Ep. 11 - Fall 2025: Tragedy, Power Plays & Missed Priorities

Headlines fought for attention all fall, but only a few moments truly shifted the ground. We open with the hardest one: the assassination of Charlie Kirk and what political violence steals from public life. You don’t have to share his views to feel the loss of a sharp, prepared voice who pushed hard debates onto campuses. When fear silences argument, fewer people step into the arena, and our civic muscles weaken. That is a cost no party should accept.

From there, we walk through the 43-day federal shutdown, the longest on record, and the perverse incentives that made it possible. SNAP interruptions, FAA disruptions, and a month-plus of uncertainty set a new low bar for “toughness.” If a shutdown used to be the fire alarm everyone ran to put out, it’s now background noise leaders exploit to rally their bases. We talk about how that happened, why the wins were illusory, and what it would take to make governing outcomes, not optics, the metric again.

Election night energy delivered predictable results: Democrats strong in blue-leaning states, momentum headlines, and fresh talk of flipping the House. We frame it as a treadmill, intense effort, little policy movement, then pivot to the story that ate the cycle: the Epstein files. The facts are grim and the unanswered questions real, but the frenzy drowned out the high-stakes work we keep postponing: a $38 trillion federal debt and rising interest costs, a stressed farm economy at harvest’s end, tariff policies acting like broad taxes without clear success metrics, and AI’s rapidly growing footprint of data centers, power draw, and jobs. These are solvable problems if we define goals, timelines, and tradeoffs.

A surprising spark came from culture, with Billy Bob Thornton calling himself a “radical moderate” on a major show. That phrase captures the spirit we push for: argue hard from facts, measure what matters, and make deals that stick. If more of us reward that approach, by clicks, shares, and votes, shutdown theater loses its audience and real policy gains the stage. 

Subscribe, share with a friend who’s tired of outrage loops, and leave a review with one priority you want on the 2026 agenda.

Transcript

Setting The Q4 Review

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome back, everybody, to the Radical Moderate Podcast. This is your host, Pat O'Brien. Uh, today I'm going to do something a little bit different. I don't want this podcast to be a lot about current events and what's in the news, you know, from a from a day to day or week-to-week basis. But I'm taping in December of 2025, and I thought maybe this was a good opportunity to kind of summarize the fall of 2025. And really, this is uh episode 11 of my podcast, and to kind of to take a look back at some of the things that happened during this time period that are noteworthy, and then say, I mean, in the big scheme of things, does that mean anything or not mean anything? And so that's what I'm gonna do today is kind of a Q4 type of report looking back. So the first thing I'm gonna start with is uh unfortunately a tragedy, and that is the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which happened on September 10th of 2025. Now, for those of you who listen to my first podcast, just kind of the behind the scenes on that is that when I started the podcast, I actually taped in late August of 2025. So those first few episodes were already done. And then uh my initial uh podcast was launched after his assassination. So I I never said anything about it during the initial episodes, and and I could I did kind of realize that looking back because uh looking back at this this fall of 2025, because this was an incredibly significant thing. And I called it a tragedy. It was uh horrific, it was awful for so many reasons. And and I know that you can say that there have been uh other notable people and even elected officials who've been targeted, some of which were killed in over the last couple of years, some of which were injured, or you know, that you can go through the litany of it. But I would say the thing about Charlie Kirk is he was a person who was had youth and vigor. He was sharp as a wit, you know, could think on his feet, and he did something incredibly innovative, which I have to say I respect. It, you know, he broke through and and started something in terms of going to college campuses and and being able to engage with college students in a way that you really had never seen before. Now, you can like or dislike any of his opinions. I can tell you that from my perspective, the first thing I want to say is when it happened, I thought about how awful that is for our country. I thought about how awful how that massive, uh, unspeakable effect it has on his wife and children. I mean, it's just awful, awful, awful. And and I'm putting him in a different category because while he wasn't an elected official, he was a person who was outspoken in in politics and and public policy. And and while I'm sure I would have had many disagreements with him, I wanted to start from the the standpoint of uh after I had time to process his loss a week or two later, and then I'm you know starting a podcast, I said to myself a tragedy on so many levels, but what I'm trying to do in this podcast is to say that we can be passionate about our disagreements, we can fight over it, we can spar back and forth. I want to provoke thought, I want people, it doesn't have to be my idea, but I'd like to challenge the ideas, the conventional wisdom out there. And that's exactly what Charlie Kirk did. So, in my wildest dreams for this podcast, five years in, if I had enough of a following that he would join it and maybe we could have some sparring back and forth, like that would have been just the most amazing thing ever. And I'm sure we would have disagreed. Uh, but that's the whole point, right? That's the point of our democracy and and freedom of speech. And uh a gunman took that all away from us, obviously, not just for me, but for all the people who followed him closely. And I will say I had I was certainly aware of him. I had seen uh some of his videos on YouTube. Uh it's it was some clips, but it was really only after his death that I went back and took a deeper dive. And what I would say is there were many times where he his level of knowledge, I would say, was just so high that I had to go then myself, go look up fact check. Like, was he totally on point with that? Or did he would was he overstating a little bit? And more more often than not, maybe almost all the time, he knew his facts. Now, when it turned into opinion, that's where the arguments came from, right? And and it was thought-provoking, which I think I I know he was trying to accomplish a lot of things, and and there's a zero comparison between what he did and what I'm trying to do, except to say provoking thought is good. It is needed, it is necessary. And I wanted to at least say uh in this podcast that I do recognize the contributions that he made uh to the debate in this country. And it's just an absolute tragedy that he was lost in September of 2025. So that was that was the first thing that I'd say, man, that was a really notable thing that happened in the fall. The next thing I would talk about is uh not quite a tragedy, but certainly just a a not good thing, and that is the shutdown, the federal government shutdown. So uh it set a record, um, and this is not the kind of thing that you want to set a record for. The the sh the federal government was shut down for 43 days, which is the longest in the history of our country. And while shutdowns are more of a recent phenomenon of the last couple of decades, um, they've intensified, and I think it's because of the partisan nature of our Congress and and our politics. But it was it was so it was notable in that regard that it was 43 days long. I as we're sitting here, as I'm sitting here typing in December of 2025, I'm not sure if we really know all of the effects of it. And and I'll break that down in a couple ways. Let me first talk about the economic effects. I don't think it was good at all that SNAP benefits were paused and some places canceled. I think these are people, I mean, when you're talking about food security, just somebody's ability to feed themselves and their family, I think it was just an uh just symbolic of how broken our system is that the government was shut down so long and it had this effect on people's lives. You know, maybe 40 to 50 percent of the American population kind of lives check to check. And for those that are on were on, are and were on SNAP benefits, taking away their food and making them make other choices of what am I gonna not pay for so that I can pay for my food, that's just a bad state of affairs. And so I think the economic effect, both on a personal household level for people on those benefits, but then within the communities that were affected, I could speculate, but I think you should do your own research on that because I think we're still seeing some of those effects that started in October and I think intense and really carried over to November and might carry even on into the beginning of 2026. So going back to now talk about like, well, what how did this happen? First off, well, I think one of the reasons why we had a federal shutdown is because no one's really scared of it anymore. We've had shutdowns, and I think prior to this, the one of the longest shutdowns, if not the now the second longest, was during the first Trump administration. But you can be really it'd be easy just to blame and say it's this person's fault, this party's fault. I think that the shutdown started for a couple of reasons. First, earlier in 2025, there was a standoff and there could have been a shutdown, and Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer went ahead and made a deal with the Republican Party. Now, I haven't really analyzed that deal in great detail, and I'm not going to do that now. But what I will say is it was viewed, I believe, by the National Democratic Party as weakness. And in particular, uh Alexandria Casio-Cortez, who everybody calls AOC, is clearly, or obviously she's a Congresswoman and a bright star in the Democratic Party and a strong voice without with the sharp as a whip, too, and zero question about that. But she's also a threat to Chuck Schumer's job because there's a lot of people who want her to primary Chuck Schumer the next time that that can happen. And so I think one of the big factors of the shutdown was that Chuck Schumer needed to look tough uh to his own party, to his base, and trying to protect his job. That's an awful reason for the federal government to shut down, but I think it had a tremendous amount to do with it. The other reason, more broadly, is the two parties can't get along. The Democrats and Republicans can't get along. And no one is shocked or surprised by that, but we've it has become such a fact of our polit politics that we don't even think about it twice. What I'm saying is the shutdown was awful. Now, it in in particular because it was 43 days long. If it if the government had been shut down a week, maybe even two weeks, maybe that's important to get rid of the bad blood, maybe that's important for people to show their party that we're really trying to do something. I think 43 days was way too long. And I don't think that much was gained. Now, what the Democrats, I'm sure, are saying is that they raised the awareness of the healthcare debate and the subsidies that originally started with Obamacare were extended during COVID, that they they ran out and they wanted to uh put front and center, and to some extent they did, that this is a big issue that should be dealt with. The problem, among the problems with that line of thinking is it's always been, as far as I remember, it's been the Republicans who wanted to shut down the government, going back to the days of Newt Gingrich being the House Speaker. And it was always the Democrats who would say, give us a clean continuum resolution, and we'll talk about this other stuff later. And and that's not what happened here. The the the Republicans were the ones saying we want a clean CR. And it was the Democrats saying, no, you've got to, you've got to do XYZ when it comes to health care and particularly subsidies for people on Obamacare. And the Republicans thought that was a winning battle and they were willing to fight it. And then they expanded it to things like SNAP. So anytime you have uh what basically boils down to a gang war in the United States Congress, it's just bad for the American people. And so I'd say a pox on both houses, if somebody thinks that they gained, if the Republicans or Democrats think that they gained, I would say that that's wrong. I think the only clear losers were the American public. And in a much smaller inconvenience, I would say to me personally, was that I had a flight canceled uh in November. And it was, I had a night event on a Sunday night, and then I had a night event on Monday, nine hours away. So out of convenience a month before, I booked a flight. It's important business on both ends uh for me. And this was during the time period where the FAA was having difficulties, understandably so, because people weren't getting paid and maybe not coming to work. And so my flight got canceled, and a bunch of people's flights got canceled. And luckily mine wasn't a situation where I was trying to get to a wedding or you know, a 50th anniversary of someone. Like it wasn't like that. I just got in a car and drove. But it's an example of like the only people who got hurt, or I think the people who got hurt are the broad, broadly the American public. And I don't think there were any wins. Now, the Democrats will see. I think they were promised to vote on Obamacare subsidies. We'll see if that even happens. They didn't get a lot. And and by the way, Chuck Schumer voted against the deal, so he was able to preserve his kind of his purity test, if you will. It's just pretty awful. So that's the second big thing that I happen that I believe that happened in the fall of 2025. And I really don't have anything good to say about any of it. Um, there were elections in in November, as there always are, and we call these off-year elections because they're the year before uh a presidential election. And I'm sorry, in this case, they're a year before a midterm, sometimes they're a year before a presidential election. But they were the typical places. You've got governors of Virginia and New Jersey, and those are certainly now blue-leaning states. And and to no surprise, that that the Democrats won both both of those governorships. I will say the Democrats did quite well in in all of the elections that that there were, which is which is very typical, though. You've you're in the second term of a presidency, even though there was a term in between of Joe Biden, but you're in Trump too. Uh and and this is very typical. If you look back at Obama second term, if you look back at um, or even the midterms, probably of Obama's first term, but Clinton's midterms, uh, Bush's second midterm in 2006. Like the so there's nothing surprising. I mean, I would the surprise would it be if the Democrats didn't do well. I I will say though, that it makes the Democrats feel good. Like, hey, we're gonna win at least the House in 2026. And that's fine. But folks, um, I've been seeing this game played my entire life. I guess I've been playing what paying what I would call fairly close attention now for 35 years. And it's the same old merry-go-round. It's the same old seesaw, and it's it doesn't go anywhere. And and it crowds out our ability to talk about real problems and come up with real solutions. And so the Democrats did well, and and you got to give them that. But I think, you know, and and I would even say that they're likely to take back the House next year. Um, but what is that gonna do? Then we'll just have divided government, we'll be just as partisan as ever, and we won't solve any problems. But I don't I don't know that just where we are in our politics we can solve. Anybody's even willing to talk about solving problems right now. I will also note that an interesting, or at least something that got a lot of attention this fall was the New York City mayor's race. Now, let me tell you, I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, you know, the middle of the country, and I I love New York City, visited several times. I think it's a great American city. But really, at the end of the day, I don't I don't care that much who the mayor of New York is. And I don't know that that is someone that anyone should look to for guidance on what to do with the rest of our country. But if you watch traditional media, you heard a tremendous amount, whether it was from a left perspective or right perspective, on the mayor of New York City. My advice is um the mayor, mayor of New York City is not going to have anything to do with the price of your crop, you know, or the the how well your business is going to do, no matter if you're in retail or manufacturing. It's it while interesting, and I'll grant you that, it it a lot of it's just a big distraction. And so to talk about what I would say is the biggest distraction of the fall of 2025, I've got to give that to a person who's who's now dead, and that is to um to Jeffrey Epstein. So the so-called Epstein files was something that was really kind of the politics of the shutdown was coincided with the politics of the Epstein file, and there's there's a couple layers of this, and I would say that the whole thing was again very interesting, maybe even very entertaining, but I I don't think at the end of the day is anything more than a big distraction. But I will do a deeper dive on this because there I think it is it's noteworthy to to talk about. So I'll start with this. First, um, Epstein was a creep, Epstein was a criminal, even if like he and and Epstein's now dead. So so to go back for a second, he was a creep, he was a criminal, and he's dead, so he absolutely, I think, got what he deserved, but he was also super connected, and that's why he got the all of this got so much attention. So a little bit more of a deep dive. Who was this guy? Well, he's a Wall Street guy, he believe it or not, he was a high school teacher at one point, and it from what it you can I can tell, it looks like he was doing creepy things as a high school teacher, and things like maybe showing up uh to parties with teenage girls, you know, in high school. And there, you know, people like, why is he here? Why is this teacher here? So I think it was part of his DNA to be a creep, and and then the the criminality of that just, you know, one thing led to another. Um, but he was having issues, I believe back if you go back to 2008, he was having uh to plead guilty to some things, but he probably utilized connections to get a better deal there. I th I I think he maybe have had, he served one year of detention, but it was really work release. I mean, and and there's there's a lot of information you go to there. But I think suffice it to say, he gets investigated in 2005. By 2008, he's pleading guilty to something. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. And I think, you know, as a lawyer, as somebody who's been a prosecutor before, I would say somebody didn't do their job. I think I think that's just crystal clear. And then you got to ask yourself, well, why didn't somebody do their job? So this part of the story, I think, is is important because it's uh it's a bad look for the legal system, the criminal justice system, anybody who touched that. But then in in the interim decade, this guy continues to clearly continues to do things that are now crossing the line from creepy to criminal. And it's one of those things, and maybe I could uh say the only thing I could that comes to mind that's a little bit similar was the Bernie Madoff situation. Jeffrey Epstein knew everyone. I mean, he did know Bill Clinton really well on a personal basis. He knew Donald Trump super, super well, and there's a whole lot of smoke around both of those relationships. Relationships. And I know for people, hopefully, most of some of you are like, I didn't really follow this that closely. Pat's boring me now. That's what I hope. Unfortunately, I'm thinking a lot of people know about this guy and his story, and they know about the island that he had. And then the questions are like, did Bill Clinton go to the island? Did Donald Trump go to the island? Were they around when the creepy criminal stuff was going on? And I think the answer to a lot of that is going to be we don't know. We just absolutely don't know. But then during the first Trump administration, uh Jeffrey Epstein gets investigated again, and then things happen really quickly. So he gets arrested, I believe it was July 6th of 2019 for sex trafficking, basically. Not more than a month later, the guy's dead. So he's just getting arrested, and then he's in a federal prison, and a lot of it was the circumstances of his death were very were shady as hell. And I am a person who really tries to to to not believe in conspiracy theories. And that's primarily because most of the ones that I've done a deep dive on don't pan out, and that there's there's clearly an explanation. Here, my default is that it's not a conspiracy, it but I I have I would have real questions if I was investigating the situation. So it was ruled death by suicide, and that is the most logical explanation. However, he's in a federal facility and there's cameras on his cell, and there's somewhere between 60 seconds to three minutes of missing video. That's bad. That's just absolutely bad. And while it could happen, I mean, their technology issues happen all the time. I'm very familiar with camera systems. This is a little different. This isn't just Joe Smith who you got a camera on. This is Jeffrey Epstein. And so he had already been on suicide watch, I believe July 23rd of 2019, he had attempted suicide. And so there's a lot of rules and protocols that weren't followed, probably. I believe that the there was a guard posted near his cell, the guard fell asleep in the middle of the night. Can that happen? Well, sure it can happen. Should it happen? Absolutely not. And it it's suspicious. And again, I don't like conspiracy theories by default, but you've got missing video, you've got the guard falling asleep. I believe there was a situation where he had a roommate, but then the roommate gets moved out. And that's again, all of these things can happen. The fact that all of them happen together is suspicious as hell. Now, I am gonna just believe that he committed suicide, which is a very logical explanation until proved it, proven otherwise. And and and why would I say that? Number one, a conspiracy is really hard to keep secret. Number two, you had two different administrations involved in this. This he was arrested in 2019 and he died in 2019. So that's Trump president, Trump term one. Then you've got four years of Joe Biden in between, where if if there was a connection, if if the Trump administration had really done something nefarious, I think someone in the Biden administration had an incentive to show that. And we never really saw that. And going back to the Trump administration, Bill Barr was the attorney general. He did an investigation, and nothing really shows up, or or they basically say it was it was suicide. But now we're in Trump 2.0, second term, and for whatever reason, President Trump was clearly resistant to to talking about Epstein anymore. And again, I tie this back to the shutdown. At the end of the day, here's what we know Jeffrey Epstein was a creep, he was a criminal, and death was what he deserved. In between, he made a lot of friends, and that's a bad look for everybody. It's a bad, I mean, Peter Thiel, uh Hiyad Barak, the former prime minister of of Israel, uh Prince Andrew, like this guy knew everyone. And and that's it, it you should be careful of who you hang out with, even if you're famous, and and maybe do some background and on these people uh before you hang out with them and that sort of thing. So that's really who Jeffrey Epstein was, and why am I even bringing it up? Well, it was significant, and the the so-called Epstein files was something that got discussed a lot in the fall of 2025. What do I think is going to happen? What I think is gonna happen is pretty much nothing. I think if there was people who truly did bad things with Jeffrey Epstein, we'd already know about it. But I fully support more investigation, I fully support transparency. Those are things I'm I'm all about. But here's my big issue, and I'll come back to more of a radical moderate approach. While we were talking about, or at least hearing about the Epstein files, we were not talking or hearing about the$38 trillion debt that the federal government has. We were not talking about the farm economy, which is has by all accounts in bad shape and has only gotten worse as 2025, you know, has finished out the harvesting season, and and and you can I'd I'd love to have a guest on to talk about the farm economy, not just in Arkansas but beyond. Well, we weren't talking about that if we're talking about and listening to the Epstein files, and then there was not there was a lot of discussion on tariffs. And I definitely would like to do an episode on tariffs because quite frankly, it's a very risky strategy that President Trump has employed. But maybe he's right. But where's the metric? Where's the goalpost to know if he's right? Because the early returns, it looks like, yes, it's been a very big tax to bring in money to the federal government, but it also looks like it's had an effect on the economy. But I'm open, I'm open-minded about it, and I'd love to have somebody on here to say, hey, I think these Trump tariffs made a lot of sense, and I think it's gonna do good things for our country in years to come. I'd love to see that played out because we really haven't tried something on this scale in a hundred years, which, by the way, was right before the Great Depression happened. We didn't talk about education policy as a country this fall. We almost never do, but it's an example of things we didn't talk about. And then a big one is is I, you know, got a couple more minutes left in this podcast episode. A big one is AI. We need an AI policy, even if the policy is we're gonna leave it alone, which is kind of what the early policy was with the internet. And and but there's real effects happening with AI and the massive server farms that are going into communities. And there's been a lot of good journalism on that. I've seen a lot of good stories that are that are shining a light on that, but you gotta you gotta kind of go way past the headlines, I think, to find that big discussion. And so, end of the day, I wanted to mention Jeffrey Epstein and the quote Epstein files to the extent they exist, because it was a big story in the fall of 2025. And then really lastly, I want to mention this, and this is I I kind of view this as like a small win for for what I'm trying to do, and that is um episode 2407, which aired on November 7th of the Joe Rogan podcast. And this particular episode had Arkansas native Billy Bob Thornton, so amazing, well-accomplished actor. You know him from Sling Blade and Armageddon, and more recently, Landman, which I'm I'm I'm I'm up to date. I've seen every episode, season one, and even uh into season two, and think they got a great cast. I think I think he's a very cool actor, but I'd never I listened to the whole three hours of the podcast, I never heard a deep dive into all of his story and and and and he's there's a lot, a lot of layers there. But the reason I'm bringing it up is about one hour into that episode, I believe it's episode 2407, November 7th, Joe Rod, uh Joe Rogan podcast, they get into this discussion about it. I wouldn't call it politics, but it kind of leads into that. And then Billy Bob Thornton says, Hey, I would describe myself as a quote, radical moderate, end quote. He used the exact words of the name of my show. Now, I am positive he's never read my book. I am positive he's never heard of my podcast. I think what's cool is that he's coming at it from a different perspective, and and that he like it's on his brain, and and and that's encouraging. And and by the way, if he's an Arkansas native, I don't know him. I bet there's someone in that I know who knows him. Open invitation. Billy Bob Thornton can be on my show, or I can go find go wherever he is and tape a podcast with him because you know, maybe he's got I'd r I'd love to explore those thoughts a little more and with him. And, you know, Rogan kind of responded back with, yeah, so maybe we need like a common sense party or a non-ideological parties. And there, there's something to that. So just I thought I'd throw that in as a little personal note. I thought that was super cool. Thank you, Billy Bob Thornton, for you know, having a thought and provoking thought, which is, I think, probably what he was intending to do. Well, folks, that's the that's kind of the the review of the fall of 2025. Uh, I've I've been having a lot of fun uh on this podcast so far. I appreciate you listening, especially if you've listened to multiple episodes. And with that, I'm I'm gonna catch you next week. Uh, but for now, that's the POV of POBI.