The Eric Metaxas Show - Hegseth & Goodwin (continued) and Andrew Giuliani

Episode Date: June 18, 2022

Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin continue sharing facts from their book, "Battle for the American Mind," which investigates decades-long decline in public education; then, candidate for governor Andrew Giuliani outlines his vision for a better New York.

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Eric McTaxis show with your host, Eric Metaxis. Welcome back. We're talking to the authors of Battle for the American Mind, uprooting a century of miseducation. Pete Hegssef of Fox and Friends. David Goodwin, not of Fox and Friends. But he's a friend. So you get, but he's a friend. So let me just say, this book tells us how it happened. And that's what we're talking about is like most people don't know how it happened. They just know suddenly they turned around and lunacy was prevailing. I mean, it's almost unbelievable, the level of lunacy. And, you know, whether we're talking about pronouns, you're kind of like, wait a minute, what? What? Who came up with that 10 minutes ago that we have to like talk about? I mean, and you do want to know who did come up with this. madness. And in a funny way for me, the issue is the brazenness of it. And those you might as

well be, you know, George Orwell in 1984 saying, we're going to get you to say two plus two equals five. If the party tells you two plus two equals five, you better say two plus two equals five. It's the brazenness of it that I think is the most alarming. The question and the thing, the thing that they can count on is who do you point at? At this point, when, as we tell the story, there's no one boogeyman. You can say, well, that person It was just Barack Obama. It was just Randy White Garden. It was just common core.

It was sort of death by a thousand cuts over time as they took over and controlled all of these institutions, which is why, in addition to problem identification, we spend three chapters in the book on the solution. I mean, breaking down what classical Christian is, breaking down what you can do as a parent. And then I think the challenge is, and we start the last chapter by saying the most difficult part of this book is exhorting parents and grandparents to choose a different educational path for their children without shaming them for how and where their kids. kids have been educated thus far. We all had no idea. And once you understand that it is, yes, it is your public school. It's not just that school over there or the Democrat control there is.

It's your affluent suburban school. It's your rural school. Because the pipeline is still the same of the teachers, the tests, the standards that feed the tests. All of it is a giant feedback loop. So unless you're in a very specific type of school, a very intentional Christian school, or homeschooling. And thank goodness, there's a much more robust network that feeds homeschools at this point. To include classical Christian curriculum. So options are there for parents. But you got to get past the whole, I pay taxes, I pay property taxes. We moved here because the zip code is good and the schools are good and there's a brand new gym and everyone has iPads.

There's ways you can rationalize it. Wow. And we all have done that. And we think about the amount of time you spend on vacations or where you're going to do this or we're going to take a moment to realize. if you're not focusing on education, you're probably sending your kids off to Democrat camp every day. In a school you think is nice with teachers who are nice and principals who are nice. And by the way, when you say Democrat camp, that's a really nice way of putting it. Because when we think of the Democrats, we forget this is Marxist leftist camp. The Democrats, you know, Richard Gepard and Walter Monday, you know, the Democrats of the past were, you know, kind of like George W. Bush. we don't have people like that anymore. We have people that either are radical Marxists

or are utter cowards who are just passing the baton, you know, the current White House administration. They clearly don't have any beliefs except whatever is going to, you know. So they're very happy to let AOC and the actual Marxists take over. And, yeah, we have to be honest about this. And we have to say we have to pull our kids out yesterday, whatever it takes, because this is really, it's just dramatic. Now, you know, being the head of the Association of Classical Christian Schools,

I've spoken, I'll speak this week at a classical Christian school event. But everywhere I go, I also meet homeschoolers. And I have to say, the thing people used to say about homeschoolers is like, yeah, but they don't, they're not socialized, right? Every homeschooler I meet is the most mature young person, and I say these kids are taking over the world. So between classical Christian school and homeschool, I think the radical left doesn't know what's coming.

Well, there's a big portion of the homeschool movement that's distinctively classical Christian, classical conversations. It's the organization that does a lot of that. One of the things I'd like to append on to kind of, you know, the conversation about Democrat can't. It is true that there's a lot of indoctrination that's going on right now. But what's been robbed from our kids is a vision of the good life. What they're being told, and the reason we have 20-somethings in the streets throwing bottles, is that they don't know what they're about.

They don't have a solid grounding in what God made them for. and how God, you know, seeks to make their lives, you know, bigger than themselves. That's the gift God gives us, is a life that's bigger than any of us can make on our own. And yet what the leftists have done is convince them that they're all important. Each child is big in their own right. And that's just a lie. Once they're out of the womb, let's be very clear. only then before that you're trash um yeah if i could add though i mean you you could define because

you could say it properly and i can't the the phrase paidea the inculturation the development the vision of a good life for the youngest right so we assume college education what the left focus on was four five six seven eight years old because that is when who you are is imprinted on your heart and and if you can control that that's why they're so obsessed with early child education as well. Get them in the hands of Uncle Sam as early as possible. They realize that's the key. That's where Pidea is formed. That's where the trajectory of their life is formed. So while we were focused on the lunacy of higher education, it's not lost on you. Closing of the American mind is similar to bat. We've been focusing on K through 12 or, excuse me, higher education for a very

long time when the real work of progressives was to get into our youngest of classrooms, because that's where the real transformation happens. And what they said they were doing was in education, as you pointed out earlier, which is what? The pursuit of a good life is tied to material goods. Right. We'll get you job. We'll get you some bread, some vodka. You can live in the center block building. Shut up. We don't want to know what you think. I mean, that's communism, except it's wrapped in a different package. You lose the marriage, the family, kids, the real joys in life. We're cultivating a young generation that just doesn't appreciate the real joy. The good, the true, and the beautiful. You know, you keep here.

during that phrase. And those are the kinds of things. Look, we know that the whole 20th century was a war on the good, the true, and the beautiful. Art got ugly. What happened? What happened to the beautiful rhyming poetry of Longfellow, patriotic and beautiful, whatever? Somebody, you know, and this is when I was at Yale, I learned this, right? Like, if it rhymes, Norman Rockwell, like, all that stuff is for the rubs in Middle America. The elites, you know, we're going to read, I don't know, Wallace Stevens or whoever we're going to read. We're going to read. We're going to We're going to read this stuff that nobody wants to read, and we're going to go to the museums and look at stuff that nobody would say is beautiful. And we're going to persuade ourselves that this is the way the elites, this is the way we want to go.

And it's the exact opposite of what made this country great. And by the grace of God, we are still able to even talk about this. It's not over yet, but we're in a battle. It's not over yet, but I'd say the darkest time in American education was the 1970s. when classical Christian education was completely buried. There were no classical Christian schools at all. The progressive Pidea had completely taken over. Today you could enter over 500,

over 400 classical Christian schools in almost every state across the country. A huge homeschooling network of millions. They tried to outlaw homeschooling, as you know. I mean, there was a big effort to end all Christian education, private education. They didn't succeed, though. So we have our chance,

in light of this new moment where we realize what the Marxists have done, we just have to get at it. Now, if somebody says, I'd like to know if there's a classical Christian school around here, is there a website they might go to? Classicalchristian.org. Classicalchristian.org. If you can't spell that, you didn't go to a classical Christian school.

Classicalchristian.org. You know, I just can't say enough about how centrally important this is. And you're right, Pete, when you say that, I mean, we know that in Europe, Europe is always a few steps ahead in terms of the lunacy, and they are persecuting Christians who want to educate their kids and whatever. They are openly persecuting them. Of course, it's come here now, but enough people are waking up. I hope people listening to this program are waking up and we'll send this video to their friends and understand that we're in a war. We're going to keep talking about battle for the American mind with Pete Hegsef and David Goodwin.

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The book is The Battle for the American Mind, uprooting a century of miseducation, Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin, the authors. Again, the good news is we're waking up to this. The good news is there are solutions that are still possible. But we are in a battle. I mean, the teachers unions, for example, we now know are just leftists.

They are just Marxists. They don't even believe that we should have a say in what our kids learn. I mean, it's kind of like we skipped backwards to Mao's Cultural Revolution, and we're suddenly in China in 1965, and the parents are being, you know, demonized by their own children. I mean, it's like you just didn't think this could happen in America. Not only do they not think parents should know, they think parents are the rubs over here who are, oh, yeah, poisoning their kids with yesterday's dogma.

and it's the job of the school to give the correct education to hide the gender transition that's going on at school from the very parent. This is a war. We chose that intentionally. I mean, yes, I have a military background. It is a war for the future of our country, of ideas, of our faith, of the things our country was founded on. And if we don't, but education has just been this secondary issue for too many people. Every other political issue has been atop the list for decades. Well, look, and let's be honest, do you have Republicans like Jeb Bush pushing Common Core? I mean, they have been useless, utterly useless. They don't seem to get this. And it took almost until the fourth year of the Trump presidency to it as a huge fan of his to look at the 1776 commission. Oh, man.

I mean, he's fighting a thousand battles, so I don't begrudge him anything. But it is the type of thing where it has snuck up on us so slowly yet so quickly. And our answers are so insufficient that that's why the solution section is as big as it is in this book, because you've got to get people to wrap their heads around how infected we all really are. How much we didn't learn. One of the things that, you know, I think we just have to be clear, in American public education, before it went wrong in the 19th century, we would teach love of country, love of God, like these basic things, love of freedom, what is freedom?

We really understood that there's just no pulling these things apart. and if we don't teach them, they go away. In most of the world, they don't have this kind of stuff. So we had this pride in inculcating the generations with these ideas and celebrating them. And as we know, through the decades, this went away so that patriotism, you know, it just kind of went out in elite circles. They just kind of, well, you know, we're globalists, we're elitist. We don't believe in that, Rube stuff, you know, rah, ra, America. and they demonize the concept of love of country,

which I just find amazing, especially you served in the military. I mean, the idea that we would denigrate a healthy love of country as somehow, you know, jingoistic, chest thumping, triumphalist. I mean, it's kind of amazing how deep those bad ideas got so that you have a lot of people in the country who they just kind of have gone along with that, especially in the blue states. Yeah, we're self-loathing at this point.

was, I mean, to quote the disgraced former governor of New York, America was never great. That is the view of the left at this point. Can you imagine? But before it was Hannah Jones and the 1619 project, it was Howard Zinn, a people's history of the United States, which is the most prolific history textbook of the modern era. And if your high school doesn't have the book in the classroom, then the textbook that was written for your child's classroom was based on Howard Zinn and People's History, which is American history written from the Soviet perspective. And then David Coleman and the folks at the college board rewrite the SAT to respond to the Common Core, which was based on Howard Zinn.

So now what your kids are learning, what they're tested on, and their entrance exams are based on a Marxist view of American history. No wonder we get kids that are pumped out saying, this America thing is terrible. We're teaching them that. There is no Bill Bennett's two volumes of American history that talks about the providential nature. of our country. That's gone in public schools completely. Well, again, I mean, it's the Marxist view of American history, which is fundamentally anti-American. And you go, okay, so you want to point out our flaws. I mean, speaking as a Christian, I want to know my flaws because I want to repent of them and do better, right? So in this

country, we had something called slavery. Well, we had a war. We abolished slavery. Like, can we celebrate that, that we abolished slavery? And people like, no, no, no. Like, we can't celebrate anything. We have to be relentlessly negative. We can never say that we did anything good. We had Jim Crow. We got rid of Jim Crow. Can we celebrate that? No. It's kind of like a really neolithic, I would say, satanic view of reality. It's really very, very dark. It's what happens when you wrongly order your loves, is what The circumstance is that, as we said, the progressives replaced God and Christianity with patriotism. And patriotism couldn't stand up to that kind of pressure.

It was wrongly ordered at that point. But it wasn't even healthy patriotism. Once you have patriotism devoid of God, in other words, if patriotism, if love of a country is not rooted in the deeper love of truth and God and goodness and beauty, then eventually it'll float away like a mylar balloon. It has to be rooted in a transcendent. You talked about the true, the good and beautiful. You don't, you know, no institution of man creates true good and beautiful ideology. It has to come from God.

And when they disordered it, anything that's disordered, even a good thing like patriotism, becomes ugly. When it gets set on top and made the centerpiece, This is what we said about taking the pressure plate. You know, you put the patriotism on the pressure plate, and it can't perform there because that's not what it's there for. That's a headline for me. I mean, I have absolutely never heard that when you said at first Pete, but I've never heard that idea that Dewey and these progressives very, very slyly thought, yeah, we want to get rid of God, but we're going to need to do a little sleight of hand. So how can we pull this off?

We'll use patriotism. I mean, it's really evil because, of course, it's not real patriotism, but it's enough patriotism to get the rubs not to pay attention. And so what, you know, when they talked about that, what kind of patriotism or what was the long game, the idea that we're going to put patriotism in and what? I mean, it was just kind of like a filler at that point? What was it, what was their idea of patriotism?

Well, it had to be close enough to legitimate patriotism in order for Americans to buy it and say, it's okay if you take the creeds of Christianity out of the classroom as long as you replace them with the Pledge of Allegiance. Because the Pledge of Allegiance is a good thing. So a good thing replaced something. Okay, I think I'm figuring it out. What you're telling me, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is ultimately the secularization of America. In other words, it's the mis, it's the wrong idea. that you get in the Burger Court or whatever,

that basically they say, we're going to have separation of church and state, which doesn't mean what it meant to Jefferson, which is that the church is sacrosanct and the state cannot touch it. No, no, no, we're going to completely subvert that and we're going to say, we need to take the church away from the state

and they can have nothing to do with each other. So we're going to have a secular patriotism. We're going to have love of country, but it's going to be what Richard John Newhouse called the naked public square. We're going to pull God out, and we're going to make it look neutral, but it's actually satanic. I mean, it seems to me like that's what I'm getting.

And it had a practical application at the time, influx of immigrants. How do you unite them? You unite them under one flag, as do we often did. It was either, you know, training for the future vocation or integration that way. They used it in that application. And they debated it openly in the new republic. It was how do we remove God? Do we, okay, we're going to, we're going to let them.

do religious instruction off-site. And then the churches, as you talked about, Eric, did the work for the left at that very same time, which is a huge section that David wrote about by splitting itself. I mean, today's evangelical movement has basically given up the idea of education at all, and that became Sunday school. And the progressives, we have a couple of quotes in here, openly mock it. They say, what can one hour of theistic training on Sunday do against five days of progressive training during the week? They knew once God was pushed out, out, they had the advantage, which is why the name of this book was almost the 16,000-hour war, because it's 16,000 hours of public instruction that your kids get from K through 12 when that's nowhere near the amount of time they would spend inside a church or a church group or with religious instruction. I mean, this is jaw-dropping stuff. This is absolutely jaw-dropping stuff. I, you know, I marvel at the genius of the wicked. In other words, the idea that they thought this through and that they were so dedicated to getting God out. And again, there are many people today, many, you know, they think they're conservatives,

who don't understand that without virtue and faith, you can't have freedom. You can talk all you want about the free market and the we believe and free. Your version of freedom is like Dewey's version of patriotism. Ultimately, it's hollow and there's nothing there. and you're going to find out, you will find out, if you don't understand, that at the heart of what you think you value has to be some kind of virtue, you're going to have to teach virtue, and virtue comes from faith in something larger and whatever. But if you're teaching nihilism, you can't do that. So it's this sleight of hand, and, you know, the proof will be in the pudding. We're talking to the authors of Battle for the American Mind, Pete Hegsef and David Goodwin, don't go away.

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It gives me such joy to know that you not only get this stuff, but that you've joined with David and written a book about it and that you're using your platform to get the word out to the American people about what is happening. I think part of this has been as a father, a journey of discovery myself, as a parent, right? I mean, and that's how we've treated this book and how we treated the film series at Fox Nation as well.

David, I call him my Sherpa, you know? He's leading me through, and I'm discovering in real time, very much like most of our viewers are right now. Oh, my goodness, I knew there were some problems. I didn't realize it was this big. and hopefully, because I've only more recently made some of the choices to get my kids intentionally into some of these schools. So all of us are behind the curve. And I feel this ticking clock in my mind of every moment they're not in that education.

I'm not doing what I should be doing for them. Yes, I need to be doing it in the home. Yes, I need to be doing it in church. But to not have the third part of that of the classroom reinforcing the things that I believe, I'm just losing time. And so I would urge the same thing to parents. Do the research, take a look. it's not enough to feel like, you know, your principal's a nice guy or you've got two members of the school board. That's wonderful.

We should fight those places. I don't think we should give up any space. But right now we're in a knife fight. We're in the kill zone. And they've got us surrounded. And you've got to act when you're in that spot. Well, I've got to tell you, you know, that's a fact, what you just said. And there are lots of people that don't get that.

They don't have the urgency. They think, oh, you're being hotheads. How I wish that were true. How I wish that were true. I mean, look, Chesterton was talking about this stuff in the 1920s. Some people saw this, and they've been talking about it. C.S. Lewis was talking about it, and the abolition of man. This has been going on and on and on and on, and all along the bad guys will smile at you

and say, we want to help your kids, you know, in the new world here that we're creating. It's, to me, it's the level of urgency that needs to be communicated. And I know you do in the book. what is the website again for the classical Christian? Classicalchristian.org. Classicalchristian.org. There's just no way around it. You don't have America without these ideas.

In other words, the West, the Greek tradition, the Geo-Christian tradition, come together to make real freedom possible. And people died for this. And when you remove those things, you know, it's a brave new world, it's China, it's death camps. But people don't believe that. They don't seem to understand and how close we are, basically. Well, before, I mean, we tend to see what's closest to us, obviously. If we go back in history, before Christ and before this form of thought and education, it was an ugly place.

It was pretty brutal. People don't. We do not want to go back. People don't realize. I mean, look, because my mother grew up in East Germany and my father came from Greece where the communists were trying to take over, they raised me to love this country and to understand like how horribly bad it can be. But I think most Americans think like, how bad could it get? Maybe the economy will down, it would go down or gas prices will go up to $10. But you know what? It can't get that bad. They don't seem to understand that when you pull these things out, it becomes a satanic nightmare. They just, they won't believe it until. they see it, but I think people are beginning to see it. I think American exceptionalism comes with a dose of a feeling of America inevitability. And as a result, people say, well, yeah, it's bad, but there's no way we can be that and things will be okay. And my kid is going to be just fine. And so there is a complacency inside all of us. And when you start to realize the depth

of the problem, you realize how small you are, which is a wonderful recognition, actually, but that means you can affect something. You can choose where you're kids go to school. You can choose where your grandkids go to school. And that's the beautiful message of the book, is there are options. I think the providence, you know, we've talked from the beginning of this interview about how this thing came together. The providence of it is that Pete and I started work on this in, I think it was February or March of 2020. So if you do the backwards math, you realize that when Pete was first discovering this stuff and I was telling him about it and I was learning a lot of it myself, none of the current madness was really visible yet.

And as you pointed out several times, Eric, it's like the Lord has used the providence of our moment. This book took two years to get here. And when it arrives, we're in a time when people are seeing the consequences of this form of education. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. It started before the China virus even hit. And everyone was more than by reality. By the way, it's not right to call it the China virus. It's called the, what's it called?

It's called the Kung Flu Pandidemic. Kung Flu Pandanemic. D-edemic, okay? Make sure you get it right. Otherwise, it's politically incorrect. Pete, I've got to ask you, were you raised in the faith? Did you come to faith later in life? Very much so. My parents, we went to a small Baptist church in Minnesota. It was a wonderful faith-filled home. But in looking back on it, my childhood, even with all of that, was effectively secular. Well, sure. And I went to a great conservative public high school. My dad was a public educator. I mean, we were, but it was a veneer of Christianity with a core of a secular. and I've careened around life as a result. And the reason we wrote this book is we want more intentional foundation and development of our kids at an earlier age so that they can avoid a lot of the careening around because we don't have that time in this country and in their lives. It's just such a wonderful thing that you guys have put the work into telling this story.

Because listen, everyone in America needs to understand how this happened, what is happening. otherwise we're just going to keep drifting along. But I really do think that you've done it. So congratulations. Ladies and gentlemen, battle for the American mind, uprooting a century of miseducation. It's all true, unfortunately, but we can get out of it if we're aware of what it is.

Thank you for all you do. God bless you guys. Thank you for this book. Thanks for your time. Hey there, folks. Eric Metax is here. As you know, our friend, and he's a real friend,

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800-978-3057-80-80-107. 800-978 3057. Folks, welcome back. I have the joy of speaking again with Andrew Giuliani claims to be the son of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Anybody could say that. Come on. No, as I get to know you, Andrew, it's obvious that your father's son, you have a great sense of humor. And, you know, I said this to your dad, actually, when we were together. One of the things that makes me happy by getting to know you is not just that you're right on the issues and you're a fighter, but you have political instincts.

There are a lot of people in the world of politics, they're very, they're just dead. They don't have that joy in meeting people and stuff. And you have that. So I think it's bodes well for your future, but I don't care as much about your future as I care about June 28th, which is the beginning of your future. That's the New York primary. You're running in the GOP against Lee Zeldon, who's not a bad person. He's just not, I don't think, the right guy for this job, if you're running. So June 28th is the primary for the, for the governorship in New York City. The website is save n.y.org. Did you know, growing up or did it ever occur to you that you'd want to go into politics? I mean, everybody

who's my age remembers your father's first inaugural when you were like running around like this bad kid, like running around stealing the thunder, stealing the show from your father. It was like one of the funniest things ever. Let's be honest, Eric here. The reason why my father is helping me so much. And, you know, us Italians, we remember, we have a very long memory. He wants to make sure he gets me back at my inaugural speech. So that's really what he's trying to do. And, like, and, like, and, let's be honest on that. But really, I think, and you mentioned this before, in terms of having political instinct, look, I think a lot of times people that get into politics and they've been, you know, they have staff telling them that they're this and they're that, they forget to listen

to people. And to me, that's one of the things that I always try to make sure wherever we go to events, I'm not talking to people. I'm talking with people. You also need to make sure you're listening. Maybe the message that you're sending is not necessarily exactly what's really plaguing New Yorkers. So for me, I've always tried to make a real effort to really listen, get that feedback. It's really for those who want to know, they're really in the field polls every single day. But it also gives you a real touch in terms of what's going on. When I say a touch, not a Cuomo touch, an engagement in terms of what's going on.

Hey, it's a family show. We don't have that kind of touching. No, honestly, just the madness. When I think about what New York has been through, I mean, listen, to think of Hillary Clinton being a senator from New York. and how many people really got fooled into thinking, well, she's kind of a centrist and she's nice and da-da-da-da. And you realize that these folks are, they're very, very power-hungry. They are corrupt. Genuinely, I mean, we have to be honest.

Ideology aside, there's corruption, it's career politics. I mean, obviously you're part of a dynasty now. But in my view, it's dramatically different because you don't believe in dynasties. You don't believe in career politicians. You believe in the values that the founders believed in. But in New York, that's been very rare. Let's be honest. We haven't had a lot of that.

Yeah, look, I started my campaign over a year ago, and I've made sure that I try to talk to as many of the 2.9 million registered Republicans and over 10 million registered voters as possible. And like I said before, listen to them. Of course, I think the dynasties are something that, you know, you should never be handed anything. This is all about going out and earning it. And that's why for me, I started off our campaign, promising that I would come to all 62 counties within the first month.

And we did that. And we continue to do that. And that's the pace that we're going on. Because to be honest, look, if we're going to really change this state and not just say we're going to change it, but actually do it, it's going to take somebody that's going to be able to have the energy, the kind of effort and the kind of conviction that we need, who's going to be able to go to Buffalo in the morning, New York City in the afternoon, back to Syracuse in the evening, to fix all the issues that have been plaguing our state. First Cuomo, now Hocal, unfortunately, like you said before,

it's a whole lot of corruption that New York has seen over the last 12 years. We need somebody who's going to come in there who's not going to be your typical Albany politician, but is going to change things from the ground up. There's a lot of cynicism, I think. I think that people who are okay with corruption and Cuomo, they're cynical. They don't believe that anything really good can be done. And you need to be a little bit of. of a maniac to think that you can change this stuff. Yeah, and I think that's probably learning from

Donald Trump and working four years in his White House. Definitely. And living and having dinner conversations every night with Rudy Giuliani and figuring out how you did this. I mean, these are two guys who went in with the mindset with Rudy, the City Hall, my father to City Hall and with President Trump to Washington, D.C., where they said, no, no, you know, the bureaucracy's too big. You're not going to be able to change it. It changes you. And they said, no way. I'm coming in there. And I'm going to make sure. I do everything that I possibly can day in and day out relentlessly to make sure I'm representing the people, the constituents that elected me, not the other way around, not where I am their boss,

they are my boss. It seems really clear to me that your father and Donald Trump are extraordinarily rare in having the ability somehow to withstand the stunning level of attack. and somehow the heart to be willing to actually change things. Because let's face it, the easy path that most Republicans take, they play it safe. You know, they want to be on the morning, Sunday morning shows. And so they kind of, well, I'm a moderate. I'm not like those other guys.

And they enable evil to continue. And when I say evil, I mean, it hurts people. You were talking about it earlier. Your average citizen, that's exactly who we're supposed to represent if we're That's exactly the whole idea of America. And I really think people, they get in bed with power, they get addicted to power, and they genuinely lose sight of that. It amazes me that your dad and Donald Trump did not.

You know, my mother-in-law lived 46 years of her life under Soviet oppression. She's from Lithuania, and she remembers when she was three years old, hiding under the bed when the Red Army took her father to Siberia, to nationalize the country. their farmland. Before she passed last year, we had a conversation, and she said that the media in the United States of America, she wasn't referring to you, but the media in the United States of America reminds her more of Pravda than it does of free press. That was one of the things that gave me the conviction to make sure that we are fighting for truth, that we are fighting to make sure that we are getting the message out there clearly. Whatever evil we have to fight against to do that,

I'm happy to take on that burden. And honestly, it motivates me every day. This is another reason I like you, because look, my mother grew up in East Germany. I have lived this. My family knows how bad it can get, how people can suffer. And those of us who've seen this, I write about it in my book, Fish Out of Water. This is real. We're not making this up. And I think a lot of Americans, they seem to think everything's fine. We need to know that things can get much worse than they are right now. We'll be right back.

We're talking to Andrew Giuliani, the website, save n.y. Yes, folks, welcome back. A couple of seconds left with Andrew Giuliani. Yes, he's the son of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. And I'm glad to say you got a lot of those genes. You're a fighter. You've got a great sense of humor, common sense. I'm not just saying this.

Anybody listens to this program, I hope knows I wouldn't. You have a very important primary on June 28th against your GOP rivals. It seems clear to me that you're the man for this job, which is why I insisted you come on this program and try to convince any New Yorkers or anybody listening to this program. If you know somebody in New York, June 28th is the day. You have to vote. Now, a lot of people don't vote in these primaries.

You got to come out and vote. It's so important. And I always say this. If you don't like what's going on in government and you don't vote, you have no right to complain. So give yourself as New Yorkers the right to complain by coming out and voting. But honestly, I really think in looking at this that we are neck and neck to where we need to be. The last poll actually had us up 10 points for the nomination. So we're in a good place. But as we know, sometimes these primaries, which are the week before July 4th, sometimes get a little less turnout than you would like. To me, it's about making sure that all New Yorkers have a voice in this process. That's what this has been about since day one. So my candidacy has been about. And I think, frankly, our grassroots is very, very strong. We're going to get them out there on June 28th. Well, again, the country's at stake.

This is not 1985 or 1995. The country's at stake. Maybe 1984, it feels like, but yeah. Because we kind of have, but I'm saying I think most Americans are waking up and they're thinking, whatever was going on, this is crazy. I mean, this is, I was in California. I saw the $7 gas. I should have taken a picture.

$7 for gas. Everywhere you look, there's just madness has been unleashed, lies, insanity. And I think your average American just says, how did this happen? Yeah. How did this happen? And I would put forward that it is Republicans who play patty cake with the devil. They just said, you know what, I don't want to take that on. I don't want to be like Donald Trump or like Rudy Giuliana.

I don't want the people coming after me. I'm just going to play nice. And by playing nice, you've opened the door to evil. And who suffers the poor and the working class? Let's take an issue that I know is very important to you and very important to me as well, the First Amendment. You know, recently Kathy Hochel signed legislation that became law that would allow the government in New York to actually crack down on social media companies more and more. I look at it this way, right? I think we need more speech, not less speech.

I know this is something that's important to you. If we want to actually go after social media companies, instead of creating a board that's filled of bureaucrats, basically leftists, let's actually just repeal Section 230. How about that? Because then what you're going to get is you're going to get the general counsels in there, not a leftist board that's going to say, wait a second, where are we going to be actually liable in all this?

Because, let's face it, they are publishers when they end up taking off the Eric Mataxson, the Donald J. Trumps of the world and keeping on the Ayatollah on there, they've decided which bed to lay in over here. For us, let's make sure we have members that are going to come out there and push Section 230. I know that's federal and that's not on a state level, but we are dealing with it in the state right now. And the Patela reflex to go and take speech away and attack our Constitution even further shows what we're fighting against. So you're a lifelong New Yorker. you grew up here. You're raising your brand new baby here.

You care about this city and you care about the state. But you clearly love America. We just got seconds left. But what gives me the most encouragement about you other than the fact that you're Rudolph Giuliani's son is that you worked in the Trump administration. You saw what he went through. Well, to work four years from,

and I have to tell you, right after left the Trump administration, I was talking with my wife and we were saying, well, what are we going to do? What's the next step? It's when I decided to run for governor and we basically made the decision for the next 50 years, God willing, we were going to fight for New York and fight for America. Ladies and gentlemen, June 28th is the primary. The website save n.wai.org. Andrew Giuliani, God bless you. Eric, always great to be on with you.