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 issues were vital building blocks for our nation the woke culture and other and other things
Like it is more fundamentalist than most hardcore bible thumpers uh 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 uh 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 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 hanson So victor i was at a friend’s house over the weekend and condi rice was there and is she as as you would know she is uh what is she the head of the hoover now i don’t know what the title is exactly uh director institution yeah 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 uh and although it you know past results don’t uh 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 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 sh we were in the past i’m not sure sure as good as we have can you go through some of those what 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 uh 150 year old nine person supreme court a 232 year old let caller college a 60 year old 50 state union uh you don’t try to subvert the constitution with a national voting federal comprehensive state that overruns the state statutes and uh you don’t you know we
Have 60 we 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 percent 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 six trillion dollars
And we’re getting up to a 30 trillion dollar debt we have a generation that’s never heard of the word stagflation or inflation yeah and prices have gone up two 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 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 or anything else when we are looking at printing it’s almost as i mean because it is it’s historic um uh 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 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 one or two percent were 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 couple
Works their 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 two percent or you know a mega truck at uh 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 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’ve produced we’ve got we’re kind of running on a flywheel we’re still
We 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 70s style you know six percent seven percent inflation and then it can go higher and then it requires a fed to intervene with high interest if that uh you know if that uh
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 gonna 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 sixty thousand today for a pickup and i was the only one that bought the moderate one
All of these people were in line to buy the huge one seventy thousand and i asked them 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 a dollar 10 cents in the last 90 days and houses in
Fresno county believe it or not is the highest uh appreciating market in the united states right now 21 in prices in the last six months so this and these not these are big item purchases so they’re not in the consumer price it you know food and stuff which already went up two percent
Almost last month so it’s it we’re in an inflationary cycle and of course because we’re paying the 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 percent of the budget and debts
So how do we um 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 uh 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 uh react when they’ve played by the rules and the rich are getting richer the 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 eight or nine percent inflation or even six or seven and these banks are on 30-year loans at two percent they’re going to want to foreclose
And if a guy loses his job and even can’t make that two percent 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 an 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 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 if you
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 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 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 in nationals 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 would be kind of jacob and 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 um
Has any nation recovered from that kind of of situation and if so how did they recover how do you disenfranchise the center of the country have the elites um get stronger and more powerful the poor or the disenfranchised uh 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 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 was they were
On a three-day work week they didn’t 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 there’s paul volcker’s got to have 12 the first thing that happened was the
Air traffic traffic controllers and he said they work for the government they’re not supposed to strike i just fired them all 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 thermadors came in and said you know what that’s enough of that and he got 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 uh voter id more energy they’re against their polling contrary to what the buy demonstration wants but the bite administration relies on social media media as i said professional sports entertainment figures corporate board rooms
Uh 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
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 wide 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 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 uh are being violated and those who are protecting it are the biggest violators of it
So what do the citizens do what what 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 w j 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 i i’ve used the term
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 step 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 if
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 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 and then we have to have alternate institutions parler parley parler which everyone once prefers was destroyed by amazon and google and facebook and twitter but we need
It 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 so but it is almost impossible i mean libertarians and generally uh small you know
Uh 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 in a different way not just academically but really trying to understand how it worked
Why it worked what the failures were etc and he was right he said without a soundtrack so without the cultural presence and without a uh an arm that is is uh punishing uh with boycotts uh 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 gotta change the language what they’re doing is jim crow and reverse so when they get for example if they predicate farm aid and they say a five billion dollar farm aid is not going to be given anybody who’s white or the ivy league this year say princeton let’s send 13
Of their uh admissions or white males when it should be according to proportional representation forget merit or whatever about 27 when they’re not doing that or if oakland uh 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 the 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 a racist and i’m not and then when the obidens when
Uh obiden said i’m calling him abiding obama 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 iraq 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 at 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 did had all these documents but if somehow they vanished in thin air when he crossed the border and so they use the language very effectively and they’re whether it’s michael 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 sublet it exists only to people with proper antenna and if it’s systemic it doesn’t mean it’s over it just everywhere so it’s everywhere it’s really nowhere and
I think we we’ve gotta 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 boilerplate 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 in you know 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 drop 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 if you don’t have content for what they’re doing then they’re going to uh 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 else and they want names and before you know it you’ve sold out everything
And remember the the people who and the difference there is i mean at the very beginning there were communists it wasn’t like the satan witch trial where there were witches there were communists but it got after the original people like alger hirsch was exposed they went after i mean they went after
Horse and wells 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 floated 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 uh 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 women who believe must be believed meaning the accusation was tantamount to the conviction and that started to work uh weaken it and then finally joel biden was caught up in the web of me too with the terror reid allegations which by the way
Had some contemporary communications that sort of corroborated in a way that was never true and that ended it because they thought wow you we took out al franken the u.s senator now we’re going to take out the only guy who could might be this can’t 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 ver some new york times op-ed writers or i think bill maher and they always do that there’s 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 improved so it did you see the um op-ed piece from uh 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 racist
Whatever they said yeah okay so we accept that we’re we don’t have anything to do with that but um there we’re going to clean out our own house and these these uh feminist 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 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 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 don’t we’ve never we’re conservatives and traditionalists and you may not agree with us if you’re a swing voter or 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’re trying to destroy statuary they’re renaming names it’s like the chinese
Culture level if you wake up i woke up i mean not woke up but i went one day to my office and there was junipeo sarah boulevard below the hoover tile tower next to 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 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 don’t didn’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 type of victimizers and will adjudicate which is is and who faces and does not face consequences but
The moderate can’t be for that they have they we have to get them on our side as well so they won’t be able to operate as a as they are now so so help me out because i think um well i was not a supporter of donald trump
The when he first ran not at all not even close however when i watched him i would have been a a hypocrite um and just one of these never trumpers if he would if if he would have done the things i thought he was going to do in office um 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 uh israel um 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
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 don’t 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 i think so too by by sheer force of energy character he could tweak tweet tweet tweet and override them and he had no idea
I’ll give you one example the country’s in flames the saint 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 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 uh 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 you weaponized the capital we haven’t seen that since jubal early marched on 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 shorenstein center he he had no idea that the oscars the emmys the nfl golf everything was woke
And so he 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 state when i read in march and april they changed the state voting laws yep to allow longer periods and no signature very verification address i thought wow and
Then when i heard mark zuckerberg was going to give 500 million dollars and others were going to try to match him for pre-selected precincts or basically take over from the government their responsibilities and and go out and get ballots and drop boxes i said how can anybody
Fight that it’s 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 ba and my base i agree we’ll count and then barnstorm the country right now no protest at the he would be andrew jacksonian figure right now
He would say you know what i’m coming back in righteous indignation and hurt and but you know for humans or humans i think at some point i would get up myself 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 i agree with you i was there at the white house when uh when he lost the uh uh last supreme court uh challenge you know right before christmas and it did not go it did not go well and i i i was with my daughter and i said
Think of the 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’s he’s he snaps and i think i would have snapped a lot longer or a lot earlier than he did you know i don’t he was completely alone i i can tell you that i talked to an administration official uh 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 the country from the fact that trump never had of course one million were getting vaccinated today 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 mortar sparked this fundamental economic foundation foundational change and they’ll perpetuate 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 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 a baseball very well or something like that i can’t be part of i can’t be part of that thank
You donald trump for stopping the illegal immigration thank you for re-formulating 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 um would he win with the way things are going to be and the the way it ended in the first term
You know that that’s a question that requires that we fill in the blanks is what you really mean glenn is if ron desantis or or mike pompeo or nikki any of these other people if we put them in that place would they be able to have the resin resonance
That trump did with their in other words what they lacked in dynamism or sheer animal energy and bluntness and cutting through the swamp lingo would that be uh more than compensated is 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’d 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 merocratic 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 percent of the popular vote i think he can probably win the electoral vote and i don’t know what will have
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 don’t we haven’t seen enough of them has his skills and as an outsider uh 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 would kind of almost as see of squeak
Obsequiously had to go back and and try to get in his good graces so that paradigm does not does not work anybody is going to run it that’s not going to work yeah and that is um if he does run uh you know you’ll split the party so
Badly i mean the 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 it’s happening across the spectrum and uh you know we need a we need a unifying uh
Moment uh where we don’t look at the personalities we look at the qualifications and the uh and the plan and come together and whatever our best shot is that’s our best shot uh but if we i agree if we tear it apart uh and lose we’re done the reason the
Reason that all of the media and people are looking at ron desantis 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 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 him and he’s got all the ear 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 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 on the campaign trail he found it very different different than we thought that he would uh when we first got on the uh we first
Got on skype together we heard a tractor go by and you said you were on a farm and you used the word uh their disking today and i thought i love a man who knows what disking is in real life um i i am a rancher a farmer
Kind of you know i mean kind of like uh jay leno is a you know is a mechanic a little bit he had a lot of help um 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 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 i think we as a nation have have lost something that was vital to our early success and that is this um soil rooted common sense and decency
Does that make sense to you yeah there’s 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 we our whole purpose was to have independent autonomous freeholding small agrarians and we’ve lost those we still have that independent person the business person the independent trucker uh 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 corporatized social media it’s making this uniform urban uh type of population that wants
Something from somebody or is always victimized or always feels they eat somebody is odium 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 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 uh this is going to make a profit of 4 000 an 8 we’re going to clear 20 000 and it 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 mccann 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 the best thing you’ve ever had and grateful and great 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 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 when he’s 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’d been reused wire that had been reused vineyard steaks that had been used for the house everything yeah 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 had
He was a college administrator but he was a farmer too and i said it went pretty well he said what did you what did you have to do for your phd you know i said i 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 you said 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 aleck brother who was very
Educated very smart guy and he turned to me and said you remind me of dr uh 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 phd’s but they have no practical as you say knowledge that’s grounded and audited by physicality i was uh i was i had uh dinner with um the president of uh i think it was rwanda uh a couple of years ago and um a few of
The people that were brought over for this this um this talk and they they were students in the united states uh 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 uh 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 i listen to 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 uh she had bought into the the western uh you know uh excuse the expression mental masturbation i think yeah i had a guy i know 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 there 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’s the water in the lakes well it must come out of the ground i said no it comes 400 miles in the california water project or from hetch 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 did your sewage go and you 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 this 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 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 and 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 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
Laid workers 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 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 i 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 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 just yes thanks for your your your steady uh historic look at where we are uh at any given time yeah i appreciate it thank you
Okay thank you for having me glenn
