Was George W. Bush Treated Unfairly?

 person 1: If you look at George W. Bush, people—his reputation has gone up a little bit because he broke with [Donald] Trump, the next Republican. I’m not sure he voted for Trump, and he made his peace with [Barack] Obama.

There were three things that people fault Bush for. I’m not sure he was responsible. No. 1 was the Iraq War. No. 2 was the Afghan War. No. 3 was the 2008 financial meltdown. I think he was the most conservative Republican president that we have had since forever.

He was much more conservative than his father, George H.W. Bush. He tried to do a lot of things. I think part of the problem was they thought they could deal with the Democrats. So, they did things like prescription-drug entitlement and things in education that didn’t work out. But they thought that the Left would appreciate that magnanimity, and they interpreted that as weakness.

So, when you look at Iraq, on the plus side of the ledger, after 9/11, we were told that they were going to blow up airliners, 10 or 11 of them, in the Philippines. We uncovered a lot of al-Qaeda plots, and there were a lot of foiled efforts. And for all the false WMD narratives about Saddam [Hussein], we really never knew what happened to the WMDs.

We knew he had them, and they might have gone to Syria because we know they were used later by the Assad government in Syria. But that hurt him when Colin Powell went before the United Nations and said, “This is WMD, and they’re going to do this and this and this.”

But that being said, Iraq never quite degenerated like Afghanistan.

So, today they actually are working with the United States to expel Iranian influencers. And they do have elections. And we have Americans still there advising the Iraqi government.

Was it worth all those deaths and mayhem and casualties? I don’t know. We’ll see, but I don’t think it was. I supported the war, and I’m someone who supported it to the end.

The only thing that was very bad for Bush is the people who really had called for that war was the Committee for the New American Century. That was Bill Kristol, Fareed Zakaria, Robert Kagan bipartisan effort. And almost all of those people turned on the war, not so much as Richard Perle did or David Frum— all of those neocons did.

And then, you know, as Matthew Ridgway said, “The only worse thing than a bad war is losing it.” So Bush was orphaned, is what I’m saying. There were a lot of conservative scholars, neocons, that said, “You’ve got to go and deal with this, and then if you knock him out and you put a consensual government, it will spread like wildfire.”

That didn’t happen. It did corral Iran for a few years. And then the Afghanistan thing—it was a brilliant campaign. We removed the Taliban in eight weeks. We had a government there, the Karzai government. Everything was going well, and then we diverted a lot of resources to Iraq.

But the problem was everybody said the Afghan war was the good war because it was stable and the Taliban were in hiding and regrouping, and Iraq was the bad war. Why didn’t we just get a Karzai? Why didn’t we just do it like Afghanistan?

Well, the problem was Afghanistan was always the problem. It was landlocked. It had no ports. It was in a terrible neighborhood. The terrain was terrible. The weather was terrible. The Taliban were completely fanatic. They were being supported all around their borders.

We had to deal with the Chinese, with the Russians, with the Pakistanis. Iraq was flat. It was arid. The weather was clear. We had access to a port, and the Iraqi people were somewhat industrialized and educated compared to Afghanistan.

So, once people kept saying that Afghanistan was a good war, but when Obama just pulled all the troops out of Iraq, Iraq had a bumpy period. It was stable.

When Obama took office, there were fewer Americans dying in Iraq each week than the accident rate. It was stable.

And then he pulled out and he said, don’t worry, ISIS are JVs. And the ISIS people took over. Then we came back in under Trump and bombed the blank out of them.

And so, Iraq is a work in progress, but it’s better than under Saddam Hussein. But I don’t know if it was worth the cost in American lives.

I think Americans feel that not one American is worth what—when you see the stuff that’s going on in the Middle East and the idea that we’re going to go over there and try to change their minds, I don’t think so.

It’s more worrisome that they’re coming over here and trying to change our minds.

And then very quickly, the financial—that was a Democratic project in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

person 2: You mean the 2008 financial crash?

person 1: Yes. That was the idea that we needed to get homeownership up over 60%.

And we had these subprime loans to people who were not qualified. And then even the interest sometimes was adjusted because they were bad risks, so they couldn’t make the interest payments anyway. It was all speculating on people on Wall Street.

Barney Frank was right at the middle of that. He was in the House Banking Committee, and he was basically calling people racist who were opposing these reckless loans and the speculation.

So, all these banks were making these loans, and then they were saying they were guaranteed by the federal government. But the guarantees of the federal government covered what—5%, 2% of the loan portfolio?

So, when one started to go, everybody wanted to—they all started to default. And then the people who were covering the default didn’t have the capital, and the government had to step in.

And that said, people sometimes forget that happened in September. So, there was the end of September, one; October, two; November, three; December, four; and January, five.

When Obama came into office, things were stabilized. If he had just let the actual market forces continue, we wouldn’t have had that 9% unemployment and 0% or 1% growth for his first five years.

He made it a lot worse with all those crazy programs—Cash for Clunkers, Obama phones, those huge deficits. It didn’t do any good at all, among other things.

Bush did some good things on the conservative side. The only thing that I really disagreed with him—he had tax cuts, and he came in with a surplus that the Gingrich-Clinton compromises for the last four years under [Bill] Clinton had given us.

He came in—we were in a mild recession. The dot-com boom had busted. So, he thought tax cuts would spur growth, but he didn’t insist on budget cuts.

So, we started this cycle where we were working to pay off the debt, and he cut taxes, and he actually got some more revenue for a while, and then all the spending—like prescription drugs, No Child Left Behind, all these massive programs.

It wasn’t representative. I hope Trump looks at that. I hope when these midterms are over, he really recalibrates and reboots DOGE, and then if he’s going to have these big tax cuts—and they’ve already hit—we’re going to have deficits unless we start cutting, cutting, cutting.

person 2: Yeah. Well we need to go to a break and then come back.

person 1: Oh, I should say one last thing—that George Bush was treated, I think, very unfairly by a lot of American people. They call him—all this idea that Trump is unusual and we’ve never called a president a fascist or a Nazi—

Al Gore said Bush and [Dick] Cheney were digital brown shirts. [Angela] Merkel said it was the old Nazi thing. John Glenn said that.

That was mainstream. He was the first president that they really called a Nazi. The Left hated George Bush, and they hated Cheney.

And then, as always happens, when the next Republican came, they transferred their hate and said, “Trump is now the new Nazi, and those other guys, they weren’t that bad. We like them.”

And they said that exactly about George H.W. Bush. They said, “He’s a wimp. He’s a fascist. But compared to W, we like him.”

And they said the same thing about [Ronald] Reagan. “He’s a fascist. He’s horrible. He’s terrible. But compared to George H.W. Bush, who’s a meanie and went to war, we kind of like Reagan.”

And that’s what they always do.

You Don’t Have to Be Complicit in a Lie

 The other day, they held a debate in Maine, choosing among the potential replacements for Herr Öystërgrüppënführër after his ignominious and cowardly retreat from the Senate nomination, and it was just as horrific as you could imagine. Most of the candidates were just communists, but one was a dude pretending to be a woman. And this wasn’t just any dude. This was a slab of beef, a hulking mook who could’ve been a construction worker if he hadn’t gone off the rails, but is now probably a dungeonmaster in the world’s worst D&D campaign. And you sat there watching this 12th-level ogre, feeling either pity—if he is simply deranged—or contempt if he’s some sort of pervert. Those are your two options. But you also had to wonder what was up with the media and the other candidates. After all, it was a man dressed as a woman, and nobody called out the weirdo in the room.

Let’s establish something right at the beginning. You should have compassion for people who suffer from the mental disorder of gender dysphoria—these people are in pain through no fault of their own. But you should have contempt for those who are merely perverted, and plenty are. Sick or sicko: those are your options. You are in no way required, morally, ethically, or otherwise, to cater to their delusion either way. A dude who decides he’s a chick, much like a chick who decides she’s a dude, is not entitled to your obedient and humiliating concurrence with the lie they are living.

But the media and the other candidates did exactly that. Why didn’t one of the people on the moderator panel look at this person and ask the most pertinent question: “You’re obviously a man pretending you’re a woman, so why would anybody in their right mind ever vote for you for any position of responsibility?”

Fear. “Trans” has become scary—putting aside the social sanctions, they scream and yell at you, and sometimes they try to murder you. This is different from the drag queens of yore. The drag show thing is boring and creepy, but a traditional drag queen was a gay guy who just dressed up like a woman. He never thought he was a woman. He never expected you to believe he was a woman. That was the point of drag—it was camp, a parody. And whatever humor and entertainment value it ever had is completely demolished by looking at the audience and, instead of winking, essentially saying, “No, I’m serious, and you’ve got to be serious, too.” Moreover, a classic drag queen would slap you if you brought your kid to a show and ask you what the hell you were thinking. But now we’ve got trans activists trying to use that genre to access your kids, and they’re not doing it because children are critically deprived of gender-ambiguous entertainment. You’ll note that they never, ever go “entertain” at an old folks' home.

If you talk to gay people, most of them have had it with the trans fanatics, too. But sadly, the faculty-lounge communists, sexually dysfunctional wine women, and the other assorted creeps who have taken over the Democrat Party, think differently. They try to force this mutant gender ideology down our throats with social intimidation when we resist. But, of course, we weren’t always resisting. We tried to be nice. Live and let live, you know—right up until the point where they wanted to live in our kids’ schools. The cultural Marxists exploited what was basic courtesy—you don’t go out of your way to cause people pain unless they deserve it—and morph it into complicity.

Reality was right there in an XXXL dress—but the media didn’t ask any questions about it. They didn’t point out the obvious: that this sad person is living a lie and somehow expects us to go along with it. I was informed—by the journos—that journos are neutral truth-tellers who don’t care whose feet they step on in the pursuit of the facts, unless it’s a dude’s feet in a pair of high-heeled Christian Louboutins. Then they shut up. They don’t ask the obvious question, but it’s the one everybody’s thinking. And why? Because of social pressure. These are the most gutless conformists on Earth. Not one of them will stand up and say what most people know—this is weird and creepy, and people suffering from this kind of delusion or perversion have no business holding office.

The other Dem candidates weren’t going to go down that road either. Of course not—this is the Democrat Party, and transsexuals are a very special constituency for some reason. It’s still not exactly clear why. The genderfreak population is a small fraction of Americans, yet the fact that normal people are repelled and disgusted by it is completely ignored in favor of bizarre and ardent advocacy. It’s in the culture, too. We’ve even got gender-switching in The Odyssey. Why? It’s certainly not because a butched-up Ellen Page was the very best person to play an ancient Greek warrior. You get rewarded for parroting the lie, but there’s a price to be paid if you don’t go along. They have tried to turn J.K. Rowling, beloved by hundreds of millions, into a literal Hitler—almost as bad as Maine Sen. Susan Collins!—not because she thinks trans people should be abused, but because she doesn’t think men belong in women’s spaces. Move over, Mussolini!

And the weirdest thing is when libs look you in the eyes and say, “Yes, this man pretending to be a woman is actually a woman.” We saw that with the head of a medical school the other day testifying to Congress that “the vast majority” of the people who have babies are women. Well, that’s technically true, but it’s not exactly specific. If he were specific, he would have said all of the people who have babies are women. And in fact, he didn’t even need to say that because we all know it. But he was making a statement. He was showing allyship. He was allowing himself to be ritually humiliated by saying what he knows is a lie to people who know he’s lying in order to prove he’s willing to defenestrate his own dignity and honor for the sake of solidarity and cocktail party invitations. That’s the thing—if you’re not all-in with the lie, it’s social suicide in the lofty circles. Just look at all the ungrateful actors who made it big in the Harry Potter movies turning on the author of the books that lifted them out of obscurity.

It’s so pathetic. But it’s an indicator. It’s an indicator of weakness. 

So, how do we fight back?

With strength. Have the strength to be impolite. You don’t need to go out of your way to hassle people, though the left seems intent on normalizing that. You just have to have the strength not to play along. Embrace the power of “No.”

No, that’s obviously a man and not a woman.

No, a man cannot be pregnant.

No, a woman cannot be a father.

No, castrating males and chopping the breasts off of women and doing other unspeakable things with a scalpel and chemicals is not “gender-affirming care.” It’s an atrocity that would make Caligula puke.

This is a scheme to acclimate you to accepting the unacceptable, to swallow lies and be silent in the face of oppression. First it’s the trans stuff. Next, they’ll be demanding that you deny your religion or your patriotism or your family. Ask an immigrant from a communist country—they know the script, and they know the score. And it’ll probably work in much of the world, bereft of honor and the manly virtues of courage and virility as they are, but it doesn’t have to be that way here in America. They can only control you with their social pressure if you allow them to. And if all of us refuse to be controlled, what are they going to do? Cry about it and ruin their makeup?

I don’t know if they teach kids fairytales and fables anymore, but the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes comes to mind. Except this emperor isn’t butt naked. He’s wearing a cocktail dress and teetering on stilettos while sporting a 5 o’clock shadow.

Be the kid who points at him and shouts, “It's a man, baby!”

Half a Nation of Traitors

 Democrats hate this country. They hate you if you don’t also hate this country. And they will do anything to avoid you continuing to live free in this country, up to and including murdering you, because that’s who they are. If Russia or China offered to help them seize power, they’d take the deal no matter what they asked for in return. After 250 years, one of our political parties has become infested with traitors the way an old dead tree becomes infested with termites.

There is only one Democrat in the country speaking with any sense of sanity; one person who does not openly appeal to racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and all the other divisive tropes “progressives” marinate themselves in to gain control over feeble-minded voters and that’s the guy who had a massive stroke a few years ago.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is a man of the left – on 99 percent of policy issues, Sen. Fetterman is on the wrong side. But he doesn’t want to destroy Israel; he doesn’t want to “burn down” the United States; he recognizes there are people who disagree with him on other issues and does not seek to force himself and his will on everyone else. He has a “live and let live” attitude, and works to change minds in the future.

For this, there is a better than average chance that some leftist somewhere murders him, or at least tries to, before the end of his first term.

I don’t say that in any hopeful way; I say it because it’s exactly how the people the Democrat Party is embracing operate. Their 99.9 percent friend is their 100 percent enemy. You are either all in, or all out.

That’s why there is so little dissent on the left. Do you really think they all had a mental breakdown about 15 years ago and collectively forgot what a woman was? Biological and gender realities were simply wiped from their minds, and all of human history disappeared, leaving them standing at a urinal next to a “woman” built like a linebacker thinking, “She has a pretty large penis”?


No, they’re afraid of being killed. They’re also afraid of losing reelection, but they’re mostly afraid of being killed.

They aren’t suffering from a collective delusion; they’re engaging in collective risk management for power and financial gain.

How do I know this? Is there a single male Democrat with a history of whoring around who has ever been linked to a “trans woman”? If “trans women are women,” and it’s totally straight for a man to date one, why hasn’t it happened to the people in public life who insist the loudest that this is reality? There wasn’t anything Hunter Biden wouldn’t have had sex with while high on crack, but he knew what a woman was and only patronized real women prostitutes. He didn’t get lucky; even in full-blown junkie mode, he could tell the difference between an “innie” and an “outie.”

This week, a majority of Democrats in the House voted to cut off all military aid, offensive and defensive, to Israel because their fringe demands someone finish the work their progressive forefather Adolf Hitler started. If you told yourself 20 years ago this is where Democrats would be, you’d have yourself committed, especially since most of the “aid” involves that money going to US companies for weapons – ensuring American jobs – and never actually leaves the country.

Democrats don’t care. The only part of their party with any energy – the radical communist wing – hates Israel, so it has to go. They hate America, so capitalism has to go. They hate you, so…

It’s only a matter of time before, should they gain power, the old ways of them doing business return.

In New York, we’re seeing the push to seize private property, we’re hearing echoes of Nuremberg in campaign speeches from Democrats, and we’re seeing existing Democrats capitulate to the demands of the radicals – pretending to agree with them in the hope that they won’t be challenged next.

The people who worked with the Nazis were wiped out, just as the people who worked with the communists were wiped out, the moment they were no longer needed. Theoretically, being killed last is preferable to being first, but it’s better not to be killed at all.

To do anything of this, and to do anything they advocate, our system of government, our founding documents and our very rights MUST BE WIPED OUT. There is no other way, as the “isms” – fascism, socialism and communism – are not compatible with individual liberty and a constitutionally limited republic.

The only way forward for these leftists is to betray our national principles, to become traitors against the foundation of the United States. They already are, in spirit, but now they’re moving into places where they can enact their fascistic fever dreams legislatively. They’re doing this in districts so gerrymandered that the only real election happens in the primary.

Gerrymandering exists because some people didn’t want to risk having to earn votes to obtain power. Still, it’s led to the absolutely insane winning because there’s little difference between crazy turned up to five and crazy turned up to 10; once you accept crazy, the degree of that crazy barely matters. Now Democrats are fighting down their own trench and trying appeasement over dominance, and they’re being dominated for their troubles.

Their party is being taken over by people who read the room and saw a vulnerability and exploited it. Traitors are rapidly annexing half the political world. Maybe Democrats will wise up before it’s too late and work with Republicans (behind the scenes, because they’d get killed otherwise) to redraw districts that disfavor the antisocial fringe and relegate the violent goons back to the outside, but that is unlikely.

As long as the driving force in the Democratic establishment is Trump Derangement Syndrome, party leadership will continue to play chicken with whether or not they can hold on to power past 2028.

It’s an evil game, to invite in murderous revolutionaries in the hope of controlling them, and it’s not really worked out anywhere else before. Democrats would be wise to stop embracing traitors, but they’ve become traitors themselves in a scramble for relevancy. It’s up to the American people to make sure that party, and not the country, pays the price for that. We’ll find out in November which way the scales are tipping.

The Reality Behind Europe’s Rift With America

 person 2: Apparently, according to a Wall Street Journal article, they had a secret meeting in which they vented their frustration about [President Donald] Trump. They called it “Therapy Night.” But what the article said was they were discussing how to manage a breakup with the United States.

Do you think that—

person 1 Promises, promises.

Winc: I know. I was going to say, do you think that the Europeans would really break with the United States?

person 1: No, I know they won’t. Why do I know that? Because I’m not stupid. Spain was—I think his name is Gonzalez. Isn’t he the prime minister of Spain?

Winc: I think it’s [Pedro] Sanchez.

person 1: Yep. Sorry. He was bragging that he was not going to spend over 2%, and he was bragging to his own people after he let in 500,000 illegal people from Africa who were going to be able to go all through Europe, given they were given green cards from the Spanish government.

But he was also bragging that he denied U.S. access to a NATO joint base, that he wouldn’t let them use airspace, and that kind of influenced everybody wanting to tag along.

“Well, I’m [Emmanuel] Macron. We’ll do the same. We won’t let them.”

And then Germany said, “Well, you know, I’ve already called it. It’s not our war. We’ll just kind of keep our bases away.”

And then [Giorgia] Meloni said, “Oh, my defense minister said you can’t land much more in Sicily. It’s now closed.”

And then [Keir] Starmer said, “You can’t go to Diego Garcia unless it’s defensive.”

So, then they all kind of backed off. That’s what they do. So, when Trump said, “Well, Spain is the worst offender. We’re just not going to trade, and we don’t have any ill feeling with them. We’re not going to trade with them.”

What was it? Twenty-four hours later, he approached Trump and said, “Please, please.”

And then, when Trump told [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, “Yeah, [Joe] Biden wouldn’t let you hit anything. That’s kind of dangerous going in there. It’s a provocation, but go ahead. Go hit stuff like you’re doing with your drones.”

Biden never did that. That confused the Europeans.

“Hey, wait a minute. Trump is a neo-isolationist and he wants Russia to win, but he’s letting Zelenskyy do things that Biden didn’t do, that we cautioned him not to do? This is strange. But on the other hand, he killed the Wagner Group, and he raised sanctions on the oligarchs, and he gave them Javelin offensive weapons when [Barack] Obama didn’t. He got out of an asymmetrical missile deal, blah, blah, blah.”

So, they talk a great game, but they have 500 million people in Europe—450 million, I think, are NATO and combined EU countries.

And they have a social welfare program that has been overrun by 30 or 40 million people from Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere, and it’s not sustainable.

And it was paid for in the past because they were very, very smart economists, socialists though they were. But when you shut down the North Sea oil fields, you don’t let the French companies tap natural gas, and the Germans shut down their nuclear plants, and electricity costs in Britain or Germany are anywhere from twice to four times as high as here, you can’t afford it.

You cannot afford it. And then, when all this is predicated on a $200 billion trade surplus with us, it doesn’t work.

So, Trump’s message wasn’t to punish Europe. It was always, “Please, please be a partner because we have another common enemy, and it’s called China. And we have other countries just like you that depend on us, like South Korea and the Philippines and Taiwan and Japan and Australia.

“And we can’t give good attention when we’ve got 75,000 troops tied down here on the border with [Vladimir] Putin, and we’ve got all this aircraft, and you’ll still be on the nuclear deterrent. But if you can just go up to 5%, maybe we can protect you with 30,000 or 40,000.”

But instead it was crazy.

It was like, “Eighty-three years after World War II, you dare take troops out of our country? You can’t do that, America. You’re 7,000 miles away. You’re right next to us. You can’t do that. You have no business doing that. And of course, we don’t want you to use our bases when we feel that it might be inconvenient, and you can’t use our airspace. But how dare you say that 82 years after World War II you’re going to take out any troops?”

That’s Donald Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump. It doesn’t work anymore, Euros. We’re tired of it.

And if you look at all the criticism that Trump and [Vice President JD] Vance have leveled, and you wade through all the rhetoric and the therapy, it’s basically:

“We want Europe to be a partner. It’s a Western tradition. It birthed our culture. We honor it. We like Europe. We want more Europeans to come to America, and we want to nudge them, force them, cajole them, plead with them to spend money to protect themselves so Vladimir Putin is deterred and he doesn’t attack them and then divert all of our resources over to Europe while China, in conjunction with Putin, stages a simultaneous attack on Taiwan.

“But that’s what will happen if you don’t defend yourself.”

And they had a secret little meeting saying:

“Oh my gosh, we can’t have trade surpluses with the United States anymore? It’s going to be reciprocal? Zero? Oh, he’s telling us that China is taking advantage of us? He’s saying that his open borders, no more illegal immigration, and getting rid of DEI is a good formula for us? We should drill like he did? Oh my gosh, that’s an insult. We can’t take that.”

Well, what are you going to do about it? Nothing.

Nothing.

Get your Eurofighter. Get the Eurofighter and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you canceled the Eurofighter.

Get Leopard tanks and every—

Oh, I’m sorry, you only had nine that worked at the beginning of the Ukraine war.

Let’s get your huge drone fleet.

Oh, I’m sorry, it’s Ukraine’s huge drone fleet, not yours.

So, they have a lot of problems.

I like Europe. I like the Europeans. I like the Germans, the French, the British. Americans like them all. But they will never like us if they’re dependent on us.

In other words, if they think it’s their birthright to be subsidized in their defense, subsidized in their trade, subsidized in their rhetoric, and that allows them to pursue their utopian socialist dreams.

I mean, basically the country is run by [Zohran] Mamdanis and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortezs and [Darializa Avila] Chevaliers. That’s who runs Europe—socialists.

While Europe Reminisces About the Good Old Days, It’s Being Destroyed From Within

person 1: I’m gonna bring up this Wall Street Journal, first of two major articles, are the United States and Europe divorcing or separating? And if so, is it a good thing or is it a bad thing?

So, this is written by a trio of people and it’s titled “There Is No Going Back: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture with the USA.”

I’ve written too many things here, but in its 250th year, has America, protector of Europe, now become a threat? In the months to come—this is after certain things happened, you know, when Donald Trump came into office again with Greenland and all sorts of things going on at that point—in the months to come, the January crisis meeting would be remembered by Europe’s most powerful figures as the moment that countries bound together by blood and a sense of shared destiny since the aftermath of World War II began to explore separate paths. Nobody has filed divorce papers, and important players on both sides are working hard to keep a loveless marriage going.

Untangling the ties between Europe and the U.S. would be a massive undertaking. Then there’s stuff in here about Canada. But, interesting article, Victor. Is there a divorce happening? And is it a good thing? And is it a hostile divorce?

person 2: Well, the subtext of all that is there’s about two or three realities that explain this estrangement.

No. 1, for 500 years, Europe was the fountainhead of Western civilization. It was since the Greeks, but I’m talking about the period, oh, 1500 into the 20th century. Major wars were fought there, Thirty Years’ War, Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, the revolutions. That was where things happened. The capital, the financial capital of the world was London, and the cultural capital and scientific capital of the world was Paris.

And by the late 19th century, with the unification of Germany, the industrial capital of the world for a while, it had overtaken Britain. And then this United States comes up, and it has a completely different way of doing things. Its constitution is different, its attitude is different, and it welcomes mostly from Europe what Europeans would call the rejects.

These were the poor people, the people who had no land, the people who had no titles, and they expected us to fail. But it was actually a Darwinian process where the most bold, the most rugged, the most adventurous, the most gambling type of people from the English-speaking parts of Europe, from Germany, from Ireland, you name it, Italy, they all came over here, and from that period, from the Civil War to World War I, they just took over the world.

And in World War II, we were the powerhouse. We had a GDP by 1944 that was larger than Germany, Italy, Japan, Soviet Union, Britain, all put together. We had a fleet that was bigger than all the warships in the world. And that changed everything for them. They had committed suicide twice in 1914 to 1918, and they repeated it in ’39.

And in both cases, they got angry because we saved them, and they made a convincing argument. They said, “But we lost more people, and we fought from 1914 to April of 1917. You wouldn’t help us. And we fought from ’39 all the way to ’42, and you weren’t there.”

And then we said, “It wasn’t our fight, but when we did get in, we were the difference why you won.”

So, there was that tension.

And in the Cold War, they’d said, “Yes, you have two oceans. You’re 7,000 miles away from the Soviet Union, so when they’re gonna overrun Europe, we can’t defend ourselves.” So, we said, “OK, we’ll keep troops there.” At one point, 375,000. So, they have lost that prestige and that power, but they still want to act as if they have it.

So, Britain keeps talking about, “Well, we’re gonna do our part for the opening up the Strait [of Hormuz].” Well, what are you gonna do? Send the U.S. the HMS Dragon, one ship? You had one frigate that could sail or steam, and you couldn’t even get it to Cyprus for three weeks. And what’s the combined carrier force of the entire 450 million people in the EU?

It’s about three carriers, and most of them are in repair. It’s not 10 or 11 fleet carriers with whole fleet auxiliary ships like the United States Navy, which is now having to rebuild, get even bigger.

So, there’s such an imbalance in economy. The EU was supposed to overtake us in 20 years, we were told in 2001.

It’s 10 trillion smaller as far as GDP, 20 trillion to 31. Things didn’t work out. And then they adopted this utopian, arrogant, narcissistic agenda of green energy, shut down coal, shut down nuclear, shut down natural gas. They ruined the German economy, which anchored all of Europe. They opened their borders.

The single biggest villain, she’s gonna be the Europe’s version of Anthony Fauci, was Angela Merkel. She destroyed Europe. She said, yes, we can. We’re gonna open the borders. She demonized the Eastern Europeans who said we’re not gonna do it. And they flooded Europe with honest, unassimilated illegal aliens, 16% of the population in countries like Germany.

And then, in addition to that, they went socialist, and in addition to that, they went pacifist. And then, the world caught up with them, and they thought, “Well, we can buy natural gas from Russia, and we’ll tame Russia with Nord Stream pipelines.” No, you won’t. You’ll make yourself dependent upon an ex-communist thuggery, thuggocracy.

Well, we don’t need to be armed because the dull-witted, brutal United States will always come over when we philosophers tell it where to go. Go to Chad, help us in the Falklands, go to the Balkans, go to Libya, bring all those big jets and all that firepower, and then we’ll kind of sit in the back and have our cappuccino and tell you where to bomb and do all this.

And Trump came along and said, “Can’t afford it anymore. I’m sorry. What have you done?” So, all they had to do, it was not very hard to do.

They did have a $20 trillion GDP. All they had to do was about 10 years ago just make 2%. 2% of their GDP of each country in defense. And when Trump came in office in 2017, I think they only had six of the 31 NATO countries were doing it.

No. 2, all they had to do was keep quiet when the United States was acting unilaterally in their interest. I’m not saying and just keep quiet and just don’t even join the U.S. if you don’t want to but let them use your airspace and joint bases that we paid for in many cases.

So, Spain, France, U.K., Germany, Italy, all you had to do was just say, “This was a United States mission. We support the idea that we want a nuclear-free Iran, and we support Donald Trump trying, finally dealing with the problem. And to the extent that we are obligated to a NATO power, we, in our own way, and we’re not gonna disclose how, we will aid our [ally].”

That’s all I had to say one time.

They couldn’t do that. All they did was, “We are not going to let them use Diego Garcia.”

“Well, we’re gonna top that. We’re not gonna let you use our big base in Spain.”

“Well, we can top that. You can’t land in Sicily like you’d like to.”

“Well, we can top that. I’m Macron, France. Well, you can’t fly over our airspace.”

And, “This isn’t our war,” in Germany. Remember [Chancellor Friedrich] Merz? So, they went out of their way to antagonize Trump and the United States. And then, that’s where the situation is. It’s a country that used to rule the waves of the world, of continents. The Dutch, the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, the British, they ran the world.

And now it is being overrun by illegal aliens. It’s being destroyed by socialism and green ideology, and it’s getting weaker and weaker and weaker. And it’s getting more arrogant and more arrogant and more arrogant about this lost power and influence they used to enjoy.

And they know the medicine. They know the medicine. They have 450 million people. They’re very bright people. In some ways, they’re better educated than we are. And all they have to do is make about eight reforms, and they could get back on their feet and be a full equal partner with the United States, and they won’t do it.

The medicine is worse than the disease for them.