From Monroe to Clinton, How the American Presidency Changed

person 1: Your presidents today are, as you’ve been speaking of, Bill Clinton and then also [James] Monroe, who followed on [James] Madison’s work and is probably most famous for the Monroe Doctrine.  

person 2: Yes. James Monroe was our fifth president. [George] Washington, [John] Adams, [Thomas] Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and he was … Just think of it. 

He was, after Washington and Jefferson and Madison, he was the fourth president from Virginia, and that was at that time called the Virginia Dynasty. I think there would be four more. I don’t know if I remember them all, but there was [John] Tyler and Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson. I’m sure Woodrow Wilson was a Virginian. 

He was a Southerner, abject racist, by the way, not that that’s always to be equated with Southerners. It’s not.

But [Monroe’s] known now for a couple of things. Liberia, the capital is Monrovia. Remember that? He was a big advocate of reverse colonization as a solution to the slavery problem, and during his administration, it didn’t work out too well because slaves, African slaves had been there for 200 years. So they were no more African than white people were. 

You know what I mean? So, it didn’t work out too well. But he also had seen this during Madison and his presidency, they had closer ties with …  

After the War of 1812, they kinda shifted, and they normalized their relationship with Britain, number one, and they had seen what the French Revolution had done and Napoleon that followed had done to Europe. 

And they were very skeptical of the Spanish Empire. So, there was a new idea that the United States would follow Washington, would not get involved with foreign powers. But they had established a much better relationship with Britain. They were going back to being pro-British again. And the result of that was they were very skeptical of the Spanish. 

And so, under Monroe, they annexed Florida. And he and Madison were really instrumental in carrying out the, not the spirit of the Louisiana Purchase, but the actual implementation of it.  

So, this was a period where they doubled the size of the United States, and he was … But one of the things he did not want were imperial European powers intervening in the Western Hemisphere. 

That was largely Spain, because the Spanish Empire had a very different attitude about colonization. It was not open to Europeans. It was not open to Protestants. You had to get permission of the Spanish Crown, and you had to get the permission of the Spanish Crown and its Catholic manifestation. 

And he was worried that Spain was playing too great a role and would get too powerful right on our border with Mexico.  

person 1:  I think that was the period, the 1820s, when the Spanish Empire was falling all over Latin America. Like, there were revolutions,  

person 2: It was. It was starting. But the impetus was that he felt that the imperial … 

All the Founders have thought that the imperial tradition of the French in Canada, the Spanish and the British in Canada, the British in America, the Spanish south of the border was nefarious, toxic. So, it was the duty of the United States to get them out. And get them out in the sense to get the French out and buy their land off and get the Spanish out of the United States and buy Florida or settle it. 

And by extension, they did not want Spain to then start dictating to these national liberationist fronts. They really did believe that Bolívar and San Martín, all these people were gonna create United Stateses.

They weren’t. They weren’t gonna last is what I’m saying. They had a very different origin and maturity than we did. 

The Spanish crown was very different than the British crown. They weren’t the same. There was no Spanish enlightenment like there had been a British and Scottish enlightenment.  

He’s known now for the Monroe Doctrine, which in 2013 [John] Kerry said that he had renounced. It was no g- But now it’s sort of been reinvigorated. 

I think most people consider him a very good president, better than average. But he’s also kind of the end of a president either selecting his former opponent as secretary of state or vice president, or there’s not a big difference in the party between the Whigs, and the Federalists party was dying at this time, and the Republican Party, the people for the Republic, I should say, it’s different than the later Republican Party. 

They were gaining ground, but I think they call it the era of good feelings or the era of good relations. 

It was ending. So you’re gonna get a modern antithetical two-party system of really angry, and it’s gonna be characterized by we want a strong federal government and we want internal improvements, and we want taxation and tariffs versus a Jeffersonian, we wanna be left alone and have states’ rights, et cetera. 

So, anyway, the idea of an aristocracy has only got one more president left, John Quincy Adam, and then that’s over with. The idea that you’re gonna come from New England or Tidewater, Virginia, it’s gonna be populism. You know, Zachary Taylor and James Polk and Andrew Jackson.  

As far as Bill Clinton goes, elected in ’92, he never got over 50% of the vote. 

I don’t think he ever did. I think he got 41 or 42% in ’92, and he got 49.6 or something in ’96. That was largely because of Ross Perot. Ross Perot, for what all the Democrats wanna say, he took more votes away from George Bush than he did from Bill Clinton, and he was responsible, and he knew that. He said that he wanted to help the Democrats. 

He said they’d become normal again under Clinton. He was a leftist, and the Republicans, when they ran against him, tried to say that when he was a student at Oxford, you remember that he … I like that new word. He was adjacent to the communist other students, and they said that he was smoking marijuana. That was when smoking marijuana was disqualifying, and he said he did smoke, but he never inhaled. 

And that was the beginning of, “I never had sex with that woman,” because the type of sex he had with the woman he didn’t say qualifies with traditional notions of sex.  

person 1: What was that thing where they kept saying he said, “Well, that depends upon what is is”? 

person 2: Yes, he was being asked by the special prosecutor, and he said it depends on the definition of is, meaning are you, basically, are you having sex? 

Did you have sex? And it was sort of like, “Now? Well, no, I’m not.” You know what I mean? 

person 1: Was the special prosecutor Fitzpatrick? Was that the one?  

person 2: No, he was the one that went after Scooter Libby, as I remember. Oh, that’s right. That’s right. It was Kenneth Starr. Ken Starr. I met him and I knew him a little bit. 

He was a very fine person. He was dean of the Pepperdine Law School, and, and he got a really bad … 
 
You can chalk that up to James Carville. He got on TV and he just character assassinated him. “And there, that special prosecutor, he’s a cigarette lawyer. He’s a cigarette lawyer. That’s what he is. He just is sending cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes.” 

That’s what he did. I met James Carville once when I was speaking  on a Hillsdale cruise. He was incidentally on the same boat, and he came up to me, and he tried to tell me that the T-34 was the best tank in World War II. I see you’re talking on World War II. The Sherman was …  

And I said, “That’s just so stereotypical, James. Do you have any idea of maintenance and hours of maintenance to make it, you know … ” The T-34 had no radios in it. It stored its shells verydangerously at the front of the compartment and they could blow up. 

It was a very good tank, but it was basically based on a Christie American chassis. And the Sherman, for all of its defects, it was a medium tank. It was not intended for …  

Oh, I was explaining on, “No, no, the Sherman’s no good. It’s no good.” Very dogmatic guy.  

Not to mention that he didn’t … He and Doug Schoen and Mark Penn made sure that Clinton and Dick Morris got the white working class. And they all staged that Sister Souljah moment where they went to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and they deliberately said to her, and she said, “Why do we Black people kill each other? 

Why don’t we just go for a change and kill white people in their neighborhoods?”  

And he said, “You should be ashamed of you should be ashamed of yourself.” And that that took a lot of independence. They said, “Wow, he’s not that left-wing after all.” He’s known really for a couple of things. 

Whatever you can say about him, in 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, he had a balanced budget. He had a surplus. He was paying down the debt. Now, conservatives will tell you it was because Newt Gingrich forced him to cut, cut, cut.  He did, but he also gave in to an increase in the income tax. That was the big grand deal. 

And it worked. And they had a balanced budget. Had we continued on that we would have no national debt now. We would have paid it off. We wouldn’t be thirty-one trillion in debt.  

So you gotta give him credit for that.  

And I went back not too long ago, I wrote about in “The Dying Citizen,” but if you look at the charter of the ’92 Democratic Convention and the ’96 Democratic, and I think that was written by Mark Penn, maybe people listening will correct me, and Doug Schoen, with input from some other people. 

It’s a Republican … I mean, it says, “We want closed borders. We want legal-only immigration. We want juvenile murderers and violent criminals charged as adults. We want everybody to pay their fair share. We want to make sure people are not cheating on their income taxes. And we are for a strong defense.” 

And you know, he bombed—It was kind of a misadventure—but he bombed [Slobodan] Milosevic and got the Serbs out of Kosovo, seventy-seven days, without congressional authority, of course. 
 
Where he was faulted, he had numerous opportunities to stop, al-Qaeda and [Osama] bin Laden, and he passed up on them. 

He could have stopped it. 

The ‘Performance Art Joke’ at the Heart of the Democratic Socialist Movement

 

person 1: Everyone should notice, if you’re watching this on YouTube or Rumble, that over Victor’s right shoulder are the galleys of his forthcoming book “The Counterrevolution: The Fall and Rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA Movement,” which will be out on Sept. 8. You can go to Amazon and preorder it now. 

I always like the preorder. You order it and it’s pre-publication, but—and it’s the movement.  

person 2: [Donald Trump]‘s not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary, Jack. He’s trying to upend the progressive project. The progressive revolution.  

person 1: Well, it’s a—  

person 2: He’s a Thermidor trying to stop the Jacobins.  

person 1: We won’t name names here, but to me, this has been the obvious fight, the size, the scope of the Left, the viciousness of it, the murderousness of it. And many on the right have been involved in circular firing squads too often, while the main enemy is, of course, the Left. But not to get off track. 

Go ahead, Victor. 

person 2: No, you’re right. The thesis of this new book is that, for all of the criticisms of his methodology and style, language, tweeting, I can’t think of another Republican president—maybe you can—who walled the border, nor … And he will finish the wall at the current pace, nor took on the Iranian nuclear bomb project, nor took on the trans issue, nor took on DEI, nor took on the, I guess you would call it, sanctuary cities project. 

I mean, it’s a real counterrevolutionary. I just talked today, Jack, with some House staffers about the Smithsonian. They’re going to be calling in the head of the Smithsonian. When I say they, I mean the Republican House leadership. 

person 1: Mm-hmm. 

And, yeah, people want to find out more about that, Victor. 

On the White House website, there is a link to the full, it’s about a 160-page report on the Smithsonian. 

person 2: I looked at part of it, and, I mean, these people want to rewrite American history as if it was completely evil and there was no self-critique, there was no open discussion, there was no back-and-forth, which there always was. 

There were no 700,000 people who died in a war over slavery. There was no women’s movement. There’s no reason they can explain why 12 million people broke through the border to get here from mostly third-world countries if it was so white and so evil. They can’t explain that.  

They can’t explain why the United States is the only really long-lasting democracy, why it lasted so long. 

They can’t explain anything. Why everybody wants to come here. We saw that with the World Cup.  

And then we had Hasan Piker yesterday addressing democratic socialists in a Mao Zedong suit, and he was listing all of the evils of the United States, and you want to say, “Wait, Mr. Piker. You don’t know anything about this country. You may have been born here, but you spend a lot of your time in Turkey in a very anti-American climate. But you’re wearing a suit that is a replica of the greatest mass murderer in not U.S., not European, in all of history.  

“Any historical framework you want to use, he killed 70 million people, and you’re trying to glorify him by emulation?” 

It makes no sense at all. What are you doing? And he had them all captivated, the audience. And then he went down off the podium, Jack, and with his Mao suit, and then he went into his Porsche Targa, you know, and maybe he, I don’t know, maybe he saw Ro Khanna’s wife coming by in her Range Rover. I don’t know. 

But these people are ridiculous. They’re not just evil, but they’re ridiculous. They’re absolutely absurd. These people enjoy every benefit, every fringe, every indulgence, every appetite of capitalism, and then they start this faculty lounge berating America, berating its economy while they emulate and brag about mass murderers. 

[California Gov.] Gavin Newsom was—we said the other day, you know, capitalism doesn’t work. It worked for you, Gavin. You got a $9 million home. 

person 1: Right. Yeah.  

person 2: Why don’t you open it up to the dispossessed who are the victims of capitalism? You can’t. And your businesses, I guess they’re called PlumpJack.  

To whom do they appeal? They appeal to capitalists of the upper class who can afford your fine wines and cheeses and your ambiance. And then you mock it? It’s all performance art. It’s a joke. It really is, these democratic socialists. 

person 1: I think the revolution is more here than we think it is, Victor. Before we get to Iran and Kuwait, which we want to talk about, since you raised it, Daniel Greenfield has this article. 

It’s titled “25 Million Communists in America.” And let me just read a chunk here. “Despite the countless millions dead at the hands of communist regimes, a significant portion of the electorate has a positive view of communism as a political movement. A recent Cato poll shows that more members of Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, have a positive view of communism than those who have a negative view, with around a third splitting each way. 

“Some of this can be attributed to social media propaganda, the educational system, and popular culture, and helps explain the young activists flocking to the DSA. Forty-three percent of students rate communism favorably and only 29 rate it unfavorably, making it clear that the higher education system isn’t just broken, it’s actively recruiting the next generation into extremism, direct domestic terrorism, and totalitarian ideologies, etc.” 

Twenty-five million is not a small number.  

person 2: I will say that the white population in the United States is controversial because of mixed marriages and everything, but it’s estimated to be somewhere between 68% and 70%. The DSA’s membership list shows that 85% of the DSA members are white. 

So, what we’re talking about is not the upper-middle class. What we’re talking about is not a bunch of people in rural Texas or the Ozarks or Appalachia or here near Kings or Tulare County in the Central Valley of California. This is not a bottoms-up revolt of the masses over the inequities of capitalism. 

This is a movement fueled by the educated, the mostly white, and the rest of the 15%, whose public faces are mostly immigrants and mostly from failed states, as we said earlier.  

And it’s a frustration that they cannot have the consumer lifestyle and their appetites cannot be satisfied with the people they rub shoulders with every day in these environments in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, etc., Austin. 

That’s what it’s about. And we’ll see if they win a statewide election as socialists. I’m not saying they can’t win if they do the waxen effigy Joe Biden, good old Joe Biden from Scranton. And maybe they can get their rogues’ gallery. They can get good old Graham Platner from Maine, the hardworking oysterman. 

They can get Tim Walz from Minnesota, the roly-poly change-my-own-oil-and-I’ll-figure-out-how-to-load-my-shotgun-in-a-year-from-now guy. And maybe James Talarico, the Bible-thumping evangelical, evangelicus from the lower white middle class. 

You can see that effort to find the elusive unicorn white man of the middle, of the working class, shows you that the agenda does not appeal to anybody. 

President Trump Sparked the Counterrevolution to End the Destruction of America

 

I’d like to speak today about revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Whether we realize it or not, we’ve been in a progressive revolutionary cycle for about 50 years.

And by that I mean there has been the effort of most of the Democratic Party, and now the radical elements to accelerate that efforts as emblemized by the democratic socialists to take control of government, expand it, redistribute income so that many people in blue states especially are paying over 10% of their income, in addition to 38% of their federal tax or two or three percent in Obamacare tax and other add-ons.

And it’s not very difficult to pay 50% of your income or more for the taxpayer who’s salaried without much write-offs. And the welfare state, which has distributed over twenty trillion dollars since this started under the Great Society, is getting bigger and bigger, at least until Donald Trump.

And this progressive revolution doesn’t believe in borders. It has let in—we have now 53 million people that were not born in the United States, and in California, it’s over a quarter of the population. It’s all-time high percentage-wise, 16% foreign-born.

They don’t have confidence that you, the people, will buy into the progressive project. And so, they want to import a demographic that is poor and needy on the idea that they will be constituents that will trade their votes for subsidies.

And we saw that with the Somali community in Minnesota, and we’ve seen it with other communities here in California.

And so, the progressive project has given us a real revolution. We never imagined that there were going to be more than two genders or sexes. We never imagined that they would try to normalize biological men taking over women’s sports or dressing among young teenage girls. We never imagined that.

We never imagined that prosecutors would let out career felons who had committed violent acts the same day they were arrested. We didn’t know we were gonna empty the prisons because we felt that punishment, penal punishment was too mean.

We never really felt that our only real democratic country and ally in the Middle East, Israel, we would try to disassociate ourselves, and we would try to romanticize terrorists like Hamas.

But what I’m getting at, this was the progressive project. It was anti-American, it was anti-Western, and it glorified other modes of civilization, so to speak: socialism, communism, anarchism. And it was very critical of the very society who had enriched most Americans.

I say most—the middle class of America is the largest middle class in the world and the most affluent, and our poor are better off than most middle class and upper middle class in other places.

It’s important to remember that there has not been a counter-revolution. Ronald Reagan was the first and really last Republican president that had an economic counterrevolution. It was quite successful. He lowered the tax rate. He deregulated the economy, and by 1983-84, he was growing the economy at 7% GDP growth.

And then, of course, that was watered down in subsequent years. But the two Bushes, candidates like John McCain, Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, their agenda was to slow down the revolution, but not to try to overturn it.

What do I mean by slow down? Kind of advise Hollywood that they didn’t have to be so anti-American and have movies that talked about race, class, and gender ad nauseam. Try to tell professional sports not to be weaponized.

Try to tell K-12, calm it down a little bit. We don’t need sex education in the first grade, and there’s nothing wrong with a teacher occasionally giving a prayer that she inadvertently forgot was illegal.

Calm down. You don’t need to send the FBI to school board meetings, that kind of thing. We don’t need to take the knee at sports and ridicule “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

So, this revolution had infiltrated K-12, the corporate boardroom, the universities especially, the media, the foundations, and popular culture. But the Republican and conservative movement had just tried to slow it down.

And then came Donald Trump.

He was not—he’s surely not a revolutionary. We were in the middle of a revolution, but he was not a trimmer either. He was a true counterrevolutionary.

The first term, he was not familiar with Washington. He made appointments with people who did not agree with him—not just they did not agree with his methodology, but they didn’t agree with his counter-revolutionary agenda.

But it was still in places working. And what was the result? The result was COVID-19 and the COVID-19 lockdown, and it was aborted.

The second time he came around, he tried to finish the counterrevolution. So he pretty much demolished the subsidies for green energy and re-emphasized oil and gas production, and we became the greatest producer of oil and gas in the history of civilization.

He sort of said, “We’re not going to regulate AI and robotics, cryptocurrency, genetic engineering, drone. We’re not gonna legislate them out of business. We’re not gonna have antitrust and complete investigations of all these people. We’re gonna promote it. We’re going to promote these new innovations and new technologies.”

And lo and behold, we’re ahead of the Chinese in almost all of them now.

He didn’t just say, “I am worried about the military. It may be that DEI has discouraged a particular demographic that over generation after generation has provided the largest percentage of our combat units, namely white males.”

He did away with DEI. And what was the result? All of a sudden, we have met all of our recruitment figures.

He didn’t just say, “Well, the border’s been open. I know that we’ve let in 10 million people a year over four years. I know that 10,000 were coming a day under Biden. I understand that, so maybe I’ll say no more catch and release. Or maybe you have to apply for refugee status in, say, Mexico.”

No, no.

He said, “I’m going to finish the wall. I’m not gonna let anybody stop me. This time there’s going to be a wall, and we are going to deport people. We’re gonna deport a million people in my first year, and we’re gonna make sure a million others self-deport, and we’re gonna go after 500,000 with criminal records.”

He didn’t just say, “I am very worried about Latin America.

“Under [Barack] Obama and under [Joe] Biden, we saw a wave of left-wing governments, and the Panama Canal is in danger. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves really in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world, and they are exporting convicts and drugs to the United States.”

He didn’t just say that.

He went down there and basically threatened Panama that we would take over the canal unless they honored our Panama Canal treaty and expelled the Chinese from trying to control the entry and exits of the canal.

He said to [Nicolas] Maduro, “You better stop because you’re exporting terror and communism and bullying your neighbors.”

He didn’t, and he extradited him and ended that threat.

And now as we look at Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, I could go on, they’re mostly center right.

So, he staged a strong counterrevolution by reinforcing the Monroe Doctrine that had been rejected by the Left, and he made South America and Central America now a free market and, for the most part, a society that’s pro-American, with some notable exceptions.

For example, in Nicaragua, a beleaguered Daniel Ortega and a beleaguered Castroite government in Cuba that are both now for the first time in years isolated.

In addition to that, he made our allies stronger. He used unorthodox methods. He was the proverbial gunslinger who came in to help the townspeople who were ossified and couldn’t deal with the robber barons or the cattle barons or the outlaws, and then he cleaned up the town, and then they got tired of him because of his methodology and rhetoric.

But nonetheless, he said to our allies, “We’re not gonna be in NATO unless you’re real NATO members. You’re not NATO members. You’re not arming yourself. You’re not abiding by your commitments.”

Same held true to Canada. And lo and behold, now we have much stronger allies, and the alliance is stronger than ever.

What am I getting at? Donald Trump is not a revolutionary. He’s a counterrevolutionary.

And what is he trying to do? He’s trying to undo the entire half-century progressive project within four years. That’s an impossible task. And yet he’s trying to do it.

He’s the first authentic counterrevolutionary since Andrew Jackson.

Democratic Socialists Think America Is Somehow Worse Than Mass Murderer Mao Zedong

 

We’re hearing more and more from the Democratic Socialists of America about all of the sins of America and very little of the good things we’ve done to ourselves and to the world at large on our 250th birthday. 

What is it, the nature of this DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, and the diversity, equity, inclusion criticism that we were racist, sexist, nativist, cruel, ruthless, etc., etc.  

But my question is, compared to what? 

Mao Zedong? He killed 70 million people. He was the greatest mass murderer in history, and that government is still communist in an unbroken chain from [Chinese leader] Xi [Jinping] all the way back to Mao. Do we ever talk about that or the million people who are in concentration camps in China? 

Compared to historically to the Aztecs? We’re told the Aztecs were great people. They had an empire, but they crushed over a million people to create their empire. Some years, they sacrificed up to 10,000, maybe 15,000 a year of conquered tribes of fellow Indigenous people. 

Do we remember Shaka Zulu, the 19th-century creator of the Zulu nation? He was responsible for a genocide in crushing his enemies that probably cost over a million lives. 

Do we really think that the Native Americans were living in paradise until Europeans came? The story of Native Americans was conquest, enslavement, butchery of rival tribes. 

So, what is going on? 

We have a tradition in the West of self-criticism. That’s what makes us different. Rationalism, self-criticism, improvement. But when that goes to an extreme, it ventures from self-criticism and self-reflection to nihilism, and it’s quite destructive. 

So, let’s just take a look at where the United States is compared to the rest. 

Look at immigration. Why do a million people, or 2 million people, 10,000 a day under Joe Biden, from very poor countries, most of them from what we would call the former Third World that were victims of socialism, why do they risk their lives coming here every year? 

Why do all these critics of the United States … [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], why did her parents want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Ilhan Omar’s father want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Rashida Tlaib’s father want to come here? Why did [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani’s parents want to come? Was it so bad? 

Can’t they ever acknowledge that they came here because they had greater security, they had greater freedom, they had greater economic opportunity? And if they had criticisms, it was never enough that they wanted to go back to the places that they praised, but only from a distance and in the abstract. 

The truth is that the poor in the United States are better off than most of the middle classes in every other country. We saw that in the World Cup when middle- and upper-middle-class Europeans came over, and unlike … to watch the games, and unlike most tourists, they didn’t just stick on the coasts. They went to places in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, the South, and the Midwest. 

And they found two things. One, Americans were amazingly friendly and open, upbeat, not downers and drab, and everything’s terrible, which they expected from their experiences in Europe. 

And more importantly, they were affluent. They had big homes. They had air conditioning. the poor had appurtenances. Everybody has a cell phone. Nobody worries about the cost, apparently. 

There’s also then the hypocrisy of a lot of our critics. And let me just give you an example of a few of them. 

Hasan Piker is a child of very, very wealthy Turkish immigrants that became U.S. citizens. He grew up for much of his life in Turkey. He gave a talk the other day in a Mao suit to Democratic Socialists of America. Think about that. He put on the uniform, so to speak, of the greatest mass murderer in history, and then he denounced capitalism. 

But he didn’t denounce capitalism in his own life because his parents are multimillionaires. He is a multimillionaire, and he drives a, what? $120,000 Porsche. Isn’t that a luxury of the bourgeoisie? 

And then there’s Zohran Mamdani, of course. His family, as I pointed out numerous times, was the elite of the elite of the elite in Uganda, a community of expatriates, Indians, from India that control 60% of the wealth, and they’re only 1% of the population. 

And he grew up in privilege here. He had a very nice home. He has a family estate on Lake Victoria, of all places. 

Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, he always is pointing out the evils of Republicans, and as he looks at the drift of the Democratic Party, he puts his finger in the wind, and he says socialism is the answer. Ro Khanna does. 

But he’s a multimillionaire. His father-in-law is one of the wealthiest members of the Indian American community, probably worth $500 or $600 million. His own children have been deeded golf courses. His wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover, and he’s lecturing us about our shortfalls? 

And then, of course, we come to [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom. He wants to get in on the socialist craze, so he said the other day, as is his wont, moving his arms around and being very slick and glib, that capitalism fails. It didn’t work. 

It worked for you, Gavin. You have a $9 million home. You are the, basically, the quote-unquote, “protégé” of the Gordon Getty oil for- fortune, who backed all of your business opportunities. 

Graham Platner, the now-disgraced madman who thought he was going to be senator with a Nazi tattoo. He criticized capitalism. He said that, you know, he was drifting towards socialism, very critical of America. 

But he really wasn’t a small-business person. He was a construct. His mother and father, who were very wealthy, one owned an upscale restaurant, the other was a well-known, often corporate real estate lawyer. They set him up in business, and they were his only client, and they allowed him to have land to use. 

So, what I’m getting at is most of this criticism of America is not coming from the so-called poor. It’s not coming from the lower middle classes. It’s coming from elites in urban enclaves who have done very well with capitalism, and they feel that by mouthing these socialist and communist platitudes, it’s a way to get power within the Democratic Party first, and then within the United States second. 

And remember one thing, this is not new. Most of the violent socialist communist movements in history, whether we look at the anarchist of the late 19th century, or whether we look at the Bolsheviks of 1905 all the way up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, or we look at the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, especially the Reign of Terror, 1792 and 1793, when a bunch of very wealthy, this should sound familiar, socialists hijacked the French Revolution and turned it into a Stalinist-like murder spree. 

They all had one thing in common. They were very, very wealthy, and they hated the very system that had enriched them, and they wanted to try out a whole series of nihilist projects on whom? On the middle class and the poor, with the proviso that none of their ideology would ever apply to themselves. 

Changing Voting Laws Only Benefits the Left

 

person 1 Donald Trump gives a speech to the nation on the 2020 election and the involvement of our intelligence agencies and other bad actors and mayhem. Many of the networks did not carry it, disparaged it in advance, had to fact-check it, etc.

What’s your take on what Donald Trump said and your take on the spin or the intransigence of these liberal media—excuse me, leftist media elites?

person 2: Well, I don’t think it’s—I mean, we’ve got so many things right now with the budget and the SAVE Act and Iran. We’ve got great economic news on inflation. GDP is pretty good. I’m still worried about the deficit, but that’s another topic.

I don’t know. When you address the nation, maybe it would have been on Iran, or maybe it would have been on the good news from the economy.

But that election—I understand he wants to remind people so that they don’t do it the next time. But I think the whole MAGA emphasis on actual Election Day cheating—and now we hear from Markwayne Mullin that there are 1 million unregistered voters who got ballots.

person 1: He says there are 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four Democrat-run states.

person 2: Yes, four states. One million voters. That could have changed any of the swing states. They were illegal, and they knew it.

But the issue, I think, he should say is, “I’m not going to adjudicate 2020 because, by the time the ballots were cast, the system had been altered under the pretense of COVID.”

And now, what do I mean by that?

Then he could just go through the items that Molly Ball, in her triumphalist article—she’s a woman of the Left—bragged about. They changed the voting laws by going through lawsuits to district court judges and, in blue states, bypassing the legislatures.

What had traditionally been 30% absentee ballots was renamed and rebranded as mail-in ballots, and that became almost 70% nationwide.

Under the guise of COVID, they brought in rules that said you could register to vote without an ID or a driver’s license. They would give you an ID if you had—you could use a credit card, you could use almost anything. But if you didn’t have anything, they would give you a number, and then you could vote that same day. You could ballot harvest.

That changed, radically, the entire American electoral system in one direction—for the Left.

That’s what I wish he would concentrate on. I don’t know if it was legal or illegal, but the way they did it altered the way we voted.

If you look at population increases, there’s no way in the world that you would get so many people voting. More people voted in 2020 than in 2024. It was just outstanding. It was a sudden rise in voters.

We know now that Mark Zuckerberg spent $417 million to appropriate the work of election registrars in key swing states.

By that I mean he basically gave them all this money to put drop boxes all over their states that couldn’t really be accounted for, and money to sue to extend the acceptance of mail-in ballots—as here in California—for seven to 10 days, depending on the particular state, after Election Day.

So, it really ruined the system. It really did.

And we know it because Sen. [Elissa] Slotkin let the cat out of the bag when she was commenting on the SAVE Act. She said, you know, everybody’s going to have an ID. Everybody’s going to have to be preregistered. You still have a window where you can vote early if you wish. You can mail in a ballot, but it’ll be an absentee ballot. You’ll need an excuse like we used to.

Primarily, you’re going to be expected to show up at the polls, show an ID, and your name will be crossed off a list of previously registered voters. If you’re not registered that day, you’re not going to vote. If you don’t show up that day, you’re not going to vote.

And when she said, “Well, we can’t win elections like that”—that’s basically what she said. “We can’t … ”

Of course, she was right. They can’t.

So, that was the biggest piece of legislation, I think, that the Senate is dealing with. They’ve only got, what, 20 days before recess?

person 1: Hardly any time.

person 2: I don’t know why they’re not doing something about it. I know there are holdouts. Why don’t they go to Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski or Rand Paul—whoever it is. I don’t think he’s with the opposition on this one. Just say to them, “What do you object to, and how can we work to get your votes and get this through?”

Yeah. And, you know, JD [Vance]—he is the head of the Senate.

person 1: He’s president of the Senate.

person 2: Yeah, he’s president of the Senate, and he breaks tie votes.

I think Kim Strassel wrote a pretty tough article about him. I know both JD and Kim, and I like them both. But she had a point. Time is running out, and you’ve really got to galvanize the senators.

They’re not that close. Trump is a different type of politician. You want the president of the Senate—your guy—to go camp out in the Senate and count votes every single day, then find out how many you need and what they want.

You don’t want to go on Joe Rogan, or something, pushing your book while you’re vice president at this particular time, when you have a recess coming up.

My point is, if I were vice president and I were to write a book, I would have timed the publication date to coincide with the August recess. Then I would’ve spent every single moment—20 hours a day—on that Senate floor and on the phone making sure you got this passed.

Otherwise, it looks like a complete disorganized mess.

person 1: Yeah. Kim’s Wall Street Journal op-ed begins: “Republicans were eagerly awaiting their Tuesday meeting with Vice President JD Vance, hoping he’d break Congress’s gridlock. They instead were notified of a scheduling conflict as Air Force Two winged to Texas.”

That’s where he went for the Joe Rogan Experience, where he bashed the Senate for its, quote, “procedural bull—-.”

And yes, he’s promoting a book.

Another tough article, along the same lines—and I think even stronger—came from Lee Smith in The Tablet. He compared Vance to Barack Obama. He also pointed out that Vance has now written a second memoir before even turning 45.

Very tough stuff, I think.

So, how much of it is deserved? I don’t know, Victor.

person 2: I don’t know either. But I do know this: Right now, we’re in a fighting mode in the Middle East. Israel is giving us targeting information, Iran is attacking us, and the Gulf States are not doing anything.

It doesn’t seem wise to say that Israel can’t kill its way out of its problem.

As soon as Trump turned his attention to the Lebanese government and said, “Hezbollah is the reason why Israel is there. So if you want Israel out of Lebanon, you have to work with us. Now that we’ve defanged Iran and they don’t have any money, now is the time. You’ll never have a better opportunity to get Hezbollah out.”

Israel said, “If you don’t send missiles into us, we will withdraw.”

So, given everything I just said, I don’t know why you’d say that our only ally can’t kill its way out of its problem. That’s what I don’t understand.

On Oct. 7, there were 5,000 people. They were not just Hamas. They were members of all those Palestinian radical terrorist groups that sent volunteers. There were also tag-along people who just wanted to go kill, rape, and torture Jews, and they all went in there.

Take away that attack, and we wouldn’t be where we are now. It’s very simple.

I don’t see why people can’t see that.

Instead, you wait three weeks. You don’t go into Gaza. You say to them, “Give us back the hostages. Give us the people who committed the murders.” They don’t do it.