Rob Montz

support us: https://goodkidproductions.substack.com How does the single luckiest person of the 90's manage to become a criminal? Meet Prakazrel Michel, a slightly below-average rapper and a man of minimal talents who happened to be high school friends with Lauryn Hill and a cousin of Wyclef Jean. They latch him into...The Fugees, who emerge from nowhere to become the most popular group on planet earth. Our bro luck out on life. And then he used that geyser of wealth and fame in ways that got him to where he is now: a convicted criminal.

The Department of Government Efficiency has now cut about 160 billion dollars in government waste. This is a micro step toward the goal of correcting the obvious fiscal insanity of the federal budget. One of DOGE’s top targets has been USAID. And that deep clean has brought to light one of the agency’s most curious contracts: three millions dollars going to the West Bank to finance...an anti-Israel rapper? How did your money end up with this guy? This story represents a complete collapse in accountability in USAID and the flagrant waste of your money on people actively undermining peace. In partnership with Legit Politic.

The politics of the pandemic have been defined by brutal tribal division, but there’s at least one point of consensus among the professional punditry: the COVID school closures were a catastrophe. The thinking goes: shutting down K-12 led to vast, unrecoverable learning losses, hobbling the next generation of workers, and we’ll be suffering the economic repercussions for decades to come. School does indeed serve valuable purposes, most importantly providing shelter and food for low-income kids. But education? We’re not so sure. That’s why we sat down with Professor Bryan Caplan, the George Mason economist and author of “The Case Against Education,” the book that convinced us school is largely a waste of time. What does he think about this consensus on the COVID school closures?

As an unknown undergraduate philosophy major, Coleman Hughes penned a series of brilliant essays on race and crime, carefully dismantling what he called “the racism treadmill,” the stale, endlessly repeated narrative about institutional oppression in America. His fan base exploded and he’s now regularly called up to battle the high priests of right-think on race. We got together to talk personas, heroes and using rap to deal with the absurdity of death.

We have unapologetic cringey Boomer love for the idea of America as a creed, not a clan; as a set of ideals and principles open to anyone. Immigrants have been an essential part of this country's cultural dynamism and economic dominance, and closing up our borders seems like it would compromise the magic of America. On the other hand, there's ample evidence that there are real costs of excessive immigration, and those costs are not evenly distributed. Fortune 500 titans get to load up on H-1B engineers and cheap entry-level laborers, while low-skilled American citizens suffer shrinking wages and fewer footholds into the labor market. We just talk about all this with Roy Beck, founder of NumbersUSA and one of the country’s leading advocates for tight immigration restrictions. He has an interesting new book documenting a forgotten fact about the immigration debate: many prominent civil rights leaders opposed immigration, specifically because they feared the flux of low-wage workers would rob black Americans of economic opportunity.

War reporter Sebastian Junger has spent years in some of the most violent places on earth, documenting up close the details of human conflict. His signature works are Restrepo and Konregal, feature documentaries about a remote military base in Afghanistan, an infamous outpost of nearly non-stop combat Junger followed those soldiers once they came back home, and he noticed something strange... They missed the war. Why would an American man, having returned home to a land of plenty, of safety, of the infinite stimulation and comforts of modern life, ever miss war? Junger says soldiers are longing for the tribal ties of combat -- that war, as horrible as it is, still feeds a natural human need for belonging.

Xi Van Fleet spends her spare time warning about a cultural revolution in America--because she's actually lived through one. Born under Mao's China, Van Fleet knows the warning signs of a civilization on the verge of chaos. We sat down with her to hear to take on the present-day American parallels to her youth in China.