LM#84--The Cost Of Sitting Out

Cold Open Future Without Your Vote

SPEAKER_02 0:52

It's January 2031. You stayed home in November of 2026. You were gonna teach the Republicans a lesson. They were too soft, too slow, too comfortable. So you sat it out. Here's the thing about lessons. Somebody has to be in the room to learn them. The people who learn the most from your lesson weren't Republicans at all. Let's talk about it on this Liberty Minute.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

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

SPEAKER_02 1:43

Hello, my name, David, and welcome back to this Liberty Minute. Today's, in fact, October 16th, 2026. Election day is Tuesday, November 3rd, and that's just 18 days away. Today I want to walk you through a story that hasn't happened yet, just to be clear, but I do want to show you a story that already did more than a hundred years ago.

A Viral 2031 Warning Scenario

SPEAKER_02 2:11

So with that, let's go to our post of the day, because I thought it was fascinating. Go on to the post. You set out the midterms to quote, teach Republicans a lesson. They didn't learn anything. The year is now 2031. The 2030 midterms just concluded and the GOP flipped three Senate seats. Here's the problem. Democrats won the Senate in 2026. They abolished the filibuster as there was no cinema or mansion to protect it this time, and blocked all of Trump's judges. Then in 2028, they rode a sluggish economy back to the White House. President Ocasio Cortez made it a point to instantly pack the Supreme Court to 17 justices, thereby overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the First and Second Amendments, and much, much more. Then there was also another border surge of 10 to 20 million illegal immigrants. Legal immigration has been doubled under the Immigration Act of 2027, a comprehensive expansion of the 1990 Act, and the U.S. became a majority nonwhite nation under the 2030 census. Then, as the Senate was deemed racist and rooted in white supremacy, they decided on voting to add states to the Union as quote reparations for non-white representation. They gave two seats each to America and Samoa, Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. But not, repeat, not evil white supremacist Northern Mariana Islands, because why they vote Republican? They also split up California into three states, citing efficiency reasons they refused to explain. They also passed a gerrymandering ban, which led to independent commissions creating inexplicably gerrymandered maps that included three blue states in Kentucky and four in Missouri, not to mention only a single red seat in Illinois. The Senate then rushed through a single-payer healthcare act, which caused a massive tax hike in exchange for subpar DMV-style run health care that led to shortages, extreme shortages in wait times. And then they passed through a blanket amnesty for 60 million illegal aliens and other foreign visa holders, while they still can't legally vote until 2036. They will still make up 25% of the electorate when they do. Despite all this, much of the retard right continues to call President Ocasio-Cortez, quote, the most America first president in history, because she cut all the foreign aid to Israel. She arrested Benjamin Netanyahu, who's now cellmates with President Donald Trump and Rikers Island. And while Patriots are routinely censored, once again, these grifters are not for some reason. Even if Republicans manage to win in 2032 presidential election in most key swing states, some of the polls have them doing that. It's unclear if they will be able to win enough to overcome the additional states in the electoral college. But even if they do, it's unclear at this point if a GOP victory would be certified. You see, JD Vance had also been arrested, and Marco Rubio had been deported to Cuba for hate speech. It's the only deportation of her term, Ocasio-Cortez, since ICE was abolished in early 2027. I forgot to tell you that. And all this is leading many to speculate who the next man up for the GOP would be. And that is a fantastic, fantastic post by a guy who I've been following for about the last three months. Name is Red Eagle Politics on Twitter. I still call it Twitter. I guess it's X, but it's his pinned post, and I just read through it occasionally, just to just to make sure I am all squared away. So follow Red Eagle Politics, and he he has very, very good commentary, a little snarky at times, but boy, I love the snark. So yeah, that's Red Eagle Politics. His post has been making the rounds online, and I just love the fact that he he he wrote a very creative story about what America could look like five years from now after conservatives sat out the 2026 midterms because of polling, or just to make a point. Certainly some of it's over the top, but strip away the wild parts and what's left

Senate Control And The Filibuster

SPEAKER_02 7:31

is a chain of events that certainly runs on real proposals with real votes behind them. So let's walk through that. That's what I thought could be educational for us, just 18 days out. Link one, the Senate could certainly flip in 2026. I don't think it will, but it could if we sit out. Democrats only need a handful of seats. Whoever holds the Senate controls judicial confirmations. So every judge the president sends up can sit in a drawer if they don't like him. They can certainly kill the filibuster. You may remember in January 2022, Senate Democrats had the majority. And they tried to change the filibuster rules to pass their election bill, and it failed 48 to 52. How did it get stopped? By the skin of our teeth. Two Democrats, rational Democrats, certainly didn't agree with everything they they did or said, but boy, two Democrats saved it, Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema. Neither one is in the Senate anymore. So there's no firewall left. And link number three is if a progressive wins the White House in 2028, and that's what that post imagined, President Ocasio Cortez cringing, riding a sweek weak economy into office. Maybe it's her, maybe it's somebody else from that wing of the party, but the DSA has certainly certainly taken over some parts and aspects of our culture. The name matters less than the math. Because once you have the White House and the Senate and the House with no filibuster, you only need 50 votes in a tiebreaker for anything. And what does what does that 50 vote margin get you if you're a radical? Well, here's your shopping list. Every single one of them has already been written up as a bill and been pitched by sitting members of Congress. A bigger Supreme Court? Yep, they did it. Judiciary Act of 2021. Proposed going from nine justices to 13. Congress sets the number by simple law. There's no amendment needed. New states, yep. The House passed the DC statehood bill in 2020, and then turned around and did it again in 2021. Thank you, Nancy Pelosi. Puerto Rico statehood bills keep coming back over and over. New states mean new senators, and new senators mean new electoral votes. Single payer health care, yep, they've been at that for a while, going all the way back to Barack Obama. Medicare for all bill. It would replace all of private insurance with one governmental plan. That means one line, one rule book, one office deciding what you get and when. Mass Amnesty, boy, if you don't need a reminder about this, I'm not sure what. U.S. Citizen Act Citizenship Act of 2021, that actually put things in pay on paper, laid out the path to citizenship for roughly 11 million people that were here illegally. And you paired that with an open wide border, and the number is just going to grow. So if we take a look at that list again, notice how each item locks in the next one. A packed court blesses the new laws. New states add new senators who protect that packed court. And amnesty reshapes the voter rules for a generation. That's the core of it. A party that wins once with no filibuster can rewrite the rules so it never has to win fairly again. Certainly, some, especially if you check out the comments on the Red Eagle Politics Post. Some say that sounds so far-fetched.

Court Packing Statehood Amnesty Explained

SPEAKER_02 11:43

If it does, let me show you the last time it happened. That's where we're going to go to our book of the day, American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism by Ned Ryan. Covered this book before, but Ryan is the founder and CEO of American Majority and Voter Gravity, two grassroots groups that train and elect conservatives at the local level. He's the son of Jim Ryan, the Olympic runner and former Kansas congressman. Now, American Leviathan came out from encounter books in 2024, and we covered it in our book brief at Substack, book brief number 27. But Ryan tells the story of how the giant federal bureaucracy you live under today was actually born. And the birth date is a lot closer to the one single election than most people realize. So picture the Republican Party in 1910. It held the White House. Actually, it held the White House for most of the past 50 years. But the party was at war with itself. The old guard backed by President William Howard Taft, the insurgents wanted Teddy Roosevelt back. They were so busy fighting each other that they forgot who the real opponent was. In the 1910 midterms, Democrats took control of the House for the first time in 16 years. That was the warning shot. Nobody listened. So in June of 1912, Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination to Taft. So he walked out of the convention, took his supporters with him, and started his own party, the Bull Moose Party. Essentially

The 1912 Split That Changed America

SPEAKER_02 13:39

took his ball and went home. And what was that result? Well, if you look at the 1912 results, Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won about 42% of the vote or 435 electoral votes. Teddy Roosevelt about 27%. He was the progressive. That was 88 electoral votes. And then William Howard Taft was the Republican. About 23% is what he won, and just eight electoral votes. You break that down and you add Roosevelt and Taft together, they beat Wilson, the Democrat, outright. But a split ticket, a split vote, is a losing vote. Wilson won the White House, and Democrats took full control of Congress. And Ryan shows you what they did with it in Wilson's first two years. The federal income tax was signed into law in 1913. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. And the Federal Trade Commission was created in 1914. Wilson had been dreaming about a government run by experts for decades, even wrote about it as a law professor before he got there. And the Republicans, yep, they split themselves and handed him the keys. So when conservatives stay home and pout, the other side just doesn't get to win an election. They get to build things that last sometimes even a hundred years. Republicans didn't get the White House back until 1920. That income tax that they signed, Democrats, it stayed. It's still here now. The Fed? Yep, the Federal Reserve is still here. And those agencies, they're still here. Every Republican president since has tried to live in the house that Wilson built. Now connect that back to the single-payer health care we talked about before. That would be the biggest new piece of bureaucracy since Wilson's day. And just like Wilson's agencies, once they're built, nobody ever tears them down. Now I wrote a little bit about this in Substack. You can check that out. Link is in the show notes, but let's connect this with some other book briefs that you can check out. And first we're going to go to Forgus Bordwich, his great book, Congress at War, because we like to tell you the Civil War is just about Abraham Lincoln. And Bordowicz shows you it was just as much about Congress's story. And that story is portrayed in Congress at War. That's the name of the book. Republican reformers in Congress pushed through the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroad, Land Grant Colleges, and the 13th Amendment. And the great brilliance of this book is sometimes they had to push Lincoln harder than he actually wanted to go. That is the important part. Here's the point. Presidents get the headlines and Congress writes the laws. In 1862, a United Republican Congress remade America for the better. In 1913, a Democratic Congress remade it the other way. Same lever,

Congress Power And Border Policy Lessons

SPEAKER_02 17:11

just different hands. Another great book you need to check out is Todd Benzman's Overrun. We've talked about that here on this podcast. That was is also book brief number 28 over on Substack. Benzman spent years on the ground at the southern border. He showed you how quickly a change in policy at the top turned into millions of crossings on the ground. They didn't take an act of Congress. It took a few executive decisions and the lack of political will to stop them and to enforce the laws. Next thing you know, we had between 10 and 20 million illegals. So picture what happens when the people who made those decisions just don't hold the White House, but they hold the pen in Congress too. Amnesty doesn't stay a talking point. It then becomes law. Now I know what some of you are thinking, but David, the Republicans haven't earned my vote. Gas prices are still too high. I don't like the war. They slow walk the Epstein files, they cave on everything. Why should I bail them out? I get it. Let me start with a confession. In 2016, I didn't vote for Donald Trump. I got that one wrong. But at the time, Trump was not a proven value. Think about what we knew back then, no experience. He'd never held public office or worn the uniform. Known to be a deal maker, he spent his whole career cutting deals. Many of us, me included, wondered which side he'd cut a deal with, or how many deals would he cut that nothing would ever be of value. And again, he had no record. There was nothing to measure him that is Donald Trump against except his words. Now we all know he's not the greatest speaker in the world, so his words were not magic.

SPEAKER_01 19:16

But who could have known he would become the biggest part of the conservative counter-revolution since the Reagan Revolution? Judges, tax cuts, a secure border for sixteen straight months, no gataways, nothing?

SPEAKER_02 19:36

Complete silence at the southern border? When Europe is just completely infested, the UK is on the brink of civil war

A Frustrated Voter’s Case For Voting

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because of illegal immigration. Now I wrote about that back in May of 2025 in Trump's first hundred days. A conservative counter-revolution that had begun. Actually reminds me about Stephen Hayward's The Age of Reagan. That's book brief number 42. Howard shows how fifteen years of liberal failure built the runway for Reagan. Plenty of conservatives doubted Reagan too. Some thought he was just an actor, too old, too extreme. History proved them wrong too. So I understand hesitating over an unknown. I get it. But that's not what's happening today. In 2026. Today nobody's asking you to take a gamble. The record's right there in front of you. You know exactly what you're going to get with each party, and you know exactly what the other side has promised to do with 50 votes. Sitting out because of gas prices that didn't come down fast enough, or because of the Epstein files, or because of the war, or because whatever your pet issue is this month. That's not a protest. That's a temper tantrum. It's a 12-year-old who didn't get picked to pitch, so he takes his ball and goes home. That's Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. And we're still paying that bill. This time the ball is in the Senate. It's going to take us to the Supreme Court and to the border. And the other team? Frankly doesn't need our ball to keep playing.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

They're just going to change the rules of the game. Your vote is not a gift to a party, it's a choice between two futures.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

One of those futures has a Senate that still needs sixty votes to change the country forever. The other doesn't. One keeps a quarter of nine, the other won't. Staying home doesn't punish the politicians. It punishes your future and your kids'

Your Two Minute Plan To Vote

SPEAKER_02 22:16

future. So with 18 days, let me ask that you go check your registration. Go to your Secretary of State's website. It takes two minutes. Make a plan, early vote, absentee vote, election day vote. Pick the day, pick the time, pick put it on your calendar. Bring three people with you. A brother, a buddy, your neighbor. Ask them directly, are you voting? And then ask when. Look down the ballot, your Senate race, your house race, your state legislature. That's where the rules are getting written. This isn't a marriage. You don't have to love every candidate. You just have to understand what's on the line. It's a choice between crazy, which is the Democratic Party, right now, because it's not the Democratic Party of JFK or FDR. It's the Democratic Party of Radical Democrat Socialist. That's the crazy side. And then there's common sense. Yes, I don't love everything that the Republicans did or haven't done. But the other side is crazy. In 1910 and 1912, Republicans were too angry at each other to see what was coming. They split, they sulked, they handed the other side the pen. We are still living right now with what that pen wrote. The year 2031 isn't written yet. You still have the pen. Can I please ask you to get out and vote? This is the difference between crazy and common sense. As always, keep fighting. The good fight.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

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.