Point of View January 30, 2025 – Hour 2 : Branches of Conservatism

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View. And now, Dr. Merrill Matthews. And welcome back to Point of View. I'm Merrill Matthews, sitting in for Kirby Anderson today. And my guest for this last hour is John Hood. He's a long-time political conservative activist. He's based in North Carolina.

[00:00:33] He is currently the president of the John William Pope Foundation. That's a Raleigh-based grant maker. He has, since 1986, written a syndicated column around 50 of the newspapers there in North Carolina. He has appeared on CNN, Fox News, NBC, National Public Radio. He chairs the North Carolina Institute of Political Leadership. He co-chairs the North Carolina Leadership Forum. And he serves as vice chair of North Carolina Public Radio.

[00:01:03] John, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Well, we've been talking a bit about the conservative movement. In the last hour, I had Tim Chapman from Advancing American Freedom, Mike Pence's group, and their position on RFK. And we were talking just a bit about the split in the conservative movement, just in those who support Robert Kennedy. And you and I have been talking about this a little bit as well.

[00:01:29] Now, we go back to the 80s. And, you know, Ronald Reagan was able to take the conservative movement was split then. You had the economic conservatives. You had the social conservatives. You had the defense hawks. There was a lot of overlap among some of those social conservatives were often economic conservatives. Economic conservatives might have been social conservatives or they might have been libertarian, less social conservative and less defense hawk.

[00:01:55] But Ronald Reagan was generally able to hold these groups together. Some of this started splitting, it seems to me. And when the Tea Party movement arose during Barack Obama's tenure as people who were saying we're conservative, but we're going to go out and challenge certain elected officials who were clear traditional conservatives.

[00:02:19] And now we've got what I would call just a real split in the conservative movement among those who are very supportive of Donald Trump, the MAGA conservatives. But you also have those who are traditional conservatives, sort of Reagan traditional conservatives. I consider myself in that group. And then you've got other conservatives who are generally following a conservative line, but they're just not they're adamantly opposed to Trump and anything that he does.

[00:02:49] What are your thoughts on some of these groups? Well, I do think you pretty much laid out some of the divisions we see on the right in America today. Even if you go back to like you're here in my sort of formative era and you look at the 70s, 80s, the Reagan coalition, it was a coalition and there were difference of opinion. I remember well when I was first in Washington in the 1980s, I knew conservatives who thought Reagan had gone soft on various issues. Oh, yes.

[00:03:19] A lot of back and forth about all whether it was foreign policy or social policy or even economic policy. Remember that Ronald Reagan after the 1981 tax cuts, he then signed some, not as large, but some tax increases in 1982, 83, 84 that made some conservatives mad. So there's nothing new about any political movement. Forget the right of the political spectrum.

[00:03:43] Any political movement is going to be made up of more than just a few carbon copy acolytes. It's going to be a coalition of groups of people who have enough in common to work together, but they disagree on some things. What's happened in the last decade, I think you're right that the Tea Party was part of this story.

[00:04:01] I think there were several different parts, the disaffection with the outcome particularly of the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and how that not only juiced up the Tea Party movement, but it also led some on the right, I think mistakenly, to think that the great recession, the financial crisis and the great recession, 2007, 2008, etc.,

[00:04:25] that that that was a crisis of free markets, that the government had not been active enough in breaking up companies or controlling what the banks did. Now, this is a critique that wasn't just present on the left. It started to become evident on parts of what we might call the populist right. This is all before Donald Trump comes down the escalator and further scrambles things up in 2015, 2016.

[00:04:50] There are lots of different typologies that pollsters and others use to classify voters and to classify these groups on the right. I think that you're correct to zero in on two groups which pollsters sometimes called MAGA conservatives and Reagan conservatives. I think freedom conservative is a better term for the second group just because I don't think you want to associate any of these groups with one particular human being. You want to talk about the ideas. Certainly, there are leaders that matter.

[00:05:18] But if you look at this MAGA or national conservative, there's a group of conservative intellectuals and activists and politicians that call themselves national conservatives. And they put out a statement in 2002 that laid all their beliefs out. And a year later, some colleagues and me got together and recruited some folks to create the freedom conservative statement of principles, which laid out our beliefs.

[00:05:45] And there's actually a fair amount in common between those two groups. And they're both parts of the as a political matter. They're part of the GOP political coalition today. But there are some important differences on things like fiscal policy, trade and tariff policy, national defense to some extent, social policy to some extent.

[00:06:09] Whether there should be an establishment of religion is actually a dispute, at least at the state level. So there's lots of these kinds of divisions. But the key thing to remember is there is another group who were on the right and they probably still consider themselves to be on the right. And they were so opposed to Donald Trump that they actually actively endorsed Joe Biden in 2024 Kamala Harris.

[00:06:35] Yes. This is not a very large group in terms of voters. There's some notable people in this group that used to be political activists or conservative journalists. And there's sometimes they call themselves never Trumpers. Now, I am a very strong critic of Donald Trump myself, but I never thought that this would lead me to vote for somebody with whom I disagreed on lots of other matters. So I think that the people have navigated the last 10 years in a variety of ways.

[00:07:04] And if you look at the what are sometimes called the Reagan conservatives or freedom conservatives, I think is a better, more modern term. Some of them enthusiastically support Trump and in fact work in the administration like Kevin Hassett, who worked in Trump's first term and has now gone back into the White House to run the domestic or the Economic Policy Council. He's a free consignatory, a freedom conservative.

[00:07:28] Other people associated with with Trump's new administration are national conservatism statement signatories. So there are differences of opinion among people who support Trump. Other people who didn't support Trump, they're conservatives. They didn't support Biden necessarily, but they didn't support Trump. They're also in the freedom conservative camp. So it's important not to think about these differences and is entirely about the Trump phenomenon.

[00:07:54] As I said, some of these differences were evident before Donald Trump announced for president in 2015 and after 2028. And in fact, during the 2028 GOP primaries, when I presume J.D. Vance will run for the Republican presidential nomination, there will be other candidates. There will be other there'll be alternatives. So this is not something that is caused by the rise of Trump and is all about one person.

[00:08:21] It's a broader debate about what the future of American conservatism is. We know what it was and the extent to which it was a alliance of people, some of whom were mostly motivated by social or moral questions, some by foreign policy, some by economics. This is a debate that is going to continue. We're going to take a break. We'll be back with my guest, John Hood, in just a minute.

[00:08:58] This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. Senator Rand Paul was on a TV interview with Larry Kudlow to talk about government spending. They began by acknowledging that we have a national debt of thirty six trillion dollars and a fiscal budget that needs to be brought under control. Senator Paul believes that the best benchmark is to only spend what comes into the federal treasury. But that hasn't happened in decades.

[00:09:23] But he suggested the first place to start would be to cut the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated to study. We might cut the money allocated to study whether lonely rats use more cocaine than well-adjusted socialized rats. Or Senator Paul suggested we might cut the money allocated to study whether Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous. With a bit of sarcasm, he suggested there are a few things we might be able to cut.

[00:09:46] Of course, these aren't large cuts, which is why Larry Kudlow wanted to know if it were possible to save the money by not spending funds allocated but never used for covid or the inflation reduction act or even the chips bill. Senator Paul responded there is a way to do this. It's called rescission. It was tried once in the Trump administration to send back 15 billion dollars in unspent funds, but there were two Republicans who did not vote for it.

[00:10:11] He is convinced that perhaps now you could get 50 Republicans to vote for rescission and cut 500 billion dollars. The other idea they discussed was impounding funds, but the Supreme Court ruled against President Nixon doing that. This current court might be willing to consider the process of impounding funds since it was done for 100 years before the court ruled against Nixon in 1975. There are ways to cut federal spending. Let's see if Congress has the will to do so. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view.

[00:10:46] For a free booklet on a biblical view of anti-Semitism, go to viewpoints.info.com. Viewpoints.info.com. You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. And we're back on Point of View with my guest, John Hood. He's a longtime conservative activist, thinker, commentator there in North Carolina, but also nationally because of his impact in so many places.

[00:11:16] And John, we were talking a bit about some of the difference between the MAGA conservatives, which we sometimes call national conservatives or NATCONS, and the Reagan conservatives, which you call freedom conservatives or freecons. Let's talk a little bit about some of the places where they agree and disagree. So traditional conservatives are generally going to be for lower taxes. I'm for that. President Trump's for that.

[00:11:41] He wants to renew the tax cuts that he signed in 2017 and actually bring in some more tax cuts. I'm not sure I'm on board with all that he wants to do, but he wants to keep those taxes low. But then traditional conservatives are for small government. It's not clear to me with some of the things that Trump or J.D. Vance has been proposing that that's really small government.

[00:12:06] For one thing, J.D. Vance has proposed increasing the child tax credit significantly, which is a kind of a new handout out there that sort of expands the government. So I'm not sure that we're right on the same place on small government. Well, you're right. I mean, that is definitely one of the areas of difference. There is a general belief among all conservatives that government is best when it is smaller.

[00:12:33] But when it comes down to setting priorities, I think it's fair to say the freedom conservatives of today put a much higher priority on the federal debt, reducing the federal debt, doing something about the long-term fiscal catastrophe that America has gotten itself into. It's not as if the national conservatives and the people associated with Trump don't care about that. It's just it's not a higher priority for them.

[00:12:59] Then when you get into specific questions about taxes, taxes on trade, tariffs, of course, and other kinds of tax reforms, there are important differences. The freedom conservatives tend to believe in lower marginal rates, reading all kinds of income the same as much as possible, getting rid of the double taxation or triple taxation of investment. And doing something about entitlements. And this is a very important difference.

[00:13:26] We know that President Trump has essentially ruled out doing anything on Social Security and Medicare, and many Republicans have followed his lead. As a practical matter, you simply can't make much headway against the federal deficits and trying to keep federal debt from soaring into the stratosphere if you don't make some changes to the major drivers of federal spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and some other related things, veterans benefits and things like that. So you've got to do something there.

[00:13:55] You don't have to slash benefits for everybody. You could introduce some means testing. You could change the way certain benefits are calculated over time. But just leaving that completely out of your calculation, doing nothing about it, most freedom conservatives just don't think that's realistic. And to be fair, most national conservatives think it's unrealistic to touch Social Security and Medicare. They think it's politically nuclear. That's a dispute. And then the question about tariffs and trade is a big difference. Yes.

[00:14:24] It is very evident right now that the Trump administration and national conservatives tend to favor raising tariffs. I think this would be a good way to pay for government and be good for domestic manufacturers and other industries. And freedom conservatives tend to believe in free markets, taxing all goods at a similar level, not creating protectionist tariffs. And after all, the numbers just don't work.

[00:14:52] You can't raise tariffs enough to generate enough revenue to cut income taxes very much. It's just you're taxing with tariffs. You're taxing on a much, much smaller base. So you would need to have a much higher rate getting where close to the revenue we generate, even from the corporate income tax. So we're all in favor of making tax changes. But as you can see, Merrill, they go in different directions.

[00:15:12] We know this is this is an important point because historically, since World War Two, the conservative movement has generally wanted to open up to a free trade, minimizing the tariffs out there and essentially saying if if you want to buy something from somebody in the in this country or another country, you already would have the freedom to do that and vice versa. And so we thought that free trade sort of really maximized economic efficiency.

[00:15:38] If another country is really good at producing something and can do it at a low cost and we are really good at producing something at a low cost and they want to buy our low cost product and we want to buy theirs. That's what you ought to do. I mean, I'm not I'm not a good gardener. I'm not a good handyman around the house. I would spend hours and hours trying to do things around the house and I would just make a mess of it.

[00:16:02] So it's better for me to hire somebody who knows what they're doing and they'll come out and they'll do it quickly and get it done rather than doing it than me trying to do it. So we had this idea that comparative advantage that if you if one person or country or business is good at doing something and somebody else is good at doing something, then you just allow allow them to trade and do what they're best at. And that's not the MAGA conservative position. Yeah, I certainly accept your argument. I agree with that entirely.

[00:16:31] So what are the net cons say in response? Well, one of the things they say is what about trade in strategic materials or rare earths or high technology products with potential rivals or enemies like China? I think that's a legitimate thing to bring up. No free trader, no free traders ever argued that there couldn't be national security considerations that trump your economic interests. Occasionally, that's going to happen.

[00:16:58] And in fact, in our statement, we talk about the benefits of free trade with free nations. That doesn't mean we necessarily don't have benefits of trade from other nations, but it makes very little sense to bring up the national security objection, which is common, and then say, therefore, we'll tariff Canada or Germany. But these are obviously not our strategic rivals. They're our allies.

[00:17:21] The other objection that net cons make is that manufacturing in particular simply needs to be protected, that those are good jobs that Americans are no longer able to do, and it means that their economic prospects are weakened. Even if consumers get lower priced goods, it's too costly for America not to manufacture certain things here rather than buying them from somewhere else. I just don't think the math works out on that for every person who is dislocated through trade.

[00:17:50] And obviously, Merrill, you know that happens sometimes. Yes. There are just vast majorities of people who benefit from getting goods and services either at a lower price or at the same price but it's higher quality, and so they benefit. The best way to approach the manufacturing question is to point out we actually manufacture more today than we did 10 years ago. Yes, we do. There's even been a slight increase. There's even been a slight increase recently in manufacturing employment.

[00:18:16] Over time, the employment in manufacturing has gone down not because we aren't making stuff but because we're making stuff more productively. We're using technology and machinery, and so we're still generating a lot of product that we sell in America and around the world. But it employs fewer people. We went through the same process with agriculture when not that long – 100 years ago, the vast majority of Americans worked on farms. Today, it's a tiny percentage.

[00:18:44] It's not that we don't generate as much food stuff and fiber. In fact, we generate more food and fiber today than we did 120 years ago. But we do it with many, many fewer people working on farms because of technology of various kinds. So these are productivity gains that we benefit from. And the best way to ameliorate the cost of some people who are dislocated is to make sure they have other opportunities to retrain, go back to school, start other firms.

[00:19:11] What we need is an entrepreneurial culture, which we can nurture through better education and lower taxes and less burdensome regulation, not by erecting these trade barriers that would just provoke other countries to erect barriers against our exports and hurt our farmers and other people who generate lots and lots of income for themselves and others by selling products around the world. We can't afford to have a trade war that hits both sides hard.

[00:19:38] You know, one of the questions that just puzzles me is President Trump keeps implying that the tariffs that people are paying that are going to pay on his tariffs are coming from the other countries. And I've called economists saying, am I missing something here? Don't we pay the tariffs when we impose tariffs? Isn't it American businesses and individuals who pay that? And everybody says, yes, it's us who pays it.

[00:20:03] And yet the president seems to keep implying that he's filling our treasury with tariffs that other countries are paying. It's a mystery to me why he thinks that. Yeah, I'm not sure either. I mean, in theory, when you tax a good, I mean, in theory, the consumer could just end up paying a higher price or potentially the seller. If he's concerned, he might lose the sale. He might eat the tariff difference and reduce the price. So it could happen that way.

[00:20:31] It's just it doesn't happen that way very often. If you look at the tariffs that were imposed in the first Trump administration, not 100 percent, but almost all of the costs of those tariffs ended up being represented in higher prices. They didn't – it wasn't lower profits by foreign companies exporting the goods to us or something. It was really made up with higher prices. That is usually what's going to happen with tariffs is the vast majority of the adjustment effect.

[00:20:58] And so you're right to wonder why we keep thinking that a tariff is to force foreigners to pay for our government. It just doesn't work that way. Now, obviously, when you put a sales tax on all goods, whether they'd be domestically produced or produced in other countries, that is a source of revenue for many governments. But that's not a tariff. That's generally applied. My guest for this hour is John Hood. We're talking about the split among conservatives these days. So stay with us. We'll be right back on Point of View.

[00:21:31] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men. People are prosecuted differently or not at all, depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up. But we can't. We shouldn't. We must not.

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[00:22:57] You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, Dr. Merrill Matthews. And welcome back to Point of View. My guest, John Hood. And we're talking about the divisions in the conservative movement that exists today. If you have a question about it, 1-800-351-1212.

[00:23:25] If you'd like to call in, 1-800-351-1212. If you've got a question about where you might fit in or what some of these conservative groups are doing and so forth, give us a call and you can talk to John. John, you have set up the National Conservatives have established a sort of a statement of principles that people can go and look at and sign on to. Tell us a little bit about that statement of principles. Sure. Both groups, the National Conservatives and the Freedom Conservatives, have issued statements.

[00:23:55] The National Conservatives statement was issued in 2022. And it's easy to find because you just go to nationalconservatism.org and you can read the statement. And you can also read a list of the people who have signed on to the NATCON statement. A year later, my colleagues and I issued the Freedom Conservatism statement of principles, which again you can easily find at freedomconservatism.org, list of all the signatories.

[00:24:22] And you'll see that the FRECON statement is a bit briefer. I mean it's got 10 points just as the other does, but we tried to be a little less verbose. And you'll see that there are some areas of agreement and there are some differences. We've talked about some of them. Another one that may not be immediately obvious but is very important to me is the difference in – if you look at those actual names,

[00:24:48] the National Conservatism statement and the National Conservatives, the NATCONs, do tend to have less respect for state and local prerogatives. They will point out some crazy thing that some left-wing local government does, which I might certainly agree is crazy. And then they suggest the solution is to pass a federal law or to have the federal government forbid a state or locality from doing a certain thing that they don't like.

[00:25:16] My view is that it would be better to devolve power out of Washington. And we make that point in the freedom conservatism statement that we believe freedom will be better secured, families will be stronger, our republic will be healthier. If we made fewer decisions in Washington and more decisions in state capitals and local communities, we just think that is a good traditional American conservative value that still applies today. In fact, it applies more than ever.

[00:25:46] However, there are going to be differences of opinion in a country as big as ours, 340 million people I think is the current count. There are going to be some people with very different views about all sorts of things. And I don't think we can resolve all those disputes in Washington. If 51 percent make 49 percent obey until the next election when the 49 percent become 51 and then they make everybody else obey, this sort of to-and-fro teeter-totter is just not in anybody's interest.

[00:26:14] We do have to do things at the national level and we have to debate those. But when it comes to educational questions, what should be in local libraries, how roads should be laid out, what housing regulations should be, I know what I want my community to look like and I'm going to try to make that happen. And if I can never get that to happen and if I can't get policies in my local community that I'm comfortable with, I guess I'll move to another community that better fits my values.

[00:26:42] We think that is a more durable solution to some of these problems and more respectful of America's constitutional traditions. The Congress was never intended to solve all of our problems. It was just supposed to work on national matters. You know, this gets to the Tenth Amendment issue where the Tenth Amendment says that those powers expressly delegated to the federal government belong to the federal government, but those that are not delegated to the federal government are reserved for the states and the people.

[00:27:09] And that's been an important part about what we just call federalism and the notion that Washington does some things. If the Constitution tells you you can do it, Washington can do it. But if not, it's left to the states and to the local communities. And the states and local communities may do things I disagree with vehemently, and yet they have a certain freedom to be able to do that. And if I don't like what my state or why my local community is doing,

[00:27:38] I have the freedom to move to a place that does. That's exactly right. Now, of course, this principle used to be called states' rights, I think, inaccurately, because governments don't have rights. Only individuals have rights. Governments have powers. And the reason why that phrase fell into disrepute was obvious. It was used to justify segregation. There are federal prohibitions against states doing certain kinds of things,

[00:28:06] like, for example, discriminating on the basis of race. That should always have been in contravention of the federal Constitution. But when it comes to making just prudential questions, like you say, just different policies that people are going to pursue, the solution is decentralization, not centralization. And those who argued that the Congress could do anything that it wasn't prohibited from doing turned the entire constitutional framework on its head. They would cite, for example, the language in the federal Constitution

[00:28:36] that says the Congress can use the taxing power to promote the general welfare. They said, well, this means pretty much anything that benefits the public. Therefore, there really aren't any limits to Congress, which, as you know and I know, is not at all what that phrase meant. That phrase is actually a limitation. What it was saying is you can't take – at this point, it would be mostly federal tariff revenues and land sale revenues back in the 1800s. You can't take that money and build a port in a particular city.

[00:29:04] That's a local function. What the federal government could do is have an army and do certain customs procedures and administer federal lands and weights and measures and patents, things that are specified in the Constitution. Everything else is supposed to be a state or local matter. That sounds old-fashioned to lots of people, and I guess it is in the sense that it was the original intent of the Constitution. But I think it's actually a very modern idea. It's a very now idea.

[00:29:34] It's just this country is far too big. Back then, the country was only a few million people. Today, it's 340 million people. It's just impractical to have national policies on housing, health care, education, transportation. It's just not a practical solution in the 21st century. We've talked a bit about the principles of both the free cons and the nat cons, but it turns out everybody's getting their own conference as well. So you've got one coming up in February. Talk a little bit about what your conference is and what you're going to focus on.

[00:30:05] Sure. Well, obviously, if you've been in the movement as long as you and I have, you've been to lots of conferences. You've seen lots of organizations hold events. What happened several years ago is this national conservatism statement occurred, and then they started holding national conservatism conferences. I think they've had four or five of them. And we didn't want to just reflexively do the same thing. We wanted to think more clearly about what our strategy would be once we got past getting people to sign the statement and get them to write about the statement.

[00:30:33] We want to bring people together to talk about what the conservative agenda in America should be in 2025 and into the future. We're going to do that with an initial Freedom Conservatism Conference on February 24th in Washington at the National Press Club. But rather than just have a series of events in the nation's capital, which, as you can tell from what we were talking about a few minutes ago,

[00:30:56] is not really our vision for what conservatism should look like, we're also going to have FRECON forums out in states, out in regions across the country. We'll be doing that over the next couple of years. So we plan to have more than just the Freedom Conservatism Conference in Washington on February 24th. But you should see a lot of other FRECON events not in Washington, but in places like Austin, places like New Hampshire, places like Arizona, places like where I'm from, the Carolinas,

[00:31:25] because we really want to celebrate conservatives who are governing states and localities effectively and try to suggest that's the model for Washington, not Washington telling the states and localities what to do. You mentioned the NatCons having their own conference, and I sort of just see CPAC, Conservative Political Action Conference, as essentially a NatCon conference as well because it's generally based around Trump and pro-Trump stuff,

[00:31:50] whereas I used to go to the CPAC meetings for years, and you could have debates. You'd have different people up there taking different positions on things, and I don't know that that's the case with CPAC so much anymore. I think you're correct, and it's too bad because I know, and you know, some of the people that created the American Conservative Union, and then they turned around and created CPAC, and they would be on the Freedom Conservatism side, not the National Conservatism side.

[00:32:20] But you're right that the CPAC has been unfortunately largely captured by these NatCon populist nationalist activists, some of whom, by the way, Meryl, are friends of mine, and I will happily debate them. You know, I'm not – this doesn't have to be a knock-down, drag-out fight, you know, like some sort of apocalyptic moment, but we do have some very serious differences, and we need to be clearly defining them and debating them,

[00:32:46] agree when we're going to agree, which is a fair amount of the time on various matters. Most of the NatCons are pretty good on deregulation, for example, maybe not antitrust, but most other areas, I think conservatives of all stripes recognize that we need to make it easier to build, to build housing, to build factories, to build pipelines, to build roads and schools. We need to do something about that, and that is a unifying belief.

[00:33:10] But on many other matters, there are important differences, and there's nothing wrong with debating them, you know, clearly and robustly. When we come back, we'll mention that the Never Trump conservatives are having their own meeting just in Washington right before yours, and we'll talk a little bit about some of the ways that we can work together. So stay with us. We'll be back on Point of View.

[00:33:55] You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. And we're back with our final segment with John Hood as we talk about the splits in the conservative movement right now. We've got Elmer from Alaska on the line. We'll come to you in just a minute, Elmer. But, John, I wanted to make sure that we've mentioned that the Never Trump conservatives have got their own conference coming up.

[00:34:19] Right before yours, they're calling it the Principles First Summit, February 21 through 23 in Washington. And they're expecting a big group there, but some of the people that they're highlighting, George Conway, he was the husband of Kellyanne Conway, who worked in the first Trump administration. Kellyanne and George, I think, ended up getting divorced in large part over their disagreements over Trump.

[00:34:46] Michael Lettig, I think he was the one who, the attorney who advised Mike Pence that he didn't have the constitutional authority on January 6th to stop the vote. Adam Kinzinger, who was a Republican on the January 6th committee, one of the two Republicans there, along with Liz Cheney. So you can see these are people who've had some antagonism against Trump in that particular conference. But right now I want to go to get Elmer on from Arkansas. Elmer, you're on the air.

[00:35:17] Yeah, actually, I'm in Alaska. I said Arkansas, yes, Alaska. Okay, fine. Yeah, I wanted to challenge the idea that I were to offer a concern with the idea of distributing power to the states and that kind of thing because it seems to me what I've observed is the oil companies in Alaska have significant influence and power.

[00:35:42] And it seems like they're able to do this because it's a smaller state population and it's easier to influence and manipulate the people and the legislative bodies. And so to get their own thing. But in particular, what it is, is they wanted to claim a unified tax,

[00:36:06] which meant that they would take their profits and things from whatever losses that they would have elsewhere in their world operations or U.S. operations, and then they would apply all of that to their Alaska income in determining what their tax liability would be. And so I just see and I saw this manipulation go on, and it just occurs to me that it's because we have a small population

[00:36:35] and it's easier to do in a state than 340 million people. You know, John, it's an important question because it's the issue of state and local government. Are they more manipulatable? Can you get forced things through that you might not be able to get through the federal government? So maybe always having the state and local have that priority may not always work out well. Well, that is a fair objection.

[00:37:02] In fact, one might recall it was James Madison's argument for the federal constitution. He said, look, there's always going to be factions. There's going to be groups of people who organize themselves, try to get something done. And if everything is done locally, a faction could get a hold of a local government. If we do some things nationally, then the factions will sort of have to fight each other. They'll have to compete for power, and that would be healthy.

[00:37:27] So that was the argument for having a federal constitution, and I agree with it to a certain extent. But I just think we're making so many decisions. I mean, the caller is bringing up a very complex question of how to tax the profits of corporations or the earnings of corporations that operate in multiple states or across the world. It is a complex matter where you do have to try to figure out some sort of unified reporting so that you don't have entities gaming the system,

[00:37:55] though I think the fundamental problem is corporate income tax itself is really not the right way to raise revenue. But it's a fair point. It doesn't have to be about land use or taxation. It could be about a variety of things. It is certainly conceivable. There could be moments when a local government, or somewhat less likely, but certainly possible, a state government would just be in the pocket of a particular special interest. The problem is that when you nationalize everything, which is what we're doing now,

[00:38:22] we're making national decisions about 70%, 80% of what government does. Because that means all the factions just go to Washington and lobby. And believe me, they get lots of carve-outs from the federal budgets and the federal regulatory agencies. They still do it. So my view is move it back at least a fair amount back to states and localities. If people are very dissatisfied with how their local government is run, how their state government is run,

[00:38:48] as Merrill said earlier, that's what being an American means. You can get up and leave and go somewhere else. And when people vote with their feet, that's another way to communicate their preferences rather than just voting every two or four years. And, you know, it may also be easier to get a change at the state and local government because you have to persuade fewer voters and it needs less money to advertise and other things of that nature. That's true.

[00:39:14] And also, I don't want to romanticize people in state and local government, though I know many and have worked in the point of jobs myself. People at the state and local level, they're closer to the communities they're governing. They're not typically, or at least most of them are not professional politicians. They have other roles to play in the community. They have other experiences. I just think that state capitals are, frankly, a healthier place to make policy than Washington is. Now, we can't make national defense policy there.

[00:39:45] We can't even do some environmental things in states. There are certain air quality matters that you do have to make national or at least regional decisions about. But for many other questions about how students are taught in schools, how to govern universities, what kind of health care providers should be allowed to practice and compete and price transparency, those kinds of things I think are best decided in state capitals and local government.

[00:40:12] John, we don't have a lot of time left, but tell me, what do you think the conservative movement goes from here? Is it going to be more divided or are we going to start pooling together? Where do you think it goes? What I'm seeing, and I think you can see it in just the first few days of the new Trump administration and the new Republican Congress, is there will be areas of broad agreement that most conservatives, regardless of what they think about the appropriate level of legal immigration, for example,

[00:40:40] most conservatives want to do something immediate and effective to get order at the border. That's an area of agreement. Most conservatives want to extend the tax cuts that were originally passed in 2017. Most conservatives want to deregulate, as we were talking about earlier, industry and make it easier to build things and get more infrastructure and more private development and housing going. So those are areas of agreement.

[00:41:05] But I think that there will continue to be these differences on trade policy, on foreign policy. We are seeing now, even this week, the debates about some of the nominations that President Trump has made for his cabinet, where there are some differences of opinion. I think that they will become more commonly debated over time. Right now, a lot of people are sort of trying to not get on the bad side of a particular leader, whether it be Trump or someone in Congress.

[00:41:30] But I think over time, these debates will unfold within the conservative movement, within the Republican Party, as it attempts to govern in Washington and in most of the states. Most states have Republican governments. And those debates are healthy, in my view. I think it's important that we get back to our fundamental principles, but then figure out how to best apply them to the problems of the 21st century. And if people want to find out more about the Freedom Conservatives, about your statement of principles, where do they go?

[00:42:02] Go to freedomsconservatism.org. You'll find the statement, but you'll also find lots and lots of materials that we've put up. In fact, we have a weekly newsletter people can sign up for and learn more about what freecons are doing, what they're saying, what they're writing, the roles that they're playing. You can learn more about the events that we're having, not just in Washington in February, but other events that we'll have around the country. So freedomconservatism.org is the first place to go.

[00:42:30] From there, you can follow our Facebook and LinkedIn and X pages and that sort of thing, so you'll get constant updates. We have lots of information for people who are interested in it. And the easiest starting point is freedomconservatism.org. Including that new piece that you have up on Real Clear Policy? Yes, that will be up there shortly, too. Anything that's published about the FRECON project, we put it up there so people can find it. Thank you so much for joining us, John. Thank you.

[00:43:00] And I will be back tomorrow. We'll have Kelly Shackelford and Jeff Mateer in from the First Liberty Institute as we'll be looking over the many events that happened this week. Thank you for joining us on Point of View. In 19th century London, two towering historical figures did battle, not with guns and bombs, but words and ideas. London was home to Karl Marx, the father of communism, and legendary Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon.

[00:43:28] London was in many ways the center of the world economically, militarily, and intellectually. Marx sought to destroy religion, the family, and everything the Bible supports. Spurgeon stood against him, warning of socialism's dangers. Spurgeon understood Christianity is not just religious truth. It is truth for all of life. Where do you find men with that kind of wisdom to stand against darkness today?

[00:43:56] Get the light you need on today's most pressing issues delivered to your inbox when you sign up for the Viewpoints Commentary at pointofview.net. Every weekday, in less than two minutes, you'll learn how to be a person of light to stand against darkness in our time. It's free, so visit pointofview.net slash sign up right now. pointofview.net slash sign up.

[00:44:27] Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.