There is a line in the original "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie that speaks volumes. Captain Jack Sparrow and Will Turner used an upside-down rowboat to walk underwater causing Turner to say, “This is either madness or brilliance!”
“It’s remarkable how often those two traits coincide,” Sparrow responds.
So true. Sometimes the craziest ideas are the best ideas. They’re audacious, pugnacious, contumacious ... but brilliant. Crazy ideas are often what break the status quo.
This is exactly what we are watching with President Trump’s commissioning of Elon Musk as an outside consultant with the authority to overturn every rock and find what’s hidden. It’s madness and brilliance all at the same time. It’s the attitude that makes America a world leader, the doing of things so maddeningly risky and outright crazy that few would ever think of doing them.
These moves remind me of a story from 1960, when a man parachuted from the edge of space. The Cold War era saw the space race, which included experimental aircraft that could fly the periphery of the atmosphere and break the sound barrier. Wild stories of daredevils like Chuck Yeager galvanized the world as test pilots flew by the seat of their pants.
In the late 1950s the U.S. Air Force launched Project Excelsior to determine whether a manned flight could break up at extreme altitude and the pilot still safely eject. There was no way to know without trying, and the volunteer was 32-year-old Air Force pilot Capt. Joseph Kittinger.
His first attempt from 76,400 feet (nearly 14 miles up!) did not go well. When Kittinger jumped he could see the curvature of the earth. The main chute malfunctioned, the shroud lines wrapped around his neck, he was knocked unconscious as he spun downward at 22 times the force of gravity. The automatic reserve chute saved his life.
Kittinger was asked if he would jump again, but he knew it was about something bigger than him: the safety of extreme flight pilots. The brilliant idea had to be accompanied by absolute madness.
“On Aug. 16, 1960, Kittinger ascended above New Mexico in an open gondola suspended from a huge helium balloon,” Matt Fratus writes in an article for Black Rifle Coffee Company. At the door of the gondola some joker had put a sign that read, “This is the highest step in the world.” Kittinger wore a fully pressurized suit, much like an astronaut, and 19 miles above the earth, (that’s over 100,000 feet!) Kittinger jumped. He fell at speeds exceeding 600 mph for over four and a half minutes. At 14,000 feet, Kittinger opened his parachute and safely landed. Problem solved. Holy cow ... it was madness and brilliance.
Look back at some of history’s greatest innovations and you will find they often were deemed mad when first proposed.
Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing revolutionized the world of media when they built Daily Wire from their garage. They saw a way to communicate conservative views using the internet, social media and radio. Their boss fired them for dreaming it up, but eight years later, Daily Wire is the largest non-traditional media company in the world with annual revenues of over $200 million. Madness and brilliance. The world of media will never be the same.
In 1902 the New York Times announced that the automobile was an impractical fad. They predicted no way to achieve an inexpensive means of putting automobiles in the hands of the average consumer. They didn’t see the madness and brilliance of Henry Ford’s mass production assembly line. The price of automobiles came down and the world of travel and commerce was forever changed.
I could tell a dozen more stories of inspiration, innovation, and heroic effort — true stories of Americans doing things deemed absolute madness that turned out to be brilliance.
It is that sense that is needed to fix our government. The left calls it madness, the right calls it brilliance.
But with the advent of DOGE, common sense executive orders, the pardoning of political prisoners, the termination of bad actors, the securing of the border, investigation of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the cutting of wasteful spending on frivolous projects, the restoration of destroyed areas of North Carolina, the demand for accountability in the war in Ukraine, the end of DEI, and the restoration of military readiness ... I could go on. We are watching a pace that no one thought possible in the realm of government. The left plays constant catch-up in the day-to-day running of the righting of the American ship of state. It is madness and brilliance all at once.
I don’t want a government that settles for the status quo. This is the nation that won the space race, invented atomic energy, and tore down the Iron Curtain. We survived our own civil war and established the world’s premier civil rights. We solved problems throughout our history that many thought were unsolvable.
We did it because, as a people and as a culture, we are mavericks. We see problems and know that solutions will take madness and brilliance, and we love that. It is part of who we are.
This is the by-God United States of America, where we break norms, tear down walls, and run through obstacles just because we can.
And the only way to keep that brilliant craziness going is to leap off of the highest steps in the world. That means having a government that is not bloated, slow or belligerent. It means having a government that is lean, hungry for more and empowers the private sector to pursue crazy ideas that change the world.
So yes, I’m loving the changes I see in government right now. It is madness and brilliance ... it’s amazing how often those traits coincide.
To contact Phil or request him for a speaking engagement, go to www.rightsideradio.org.
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