504: Victor Davis Hanson—The Counter Revolution

0:00Hello friends, Mike Rowe here with another episode of the way I heard it happy to see my old buddy Chuck all lit up here on my computer screen. How are you pal? I'm living the dream, Mike. Live in the dream. You know, it's weird. I think I've done seven of these without you over the last couple of months for various reasons and it's just, yeah, it's just not the same. I'm happy to hear that. I didn't say it was better or worse. Oh, I see, I see. It's just not the same. Oh, yeah. But you've been traveling. You've been vacationing. You've been relaxing. I hope a little bit. All three of those. Yes. Excellent. Well, welcome back. I'm glad you didn't miss this one because I think you are probably as big a fan of Victor Davis-Hanson as I am. And I hope you enjoyed the conversation you just produced. Yeah, this guy is he's a brainiac. He's smart. He's level headed. And he's really calm, you know. He's not a guy who gets worked up. He's a guy who can argue convincingly and it's not really arguing.

1:06It's just he makes such a persuasive case that you have to pay attention to it. Well, he's very experienced. I would never suggest he's old, but like all of us, he's older than he's ever been. I don't know how exactly or when. I think I know how, but I don't know when precisely. He came to occupy such a huge piece of real estate in the zeitgeist. But maybe it's a confirmation bias. Maybe, you know, the brain finds what it looks for. And I started looking for Victor Davis-Hanson seven, eight years ago because every time I heard him speak, I heard what you just described. It was a mix of experience, common sense, but also a balance. I was really delighted to spend the first 30 minutes with him talking about the importance of the generalist. Yeah. And our infatuation with the specialist. Yeah. And, you know, he would never describe himself as a Renaissance man. But when I talk to him, I can never quite decide if he's a bigger fan of history, of the present day, of the skilled trades, of the true pursuit of knowledge.

2:19His time at Stanford, his hundreds of articles, his dozens of books, they all just really speak of a curious mind. And a very brave guy, because he has taken it in the neck. I mean, from both sides for the last 10 years, and he just doesn't seem to care. No, he doesn't. And partly, it's because he ridges two worlds. He's a man of two separate places. He's an intellectual and an academic. You know, he's, I think senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, right? It's Stanford. And yet he's also a raisin farmer. And, you know what I mean? It's like he's a guy who could kind of like Reagan, who could be mending offense, you know, one day and negotiating a contract the next. I don't think you would disagree. I just don't think he would put him in that order. I honestly think he sees himself as a raisin farmer first. And the son, the grandson, the great, great grandson of farmers. This guy has made his home in the Central Valley here in California. He has not just passionate views about what's happening to California, but informed logical. You just don't want to argue with this guy.

3:38And honestly, the reason I wanted to have him on, I so enjoyed talking to him a couple years ago when we did this. And he's written a book. It's called the counter revolution. It's going to do what his last three or four books have done, which is inflame and inspire and confuse and challenge people on both sides of the aisle and sell. It's going to sell a lot. I'm sure it's already. It was number one on Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a thick book. I'm about halfway through it. The way a bea list celebrity gets through a book when he's attempting to impersonate the impression of preparedness for an interview like this. I will finish it, cover the cover before too long. But I didn't want to wait. I wanted to talk to him immediately. I do want to see his book sell out. I'm sure it will. But I also want people to arm themselves with it. It doesn't matter how you vote. If you can understand what's happened in the country vis-a-vis Trump over the last couple of well over the last decade, then you can probably start to understand what's happened to your own relationship with your friends and with your family. I don't want to speak for you Chuck, but you know, I've got members of my family who have very strong opinions on the other side of the aisle. I think you do as well.

4:58Yep. And I say that not even knowing what side of the aisle I'm really on. I haven't even talked to you about my interview with Joe Manchin. Wait a year that. You're going to yeah, you're just going to love it. But what you're about to hear are the well articulated thoughts of a man who is master Greek studies and classic literature and at the same time, grosses raisins and writes his papers and earns the respective anybody. Who who genuinely gives a damn about our country and who is intellectually curious. I think I think he's so e-genreous man, I think he's unexampled in these times agreed and you know before we got on to do this preamble you asked me what my favorite part is and now I remember it when you brought up California. There is a part in here where he makes a list and he just pulls this off at the top of his head and this is not a very young guy. But he brings out a list with statistics and facts and numbers about what the state of California today in what dire straits it is.

6:09He's in that impression and to your point he's older than he's ever been and he's coming off a terrible fight with cancer which he at the moment appears to be winning and I'm so happy to report that as well. Amen. He's I think the most popular guest we've ever had historically when you listen to this episode, I think you'll understand why we're calling this the counter revolution because that's the name of the book his latest book. And it's worth your time right after this. You ever wonder how meat got so expensive I do and I just asked the secretary of agriculture, brook Rollins to explain it to me like I was a small child. She did and I'll have that whole conversation for you in a week or two. It's an eye opener. In the meantime, you should know that our government in an effort to reduce the price of ground beef has just allowed 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the US market.

7:11Here's a problem. In the grocery store, you'll have no way of knowing where the ground beef you're buying actually came from. That makes it really difficult to support American ranchers, which I encourage all meat eaters to do. Good ranchers is the number one company delivering 100% American meat straight to your door. They partner with over 100 local farmers and ranchers to deliver pasture raised meat with no antibiotics and no added hormones. They've got 25,000 five star reviews on trust pilot, including my own. And this month when you visit GoodRanchers.com slash row, you'll get a free Angus ground beef bundle with your first order. Again, that's GoodRanchers.com slash row for four bonus pounds of ground beef raised right here in these United States. Good ranchers American meat delivered. If you could eat a steer, if you could eat a cow, don't take a chance on a foreign ranch.

8:14Get good ranchers now. Hey, hall. Well, before we dive in to the book, can you endure two quick compliments? Yeah. Yeah. Are you still in the stage where that makes you awkward and uncomfortable? In the book business, nothing makes the author uncomfortable. If it's positive, only negative things make the offer. We just finished our 500th episode and I was looking back at them and the spontaneous conversation that you and I had a couple of years ago has generated and continues to generate more questions, more interest over five million views. I don't know how many downloads and shares, but I only point that out because I would hate for you up there on your great, great, grandmothers farm to lose sight of the fact that you are adored and valued in ways that I want to ask you to explain in a moment the second compliment happened earlier this year.

9:20I was invited to speak at the independent women's forum and they were honoring you in part, but you were recovering from your illness and you zoomed in, you know, long distance, probably from where you're sitting now. I was, yeah, right here. And you spoke for about a half hour and I know how disconnected it feels to do things like that this way and I was sitting there in the audience and I just have to tell you when the signal was gone, the MC walked out and it took about 20 seconds for people to stop talking in response to what you would said. The entire crowd was hanging onto your every word in a way that I don't mean it is cheap flattery. I just mean to say that you're out there today with a message and a voice and a resume and some gravitas. And what you're speaking is, is resonating like some sort of tuning fork and I just wanted to get that out of the way before we start.

10:25I appreciate that because I didn't have no idea because you were exactly right when you give a talk like that on zoom and then it says you're done. So you just get done. So you have. So I remember saying to my wife, I have no idea how that went over and she said, well, that's because you didn't stay on. They may have really liked it. I said, well, they didn't clap. I was kidding her. But yeah, and today I really like your show, Mike, and what you've been doing the last 30 years because here I am on 150 year old home that my great, great grandmother and almost every day something goes wrong. And I've tried to redo the when my grandfather died, he said someday this place is going to fall apart. I was 20. And he said, could you, he just appointed me the custodian. He said, I want you to redo everything. So I have not touched the architect. It's an old Victorian two story farmhouse, but I've had a we wired if we plumbed and today we're doing foundation work.

11:28And for 30 years, I crawled under there until a guy called me one of the listeners. I mentioned it and he said, you know, these companies will come in. I'm sure you know about them. I didn't know about them. They'll clean your crawl space. And then they'll put a damp, I mean, a waterproof mat and then plastic over. And they did the whole thing. And then I asked a friend of mine. It's a good electrician. Could you put 12 lights in there? And I went under there and I didn't want to leave. It was like a complete different experience. I thought, wow, this is like a house under here because it's, you know, it's and I hadn't I didn't know that people were doing that. Oh, well, it's probably the perfect metaphor from which to leap into the country and, you know, the things that occur out of sight and out of mind. And the muscular trades that you've referred to so eloquently over the years really are embodied in the business of crawl space and capsulation, waterproofing foundation raising these things. They're so primal and they're so fundamental.

12:35And they're so easy to overlook. And it's interesting. It's the same sort of disconnect we were just talking about. We become technologically advanced at the same time. Our, our, our ignorance multiplies. And we just seem to be profoundly disconnected as a country from these primal things. And maybe that's a place to start. I wrote an article to about those of us who had grandparents out of the 19th, they were born in the 19th century. And that was a really great thing for me. Their whole accent, their expressions, you know, don't catch cold, don't go out yonder. I'll give you the dickens, tank funny McGee, all that stuff I grew up with. And they were before cell phones, they were for phone. They grew up without toilets and electricity. And it's funny because when I work on the house, every once in a while, I bump into them.

13:35You know, I'll take out a wall and I'll see the first iteration was newspaper for insulation 1898 or I'll be out doing yard work and I'll see poor shoes. And this place I'm having right here was a manger. This was, it's got a sloped roof when I grew up. This was where the horses came in, even though they weren't used to plow anymore. We had some. And they ate, they stuck their heads right where I am right here. And we put straw here. Hey, and then they would eat. And I gutted it about four years. I kept the outside exactly the same, but I made it into a studio. But it was really, it was like archeology going through the roofs and everything about it and seeing things. As a classist, when you and a, and a political observer, I'm guessing it's important on a personal level to have that kind of connection to your own past. Do you worry today that as a country, we're just missing something. It's hard to articulate, but it feels like a generation ago we were better connected to the kinds of things you're talking about on a grander level.

14:49And I, I just don't know how we become, how we became untethered. I think part of it was that generation that came out of World War II had largely their parents had not gone to college. And they were offered the GI Bill 12 and a half million people were in the military. And that was the entree to the new type of economy. If you were certified or you had a BA or a Master's of Public Policy, whatever it was. And they did get good salaries, but the difference was the college experience that they had, although the professors were liberal, they were disinterested. My professors and college were disinterested. I mean, they would make fun about Nixon once in a while, but they didn't hate him. And there were no conservatives that I knew, but I didn't even care whether there were, because they were, but now that's not the case. And it's a sin of commission and omission when you invest that much time in trying to indoctrinate people, whether it's DEI or Woke or Green, all of these isms and oligies, you miss out.

15:57So for the first time in my life, I can tell you that I don't see a big difference between people with a bachelor's degree as far as their knowledge. And people that, two people here today are working with a water pressure, Mexican-American guys. And I see students a lot. And I don't see any difference in their vocabulary, their way of, but I do see a big difference. If I were to ask these two guys out the door right now, oh, by the way, could you seal the tile balcony or by the way, the electricians forgot to do the junction box or by the way, my own pressure washer has a seal board, they could do all of that. But the people with college educations can't. And then they would say, well, we can always hire somebody. Well, I'm not sure that's true, but more importantly, the ability and the experience of acquiring that knowledge is kind of like anthropology. You meet so many different people in the process of mastering these physical, muscular trades.

17:00It's very important, I think, for the elite class, the people with all the letters after their name, to be not removed from the middle class and that they feel comfortable. The problem today is a lot of the people who are very elite, they adopt these very radical ideologies psychologically to square the circle that they do not feel comfortable with the working class. They either feel that the working class doesn't trust them or doesn't like them or are suspicious or they have contempt for the world. Out of that distance, they talk about, you know, we're going to do this for you and we're going to give you this program. It's an artificial alley. It really grounds when I went to Stanford as a graduate student, my first year we lost the whole raising crop and my grandfather was 85. He would call me in my dorm and he would say, now Victor, there's some music there. I'm not saying there's something going wrong there, but every time I call you on the hall, you said it's on your hall, I hear people saying language that I cannot believe.

18:11I said, well, I can't either, but I'm here. He said, now would you just, if you could just drive down on Friday night and take us to Eastern Star and Masonic Temple and then I've got all the tarps out for the raisins and you and I can, we can cover all the bins. And I said, well, I have my French PhD exam and he said, is it that important? I said, actually, it is, but you know what? I will be there in three and a half hours if the truck doesn't break down. So I drove and I would do that almost every other and then it was schizophrenic because I never moved in that area. Even today, I've been at the Hoover Institution at Stanford for 21 years, but I live here. So I have a 400 mile round trip. What I find so interesting, given the complexity of your curriculum, Vieta, is how often the intelligentsia will introduce you as a, you know, as a teacher up at Fresno State and a raisin farmer.

19:14And it's like, dude, the guy wrote 22 books. I know, I don't know if you ever remember that he was kind of an, I knew him, but it was, Tarcanian was our basketball player coach and he was very controversial and Fresno State for a brief period enjoyed two things about him. They won a lot of basketball games, but they were always under censured by the NCAA for recruitment violations. And I, you know, raisin, I don't know what it was, but they couldn't say that we had tree fruit. You know, they never said he's a grower of tree fruit, but every time I went to a university campus, it was, here's Victor Hansen, I never said Cal State for us. No, I thought I could get a little shred of dignity if they said Cal State, but they always wanted to put the location of the particular branch in Fresno. And I remember being at Princeton, giving it to all kids. This is Victor Hansen. These were by classicists. Victor Hansen, he's a raisin farmer from Fresno State. And I don't know much about it, but I remember Jerry Cardcanean is there.

20:20And then even the guy at the Hoover would introduce one of my close friends with the director and said, you know, we don't have affirmative action at Hoover, but we don't hire people from Fresno very often. In fact, we've never done it. Cal State Fresno. So Victor is an affirmative. He was, he was making a joke, but I've heard that my entire life, you know, before I ask you to support ACE scholarships with a generous donation, I want to make sure you understand that your donation won't cost you a penny. Thanks to the education freedom tax credit, you can now donate up to $1,700 to the best K-12 scholarship program in the country and take every dollar off your tax bill. This is not a deduction off your gross income. This is a $100% dollar for dollar reduction of whatever you owe the federal government at the end of the year. Now, why ACE scholarships? Because ACE scholarships were designed to rescue young kids from failing school systems all over the country by empowering parents with real school choice.

21:30So far, over 121,000 scholarships have been awarded over the last 26 years. I know these guys personally. I support them directly. And I've spoken at several of their annual fundraisers. Most recently, earlier this year in Denver, it was extraordinary. The event gave me a chance to meet a few of the kids who have benefited. Some of whom have gone on to apply for a scholarship from my foundation and then entered the skilled trades. ACE operates with total transparency, absolute integrity, and a fierce dedication to reinvigorate the American workforce. So now you can help them reach a lot more kids and it won't cost you a penny thanks to the education freedom tax credit. Learn more at educationfreedom.org. That's educationfreedom.org. The fun story I'm not in with this. I was a professor in 2002. John Racing was a wonderful guy called me up and said, we'd like you to come to the Hoover institution. So I went up there and one of the assistant directors who was actually from Ohio State.

22:36He tells me about the Hoover and he has no idea that I was a graduate student at Stanford for four years. He has no idea that my mother got a BA and a JD at Stanford in 1944. She was one of the first women in the law schools. I had no idea that my aunt, my cousins all went to Stanford and didn't really make a big thing about it. So he says, you know, you're in the big leagues now Victor. I had written 15 books and it's going to be a very different environment from you. And I said, well, where did you go to school? Well, I, I, there's a matter, but you're, you're in the big leagues and you're going to have to get re-acquainted. It's going to be a very stressful. And I said, you're the one that stressed. I'm not stressed at all. I, I know this place by the back of my hand and I was also a visiting professor of Greek in Latin for two years at the classics department. So I said, I've never quite been impressed with it. And he said, well, why didn't intimidate you? And I said, no, just the caliber of people seem so one dimensional. And I haven't really been impressed with a lot of the faculty. More so as I get older.

23:48When I was there, they had German French philologist, but today I think what's happening, why we have this questioning of the call, it's not just that they overcharge on federal and grants. It's not just that Stanford lets in 9% white males out of even though the Supreme Court is suing them, I guess. Or I mean the government isn't because of the violation of the Supreme Court. It's not just the DI, the separate racial graduation, the theme houses that are racially segregated. It's what they claim they did better than anybody. These Harvard is not true. They have remedial math, now at Princeton Yale, Stanford, 80% of the grades are A's. And I was thinking I was going to really shock some Silicon Valley people about a year ago. And I saw them at a Donors conference for Hoover. And I said, you know, I get into the point. You know, I meet these Stanford students. They don't know anything. They have no SAT scores and they come in and they're taking remedial math. And when you talk to them, the faculty, they either have to inflate the grades or downsize the course or invent new courses.

25:02And I wondered someday at some point, you people will find out that that brand, that Cal Brand Stanford is not going to impress you. This guy just said, where in the blank have you been? Dr. We surmise this two years ago when we prefer the Georgia Tech or the Texas A&M graduate because A, they come from a different environment and they have none of the therapeutic curriculum. So they can concentrate on mathematics, physics, engineering. And they don't go to HR the first moment they have a psychodrama and the Stanford students do that. And that was a shock to me. And I think that's all of higher education is under the 18 year old cohort is shrinking as we all know the fertility rates going down. And this comes at the same time we're in this manufacturing assembly boom where we need these skilled people. I know so many parents are doing one of two things. They're either telling their children and these are people who went to these schools. They're telling them to go to schools in the south or the Midwest very carefully. They always say Hillsdale and that's a great choice. But Hillsdale camp could accommodate everybody.

26:18But basically things like Vanderbilt or Rice or something like that they would never have said that earlier. And then the second thing they do they always have one nephew or cousin that is a master electrician or he is a horticulture engineer or landscape architect or something like that where he actually does stuff and they're making more money than the kids that are the college graduates at least initially. And that's new. I didn't think that would ever happen. But you probably you know more about than I do but I think it's a good sign. I'm wondering in the most general way if you think it's possible for higher ed and trade schools to somehow come together everything you just said about grade inflation and just the hollowing out of the brand that is the Ivy League is super concerning.

27:18I wonder if one way through and I've talked to the guys at Carnegie Mellon and MIT about this why isn't there some sort of trade certification under that rubric or to be fair why aren't the leading trade schools in the country. Why don't they have some sort of adjunct where a classist if we want our kids to think logically surely we must expose them to the Stoics and to Aristotle and down the list and I I just wonder again back to your resume a raisin farmer a classist I think the reason you're vibrating like a tuning fork in pop culture is because you have the Renaissance brain and frankly the courage to speak the truth to your own tribe. I think also my father grew up very poor and he and his he had a first cousin whose parents died so he adopted him so there were two big Swedes one of them they join the Marines I don't know what happened one of them hit an officer they told the other guy he's going to take the who wanted to take the wrap.

28:33My dad took the wrap and they thought it would they basically sent in some to fly to be on a B-29 experiment you know when they first came out they were very dangerous so he went in a brass gun I think he had three crashes and then he ended up 40 missions over Tokyo as a central fire control and he had five you know I don't like to use the word kills he was a top gunner almost on all of tinion and then his tail gunner ball gunner central for yeah he had that had a computerized system so the top bubble gummer and that blister he could override all of the other 11 machine guns and point them at one target and you had to be very careful because if you did too much people would be robbed of their ability to you know but and the Japanese knew that so they would always dive down at that gunner and they had a lot of problems with people that cracked up doing it and then Victor went in the six marine division he was killed on Okinawa so I was named after him but that was the first college people and so he came back and then he farmed and he was a JC teacher then and JC and but he never he would come home and he'd say hey Victor would you help me correct my papers I got to do some welding so my whole family my brother got a master's in biology he was in a PhD program he didn't like it

30:00but it was just second knowledge that there was no distinction between you were not an elite to study philosophy or history or when we would prune vines we would talk about I had a cousin who farmed with us and he was into Indian philosophy and he and I I would argue about which inductive method the Greek or the Indian model was more sophisticated that's why we were pruning trees but that seems to be lost that somehow it's antithetical and and I think the thing that really helped me and I don't think I would have turned out very well if I had have gone up there and been impressed with all the academics and all that stuff if I didn't have parents and family and friends that always reminded me you know I came home I can remember when I said to my father well I got my PhD there's no jobs but dad I'm 25 and he said well I feel bad I didn't go to your graduation but we had the crop to worry about and I said I didn't go either and then he said well you have a PhD can you go down the dehydrator we're going to we're wiring a 220 and you're not very good electrician so you go down there and Miguel and you figure it out and then my older brother was very witty he quoted a quote from Samuel Johnson

31:22and he said dad he's he's kind of like what's he's a master he can read I looked at he did very well he was one of the top students in the PhD program he finished faster but it's kind of like a dog with two legs it's impressive but nobody knows why you'd want to do it it was a good childhood a middle class and my mom was a second appellate court judge in California that was a female she'd have a Stanford degree was very rare but we always went on Saturdays to go to college on Saturdays to pedal fruit farmers market so here she was out in jeans and a t-shirt in her 60s with my dad and all of us and we had a big table at Monterey or Santa Cruz and we're all that was what we did with our over right plums peaches and nectarines we'd drive it over 200 miles and she would be in this used she was 64 one of the top judges in California and she was sitting in a used belt they went belt telephone sold all their vans off we bought one it was a terrible no air conditioning and we drive over a patch ankle pass but it was and my kids did this they had that's why I really get along with my children they grew up that way and they're not impressed in fact my thought my son a year ago he said to me something was striking he said hey dad

32:39his heroes are people like Joe Rogan and all the podcasters and he said one of them mentioned your name the other day I said really he said yeah do you do podcasts I said I do and he said you never told me that and I said you never ask and he's he's 42 when he's a high school teacher and he's a master mechanic we took the boat up and I was I thought he took the engine and all part and he's I said I can't go I've had this surgery and he backs up the boat by himself nobody helps him into the lake with a truck and then he launches it and then when he's done he alone goes in the water I don't know how he does it and he alone gets his 26 foot houseboat back on the trailer and attached and drives out himself nobody helps him so I don't know where he got all that but I do know that he was told that he should read as much as possible but there was no correlation necessarily between wisdom and degrees and that he had to be

33:44skilled in getting along with people of different classes well what you've just described is heroic and I think we used to see it as heroic and we used to we used to magnify the individuality the skill the self-directedness all of that stuff I want to stay with it for a minute because the Mexican gentleman you referred to outside your home he's the generalist right he's the guy that can basically get it done whatever it is and the academics that you were describing earlier at Stanford and other places they're the specialists and they're very good I guess at doing whatever it is they do but the resentment that they have or the relationship that they have with the first guy you were describing whether he's encapsulating

34:45your house or putting in a spring cell or whatever it is do you think that that disconnect could be rooted in the fact that they're painfully aware of what they can't do and they have to rely on someone else to do it for them and that just cuts them to the quick so right now as we speak there are approximately 400,000 open jobs in the defense industrial base most of which don't require a four-year degree welders, electricians, plumbers, steamfitters, pipefitters, shipbuilders and so forth we need more submarines we need more ships a lot more and buildfreedom.us is an attempt on the part of the Pentagon and the Department of War to shine a bright light on all of this opportunity and encourage you to investigate the possibility of landing an AI proof six-figure job that doesn't

35:49require a four-year degree better still they've donated ten million dollars to my foundation so i have the money at microworks to pay for the training you need to get a job in the defense industrial base right now go to buildfreedom.us poke around click on the links apply for a scholarship land a job that will build freedom for yourself and our country buildfreedom.us yeah i think the word when you were describing that phenomenon i was thinking i was trying to remember why that you described it perfectly and i would call it fear they have a great fear of the middle class of being found out when i was a graduate student we had a very small stipend for teaching but the way i supported myself was i had an old truck and we did i went to the faculty all i know them and said they all had Japanese and that in those days in Minnell Park in Atherton a Japanese they all lived in very nice homes the Japanese gardener

36:51was the prestige item on because he would prune but he didn't want to take away all the trash or the you know the cement or whatever they were working on so my job was to go in to all these homes after the exotic gardener left and then i would take out all of his clippings or i grew up pruning if there was a tree he wouldn't put him i would shenny up and do a redwood tree or whatever and then i would fill it in the truck and it was just amazing that they didn't know anything and they'd always ask me questions like mr smith came in and he replaced the 220 plug he said i don't know what a 220 plug on my dryer and i paid him this much is that reasonable i said yeah that's reasonable or my roof is leaking he asked me on the phone if i had a composition or a shake or do you know what that meant i said yes and but it was a fear that there was

37:53people out that knew all these things and they knew nothing about it they were afraid they were going to be taken or they would be made made fun of and this is a wordy exclamation it didn't work in reverse and by that i mean when i would meet the middle class people or that working classes i would say in the last 30 years i've had some pretty well-known people for some reason when they're driving to LA or San Francisco they'll stop and see me phd's people in government and when i'll always have somebody here because we have a kind of a big farm house and where we had a lot of neighbors and they drop in and every time they've seen somebody who's a tractor driver or another farmer i had one um bb net and y'all whose brother edo net and y'all who came he called me he wanted to come by and i didn't know exactly what moment he would come by so i asked a couple of farmers to come over he was fascinated by them because he was talking about because we had the

38:57same type of agricultural problems that israel did he's kind of a rena he's a playwright he's a radiologist but he also has a little house near the sea of gallilee with farming word so he was but my point is they were not odd at all about it and i think what i'm getting out is there is something to the idea that if you have some mechanical aptitude or you can use your hands in a way to construct or fix things that gives you a different type of confidence it's almost some poca-liptic content you think you know if everything went wrong the electricity went out if the water went out i can still survive but the people who can't do that and they're i'm not saying they're not important they're vital i think classics is one of the most wonderful or english literature or any of the professor the disciplines and the academic but it does mean that you're absolutely you're at the top of a pyramid so to speak and there's this and you don't know what's going on and you would not know how to survive one day and the same thing about arms they were terrified of

40:02i think in the upstairs i must have i don't know 15 guns and i haven't bought one of them they're all inherited you know 1898 double barrel shot can 18 88 30 30 things like that and they don't know anything about they never knew anything about firearms they just suspected me but then i would i'd say i have to use them sometimes and they say why i said have you ever been in your yard when a rabid coyote came near the house and your dogs are going crazy your your child is out there when somebody's dumped a pit bull right it you know pulled up your house kicked out two pit bulls and they're in coming in your yard and things like that and i say you ever have a neighbor when you're have a consolidated ditch and you're out of water and you had your turn and he had his turn then he took two turns and you don't have any water and if you don't have any water you're you're going to lose your son of a rosa plum crop and he says if you want your water you stop me what do you do

41:03you go to the ditch dinner the ditchers i'm not going to intervene he's crazy so what do you do you confront him if you confront him you have to be armed sometime and it's they understand that that they're very vulnerable is what i'm trying to say and that the middle classes are very american middle classes i've been all over the world i'm just always amazed at the american middle class it's different than the french middle class the british middle class they're just they have a can do confidence about them yeah i don't know where that came from the frontier or world war two well that's too bad because i was going to be my next question where did that sensibility come from because it is so clearly not Jacobian it's not french it's not it's no i think it has something to do with the front to talk bill said that he thought america when he wrote democracy in him in america in 1832 he said i think they have a chance to make it in a way that we don't in europe because they don't have an indentured peasant

42:04class they have a middle and lower middle class at own property and they're self-sufficient and he's as the problem in europe is that most people of the middle and lower classes would rather be equal and all poor than all better off but have some very much better off because of the what he said the the bad sort of envy the worst kind of envy not the envy of emulation but of envy of resentment but americans were always i think the frontier did a lot of it and they were a mechanical people George patent was saying with people came to him once and said the german panther and the german tiger tank we think are better and he said there's nothing better than a sherman tank and he went on to explain that the sherman tanks transmission could be taken out in two hours not sent back to the factory and the hours are not necessary for maintenance but what he was getting

43:05out he said my guys fix everything they grew up fixing cars they can get a sherman truck back on in two hours they're not in the russians and the the germans can't do it because they all grew up on their own family farms and they were mechanics and their modeles and model teas and he he thought that was one of the reasons we won the war that we had so many people that could fix things and had that confidence from fixing things and i think the war the yes out in the field in real time that's the difference the germans most of their heavy equipment had to be sent by rail back it was so the the demand the specifications between the pistons and the cylinder it was so exact and it was so intricate they were wonderful machines but you really couldn't fix them in the field but the sherman and all of our weapons in the m ones were all designed for mass production pretty good stuff doesn't have to be perfect and we're going to flood the zone and have more tanks than they do

44:07more shells more bullets more guns and everybody's going to know how to maintain them and they did isn't that the difference fundamentally between maybe effectiveness and efficiency like the germans were so efficient and their guns were so tight that from what i read they froze at stolen grad meanwhile right the Russians got these clunky old ancient bolt actions that were loose and not perfect but they worked same thing with their t-34 tanks they they didn't have very close specification but they had an aluminum diesel engine that was pretty reliable and they had more armor and they had it they had an American suspension the christy suspension system but it was the idea i think it comes from the frontier and that you have to be able to be independent autonomous and there's also the idea that the people who created our machines or the people in

45:11the business class at least until recently they weren't part of a class system there were people like Henry Kaiser Henry Ford William all of these guys may you know Carnegie they were all self-made people and they knew were very practical people and they had some kind of affinity as crazy as Henry Ford was and some of his ideas he had an affinity for the middle class and he paid more than the unions did just because he wanted to empower the middle class there's our bridge to the counter revolution for all his ideas for all his appearances. Donald Trump has a relationship with the middle class that i think the devil's people to this day it just seems so counterintuitive i'll never forget and this is when you first came across my trance and i rarely mouth off about politics but in 2016 that's all anybody was talking about and i somewhat cheekily predicted that i i thought

46:15Trump would likely win and two weeks later i was on meet the press trying to explain why that happened you of course did a much better job but this is the guts of your book how is he so underestimated how did he manage to come back and really maybe the better question victor is since i think you just coined the phrase envy of resentment what can Trump do for the country broadly in the context of the conversation we're having right now to reinvigorate somehow the uh renaissance sensibility of not blue or white collar not ivy league or trade but somehow is it possible that he could pull us back together in some general way i think that question can't be answered to is finished but he did do something that i and that's one of the themes of this new book the count he did substitute or he tried to substitute class for race in other words he was really making the argument

47:19that the black truck driver the hispanic electrician and the white plumber had more in common than each did with one of their newscasters or professors are the elite and that they were part of the middle class and i think that's one reason he won 26% of the black male vote maybe 13 or 14 overall and he won 56% of the hispanic vote i noticed because i live in a 95% hispanic neighborhood southern sent central valley when i talk to hispanic people which is pretty much the only people i see every day if they have children in school and at cal state fresno they're pretty liberal but the parents are not and they're all independent contractors that's the ethos of the community i want to have a roadside canteen i want to be a plumber i want to be like the guys out here they'll pressure anything you need to pressure washer they'll touch up any paint job they'll fix anything they come

48:23to your house and they just say you know hey big there i'm here every year i'm just gonna go through and i'll see anything i i can fix it for you i said fine just go do it and he tried to create a solidarity that's what was all behind i don't think i cannot imagine and i i have nothing i like Mitt Romney i like john make i can't think of McCain or Romney or the bushes or Bob Dole all presidential candidates are present who would say we got to get the tax off tips tips i mean it was all capital gains we've got to reduce the capital gains set but nobody in their mind i never heard any politicians say that i've never heard any he was on tv this morning and he was talking about the trade dispute with canada and he said hey you farmers my farmers our farmers we got i'm gonna get that trade thing it's almost done we're not gonna have any tariffs in canada our farm he always uses the term our our farmers our i love our workers i was very interested about this question it's interesting you ask in 2016 i was very skeptical at first

49:30because i was working at national review and it was an echo chamber but i was i think jack fallor and i were the only ones that thought that he could win and jack's a wonderful guy and uh we left at the same time but i called a person that i knew in new york who was i would call him in the near billionaire class finance and i said what is it about this trump guy and he said well you know he has all these shady deals and you can't trust you all but he did say this i said well he seems to he's got the old tea party people he's got the Buchanan people but he's got a different message it's a populist nationalist message that empowers the middle class and says that they're more important than investing in china our farmers and he said well i'll tell you something i had a office when he had a building down the road nobody ever saw him and he came by in the limo and he was not dressed to go out and see the workers he had wingtips it looked like and every other morning

50:37he stopped and he went out and he shook hands with the concrete the riveters he walked all around and he must have been pretty dirty in a suit when he got back in the car and i said was anybody watching it and they said no and then the flip side of the coin was that year he came to tellyory about 30 miles from here and every time we have a election the candidate democrat republican puts on the puff the sheep skin vest they get the caterpillar hat they get the blue faded jeans they get the work boots get the Oklahoma draw yes they do exactly because we have a lot of Oklahoma the osper here and then they go there so i couldn't go to this and so i called a good friend he went so i said what was trump like he did he have you all no he did not and i said did he have the jeans no i said he didn't have the jeans at least the caterpillar had no i said well what he'd look like it was kind of weird victor he had this blue suit and he had a red tie

51:40and he had wingtips and it was a hundred and six and he had no hay bales he was just standing up the whole time he had makeup on or something he was sweating like a dog and he had this grading queens accent or whatever he said brook bronx i said i think it's a queens accent and he said and it just we never heard a guy talk like that i said so everybody thought he was out of play i said no they loved him they loved him because he was so authentic so i'm having a love affair with my socks not the weird dirty in a appropriate way but in the way a grown man does when he finally realizes well into middle age that the socks he wears have as much to do with how his feet feel at the end of a long day as the shoes that surround them i'm talking about ironside marino wool socks from camel city mill made by hand in the great state of north carolina these are not the cheapest socks on the internet but i do believe they're the

52:45best and if you think about cost per wear they're an absolute bargain because every pair is guaranteed to last for ten years seriously if you get a hole or a tear in your socks in the first decade camel city mill will replace them for free and believe me when your feet sweat inside those steel toad construction boots the last thing you want to be wearing are cotton or polyester socks you want wool soft sturdy breathable wool in lots of different cuts and lots of different weights camel city mill has already sold half a million pair they have nearly 8,000 five star reviews and the best testimonials for socks i've ever seen at camelcity mill dot com the entertainment value alone is worth a visit go to camelcity mill dot com pick up a bundle save an extra 10 percent with promo code row that's camel city mill dot com code row camel city mill dot com code row

53:50i said well what did he say he said well i don't know much about the water but i know that you guys are getting ripped off because we're feeding a bunch of fish and all of fish people don't want to give you guys water and without you guys we don't eat we can live without the delta smell but we can eat and that resonated so there is authenticity about him where he got that i don't know but he does feel more comfortable that's why his his stunts like the the McDonald's stunt and the garbage stunt any do caucus tried that i think you remember in the uh tank the yes the tank the 90 the 88 election the tank thing did not work most of the politicians who do that when gabanusum goes down and tries to pick up trash by la uh rail yards he uses a special little spike and he's all dressed up like he came out of abracombia and fit you know but he can pull it off i think that iconic moment i i wrote that in the book of the 2024 election when he was i understand that the

54:54people were screened but when there was a couple that i don't know if you remember that mike he was at the window and there was a couple from indian immigrants and he said can i help you what do you want you want the big Mac and they said we just want to thank you for we want to thank you for caring and he said wow i who i what he says we're nobody and he said no no no you're somebody don't tell me that everybody is somebody you're somebody and then he said i guess we are and that was not scripted so for all the crudity and the anger and the spontaneity the reason that he recovered was he had a large group of people who did believe he cared about people that were not rich or privileged and he had admiration for people who worked with their hands he was a builder and i and he always says that i'm a builder that was one of the keys to his success the other was he was a Nietzschean figure anything that didn't kill him it was stronger he was like 78 77 at that time

55:58he was sleeping three or four hours anything what was being said at him was so venomous some of it earned some of it not that anybody would have had a psychological episode but they were trying to destroy him physically psychologically financially materially and every time they did it he got stronger and he went up in the polls i would chart it in the book he went up one point two points mug shot two points uh goes to a bodega in between quarter appearances talks to the Hispanic people up one or two points it was really kind of unfair for dissentists and niki hailey they were both were seasoned politicians but you'd see them and you'd say it's not going to work you guys because if you come out you have two choices and they're both bad if you come out and say well trump got himself with all the classified files so i can see why they went a more loggo then you're siding with the people who were conducting law fair in a

57:00primary that we publicans won't like because they all didn't like what was going on they may not have all liked trump they didn't like what they were doing to trump but if you sided with trump then you were just eating and then feeling as candidacy and they couldn't you there was no way to square that so and he was out the last hundred and fifty days at the campaign i looked at it when i was reading the book she spent one point six billion dollars it was three times what he had i can't imagine don't trump paying money say if he had opa to opa's media company a million dollars or biance's company to do that i don't think he paid he would never pay anybody to appear with him that's why he doesn't lose the base they always stay with him because uh... you know they think he's at least authentic what do you think has happened to the people on the right side of the aisle who he has lost i don't know i have a personal we have i have a theory about that yeah so i'm not talking about nick for winters i don't think trump really knew him at all but people

58:07like kandas o1 tucker to lesser extent steve bann i don't think he's really divorced himself from trump but let's just say marjorie taylor green tomas massie those guys ostensibly they say tucker i think yesterday said trump should be put in jail or he should i think it was either jail or he should be removed immediately and he's going to i think he's going to endorse elsaid which is interesting cuts an ant it's an antithesis to everything he said for his entire life but this is not like the never trumpers of 2016 the bill crystals that david from the george wills all those guys they bolted because either they were free market guys or they thought but most it was his crudity they fell they felt not in my name i don't want him to represent this is different ostensibly it's two issues that what they call forever are endless wars even though

59:09tragically we've lost 18 but we spent 70 billion but compared to wars that can't be qualified as an endless war second is the i don't know how to put it i don't want to make accusations but there is something that resonates and when tomas massie said my opponent is in israel now or when marjorie taylor green kept saying the epstein files epstein files or when tucker has people on there that says basically the jews started world war two and it was and Churchill was a dupe so there is this strong anti-symmetism there and the cloak is well i'm just i just don't like israel but they don't just like is it wasn't just israel it's jews so why did they do that because that those thing i mean his first term he bombed bagdaddy he killed bagdaddy he wage war with a wheytoner group attacked and he he obliterated them he took three

1:00:16months to bomb the blank blank out of isis he said and he did there was no criticism so i think what it is is they're developed and all of those people a sense of over familiarity in other words they were going to marlago they were being on air force one they were going to the white house they felt a sense of importance but control anybody knows anything about don't trump nobody controls don't trump so when that war started or when the epstein files trump said publicly i got tired of her because marjorie taylor green called me six or seven times a day and tucker was going out there on air cuckers said i campaign for him every once in a while he had called me but i i don't want to say what he said or that would be in polite but i can tell you that i have never been to the white house and i wouldn't go because if you're writing about somebody you want to be objectively for their sake and you're

1:01:18saying and then i would always think you can't do that you can maybe visit for an hour George Bush used to have historian six or seven of them but you weren't talking about politics it was just history of war and stuff but i think they merged you should have critical distance they merged that and that gave them a cell a sense of self importance and control and they felt they were some of the most influential people in the world and that he had not listened to them on the epstein piles on around on israel on the jews and they really did think that he had called them and been so nice to them and accommodated him that he would snap to it maybe they just forgot he was president that's what he they did that's exactly what they did they forgot that there's 20,000 other people he probably talks to in any given year and no one's much important that was kind of what the the the never trumpers we i had a very prominent never temper that came

1:02:21to hoover and he he said i got to i'll have lunch with you and he went on and on about a horrible person don't trump was he was not going to vote for him and he was one of the architects of the never trump movement and then he said something when he got up which i'll never forget he said these people don't know what they're doing and because that you have said he's going to win and you've written you know favorably of him he'll call you at some point and if he does just mention my name that's all that i will be willing to offer my services to help him get out of the mess that he'll create and i said that's a very i said are you serious he said no i i'd like to get back in the white house and i think a lot of that is with the never trumpers that was one but with these apostates on the right because they haven't really developed a coherent anti-maga agenda and 90 percent of the stuff that he's doing they're still four they won't admit it

1:03:21they want the border clothes they want illegal immigration stop they like the reduction in crime they don't like the radical green new deal they don't like d.i. but it's the around war and Jews, Israel, three issues and out of those three issues they have created a intense dislike of don't trump and i think it has something they feel betrayed because they they in a fantasy fashion imagine that they were the kitchen cabinets so to speak that were running the country and they weren't and anybody who knows anything about trump whether through first hand dealings with him is that he is very magnanimous and friendly but that is should be cautionary that you do not and you don't interpret his magnumity that you are reciprocal or you're symmetric with him he is the president of the United States and you do not want to i don't think you want to follow

1:04:27up because he's so busy doing these things for the country he doesn't have time to you know to say come by for coffee or stop by i think he genuinely means that when he says that to people but if you take him up on it you'll very soon find that you're bothersome and i don't think that ever occurred to them and there that's what happened here's something that happened the and this came up on me the press i think as i'm in violent agreement with everything you've just said it makes perfect sense to my brain but in 2015 Jeff Zucker who was running CNN called to tell me that i had a show on at the same time it was a companion show with Anthony Bourdain's and it was constantly being preempted because you know a news is network would preempt it and it was getting frustrating and Jeff called to tell me look i'm going to give you the show back because you're going to be preempted every week i'm going into the Donald Trump business is exact quote and i said okay

1:05:32it was nice of him to give it back it was a licensed show and so i had a chance to sell it elsewhere but the point is i wrote a pretty cheeky post the next day essentially blaming Bernie Sanders Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for getting my show canceled right and i said to make up for it you're all invited to donate a personal item that i can auction off to raise some money from my work ethics scholarships i ask for Bernie's you know one of his a rumpled blazers and i thought Hillary could give up one of her pants suits maybe autograph it i said uh Donald Trump maybe i don't know a pair of slippers of bathrobe from one of your hotels just sign it we'll auction it off now i knew i wasn't going to hear from anybody right it was just a thing to do to let my fans know that the show was going to be moving someplace else three days later what was i handed special delivery it was a damn autograph bathrobe from Donald Trump which i had no choice but to put on and make a video tape and offer it to the highest bidder for

1:06:34our scholarship program i wound up getting thirty eight thousand dollars for the thing now the moral of the story is this before he's even president all the stuff you have said i think very very germane but as a marketer as an opportunist as a guy like why wouldn't the other two even consider it and why did he so reflexively pick up the phone and say hey somebody somewhere get me a robe send it to this guy he's got six million people on a facebook page i'm trying to win an election i think i would answer that with a phrase that they used the julias cesar julias cesar was supposed to be you know he he killed a million gals and he enslaved a million over ten year campaign to conquer what's now modern belgium in france and he was known as vicious but he was also unique they called her he in his mint age his coins they always said clementia chisaras the clemency of cesar

1:07:36because he would forgive he forgave brutus and then brutus turned around and killed him brutus was one of the revolutionaries against the anti-sisterians so if you notice that when steve bannins had all those terrible things about him steve bannins is a close associate again with him how many times at elan must say that trump was guilty of things and he called him back i guess it was michael is that michael koan who was part of the league he was on tv with him the other day and he killed the arch-terrest of aran sole mani and then aran called us up and said i e trump the us americans and he said well we have to do something to save face and they made a little deal that they could send six or seven rockets at our installations they told us where they were going to land that was widely reported i think some people complained that some soldiers got out of concussion or something from the blast but basically he did it and then after he bombed last june the next day

1:08:42he said i want to make aran great again and i thought wow for all the viciousness of his tweets he does not have a hillie clinton old feud mean street he does not have you know i can remember when there was a clown in the mazari state fairer who wore a mask of obama and he had worn other presidential masks of rodeo clown and the white house called and they banned that guy for life so what i'm getting at he calls people up he screams and yells them but he's transactional and when i wrote the book i read almost all of the art of the deal art of the comeback and he did say something that you never really insult somebody or hold a lasting grudge after a deal you usually you go in and you want 90% of the deal and he's not going to give it to you and then you scream and yell and when you get down to 53% advantage or 55 you cut a deal but you don't go brag that you

1:09:46took that guy you say that i it was really tough because you never know when you're going to deal with him again see him and that is a theme that i wrote in the book one of the reasons he came back he can call ronda santis all sorts of things sanctimonious but if ronda santis calls him up and says mr. present i got a good person for a federal judgeship and florida trump will say well ron let's work on it he is that way it doesn't make sense to a lot of people they keep thinking he's vindict he's not a vindictive person he can say terrible things but the next moment he's transactional with almost anyone when it comes to educating their kids in 2026 parents are desperate they know the public school system is failing and they can't afford a private school and they don't have the time to homeschool so you know what they're doing well a lot of them

1:10:49are relying on k-12's career and college prep program this is a tuition-free online public education that prepares kids for lucrative careers in construction and health care and cybersecurity and so many other fields that are expanding every day and it's growing like crazy because every year thousands of students get the industry certifications they need to hit the ground running this allows them to earn college credits along the way so if they want to head to a university or jump straight into a high-demand trade k-12's career and college prep gives them something a diploma can no longer guarantee a head start it is practical it's smart it is working give your student the opportunity to explore the right fit for them right now with k-12's career and college prep go to k-12.com slash row and learn more that's the letter k the number 12 dot com slash row

1:12:04when do you cringe or do you i do i do i don't like it especially the Romans it's a very famous phrase in early church doctrine but also among the Romans decarate newlam nisi bonum de mortui say nothing good say nothing but good things say nothing bad it doesn't really it translates better say nothing unless it's good about the dead and they mean that the recent dead so when he said that about rob reiner i got very angry about that and i said i he shouldn't have done that i know that rob reiner had been very vicious to him but he had just died he had died tragically by his own son and then there was a very controversial my i'm very close to my oldest daughter and she has a disabled child with a very severe genetic defect and one of the manifestations of that defect

1:13:04it's called smith beginnes it's a little bit worse than downs and she'll do this grab her face or she'll go like this and he i know you you remember it so much during that campaign he did this to a reporter and he his supporters and he said that he had done it to other people just like this but it came across that that person had a and i thought my daughter called me and was very upset and i i looked at it 20 times and i never really knew but i don't think you even want to get in that situation where you make fun of someone those are the things that have made me cringe when he makes fun of a person's um he said the other day about the premiere of Ontario yes Ontario Ford who's kind of heavy and he said well he's known as a slob you could say a thousand things but you're gonna have to deal with him so i didn't understand why he would call him a slob like that so and i think he he understands that he does that sometimes

1:14:12i know that he didn't continue that with rob robin or he was defensive after that some of the things he says are cruel but we'd forget that the he what he said about john McCain i objected to when they said something was signing a book and he said john McCain doesn't approve i would prefer our people were not taken prisoner something of that effect but he didn't the subtext of that is john McCain had just said the day before that trump brings out all the crazy all the people who are strump support he called him crazy in another time i think he called him hobbits or something so it was a tick but still that wasn't an and a wrong thing to say so i think everybody knows that there's certain things that he does that i have an open mind but i'm very syskept promising people five thousand dollars before the midterms if he had said that they were going to that all americans regard us if we hit certain financial targets would get a five

1:15:15thousand dollar rebate but my gosh we're we're forty one trillion dollars in debt and we're gonna run a trillion dollar deficit again and we're can't i best it is it who's a i think of fiscal genius but i don't think we can grow our way out of that without controlling spending so what then is your advice if any for people where do you put your disappointments and how do you acknowledge them and then reconcile them with the larger issue are you able to do that because you're an historian who can quote really relevant Latin phrases and it's all my i guess my question is trump reconciliation for dummies well i do it two ways one because of the nature of the media that does not feel that it's informative but it really is part of a political moment so i was with a member of my family who i will say despises don't trump and by association probably

1:16:23despises me and we were talking and i got very tired so i said the following i agree with you i can't believe he was in the white house and his own daughter of bonko was going down the hallway and arranging to have a mistress with him his mistress right in the white house and then i said and you know nothing it really bothered me there was an eighteen year old intern that he was having sexual relations with and he kind of farmed her out to an aid but even worse he was on the toilet deficit every time he gets on the toilet he waits until he has to have a bowel movement and then he has a associate come in to take notes with the door open he humiliates them and then i say in this should have given it away i said and then there was a very sick act he conducted in the oval office with an intern who was his subordinate and he took advantage of that and destroyed her life probably

1:17:31but it was a very sick thing sexually to do and she said i'm glad i'm glad you finally agree i said i just talked about fdr jfk lbj and bill clen and she said oh that's not true i said it's demonstrable true every one of those incidents and then you know she said well how about stormy Daniels i said that is bad i believe that he did have an affair with her and it was bad but then i also want to know why terror read was destroyed basically when she had even better documented and we don't associate that with so part of it is that people focus on him so when hillary clinton you know when he did the grab him by the pee uh expletive from ten years ago talking to it see that there was a context there but when she got so sanctimonious and then he brought in all of the former leazons of bill clen and right in front of her at the debate he really did expose that we

1:18:36have a double span then the other part how i do i just the greater good i'm not saying i justify it but i say to myself we were in big trouble we had 50,000 recruits short and there was a particular demographic of white males from rural areas that were not joining they were 85 of them had been kicked out for not getting vaccinated when we were letting in 10,000 people a day not vaccinated part of it was DEI but all of a sudden he brought in now we have no equipment problems nobody talks about that and when you look at uh workers income it's starting in the first term it went up it's going up again i think that this idea of emphasizing class rather than race was salutory DEI I had continued or I think it'll ruin the country because it's a classical tribal mentality and it's anti-merocratic and there's too many tribes that it won't work

1:19:43and any big democracy in the world that has a tribal system like India or Brazil or Indonesia doesn't work very well so i never thought that the United States who which at the mercy of our exporters i never thought that we would be the greatest producer of gas and oil in the history of civilization which we are now i never thought that he ever would close the border i didn't think it would be possible i never thought we'd be at a 70 year low in violent so all of those benefit millions of people there is a line where you can't support but i haven't got there yet where the things he says are so we accrued that it negates all about this morning Gavin Newsom said that he would tax 100% any $5,000 dividend that was sent to California yeah i mean i see Gavin Newsom and i say California has the highest income tax it has the fourth highest sales

1:20:51tax it has the highest gas prices it has the highest gas taxes it ran a $70 billion deficit at the beginning of the physical year it has one third of all welfare recipients it has i think now more than west virginia 21% below the poverty line 50% of all the burs are in medicae 40% of the people are on medicae we've had three catastrophic fires the aspen fire the paradise and the pacific palisades and they still look like they happened yesterday almost the high speed rail shut down my road it's five miles to the west from where i'm speaking for five years for one overpass it's about 30 billion dollars and they haven't laid one foot of track yet and when they do finish it'll be how to get on the train uh one hour and 30 minutes quicker to go from bakersfield to merced than

1:21:51the amtrak and i look at all the thing the 99 freeway is by the 100 miles driven the most dangerous in the world and it's right here and there are areas that have not changed in 70 years two lanes each way gavin newsome let 45,000 people on the road that did not have to have what we would call the normal three hour written exam they had to be 21 they had to be US citizen they had to have a physical they had to have a two hour in person i don't know how they did it but i see them on the freeway when i drive to stamford they're in the left or middle lanes going and they've killed people all of those things when i see gavin newsome he looks great he has a nice nine million dollar mansion he knows all of the people he knows the polosies he knows barboboxery new dianne findsstein he knew the whole barrier political establishment he comes

1:22:52down to stamford he knows all of silicon valley he dresses well uh he anytime he does use an expletive it's it's contrive but he he pretty much is pretty elegant he's smooth but he's done he's ruined a lot of lives uh in california i i i was born i'm the fifth generation in this house and i have never seen the state in worse condition than what he's done yeah it's hard to destroy california it's so naturally rich and we had such prior brilliant general everybody it seemed to me in the united states who from 1920 and 1950 it was brilliant came here what is your hope for the book i think it will be a time capsule i think most of your stuff is but do you have an affirmative hope yeah i think i do i think the lesson is that you don't destroy institutions because you have fixated

1:23:53in your personal hatred whether it's war under or not as the historian thusity says you don't do it because you never know when you're going to need them basically the left said to us it's now okay to raid a president's house even though there was 0.001 percent 101 files out of somewhere between 11,014 they went into millenia's drawer they put their little stickers on things they messed up the floor without files you don't in five separate criminals you know you don't try him at the local level with alvin bragg at the county rebel with fanny willis at the state level with lequisa james at the federal level with jack smith with eging carol funded by a billion error from silicon valley you don't try to get a candidate off the ballot 25 states tried to get him off the ballot you don't have a level of the tupperation you'd like to cut his head off shoot him blow him out

1:24:56poison him set him on fire stab him i have all of those in the book if you're a retired general and you're sober and judicious and we all love you you why do you call the president of the United States whoever it is musilini apathological liar a Nazi similar to the architect of alchewitz quoting directly so i wanted a chronicle all of that and say we went in with the steel dossier and hunters laptop in the fifty we went into a period of sheer hatred where the institutions and i got into covid and all of that falchi they felt he was such an existential threat that any means necessary were justified to get that end and the end was just not to get him out of the office but to destroy him destroy what he represented in destroy him and i wanted to chronicle all of that and then i wanted to also explain that one of the great things about america is and i have

1:26:04we like people who have been destroyed and come back nixon is popular now there's a whole cult on campus we have these things called the comeback of the year award we like people who hunter Biden is all over tv for some reason but it has something to do with he was the the lowest of the low with his drugs and sex and now he's pontificating about politics that's why i started the book in the moments after january six and i thought he is done he was despised and then what does it take to do that and how does america allow that and i think it's a good thing too that we like people who never give up i wanted to do that well you you accomplish it it's a terrific read but i want to close with uh since you invoked some latin i'm thinking of uh i'll get this wrong but i think it's damn nation mimoire yes damn not to you'll memoir i yes i thought of it

1:27:04years ago when we saw our statues coming down and so many attempts whether it's the 1619 project we know ways to revise history expunge it in total fabricate it from whole cloth do you think that somehow rhymes today and is the fact that we love our phoenixes rising from the ashes in some counter-intuitive way interesting to riff on with the italian sentiment i do i think people get very angry that in the year of our lord 2026 that people dare to go in and destroy the foundational date 1776 and say it's 1619 or they want to tear down any confederate even john james long street who regretted slavery never owned a slave he worked for the union afterwards but anybody who fought on the south we're going to take his statue down the romans

1:28:09down the prior emperor and they were a lot more practical they left the body of the statue there and they just changed the phase because they all looked the same but and that's what the french revolutionaries did they came in and they renamed the days of the week they renamed the days of the month they renamed the year zero so they started out at zero they killed priests they just tried to destroy destroy the catholic church and they got Napoleon as a result i don't think people like what's going on i'll just finish by saying i'm no bigger supporter of legal immigration i think it's been wonderful for this country but when you bring in people from antithetical positions and and i should say environments states so we have miss keros comes in from ethyopia and is lecturing us now what's wrong with american we have to have reparations and then we have

1:29:11mr. saïd giving a full sale critique mr. mandami ilian omar and they're all blasting this system of this magnanimous host that took them in they all come from wretched places egypt and haydee and port of rico and ethyopia and yugondo and they start doing this and the american people just finally get you know they don't know anything about ewa jima they've never heard of bella wood they've never heard of chanceursville they've never heard of tomas edison or any of these people they have no interest in learning about us but they either they are first or second and they start giving i have never seen our immigrants do that and then when you contrast to finish how vulnerable and expose they are to their own indictment of us you say okay settler colonialists mandami you were from the indian community in yugondo that was the one percent you own 65 percent of the gdp of

1:30:15yugondo your community did your community was placed there by the british empire to heard the yugandas to watch over them make them good imperial subjects ilian omar you're talking about the israelis and us and you use that term and you say jenisa your father was a kernel in saïd bary's army that killed 200,000 people and he was very well known according to the people and today in samali land that he helped slaughter and i could go on with all of these groups elsaïd giving this big and i have been to old kairo and i have been to egypt and when hasan parker says this his families from turkey they're very rich many of these people are very rich they just took the greatest church in chris adam for a thousand years hagea sofia the church of holy wisdom which had been a you in designated landmark and they made it into a mosque just as if it's 1453 again

1:31:17and they've taken it and of course constantanopal was the chief city of the eastern woman empire and after four seventy three the chief city and the christian western world until it was taken by islam at a very late date in its thousand year history but of course we don't think like that we think that's just tragedy that's what history but these people have been started and guiding us for things that happened years ago and we're supposed to say they're immigrants or they fit a category of de i's so they're completely exempt and i just don't think people are going to accept that anymore and it's nothing to do with race it's just common hospitality that when you go where to come in to someone's house or you want to join someone you say they don't have to be perfect to be good or you say there were elements in that culture that wanted me to be a part of it there's something about the like the rules of engagement and the impact of language i know we're

1:32:21done but i just want to say that you you mentioned john mccain and i agreed whatever trump said i prefer i prefer my war heroes not to be captured or something like that yes that's what he said well around the same time mccain corrected someone for referring to president obama that was at a radio yes that was at a indiana rally and the person said Barack who's saying in obama and that can't said no no no that's not like that game yes and that person and the funny thing is that Barack obama had been using as an at an earlier iteration of his career and one of the reasons that that whole birther nonsense grew up is because Barack obama put on the jacket of his first book that he was born in kina and that's what started all you can still see it and if you get in a use book so Barack Barack who saying obama is a brilliant new state legislature and he's written

1:33:25a book dreams of my father and he has an insight as a kina born in kina and that was not true he probably what i don't think he was born i know he was born in the united states but he thought that as literary publicist do that would give it a little d i experienced yeah so yeah i know that and that was why mccain lost and mccain and romney too they said we play by the marcus of queen's berry rules and we would rather lose nobly than win ugly and trump came along and said that's what George hw bush said that's what dull said that's what and the only time you ever win is when you get a guy like leo water and he said does the tank and the most in harbor and the willy horton and then as soon as he wins for you when he uses their tactics then you ridicule him and you don't ever want to do that again that's going back to do cock i don't think do cockis was a bad guy no he's a wonderful person but he was a lousy candidate and he is not truthful about

1:34:29his his vulnerabilities and leo water was kind of a mean crass guy but he was a brilliant tactician and he got George w bush hw elected and after that the republican aristocracy said we don't play that game and bill clinton you know he tore into bush he said it was the worst depression we've ever been in it was a mild recession romney they just destroyed him they said he had you know put a dog on his roof through his wife uh was a equestrian and all of us he had ms he didn't respond in the way that he should and regan did reg the last person to do was wrong regan really and that one little campaign of George hw bush and trump said well i'm gonna win ugly but i'm gonna win because if i don't win the country's gonna go to blank blank that was his message except he didn't say blank blank didn't he no he didn't

1:35:29well any of your gentlemen sir your uh your new book is thick and thoughtful and like all your others um i have no doubt it'll be remembered as important and maybe prophetic i'll close with this you toss me a softball an hour and a half ago with that crawl space encapsulation and that's what this is our country is a big house and it's getting older and there are parts of it that need to be tended to and they're out of sight and they're out of mind and uh you're heroic to me because you you don't just pay homage to the people who tend to the infrastructure you work with them you live with them you are their hero and for so many other people i'm telling you victor it's the headlines have caught up to your message i don't know how to explain it i'll just finish with i like them i've always liked them i like the american middle class i've always liked them i do too yeah i know you do i like you well thank you again take care of course thank you when you leave

1:36:38or if you only five stars will do not just one or just two or just three we were hoping for more as in a one more than a four please or just a quick review with five stars to from the you five stars will do the way i heard it is brought to you by progressive are you driving your car or doing laundry right now podcasts go best when they're bundled with another activity like progressive home and auto policies their best when bundled too having these two policies together makes insurance easier and could help you save customers who save by switching their home and car

1:37:42insurance to progressive save over seven hundred seventy five dollars on average quote a home and car bundle today at progressive dot com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national average twelve month savings of seven hundred seventy nine dollars by new customer surveyed who saved with progressive between June 2022 and may 2023 potential savings will vary not available in all states are you noticing your car insurance rate creep up even without tickets or claims you're not alone that's why there's Jerry your proactive insurance assistant Jerry handles the legwork by comparing quotes side by side from over fifty top insurers so you can confidently hit buy no spam calls no hidden fees Jerry even tracks rates and alerts you when it's best a shop drivers who save with Jerry could save over thirteen hundred dollars a year don't settle for higher rates download the Jerry app or visit Jerry dot AI slash libson today that's J-E-R-R-Y dot AI slash libson