The Daily Signal - Former Trump Adviser Warns Against Ravages of Globalism

Episode Date: July 14, 2022

In the wake of globalization, the industrial base of the country has been hollowed out. Booming towns throughout the Rust Belt began to hemorrhage residents as jobs dried up and were shipped overseas. Americans are beginning to seriously question whether the decision to send manufacturing overseas was worth it. Paige Willey, a former adviser to then-President Donald Trump and host of the “This Is Your Country” podcast, joins the show to discuss how globalism has ravaged America, and what can be done to counter it. We also cover these stories: The Labor Department reports inflation rose to a whopping annual rate of 9.1% in June, the highest rate in nearly 41 years. An Austin, Texas, newspaper releases portions of school surveillance footage showing law enforcement officers retreating from gunfire in the hallways of an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, during a May mass shooting. Louisiana state District Judge Donald Johnson temporary enjoins a state law banning most abortions in the state pending a lawsuit challenging the legislation. Citing safety concerns for staff and customers, Starbucks announces it plans to close 16 of its coffee shops across the country. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, July 14th. I'm John Pop. And I'm Doug Blair. In the aftermath of globalization, the industrial base of the country was completely hollowed out. Booming towns throughout the Rust Belt began to hemorrhage residents as the jobs dried up and they made their way overseas. Americans are beginning to seriously question whether the decision to ship manufacturing across the ocean was worth it. Paige Willie, a former advisor to President Trump, and host of the This Is Your Country podcast. podcast with American Firebrand joins the show today to discuss how globalism ravaged America and what can be done to counter it.

But before we get to Doug's conversation with Paige Willie, let's hit today's top news. Americans hoping for some financial stability were disappointed to see June's Consumer Price Index, which indicated inflation had risen to a whopping 9.1%, the highest rate in more than 40 years. The Labor Department reported the sky high statistic on Wednesday and indicated that costs for goods and services. had risen across the board. Prices for energy resources like natural gas rose 8.2%, marking the steepest bump since 2005, while core prices for non-energy and food-related items climbed 5.9% from last year. Renters also took a walloping as rent prices increased 0.8% in June. More information continues to come out surrounding the botch police response to the shooting at Rob Elementary in Uvaldi, Texas. On Tuesday, a local newspaper, the Austin American statesman

released portions of school surveillance footage depicting officers retreating from gunfire in the school's hallways. The footage shows officers approaching the door of the classroom minutes after the shooter, then fleeing after the gunmen shot at them. The police don't break down the door until nearly an hour later. The newspaper reportedly edited the video to remove the screams of children. Family members of some of the victims were outraged when they saw the video for the first time on Wednesday. CNN reported Angel Garza, the mother of one of the victims, saying, who do you think you are to release footage like that of our children who can't even speak for themselves? But you want to go ahead and air their final moments to the entire world.

What makes you think that's okay? Uvaldi Mayor Don McLaughlin also criticized the decision to release the footage, saying there's no reason for the families to see that. According to a Louisiana state judge, abortion is temporarily legal again in the Pelican state. Judge Donald Johnson ordered a temporary halt to a law banning a abortion in the state pending a lawsuit challenging the legislation. In response to the order, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry took to Twitter to criticize Johnson. Landry tweeted, The people of Louisiana have spoken both directly at the ballot box and through their elected

legislature again and again, not only statutorily, but also constitutionally. To have the judiciary create a legal circus is disappointing in what discredits the institutions we rely upon for a stable society. The rule of law must be followed, and I will not rest until it is. Unfortunately, we will have to wait a little bit longer for that to happen. This is the second time a judge has blocked legislation banning abortion from taking effect in Louisiana. Judge Ethel Julian issued a temporary block on June 27th that expired prior to Johnson's order. If you're hoping to grab a Starbucks coffee in Portland, Seattle, or Los Angeles, you might have to look a little bit harder for a store, citing safety concerns for staff and customers, the

company announced Tuesday it plans to close 16 stores across the country. In a statement originally reported in the LA Times, Starbucks said, after careful consideration, we are closing some stores in locations that have experienced a high volume of challenging incidents that make it unsafe to continue to operate to open new locations with safer conditions. In total, Starbucks plans to close six locations in Los Angeles, six around Seattle, two in Portland, Oregon, one in Philadelphia, and one in Washington, D.C. The stores will close by the end of July. That's all for headlines. Now stay tuned for my conversation with Paige Willie as we discuss how globalism negatively impacted the country. Conservative women, conservative feminists. It's true.

We do exist. I'm Virginia Allen. And every Thursday morning on problematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories that are of particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whose views and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left. We talk about everything from pop culture to politics and policy. Plus, we bring you an exclusive interview with a problematic lawmaker or conservative activist every second and fourth Tuesday of the month.

Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts. And we are also problematic. on social media. So be sure to follow us on Instagram. My guest today is Paige Willie, a former advisor to President Trump and host of the This Is Your Country podcast with American Firebrand. Paige, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's so nice to be here. Well, we're very happy to have you here. And let's talk about your podcast a little bit. You cover a host of issues relating to America on your podcast. And your most recent issue

was how Washington elites and globalists are kind of hurting the American experiment and Americans overall. So what issues are you sort of trying to expose your audience to and what do you sort of hope they take away from your show? Yes, thank you for asking and thank you for plugging, this is your country. It's a fun. It's a show that's a lot of fun to do because I try to bring the listener in on the revelation of what information I'm using to sort of demonstrate these policy viewpoints. And so on the topic of globalism, the key consideration there is that I feel I've identified is that this is when leaders of this country prioritize abstracting. and high-minded moral crusades over the material welfare of the American people.

And they expand their focus from the, you know, questions of economic prosperity, questions of where is the future of this country going, what are Americans, you know, wages, job prospects, their family formation prospects, and instead take on causes the planet over on, you know, saying, you know, we have huge waves of migration that we need to expect, that we need to prepare for. We have the situation in Ukraine that Americans, Mitch McConnell called it the most important, you know, situation in the world. You know, that type of focus that really broadens out their interest from how are we using Americans' resources and the power of the government to fix people's lives, make things better in this country, and expanding it to a lot of causes that, as I expose in a recent podcast episode that you mentioned, sort of causes that are often, someone is enriching themselves off of them. You know, there's foreign lobbyists. There's a whole host of interlopers and people enriching themselves off of the cause of how is American power and money spent.

So it seems like globalism is just a bit of an issue overall. I'm getting that vibe from you here. And you apparently do a lecture called How to Be an anti-globalist. You did it recently here in Washington. But I guess specifically, why is globalism such a bad thing? Is it just it's being done wrong or is globalism as a concept not working? Great question. Okay, how to be an anti-globalist. That's my pun on the common, you know, how to be an anti-racist. It's not enough to not be a globalist. You have to actively be an anti-globalist if you love your country. No, I'm being a little bit funny there. But the key thing is that, as I say, it is the replacing of the interests of the American people with things that are often not in their interest. They are enriching someone at our expense. And what I try to explain, especially with issues of things like trade and immigration, like if you got the issue of immigration, a lot of times the

globalist perspective is, well, America is such a wonderful, prosperous country. Of course, you know, we want to welcome as many people here that we can. And to me, that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing when it goes beyond the policy considerations of what are the downsides, what are the costs are if we open up America to enormous waves of immigration, what efforts are we making to assimilate people to make sure that this is the prosperous and unified, harmonious country that people want to come to? And so oftentimes these, as I call them, high-ended abstraction, are not accompanied by the practical, pragmatic considerations of how is this affecting the American worker, the American family? So I just try to bring people back to things that rather than making an

ideological conversation, look at the data, look at it quantitatively, right? It's like if you believe in supply and demand at all, and you've got a president like Joe Biden bringing in three million people over the border every year, you necessarily have to believe that there's going to be some wage and economic competition there for people, especially as you're seeing some of this political backlash in places like South Texas, backlash from recent immigrants who are being out-competed by another three million people every year for the same jobs in some cases, right? Not to overgeneralize, but just to give a sense of how these dynamics are sometimes not totally explored in the common discourse on these issues. So how does one then be an anti-globalist? Obviously, if it's not enough

to just be anti-globalist, you have to be an anti-globalist, exactly. So I guess, as I say, my perspective is look at some of these issues quantitatively, look at who is affected by them. And rather than speaking in, you know, moral crusades, rather than speaking in, well, America has always been, you know, a nation of welcome. Well, of course, we love that. And like, no one is impugning that, right? But the fact is, look at some of these situations where it is hurting people.

And so that's where I push for, and where I sort of bring it back to some of these things that President Trump campaigned on in 2015 and 2016, where he was one of the first politicians to really put a finer point on this and say, you know, it's nice to talk about free trade in the abstract, but if you are not protecting your exports in some way, or if you're just hoping that other countries will, out of altruism, let you send your exports to their country, et cetera, et cetera, out of, I don't know, devotion to the liberal world order, then you are not making good choices on behalf of your country. You're not operating in the realm of reality. And so how to be an anti-globalist to answer your question, it's important for politicians and policymakers to look at these things seriously and say, am I speaking in a way to other countries that indicates that I put my country's self-interest first, which is a good thing.

It means that everyone can get closer to what they want in an international community. It means that you are defending your citizens' interests. And in the absence of that, when they're speaking only in philosophical terms, as a lot of Joe Biden's advisors do, you'll hear. Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, Brian Dees, the National Economic Council Director, speaking in these very abstract terms and not speaking specifically about the welfare of our people. That's where the crux comes in. And it seems like we're starting to see a push back to this. Obviously, as you mentioned, and we talked a little about you worked in the Trump administration.

And Trump's, it seemed like victory was almost predicated on this idea that people were kind of tired of a global-based economy. They were looking at the Rust Belt and they said, well, this wasn't like this in the past. How do we get back to that? Are we seeing that pushback continue that Americans are still against globalism as a whole? Great question. I think that the pandemic really exposed a lot of the weaknesses and downsides of globalism. You saw the issues with supply chains. People realizing, oh, my goodness, we make so much medical supplies in China. We make so many medications in China. We are in a position of weakness and at a disadvantage because our economy has been offshore to such an extent. We've lost know-how.

even in some cases, like you have situations where companies thought that they were offshoring to China, to, I don't know, to save costs or to access the market in a lot of instances, right? And the Chinese government, their condition was, okay, well, you can have access to our market, build your factory here, et cetera, but you have to, you know, share all of your IP with us, you know, right? And so, but then what they would do is they, after, you know, a couple years of learning how to make whatever American product it was, a vaccine, a medication, they would revoke that company's license to sell it in China and start making it themselves. So it was, you know, it was bad business sense.

And what I try to make the connection of with some of these elements of globalism is that when a big, powerful corporation or an industry that enjoys a lot of sway in Washington makes such short-sighted decisions with their own business, it's dangerous when they have so much sway over what happens in Washington with the nation's business. Right. Right. Okay. So it sounds like we have this issue with globalism that we have.

was addressed at least slightly under President Trump, but we are now almost two years into a Biden administration that is bad. I mean, I think that most Americans are suffering now more than they ever have. Is that a shift back to globalism that we can blame as that cause? I mean, obviously, the Biden administration views the world quite differently than President Trump does. That is my argument, that the chief weakness that we are seeing and this devotion in a way to decline under Joe Biden is attributable to globalism because, as I say, he has broadened his focus from the national interests. Oftentimes, they won't even justify things in the terms of the national interests. They will justify it. As you heard Brian D. say the other day when he was being interviewed

about gas prices, which is an issue where so many Americans are suffering right now. They're worried. Can I afford to drive to my job, right? And he's saying basically the suffering will continue until the liberal world order is achieved. And that is the type of, that is, I could not have dreamed up a more perfect case study of my sort of diagnosis of this, which is it is the replacement of the material interest of the American people with these sort of like baby talk abstractions, right? What does that even mean? And the further element of this that I try to expose on my podcast is that the founding fathers,

when they were designing our country, they were protectionists, their first piece of significant legislation that they passed in the first United States Congress was a tariff. And you had a lot of a lot of deep thinking from Alexander Hamilton and the other founding fathers on the value of building up a strong export economy and that knowing that if we had had weaknesses in that element, that other countries who wanted us to fail, who wanted our, you know, very new experimental nation, who wanted us to fail, would be delighted to see us have struggle to build up our exports, struggle to build a industry. And the saddest thing is that that is exactly what the leaders of this country did for close to 30 or 40 years is dismantle offshore, disassemble our

entire industrial power, which was what made us strong in the first place, right? The United States was producing something like 60% of the world GDP after World War II. Where has that gone? Right. I mean, I think it's interesting that you mentioned the founders because obviously the conservative movement tries to trace a lot of its legacy, its thoughts, its political philosophy towards the founding, right? Looking at the Constitution and the Declaration as our baseline, whereas the left is represented by the sort of progressives and Joe Biden does not. Do we think that there's anything in particular that the founders can offer to the Biden administration that would say fix the issues? Oh, a huge amount. But the especially important element here is

some of these insights, as I say, pertaining to the material prosperity of the nation, the material strength of your nation. And I don't mean to sound like some type of cold-hearted utilitarian. That's not what I mean at all. It's that they were saying, if you love your country, you want to build a successful experiment, these are the fundamentals of it, right? And so when you drift and stray and even subvert these fundamentals, you are making your country weaker. So one particular example, Biden and a number of people in Congress, including some GOP senators, lots of Democrats, are looking at repealing the China tariffs that President Trump applied. And to me, that is a horrible misunderstanding of how to make our country strong. And that's why I invoke some of these viewpoints from the founders, their first piece of legislation that was significant, a tariff, right?

And so it's almost as if when people, especially, you know, Republicans want to claim the mantle, the noble, mantle of, you know, the people who are true to the origins of this country, the people are true to the, the spirit of the founding. They, sometimes I want to, you know, send them like a letter, you know, like maybe you need to brush up on your Hamilton a little bit. Maybe you need to brush up on your federalist papers a little bit because these were understood, as I say, just to be the true fundamental truths of how to make a country strong. Shifting slightly back to President Trump, the current administration has been trying to label anything that is either Trump adjacent or related to Trump as ultra-maga or king, ultra-king Trump or something?

The Maga-King. Maga-King. That was it. That was it. They try to label these policies that they think will be unpopular with the American people as ultra-maga and ultra-King. Why, though? It seems like this is something relating to what people generally want.

Yeah. Imagine that. People wanting their country to be great. Crazy. So, yes. I mean, it's a dangerous game that they play sometimes. Because here's my viewpoint. The Democrats, they run a very centralized, top-down messaging operation.

And you see this a lot of times. They will all, you can tell when the talking points were distributed because they will all start saying the same thing about the same topic, ranging from Pelosi to Biden's advisors to people on MSNBC, whatever. The latest one it feels like is they're all talking about, you know, the gas companies need to get those prices down. and why won't you lower prices? You're gouging consumers, and everyone knows that it's like transparently false. But the power of what they do in a way, I mean, I think they always have a challenge

because they are fighting the truth and the truth is a force of nature. And so they necessarily have to invest in this big ecosystem of like propaganda and information control and, you know, information influence in a way. So the centralized messaging becomes a necessity. But the key thing there is that the American people

are not finding this convincing, the more that you accuse people who want the country to be great of doing something extremist, doing something out of the mainstream, it's just not comporting with how people are perceiving it, right? And when they have stewarded our country to decline to such an extent by every measure, it's a risk to paint your opponents as wanting to make the country too great for your liking. One of the things that's sort of related to that, And again, focusing on America and making America great is this push towards allowing global institutions like the Who, for example, to have outside sway in domestic affairs, right? There was rumors for a long time that the WHO medical board, I cannot remember what it was called, but they were going to have basically the first response towards pandemics and that the U.S. would be beholden to that. How do we as American citizens counter that if our government seems to be going headlong into wanting that to be the case?

Excellent question and excellent salient topic. A key thing there is I just think that the Republican Party can in its way return to its roots, return to its mantle as the small government less spending party by looking at some of those obligations, look at some of those institutions, audit how much we spend, audit our obligations to them, reform them, even defund them in a way, which was something President Trump did at one point because of their horrible performance with the pandemic and lying to us, misleading the world about it, clearly working directly with China. In that case, you know, they are collaborating with a foreign adversary on something that was killing our own citizens. And then the first day that Joe Biden is in office, he's got that giant stack of executive orders on his desk, and one of them was rejoining, refunding the WHO. To me, that's something that is worthy when Republicans take Congress back of examining that relationship, looking at our funding again and even looking at, you know, Joe Biden's role in that because if this is an entity that, and this was something I heard Tony Fauci say personally in a task force meeting in the White

House, that he knew Tedros, the head of the WHO, to be compromised by China. He said he has a China problem. And to me, if a world, if our president is advised by someone who knows that this organization is compromised by a foreign adversary and they give our money to it anyway and even sublimate our sovereignty to that organization with decision-making power, you've got a potentially even a criminal question there, right? Like, I don't want to overly speculate, but to me, that is of concern to a lot of Americans. Republicans, they take back Congress will have tools to deal with some of this. Okay. As we begin to wrap up here, I want to sort of end on a similar note to that question. It seems unlikely that the Biden administration is going to move in a direction that is pro-American.

They're not going to be pursuing policies that are, I mean, we literally just heard that they were selling gas to China. But what can Americans do at the local level to prevent the worst impulses of the Biden administration from coming through? Gosh, great question. I think the most important thing is that we not be demoralized out of recognizing the type of leadership we deserve. I think that people, as you say, local activity is a great one. I think people have strayed in a way, and the pandemic was hard, and we have a huge amount of polarization in this country. But I do wish that more Americans would do outreach in their communities that doesn't have anything to do with politics in a way.

And I feel like you can find communities that are dedicated to, you know, even like the sad thing is like even the Boy Scouts. Like that's been subverted in a way by ideology and other things. But I think that so many Americans are not ideologues, right? Like we in Washington, we think of things in terms of ideology because it's our career and it's our position, it's our responsibility in society.

But there are so many Americans who are not ideologues. And so I think that it would be really nice to see a resurgence of, like sports leagues and these things that like people do that have nothing to do with that. And I know that people want it and they're frustrated with the level of ideology in the discourse as well. But honestly, being good citizens in your own community goes a really far away. And it's in a way it builds up your credibility as a good person when you have so many people around us doing evil things in the name of being compassionate and virtuous.

That's a, I mean, it's a great point. And that was Paige Willie, a former advisor to President Trump and host of the This Is Your Country Podcast with American Firebrand page. Very much appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to be here. And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to The Daily Signal podcast. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio.

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