Oct. 19, 2025 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
54:46
Radio Show Hour 2 – 2025/10/18
|
Time
Text
You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the political cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Always a good time when Mark Weber is on the show.
As you know, going back now nearly 21 years, and it will be 21 years next week, October 26, 2004.
Mark has been a mainstay on this program.
Always an informed, insightful discussion, prescient in many ways when he's on, but we have fun with Mark on the air and at events.
We last saw Mark at our event in South Carolina earlier this year.
So many of you were there, and we've talked to him since then, but he's back with us tonight for a very special reason, and that is to share with us his observations and takeaways from his recent visit to Vietnam of all places.
And Mark will provide an emphasis on what's relevant for America from that country's past and its increasingly important role now and in the years ahead.
Mark, welcome back.
A very interesting and sort of off-beat conversation we will have over the course of the next hour.
And I look forward to sharing it with you.
Right.
Thanks, James.
Yeah, I'm glad to be on.
And, of course, glad to talk about this recent trip.
So it's very much on my mind.
We'll be having a meeting in a few weeks, and I'll be talking about that observations about Vietnam in even greater detail.
But your listeners might want to know, I've been to quite a few countries.
In Asia, I've also been to Japan and China.
I've been to Iran three times.
I've been to virtually every country in Europe.
I lived in Europe for two and a half years.
I lived for a time in West Africa.
I traveled to quite a few countries there.
And I've been, from a very early age, very interested in different societies, what they're like, what they're not like, and comparing them to our own country.
And the visit to Vietnam is just part of a kind of interest I have in other societies and countries beyond just the color and vibe of Vietnam as an interesting place to visit.
I'm interested in what it has, what's going on there, what it means for Americans.
And especially because I'm old enough to remember the Vietnam War, which had an enormous impact in my life and in the life of everyone in America back in the 60s and 70s.
So anyway, that's kind of a background way to look at it.
But it's a fascinating country.
And the big thing that anybody coming to the country will be immediately impressed by is the dynamism, the confidence that one sees everywhere.
There's a tremendous amount of building.
The population is youthful, and the economy is booming.
It's been booming for years.
It's going through a period of rapid economic growth and diverse, increasingly diverse economy over the last 10 years, similar to what China has gone through, similar to what other countries have gone through in the past.
And now that's happening in Vietnam.
Anyway, it's very impressive to be in a place like that and in a country that is very homogeneous.
The population is overwhelmingly Vietnamese, and there's a very, very strong sense of Vietnamese-ness, you might say, Vietnamese nationalism.
But Vietnam is also, many people may not know this, but very important to the United States.
It's a big exporter of goods to the United States.
In fact, a fun fact, the United States imports more from Vietnam than it does from Germany or any other specific country in Europe, for example.
And now Vietnam is even exporting to the United States automobiles made in Vietnam.
And what a contrast that is from the country that had been just pummeled and was in poverty when the Americans finally left in 1975 and the country was unified.
Well, folks, just to give you a little more background before we dig deeper in on this topic with Mark is that unlike a lot of Americans who, when they take a vacation, they may go to Orlando or Branson, and I'm including myself in that company, or maybe the Florida Gulf Coast, something like that.
Typical vacation destinations, if you're traveling domestically, Mark is a bit of an adventure traveler.
I mean, he has gone to some places that most people will never see.
And this is not the first time we've had Mark on to talk about some of his travels.
I was looking through the archives here a little bit earlier.
It looks like a couple of years ago, he was in Estonia, and he shared observations with us from visits to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Austria.
That was not the only time we've had him on to talk about some of his travels.
And he has gone to some, again, some very unique places that most tourists wouldn't think about taking a vacation to.
And we will get to more of that.
But Mark had emailed me, and we've been talking about doing another interview for a few weeks now.
And we never go too long without talking to Mark about some current event or headline or whatever reason he's on for.
He's such a regular.
But we were on the phone a couple of days ago, and we were just talking.
I just thought this would make for a fascinating.
I was fascinated by it.
If I think I'm fascinated by it, I think perhaps you might be as well.
So that having been said in that stage now, reset for you, Mark.
Please share with us more about your time in Vietnam.
What prompted you to go there?
And as a traveler, I mean, if you tell me you went to any major city in America, I could probably pretty quickly determine the tourist attractions or the so-called tourist attractions in that location.
What is there for American travelers?
What do American travelers look for in Vietnam?
What are you doing there?
Well, that's a good question.
I went there with my wife, and we went different parts of the country.
We landed in Saigon.
Officially, it's known as Ho Chi Minh City, but people still call it Saigon.
It's referred to as Saigon all over the city.
Lots of things say Saigon.
Even periodicals refer to the city as Saigon.
And it was interesting comparing it with Los Angeles.
Each city is about the same size and population.
Saigon's population is about 9 million.
It's the biggest by far city in Vietnam.
Saigon alone is responsible for a quarter of the country's GDP.
And the contrast with Los Angeles is really striking.
It starts even in the airport.
The Los Angeles airport, by all accounts, is one of the shabbiest, most chaotic airports in the United States, maybe in the world.
The big airport for Saigon, Tencinut, is very modern, just like airports in Singapore or Japan or China and so forth.
They're well organized, clean, efficient, a big contrast already.
And then in Vietnam, in Saigon itself, what's there to see?
Well, first of all, we stayed at a very nice hotel in the center, which has beautiful buildings from the French colonial period.
For almost a century, Vietnam and Indochina or Southeast Asia was under the control of French.
So there's some beautiful buildings.
There's an enormous Catholic cathedral, there's a big opera house, and if you've seen the movie The Quiet American, the Continental Hotel, which was just a few blocks from where we were.
Also, it's in the kind of center of things.
One evening there was an enormous rock concert, outdoor rock concert, of young people listening to music that's very similar to modern music all around the world.
Lots of young people all enjoying themselves and gyrating.
The first impression one gets coming into Saigon is the tremendous number of motorbikes.
Saigon, as I said, has about 9 million people and it has 7 million motorbikes.
It's just huge fleets of these people riding on motorbikes.
Now, they don't do that not just because they can't buy a car.
There are lots of cars.
There's 300,000 cars registered in Saigon.
But because the roads are narrow, most of them.
And because if everybody drove a car, there'd just be no part, traffic would just be a standstill.
But it's incredible the extent to which all these people on these motorbikes sort of make it all work.
And they don't drive as fast as people do in the United States.
But that's one of the things that comes right off the bat.
The other is a tremendous amount of building going on.
Vietnam, you ask about tourist things, hundreds of miles in the central part of the country are very beautiful beaches.
And a tremendous amount of money has been put into building hotels, resorts, and so forth along a very large area up around Da Nang, which is very beautiful beaches to handle tourists.
And the tourists come mainly, though, not from the United States or even from Europe, but from Korea, Japan, China, India, Indonesia, other parts of Asia.
So that's a big thing.
One of the most beautiful places in Vietnam is in the north, and it's a place called Ha Long Bay.
There's some very beautiful scenes of that in the movie Indoxin with Catherine Deneuve, a French movie from the 1990s.
It's a bay with about 3,000 small islands, and it's a very, very beautiful, very restful, very impressive thing in the north there as well.
But in Saigon, it's not so much that the city itself is so beautiful, although it has many beautiful buildings from, especially the French period, but it has just a very dynamic vibe to it.
Hanoi, the capital, is a lot more sort of formal.
The population is not as large.
The people are not as perhaps as focused on enterprise and money and getting ahead.
But the building is going on all over the place.
Hold on right there.
Mark, hold on right there.
We're going to take a quick break.
We will be back with you, Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, sharing with us his observations and takeaways and why it should be of interest to our audience as we continue his recent.
Do you enjoy great tasting coffee but are tired of supporting companies that hate you?
If so, let me tell you about Above Time Coffee.
Above Town Coffee is a privately owned and operated small business.
They hand roast coffee and ship it to customers throughout the United States and abroad.
Above Top Coffee was launched because they saw a need for more pro-white businesses serving our people.
The time has come to take our own side.
And did I mention their coffee tastes great?
It's the best coffee I've ever tasted.
When James brought home a sample from a conference, I was hooked and threw out all the other brands.
I think you will too after you make an order at abovetimecoffee.com.
Living a healthy and active lifestyle is important to us.
And I appreciate the effort Above Town Coffee invests in keeping its products organic.
And there are so many flavors to choose from.
Check it out for yourself by visiting abovetowncoffee.com.
It's the only coffee we drink at the Edwards Home.
Delicious Coffee, a company that serves the interests of our people.
Check out their selection today at abovetowncoffee.com.
Introducing PrepStartsNow.com, your ultimate guide to readiness and peace of mind.
We offer practical preparedness tools, training, and education to take your family's household readiness to the next level.
Browse the prep shop for essential products, check out our planning guides, and stay informed with our prep blog.
Visit prepstartsnow.com and subscribe to our emails for exclusive offers, new products, and future events.
Remember, preparedness begins with PrepStartsNow.com.
Former Sheriff Richard Mack recounts in his book, The Proper Role of Law Enforcement, how he came to realize while working as a VCOP how wrong the all-too-common orientation of police officers is when they think of their job as being to write tickets and arrest people.
Richard Mack tells of his personal transformation from by the number cop to constitution conscious defender of citizen safety and freedoms.
Learn what it really means to serve and protect.
Purchase your copy at cspoa.org.
That's C-S-P-O-A dot org.
So we're back with Mark Webber.
A little bit different tonight.
Of course, as always, Mark is the director of the Institute for Historical Review.
As ever, an accomplished historian, lecturer, current affairs analyst, and author, educated in both the United States and Europe.
And boy, is he well traveled, holds a master's degree in modern European history to boot.
And I do enjoy, we don't do it often, but when we do it, I always enjoy it, whether we're talking with Mark, as we have done before, this is not his first time to talk about his travels, or someone else, or even my own.
A few years ago, I believe seven or eight years ago, my wife and I traveled to Belize.
We also spent a little bit of time in Mexico and Honduras.
And it's just fascinating.
I mean, the Belize excursion, especially so, because it was in Belize City.
The president's quarters are there.
I mean, not far.
It used to be called British Honduras.
And well, it was something.
There is, beyond trivial pursuit and trivial knowledge, there is an appetite for this sort of discussion, Mark.
And so I toss it back to you, my friend, and ask you, again, what are the takeaways for an American listening audience and why they should be interested in the goings-on in Vietnam today?
Well, the big reason is Vietnam's an increasingly important country, and especially the United States.
As I said, there's a lot of import from Vietnam to the United States, more than any other single European country, including even Germany, which is the biggest exporter to the United States.
Trade with Germany is larger because the United States itself sells more to Germany than it does to Vietnam.
But the imports from Vietnam and the imports from Vietnam are mostly, number one, electronic goods, cell phones, big screen television sets, computers.
They also export large numbers of a large amount of clothing and other goods.
Vietnam exports aluminum.
It's the world's second largest exporter of coffee, although most of the coffee from Vietnam is sent to Europe.
But the big thing is Vietnam is trying to navigate between the United States and China.
And this is an important point.
Even though the ruling party in both China and Vietnam is a communist party, they are very wary of each other.
There's a very strong view in Vietnam that China is the great sort of danger, the great rival.
And there are monuments in Vietnam, not just to those who fought against the French or the Americans, but of Chinese generals and commanders who fought in the 13th and 14th centuries against the Chinese.
China is the great country that Vietnam worries about.
And that's why its relations with the United States have been very good.
And so Vietnam tries to navigate, like much of East Asia does now, between the United States and the increasingly important China.
And that's an important thing.
The Chinese are nationalists.
You know, if there's anything to underscore the kind of, I think, fiasco or stupidity of the Vietnam War, it's that after the country Americans left and the country was unified, five years later, the Chinese and the Vietnamese fought a war against each other.
Even though during the war we were told that China and Vietnam and the Soviet Union are part of this big communist monolithic world.
In fact, nationalism is far more important, not only for the Vietnamese, but around the world.
That's far more important than whatever ideology or political system they claim to have.
And finally, more importantly than that, is starting in the 1990s, Vietnam began developing very close relations with the United States.
Now, there's a great deal of apprehension and worry about the U.S. because of Trump's tariff policies.
Not just that there are tariffs on Vietnamese goods and that the United States has been an important market for those goods.
It's that there's not any certainty about what even Trump's tariff policy is because he keeps going in and out and back and forth on the thing.
And that causes a lot of apprehension about its relationship with the United States.
And that's dangerous because countries like to deal with other countries on the basis of predictability and trustworthiness.
And that's a big problem right now, not just for Vietnam, but for many other countries in their relations with the U.S.
And that's discussed even in the press and media in China.
Of course, it's discussed all over the world too.
But my point is that the Chinese economy, or excuse me, the Vietnamese economy has been growing over the last 20 years or so about 6, 7, 8, 9% a year.
This year, the government wants it to be 10% growth.
The United States growth this year economically may be 1.5%, something like that.
And it's been more or less flat in Germany and France and Britain in recent years.
So China is just increasingly important.
The government of Vietnam is building a high-speed railroad connecting Hanoi with Saigon.
That's a distance about from Los Angeles to Eugene, Oregon.
In other words, quite a distance.
And they'll build it.
And one of the contrasts, and especially for somebody here in California, is that some years ago, California was supposed to build a high-speed railroad connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles.
And after cost overruns and delays and bureaucracy, the government now says, well, they'll build the high-speed railroad connecting Fresno and Merced, which makes the whole thing ridiculous because they're connecting just two basically secondary important cities.
But anyway, that's one of the differences, is the dynamism of Vietnamese society and many of these countries that are that rapidly developing.
One of the big points I think to make is that this is not the world of the 1950s or 60s or 70s or 80s.
That world is gone.
And America's role in the world has to take into account the reality that China and Vietnam and other countries, Indonesia and so forth, are increasingly important economically and increasing and will be increasingly important even politically in the years ahead.
Mark, this is Keith Alexander.
Let me ask you this.
Where did Vietnam get its technology and where did it get its industrial infrastructure?
Did they get it from China, the United States, or some third party?
Well, like other countries, Vietnam sort of started from ground zero in 1975.
And for some years, they tried to copy the Soviet model, which was a fiasco, which was a catastrophe.
Since then, the development has been fueled above all by foreign investment.
For example, there's an enormous Samsung cell phone factory outside of Hanoi that we went by.
The manufacturing of Vietnam is the number, it's replaced China as the number one producer of athletic footwear and sneakers in the world.
But they're marketed under names like Nike or Adidas or whatever in the United States.
In other words, it's foreigners who have put in a lot of that.
But they graduate a lot of engineers in Vietnam.
Of course, China graduates even many more engineers, both proportionately, percentage-wise, and in numbers than the United States.
But the high-speed railroad that's being built is built by the Chinese.
But other things, they just opened a subway in Saigon.
I think it was built by a French company, I think, or a Japanese company, maybe Korean.
Anyway, outside.
So China, I mean, Vietnam has developed largely with foreign, you might say, money and development.
But the technology is not all that advanced.
This is basically putting together things.
They're not at the level of innovation yet.
But they'll get there.
I mean, they'll go ahead just in the same way that in the 1960s when the first Japanese cars popped up in the United States, they were pretty small and boxy and so forth.
But eventually they get better and better.
And that will happen, I'm confident, with Vietnam as it has for every other country.
Mark, I've got so many questions for you.
Just curiosities, I guess.
And I want to get to the issue of homogeneity.
I don't want to try to work in a broad subject like that and how it plays into what's going on in Vietnam with the couple of minutes we have remaining before the end of this segment.
But I would ask you this.
Do the Vietnamese people, or in your experience, did the Vietnamese people during your 11 days there, do they look suspiciously among Westerners, particularly Americans, based upon, of course, the war?
No, absolutely not.
The war is over.
They're just building ahead.
Vietnamese are very friendly to not just Americans, but almost everybody.
The society, one of the things I want to stress is how conservative the society is.
There's a very strong sense of a kind of Confucian respect for elders.
People try to be polite.
They think it's wrong to lose control of your emotions.
For example, a couple of things.
First of all, there's no DEI in Vietnam.
There's no political correctness in Vietnam.
To the contrary, homosexual behavior is not allowed in any public way.
There's a very strong anti-drug policy.
Even having drugs or even being in the possession of people who possess drugs or sell drugs are very severely punished in Vietnam.
Pornography is fairly ubiquitous and widespread in China and Japan.
It's forbidden in Vietnam.
Prostitution is illegal in Vietnam.
And also, I was very surprised at how religious the society is.
Vietnamese religion is a kind of combination of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucian, but the vast majority of shops and stores have little shrines, have religious shrines, and they have them in their homes.
But 10% of the population is Roman Catholic, and there are very flourishing, big Catholic churches and cathedrals around the country.
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
The Chinese government even—what's that?
I was just saying that's fascinating.
That's fascinating to me.
Oh, yeah.
One of the biggest, I mean, this was introduced by the French, but no, Chinese, Vietnamese society is basically very conservative, largely because in 1975, something like 90% of the population were rural people.
About 75% of the population or 60% now are from the countryside, but they're developing in the way every industrializing country does.
That is, large numbers of people move from the countryside to the city to take jobs and so forth in urban places.
And anyway, Vietnam is going through what Britain did in the 19th century with Japan did in the early 20th century, what China went through in the last 40 years.
Hold on right there.
That same process is taking place.
Hold on right there, Mark.
We've got to take a break.
IHR.org for the Institute for Historical Review, IHR.org.
We're going to talk to Mark about homogeneity when we come back.
How would you like to help this program reach more people and earn silver at the same time?
Call or text 801-669-2211 for complete details.
News this hour from Town Hall.
I'm Mary Rose.
Former Trump advisor John Bolton has pleaded not guilty to charges of sharing classified information.
The Justice Department case accuses him of emailing classified information to family members and keeping top secret documents at his home.
Former Missouri Senator Jim Talent says as a former lawmaker, he understands the importance of handling classified material with care.
When I think of what I had to go through, every time I got a classified briefing, and I got a lot of them, and how much I sweated trying to remember when I would do interviews, trying to not to reveal information that I had gotten when I was talking about subjects just to stick to open source stuff.
The 76-year-old Bolton is a longtime fixture in Republican foreign policy circles and served for more than a year in Trump's first administration as national secretary advisor.
Democrats are reportedly looking to oust Senator John Fetterman from the Senate in the next election.
Fetterman drew the ire of his party by blaming Democrats for the government shutdown.
Quote, I follow country, then party, and it's the wrong thing for the country.
Fetterman also echoes a Republican point about those expiring Obamacare subsidies, reminding his own party they were already set to expire at the end of the year.
Media reports now say top Democrats in Pennsylvania are maneuvering to run against Fetterman in a 2028 primary.
Bomb Agnes reporting.
President Trump is seeing a boost in public approval for his handling of the Israel-Palestinian conflict following his role in brokering a ceasefire in Gaza.
The latest AP Nork poll finds that 47% of Americans support his approach, a notable increase from 37% a month earlier.
It's driven primarily by Democrats viewing Trump more positively on the issue.
More on these stories at townhall.com.
Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder, launching a new project, or just looking for that extra edge, your brain is your most valuable asset.
And now there's a way to support it every day.
Think Factor.
From the Makers of Relief Factor, ThinkFactor is built to help you stay sharp, nurture your memory, and boost your attention.
It unlocks the mental clarity and precision you need to stay ahead of the game no matter the challenge.
For me, it's been a game changer.
I have never had such clarity, focus, and concentration before.
I love telling you about Think Factor.
If you're a go-getter who refuses to settle, ThinkFactor helps you perform at your best and keep your edge.
Call 800 the number for relief, 800 for Relief, or visit relieffactor.com to order ThinkFactor.
That's 800 for Relief, or go to relieffactor.com for ThinkFactor.
Your first bottle?
Just 1995.
Think Factor.
I'll bet it'll be a game changer for you like it has been for me.
Think Factor.
Think clearer.
Perform better daily.
Think Factor.
The Occidental Quarterly is a journal for people who dare to think for themselves and refuse to accept the current liberal orthodoxies and media-fueled delusions.
Edited by Dr. Kevin McDonald, TOQ fearlessly discusses race, culture, the future of the Western world, and other subjects that our enemies consider taboo and want to outlaw.
TOQ writers give no quarter to political correctness or other modern methods of suppression.
Four times a year, right to your mailbox, TOQ delivers thoughtful analysis and commentary on current events, new perspectives on history, interviews, reviews of important books, and so much more.
Do you have the courage to subscribe to the next four issues of TOQ for just $60 per year?
If so, you can subscribe today by visiting www.toqonline.com.
You might be surprised how much you already agree with our fearless contributors.
Subscribe to the Occidental Quarterly, edited by Kevin McDonald today at www.toqonline.com.
It is common for politicians, major media outlets, and nonprofits to hype white on black murders aggressively, or even claim that blacks are living in fear of white people.
Lynch for simply being black.
Hard to believe, but that's what was done.
And some people still want to do that.
This is why National Conservative launched the Interracial Homicide Tracking Project.
We have now documented well over 2,000 confirmed interracial homicides since January 2023 and created the most comprehensive overview of these killings anyone has ever made.
We plug the gaping holes in data left by other homicide trackers and government crime stats.
Rather than engaging in hyperbole and vitriolic rhetoric like everyone else, we are simply creating a massive sample size of empirical evidence so people can form rational and informed opinions about a sensitive and politically charged issue.
Visit natcon.life.
N-A-T-C-O-N dot L-I-F-E.
And welcome back with the one and only Mark Webber.
I know a lot of you who were at our sold-out conference in South Carolina earlier this year had the chance to meet with Mark and left better for it.
And for all of these years, we are so thankful, you and I and all, for his contributions to this radio program.
I will give you a little foreshadowing.
This is a preview of what you will get if you attend the next IHR meeting in Southern California.
Mark is going to be talking about there and then what he's talking about here with us tonight, his recent trip to Vietnam.
A surprising and dynamic country, as he writes, that has become an important trade partner of the United States with a youthful and homogeneous population of more than 100 million.
100 million, did you know that?
And a rapidly growing and increasingly diverse economy.
The Southeast Asian nation exports big screen televisions, computers, cell phones, clothing, and much more to the United States.
Vietnam recently overtook China as the world's largest manufacturer of athletic footwear and sneakers.
Just mentioned that, in a presentation enhanced with video clips, photos and images, Mark will describe, at the next IHR meeting in California, the remarkably conservative and religious character of the Vietnamese society, the commanding role of the Communist Party, the legacy of the U.S.-Vietnam War and how this confident but wary nation tries to maintain good relationships with both the U.S.
And China as it plays an increasingly important role in The world.
Mark, all of this must be very densely populated, because you just said that they have a hundred thousand million people.
America has three hundred and thirty million people, so they almost have one-third of our population and I guarantee they don't have one third of our land.
That's what popped into my mind.
Well, we'll take that one first.
And then i've got another question that tends into that Mark.
Well yeah, almost every country is more densely populated than the United States.
I mean France Germany Netherlands, of course, is even more densely populated.
Um yeah, they're a large uh yeah, the population is, of course uh yeah, more dense than the United States, or huge.
Of course, everyone knows enormous tracts.
I've even lived there in the, in the Midwest.
There are just uh very very, very few people.
But no, I I want to get the point that you are sort of hinting at uh James, and that is Vietnam, is a nation, the population is Vietnamese.
They are very uh mindful and proud of being Vietnamese.
Uh they uh, they fought uh war for years against first the French colonial power and then against the American government in south Vietnam, which had really very little, really uh genuine popular support in the country.
Uh, the national hero of Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh, and he was, from his very early age, a very staunch patriot.
At the age of 29 he was living in Paris.
Ho Chi Minh lived in France, in London, in New York, Moscow.
He traveled widely.
He spoke not just Vietnamese but also French and Chinese.
But from an early age he was determined to fight for his people and he did.
At the age of 29 he rented a suit and went to the Versailles Conference of the victorious powers of the First World War to ask for freedom for Vietnam.
They ignored him, they didn't pay attention to him.
The only people that would listen to him were the communists, was the Soviet Union, and that's one of the reasons that he was for years a communist.
But he was much more importantly for him than that was his ardent support for Vietnamese independence, and he fought his whole life for that.
He was a very.
He was a modest man.
He worked as a day laborer, as a cook, as a snow sweeper, in very humble jobs in France, in England, in the United States, and he observed, but he never forgot and fought and worked for his life for the independence of his people.
I think that's an inspiring thing for many people in our country who they care about our people but they want things to happen very quickly.
They don't have anything like the dedication that goes over more than half a century and more that Ho Chi Minh and other people who have been patriots in their own people, in their own countries, which I think should be a model or an example for ourselves.
He was not a great supporter of DEI in Vietnam then, I'd tell you.
Jose, yeah, no, it's a very masculine country.
It's a very, it's not a, yeah, it's a very, very, no, that, that, that would just be considered laughably stupid in most of the world.
Remember, Asian societies, uh, Confucian societies, they're hierarchical.
They believe that there are immutable, age-old distinctions between parents and children, between husbands and wives, between different generations.
That's sort of, as they say, baked into Asian society and the Confucian way of looking at things.
Americans have, for better or for worse, put a huge emphasis, especially in recent decades, on individualism.
We're all individuals.
And a country like that is not a nation.
It's a collection of individuals.
And I think that's shown by the fact that increasingly it's very difficult for America as a country to do things successfully as a country.
I mean, there are businesses that do well.
There are certain things that do well.
But as a country, the last time, I guess, America as a country did something successful was maybe the moon landing in 1969, or maybe the fraud.
Please, what?
I said, which may be a fraud.
You know, they've had a lot of people.
Well, okay, but my point is America doesn't do things as a nation.
Vietnam does.
China does.
And the leadership of the country, again, it's a one party, but it's led by people who are really nationalists.
They're patriots.
They care about their country and their people, not just individuals or so forth.
And anyway, that's, I think, an important one of the reasons why Vietnam or China are not only doing better, I mean, they're not only growing in that sense, but they will continue to do so because they have a much sort of focused vision of the future and of the future of their own country and their own people.
Well, you were talking to me about the advancement that has been made there in the cities that you visited in Vietnam, Mark.
And, you know, for me, I admitted to you earlier this week when we were talking about it.
I hadn't really considered Vietnam outside of its history during the war in the 1960s and 70s.
And when you compare it to places like Beijing and Tokyo and Korea, other places like that, it sort of seems like a second-tier Asian city, you know, Asian nation.
But you're telling me now that it has skylines that not only rival but surpass a lot of American cities.
Can we borrow something from their experience?
You know, how could we make America more like Vietnam?
How does that modify?
It's very difficult.
It would mean a tremendous change in how we look at things.
One of the big worries I have about America is a kind of complacency that many people have in the United States.
This view that we've had a great run.
We were top dog for many years, have been the top dog.
America is still the number one, I think, military power in the world, certainly, and certainly the number one financial power, even if it's not number one anymore in manufacturing, it's still very important.
And there's a sense by Americans, how can we just hold on to that?
And we don't need to change.
We just need to sort of continue doing what we do.
That's a dangerous thing.
I think that in the future it's going to mean just radically rethinking the trajectory that we've been on for the last 50, 60, 70 years in this country.
And that's very difficult.
But for a country or for any society that's been so successful in the past, so people don't want to, well, their tendency is not to change when we've had such a successful run in the past.
But that's the legacy of empires that fall because they are not able to change and adapt to new circumstances.
And that's very important because the world is a very different world than it was in the 1930s, 40s, 50s.
Remember, after, I've made this point many times, but after the Second World War, the United States was the only important country that hadn't been destroyed in the war.
And America was top dog, number one, financial.
Jewish power and influence started to destroy America.
We have, you know, I said, and then Jewish power and influence started to destroy America with things like the civil rights movement, the homosexual rights movement, and all of this liberalism.
That's why I think that, you know, Trump basically represents a repudiation of the last 70 years in a lot of ways.
And maybe that's a good thing for America.
He represents a repudiation.
He's a reaction to that.
But he doesn't have a clear idea of the kind of country it should be.
He says he wants to make America great again.
Good point.
When was it great?
What exactly is the basis on which he thinks society should be built?
That's much less clear for Donald Trump, and I think for many people who are supporting him.
But anyway, Vietnam, I mean, Vietnam's not the greatest country in the world.
It's still much poorer than the United States or Europe.
The average income is just a fraction of what it is in the United States, especially in the countryside.
In the countryside, people live still much more poorly than they do in Saigon or Hanoi.
But that's changing.
And my big point isn't that Vietnam's the greatest place or anything like that.
It's just to be aware of the rising challenge of Vietnam and of other countries too that are going to be playing an increasingly important role in the world.
And that means really adjusting.
It will require adjusting for the American attitude.
Remember, the American attitude, I remember, I mean, a couple years ago was let's have you finish that thought when we come back.
We've got to take a quick break.
Our last of the hour, Mark Weber, to conclude this hour and his final thoughts for you right after this.
Stay tuned.
Find your inner rebel at Dixie Republic, the world's largest Confederate store, located in Traveler's Rest, South Carolina.
The anti-white, anti-Christ, anti-Southern world ends at the asphalt.
Welcome to God's country.
Log on to DixieRepublic.com to view our Southern merchandise from flags to t-shirts to artwork.
At the store, browse through our extensive collection of belt buckles and have a custom-made leather belt handcrafted in our Johnny Revs gun and leather shop.
That's DixieRepublic.com where you can meet all of your Southern needs.
While you're waiting, drop by our Confederate corner for a free cup of coffee and good conversation.
Remember, there are no strangers here, just friends who haven't met yet.
Dixie Republic, we're not just a roadside attraction, we're a destination for our people.
For more information, visit DixieRepublic.com.
I have a question.
Can a nation conceived in liberty carry its head high if it denies protection to the youngest and most vulnerable of its citizens?
Can a country founded on God-given rights continue to thrive without understanding that life is a precious gift from our Creator?
I believe that great nations and great civilizations spring from a people who have a moral compass.
I don't think a civilization can long endure that does not have respect for all human life, born and not yet.
I will be in earnest.
I will not equivocate and I will not excuse.
I will not retreat an inch and I will be heard.
One thing I promise you, I will always take a stand for life.
Mark Weber has long been its director.
I am there now.
You should be too.
Please support his work.
We're talking with Mark tonight, not about current affairs, as we so often want to do with him.
And we certainly could have purposed this hour very well in doing so again.
But I wanted to take a different path tonight and talk with him about a unique experience that I think not many of us can say we have shared.
He recently spent 11 days in Vietnam, and I enjoyed hearing about it over the phone, and I thought you might too.
And so that is what the purpose of this hour has been.
And Mark, I'm going to ask you two questions with only one segment remaining, and I want you to pocket this one.
We'll get to this maybe last.
But as an American tourist, you and your wife, you were not there on official business.
You were there on leisure time, I guess you could say.
I want to ask you what you did, what you saw, you know, the things you wanted to see in country.
We'll save that for last.
But what do you think is important about your experience that you would like to communicate to Americans?
All right, that is the last question.
But before we get to that, it will be homogeneity.
When you compare and contrast, you know, Vietnam, which had a hard time a few decades ago, and its homogeneity, how would you compare its advantages that it may have even against a superpower like America because it is a homogenous country?
Let's start there.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's an enormous strength for any nation when its population is unified.
And I don't mean just politically, but also culturally, racially, ethnically.
That's a powerful thing.
And the Vietnamese population is overwhelmingly Vietnamese.
And its leadership is dedicated to what's good for Vietnam, not for humanity, not for individuals.
You know, one of the interesting anecdotes that the tour guide who there's a long thing to say about him, he made, he said that when somebody in a marketplace tries to steal something, the reaction of other people is to beat the hell out of them and then turn them over to the police.
He gave an example when he was in university.
Somebody tried to steal something from one of the students and they just beat the hell out of him and then turned them over to the police.
And the police accepted that.
Now, that can't happen in America because people would say, well, wait a minute.
You don't have the right to punish someone without any due process.
Why, that's just taking away his rights.
And we have, of course, all these Miranda rights and so forth.
The Vietnamese don't look at society like that.
And that's the way Americans used to look at.
Yeah, that's why they used to do in the South, I can tell you for sure.
Back in 1995.
That's right.
That's right.
And that's a healthy society.
I mean, sure, there are going to be cases, there'll be injustices, but it's a healthier situation than what we have now with this hyper emphasis on my rights, my rights are paramount.
A society like that is a collection of individuals.
It will not be able to act in a coherent communitarian way when everybody's looking out for number one first and foremost, and that's what really matters.
And Vietnam, and again, China's like this, Japan, these countries are, now, they're going to suffer because especially a country like Japan has been under American influence, just like Western Europe.
And so they have imbibed or accepted a lot of this American emphasis on individualism.
We're all supposed to find ourselves.
Well, we only find ourselves as human beings within the context of other people.
We don't have any.
We are social beings.
And anyway, I guess that's a big point.
And, you know, I wish well of every country, every people.
And the Vietnamese are on a fairly good path right now.
And that's helped enormously by the fact that they have a clear sense of their identity.
See, and I think what's so interesting about your testimony tonight, Mark, and you basically, I mean, I say testimony, I mean, that's one way to put it, but otherwise, just sharing your observations of your time over there for nearly two weeks is that, I mean, of any country, it would be interesting to me, but this particular country, one which, quote unquote, we were at war with for so many years back a few decades ago, to see it prospering at this level is interesting to me.
And so, again, I would ask you, as we begin to get to summation, and you can take that summation in any direction you would like, but I would like to ask you, when you and your wife were mapping out this trip and you were planning the places you wanted to see, you wanted to go to, where are the stops?
Where were the stops that were of most interest to you?
She's more interested than I am in the food, which is good.
It's very plentiful.
It's healthy.
Vietnamese food, if you're familiar with it, is good.
And it's, of course, inexpensive, too.
I mean, the costs are much lower than in the United States for even the same level of service.
And, of course, you can go native and save even more money.
There are beautiful sights, too.
I mean, beautiful scenery.
We went on a boat trip, several boat trips in some of the river areas, including the Mekong Delta.
I mean, one thing, though, I will say is I'm very glad to be living in Southern California because the climate in Vietnam is a lot like Florida or South Alabama.
It's hot and humid.
And, well, I don't like that very much.
But I appreciate being living in Southern California.
On the other hand, we don't like the politics of Southern California.
Well, that's right.
That's true.
It's a give and take.
Right.
It's the people that are going to matter, really.
But anyway, that's one thing, of course.
And so, I mean, she wants to go to a place that's interesting, fascinating, and different than just going to a country we're more familiar with.
I mean, we've been all over the United States, too, and I have as well, even more when I was younger.
And we've seen a lot of the United States as well and Europe.
But, you know, she's more interested, especially now, to go to places that are going to be out of the beaten path, off the beaten path.
Is there any.
No, no, for sure.
I mean, yeah, no, it is fascinating to go to places that are so much less traveled than places in Europe and elsewhere, even though we don't have a spiritual or racial connection to these places.
It's fascinating to visit.
I was always fascinated with pre-Columbian culture, even though I had nothing to do with it.
But I would ask you, I would ask you, is there any sort of expat community in Vietnam to speak of?
In Costa Rica places, there are Americans living there because it's a fun vibe.
The crime rate is a lot lower in the United States.
don't feel afraid walking around it at night uh i mean it's uh yeah it's it's kind of a most of the people speak english Many people speak English.
That's the big language.
And of course, anybody who wants to sell things to tourists and so forth, they've learned some rudimentary English, but many people speak it very well.
I mean, during the French period, the second language is French.
Then during the Soviet, you might say allied period, then Russian was taught in the schools.
But now English.
And English has, of course, become essentially the world language for a second world language, the lingua franca.
If a person from Hungary is talking with somebody from Brazil, they talk in English.
I mean, luckily for us, that's the kind of world language.
But, yeah, I guess that's my answer to that question now.
Let me ask you this.
Go ahead, Keith.
Do you think that Vietnam is going to challenge the hierarchy that exists among nations in the Far East?
Are they going to challenge the Chinese?
Are they going to supplant the Japanese or the Koreans or the Taiwanese?
How do you see the future economy?
One minute.
It's going to have a larger population than Taiwan, and the population is younger than Japan.
Japan society, you know, the economy has been almost flatlined for years in Japan.
I mean, it's been a very, very almost stagnant.
I mean, they live very well.
Japan's a rich country, but it's not a very dynamic country anymore.
It's become an elderly country, a lot like European countries have become.
But Vietnam will, Vietnam will continue growing for years because it still has a very large rural population of young people that can come to the cities and replenish, you might say.
And of course, the average age, it's only about the average age of something like 27 or something.
I mean, it's much more youthful.
And so the whole vibe is very different.
It's very, you sort of, things are alive and so forth.
Americans don't have as many children.
And so that's, but that will get, but it will bend to China, especially because America is very confused about even what its foreign policy is.
Donald Trump promises an America first policy, but he's been involved now, increasingly in a second term, in all sorts of things overseas.
And that's contrary to at least what people were expecting, I think.
So it's a little unclear what direction he wants to go in.
But the point is that Vietnam and other countries are trying to navigate, including even countries like Australia or New Zealand.
They have to navigate because China is increasingly important.
And Vietnam and Australia and these countries have to navigate between the two big rivals, the United States and China.
Well, I think that America, particularly under Trump, Trump wants us to become more self-sufficient, to be the way that we used to be before we offshore all of our factories to the Far East.
And that, I think, is a worthy goal.
It's basically, we used to have a very vibrant blue-collar middle class in America when I was growing up.
You could have a person that could, you know, with a high school education could get an industrial job that paid enough so that he could give his family a middle-class life on one income.
And that's probably what they're striving for in Vietnam and in every other nation.
On the other hand, we have the biggest market, so we have a lot of other people that want to come into our market but don't want us to be involved in there.
Well, Keith, thank you for the punctuation mark on this hour.
Mark, I got to tell you, you really stuck the landing, brother, on this one, as you always do, but this was a little bit different hour.
And 60 minutes went by real fast talking about this.
I hope that everybody enjoyed it and learned from it and had some interesting takeaways as a result of Mark's sharing of his trip with us.
Going to be in Southern California, and you can hear it for yourself when he speaks on it at the next meeting of the IHR.
But until then, IHR.org.
Mark, we will look forward to talking to you again, I hope, before year's end.
Another year, as this broadcast always does, another year going by all too fast as well.