Ezra Levant and Ben Weingarten analyze Donald Trump’s first month in 2025, where he dismantled the administrative state faster than Vietnam or 9/11 reshaped it—stripping Fauci’s security, revoking Hunter Biden-linked clearances, and ending Power’s USAID slush fund. JD Vance’s Munich speech exposed EU hypocrisy on free speech, while foreign leaders like Japan’s PM (calling Trump "frightening") and SoftBank’s CEO pledged billions, signaling global deference. Trump’s executive orders—like combating the "censorship industrial complex"—and nominees (Patel, Gabbard, RFK Jr.) mark a shift from weak Republican caution to aggressive reform, reversing Western emasculation and progressive ideologies, potentially sparking global conservative movements. [Automatically generated summary]
What a great conversation with my buddy Ben Weingarten today.
You might remember that Ben spent a very long night with us on election night in the U.S. on 2020, when Donald Trump was leading until, oh, about 1 a.m. when all sorts of ballots were found and the Democrats pulled ahead.
Well, that was a terrible night.
How is Ben feeling about the world now?
We'll go through Trump's many achievements and see what Ben thinks about it.
I think it's going to be a great conversation.
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Funding Freeze Fallout00:15:03
Tonight, a recap of the amazing first month of Donald Trump.
We'll talk to Ben Weingarten, who was with us the night Trump lost in 2020.
We'll ask how he's doing in 2025.
It's February 17th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Shame on you, you censorious bug.
Well, absence makes a heart grow fonder.
Donald Trump was not the president between 2020 and 2024.
Many people said it was rigged or even stolen.
I tend to agree with my friend Joel Pollock, who said the rules were changed, quote, legally, just to make it unfair, including ballot harvesting and mail-in ballots.
Well, that absence worked both ways.
I think Americans realized what they had lost looking every day at Joe Biden or whoever was actually running things behind the scenes.
And I think Trump himself used his four years in exile to think about what he would have done differently, what he would do if he had a second chance.
And indeed, he hasn't even been president for a month.
And I put it to you, it's been the most consequential few weeks in American history since, oh, I don't know, the Vietnam War.
Maybe even more than, I'd say than 9-11.
I mean, more has been done by the president on every front.
It's astonishing.
I remember election night 2020 when Trump seemed to be leading.
And then very late at night, new ballots were discovered and what looked like a win was turning into a loss.
And I remember it because live with our program all night was our friend Ben Weingarten, a senior contributor to the Federalist.
And we both had that sinking feeling that we were watching a bank robbery.
Well, Trump is back.
And is he ever?
And you know who's back too is our friend Ben to catch up on the last three weeks.
He joins us now vice guy.
Ben, great to see you again.
It's always a pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
A few more gray hairs than that 2020 election night, but it feels like we're operating in a different civilization, quite frankly, today than we were then.
You're so right.
And I'm not saying that having a four-year hiatus was good, but it certainly allowed Trump to think very clearly about what exactly he would do.
I've had some people say Trump is a better president because of the four-year absence.
I think he's, whatever the reason, I think he is a better president.
I think opinion polls show the American people like what they're seeing.
And I've just never seen so much action.
Give me your sense of things.
Even before the inauguration, he was having sort of a mini de facto White House out of Mar-a-Lago.
He was calling the shots even before January 20th.
Give us your summary of what the most important things have been the last few weeks.
Well, gosh, it's tough to even know where to begin there, but let me just comment before I do on some of the substance.
The other thing about the last four years is that our ruling regime, or maybe former ruling regime, let's see, thought that when they sidelined Donald Trump in 2020, that they had won the war.
And Donald Trump continued to battle after that war was finalized.
And it became very clear that our ruling elites thought that they could run roughshod over the opposition in America.
They could violate our rights.
They could abrogate liberty and justice to ensure a permanent majority, a permanent ruling elite majority, essentially.
And that includes the lawfare efforts, the censorship efforts, the open borders, and all manner of rot and corruption, hyper-politicization and weaponization from the entirety of our administrative state, plus their adjuncts in the quote-unquote private sector.
And we're finding out not-so-private NGO oligarchy or oligopoly, or maybe we call it an NGO archipelago.
Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted to the nth degree.
And that also revealed, I think, the tyranny of the regime and the imperative that if we're going to have a country, a thousand-front war has to be fought against it.
And so I think it steeled the resolve of millions of Americans.
It exposed just how rotted and corrupted our ruling regime was.
And that created a scenario, an opportunity, and an imperative to go with full force into a dramatic agenda, the likes of which, in terms of speed, size, scope, and frankly, the revolutionary nature or counter-revolutionary nature that we've seen in the first few weeks of Donald Trump.
And add to it, of course, the fact that the man almost got killed.
The man almost got imprisoned.
He had the full weight of the regime against him.
And now he is a lame duck, effectively.
The gloves are completely off.
And so what we're seeing is a war on a thousand fronts that the left's never seen and the left's never expected.
And in some ways, they seem more rudderless and ineffective than I can remember in my lifetime because they've never been so under siege.
I mean, Donald Trump has gone at the administrative state from every single angle.
Freeze the funding, freeze the regulations, freeze and try to reduce the personnel.
Bring in people who actually know how to try and take command over an administrative state that has been aimed directly at Donald Trump in the past and actually make it work for him.
Impose or execute rather a raft of executive orders firing a nuclear missile at the censorship industrial complex day one.
There's an executive order on ending the weaponization of the federal government.
There's a whole slew of other executive orders essentially around making the government once again responsive to the people, the mandate that Donald Trump won, restoring our liberties and justice in this country, and also bringing to light with full transparency all of the misconduct over the last four plus years and threatening to hold people accountable for it.
And that's not retribution at the end of the day.
That's what's required to restore justice and to have reconciliation in this country.
So we can talk about what's going on with the FBI and DOJ, getting the intelligence community under control.
We can talk about the censorship industrial complex.
We can talk about the national security and foreign policy measures.
Of course, the border and unleashing energy were agenda items one and one A for the president.
Because obviously, first of all, if you don't have control over your borders, you don't have a homeland and you're going to be insecure.
And that's required before you deal with all the foreign contributors to it.
And then, of course, the unleashing of the energy.
Energy literally underpins our entire civilization.
When you unleash American energy, it undermines all of our worst adversaries who are reliant on energy revenues or purchasing energy from adversaries.
And so consequently, from a national security perspective, as well as an economic perspective, that's integral.
And then we can go into the president's, obviously, a targeting of our worst adversaries, trying to restore truly free, fair, and open trade and beyond.
It's been a marvel to witness.
And again, I would note that the flood the zone kind of strategy involved here has proven to be brilliant.
There are definitely lessons learned from Trump 1, where the resistance gummed up the works literally from the minute of inauguration, essentially.
And now we see the media, and we'll see ultimately as Congress tries to codify many of these policies, you know, what the Democrat resistance looks like, how wobbly Republicans are.
I think it's notable that so far the whipping operation has been effective enough to even steal the spines of the wobbliest of Republicans with rare exceptions.
And it seems like even those nominees who were on shakiest ground are all going to be confirmed, which is a real change for the Republican Party, quite frankly, in terms of backing up the president.
But obviously there's the lawfare effort, and that seems to be the primary venue for how Democrats and the left are trying to obstruct the agenda.
They don't have a Supreme Court.
That's one of the reasons why they're trying to delegitimize for the last X years the Supreme Court and threaten and cow the justices.
Some of those purportedly conservative or originalist Supreme Court justices themselves have proven to be unreliable in defending the Constitution in certain realms.
But essentially what you have are random federal judges.
There's forum shopping from the left, and they're trying to target random federal judges who will issue these nationwide, asinine and dubious universal injunctions to prevent the president from making the most basic decisions that he's entitled to on hiring and firing, on how to faithfully execute his office, on reviewing programs that, again, he's supposed to faithfully execute.
Any one of those federal judges, if they want, they can run for president if they want to make those decisions.
They can't do it from the bench.
And I think ultimately these cases, many of them will be on the fast track to the Supreme Court.
And I do expect the Supreme Court to smack them down.
But right now, that seems like the only game in town for the left.
It's that and trying to attack Elon Musk.
And by the way, I think that whole effort is going to completely backfire as well because the American people are going to love Doge at the end of the day.
They're going to love the fact that finally someone is going into the machine and saying, here's where all the rot and corruption is.
Here are all the asinine things you've been funding for years.
Here are all the people whose pockets you've been lining.
Here are all the nefarious and sinister things that you've been funding.
And this guy, the richest man in the world, is going in there and serving as the ultimate management consultant for the U.S. government on behalf of the taxpayer for free.
And the left thinks that that's going to be unpopular.
So I think ultimately it's been remarkable to witness the energy, the dynamism, the thoughtfulness with which the incoming president and now the president prepared for attack on all of these different fronts on day one and how tightly the executive orders have been written to try and implement the agenda.
It's been remarkable to witness, and it's been a boon for liberty and justice here.
And I also believe for liberty and justice around the world.
And I think it has sent a shiver down the spine of our adversaries.
And I'll end there by saying we've seen the Trump effect in a whole slew of realms with adversaries essentially making concessions at no cost to the U.S. government and America.
We've had hostages returned.
We've had essentially a reduction in hostilities from our adversaries, a willingness to come to the table and want to negotiate because America is coming at it from a position of strength, of resolve, of putting our interests first.
And that redounds to the rest of the free world or what remains of it.
You are so right.
Every word you've just said, I tell you, I've got so many thoughts.
Let me start with this one.
I remember when it was Ron DeSantis versus Donald Trump in the presidential primary, and Trump made short work of DeSantis.
And my one regret was that DeSantis was such an effective governor.
And it was because, in my view, he used all the levers he had.
If there was a problem, he would do on a state level what Trump's doing now.
He would fire people.
He would put loyalists in a position.
He would remove, like he was an action-oriented guy who would say, I've got about 20 levers and dials I can operate.
How can I use all 20 of them today?
Like, that was my favorite thing about Ron DeSantis, the governor, is he used every power and tool and lever of the state, whereas most Republicans never do.
They never think of it, or they're too shy, or there's some Marcus of Queensbury rules they don't want.
Trump has done that times 100.
And, you know, there's so many things you said I want to respond to, but I think one of them is how remarkable it is that quite spicy nominees like Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and RFK Jr., because he's quite radical on some of his views.
I like the guy.
I love the guy.
In fact, I was very touched by his speech the other day.
But to get those across the finish line in the Senate, that tells me that Trump isn't just working above the radar.
There's a lot going on behind the scenes.
I have no idea what.
But like you said, to whip the Senate, and senators are hard to whip.
What do you do to a senator?
How are you going to get a senator?
They're around for six years.
Something's going on.
And I guess my last point, Ben, would be because every single day there are huge announcements.
The bad guys are on the back foot.
By the time they respond to issue number 24, there's issue number 25.
And one last thing that Trump did is he went after the ringleaders.
He took away Fauci's security detail.
He took away security clearance for the 51 or however many people who said Hunter Biden's laptop, whatever, like all these deep state liars.
He banned them.
Like he took away Samantha Power's huge slush fund in USAID.
So the bad guys are worried about how do I pay my bills.
The bad guys are having privileges taken away.
And every single day Trump starts, as you say, a thousand front war.
He launches five more fronts.
And he's doing it all so entertainingly in that Trump way.
I mean, I don't know if you saw his announcement on plastic straws.
He's talking about the sharks munching their way through the ocean.
Like this guy is at his best and he's almost 80.
And I'm a Canadian, as you know, Ben.
It's been the best thing to happen to Canada other than this tariff battle, which we got to figure our way out of.
But I think that's on Trudeau's side, not Trump's fault.
It's amazing to see.
I think the entire world is riveted.
And frankly, a lot of the entire world is jealous.
I'm jealous of Doge.
Kash Patel's Senior Roles Revealed00:10:50
I'll tell you that right now.
Well, and hopefully it will inspire similar movements throughout the West and around the world.
Let me note also that Vice President Vance has said it's going to be the policy of this administration to go at a million miles an hour for four years.
So this isn't going to stop.
I don't expect the momentum to stop, although I'm sure that the resistance in the U.S., to the extent it still exists, is going to do everything in its power to try and gum up the works.
I think to your point, it's worth noting with respect to the nominees.
First of all, on the one hand, it would really be against norms, so-called, for Republicans to have voted against their own nominees, particularly at the cabinet level.
And sometimes we forget that.
And maybe that's because now everything is on partisan lines, essentially.
But obviously, Republicans have voted en masse for Democrat nominees for cabinet positions.
They certainly did it during Joe Biden.
So it's a remarkable commentary that it requires a serious whipping operation.
But nevertheless, Republicans have often proven intransigent.
They haven't known what time it is.
That's what I've argued in the past.
And I think these nomination fights where President Trump has ultimately prevailed over the senators illustrates that they know what time it is and or they understand that this MAGA movement is as big as Donald Trump, if not bigger than Donald Trump, and that there is a real realignment happening.
And basically, they are being responsive to the voters.
That's what a democracy is supposed to be.
And of course, the other side uses the word democracy.
What they really mean is oligarchy or ruling elite dominance, tyranny.
That's how they define democracy.
But because democracy has a veneer of legitimacy, they throw that word around, even though they actually mean something entirely the opposite.
I mean, what's more democratic than a president having control over his agencies, who works in them, what the programs are, knowing what each line item looks like, because the American people voted for him to do that.
And it would be the opposite of democracy for the agencies to run wild and do whatever they want.
Let me just make one last brief point on the nominees.
I'll just say RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard.
RFK Jr. was the scourge of the public health establishment, of big pharma, of everything that prevailed as the draconian COVID-19 COVID-19 was imposed over the U.S. and eviscerated liberty and justice here and signaled to the rest of the world that it was okay to pursue those policies as well.
He was censored by the censorship industrial complex, targeted by the public health establishment, arm of that censorship regime.
Now he's the person in charge at HHS.
Same goes for Tulsi Gabbard.
Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has fought for our country, who's an ardent counter-jihadist.
She has heterodox views.
She's taken on the foreign policy establishment, the foreign policy blob.
She has called out the foreign policy establishment and the deep state for weaponizing their powers against the American people and abusing our civil liberties.
Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the TSA's quiet skies program, where she was pursued essentially as a high-risk passenger when she flies, as if she was a domestic terrorist.
She's been targeted by that regime, and now she's put in the position of overseeing the entirety of the intelligence community and ensuring that it's not politicized and weaponized against the American people.
The turnabout here, the turnaround here, is remarkable.
Those who were targeted by the institutions have now been put atop the institutions, and no one would know better or be more determined to fight, to wring out the rot and corruption, politicization, and weaponization than those who have been targeted by it.
That goes for Kash Patel and many others as well.
And of course, it starts with Donald Trump, the most targeted man in America.
And it includes Elon Musk as well, who, I mean, we know him as the spaceman and the Tesla man, and now we know him as the Doge Waste Finder.
But let us not forget that he was targeted and his companies were targeted by the Biden administration on everything from the SEC to some coastal commission saying you can't launch more rockets out here.
So, you know, the Wall Street Journal the other day called Elon Musk an avenging angel, as in he's, but there's some truth to it because every person you just said was harassed, and I would say unfairly and perhaps illegally by the institutions they now run.
So I can tell you two things.
Number one, they will not be co-opted by them.
And number two, they probably learned a thing or two by the lawfare against them, especially RFK Jr., who is a litigator, a public interest litigator himself.
It's just incredible to see it.
And I saw a stat, maybe you saw it too, Ben, that it was revealed that more than one-third of all FBI officers were dispatched to the January 6th insurrection file.
Did you see that statistic as well?
I did, and 5,000 FBI officials apparently were involved in January 6th probes.
Wow.
And that's an astonishing number.
I mean, as you know, Trump has basically invited every single person in the public service to quit, even in the CIA and the FBI.
I mean, that is such a huge diversion of a public resource and the integrity and reputational capital of the FBI.
I think most Americans still like the FBI.
They think of them as the good guys.
I think most do.
I mean, you would know better than me.
But to have it revealed as such a partisan errand boy is astonishing.
It's going to be incredible to watch, especially if Kash Patel is confirmed as FBI director.
When is that expected?
So he was voted out of committee yesterday.
He'd have to be voted out of committee out of the Senate Judiciary Committee along party lines, of course, because that's the way it goes these days.
And then unfortunately, there's a little bit of a lag, but it's expected that late next week, he will get his vote on the Senate floor.
Fully expect him to be confirmed.
And let's note as well, Kash Patel was targeted by this regime himself.
Now, if your audience isn't familiar with all the nitty-gritty of this, Kash Patel has held a lot of senior positions across the national security and law enforcement apparatus.
He's a federal prosecutor.
He was on staff at DOJ.
He worked at the National Security Council on counterterrorism.
He worked under the acting DNI Rick Greno at the end of last administration.
He was the chief of staff, I believe, for the Defense Department last time around as well.
But Kash Patel really made a name for himself with the public when he served as a chief investigator for Devin Nunes on the House intelligence community during the Russiagate hoax.
And he was largely responsible for unearthing, first, the FISA fraud perpetrated on the FISA court and abuse.
And FISA, that's the first thing.
That's the foreign intelligence.
That's the spy court.
That's the secret intelligence court that basically launched the warrants against Trump.
Am I right?
Exactly.
And Carter Page was sort of the tip of the spear there.
And they got these FISA warrant applications to surveil him as a window into the entirety of Trump World.
Kash Patel revealed the fraud perpetrated on the FISA court to secure those warrants on him and spy on Trump World.
And he exposed much of the other fraud, corruption, and illegality, arguably, from the FBI and DOJ.
At the very same time he was engaging in that investigatory effort, and Devin Nunes himself got savaged by the entirety of the regime, essentially.
Patel's own communications were being subpoenaed by the DOJ.
They were surveilling his communications dating back to December of 2016 at the very time he was investigating the DOJ and the FBI for their abuses.
So he has been targeted relentlessly as well.
And now he's being put atop that very FBI you talked about.
And the FBI, many of the senior officials there under Christopher Wray, and let's note the FBI, was not only weaponized against J-Sixers, but also against faithful Catholics, against parents engaged at school board meetings, against pro-lifers.
We've seen many of those cases reversed, dropped, arguably clemency or pardons given to those targeted.
But we've also seen some of the top FBI officials themselves forced out of the agency.
And they themselves, in part, even though the story hasn't been reported, I reported at Real Clear Investigations how several of those individuals weaponized security clearances against whistleblowers within the FBI.
Whistleblowers came forward with claims of malfeasance, including around January 6th, around COVID-19 policies and beyond at FBI.
They had their security clearances suspended.
Their lives were wrecked while these investigations went on.
And in some instances, you had people who had essentially no closure on their cases for well over two years while they were held, suspended security clearances and unable to work for the FBI and therefore not receiving pay.
And there were people who blew the whistle on the fact that these whistleblowers were being targeted internally and they faced retaliation in the form of their security clearances being pulled too.
So it has been reported why some of these very senior officials at the FBI were forced out.
You have Democrats here, particularly on the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying that Trump is imperiling national security by pushing out the senior leadership.
But the whole point is this is consistent with the Trump administration policy to root out those who weaponize their powers and not only subverted our liberties, but also to your point, at great opportunity cost to the actual threats facing us when you target Americans like word domestic terrorists or enemies.
Kash Patel has been a champion of those whistleblowers.
He's been targeted himself.
And that's why it's another vital appointee that we have, nominee that we have.
And I do expect him to be confirmed next week.
Believing in Power Centers00:10:55
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Well, I appreciate the background on him.
And I have to say, of all the cabinet-level picks, he's the one I'm least familiar with.
Now I know a little bit more about him.
I do know this.
His eyes have a piercing stare.
He's got sort of a wildness in his eyes.
And, you know, there's a saying, if you go for the king, you better not miss.
Well, they literally missed on Donald Trump by one inch with a bullet.
They missed with their endless lawfare against him.
Now he's in charge and he's putting in all of these people that the deep state tried to knock off, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard and the fake no-fly list, RFK Jr.
It really is something to behold.
And let me say this.
It is not ideologically partisan.
Many of the names we've just discussed, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., even Elon Musk himself, were until fairly recently Democrats.
In fact, Tulsi Gabbard was a staunch Bernie Sanders booster, or at least she was appalled by the way he was barred from running, I think it was in 2016 in the primary by Hillary Clinton's people.
And even if you looked at RFK Jr.'s swearing-in moment with his sort of family, they were Democrats.
I mean, he's from the great Democrat family.
I think it's to Trump's credit that a man who loves being in the center of attention, who loves the spotlight, he's a natural entertainer, has within his bosom big personalities who attract attention on their own right, who are on side with them, but not maybe perfectly on side rhetorically, for example.
And Elon Musk is an example.
I mean, the fact that Trump can abide world-class leaders in his cabinet, I think speaks to his, I think shows a side of his character that people might not have expected.
What do you think about that?
Surrounding yourself with exceptional people in a variety of different ways, it's right on the politics.
It's right on the merits.
And I do think it illustrates, to some extent, again, lessons learned from Trump One.
But then also, to your point, the character and the nature of how he thinks of running a business or if you were applying business principles to how you would run government.
I mean, I've likened Elon Musk sitting in the position he is at Doge to basically bringing in the world's greatest entrepreneur, arguably, certainly of our time, or greatest management consultant, essentially, into the federal government with the Silicon Valley ethos of move fast, break things.
And the same goes for lots of other heterodox thinkers who, as you note, are very formidable figures in their own right.
I think what it in part reflects is that this isn't about Republican versus Democrat and partisanship.
It's sort of about the machine versus everyone else, or the ruling elites versus the scourges of the ruling elites.
Or another way of thinking about it is it's those who are against concentrated power centers, whether in the public sector or the private sector, versus those power centers themselves.
And this can be defined as populism, nationalism, putting America first, the national interest first, standing with the little guy, standing with the forgotten Americans.
But I do think one thing that unites most of these forces is this belief that there's been these concentrated power centers.
They're rotted, corrupted.
They're turned against the American people.
They've been failures.
And so this is like a turnaround artist being brought in with full power and with the greatest minds and intellects and people with experience to come in and radically reorganize and restructure the government and put it in alignment with America's national interests.
And that's going to be a winner way beyond Republicans.
And I think it's going to redound to the benefit, not just of Americans, but the rest of the world as well, to the extent it's able to fulfill this highly ambitious vision.
Yeah, I keep coming back to Mark Zuckerberg's statement where he basically jettisons political correctness, says he'll lay off 40,000 fact checkers.
I'll believe it when it's actually done.
But the most important thing in his comment in my mind, Ben, was when he said he intends to lean into freedom of speech outside America too, including in Europe and South America.
And he specifically said, and this is what caught my ear, with the support of the State Department, because there's no way that a company can beat a government anywhere.
When you're operating in Brazil or France, you have to follow Brazilian or French laws.
And you can say we're going to have First Amendment style freedom of speech, but if that's not the way it is in Brazil or France, you can't do it unless you've got Trump going to pick up the phone to Lula or to Macron and say, don't you touch my company or I'm going to tariff you.
So and JD Vance and his speech at the Munich Security Conference going right into the heart of Europe, not just Europe, but the EU collectivist Europe and saying, you guys are falling apart on free speech.
You're falling apart on respecting democratic elections, like in Romania, where they voted for conservative populists and the authorities just said we're going to not acknowledge that.
It was a very interesting speech.
It was a little bit about security, but it was mainly America saying we're going to reassert our American values around the world, not so much as an empire with colonies, but they're just going to speak out more.
And if American companies are punished in some way, Trump will clap back.
I think there's a toughness to it.
Some critics would say it's bullying, but I can't get over a few visual images, like when the head of SoftBank came and promised to invest, I think he said $200 billion or something.
And the Japanese prime minister came and said he was going to invest, I think he said a trillion dollars.
And that one after the other, all these foreign leaders come and bend the knee.
And it's almost like they're going to kiss his ring if he had one.
And some of them are in awe.
The Japanese prime minister said, well, I always saw the president on TV.
And frankly, I found him a little bit frightening.
He literally said he was in awe.
But you might say, well, that's Trump.
He's over the top.
But I think any member of any nation wants to feel like their nation is great.
And if their leader earns that respect from a foreign place, it trickles down to them too.
To see the leader of Japan say he finds America awesome, how does that not make 350 million Americans feel just a little bit more awesome?
And that's okay to have national pride.
I don't know.
I think there's something masculine and strong and great.
And I look at what the Democrats have always put up, Tim Walz, David Hogg, that's not masculine and strong and great.
And they've had sort of a war against masculinity on the personal level, but also on the global level.
Like the idea of telling Panama, change your ways or we're going to reconquer the canal, that may sound like a lot of tough guy swagger, but it sort of works.
I think that's part of it too.
The emasculation of America happened at the micro level, but also at the global level.
Everyone thought they could walk over America.
And I think that in less than a month, that has been absolutely undone.
What do you think?
I agree wholeheartedly.
And I would say that the emasculation, which is probably something that's occurred across almost all of the West and has been a long project to do so, goes along with a slew of other policies, you know, the radical gender ideology, trying to pit kids against their parents, trying to essentially create and stir up tribal warfare among different groups throughout the West.
All of it, in some measure, is about, first of all, obviously, fighting against the underpinnings of our civilization and trying to pit us against each other and divide us.
But it's also about suppressing and trying to get us to reject human nature and what we know to be true.
We could have a great academic debate about does every culture aspire to greatness, excellence, and achievement?
And how do we define that?
But certainly in the West, and certainly speaking for Americans, this beats within the hearts of all Americans.
And we've been told that America is a bad place and that we shouldn't be proud of ourselves and that we haven't achieved great things and that our ideals are rotten or we never live up to them and that we were conceived in sin, et cetera, that men can be women if they want to be women, that chemical castration for kids is okay.
It's all about respecting and doing whatever you want and the like.
And essentially, this is just a repudiation and rejection of all of it, which is really just a return to normalcy, to tradition.
And again, a recognition of human nature and pursuing greatness, pursuing excellence, trying to achieve great things, having very high aspirations.
That's who we are.
That's what we learned when I was a kid in grade school, at least, before it was wholly corrupted.
Pursuing Greatness Abroad00:03:00
That's how it had been here.
And we do have things to be proud of and we do have things to aspire to.
And why should we set our sites low?
And why should we reject the things that on a relative basis and an absolute basis ought to be celebrated?
So I definitely see that as a part of it.
Like it's okay to actually love your nation again and want your nation to achieve great things.
And there's sort of an elation and there's sort of a rational exuberance and you can finally take a deep breath and you're not walking on eggshells.
And of course, you know, a footnote to this, but a massive aspect of this, as you noted, is sort of the fighting against the censorship and also that governments, as JD Vance emphasized in that Munich speech, particularly in Europe, are effectively operating like they're afraid of their people.
Like people can't be allowed to speak openly and honestly about the ills of open borders and the invasion policy that's plagued the West, about the ills of progressive policies, about the crackdowns on free speech.
It's been very interesting advanced, not only in the Munich speech, but also in his first foreign speech on artificial intelligence was emphasizing the imperative that there be no censorship in AI development.
You noted Mark Zuckerberg talking about how he's going to work with the U.S. government to fight against censorship regimes abroad.
And it's worth noting, and I've reported on this, that the censorship regimes abroad, like the Digital Services Act in the EU, threatens to destroy big tech companies that don't impose the content moderation standards, which are anti-free speech, I put content moderation in air quotes, from the EU and other places as well.
And there's a boomerang effect, which is that if you have to adhere to those standards abroad, you're going to squelch American speech on the speech in other places that have free speech.
It's notable that Zuckerberg and others want to get on the right side of the administration.
They want to partner with the administration against those regimes.
You have the administration going out and telling the world, you should have free speech.
You shouldn't try to impose these standards on the big tech companies.
The State Department itself has said it's going to be laser focused in putting out its earliest kind of mission statement.
It was only a few paragraphs.
One of the paragraphs was on combating censorship, and we're not going to use the State Department to go after American speech, certainly, even if we're going to combat foreign foes.
And on the first day, the president put forth an executive order combating the censorship industrial complex, prohibiting federal officials from engaging in censorship themselves or indirectly, and prohibiting them from using federal resources, i.e. federal money, grants, et cetera, towards censorship as well.
And then also engaging in a review of the censorship activities that the Biden administration engaged in for the last four years.
So this is a laser focus of the administration.
Laser Focus on Censorship00:09:10
And now we're seeing it play out on the world stage.
And again, to your point, I think it redounds to all these other peoples who feel alienated because their ruling elites rule over them like subjects instead of like citizens and instead of operating with their consent.
And I think the nationalist view, populist nationalist view of this administration is that peoples will be better off if their governments are responsive to them.
And that in a world of nations each pursuing their national interest, that's far better than the sort of globalist progressive rule that many of these regimes have been trying to impose in recent decades.
We'll all be better off if each nation pursues its own interests, pursues greatness as it understands greatness.
There's going to be differences.
There's going to be areas of commonality, but that makes for a much better, more stable, more peaceful, more prosperous world than the kind of ruling elites versus the broad masses dichotomy that we've seen play out in recent years and that increasingly is being rejected across the West.
You know, you make me think of a tweet by J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, who is very focused on the trans issue.
She's a feminist.
She's pro-lesbian.
She's all of that.
But she finds that transgenderism is anti-feminist.
It's a war on women and women's spaces.
And because she's so big, she's been hard to cancel.
She lives in the United Kingdom, whereas a lot of people with a lower profile have been easier.
I don't think the police would dare go after J.K. Rowling.
But when Donald Trump signed an executive order ending biological men in women's sports and women's change rooms, he had this wonderful gathering of all sorts of women athletes, including some who had been punished for speaking out.
And it was 100 young women in the Oval Office, I think it was.
And he was signing the order and he said, come on, girls.
And they all sort of closed right in.
And it was actually a very beautiful photo of Donald Trump looking sort of like a secular Santa Claus and a hundred lovely kids around him smiling.
It was an amazing photo.
And J.K. Rowling tweeted, I'm going from memory here, what a photo the Democrats could have had this.
As in she was saying, I find that's her way of saying, I find it odd that I'm cheering for Donald Trump, someone I've been programmed to dislike, when he's done an amazing thing for all these girls.
But she was a little bit wrong because it wasn't all the Democrats had to do to get this photo op.
No, no.
The photo op is the cherry on the cake.
It's the footnote.
It's a side effect.
The hard part was doing it.
The hard part was standing up to the hurricane of censorship and defamation that you're anti-trans.
And I saw a number of lefties who sort of said, oh, what a shame we couldn't have had that moment.
That's the victory lap.
You only get that once you have the victory.
And that is something that Trump spent some personal capital on.
And by the way, I think it really resonated with a lot of minority voters.
I keep hearing that the ads that Trump ran, especially on black and Latino media, about the Democrat obsession with transgenderism really moved the needle there.
But I don't know, my message about J.K. Rowling is Trump didn't do it for the photo op.
He did it for its own sake.
The photo op was an after-effect.
But maybe it'll give courage to people around the world like J.K. Rowling.
And maybe JD Vance going to speak in Munich and others.
Maybe there will be a revival of populist conservative political leaders around the world.
Who knows?
Last word to you, Ben.
The first hasn't even been a month, it's been a sprint.
Donald Trump has a lot of energy.
I mean, he campaigned every single day during the election for really 18 plus hours a day.
I don't know how he did it.
He seems like he's in good health.
Thank God.
How do you see things a year from now?
It's hard to think that far ahead given the pace of things, but how do you think things will look a year from now when America's attention starts to turn towards the midterm elections?
Well, first of all, I think, to your point, we are witnessing a world historic figure in a world historic moment where many of us on the conservative side of things sort of felt that we were in an inevitable decline and you have all of these massive forces against you and the game kind of rigged against what you believe and the chances of overcoming it.
And Donald Trump has essentially said, no, we will act.
We will bring in the personnel and implement the policies we said we're going to do.
We'll take the war to an administrative state that we were told a war can never be taken to it, that it's a fourth branch of government that really sits above the rest of the government and is tyrannical almost by its very definition in usurping the powers of the legislative, the judiciary, and executive branch all in itself.
And he's said no.
And he's shown by example that it can be fought.
And to your point, you know, example, acting courageously can inspire courage in others.
It also has positive political effects and effects on the merits as well.
And so I think if you want to be bullish about where things are headed, if this program and if these acts look as popular with the American people as it appears right now, politicians are going to want to be on the right side of history.
They're not going to want to oppose it.
And this is going to be an agenda that's going to be a winning agenda on the politics and the merits.
And as a function of that, it's going to lead to codification in legislation.
I think on the merits, obviously, the things that go before the courts, ultimately, I think the Supreme Court's going to smack down a lot of the lunacy that's going on right now.
And I think ultimately what you're going to see, if things proceed down this path, is everyone's going to want to be on this administration's side.
It's going to be a massive popular winner.
And as a consequence, that momentum is going to lead, create basically a virtuous cycle of more and more policy victories.
And those policy victories are ultimately going to redound to the American people in the form of peace and prosperity here and also the spread of peace and prosperity around the world.
So I don't mean to be pollyannish in my outlook, but it's very hard to look at the first few weeks and think anything other than that there's nothing, this administration will not let the momentum be stopped.
It has the policy and it has the personnel to implement it.
It has the other side, to your point, on its back foot, which is something I can't remember in modern American political history.
And consequently, the Trump effect is reverberating around the world.
And it's, again, to the peace and prosperity of America, to the West, to people who desire freedom everywhere.
So I have to say that I think the outlook has to look very positive.
That's not to say that this isn't going to be a knockdown, drag out war and that the losing side right now in this is not going to marshal all of its resources and more to try and overcome it.
But you have to look at things more positively and optimistically, probably than at any time in my lifetime for the chance that the core principles that we believe ought to govern our administration are going to prevail and that America is going to have a better future than it looked like we were going to have as recently as a few weeks ago.
Yeah.
You know, I can't help but think of Ronald Reagan, and he had many of these themes, riding tall in the saddle, deregulation, a strong foreign policy, strong military.
Ronald Reagan did a lot of wonderful things, but on almost every measurement, Trump is going farther, faster, harder, deeper.
I think Reagan, if he's looking down from heaven, would be deeply impressed and pleased with what he would see.
Totally different style.
I mean, Reagan, of course, a TV actor, film actor, a showman in his own way, but genial and never a hard word.
I think he'd probably be appalled by Trump's sharp tongue.
But when he would see what's actually being done and realize how brutal the political landscape is, I think Ronald Reagan would be absolutely thrilled by what he sees.
Ronald Reagan's Vision00:01:01
Ben, it's great to catch up with you.
Thanks for joining us again.
And it feels a lot better than four years and four months ago when you and I both had sinking hearts as we saw the ballot boxes being discovered and counted and giving the win to Joe Biden.
But the pendulum swings back.
Great to see you.
You too.
Thanks for having me.
There you have it.
Ben Weingarten, senior editor at The Federalist.
Well, that's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of all of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.
Good night and keep fighting for freedom.
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