Podcasts about texas constitution

amazon texas juneteenth re air bob white annette gordon reed texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2024 78:26

We first cover what was going on in the nation before the emancipation proclamation, then zoom in on Texas specifically and what the culture was like, share some stories from the past, and tie the through-line to why and how people celebrate Juneteenth.Bob White story perspective:https://hauntedconroe.com/murder-in-the-courtroom/Great book on Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed:https://www.amazon.com/Juneteenth-Annette-Gordon-Reed/dp/1631498835/ref=nodl_Texas Constitution 1824 - 1876:https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/republic-texas-1836/general-provisionsVisit us at blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Buy our book on Amazon!$5/month supports us at patreon.com/blackhistoryforwhitepeople.Check us out on Twitter @BHforWP and Instagram @BlackHistoryForWhitePeople or feel free to email us at hello@blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/black-history-for-white-people/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Dr Sebastian Gorka - Biden's Campaign Against America, the MAGA Media Juggernaut & Trump's Hold on the RNC

Hearts of Oak Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 11, 2024 48:28 Transcription Available

Show notes and Transcript Dr. Sebastian Gorka returns to Hearts of Oak to offer his insights on the importance of personnel in politics, emphasizing the challenges faced by Trump supporters. He discusses the evolving dynamics within the Republican Party towards a more MAGA-centered approach and the need for alignment with the American people. We move onto populism in Europe, media landscape changes, challenges in education, and the significance of local politics for societal change. Dr. Gorka highlights the importance of grassroots activism and community engagement in shaping the future political landscape. Sebastian Gorka, PhD., served as Deputy Assistant for Strategy to the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, and is currently a presidential appointee to the National Security Education Board at the Department of Defense. He is the host of AMERICA First, a nationally-syndicated radio show on the Salem Radio Network, and The Gorka Reality Check, the newest show on the cable news network Newsmax TV. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling book “Defeating Jihad,” and “Why We Fight.” His latest book is “The War for America's Soul.” Connect with Seb... LINKTREE linktr.ee/sebgorka SUBSTACK substack.com/@sebastiangorka X x.com/SebGorka WEBSITE www.sebastiangorka.com/ Interview recorded 8.4.24 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA heartsofoak.org/connect/ SHOP heartsofoak.org/shop/ TRANSCRIPT (Hearts of Oak) And I'm delighted to have Dr. Sebastian Gorka back with us again. Dr. Gorka, thank you for your time today. (Dr Sebastian Gorka) My pleasure. Thank you for having me. Great to have you on. And of course, former Deputy Assistant to President, nationally syndicated radio host of America First with Sebastian Gorka and best-selling author. And people can find you obviously @SebGorka. And we'll get into some of your thoughts on your Twitter page in a little bit. But, Dr. Gorka, if I can ask you, maybe first, looking at the GOP, back at the beginning of President Trump's first term in office, he trusts the GOP to fill those, I guess, 3,000-odd positions to keep the system running. And he seems to, I think everyone seems to have learned that there was a concerted effort to push back. But it seems to be that the President has realised he needs to fill those positions himself and there's a concerted effort to fill those positions with the brightest, the best patriots that America have, do you want to just let us know about that because he is going into this with his eyes wide open. Well, absolutely, after what they did to him and to his administration the first time round. And this is my greatest concern going forward, because it is clear the American people want him back. He's trouncing Biden in the polls. If you look at the primary results, we haven't even finished the primaries. He's already broken his record for 2016. So whether it's wars across the world, the state of the economy, 16 million illegals, President Trump, if there is a free and fair election, will be God willing, if we do our part, the next president. However, as Ronald Reagan taught us, politics, you know, personnel is politics. And I am very concerned that we not have what we had last time, which is even at the cabinet level, subversives in the Trump administration. So we can't make that mistake again. However, I give credit to the left. My friend Chris Plant, who has the morning show here in D.C., has made this point very eloquently over the years. Why would a decent person, especially a family man or a family woman, why would you work in a Republican administration, especially a Trump administration? You look at my example. Look, I don't mind getting attacked by the left because, of course, I'm a proxy for the president. But when they came after my wife, I had one journalist write 52 hit pieces on me in three months. And when one of the articles named my 18-year-old son and called him a traitor in the headline, what person wants to actually put up with that? I mean, I'm prepared to do it again. And there's a handful of us who served in the Trump administration who understand America First, who are loyal to the president, are loyal to the mandate he received already, are prepared to do it again. But there are 4,000 positions, 4,000 presidential appointees. What lunatic is prepared to have the inhuman treatment meted out against them from a quote-unquote elite in the media that just dehumanizes. I mean, from Hillary's deplorables comment to Biden last year standing in front of one of the most important buildings in the world for us when it comes to American history, which is Independence Hall, bathed in red light, flanked by two Marines in their dress blues, and he calls half the nation fascists, MAGA extremists. I mean, this is how radical the left has become and how they've dehumanized the others. So, yeah, I mean, you've hit upon my neuralgic point, which is the personnel policy, if we win, God willing, will be second Trump administration. We cannot get it wrong this time. We just cannot get it wrong. What does seem that the left are utterly vicious and ruthless in going after individuals and I had the privilege of watching the president speak twice when I was over last in Pennsylvania and then down South Carolina and it's an hour and 40 minutes of a political speech I've never seen before and I've been involved in politics in many years in the UK but it connects you at a heart level as opposed to the head level and he knocks off those attacks but the left are adamant that they will go after individuals. Let me give you one concrete example, lest, you know, your listeners and viewers think this is just, you know, Sebastian Gorka's axe that he's grinding. So I had a colleague, I was deputy assistant to the president. My colleague, Peter Navarro, was assistant to the president for trade policy. He was one of the key architects of our China policy. Peter was subpoenaed by the infamous January 6th Committee of Congress, which was illegally constituted. So an investigatory, I don't want to get into the weeds, but an investigatory committee of Congress has to have delegates from both parties. It can't just be the majority party. Nancy Pelosi refused the then speaker to accept nominations from the Republican Party. So she picked a couple of the worst Trump haters who are nominal Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. And as such, this was an illegally constituted committee. Peter Navarro receives a subpoena from this congressional committee, ordering him to come and testify. He says, A, it's an illegal committee, I'm not going to comply. B, I have it in writing from President Trump that my work for him is covered by the executive privilege, which is a constitutional statute in America that the discussions between the president and his aides are protected and they can't just be just willy-nilly divulged to anybody. Peter lives one block away from the FBI. When he was in contempt of this subpoena, which is a misdemeanor offense, not a felony, it's a misdemeanor. Instead of the FBI writing to Peter or writing to his lawyer, could your client come to our offices tomorrow morning and we'd like to present him with his breach of congressional subpoena documents. Instead, my colleague, a renowned economist, academic professor, was tracked by the FBI to Reagan Airport, which is the airport for Washington, D.C. And after he boarded a plane on a business trip, he was arrested in public, not only handcuffed. This is when you realize we are in a police state. And I say that with all sincerity. He was handcuffed and put in leg shackles, which meant he had to shuffle out of the airport like some slave on a chain gang. Then he was taken to the FBI headquarters where he was strip searched on a congressional misdemeanour charge. He is now sitting, as of two weeks ago, he is sitting in a federal prison in Florida, serving a four-month sentence for being in contempt of Congress. So, you know, this is the left. This is the left. They talk about President Trump and MAGA is a threat to democracy. Well, the only fascists I see right now are the Democrat Party, Biden's DOJ, and the FBI. A woman, I had her daughter literally text me on Friday, said, my 73-year-old grandmother, who spent 10 minutes inside Congress praying for the nation on January 6th, has just been charged with four charges that will lead her to spend a year in prison. A 73-year-old grandma who's going to be on my radio today has been charged with being inside of Congress and praying, Peter. Yeah, I've seen the praying grandma. I've seen a number of clips of her and Peter's book, Taking Back Trump's America, certainly was an eye opener for me. And I learned a lot reading that. And of course, we've had some of the anniversaries of the J6ers. There's no Jake Lang's now fourth anniversary of him in jail. I mean, what does that mean? How do you see, God willing, President Trump winning the election? Well, not winning, but allowed to win the election in November. What does that mean for, for instance, some of those J6ers in jail, hundreds of them in jail for years and years, simply for going and being part of that event? Well, the president has said this openly just last week. I was with him at Mar-a-Lago, and he said it the week before. All the J6ers who committed no violent crimes, who simply walked through the halls, through the velvet rope, every single one, all the cases will be reviewed, and the president will pardon them. Wow, wow. That's simple and decisive. What you'd expect from Trump as opposed to Biden, and it's like, here's the job, let's get this done. I mean, this is, we could talk about this for hours. This is how he functions. I mean, you don't get to be the most successful entrepreneur in the hardest market in the world, which is Manhattan real estate. You don't have the most successful TV show for 14 seasons in a row unless you're decisive. And I saw this in the White House. You know, when we made the argument, the Iran deal, Obama's Iran deal is bad for America, bad for Israel, bad for the Middle East and actually gives the Mullahs a bomb, he said, okay, we're canceling it. He didn't waffle. He didn't say, oh, let's create a task force or let's have a conference in Vienna. He said, no, we're going to kill it now. Absolutely. Can I ask you about the RNC? Because I've looked at this and the media have billed it as Trump taking charge, taking control of the RNC, which seemed to be one of the biggest pushbacks to his presidency, certainly at the beginning with all those appointments. It's now a very different situation with a lot of good people put in and what does that take over mean? And does that mean that actually moving past November and that he will be in a very different situation Well it's massively significant. I mean I said this when I was in The White House. I said it when I left The White House, Donald John Trump won the election despite the Republican Party, not thanks to the Republican Party. The Republican Party hates him. I mean, it's the same as, you know, Brexit and the Tories. It's the same as establishment politicians and Millei or Meloni. We have these establishment, look, I think Bannon popularized it here. We have the Uni-party. There's really not much difference between this amorphous blob that is the Democrats and the establishment Republicans. Why? Because the Democrats are lunatics who hate America, and the establishment Republicans, we call them RINOS, Republicans in name only, are cuckolds who just facilitate what the left does and never push back even when they're in majority. And they hate President Trump. To this day, the likes of Mitch McConnell and Mitt Romney think that 64 million Americans, voting for a man who'd never run for political office before, and him becoming president, they think that's an anomaly. They think that's, oh, just a blip, and we'll get back to business and footsie under the table with the Democrats. They have no comprehension of the global phenomenon that is populism. From Brexit, to Modi, to Maloney, to Orban, to Millei, you know, to Bolsonaro, there is a wholehearted international rejection of what a friend of mine called on my show recently, and I literally just wrote an article on this for my Substack, the un-accountable's. It's, you know, it's not left and right anymore. We've got to ditch that taxonomy. It's not even conservative and liberal. It is the unaccountable elites who are completely cosseted and insulated from anything in the real world. The price of petrol doesn't affect them. They think a six-quid almond latte from Starbucks is a good deal, and they don't give a crap whether manufacturing jobs have been shipped over to China or Mexico. As long as the Wi-Fi signal in Starbucks is good, they can do their job as, you know, chief DEI officer or, you know, head of HR for some woke corporation. And then there's the rest of us, the accountables who, you know, the plumber who, when the price of petrol goes up 300% under Joe Biden, you can't put food on the table for your kids. Or you're the legal immigrants who came here from Mexico 10 years ago, got in line, took the exam, paid the money. And you're a waiter in Dallas, and along comes this Nigerian illegal, one of the 16 million let in by Biden, who tells the boss of that cafe, I'll do Jose's job. For cash, for 50% of what Jose's doing. I mean, these are the people who pay the price of the betrayal of the people who build America, betrayed by the Democrats and their enablers in the Republican Party. So yeah, that's where we are today. And the GOP, look, Lara Trump becoming the co-chair, the firing of Rona Romney McDaniel. OK, let's be clear here. The chair of the RNC, the National Committee, was Mitt Romney, one of the biggest rhino Trump haters, niece. And her loss of eight elections in a row had to have some consequences. Now Lara's in charge. They've hired Scott Press, a friend of mine who's one of the best grassroots activists in America. And finally, the choice of the people will be reflected in the party that is supposed to be his party. So to put it very briefly, the Republican Party will finally be a MAGA America First Party. I saw one of your shows recently, I think it was Scott saying maybe it should be renamed America First instead of the GOP. That was actually my associate producer talking in my ear. He wants me to shut up about that because he wants President Trump to drop that at the convention. I think it's right. Why should we be called the Grand Old Party? I mean, we're not in the 19th century, right? I mean, let's have something that reflects the will of the American people. And I watched that interview with Scott. And that's exciting to bring in a different generation, actually have different ideas. And someone who's done the groundwork for 10 years really should be rewarded with a position to roll out what he's doing in an area actually nationwide. So it's exciting to see that, I guess, the boldness that Trump changing the RNC now can have for going forward. Yeah, yeah. Look, the proof of the pudding will be the convention. The proof of the pudding will be the results. But we're seeing some incredible, I mean, look, it's a little bit arcane and only relevant to American politics. But we have this primary system where state by state you choose the candidate to lead the party for the election. And I know New Hampshire very, very well. New Hampshire is not an America First state. It used to be conservative. Now a lot of hippies and, you know, idiots have moved in. The record for primary votes, for the most votes ever cast in a primary, is held by Bernie Sanders. That tells you just how, you know, woke a state it has become. President Trump broke Bernie Sanders' standing primary record in New Hampshire this year. I mean, these things are unprecedented. The fact that he, as of last week, he's had more people vote for him in primaries than voted for him in the whole primary season in 2016. I think there's a grand awakening. And if just, if only 60, 70% of the reports are true about the Hispanic and black vote. According to the polls, the president now enjoys the majority of Hispanic votes in America. That's just mind-blowing. The man who we've been told by the establishment of media is the racist, bigoted, you know, yada, yada, yada. He's more popular with Hispanic Americans. And I don't want to, you know, tempt fate. He's getting upwards of 28, 30 percent of the black vote if that if that preference translates into actual ballots on November the 5th the democrat party will implode, I mean they've had a lock for absurd reasons, they've had a lock on the black vote for 70 years, the party that created the KKK, the party that was the party of southern segregation and plantations has had a lock on that vote forever and if 20, 30 percent of them leave that's it, there will be a crisis in the democrat party and it will be long overdue. Yeah I'm seeing that break away from the tribal politics, how your parents voted to actually voting with your gut and your conviction which could be a massive change. Does Trump actually need to do debates head-to-head? Obviously, he pulled out of the ones with the Republican field because he said, what's the point, and did his own. And that was genius, pure Trump. But actually, going head-to-head with Biden, what is the point? He's so far ahead in the polls. How do you think he will play it? Because then you fit into the CNN, MSNBC, you fit in the Fox News, you fit into their schedules, and he doesn't need to do that. Well, no, he doesn't need to because they're both known quantities. They've both been presidents, one the most successful president of the modern era, biggest economy we've ever had, no wars for four years, crushed ISIS, stock market rallies literally every other day. I had to watch the ticker tape in my studio because there was a new stock market rally, which isn't just for the fat cats. Your pension is tied to that stock market. So people's 401k pensions are like blossoming. And then we've had what? We've had Biden, record inflation. Petrol got up to $7 a gallon in California. You've got the invasion of Russia, the invasion of Ukraine, the surrender of Afghanistan, war in the Middle East. So it really should be a very stark binary option. So do you need a debate? Not really. But President Trump's great troll comment last week that, yeah, we should have a debate as long as Biden is drug tested, because they found a bag of cocaine in the White House, which the Secret Service, mystically couldn't find any fingerprints on, despite a bag of cocaine being the perfect thing to find fingerprints on, because it's not porous. It's absolutely like a sheet of glass that's plastic, right? And they definitely pumped him full of something for the State of the Union because this is a guy who is not compos mentis. This is a guy who doesn't function. And then, you know, he actually ranted like a lunatic, like on speed or something for an hour during the State of the Union. So it was a perfect troll. Will there be a debate? I doubt it. I doubt they'd let Biden debate with President Trump. But, you know, who knows? politics has been pretty weird for the last 10 years in America. And earlier you mentioned about some of the populism and across Europe, also in Bolsanaro and Brazil. And we're obviously having the European parliamentary elections coming up in June with a massive rise in populism. And you understand this as a Brit, as someone who's Hungarian roots and studied in Hungary and now you're an American citizen. You've got quite a unique perspective and view on this. And I'm wondering how, because with Trump going into the White House, having an open and possible very good relationship with Europe, which wasn't there in the first place, I'm kind of sitting back intrigued watching how this will play out. Because this could be a new, very strong relationship linking Europe and the US. Well, it could. It just depends who wins the elections in Europe, right? I mean, if it's the right people like Meloni in Italy, absolutely. If it's the wrong people like the socialists, the trounce, truth and justice in Poland, then it'll be a different kind of relationship. But people need to understand the president has a very strong soft spot in his heart for Europe because of his family background. But just go back to that video, if your viewers haven't seen it. Go back to the video when the president spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, long before Biden and the invasion of Ukraine. And he said, very declaratively said, by way of wanted to help, he said, Germany, Europe, why are you buying energy from Russia? It makes you dependent on a dictatorial regime that has military goals against NATO members or border countries. And then the camera panned from the president warning Europe not to do that to the German delegation. And the German delegation was tittering and giggling, saying, what does he know about geopolitics? Well, isn't it funny that when we leave the office? Vlad does what he did, puts a stranglehold on the energy of the Baltic states, Hungary, the Ukraine, and then Germany has to literally do a 180 and say, oh, we like nuclear energy now, and we're going to stop shutting down our nuclear energy plants. So, you know, which part of Europe are we talking about? The unaccountable asshole elites who are arrogant and don't give a fig for the people? Are we talking about politicians like Nigel Farage who understand that the political elite has been roundly rejected by the people of Europe? That's what will affect relations. Who's in charge? Are they the, what is it, the Klaus Schwab fanboys and fangirls? Or are they people who believe in the sovereignty of their own individual nations? Well, it could be rewritten with AFD in Germany and Freedom Party in Austria. Yeah, but look at the UK. Look at the UK. The UK's a disaster. I was with Steve Hilton yesterday in California, and I'm like, this is a guy who worked in 10 Downing Street, and I said to him, so what is it with the Tory party? And he said, he can't even explain it to me. How does, he said, Sunak is just so wet, so pathetic, and this is the best the UK can do. So Nigel, get busy. A hundred percent. It's depressing looking at every other green shoot across Europe and looking at the UK and having zero. But yeah, I know Nigel is seriously considering his political future. But he's involved in media. And I want to ask you about media. Nigel, of course, very involved in media and in GB News, probably the star on GB News. and in the States, I think it was an Axios article a few weeks ago talking about a MAGA media juggernaut that seems to eclipse, no pun intended for today, but eclipse any influence that Fox ever had. You're right in the centre of that, as is Bannon, Charlie Kirk. I mean, the list is wide of the names of individuals who have stepped up to the mark and helped the public understand. Tell us about that, because to me, that will be part of winning this war and getting the message out over the next six months. Well when it comes to the media there's only one mass media platform that conservatives control and that is of course talk radio, the left has tried talk radio and it's always recuperative and bile filled and nobody can listen to it for more than three minutes. I mean, my show's only five years old. I've got three and a half million daily listeners. You look at the Rush Limbaugh slot that is now divided between Dan Bongino and a couple of other hosts, Buck Sexton and his partner. And Rush was getting 20, 22, 23 million people listening. Fox doesn't even do that. I mean, before Tucker left, Tucker had the most popular show. And on a good night, that was 5 million, which tells you why television is kind of irrelevant. I mean, 5 million in a nation of 340 million, and radio is multiples of that. Now, since then, of course, we have what in the last few years, the rise of the Breitbarts, Newsmax doing incredibly successfully, pushing Fox out. But the hope, I don't know if you can can pull it off. The renaming was the dumbest thing ever. But Elon's buying of Twitter, I mean, he's been very open about he wants to make Twitter, the multimedia platform, he wants it to be the the Twitter, YouTube, Google, Spotify, all in one information platform. And we'll see what happens with you know, the next thing is going to be video long form videos on that platform. And God willing, power to his elbow, absolutely do it. And then President Trump, I don't know how the left failed to sabotage him, but with the SEC giving him permission to have that merger of the Truth Social and the SPAC on the stock exchange, President Trump just affected a, what was it, $8 billion deal. I mean, I don't try a lot. I mean, I put my segments from my radio show on Truth Social, and then I kind of cut and paste whatever I'm putting on Twitter on Truth Social. So I'm not, you know, really working on Trump's platform. And without trying, I got 900,000 followers. Now, that tells you, and this is a free speech platform that's not full of bots that are being generated for political purposes. This is a true free speech platform in accordance with the First Amendment. So I don't have a crystal ball, but the media environment is, it is being shook up something fabulous. You look at how wokeism, I mean, you look at what wokeism has done to the likes of Netflix and HBO, and along comes Angel Studios with the Call of Freedom and that mega series on Jesus, that reinterpretation of Jesus. Chosen? Chosen, yeah. This is like a boiling cauldron of things that are forming and shaping. And it's going to be, I mean, look, I'm not a fan of Tucker. Tucker's become a clickbait animal, in my opinion. But the figures he's getting for his videos, that presages something very interesting for the future. It's funny when the left think they've got rid of a problem like Trump, like Tucker, and they come back to haunt them. I love it. And I love it when they say, oh my gosh, President Trump's running out of money, and then the SPAC merger is approved, and he garners $4 billion himself from that deal. It's like, oh my gosh, Biden and Obama and Clinton, they're so cool. They had a fundraiser in Manhattan last weekend and they raised 25 million and president Trump had a fundraiser by himself, this weekend and raised 50 million, you just, you gotta laugh. You do, you read the headline, there was a guardian hippies think on the RNC takeover saying oh well you know it hasn't gone as planned, you're thinking, well actually he's really, he's taken over the apparatus, the party machine and actually, it's going to take a little bit of time to get smooth running when you're taking over. But it was the headline was anti. And then you read and you think, wow, that's bloody good. Well, it's at the tactical level. So my wife, who hates politics because she's sane, she, because it's a long story, but there was a drag queen story hour at our local community center that provoked her to run for the board of that community center. And then she became an election officer because she was worried about the integrity of the election. So she became the chief election officer for our part of Virginia. And then on Saturday, because she's fed up with the... We are in the richest county in Virginia. It's the second richest county in America. And it's run by... The RINO class at the RNC under Rona used us as a piggyback. They took all the money from Fairfax County. And then they never gave any money back to our candidates. So my wife was convinced to run for the chair of the GOP in Fairfax County. And I thought, oh my gosh. I mean, she'd never mentioned my name once. She didn't mention in any of her campaign promotional material. She trounced. It was a primary to other candidates. She defeated the second-placed loser by 40 points on Saturday. And then, the hit piece is, oh, my gosh, MAGA, wife of Trump, takes over GOP. It's like, you know that's how democracy works. When 68% of the delegates, 68% said, yeah, we want her. It's so weird how the left really hates the will of the American people now. But that's what it's about. It's about winning. And it's easy in some ways to say, let's all move to West Virginia and get an area of freedom. But actually to stay and fight, that's what's difficult. And that's what's required to win. Right, right. It's like, who's that guy who wrote Liberal Fascists, that conservative who went lunatic, anti-Trumper? There's this, I can't believe he actually said it live on television. He's become, you know, the quasi-Republican on CNN. And here it's, oh yeah, so it's Jonah Goldberg. Jonah Goldberg was bashing Trump again on CNN or whatever, and he actually said out loud, all these small donors that President Trump is getting, it's a real problem because they don't understand the world, and it should be the policies of the mega donors that shape the Republican Party. I say, Jonah, did these words just come out of your mouth that the plebs, the plebs are stupid? How dare the people's desires like wanting to have a border and jobs in manufacturing? How dare, leave it up to the billionaires because they really care about America. Jonah Goldberg actually said that live on television. And he didn't apologize. He didn't catch himself and say, oops, I said the quiet bit out loud. These people believe it, Peter. They believe it. How dare, how dare the American people vote for Donald Trump? How dare they? I've seen a number of your tweets and you've been pointing that out, Biden at war, not with America's enemies but with America itself and America last, you put war on common sense, war on Christians, it's war on our children war on free speech. Think of this I was speaking in front of about a thousand conservatives yesterday in California and I think, this is so, to diagnose the situation we live in the most perverse of ages because never before has a society or a civilization been run by those who hate their own country. I mean, Obama said it. He said, I wish to radically transform, fundamentally transform America. Well, you don't love anything that you wish to radically transform. And it sounds extreme, but look at what just happened. The federal government, the federal government, whose number one duty is the safety of our citizens, That's its number one thing, is now suing the governor of Texas because he deployed his National Guard elements to put container boxes along the border to stop it. The feds were letting in the illegals, 10,000 a day. And the governor, Abbott, said, OK, well, I've got to do something because I'm responsible for the citizens of my state of Texas. In the Texas Constitution, it says he must secure his state if there is an invasion. So he moved the Conex boxes to just put a barrier along the Texan border. Biden is suing Texas for trying to secure the territory of America. It's like that's when you realize these people truly hate their own country and hate their own people. 100% and that's what seems to be the big two issues are the border and the economy and there are many other issues but I guess those two are simple election but then when the election is won you've got a much, well you've got a whole litany of issues that then need to be sorted out. Well yes I mean here's the massive irony. I'm going to write a piece on this today or tomorrow that, this is the delightful thing about the left. They're evil bastards. They hate Judeo-Christian civilization, but they're really quite stupid. Why did Donald Trump win in 2016? If you have to boil it down to one univalent answer, he won because of illegal immigration. I mean, the most powerful mobilizing slogan of 2016 was build the wall. I mean, that really was, if you had to choose one, it was build the wall. What have they just done in the last three and a half years, if there's one issue if you know you're running against him again, what's the one issue Peter, you shouldn't give to Donald Trump a second time round, you probably shouldn't give him the issue he won on the first time, you probably shouldn't give immigration back to him as a weapon and they haven't given it back to him as a weapon. They've given it back to him as a nuclear bomb. When you let in 10,000 illegals a day, and there's this guy who actually sealed the border eight years ago, you're actually re-electing Donald Trump on the same issue that you helped him to get elected on the first time. These people are cretins. I mean, they really are cretins. Completely, can I just finish off on education because it was your wonderful Oxford Union speech, I think it was the beginning of this year and it was Sebastian Gorka explains why America and the world needs president Trump back in office and you realize this is a battle for education for the next generation for children to actually rediscover the American dream that their parents fought for and strived for. But let me just tell, what was that like going into an arena where you are hated because you stand up for the best of a country itself? And then what are your thoughts on, actually, it is about reclaiming the education system? Well, look, I thought twice about it, because it's got to be as, a heart of darkness when it comes to wokeism but I've got to give them full credit, I mean really, it's not part of the University but it's affiliated to it and it's run by the students of Oxford so, and look when the Oxford Union invites you to debate on any subject you have to go, when you see the photographs of Einstein, Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan who've all debated in that beautiful building, you don't say well sorry, I'm not, I'm too good for that, And so they believe, you may not have it in the British system, but they believe in a First Amendment and freedom of speech. And I'm just absolutely stunned that I had 120, 130 students vote for President Trump after I gave my speech. But let me tell you a story. So it's run by this committee who, interestingly, are mostly classic scholars. So the dinner beforehand was, you know, debating the Pliny versus Tacitus. I felt like I'd arrived in some Evelyn Waugh novel. It was quite, quite funny. But one of them, because you can only go and listen if you're a member of the union. One of these students, after I gave my pitch, he stood up, took the microphone, and he was a perfect exemplar of what we face. And he said, in front of hundreds of people, I mean, it was a packed crowd, standing room only, and I've literally just given my speech and I've traveled, what, 8,000 miles on my own dime. And he says, I hate you and everything your former boss stood for. And I'm an American. He was like an exchange student or whatever. And he said, I would rather vote for a dead twig than to vote for President Trump. And I accosted him afterwards over the little, you know, cocktails we were having. And I said to him, you do realize how privileged you are, that you're an American at Oxford, and you really shouldn't dehumanize other people. And to say in public that you hate a man you've never met before, and you'd rather vote for a piece of wood than a human being, you're actually dehumanizing at the level that the Nazis dehumanized somebody they politically disagreed with. And then to his credit, he apologized. He said, yes, you're right. And then literally 40 seconds later, he did it again. And he made an ad hominem attack against me in front of witnesses as we're drinking. And he just, the level of indoctrination is stunning. And I had the president of the Heritage Foundation on my radio show the week he was appointed. And he's a former president of a college in Texas. He's a fourth-generation educator, PhD in history. And my wife, who worked for Heritage at the time, smuggled me a question to ask him at the end of the hour. And I said, so, Dr. Roberts, it's exciting to see Americans take back the schools, the mama bears rising up against the insane COVID mandates, the masks, the CRT, all this garbage. That's cool. But what about higher ed? What about the colleges? What about the universities? You've run one of these. Can we salvage them? Can we rebuild them? Live on air in front of three and a half million people, he said, it's brand newly minted president of the Heritage Foundation. No, we have to burn them to the ground. Now, when he says that, you think, you know, let me think about that. And then what happens? Three years later, the president of the most famous college in the world says, genocide of the Jews, that's a contextual statement and may not be hate-filled. Then he's right. I mean, I got in an argument about this with a fellow conservative who said, well, we've got to save the colleges. I said, you can't save that. I mean, when it's so ingrained that calling for genocide on Harvard campus is something the president thinks is OK, you can't change that unless you change everybody who works at Harvard, because they're all like that. I mean, maybe there's two professors left who aren't woke, but you can't build it with thousands of people who hate America. It's like, let me make an analogy that you're not supposed to say. It's impolitic. My thing is national security and people tell me, well, Israel has to do what it has to do and it has to crush Hamas and then it'll be okay. And they have to do whatever it takes. Civilian casualties, yes, we get it, but they just got to crush Hamas. And I say, You can't crush Hamas. The polls say 70% to 80% of Gazans support what Hamas did on October 7th. When 70% of a population says murdering beautiful young women at a rave in the desert is okay. Unless the population is removed somewhere else, and Egypt built their wall with God. You cannot fix that by killing the people who did October 7th because you'll just find more recruits. You can't fix these colleges. And that's why home-schooling is enormous, why Hillsdale and the like of Grove City, conservative colleges that don't take one cent from the feds. So the feds can't force their CRT and equal rights garbage on them are so thriving. But, my parents escaped communism. And it's the idea that we're in that situation where in every communist nation that had a semblance of resistance, the kids would come home from school and then the parents would put the radio up loud and then deprogram their kids at night. And say, okay, what did that commie teachers tell you about Stalin? Let me tell you what the truth is about the West and capitalism. And to think that we might be in a similar situation without a Berlin Wall, without bipolarity, but where we need to deprogram our kids. That's why I tell people it's cool to work in the White House. Don't get me wrong. As an immigrant, it's pretty cool. It's pretty cool to be president. It's pretty cool to be a senator. But it's mostly irrelevant. I mean, the founding fathers were very clear. Federal government should be irrelevant. It should deal with two things, war and interstate trade. That's it. Alex de Tocqueville understood America better than anyone, of course, because he's a foreigner. And he said, where's the locus of power? Where's real America? It's locally. It's at the county commissioner. It's at the school board. That's why when you want to take back a country, that's where you take it back. Why is George Soros funding local school board races and local prosecutors at the county level? I mean, people like Fani Willis. What the hell is the billionaire who broke the Bank of London doing funding local prosecutor races? Well, because that's how you steal a country. And we kind of just snoozed past it for 40 years as bit by bit, the real locus of power at county, at a municipality level was taken over. I mean, Tip O'Neill famously had this phrase in the 90s, the Democrat speaker, he said, politics is local. And it became this kind of bumper sticker for the Democrats. Oh, oh, all politics is local. And we kind of laughed and said, oh, that's cute. Well, they actually meant it. They understood that you capture a nation not with a presidential election. You capture a nation. When I arrived to Virginia, I moved from Europe 2008. And we put our kids into the local schools. And we looked into the local school district, school board. There were nine members of the school board. Every single one of them was a raving left-wing loony. And here's the important thing. None of them had a child in the public schools of the county. And you go, what? Then why are they running the board? Because it's about controlling my children, right? This is what we have to wake up to. Dr Sebastian Gorka it's wonderful having you on, it's an honour and I know you are, what three hours a day is it? Three hours of live radio every day and then a weekly tv show on Newsmax. On Salem media group, on Rumble, on Spotify, any place you want to watch it, all the links are on Sebastian's twitter feed at the top, so I appreciate your time thank you so much, Dr. Gorka. Thank you. And check out my Substack, Sebastian Gorka, one word, sebastiangorka.substack.com We will put it in the description. Thank you so much.

covid-19 united states america god tv jesus christ american university spotify netflix california live texas president social media donald trump europe israel google uk china interview strategy freedom washington soul media mexico british americans germany new york times west podcasts phd war russia joe biden european ukraine italy german pennsylvania barack obama brazil hbo congress bank white house afghanistan harvard fbi defense cnn middle east iran jews nazis hearts states republicans shop manhattan democrats starbucks oxford campaign brexit bernie sanders poland federal fox news chosen sec austria albert einstein west virginia new hampshire wifi nato roberts clinton heritage committee hamas dei state of the union substack nigerians gop hispanic nancy pelosi msnbc freedom of speech hungary marines maga linktree ronald reagan republican party joseph stalin jair bolsonaro abbott secret service first amendment doj lago texan hungarian national guard vlad mitt romney rnc crt mitch mcconnell george soros kkk afd modi rush limbaugh oak seb berlin wall liz cheney civilian axios juggernaut america first heritage foundation bannon spac downing street baltic tories conex truth social petrol newsmax maloney judeo christian meloni nigel farage orban rino democrat party sunak united nations general assembly trumpers peter navarro alexis de tocqueville pliny fairfax county gorka dan bongino national committee gazans lara trump gb news hispanic americans hillsdale deputy assistant sebastian gorka jonah goldberg independence hall oxford union evelyn waugh grove city newsmax tv freedom party buck sexton mullahs why we fight steve hilton maggie thatcher bolsanaro salem radio network texas constitution defeating jihad

Olivarez discusses minimum housing standards in unincorporated areas at AltaCair event

Rio Grande Guardian's Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 8, 2024 7:32

MCALLEN, Texas - Public health official Eduardo 'Eddie' Olivarez says the biggest impediment to a healthy population in Hidalgo County is substandard housing in unincorporated areas. Hidalgo County's chief administrative officer for health and human services made an impassioned plea for tougher minimum housing standards at a recent AltaCair Foundation event. The “cluster meeting,” featuring dozens of healthcare professionals and academics, focused on ways to improve the quality of life of colonia residents. Olivarez said two environmental issues would help - public transportation and better housing. “We need a public transit system that's functional, we are desperate for that,” Olivarez said. But he spoke at much greater length about housing. “We need a minimum housing standard. You're saying what does that have to do with health care? If you don't have a minimal housing standard, the county does not have building codes. We have no building codes. And the State of Texas Constitution does not allow that,” Olivarez said. Inside city limits, stricter rules are in place, Olivarez said. “You got to have a frame house… elevated off the ground. In the county, there are no rules,” Olivarez said. “So, how are we going to improve the quote, unquote, colonias in our community? By developing a minimum housing standard. We cannot get healthcare any better without that, and I'm not talking about a big, fancy, subdivision, or a big house. Just four walls, composition roof, adequate sewer, either septic system or main sewer line, adequate water supply. But the main thing is the composition of the home, four walls, a roof.” Olivarez said when there are severe storms, his team has to go and rescue families living in a house made of pallets and a tarp. Poor quality walls allow mosquitos to enter a home, leading to Dengue Fever, he said. “If we get the rules in place for a minimum housing standard, our health care, our health future, will be astronomically increased because you're not living in those sub-poverty conditions,” Olivarez said. Olivarez said the Legislature should allow counties above a certain population, say 500,000, to set minimum housing standards. He said he has tried for years to get such legislation passed but to no avail. Former state Rep. Veronica Gonzales, now a senior vice president at UT-Rio Grande Valley, agreed with Olivarez that developers have always been able to thwart legislation aimed at setting tougher minimum housing standards. Here is an audio recording of Olivarez's remarks about minimum housing standards at the AltaCair event.To read the new stories and watch the news videos of the Rio Grande Guardian International News Service go to www.riograndeguardian.com.

state event poor standards housing areas minimum legislature mcallen dengue fever olivarez unincorporated texas constitution hidalgo county

You Do Not Own Me! part two

This Weeks Story

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2024 4:30

What should my rights as a United States citizen be? What are my God-given rights?

united states god happiness rights declaration of independence texas constitution

Steve Gruber, Reckless and dangerous policies from the Biden Administration

The Steve Gruber Show

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 25, 2024 11:00

Live from STUDIO G- in the heart of America- I'm STEVE GRUBER- saying the things you wish you could -every day- Fighting for you from the Foxhole of Freedom and defending this great nation— This is THE STEVE GRUBER SHOW! Here are 3 big things you need to know right now— Number One— The first major narco sub of 2024 has been caught and confiscated over 1750 pounds of cocaine valued at $27 million dollars—and the band played on— Number Two— Ohio has now made it illegal to perform life altering surgeries or give powerful drugs for kids to pursue an alternate gender—AND banned boys from competing as girls in sports too—what a day! Number Three— Reckless and dangerous policies from the Biden Administration—lawsuits flying back and forth and a narrow Supreme Court decision this week have brought America as close to a Constitutional Crisis—as I have ever seen in my lifetime— With unprecedented numbers of illegals flooding into the Country after Joe Biden dismantled our border security with more than 90 Executive orders—the nation and its people have reached the breaking point— So along the way Arizona and Texas tried to stem the flow—which is officially more than 8 million illegals over the border just since Joe Biden took office— When Arizona put up steel shipping containers to slow the flow of illegals—the Biden Administration sued—and forced them to be removed—the election of a left-wing governor in 2022 meant Arizona would keep the floodgates open— BUT in Texas Governor Greg Abott was not going to take the ongoing flood of illegals lying down—he intended to fight alongside his firebrand Attorney General Ken Paxton—they kept working to shut the border down—and protect the Lone Star state from further devastation— Governor Abott began shipping illegals by the busload and the planeload to dark blue cities like New York and Chicago—that quickly began howling and screaming that the Texas Governor was playing political games—when in fact he was just sharing the wealth of millions of people in the country with no job, no house, no food and no job with the very people who claimed they wanted them—when they declared their cities sanctuary cities— As 2021 moved into 2022 and the numbers of those crossing illegally continued to climb—people began to take notice—but the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkis was more than happy to sit in front of Congress and lie time and time again about the border being secured— Texas began to build some wall sections in some areas but that was shut down too— More recently they placed giant rubber balls and razor wire barriers in the middle of the Rio Grande River in an attempt to slow the invasion—and stop what had obviously become far worse and had grown far beyond a problem for Texas into a National Security crisis— Once again, the Biden Administration defended its open border policies in court and had those barriers removed— And during the entire year of 2023—new records for daily encounters with illegals set daily, monthly and eventually an annual record of illegals coming into America, unchecked, unvetted and unleashed on our nation— Almost 2 million in 2021, 2.8 million in 2022 and 3.2 million last year—for a total of 8 million illegals—and those are just the ones that the Biden Administration admits to—and the number could easily be twice as high— So in September, Governor Abott declared an invasion under Article 4 section 4 of the United States Constitution—that clearly states that the federal government “shall protect” each state from invasion— Despite this obvious clarity—the feds didn't care and kept stopping the efforts from the Governor at every turn—then a couple of weeks ago the Texas National Guard seized a park in Eagle Pass Texas and kicked out all federal agents—the Biden Administration was outraged and took the matter straight to the Supreme Court—and in an unbelievable ruling—sided with Joe Biden and his reckless destructive open border policies 5-4— But if you thought that would be the end of it—you were wrong— Not only has Texas refused to leave the park—they have sent National Guard reinforcements and put up more barriers along the disputed 2 and half mile stretch of the Rio Grande and the border with Mexico— Which brings us to this Constitutional Crisis—the Supreme Court has ruled—and ruled in favor of the administration—and Texas—its Governor and its Attorney General—do not seem to care—instead of backing off and allowing the invasion to continue full speed in Eagle Pass—they are standing their ground— And yesterday Governor Abbott released a statement—accusing the United States of violating the Constitution and breaking the compact between the states— Folks, this is serious—and you really need to pay attention to what is going on— Abbott wrote in part; “The Executive branch of the United States has a Constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting the states… including immigration laws on the books right now.” Governor Abbott further outlined that President Biden has violated his oath to execute immigration laws, instructing his agencies to violate federal law, wasting taxpayer dollars to destroy the right of the state to remain protected from an illegal invasion and much more— And not only does Governor Abbott cite the US Constitution and its guarantees against invasion—BUT he also cites the Texas Constitution and the authority given to protect itself— So far he is not moving— BUT how long can the Governor stand—and what will Joe Biden and his Administration do? What happens next? Will Biden and his ailing Secretary of Defense try to federalize the Texas National Guard? Will federal troops march on Texas—it has happened before—Dwight Eisenhower took control of the National Guard to integrate schools in Little Rock Arkansas in 1957—BUT Joe Biden ain't Ike—who led the allied victory over Germany in World War Two— And what about the political ramifications? The border has become the number one issue for voters—that according to several recent polls— The border crisis is a major disaster for Joe Biden and his car full of clowns— So, seriously Federal troops marching on Texas to rip down border barriers to allow the continued invasion by millions of people into this country with no regard at all for the citizens and our national sovereignty—I am pretty sure that won't sell on the evening news—NOT even on MSNBC— So, do they let Texas rule the roost? You cannot let that happen because then every state will feel empowered to do that. Is this all part of the plan—so that when Donald Trump is re-elected, he will be powerless to put down riots in the streets by using the National Guard in places like Minneapolis—because Texas set the precedent to ignore the Supreme Court and the Administration in charge? You had better damn well think about what is happening right now in Eagle Pass—because whether you see it yet or not—it could soon affect every single one of us— AND—there are plenty of people paying attention besides me—so even though it may not be getting a lot of coverage on the corporate media channels I can guarantee you right now—its getting a lot of attention from those in Washington—and their counterparts in Austin— And by the way—this is also fueling the rise in the movement to have Texas leave the union—the Texit movement was small and insignificant just a couple of years ago—it is neither today.

Legal challenges to amendments appear quashed

texas gov greg abbott amendments dallas morning news legal challenges texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 12, 2023 5:48

A half-dozen lawsuits challenging the 13 approved Texas constitutional amendments appear to be dead in the water, The Dallas Morning News reported. The secretary of state's office last week declared the propositions approved and now a part of the Texas Constitution, while Gov. Greg Abbott canvassed the election and certified the results. One proposition that would have raised the retirement age of judges was rejected by voters. In addition, the Texas attorney general's office said the lawsuits had improper “citation and return of service.” The plaintiffs are unable to correct those citations because the election results have been certified. The...Article Link

S001 E015 - Electoral Musical Chairs

2A Ricochet

Play Episode Play 30 sec Highlight Listen Later Nov 15, 2023 43:10

Andi Turner and Garrett Fulce discuss the latest developments in Texas politics, including the fourth special session, school choice, and border security. They highlight the challenges and potential impact of proposed legislation, such as enhanced punishments for illegal immigrants and the school choice bill. They also touch on the role of the Texas Constitution and the part-time nature of the state legislature. The hosts express their concerns about the current state party chairman, Matt Rinaldi, and his handling of fundraising and candidate support.Follow us on all socials at @theseeingredpod and online at our website Seeing Red Podcast

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Voting today on ESD measures, constitutional amendments, more

texas voting voters proposed measures polling constitutional amendments wilson county texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 7, 2023 2:27

If you didn't cast a ballot during early voting, today's the day to have your say! Polling locations are open until 7 p.m. today across Texas, for registered voters to weigh in on 14 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution. Voters in Wilson County also have several items related to emergency services districts (ESDs): Proposals to levy sales taxes by Wilson County Emergency Services Districts (ESD) 4 and 5 (See https://www.wilsoncountynews.com/articles/esd-5-proposes-1-1-4-cent-sales-tax/ and https://www.wilsoncountynews.com/articles/esd-4-calls-for-election-on-sales-tax-discusses-mutual-aid/ ) Proposed annexation of the Stockdale Volunteer Fire Department service area into Wilson County ESD 1. (See https://www.wilsoncountynews.com/articles/eastern-wilson-county-will-vote-on-stockdale-area-fire-annexation/ and https://www.wilsoncountynews.com/articles/people-just-dont-volunteer-the-way-they-used-to/) In addition, voters in the Floresville Independent...Article Link

11.3.2023: Dade Phelan accused of violating the Texas Constitution

Texas Minute

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 3, 2023 5:45

Lawmakers Accuse Dade Phelan of ‘Flagrantly Violating' the Constitution… House Members ran out the clock… University of Texas to Host DEI Roundtable… Parents Successfully Pressure Plano ISD…

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Early voting is under way for Nov. 7

elections proposed proposals early voting 7a 7c wilson county texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 24, 2023 1:43

Early voting continues through Friday, Nov. 3, for the Nov. 7 elections. A total of 130 ballots had been cast in Wilson County by the end of Oct. 23, the first day of early voting, according to Rose Pruski with the Wilson County Elections Office. On the ballot for county voters: •14 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution (see pages 7A and 7C for more on these) •Proposals to levy sales taxes by Wilson County Emergency Services Districts (ESD) 4 and 5 •Proposed annexation of the Stockdale Volunteer Fire Department service area into Wilson County ESD 1 •Election of trustees...Article Link

Voters: Check both sides of your ballot -- multiple elections are on one ballot!

texas elections constitutional angela smith texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2023 7:10

Early voting in the Nov. 7 elections starts next Monday, Oct. 23. There are a number of items for area voters to consider — and many voters in the Wilson County News coverage area will have multiple elections on their ballots. Area elections include: •14 proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution; this is a statewide election •Candidates for Floresville Independent School District (ISD) board of trustees, Sandy Oaks City Council, and the San Antonio River Authority board of directors •Two separate sales tax elections for Wilson County Emergency Services Districts (ESD) 4 and 5; most voters in western Wilson County...Article Link

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10/2 - Texas Constitutional Election - Nov 7

The Matt Long Show

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 2, 2023 45:16

Angela Smith and I start our discussion on the 14 proposed amendments to The Texas Constitution. Quick guide - YES on 1 & 3 NO to the rest and *Your pick on 13*

Episode 137: Humbly Invoking the Blessings of Almighty God

The Liberty Café

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 20:07

The Texas Constitution opens with these words: “Humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the State of Texas, do ordain and establish this Constitution.” As we celebrate our nation's independence, on this week's Liberty Cafe Bill discusses how Texas and Texans might build on this foundation to better experience the blessings of … Continue reading "Episode 137: Humbly Invoking the Blessings of Almighty God"

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Humbly Invoking the Blessings of Almighty God

Texas Scorecard Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 5, 2023 20:00

The Texas Constitution opens with these words: “Humbly invoking the blessings of Almighty God, the people of the State of Texas, do ordain and establish this Constitution.” As we celebrate […]

texas state blessings constitution almighty god humbly invoking texas constitution

Juneteenth (RE-AIR)

amazon texas factor juneteenth re air bob white annette gordon reed texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 19, 2023 78:26

We first cover what was going on in the nation before the emancipation proclamation, then zoom in on Texas specifically and what the culture was like, share some stories from the past, and tie the through-line to why and how people celebrate Juneteenth.Bob White story perspective:https://hauntedconroe.com/murder-in-the-courtroom/Great book on Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed:https://www.amazon.com/Juneteenth-Annette-Gordon-Reed/dp/1631498835/ref=nodl_Texas Constitution 1824 - 1876:https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/republic-texas-1836/general-provisionsVisit us at blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Buy our book on Amazon!$5/month supports us at patreon.com/blackhistoryforwhitepeople.Check us out on Twitter @BHforWP and Instagram @BlackHistoryForWhitePeople or feel free to email us at hello@blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Our Sponsors:* Check out Factor 75 and use my code blackhistory50 for a great deal: https://www.factor75.com/Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/black-history-for-white-people/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Episode 3239: Abbott vetoes important taxpayer protection bill; panic? | More evidence impeachment wasn’t needed – Pratt on Texas 6/14/2023

Pratt on Texas

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 14, 2023 43:12

The news of Texas covered today includes:Our Lone Star story of the day: Governor Abbott has vetoed one of the most important taxpayer protection bills passedby the legislature and it appears to be an act of panic over his inability to fulfill, as of yet, his biggest campaign promise of record property tax relief – ironic almost beyond belief.As The Texan reports it:“In an apparent response to this property tax standoff, Abbott vetoed his third bill from the regular session on Tuesday: Senate Bill 2035 by Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-Houston) that'd prohibit the kind of cheeky debt maneuver deployed by the City of Amarillo to finance a project voters had rejected two years earlier.“Bettencourt is the author of the Senate's property tax plan and, other than Patrick, the most critical of the current compression-only proposal.”It appears the Governor, who has always had trouble working with the legislature, is in panic mode over headlines like this: DeSantis overshadowing Abbott as leading conservative ahead of the 2024 presidential election.Our Lone Star story of the day is sponsored by Allied Compliance Services providing the best service in DOT, business and personal drug and alcohol testing since 1995.In a deplorable decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Ken Paxton's criminal securities-related case will be heard in Democrat-dominated Harris County instead of his home county. On it's own it is a terrible decision because it sets the idea that the state can venue shop in a criminal case as opposed to the defendant having the ability to be tried by his peers.The Dallas Morning News reported:“Judge Sharon Keller disagreed with the majority opinion.“The Court cites no case supporting its conclusion that a regional presiding judge can vicariously agree to allow the holding of court by a different district judge under the Texas Constitution. Because the law is unsettled, mandamus relief is inappropriate,” wrote Keller, who was joained in her dissent by Judge Mary Lou Keel.Judge Kevin Yeary also dissented.”Separately, the case is yet another example of how the wheels of justice were already turning and makes the House's radical decision to use impeachment in the Paxton case improper. Substituting a bunch of politicians for police and judicial systems, that come with due process and appellate protections, is unwarranted in the Paxton case.I review more bills Governor Abbott has signed.And, other news of Texas.Listen on the radio, or station stream, at 5pm Central. Click for our radio and streaming affiliates.www.PrattonTexas.com

Mon 6/5 - Law School Admissions Normalize, SEC Dismisses Data Access Cases, Solicitor General Whoopsies and LOTR Unauthorized Sequel Lawsuit

Minimum Competence

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2023 8:12

On this day in legal history the landmark Supreme Court decision of Sweatt v. Painter was decided. In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, an African American man, applied to the all-white University of Texas School of Law but was denied admission based on his race. This decision was made in accordance with the segregated policy outlined in Article VII, Section 7 of the Texas Constitution. Sweatt took legal action with the support of the NAACP, seeking enrollment at the university. Initially, a temporary law school called the School of Law of the Texas State University for Negroes was established for black students. It provided access to resources such as the Texas Supreme Court library and had faculty members from the University of Texas School of Law. Sweatt's case was dismissed by a state court after the black law school was established. However, Sweatt appealed to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the Texas admissions system violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. On June 5, 1950, the Supreme Court ruled that in states where white students had access to graduate and professional schools while black students did not, black students must be admitted to the white institutions. This decision led to Sweatt's admission to the University of Texas School of Law, along with the enrollment of other black students in subsequent years. The impact of the case was limited to graduate and professional programs at the University of Texas, as black undergraduate students were still not admitted, although graduate students could take undergraduate courses if necessary for their program.With Sweatt v. Painter and another case, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the Supreme Court began the long process of overturning the separate but equal doctrine in public education–first by requiring graduate and professional schools to admit black students.Law school applications in the United States have returned to normalcy after the pandemic-induced surge in 2021. The number of applicants has decreased for the second consecutive year, indicating that the previous year's increase was an anomaly attributed to COVID-19. As of Thursday, law school applicants were down by 2.4% compared to the previous year. The Law School Admission Council expects the national applicant pool for this cycle to be slightly smaller than the year before, which was already 12% smaller than in 2021. The decrease in applications aligns with the trend of the past five years, where the number of applicants remained relatively consistent. The increase in applications in 2021 was attributed to various factors, including the disruption of the job market for college graduates caused by the pandemic, protests over racial inequality, and the political climate. The pool of law school applicants continues to become more diverse, with applicants of color comprising 46.5% of the current pool. It's a 'return to normalcy' for law school admissions | ReutersThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has dismissed 42 enforcement cases after discovering that its enforcement staff had unauthorized access to materials intended for commission officials handling those cases. The SEC conducted a review of the matter, which was initially raised in April 2022 when it was revealed that certain databases allowed enforcement staff to view legal materials meant for the in-house court officials. The SEC acknowledged the error and expressed regret, emphasizing its commitment to rectify the situation. The improper access was deemed accidental, as administrative staff in the enforcement arm unintentionally accessed adjudication materials while collecting relevant information. An internal review concluded that the improper access had no impact on the decisions made by the enforcement staff or the officials reviewing the cases. However, the SEC decided to dismiss all pending cases that were affected by the improper access, primarily involving individuals and smaller firms. Additionally, the SEC agreed to lift industry bans on 48 individuals who had requested relief from the agency and were also implicated in the incident.US SEC to dismiss 42 enforcement cases after internal data mishap | ReutersThe US Solicitor General has admitted to misleading the Supreme Court in a 2017 patent case involving Nike and Adidas. The misrepresentation occurred during an argument about the validity of inter partes review, a process that allows the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to reexamine issued patents. By way of very brief background, inter partes review is a process in the United States patent system that allows a third party to challenge the validity of an issued patent before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). It provides a mechanism for reviewing and potentially invalidating patents based on prior art and other grounds, offering an alternative to litigation in resolving patent disputes. In this case, the Solicitor General apologized, stating that the USPTO failed to alert them about the mistake. This is not the first time the Solicitor General has corrected statements made to the justices. The admission came in the context of a separate whistleblower dispute raised by Judge Michael Fitzpatrick, who expressed concerns about attempts to expand the number of judges in the Nike case. The Merit Systems Protection Board ruled in favor of the judge, noting that the Solicitor General's office was not made aware of the potential mistake. The government acknowledged the need for absolute candor and accuracy in its representations to the Court. Solicitor General Office Admits It Misled Court in Patent CaseThe estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, the renowned author of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, has filed a copyright lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court against author Demetrious Polychron. The estate accuses Polychron of writing and selling an unauthorized sequel titled "The Fellowship of the King." The lawsuit comes after Polychron himself filed a copyright suit against the Tolkien Trust and Amazon Inc., alleging infringement of his sequel's copyrights following the release of the TV series "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power." The estate discovered Polychron's unauthorized sequel online in March and sent a cease-and-desist letter. Despite the estate's policy of not licensing writers to create sequels, Polychron persisted in pitching his written sequel. The estate attempted to resolve the dispute through a call, but Polychron continuously postponed, citing illness and instead Polychron filed a lawsuit against the Tolkien Estate and others. The estate's complaint states that Polychron's sequel incorporates various copyright-protected elements from the original trilogy, including verbatim passages, characters, and the entire plot premise. Online reviews of the sequel suggest that readers were aware it was an unauthorized derivative work.Tolkien Estate Sues Over Unauthorized ‘Lord of the Rings' Sequel Get full access to Minimum Competence - Daily Legal News Podcast at www.minimumcomp.com/subscribe

Texas Can Stand for Secure Borders - with Mark Meckler

WallBuilders Live! with David Barton & Rick Green

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2023 26:59

Today, we have Mark Meckler on to discuss the issue of border security. There is a boom in fentanl related deaths and child sex slavery and trafficking. What can we do to fix the issues with our border security, when Washington DC refuses to act? There is a provision in the Texas Constitution to repel invasion. On April 29th, Texans will stand at the state capitol and demand action.

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Could Texas secede? Lawmakers file 'TEXIT Referendum Act' in Austin

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 21, 2023 1:37

State Rep. Bryan Slaton has filed HB 3596, which is commonly known as the “TEXIT Referendum Act.” If HB 3596 is passed, it will place a referendum on the ballot during the next general election, allowing the people of Texas to vote on whether or not the State should investigate the possibility of Texas independence, and present potential plans to the Legislature. “The Texas Constitution is clear that all political power resides in the people,” Slaton said. “After decades of continuous abuse of our rights and liberties by the federal government, it is time to let the people of Texas...Article Link

Protecting farming, ranching in our Texas Constitution

texas protecting farming texans ranching texas constitution

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2023 3:02

Texans like to hunt and fish. It is part of our state's heritage and culture. Is the activity worth protecting? Texas voters resoundingly answered, “Yes,” in 2015. A state constitutional amendment that year was approved with 81 percent support. The amendment recognizes the right of the people to hunt, fish, and harvest wildlife subject to laws that promote wildlife conservation. Do you think farming and ranching are also part of our state's heritage and culture? I definitely do. Are the two pursuits worth protecting in our state's constitution? It is a question I hope you and I have a chance...Article Link

Patriot Mom And Dad Give Update On Their Case Of False Allegations, False Imprisonment And Help From The NLPA

Slam the Gavel

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2023 58:59

Slam the Gavel welcomes back Patriot Parents to discuss their update to their case. They were last on the podcast October 25th, 2022 Season 3, Episode 140. They discussed the march against CPS corruption. Patriot Mom discussed the retaliation they both have endured after filing a Mass Tort Federal Lawsuit on the County, but went into default, as well as discussing how the Governor terminated the Commissioner. There have been 3 false allegations placed on Patriot Dad. We discussed the fear tactics used in Texas against Patriot Dad, as he was driving to the gym and police pulled him over as he was surrounded by 16 US Marshalls, taken to Jail. Patriot Dad asserted his 8th Amendment Rights as they kept him in Suicide Watch for 24 hours and had to beg for his phone call. Bond was set at $50,000.00 and was able to go home the next day. This is just is just a taste of Texas justice system. Patriot Mom and Dad explained that CPS is a 53 billion dollar a year business as they separate children from their parents as well as dividing spouses. Patriot Mom gave excellent advice, "be strong for your spouse undergoing false allegations and be strong for your children." Patriot Mom and Dad discussed the help they have received from the NLPA (National League Professional Association). HB 19 is very damming to the Veterans, discrimination noted to Veterans. Patriot Dad recommends that you do no "consent to waive your right to a SPEEDY trial, and if the attorney motions for an extension he is waiving your right." New trial date June 12th. There is a limitation when you can hold a "speedy" trial from the time of indictment to trial is 3 years. May be able to move to vacate the case on June 13th 2023, as it is unconstitutional. You can contact Patriot Mom and Dad through dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.comHere is the link for the NLPA:https://nlpa.com/Texas Constitution; Article 15: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CN/htm/CN.15.htmSupportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri)https://www.buzzsprout.com/1364944/subscribehttp://www.dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com/Support the showSupportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri)http://www.dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com/

Patriot Mom And Dad Give Update On Their Case Of False Allegations, False Imprisonment And Help From The NLPA

Slam the Gavel

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 15, 2023 58:59

Slam the Gavel welcomes back Patriot Parents to discuss their update to their case. They were last on the podcast October 25th, 2022 Season 3, Episode 140. They discussed the march against CPS corruption. Patriot Mom discussed the retaliation they both have endured after filing a Mass Tort Federal Lawsuit on the County, but went into default, as well as discussing how the Governor terminated the Commissioner. There have been 3 false allegations placed on Patriot Dad. We discussed the fear tactics used in Texas against Patriot Dad, as he was driving to the gym and police pulled him over as he was surrounded by 16 US Marshalls, taken to Jail. Patriot Dad asserted his 8th Amendment Rights as they kept him in Suicide Watch for 24 hours and had to beg for his phone call. Bond was set at $50,000.00 and was able to go home the next day. This is just is just a taste of Texas justice system. Patriot Mom and Dad explained that CPS is a 53 billion dollar a year business as they separate children from their parents as well as dividing spouses. Patriot Mom gave excellent advice, "be strong for your spouse undergoing false allegations and be strong for your children." Patriot Mom and Dad discussed the help they have received from the NLPA (National League Professional Association). HB 19 is very damming to the Veterans, discrimination noted to Veterans. Patriot Dad recommends that you do no "consent to waive your right to a SPEEDY trial, and if the attorney motions for an extension he is waiving your right." New trial date June 12th. There is a limitation when you can hold a "speedy" trial from the time of indictment to trial is 3 years. May be able to move to vacate the case on June 13th 2023, as it is unconstitutional. You can contact Patriot Mom and Dad through dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com Here is the link for the NLPA: https://nlpa.com/ Texas Constitution; Article 15: https://statutes.capitol.texas.gov/Docs/CN/htm/CN.15.htm Supportshow(https://www.buymeacoffee.com/maryannpetri) http://www.dismantlingfamilycourtcorruption.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/maryann-petri/support

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[Best] Lars Doucet - Progress, Poverty, Georgism, & Why Rent is Too Damn High

The Lunar Society

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 9, 2023 100:23

One of my best episodes ever. Lars Doucet is the author of Land is a Big Deal, a book about Georgism which has been praised by Vitalik Buterin, Scott Alexander, and Noah Smith. Sam Altman is the lead investor in his new startup, ValueBase.Talking with Lars completely changed how I think about who creates value in the world and who leeches off it.We go deep into the weeds on Georgism:* Why do even the wealthiest places in the world have poverty and homelessness, and why do rents increase as fast as wages?* Why are land-owners able to extract the profits that rightly belong to labor and capital?* How would taxing the value of land alleviate speculation, NIMBYism, and income and sales taxes?Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow Lars on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter.Timestamps(00:00:00) - Intro(00:01:11) - Georgism(00:03:16) - Metaverse Housing Crises(00:07:10) - Tax Leisure?(00:13:53) - Speculation & Frontiers(00:24:33) - Social Value of Search (00:33:13) - Will Georgism Destroy The Economy?(00:38:51) - The Economics of San Francisco(00:43:31) - Transfer from Landowners to Google?(00:46:47) - Asian Tigers and Land Reform(00:51:19) - Libertarian Georgism(00:55:42) - Crypto(00:57:16) - Transitioning to Georgism(01:02:56) - Lars's Startup & Land Assessment (01:15:12) - Big Tech(01:20:50) - Space(01:23:05) - Copyright(01:25:02) - Politics of Georgism(01:33:10) - Someone Is Always Collecting RentsTranscriptThis transcript was partially autogenerated and thus may contain errors.Lars Doucet - 00:00:00: Over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism, so not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book. If you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line. Let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. The income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich. And it's just this horrible burden we have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:00:39: Okay, today I have the pleasure of speaking with Lars Doucet, who developed the highly acclaimed Defender's Quest game and part two is coming out next year, but now he's working on a new startup. But the reason we're talking is that he wrote a review of Henry George's progress and poverty that won Scott Alexander's Book Review Contest and now it has been turned into an expanded into this book Land is a Big Deal. So Lars, welcome to the podcast. New Speaker: Great to be here, Dwarkesh . Okay, so let's just get into it. What is Georgism? Lars Doucet - 00:01:12: Okay, so the book is based off of the philosophy of a 19th century American economist by the name of Henry George from once we get George's and basically George's thesis is kind of the title of my book that land is a big deal. Georgism is often reduced to its main policy prescription that we should have a land value tax, which is a tax on the unimproved value of land, but not a tax on any buildings or infrastructure on top of the land, anything humans add. But the basic insight of it is that it's kind of reflected in the aphorisms you hear from real estate agents when they say things like the three laws of real estate or location location location and buy land, it's the one thing they're not making any more of. It's basically this insight that land has this hidden role in the economy that is really underrated. But if you look at history through the right lens, control over land is the oldest struggle of human history. It goes beyond human history. Animals have been fighting over land forever. That's what they're fighting over in Ukraine and Russia right now, right? And basically the fundamental insight of Georgism is that over the last century, we've had this huge conflict. All the oxygen's been sucked up by capitalism and socialism duking it out. We have this assumption that you either have to be pro worker or pro business that you can't be both. And Georgism is genuinely pro pro worker and pro business. But what it's against is is land speculation. And if we can find a way to share the earth, then we can solve the paradox that is the title of George's book, progress and poverty, why does poverty advance even when progress advances? Why do we have all this industrialized technology and new methods and it in George's time it was industrial technology in our time its computers and everything else? We have all this good stuff. We can make more than we've ever made before. There's enough wealth for everybody. And yet we still have inequality. Where does it come from? And George answers that question in his book. And I expand on it in mine. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:03:15: Yep. OK, so yeah, I'm excited to get into the theory of all of it in a second. But first I'm curious how much of your interest in the subject has been inspired with the fact that as a game developer, you're constantly dealing with decentralized rent seekers, like Steve or iOS app store. Is that part of the inspiration behind your interest in Georgism or is that separate? Lars Doucet - 00:03:38: It's interesting. I wouldn't say that's what clued me into it in the first place. But I have become very interested in all forms of rent seeking. In this general category of things we call land-like assets that come to first mover advantages in these large platform economies. I've started to think a lot about it basically. But the essence of land speculation is you have this entire class of people who are able to basically gatekeep access to a scarce resource that everybody needs, which is land, that you can't opt out of needing. And because of that, everyone basically has to pay them rent. And those people don't necessarily do anything. They just got there first and tell everyone else, it's like, well, if you want to participate in the world, you need to pay me. And so we're actually the actual connection with game development, actually clued me into Georgism. And I'd heard about Georgism before. I'd read about it. I thought it was interesting. But then I started noticing this weird phenomenon in online multiplayer games going back 30 years repeatedly of virtual housing crises, which is the most bizarre concept in the world to me, like basically a housingcrisis in the Metaverse and predecessors to the Metaverse. And as early as the Alt Online (?)online when I was 19, this is this online game that you could play. And you could build houses in the game and put them down somewhere. And so what I found was that houses were actually fairly cheap. You could work long enough in a game to be afford to buy blueprints for a house, which will be put it somewhere. But there was no land to put it on. And at the time, I thought, oh, well, I guess the server failed up. I didn't really think much about it. I was like, this stinks. I didn't join the game early enough. I'm screwed out of housing. And then I kind of forgot about it. And then 20 years later, I checked back in. And that housing crisis is still ongoing in that game. That game is still running a good 25 years later. And that housing crisis remains unsolved. And you have this entire black market for housing. And then I noticed that that trend was repeated in other online games, like Final Fantasy 14. And then recently in 2022, with all this huge wave of crypto games, like Axi Infinity, and that's Decentral Land and the Sandbox. And then Yuga Labs' Board-Ape Yacht Club, the other side, had all these big land sales. And at the time, I was working as an analyst for a video game consulting firm called Novik. And I told my employers, it's like, we are going to see all the same problems happen. We are going to see virtual land speculation. They're going to hit virtual. They're going to reproduce the conditions of housing crisis in the real world. And it's going to be a disaster. And I called it, and it turns out I was right. And we've now seen that whole cycle kind of work itself out. And it just kind of blew my mind that we could reproduce the problems of the real world so articulately in the virtual world without anyone trying to do it. It just happened. And that is kind of the actual connection between my background in game design and kind of getting George Pilled as the internet kids call it these days. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:06:43: There was a hilarious clip. Some comedian was on Joe Rogan's podcast. I think it was like Tim Dillon. And they're talking about, I think, Decentraland, where if you want to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the Metaverse, it costs like a couple million dollars or something. And Joe Rogan was like, so you think you can afford to live there. And then Tim Dillon's like, no, but I'm going to start another Metaverse and I'm going to work hard. But OK, so let's go into Georgism himself. So Tyler Cohen had a blog post a long time ago who was comparing taxing land to taxing unimproved labor or unimproved capital. And it's an interesting concept, right? Should I, so I have a CS degree, right? Should I be taxed at the same level as an entry level software engineer instead of a podcast or because I'm not using my time as efficiently as possible. And so leisure in another way is the labor equivalent of having an unimproved parking lot in the middle of San Francisco or capital. If I'm just keeping my capital out of the economy and therefore making it not useful, maybe I should have that capital taxed at the rate of the capital gains on T-Bill. And this way, you're not punishing people for having profitable investments, which you're kind of doing with a capital gains, right? What would you think of that comparison? Lars Doucet - 00:08:07: Yeah, so really, before you can even answer that question, you've got to go back to ground moral principles you're operating on. Like, is your moral operating principle like we just want to increase efficiency? So we're going to tax everyone in a way to basically account for the wasted opportunity cost, which brings up a lot of other questions of like, well, who decides what that is. But I think the Georgist argument is a little different. We're not necessarily like it is efficient, the tax we propose, but it actually stems kind of from a more, from a different place, a more kind of fundamental aspect of justice, you know? And from our perspective, if you work and you produce value, your work produced that value, right? And if you save money and accumulate capital in order to put that capital to work to receive a return, you've also provided something valuable to society, you know? You saved money so a factory could exist, right? You saved money so that a shipping company could get off off the ground. You know, those are valuable, contributed things, but nobody made the earth. The earth pre-exists all of us. And so someone who provides land actually does the opposite of providing land. They unprovide land, and then they charge you for opening the gate. And so the argument for charging people on the unimproved value of land is that we want to tax unproductive rent seeking. We want to tax non-produced assets because we think we want to encourage people to produce assets. We want to encourage people to produce labor, to produce capital. We want more of those things. And there's that aphorism that if you want less of something, you should tax it. So I mean, maybe there is a case for some kind of galaxy brain take of, you know, taxing unrealized opportunity costs or whatever, but I'm less interested in that. And my moral principles are more about, let's start with just taxing the things nobody has made and that people are gatekeeping access to. Let's tax essentially monopolies and rent seeking. And then if we still need to raise more taxes, we can talk about that later. But let's start with, let's start with just taxing the worst things in society and then stop taxing things we actually want more of because we have this mentality right now where everything's a trade off and we have to accept the downsides of income taxes, of sales taxes, of capital taxes because we just need the revenue and it has to come from somewhere. And my argument is it's like, it can come from a much better somewhere. So let's start with that.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:10:39: Yeah, yeah. So I guess if it was the case that we've implemented a land value tax and we're still having a revenue shortfall and we need another kind of tax and we're going to have to keep income taxes or capital gains taxes. Would you in that situation prefer a sort of tax where you're basically taxed on the opportunity costs of your time rather than the actual income you generated or the returns you would interest your generate in your capital? Lars Doucet - 00:11:04: No, I think probably not. I think you would probably want to go with some other just like simpler tax for the sake of it there's too many degrees of freedom in there. And it's like, we can talk about why I will defend the Georgist case for property tax assessments, you know, for land value tax. But I think it gets different when you start like judging what is the most valuable use of your time because that's a much more subjective question. Like you're like, okay, are you providing more value to society as being a podcaster or being a CS computer science person or creating a startup? It's like that may not be evident for some time. You know what I mean? Like I can't think of an example, but like think of people who were never successful during their lifetimes. I think the guy who invented what was it? FM radio, right? He threw himself out a window because he never got it really adopted during his lifetime but it went on to change everything, you know? So if we were taxing him during his lifetime based off of what he was doing of being a failure, like if Van Gogh was taxed of his like wasting his life as an artist as he thought he was, which ultimately led to his suicide, you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily realized at the time. And so I think that's, and you know, it would need a much bigger kind of bureaucracy to like figure that all out. So I think you should go with a more modest. I mean, I think after land value tax, you should do things like severance tax on natural resources and other taxes on other monopolies and rents. And so I think the next move after land value tax is not immediately to capital and income taxes and sales taxes, but to other taxes on other rents seeking and other land like assets that aren't literally physically land. And then only after you've done all of those, if you still, you know, absolutely then, then move on to, you know, the bad taxes. What is this, severance tax? Severance tax is a tax on the extraction of natural resources. Is what Norway does with their oil industry that has been massively successful and a key reason that Norway has avoided the resource curse? Yeah. Basically, it's, Georgist purist will say it's essentially a land value tax but of a different kind. A land value tax like you can't normally like extracts just like land like on this, in this house you're living on, you're like, you're not using up this land, but non-renewable resources you can use up. Yeah. You know, and so a severance tax is basically, Nestle should be charged a severance tax for the water they're using, for instance, you know, because all they're doing is enclosing a pre-existing natural resource that used to belong to the people that they've essentially enclosed and now they're just putting it in bottles and selling it to people. You know, they should be able to realize the value of the value add they give to that water, but not to just taking that resource away. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:13:53: No that makes sense. Okay, so let's go deep into the actual theory and logic of Georgism. Okay. One thing I was confused by is why property owners who have land in places that are really desirable are not already incentivized to make the most productive use of that land. So even without a property, sorry, a land tax, if you have some property in San Francisco incentives, let's go, why are you not incentivized to construct it to the fullest extent possible by the law, to, you know, collect rents anyways, you know what I mean? Like why are you keeping it that as a parking lot? Lars Doucet - 00:14:28: Right, right, right. So there's a lot of reasons. And one of them has to do with, there's an image in the book that this guy put together for me. I'll show it to you later. But what it does is that it shows the rate of return. What a land speculator is actually optimizing for is their rate of return, right? And so if land appreciates by 10% a year, you know, you're actually incentivized to invest in vacant land or a tear down property because the building of a tear down property is like worth negative value. So the land's cheaper because there's garbage on it, you know? Then you are to necessarily invest in a property and you're basically your marginal dollar is better spent on more land than it is on building up. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:15:16: But eventually shouldn't this be priced into the price of land so that the returns are no longer 10% or they're just like basically what you could get for any other asset. And at that point, then the rate of return is similar for building thingson top of your existing land than buying a new land because like the new land is like the, you know, that return has been priced into other land. Lars Doucet - 00:15:38: Well, I mean, arguably, empirically, we just don't see that, you know, and we see rising land prices as long as productivity and population increases. Those productivity and population gains get soaked into the price of the land. It's because of this phenomenon called Ricardo's Law of Rent and it's been pretty empirically demonstrated that basically, and it has to do with the negotiation power. But like why some people do of course, build and invest, you know, there's a lot of local laws that restrict people's ability to build. But another reason is just like, it also has to do with the existing part of it. It part of the effect is partially the existing property tax regime actively incentivizes empty lots because you have a higher tax burden if you build, right? So what actually happens is a phenomenon that's similar to oil wells, right? You have, it's not just because of property taxes, those do encourage you to keep it empty. But there's this phenomenon called land banking and waiting for the land to ripen, right? Sure, I could build it now, but I might have a lot of land parcels I've got. And I don't need to build it now because I think the prices might go up later and it would be better to build on it later than it is now. And it's not costing me anything to keep it vacant now. If I build now, I'm gonna have to pay a little bit more property taxes. And I know in three years that the price is gonna be even better. So maybe I'll wait to incur those construction costs then and right now I'm gonna focus more on building over here. And like I've got a lot of things to do, so I'm just gonna squat on it here. It's the same way I have, I'm squatting like, you know, I bought to my shame, like about 30 domain names, you know, most of them bought before I kind of got ontoGeorgism. And it's like, yeah, I'll pay 15 bucks a year to just hold it, why not? You know what I mean? I might use that someday. Right. And it's like, I should probably release all the ones I have no intent of using because I was looking for a domain for my startup the other day and every single two word.com is taken. Right, right. And it has been for like 10 years, you know, and it's a similar phenomenon. It's just like some of it is economic, rational following of incentives. And some of it is just it's like, well, this is a good asset. I'm just gonna hold on to it because why not? And no one is, and I don't have any pressure to build right now. And this happens on the upswing and on the downswing of cities. So while the population's growing and while the population's declining, people will just buy a lot of land and hold it out of use. Cause it's also just a great place to park money because it's an asset that you know if the population ever starts growing, it's gonna keep its value better than almost any other hard asset you have. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:18:16: Yep yep. I guess another like broader criticism of this way of thinking is, listen, this is all, and sorry for using these like podcast lingo of scarcity mindset, but this is all like scarcity mindset of, you know, land is limited. Well, why don't we just focus on the possibility of expanding the amount of usable land? I mean, there's like not really a shortage of land in you. Maybe there's a shortage of land in urban areas. But you know, why don't we like expand into the seas? And why don't we expand into the air and space? Why are we thinking in this sort of scarce mindset? Lars Doucet - 00:18:48: Right. Okay, so I love this question because actually our current status quo mindset is the scarcity mindset. And Georgism is the abundance mindset, right? And we can have that abundance if we learn to share the land. Because right now, you know, why don't we expand? And the answer is we've tried that. We've done it twice. And it's the story of America's frontier, right? And so like right now there's plenty of empty land in Nevada, but nobody wants it. And you have to ask why, right? You also have to ask the question of how did we have virtual housing crises in the Metaverse where they could infinitely expand all they want? Like how is that even possible, you know? And the answer has to do with what we call the urban agglomeration effect. What's really valuable is human relationships, proximity to other human beings, those dense networks of human beings. And so the idea is not necessarily that like, in a certain sense, the issue is that land is not an indistinguishable, fungible commodity. Location really matters. Or America has a finite amount of land, but it might as well be an infinite plane. We're not going to fill up every square inch of America for probably thousands of years if we ever do, right? But what is scarce is specific locations. They're non-fungible, you know? And to a certain extent, it's like, okay, if you don't want to live in New York, you can live in San Francisco or any other like big city. But what makes New York New York is non-fungible What makes San Francisco San Francisco is non-fungible That particular cluster of VCs in San Francisco until or unless that city completely explodes and that moves somewhere else to Austin or whatever, you know, at which point, Austin will be non-fungible. I mean, Austin is non-fungible right now. And so the point is that the way Georgism unlocks the abundance of it, let me talk about the frontier. We have done frontier expansion. That is why immigrants came over from Europe, you know, and then eventually the rest of the world, to America to, you know, settle the frontier. And the losers of that equation were, of course, the Indians who were already here and got kicked out. But that was theoriginal idea of America. And I like to say that America's tragedy, America's problem is that America is a country that has the mindset of being a frontier state, but is in fact a state which has lost its frontier. And that is why you have these conversations with people like boomers who are like, why can't the next generation just pull itself up by its bootstraps? Because America has had at least, I would say two major periods of frontier expansion. The first was the actual frontier, the West, the Oregon Trail, the covered wagons, you know, the displacement of the Indians. And so that was a massive time, that was the time in which Henry George was writing, was right when that frontier was closing, right? When all that land, that free land was being taken, and the advantages of that land was now being fully priced in. That is what it means for a frontier to close, is that now the good productive land, the value of it is fully priced in. But when the frontier is open, you can just go out there and take it, and you can get productive land and realize the gains of that. And the second frontier expansion was after Henry George's death, was the invention of the automobile, the ability to have a job in the city, but not have to live in the city. The fact that you could quickly travel in, like I commuted in to visit you here, right? That is because of the automobile frontier opening that has allowed me to live in some other city, but be able to do productive work like this podcast by driving in. But the problem is, sprawl can only take you so far, before that frontier as well closes, and by closes I don't mean suburban expansion stops. What I mean is that now, suburban homes, you fully price in the value of the benefits are able to accrue by having that proximity to a city, but still being able to live over here, through of course, for Ricardo's Law for it. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:22:37: Yeah, but I feel like this is still compatible with the story of, we should just focus on increased in technology and abundance, rather than trying to estimate how much rent is available now, given current status quo technologies. I mean, the car is a great example of this, but imagine if there were like flying cars, right? Like there's a, where's my flying car? There's like a whole analysis in that book about, you know, if you could, if people are still commuting like 20 minutes a day, you know, a lot more land is actually in the same travel distance as was before, and now all this land would be worth as much, even in terms of relationships that you could accommodate, right? So why not just build like flying cars instead of focusing on land rent? Lars Doucet - 00:23:21: Well, because these things have a cost, right? The cost of frontier expansion was murdering all the Indians and the cost of automobile expansion was climate change. You know, there has to be a price for that. And then eventually, the problem is you eventually, when you get to the end of that frontier expansion, you wind up with the same problem we had in the first place. Eventually, the problem is the first generation will make out like gangbusters if we ever invent flying cars, even better like Star Trek matter teleporters. You know, that'll really do it. Then you can really live in Nevada and have a job in New York. Yeah. There are some people who claim that Zoom is this, but it's not, you know, we've seen the empirical effects of that and it's like, it's the weakest like semi-frontier we've had and it's already closed. Because, because of Zoom, houses like this over in Austin have gone up in value because there is demand for them and there's demand for people to telecommute. And so anyone who, so the increased demand for living out in the suburbs is now basically priced in because of the Zoom economy. And so the thing is the first people who did that, who got there really quick, the first people to log in to the ultimate online server were able to claim that pace of the frontier and capture that value. But the next generation has to pay more in rent and more in home prices to get that. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:24:34: Actually, that raises another interesting criticism ofGeorgism, this is actually a paper from Zachary Gouchanar and Brian Kaplan, where it was titled the Cerseioretic critique of Georgism, and the point they made was one of these, like one way of thinking about the improvement to land is actually identifying that this land is valuable. Maybe because you realize it has like an oil well in it and maybe you realize that it's like the perfect proximity to these like Chinese restaurants and this mall and whatever. And then just finding which land is valuable is actually something that takes capital and also takes, you know, like you deciding to upend your life and go somewhere, you know, like all kinds of effort. And that is not factored into the way you would conventionally think of the improvements to land that would not be taxed, right? So in some sense, you getting that land is like a subsidy for you identifying that the land is valuable and can be used to productive ends. Lars Doucet - 00:25:30:Right, yeah, I know. So I've read that paper. So first of all, the first author of that Zachary Gouchanar yeah, I'm not been able to pin him down on what exactly meant on this, but he's made some public statements where he's revised his opinion since writing that paper and that he's much more friendly to the arguments ofGeorgism now than when he first wrote that paper. So I'd like to pin him down and see exactly what he meant by that because it was just a passing comment. But as regards Kaplan's critique, Kaplan's critique only applies to a 100% LVT where you fully capture all of the land value tax. And the most extreme Georgists I know are only advocating for like an 85% land value tax. That would still leave. And Kaplan doesn't account at all for the negative effects of speculation. He's making a speculation is good actually argument. And even if we grant his argument, he still needs to grapple with all the absolutely empirically observed problems of land speculation. And if we want to make some kind of compromise between maybe speculation could have this good discovery effect, there's two really good answers to that. First, just don't do 100% LVT, which we probably can't practically do anyway because of natural limitations just empirically, you know, in the signal. It's like you don't want to do 115% land value tax. That drives people off the land. So we want to make sure that we like have a high land value tax but make sure not to go over. And so that would leave a sliver of land rent that would still presumably incentivize this sort of thing. There's no argument for why 100% of the land rent is necessary to incentivize the good things that Kaplan was talking about. The second argument is when he talks about oil, well, we have the empirical evidence from the Norwegian massively successful petroleum model that shows in the case of natural resources how you should deal with this. And what Norway does is that they have a massive, massively huge severance tax on oil extraction. And according to Kaplan's argument, this should massively destroy the incentive for companies to go out there and discover the oil. And empirically, it doesn't. Now what Norway does is that they figured out, okay, so the oil companies, their argument is that we need the oil rents, right? We need these oil rents where we will not be incentivized for the massive capital cost of offshore oil drilling. Well, Norway's like, well, if you just need to cover the cost of offshore oil drilling, we'll subsidize that. We'll just pay you. We'll just pay you to go discover the oil. But when you find the oil, that oil belongs to the Norwegian people. Now you may keep some of the rents but most of it goes to the Norwegian people. But hey, all your R&D is free. All your discovery is free. If the problem is discovery, we just subsidize discovery. And then the oil companies are like, okay, that sounds like a great deal. We don't have to, because without that, what the oil companies do is that they're like, okay, we're taking all these risks. So I'm gonna sit on all these oil wells like people sitting on domain names because I might use them later and the price might go up later. But now because there's a huge severance tax, you're forced to drill now and you're actually, you're actual costs of discovery and R&D and all those capital costs are just taken care of. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:28:26: But isn't there a flip side to that where I mean, one of the economic benefits of speculation, obviously there's drawbacks. But one of the benefits is that it gets rid of the volatility and prices where our speculator will buy when it's cheap and sell when the price is high. And in doing so, they're kind of making the asset less volatile over time. And if you're basically going to tell people who have oil on their land, like we're gonna keep taxing you. If you don't take it out, you're gonna keep getting taxed. You're encouraging this massive glut of a finite resource to be produced immediately, which is bad. If you think we might need that reserve in the ground 20 years from now or 30 years from now, you know, went oil reserves were running low. Lars Doucet - 00:29:10: Not necessarily, you know? And so the problem is that speculation in the sense you're talking about if like encouraging people to do arbitrage is good for capital because we can make more capital. But we can't make more land and we can't make more non-renewable natural resources. And the issue in peer, and I just think the evidence just doesn't support that empirically because if anything, land speculation has causes land values to just constantly increase, not to find some natural part, especially with how easy it is to finance two thirds of bank loans just chase real estate up. And that's just like, if you just look at the history of the prices of, you know, of residential real estate in America, it's like, it's not this cyclical graph where it like keeps going back down. It keeps going back down, but it keeps going up and up and up, just on a straight line along with productivity. And it underlines and undergirds, major issues, everything that's driving our housing crisis, which then undergirds so much of inequality and pollution and climate change issues. And so with regards to speculations, like even if I just bite that bull and it's like, okay, speculation is good actually, I don't think anyone's made the case that speculators need to capture a hundred percent of the rents to be properly incentivized to do anything good that comes out of speculation. I think at some small reasonable percentage, you know, five to 10 percent of the rents, maybe 15 if I'm feeling generous, but I don't think anyone's empirically made the case that it should be a hundred percent, which is more or less a status quo. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:31:I mean, with regards to that pattern of the fact that the values tend to keep going up implies that there's nothing cyclical that the speculators are dampening. Lars Doucet - 00:30:41: Well, there are cycles to be sure, but it's not like, it's something that resets to zero. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:30:45: Yeah, but that's also true of like the stock market, right? Over time that goes up, but speculators are still have like an economic role to play in a stock market of making sure prices are, Lars Doucet - 00:30:55: I mean, the difference is that people are now paying an ever increasing portion of their incomes to the land sector. And that didn't used to be the case. And if it keeps going, it's going to be, I mean, you have people are now paying 50% of their income just for rent. And that's not sustainable in the long term. You're going to have the cycle you have there is revolution. You know, you, you know, Dwarkesh Patel - 00:31:16: (laughing) Lars Doucet - 00:31:17: I'm serious. like what happens is like you look through history, you either have land reform or you have revolution. And you know, it's, it's either like either you have a never ending cycle of, of, of transfers of income from the unlanded to the landed. And eventually the, the unlanded will not put up with that. You know, there was a real chance in the 19th century, at the end of the 19th century of America going full on socialist or communist and the only thing that saved us. What, and George's argument was like, it's either Georgism or communism. And if you want to save capitalism and not go toTotalitarian, we need Georgismand then what George failed to anticipate was, you, of course, the automobile. And the automobile kicked the can down another generation, another couple generations, right? And it came at the cost of sprawl. And that made everyone feel like we had solved the issue. But basically we just, and the cost of sprawl are enormous in terms of pollution and poor land use. Just look at Houston right now, right? But now we've come at the end of that frontier and now we're at the same question. And it's like, you see this research in interest in leftism in America and that's not a coincidence, right? Because the rent is too damn high and poor people and poor people and young people feel really, really shoved out of the promise and social contract that was given to their parents and they're jealous of it and they're wondering where it went. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:32:36: Yeah, yeah. Actually, you just mentioned that a lot of bank loans are given basically so you can like get a mortgage and get a house that's like towards land. There was an interesting question on Twitter that I thought was actually pretty interesting about this. I can't find the name of the person who asked it. So sorry, I can't give you credit, but they basically asked if that's the case and if most bank loans are going towards helping you buy land that's like artificially more expensive, but now you implement a land value tax and all these property values crash. Oh yeah. Well, when we see just, and then all these mortgages are obviously they can't pay them back. Lars Doucet - 00:33:13: Right, right, right. Are we gonna destroy the banking sector? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:33:15: Exactly. We'll have like a great, great depression.Lars Doucet - 00:33:17: Well, I mean, if you, okay, so like this is, this is kind of like, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to compare landlords to slave owners or something, but it's like, it's like the South had an entire economy based off of slavery. This thing that like we now agree was bad, right? And it's like we shouldn't have kept slavery because the, the South, the, like it really disrupted the Southern Economy when we got rid of slavery, but it was still the right thing to do. And so I mean, there is no magic button I could push as much as I might like to do so that will give us 100% land value tax everywhere in America tomorrow. So I think the actual path towards a Georgist Future is gonna have to be incremental. There'll be enough time to unwind all those investments and get to a more sane banking sector. So I mean, like if we were to go overnight, yeah, I think there would be some shocks in the banking sector and I can't predict what those would be, but I also don't think that's a risk that's actually gonna happen. Because like we just, we just cannot make a radical change like that on all levels overnight. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:34:13: Yeah yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's get back to some of these theoretical questions. One I had was, I guess I don't fully understand the theoretical reason for thinking that you can collect arbitrarily large rents. Why doesn't the same economic principle of competition, I get that there's not infinite landowners, but there are multiple landowners in any region, right? So if for the same reason that profit is competed away in any other enterprise, you know, if one landowner is extracting like $50 a profit a month, and another landowner is extracting, you know, like whatever, right? Like a similar amount of $50. One of them, and they're both competing for the same tenant. One of them will decrease their rent so that the tenant will come to them and the other one will do the same and the bidding process continues until all the profits are, you know,bidded away. Lars Doucet - 00:35:04: Right, so this is Ricardo's law front, right? And there's a section on in the book with a bunch of illustrations you can show. And so the issue is that we can't make more land, right? And so you might be like, well, there's plenty of land in Nevada, but the point is there's only so much land in Manhattan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:35:19: But the people who have land inManhattan, why aren't they competing against themselves or each other? Lars Doucet - 00:35:23: Right, well, what they do is because the nature of the scarcity of there's only so many locations in Manhattan and there's so many people who want to live there, right? And so all the people who want to live there have to outbid each other. And so basically, so like, let me give a simple agricultural example model. And then I will explain how the agricultural model translates to a residential model. Basically, when you are paying to live in an urban area, or even a suburban area like here in Austin, what you're actually paying for is the right to have proximity to realize the productive capacity of that location. IE, I want to live in Austin because I can have access to a good job, you know what I mean? Or whatever is cool about Austin, a good school, those amenities. And the problem is you have to pay for those and you have to outbid other people who are willing to pay for those. And Ricardo's Rolf Rent says that the value of the amenities and the productivity of an area, as it goes up, that gets soaked into the land prices. And the mechanism by that is that it's like, okay, say I want to buy a watermelon, right? And there's only one watermelon left out bid that guy. But the watermelon growers can be like, oh, a lot of people want watermelon. So next season, there's going to be more watermelons because he's going to produce more watermelons. But because there's only so many locations in Austin, you know, within the natural limits of our transportation network, basically it forces the competition on the side of the people who are, essentially the tenants, right? It forces us into one side of competition with each other. And that, and so there's an example of like, a simple agricultural example is like, okay, say there is a common field that anyone can work on and you can make 100 units of wealth if you work on it, right? So, and there's another field that you can also learn 100 units of wealth in, but it's owned by a landowner. Why would you, why would you go and work on the landowners when you're going to have to pay them rent? You wouldn't pay them any rent at all. You would work on the field that's free, but if the landowner buys that field and now your best opportunity is a field that's only worth a free field that will produce 10 units of wealth, now he can charge you 90 units of wealth becauseyou have no opportunity to go anywhere else. And so basically as more land gets bought and subject to private ownership in an area, landowners over time get to increase the rent, not to a maximum level, there are limits to it. And the limits is what's called the margin of production, which is basically you can charge up to, and this is where the competition comes in, the best basic like free alternative, you know, and that's usually, you can realize that geographically, like out on the margins of Austin, there's marginal land that basically is available for quite cheap, you know, and it might be quite far away, and it used to be not so quite far away 20, 30 years ago, you know, and so as that margin slowly gets privatized, landowners can charge up to that margin. The other limit is subsistence, that can't charge more than you're actually able to pay, but the basic example is that, so this is why this is how frontier expansion works. When the entire continent's free, the first settler comes in, strikes a pick in the ground, keeps all of their wealth, but as more and more of it gets consolidated, then landowners are able to charge proportionately more until they're charging essentially up to subsistence. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:38:51: Yeah, does that explain property values in San Francisco? I mean, they are obviously very high, but I don't feel like they're that high where this offer engineers were working at Google or living as subsistence levels, neither are they at the margin of reduction where it's like, this is what it would cost to live out in the middle of California, and then commute like three hours to work or something. Lars Doucet - 00:39:13: Right, well, so it has to do with two things. So first of all, it's over the long run, and so it's like, you've had a lot of productivity booms in San Francisco, right? And so it takes some time for that to be priced in, you know, and it can be over a while, but given a long enough time period it'll eventually get there. And then when we're talking about stuff, it's also based off of the average productivity. The average resident of San Francisco is maybe not as productive as a high, and like basically doesn't earn as high an income necessarily as a high income product worker. And so this means that if you are a higher than productive, higher than average productivity person, it's worth it to live in the expensive town because you're being paid more than the average productivity that's captured in rent, right? But if you're a low, if you're lower than average productivity, you flee high productive areas. You go to more marginal areas because those are the only places you can basically afford to make a living. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:40:06: Okay, that's very interesting. That's actually one of the questions I was really curious about. So I'm glad to hear an answer on that. Another one is, so the idea is, you know, land is soaking up the profits that capitalists and laborers are entitled to in the form of rent. But when I look at the wealthiest people in America, yeah, there's people who own a lot of land, but they bought that land after they became wealthy from doing things that were capital or labor, depending on how you define starting a company. Like sure, Bill Gates owns a lot of land in Montana or whatever, but like the reason he has all that wealth to begin with is because he started a company, you know, that's like basically labor or capital,however you define it? Right. So how do you explain the fact that all the wealthy people are, you know, capitalists or laborers? Lars Doucet - 00:40:47: Well, so the thing is, one of the big missed apprehensions people have is that, when they think of billionaires, they think of people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, those are actually the minority billionaires, most billionaires or hedge funds are people involved in hedge funds. You know, bankers and what are bankers, most what are two thirds of banks? It's real estate, you know? And so, but more to your point, like if I, if it is like point that directly into it, it's like, I don't necessarily have a problem with the billionaire existing. You know what I mean? If someone like genuinely like bring something new into the world and like, you know, I don't necessarily buy the narrative that like billionaires are solely responsible for everything that comes out of their company, you know, I think they like to present that image. But I don't necessarily have a problem with a billionaire existing. I have a problem with, you know, working class people not being able to feed their families, you know, and so like the greater issue is the fact that the rent is too high rather than that Jeff Bezos is obscenely rich. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:41:45:No, no, I guess my point was in that, like, I'm not complaining that your solution would not fix the fact that billionaires are this. I also like that there's billionaires. What I'm pointing out is it's weird that, if you're theory of, like, where all the sort of plus in our society is getting, you know, given away is that it's going to landowners. And yet the most wealthy people in our society are not landowners. Doesn't that kind of contradict your theory? Lars Doucet - 00:42:11: Well, a lot of the wealthy people in our society are landowners, right? And it's just like, it's not the, so the, so the thing is is that basically making wealth off land is a way to make wealth without being productive, right? And so my point is is that, so like you said in your interview with Glazer that it's like, okay, the Googleplex, like the value of that real estate is probably not, you know, compared that to like the market cap of Google. But now compare the value of all the real estate in San Francisco to the market caps to some of those companies in there, you know, look at the people who are charging rent to people who work for Google. That's where the money's actually going, is that, and, and, you know, investors talk about this is that it's like, I have to, like, if you earn $100,000 in San Francisco as a family of four, you are below the poverty line, right? You know, the money is going to basically upper middle class Americans and upper class Americans who own tons of residential land and are basically, and also the old and the wealthy, especially, are essentially this entire class of kind of hidden landed gentry that are extracting wealth from the most productive people in America and young people, especially. And, and it is creates really weird patterns, especially with like service workers who can't afford to live in the cities where their work is demanded. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:43:30: Yeah. Okay. So what do you think of this take? This might be economically efficient. In fact, I think it probably is economically efficient, but the effect of the land value tax would be to shift, to basically shift our sort of societal subsidy away from upper middle class people who own, happen to own land in urban areas and shift that to the super wealthy and also super productive people who will like control the half acre that Google owns and like mountain view. So it's kind of like a subsidy, not subsidy, but it's easing the burden on super productive companies like Google and so that they can make even cooler products in the future. But it is in some sense that's a little aggressive, you're going from upper middle class to like, you know, tech billionaire, right? But it's still be economically efficient to do that. Lars Doucet - 00:44:18: Well, no, I don't quite agree with that because it's like, although there are a lot of upper middle class Americans who own a lot of the land wealth, it's not the case that they own where the majority of the land wealth is. The majority of the land wealth in urban areas is actually in commercial real estate. Is the central business district, if you, and I work in mass appraisal, so I've seen this myself in the models we build is that if you look at the transactions in cities and then you plot where the land value is and like a graph, it looks like this. And this is the city center and that's not a residential district. So the residential districts are sucking up a lot of land value and the rent is toodamn high. But the central business district and this even holds even in the age of Zoom, it's taken a tumble, but it's starting from a very high level. That central residential, I'm not residential, but commercial real estate is super valuable. Like orders, like an order of magnitude more valuable than a lot of the other stuff. And a lot of it is very poorly used.In Houston especially, it's incredibly poorly used. We have all these central parking lots downtown. That is incredibly valuable real estate. And just a couple of speculators are just sitting on it, doing nothing with it. And that could be housing, that could be offices, that could be amenities, that could be a million sorts of things. And so when you're talking about a land value tax, those are the people who are going to get hit first. And those are people who are neither nice, nice, friendly upper middle class Americans, nor are they hardworking industrialists making cool stuff. They're people who are doing literally nothing. Now, if you do a full land value tax, yeah, it's going to shift the burden in society somewhat. But I feel that most analyses of property taxes and land value taxes that conclude that they are regressive, I think that's mostly done on the basis of our current assessments. And I feel like our assessments could be massively approved and that if we improve the assessments, we can show where most of our land values actually concentrated. And then we can make decisions about exactly, are we comfortable with these tax shifts? Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:18: Yeah, yeah. Hey guys, I hope you're enjoying the conversation so far. If you are, I would really, really appreciate it if you could share the episode with other people who you think might like it. Put the episode in a group chat you have with your friends, post it on Twitter, send it to somebody who think might like it. All of those things helps that a ton. Anyways, back to the conversation. So a while back I read this book, how Asia works. You know,Lars Doucet - 00:46:45: I'm a fan. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:46:47: Yeah, and one of the things, I think Joseph Steadwell was going out there, what are the things he talks about is he's trying to explain why some Asian economies grew, gangbusters in the last 20th century. And one of the things he points to is that these economies implemented land reform were basically, I guess they were distributed land away from, I guess the existing aristocracy and gentry towards the people who are like working the land. And while I was reading the book at the time, I was kind of confused because, you know, we've like, there's something called like the Kostian. The Kostian, I forget the name of the argument. Basically, the idea is, regardless of who initially starts off with a resource, the incentive of that person will be to, for him to like give that resource, lend out that resource to be worked by that person who can make most productive use of it. And instead of what was pointing out that these like small, you know, like these peasant farmers basically, they will pay attention to detail of crop rotation and making the maximum use of this land to get like the maximum produce. Whereas if you're like a big landowner, you will just like try to do something mechanized. It's not nearly as effective. And in a poor country, what you have is a shitton of labor. So you want something that's like labor intensive. Anyways, backing up a bit, I was confused while I was reading the book because I was like, well, wouldn't the, wouldn't, what you would expect to happen in a market that basically the peasants get alone from the bank to work to, I guess, rent out that land. And then they are able to make that land work more productively than the original landowner. Therefore, they are able to like make a profit and everybody benefits basically. Why isn't there a co-scient solution to that? Lars Doucet - 00:48:24: Because any improvement that the peasants make to the land will be a signal to the landowner to increase the rent because of Ricardo's law of rent. Yep. And that's exactly what happened in Ireland when, and George talks about this in progress and poverty, is that a lot of people were like, why was there famine in Ireland? It's because the Irish are bad people. Why didn't they, they're lazy? Why didn't they improve? And it's like because if you improve the land, all that happens is you still are forced into one side of competition and the rent goes out. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:48:50: Yep. OK. That makes sense. Is the goal that the taxes you would collect with the land value tax? Are they meant to replace existing taxes or are they meant to give us more services like UBI? Because they probably can't do both, right? Like you either have to choose getting rid of existing taxes or getting more.. Lars Doucet - 00:49:08: Well, it depends how much UBI you want. You know what I mean? It's like you can, you know, it's a sliding skill. It's like how many taxes do you want to replace versus how much? Like, I mean, you can have a budget there. It's like if you can raise, you know, I show in the book the exact figures of how much I think land value tax could raise. And I forget the exact figures, but like you can pull up a graph and overlay it here of, you know, whether you're talking about the federal level or federal local and state, you know, there's $44 trillion of land value in America. And I believe we can raise about $4 trillion in land rents annually with 100% land value tax. And we would probably do less than that in practice. But even on the low end, I forget what figure I quote for the low end, like you could fully pay for any one of social security, Medicare plus Medicaid together, so the second one is healthcare or defense. Entirely with the lowest estimate of what I think land rents could raise. And then I think you can actually raise more than that because I think, and I give an argument in the book for why I think it's closer to like $4 trillion. And that could pay for all three and have room over for a little bit of extra. And so I mean, it's up to you, like, that's a policy decision of whether you want to spend it on spending, whether you want to spend it on offsetting taxes or whether you want to spend it on UBI. I think the best political solution, because like if I bite the bullet that there might be some regressivity issues left over, you want to do what's called a UBI or what, you know, in George's time was called a citizen's dividend, right? You know, this will smooth over any remaining regressivity issues. And then, but I very much am in favor of getting rid of some of these worst taxes, you know, not just because they have dead weight loss and land value tax doesn't, but also because there's this tantalizing theory called ATCORE- All taxes come out of rent, which suggests that if you reduce other taxes, it increases land values, which means that if it's true in the strongest sense, it means the single tax,right? Land value tax replaced all taxes would always work. And I'm not sure if I buy that, I want to see some empirical evidence, but I think at least some weak form of it holds, so that when you offset other worst taxes, not only do you get rid of the dead weight loss from those, but you also wind up raising at least a little bit more in land value tax revenue. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:51:20: Yes, yeah. I mean, as a libertarian, or I guess somebody who has like libertarian tendencies, my concern would basically be like, this obviously seems better than our current regime of taxing things that are good, basically capital income. But my concern is the way I'm guessing something like this would be implemented is it would be added on top of rather than repealing those taxes. And then, yeah, I guess like we would want to ensure. Lars Doucet - 00:51:44: I get this one a lot. Yeah, no. And so I have, you know, I've been a libertarian in my past, and I have a soft spot for libertarianism. I used to be a Ron Paul guy, I went back in the day for a hot minute. And so I think the thing to suede your concerns there is what is land value tax? It's property tax without a tax on buildings. Yep. So the natural path to actually getting land value tax comes from reforming existing property tax regimes by reducing an entire category of taxation, which is the tax on buildings. And so that's what I think is the most plausible way to get a land value tax, like in Texas here, if we were to start by just capture the same, like what I actually proposed for our first step is not 100% land value tax federally. I don't know, even know how you get to there. I think what you actually do is you start in places like Texas and like here, legalized split-rate property tax, thus, re-tax buildings and land at separate rates, set the rate on buildings to zero, collect the same dollar amount of taxes. Let's start there. There's proposals to do this in various cities around the nation right now. I think there's one in Virginia. There's a proposal to do in Detroit. I think there's some talk of it in Pennsylvania and some places. And I'd like to see those experiments run and observe what happens there. I think we should do it in Texas. And that would be something that I think would be very friendly to the libertarian mindset, because very clearly we're no new revenue, right? And we're exempting an entire category of taxation. Most people are gonna see savings on their tax bill and the people who own those parking lots downtown in Houston are gonna be paying most of the bill. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:53:14: Yeah, by the way, what do you make of, is there a good, Georgist's critique of government itself? In a sense that government is basically the original land squatter and it's basically charging the rest of us rents or staying on rent that. It's neither productively improving. As much as at least it's getting rents or must work. Like if you think about, even your landlord usually is not charging you 40%, which is what the income tax rate is in America, right? And it's like almost, you can view the land lord of America. Lars Doucet - 00:53:46: Well, I mean, it's like, I mean, if you wanna take the full, like if you're asking is Georgism compatible with full anarcho capitalist libertarianism, probably not 100%, I think we can have a little government as a treat. But I think it's not a coincidence that if you look throughout America's founding, I don't think it's a coincidence that originally, like people talk about it's like, oh, it used to be only white men who could vote. White land-owning men could vote. Like a government by the landowners for the landowners of the landowners, right? And that's very much kind of the traditional English system of government, just neo-feudalism, right? And so I think Georgism certainly has a critique of that, that it's like government is often instituted to protect the interests of landowners. But what's interesting is that if you look throughout history, I'm very much a fan of democracy, rule of the people. And it's like, I think we, you know, I kind of sympathize with Milton Friedman here, where he's like, you know, he might want to have less government than we have now, but he doesn't believe we can have no government. And then he goes on to endorse, you know, the land value taxes, the least worse tax, because income tax especially, I feel like is a gateway drug to the surveillance state, you know, one of the advantages of land value taxes you don't even care necessarily who owns the land. You're just like, hey, 4732 Apple Street, make sure the check shows up in the mail. I don't care how many shell companies in the Bahamas, you've like obscured your identity with, just put the check in the mail, Mr. Address, you know, whereas the income tax needs to do this full anal probe on everyone in the country, and then audits the poor at a higher rate than the rich, and it's just this horrible burden we have, and then it'll, it gives the government this kind of presumed right to know what you're doing about everything you're doing in this massive invasion of privacy.Dwarkesh Patel - 00:55:42: Yeah, no, that's fascinating. I speak to you, I have shell companies in the Bahamas, by the way. Yes. There's an interesting speculation about what would happen if crypto really managed to divorce and private, I guess, make private your log of transactions or whatever. And then, I guess the idea is the only legible thing left to the government is land, right? So it would like force the government to institute a land value tax, because like you can't tax income or capital gains anymore, that's all on like the blockchain and the right, right? It's cured in some way. And yeah, yeah, so that, I mean, it's like crypto the gateway drug to George's own, because it'll just move income and capital to the other realm. Lars Doucet - 00:56:20: Yeah, it's just so weird. I've gone on record as being a pretty big crypto skeptic. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people get into Georgism home. I mean, not the least of which is Vitalik Buterin and you endorse my book, who's a huge fan of Georgism home. It's like, I'll take fans from anywhere, even from people I've had sparring contests with. I'm generally pretty skeptical that crypto can fulfill all its promises. I am excited by those promises, and if they can prove me wrong, that would be great. And I think there's some logic to what you're saying is that if we literally couldn't track transactions, then I mean, I guess we don't have much the tracks accept land. I don't think that'll actually come to pass just based off of recent events. You know, and that's basically my position on it. But I have noticed a lot of crypto people, just they're some of the easiest people to convince about George's home, which was completely surprising to me. But I've learned a lot by talking to them. It's very interesting and weird. Yeah, yeah. Dwarkesh Patel - 00:57:16: So there was some other interesting questions from Twitter. Ramon Dario Iglesias asks, how do you transition from a world today where many Americans have homes where it really starts sparring to have homes to a world where, I mean, obviously, it would be like a different regime. They might still have homes, but who knows? Like, their property will be just be like, think I thought I'm going to complete a different way. How do you transition to that? Like, what would that transition look like for most Americans? Lars Doucet - 00

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Joshua Brown Chapter plans Nov. 12 memorial ceremony

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 1, 2022 1:52

The Joshua D. Brown Chapter of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas met on Oct. 24, and welcomed Ann Jossefy Hunn as the first speaker of the year. Her topic was “How the Texas Navy Saved Texas.” Ann's ancestors arrived in Texas in 1830 and have played significant roles in developing and strengthening Texas. Her great-great-greatgrandfather, Samuel Rhoads Fisher, was the first secretary of the Texas Navy during the Republic era, appointed by Sam Houston. Fisher also signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and helped write the Texas Constitution. Ann is committed to educating more people about the vital...Article Link

SLi Students Wrestle with SOGI Issues

The Journey: PCA Parent Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2022 21:15

Guest: The Honorable Matt Shaheen, Texas State Representative, District 66 Student Leadership Institute (SLi) is a leadership training program for Upper School students to train our students how to think critically, engage and debate ideas, and present their solutions to an audience. Each year we select a current cultural issue and this year our PCA students are wrestling with SOGI (Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity) issues. We selected this topic because of the prevelence of this issue in our culture, and one example is the narrative of the parental rights law passed in Florida that the media dubbed the “Don't Say Gay” bill. Here is an article from the Washington Post on this legislative initiative - notice how a bill meant to protect children from LGBTQ indoctrination has a headline that is more worried about how this bill might “limit discussion” on these issues. The Texas Legislative Session will begin in January 2023 and run through May. The Texas Constitution limits the legislative session to 140 days every two years, although the Governor may call as many Special Sessions and reconvene the legislators as needed to complete the work of the state. If you want to find out who represents you in the Texas Legislature, visit Who Represents Me? Site, put in your address, and they will tell you who your elected representatives are for your location. For the actual story on the young woman influenced by her school to transition genders, check out the BreakPoint article by John Stonestreet. Thank you to Jared Wood for allowing The Journey to use his incredible musical gifts and talents as our intro and outro for this podcast. Check out his music at JaredWoodMusic.

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OA622: Will Alex Jones' Damages Be Capped by Texas Law?

Opening Arguments

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 16, 2022 60:32

The unfortunate answer is... yes. BUT. There may be a one weird trick that actually could sidestep this! Listen in for the breakdown and why there is a sliver of hope on this really terrible nonsense. After that, we talk about our Matthew Hoh interview and the response we have gotten. Links: Texas bill, More TX statutes, Texas Constitution, Hanna v. Sweeney, 78 Conn. 492, NCSBE certified GP as a political party, new Demw lawsuit

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Tuesday Red Pill Diaries-Texas GOP Votes To Texit As The Utter Declaration Of Dependence Dawns

Mike Church Presents-The Red Pill Diaries Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 21, 2022 13:32

HEADLINE: TNM Moves Closer To Making A TEXIT Vote The Official Position of the Republican Party of Texas by TNM Admin The two planks read as follows: 33. State Sovereignty: Pursuant to Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution, the federal government has impaired our right of local self-government. Therefore, federally mandated legislation that infringes upon the 10th Amendment rights of Texas should be ignored, opposed, refused, and nullified. Texas retains the right to secede from the United States, and the Texas Legislature should be called upon to pass a referendum consistent thereto. 224. Texas Independence: We urge the Texas Legislature to pass a bill in its next session requiring a referendum in the 2023 general election for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation. Every time we go to the ballot box, WE lose. #VoteHarder Our parish has sold its soul to the devil - St Tammany Parish If a developer comes here and says I'm going to kill 2,000 children in 5 years but in those 5 years I will make your parish rich - they will do it! If you are a Christian and you live in Christendom you have the best advocate fo all, Jesus Christ. QUESTION: What do you citizens of Texas think you have to lose? TEXAS has been ground zero for a ground that hasn't really been fought yet. Who is an alien enemy and who is a alien friend. QUESTION: Can the US conscript a naturalized citizen of Honduras and compel them into it's army? This is how you determine citizenship into countries. The people that swam the river to enter illegally, you cannot be conscripted, via our draft, to fight in our military. Now that is different for militias. Citizens of TEXAS can call up their own militia.

Juneteenth (RE-AIR)

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2022 78:26

We first cover what was going on in the nation before the emancipation proclamation, then zoom in on Texas specifically and what the culture was like, share some stories from the past, and tie the throughline to why and how people celebrate Juneteenth.Bob White story perspective:https://hauntedconroe.com/murder-in-the-courtroom/Great book on Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed:https://www.amazon.com/Juneteenth-Annette-Gordon-Reed/dp/1631498835/ref=nodl_Texas Constitution 1824 - 1876:https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/republic-texas-1836/general-provisionsFor bonus content, full interviews, and the ability to vote for future topics, $5/month supports us at patreon.com/blackhistoryforwhitepeople.Check us out on Twitter @BHforWP and Instagram @BlackHistoryForWhitePeople or freel free to email us at hello@blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/black-history-for-white-people/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The South Will Step on Its Own D*ck Again: The Myth of the Lost Cause and the Neo-Confederates

The Not Your Grandmother's Book Club Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 1, 2022 88:21

This week we take a look at another persistent myth of American society the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy, which like “American Exceptionalism” “meritocracy” and the “protestant work ethic” remain strong cultural beliefs despite all evidence directly to the contrary. Indeed, this week we take a deep dive into one of the primary GOP platform positions, that of the glory of the south and the desperate struggler to maintain the mythical white supremacy so many of these people hearken back to. To be clear, the U.S. Civil war was instigated and started because of slavery, and if you believe otherwise you are either an idiot or a white supremacist. The lost cause narrative, however, exists not only to lie about and cloud the reasons for the war, the treatment of slaves, and the reasons why the South lost the war, but also to re-write the ensuing hundred-plus years of racial segregation and terror aimed at African Americans. However, as anyone with a brain could tell you, “Heritage not Hate” doesn't mean much when your heritage IS hate. This week we look at some of the arguments pushed by the peddlers of the lost cause, as well as some of the modern figures most closely associated with the movement, particularly the “League of the South” a white supremacist hate group founded in the 90s which exists for the purpose of accomplishing the secession of the Southern United states and the establishment of a white supremacist theocratic nation. Thanks as always for listening and enjoy the show! Become a patron at patreon.com/NYGBCpod Find this episode on our website at NYGBCpod.com Follow us on twitter at @NYGBCpod Show Links: You can catch video of the Burkman/Wohl con-attempt from a journalist who was on the scene Ford Fischer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1528770106565840897?s=20&t=hGBIQ3F6KNsqexk9waIUBQ South Carolina Declaration of Secession 1860 Article 8 of the Texas Constitution of 1866 Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy – Southern Poverty Law Center Article on the Slave Renting system in the Old South – Proquest – Courtney Suciu Misconceptions about race, slavery and the civil war – Rex Springston – Virginia Mercury “Did Black People Own Slaves?” Henry Louis Gates Jr. – The Root SPLC Extremist File Michael Tubbs SPLC “Neo-Confederate” SPLC Extremist Profile “League of the South” SPLC designated hate group. SPLC List of other Neo-Confederate groups

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Homestead exemption goes up from $25K to $40K

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Play Episode Listen Later May 17, 2022 2:58

Texas homeowners may see some relief from higher property appraisals. The homestead exemption has increased from ,000 to ,000, following voter approval May 7 of an amendment to the Texas Constitution, raising the homestead exemption. Although the measure only passed this month, its effect is retroactive and the exemption actually became effective Jan. 1, 2022. The exemption applies to the 2022 tax year, across the entire state of Texas. Tax bills in October will reflect the new homestead amount. According to information from the Wilson County Appraisal District, a buyer may file for a homestead exemption immediately after closing, even...Article Link

Vote Saturday in local elections, constitutional amendment proposals; five polling locations in Wilson County

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Play Episode Listen Later May 5, 2022 2:21

Election Day for local city council and school board places, along with two proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution, is this Saturday, May 7. (View election day coverage: click here) On the ballot for area voters: Falls City ISD, at-large, Robert Hons, BJ Sekula, and Russell Kowalik Floresville mayor, Cissy Gonzalez-Dippel and Juan Ortiz; and city council Place 2, Gloria Martinez and Terry Rolland St. Hedwig City Coun-cil, Place 2, Russell Beck and Ellen T. Swetman Stockdale ISD, District 2, Craig Clancy, Ernest “Ernie Gonzales, and Sherry D. Lambeck; , District 5, Teri Dugi and Charles “Chuck” Scribner; and District...Article Link

Early voting ends for May 7 elections

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Play Episode Listen Later May 3, 2022 1:12

Voter interest in local elections May 7 appears mixed, based on totals of ballots cast in advance of Election Day. Totals for April 25-29 — the first five days of early voting, which ended May 3 — are as follows for these government entities: •Floresville City Council: 242 •Stockdale Independent School District: 70 votes •Stockdale — A referendum on the sale of the natural gas utility: 16 votes. In addition, 642 voters cast ballots in Wilson County in a statewide referendum on two proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution. Voting totals for Falls City Independent School District and St. Hedwig...Article Link

Texas voters: register by April 7 to vote in May 7 elections

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Play Episode Listen Later Mar 31, 2022 5:08

Secretary Scott Reminds Texas Voters to Register by April 7 to Vote in May 7 Constitutional Amendment, Local Elections AUSTIN — Texas Secretary of State John Scott today is reminding all eligible Texas voters who have not already done so to register to vote by Thursday, April 7 to vote in the May 7 statewide Constitutional Amendment election, as well as local elections for municipalities, school districts and other local entities holding elections. While not every local entity holds elections on May 7, every Texas county will be holding elections on two proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution approved by the 87th Texas Legislature during...Article Link

Canvassing the votes

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Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2021 0:44

Wilson County Auditor Brenda Treviño folds up the adding-machine tape Nov. 9 after checking vote totals from the Nov. 2 general election one more time. County commissioners canvassed the votes, thereby making the returns reported the night after the election official. Statewide, voters approved all eight proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution, but a majority of Wilson County opposed Proposition 2, which will give counties more latitude in financing transportation or infrastructure projects. Only 2,278 ballots were cast in Wilson County.Article Link

WiseUp on the Ballot for the Nov 2, 2021 Election

WiseUp TX

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 22, 2021 16:47

Hey friends! Early voting is happening right now thru October 29, and election day is Nov 2nd. What are we voting on? Amendments to the Texas Constitution, plus there could be some local elections and local propositions on your ballot. Tune into this short episode and learn about the 8 Propositions amend the Texas Constitution that you will find on your ballot. Punam Kaji and Areeba Amer break it all down in less than 20 minutes. WiseUp TX is a nonpartisan nonprofit and does not endorse any candidate or political party. Learn more about WiseUp TX here.

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Monday with Angela Smith

The Matt Long Show

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 18, 2021 45:36

Proposed Amendments to Texas Constitution. Early voting is starting!

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Protecting the Power Grid; Redistricting Special Session Wraps Tuesday

Lone Star Politics

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 17, 2021 20:55

The chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission explains what's being done to protect the state's power grid as the weather starts to cool down, Rudy Bush of The Dallas Morning News reviews the Texas Legislature's special session on redistricting, which concludes on Tuesday, and University of Texas government professor Zach Elkins previews the proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution on the ballot this fall.

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Does the Heartbeat Act violate the "Open Courts Clause" of the Texas Constitution?

Coale Mind

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 3, 2021 7:11

A few weeks ago, I considered whether the new Texas abortion statute, the "Texas Heartbeat Act," violated the "Separation of Powers" Clause of the Texas Constitution of 1876. This week I examined whether the Heartbeat Act may violate the "Open Courts Clause," another unique feature of the 1876 state constitution, which also has no direct equivalent in the U.S. Constitution. While the application of that clause to the Act would raise some novel questions, the near-shutdown of abortion services in Texas over the last month suggests that the practical effect of the Act has been to deny the constitutional guarantee of "open courts" to providers--who would otherwise seek to defend the legality of the services they offer.

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Register to vote now for Nov. 2 election

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Play Episode Listen Later Sep 28, 2021 0:50

Wilson County voters will go to the polls Tuesday, Nov. 2, on eight proposed amendments to the Texas Constitution. To be eligible to vote, county residents must be registered by Monday, Oct. 4. Mail-in ballots may be requested through Friday, Oct. 22; these are due to elections officials by Nov. 2 at 7 p.m. Early voting begins Monday, Oct. 18, and will end Friday, Oct. 29. Watch for more information on the proposed amendments and voting places and times in coming issues of the Wilson County News. reader@wcn-online.comArticle Link

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Does the Heartbeat Act violate the Texas Constitution?

Coale Mind

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 8, 2021 8:41

Building on an insightful op-ed in today's Boston Globe about the Supreme Court's 1981 Grendel's Den case, this episode considers whether the Heartbeat Act's delegation of enforcement authority to millions of private citizens may violate the Texas Constitution's separation-of-powers clause -- a clause that does not appear in the U.S. Constitution.

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Austin Daily Drop - Thursday September 2, 2021

The Austin Daily Drop

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 2, 2021 9:06

The new Texas vigilantism-fueled abortion law shocks the nation. Details are released on the 5-4 vote in the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied an emergency appeal against the law, which primarily affects women who lack the economic means to travel out of state for abortion services on their own. "Self-managed" abortion is likely to see a rise. U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to speak on health care access in Austin today alongside U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett. A pair of Texas State Senators, including Austin's Sarah Eckhardt, have filed a lawsuit claiming that Republican plans to handle redistricting during another special Lege session are in violation of the Texas Constitution. Local COVID: our new hospitalization rate drops, but our death rate rises, while several area school districts are resorting to shutdowns to stem outbreaks, and Austin Public Health issues a fresh advisory for COVID patients not to self-treat with livestock deworming drugs - while Austin-based podcaster Joe Rogan claims he has recently done just that. A City program to re-house people experiencing homelessness has completed its first phase. With simultaneous events coming up, can Texas Longhorns football and Austin FC soccer co-exist? Austin Business Journal analyzes the Texas private space flight industry. Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ is bringing big fat burgers to Buda. And at the tail end of what's been a cooler than normal summer, we could see triple digits over Labor Day weekend.

#110 Return of Texas Tuesday!

According to Kallas

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 17, 2021 28:56

As a RP Republican; I struggle with how is the best way to protect and improve Texas at the same time. I struggle with the constant let down by the people we have supported to get in a position that they might do this on our behalf. I value Liberty and The Texas Constitution, what can be done? The answer has always been the primaries. Now the right answer and the right race has been shared with me. Please give this a listen and respond. If you agree share it. We can make this happen.

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Juneteenth

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 16, 2021 78:26

We first cover what was going on in the nation before the emancipation proclamation, then zoom in on Texas specifically and what the culture was like, share some stories from the past, and tie the throughline to why and how people celebrate Juneteenth.Bob White story perspective:https://hauntedconroe.com/murder-in-the-courtroom/Great book on Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed:https://www.amazon.com/Juneteenth-Annette-Gordon-Reed/dp/1631498835/ref=nodl_Texas Constitution 1824 - 1876:https://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/constitutions/republic-texas-1836/general-provisionsFor bonus content, full interviews, and the ability to vote for future topics, $5/month supports us at patreon.com/blackhistoryforwhitepeople.Check us out on Twitter @BHforWP and Instagram @BlackHistoryForWhitePeople or freel free to email us at hello@blackhistoryforwhitepeople.com.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/black-history-for-white-people/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

You can’t shut us down: T&D HR 1

The Todd and Don Show on News Radio KLBJ 2019

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 12, 2021 39:49

EastVillage, a $1 billion development in Northeast Austin, is set to begin apartment construction, Parler sues Amazon over server shutdown, and demonstrators called for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to resign, and if he doesn’t, he could be impeached under Article 15 of the Texas Constitution. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Appeals, Jury Trials, and the Texas Constitution | Bill Chriss

Texas Appellate Law Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 17, 2020 51:33

Bill Chriss is truly a Renaissance man. A lifelong learner with degrees that include a Ph.D, Bill’s interests range across history, politics, law, and ethics. Bill’s recent research interest focuses on the Texas Constitution, both its origin and evolution. Bill sits down with Todd Smith and Jody Sanders and traces his career journey—from working as a trial lawyer handling his own appeals to becoming an appellate lawyer, with a stop along the way at the Texas Center for Legal Ethics. The conversation covers things attorneys should know about the Texas Constitution, its political history, ways attorneys can raise constitutional issues, changes Bill foresees in the near future, and shifting political winds in our great state.Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Here’s How »Join the Texas Appellate Law Podcast Community today:appealsplus.comTwitterFacebookLinkedInYouTube

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EP 9: Texas Constitutional Amendment Special Election

GET It Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 25, 2019 59:27

Co-hosts Chad Hankins, Ryan Thompson, and Roy Aguillon, are joined by journalist B.Kay Richter to discuss the 10 proposed changes to our Texas Constitution. Election day is November 5, 2019. But, even if the election is already over, you'll still want to listen to this one, because Chad reveals where he hides his gold bars, and an ex-felon in the audience steps forward to talk about the conspicuous lack of guidance that ex-felons are given from Texas officials about restoring their voting rights. #TexasVotes #GETItPodcast #ConstitutionalAmendmentSpecialElection2019 #GrowingEmpoweredTogether #GET_Texas

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Terror in Texas (Explicit)

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Play Episode Listen Later Aug 19, 2019 36:17

(WARNING: This episode contains graphic language and descriptions of Spanish Royalists' sack of San Antonio following the Battle of Medina.)After defeating the Republican Army of the North at the Battle of Medina, Spanish Royalist General Joaquín de Arredondo entered San Antonio intent on teaching its citizens a lesson they would never forget. The subsequent Sack of Béxar, the execution of hundreds of Tejano men, and the imprisonment and assault of just as many Tejana women marked Texans for many generations to come…though not, perhaps, in the way that Arredondo intended.The research team makes one last effort to high-grade the various leads they have compiled over the course of the previous year to map the battle site, based solely on the observations of contemporary, post-Battle of Medina accounts and artifacts.

The Original Texas Declaration of Independence

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 1, 2019 21:08

For the first time that I know of, we present here the original Texas Declaration of Independence in English – as performed by a direct descendant of the men who brought about that independence back in 1813!

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The Free and Independent State of Texas

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Play Episode Listen Later Jun 24, 2019 35:24

On April 6, 1813, Texas declared its independence, having momentarily rid the province of all traces of Spanish control. Eleven days later, the new Texas government promulgated a constitution, drawing from both Spanish civil and Anglo-American natural law traditions. Unfortunately, a horrific series of executions of captured Spanish officers nearly ripped the Republican Army apart at its seams, just as a Royalist army of retribution came sneaking up the Camino Real.The research team starts digging at the suspected site of the Republican camp the night before the battle. What they learn while digging may be even more important than what they find!

DC Does Good with Shazam! and Jussie Smollett is Innocent But Not Really

Bedroom Drinking

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 10, 2019 29:25

We discuss an April Fool's joke gone horribly wrong, updates on the super weird Jussie Smollett hate crime hoax, and DC's Shazam! is so good it could've been a Marvel movie.

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Steven Kirkland: Texas' First Gay Supreme Court Justice?

Millennial Politics Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 26, 2018 26:32

While judicial elections are rarely well-publicized, the impact of who sits on our judiciary has gotten more attention under the Trump administration, with judges striking down the Muslim bans, the transgender military ban, and DACA repeal. Even State Supreme Courts have received some coverage in the wake of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's takedown of state GOP's unconstitutional gerrymandering. This year, 32 states are holding state Supreme Court elections, with a total of 74 seats up for election. If the blue wave sweeps judicial offices as well as Congress in November, the ideological composition of our state judiciaries could shift left for decades. Steven Kirkland joined us on the podcast to discuss the right's takeover of the judiciary, the difficulty of running for public office as a former alcoholic, and why he believes civil rights are protected by the Texas Constitution.

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The First Republic of Texas