Ben Weingarten Defends The Freedom Hut

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This is the Buck Sexton Show, where the mission or
mission is to decode what really matters with actionable intelligence.
Magnorma stake America, You're a great American. Again, the buck
Sexton Show begins. Analyst, remember the d This is the

(00:22):
Buck Sexton Show, and this is Ben Weinegarden in four
Buck Sexton here on a snowy night in Manhattan. A
four four nine zero zero Buck. That's eight four nine
zero zero two eight two five. Again, this is Ben Weinegarden,
pinch hitting for Buck. And even though it is spring training,
I have to admit that that analogy sort of pains

(00:42):
me as a Mets fan after what occurred yesterday, which
we want to talk about a thirteen year, three hundred
and thirty million dollar deal in our division. Well, Ben,
you do know that I'm a huge Phillies fan. Well, yeah,
I didn't want to get into it before this, and
now I expect the show to be sabotage. So this
should be an interesting few hours here live from New York.

(01:04):
As I mentioned, this is Ben Winegarden. If you haven't
heard me before, I'm a senior contributor at The Federalist,
a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research,
and you can follow me on Twitter at bh wine Garden,
where I do talk about baseball at night. During the
day it's all business. Most of the baseball tweets have
been as neurotic and upset as you might expect as

(01:26):
a New York Mets fan blowing our window, blowing our window.
All right, if you're not a baseball fan, I will
spare you with my sorrow here as the guys behind
the glass laugh at my dismay. I want to open
tonight first by thanking Buck because he does a vital
job here, and that is to articulate the values and

(01:48):
principles that we all share and then are not well represented.
And you know they're not well represented when you see
what the loyal adversary, the Democratic Party does on a
daily basis. And we're going to start tonight by talking
about Democrats, and we're gonna close by talking about Republicans
and conservatism and what the future holds. So this week,

(02:10):
of course, the big story was Cohen Kabuki theater. Michael Cohen,
the least credible person, a person who perjured himself in
front of Congress. Now the red carpet is rolled out
for him in Congress, of course, you know, just happening
to coincide with the highest level nuclear negotiations with the

(02:30):
North Koreans that you could possibly have. By the way,
there were some other big stories as well. Robert Whiteheiser
was on Capitol Hill and he dropped some important information
about the Chinese trade deal that there would actually be
an enforcement mechanism, and there was news but the fact
that incremental tariffs would not be levied on the Chinese
as part of ongoing negotiations. We have the collapse of

(02:53):
a socialist regime happening in our own hemisphere. We have
India Pakistan squabbles which are highly dangerous and potentially threatened
many US national interests in that part of the world.
But the media focus was on the least credible person
you could possibly have. That was the media's focus. Oh

(03:16):
and by the way, he was coached, it seems or
at least had communications with dubious representative Adam Schiff. Oh yeah,
and speaking of Russia, by the way, this week it
was revealed the Trump administration engaged in a cyber attack
to completely take offline a Russian troll farm that was
attempting another shoddy effort to post some garbage and influenced

(03:36):
quote unquote the twenty eighteen midterm election worst collusion ever,
worst collusion ever, folks. Where Michael Cohen is important is
not because of anything Michael Cohen said, although what he
did show is that there is no collusion, once again
for the million of time, after two committees showed it,
after all the weeks from the Muller Special Council showed it.
Not that Cohen has any credibility, but at this point

(03:58):
he has nothing to lose. He's going to jail. Essentially,
no collusion, not one iota. This person who is so
close to the president, this person who could read his
mind based upon his testimony, Cohen isn't what's important. What
Cohen represents is important, and that is that he is
a precursor to what's coming for the next two years
of every of endless coverage of every last iota of

(04:22):
Donald Trump's life being investigated by his worst enemies. So
Axios's lead article this morning, which is sort of a
good proxy for where the left establishment sees the world going,
they write, whether or not Mueller is sitting on a
grand finale, Democrats are picking up the Baton with a
vast probe that already involves a half dozen committees. That's

(04:42):
great use of taxpayered dollars and will include public hearings
starring reluctant witnesses. So who are these witnesses they want?
The Democrats want to call Trump family members with subpoenas
if necessary. The investigation will touch Trump's businesses, his foundation,
because after all, his businesses and his foundation are so
relevant into his presidency right now, and then they want

(05:02):
to talk about his presidency. Oh and it could extend
to twenty twenty. Top Democrats tell axios by coincidence. Besides Russia,
topics include conflicts of interest, money laundering, and Jared Kushner's
security clearance and other White House clearances. Rep. Jamie Raskin,
a Democrat from Maryland who's on the House Oversight Committee,
says that the committee is zeroing in on the Moscow project. Yes,

(05:23):
the famous Moscow building project which never got off the ground,
where there were never any high level conversations which had
no impact whatsoever on anything relating to this presidency, the
Russia connection and the influence of oh other foreign actors
like Saudi Arabia. They've teased that for a while that
they're going to look at basically every foreign connection because
after all, we found so much collusion already, Am I
wrong again? So many of these actions actually occurred before

(05:49):
the presidency, so they're really irrelevant in context of anything
resembling impeachment, which is what they ultimately want to get to.
So and let's continue a little bit down that road.
I'll quote here from a Wall Street Journal article titled
House Committee's planned to interview Trump organizations, CFO and others.

(06:12):
Congressional investigators don't want to cross wires with mister Muller's
probe into Russian interference in the twenty sixteen presidential election,
which is expected to end soon, among other matters. Mister
Muller's investigative, mister Trump, are members of the campaign concluded
with the Russians? And if the President has obstructed the
progress of the inquiry by firing a subordinate By the way,
they didn't put that in the article, but that's the reality.
Firing a subordinate somehow, obstruction potentially declassifying documents somehow an

(06:36):
impeachable offense. The article continues, mister Trump has repeatedly denied
wrongdoing and call the investigation of which hunt. Some Democrats
are concerned that not all of the findings from those
investigations will become public. By the way, if there is
no indictment, then it should not become public. You're supposed
to protect the innocent. Justice Department policy prevents the indictment
of a sitting president, most legal experts say, and Democrats

(06:58):
fear that evidence against that it may not be released
if it isn't in an indictment. I thought this was
supposed to be the party of criminal justice, but apparently
not so. Then there's a quote from Representative Raja Krishna Morti,
from a Democrat from Illinois and a member of the
House Oversight and House Intelligence Committee quote, we should just
assume the worst and that we're never going to find

(07:18):
out what any of these investigations reveal if they don't
lead to an indictment. That's the worst. We're talking about
a member of the House of Representative, someone who is
supposed to at least feign interest in justice. And what
is he saying. He's saying we have to assume the worst. Ie,
We're not going to get information that we can use
to attack a president if it isn't used to indict someone.
That's the worst, you know, if they want everything that

(07:44):
Mueller did exposed. Congressman noonez today during SEPAK said something interesting.
He said, and I agree with him. If this is
going to happen, if we're really going to go down
this road, Let's see every communication of the Mueller Special Council.
Let's see every last shred of evidence. Let's see it all.
Let's see all the personnel. Let's see the background checks
that were done into the personnel who comprised the special counsel.

(08:06):
Let's have it all hashed out, and then let's declassify
every last document associated with any investigation or President Trump.
I don't think the investigators want us to look at
the information that they use for their investigations. I want
to go back and take a trip down memory land
with a quip here. And I'm not going to tell
you when this clip occurred or who said it, but

(08:29):
let's roll clip one. The effective impeachment is to overturn
the popular will of the voters. We must not overturn
an election and remove a president from office except to
defend our system of government or our constitutional liberties against
the dire threat. And we must not do so without
an overwhelming consensus of the American people. There must never
be a narrowly voted impeachment, or an impeachment supported by

(08:53):
one of our major political parties and opposed by the other.
Such an impeachment will produce the divisiveness and bitterness in
our politics for years to come, and we'll call into
question the very legitimacy of our political institutions. You may
have the votes, you may have the muscle, but you
do not have the legitimacy of a national consensus or

(09:13):
of a constitutional imperative. This partisan coupe data will go
down in infamy in the history of this nation. I'll
give you a second to write down on a piece
of paper who you think it was that made those
comments and when those comments were made. All right, are
you listening? That was Gerald Nadwer in nineteen ninety eight.

(09:36):
You might remember Gerald Nadwer, Democrat from New York. He's
still in the House today. Back then and today he
would be the person, as the chair of the House
Judiciary Committee who would oversee impeachment proceedings. Back then, he
was defending Bill Quinton against impeachment. Isn't it amazing how
that exact argument could be applied today, but you will

(09:58):
never see the left apply because it doesn't suit them,
it doesn't support their political interests, because they aren't actually principled.
But you know what impeachment itself is actually besides the point. Yes,
Democrats would love to impeach and remove if they could,
they're not going to be able to get to the removal.
And frankly, they recognize some of them, at least the
more sober ones, the old guard, if you will, and

(10:20):
we'll talk about the old Guard versus the Young Turks
a bit later. The old Guard recognizes that impeachment is
a weapon that can lead to self destruction. They saw
the Republicans do it, and with some of the folks,
the more progressive folks in the Democratic House right now,
they could be in big trouble if they actually go
down that path. But impeachment, again is besides the point.

(10:41):
It's not about that act. The goal of these investigations
is to continue to create the appearance of smoke, but
there's never any fire. There has never been a smoking gun.
There is no fire. You've had people who loathe the
president take unpressed in an action to look into communications

(11:02):
private documents, take away boxes and boxes full of the
most private communicators with lawyers of the president and others.
There's no there there, But the momentum is such that
they can't stop. They have to feed their base, and
they are wedded to this narrative. And so again, it's

(11:23):
about creating the appearance of smoke for as long as possible,
and that's going to mean into twenty twenty and through
the election. Clearly. Now the question is does that actually
move the needle with you, the American people, And I
would suggest that it won't. Those who believe this is
essentially a hoax, we're gonna believe it's a hoax. Those
who are on the other side and believe it's a
Russian spy, they're gonna believe what they're gonna believe. The

(11:47):
people in the middle, those old Reagan Democrats turned Trump Republicans,
I don't think that this is gonna play well with them.
I really don't. But that said, you can bet the
House committees are going to leave no stone unturned because
they need to create a constant hysteria. This isn't about oversight.
This is a political conviction in search of the appearance

(12:10):
at least of crimes. It's an investigation in search of
a crime, and in a worst case scenario for the investigators,
the process itself is the punishment. The process is the punishment.
The whole purpose of this, this whole effort that started
well before Donald Trump was elected president and we're talking
June and maybe even earlier in twenty sixteen, the whole

(12:30):
purpose was to sabotage and paralyze a presidency. And that's
why we have four years of quote unquote investigation. This
is Ben Winegarden in four buck Sexton. Lines are open.
Eight four four nine zero zero buck. That's eight four
four two eight two five. Will be right back. Welcome
back to the buck Sexton Show. This is Ben Weinarten

(12:53):
in four buck Sexton. Thanks for joining us on this
Friday night. Eight four four nine zero zero buck. That's
eight four four nine zero zero two eight two five.
Before the break, I was talking about process as punishment
when it comes to all of the investigations, first in
both the Senate and House Intelligence committees, the Molar Special

(13:15):
Council investigations that preceded them. I want to kind of
summarize what has transpired because I continue to believe that
this is probably the biggest scandal in American history, and
only a small fraction of so called journalists are the
ones covering this. And that's a travesty. It's a travesty
not because we care about media, but because we care

(13:36):
about truth. And thank god we have the Internet. We
would not have an informed citizenry without the ability of
anyone potentially to be a journalist. So the intent, first
of all, when it comes to every step back, when
you know, when the President talks about while Jim Comey
assured him he's not a target, the president was always

(13:58):
the target from probably even before or investigations or dossiers
or anything else started. We're talking in earlier in twenty sixteen,
when he was popular and it actually looked like, wow,
this guy is going to be competitive. So the first
attempt was, let's destroy him during the press in the
run up to in the elections in the primary season
even but then as it advanced, let's start investigations as

(14:20):
an insurance policy, you know, just in case the point
zero zero one percent chance this guy actually triumphs over
Hillary Clinton, then what's spy on his associates? And let's
use informants to try and entrap them in Russian collusion
premised on a selacious and unverified dossier paid for by
Hillary in the DNC and collected from shady Russian sources.

(14:41):
That's an interesting way to try to and affect frame
someone that's very It doesn't get any more Clintonian, really,
it really doesn't get any more Quintonian than that. So
he gets elected before he's even elected. There are approaches,
there's recordings of conversations, and does the intent of this

(15:02):
to take out two people who were vital to the president?
Number one, the Attorney General Jeff Sessions has to recuse
himself because of Russia from the very start. So, in
other words, the law enforcement bodies, FBI, Department of Justice,
the person at the top who might be able to
control them, taken off the board. The national security advisor,
who actually agrees with overturning what the foreign policy and

(15:24):
national security establishment have done for decades, taken off the board.
So two vital cogs pulled out immediately, taken off the
playing field. Later on, as they're continuing these investigations, they
use a firing letter that's drafted by one of their own,
dag Rosenstein, to try to create a case of obstruction.

(15:47):
See Rosenstein wrote the letter on behalf of the President.
The President fires Jim Comey. But isn't that interesting? It
was sort of a trap in some way. It's kind
of it'd be interesting to actually it will. Of course,
Congress can interview Rosens because he's running out the clock.
He's talking to favorable media offline, getting them to write
favorable things about him in a war that he is

(16:07):
having with McCabe. But Congress doesn't get to have any
oversight over something that really matters Dad Rosenstein. All of
this is happening while Congress is throwing the president's agenda,
and that's on a bipartisan basis. Courts are holding up
policies under assinine universal injunctions. And then you have a
molar Special Council which is not only squeezing anyone close

(16:32):
to Trump but toxifying anyone around him, trying to get
them to cough up something anything that will stick. So
that's part of it. But then the other purposes to
cover up the needed investigation of the investigators. How do
you have a team and not just their political inclinations
of the fact that they were all pretty much pro
Hillary people, but how do you have people who are

(16:52):
the establishment of the establishment as the ones who are
supposed to be independent. If you are a part of
the deep state, quote unquote, you can't be dependent. If
your career was made, if you spent decades in these bureaucracies,
in these institutions, your independent special counsel in name only.
Many of the folks involved with wrongdoing which was never
investigated the investigators probably very closely. No Robert Mueller. They

(17:16):
might have gotten promotions from him at certain points during
their career. He was the FBI director. How can it
possibly be independent? Oh yeah. And then in the middle
of all this we find out about you know, perspective
Kuda taz twenty fifth Amendment, literally deposing a president that
is the stuff of police states. So who are the

(17:40):
ones destroying the institutions? Who were the ones acting in
true Russian if not Soviet fashion. You know, Vladimir Putin
is probably smirking about this whole thing. I have to say,
And what is going on in Congress right now is
merely the extension of one big, never ending effort to
create the appearance of illegitimacy of crime. Tis said, even

(18:00):
if President Trump isn't taken out by Congress, the voters
will do their bidding, or very worst, he'll be a
president not even able to stand on one leg, but
maybe standing on a pinky toe. You know, the gravest
national emergency of all has been the rolling effort to
fram the president as a national emergency that requires regime change,

(18:21):
or maybe there never was truly a regime change in practice,
the first peaceful non transfer of power in American history.
This has been one garden in for Buck Sexton on
The Buck Sexton Show eight four four nine zero zero
Buck A four four zero two eight two five. Why

(18:41):
pay your hard earned money to join an organization that
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Well in that scripted portions of White House speeches behind
closed doors to ensure the passage of the Affordable Care Act,
the organization that stood against tax cuts for middle class
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join AMAC instead. The conservative alternative AMAC offers the same

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Become an AMAC member right now at AMAC dot us
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Better for America. This is the Buck Sexton Show, and
this is Ben Weinegarden in for Buck Sexton. Phone lines

(19:49):
are open eight four four nine zero zero. Buck. That's
eight four four nine zero zero to eight two five,
and let's go to the phones, and let's go to
first to Charlie in Maryland earlier on the Box Sex
and Show. This is Ben Weingarten. Hey, thanks for thaying McCall. Ben.
I've been following this Mueller thing for some time now,

(20:10):
and I am mad at the politicians for only one reason.
They don't run this country. The bureaucrats run it, and
they are openly about it. They are committing treason against
this president and nobody is really saying much. I just

(20:30):
find it absolutely amazing that we let just go. Charlie,
thank you so much for the call and you know,
I agree with you. This really comes down to the
administrative state. At the end of the day, regimes change,
our administrations change, control of the House, control of the

(20:53):
Senate fluctuates, but the bureaucrats are forever. They are always there,
and many of them are almost possible to fire. In fact,
if you actually look at the government's internal ratings of
government employees, everyone gets like an A plus plus. It's
almost impossible to get downgraded. Probably the more corrupt or
political acts that you make, you probably rank higher sad

(21:15):
way in many agencies. And this has been reported and documented,
though obviously not bandied about frequently by the political class.
Not to say, of course that there aren't rank and
file folks who do a great job. But if you're
in a political bureaucracy and you are not political, it's
very tough to rise in advance. That's why someone like
a Mike Flint, incidentally, was so amazing that he rose

(21:38):
to the position as the head of the DA under
President Obama. Amazing that he ended up at that point,
given how impolitic he was. But it really does come
down to the bureaucracy, the administrative state, and incidentally, Congress,
Congress has seeded power to these agencies. These agencies technically

(21:58):
fall under the executive branch, but it's clear they are
a fourth branch of government. I wrote a lengthy piece
about this actually, and I just tweeted it out where
I talk about the fact that we have created a
fourth branch of government that is unelected, unaccountable, and it
molds the powers of all three branches. So actually, if

(22:18):
you look at how a federal agency works, literally, federal
agencies play judge, jury, prosecutor executioner. So if you are
involved in some sort of legal action when it comes
to an agency, you have a business, Your business is
regulated by an agency. You flatter regulation. You want to

(22:39):
litigate against that agency, you have to go in front
of an administrative judge. So it's a government judge. You
couldn't have a more rigged playing field. There's a great quote.
I urge you to look it up. Look up Gary Lawson.
He's a law professor who's written about the administrative state
and shows you that the administrative state is tyranny. If
you have all three branches of government in one subset

(23:00):
action of the executive branch, that's tyranny. The whole purpose
of separation of powers was that you didn't have executive, legislative,
and judicial functions all under one roof. That's why this
is much bigger than any one particular president. It's much
bigger than these last two years and maybe the six

(23:21):
years succumb It's fundamentally about who rules. We the people rule,
or de bureaucrats rule. Congress has ceded its power to
these agencies. They've delegated their own powers away. Sham on
Congress for doing it. And it also allows Congress to
never take responsibility for anything. And we wonder why does

(23:42):
every pivotal decision end up at the Supreme Court. Well,
it's because Congress is completely derelict in its duty. It's
out to lunch. There's no courage among Congress to actually
do its job, which is to legislate. One other quote
that I would urge you to look up and i'll
paraphrase it here is from Harry Truman. Harry Truman talks
about the fact and again here we're talking now seventy

(24:05):
years ago, almost sixty seventy years ago, Harry Truman talked
about the fact he thought he had power as president
until he met the bureaucrats. He says something like, except
for those damn bureaucrats, they run the show. That's a president.
So imagine, now you know, we're almost seventy years on

(24:27):
from Truman, how much more entrenched and powerful government is,
which is already so big and already has literally stacks.
If you look at the Federal Register, we're talking hundreds
of thousands of pages. And then when you look at
the rules and the regulations, which is really where laws
are written, it's not written by a congresshman. A congressman says,
here's sort of the broad policy, and it might be
a thousand or three thousand page bill, but then every

(24:50):
single part of that bill, all of the rules and
regulations are then delegated out to these agencies. So the
real laws come down to a bureaucrat. And by the way,
if you're one of those bureaucrats and you want to
go to the private sector, you might you might yourself
take it upon yourself to draft the rules. That they're
really complicated and only you, as a regulator, know how
to interpret them. So what do you do. You go

(25:12):
work then in the industry that you were regulating, and
what do you do there? You consult on the most
complex regulations ever that you yourself drafted because you're the
only one who can help that company avoid getting in
trouble with a particular agency. And you make x times
as much as you made while you were working in
the public sector. So it's a really perverse incentive system,
and it's a perversion of limited government consent of the governed.

(25:38):
They run the show, You don't run the show. All right,
let's go to another call. Let's go to Bill in
West Virginia. Bill, you are on the Buck Sexton Show.
Thanks for taking McCall. Hey, I believe in fighting fire
with fireing at and they've been hounding Trump with over
the twenty sixteen East election and he's had no, no

(26:00):
proven collusion and buy him with the Russians in it.
I think the twenty eighteen election should be investigated because
the Democrats seem to want to keep the border open,
and Trump and Republicans should call for an investigation of
the Democrats and in any possible collusion that they're using
to aid the Mexican drug cartels by wanting to keep

(26:22):
the borders open. Thanks for the call, Bell, And you
know it's interesting they never want to talk about foreign
influence when the foreign influence might actually help democrats. But
let's look at the facts. I've talked about this on
a prior episode where we went really deep into the
weeds on the census citizenship question. What's that all about. Well,

(26:45):
non citizens, including illegal aliens, get counted in the census.
The census, the population numbers count everyone citizens and non citizens.
So that includes the you know, the kind of range
of ten to twenty million illegal aliens or maybe more
in America as households are counted in the census. And
what are those census numbers used for? Total population is
used to determine the apportionment of seats in Congress and

(27:08):
local seats as well. In other words, those places that
have more illegal aliens, they get more political power than
those places that don't have a lot of illegal aliens.
And naturally, the places that are magnets for illegal aliens, well,
of course they're naturally blue places, sanctuary jurisdictions. And then
hundreds of billions of dollars of federal funds are dulled

(27:29):
out based upon population numbers from the census, population numbers
inflated by illegal aliens. So you want to talk about
foreign influence in Meadowing. It's right there. Democrats encourage it,
they incentivize it, they protect illegal aliens. They probably give
illegal aliens in some ways more rights than you have
as a US citizen. That's foreign influence in Meadowing. And

(27:52):
that's not even to mention, by the way, a little
tidbit that Democrats are loath to talk about. And we'll
get to this a little bit later tonight. Chinese foreign influence.
According to Vice President Pence in a landmark speech that
he gave at the Hudson Institute last year, the Chinese
were running ads, for example, in Midwestern states that were

(28:14):
impacted by the tariffs the Trump administration put on them
to essentially try and lobby against those tariffs and also
use them against the Republican Party for their own political interest.
That's foreign influence. And it's not just then. If you
look in the papers today, Huawei, massive Chinese tech company
which the US government has been clamping down on, telling
our allies in Europe and elsewhere, don't use Huawei technology

(28:36):
for five G because it's going to create a backdoor
and allow the Chinese to spy on you. Guess what
they are running marketing literature lobbying American citizens in our
newspapers today telling you how great a company Huawei is,
and they don't pose a threat and they come in peace.
So you want to talk about foreign influence, that's foreign influence.

(28:57):
And this is not even to get into if we
applied the same logic applied to Donald Trump, to Barack Obama,
and Victor Davis Hanson has written a great piece on this,
I urge you to read, well, would we start looking
at Iranian influence? How could a president ever make those
sorts of decisions towards the Iranians? The appeasement of all appeasement,
Neville Chamberlain. Peace in our time? What if we started

(29:21):
looking into that? If we're going to make decisions, investigatory
decisions on the basis of hunt, these policies are kind
of sketchy, and maybe they're helping our adversaries or not,
as the case may be. In this case. Actually, when
it comes to Trump, the foreign policy establishment has scuttled
an attempt to reach out to Russia, to split off
Russia from China. And oh, by the way, our own
intelligence services have now said Russia and China are closer

(29:41):
than they've been in decades to our great detriment. But
what if we applied that foreign collusion meadowing standard to
anyone else. I don't think it's a road we want
to go down, but the genie is out of the bottle.
Let's take a quick break. This is Ben wine Garden
in four buck sexton eight four four nine ers or
a buck eight four four zero zero two eight two five.

(30:05):
Welcome back to the buck Sexton Show. This is Ben
Weingarten in four buck Sexton eight four four nine zero
zero buck. That's eight four four nine zero zero two
eight two five. We were just talking a bit before
the break about foreign influence meadowing, the broader scope of

(30:26):
all this, and the broader context for all of this,
which comes down to legitimacy of our government, whether there's
consent of the governed, whether the investigators themselves need to
be the ones who are investigated. And this is in
some sense and elaborate cover up of a plan that
they never expected would be revealed because they never thought

(30:47):
Trump would win. But let's look ahead to twenty twenty
and I noticed an article. It didn't get a lot
of press, but I think it's gonna be the first
data point that we may be able to point to
in terms of trying to delegitimize at the very beginning
a potential Trump win in twenty twenty. So Politico had

(31:10):
an article came out on the twentieth titled sustaind an
ongoing disinformation assault targets dem presidential candidates. A coordinated barrage
of social media attacks suggests the involvement of foreign state actors.
And I want to read a little bit from this
because it's critical to note that they are getting this

(31:33):
information out now, that foreign powers are using social media
to try and destroy democratic candidates. So it starts A wide,
raging disinformation campaign aimed at Democratic twenty twenty candidates is
already underway on social media, with signs that foreign state
actors are driving at least some of the activity. The
main targets Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders,

(31:56):
and former Representative Beto Cultural Appropriation O'Rourke, four of the
most prominent announced or prospective candidates for presidents. A political
review of recent data extracted from Twitter and from other platforms,
as well as interviews with data scientists and digital campaign strategists,
suggests that the goal of The coordinated barrage appears to

(32:17):
be undermining the nascent candidacies through the dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation,
and distortions of their positions, But the divisive nature of
many of the posts also hints at a broader effort
to sew discord and chaos within the Democratic presidential primary.
Where have we heard this narrative before, dissemination of memes, hashtags, misinformation,

(32:41):
and distortions of their positions. Well, if that's going to
swing the election, why didn't we lose the Cold War
like sixty years ago? I mean, if it was just
literally let's put out some memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions.
I mean, wouldn't the Soviet Union of one? They could
have flooded Aerican news with all sorts of memes and hashtags.

(33:06):
This isn't to discount the fact that foreign adversaries use
misinformation and disinformation for their ends. They absolutely do. If
you want to see that, look no further than the
Kashogi caper. Look at how they created this narrative about
Jamal Kashogi that actually has completely influenced US foreign policy,
pushing us away from the Saudi is trying to attempt

(33:26):
to undermine a block against Iran, the number one threat
in that region of the world. Foreign influence is real.
Misinformation and disinformations are a fact of life, and they
are massively powerful because when you change people's minds, you
ultimately change their activities. And in politics it's obviously paramount.

(33:47):
But let's put in context what Russia did last election.
If you look at the they spend a few hundred
thousand dollars on some crappy social media ads that, yeah,
there may have been several million impressions, But do you
think that anyone changed their mind based upon any of
the garbage that was put out by the Russians? You
think that that caused discord and influence the election and

(34:08):
swung votes. There was never any proof that anything that
the Russians did swung votes. In fact, if you look back,
if you even look back at the DNC emails that
were leaked, the poll numbers didn't really shift after that leak.
So when we talk about influence, swinging elections, leaking emails,
that could be devastating, obviously, But memes, hashtags, misinformation and distortions.

(34:34):
If you have people that are making videos where they're
making it seem like candidates are saying things and they're
fake videos, and the technology is there to do that
sort of thing. Yes, that could certainly swing things. It
could certainly cause discord. And if you're an evil actor
that wants to do America harm, you can come up
with some pretty substantive ways to cause a lot of
casks in our system, especially with the media that we have,

(34:54):
which is willing to run with this stuff and rarely
does their homework, but memes, hashtags, misinformation, and distortions. And
it's only the Democratic Party that's been subject to this.
So it continues. The cyberpropaganda, which frequently picks at the
ross most sensitive issues in public discourse, is being pushed
across a variety of platforms and with a more insidious
approach than the twenty sixteen presidential election, when online attacks

(35:17):
designed to polarize and mislead voters first surfaced on massive scale.
Recent posts of widespread dissemination include racially inflammatory memes and
messaging involving Harris Arooric and Warren and Warren's case, and
it goes on and on, and they say not all
of the activities organized. Much of it appears to be
organic or reflection of the politically polarizing nature of some
of the candidates. And on, guess what, the candidates are

(35:40):
going to destroy themselves by themselves. It doesn't take social
media memes and hashtags. You know, only Democrats think that
hashtags can defeat evil adversaries. I mean, come on, come on,
a kid in their basement could do this again. But
when real influence operations actually impact us, the media hoaxes,

(36:01):
the Kashogie caper, the Jesse Smollette story, Russia Gate, confucious institutes,
as we'll talk about a little bit later. What is
this really about again? Number one, delegitimizing a potential Donald
Trump victory in advance and propagating the narrative the meme
of foreign influence boogeyman. But two, ultimately, this is about
hyperregulating political speech, which means killing conservative speech on social media.

(36:25):
The left wants to have a monopoly on political thought,
and that's traditional media, social media, academia, the whole bureaucracy.
That's the reality. This is ultimately going to be about
regulating political speech, and regulating political speech is not going
to be to the benefit of protecting all First Amendment speech.

(36:46):
Political speech of which is the most important and conservative speech,
of course, which is quite valuable. This has been onegar
in for Buck sex in eight four four two eight
two five will be right back, And I read it
and I was like, you know what, I don't care anymore.
I don't care anymore because again, I'm at least trying

(37:09):
and they're not. So the power isn't the person who's trying,
regardless of the success. If you're trying, you've got all
the power. You're driving the agenda, you're doing all this
stuff like I just introduced Green New Deal two weeks ago,
and it's creating all of this conversation. Why because no
one else has even tried. Because no one else has

(37:32):
even tried. So people are like, oh it's unrealistic. Oh
it's vague, Oh it doesn't address this little minute thing.
And I'm like, you try, you do it right, because
you're not because you're not. So until you do it,
I'm the boss. How about without in respect to miss Ocasio, qute,

(37:53):
she's not the boss on this program. This has Ben
Weingerten in four Buck Sexon on the Buck Sexon program,
and that was Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez saying that she
is the boss, although I think Nancy Pelosi would beg
to differ. But it brings up an important point, and
that is that when Democrats aren't warring to try to

(38:16):
bring down Donald Trump, there's a war going on, a
Democrat civil war. You know, we've heard for years Republican
civil war. There is a Democrat civil civil war for
the soul of their party. It's the old Guard versus
the young Turks, because now we live in a world
where the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and

(38:37):
Diane Feinstein they aren't sufficiently radical. And that video of
Finstein with the kids, I don't even know where to
start with that, except to say that it is scary
that progressives start that young. And we've talked about this before.
Their whole idea is to indoctrinate from day one so
that everyone is woke. I think you're going to see

(39:01):
though the Dems. The Dems cannot get out of their
own way, whether it's the Green New Deal, fake fake rollout,
actually the Rio rollouts where we're talking about slaughtering cows
and no more air travel and transcontinental railroads and the like,
a cross oceans, railroads, high speed fout in California, or
we're talking about Congresswoman Omar's anti semitism, where basically every

(39:26):
single week she racks up another point on the anti semiboard,
or Rashida tayeb insinuating Mark Meadows as a racist. It
was pretty blatent by the way she was calling him
a racist. Mark Meadows is a better man than I
because he apparently went up to her and hugged her
after the fact and forgave her. But while the left

(39:48):
is going to overreach, and I think you're gonna see
in these hearings that they're gonna be clown themselves. They're
not going to be able to help themselves. Because for
the younger ones, the more impressionable ones, the more naive ones,
the ones you don't know about how Washington works, they
are so energized and animated. Their trumped arrangement syndrome is
so deep it's gonna shine through and people aren't gonna

(40:09):
like what they're gonna see. And then for the others,
you kind of have to tag along because if all
the energy is with the progressives, you need to take
up the most progressive causes possible because that's votes, that's fundraising,
that's media airtime. I mean, look Acasio Cortez and media darling.
They like her not just because she says insane things,

(40:30):
but because the media actually agrees with a lot of
those things. Democrats right now, if you look at the
presidential candidates, and we're going to go through a little
bit of the horse race and just a bit, it's
a party of infanticide. It's a party of socialism, including
socialized medicine. It's a party of the mass slaughter of
cows and the grounding of all plans. As I mentioned,

(40:52):
it's a party of abolish ice. It's a party of
border walls are immoral. It's a party of anti Israel,
pro Iran deal. Orange man Bad is one of the
only things that unites all of them. I would suggest
that they've failed to learn something from Barack Obama, who

(41:13):
I think agrees with all of these progressives, and he's
sort of their leader, even though he's been very quiet
because he's making millions of dollars at Netflix and elsewhere,
but I guarantee you he's playing a role in this election.
The Democrats, the progressives have regressive progressives. I like to
call him regressives, We'll see if that catches on. They
failed to learn from Barack Obama that, to paraphrase Van Jones,

(41:36):
you have to drop the radical pose to achieve the
radical ends. What does that mean. It means you need
to wrap your radicalism in a non threatening, non offensive,
non left wing, tinfoil hat wearing sort of robe garb.
And this is why if you look back to the
original regressive progressives, the Angela davis Is of the world,

(41:59):
or the Bill Airs of the or the radicals of
the sixties, they stopped throwing bombs and they started fighting
wars for the minds of young people. They put on suits,
some of them, at least most of them, shaved and showered,
and they went into the institutions. They became teachers, they
became bureaucrats. They needed to drop the radical pose to
achieve the radical ends. And Barack Obama did the exact

(42:20):
same thing. He covered the radical leftism in a seemingly
non threatening, common sense, every American, every man kind of way.
It did shine through at times, but not enough to
imperil his eight years. Although Democrats did lose at every
level because people actually hated the policies they liked the person.

(42:43):
So while on the one hand, Democrats are being shifted
to the left, far to the left, and the Overton
window perhaps itself is shifting as they stake out the
most radical positions, and those positions over time become more
mainstream because political shifts happened faster over a wider birth
than they ever have. If you look at what was
considered radical five or ten years ago, that becomes routine

(43:05):
now in a lot of respects, unthinkable things become the norm.
In fact, hundreds of years of human history and teaching
and practice have become overturned in recent years. But there's
a whipsaw effect that's occurring because while on the one
hand there's the impeach and remove at any costs caucus,

(43:27):
they're also so called moderates in hotly contested seats going
into twenty twenty, folks in purple district districts that you know,
we're probably suburban, middle upper middle class. You might even
have Republican majorities, but they don't like Trump, and Republicans,
to their credit for once, are actually playing political hardball.

(43:49):
So you have Republicans in the House that are making
amendments to legislation and forcing Democrats to actually take hard votes.
So here's the latest one. There was gun legislation that
came out in the House. And what did Republicans do. Well.
It was a bill to expand federal background checks for

(44:11):
gun purchases. This is out, It's described in the Washington Post.
So I'm going with the left interpretation of what happened here,
and they write, twenty six moderate Democrats join Republicans in
amending the legislation, adding a provision requiring that ICE be
notified if an illegal immigrant seeks to purchase a gun.
Talk about a poison pill. Democrats can't vote for that. Well, actually,
twenty six so called moderates did. This not only incensed

(44:36):
the Occasio Cortezes of the world, it actually incensed Nancy
Pelosi too, because her job is to keep order within
her party and make sure they all stick together. So again,
I give Republicans credit. They actually played hardball once. Amazing.
They should do it more often. They should do one
of the things that we care about. So what is

(44:57):
the reaction of Speaker Pelosi and the Occasi zero Cortezes
of the world. When we come back from this break,
I'm going to go through the sort of gulag politics
that you're about to see from the left. This is
Ben Winegarden in for Buck Sexon on the Buck Sexon Show.
I'll explain what I mean by gulag politics in just
a minute. Eight four four nine zero zero Buck. That's

(45:19):
eight four four nine zero zero two eight two five.
Welcome back to the Buck Sexton Show. This is Ben
Weinegarden in four Buck Sexton. Phone lines are open eight
four four nine zero zero Buck. That's eight four four
nine zero zero two eight two five. During the break,
I was scanning my Twitter feed and came across this

(45:42):
great tidbit that sort of exemplifies exactly what we were
talking about earlier when it comes to bureaucrats. This is
exhibit a of bureaucrats cashing in. And I believe this
is from Politico Annals of Speculation. I'll quote from this
one on't note. How much could Robert mull Or make
if he decides to head to a law firm as

(46:02):
he wraps up his investigation as special counsel washington Ians
Marissa Kashino asked around quote as high a number as
the market has available, says Jeffrey Lowe. The Washington managing
partner of legal recruiting firm Major Lindsay in Africa, quote
firms that can pay five million dollars while for five
million dollars. If they can pay between five million dollars
and ten million dollars, that can be the number two unquote.

(46:24):
To be clear, this is Politico writing. We're talking about
annual compensation, so five to ten million bucks a year.
Another quote five million. I think that's the starting point,
says the McCormick Group's Stephen Nelson. At least several millions,
says Garrison and Sissons Dan Binstock, though he adds it
could be significantly higher at certain firms exhibit A of
bureaucrats cashing in. But let's actually look at the more

(46:47):
substantive point, which is if Politico is writing right now,
and I believe it's Poetico about how much Mueller stands
to make in the private sector before the report is
even delivered, this really must be a nothing burger of
a report. I mean, you're talking about compensation for Robert
Mueller before this report that we've been waiting for with

(47:08):
these breathless bombshow report after bombshow report, day in, day out,
every news cycle. Now the story that they want to
focus on is how much Robert Moore is going to
make when the Special Council concludes. Let's go back to
what I was talking about before, which is the Democratic

(47:29):
civil war and the sort of AOC versus Speaker Pelosi,
old guard versus young Turk split. Well, in this case,
AOC and Pelosi are standing together against their so called
moderates in their party, who of course are a minority
within their party. So the Washington Post headline is House

(47:49):
Democrats explode in recriminations as liberal as lash out at moderates.
I'm kind of surprised that the article didn't read Republicans
pounce on House Democrats explode in recriminations as liberals lash out. Well,
they'll probably do it now. So that article says, and
remember this is dealing with legislation that twenty six moderate
Democrats in the House went along with Republicans on where

(48:11):
in expanding federal background checks for gun purchases, Republicans added
a provision requiring that ice be notified if an illegal
immigrant seeks to purchase a gun. Democrats hate that. Now,
it's absurd that they hate that, But Democrats hate that
so the article reads in part and I quote in
a closed door session, a frustrated speaker Nancy Pelosi lashed

(48:32):
out at about two dozen moderates and pressured them to
get on board. Quote, we are either a team or
we're not, and we have to make that decision unquote,
Pelosi said, according to people present but not authorized to
discuss the remarks publicly. But Ocasio Cortez, the unquestioned media
superstar of the freshman class. That's aw. Let's see when
a Republican is described as an unquestioned media superstar in

(48:55):
a supposed we straight news article on the Washington Post,
the unquestioned media superstar of the freshman class up the
anti admonishing the moderates and indicating she would help liberal
activists unseat them in the twenty twenty election. So Kazio Cortes,
this twenty nine year old with no power in Congress whatsoever,
but a massive social media following and a press that
loves her. Clearly self evidently she's talking about primarying moderates.

(49:20):
Corbyn Trent, a spokesman for a Kazio Cortez, said she
told her colleagues that Democrats who side with Republicans quote
unquote are putting themselves on a list. You're on a
list if you cross Alexandra Kazio Cortes. So now we're
talking about blacklisting within the Democratic Party. Isn't that fascinating?
Who are the ones acting like authoritarians? So Corbyn Trent,

(49:44):
this spokesman goes on. She said that when activists ask
her why she had to vote for a gun safety
bill that also further empowers an agency that forcibly injects
kids with psychotropic drugs. You seriously can't make this stuff up.
They're going to want a list of names, and she's
going to give it to them, Trent said, referring to
US Immigration and custom Enforcement. You're on a list, you're

(50:04):
a moderate, you vote your conscience, you vote probably in
line with what you're moderate. Supposedly constituency says, you're on
a list, and you'll get primaried. Now, I encourage Acazio
Quartz to try to primary these people, because if they
get primaried and they're quote unquote moderate districts, that means
Republicans are going to sweep those districts. Queen I'll be
back in a majority in the House. But seriously, that

(50:25):
takes some nerve. First of all, again, who is Alexandro
Acazio Quartz to be the one coming up with these
litmus tests? But then, even more importantly, Democrats are drawing lists.
You know, I'm just I'm reminded of the Seine Fight
episode where a land Venice. You know, she's on the list.
She can't get the Chinese food. She's been blacklisted by

(50:48):
the Communist Party. So when I talk about Gulag politics,
that's where I'm going. You're on a list, You're out.
It's a Kazio Quarte as his way or the highway.
Is that where the Democrats want to be. They want
to systematically pick off anyone who dares dissent from what

(51:11):
progressivism demands. Again, please do that, Representative Acazio Quartz, Please,
I beg of you, name and shame every single moderate
who votes along with the Republican on something rational. Illegal
aliens going to buy a gun? H Maybe that should
concern us a little bit. In fact, it's an issue

(51:33):
in her home state. MS thirteen runs rampant here. Acazio
Cortes knows full well who they are. What if you're
a law abiding citizen in one of these places, What
does a Kazio Quartes say to you when a kid
is out playing in the street and illegal alien buys
a gun, kid gets shot, accidentally buy a gang member,
What does she say to those parents? You know, being

(51:57):
a leftist means never having to grapple with the consequences
of your policies, Republicans. When the policies work out, Democrats
will say, well they didn't work out well enough, or
they'll try to find the anti silver lining, the fool's
goal of lining in it. Democrats, it's all about feelings,
what feels good, what seems compassionate. It's never about getting

(52:20):
thrown off your healthcare plan. It's never about never being
able to see the doctor that you liked for your
entire life. It's never about being freed from joblock quote unquote, ie,
let's celebrate people getting fired because now you can go
find better benefits somewhere else. AOC never has to grapple

(52:43):
with the reality of anything that she says, because the
media will never Where are the fact checkers going line
by line, word by word through every last thing that
Alexandrea Kazio Cortez says. And I hate to harp on
her because on the one hand, she's a side show.
It's sort of embarrassing. On the other hand, though she
is a representative of where her party is going at

(53:05):
the very least ideologically. I'm sure there are going to
be more seasoned people that are going to follow in
her footsteps, although of course Democrats might not like someone
who's more season They think that she's authentic quote unquote,
she's a bartender quote unquote. In fact, I would say
that AOC is just the new age version of Bernie Sanders.
And look where Bernie Sanders is. Bernie Sanders would would

(53:27):
have been dismissed as a total kuk socialist, goes on
his honeymoon to the Soviet Union, and if you haven't
seen those videos, you have to see the videos of
him celebrating, looking like the useful idiot that he is,
taking shots of vodka in the Soviet Union in the
Cold War, celebrating with these folks. But that guy would

(53:48):
have been competitive in a general election last time around,
and he's one of the favorites in the Democratic primary
this time around. In fact, if it hadn't really been
rigged on the Democratic side with the super teligates last
time around, he probably beats Hillary Clinton. Acazio Cortez is
just an inexperienced version of Bernie Sanders. So we can

(54:09):
dismiss her, we can mock her, we can ride her.
But the reality is she has built up a following
in the public, and not only that, she has shifted
the Overton window. I said it before. These policies they
may seem nuts, and they are nuts, and they are disastrous,
and you can look at world experience, example after example,
but the lesson has to be constantly retaught. That's what

(54:31):
Reagan taught us, freedom never being more than one generation away.
What democrats are talking about right now are the worst
possible ideas, the most regressive ideas you could ever have.
They've been tried over and over again. Look at East
and West Germany, look at North Korea and South Korea.
Examples are plentiful. They need to be taken seriously, and

(54:51):
they need to be fought day in and day out.
We're gonna talk a little about that democratic field and
what is to come. This has Ben Wagaran in for
Buck Sex and on the Buck Sexton Show. A four
four zero two eight two five. That's a four four
nine zero zero two A two five we'll be right
back talking the horse race, democratic radicalism, Overton Window and

(55:12):
much more. Welcome back to the buck Sexton Show. This
is ben Wine Garden in four buck Sexton. In just
a short while, we're going to pivot to what's going
on in international affairs and we'll talk a little bit
about China and North Korea. And you know, in some
ways it's funny to talk about the left and then

(55:32):
you're talking about China and North Korea and these other
places where that's where the socialist dream is. And you know,
maybe the best depiction of it is you look at
a world map of different places at night, and then
during the day, North Korea is just dark. There's no activity,
there's no commerce. It's a very telling thing when there
is no light, and literally you have a gulag nation.

(55:55):
And I go back to again East Germany and West Germany.
If you ever look, that is maybe the greatest controlled
experiment of all time in terms of here you have
the same people they started out, the same infrastructure, the
same level of talent, the same traditions, values, principles, literally
the same families. Look at where East Germany and West

(56:18):
Germany were at the end of the Cold War, and
even today if you look at many measures, East Germany
is still behind West Germany in a lot of economic
measures and other measures as well. That is the human
toll of terrible ideas, terrible ideas that there may be
claims of good intentions behind, but imposing your view of

(56:39):
what's moral and just, which requires mass wealth redistribution and
dramatically altering the way that you conduct your lives. That's tyranny,
even if it ended up with good outcomes, quote unquote,
it's tyranny. And none of the socialistens in anyway will
ever explain how it is that the stuff will be
created that they then redistribute. Under a system where there's

(56:59):
only reading distribution, who's going to create in that system?
You're just going to be sharing a shrinking, shriveling, dying
pie with everyone because there's no incentive to create, to
be dynamic, to pursue your dreams. If you look at
what the Soviet Union was like, and you wonder in
part today, why is the Soviet Union? If you look
at the alcoholism rates, they're just off the charts. I

(57:21):
would pause it that one of the reasons probably is
human capital was destroyed by socialism and you're still seeing
the effects of it today, Which brings me to the
Democrats twenty twenty. Field. I see a major challenge for
the Democrats in twenty twenty. And it isn't just that
I think Trump is going to have a great agenda
to run on, or perhaps that the economy is going

(57:43):
to be continue to be rip roaring, and financial markets
and all the other things that all the pundits always
say or what people vote on. To be the Democrat
that wins your nomination, you have to be sufficiently woke.
You have to demonstrate social justice, warriordom to the death.
You also have to check the identity politics boxes. And

(58:05):
then you still have to attempt to win a state
like a Florida, arn Ohio, or a Pennsylvania or a Michigan. Now,
while they won't make the same mistake as Hillary Clinton
of not campaigning in a place like a Michigan, it
is very tough to try to sweep out in a
primary where everyone is so far left and everyone is

(58:26):
trying to outdo each other on the left, and then
seem reasonable enough to win in those places where that
are completely intolerable of that insane leftism. So I just
want to take off the names. These were kind of
my initial thoughts on a handful of names today. Okay,
Joe Biden, what has Joe Biden been running on? Well,
he took back a nice comment that he had for

(58:48):
Vice President Mike Pence on social media because he got
attacked by social justice warrior and failed candidate in New York,
Cynthia Nixon. Took back his nice words for Mike Pence
because god forbid, you're actually ennuy towards someone of the
other party. Oh yeah, and Uncle Joe went overseas in
front of a European audience in the last couple of
weeks and badmouth America. One of the first rules of

(59:10):
one of the seminal rules of politics that a quote
unquote elder statesman like a Joe Biden would acknowledge always
is you don't go overseas and attack America. You just
don't do that, period full stop. Okay, we have Spartacus.
Spartacus kicked off his campaign by violating rules in Congress
while grand standing during the shameful Kavanaugh hearings, and go

(59:32):
look up his friend t Bone. That's a laugher. Elizabeth warned,
what Folcahontas is the defining aspect of her career. Kamala Harris,
her own paramour, admitted how she made her way to
the top in San Francisco politics. Hint it wasn't based
on merit. She called for abolishing private insurance compared eyes
to the KKK, lied about her drug usage and attempting

(59:53):
to quense the fact that she's now pro drug after
being anti drug as a prosecutor. Lied about the music
she was listening to while smoking pots. So was she
lying about the pot usage? Was she lying about the
music she was listening to? Was she lying about her
position altogether? Beto is the Robert Francis O'Rourke, I should say,

(01:00:13):
is the cultural appropriation candidate and sort of the EMO candidate.
He's also a white male and tries, he might to
call himself Beto. White male is a dangerous thing to
be in the Democratic Party, doesn't check off the identity
politics box, try as he might, and of course frames
himself as Beto when he's running against somewhat of actual
Cuban descent. But let's leave that aside. Amy Quobachar I

(01:00:36):
thought that Amy Quobachar could potentially be competitive because she
kind of comes off as you know, reasonable. She had
all these moderate Republicans fawning over her in articles, but
you cross Amy Quobachar and she'll throw a stapore at
your head. I mean literally, it's like a character and
office space, like a violent Milton or you know, her

(01:00:59):
ridge is more than Hillary Clinton's rage at Bill Clinton
based upon the descriptions that we've seen. And then today
we had the announcement that Washington Governor Jay Insley would
be running, and he is running as the climate change candidate,
fighting the climate. So his platform when we talk about
fighting climate change is let's massively reorganize our daily lives

(01:01:21):
over a hypothetical issue where the scientists have been persistently wrong.
And oh, by the way, their funding is generally tied
to proving the consensus is what they claim the consensus
is about global warming that justifies all manner of wealth redistribution.
And oh, by the way, the worst offenders in the
world won't go along with whatever their scheme is anyway,
So we're going to sacrifice our position as the pre

(01:01:41):
eminent capitalist world power. But China and all the rest
of the countries are going to keep trucking along. I
would say the field is set tremendously for Donald Trump
in a lot of ways. But long term, the Woke
crew is going to triumph over the Democratic Party again.
I think the Overton window is shifting. The most radical
positions have now been put out there by multiple candidates.

(01:02:02):
They're all signed off on the Green New Deal. I'm
going to talk about that in a second. They are
directionally where the party is going. They may have staked
out the positions too orally. Those positions may be losers
in twenty twenty, they might even be losers in twenty
twenty four. But where's the country going? Well, their view,
the progressive view, is the view that dominates in popular culture,

(01:02:23):
in our schools, everywhere in the bureaucracy itself in a
lot of ways, and worth noting. Incidentally, Democrats are out
there working to kill the electoral college right now. Colorado
was the most recent state to enter an interstate compact
that needs a majority. It needs I think two hundred

(01:02:44):
and seventy electoral votes for this legislation to pass, where
essentially you would have a national popular vote that determines
where all the electoral votes in a given state go
so a state might vote Republican, but if the country
majority votes Democrat, all those states electors go Democrat. And
it appears, at least right now that it's constitutional. You

(01:03:06):
have twelve states and the District of Columbia. I forget
if they're included in the twelve over they're incremento to
the twelve states one hundred and seventy two electoral votes
by the latest count covered here. See, they want to
actually have direct democracy, which is tyranny. All of these
politicians love to talk about democracy the greatest thing ever.
The Founders hated democracy. The Founders talk about democracy as

(01:03:29):
tyranny of the majority, where fifty percent plus one vote
can vote away the rights of everyone else. Just because
you have free voting doesn't mean you'll end it up
in tyranny. And let me just say why the Greens,
why are they going with green Jay Insley the most
recent one, and the Green New Deal and the rest
of it. I would suggest that it's because science is

(01:03:52):
the only way that they can justify socialism. The Green
movement is socialism masquerading as science. They have to create
a crisis they can justify by something that is unimpeachable,
that you cannot argue against or your anti science. So
if the science demands the totalitarian response, only a Neanderthal
could oppose it. Worst case, if the green agenda fails,

(01:04:16):
they get their friends rich through chronyism. We have cylindras
add infinitum, in perpetuity forever. That's what the green thing
is really about. It's about they can't win based upon
the actual evidence, so they need to go science. Aha.
This is Ben Winegarden in for Buck Sexton on the
Buck Sexton Show. A four four nine zero zero two
eight two five A four four nine zero zero two

(01:04:38):
eight two five. Welcome back to the Buck Sexton Show.
This is Ben Weinegarden in four Buck Sexton eight four
four nine zero zero Buck. That's eight four four nine
zero zero two eight two five. All right. In a
past episode of this program, I went into great detail
into what I think is the most vital, underestimated, underappreciate it,

(01:05:02):
and potentially most significant of all policies that the Trump
administration has undertaken, and of course not gotten nearly the
credit it deserves for it, in part because it is
in some way as a rebuke of everything the experts
quote unquote have told us for almost fifty years, and
that is the fact that China is a competitor more
than that it's an adversary. And while the administration may

(01:05:25):
catch its terms somewhat diplomatically at times, it's very clear
that there has been a market change. Now, why should
we care about China as a major geopolitical competitor beyond
the fact that it's a world's second biggest economy, it
has nuclear weapons, it's a massive population and landmass, massive
natural resources, and all the other knock on effects of

(01:05:47):
having this behemoth that's adversarial with the communist run government
facing US in a vitally important strategic region of the world.
I always go back to the question why should we care?
How does this actually our daily life? And the first
thing right off the bat is, besides trade that we
have with China, there's also the fact that literally trillions

(01:06:09):
of dollars worth of goods traffic through areas seas that
are in China's sort of near abroad. And if that
were to change, if that relationship were to somehow fundamentally change,
or those seas were not to be able to be
patrolled freely by the US, you can imagine the economic
calamity that would occur if China actually took aggressive measures there.

(01:06:29):
And by the way, the Chinese military has threatened US
ships in this region. So this is a real threat
and it really does impact actually the day to day
and we're not just talking stock prices, but we're talking
about costs of goods when you go down to your
local Walmart or any other store in America for that matter,
overshadowed in what I've termed sort of the kabuki theater

(01:06:52):
of the Cohen hearing and all the rest that we're
about to see over the next couple of years. Over
the last two weeks, there were three major development, three
major stories relating to China that have nothing to do
with the trade deal that may or may not ultimately
end up being negotiated. What are those three stories. Well,
one of them starts in all places in Cincinnati, Ohio.

(01:07:15):
I doubt that you saw this story. A local news
source there, WCPO nine Cincinnati, a local television station I believe,
wrote an article the titled Chinese spies covet Cincinnati's corporate
secrets was October arrest an isolated incident. And here's how
that article starts. It says, to anyone who has startled
when an alleged Chinese spy who targeted ge aviation was

(01:07:36):
arrested in October twenty eighteen, here's an even more alarming fact.
It wasn't an isolated incident. Cincinnati companies are regular targets
of Chinese spies, hackers, counterfeiters, and business partners. This news
source has learned from court documents, government records, and interviews
with business and federal law enforcement officials. And then they
go on to quote a US attorney for the Southern
District of Ohio, quote, economic espionage is a very significant threat,

(01:08:00):
said Benjamin Glassman. It could cost people their jobs, It
could destroy companies. With the destruction of companies comes the
destruction of communities and really a radically different place for
the United States in the world. And the article goes
on to talk about all the sorts of economic espionage
that has involved companies just in Cincinnati, Ohio alone, and
you can bet that their investigations into this sort of

(01:08:22):
espionage everywhere, because, as the article laighs out, there have
been indictments, numerous indictments that the Trump administration under this
FBI and Department of Justice have ramped up to bring
Chinese nationals to justice, and in the particular case when
it comes to ge aviation and involved what's termed the
first Chinese intelligence officer to be extradited to the US

(01:08:42):
for prosecution. And by the way, he's not the only one.
News broke just before we came on tonight that Canada
is set to begin proceeding as the will allow Huawei
CFO Manguanzo to be extradited to the US per an
announcement from the Canadian Department of Justice on Friday. So
this is ramping up. We are starting to ring Chinese
actors who violate sanctions, potentially allegedly or engage in economic espionage.

(01:09:07):
We're actually taking the fight to them. We are applying justice.
We are not acting fearful in our response and proving
that we're a paper tiger, as the Chinese may have
assumed for say the last eight years, and really probably
the last twenty eight or thirty eight or forty eight years.
It's one story Cincinnati. Another story. A report out from

(01:09:28):
the US Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship that's
chaired by Senator Marco Rubio, who has come out as
one of these staunchest China Hawks joining the Trump administration
and encouraging the Trump administration's actions against the Chinese. His
committee put out a report called MAIDE in China twenty
twenty five and the Future of American Industry. A MAIDE
in China twenty twenty five is all about Chinese dominance

(01:09:51):
in manufacturing and industry. And of course the way they
do that is, in part is by cheating when it
comes to trade, is by economic espionage, is by enforcing terms.
When it comes to our dealings with them, they're completely
one sided and go in their direction. And what this
report lays out, and I'll quote in part from it,
is the MAIDE in China twenty twenty five Industrial Plan
targets ten high value industrial sectors for global dominance, demonstrates

(01:10:13):
that the Chinese government is doing more than merely breaking
the rules. It is seeking to set new terms for
international economic competition. Evaluating the MAIDE in China twenty twenty
five Plans should contribute to the American policy framework in
two ways. First, assessing the plan's particular goals and progress
toward them can identify areas for defensive action. Second, comparing
areas of China success to America's relative decline can help

(01:10:36):
identify areas for creative reform. China has a direction that
they're going when it comes to manufacturing and industry. We're
playing defense right now. We're just starting to identify the
scale of these Chinese efforts and their intent, which is
ultimately to undermine us. Last point I'll point out, Senate
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations just released a report that I
urge you to look at. It's called China's Impact on

(01:10:58):
the US Education System and represents perhaps the most extensive
investigation to date of confucious institutes. What are confucious institutes?
Will their Communist Party backed educational so called cross cultural
exchange programs, backed with Chinese money, oftentimes with Chinese Communist
Party approved professors who go to US universities and they teach,

(01:11:19):
and of course, naturally, when you look at what they teach,
it's a completely one sided pro Chinese Communist curriculum. And
actually FBI Director Ray has indicated that there may be
espionage associated with these so called educational programs, including spying
on Chinese nationals who are here. So it's not just
necessarily collecting information that might be useful from US universities,
but it's even inspiring on what they consider their own

(01:11:42):
people and threatening them. And this report goes into great
detail about the size, scope and sale of these activities.
And we're talking hundreds of these across the US. We're
also talking hundreds of millions of dollars that China has
put into this. This is real foreign influence. This is
foreign meadowing in US society when you have a foreign path,
our adversarial putting millions of hours into our academic institutions

(01:12:04):
to advocate for literally the party line, the Chinese Communist
party line. When we come back, we'll talk with Stephen
Yates about China, North Korea, and a whole bunch of
other goings on in the region. This has been weangarten
in four Buck Sex and eight four four nine zero
zero Buck. That's eight four zero zero two eight two five.

(01:12:26):
They wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we
couldn't do that. They were willing to denuke a large
portion of the errors that we wanted, but we couldn't
give up all of the sanctions for that. So we
continue to work and we'll see, but we had to
walk away from that. I think we'll end up being

(01:12:47):
very good friends with Chairman Kim and with North Korea.
And I think they have tremendous potential. I've been telling
everybody they have tremendous potential, unbelievable potential. But we're going
to see. But it was about sanctions. I mean, they
wanted sanctions lifted, but they weren't willing to do an
area that we want. That was President Trump talking about
his negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong un, and

(01:13:11):
clearly to the disappointment of many in the media who
wanted to say that Trump made a horrendous deal, as
sad as it is to say, but you could see
that in their reactions. Trump, in my view, rightly walked
away from the table from a horrible deal when it
comes to the US national interest. Today, we're going to
speak with Steve Yates about both North Korea trade negotiations

(01:13:32):
and more broadly, the Trump administration's China policy. And Steve
joins US now. He's an expert on Asian politics, geopolitics,
and perhaps most notably, the former deputy National Security advisor
to Vice President Dick Cheney from two thousand and one
to two thousand and five. You can follow him on
Twitter at Yates d CIA. Steve, thanks so much for
joining us. A pleasure to be with you. Well, let's

(01:13:54):
start in North Korea. And the vital question when it
comes to all of these negotiations is what does Kim
Jong un actually want to achieve? So I asked that
question to you, what does he want? It's a fair question,
but I think before you even get to that, I
think there's a couple of things that are long term
issues where people are experts, pundits and sometimes foreign leader's mistake,

(01:14:18):
where our president thinks he wants to go and how
he's going to get there. And I think we've seen
in this instance another example of people making long term
assumptions based on short term tactics by our president, and
just as they have been in for several years now,
they're likely to be wrong. And so the on again,
off again summits and walking away from the table. It's

(01:14:41):
part of what this president does in his negotiations, and
sooner or later people will figure it out. North Korea,
the best we can tell, this is one of the
most isolated parts of the planet. It wants some sense
of connection with the outside world, but too much in
its own country, still has total control, and it wants

(01:15:05):
easing of sanctions which affect its ruling class more than
its people. And it wants the US to remove its
forces from the Korean Peninsula, somewhat lessening the security threat
it perceives. So those have been basic elements that they've
been talking about for three two term US presidents of Clinton,

(01:15:26):
Bush and Obama in different ways, and all of those
conventional approaches to diplomacy, and those administrations failed to change
the direction North Korea was going. Hence we have it
Donald Trump and a different approach to these talks. Kim
Jong UN's predecessor, his father, Kim Jong il, left a
last will and testament, at least parts of which have

(01:15:48):
been disseminated publicly. And in that last will and testament,
he laid out a strategy to essentially use nuclear weapons
as in some sense a bargaining chip, with the ultimate
goal of reunification of the Korean Peninsula, presumably under communist role,
So a Korean peninsula where North Korea is the dominant
power there. Obviously, in South Korea we have an administration

(01:16:11):
which is somewhat more favorably disposed towards the North Koreans
than those in the past. Do you think that Kim
Jong un ultimately wants reunification as his number one goal?
I think that is their dream, and I think in
the North Korean propaganda world, they believe their dream, but
it only takes a few seconds of awareness of what

(01:16:33):
reality is in North Korea. Even some skeptical journalists have
been able to go from time to time, and some
health ministries like the Graham Ministries have been able to
go to hospitals get a glimpse, and it's so different.
It's the most pulverized polity on the planet. There's no

(01:16:53):
way there's going to be any meaningful unification like East
and West Germany at the end of the Cold War
anytime soon. And so they do have that dream. They
do see themselves as on the winning side of this,
and South Koreans, for the most part, they for many
decades had the same dream, but with them on top
of it, and in recent decades they've kind of come

(01:17:14):
to the conclusion of this would be extremely costly, extremely risky,
and just because we're technically all Koreans were totally different
than these people now. And so I think there's been
this desire to give piece a chance on the South,
but not necessarily wanting unification and having to deal with

(01:17:34):
the cultural and economic deadweight that North Korea would be
for them. Absent the credible threat of a real imminent
attack to Kim Jong Gun's regime or a sanctions regime
that is so airtight that it is literally completely starved
for capital, how are we not to assume that Kim

(01:17:56):
Jong gun will continue to try to play us off
with negotiations and bite his time because he knows the
reality that at most Donald Trump has six years left,
whereas Kim Jong gun is leader for life absent some
sort of coup. Well, I think there's a heavy, heavy
reality in what you described, and you know, sort of.

(01:18:16):
When I first went into government, I was told that
the easiest answer for a government lawyer to give when
asked the question is no, and the easiest assumption when
wondering about changes in fundamental policy or direction of the
countries is also know that these regimes linger longer than

(01:18:39):
anyone would like, and sometimes are even forecast. In the
nineteen nineties, I was on the receiving end of some
public but also some internal government reports that forecast the
imminent collapse of North Korea. Tons of evidence, very high confidence,
and obviously we're two decades later and they're still there.
So I think the odds are he stays in this,

(01:19:02):
and so I think somewhat rationally, the president's strategy is
to do what is necessary to mitigate the threats that
get beyond the peninsula. So his approach to this, whether
by coincidence, dumb luck, designed, whatever it is, have resulted
in many viewers. In other words, none of the provocations

(01:19:24):
that occurred during the Obama administration when they were not
engaging in talks, and he's still avoided the major concessions
with a lot of money and other kinds of changes
that were put forward under the Clinton and Bush administrations.
So for now I think he's been threading that needle.
I don't think it's been a mistake to try to
hold out the Vietnam economic development model as something for

(01:19:47):
a North Korean to possibly understand and maybe aspire to,
because they're not going to become sole They could march
in the direction of a reformed communist economy, and that's
what Vietnam has been. If you accept the premise that
North Korea is in some sense a proxy of China
and probably does not make any major decision without serious

(01:20:09):
consultation with Shia's regime. Given that background, do we believe
that stepping away from the table impacts talks with China
and She? I believe it does. But I also believe
that was the president's intent. It was conspicuous that he
made direct mention of the trade talks and the fact

(01:20:32):
that what he was doing and annoy by getting together
and meeting and putting cards space up on the table,
saying publicly how much positive rapport there are is between
the two leaders, and yet they had demands that we
couldn't accept and so it's a bad deal. I'm going
to walk away. And he made a direct reference to

(01:20:52):
the coming conversation with Shijingping that is supposed to be
at Mara Lago soon and that he would be prepared
to take this same approach. She's got fabulous rapport, was
she temping? Supposedly something that I find hard to understand,
given that I don't believe that communist leaders have a
soul with which to have rapport, But the President is

(01:21:13):
playing that part, and I think it was a strong
positive signal. Now we have to see what he does.
But best I can tell, the administration is looking for
a framework for long term negotiations on trade, not believing
that they're going to get a quick hit on China
trade that's going to solve the problem. And in that regard,
it's the same as North Korea goes without saying how

(01:21:36):
vital trade is between the US, the number one economic
power in the world, and China at number two. Do
you see the trade negotiations as I do, as one part,
one facet, albeit a very big one, of a much
more comprehensive pushback in some sense, overturning almost fifty years
of US policy visa each China pushing back on both

(01:21:58):
when it comes to law enforcement, and that is indictments
over espionage and other malign acts of the Chinese in
the US, a military build up, rhetorical and then also
substantive policy issues where we are comprehensively pushing back. Is
trade just one facet of a comprehensive plan in your view?
So I deeply hold that view that the trade negotiations

(01:22:19):
are very important. They're fundamentally much much more important to
China than the art of the United States, And I
think we might have the first administration in my lifetime
that fully understands that, or at least partially understands that.
But China's economic dependence on the United States is a
sizable proportion of its total GDP. For the United States,

(01:22:42):
our interaction with China is like half a percent of GDP,
and you know, we don't want to lose that. Willy nilly,
that kind of a change matters. It will be felt,
but it's far from fundamental. And so we have a
negotiating position of strength, and it's good that we have
some sense of that and engage in the conversation. But

(01:23:04):
whether it's beginning with Vice President Pence's speech at the
Hudson Institute last October, but I've had interactions with Australian
senior leaders and Japanese senior leaders, and even some European
senior leaders, and now even our friends in the Great
White North in Canada. There's a fundamentally different conversation about
China today because we don't just look at the threats

(01:23:25):
that are happening inside their country or international relations, but they,
under the Communist Party's rule, are interfering with the fundamental
institutions of our nations. Our education, systems, our media, and
our political systems, and I think for the first time
in most of my career, they're not getting a complete pass.

(01:23:46):
Nothing big has really been done to change it. Yet
they've been called out on the Huawei technology issues and
five G and sanctions busting when it comes to Iran.
So we're at the beginning of this law conversation, and
I'm very very heartened that the conversation is taking place
beyond just the usual lobbying halls about trade or no trade.

(01:24:10):
It's a bigger strategic issue, and it's kind of bothered
me that people have talked about the Cold War being
over in the early nineteen nineties when a very large
communist party plays a furious role in global strategy. Today,
there's a substantial challenge for the administration, which is that
long term, China, I think clearly does represent the biggest

(01:24:31):
geopolitical threat to America, But in the short term, financial
markets and many in the business community hit the sort
of punitive policy that the Trump administration has taken to
develop the leverage to actually have hopefully beneficial negotiations. If
you were counseling the president, how would you suggest that
he deals with the competing tensions of needing to keep
the pressure on China, which has had real impact internally

(01:24:54):
in China, but also dealing with the fact that financial
markets don't necessarily like it, and he's going to be
the ballot in two years, you know. I think that
the administration's team at the at the highest levels are
very sensitive to this and very aware of it. Now.
I wouldn't mislead to say that I have been brought
into multiple inside conversations and this is what I hear

(01:25:18):
firsthand in those multiple conversations. But but my dealings with them,
uh indicate that they that they basically have somewhat of
a divide and conquer communications strategy, which is hard in
this day and age that everything goes out into different
medium and blurs together. But they've been They've been messaging
to Wall Street their intent, which they mean to try

(01:25:41):
to make some real progress and rebalancing the US China
economic relationship. And I think that they have worked into
their communications somewhat an element that I believe strongly in
that I have a great respect for the history of
China and for the people of China. Don't think that
the policies we stand for, our anti China. That's what

(01:26:03):
the Communist Party wants to parlay out there to keep
us from being able to do anything to protect our
own interests. It's the Communist Party that's the problem. That's
the one percent of China that dominates the ninety nine
percent of the rest of the Chinese. And that one
percent is the one that has denied their culture and
their heritage and broken their fundamental institutions of family and

(01:26:25):
faith and other things that were valuable parts of the
historical Chinese experience. And so well, that's a big nugget
to get out there in the public. There are elements,
I think of the administrations. They understand this. So they
speak to the Wall Street which they're familiar with, and
they have people on the team that talk every day
with leading influencers up there to try to make sure

(01:26:48):
that they understand we are going to try for outcomes.
This isn't just an all out war for the sake
of war. When it comes to talk of trade, it's
a rebalancing with a purpose, and we should benefit from it,
and so should the Chinese people. It's done right. And secondarily,
they so far have remained committed to keeping elements of

(01:27:08):
pressure in place. There's some of you know, they've delayed
the escalation of earths from from ten and fifteen percent
up to twenty five. But that's for a time and
I think if as the President has to walk away
from the next round of talks about meaningful progress, those
things will come into play and he'll keep the leverage
going into the election cycle. He can't afford to go

(01:27:31):
soft on this, in my estimation, and hold the electoral
college coalition he had in the rust belt states. That
was a big change in twenty sixteen and it made
a strategic difference politically. Steve, we're gonna have to leave
it right there. Thank you so much for coming on.
We've been speaking with Steve Yates. You can follow on
Twitter at Yates DCIA. Thanks so much for coming on,
my pleasure. Thank you. This is Ben Weingarten in for

(01:27:54):
Buck Sexton on the Buck Sexton Show. Eight four four
nine zero zero. Buck, that's eight four four nine zero
zero to eight to five. Lines are open, all right.
We just spoke with Steve Yates, former deputy National Security
advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney and someone who I
would say has a tremendous grasp on the situation in Asia,

(01:28:17):
this battle that's going on right now between the Chinese
and their proxies, namely North Korea and then all of
the other nations, and the US has been working to
align itself with these other nations and start to comprehensively
counter China. And you know, for years, for decades and decades,
we were told about China's peaceful rise. This relationship was

(01:28:39):
open with Richard Nixon back in the seventies, and the
idea was that China would get rich alongside the US.
This would be in both of our interest. Economic liberalization
quote unquote would lead to political liberalization. Well, everything that
we've seen since Tianamen Square in nineteen eighty nine proves

(01:29:00):
that that was pure folly. And guess what, the Chinese
Communist Party doesn't necessarily want to be a peaceful trade partner. Essentially,
what we have helped to do is build China's economy.
And it's not just through anything resembling free trade or
fair trade. It's through stolen intellectual property and the parts
of the Chinese. It's your economic espionage, it's unfair trade dealings,

(01:29:23):
it's your cyber attacks, it's through them killing out our
intelligence officers, literally, it's through the biggest attack in US history,
cyber attack in US history, the Office of Personnel and Management,
where essentially China stole the files of more than twenty
million supposedly government employees, the most sensitive information, the documents

(01:29:45):
they fill out to try to get a government job
when there's a national security implication, there's an investigation, a
substantial background check, and we're talking hundred plus pages background check.
China hack that information and it gave them a tremendous advantage.
Trump has challenged this notion of China's peaceful rise. It's
said in his National Security Strategy in twenty seventeen economic

(01:30:08):
liberalization has not led to political liberalization. We're actually a
strategic competitor of China, and it's maybe even more ramped
up than that. And we've seen a comprehensive effort by
the Trump administration to start to push back on this.
And with my next guest, we'll talk about some more
things that the Trump administration has pointed out about the
failure of our elites and how detrimental it's been to

(01:30:29):
our national interest. This is Ben Weingarten in for Buck
Sexon on The Buck Sexton Show eight four four nine
zero zero Buck. That's eight four four nine zero zero
two eight two five Back in just a moment, Welcome
back to the Buck Sexton Show. This is Ben Weinegarten
in four buck Sexton lines are open eight four four

(01:30:50):
nine zero zero Buck. That's eight four four nine zero
zero two eight two five. Or We've talked a lot
this evening, in particular an hour one about the deficiencies
on the Democratic side, both ideologically and tactically, but at
the same time the world is in some ways also
going their way now. In January, Tucker Carlson set the

(01:31:12):
Republican intellectual world ablaze by articulating in a sense why
Trump won, namely that he called out a failed intellectual elite,
a failed ruling class, starting with Mitt Romney, and this
was in response in part to Mitt Romney's anti Trump
editorial in the Washington Post, and what Tucker rays were
many failings of the elite, starting with the fact that

(01:31:34):
they're not really ruling for the common good anymore so
much as the good of third world nations or feel
good policies that make them feel as if they're virtuous
and compassionate people, regardless of the outcomes for their supposed
beneficiaries while they continue to enrich themselves and a crew
more power. Doctor Matt Peterson has written extensively about this.

(01:31:54):
He's the vice president of Education at the Claremont Institute
and editor of the American Mind, and he wrote the
piece at that new website, The American Mind, where he
argues Tucker Carlson is right now. Full disclosure before we
jump in. I'm a publious fellow at the Cremin Institute,
and I continue to do work with them because I
think they're a great institution that's doing God's work and
trying to restore America's founding principles. Doctor Peterson, thanks so

(01:32:16):
much for joining us. Thank you so much for that introduction.
Then thanks well, it's my pleasure and thank you for
writing this piece. Let's start at the highest level, which
is how, in your view, have our elites found us?
Oh gosh, so there's so many ways. I mean, I
would start, though, with a misunderstanding of American principles and purpose.

(01:32:38):
The first failing you'd have to talk about is that
the education of our elites fails to understand and distinguish
what is distinctive about America and what American the American
principles of government aren't therefore what we ought to be
aiming at. What's the purpose? And so what you have
what you see in elite society is an unwillingness or

(01:33:00):
an aura culture that is very reluctant to embrace something
distinctly American. And it's much more apt to say what's
wrong with America? Right, And it's the suspicious of patriotism.
I would start there. And then the problem is that
outside of that, if you don't have a way to

(01:33:21):
be a patriotic elite, or you're not taught what the
principles and purposes of your government are, you then descend
to self interest. Right. The only other thing you have
in the academy is self interest or some form of
then social justice woke doctrine. Right. So this is an
enormous problem. It's been going on for a long time.
It's been building for a long time. But what you

(01:33:43):
see now are people like Tucker talking about it explicitly
on the right in ways that really no one has
for some time. There's a political element, of course, but
if you believe that politics is downstream from the culture,
part of what comes out of our elites are sort
of norms governing practices for how to live your life,
and that comes well before we talk about policies. Charles Murray,

(01:34:06):
whose work I'm sure you're very well familiar with, talks
about in one of his books the idea that the
elites don't preach what they practice. In other words, they
sort of promote and anything goes progressive utopic sort of
worldview where they reject the traditional values and principles on
which our entire civilization is based. But then in their

(01:34:27):
own wives they live very conventionally and they really do
a disservice when they exhibit certain behavior in their rhetoric
and other behavior in their private life. Do you think
that factors into the sort of Tucker thesis and your
view as well. Oh? Absolutely, I think Tucker is one
hundred percent writer about this, And obviously Charles Murray has
spearheaded that the proof of this in very real and

(01:34:51):
damning social science. So what you see is that when
you are a member of the elite, you're reluctant to
adopt any policy that actively promotes the health of the family.
At the same time that you know, because of your station,
you know that getting married is a good idea of
staying married is a good idea. Marriage is much healthier

(01:35:13):
among elites than it is among the rest of society.
And so this is where Tucker really made his mark.
This is why Tucker's monologue resignated throughout the country. What
he said was this is quote, culture and economics are
inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive, and

(01:35:34):
thriving families make market economies possible. That's what he said.
And so what he did is do something different. He said, no, no, no,
you can't just treat policy is is it's separate from
the promotion or the denigration of the family. Economics is
it used to be called used called political economy. Economics
is necessarily tied to morality and to promote certain kinds

(01:36:00):
of behavior and rewarding it and punishing other kinds of
behavior or discouraging it. And I don't really think that
this should be controversial, but unfortunately a lot of rhetoric
on the right that we're just used to, that we've
adopted over the last few decades, makes it controversial to
say these things. I think it's kind of a truism
that an economy derives from a culture and Embedded in that,

(01:36:24):
to your point, is the idea that morality matters, and
it clearly functions in a free market, and a capitalist
system doesn't just arise out of nowhere otherwise, you know,
the people who had claimed that China, for example, would
become economic would become politically liberal and socially liberal because
it's economically liberal, they would have been proven right if
it was that economics decided. But actually it's the other

(01:36:45):
way around, and it starts with people and their own
voluntary actions. Now, the criticism of Tucker's piece, and you
deal with this in your piece as well, is that
if the free market leads to certain disasters in society,
creative destruction implies both not only creation but also destruction,
and there's real societal costs to that. Then is Tucker arguing,

(01:37:07):
and are folks like you who support his argument then
arguing that we should sort of rebel against the free
market in some ways because there are societal losses in
free market systems as well. I think it's a matter
of priority. I think I think the best way to
understand it is that even make sure it does desire

(01:37:29):
a free market in a sense that we do have
a drive within us right to be creative, to take
initiative to buy and sell things amongst ourselves, the fourth
and so on. But in order to do that, we
need a governmental structure around it some way, but that
the establishes kind of rules of the game and points

(01:37:50):
us in certain directions as opposed to others. So let
me give an example, because I understand absolutely why many
people might be listening saying I'm not sure what this
guy's talking about, or I don't know if I quite
agree with Tucker. This sounds like, you know, some kind
of socialism kind of you know, great society typed out,
And this is not what we're talking about. It's not
what Tucker's got talking about. Carlson said that our leaders

(01:38:13):
should speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial
system because not all commerce is good. Uh, some commerce
is in fact harmful. And so what are the questions
he asked, was why is it why is it defensible
to loan people money, poor people money that they can't
possibly repay, So take payday loan outlets and poor neighborhoods, right,

(01:38:34):
four hundred percent annual interests. This is this is this
is a practice where you might raise a question mark
might I say, why is this commerce good? And in fact,
in American history, Abraham Lincoln, when he first ran for office, said,
you know, loaning money to poor people at exorbitant rates
of interest. In that idea, Noah Webster during the ratification debate, said, look,

(01:38:56):
you can't separate the morals of the people from the
influence of money on men's sense of justice and moral obligation.
The law, you know, influences our habit, and we should
restrict credit to people who won't be able to pay
money back in order really to encourage them to save
and to be responsible. Now, I think that's a matter

(01:39:17):
of common sense. But when you when you have a
kind of a brittle conservative rhetoric, it really is libertarian
in a way, right, that says, well, there's no connection.
I mean, that's that's why people were upset with what
Tucker was saying. But I think no Webster was right.
Right laws to credit the poor people, they help encourage

(01:39:37):
good behavior. So that that leads to a fundamental question,
which is is it government's job in some way to
promote virtue. People instantly sort of recoil when you talk
about should government be promoting certain moral as values and
principles and not others. Do you believe that it is
the fundamental job of government to do so well? I

(01:40:02):
think that the first instinctual reaction of many older conservatives
would be to say, what are you talking about? The
Taliban had a department of virtue and vice, and the
last thing we do is last thing we want is
to increase the power of the administrative state. And there
are certainly a lot of truth to that. In a way,
I agree with that one hundred percent. At the same time,

(01:40:23):
we can't neglect what law is. And here the American
founders can help us out because they did not promote
a kind of great society where government interfered in every
part of people's lives. On the other hand, they did
not lie to themselves and think that law and policy
on matters of numbers, right on matters of economic policy,

(01:40:44):
we're just kind of morally neutral. They knew that law
either encourages or discourages certain kinds of habit and certain
kind of kinds of behavior, and they didn't pretend otherwise.
So the way I put it is, of course government
and law can't reach inside people and make them virtuous.
That certainly is not something that law him do directly.

(01:41:06):
In fact, other institutions to be doing that much more
directly than government. On hand, I mean to reward certain
kinds of behavior and encourage it right, certain kinds of
habits and ways of life, And it is to discourage
other kinds of habits and ways of life, and to
pretend otherwise, I think is very dangerous. Where does Trump

(01:41:29):
factor in in this thesis? I mentioned in my open
that in some sense what Tucker was explaining as why
Trump won while the elites failed, he called them out
on it. What is the takeaway in terms of what
the future of conservatism looks like? Is there something within
Trump that recognizes the problem and you can say, here

(01:41:50):
are the sorts of policies that we might want to
push for based upon what he saw in the electorate.
So I guess one question, what does the future of
conservatism look like? Too? Well, the Republican rank and file
simply reject this out of hand and take the sort
of view that, well, look, this was a blip in
US history. This president actually rejected everything that we show

(01:42:10):
it in our twenty twelve autopsy of why Mitt Romney
lost and the status quo will ultimately prevail again, well,
I certainly have the view that even though there are
many people in Washington and elsewhere in power, you President Trump.
I mean, they think that once President Trump leaves the scene,

(01:42:34):
and of course they hope to force him out off
the scene, force him off the stage, they hope that
things will go back to the way they were. And
I think this is a dangerous delusion as well. I
don't think things are going to go back to the
way they were. I think that what we're having is,
or what we should be having, is a very serious
debate about what is a matter of principle and what's

(01:42:55):
a matter of policy. So principles should be the things
that don't change, right, that that dictate what kind of
policy we should propose given the circumstances. But policy changes
over time because we find ourselves in different circumstances. So,
you know, to give an example of I think what
Trump understands and what Trump can actually teach us, the

(01:43:18):
federalis papers. Let's go all the way back to the
you know, the ratification of the US Constitution. Our founders
are very clear about this. Justice is the end of government.
And Charles Kessler, the editor of the Claremont Review Books
warned of this twenty years ago. He said, conservatives avoid
arguing about questions of justice whenever possible, And by then
I think he meant, you know, they like to argue
about numbers in GDP and utilitarian kind of arguments of efficiency,

(01:43:43):
and they don't want to argue about justice. In the meantime,
the last talked about justice all the time, right, Social
justice is their mantra. And so if we avoid arguing
about questions, of arguing about political questions and talking about justice,
we really are are essuing politics. Kessler said, a central
issue is justice, and that's the problem. So the example

(01:44:04):
I would give is a matter of rhetoric when it
comes to economic policy. Whatever the policy should be, we
can debate about. We can debate about right with evidence
if we if we know Paris as an example, will
this lead to the ends that we will think about
the arguments that are going to win that resonate with people.
Trump's argument economically, over and over again is I care

(01:44:26):
about our people. My purpose is to make their lives better.
And he's very clear about that. He's very very simple
and stark language. Whereas conservatives are still in a way
fighting the Cold War in their Mind. You know they're
fighting is the Soviet Union, and they'll say things like, well,
you know this is good because it's it's free, it
leads to freedom and it's part of the free market. Well,

(01:44:48):
freedom is good, right, but freedom needs to be justified
because ultimately justice is the end of government. The name
of the piece is Tucker Carlson is right. You can
find it at the American Mind and we've been speaking
with its author, my friend, doctor Matt Peterson, vice president
at the Clermont Institute and also the editor of the

(01:45:09):
new website, The American Mind. Doctor Peterson, thanks so much
for joining us. Thank you so much for having me,
and we'll be right back. This is Ben Winegarden in
for Buck Sex and on the Buck sexon Show eight
four four nine zero zero buck. That's eight four four
nine zero zero two eight two five. All right, So
we're about to round out our three here on the

(01:45:29):
Buck Sex and Show. And this has been Ben Winegarden
in four Buck Sex and follow me on Twitter at
bh Winegarden. Check on my website at ben Winegarden dot com.
In our last interview, we spoke about one thing that
was very fundamental and it extends beyond any single presidency.
It's bigger than Donald Trump. It's bigger than Democrats and Republicans. Really,
we talked about the fact that our elites have failed us,

(01:45:52):
our ruling class has failed us, and that extends beyond
any one party. This outrage, this resistance, it extends beyond
any one party, because really, what Donald Trump represents is
a threat to the power of that failed, largely progressive,
bipartisan elite and a representation of what the American people
want and the American people being fed up with a

(01:46:12):
so called group of representatives that don't actually represent them.
So Trump, in my view, is a living, breathing symbol
that they've failed. He's constructed a massive Trump Tower in
their collective heads. Again, this goes beyond any one presidency,
and it goes to the core of what our nation
is built on, and that is the idea of consent
of the governed. That is how our republic works. The resistance,

(01:46:37):
the outrage, the intransigence of our political class is in
direct proportion to how strong his punchback has been against them.
They hate him, they hate what he represents, because he
represents their failure, and he represents you, you, deplorable Americans,
anyone who doesn't agree, anyone who dissents from the prevailing

(01:46:57):
progressive orthodoxy. Finally, I just want to thank Buck sex
and for having me on tonight. It's been a real
honor and privilege. Hope you have a great weekend. Again,
this is Ben Weegarten. Follow me on Twitter at Bhwinegarden
and online at Benwegarden dot com. Thank you so much
and have a great weekend.