His latest is The Lessons of American Civilization, Its Confident Rise, and The Warning Signs of Its Decline.
You're not going to want to miss it.
Buckle up and get ready to make sense of the madness And we are back
We are joined by Thomas G. Del Beccaro.
Thank you so much for joining us, sir.
Now, you've been involved in the political arena for quite some time.
You've also been talking about in op-eds and other pieces about the growing divisiveness in the culture in the United States.
So, take us through a little bit of that history and where that leads us to this book.
Well, I got my family started in politics in the 50s and I met Nixon, believe it or not, at seven years old.
So that's where I started to get my political bug.
And writing has been something I've been doing for a long time now.
And what I try to do in my career is give people Perspective, to put things in perspective, the politics of the day, because we live by experience.
We, you know, even just driving to work, we choose roads that by our experience, we think are the better roads to take.
We should live our lives and run our government by learning from others and our experiences as well.
And so I take those experiences from the past, whether it's in the book called The Divided Era, which explained how political division has risen so quickly in the last two to three decades, or this book, which is my life's work, that talks about how civilizations come together, rise and fall throughout history, and then tells the American story.
So let's talk about these civilizations, because one of the talking points that's rather popular right now is that we are the modern-day Rome, and we are a failing civilization, and our death is inevitable.
And, you know, I never buy into these talking points.
I think they're extremely skewed.
I think when we look at the destruction of I would say American dominance.
I look at destroyed by design.
You know, I look at an arena of globalists and interests that want to homogenize the world and, you know, basically centralize their power by de-strengthening ours because ours is based in individual freedoms and not necessarily the collectivist model that you see in many other parts of the world.
Am I way off on that?
And where do you think we are today?
Well, throughout history there have been people acting similar to the Kamala Harrises of the world today.
I mean, Rome, the fall of the Roman Republic, a feature of that was socialists, socialists of their day, doing similar things to what we are doing today, and they hasten the decline.
You are right that there is no time slip that says when a civilization should end, and I talk about this in the book.
There are human actions and human will that can determine what we do tomorrow.
We don't have to have dumb economic policies that are contrary to the lessons of history.
We can choose better policies.
We don't have to centralize power and government.
We're doing it too much to our detriment.
But it is a question of will, the pattern of where a civilization goes.
We are exhibiting symptoms of what has failed in the past.
And the reason I wrote this book is so we can wake up to it.
And make a different determination.
Now look, if we elected someone like Harris with no foreign policy experience and remember I ran against her for U.S.
Senate and debated her and actually the polls after the debate said I beat her because she has such a lack of knowledge.
If you elect someone like that, you are risking foreign policy errors which could harm you in the long term.
That's a question of will.
We don't have to do these wrong things.
And so what the book does is explain some of these things, including, as you mentioned, centralization of power that destroys freedom.
And we can, of our free will, if you like, make a choice to make things worse or to recover from the low, the seemingly low we're in now, caused by years of centralizing power and bad economic policy.
So, you brought up Harris.
I guess that's the next place that we really need to go, especially because she's on the cover of Time Magazine.
It's her moment.
Let's just look at the presidential runs for a couple seconds.
Now, the cry of the Democratic Party is they are constantly saving democracy.
Now, I'm just going to go back to 2016 really quickly.
It was clear in their primary process Bernie Sanders won that deal.
They didn't care much about democracy then.
Then let's go to 2020.
You have a plethora of Democrats across the board and Kamala Harris is one of the first to drop out because she can't get 3%.
Now, I'm not sure during that primary process whether she was taken off every ballot, but just for this sake, let's say she got pretty much zero votes because she wasn't in the mix during that time period.
You know, you look at someone like Amy Klobuchar, who's far from a household name, and she lasted longer.
Okay?
Let's get to this election cycle.
So I would argue the last time democracy was totally and completely subverted.
You know, I just mentioned Klobuchar.
You could talk about Pete Bootlicker.
All these people dropped out at strategic points to allow Biden to get that nomination.
It's not like he was dominating in the primaries.
You know, he's barely getting any votes himself.
That was extremely strategic.
So, you know, again, the people who are so worried about democracy subvert the democratic process.
We've never seen anything like this last one.
I don't think they ever had an intention of running Biden this time around, whether he knew it or not.
They wanted no primary debates whatsoever.
They certainly didn't want RFK Jr.
to come into their party and possibly disrupt it in the manner that Trump disrupted the
traditional Republican party.
So now we fast forward and the presidential nominee literally got zero votes from any
American citizen.
I mean, we're literal zero.
Now let's look at where we are in this process.
She's the presumptive nominee.
We haven't gotten to the DNC.
We will shortly.
In light of some kind of crazy disaster, I don't expect anything to go further.
She has nothing to point to.
I mean, literally not one accomplishment as the vice president over the last three and a half plus years.
I can't point to one thing.
I don't think anybody could look me in the eye and point to one thing.
On top of that, this is the most outwardly puppeted administration.
Talk about the decline of this country.
The guy was senile when they put him in.
He clearly had dementia all the way back in 2021 when he was sworn in.
It got so bad that at the tail end when they wanted to get rid of them, now it's a talking point.
Oh, we had no idea.
Total nonsense.
So, I mean, when you look at that, that really speaks to where we are as a country.
I would go so far as it's more than she's going to make policy mistakes.
She doesn't have any policies.
Her policies are the ones she's told to talk about and she can't even articulate those in a coherent manner.
Yeah, so much you put in there.
So let's unpack some of it.
A big topic in my book relates to how not only things centralize over time, but also it is the cry of big government socialists who want to take your freedom that they That they have to do this to preserve democracy and I go back to many centuries ago the Venetian Republic.
I give the example of how they created a spy network because they said there was threat to the Republic and therefore we have to do this to preserve the Republic.
That's as old as time and so whatever you should always be very careful when some politician is saying I have to take away your freedoms because the republic is at risk.
Remember Franklin said those who exchange security for freedom get neither in the long run.
So that's a tried and true big government take away your freedom cry.
We have to preserve democracy so give us your or the republics will give us some of Now, let's go to Kamala Harris, who I call Madame Deficit, by the way, which if you're familiar with your French history, that's what they call Marie Antoinette.
But this one is Harris, Madame Deficit, who will spend us into oblivion, but doesn't know anything really about politics.
So let's talk about that.
When she was the D.A.
of San Francisco, her mentor was Willie Brown, who was on the left, but he was practical.
And she wasn't altogether bad when he was telling her what to do.
But then as farther away she got from him, whether it was going to Sacramento as Attorney General or winding up in Washington, D.C., and then deciding to run for president, she wasn't always the most liberal senator.
But as soon as she declared for the presidency, She went farther left than Bernie Sanders.
And so your comment is spot on when you say she doesn't know what her policy is because she's reading these scripts.
She doesn't have policy depth.
She relies in on her consultants dramatically.
And so where she's going to be going at any one day is anybody's guess.
And that's dangerous because then she's just doing things by the polls and by consultants instead of being a leader.
And given the results of the last three and a half years, that's a high risk operation, especially in this dangerous world.
This is not Jimmy Carter's world where you could be weak and know China really existed at that time, right?
They weren't as big a deal as they are now.
There was no internet at the time and the risk to America wasn't that high.
But now we're in the internet age.
Now they have the capacity with a computer to wreak havoc.
They're around the world trying to take in their client states while we sit here weekly.
We see what Iran does with the billions of dollars that were freed up for them to cause terror in the Middle East, and we see what Russia does.
Couldn't we really have someone so weak as Madam Deficit Kamala Harris, that she should be the leader?
You know they're salivating at that sort of thing.
So, yeah, you could look at all of those things, but also keep this in mind.
Internal division, you mentioned earlier, on purpose.
The left in history has used internal division for as long as you can imagine to say, you need to elect us because things are divided and we're going to bring us together.
Remember that?
That happened in the ancient Greece democracy.
But they don't do that.
The division gets worse, and then what happens is, in ancient Greece democracy, Philip of Macedon came and took them over because they were so consumed with fighting each other.
We are so consumed with fighting each other because of what government does, that we're ignoring the outside world to our detriment.
You know, one of the things that you just described was basically government by bureaucratic committee, right?
And some people have pointed out to the idea that we are certainly in an oligarchy.
I think the argument can be made.
We certainly are no longer in a constitutional republic of checks and balances which are governed for and by the people.
We've gone a far, far distance from that.
So where are we right now?
And I would imagine that you believe, as I do, even though Trump is an imperfect vehicle, that There may be some semblance of normalcy and the possibility that we don't just go completely into decline, completely into global warfare if you get this guy in.
You know, I had a lot of critique in that first administration, but at the same time I would give the man his due when there was more money in my wallet right out of the gates.
I gave him his due when we weren't starting large-scale warfare and buying into this Russia, Russia, Russia propaganda that was everywhere.
I'm an anti-war guy.
I like the fact that he went to North Korea and talked to Kim Jong-un.
I want more dialogue.
That's what I'm looking for.
So, what are your thoughts on that?
If we are on the precipice of just the point of no return, is it over if a Kamala embarrassed administration gets in there?
And if a Trump administration somehow does get in there and he's sworn in in January, can he bring us back?
I don't subscribe to it's over.
The United States is very unique.
Those two big oceans and docile neighbors North and South have allowed the United States the luxury to make mistakes and not pay for it too much.
Think about the election in 2016 if Hillary had won.
Our Supreme Court wouldn't be the Supreme Court you know it today, which is trying to limit government exercise and limit the power of the bureaucracy.
If Trump had lost then, then that would have been a huge blow to the Republican because
the Supreme Court would be so liberal that it wouldn't stick to the Constitution.
So any one election can make a big difference.
The policy differences that Trump would make just on energy alone would strengthen America
and stave off some of the foreign policy problems that are out there.
On the other hand, if Kamala Harris is put in there, this bureaucratic state, the fact
that the DOJ and the FBI, and I wrote about this three years ago at Fox about how the
FBI and the DOJ want to decide who can be president or not by going after one party
or the other, that type of thing would go on.
Does anybody think that Kamala Harris wouldn't?
Keep Merrill Garland or put in someone even worse that would go after their enemies.
So at any one moment, an election can make a big difference.
It's also true throughout all of history that leaders can make an enormous difference when things are on the line and push things in a better direction.
Don't mean to go too far back, but if you go back 2,500 years to Solon or longer, You see a great politician bridge the gap in the United States.
Think of George Washington.
His character made all the difference.
He could have been king, but he decided to hand his power back to make this experiment real.
So yes, a leader could come in and make a difference.
It's getting harder in America because of the bureaucratic state you were talking about, because of how bad the media is.
in shielding the left and pushing through their policies.
So we are not in some permanent decline.
This could just be a pendulum swing to be undone, as I said in the book.
But something's very critical here that people need to understand.
The United States wasn't founded by voting out King George.
It took individual will and Americans to make the difference.
When Franklin said that it's a republic, madam, if you can keep it, he didn't say if your leaders could keep it.
He said if you, meaning the individuals.
And Americans, if they want to preserve the republic, have to get off their couch and make this difference.
Well, let me just say this, you know, I'm a big, big purveyor of not looking to others and believing in heroes, right?
The bottom line is you wake up every day, and when you brush your teeth, you're looking at yourself in the mirror, and that's the person that you need to rely on.
We gotta take a quick break.
When we come back, I wanna hit on what you said about the Supreme Court, because quite frankly, I haven't been in love with them The book is The Lessons of the American Civilization, Its Confident Rise and the Warning Signs of Its Decline.
We'll be back after this with more Making Sense of the Matters.
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And we are back with Thomas G. DelBaccaro.
So you mentioned the Supreme Court, and I certainly agree with you
that if Hillary Clinton got in there, it would be even worse.
But quite frankly, alright, now don't get me wrong, I think on the abortion issue, bringing it back to states' rights, I love that.
I'm a big states' rights advocate.
I think that the importance of states' rights and those separation of powers couldn't have been better illustrated than during the COVID-1984 nightmare.
Depending on where you lived, there were big, big differences.
You know, I ended up leaving New York.
I live in Iowa now.
So many other people made the journey to other states, Florida in particular, etc.
But when you look at the rest of what the Supreme Court's been up to, even after the Trump appointees, on some of the largest issues.
You know, a lot of people championed, for instance, this ruling that the president was immune from prosecution on official business, but they left the loophole of what official business was.
So we still may see some type of sentencing in this lunatic New York case.
Let's go back to 2020.
They basically said the president of the United States and the American people didn't have standing to look at all the corruption that was extremely apparent in that election cycle.
Furthermore, I don't think Trump did himself any favors by not jumping in on the large scale social media companies when they began deplatforming even people like Alex Jones, whether you love him or hate him.
That was the canary in the coal mine.
And on the eve of the election, they de-platformed the president of the United States.
I mean, that's huge, especially when the media is already censoring and altering the narrative.
Okay.
So then we get to this last round where that no standing made me want to vomit, but really the Missouri versus Biden case where we had had a state Supreme Court.
Come in, look at the evidence and clearly show collusion with big tech and big government.
Now, I'd argue it goes well beyond and has for a very long time.
And this has caused a plausible deniability loophole that has been a detriment to our society.
But they didn't even look at it again.
Again, this no standing thing.
You know, I see I wasn't even aware of the fact that if a state Supreme Court looked at the evidence, Our Supreme Court could just not look at the evidence.
I thought they'd actually have to at least do that.
Now look, there were dissenting opinions, right?
Clarence Thomas, Gorsuch, Alito did that write-up, and I thought that his write-up was extremely solid.
But at the end of the day, that is the tip of the iceberg, and they refused to look at it.
So, I mean, everybody wants to champion the Supreme Court.
If it got any worse, I don't know where we would be because they should have absolutely looked at the election in 2020.
And who knows where we'd be if they did that in these past four years.
This election cycle would be completely different.
And, again, we're talking about outward techno-fascism and authoritarianism when we're talking about the type of censorship that went on with these companies and our highest courts won't even look at it.
Your thoughts?
And Google just admitted today that the Trump assassination thing, keeping that out of the search engine, was no mystery.
You know, the great Thomas Sowell, for my money, the smartest man maybe in the world when it comes to history and politics, said, you must always ask, compared to what?
And I do that throughout the book.
You are right.
There are decisions that the Supreme Court, as me as an attorney for 35 years and a historian, shake my head at.
But my point is, if it was a 6-3 majority because Hillary had been president, you would have none of these things.
I'd look at something like the Chevron case and the Bumstock case, which all they said was, The bureaucracy cannot make laws that Congress did not give them the power to do.
They can't put out regulations that go beyond the letter of whatever law it is that Congress passed.
And it had been doing so for decades, and we were being ruled by a bureaucracy.
Think about this, the Obamacare, which was a ludicrous decision by Justice Roberts.
Was 2300 pages long.
Within a year, you had 35,000 pages of regulations.
That is separation of powers lutency, right?
My point, though, is, yes, we are exhibiting signs of decline.
Yes, centralized power, which is a real danger.
And we maybe should talk about that a little longer as to how much a danger that is.
But My point was, in any one election, there can be a dramatic difference.
And it just so happened in 2016 with retirements, the direction of the Supreme Court was decided, whether people knew it or not, between Hillary's choices and Trump's choices.
And keeping Merrill Garland off the Supreme Court, that guy shouldn't be in charge of anything judicial, because it's very obvious that he has no moral core or intellectual honesty.
You asked, this started with you asked, are we in some sort of permanent decline?
No, we still, leaders can still make a difference.
If Trump stands up to the DOJ and FBI and cleans it out, that is a good thing.
And by the way, is very necessary.
If Kamala Harris gets in there, they will practice four more years of what they've been doing, what they did under Obama and what they did under Biden.
And that would be a blow to the Republic and making it ever harder to retrieve the freedoms that were guaranteed to us under the Constitution, but which are being taken away day by day as you describe.
You know, I do want to get into where you think the rise and the peak is.
But before we do that, let's talk about centralization of power.
Because when I look at our long and storied history in this country, when I think of centralization of power, yes, there's the banking.
Yes, there are the corporations.
Yes, there's the government collusion.
But there are also these non-government organizations that have been put together, not just people like Soros with the Open Society Foundation, etc., but institutions like the United Nations.
And I've been covering institutions like that and other think tanks, Council on Foreign Relations, etc., for many, many years, and especially in the case of the UN.
You could make the argument, I would say, prior to the COVID-19-84 nightmare, that it was a paper tiger, right?
It really didn't have any teeth.
It can't institute policy, et cetera.
But then COVID comes around.
And again, that plausible deniability circle that I talked about, all of a sudden it's UN suggestions, it's World Health Organization dictates that trickle down.
And then there's really no criminal accountability.
I think, you know, obviously it's not those organizations that are actually dictating these policies for benevolence.
It's those behind them that are pushing these policies for that centralization of power.
And, you know, you mentioned China, etc.
We've never been so globalized, not just because of the Internet, not just because of the rise of their military-industrial complex.
But, because we have had this homogenous or more homogenized relationship via trade.
You know, you mentioned Nixon, right?
It was really at the beginning of that Nixon administration, via people like Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller behind him, that started bringing China into the fold, right?
They started getting Coca-Cola and blue jeans and loosening some of their authoritarian policies.
And we got their cheap labor and products and widgets.
And I would argue we moved, at least politically, more towards their authoritarianism.
So what are your thoughts on that idea of the centralization of power we're seeing?
And this is covered extensively in the book.
One of the laws of history is that power centralizes over time.
And our brilliant founders, who had studied the end of Greek democracy and the end of the Roman Republic, and who lived under a monarch, and of course a monarch is as centralized power as you can get, and they had studied what was going on in Europe, they understood that power centralizes.
So how did we start?
And this is really important.
We had 13 colonies.
There was no big centralized government, no big capital like there is in Washington, D.C., where all the power, so much power resides.
Instead, economic and political power were even, almost even throughout the states, although Virginia clearly had more power than, say, Delaware.
But it was the individuals colonies turn little nation states with that exercise the power and when economic and political power are pulled apart, which was different than most of the history.
Most of history is the monarch or the feudal lord at both economic and political power.
And capitalism brought the economic power away from them and balance things.
When you have that good balance, you can actually have a working republic where people like you and me and average people have a say.
The danger of history is when that power starts to centralize in the economic and political power.
Get back together.
And COVID is the absolute example of the danger of that.
Who decided American policy after COVID was decided?
Was it you?
Was it me?
Or was it Pfizer, Moderna, WHO, the UN and the U.S.
government and massive contracts which transferred Billions and billions of dollars to really big entities.
The coming together of big business and big governments is anti- Democratic here, meaning it's against the free election and the ability of the little guy to have a say in his government.
And that is why it is so important that Madam Deficit, as I call her, Kamala Harris, not get into power.
Because not only does she not understand history, but she actually believes that a centralized government can make these determinations for the common good.
All of that very dangerous.
So this is a big deal.
It is a law of history that power centralizes and therefore freedom is extinguished day by day.
And this election, that is on the ballot.
We live in an age, and I'll finish with this, we live in an age where those in power want to protect themselves from us.
That has happened many times in history.
I can cite the examples.
They want to exercise their power to keep it and take it away from us.
And they want our money, but not our two cents.
And that is what is going on today.
The lessons of the American civilization, its confident rise, and the warning signs of its decline is out there.
You can get it on Amazon.
We're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, I want to talk about the modern day apex of what is known as the American or Anglo-American empire and where we are in regards to that today.
We'll be back with more making sense of the madness after this.
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And we are back with Thomas G. DelBecaro.
Now, to me, at least modern day, we really do show our prominence and dominance post-World War II.
You know, and Tucker Carlson talks about this a lot.
I look at that era, you know, first of all, obviously after World War I, we start getting that prominence.
You know, the League of Nations comes into being.
Americans aren't hip to it.
We talk about centralization of power.
That eventually fails.
World War II comes into play.
There can be no doubt that at the end of the day, because we got the bomb, we were the dominant power.
Period.
Amen.
Now that is done through the Manhattan Project.
Now we have had compartmentalization before, et cetera, plausible deniability, but to me that became the model.
You know, and you could argue after World War II, we are at the apex, there can be no doubt, but we started moving away from that system of checks and balances and the idea that the commander-in-chief is in charge.
Now, what do I mean by that?
You start creating black sites.
Everybody wants to talk about Area 51 and aliens.
Hey folks!
So we're doing the nuclear testing, propulsion systems, weapon systems, and where a system of quote-unquote born classified came into fruition for these plausible deniability circles.
Well, when you have things that are born classified and outside of the directive of the regular executive, you're creating an executive within an executive.
Now, this continually grows over the years.
Now, obviously, post-World War II, you also get the United Nations, and that's part of it.
But I would argue that we get so out of control that really the last time we saw any accountability of that executive within an executive, that was warned about via Eisenhower.
We saw it firsthand.
come out of World War II and warned us about it at the end of his presidency, not to mention,
you know, Kennedy gets his head blown off afterwards, just pointing that out.
You have this executive within an executive and the last time we've had real criminal
accountability was the Iran-Khashoggi scandal.
And a lot of that was slaps on the wrist.
A lot of that was commuted or pardoned after the fact.
You know, Oliver North, I don't think he was directing it, he was taking orders, but hey
He got radio shows and book deals.
And we haven't seen any accountability since.
Now, post 9-11, things go off the rails.
We're talking Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, Formation of Homeland Security, fusion centers on top of that.
And I only named maybe 1-100th of what was actually done solidifying that executive with an executive.
How do we move away from that?
And I mean really far away from that because, you know, you just talked about Trump getting in and really having to go into these three letter agencies, FBI, CIA, NSA, but that's three of the three letter agencies.
They're literally, when you're talking about these bureaucratic intelligence committees, institutions, they've outsourced.
Right?
They have even more plausible deniability.
Yes, there's a lot of work being done within those organizations, but there's so many subdivisions at this point.
How do you get out of the weeds and you bring back the constitutional republic?
And when you do have high-level criminals like Merrick Garland doing what they do, get them into a criminal courtroom and successfully prosecute them.
I know that was a ton, but you're the guy to answer.
So first of all, what I do in the book is try to get people to understand that this dynamic which you describe in some detail is not unusual.
I've actually told people, don't say the deep state.
There's nothing deep about it.
It's really just there in front of you and it's normal in history.
I gave you the example of the Venice Republic when they were challenged.
They created a spy network.
Marie Antoinette's sister, when she was the Queen of Naples, watched what happened in France and created a spy network to make sure that it didn't happen where she was living.
This enlightenment and threats to the To the monarchy.
That is normal for politicians who want to hold on to power.
And this centralization process you have talked about is very normal.
So we have to stop thinking, oh, this is some exception or that the dynamic doesn't exist.
That's step one.
Like, isn't step one in the 12 steps of drinking?
You have to acknowledge that something is real.
So this is incredibly real.
That's number one.
Number two, there's an asymmetry, right?
Because those who are for freedom, like you, Have less incentive than those who are making money off what they're doing.
The richest counties in America, most of them surround Washington, D.C.
This is big business to them.
They make billions of dollars a year.
And so they're very vested in this process where someone like you, who speaks out against it, and someone like me, we don't make billions of dollars.
And the average person has to go work.
So we have to recognize that as well.
So then how do you break some of these things open is the question you ask.
And in history, there's no clear guide except that you have to have someone willing to expose these things dramatically.
There has to be Some moment where something is broken open.
You can make the argument that some of what the Republicans in Congress did to expose what's going on in Washington had an effect, but they didn't go far enough.
And here's what I mean by that.
Many years ago, I told people in considerable power in Washington that if you want to change the immigration issue, You have to use video behind the border to demonstrate what's going on with the cartels.
I'm not saying that my advice changed the world, but why is that issue changed?
Because now Americans see the video of this going on.
If you want to take on the big bureaucrats, They will have to do something.
There has to be an amazing expose.
What brought Nixon down?
A tape and video of things.
That is what has to happen.
It's not enough for those fighting for freedom in Washington to argue with the Washington Post in Washington, D.C.
or argue with the Democrats in Washington, D.C.
They have to convince voters of something very real to expose it.
And that effort hasn't been made.
So it takes an amazing leader.
It takes someone willing to risk to expose.
And then you have to place it in the hands of voters So, they see a scandal of significant size and then make an election decision based on it.
So, in your opinion, where is the apex of this rise?
What is peak American civilization?
And what are some of the signs early on you saw the decline of that start?
Well, civilizations are born in faith and they die in doubt.
And what I mean by that is they're born in believing their basic purpose and have a religious basis to them and they die in doubt, which means that their purposes are no longer.
Uh, shared by significant portions of the population, and also there is a moral and religious decline.
America's purposes, which I talk about in the book is opportunity for all.
And democratization, what I mean by that is our founders purpose wanted us to have the broadest franchise, the most participation in government in history.
And we built on that for for a long time.
All the way into the 1900s, you made a very interesting analysis, which a lot of people don't do, which is talking about World War I, II and then the Korean War.
Our purpose of believing in freedom and exporting it Rose with World War One, what did we do?
We fought against a tyrant for the purposes of democracy.
World War Two, we were the arsenal of democracy.
We fought a bad group of people in North Korea.
And at the same time in that decade, we passed into a rare place in history where our entire civilization on balance was spending more on non-necessities Then necessities.
Housing and food is necessity.
We were spending money on luxuries.
No civilization of this size in history could say that 53% of expenditures were on non-necessities.
So that was an amazing period, the 1950s.
And then the 1960s and television came along.
And the Vietnam War, there wasn't a clear bad guy that we could see that mattered, that seemed to matter.
You know, Hitler had invaded North Korea.
The North Korean area, South Korea was invaded.
You could see these things.
Vietnam wasn't as clear, and television came along, and you saw the protests saying that America was bad.
And since then, you have seen that rise of, well, America wasn't good because it started with slavery.
Well, it didn't start with slavery, A. And B, slavery was all around the world.
There's more slaves than ever before.
But now people are saying, no, America isn't good.
And because it did something wrong in the past, it can't be good now, which is ludicrous, right?
What human being didn't make a mistake in the past or do something very wrong in the past, but they're a different person now and group.
So the fulcrum, if this continues without some sort of revival that a leader can effectuate along with people who who are reinvigorated that fulcrum could be the 1960s and one of the catalysts could is could be the Vietnam War and the growth in television because if you look at a spending
Of government spending, it is driven by the media, and we cannot sustain the spending.
As you well know, the third largest item in the budget right now isn't defense anymore.
It is interest on the debt, and that's unsustainable for any civilization.
So you just mentioned the media.
Originally, the media, of course, not part of the government and known as the fourth estate, a.k.a.
this extra branch that would be that extra check and balance on power.
We have seen almost the complete inversion of that when we are talking at least about mainstream media.
We have seen the persecution and prosecution of those inside the alternative media that dare to challenge the narrative and now We have moved into thought crime, not just in the United Kingdom and social media posts.
But for instance, you can hate Enrique Tarrio's politics.
You can hate the Proud Boys.
You can believe in an imagination land insurrection on January 6th.
That guy's doing 20 years for not being at the Capitol and not being in D.C.
on January 6th.
I mean, this is where we are as a country.
We do have, you know, a candidate that says if he gets in, he's going to change that.
He's at least going to commute and pardon some of these things.
But the precedent has been set.
How do we roll that back?
Yeah, you know, forced thought is what I call it in the book.
And of course, throughout history, and the line I use in the book is that dissent is the mother of democracy.
And by that I mean freely elected governments, republics and democracies like Greece used to have.
Dissent is the mother of democracy.
If you don't have the right Not just the ability, but the protected right to disagree with governments.
Then you don't truly have a republic or democracy anymore.
And we are, of course, as you point out, we don't have that freedom anymore.
It's not unfettered.
We don't get to say that Joe Biden is doing the wrong thing.
Trump doesn't get to say drain the swamp because they go after them.
And so we have to recognize how valuable Freedom of speech is, but as you well know, we have to talk about the education system.
There is an enormous percentage of kids under 30 years old who don't understand that dissent is the mother of democracy that are willing to.
To curtail free speech because they think that's better and more stable and they were sold that by their schools and they're sold that by the government that says, oh, you have to curtail your freedom of speech for the stability of the democracy.
Listen, we gotta take one more break.
Let's come back with the education system because I do think that is key.
You know, I hate to say it when I talk about destroyed by design, dumbed down by design as well.
final segment of Making Sense of the Madness after this.
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I'd have my mom call the number on the screen.
You?
You come see me alone.
We'll work it out.
Really, we will.
And we are back.
We are with Thomas G. Del Beccaro.
We're talking about the book, The Lessons of the American Civilization, Its Confidence Rise, and the Warning Signs of Its Decline.
Let's talk about the education system.
Now, I'm 45 years young.
For me, I grew up dirt poor.
One of the only reasons that I even excelled was that I looked at doing well academically as a way to get ahead.
Not that I got a bunch of scholarships or anything like that, but I was also lucky enough to be in an era where I went to a state school, Yeah, you know, my education, whatever, but I had gravitated to a certain subject.
The internet was here now.
So, you know, I was in a computer lab all the time.
Really, it was my peers I was learning from.
And if not my peers, I would look stuff online.
I was sold on the idea, especially late 90s.
I was going to make it six figures easy.
You know, the economy was on the up and up at the time.
A lot of people forget that we were in a surplus.
At the end of Clinton, and on top of that, I mean, gas was under a buck a gallon.
I've never seen those days again.
And, you know, quite frankly, I think there's a huge gap between myself and my youngest sister, who is about 16 years younger than me, not just on baseline education, but again, social and cultural mores, where a lot of her belief system are completely and totally upside down.
Now, sometimes I can sit her down and we can have a conversation.
And through reason and deduction, maybe I can get her to think another way.
But when I look at this generation, I see them indoctrinated into systems of entitlement that they think are benevolent and helping society, but in reality, they entrap them into this culture where you're a grown child your entire life.
You are dependent on the state and that is the antithesis of what was really trying to be formed here.
You're not dependent on the state.
You're dependent on yourself and yourself is protected.
In fact, the idea that the state is God is something that before the founding fathers really railed against.
There was a supreme being and it wasn't a king and it wasn't a government.
It was your God-given rights.
You're really good.
You have a great understanding of history for someone your age.
I wish many more Americans understood that.
You are 100% right.
Here's the dynamic of history.
While a civilization is in the countryside, self-responsibility prevails and limited government is very plausible.
As it moves through the city and urbanizes with industrialization, And America is 82% urbanized today.
The calls for bigger government to deal with inequities between those who work really hard and make a lot of money or just make a lot of money and those who don't grow the clash of danger related to the workplace.
Creates these calls for big government.
And that is one dynamic that is going on in America.
Educationally, keep in mind that for most of American history, it was a private or religious enterprise.
It started at homes in the Bible.
I go over this in the book.
It started in homes with the Bible.
It started with very religious schools.
That's what Harvard was.
It was a religious mandated school.
That type of thing.
But then in the early 1900s, government took over schools, not only in funding it, but in directing curriculum.
And over time, what has happened?
Government has started to teach government values, and kids today have a very negative view of capitalism.
They're not taught what capitalism has done in history versus socialism.
They're just taught that it is bad.
They're taught that America is bad.
And it just spirals and spirals, and no longer do we have our traditions being taught to our children.
Let's take it one step farther.
There's only eight states in America, and I talk about this in my book, there's only eight states in America that require a full year of U.S.
government slash civics.
So, they are deprived of actual history, they are not taught about the benefits of capitalism, they are waxed with socialism, and then they grow up in these beliefs.
And then there's one more element to it.
You started with the banking crisis.
What I do in chapter 10 of the book called America's Capitalism and Socialism is talk about all the instances in our history where government was suddenly called upon And became a bigger part of the process that related to banking crisis, of course, the New Deal.
Then you have other circumstances of that, the Great Society.
And slowly but surely, people begin to believe that, well, government is good and it's doing the right thing, even though it hasn't produced results and it's taken away their freedom.
So this is a societal process that happens for economic terms, what I talked about moving from the countryside to the city, government taking over education, not educating our children of the past.
And you're going to ask, so what do we do about this?
Well, at the end of the day, you either choose To teach true history and the benefits of civilization.
This is essentially what my book is doing.
The benefits of capitalism versus the dangers of socialism.
Or you do not.
And until we wake up and say we're going to reclaim the education of our children and teach the past instead of succumbing to what's going on today, then we are inviting our own decline.
Well, the bottom line is that you have to be involved and you have to take responsibility, not only for yourself, but your loved ones around you.
And you cannot just be subservient to the education system.
You know, when I pick up my nieces who live with me, the first thing I do, if I'm doing that for school, what'd you learn today?
They don't want to talk to me, they don't want to tell me about it, but I get it out of them, especially when we're talking about American history and what's going on in the world.
The Lessons of the American Civilization, Its Confident Rise, and the Warning Signs of Its Decline is available on Amazon.
This has been a wonderful conversation.
Thomas, I really appreciate you coming on, and I appreciate you guys watching this show five days a week here at Patriot.tv, where the truth lives.