Matt Continetti argues that if you look at the past, it will show you where the GOP is going and what to expect in 2020. He has written a book called The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism, which is out now.
00:00:00.440Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
00:00:11.620Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. 25 minutes over 18 months.
00:00:18.720That's the amount of time the mainstream media covered the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.
00:00:22.560Think about that. 25 minutes over 18 months.
00:00:26.880Yes. It's no surprise that the media continues to run cover for the Biden administration.
00:00:31.000And we're going to get into the very latest with the president of the Government Accountability Institute, Peter Schweitzer, who's been on this from the beginning.
00:00:39.360I mean, from four years ago and also discuss the latest on what's happening in China.
00:00:44.720By the way, I'm wearing my lighter shades today because I'm having some light sensitivity in the wake of my LASIK.
00:00:50.340It's not uncommon when you have dry eye like me.
00:00:52.800So I found a happy medium on my eye approach today.
00:00:58.000Anyway, we're going to begin the show today, however, with journalist Matt Continetti on the past, the future of the Republican Party.
00:01:05.860And they're related. And it's actually sort of a roadmap, he argues.
00:01:09.400If you look, you look at the past, it'll show you where the GOP is going and what to expect.
00:01:13.920He has literally written the book on the right. His book is called The Right, The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism.
00:01:29.840Thanks for having me, Megan. It's great to be here.
00:01:32.080So I love this because we always approach our lives, I think, whether it comes to the covid pandemic, whether it comes to politics, as if we're the first people to ever be here.
00:01:40.680You know, like there's there's no past from which we can learn.
00:01:43.700We're just going to have to forge our own path.
00:01:45.460And yet somebody like you takes the time to actually study, for example, in this case, the history of the GOP.
00:01:51.140And you say it kind of explains exactly where the GOP is going.
00:01:55.540And one of the most interesting things I thought from it was how you argue Trump was not an aberration.
00:02:04.080Trump actually may have been the normal for the GOP, not necessarily the tweeting, but policies and his approach and what was appealing to him.
00:02:14.980And Ronald Reagan may have been the aberration.
00:02:18.680So let's just start with that. You look back at 100 years and what gave us the top line conclusion there.
00:02:25.780Why did you why did you reach that assertion?
00:02:29.400Well, Megan, most histories of the American right, they begin at the end of World War Two and they culminate with the election of Ronald Reagan.
00:02:37.700Or sometimes if they take the tragic view, they have a coda with Barack Obama in 2008.
00:02:44.220What I wanted to do was I wanted to kind of widen the lens to take in a greater picture of American history and the history of the right and also include the prehistory of the American right.
00:02:55.860What the right looked like before the Cold War, before America's victory in World War Two and take up the story basically until today.
00:03:05.440So my story begins in 1921 and it ends in 2021.
00:03:10.220And when I told the story that way, I found that the Republican Party of 2020 resembles in many ways the Republican Party of 1920, especially in its attitude toward immigration and its attitude toward international economic competition and trade and its attitude toward overseas entanglements and foreign intervention.
00:03:34.420Hmm. All right. So you start way, way back with the Harding administration, then into the Coolidge administration and then and conservatives are sort of going along, pushing these ideals that you talk about.
00:03:47.600And then FDR, I mean, comes along and things change dramatically.
00:03:53.580The pendulum shifts in the country toward progressivism for many, many years.
00:03:58.380So how did that happen? How were the Republicans out of power for some 20 years after Harding and Coolidge?
00:04:05.240Well, the answer is pretty simple. The Great Depression and the Great Depression really delegitimized the Republican economic record.
00:04:16.600The Republicans of the 1920s really benefited from the public perception that their policies were responsible for the extraordinary growth of the period.
00:04:26.980But when the Great Depression happened, that really kind of delegitimized, discredited the Republican economic policies, and it allowed FDR to fundamentally transform the social contract in the United States and expand the size and scope of the federal government really in a way that America had never known.
00:04:49.580And so the right in the 1930s defines itself in opposition to FDR and his New Deal.
00:04:57.800And this is an interesting development because most conservatives in other countries are defenders of the established order.
00:05:08.360That's basically what we mean when we talk about conservative.
00:05:12.420But for America, the established order beginning with the New Deal is liberal.
00:05:17.140And so conservatives were on the outside, and it took a long time for conservatives to work their way back in to the center of power and the center of American politics.
00:05:28.180Was the electorate right to blame Republican policies, conservative policies, for the Great Depression?
00:05:37.820I mean, the cause of the Great Depression wasn't necessarily the fault of the banks or the stock market.
00:05:46.140I think the studies of Milton Friedman, the great libertarian economist, pretty much to prove that the Great Depression was worsened by the policies of government, by the policies of the Federal Reserve that led to the credit contraction and the banking crisis and prolonged the Great Depression.
00:06:02.060For whatever reason, the American electorate thought that FDR was handling the Depression well, not only in his pragmatic attitude of experimentation, but also his personality.
00:06:16.880You know, one of the lessons of this history that I wrote is that personality counts for a lot in American politics.
00:06:23.660The quality of candidate matters a lot.
00:06:27.180In fact, the personality of a candidate probably matters more than his or her policies.
00:06:42.580And so the American public invested a lot in him.
00:06:45.640And then by the end of his presidency, of course, America had entered World War II and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor delegitimized the rights foreign policy of non-intervention and no overseas entanglements in the same way that the Great Depression had delegitimized its economic policy of laissez-faire.
00:07:07.740So really, by the end of the Second World War, the right is out of power, and it's also on kind of the margins of intellectual and cultural life in the United States.
00:07:20.780And so there my story starts charting how they got back in, got back into the mainstream.
00:08:04.320There's no getting around that for the White House.
00:08:06.280And it comes on the heels of a Politico interview, as as Blow also notes, with Biden's pollster, in which he's very blunt and says there's really no one who would deny this is a really sour environment for Democrats.
00:08:21.740And Blow is asking the question about what if the issue here is not the messaging, right, because the White House and the pollster, they all say we got to do better on the messaging.
00:08:35.500They said Biden on a two city tour to bring the message to the American people like, oh, wow.
00:08:43.280OK, but he says, what if it's not the messaging, but the messenger?
00:08:49.080And he he makes the point, Charles Blow does that, that that voters have a void of emotional connection to him, that they can't cheer him on.
00:08:59.920And if they can't cheer you, they will chide you and talks about how he's just not resonating, even with the people on his side, to the point that you are just making,
00:09:09.480which is even if his people like his policies, and I don't know that they do, they feel nothing for him.
00:09:15.980Right. And if they felt more strongly about Biden, then perhaps they would kind of overlook some of the awful consequences of his of his policies.
00:09:25.120And I think one of the more revealing poll results in recent weeks was Gallup asked the public what their concerns are.
00:09:32.800Of course, the number one is the economy, cost of living, the inflation.
00:10:26.500He won the Democratic nomination basically because Democratic bigwigs realized that he was the only plausible candidate to take on Trump in the general election,
00:10:36.820that the alternative was Bernie Sanders and the Sanders nomination might mean a total collapse of the Democrats.
00:10:43.000And then he won the general election, in my view, mainly because he wasn't Donald Trump and that it was it wasn't a mandate he received from the public.
00:10:53.740It was don't be Donald Trump and otherwise don't do anything else.
00:10:58.320And that's why the Republicans performed better than expected at the congressional level in order to even check Biden there.
00:11:07.880But, of course, Biden, with not realizing that he received an anti mandate, not realizing that he had the smallest margin in the House of Representatives for Democrats in 100 years,
00:11:19.960decided, you know what, I will be FDR without the charm.
00:11:23.440And that has not worked out well for him at all.
00:11:27.320Right. And not only going hard left on economic policy, but going hard left on social issues, which many believe is why his he's seeing such a precipitous drop with Hispanics.
00:11:39.300Those those two issues, Hispanics tend to be more conservative socially and he hasn't been.
00:11:45.540And they're getting hit by these pocketbook issues in a way they weren't under the Trump administration.
00:11:50.860And so, you know, the White House is in a panic.
00:11:54.680There's no question they understand what's coming their way in these midterms.
00:11:58.140And the only real question is, do they lose the Senate and the House or just the House?
00:12:13.360You've seen it before of the new plan to bring back, build back better.
00:12:18.960Remember, the two trillion dollar additional spending plan that was already rejected because they couldn't get their own party, namely Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to sign on to it.
00:12:29.040And they're going to revive it right now with record inflation.
00:12:32.040They're going to spend more if their party allows it.
00:12:34.700Now, this is a night of the living dead when it comes to legislation.
00:12:39.620I don't see much of a chance for build back better precisely, as you say, Megan, because of the inflation.
00:12:45.280That was Joe Biden's main concern in December when he came out against the bill.
00:12:49.240Inflation has gotten only worse with time.
00:12:51.780Look, the window is closing on this Democratic majority.
00:12:55.620And I don't think they really know what to do.
00:12:59.080And it's because they're so beholden to their progressive left wing base that they're unable to pivot to the center.
00:13:08.540You mentioned the Hispanic vote and the realignment of the Hispanic vote, just this epical development in American politics.
00:13:18.220You know, I think we still haven't internalized the anger and frustration and grief, in many cases, among American parents because of the way that the schools handled COVID, the way that they continue to handle issues like masking.
00:13:36.020And then, of course, COVID provided this moment of radical transparency into what is being taught in the schools.
00:13:42.580And there are two parents are up in arms.
00:13:45.380So, when you think of the education issue, for example, historically, that has been to the benefit of the Democratic Party.
00:14:16.560Biden doesn't have that luxury because of his very policies, because of that stimulus bill he put in place a year ago, despite the warnings of Democratic economists that it would unleash inflation.
00:15:00.900Where it used to be the Republicans were sort of the Chamber of Commerce Party and they sort of had the working class.
00:15:07.760They didn't care about the working class, right?
00:15:09.180It was like they were worried more about the white shoe class and, you know, Wall Street and people who make the money and pay the paychecks.
00:15:18.120And now that seems to have done a complete 180, you know, over the course of Bill Clinton's warming up to Wall Street.
00:15:23.900And then Barack Obama's doubling down on it, not caring at all about the working class and its problems, which led to Trump and this migration of voters over to the GOP side.
00:15:34.140And you write about this, too, about this internal conflict and also coordination within the Republican Party when it comes to elites versus populists.
00:15:49.800Well, it's, as you say, a major theme of my book, this competition and sometimes coordination, cooperation between populists and conservative elites, intellectual elites primarily.
00:16:04.760And it starts really at that moment where the right after World War II is delegitimized, is out of power, doesn't even have a foothold in the Republican Party.
00:16:16.760And what the conservatives of that time in the mid-20th century discovered, Megan, was that their arguments weren't convincing the elites in our society who were primarily liberal elites, but they were resonating with the working class, with white Americans without college degrees, with the basically the descendants of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe.
00:16:43.460And so when William F. Buckley Jr. runs for mayor of New York City in 1965, he does it in order to knock off the Republican candidate, who was a liberal, a congressman named John Lindsay.
00:16:57.580Instead, what happens is Buckley's votes come from the Democrat.
00:17:02.680They come from the Democratic candidate Abe Beam.
00:17:05.200And it's because Buckley's arguments for economic dynamism, for law and order in particular, they resonate most in the outer boroughs of New York, the same places that would go on to put Rudy Giuliani in power in the 1990s.
00:17:22.800And a place like Staten Island, of course, voted heavily for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020.
00:17:28.700So we can see, even in the mid-1960s, that the working class is going to move out of the Democratic column.
00:17:38.900And this happens with Richard Nixon and his hard hats, right, the construction workers that was one of his most devoted constituencies.
00:17:49.260It starts with the Reagan Democrats in 1980, and it just carries on through to the point where we have today, where the Republican Party is, I think, a populist party.
00:18:02.000And it's become a unique situation for conservatives because conservatives who appreciate populism and its power also need to be able to figure out, well, how can we inject populism with our ideas and our policies in order to address some of those very real concerns that the electorate has today?
00:18:27.880Yeah. So define populism for this, for the purposes of this discussion.
00:18:32.780Sure. For me, populism is a confidence in the ability of everyday people to make decisions and a lack of confidence in what the experts or the elites in our society are saying and doing and the decisions they make.
00:18:51.640So that's how I define populism. And when you look at the history of the United States, you find that populism is a feature, not a bug in American politics.
00:19:03.480From the original Tea Party to today's Tea Party and the Trump movement. Populism has always kind of risen up at moments in American history where elites, the people in power, are not responding to changing social and economic conditions, or they're responding in the wrong way.
00:19:24.940And so, well, I date this latest populist upsurge really toward the end of George W. Bush's administration when George W. tried twice to pass a comprehensive immigration reform that included an amnesty for illegal immigrants residing in the country.
00:19:42.960And that, I think, really created a fissure between conservative elites in Washington who were for the Bush bill and for the populist grassroots, which were living through what was happening on the border.
00:19:56.200And they said that amnesty would only incentivize more border crossings, more lawbreaking, and that distrust between the populist grassroots and the conservative elites in Washington that began, I think, circa 2006 with the fight over immigration only grew worse over time.
00:20:21.080So how does it wind up that they elect Barack Obama out of George W. Bush, right?
00:20:26.880I mean, there just weren't enough Republicans to whom immigration was important, because you certainly wouldn't have gone that route if your main concern was immigration.
00:20:36.580Right, right. Well, many people stayed home for when the nominee is John McCain, right?
00:20:43.080And there's also simmering distrust and discontent with George W. Bush's Iraq war.
00:20:52.120And that's another element of the populist upsurge as well.
00:20:57.040By 2007, when Bush finally changed his strategy and sent more troops to Iraq to pacify the insurgency and secure the population,
00:21:08.320a lot of Americans and even many Republicans were beginning to believe that the war had been a mistake.
00:21:16.460And so you saw kind of the phenomenon of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 as an expression of this discontent with the way that Republican elites were running things.
00:21:29.780And so Barack Obama in 2008 benefited from, I think, disillusionment with the war.
00:21:38.700He benefited from a lack of Republican enthusiasm precisely because Republicans were not on board with the Bush administration's immigration plan.
00:21:48.000And then, of course, he benefited from the financial crisis and Great Recession, which the Great Recession had started even earlier.
00:21:56.320But the financial crisis kicks in in September 2008.
00:21:59.800And that was kind of all she wrote, as they say.
00:22:03.520The Great Recession did for Obama what COVID did for Biden, right?
00:23:02.860You don't mess with somebody from Jersey, you know?
00:23:04.760And my husband has jokes because we have a we have a we spend our summers there and he's like, you just wanted to buy the property in Jersey so you could make the Jersey jokes.
00:23:13.580But anyway, my point is, everybody loved him, but he missed his window.
00:23:17.540And I wonder whether in retrospect, he really would he might have gotten it done.
00:23:22.700He might have beat he might have beaten Barack Obama because Mitt Romney was completely the anti Chris Christie of that year and the anti Trump, you know, the elite, religious, you know, corporate raider, perfectly quaffed.
00:23:38.460You know, I mean, if you want to look at Republican elite, look it up in the encyclopedia.
00:24:08.660Well, I think primarily it was because Romney did not connect with those working class voters that had been so important to successful Republican coalitions in the past.
00:24:21.980And in particular, I think of an ad that the Obama campaign used very effectively, which was simply a testimonial from a worker who had been laid off at one of the factories, which Romney's company had turned around.
00:24:38.000Basically, by laying off people and it was direct to the camera and he talked about how devastating that was for him and his family when he was laid off and in the Rust Belt, an ad like that really went a long way.
00:24:53.200So Romney couldn't capture that, couldn't connect on that level.
00:24:57.820And then a second reason is that there was a feeling among many conservatives and especially the populist grassroots that Romney was, you know, he played by the rules which had been rigged in the liberals' favor.
00:25:12.140So, of course, he didn't challenge Candy Crowley during that presidential debate when the CNN anchor who was moderating the debate, Crowley, basically lied about what Barack Obama had said after the Benghazi terrorist attack.
00:25:42.680And Crowley basically just shut Romney down and Romney didn't fight back.
00:25:46.920And so there was this building sense among a lot of conservatives and especially among the populist grassroots that they wanted someone who would fight back against these institutions, primarily the media, that they felt were so anti-conservative that had been captured by the progressives.
00:26:08.260And so you see how that would attract this group to someone like Donald Trump, who didn't care, didn't care what anyone thought about anything.
00:26:17.700And even today, you see how they're attracted to someone like Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, because he also is willing to challenge the press and he's also willing to challenge liberal corporate elites.
00:26:33.900He's going up against the House of Mouse, right?
00:26:36.740So I think there's a lot of conservatives who admire that quality.
00:26:40.640The question is, though, does that fighting spirit repel some of the voters who are independents and who are more moderates who live in the suburbs, but who are also key to having a Republican victory?
00:27:59.320More with the guy who has become an expert on all of this, thanks to self-study, tons of reading, and a lifetime devoted to these causes.
00:28:06.540In the introduction, you refer to 1150 17th Street.
00:28:15.960And there's a reason you start here, because it sort of shines a window on the effort by the right to start fighting back and trying to recapture the national narrative and these cultural institutions.
00:28:33.740Well, one of the strategies that the conservatives used to fight back was to create what they called counter-institutions.
00:28:42.660So if the media was too liberal, we were going to have an alternative conservative media.
00:28:48.440And talk radio is the greatest expression of this.
00:28:51.060If the universities are captured by the radical left, we're going to have to find think tanks where right-leaning scholars can work and have a home where they can formulate their own ideas.
00:29:05.420And so the address in Washington, 1150 17th Street, was a hub of these sorts of counter-institutions.
00:29:13.240It was the headquarters for many years of the American Enterprise Institute, where I work today.
00:29:19.560And it also housed the magazine where I worked for many years, The Weekly Standard.
00:29:25.040And in addition, it even had a small think tank also associated with The Weekly Standard called The Project for a New America Century.
00:29:33.440So 1150 17th Street was kind of the main hub of the American right for a period of basically the turn of the 21st century and throughout the George W. Bush administration.
00:29:50.020And it was there that I showed up for work one day in July of 2003 as a recent graduate of Columbia University and to begin a job at The Weekly Standard.
00:30:00.840And I think it was meaningful because now, today, if you go to 1150 17th Street, you see nothing.
00:30:10.600The building was knocked down in 2016.
00:30:13.720And those institutions that were once housed there, some have moved.
00:30:17.860So AEI, where I work, is in another building a few blocks away.
00:30:22.140But The Weekly Standard, for example, is no more.
00:30:36.740When The Weekly Standard shut down, I can't say it was a surprise because at that point, Bill Kristol, who's, you know, mainly associated with it, had so alienated the Republican base, the Trump-loving Republican base.
00:31:06.920And all these guys who were on the Bret Baier special report panel slowly got removed because as Trump captured the Republican Party, people didn't want to hear from the never-Trumpers all the time.
00:31:26.940And so those publications started to fall and falter.
00:31:30.180And it wasn't, you know, you could have predicted Weekly Standard was not going to withstand the Trump era.
00:31:37.340Well, I think that in many cases there was a fixation on Trump, which wasn't helpful for the pundits we're talking about.
00:31:54.800But did the Weekly Standard have to close?
00:31:58.100I'm not so sure it had to, but it did.
00:32:02.640Well, I mean, it could have been more like National Review, which I had Rich Lowry on my show, The Kelly File, the night they published Never Trump.
00:32:12.320I mean, I believe that's where the phrase Never Trump came from, the Never Trumpers.
00:32:16.760But National Review, while quick to criticize Trump if they disagreed with him on various issues, once he won, started to sound more like a normal conservative publication that had its issues with him, but understood the Republicans were not the enemy.
00:32:33.580On these culture wars, on these political battles, on these economic tests.
00:32:37.580And so, you know, Charles C.W. Cook is one of my favorite commentators there is.
00:32:52.740So he would he would criticize him, but he would understand what Donald Trump did a good thing, that that that was an appropriate thing to praise.
00:32:59.080Right. Not like these blinded left wing commentators are never Trumpers who just couldn't see any good the man did.
00:33:07.020Yeah, I think that it speaks to the change that happened, not only on the right and how Trump kind of forced the issue for a lot of people where you stood and what you were willing to defend and to and to and to, you know, overlook or just also to say that, you know, the the goal was the policies and not the personality.
00:33:32.320And it basically forced a realignment within the Republican Party and the conservative movement, made it much more populist, made it much more based on outsiders.
00:33:45.080The people who were in the periphery of the conservative movement 25 years ago are now at the center of it, are now in charge of it.
00:33:53.380And that also coincides with this larger trend we were talking about, which was the return in many ways of the ideas of the old right of non intervention of no overseas entanglements of insulating the American economy from global economic pressures, especially vis a vis China.
00:34:17.040And of course, and an attitude toward immigration, illegal immigration in particular, that wants to secure the borders.
00:34:27.060So the American right is a very different place than when I showed up 20 years ago in Washington.
00:34:32.700And that's one of the reasons that I wrote this book, because I wanted to not find out from how it happened.
00:34:38.820Right. Not that not that different from the Coolidge administration, which we open the the Harding and Coolidge, which we open the discussion on and you spend time on the book.
00:34:47.840So it's interesting. We have been here before, not within our lifetime, but we as a country have seen a Republican Party that looks very much the way it looks now, at least on paper.
00:34:58.060You ask the following question. Is the American right, the party of insiders or outsiders?
00:35:03.780Is the right the elites dash the men and women in charge of America's political, economic, social and cultural institutions?
00:35:13.200Or is it the people? And I made a note because in no if that's the definition of the elites, the people who are in charge of our political, economic, social and cultural institutions.
00:35:26.940Then, no, there's no question the right is not is not the elites because the right doesn't control any of those.
00:35:35.340I mean, they've all been seated to the left. The left is taken over.
00:35:38.760I mean, it depends on the day, but certainly political institutions today, they control the White House.
00:35:43.940They control the Congress. They can the House and the Senate economic policies being driven by Joe Biden.
00:35:48.980Social. I mean, name me a social institution that the Republicans control cultural all the university systems, not to mention it's expanded media, completely controlled by the left sports, not to mention corporate America.
00:36:02.940Now, more and more aligning itself with leftist causes.
00:36:06.320If that's the definition, then the then the right cannot be the elites.
00:36:10.880Right. Then the American then the American right has to be the party of outsiders slash the people.
00:36:16.520I think that's where it is right now. I think that's where the right is now.
00:36:22.300It wasn't always that way, you know, and again, we're going back to the 1920s is one difference, actually, between today and the 1920s is that the right was in charge and it was self-confident.
00:36:33.380And it was more than just the people at that time.
00:36:38.720But when you look at the institutions you mentioned today, for sure, the right is locked out of them.
00:36:45.940That's not to say that the right is completely powerless.
00:36:49.600You know, they're they don't have a majority in Washington, but there are many governors throughout the country.
00:36:54.920Many states. Yeah. And, you know, there are alternative media.
00:37:04.180There's there's the Fox News channel there.
00:37:08.240You know, there are other institutions, but you're right that they are outweighed.
00:37:12.960The cultural mass is certainly on the progressive left.
00:37:17.920And so I would just say that this is a situation that the right has faced throughout its history ever since that New Deal and that transformation of American government.
00:37:30.340The conservatives have had to find a way.
00:37:32.680Well, how do we maneuver in this new situation?
00:37:41.300I think right now the momentum is with the conservatives.
00:37:44.360It's with the right precisely because the the larger electorate is encountering the results of progressivism and not liking what they see.
00:37:55.740I mean, people want to have, you know, to afford their grocery bill.
00:38:00.540They want to send their kids to good schools and they want to live in neighborhoods with safe streets and they don't have any of that now.
00:38:09.820And so they're going to they're going to turn to the out party, which is the Republican Party.
00:38:15.120And the question then becomes, will Republicans and conservatives have solutions that they will be able to implement and that will effectively address these major concerns of the public?
00:38:27.380And I worry sometimes that while the right today is very good at capturing the frustration, very good at pointing out what's going wrong.
00:38:37.580I worry that they're not doing enough work to figure out what they have to do or what they're going to be able to do when they when they have Congress in, I believe, next year.
00:38:49.580Well, I mean, is your argument that they should come up with a plan to do more because we've had a lot of conservative commentators on this show from all different walks of life.
00:39:00.740Peter Schiff was just on economist talking about how what we what do we need from government?
00:39:06.100Nothing. Get them out of the way. Get them out.
00:39:09.180The politician left or right will be part of the problem in the in the Reagan-esque way.
00:39:13.800So what we need is a shrinking of government in every department.
00:39:19.580Well, I mean, it's very hard, of course, in divided government.
00:39:22.220But I do think that the Republicans should be ready to say, well, this is going to be our budget.
00:39:27.020This is what we're going to want to propose that government spend.
00:39:31.180Not necessarily rush to have a fight over the debt ceiling, but have an alternative and say this is what we want to do.
00:39:37.560Because if we know one thing about the spending is that it's driving the inflation.
00:39:42.120And so cut the spending in addition to kind of making sure that the Fed does its job.
00:39:48.340But I also think there is a broader agenda that needs to be done.
00:39:52.020How do how can the Republicans at the at the federal level give parents the tools they need to to to have successful education for their children?
00:40:03.140How do we address the deaths of despair that are still devastating this country that were made worse by the pandemic, the fentanyl that's flowing over the border?
00:40:13.080And I think the Republicans need to spend more time talking about their solutions.
00:40:20.940And in the past, as I go through my book, conservatives have had the solutions.
00:40:27.080They had solutions to the stagflation of the 1970s.
00:40:30.680They had solutions to the crime wave that began in the 1960s.
00:40:34.980They had solutions to the growing welfare dependency that was also a feature of the second half of the 20th century.
00:40:43.160So I think in some cases, they're the same solutions that we can apply today.
00:40:47.340But I would like to see more conservatives and more Republicans talking about the solutions.
00:40:54.720I think Kevin McCarthy is doing a lot of work in forming these attack task groups, task forces to look to look into policy solutions, because if if they don't have the solutions, they don't have an affirmative policy agenda.
00:41:10.820I think people will get frustrated very quickly and that no none of these problems will be solved anytime soon.
00:41:19.480What is what is your look back tell you about how the culture wars are likely to play out?
00:41:24.800You know, right now, the left is so focused on identity politics, skin color, gender, sexuality and so on.
00:41:32.600And the right is finally starting to push back on it.
00:41:38.460This race essentialism, this radical trans ideology, this forcing kink on five year olds in their classroom as if it's somehow illuminating or beneficial to them in any way.
00:41:56.160Has the pendulum ever swung hard left only to come back?
00:41:59.300Or once it edges leftward, are we just stuck there?
00:42:03.480And, you know, we have dissenters, but but that's where we are for better or for worse.
00:42:08.480Can you look around in American society today and take a look at let me just take one thing because it's going to make me sound like an old lady.
00:42:19.500Look at how women walk around dressed these days, whether it's the Oscars or just on the street, you know, with literally their butt cheeks hanging out wherever you go.
00:42:27.200You can't avoid it. I have a little boy.
00:42:29.160I have three little kids, but one's eight.
00:42:30.820You know, I don't want him seeing that.
00:42:32.940There's no way you turn on the Super Bowl.
00:42:36.600You turn on anything you're going to see raunchy.
00:42:38.820You're going to see somebody smack another actor right across.
00:42:40.500You're going to see just the lowering of our cultural standards when it comes to class, just a sort of a genteel manner, respect for one's self and others.
00:42:57.600What if what if anything did you learn on on that front?
00:43:01.320Well, I think if we're talking about manners and mores, there hasn't been much success in kind of stopping that lowering of standards that you're discussing.
00:43:11.340And it's caused a lot of frustration among conservatives over the years.
00:43:15.300It's caused a lot of disillusionment and even despair about the state of America.
00:43:21.520And I think that's a danger for the American right to become so frustrated with the condition of American society that they lose all hope in it.
00:43:32.080They neglect to see the more positive aspects of America.
00:43:36.260I think that on the culture wars, it depends on what issues you're talking about.
00:43:45.460And for there, there's no denying, I think, the degradation throughout American society.
00:43:52.360But if you look at an issue, say abortion, right, well, the pro-life movement, which began in the aftermath of the Roe decision in 1973, is on the verge of perhaps having an amazing victory, depending on what the Supreme Court rules in the Dobbs case in June.
00:44:12.860If you look at guns, gun rights, the transformation of the gun debate over the last 30 years, much less 60 years, is remarkable.
00:44:27.380Americans are much more protective of their Second Amendment rights.
00:44:32.780And whether it's concealed carry or constitutional carry, we offer much more liberty to gun owners than we have before.
00:44:40.760If we think of the role of affirmative action, here too, there's the potential for a Supreme Court case in the next term to really roll back affirmative action.
00:44:55.600So I do think that there are some green shoots, but I do think that there are also signs of decay and things to be worried about.
00:45:07.000I worry about the collapse in religious attendance and religious affiliation.
00:45:12.660I want to see that come back, and I worry that it might not for a long time.
00:45:19.580One thing I do take from my history is that Ecclesiastes is right.
00:45:27.740And you can find precedent for almost every fight we're having in America today.
00:45:32.800You can find precedent for various situations and conditions in America today.
00:45:39.700And on one hand, that means that we don't make much progress.
00:45:44.240But I'm a conservative, and I don't really believe in progress anyway.
00:45:48.260On the other hand, it means that we've been here before, and we've gotten through it.
00:45:53.640And we'll get through it again, because this is the United States of America.
00:45:57.020And what I worry so much about is parts of the right losing the faith in the United States of America and its constitution and its political principles.
00:46:07.320And I think that's what we need to anchor conservatives and the right now and forever.
00:47:25.060Okay, so I really enjoy your podcast and listening to you, and you are very good at explaining such a dense subject matter.
00:47:32.640It's like, I don't know how you've done it for years.
00:47:36.160And I heard you joking recently that, you know, the good news is four years after you got onto this, the mainstream media has finally come along.
00:47:44.120So maybe four years from now, they'll finally come along on China, right?
00:47:47.340Which is what you put your other book on.
00:47:55.060So I think one of the fascinating things you've been talking about lately is, because I had Ron Johnson on the show, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, and he, I'm like, let's talk about the tie, the evidence that Joe Biden's tied to any of this.
00:48:26.580But let me just start with a broader picture, because I know you do believe, given the New York Times reporting on this, finally, the Washington Post finally coming on board, that they did that for a very good reason.
00:48:46.320We first started reporting on this in 2018.
00:48:48.560And the Biden team has ignored this story from the beginning, and they've obscured it, or they've said that first there were no deals.
00:48:57.600Then they said there were deals, but Hunter made no money.
00:49:00.300Then they said that Hunter didn't talk to his dad about it.
00:49:03.300Then they shifted to, well, his dad didn't make any money on it.
00:49:06.760The bottom line is that they have ignored this story.
00:49:09.820So suddenly, about four or five weeks ago now, the New York Times runs a piece that has the fingerprints of the Biden legal team all over it.
00:49:19.140The big revelation there, of course, was that the laptop was real.
00:49:24.900But if you read the story, the story is all framed in the context of, yes, he didn't pay his taxes.
00:49:32.060Yes, there are these other legal concerns.
00:49:34.320But, you know, Hunter has paid back the taxes that he owed, and judges usually don't send people to jail for a very long time if they've paid their back taxes.
00:49:44.980That, to me, all stinks of just getting ahead of the story.
00:49:49.900They're working with the New York Times on it.
00:49:51.680And they're trying to frame it now, the fallback position, is that Hunter may have done some illegal things, including failing to pay millions of dollars in taxes.
00:50:00.800But it's going to be OK because they are messaging it accordingly.
00:50:05.940So that, to me, is squarely evidence that they are very concerned that Hunter is, in fact, going to be indicted on some of these charges.
00:50:13.840Much better for them if they're like, you know, he's just like you.
00:50:17.660He may not have paid every dollar owed in tax, but don't we all hate the IRS?
00:50:29.940And we'll get into why, why you say it matters so much more than whether he paid his damn taxes or not.
00:50:35.400Let me just show the audience the evidence of what you just said.
00:50:40.100Joe Biden's evolving story on his son's overseas roles.
00:50:45.160And people should keep in mind they did not just take place when Joe Biden was, quote, a private citizen in between the vice presidency and the presidency.
00:50:52.500A lot of the China stuff goes back in Ukraine, too, to when he was the sitting vice president.
00:51:00.420And so and if the mainstream media would do its job and cover this, everyone would know this.
00:51:04.340But let's just talk about his evolving story, because there was Biden in 2019, Joe Biden in 2019, claiming, despite the fact that he had a 12 to 16 hour ride over to Asia, to China with his son on Air Force Two.
01:19:55.620BHR is entirely funded by the Chinese government.
01:19:59.300It was very it was very special fund at the time.
01:20:02.580It got a special status in the Shanghai free trade zone that no other firm had on the planet.
01:20:08.400And it started making all kinds of deals that advanced Chinese interests.
01:20:14.040So, for example, Hunter Biden's firm, BHR, took a early anchor investment stake in a Chinese company called CGN, China General Nuclear.
01:20:25.920CGN is an atomic power company, as the name implies.
01:20:29.440The problem is about a year after Hunter Biden's firm invests in it, the FBI charges CGN and senior executives with stealing nuclear secrets in the United States.
01:20:44.700I mean, the other investments they make, they go in and they buy a American manufacturing company called Hennigis that produces dual use technologies that have both civilian and military application.
01:20:57.000They invest in mining companies that help China acquire precious minerals that they are trying to get at the expense of the United States.
01:21:06.420So this is not just some sort of random electronics firm in China.
01:21:10.600This is an investment firm where Hunter Biden sits on the board that is making investments in advancing Chinese state interests.
01:21:20.200That's about a 20 million dollar deal.
01:21:21.980Then you have another five million dollar deal involving Hunter's firm Burnham, where five million dollars is wired by a gentleman named Mr.
01:21:41.820That business, his business partner, is the family of the former minister of state security, which is the guy that runs not just the CIA of China, the FBI, the NSA, everything.
01:21:55.860So that gentleman is wiring five million dollars to Hunter Biden.
01:22:00.700And those are the beginning of the China deals that Hunter Biden secures in Beijing.
01:22:06.480And as we've seen, some of that money is being used to subsidize his father's lifestyle while he's vice president of the United States.
01:22:13.960Right. And I mean, we saw the email later when Joe Biden is, quote, private citizen Joe Biden, but he's about to run for president, 10 percent to the big guy.
01:22:22.580But, yeah, even back then, you know, you reference the email to his daughter.
01:22:27.480I've been paying half my salary to the dad.
01:22:29.640And I know this is a smaller item, but it's you have the proof in black and white of the cell phone bills.
01:22:36.720Right. That he was paying Joe Biden's cell phone bills, which is a little weird and had been doing it for years and years and years.
01:22:45.260And it only stopped, I guess, in that period where Joe Biden went into private citizen mode and then he started to pay for hunters.
01:22:52.240But like that's in black and white that we know that he was doing that.
01:23:25.460And to my mind, it's probably because that was their direct means of communication.
01:23:30.120And we know based on the laptops that there were meetings that Joe Biden had meetings in the Obama White House with business people that Hunter was either doing business with or Hunter wanted to do business with.
01:23:43.220These were individuals from Ukraine and also from China that those individuals say they met with Joe Biden in the White House.
01:23:50.660But when you look at the official White House visitor logs, those meetings don't show up.
01:23:55.940So they were making efforts to have off the books meetings in the White House with Hunter Biden's business partners that that reeks of cover up.
01:24:04.260If you ask me, then it seemed that seemed to happen repeatedly with that, with the meetings happening when Joe Biden was in the White House.
01:24:16.080In 2011, Devin Archer, Hunter's business partner, let's see, was able or or Hunter, Devin or Hunter, able to deliver 30 members of the Chinese Entrepreneurs Club.
01:24:28.320And they they visited the White House on November 14th, 2011, according to White House visitor logs.
01:24:33.480But these logs fail to disclose precisely with whom those Chinese entrepreneurs met Joe Biden himself.
01:24:48.780Hunter Biden invite invites a bevy of foreign oligarchs, including the former mayor of Moscow, Yuri Lushkovs and his billionaire wife, who you mentioned, to dinner at Cafe Milano in Washington, D.C.
01:25:01.580Great restaurant. You should go there if you go through D.C.
01:25:03.360Yeah. The Russians did not wind up attending, but others oligarchs from Kazakh did and the Ukrainians did.
01:25:11.620And they were able to meet with Vice President Joe Biden in the secluded garden room.
01:25:16.720You go on to say, as with other meetings with Hunter Biden's foreign business associates, Joe Joe Biden conveniently did not disclose the garden room meeting on his official schedule.
01:25:29.200And on it goes. So it's and then when caught because he was gotten that this doesn't even touch on the Ukrainian Burisma visit to the White House, which he also didn't put in the White House visitor log, Joe Biden.
01:25:43.920And when caught, the White House just said, oh, we're not we don't know about that, meaning that wasn't in the log.
01:25:49.980So they've been lying to their gaslighting us.
01:25:52.620They really are. And, you know, honestly, you have to kind of wonder, Megan, I mean, you've been in journalism for a long time.
01:25:59.720You know, a lot of people in journalism. It's kind of a horrible case of kind of spousal abuse where the Bidens keep continuously lying and abusing the media.
01:26:10.080And you wonder, when are they going to kind of stand up and say, we're tired of this?
01:26:14.100We're tired of them making us look like fools, lying to us, changing their stories.
01:26:19.420And we just kind of happily go along. I do feel like it's maybe starting to turn a little bit.
01:26:26.280And I think part of that is because The New York Times is now proclaimed from on high.
01:26:31.980The laptop is real, even though it's been known for a couple of years.
01:26:34.820But I also think within the Democratic Party establishment, and let's face it, a lot of these media figures have at least social relationships with people in the Democratic Party establishment.
01:26:45.360I think there's increasing acceptance of the fact that Joe Biden is weighing down the Democratic Party, weighing down the ticket.
01:26:53.480He's probably not going to be the guy at the top of the ticket in 2024.
01:26:57.920And I think there are moves to to basically jettison him, to kick him to the side.
01:27:02.700You think so? That's why I think. Yes, I do. I really think you're going to start seeing that.
01:27:07.440His polling numbers are horrible. Wait, but let me ask you about it.
01:27:10.320OK, because I was asked about this recently by my pal, my pal Dan Wooten over on GB News.
01:27:15.580And there was a think piece about whether this is all really an effort to get rid of him because he's terrible in terms of the polls.
01:27:22.100Like when 33 percent approval rating, you don't win reelection at that.
01:27:27.800I didn't believe that this is an effort by, you know, the Times and the Post to start laying the groundwork to get rid of him because and I've heard you talk about this, too.
01:27:35.920The pieces were they were they were puff pieces for him.
01:27:38.920It was like, let's break this so we can be on record with a laptop because we know an indictment's coming.
01:27:44.080But in the gentlest way possible for Joe Biden.
01:27:46.580And I mean, both of them bent over backwards, say no connection to Joe Biden, no benefit to him.
01:27:51.760This is the loser's son. And that's my word. I didn't say that.
01:27:55.440But, you know, and and like you pointed out before, it's tax evasion.
01:27:59.700You know, so I was like, it doesn't read to me like the beginning of it.
01:28:06.960It reads to me like Joe Biden's using the media to distance himself from his son's nefarious dealings because they all know an indictment's likely to come.
01:28:14.740Yeah, I mean, you certainly could be right about that.
01:28:17.920The stories have not been harsh. They've not been critical, but they're starting to actually cover them.
01:28:22.560I mean, you had the The Washington Post run the story on, you know, shocking revelation, the Biden's link to Chinese energy deal.
01:28:30.540They ran this a couple of weeks ago, even though The New York Post had run that story in 2020.
01:28:35.780There starts to be a sort of circling and understanding that there's probably going to be some issues here.
01:28:41.740And I think a lot of it's going to come down, Megan, to what happens with this grand jury.
01:28:45.680I still think one of the great things about our system, and there are many, is the fact that we have a jury of our peers.
01:28:52.780And there is a group of regular Americans in Delaware who have been hearing all of this material involving Hunter Biden and the Biden family.
01:29:03.500And we know, based on some leaked information, that the jurors asked at one point who actually is the big guy in these emails.
01:29:12.300So it's going to be very interesting to see what this grand jury comes back with.
01:29:16.000They're going to make a recommendation, and then the prosecutor is going to decide in consultation with the Department of Justice, and we know how political that is.
01:29:24.180But if the grand jury were to come back and say, we see tax evasion, we see money laundering, we see political corruption, and or we see that he failed to file as a foreign agent.
01:29:36.100He's doing all of these lobbying-like activities.
01:29:57.020But I have a lot of faith in our judicial system and with the grit and the common sense of average Americans.
01:30:03.420And it's going to be interesting to see what this grand jury has to say.
01:30:06.780Well, Joe Biden couldn't put an end to this prosecution being done, not prosecution, but investigation right now before the grand jury being done by this U.S. attorney in Delaware because it would have made him look terrible.
01:30:17.760I mean, it would have been shocking for him to pull this guy.
01:30:22.480And so now he's going to be stuck with the result because we're going to find out one way or the other.
01:30:28.140It's been going on for a long time, but we are going to find out one way or the other what the guy's conclusions are.
01:30:47.380I've heard you make the link about then Joe Biden goes and fires this prosecutor who's looking into Burisma, among other corporations, and says it's because this guy's bad and we don't believe he's going to clean up anything.
01:30:59.700But I've heard you say, oh, it's too coincidental.
01:31:03.720It happened like he fired this guy and basically protected Burisma right after Hunter gets all these windfalls from the company.
01:31:13.240But others have said, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the EU, they were all complaining about this guy.
01:31:22.980So doesn't that undermine, I'm with you, I get that he was getting, this is grift, the 50 grand.
01:31:28.840But tying to what Joe Biden did to the prosecutor, I'm not convinced because not all those entities would have had an interest in covering up for Hunter or making sure Hunter's money continued to flow to Hunter and possibly slash Joe.
01:31:54.920We also know that he was at the time, and there's documentary evidence for this, he was at the time investigating Burisma, which is the firm where Hunter Biden was on the board of directors.
01:32:05.460So those two facts are, you know, clear.
01:32:09.880Do we know the ultimate motive as to why Joe Biden fired the prosecutor?
01:32:14.160No, but to me, it's pretty clear, Joe Biden should not have been making those kinds of decisions in the first place.
01:32:22.860You know, imagine the context in the United States.
01:32:26.180You can't have a powerful politician fire a prosecutor, even if there's legitimate grounds for doing so.
01:32:33.280If that prosecutor is investigating the politician's son, it's a massive conflict of interest.
01:32:40.680We don't have definitive proof that they were linked.
01:32:44.020There were other reasons to get rid of him.
01:32:46.100But the fact that Joe Biden so brazenly in a number of cases, Ukraine, Russia and China, is involving himself in direct decisions that involve companies and entities and business partners linked to his son shows to me that he does not take conflict of interest and these kinds of provisions seriously.
01:33:06.900And as a president or vice president, he's required to.
01:33:09.700Yeah. For what it's worth, the Wall Street Journal says by the time this prosecutor left office, Shokin is his name, he was no longer pursuing the Burisma investigation.