Valuetainment - Is America About to Lose it All？

00:00:00.000 I grew up extremely rich.

00:00:02.800 My father was a schoolteacher in Pocahontas, Arkansas,

00:00:06.340 and he loved to read books.

00:00:08.120 Think of the wealth that I got from that.

00:00:09.860 And because he was poor, I learned how to work.

00:00:13.120 There is this concern that this is the tipping point election-wise.

00:00:17.440 There's an attempt to undermine the Constitution,

00:00:20.100 and now elections are deeply controversial and there may be major fraud.

00:00:23.840 What are some of your biggest concerns under a Biden and a Kamala administration?

00:00:27.540 They will change the structure of the nation.

00:00:30.620 They form a ruling class now.

00:00:32.800 What angle do you think they're going to take to go pack the court?

00:00:35.780 It's been nine for 150 years.

00:00:37.780 If you can appoint six more, that'll be enough to get what you want.

00:00:41.520 The conversation about reparation for slavery.

00:00:44.240 People who never had a slave are going to be paying people who were never slaves.

00:00:48.560 Why is that right?

00:00:49.740 Governors like a Newsom, Cuomo, or Mayor de Blasio, or Garcetti,

00:00:53.680 what kind of jurisdiction does the government have to tell all of us

00:00:57.080 that you cannot go anywhere and you have to stay home?

00:00:59.800 If the flu gets bad in any year,

00:01:01.980 they can shut down the economy or whatever parts of it they want.

00:01:05.320 What about the businesses lost?

00:01:06.900 What about the young people who lose the golden years of their life 0.84

00:01:10.780 when they can prepare their intellects and character?

00:01:13.580 If the idea of America doesn't work, what's option two to America? 0.52

00:01:17.900 We have to save the country.

00:01:19.680 The country's in trouble.

00:01:23.680 My guest today is Larry Arnn.

00:01:28.080 He is one of four founders of Claremont Institute in Claremont, California.

00:01:32.140 He's also the 12th president of Hillsdale College,

00:01:35.640 as well as alma mater, a London School of Economics and Oxford University.

00:01:40.200 Larry, thank you so much for being a guest on Valuetainment.

00:01:43.440 Great, Patrick.

00:01:44.340 Very nice to be with you.

00:01:45.820 So, Larry, here's a story that I didn't want to bring up to you off camera.

00:01:49.100 And I wanted to tell you on camera is March 29, 2009.

00:01:53.320 You put an event together at Miramar Hotel and you had George Will there.

00:01:57.680 And I think you had Pat Poon was in the audience and a few other guys were there.

00:02:01.800 And I was at that event and I had a chance to listen to George Will speak.

00:02:06.800 And his views, he was upset at lawyers because lawyers were suing companies that are selling fish hooks because the kids swallowed it.

00:02:15.780 So, they said there needs to be a warning sign on there.

00:02:18.100 And his message just stuck with me.

00:02:19.920 I came back and I couldn't stop thinking about capitalism and politics and my life changed.

00:02:24.900 So, I appreciate you for putting that event together.

00:02:28.240 Well, thank you.

00:02:29.300 Look what's come of it.

00:02:30.520 You're an awesome man.

00:02:32.260 Well, thank you.

00:02:33.000 Yes.

00:02:33.260 And I used to go with Larry Greenfield to, I think it was Wayne Hughes' home in Malibu.

00:02:38.940 And they would have all those meetings.

00:02:40.880 Yeah.

00:02:41.380 I know he's a friend of yours.

00:02:42.620 And I used to go to those events.

00:02:43.920 So, anyways, you know, I got a lot of questions for you, especially with the current times we're living in.

00:02:48.160 And a lot of my conversation having with you is around the Constitution and how we're protected because of this paper that was written.

00:02:56.140 And the angle I want to take is slightly different because, look, we're all following the story.

00:03:03.460 Sidney Powell, Giuliani, hey, you know, there's so much fraud being shown.

00:03:09.700 You know, I cannot tell you what we have here.

00:03:11.740 There's so many things that we have going on.

00:03:13.320 And then behind closed doors, you know, they're losing some cases.

00:03:16.660 And then, you know, folks are saying, well, you have all this proof.

00:03:19.440 Show it to us.

00:03:20.180 Why don't you just show it to us?

00:03:21.240 There's no way in the world, you know, Biden won 80 million to 75 million.

00:03:25.480 You know, Trump's the one that had 80 million votes.

00:03:27.520 All this stuff that we're hearing.

00:03:29.600 The part that gets me thinking is the following.

00:03:32.220 There is this concern that this is the tipping point election-wise.

00:03:37.600 If a Biden administration gets elected, Elizabeth Warren is going to come in and she's going to change the game. 1.00

00:03:44.380 Sanders is going to come in and he's going to change the game with minimum wage federal to 15 bucks and colleges and all this other stuff.

00:03:50.620 That's going to go on.

00:03:51.880 How much are we protected by the Constitution?

00:03:56.200 Well, perfectly if it operates.

00:03:58.620 But, of course, the whole thing, the reason we know this is fundamental, is that there's an attempt to undermine the Constitution.

00:04:05.940 Just start with this.

00:04:08.120 There are two things that are the most sensitive about the Constitution.

00:04:12.320 One is we're a purely representative government.

00:04:15.460 That means the only way that the sovereign, who's the constitutional majority, has to control the government is through elections.

00:04:23.500 And now elections are deeply controversial and there may be major fraud.

00:04:27.820 The second thing is the Constitution is, above all, more than anything else, a structure, says James Madison, a set of arrangements.

00:04:35.580 And those arrangements divide powers among the branches.

00:04:38.680 And that helps keep them in line.

00:04:41.560 And they can be strong and yet not despotic.

00:04:44.920 Well, today, 80% of our laws are not passed by the Congress.

00:04:49.140 They're passed in something we call the executive branch.

00:04:52.000 A whole new thing, the administrative state.

00:04:55.360 And it's hard for us to control a thing like that.

00:04:58.620 And, of course, just look at the intention to pack the court.

00:05:01.500 The rule of law depends upon an independent judge who can't be fired making a decision that may be contrary to the vast power of the executive in the legislature.

00:05:14.020 So those things are all threatened right now.

00:05:16.520 And that means that it is very fundamental.

00:05:18.860 And you could, the people are at the cusp of losing control of their government.

00:05:24.160 So, okay, so then let's go back.

00:05:25.640 Then it says, are there some flaws in the Constitution?

00:05:28.140 Because when you think about the court packing situation, and you saw Pence debate with Kamala when he kept cornering her, are you guys going to pack the court?

00:05:36.540 Are you guys going to pack the court?

00:05:37.680 Are you guys going to pack the court?

00:05:39.280 And then she revealed what their approach is going to be.

00:05:42.760 She revealed the fact that they're going to come out saying, well, you know, let's just talk about the judges that not one judge is African-American, et cetera.

00:05:48.940 She took that angle, which means they can come out and say, hey, maybe we need to be a little bit more inclusive and have, you know, diversity in our judges that we have.

00:06:00.620 So if today it's nine and a number you hear about is up to 15, who came up with the number 15 that we can't go all the way up to 15?

00:06:09.540 Well, the Constitution doesn't say.

00:06:14.820 There's been three different numbers on the court, one of them was six.

00:06:18.280 It's been nine for 150 years.

00:06:20.460 It was changed for the last time right after the Civil War.

00:06:23.500 And I think the arithmetic is pretty simple.

00:06:25.780 If you can appoint six more, that'll be enough to get what you want.

00:06:31.160 And so, you know, I think it's just that.

00:06:34.060 I think they're just thinking backwards from what they want.

00:06:36.240 No, I get that part.

00:06:38.600 But what I'm asking is, why isn't it set in stone to say nine is it?

00:06:42.540 We're not going above nine.

00:06:43.720 So, you know, it's got to be five, four, six, three, two, seven, but we're not going above nine.

00:06:48.640 Why is there that additional 15 left there to say we can go all the way up to 15?

00:06:53.780 Obviously, we know what the motive is.

00:06:55.080 If they're up nine, six, they get to do whatever they want to do.

00:06:57.960 But why did we leave that out for people to be able to one day take it to 15?

00:07:01.500 Well, the court was not supposed to be as important as it's become.

00:07:06.900 I mean, the court is designed for one great thing.

00:07:10.420 And that is, it is decisive in the particular cases that come before it.

00:07:16.200 And those set precedents that are worthy of respect.

00:07:19.480 But the other branches also have constitutional duties.

00:07:23.160 You know, behind you is Abe Lincoln, right?

00:07:25.140 And Abe Lincoln, the Republican Party, which was partially founded at Hillsdale College, I'm proud to say.

00:07:31.760 They had a plan.

00:07:33.180 And the plan was, we don't have the constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states, but we can forbid it from going anywhere else.

00:07:42.620 And that means most of the land, the unincorporated federal territories.

00:07:46.940 And that'll place slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.

00:07:50.120 Well, in 1858, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not give the Congress any power to exclude slavery in those territories.

00:08:01.400 In other words, it cut the heart out of the platform of Abraham Lincoln.

00:08:05.280 And so he gave a wonderful speech and explained the relationship.

00:08:08.860 He said, each of the branches has responsibility to interpret the Constitution as it deploys its power, not exclusively the Supreme Court.

00:08:18.480 Ultimately, in a conflict between the branches, the people are going to get to decide through an election.

00:08:23.480 And then he went on to say, poor Dred Scott, who was a slave who sued for his freedom because he was taken into a free state, he is a slave now.

00:08:35.280 And no power on earth can liberate him.

00:08:38.340 It's been decided in the final court.

00:08:41.200 But the question, what are the powers of the federal government?

00:08:44.440 Those people can't decide that by themselves.

00:08:47.920 And so, but now we've written it in stone that they can.

00:08:53.720 And they, you know, they've written the craziest opinions in which they say that they personally are supposed to personify the people and the Constitution.

00:09:02.160 So, it becomes more important now than it used to become.

00:09:06.720 And, you know, if they do get to pack the court, it will hurt the dignity of the court.

00:09:12.040 But the residual dignity that the court enjoys will make it a very powerful move if they do it.

00:09:18.220 And, you know, sometimes in competition or in war or, you know, whether you go study, I know you're very, very well read.

00:09:25.960 You can, you've read the books that many of us haven't read over the years.

00:09:30.900 And I know you're a big Churchill person and you've studied a lot of these guys, even Aristotle, the Bible, all of it.

00:09:36.780 When you think about strategy, you think about what the opponent's going to do.

00:09:39.880 You have to start thinking like your opponent, your enemy, your competitor, whoever you're facing.

00:09:43.640 What do you think is going to be the direction they're going to take, Biden or Kamala, the Democrats?

00:09:52.800 I'm a registered independent.

00:09:54.160 You've got Republicans.

00:09:55.080 You've got Democrats.

00:09:55.900 They want to go pack the court.

00:09:57.420 What angle do you think they're going to take to go pack the court?

00:10:00.260 Well, they've hinted at that.

00:10:05.080 They'll appoint a blue ribbon commission, probably full of famous scholars and distinguished politicians, all of them people who are ready to pack the court.

00:10:14.680 And then they'll make some argument about why the court is not functioning properly.

00:10:19.540 And they'll say that we can make it much more efficient.

00:10:22.280 And then this race thing, which is just dreadful, you know, because the truth is the human soul is immaterial. 0.61

00:10:31.800 And if it is immaterial, then the human being can be free.

00:10:35.280 And if it's not immaterial, it can't be free.

00:10:38.680 And things that don't have matter don't have color.

00:10:41.260 So the idea that you would identify the human being with the color of the skin, that is a specific evil that was committed by the Confederacy. 0.75

00:10:51.040 And for that matter, Adolf Hitler. 0.63

00:10:54.120 Got it.

00:10:54.720 So blue ribbon commission, court not functioning properly, which, by the way, Biden has kind of alluded to it, I think, in a 60-minute interview when he said that he's going to bring people from both sides, scholars and educators, and to kind of sit down and see what's the right thing to do.

00:11:11.020 And he says, we'll see what we're going to do.

00:11:12.180 We have some options.

00:11:13.640 And we'll see how that'll take place.

00:11:16.420 What are some of your biggest concerns?

00:11:18.560 You know, there's a lot of conservatives I speak to.

00:11:21.160 You know, we've had people on both sides on to kind of see what they're saying.

00:11:24.200 But what are some of your biggest concerns under a Biden and a Kamala administration?

00:11:29.440 Well, you know, I'm running an old college.

00:11:32.040 It's 176 years old.

00:11:33.560 And in March of this year, for two months, and now again, for three weeks, she says, the operations of the college have been ceased.

00:11:43.740 And, you know, that didn't happen in the Civil War.

00:11:46.440 That didn't happen in either World War.

00:11:48.200 That didn't happen in the Great Depression.

00:11:49.720 And it's just the will of one woman.

00:11:52.760 And she's got an administrative system. 1.00

00:11:55.960 She's part of one that reaches up to Washington, D.C.

00:11:59.440 But, you know, there's public health offices in every town in America.

00:12:04.080 And you can just see if the flu gets bad in any year, they can shut down the economy or whatever parts of it they want.

00:12:13.300 And, you know, the freedom to assemble and to speak with one another is simply fundamental.

00:12:19.480 And they have interfered with that on a massive scale and it has never before.

00:12:24.660 And so you can see.

00:12:26.080 And then the second thing is, why is there not outrage about that?

00:12:29.120 Well, there is, but it doesn't break into the biggest media because the media and the academy, the elite universities, the big corporations who are heavily regulated and have reasons to be beholden to the government and the government itself.

00:12:47.520 And it's, you know, 23 million state, federal and local employees there.

00:12:52.720 They form a ruling class now.

00:12:54.960 And the rights of ordinary people are, you know, one of their strategies, by the way, is to concentrate political power in the urban centers.

00:13:05.360 And it's a vast country.

00:13:07.380 And the magic, the magic, the wonder of the American Revolution was they intended to unite a great continent under self-government at a time when they didn't even know how big the continent was.

00:13:19.700 Nobody had ever been to the end of it.

00:13:21.800 And so what we're going to do is we're going to concentrate power among people who live a certain way.

00:13:27.480 And, you know, that's not, that's maybe most people, but if most, barely most.

00:13:35.080 And then there's just all kinds of people who are not going to get a say anymore.

00:13:41.500 Is there the possibility of what Reagan said many years ago, we're all one generation away from losing our freedom.

00:13:47.880 Is that really something that applies to where we are today, where we can really dramatically change the face of America in one election?

00:13:58.340 Yeah, I've been thinking that's coming for a long time, and now I think it's here.

00:14:02.920 And, you know, these things that we've been talking about, right, they will change the structure of the nation and make it very difficult for ordinary people to have any influence on that.

00:14:12.320 And here's something, you know, the intensity of the political debate is like the 1850s, you know, violence in the streets, completely divergent views about the Declaration of Independence, its meaning, and the Constitution.

00:14:27.580 But now there's something new, and that is sort of all of the establishment, all of the people who are in the best and most privileged places, they're all in agreement with each other.

00:14:38.260 And, you know, it's just breathtaking to watch how uniform and predictable are the things that are said in the media and the things that are said in the academy.

00:14:49.800 And, you know, that's, and, you know, another thing that's going on, this is like 1984, the novel.

00:14:59.320 We're changing history now.

00:15:02.840 That's, you know, history is reality.

00:15:05.280 Aristotle says, this alone is denied even to God, to make what has been not to have been.

00:15:12.700 And if you look at that 1619 project, that thing is just atrocious.

00:15:17.240 It's just a complete distortion of the history of the country.

00:15:21.200 And, and, and that, you know, and, you know, thank God for it.

00:15:25.320 Here's a bright spot.

00:15:27.080 Some of the best established historians, Gordon Wood, especially, have attacked that thing.

00:15:32.020 And so there's some honest people left in the academy, and one has to pray there'll be more.

00:15:38.420 Yeah, you're not saying making history, you're saying changing history.

00:15:41.940 And how do you go about changing history?

00:15:45.100 The protagonist in 1984 is a man named Winston, Winston Smith.

00:15:49.440 It's written, the novel was written by George Orwell, who, you know, was a communist for a while and was in a prison, thinking he was going to get selected to be shot.

00:15:58.200 And that concentrates the mind, he later said.

00:16:01.900 Winston Smith's job, his function in that novel, is to rewrite history as a constant activity.

00:16:09.760 And millions of other people do it too.

00:16:12.700 And so he gets, there's a little pneumatic tube and a, and a cartridge drops down.

00:16:17.120 And he gives him instructions, and he calls up any printed publication, they're all digitized now, and he changes it, what it says, old newspaper articles, magazine articles, encyclopedias, books.

00:16:30.200 They change it to fit with what the party has said true today, and then they reprint everything.

00:16:36.560 And so the whole literature of the society is flowing by like a river.

00:16:42.840 And that is key in the final interrogation of Winston Smith, which happens at the end of the book when he's under torture.

00:16:51.500 One of the points that has to be established in his mind to make him subject himself completely to this tyranny is that there's no reality.

00:16:59.760 And one of the proofs of that is history itself is changeable.

00:17:03.860 History itself is changeable.

00:17:08.200 Whoever controls the present controls the past.

00:17:11.420 I mean, we've heard that many, many times.

00:17:13.860 You've read the book.

00:17:15.180 Yeah.

00:17:16.320 By the way, what's funny is I just finished, again, Animal Farm in 1984 to get myself readjusted to it.

00:17:23.080 I read this two weeks ago.

00:17:25.320 And just to kind of see how much of it's applying to what's going on today.

00:17:28.920 So, you know, for me, here's why my family escaped Iran.

00:17:34.100 We went to Germany.

00:17:34.860 We came here.

00:17:35.780 We came here for the idea of America.

00:17:38.360 Okay.

00:17:38.580 It's the idea of America.

00:17:39.880 We've never met George Washington.

00:17:41.680 I don't know Thomas Jefferson.

00:17:43.220 We don't know Adams, Benjamin Rush.

00:17:45.780 I don't know.

00:17:46.540 We've never met.

00:17:47.440 We've read about them.

00:17:48.340 We know what they've put together.

00:17:49.560 We know why America became what it is today.

00:17:52.340 But we're here for the idea.

00:17:54.200 And we're protected by a couple pieces of paper.

00:17:57.540 And if those papers go away, Larry, this may sound a very strange question to someone like you.

00:18:04.100 If the idea of America doesn't work, what's option two to America? 0.52

00:18:09.760 Well, that's it.

00:18:12.780 From the founders through Lincoln, one of the favorite things to say about America is that it was the last best hope of mankind on earth.

00:18:19.440 And if we become a despotism, it'll be very hard to imagine where one could go.

00:18:25.600 And, you know, this is a big place, right?

00:18:28.660 And, like, we can absorb the Cubans and the people of Eastern Europe and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, you know, millions of them.

00:18:37.900 And, you know, my own view is if they come under the law and they're freedom-loving people, let them all in.

00:18:45.060 But, you know, sometimes people talk about New Zealand.

00:18:52.140 That's a tiny little place.

00:18:54.020 And you can't get in there.

00:18:56.120 And so, you know, in this growth of this bureaucratic form of government, you know, our government operates in many respects the same way as the government of China operates.

00:19:09.620 That is to say, they're a bunch of engineers, they control a lot of power, they tell people what to do in detail, they give you a social score based on what you post on social media and what you're overheard to say and what you print in the press.

00:19:27.000 And what your letters say, they open those sometimes.

00:19:31.080 And then if you get a bad social score, then you can't travel anywhere.

00:19:35.040 And it's hard for you to get a job.

00:19:37.460 So it's a very scientific kind of control by force.

00:19:43.520 And that's it.

00:19:44.980 The scientific part is what makes it different.

00:19:49.360 They can hear everything.

00:19:51.280 In 1984, there's a telescreen, and it's two-way.

00:19:57.160 You have to watch it.

00:19:58.440 You're forbidden to turn it off.

00:20:00.160 And they can watch and listen to you whenever they want, and you never know when they're doing it.

00:20:05.140 Well, that's, you know, the technology is here for that now.

00:20:10.680 Larry, as a parent, we know how to create urgency with our kids.

00:20:17.080 As a boss, you know how to create urgency with the folks who, you know, report to you.

00:20:23.540 As a CEO, founder, you know, you know how to drive an organization.

00:20:27.660 You're the president of a university with, you know, roughly 1,450 students from 47 states, including D.C. and foreign countries.

00:20:35.680 We know how to create urgency, right?

00:20:37.700 There are ways to create urgency.

00:20:39.120 Sometimes I wonder if the political parties are using fear tactics to create urgency for people to vote, but it's not really the end of the world.

00:20:50.560 Let me explain.

00:20:51.360 You know, it's, oh, you guys, if we don't get Trump back in, let me tell you what's going to happen.

00:20:55.840 It's the end of the world.

00:20:56.560 If we don't get Trump out, we're going to be end of the world.

00:21:00.760 I think there's so much of that from both sides.

00:21:03.540 It's the end of the world tactic to create urgency to want to go out there and vote.

00:21:07.080 But I know a lot of people that it's created the kind of anxiety that people are losing their minds.

00:21:12.660 They're thinking the end of the world is really coming to America.

00:21:15.620 And so as effective a strategy that may be to create urgency, I also think it's increased anxiety and panic into families at the highest level today.

00:21:28.060 So to either reassure or validate the point, do you think there is a real, real sense of urgency of what could potentially happen to America?

00:21:40.420 Or are the documents that our founders wrote that we have together in our court system, are we still going to be protected long term by that?

00:21:50.240 Well, you know, we have to save the country.

00:21:55.660 The country's in trouble.

00:21:57.220 Having said that, we should be cultivating respect for our fellow citizens.

00:22:04.720 And we should be cultivating reason and not force.

00:22:09.340 Because when you start using force, then you get the civil war and that's a god awful mess.

00:22:13.340 So, yeah, sure, and we should look to compromise everywhere we can.

00:22:23.260 These sweeping things that they propose to do, those are not compromises.

00:22:27.760 And those should be resisted, but they should be resisted with argument.

00:22:30.820 You know, I issued a massive call for action at three receptions in Arkansas and Texas this week.

00:22:38.860 And the call for action was, here's a list of books you should read.

00:22:43.320 And then you should talk to your neighbors about them.

00:22:46.420 That's the kind of thing that can get us out of this mess.

00:22:48.620 So, here's a part I want you to know from my end.

00:22:53.560 Larry, I'm not worried if it is a real urgent matter that we may lose the country.

00:22:58.840 And I'm comfortable it being just a marketing tactic.

00:23:02.440 I'm both either way.

00:23:03.360 I'm just trying to see from your standpoint, which one is it more?

00:23:06.760 Are we really, you're somebody that is well read.

00:23:10.400 This is your world.

00:23:11.320 It's like talking to a doctor.

00:23:12.460 If I go have a meeting with a doctor, I'm going to ask the question from the doctor.

00:23:15.260 I just had a physical.

00:23:16.820 So, I got my score back on triglycerides.

00:23:18.840 I got my cholesterol score back.

00:23:20.500 And I use that hour to ask every single possible question I can about the body that I have to see what I can get.

00:23:25.480 I have you right now.

00:23:26.440 You've been in this world for a while.

00:23:28.220 Is it really that urgent and that scary?

00:23:30.900 Or this too shall pass?

00:23:34.860 Well, it will surely pass.

00:23:37.800 All human things pass away.

00:23:39.880 But the way you analyze it, you know, so Aristotelian political science.

00:23:44.180 The first political science.

00:23:45.880 Here's how it works.

00:23:47.560 You think about the causes of things.

00:23:50.560 In Aristotle, everything has four causes.

00:23:53.420 It's made out of something.

00:23:54.880 That's the material cause.

00:23:57.260 Somebody made it.

00:23:58.400 That's the efficient cause.

00:23:59.740 It looks like something.

00:24:01.480 That's the formal cause.

00:24:02.940 And it seeks something or loves something.

00:24:06.360 That's the final cause.

00:24:07.620 The most important of the last two.

00:24:10.160 In America, the final cause of America is the Declaration of Independence.

00:24:13.580 That's in its principle that we are created equal and endowed by our creator with rights.

00:24:19.220 That's what we love, we Americans.

00:24:21.220 That's what brought you and your family to this country.

00:24:24.400 And 150 years before, what brought my family to this country.

00:24:28.080 So the formal cause, what the people of America, when they act together, look like, is they look like the structure of the Constitution, the executive branch, the Congress, and the courts.

00:24:42.620 And so if you have a debate going on, and this is the third time this has happened in American history.

00:24:49.740 The first is the Revolution, and the second is the Civil War.

00:24:52.600 If you have a debate going on about the meaning of that final cause, there's a sharp difference of opinion about what equality constitutes.

00:25:03.120 The equality that you came to this country for was, we're going to start out as nobodies, as we are likely nobodies where we are right now because it's turned into a tyranny.

00:25:12.520 But here's a place where nobodies get a chance.

00:25:16.840 They got to go.

00:25:18.660 And so that's your equality, right?

00:25:21.000 And it'll come out different according to different people.

00:25:24.300 The other quality is, if somebody is higher than somebody else, that has to be discrimination.

00:25:31.280 And the government exists to even that out.

00:25:34.140 And so that's a very fundamental debate.

00:25:36.440 It can't be both those things.

00:25:38.640 It's either one or the other.

00:25:40.080 Well, and then the formal, right?

00:25:42.520 So this PAC in the court, you know, we have created a, you know, the worst no-no in the, as a violation of the Constitution and the founders, was to delegate the legislative power.

00:25:56.860 The first three articles, you know, the first is about the legislature, and the second is about the executive, and the third is about the judges.

00:26:03.380 They all began with, the blank power shall be vested in.

00:26:09.940 So the executive power in a president, the judicial power in a Supreme Court and the lower courts.

00:26:18.240 Only the first one says all the legislative power.

00:26:22.720 That word all only occurs there.

00:26:25.640 And if you read John Locke, you'll see there's a whole chapter about the vice of delegating the legislative power.

00:26:31.680 Because if you do that, there can be a lot more laws.

00:26:36.000 You know, the Congress of the United States makes, and the president signs, about 150 to 200 laws a year.

00:26:43.180 And that's the number that it's made for 150 years.

00:26:47.480 And why?

00:26:48.040 It works the same way.

00:26:49.160 It's cumbersome.

00:26:50.000 It takes a while.

00:26:51.180 And so now they delegated that out, right?

00:26:53.180 And, you know, in the last year of Obama, I happen to know, they added 80,000 pages of regulations to the Federal Register.

00:27:01.500 Few of those were made by the Congress.

00:27:03.920 And then the question is, who made them?

00:27:07.040 Well, you got to look it up, right?

00:27:08.560 Because there's 150 agencies or so.

00:27:11.140 By the way, there's been, every little while, there's an outbreak of argument about exactly how many administrative agencies there are.

00:27:22.080 And the answer is, there are too many to count precisely.

00:27:25.540 And so, yeah, we've built a great engine.

00:27:30.180 And it's bigger than we are, or threatening to become so.

00:27:34.900 And so, my point is, we should be concerned about that.

00:27:37.640 And we should think that through, right?

00:27:41.980 It's not enough.

00:27:43.780 We do need a very high level of statesmanship.

00:27:47.540 The reason we got out of the Civil War is that man sitting back there over your right shoulder, right?

00:27:53.040 He was nobody, you know, hardly anybody in history like him.

00:27:58.680 Well, we need that standard now.

00:28:00.280 We need somebody who's eloquent, who has a deep understanding, who can explain beautifully, and who's courageous.

00:28:09.380 And, you know, Donald Trump is some of those things.

00:28:12.120 But, you know, it would be, it's almost like a miracle when you get somebody as good as that.

00:28:17.840 You know, Winston Churchill was like that.

00:28:19.300 He was just an awesome human being.

00:28:20.760 And he changed things because of that.

00:28:24.600 And he could because, and he did it with his mouth.

00:28:29.640 You know, he just, people heard what he said, and it was more powerful than swords.

00:28:36.920 Although it put a lot of swords into motion.

00:28:41.480 Larry, why do you think men like that are hated?

00:28:43.560 Well, I mean, Churchill was hated.

00:28:47.800 If you read his books, the, the, the, and, and I'm a Churchill guy myself as well.

00:28:52.580 But why are people like that, leaders like that, hated?

00:28:55.860 Well, you know, first of all, they do a lot.

00:28:59.540 You know, they're consequential.

00:29:01.780 And at the biggest scale, people like that make decisions that help or harm very large numbers of people.

00:29:10.200 The good ones, they don't intend to harm anybody, except as an act of justice if somebody's done wrong.

00:29:18.760 But, you know, like, here's an example.

00:29:23.200 Here's what happens when you're a statesman.

00:29:25.600 Churchill forecast the horrors of modern war.

00:29:29.780 He's a very brave soldier.

00:29:31.000 He wrote three best-selling books about his war experiences before he was 26 years old.

00:29:36.880 And in 1901, he forecast the dreadful cost of the First World War.

00:29:44.080 Only one who did.

00:29:45.520 And then he tried to avoid that war.

00:29:47.660 And then when they got in that war, he tried to mitigate its cost.

00:29:52.040 In life, especially.

00:29:53.840 He said, we're a free country.

00:29:55.200 We don't send, you know, a big percentage of our young men to death in a four-year period.

00:30:02.000 So he had two plans.

00:30:05.040 And one was, he started the experiments that involved, that invented the tank.

00:30:11.700 He's the one who thought it up.

00:30:13.560 It's called tank because he was in the Admiralty.

00:30:17.020 He was the head of the Navy.

00:30:17.840 And he got a naval engineer to start working on it.

00:30:20.340 And the code name was Waterships Tanks.

00:30:23.980 He was trying to spare life.

00:30:25.940 Well, then the other thing was to go around.

00:30:29.560 And since the trenches went from the Alps to the sea, you sort of had to go around the continent.

00:30:35.240 And so he went down to the Straits of the Dardanelles and tried to force them with the Navy and get through.

00:30:42.260 And Turkey, which was in league with Germany in that war, was in the way.

00:30:47.680 Well, it didn't work.

00:30:49.060 And the thing is, this effort of his to save lives ended up costing a lot of lives.

00:30:57.940 And those people, you know, whose family members died, they didn't know what his motive was.

00:31:03.620 If it had worked, it would have saved millions of lives.

00:31:06.400 And it didn't work.

00:31:08.520 And, you know, he learned a lot of lessons from that.

00:31:11.040 He thought maybe, well, he accepted responsibility for this part.

00:31:16.140 He actually didn't think up that particular way of going about this cotton-wide flanking maneuver.

00:31:22.940 He wanted to go north.

00:31:24.900 But he adopted it.

00:31:26.200 And when it met trouble, everybody else sort of drifted away.

00:31:31.820 And they left him holding the bag.

00:31:35.420 And so he learned from that.

00:31:37.660 What he learned was, don't take responsibility for something you don't have the authority to accomplish.

00:31:44.640 So that means, by the way, that tens of thousands of people on the Gallipoli Peninsula, many of them from Australia and New Zealand, died because that effort went wrong.

00:31:57.960 And Churchill's part in it was that if he had seen that they were going to blame him for this, and he still didn't have the power to make it happen, he might have stopped it.

00:32:10.120 And in the Second World War, he learned.

00:32:13.120 He set things up very differently from that.

00:32:16.080 So the point is, statesmen have consequences.

00:32:20.640 And sometimes people are harmed, whatever they do.

00:32:23.220 And innocent people, too.

00:32:24.500 And then, of course, there are the partisans on the other side, you know.

00:32:28.580 I mean, until sometime in September 1940, but reoccurring through the war, they were leading people in the British government and the British aristocracy who were in touch with Hitler, trying to work out a peace, and thought that Britain ought to side with Hitler.

00:32:46.760 And then, you know, the communists in Britain, they agitated against the war, well, in the beginning, because in the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union was in league with Nazi Germany.

00:33:04.020 And so the daily worker and the communist rags in Britain, they agitated against getting in the war.

00:33:11.240 And then the minute Hitler attacked Stalin, then they wanted to get in. 0.93

00:33:15.820 They were all for it, right?

00:33:17.120 And so partisanship explains a lot, too.

00:33:19.780 And the challenge, and it's the challenge for every citizen, too, is to do the work, think as hard as you can, say your prayers, try to place yourself in the right, and try to place yourself in the right in a way that harms the fewest people and helps the most.

00:33:39.720 And so that's the spirit.

00:33:41.720 And that's, you know, that spirit is strained right now in the country, because it's hyper-partisan.

00:33:47.480 I agree.

00:33:50.200 It is hyper-partisan.

00:33:51.640 You know, you said something earlier.

00:33:53.140 By the way, thank you for explaining that regarding why folks like Churchill are hated at the level that they are in.

00:33:58.080 I know you kind of said we need a Lincoln, and we need a—Trump has some of that, you know, where they have similar methods of facing opposition and power.

00:34:09.500 Who is the closest thing to a Lincoln that we have right now?

00:34:12.460 Are you seeing anybody outside of Trump?

00:34:14.000 I'm talking about the future.

00:34:15.080 Who is somebody you're looking at right now that could be a future Lincoln?

00:34:20.020 Well, I have hopes for some of the young ones who—I'm an old man now, so I know a lot of people.

00:34:25.140 And, you know, Tom Cotton, a senator, is a friend of mine.

00:34:29.880 We're both from Arkansas.

00:34:31.060 It means we're cousins.

00:34:33.660 You know, Mike Pence is a heck of a guy.

00:34:37.300 Do they have that level of talent?

00:34:39.420 Well, we'll see, right?

00:34:42.680 You know, Tom Cotton is a personal friend of mine.

00:34:45.620 I've known him a long time, a long time before he got in politics.

00:34:49.020 And, you know, I believe, by the way, that Clarence Thomas is one of the greatest Americans in history.

00:34:55.420 I think he's the greatest member of the court in our time.

00:34:58.160 And so he's not a political man.

00:35:04.120 He's a legal-slash-political man.

00:35:06.540 But I think he has the qualities in spades.

00:35:09.200 I mean, it's just awesome.

00:35:10.880 So anyway, there's some greatness.

00:35:12.840 But is there that level of greatness?

00:35:14.600 That's kind of once in 100 years kind of thing.

00:35:17.480 I agree.

00:35:18.200 I agree.

00:35:18.680 I think that's why when sometimes people say, we need a Reagan, we need a Lincoln, we need a this,

00:35:23.300 I think it sometimes puts the pressure on the party because everybody's sitting there saying,

00:35:26.960 well, you know, no one can compare to Reagan's humor and wit. 0.99

00:35:29.880 No one can compare to, you know, what Lincoln had to do when he went against.

00:35:33.400 And it kind of sometimes scares some people off to say, well, maybe I'm not that good enough to go there.

00:35:39.580 By the way, didn't Clarence Thomas, wasn't he a faculty of Hillsdale?

00:35:45.360 I thought he was faculty.

00:35:46.400 That's a faculty, right?

00:35:47.340 Yeah.

00:35:47.780 Well, you know, I just was fortunate to meet him before he became famous.

00:35:52.860 And before he became famous, I began to think that he's one of the greatest people I'd ever seen.

00:35:59.320 And then he got on the court.

00:36:00.700 And, you know, he's just a very magnificent man, magnanimous man.

00:36:05.500 So I went to see him one time.

00:36:09.020 And, you know, I don't go to see him very often because I don't feel like I ought to take his time.

00:36:13.720 But he usually chastises me for not.

00:36:15.580 But I said, you know, Justice, this morning, I said, I've done some work and I have to talk to you about something.

00:36:22.040 And I'm going to take 30 minutes.

00:36:24.160 And I apologize in advance.

00:36:25.600 You won't like it.

00:36:26.460 And he said, what do you want to talk about, Larry?

00:36:29.440 And I said, I want to talk about your greatness.

00:36:32.380 And he said, I don't want to talk about that.

00:36:35.480 And I said, see, I told you, I'm going to read you some things that you've written and some things that John Marshall wrote and some things that some of your contemporaries wrote.

00:36:46.020 And you will see that you are a recovery of something amazing.

00:36:51.480 And I read it to him.

00:36:53.500 And he actually said, Larry, you know, you and your friends helped me learn how to do that.

00:36:59.780 And I said, sir, we do not know how to do that.

00:37:03.000 We are not judges.

00:37:04.600 You have done that.

00:37:06.360 Thank God for it.

00:37:07.940 Well, I just think he's awesome.

00:37:09.220 And I don't mind saying so.

00:37:10.520 And he doesn't like me saying so.

00:37:12.680 He comes across as I've never met him.

00:37:15.260 He comes across.

00:37:15.980 I've watched a lot of his on how he takes his approach.

00:37:18.740 He seems like a very strong character type of a leader.

00:37:23.800 And it's good to see you saying that about him.

00:37:27.420 But, you know, you said something.

00:37:28.980 If we can go back to civil war, you said civil war, all these other events that's happened, we've not shut down.

00:37:35.360 Right.

00:37:35.560 We've not shut down and told kids, you can't go to school.

00:37:37.640 You can't do this.

00:37:38.180 You can't do that.

00:37:38.780 I lived in Iran when Saddam Hussein attacked Iran.

00:37:41.980 We got bombed 167 times in a day in Tehran.

00:37:44.980 We still had school.

00:37:46.680 You know, we still went to school.

00:37:48.520 I mean, we moved to Bandar Pahlavi, which is a different city now, Shomal.

00:37:53.280 And I still went to school.

00:37:54.820 They didn't shut down school.

00:37:55.960 And that was a war with bombing and people dying and half a million.

00:37:59.380 You know, it was a pretty intense time for where we were at.

00:38:02.960 What kind of jurisdiction, if I can say, do governors like a Newsom or a Cuomo or Mayor de Blasio or Garcetti have, like last night coming out and just saying we're putting a curfew 10 o'clock until December, you know, going into Thanksgiving.

00:38:21.520 And Cuomo had his big exchange on TV with the report asking him a question.

00:38:26.720 And he said, that's an obnoxious question.

00:38:28.320 And the next thing you know, a few minutes later, they pretty much shut down, you know, New York.

00:38:32.400 What kind of jurisdiction does the government have to tell all of us that you cannot go anywhere and you have to stay home?

00:38:40.140 Well, that's right.

00:38:42.880 They have built, we have built, we have permitted them to build, I guess you'd say, a mechanism that can reach into every village in the land.

00:38:51.980 And a key to it is every village in the land, Hillsdale, Michigan, all of them, they have people whose prime duty is to read bureaucratic rules that come down from above.

00:39:05.180 And that's what they do all the time.

00:39:07.240 And, you know, in Hillsdale, I know some of them.

00:39:09.460 They're very nice people.

00:39:11.080 They're neighbors.

00:39:11.800 They're neighbors, but also they get these complicated things, you know, like here's a rule that we've been enforcing or did enforce for a time in Michigan.

00:39:22.340 It was legal for you to go to the market and buy a garden hoe, but you couldn't buy seeds. 0.97

00:39:30.120 And so stores, you know, on paying a fine and being closed, had to rope off the seed section.

00:39:36.440 And, you know, there's a list of things you can go and buy.

00:39:42.380 There's a, you know, our governor has written a thousand pages of rules with her and six or eight people who work for her.

00:39:50.280 And then, you know, all over, right?

00:39:53.140 I mean, 250,000 college students, according to the New York Times, I like to quote them when I think they're right, have had this virus and three have died.

00:40:04.620 And the three had very serious other illnesses, right?

00:40:09.780 So the point is, this is much less dangerous to the young than the ordinary flu, but we're shutting them down.

00:40:17.820 And, you know, if you go read the governor's rules, because the people who are dying from this virus, and it is very serious virus, right?

00:40:26.260 One must be careful if you're older and if you have one of several diseases, respiratory illness, heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, things like that, right?

00:40:40.600 And then it can kill you in a hurry, right?

00:40:43.160 And so those people should be incredibly cautious, and others should be cautious when they're around them.

00:40:49.300 But if you confine everybody to their homes, then, you know, the head of the CDC in July, the guy one step above Fauci, okay, his name's beginning with an R, he said in July that in the last two months, there had been more extra suicides than there had been COVID deaths.

00:41:10.140 Nobody counts that, right?

00:41:12.400 What about the businesses lost?

00:41:13.980 What about the young people who lose the golden years of their life when they can prepare their intellects and character to live a great life?

00:41:22.740 We just suspend all that.

00:41:25.080 And the decisions are made by people who don't even understand what that activity is.

00:41:31.060 Larry, you said your governor wrote a thousand rules, a page with a thousand page, something with a bunch of rules.

00:41:39.500 Isn't your governor also, you know, some folks are trying to get her impeached? 1.00

00:41:43.340 I just read something yesterday.

00:41:46.100 In a rare outbreak of virtue, they've put articles of impeachment in against her. 0.88

00:41:53.480 And I, you know, I think she, look, here's the situation.

00:42:00.440 The Supreme Court of Michigan ruled that she was acting like a legislature and going beyond her power.

00:42:08.500 And so she didn't have the power to do the, to extend these emergency orders.

00:42:15.660 So then in the next step, she delegated that to the health department, which are her appointees.

00:42:21.700 So her position now is an elected official may not have the power to do this, but these bureaucrats have the power. 1.00

00:42:28.460 And so they're just, you know, they just won't stop.

00:42:32.320 And, you know, I can just tell you at Hillsdale College, it's, it's a wonderful place, right?

00:42:37.660 And the kids are heartsick about these disruptions.

00:42:41.100 And they're, they like me because I'm fighting them, but they wish I'd be more successful.

00:42:47.080 I'm working on that.

00:42:48.420 I know you came out yesterday.

00:42:49.940 I believe it's yesterday saying you sent an email out to your students, faculty and staff saying regret, regretfully, we are no longer able to hold or attend classes in person.

00:42:58.200 As of Wednesday of this week, we comply with these orders unwillingly and intend to do everything possible in order to carry on the life of the college, despite this interference and your active cases, I believe went down from 76 the week prior to 32 and 189 students of yours have tested positive for COVID-19.

00:43:18.940 And you guys have like a 10 day quarantine guidelines that you follow on your school.

00:43:22.380 How are you being affected with some of the decisions she's making as well as coronavirus?

00:43:28.200 Well, there's this thing called the Great Barons and Declaration, you can just find it on the internet.

00:43:33.600 And it's three really, you know, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, one from Oxford, three leading epidemiologists.

00:43:40.660 And now they've been signed on by 20,000 others or something like that around the world.

00:43:46.540 And what they say is, this thing does not hurt young, healthy people.

00:43:51.520 And they say, herd immunity is not a strategy, it's a biological fact.

00:43:56.460 If we get a vaccine, the only way it can be effective is by helping us achieve herd immunity faster.

00:44:03.720 And herd immunity means most people are not vulnerable to it, and so the virus can't spread.

00:44:08.160 Well, the way we're doing it is, we're preventing people who won't be harmed by the virus from getting it.

00:44:15.280 And that spreads the load of getting herd immunity equally upon the people who are safe from it and the people who are vulnerable to it.

00:44:26.480 And that thing, you know, in other words, if I was left to my own devices, I would, every time a kid got sick, I'd say, stay in your room.

00:44:36.000 We look in on them twice a day.

00:44:38.220 Call if you get breathing problems.

00:44:39.880 Very unlikely that you will.

00:44:42.780 But if you do, you know, we'll be there, right?

00:44:45.180 And then when the symptoms go away, you can come back out.

00:44:49.180 That's what you should do, right?

00:44:50.980 And then you wouldn't be quarantined people who won't be harmed by it for 14 days for fear that they will get it.

00:45:00.160 And that's 14 days lost in their lives, and these are precious days.

00:45:04.920 So the point is, it's just, in my opinion, just wrongheaded from the beginning.

00:45:10.180 And see, here's another thing.

00:45:11.980 Let's say I'm wrong about that.

00:45:15.280 Well, first of all, there's nobody at Hillsdale College who's not a volunteer.

00:45:21.100 There's 4,500 other colleges.

00:45:23.940 You can go to any of them, right?

00:45:25.540 If there's one that has all the harshest quarantine policies in the world, you could go to that one.

00:45:31.500 Faculty members, they can work anywhere they want to, right?

00:45:34.820 And, you know, with the faculty, because some of them are older, we tell them, if you're concerned about this, you can teach by Zoom.

00:45:42.500 And we tell the kids, if you think you're vulnerable to this, you can study by Zoom.

00:45:46.820 Now, none of the kids do, and few of the faculty members do.

00:45:49.920 The point being, if I make a determination about this, there's options for everybody affected by it.

00:46:00.680 If the governor makes the determination, it's the law.

00:46:04.920 And you've got to move out of the state if you want to escape it.

00:46:07.860 And maybe that won't be enough.

00:46:10.060 So it just looks so wrongheaded to me.

00:46:13.360 Right.

00:46:13.880 It's a big difference.

00:46:14.840 And by the way, what are your thoughts about vaccine when the vaccine does come out?

00:46:20.360 I know right now, Moderna and Pfizer came out, and they're both talking about 94.5% on the Moderna side.

00:46:26.920 And then Pfizer originally said 90.

00:46:28.480 Now they're saying 95% efficacy.

00:46:30.380 When it comes out, are you going to make it a mandatory thing?

00:46:34.200 Are you going to require your kids to take the vaccine to go to school?

00:46:38.140 Or are you going to make that an option as well for them?

00:46:41.920 Yeah, I'm not going to require them to do anything they don't want to do.

00:46:44.320 Unless I've got a really clear reason, right?

00:46:48.140 So there's a woman. 0.99

00:46:50.300 She's a heroic woman.

00:46:51.460 She's a member of our faculty.

00:46:53.440 And I don't know what she's got.

00:46:55.360 But everybody says if she gets this thing, she'll die.

00:46:58.840 I can't keep her out of the classroom.

00:47:01.600 I've said to her once, I said, you know, if you get this thing and die, it'll be very inconvenient to me.

00:47:06.920 For my sake, don't do it.

00:47:09.180 And she says back to me, she says, okay, I'll stop when you stop.

00:47:13.080 You know?

00:47:14.140 Well, I just adore that woman. 1.00

00:47:16.820 So I will encourage her in the strongest terms to get the vaccine.

00:47:21.880 But she's a human being.

00:47:23.840 And you know why she keeps teaching?

00:47:26.240 Same reason I keep teaching and I keep working.

00:47:29.680 This is my life.

00:47:31.340 It's what I'm supposed to do.

00:47:33.080 I agree.

00:47:33.520 And so I should do it against obstacles, too.

00:47:37.580 Because there's an obstacle every day, right?

00:47:40.300 And what we're teaching young people is your life can be suspended for causes that are not obviously good.

00:47:48.700 And that's not going to make them stronger.

00:47:50.680 It's going to make them weaker.

00:47:52.460 But I think that's part of the purpose.

00:47:55.240 Interesting.

00:47:55.840 I like the whole choice part where, you know, you're going to give them a choice to decide what they're going to be doing.

00:48:01.040 But at the same time, you're sending the example.

00:48:03.200 Another topic that's been coming up is college tuition being paid for.

00:48:07.000 Biden, first two years for everybody.

00:48:09.940 Let's forgive $10,000.

00:48:11.840 No, let's forgive $50,000.

00:48:14.180 And then Elizabeth Warren says, let's forgive all the $1.5 trillion.

00:48:16.900 How are you affected by that if all of that's being forgiven?

00:48:22.260 Because it doesn't affect the colleges and universities.

00:48:25.260 That goes straight to Sally Mae and the lenders and the taxpayers, right?

00:48:29.220 What do you think about what's being proposed with, you know, paying for college tuition of kids?

00:48:35.580 Well, two questions.

00:48:37.660 You know, first of all, is it a good idea?

00:48:40.280 And the second is, what's its effect on us?

00:48:42.520 Well, it can't be a good idea.

00:48:44.460 And the reason is, of all of the things on earth that somebody can give you, education is the last thing that you can get as an entitlement.

00:48:56.540 And the reason is, every minute that you're learning, you're concentrating.

00:49:01.280 And it takes energy and discipline to do it.

00:49:03.740 And the teacher can be brilliant.

00:49:05.840 And you're not paying attention.

00:49:07.200 You learn nothing.

00:49:07.860 So, the first step is, to get a higher education, you need to want one and be prepared to sacrifice for it.

00:49:16.980 So, this idea that we're just going to send everybody to college, well, what will they do when they get there?

00:49:22.960 Used to be a distinction to go, right?

00:49:25.640 And, you know, the success rates in college are miserably low now.

00:49:29.020 So, I don't think any of that's a good idea.

00:49:32.080 And I don't think that's where the problem is.

00:49:34.140 Now, affecting us, we don't take any of that money, right?

00:49:36.780 So, we get, and the other thing is, we get a small percentage of our money from the students.

00:49:43.160 Last year, it was 7% of the revenues of Hillsdale College came from the students and their parents.

00:49:48.420 And we're trying to make that number zero.

00:49:51.200 Now, we have an unusual reason for wanting to do that.

00:49:53.860 But, you know, we have an honor code.

00:49:57.860 It's very difficult to get into Hillsdale College.

00:50:00.620 And that's precious because you're going to have to work.

00:50:05.100 Half the time, the course is the same for every student.

00:50:08.820 And that means you don't like physics, never mind, you got to take it.

00:50:11.720 You don't like philosophy, you got to take it, right?

00:50:14.280 So, we need kids who commit and they sign an honor code.

00:50:19.340 And if we're not charging them anything at all, then we can ask for more in the way of commitment from them.

00:50:26.720 And that's the valuable thing.

00:50:28.300 That's what makes success.

00:50:30.120 I like that.

00:50:30.720 That's a very interesting perspective on what you said there.

00:50:33.720 If we're not asking nothing from them, we can expect more from them.

00:50:38.700 And you're only taking 350 kids a year anyway.

00:50:40.960 So, it's not like you're opening it up to everybody.

00:50:44.340 And see, the other thing is, we teach, we have two and a half million people taking online courses at Hillsdale College.

00:50:52.800 And those are free.

00:50:54.720 We don't ask any money in them either, right?

00:50:57.620 And there's about 70,000 people now, I think, that have taken all 26 of the courses we've done so far and taken the exams and passed them.

00:51:07.440 And they've got a sort of undergraduate education there.

00:51:11.320 And, you know, we have a rule of action.

00:51:17.300 First of all, Hillsdale College itself, the little nuclear reactor in remote Michigan, that has to burn hot and pure.

00:51:26.080 You got to get the best kids, the ones that most want to be there, the faculty who are the most eloquent and able.

00:51:32.940 And you got to make that thing a treasure.

00:51:36.140 And then that thing can radiate all over the country. 0.98

00:51:39.280 We started, what, 24 charter schools now.

00:51:42.580 We've got eight more forming, right?

00:51:44.520 And our kids go teaching them.

00:51:47.040 We're about to start a master's degree program in classical education to get to build trained school leaders, you know, so people can teach others, right?

00:51:55.200 And the thing is, this is an activity that has never been, you know, at its peak, it's never been a profit-making activity.

00:52:06.260 Education is for young people who haven't established themselves yet.

00:52:11.340 And they take some time before they start their career, and they improve their intellects and their characters.

00:52:17.620 So, of course, it's a charitable enterprise.

00:52:19.920 You should do it efficiently, and you should do it as cheaply as possible, and you should do it excellently.

00:52:28.360 And, you know, when education was private, that was how it was.

00:52:34.940 You know, used to be 70% of the people, it's about 1960, went to liberal arts colleges.

00:52:42.580 Now it's 16%.

00:52:44.780 And where do they go now?

00:52:46.580 They go to the second and third tier state universities.

00:52:50.880 And that's a change, right?

00:52:53.200 And those places are not teaching the good, the true, and the beautiful.

00:52:58.420 And it would be better if we trained them, and if students learned the history and principles of their country, and what kind of thing they are, and the great story of the past, and philosophy with its many contentions, right?

00:53:16.380 Everybody, you know, used to be a high school education brought most of that stuff.

00:53:20.680 So that's, you know, one of our problems is, we've bureaucratized education.

00:53:27.220 It's a centralized, top-down thing.

00:53:29.860 And, you know, Republicans are extensively responsible for that.

00:53:34.060 And we need to liberate that, right?

00:53:36.500 Charter schools is the great engine.

00:53:38.700 Wait, you said Republicans are responsible for that.

00:53:40.620 Why is that?

00:53:42.320 No Child Left Behind Act.

00:53:44.140 In the first, the two guys named Bush since Reagan, right?

00:53:49.200 They both, the elder, you know, they're fine people, by the way.

00:53:53.700 And I voted for them and would vote for them again, you know, depending on the alternative.

00:53:59.440 But they thought that they could fix education in America from Washington, D.C.

00:54:06.640 And so they came up with this idea of high-stakes testing, which means, and then, you know, one of them said to me, a senior guy in this George W. Bush administration, when they were about to launch the No Child Left Behind Act, which was a disaster and had to get rid of.

00:54:25.740 He said, well, we'd like you to take the lead in this.

00:54:29.140 And I said, sounds like a bad name.

00:54:31.360 And he said, bad name?

00:54:32.380 I said, yeah.

00:54:32.940 I said, you ever been in the classroom?

00:54:34.160 Somebody's always getting left behind.

00:54:37.020 You got to go back and get them.

00:54:38.500 But also, some of them are going to just get farther than others.

00:54:41.660 That's just how it is, right?

00:54:43.860 And then they thought, and they said, well, we're going to have these national tests.

00:54:50.880 And see, schools all over America now take two months off in the spring and teach toward the test, right?

00:54:57.860 And that means the tests are driving curriculum.

00:55:01.440 And who writes the test, right?

00:55:03.540 Except the education elite. 0.99

00:55:05.760 It was the most foolish idea I've ever heard. 0.97

00:55:09.160 And it dominates education today, K through 12. 0.98

00:55:14.120 That's why I wanted you to tell the history on that.

00:55:17.100 It's funny how you said, no child left behind, no family left behind.

00:55:20.400 You know, it's a concept of somebody is going to be left behind because there is competition.

00:55:25.480 And someone's going to be willing to do more than the other person is.

00:55:28.340 Makes a lot of sense.

00:55:29.200 I got two other topics for you before we wrap up here.

00:55:32.940 One of them is regarding, we talked about slavery earlier.

00:55:36.960 I'm half Armenian, half Assyrian.

00:55:38.920 And if you know history, which I'm willing to bet you do, you know what happened with Armenian genocide, with the Ottoman Empire and the Turks and all that other stuff that took place.

00:55:48.300 This year earlier, you had both Congress and Senate that said, yes, that event did take place until it went to all the way to the top.

00:55:55.100 And they said, no, we're not going to pass it to make it official, with the fear of the relationship with Turkey being hit with Erdogan.

00:56:00.920 Because Erdogan has got the most powerful military in the Middle East.

00:56:06.060 And if, God forbid, America says, yes, it was a genocide, you know, Turkey may face a trillion or two dollars of reparations that they may need to pay.

00:56:15.940 You're seeing a lot of conversations come up.

00:56:18.420 And I have a feeling over the next four years, it's going to be even more, the conversation about reparation for slavery.

00:56:24.300 What are your thoughts about folks who bring up for all those years of what happened that maybe it deserves a reparation?

00:56:33.440 What are your thoughts on that?

00:56:35.600 Well, the problem is, who's going to pay whom, right?

00:56:41.580 Because people who never had a slave are going to be paying people who were never slaves.

00:56:48.500 You see, that's what you have to do if you're going to have reparations.

00:56:51.720 And why is that right?

00:56:54.020 It means, by the way, that some people who are poor are going to be paying other people who are rich.

00:57:00.920 That's, by the way, what affirmative action does in colleges. 0.75

00:57:03.620 It means that rich people of one race get in ahead of poor people of another race.

00:57:12.120 Because if they just mean tested, you know, like we have the Frederick Douglass Scholarships at Hillsdale College.

00:57:18.720 Frederick Douglass spoke on our campus twice.

00:57:20.900 Really great man.

00:57:22.640 And so severely poor kids, inner city kids, difficult background kids. 1.00

00:57:29.100 We don't care what color they are, but we're looking for that, right?

00:57:31.760 We have scholarships for those kids, but they're just like everybody else.

00:57:36.160 They got to want to come and they got to be able to do it.

00:57:39.600 And so we go looking for ones who are like that and come to find out.

00:57:42.720 You can find some of them in the poor areas because most of these colleges that do pick them by color,

00:57:47.660 according to a book by a woman from Stanford, they're getting them from the suburbs.

00:57:52.560 They're getting relatively rich kids, right?

00:57:55.040 And that doesn't, that's not the deal, right?

00:57:58.080 I mean, like, you know, the Armenians were slaughtered en masse, right?

00:58:06.000 And I, we, the world should acknowledge that.

00:58:10.440 That was shameful, right?

00:58:12.300 And, you know, the guy who did it, above all, Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey,

00:58:18.000 he was in many ways a very great man.

00:58:20.960 And he turned Turkey toward the West as part of NATO, right?

00:58:24.820 And here's another funny, history is so ironic.

00:58:29.240 In the last stages of that Dardanelles campaign, where Churchill tried to flank around in the First World War through the Mediterranean,

00:58:36.840 too late and uncoordinated, they launched a land attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula,

00:58:42.740 which is in the Straits of the Dardanelles that connects the Black Sea and the Mediterranean,

00:58:49.440 which means it reaches up to Russia and all around Eastern Europe, right?

00:58:54.820 It's a key place.

00:58:56.980 Well, they decided they didn't make it by ships.

00:58:59.820 They decided to land some troops.

00:59:02.120 Well, they landed some troops and they went up and surveyed the hill above them.

00:59:08.900 There's photographs from the top of the hill of British soldiers sunbathing on the beach.

00:59:13.840 And the general said, well, go up there tomorrow.

00:59:17.520 Well, the next day when they tried to go up there, this Turkish force had arrived and it was led by Kemal Ataturk.

00:59:28.440 It was led by the, who would become the founder of modern Turkey.

00:59:32.040 And he was a tremendous soldier, right?

00:59:34.600 And defeat of that thing had terrible effect on the career of Winston Churchill.

00:59:38.800 And my point about that is, that's an incredibly significant man.

00:59:47.200 And for the West and for freedom, he ended up doing a lot of good.

00:59:51.460 And, you know, for Turkey, he killed a bunch of people. 0.87

00:59:55.280 You should not sweep that under the rug.

00:59:58.440 I agree.

00:59:59.420 I agree.

00:59:59.980 And the thing is, the right history being told for folks to know what really happened in events.

01:00:04.300 So that was an interesting answer on reparations saying those paying who didn't own slaves to those who weren't slaves.

01:00:16.080 That kind of makes you think about it.

01:00:17.600 But the argument, come back and say, well, like the argument, I don't know if you saw when Kamala made that one video saying, you had a better head start than I did.

01:00:25.820 I don't have any generational wealth.

01:00:27.760 You did.

01:00:28.340 You did have generational wealth.

01:00:29.840 I don't have any generational wealth because I come from a family of slaves.

01:00:34.760 So I don't deserve, I deserve something to give me the same upper hand to be able to compete with you.

01:00:40.200 That's the argument you're seeing being made on the other side.

01:00:42.680 What do you say to that?

01:00:44.680 Well, two things.

01:00:46.140 The goal is equality of opportunity.

01:00:48.900 Equality of opportunity will always be imperfect.

01:00:53.520 And the reason is kids love their, parents love their kids more than they love other people's kids.

01:00:59.240 For example, I grew up extremely rich.

01:01:03.540 My father was a schoolteacher in Pocahontas, Arkansas, and he loved to read books.

01:01:09.920 Think of the wealth that I got from that.

01:01:12.420 And because he was poor, I learned how to work.

01:01:15.840 Right?

01:01:16.360 And I watched him and my mother work all the time.

01:01:20.100 And, you know, so I became a worker.

01:01:22.100 Right?

01:01:22.420 And I love to read books.

01:01:24.080 Now, not everybody gets that advantage.

01:01:26.320 And, you know, I like to say, you know, I might have been born to a rich wastrel.

01:01:31.840 And instead, I got lucky.

01:01:34.060 But, you know, Patrick, you got lucky.

01:01:37.460 Right?

01:01:38.320 Your family, a grand adventure, courage, trouble.

01:01:44.660 Right?

01:01:45.220 Has that been anything but good for you?

01:01:47.300 And it's partly because of your character and what kind of guy you are.

01:01:51.420 But it had those experiences to temper that character.

01:01:54.740 You'll never even all that out.

01:01:56.940 You can't do it.

01:01:58.440 So what you need is, and the other thing is, now you're going to take a force.

01:02:02.720 Right?

01:02:02.960 Because the way you make money in a free economy is you do things for people that they like and they pay you for it.

01:02:08.040 That means the free economy is responsive to the needs of others.

01:02:12.360 Right?

01:02:12.800 So now what we're going to do is we're going to pass a rule that's going to take a whole bunch from one bunch of people and give it to another bunch of people.

01:02:20.060 And that makes the people in charge of that rule really powerful.

01:02:23.760 And those people are people too.

01:02:27.300 I like that.

01:02:28.260 And I got to tell you, you're right.

01:02:31.520 I feel like I'm the luckiest man alive.

01:02:33.980 Like, literally.

01:02:34.740 I literally feel like I'm the luckiest man alive.

01:02:38.280 And if anybody works with me, they will tell you I've said that a few thousand times, that I feel like I'm the luckiest man alive to have lived, that I've lived so far.

01:02:46.440 Technical question for you at the end here before we wrap up.

01:02:49.140 Ronald Reagan.

01:02:49.800 So here's a man who you said, I think your words were somewhere you said what made Reagan special is the fact that he was a great explainer.

01:02:58.560 Which I've never heard that before, to say Ronald Reagan or a person is an explainer.

01:03:02.760 Like, he explained things and you were kind of like, okay, that kind of does make sense when you explain.

01:03:07.700 Because sometimes people are just quick, they give you the answer.

01:03:10.160 But you're right, he was an explainer.

01:03:12.040 So if Ronald Reagan, who is adored by his side and respected by folks on the other side, and he wins 49 out of 50 states,

01:03:21.420 why is it that his own son disagrees with him politically, his biological son, Ron Reagan, but his adopted son, Michael Reagan, agrees with him politically?

01:03:33.100 How does that work out?

01:03:34.120 Well, isn't that proof of human freedom?

01:03:41.640 You know, I mean, you know, I'm in the kid business.

01:03:45.980 I'm an expert on 18 to 21 year olds.

01:03:49.160 It's a really vibrant bunch, right?

01:03:50.720 And we get siblings, and they're different, because they're human, right?

01:03:56.360 And they've got different inclinations.

01:03:59.640 You know, Aristotle teaches us a beautiful thing, many beautiful things.

01:04:03.520 One of them is, how do you form your character?

01:04:06.420 The answer is, you form it by making choices, especially difficult choices.

01:04:13.060 And choices are difficult when there's something that's convenient or easy or will avoid pain.

01:04:18.920 But there's something else that makes you want to do the harder thing.

01:04:23.260 And that's the voice of the good talking to you.

01:04:25.880 And your character is formed when you listen to that voice.

01:04:29.460 And then you might suffer or forego some pleasure.

01:04:33.020 And if you do that over and over again, you'll become a great person.

01:04:37.960 And the motive force for that choice is always in the person.

01:04:42.680 And that means two siblings can make it different, right?

01:04:46.840 And I'm not saying that, you know, Aristotle says that only a very few people become fully vicious.

01:04:53.680 And only a very few people become fully virtuous.

01:04:58.020 He says, most of us are in the middle, leaning toward the virtue.

01:05:02.280 And I think that's, you know, there's no accountant for people, right?

01:05:07.280 They're free.

01:05:08.040 That's what they're like.

01:05:09.680 I love that explanation.

01:05:11.440 I love that explanation.

01:05:12.620 Larry, thank you so much for being a guest on Valuetainment.

01:05:18.160 I was going to ask you, if you don't mind giving us the link to the book,

01:05:21.920 the recommendations you said of books for people to read.

01:05:24.120 And we're going to put that below for folks to be able to go get the list of your books in PDF format.

01:05:28.540 You can send that to us or have your folks send it to us.

01:05:30.720 And we'll put that below as well for people to get.

01:05:32.680 But once again, Larry, I'll give you the final words.

01:05:34.920 Anything you want to tell the folks when we're going into a possibility of a new administration?

01:05:40.340 Yeah, well, pray for our country.

01:05:43.180 God will preserve it.

01:05:44.940 And also, I want to thank you again.

01:05:46.540 You know, I have my wife and I have a son in the 82nd Airborne.

01:05:49.600 And you were in the 101st.

01:05:53.000 My son is in Syria right now.

01:05:55.220 And he's fine.

01:05:57.060 But I know what a family thing that is.

01:06:00.400 And so America was blessed when your family made its way here.

01:06:04.460 I appreciate that.

01:06:05.240 Thank you so much.

01:06:06.020 And I appreciate your son's service as well.

01:06:08.880 82nd is one of the most prestigious units to be a part of.

01:06:12.580 And for him to represent that in Syria, you know, it says a lot.

01:06:15.840 And I'm sure he's going to appreciate that long term when he tells those stories to his kids and his grandkids.

01:06:20.700 Larry, once again, thank you for being a guest on Valuetainment.

01:06:23.580 My great pleasure.

01:06:24.820 Thank you.

01:06:25.460 Take care.

01:06:26.380 Very heavy interview.

01:06:27.480 A lot of different topics.

01:06:28.620 Not just one.

01:06:29.120 I mean, we went all over the place.

01:06:30.460 And there was a part where he talked about his book list that he recommends.

01:06:34.060 We're going to have that below for you to get.

01:06:35.580 So if you want to get the book recommendations, go below.

01:06:38.120 Click on the description.

01:06:39.060 There's a newsletter there.

01:06:39.920 You click on it.

01:06:40.460 We'll send you the PDF with the books he's recommending.

01:06:42.740 As well as if you like this interview, you want to watch another one similar to this format.

01:06:46.400 I did an interview with Richard Wolff, who's a professor, a diehard socialist.

01:06:50.880 We went back and forth.

01:06:52.300 Very friendly, but it was a heated debate back and forth.

01:06:54.420 If you've not watched it, click over to watch it.

01:06:56.340 And if you're not subscribed to the channel, please do so.

01:06:58.340 Thanks for watching, everybody.

01:06:59.180 Take care.

01:06:59.640 Bye-bye.

Valuetainment - December 02, 2020

Is America About to Lose it All？

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