gas lit and you're seeing it firsthand, yeah, it's time. It's time to stand up and say, this is goofball, and to start voting in your self interests, right? And I know a lot of folks were also using their vote as a means of defense.

So I say all this COVID was one of the worst things we've ever had happen to our planet. Across the board, hundreds of 1000s of people died. Elephant in the room. It looks like the virus itself was created by government, our government, but conversation for a different day, and when you look at what was happening during COVID I was I was one of the folks saying, I don't know what we're going to be able to do to help reign this back in. And I didn't realize it was the overreach of government itself, and it was the the friends on the progressive left who were trying to push the narrative so far to the left. It was in their actions that actually helped us wake so many people up to have such a a pendulum switch, pendulum switch in such a fast manner. So I look at where we are today, and I I'm confident in saying we would not be here, were it not for COVID, and were it not for Joe Biden winning in 2020 and as a matter of fact, I almost feel that we As a country are in a way better position to go forward than if Donald Trump had one and been sworn in in 2020 for re election. Because what's happened is, over the past four years, people again have seen what has taken place, and they can't unsee it, and they have a direct foil in what they've seen over the past four years and what they saw in the preceding four years before that. So were it not for COVID? Were it not for Joe Biden, and yes, in association, were it not for Kamala Harris in 2020 I don't think we are where we are today in 2024 so that, ladies and gents, is how the COVID 19 pandemic actually led us to the election we saw in 2024 and frankly, where I think we're going to be able to build Upon going forward now. What does that look like for political movements? Populism is King right now, and the reality is it will be king, especially in a world of democracy. So what is democracy? Democracy? See, is nothing more than mobilizing the masses to go out and vote for a preferred candidate or policy. Now to do that, you need to get more people to vote for your candidate or for your policies than the other team, and that is, by definition, a populist sentiment, a populist tactic, right? So in that mindset of understanding that populism is, in fact, what helped us win in 2024 that means we have to continue to leverage populism going forward, to maintain what we have thus far been able to accomplish. So that means that we're going to see things that are overtly not libertarian in policy, but by and large, pushing the envelope further and further towards a more pro Liberty environment. Right. For every one step back, we will be taking four steps forward. And I need to say this, for all the small l and big L libertarians in the audience, I know there's quite a few of you still that means you're going to see things that you're not going to like from a principled standpoint, but you're also going to see a lot of awesome wins. So for every every Jay Bhattacharya that we get put into a public health position, we might see some folks, I'm trying to think off top my head, like Marco Rubio right in the Secretary of State position, right? So we have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time understand that the coalition that was able to secure victory in 2024 was not an overtly libertarian outcome. It was not an overtly conservative outcome wasn't an overtly independent outcome. It was an outcome of a bunch of different coalitions coming together under the understanding that what we have is our status quo. It ain't working, and as a matter of fact, it ain't working. And also we haven't been able to address it because we've been we've been gas lit from the powers that be, the corporate media entities and our institutions that are bureaucratic in nature and have nobody to really respond to, right? Those are the institutions that got us to where we are. So we have to work together to unwind that and to think that we are just going to go in with one ism, libertarianism, conservatism, independent, ism independence, that that's going to be the thing that fixes everything is silly. It's not going to be it's going to be a piece of the puzzle. All of these things coming together are pieces to the puzzle. So in order to continue moving forward, I challenge the listeners who were excited about the outcomes of 2024 to heed this, this warning, don't lose sight on what we were tasked to accomplish here in 2024 we were not tasked to put in a libertarian government. We were not tasked to put in a conservative government. Weren't tasked to put in an independent government. We were tasked to put in a government that is by the people, for the people and of the people, and that means a government that is is honest with its constituents, a government that will respond to the needs of its constituents, a government that will allow its constituents to voice concerns even when those concerns go in direct opposition to the accepted government narrative, right? We have to be able to question everything. We have to be able to ask those tough questions, and we have to be able to challenge existing status quo narratives. If we go through the mindset of, we won because we are ism, we will lose, because that's what the left did. The left thought they had a mandate when they won in 2020 to institute progressivism on a grand scale, leftism on a grand scale. And that's why we saw the DEI goofballs put in place in different positions of power in the federal government, despite Credentialism and with that, despite just any qualifications, like Rachel Levine is in a powerful position in the Cabinet for Health. Why? Because it's a dude who dresses like a chick. Okay, like, like, just to say, because they they represent the ISM that that means that this is good. This is an inherent good. It's silly. It's absolutely silly. So we have to make sure that we're not doing the same thing on accident. So I challenge you, if you find yourself in a situation where you're like, oh, you know, maybe this isn't so bad. Maybe, maybe we are going to go ahead and have some success here, getting some isms into into action. Take it. Take a break. Take a break. And let's actually acknowledge what mandate we were given, and let's make sure we don't lose it. So I'm going to go ahead and put a pin in today's conversation. If you got some value, please go ahead, do me a favor, give us a. Subscribe hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform, Apple podcast, Spotify, YouTube, music or your favorite video platform, YouTube, Rumble, Twitter, Facebook, we are going ahead and live streaming every Saturday morning for our AMP America Week in Review, yours truly and my good buddy, remzo Martinez, so if you want to go ahead and check that out, we do live stream on Saturday mornings hit that little notification bell over on my Twitter, assuming single time we do, in fact, go live, and with that, find yours truly on social media at B Nichols liberty. And also, if you have not gone ahead and give us a five star rating and review, please do so that helps us reach more and more people and shows how, yes, we can, in fact, continue to find some wins, 2024 and beyond. So we're going to go ahead and wrap things up there with that. Thank you for joining us today. Brian Nichols, signing off. You're on the Brian Nichols show. We'll see you next time. Bye.

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