Nov. 16, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:52
3500 Making America Great Again | Bill Whittle and Stefan Molyneux
Bill Whittle joins Stefan Molyneux to discuss the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, the massive undisclosed failure of President Barack Obama, the future of American conservatism and the nature of the Never Trump movement. For more from Bill Whittle, please check out:https://www.billwhittle.comhttps://www.youtube.com/BillWhittleChannelFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
We're back with our good friend, Bill Whittle, whose work you can find at BillWhittle.com.
You can also subscribe to Bill on YouTube at YouTube.com slash Bill Whittle channel.
Whittle spelt like the thing that your high-pants granddad used to do with a stick on the back porch while complaining about all the balls in his yard.
Bill, how have you been?
What's new?
Good to have you back.
Slow News Week, huh?
Slow News Week.
If only we could find something to talk about, we'd have a real show here.
I did, after the night that they called it, the election night, I was doing something live, and I mean, I did a canned speech for the people, and I started off with the clip from Lord of the Rings, where the Tower of Baradur collapses, you know, and the evil eye falls to the ground, and everybody's...
And that sense that It's not impossible for me to believe that Donald Trump won, Stephan, but I don't think you or I or anyone has really any idea of the magnitude of what's happened.
I know we think we do, but first of all, we don't have any idea about the kind of pushback that's going to come, but put all that negative stuff aside for the time being.
It is simply the most spectacular thing I've ever seen in this country's history.
It was just absolutely magnificent, and there's so much to talk about, so I'll let you just lead this thing along here, but I'm still just completely overjoyed.
Of course, I'm far too cool to get any of these Lord of the Rings references.
By the way, I wanted to congratulate you publicly.
You've been right this whole time, 100% right.
I had some serious concerns about Donald Trump as a candidate.
Needless to say, I supported him and I voted for him.
And I have to say, since the third – I don't think we've talked for a while.
He was different in the third debate.
I thought the third debate, he was great.
I thought the Gettysburg Address was great.
I thought the speech in Grand Rapids was great.
And then to my, not to my astonishment, but to my absolute joy, I have to tell you a super quick story which you'll like quite a lot.
I was watching, I was live casting the event, the election results.
I was pretty much at Never Trump headquarters.
And believe it or not, I wanted to be there because I wanted to be a kind of a pro-Trump voice because, you know, When somebody said, what do you think about Trump?
My first response was, I like his hat.
And it turns out the hat won.
In any event, I was over at this kind of Never Trump headquarters.
And as you remember, the election was over.
And then two hours later, they called that the election was over.
And so it was a two hour period.
They're waiting for them to have the courage to admit this.
And somebody who's a prominent, very prominent never-Trumper said, okay, now Trump's going to come out for his acceptance speech and he's just going to trash everybody.
He's going to talk about how he told them all and how he won big, hugely, hugely, hugely.
And in real time, I said, what if he doesn't?
What do you mean?
What if he doesn't?
What if he comes out and he's gracious?
He's not going to be gracious.
But what if he is?
You've been saying this whole time, and there's a case to be made for it, that Donald Trump was telling people what they wanted to hear in order to become president.
Well, he's president-elect now.
He doesn't have anything to prove to anybody.
He can be him real self.
What if he's graceful?
What does that tell you?
And they just simply couldn't believe it.
And then he came out and gave the most graceful acceptance speech I think I've ever heard.
The next day or the day after, he's sitting with Barack Obama in the White House.
And instead of, you know, Barack Obama called him a fool and unfit and insane, basically.
And he says, you know, I have a great meeting with the president and I look forward to working with him in the future.
I look forward to getting his counsel in times of crisis.
I mean, these are presidential moments.
And I... Well, again, I bow down before your vision.
But clearly, I think we can agree that this is not the person who started this campaign and ran through the primaries.
Certainly, it's not his public persona.
Well, sure.
And I mean, this was not wildly unpredictable from knowing Successful marketing, successful sales.
You first make a splash to get people's attention, which is why you talk about rapists on the border and so on, and then that gets lots of people's attention.
And then you go through that Henry V arc from Playboy to King, and you bring people along with you.
I mean, this is something that – if only he hadn't published his playbook, I guess we could call this prescient.
But it's funny because, you know, lots of people were saying to me that I predicted it.
And Mike and I on the show have been calling this stuff since last summer.
And it's not – prediction is a very passive thing, you know.
It's like saying, well, I predict that I'm going to go to the store tomorrow and get milk.
I understand.
Well, you know, if you're working to try and achieve something, you don't make a prediction.
You make it happen.
And that, I think, is a bit of a different thing.
But yeah, certainly the man came through and the voters came through.
And now we're just watching this giant man stride over the smoking wreckage of the mainstream media's credibility, which has been my target all along.
As mine, I was good friends with Andrew Breitbart and I remember speaking quite a bit about, Breitbart said it's never, the progressives are not the enemy, the candidates are not the enemy, it's the press, it's the press, it's the press, it's the press.
And because if we had a free press, we wouldn't have had a President Obama, we wouldn't have had Hillary Clinton as a candidate.
So yes, they're destroyed.
As I said, the magnitude of this is unbelievable.
And I've had a chance.
I was at an event right after the election with some pretty big donors.
And to my enormous, enormous relief, the universal mood among everybody was – there was not a single person who went, hey, we won.
Game over.
There'll never be another Democratic president in their lifetimes, you know.
Everybody I spoke to said we have got four years to really make some fundamental advances in this country and I think we've got four years to grow an entire crop of conservatives.
My messaging going forward is going to be very different.
I've been playing defense for – even when George Bush was in power, I was playing defense.
We've been so busy telling people what we're against, it's time to start telling them what they're for, so I'm going to start getting down to the fundamentals of capitalism, the fundamentals of income inequality, all the rest, because we have got to turn this younger generation, and frankly, if you've already voted for Hillary or Bernie, we're just going to triage you off to the side for the time being.
I want a message for 15-, 16-, 17-year-olds who are going to be voting for their first time in 2020.
Well, of course, the important thing to remember is that young people have never known a decent economy.
They've never known opportunity.
They've never known growth.
You know, when I was a kid, I got my first job when I was 10, and I've been working pretty solidly ever since.
And you could just You know, it's like old economy steam.
Steve, this meme that's really, really funny.
You know, arrive 15 minutes before your flight leaves because you live in the 70s, right?
Arrive 15 minutes before your flight leaves.
Here you go.
Come on board, right?
And one of them is like, get fired from your job.
Walk across the road.
Get another job.
You know, the economy used to function in ways that people simply don't understand.
This all started to sort of fall apart.
I remember graduating from my master's degree in the 90s.
And man, it was brutal trying to get work.
I mean, I couldn't even get a job as a waiter.
I was weeding people's gardens, washing their cars.
The economy started to fall.
So the younger people have not seen a functioning economy where wages are going up, where there's demand, where you have choices.
Because when there's a functioning economy and demand is increasing, the workers have a lot more power.
When the economy is shrinking, particularly with the H-1B visas, who basically are like modern digital serfs, then the employers have all the power because there aren't other jobs out there who are demanding your services.
And so they've seen what the socialists complain about.
Oh, the capitalists and the bosses have all the power and the workers are helpless.
It's like, yes, that's because of socialism.
That's not why socialism.
That's after socialism because they haven't seen a functioning economy in their lifetimes or their parents for the large part.
My great concern and I've been expressing it for the last eight years was that we were raising entire generations of Americans who had never experienced anything like correct economic growth and that one percent or half a percent would be the new normal.
That would be a good year.
So think about the opportunity that this gives us for people who – let's just take a hypothetical person who voted for Obama in 2008 when they were 18.
They have never seen real economic growth.
They've never seen companies hiring people.
They've never seen any of this stuff.
They've never seen negotiations in overseas diplomacy that are fundamentally based on what we can achieve together rather than...
Look, the whole Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama thing, these were two really weak, weak individuals who had to just rattle sabers and we came, we saw, he died kind of Just vile nonsense.
Trump's position, you know, is like, well, Putin and I seem to get along.
He's got his national interests.
We have ours.
Let's find out where they overlap.
Let's work towards those.
And Putin's response was, we're looking forward to normalized relations, just as an example.
The opportunities are amazing, but the one I really, really, really want to gloat about, I just want to gloat about two things.
I want to gloat about Hillary Clinton's character, and I want to gloat about the pop culture, about the whole movie star celebrity media complex thing.
Well, gloat away, you certainly won't be losing me if you have negative opinions of Hillary Clinton's character.
You know, I just want to insert a tiny joke before we start, where Hillary Clinton talking to the devil, saying, you said I was going to win!
The devil saying, you said you had a soul.
So, off you go.
Well, you know, I think the most telling thing ever about Hillary Clinton in her entire career, which ended with a big exclamation point on Tuesday...
It's funny, I think the dot at the bottom of the exclamation point was actually the most revealing thing about her.
She had, as every candidate has in a presidential election, she had large numbers of people, thousands of people waiting for her campaign headquarters, and perhaps more than any election really in recent history, with the possible exception of Obama in 2008, these people were convinced they were going to win.
And I think the fact that Hillary Clinton did not come out and address her supporters is the Not in terms of scale, but in terms of revealing who she is.
It's the worst thing I've ever seen.
I mean, when you lose an election, and believe me, I know this feeling, what the concession speech is, Stephan, is a chance for For the candidate to first of all say to those people who are standing out there, thank you for your work.
We know that you gave a year of your lives.
We know we gave them everything you got.
Thank you for your work.
But ultimately, really, what a concession speech is, is it's emotional closure.
It's a sense of saying, look, we gave it our best shot.
We did our best.
We didn't win.
Now that we haven't won, we need to congratulate the president and we need to understand that he deserves a break and it gives them closure and a decent, gracious concession speech It makes them think that they voted for the right person and that this all wasn't in vain.
For her to do what she did and the way she did it, first of all, I'm not coming out.
I'd like to speculate about that for a minute.
Is she incapable of coming?
Yeah, that's what I think too.
Yeah, I think she was in the sauce.
I think so too.
When this was happening live, as I say, I was watching this live on camera and when it was revealed that she was not going to come out, I just yelled at the TV screen, you coward, you coward, you miserable coward.
There are people out there waiting in the cold for you to come out and tell them what happened.
You would have come out if you'd won, wouldn't you?
You cowered.
And then to send Podesta out there was cowardice.
Of all the people.
I mean, this is the guy.
The guy who was so bad with his security, right, he gets one of these phishing emails saying, oh, you change your email account, password, and then he's like, the IT guy's like, no, no, don't click on that, because that's just phishing.
Here's the correct link, but you should go and change your password.
He goes and clicks on the original, enters his password.
This is the idiot who started this drip, drip, drip, right, that came out that was, you know, cost a lot of Hispanic votes.
Apparently, they're not that much into spirit cooking slash devil worship slash whatever god-awful thing was going on in this Yeah, of all the people to send out.
Send out your dog to yap into the microphone.
Do not send out Podesta, who a lot of people blamed.
And just let me just to finish this point.
So they send out Podesta.
And Podesta comes out and says, well...
As far as we're concerned, the election is still on.
A lot of states are too close to call.
And the second he said that, I shouted it again.
I wasn't aware of this.
It wasn't something I did intentionally.
I was just so into the moment.
Again, coward, you cowards, you miserable cowards.
What we want is we want all of you to go home.
We'll be here in the morning counting overnight.
You miserable, miserable, right at the same time she's giving her concession speech.
So, these people didn't even have the guts to face their own core supporters and I think this is not just something to gloat over.
I think this is something that needs to be really trumpeted.
To these people who think that Hillary Clinton...
Did you see the Saturday Night Live thing where they're playing Alleluia?
You know, honestly, it's like George Washington had just died.
Do not milk the death of Leonard Cohen to get us to cry crocodile tears for this Middle East-destroying sociopath.
What a horrible juxtaposition.
Exactly, exactly.
But we need to press this point, and I think of all the points that we need to press in terms of either the left, who's very difficult to convince, or the moderates, who I think are just looking to be convinced, We have to say to them, you claim that this person should have been president because she's fought all of her life for you.
Well, she's not done anything.
She named a street and she named a building when she was a senator.
She's destroyed the Middle East and she didn't even care enough about you.
To be able to come out on stage and say thank you and goodbye.
And by the way, I know you're going to run with this one, but what does it say, you know, that the woman power candidate, you know, women, women, women were powerful, were powerful, were powerful, was apparently too upset to come out and give a concession speech.
You know, I don't remember, in my living memory, I cannot remember a candidate not giving a concession speech, except for Gore, of course, who conceded and then unconceded, but he at least had some counting to do.
What does it say?
To all these, you know, to these power feminists who say, Hillary is the… She was crying and collapsed and couldn't face the public.
What does that tell you about her ability to deal with some grave, grave financial problem or international military problem?
Well, I don't know that it does a lot to push back against gender stereotypes if we think that she was too emotional to come out and give a speech, to overcome with emotion, to do the right thing, not just for her reporters or for Donald Trump, but for the Republic as a whole.
You need that concession.
You need the handshake after the match.
That is a vote of confidence in the orderly transition of power that the Republic represents, and that would have done a lot, I think, to calm down her voters.
And the speech she finally gave...
was not the speech that helps calm down.
She knows her supporters are volatile.
Hell, they paid them to be volatile.
They paid for this bird doggy.
They paid for these mentally ill people to go out there and start fights with Trump supporters.
They know their supporters are violent, so they should have been talking them out of their fiery trees at the beginning.
And the way that she handled it was almost guaranteed to add fuel to the fire of what came and what we've seen over the past five or six days.
And we should have been hearing this nonstop from President Obama and from Hillary Clinton on TV all the time saying, "Listen, this is disgraceful.
This is not who we are.
They're always telling us who we are.
They could be doing an awful, awful lot to be calming these riots down and they're not.
And now this guy was beaten to death over it.
They're not doing anything and that's who they are.
By the way, I know we're on the same page on this, but every single night we watch this, more people who had their doubts about Donald Trump become more convinced that he was the right vote.
They stopped the 101 freeway for a couple of hours.
The second I heard this, I said, you've just made 80,000 Trump supporters.
You're the reason that he won and you're the reason that people who may have voted with some Reservations.
Every single night, we become more and more convinced this was the right thing to do.
Well, and it's, to me, most delightful.
I think the mainstream media was Trump's biggest ally, despite themselves.
And it's wonderful, absolutely wonderful, Bill, to see that they've learned absolutely nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
They're doubling down, as these idiots always do.
I mean, the social justice warriors who invaded Twitter and are threatening the existence of Twitter, they invaded a bunch of other companies, not to reform them, but to destroy them.
And they've invaded the Democrat Party and turned it away from – I think it had a much more reasonable mission in the past.
But they've invaded it and destroyed it.
And they've invaded the mainstream media and they're destroying it.
This is just a bunch of termites.
Go find whack-a-bigot game from here to eternity.
Find some area in human endeavor.
Find a disparity.
Blame all the disparity on bigotry.
And then propose more government programs to close it down, which can never work because some of these disparities are not due to bigotry but just the bell curve of abilities across various groups.
And this game that has infested the media, has infested Democrats, is infesting academia, going to bring all these institutions down and good damn riddance to that because we need something healthier to grow in its place.
When we talk about not really fully realizing the magnitude of what's happened yet, I haven't heard anybody else talking about this, but it's going to come up.
If we're smart, we're going to run with this football all the way down the field.
More blue collar workers voted for Republicans than Democrats.
The Democrats had the multi-millionaire of Silicon Valley guys and the multi-millionaire of celebrities, but the Republicans had the working man, the common people.
What's so interesting about this is That the Democratic brand is the little guy.
That's the brand.
It's not like a coalition of theirs.
That's their brand.
This last election proved that they don't have a brand anymore.
They cannot go back and recover these people.
They are now the party of millionaires and billionaires.
The Republicans are the party of the working man and honesty and bringing jobs back and all the rest of it.
That leaves them not just without votes, but it leaves them without a purpose.
They're going to find some new purpose, by the way.
And by the way, Stephan, I am on my knees.
We just can't be this lucky at one time.
But if they do make Keith Ellison the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in order to show us how progressive and tolerant they are, they're utterly convinced that they lost because they didn't run hard enough to the left.
If they do that, and there's serious talk about doing it, then I think we will be...
Did you not know this?
I have heard a number of explanations as to why they lost, which we'll get into after this.
I had not heard the one that they didn't feel that they've run left enough.
I'd be more successful if I was just a little bolder.
I mean, what the hell does that mean?
Ellison is being trumpeted as the answer.
Bernie is pushing him very hard because see, when you live in a world of virtue signaling and virtue signaling trumps everything else, if you'll pardon the expression, then you find yourself in a world where, well, okay, we didn't win because we didn't signal how much – they did their very best to demonize anybody who was against them as a racist, bigot, homophobe, misogynist, but maybe they didn't show everybody just how much better than us they really are.
So now they're going to elect the only Muslim in Congress, or at least he was when he started As the DNC chair to show all of us just how unbelievably tolerant and special they are.
And we just don't have that kind of luck.
Yes, I did notice all of the tolerance that the Hillary Clinton campaign showed, the basket of deplorable statements, and Obama too, right?
Remember all of the people who were sort of in flyover country, the white people were like rednecks, bitterly clinging to guns and religion and all that kind of stuff.
And yeah, no, the contempt that the left has infected the Democrat Party with is, you know, that there's statements that Democrats made in the past.
I mean, you look at JFK, a staunch Democrat, his statements on communism could have come out of the mouth of Richard Nixon.
He would be a center-right politician today if he was.
If he didn't change at all, he'd be a center-right politician.
Absolutely.
Ask not what your country can do for you.
Ask what you can do for your country.
What do you mean, ask not what my country can do for me?
The only reason I'm voting for you bastards is so I get my little food stamps and my free phones.
No, the world is changing and they're going in the wrong direction.
It makes me very, very happy.
No, they're done, I believe, if we don't let up, right?
You know, it's like this, to take an analogy, you know, that scene, ah, we are flushed with endorphins from our victory.
Let us now be gracious.
And Magnanimous is like, nope, I've seen this movie way too many times when the good guy lets the bad guy back up.
And that's not a good ending because it just gets uglier from there.
I want to be clear about this because I think this is a really, really very important point about where we go now in the next several days, but between now and the inauguration, let's say.
Showing grace to these people is not losing the battle.
Showing grace to them, at least from Trump's point of view, is in fact He's beating them worse.
He's beating them worse.
But to your main point, I couldn't agree more.
We're both students of history.
I'm a big student of military history and any numbers, any, again, countless numbers of wars could have ended after a crushing defeat of one side, but the victors stood on the battlefield and cheered and cheered and cheered and then the defeated army ran across the river and regrouped and came back but the victors stood on the battlefield and cheered and cheered and cheered We got to run these bastards into the river.
We have to run them into the river.
Peter Robinson: One example, of course.
Peter Robinson: The entire philosophy.
Peter Robinson: Yeah, one example which is a more complicated but just for something to stick in people's heads.
In the First World War, Germany was never invaded.
And then they regrouped, took them 20 years, they regrouped and started again.
Now, in the Second World War, Germany was eviscerated, bombed into crap, and invaded, and they've pretty much been meek as lambs ever since.
If you look at what happened, of course, to Japan at the end of the Second World War, well, I mean, everyone knows, of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the fire bombings of Tokyo killed even more people.
And so it is tragic, and of course, we're speaking in analogies.
Nobody's talking about violence against people, but...
The reality is that an enemy vanquished to the point of true humility.
Not humiliation, but true humility.
That is when they just magically will discover reason and peace.
And you haven't seen a lot of imperialism coming out of Germany or Japan since the Second World War.
And that's just one of countless examples we could pick out of a basket.
The examples of Germany and Japan are precisely what we should be looking at because, as you say, in both cases, they were faced with utter ruin.
It wasn't like we kind of knocked them back behind the borders of Germany.
They were utterly on their knees.
All of the firebrands had been killed and basically the German people had come to the conclusion that they would rather surrender Then continue this thing.
Because they could have fought on with bamboo spears in Japan.
But they were absolutely defeated.
And if they are absolutely defeated and then magnanimity is shown to people, that's the magic formula.
Because they've been told their whole time, their whole lives, the Japanese and the Germans, especially the Japanese, the Americans are going to come and they're going to rape all of our women and they're going to murder our kids and put them on poles and all the rest of it.
And when the Americans came and they were expecting this, And they were still willing to surrender expecting this kind of horror.
And the Americans came and started handing out candy bars.
It rewired those countries, utterly rewired them.
And this is why I'm so impressed with Donald Trump's magnanimity because if you can have that grace and at the same time, you've got to push, push, push these political objectives.
You've got to just do it.
Then you are going to genuinely make a major movement that's going to really have a long-term effect on this country.
So let's talk about two things, if that's all right with you.
Number one is Obama's legacy, which I think is being a little brushed over at the moment because apparently looking at these facts, I don't know, probably racist, who knows what people are going to say, number one.
And number two, I want to sort of understand some of the Never Trumper stuff, and you're a little closer to them than I do, so you can help sort of carry the message out.
So Obama's legacy, I'm trying to find a place for this rant.
I'll keep it short, and I appreciate your patience, but lord above, this was not a real president, and this was not a real presidency, in my opinion.
This was more like live-action role-playing.
It was like hail to the chief in a video game, the reason being that there was, as you know, the stimulus bill that was passed in the 2008 crisis that gave an extra trillion dollars, basically a trillion, 970, whatever it is, right?
Basically a trillion dollars of extra spending.
And for those who don't know, there's been no budget ever since because if there was a budget, they'd have to drop that trillion dollars of extra spending.
And that trillion dollars went on George Bush's tab, by the way, because even though Obama raised it and spent it, it happened in fiscal 2008, so that money goes on George Bush's tab.
Right.
So every year, because they haven't passed a budget in Congress, every year they got to spend an extra trillion dollars.
Now, you don't have to be a great politician to prop up a faltering economy if over your eight years you spend eight trillion extra dollars.
Eight trillion extra dollars.
That is half the GDP of the entire United States and almost half the debt that has accumulated.
That is a staggering sum of money.
And the fact that the economy has performed so badly that it's just kind of petered along and just kind of drudged along and said, oh, well, unemployment is down.
It's like, well, you know what?
If you get to spend an extra eight trillion dollars in your presidency, it's not a real presidency.
And Obamacare would have collapsed long ago if they weren't able to prop it up with all of this extra money.
It's not a real presidency.
It was all just magic money, fantasy money, made up stuff.
You didn't have to be that great.
It's like saying, hey, you know what, Bill, I'm a great psychologist.
I can make you fantastically happy by injecting cocaine directly into your brain.
Hey, look!
One session with me and you're happy.
It's like, that's not real therapy.
That's just artificial stimulation.
So, the legacy to me, people aren't even talking about that it was all unreal based on this magic money that was created.
I did a video I want to say about three or four years ago called the vote pump and basically what I was saying was we know what we spend and what we raise and what we borrow.
You could in fact give everybody prior to Trump arrival, you could give everybody a tax cut and still pay for the federal government that almost three quarters of the money we spend are on entitlements.
So what entitlements are essentially is they're taking money from Republicans and from people who produce and they're giving it to people in exchange for votes.
And when you take two, because you said it's a trillion dollars in extra spending, when you throw in the actual entitlements that were in fact budgeted, it's more like two trillion dollars a year.
And people talk about, well, there's a hundred million dollars in campaign ads or Soros has pushed a billion dollars into this.
Please.
When you look at the magnitude of the win, Stephen, Trump won despite the fact that huge numbers of people had been paid to vote Democrat for their entire lives, and he won against a 50-point headwind in terms of the media, at least that.
I mean, honestly, if there had been a fair media, there wouldn't have been a Hillary Clinton.
It is a magnificent, monumental thing, and I utterly agree that their credibility is just burned to the ground.
There's a five-point thing I'd like to talk about if we have a moment about what we do from here, but yes, I couldn't agree with you more.
It is the end of the Obama presidency.
What's his legacy?
Obamacare.
It's collapsing on its own.
That's all he has.
The Middle East is a catastrophe.
The economy is a catastrophe.
Racial relations are catastrophes.
The only thing he has is Obamacare, and it's done.
It's not going to live long enough for Trump to sign it out of existence.
Well, I mean, the whole party has collapsed underneath Obama.
People aren't really talking about that much.
2010, Republicans took the House by winning 63 seats.
Biggest pickup since 1948.
Six seats in the Senate.
2014, Republicans got another 13 House seats, took control of the Senate.
The Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislature seats in the period of Obama's rule.
I mean, you've got a roof and everything underneath is collapsing.
Remember all the conversations that were being had back two, three months ago, which might as well have been two or three thousand years ago, as far as I'm concerned, given the changes that have happened.
But it's the end of the Republican Party that the split between Donald Trump is the end of the Republican Party and Trump.
And there won't be nothing left out of the wreckage.
And as it turns out, there's the presidency, there's the Senate, there's the House of Representatives picked up.
Everybody who ran with Trump won, and everybody who ran against him, Republican-wise, lost.
So yeah, I'd love to talk about the Never Trumpers only because...
You're right.
I'm probably closer to them than you are.
I'm not one of them.
I'd like to say this one more time.
I'll bookmark the five-point plan because we also want to place it.
So the never-Trumpers, I'll just give you my two cents on it.
So I can understand like if you were a cruise guy or a Kasich guy or whatever – Yeah, give it your all.
You know, get behind your candidate and try and get him the nomination.
So I got no problem with people who were against.
But once he got the nomination, I mean, come on, because then your choice was Trump or Hillary.
Now, maybe you thought Trump was a fool.
Maybe you thought he was a buffoon.
But you know what he wasn't?
He wasn't somebody who threatened a nuclear power with war.
He wasn't somebody who threatened to nuke Iran.
He wasn't somebody who had ridiculous amounts of scandals.
He wasn't somebody who was married to a sexual predator.
He was like he was none of these things.
So the Never Trump stuff seems to be kind of hard to sustain after he got the nomination.
I just want to say that the last video I did before the election was called Election 2016, Clinton vs.
a Turnip.
And basically, I said, if you're so lathered up about Donald Trump as a person, take him out, replace him with a turnip.
How does Hillary Clinton stand up relative to the turnip?
And the turnip wins hands down.
I mean, it's no question, it's no contest that the turnip wins hands down.
So what was the argument from the Never Trumpers, again, post-nomination?
I'm always hesitant to speak for other people.
I've tried talking about libertarianism once or twice and I'm simply just not going to do it anymore.
Your interpretation of their arguments has been that way.
My interpretation is, and I think this is pretty close to the fact, I think there's a philosophical argument and I think there's an emotional argument and they're connected.
So I'll give you the philosophical argument first.
As I understand the never Trump people, the argument was this.
Obviously they have distaste for Donald Trump and so on, but they had more distaste for Hillary Clinton.
I think that's actually true.
So why would they allow her to become president by not voting for Trump?
Their position was that true conservative values, classical conservative values, you would have a very difficult time fighting for those principles against a Republican who didn't believe in them.
Their feeling was that if you had a Democrat in there and that the catastrophes that are going to happen fell on the shoulders of the Democrat, then the contrast between Hillary Clinton and classical conservative values would be much clearer and much more easily done.
So their position was Trump is not a conservative.
That's not what I'm saying.
This is what they say.
Trump is not a conservative, and if we want a conservative, then we cannot have somebody who's not a conservative wearing the mantle of the conservative party.
That's the essential argument.
They thought their chances of a substantial cultural change would be much better in four years.
Now, I'll get to the emotional argument in a minute, but how I responded to that argument was There's not going to be another four years.
Everybody says that.
I mean, it's always hyperbole about this.
This is the most important election of our lives.
But the point I was making is, look, it's not a question of the two candidates.
The IRS has been weaponized for four years now.
The Department of Justice is not the Department of Justice.
It's the Department of Justice that is suppressing the evidence that this woman is a multiple felon and a traitor.
The institutions are so corrupt that the idea, and forget the voter fraud and all the rest of it.
I think if Hillary Clinton won, you could make, we'll never know, thank God, but you could make a pretty compelling case that if Obama took eight years to get the country into that kind of shape, somebody as criminally Corrupt as Hillary Clinton in the final four years could, in fact, institute such incredible government corruption and voter fraud and all the rest that, in fact, you wouldn't win.
So I didn't think it was a no-brainer for me.
Now I want to get to the emotional part of the argument, I think.
There's a term that we use a lot.
The first time I heard it, I loved it because it's one of those expressions that you don't need to explain, and it's virtue signaling.
We talk about the left as virtue signaling.
I'm driving down the 405 freeway and somebody's driving a Prius and I have a free Tibet bumper sticker on.
They don't give a damn about freeing Tibet.
You want to free Tibet, have a bumper sticker that says National Rifle Association or U.S. Marine Corps.
What they're doing is they're showing all the other drivers on the road what incredibly noble people they are.
They're very well educated.
They're very moral.
They feel for the people of Tibet and they want you.
But it doesn't accomplish anything.
It's virtue signaling.
And all the celebrity stuff is virtue signaling.
You made $30 million and you're talking about poor people because you want to show everybody how swell you are.
I think the Never Trump crowd It was virtue signaling.
I think they were virtue signaling on the right.
They were essentially saying, I understand these conservative values and hold them so dear to my heart that I will not compromise with them no matter what the situation is.
I would rather go down on this sinking ship with my integrity intact than to make the kind of compromises that they saw Donald Trump as being.
And they were emotionally connected to They had a political philosophy.
They had an actual political strategy that made sense.
I think it was completely wrong, but it's internally consistent.
We'd have a better chance to bring what we consider real conservatism in against Hillary than against Trump.
That's the political argument, and that makes internal sense.
I disagree with it completely, but it makes internal sense.
And then the emotional argument is, you know, I don't want to put, when people say I don't want to, I could not associate my vote with Donald Trump after the many things he said and did that are vulgar and just, you know, coarse and all the rest of it.
That was the emotional cover, I think, that they used.
To justify this political position.
So one justified the other, right?
They had the political philosophy that says, all right, well, this is the reason why we shouldn't vote for Trump.
But they had emotional reasons, too, and back and forth.
And listen, this is my final thing on the final Trumpers, never Trumpers, and that is that if we had lost this election, especially if we'd lost it narrowly, then there would be a split in the conservative right, or just call it whatever you want to, in the right that I don't think would ever heal.
The never-Trumpers would say that, see, we told you Donald Trump could win, and the Trump supporters would have said he would have won if it hadn't been for you and your intransigence.
And for me, once he became the nominee, it was a no-brainer.
I've criticized him, and I'll continue to criticize him for things that I think he needs to be criticized for.
He, every day, has become a better and better and better candidate.
And unlike the Never Trump people, I've been preaching about this actually for the last two, three months, maybe before the election, certainly since the third debate.
My position was, everybody's saying, oh, he's just tailoring the message because he wants to tell people what they want to hear.
My position the whole time was, what if he's learning?
I mean, what if he is actually learning on the job?
I suspect that Donald Trump didn't give a great deal of thought to a lot of constitutional niceties and stuff before he ran for president, and I think I used to be a horrible person.
I'm still a horrible person.
I'm slightly less horrible than I used to be, but I stepped up into this line of work, and he appears to be doing that with astonishing speed.
I would say to them, look, Donald Trump learned how to be obnoxious for the apprentice.
I've worked on reality TV shows as an editor.
There's nothing real about them.
Let's just hypothetically say that Donald Trump is a relatively coarse guy.
Maybe he's got a lot of ego, obviously, but when he goes on The Apprentice for the first time, he says, you know what?
This isn't working out.
I think we're going to have to terminate your engagement.
Then the producers of the show pull him over and say, no, no, no.
This is not what people are watching.
We want bombast.
We want numbers.
You're fired.
He learned how to be that guy for the TV show.
And I think he's been doing an extraordinary job of improving as a candidate, and I think he's going to be a superb president.
I think that the never-Trumpers, I think there's an intellectual argument, and then there's emotional one.
But I think there's a deeper level, too, which is there is a tragic reality of the demographics in America, as in the Western country as a whole, that people who are coming in from the third world overwhelmingly vote.
Democrat.
I mean, it always struck me as kind of odd, and it was a huge mistake, I think, that Ronald Reagan made, which was giving California to the Democrats by providing amnesty for 3 million immigrants or illegal immigrants who are now 10 million.
And a fifth of every election after that.
A fifth of the way to every presidential election after that, yeah.
You'd think that the Hispanics who were legalized by a Republican might show some gratitude by voting Republican, but no!
I've done the statistics, I've done the analysis, 80-odd percent of Hispanics, out of many groups, but just to sort of, obviously the big one, they're going to vote Democrat.
And so Hillary Clinton gets in and she starts the process of legalizing 10 to 20 million voters, 80% of whom are going to vote for the Democrats.
It doesn't matter what your political strategy is after that.
You know, it's like if you're holding up a little sword and there's an atomic bomb coming down, it doesn't really matter what your plan B is.
But they didn't want to say that because they didn't want to talk about...
Ethnic or group disparities in voting patterns because then, oh, even though Hispanic is not a race, it's racist, right?
So I think that this failure to address demographics, the people who I think were the most pro-Trump were the people who got and understood the demographic argument, and the people who avoided that argument out of fears of being called racist were the ones who pretended there could be a plan B when statistically and demographically there couldn't be.
We were not going to get to 2020.
There wasn't going to be a 2020 if we had let this person win.
I saw that very clearly.
As you will know, and as we both know, once you start making comments on the kind of things we comment about, the first thing they do is call you a racist.
And when they call Mitt Romney a racist and a misogynist and John McCain, you just have to understand it's all they have.
And, Stephan, the thing about this that I think is really powerful is that this racism charge only works against people who aren't racist.
I mean, in terms of making people shut up, it only works against people who aren't racist.
You know, I have an opinion, that's racist, and they'll shut their mouth and they'll look down, because they're not racist.
They don't want to be considered racist.
Actual racists, like Nazis or Klansmen, they're proud to be racist.
Yeah, if you throw anti-Semite at Hitler, he's like, I guess you read the book.
Did you not see the armband?
Did you not see the hood with the little...
So they're proud of it, but I think that this has been their H-bomb, this racism thing, and they've dropped it so many times.
It's actually now at the point where it's not only not effective, it's actually almost funny.
It's actually almost comical.
It's getting there quickly.
Well, Trump won because of racism.
Most of the people that gave Trump the victory were people who had voted for Obama.
A lot of working class whites who had been voting Democrat their entire lives just got tired.
They elected Barack Obama and he spent eight years telling them how racist they were.
And all of the media and all the celebrities told the American people who elected Barack Obama to end racism, to show the world, you know, this was the mood back in 2008.
We're going to show the world that we're not the monsters that the Democrats and the socialists have made us out to be.
And what do they get for their trouble?
They get more of it and more of it and more of it and more and more and more and more and more.
And people just had enough of it.
Yeah, it's funny how affirmative action doesn't work out in politics any more than it does in the private market.
None of this does.
So let's...
Let's talk about the what's next, right?
You said there's a sort of five-point plan, because I think now that the smoke is clearing from the battlefield, people are looking at, you know, the rebuilding, the momentum into the future, and there is, of course, going to be some activity on the part of the left in the transition period between now and January.
What are your thoughts on next steps?
Well, I just – look, everybody's got plans, but the first thing I realized, Stefan, was the reason that the left got as far as they did, and they damn near won the selection, that would have been the end of the country.
It's because for 50 years they've had a plan and the plan is very clear.
We all know what it is and we're going to get into that with the Alinsky and the whole idea of taking over the academia.
They started with 1% or 2% of the population that were genuine communists and they managed to get to 50% of the population.
It occurs to me, despite all the work that you're doing and I'm doing and everybody else is doing, nobody had a plan.
Nobody had a plan on our side for how do you fight these guys.
I think we basically used their plan.
Just very, very quickly, the first thing we need to do is we need to win the hearts and minds of young people.
That means we have to ammo up the young conservatives who are out there.
These kids have tremendous moral courage and physical courage.
Call them conservatives, libertarians, whatever you want to.
They're individualists and they're anti-statists.
We have to get them these little hand grenades of arguments.
I went to an event for Turning Point USA and a lot of these kids were wearing stickers that said, I heart capitalism and that's awesome because they're giving social proof that it's okay but then I would say, what happens if somebody comes up to you and says, why do you heart capitalism?
Got to be able to answer that question and so we got to get them the tools they need to start spreading, going at the young people because you talk demographics, we cannot win a fight when they get bigger and we continue to get smaller.
I think the second thing we need to do is get into the pop culture, obviously.
We try to make conservative films.
It's a disaster.
We need to make excellent films that happen to be made by conservatives.
Easy Rider came out at a time of Painter Wagon and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Easy Rider wasn't about communist takeover of healthcare, but it was about America as a dark place and an evil place, and it hadn't been seen much about that before.
It was cool, and it was different.
People saw it.
Third, I think we need to outflank the news media and we don't have to beat them because they're dying and they were dying before this election.
The classic example for me is When Hillary Clinton stumbled, remember when she stumbled on the curb and just misstepped into that van?
She collapsed.
And the only reason she collapsed was because there's 180 million people walking around this country with high-definition television cameras in their pocket.
She collapsed like the Titanic took on just a little water.
Took on a little water, exactly.
And you know what they say on Facebook and stuff is it's pics or it didn't happen, right?
One thing I learned from this last cycle is if you do not have visual evidence, it just didn't happen.
There was no sound of her saying, I'm going to sell out the people and give me the money.
And Trump, there was for the, you know, grab them thing.
There was actual audiovisual for that.
So, you know.
I'll flank the media.
Fourth, we need new kind of politicians.
We need to send people to Washington who don't want to go.
Going to serve in Congress should be like jury duty, and there should be no re-election.
If you had a party that didn't re-elect its candidates, the American people would fall down because we're citizen legislators.
And finally, and this is the one that is going to generate a lot of feedback.
I'd like to get your opinion on this.
We have to take away the progressives' weapons and the way we do that is we have to address their causes.
We have to understand that these protesters out there, we have to have an answer for them.
We have these cities that have become war zones and the toxicity gets nastier and the area gets larger.
The thing that Trump did, I think, of everything that I saw, the smartest thing was to say basically a new deal for black America because it is progressivism that has created this horror of violence and so on.
There is a free market solution to all of this, but if we don't address these issues, then somebody else will.
I don't want there to be a reason for progressives anymore because they're bad people and they mess up everything.
Well, I certainly think we need an answer to social dysfunctions.
And to me, the answer is freedom.
And if that doesn't turn out to be the answer, more freedom.
And if that doesn't, I think you get the pattern.
Just more freedom.
I do.
I think a huge thing that needs to happen, and Trump has touched on this very briefly, but...
We need to cut federal funding or even local funding to higher education.
This needs to be scoured back down.
There are way too many people in higher education.
Not everyone is that smart.
Not everyone is that competent.
It needs to go back to the...
And I don't care where you come from, race, class, gender, who cares?
You need to be super smart to get into higher education and everybody else needs to be out there earning a living because if you're in higher education, you're just continuing in that general amniotic sack of childhood to academia.
It doesn't get you out into the real world.
We need to get more people out there paying taxes and fewer people in there being indoctrinated into Marxist ideology.
That is gonna be huge.
School choice for parents is gonna be huge because that's gonna flush out the bad teachers and parents finally are gonna have to have They're going to get a say, can you teach my child something useful in the marketplace?
I don't care how indoctrinated they are because now they're saying, well, you know, we've got these kids coming out of high school, Bill, and, you know, we need to force employers to pay them $15 an hour.
Why?
Because schools suck.
Because they can't do a damn thing.
They don't understand the market.
They don't understand entrepreneurship.
They don't understand adding value.
They don't understand serving customers.
They understand nothing.
And we've got all these rules.
And of course, the immigrants are coming in, illegal immigrants coming in, taking away jobs from teenagers, which is their entree into the workforce and into reality.
More people paying taxes means smaller government.
More people in academia being indoctrinated.
Fewer people having jobs.
More people on welfare means more and more government.
Just look at these protesters.
It doesn't look I hope that they're overly concerned about getting up in the morning and getting to work.
They're college kids who are bored and trying to show off their moral virtue.
That's exactly right.
Somebody said that we should immediately, that President Trump should immediately issue an executive order that says that any suppression of free speech or any suppression of conservative values or any other values, any kind of intimidation, signs that are taken down, teachers that are doing this, that will cut off your federal funding for your institution.
That would get their attention.
And listen, on a specific point, I'm very serious about this.
I think I had a chance to talk with James O'Keefe briefly and I think what we ought to do is we ought to take a high-profile school.
Let's just take Stanford for an example.
I think what we ought to basically do is say, listen, we're paying $60,000, $70,000 a year for my son to go to school here and he's taking a math class and he's supposed to get 50 minutes of math, but he's not getting 50 minutes of math.
He's getting 20 minutes of math and 30 minutes of how great Hillary is.
This is fraud.
We're going to sue you.
We're going to have a class action lawsuit for you not delivering what you said.
My son is in biology.
Any minute that they spend in their lecturing about politics and not speaking biology is ripping me off.
You either stop it or refund or give me $20,000 back because I'm not getting an hour of biology and I'm not getting an hour of math.
Because your professors are pushing all this stuff in.
Get some cameras in there.
Everybody takes their cell phones into class.
Get the evidence and then sue them.
And you only have to do this one time to one school because then all of the other schools will realize that there's a liability here and they'll tell their faculty to knock it off.
Well, assuming they have the capacity to knock it off, or they'll replace it.
Because, yeah, I mean, even if you go in— Keep suing.
Keep suing.
Forget about math.
I mean, that's certainly a valid approach.
But in other things, too, you know, if you're going into feminist studies or you're going into, I don't know, history of art studies or whatever, they all say that they're teaching critical thinking.
Okay, well, where's the proof, right?
Show me how critical thinking has improved.
Give me independent tests about—because, in general, people who go into university come out knowing less and being less smart, less able to think than before— That's right.
It's actually a brain toxin.
It's environmental hazard for your basic synapses.
So let's look at what was promised.
Let's look at what's delivered.
And if, yeah, if there are gaps, or even if it's just as taxpayers, stop forcing me to pay for the indoctrination of the next generation.
It's going to overturn the very system I grew up loving.
How about we have that as an option?
I mean, look what – it was James O'Keefe who did that to Acorn, right?
I mean, he saw – he showed what was going on under there.
And then they lost their funding and they lost their go.
And same thing's happening with some aspects of Planned Parenthood.
And of course, he did that with the DNC and he did that with their donors.
So I'd love to see more cameras in higher education.
I don't think people have any idea because, you know, they have the fond memories of when they were in school, when things were a lot more open-minded and critical thinking was still being taught.
I think if you lift the lid on this Marxist brain-killing indoctrination cult that passes for higher education these days, I think people would be unbelievably shocked and appalled and then be like, it'd be pretty easy to cut their funding.
I think and this Trump revolution happened at an incredibly interesting time in human history where we could have gone either way and all of the structures that we've been talking about, the mainstream media, college education, big education, Hollywood, the culture mill in Hollywood, All of these structures are the result of a second wave industrial era economy where everything had to be centralized.
The first wave economy of agriculture, our constitution was written for an agricultural people.
Basically, the constitution said the government should have the power to pave the roads and keep away the Canadians.
That's pretty much all they need to do and then otherwise just let me get to market with my stuff.
But as we got into the second wave industrial era, more and more people had to live in cities because factories require proximity.
You have to have the workers in one place and all the materials have to come in one place.
Then we started getting the progressive amendments of the last century, you know, prohibition and income tax and all the rest.
My point is this.
We're now well, well, well into an information age where individual citizens can order steel in China while they're eating dinner at a table someplace.
The government has to conform to the economy.
The economy has become an information-based economy and the government has to conform to it because you cannot run an economy this complex and this independent and this democratic.
With a federal structure that is this fossilized, this tall, this heavy, this fat, this slow, this stupid and this expensive.
Mainstream media is coming to an end.
Nobody wants to see it anymore.
Young people get their news off of Facebook and Instagram and all the rest.
Colleges are, as you say, they're just mills where you pay a fortune and go into debt for 30 years so that you can come out less smart than you were when you went in.
And the Hollywood situation is pretty much over.
The only model that makes any sense in Hollywood anymore is the super tentpole $400 million superhero movie.
So all of these things are dying and they're all being replaced by very democratic, very small, very low cost, inexpensive, mammalian ways to get around these dinosaurs.
And for Trump to have pulled off this miracle, for the American people to pull off this miracle at this time, It means that these old institutions that were so powerful are now going to dissolve essentially into thin air.
Well, let's hope so, and let's not let nature take its course.
Let's lean as hard as we can against these rotten structures.
Shovel them into the river, baby.
All right.
Well, thanks for a great chat, Bill.
I just wanted to remind people, BillWhittle.com for Bill's work and YouTube.com slash BillWhittle channel.
We'll put the links to all of these below.
Thanks for a great chat.
It's great to see you on this side of the fight to save Western civilization.
And thanks for a great and enjoyable conversation.
I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
See this expression?
We didn't have this expression before.
I didn't even know I had those muscles.
It's been so long of losing.
I didn't either.
And Stephan, you're a big part of this and you deserve an awful lot of credit for it.
And congratulations to you and all your viewers.
And for those of you who are my viewers, that's freedomainradio.com.
And it's been a pleasure talking with Stephan.
And the fun thing now will be to determine how do we remake this culture?
In the wake of this unbelievable gift of a window of opportunity.
That's going to be the big challenge over the next couple of years.
