The War On Truth | Eric Hovde
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Well, folks, the state of Wisconsin may decide the presidential election. It's about as tight as it gets, not just on the presidential level, but also in terms of the Senate race between Senator Tammy Baldwin and Eric Hovde, a businessman from the state of Wisconsin. I had the opportunity to travel around the state with Eric Hovde a couple of weeks ago, and then I sat down with him for a fireside chat. Here's what that sounded like.

Eric, it's a pleasure to be here. I want to start by asking you about the economic situation in the country. So we're being told in the run up to the vice presidential debate that the economy is doing amazing, that it's going great guns, that the Biden record has been incredible. But obviously, that's not how the American people are feeling it. So the media are trying to convince everybody that what they feel really isn't real. It's just their feelings. Tell me a little bit about how how inflation has hit here and what what has gone wrong? What needs to what needs to change?

Look, over 50% of people in America and Wisconsin feel that they've been in a recession the last two years. Why? Because they have been. We've never had real wages decline for three years in a row. That's wage increases subtracted for the rate of inflation. Because they collapse the purchasing power of everybody's dollars.

By 22% if you measure inflation the way they measure it now. But if you took the way they measured inflation back into the 80s, it's almost a decline by 40%. It's hammered people.

And everybody sees it with the price of their groceries, their energy bills, the housing costs. I like to talk about the price of auto insurance because I got my bill about three months ago and it went up 30 percent in one year. And it's like, holy cow. So this is a direct consequence of what they have created. What I love about the left is they have become experts at gaslighting.

on every single issue. They talk about wealth inequality. I don't know if everybody knows out there, but wealth inequality grew more under President Obama than at any time. It actually declined under President Trump. Real wages rose by 7.7%. Then wealth inequality skyrocketed again under President Biden. What is happening? Well, it's called the cash economy.

Think of the letter K. 50% of Americans have been crushed. Their real wages have gone down. If you are in the top 10, 20%, you've done very well because your asset values have gone up the stock market because just like inflation, they created inflation in assets. So if you own real estate, stocks, or a business, you've done very well. And if you're in that 20, 30% that you own your own home,

And you were able to refinance it, but you don't own a lot beyond that. You've kind of gone sideways. Your purchasing power has gone down, but you refinanced your mortgage at a low rate and your home value has gone up in value. So half of Americans are getting crushed, 20%.

20% to 30% just kind of move sideways, and it's really only about 20% that has done very well. Some say that's only really about 10%. So that's what they've created. They've created more wealth inequality. They've hammered everyday American, the working class, the middle class,

The elderly who are living on fixed incomes and they've created this inflation with all their spending. It's amazing how the press tries to cover for them. Here's another very important thing that people need to know when they talk about GDP growth, the GDP about 2 percent. I don't know if everybody realizes this.

That GDP is almost all deficit spending. It's not a productive use of a dollar. If you spend a dollar in the private sector, you get more than a dollar in return.

So what they're basically doing is robbing our futures. And every young person out there should be outraged because what they're doing is stealing from the future when you deficit spend. And think of it for yourself. If you rack up a credit card, okay, you can go buy some nice things, but you're going to have to pay that back.

So they're just stealing from the future to try to create some level of economic growth today. And you can see it on all the government spending. Look, driving around the state, I live in Madison. The buildings that are being torn down by the university, the roads that are being redone. That was all this money that they shoved in that they're trying to spend right now to keep the economy propped up. So they've done so much structural damage to our economy. It's gonna take a while.

a long, long time to fix this problem. And obviously you're a housing guy. The housing costs in the state of Wisconsin, of all the blue wall states, so-called blue wall states, they've gone up the most in the state of Wisconsin. Tell me about how has federal policy contributed to that? It's so much of that as local land use sort of stuff, but there is federal policy that contributes to the cost of housing for people as well. Of course, first to build new housing because of the inflation they ignited. And look, I had to halt a couple of different big apartment projects

because the costs of concrete, steel, rebar, lumber. I mean, they almost tripled lumber prices for a period of time. And it just rolls all the way through. And then insurance costs. But it's the amount of regulation, the National Association of Home Builders,

estimates now that 25 to 30 percent of housing cost is tied to taxes, impact fees and regulations. That's absurd. This housing crisis is very acute for Americans on multiple different levels. First of all, for young people, what do you do? You meet a mate and

you tend to buy a dog to pre-parent, right? And then you get married and then you're like, all right, we want to buy a home. We want to start a family. If you can't find a home and can't afford a home, it's a lot harder to start a family and apartment. Not that you can't do it. And again, it's making it so difficult for the younger generation. So there's a lot of things that need to be fixed.

You're exactly right, Ben. A lot of it needs to be done at state and local levels. And I could go into the details, but I'm not going to bore everybody. But the requirements that they place today, and there's this weird dynamic with the left, just so you know. They don't like single family homes. They don't. Madison makes it almost impossible to build it. Why? Because they think that has too much of a carbon footprint. They want to have immense density.

I think it's insane. That's the American dream, to be able to own your own home.

So they're making it so much more difficult to even land plan and zone for single family homes in a city like Madison. So there's multiple different layers to it, but it's really having negative consequences for Americans. Eric, one of the things that's nice for me listening to you is that obviously you run business, so you know what business looks like. And one of the great irritants of my life covering people in politics is that none of these people have ever even remotely come close to running a Popsicle stand.

I mean, it's it's that is so true. It's truly amazing to watch people who have never had to make payroll try to explain how they have created jobs. And by creating jobs, I mean, they sucked money out of the private sector and then redistributed it to all their friends in the most inefficient possible way, thus making it more difficult for the private sector to actually generate the wealth upon which private

all of their redistribution is based. It's gotta be highly irritating for somebody like you has been so successful in business to watch it. Ronald Reagan had a great quote, uh, Democrat policy on business. If it moves, tax it, if it continues to move, regulate it. And if it keeps move or if it stops moving, subsidize it. So they do everything backwards. Um, and you know, I'm out there every day talking to small businesses, farmers, and I,

Every single one of them talks about how they're being crushed by regulation.

You know, when President Reagan got elected and he inherited an economic mess, the inflation of the late 60s and 70s, oil crisis, a whole host of different things. So he had to come in and break inflation, took interest rates up to 20, 21 percent to stop out inflation. But as part and parcel of that, he had to get the economy going.

And one of his key policies was deregulating the economy. So they pushed through massive deregulation and the economy flourished. It was really an impetus for the economic growth of the 80s and carried on into the 90s. Well, folks, I hate to tell you, but today we have a heck of a lot more regulations in place than when Ronald Reagan went about deregulation.

And then here's another one. We have more Americans not involved, working age Americans not involved in the workforce than ever before. Such a high percentage. Well, Bill Clinton, a Democrat with Newt Gingrich brought about welfare reform. By the way, welfare reform started here in this state by Tommy Thompson, if people recall. And they took that what Tommy Thompson did. Yeah, let's give a round of applause.

And by the way, the other thing that started in this state, just so everybody remembers, was school choice. And God, do we ever need school choice? But back to welfare reform. So Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich brought about welfare reform. That helped the economic growth of the 90s meaningfully.

And it pulled a lot of people into the workforce. Well, today, our welfare system is bigger than it was before Bill Clinton knew Gingrich did that. So we're choking on regulation. We have a welfare system completely out of control. And we need to correct those two things as we're pulling down this federal spending to really get the economy growing and get people's real wages growing.

When you speak about the economy like that, all I can think is how much I wish you were talking about how you grew up a middle class child.

Those are the kind of specifics that Americans are just crying out for, as more talk about that sort of thing. So when you're talking about, obviously, the handling of the economy, that also has to do with what's happened to the wage base in the country, and that has to do with the immigration system. This administration, with the help of Senator Baldwin, has opened the border wide. It's the greatest border crisis that we've had in modern American history, and

I went down to the border. I visited the border patrol. I drove for, I believe, something like 20 miles. We didn't see a single border patrol agent because the way they've set it up on the border, thanks to Joe Biden's regulatory structure, is that if you arrive on the border, rather, if you are dropped on the border by the drug cartels, because the drug cartels actually control the entirety of the southern border. I mean, when we were there, I was doing a ride along.

And there was a drone flying above us. And I turned to the border patrol agent. I said, that's ours. I assume they said, nope, that's the cartels. And the cartels literally had their drones flying over on the American side of the border, keeping tabs on the border patrol officers and where they were staffed and everything. Basically, what the drug cartels do is they actually drop off large scale illegal immigrant shipments at the

border, they know that Joe Biden had ordered Border Patrol, the first priority, was to process all these people who were falsely claiming asylum. So it served two purposes. One, they would get all those people processed and let in the country. And two, like a magnet with iron filings, all Border Patrol would have to rush to process all these people, thus leaving the rest of the border wide open for the smuggling in of tons of fentanyl, human trafficking, sex trafficking, and all the rest. And you've been watching what's going on with the border. It's had tremendous impact in every state, including Wisconsin.

Look, every state is a border state today. We felt it when they dropped 1,000 illegal immigrants in Whitewater, a town of 13,000, 14,000. The budget went upside down immediately.

The access to housing, health care got impacted significantly, schooling. It's caused enormous amounts of difficulty. I call the open border the rotten onion, and it's a strange term, but the reason why I use it is because an onion has many layers.

And if you go peel back the layers, you'll understand what I'm addressing. The first layer is what I just got finished mentioning, the access to housing and health care. When you bring in 10, 16, 20 million, they're using housing and health care. And so it's compounding that problem. And by the way, they're not paying into our health care system.

And what does that mean? Well, there's no such thing as a free lunch. So that cost gets transferred to everybody that is through higher medical bills and higher health insurance costs. So that's the first layer. The second layer is the crime issue. I don't know if everybody saw, but last week ICE put out numbers that, what was it, 13,800 former convicted criminals

murderers are in our country. 15,700 people that were convicted of sexual assault have been brought into our country. People with a criminal background, it's something to the tune of 350,000. So look, every state is dealing with this. That's why President Trump was over in Peridushin on Saturday pointing out that woman who was brutally raped

by a Venezuelan gang member. And they don't say whether it was her daughter or not, but they just say a younger female was also assaulted. And they know it was a Venezuelan gang member. And by the way, Venezuela dumped their jail cells into our country, no different than what Castro did during the Mariel boatlift.

So you've got that layer. Then you've got the layer of terrorism risk. I don't know if everybody realizes, but we're at one of the highest terrorist watch alert levels by the FBI right now in this country today because of the amount of terror suspects that have poured into our country. And then you get down to the fentanyl crisis. We lost 108,000 Americans last year to fentanyl, 112,000 the year before.

Those are enormous numbers. I like putting numbers in perspective. During the Vietnam War that went on for 19 years, major conflict for seven and a half years, we lost 58,000 Americans. Now, when that was happening, the press reported about it every day, and there was protests on college campus all over the country. Madison was one of the big ones where the protests happened. And yet here today, we're losing almost twice that amount

Every single year to this poison that's produced in China, sent to the drug cartels and brought up over our southern border. Now, the last ugly nugget about this whole thing is the humanitarian crisis they've created. Many of you know, many of you don't know. I've been fighting against this trade for decades.

15 years in this country, over 20 years internationally. I have my Hovde homes around the world rescuing abandoned children, children sold into slavery in the case of Ghana.

All of it touches all the maladies that happen to a child. And I funded something called Spotlight, which in a partnership with Thorne that all law enforcement uses to track trafficking on the Internet, because this is where a lot of trafficking happens over the Internet today. So back to the southern border, they can't account for anywhere between 80 to 100,000 children.

Now, when Donald Trump couldn't account for 4,000, the press ripped him alive. Rachel Mardau shed tears on MSNBC about that. And they can't account for 80 to 100,000 today. But sadly, a lot of those kids have ended up in the trade. And by the way, we have modern day slavery going on in this country today. How does that work? So let's say you're a Venezuelan. You want to come into this country. You go to a human trade.

cartel. I need to get into America. They tell you they're going to charge you $10,000. I don't have 10,000. Well, what do you have? I've got 5,000. Okay, you owe us 5,000. You'll pay us when you get into the country. They bring the person into the country. Now they say, oh, it costs us more. And by the way, a lot of these people are dying on that pathway into this country. But they come into the country. Okay, now you're going to be charged 15,000.

Okay, so how I'm going to pay that back? You're going to go work at this factory or this slave labor spot, and you're going to pay us a third to half of your paycheck every single month. And they're just trapped in a form of indentured servitude. So what they've created is a massive humanitarian crisis on top of all the other problems that they've created for this country.

And again, it really is astonishing. And until you go down and visit the border, you really don't even understand the extent of it. I mean, they just have full access

just giant tents that had been built to house people who are coming over temporarily, just piles of clothing that have been abandoned at the border. They're trafficking kids over the border. And then they're actually sending the kids back in because they're using the kids as a way to actually leverage in people illegally. So they'll take a kid and let you cycle the kid through three or four times. Cause it's easier to be given asylum. If you come with a child than if you come without a child, I mean, it really is quite awful. Despite the fact that, uh, our eminent borders are has done such a tremendous job, uh,

on the, on the Southern border. She's been excellent. As with all of her things, she's such a good head of the space national space foundation. We actually have people stuck in space. That's how amazing Kamala Harris is at everything. Um,

In any case, there's so many issues that you're taking on in this election cycle. We had the privilege of sitting a little bit earlier with some members of Moms for Liberty who were talking with us about Title IX and the attempts by Senator Baldwin and others in the federal government to cram down a perversely idiotic view of

radical gender ideology on people saying that boys should be in girls' locker rooms and all the rest. I mean, this is really out of touch stuff. And I think one of the things that makes it hard for Americans is we never were forced when we were in fifth grade to learn the details of the SRY gene. We just knew from the time that we were two that there's a difference between boys and girls. And we've relied on that. And it's worked out pretty well, actually, for literally all of human history.

And now we're being told that unless you can actually explain the varieties of various intersex peoples, then maybe your boy is actually a little girl. This is something that's being pushed by the federal government. It's being pushed at the federal level by the administrative state and by Senator Baldwin, who is very involved in these efforts.

Yeah, look, this is deeply troubling at multiple different levels. And Senator Baldwin is one of the ones pushing this big. And our school boards are dealing with this right now. And sadly, a lot of them are capitulating to this, requiring schools to allow guys to go into girls' bathrooms and locker rooms.

and for guys to compete in girls' sports. My youngest daughter was just a phenomenal athlete. She won the Wisconsin Female Athlete of the Year when she was her senior year in high school in 2017. And, you know, when I grew up, you know, because I just turned 60, so...

There wasn't a lot of opportunities for girls in sports. There just wasn't, you know, cheerleading, dancing, tennis. There was a few limited sports.

And I got to see the growth of all these sports for women and girls. And I thought, what a wonderful thing. So my wife and I sat in more basketball gyms, on sidelines of soccer fields, watching tennis, you name it. My daughter did it. And to think...

She would have had to compete against guys. Now, when she was in sixth grade and lower, she could compete with boys. She was as good as any boy out there. But then all of a sudden, something kicked in. It's called puberty. And guys start getting something called testosterone. And they grow bigger and faster and more muscular. Some of them. Yeah. I only grew facial hair recently. I'm 40, so...

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It's insanity what we're even talking about. This is what...

know, what I say, I feel like I've woken up in a bad episode of the Twilight Zone where what is right is wrong and what is wrong is right or Alice in Wonderland where we're flipping our morals and traditional values on their head. I mean, every species has a male and a female. We are born male or female.

I just had to do a radio show today about these books that they're sending out to daycare centers all over the country, basically saying gender isn't a real thing. You can be whatever you want. Gender is just being pushed on you. And then it went off on a whole nother thing about if you're white, you created race and it was a way to subject everybody else to you.

I mean, it was so insanity. And I'm reading this and you're teaching little children these things. And I'm like, well, on the race piece, you're telling either if you're people that are white, you're inherently bad, racist, you're not a good person. That's damaging to little kids. And if you're telling people that, you know, are non-white that you're a victim, well,

Well, we know by psychology, victimization, victim mentality is horrible. So who are they trying to help? They're helping nobody. All they're doing is creating division. They're making things worse at the deepest levels. So this is what's been going on. And the other thing that it's just another layer to this whole thing, and that is

We get taxed in our local community. We know how to educate our kids in our local community. But they created this thing called the Department of Education, one of the worst monstrosities that's ever been created. Yeah.

So now you send our money up to Washington, D.C. They take off this big chunk of it. They send our money back to our communities, but they try to tell you how to educate your kids from Washington, D.C. And by the way, how you educate your kids...

in a small town in Wisconsin may be very different than Chicago or Miami or LA or someplace else. So I think we are much better set educating and making the decisions for ourselves at our local community level than having some big government monstrosity and bureaucrats and politicians that don't care about the kids at our level and pushing mandates.

And by the way, in the world of business, results matter. You know, when I create a business or build a business, every day I get measured. Am I making money? Am I losing money? Results matter. Department of Education, go look at its creation and now look at educational achievements in our all over the country. And it's the same everywhere. Only 27 percent of our kids in this state can read at grade level.

Think of that. Lesser proficient at math at that level. And instead of teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic and going, "Oh my God, we have a crisis on our hands."

We have a severe crisis on our hands. We're not educating our kids properly. Instead of doing that, they're trying to push gender ideology, which is just nuts, and all these other things. They're trying to social engineer your children. So I am just so fundamentally opposed at this. And the Department of Education, if I get to the U.S. Senate, one thing I'm going to say, hey, there's a spot to save a lot of money and do America a lot better, closing that thing for good.

All of this, obviously, is part of a broader war on truth that's being fought by a radical left in our country. My wife, who is somewhat famously a family doctor, when she was in medical school, she let's just say that she was in California, which meant that you had to treat patients based on their preferred gender identity, which sometimes made for some awkward prostate exams. In any case.

In any case, the, the war on truth, obviously you've been fighting this, this very hot battle with, with Senator Baldwin. This is extremely close race. I mean, by, by virtually all the polls to the margin of error. And she's put out a series of, of hit ads on you, the media coverage from places like the Milwaukee journal Sentinel and other online newspapers. How do you fight back against that? The,

The way they wage war, they have absolutely no ethical or moral compass. Before I even got into this race, they sent a group of protesters, largely transgender people, to my house. I wasn't there. Fortunately, my wife had just left. And these people showing up, yelling, screaming, they've manufactured phony lawsuits against my companies.

Just to try to write a hit piece. The whole thing about me, nursing homes. I don't own nursing homes. Okay. I finance nursing homes, but they wrote a whole phony hit piece. They just have, they're running an ad right now saying Eric Hovde's bank took money from drug cartels. Okay.

Okay, folks, if that had even that much of truth, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I'd be in jail. Okay? Banks are the most regulated entities there are, period. Everything I do goes through the Federal Reserve, through the FDIC, checked, everything. It's total nonsense. And the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel created this whole nonsense article. We gave them the details on everything.

They're taking news clips from 10 years ago, talking about a totally different business line. Everything they said was wrong, except Eric Hovde has never been accused or indicted of anything. And why did they put that in there? Because they told him I'd sue him. So they had to cover their butt in the article. And they wrote the article. Why?

Because they're controlled by the Democratic Party. You have to understand the media complex and the Democratic Party have become one. Pre-Bill Clinton, the media would never bring in a political operative into the media. Bill Clinton made a deal with a number of the big media firms, said he'd eviscerate antitrust laws. And shortly after that, you saw a massive consolidation. We used to have some of the most

Complex antitrust laws where a TV station, you couldn't own two TV stations in a market. A TV station couldn't be owned by, couldn't be connected with Hollywood, by a movie studio, couldn't be connected with radio. Everything was splintered. He eviscerated that we got pretty quickly consolidated down to four media complexes.

And what also happened with that, all of a sudden, all these Clinton operatives went into the media. And then all these Obama operatives. So when you watch ABC News, remember who George Stephanopoulos was. He was this comms guy. And the whole media is that way. So they're one in the same. So Gannett, which owns Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is nothing but a propaganda tool for the left. So you're running a race that

And they won't even call BS on all the lies. And yet they will manufacture something that is just so wholly crazy against me so the left can run ads. Now, the only good thing about this is, and you were talking about this earlier, Ben, people have lost total confidence, deservedly so.

And you watch what's happening to their viewership and to their subscriber base. Do you know Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's subscriber base is only 42,000 now? Now, that probably was almost a quarter million 30 years ago. I mean, seriously, this is what's happening. Gannett stock, you can pull it up. This company will probably be bankrupt in two years. And by the way, you can speed it up by unsubscribing.

We have the power of our wallet. We have the power of the wallet. And as I was talking to a group of people in 2022, the conservative voice woke up and it was with the Bud Light incident. And everybody said, you know what? I'm not going to have this shoved down my throat. And they stopped buying Bud Light. And wow, boom, did they change. Then Target, right? Yeah.

You know, Harley Davidson just got busted for all their crazy DEI. They're pulled back on that. So you're seeing the sea change. It has huge implications if we carry on with this. In fact, Ben, share with the crowd. I'd love to have you share what your perspective, because you are part

Of this new disintermediating the mainline media and the growth of your business. Because I go to your website every day to get real news. I appreciate it. Thank you. Not to turn this into an ad for Daily Wire. It's dailywire.com slash subscribe. But what we do have. EricCovdy.com too.

It's about a million paid subscribers at this point. We do well over $200 million a year in business. That is because people so distrust the media. Our business did not exist in 2015. And a decade later, it's a rather large media business, one of the bigger media businesses in the country. There's tremendous embedded mistrust of the media for all the reasons that Eric just stated. And just for the record, if Eric were going to commit a crime, I mean, the obvious way to do that is you send your son to Ukraine to pick up bags of cash. Ha ha ha!

And then you just never file it under your own name. I mean, that's obviously how you do it. You don't do it by taking drug money at a bank or something. Come on, that's stupid. Okay, so speaking of foreign affairs, I want to ask you about the Biden administration, the Biden-Harris administration's foreign policy, which to my mind, of all the terrible things they've done, their foreign policy has been the worst. Because when it comes to domestic policy, there are all sorts of complexity. There are 50 different states.

Tons of local jurisdictions. There are obviously a lot of complexities to the market. When it comes to foreign policy, the administration really does have effectively plenary power over how foreign policy is done. And the administration inherited the single most peaceful world of my lifetime. They inherited a world in which the United States was engaged in no major wars, in which there was no major war on the European continent, in which the Abraham Accords had broken out in the Middle East, in which China was in a state of retreat vis-a-vis China.

Philippines, South China Sea. They were certainly flexing their muscle less with regard to Taiwan. All of that has been reversed. This has been the worst foreign policy presidency of my lifetime. Bar none, they make Jimmy Carter look like George Washington. It's insane. I agree. So-

When you're in Washington, D.C., what are your top priorities in terms of foreign policy? Let's go back to their administration because there are two things that were so incompetently done, it's hard to fathom. And I think we're here today because of that. One was my most embarrassing moment as an American was just the most incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan.

You know, it happened three years ago in August. And look, I had no problem wrapping up that war. But you would have thought we would have kept Bagram Air Force Base, which was so strategic to that part of the world, and could have tamped down on future terrorist activity that was happening in Afghanistan. Instead, they leave the Air Force Base. They pull out the military without taking out American citizens and our Afghan allies.

Now, there is a reason you saw those Afghanis running, holding on to those planes, falling to their death, because they knew they were going to be killed. We lost 13 Marines that day.

We left billions of dollars of high-tech military equipment behind. I mean, you couldn't do anything more incompetent. So to me, that's – our adversaries saw that. Putin moved on Ukraine. The Ayatollah of Iran moved through their proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, on Israel. And China has gotten more and more aggressive. And you're following what's going on in China and the South China Sea –

conflicts over Philippine islands, conflicts with Vietnam, increasing pressure on Taiwan. So that was the one just colossal mistake. But they even did something that you could say is every bit as dumb. And that is President Obama thought he could cut a deal with Iran. Now, I don't know why anybody would ever think that Iran was gonna honor any kind of agreement

But he transferred money to them and loosened up economic sanctions on Iran. And pretty quickly, all that money went out to terrorist groups all throughout the Middle East. And ISIS started growing very rapidly.

President Trump came in, said this was one of the worst policies. He shut it down, put severe economic sanctions on Iran. Their economy was cratering. There were protests. If we would have kept it up, I think we could have toppled their regime. But instead...

Joe Biden goes back and doubles down on the policy that failed miserably that President Obama signed off on. And that is a path for Iran, released all those sanctions, gave them money. And voila, here we stand today. And don't think for a second, a lot of people think this is a conflict between Israelis and the Palestinian people.

It's a geopolitical conflict between Iran and America and Israel. That's what's very important for everybody to understand. Hamas would have never moved.

ever without directions from Iran. Hezbollah would have never moved. All their funding, all their direction comes from that. And probably Russia's playing a role with Iran, and probably China's playing a role with Iran in promoting that. So what do we need to do?

First, we have to have very clear vision on who our allies are and who our enemies are. And if you think you're ever going to negotiate in an honest way with our enemies, you're fooling yourself.

It was interesting. I was watching a CNBC show with they had Richard Fisher, who used to be a Federal Reserve Board member, you know, is involved in government in many different ways. And he said, with China, I negotiated the trade deal with China and they literally broke every single sentence. We first have to understand who's our biggest threat in the world today. It's China.

We have to understand that China and Iran and Russia are all accesses of evil. We have to have a military that is not wasting its time on things like DEI and all this nonsense. A military should be a fighting force and it should have one mission to protect this country and win wars, period.

And lastly, we better understand that they're waging economic war on us. Ronald Reagan, if any of you haven't seen the Reagan movie, go. I strongly encourage you to go see that movie. Reagan, it goes in not as in detail as I would like, defeated the Soviet Union economically and with words.

The scary thing is China's taking with the Democrats help is helping destroy us economically right now because great societies fail. First, they lose their moral compass and then they bankrupt themselves.

That's what happened to the Roman Empire, to the Dutch Empire, to the British Empire, to different Chinese empires. We're on a path to bankruptcy. We've lost our moral clarity. And we've got to get both of those back. And we've got to project strength. And we have to align with our true allies and understand who our enemies are. Thank you.

So I've spent a lot of my life in rooms with pseudo-sophisticates on an intellectual level. I went to UCLA, then went to Harvard Law School, and I've spent a lot of time in high-AQ rooms. And these are the same people who believe that Donald Trump is some sort of idiot schmuck, right? Like, what is Donald Trump doing as president? So I did a fundraiser for President Trump down at Trump Doral. And I was sitting with President Trump briefly, and he was laying out his foreign policy. And it's great. His foreign policy was something like this. He says, you know, Ben, you know...

I've said to you, you know why Vladimir Putin never went into Ukraine? The reason he never went into Ukraine is because I called him up and I said, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the shit out of you. And he says...

And then he says, and Vladimir Putin, he says to me, Mr. President, you wouldn't do that. And I said, well, I might. And then he says, and here's the thing. If you're the United States and there's even a 5% chance, a 5% chance we're going to do it, you don't move over that line. And he's right. It turns out the credible threat of the use of force is the keystone of all American foreign policy. It always has been a strong military is the basis for all of this. So, Eric, I have to ask you on a personal level.

why are you running? I mean, you have a happy life. I get it. So, you know, look, I'm in politics, which means I get asked all the time about running for office. And I'm always like, are you crazy? Why would I possibly do that? Right. I have a wonderful life. I have four kids. I make a good living. Why would you, why would you want to take on the sacrifice of running for it? It really is. I mean, if you've ever watched a candidate and I've done it many times now, watch Canada's run for office. It's extremely stressful. Uh,

It's a lot of movement. You don't get to sleep in your own bed very much. You have to go into rooms with people who are high rollers and ask them for their support. It's not the easiest life in the world. Why would you want to give up what you were doing in order to change your life this way? I know it's going to sound corny, but I'm old fashioned. I love my country. I was raised very patriotically. My father served President Reagan. President Reagan had a way with words.

And I was raised in that time and talking about the shining city on the hill because America was. It's what brought my ancestors from the top of a mountain in Norway to come here and their journey and how they struggled to get here and to make a life for themselves.

And we all have these stories. And we created the greatest society in human history that provided more civil liberties, freedoms, prosperity than any country ever has. And this country, we can't lose it. We cannot lose this country. If we lose this country, the world is destined to a very long, dark period. I have two daughters. I have three grandchildren. I have Christian faith.

And my Christian faith tells me to whom much is blessed, much is expected. To where a man's heart goes, so goes his treasure. My greatest treasure at this point in my life is not my money. I've been very successful. I think most people know that is my time. I got a limited amount of time left on planet Earth. I want to go do what I can to save this country. We all have to do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

You're all here for the same reason. That's why you came here. That's why you're fighting these battles. We all know that we had something special. We can't lose it. I'm going to do my part. I'm going to fight all the way to the end. You know, fortunately, God blessed me with two things, a lot of energy and very thick skin. And, you know, I fought martial arts large parts of my life. And I'm going to fight all the way up to the very last breath in me to win this election and

And if I get there, do what's right. We've got to get rid of the corruption out of D.C. We've got to change the course of this country. Eric, thank you so much for sitting with me. Ben, thank you for coming out. You know, let's give before we give him a round of applause. He's a comedian as well as a very smart guy. I mean, Donald Trump all around. So thank you. Thank you so much.