This week, on GrokTALK!, it’s Memorial Day, and I hope you made time to remember those who died for liberty. A fragile thing. How fragile? Well, today we read through a piece that helps us understand that and, I hope, inspires us to share it with others so they turn up to vote before the left changes the system such that your vote, my vote, their vote, voting itself, really doesn’t matter anymore.
00:00 Introduction and Acknowledgments
02:51 Reflections on Liberty and Democracy
09:14 The Threats to Our Political System
11:37 Call to Action and Conclusion
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler
Watch on the ‘Grok Rumble Channel if the embedded video does not load.
Link
- https://thepriceofliberty.org/2026/05/23/guest-commentary-what-does-it-matter/
Transcript [lightly edited]:
Welcome to another edition of Grok Talk brought to you by GranitGrok.com and Grok Media LLC. Quick shout-out to our readers. You guys send me tons of stuff. And I can’t begin to name you all, and you may not want to be named, but I want to just remind you how much I appreciate everything you guys do out there, finding content for us to share, and remind you that there’s so much of it that I can’t share it all.
And it is important to note that timing is everything. Sometimes I get something and bam, it turns into a post, or it becomes a morning update, or it ends up on an edition of GrokTALK! And sometimes it gets saved and stored until something else comes along from somebody else that triggers something that makes that kind of add a layer to the thing that I’m suddenly interested in. And I have to be interested in it. And there’s a lot of stuff out in the world, and it just because I don’t write about it or talk about it doesn’t mean it doesn’t interest me.
I just wasn’t feeling it. And I just want to let you guys know that that’s no reflection on you. Thank you, especially, you know, you guys with the memes and everything else. We really appreciate it. I really appreciate it. There really isn’t any we. It’s pretty much all me. But I do also want to thank the handful of authors that we have that do regularly contribute, and the handful of authors who occasionally contribute, all of whom make what you experience on granitegrok.com possible.
The other thing that makes it possible is your financial support. We’re running a little behind on fundraising this year, ladies and gentlemen. And as you know, things cost more. So if you have an opportunity, or know someone who might be able to become a larger donor, please let us know who that might be. We really need to keep raising money to keep all this stuff going. Everything costs money. This recording platform costs money, editing costs money, web space costs money, and bandwidth costs money.
⁓ and my time, which I’m not charging much for my time. I just need enough to eat and buy beer, really. That’s about it.
So anyway, today is Memorial Day. We hope you are celebrating it appropriately. Hot dogs, burgers, and things are nice. It’s it’s awful cold and rainy in New England, but hopefully wherever you are, you’re having a nice warm day where you can go out and remember those who fought for freedom, to allow us to have the kinds of things we have today and to use these platforms to express opinions that nobody has to agree with, but they can’t stop you from talking about it.
So here we are. And on this particular day, we’re gonna do one piece. Somebody sent me something, right, in the email, and it was a great link. And I’m going to read it to you, and I want you to ponder it. And that’ll pretty much be it. And that all starts in less than sixty seconds.
[ad break]
All right, so welcome back to grokTALK! I had a much longer than usual opening there, I think. But anyway, this comes from a website called The Price of Liberty. It’s a guest commentary. ⁓ says it’s by a correspondent named Kevin Hayslett, and ⁓ he has this photograph, which I’m going to share.
There it was. I saw a photograph this week that bothered me. A boy, maybe nine or ten.
I’m gonna wait a minute. Somebody’s cooking in the kitchen, making all kinds of noise. It’s pretty funny. This podcast does come with household sounds. So anyway.
A boy maybe nine or ten. Dark maroon shirt, slightly rumpled, both hands flat on the glass of a display case at the National Archives. Face almost touching it, leaning in, reading a page lit from inside the case, a page covered in signatures from men who have been dead.
For 200 years. Not posing, not bored, reading. A guard in a dark uniform stands a few yards behind him, hands folded, watching the boy instead of the case. I don’t know his name. Let’s call him Sam. Sam is nine. Sam will be old enough to vote in 2034. Sam is trying to understand the rules the adults no longer want to follow.
Four miles away, a former vice president of the United States was reading aloud a list of things to do to that document. The recording is still up. Almost nobody watched it carefully. She did not walk in with convictions; she walked in with bullet points, fed to her one sentence at a time, curated to ignite a weary base looking for a contender written somewhere else for reasons nobody in that room voted on. A whiteboard in the corner with four words on it. Court, college, districts, states. She said exactly what they told her to say.
Then she went home because she was not the point. The list was for whoever they picked next. She was the dress rehearsal. The audience thought they were watching a conversation. They were watching a blueprint. Here is what she said, word for word. This is a moment where there are no bad ideas. No bad ideas when the system itself is on the table. Then she read the list.
Reform the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, replace single-member congressional districts with multimember districts, and grant statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.
Fifty-nine presidential elections, two close ones. That is the entire case for tearing it down. Nine justices for one hundred and fifty-six years, she wants more. Fifty states for sixty-five years, she wants fifty-two.
Four hundred and thirty-five districts, she wants to scrap that too. She did not whisper any of it. she read it to a room that applauded. I’ve spent forty years in courtrooms listening carefully to the words people pick when they think nobody is paying attention. Pack the court when your side wins, and the other side packs it the minute they take it back. Once the number is political, there is no number.
Reform the Electoral College down to a popular tally, and your state goes quiet. Six counties in three states pick every president from here on out. Florida does not matter, Ohio does not matter, Pennsylvania does not matter. And two states to lock in four senators, that the next majority adds two of their own, then two more after that.
The Senate stops being a safeguard and turns into arithmetic. Trade single-member districts for multi-member districts, and the seat your county has held for a hundred years gets parceled out to strangers from cities you have never been to.
Picture it. A Tuesday in November, eight years from now, Sam is seventeen. Sam is standing in line with his father at the elementary school where his father has voted for thirty years. The fluorescent lights. The styrofoam cup of coffee at the sign-in table.
The woman who always sits behind it nods at them the way she always has. His father fills out a ballot, he feeds it into a machine. Walking back to the truck, it hits him the way these things always hit you. Slow. In his chest. What he just did did not count anymore. Not because somebody cheated, because somebody changed the rules while he was busy raising Sam. The map already got drawn.
The senators already got added. His state’s name does not appear on any path to 270 because there is no 270. Just a tally somewhere, and his tally went into a column already decided in a building he has never been inside. He drives home quieter than he left. Sam is watching from the passenger seat. Once any of those doors close behind you, it does not open again.
That is not reform. That is a one-way door. They are not trying to win the next election. They are trying to make the next election the last one that matters. This is the part most of us have quietly worried about for years. That win at any cost would eventually mean dismantling the rules instead of winning under them. That the checks and balances built more than two hundred years ago to slow ambitious people down would start looking like obstacles instead of safeguards.
Both parties have flirted with it. Neither one wanted to be the first to say it out loud. We always feared the day someone would. That day arrived on a Wednesday afternoon in May, quietly, on a live stream most people scrolled past. The country your grandfather fought for, the country your father voted in, the country Sam will inherit. All of it was on the table at the same time in a basement studio, on a whiteboard.
While the rest of us were checking our phones. Almost nobody even paused. Somewhere tonight, that piece of paper is still sitting under glass in the National Archives. The hall is dark, the guard has gone home. Sam went home too. He has homework, a spelling test on Friday. He does not know yet what the woman on the recording said about the page he was reading. He will find out. We will be the ones who have to tell him.
As lovers of liberty, as with lovers of the Lord, we must always remember that some enemies of liberty are worse than others. It is clear that the former vice president of the United States and her puppet masters are such.
That’s a pretty important piece of writing, which is why I wanted to share it to you. And I think we’ve all known all these things. I mean, most of us, many of us watching this, many of us doing this, have been in this fight for quite a few years now.
We’ve seen it coming, and we’ve been pushing back, pushing back, pushing back. And we’ve had resistance from both sides. It’s not just Democrats. I mean, honest to God, Republicans are the only party that has ever tried to get me fired for writing about Republicans, ’cause they didn’t like it. Democrats call you names. Sometimes you get death threats. Those are pretty rare for me, but it is implied on occasion. And ⁓ of course, you know.
They tell you you’re a hater, and they call you a racist, and most of those people have never read a word written or never listened to a word you’ve spoken. They heard somebody else say it. So they just talk. And you know, some of those people you can you can talk them down by just saying, Look, you have to provide evidence and if you keep this up, well, we might be talking about defamation. So anyway, they don’t care. They don’t give up. The left and its project require violence.
But it can’t really use the violence effectively until it knows it controls the system that is meant to police the violence, that is meant to punish the people who infringe on other people’s rights. The problem is that when you have a one-party left-wing state, you don’t have any rights unless you’re doing them favors, unless you’re saying the right things. And that’s what’s gonna happen. If you look at how violent they are now, and they will get worse, no matter what happens, because they have to.
It’s all they have. All they have is force because you don’t agree with them. You don’t want what they want. The problem is that most of America is asleep, looking at their phone, seeing whatever the streaming services and the algorithms want them to. Sometimes that puts them in places where it’s not good because all they ever see is what they want to see. Sometimes you have to show them things that are unpleasant.
And they don’t want that. They want to be comfortable. They want to be comfortable until it’s too late. Well, every election lately has kind of been that kind of election. The one in twenty twenty-six is no different. The one in twenty twenty-eight is no different. But we need to keep doing this as long as we can until they stop us. That’s it. You guys have a great week, and we will try to come back with some more new content every day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
That’s the deal.
We’re gonna try and keep that promise for as long as we can.
See ya.
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