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Oct. 29, 2025 - The David Knight Show
03:02:41
Wed Episode #2127: America’s Gangster Government: Venezuela Killings & Gaza Genocide
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In a world of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
It's the David Knight Show.
As the clock strikes 13, it's Wednesday, the 29th of October.
You're our Lord, 2025.
Well, interestingly enough, Bill Gates has written an essay, pulling back against climate alarmism.
He's still selling global warming, but now he is saying that it's not an existential emergency.
So does that mean that we have zero justification for net zero?
I think it does, but we'll see what happens and what might be behind the motives behind what he is doing.
We're also going to have in the third hour an interview with the CEO of the National Constitution Center.
He's just written a book that kind of traces historically how the country has swung between the two poles of Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism.
Where are we today?
Where should we be?
We'll be talking about that in the third hour.
And prior to that, we'll be talking about the gangster government that we truly do have at this point in time, continuing to ramp up the threats, the murders, the lies, the theft.
We'll be right back.
Stay with us.
Well, what we see is nothing short of federal gangsterism.
And remember, the term gangster, where did that come from?
It came from alcohol prohibition, the original drug war.
But that was done at a time when we still had, as a country and as both parties, had respect for the Constitution.
That is no longer the effect that is here.
We have the U.S. military bragging about killing another 14 people just yesterday.
Four more boats blown up.
And they openly admit these crimes.
This is murder.
These extrajudicial killings are not legal under our law.
They're not legal under the Constitution.
They're not legal under international law.
This is a gang that we have.
It's not the Trump administration.
It's the Trump gang.
They act like they're, I don't know, like they're from the gambling industry, the mafia people or something, right?
Organized crime.
We got Warpet announced on Tuesday yesterday at the direction of President Trump.
The Department of War carried out three lethal kinetic strikes on four vessels operated by designated terrorist organizations.
They've got that all uppercased.
I guess we're going to be talking about DTOs next, right?
Well, you're a DTO.
We have designated you as a terrorist organization.
We don't have to prove anything.
We just point and label, just like the liberals, right?
They call you a racist or a fascist.
Then you are.
They don't have to prove anything.
They don't have to debate you.
And of course, Trump doesn't like debates either, especially with Ronald Reagan, because he would lose badly.
But he doesn't want to have any discussion of policy, any discussion of the Constitution.
The four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus.
This is what Warpett said.
What is the intelligence apparatus?
They should be calling them intelligence apparatchiks.
These are the people who serve the government's interest.
They were known to be carrying narcotics.
These are all allegations.
Not a single ounce of truth or detail about any of this.
No due process whatsoever.
There was one survivor regarding the survivor.
They contacted the Mexican government and said, you take care of him.
I guess pretty soon we're going to be up into the Gulf of America.
Accepted the case, they assumed responsibility because Americans can't be bothered.
We don't only kill people.
We don't rescue anybody.
These narco-terrorists, according to Warpete, have killed more Americans than al-Qaeda.
Prove it.
Prove, first of all, who they are.
Secondly, prove, give us a comparison about this.
And you know what?
You have Trump's vaccine has killed more people than the drug war and al-Qaeda combined.
They just won't admit it yet.
As a matter of fact, there was an interesting article, completely false, by Reason Magazine saying, where's all the dead people?
Well, you don't see them because you just read the government reports.
You should be ashamed of yourself at Reason to not see you never saw before kids dying of heart attacks who are in middle school and high school.
You never had schools doing electrocardiograms before the kids were allowed to participate in sports.
And yet they go along with the denial.
Anyway, some online reactions to Monday's operation that were put together by WND, who loves this kind of sick cheering of mass murder, said, It's like the word isn't getting back to the club.
All the boats are spontaneously combusting.
Another one.
Can we get this in 4K, the video of the ships being blown up, asking for a friend.
Yeah, there's a large number of people still, I think it's a, oh, I hope it's a small percentage of people who glory in this kind of violence.
They cheer the government on.
They want more militarized police.
I forget the guy that used to work for Fox News when the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened.
He said, all these people complain about militarization of police.
I want more militarization of the police.
Well, how about we just keep the radical Muslims out of the country?
Would that do?
Instead of turning ourselves into a police and surveillance state, instead of destroying the Constitution completely over this failed approach to harmful drugs.
And I point out they are harmful.
Alcohol was harmful too.
It didn't work to have prohibition, did it?
Death from above, below, by land or sea.
It has long been overdue to rid ourselves of this terrible plague, said another one.
And for what it's worth, I lost a daughter to this demon as well.
It hits hard, and now we strike back harder.
Well, I'm sorry that you had a loss, but to blindly strike out at other people makes about as much sense as somebody, this whole tactic here has been a proven failure for half a century.
And to continue down this road and to just blindly strike out at people when that's not going to change anything.
It's not going to bring your daughter back.
It's not going to save other people from a drug overdose.
This is a spiritual medical problem.
It is not a law enforcement problem.
And this makes about as much sense as somebody who's who lost a family member going on a mass shooting spree.
That's what these people are.
These are people they've had a difficult situation in America here with the drugs.
And so what Trump is going to do, as far as I'm concerned, is a complete non-sequitur.
Because he was bullied or because of the drugs or whatever, he's going to go out and start killing people.
Just like these tranny shooters.
They brag about it as well.
So when you've only got a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And they want to hammer everything.
So War Pete is famous for saying, no refuge and no forgiveness.
And, you know, there's no sanity in this either.
Continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results is a very definition of insanity.
And that's why these people have gone crazy with the drug war.
They've basically lost their mind.
They've OD'd on force.
Hegseth announces the 14 dead in the Pacific military strike and alleged drug boats.
Yeah, you know, War Pete is a really tough guy.
He can push a button thousands of miles away and kill people.
That makes him really tough, doesn't it?
This guy disgusts me.
Like so many other people in the Trump administration.
You've got an attorney general who has set herself against the Bill of Rights.
We're going to talk about that later.
Condemnation for the strikes has grown, universally condemned by Democrats as well as a growing number of Republicans.
No one said their name.
No one said what the evidence is.
No one has said whether or not they're armed.
And we've had no evidence presented, said Rand Paul.
Details on strikes have been scant, with Paul claiming that as a senator, he hasn't been briefed on the strikes whatsoever.
The Trump gang has been tight-lipped about the operations.
One whistleblower within the Trump administration admitted that one of the vessels was retreating before it was struck, a key detail that was admitted by War Pete when he announced the strike.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is conducting a third bomber flight off the coast of Venezuela.
They want to start that war so badly, and they are not planning on even asking permission.
They're not even going.
Yeah, they probably get it from the warmongers in Congress, but they don't even want to bother with it.
Who cares about the Constitution?
I also want to point out, in both these articles, they've had that line.
The Department has spent over two decades defending other homelands.
Yeah.
Look how well it's worked out for them.
Yeah, that's right.
Maybe we want the tender ministrations of the U.S. military to do for us what it did for Afghanistan.
Putting them on tender hooks.
Yeah.
Yeah, it worked out really well for all these other countries, didn't it?
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.
How's this going to work out for us?
Good point.
Well, two U.S. B-1B Lancer bombers departed the U.S. and flew near the coast of Venezuela Monday, according to flight tracking data and the latest provocation aimed at the country and its leader, Maduro.
The flight marks the third time that bombers have flown near Venezuela since October the 15th.
I didn't vote for this.
I hope you didn't vote for this.
I hope even the MAGA people didn't vote for it.
I've seen some accounts out there that are, you know, people who want to get a big following or whatever, influencers or bots saying this is what I voted for.
Shame on you.
Shame on you.
You voted for war, murder, and a continuation of this failed war on drugs.
You're stupid and immoral, just like the Trump gang.
You know, the one of the gang, the MAGA gangsters.
But this is exactly what everyone at MAGA was hoping for.
Everyone was voting for Trump with the wishes that he would just go to war with Venezuela.
Those damn Venezuelans.
Yeah, that's right.
Make America a gangster again, right?
The Rubio doctrine, the neocons are back.
And this is an essay by Ron Paul, not Rand Paul.
Ron Paul came out swinging against the neocons, especially Marco Rubio.
According to Bloomberg, says Ron Paul, it was Rubio who finally convinced Trump to take ownership of the U.S. proxy war in Russia in the first place, the first time to place sanctions on Russia.
Up to this point, Trump chose to portray himself as a mediator between Ukraine and Russia and to say that it was Joe Biden's war.
But then after Rubio pushed him, he owns it.
And he makes it clear that he wants to escalate.
Following a confusing few weeks since the Trump-Putin-Alaska summit in August, after that meeting, Trump dropped the neocon position that a ceasefire in the Russian-Ukraine war would occur before any peace negotiations.
It was a sign that Trump was looking more realistically at the war.
But a surprise call to Putin the day before Ukrainian President Zelensky was to arrive in town just over a week ago reinforced that position.
Zelensky left empty-handed.
He was seeking tomahawk missiles that could strike deep into Russian territory.
Then, out of the blue, Trump last week announced through his Treasury Secretary, the Soros Secretary Scott Besant, that the U.S. would be sanctioning Russia's two largest oil companies until Russia declares a ceasefire in the war before negotiations.
That won't happen.
But what it means is that Rubio and the neocons have successfully gotten Trump to step on the escalation escalator.
That is what they always do, and it'll be much harder to back down now.
Suddenly, after several weeks of extrajudicial murder on the high seas in the name of fighting the drug war, Trump announced that land strikes on Venezuela would begin soon.
He did mention that he might brief Congress on his plans for war.
Not that Congress can be bothered to care much one way or the other.
The neocon old guard that still dominates Washington foreign policy is taking a victory lap.
South Carolina's Lindsey Graham was on the Sunday shows bemoaning the conversion of no regime change wars president.
I'm sorry, he wasn't, he was beaming over the conversion of no regime change wars Trump to a regime change war Trump.
The Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction factories of 2002 have become the Nicholas, Maduro, cocaine, and fentanyl factories of 2025.
That's exactly right.
What Ron Paul is saying is that the weapons of mass destruction factories didn't exist.
It was a made-up lie.
And just like the fentanyl and cocaine factories don't exist.
It was a made-up lie.
Once again, the neocon war lies are amplified by the mainstream media and transmitted to the American people.
The global war on terror, so-called, has been rebranded the hemispheric war on narco-terror.
And the U.S. military-industrial complex is rubbing its hands in anticipation of a windfall.
After Bolton's disastrous stint in the first Trump administration, promises were made that the second Trump administration would be neocon-free.
Instead, the neocons are back, this time with little Marco.
Unless Trump wakes up soon, the neocons will destroy his second term and maybe the country.
Yeah, we'll see what happens with this.
But that's where Trump is.
He has no principles, so he is open to being persuaded by whoever's got the most money or whatever.
And again, there's money behind this stuff.
Many times he will say whatever he needs to get the votes of the MAGA people, and then he will do whatever he needs to get the money of the big financial backers that are out there.
RT has an interesting story about Trump's idea of the Golden Fleet.
Actually, it's going to be a Golden Fleece.
This is not Jared and the Argonauts and the Golden Fleece.
We've got the Golden Dome.
Israel's got their iron dome.
We've got a Golden Dome because of Trump, of course.
And now he wants to have a Golden Fleet.
I just assumed the Golden Dome is what he called his head.
Well, RT points out some very interesting facts about what has happened to American naval power.
He said, it's well known the current state of the U.S. Navy does not meet existing challenges, let alone those that could arise from a potential conflict with China.
During his first presidential term, Trump aimed to significantly enhance the fleet.
He wanted to get it up to 355 major vessels, but right now there's only about 290.
Details are still unclear about the number and the kinds of ships that he wants to build because he's just throwing an idea out there, the golden fleet.
But we don't know what that is.
Hopefully not the kind of ship that you launch once and then it sinks or stops working and it's multiple billions of dollars worth of debt that you've accumulated.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, here's the real issue.
And it's kind of interesting for RT to look at this because when I talked to Putin's recipient, the guy they call that, what was his name?
Alexander Dugan.
Thank you.
Alexander Dugan.
One of the things that struck me was how the Russi perceived, they call us Atlanticists, right?
And they kind of see America as a continuation of the British Empire that was based on sea power.
They say both the British Empire and the subsequent American Empire are based on sea power.
So they kind of group the two together and call them Atlanticists.
Well, they see themselves as a land power because, again, they have the largest land mass of anybody.
But for them to look at America, the sea power, and to see what the facts that I'm about to give you here tells you what they think of America, what we should be concerned about right now.
The root of the problem, says RT, lies in the overall decline of American shipbuilding, which is once the strongest in the world but has lost ground to European competitors, then to Japan, then lost ground to South Korea and now to China.
Currently, the U.S. accounts for less than 0.13% of global commercial shipbuilding, while China dominates with a staggering 60%.
They have 60% of the shipbuilding.
We have one-tenth of 1%.
Think about that.
It's pretty amazing.
600 times what we are doing.
Military shipbuilding, which once drew talent and resources from the commercial sector, now finds itself in limbo.
And I got to say, you know, when you look at the electronics, for example, when I was working in electronics, The military stuff was lagging severely behind the commercial stuff.
It was not where the state of the art was.
And part of that was that they had to do testing on everything, rigorous testing.
It had to be proven in a lot of different environments.
So you still had the space shuttle using very heavy, very bulky core memory rather than solid-state memory because it just doesn't have enough of a history on it.
So the military stuff is not where the cutting-edge technology is happening.
And the same thing is true in shipbuilding.
And so if you don't have a viable, thriving commercial shipbuilding, you're not going to have a viable, thriving military shipbuilding operation.
It reminds me of that story that you always tell of the carpenter that you used to know who used to work on yachts in North Carolina and how there used to be a large yacht building industry in North Carolina, but then there was a tax on yachts.
So, you know, these billionaires are going to have to pay more for their yachts, which destroyed the yacht building industry in America.
And the billionaires just went and got their yachts from other countries because, you know, you can easily just sail them to America.
That's right.
That's right.
You don't have to do anything special.
Look at them here.
All right.
So our shipbuilding, commercial shipbuilding volumes, I said, are even lower than Russia's, which is basically a land power.
They're going to hang on to these areas in Ukraine because that's where their Black Sea fleet is and things like that.
But other than that, for the most part, they're kind of landlocked.
Where are they building all these ships?
They're building more ships than we are.
And then to Israel.
The IDF chief on Gaza says the war is not yet over.
Hold that peace prize for a little bit longer there.
We're not really sure if they're ready to get that printed up with Trump's name on it yet.
Trump will have to settle for some casino in Gaza.
He may not get his medal.
Well, the war isn't over yet.
They aren't claiming that they're still being attacked.
We just haven't finished attacking them yet.
That's right.
That's right.
We still have to go.
We have some more civilians we can kill.
Yeah, that's right.
What he means is there are still Palestinians alive in Palestine.
Yeah.
Our sacred mission of bringing the fallen hostages home, and we will continue the campaign against Hamas.
And again, people are digging through the rubble that Israel has created, trying to find the bodies.
They have found a few more, but until they get that last one, they're not going to stop.
Ayal Zamir said this at a military conference.
Israeli forces have continued launching attacks since the ceasefire deal was signed October the 10th.
They never stopped.
I knew that was going to be the case.
Killing at least 93 Palestinians in that time.
Well, you know, we're trying to catch up there in Venezuela with boats, I guess.
According to numbers from Gaza's health ministry and the IDF that currently controls about 58% of Gaza's territory, that's why it's going to continue.
They only got to get that other 42%.
Zamir's comments came on the same day that Hamas returned another Israeli body, leaving a total of 12 deceased hostages under the rubble in Gaza.
Israel has handed over at least 195 Palestinian bodies to Gaza in exchange, including many that could not be identified and that were buried in a mass grave.
Well, how do they know that wasn't one of them?
Yeah.
One of the hostages.
That's right.
It was clear that when Israel signed the ceasefire deal, that recovering all of the Israeli bodies would take some time.
But the Israeli government attempted to use Hamas's lack of access to all the hostage remains as an excuse to blow up the deal and continues to claim that the Palestinian group is delaying the process.
According to Israel news site Wynette, Hamas has conveyed that it has located the remains of seven to nine Israeli bodies and is working to excavate them.
Israel is asking the U.S. for permission to expand its occupation of Gaza.
See, like I said, they've only got 58%.
They want that other 42% as a sanction against Hamas for the time that it is taking to find the bodies that perhaps Israel buried under the rubble.
Israeli drone strike attack in southern Gaza kills two more Palestinians.
Since the truce went into effect, they've killed dozens of Palestinians.
I think the account in the other article was 90-some odd.
Who allegedly crossed a line, including, as I reported last week, seven young children who were targeted in a vehicle with their family.
They killed 11 people in that attack.
And it's kind of what the U.S. did in Panama.
Know you tell people, don't go to this particular place in that particular place.
You know, get out of the area came the loudspeakers in Panama.
People are like, What area are they talking about?
And where do they want me to go?
There's no information.
Instead, death rained down pretty quickly.
It's the same type of thing here.
You need to get out of this area.
Don't cross that yellow line.
What yellow line?
I don't see a yellow line.
They kill them.
So before we take a break, we have North American House Hippo.
Thank you very much for that.
Tried reading the Art of the Deal.
You should read Lucky Loser.
Couldn't get past it.
Couldn't get past the first page.
Spelling, grammatical, and obvious factual areas, inappropriate capitalization, run-on sentences, no paragraph structure.
Awful.
Well, I thought he had at least gotten a ghostwriter for him, but evidently maybe he had more participation in it than the ghostwriter did.
Maybe he had too much ego to get a ghostwriter.
Yeah, yeah.
We've got Guard Goldsmith.
Good to see you, Garden.
You can find Guard at Liberty Conspiracy, his show that runs at 6 p.m. during the week.
He says, and even the anti-drug statutes are unconstitutional.
They might as well claim people were smuggling marbles because they have lost them in D.C. Yeah, you can't bring those into the District of Columbia.
The real Octo spook.
Welfare countries like America cannot afford shipbuilding of a large military scale.
Probably will never happen.
Probably can't afford to have another build it for us.
Yeah, unless we can get somebody to take our phony paper money, I guess.
That's the one issue.
I promise we're good for it.
Yeah.
We're going to take a quick break, folks.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
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Well, welcome back, folks.
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Appreciate it.
And right now we are at about 5'8 on the gas gauge, just a little bit under that.
And we're getting pretty close to the end.
But we'll continue on with this.
And I want to talk about what's going on with Bill Gates, as I mentioned at the very beginning.
We have Bill Gates now saying that climate change will not lead to humanity's demise.
Isn't that interesting?
Maybe net zero will.
Certainly they intend to de-industrialize.
I mean, we're talking about something that's far beyond just losing shipbuilding capability.
It's losing all manufacturing capability.
It's about losing our power as well.
And so this is something that I reported last week.
There was one guy who's been one of the well-known climate alarmists, which is what we always call them.
They would call us deniers because we deny that CO2 is a problem.
We would call them alarmists because they're telling everybody the sky is falling and the world is going to end.
And now even Bill Gates is pulling back from that.
We had a guy who was pulling back from it I mentioned last week.
He said, I still believe that there's global warming.
I just don't believe it's going to kill everybody.
Well, there's been a lot of people who've been saying that for a very long time.
I don't believe there's any global warming.
And I certainly don't think that CO2 is an issue, especially whatever is happening, whether it's CO2 or anything else, or even if it is warming, it's not man-made.
So it's not made by man, and it's not going to kill us all.
That's the two things you need to understand about.
We should all agree on that.
And so the question is, what is up with Bill Gates?
Why is he doing this?
This is, what's the justification now for net zero if they don't have the alarmist thing?
We have to sacrifice everything or we're all going to die.
So, you know, we're going to tell you what you can eat, what you can drink, what you can wear, if you can travel.
You're not going to be allowed to own anything.
What's the justification for that kind of draconian policy?
So he's warning against climate alarmism, which is pretty amazing.
Because he spent billions of his own money sounding the alarm about the dangers of climate change, he's now pushing back, says the New York Times, against what he calls a doomsday outlook.
He appears to have shifted his stance on the risk posed by a warming planet.
Many people have said, even if your dire predictions of the rising seas and rising temperatures and all the rest of that stuff happens, we can just adapt.
You know, there isn't anything that we couldn't adapt to in any of that.
I don't think any of that stuff is going to happen.
The coral reefs are not dying as they predicted.
The glaciers haven't melted.
The polar ice caps haven't melted.
Not a single one of their predictions has come true.
That's right.
We've got 50 years of failed predictions, just like 50 years of the war on drugs.
If they were to come out tomorrow and say, the sky will continue to be blue, chances are it would turn green the next day.
I also want to point out that the headline is, Bill Gates says, climate change will not lead to humanity's demise.
And I assume he whispered under his breath, you know, so no one could hear, it will be me.
Yeah, right, yeah.
Yeah, that's the question.
What are they going to do?
Are they pivoting now 100% to the pandemic, McGuffin?
You know, because he has to have some kind of justification for the global ID and the surveillance police state and some kind of a justification to steal all the money from us and to force us to eat what he wants us to eat.
So I don't really, I'm not sure what his end game is here.
But the New York Times continues.
They said, coming just four years after he published a book called How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, now he says there isn't going to be one.
What's that?
We made it.
All right.
We made it.
Yeah.
And that's the tact that he is taking now.
It's the same thing that Trump and Fauci and the rest of these people did after what they put us through with their fake pandemic, MacGuffin.
They declared victory.
They said, see, it worked.
We made a few mistakes, but hey, it worked.
I think that's part of what he's doing now.
I think it's getting to the point where the lies are so untenable, just like with the pandemic, that they have to pull back and say, see, it worked.
And they're going to take another tact to get where they want to go.
I think there's also a little bit of the fact that if you tell people over and over again that the world is ending, it breeds this sort of nihilism where people eventually don't care anymore.
Okay, the world's ending, so I'm not going to do anything.
If you say the world is ending, so you got to give me this, eventually they just go, why would I give you any?
The world's doomed.
I'm not going to give you the last little bit of my freedom so that you can, you know, I want to at least enjoy myself on the way out.
I think it's just that it's what you're saying.
They've kind of played out global warming for the time being.
They need to give it a rest.
They'll come back in a few years with, oh no, we've got a new climate disaster.
This is so much worse than global warming, which, of course, we were right about the whole time and we've backed off of that.
But this one, this is different.
Global warming too, new and improved.
And of course, they did a complete 180 after about eight years of this stuff.
First, it was going to be a new ice age.
And then they just go completely opposite direction, say, no, we're going to have such massive global warming that everybody's going to die.
And then after it became clear that it wasn't going to be any global warming, they switched to the term climate change.
You know, that's a good thing.
Still, all the dire alarmism.
And so now, you know, they're coming back and saying, well, it's still a problem, and we're still going to have to have you do certain things for us, but we can't go with these dire predictions like Al Gore and the rest of them.
And of course, Bill Gates was one who is selling that stuff as well.
Well, a Princeton professor, Michael Oppenheimer, is quoted by the New York Times.
said Gates is setting up a false dichotomy.
He said that is usually propagated by climate skeptics.
That's right.
We've been calling these people alarmists all this time.
He said it pits efforts to tackle climate change against foreign aid for the poor.
Despite his efforts to make it clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy the efforts to deal with climate change.
Yeah, that's me.
I would love to destroy all this stuff.
So he's rejecting the doomsday view.
There's a headline from Bloomberg, the doomsday view of climate change.
In a memo, he rejected it.
According to Gates, prioritizing the fight against rising temperatures above all else means that issues such as human health and equality risk being overshadowed.
So where is he going to go with this?
Is he going to try to bring back DEI or something like that?
There's also the fact that if the world really is melting down, if it's ending, if it's about to collapse, who cares?
Oh, this is going to negatively disenfranchise somebody in Guiana or something like that.
From a purely rationalistic, materialistic perspective on things, if you believe that the world is melting down and we have too many people, there's no God, who cares?
You cut off all foreign aid.
You starve these other countries out.
You say, I'm sorry, this is a zero-sum game.
The world is burning down, and I've got to make sure that our country survives.
So if your country doesn't make it, too bad.
My apologies.
Well, that's why when you look at these two things, human health and equality, I think that first one, human health, that means that he's pivoting to this kind of World Health Organization MacGuffin.
I think that's what he's going to put all his eggs in that basket.
The solutions are becoming, well, we've got to track and trace you all the time.
The solutions aren't, you know, openly.
Well, we have to cull the population.
It comes down to that eventually.
They got way more traction in just a few years with this health MacGuffin than they did with the climate MacGuffin over decades.
That's right.
Look at how effective that was when you had Trump and the rest of the world on the same page, scaring everybody to death about the boogeyman germs that are out there.
So, you know, you do that, and that worked so well.
Let's just go there with that because they get all the same things.
They get a global ID.
They get constant surveillance and tracking.
They get to lock you down.
That was always the goal with the climate stuff.
And so it's a lot easier for them to do a lockdown based on a fake pandemic MacGuffin than it is on climate change.
So he's pivoting to that.
And he's going to do it in the name of helping humanity.
So he said, climate change is serious, and we've made great progress.
He's going to declare victory just like Trump and Fauci and Biden did on COVID.
And so you have the head of Climate Change Center, the European Central Bank, because all these institutions have got now people who have built their career on pushing this lie.
Her name is Irene Hemskirk.
She said on Tuesday that water scarcity and floods are putting the economic output of Europe at risk.
Oh, really?
The economic output of Europe at risk?
What about destroying people's access to affordable energy?
What about deindustrializing everything by saying you can't have a factory, you can't build anything because you're going to make some magic farts that are going to destroy the world.
That deindustrialization is the thing that is pushing the economic output of Europe into the ground.
You know, they're talking about water scarcity.
You know, I've seen lots of stuff.
I don't know what the situation is in Europe specifically, but I've seen lots of stuff about these massive alfalfa farms done in the desert.
Is it alfalfa?
It's one really thirsty plant that these Arab farmers are, well, you know, they own lots of land, so they're called farmers.
They own this stuff, and they grow massive amounts of this really thirsty plant that they then ship back to their arid countries where they aren't allowed to grow it because it's so water intensive they can't grow it there.
But instead, they grow it in the desert in America and take the water from the people in the U.S. You know, they have scarcity generated by that for the communities around where they are.
Well, the planet is mostly water.
And if they're worried about flooding and drought at the same time, look, you can get water out of the, you can have desalinization plants, and you can get it out of the ocean.
You can have condensation, you know, what do they call them?
It's a device that basically takes moisture out of the air because there's a lot of moisture in the air everywhere.
And so that's not really an issue.
That's just a technological issue.
Well, what I'm saying is that it's, you know, these problems that they've created, and they're trying to make it, the solution is we need to do carbon sequestration.
We just need to cut down a whole bunch of trees.
Then you'll have more water.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, you know, and of course, when you look at all their green stuff, and then especially now the AI stuff, you want to talk about water?
Lithium is one of the thirstiest of the mining procedures that are out there.
They need to have massive amounts of water.
And of course, artificial intelligence, the water that they need for cooling.
Maybe we should call it, you know, artificial industrialization because AI is not really industrializing anything.
It's not really making anything.
But the stuff that they want, the batteries and the AI and stuff like that, are the things that are really thirsty for water.
So maybe what they need to do is to focus on how they can extract it.
Instead, what they're doing is they're trying to pull CO2 out of the air instead of trying to pull water moisture out.
And interestingly enough, water, they say, is the biggest greenhouse effect.
And so, again, but that's a natural process.
They can't complain to us for releasing too much water, which again tells you that it's not man-made.
The problem is not man-made.
The problem is bureaucrat-made.
So Gates described the U.S. government's decision to cut climate and clean energy programs to be a huge disappointment.
That's the other thing.
They're having trouble in the first administration with Trump getting him to go along this climate stuff.
And they're having trouble, a lot of trouble in this one as well.
So he's not on board with that.
He's 100% on board or maybe 110% on board with all the pandemic stuff.
But he's not on board with the climate stuff.
So this is another reason for them to pivot from climate to pandemic.
Gates said his views on the necessity of the Paris Climate Agreement and the need for companies to lower their emissions have not changed.
I'm a climate activist, but I'm also a child survival activist.
Okay, so he's going to focus on childhood vaccines, right?
Now it's time to put human welfare at the center of our climate strategies, which includes reducing the green premium to zero and improving agriculture and health in poor countries.
Because again, he's the guy that now is, when it's pointed out, wants to cut down trees rather than to plant them.
Gates warned that the doomsday outlook had led climate advocates to focus too narrowly on near-term emissions.
Well, that's an understatement.
Richard Dawkins is complaining about Nature magazine, saying they have abandoned science for social justice.
We've abandoned science for every kind of purpose.
I mean, all this trust the science nonsense that we heard during the pandemic, that is completely, that meme has become a mockery of what science is.
And of course, climate nonsense is a mockery of science as well.
These people don't want to show you their data.
They don't want to have anybody try to test their assumptions.
It's not reproducible, et cetera, et cetera.
The same type of stuff as we talk about with the viruses.
They don't isolate the viruses, and they never do that, and they never prove that they've actually got a virus.
They never actually do the scientific procedure that would say this substance here, when it's here, people are sick.
When it's not here, people are not sick.
They've never done that with viruses.
That's why I don't, that's why I question the whole science, quote unquote, of virology.
I think it's as hokey as the so-called science of climate change.
They don't actually follow scientific procedure.
It's also not just virology or the climate change sciences.
Every single science, as far as I'm aware, has a replicability crisis when it comes to studies.
I think it's something like 70% of studies are unable to be replicated.
Someone goes out and they does a study.
They do a study and it comes back with its conclusions.
You go, oh, wow, that's incredible.
And then a few years later, someone comes back and says, all right, well, let's try to replicate it.
Let's see if we can actually get hard data and confirm this.
And they can't.
But that information has been spread far and wide in the journals or on magazine covers or you saw it in a meme somewhere and now it's basically confirmed as fact and truth despite the fact that it can't be replicated.
They don't know how they got those results.
They don't know what led to those results.
And it's just out there forever now.
That's right.
70%.
Like I said, when they say science, what they really mean is the polar opposite of that.
When Francis Bacon first talked about the scientific method, he was comparing it as an opposite to academia.
He was saying that academia, these dogmatic beliefs that the elites push forward without any rigorous study, is killing science.
So, you know, he created the initial idea of the scientific method of testable, reservable, beatable, etc.
And it's an alternative to this.
So it should be, they've abandoned academia, the opposite of science, which is what they were always, well, no, they are still pushing academia.
It's just now changed slightly against what Richard Dawkins typically likes.
Well, as Fauci said, he is science, right?
You know, what I say is science.
Just like whatever Trump says is law, right?
So we have these dictators in place rather than the rule of law, rather than the rule of science.
These people are the rulers.
Well, we have Anna Krylov, who's a professor of chemistry at a prestigious university, said she was asked to do reviews for Nature magazine.
And she said, even though what they asked me to do is in my field of expertise, and she said, I would normally welcome the opportunity, but because of the statements that have been made by Nature magazine, she was reluctant to do it.
She said, is it because of my expertise in the subject matter?
Or is it because of my reproductive organs?
In other words, have you selected me simply because I am a woman?
And Richard Dawkins jumped in on that with both feet.
And he said, Nature used to be the world's most prestigious science journal, one of the most prestigious of science journals, but claimed that it is now among many who place emphasis on the background of the authors rather than only on the excellence of their science.
And again, we have just too much respect and awe and deference for these academics and the so-called science.
And so it's going to be kind of interesting to see what happens.
I really do think that Bill Gates is going to focus 100% on the quote-unquote health issue.
He's going to continue down the vaccines and the pandemic stuff.
Remember, he's one of the heaviest funders of the World Health Organization, more than most governments.
And when Trump cut funding to them, he made it up and made up the difference in terms of that.
Well, let's take a look at the comments before we take a break here.
That's right.
The real octo spook says China has what?
99% of production in manufacturing worldwide.
China's military will soon become the best on earth as they have planned.
I'll have to wait and see.
Steve Ebs.
Hey, the new Elite's ballroom will be as big as the rest of the White House.
Well, actually, it's going to be bigger.
There was the White House, which is 55,000 square feet, and then there was the East Wing and the West Wing.
I don't know the square footage of those.
But the White House dwarfed those two when you looked at the plans.
55,000 square feet.
The ballroom is going to be 95,000 square feet.
So it's going to be almost twice the size of the White House.
It truly is amazing.
We'll be talking about that here in a moment as well.
Monumental waste of space.
Yeah.
It is monumental to him.
The Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump White House ballroom.
And of course, the Lincoln Project people did a great ad.
We're going to play that for you here in just a moment.
That really trolled him on that.
Guard Goldsmith says, Israel's logic to recover bodies from rubble, stop heavy equipment from operating in Gaza, then bomb and kill people and create more rubble.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's never any intention to have peace there.
This is just a gimmick.
And the fact that Trump thinks that he deserves a peace prize, that he thinks he's going to get another one with Ukraine and Russia.
The question is, is he fooling himself?
He's trying to fool other people, and he is fooling a lot of other people.
Maybe he's fooling himself as well.
Maybe he's self-deluded.
Don't frag me, bro, says Bill Gates of hell.
Hell 9000 Watson.
They still let him get away with destroying people and the environment.
That's right.
North American House hippo.
This is what pissed me off about Pierre Poliver.
Poliev.
Poliev.
Canada's conservative, quote-unquote, leader.
He gave hardcore speeches, but then it always came back to accepting the premise of climate change and supporting.
Yeah.
If you give into someone's worldview, if you accept and argue from that perspective, you've already lost.
You have to just reject it.
And again, like I said, Trump did push back.
He had some good people in for a short period of time in his first administration that were against the environmental thing.
The big Achilles heel was that he treated the Paris Climate Accord as if it was the law of the land.
And it's the only law that I've ever seen Trump respect.
He doesn't respect the Bill of Rights.
He doesn't respect the Constitution.
If he respected the Constitution, he would know that that was not a valid treaty, but he doesn't respect anything other than this globalist accord that is actually a treaty that was not ratified by the Senate.
And so it is kind of amazing that that's the only law that he really cares about.
Tells you something, I think.
Big Brit is back again.
Gates will turn his attention on killing as many as possible with his jabs and genetically altered insects.
Yeah.
You don't want your delicious cricket paste?
Come on.
He's going to do it in the name of helping your health.
Soyl and Goy, by their own rationale, we've already crossed the dark side of the moon on climate change, and we're totally doomed no matter what we do.
That's what they've been saying, you know.
Yeah.
For about 20 years, they've been saying that we've got 10 years to fix this before we're all doomed.
Soyl and Goy, according to the IPCC, if we stopped all industry right now, it wouldn't make a dent in solving the alleged global warming.
That's right.
There's nothing to be done.
We're doomed, you know.
Just might as well let it happen.
So let's enjoy ourselves here.
It's power creep for their narrative.
Like, they have to keep ramping it up to a point of absurdity because it has to be worse than what they said before.
Well, no, not only is it going to get warm, but the planet's going to explode too.
Yeah, that sounds bad.
It's global boiling.
That's what global boiling is next, right?
Catch me out in Alaska with them king crabs, brother.
Big Britain.
Well, the whole retreat from the term global warming to climate change was kind of telling, I think.
And, you know, it's interesting to see how many different ways that they have manipulated this thing.
As I said, it started out as an ice age, then it became global warming, then eventually it became climate change.
But if you look at things like the EPA, the EPA originally began as a pushback against pollution, pollution that you could see, pollution you could smell.
And then they went into this mission of deindustrialization.
And so everything about this has been this constantly morphing blob that just swallows up everything.
And I'm glad to see at least that MacGuffin fail.
We're still going to have to fight this Gates health MacGuffin, the pandemic MacGuffin that's going to be out there.
Lets them do everything that they could with the other one.
The two of them are there.
But it'll be interesting to see what happens with Europe.
I think what happened is that they moved quickly enough on this thing, shutting down, deindustrializing, for instance, the UK, but also Germany.
People are starting to see what's happening there.
And I think Gates can read the room and he can see that people basically had it, having their ability to even heat their homes taken away from them.
They are not allowed to make anything, to grow anything.
And it's going to create a grassroots movement in terms of revolution.
But on the other hand, as you were saying, Travis, the scare about boogeyman viruses that they don't have to produce any evidence of, that worked perfectly.
So it makes a lot of sense for him to pivot to that 100%.
Big Brit is back again, says the massive data AI centers are stealing all the water.
Yeah.
Not going to be able to grow anything because we need to generate more nonsense.
The real octo spook, all I see is Gates admitting he was a criminal all along, and the majority of we the people, as usual, were right.
They're doubling down in their attacks while playing to be becoming benign.
Yeah, that's another thing is he's saying it's not a disaster now, so is he going to apologize for destroying economies in the name of stopping this disaster?
Yeah.
Yeah, there's no steel refinery left at all in the UK.
They shut down the last one of those and they're not allowed to get the kind of coal that they used to make steel.
They're not allowed to have the energy that they can use to make steel.
And Germany is shutting everything down as well.
German car companies are being mandated to go away because they've got to have zero emission vehicles.
It's not even good enough to have a hybrid that's out there.
You've got to have zero emissions.
And so with that declaration, what they did was they erased the massive lead that European car companies, German car companies, American car companies, the massive lead that they had in engine technology that involved quite a bit of evolution in terms of the technology involved and just clear the DICS and start over again.
And that allowed the Chinese to not only be equal, but superior to them because they also have access to unlimited cheap energy, as well as resetting the board when it comes to car technology.
Niburu 2029 says those alfalfa farms are also a front for the aquifer water extraction that's being bottled and shipped overseas by the millions of hectares.
SoloCat 1980, collecting water from your roof gutter downspouts and ACD humidifier drain lines can go a long way to reduce dependency on municipal water usage in some areas.
Interesting and good advice from SoloCat.
Well, we're going to take a break and when we come back, we're going to take a look at Trump and his theatrics.
And this last week, we've seen a lot of theatrics about a third term.
And we're going to take a look at what both the left and the right are saying about this.
You got an essay from Steve Watson saying, well, look at this.
Trump is just trolling these people and they're losing their mind over this.
Well, I don't know who's losing their mind over it.
Maybe we're losing the Constitution.
You might want to hear it in your heart.
You'll owe nothing and be happy.
Ain't got no cash, ain't got no car.
But 24 booster shots in your arm.
Oh, nothing.
Be happy.
You can't even buy shit in the store because of your low social credit score.
Oh, nothing.
Happy you will own nothing And be happy.
Be happy and eat the bugs.
To
the David Knight Show.
Hello, it's me, Volodymyr Zelensky.
I'm so tired of wearing these same t-shirts everywhere for years.
You'd think with all the billions I've skimmed off America, I could dress better.
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But he told me to get lost.
Maybe one of you American suckers can buy me some at the DavidKnightshow.com.
You should be able to buy me several hundred.
Those amazing sand-colored microphone hoodies are so beautiful.
I'd wear something other than green military cosplay to my various galas and social events.
If you want to save on shipping, just put it in the next package of bombs and missiles coming from the USA.
Elvis.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles and the sweet sounds of Motown.
Find them on the Oldies channel at APSRadio.com.
Well, welcome back, folks.
And we do want to thank Charlie and APS for carrying the program there and also for supporting the program as well.
Appreciate that.
Thank you, Charlie.
Also, Karen brought in the list of people who paid and have supported us with checks.
And she said, I hadn't read the second week of October yet.
So let me catch up on that.
I want to thank Helen T., Aaron W., Fred and Jackie Yu, Stephanie K., Jack H., David and Anne-Marie N., Melda D, Mike M., Christina J, David and Deborah W., Ronald C., Gonzalo and Susan M., Greg R., Aaron F., Meg J, and the Sellers family, Monica especially.
Thank you all of you for your support.
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Thank you.
Thank you, Brandon.
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Yes.
And Brandon, Grateful Baptist.
He says, please continue to pray for me about getting off of opioid medication.
I've only been able to lower my dose.
I'm really in a battle, but it's victory to even lower the dose.
And we will be praying for you, Brandon.
I'm sorry to see that.
That's one of the great tragedies of this opioid thing.
And that is the fact that a lot of people, so many people, got hooked on this because of the doctors that were out there.
I remember the story from Chris Christie, when people asked him about marijuana, he pivoted to the opioid thing.
It's like talk about a total non-sequitur.
They're completely different.
The opioids are much more addictive, and it is a choice that people made.
He said, I had a friend who did from law school.
He said he's a very successful partner in a law firm, and he was jogging, unlike Chris Christie or myself.
I don't jog.
And he said he injured his back.
And he said they gave him opioids.
He got addicted to them, that pain medication.
And he said it cost him his job as a lawyer.
It cost him his marriage.
And eventually he took his life because it was so difficult to get off of that.
So Brandon, we'll be praying for you.
Don't do anything rash.
God can change things.
But then he pivoted, Chris Christie did, to marijuana, which is a complete non-sequitur.
And if you want to prohibit stuff, maybe you should start looking at some of the things that the pharmaceutical companies are doing because they're harming people without fully informing them what is involved in this.
I remember when Rand Paul got tackled by his neighbor and broke several ribs and he was in a great deal of pain.
And he said, I'm not taking any opioids at all.
He was informed about it.
But, you know, if you don't know about this stuff, it's very easy.
All of us at one point or the other have been blindsided by the medical community.
So we'll be praying for you, Brandon.
I want to talk a little bit about Trump and his theatrics.
And, you know, when you look at all this back and forth about a third term and what Steve Bannon is doing, these people are liars.
They're grifters.
They're thespians.
That's what they should have for the LGBT, right?
Thespians and transgenders.
The theater.
The theater.
The theater, the theater.
So on CNN, one person who used to work for the Pentagon as a spokesperson, Sabrina Singh, kind of laughed it off and said, this is a hell of a drug for Trump, isn't it, to troll people all the time so that he can grab headlines.
And so you've got a lot of mainstream media talking about it because of Steve Bannon, who's also another grifter and theatric headline grabber.
So she said he's trolling people about running for a third term.
Sabrina Singh, former Pentagon spokesperson, said her comments came after Steve Bannon said during an interview with The Economist that there is a plan, quote unquote, in place, trust this plan, right?
To make sure that Trump is president in 2028 and beyond to infinity and beyond.
He should have brought in Buzz Lightyear.
He may really be seeking relevance instead of another term as president, said Sabrina.
So I think relevancy is one hell of a drug.
And I think he likes to stay relevant.
In other words, he wants to grab all the headlines he can.
And he also wants to distract people from the other things that he's doing.
You know, he put out a video that trolled people about the fact that he was never going to leave.
He should think about whether he's going to live that long.
You know, when you look at what happened with the MRI, you know, he's getting well past life expectancy for men in America, and none of us has tomorrow guaranteed for us.
Most Americans disapprove, by the way, of Trump's AI videos.
Most people are not a fan of what he did with that trolling of the No Kings protest last week.
What, you mean, Americans don't like seeing their president dumping fake excrement on all of America?
That's right.
Yeah.
They said 61% of respondents strongly disapproved.
Another 9% somewhat disapproved.
Well, all that is 70%.
So that's more than two-thirds of people didn't like it.
You wouldn't know that to look at social media, to look at X. You would think that everybody loves us.
That's just how dominated it is by the Make America gangster again crowd.
60% of poll respondents called the video unpresidential.
More than half described it as disturbing or offensive.
Only a small share viewed it positively, with 15% finding it entertaining and only 9% saying that it was clever.
So, again, CNN is fear-mongering, says Steve Watson.
I just told you what the one analyst said, laughed it off and said, he can't possibly be serious about this.
It isn't going to happen.
He's just trying to grab the headlines and pretend that he's got this, you know, he's addicted to being relevant, to being in the headlines.
But Steve Watson attacks CNN rather than Trump.
He says CNN's fearmongers Trump's despot talk of a third term.
They think that it's a serious threat.
Let me just say this, Steve.
We have a thing, I know you don't have it in the UK, but we have this thing called the Constitution.
And these people don't have any legal authority if they ignore the Constitution.
That's the key issue with what Trump and Steve Bannon are saying.
They don't care about the Constitution.
They actively and publicly hate it and do everything they can to undermine it.
That is the issue.
Just like the issue in his anger about the Canadian commercial playing what Reagan was saying, the issue was that Trump was A, lying, and that B, he was a temperamental tyrant who immediately imposed a 10% tariff.
And that, I hope, is going to come back to really haunt him when he goes before the Supreme Court.
He wants to claim it's an emergency, and yet he just showed that it's based on his own personal, capricious, arbitrary whims, what level of taxation he puts on and who he puts it on.
And so those are the real issues.
The fact that Trump doesn't want to debate the issue.
It doesn't matter what you think about the tariffs economically.
He doesn't want to debate Ronald Reagan.
And he doesn't want to debate anybody.
And he doesn't want people to have free speech.
And if it's something negative about him, he immediately came back out the next day and said, these polls that are out there, we need to ban them if they're negative about me.
They shouldn't be allowed to run ads with polls that I don't agree with.
And they should be banned.
And he's trying to ban ads in foreign countries by throwing tariffs at them as well.
That's the real issue that's involved there.
That's the bigger issue than the tariffs.
So Trump responded to a reporter who asked about Steve Bannon's remarks.
The president largely dismissed the notion, says Steve Watson, saying that he wouldn't run his vice president and then have the new president step aside because the American people, quote, wouldn't like it.
He doesn't say, I wouldn't do it because the Constitution doesn't allow it.
You know, we have a specific amendment that doesn't allow that.
But of course, he didn't care about the Second Amendment.
He decided that he had the power to ban whatever he wanted to by decree.
And he did, and he set a precedent that Biden continued on with.
He says, calling a third term is something that Washington in his farewell address would have called something different.
He called it a despot.
But you know, something like despots, dictator, monarch, that's not going to poll well with focus groups, said Coe, who wrote for the New York Times.
So Eric Dottery quoted CNN and said, we have to take this quite seriously.
It's a threat.
It is a threat.
It's a threat to the Constitution.
Nearly everything that Trump does is a threat to some aspect of the Constitution.
And he is a despot.
And he is desperate for relevancy, for attention, and to divert people's attention from serious things to the nonsense that he puts out there.
So, Coe at the New York Times said, I think there are, as Bannon threatened, I would like to say that we do have to take this quite seriously.
We should view it as a threat.
And so Steve Watson is saying, well, absolutely not, but it is a threat to the rule of law.
And we played this for you the other day.
I want to play it again.
This is what Steve Bannon actually said and left the economist reporters from the UK actually amazed that he was saying that he's just going to ignore the Constitution or they'll find some way to get around what he knows the Constitution says.
We'll get around it, right?
I know that it says we can't have a third term.
We'll find some way to wiggle around the Constitution and the law.
Oh, that's the wrong one.
Let's see.
We got the wrong clip in there for that.
Do you have the Bannon clip that you could play?
Yeah, let me just find it here.
Okay.
Well, he's going to get a third term.
So Trump 28.
Trump is going to be president in 28, and people just ought to get a copy of the term.
Well, yeah, he will be president in 28.
22nd Amendment.
The new president doesn't come in until 22.
There's many different alternatives.
At the appropriate time, we'll lay out what the plan is.
But there's a plan, and President Trump will be the president in 28.
We had longer odds in 2016 and longer odds in 24 than we got in 28.
And President Trump will be the president of the United States.
What a line-grifting fraud he is.
He belongs in prison.
Finish what we started.
Finish the wall.
Finish it.
Trump is a vehicle.
I know this will drive you guys crazy, but he's a vehicle of divine providence.
He's an instrument.
He's very imperfect.
He's not churchy, not particularly religious, but he's an instrument of divine will.
And you can tell this of how he's pulled this off.
We need him for at least one.
This guy is an unbelievable.
And he'll get that in 28.
You're not driving me crazy.
We, we, we.
You're not in the administration, Bannon.
You're not an insider to this.
The things you've just told me in the last few minutes.
On the one hand, you've said the Constitution is fit for purpose.
Secondly, you've said that President Trump needs another term, even though the 22nd Amendment makes pretty clear that he cannot have a second term.
Why does it make that clear?
Because he's on his second term already.
At some point in time, we will make sure we go through Zani and define all those terms.
But even if you find a way to undermine the you will be undermining the spirit of that amendment, even if you find some way around it.
And to those who are not afraid of the people.
And the American people, can the American people, if the American people, with the mechanisms that we have, put Trump back in office, are the American people tearing up the Constitution?
Would that be tearing up the Constitution?
Yeah, it would be.
Would the American people be going against the spirit of the Constitution?
We have a republic, not a mobocracy.
Actually, because I think what you are going to, what you will end up with is a computer justification for a quasi-democracy.
Demagogue.
That's not true at all.
Demagogue.
Trump is a dictatorship.
Did you just see the compromises he had to make on the big beautiful bill?
You see the compromises he has to do on everything, on accommodating Zelensky, on what President Trump, President Trump is nothing but a series of negotiations to kind of keep this thing rolling forward where he's having trade-offs all the time.
You've just spent the last 20 minutes telling me we have to smash the other side.
There's no room for debate.
There's no room for compromise.
We must smash them.
And now you're telling me this is a negotiation.
No, no, no.
Why are you interviewing this guy anyway?
He's obviously just a line grifter.
He's got the standards in 2028 and continues to stay in office is by the will of the American people.
Okay?
And the will of the American people is what the Constitution embodies.
And so I think we're going to be in good hands there.
We need to finish what we started.
And President Trump is the instrument, a providential instrument to finish that, to finish this job.
He's going to wrap himself in God.
Okay.
Providential.
This guy is such a crook.
He belongs back in jail.
Remember, he grifted all of the MAGA people about the we build the wall thing.
And he went to jail.
And it was Trump who let him out.
But he's not on the inside.
All this we, we, we stuff, this royal we.
Bannon is not a part of this administration.
He doesn't have any influence except with the MAGA people.
He's got influence with them because people like the economists come in to talk to him.
And of course, he gets a lot of attention.
And so they do that for the same reason that Trump does this nonsense and the same reason that Bannon does this nonsense.
But Bannon is selling some very dangerous ideas.
We don't have a democracy.
We don't want a democracy.
A democracy is a mob.
We want the rule of law.
We want a constitutional republic.
And everything that Bannon and Trump and all the rest of these MAGA jerks have done is to undermine and destroy the Constitution.
And he's openly talking about, we'll find some way to undermine the 22nd Amendment, just as they found ways to undermine the rest of the bill of the amendments and the Constitution.
I think I mentioned this before, but he is going about this in the worst possible way he could.
You know, if you're going to have a strongman, if you're going to have someone that comes in and seizes power and says, all right, I'm a dictator now, but I'm going to do everything that the right wing wants.
You could potentially make an argument that, all right, you know, eventually it'll be bad, but for however long this guy lives, he's going to give us exactly what we want.
So there's, you know, there's room.
There's something to gain there.
He's assuming all this power, and then he's immediately going to divest it of himself and hand it to people that hate you, people that want to utilize it to bring the hammer down on you.
Yeah.
He is powers that you're giving to the next Democrat president.
And there is going to be one.
Yeah.
He's setting it all up and he is pissing them all off to the point where no one is going to be able to fill his shoes.
Well, that's my point.
What Trump is doing and what Bannon is cheering is the destruction of a Constitutional Republic.
He wants a dictatorship.
He wants a mob that is going to be out there.
He hates the Constitution.
This guy should be in jail.
He is nothing but a grifter grifting and deceiving these MAGA people who don't know any better.
If anything, he's making it extremely easy for the next Democrat to come in and say, we saw what those Republicans did.
We saw how they almost ran for a third time.
Who knows?
Maybe next time they get in, they'll just do away with it.
So maybe we have to do away with it now.
Yeah.
So this woman who, again, I can't understand why anybody would care a whit about what this lying crook, Steve Bannon, says, she said, I think actually that what you will end up with is a populist justification for a quasi-dictatorship.
Well, of course.
And Bannon says, well, the will of the American people is what the Constitution embodies.
Absolutely wrong.
The law is what it says.
This is the Republican slash conservative version of the Constitution as a living document, which is the fiction that the left created a long time ago to basically overthrow the Constitution.
It's a living document.
It is what we say it is.
It is what we want it to be at this point in time.
We're not going to be bound by the actual text of the Constitution.
We're not going to be bound by the law.
It is what we aspire for it to be.
It is what the president says it is or what the Supreme Court says that it is.
Bannon's tone suggests a more serious movement may be forming around the idea.
Well, let's hope not because these people are bad enough.
Trump is not ruling out a third term.
He proclaims to reporters, I've saved the lives of millions of people.
Well, he's actually a mass murderer, and he's proud of being a mass murderer.
He's proud of killing people in boats, but he also boasts about killing people with his jab.
He keeps pushing that jab, and he loves the mRNA stuff.
That's what's so dangerous about Bill Gates pivoting in this direction.
Bill Gates has hung out now with Trump on several occasions since Trump has come back in a second time.
And Bill Gates knows he's not going to get anywhere with the climate MacGuffin, but he can get everywhere with the pharmaceutical MacGuffin and the pandemic MacGuffin.
It's truly amazing how full of himself and self-obsessed Trump is continually being like, I've saved millions of people.
Yeah.
How many...
I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.
Can you imagine someone like Audi Murphy coming in and just bragging about, I saved so many men.
I saved people real heroes don't do that.
Real heroes don't come in and start beating their chest and making sure you know how great they are.
Sergeant York or something.
They're not out there continually reminding you, look at all these medals I got.
Look at what I did.
Look at how great I am.
It's the exact opposite type of character.
Yeah, that's right.
So again, you know, Trump's going to be president 2028.
Yeah, Steve, you know so much about all this stuff.
You do realize, of course, that 2028 is the election year and that the new president is not sworn in until January of 2020.
Did you know that, Steve?
Maybe you should go back and just look at the calendar or the schedule here since you don't want to read the Constitution.
Maybe you could inform yourself at least that much.
What a boasting a-hole this man is and a criminal to boot.
He deserves to be back in jail.
So again, you had reporters because of the Bannon interview, because the economists gave this guy a platform.
You got all these reporters peppering Trump.
And of course, Trump is going to be intentionally invasive and vague and all the rest of this stuff, he says.
So do you think you could run as vice president?
Yeah, I'd be allowed to do that.
Do you think the White House or the White House council is in a legal position like this?
And by the way, he would not be allowed to run as vice president because the vice president has to be somebody who is qualified to be president.
And he is not qualified to be president a third time because of the 22nd Amendment.
So Trump says, no, you're allowed to do that, but I wouldn't want, I wouldn't want to do that because it's a little bit too cute.
He's a little bit too cute.
So you're ruling that out?
Yeah, I wouldn't rule that out because it's too cute.
I think the people wouldn't like that.
It's too cute.
It wouldn't be right.
And so what he's saying is, just like Bannon, and this is what makes it dangerous, he doesn't care, folks, about what the Constitution says.
It's just what he can get away with and what the people will like.
In other words, it's just pure demagoguery.
Meanwhile, he posts a picture thanking himself for saving the country that doesn't appreciate him.
Pull that up, Lance, in that article.
You can see the meme that he actually put up.
On Sunday night, he posted a picture of himself to social media that sang his praises for, quote, working like a dog for no money in order to save a country that doesn't appreciate his sacrifice.
That's the article that has the headline, Trump post a picture, thinking himself, can you show the picture that he posted?
So in that picture, I'll just describe it to you.
He has his ties off and hanging on his neck, and he's got his MAGA red cap in his hand.
So he's really tired.
He's had a hard day of talking.
So, yeah, I want to thank Donald Trump for working like a dog for no money to save a country that doesn't appreciate his sacrifice.
Thank you, Mr. President.
Well, he's just about to write himself a check for $230 million, of course.
And that's compensation for the unjust attacks.
And I believe they were unjust, the Russia Gate attacks and the money that he had to pay to defend himself.
Mr. Trump, why don't you give some compensation to the J6 people?
You ripped them off for $250 million with your Save America stuff.
And Alex Jones ripped them off with Stop the Steal.
You didn't give them any of their money back.
You kept all their money.
And then they had to defend themselves.
Some of them went to jail, some of them for years under horrible circumstances.
And you're not going to give them any compensation?
The $230 million that you're going to pay yourself for legal fees, you ought to consider that to be your campaign contributions because it was the attacks from the Democrats that made you president, not your record, that allowed him to escape his record.
And so another busy week for the president.
Trump increased tariffs on Canada.
There's the meme right there.
He increased tariffs on Canada by another 10% on Saturday after a temper tantrum.
And so he's been talking about his new $300 million ballroom.
Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that.
This is the Lincoln project, which has always been against Trump.
This is the Trump Epstein Ballroom ad that they've put out that's pretty much going viral.
Maybe you've seen it.
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Say goodbye to 123 years of history and say hello to the Donald Trump Epstein Memorial Ballroom at the Donald Trump Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom.
Every day is a wonderful secret.
Every day is a wonderful secret.
Well, some of the secrets are going to be coming out because I told you earlier this week, author Michael Wolf is going to be suing the Trumps, and there's going to be a discovery process in that.
I think he's going to get more information than the Congress will ever release.
And he had an interview with young Turks where he talked about Trump and Epstein and what broke up this wonderful friendship of 15 years.
In 2004, Epstein believed himself to be the high bidder on a piece of real estate in Palm Beach, a house.
$36 million was his bid.
He took his friend Trump around to see the house to advise him on how to move the swimming pool.
Trump, thereupon, went around Epstein's back and bid $40 million for the house and got the property.
Epstein, who was well acquainted, in fact, deeply involved with Trump's scattered finances, understood that he didn't have $40 million to pay for this house.
Now, if that was the case, it was someone else's $40 million.
At the time, Epstein believed this to be the $40 million of a Russian oligarch by the name of Rybolev.
Less than two years later, this same house that Trump had bought for $40 million was sold for $95 million.
And it was, in fact, sold to Mr. Rybolev.
This is all a red flag of money laundering.
What Epstein did, and he was furious about losing this house.
I mean, there's something about these guys that nothing rouses them so much as a real estate betrayal.
Epstein, after the sale of this house, after Trump went around his back, got this house, Epstein began to threaten him.
He began to threaten him with lawsuits.
He began to threaten him with going to the press and saying that Trump was a front man for a money laundering deal.
Trump panicks at this point.
And Epstein believed, and he believed to his dying day, that it was Trump who went to the police, Trump who was fully acquainted with what was going on at Epstein's house, fully acquainted for many years.
Trump went to the police and, as Epstein said, dropped the dime on him.
That is to say, informed the police of what was going on.
And Mike Johnson has said he was an informant.
Began and all of Epstein's legal problems for the next 15 years began to unfold.
This story about this piece of real estate and their falling out was first published in June 2019.
It was published actually in my book, Siege, the second book I had written about the Trump White House.
Epstein had recounted this story to me.
I put it in this book.
Epstein at that moment was in Paris.
He read the book.
He called me with some alarm, and he said he was afraid that he might have said too much.
Three weeks later, he returned to the United States from Paris and was promptly arrested on the tarmac of Teterborough Airport in New Jersey when his plane landed.
In the White House, they believed that the story in the Wall Street Journal about the birthday greeting that Donald Trump, the salacious birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 on the occasion of his 50th birthday, was a leak from the Maxwell family.
And in the White House, they regarded this as, quote, a shot across the bow.
So a threat, you know, that Ghillain had damaging material on Donald Trump.
So Donald Trump's lawyer went down, and I expect to try to figure out exactly what Ghillain Maxwell had.
Yeah, and it's kind of interesting.
I believe because of the timing and because people talk about the fact that what broke up their friendship was that real estate fight over that one house that they're both trying to get and the fact that Trump got it.
And it was shortly after that that somebody anonymously blew the whistle on Jeffrey Epstein.
And I said long before Mike Johnson said that Trump was an informant, I believe that it was Trump who did it out of spite.
But from what Michael Wolf is saying, it was out of fear because Epstein was talking about the money laundering thing.
That was an angle I didn't know about, the Russian money laundering thing.
Whether that's true or not, I still believe that it was Trump.
And I believe that that was validated, in a sense, by Mike Johnson.
He said, well, Trump is actually an informant.
And of course, that begs the issue as to how much Trump knew.
And of course, we know that Trump knew everything that was being done by Jeffrey Epstein because they were such close friends for 15 years.
And that's why he was an informant.
And the whole thing that kicked all this off was that real estate fight.
And so, you know, Trump is looking at his new ballroom.
He's helping Argentina while the USDA and FEMA is ignoring Americans and American farmers.
And he's throwing temper tantrums about negative ads that he doesn't like, whether they're true or not, whether or not the poll is true, and whether or not what Reagan had to say is true, whether or not that was truly what Reagan had to say.
And folks, it was.
I played the ad for, I read you the transcript.
It is exactly what Reagan said.
We all know that Reagan was open trade, low taxes, and it is completely consistent with everything that he did.
And the people who are misrepresenting him and spending his words are the Trump people and the MAGA media that is trying to cover for the dictator.
So it is absolutely reprehensible.
It's his attack on the First Amendment, as he has shown complete contempt for the entire Bill of Rights as well as the Constitution.
He's escalating the ICE raids, and now you've got local community defense networks are growing.
This is an article from Free Thought Project about one pushback in Richmond, Virginia.
But it's not just that.
He is energizing the left in a way that they've not been energized before.
You know, we saw Obama energizing many people on the right.
It was still a small but growing minority on the right.
But this is getting really big, and I think the Republicans just don't realize how much they are energizing people in opposition to them.
And I hate to see that happen because I don't want the policies that the Democrats want.
I want the policies that the Republicans claim to want, that they work against actually in practice.
But the things that they run on, the things that they say they want, are the things that I would like to see happen.
And of course, you can always hold that against them if they say that that's what they want.
If they've got a constituency that's built on those policies and they betray that constituency, that constituency can speak out.
But if the Democrats win, it's going to be, well, we've got a mandate to take you into full socialism and Marxism.
What, Lance?
A lot of the cult of Trump started from Obama energizing the right to want to push back in some way.
It got subverted by Trump, but it was a desire to actually change something for good.
That's right.
Absolutely right.
Well, we have a couple of comments here.
Username 0123456789 says the troll-in-chief.
Yeah, that's right.
Maybe we call him the troll on the shelf or Christmas time.
That's what we should do.
We should make a little Trump elf doll, the troll on the shelf.
Let's hope they get put on the shelf.
We'll have to get a few more years at least.
Sadly.
Steve Ebbs says, Trump will finish the job.
I agree, but what's the job?
Yeah, I think we saw the job in 2020.
I think that was his work assignment.
It's been called the 2030 agenda.
Yeah, the Manchurian agenda that he's got there.
Not all Manchurian candidates.
It's not worth doing.
That's right.
Well, we're going to take a quick break, folks.
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We cannot thank you all enough.
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Unlike most revolutions, where the people rise against a real economic oppression, in our case here in Boston, we are fighting for purely an abstract principle.
It is, however, not nearly so abstract as the young gentleman supposes.
The issue involved here is one of monopoly.
Today, the British government will monopolize the sale of tea in our country.
Tomorrow it will be something else.
It's your move.
You are listening to the David Knight Show.
Whether you're feeling like the blues or blue grass, APS Radio has you covered.
Check out a wide variety of channels on our app at apsradio.com.
Well, welcome back.
David Ramsey 2328, I guess, regarding the Constitution says, David, who cares if they tear it up?
We didn't sign it.
I know why Sander Spooner said that.
He said the Constitution is a document in which I cannot find my signature.
The difference is, and why this is important, is because you and I did not sign this.
These people swore to uphold it as a condition of their office.
It is an restraint that is external to them.
They have to have some sort of external restraint.
And, of course, it's not going to enforce itself.
But when they violate it, they have shown that they have no authority.
And I think that's why it's important.
I also think that's a pretty good form for government.
I think it served us well for a very long time until it was destroyed by Lincoln.
And then, of course, we had another fourth turning president, FDR, who also took his acts to the Constitution.
And now we've got another fourth turning president doing the same thing.
So I think the Constitution is important.
I think it's a good outline, a good document.
Bill of Rights is very important.
And it's mostly important because they swore to uphold it.
And it shows that they're liars, thieves, and crooks when they violate it.
And it shows that they have no legitimate authority.
You want to talk about a divine purpose when you guys don't follow the Constitution?
Well, real quickly, I understand there's a lot of people out there.
Guard specifically, he's an anarcho-capitalist, really believes in free association and that sort of thing.
I think he's put a lot of thought into it.
I personally am not that far into the anarcho-capitalist world.
I think hierarchy tends to naturally develop.
And people, the majority of people are followers.
They want to follow someone.
And so you have to have a structured system in place for who you are going to put in charge.
Otherwise, the mob just gets together and says, well, that guy's the biggest, strongest, toughest looking guy.
That guy's promising me more stuff.
And it becomes this, you know, free-for-all of who is going to give the mob what they want.
So you have to have systems and structures in place that dictate who can wield power, who's fit to wield power, or the mob just chooses.
Well, I think it was Madison who said, because men are not angels, we need to have government.
But because the government is composed of men, how do we keep this under control?
I would say that the alternative, as you're saying, Travis, to having a government, a structure, a system of agreed upon laws that are not dictates coming out of somebody's mouth, but a system that they agree to abide by as a condition of being allowed to do their job, the power that they're being handed to.
They're being handed that power on condition.
And I think that is an alternative, not so much to individuals who are bad, but to the mob, the mob mentality that's out there.
I think the alternative to a constitutional republic is a mob, and that's exactly what Steve Bannon is pushing.
That's why it bothers me so much.
Oh, also, Owen61 in chat says, I do meth so I can watch the Day of the Night Show 24-7, 365 days of the year.
Well, we have with our most dedicated fan.
Finally, a good reason to do meth.
Yeah.
Well, a Michigan school says that a seven-year-old boy cannot walk home from the bus stop.
I mean, this is the extreme position that we've gotten to with all this helicopter parenting.
People don't want to let their kids be kids.
And of course, I'm not going to go through this thing that I walked 10 miles through the snow to get to school every day.
I lived in Florida, so that wasn't, it was actually worse than that.
I had to carry a large musical instrument back and forth to school in the heat.
But it wasn't that far.
This kid is just a couple of blocks.
It's a three-minute walk for this kid.
And this kid has already done one year of this in kindergarten and walking home from school, which again, it's just a couple of blocks.
The walk takes three and a half minutes.
And he did it when he was six years old.
But now that he's seven, they've got a new rule that says that the school will not let him do that.
It's too risky.
So this newly enforcing a rule that says that a parent or other adult must be waiting at the bus stop to escort anyone in kindergarten or first grade.
And of course, he did it when he was in kindergarten, but now he's in first grade, they won't let him.
So his mother believes that Emmett can walk home by himself.
He's done it for a year, but that doesn't move the bureaucrats at all.
She even points out other districts have less strict rules, and this wasn't the rule last year.
Suddenly now, it's not acceptable.
Michigan has not yet passed a reasonable childhood independence law, unlike 11 other states.
If your state doesn't have this, that means that if a child is out doing the kinds of normal things that we would do, it wasn't so much us going back and forth to school, but it was perhaps it was that way when you grew up.
We had playtime.
We got finished with whatever we needed to do, chores or schoolwork or whatever.
We were gone for hours at a time.
And I would go on long bike rides or I would hang out with other guys in the neighborhood.
We'd build forts in the woods.
And we had parents would have, some of them had a large bell that was like a dinner bell.
I mean, it was up on a pole and they would ring that thing and the kids, oh, that's my parents.
I've got to go.
And because they didn't have cell phones.
But, you know, it was, you weren't confined with that.
But we've had this scare that has gone on thanks to media and especially these media conglomerates that have all these different affiliate stations that they own and they're passing the news from one to the other.
So whenever anything happens in anywhere in the United States, it's reported to you as if it happened in your own neighborhood.
And that's the way people subliminally begin to see it.
I saw it happen with my sister getting really paranoid about stuff like that when I was a kid.
But here's the truth.
They said, this is reason.
They said the mother even referenced one of my favorite stats.
That's the writer's favorite stats.
A child is about five times more likely to be born with a conjoined twin than to be kidnapped by a stranger.
Our fear of rare events is inhibiting our children from developing the resilience that they need to thrive.
Walking home for three minutes is not something you should fear.
And at the request of the writer for Reason, she actually took pictures of the neighborhood.
You can show that in the article there.
This is the very dangerous neighborhood that he's in.
And of course, the thing that really surprised me, it's such a strange thing.
We're out driving.
Karen and I will even remark, look, there's somebody outside of their house.
You know, you hardly ever see anybody outside the house.
If you do, they're usually on a rider mower.
But to just see somebody, especially kids, even playing in the front yard of their house, is something you just don't see anymore.
We've had the media has completely scared us to death.
That's why the pandemic type of thing worked so well.
Look at what they've been able to do.
You know, you're five times more likely to be born with a conjoined twin than to be abducted by a stranger.
Most of the abductions are done because there's a dispute between husband and wife or something like that.
Parents ought to be able to decide when their children are ready to take on more independence.
They should never have to worry that the state is going to punish them or take away their children for letting them do regular childhood activities like going to the park or walking home from school.
I 100% agree.
So the lawyer representing her said the school is misinterpreting Michigan's liability laws.
School administrators are severely limiting this family's choice based on a misunderstanding that the district might be liable if the child were harmed.
In fact, Michigan provides broad immunity for schools, even in cases of clear neglect.
Letting a child walk a few yards at the request of their parents simply does not put the school district at risk.
As a matter of fact, they put your kids in a bus that doesn't have appropriate padding, doesn't even have seatbelts.
But it's fine because it's protected by laws and yellow paint.
So these school buses, they put you in the school buses with no seatbelts.
But if you're in your family car and you don't have a seatbelt and you're in an accident, they come after the parents and charge them with whatever happened to you.
It's kind of interesting to see this article here.
This is on Expose News out of the UK.
And it kind of filled in some gaps for me with what General Flynn has been doing at these Reawaken America tours.
I've played for you several times the prayer that he plagiarized from Elizabeth Claire Prophet.
And this is a prayer that she put together to ascended masters and the sevenfold rays of light and all the rest of it.
You know where that stuff comes from.
That comes from Bailey, Alice Bailey, a theosophist and an occultist, who was very much involved with the Lucis Trust that is very much involved with the United Nations.
And so this is an article from Expose News.
Audio recordings of the Lucis Trust meeting capture key figures who are discussing, quote, the reappearance of Christ.
According to their exoteric teachings, the year 2025 represents a pivotal moment in spiritual evolution.
As such, they've been preparing for the externalization of the hierarchy, as they point out, the emergence of these hidden masters, spiritual hierarchy, into public work.
And so, again, this calls in the question, really, who is General Flynn and where is he coming from?
Is he a part of this stuff as well?
This shadowy figure who hung out in the intelligence agency, this guy who was pushing from its very inception Pride Month and transgenderism, and then he goes around to the Reawaken America crowd.
He wraps himself in the cross of Christ and then leads people in these prayers to ascended masters.
The Lucis Trust is an organization founded in the early 20th century by Alice Bailey, theosophist, occultist, and prominent figure in the New Age movement.
Originally, it was named the Lucifer Publishing Company, later renamed the Lucis Trust.
And of course, Lucifer and Lucis are words that mean light or bringer of light.
It's known for publishing spiritual texts.
Gary Wayne summarized the origins of the Lucis Trust and Bailey's beliefs in his book, The Genesis VI Conspiracy.
Bailey founded the Lucis Trust, originally known as Lucifer's Press, as an offshoot of the Theosophical Society, designed to publish the teachings of her spirit guides, again.
More of the language that General Flynn had people reciting in church buildings.
She founded the Theosophical Network in 1961, which established arcane schools and organizations such as World Goodwill, another occultist organization called World Union, all dedicated to implementing world government.
Perhaps this is the secret agenda of Michael Flynn.
Who knows?
Bailey's arcane schools teach occult philosophy, received by Bailey, she said, from her purported spirit guides that are Tibetan, in order to initiate a new group of world servers to assist the masters of the Great White Lodge.
The White Lodge in Theosophist and Occultic Systems is a secret snake brotherhood of advanced souls that form the hidden world government.
This alleged, extremely powerful organization is further known in occultism to be the Great White Brotherhood.
So these groups are directly linked to the World Constitution Parliament Association.
But there's more connections to the prayers that you got General Flynn leading the MAGA cult.
And in 2011, Walter Veith gave a lecture at the UN during which he exposed the real motives behind the UN's New World Order.
The creation of a global religious political system.
The aim is that the world is going to move towards a unified, universal world religion.
He explained and quoted a letter published in World Goodwill in 1993.
The letter said, the universal world religion will neither be Christian nor heathen, neither Jew nor Gentile.
But simply, is that it?
Did you find the speech that he had?
Yes, sorry, I was trying to pull that up for you.
Good, yeah.
Pull that up.
That'd be great to play that when I get a little bit further along here.
He says, they will accept the truth.
They'll recognize divine sonship, and they will seek unitedly to cooperate with the divine.
According to Bailey, a general assembly of the hierarchy has been occurring every 100 years since 1425 to determine the spiritual and political direction of humanity for the next century.
The 25th year of each century is when the hidden spiritual hierarchy meets in conclave to advance a divine plan for evolution.
Maybe this is the plan they're talking about.
Who knows, right?
Alice Bailey taught that a spiritual hierarchy of enlightened beings, sometimes called the Ascended Masters, guides humanity's evolution through the scenes.
Hierarchy, she said, consists of an advanced spiritual entities, many having once been human, who work on inner spiritual planes to carry out the supposed plan of God on earth.
Now, I don't believe any of this stuff, but the issue is that a lot of these globalists do.
And the question is, does Michael Flynn, and is this really where he's going?
Is he trying to come up with some kind of religious political movement or deception in order to push world government?
According to Bailey's externalization of the hierarchy, published in 1957, they meet in a general assembly of the hierarchy once every 100 years, precisely in the 25th year of each century.
The most recent one was held in 1925, and they scheduled one for 2025.
I think it's already been held this year.
Yeah, it was in June this year, because they do it, of course, at the summer solstice.
Various key spiritual observances, including the World Invocation Day on the 11th of June, 2025.
So they said the revelatory period ahead of the anticipated reappearance of Christ with major spiritual observations like the Seven Rays Conference and the World Invocation Day scheduled in June.
So again, this is ticking a lot of boxes that are inside this speech by this plagiarized prayer, I should say, that General Flynn had people praying at the Reawaken Conference.
Let's go ahead and play that, Lance.
And you'll hear a lot of these terms I was just talking about in that sevenfold rays and so forth.
There we are.
You are your instrument of those sevenfold rays and all your archangels, all of them.
I am here, O God, and I am the instrument of those sevenfold rays and archangels.
We will not retreat.
We will not retreat.
We will stand our ground.
And I will not retreat.
I will take my stand.
We will not fear to speak.
We will be the instrument of your will.
Whatever it is.
I will not fear to speak, and I will be the instrument of God's will, whatever it is.
In your name.
In the name of your legions.
Here I am.
So help me, God, in the name of Archangel Michael and his legions.
We are freeborn.
And we shall remain freeborn.
I am free-born and I shall remain free-born.
And we shall not be enslaved by any foe.
Within or without.
And I shall not be enslaved by any foe within or without.
Well, there you go.
So what is happening with this?
What is he up to?
What is Reawaken America Tour up to?
What is the MAGA cult up to?
In this article from Expose News, they quoted one individual who'd listened to the audio, and he said, they use a lot of language that is happening in the churches today.
He's not meaning this Reawaken Tour.
That did happen in a church building.
He said, primarily based on love and light and not being separate, but having this ecumenical experience.
This is very important to understand that this is coming from an outwardly open Luciferian organization.
So I want people to have their ears tuned to that because there's a lot that sounds biblically accurate.
That's how the deception works.
You've got to look again at what Alice Bailey says.
You've got to look again at what Elizabeth Claire Prophet said.
Look again at what General Flynn is getting these people to repeat.
It's just amazing.
It also makes me wonder about Peter Thiel's constantly talking about the Antichrist, if that fits in pretty well with all this stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, of course, they've all got their different agenda, and they'll all come in with, they'll all pull in a twisted version of Christianity to accomplish their purposes.
Which brings us to Zionism.
The next thing on my list here.
This is an interesting bit of research done by J.D. Hall about what the Israeli government is doing in terms of lobbying.
They have actually created recently three different organizations that are going to be lobbying for the political Israeli government's position on the biggest Christian radio network that's out there, Salem News.
And one of these organizations is run by Brad Parscale, who was a very talented individual in terms of manipulating the public for Donald Trump.
If that name sounds familiar, that's where you've heard it before in his first administration.
The organization Show Faith by Works LLC has registered as a foreign agent.
You know, people have said, well, APAC needs to register under the FARA requirements, a Foreign Agent Registration Act.
Well, these organizations did, and that's how J.D. Hall found out about it.
Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs registered this group called Show Faith by Works.
Within nine days, you had three of these organizations registered by the Israeli government, and they're all very heavily connected with each other and heavily connected with the largest Christian radio network there is out there, Salem Radio.
Clock Tower X, Bridges Partners, and Show Faith by Works all entered the federal ledger within nine days.
They all filed the same registration on behalf of Foreign Ministry, and that is the Israeli Foreign Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
That alone would be an extraordinary story.
A foreign government hired a private American outfit to target worshipers on Sunday mornings and during chapel hours, and to pretty much all of these big evangelistic organizations that have very popular preachers or whatever.
They've all got programs on Salem Radio.
And so the firm then rolled a mobile museum across church parking lots that lobbied for more dead babies in Gaza in the name of Christian loyalty to Israel.
And pastors then received resource kits as well.
Attendees received ads.
Everyone received a narrative.
Yet Show by Faith is not an anomaly.
It's just a spoke in the larger wheel that is out there.
So the one that is involving Brad Parscale is Clock Tower at the top of the stack.
It's a multi-million dollar scope to deliver strategic communications and media services for Israel's campaign inside the United States.
And it is integrated very heavily with Salem Media.
And so the structure of all this, again, Brad Parscale, the analytics brain behind Trump's digital machine, operated the data mining arm known as Cambridge Analytica.
Remember that from the first Trump administration?
Well, as soon as Trump was out of office, he went into private consultation and got involved in this kind of thing.
He's a numbers savant who turned behavioral science into a persuasion model, tracking moods, testing phrases, mapping emotional circuitry of entire demographics.
His genius and his danger lay in understanding how digital ecosystems could be engineered to steer opinion, not just to measure it.
When a man like that resurfaces in Christian broadcasting, it isn't marketing, it's psychological architecture wearing a cross.
And so his company is Clock Tower X. And they filed their fare registration the same month that he joined with Salem.
And so he's kind of the connecting point of connection between Clock Tower X and Salem.
And Salem Radio Network is where this is all going to be running through.
So it is very, very technological.
They're using artificial intelligence.
They're using other ways to propagandize people and to tell them that they need to do whatever is necessary for the survival of Israel.
And this is the issue that I have with dispensationalism.
They talk about people, I say, well, you think that Israel's been replaced by the church.
I don't think that replacement is the right word.
I think we're talking about enlargement.
What used to be targeted towards one ethnic group, Christ came to take it to every nation on earth.
And through Christ, all nations will be blessed.
Not through some race or ethnic group descended from Abraham.
Because there's many different races and groups and nations that were descended from Abraham.
But through Christ, every nation will be blessed.
And there's no longer Jew or Greek, male or female.
Those walls have been torn down.
And yet you've got people like John Hagee who are always out there trying to rebuild those walls and telling us that God is only concerned about Israel.
And it is an antichrist message.
Christ doesn't matter in their theology.
What matters is your ethnicity.
It is a form of racism.
And what happens when you tell people that they are part of a superior race?
Well, we saw what happened in Nazi Germany.
And we see that the Israelis have become what they fought in Nazi Germany because of this idea of racial superiority.
That means that the other people that aren't you, that aren't like you, are subhuman.
And that is always the first thing that people do in order to justify an attack on a group of people, which we usually call genocide, right?
And that's where all this stuff ties together.
And the problem is, is that they are politicizing and weaponizing these politics, mixing it together with Christ in the same way, but similar, but in a different way than what the theosophists and the people like Michael Flynn are doing.
We have these different approaches that all have a kind of a confluence at this point in time.
So think about what you're seeing there.
Have some discernment about this.
Understand these threads that are coming at you and where they're coming from and the purpose that they have.
As Christ said, by their fruit you will know them.
And he was talking about false teachings.
So we're going to take a quick break and we're going to be joined with our guests.
You want to say something?
Real quick, I've got to read these comments before we go out.
We can scroll them up.
Owen 61 says, and thank you very much, Owen.
I never feel dumber after a presentation by David Knight.
Maybe.
Appreciate that.
Thank you for the support.
That's not just the meth talking, you know.
No, he doesn't really do meth.
Let me clarify that in case the sarcasm isn't coming through.
North American House Hippo.
Thank you very much.
Does that ever tell you about the time I met a space alien?
Came up to me and said, take me to your leader.
So he came home with me and met my wife.
No reply.
We've got Pezzan Avante 1776 says, can't walk to school, but can genitally mutilate.
Yeah.
Syrian girl says they need transportation to the slaughterhouse.
That's right.
Isn't it amazing?
You know, there's all these things that they don't want kids to be able to do, but they can decide that they're in the wrong body and they can decide that they want to be irreparably mutilated.
And that's the most insane thing.
I saw a clip where Jon Stewart was hectoring some guy who was a Christian over that.
He goes, so what's the problem with a drag queen story hour and all the rest of this stuff?
You have a problem with that?
This is the part where you just disengage.
If someone doesn't intrinsically understand why this is wrong.
So, what's the problem with Jeffrey Epstein after all, right?
I mean, you know, come on.
That's where you just walk away and say, I'm not going to argue with you on this.
It's obviously ontologically evil.
If you can't see that, nothing I can say will change your mind.
You should just disengage.
Well, we have an interesting interview coming up.
This is a book that has been written by Jeffrey Rosen, I'm sorry, who is the CEO and president of National Constitution Center.
And this is The Pursuit of Liberty.
And what is interesting about it is it contrasts Hamilton and Jefferson as these two poles in the American Revolution and their two approaches to American government.
And he goes through and looks at how America has been pulled towards one pole or the other throughout history through different time periods.
You know, might be, I think we live in a thoroughly Hamiltonian world right now.
But as one person said, it's thoroughly Hamiltonian world with a thin veneer of Jeffersonianism.
And I kind of think that's where we are.
But I think the Jeffersonianism veneer has worn off at this point.
I don't think it's even there anymore.
I think it's just thoroughly Hamiltonian.
But we'll see what he has to say.
He's made a study of this, and he's published the book, which just came out October the 21st.
So we're going to take a quick break.
And when we come back, we're going to talk to Jeffrey Rosen.
We'll be right back.
Making sense.
Common again.
You're listening to The David Knight Show.
Welcome back.
And our guest now is Jeffrey Rosen, the book which just came out about a week or so ago, The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton versus Jefferson Ignited the Glasting Battle Over Power in America.
And in his book, he traces this over different time periods, a couple of decades, each of these things, and how people's viewpoint and our viewpoint of government has shifted between these two polls, I guess, in terms of looking at how power should be structured here in the United States between Hamilton and Jefferson.
But you have an interesting anecdote about Hamilton and Jefferson and what happened, what Jefferson did after Hamilton died.
Tell us a little bit about that.
It's so moving that Hamilton and Jefferson's battles define our early debates and, in fact, all debates ever since about national power versus states' rights, or a strong executive versus a strong judiciary, or liberal versus strict construction of the Constitution.
And their battles over the Bank of the United States and the Alien and Sedition Acts lead to the formation of America's first political parties.
But despite all of those clashes, at the end of his life, after Hamilton dies in the duel, because they're both united in believing that Aaron Burr is a traitor who's trying to raise an insurrection in Spanish Louisiana and set himself up as a dictator, after they both united against Burr, Jefferson places a bust of Hamilton across from his own in the central entrance hall of Monticello.
You can see it there today if you go there.
And pretty past it, Jefferson would say, opposed in life as in death.
And he viewed Hamilton not as a hated enemy to be destroyed, but a respected adversary to be engaged with.
And that spirit of civil dialogue and learning how to listen to the other side and disagreeing without being disagreeable is one that we've urgently got to get back today.
Oh, yes, we do.
You have that almost every day.
What has happened with that?
Let's start with the introduction.
You say the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar, quote unquote, and the dinner party that defined America.
Tell us a little bit about what that is about.
What's that dinner party about?
It's amazing how relevant it is to our current debates.
So this is a dinner party in the room where it happened, not the one where they moved the Capitol from New York to Washington, D.C. in exchange for assuming the national debt, the one in the Hamilton musical.
This is a year later, and Washington's away.
The whole cabinet is gathered.
At some point, Hamilton says to Jefferson, who are those three guys on the wall?
And Jefferson says, those are my three portraits of the three greatest men in history, John Locke, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton.
And Hamilton pauses for a long time and then he blurts out, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.
And this convinces Jefferson, he writes in his diary, that Hamilton is for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.
And he proceeds to found the Democratic Republican Party in order to resist the alleged dictatorial ambitions of Hamilton and the Federalists.
And Jefferson's convinced from his studies of history that all elective monarchies end with popular leaders like Caesar converting themselves into hereditary despots.
And that's why Jefferson wants a one-year term limit for the president.
When he gets a copy of the Constitution, he writes to Madison that a future president might refuse to leave office, so we need a one-year term limit.
Now, the anecdote is so interesting because as Ron Cherno, the great Hamilton historian notes, when Hamilton praised Julius Caesar, he must have been joking.
He insisted throughout his career that the greatest threat to America was an authoritarian demagogue like Caesar who could overthrow popular elections and consolidate power in his own hands.
Hamilton's solution, amazingly, is a life term for the president.
Basically, if the president's elected, he says he won't be tempted to extend his term.
And that's too much at the Constitutional Convention.
But amazingly, James Madison and Governor Morris at some point support a version of a life term.
So Hamilton wasn't totally off on his own.
Nevertheless, the Constitution chooses no term limits.
And then Jefferson establishes the tradition of stepping down after two terms.
Washington, of course, famously gave up the office like Cincinnati, returning to his farm.
But it was Jefferson who, by reaffirming that tradition, establishes it.
And, you know, I've just been looking into it in light of the recent question about whether or not President Trump can run for a third term.
That Jefferson tradition holds until Grant, who actually does want to run for a third term, but Congress objects and he kind of pushes back.
The first president who's nominated and runs for a third term, of course, is Theodore Roosevelt on the third party ticket.
He promised not to run again, and then he breaks that promise.
And then Franklin Roosevelt.
And NFDR is such a great example of the kind of Julius Caesar because he's attacked throughout his term as a would-be Caesar, and he dresses up in 1934 like Caesar.
He has a Caesar-themed birthday party, and Eleanor dresses like a Roman matron.
But it's in the middle of World War II, so he arranges to be drafted by the Democratic Convention.
He runs for a third term, and then he wins a fourth.
He dies after 82 days after his election as a fourth term.
And then Republicans in Congress just think this cannot happen again, a kind of president who keeps running.
So in 1947, Congress, which has been retaken by the Republicans, proposes the 22nd Amendment, which says you can't be elected to the office of president more than twice.
It's ratified in 1951.
And ever since then, that's pretty well stuck.
I mean, sometime Ronald Reagan wanted to repeal the 22nd Amendment after he left office, but there haven't been any real efforts to do it.
It's relatively popular.
And that brings it to our current debates.
You know, President Trump had noted that his staff had discussed this potential loophole where you could run as a vice president, be elected, and then the elected president could resign and you could succeed that way.
President Trump called that probably too cute.
And I saw that just this morning, he seemed to acknowledge that the amendment clearly forbids a third term.
He'd say, I'd say if you read that, it's pretty clear I'm not allowed to run.
But the debate is so interesting because it goes back to Hamilton and Jefferson, to that dinner party that defined America.
And the point is that all of the framers are very concerned about presidents extending their power through dictatorial means.
All the ancient republics of Greece and Rome had fallen because the virtue of the citizens hadn't led citizens to protect liberty and had made them succumb to these demagogic leaders.
And that's why, although we've debated exactly how to impose term limits, I think Harry Truman put it best when he, in 1950, said he, I think he said, I know I could be elected and continue to break the old precedent, but it shouldn't be done.
The president should continue to be limited by custom based on the honor of the man in the office.
And I think that's a great way to.
I agree.
And, you know, that's what is so dangerous about it.
You know, that dinner, of course.
Certainly, at least in Jefferson's estimation, you had Hamilton crossing the Rubicon.
It's like, oh, that's it.
You know, this guy was a lifetime president.
He thinks Julius Caesar was it.
But, you know, it's something that has really bothered me when people talk about this guy being the drug czar.
I think it's William Bennett.
And he accepted that term.
And it's like, well, you know, czar is Caesar, right?
It's the same thing.
And we see this over and over again.
We've got a czar for this and a czar for that.
So we have this trend towards a kind of authoritarian dictatorship leader, strongman, whatever you want to call it.
I think it's a very dangerous trend.
And the thing that concerned me is I said earlier in the program, you know, if we don't understand the history, if we don't understand the Constitution and how we got there, you know, we're still having these same arguments, as you point out.
That's the whole purpose of your book is to point out how this has gone back and forth.
And we have these two poles that we're drawn to.
And if we don't understand history, we don't really see human nature and how human nature is continually going back to these types of things over and over again.
So we don't have a context for it.
But I think that's what's really important about your book and about studying history and looking at these different philosophies that are there towards government.
I think it's very important.
Now, so we have, that was the introduction to your book.
And then you're talking about how the will of the majority should always prevail, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration.
That was one of the things that Steve Bannon was saying.
He said, well, the will of the people is the Constitution.
And I'm like, well, no, I believe that the Constitution is a written document.
And I think it's very important to have an established standard that is out there that is external to the people.
I think you have to have some kind of an external standard so that you don't wind up with a dictator or so that you know that you've got a dictator if they ignore that standard that's there.
As someone who is working with the constitutional issues all the time with your organization, what do you think about that?
Well, you're absolutely right that that's a central debate that goes back to the founding, the balance between democracy and rule by elites.
How can we empower majorities while resisting the mob?
And that's the central reason the Constitutional Convention was called.
Hamilton and Madison and the other Federalists are afraid of Shays' Rebellion in western Massachusetts, where debtors are mobbing the courthouses and the federal armory.
And Hamilton says, imagine that Shays' Rebellion had been led by a Caesar or a Catiline.
He would have begun a demagogue and turned tyrant.
So so much of the Constitution is designed to slow down deliberation, to prevent mobs from formalizing, to put on checks on direct democracy.
At the same time, the will of the people must ultimately prevail.
And that's why Jefferson's great vision was that the will of the majority should always ultimately prevail.
He wanted, believe it or not, a constitutional convention every 19 years so that the people could decide whether they still supported it.
Hamilton thought that was a disastrous idea because it would, you know, it was a miracle the first convention had succeeded.
But that balance between democracy and rule by elites is central.
FDR is really amazing here.
And you're so right about the importance, the urgent importance of studying history.
I was so struck by how presidents throughout history have actually invoked the Hamilton and Jefferson debate to structure our understanding of history.
I was inspired to write the book when I saw that John Quincy Adams traced the entire development of America's political parties back to the initial debate between Hamilton and Jefferson about democracy versus aristocracy, which is the question we're talking about now.
And that kind of Hamilton and Jefferson go up and down throughout the 19th and 20th century.
And Lincoln says that he's a Jeffersonian, even as he's extending the powers of Congress dramatically during the Civil War.
Theodore Roosevelt leads a Hamiltonian revival when a historian called Herbert Crowley calls on him to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends.
In other words, the Hamiltonian means of strong federal power for the Jeffersonian ends of democracy and curbing the corporations.
But the most amazing turn, Hamilton's stock crashes after the stock market crash in 1929.
No one likes Hamilton.
Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 reinvents the Democratic Party as the party of Jeffersonian democracy rather than limited government, and he makes Jefferson the patron saint of the New Deal.
Now, this takes incredible hits.
Franklin Roosevelt is expanding government more than any other president in history, but he puts Jefferson on the nickel and he builds the Jefferson Memorial and he reinvents himself as the patron saint of Jeffersonian democracy.
So this just shows how protein, how malleable Hamilton and Jefferson are.
Both sides are often invoking them, you know, for both purposes.
But then to close this part of the story, Ronald Reagan said that he left the Democratic Party in 1960 because it had abandoned the principles of Jefferson and limited government.
And he proposed to reinvent the Republican Party as the libertarian Jefferson rather than the Jefferson who hated the banks and the patron saint of the New Deal.
And that really does bring us to today where, as you suggested, the sides are so scrambled.
And in some sense, both sides will still invoke both folks.
President Trump said that he was running for office in 2020 because Democrats wanted to take down statues of Thomas Jefferson, and he was defending the founding ideals, although he's certainly using executive power in ways that Jefferson would have questioned.
Whereas Joe Biden and the Democrats, everyone's a Hamiltonian after the musical and President Obama at the White House and stuff, but they're hardly fans of Hamilton's fiscal responsibility or his principles of capitalism in the free market.
So we're very much, as always, debating the legacy of these men.
But that basic tension you just identified between democracy and ruled by elites is central in American history.
And of course, Jefferson was really well loved by the people.
He was so linked to liberty.
You're talking about the libertarian streak of it, but he was linked to liberty and the minds of the American people.
We've got towns and counties all across America that are named after Jefferson.
Everybody wants to claim that he is with them on their political journey.
Of course, the Democrats, for the longest time, had the Jefferson-Jackson dinners that they had there.
And yet, you know, they're pushing for a central bank, which neither of them liked.
And so, you know, it's kind of interesting to me.
Like I said, we have this increasingly centralized, all-powerful government like Hamilton wanted to have, and yet everybody wants to pretend that they're Jefferson at the same time that's this veneer of Jefferson that's there.
Maybe with this musical Hamilton, they're going to change that and finally own what is really there.
By the time you get to the third chapter, you're talking about the struggle of the bank.
Let's talk a little bit about that because both of them are on different sides in terms of the bank.
The central bank likes Hamilton.
They put him on the $10 bill.
But Jefferson, they put him on a short-lived $2 bill.
But talk a little bit about the struggle over the central bank and the national bank.
It's amazing.
This is the central debate in American constitutional history, and it resonates for the next 200 years.
The question is whether Congress can set up a bank.
It's the centerpiece of Hamilton's financial plan.
He wants to assume the state debts and create reliable credit.
But the problem is that Jefferson says it's unconstitutional.
So Washington asks for memos from Jefferson and Hamilton, and these become some of the most important constitutional memos in American history.
Jefferson says that it's unconstitutional to create a bank because the Constitution allows Congress to create all means necessary and proper for promoting its enumerated ends.
And although Congress has the power to tax and to promote the general welfare, creating a bank isn't absolutely or indispensably necessary to promoting the general welfare or raising taxes.
Hamilton responds, and he pulls on all-nighter.
He writes 14,000 words, and he says you should interpret the necessary and proper clause liberally rather than strictly.
And as long as a chosen means is conducive or appropriate or useful for carrying out an enumerated end, then it's consistent with the Constitution.
And since it might be useful to have a bank because that would promote credit, then the bank should be permissible.
Washington sides with Hamilton rather than Jefferson.
Then it goes up to the Supreme Court a few years later.
And John Marshall, in one of the most important Supreme Court opinions ever called McCullough versus Maryland, sides with Hamilton over Jefferson.
Marshall views himself as Hamilton's successor.
He's writing Washington's biography.
He has next to his desk Washington's papers given him by Bushrod Washington, who's Washington's nephew.
And he reads in Washington papers Hamilton's memo about the bank.
He paraphrases it almost word for word in McCullough versus Maryland.
And in one of the most famous sentences in constitutional history, Marshall says, let the end be legitimate if the means are appropriate.
Then it's consistent with the Constitution.
Almost a direct paraphrase of Hamilton.
And then for the next 100 years, the constitutionality of the bank is still alive.
Andrew Jackson resolves to kill the bank.
He seizes Martin Van Buren's hand and says, the bank is trying to kill me, but I will kill it.
He lets it expire.
James Madison, eventually, having initially thought the bank was unconstitutional, changes his mind because he thinks the people have come to accept it, showing that he has a kind of evolving version of the Constitution.
And this question of the ability of Congress to print paper money is central in the Civil War.
And Lincoln actually appoints Supreme Court justices to try to uphold his power to print paper money.
And then I won't take you through the rest of American history right now, but when you think about the biggest disputes in American constitutional history, including the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which led to the Civil War, the constitutionality of the post-Reconstruction Civil Rights Act, all the way up to the constitutionality of health care reform, it all goes back to liberal versus strict construction, what's necessary, what's conducive, what's appropriate.
And just last week or so, the Supreme Court is debating the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act, and it all goes back to that same debate.
So I was really struck how central this is.
And the main debate in constitutional history is not between originalism and non-originalism.
It's between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution.
Yes, whether or not we take the Tenth Amendment very literally to say, well, if you don't have it listed there, you don't have those powers.
But they won't always infer it in terms of the Supremacy Clause or the General Welfare Clause or the Commerce Clause or something like that.
Now, you know, that chapter, you've got dates on many of these things as well.
That was the debate in 1790, 1791.
And then we move on to the nullification debate and whether or not that is the rightful remedy.
You've got that date as 1792 to 1780.
Let's talk a little bit about that because, of course, nullification comes back in in the 1830s and we nearly had a secession and during the nullification crisis and the tariffs of abomination that happened.
I've talked about that many times because it's kind of the situation where they reached a compromise and they were able to defuse it without having a full-blown secession, which happened like 30 years later.
And I've looked at it kind of from the standpoint of the fourth turning thesis of Strauss and Howe and how they're looking at about every 80 years you have this major restructuring.
I said, yeah, it was like the society wasn't really primed for it at that point, but the timing was right 30 years later.
But nullification was always a big issue.
Talk a little bit about that back in 1792 to 1780, what was going on with nullification at that point in time.
Absolutely.
You really well describe the debate, and it goes right back to Hamilton and Jefferson's debate over the Alien and Sedition Acts.
So in 1798, the Federalists, led by John Adams, passed this law, and it's the greatest assault on free speech in American history.
It makes it a crime to criticize the Federalist President, John Adams, but not the Republican vice president, Thomas Jefferson.
It's a pure political hatchet job, basically.
So Jefferson and Madison object.
And they write the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions claiming that these laws are unconstitutional.
Madison always takes a moderate and middle position between Hamilton and Jefferson.
Sometimes it's so complicated that only he can understand it.
And he says if states don't think that a law is constitutional, they can interpose an objection.
No one knows what this means except maybe like sending a stern letter saying that they don't like it.
But Jefferson goes further.
And in the Kentucky Resolution, he says if a state doesn't think that a federal law is constitutional, it can nullify or refuse to obey it.
That's too much for Madison.
He thinks that would lead to secession, and indeed it does.
As the Civil War approaches, Southern opponents of federal power invoke Jefferson's Kentucky Resolution for the principle that states can refuse to carry out federal laws that they disagree with.
And it comes to a head first, as you said, in the nullification controversy arising out of the tariff of abominations in 1828 when South Carolina objects that this northern tariff is going to hurt its commerce.
And John Calhoun says, who's Andrew Jackson's vice president, says that South Carolina can refuse to carry out the tariff.
It's an incredible moment of testing for Andrew Jackson.
After all, he's a Jeffersonian who generally likes limited government.
But in this noble decision to favor union over secession, Jackson gives a toast.
He says liberty and union, they must be preserved.
And he insists on enforcing federal law and not allow South Carolina to nullify.
So that is the first great statement of nationalism in this period.
But nevertheless, Calhoun and the Southern secessionists continue to invoke Jefferson.
And finally, right before the Civil War, they claim that the South can secede from the Union because we are a compact of states and federal law is not supreme.
Once again, Madison disagrees with that.
He thinks that once states agreed to form the Union, they can't unilaterally secede.
Abraham Lincoln cites Madison and John Marshall and James Wilson, all nationalists, when he denies the South's power to secede.
And that's one of the precipitants of the Civil War, the constitutionality of secession.
And it takes the Civil War and the war came, as Lincoln said, and all the blood and tragic loss that resulted from that to establish the proposition that we, the people of the United States, are sovereign, that states can't unilaterally secede from the Union, and that nullification is unconstitutional.
And of course, Jefferson, in terms of your point, he wanted to have frequent constitutional conventions because he was so heavily involved in the idea of self-governance and that people would be able to make that determination.
And the nation had been born by declaring its independence from Great Britain.
And so, in a sense, you know, as the writer of the Declaration of Independence, he's looking at this and saying, you know, we're born out of secession and we have the right of self-determination to determine where we're going to be.
It's interesting that today, of course, we're still seeing echoes of this, especially with what's happening with immigration and other issues.
And we've had another aspect of this that's been added, which, of course, is the non-commandering thing, saying that you can't force a state to work along with the federal government on its agenda if the state doesn't agree with it.
I think one of the things that's kind of been the way that they have moved to have a direct confrontation is kind of the oblique method of saying, well, we will pay you money or we'll withhold funds depending on whether or not you do what we tell you to do from the federal government.
And so that method of, I call it bribery or blackmail financially, that has kind of kept this issue from coming to a head up to this point.
And we still see aspects of it when California wants to go their own way on immigration.
They threaten them with removing funds, just as they do on issues about bathrooms and gender and things like that.
You're so right that the central question of the residual power of states' rights under the 10th Amendment remains one of America's central constitutional questions.
The constitutionality of secession turned on who was sovereign, the people of the United States, the people of each state.
And as you say, there are still some states, and now some of them are blue rather than red, that are claiming there should be a residual right to secede.
And more broadly, this question of when the federal government can commandeer the states and what the residual state sovereignty is, remains crucial.
Barry Goldwater, when he began to flament the conservative revolution in response to the New Deal, said that the 10th Amendment was central.
And on the current Supreme Court, many of the justices invoked the Tenth Amendment in arguing that the Obama health care mandate was unconstitutional and that you can't commandeer the states.
Justice Anthony Kennedy was a big fan of federalism and insisted that federal and state power had to be kept within their appointed spheres.
He said the founders split the atom of sovereignty.
It all goes back to that initial Hamilton-Jefferson debate.
And the truth is, we're not entirely, there's disagreement.
There's not consensus on the question of whether the nation is totally sovereign, as Hamilton said, whether the states are sovereign, as Jefferson said, or whether there's a kind of dual sovereignty, as Madison said, which I think is the best reading of the Constitution, which part where we the people are sovereign, but we parcel out some sovereignty to the states and to the federal government, and we've got to keep the balance between them.
Yeah, so that's basically what he put the Fifth Amendment.
These powers have been delegated by the people in the states.
So this is these debates that this is why your book is so important, because the debates that we're faced with on all these core and divisive issues that are there, these have been debated from the very beginning, again, between these two polls of Jefferson and Hamilton.
Your next chapter here is 1800, 1826.
And this is President Jefferson, Chief Justice Marshall, and Aaron Burr in court.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Well, first, I have to say what a villain Aaron Burr was.
Historians have been wishy-washy about his degree.
When I was in North Carolina, we had a descendant of his who became a senator.
Oh, his descendant was better than he was.
He was charming and a rogue and very pleasant to be to have drinks with.
But the guy was dead to rights.
Henry Adams, the historian, found in the archives of the British ambassador a letter where Aaron Burr offered his service to the British in exchange for their supporting his efforts to lead a secessionist movement in Spanish Louisiana and set himself up as dictator of Mexico.
So he may not have been technically guilty of treason, because as John Marshall said after Jefferson prosecuted him, the Constitution sets a very high bar.
You need two witnesses and an overt act.
But there's no question that he was conspiring to secede from the Union.
Another Benedict Arnold.
He was totally abandoned Dick Darnold.
And that's what was so, and that's why Hamilton died.
Remember, Hamilton really distrusts Jefferson, of course, but he thinks Jefferson is a patriot, and he thinks Burr is a traitor.
And that's why he calls Burr a traitor, and that's why Burr challenges him to a duel, and he sacrifices his life because of his devotion to the Union, and Jefferson joins him in this.
So after Hamilton dies, Jefferson decides to prosecute Burr for treason.
And this precipitates the huge clash between Jefferson and John Marshall in the Supreme Court.
John Marshall is a Federalist redoubt.
After the Federals have lost the election, they appoint all these Federalist justices to pack the courts.
John Adams smuggled in Marshall as Chief Justice during the waning days of his administration.
And Marshall sets out to defend Hamiltonian values, namely property rights and national commerce over states' rights and too much democracy.
And Marshall has these huge clashes with Jefferson.
The most famous one, Marbury versus Madison, involves can he order Jefferson to turn over a commission that Adams had made to a judge.
And Marshall doesn't want to issue an order that he knows will be defied because it'll expose the court as weak.
The same question we're having today, is the president going to defy the Supreme Court?
Marshall dodges the question by saying the court has the power to order the subpoena, but he's not going to do it now because the act authorizing the subpoena to be turned over is unconstitutional.
Even to state this shows he was such a master of what Jefferson called twistifications.
He would come up with these very complicated legal compromises.
I like that word, twistifications.
We need to bring that back.
Jefferson also said of Marshall that he's so untrustworthy that if you ask me the time of day, I'll say, I don't know, because he'll twist my words against me.
They really disliked each other.
They were distant cousins.
And I think Jefferson had courted the lady who became Marshall's aunt or something like that.
So they have bad blood in the family.
But the point is, it's a huge clash.
Basically, the clash between Jefferson and John Marshall is the clash between Jefferson and Hamilton continued after Hamilton's death, because John Marshall views himself as Hamilton's successor.
And in the end, in the Burr trial, Marshall does order Jefferson to turn over papers related to Burr.
This faces Jefferson with a question, and he briefly considers not obeying or abiding by the decision.
He does decide to turn over the papers establishing the precedent that the president can be subpoenaed.
But Jefferson, in his response to Marshall, declares that the president has an ability to interpret the Constitution differently than the Supreme Court and to follow his own conclusions.
This is a principle that becomes known as departmentalism, where each department can reach its own judgment.
And carried to its extreme, it would allow the president to defy the Supreme Court when he disagreed with it.
Interestingly, no president has taken that radical a position and openly defied the Supreme Court.
Lincoln briefly defied Roger Tawney for two weeks during the Civil War when Tawney ordered him to free a Confederate prisoner and said that he'd unconstitutionally suspended habeas corpus.
Lincoln didn't do that for two weeks.
Then he did comply.
But Tawney was acting as a district court judge, not sitting for the whole Supreme Court.
So no president has ever openly defied the full Supreme Court.
But the point of that chapter, the clashes between Marshall and Jefferson, are that they also establish the constitutional battles that we're still facing today between liberal and strict construction of the Constitution.
And remember, Marshall's approach, which he calls liberal or fair construction, which he gets from Hamilton, is always construe federal power fairly, you know, not to be unlimited, but broadly, consistently with its spirit.
And Jefferson, as you said, said, if the power isn't explicitly enumerated, then you shouldn't construe it to be present, and you should also carry yourself back to the spirit in which the amendment was passed.
It's strict construction.
And that debate is won by Marshall temporarily.
But then, just to finish this part of the story, Marshall is succeeded by Roger Tawney.
And Andrew Jackson wants Roger Tawney to constrict federal power and to prevent Congress from chartering a bank.
And Tawney gets in and he comes up with a more Jeffersonian approach on the Supreme Court.
And it culminates in the debate over the Missouri Compromise, which leads to the Civil War.
Yes, it is amazing to see these same strains being pulled back and forth as we go through history.
I love the way your book is set up.
It's very interesting.
Of course, with Marbury versus Madison, if I remember correctly, Jefferson said, well, that's the end of the Constitution if we're going to have the Supreme Court be able to decide and have the final say as to whether or not something is constitutional.
I'm kind of paraphrasing him here.
Maybe you know the quote.
That's absolutely right.
And he said that Marshall would make a thing of wax out of the Constitution if he could construe it so liberally as to eliminate all powers.
And that's why he wants strict construction to prevent Marshall from turning the Constitution into a thing of wax.
Yes.
That's a great way to put it.
Today they talk about being a living document, but I like the idea of it being a thing of wax.
That's great.
And then you have the period from 1826 to 1861.
You say, all honor to Jefferson.
And so up until the point of the Civil War, you know, we have everybody again, Jefferson, who spoke so eloquently about liberty, captured everyone's imagination in America, and he is the one that everybody wants to be seen as.
Talk a little bit about that period in history there, because there we're going through the nullification crisis and many other things.
Absolutely.
And culminating in the debate over the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which is the central compromise over slavery in the early Republic.
The basic question is, does Congress have the power to ban slavery in the newly acquired territories and in new states?
And Jefferson initially said yes.
He in 1784 sponsored a provision called the Jefferson Proviso, which would have allowed Congress to ban slavery in the territories.
But then he becomes president.
First of all, he doubles the size of the U.S. by buying Louisiana, even though he's unconstitutional.
But he swallows his doubts because he's more interested in the obvious benefits of doubling the size of the U.S. But then he really is afraid that the Missouri Compromise is going to lead to civil war.
So he argues that it's unconstitutional, embracing the same narrow construction of the territories clause that he'd rejected in buying Louisiana.
So it gets up to the Supreme Court, and it all comes back to that same question, liberal versus strict construction of the single word territories.
And Chief Justice Roger Tawney, channeling the late but not the earlier Jefferson, says, because the Constitution allows you to pass regulations for the federal governing land in the federal territory, singular, it only covers the territory that was held by the U.S. at the time of the founding, not future acquired territories, plural.
It all depends on what the meaning of the word is.
It's incredibly legalistic.
And the point here is that Jefferson had flipped on this question, and it's the central constitutional question of the antebellum period.
The entire Republican Party is founded by Lincoln and others in 1857 on the proposition that Congress does have the power to ban slavery in the territories.
So Tawney is imposing a contested interpretation of the Constitution above the consensus of the Republican Party as well as many other pro-popular sovereignty Democrats.
And his opinion has the effect of helping to precipitate the Civil War.
Tawney wrongly thinks that this will end the divisions over slavery, but as usual, when the court tries to solve a contested question without clear constitutional answers, it made things worse.
And Lincoln says that he will not follow the Dred Scott decision, except with regard to the parties in the case, but otherwise he doesn't view it as part of the Constitution.
Interestingly, embracing a kind of Jeffersonian view of the president's power to interpret the Constitution separately from the court.
That's when Lincoln stands in front of Independence Hall in 1861.
And he says, I've never had a thought politically that doesn't stem from Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence.
I'd rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of Jefferson.
It's an incredibly powerful statement by the great emancipator.
Why is Lincoln a Jeffersonian?
After all, he's embracing a version of federal power that really wants to expand the government in ways that are consistent with Hamilton's views.
Basically, it's because, you know, Hamilton's name is mud, and he's viewed as an aristocrat, and the Federalist Party is dead.
And Lincoln's mentor, Henry Clay, the founder of the Whig Party, studied with Thomas Jefferson's law tutor, George Wythe, and views himself as a Jeffersonian nationalist.
So that's why.
And plus, Lincoln wants to win, and everyone loves Jefferson.
So that's why he embraces Jefferson before the Civil War.
But the great constitutional achievement of Abraham Lincoln is to inscribe into the Constitution the principle of liberty for all.
And by talking about the goals of the Declaration and the Constitution, in the phrase liberty for all, he's inspired by Jefferson, and that's what leads to the post-Civil War amendments to the Constitution.
It's just an amazing reminder of how central that old Hamilton-Jefferson debate was in leading the court to strike down the Missouri Compromise and helping to cause the Civil War.
And as you say in the next chapter, you know, post-oh, from 1861 on, Hamilton is waxing.
In other words, Hamilton is growing and it's becoming more and more concentrated and centralized.
As many people pointed out, they would say the United States are before the Civil War, but after that, they say the United States is.
And so we have this tremendous consolidation that happens because of the Civil War.
Speak to that.
It's so striking, isn't it?
Jackson was the first, well, James Wilson and Governor Morris, who wrote the preamble to the Constitution, talked about the United States are.
Jackson picked it up, and then the Civil War establishes that we're a plural union.
I think it's so inspiring that James Garfield led a Hamilton revival after the Civil War when he read the collected works of Hamilton in the library.
Hamilton's son, James, published them, and Garfield read them and said, I want to make him the patron saint of Reconstruction.
Then Reconstruction congresspeople like John Bingham, who's an incredible admirer of John Marshall, cite Marshall and Hamilton when they propose the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
And the 14th Amendment in Section 5 gives Congress the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Bingham is trying to empower Congress in ways that Hamilton would have wanted.
And the first draft of the 14th Amendment says Congress shall have all power to make laws necessary and proper to enforce equal protection.
He's taking that liberal construction of that necessary and proper clause, all channeled by Hamilton.
These guys are such good lawyers, but more importantly, they're great historians.
They studied history as kids.
They were inspired by their heroes, and they want to make Hamilton and Marshall central.
And then the great debates over Reconstruction.
And it's such a tragic period because Congress passes these laws, and then there's a violent reaction, and black civil rights are subverted, and black people are lynched and murdered.
And then the Supreme Court goes on to strike down a lot of the pillars of Reconstruction, including the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which forbids discrimination in public accommodations, and also the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1877, which allows the punishment of racially motivated violence.
And in striking those acts down, they invoke Jefferson's reconstruction of the necessary and proper clause, and they ignore the fact that Hamilton had the opposite view.
And Justice Bradley is kind of a villain of my book because he really does a number on Reconstruction and strikes all those acts down.
And the hero of this part is John Marshall Harlan, a great justice named after John Marshall because his father admires Marshall so much.
Harlan is the president of the Alexander Hamilton Memorial Society, and he writes the only dissenting opinions, both in the civil rights cases, which strike down the Civil Rights Act, and in Plessy versus Ferguson, the infamous case which upholds segregation and railroads.
And Harlan nobly says the Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
And he explicitly invokes Hamilton's broad construction of congressional power.
It takes another 100 years for Thurbert Marshall to read Harlan's opinion aloud before he argues Brown versus Board of Education.
Today, Justice Neil Gorsuch has a portrait of Harlan in his chambers showing that Harlan has been embraced by strict constructionist conservatives as well as liberals alike.
But it all goes back to that Hamilton revival when Bingham wants to make Hamilton rather than Jefferson the patron saint of Reconstruction.
Interesting.
And as we look at Reconstruction and the idea that we had a standing army that was a part of that, Posse Comitatus, which is now back in current events because of the actions of ICE and the Trump administration, that was a kind of a capstone to Reconstruction and some of the abuses that were happening with a standing army at that point in time.
So all these things keep coming back, don't they?
They really do.
And to make things even better for the Hamilton-Jefferson narrative, although not for the country, the debate over posse comitatus is part of this long-standing debate about the president's power to call up the militia to enforce federal law, which goes back to the Insurrection Act of 1807, sponsored by Thomas Jefferson.
It's amazing that Jefferson is the guy who, before the founding, says, oh, we should, a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and we should pardon the whiskey rebels, and we've got to moisten the blood of tyrants with revolution.
I mean, he like endorses the French Revolution.
But then he becomes president and totally switches his tune when Vermont rebels against his hated embargo.
Jefferson has this disastrous economic policy.
were cutting off all trade with the rest of the world new england that sounds familiar too but Yeah, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Everybody goes back to those days.
Well, New England, then as now, actually, rebels.
And Jefferson writes to Madison, do I have the power to send out the troops to stop these guys?
Madison says, I don't think so.
So they pass the Insurrection Act, which is the same one that has been invoked throughout American history.
And President Jackson invokes it to put down rebellion.
Lincoln invokes it to put down secession.
Grant invokes it after the Civil War to try to put down some of that mob violence.
And it goes all the way up today.
And the last time it was invoked was during the Civil Rights Movement.
And then George H.W. Bush involved it to put down the Rodney King riots.
That was the last time.
But this question, which is obviously central now, both with the Posse Comitatus Act and also the question, can President Trump send guards from one state into another, goes back to that initial Hamilton-Jefferson debate.
And having read the Insurrection Act as it was amended over the years, it does seem to give the president pretty broad authority to send the troops even for domestic law enforcement, although Jefferson and Hamilton initially thought that you couldn't federalize the troops for domestic law enforcement only to put down insurrection or serious external threats.
But because Congress has succeeded in the expansion of executive authority over the years, the president's authority may be unconstrained.
Yeah, it's a very interesting debate we have there.
And then we go to the period of the early 1900s.
You have this titled, Hamiltonian Means to Achieve Jefferson Ends, question mark.
And so we've got the time of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and the new nationalism, Henry Cabot Lodge, Calvin Coolidge.
Talk a little bit about that.
I was partly inspired to write this book when I read this historian from the progressive era, Herbert Crowley, calling on Theodore Roosevelt to deploy Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends.
Crowley was the founder of the New Republic magazine.
As it happens, I spent almost two decades there as the legal affairs editor a while ago.
And I just thought that was an interesting phrase.
And I was so struck that Roosevelt used it and quoted it word for word when he said, I am a Hamiltonian with regard to my views of federal power and a Jeffersonian in my views about democracy.
So obviously the categories were getting scrambled.
And this is the period when Theodore Roosevelt makes Hamilton the hero of the progressive era.
And then Coolidge and Harding make Hamilton the hero of the Gilded Age.
Coolidge really admires Hamilton, who he studies at Amherst College.
He reveres the founding, in particular, the Puritan basis of the founding, and he sees Hamilton as a patron saint, both of free enterprise and of limited government.
It's so striking, and there's a huge change in the understanding of executive power in the election of 1912.
If you had to pick a single moment for the growth of the modern imperial presidency, it would be 1912 when both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the progressive and Democratic candidate, say that the president is a steward of the people who should directly channel popular will.
And William Howard Taft, the old constitutionalist, thinks that they're both demagogues and that the founders thought that the president should be a chief magistrate who enforces the laws of Congress but doesn't communicate directly with the people.
Interestingly, all three of them are historians who love Hamilton.
And Theodore Roosevelt, isn't it?
I thought this was so cool.
Theodore Roosevelt wrote a biography of Gouverneur Morris, who is a big Hamiltonian.
He's a great historian as well as a great leader.
Woodrow Wilson is the only president who ever got a PhD in history or in anything.
And he admires Hamilton, although he also admires Hegel, the German philosopher, and criticizes the natural law, separation of powers, basis of the Declaration of Independence.
And William Howard Taft thinks that Hamilton and Marshall are the greatest Americans ever and writes a book on presidential power.
So George Will once told me that you can tell what kind of conservative someone is today based on where they would have stood in the election of 1912.
And if you're a kind of populist conservative, then you'd love Wilson or Roosevelt.
And if you're a constitutionalist conservative, you like William Howard Taft.
Yeah, I would have gone for Taft, I think.
No doubt about it.
I have to just briefly say, as it happens, I wrote a short biography of William Howard Taft for the American President Series a while ago.
I didn't know much about him until I got the assignment, but I really came to admire him as our last constitutionalist president.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, he's a great man, not just by his size, but he was an outsized character in history as well.
And so at this point in time, this is also when we have a major restructuring of our country with the bank, with the Federal Reserve.
You're talking about these guys being fans of Alexander Hamilton.
Well, we can certainly see that with the Federal Reserve Act that happens at that point in time.
And then we have 1932 to 68.
So New Dealism, FDR, and other things.
The economic Hamiltonianism has become political Jeffersons, Jeffersonians.
Talk a little bit about that.
Another example of a time when best-selling books are changing Hamilton and Jefferson, going up and down.
Theodore Roosevelt's inspired to embrace Hamilton when he reads a bestseller by a woman called Gertrude Aberton, The Conqueror being the true and romantic tale of Hamilton.
It's the Hamilton musical of its day, and it makes Hamilton the star of the moment.
But FDR is inspired to resurrect Jefferson after reading a book by a guy called Claude Bowers called Jefferson versus Hamilton, The Struggle for Democracy Over Aristocracy.
And FDR invites Bowers to speak to the Democratic Convention of 1928, and he's a huge success.
And then he reinvents himself as the second coming of Thomas Jefferson based on his reading of this book.
FDR is a Hudson Valley aristocrat who, you know, you'd think his grandfather had actually been an ally of Hamilton, but he just identifies with Jefferson, the Democratic aristocrat.
You know, he's collecting stamps and tracing his ancestry back to the founding and decides to make himself the second coming of Thomas Jefferson.
But this raises the question of the limits on the New Deal administrative state.
As you said, independent agencies were created during the progressive era by Woodrow Wilson and Louis Brandeis, who's another hero of mine, actually.
Brandeis was a great Jeffersonian.
He admired Jefferson more than anyone.
And in constructing agencies like the Fed and the Federal Trade Commission, he viewed them as a combination of public and private control that would prevent too much centralization in the federal government.
And Brandeis upheld the constitutionality of the independent agencies in the 1930s in a case called Humphrey's Executor.
That was a unanimous Supreme Court decision.
That's the central question in the Supreme Court's going to hear in a couple of weeks.
Are independent agencies constitutional today?
And lots of folks think they're going to overturn that Humphreys executive decision and strike down the agencies on the so-called unitary executive theory, which says that the president can fire anyone he appoints.
Who's the patron saint of the unitary executive theory?
Alexander Hamilton.
He came up with the idea of it in his Pacificus letters, and Reagan administration lawyers invoked it when they first came up with the unitary executive theory.
And who's the patron saint of the constitutionality of the independent agencies?
Thomas Jefferson, who Brandeis invoked in the Humphreys executor case.
So once again, I think you got the thesis of the book now.
It all goes back to that initial clap.
It's so interesting.
And of course, what we've seen is everybody wanted to embrace the image and the reputation of Jefferson and identify themselves as Jeffersonianism.
And again, I think it was because Jefferson was so linked with the idea of liberty, you know, as the author of the Declaration of Independence and all the rest of this stuff.
But now, lately, there's been this effort in modern times to link him to slavery.
And so I think his reputation has been tarnished now.
We've got Hamilton with his own musical, and we have Jefferson, who is now decried as someone who had slaves.
And so there's been a reversal of that.
And I think that's kind of a key thing for where we are right now.
Because again, people would have this veneer of Jefferson there, but they really were consolidating power because that's just the nature of politicians and politics is that you would have a consolidation of powers, Acton said.
But speak a little bit about that and where we are because we're nearly out of time.
Let's give some closing statements here as to where you see us right now in terms of this being pulled from one pole to the other, Jefferson and Hamilton.
Well, these are challenging times for the American Republic, as we all know, and we are more polarized than at any time since the Civil War.
And there is talk once again in the land of secession and Julius Caesar and the question of whether the Republic will survive.
It's so striking that Hamilton and Jefferson embraced the basic principles of the American idea as embodied in the Declaration of the Constitution, liberty, equality, and government by consent.
They disagreed about how to apply those values in practice, and they had fierce debates over the proper balance between liberty and power, with Jefferson thinking every increase in power threatened liberty, and Hamilton thinking that increases in centralized power could secure liberty.
The point of the Constitution is not agreement, but debate.
The Constitution is made for people of fundamentally differing points of view, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said.
And disagreement is not a bug in this system.
It's a feature.
But the debate has to involve listening to the other side.
It cannot involve viewing the other side as enemies, owning the libs and owning the conservatives.
We've got to be committed to the process of deliberation itself.
And that's why the Hamilton and Jefferson debate is so inspiring.
As long as we maintain it, we will keep the Republic.
And it's only when we reject the debate itself that the shooting begins.
Oh, I absolutely agree with that.
Yes.
When we look at the fact that, as you point out, both people on the left and people on the right want to shut down the other side, censor them, punish them, take away licenses, whatever.
We have to have that debate.
And that was one thing on which both these two polls agreed.
That is the quintessential American thing, is that we have to have a debate on these different issues.
Thank you so much.
Again, the book is the, let me get the title again here.
It is The Pursuit of Liberty, How Hamilton versus Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America by Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the National Constitution Center.
And where's the best place for people to find this?
Do you sell this directly or on Amazon?
The book's on Amazon and in bookstores near you.
Okay, that's the best place for people to find it.
Looks like a fascinating book.
It's been a fascinating conversation.
Thank you so much, Mr. Rosen.
It's a real great insight that you have there.
Thank you.
And everyone, have a great day today.
And thank you, Scott Helmer.
Thank you very much for the tip.
I appreciate that.
And we'll talk about that tomorrow.
Again, scotthelmer.com.news, an anthem for a divided world.
Scott Helmer's website there.
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He said, latest single speaks to.
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