Nov. 2, 2026

Vote Like It's Self-Defense

This is something I fundamentally believe, and this is my perspective.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 3, is Election Day. And I'm not here to cheerlead for the Republican Party.

I'm here to tell you to vote like it's self-defense. Because it is.

I'm Not a GOP Cheerleader

Let me get this out of the way first.

You don't have to enthusiastically support Republicans. I don't.

The Iran war? No. I opposed it, and I've said so openly. Bending over backwards for Israel's foreign policy? No. Israel is a foreign country like any other, and American foreign policy should be about Americans.

I'm America First. Honestly, I'm leaning America Only.

So if you're frustrated with the GOP right now, good. So am I. Hold onto that, because we're coming back to it.

They Told You What They'd Do

Here's the thing. The other side hasn't been hiding the ball.

In May 2019, on the presidential primary trail in Nashua, New Hampshire, Kamala Harris was asked about adding as many as four seats to the Supreme Court. Her answer, as reported by Bloomberg: "I'm open to this conversation about increasing the number of people on the United States Supreme Court." Two months earlier she told Politico that "everything is on the table."

That wasn't a one-off. In April 2021, Democrats in Congress introduced the Judiciary Act of 2021 to take the Court from nine justices to thirteen. Then-House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler made the pitch himself: "Thirteen justices for thirteen circuits is a sensible progression." Sen. Ed Markey, standing on the Supreme Court steps, said Congress "must expand the court and we must abolish the filibuster to do it."

The Electoral College? Elizabeth Warren called for getting rid of it at a CNN town hall in March 2019. In October 2024, the Democrats' own vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, told donors at a fundraiser, "I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go." His campaign walked it back. The donors applauded anyway.

DC statehood? The House passed it twice, in June 2020 and again in April 2021, without a single Republican vote.

Puerto Rico? In December 2022 the House passed a bill setting up a binding vote on Puerto Rico's status, with statehood on the ballot. Every Democrat in the House voted yes.

Pack the Court. Kill the Electoral College. Add new states with new Senate seats.

None of that is a policy disagreement. It's changing the rules of the game so the game is over.

We Already Lived Through It

And this isn't hypothetical. We lived through it.

We lived through the COVID lockdowns, when people in charge decided which businesses got to stay open and which families got to see each other.

We watched an LGBTQ push aimed squarely at kids, through their schools and through the media they consume.

We watched social media censorship. Not as a conspiracy theory, either. In August 2024, Mark Zuckerberg wrote to the House Judiciary Committee that "senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire." He said the pressure was wrong. He also admitted Facebook shouldn't have demoted the New York Post's Hunter Biden reporting in 2020.

And we watched people get actively targeted for what they believed and what they said.

That's what it looks like when they have the power. You've seen it. You don't need me to tell you.

Why the Anakin Memes Hit

Now, a word to the young men and the zoomers.

You've seen the Anakin memes. There's a reason they resonate.

You were lectured your whole life by boomers. They handed you a world that kept getting worse. Housing out of reach. Debt piled to the ceiling. A culture that treated you like a problem to be managed.

They did nothing to stop it. And then they turned around and told you that you're the bad guy.

You're not the bad guy.

You're the group that can actually change it.

Rule or Be Ruled

I get it. Voting isn't fun. Standing in line for a party you don't even like is nobody's idea of a good Tuesday.

But politics doesn't care whether you find it fun. It's rule or be ruled.

For decades we were sold live and let live. We were told "diversity is our strength." How did that go? The other side never agreed to leave anybody alone. They took the schools, the newsrooms, the HR departments and the agencies, and they used them.

That's the lens Auron MacIntyre lays out in his book The Total State. Power in America doesn't just sit with whoever wins an election. It runs through a managerial elite of bureaucrats, executives, academics, media figures and nonprofit professionals who administer the institutions. Culture sits upstream of all of it. Policy is the last thing to change, not the first.

Which is exactly why you can't sit this out. If you won't rule, someone else will. And they've told you how.

Defense Tuesday, Offense After

So here's the plan. Two steps.

Step one is Tuesday. Play defense. Make sure the DSA, the communists and the cultural left never get their hands back on the levers of power.

And don't tell me the DSA is some fringe online club. A DSA member was sworn in as mayor of New York City on January 1 of this year.

Step two starts the day after. Go into the GOP and remake it from the ground up. Precinct committee seats. County parties. Primaries. The managerial class inside the Republican Party isn't your friend either, and the only way that changes is if new people show up and replace it.

And here's the good news. Time is on our side. The boomers are leaving. The party, and the country, will belong to whoever is in the room when they do.

But none of step two matters if we lose step one.

Not a Spectator Sport

So vote on Tuesday. Not because you love anyone on the ballot. Because you understand what happens if the other side gets the keys back.

Politics is war, and war is not a spectator sport.

Sources

Brian Nichols

Host

I'm Brian Nichols... and I spent years watching good ideas lose arguments they should've won.

Not because the ideas were wrong. Because nobody knew how to sell them. That's where I come in.

I come from the world of sales and marketing - helping businesses communicate better, close more deals, and actually solve real problems. Somewhere along the way, I realized those same skills translate directly to politics, policy, and culture. So that's what TBNS is.

Sales. Business. Politics. Health. Taught like a real human talks. No partisan cosplay. No debating obscure philosophy. Just practical conversations about what actually works - one episode at a time.
1,100+ episodes in. Still going.

Also: unapologetic Cowboys fan. We don't need to talk about it.

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