A (3:28)

He's. Yeah, I actually just wrote down my top presidents and he is probably. Yeah, I think I put him at least in the top six or seven. He's up there. One of the knocks for Reagan right now is he was so valorized on the right for the last 20, 25 years that he became this kind of mythical, legendary figure. And so then there was a correction to that. And some people pointed out that there were bad aspects of the Reagan presidenc, even a little bit of naivete from Reagan. The clearest example being the issue that we're all talking about right now, which is mass illegal immigration. Reagan signed the amnesty. Now, he signed the amnesty because he thought he was dealing with the Democrats in good faith, Democrats who controlled the Congress. And he said, okay, I'll give an amnesty to this relatively small number of illegals if you close the border. And they said, yeah, sure thing, Ron. You bet. We got it, Gipper. And then what happens? They got the amnesty and we never got the secured border. So there's been a little correction to the legacy of Reagan, but he really was a great president. He really did more or less win the Cold War. He really revitalized the economy of the nation after the hideous stagflation under Jimmy Carter. And he also revitalized the spirit of the nation because the nation had been reeling after. Well, after Jimmy Carter made us all feel ashamed and after Jerry Ford, who in many ways was a patriotic president because he did the right thing and pardoned Richard Nixon, but it killed his political career. And it just made us feel this kind of malaise after Nixon, who was wrongfully chased out of the presidency. The downfall of Richard Nixon was an op by people who never forgave him for being right about Alger Hiss, a communist who was at the high levels of the State Department, helped found the United Nations. You know, the lore goes way, way, way back, but even that was a national trauma. Before him, LVJ was absolutely awful. Before him, JFK was assassinated and was a pretty bad president even before he was assassinated. So, you know, basically since Eisenhower, you hadn't really felt great about yourself as an American. And then in comes Reagan. And probably the most important part of his legacy is he made America feel good and moral and strong again. He made America great again. And which is why, actually, that phrase was from the Reagan campaign and Trump very wisely borrowed it for his campaign.

B (5:48)

Right. People don't realize that it was a Reagan phrase. Everyone thinks it was just like this Trump bumper sticker that came out of nowhere. So you hit on a couple things that I wanted to address. And actually, if people want more, more on Richard Nixon and what you just referenced, I did a great show. We just taped it. It'll be up in a day or two with Jeffrey Tucker from the Brownstone Institute, who goes all into that. But let's talk about the fact that Reagan started on the other side politically. I know a little something about that that is part of what has made Trump's MAGA movement so big these days. You like those kind of stories when Democrats, particularly from California, who are in Hollywood, I mean, he was a big Hollywood star when they come around.

A (6:27)

Yes, those are some of my favorite stories, actually. And it was important too, for Reagan as part of this national healing after the tumultuous 60s, after the trauma of Nixon's resignation after Carter, it was very helpful to have a guy who Americans really felt, heard them and understood their condition. And Reagan had that famous line, a line that's been echoed by some of my friends since then, which is, I didn't leave my party. My party left me. Ronald Reagan, in some ways made peace with the advance of liberalism of the 20th century. Yes, he fought against it. Yes, he changed course a little bit, you know, for America. Yes, he was the fulfillment of the post war conservative movement founded by guys like William F. Buckley, Jr. And Frank Meyer and Burnham and these other guys. But he also kind of made peace with liberalism. No more did the conservatives try to repeal the New Deal. Ronald Reagan liked the New Deal. He was a New Deal. Democrat. And would the country have been better off if we hadn't had the New Deal and had FDR not bullied the Supreme Court threatened to essentially blow up that part of the constitutional order if they didn't give it to him? Yeah, maybe we would have been better off. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. You know, this is all interesting hypothetical history, but Reagan was a man of the moment and a man of political reality. And so he said, okay, we're gonna keep what is best of or what at least we're stuck with from liberalism, but we're going to roll back the parts that, that are rolled backable, you know, and that we don't need to deal with it and that are really hurting us. And then ultimately Ronald Reagan was a cold warrior. I mean, that is what he focused on. And so Reagan as the culmination of that post war conservative movement made a lot of sense because that movement included libertarians and traditionalist conservatives and disaffected Democrats, especially Warhawk Democrats. And why, you know, these are three groups that are quite disparate, they don't agree on basically anything, but they formed this three legged stool of the Reagan coalition of the conservative movement. Why? Because they all had a common enemy.

B (8:32)

Which by the way is similar to what Trump has done now. But we can shell that.

A (8:35)

Exactly. Yeah. I mean Trump in some ways is just Reagan for the 21st century, for better and for worse. You know, he's kind of Reagan on steroids. But, but the, the fact that you could have the libertarian say, look, we hate the collectivism of the Soviet Union and you'd have the traditionalists say we hate the atheism and the modernism of the Soviet Union. And you could have these Warhawk Democrats who kind of become the neocons, say we hate the imperial ambitions of the Soviet Union. And Reagan could unite these guys. And part of the way he could unite them is precisely what you're talking about. He had been on the other side. He had a real appeal to people. He was obviously an extraordinary communicator. He was the great communicator. And the fact that he had been a Hollywood star, his enemies tried to degrade him as a B movie actor. He was a big, big Hollywood star and a leading man. So that obviously reaches out to people in a way that we didn't see again until Donald Trump, who was a big television star, big reality TV star, really reaches out to the common man. But the other thing that made Reagan so effective is that Reagan was the head of the Screen Actors Guild. So you Know, everybody focuses on the fact that he was really good on radio and film, but he also knew how to deal with actual communists, first of all, in Hollywood. And he knew how to make deals, he knew how to get things done. This is another part that you see an echo of in Trump, because Trump is this great communicator from his time on TV and tabloids and film, but he also is actually a businessman, and he's had a very successful business career, no matter how much the left wants to degrade that. And so he too can make deals. And so while both of those figures are seen as cowboys, radicals, I mean, everything they said about Trump, they said about Reagan in 1980 and in the late 70s. He's a Nazi, he's a white supremacist, he's mainstreaming the worst bigoted parts of the right. I mean, all this stuff, you can find it. But what's funny is whatever you want to say about their radical vision or, you know, their rhetoric, what really distinguishes them is they could reach out to that other side, the disaffected voter, the person who might have been on a Democrat who said, my party's left me. I'm going to come on over here. They built up a new coalition that ended up winning the country. In the case of Ronald Reagan, you have 1984. He wins 49 states. Freaking Minnesota. It's always Minnesota. Minnesota's the holdout because of Mondale, though. I once spoke to the guy who ran Reagan 84, and he thought that there was funny business and they might have won Minnesota, too. They just didn't want to look like sore winners. It was Ed Rollins. But with Trump, you know, he ends up right.

B (11:07)

You gotta. You gotta let that one go.

A (11:09)

You don't want a 49 winner, okay, but. But then you have Trump. You know, obviously he comes back. He's booted out of office for various and sundry reasons. Some may be unjustified, but in any case, he comes back, he wins the popular vote. So even that, the fact that the reelection is even bigger than the first election shows you. Well, there's real momentum here. And look, we hope that will continue with Trump. But when it comes to Reagan, Reagan really set the stage for a quarter century of growth. Every good thing that happened under the Clinton presidency, really, you can trace back to Ronald Reagan. The George Bush presidency. H.W. bush was effectively Ronald Reagan's third term. It wasn't really until 911 that you see America now on a new sort of course. But the consequences of Reagan are almost impossible to Overstate.

B (11:58)

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A (13:54)

Yes.

B (13:55)

Or Trump's trying to bring it back, but we've gone through.

A (13:57)

Yeah, we have to be afraid that nostalgia is history after a few drinks. So when you remember the late 80s into the early 90s, yet look, there was some bad stuff. Massive crime surges, especially in the early 90s. You had basically peak of American divorce, you had abortion hitting record highs. I mean there was bad stuff going on. However, some of what we remember actually did happen. And I find now when I talk to zoomers, they're so quick to denigrate Reagan now because, you know, he's been exalted for so long and they're a little contrarian or they'll say, oh, you're just remembering things through rosy lenses. But no, it really was different. I'll give you one example of this from the 90s. I just sat down with this guy. I don't know if you caught it. He's a meth maxing, look smogging guy. He's actually in the clink right now. He's clink maxing right now, but his name is Clavicular and he's this kind of.

B (14:58)

Wait, wait, wait. He's. I know, I did see some of it. Wait, is he literally in the clink now?

A (15:02)

Yeah, he's jumpsuit mogging his in his cellmates because he's a jail maxer. But he. I think it was for passing a fake ID or doing drugs or whatever. You know, the guy, the guy.

B (15:13)

I must have just missed this. The guy's done some strange things. He does crystal meth to stay thin while he's like. The guy's whack job.

A (15:18)

Yeah. He said he'd prefer to vote for Newsom because he finds him sexier than Joe, man.

B (15:23)

Yeah.

A (15:24)

You know, he's a confused guy and, you know, he's really popular, I think, because it's entertaining and it's kind of reality tv. I get it. I hope the guy's life turns out okay because he's in some trouble. But he said something very illuminating to me. I was very glad I spoke to him because we were talking about the Clinton impeachment and he said, bro, he should have taken the double down pill. I said, what? He goes, he should have come out and just said, yeah, I did this with Monica Lewinsky. It was awesome. It was great. And I said, oh, well, what you don't understand is he would have been impeached and convicted and removed from office for that. And he said, no, he wouldn't have, man. No, he wouldn't. He would have survived it. And I thought, oh, this is an example of a 19 year old actually not realizing that things used to be different had Clinton had to perjure himself if he wanted to stay in office. Because both parties would have agreed at that time that if he actually just admitted to that, he would have had to be removed. That is different from today. Today you would take the double down pill. That is how it would work today. But it is different. And so, look, that's all a long word maxing way of saying some of what you remember, Dave, I think is real. There were real challenges there. But what we saw was really the culmination of a once in a nation, a once in history culmination of historical circumstances. The beginning of the information technology boom, I mean, just gave an unprecedented degree of material prosperity. The fact that we won the Cold War, we were the undisputed superpower, the fact that we had resolved some of our domestic problems, like the racial strife that you saw in the 60s and 70s really kind of petered away in the 80s, even after the AIDS crisis, Some of the sexual issues with the gay rights movement, people were kind of chill about it. You know, that wasn't really a major issue. And all of that really did exist. Some of that you have to chalk up to historical circumstances. But some of it you really can attribute to Ronald Reagan's leadership. He really brought about, to no small degree the end of the Cold War. He brought about those circumstances, and he really deserves some credit for it.

B (17:30)

Do you think it's partly because from everything I've read about him, and I've gone back and watched many of his speeches, and I've watched some of his State of the Unions, everything about him in the public sense was aspirational. Yeah. There was no sense of this isn't going to work or we're in a lot of trouble or anything else. It was, we are going to make it better. This is great. There's opportunity here. We're doing it right, you know, and a little bit of they're doing it wrong, sure. But that it was all aspirational. And nowadays it's hard for people to even accept that that might be a way to look at things.

A (18:04)

Yes. The problem is Reagan was entirely aspirational and he was real scripted. You know, he was a product of film, of the studio system.

B (18:13)

He knew how to like, he'd go on the Tonight show and he could land the line, man. And he knew when to wait for the laugh and all that perfectly.

A (18:19)

Yes. In a. That actually wouldn't play today because when Ronald Reagan goes up there, says, well, I was. I once heard of a politician who gave a speech on a pile of manure and the. The farmer said it was the first time he ever heard Republican policies on a Democrat platform. You know, it's so. It was so.

B (18:44)

Right, right.

A (18:44)

And. And that wouldn't play today. That would read as inauthentic because we live in this culture of not even reality tv. We're now living in live streaming, which is the hyper real, you know, Extreme version of reality tv. So, you know, that's why today we have Trump. You know, Trump is kind of the Reagan for our times, but, you know, Reagan really fit his era. And I think also this is why Reagan has fallen a little bit out of favor after we had put him up in the pantheon for the past 25 years. And is a recognition that you can't dig a guy up from the grave. You know, let the poor man rest, he did his part. But you can't just go back to the same old slogans of the 1980s. I think part of the reason that politicians aren't quite as aspirational in their rhetoric now is the problems have gotten worse. Ronald Reagan could minimize illegal immigration in the 1980s when there were relatively few of them and it wasn't a big problem. When you have like 20 million of them with face tattoos bringing in fentanyl, killing 75,000Americans a year, this is a different sit. And you need to get a little bit tougher. Same thing. We're no longer the unchallenged global hegemon. You know, Reagan there confident he was gonna win the Cold War and then leads to that post war peace. That's one thing. Now you have China legitimately threatening our interests. You have Russia as weakened as Russia is legitimately threatening our interests. You have Iran legitimately threatening our interests. You have to speak a little bit differently. So, yes, look, we could all take a note from Reagan on rhetoric. He was a master of churning a phrase. But we have to avoid the temptation to just go back and relive the 80s because for some of us, that was our childhood or because we recognize it as a halcyon era. It wouldn't play today. You know, there's a reason that we have Don instead of Ron today.

B (20:33)

Yeah. Do you think part of his success also was that the Democrats, even though you pointed out they kind of screwed him on amnesty, There was at least a. There was a wing of the Democrat Party. I would probably argue most of it, that, yeah, you may have. You personally may have disagreed with them, or conservatives may have disagreed with them, but they basically liked the country. They were pretty much, you know, relatively moderate. You know, this is even pre Bill Clinton Democrats, where they could go out to dinner in D.C. and enjoy each other, where now one party's gone completely insane. So Reagan had the advantage of at least, even if they were going to screw him over, they weren't all completely, completely bananas like it is now.

A (21:12)

This I think you see especially under Eisenhower. Eisenhower was courted by the Republican Party and the Democrat Party to run for president. That's talk about an amazing degree of consensus. And he was a Republican, but he's kind of a liberal, moderate Republican. And it's even difficult for us to understand what that means, because when we talk about moderation or. So when we use moderation as a dirty word, we're really thinking, I think, mostly of the culture war issues. Abortion, transgenderism, marriage, whatever. And at that time, none of those were up for debate. None of. There was no abortion debate. Just everyone agreed it was bad. Transgenderism. Could you imagine, Ike Eisenhower giving a speech? I mean, it was just completely unthinkable. And, you know, that was substantially true even up until the 1980s. So, yes, people always say that. Reagan and Tip O', Neill, you know, they'd beat each other up during the day and get a drink after work. And I think that's a little bit overstated. I don't think those guys liked each other all that much, actually. But they could do that because the Democrat Party at least had to say. At least had to pretend that they didn't want illegal immigration, that they opposed abortion, even if they publicly allowed for it. You know, they private. Personally opposed it. You know, they. They had to wave the American flag. They had. They. They wouldn't go to a rally as they would today, and wave the. The Mexican flag and burn the American flag. So there was that degree of consensus that. Getting to. Back to your first point, you say your earliest memory is Reagan getting shot. Reagan gets brought into the medical center, and the doctor is there, Giordano. I forget his first name. And he's lying there, Reagan, on the gurney. And he says, well, I hope you're a Republican. And Giordano, the doctor says, Mr. President, we're all Republicans today. And years later, I was living in New York, coincidentally, I became friends with that surgeon's son. And we were talking about this incident. He said, yeah, my dad was the surgeon who operated on Reagan, helped save his life, and said, we're all Republicans today. He goes, and I promise you, he was not a Republican. He was a Democrat. But whereas today, ICE officers, I mean, they're being told by nurses on TikTok that the nurses are gonna let him bleed out. Cops can't go into Starbucks and get a drink. Cause they're afraid they're gonna put something in their drink. So the conditions have frayed. And I think that's another reason that a little bit of the shine has come off. Reagan is. You know, ultimately, it didn't work. Ultimately, the country is worse. Reagan said America's best days are in the future. That might be true, but today things seem worse than they did 30 years ago. But I guess the answer that I would have to Reagan's detractors that way is, hey, guys, he gave us a quarter century, one of the greatest quarter centuries in American history. What more do you want from.

B (24:03)

Right. I mean, I don't buy that, whether things are worse or better or whatever. To me, that's not the argument. Because you can't blame someone who, first off, he's been dead for 20 years, but also hasn't been in office in basically 40 years. Like, he did the best he could. It would sort of be like blaming Winston Churchill for problems that London or that the Brits are having today, wouldn't it? Knowles?

A (24:24)

Anyone doing that?

B (24:24)

Wouldn't it be like that? Knowles? Oh, look, drink your drink. What about his later years? You know? No. Purely hypothetically, of course, as you drank the cyanide. This interview is over. I don't know what percentage of my audience got what just happened there, but whoever did pretty good. Sam Altman just announced that ChatGPT can now reference all your past conversations, every thought, question, idea you've ever shared. And with a former NSA director now on their board, Edward Snowden, called it a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth. We've seen this before. Alexa listens, meta tracks, everything you do. Why assume AI will be any different? And now OpenAI might even start asking for government IDs to use ChatGPT. That's where Venice AI comes in. It gives you the power of AI without giving up your privacy. It's open source, private, and runs right in your browser. No spying, no censorship, no data collection. Your chats stay encrypted and stored only on your device. Go to Venice Aidave and use code Dave for 20% off. A pro plan. That's Venice AI, Dave. Code Dave. Real AI, real privacy. You know, the later years obviously was starting to have some cognitive stuff. You know, we're just a year plus out of four years of complete cognitive failure by the President that he was even able to hide it somewhat and do it in a dignified way. And I guess it was pre Internet so people couldn't see some of those things. But even that's pretty, pretty remarkable.

A (25:54)

Yes. You know, for a long time, conservatives wanted to insist that Reagan did not have any cognitive problems, even though he was. He left office. What was it, five years before? Five or six years before he publicly came out with his Alzheimer's diagnosis. So you'd say, look, even if he didn't know about it, there would have been some early signs, just given how that disease tends to develop. However, I think the rejoinder to that is, look, maybe he did have cognitive impairment. I mean, there's one example that people often point to, which is, I think they were at the ranch and Reagan was asked some question by the press, and he just didn't have an answer. He just stared kind of blankly. And Nancy turns up to him and says, we're doing the best we can. And Reagan doesn't miss a beat. Great trained actor. He goes, we're doing the best we can. And so I think if you point to that example, you'd say, okay, look, that might have been, at the very least, a senior moment. And people have that in their 30s or 40s. So knowing what we know now, maybe there were some issues. But I think the rejoinder to the critics who say he was impaired at the end of his presidency is, you know, it was at the end of the presidency that he basically won the Cold War. So if that's Reagan impaired, you know, give me someone who is demented over the kinds of Democrat presidents we get today, whether we're talking about Joe Biden, who was quite literally demented, or Barack Obama, who had all of his faculties about him, and maybe that was actually worse.

B (27:23)

So, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall that you view as. That's the peak of the peak right there, probably.

A (27:29)

And that's a line that was written by Peter Robinson, the great Peter Robinson of uncommon knowledge. And I've talked to Peter about that line a number of times. And I said, you wrote that line. And Peter's answer is, well, Reagan wrote the line in that I was writing for him. And so he might have literally written that line. But that was a line that Reagan wanted to use. And Peter's obviously being humble about that, too. It's one of the most consequential four words in American oratorical history. However, Reagan had to fight for it. There were a lot of forces who wanted to take that line out. It was very much in keeping with his foreign policy. So I think there are many reasons to compliment Nixon and Kissinger's policies in the 60s and 70s. You know, I think they. They did do a great job for their time, But Reagan was a pivot. Reagan was a pivot away from detente sometimes. You know, sometimes he was cozying up to Gorbachev, and they were all going to agree to abolish nuclear Weapons entirely. But then at other times, he was going to saber rattle, and he was going to go there to the Brandenburg Gate and say, tear down this wall. And sometimes he would. He would jokingly, in a mic test, say, I've signed a law outlawing the Soviet Union. The bombs begin in five minutes. And the Soviets would hear it and think that we're actually on the brink of war. So he had both of those, in a way. You see an echo today with Trump who is unpredictable. Is he the biggest dove, a correction to the neoconism of George W. Bush, or is he this big hawk who goes in and drops the Moab and bombs fordo and takes out Maduro? And what is he? Well, you know what he is, he's unpredictable, which is very helpful. And he is inclined toward peace. And so this phrase, peace through strength is abused, especially by neocons and more hawkish people, to be violence for strength, peace through violence, or something. But that wasn't Trump and Reagan. They really did have peace in mind. Ronald Reagan, had Gorbachev played ball, Reagan would have abolished nuclear weapons, I think, really did want that. However, he was willing to make the prudential calculation of how far he could push things. And at the Brandenburg Gate, I think that's about as far as it goes. And it worked.

B (29:49)

And he was also president when Rocky fought Ivan Drago on Christmas Day in Moscow.

A (29:56)

One of his biggest challenges. Michael Knowles.

B (29:57)

Michael Knowles, do you have anything left to add?

A (30:02)

I mean, I said that the Brandenburg Gate was the culmination, but. No, no, you're right. I think it was Rocky, actually, You know, you could say there was a little coda to the Reagan presidency, which is when he wrote that letter and it confessed his Alzheimer's diagnosis, you know, disclosed it to the American people, this beautiful handwritten letter. And he says, you know, at the moment, I feel fine. I feel sorry for Nancy, for what's about to come, but, you know, I'm at peace, and I have no doubt that America's greatest days will lie ahead. And, you know, it's this great expression of gratitude, it's this great expression of humility for a man who would come later, not famously, not to even recognize the White House in a snow globe. And it ties back to the very first thing you talked about, which is he was almost offed at the beginning of his presidency. And he wrote down in his diary after that, I now know that I owe my life to God. And I think you see that clearly. I think clearly you see the hand of God over the Reagan administration, and even for people now who want to downplay that. I was talking to Yoram Huzzoni about this some years ago, and he said, you know, you kids, you weren't there. You don't remember. But for all of the foibles and pitfalls, it really felt like a moment not just of national renewal, but of religious renewal in the country. I mean, there was something, as Ronald Reagan said in one of his most famous speeches, a time for choosing. When he was campaigning for Barry Goldwater, he said, you know, when great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits, not animals. And something is going on in time and space and beyond time and space, whether we know it or not, is called destiny. And you and I have a rendezvous with destiny. And that trust in God's providence and that willingness to cooperate with God's grace, I think that was really sincere. People thought it made Reagan a kook. In reality, it made him one of the most successful presidents we've ever had.

B (31:52)

Well, you did him proud, Knowles. I thank you for your time.

A (31:55)

Thank you, sir. Good to see, as always.

B (31:58)

Well, you did Bill Clinton at the end.

A (32:00)

Well, Dave, I feel your pain having to listen to my explanation.

B (32:05)

I did not have sexual relations with that woman. But he was talking about Hillary. That was the thing. Okay, see ya.