00:04:41.560And they can be strong and yet not despotic.
00:04:44.920Well, today, 80% of our laws are not passed by the Congress.
00:04:49.140They're passed in something we call the executive branch.
00:04:52.000A whole new thing, the administrative state.
00:04:55.360And it's hard for us to control a thing like that.
00:04:58.620And, of course, just look at the intention to pack the court.
00:05:01.500The 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.
00:05:14.020So those things are all threatened right now.
00:05:16.520And that means that it is very fundamental.
00:05:18.860And you could, the people are at the cusp of losing control of their government.
00:05:25.640Then it says, are there some flaws in the Constitution?
00:05:28.140Because 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?
00:05:39.280And then she revealed what their approach is going to be.
00:05:42.760She 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.
00:05:48.940She 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.
00:06:00.620So 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?
00:07:33.180And 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.
00:07:42.620And that means most of the land, the unincorporated federal territories.
00:07:46.940And that'll place slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.
00:07:50.120Well, in 1858, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution does not give the Congress any power to exclude slavery in those territories.
00:08:01.400In other words, it cut the heart out of the platform of Abraham Lincoln.
00:08:05.280And so he gave a wonderful speech and explained the relationship.
00:08:08.860He said, each of the branches has responsibility to interpret the Constitution as it deploys its power, not exclusively the Supreme Court.
00:08:18.480Ultimately, in a conflict between the branches, the people are going to get to decide through an election.
00:08:23.480And 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.
00:08:35.280And no power on earth can liberate him.
00:08:41.200But the question, what are the powers of the federal government?
00:08:44.440Those people can't decide that by themselves.
00:08:47.920And so, but now we've written it in stone that they can.
00:08:53.720And 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.
00:09:02.160So, it becomes more important now than it used to become.
00:09:06.720And, you know, if they do get to pack the court, it will hurt the dignity of the court.
00:09:12.040But the residual dignity that the court enjoys will make it a very powerful move if they do it.
00:09:18.220And, you know, sometimes in competition or in war or, you know, whether you go study, I know you're very, very well read.
00:09:25.960You can, you've read the books that many of us haven't read over the years.
00:09:30.900And I know you're a big Churchill person and you've studied a lot of these guys, even Aristotle, the Bible, all of it.
00:09:36.780When you think about strategy, you think about what the opponent's going to do.
00:09:39.880You have to start thinking like your opponent, your enemy, your competitor, whoever you're facing.
00:09:43.640What do you think is going to be the direction they're going to take, Biden or Kamala, the Democrats?
00:10:05.080They'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.
00:10:14.680And then they'll make some argument about why the court is not functioning properly.
00:10:19.540And they'll say that we can make it much more efficient.
00:10:22.280And then this race thing, which is just dreadful, you know, because the truth is the human soul is immaterial.
00:10:31.800And if it is immaterial, then the human being can be free.
00:10:35.280And if it's not immaterial, it can't be free.
00:10:38.680And things that don't have matter don't have color.
00:10:41.260So 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.
00:10:54.720So 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.
00:11:11.020And he says, we'll see what we're going to do.
00:12:26.080And then the second thing is, why is there not outrage about that?
00:12:29.120Well, 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.
00:12:47.520And it's, you know, 23 million state, federal and local employees there.
00:12:54.960And the rights of ordinary people are, you know, one of their strategies, by the way, is to concentrate political power in the urban centers.
00:13:07.380And 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.
00:13:19.700Nobody had ever been to the end of it.
00:13:21.800And so what we're going to do is we're going to concentrate power among people who live a certain way.
00:13:27.480And, you know, that's not, that's maybe most people, but if most, barely most.
00:13:35.080And then there's just all kinds of people who are not going to get a say anymore.
00:13:41.500Is there the possibility of what Reagan said many years ago, we're all one generation away from losing our freedom.
00:13:47.880Is that really something that applies to where we are today, where we can really dramatically change the face of America in one election?
00:13:58.340Yeah, I've been thinking that's coming for a long time, and now I think it's here.
00:14:02.920And, 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.
00:14:12.320And 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.
00:14:27.580But 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.
00:14:38.260And, 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.
00:14:49.800And, you know, that's, and, you know, another thing that's going on, this is like 1984, the novel.
00:15:27.080Some of the best established historians, Gordon Wood, especially, have attacked that thing.
00:15:32.020And so there's some honest people left in the academy, and one has to pray there'll be more.
00:15:38.420Yeah, you're not saying making history, you're saying changing history.
00:15:41.940And how do you go about changing history?
00:15:45.100The protagonist in 1984 is a man named Winston, Winston Smith.
00:15:49.440It'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.
00:15:58.200And that concentrates the mind, he later said.
00:16:01.900Winston Smith's job, his function in that novel, is to rewrite history as a constant activity.
00:16:09.760And millions of other people do it too.
00:16:12.700And so he gets, there's a little pneumatic tube and a, and a cartridge drops down.
00:16:17.120And 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.
00:16:30.200They change it to fit with what the party has said true today, and then they reprint everything.
00:16:36.560And so the whole literature of the society is flowing by like a river.
00:16:42.840And that is key in the final interrogation of Winston Smith, which happens at the end of the book when he's under torture.
00:16:51.500One 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.
00:16:59.760And one of the proofs of that is history itself is changeable.
00:18:56.120And 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.
00:19:09.620That 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.
00:19:27.000And what your letters say, they open those sometimes.
00:19:31.080And then if you get a bad social score, then you can't travel anywhere.
00:20:39.120Sometimes 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.
00:20:56.560If we don't get Trump out, we're going to be end of the world.
00:21:00.760I think there's so much of that from both sides.
00:21:03.540It's the end of the world tactic to create urgency to want to go out there and vote.
00:21:07.080But I know a lot of people that it's created the kind of anxiety that people are losing their minds.
00:21:12.660They're thinking the end of the world is really coming to America.
00:21:15.620And 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.
00:21:28.060So 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?
00:21:40.420Or 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?
00:21:50.240Well, you know, we have to save the country.
00:24:21.220That's what brought you and your family to this country.
00:24:24.400And 150 years before, what brought my family to this country.
00:24:28.080So 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.
00:24:42.620And so if you have a debate going on, and this is the third time this has happened in American history.
00:24:49.740The first is the Revolution, and the second is the Civil War.
00:24:52.600If you have a debate going on about the meaning of that final cause, there's a sharp difference of opinion about what equality constitutes.
00:25:03.120The 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.
00:25:12.520But here's a place where nobodies get a chance.
00:25:42.520So 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.
00:25:56.860The 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.
00:26:03.380They all began with, the blank power shall be vested in.
00:26:09.940So the executive power in a president, the judicial power in a Supreme Court and the lower courts.
00:26:18.240Only the first one says all the legislative power.
00:31:37.660What he learned was, don't take responsibility for something you don't have the authority to accomplish.
00:31:44.640So 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.
00:31:57.960And 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.
00:32:10.120And in the Second World War, he learned.
00:32:13.120He set things up very differently from that.
00:32:16.080So the point is, statesmen have consequences.
00:32:20.640And sometimes people are harmed, whatever they do.
00:32:24.500And then, of course, there are the partisans on the other side, you know.
00:32:28.580I 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.
00:32:46.760And 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.
00:33:04.020And so the daily worker and the communist rags in Britain, they agitated against getting in the war.
00:33:11.240And then the minute Hitler attacked Stalin, then they wanted to get in.
00:33:17.120And so partisanship explains a lot, too.
00:33:19.780And 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.
00:33:53.140By the way, thank you for explaining that regarding why folks like Churchill are hated at the level that they are in.
00:33:58.080I 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.
00:34:09.500Who is the closest thing to a Lincoln that we have right now?
00:34:12.460Are you seeing anybody outside of Trump?
00:36:26.460And he said, what do you want to talk about, Larry?
00:36:29.440And I said, I want to talk about your greatness.
00:36:32.380And he said, I don't want to talk about that.
00:36:35.480And 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.
00:36:46.020And you will see that you are a recovery of something amazing.
00:37:55.960And that was a war with bombing and people dying and half a million.
00:37:59.380You know, it was a pretty intense time for where we were at.
00:38:02.960What 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.
00:38:21.520And Cuomo had his big exchange on TV with the report asking him a question.
00:38:26.720And he said, that's an obnoxious question.
00:38:28.320And the next thing you know, a few minutes later, they pretty much shut down, you know, New York.
00:38:32.400What kind of jurisdiction does the government have to tell all of us that you cannot go anywhere and you have to stay home?
00:38:42.880They 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.
00:38:51.980And 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.
00:39:11.800They'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.
00:39:22.340It was legal for you to go to the market and buy a garden hoe, but you couldn't buy seeds.
00:39:30.120And so stores, you know, on paying a fine and being closed, had to rope off the seed section.
00:39:36.440And, you know, there's a list of things you can go and buy.
00:39:42.380There's a, you know, our governor has written a thousand pages of rules with her and six or eight people who work for her.
00:39:53.140I 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.
00:40:04.620And the three had very serious other illnesses, right?
00:40:09.780So the point is, this is much less dangerous to the young than the ordinary flu, but we're shutting them down.
00:40:17.820And, 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?
00:40:26.260One 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?
00:40:40.600And then it can kill you in a hurry, right?
00:40:43.160And so those people should be incredibly cautious, and others should be cautious when they're around them.
00:40:49.300But 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.
00:41:13.980What 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?
00:42:49.940I 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.
00:42:58.200As 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.
00:43:18.940And you guys have like a 10 day quarantine guidelines that you follow on your school.
00:43:22.380How are you being affected with some of the decisions she's making as well as coronavirus?
00:43:28.200Well, there's this thing called the Great Barons and Declaration, you can just find it on the internet.
00:43:33.600And it's three really, you know, one from Stanford, one from Harvard, one from Oxford, three leading epidemiologists.
00:43:40.660And now they've been signed on by 20,000 others or something like that around the world.
00:43:46.540And what they say is, this thing does not hurt young, healthy people.
00:43:51.520And they say, herd immunity is not a strategy, it's a biological fact.
00:43:56.460If we get a vaccine, the only way it can be effective is by helping us achieve herd immunity faster.
00:44:03.720And herd immunity means most people are not vulnerable to it, and so the virus can't spread.
00:44:08.160Well, the way we're doing it is, we're preventing people who won't be harmed by the virus from getting it.
00:44:15.280And 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.
00:44:26.480And 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.
00:48:44.460And 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.
00:48:56.540And the reason is, every minute that you're learning, you're concentrating.
00:49:01.280And it takes energy and discipline to do it.
00:51:47.040We'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?
00:51:55.200And the thing is, this is an activity that has never been, you know, at its peak, it's never been a profit-making activity.
00:52:06.260Education is for young people who haven't established themselves yet.
00:52:11.340And they take some time before they start their career, and they improve their intellects and their characters.
00:52:17.620So, of course, it's a charitable enterprise.
00:52:19.920You should do it efficiently, and you should do it as cheaply as possible, and you should do it excellently.
00:52:28.360And, you know, when education was private, that was how it was.
00:52:34.940You know, used to be 70% of the people, it's about 1960, went to liberal arts colleges.
00:52:53.200And those places are not teaching the good, the true, and the beautiful.
00:52:58.420And 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?
00:53:16.380Everybody, you know, used to be a high school education brought most of that stuff.
00:53:20.680So that's, you know, one of our problems is, we've bureaucratized education.
00:53:44.140In the first, the two guys named Bush since Reagan, right?
00:53:49.200They both, the elder, you know, they're fine people, by the way.
00:53:53.700And I voted for them and would vote for them again, you know, depending on the alternative.
00:53:59.440But they thought that they could fix education in America from Washington, D.C.
00:54:06.640And 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.
00:54:25.740He said, well, we'd like you to take the lead in this.
00:55:38.920And 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.
00:55:48.300This 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.
00:55:55.100And 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.
00:56:00.920Because Erdogan has got the most powerful military in the Middle East.
00:56:06.060And 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.
00:56:15.940You're seeing a lot of conversations come up.
00:56:18.420And I have a feeling over the next four years, it's going to be even more, the conversation about reparation for slavery.
00:56:24.300What are your thoughts about folks who bring up for all those years of what happened that maybe it deserves a reparation?
00:59:59.980And the thing is, the right history being told for folks to know what really happened in events.
01:00:04.300So that was an interesting answer on reparations saying those paying who didn't own slaves to those who weren't slaves.
01:00:16.080That kind of makes you think about it.
01:00:17.600But 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.
01:02:12.800So 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.
01:02:20.060And that makes the people in charge of that rule really powerful.
01:02:34.740I literally feel like I'm the luckiest man alive.
01:02:38.280And 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.
01:02:46.440Technical question for you at the end here before we wrap up.
01:02:49.800So 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.
01:02:58.560Which I've never heard that before, to say Ronald Reagan or a person is an explainer.
01:03:02.760Like, he explained things and you were kind of like, okay, that kind of does make sense when you explain.
01:03:07.700Because sometimes people are just quick, they give you the answer.
01:03:10.160But you're right, he was an explainer.
01:03:12.040So 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,
01:03:21.420why 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?