The StoneZONE with Roger Stone - April 26, 2025


The Stone Zone ｜ 04-25-25

Topics
neocon war hawks attack America's Cultural Revolution
Hosted by
Roger Stone Troy Smith Jake Novak
Mentioned
Donald Trump Richard Nixon Chris Ruffo George W. Bush Mark Levin Christopher Ruffo Ronald Reagan Gabbard Hillary Clinton Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Ayatollah Khomeini Dwight Eisenhower Richard Milhouse Rod Blagojevich Saddam Hussein Tucker Carlson Jerome Powell Paul Manafort Brian Ballard Pete Hegseth and 15 more
The Stone Zone ｜ 04-24-25 Mike Crispi ｜ 04-28-25

Episode Stats


Length

38 minutes

Words per minute

135.61

Word count

5,215

Sentence count

351

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with Donald Trump. President Donald Trump's wife, Nidia Trump, was diagnosed with a rare heart condition, and doctors initially misdiagnosed it as an undiagnosed heart condition. Her husband, former Vice President Joe Biden, rushed her to the hospital and learned that she had a rare genetic condition called idiopathic cardiomyopathy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:25.520 We'd love to talk business.
00:00:30.000 The Stone Zone.
00:00:32.440 Entertaining and informative.
00:00:34.600 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:00:37.460 Welcome.
00:00:38.260 You are entering the Stone Zone.
00:00:40.920 I want to say a word about health care in America.
00:00:46.100 Two Thursdays ago at about 11 o'clock at night,
00:00:50.100 my wife experienced what they're now calling a cardiac event.
00:00:56.400 Now, my wife, Nidia, is a survivor of stage 4 cancer, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
00:01:04.560 She is an extraordinarily upbeat, optimistic, extraordinarily healthy woman
00:01:10.800 who eats carefully, drinks little, and exercises regularly.
00:01:15.840 During the Mueller witch hunt and the attempts to destroy me, she was my rock.
00:01:21.880 She was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which I think was brought on by the stress of being hunted
00:01:29.160 by a vicious, weaponized judiciary almost immediately after I was given a full and unconditional pardon.
00:01:37.560 But around 11 o'clock, while trying to finish our taxes, she was seeking to upgrade, quicken, 0.99
00:01:47.320 and there was a glitch, and I think she lost about two weeks of her clerical work.
00:01:54.000 The day before, somebody had attempted to hack our bank accounts only by going to the bank branch
00:02:01.180 in the nick of time, did she prevent that, and for some odd reason, we had received a notice
00:02:07.680 that our health insurance was about to be canceled.
00:02:11.820 That was also an error.
00:02:14.060 So, she was rushed to the hospital after experiencing severe chest pain
00:02:20.720 and briefly losing consciousness.
00:02:23.480 And then, after being examined by a cardiologist there, she was told that she had idiopathic cardiomyopathy.
00:02:34.340 Now, idiopathic cardiomyopathy is the classification of cardiomyopathy characterized by heart muscle dysfunction
00:02:42.960 without any identifiable underlying cause, even after thorough testing and evaluation.
00:02:52.120 This condition, they say, is particularly significant because it will lead to heart failure,
00:02:59.480 arrhythmias, and sudden cardiac death.
00:03:04.760 The doctor essentially told her that they were sending her home, that she could wear this harness,
00:03:10.920 which was a defilibrator, and that if her heart stopped, well, it might, might give her an electric jolt
00:03:18.660 that would bring her back to life. 0.72
00:03:20.220 She literally was told to go home and die.
00:03:24.740 Then, for three days, I could not get the cardiologist or his assistant on the telephone.
00:03:31.820 I wanted a second opinion, but any doctor who was willing to see her, any cardiologist other than the one
00:03:39.420 at the hospital, wanted to see the results of the various tests that she had been given.
00:03:45.520 It was a very difficult weekend because we both believed that, well, her death might be imminent.
00:03:53.040 Ultimately, I was able to wrench her medical records out of the hospital and take her to a different
00:03:59.560 and, thankfully, much better cardiologist who told us that the diagnosis she had received at the hospital
00:04:08.000 was completely wrong, that the tests they conducted were the wrong tests,
00:04:13.180 and that the medications that they had given her were far too strong for her.
00:04:18.460 She's rather petite. 0.98
00:04:20.100 They told us what she has, more precisely, is broken heart syndrome, also known as tachytsubo cardiomyopathy,
00:04:31.400 generally curable, and in most individuals, a full recovery is coming within weeks or months
00:04:38.760 as long as they remain stress-free.
00:04:41.500 Thank you, Jesus, for this news, but as for that cardiologist, I learned after the fact,
00:04:49.820 he never actually met and came face-to-face with my wife.
00:04:54.800 He was essentially phoning it all in.
00:04:58.800 I am particularly grateful to God Almighty for this good news, but it has been a horrific couple weeks.
00:05:06.980 In the meantime, Tulsi Gabbard, our director of national intelligence, is under attack from those who are upset
00:05:16.720 that she is telling the truth about Iran. 0.50
00:05:19.720 Now, she is the director of national intelligence.
00:05:22.560 Tulsi Gabbard is a former four-term Democrat congresswoman from Hawaii, now turned a Republican, 1.00
00:05:30.660 and she is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve.
00:05:35.220 She is a combat veteran of both Iraq and Kuwait.
00:05:40.240 She is also a crack shot and a championship surfer.
00:05:45.040 I said recently on the Alex Jones Show that I believed she would be the first woman president,
00:05:52.040 and I still believe that.
00:05:53.820 That doesn't necessarily mean that she will be president in 2028,
00:05:58.120 but she has it, meaning that elusive quality of charisma.
00:06:04.200 She's brilliant.
00:06:06.020 She's highly principled, and she's very, very quick on her feet,
00:06:11.560 and the camera loves her.
00:06:13.780 She's going to be president. 1.00
00:06:16.080 But right now, she's receiving fire from the neocon war hawks in my own party
00:06:21.740 for refusing to spread alarmism about the threat from Iran.
00:06:27.180 Speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee last month,
00:06:31.020 Gabbard stated that the intelligence community continues to assess
00:06:34.420 that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon
00:06:37.460 and that Supreme Leader Ayatollah al-Khamenei
00:06:40.980 has not authorized the nuclear weapons program,
00:06:44.440 which he suspended in 2003.
00:06:46.980 Her comments sent neocon friends of mine like radio host Mark Levin
00:06:53.560 and the failed presidential candidate Nikki Haley into a tizzy.
00:06:59.560 They shared an op-ed in The American Greatness
00:07:02.340 written by former John Bolton Chief of Staff Fred Fleets 1.00
00:07:07.460 calling the intelligence reports referenced by Gabbard as stupid 0.99
00:07:11.960 in arguing for George W. Bush's aggressive war on Iran policy. 0.99
00:07:19.500 Very important.
00:07:20.600 Please read to the end, he said.
00:07:22.940 Red flags are everywhere.
00:07:24.680 Can't say we haven't been warned.
00:07:26.620 That's what Mark Levin wrote while sharing that piece on X.
00:07:30.980 I raise alarm bells, Levin wrote, about this when she was nominated,
00:07:35.720 but chose not to attack her over it anyway.
00:07:39.640 There is no room for Iranian sympathizers 0.88
00:07:42.840 in the national security team of the United States.
00:07:46.900 That's what Nikki Haley wrote,
00:07:48.460 taking it a step further by accusing Gabbard
00:07:50.760 of being disloyal to the United States.
00:07:54.500 Nikki Haley, which branch of the service did you serve in?
00:07:58.140 Which war front did you risk your life in?
00:08:02.880 These Bush-era leftovers are once again misleading the public
00:08:07.580 about Iran in an attempt to draw America into war.
00:08:12.060 Remember that once upon a time, these very same people claimed
00:08:16.300 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
00:08:19.920 in order to promulgate the basis for a war with Iraq.
00:08:24.740 They also told us that Iraq was involved in the 9-11 attack on America,
00:08:29.140 which they were, but they used both as a basis for war
00:08:33.980 and were successful to the great detriment of the world.
00:08:38.560 These same interests today are trying to do the exact same thing with Iran,
00:08:43.040 using nuclear boogeymen as an excuse to ratchet up hostilities
00:08:47.640 that could lead us to World War III.
00:08:51.180 While Iran's actions should not be ignored by any means,
00:08:55.700 the source claiming that they are the major threat
00:08:58.340 is not exactly credible.
00:09:00.700 Neocons have been claiming that Iran is on the verge
00:09:04.600 of creating a nuclear bomb for over 20 years.
00:09:09.360 Their rationale is always that Iran is so close to nuclearization
00:09:13.620 that America must take action now or calamitous circumstances will result.
00:09:19.320 But their dire prognostications never, ever seem to materialize.
00:09:25.360 Iran has weakened over the years,
00:09:27.180 particularly in the aftermath of the horrific October 7th attacks by Hamas on Israel
00:09:33.200 and their Islamic extremist government may falter on its own
00:09:38.140 without direct American intervention.
00:09:40.980 There are enormous demonstrations by the resistance
00:09:44.900 among the Iranian people going on in that nation today.
00:09:49.300 A massive bombing campaign or an invasion by the United States
00:09:54.640 would be counterproductive, in my opinion, and could actually backfire.
00:10:00.260 This would give the Atollas something to rally the people against. 1.00
00:10:04.520 If we are successful in conducting regime change,
00:10:08.660 the people could rise up and demand something just as bad,
00:10:13.120 if not worse, in the event of a U.S. attack.
00:10:16.580 Some will remember what happened when the U.S. allied forces
00:10:21.080 propped up the Shah in 1953 and the blow black that ensued from that. 0.80
00:10:27.680 Look at Syria and Libya for two recent examples of areas
00:10:32.340 where the U.S. and NATO interventionism led to regime shame
00:10:37.420 and violent terrorist killers took control of both those countries
00:10:42.180 as a direct result.
00:10:44.460 Well, this libel against Gabbard is asserted,
00:10:48.640 similar to the insults that Democrats have lobbed at her in the past. 1.00
00:10:53.380 Hillary Clinton actually said while running,
00:10:55.900 while she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, 0.73
00:10:58.820 that Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian intelligence agent.
00:11:04.160 No Trump administration official is defending the Iranian regime.
00:11:08.700 Their values are abhorrent and an affront to the American way of life,
00:11:12.760 but imposing our values upon them with bombs and guns,
00:11:17.180 well, that's not going to work.
00:11:20.220 The track record of U.S. military inventionism has been a failure
00:11:24.200 to everyone except for the defense contractors
00:11:27.160 who profit mightily from death and destruction.
00:11:31.520 There's no reason to believe why a war with Iran would be any less catastrophic 1.00
00:11:36.540 than the previous wars in Afghanistan,
00:11:39.240 or the Iraq war, for that matter.
00:11:42.860 The military-industrial complex, that's what Dwight Eisenhower called them,
00:11:47.040 and its neocon cheerleaders will use any pretext to drive the U.S. into conflict. 0.99
00:11:53.480 Even though some of those voices have been removed from the Republican fold,
00:11:58.680 certain prominent characters remain,
00:12:01.160 camouflaging themselves now as MAGA patriots
00:12:05.320 in an attempt to push the same old, failed, Bush-era foreign policy
00:12:10.980 which has hurt America.
00:12:14.120 They will attempt to railroad Tulsi Gabbard now, in my opinion,
00:12:17.620 or any official in the Trump administration
00:12:20.160 who authentically wants to put America first.
00:12:23.840 They're receiving flack because they're over the target.
00:12:27.600 This is also, in my opinion, the situation surrounding Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
00:12:34.840 He's under attack today not because he did something wrong,
00:12:38.700 but because roughly 10 days ago he joined with Vice President J.D. Vance,
00:12:43.700 Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard,
00:12:47.720 White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles,
00:12:50.480 the first woman to hold that position,
00:12:53.180 and others to oppose this unilateral attack on Iraq.
00:12:59.880 The Trump administration is a radical departure from the establishment of Republicanism
00:13:04.760 on a myriad of issues, including foreign policy.
00:13:08.360 Recent news that President Trump resisted the call to launch this massive bombing campaign
00:13:13.880 after listening to Common Sense from Gabbard and the others I mentioned
00:13:17.700 is a demonstration that there is a new sheriff in town
00:13:22.340 and that Donald Trump has no interest in rushing to war.
00:13:27.020 Expects their attacks to ramp up against the sane voices
00:13:30.640 who oppose war in the White House.
00:13:33.760 My good friend Tucker Carlson has been particularly good on this subject.
00:13:38.060 America first patriots must remain vigilant
00:13:40.560 and repel this neocon influence whenever necessary.
00:13:44.640 The success of the MAGA movement ultimately depends
00:13:49.100 on ignoring the war hawks who are demanding an attack on Iran.
00:13:56.240 If you're just tuning in, this is The Stone Zone.
00:13:59.760 I am Roger Stone, and whatever you do, don't touch that dial
00:14:03.500 because we'll be right back.
00:14:06.680 The Stone Zone on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
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00:14:47.280 The Stone Zone.
00:14:49.280 Entertaining and informative.
00:14:51.440 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:14:54.280 Welcome back.
00:14:55.340 You're back in the Stone Zone.
00:14:58.100 President Donald Trump this week unveiled his latest plans
00:15:01.380 to shake up the White House grounds on Wednesday,
00:15:04.340 announcing that he will pay personally for two large flagpoles to be installed,
00:15:10.880 as well as two 100-foot-tall American flags,
00:15:15.840 one on one side and one on the other side in the Rose Garden area.
00:15:21.300 Now, you may remember that back when President Donald Trump first bought the Mar-a-Lago property,
00:15:29.460 which had been the palatial Spanish-style home of Meriwether Post,
00:15:36.240 the heiress to the Post serial fortune,
00:15:40.640 she willed it to the U.S. government,
00:15:44.520 didn't know what to do with it.
00:15:45.620 It was a grand property, but they boarded it up,
00:15:49.000 and it remained boarded up and closed for 15 years
00:15:53.020 until Donald Trump bought it in an auction.
00:15:58.420 I was actually with him when we flew from New York to Palm Beach,
00:16:03.580 where he had a home on the island,
00:16:06.820 and he knew I didn't care too much about real estate
00:16:09.900 because all I cared about was politics,
00:16:11.420 but he said,
00:16:12.460 hey, do you want to walk through this property with me?
00:16:14.580 Now, it was kind of like, I don't know,
00:16:16.740 it was grand.
00:16:18.060 It was kind of like the Addams family, though.
00:16:19.960 You know, all the furniture was covered with these white sheets.
00:16:23.060 It was very dusty.
00:16:24.720 There was a substantial amount of water damage,
00:16:30.080 and I said,
00:16:30.880 wow, this is like a haunted house.
00:16:33.940 He said,
00:16:34.620 no, you don't see it.
00:16:36.300 This could be absolutely magnificent.
00:16:39.060 I said,
00:16:40.560 are you going to buy it?
00:16:42.140 It's on an auction.
00:16:43.480 He says,
00:16:44.140 I'm only going to buy it if I can steal it.
00:16:47.660 And indeed, he did.
00:16:50.000 I believe he paid $5 million for it.
00:16:53.080 Today, it is estimated as being worth as much as $200 million,
00:16:58.580 notwithstanding the fact that a New York judge claimed it was only worth $18 million.
00:17:03.680 But his first big fight when he decided to convert it into a private club
00:17:11.000 was over an enormous American flag that he wanted to install on the property.
00:17:17.380 The Palm Beach County Board of Commissioners said he had to take the flag down.
00:17:22.680 He refused, paying a $1,000 a day fine over his refusal to take down the flag.
00:17:30.180 Finally, the county commissioners threw in the towel.
00:17:36.280 And today, this enormous American flag remains.
00:17:40.420 You can see it for miles while you approach Mar-a-Lago.
00:17:44.480 It shows you how much Donald Trump loves this country.
00:17:48.280 Joining me coming up is Chris Ruffo.
00:17:51.000 He's a prominent American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:17:53.900 He has written one of the most important pieces I have read about where America stands
00:18:00.300 and the need for a counter-revolution.
00:18:03.560 This is an interview I've been looking forward to for a long, long time.
00:18:08.180 So we appreciate your tuning in to The Stone Zone.
00:18:11.480 Christopher Ruffo will be right back with us on the other side.
00:18:14.620 So whatever you do, please don't touch that dial.
00:18:17.460 The Stone Zone on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:18:23.900 The Stone Zone, entertaining and informative.
00:18:31.720 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:18:34.960 Welcome back.
00:18:36.060 You are entering The Stone Zone.
00:18:38.160 Again, joining me now is Christopher Ruffo.
00:18:41.080 He is a prominent American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:18:46.240 Renowned for his influential role in shaping contemporary debates on culture, education, and public policies.
00:18:53.060 He's the author of America's Cultural Revolution, How the Radical Left Conquered America,
00:18:58.580 a best-selling book that traces the intellectual roots of progressive ideologies and their impact on American institutions.
00:19:07.640 Chris, welcome into The Stone Zone.
00:19:11.700 Thank you for having me.
00:19:13.640 I have wanted to have you for a long time.
00:19:15.960 I'm glad we were able to finally get this set up.
00:19:18.400 You wrote a piece entitled Bring on the Counter-Revolution.
00:19:23.980 This is, I think, one of the most important things written in the last 10 years in terms of understanding how the past is prologue
00:19:33.280 and how what America is going through today is what America has gone through in the past.
00:19:40.700 And as the subhead of your piece says, conservatives need a national agenda that reclaims America's institutions from the left.
00:19:51.440 A blueprint exists, but from a surprising source.
00:19:55.880 That source, according to your piece, is one President Richard Milhouse Nixon.
00:20:02.680 I'm just going to read the first sentence and let you kind of take it away.
00:20:06.540 America is trapped in the roop of 1968.
00:20:09.680 The politics of that fateful year have set patterns and bounds of our current national life and national life for decades.
00:20:18.260 Chris, take it away.
00:20:21.160 That's exactly right.
00:20:22.580 And, you know, growing up, I bought into what was and unfortunately continues to be the conventional wisdom about Richard Nixon's presidency.
00:20:30.860 But as I dug deeper and read the history, and this is, of course, something that, you know, from your own firsthand experience and relationship with the former president,
00:20:39.580 it was very different.
00:20:41.580 The reality was very different than the narrative.
00:20:44.700 And one thing I learned studying Nixon is that all of the great political questions and dramas and archetypes that we're grappling with today really first emerged in the first and, you know, the first part of the second term of President Nixon.
00:21:02.360 And in fact, he anticipated many of these questions.
00:21:05.580 He had some wisdom on how to potentially address some of these questions.
00:21:10.040 And I think that he really is the kind of skeleton key to modern politics and should be reappraised for those of us, especially on the right.
00:21:19.460 Yeah, I obviously agree with that.
00:21:22.460 I think one of the great tragedies, of course, is that many of his great accomplishments, a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviets, 0.79
00:21:32.200 the desegregation of the public school system without bloodshed or incident, the saving of Israel unilaterally in the 1973 Yom Kippur War,
00:21:44.380 federal revenue sharing where public monies are best spent at the local level, the war on cancer,
00:21:52.920 bringing China in out of the cold at a time that China was a dirt poor agrarian society with little technology without a strong military.
00:22:07.320 Most of the Chinese did not have indoor plumbing.
00:22:10.280 The rural areas had no electricity.
00:22:12.320 There was no way for Richard Nixon to know that 30 years later,
00:22:17.960 President Bill Clinton would give the Chinese most favored nation trading status.
00:22:23.800 And he would also sell the Chinese some of our top military secrets, 0.99
00:22:30.400 including our missile targeting technology in the Loral strategy.
00:22:35.120 Those two things playing a major role in making China the great danger it is to the country today. 1.00
00:22:43.080 You make an excellent point about the fact that the Black Panther Party of the 1970s now reappears as Black Lives Matter.
00:22:53.280 And the weather underground reemerges as Antifa.
00:23:00.200 Past really is prolonged.
00:23:03.040 As you say, the cultural revolution began half a century ago is now reflected in the, as you put it,
00:23:10.140 deadening sequence of acronyms, CRT, DEI, ESG, and more.
00:23:15.780 So I think what you say is absolutely true, that Nixon anticipated these things, and frankly, he dealt very effectively with them.
00:23:27.760 It is, it's a terrific piece entitled Bring on the Cultural Revolution.
00:23:33.040 I highly recommend it to you.
00:23:35.480 But in your new book called America's Cultural Revolution, you talk more about the parallels between how the Chinese and American institutions have been conquered by communists.
00:23:48.840 Talk to us about that.
00:23:51.840 Yeah, I mean, that's right.
00:23:54.260 And I think, look, President Trump has really outlined this in his very unique and colorful way.
00:23:59.980 He talks about the radical left lunatics at Harvard and Columbia and Princeton and other elite universities.
00:24:06.680 And the ideologies that are really manufactured within those universities have now extended outwards.
00:24:13.340 And, you know, what I found particularly fascinating is that the Black Panther ideology, the Weather Underground ideology, the new left ideologies that were really at the fringes of that time,
00:24:25.660 suddenly after 2020 became proliferating throughout our institutions, universities, corporations, schools, government agencies.
00:24:35.400 And really what Nixon feared came to pass.
00:24:41.760 And the tactics and techniques that he had contemplated then, unfortunately, were not implemented at that time.
00:24:49.920 And now we're going to have to take much more dramatic action.
00:24:52.880 That's why I think we've seen in the first almost 100 days of the Trump presidency, this really brutal, you know, drag out, knock down fight with the Ivy Leagues.
00:25:03.400 And I think that is targeting exactly the heart of the problem.
00:25:08.020 He's kind of lifted up the rock and finding all of the, you know, the critters that are hiding under these, in the dirt.
00:25:16.220 And it's really time to take these ideologies, these ideas that have baked in these places for so long, and to actually try to mount a proper and true defense.
00:25:29.720 He's certainly unique.
00:25:34.100 I watched him the other day talking about Canada.
00:25:37.080 It was, I'd never seen him so crisp.
00:25:38.780 And he was basically said, look, we buy virtually nothing from them.
00:25:43.460 They really have nothing that we really need.
00:25:45.720 They buy a lot from us.
00:25:47.940 As I like to tell Governor Trudeau, I mean, who else would say that?
00:25:52.020 Can you picture Ronald Reagan calling the prime minister of a foreign country governor, a governor as if they were governor of U.S. state?
00:26:00.480 I mean, the guy is, he's part stand-up comedian.
00:26:04.020 He's part statesman.
00:26:06.020 He's part salesman.
00:26:07.580 But he's also part stand-up comedian.
00:26:10.220 The guy is hysterical.
00:26:11.500 But it was one of his most crisp deliveries in terms of messaging that I have seen.
00:26:18.720 I mean, look, we saw yesterday that tariff revenue is up to $15 billion, which is an all-time high.
00:26:30.320 That was in April.
00:26:31.780 Yet inflation remains relatively low, unless you're Jerome Powell and you can't read.
00:26:38.220 So that, to me, tells us that Trump's underlying economic theory is correct.
00:26:47.680 Well, yeah, it's a good question.
00:26:50.280 And I think that, look, his economic theory is really at odds with, again, the conventional wisdom.
00:26:56.460 And I'm not an economist.
00:26:57.780 I won't hazard any predictions.
00:26:59.340 But we're going to see if the conventional wisdom holds or whether Trump, who arrives at these questions intuitively rather than purely intellectually, is actually right.
00:27:10.420 So we're going to see that.
00:27:11.360 But on the point of his humor, I'll admit, in 2015 and 2016, I was turned off by the way the president spoke.
00:27:19.580 I didn't quite click in with it.
00:27:22.100 I thought that it was outrageous.
00:27:24.220 But then there was a moment in his first term when I was watching him at length, and it suddenly clicked with me.
00:27:32.360 I said, he is hilarious.
00:27:35.640 I mean, he knows exactly what he's doing.
00:27:38.240 It's this dry sense of humor.
00:27:40.160 It's this New York attitude.
00:27:41.640 And from that moment, when I really understood the president's humor and wit was really when I really understood him as a president, as a public figure.
00:27:55.520 And I mean, I'll tell you my favorite line of his.
00:27:59.740 You know, during the 2020 debates, they were questioning him, you know, basically saying, oh, you're racist.
00:28:05.500 And he's in this big debate hall, and he shields his eyes from the Klieg lights, and he says, you know, I can't see all the way in the back, but I'm pretty sure I am the least racist person in this room right now.
00:28:19.320 And it's just the outrageous, you know, totally off the wall.
00:28:23.700 I mean, it's an inborn talent.
00:28:26.680 You can't teach that.
00:28:27.920 You can't develop that.
00:28:28.900 You can't practice that.
00:28:30.200 He's just a kind of creature that is totally unique in American life.
00:28:36.440 Well, something President Nixon once told me is that the only thing wrong in American politics than being wrong is being boring.
00:28:45.240 And Donald Trump completely understands that.
00:28:48.820 He is never boring.
00:28:50.740 He's always interesting.
00:28:53.020 And he's also entertaining.
00:28:55.000 I think he also recognizes that if you're not interesting, well, the voters begin to look elsewhere.
00:29:07.180 But the other thing is that he is, I can tell you, he's completely unscripted.
00:29:13.740 I mean, what you see is what you get.
00:29:15.340 But we couldn't get him to even think about using a teleprompter until the after he had won the nomination in 2016.
00:29:25.440 He flatly refused to do it because he thought it was phony.
00:29:29.940 I don't want to look like a politician, he would say.
00:29:33.140 It was hard enough to get him to speak from just notes.
00:29:36.380 He spoke, you know, contemporaneously off the cuff almost all the time.
00:29:41.840 Now, after the first time that I think it was Paul Manafort persuaded him, please once, just once, try the teleprompter.
00:29:52.180 Well, once he tried it, he loved it.
00:29:55.020 However, when he's using the teleprompter, you can always tell when he goes off a teleprompter into one of his rhetorical cul-de-sacs that are always pretty funny.
00:30:08.260 And then he'll come back to his main topic.
00:30:10.120 He calls it weaving.
00:30:12.240 He will say, you see how I weave that?
00:30:15.120 The guy is very, he's very funny.
00:30:18.760 Which American institutions that have been captured by the hard left are most crucial for the American people to reclaim in order to preserve the country?
00:30:28.960 Well, look, I think you have to start with the universities.
00:30:35.520 You have to then continue to the schools.
00:30:39.040 And then you have to burrow into, you know, the civil rights regime.
00:30:43.960 So, HR, legal, and other professional class institutions.
00:30:50.320 And I think that that will go a long ways.
00:30:53.120 And, you know, what President Nixon saw the beginning of, and we're really arriving to this in mature form.
00:30:59.840 And he talked about what was known then as the Eastern Establishment.
00:31:03.440 But I think now it's really a nationwide, kind of bi-coastal, professional managerial establishment.
00:31:10.360 And as much as we may disagree with the popular ideologies within that establishment, that really is where policy gets made, how the narratives that circulate through the country get made, and where politics is shaped and formed.
00:31:26.700 And I think conservatives are going to really have to think in the next, you know, three and a half years, how can we influence that sector of society?
00:31:36.040 Because what I see right now in President Trump's second term is that you have a charismatic leader at the top who really is a force of nature.
00:31:45.180 And you have the MAGA base at the bottom, kind of working class, middle class, you know, a lot of, especially working class men, massive support across racial demographics.
00:31:57.840 But what we need is a kind of middle layer of professionals, institutions, and administrators that can take the raw democratic power of the base and the charismatic leadership of the president, and then translate it through these captured institutions so that we can start to arrive at significant reforms.
00:32:18.340 Yeah, I think, I guess the answer to my question is kind of obvious.
00:32:21.280 We have to, we have to take back the schools.
00:32:23.400 If we don't take back the schools, then we lose the youth.
00:32:28.380 And if we lose the youth, well, we lose the country.
00:32:33.380 I also think people don't understand that Trumpism is far, far broader and far, far deeper than the Republican Party.
00:32:43.540 There are people who voted for Donald Trump, who voted for Jimmy Carter and voted for Barack Obama.
00:32:49.460 The appeal of the MAGA movement, the America First movement, far more, far broader than the Republican Party.
00:33:00.700 And now when you add to it what I call the common sense Democrats, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., like Tulsi Gabbard, who's now a former Democrat, like Rod Blagojevich, like the mayor of Dallas, for example.
00:33:16.740 You have a realignment, very similar to the realignment that was fashioned by Richard Nixon in 1968, in which white Southern conservatives, working class blue collar Catholics in the Northeast, combined with traditional Republicans in the country to form a new majority.
00:33:37.040 That coalition may have been frozen temporarily by Watergate, but by 1979, it was flowing again.
00:33:44.880 It elected Ronald Reagan.
00:33:47.080 It is fundamentally the same coalition that would go on to elect Donald J. Trump.
00:33:53.840 If you're just tuning in, folks, we're talking to Chris Ruffo.
00:33:57.800 He is a prominent American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:34:03.200 He's an amazingly good writer, and I'm fanboying here, but I love his piece, Bring on the Counter-Revolution.
00:34:13.520 Don't go away, because we'll be right back with more of Chris Ruffo.
00:34:17.320 The Stone Zone.
00:34:19.040 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:34:27.840 The Stone Zone.
00:34:29.820 Entertaining and informative.
00:34:31.600 On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
00:34:34.860 If you're just tuning in, first of all, I'm happy to share the good news of my wife's recovery and her rebound and the fact that she's headed back to robust health after a horrific health scare.
00:34:52.040 But we're talking to Chris Ruffo, American writer, filmmaker, and conservative activist.
00:34:57.880 He's an amazing writer.
00:34:59.340 Chris, I ask this question of virtually every guest.
00:35:04.180 If you had to give one piece of advice to Donald J. Trump, who, by the way, does ask a lot of people for advice.
00:35:11.660 In the end, he makes the decisions, but he works the phones hard for advice.
00:35:17.400 If you had to give him one piece of advice, what would it be?
00:35:19.600 The president should hold the line with the Ivy League universities, and I think that he needs to actually follow through on his promise to defund at least one of them.
00:35:32.180 So he can make a dramatic example of what happens if these universities don't comply with American civil rights law, and we can watch in dramatic and spectacular form one of these universities implode, which I think will accomplish his broader goal of reforming the universities as a whole.
00:35:51.000 It's interesting.
00:35:53.000 I see recently that Harvard has hired Brian Ballard and company as lobbyists in their dealings with the Trump administration.
00:36:06.100 I think he's on exactly the right course with these universities.
00:36:10.100 I agree with your advice.
00:36:13.580 Chris, tell people where they can follow you on social media.
00:36:18.060 Sure.
00:36:18.460 You can follow me on Twitter at RealChrisRuffo.
00:36:20.760 You can visit my sub stack at ChristopherRuffo.com, and I'll be really tackling some of these issues related to higher education in the coming weeks and months.
00:36:31.440 I'll be right back to you on social media, and I'll be right back to you on social media platform.
00:36:51.400 I'd hope to have time to get to it, but I appreciate this lively conversation.
00:36:55.440 And I want to invite you to come back again when we have a bit more time.
00:37:01.380 Again, my thanks to Chris Ruffo, our guest.
00:37:05.340 Yes, this weekend I am going to make my famous Sunday gravy one-third beef, one-third pork, one-third veal, San Marzano tomatoes, one can of tomato paste,
00:37:18.680 all the appropriate spices, garlic, onions, parsley, and, of course, lots of oregano.
00:37:26.360 Cooked for five and a half hours.
00:37:28.460 On Monday, there will still be some left, but Sunday, Marron.
00:37:33.140 I also want to thank everybody out there listening to The Stone Zone.
00:37:37.180 It has been a tumultuous week in the Stone family, as I told you earlier, and we are grateful for your listening and very grateful for your prayers.
00:37:49.500 Until we meet again, God bless you, and Godspeed.
00:37:53.500 Thanks for listening to The Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
00:37:57.720 You can hear The Stone Zone with Roger Stone weeknights at 8 on 77 WABC.
00:38:03.960 If you like the podcast, share it with your friends and listen anytime at WABCradio.com and download the WABC Radio app.
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00:38:21.600 See you next time for a new episode so you never have to wonder.
00:38:25.600 What the heck is going on here?