← Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Keeping It Real: Conversations with Jillian Michaels
Victor Davis Hanson: The Dangerous Ideologies America Is Sleepwalking Back Into
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The criticism of socialism is eventually you have a cadre. You always say that you're for the people, but you say this kind of like John Kerry says, I have to fly private so I can advance, you know, global warming advocacy against it. You always create a cadre that's not subject to the consequences of its ideology.
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World class historian at Hoover Institution senior fellow Victor Davis Hansen joins me today. He's got a true masterclass for us on how we got here. He spent his entire life studying war, empires and the rise and fall of civilizations, taking us inside the mind of Karl Marx. And how did his theories morph into the socialist and communist movements that reshaped the world and still haunt us today? We examine the deadly pendulum swing between crony capitalism and communism and how unrestrained, corrupt capitalism has bred the resentment that fuels Marxist revolutions, and how those revolutions inevitably gave rise to regimes just as oppressive, if not worse. Victor walks us through the entire arc of history to explain how we arrived at this moment, a West that's exhausted, divided, and once again flirting with ideologies that have already burned the world down. You don't want to miss this one. Keeping It Real with Jillian Michaels to start out with the quote that if we don't understand history and we don't remember it, we're doomed to repeat it.
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That was George Santayana from Harvard. He was a historian. He wrote that in a very obscure, I mean, he's always quoted those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. But it was a very obscure essay he wrote about it and it has a lot of context to it, but he's, it's one of the most, that's, it's tragic that that's why we remember him, that one quote. But he's actually a very distinguished historian.
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C
Really. See, but I guess because it's so freaking telling and we're clearly doing that again. So I, I just want to start at the top. Who is Carl Marx and what is he responsible for?
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B
Okay, so Karl Marx was a German. Actually he was a German Jewish. I only say that because he was very critical of Judaism, even though he was himself Jewish. And he was in those. He wrote in the aftermath of the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 that where they were overthrowing monarchies and they were anarchists. And he and Frederick Engels, his partner wrote this classic work, Das Kapital and they wrote others as well. But that was very influential because he introduced some things that were. Put it this way. They had. There was a German tradition of Hegel and other philosophers that I guess you would call it communitarian. And it goes all the way back to antiquity. But the question had been framed along the. Before Marx in this sense that communitarianism, that is not having your own property, not being rewarded based on your excellence or your productivity summed up best by a quality of result rather than a quality of opportunity was not the main. That was not seen as creating Western civilization. There were people in the past, the Pythagoreans, Greek colonial practices, classical. They didn't really work. But he came along and that had been the traditional view. And he came along and said that. And he was a product of the Industrial Revolution. So people were going in these cities, they were the original cramped, dirty conditions. There was a lot of oppression. There was no rules about 40 hour work, any of that.
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Okay.
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B
And he's. And he called them the proletariat and he said that these. They need to seize the means of production. That's the first thing he said. In other words, that there should no be no private ownership right of. Of production. That meant factories, farms, etc. And then he said each person according. Not to his production but according to his need. In other words. And then there was that. That anecdote. I don't know if it's true or not that he. When he had his salons and he brought intellectuals in that agreed with him. He would have a little tray everybody would put money in and then people could take out what they needed as they left. And of course it didn't work because people would take more than they needed. But the idea was that you would be paid about what you would. What you needed. And the other thing was he created another idea of false consciousness. And he was the one that gave us that other quote. Religion is the opiate of the masses. He and Engels. In other words, we really don't know what is good for us. But intellectuals are people who are informed with revolutionary doctrine will tell the peasantry and the working classes don't be fooled by what they tell you in your church, that you know you're going to be rewarded in heaven and suffering is good on this earth. Do not be. Don't believe the king, the monarch, the government. You have to develop a revolutionary consciousness about the chauvinism of the exploited classes. And a lot of it was influenced by Rousseau and the French philosophers who said, we're all born, we're naturally good people, but society, I think Rousseau said, you know, man is born into chains. The noble savage people in the New World were living in the state of man, what it should be. And that had been. That was very radical because the old classical idea and the Christian ideas were born sinful and were capable of horrible things unless we're civilized, we have religion, and our sharper edges are rounded out by family, community. But he had this very naive, romantic idea that the government and capitalists oppress people, but if you got rid of them, then they would only take what you need. They'd be communal, and they did not have an innate desire to be recognized for their individual excellence. It was very. And he drew on a lot of people. Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America, had earlier in 1832, said the United States had solved the problem that the French Revolution had. Not that they were creating independent, entrepreneurial small farmers and there was not a peasantry or serfs. And these were. This was important because they were economically independent and therefore could vote without demanding subsidies for the poor or inside deals for the rich. And he said at one point, most people innately would all rather be poor and equal than to be all better off, but have some people more powerful because of envy. And Marx then was sort of at the other pole, that, no, most people should be equal. So we're going to bring the poor up and then we're going to bring the wealthy down by mandate. So he got a bad reputation because as this didn't really catch on in the west, it did in Russia. So the efforts to get rid of the Zardom and Russia in World War II, put it this way. The Marxist advocates in Europe, that had not been successful, the German army put Lenin on a rail car and they sent him to Russia because they were still fighting on the Eastern front and they wanted a Bolshevik revolution, a Marxist revolution, okay? And when they overthrew the Tsar, there was a constitutional republic group, there was Kinsky, the Mensheviks. But there was no idea that anybody in their right mind would actually take these crazy ideas of Marx and try to implement it. And the Bolsheviks did. And the only way that they could do it under Lenin and then of course, Stalin, because it's contrary to nature, was to force it down people's throat. So then they created from the Marxist idea, enemies of the people. The bourgeoisie were the great enemies. They call them the kulaks. You know, they went in the great famine, the show trials, the military ex. They killed 20 million people. And then they made this. And this was unfortunately, a lot of naive people from America and Britain went over there. George Bernard Shaw was a big champion of it. And they, we really didn't know what was going on. They, they said this is. This was the first real Marxist example. And then it. The reputation. After World War II, they broke all their agreements with the Allies. And then we realized for the first time we had a lot of fellow travelers in the State Department that like Stalin, Alger Hiss and stuff. And then we found out the naive. They woke up and said, my God, Mao is. He's. Now they've spread and there's something called the coma turn. They want to spread communism all over the world. North Korea, East Berlin. And every time they do it, they have to kill people. Because no one would want that. Every person innately wants to be recognized as a unique individual and rewarded according to his ability or achievement. And to the degree that people are not equal by birth or health, the government and a consensual society has an obligation to take care of them. But that does not mean that you're going to mandate. You don't bring people down, you bring people up. And that's the thing about it is then people said, well, we can bring in Marxism. We don't have to do what the Bolsheviks did. We can bring in Marxism by elections in France, even before the Bolsheviks. So people said they were democratic socialists and by that.
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So real quick.
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Yes.
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So socialism is Marxism.
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Yes, but with one proviso, to get it elected willingly.
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That's democratic.
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Yes.
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You choose it.
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Yes, but they can't. They always say we do not or we're not going to take over the method, the means of production. Not like Marx. It didn't work. So as a democratic socialist, vote for me. Mandami. He did say privately he wanted.
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Yeah, he said he's going to do that.
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Yeah, as a communist, but he didn't say that publicly. So what he says, what democratic socialists say is, as they do in Europe, vote for us, you get to have your private property, but we're going to give you like, sort of like California. We're going to give you. We're going to control energy, we're going to have a 13.3 tax rate, we're going to be redistributionists, but we're not going to take your house or we're not going to tell you. The problem is what, what we've determined. Creeping socialists, usually socialism doesn't work. So what happens? It creeps up. They say it doesn't work because we were not socialist enough. So then they start to regulate the utilities and then they start telling you who can, you can hire in the university and then they do this, this, this. So in America when we talk about Marxism, we, we reflect this large spectrum from hardcore murderous communism where there's no freedom, they just regiment, they're totalitarian to people who say they're not communists but they're democratic socialists. But because socialism doesn't work, as you see in the eu, they gradually then start to outlaw free speech and they go on that trajectory where it ends up. And so we, we call those creeping.
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Socialists and, and creeping towards communism.
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Obviously creeping toward communism but nobody really wants communism because they know the history of it.
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Can you explain to me though, I don't understand, I'm ashamed to admit this, but I actually do not understand the difference outside of like we don't want to be communist and we're democratic socialists and they're totally different things. But then on the other hand someone goes, that's not true. Socialism is the road to communism and commun. Communism is considered the utopia. I don't understand the difference. What is the difference between communism and socialism? Just unto themselves.
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Socialism says. Communism says that we have to turn society upside down and abolish private property. Oh, totally and totally. And, and have the government control speech, the movie. Everything has to. It's kind of like a DEI on steroids. Everything has to be ideal. The movies, your school. Everything has to be indoctrinated and there is no dissent. Because if you have dissent, you will fool the proletariat. You'll try to beguile them or bewitch them. So only this official Ministry of Truth, kind of what Orwell talked about.
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Got it?
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And so the socialists say no, no, no, no, no. We're going to just help people by having the government take control of profit making exploitive industries such as power. We're going to regulate power. We're going to regulate the oil industry, we're going to regulate health care, we're going to regulate this. And because we're benevolent and we don't need to make profit, they will be cheaper Like a formal Affordable Care Act. And then the critics say, well, if you take away individual incentive, then people will not work to their full capacity because they're not accountable and they're not going to be effective on the purpose of idealism. Or they, they're just such wonderful people, they don't need it to, you know, loaf around on the job or not take a salary. And eventually you will see that, that it doesn't work. And what you will do is what they always do. You will not be introspective, you will not open a bit debate. You will start to shut down criticism and you will double down. You'll call criticism misinformation, disinformation, enemies, right wing, crazy fascists. You'll do anything but allow an open discussion of why socialism is contrary to human nature and has always impoverished people. And then, and so then they of course deny that, but you'll see that it creeps, creeps along to you until you have inefficiency. And more importantly, they start to suppress free speech. As we've seen in the eu, you can't say certain things, right? You can, you can't criticize open borders, you can't criticize Israel in the EU or you're going to be in trouble. And that's going to, and the other thing that is the criticism of socialism is eventually you have a cadre, the European EU elite, or here in America a person like Bernie Sanders with three houses, or Mondamini, very wealthy, or Ilya and Omar now worth millions. You always say that you're for the people, but you say this kind of like John Kerry says, I have to fight private so I can advance, you know, global warming advocacy against it. You always create a cadre that's not subject to the consequences of its ideology. And that came from, that was brilliantly pointed out in Orwell's Animal form, where he said the pigs get to finally walk on two legs just like humans because they're trying to help animals on four legs. And then they go into the house and they eat with humans and they feast and they become exactly like the people that the pigs originally overthrew the, the humans and kick them off.
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Right?
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So, and that is that, that was, I mean, Orwell really, he was the greatest critic of, he said he was a socialist, but he was the greatest critic of creeping socialism that ultimately went to communism. So they, they always use the word fascist as their critics. A fascist. And there's two reasons they do that. Fascism is very similar in the sense that it is a, a marriage between industry and government. But the difference between fascism and socialism is the government has kind of a crony capitalism. It picks and chooses people and says, if you're Adolf Hitler and you're coming to power, I need the German industrials. If you are support my state control and censorship and my policies of national. I will allow you to, to make all the money in aluminum that you need. And you, you can develop the petrochemical industry private, make it all, but I'm going to control winners and losers and, and then the state then exercises control of the media, but it's usually for a small cadre of particular people. And the difference also is in the propaganda. The communist says he's for the brotherhood of man and he's for equality of result. And the fascist says that he's usually for nationalism and that their country and their common creed or their common race or their common religion have been shorted by the world. And they're going to develop a, they're not going to develop a new man. Communism says we're going to make a new man. The new man who is not going to be subject to innate human propensities. He's going to be redeveloped by indoctrination to be loving and equal and etc. And the fascist says we're going to make a patriotic nationalist who defends our religion, our race, our language. And, but they're very similar. That's why Hitler, you know, said, I'm a National Socialist party, right?
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That's the part that it's so confusing because they called Trump a fascist. They then declare that they're democratic socialists. I'm like, I'm almost positive that's what Nazis stood for, National Socialism. And it's, that's the just. And then like, no, no, no. But he was alt, right? I'm like, okay, yes.
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I mean, when Hitler, he. People, if you're Hitler, did something every night he got his advisors and he talked till 2 in the morning. He rambled and they published a lot of those transcripts. They had a secretary typing them the Fuhrer's ideas. And it's called table talk. He said in one of his last conversations, if I had won the war, I would have shot Roosevelt and I would have shot Churchill, but I would not have shot Stalin, even though I invaded Russia. And he's. Because he basically, he killed 20 million people. He was, he knew how to knock some heads around. And he was a socialist and I was a socialist myself. But even though they hated each other because he called them a Jewish Bolshevik, but The other thing very important is one of the modern strains of antisemitism comes from the fact that Marx was Jewish and Trotsky was probably Jewish and a lot the Bolsheviks came in and said we're not going to have any of the prejudice and the anti Semitism of the Tsardom and we're not going to, we're going to let women and emancipate all of. We need every new person we can. And of course for a while it worked. And Jews who had been subject to pomgram and everything became very visible. And then all of a sudden Hitler, who was opposed to this Bolshevism, coined the word Jewish Bolshevism and Marxist Bolshevism, Jewish Bolshevism. And so then it was then that came in with this slur that well, you know, the Jews are always. They're money lenders and they have all this money and they're always behind something. So there's a cabal of Jews that took over communism and, and the fact was they were persecuted terribly by. Eventually Stalin said he didn't like Jews. They were persecuted. They were. By 1940 you, if you were Jewish, you were not going to have a prominent position in the Communist party. But it was the old idea that after the destruction, you know, of Jerusalem and the diaspora of Jews and from the force, oh 1st century AD for the next 100, 200, 300 years into the dark ages of modern Europe, Jews were in many countries were not the aristocracy based on land. So they were not allowed to buy land. They were not allowed to have titles. They were called secretive and cabal. But one thing happened, they, they, because they were forced to, they understood a mercantile monetized economy that appeared especially during the Industrial revolution. So when they needed people with expertise, suddenly banking, finance, insurance, the people who had had no recourse to specialize in these disreputable positions. They didn't have estates, they didn't have titles, they couldn't put. They were the experts. So they started to name them silver and gold, Goldstein, silver, satin, all of these names of pejorative names. But then they became very astroit at it and they couldn't win because the first they weren't allowed to do. To do all the things that have prestige. So they did the things that had no prestige and they got good at it. And then the things that had no prestige as the modern era started to develop, they were the experts. And then they were, they were damned as a cabal and secretive and money obsessed and everything.
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So hold on, let me get this straight. You're telling me that because they weren't allowed to hold positions of power, they weren't allowed to be lords and ladies, they weren't allowed to hold land, they were forced into trade and this mercantile business and lending money and learning this craft. But then that ended up being what made them so wildly successful and powerful.
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And as the economy started to change, modern economy started to merge out of Europe that was not based necessarily just on land. And there was no connection between. There used to be. There still is in Europe to extent. But their prestige came from birth, ancestry, land, not money. It was. Money was static. But when the economy started to industrialize and it started to be globalized in the 18th, 19th, 20th century especially then people who had been dabbling and the only thing they could do trading diamond. That's why, you know, in the. The real anti Semite will always say, well, that guy's name is Diamond. That guy's name is. That guy name is Gold. That guy name is Silverstein. And they don't understand why those names came up. They were not adopted by Jews, they were adopted by Gentiles as. As last names that were pejorative when they were in Europe. And so the other thing was the old cabal was that since Roman times, every conquered people were given habeas corpus. The Gauls, the Spaniards, Iberians, anybody. All you had to do was say, I respect the divinity of the emperor from say 100 A.D. to 500 A.D. okay. When they, when they went into Judea, the Jews alone would say, we do not. We're not even going to go through the rituals. They said to the Jews, you can believe whatever you want, but just say for public purposes, bend the knee. That. That yes, Vespasian or Titus or Domitian is God. And they said no. So then they wiped out. They destroyed the second temple. And they were scattered from Judea.
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Right.
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Some stayed, but they were sent all over the empire. And that's why they never really were cohesive. And the way they maintained their culture was to be adamant about their religion. And then of course, Christianity had the ancient smear. You kind of saw that a little bit when Tucker was talking. I don't know if he meant it to. I think he knew what he was doing when he. At Charlie Memorial.
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Yes.
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When he said yes. He said there's a bunch of things around.
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Eating hummus.
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Yeah. And that was an allusion to the Pharisees in the back room that were supplying Pilate with information about Jesus and basically saying if you kill him, we'll be happy and we can cooperate with you. That was the ancient slur that they were Christ killers because Jesus was going to overthrow Judaism and the Pharisees and the hierarchy and create a new religion that was not based on being Jewish, but anybody could be Christian. And so that was the slur, along with money making. They control Hollywood.
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Yes. Jealousy.
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They control the banking. Yes.
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Right. Because, you know, throughout my lifetime I have heard like, well, you know, they did kill Christ, but I, I'm not religious. I didn't really understand the history. I was like, I thought the Romans killed Christ, but I never really took the time I did. Okay, so now the. Now in order to promote anti Semitism, it's like, well, they conspired with the Romans to kill Christ then. That's kind of what we're suggesting is that these Pharisees in the back room didn't want.
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We have some references. Forget about what people say now. We have references in classical literature to Christ. Tacitus mentions in passing. Christos just means in Greek, the anointed one. And it's always referred to. I'm not talking about apocryphal literature or literature that is religious in nature. We have some. A few secular references to what was going on in this weird place at the edge of the empire. And they say things like task. There was this radical guy named Christos that had one of these insurrections. And so we had to. Basically the Romans had to deal with him because he too would not acknowledge the divinity of the emperor. And he said, give unto Caesar what is Caesar? And he allowed that people could, in a practical sense, be Roman citizens and Christians, but you could not if you were going to. If you were a pagan and you worship Caesar, that would disqualify you as a Christian. But more importantly, they saw him as an insurrectionist and a magician. Even they. There's a Jesus. The Magician was written by a scholar in Columbia that showed that. I don't necessarily agree with his thesis, but there were a lot of people that. That were traveling magicians. And Christ was the best one. And that also bothered the Romans that he was able to create mass populist, Sermon on the Mount stuff. And then the message, you got to remember that the message.
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I didn't even know this guy. This is going to infuriate people and I'm so sorry and I stay out of it. But I thought we weren't even really sure whether or not Jesus existed. And the apostles wrote this stuff hundreds of years.
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No, no, we. No, the Romans knew very. We have Roman documents completely separate from religion, that he was a magnetic. He was a medic, a romantic, wonderful person to the people who knew him. And he had staged a revolution and that. That presented a problem in this troublesome province. And how the Romans ran Judea, as they ran everything, they had client kings, Herod, so they would go to the Jews or the Gaul, anybody, and say, you're going to be the regent here. This is the protocol. We have Roman legions to keep you in line, but we want this. And it's basically a question of taxes, control. And in exchange for that, we give you roads and aqueducts and habeas corpus and civilization. And that was a deal. So this sounds like the way, by.
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C
The way, that we go into the developing world.
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Yes. And so there were regent kings, and then you always had a provincial Roman official, like pilot who had a temporary, you know, assignment. And he was the ultimate judge. So his whole point was, I don't want to get into this stuff between this new offshoot of Judaism called Christianity and this guy Jesus and the Orthodox. But I do know, I don't know what he did, but I know that it's troublesome both. He's got a new religion and unfortunately it's turned the other cheek. Brotherhood of man. Blessed are the meek, blessed are the poor. That's not Roman. We have a Roman military ethos that the strong inherit the earth. And you, if an enemy offends you, you hit him twice. And this guy is preaching something very different. And oh, by the way, the local Orthodoxy doesn't like him either, so. So, well, just wash my hands of it and say, how do we kill two birds with one stone, I. E. Not have them angry at us so that. And not have this revolutionary new sect. So what we'll do is we'll get Pilate and he'll say, well, I wash my hands of it, but since these guys think he's guilty, I'll let him kill him and then we'll blame them. But at the same time, with the apostles and the next two generations, they were being killed systematically in Rome by Romans that had nothing to do with Jews.
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C
Right? Right.
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Yeah. So. So when anybody says that, that the Jews killed, killed Jesus, it's more like the Romans wanted a quiet province and they did not like Jesus and what he represented. It was anti Roman. It was a popular revolt they thought could happen. And there was an Orthodoxy that they had come to terms with and used them to keep the peace. So they said basically, well, the. In Judaism, in Judea the Jewish establishment, the religious establishment doesn't like him any more than we do. So we can get rid of them and then say the Pharisees basically did it.
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C
This is so wild. I. I'm. I act. I'm sorry. I know it's not wild for people who know this information, but I genuinely thought, okay, the Jews had the Old Testament, the Torah, and then maybe there was this guy Jesus. The apostles wrote stuff, but the first guy who wrote something was like, you know, 90 or so years later, we think maybe there's some Dead Sea Scrolls kind of mention this guy Jesus. But then Constantine had a. With the Council of Nicaea or something.
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B
Like that in the year, he had a vision at the Milliman Bridge that all of a sudden he saw a cross in the sky and he flipped the entire empire. So under Diocletian and other recent emperors, they were completely banned and they were executed because they were too revolutionary. Christianity, because they could deal with the Jews, because the Jews. Judaism was localized in a particular area at that time, and it was a particular group of people. But Christianity said that anybody could get to heaven through the combination of what would become the New Testament and the Old Testament. And so the Romans said, you know what? This has an ability to be. It's kind of like what Islam would do later. This can infect everybody because it's not. It's not ethnic or anything. It's very dangerous. And then all of a sudden, Constantine was flipped 300 years after the death of Christ. And then they took all of the Roman rituals that had been used to oppress Christianity and turned them upside down. So when you see a cardinal with the purple and that and the pointed hat, that's all from the Roman legate and provincial system. And when you look even today, the organization of the Roman Catholic Church, it mimics the divisions in the empire. They took the whole administrative system that the empire had and they flipped it over to advance and institutionalized Christianity.
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C
Okay, can I ask one more question?
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B
Yes.
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I was told that at that council that Constantine had, there was a vote on whether or not Jesus was divine. And Victor, to be honest, I always thought, like, well, you did this because you want to control. So he had to be divine.
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B
And no, there was a big discussion about the Trinity, though. And there was a discussion which would eventually fragment the Eastern Empire, what we call Orthodoxy, the Byzantine versus the Western Empire. And it had things about which. How you cross your. It had rituals. But eventually it was, what is Jesus a man? Was he a incarnate man who was Born to men and he is separate or is he the, the human representation of God? Is there a God and there is a divine Jesus or they collapse together and that's a manifestation of God. And they had a big, that was a big fight. The other problem they had was when if you read Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, the four Gospels and the other so called Gnostics and you're going to try to form a church, there are, there's no information in there about questions that a Christian would have. I have a baby, he died, but he wasn't baptized. Where does he go? Does he go to heaven? Does he go to hell? Is there something called purgatory? Can we call something limbo? So then you had people like Augustine and the early Church fathers that created a whole corpus of doctrine and it tried to explain what they felt was the true intent of the words of Jesus. But the problem was each. There were Donatists, they were liberalists, there were Manichaeans and it wasn't working. So the Church had to come in under Augustine as a thinker and try to suppress these heresies and make a canonical word. And so they came up with purgatory, limbo, Hell.
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C
Wow.
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B
And a lot of that was Neoplatonic. So they said, where do we get these ideas that would be conduit, would be compatible with the words of Christ? Well, the Greeks under Platonic thought said that you have a soul separate from the body and the, the ultimate fate of the soul will depend on how that person in a corporal existence functioned on earth. Was he good or bad? Did he surrender to the appetites? So then the Church Father said, this is a good model and we can use it to explain some of the contradictions and minutiae. And that was sort of what these. All of the Church fathers were brilliant classical scholars. That was the only thing they had to use to explain to the churches and the bishops and the clerics, how do you function in a real world? You need some exegesis. And that's where they got it from. But there was a Jesus and there was no question among Christians that he was divine. It was just what nature of the what, what was his relation with God and was he the Son of God or was he God Incarnate, etc. And all of these sects had different shades of interpretation.
- [37:42]
C
Every fall there's that shift in the air, right? Mornings get a little cooler, the light changes and suddenly you're reaching for layers that make you feel grounded, comfortable, pulled together. And those are just a few of the things that I love about coins because their pieces don't scream for attention, but the second you put them on, you feel the difference. They've nailed the sweet spot of luxury quality without the luxury markup. Their $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters are ridiculously soft. Not too heavy, not too thin, not itchy. It is literally the perfect layer that I wear under a coat or on its own. The denim fits like a dream. Clean lines, flattering on everyone. These are the kind of staples that end up on repeat. It's your personal fall uniform without even trying. My favorite piece is the Italian wool coat. Oh my God. The one I have looks and feels designer, but it costs a fraction of the price. The tailoring is beautiful, the weight is perfect and somehow I managed to look great effortlessly every time I have it on. And what makes quints different is how they work. So they partner with ethical top tier factories, the same ones that produce for major designer labels. And they cut out the middlemen. So you're getting exceptional craftsmanship, responsible production and prices that are about half of what you'd normally pay for pieces of this quality. So it's refined without being fussy, elevated but approachable. The kind of wardrobe that makes you feel like you've grown into your style. And finally, stop compromising between quality and cost. Find all your staples at quints go to quince.comjillian for free shipping on your order and and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's quince.com/jillian to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/jillian Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US. So if you're intimidated about designing a website, don't worry. Shopify's got you covered from the get go with beautiful ready to go templates and to match your brand style. And if you need a hand you can get help with everyday tasks like enhancing product images, writing product descriptions, generating discount codes. Shopify's AI tools are created for commerce. And if people haven't heard about your brand, Shopify helps you find your customers with easy to run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award winning 24. 7 customer support. They have you 365 degree covered. So turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. So sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today@shopify.com Jillian, just go to shopify.com. jillian. That's shopify.com. jillian. Okay. Can I go circle back to the beginning?
- [40:41]
B
Yeah.
- [40:41]
C
When you mentioned that socialists looked at religion almost with regard to like this, this manhole cover on our very primal urges of envy and jealousy and greed and this and that. And to be honest, I always thought it kind of was. I thought was. That was sort of the idea, like, behave, don't kill your neighbor. Don't sleep with that guy's wife, otherwise you're going to hell. I just thought it was a mechanism of control. And I thought, you know what? It gives people peace. I'm happy about that. Literally, God bless. And if it carries you through life with like principles, that's wonderful. And I never looked at anything beyond it because I wasn't raised with a religion. So do you think there is an element of that where they began to utilize it in this way of like, hey, guys, these are the rules and these are the guidelines. And then the socialists grabbed that and tried to demonize it. Because I have read God is not great.
- [41:37]
B
There was, there was two reasons why the socialist hated Christianity. And most of them today are atheists or agnostics. And communists destroyed the church. And, and they. Because they saw it as incompatible. The first was the church says from. In the Old Testament, the garden of man has fallen. He ate the. The snake. Snake and the apple. So we have these. When we are corporalized, when we have a body, we have these bad thoughts of greed, sexual promiscuity, stealing. And if we were to surrender to that natural state, then anarchy. You would have. You'd have anarchy. So we're going to set up rules and regulations and we have to enforce them with a divine mandate so that people understand it's not us, that's Crip. You know, it's when in the Declaration of Independence, by nature we're all. Man is equal. And so that's the first thing. And socialism says. And communism says, no. We have a Rousseau in view that you go across. You see the Apache or you see the Aztecs. They're living in nature because they haven't been polluted by this Christianity. They're wonderful. They weren't, of course, they were more savage.
- [42:54]
C
Yes.
- [42:54]
B
But then the right. So the church says the socialism. No, no, it's the natural order of things is not for people to be generous and want to be equal and just work for the state. No, no, they'll revert. If you have no filters, no parameters on human expression, they will kill each other. But we Give them a code of behavior that's conducive to treat people well. But you don't because you say it's natural to be a socialist when it's not. The second thing was, I get it, that they hated the socialist said there. When you're your body and your soul, to the extent it even exists, is inseparable when you die. That's it. This is it. So those opiate people in the church keep saying, oh, you're poor, oh, you're hungry, but don't worry, breasted are the meek. It's easier for a camel to go through with an eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven. Ha ha ha. Yes, but you get exploited on the here and now and then you're supposed to be in heavenly splendor when you're dead. And because you were poor, it's going to be easier for you to get to heaven and don't believe that that's his. What the church, with all of its land and slavery, they just do that to oppress you. So we're going to destroy religion and tell you that your heaven, you have that term, that social, is heaven on earth or year zero. They always say French Revolution believed. He's a year zero failure. We're going to re. And that's sort of what socialists and communists do. So we're going to rename, we're going to tear down statues. We're going to rename the foundational date 1619. We're going to create a whole new paradigm of equality right now and help you people. And we're going to destroy all these crazy government and religious thing that says be a good citizen, be a good Christian, be a good Jew, and you'll go to heaven. You're not going to go to heaven when you're dead. You're going to rot. And that's it. So you better be a socialist now and get some equality.
- [45:06]
C
Oh my God. I, I have to admit that I'm. I'm guilty of thinking in this way for many years. I remember going to India and you would see people who would just suffer so greatly. And it was like, no, no, don't worry though, because see, here's the thing. And in a past life, you did something super shitty. So you, you got to contend with this now. This is your punishment. There's a caste system and you, you know, you were born into this for stuff you did way back when. But hey, you know, if you do the right thing and you behave this time, you're gonna go to heaven. And just for years. I kind of subscribe to this thinking of they're controlling these people. They're holding them down with this to a certain extent. I like the fact that it inhibited our more aggressive nature. But I just, I didn't connect. I never in any universe would have drawn a connection of socialism and communism to religion and this manipulation.
- [46:09]
B
Also fascism, though fascism is kinder to. That's a bad word. It's more tolerant of religion because they think that religion, a national, A one religion inculcates national racial, ethnic solidarity. And they, and therefore they either permitted or promoted. Like Franco, for example, or Mussolini. They didn't, they didn't like the church, but they thought the church could be useful to making a. An Italian nationalist, modern Roman. But the thing Hitler, for example, understood, he never went after the church in the sense of destroy the church and he. All the, the worse he got. He kept talking about Christianity, but he, he absolutely despised the church. And when you actually look at the Nazi hierarchy, they were sort of Norse God, weird Aryan pseudo religion of almost right out of a saga in the.
- [47:08]
C
Ninth he came to the occult.
- [47:09]
B
Right.
- [47:10]
C
He was super into that. I okay.
- [47:12]
B
Because he, the reason he hate it was the same reason he said, you know what the church will say that the key for a human being is to live a nice life, be kind to people, curb your appetites and go to heaven when you're dead. And I'm telling you, you're not going to go to heaven. The only thing here is on the earth. And I'm going to give you national Socialism. We're going to control all of Europe. We're going to kill the Jews that you've always hated. We're going to give you vacations. Hitler was a big environmentalist. We're going to give you hiking trails. We're going to give you vegetarianism. We're going to outlaw smoking. I don't allow anybody to smoke in my presence.
- [47:55]
C
Hitler, I remember him being a vegetarian actually somewhere I'd heard that along the way and thought it was.
- [48:01]
B
He wanted to make a new. He wanted to make. Not a new communist man, he wanted to make a new nationalist socialist, a new German. That his whole purpose in life was to advance the German language, the German culture and spread it and control all of Europe because he thought that it was based on a racial hierarchy. And you know, it was. I don't think people who talk in nice terms understand like you know, some of the Daryl Cooper and these people. I mean it was a complete pseudo science. It was just insane. I mean, we're going to get rid of the Jews because they're a unmentioned group of people. But in Western Europe, where they're fully assimilated and they're not, they're more affluent than Eastern Europe, we know who they are, but we can't tell who they are because they're smart, they look like us. So we're going to have to put a star. And a lot of Nazis said, well, wait a minute. If we put stars on their coat, then we're admitting that we can't tell the difference between a Jew and what happens if some of us have. And so they said, well, we'll have Nazi genealogist. And if you think your great grandfather is Jewish, we're going to have an appeals court where you can admit and confess, but you can say the Jewish blood did not manifest itself in you. But the whole point I'm making is de facto the idea you had to identify Western Jews was an admission you couldn't tell the difference between an Aryan and a Jew only in Eastern Europe, when you still had traditional Jewish dress, beards and, you know, the ghettos of poverty did it. And then they didn't really need the stars to the same degree because they were easily identifiable by their rituals and their more traditional dress. But all of Nazism is kind of a gobbledygook and.
- [49:55]
C
Okay, so, okay, can you tell me where capitalism plays into all of this? I always thought capitalism sort of meant this is a system based on meritocracy. You work hard, you can achieve anything, you're incentivized. But then the system kind of gets rigged by the billionaire class and they get a hold of the government and they rig the rules and then people get disgruntled and then they go over to socialists like Mom, Donnie, because the system doesn't work for them.
- [50:27]
B
Yes, capitalism is. I mean, we used to think that capitalism didn't develop really fully until the Industrial revolution, but it's in the ancient world. Athens had a monetized economy, profit and loss. It was very sophisticated. We know that now, much more so than everybody anybody thought. But basically, Adam Smith kind of first explained self interest as good. In other words, everybody has a self interest in doing well, right? And the people who have more talent or the better health or greater inheritance have advantages and they can do great things by. You know, you can have Henry Kaiser, Henry Ford, Carnegie, if they're allowed to express themselves. And then you have competition. And there's two types of competition. There is socialist competition, which is envy. So if you're in Britain and you see a guy with a Rolls Royce, you want to go kick it. Or there's emulative, Emulative envy. So if you're in the United States and you see somebody with a nice Tesla, you walk over and say, if you're poor, my gosh, how did you get that? Tell me how to do it. Did you loan it? I'd like to get one just like it. You must be successful so I can learn from you. I want what you have. And so what the capitalist system tries to do in theory is encourage the good envy and allow all of these personal. You want a Steve Jobs, you want a Bill Gates, you want all these people, Elon. And you want to express themselves and make money, but you don't really care about how much money they have. All you care about is the people below have a seal, a ceiling or a floor, I should say. So you then have a tax system where you have, you know, entitlements. I went to the store. I'm in a very poor area of Fresno County. I'd say of the first 10 people in line and the two lines of groceries, I was the only one that paid with a non EBT card. And when I go out in the parking lot, I would say their cars were as good or better than mine. So they can say, oh, whatever we want. But we have been, because of capitalism, we have been able to achieve a level of prosperity. The wealthiest black people in the world per capita are American, African Americans. 12% of the population have a greater GDP than any country in Africa. Any of them. They're the most successful people in the black world that we know of. The 2 million Arabs that live in Israel have a higher standard of living than any other people outside the Gulf and they have a higher life expectancy of anybody outside the Gulf. I say the Gulf because that's an aberration. Because the oil money.
- [53:30]
C
Right, of course.
- [53:31]
B
And, and that's because it's a capitalist system. And it, it assume. It doesn't try to say people are not greedy. It does not try to say they don't try to cheat. It doesn't say they try to build houses they don't need. It accepts that. But what it tries to do is to control the excesses so they don't impoverish the poor. And more importantly, that there's competition between these people so that they're always trying to think of a better way to do something. A car that has more battery life than the. And that helps Everybody, Right, I get it. And, and everybody said, well, it's greedy, it's pessimistic, yes, but it can control it in a way that helps the poor and the middle class. And if you try to stop those people and liquidate them or kill them and control it, you're saying that you can outthink the market. So if you have a podcast right now, you have an audience because you are able to express yourself, you understand the podcast market and you've developed you. And you know better. And I have pot. I know better than the Ministry of Information that says, jillian, I'm going to give you this little market share and this is what you're going to say, and I'm going to regulate you. And Victor, you're over here and you do this and you know that's not going to work because they're not going to listen to you and you're not going to be able to succeed or fail and then learn from it, of course.
- [55:01]
C
Okay, so now you got a bunch of kids that are jealous of the Tesla, and for some reason they don't feel that they can earn that Tesla, admittedly, it is getting harder, you know, and now you've got AI coming, and that's gonna take jobs and all the mom and pop places. So many of those are gone because of things like Amazon. And I've been guilty myself of ordering from Amazon. I'm like, I don't wanna wait a week for that. I don't want that to be a pain in the butt to return. This is so much easier. I'm just gonna get it on Amazon. I get free shipping. So it's as though all of the wealth just keeps being siphoned off to that 1%, and the system is seemingly no longer really working that well. And now these kids feel like they can't earn the Tesla and they're pissed and they're envious and they go over to Mom Donnie's way of thinking. And now I think, apparently they just got a new. A socialist mayor in Seattle. Some woman, I had her name written down that no one's talking about. Katie Wilson. Omar Forte almost got the gig in Minneapolis, but he was crooked, I guess, and they busted him. So the DNC or the Democratic Party withdrew their nomination. But this is coming. So now what happens? Because they're pointing to places like, you know, Europe and Norway and whatever, all these countries where they get health care and everybody's happy and, and, and it's hard to argue with that. But all I usually.
- [56:30]
B
Usually people who are Socialist are disaffected. They live in areas that are too socialist. For example, a young person, there's 4 million people a year. Leave the blue state paradigm. I'm talking Chicago Min. S. They go to red states, Tennessee. And that shouldn't happen because they were on the this. They inherited the old Confederacy. They struggled with Jim Crow, they struggled segregation. Their economies were agrarian, they were backward. For centuries, the left, the northern states and cities were enlightened. They were wealthy. That was where the industrial. Not now, because all of them have gone socialist. And so people say to themselves, I can buy a house easier in Texas than in northern, than New York or California. Why? Because their traditions allow less regulation, less zoning. And if I want to make a development, I don't have to go through 25 different things. If I want to build an apartment building in New York, I don't have a government. I have a government guy that comes and says, you can only charge $2,000. It's going to be regulated. You think, well, here's Mr. Mandela. You don't know anything. You've never been in business. Here's how much it is to get the lot. Here's how much it is to pay the union. Here's how much I have to get the Sheetrock. It won't pencil out. And I. I have to be able to charge. And if I'm charging too much and you let everybody do this, another guy will build something and he'll say, I figured out something cheaper, so I'm going to undercut him. And that will lower the price and make it affordable. That's the theory of capitalism versus socialism. It says that all these individual people are brighter than Mandami, a big, you know, brain saying, I'm going to pick you and you and do this. So they're. Why are they angry? Because the housing market in New York, like California, is highly regulated. It's. It's zoned, and it rewards a particular type of person who was able to buy that house under a different auspices. That is, until the last 30 or 40 years, they were not so socialist. California, if you go along the C.O. i, I can give you one example. In 1971, I went to UC Santa Cruz with two brothers. It just opened and my parents didn't have a lot of money. But they said, you know what? It would be really good if we bought a house. You three guys could live there and then you could rent it out and pay. So a house in Fresno was $20,000. A house in Santa Cruz, you're not going to Believe this. Right next to the campus was $24,000. And there were no rules about development. And we bought. My parents had $3,000 down and the mortgage was 5%. And we had $160 mortgage. And we had two renters and paid, charged them $80 each. And then we did it. That house we kept on, okay, since that period of building houses. They stopped all building in Santa Cruz. And who did that? The wealthy people that had beautiful homes. They said, we, we don't want to go down the coast. We don't want these people. Let them stay in Gilroy or Santa. We're not going to touch this. That Same house is 1100 square feet. That's all it is. I just gave it to my daughter. I kept it. You know much what the market value was? 1.6 million.
- [60:12]
C
I was going to say 2 million. I was going to go for 2,000 a square foot.
- [60:15]
B
Could ever. Who could ever buy. Who could ever buy that?
- [60:17]
C
That's right.
- [60:18]
B
Who could ever. And she has no money at all. She can hardly maintain it. I. So my point is, if they had just let things, you know, open up and had competition and not. I have another friend who's a builder and I said, why is your house is so small? He said, I have to hire a cameraman to film every aspect of every house I build. Because when I put a person in there, they're going to say that the door didn't shut and they're going to sue me and say I didn't follow the code. And then I can show them the film where I'm building it, right? But he said, that is seven, $8,000 to have a cameraman film all that for the life of the building and the construction and zoning. But Mandami, you know, he knows that, but he's not going to do that. The other thing is, why are people so wealthy compared to recently around the millennium? Most people who were capitalists, if you look at the forbes or Fortune 400, say in 1970, I did it the other day. Most of those fortunes were in construction, assembly, mining, farming, transportation. And in equivalent dollars, you might have had a few billionaires like the Rockefeller family. The Mellon inherited wealth, right? But when you, when you opened up under globalization and you had instant technology, communications, and you had new markets, it wasn't 250 million Americans in 1970. It was 6 billion people in 2000. And there were particular fields of commerce that tapped into that audience. Law, tech, banking, insurance, media, academia. You could put a Stanford campus and tap into Saudi Arabia. You could have Citibank in South Africa, you could have Apple in China. And so they had a consumer market of $7 billion. So this little Silicon Valley. When I was in graduate school at Stanford, I would see these guys, they would come on the Stanford campus. I remember Steve Jobs spoke. They were like, nobody. And then all of a sudden, they created these wonderful products that everybody wanted. Not in the United States, but they had the money and they had the knowledge and the communications to get a laptop or an iPhone. Like today, the market capitalization of Silicon Valley is $11 trillion. It's never been bigger. But on the flip side, if you were a farmer, if you were a miner, if you were a logger, if you were a construction guy, if you made furniture, these. This same system said, well, I can take the design and put it in. Vietnam put it in. I can offshore outsource it. So anybody that had muscular labor, I can tell you on farming, my twin brother went broke and my cousin went broke because suddenly they had grapes. And we used to get a pretty good price for grapes. And then the next thing you knew, some corporation had 20,000 acres in Chile, 40,000 in Peru, a hundred thousand. And all of a sudden this foreign stuff came in, competed, and that was hyper capitalism, but it was laissez faire and crony capitalism, too.
- [63:44]
C
Can we, Sorry, can you explain laissez faire and crony capitalism? Because this is where it seems like it gets corrupted and then everybody goes over to socialism.
- [63:52]
B
Laissez faire capitalism said, there's no regulation at all. So I debated Milton Friedman once, and he said. I said, we have an open border and people are coming in here and they're undercutting illegally human wages, and we have no control. And he said, victor, the market will adjudicate. We had a little debate at a restaurant in San Francisco. I said, the market will adjudicate. What do you mean? He said, well, wages will fall, it'll get down to $1 an hour, and then people won't come because the market will say that it's no better. And I said, yeah, but we'll be down to Mexico's level, and people's lives will be wiped out. So when we were raised, I was farming raisins. The price was 500, $1400 a ton. Cost of production, a thousand. 1983. I. I liked Reagan, but he opened the borders. No, I mean, there was free trade, but not fair trade. So all of a sudden the EU was formed, and they said, we're going to subsidize EU raisins at $400 a ton. In other words, they were going to put them on the world market. And we were charging 1400 and they were charging 1300 and the government was giving the farmer four or five hundred dollars a subsidy to get market share. So we told a guy came from the Reagan administration to Fresno. I was only, gosh, I was about 26. And the people asked me to speak on behalf. So I went up and I said, you're destroying us. And he's. You know what he said to me, this minor official from the raisin administrative crony capitalist federal committee that regulated the ragus and industry, he said, this is good for you. And I said, why? And he said, it'll make so much competition that will weed the get the chaff from the wheat, the guys who cannot make it at 400. I said, nobody can make it at 400.
- [65:46]
C
Just like we can't compete with China. Right? It's like the same game.
- [65:49]
B
You cannot make it.
- [65:50]
C
God, all these lights are going on. I'm sorry.
- [65:52]
B
And he says, yes, yes, this is laissez for a cow. You can make it. I said, no. And he said, you know what? The price will go down in the store. I said, it won't. The middleman will just put the consumers used to paying $2 a pound, 4,000 a ton. They will keep the price and make a bigger profit and we'll get nothing. And then he said, well, they won't be able to afford it because it's not capitalist Europe. I said, they are not spending any money on defense. We are defending them and they will use that savings to subsidize their agriculture, to dump product here, just like China's doing with industrial. And you're going to destroy the interior of this country. I said that.
- [66:31]
C
Okay, so this is America first, essentially.
- [66:34]
B
Yes, exactly. So Trump comes in and he says, I am a capitalist, but I'm not a laissez faire capitalist. I'm going to have certain regulations to make it fair. So Europe, you are not defending yourself. And we're paying the budget and too much and a greater percent. You start paying 2% and you're not. If you subsidize and you dump food in here, our cars, we're going to do it to you. And everybody who's a laissez faire capitalist said, this is not pure capitalism.
- [67:04]
C
Right.
- [67:05]
B
So that. And then crony capitalism is kind of like then a tech baron goes to, you know, he goes to the government and he gives a lot of money to a particular candidate left and Right. And he says I don't want this particular company competing with me.
- [67:27]
C
He rigs the game.
- [67:28]
B
Yes. And. Or I don't, I want to absorb that company and I don't want antitrust legislation to. So. And that's crony capitalism.
- [67:40]
C
So hold on, hold on, hold on boss, sorry, hold on a second. So I, I think I'm fault. So crony capitalism is all the way over here on our continuum. Communism is all the way over here on our continuum. The more the pendulum swings towards crony.
- [67:54]
B
Capitalism and laissez faire capitalism is way over. That's just a lot Darwinianism, you just let anybody go do whatever you want if. And a laissez faire capitalist will say well why do we need regulations? And I, and I would say to them, well what happens if you sell soup and you shorted out and million cans of soup have botulism and the crop laser fair capitalism will say well people will find out about it. And once they find out about it, they won't buy it, will they? And you say well they'll be dead in the process. But a laissez faire capitalist believes that capitalism always in every aspect self corrects. It does, but it does with human. So what our system of modified free market.
- [68:41]
C
But seems like it's self correcting over to mom, Donnie. That seems like it's swinging too far the other way.
- [68:47]
B
And that's because a couple of things. Number one, globalists have made so much money with these international markets and they have such ostentatious lifestyles that people in New York see these things and they think I have no, I would never be that way. Number two, we sold this country on the idea that everybody has to have a college degree and we started subsidizing that 1.7 trillion in student loans. So Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton. If you look at their tuition, it has gone up higher than the rate of inflation every year. The number of administrators per students at Stanford is almost one to one. Center for Gender and Rhetoric Program on Diversity all this nothing to do with teaching. So what happened is all these students bought into the university propaganda that if you get a college degree you are entitled to letters after your name, B A M A J, D. And you're going to be set and we're going to charge you for four years. We're going to charge you a quarter million dollars but it won't matter because you can take a loan out from the federal government and they will guarantee to pay us. And you say well why don't you guarantee it you have a billion dollars plus. No, no, the federal government. So then the student takes out the loan. They graduate. And they also know that certain things are easier. Environmental studies, women's studies, sociology, psychology, you know, not liberal arts. Yes, classic. Yeah, they, they major in these things because they're the easiest thing. They take $300,000, 200,000 in debt, and then they have to pay. And it's not cheap, it's 6, 7%. And then they go out in the marketplace and they say, my parents, my mom was a doctor of that generation. My dad was an administrator. I have a degree, an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore. I have an MA from Columbia. But I also owe $300,000 in debt. And the market says, what do you want me to do with you? You say that you need $4,000, 5,000 to rent apartment A, one bedroom in New York. You need such and such to get on the bus. You need. I can't afford to do that. And now I have AI and I have all these things that can replace you. And so what it is. A lot of the people who voted for Mandami were two types, three types. If you look at the sociology of his support, they were the subsidized poor people who wanted free stuff. Obviously they were the foreign born, as he said, the immigrants.
- [71:25]
C
Yep.
- [71:25]
B
I think 70%. And they were the upwardly mobile, wannabe white Asian professionals from wealthy or middle class families who were very well educated and felt that their education per se meant that they deserved a certain type of lifestyle because they were smarter and better educated. But they didn't ever look at the market. They didn't look at the level of debt they were accruing. So then they got angry and said, I want to be Samson and tear the whole system down and vote for the soul. And who didn't vote for him? It was probably your Puerto Rican taxi cab driver, it was your Italian American small merchant. Anybody really had to make it and was getting killed by regulations and was dealing with theft, looting, insurance, all that. And so that's how he got elected. And that's how socialism comes. And he will destroy that if they let him do what he wants to do, and he is stupid enough to do it, that he will destroy the system. And then somebody like a Giuliani will come in and say, we got to clean up the city. We've got to do this.
- [72:35]
C
Okay.
- [72:36]
B
That's how it works.
- [72:38]
C
I thought for sure we would have been there right now after de Blasio, though. But then, you know, well, we have.
- [72:44]
B
We, we pretty much have. If you look at the amount of capital that's left, I think almost a million Jewish residents have left New York in the last. It's no longer a third Jewish. They're mostly in Tennessee and Florida. And the same thing's happening in California. We lose 300,000. It's what can't go on, as Herb State sign said won't go on. And they're losing capital, they're losing population. And when you have a Alvin Bragg as a prosecutor who won't prosecute crime and you have a communist basically as a mayor, he's more so than de Blasio. And we know where it's going. It's going to be like. First time I ever went to New York, I was 18. I was at Yale University in a summer program. I took a train. I never been out of California. I took a train to. And they'd let me off in Grand Central Station. I walked to Times Square. Oh, it was like it was 1971. And it was crime, it was filthy dirty. There was prostitution everywhere. It was the most horrific thing I'd ever seen. And then I went back the next time, I think 20 years later, and I, I went to a restaurant and I walked to the hotel. Two miles at 12 at night. It was perfectly safe. It was clean. Everything was. The sidewalks were crammed. Everything was going great. That was under Giuliani and Bloomberg. And when it gets really good, then people get really naive and said, well, why do we have to stop such and stop and search? Or why do we say that you can't have squishy guys with, you know, doing your windshield at the, the red light? Or why do we. Why do we torment that they can do that? Because capitalism and conservative government made things work and prosper, and that gave a level margin of error. And then people cyclically think, well, I'm better than this and to help everybody. And then they start down the capital, the socialist and goes to hyper and then it collapses. And then you get a. A reformer.
- [74:54]
C
I see. Okay, one more thing I want to look at when I, When I now I, I understand a bit more regarding the incentives on tariffs and renegotiating. And I kind of thought, well, we're trying to reshore jobs and we want more national security. All that made sense. I'd heard, like, oh, we're subsidizing them so they're able to be more prosperous. But I didn't really understand how it worked.
- [75:16]
B
Yeah, well, very quickly it's always moderation. So you want to Protect your native industries with tariffs, but not to the effect, not to the extent that the domestic industry then gets fat and soft and says, well, I don't have to innovate. I don't have to match that brilliant product from Holland that's coming in because they're protecting me. That's what the Latin America and Africa does. And then you, you have a declining.
- [75:43]
C
No competition then.
- [75:44]
B
Yes, that's the key. You want competition from foreign goods, but you want to insist that they play under the same rules that you do. They're not subsidized.
- [75:53]
C
This sounds like a very delicate dance.
- [75:55]
B
It is. It is. It is. I think Scott Bassan is a very good guy. He understands it.
- [76:01]
C
He has seemed people I, I respect. Respect. Like him. Like yourself.
- [76:05]
B
Yeah. And I know Kev. I've known Kevin Hassert. He's from the who. He's a very smart guy, and he's one of the chief economic advisors. And there's people in that administration that understand you have to have a balance. And Trump, for all the criticism of the tariffs, when you actually look at what he, he sees them as art of the deal, shock them and then down negotiate downward to parody. And that's what he's trying to do.
- [76:30]
C
Does he succeed?
- [76:31]
B
Yeah, I don't know if he is going to. It's, it's very tricky because you get, you get the people. The laissez faire on the right says you shouldn't have any tariffs. You get the left, who was for tariffs. And now he says that he's, I think he's doing it about his.
- [76:47]
C
Now I understand why. Yeah, I, I, I, Because I've actually interviewed people who are, I guess, laissez faire capitalists, and they're like, no, no, just leave it. Leave trade alone. You don't understand. And I work on Wall street and listen, I respect these people very much.
- [77:02]
B
But now I, they're right in the sense that if they lived in heaven, it would be perfect system. But the Chinese produce things at a loss. They dump them here at a loss so they can get market share. Once they get market share, take rare earths. 1980, we made all of the rare earths basically in the world, the finished product. China comes along, looks at that particular industry, copies. It sends our students or people over here, they, they copy it, how to process it, how to mine it. They go back, they create it on their own shores, and then they say, how much do they charge for this particular, you know, rare earth? We'll go at, we'll do 20% cheaper. Our industries buy the cheaper product after 30 years. We've forgotten how to mine it, we've forgotten how to refine it. And then China says, ah, we have a monopoly now. This is what we're going to charge. And that's.
- [78:00]
C
And they have us over a barrel.
- [78:02]
B
Yeah. So you want free trade, but you don't want to allow others to dump product, manipulate the currency, have asymmetrical tariffs. The reason that Donald Trump has been somewhat successful with tariffs and the Wall Street Journal was wrong when they said he would cause a depression or collapse because we had no idea how much subsidies, indirect and direct, these entities were getting. These foreign suppliers, they had a profit margin of a certain percentage. So when Donald Trump finally negotiated, we're going to charge you 20% subsidies, everybody said, oh, they won't do it. But a lot of them did it because they, they knew they were making, say, 30%. So they were going to pay. They were not going to make the same amount of profit, but they were going to make enough profit that this huge market in terms of quantity was surely worth it. So what they're trying to find out right now is as we shock them and bring them to the table with these exorbitant tariffs that the Wall Street Journal and everybody trashes, for what level can we negotiate downward so that they don't dump product and take away jobs, but we don't cause a trade war or we don't make our own producers inefficient and, you know, lazy. So that, And I think it's somewhere between 10 and 20%, given the amount of money these people were making. And then we says, we're going to use it for symmetry. If they have a tariff on us, we're going to have a tariff on them. Them. And that's why Canada is so angry right now, because, you know, they, they've had a lot of asymmetrical ride.
- [79:45]
C
Yeah, you know, it's, it must make you so frustrated that so many people have an opinion on things they can't even begin to understand. That must make you insane.
- [79:58]
B
Yeah. I mean, just, especially when they get, you know, when you're at an airport, somebody comes up and screams at you, or you're, you know, you get a. I've had my house swatted with sheriffs that said, oh, you have an armed intruder here with a gun. We have to come into your house. I've had, I've gone to my bank account and I. Mr. Hansen, you don't have any money in your checking. How about My bet. No, all of your money's gone. Well, what happened? Somebody hacked it last night at 2 in the morning. So it's, it's very volatile right now, and it's very important that I think, I try not. When I write and disagree vehemently. I'm pretty tough, but I try never to be ad hominem.
- [80:42]
C
No, you're never ad hominem.
- [80:44]
B
Yeah, you don't want to do that.
- [80:46]
C
Like, you don't shock people down. You don't launch into personal attacks. You attack their ideas brilliantly and you have the knowledge.
- [80:54]
B
I, I used to know Dick Cheney a little bit when I taught the Naval Academy, and I liked him. I liked Liz Cheney. I didn't. I disagreed with him on their vehement. And you flip about Trump, but when he died, I thought he was a good person. And I don't hate Liz Cheney. Tucker the other day said he apologized. To his credit, he said if I had Liz Cheney as a child, I'd kill myself. Then he said he thought about it and said that was a wrong thing. I'm glad he apologized, but I think you don't want to get to that point. Liz Cheney is a very nice person. Dick Cheney is a nice person. I have nothing against. I criticize Nancy Pelosi. I think it's. She made a lot of money, she's done a lot of damage, but she's not a bad person. I don't want her to be ill. I want her to be healthy.
- [81:39]
C
I don't want her to be ill. But I do think she's a bad person. I think, well, you know what? I'm is a bad person and I have to stop calling him names. He's the one person that I feel the same way.
- [81:50]
B
There's something about him. When I look at California as a lifelong native, fifth generation, the same house, and I think what California was, yes, what he did not do, incompetence, but from out of malice, greed with greed.
- [82:05]
C
Sociopath.
- [82:06]
B
I look at that. I look at that cadre of Bay Area, Nancy Pelosi, Camilla Harris, Jerry Brown, the late Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, all of them. Gavin Newsom. They all were very, very wealthy. They were very privileged, and they did policies that hurt a lot of people, but never, never themselves.
- [82:27]
C
Right, Right.
- [82:28]
B
Never themselves. They were always exempt. And that's what I don't like about them. But I don't dislike them personally. I don't want them.
- [82:37]
C
I don't either. I agree with you completely. One last thing. If I was to levy an attack On Trump, the one thing that we talked about, he. He does seem to practice crony capitalism. It's like, these are my. I like.
- [82:52]
B
Do you think I said that on my podcast, that I'm very worried because he had a very good argument that the Biden family and all of his associates were shaking down foreign governments as Hunter Biden.
- [83:09]
C
Yeah.
- [83:10]
B
So what I would advise him, and I've said it. I don't know if I don't think he himself knows exactly what's going on, but I think there are people around him that are making deals, especially in the Middle East.
- [83:23]
C
Oh, yeah.
- [83:24]
B
That are extremely. They would never. I just asked this question, would X and Y be this wealthy this quickly if they didn't have connections? And are they that adept in commerce to make that kind of money or have that kind of influence? So I hope that there they reform themselves because heaven forbid, if they lose the house, the first week in January, they will try to impeach Donald Trump. The second week, they will have subpoenas for every single one of those people, and they're going to bring them in and rake them over the coal. So I hope that they can just say, we have to be better than the Bidens. We've got to be perfect because we're controversial. Donald Trump is a controversial person. Person. And he had five lawfare courtroom attacks on him.
- [84:13]
C
Right.
- [84:14]
B
And he should know that they will try to destroy him and don't give them any opening. So be better than divine when you're doing business. Do not have any conflict of interest whatsoever.
- [84:27]
C
There is a myopia there, though, that I'm seeing across the right to a large extent. And it's like, no, no, we need to be unified. I'm like, no, no, you need to call out your crazy and disavow them. You need to behave better because you are going to lose. Then this pendulum is going to swing this way.
- [84:49]
B
And I don't think they understand that. I did a pause on. They don't understand platforming and cancellation. So when they say people on the right. I don't cancel anybody. I don't either. But that's very different than offering a platform to. To grow an audience that is racist, anti Semitic, dangerous. And what they don't understand is there is a reason why Nick Fuentes is popular, because he takes this disaffected cohort of young white males who suffer from dei, affirmative action, globalization, and then he feeds them certain reasons why they're that way that aren't accurate. Usually the Jews did Jews, right?
- [85:33]
C
Yes. The glory turned into the Jews. Constantin Kissing just said that. And I was like, ah, yes, that's it.
- [85:40]
B
But if you put them on your platform like Tucker did, then you better be able to cross examine them, because there's two things you should be aware of. They're not stupid. They come on your show, they're going to be smooth, articulate, charismatic, and they're not going to reveal themselves. So when Nick Fuentes went on Tucker, he didn't talk about all the horrific things he said about J.D. vance's wife.
- [86:07]
C
Right.
- [86:07]
B
He didn't say all the things he said about Jews. He just said, I like Stalin. Oh, oh, you did. But he came across.
- [86:15]
C
You must have died. You must have died. I was like, wait, what?
- [86:23]
B
I know it. So he was rebuilt. And after that was over, his audience has, has doubled and it will triple the next time he's going on there. And William F. Buckley, you know, I always grew up watching Fireline, and he was kind of pretentious and all that, but he did believe in giving not a platform, but an avenue to cross examine people who were left and right dangerous. So we had the rapist convict, Black Panther, Eldridge Cleaver on, and he had the eugenicist, Nutty Shockley on, but he had George Wallace, the segregationist governor. And you go watch those things. And he was taxed to the limit. These people were not stupid. They were charismatic, they lied, they tried to soft. You should watch him with George Wallace. Well, Mr. Wallace, you're a product of a segregationist society that does not allow African American. Well, you're going to say that, aren't you? But you know what? You ran for mayor and I got more black votes than you did because I love black people. But you don't let black people. Well, that's just a northerner. And I tell you something, right now, I can go up north and there's going to be more northerners that will vote for me than Southerns will vote for you. And he was, he didn't look at, he looked at the camera. He was smooth and it was like Sourman and Lord of the Rings. He had this dangerous voice. And so if you're going to put him on there, I all I would say, I use, I, I used to really get along with Tucker. I was on his show. He was so nice to me. But if you're going to put him on there, you got to be. You're going to. He's going to be a formidable opponent. He's going to mask his true hatred and he's going to try to win people over. So you got to be like Buckley. And even then, if you have the Buckley skills, it's an iffy thing to do. If I put Nick Fuentes on here, I would have to prep and prep and I wouldn't do it because I have a feeling that I might not be up to it. And it would. It would further his agenda. Yes. That's not canceling. That's just not giving him an opportunity.
- [88:31]
C
It's not normal.
- [88:33]
B
You're really getting in dangerous territory when you bring those people over, especially if you agree with some of their views or you want to amplify their audience. I think that's what happens.
- [88:45]
C
You are just magnificent. I am so grateful for your time and your knowledge. I always learn so much when I listen to you. And having the extraordinary luxury of being able to sit here and ask you questions is not a gift that they take for granted. Where can people find you? Where can they get more?
- [89:03]
B
You can go to victorhansen.com and we redid our podcast. It's now Victor Hanson in His Own Words and it's at the Daily Signal.
- [89:11]
C
And which books would you recommend of yours that people go to based on our conversation today?
- [89:17]
B
And just in general, the latest book I wrote was the End of Everything. It's about why civilizations are wiped out in history and it has case studies. And I wrote a book two years earlier called the Dying Citizen why Citizenship Is Evaporating. You might like that. That's at my website, vicar hansen.com too.
- [89:36]
C
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed the podcast, please like, comment, subscribe and share. And make sure to let me know what guests you want to see on in the future.
- [89:51]
A
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