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election and these people can't imagine that it actually was a time of unity and in those days just because the president had an r next to his name didn't mean that you needed to hate him and call him a racist so you give them today a message of unity which they claim that they want and they hate it they want to divide they say they want inclusion and diversity right uh no they want to divide so that's a good point even if you had to write reagan today there'd be a lot more hate of him uh regardless from the left dr paul kangour is a distinguished political scientist best-selling author and expert on communism and the political history of ronald reagan's presidency kangour is professor at grove city college where he currently serves at the well as a contributing editor at the american spectator kangour has also offered over 20 books on topics ranging from reagan's relationship with pope john paul ii to the bias of the american media kangour's analysis of marxist ideology and historical implications position him as a leading voice in our contemporary debates about socialism capitalism and political freedom in fact the recent blockbuster film reagan was inspired by kangour's 2007 book the crusader ronald reagan and the fall of communism in today's episode paul and i dissect the infiltration of marxist ideas among american progressives the ideological process of a marxist's worldview and whether or not harris can actually be classified as a marxist herself we also examine the similarities and differences between the presidencies of ronald reagan and donald trump and how american conservatives can lead the way toward the less divisive future dr paul kangour's body of work has enriched the public understanding of marxism and issued an important warning about how damaging ideas can alter the course of history don't miss this important conversation with dr paul kangour on this episode of the sunday special paul thanks for taking the time really appreciate it yeah ben i gotta tell you this is kind of a reunion so you and i first met you probably remember this but at the reagan ranch center in santa barbara and so thus i have my rancho del cielo shirt on was there for a few weeks ago for the premiere of the reagan movie i know we're probably going to talk about that too but i was trying trying to remember when that was i'm kind of dating it by the age of my daughter who remembers it all really well i think it was probably at least 10 years ago yeah yeah you're talking about 2014 2015 yeah yeah yeah you weren't famous yet yeah exactly exactly better times but let's talk about obviously you've written about a huge number of topics of interest to our audience most recently you've written a lot about marxism and you know the the race today between donald trump and kamala harris that the term marxist has been thrown around by president trump with regard to kamala harris and there's some people say that's unfair she's not totally in favor of say nationalization of all means and mechanisms of industry she probably didn't write carl marx do you think it's fair for president trump to call her marxist how should we determine whether someone is sort of marxist even colloquially in american politics these days well that's a great question and by the way i'm a grove city college or institute for faith and freedom i teach a course on marxism at grove city college and this semester i'm teaching a course in comparative politics we're talking about marxism right now and i told my students last week i said just as we don't like it when the left calls conservatives fascists right we want to be very careful about calling leftists even radical leftists maybe even democratic socialists we could go through that uh calling them marxists right i mean if you want to just call them an extreme leftist i think that's good right but i want to call a marxist a marxist only if we're dealing with a legitimate marxist all right now in that debate um i think trump was right about kamala's father i mean kamala's father i mean based on his writings and i've read some of his journal articles and he was on the econ department at stanford university and from what i can tell he was a marxist now her yeah it's a good point i don't know if she even reads has read carl marx um she certainly probably is bourgeoisie proletariat um probably hasn't read the communist manifesto now when you get into the more general kind of broadening area this is where we are today taking the sort of marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor all right you find your two groups to pit together right in classical marxism this was based on economics and class it was a proletariat bourgeoisie there you had your oppressor and oppressed today with the race-based marxist it's black versus white right with gender marxist male versus female with marxist operating culture it's some other cultural application and oftentimes the people that are doing that have no idea that they're even part of that general marxist superstructure so if you say to them you know that's a form of cultural marxism or race-based they'll scoff and maybe they should scoff because they don't even know what they're doing but in her case she might be coming more from that general superstructure and issues of race gender culture um but i stay away from saying in a national debate right she's a marxist unless you can really defend it and explain it kind of the way that i just did yeah i think one of the problems actually with doing that is that not only may not be fair in terms of her actual belief system because again who knows what the hell she believes but it also actually waters down what marxism is and makes it more palatable for the masses because people go okay well kamala harris is a marxist doesn't seem that bad we're not talking about the soviet union we're not talking about fulbo we're not talking about venezuela we're talking about a lady who's hobnobbing with tech ceos and wants government interventionism in the economy and more redistribution whatever people think of her they tend to then box that in with the same sort of democratic socialism that bernie talks about in norway with the same you know soviet full-scale marxism that we saw applied for nearly all the 20th century yeah that's right on and then so then when you meet the real mccoy right and when someone like me and you says um you know bernie sanders wasn't a member of the trotskyist socialist workers party but he was an actual formal presidential elector in 1980 right he was uh he was pro trotsky he was a trotskyist in college at the university of chicago uh he joined a he joined a stalinist kibbutz ron radosh has written about this when he was in israel so then we say those things they're inclined not to believe us when i did i did a full book on obama's mentor frank marshall davis and it was called the communists it was published by simon schuster mercury inc glenn becks and it was a bestseller so they viewed like top 10 of the new york times and i immediately got emails from people on the left saying you know you guys just call our people communists all the time and then i had to say i know i know we do but this guy look at the cover of the book we put his communist party usa number right on the cover 47544 right yeah this guy testified before the senate internal security subcommittee in december 1956 he had a security index on him there's a 500 to 600 page fbi file on the guy you know this guy was really a communist and when you look at some of obama's rhetoric early in his life and when he went to occidental college it seems like he was at one point a marxist today probably not although you still see some of that rhetoric right although he never ever reputed it by the way this bothers me too um if you left that stuff come out and say it because it's part of your your narrative it's part of your conversion story right hillary clinton uh yeah i was a goldwater girl right uh but i don't believe that anymore yeah i was in touch with sula lindsey but you know maybe she's not an lindseyite right uh george w bush i was an alcoholic but i left that then i had my conversion right if you're obama come out and say well in my youth you know like a lot of people at columbia and some of these places i flirted with those ideas but i know better now you got five points if you if you say something like that but instead there's no public repudiation so it makes us suspicious uh but that said my point a guy like frank marshall davis a guy like bernie sanders aoc democratic socialist so when we mislabel people it hurts our ability to label them correctly uh when they're indeed like you know the real marxist mccoy we'll get some more on this in just a moment first did you know you spend a third of your life sleeping if you're not doing it right you're literally wasting years of your life i don't know about you i can't afford to do that which is why i 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to get to the nitty-gritty what would you consider to be real full-scale marxism where would you feel comfortable saying this person abides by these principles that makes this person a marxist as opposed to just say membership in the communist party you know that's sort of an easy outline indicator that somebody's not a member of cpusi and they are a marxist interview what principles do they have to fulfill well from a practical point of view a poster boy country would be north korea okay north korea cuba in fact you look at something like the heritage foundations index of economic freedom uh you know north korea has been the very bottom of the ranking since they started doing this thing 30 years ago right um but theoretically go to the communist manifesto in fact people will say to me then they'll say give me a one sentence definition of communism so okay i'll make it easy marx and engels gave us one in the manifesto they say the entire communist theory may be summed up in a single sentence abolition of private property so it's the starting point i mean it's a war on private property and of course that goes against uh you know the judeo-christian foundation uh you know the old testament new testament thou shalt not steal the ten commandments right implies you have the right to property some people consider it a natural right a sacred right uh from the cave to the courthouse people have had the right to property when you do something like literally try to abolish all private property then you're really raising r-a-z-i-n-g uh the foundations of everything and they were all about that in the manifesto too marx and engels immediately immediately doubled down on that they say uh you were horrified at us intending to do away with private property they don't pause there and say well we don't really mean that what we mean is no they say precisely so that is precisely what we intend to do so at that point maybe one could argue different variations gradations degradations whatever of communism to what degree is a communist society abolishing private property right at the level of the home at the level of agriculture at the level of you know pol pot in cambodia whether you're allowed to own personal hygiene products uh you know toothpaste in cuba uh whether or not you're allowed to pick your mangoes from the front tree growing on your property in cuba um i have a former student lorenzo carizana whose aunt in cuba um had a mango tree in her front yard and the family was hungry and it pained them terribly to know that they were fresh beautiful mangoes growing on their property but because that belonged to the state and they weren't allowed to pick and sell their own produce because of the laws of market control versus central planning on prices and production level they couldn't even pick the mangoes from the front yard and when they took some in the middle of the night they realized when they got up in the morning what they did they threw the peels in the garbage so they go out and they bury them in the ground so the state won't see that they picked the mangoes now that's abolition of private property at a very severe level so as a starting point um property above all abolition of private property you know that provides a really useful framework for thinking about because it also shows you the spectrum of economic interventionism and where things actually line up so one of the great lies of course is that for example that has been used by soviets and communist factors is the idea that nazism and soviet economics were in 100 opposition that basically you know the the capitalist side is closer to nazi economics and that the communist side is therefore good because what the communists tend to do is they use the world war ii model as a way of demonstrating communism is actually good since the soviet army by the end of the war was on the right side of the war as opposed to the beginning when they actually led to the war but with that said if you use your framework of abolition of private property what you end up doing is also recognizing that heavy regulation of the use of private property is closer to actual public ownership of private property than it is to economic freedom so if you have a very corporate system as nazi germany did which everybody's organized into guilds by the government in which the government is reaching into everybody's pocket determining how your private capital is used that is much closer to public ownership of the production than it is to you being able to make free decisions about the dispensation use of your own wealth that's exactly right i mean they're not following hayek and nises and milton friedman right in nazi germany and of course the very name nazi which is short-pan for national socialist there's a national socialist german workers party and and then people will often say yeah but hitler yeah hitler was killing the communists too well sure i mean but but but these people on the left are always at each other's throats i mean trotsky versus stalin trotskyist and stalinist the american communist party was um filled with um in fact once the hitler-stalin pact took place in august 1939 um huge numbers of american jews left communist party usa because because joining communist party usa you swore a loyalty oath to stalin's soviet union right to work to ensure the triumph of soviet power inside the united states uh ussa as langston used call it so they knew at that point they couldn't they could no longer swear a loyalty oath to stalin's soviet union because stalin was now on the side of hitler he aided and abetted hitler so that point a lot of them left and you can see there too hitler and stalin at that point found common cause and they worked together but but the left is filled with all kinds of angry militant factions i mean we have our disagreements and arguments on the right you go to a conference of like far leftists i mean these people are are at each other's throats over little tiny issues that uh you know that most people can't even relate to or explain or understand you know wasn't capitalism an ice pick through trotsky's eye so you know with all of that sort of pointed out in the backdrop of marxism how do we distinguish between marxism and something that you've talked about which is just the old biblical story of the oppressor versus a false matrix so i pointed this out myself you know as somebody who reads the bible pretty regularly in the original hebrew you know when the cane able story is the single most indicative political story in all of human history you have one sacrifice that god takes able sacrifice and can sacrifice for a reason unspecified by the tax is rejected and then god warns cain and he says you have this inclination to do sin and it crashes at your door but you can master over it and cain rejects that and goes and kills abel and that that sort of matrix in which you know cain doesn't have a reason to hate abel there's not abel's fault that god decides to accept abel's sacrifice and then so cain decides to kill abel that sort of sense of victimization that results in aggression toward people who are more successful in one way shape or form through a perceived sense of oppression that is the story of so much of human history is this perceived sense of grievance against other people who are more successful how do we distinguish that from marxism versus marxism just sort of one offshoot of that general oppressor oppressed matrix yeah in fact i would argue others have too that you know the primary virtue in marxism is envy right uh envy hate avarice and it's amazing to read carl marx and hear him complaining about people's obsession with capital marx was obsessed with capital i mean all marx can think about is capital i mean mark marx gets up in the morning and belly aches and moans and ruins his day just thinking about capital all marx wants is capital right in fact uh marx's mother and wife both express the wish that carl would start earning some capital rather than just writing about capital but it's a classic example of how the left thinks right they talk about diversity equity and inclusion and but they don't include us right we don't fit under their diversity umbrella they talk about tolerance but no tolerance for us and their side they talk about hate when guys like you and i are looking at them smiling it's like i don't hate you man i mean i'm not angry at you at all smoke's almost coming out of their ears they're screaming hey right they project and this is what marx and the marxists do i mean the marx they talk about greed you don't see greed anywhere like you see among marxist societies and marxist leaders i mean they take all the capital they take everything they take all the production themselves marxism is not for the rulers it's for the ruled i mean everybody else that has to follow those rules And I would forward here to, I often hear as a Christian, they'll point to Acts, Acts 432 through 435, where it says, the early apostles held everything in common. They pulled together their resources and shared everything. And as even Pope Francis has said, you know, Pope Francis is hardly a Lysian capitalist, right? But Pope Francis has said, that's not Marxism, right?
You know, that's charitable traditional Christianity. By the way, that's written in the first century. Marxism comes, you know, 17, 18 centuries after that. But if you look in Acts and also the Old Testament, they have the right to property.
They have the right to own things. Also, we get to this in a minute. They don't hate religion, right? They're not atheists.
You know, Marxism is inherently atheistic, as all the Marxist Leninists and all the Marxist leaders have always said. So to have a group of apostles in the first century getting together voluntarily on their own, all right, by their own free will, and if you read the whole text, selling portions of the property that they're permitted to own in order to pull them together to help their fellow man, that's not Marxism, right? That's a free will choice. Now, Marxism would be the heavy-handed states coming into that community and every community in the entire country and telling them forcibly, all of your property will be banned.
By the way, so will your religion, all right? And so will all traditional relations that you have. Marx and Engels said, communism represents, quote, the most radical wealth in traditional relations, unquote. We're going to violate all of that, and we're going to forcibly redistribute all of your wealth.
We're going to abolish the right of inheritance. That's part three of their 10-point plan. We're going to have a full progressive income tax, right? We're going to do this, all this other stuff.
That's communism, right? People voluntarily getting together to live in community. The Dominicans, the Franciscans, right, which is 0.0000001% of all Americans, right, on their own to voluntarily share their stuff. That is not a Marxist state.
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I'm a Marxist. Meaning, I share my wealth in common with my wife, right? I mean, we don't earn equal amounts of wealth and my kids certainly don't earn anything. But we all have access to the pool of cash because when it comes to family, obviously, it's share and share alike.
That is not the same thing when it comes to things outside the family, which is, of course, why Marx is attempting to abolish the family because the family is, in fact, a bulwark. I can say that everyone is family. If you have family, then you know there's a big difference between you and your wife and your kids and, you know, this guy in New York you've never met before. And you shouldn't be asked to treat that person as though they're a member of your family because that's not realistic to how human nature is.
And I think this is one of the points that you make with regards to Marxism in particular. Is that Marxism, for all of its talk about being a scientific theory, which, of course, it absolutely is not. I mean, it's pseudo-scientific, absolute sheer trash. It doesn't make sense mathematically.
It doesn't make sense logically. It promotes itself as a scientific theory because that way it can somehow get away with making the claims that it's making. And that's why, even today, Marxists will attempt to avoid the reality of the failures of Marx's prediction. They've attempted to end around that in a wide variety of ways, including Lenin, who basically suggested that it wasn't descriptive, it had to be normative.
That instead of Marx attempting to describe the arc of history in a sort of passive fashion, you had to enact it, you had to do the thing. And that really was called action as opposed to what Marx thought it was going to be, which was a prediction of the future that never came true. In fact, it turned out to be false in every respect, ranging from the depression of wages to the idea that there would be a worldwide class uprising of the poor against the rich, which, of course, never happened. World War I being the best indicator that it never happened when everybody sided along national lines as opposed to along class lines.
What Marxism actually is a religious theory. It's a religious theory positing an eschatology of man. And when you read Marx, what you see is that he's substituting his own idea of the transformation of human nature that will erupt as a result of this inevitable end of capitalism. And a new man will be born, in which everybody is purely generous and purely benevolent.
And it turns out that all of the evils of the human heart, which he says were planted by capitalism in the same way that Rousseau suggests that all of the evils of the human heart were planted by a first man who created a fence, basically, that all of that will disappear. And so you won't need government. Government will wither away. That's what the anarcho-communists, which, of course, makes no sense.
This is what they claim. What they're really shooting for is a time when government will wither away and we'll all live in a voluntary brotherhood of man in which we ourselves have been transformed in soul. That's a religious promise. And I think that's why Marxism will never die, because if you're making a religious promise, there's no way to actually determine whether it's true or not until you hit some sort of messianic age.
Yeah, and especially if you're making that argument to people who aren't religious, right? So they don't follow Judaism or Christianity, so instead they're atheistic. So this gives them their secular utopia, right? So most religious people would say, come on, dude, that's what you get in heaven, all right, when all this is over, right?
You can't have that possibly here on this earth. But if you read statements from Marx, from other early communists, Moses Hess, Arthur Kessler, who's one of the people in The God That Failed, I mean, they talk about how this was like a religion. And, in fact, Raymond Aron, his classic book is called The Opium of the Intellectuals, because really, to them, that's what it's like. They make fun of religious people called religion the opium of the masses.
I mean, Marxism is really absolutely the opium of the intellectuals. Ronald Reagan said, well, Marxism, Leninism, that religion of theirs. And, indeed, you start off by saying scientific. Yeah, they have this phrase, scientific socialism.
The Soviets used it all the time. Vladimir Lenin in the state and revolution, but he started writing, it never really fully finished. That was September, October 1917. The revolution got in the way, so he didn't finish it.
He describes Marx as a scientific socialist, this genius, all this flowery, gushing, you know, hagiographic language, way over the top. People have to remember that Marx lived 1818 to 1883. So he is alive in the period of Darwin, when the origin of species comes out. So they were hoping that Marx would do for the social sciences and for economics what Darwin did for the physical sciences.
So there's this idea of this evolutionary movement where mankind would start in slavery, serfdom, capitalism, socialism, and eventually to communism, right? Socialism, according to Marxist Leninist theory, would be the final transitionary step into communism. So this added a historical inevitability to the whole thing, right? So people could see this unfolding over time, this evolution of the history of the world.
And Ingalls, at Marx's funeral, and also at Marx's wife's funeral, quoted Darwin, right? He's not quoting the scriptures. He's not quoting the Old Testament or New Testament. He's quoting Darwin, right?
Here lies the vivacious Jenny, right? He gives this kind of depressing little sermonette about basically Marx's wife now rotting a casket, turning to dust or worm food. I don't know. But the great news is, right, through this historical Darwinian evolution that Marx created and pioneered, the world will eventually reach that utopia in the sky, full communism, classless society.
And that's just one of almost every prediction that Marx made, which is complete fatuous nonsense and never came true. So one of the things that we see is when we talk about this, again, we come back to the same point, which when we talk about Marxism, I think if you don't have an understanding of Marxism at all, you see how terrible it is, it's terrible results. But the point that Hayek makes in the road of serfdom is that it actually is a road to get there. It's not as though one day you wake up, it's not like Russia in 1917, where you wake up one day and suddenly it's imposed top down.
This is something that you gradually slide into. And this is where I think the temptation is for the right, saying that, okay, we're just going to describe Kamala Harris or Barack Obama as chiefly Marxist, they may want something like that in the back, in other regions of their brain, sort of like the lizard Marxist brain from college, 30 years in the future. But to get there, they're willing to do an awful lot of gradated actions. And that's why you're seeing Kamala Harris wooing CEOs and treating capitalism as though capitalism is still, you know, Joe Biden says this all the time.
I'm not begrudging anybody. I'm not saying that. I love capitalism. Capitalism.
But all we need is just one more restriction. All we need is one more set of regulations. All we need is just a little more control. And it's always just a little more control.
That's right. You quote Reagan in the time for choosing speech, right? The more the planners plan, the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. And so at the very least, they favor what Woodrow Wilson called the administrative state, the heavy regulatory state.
And once again, did you notice this? I mean, for a while, it seemed like the last few years, the left, the Democratic left, had kind of given up on a lot of the class warfare rhetoric that they were engaging in the 1990s. You might be, you're younger than me, probably about 10 years or so. I don't know if you remember Dick Gephardt in the early 1990s and talking about how people who are wealthier have done well or the winners in lights lottery and so forth.
But every four years and younger people would have experienced this. But the Democrats, they would just trot out this. He favors the rich, he favors the rich, tax cuts for billionaires, on and on and on and on. They seem to finally give it up with Donald Trump, I think because Trump so appealed to the middle class and the lower working class.
I live in western Pennsylvania. I was born in Pittsburgh. My family worked in coal mines and steel mills, right? My dad was a steel worker.
So, you know, that stuff appealed to the Democrats for a long time. Those people are all now voting for Trump. All of them. I mean, Pittsburgh's about an hour from Morgantown, West Virginia.
All the West Virginia coal miners are voting for Trump. All of them. So to hear Kamala in the last debate, and I've heard some commercials on television and radio since, they're going after Trump on the tax cuts for billionaires again. And when you look at Trump's tax cuts, what were they, 2017, 2018?
They were really tiny. And in fact, you have to look at the brackets and the rates. I think there's five brackets altogether. This one came down a little bit.
That one went up a little bit. They changed that bracket. And this one, it's hard to see any dramatic. I would complain.
They didn't seem like much of a tax cut at all. But they've gone back to that playbook, which tells me that that's Kamala in my state of Pennsylvania, probably trying to go back to that lower middle class. But I don't think it's going to work because they know that she represents the sort of Silicon Valley wealthy elite. And it's the wealthy elites that are now liberals.
I mean, the corporate fat cats are DEI people running operations like Bud Light, right? What are they doing? Bud Light. Well, that's the people they're hiring.
That's the people they're hiring from the business schools. They're all left wingers. All righty, folks. Let's talk about dressing sharp without sacrificing comfort.
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And in the United States, if you were a corporate head, there was a feeling of no-blessed liege that was largely church-based. It was largely based on membership in a religious community. And as that wore away, that's very odd sort of elitist combination of Marxian social politics with capitalist economics, which is the smallest portion always of the American electorate. Every four years for my childhood, there's talk about a libertarian uprising where it would be, I'm left on social politics and I'm really right-wing on economics and turns out that's like five people in the country.
And it turns out that that's the thing that drove all the coal miners into the arms of Trump. I think this tends to turn the sort of Trumpian phenomenon with the middle and lower class. And I even hesitate to use those terms in America because they really don't apply. A few percentage of people who started in the lower class will end up in the upper class and middle class.
There's no class distinction in the United States with the way that there was in continental Europe in 1890 or something. So this sort of weird divide on social policy that came along with the atheistic revolution of the 60s and 70s, in which the most successful people economically also hated the morality of sort of middle-class church-goers. That's what's like to this divide. And what Trump was doing to those West Virginia miners, he wasn't saying that I'm going to bring to you all sorts of good economic goodies in the way that Dick Gaphart or John Edwards in 2004 would have to do America's nonsense.
It's not going to be that. What it will be is I'm going to respect the fact that you want to live with your family and go to church. I don't look down on you. I don't think that you need to trans your kids.
Those social policies, the idea that he actually understood them and didn't sworn them, that's the whole thing. To me, the signal break in sort of American politics pretty much occurs in 2008. It goes by the wayside because we all pretend it didn't happen. But when Barack Obama made that better claimer speech in San Francisco, that was like the hard divide in American politics where he's in San Francisco with a bunch of really, really wealthy people in shiny buildings.
And they're talking about how the real downfall of the country is these schlubs who live in West Virginia and who have this whole thing about how they like God and guns and actually want hoarders. And I think that that was really more the thing. And so there's been this unfortunate gap that's now grown between, I think, Americans who have traditional values with regard to social politics and capitalism itself because this term neoliberal gets thrown around. And I always wonder exactly kind of what I mean.
I'm very free market oriented and also incredibly socially conservative. And from most of my childhood, those two things went together. And it's only in the last decade or so they seem to have sort of gone separate ways. Yes, right.
In fact, a couple of thoughts there. One, Barack Obama. I'm thinking of John Drew, who went to Occidental College with Obama. And I interviewed him for the book The Communists.
And he was introduced to Obama by his girlfriend, John Drew's girlfriend. And she said, this is Barack. Right. He's one of us.
And he ran the Marxist club as John Drew called. John Drew is now like a conservative Baptist today. But I talked to him. I said, do you think in any way, do you see any of the Marxism residual stuff in Obama today?
This would have been like 2010. And I'll never forget that he used the phrase. Yeah, I still see some of the Marxist mental architecture in phrases like bitter clingers, right? Clinging to their God and guns, right?
That's very much a kind of like Marxist-like sentiment, even if it doesn't make Obama a Marxist. And the other one, I think, if you mentioned the 60s radicals, Mark Rudd, who founded SDS, he wasn't the founder of SDS, but he ran SDS and shut down Columbia University April 1968. And I read his memoir a few years ago, which is a shocking book. But to Rudd's credit, he's very honest and very, very candid in that book.
And he talked about him and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn and the people in SDS who eventually became the weathermen, eventually the weather underground. They would go out into the working class neighborhoods, he said, of Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and they'd be preaching Marxism to the unwashed masses, right? The working class kids, the kids of the steel workers, right? And he said, what was the response of these people?
They would beat us up. These are like ethnic Poles and Italians and Irish, right? Like, you know, we don't want your stake in communism, you atheists. You know, get out of here, right?
And meanwhile, one of these guys are laying on the ground. But don't you understand, right? And preaching what they learned at Columbia. We're here to bring you.
We're here to free you, right? You know, you're in this class and you're about to go here. But yeah. And those people have always wanted an American.
This is what so many people left in the Democratic Party didn't get. A lot of them want to be, maybe not rich, but aspire to get out of the lower class and be as well off as they can be, right? So the incessant class warfare that the Democrats always engaged in, like I said, it seemed like it cooled in the last few years. I think because Trump has won that element.
But it's coming back right now in the last few weeks, probably because Kamala is trying to make a push for some of those voters. I think this is also due to the failure of the race Marxism. So in the 2012 to 2024 era, the Democrats really, really started moving towards sort of the economic Marxism of, say, John Edwards and maybe even Bernie Sanders and started moving very heavily in the direction of race Marxism, the idea that you could determine whether someone was victimized or not by membership in a racial group because racial groups don't stack up equivalently in terms of average income, for example. And so Barack Obama won on that basis in 2012.
And Hillary kind of tried to run that same campaign in 2016, and she failed because she's an upper class white lady. And then Joe Biden ran that campaign again, in part, in 2020. But it was already failing by 2020. He had to sort of run as a moderate in the room, despite everything that was going on in the Black Lives Matter riots and everything.
He sort of tried to ignore what was going on and throw a stop to his supporters by picking Kamala as his vice president. And then by 2024, one of the things that's actually quite fascinating about the way that Kamala's running this campaign is she's not talking about race at all. Everybody on the left is begging her to talk about race. You're the first female black woman who's going to run for president and win.
And she doesn't want to talk about it. She keeps avoiding it, which I think is a smart strategy, because I think this is played out. I think they're moving back toward this sort of class-based economic Marxism. If there are only a few games that they can play here, and one of them is played out, they're going to turn to the others.
And those right now seem to be class-based Marxism and sex-based Marxism, in which they're sacking up women against men. You're seeing the largest gender gap in American history breaking out this election. Yeah, and in the last debate, the two moderators from ABC, right? I think it was David Muir, who was the one who did it, brought up the Trump comments about the race, about Kamala's race.
And I remember telling my students right before that debate, I said, Trump in this debate can't do anything really stupid, like bring up her race. Trump's credit, he said, I don't want to talk about it. He said something like, she's the one that brought up, and then he zipped it. And then they went to her, and she just got the knife out, right?
And she just started talking about how divisive he is, hateful he is, pits people against each other over race. And then they said, Mr. President, they went back down, zipped. He didn't say anything.
So he was very smart, very disciplined on that. But yeah, and what could be more divisive, literally divisive, right? Which is what Marxism is. It's about dividing people, right?
Dividing according to class, right? What could be more divisive than telling everybody in America, hey, the world is this simple. You're either black or you're white. You're in one of these two blocks, right?
My youngest son, who's adopted, is black, right? He's half black. I mean, he's as black as Obama, because Obama's father was black, and so is his father's. Both of them have white mothers.
He's technically considered black. But if we did DNA tests on everybody in my family, which we have, they're all over the place. I mean, my wife has every ethnicity in the Middle East, including Jewish, right? Jewish, Syrian, Lebanese, Greek, Italy, everything.
So to tell people in modern America the most diverse melting pot in history, very simple. You're black or you're white, all right? Then you're oppressed or you're the oppressor. And so then you go up to somebody and say, now, Kobe Bryant or Oprah, okay?
I want you to know that you're oppressed. You may have billions of dollars. You may have this amazing life, Kobe. You had wealth ever since you were a young kid.
But you're oppressed. They're like, why? Well, because you're black. And that white homeless guy over there, all right?
He's your oppressor. Huh? Well, he's your... Why?
Because he's white. No one in America wins any part of that gobbledygook, divisive, vicious nonsense. But that hails, descends from Marxism. Right space, in this case.
To shift topics slightly, but it's still part of the same overall conversation. You've written extensively, obviously, on Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan's last Republican president. So have won broad majorities.
You could say George H. W. Bush won a broad majority. That was really on the back of Ronald Reagan.
By 1992, obviously, he loses to Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, which is not exactly a duo of tremendous performance. But in any case, the Reagan era does raise questions for how conservatives can win going forward. Because Donald Trump won what can best be described as statistically, at least, a fluke election in 2016. That is a fluke election in which you lose the popular vote by 3 million, but you win by just enough votes in just the right places in order to win.
And it looks very much as though he's going to have to pull off the same feed if he wishes to win this year. It looks as though the popular vote gap is going to be, I would think, relatively significant. I would be shocked if he wins the popular vote in this year's election. He might just win in just enough places, just 10,000 votes here in North Carolina, 12,000 in Georgia, and all the rest of that.
In order to pull off the presidency, there's been a long time since a Republican won sort of a broad sweeping victory. Even George W. Bush's victory in 2004 against John Kerry was a near-run thing. That was a very close election coming down to basically Ohio and Florida.
And so when you look back at the Reagan era, one of the things that is clear is that because he has the Soviet Union to run against, a thing where he can say, look, this is the thing, right? We have to beat this thing. This thing's out here. It's really bad.
And the only way we're going to beat that is by getting rid of the ineffective, right? The argument he was making against Jimmy Carter was that Jimmy Carter was a fool and an ineffective fool. It wasn't that Jimmy Carter was actually deeply immoral. It was that Jimmy Carter was deeply ineffective.
He only became a figure of jocularity. And because the Soviet Union was out here, you had this dual threat. You had the dual threat from within, a weakness, and you had the threat from without of a powerful and aggressive state that actively sought to destroy America's interests. Well, now we fast forward to 2024.
I think there's been an attempt by Republicans and Democrats to say that China is sort of like the USSR. That parallel hasn't gone quite as well because of the deep and abiding economic relations with China. But the argument by a lot of conservatives has shifted from this sort of dual threat of inefficacy from the Democratic Party and deep and abiding threat on the foreign front to ignore all problems on the foreign front. The real threat is the internal threat.
And I just wonder if that's a winning electoral message because I don't think that most Americans look at Kamala Harris and want to see Kamala Harris as a sort of crisis-level red alert threat. Yeah, you know, in our print edition of the American Spectator, I'm the editor of the American Spectator, I have a piece called Reagan Conservatism is Alive and Well. It's a special print edition on conservatism. And I'm hearing a lot of conservatives today saying, well, Reagan conservatism is dead.
It's not. In fact, I have a book called Eleven Principles of Reagan Conservative. I lay out the eleven principles. Faith, freedom, safety, freedom, life, anti-continism, belief in the individual.
I won't go through all of them here, but I've said that Trump can check the box on probably 11 out of 11, certainly in terms of how he governed as president, right? I mean, if you don't think that he's maybe in his heart a pro-lifer, I mean, he did more for the pro-life movement than Reagan did as president. The difference, though, it's not the message, it's the messenger. And Reagan was just so likable.
Now, he did have the Soviet Union to run against, right? But people liked him. They just liked him. Even the left who didn't vote for him liked him.
I quote in one of my books, Walter Cronkite. Walter Cronkite was CBS's news anchor, and America's news anchor. He's also very liberal. And he said, I've never seen anything like this.
Everybody loves Reagan. Nobody hates him. I was alive for Franklin Roosevelt. I never thought I'd see a president as liked as Roosevelt.
Reagan has it. He's even more beloved than Roosevelt. So because of that, and keep in mind, 1984, Berlin Wall didn't go down yet, right? Cold War isn't over yet.
Mikhail Gorbachev didn't even come in yet. So at that point, Reagan can just run on restoring America strength, make America great again. It was originally a Reagan statement. Economies taking off.
So even without the crash of the Soviet Union, he won 49 out of 50 states. He took the electoral college 525 to 13. The only state he didn't win, Minnesota. By the way, this is interesting.
The only state Reagan never won was Minnesota. He didn't win Minnesota in 1980 either. Reagan twice won California, New York, New Jersey. My home state of Pennsylvania.
Reagan twice won Massachusetts. Okay? So I think the message still works. I think it's the messenger.
And Donald Trump is hated, just absolutely and utterly loathed by over 50% of the population. And if your ceiling is like 47%, right, it's going to be a 1% to 2% race. By the way, if he loses a popular vote by 1% to 2%, I think he'll win the electoral college. But I'd be amazed if he got 50%.
But my thesis argument here, Ben, is if you get somebody else with Reagan's kind of background-like ability, I think the conservative message can win big like that again. But it takes the right messenger to pair with the message. We'll get more on that moment. First, getting in credit card debt is really easy.
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Meaning that it's almost impossible to see any Republican winning, say, New York or California, absent some serious existential threat. Even George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9-11, they had to run a super competitive race against John Kerry in 2004. They came down to a few different states.
We're seeing it, obviously, with President Trump that's coming down to a few different states. It's almost impossible for me to imagine it as a transplant from California to Florida. The idea that a Republican would ever win, say, California again or New York or Massachusetts. Are there a bias in the country?
Just do why. And if so, what can be done about that? I think that's right. But I think a Republican could win 40 out of 50 states.
And also, and I'm not trying to say this to dump on Donald Trump in this interview, but 2016, 2020, and 2024, I mean, your opponent is Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. That should be an easy sweep for any remotely, decently likable Republican. And I know people on our side will say, if Trump gets out the vote, has his core supporters, he does. Absolutely true.
Nikki Haley couldn't do that. I don't know who it would be, right? Well, actually, I do have some ideas of some of the people. I won't go through it because I'm willing to argue about each of those people.
But those are three easy-to-beat opponents. They really, those should be slam dunks. And I think if you get somebody, if you had somebody who was more likable, they'd beat them fairly easily. I mean, I think that one of the things that President Trump had for a moment in this election cycle, when he was running against Biden particularly, and then after the assassination attempt, since basically 2014, I think the American people have been craving two things that seem to be in conflict.
One is normalcy, and the other is change. They want to change from the direction of the Obama years, but they also want some semblance of normalcy. They just don't want to think about what's going on in the presidential race three years in advance of an election. They don't want to be dealing with whatever is a crazy level.
I think that's what was behind whatever desire there was for Joe Biden in 2020. It was more like, okay, fine, he's dead. What bad could happen? I mean, he's a corpse.
And they did get a dead person. The problem was that he did things, and they didn't like any of the things that he did. He actually made an incredibly controversial moves. He governed like a far leftist.
He basically took Bernie Sanders' agenda and tried to run the table with it. And on foreign policy, he said, the world's on fire. But I think that the thing that most Americans right now are craving, and this was true, and I think Trump was doing a good job of this for a little while in the election, was just a sense of, okay, you know what, we need everything. Just go back to normal.
Leave everything alone. Calm down. Take a breath. And so there was a period between that debate and the assassination attempt in the RNC when Trump really went silent.
And that was the best point of the election for him, because he was just allowing the story to be Joe Biden and not be Donald Trump. And then the assassination attempt happened, and then the RNC happened. I think there were a couple of tactical errors at the RNC. I think J.D.
Vance is incredibly smart. I'm not sure that J.D. Vance added anything to the ticket that Donald Trump didn't already have going for him on the ticket. Yeah, I would pick somebody like one young kid if it had been me, and try to make some sort of play for the middle, try to make some play for women voters.
And then I think Trump's speech at the RNC was a very bad move for him. I think he had a unique opportunity a week after the assassination attempt to do something almost Reagan-esque. I mean, obviously, Reagan was shot by Hinkley, and there was a unifying kind of rally around Reagan moment because of that, because Reagan treated that with such geniality and joviality, and let's come together. And Trump could have done that.
He could have given a speech where he said, listen, I've said advice in the past. I'm going to keep saying things that this is people off. That's just who I am. But when a bullet whizzes past your ear and kills somebody behind you, that makes you start to think about things that are important in life.
The thing that's important to me is making America strong. It's the thing I've always cared about. It's the thing I care about you and your family. Like, that would have been a moment when he could have done that.
He didn't do that. And so people asked me at the RNC when he was up in the polls what I felt like. And I said, I feel like a baseball fan who is in the sixth inning and we're up three runs. And we just left bases loaded, no outs.
And you know that it's going to come back to calling you. And that's kind of what I felt like. I felt like 30, 40 minutes into it. I was telling my kids, I'm like, this is fascinating.
This is just great. This is a grand slam to you, right, baseball? But then he just went on too long. I mean, an hour and a half, almost two hours.
And then he started taking some shots at Biden. Not as harsh as usual, but he should have stopped there. By the way, the most meaningful thing to me in that speech, especially being a Reagan scholar, after Reagan was shot, March 30, 1981, and Reagan says to a number of different people, he wrote this in his diary, said it to Billy Graham, said it to his son, Michael. He said it to Mother Teresa.
He said it to Terrence Cardinal Cook. Whatever time I have left is for him. Capital H-I-M, him, right? My life has been spared.
It tells us to John Paul II a year later when they meet at the Vatican after both of his survived assassination attempts. And Trump said that night in Milwaukee, and he said it. I'm a scholar of this stuff. I'm writing these down.
There's about 12 examples now where Trump has said, God spared my life. God spared my life. So that's a very humbling thing. But unless the humility is further, and I think he has something.
He doesn't seem as harsh as before, but he still has that edge to him that I don't think it's going to push him over 48, 49 percent. Even after the shooting in Butler, by the way, you've probably done this. Butler, Pennsylvania is my hometown. Do you believe that?
There's a great number in for this. Butler High School class of 84, which is only a 25-minute drive from where I am in Grove City College. But yeah, I mean, he was, that's probably about the peak of where he got. I've gone in probably too many directions.
He's also lost the edge he had with Hispanic voters, which was looking, I don't think he was going to win 50 percent. I thought he should have picked somebody like Cruz or Rubio. I hate doing identity politics. But those guys are the future of the party, not that J.D.
Vance isn't. But that would have really done something for him. And I think one of the areas where Kamala has really taken a step up on him is with Latino voters, because they weren't voting for Biden, at least not in the numbers they usually were. She seems to have pulled a good number of them away from Trump.
So I think that was kind of a strategic electoral political mistake by Trump. I think the other thing that is really fascinating about how Trump has campaigned, and this is true since 2016, he took the sort of position against the field in 2016 that the Iraq war was inherently bad. He said some things that you would have expected to hear actually on the Democratic stage in 2016 with regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan. So a big international answer, right?
He lied. He lied. He lied. He lied.
Exactly. He's using that kind of language. And because by that point the country turned on the Iraq war, that allowed him to be the insurgent inside the candidacy. But that also has meant that there's been this growing wing inside the Republican Party.
When you talk about the rejection of Reaganism, I would say that the rejection of Reaganism has come in a couple of flavors. It's not on the socially conservative front. I think the rejection of Reaganism has come in the economic flavor, and it's come in the foreign policy flavor. I'm not saying more on the foreign policy flavor than on the economic flavor.
There's been a new sort of half-Ukanan isolationism that is cropping up in the Republican Party. It's always been there. To pretend that it wasn't there in the 30s, 40s, 50s, is to be ignorant of sort of the split in the Republican Party that has been there for a very long time. But it was sort of in abeyance for a while.
And now it seems to come back with a fair bit of alacrity, this sort of anti-caukishness, anti-muscularity in foreign policy. And it's been exacerbated by sort of the bifurcated way that Trump has dealt with foreign policy. He talks like Papi Buchanan, and then he actually acts like Ronald Reagan. His foreign policy is extremely Reaganist.
Let's build up the military. He's true strength. Yeah, exactly. Let's threaten our enemies.
If they decide they want to try and threaten us, we'll back them off that point. And I remember I did a fundraiser for President Trump, and in that fundraiser, we were in the back room, and he was saying that the reason that, he says, the reason that Vladimir Putin never went into Ukraine is because I said, damn, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the f*** out of you. And Vlad looked at me, and he said, no, you won't. And I said, well, I might.
And then Trump looked at me and said, if you're the United States, and you're the United States, I mean, they think there's a 5% chance you can remove the s**t of them, and then they don't want to... I mean, that's like pure kind of Reagan back them off the point with current. And so what he did as an actual president is very Reagan-ass. The way he talks about foreign policy is very not Reagan-ass.
And so it's led to this bizarre split in the Republican Party where people who are perceived as too hawkish on foreign policy are now considered sort of hyper-interventionists who are willing to get involved anywhere, as opposed to what most of the battles in the Republican Party are, which are really about sort of... It's more situational. Does this fall into if we should be involved category or not involved category, not into a democracy-building Woodrow Wilson category? I don't see a lot of people in that sort of George W.
Bush 2005 mode. Yeah, in fact, Reagan told Gorbachev directly to his face. He said, we're going to challenge you to an arms race, and you know you can't win it. And Gorbachev knew that, and he understood that.
And when you look at a lot of conservatives, Trump supporters are angry that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won't endorse Donald Trump, but I mean, when you say about the primary issue of their foreign policy, that Bush lied about that. That's not the Ted Kennedy, Code Pink, international answer, was saying in those days. Reagan's former arms negotiator, Ken Ableman, endorsing Kamala Harris, and even saying that if Reagan were alive, I think he would endorse Kamala.
Well, that's absurd, okay? But I can see why they wouldn't support Trump because of that, all right? You don't need to take a step in the doors, Kamala. I mean, do you think she's a peaceful strength, anti-communist, Ken?
I mean, come on. But you say things like that, like Trump did in a very unsophisticated, uncouth, kind of vulgar way, you're going to have to take your lumps and expect people like George W. Bush, who are you accused of lying about WMDs, you're going to have to expect them not to support you. So when you look at sort of the future of the Republican Party, I agree with you that I think that the sort of, the Reagan is dead.
What did Reagan's member do for you is just ignorance of history. They're not in favor of heavy interventionism and subsidization of the economy. And they tend to be more socially conservative, certainly, than the left is at this point. When you look at that, it's bewildering to me, I think, why there's been this attempt to pair away from Reagan.
Why do you think there has been this attempt to say, by many in sort of the MAGA movement, as opposed to kind of grasping on the Reagan legacy and saying, yeah, we're a continuation of that. There's been this attempt to say, no, we're totally completely new, we have nothing to do with that, forget all that. Yeah, I think it's kind of almost an anger that they feel, hey, you know, we're following some of these Reagan principles and they're not working for us the way that they did for Reagan. But that gets back to my point of, it's not the message, it's the messenger, all right?
You know, Ronald Reagan running on those things today could still win. And I mentioned those 11 principles of Reagan. You just mentioned a few of them there, right? Limited government, lower taxes, peace through strength, belief in the individual, anti-communism.
Those are all winning issues. I mean, you beat the Democrats in every election on that. Even sanctity and dignity of human life, you know, maybe not on the abortion issue, depending on how you frame it and so forth. Freedom, family, those are still socially conservative.
People still support the family generally. So you might lose on certain cultural social issues, maybe same-sex marriage, maybe IDF, right? Maybe, although on gender issues, gender ideology, I mean, that's, I think even Bill Marr said, if I was a Republican, I'd run on Drag Queen Story Hour in every campaign. In my state right now, Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who's running against Bob Casey Jr., is constantly hitting him on gender transitioning for teenage girls.
You know, that's a winning issue. So those are still winning issues. It's still the right message. You just need the right messenger.
Can you win 49 out of 50 states? Probably not. But can you win 40? Yeah, I think so, with the right messenger.
It really is interesting the way that the left has sort of retconned Reagan. So the usual critique of Reagan now, it wasn't the time, but they've really sort of amped this up, is the idea that Reagan was an idiot. And if you read Reagan's diaries, if you read anything that Reagan ever wrote, if you listen to his speeches from the GE circuit, you know that that is one of the stupidest contentions ever. This idea that Ronald Reagan was some sort of complete moron.
First of all, I would just point out that if you play even a George W. Bush-Al Gore debate now, it sounds like the Mosthenes debating Socrates. It's insane. Every political debate from 25, 30 years ago sounds like people who actually know things.
And George W. Bush was like the dumbest person in America. I was there. I mean, in 2000, they were talking about how he was a complete moron.
You can pronounce it. He said nuclear instead of nuclear. And then you watch the base, and you're like, these are fairly substantive. They actually know about issues.
And he and John Kerry, that was only 20 years ago. That's it. It's crazy. Watch that debate.
And with Reagan, so my book, The Crusader, Ronald Reagan, The Fall of Communism, lays out that this had been a strategy for Reagan to take down the Soviets dating back to the 1960s. And our Reagan movie focuses on that. And so for people who say, even some people on our side, well, you know, it's kind of hagiographic. I mean, what's hagiographic?
Do you want us to not say that we didn't win the Cold War? Do you want it to end with a mushroom cloud over Manhattan? Do you want us not to have the tear-down-the-wall speech? Do you want Reagan and Gorbachev not to be shaking hands peacefully in the Cold War together?
Do you want him not winning 49 out of 50 states? I mean, that actually happened. And then you and I, we both into the Reagan match. The end of that film, where he rides off into the Reagan the sunset with John Barletta, and they overplay his November 5, 1994 Alzheimer's letter describing getting Alzheimer's as, now I will ride off into the sunset of my life.
Everyone's bawling in the theater while they're watching it. Guess what? That actually happened. He actually said that.
This was a time of unity, and it's a good story. That story can happen again, I think, with the right leadership. You know, I think it also can happen if there is a left that is no longer as radical as it was. Yeah, that's right.
I mean, it really has gotten so much worse. People talk about it in sort of, again, hegagraphic terms, that sort of tip O'Neill-Ronald-Frage in the relationship, the fact that they would get together and that they were friendly with one another. But that was a real thing. They could hold hands together and pray.
Yeah, I mean, can you imagine Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump holding hands together and pray? That is not a thing that's ever going to happen. Impossible. And by the way, the worst vicious reviews 1984 presidential election.
And these people can't imagine that it actually was a time of unity. And everybody didn't hate the guts of the president. And in those days, just because the president had an R next to his name didn't mean that you needed to hate him and call him a racist, right? So you give them today a message of unity, which they claim that they want and they hate it.
They want to divide. They say they want inclusion and diversity, right? No, they want to divide. So that's a good point.
Even if you had the right Reagan today, there'd be a lot more hate of him, regardless, from the left. That's one of the things that's sort of fascinating about the transition from Carter to Reagan is that Carter, who I think was one of the worst presidents in American history. I think that Joe Biden and Carter are the two worst presidents of the last hundred years, by far, not close. And when you look at Carter, however, Carter was in 1976 campaigning as a cultural conservative.
Carter campaigned as a church-only man who wanted to restore honor and normalcy to the White House, almost in the same way that George W. Bush tried to campaign that way in 2000 against the Clinton legacy. And so in 76, by the time you get to 80, there is this backlash that has materialized almost on both sides of the aisle against the governorite 1960s left-wing far-radical coalition. And so in certain kind of cultural ways, Carter almost presages Reagan.
So in terms of policy, for sure not. Yeah, in fact, Mark Rudd and those guys created in 2008 the group Progresses for Obama, right? And in fact, what they really were was ex-weatherman Marxists for Obama. And they said that Obama was really the first candidate they could support, right?
Jimmy Carter was a heck in a hayseed, right? They didn't like RFK Sr. In fact, Prairie Fire, the manifesto of the Weather Underground, has among the dedications in the beginning to Sirhan Sirhan, the shooter of RFK Sr., right? So for them, they've needed a Democratic Party that can move to the far left, which it has.
It's no longer the Jimmy Carter 1977 Democratic Party. Yeah, and that's what my hope for the backlash that has become. I think it's not fully materialized specifically because of all the incoming fire that Trump has taken and Trump's pugnaciousness and all of that. Because of that, I think that no one has really been able to take advantage of the fact that the Democratic Party has moved this far to the left.
And so I think that Trump positionally has tried to occupy the middle in this election in some ways that, frankly, I don't particularly like as a conservative, right? On abortion, he's moved really far to the center. On economics, he's basically now throwing out proposals to various subsidies to various groups depending on where he's campaigning. But it's very obvious what he's trying to do.
He's trying to positionally grab the center and take it away from Kamala Harris. suggests he's sort of prohibited by the amount of hatred against him from ever being able to be perceived as sort of a centrist candidate in the election. But what that does say is that whatever comes next, again, God willing, Trump wins and in some sense, normalcy is restored. He governs well.
And then whoever comes after him is the person who sort of picks up both the Trumpian enthusiasm but also campaigns in the more optimistic and warm way that you've talked about. Whatever comes next for the Republican Party, the Democrats have moved so far to the insane left. It's hard to see them recovering. And for the life of me, it would be kind of shocked if Republicans, I'm a little scared of primary process, to be honest with you, because it seems to be selecting for, in many cases, some of the worst candidates.
But the opportunity is right there for somebody to grab. Yeah, and the left is so radical about it that if Trump wins in November 2024, they should calm down because he'll be out by January 2029, right? He'll have only one term left. But they're so radical and they've so radicalized themselves with slogans like Hitler, dictator, fascist, Trump's going to destroy democracy that they're making it sound like he's going to barricade himself in the Oval Office with the Marines and somehow not be able to be removed, right?
They're so radical. And here, to return to where we started the conversation, not Marxist, but just extreme radical leftists, right? That they can't even accurately portray the scenario in front of us, right? They're that divisive and hateful.
Well, Paul, thank you so much for taking the time. Folks, you can go check out all of his books. They're all fantastic. Paul, again, thank you.
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