Bannon's War Room - WarRoom Battleground EP 1021： The Founder's Mentality Of The United States

00:00:00.000 this is the primal scream of a dying regime pray for our enemies because we're going medieval on

00:00:11.020 these people here's not got a free shot all these networks lying about the people the people have

00:00:17.600 had a belly full of it i know you don't like hearing that i know you try to do everything

00:00:21.380 the world to stop that but you're not going to stop it it's going to happen and where do people

00:00:24.960 like that go to share the big line? Mega Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people

00:00:32.780 had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save

00:00:40.440 my country, this country will be saved. War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. 0.62

00:00:47.860 Okay, welcome.

00:00:53.380 You're in the war room, and my favorite war room is where we get to talk to brilliant people,

00:00:57.280 many of whom happen to be writers, and one of our favorites, Arthur Herman.

00:01:01.660 How are you doing, sir? Thank you for coming back.

00:01:03.220 I'm doing well. It's always a pleasure to be here.

00:01:05.400 Always an honor to have you here.

00:01:07.080 You've got a new book out. Everybody's talking about Founders Fire.

00:01:11.740 You've also got another book that's in constant headlines,

00:01:14.520 That's being read over the Pentagon or the Department of War all the time.

00:01:18.020 And with Peter Navarro and his team, that's Freedom's Forge.

00:01:21.640 Freedom's Forge.

00:01:21.960 We talk about the industrial power and might.

00:01:24.660 I do want to address, you had an article up that read,

00:01:29.200 in preparation for our Memorial Day weekend special on MacArthur in Asia.

00:01:35.020 And, of course, the president coming back from the meeting with the CCP.

00:01:38.640 And one of my favorites, because I always get your book in paperback also,

00:01:43.380 I can mark it up, but one of my favorites, your biography of MacArthur.

00:01:47.480 Let's start with Founders Fire.

00:01:50.200 Just an update.

00:01:51.040 How's the book doing?

00:01:52.040 I mean, people, our audience really loved it.

00:01:54.240 And what they loved about it, you take a very different take on 250.

00:01:59.860 You go all the way back, but you're not given a revolution, which is we've got Eric Metaxe's thing trying to get Eric on the side, trying to get Eric on to talk about his book, Revolutionary War.

00:02:11.640 You took a very different take on commemorating the 250th anniversary.

00:02:17.640 What was it and why did you do that?

00:02:19.740 Well, what I wanted to do was I wanted to focus on the notion of founding and founder as opposed to just founding fathers.

00:02:27.620 As you know, there's a slew of books going to be coming out.

00:02:30.020 They're already out for the 250th, talking about the importance of the Declaration of Independence

00:02:35.260 and talking about it from the point of view of how the ideas came together

00:02:40.000 and what its impact has been on us as a political system and our Constitution.

00:02:46.840 What I wanted to do was really talk about the founders themselves,

00:02:50.980 men like George Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and the others

00:02:55.720 who were part of that meeting and event in Philadelphia.

00:03:00.840 That revolutionary generation, but the founders also.

00:03:03.780 That's right.

00:03:04.060 And what they showed was with their vision of what the future could look like for America, but not only for America, but for the world, but also that willingness to sort of put everything on the line, including their own lives, to make this bold step to declare independence from the greatest empire on earth, Great Britain.

00:03:24.620 and also to this kind of commitment that they had to pushing and devoting their energy to make sure that this kind of thing happened.

00:03:36.600 So it wasn't just a dreamy vision of what could happen if America would become independent and then let's get down to real business.

00:03:46.080 That was their business.

00:03:48.020 All of those are characteristics of what we call the founder mindset.

00:03:52.560 And that's true for that group of men in 1776 and those who supported them.

00:03:58.460 But it's also true for in American business and in certain crucial moments in American history.

00:04:04.200 As I explain in the book, it's also important in American governance.

00:04:09.160 And when you look at what happened with Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War, when you look at Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement.

00:04:16.860 And I think if we look at what Donald Trump has been working to accomplish, both in his first term and in the second term, you see that same combination of drive, of vision, of willingness to take big risks in order to achieve major opportunities.

00:04:34.600 And and also, too, from the point of view of our government and thinking about it as a way to rededicate, rededicate America to what those founding principles really were in 1776 and then again in 1787 with the Constitution.

00:04:51.620 The because I break that period down into three sections, the American Revolution, which I say essentially culminated, a part of it culminated on the signing of the Declaration of War, Declaration of Independence.

00:05:07.960 Then you had the Revolutionary War. You actually had to fight for it. Then you had nation building where the revolutionary generation, some of them came back with others and had the Constitutional Convention, but set the Constitution up, etc.

00:05:21.620 What ties together Freedom's Forge, which is really talking about World War II in a totally different take, you look at industrial power and the way that industrial power was essential to actually becoming the underpinnings of global freedom really was, in addition to the valor and courage of our fighting men from the Eighth Air Force over Germany to Peleliu,

00:05:49.160 was this underpinning of a massive industrial power

00:05:53.060 that could take on Imperial Japan and the Nazis simultaneously and defeat them.

00:05:59.960 To tie it back, because in Founders' Fire, you do talk about individuals,

00:06:05.240 but what's fascinating to me, you talk about times in history you've had groups that have a Founders' Fire.

00:06:12.360 The Industrial Revolution and how we perfected it to the United States,

00:06:16.780 and maybe Britain didn't, is because you had guys like Henry Ford,

00:06:21.160 but they inspired a generation.

00:06:23.440 When you get to Detroit in the 1930s and 40s,

00:06:27.680 and then the aircraft industry, you have a mindset of a generation.

00:06:32.220 That's very different than individuals.

00:06:33.920 I mean, a lot of times we think, and I can say with President Trump,

00:06:37.620 oftentimes it feels like you're fighting alone or with a handful of compadres.

00:06:43.060 Where we've really moved the needle is when that founder's fire spreads throughout a generation of like-minded individuals, and then you have huge things like the 30 or 40 years it took to actually – the revolution, the winning of a war, and the founding of a powerful nation is a 30- or 40-year process.

00:07:03.560 What gave us Freedoms Forge, the ability and capacity to do that in Detroit was a 30-, 40-, or 50-year process, but you had like-minded mindset across, and it was embodied or manifested in many different individuals, right?

00:07:20.240 And then all the way through these institutions, they institutionalized the revolution in the building of the nation.

00:07:27.200 They institutionalized the industrial revolution in the modern industrial power of the United States.

00:07:34.700 And I think this is what separates us from really who founded the industrial revolution, the British.

00:07:40.660 The British.

00:07:41.560 And that revolutionary generation in Britain who create that industrial revolution, who harness steam power.

00:07:51.000 If you take the whole history of the earth and you go back, it's the steam engine.

00:07:55.880 You've got agricultural production, da-da-da-da-da-da-da.

00:07:58.500 That's right.

00:07:58.960 Boom.

00:07:59.620 You've got everything booms.

00:08:01.480 It's 10,000 years, and then suddenly in 1776.

00:08:06.440 Talk to our audience about that.

00:08:07.800 Well, up until then, everything, the power, the way you got things done was basically muscle power,

00:08:15.520 either animal muscle power or human muscle power,

00:08:18.340 from the building of the pyramids all the way through to the slave plantations in the south,

00:08:23.880 the slave plantations in the Caribbean, the peasant economies of Europe, continental Europe,

00:08:31.700 for thousands of years, going back before the Romans, was all built on muscle power.

00:08:36.980 Steam power, for the first time, you have an alternative source, much more productive,

00:08:42.560 much more efficient, much more energy density compared to having to rely on human muscle

00:08:49.160 and being able to do a single steam engine, a power engine,

00:08:53.760 able to do the work of hundreds, even thousands of people in a shorter amount of time.

00:08:59.220 That generation who brought that about, men like Matthew Bolton,

00:09:04.700 who's really the great titan of the iron industry in Britain, Josiah Wedgwood,

00:09:09.720 they were a generation, and they enabled Britain to win a war, a world war against Napoleon,

00:09:17.520 arming both the Navy and also the Army, and also financing all of the continental allies,

00:09:24.600 Russia and Prussia and Austria, all depended upon the money that that economy, that that

00:09:30.800 globalized economy that Britain was able to build, thanks to that industrial revolution,

00:09:36.740 was able to bring to bear. And that was the case with us, too, in World War II.

00:09:41.040 It wasn't just an industrial might to arm America.

00:09:46.880 We were also arming our allies, including Russia, including the Soviet Union, in ways in which they could never have survived the war without that economic industrial muscle that was built into the American mindset in the 30s and 40s.

00:10:04.000 You have to help me out here because you look back over history, the 18th century is just so much.

00:10:11.900 So we talked about last time in 1776, we release, within six months, we release the first volume of the decline and fall,

00:10:22.300 Gibbons' decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations,

00:10:27.200 and topped off by Jefferson and Adams with the Declaration of Independence, right?

00:10:31.620 Not a bad run in six months. Right. But the forerunners of all the great industrial revolution being manifested were all learning and thinking and tinkering at that time.

00:10:44.380 Also, what was it about the 18th century, particularly in Scotland, in the British Isles, that led to this magnificent flowering in ideas about man and man's relationship to government, man's relationship to economics, and at the same time, the mechanical arts, really taking the beginning of science but turning it into what we call technology?

00:11:07.100 Why did why why was the 18th century such a major foundational element for the modern world?

00:11:15.380 Great question. A lot of it I talk about in my book that, you know, very well, how the Scots invented the modern world.

00:11:22.160 And I talk about a backwater country that's on its ass, essentially. 1.00

00:11:26.360 Right. Because it is broke. How does that happen? Broke. How does that happen? 1.00

00:11:31.020 It happens in two ways. Number one is that this bankrupt, impoverished country, no natural resources at all.

00:11:41.260 Scotland is go to the high. There's nothing there. And for generations, even after even after the union with Britain,

00:11:50.500 Scots try to get away from the homeland as fast as possible, whether it's to North America, whether it's to to Africa,

00:11:57.020 or whether it's India, Caribbean, beyond. But the one resource, the one imperishable resource

00:12:03.980 that Scotland had, thanks to the church, thanks to the Presbyterian church, was literacy.

00:12:10.660 It was, I think, without doubt, in the 18th century, the most literate population on earth.

00:12:18.560 How did that come about?

00:12:20.580 Through the schools and the insistence that every boy and every girl in Scotland

00:12:25.820 learned to read in order to read the Bible.

00:12:28.260 Was that back from Elizabethan times?

00:12:30.180 Because Elizabethan times is known as starting the grammar school.

00:12:33.020 I mean, one of their big things that's never mentioned is to teach,

00:12:36.440 actually to break from the church and make sure that you had a population

00:12:39.940 that could actually read the Gospels in its own native language.

00:12:43.120 In its own native language.

00:12:43.740 They started these grammar schools.

00:12:45.340 Elizabethan education is so important.

00:12:47.320 It's kind of missed over.

00:12:48.400 Is that a raw?

00:12:50.340 It's a similar outgrowth that springs up in the 60s.

00:12:53.220 It's the result of the Reformation.

00:12:54.420 And the Reformation is that the church, the Catholic church, was widely believed, had kept the masses ignorant of what the true message of God and Scripture was.

00:13:05.000 And that the best way to make that message immediate to everyone was to disintermediate the priest cast by giving a fancy Harvard Business School term, but the same concept.

00:13:19.060 Disintermediate the priest cast by the printing press.

00:13:22.500 But people have to be able to read to take advantage of the freeing press.

00:13:25.260 And it's that in Reformation, every man or every person is on priest, the priesthood of all believers.

00:13:31.560 And that the equipment, the essential equipment, if you're going to play that, do that kind of role, is you're going to have to be able to read.

00:13:38.260 But how does literacy then turn to the magnificence of what you had?

00:13:43.660 You know, you had Gibbons.

00:13:45.120 You had Adam Smith.

00:13:48.340 David Hill.

00:13:48.780 And Jefferson and those guys would admit they got this from the English Enlightenment, right?

00:13:53.400 But also the technology part and the science part, the foundations of the Industrial Revolution, the foundational element of that all took place in the late 18th century.

00:14:04.320 And what happens is in Scotland, you get a generation of intellectual leaders like Adam Smith who are able to watch the process of commercialization of society, of the changes, the positive changes that take place in a society as a result of trade and commerce.

00:14:22.820 They watch it happen from the ground up. They can watch it grow up from up from the ground and from a workforce that has this incredible gift of literacy.

00:14:34.320 But also, too, of a philosophy that takes root in Scotland in the 18th century, the philosophy of common sense.

00:14:41.740 The idea that every human being is equipped with an ability to understand the right and wrong, to understand what's up and what's down.

00:14:49.960 Drill down on this, because in Germany and the continent, you have Voltaire, you have these great thinkers, but it's very theoretical.

00:14:56.820 And a lot of it's just when you look at it today, it's like it's just dead wrong, but it led to a lot of problems.

00:15:01.680 It did.

00:15:01.860 Why did the Scottish and the British come to this whole thing of common sense?

00:15:06.240 It's a break from the elitism of the continental philosophy and the usual approach to enlightenment that you see, which is that enlightenment and understanding the world belongs only to a few trained minds who are able to understand the world as it really is, who are able to understand the larger metaphysical principles that underpin everything.

00:15:28.540 The Scots say, no, this is something everybody is equipped in order to do this.

00:15:33.920 And if you have that trust in the ability of ordinary people to understand how the world works, equip them with the power of literacy and of being able to make and to and to create based on how they're able to understand the scientific,

00:15:53.200 the mechanical principles that they're able to learn and understand

00:15:56.520 of how to enter into that world and to make a difference

00:16:00.940 and to make a life for yourself,

00:16:02.620 you've unleashed this tremendous source of power and ingenuity that comes from that.

00:16:08.620 Is this one of the fundamental differences?

00:16:09.760 And the guys we're talking about are Scottish Enlightenment figures.

00:16:13.040 Adam Smith is just one of the ones, as I talk about it in the book,

00:16:15.740 How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

00:16:18.080 You've got David Hume is there. 0.99

00:16:19.900 William Robertson is there.

00:16:21.240 Francis Hutchison is there. What they're doing is they're watching this process take place before

00:16:27.280 their eyes. And they're writing about what happens when people become part of what we

00:16:35.520 call modern society, that there's a transformation of personality, a transformation of means in terms

00:16:42.320 of the material growth and prosperity that comes as a result of that. And that that becomes a

00:16:48.800 benchmark for understanding what it is that distinguishes us from the past, from the agrarian

00:16:55.280 society, or the ancient societies of Rome that depended upon slave labor, for example.

00:17:02.820 Edward Gibbon understood all of these principles from his Scottish friends and used that analysis

00:17:08.740 to help shape his framework. That framework. That's it. To shape his view of the decline and fall of

00:17:16.080 of the Roman Empire, of understanding that in the end, the Romans, for all their cultural

00:17:22.080 sophistication, for all their great architecture and art and great law, that they were still

00:17:28.380 trapped in a primitive economy that depended upon slave labor, on human labor, and was

00:17:35.700 not able to enjoy the kind of benefits that flow from modern commercial society.

00:17:41.560 I want to hit this one more time because it's important for the audience to understand.

00:17:44.540 gibbons tells you that um he's done the grand tour of europe and he's particularly gone to italy

00:17:53.340 and he's quite frank he's blown away it was it was so it's so overwhelmed him to what he thought

00:17:59.280 it was he's sitting there in actual rome and you can go the very steps of one of it's a church now

00:18:04.700 but he was it was uh he's sitting on that on the top of those steps and it's um late in the

00:18:13.000 afternoon and he sees a group of monks go by and they're chanting

00:18:17.200 they're doing evening vespers. And

00:18:20.980 it hits him and he looks around and he goes and he sees the Arch of Titus. He's right

00:18:24.980 there at the center part right near the Coliseum or the Forum.

00:18:29.140 The Forum you can still see. He sees these magnificent

00:18:32.380 ruins. And he looks around and he goes

00:18:36.980 how did all of this

00:18:40.360 happen. And this is what we have. We have this group of monks, investors in a city

00:18:45.660 that is just a ruin and a shadow of its former self. How did that happen? That begins this 30

00:18:53.660 or 40 year effort on research and writing it. And what was the framework you work with? The work is

00:18:59.960 magnificent and people don't realize it goes all the way up to the, you know, to the, to the

00:19:04.800 The fall of Constantinople?

00:19:06.000 The fall of Constantinople. 0.99

00:19:07.120 I mean, he takes, I tell people, if you want to start with the issues with Islam,

00:19:13.400 Gibbons laid it out for you in 1776, or later, I guess it was a couple of years later, the volume came out.

00:19:20.460 What was it again that he picked up from the Scottish Enlightenment

00:19:23.960 that was the framing device that made that all made sense eventually in his writings,

00:19:28.780 from the ruins he was sitting in to evening vespers with the monks that he couldn't figure

00:19:35.400 out how did this all happen? What he realized was that the Roman Empire and the Romans and the

00:19:42.820 ruling elite of that society simply didn't have the means by which to confront the challenge of

00:19:50.280 barbarism. That in a primitive economy of that sort, so dependent upon agricultural labor and

00:19:58.360 a a workforce that are basically enslaved or peasant bound to the land that you just don't

00:20:06.900 have the material resources necessary. Although Roman engineering, Roman engineering was at the

00:20:12.400 elite. It's what separate their roads, the way they brought water down, that they were the way

00:20:18.320 monuments are magnificent, the way they threw bridges across the Colosseum, you know, bridges

00:20:22.600 across the Rhine. And sitting there in the forum, looking at the ruins of the great temple of

00:20:28.760 Jupiter and the other surrounding, the remains of the greatest empire the world had ever known,

00:20:36.700 and then realizing that all of this came to nothing. All this crumbled and collapsed.

00:20:44.180 And part of it is he gives part of the blame to Christianity in the sense that Christianity sapped away the morale of that we don't need to keep this empire going because there's another empire coming, which is the city of God.

00:21:02.480 And that therefore, that by directing our, the Christianity directed human beings' goal and horizons towards a world beyond this one.

00:21:14.180 Also sapped, it did sapped the military focus of the ethos of the warrior class, particularly the centurions. 0.78

00:21:23.500 But see, that's so interesting, because given understood, that's all there was.

00:21:27.280 There wasn't an economic base, what we would call an economic or industrial base.

00:21:32.480 of a modern sort on which you could rebuild an economy and rebuild society.

00:21:37.300 It was either, you had the soldier emperors who held the empire together with an iron clamp

00:21:43.220 and kept the barbarians at bay, and then if their grip slipped, then barbarism and collapsed.

00:21:53.020 It's interesting because in his case, the line he was drawing is, this isn't going to happen to us.

00:22:00.260 And people often read Gibbon in that regard.

00:22:02.920 Oh, he's predicting decline and fall of the British Empire.

00:22:06.500 Exact opposite.

00:22:07.700 Exact opposite.

00:22:08.540 Why is that?

00:22:08.980 Because in a modern society, we have the resources.

00:22:12.900 We have the means by which to sustain civilized existence and, in fact, to build a brighter future.

00:22:19.740 And that's why I think the founders, American founders, writing a Declaration of Independence

00:22:25.280 could go forward with confidence that they had now entered into an era

00:22:30.620 in which political freedom and liberty and life and liberty

00:22:37.060 and the pursuit of happiness were now possible and sustainable to the future.

00:22:40.880 Well, they had that concept of pursuit of happiness.

00:22:43.000 Is this why fundamentally the American Revolution is quite different than the French Revolution?

00:22:48.100 That happened at the exact same time? 0.95

00:22:49.520 I think it's exactly right.

00:22:51.740 That the story of the French Revolution, which happens at almost the same period of time, that revolution is one that celebrates not the freedom of the individual, but the power of the community, the general will, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau framed it.

00:23:10.680 And if you look at the two paths, and I've written about this in an essay in Civitas Outlook, the magazine, the online magazine on this, that the modern world is, I believe, shaped by two legacies.

00:23:25.920 One from the French Revolution, the events and ideas that it set in motion, and the other of the Scottish Enlightenment and the American Revolution as part of that branch of the revolutionary generation of the 18th century.

00:23:39.700 that from the French Revolution ideas and direction, the necessity of supporting the

00:23:46.360 community over the individual, that the individual is free to submit to the standards and demands

00:23:53.220 of the general will of the community, we get Marxism, communism, the national socialism

00:24:00.560 flow from that heritage that springs out of France and the French Revolution, including

00:24:06.340 the violence and terror that flows. From the Scottish Enlightenment, we get the American

00:24:12.060 Revolution. We get the changes within Britain itself of evolving into modern democracy in the

00:24:19.200 19th century. This is the current fight we have within this country. It's happening right now.

00:24:22.600 It's the Mondami. When Mondami is promulgating in New York City, what you see in Minneapolis,

00:24:28.540 in the streets of Minneapolis, is exactly those two revolutions at war themselves here in the

00:24:34.940 United States today. Today. And what is dismaying is that I don't think people really understand

00:24:42.060 that. I think they see someone like Mamdani or even AOC or Bernie Sanders. They see them as

00:24:51.200 figures who flash and who have magnetic personalities that draw media attention

00:24:58.120 and have interesting things to say instead of saying, what are they, what ideologies are they

00:25:03.940 really conveying here? What's the future that they're looking and setting out for us here?

00:25:08.340 And it's ones that I believe are ultimately rooted in evil. When I listened to Mondani,

00:25:17.160 the face that I see, when I heard him in the very first debate, the very first debate he had,

00:25:23.700 a mayoral debate that they broadcast, I said, who does that face remind me of? And I said,

00:25:28.940 It reminds me of Paul Pott.

00:25:30.900 Paul Pott, the genocidal dictator of Cambodia.

00:25:35.040 He had the same smile.

00:25:37.140 He had the same magnetic personality.

00:25:39.400 That kind of youthful exuberance of Marxist ideas that he had learned at the university in Paris.

00:25:48.120 Arthur Herman, you're so good.

00:25:50.140 Nobody can make that thing.

00:25:51.520 That's so, so brilliant about you.

00:25:52.920 People think of Paul Pott today, if they think about him at all,

00:25:55.940 They think the killing fields of some monster that has something he was he was a open, vibrant personality.

00:26:03.080 This reason he was able to do what he could do.

00:26:05.560 Delightful guy to go and sit in the cafe and one of the biggest, one of the most brutal murderers in modern history. 0.83

00:26:12.060 Now, I don't think Mamdani has the same goal, but you're setting setting up the cult, the killing fields or. 0.56

00:26:18.120 But there is nothing in his outlook on what needs to be changed and transformed in terms of American society that doesn't overlap with what Paul Potts' great goals were.

00:26:31.140 We're going to take a short commercial break.

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00:26:52.900 Short commercial break.

00:26:54.360 Break.

00:26:54.980 Back with Arthur Herman in a moment.

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00:28:26.560 everyone's focused on how the conflict in the middle east is raising oil prices but there's

00:28:31.980 another grim reality to this contention oil isn't the only resource being constrained about one

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00:29:52.120 Listen up, patriots. President Trump is dropping a $100 trillion bomb on the globalists. Jerome Powell's term has come to a close, and he's installing a real America First Fed chair who will, according to Jim Rickards, slash rates and supercharge our reindustrialization.

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00:30:24.800 The same forces that turned five thousand dollars into over a million in less than five years during China's booms are hitting here now.

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00:31:15.760 War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Mann.

00:31:21.140 It's okay.

00:31:23.180 Welcome back.

00:31:25.340 I want to continue on this for a minute.

00:31:29.960 Go back to the Industrial Revolution part of this.

00:31:32.980 Oh, by the way, I always tell my favorite story and talk about the French Revolution.

00:31:37.100 It's when Nixon and Kissinger show up to Mao Zedong, and they go over this huge meeting.

00:31:43.540 Kissinger's been working on this in secret for a year.

00:31:46.860 They finally go, and William Rogers, the Secretary of State, goes with a whole entourage like President Trump had.

00:31:52.020 When they land, Mao, who's just – he's an emperor.

00:31:57.380 He just does his deal.

00:31:58.420 They said, well, the formal things – he says, screw the formal things.

00:32:00.940 He says, get Nixon and Kissinger over here right now.

00:32:03.520 I want to meet them.

00:32:04.660 And they go, well, no.

00:32:05.300 the protocols and they says no i want to meet him and he's at his pool house where he lives in

00:32:09.100 johan chai which is the the where president trump went was she on the last day and they go over and

00:32:16.880 it's just four of them it's nixon and kissinger are very jet-lagged and you have cho enlai and

00:32:22.920 you have mal and they're just kind of sitting there mal trying to figure out what these guys

00:32:26.020 are like and of course they have translators and there's some slowness you know there's a thing and

00:32:31.180 So Kissinger, who is very nervous to keep the conversation going in one of these lulls, you know, turns to Cho in line, says, you know, you're a revolutionary figure.

00:32:42.200 What are your thoughts on the French Revolution?

00:32:44.420 Going back to your point, it's the railhead of that.

00:32:47.560 And Cho in line looks at him, he takes a while, and he says, too early to tell.

00:32:54.220 But in their mindset.

00:32:55.300 That's a long view of history.

00:32:56.380 It's a long view of history, but it's a correct view of history. 0.89

00:32:58.560 It's what you just made, the analogy that, hey, you see AOC, you see Mandami, and the media presents him as, you know, Mandami had the little TikToks and he was going through the grocery stores. 0.88

00:33:08.900 But people forget, and we're not saying he's going to be a Pol Pot, but if you look back at the time, people don't know anything about Pol Pot, except he was a worse murderer than even Hitler. 0.56

00:33:22.140 I was thinking it was 30 million people in Southeast Asia. 0.50

00:33:24.380 It's the darkest days for America.

00:33:26.380 When we left Vietnam and Southeast Asia and just left it when the Democrats, after the Watergate scandal, cut off all the funding.

00:33:34.120 They did.

00:33:34.620 In 1975, I think.

00:33:36.160 Shameful episode.

00:33:37.020 The most, is it not the most shameful episode actually in America's relationship to the world?

00:33:42.640 We just walked away and let all the people that we've worked with for years, just the devil gets the highest.

00:33:47.820 I would say that one and maybe also the abandonment of China to Mao's forces in 48, 49.

00:33:53.580 We're going to get to that.

00:33:54.460 It's another one.

00:33:55.380 It's horrible.

00:33:55.660 Horrible. Horrible. 35 million casualties.

00:33:58.140 Did not. We believed all the propaganda that the communists and their supporters were providing about what a post-Civil War Maoist regime would look like.

00:34:08.300 And it was a complete fabrication and we fell for it.

00:34:11.520 I'm going to get to that in the MacArthur. And by the way, we're going to try to do another episode very quickly.

00:34:17.040 Let me say this about Paul Pott.

00:34:18.580 Pol Pot didn't start by saying, I'm going to go massacre, you know, a million and a half of my fellow Cambodians in order to in order to bring about my my dream.

00:34:29.720 But this is what happens. This is what happens in socialist, the socialist political process and communism marks and communism springing out along the same flowing from the same branch.

00:34:41.680 And that is, is that it's all built on an idea that human beings can be perfected and be perfect.

00:34:48.580 and that you just have to create the conditions through government

00:34:52.220 in which human beings will always act on their best behavior

00:34:56.940 and will always be able to carry out the highest wishes that we have

00:35:03.460 about what makes a perfect world, a utopian view of the world.

00:35:06.940 But of course what happens is humans don't act the way socialists want them to.

00:35:11.060 So what do socialists do?

00:35:12.300 They have to impose new, more coercive measures

00:35:15.920 in order to get people to act the way socialists want them to act.

00:35:20.860 And then when people rebel, resist that,

00:35:23.400 then they have to go to the next level and then to the next level.

00:35:26.600 That's what Frederick Hayek called the road to serfdom.

00:35:30.740 It doesn't start with communist or socialist politicians

00:35:35.500 wanting to create serfdom.

00:35:38.640 They don't see human beings that way, 0.95

00:35:40.440 but they're forced to do so because their pursuit of their utopian dreams

00:35:45.180 makes them impose more and more.

00:35:48.580 The road to perdition is paved with good intentions.

00:35:52.080 Good intentions.

00:35:53.020 And the best way to deal with those good intentions

00:35:56.940 is keep them out of power. 0.80

00:35:59.140 You know, let them sit in the cafes.

00:36:00.380 Let them sit in the seminar rooms at Harvard

00:36:03.960 or at a Brown University

00:36:05.780 and spin their ideas about what a perfect society would look like,

00:36:10.860 about how we would save the planet in terms of protecting against climate change.

00:36:19.040 Don't give them the power, the means by which they can put their absurd ideas, utopian dreams, into action.

00:36:27.820 Because they will do whatever they can to pursue that.

00:36:32.960 And human liberty and happiness pays the price.

00:36:36.040 Isn't it fascinating that the same cafes and clubs that were the foundational element for 0.83

00:36:42.840 the French Revolution, that ultimately, if you go back and look at the Chinese communists, 0.97

00:36:49.420 if you look at Ho Chi Minh, if you look at Zhou Enlai, if you look at Pol Pot, the Asians 0.82

00:36:54.260 that really took the model of the French Revolution more even than the Bolsheviks and really 0.96

00:37:00.920 tried to perfect it, all of them, Deng Xiaoping, all of them started their education, they

00:37:07.860 were all brought in, they were all in Paris, right, and they were all in Paris, in the

00:37:11.440 same cafes, with the same types of philosophies, being taught by the same types of people.

00:37:16.880 Same Marxist professors at the university, men like Louis Althusser and others, I have

00:37:22.060 a long discourse if you like, Alexandre Colgev, and who, the sort of Hegelian.

00:37:27.340 Well, that's what tried to happen here with Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School.

00:37:30.540 they try to come to the united states people you have to understand this it is a it's interlocked

00:37:36.300 right of what they've tried to do all from the railhead in paris and that radicalness whether 0.77

00:37:41.040 it's the frankfurt school coming here to the united states or it's taking these asian young 0.90

00:37:46.300 kids and that's what they do chou enlai deng xiao ping uh ho chi min ho chi min pol pot they all go 0.54

00:37:54.580 to the universities or the left bank of paris they all sit in the same cafes they all get infused at 0.96

00:37:59.660 the formative years with these radical ideas, and you see later you get the killing fields of Asia. 0.96

00:38:05.900 That's right. And in the chaos that follows post-colonial Asia, 0.92

00:38:11.000 their opportunity springs up to do just that. First in China, but then, of course, also in Vietnam 0.86

00:38:17.840 as well as French rule, or even I would say French misrule, declines and falls apart.

00:38:25.720 those moments then come to put all of those ideas you can't you can't understand you can't

00:38:33.580 understand how there could be hatred by the working class people against french elites and

00:38:39.260 french aristocracy because the most arrogant the french aristocracy is the most arrogant world

00:38:43.000 the great story of the french revolution is when after and this is what's so fascinating about the

00:38:48.600 story having financed the american revolution first off the french and indian wars and then

00:38:55.000 the American Revolution, the French basic government was broke, right? Because that's

00:39:01.220 because of the first global war was really the French and the English fighting on battlefields

00:39:07.380 all over the world for essentially global control. And the French underwrote that. In fact, we would

00:39:13.440 not have won. This guy knows his history. We would not have known victory if we didn't have the French

00:39:20.540 fleet and the french thing but particularly franklin those guys are they get french money

00:39:24.920 when they get cash when they get they come to them and say look we're broke this is the same

00:39:29.760 time that we're trying to now come out of the war and build our nation the and as you know the the 0.93

00:39:35.160 united states has a we started with the english because we don't want to pay taxes for the french

00:39:39.300 and indian war but we're not about stiffing the french either for helping us they go they said

00:39:45.020 look we got to figure out how to pay for this and they said well how do you do it says well

00:39:49.280 Well, we need to raise taxes, but most importantly, we need to get our hands on some of this church revenue and church income like Henry VIII did over in England that made them a global power.

00:40:01.600 But the way to do that is we have to bring the estates general.

00:40:04.180 Everybody has to come together.

00:40:05.420 We haven't done it in 100 years.

00:40:07.580 And so the king says, OK, let's do that.

00:40:11.000 Let's do it.

00:40:11.340 Let's do it.

00:40:11.840 That's good.

00:40:12.240 And we'll do that.

00:40:12.780 It's taxation with representation. 0.69

00:40:14.740 Taxation with – we're going to do exactly different than the English did.

00:40:17.520 And that's we're going to not have a revolution here.

00:40:19.640 And the non-nobles and non-clerics in that the three estates, aristocracy, clergy, and then the bourgeoisie and the towns, they that group said, OK, hang on. 0.78

00:40:34.440 They're going to they're actually going to take one step farther.

00:40:36.580 They're going to elect their groups.

00:40:38.360 And that's how you get young lawyers, like a lot of lawyers, like Robespierre, a lot of who are not.

00:40:44.240 But the finance minister says, and when better, King, because, you know, your people are seeing that you're going to have taxation with representation already through.

00:40:53.820 Let's go ahead and just publish the books.

00:40:56.080 Let's give them the complete financial situation so they'll be our partners in making this change.

00:41:01.360 And the king's not Einstein's cousin.

00:41:03.620 He says, OK, that's a good idea.

00:41:06.160 So they had these broadsheets, and they actually put the books of the cash flow in and the debts.

00:41:11.900 And these people are looking at it and they're going, we're living like animals in the sewers of Paris.

00:41:18.060 And look at this. These guys have all this. They own everything and they pissed everything away.

00:41:23.720 The single biggest line of demarcation is once people saw the books, they go, are you crazy?

00:41:30.920 We're living like animals and you're living in Versailles and you've got all this and you've bankrupted us.

00:41:36.720 And, you know, you have you can't manage the government at all.

00:41:40.140 In fact, there has to be that empowered the one estate that the young lawyer said, I think we can have a better idea on this.

00:41:47.520 And, of course, you had all the radicals underneath the people that believed in God and the people that, you know, it was a spiritual war, too.

00:41:53.760 But the practical nature of it is once you open the books, the little guy understood, why am I living like an animal? 0.91

00:42:00.860 I'm being screwed. Why am I being screwed? And they're living in Versailles. 0.97

00:42:03.740 That's right. And, you know, in some ways, I sort of feel just to bring it up to contemporary events, I kind of feel like this whole anti-fraud campaign that the vice president, that J.D. Vance and others are lynching, has a similar, could have a similar impact of making people, because we have been sold, the American public has been sold for since the Great Society, that all of these wonderful welfare state programs.

00:42:30.540 The $39 trillion that we paid for the welfare first.

00:42:33.920 It was all in order to better.

00:42:35.040 That just happens to equate to it, but randomly with the number of our debt is.

00:42:38.060 That's right. It was all done for the betterment of the poor and the oppressed.

00:42:41.980 I'm not an Elon fan, but his original construct that we can cut a trillion dollars in our annual budget because the whole thing's fraud, he didn't really have the ability to do it.

00:42:52.420 OMB does, but you're right. There's been so much fraud. We're just seeing the surface of it.

00:42:56.640 It's so corrupt and how it's misallocated money.

00:43:00.540 He had the, he had took one look, made a common sense call on and said, we can, we can clear

00:43:05.860 out, clear up half a trillion dollars just off the top.

00:43:09.800 But I think what we're really going to discover, Steve, if, if the vice president, if I were

00:43:16.100 advising him and advising the anti-fraud task force that they're working on, is you can

00:43:20.800 expand this narrative and you can begin to show that this entire welfare state, great

00:43:26.560 society apparatus that we have been paying for, that has been built on the U.S. government

00:43:33.880 has all been a fraud, that it's all been a means by which to enrich a whole range of

00:43:42.920 NGOs, of a whole range of politicians and government bureaucrats who have made their

00:43:49.340 living scooping out the money that taxpayers are providing, thinking that it's going to 0.77

00:43:55.340 make the lives of the poor and oppressed, the halt and the lame, the widows and orphans

00:44:02.020 better.

00:44:03.660 And you know Walter Williams, as he said, just imagine if you'd taken a fraction of

00:44:10.120 the money, a fraction of the trillions that have been spent on welfare state, and just

00:44:15.680 wrote a check to the halt and the lame and the widows and orphans, how their lives have

00:44:22.280 been so it was so much better than what the welfare state has done done instead but and i'll

00:44:28.160 include among those i would include among those who have benefited from this fraud the teachers

00:44:34.560 unions oh all the oh the all the teachers unions which is as you know the university of california

00:44:41.760 is now the professors are saying we got to get back to the sats because i think the report they

00:44:48.800 did the other day of high schools, graduates in the state of California graduating with A's in

00:44:57.420 mathematics and most and many of them in advanced mathematic classes. They have come to the

00:45:02.640 assessment in the STEM programs in the at the University of California system that the vast

00:45:09.140 majority of the graduates are at a sixth and seventh grade understanding of mathematics that

00:45:17.340 it has to go back. And this is with people

00:45:19.320 graduating with A's that go to these top universities.

00:45:22.180 I want to go back. I want to close this

00:45:23.500 segment. We're going to keep you around.

00:45:25.320 Go back to the common sense.

00:45:27.880 Because

00:45:28.240 the two different

00:45:30.800 railheads, the Scottish

00:45:33.500 Enlightenment and the American Revolution

00:45:35.060 and the French Revolution about the community,

00:45:37.300 because they all talk about the community all the time.

00:45:40.160 The fundamental

00:45:41.340 difference in the Enlightenment is

00:45:43.360 the understanding of practicality

00:45:45.540 and common sense versus utopianism.

00:45:47.920 That's right.

00:45:48.300 And at the beginning of the French Revolution, as you just pointed out, the first steps there

00:45:53.340 were much more similar to what had happened in America in 1776.

00:45:58.920 Taxation with representation, letting people see the numbers, show us the numbers, show

00:46:05.240 it what's really going on.

00:46:06.700 And people will use their common sense to figure out and sort of say, this is not going

00:46:11.040 right.

00:46:11.840 We need big changes and big transformations.

00:46:14.180 And for a few crucial months in 1789 in France, the early stages of the French Revolution, they were moving in that kind of direction.

00:46:24.120 And then the radicals seized control as the government began to lose more and more grip on civil order in a situation like that.

00:46:33.060 It's a story that's been told in not just in France, but across around the world ever since of what happens when the status quo government loses control of civil order and the radicals are able to grab a hold and step into power.

00:46:48.580 I don't want to put another burden of a book, but you got to take that essay and expand it to a book because people don't understand.

00:46:53.600 This is quite fundamental.

00:46:56.180 Every day in the news, you see this.

00:46:58.000 You see what's happening in Minnesota.

00:46:59.780 You know, you have Bruce Springsteen with a song running around his concert.

00:47:02.020 You see, the basic fundamental difference comes from that period in the two revolution that were inspired, one by the Scottish Enlightenment, right?

00:47:12.860 And in the practical nature of just the English speaking people versus the, as Thomas Moore warned us about in the book Utopia.

00:47:21.180 And then we were born again in Brave New World, right?

00:47:24.240 The whole concept of kind of do gooderism, you know, to do good. 0.84

00:47:28.140 But it ends up in the killing fields of Pol Pot. 0.79

00:47:30.540 If I can conceive a perfect world in my mind, why can't there be a perfect world in reality?

00:47:36.560 That's the kind of framework of thinking about the world that you're often taught at the university level, at an academic level.

00:47:46.100 And then when you carry that into, if you're given the opportunity to carry that into reality, as happened in post-colonial Asia, as it happened in France after 1792,

00:47:57.780 too, the results can be truly horrible.

00:48:03.840 We're going to get you to stick around, and we're going to do this.

00:48:06.140 We're going to play the second part tomorrow night.

00:48:08.380 But in teeing up to talk about Asia and everything with MacArthur, all that,

00:48:11.820 the Industrial Revolution, what we saw in Freedom's Forge.

00:48:15.780 Give me a couple of minutes just to end this episode, but to tell us what happened,

00:48:19.380 what was so spectacular about what manifested itself in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s

00:48:25.580 in the United States in our industrial heartland.

00:48:27.780 Well, actually, I talk a lot about this in Founders Fire also, which is that what you had was a revolution that is set in motion by, again, a revolution in terms of sources of power.

00:48:42.300 As America moved away from steam power as a primary means of moving industrial development and manufacturing, the inheritance from the British, from the 18th century, from that point of view,

00:48:55.840 and then make the crucial jump to using gasoline and kerosene in an internal combustion engine.

00:49:05.500 And that is a jump not, we think about, usually we think about the internal combustion engine

00:49:11.260 and the power provided through the energy density of gasoline or its predecessor, kerosene.

00:49:22.420 That's how John D. Rockefeller made his fortune, was by refining from gasoline, getting kerosene and using that for illumination, but also for power as well.

00:49:32.500 We think about it in terms of the automobile and our mobility, but it also became a key factor in transforming how Americans' factories ran and how the source of power for America's industrial might in the 20th century flows from that same sources of power.

00:49:53.640 And so what happens in the case of Detroit is that these two revolutions, these two developments, our industrial revolution and the mobility revolutions that Henry Ford, and he's not alone, set in motion with the automobile, come together.

00:50:12.000 And the result is to make Detroit and the automotive industry the center of the economic world, not just of American economy, but also the center of how America becomes the dominant economic force in the world.

00:50:30.300 The Great Depression represents a kind of speed bump in that development.

00:50:37.860 There's no doubt about that.

00:50:39.640 Factories close.

00:50:41.560 The economy winds down.

00:50:43.580 Unemployment spikes.

00:50:45.300 Aggrooted demand collapses.

00:50:46.260 Government doesn't help with its redistributionist approach to dealing with this economic shock.

00:50:54.320 I mean, all of Roosevelt's plans, by 1938, were back into the worst days of the Depression.

00:51:00.860 The second, what they call the Second Great Depression hits.

00:51:04.180 But that generation, this goes to the point we started with, that generation who had then, who had built Detroit into this industrial as well as automotive hub, they simply persevered through.

00:51:17.860 They just powered through the Great Depression.

00:51:20.120 The same patterns of making cars, of getting American consumers to face that, to make the decision to buy a new automobile, continues and goes on and then carries through when that same mentality and mindset and base has to be mobilized for war.

00:51:38.800 We're going to continue this conversation tomorrow, so let's go out with the right stuff.

00:51:44.560 Arthur Herman, where do they go to get all your books?

00:51:47.420 What's the site?

00:51:48.040 Oh, you can go to my website, arthur-herman.com.

00:51:52.840 You can go to Amazon for Founders Fire or for Freedom's Forge.

00:51:57.060 Barnes & Noble, I recommend going to Barnes & Noble as well.

00:52:00.220 Buy it in the store.

00:52:01.420 I want to thank Birch Gold, birchgold.com, slash Bannon, end of the dollar empire.

00:52:06.880 This is sold out.

00:52:07.720 It's on back order.

00:52:08.380 But you get all free, all eight installments, all free.

00:52:12.660 We'll see you tomorrow evening.

00:52:13.480 Thanks.

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Bannon's War Room - June 02, 2026

WarRoom Battleground EP 1021： The Founder's Mentality Of The United States

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