Elon Musk Is Powering the American Renaissance

There’s a lot of controversy about Elon Musk. His reputation took a big hit, remember, right after the election, because half the country voted, roughly 48%, voted against Donald Trump. Elon Musk had flipped from a former Hillary Clinton supporter and Joe Biden supporter to a firm MAGA adherent and voted for Donald Trump in 2024.

As a result of that and his comments opposing illegal immigration, there were people who not only were demonstrating against [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but attacking Tesla dealerships. Everybody said that Elon Musk’s brand had suffered accordingly, that Tesla was on the way down, that European and American [electric vehicle] makers, along with Chinese EV makers, would dominate the market, given the tarnishing of the Musk brand and in conjunction with the end of the federal subsidy for electric vehicles.

So, people were suggesting that the era of Elon Musk was over. He was very controversial, and he was outspoken on his own platform, X, on conservative issues such as illegal immigration, green energy, [artificial intelligence] in ways that infuriated the Left. And the Left, remember, was considered the natural consumer of electric vehicles.

So, are we watching the decline of Elon Musk? No. No, no, no. The exact opposite is happening. In the second quarter of 2026, Tesla had a rebound, and it captured 52% of all the EVs sold in the United States. It has a market capitalization of $1.2 trillion. The other “Big Three” automakers are beginning to exit the EV market.

China cannot send their EVs into the United States. Why did Tesla rebound? Was it because all of a sudden Elon Musk had a fight with Donald Trump for a while? No. Was it because he apologized to the Left? No. It’s because when you buy a Tesla and you drive it and you compare it with other brands of the Big Three in terms of distancing, acceleration, safety, appurtenances, it’s not just better, but it keeps getting better geometrically, at a geometric rate, not just an arithmetic.

It has the best program for self-driving. It’s the safest. It has the longest range. It’s the most fun to drive, and people like it regardless of their politics. If you move to SpaceX, 67% of all the satellites in low orbit around the world today are associated with Elon Musk’s SpaceX company—67%, over 12,000 satellites.

The market capitalization of SpaceX is well over $2 trillion—$2 trillion. SpaceX, with its various rockets, has saved a morbid, calcified, ossified NASA. It alone, with its rocketry and space vehicles, has put the United States not just back into the so-called space race and return to the moon and eventually to Mars, it’s made it preeminent over the Europeans, the Japanese, and the Chinese. More importantly, it’s given the United States enormous technological advances in rocketry, ballistic missiles, which have a definite military component to them.

When Elon Musk paid an exorbitant fee for X, people felt that he had made an enormous mistake, that it was overpriced. And yet, people were saying that users would abandon him and go elsewhere. In fact, that has not happened. That has not happened. There are 560 million users of X today. BlueSky, the alternative that was supposed to break X, has 3 million users. Three million versus 560 million users.

And remember that his Starlink satellite platform has captured 97% of all satellite internet usage. There are 12 million people who have a Starlink receiver and are subscribers in 160 countries. Most of the U.S. military and our allied militaries, including the Ukrainians and the Israelis, count on Starlink to guide their missiles and their drones, to protect them from incoming attack.

Let’s just put all of this in some kind of perspective. In terms of market capitalization, Elon Musk has well over $3.5 trillion in his various companies. SpaceX is the largest and it’s the most dominant, and it will either ensure that the United States is first in space exploration and satellite launching.

And, by the way, more satellites were launched on Elon Musk rockets last year than all of the satellites launched elsewhere put together. In addition to that, he created the electric vehicle market. It did not exist. He created the idea. Everyone said it would not work, that he was going to go broke, and he was finished.

He not only created the Tesla electric vehicle, he made it preeminent and dominant today. And he did it because, for the price and a cost-benefit analysis, it was unmatched. In terms of Grok, it is about third. About 16% of all AI platforms and chatbots use Grok. So, let’s just keep that in perspective.

The United States is preeminent today in social media, in artificial intelligence, in satellite launches, in the number of rocket launches in general, in electric vehicles. And all of that put together is due to one person, Elon Musk, who has been reviled and attacked by the Left as either treasonous or insane or cruel or whatever.

One man has combined the talents of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford all in one person, and he’s an American. In other words, much of the success of the United States’ current renaissance in digital media, in satellites, in electrical vehicles, in AI, in software is due to one person. One person can make a difference. In the case of Elon Musk, he made a big difference.

‘Unassimilated Immigrants Will Make a Failed State in the United States’

 

person 2: A 26-year-old sub-Saharan African, Benedict Chinedu Ogbodiegwu, I’m sure I’m saying that wrong, allegedly murdered a white man, 62-year-old Andrew Wimsatt, sitting on a bench, and he stabbed him to death and tried to behead him.

It turned out that Wimsatt was actually friends with Tyrus and Kat Timpf and others.

For whatever reasons, you know, he communicated with them, went to some of their local shows. So, he seems like a nice guy. They knew him. So, some of this news has gotten out, but otherwise, if he didn’t have friends in high media places, this seems to be another kind of story where a heinous black-on-white illegal immigrant—I think he’s an illegal immigrant, this dude—murder has happened, and gruesome.

Again, an attempt to saw off this guy’s head would have just passed in our media, as do so many shootings and murders in Chicago, for example. We don’t hear about this. Anyway, any thoughts on this beheading attempt, Victor?

person 1: Yeah, I mean, it was … The Left sees this as collateral damage.

So, they have a narrative that white supremacists and white rage hurt black people. And the reality is that 49% to 50% of all rapes, assaults, murders are committed by black males, who make up 2.5% of the population. That is a narrative that they do not want to discuss. They call this collateral damage to the narrative.

The narrative is anti-empirical; it’s deductive. It just says this: White people are racist, therefore, they must kill black people inordinately, even though, in rarer interracial crimes, depending on the violent act, it’s six to 20 times more common for a black person to hurt a white person. I think in the case of female crime—and please, listeners, correct me; I’m doing this by memory—but the data that I had looked at said that is even more egregious that black …

I don’t think there was a case last year of a white woman killing a black woman. But the reverse is certainly true. So, the second myth is that our immigrants, both legal and illegal, are more law-abiding. They always say that they’re more law-abiding than Americans are, and that’s not true if you look at the data, especially on illegal immigrants and especially on the recent generations of legal immigrants.

And that makes sense not because of racial differences, but because we are importing people. I say that because they look at it as—their home countries look at it as export for remittances. They are exporting people from some of the most violent places in the world, from the Sudan, from Somalia, from Venezuela, from Central America, some of the most violent places in the world, Mexico cartels.

And that behavior continues. And we always get back to the same truism, Jack, that if you bring people into the United States and you don’t have confidence that you’re going to assimilate, acculturate, and integrate them, and they have no desire to do that.

They did not come here to be Americans. They came here to be Syrians or Egyptians or Qataris or Venezuelans or Ugandans or Nigerians with greater prosperity and greater security, prosperity, and greater freedom.

That’s all they wanted. They did not want to integrate into the system. And if you do that, then why wouldn’t they retain the same characteristics, values, behaviors that made their countries failed states? And if, therefore, they do not acculturate and integrate, then they will—and their numbers are large enough—they will make a failed state within the United States.

And that’s just—that’s not racist. It’s not culturally chauvinistic. Right? If you look at one million Mexican nationals in Los Angeles County, and they’re not integrating or intermarrying and assimilating, then that million people will follow the same patterns of behavior that they did in Mexico, which collectively drove them out, and they voted with their feet and they said, I don’t want to live in Mexico because I don’t feel safe.

I don’t feel I have enough money. I don’t think I have freedom. I wanna go to the United States.

But part of the bargain, what they used to call the brutal bargain, was if you come here, you’re gonna be an American or not. It’s your choice. If you’re not, go back. And we haven’t done that, and they don’t want to.

You remember, right during the infancy of the [Abdul] El-Sayed candidacy, he had a hot mic and he was with his handlers, and he said right after the first day of the war on Feb. 28, he said, well, be careful. I don’t think my constituents in Dearborn are going to like the news that we killed the supreme leader of Iran, a terrorist leader who had just been responsible for butchering 30,000 to 40,000 of his own people.

So, what El-Sayed was saying is, I have a whole constituency that doesn’t integrate or assimilate and took an American city and took it over and feels more affinity with theocratic Iran than the country who welcomed them in. That’s a fact.

person 2: Well, some of these, you know, some of these documentaries that we’ve seen the last few days, I have, I assume you have and many of our listeners have, on 9/11 show these clips taken from not America, from some Arab countries, of joy in the streets.

person 1: Oh, yeah.

person 2: With the news. And then even more—

person 1: Handing out candies in Cairo.

person 2: Yeah. And more recently, of course, after Oct. 7, the dancing and thrill in Gaza over the slaughter of Jews. And so—

person 1: Did you see that? That one is making its rounds. It’s one of the sickest things I … I think her name was Shani Louk, and she was a German Israeli, and she was one of the first hostages that they sexually abused.

They stripped her, they crushed her limbs, and she’s in the back of that little truck, almost naked, and they’re pulling out her hair, the corpse, and they’re driving through Gaza, and everybody’s trying to get there to harm her, and a young kid comes up and spits on her. I think she was dead at the time that was taken, but the pictures show her 80% naked, suffering sexual trauma, and her limbs have obviously been broken and at angles that are sick.

And when you look at the crowd, there’s not one—I mean, everybody is in a state of ecstasy. Right? So, when I hear that Israel committed genocide, Israel said that they picked out 30,000 Hamas people of maybe the 45,000 or 50,000 that were killed that were collateral damage. But unless these … And that’s — I would just give one example.

It seems like all the people in Gaza after Oct. 7, if you took a poll, would say, 99%, I like the idea of butchering, dismembering, disfiguring, raping, beheading Jews.

person 2: Yeah. Well, you know, let me throw another immigration-y thing quickly here, Victor. I just saw it before we came on.

Maybe I said it before. [New York City Mayor Zohran] Mamdani announced that he is now going to sue the Trump administration over the administration’s new rule to deny green cards to foreigners who rely on welfare.

person 1: That used to be a law in most countries. It was a law here. You had to have proof of self-sustainability before you could get a visa. So, I don’t know what he’s talking about.

person 2: Yeah.

person 1: A green card.

person 2: Yeah. Well, fleecing the system, tapping into the system, not the opportunity for meritocracy, but the ability to draw a check on the taxpayers of the United States is truly now, everywhere you go, part and parcel.

person 1: Yeah, everybody should remember there’s this, there’s always this cycle with socialism. When it comes in on its body of lies, it is initially very successful for the first few months because it promises everybody free stuff. When they threw [Fulgencio] Batista out, people were in the streets praising Fidel [Castro]. Praising even Che Guevara, the psychopath, they were praising.

And it didn’t take them more than a year. Then they started going after especially the upper middle class, the bourgeoisie. And usually the very wealthy cut a deal with them. But they always go after the bourgeoisie first, and then the honeymoon was over when they broke the country, and that’s what’s gonna happen in New York.

Everybody’s happy. They’re gonna get free stuff. Some of the aristocratic rich people said, I can deal with him. I can buy him this. They’ll leave me alone. But you watch, month by month, he will target the upper middle class, and they will start leaving or they will start voicing their furor at him, and it’s already started because that’s who he is.

It’s the same frog and the scorpion. He can’t help it. He’s a socialist. That’s what socialists do. They have no choice.

person 2: You know, sometimes, Victor, we’re Eeyore, sometimes upbeat. Despair is a sin. And we’ll talk about this a little later. There’s an article from National Review about, are we entering a new age? And we talked recently about David Mamet’s piece, essay on kind of despairing.

But it’s hard not to despair. We love our country. We love everything it stands for. But significant pockets of it, and those are our major cities like New York, they’re circling the drain. And again, the other day in Providence. So, remember, we thought Providence had a whack-job mayor when those murders happened.

At Brown University. Well, he was defeated in a primary by a far greater whack job. So all of our major cities, one by one, seem to just be turning into—

person 1: And I think a lot of that is where we have 53 million people who were not born in the United States. Probably 20 million are exemplary legal immigrants, but 30 million of them are illegal and maybe more.

Seventeen percent of the population. The majority of those people live in cities. That’s why the British government wants to take illegal and legal immigrants from Third-World countries and take them out of Birmingham, Liverpool and London because they’ve already served the purpose. They have got majorities in there that get liberal politicians and Labour politicians elected.

Now they want to take them out in the country and disturb what they call, oh, these quaint little old white people out in their little shires. We’re going to screw that up. You just watch. And that’s sort of what is the subtext.

Why did the cities fall apart? Why did Los Angeles fall apart? One reason is we imported millions of people who could not support themselves, and they became wards of the Democratic Party, who basically has got 45% of the federal budget through distributions to the states and local municipalities for welfare of all sorts: education, food, shelter, legal, health.

And that enormously goes to people here, especially here illegally. And they live in cities, and they want blue representation. So, you say Mayor [Brandon] Johnson couldn’t possibly be reelected because he’s a racist. He’s broke. He has absolutely bankrupted the finances of Chicago, and he has increased the shootings by defunding and demasculinizing the police.

He couldn’t be elected. Well, he has a lot of people who feel that the welfare system is really great. They feel that teachers’ unions and all these people who are not subject to any audit are great. They get highly paid.

person 2: He’s gonna run again, you know.

person 1: He’s gonna win.

Did you hear that?

Yeah, he’s gonna win.

person 2: Yeah. Unless—

His work is not completed. He has more. He’s a—

person 1: Maybe we can get Lori Lightfoot back.

person 2: Oh, gosh. My gosh.

person 1: Karen Bass said she failed. She said, I didn’t … They ask her about all the fires and all the disasters, and the streets are not—they’re just … I just remember driving Los Angeles. There are huge—everywhere.

And she said, it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. I’m only mayor.

I mean, the thing about—another thing about DEI is that if there’s no accountability, that’s the real secret of DEI. There cannot be accountability because the person is always in a protected species. They’re always a victim of a—

person 2: They’re victims, yeah.

person 1: —cosmic injustice generations ago, and therefore, they’re incapable of being culpable. And human nature being what it is, they understand that. And so, if you’re a DEI person and you’re driving down the road and the cop pulls you over, you’re going to badmouth the cop and say, you know, you basically want another George Floyd incident, and the cop will treat you in a way different than he would somebody else.

And if you’re an official in LA and you want to be water and power director, you might get 750,000, and nobody’s going to look at what you did when you were working for PG&E. No one’s going to look at the fact that half the fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area don’t work. Nobody’s going to look at the fact that a reservoir has been dry for months, critical to the safety of that neighborhood, because you’re a DEI person.

And the same thing with the mayor. If you phone in—the deputy mayor phoned in a bomb threat, nobody’s going to put you in jail for very long. You’ll just be at home. You’ll have a suspended sentence, maybe sent—I don’t know. And if you’re mayor, yeah, you can go on a junket to a wedding in Africa right during fire season, but because you’re a victim.

And so, add the number of victims and the victimhood scenarios, and you’re going to get an utter disaster in a complex society. It can’t work on anything other than meritocracy. It can withstand or it can accommodate some incompetencies.

You can have the old white-boy network where seven generations of policemen were heroic, and then finally in our age, they hire their son, and their son’s a total blank. Maybe the society can hire them.

Or you can have a whole family of billionaires that get their kids into Harvard, and one kid is a complete moron, and he gets in. But those are incidental. They’re not essential to the system.

But when you have blanket thousands of people who are being promoted on without demonstrable skills that are necessary for the job, and your society is not a hunter-gatherer society, but it’s a complex post-industrial society, you’re asking for disaster.

And that’s what we have now.

Mark Carney Is Leading Canada ‘Right Over the Cliff

 

I know we’ve talked a lot about the current Canadian-American trade dispute, but it involves larger issues of globalism versus nationalism versus North American relations versus the United States paradigm versus the EU paradigm, etc., etc.

And what’s happened is I would call it [Canadian Prime Minister] Mark Carney’s fantasy house, Mark Carney’s dream house, Mark Carney’s imaginarium. He has no … It doesn’t seem like he has any connection with reality. His economy has lost 41,000 jobs. It depends on exporting to the United States 72% to 76% of all of its products.

That is going to be very difficult. It is now difficult. It’s going to be almost impossible if he continues. He has to keep his oil wells going, and given the fact that other provinces have not been ready and willing to make pipelines to the rich tar sands of Alberta, he depends on a 4 million-barrel export a day to the United States.

Some of it is thick tar sands, some of it has been diluted and is marketable elsewhere, but it’s a very good deal for Canada. When you talk about cutting that off, you’re talking about cutting your nose to spite your face. This would be the most self-destructive thing. The fact that Canada even mentions it shows that they’re entering a period of delusional thinking.

This new relationship with China, they’re bringing in 48,000 low-tariff, I think it’s only 6%, EVs. They’re going to ruin what little they had left of the Canadian auto industry. But more importantly, that trade agreement is ushering in a whole set of new agreements, some of them military.

Does Canada know, does Mark Carney know, that if Canada negotiates a special military relationship with China and it’s on our borders and we have NATO relations, that will endanger the alliance and it will permanently wreck the relationship between Canada and the United States?

The other thing that’s very disturbing is right now, as we speak, the European Union model is under assault, not by America, but by Europeans.

They don’t believe the socialist model of open borders, illegal immigration, dismantling fossil fuels, not using fossil fuel resources, subsidized expensive green energy, de-arming, disarming, whatever term we use, low fertility, works. They used to have, about a quarter-century ago, the 470 million Europeans, they had about the same gross domestic product as the United States.

Now they’re $10 trillion at least smaller. So, why is Canada emulating the EU failed model? Forty-five percent of your population was not born in Canada or their parents weren’t born. Why are you subsidizing green energy and you’re not utilizing this rich resource in Alberta? Why are you disarmed?

Why won’t you meet your 2% commitments? You may or may not have done it just one year, but why do you repeatedly not do that when you have such a vast nation and it is so exposed in a very dangerous world, in the Arctic, in the Northwest Passage, and the airspace over North America?

And the answer is your economic model does not allow you much margin. Your immigration model does not allow you much margin of error to compensate for these decisions that you’ve made for a weaker, poorer, more disunited Canada. You feel you can’t arm yourself because the United States will protect you.

You feel that you need a $50 billion surplus because the United States is far wealthier and you’re in dire straits.

Next problem. You don’t express your disagreement or anger at the United States over trade policy by warming up to, and allying with China, which is the greatest trade violator in history with its patent theft, copyright theft, dumping product below the cost of production, currency manipulation, forced labor camps.

And you don’t win yourself national support when no other country except you and China have slapped counter-tariffs, not because they didn’t want to, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they realized they were running surpluses for years with the United States, and they could still make money with a more symmetrical trade agreement.

You apparently don’t think that. You think if you lose your special $50 billion surplus relationship, or you might have to rearm, the choices that you’ve made on energy and immigration and economic policy prevent you from being competitive, and you need to be thus indirectly subsidized.

But more importantly, you’re not going to win world sympathy, at least among the United States and other countries that are its allies.

Now you’re engaged in an anti-Israel boycott. So, any products that were produced in the West Bank, you’re not going to buy. I have a question for you, Mark Carney. Does that include products that come from China that were assembled by a forced million-person labor force, the Uyghurs? Does it come from Nigeria, where Christians are being slaughtered?

Does it come from parts of the Russian Federation before the boycott? You imported things from them. They treat their minorities very harshly. No, it’s completely asymmetrical.

And finally, do you think that that sets a good example when you alone of the Western world are assisting people to kill themselves and that results in over 5% of your deaths each year being government-aided at a time when people really don’t know all the causes of suicide or terminal disease or there’s medical breakthroughs?

You, in this weakened economic state, are still allowing assisted suicide, not allowing it, promoting it to such a degree that you are the capital of assisted suicide.

And finally, this was a disagreement between governments, between Mark Carney, the globalist, and Donald Trump, the nationalist. And Donald Trump wanted to seek parity with Canada.

It didn’t want to run up a surplus with Canada. It didn’t want to take over Canada. Those were trolling memes. What it wanted was basically no surplus on either side, Canada arming itself like every other member of NATO, North Americans getting along. But you, Mark Carney, turned this into a literal war.

Those are your words, not mine. You use the word battle and war, and then you whipped up Canadian national anger and venom to the petty level that you Canadians are now booing the Star-Spangled Banner. They’re talking about putting signs up at the border warning Americans. This idea of moral superiority.

Americans are oblivious to this until now. They didn’t … They were as critical of Donald Trump as anybody. You whipped up popular fervor against the United States. Donald Trump didn’t say to Americans: Get angry at what they’re doing to … because you only represent 10% to 15% of our trade. It doesn’t make much difference.

We’d like to treat people equitably. We like to have basically small surpluses and small deficits. You were the one that did this, and it’s very paradoxical and ironic that you take this high moral ground when in actuality you’re dealing with a murderous government in China and you’re adopting economic policies that make you poor and you blame that poverty on other people.

All you have to do is look in the mirror and say, “We can reform and open and deregulate the economy. We’re not going to be that naive to trust China. We know the Chinese agenda, and we’re going to take another look at various things culturally, like open borders, illegal immigration, mass euthanasia, that make us quite different.

“And we’re not going to blame our problems on the United States or suddenly decide very loudly and virtue signal that we’re not going to trade with any products that come from the West Bank under Israel’s occupation.”

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Kennedy Treated LBJ Worse Than Biden Treated Harris

 

person 1: Well, I was thinking about Zachary Taylor, and then, off the top of my head, I was going, I know the name for some reason, and I did have to look him up. It was the campaign down into Mexico.

person 2: Yeah, he was brilliant. Brilliant.

Winfield Scott was a brilliant strategist, but the best tactician on the battlefield was Zachary Taylor. He won an incredible battle at Monterrey and Palo Alto in Mexico. He was from a Virginia planter family that moved to Kentucky, I think.

He was only president for 16 months, from 1849 to 1850. It was a very tumultuous time that he came in. There was a gold rush in California that all of a sudden made this obscure place have more capital than most states because of the amount of gold and silver they were mining.

In addition to that, there was the height of the Mormon uprising, or so-called Mormon tensions, in 1850.

In addition to that, there were the vestigial remnants of the Missouri Compromise and the question of how you bring states into the Union. He was a Southerner who owned slaves and was originally from Virginia.

His 16 months were characterized by unity. I don’t know how he was nominated because he was up against Henry Clay in the Whig Party and Winfield Scott, his superior in the Mexican War, but he was very popular. He was known for humane conduct. He treated Mexican prisoners very well. That was all in the headlines.

He was 65 years old. He had problems with his stomach his whole life, and he died.

This was a period, if you look at it, Martin Van Buren, [James] Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan. These five or six presidents were considered, with the exception of Polk, who was only there for one term, mediocre or a low point. People argue over who was the worst president in United States history: Millard Fillmore or James Buchanan.

But of those people, he was the most famous because he had single-handedly outfought the Mexicans and had won that war, and he was on everybody’s list of famous people. He was kind of just a caretaker.

Nobody knows much about him because he was there for, I think, the third-shortest presidency up to that time, and he died.

So, you can’t think of anything he did other than try to calm tempers down about the admission of states. As a Southerner, the North supported him because he did not demand that for every California or New Mexico admitted, there be a similar slave state. He kind of squashed the idea that they were going to let in Cuba. They wanted to let in Cuba as a slave state.

John F. Kennedy, who was president from 1961 to Nov. 22, 1963, the thousand days that the Left called Camelot, had three cycles of public attitudes toward him.

He was a senator for one term from Massachusetts. Joe Kennedy basically bought it all and put money into the campaign. Joe Kennedy Jr. was considered the brilliant one. He was killed in World War II on a weird experimental bombing mission involving a radio-transmitted bomber. He was supposed to pilot it, jump out, turn on a radio navigator, and it would be like a big cruise missile, but it blew him up.

Then JFK was almost killed in World War II on PT-109. He broke his back, swam to an island, and then he was rescued. So he was a war hero. He was up against, basically, Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Adlai Stevenson had lost twice to Eisenhower, so he was still running around, you know.

But Kennedy, people were suspicious of him in the Democratic Party because, remember, the Democratic Party was anchored by 11 segregationist states of the old Confederacy. So you had people like Strom Thurmond, [Herman] Talmadge, and all of those Southerners, and they didn’t trust a New Englander. So he appointed Lyndon Johnson as his vice president, and they just humiliated him. The Kennedys hated him.

Camelot meant that you were getting the brain trust from Harvard, so Robert McNamara and the Bundy brothers, etc., and they were going to use science and technology.

Basically, he had one great achievement, and that was he stared down the Russians, who tried to place nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles in Cuba. He put up a blockade, and we came almost to a nuclear war, but they backed off.

What we didn’t know at the time was that they backed off not just because Kennedy stood up to them, but because he also said we’ll take all of our Atlas liquid-fueled rockets with nuclear tips out of the Turkish border. So, it was not quite what everybody thought.

Then he tried to advance civil rights, but he got very irritated with Martin Luther King because he was running in 1963. In November, he was less than a year away from reelection, and it wasn’t clear he was going to be reelected. He didn’t know what to do. So, he was always telling Martin Luther King, Slow down. I have all these Southerners. I need those 11 states.

Then he was killed.

So, he was kind of an ineffective president, very charismatic, good-looking, Jackie, and all of that. That first stage of people being suspicious of a Catholic or the Kennedy family when he was running … He had one of the narrowest races, and there were always accusations that Joe Kennedy had called up Mayor [Richard] Daley in Chicago and gotten an extra 100,000 votes that won Illinois for Kennedy.

They did the same thing in Texas and made Texas go for him, and he won in the Electoral College. He only won by about 100,000 votes.

person 1: Yeah. So, do you think that was true about Mayor Daley?

I don’t know. Wow.

person 2: I think it was more likely in Illinois than Texas, but I’m not sure. It’s part of American mythology that Joe Kennedy helped buy the election.

[Richard] Nixon was very magnanimous. He said it won’t work if you question the results. So, he bowed out and gave a concession speech immediately.

But other than the idea that he stood down communism and didn’t get us into Vietnam, he had about 20,000 advisors there. We don’t know whether he would’ve gotten us in or not. He was also big on space exploration. Those were his three things.

He was a different type of Democrat. He believed in capital gains tax and income tax reductions, so the economy wasn’t too bad. Then he got killed, and LBJ could get civil rights through because he went to all those buddies of his in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and elsewhere and said, “You’re going to vote for civil rights, or you’re not going to filibuster if we have the votes.” That’s how it got passed, through Johnson.

But Johnson had been kind of a shady character. We’ll talk about him next time. None of the Kennedys in their right mind thought that when they put Johnson in there, he’d ever be president. He would never have been president after Kennedy’s second term. They wouldn’t have allowed that. He really was embittered.

There was a guy named Vaugh Meader who imitated Kennedy. You can’t have missiles in Cuba. No missiles in Cuba.

One of the jokes was, “Has anybody seen Lyndon around? Is Lyndon doing anything?” Ha ha ha.

They made fun of him. He was very bitter about that. But the Left came to like him because he got through all of the affirmative action and related programs from 1965 to 1967.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: That was the beginning of the whole Great Society liberal 22 trillion-dollar redistributive program.

person 1: Yeah, it sounds like the Kennedys treated Lyndon Johnson kind of like the Bidens treated Kamala Harris, handing off impossible things.

person 2: Worse.

person 1: Worse? You think it was worse?

person 2: Yeah.

I mean, you mean making her space czar and border czar?

person 1: Border czar when the Left has no border policy whatsoever.

person 2: Well, when there’s no border, they make her border czar, and then when they neuter the space program, they couldn’t even get a … They abandoned those guys up in space.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: Then you make her space czar, and she hires actors, little boy actors, to impress herself.

I don’t know how we … We’re very lucky. [Otto von] Bismarck said that only fools and drunks … He had a quote to the effect that he doesn’t understand how America gets out of its predicaments. Only fools and drunks could do that. And we always get into a crisis like Kamala Harris, and then we get out of it.

person 1: Yeah. The last thing, though. Kennedy’s campaign was famous for the Nixon-Kennedy debates. Did you watch those debates?

person 2: Yeah.

And the thing about them, there’s a theory, or it’s not really a theory because they took polls. The people who heard the debate on radio thought Nixon won. But Nixon had what they called a five o’clock shadow. He had black hair and white skin, and he had to shave three times a day. He was kind of a hunched-over guy. He looked like this, you know. Didn’t have much of a neck.

Kennedy actually looked kind of sickly, but he was not in great health. Kennedy had Addison’s disease, and he was yellow. He had a broken back and was very ill. He had suffered some venereal diseases. He was completely indiscreet. We know that he was having sexual relations with interns while he was president in the presidential bed. One staffer wrote about it.

He would’ve made Bill Clinton look like a rookie in terms of illicit sexual behavior.

But anyway, before the debate, he got his cortisone shot and his tan, and he looked great. Nixon looked like he had a five o’clock shadow and was hunched over.

If you listened on the radio, it was like, Formosa is a very complex question about the two islands, and we have a plan.

And then Kennedy would go …

But if you watched it on TV, Kennedy looked robust, even though he didn’t say much.

So now he’s in a period where people look back at it, especially on the left during “Me Too,” and ask, “Who was the most promiscuous, callous cad who was ever in the White House?” Probably one of the Kennedys, JFK.

Then you look at Teddy. Teddy didn’t do that legacy any good. He was a near alcoholic and a promiscuous cad himself.

So, I don’t know.

But I give Kennedy credit that [Harry] Truman and Kennedy, before Johnson, were more Cold War fighters. There was Adlai Stevenson, who was a radical leftist, but when you look at Kennedy and Truman, they hadn’t gone crazy yet.

person 1: He was the better man to have in that case? Is that what you’re saying?

If you had to have a Democrat …

person 2: Yeah. Nixon.

person 1: No, if you had to have a Democrat …

person 2: Oh, I would’ve voted for Nixon.

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: My grandfather was Swedish, my mother was a Democrat, and my father … I was like 7 years old, and my maternal grandfather liked Nixon because he said he was a great poker player. He was forced to vote for Kennedy by my parents, I think, because they were Democrats.

I was about 6 or 7 years old on my grandfather Frank’s birthday, and I said, “Hey, Grandpa Frank, who are you going to vote for, Nixon or Kennedy?”

My mom said, “Don’t ask him that. That’s rude.”

“Well, you know, I have something to say. I’m voting for Nixon. I’m a little worried that he’s not conservative enough, Victor. But he’s a very good poker player. He can play poker and cards, and he knows about the world. He’s not flashy. That’s my kind of guy.”

And my mom said, “Oh my God. Why’d you say that, Victor?”

“No. We were getting along fine.”

person 1: Yeah.

person 2: Then my mom said, “Frank, you’re going to vote for a Republican like Nixon? Tricky Dick?”

“Well, if he’s tricky, he knew things.”

I loved my grandfather. He was a great man.

Minnesota Is One State Among Many Pushing Gender Ideology on Its Students

 

College students at the University of Minnesota are faced daily with progressive gender policies that force behavior in conflict with personal conviction. These unconstitutional policies are not only a violation of free speech, but also come with the threat of university-imposed consequences if violated. But students of principle still remain and are pushing back against these insane campus rules.

One such policy is called the “Pronoun Policy.” It states, “University members and units are expected to use the names, gender identities, and pronouns specified to them by other University members” and “University members and units are also expected to use other gendered personal references, if any, that are consistent with the gender identities and pronouns specified by University members.”

This policy directly requires students and faculty members to refer to others in an ideologically loaded manner, even if it is against their personal convictions on sexuality. In contradiction with biological reality, the policy asks the students to adopt a certain set of values in practice, even if it is misaligned with not only their beliefs, but the factual truth. If they don’t adhere to the rules, students can be charged with violating the Board of Regents Policy: Student Conduct Code and/or the Administrative Policy: Discrimination, which could result in unspecified discipline. This information is found on the University of Minnesota’s website “Policy Library.” Various student testimonies from around the nation have also demonstrated harassment or disdain from professors and peers often accompanying their refusal to adhere to things like pronoun policies.

Unfortunately, this is not the only instance of publicly-funded universities forcing students and faculty to bow to progressive gender ideology. In 2023, student Daria Danley sued Montana State University (MSU), which charged her with “hate speech” and “discrimination.” It also gave her a “no-contact order” toward her sorority and recommended that it evict her from her sorority house. This was after she questioned Alpha Gamma Delta’s “insistence” that members identify themselves with preferred pronouns. A settlement was eventually reached in which MSU dropped the “no-contact order,” and Danley dropped the case. Fortunately, the national Alpha Gamma Delta reinstated her membership. The whole incident was, however, a gross violation of Danley’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech.

In 2018, philosophy professor Dr. Nicholas Meriwether filed a lawsuit against Shawnee State University Trustees. He had been accused of violating the university’s nondiscrimination policy and of creating a “hostile environment” by refusing to call a student by their preferred pronouns. However, he had offered to refer to the student by their last name. The university informed him that further refusal to use preferred pronouns could result in corrective actions, including suspension or termination. A federal judge initially dismissed the case, but it was eventually ruled in Meriwether’s favor by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. The university settled for $400,000 in damages and legal fees and guaranteed that Meriwether would be safe in the future from using any student’s preferred pronouns. Yet, the university publicly stated that they “adamantly deny that anyone at Shawnee State deprived Dr. Meriwether of his free speech rights or his rights to freely exercise his religion” (Shawnee State University).

Yet another example is theater professor Richard Bugg at Southern Utah University (SUU). In 2022, he filed a lawsuit against SUU because he was charged with violating university policy for not using gender-neutral pronouns for one of his students. Bugg was accused of discrimination and harassment based on gender identity. SUU’s punishment required Bugg to take a class about gender-neutral pronouns, forcing him to use students’ preferred pronouns, and the looming threat of possible termination. In the end, the case was dismissed, but he continued in his position at SUU.

I grew up in the Minnesota public school system until the 10th grade. My parents decided to pull me out because of the woke ideology being taught at school. I am so grateful for this decision. I distinctly remember one moment when I realized progressive ideology was taking over. I was given a vocabulary test in my 9th-grade English class. Most of the test seemed normal, until I got to a question that asked me something along the lines of “President Trump makes women feel ____ when he looks ______ at them.” I was shocked, stunned, and unsure of how to answer. This was a turning point for me and should sound the alarm to all parents who want to protect their children!

The University of Minnesota is a government-sponsored institution, and its “Pronoun Policy” is in direct violation of the First Amendment. One current student said she “believe[s] freedom of speech is essential, but it can sometimes be manipulated to portray conservative viewpoints as inferior, particularly on college campuses.” Another student said that, “[a]s someone who has lived in the South my entire life, coming to freshman orientation and being told I had to introduce myself using pronouns was definitely a shock. And after reading the University of Minnesota’s pronoun policies, as a student, that is definitely not something I am proud to represent. Because of freedom of speech from the First Amendment, I have the right to call my peers by the gender pronouns that God created them to be, as well as remain silent when asked about my own pronouns.”

American universities have long been known to be indoctrination factories for young adults. This pattern of various University administrations imposing progressive rhetoric and labels on students and faculty is not only unconstitutional but also utterly disturbing. Upon celebrating the 250th birthday of our great nation, we must fight to preserve moral clarity and common sense not only in our educational institutions, but in the very fabric of our society. The next generation needs to be equipped and prepared to preserve truth and order so America can continue to flourish, not be destroyed by progressive ideologies claiming freedom. If our freedom of speech is taken away, as shown at the University of Minnesota, many other rights are sure to follow.