A Radical Reset
Our Republic has been converted into a democracy which is just another name for mob rule. The mob is getting what it wants, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, good and hard. One day soon, the entire edifice is going to collapse under its own weight and what takes its place historically will be tyranny. A Radical Reset is the alternative and the system is called Antipolitism. It calls for a new republic based upon merit and not ambition. No parties, no money in politics, no careers in politics, and only serving the public good.
A Radical Reset
The Cossacks Are Coming: Why Student Debt Breeds Socialism
The student debt crisis has trapped 32 million Americans in financial quicksand, fueling a dangerous rise in socialist politics across urban centers. When educated young people have no path to economic freedom, they inevitably turn to government solutions.
Herbie K explores this connection through personal stories and historical patterns, drawing parallels between economic hopelessness and political radicalization. The recent election of socialist candidates in New York isn't surprising when we understand who's voting for them—predominantly educated white voters buried under student debt with degrees that offer little financial return.
Through prison experiences and Jewish history, Herbie shares a powerful perspective on overcoming victimhood. Rather than wallowing in despair, he advocates for finding alternative paths forward: "Find a way and forget them." This approach, which helped Jewish communities survive centuries of persecution, offers wisdom for anyone facing seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
The podcast warns that America stands on an economic precipice, with student debt representing just one aspect of our financial vulnerability. Despite political victories, we must address these fundamental economic challenges before they trigger widespread collapse. Herbie proposes allowing student loan bankruptcy as a pragmatic solution—creating consequences through credit damage while offering escape from perpetual debt.
Antipolitism—a system of government based on merit and lottery rather than elections—represents Herbie's vision for breaking this cycle of political failure. His book "A Radical Reset" outlines this alternative approach for those seeking solutions beyond our current broken system.
Hey, dudes and dudettes, it's me Herbie K, your host at A Radical Reset, the home of Antipolitism. Before I get started, for those of you who are here for the first time, don't forget to check out A Radical Reset. It is the manifesto of Antipolitism, available to you on Amazon in Kindle, paperback or hardcover. Antipolitism is a new kind of republic where, instead of elections, we have selection by merit and lottery. I know that sounds strange, but it'll seem completely logical after you read it. We're here to start a movement because the politicians of this country, right and left, have messed us up beyond all belief, and anti-politism is the way to not only fix the problem once and for all, but keep it fixed. Okay, so let's see. What do we want to talk about today? I want to talk. Well, first of all, let me just cover a few items in the news. Donald Trump has had a remarkable week. I think that goes without saying. In my lifetime I'm 68 years old I would say this is probably the he's been, from the day he was inaugurated until today, the most productive president of my lifetime. I would say LBJ, and when I say productive, I'm not saying good or bad, just the sheer amount of laws and executive orders and changes and deregulations and negotiations and peace treaties and the tariffs. I think he dwarfs LBJ and LBJ was really something, although I stand to be proven wrong on that. But if he isn't the number one, he is a close number two. A remarkable, remarkable amount of productivity, and most of it, seemingly early, is good. One warning I wanted to voice today, before I got into the meat of today's podcast, is you know, pride goeth before a fall. I just want to tell all my MAGA friends everything is going Trump's way and I want to relate a story to you guys of years ago. So I have a first cousin. His name is Marty Marty. He's retired now, he's 80 years old, but this is decades ago, back when he was actively practicing law and I was on top of my game and we were both sitting. He lived in Miami and I lived in Tucson and both of us had offices on the top floors of high rises and we're doing very well and everything was great and Marty and I have always been closer than cousins normally are, more like I won't say like brothers, that's delusional but really good cousins. So anyway, long story short, I was talking to Marty one day in my office. I had my feet up on my desk and everything was. The world was in a good place that day, and for him too, and so you know. So I asked how's Nancy? That's his wife? He said great. How's Terry? That was my wife. Great. How are the kids? Great. How are your kids? Great. What's new? Everything was great, great, great, great, great, great.
Speaker 1:And then we both got deadly silent and there was about. You know how a prolonged silence might only be 30 seconds, but it feels like an hour. We had a long silence. It could have been 30 seconds, 60 seconds, but neither one of us said anything. The line was just open. And then Marty said you're waiting for the Cossacks, aren't you? Now, that's the truth. And then we both laughed.
Speaker 1:Now, for those of you who aren't Jewish and don't get that reference, the Cossacks were soldiers of the Tsar who would ride into Jewish villages and slaughter the men and rape the women, and this was an institutional practice in the days of the Tsar. So you know, the Cossacks had become emblematic, and the thing is, they would ride into town and you never knew when they were coming. Had become emblematic, and the thing is, they would ride into town and you never knew when they were coming. So what's happened to the Jewish psyche over the years is that because you know, inarguably Jewish people are the most persecuted people in history. You know you can.
Speaker 1:Those of you out there who are anti-Semitic, there's nothing I can say to you, because anti-Semitism is a thought crime and telling you not to be anti-Semitic is, you know, a waste of my time and effort. So if you hate Jews, you hate Jews. I don't care, I don't like you either. You know it's. I don't like to, I don't like to get engaged in that sort of thing, but we are. We've been persecuted for thousands of years. You know black people, a little over a hundred years, jewish people, thousands of years. And in the last century, the Holocaust need I say more? And that was only the latest. Well, it's not even the latest. October the 7th was a slaughter and a rape.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we Jews have grown to expect it, quite frankly, and we're not surprised when things like this happen and in a weird way, and this is how we've survived all these centuries we've learned to cope through finding a way around it and just expecting it to happen and not being surprised when it does. It's like an optimistic fatalism. We're optimistic, we're going to survive. Another thing about being Jewish is, at least for me anyway they come and they go. We're still here. That's kind of how I look at it. They come, they go. There have been bad people before. There will be bad people again, but for whatever reason, we outlast them. And I think one of those reasons is that, while we are fatalistic, we know bad things are going to happen, we're always prepared for them and we're calm. We don't just fall apart. We don't, you know, descend into victimhood. We find a way.
Speaker 1:You know, relating another prison story to you, another story to you. This is a prison story when I was in prison and yes, those of you who are new to the show, I was in prison. I make no secret of it. There are discussions of it a little bit in past episodes.
Speaker 1:I don't go into it very deeply, guys, just as review, because I feel like I'm on my road to redemption, and part of redemption is not making excuses, and the minute that I start to explain how I did what I did, um, it's going to sound like weaseling and I, I, I just don't want to do it. It would be an insult to the victims of my crime. It would be an insult, frankly, to to my path to redemption. So I never, I just don't go into it. To my path to redemption, so I never, I just don't go into it. I did it, how I did it, why I did it, the circumstances of when I did it, all those things I never discussed because I just don't want to weasel it's I. I live in deep remorse over it and that's as much as I'm going to share as I'm going to share.
Speaker 1:But anyway, I did learn a lot in prison. It was a net positive experience, if you can believe that. So, while I was in prison, because I was educated, although I'm an autodidact, I'm obviously educated, though I'm uneducated. I know that sounds strange, but anyway, you hear the vernacular that I speak in. By the way, this is my normal speech. I'm not adding words like vernacular to be fancy. You know what I mean. It's just part of how I speak. So I come off as educated even though I'm an autodid.
Speaker 1:The COs, the corrections officers, they have to teach various classes of what are called re-entry classes, of teaching a lot of these very, very damaged men, all of these very damaged men. These are mandatory classes how to get back into society, which are, by the way, they pretend to teach the classes. The men pretend to listen. Nobody gets anything out of them. It's just a giant kabuki theater to prove to the taxpayers there's some sort of rehabilitation going on. But anyway, when I was at Kingman Prison, a lot of the COs would ask me to teach their classes for them. Now they would do that for two reasons. One is they didn't feel like teaching their classes because, like I said, it's a kabuki and would you? I mean, I don't blame them. And secondly, the couple of classes I had taught up to that point proved to be really popular and the inmates really liked me and they liked it, even people that didn't have my class crammed in because I didn't stick to the curriculum I would go off.
Speaker 1:And one of the in reentry, especially when I was talking, there was a class on racism and all that. You know, all the woke crap. I was in prison from 2015 to 19. So it was, you know, there was a lot of wokeism, a lot of DEI, a lot of racial understanding, bullshit. And so I was teaching this class on this, on this racial class, and I said to the black guys and, by the way, I want you to understand that prison is heavily segregated.
Speaker 1:Okay, not not by the, the staff of the prison, but by the inmates themselves, the races left to their own devices of that socioeconomic class I want to make that clear Of that particular low end of the run socioeconomic class. The races do not want to mix, they don't like each other. It's not that they're out to kill each other, it's kind of a soft racism in the sense that they get along fine but they don't mix, they don't go into each other's areas. It's forbidden to eat with another race. I'm not going to go through them all, but there's lots of rules.
Speaker 1:But I get along really well with the black guys. They protected me in prison. The white guys are the ones I had a hard time with because they were mostly skinheads and Aryan brothers and being Jewish didn't really endear me to them. But the black guys protected me. So I had a very good relationship with the black. The white guys call themselves the woods, which is short for Peckerwood, and I don't know why white guys pick that title, but that's what it is. They're the woods. The black guys are the kinfolk. So I rolled with the kinfolk all the time and I got along great with the yard boss and his name was Big Chris, anyway.
Speaker 1:So I was teaching these reentry classes and I knew all these young black men because I hung out with them and spent time on the yard with them and walked the yard with them, and one of the things I did in prison was I wrote motions. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been around so many lawyers over the years. I'm kind of another autodidact lawyer, so I know how to use the law library and find precedent and cite it and write motions and so on and so forth. I even got a guy out of prison so I'm very proud of that on a gun charge, illegal search and seizure. I was very happy with that one and the guy was innocent, by the way. So not only did I get him out, but he was an innocent man. He was one of the very few innocent men I met in prison. But anyway, to make a long story short, I knew these men, I had a good relationship with them so I could say things that you might cringe at the thought of saying.
Speaker 1:And so I'm teaching this class and I said to the black guys you've got to stop being such victims. This is getting you nowhere. This victimhood thing, this reparations thing. You've got to all pretend you're Jews, man, and they looked at me and said what do you mean? And I said find a way and fuck them. You know, jews have been crapped on for years. We don't try to change the mind of the anti-Semites, we just find a way around them. And that's the best advice you can give to somebody who's being persecuted, whether it's for their race or for their religion, or their sexual orientation or whatever it is. You know, turning yourself into a victim of whatever the kind of persecution it is that you're experiencing is not going to lead to a positive outcome. It's going to lead to depression and victimhood. That's the only possible outcome of playing the victim. Victimhood, that's the only possible outcome of playing the victim. And this is why people who are hustlers race hustlers, religion hustlers you know they play on that. They know how to manipulate you because you're weak, because you buy into this nonsense, instead say to yourself you know what? I'm not going to change their mind, so fuck them, find a way and fuck them.
Speaker 1:You know, one of the reasons that the Jews are so prevalent in Hollywood is that we invented the business Back in the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Jews. When they first came to America, like my grandparents, they were shut out of everything. You know Jewish bankers good luck finding one but they were shut out of banking for forever. They're, of course, they're Jews. Today they're in banking, but the largest banker in the world is Syrian, jamie Dimon. He's not a Jew, you know that's Citibank and, by the way, not that it's important, but you know that old the Jewish bankers, the only Jewish bankers in the world, are in Israel. And what else would they be in Israel? You know, like, wake up. So. But a lot of. We were shut out of the big law firms. We were shut out of medicine. All the things we're in today. We finally got into we couldn't get into then, and so we just started our own industry, and that industry was the motion picture industry that nobody even knew about.
Speaker 1:First the silence, then the talkies. That's why there's Jewish names Metro, golden, mayor, you know. And oh, there's all the Warner Brothers, which is Jack Warner and his brother. I forget what was his brother's name, I don't remember. I need to take a sip of water. Hold on, anyway, find a way and fuck.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get onto, let's get off of all of these tangents. I don't know what made me go off there, but that's what makes the show interesting. I think I am willing to tell a story and go off and do a tangent. I like to teach by storytelling. It's just, and I just have so many true life stories. You know that I've really experienced and they're interesting. I think they're interesting If you, if you do too, do me a favor and comment.
Speaker 1:Let me know that you like the stories. If you don't like the stories, then by all means comment and say stop with the stories already. Stick on, stick on the subject. I get it bit Anyway. So let's talk about what I was going to talk about today, which is the elections in New York of the communist and I'm not going to well, socialist communist, call them what you want Zoran, I can never think of his last name, anyway, zoran. Zoran, who's the name of the fortune teller in the movie Big. I don't know if you remember that when you went on the boardwalk and the Tom Hanks character, the little boy character, wanted to be big. Anyway, that was Zoran. Just thought I'd throw it out.
Speaker 1:Zoran is the inevitable outgrowth of 32 million overeducated young people now buried in student debt so deep that they'll never get out and have no hope for their future. This is this outcome is a direct. If you look at who elected him, he was elected by highly educated white people Okay, and young, highly educated white people. He was the blue collar folks in New York, of all races, did not go majority for Zoran. Okay, the, the, the educated white people went for Zoran.
Speaker 1:Weirdly, a lot of educated white Jews went for Zoran and the guy's an open anti-Semite which, by the way, just as a side note, there's a strain of Jews in the United States who, though they are capitalists, vote like communists and because they don't really believe in God, they're secular Jews. Their politics come before their religion and this is why they'll support a guy like Zoran, even though they're kind of ashamed of their Jewishness. They're the ones who changed their well, my last name is definitely not originally K, I don't know what it was, I didn't do it but they're the ones who changed their names and make them more anglicized and all that kind of stuff. So, long story short, zoran gets elected, but the reason he's elected isn't because of AOC or just New York City in particular. It's that in New York City is a concentration of highly educated white people who are buried in student debt and across the United States.
Speaker 1:And what happens is when you bury 32 million people and that's how many we're talking about when 32 million people are in debt so deeply, and when they took on the debt, many of them either didn't use the money for school at all, never finished and just left with the debt and used it to buy cars and blow it, because there were very loose controls on how that money was used, depending on what kind of student loan it was, and it was all guaranteed by the government. So you know, there you go. Or they got degrees, largely in things that are completely useless. You know a degree in African studies or in Asian studies, or in Latin American studies, or in you know English literature, or you know there are a lot of degrees that are great to get. The problem is they don't pay anything and so you have no hope of repaying the debt you took on.
Speaker 1:When you took on all that debt, that $100,000 or more of student debt, that's burying you today and accruing interest, and you're trapped in it because you can't even bankrupt it out. It's like taxes. There are two things you can't bankrupt out of taxes and student debt. It's government guaranteed student debt and we're going to have to do something about this, because what's happened is because the average human being is not a go-getter. The average human being is a go-along to get along, and there's nothing wrong with that, by the way, but it makes them easily manipulable, manipulatable. A lot of syllables there. Anyway, they've been. Let's slow down. They've been manipulated.
Speaker 1:And what happens is and historically, this is not the first time it happens when the young generation coming up loses all hope, for whatever reason. If they're, in this case, buried in debt and debt's so high that they'll never have a first home, they'll never be able to save money, they'll never get ahead of it. They feel trapped by it. They'll never get ahead of it. They feel trapped by it. They have degrees that translate to nothing, or they have no degrees at all, and they're just sitting under all this debt and they're trapped and they can't bankrupt out of it. Naturally, they're going to turn to somewhere to get something that they can't get for themselves, and that somewhere is always the government. So what happens is, historically, is that the government becomes very, very socialist. This is how socialism happens and then it gives away a whole bunch of crap and then it collapses, and then the right takes over and it starts to cycle over again.
Speaker 1:Because socialism doesn't work, no matter how you try it, no matter what you do with it. Right now, as we speak, the Chinese economy is in the midst of the greatest economic collapse of any country in history, though completely unreported, or almost completely unreported, in the Western press, partially, I think, because of economic ignorance, partially because it would break the spell of the military-industrial complex trying to talk us into believing that we're going to have to defend Taiwan, when we're not. The Chinese are not going to invade Taiwan, maybe out of complete desperation, maybe, who knows, but very unlikely. Anyway, socialism doesn't work. It doesn't work anywhere. No matter how you try to sugarcoat it or put it together, every country that's ever tried it dumps it, and they always end up. And what's happening in Europe now is they've socialized too much, they've buried their young people, they've put them behind the eight ball, and all of what's going on in Europe is a direct result of no hope.
Speaker 1:In our country it just manifests as student loans and we're going to have to do something about it Now. Biden, his idea was to simply forgive the loans. I know this is going to make the heads of my MAGA friends explode, but I understand why Biden wanted to forgive the student debt Now. It's unfair because then the person that took the debt and a lot of these people knew exactly what they were doing and they were hustling the system. And let's not kid each other, they don't want to suffer a consequence. But if you forgive the debt, someone has to pay for those guarantees, those loans and those loans will be paid back by the government, which means the taxpayers have to pay for those guarantees, those loans and those loans will be paid back by the government, which means the taxpayers have to pay it back. So that was dead on arrival. There's never going to be student loan forgiveness until someone, like you know, zoran, becomes the president of the United States and they control the Congress, which isn't going to happen. The country's economy will collapse long before then.
Speaker 1:Now, having said that, they're going to become increasingly successful, particularly in the inner cities, where a lot of these highly educated white people and highly educated people of all races, frankly, are trapped and getting angrier and angrier by the moment, and the anger is being played upon, disrupted, and this flood of money has resulted in an enormous amount of unnecessary administrators, an enormous amount of unnecessary teachers. Frankly, an enormous amount of unnecessary building, an enormous amount of unnecessary everything. Because they basically had a free money tap, the kids could get all the money they needed. The money went to the universities. The universities had an unending flow of it and it was a collusion between the Department of Education, which really only exists to make student loans, and Trump's trying to kill it. Thank God Student loans have to end. Okay, education is going to have to change its business model and soon it's out of control. It's all out of control. I'm telling you what you already know.
Speaker 1:The point of today's story is, when you make people hopeless, they turn into socialists because they have only the government to turn to. And the solution here? There is no solution. Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions, only trade-offs. I live by that. There are no solutions to anything but the trade-off.
Speaker 1:A better trade-off here would be to allow them to bankrupt the debt. Now, that would still end up. The money would be lost, but they would suffer a consequence. Yes, the taxpayers would end up eating a lot of the guarantees. You know we've done incredibly stupid things. We're just going to all have to pay the price for it. We voted these schmucks into office. We're going to have to live with it, which is a good argument for being anti-political, by the way, none of this would have ever happened in an anti-political government.
Speaker 1:But we are where we are, we're in a place where we're in, and these kids, if they aren't given a path to financial success, they will continue to descend into socialism. We must let them get out from under it, and the way to let them get out from under it is to allow them to bankrupt that debt. And then, yes, their credit will be wrecked for a period of years, but that's the price you pay for making a stupid decision, and consequence is the only teacher. So the trade-off here is yes, the taxpayers would have to eat some of the debt and it's going to add to our already existing government debts. We don't have the money to pay the debt. I mean, I keep saying the word debt. We have so much debt everywhere. This is what really worries me. This is why I warned at the beginning of the podcast all my MAGA friends pride goeth before a fall. This debt could come out and bite us on the rear end at any moment.
Speaker 1:We're in the precipice of a terrible situation and President Trump, for all of his positive attributes, is simply ignoring this, and his plan is we're going to grow out of it, and maybe we will, and I hope he's right and I hope that my concerns are fruitless. But at this moment I'm waiting for the Cossacks. I know they're going to show up. They just haven't shown up yet. My friends, all of you who are MAGA, the Cossacks are coming. The Cossacks are coming and we're all going to. All of us Americans are going to have to face them together. We have sown a lot of poisonous pills into our.
Speaker 1:I know I'm mixing and fracturing and ruining metaphors and analogies here. Just go with me. We have baked in an enormous amount of inefficiency and disruption in a system that otherwise would work, and we're going to have to unwind it. And then unwinding is not going to be painless and we're all going to have to take the consequences of it. But you know, new York is about to be ruined and it's a goddamn shame, and it's going to be ruined because of this exact problem.
Speaker 1:It isn't the Hamas thing is being financed by foreign money. Okay, that's not it. What's going on here is a bunch. Of the reason these white kids fall into you know they're demonstrating for Hamas is they don't know what else to do with themselves. They have no hope in a career. They're buried under student debt, they have degrees in nothing and they're just angry, and so it's manifesting itself. We have to let them get out from under it, and a big way to do that would be to allow them to bankrupt student debt. Okay, let's just wrap this up and take care of the business. Don't forget to share this with all your friends. Yada, yada, yada. You know the drill.
Speaker 1:Please pick up a copy of A Radical Reset on Amazon in Kindle paperback or hardcover. The Manifesto of Antipolitism. Democracy I don't like the word democracy. Democracy is mob rule, a republic by lottery, by merit-based lottery. I know that's different. I know it sounds crazy, but crazier things have happened. You know people, the cynical. I'm asking you to be a skeptic, not a cynic. A cynic says it'll never happen. A skeptic says show me how it could happen. Read the book. That's how it happens. Pick up a copy of A Radical Reset by me, herbie K. I spell Herbie with a Y, not an IE. I don't know. That started my childhood. I've just always kept it. I kind of like it. That's it. Have a beautiful day, a beautiful week ahead. I'll talk to you on Wednesday and until then this is your pal Herbie.