 The longer you fail to treat a disease or an injury, the more severe the cure becomes in order to save your life. If you were to get a cut on your arm or your finger and you were to just ignore it, not wash it out, not really do anything for it, and it becomes infected, well now you know you're going to need some antibiotics in order to counteract the infection, you're going to have to thoroughly clean the wound out. If you do nothing at that point, you don't take antibiotics, well now maybe a little bit later you're talking about amputation, it just becomes so infected or gangrious or whatever that you're going to have to cut off the whole arm. And if you do nothing at that point, well now maybe you're just going to die. We're not talking about getting a cut on your finger here. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and we're going to talk about the possibility of voting our way out of this problem. I've been thinking about this for a couple days and I thought it was worth some discussion. So the question is can we vote our way out of this? Like is there a way to vote America back to a prosperous reasonable nation? So if we are going to do that, if we're going to vote our way out of this, here are the main huge issues as I see it. So the very first thing that I think we would need to discuss or fix in this country is the debt or it makes them austere spending cuts. I hope I spelled austere correctly there. I might not have. I apologize if I can't spell. Point being that whoever would run for president or win the presidential seat in the 2024 election, if we're going to write the ship, is going to have to do something about the debt and the spending. You cannot just continue to draw debt indefinitely. That's not how science works, that's not how math works. That's not how money works. You cannot just continue to draw debt into infinity. Eventually that bill will come due. If you don't believe me, just max out all your credit cards and let me know how that goes. So if we were to elect some candidate, that's something that they would have to address. And that's possibly the biggest issue that we don't talk about. Is this a looming, just absolute, to call it a millstone, isn't even doing it justice. It is a massive, massive problem. The debt is just a massive, massive, massive problem. And in order to address that, not only do you have to stop spending more money than we have, however you have to actually spend less than we have and then use the surplus money in order to start to pay down the debt. Something like 50-ish percent of the U.S. budget every year from the federal government goes to welfare programs. I'm talking about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, stuff like that is really where I think it's around 48, 49 percent of the U.S. federal budget every year goes to that. About a quarter of it goes to the military, right? So there's 75 percent of the federal budget from the government every year. So the most obvious place to cut spending would be those two big areas, starting with the welfare programs because like I said, that's half the budget. So that's one, that's the very first and probably the biggest issue. The second really big issue is the bureaucratic state or what some people call the deep state. This is all the bureaucrats and administrators and office workers and people that work within the federal government that really don't change when someone new is elected. If you're some office worker at the ATF checking tax stamps every day, who is and isn't president really doesn't change your day-to-day job. You're still going to check the tax stamps and do the background checks and whatever because you know, that's your job, right? And there are literally millions of people that do the actual day-to-day governing in America that the president or congress has little to no oversight over. Yes, they're set up in these deep structures where you know, this bureaucracy reports this one which rolls up to this cabinet head, which rolls up to the president, okay, I get it. But there's no real oversight in a practical sense of what's going on in this bureaucratic state that administers most of your life, right? Well, why do you have to pay $200 for a tax stamp? Well, because you know, that's the law and that's what it says and you know, I'm just doing my job. I don't really have time to argue if it's constitutional or not constitutional or legal or right or whatever. None of that matters to me. I'm just here to do my job, which is to do your background check and process the tax stamp, right? And again, when you look at that on a larger scale, there are millions of people that are doing that. The FBI, of course, has been at the forefront of a lot of this, right? When they manufactured a campaign to kidnap Governor Whitmer and then try to entrap some people in the case and totally lost in court because the FBI can't actually be bothered to pursue crime, they have to manufacture crime. And it's this kind of deep bureaucratic state that is a real, real issue and an enemy of the American people in general, because it is stagnant. It's not changing over with who gets elected and who doesn't get elected. And the only way that I can imagine to actually fix that problem would be to completely clean it out. And by clean it out, I don't mean like fire some people. I mean like remove certain bureaucracies from existence. They need to be completely decommissioned. Their building should be, you know, bulldozed to the earth and we should put a nice park in its place or something like that. The third big issue that I can think of is fraud slash money laundering. And what I mean here is the idea that people treat the U.S. federal government as their personal piggy bank. We just saw this recently with the, you know, shots. I don't want to say the word because of algorithms, right? But the shots that you had to get injected into your body that taxpayers paid for because, you know, they were free and how they were going to be forced upon you no matter what your vocation is across America because, you know, you have to have them in order to be a participating member in society that they've all backed off now and we're supposed to forget that. But the pharmaceutical companies in those cases made billions of dollars in profit. Not just like revenue, like total profit, billions of dollars. That was all just handed over from the U.S. federal government. And that's not the only example, it's just the most recent abhorrent example. Recently, the U.S. federal government is going to send $40 billion to Ukraine and I'm curious how much of that money is actually going to get there. Point being that there is a massive problem of just stealing money from the U.S. federal government and everybody knows it. I don't think that's really a partisan issue anymore. I think everybody would agree that billions and billions of dollars are being laundered and moved around through the federal government in order for people to just make money. So that would be another huge issue we need to address. The fourth issue would be to end the mass surveillance state and this kind of goes hand in hand with the bureaucratic state but it's a little bit different in the sense that, for example, you have the FBI targeting suburban moms at school board meetings as domestic terrorists because they disagree with what the school board is doing and choose to complain about it, right? You have this idea where the government is mass surveilling people. The CDC allegedly surveilled people's cell phones to see if they're complying with stay-at-home orders to track your location. So there have been multiple, multiple issues with no reforms where the government has been mass surveilling its citizens in order to intimidate them and get them to comply with what they want. That would have to end. The last issue would be election integrity. Whether or not you believe the last election was stolen is completely irrelevant because about half the country thinks it wasn't legitimate. Therefore, if we are going to rule as a legitimate government where we all agree that elections, you know, choose the ruler, if half of the people who are voting don't think that that actually matters or makes a difference, then they become disenfranchised and everyone loses faith in the system and, well, I think you can kind of see where it goes from there. So if we were to, you know, it's positive how we're going to vote our way out of this, people actually have to have faith in their elections that they're going to be free and fair. So the question I would ask you is when you look at these list of things, of having to have severe cuts in spending, having to eliminate the bureaucratic state, having to deeply root out and prosecute people for fraud and money laundering, completely ending the surveillance state, and then restoring faith in elections, can you show me any serious candidate that's going to run on a platform like that? I'm not even talking about doing it. I'm just talking about running on a platform like that. I mean, show me a candidate who's going to get up there and say, listen, unless we, you know, completely eliminate social security, this country is over. Like, we won't have money to continue as a nation. It's done. Imagine if a candidate were to say that, and then he were going to say, and by the way, we need to completely eliminate the FBI and the NSA. We're just, we're going to fire everybody and those organizations are at an end. And in addition, we're going to investigate every single member of Congress and their bank accounts because we have some concerns about where that money is actually going. And then, you know, after we investigate members of Congress, all the data that we have collected over the decades since the Patriot Act, we are going to go ahead and release it all to the public, completely unredacted, and then we're going to delete it. And then when it comes to election integrity, we're going to also, you know, pass laws for voter ID and stuff like that. I mean, it's laughable when you say that out loud because this would be considered such a radical austere platform at this time in history that just saying that out loud, of course, feels like political suicide for some candidate to try to run on that platform. However, I think you need all five. You can't just have four out of five because any one of those in and of themselves would be a deal killer for the long-term health of America. Like I said earlier, the longer you forego treatment, the more extreme the treatment becomes in order to save the patient. In this case, America has foregone treatment for a very long time. And so now we're at a place where if the country is to survive, there's going to need to be some very extreme treatment measures in order to save the patient, the patient being the republic. And I'm just unclear if anybody would be that brave or be able to see it that clearly in order to take the measures necessary to save the republic. If we can vote our way out, I think this would be the path forward. But show me someone who's a serious candidate who actually believes that. Do brave deeds and endure.