Power is finite.

That's what I learned from the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood.

Critics consider it one of the finest films of the 21st century. Paul Thomas Anderson (one of the premier modern directors) delivers his best work alongside an Oscar-winning performance from Daniel Day-Lewis and Oscar-winning cinematography from Robert Elswit (the film received eight nominations in total).

[Spoilers — Skip to The Next Section] There Will Be Blood is about an oilman named Daniel Plainview. He manipulates Eli, a cunning local preacher, and his naive congregation into selling him the oil underneath their town. As Daniel's profits grow, so does his greed. He becomes a raging alcoholic, abandons his son, and kills multiple people who stand in his way. Bandy, one of the members of the town, allows Daniel to use his property for an oil pipeline. In exchange, Daniel has to go to church. But Eli uses the opportunity to publically humiliate Daniel. He implores him to be "washed in the blood." But he doesn't actually care about Daniel's salvation. We find out later that Eli isn't the religious man he claims to be.

In the final scene, Eli meets Daniel in the private bowling alley underneath Daniel's mansion. He tells him that Bandy has died, and he offers to sell Daniel the land. Daniel makes Eli denounce his faith in exchange for buying the property. But after Eli does, Daniel admits that he'd horizontally drilled underneath Bandy's ground and extracted all the oil. The property is now worthless. Dismayed, Eli reveals that he has morally strayed from the church and gone broke. He begs for mercy, but Daniel kills him with a bowling pin. The film ends with Daniel standing over Eli's body as his blood covers the bowling lane.

There Will Be Blood is every bit the left-wing propaganda piece you think it is. But it offers a beautiful allegory. The film uses blood and oil interchangeably to represent power (hence the name). Everyone's born with a fixed amount of blood. The only way to get more is to make someone else bleed. Likewise, the world contains a fixed level of power, and the only way to get more is to take it from someone else.

There's a loser for every winner. It's time for us to decide which one we want to be.

Power Is More Important Than Rights

You might be thinking...wait, Luke. Is the world just one big struggle for power? Seriously? That sounds a bit harsh.

Let me start by defining power. Power is the ability to control outcomes.

Here's another way of looking at it. Exercise scientists define power as strength times speed. How much can you move? And how fast can you move it? Check out this video of Saquon Barkley (New York Giants running back) power cleaning 405 lbs.

THAT’S power. 99% of us will never clean 405 lbs, no matter how hard we try. Saquon can simply move weight we can only dream of (he also runs a 4.40 40-yard dash).

Money is another form of power. If I pay Amazon $50, I can have a jug of whey protein on my doorstep in two days. Now imagine what Jeff Bezos can do.

Prosperity increases over time. Have you noticed how many homeless people have smartphones? We're reaching a point of universal development. Where everyone has access to healthy food, utilities, shelter, and other essentials. It's a long way off, but we can get there if nations implement the America First economics principles (which can be replicated anywhere).

But we won't become collectively more powerful. At the 1952 Olympics in Helenski, US sprinter Lindy Remigino won gold in the 100m with a time of 10.4. But he wouldn't even make the team today. Track has become faster across the board. But there are still only three spots at the Olympics.

Even though our grandkids will (hopefully) be richer than we are, there can only be one richest person in the world. And compared to you, they'll still be thousands of times more wealthy. There will only be one president. Only so many Hollywood actors and actresses. You get the point? There are only so many spots on the team.

Power is finite. But society gets to decide how to divide it up. One of our America First economic principles is the decentralization of power. You might not be the wealthiest person in the world, but you can use your money to vote for them. Right now, that's Elon Musk. He's currently worth $250 billion because millions of investors believe in his leadership and own his companies' stock. Increasing Main Street ownership is the most effective way to decentralize power.

America First Economic Principles - Part 1

Jeff Perlot and Luke Perlot · March 24, 2022

All the Main Streeters we know have good hearts. They want the best for their parents, their kids, and their friends. They’re willing to help out neighbors in need and protect their communities from trouble. When you live your life like that, it’s easy to believe everyone else does too.

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The Founding Fathers designed the United States to decentralize political power via elections. You choose political representatives, and they promise to stand up for your rights. But their words are meaningless. "Rights" originally meant power. The power to speak your mind. The power to worship freely. The power to defend yourself. Now these rights mean nothing because we can't act on them.

For example, you might think you have the right to speak freely. In reality, you can be fired from your job or removed from your bank for saying the wrong thing. But conservatives won't do anything about it because "muh small government." That's why politicians on both sides love to throw around the word “rights.” They know it's a big joke. Your legal rights mean nothing without the power to exercise them.

Institutions Are The Key To Power

What happened to our power?

The answer to that question lies with our institutions. In a previous article, I explained how cultures balance their freedom against convenience and comfort by creating institutions responsible for managing different sectors of our society.

You Get What You Pay For

Luke Perlot · Apr 26

"Politics is downstream from culture" - Andrew Breitbart. Lately I've been trying to understand why every society has classes. No matter what economic system you choose, there's always an upper crust of rich and powerful people making all the decisions.

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We give up a bit of our power to these groups in exchange for their talents. Law is a great example. Instead of embarrassing yourself in front of a jury, you let a lawyer argue your case.

Whoever controls these institutions controls civilization. And every institution has a set of gatekeepers who govern it. For law, it's the bar association. In Hollywood, it's the producers and executives. For politics, it's the megadonors, lobbyists, and party officials. And in just about every other industry, it's the university system. The left identified that these recruiting mechanisms were a bottleneck they could exploit.

They started with the higher education system. Universities used to encourage curiosity and open discourse, so it was one of the only places where communists could express their ideas without repercussions. There's no compromise with communists. When you give them an inch, they take a mile. And time was on their side (they started over a hundred years ago).

The 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs vs. Duke Power made it nearly impossible for employers to use competency tests in their hiring process. So they have to rely on the university system to certify a candidate's skills. The best universities provide the best job opportunities, which are increasingly located in a handful of affluent cities like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Using standardized testing, the left created a pipeline to identify top talent from across the country, indoctrinate them, and embed them in the finest institutions in the world. No wonder corporate America has gone woke. We're finally seeing the impacts of entire generations brainwashed by the university system coming into power.

Seriously. Look up the CEO of your favorite company. Current and past presidents of the American Bar Association or American Medical Association. Hollywood Reporter's list of the most powerful people in entertainment. Or even those fools they throw on the nightly news. They all went to universities dominated by left-wing ideology. As these institutions grow, major cities develop a critical mass of progressives and become insufferable for anyone on the right. But when sane people move away, they leave the levers of power behind.

The War Between Spiritual Right and Left

Institutions are usually elitest. Especially when they require an Ivy League education to get in. It's a big club where members rub elbows with other rich and famous people. Once you get in, you can't go against the group or you'll lose your spot.

But every class has a unique claim to power. The Protestant church is a great example. While many churches belong to a denomination or organizational body, each individual church is run by the community and has a lot of decision-making autonomy. Plus, 99% of them are open to everyone. On the flip side, the Catholic Church is centralized and easier to control. That's why the left hates Protestants but seems okay with Catholics.

Labor unions are another example of a lower-class institution. While unions are undoubtedly prone to big-money influence, they're primarily run by their members. Ultimately, the regime still needs foot soldiers like activist groups, youth, and workers. The left used to rely on these lower-class institutions for votes and grassroots support. They generated popular support with little mainstream success.

Unfortunately for the communists, their ideology is built on opposition to elitest institutions. And it's hard to make a serious push for control without the weight of those institutions behind you. They needed a way to seize power without alienating their base.

So they made a deal with the devil. In exchange for giving up their opposition to corporate America, they got to grace the halls of power.

According to Marx, the upper class are the villains, and the lower class are the heroes. According to the American left, rich old white heterosexual conservative males are the new villains, and the heroes are...everyone else. It's a convenient framework because very few fit the villain's description. There are still foot soldiers who think this is all about class warfare. But it's not. They have no idea how the upper echelon of society uses them.

Did they really think that after decades of ruthless struggle for power, the elitest left would become an ideological force for good? Of course not. Power corrupts. It's human nature.

Private equity firms used to be called corporate raiders because they'd take over companies and sell them off in pieces. The elitest left are American raiders. And they're selling it off in pieces, profiting off the decline of a once-great civilization.

The elitest right made a deal with the devil too. In exchange for bowing to the left-wing agenda, they get to share in the profits from America's decline. Now they're just controlled opposition. That's why we use the terms left-wing and elite interchangeably. That's also why it's irrational to expect politicians to save us. Democrats and Republicans alike are only interested in financial gain.

The way I see it, this really is a class war. And the boundaries aren't economic. They're spiritual. We often use the left/right terminology, but it implies that the two sides are on a level playing field. That's not how the elites see it. They're more than an upper class. Whether they realize it or not, they see themselves as gods. They believe they can control the destiny of humankind, even the moral determination of right and wrong.

It's impossible to deny the world behaves according to predetermined rules we don't fully understand. The spiritual right believes in God, family, nature, health, beauty, science, and tradition, even if they don't express it politically. The spiritual left despises these things because it reminds them of a power they can never obtain. This is the only way to understand the defining conflict of our era. 

If you consider yourself spiritually right-wing, you're part of the rebellion, and we created Main Street Insiders for you.

The Spiritual Left Protects Their Own

The spiritual left is a sickness growing within our civilization. A parallel network of startups, NGOs, investment funds, think tanks, government agencies, and affinity groups at the world's most prominent organizations growing like a cancerous tumor. Now the entire body is infected, and it's impossible to distinguish the sickness from the host.

The disease protects itself. If you're a young liberal activist, you can post your radical views online, organize progressive student events, and volunteer at a left-wing non-profit. Your career advisor will still connect you with a cushy job at a Fortune 500 company. If you don't like your company's social policies, you can protest and get your CEO fired. You can take a career break and work for a Democrat campaign, and your old job will still take you back. When you rack up tens of thousands in student debt for your postgraduate degree, the politicians will bail you out at taxpayers' expense. Even if you're a communist politician who destroys a great American city, they'll just recycle you back through the university system. They've created a network of institutions that protect each other.

There Will Be Blood

Our institutions are compromised. The left has won. So many on the spiritual right are tired of the word "conservative" because we have nothing left to conserve. It's time to rebuild. Our goal is no longer to defend our way of life. Our goal is to take it back.

We're in the final days of a losing war against the spiritual left's institutional apparatus, and most "conservatives" don't even realize it. We need to stop trying to appear "fair" and "bipartisan." Contrary to popular belief, we don't all want the same things. The spiritual left advocates a vision for society that cannot coexist with ours. This is war.

War means that we might have to sacrifice our minor principles for the sake of our major ones. You might be libertarian by nature. You might not like corporate activism. But the only way we're going to win is by using every lever of power at our disposal.

War means the spiritual right will have some minor differences. Things like election integrity, who we're supporting in the primary, or something controversial someone said years ago. But we need to put our differences aside and protect our own because that's how the left does it.

War is about more than soldiers. It’s also about equipment, supply chains, and intelligence. We don't need more right-wing think tanks and Twitter influencers. We need right-wing startups. Right-wing law firms. And right-wing film studios (yes, many popular films contain right-wing themes. I've written about it before. But these projects are at the mercy of Hollywood executives. Look at the new Oscar guidelines. We need to create an infrastructure that supports spiritually right-wing content).

One Way Out

Jeff Perlot and Luke Perlot · Feb 16

The Main Street Insiders theme for 2023 is "Choose Freedom." Main Streeters are a community of Americans awake to the bigger-picture struggle between our freedom and the international elites who want to take it from us. We're dedicated to choosing freedom in every aspect of our lives. We compare ourselves to a rebellion. Of course, not everyone is on the front lines. But everyone has a part to play. Some people are relaying messages. Others are providing shelter. And no matter what your role is, you're committed to freedom.

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I'd love to take a full inventory of the organizations building the institutional networks we need to win this war. But that would take up too much space, so I'll save it for a later article. In the meantime, I'll leave you with this:

Power is finite. The spiritual right and spiritual left cannot coexist. The left controls the power right now, which means our only option is to take it from them. So we'll do exactly what they did. We'll create a parallel network of institutions. Call it the antidote to their disease. And we'll spread it throughout the body until America is cured.

There will be blood. Are you ready for that? This war will have one winner and one loser. It's time for us to decide who we want to be.

This is the way.

God bless and God bless America,

- Luke Perlot