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

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 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 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 the Budget Institution.

Right.

And, you know, obviously, as a senior fellow, you work with her.

She had the best

happy face on I have seen.

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 it,

you know, 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 sure as good at words as we have.

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

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 have 60, 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.

And prices have gone up 2% 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 states that are being added now are just to give one party control.

It's almost like the Missouri Compromise days, where 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 as, I mean, because it is

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 too that a

let's face it, it's a zero interest interest policy because

the one or two percent we're paying out on T bills doesn't catch up with inflation and they feel that in some way that redistributes capital so that people have a s a couple works their whole entire life, they have a hundred thousand dollars in the bank, they get nothing for it.

Whereas a young 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

money is just a construct.

And so if you get up to 110% of GDP, of annual GDP and 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, we were all locked down for a year, and then the Trump deregulation and tax reform

and all this oil and gas that we produced,

we're kind of running on a flywheel.

We're still, 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.

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 70s style, you know, 6%, 7% inflation, and then it can go higher.

And then it requires a Fed to intervene with high interest.

If the velocity of money starts moving, if we do have a boom, then we will have inflation.

And I talked to Art Laffer years ago, and I said, Art, 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 $2 trillion.

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 of $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 item purchases, so they're not in the consumer price at food and stuff, which already went up 2% almost last month.

So, it's

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 screw.

So, how do we

tell me historically what happens to a society when

the average person

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%

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 6% or 7%, 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 says, you know, it's all about monthly payments.

I can buy a million-dollar house, but they're all overextended now.

And if the banks don't want to be in that situation if we get in inflation, so they're going to be very tough on a missed payment.

So, yeah, we could have a really something like 2008, but what 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 health to break the quarantine.

If you and I go into a church service, we could be fine if we don't have masks.

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 national.

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 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 it 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

a 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, they were on a three-day work week.

They had blackouts.

And then Margaret Thatcher came in and 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 Volcker's got to have 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 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 Thermidors 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 their 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 proverbially woke.

So right now we're in a war.

We know that if 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, 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 that 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

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 not just have 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 and

George H.W.

Bush won.

But then culturally or socially, you know, conservatives are traditional people.

They worry about their religion, their community, their 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 that they have to live in a monastery of the mind where they just say, you know what, I'm not going to make a big stuff 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 if 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 of Parlaire, which everyone once prefers, was destroyed by

Amazon and Google and Facebook and Twitter.

But

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

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,

really studied Martin Luther King 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'll give you an example.

If they predicate farm aid and they say a $5 billion farm aid is not going to be given to anybody who's white,

or the Ivy League this year, say Princeton, lets in 13% of their

admissions are white males when it should be according to proportional representation, forget merit or whatever, about 27.

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 in a supposedly racist society twenty thousand dollars more in 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 obidens when uh obiden said i'm calling him obiden 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 turn into a Balkan, Rwanda, Iran,

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 systematic or 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, a subtle.

It exists only to people with proper antenna.

And if it's systemic, it doesn't mean it's overt.

It's 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 boyer 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,

you know,

about nine years.

We've written 15 books in the time you wrote this.

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 graces of the university?

But you have to have, I hate to say it, you have to be polite, but you have to have contempt for what they're doing.

And if you don't have contempt 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 no clothes you talked about you talked about this in uh one of your latest articles hang on just a second it was uh new rules that are changing america and uh

you were talking about how really mccarthyism is coming rule number eight mccarthyism is good um that's the kind of thing that is happening once you give in then they want names and then they'll go after somebody 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 there weren't no witches.

There were communists, but it got after the original people like Al Drew Hearst was exposed.

They went after, I mean, they went after

Orson Welles and all these other people who were kind of naive in their 30s, but very patriotic.

They tried to destroy them.

And when enough people said no more, then McCarthy just kind of employed it, ploated, Roy Cohn unploded.

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 elite.

But then it did something that was very dangerous.

They went after Brett Kavanaugh and they created a new women must-be-believe, meaning the accusation was tantamount to the conviction.

And that started to work, weaken it.

And then finally, Joe Biden was caught up in the web of Me Too with the Tara Reed allegations, which, by the way, had some contemporary communications that sort of corroborated in a way that was never true of Brett Trump.

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 Don dumb.

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 Maupma.

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 sellout because there's no end to it until it close.

So did you see the op-ed piece from the head of Planned Parenthood in the New York Times?

Yes.

I think that's an example of that.

They weren't saying, oh, we are 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 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 it in mind in part when I said if we can get national Republican leaders who can say, look,

we've 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 evolution.

You wake up.

Well, I woke up, I mean, not woke up, but I went one day to my office, and there was Unipio Serra 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

nobody's been indicted for the greatest material and human damage in riots over 90 days.

We still don't get very many indictments because the law is now saying to all of us there is no such thing as a law.

There's certain types of laws and certain types of victims and for certain types of victimizers, and we'll adjudicate which 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-Trumpers.

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 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?

You're absolutely right about Donald Trump.

I think 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 country's in flames.

The 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, the four former chiefs of staff of 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 the commander-in-chief.

Nobody cared.

Okay.

And he didn't have any idea that some of these people he'd appointed to 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 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 woke, 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 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 his statements.

When I read in March and April, they changed the state voting laws to allow longer periods and no signature

verification or address, I thought, wow.

And then when I heard Mark 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 boxes, 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 independents, this is your future if you don't vote the right way.

And

my base

will count.

And then barnstorm the country right now.

No protest.

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 and I 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

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 longer 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 will have saved 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 it'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 it.

I 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 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 what Donald Trump's faith.

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 a 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 changed by tweeting?

And that's what happened.

So does he, should he run again?

Would he win with the way things are 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 Ron DeSantis or Mike Pompeo 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-end 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, but we're not going to dwell on it.

And we're going to be tough on trade and asymmetrical commercial practices by our enemies and allies.

And we're going to make sure the border is only there, it's only crossed legally and in meritocratic meritocratic 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 repeat what we're doing.

But

he would be shot at metaphorically 360 degrees.

But I don't know if another candidate yet, we haven't seen enough of him, has his skills and is 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 modulities.

That didn't work.

I mean, everybody said,

be quiet.

And then she kind of almost

obsequiously had to go back and try to get in his good graces.

So that paradigm does not work.

Anyone 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 and the plan and come together and whatever our best shot is, that's our best shot.

But if we

agree,

if we tear it apart

and lose, we're done.

The reason that all of the media and people are looking at Ron DeSantis is that he's kind of got

he 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 uh substantiated by events and i don't know 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 tough, but he doesn't seek these sort of gratuitous encounters with.

And he's got all the things that they think,

they think, not necessarily us, but they think are important, the Yale heart, 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 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 mechanic.

A little bit.

Yeah, 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

that 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, it is.

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 agrarian.

And we've lost those.

We still have that independent person, the business person, the independent trucker.

Anybody who doesn't depend on anybody other than himself is, 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 corporatorized, social media, it's making this uniform urban

type of population that wants something from somebody or is always victimized or always feels that somebody is owed him.

Where the farmer,

one of the things I realized farming is

you keep a tragic view.

I 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 thinned 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 done, 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 that 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 till

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, 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 are

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'd it go up there?

And he was a learned person.

He was a college administrator, but he was a farmer too.

And I said, said, it went pretty well.

He said,

what did you have to do for your PhD?

And 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?

And I said, no.

He said, well, what the hell was it?

What was the five years for?

If you can't do that.

And I got really angry at this time.

I had a smart Alec brother who was very educated, very smart guy, and he turned to me and he said,

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 in law and all this and PhDs, but they have no practical, as you say, knowledge that's grounded and audited by physicality.

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 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 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 her.

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 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's an academic.

He drove all the way down here to talk 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 Hetchy.

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 and

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 the most unlikely person to say to the United States, you wiped out the entire interior with outsourcing and offshoring and moving factories, and we're not going to do any.

And these guys are valuable.

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 labor?

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 MAGA 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 for 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, you can live one more day without a column from Victor Hansen.

You cannot live without food or fuel or a policeman.

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.