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Aug. 16, 2023 - The StoneZONE - Roger Stone
59:21
Meme-Master Brenden Dilley On The Epic Failure That is The DeSantis Campaign - The StoneZONE
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Stone is served as a senior campaign aide to three Republican presidents.
He is a New York Times bestselling author and a longtime friend and advisor of President Donald Trump.
As an outspoken libertarian, Stone has appeared on thousands of broadcasts, spoken at countless venues, and lectured before the prestigious Oxford Political Union and the Cambridge Union Society.
Due to his four-plus decades in the political and cultural arena, Stone has become a pop culture icon.
And now, here's your host, Roger Stone!
Welcome, I'm Roger Stone, and you are about to enter the Stone Zone.
I cannot overstate the way in which the advent of the Internet has completely revolutionized American politics.
Digital communications and digital advertising have completely overtaken what was the dominant media for communications to voters, network television, and has now quickly outpaced cable television as the single most important communications tool for anyone seeking to dominate or change or make a case in the political arena.
Radio remains a driver, but today the internet is the single most efficient, effective way to communicate with voters.
Internet sites like Twitter, now known as X, are an important platform for affecting elite opinion, while unfortunately faces like, pardon me, platforms like Facebook, where I'm banned for life, Are an excellent driver for reaching mass based voters.
We've known for some time that elite opinion always precedes mass opinion.
And my guest today is a man who is extraordinarily effective at at shaping the narrative of elite opinion on the internet.
I speak, of course, of Brendan Dilley.
Now, Brendan Dilley is also an author.
His book, Still Breathing, The Wisdom and Teaching of a Perfectly Flawed Man.
This really sounds good to me, and this self-help book breaks all the rules.
Author-publisher Brendan Dilley brings it directly to you.
Rough, rugged, and raw.
If you're looking for a bunch of one-liners and warm, fuzzy slogans, you won't find them in this book.
This is not your mom-and-pop's self-help book.
Still breathing is relevant, it's practical, and above all, it's thought-provoking.
Brendan Dilley's message does not come sugar-coated or wrapped with a pretty bow.
He takes an aggressive, unfiltered approach to self-help, and he doesn't pull any punches.
Though his humor and unwavering authenticity, he allows you to confront your fears and your insecurities.
Still breathing contains Practical advice necessary to forgive those who have hurt you, and more importantly, forgive yourself for your past mistakes and imperfections.
Lessons within these pages of this book will assist you in living a more passionate, purposeful existence.
Brendan Dilley aims to help you stop inviting toxic people into your life, stop sabotaging yourself, stop settling, stop wasting your time, and start taking back your power and creating your life, the life you envision for yourself.
You will find yourself referring back to this book throughout your life as you evolve, change, and grow.
This sounds very much like my own book, Stone's Rules.
I'm very anxious to read my copy of Still Breathing, The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man, and you can get your copy of this great book as you can get my book on Amazon.
You can also get my book at stonezone.com.
Joining me now to break down the political firmament is the man himself, warlord Brendan Dilley.
How you doing, Roger?
I'm so happy to be here with you, man.
I'm really honored to have you.
I must say, there are very few people on Twitter who have the ability to actually make me laugh out loud, but you are one of them.
I'm a great admirer of creativity and the way you have moved the needle, particularly on the question of Governor Ron DeSantis.
Really something to behold.
We're going to throw up a couple samples of your work here, let you talk about them, but kind of to set the table, politics, generally speaking, is a field in which perception is reality.
And unfortunately for Governor DeSantis, he allowed the perception of his status to get out of control.
Now, I don't believe he can live up to that expectation.
Let me give you an example.
In 1976, when I was working for Governor Ronald Reagan, we were challenging appointed President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination.
Now, normally a sitting president, even unelected, would be expected to lead in all the primaries.
And ultimately, Gerald Ford defeated Governor Ronald Reagan in the New Hampshire primary by a solitary point.
Unfortunately, Because the Reagan campaign had let perceptions and predictions get out of control.
Instead of that being read as a victory, it was read as a defeat.
Contrast that with 1968 when Senator Eugene McCarthy got a mere 40% of the vote against a stand-in for President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
But because McCarthy and his supporters had managed expectations, That was read as a smashing victory for Senator McCarthy, so much so that Robert F. Kennedy then entered the race challenging President Lyndon Johnson, who shortly thereafter dropped out.
So I would say that unfortunately for him, Governor DeSantis has Let the expectations get away from him.
Remember, he was going to be Trump without the baggage.
When Trump was indicted, his campaign would collapse and Ron DeSantis would be left holding all the marbles.
A great story today, which I read in the Business Insider, in which a former Republican state chairman said, well, The more voters get to know Ron DeSantis, the less they would like him.
What is your assessment, Brendan, of where the DeSantis candidacy is today?
At this current point, I think he's DOA.
I think their message is it's not a strong one.
I think that the thing that's awkward, Roger, is they launched this thing, as you said, just what you just said.
They're supposed to be Donald Trump without the baggage, which generally would mean without the mean tweets, right?
Aside from everything else, it also includes a higher level of more sophisticated Republican.
The problem that Governor DeSantis has is that he hired degenerates to represent him on social media.
And when he did that, he opened himself up to the critiques of the fact that, yes, you, the governor, might not be out here speaking out and having a loud voice and being transparent about your opinions and your thoughts.
You hired people who are misrepresenting what you believe or whatever your brand is, and since he remained silent on the fact, it essentially became the narrative.
It became truth, because he didn't push back against it.
He still never actually addressed a lot of the toxic people that are attached to his campaign, and I have to believe that that is either A, he is okay with it, And if that's the case, I think both of those are non-starters for him.
I think they're disqualifying aspects because that means you're either a weak leader who doesn't have the courage to stand up and change the direction of your campaign, Or you're scumbag and you're okay with these people misrepresenting, or maybe they are actually representing his beliefs and thoughts about people, but the fact that they sort of went into this with zero self-awareness, zero understanding of who their actual base was, and I think that's the shocking part.
DeSantis doesn't have a DeSantis coalition or a base.
What he had on lent to him was MAGA.
MAGA was borrowed from Donald Trump while Donald Trump wasn't in office.
As soon as Donald Trump decided he wanted to run in 2024, you were out of, as far as DeSantis goes, you're out of the picture now.
Because those people backed you because they didn't have a horse in any race during that two-year period.
And because their president had essentially endorsed him and said, hey, this is the guy you're going to want to support down in Florida.
And he had really good communications teams that were putting out a very strong message of pushing back against establishment.
But as soon as he stepped into that ring and showed zero self-awareness for who had actually put him into that governor seat, whether it being President Trump or whether it's President Trump's voters, I think it really set his campaign on a collision course with reality, which is where we're at now, which is He continued to expose itself every single day.
The bad messaging, the really vitriolic sort of statements from his team, non-stop attacks from his team, a very Ted Cruz 2016-esque, never Trump-esque sort of attack, and they got destroyed, man.
They got really destroyed, and I don't know that he's gonna have much to do after this, Roger.
Obviously, you're the political expert, but I look in the state of Florida, and I think, Your governorship is done in 2026.
You are toast for 2028.
He can forget about that.
So then I look and I say, is he going to try and get a Senate seat in Florida?
I don't see him beating a Marco Rubio.
I don't see him, you know, eventually taking a seat from Rick Scott.
So then, does he go back to Congress?
I'm not sure, but as far as I'm concerned, Roger, now that we've got polls showing him at eight, nine percent, he's polling behind Chris Christie, which is comical, and Rameshwami, which, again, a guy that I still probably don't say his name correctly.
I would say this is probably about as bad as it can get for DeSantis, short of actually dropping out or going broke, which I've heard rumors of.
You know, I agree with your analysis.
I made one miscalculation.
I have written and said that I thought the governor's candidacy was a tremendous act of treachery, that he's basically backstabbing the one man who believed in him, the one man who elevated his political career, the one man who literally lifted him out of obscurity, guaranteed him the Republican nomination for governor, and then changed his schedule
Come to Florida in the final two weeks of the 2018 campaign to literally drag Ron DeSantis across the finish line.
Where I made a mistake is I thought that while that might matter to politicians, that it would not matter to voters.
By the way, I was wrong about that based on serious polling that I have seen.
So I agree with you that I think the governor, to some extent his wife, Who appears to be the major influence in his campaign, really had a very elevated opinion of themselves and I think may have had an extraordinary misperception of how well known he was or how deep his limited level of support was.
It's very easy, for example, to lead in Florida after you've just spent $150 million on cable and broadcast television.
and radio, and you've saturated the state with mail.
So immediately after the last election, yes, he led former President Trump in the Sunshine State by double digits.
But once that had the chance to wear off, and once it was not reinforced with new advertising, things settled back to where they were naturally.
And if the Florida primary were held tomorrow, Donald Trump would defeat the sitting governor of Florida by double digits.
Some of these poll numbers are really astounding.
RMG Research now has Trump at 60%.
That is a new high watermark.
Ramaswamy, I'm probably also mispronouncing his name, at 13.
DeSantis dropping to 8.
Chris Christie at five.
Mike Pence, a man who was actually Vice President of the United States for four years, at four.
Nikki Haley at four.
And Tim Scott at two percent.
This is really extraordinary.
New Hampshire poll.
Emerson College.
Let me say that I have studied their methodology.
It is scientifically extraordinarily solid.
These are not fly-by-night polls.
These are not polls.
that are worded or loaded to elicit a specific result.
Trump in New Hampshire, 49%, a 40-point lead.
Chris Christie at nine, a man whose candidacy has no rationale other than revenge and no legs.
Wouldn't matter, he couldn't run anyway.
DeSantis now slipping to third place at 8%.
Senator Tim Scott at six, Burgum, who I know very little about, at four, Ramaswamy there in New Hampshire at three.
When you consider the expenditure of time and the burn rate of money, these numbers are truly, truly devastating.
Well, and not just, devastating is a great word, Roger, but it's also, I would venture to say it's a little bit embarrassing.
You know, this is a man who is in charge of one of the largest economies in America, a man who was just re-elected, somebody that, had they had any sort of humility about his campaign, If they would have pushed him as the OG Shucks guy, he would be polling better.
I think that what they underestimated is that they didn't realize how loyal Trump supporters were going to be.
And honestly, they made it easy.
I think that when somebody has a challenge with a personality or a lack thereof, as President Trump has cited, You better do everything you can to keep everything policy-driven, and keep everything in that person's wheelhouse, in their strength.
Which is, if you're going to be that more polished candidate than Trump, be that.
Actually be that.
Save all the barbs, tell your entire staff should be reflecting that type of narrative, and you should be highlighting a lot of your policy plans.
DeSantis doesn't still, to this day, have a policy agenda breakdown on his website.
I don't know how that happens this far into a campaign with, given what you just said, Roger, this much money spent.
The fact that he and his wife are featured on the website is weird.
I don't know why Casey DeSantis, who is not a politician, she is not elected, and as far as best I know she is not running for anything, I do not understand why she is featured on this campaign website.
There's just a lot of oddities done with this man's campaign.
And as I mentioned, Roger, I don't think there's there's not going to be a recovery here.
This is going to be one of the most legendary failure campaigns, I think, in American politics.
I think the person most benefiting from this is not actually President Trump.
It's Jeb Bush, because people are going to forget how colossally bad he was in 2016, given how much money he spent.
And I think, frankly, DeSantis is going to take over the mantle for worst Just to remind people, Jeb Bush burned through $600 million between Super PACs and his campaign, only to be ignominiously defeated by Donald Trump.
I think I can answer your question, though, and that is polling during the recent gubernatorial race indicated that Casey DeSantis, the governor's wife, was far more likable and far more At that point, relatable than the governor.
I think the likability factor in politics is vitally important.
Ron DeSantis seems to me to be aloof, unrelatable, distant, socially awkward.
Perhaps it is just that he is an introvert and an extrovert business.
Or maybe he has a serious personality disorder, but voters do not warm to him.
And above all, his political advisors should never show him eating.
Eating is a giant mistake.
It's always weird the way he eats.
And then when he endeavors to be a regular guy, it's actually on the verge of embarrassing and cringeworthy.
He is really not that.
Now look, I worked for Richard Nixon, who was a man who was uncomfortable in his own skin.
He was indeed an introvert in an extrovert's business.
In 1968, Roger Ailes, the legendary television producer, completely remade Richard Nixon compatible with the medium of television, warmed up his image, and it was done quite successfully.
It's also the first presidential campaign to use mass media and mass television advertising to great effect.
John Kennedy had done some of it minimally in the primaries in 1960, but it was really Nixon who made first use of the television medium.
Television played no role in the 1950 race for president.
The internet has changed all of that.
And as I said, I think it runs on two tracks.
Twitter, now known as X, where I am honored to have been reinstated.
Surprised, but honored.
I had 900,000 followers when I was banned for life in 2017.
When I was reinstated, I had 25,000.
Today, I'm just under a half million.
By the way, folks, if you want to go to Roger J. Stone Jr., Right now and follow me on X. I would deeply appreciate it.
You have had some of the most devastating memes and videos that I think have helped unhinge Ron DeSantis.
We're going to show one of them right now.
Now, I have control in why.
Because his parents not what I bargained for.
It's the truth.
I don't know what to do.
Someone had to take control of our life.
Because they just don't know what to do.
She's credited with carefully managing his public image.
Even changing how he pronounces his name.
She persuaded him to soften the first syllable.
As a governor of summer, I was leading this morning and so happy.
I saw the writing on the wall.
You are weak and thinking small.
So I took the money.
Now every stop you have to talk.
You emasculate me like Hillary.
You know what they mean.
So we take each other's hand.
State our names just like we planned.
Casey, Kelly, Hope I remember.
This is my scene.
I must look at you like I'm in love.
Stand up straight, don't embarrass me.
We're paid to stop jokes.
Okay, say.
I have a controlling wife.
I'm getting thirsty.
Please clap.
Uh.
Oh, I love that.
First of all, I must say, I love your view of wearing a helmet like General Patton.
With the cigar in your mouth, I gotta tell you, I really, when it comes to branding, I love that, and I want one of those t-shirts.
Let me just say it right now.
I'll make it happen, Roger.
Thank you.
Yeah, that's one of my favorite memes they did.
That song, the original lyrics, obviously, in the ridiculous video, it's just a ton of fun, but I'm glad you enjoyed that.
I think that this is the kind of work that has really shifted elite opinion.
But also, the DeSantis campaign has obviously been run by someone who has never budgeted or planned a presidential campaign previously.
In 1976, when Governor Reagan's challenge to Gerald Ford ran low on money, Governor and Nancy Reagan actually flew commercial to his rally and public events.
We actually made a big deal of it and turned out to be a vote getter.
People could relate with that.
It meant that the Reagans didn't see them as being above the average person.
The idea of governor or Casey DeSantis flying commercial is out of the question.
One of the other disturbing things is that Florida used to have one of the broadest and most enforceable sunshine laws in the country.
Literally, in this state, it was possible for a penny of the taxpayer's money to be spent without the average voter being able to find out how and where it was being spent.
They have changed all of that.
They will not tell us where the state airplane has been.
They will not tell us what the cost of travel has been, other than to say that it doubled.
They do not tell us the past schedule for the governor.
Uh, but we do know that his security costs have more than doubled during the period in which he is running for president.
I don't know why it is fair, uh, for the people of Florida to foot the bill for his security.
When Donald Trump travels, he has to reimburse, uh, the Secret Service for their costs.
He has to reimburse, uh, he has to pay his own air, his own airplane costs.
his own rally costs, all of that comes off the top.
So it has really turned accountability on its ear, but it is just, I think, a small part of the problems that the governor has here in Florida.
Let's show another one of your very funny memes. - 2024 is the final battle.
They're going after Trump, but if they can get Trump, it means they can get you, they can get me, they can get all of us.
He is standing in the way, and that can sound like a campaign slogan, but it's very true.
Now we're approaching the most important battle of our lives.
Now, for the very first time in American history, a sitting president, C.O.J., has indicted a top political rival ahead of a presidential campaign.
When they indicted me for nothing, I said, now the gloves are off.
Now we have to say it like a music group.
I can feel it coming in the air tonight.
Hold on.
And I've been waiting for this moment for all my life.
Hold on.
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight?
Now we're approaching the most important battle of our lives.
Hold on.
Fuck around with us.
If you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.
Well, you told me you were drowning.
I looked not in the hand.
I've seen your face before, my friend.
But I don't know if you know who I am.
I was there and I saw what you did.
I saw it with my own two eyes.
So you could wipe off that grip.
I know where you've been.
It's all been a pack of lies.
If you have a problem with someone, you have to go after them.
And it's not necessarily to teach that person a lesson.
It's to teach all of the people that are watching a lesson.
When we get back in the White House, I will totally obliterate the deep state.
The pains to roast some more than you and me.
I knew we were coming in the end of life.
Oh, Lord.
I've been waiting for this moment for all my life.
Oh, Lord.
Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.
Oh, Lord.
When we get back power, I don't really want to have peace with these people who did this to us and are continuing to do this to us.
We have to turn the tables on them, give them a dose of their own medicine, and then we can even the playing field and then we can discuss unity.
Extraordinarily powerful, not satirical, unlike the first ad, but I think very, very effective.
The 45 years I have been in American politics, a veteran of 13 Republican presidential campaigns, working for three American presidents, I must say I've never really seen anything quite like what's going on in our country today.
There was a time when both parties in our country were patriotic.
There was a time when both parties were committed to capitalism, to free enterprise.
There was a time when both parties in our country were bulk works of anti-communism.
John F. Kennedy, for example, was an ardent anti-communist.
That Democratic Party, the party of John F. Kennedy, the party of Harry Truman, who broke the backs of the communists in Greece and Turkey, literally no longer exists.
The old traditional Democratic Party has been taken hostage by Socialist, Marxist fringe, and their preferred tool is lawfare.
I thought when I attended President Trump's announcement of candidacy, that while he was a favorite, there was a certain spark missing.
There was a certain electricity that was absent that night.
That electricity has now returned tenfold.
The Trump that I see now, the Trump I traveled with three weeks ago, is a Trump on the attack, a Trump who is re-energized, a Trump who is resolute, who is determined, who is upbeat.
Is he angry?
Yes, he has every right to be angry because no former president of either party has ever been treated this way.
I have been in the meat grinder of the DC court system.
I understand its many flaws and biases.
I think it is virtually impossible for any Republican or any Trump supporter or any free thinker or any non-Democrat to get a fair trial in that venue.
But even I, as a veteran of 45 plus years in American politics, Um, have really never seen anything like the current surge in Donald Trump's support.
What I mean by that is it's not just that he's gaining, uh, both in the overall Republican primary preference.
Uh, he continues to lead Joe Biden, uh, in the national trial heats, but also in the swing states.
But it's more than that.
When you begin to look at the internals in this polling, the number of those who say that they Uh, will probably vote for Trump.
Uh, and the number of those who say they will definitely vote for Trump have changed position, meaning he is galvanizing his support.
Those who say they will definitely vote for him continues to surge.
The number of those who say they were probably going to vote for him moved to the definite category.
This is the galvanization of his support.
I worked for Ronald Reagan.
He was an enormously popular president.
He was the last outsider we had in the White House.
He never, ever had numbers like this.
Brendan, your reflections on the current position of President Donald Trump.
Well, you know what's happening, Roger, and this is what we do.
As you had mentioned, obviously that meme that you just played was very different than the previous one.
One was very satirical and funny and a little bit ridiculous, and then we play another one where we're taking music that resonates with the American public, and this is part of what we do with our messaging.
This country used to have a culture.
It doesn't currently have a culture.
Right now, this country is void of any culture because they've canceled most of it out, which is why almost everything looks and sounds and feels the same.
It's cheap.
It's not very polished.
It's really a void in talent that's being promoted.
So what we decided to do is we wanted to remind Americans of what they actually are capable of, and that's part of the reason that you see some of the musical selections that we make, some of the visuals that we include.
What Donald Trump is experiencing right now, what I believe President Trump is experiencing, is a product of consistency.
President Trump has never went out and pretended to be a perfect human being.
That's not what America needs right now.
What they need is somebody who they understand and can relate to, but more importantly, and this is as Governor DeSantis is finding out, someone they can trust.
So you might not like everything that President Trump says at times.
You might not like the way he conducts his messaging and jokes and things that he thinks he maybe thinks are funny.
But what you can count on as an American is that he's going to go to bat on your behalf regardless of who you are, especially if you're working class, if you're somebody in that You know, that level where you're working with your hands and your blue collar and you're grinding every day.
There isn't anybody else even thinking about running for president right now, let alone the ones that have all decided to run who is as concerned about those individuals as President Trump is.
And I think it's very evident he has earned the trust of the people.
And what we are witnessing right now, Roger, I believe it's a culture shift.
I think the culture The culture of Trump and the culture of MAGA and the culture of even what we do is starting to turn the tide in this country because, frankly, we know that we went off the cliff.
I think most Americans, whether they're on the left or the right, recognize we've gone way too far.
This is not representative or indicative of what the United States of America actually thinks of itself or a lot of topics in regards to the culture.
And so right now, they've essentially, with every indictment, they've martyred him.
They've made him something bigger than he could have ever been, I believe, on his own.
They showed a side where it was very easy for the average American to look and say, that could easily be me.
Or maybe that was me.
Or a family member I know.
Or a friend I know.
To witness the two-tiered justice system being applied to a mega-billionaire former president It essentially means that your average Joe has a snowball's chance in hell of ever, ever rising to a certain level of prominence if they hold the wrong opinions or the wrong think or the wrong political stances.
And I think so that's one of the things.
The other is tangible results, man.
President Trump, you could look, you could feel, and you could touch his policies.
Unlike most politicians that get into office, it's not evident what they're doing.
Only when it's negative do you become aware that there's been a policy change.
Very rarely have I in my life, and I'm only 41 years old, but I have not experienced very many presidential candidates who pass policy where I wake up one day and I go to participate in my own life And I find that my life has somehow actually been touched by something someone in DC did.
99% of the time when that happens, it's negative.
It's something bad.
There's a new paperwork you have to fill out.
There's a new loophole or something I have to jump over, some new tax I gotta pay, some new registration I've got to include.
Very rarely do we actually have presidents, period, who get into office and actually make tangible, functional changes where normal people can actually associate the result with the politician.
That just doesn't really happen, and I think that's part of what's going on.
Joe Biden, unfortunately, is providing the perfect juxtaposition to Donald Trump's 2016 to 2020.
And people are feeling it.
They are nostalgic for it.
People who didn't vote Trump in 2016 or 2020 are nostalgic for a Trump presidency, and so I think that's what we're witnessing right now.
I think it's a really incredible time.
Like you, Roger, myself, my entire team were banned from Twitter, now X, and were only released back into the social media world In November, December, January.
I was returned in January, and we've been going gangbusters ever since.
But that's part of what I think is happening.
I think that's where you're seeing this massive surge is people are kind of like, they've baked into the numbers.
Okay, we understand what President Trump is, we understand what he isn't, and we feel comfortable with whatever comes next.
And that's where they're moving forward with their support of him.
I'm very proud of the job he's doing right now.
It seems, Roger, you obviously spent time with him three weeks ago.
And I tell this to people every day.
This is a very heavy business.
It can wear you down.
It can grind you down.
It can affect your mindset.
And I tell everybody, buoyancy is the key, which is why we sprinkle in so much humor in our messaging of what we do, because it's a very serious time in America and a very serious subject.
But without that buoyancy and that bounce, it's very hard to continue to wake up every single day with as much energy.
When I look at President Trump, as angry as he may be, and certainly as you mentioned is entitled to be over these indictments and a lot of the treatment he has received, he appears to be having fun.
And I think that when you watch him, this is a man who spent his entire career fighting.
I think he enjoys the fight.
I think he enjoys a good challenge.
And this one in particular, I think he feels really confident he's going to win.
And so that fun, I think that Americans witnessing a man being persecuted, And that man smiling in the face of that persecution, double, tripling and quadrupling down.
That's a remarkable thing.
It's impossible to ignore.
And I think he's earning the respect of a lot of people who perhaps had him maybe misunderstood or misjudged him previously.
I think that's an excellent analysis.
Look, it has always been my policy and the policy of those who work for or with the president not to divulge the content of private conversations.
But you're absolutely right.
He is positively buoyant.
He is super confident that he will emerge the winner.
He really means it when he says, it's not me thereafter, it's you thereafter.
I just happen to be in the way.
That's not just rhetoric.
He is a happy warrior.
I think that he's actually at his absolute best in crisis.
And it's kind of ironic.
What did they tell us when he was running for president?
Oh, if you elect Donald Trump, we're going to have a depression.
The stock market is going to collapse.
Instead, we had the greatest rate of job growth, the greatest rate of wage growth, the lowest levels of unemployment ever recorded in the history of the country among all Americans, black Americans, white Americans, Hispanics, Asian.
Young, old, urban, rural.
We had a record stock market.
Not once.
But actually returning to a record stock market after Donald Trump was forced, for the good of the public safety, listening to his medical advisors, to destroy the most vibrant, robust economy in our history, an economy that came roaring back because the fundamentals under Donald Trump were still there.
When it comes to World War III, who is it that is that is waltzing us up to the cusp of World War III?
Why it's none other than Joe Biden and his State Department.
It boggles the mind to think that we have no peace talks going on.
There are no conversations between the Ukrainians and the Russians with any third party at the table just trying to stop the killing.
We now know that there were two potential peace deals that would have ended this conflict, and they were both scuttled by the Biden Justice Department.
There is, pardon me, the State Department.
There's the supreme irony.
Donald Trump is the peace candidate.
Donald Trump is the freedom candidate.
Donald Trump is the candidate who opposes mass-based censorship.
Very disturbing stories now about the World Economic Forum dictating to Google and to Chrome and to Firefox and others about an approved list of websites that they're allowed to go to.
This is the last frontier.
It's also the biggest and most important frontier.
I was on with Alex Jones yesterday and I actually said what would be great would be if Elon Musk would build a new search engine that did not resort to this kind of globalist new world order censorship.
Do you see that, Brendan, as a real danger?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I think it's really difficult.
And as part of what's happened, Rogers, we've won the ideas competition.
The idea debate has overwhelmingly been victorious on the side of MAGA, on the side of President Trump, on the side of, you know, economic You know, nationalism.
I think these are all popular ideas.
Hey, we don't want to get involved in foreign conflicts.
We want to keep those tax dollars here at home.
We want to utilize that for people here in this country, citizens who are going without, people who are hungry, people who are homeless.
We want to put America first.
A totally universally popular message.
And when you look at the censorship, part of what I find the most challenging aspect As a Trump supporter in 2023 is not winning people over.
It's facilitating their experience and knowledge of what's actually going on in the world because of what you just said.
Everybody is funneled into silos.
They're funneled into digital ghettos where they're deliberately being separated out from one another so that they're not allowed to essentially escape that sort of that ghetto and have that conversation.
When that conversation is had, People are shocked at the results.
They're shocked at how much they have in common.
They're shocked at how much they actually believe and feel the same things.
They're shocked at, I believe, how much, how I think misunderstood and lied to they've been about Donald Trump.
It's part of what we do with meme warfare.
You've got a limited amount of time with people when it comes to influencing them and influencing a decision.
And when you can take an idea and you can use comedy or some other type of emotion or nostalgia or using music and other familiar topics, you can tie that into something and usually you can break through a little bit.
It might not change their vote day one, but you are at least planting seeds inside of people to just take a second look.
But right now, this World Economic Forum thing, a lot of Klaus Schwab, the stuff that they're pressing and they're pushing down, What's unnerving about it to me, Roger, is how overt they are.
This used to be a very clandestine operation.
The deep state, a lot of these controlled, uniparty politicians went through great lengths to never let you know that they are all working together.
And now they have dropped all conception, basically trying to hide What they are.
They don't even pretend that they don't want you to not know that they're working together.
They are open about it.
Whether you're a Mitt Romney, openly, openly essentially going with whatever the establishment is.
And they don't hide it.
They used to pretend to be conservative or pretend to be something different.
And now we're almost past the point, Roger, of conservatives or liberals.
We're almost now to the point where We've got an establishment that's essentially stumping for a total and complete globalist takeover of the United States of America, and they're really not dressing it up anymore.
And that's why they're so open about their support of the World Economic Forum.
That's why someone like Klaus Schwab is so cavalier about discussing a lot of his ideas in the World Economic Forum's visions for the planet.
Um, and I think the one challenge they've got, in my opinion, aside from President Trump, everybody who's evil is really, really old, Roger.
They're really, really old.
And, you know, I don't know if we see George Soros even make it to 2024.
I don't know that Klaus Schwab had, what, two, three strokes last year.
I don't know that that guy is going to be making it to the next election.
And the thing about, in my opinion, Roger, True evil, it takes time to develop that.
It takes a certain type of upbringing, a certain type of influence, for an extended period of time.
You don't just wake up one morning and be Hillary Clinton.
If that were the case, Chelsea would be a lot scarier.
The truth is, I don't believe that we've got a lot of people taking up that mantle behind the current leadership.
I think the current leadership, whether it's the World Economic Forum, excuse me, or the Uniparty here in the United States of America, You're not backfilling those evil positions, because frankly, the last few generations didn't go through what it would take to have that type of mindset, I don't believe.
I think that you've got a softer country with softer leaders on both sides, whether it's for America and doing something righteous or whether it's evil and doing something completely villainous.
I just don't think that we have people that have that kind of sand.
I think that you've got a lot of very middle-of-the-road sort of tempered people that many times are – I mean, if you're still being intimidated, if you're a Democrat, you're being intimidated by, say, like a Nancy Pelosi in 2023.
It's a little odd.
You know, she can barely form sentences.
She's very weak.
She's frail.
But yet that's the case.
I mean, that picture, that very famous picture only a few years ago during the Brett Kavanaugh hearing of Dianne Feinstein, intimidating was, I believe it was Susan Collins or Murkowski.
I believe it might have been Murkowski.
Very famous picture.
She's got her pen against the wall, intimidating her into a vote.
Now that same Dianne Feinstein, obviously, she's not doing so well.
So I think you've got a lot of these people who had a lot of really bad ideas that are on their way out.
And you're seeing the tide turn.
You're seeing the populism within nations around the globe.
We're going to show another one of your great videos here while we still have time.
their own nations growing but the leaders the younger leaders the people that are actually stepping up i do believe that they're they're going to naturally start gravitating towards a more uh sovereign view of of world events and world trade and everything else so that's that's just my thought but maybe i'm maybe i'm a little bit of an optimist we're going to show another one of your great videos here while we still have time
let's uh let's roll it why hello everybody ah I am beautiful.
This big fat pig is beautiful.
It's my subo suit.
I just didn't inflate it all the way.
I'm so glad that I bought instead of rented.
Body image.
We are here because there is something wrong with society.
See, if it's me, then society made me that way.
For a minute there I thought that was Chris Christie, because I think Chris Christie really needs to run.
Not for president, he just needs to run.
What was the point of that?
Well actually I think that one had a caption that might have got to cut off, but it was basically that Ron DeSantis decided to try and eat Chris Christie as an attempt to catch him in the polls.
So that's how he got to that size.
Yeah, the office memes from C3P memes are, they're a lot of fun.
Obviously, that was a very legendary, hilarious show, and being able to create that C3P meme did a phenomenal job with the AI for DeSantis, but that one in particular is just, it's funny.
Actually, you know what?
The only flaw with that meme right there is they made him a little too charismatic, because I don't think that really lines up with the actual Ron DeSantis.
Good point.
So, look, when I went set out to write my book, Stone's Rules, I was thinking, you know, Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Machiavelli's The Prince, you can get a copy of my book at StoneZone.com in the shop.
I'm honored to have an introduction by my good friend Tucker Carlson, so please consider getting your signed copy by going to the shop at StoneZone.com.
But Brendan, tell us more about your book.
Well, I wrote my book, Roger, I wrote it 10 years ago, and I still can't believe that I wrote it.
I was 31 years old when I published my book, and it's amazing.
You know what actually inspired it?
I think you'll appreciate this.
I wrote my book, Roger, because I was passionate and involved with politics, specifically with Dr. Ron Paul.
That was the first person that pulled me into politics, and I felt like this person's message really is resonating with me.
I believe in what he's doing.
And I worked tirelessly, I tried to volunteer in 2008, I donated to his campaign, and then again in 2012.
And in 2012, when Barack Obama won re-election, I stopped and I looked at the landscape and I thought to myself, okay, we're screwed unless somebody does something to start turning around the culture.
Unless somebody does something to start changing the way we're approaching not just politics, but life.
And I went back to previous writings and my mom's a self-help author and also a motivational speaker and has been for almost 30 years.
And so I went back and I said, okay, I can't make the difference inside of politics because the electorate is too dumb and they don't really understand what's going on.
And that's where I started launching my crusade into saving the culture, and it began with this book.
So this book is an irreverent look at self-development.
At the time, I was a two-time divorced father of three.
I had two kids with one woman, another kid with a different woman, and I essentially was a cautionary tale.
And I pretty much unloaded my entire soul into this book, using a lot of different stories and examples, along with what I felt was sage advice, given my experiences.
And then I proceeded to, so it's interesting because most people write a self-help book after they've succeeded in life and I wrote one after I had failed.
And then I took my own advice from the book and I built a life.
And now I've been with my wife.
We've been together for nine years and married for coming up on two years, very happily.
And my kids are all doing wonderful and my business has been thriving.
And so I took my own advice from this book and basically showed everybody how to do it and started implementing it.
But it's a book for people that don't read self-help books, man.
When I first released this book, I had farmers in the middle of the country writing me to say, "Thank you, this book resonated with me." And at the same time, I had crack dealers out of Philadelphia that would write messages to me on Twitter and thank me for how it was inspiring them and changing their lives.
So it really depends.
This book is really about humility.
It's about reaching out to people who You know, that don't resonate with that traditional sort of polished self-development book.
And, uh, and it's just a lot of fun.
You know, there's a lot of, a lot of tongue in cheek humor in there.
And, and I think, uh, you know, it's, it's reflected even now in my show with what I do.
All right, folks, the book again is Still Breathing, The Wisdom and Teachings of a Perfectly Flawed Man by Brendan M. Dilley, also known as Warlord Dilley.
I love that.
You can get that, folks, on Amazon.
I share your high regard for Dr. Ron Paul.
Actually, the last Republican I voted for in the Florida presidential primary was Dr. Ron Paul.
After that, I switched briefly to the Libertarian Party.
Then I learned that they had changed the state law, so it was impossible for me to switch back to the Republican Party in time to vote for Donald Trump in 2016.
So the first time I got a chance to vote for him within the Republican primary was in 2020.
Dr. Ron Paul, I actually went to Houston, Texas to work for the special election in 1977, in which Dr. Paul was first elected to Congress.
And Dr. Ron Paul was among a small handful of House Republicans who supported Ronald Reagan over Gerald Ford.
Ronald Reagan, the last outsider president we've had since Donald Trump.
All right, this has been terrific.
We're just about out of time.
I want to thank Brendan Dilley from the Warlord Dilley.
That image of you with the General Patton style helmet and the cigar is an absolute favorite of mine.
Thank you so much for joining us and tell people where they can follow your work.
Absolutely.
Thank you, Roger.
It's been really a pleasure to be here, and an honor, sir.
I've followed most of your career, and I've really... Back in 2017, I had a different Twitter account, Roger, and you were one of the first political people that followed me on that account.
It was a big account.
It was centered around my self-development, but you followed me, and I thought that was the coolest thing back then, and I still think it's the coolest thing now, so thank you.
But as you just mentioned, on Twitter or X, you can follow me at WarlordDilly.
And then the best place to connect with me or find my show is to go to dillyshow.com.
That's dillyshow.com and you can find links to pretty much all of my work and the different places that we broadcast daily, Monday through Friday at 12 p.m.
Eastern.
Very good.
Brendan Dilley, thank you so much for joining us today in the Stone Zone.
Thank you, sir.
Alright folks, before we wrap it up here, I want to remind you that this show, The Stone Zone, shows every day at 4 o'clock Central, 5 o'clock Eastern, where we talk news, politics, history, style, fashion, and we are brought to you by the great folks at MyPillow.com.
MyPillow.com, where we ask you to use promo code STONE.
So we are completely and totally listener and viewer supported.
If you don't go to MyPillow.com or to StoneZone.com and purchase any of the great products at either one of these places, well, then it makes it much tougher for Mrs. Stone and I to keep the lights on and pay the bills, not to mention mailing that monthly check to the IRS.
So whether it is the revolutionary new MyPillow 2.0, or whether it is the six-piece towel set, or whether it is the men and women's moccasin slippers, or whether it is the legendary Giza dream sheets, or whether it is the new MyKitchen towels, or whether it is the waffle blankets, or the throw blankets, Or the bathrobes.
There are many, many great products at MyPillow.com.
Please remember to use promo code STONE when you go there.
If you are not that adept at the internet, well, first of all, I wonder how you're watching this show, but you can dial 1-800-544-8939.
File 1-800-544-8939.
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And place your order over the telephone.
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Check out these great products, the dog beds, the pet blankets, all the aforementioned products.
Mrs. Stone and I will be most grateful.
This has been the Stone Zone.
Special thanks to Brendan Dilley, Warlord Dilley, on Twitter, now called X, for joining us today in the Zone.
God bless you, and Godspeed.
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