George Allen

0:00I call this Monday, I'm John Reed, the Reed Revolution continues and we get the opportunity to talk to former Virginia governor and former U.S. Senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, George Allen. And governor, I appreciate the chance to talk to you. I hope you're feeling better. I heard that you had a little surgery. Are you doing okay? Oh, did we lose the camera? Well, Doug Garnett, producer Dan, he was up there for a second. Now I don't see him. You can't hear governor Allen. Let's see. It looks like his mic is muted. Here he is. How are you? I'm fine. I've just getting all this stuff straight here. I've got blocks on top of blocks. Oh, okay. To get the camera right. Okay. Yeah, I don't know if it's right on myself. I can't close other Riverside browser tabs. Box that is. Don't touch anything. It's you look good and we can hear you say,

1:01don't touch anything. I just leave it as it is. It's like the plane is on autopilot. We'll go with this. So real quick, I heard you had surgery. Man, I'm allowed to bring that up. You're doing all right. Yeah, I have eyes on my knee. I had right knee replacement surgery a couple of weeks ago. Huh? Generally what's going on, I get on a show like you and it'll melt the eyes on my knee because I'll get fired up. So one of the great things about technology, the internet and Zoom meetings and all the rest is I can operate right here out of the kitchen table. Good. Well, I appreciate you coming on. So let's start with the gerrymandering issue. And I know this has probably got you hot. And Governor Spamberger actually came up and said, don't worry everybody. This is just a temporary thing. She did that going into the vote on Friday when the voting started. This isn't temporary, come on, right? Right, it's this for six years. Six years doesn't seem really temporary.

2:02And what it is is the suspension of our Virginia for Virginians are constitutionally protected rights to have honest representative democracy. And so what they're doing, it'd be like saying, let's suspend the first amendment for six years that you won't have freedom of expression. And representation in Congress or in any legislative body is the voice of the people. And so what they're trying to do is invagled the people of Virginia to really silence their voices. And when you look at these maps, John, when it's not just theoretical, when you look at these maps, you see what they're doing is for people who live in rural areas, outer suburbs from the Shenandoah Valley. There goes my cane. That's gesturing. I hit a cane. And anyway, people in the northern neck, the middle peninsula, New Kent County,

3:04York County, Goodsland, Powhatan, they're going to be represented by people in northern Virginia. And it's just so wrong. And they're taking one representative away from the Hampton Roads area to give it to northern Virginia. And it's silencing their voices. Now, the Democrats will say, this is because of President Trump and what, yeah, well, that's that. I'm good. I'm glad you got that up. They're saying this is because of President Trump and what Texas did. And I've said from the beginning, President Trump should not have been pushing and pressuring Texas and other places to do this abnormal mid-decade redistricting or jerrymandering. Texas did it. And then California did it and offset Texas. I like the principal stand that Republican legislators in South Carolina and Indiana did. And they said, no, we're not going to do this.

4:04Now, Virginia has a special protection in that just five years ago, six years ago, I'm most now. 66% of the people of Virginia voted to mend our constitution to prohibit politicians from designing districts. If you'll put that back on, this was done by David Poole, who's an independent, he's not a Republican or a Democrat. This shows these districts how much is controlled. Right now, there's three congressional districts that are northern Virginia congressional districts with it in the bottom, and that's the top one. And the kind of the burnt orange is northern Virginia, which is nothing like burnt orange texts, but it's, but you see that now they're going to have five districts that they control. And it subsumes, and in each one of them, you see it subsumes either the Shenandoah Valley

5:05and three of them, the Shenandoah Valley. Buffalo Gap is in with Arlington or Alexandria no connection, those people share no, none of the common concerns about issues. And in fact, our constitution says you're supposed to have compact, contiguous districts of communities of similar interest, communities of similar interest, and rural community, small towns, outer suburbs, they really don't have much in common with inside the beltway or very densely populated, liberal elitist, northern Virginia. They don't have forestry and dairies and ag interests or any of that in northern Virginia. And it's just so wrong to do something like this to the people of Virginia. So I'm with a group called No Jerry Mandering Virginia. It's a bipartisan group, John. And I know you've tried to be bipartisan.

6:07You try to stand on principle rather than situational principles or situational ethics. And chap Peterson, a Democrat from former state senator from northern Virginia and I have an op-ed that was posted on land today in the risk of time's dispatch. And we point out how wrong this is that chap's writing it as well, that Republicans will be consigned to 9%, 9% of the Virginia congressional representation of Washington will be allocated to Republicans, 91% or 10 districts will go to Democrats. And this is not representative democracy. Especially, John, I know you love history like I do. This is a 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence from a British monarchy. And now we have outside elitist monarchical interests and I almost feel like for the modern day Jack Jewett's,

7:09Jack Jewett, you know, right, the Virginia's Paul Revere trying to warn people that this is what's going on and warning about this takeover of Virginia for outside interests rather than the best interests of the good people of Virginia. It's remarkable that the people who for the last several years have gone into the streets claiming that they're protecting democracy. American democracy are more than willing when it serves their purpose to stomp on the votes and the voices of people they may disagree with in other parts of the state that they never go to. I mean, it shows a real disdain and disrespect for Southwest Virginia, for parts of Central Virginia and Southside Virginia where people have a different value set than many of these people do in the Virginia. You know, with all due respect to the crowd in North of Virginia, which does think in a monolithic way,

8:10don't lecture me about democracy if this is your response to a national problem that you've identified and that's to stomp on the voice and the votes of other people around the state. It was really insulting and revealing, I think. Yeah, it really does hear exactly correct, John. And it is, and then the language in this, they said they want to restore fairness. Well, we now have fairness in our districts in Virginia because of our constitutional amendment in Virginia that again was passed. Well, over two million people voted for it. Now they're rushing this through and in my view, an unconstitutional way of trying to make a constitutional amendment. But I'm not going to get into all the legalities you could get law years unlike Tim Anderson's very good on all the law part. The reality is, it's what they're trying to do and say, well, these other states did this and they were wrong and I agree, they were wrong. And as was on both sides, Republicans and Democrats,

9:14but what they're having to do in Virginia is negate our protections in our constitution for fair representation. So they're not restoring fairness, they're taking away fairness. And it's not just me saying this, John. There's a group out of Princeton who analyzes all the congressional districts across the country in various states. Virginia, along with maybe Arizona and a few other states, but there's only about four states, four or five states that have a grade rating for their districts. And you look at our current districts, they're fair, they're compact. You have the three in Northern Virginia, you have the outer suburbs, ones of Northern Virginia, you have the Shenandoah Valley, you have the Southwest, South Side, the Hampton Roads area, you have minority majority districts which are required by the Voting Rights Act. And so it's a very fair and right now, it's six to five, Democrat.

10:14And in Abigail Spanberger, just a few years ago was saying, how terrible gerrymandering is, we need to oppose that. Those are, she had the right principles a few years ago and now she's going along with this. She's just totally changed it. Yeah, and by the way, in her election last year, you were part of it. You did better than the top of the ticket, but Abigail Spanberger won the first and the second congressional districts. So if you have candidates and an agenda that are advocating a positive or meritorious agenda, they can win in those districts. And so in a legitimate election, it could end up being seven, four, eight, three, Democrat, which is, but that's the people in those areas voting that way. And so they just have gone to such extremes to rig these elections to make sure that the Democrats win.

11:18In fact, some of the Democrats, Helmer in particular, member of the General Assembly, they designed the district for them to run it. You know, it's just, it's just so cynical. Yeah, I've heard a lot of Democrats who really resent him for his behavior. They don't appreciate what he's done. Yeah, and so he lives in Fairfax and he's going to represent the Shenandoah Valley, parts of the Shenandoah Valley, which again has nothing to do with Northern Virginia, as far as other than being in the same state. And so that's a self-dealing. This is what people hate. Politicians pick in their voters' rigging elections rather than the way represented democracy's supposed to work. And that is the people, we the people, the owners of the government, it's a consent of the govern. But if they rig the consent of the govern to get outcomes, they want that it's just so wrong in contrary

12:19to the foundation and founding principles of our country and Virginia being the cradle of American liberty of all places that ought to stand up for those enduring principles. It should be that people of Virginia, whether they're Republicans, independents, libertarians or Democrats. And our group, this no-gerrymandering Virginia, has Brian Cannon with us. He and I went all over Virginia for this constitutional amendment, trying to get, he's a Democrat. They needed me to try to persuade Republicans for the constitutional amendment. And then they got through and then the subsequent year, the Democrats talk over the majority and wanted to keep them all together and passing it and then sending it to the voters. And the whole way this is going about, again, is so wrong. There wasn't a single candidate. Last year, John, you were on the campaign trail. You ran a grassroots campaign. That's kind of, we're trying to run a John Reed-type campaign

13:21with our no-gerrymandering Virginia. True, we're not expecting any money from outside. For decent sources or any of those folks. And we're trying to make sure people understand what's at stake in this. Because in the elections last year, when you were running your opponent, Abigail Spanberger, nobody, nobody, or anybody running for the House of Delegates, when they passed this in the final week right before election day. And Virginia doesn't have election days. We have election seasons for 45 days. And so they passed this a few days before the final day of voting. No one was saying, hey, elect me. We're going to, we're going to, if you elect me, we're going to pass a constitutional amendment to gerrymandering the districts in Virginia so that it'll be 10 to 1 Democrat, assuring that no one was running on that. Now, you do remember they were running on some

14:24of the other constitutional amendments, which will be voted on not on April 21 in this odd, rushed election. But back, if it'll be voted on in November later this year on regular election day, on reproductive rights as they call it and giving voting rights to felons and, and, and marriage equality issues. And they were running on that. They, there were delegates running. And, in fact, your opponent was running on that. And so that's the proper way to do it, rather than this, this really, let me show you cards. Be up front with everybody. Exactly. I don't, no one gets held accountable for that. And this is the last chance to do that. Hold people accountable before everything changes. And it's going to be really difficult to fix this back to a fair situation for everybody if, if this gets out of control. I don't want to run out of time with that.

15:24Before we go into that, I think that any political party, Republican or Democrat who has to rig elections with Jerry Mandarin, must not have much confidence in the popularity of their ideas or the merits of their agenda. So they have to do this. And that really shows a posity of integrity and also a lack of confidence in what they're actually running on as popular with the people when they have to, to, to Jerry Rig districts this way. Yeah. Well, especially when they propose 51 different tax increases after they just talked about, you know, affordability. I'm. Yeah. It'll be fun at the end of this session. It'll be interesting at the end of this general assembly session to look at this affordability issue. And with the tax increases and rejoining that regional greenhouse gas idiocy, which is regressive, which is going to add three or four, maybe more percent, everyone's power bill monthly in a variety of other things.

16:27How much power bills will go up because of that in the various taxes on employers and employees? I think Virginia, at the end of this, there's going to be, there's going to be a scoreboard. I think Virginia is going to end up being less affordable and less competitive with the states we compete with for investment and jobs, especially North Carolina and Tennessee. Well, last week I had one Democrat who I like, nice person, disagree with him, but they told me, you don't understand your definition of affordability, affordable is different than ours. And I said, gosh, really? What? I don't understand. We shouldn't have to go to the dictionary for this. They're like, no, we're going to make it more affordable for people who need it to be more affordable. And I said, oh, so it's not more affordable with just the price on the ticket or the price on the wall or the price at the gas pump.

17:27You're coming up with a government scheme to try to siphon money to certain people so they will have a more affordable situation in their life. That's not affordability. That is a government scheme. It's a socialist scheme. Yeah, and read distribution. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, some of their schemes, particularly on power bills, is redistributionists. They're saying, yeah, well, these rates, these power bills are going to go up and it's very regressive. The people hurt worse by having another 11, 12, 13% added to everyone's power bill every month for the offshore wind project in the clean Virginia and the renewable and regional, you know, regressive greenhouse gas idiocy joining these, these loser high cost northeastern states. All of that hurts lower and middle income working people the worst. And so they've come up with some scheme that if your poverty level, whatever's 150%,

18:29or whatever it is of the poverty level, your bills will only go up, say, 6%, not 12%, and the difference will be made up by those earnings, say, over $80,000, and their bills will go up by 15 or 16, or 18%, again, this kind of stuff, this is not going on in places like Tennessee or North Carolina or Georgia or South Carolina or Florida or Texas. And Virginia competes with those states. We're not competing with Maryland and New Jersey and New York and those states. And it's just going to make for the cost of doing business a cost of living in Virginia much higher. Yeah, all right, look, I do need to run, but I got to ask you, when I work for you, you are on the farm relations committee. I remember sitting in briefings about Iran attempting to get a nuclear weapon. Give me in 60 seconds what your snap assessment is

19:29of where we are right now with the decapitation of the itola and his leadership. Well, I think it's all good. I know right now there's some short-term pain. No question about it, gas prices are up. I think it'll be temporary. They, Iran is the number one state sponsor of terror in the world. It's not just them, it's all their proxies whether it's the Houthis or Hezbollah or Hamas. The Syria was once part of that coalition as well as Russia and China and their roundabout ways. But knocking them out makes it safer for America, safer for Israel, safer for our allies. It's not just knocking out the top of it and whomever else we need to knock out. It's stopping their nuclear weapons program knocking out their long range and any missile technology. We got to knock out their drones in all these different ways that they can project their terrorist approaches.

20:30And so I think we need to support our troops. I think the president's made a tough decision that the time to act is now and just dawdling and kicking it down the road is not a responsible approach. And so I hope they get their objectives done with a minimal loss of life for our brave men and women serving our armed forces. I know our folks always. And you know there's John from the wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan, we try to hit military targets. You hate to have any collateral damage in it. So I think we're doing a good job. We're on the right track, need to degrade them. I'd like that most of their fleet has been sunk. And so this is something that has been neglected. You cannot deal with these autocratic fearcrats. They have a mindset that is contrary to our Jeffersonian principles. And the people of Iran and the Persians who live here

21:35in the US, the ones who want freedom and greater personal freedoms and liberty are happy with this. Right, hopeful change. And there is a difference between we don't want to kill civilians. They are fine with it. And everybody needs to pull focus on that. All right, Governor Allen, I appreciate the chance to see you happy birthday late. Hope it was a great weekend of celebrations for you. I'm yeah, it was except for the stink in Nevery Habba. I know looking forward to my next birthday, where I'll be much more mobile. It's great. You're looking good. And I appreciate the chance to talk to you always, Governor, thank you. Thank you, John, for standing strong for freedom. Yes, sir. All right, we're going to take quick break. When we come back, Dr. Michael Shires from the American First Policy Institute is with us. Stay here on the read revolution. And but there's got to be a decision that we're not going

22:37to tolerate this type of violent behavior to get your way that has been on display for an extended period of time. Not just our era, but for centuries. And this belief that it is acceptable to murder and abuse and enslave people who won't embrace your religion. And Americans have been fed a lie. And it's a nice lie. It's a pretty lie that everybody's the same wherever you go. And that's just telling you, 116 countries over the last 40 years of my life, that's not true. It's just not true. People are not the same wherever you go. When their belief system and their value system is not the same wherever you go. And you really do need to be discerning and wise about how you navigate that. You go, if you're traveling around the world, I would love to go visit Syria, or quite frankly,

23:38I would have loved to have gone to Iran and seen the amazing glass palaces in Iran from an architectural standpoint, from a historical standpoint, the history of the world is a lot of history in Iran. But I'm smart enough to recognize that would be a problem for me. You know, I'd love to go visit North Korea. So I could report back to you in a firsthand way what the situation is on the ground in North Korea. But I'm smart enough to understand that that is dangerous for me. And I, and it's not just because the government says so, it's a practical issue. And I think we're living in a fantasy world where we've been fed this very pretty nice lie and Americans don't want to face the much more, ugly reality that we're not all the same. And there's danger when we need to be aware of it. Maybe a rabbit hole to go down another day, but the Muslim community doesn't exactly

24:39have China's one child policy either. So they are, they are trying to overwhelm the world population through, you know, the people who will hear you say that, producer Dan, and they will be very angry and assume that you're spreading some sort of hostility. Please spend a little bit of time. Don't just trust producer Dan or me. Spence about this is being said openly and proudly and loudly. And I do think, you know, I find it odd. The great replacement theory, which is not a theory. You know, if you bring that up suddenly, you're a racist. Well, no, who's the racist? Me acknowledging what's happening demographically or you for promoting it. I mean, I hear more and more people saying, how wonderful it's gonna be when whites are in the minority. You think so? Do you think that's gonna be wonderful? I don't think that's gonna be wonderful because I look at the way people are behaving today around the world towards whites and Christians and others.

25:40And I think, now wait a minute, what should I expect when I am in the demographic minority to be treated nicely, to be treated fairly? Doesn't seem like that's working out real well. In other parts of the world, and I am a realist, I recognize that people who are in the majority, it takes a certain type of discipline not to abuse others. I think I've demonstrated that discipline and that commitment to my values. I'm not, I don't think other people have demonstrated that in their lives or their cultures around the world and we should be very aware of it and not be celebrating it, be kind of alarmed that things are gonna change. And then once it happens, you can't undo it. Once you're in the minority and you start to become abused, I hate to say this is only one way out and that is violence and that's not good for anybody. We've gotta be careful. John Mann, I see something. The piggyback on what Dr. Shiers was talking about

26:41a few minutes ago. Yeah, I've criticized the founders if you, if you so choose, but what I'm about to say is absolutely indisputable. To a man, they were trying to make the world a freer, more just place than it had ever been. And that distinguishes them from just about everybody in office today who was trying to make the world a less free, less just place than it previously was here. Even great men and they were good men. In perfect, perhaps, but yeah, I think the motivation was just and I, you've got a second gas in question what the motivation is from a lot of the leaders that we have today. I mean, if you're pushing socialism and in some cases, you're pushing flat-out communism. You know, your hypothesis at this stage doesn't count because we have a century of exhibited failure

27:45for these philosophies and we should push back on it. Anything that even smells like it, we should push back on it. And we have a thousand years of bad results when it comes to Islamic leadership. And I'm sorry about that. That's, God, I wish that wasn't the case, but that's the case. And I'm singing nothing right now that makes me have confidence that this new generation of leaders is gonna behave much differently than previous generations. And until I see something different, you're not gonna have me sit silently and be abused or taken over. Just knock. America is the greatest country in the history of the world and at a minimum, it is the first moral country in the history of the world. And we should be very, very proud of it and we should be very protective of her. Well, on that note, let us take a break and we will come back tomorrow. And who do we have tomorrow, producer Dave?

28:46Oh, let's see here. I think we are still building the show out, but we should have, let's see. I know that we have a guest on at 10.45, Christine, oh, I'm gonna blow the pronunciation of this name. Senator, Senator, Senator Eski? Senator Eski? Is that sound? Christine Sinoeski, president and CEO of Mediapedia. And she's gonna talk about something that we've been talking about a bit today, the bias and legacy media, but in particular, covering the attack on Iran. Okay. Yeah. All right, we'll be one guest for tomorrow. I'll look forward to talking to Christine for days out. Tomorrow. Dan, all right, that's good. Listen, producer Dan, I always appreciate your work and the chance to talk to you. And like what? I would encourage, now tomorrow, can I tell you something we're gonna do? Tomorrow, if you would like to be supportive of this podcast, we're gonna give you the opportunity to sign up to be supportive financially of the podcast because you know, you may have noticed

29:46that producer Dan is here and I am here and it's kind of a two person show and we're trying to grow this audience and it would be very, very helpful if both of us could afford our mortgage and pay some of the bills that go along with this program. So I will just mention tomorrow, we'll be providing you the opportunity to be one of the supporters of the program and the commercial element of this program will begin this month as well. There's a lot of people who have said, hey, I'd like to be supportive and you have a significant audience. So we'd like for your audience to be aware of our business and the work we're doing, we'll share some of that with you as we continue this week too. In the meantime, follow us on both of our pages on Facebook, on X, on Rumble, on YouTube. And of course, if you don't have time to watch this on your computer while you're at work or at home, you can listen to the audio version on Spotify and Apple, wherever you get your podcast.

30:47That's gonna do it for us on this Monday morning. I'm John Reed, see you tomorrow on the Read Revolution.