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June 3, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
37:24
What American Education Needs, Jerry Falwell Jr. | Ep. 41
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought us to the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the powerful Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all of the people.
A great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we are able to reason, we're able to talk to each other, we're able to listen to each other, and we're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
♪♪ Welcome to Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
And today we have a very interesting guest, Jerry Falwell Jr.
Jerry, you know, is the president of Liberty University.
He's also a man who knows quite a bit about politics, quite a bit about America, quite a bit about business, and just an extraordinary citizen that I have the privilege of knowing and really admiring.
Jerry, welcome to the show.
Rudy, it's an honor to be with the nation's best mayor in history.
Well, thank you, sir.
So, Jerry, everyone knows your dad.
He was one of the great Americans, one of the most significant people of his generation, helped to shape politics, and he left his family with quite a legacy in terms of institutions.
You had Liberty University.
You had the Thomas Road Baptist Church.
The moral majority, he eventually, it sort of disbanded, but the moral majority really, I think, kind of realigned politics in America, and probably with a lot of other charitable endeavors, I know, with Israel.
Moral majority was, there was a whole group of evangelicals who thought it was a sin to vote.
And so he taught them that it not only was not a sin, But it was something you're obligated to do as a Christian.
And that's what changed.
That's how Ronald Reagan got elected, I believe.
And the church here, he started in 1956.
And every speech he gave in the last 10 years of his life, he said, he saw the differences between my brother and me.
He said, I want Jerry.
He's more of a lawyer.
He's a lawyer.
He's more of a businessman.
And I did commercial real estate development.
He said, I want him to run the college.
and I want Jonathan, who is more of a pastor, well, he is a pastor, I'm not,
and he wanted him to run the church, and I'm so glad he divided it up
because there's no way either one of us could have kept up with his father.
Well, you know, when you have such a strong father, such a strong figure,
the thing that I'm amazed about with you, and I don't know your brother as well,
but I can see from afar that he's done very well, How did—I mean, you expanded on what he did.
I mean, you expanded on what he did.
You didn't just take what he gave you and... Now, you went from here to here.
You know, you went... Liberty University is a totally different thing now.
It's a really well-respected academically.
Yeah.
It's becoming well-respected in sport.
Right?
Yeah.
Won our first bowl game this year.
And the church has grown.
Well, Liberty University, I was 44 years old.
I spent 20 years as a lawyer restructuring debt, negotiating with creditors, because Dad had started it from scratch.
And it's a struggle to do that with a college.
And we would issue paychecks some Fridays and spend all weekend calling donors and lenders to get the money to cover those paychecks on Monday or Tuesday.
That was my first 20 years.
I didn't speak publicly until he died.
I was age 44, and it was in front of 25,000 people at graduation, four days after he died.
So I got thrust right into the fire, just suddenly.
And it took a while to adjust to that.
It was not fun for a while.
Well, of course, among other things, he was a great public speaker, both as a minister and as a political figure.
Yeah, he came from a business family, so he brought that business work ethic.
When he became a Christian, it's amazing.
He came from a family of atheists and agnostics for generations in Virginia.
But it's amazing that he became a Christian in the first place.
But when he did, he brought those business principles.
They were all successful business people.
And he treated the church and the school like an entrepreneur would.
And he brought in all these interesting speakers, the world's tallest man, the world's strongest man.
Anything to get people out.
He combined a minister, Showman.
Politician.
Builder.
Yeah.
How good a businessman was he?
Businessman.
He knew that to start something this big from scratch, you had deficit spend.
You had to borrow from anybody that would loan you money at any interest rate they charged.
And there were dozens of them that we owed millions of dollars to.
And somehow we kept it together.
He was smart.
He borrowed so much money that there's no way they could get their money except becoming our partners.
I always thought of, I always think of men like Jerry who are creative, naturally gifted speakers, brilliant men about analysis and philosophy and theology.
I always think of them as probably being somewhat unrealistic in business.
So I guess he was unrealistic, but unrealistic a little bit like a fox.
Yeah, I mean, he had such a thick skin.
He wasn't scared to go deep in debt and to take a chance.
And if he hadn't done that, this university wouldn't have a $2 billion endowment.
We've gone from $0 to $2 billion in unrestricted endowments since he died in 2007.
And we spent $1.6 billion on our campus with no debt in that same period.
But he was willing to take the big risks.
I was second generation, so I'm better to lead it now because I'm a little... I don't bet the farm every other week, you know, like he did.
But he had to, to build it.
Well, that's good.
You institutionalized it, and it's grown quite a bit.
It's grown quite a bit, I can tell you, as an outsider, in that sense.
It's grown quite a bit in reputation.
Academically, it's now considered a very, very fine institution.
You are the leader by far, and we're going to talk about that, in online education.
And here's what you do do, and I can only think of a handful of colleges, if my children were going to school again, that I would trust.
You give a traditional education.
It's not even so much a Christian education.
You teach things like history.
Of course.
We have a medical school, law school, credited by the ABA in record time in 2004.
We have an engineering school.
We have 520 different programs of study.
So you can study.
We have a huge nursing program.
Anything you want to be, you can learn it here.
And the idea was, he wanted to emulate what Notre Dame had done.
He said, why is there a school that's world class for Catholic young people, but not a school that's
world class for evangelical young people?
So he wanted to create a school with NCAA Division I sports.
We just won our first bowl game.
And that was the vision, is to create a USC, an Alabama, a UCLA
just for evangelical young people.
And it's been so much fun to watch it come to fruition.
You're there.
You're basically there.
I mean, you're a fine academic institution.
Nothing there that's lacking.
And now you're becoming a competitive sports program.
So now you've got to play Notre Dame in a bowl.
It won't be long.
It won't be long.
That would be quite a match.
It would be incredible.
We respect that institution.
I have a name for it.
What's that?
The Reformation Bowl.
We respect that institution. … I have a name for it.
The Reformation Bowl. … OK, yeah. … So tell me how you—let's talk about two things that are the most current.
One is—let's talk about Mr. Floyd first, since it's the most current, and then we'll go back to the pandemic.
Because we're going through two very, very jarring events over the last three months.
The second one being the killing of the poor gentleman, George Floyd.
Terrible.
And all of us watching the video of the police officer being told that he's choking him,
and for some reason none of us can understand, not responding to it.
Almost like he was in a trance of some kind.
Yeah. And he had 18 prior complaints.
And somebody should have done something about him before that happened.
But it's just a shame how one insect can damage so much grain.
There's so many good police officers in this country, but one guy, one guy is all it takes to just damage the reputation of all law enforcement.
We've got to weed those guys out.
I mean, I guess there's bad people in every profession.
You know, there are.
I think about lawyers, and I think about doctors.
Your dad had to go through that whole situation with the ministers.
The whole situation with the ministers.
And some people tried to lump him in with that, which was very unfair.
Yeah.
I guess that happens.
But here's the part that I really feel bad about.
I've been through a lot of police brutality cases, because I ran a city, and I had three very, very incendiary ones.
But I never had a riot, Jerry.
Never.
Really?
I took over New York City from David Dinkins, and it had more murder than any place in the country.
It had more welfare.
And we had had two major riots in three years.
One in Crown Heights and one in Washington Heights.
And one of them, one of them was really a pogrom.
It was an attempt to kill Jewish people and beat up Jewish people in a certain section of Brooklyn known as Crown Heights.
Went on for four days.
The mayor didn't do anything about it for three days.
The mayor had a theory that you should allow the rioters to vent.
Vent meant burning cars, breaking open stores, stealing liquor.
So when I became mayor, I studied that, those two riots.
A very good report had been done by then-Governor Cuomo about it.
And I trained my police in how to react to a riot.
And here's very simply what we do.
You can have any protest you want.
I'll protect you.
The minute you throw a rock, I arrest you.
We don't warn you, we arrest you.
The minute you scratch a car, we arrest you.
The minute you spit at a police officer, we arrest you.
And one of my police officers, Dan Bongino, who now has a podcast and is very famous.
He's great on Fox.
He was on and he said, you know, there was one possible riot and Mayor Giuliani was the mayor.
And he had taught us this one-two-three, but I didn't think it was going to work.
So we arrested the guy that threw a rock, and then we arrested the guy that scratched a car, and then some guy tried to go in and loot a liquor store.
We arrested him, and I thought, oh boy, now it's going to really blow.
He said within five minutes, three-quarters of them turned around and left.
They can dish it out, but they can't take it.
You got it, boy.
They don't want to go to jail.
You think they want to go to jail.
They don't.
And if you look at these six days, nobody's getting arrested.
They're just letting them do it.
It's unfathomable.
I just don't understand it.
It's just... I mean, it's just a rule of law.
Just enforce it.
And do what you did.
And that'll put an end to it.
Because they really don't want to be arrested and go to jail.
It's just common sense to me.
How do you explain the mayor in Minneapolis that let them take a police station, had his police officers retreat, and then they burned it down?
I just, I think it's, I don't understand it.
I don't know if it's theater or if it's trying to shine a spotlight on that terrible murder that never should have happened.
It was heartbreaking to see that young man be killed with a police officer on his neck.
But the way you deal with that is you punish the police officers responsible and you use the criminal
justice system, that's what it's there for.
How many murders happened in Chicago 24 hours before that?
You know?
No, oh sure.
They had a weekend I think last weekend with seven or eight murders and 38 shootings.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it happens all the time.
It should never happen, but criminal justice, we're a country of laws, not a country of just, I mean, we need to enforce our laws.
It's that simple.
And it's sad whenever anything like that happens, no matter what color the victim is, no matter what color the perpetrator is.
You know, here's what I really feel terrible about.
When it first happened, And you get over the shock.
I immediately received a call from a police officer friend of mine, who usually calls me when these incidents take place.
And he's usually telling me how they're being unfair to the police officer.
Almost always.
All of a sudden he calls me and I thought, oh my goodness, he's gonna give me a big... And he said, that's the most outrageous thing I've ever seen.
Yeah.
So as a police officer, I'm shocked.
Nobody's defending this guy.
you reacted that way? Well I got eight phone calls like that. Everybody was
united. There was no reason for these protests. They're just turning people,
they're turning people against them. Nobody's defending this guy. I mean it
was plain to see on the video and you know he just needs to spend the rest of
his life in jail or death penalty whatever the law is in Minnesota. If you
If you wanted to have some mild protest saying that this now should be subjected to study and analysis so we can make sure it doesn't happen again, you know, a sensible protest, that would be very good.
But what do you accomplish by destroying somebody's business or burning their car or you just turn everybody else against you?
The three officers standing there should have tasered the cop that had his knee on the neck of the poor victim.
And I guess they did nothing.
I don't know.
I couldn't tell.
But you would think they would just pull him off.
Everyone says that.
But now we have six days of... I mean, it's almost impossible to see the lawlessness that we have going on.
And a church, St.
John's Church was built in 1816.
Abraham Lincoln worshipped there.
I don't know if it all burned down or not, but it was on fire last night.
Well, they burned down some of it.
And they've desecrated St.
Patrick's Cathedral.
And they've done all kinds of graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial.
They've injured 40 Secret Service agents.
Forty.
Probably about 50 cops.
You can't do that.
No.
It's crazy.
I really do think that certain people in this country are fearful of what John Durham is about to expose.
And they're going all out to try to create distractions, and have been for the last three and a half years.
And only time will tell if I'm right about that, but it just seems to me like that's what's going on.
That's a very interesting perspective and quite possibly the case.
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You know, when you and I spoke the other week, coronavirus was the issue.
And tell us how Liberty dealt with it, and tell us about your experience with the great Only the news that's fit to print, New York Times!
Yeah, we spent all of spring break, in the middle of March, meeting with our executive team every day, coming up with a plan, and the governor was changing the rules, like almost on a daily basis, and so we decided that we would take all our classes online, which we did, but we also realized there were certain students who Didn't have high-speed internet at their homes.
They had elderly relatives at home.
They couldn't go back home.
They were international students.
So we knew a certain number would want to come back and live in the dorms.
So we did social distancing, put signs on all the chairs.
We did take out food from the restaurants only.
And we had about 1,200 students on a campus built for 16,000.
So you were socially distancing?
Oh, yeah, we had signs on every other chair.
We had every third computer working, and the two in between didn't work in the computer labs, so they couldn't sit together.
And so, it worked.
It worked.
We didn't have a single case.
But they came on campus after we put up no trespassing signs, because we wanted to protect our students from somebody bringing it in from the outside.
They trespassed, spent a few days, and they never talked to us.
Never interviewed anybody at Liberty.
They went across town and interviewed a doctor who had seen some Liberty students who had upper respiratory allergies and colds, which is not COVID.
And then they reported 12 Liberty students have COVID-like symptoms.
Actually, the number was zero.
Actually, ultimately, were they treated for COVID originally?
No.
No, they said Kohl's.
And so zero, zero, zero cases.
And they never corrected.
And 750 news outlets picked it up, their false story.
And, you know, we've got no choice now but to bring a lawsuit to clear the air.
Join the list.
It's a big list of people.
I think they're more comfortable with false news.
I really think they are.
Yeah, I think they're comfortable with that now.
They've lost all integrity, Jerry.
They've lost—I mean, I've been dealing with The New York Times since I was U.S.
attorney in the 70s, and they always were a bit of a Democratic paper.
I wouldn't even consider them left.
They were sort of a moderate—you would consider a moderate Democratic paper, sort of the Kennedy-type Democrat, more than far left.
What they've become now, I don't even know how to describe them.
Well, I think financial pressures have moved them to more of a buzzfeed model, where they're looking for clickbait.
And they actually take, I've been told by one of their people that they fired, who wrote a book, that they actually take money from advertisers to write negative stories about those advertisers' competitors.
And so when you read the story, you think it's a news story.
It's not.
It's just an ad.
You know what you call that?
You call that corruption.
You call that corruption.
Bribery!
You call that bribery!
Yes, I mean when you get that desperate for money, it just makes you, it turns you from a news organization to I don't know what to buzz for you.
A corrupt organization.
Yeah, yeah.
So, Jerry, now, I think one of the things that your institution, one of the things Liberty now will be known
for, and I think it's all of a sudden you've made a great
contribution to online education because you're so far ahead of everyone.
I mean, a lot of people that tried online education, they had little things go wrong.
You probably are all over that.
Ten years ago, all those things... No, we started in 1976 with adult education.
VHS tapes and books mailed out in boxes.
And then it was unaccredited back then.
In 1985, we started doing accredited online.
It wasn't online yet, but it was accredited distance learning.
And it took us about 20 years to perfect it.
So about 2005, when people started getting high-speed internet in their homes,
we were perfectly poised to serve this huge adult market of people who had not finished their undergraduate degree
or who needed a master's degree, but they had jobs, kids, couldn't uproot, mortgages, couldn't uproot and go back
to college.
And so nobody else wanted to serve that market.
I don't know if it was, if they just thought it wasn't prestigious enough for them.
We were like, fine, you'd be prestigious.
We'll build an endowment.
So we kept the price low.
It's affordable.
We're in the lowest 25% as far as tuition.
But we still run like a business.
We treat students like customers and it's worked.
And you give them a very, very good education that's a very relevant education.
Our accreditation agency requires that it be the same.
Quality academically as what they get here on campus.
So it's It's equal in quality and we actually monitor We actually have software that can tell who's actually typing when they take the test by this keystrokes everybody has a Unique way of stroking keys.
It's like a fingerprint and so we can tell if somebody's cheating or not and it's a There's lots of anti-fraud measures in software.
In other words, we've perfected it.
And a lot of these schools tried to jump into it in the middle of the semester, and I heard complaints from students at many colleges who said, this online education, they don't know how to do it.
They haven't been doing it for 30, 40 years like we have.
One of the points that I think people might not realize is, in a lot of these major colleges and universities, including some of the Ivy League schools, they now rely greatly on adjunct professors and graduate students teaching.
Because the main professors, the ones that are famous, are writing books and writing papers and staying in Tuscany and Or they're off in Sweden studying the gypsy moth or something crazy.
Yeah.
Right, right.
But that doesn't help the students at all.
We put our best professors in the classroom.
So who do you put on that?
Who do I see on my video?
And who's teaching me?
Best professors.
And most of them, we have 3,000 of them.
2,500 of them don't even live here.
Right.
2,500 of them are professors at those big universities you just mentioned in a moonlight for us.
And so we got the best professors and no more than 25 students per online class.
And you can question that.
And they have to they have to interact every day.
And we check the professor to make sure that they are in contact with their students several times a week.
And it's very closely monitored.
And we make sure it's the same quality education they would get their discussion boards.
The students are talking to each other all the time, and we make sure it's the same quality education they would get here on campus.
Well, Jerry, let me ask you a couple of concluding questions, because I know how big a supporter you are and friend of the president.
And what advice would you give him on how to reopen from the pandemic?
How fast should he go?
How hard should he push?
No.
I just came back from Florida.
these rules have to be retained, particularly with regard to young people who really, I
don't think there was ever any reason to lock down young people.
I just came back from Florida.
I was there to watch the launch this weekend.
And they've got it figured out.
I mean, everything's open.
Look at the states that have figured it out and have been successful.
Look at Liberty University that was successful and just follow that model.
I mean, I really think when you make people sit in their homes, their immune system weakens.
I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a doctor.
I don't have any question of it.
I don't think there's any question of it.
I started off being very skeptical of it because having been mayor of a city with, you know, 8 million people, you have all kinds of things that happen.
And I remember how many domestic violence cases we had.
I remember how many lock-ins we have in New York City.
Elderly people who won't come out of their homes.
I think what we're seeing with the Russia investigation, the Russia hoax, the impeachment, what's happening now with COVID being overblown, I think it's just the age-old war between freedom and tyranny.
And I really think we need to remember that.
We need to look at our history.
It only took 10% of colonists to go to war against and defeat the greatest military power
of the day, Great Britain.
And it just takes people with resolve.
And it took, I mean, Nazi Germany wanted to control the world.
If it hadn't been for America and for Winston Churchill, who gave a commencement speech
after World War II, and he only said three words, never give up.
And I think that's what we got to remember, is we're fighting a war against tyranny, people who want to control others versus people who just want to be left alone.
And conservative, freedom-loving Americans want to be left alone.
And we just need to realize that's what all this is about.
Behind all this turmoil is a battle between freedom and tyranny.
And I really think it's that simple.
Jerry, as an educator and as a man who's more closely connected to religion than most, is part of what I'm seeing on television with this complete disrespect for the law, complete disrespect for police officers, public officials, flags, Washington Monument, churches, Is it because we've lost religion as a major factor in America?
You know, one nation under God, our rights in the first 10 amendments come from God.
If you say that to people now, they don't even know what you're talking about.
Yeah, I think the Bill of Rights, the free exercise of religion, the right to assembly, all those things, they're trying to create an anti-state.
Your successor, Bloomberg, wanted to say how tall your soft drink could be.
I mean, that's the kind of stuff that we need to be vigilant on the watch for.
I think that religion isn't a threat to authoritarians because it's people, individuals, getting together and doing charitable things for others and discussing freely whatever they want to talk about.
I think the government sees that as a threat to their power.
People, you know, they want to control people, and so if you want to control people, you don't want them going to church and talking to each other and coming up with their own ideas.
That scares the authoritarians.
Doesn't it worry you that they've been able to keep churches closed for so long and that we have to fight so hard?
I mean, they kept abortion places open all throughout.
They kept liquor stores open all throughout.
Yeah.
Well, around here, three months has gone by, and there's no mask requirement.
socially separate. They were willing to wear masks.
Well around here three months has gone by and there's no mask requirement. All of a sudden
starting Friday you have to wear a mask in any public building in Virginia.
Well, Walmarts and the Targets have been packed out for months and everybody close together.
And I tweeted during that time that maybe churches should meet in the freezer in the freezer aisle of Walmart.
I mean, it's ridiculous.
It's just I don't see how they can pick and choose because There's so many people so close together, and it's allowed in so many places, but all of a sudden, when you get to this business or this church, nope, can't have that.
But it's all political, like I said.
Well, Jerry, it has been a truly interesting discussion.
I can't wait to come and see Liberty, because I have some good friends and graduates of Liberty that I work with.
I should tell you, you produce excellent I'll tell you what they all have in addition to a good education and good minds.
They have a work ethic.
Yes.
And they don't feel entitled.
A lot of students graduate from Ivy League schools and they say, I deserve $200,000 a year coming out of college because I went to such and such school.
And our students want to prove themselves.
They don't want to come out.
They don't expect everything to be handed to them.
They have a work ethic, they have an enthusiasm for learning.
You do a very good job and you should be proud of it.
And we need you now because education is in trouble and Liberty is one of a few that stands as a model
of how you can do it right.
So I can't congratulate you more.
A lot of small private schools that teach disciplines that don't lead to jobs
are not going to survive this.
And, you know.
We're sorry to see that happen, but it's a fact.
It's going to be a lot of closing colleges.
A lot of the big schools, they want everybody else to pay their bills.
They don't operate like businesses.
They want the taxpayers to pay them.
They want to raise tuition every year.
They want the donors to come in and bail them out.
That can only go on for so long.
They're not exempt from basic business principles, just like the rest of us.
But they think they're too good for that.
And that's going to be a sad outcome, I believe.
Jerry, I have to tell you, I could not be more impressed with what you've accomplished at Liberty, because I think it's so good for our country, that we have a model of a university that works Well, I wish all the journalists who interviewed me were as thorough as you.
It's been wonderful.
you many times, your students that I come in contact with, some of whom work with me,
they are among the best. Tremendous work ethic.
Tremendous work ethic. And so you should be congratulated.
BOB HERBERT, JR.: Well I've never, I wish all the journalists who interviewed me were as thorough as you.
It's been wonderful. I've really enjoyed talking to you and you know I think the difference with Liberty is
we don't indoctrinate. We teach the old fashioned way.
Which is the only way to teach.
You let any ideas be discussed and you don't ridicule somebody if they say something crazy.
It's just, that's what college is about.
Have you ever been interviewed by Jesse Waters?
Yeah, yeah.
On Fox.
Oh, Jesse Waters, when he was with O'Reilly, and he does it now sometimes, he's the one who goes out and he asks the young people, who's the first president?
And they say, Ronald Reagan.
Yeah, he actually spoke at Liberty.
Who do we fight the Civil War against?
The British.
Yeah.
I know.
It's public schools and the teachers' unions don't want to teach American history.
Well, thank God for you and your motto.
Thank you so much, Rudy.
God bless you and great health to your wonderful family.
Great to be with you.
You're great Americans.
Thank you.
So are you.
So are you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, that was a truly interesting and inspiring interview with Jerry Falwell, a really broad-based and very, very
smart man who's contributed a lot to making Liberty University into what now you would consider one of our fine
universities, which seems to have an even brighter future ahead with all of this understanding of online education.
So I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I certainly think there are a lot of things there that we can learn for the future.
Well, thank you very much, and we'll be back with Rudy's Common Sense.
Thank you.
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