Trump says he doesn t fire people because of a witch hunt, and he still has confidence in his National Security Adviser Mike W. Wray and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Meanwhile, President Trump continues to push back against isolationist voices on the right and the left who want to make our foreign policy subject to the whims of other countries.
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00:00:31.000Well, President Trump continues to resist the calls from isolationists on the right and from Insanely anti-American voices on the left to essentially make his foreign policy subject to the whims of other countries.
00:00:46.000So this Signalgate story, which ate up the headlines all of last week, this idea that because there was a group chat involving the national security apparatus inside the Trump administration that also accidentally invited in Jeffrey Goldberg, the pseudo-journalist editor of The Atlantic, That this was a rationale for him to blow up his entire national security infrastructure?
00:01:06.000President Trump addressed that over the weekend.
00:01:08.000According to a brief phone interview he did with NBC News over the weekend, he told the network, I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.
00:01:15.000Here was NBC's Kristen Welker reporting.
00:01:18.000In an exclusive phone interview on Saturday, the president told me, quote, I don't fire people because of fake news and because of witch hunts.
00:01:26.000Mr. Trump said he still has confidence in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and National Security Advisor Mike Walls.
00:01:47.000It's the only thing the press wants to talk about because you have nothing else to talk about.
00:01:51.000It has been the greatest 100-day presidency in the history of our country.
00:01:55.000So, again, this is President Trump ignoring the foolishness in favor of the actual policy, which is, if the Houthis hit at American assets or American allies, then they get struck.
00:02:05.000And President Trump seems to be upping the ante all over the world with regards to this sort of stuff.
00:02:10.000So, Many people have been fearful that President Trump was simply going to cave to Vladimir Putin, that Vladimir Putin is sort of slow-playing President Trump in Ukraine.
00:02:17.000Now, as you recall, Vladimir Zelensky came to the White House, got chewed out by both Trump and Vice President J.D.
00:02:21.000Vance, and then expelled from the White House over his sort of brazen attempts to get Trump to commit to security commitments in the room.
00:02:30.000And then Zelensky effectively apologized on the world stage.
00:02:33.000And then he said that he was going to agree to an immediate ceasefire.
00:02:37.000And in the meantime, Vladimir Putin has refused to agree to anything like a comprehensive ceasefire.
00:02:41.000He said maybe he'll have a ceasefire with regard to energy infrastructure.
00:02:44.000Or maybe there'll be a ceasefire in the Black Sea.
00:02:47.000Well, in reality, Vladimir Putin is playing a game.
00:02:49.000And everybody can see that he's playing a game.
00:02:51.000On Friday, he called for a transitional administration to be put place in Ukraine.
00:02:55.000And then vowed his army would, quote, finish off Ukrainian troops.
00:03:00.000He's attempting to pretend that he actually wants to get to the end of the war.
00:03:02.000It is now pretty clear which side does not want to get to the end of the war.
00:03:06.000Zelensky has accepted the reality, which is that Ukraine is not going to, at least in this round of fighting, win back Donbass or Crimea.
00:03:13.000But Vladimir Putin does not want the war to end because he feels the momentum is on his side and that if he can sort of continue the push, that eventually the West will give in, stop funding Ukraine, and he will in fact end up sitting in the presidential palace in Kiev.
00:03:26.000According to Yahoo News, a rapprochement between Washington and Moscow since Trump's return to office and the U.S. leader's threats to stop supporting Kiev have bolstered Putin's confidence more than three years into an offensive that has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides.
00:03:38.000The renewed call to essentially topple Zelensky was the latest demonstration of the Kremlin leader's long-standing desire to install a more Moscow-friendly regime in Kiev.
00:03:46.000Zelensky dismissed Putin's call for a U.N.-run administration as the Russian leader's latest ploy to delay a peace deal, which, of course, is true.
00:03:53.000Putin said that Russia could discuss with the United States, Europe, and Moscow's allies, quote, under the auspices of the UN, the possibility of establishing a transitional administration in Ukraine.
00:04:02.000And then he said that that would organize a democratic presidential election that would result in the coming to power of a competent government.
00:04:08.000So basically, he wants to oust Zelensky by threat of force, and then he wants his own man put in place in Ukraine.
00:04:16.000Well, President Trump is now seeing through all of this.
00:04:19.000President Trump, in an interview with NBC News, President Trump called me to tell me he is quote, Pissed off with Russia's President Putin and threatened to impose secondary tariffs on Russia's oil.
00:04:45.000Quote, if Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine and if I think it was Russia's fault, which it might not be, but if I think it was Russia's fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia.
00:05:02.000Now, secondary tariff means that it's not just that the United States will put a tariff on oil coming out of Russia.
00:05:07.000It's that he is going to essentially put tariffs on any country that takes Russian oil, which would devastate the Russian economy because Russia is basically a giant gas station with nuclear weapons.
00:05:16.000President Trump said that would be that if you buy oil from Russia, you can't do business in the United States.
00:05:20.000There'll be a 25 percent tariff on all oil, a 25 to 50 point tariff on all oil.
00:05:25.000Now, again, this is the correct response from President Trump.
00:05:37.000The problem is that Vladimir Putin does not, in fact, get the picture.
00:05:40.000And so when President Trump is pissed off, he has every right to be pissed off because he understands that Vladimir Putin is, in fact, playing him.
00:05:46.000And so for all the sort of tankies on both right and left who believe that Trump is going to simply cave into Vladimir Putin, that is not how Trump operates.
00:05:53.000The thing about President Trump is that all these people who sit around trying to figure out exactly what he is saying, what exactly he's doing, There is no massive backroom calculus that is happening here.
00:06:03.000He is not sitting in the back room with one of those Charlie Day, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, boards with all of the strings connecting picture to picture.
00:06:11.000President Trump says exactly what he thinks, and he says it clearly and openly, which is why he's been president twice.
00:06:16.000The American people know what they are getting from President Trump, and everybody who keeps looking for some sort of secret motivation, there's no secret motivation.
00:06:24.000This also happens to be true with regard to Iran.
00:06:27.000So President Trump Had sent a letter to the Iranian president saying, would you like to open negotiations over your nuclear program?
00:06:34.000And if you don't want to open negotiations over your nuclear program, bad stuff is going to happen.
00:06:38.000Well, on Sunday, Iran's president said that the Islamic Republic had rejected direct negotiations with the United States over its rapidly advancing nuclear program.
00:06:48.000President Massoud Pashakian said that Iran's response delivered via the Sultanate of Oman left open the possibility of indirect negotiations with Washington, but Such talks have made no progress since Trump in his first term unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers in 2018.
00:07:02.000That, of course, was the so-called JCPOA, which was the ridiculous nuclear deal that was negotiated by Barack Obama that essentially gave Iran a clear pathway to a bomb.
00:07:11.000It said, you have to delay it for 10 years, but you can use all the money that we are giving you and now freeing up to spread terrorism all over the Middle East.
00:07:17.000And we have seen the consequences of that over the past couple of years when the entire Middle East has gone up in flames, thanks in large part to the additional funding that was granted to Iran By the Obama administration and then the Biden administration, the relief that was given to them, so they could then spread their terror all over the Middle East.
00:07:34.000Pajetkin said, we don't avoid talks, it's the breach of promises that has caused issues for us so far.
00:07:38.000They must prove they can build trust, that we can build trust with you, who are using all the money that the Obama administration freed up to pay for terrorist proxies all over the Middle East and ballistic missile development.
00:07:53.000So, the U.S. State Department responded, quote, President Trump has been clear the United States cannot allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.
00:07:58.000The President expressed his willingness to discuss a deal with Iran.
00:08:00.000If the Iranian regime does not want a deal, the President is clear he will pursue other options, which will be very bad for Iran.
00:08:05.000Again, this is not a complex calculus.
00:08:08.000President Trump himself said that if they don't come to some sort of answer with regards to their nuclear program, the United States is going to come to an answer with regards to their nuclear program, and that answer might involve some bombs falling on their nuclear facilities.
00:08:21.000Now, of course, it wouldn't be the United States predominantly that would do that.
00:08:24.000Presumably, that would be the Israelis doing that with armaments essentially lent them by the United States.
00:08:31.000However, President Trump's foreign policy is very clear.
00:08:34.000He is willing to make a deal at any time with anyone.
00:08:37.000But if you aren't willing to make a deal, the kind of deal the United States wants to enter into, he is going to clock you or he's going to allow America's allies to clock you.
00:08:46.000Again, this is called peace through strength.
00:08:48.000It is not particularly difficult to understand.
00:08:53.000Now, meanwhile, in sort of funnier foreign policy news, J.D. Vance arrived in Greenland over the weekend and I think spoke for all Americans when he dropped this particular line.
00:09:02.000He arrived, he was talking to American troops.
00:09:04.000We do have American troops stationed in Greenland for national security purposes.
00:09:47.000Now again, Greenland has like 50,000 people.
00:09:50.000If the Greenlanders wish to join the United States, they could hold a referendum tomorrow and join the United States.
00:09:55.000They've made clear they don't actually wish to join the United States.
00:09:57.000The United States does have serious national interests in Greenland because of the Arctic channels that flow around Greenland that are now being victimized and used as bases in some ways by the Russians and the Chinese.
00:10:11.000However, slamming Denmark, like this part I don't really understand, I'll be honest with you.
00:10:17.000There is no amount of bullying, no amount of obfuscating, no amount of confusing the issue.
00:10:24.000Our message to Denmark is very simple.
00:10:26.000You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland.
00:10:30.000You have underinvested in the people of Greenland, and you have underinvested in the security architecture of this incredible, beautiful landmass filled with incredible people.
00:10:41.000And because it hasn't changed, this is why President Trump's policy in Greenland is what it is.
00:10:48.000And President Trump said we will get Greenland yet 100% and then added there's a good possibility we could do it without military force, but I don't take anything off the table.
00:10:55.000So war for Greenland apparently is still on the table.
00:11:01.000Okay. Greenland Prime Minister Jans Fredrik Nielsen pushed back and said President Trump says the United States is getting Greenland.
00:11:45.000Producer Zach went to the car dealer over the weekend and producer Zach got like a $10,000 discount on his car by using information that he got from Perplexity about, for example, the VIN number of the car, how long it had been on the lot, how much it was costing them to keep the car on the lot every day.
00:12:01.000It had been there for like 200 days and he negotiated down his car price based on information he got from Perplexity.
00:12:16.000Greenland holds significant strategic importance for the United States due to its location in the Arctic and its role in global security.
00:12:21.000It's situated at a critical juncture between North America and Europe, making it vital for monitoring air and sea routes.
00:12:27.000The U.S. operates Pitufic Space Base, formerly called Thule Air Base, which serves as a key installation for missile detection in Arctic operations.
00:12:35.000The 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement allows the United States to establish and maintain military facilities on the island, ensuring rapid response capabilities.
00:12:43.000As global rivalries intensify, particularly with Russia and China, Greenland is pivotal for maintaining U.S. influence in the Arctic region, which is becoming a contested area due to climate change and emerging trade routes, because a lot of the ice up there is thawing, and that means that ships can now travel up there.
00:12:56.000The United States has a long history of protecting Greenland.
00:12:58.000During World War II, the U.S. actually established military bases there because Denmark, of course, had been occupied by the Nazis.
00:13:04.000The 1941 Defense of Greenland Agreement allowed American forces to protect the island from German influence during the Cold War.
00:13:11.000It was a strategic outpost for us to monitor the Soviets.
00:13:14.000The U.S. has tried to buy Greenland a bunch of times, all the way from 1867 to 1946, basically.
00:13:20.000So, nothing new in what President Trump is trying to do.
00:13:22.000Whether we take it by military force or not, you know, I'm a little skeptical.
00:13:26.000While President Trump's polling remains solid because the government continues to do better things under Trump than it would otherwise, as Doge continues to surgically cut the fat from decades of bloated government spending and corruption, Pure Talk, the cell phone company I use for business every day, they are cutting the fat from the wireless industry.
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00:15:24.000Only from ZipRecruiter rated number one hiring site based According to the brand new CBS poll, President Trump remains at a 50% approval rating.
00:16:06.000It doesn't matter who the president is.
00:16:07.000If you're the president and you have a bad economy, it really stops you in your tracks.
00:16:11.000Well, right now, the polling data show that the American people are pretty skittish about some of the economic plans that President Trump is making, particularly with regard to tariffs.
00:16:19.000And again, There's plenty of great stuff happening on the economic front.
00:16:58.000When it comes to inflation, 38% of Americans say that Joe Biden's policies are still to blame the most for today's inflation rate.
00:17:06.00034% say Trump's policies and 19% say both equally.
00:17:11.000Well, that means that 53% of Americans say that Trump bears some responsibility for the nation's inflationary policies.
00:17:18.000This is a problem in the middle of President Trump's threats that he is going to have a liberation day with regard to the global economy.
00:17:26.000And by that he means that we are going to push extraordinarily broad and high tariffs.
00:17:31.000According to the Wall Street Journal, the Trump administration is scrambling to determine the specifics of its new tariff agenda ahead of its self-imposed deadline of Wednesday, weighing options as the president has promised to remake the American economy with a swath of new levies.
00:17:42.000One key point of debate is whether to impose individualized tariff rates for U.S. trading partners, As President Trump has previewed in recent weeks, or to revert to his campaign pledge for an across-the-board tariff that would affect virtually every country doing business with the United States, according to people familiar with the conversations.
00:17:58.000Trump spent most of last week playing down expectations for his so-called reciprocal tariff plan on April 2nd.
00:18:03.000But in recent days, Trump has pushed his team to be more aggressive, according to people familiar with his conversations, encouraging them to devise plans that apply higher rates of tariffs on a broad set of countries.
00:18:12.000Trump reinforced that narrative on Sunday night.
00:18:14.000He said he would target, quote, essentially all of U.S. trading partners with tariffs of some kind.
00:18:20.000Well, that would be an extraordinary move by President Trump.
00:18:23.000Frankly, I don't understand how he has the executive authority to do that.
00:18:28.000And if the Republican Congress wishes not to lose a bunch of seats in the midterm elections, I would highly recommend that if President Trump pushes really high tariffs over the next couple of days, that Congress start thinking about taking back some of its constitutionally Regardless of what you think of President Trump's policies, no president, Democrat or Republican, should have the unilateral ability to simply increase the prices on goods across the board by 20% on all Americans.
00:18:56.000That is not a power delegated to any president under the Constitution of the United States.
00:19:00.000In recent days, advisors have considered imposing global tariffs of up to 20% that would hit virtually all U.S. trading partners.
00:19:09.000Trump and his team for months promoted such a plan on the campaign trail before the president publicly ditched it in favor of that so-called reciprocal tariff plan that is still possibly on the table.
00:19:17.000Whatever the final plan, the official said the president wants the policy to be, quote, big and simple, which means the final action will be broader than earlier plans to prioritize levying tariffs on the U.S.'s biggest trading partners, about 15 percent of the world's nations, which Treasury Secretary Scott Besant had labeled in the media appearances as, quote, the dirty 15. Again, this is not good policy.
00:19:36.000Again, I want President Trump's policies to succeed.
00:19:39.000This is not a policy geared towards success.
00:19:41.000Now, the case to be made, if you're going to steelman the argument in favor of a broad tariff regime, the steelman case is the effect of the tariffs over the long haul.
00:19:50.000Let's say that you believe that trade deficits are one of the biggest problems facing America.
00:19:55.000The idea that we buy more from other countries than other countries buy from us.
00:19:58.000I don't believe in this because, again, you have a trade deficit with your grocery store.
00:20:02.000You have a trade deficit with your barber.
00:20:04.000You have a trade deficit With your local auto dealer.
00:20:06.000You have a trade deficit with everyone from whom you buy.
00:20:09.000That does not mean they ripped you off.
00:20:11.000It does not mean some great injustice has been done.
00:20:13.000That is not the way global economics works.
00:20:15.000And in fact, when we run a trade deficit with another country, they have to use those dollars for something and typically they use it to buy up treasuries.
00:20:22.000Very often they are using that in international trade in order to finance our debt.
00:20:27.000So let's be clear that it is not just we spend money on Vietnamese t-shirts and that money disappears into the ether.
00:20:32.000That is not the way any of this works.
00:20:34.000And you may not like the fact that Vietnam makes t-shirts and the United States no longer does, but we also make the entire world software industry, and Vietnam does not.
00:20:44.000There are good purposes to tariffs for national security reasons.
00:20:48.000When it comes to important national defense industries, obviously we have to maintain their production capacity in the United States, because we don't want to be reliant on anyone else if it comes to a war.
00:21:15.000But the idea that tariffs in and of themselves are going to be good for the economy, that's wrong.
00:21:19.000But to still man the argument, the basic idea would be that the American dollar right now is very strong in international trade.
00:21:26.000And the reason the American dollar is very strong is there's a large demand For American treasuries and services and all of that because of the trade deficits that we run.
00:21:34.000If you end those trade deficits and you rebalance it, you weaken the American dollar.
00:21:38.000What is the good part about weakening the American dollar?
00:21:39.000Well, if you're President Trump, the good part about weakening the American dollar is that it leads to more domestic consumption because everything becomes more expensive imported from overseas to the United States.
00:21:57.000And so the deliberate idea that we are going to essentially inflate the currency by weakening it against other currencies and making prices higher for Americans in the process, that's a lot of pain for what I think is not a lot of gain.
00:22:08.000The reality is we are not going to, at this rate, inflate our way out of our national debt without crushing the economy.
00:22:15.000The actual way that you are going to be able to get out of the national debt is by growing the economy by leaps and bounds, and that does not happen via tariff regimes.
00:22:23.000That is, tariff regimes do not lead to massive economic growth.
00:22:27.000There was something that was widely applied in Latin America, South America, during the 1970s and 80s.
00:22:34.000The basic idea was that all of these countries in South America were being ripped off by the more sophisticated Western countries who were trading in sophisticated products.
00:22:43.000And then all of these countries in South America were trading out unsophisticated, unfinished materials, for example.
00:22:49.000And this was leading to quote-unquote dependency.
00:22:53.000And so what these countries did is they raised tariffs So, what does this look like?
00:23:06.000Well, President Trump already, this is not a great political pitch, it just isn't.
00:23:10.000He told NBC News on Saturday he does not care, for example, if foreign automakers raise their prices for U.S. consumers in response to new tariffs.
00:23:17.000Here's Kristen Welker reporting on President Trump.
00:23:19.000I promise you, by the way, American consumers do care if their prices go up By leaps and bounds on the cars they want to buy for their families.
00:23:28.000And the president telling me tariffs are, quote, absolutely permanent.
00:23:33.000And on fears of foreign automakers raising prices, quote, I couldn't care less if they raise prices because people are going to start buying American-made cars.
00:23:46.000It's been bad economic policy forever.
00:23:47.000The idea you can produce everything within America's borders for the same prices that you're currently getting is not true.
00:23:54.000I understand that politicians have a stake in pretending that magic can happen in the economy whereby you shut down global trade and you don't import anything and everything gets produced right here in America and it's the same price and your life doesn't change in any way.
00:24:08.000Things are going to get more expensive.
00:24:10.000The product in the United States, by the way, gets worse because if you don't have competition with foreign competitors, there's no reason for you to make a product any better.
00:24:16.000This is basically the story of the American car industry during the 1950s and 60s.
00:24:22.000By the end of the 1960s, Toyota was eating our lunch.
00:24:24.000Why? Because we had massive tariffs on foreign automakers.
00:24:28.000We had huge subsidies to American automakers.
00:24:30.000Those subsidies were largely going to the UAW and other union members.
00:24:34.000And then, when we finally lowered our trade barriers, better cars came in at a lower price and they completely swamped the American auto industry to the point that we had multiple bankruptcies in the 1970s.
00:24:43.000And tariff policy, protectionist trade policy, is Overall, it can be good for certain sectors of an economy that are now receiving benefit at the hands of loss for the vast majority of American consumers.
00:24:55.000But let's not pretend that it is good economic policy for the vast majority of American consumers.
00:25:01.000If you tax everybody a buck and then you pay somebody $300 million, great for the guy who gets $300 million, not great for everybody who has to pay a buck.
00:25:09.000And here we're talking about a lot more than a buck.
00:25:11.000Tariffs, as it turns out, are not amazing for the vast majority of Americans.
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00:28:00.000Now, the Trump administration, because of course they work for President Trump, they continue to push forward this vision of tariffs.
00:28:05.000Peter Navarro, who's a big fan of tariffs and one of the president's advisors on trade policy, he said that we are going to make 600 billion dollars in tariff revenue.
00:28:17.000We're going to provide tax Okay, so, last year, tariffs in the United States were responsible for about $80 billion in revenue.
00:28:42.000To get to $600 billion in tariff revenue, we would need to assume that people are going to continue consuming foreign products at the same rate.
00:28:49.000It's sort of mutually exclusive ideas.
00:28:51.000One is that we're going to continue to consume foreign products and thus the tariff revenue will increase but also we're not going to consume foreign products and we're going to buy American.
00:28:59.000So one of those two things is not true.
00:29:02.000Either we're going to redirect our consumption toward American products in which case the tariffs actually are not going to raise that much money or we're going to continue to buy foreign products in which case we're going to raise more money via the tariffs but we're not going to buy American.
00:29:14.000Navarro and some of the team wants to have it both ways.
00:29:16.000By the way even if we raise 600 billion dollars through tariffs You've heard from people that this is going to pay off our national debt.
00:29:21.000It is not going to pay off our national debt.
00:30:06.000For America, tariffs will make America great again.
00:30:09.000Okay. Well, I mean, you can try this cell.
00:30:15.000The bottom line is that if Americans feel in their pocketbook, they're not going to care about the cell.
00:30:20.000Vice President J.D. Vance was on the campaign trail as well, and he was explaining why he was a fan of the tariffs while he was in Greenland.
00:30:29.000For 40 years, a lot of our friends all over the world have used America as a piggy bank.
00:30:33.000They have used us to absorb all of their excess economic production.
00:31:12.000They've been living off our largesse since World War II.
00:31:14.000It's one of the reasons why President Trump is absolutely 100% correct to demand that NATO countries pay a certain percentage of their GDP for defense.
00:31:40.000Do you think that there's a factory in Germany that churns out things at zero cost, basically, for no reason, and then just ship them here?
00:32:10.000You know, like you buy a thing at the store, that's you absorbing their excess economic production?
00:32:15.000When he says that's meant manufacturing jobs declining and middle class wages going down, middle class wages have in fact not gone down in the United States, adjusted, For the benefits that are received from the federal government.
00:32:25.000In fact, much of the middle class in the United States over the course of the past 40 years has become upper middle class over the course of the last 40 years.
00:32:32.000And as far as the manufacturing decline in the United States, the truth is that manufacturing production has gone up in the United States.
00:32:38.000The number of jobs that it takes to make the manufacturing go up has gone down.
00:32:42.000That is because of technology in the main.
00:32:43.000It is not, in fact, because of outsourcing to China.
00:32:46.000Now, again, you can make the argument we shouldn't outsource that stuff to China.
00:32:49.000But to pretend that America was going to look In 2025, the way it looked in 1980, is not true.
00:32:57.000So, again, you can make this case, it's just not going to be a particularly successful case.
00:33:01.000When this was pointed out, by the way, then J.D. Vance, who spends an awful lot of time on X sort of fighting his critics, he said, it is this brains-ed liberalism pretending to conservatism that saw the U.S. go from the world's manufacturing superpower to one in which the PRC makes nearly twice as much as we do, and where if the small island of Taiwan fell to invasion, we'd be hurled into a Great Depression.
00:33:21.000Now, I'm confused at the idea that if the United States had divested itself of global trade, then magically all manufacturing of semiconductors would be done in the United States as opposed to, say, in other places in Southeast Asia or in other places in Europe.
00:33:37.000It turns out, actually, that the line of manufacture for, for example, superconductors, for semiconductors, goes through places in Europe as well.
00:33:46.000There are many firms that are involved in the production of this sort of stuff.
00:33:49.000He says, this is not just about a few union workers, this is about a globalized economic system in which the United States absorbs much of the producer surplus of the world.
00:33:55.000Again, producer surplus is a term that does not appear in classical economics for a reason.
00:34:02.000What is a producer surplus that is absorbed?
00:34:04.000Who is sitting around just making extra stuff, hoping that people are going to quote-unquote absorb it?
00:34:10.000He says, a system whose brittle supply chains exposed our economic vulnerability after COVID.
00:34:14.000And speaking of those autoworkers, this guy has such contempt for, it was autoworkers of the 40s who allowed the United States to go from a peacetime economy to the best mass producer of aircraft the world has ever seen.
00:34:23.000Is anyone making the suggestion that GM and Ford are going to be making our airplanes now?
00:34:27.000Like the F-13, the F-47 that President Trump talks about is going to be manufactured by GM and Ford?
00:34:33.000It is true, actually, that the auto manufacturers turned to wartime production during World War II.
00:34:39.000And again, if you're doing tariffs in order to maintain our national security production, I'm with you.
00:35:00.000And I'm not saying this because I want the President to fail on this stuff.
00:35:03.000I'm saying this because I think that his economic plans here can harm him.
00:35:08.000The worst thing that could happen to the Trump administration, by the way, the Vice President Vance Stu, who wants to run for president in 2028, the worst thing that could happen here is an economic downturn.
00:35:16.000That is the worst thing that could happen.
00:35:18.000As Axios points out, economic growth has flatlined so far this year.
00:35:22.000Consumers expect both to get worse in the months ahead.
00:35:26.000Stagflation is starting to be pretty openly discussed.
00:35:29.000The backward-looking data lately has been distinctly stagflationary.
00:35:32.000Consumer spending in the first two months of 2025 has been soft coming in.
00:35:36.0000.6% below its December rate when adjusted for inflation.
00:35:39.000A real-time estimate of GDP published by the Atlanta Fed is now pointing to economic activity shrinking at a 0.5% rate in Q1.
00:35:47.000Meanwhile, the inflation measure favored by the Fed has risen at a 4.1% annual rate in the first two months of 2025, the highest in a year.
00:36:05.000The notion that you're going to rejigger all of global trade, and that's going to have no effect on American consumers, on the American economy, on American businesses.
00:36:34.000I think that he's proved that over and over and over again, actually, over the course of his career.
00:36:38.000However, that does not mean that this is, in fact, a wise move, and there is a reason that the markets are really, really nervous right now.
00:36:45.000Meanwhile, there are, in fact, good things about to happen for the economy.
00:36:50.000According to Politico, Senate GOP leaders are going to move as soon as Wednesday to begin advancing a budget plan that is the next key step to unlock President Trump's massive agenda through a party-line bill.
00:36:59.000Under the ambitious timeline being privately considered by Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the Senate would adopt its budget resolution before heading home for the weekend.
00:37:06.000A marathon voterama could kick off on Thursday.
00:37:08.000Four people granted anonymity to disclose private discussions.
00:37:11.000Caution could slip to Friday, depending on how quickly the chamber moves.
00:37:14.000In order to make all of that work, the Senate parliamentarian would need to sign off on the Republicans' plans to use a tactic known as the current policy baseline, which allows them to pursue trillions of dollars in tax cut extensions while claiming it doesn't cost anything.
00:37:27.000of a current policy baseline is that what is current policy is in fact the baseline.
00:37:33.000And so when the Senate parliamentarian has to decide on the cost of a bill saying that you're going to continue to extend the same level of taxation that has obtained in the United States for the last 10 years or so, that is not in fact some sort of weird economic trickery.
00:37:49.000Otherwise, why not assume that the taxes are going to revert to like a 60% rate and then everything costs an enormous amount of money any time you want to lower the taxes or even maintain them as they currently are.
00:37:58.000Senators believe they could secure such a ruling from the parliamentarian as soon as Tuesday or Wednesday of this week, though the meeting has yet to be scheduled.
00:38:05.000This ruling is crucial because Republicans can't finalize the retool budget resolution until they know if that accounting gambit will, in fact, be approved.
00:38:11.000Before Wednesday, the big six budget negotiators, that would be John Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith.
00:38:19.000Treasury Secretary Scott Bessens and top White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett will huddle on Tuesday for their standing weekly meeting.
00:38:26.000Now, again, the Senate parliamentarian could throw a wrench into this entire timeline if they suggest that they can't use the current policy baseline.
00:38:34.000With a 53-seat majority, Republicans can still lose three votes and pass something, but a big, beautiful bill will certainly go a long way toward making investors feel more sanguinity about the future of economic performance under President Trump.
00:38:47.000Again, business people are ready to invest.
00:38:50.000The uncertainty with regard to things like tariff policy are causing investors to hold back their dry powder.
00:38:56.000And I spent a lot of time talking to investors and business people, and right now they are all very nervous because they don't know what tomorrow is going to bring.
00:39:03.000Predictability in the markets is probably the number one factor in allowing investors to actually put their money where their mouth is.
00:39:10.000And meanwhile, in absolutely extraordinary news, this really is crazy, a court has now banned Marine Le Pen, who is very, very likely to win the next election in France, from seeking public office for five years.
00:39:25.000And this is part and parcel of a broader attempt by left-wing judiciary activists across the globe to stop, quote-unquote, populist politicians from being able to run.
00:39:34.000We saw it with President Trump, where the DOJ went after President Trump for supposed crimes that they then let Joe Biden off the hook for.
00:39:41.000We saw it in New York, where a New York attorney general Filed a civil fraud lawsuit in an attempt to stop President Trump.
00:39:49.000We have seen it in Brazil, where the entire judicial apparatus has been brought down on the head of Yair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, in favor of Lula da Silva, who was then freed by that same exact judiciary.
00:40:01.000There was a candidate named Georgescu who won an election in 2024, and then the judiciary found, they said, that basically the election had been rigged by the Russians, and they just said that the election didn't count at all.
00:40:14.000Where the Attorney General of Israel has been going after Benjamin Netanyahu on specious charges for literally years at this point and the judiciary keeps saying that Netanyahu can't do like the basic functions of an executive like fire his Attorney General or fire anybody in the executive branch.
00:40:33.000It is absolutely amazing to watch these unelected officials going out of their way to thwart the will of the people in supposed democracies.
00:40:54.000According to the Wall Street Journal, a French court convicted Marine Le Pen of misusing EU funds, sentencing her to prison and banning her from France's next presidential election.
00:41:03.000Judges handed down a sentence on Monday that bars Le Pen from seeking public office for the next five years.
00:41:08.000Le Pen also received a four-year prison sentence, half of which was suspended.
00:41:11.000The ruling takes Le Pen out of contention for the 2027 race when President Emmanuel Macron finishes his second and final term.
00:41:17.000She was expected to be the frontrunner.
00:41:19.000The court ruled that Le Pen and other members of her party illegally used millions of euros in EU funding that was earmarked for assistance helping lawmakers in the EU Parliament with their work.
00:41:26.000Instead, judges said, Le Pen and her lawmakers used the money to pay party staffers who weren't involved in work for Parliament.
00:41:33.000So, just to get this straight, they're putting her in jail for two years and banning her from running for five because Her party, which sits in the European Parliament, was paid money by the EU to help lawmakers, and those aides did work for both Le Pen's party and the lawmakers, and this is worth banning Le Pen from the election entirely over.
00:41:54.000Why do I feel like this is a put-up job?
00:41:57.000I mean, the answer is because it's a put-up job.
00:41:59.000Judges applied provisional execution to Le Pen's ban.
00:42:02.000That means it takes effect immediately, even if Le Pen appeals Monday's ruling.
00:42:05.000Her prison sentence remains suspended while any appeals are underway, which I think shows exactly where they are.
00:42:11.000The big thing is get her out of the elections.
00:42:23.000She testified it was appropriate for the assistants to perform other party-related work because they were political aides, not direct employees of the European Parliament.
00:42:30.000In other words, They didn't work for- if the European Parliament wanted them working on just European Parliament stuff, maybe the European Parliament should have hired them as opposed to paying the party to do some of the work for the European Parliament.
00:43:14.000Meanwhile, these same courts all over the world are perfectly willing to allow left-wingers to do whatever the hell they want.
00:43:21.000So, for example, a South African constitutional court has now decided that A controversial song featuring the lyrics, kill the boar and shoot the boar.
00:43:30.000Boar is being a term for white farmers of originally German extraction.
00:43:36.000That song actually is not a violation of the law in South Africa.
00:43:43.000Shouting, singing, kill the boar and shoot the boar is apparently totally fine.
00:43:47.000That is not incitement in any way, according to the UK Independent.
00:43:51.000A decades-old anti-apartheid anthem, recently denounced by Elon Musk for allegedly inciting violence against white South Africans, returned to the spotlight last week following a ruling by the country's highest court.
00:44:00.000The controversial song, featuring the lyrics, kill the boer and shoot the boer, boer being a term for a white farmer, has long been a source of contention in South Africa.
00:44:07.000Its use has been primarily confined to political rallies of the Economic Freedom Fighters, EFF, a small far-left opposition party, but is not a small left-wing opposition party.
00:44:15.000It is a party that has large-scale agreement with the ruling ANC.
00:44:20.000The song's resurgence in the headlines follows a rally last Friday where EFF leaders sang the anthem.
00:44:26.000The EFF maintains the song is a tribute to the struggle against apartheid and should not be interpreted literally.
00:44:30.000This is one of the games that gets played in South Africa is that you either have to choose between the currently racist regime of South African government and the apartheid regime.
00:44:38.000There's no in-between and there's no other solution.
00:44:40.000The only answer is you have to be totally fine with kill the Boer or you have to be in favor of apartheid.
00:44:47.000We had the opportunity last week to sit down with Dr. Ernst Root.
00:44:50.000He's an Afrikaner activist, author, and filmmaker from South Africa to discuss exactly what's going on in South Africa, which should terrify anyone who believes in equal protection of the laws.
00:45:04.000So for our listeners who are not familiar with South Africa, they might be seeing a tweet from From President Trump here or a tweet from from Elon Musk, but they don't actually know the roots of South African history And so they look at the racial issues that have arrived there and they have sort of a left-wing view That's been drilled into them that essentially this is just a matter of decolonization colonialism.
00:45:25.000Why don't we go back to the beginning?
00:45:27.000What are Afrikaners doing in South Africa?
00:45:30.000Well, thank you Ben for having me on the show.
00:45:32.000So the Afrikaners history in South Africa goes back to 1652 which is Before the Declaration of Independence.
00:45:40.000So we've been there for hundreds of years, almost 400 years.
00:45:44.000It started initially as a settlement or a refreshment station in the Cape, where Cape Town is today.
00:45:50.000And eventually they were joined by other groups coming in from Europe, French, Germans, and then in smaller numbers, initially some other groups as well.
00:45:59.000Later the English came, so we have a big white Anglo community in South Africa.
00:46:03.000And we've been there for hundreds of years.
00:47:14.000There were some areas that weren't settled, you're not allowed to say that, but South Africa wasn't densely populated back then.
00:47:20.000We started the Boer Republics, the Transvaal and the Free State, which led to the Anglo-Boer War, after gold and diamonds were discovered, after which South Africa became a union in 1910, which means all the republics, the kingdoms of the African tribes and so forth, the colonies, everything was combined into one big whole, which became South Africa.
00:47:41.000And then, of course, we had the apartheid history, and this is a very quick overview, leading to the negotiated settlement in 1994, which led to this new South Africa, which was celebrated all over the world as a miracle, and it was sort of the shining example of what the United Nations can do to save the country, and the Constitution was celebrated, and now we are here, where it turns out that that story This miracle story was not as shining as people would have liked it to be.
00:48:09.000And I think it's that part that is puzzling to people because they've been taught the miracle story.
00:48:13.000They've seen the movies about Nelson Mandela.
00:48:15.000They've seen the films and TV shows about the great moment when apartheid ended.
00:48:20.000And there's sort of been a ban publicly on talking about the problems that exist in South Africa post that
00:48:52.000That by definition means you want to go back.
00:48:54.000You want to go to the apartheid system, which no one wants to do.
00:48:58.000The fact is that the apartheid system didn't work.
00:48:59.000The current system isn't working and we need something else.
00:49:03.000But it's been, we are very happy that a lot of people are taking note about what's happening in South Africa because this has been going on for decades.
00:49:10.000And I think the pendulum has swung so far to the one side or to the left, you could say that, that it has, it's the narrative about South Africa Well, So let's talk about the history of South Africa since the end of apartheid.
00:49:32.000Again, that's where most people's story ends is end of apartheid, happily ever after.
00:49:38.000What were the political transformations that took place in South Africa after the settlement one way I think to understand what's happening is the negotiations for the new South Africa started immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:49:50.000And that was, you know, the end of history era.
00:49:52.000And there was a sort of a narrative that capitalism and liberalism has won and it's going to be the standard, the gold standard all over the world eventually.
00:50:00.000And we need to write a constitution for South Africa along these lines.
00:50:05.000And the problem with that in South Africa is that it's a very big country.
00:50:10.000It's more like Europe than like the U.S. in a certain sense.
00:50:13.000It's almost as big as Western Europe, at least.
00:50:16.000And there are many diverse nations and peoples living there.
00:50:19.000And so the ruling party, the ANC, back then they said, the way we're going to do this is we want what they call a national democratic revolution.
00:50:29.000And that essentially means using democracy as a way to promote socialist ideals.
00:50:35.000And the way they did that, they said it's going to be a two-phase revolution.
00:50:38.000Phase one is present ourselves as very liberal, very open-minded, very pro-democracy to get more and more support in South Africa and all over the world, which worked obviously brilliantly.
00:50:51.000And then the theory or the strategy that they wrote it out is all on paper.
00:50:55.000They said that once we have the power or the levers of power, as they put it, Then we should eventually move to the second phase of the revolution, and that means using the state mechanisms to become much more aggressive in implementing socialist policies.
00:51:10.000And so the first big one was 1996, in America you call it DEI, we call it BEE, which is Black Economic Empowerment, but it has nothing to do with empowerment.
00:51:21.000It's handing out social grants and it's discriminating against people who aren't black.
00:51:26.000So they started with that in 1996, which became more and more aggressive over time, up to the point where there are now more than 140 raised laws in South Africa today.
00:51:38.000Another strand was the property rights thing, where they said in 2018, we're going to start the process to change the property rights clause in the constitution so that the state can expropriate private property without compensation, which is just confiscation of property.
00:51:55.000And then there's also the strand of the hate speech and real hate speech.
00:52:00.000I mean, actually targeting a group of people, identifying them based on their ethnicity, and then saying, we need to go out and kill those people.
00:52:09.000It's calling for the Boers to be slaughtered.
00:52:12.000And that's combined with political speeches, with statements such as, and this is a direct quote, all white people are criminals and they should be treated as such.
00:52:20.000And then these politicians would burst out chanting, kill the boer, kill the farmer, and the boer is of course a reference to the Afrikaner people.
00:52:27.000And this has been getting worse and worse and worse, up to the point where, again, as I said, you cannot ignore what's happening in South Africa.
00:52:34.000But what's really strange is how people in South Africa, and unfortunately in America and some other places, are trying to deny the existence of the problem by saying it doesn't exist.
00:52:44.000So the farm killings, you have the names of the people who have been murdered.
00:52:47.000I mean, I knew people who have been murdered on farms.
00:52:50.000And for someone to say, well, this problem doesn't exist, it's really, really bizarre.
00:52:53.000So let's talk about the details of that.
00:52:55.000Because a few years ago, this started to pop up in the news.
00:52:57.000I remember we covered it on the show at the time.
00:52:59.000That's when you and I first got in contact actually.
00:53:01.000And the take from the media is that statistically speaking, it's not a big deal.
00:53:06.000Well, the counter-argument that you presented now is based on the idea that there are other problems as well, therefore you shouldn't talk about this problem.
00:53:30.000And the people who are saying this is a problem, we should do something about this, are not saying that there aren't other problems.
00:53:35.000So just to point out the lunacy in this, one way to respond to this is there's a big problem in South Africa with the poaching of rhinos.
00:53:43.000But no one is saying, why are you talking about rhino poaching?
00:53:46.000You are discriminating against elephants that are also being poached.
00:53:56.000And so to say that the farm murders have to stop is not to say that there isn't gang-related violence in Johannesburg or Cape Town.
00:54:03.000But as far as the murders are concerned, it started in 1990 and it gradually got worse.
00:54:09.000And there's been some debates on how to calculate it.
00:54:13.000If you use the police statistics, I think the police data has Quite accurate in terms of the murders, but not in terms of the attacks.
00:54:20.000The attacks are much more like this shadow number that you don't know of than what the police say.
00:54:25.000But according to police data, if you look at a period of two years, there were two farm attacks every day in South Africa, during which two people were murdered every week.
00:54:35.000And it's been going on and on and on up.
00:55:03.000And it's the worst tortures you can imagine, really.
00:55:07.000I can't think of Worse methods of torture than the ones that that we've seen in South Africa with gorging out of the eyes.
00:55:13.000We've had One farmer where I grew up had they had a shower nozzle turn up on it's the highest, you know warm water They shoved the nozzle down his throat and there are many many many such examples I mean I can go on every every torture you can imagine and has been applied in these are race-based murders So so not all the victims are all white.
00:55:33.000The victims are people of all races and I'm not aware of a black farmer that has been tortured.
00:55:39.000So it's a big phenomenon, and a lot is happening, and surely not all of them are politically motivated.
00:55:45.000Some of them certainly are, and we know that because sometimes the attackers write political slogans on the walls during these attacks.
00:55:53.000Or they would chant slogans, and then the survivors would come and say, the attackers said something like, die white man, viva Malema, who's the politician who's chanting this, kill the boy, kill the farmer.
00:56:03.000So some of them are Obviously and overtly politically motivated, and some of them probably aren't, or some of them aren't, but we don't know those statistics in terms of the motivations, but it's very, very alarming.
00:56:14.000So when it comes to the politics here, and the excuse that you hear in the world media is when you see videos of Malema saying, kill the boar.
00:56:21.000Number one, you'll hear, well, he doesn't actually mean it, it's just a song, who cares, which is absurd on its face.
00:56:27.000But the other thing they'll say is, well, you know, he's part of a party that isn't actually the governing party.
00:56:37.000Yeah, so he is, some people have called him the most influential, I think that's an exaggeration, but some have called him the most influential politician in Africa.
00:56:46.000He's certainly one of the most influential.
00:56:49.000And certainly in South Africa, his party has had some difficulty in the last election.
00:56:53.000But The thing is, ideologically, he's not far away from the EFF.
00:56:57.000In terms of rhetoric, he's much worse.
00:56:59.000I mean, he's not far away from the ruling party, from the ANC.
00:57:02.000And so, a few years ago, he made a speech where he's, one of the statements he made during that speech was, we are calling, we are going to slit the throat of whiteness.
00:57:14.000And then two days after, the president of South Africa, Siro Ramaphosa, publicly said, We invite this guy to come back and join our party because we can see that deep down in his heart, he's still a member of the ANC.
00:57:25.000So we do find that the ruling party is a bit more subtle in its approach, although just as racist in terms of the policies that they are implementing.
00:57:33.000And then we have these parties to the left of them that are much more radical.
00:57:37.000But again, ideologically, there's not much of a difference.
00:57:40.000They both The ruling party and the EFF think of people like Robert Mugabe as a euro, Mao Tse-tung they think is a euro, Joseph Stalin even, Maduro, Fidel Castro, all these communist examples.
00:57:53.000And then they would not only say that these people are euros, they would say, we need to duplicate their policies, we need to bring their policies, but in South Africa it's going to work.
00:58:02.000And as far as they would be willing to concede that it hasn't worked, they would say, this time it's going to work.
00:58:07.000Well, one of the things that is fascinating about what's happening and horrifying is the connection of a sort of communist philosophy of economics with a Frantz Fanon decolonization, violence is the solution and transforms people spiritually attitude that seems to have crept in South Africa and is part of a sort of third world-ism that now spans not just South Africa but wide parts of the Middle East,
00:58:28.000enormous parts of Asia, and it's part of a broader movement that we're seeing globally that basically suggests that the Anyone who is failing is a victim of capitalist excesses predominantly by white people, and all of that has to be overthrown.
00:58:44.000Yes. So, Frantz Fanon has become more and more popular in South Africa, and it seems like in other places of the world, and his philosophy could be summarized in The Wretched of the Earth.
00:58:53.000He says that, more or less, that if someone treats you like an animal, you don't need to behave like a human being towards that person.
00:59:01.000So it's, in a way, a justification of violence.
00:59:03.000And now the Marxist line on that is, if you are poor, it is because someone stole something from you.
00:59:10.000And if you are wealthy or successful, it is because you exploited someone or you stole from someone.
00:59:14.000So being poor by definition means that you are a victim, and being wealthy by definition means you're a perpetrator.
00:59:20.000But then they blend that with race nationalism, saying that Only black people are poor, and only white people are rich, or that's the only ones we care about.
00:59:29.000We only want to talk about wealthy white people and poor black people, when reality is much different than that, of course.
00:59:35.000And so then they blend these two by saying that the poor and the black South Africans are the same thing, and whites and wealthy South Africans are the same thing, when that's not true.
00:59:45.000And then they say now, and that's because they stole from us.
00:59:49.000And then we have our own blend of philosophy in South Africa called the Zania critical theory.
00:59:56.000Zania is sort of the leftist name for South Africa, which is taking some stuff from Frantz Fanon, taking some stuff from philosophers, critical race theory in America, Robin DiAngelo, people like that.
01:00:09.000And then in a way justifying, you know, that we should we should apply violence.
01:00:13.000And if you apply violence, it's actually morally it's it's appropriate to apply violence to the white white minority.
01:00:19.000And you can see this manifesting domestically.
01:00:21.000You can also see it in terms of the foreign policy in South Africa.
01:00:23.000South Africa famously sponsored this ridiculous International Court of Justice assault on the Israeli government, suggesting that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.
01:00:33.000And there are deep connections between Hamas and the South African government, between Iran and the South African government.
01:00:38.000There's presumably money that's changing hands along those lines as well.
01:00:41.000Yes. So looking from a South African perspective at that court case, it was really bizarre to watch the arguments because they used the same legal team As was used in South Africa to defend the kill the Boer, kill the farmer chant.
01:00:55.000So they would say in South Africa that chanting about murdering people based on their ethnicity is not hate speech.
01:01:02.000And then they would say it's not because you have to look at the context.
01:01:05.000So don't look at the words, look at the context.
01:01:08.000And the context is, of course, apartheid.
01:01:09.000So because there was apartheid, we can now talk about killing people in South Africa.
01:01:13.000And then the same legal team, the same lawyer, argued in the case against Israel.
01:01:30.000And so the argument was that we need to do this because we have a strong moral conviction and we have a strong sense of morality.
01:01:37.000And it's in the consistent application of our idea of morality that we have to take Israel to court.
01:01:44.000When if you really look what that sense of morality is, and you compare the, and you look at the application there of how some of the world's worst dictators, historically, they regard as heroes.
01:01:56.000They would not arrest them when they come to South Africa, even though they are, the International Criminal Court have sanctions on them and so forth.
01:02:04.000So it's really bizarre, but they seem to get away with that because there is this movement in the world that is So hell-bent either on participating in these type of activities or defending it and pretending that, you know, it's okay because morally it's appropriate to be on this side of the argument.
01:02:20.000So, what are the answers in South Africa?
01:02:23.000Obviously, the Trump administration is now talking about applying sanctions to South Africa based on the racial discrimination in the law, based on their threats to expropriate property from, essentially, white people.
01:02:34.000What would the actual solutions be domestically?
01:02:37.000What would a better-governed South Africa look like?
01:03:41.000Federalism, a decentralized system that's based on the idea of self-governance that local communities or cultural communities or however you want to frame it can have a degree of self-governance.
01:03:52.000Because currently we have this very big country, the distance from the north to the south is the distance from Rome to London.
01:03:58.000And it's just as diverse, perhaps even more diverse than Western Europe.
01:04:02.000It is more diverse than Western Europe.
01:04:04.000And so we have this central government trying to enforce its ideas, a government that says our philosophy or ideology is a blend of race, nationalism and socialism.
01:04:26.000I mean, the fact that that's even remotely controversial is sort of beyond me, because that is the way that it has historically worked.
01:04:32.000It worked that way in the United States originally, where even the states, members of states had their own identities.
01:04:37.000And that's why we have a very weak central government.
01:04:39.000And that's why Virginia was governed different than Massachusetts, which is governed different from New Hampshire.
01:04:43.000And the same thing is obviously true in Europe.
01:04:46.000I mean, much of the angst about the EC and then the EU has been specifically about the idea that a French identity is different from a British identity.
01:04:53.000And when you have people who don't share a philosophy or a history or a culture or an ideology or anything like that, what you end up with is one group having to dominate another group.
01:05:03.000And in one form that can take is apartheid.
01:05:06.000And a reverse form of that can be a racist regime that cracks down on white people.
01:05:09.000And so the idea that – and what you're talking about here is not racial identitarianism.
01:05:14.000What you're talking about here is cultural affinity.
01:05:18.000And the fact that you have cultural affinities between people, that of course is totally – You're not suggesting that white is better than black, black is better than white, black can't live with white.
01:05:29.000What you're saying is that there are cultures that are different, those cultures should be able to self-govern, and the idea that those cultures have to be put into a system that is ruled top-down in tyrannical fashion by either one group grabbing the gun or the other group grabbing the gun is unworkable.
01:05:42.000Yes, so if democracy means two wolves and a lamb have to vote on what's for dinner, you shouldn't blame the lamb for losing faith in democracy.
01:05:50.000But the good news is that's not democracy.
01:05:52.000That's not what democracy is supposed to be.
01:05:56.000And unfortunately, we have this tyranny of the majority that many Americans have warned about over the centuries, where some ideas are just enforced.
01:06:07.000We have the name changes in South Africa.
01:06:10.000That's going to make the country better.
01:06:11.000Just change all the offensive names, which actually started there, and now it's sort of flown, spilled over to America as well.
01:06:18.000And so they change, there would be street names and city names named after murderers, people who had just murdered innocent people.
01:06:26.000And if you ask the ruling party, how do you determine if something is offensive or not?
01:06:31.000Like, Church Street is offensive, but the name of a murderer is not offensive, then they would say, we are the people, we represent the people, and therefore we decide.
01:07:25.000And so they try to blend it with all these sort of these slogans that have been devised to sort of just Swipe something off the table.
01:07:34.000I think there was a saying, one of the big Afrikaner entrepreneurs of the previous century, Anton Rupert, who was world famous in his days, said that you can't go to bed and rest assured at night if your neighbor is hungry.
01:07:48.000And so that's also, and that's an important thing for us as the Afrikaner community.
01:07:52.000We don't want to find a solution for us at the expense of everyone else, because that's not a solution either.
01:07:57.000The solution must be a solution for everyone.
01:08:00.000And I think what we have currently is a problem for everyone.
01:08:03.000There are very few people who would still say that South Africa is working.
01:08:32.000I mean, this is what all the American founders talked about.
01:08:33.000The idea of your local government is going to be the government that is best for you, that you do have to have decentralization, that you do have to have local rule, that most of the things you agree on with your neighbors are going to be things that you agree on with your actual neighbors, not people who live thousands of miles away and share a completely different culture and affinity for different people.
01:08:50.000The We live in a sort of bizarre world where you have to force yourself into these false choices again.
01:09:00.000It's either apartheid or it's racial rule by the ANC and there's no in-between.
01:09:04.000There's nothing else that can be done here.
01:09:45.000So there's talk about Cape secession, sort of the Western provinces, really a movement, they're saying we need to break away from South Africa.
01:09:51.000The Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal are concerned that the central government isn't representing them.
01:09:58.000There's a project called Waranya in the Northern Cape to develop an Africana city.
01:10:03.000So there are already many such projects.
01:10:05.000And I think that's naturally where things are headed.
01:10:08.000There's going to be some form of a crash, you might say, or something's going to happen in South Africa.
01:10:13.000And we must just ensure that when something happens, it's a turn to a better system rather than...
01:10:19.000It's not chaotic violence and warfare in the streets or anything like that.
01:10:22.000I think there's also a great example of how paper guarantees mean nothing if you don't have some level of cultural affinity and unity among the population.
01:10:33.000When the South African Constitution was written, Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously suggested it was a better constitution than the Constitution of the United States.
01:10:39.000It guaranteed things like a right to health care and a right to housing.
01:11:00.000It turns out that the right to healthcare doesn't mean that healthcare in South Africa magically materializes in amazing ways, where the healthcare is just tremendous.
01:11:09.000All these sorts of paper ideas that were put forward at the expense of realism.
01:11:14.000In the 1990s, in places like South Africa, have completely fallen.
01:11:17.000Exactly. And so, and you've spoken about this a lot.
01:11:20.000It's one thing to talk about rights, and rights are great.
01:11:22.000But if there's no focus on responsibility added to that, then the rights don't mean anything.
01:11:27.000So almost all of these rights, in terms of the difference between de jure and de facto, the de facto reality has gotten worse.
01:11:33.000Constitution guarantees a right to health care, but in reality, the health system is deteriorating.
01:11:38.000The Constitution guarantees Good education, but in reality, the schools are failing.
01:11:45.000And so, this idea that if you have something good written as a document, that means, you know, the country has been saved is very naive.
01:11:53.000And I think maybe it's one of the consequences of modern ideologies that, you know, you look at the text and that sort of gives you an overview of what's happening.
01:12:00.000But you have to look at what's happening in reality and compare those two.
01:12:03.000And the reality between the written document and the What we call the actual constitution and the written constitution has gone like this.
01:12:11.000It's just, it's not comparable anymore.
01:12:13.000And so the question is then what does it, it's a great document, but what does it mean to have a great document if that's just not reality?
01:12:19.000And I think there's an important lesson in that also, that, and this is something that Edmund Burke cautioned against with the French Revolution, saying it's one thing to have great theory, but you need to look at experience and what's happening in the real world before you look at the theory.
01:12:34.000For sure, and one of the things Burke warned about was the idea that these sort of free-floating rights were equally applicable at all times, in all places, without any roots in the actual soil of a culture.
01:12:44.000I mean, the idea of Western-based rights are based in a particular ideology of the West that is an outgrowth of thousands of years of history, and they sort of magically manifest anywhere you drop them is obviously untrue.
01:12:55.000You have to put in place institutions, you have to develop cultures around them, and if those things don't happen, then they don't mean anything.
01:13:10.000So, we are very grateful for the focus they're putting on what's happening in South Africa.
01:13:16.000They have announced a process of refugee status to farmers.
01:13:21.000Now, that in a certain sense is good because there are people who want to leave.
01:13:25.000But I think our message to them is a lot of people and the majority wouldn't want to leave.
01:13:29.000It's almost like saying to Americans, listen, there's trouble in America.
01:13:33.000You need to all move to Europe or something like that.
01:13:35.000So, I mean, we've been there for hundreds of years.
01:13:37.000That's where our culture became, was developed.
01:13:39.000That's where our ancestors are buried.
01:13:42.000And so we are very attached to Africa.
01:13:44.000And we are concerned that if we just leave in big numbers, then we will dissolve as a community.
01:13:48.000And we want to see a future for our community.
01:13:51.000But there are people who want to leave.
01:13:52.000And if they want to leave, that's fine.
01:13:54.000But I think a more sustainable approach would be to work towards some form of dispensational change, recognizing firstly that it's not working, that the problem is wider than just not that the wrong person is the president of the country.
01:14:09.000If you put a white liberal, make a white liberal the president of South Africa, it's not going to work either.
01:14:15.000And because it's a system problem and we need to work towards a better system.
01:14:20.000And we don't want other countries to solve our problems on our behalf.
01:14:23.000But I think firstly, a recognition that there needs to be a more decentralized solution.
01:14:29.000And then secondly, support for initiatives in South Africa to try to promote this.
01:14:37.000And so, for a normal American who's watching this, and I think that we've talked about this, the fact that what's happening in South Africa is a bleeding edge indicator of sort of trends that are growing across the world, also in the West.
01:14:48.000I mean, this is an internal battle in the West that is happening right now about what exactly the West means, what are the West's values.
01:14:55.000Do the West's values require that you essentially sacrifice all the values of the West on behalf of empty rhetoric about About rights, or about constitutional guarantees, or about that sort of stuff.
01:15:07.000What does it mean to be a member of a culture?
01:15:09.000What does it mean to be a member of the West?
01:15:10.000What do you recommend that, you know, resources for Americans want to learn more about this?
01:15:15.000And also, if Americans want to help, because this actually does have ramifications far beyond what's going on just in South Africa.
01:15:20.000Yeah, so there are many ways in which people can help.
01:15:25.000One way is just to help to talk about this.
01:15:26.000The more people talk about this, The better, the easier it is to get solutions, the easier it is, for example, for the government to do something or people in Europe to support.
01:15:38.000But another way is there are many institutions in South Africa.
01:15:41.000If people spend a little time looking into what's happening in South Africa, they will find that there are a lot of institutions who are working towards some form of decentralization or working towards community organizing, towards safety initiatives, towards things like that.
01:15:55.000And I think support for such Such institutions will definitely go a long way.
01:15:59.000Well, Dr. Ernst Roots, really appreciate you being here and thanks for what you're doing.