LM#78--Crazy vs Common Sense

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Those are the drums of liberty. 70% of the country agrees on something you were told was a 50-50 fight. Not 51%, 70. And for years you were made to feel like the fringe for believing it. That's the story behind a newsletter I need to tell you about on this Liberty Minute.

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Welcome to the Theory to Action Podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in last time to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now, here's your host, David Kaiser.

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Hello, my name David, and welcome back to this Liberty

The 70 Percent Surprise

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Minute. Today is gonna be a book review. Today I want to make the case, a persuasive case, hopefully, for why you need to be reading something I've been writing every week since July. It's called the Crazy vs. Common Sense newsletter. And it's free. And here's why it matters today. Not six months from now, but today. We are barreling towards November. In a crucial midterm election. And between now and then, you're gonna be told over and over by people with microphones a lot bigger than mine, far bigger, that the crazy is actually the mainstream. And that

Why The Newsletter Matters Now

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you are the outlier. You are the problem. For thinking otherwise. And that's the lie. Let that sink in. That is the lie. Now let me tell you why I started this newsletter in the first place. Because you need you deserve, rather, you deserve to know where I'm coming from behind this newsletter. Not just the pitch. And I didn't start the crazy versus common sense newsletter because I had extra time on my hands. I don't. I started it because organically I kept having the same conversation over and over. Sometimes with people at my church, but not always. The boy. I go to my buddy's kids' games. And just the regular conversation turns to politics or the culture. Or you're in line at the hardware store, Lowe's.

Where The Idea Came From

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Or you're talking with a neighbor. And somebody would say something perfectly reasonable to me. You know, men shouldn't play in women's sports. And I would say, I completely agree. Or a border ought not to be completely open. It's not like your front door. You just don't keep your front door at your house open. A border ought to mean something. And then they would catch themselves and almost apologize for saying it. Like they had said something radical. That's not radical. Those two things are not radical. That's Tuesday. That's what normal people have believed since before you and I were born and for the last 6,000 years. And frankly, I got tired of watching good people apologize for common sense. So I started handing them and recommending them some books to prove that they were not crazy, that they were right the whole time. And here's our important nugget of the day. That the crazy versus common sense newsletter started with one book that I had read by Scott Jennings. A revolution in common sense, the CNN guy. The CNN guy who, if you flip over occasionally like I do, and you watch CNN just to see how crazy some things are being said on national television. Scott is the guy who gets outnumbered four to one all the time. And still walks away with a chuckle. And you know he's the winner. You know that other people know that he's the winner. And Jennings opens up his book with a brilliant line. And it comes

Scott Jennings And A Defining Quote

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from Thomas Paine, who wrote this. A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right. You see, that line was the whole newsletter in a single sentence. Washington and Hollywood and even your kids' school board. I certainly know our local city council. And half of corporate America. They got so used to their own dysfunction. That dysfunction started looking normal. And nobody said otherwise out loud. Or frankly, a far smaller percentage. So it's time we said the out loud part up front and loud. Or else it's just going to keep going. Until somebody finally says, You're crazy. That's a lunatic phrase. It's a lunatic policy. That's nuts. You might be shunned by your group, you might be shunned by your friends, but it's time we started calling crazy out. Certainly isn't the first time in American history somebody had to say the obvious thing out loud in print. If we go back to 1776 in January, Thomas Paine sent that pamphlet around the colonies called Common Sense. He didn't write it for scholars, he wrote it in plain language. He wrote it for the farmers and the shopkeepers and the soldiers, because the obvious argument for independence needed the saying out loud before anyone would act on it. That pamphlet sold somewhere around 500,000 copies and a sheer population of, I think, some two and a half million. Think about that ratio. One in five people in the colonies read the pamphlet. Payne didn't invent the idea that America should be free, but everybody already halfway believed

Thomas Paine And Saying It Plainly

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it. And that was just a matter who was going to really go through with it. You know, a third supported independence. A third wasn't sure. And a third was so scared that they wanted to stay with a crown. Pay just had the nerve to write it all down plainly and then stick his name on it, which was the real courage. But that's the whole tradition behind crazy and common sense. It's not my invention. It's the same old American habit of someone finally saying the plain thing and plain language out loud. Now let's talk about what the newsletter actually is because I don't want you to just subscribe blindly. Every week we talk about a political book or a history book written by someone who did the actual work, not just a hot take from a green room. But I try to run each book through three timeless lenses, maybe all three at the same time, or just one, depending on the book. But it's the three pillars we most of us have grown up with: the Constitution, Western tradition, and for me, and many like me, the Catholic teaching. And I mean what the church has actually taught for the last 2,000 years, not a fad that seems to be coming out of Rome more and more.

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Or

Three Lenses And A Verdict

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whatever is popular coming out of Rome this month.

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And at the end, you're going to get a verdict, not spin, not feelings, but a verdict. Is it crazy or is it common sense? So we're five issues in, and here's what we've already covered. So I can give you a little bite of each so you know exactly what you're signing up for. In issue one, we talk about the book, The Revolution of Common Sense by Sky Jennings. And we say crazy is Washington got so used to dysfunction in the last 25 years that dysfunction started to look normal. And it did. The fact that we don't have 435 members of the House and 100 senators all saying that women cannot play or men cannot play in women's sports.

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Men, biological men, the DNA doesn't lie. Men can't play in women's sports.

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That cannot

Five Books And Five Examples

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be controversial. And yet it is. Common sense is the same border can be shut fast when the people in charge actually want to shut it. You know, the adults in the room. Frankly, the adults in the house. The parents. The parents come to the front door and say, Shut the front door. Crazy is a parent saying, keep the front door open to our house all night, all day. And then and then get shocked when somebody just walks through. You don't know. So common sense is the is the courage to actually take charge and actually shut the door. Shut the door to illegal immigration. And it's been shut. What a crazy concept. When you actually lead on the issue, the issue goes away. When in the last two and a half to three decades has any politician stood up and said, we're gonna do this, and they do it, and the actual issue is solved. Rock solid, completely solved. I think I just read the other day that there has not been we've had 15 to 16 straight months of no illegal immigration. Not even the gataways. Border Patrol has reported no getaways. And you know the getaways were always the definition of the Border Patrol was overwhelmed by a group of people, illegals coming through, and they only had so many officers to round up the gang that there was our already four to ten to fifteen runners, you know, the people that break away and they don't have enough horses or manpower or cars or helicopters or anybody to chase those five to ten to fifteen people. Those were the gataways. That was the definition of a gataway. There's been none for 15 to 16 months, and there's been no illegals apprehended. The border is shut, just took leadership. That was issue two. Issue two's bonus was the book The Invisible Coup by Peter Schweisser. And Crazy was pretending that the open door policy had no cost. Because oh, we were compassionate. Oh, we were so nice, we were compassionate. And common sense was asking who benefits when nobody's watching that front door. Because boy, there's a lot of ramifications from that door being open. When the front door of our country is open and anybody is just coming in with nobody checking, there's all kinds of ramifications, and it's there's a lot of people benefiting, and a lot of people that have very bad intentions for our country. Issue three is the American War on Election Corruption by Seth Keschel. And the crazy part was a voting system that checks less than your pharmacy counter and technician does for your own prescription meds. Common sense is we gotta have one that checks at least as much as your pharmacy counter does. I'm sorry, David, but I think this prescription might interfere with another prescription you were you were taking. The same analogy. Can we just have anybody vote? Can anybody just walk up and say, I want to vote? No. That's crazy. Need a voter ID for anything and everything. I mean, you need an ID for anything and everything. Can't get on a plane, can't cash a check. Can't buy tickets. You need IDs. The twenty-first century. That's common sense. Issue four America's Cultural Revolution by Christopher Rufo. Incredible book. Crazy as pretending that fifty a year fifty-year documented plan to take over America's institutions was just some spontaneous, well-meaning accident. Common sense is there was a radical movement. It had a violent start. It continues to be violent. And it continues to say what it actually wants. Chris Rufo documented the people, the movement, the institutions. That's the common sense. We have to know what these people are saying and doing. It's bad. It's bad news. So far, five books, five verdicts. It's the same lesson every time. Someone in charge ignored something you already knew was true, and then reality showed up. Anyway. So we're just getting started. And here's the point part that should stop you cold. Back in issue three, I dug into a poll from America's New Majority Project. It's Newt Gingrich's outfit working with the McLaughlin Associates. Yes, new Newt Gingrich can be a partisan. I understand that. McLaughlin Associates has not been. They've been a very neutral pollster, a very good pollster, a very deep pollster. But they didn't just ask people if they disagreed with a policy. They actually gave them five different categories. And one of the categories was if it was crazy. Or if it was completely crazy. And that's not my label. That's literally the survey's own category.

The Poll That Changes Everything

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And you can see the you can see the polling. It's all there in issue three. Put the links, you can go through. It's a huge deep dive. They did it back in May, 2026. Check this out. 70% of the country, Democrats, Republicans, and independents, they're all lumped together. They just ask direct questions. 70%. And 55% don't just agree. They called it completely crazy. 68% said hiding a child's gender transition from their own parents is completely crazy. Not just crazy. Completely crazy. The survey talked about the emotional tag to that. The people just didn't want to say that's that's very wrong. They wanted to say that is lunatic fringe. Crazy. Completely crazy. So did you catch that? You were made to feel like you were the outlier. You were the fringe. Especially for the last decade. You were never the fringe. You were the 70% the whole time. You and me and a lot of us were just too worn down to say it out loud in front of our co-workers, in front of our friends, in front of our peers. But that's the whole mission of this newsletter. It's you and me handing back the confidence that we already knew. I'll give you the goods, the one book, the one poll, the same verdict every time. We'll talk about what's crazy and what's common sense. So you actually stop feeling crazy for believing what is actually common sense. Now I don't pull punches even on the books I recommend. Every single issue has a section where we talk about what the book doesn't go, where it doesn't go. Because I'd be doing exactly what I criticize the other side for if I just handed you the flattering version of anything. You get the case for the book and you get some fair criticism in the same issue. But that's not the weakness, that's that's the trust I hope to earn instead of just borrowing it. I offer my own little editorial. So you know it's me talking, not the book. But boy, I believe most Americans agree on far more than this loudest. 15 to 20 percent would have you think. Especially these DSA candidates. I can't believe. I understand there's a radical part of our country, and they've read Howard's Inn for the last four decades, and they think that America is a racist country in America, is a bigoted country in America, is an Islamic phobia country, and all the other isms and phobias and everything else wrapped into one. America is just absolutely horrific. I understand that. But I also understand that that's probably 15-20% of the country.

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When you go out and talk to real people, there's far more that are common sense than there are the 20% that are crazy.

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And we're going to provide you with the receipts, the real books, the real data, the real verdicts, not the vibes. Now, I know, which some of you might be thinking, so let me address that before you talk yourself out of subscribing. David, I barely have time to listen to this podcast, let alone read a whole book every week. And there is a reading crisis. We're gonna have to address that too. And I hear you. But that's exactly why I do the reading for you. Each issue runs you through the argument the best three things the book gets right, and where the book falls short, and about the time it takes you to drink your morning coffee, or if you're like me, your morning. Pre-workout drink. And if you want a deeper cut on any of them, we also publish the Mojo Academy book brief. It's sitting right there for you. That's a quick five-minute read, too. So you don't have to read the book. You just have to read the issue. And the companion book brief if you want. And here's the other thing this newsletter is going to

A Five Minute Read Solution

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ask of you. And it might not. It might frankly be the most important part. It's not a one-way broadcast. At the bottom of every issue, I ask you to notice this stuff happening in your own town. With your own friends. Write in. Tell me what you're seeing. Some of the best material hasn't come from my selection of the books or the bestseller list. It's come from you, the readers. So this is more of a conversation, not a lecture. So in today's Liberty Minute, somewhere in the next 24 hours, someone's going to tell you that you are wrong for believing something that you have believed your whole life. A coworker, a cable anchor, your kid's own teacher. And in that moment, you're going to have a choice. Swallow it, stay quiet, don't start a fight, keep the peace. Or no. With certainty. 70% of this country is standing right there with you. I want you to have the receipts before that moment comes, not after. That's the whole reason for the crazy versus common sense newsletter. Not to make you angrier. To make you more confident, to make you sure. Every week, one book, three lenses

Speak Up With Receipts Ready

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that have outlasted every fad that ever tried to replace them. And a verdict you don't have to hedge on. Go to crazy versus commonsense.substack.com. Again, crazy versus commonsense.substack.com right now. We'll put a link in the show notes to make it easy. Do that while it's still on your mind. It costs you nothing, not a dime, not your email sold to anybody. Nothing but five minutes of your weekday. Hit subscribe. Do it before this episode ends because good intentions don't send newsletters. Subscriptions do. You're not the crazy one. You were never, ever the crazy one. Now go get the receipts and go get them today. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on. Keep fighting the good fight, and most importantly, keep calling out crazy. Because you are common sense.

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Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademy.com where we have everything we discussed in this podcast as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.