The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 105 | Is 2022 Our Last Chance to Save America? | Victor Davis Hanson | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: April 24, 2021

Do you know where your water comes from? Renowned historian and conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson gets his water from a well on his family farm. He pumps it himself. And he believes that’s what more Americans need — to be grounded and stop taking so much for granted. Hanson joins Glenn to point out that this needs to happen soon, because as he describes in his new article, “The 10 Radical New Rules That Are Changing America,” things are getting ... bleak. The Left is subverting the Constitution more every day. The value of the dollar is dropping. The media has fused with the radical Left. Corporations, Hollywood, Silicon Valley are all working together to increase their power and their wokeness. And academia isn’t any better — as a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Hanson has watched for himself the deterioration of constitutional rights on campus. And as a historian, he knows how all of this usually ends — and what we must do to prevent it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You could accuse America's founding fathers of a lot of things, and the left goes out of its way to try. But one thing you cannot accuse the founders of is a failure to know history and think deeply. That is the exact opposite approach to our current woke authoritarian cancel culture. It's all about the future, not about the past, and let's not even take the time to think deeply on these things and question what it all means. The founders knew that ideas, making arguments, working through issues, were vital building blocks for our nation. The woke culture and other things like it is more fundamentalist than most hardcore Bible thumpers. It's their way or the highway. It is their salvation or no salvation.

And it seeks to silence every idea that questions the power, especially any of the power. especially any suggestion that America has any redeeming qualities. I want you to hear a guy today who has had a long, successful career in the academic world, and yet he is always standing for truth, in defense of truth, common sense, free markets, and actual history. He's one of America's best historians. You may be familiar with him already, but if you're not, he is a historian and a farmer that you need to know. I bring that up because we, well, just listen to the podcast.

He's a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's an American military historian, regular communist columnist for the National Review. He has written or edited 24 books, including the upcoming title, The Dying Citizen, how progressive elites, tribalism, and globalism are destroying the idea of America, which will be released next fall in October. In these unreasonable times, he is a refreshing voice of reason. Today, Victor Davis Hansen. So, Victor, I was at a friend's house over the weekend, and Condi Rice was there.

And she, as you would know, she is, what is she, the head of the Hoover now? I don't know what the title is exactly. Yes, director of Hoover Institution, yeah. Right. And, you know, obviously, as a C. senior fellow, you work with her. She had the best happy face on, I have seen it. I mean, it was a group of people that were a little depressed on the direction of the country. And, you know, she addressed those problems, but she said we can make it, et cetera, et cetera.

I'd like to hear from you as a historian. I mean, you have studied ancient warfare, modern warfare, you are one of America's leading historians. Where do you see us in the cycle? And although past results don't guarantee future results, where are we and what are we headed towards? Can you compare it to any other time? You know, Adam Smith, when he was asked that question, said there's a lot of ruin in a nation.

And what he meant by that was you can go a long way by eating your seed corn without replenishing it. And so we're a very rich, we had a wonderful inheritance this country. But what I'm worried about is there's seven or eight criteria throughout history that you, as you mentioned, history, that make a nation succeed or fail. And we were good at all of them. But I'm not sure we're as good as we were in the past. I'm not so sure as good.

Can you go through some of those? What are we losing? Well, the first is you have to have a constitutional system that's constant. And you don't do things when you're in power like trying to get rid of a 150-year-old nine-person Supreme Court, a 232-year-old electoral college, a 60-year-old 50-state union. you don't try to subvert the Constitution with a national voting federal comprehensive state that overruns the state statutes. And you don't, you know, we've had 60 years, as I said earlier, of 50 states. So what we're trying to do is change the Constitution because the power that's in party

doesn't feel it has a 51% resonance on its main signature issues. And it's, you know, the last election, it was 70 or 80,000 votes aggregate from losing the presidency, the House, and the Senate. So that's dangerous. We don't, currencies are very important. You can see in ancient cultures when you start to see how thin the veneer of silver is over bronze. But when you're printing $6 trillion and we're getting up to a $30 trillion debt, we have a generation that's never heard of the word stagflation or inflation. Yeah. And prices have gone up to $2.000.

percent this month, cars, houses, gas, everything's sky high. That's worrisome because they don't seem to be aware of it, what's going on. We have, let's just talk about monetary here for just a second. We are changing absolutely everything. I mean, we have added states, but the state that are being added now are just to give one party control. It's almost like the Missouri compromise days, where it's it's about a political agenda and adding states for a political agenda, not because it enriches the country or anything else. When we are looking at printing, it's almost, I mean, because it is, it's historic, it's a historic fact that when you debase your money,

the way we are debasing our money, it's always going to end the same way. So are we looking at a group of politicians that really know what they're doing and are intentionally trying to destroy the country? I don't know the answer to that because I don't know who's actually in control of the policy. I think people in the Fed feel that we've been to that a, let's face it, it's a zero interest interest policy because the, the one or two percent we're paying out on T bills doesn't catch up with inflation and they feel in some way that redistributes capital so that people have a couple works on entire life. They have $100,000 in the bank. They get nothing for it.

Whereas a young couple goes out and buys a home at 2% or a mega truck at $70,000 at zero interest, that's a transfer of real wealth. And they like that. But there's others that are more radical and feel that. you know, that money is just a construct. And so if you get up to 110% of GDP, of annual GDP in debt, it's no problem. And the more you do it, the more you do it, it's going to redistribute wealth. They're actively in favor of that.

And what's weird is that because of the pin-up demand and we were all locked down for a year. And then the Trump deregulation and tax reform and all this oil and gas that we've produced, we've got, we're kind of running on a flywheel. we didn't need these stimuli, what I'm trying to struggle to say. We didn't need another $4 trillion because this thing is going to boom this economy. But I think we're going to, at the end of the year, early next year, we're going to start to see what you and I remember in our generation. I'm a little older than you, but 70 style, you know, 6%, 7% inflation,

and then it can go higher. And then it requires a Fed to intervene with high interest. if that you know if that if that if the velocity of money starts moving if we do have a boom then we will have inflation and you know I talked to Art Laffer years ago and I said art what you know you were there in the 80s and you had to bring it back from the brink then and this is man we probably had printed two trillion dollars and I said what is it going to take he said I can't imagine the interest rate that it would have to be. Yeah.

Well, you know, you can see there's not the demand. I went to, I had a 16-year-old pickup, and I went out to a rural pickup dealer, and they were selling five and six, and I bought a moderate, moderate price to 60,000 today for pickup, and I was the only one that bought the moderate one. All of these people were in line to buy the huge one, 70,000, and I asked him how they had the money. He said most of them aren't working. They have zero interest incentives.

Gasoline has gone up right down the corner, $1.10 in the last 90 days. And houses in Fresno County, believe it or not, is the highest appreciating market in the United States right now, 21% in prices in the last six months. So this, and these are big item purchases, so they're not in the consumer price, you know, food and stuff, which already went up, 2% almost last. month. So it's it we're in an inflationary cycle and of course because we're paying the national debt at nearly 30 trillion in cheap money at zero interest, we can't raise interest rates because if we do we get up to 25% of the budget and debt scurred.

So how do we tell me historically what happens to a society when the when the average person it pays the real high cost because it will be the average worker that because of inflation could lose according to, I think it was Bloomberg, up to 48 percent or 48 cents on every dollar in the next five years if you're holding it in a savings account. How does the average person react when they've played by the rules and the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting help from the government, and the ones in the middle are the ones called the problem.

Well, you can see what's going to happen when if we get an 8 or 9% inflation, or even six or seven, and these banks are on 30-year loans at 2%, they're going to want to foreclose. And if a guy loses his job and even can't make that 2% loan, which is because the principal gets bigger and bigger as the interest gets lower and lower, because everybody's It's all about monthly payments. I can buy a million more house, but they're all over-extended now. And the banks don't want to be in that situation if we get inflation, so they're going to be very tough on a missed payment.

So, yeah, we could have really something like 2008, but it's even more importantly, there's force multipliers. And these are cultural force multipliers, getting back to your original question. And by that, I mean, to look at all of our institutions, the first and fifth amendment do not exist on a university campus where I work. I can't say something freely without consequences. A student who's accused of a particular crime cannot find due process. The legal system is asymmetrical.

If you go out with a thousand people and break quarantine and you're celebrating the LA Lakers in LA or BLM, then you're going to be waived. And medical professionals will say, as they did, that's necessary for your mental mental health to break the quarantine. If you and I go into a church service, we could be fine if we don't have a mask. If somebody is shot in the Capitol who is a military veteran for what could have been a felony breaking into the Capitol and the officer shoots an unarmed woman, we're not going to hear about who the officer is.

We're only going to hear how horrible this woman was. But if we have the same situation where the races are reversed, it's going to be a nationalist. So the media is fused with the progressive revolutionary movement, and they pick and select these stories. I could go on, but you get the picture that's Silicon Valley, Facebook, Hollywood, entertainment, traditional network media, the foundations. So all of the levers of influence, Wall Street, the corporate boardroom, Coca-Cola, Disney, they all have either for careerist reasons or selfish reasons or for ideological reasons.

They want to change the United States into something, I guess, would be kind of Jacobin radical, 51% vote on everything any given day. And that would be a good interpretation. They want to get rid of a constitutional checks and balances republic. So, but when you have this, has any nation recovered from that kind of situation? And if so, how did they recover? How do you disenfranchise the center of the country, have the elites get stronger and more powerful, the poor or the disenfranchised, if you're in a certain class, you know, held up. If you're not in a certain class and you're disfranchised, it doesn't matter.

The entire world seemed to be moving towards Brexit philosophy of, I don't trust the elites. I want the power closer to me. That's why Donald Trump was elected. That's why Bolsonaro was elected. They just didn't trust anything. And it seems as though the elites are closing ranks and pushing everything to an even bigger scale. How do you survive that?

Has anyone survived? Well, yeah, they have. I mean, Britain was, as you remember in the 70s, was they were on a three-day work week. They had blackouts. And then Margaret Thatcher came in and they said, you can't do what you're going to do. And she did. And Ronald Reagan came in and everybody said he's crazy. Paul Volker's got a 12%.

The first thing that happened was the air traffic controllers. And he said, they work for the government. They're not supposed to strike. I just fired them all. And they said, you can't do that. No one's ever done that. And that was the end of it. And so you have figures like that can or cannot come.

The Jacobins took over the French Revolution. and everybody thought Robespierre would behead his way into perpetual power, and suddenly one day the thermadors came in and said, you know what, that's enough of that. And he got in line. But what we're having now is the majority of the people, if you look at every one of these issues, it's in the news, open borders, voter ID, more energy, they're against,

they're polling contrary to what the Biden administration wants. But the Biden administration relies on, social media, media, as I said, professional sports, entertainment figures, corporate boardrooms, universities, K through 12. They have a minority of support, but they have a vast majority of capital. That's new, actually. It's very rare when you have a society where the wealthy and the establishment, for whatever reason, have become proverbally woke. So right now we're in a war. We know that we had a fair and free election on national plebiscite.

most of these issues would lose, but they want in this brief moment, and this is what's really scary because this is a Bolshevik Jacobin moment, in a brief moment, even though they don't have white support, even though there's no mandate like Obama, even Obama had a mandate in 2009 with a huge Senate and House leader, FDR, but he doesn't even have that. They just want to seize power, change the rules, and then perpetuate or institutionalize their power. And so it's very important. but they're stopped. Okay, so let me ask you then this question, really politically incorrect question, but one, I hear from people all the time, and I don't know the answer to it.

I'm just, I'm, I'm averse to more chaos, but people will say, okay, you have people who are trying to change the Constitution, who are sworn to protect it. They're trying to change the very fabric of the country. They are not in line with the people. And our rights that the government is supposed to protect are being violated. And those who are protecting it are the biggest violators of it. So what do the citizens do? What should we do and what should we not do?

Yeah. Well, citizens in a constitutional republic have two choices, cultural, social, and political. So if you're on the conservative side, you've got to appeal to as many people as possible and say 2022 is going to be your last chance. You're not just to win the house. You have to win it by a big margin, and you have to take back the Senate. You've got to do that, and that'll give you two years of... oxygen until you win the next race.

And you've got to get a candidate, whether it's Trump or somebody like Trump with that agenda that can get everybody back in. And they have to have a 51% majority. Republicans haven't won a 51% majority of the popular vote since 1988, George H.W. Bush won. But then culturally or socially, you know, conservatives are traditional people. They worry about their religion, their community, their friends. family, their business, and they don't cancel people out. They don't boycott. They don't embargo.

The left does that. They always do that. But they're going to have to step up. And I've used the term, they have to live in a monastery of the mine where they just say, you know what, I'm not going to make a big deal about it, but I'll organize locally. But I'm not going to do certain things. So I decided maybe five years ago, I would never again in my life watch an NBA game I think I made that decision now about Major League Baseball. I don't even turn it off. I go in a room and it's on, I turn it off. I don't want to be preached to.

I have a granddaughter. I didn't really want her to watch the Super Bowl and that type of halftime entertainment. I just quit. Not that I like Coca-Cola, but I'll never drink a Coke again. If I have a choice between flying Delta, I will not fly Delta if I can. So these are minor little things,

but it won't matter of $5 million or $10 million do that. But if you get a national movement where people say, you know what, the NBA, because of what we have done is broke now, and they're going to be overly pro-Chinese, because that's the only revenue they're going to have, $5 billion market in China. That's going to really expose a lot of this stuff that they're doing. And that applies to all of it. And then we have to have alternate institutions. Parlay or Parlayer, which everyone once proposed, was destroyed by Amazon and Google and Facebook. Twitter, but we need, it will come back and we need these alternate institutions. And then I think

when they see that, that they're losing half their market or more, they'll start to respond. But we're not doing that. But it is almost impossible. I mean, libertarians and generally small, you know, government people, they don't like doing things as a group. You know, it's hurting cats. And we've never done boycotts. And I've never been for them until I really, uh, really studied Martin Luther King, uh, in a different way, not just academically, but really trying to understand how it worked, why it worked, what the failures were, et cetera. And he was right. He said, without a soundtrack, so without the cultural presence, and without an arm that is punishing with boycotts

and the love element where you are seen always being good and decent. So good and decent people want to join you, it wouldn't succeed. Well, we don't have a cultural impact. We certainly don't boycott anybody. and I don't think, especially boycotts. If we don't boycott, I don't think it works because they're not afraid. They know we don't do anything. They're not afraid.

They control the language, too. Everybody's got to change the language. What they're doing is Jim Crow in reverse. So when they, I did make example, if they predicate farm aid and they say a $5 billion farm aid is not going to be given anybody who's wife, or the Ivy League this year, say Princeton, let's send 13% of their admissions or white males when it should be according to proportional representation, forget merit or whatever, about 27th. I mean, they're not doing that. Or if Oakland parcels out subsidies for the poor except for white people, when there are more

poor white people numerically than almost any group. And when the wealthiest group in the United States per capita, by far are Asian Americans and supposedly racist. society, $20,000 more than per capita income. What I'm getting at is that conservatives have to say that's racist. I'm not racist, you're racist. And I'm not, and then when the O Biden's, when O Biden said, I'm calling him O'Biden, Obama Biden, I should say, but when he says we're going to outlaw the use of illegal alien and assimilation, we have to say, if you're not going to assimilate, you're going to turned into a Balkan, Rwanda, a rash, war of everybody against everybody, Hobbesian war. And so we've got to use the language back.

And there's nothing wrong with the illegal alien. Alien, just a Latin word that means not of this place, not born in this country, not a citizen. And illegal means they're here unlawfully. It doesn't mean undocumented doesn't mean that undocumented doesn't mean it's illegal. It means that somebody had all of his documents, but if somehow they vanished in thin air, when he crossed the border. And so they use the language very effectively. And whether it's micro, when they use things like systemic racism and microaggression,

what they're basically saying is we can't find demonstrable racism. So we're going to redefine an aggression as a micro, it's subtle. It exists only two people with proper antenna. And if it's systemic, it doesn't mean it's overt, just everywhere. So if it's everywhere, it's really nowhere. And I think we've got to attack the way they use language and do it constantly and say, you're the racist, you're the racist. I know that we had a couple of scholars, Scott Atlas and my colleague Neil Ferguson that were brought up by the Stanford faculty Senate.

And they made these charges that we were too political or ideological. And one of them said, you know, you're racist. The whole boyar played and you're not doing scholarly work. And the only way to reply to them was to say, wait a minute. You have founded a campus affiliate to Antifa. Wait a minute. You have posted anti-Semitic literature. Wait a minute.

You haven't written a book in about nine years. We've written 15 books in the time you wrote. So you have to hammer back and say, if you really want to do this, you're going to lose. We didn't start it, but we will finish it. And then they dropped the charges. But if we had just said, I'm so sorry. What could I do?

Is there a re-education program I can go and can I be back in the good races of the university? But you have to have, I hate to say it, you have to be polite, but you have to have content for what they're doing. And if you don't have content for what they're doing, then they're going to, they want to find people to apologize. And then they say, look at this person. He confessed and we want to go to the next and the next. And once one person doesn't confess and reverses it, it's kind of like the emperor has. your clothes. You talked about this in

one of your latest articles. Hang on just a second. It was new rules that are changing America and you were talking about how really McCarthyism is coming. Rule number eight, McCarthyism is good.

That's the kind of thing that is happening. Once you give in, then they want names and then they'll go after somebody else and they want names. And before you know it, you've sold out everything. And remember the people who, and the difference there is, I mean, at the very beginning, there were communists.

It wasn't like the Say them witch trial where they were witches. There were communists, but it got after the original people like Alger Hears were exposed, they went after, I mean, they went after Horson Wells and all these other people who were kind of naive in their 30s, but very patriot. They tried to destroy them. And when enough people said, no more. then McCarthy just kind of imploded, Roy Cohn imploded, that was the end of it.

And all of a sudden, we never really had a McCarthy period. They said, what was that all about? Just like Me Too. Me Too started out very well and well-intentioned because of the monstrosities of Harvey Weinstein and that Hollywood mostly left wing and league. But then it did something that was very dangerous. They went after Brett Kavanaugh,

and they created a new woman must be believed, meaning the accusation was tantamount to the conviction. And that started to work weakening. And then finally, Joe Biden was caught up in the web of Me Too with the Tara Reid allegations, which, by the way, had some contemporary communications that sort of corroborated in a way that was never true of retro. And that ended it because they thought, wow, we took out Al Franken, the U.S. Senator. Now we're going to take out the only guy who might be done. Well, this can't go on.

and they sort of cannibalize themselves. And you're starting to see a little bit of that with this movement when they go after some New York Times op-ed writers or I think Bill Maher. And they always do that. You wake up one morning and yesterday you were the revolutionary, today, you're the moderate and tomorrow you're dubbed the sell-out because there's no end to it until they're close. So did you see the op-ed piece from the head of Planned Parenthood in the New York Times? Yes, yeah.

I think that's an example of that. They weren't saying, oh, we are a racist, whatever. They said, yeah, okay, so we accept that. We don't have anything to do with that. But we're going to clean out our own house. And these feminists, radical Marxist feminists, who won't go the next step and say, a man can be a woman and a woman can be a man,

we're coming after you. I mean, I thought, I took that op-ed, not as a surrender, but as a declaration of war on more internal enemies. Did you read it that way? Yeah, I did. I think that's why I mentioned earlier. I had that in mind in part when I said, if we can get national Republican leaders who can say, look, we never, we're conservatives and traditionalists, and you may not agree with us,

if you're a swing voter or a Democrat or a classic liberal, whatever term you want to call yourself. But even you, or especially you, can't countenance this stuff. And you know what's going on. And we're welcoming you in a coalition to stop it because this is beyond politics. They were trying to destroy statuary. They were renaming names. It's like the Chinese cultural level. If you wake up, well, I woke up, I mean, not woke up, but I went one day to my office.

And there was Junipio Sarah Boulevard below the Hoover Tower. Next time I came over, I said, where's the sign? They said, oh, it's not named that anymore. He whipped people in the 18th century. I said, he was one of the most heroic Catholic priests there was. He walked in great pain. He founded the missions. He tried to bring agriculture to this Spanish call, no matter.

And so when you get, or the Wilson Center, I'm not a big fan of Woodrow Wilson, but they just changed the Wilson Center at Princeton. And so the asymmetrical application of the law is very scary that we, nobody's been indicted for the greatest material and human damage and riots over 90 days. We still didn't get very many indictments because the law is now saying to all of us, there is no such thing as the law. There's certain types of laws and certain types of victims and certain type of victimizers and we'll adjudicate which is it is and who faces and does not face consequences.

But the moderate can't be for that. We have to get them on our side as well. they won't be able to operate as they are now. So help me out because I think I was not a supporter of Donald Trump when he first ran. Not at all, not even close. However, when I watched him, I would have been a hypocrite and just one of these never-trumper's. If he would have done the things I thought he was going to do in office, I would have stood against him.

But he actually did some amazing things. I didn't like the way he spoke. I didn't like, you know, the Twitter stuff, whatever. But that style. The substance of him, he was pretty good. He was pretty good. In fact, did things that I never thought any American president would do, i.e. Israel. But if in the end, he was completely destroyed by a cabal of,

of the elites, those who just don't care about what a president says because they're going their direction and they've been in the State Department or wherever, for however, you have Intel also, I think, completely corrupt now. If Donald Trump, who doesn't care about any of that stuff, in fact, thrives on that stuff, if he can't do it, who can't, you're absolutely right about Donald Trump. My only criticism of him is he, because he was not a politician, he was a little bit unaware of the power that the people had that were trying to destroy him. He felt that by sheer force of energy character, he could tweet, tweet, tweet, and override them. And he had no idea. I'll give you one example. The countries in flames that St. John Episcopal Church is burning. They're threatening to go onto the White House grounds.

He just says, I think we might have to get federal troops in Washington. Immediately, all of these retired generals come out of the woodwork. And they say, you know what? This is what a tyrant does. And he has to back down. Joe Biden says, hey, four former chiefs of staff, the Joint Chiefs are going to walk him out of the White House. And I'm thinking, wait a minute. The Code of Military Justice says that even retired officers are not supposed to disparage

a commander in chief. Nobody cared. Okay. And he didn't have any idea that some of these people he'd have appointed a high office. Now what do we have? We have riots and we have burning and we have everywhere. Does any of those generals say we need to mobilize the federal troops? Some of them do. But more importantly, look at Washington. It's under Bob Wire. Did any of them come out and say, wait a minute, you weaponized the Capitol. We haven't seen that since Jubal Early marched on it in the Confederate War in 1864, and they didn't say a word. But my point is he had no idea that the military was woke, that the CIA was woke, the FBI was woke, the media was. 93% negative coverage, according to the Liberal Schorenstein Center.

He had no idea that the Oscars, the Emmys, the NFL, golf, everything was woke. And so he was sort of a tragic figure. He was fighting a 360-degree fight. And to get through to his supporters, he got tougher and tougher and tougher. And that fed their narratives. And then he sort of, you know, I think I had written a couple of columns when people asked, well, when was the election lost? I thought the election was lost for Trump in March when they changed all of these states. When I read in March and April, they changed the...

state voting laws to allow longer periods and no signature verification address, I thought, wow. And then when I heard Mark Zuckerberg was going to give $500 million and others were going to try to match him for pre-selected precincts to basically take over from the government their responsibilities and go out and get ballots and drop box. I said, how can anybody fight that? It's just impossible. I think so if he had just said I was done a grave injustice structurally I had they changed the system against me

I'm going to go down to Georgia I accept that I can't change it given the tools I have I'm going to go down to Georgia tell independence this is your future if you don't vote the right way and my and my base no go go and I agree and then it's barms storm the country right now

no protest at the he would be an Andrew Jacksonian figure right now he would say, you know what, I'm coming back in righteous indignation and hurt. But, you know, humans are humans. I think at some point I would get up my say, could I take what Donald Trump's taking this morning? And the answer was usually I wouldn't be able to do it. Yeah, I agree with you.

I was there at the White House when he lost the last Supreme Court challenge, you know, right before Christmas. And it did not go well. And I was with my daughter and I said, think of the anger that you would have, the righteous anger. You know you've been smeared, lied about. You know people in power and the media have just done a grave injustice. And yet you still had belief. There's only so much a man can take before, you know, he snaps. And I think I would have snapped a lot of long.

or a lot earlier than he did. You know, he was completely alone. I can tell you that I talked to an administration official about two weeks before the inauguration. I said, you know what's happening now? And he said, what? And I said, the Biden vaccination in two weeks that will have saved him, the country from the fact that Trump never had. of course, one million were getting vaccinated a day, and Joe Biden claimed that nobody had ever been vaccinated. And then I said, the Trump quarantine and lockdown will be liberated eventually by the Biden recovery and the Biden boom.

And you've got to understand this is what's going to be like because he said to me, well, at least they'll know who did the vaccination. And they'll know that tax reform and deregulation and energy development and closing the border sparked this fundamental economic, foundation foundational change and they'll perpetuate. They said, no. They'll take credit for it as long as it's good and then when they screw it up, they will blame you for it. But you're not going to get any credit whatsoever. And I remember telling the official, you remember the end of Shane where Shane, you know, kills all the bad guys and the cattle barons are gone and this valley and he's wounded and he rides off. That's sort of Donald Trump's fate. He had certain skills that were necessary to shake the system up.

But once he shook it up and it started to work, even people who brought him in thought, wow, I didn't sign up for that tweet about Fauci couldn't throw baseball very well or something like that. I can't be part of that. Thank you, Donald Trump, for stopping illegal immigration. Thank you for reformulating the entire Middle East. Thank you for getting tough with China. Thank you for making the NATO countries step up. Thank you for changing the tax laws so people would have a chance to invest and be prosperous. and we have energy. But those tweets, man, did you really have to get all that change by tweeting? And that's what happened. So does he, should he run again? Would he win with the way things are going to be and the way it ended in the first term?

You know, that's a question that requires that we fill in the blanks. What you really mean, Glenn, is if Ronda Santas, or Mike Pompei or Nikki, any of these other people, if we put them in that place, would they be able to have the resonance that Trump did with the air? In other words, what they lacked in dynamism or sheer animal energy and bluntness and cutting through the swamp lingo, would that be more than compensated as they wouldn't get in gratuitous dead-in fights with people?

I don't have that answer. I do have the answer that if there is a candidate who feels that they are going to run on a George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, John McCain platform, they're dead. Whether we like it or not. Donald Trump said this is a workers party. We're not going to look at race. We're going to look at class. We're going to try to unify people of different races by class concerns. We're for the worker. We want, you know, we're not going to just dwell on capital gains, tax cuts or cutting Social Security. Maybe we should. should, but we're not going to dwell on it. And we're going to be tough on trade and asymmetrical commercial practices by enemies and allies. And we're going to make sure the border is only there. It's only crossed legally in merriotic and measured fashion. All of those issues are going to be there. And Donald, that was his great contribution. I don't know whether he's going to be the senior statesman or that he's going to come back. If he comes back, I don't know if he can win 50% of the popular vote. I think he can probably win the electoral vote. And I don't know what

would happen if we'd repeat what we're doing, but he would have, he would be shot at, metaphorically, 360 degrees. But I don't know if another candidate yet we haven't seen enough of them has his skills and as an outsider. When Nikki Haley sort of thought, well, I'm going to finesse this or square this circle. I'm going to say that I'm for the Trump agenda, but I'm going to attack Trump. His mechanisms or his modularities. That didn't work. I mean, everybody

said, be quiet. And then she kind of almost subsequently had to go back and try to get in his good graces. So that paradigm does not work. Anybody who's going to run it, it's not going to work. Yeah, and that is

if he does run, you know, you'll split the party so badly. I mean, the problem in America is we've just become tribes. And you are either 100% in that tribe, or you're out and you're an enemy. And that

is very harmful. It's happening across the spectrum. And you know, we need a unifying moment where we don't look at the personalities. We look at the qualifications.

and the plan and come together and whatever our best shot is, that's our best shot. But if we... I agree. If we tear it apart and lose, we're done. The reason that all of the media and people are looking at Ronda Santos is that he's kind of got... The left can't go after him because he doesn't have their credentials.

He's got all of their credentials, educational, etc. He's run a state, and his theories, at least that he would have no greater fatalities or case rates in California, but he wouldn't destroy the economy in the way California had. That kind of has been substantiated by events, and I don't know anything about him, but I'm not taking him as an endorsement of him. I'm just saying somebody who's actually run something, and the left has trouble to attack him because he's very, very, very, tough, but he doesn't seek these sort of gratuitous encounters with him. And he's got all the things

that they think, they think, not necessarily us, but they think are important, but Yale or all that stuff. So that's why they're out to destroy him right now. They fear him because people are moving to Florida. It's a successful state and he's got these skills.

But, you know, he could end up to be a candidate like Scott Walker. Scott Walker was the same way. He was tough. He had all the skills. He ran a good state. He looked like the ideal candidate, but when he got out on the campaign trail, he found it very different than we thought that he would. When we first got on the, we first got on Skype together, we heard a tractor go by and you said you were on a farm and you used a word, they're disking today.

And I thought, I love a man who knows what disking is in real life. I am a rancher, a farmer, kind of, you know what I mean? Kind of like Jay Leno is a, you know, is a mechanic a little bit. You had a lot of help. But the more I spend in the soil, the more I spend in as a farmer or in nature, the more everything becomes self-evident. The more the universal way, the nature's God works, it all just answers itself and the community helps each other because you can't be a jerk in a farming community because if you fail, nobody's going to be there to help you. And you know, you're there helping people because you actually care about them, but also because you know it's going to be your turn at some point. And I think we as a nation have lost something that was vital to our early success,

and that is this soil-rooted common sense and decency. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, that's one of my biggest worries, because when you read the Federalist papers or look at the structure of the Constitution, or even you look at more of the radical founders like Jefferson who said, this stuff won't work when people are piled up in cities like Europe. We didn't even have a word for peasant in our vocabulary. It was the Homestead Act. Our whole purpose was to have independent, autonomous, freeholding, small agrarians. And we've lost so. We still have that independent person, the business person, the independent trucker.

Anybody who doesn't depend on anybody other than himself, they're not the majority, but they're a very necessary minority because they're sort of pragmatic and they're an atoll in the flood. And we need more and more of them. And yet we're being corporatized, social media. It's making this uniform urban type of population that wants something from somebody or is always victimized or always feel that somebody is owed him or the farmer. One of the things I realize farming is you keep a tragic view. I had a five acre, we had about 200 acres and I farmed with my brother and my cousin, I thought,

well, we did everything right with the Santa Rosa crop this year. We fend it right, we borrowed the money to spray, to fertilize, to prune. I pruned the orchard, you know, 700 trees. My brother and I pruned them ourselves. And I thought, and then the fruit was beautiful. And then 24 hours before I looked at the orchard, I said, this is going to get, This is going to make a profit of $4,000. We're going to clear $20,000.

And it rained. Never rains in late June. And then it hailed. And in five minutes, it scarred and ruined the entire crop. And we said, wait a minute. We should have known that. We should have had a boom that broke up the hail or a mechanic. There was nothing.

It was tragic. And then once the farmer feels that way, he said, there's nobody to blame. Stuff happens. And I've got to find a way. to survive that. And so what I always did after that was I said, I'm going to lose this 10 acres or this crop on 30 acres. I'm going to have a bad year, but I'm going to find a way to survive it. And that makes you completely independent. Best thing you've ever happened. And grateful. And grateful. And grateful. And I really, one of the things we've lost is all reverence for our ancestors in this

country. And I'm living in this house that was built by my great, great grandmother. And I look at my grandfather, who was born here in 1890. And I didn't appreciate him when I was a teenager. And I thought, wow, he's always saying, slow down, be careful. But how he supported five people from 1910 until 66 years, one of whom had polio, my aunt, who was bedridden her entire life, two other daughters. and he never went broke. But, I mean, my whole garage, when I took it over, it was full of twine that had been reused, wire that had been reused,

vineyard steaks that had been used for the house. Everything was not to go in debt. And those values were, the best thing that ever happened to me, very briefly, was I was 25, I had a PhD in classics from Stanford, and there were no jobs. So I came home for a summer thinking maybe I don't want to go, back east for a part-time job and my grandmother said she was 90 and my parents said you've got to help us the house is full and the next thing I knew I was

doing it for five years and then I went to Cal State Fresno which was kind of a working class and taught for 20 years but my point is that that five years saved me because I was becoming something that I wasn't I was in a different world where their values were so crazy but when I came home I remember my first thing my dad said to me well how to go up there. And he was a learned a person. He was a college administrator, but he was a farmer too. And I said, it went

pretty well. He said, what did you have to do for your PhD? I said, I can write, not just read, but write in Latin Greek. And he said, oh, you can? Can you wire the 220 shed down there we need four? And I said, no. He said, well, what the hell was the, what was the five years

for? He can't do that. And I got really angry at this time. I had a smart aleck brother who was very educated, very smart guy, and he turned to me, and he that you remind me of Dr. Johnson's dog. You know, a dog that can dance on two legs is impressive, but we want to know what the purpose is. That's what a lot of our educated people are.

They have all of these esoteric skills and law and all this and PhDs, but they have no practical. As you say, knowledge that's grounded and audited by physicality. I was, I had dinner with, the president of I think it was Rwanda a couple of years ago and

a few of the people that were brought over for this this talk and they were students in the United States and they had been part of the recovery of Rwanda and every single one of the students when they got up to speak they said I'm taking you know water for water water purification I'm taking farm management. I'm taking infrastructure building.

And the last one said, I'm taking feminist Holocaust studies. And I listened to him, I leaned over to my wife and I said, she's staying. The rest are going home. And then by the end of her talk, she was saying, and I'm staying here in the United States, yada yada. Because everybody else was taking something of value that could actually change people's lives. And she you had bought into the western you know

excuse the expression mental masturbation I think yeah I had a guy I know what you're talking about I had a guy I won't mention any things about him because I like him but he he's an academic he drove all the way down here and talked to me and he said how can you live here and I said to him

where do you get your water in the Bay Area he said well I don't know it's in lakes I said where does the water in lakes well it must come out of the ground I said no it comes 400 miles in the California Water Project or from Hedge Hetching. You only have 17. And he said, well, where do you get yours?

I said, I pump my own water. I know where the pump is. I know how deep the well is. I said, where does your sewage go? And he said, I don't know. I guess I said, it's treated. And then it's dumped in San Francisco Bay. I can tell you where the sewage goes here.

And he said, well, who's responsible? I said, I don't get the pump working or the septic sewer system working. I'm in big trouble. Same thing with the power. Same thing with everything. and yet we have so many people that are dependent on muscular people. That was what was weird about the deplorables in Trump that this billionaire from Manhattan

who must have known something about his empire that he had guys that laid cement that he liked or wired. He would have been in the most unlikely person to say to the United States, you wiped out the entire interior without sourcing and offshoring and moving factories and we're not going to do it. And these guys are very very much. Because when you look at those rallies, they were saying, basically, why don't we outsource academics or why don't we outsource insurance executives or why don't we outsource lawyers? Why did you do it to lay the work?

We had cheap energy. We had good infrastructure. We had good talent. And you took our jobs because you wanted what? To make a great deal of money in China. So that was what's really important about that mega agenda. It was really a appeal to people who use their hands and their muscles that they're not just simply irrelevant anymore. That when we get up every day, people, the first thing we have to do is eat.

The second thing we have to do is have fuel per heat or transportation. And the third thing we have to be is safe. And all of those three demands have to be met by people who use their muscles, whether police or farmers or energy. workers or frackers. They're not people that do what I do type. And, you know, that's, you can get with, you can live at one more day without a column from Victor Hansen. You cannot live without food or fuel or a policeman. I, you know, that is the, I think that's the best thing I've heard in an interview that I've done in many, many months. It's that understanding, I think, that we are missing in the country. Thank you so much for your work.

on the 1776 project, which we didn't get into. I'm looking forward to your new book that is coming out in October. Yes. Thanks for your steady, historic look at where we are at any given time. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Glenn. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.