What Makes A Marxist? | Dr. Paul Kengor
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I was 17 years old in 1984, 1984 presidential election. And these people can't imagine that it actually was a time of unity. And in those days, just because the president had an R next to his name, didn't mean that you needed to hate him and call him a racist. So you give them today a message of unity, which they claim that they want,

and they hate it. They want to divide. They say they want inclusion and diversity, right? No, they want to divide. So that's a good point. Even if you had the right Reagan today, there'd be a lot more hate of him regardless from the left. - Dr. Paul Kengor is a distinguished political scientist, best-selling author, and expert on communism and the political history of Ronald Reagan's presidency. Kengor is professor at Grove City College, where he currently serves at the helm of the school's Center for Vision and Values.

as well as a contributing editor at the American Spectator. Kengor has also authored over 20 books on topics ranging from Reagan's relationship with Pope John Paul II to the bias of the American media. Kengor's analysis of Marxist ideology and its historical implications position him as a leading voice in our contemporary debates about socialism, capitalism, and political freedom. In fact, the recent blockbuster film Reagan was inspired by Kengor's 2007 book

The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. In today's episode, Paul and I dissect the infiltration of Marxist ideas among American progressives, the ideological crux of a Marxist's worldview, and whether or not Kamala Harris can actually be classified as a Marxist herself. We also examine the similarities and differences between the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump and how American conservatives can lead the way toward a less divisive future. Dr. Paul Kangor's body of work has enriched the public's understanding of Marxism and issued an important warning about how damaging ideas

can alter the course of history. Don't miss this important conversation with Dr. Paul Kangor on this episode of The Sunday Special.

Paul, thanks so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it. Yeah, Ben, I got to tell you, this is kind of a reunion. So you and I first met, you probably didn't remember this, but at the Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara. And so thus I have my Rancho Del Chielo shirt on. I was there for a few weeks ago for the premiere of the Reagan movie. I know we're probably going to be talking about that too. But I was trying to remember when that was. I'm kind of

dating it by the age of my daughter who remembers it all really well. I think it was probably at least 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, and I think you're talking about 2014, 2015, somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah, it's been a while. You weren't famous yet. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Better times.

But let's talk about, obviously, you've written about a huge number of topics of interest to our audience. Most recently, you've written a lot about Marxism and the race today between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The term Marxist has been thrown around by President Trump with regard to Kamala Harris. And there's some people who say that's unfair. She's not totally in favor of, say, nationalization of all

means and mechanisms of industry. She probably hasn't read Karl Marx. Do you think it's fair for President Trump to call her a Marxist? How should we determine whether someone is sort of a Marxist, even colloquially, in American politics these days? Well, this is a great question. And by the way, I'm at Grove City College, our Institute for Faith and Freedom, and I teach a course on Marxism at Grove City College. And this current semester, I'm teaching a course in comparative politics. We're talking about Marxism right now.

And I told my students last week, I said, just as we don't like it when the left calls conservatives fascists, right? We want to be very careful about calling leftists, even radical leftists, maybe even democratic socialists. We could go through that.

uh... calling them marxists right and then if if you want to just call them an extreme leftist i think that's good right but i want to call a marxist a marxist only if we're dealing with the legitimate marxists right now in that debate

I think Trump was right about Kamala's father. I mean, Kamala's father, I mean, based on his writings, and I've read some of his journal articles, and he was on the econ department at Stanford University. And from what I could tell, he was a Marxist. Now, her, yeah, it's a good point. I don't know if she even reads, has read Karl Marx.

She certainly probably is not what we would call a classical Marxist, right? Bourgeoisie, proletariat, probably hasn't read the Communist Manifesto. Now, when you get into the more general kind of broadening area of

And this is where we are today, taking the sort of Marxist superstructure of oppressed versus oppressor, all right? You find your two groups to pit together, right? In classical Marxism, this was based on economics and class. It was a proletariat bourgeoisie. There you had your oppressor and oppressed.

Today, with the race-based Marxist, it's black versus white, right? With gender Marxist, male versus female. With Marxist operating culture, it's some other cultural application. And oftentimes, the people that are doing that have no idea that they're even part of that general Marxist superstructure. So if you say to them, you know, that's a form of cultural Marxism or race-based Marxism, they'll scoff.

And maybe they should scoff because they don't even know what they're doing. But in her case, she might be coming more from that general superstructure and issues of race, gender, culture. But I'd stay away from saying in a national debate, right, she's a Marxist, unless you can really defend it and explain it. Yeah.

Now, kind of in the way that I just did. Yeah. And I think one of the problems actually with doing that is that not only may it not be fair in terms of her actual belief system, because, again, who knows what the hell she believes, but it also actually waters down what Marxism is and makes it more palatable for the masses because people go, OK, well, if Kamala Harris is a Marxist, doesn't seem that

bad. I mean, we're not talking about the Soviet Union. We're not talking about Cuba. We're not talking about Venezuela. We're talking about a lady who's hobnobbing with tech CEOs and wants government interventionism in the economy and more redistribution. Whatever people think of her, they tend to then box that in with the same sort of democratic socialism that Bernie talks about in Norway with the same, you know, Soviet

full-scale Marxism that we saw applied for nearly all of the 20th century. Yeah, that's right on. And then, so then when you meet the real McCoy, right? And when someone like me and you says, uh,

You know, Bernie Sanders wasn't a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, but he was an actual formal presidential elector in 1980, right? He was pro-Trotsky. He was a Trotskyist in college at the University of Chicago. He joined a Stalinist kibbutz. Ron Radosh has written about this when he was in Israel. So then when we say those things, they're inclined not to believe us. When I did...

I did a full book on Obama's mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, and it was called The Communist. It was published by Simon & Schuster, Mercury Inc., Glenn Becks, and it was a bestseller. So it debuted at like top 10 in the New York Times. And I immediately got emails from people on the left saying, you know, you guys just call our people communists all the time. And then I had to say,

I know. I know we do. But this guy, look at the cover of the book. We put his Communist Party USA number right on the cover. 47544, right? This guy testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in December 1956. He had a security index on him. There's a 500 to 600 page FBI file on the guy. This guy was really a communist. And when you look at some of Obama's rhetoric...

Early in his life and when he went to Occidental College, it seems like he was at one point a Marxist. Today, probably not, although you still see some of that rhetoric, right? Although he never, ever reputed it. By the way, this bothers me too. If you left that stuff, come out and say it.

because it's part of your narrative. It's part of your conversion story, right? Hillary Clinton. Yeah, I was a Goldwater girl, right? But I don't believe that anymore. Yeah, I was in touch with Saul Alinsky, but maybe she's not an Alinskyite, right? George W. Bush. I was an alcoholic, but I left that. Then I had my conversion. If you're Obama, come out and say, well, in my youth, like a lot of people at Columbia and some of these places, I flirted with those ideas, but I know better now. You go up five points.

If you say something like that, but instead, there's no public repudiation, so it makes us suspicious. But that said, my point, a guy like Frank Marshall Davis, a guy like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Democratic Socialists. So when we mislabel people, it hurts our ability to label them correctly when they're indeed like, you know, the real Marxist McCoy.

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Just head on over to helixsleep.com slash Ben. That's helixsleep.com slash Ben with Helix. Better sleep starts right now. So one of the things that you mentioned there is that there is this sort of no true Scotsman fallacy that people like to apply in a Marxist scenario where you'll say something is Marxist. They'll say, that's not real Marxism, right? The Soviet Union is not real Marxism or communist China in its original iteration, not real Marxism, Cuba, not real Marxism. So let's try to get to the nitty gritty. What would you consider to be real full-scale Marxism? Where would you feel comfortable?

saying this person abides by these principles that makes this person a Marxist, as opposed to just say membership in the Communist Party. You know, that's sort of an easy outlying indicator. But somebody is not a member of CPUSA and they are a Marxist in your view. What principles do they have to fulfill?

Well, from a practical point of view, a poster boy country would be North Korea. Okay. North Korea, Cuba. In fact, you look at something like the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom. North Korea has been at the very bottom of the ranking since they started doing this thing 30 years ago. Right. But theoretically,

Go to the Communist Manifesto. In fact, people will say to me, Ben, they'll say, give me a one-sentence definition of communism. I'll say, okay, I'll make it easy. Marx and Engels gave us one. In the manifesto, they say, the entire communist theory may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property.

So as the starting point, I mean, it's a war on private property. And of course, that goes against, you know, the Judeo-Christian foundation, you know, the Old Testament, New Testament, thou shalt not steal the Ten Commandments, right? It implies you have the right to property. Some people consider it a natural right, a sacred right.

uh... you from the cave to the courthouse people have had the right to property when you do something like literally try to abolish all private property then you're really raising our easy i n g uh... that the foundations of everything and they're all about that in the manifesto to marks and angles immediately immediately double down on that they say uh... you are horrified at us intending to do away with private property they don't pause there and say

We don't really mean that. What we mean is, no, they say precisely so. That is precisely what we intend to do. So at that point, maybe one could argue different variations, gradations, degradations, whatever of communism. To what degree is a communist society abolishing private property, right? At the level of the home, at the level of agriculture, at the level of, you know, Pol Pot in Cambodia, whether you're allowed to own personal hygiene products, right?

You know, toothpaste in Cuba, whether or not you're allowed to pick your mangoes from the front tree growing on your property in Cuba. I have a former student, Lorenzo Carrizona, whose aunt in Cuba had a mango tree in her front yard and the family was hungry and it pained them terribly to know that there were fresh, beautiful mangoes growing on their property. But because that belonged to the state,

And they weren't allowed to pick and sell their own produce because of the laws of market control versus central planning on prices and production level. They couldn't even pick the mangoes from their front yard. And when they took some in the middle of the night, they realized when they got up in the morning what they did. They threw the peels in the garbage. So they go out and they bury them in the ground so the state won't see that they picked the mangoes. Now that's

abolition of private property at a very severe level. So as a starting point, property above all, abolition of private property. And that provides a really useful framework for thinking about because it also shows you the spectrum of economic interventionism and where things actually line up. So one of the great lies, of course, is that, for example, that has been used by Soviets and communist backers is the idea that Nazism and Soviet

economics were in 100% opposition and that basically, you know, the, the capitalist side is closer to Nazi economics and the communist side is, is therefore good because what, what the, what communists tend to do is they use the World War II model as a way of demonstrating that communism is actually good since the Soviet army by the end of the war was on the right side of the war as opposed to at the beginning when they actually, you know, led to the war. But with

With that said, if you use your framework of abolition of private property, what you end up doing is also recognizing that heavy regulation of the use of private property is closer to actual public ownership of private property than it is to economic freedom. So if you have a very corporatist system, as Nazi Germany did, in which everybody is organized into guilds by the government, in which the government is reaching into everybody's pocket and determining how your private capital is used, that is

That is much closer to public ownership of the means of production than it is to you being able to make free decisions about the dispensation and use of your own wealth. That's exactly right. I mean, they're not following Hayek and Mises and Milton Friedman, right? And Nazi Germany. And of course, the very name Nazi, which is shorthand for National Socialist, there was a National Socialist German Workers' Party.

And Ben, people will often say, yeah, but Hitler was killing the communists too. Well, sure. But these people on the left are always at each other's throats. I mean, Trotsky versus Stalin, Trotskyists and Stalinists. The American Communist Party was filled with, and in fact,

Once the Hitler-Stalin pact took place in August 1939, huge numbers of American Jews left Communist Party USA because joining Communist Party USA, you swore a loyalty oath to Stalin's Soviet Union, right? To work to ensure the triumph of Soviet power inside the United States.

A USSA, as Langston Hughes called it. So they knew at that point they could no longer swear a loyalty oath to Stalin's Soviet Union because Stalin was now on the side of Hitler. He aided and abetted Hitler. So at that point, a lot of them left. And you can see there too, Hitler and Stalin at that point found common cause and they worked together. But the left is filled with all kinds of angry militant factions. I mean, we have our...

disagreements and arguments on the right, go to a conference of like far leftists. I mean, these people are at each other's throats over little tiny issues that most people can't even relate to or explain or understand. It wasn't capitalism who put an ice pick through Trotsky's eye, right? That's right. Who's Stalinist agents. So with all of that sort of pointed out in the backdrop of Marxism, how do we distinguish between Marxism and something that you've talked about,

which is just the old biblical story of the oppressor versus oppressed false matrix. So I've pointed this out myself, you know, as somebody who reads the Bible pretty regularly in the original Hebrew, you know, when the Cain Abel story is the probably single most indicative political story in all of human history, that you have one sacrifice that God takes, Abel's sacrifice,

And Cain's sacrifice, for a reason that's unspecified by the text, is rejected. And then God warns Cain and he says, you have this inclination to do sin and it crouches at your door, but you can master over it. And Cain rejects that and goes and kills Abel. And that sort of matrix in which, you know, Cain doesn't have a reason to hate Abel. It's not Abel's fault that God decides to accept Abel's sacrifice.

And so Cain decides to kill Abel. That sort of sense of victimization that results in aggression toward people who are more successful in one way, shape, or form through a perceived sense of oppression. That is the story of so much of human history is this perceived sense of grievance against other people who are more successful. How do we distinguish that from Marxism? Or is Marxism just sort of one offshoot of that general oppressor-oppressed matrix?

Yeah, in fact, I would argue others have too, that the primary virtue in Marxism is envy, right? Envy, hate, avarice. And it's amazing to read Karl Marx and hear him complaining about people's obsession with capital. Marx was obsessed with capital. I mean, all Marx can think about is capital. I mean, Marx gets up in the morning and bellyaches and moans and ruins his day just thinking about capital.

All Marx wants is capital, right? In fact, Marx's mother and wife both expressed the wish that Karl would start earning some capital rather than just writing about capital. And by the way, this is a classic example of how the left thinks, right? They talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but they don't include us, right? We don't fit under their diversity umbrella. They talk about tolerance, but no tolerance for us and their side. They talk about hate,

when guys like you and I are looking at them smiling, it's like, I don't hate you, man. I mean, I'm not angry at you at all. And, you know, smoke's almost coming out of their ears as they're screaming, hater, right? But they project, and this is what Marx and the Marxists do. I mean, the Marx, you talk about greed. You don't see greed anywhere like you see among Marxist societies and Marxist leaders. I mean, they take all the capital, they take everything, they take all the production themselves.

You know, Marxism is not for the rulers. It's for the ruled. I mean, everybody else has to follow those rules. And I would forward here...

I often hear as a Christian, they'll point to Acts 4.32 through 4.35 where it says, the early apostles held everything in common. They pulled together their resources and shared everything. And as even Pope Francis has said, you know, Pope Francis is hardly a laissez-faire capitalist, right? But Pope Francis has said, that's not Marxism.

Right? That's charitable traditional Christianity. By the way, that's written in the first century. Marxism comes 17, 18 centuries after that. But if you look in Acts and also the Old Testament, they have the right to property.

They have the right to own things. Also, we get to this in a minute. They don't hate religion, right? They're not atheists. You know, Marxism is inherently atheistic, as all the Marxist-Leninists and all the Marxist leaders have always said. So to have a group of apostles in the first century getting together voluntarily on their own,

all right, by their own free will. And if you read the whole text, selling portions of the property that they're permitted to own in order to pull them together to help their fellow man, that's not Marxism, right? That's a free will choice. Now, Marxism would be

The heavy-handed state coming into that community and every community in the entire country and telling them forcibly, all of your property will be banned. By the way, so will your religion, all right? And so will all traditional relations that you have. Marx and Engels said communism represents, quote, the most radical rupture in traditional relations, unquote.

We're going to take, we're going to violate all of that and we're going to forcibly redistribute all of your wealth. We're going to abolish the right of inheritance. That's part three in their 10 point plan. We're going to have a full progressive income tax, right? We're going to do this, all this other stuff. That's communism, right? People voluntarily getting together to live in community, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, right? Which is 0.0000001% of all Americans, right?

right, on their own to voluntarily share their stuff. That is not a Marxist state. That's not Marxism.

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I mean, as I've said to people all the time, I'm the most capitalist person I know. In my house, I'm a Marxist, meaning I share my wealth in common with my wife, right? I mean, we don't earn equivalent amounts of wealth, and my kids certainly don't earn anything, but we all have access to the pool of cash because...

When it comes to family, obviously it's share and share alike. That is not the same thing when it comes to things outside the family, which is, of course, why Marx is attempting to abolish the family, because the family is, in fact, a bulwark against the idea that everyone is family. If you have family, then you know there's a big difference between you and your wife and your kids.

And, you know, this guy in New York who you've never met before. And you shouldn't be asked to treat that person as though they're a member of your family because that's not realistic to how human nature is. And I think this is one of the points that you make with regard to Marxism in particular is that Marxism, for all of its talk about being a scientific theory, which, of course, it absolutely is not. I mean, it's pseudoscientific, absolute sheer trash. It doesn't make sense mathematically. It doesn't make sense logically. It promotes itself as a scientific theory because that way it can somehow get away with making the claims scientific.

that it's making. And that's why even today, Marxists will attempt to avoid the reality of the failures of Marxist prediction, right? They've attempted to end around that in a wide variety of ways, including Lenin, who basically suggested that it wasn't descriptive, it had to be normative, that instead of Marx attempting to describe the arc of history in a sort of passive fashion, you had to enact it, you had to grab it,

You had to do the thing. And that really was called the action as opposed to what Marx thought it was going to be, which was a prediction of the future that never came true. And in fact, turned out to be false in every respect. Rain,

ranging from the depression of wages to the idea that there would be a worldwide class uprising of the poor against the rich, which of course never happened. World War I being the best indicator that it never happened when everybody sided along national lines as opposed to along class lines. What Marxism actually is a religious theory. It's a religious theory positing an eschatology of man. And when you read Marx, what you see is that he's substituting his own idea of the transformation of human nature that will erupt

as a result of this inevitable end of capitalism and a new man will be born in which everybody is purely generous and purely benevolent. And it turns out that all of the evils of the human heart, which he says were planted by capitalism in the same way that Rousseau suggests that all of the evils of the human heart were planted by the first man who created a fence, basically, that all of that will disappear. And so you won't need government. Government will wither away.

This is what the anarcho-communists, which of course makes no sense, this is what they claim. What they're really shooting for is a time when government will wither away and we'll all live in a voluntary brotherhood of man in which we ourselves have been transformed in soul. That's a religious promise. And I think that's why Marxism will never die, because if you're making a religious promise, there's no way to actually determine whether it's true or not until you hit some sort of messianic age.

Yeah, and especially if you're making that argument to people who aren't religious, right? So they don't follow Judaism or Christianity, so instead they're atheistic. So this gives them their secular utopia, right? So most religious people would say, come on, dude, that's what you get in heaven, all right, when all this is over, right? You can't have that possibly here on this earth. But if you read statements from Marx, from other early communists, Moses Hess,

Arthur Kessler, who's one of the people in The God That Failed. I mean, they talk about how this was like a religion. And in fact, Raymond Aaron, his classic book is called The Opium of the Intellectuals.

Because really, to them, that's what it's like. They make fun of religious people, call religion the opium of the masses. I mean, Marxism is really absolutely the opium of the intellectuals. Ronald Reagan said, well, Marxism-Leninism, that religion of theirs. And indeed, and you started off by saying scientific.

Yeah, they have this phrase, scientific socialism. The Soviets use it all the time. Vladimir Lenin in The State Revolution, which he started writing and never really fully finished. That was September, October 1917. The revolution got in the way, so he didn't finish it. He describes Marx as a scientific socialist, this genius, all this flowering, gushing, hagiographic language, way over the top. People

People have to remember that Marx lived 1818 to 1883. So he is alive in the period of Darwin when the origin of species comes out. So they were hoping that Marx would do for the social sciences and for economics what Darwin did for the physical sciences. So there's this idea of this evolutionary movement where mankind would start in slavery, serfdom.

capitalism, socialism, and eventually to communism, right? Socialism, according to Marxist-Leninist theory, would be the final transitionary step into communism. So this added a historical inevitability to the whole thing, right? So people could see this unfolding over time, this evolution of the history of the world.

And Ingalls at Marx's funeral and also at Marx's wife's funeral quoted Darwin, right? He's not quoting the scriptures. He's not quoting the Old Testament or New Testament. He's quoting Darwin, right? Here lies the vivacious Jenny, right? Who he gives this kind of depressing little sermonette about basically Marx's wife now rotting in a casket.

turning to dust or worm food. I don't know. But the great news is, right, through this historical Darwinian evolution that Marx created and pioneered, the world will eventually reach that utopia in the sky, full communism, classless society. And that's just one of almost every prediction that Marx made, which is complete fatuous nonsense and never came true.

So, you know, one of the things that we see is when we talk about this again, we come back to the same point, which is when we talk about Marxism, I think if you have an understanding of Marxism at all, you see how terrible it is. It's terrible results. But the point that Hayek makes in The Road to Serfdom is that it actually is a road to get there. It's not as though, you know, one day you wake up. It's not like Russia in 1917, where you wake up one day and suddenly it's imposed top down. This is something that you gradually slide into. And this is where I think the temptation is for the right, saying that

okay, we're just going to describe Kamala Harris or Barack Obama as chiefly Marxists because we're warning you about where this is going, as opposed to this is a step along the roads of perdition. We just go straight to the end. We say, okay, well, what they want is tomorrow, like communist utopia. I mean, they may want something like that in the back nether regions of their brain, the lizard Marxist brain from college.

you know, 30 years in the future. But to get there, they're willing to do an awful lot of gray dated actions. And that's why you're seeing Kamala Harris wooing CEOs and, you know, treating capitalism as though capitalism is still, you know, you'll hear Joe Biden say this all the time. I'm not begrudging anybody the ability to earn a buck. I'm not saying that I love capitalism, capitalism. But all we need is just one more restriction. All we need is one more set of regulations. All we need is just a little more control. And it's always just a little more control.

Yeah, that's right. To quote Reagan in the time for choosing speech, right? The more the planners plan, the more that the plans fail, the more that the planners plan. And so at the very least, they favor what Woodrow Wilson called the administrative state, the heavy regulatory state. And once again, did you notice this? I mean, for a while, it seemed like the last few years, the left, the Democratic left,

had kind of given up on a lot of the class warfare rhetoric that they were engaging in in the 1990s. You might be, you're younger than me, probably by 10 years or so. I don't know if you remember Dick Gephardt in the early 1990s and talking about how

People who are wealthier have done well or the winners in life's lottery and so forth. But every four years and younger people wouldn't have experienced this. But the Democrats, they would just trot out this. He favors the rich. He favors the rich tax cuts for billionaires on and on and on and on and on. They seem to finally give it up with Donald Trump, I think, because Trump so appealed to the middle class.

And the lower working class. I live in western Pennsylvania. I was born in Pittsburgh. My family worked in coal mines and steel mills, right? My dad was a steel worker. So, you know, that stuff appealed for the Democrats for a long time. Those people are all now voting for Trump. All of them.

I mean, Pittsburgh's about an hour from Morgantown, West Virginia. All the West Virginia coal miners are voting for Trump, all of them. So to hear Kamala in the last debate, and I've heard some commercials on television and radio since, they're going after Trump on the tax cuts for billionaires again.

And when you look at Trump's tax cuts, what were they, 2017, 2018? They were really tiny. And in fact, you have to look at the brackets and the rates. I think there's five brackets altogether. This one came down a little bit. That one went up a little bit. They changed that bracket. And this one, it's hard to see any dramatic. I would complain they didn't seem like much of a tax cut at all. But they've gone back to that playbook, which tells me that that's

That's Kamala in my state of Pennsylvania, probably trying to go back to that lower middle class. But I don't think it's going to work because they know that she represents the sort of Silicon Valley wealthy elite. And it's the wealthy elites that are that are now liberals. I mean, you know, the corporate the corporate fat cats are DEI people running operations like, you know,

Bud Light, right? What are they doing? Bud Light. Well, that's the people they're hiring. That's the people they're hiring from the business schools. They're all left-wingers. All righty, folks, let's talk about dressing sharp without sacrificing comfort. If you're tired of choosing between looking professional and feeling relaxed, I've got excellent news for you. Collars & Co. is revolutionizing menswear with their famous dress collar polo. Imagine this, the comfort of a polo combined with the sharp look of a dress shirt. It's the best of both worlds, giving you that professional edge without the stuffiness.

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It used to be that Rockefeller actually went to church. I mean, he went to the same church as many of the people who worked for him. And in the United States, if you were a corporate head, there was a feeling of noblesse oblige that was largely church-based. It was largely based on membership in a religious community. And as that wore away, you got this very odd sort of elitist combination of Marxian social politics with capitalist economics.

which is the smallest portion always of the American electorate. Every four years for my childhood, there was talk about a libertarian uprising where it would be, I'm left on social politics, but I'm really right-wing on economics. And it turns out that's like five people in the country. And it turns out that that's the thing that drove all the coal miners into the arms of Trump. I think this attempt to turn the sort of Trumpian phenomenon with the middle and lower classes, and I even hesitate to use those terms in America because they really don't apply. A huge percentage of people who started in the lower class will end up in the upper class or the middle class.

There is no class distinction in the United States the way that there was in continental Europe in 1890 or something. So this sort of weird divide on social policy that came along with the atheistic revolution of the 60s and 70s in which the most successful people economically also hated the morality of

of sort of middle-class churchgoers. That's what's led to this divide. And what Trump was doing to those West Virginia minors, he wasn't saying to them, I'm going to bring to you all sorts of good economic goodies in the way that Dick Gephardt or say John Edwards in 2004 would have with his two Americas nonsense. It's not going to be that. What it will be is I'm going to respect the fact that you want to live with your family and go to church.

I don't look down on you. I don't think that you need to trans your kids. Those social policies, the idea that he actually understood them and didn't scorn them, that's the whole thing. To me, the signal break in sort of American politics pretty much occurs in 2008. It goes by the wayside because we all pretend it didn't happen. But when Barack Obama made that bitter clinger speech in San Francisco, that was like the hard divide in American politics, working

where he's in San Francisco with a bunch of really, really wealthy people in shiny buildings. And they're talking about how the real downfall of the country is these schlubs who live in West Virginia and who have this whole thing about how they like God and guns and they actually want borders. And I think that that was really more the thing. And so there's been this unfortunate gap that's now grown between, I think, Americans who have traditional values with regard to social politics

and capitalism itself, because this term neoliberal gets thrown around. And I always wonder exactly kind of what that means. I'm very free market oriented and also incredibly socially conservative. And for most of my childhood, those two things went together. And it's only in the last decade or so they seem to have sort of gone separate ways.

Yes, right. In fact, a couple thoughts there. One, with Barack Obama, I'm thinking of John Drew, who went to Occidental College with Obama. And I interviewed him for the book The Communist. And he was introduced to Obama by his girlfriend, John Drew's girlfriend. And she said, this is Barack, right? He's one of us. And he ran the Marxist club, as John Drew called it. John Drew is now like a conservative Baptist today. But I talked to him. I said,

Do you think in any way, do you see any of the Marxism residual stuff in Obama today? This would have been like 2010. And I'll never forget, Ben, he used the phrase, yeah, I still see some of the Marxist mental architecture in phrases like bitter clingers, right? Clinging to their God and guns, right? That's very much a kind of like Marxist-like sentiment, even if it doesn't make Obama a Marxist.

And the other one I think of, you mentioned the 60s radicals. Mark Rudd, who founded SDS, he wasn't the founder of SDS, but he ran SDS and shut down Columbia University April 1968. And I read his memoir a few years ago, which is a shocking book, I tell you.

But to Rudd's credit, he's very honest and very, very candid in that book. And he talked about him and Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorn and the people in SDS who eventually became the Weathermen and eventually the Weather Underground. They would go out into the working class neighborhoods, he said, of Chicago.

Pittsburgh and Cleveland, and they'd be preaching Marxism to the unwashed masses, right? The working class kids, the kids of the steel workers, right? And he said, what was the response of these people? They would beat us up. These are like ethnic Poles and Italians and Irish, right? Like, you know, we don't want your stake in communism, you atheists, you know, get out of here, right? And meanwhile, you can be like,

running these guys or laying on the ground. But don't you understand, right? Preaching what they learned at Columbia. We're here to bring you, we're here to free you, right? You're in this class and you're about to go here. But yeah, and those people have always wanted an American. This is what so many people on the left in the Democratic Party didn't get. A lot of them want to be

maybe not rich, but aspire to get out of the lower class and be as well off as they can be, right? So the incessant class warfare that the Democrats always engaged in, like I said, it seemed like it cooled in the last few years. I think because Trump has won that element.

But it's coming back right now in the last few weeks, probably because Kamala is trying to make a push for some of those voters. I think this is also due to the failure of the race Marxism. So in the 2012 to 2024 era, the Democrats really, really stopped moving towards sort of the the

economic Marxism of, say, John Edwards and maybe even Bernie Sanders, and started moving very heavily in the direction of race Marxism, the idea that you could determine whether someone was victimized or not by membership in a racial group because racial groups don't stack up equivalently in terms of average income, for example. And so Barack Obama won on that basis in 2012. And then Hillary kind of tried to run that same campaign in 2016, and she failed because she's an upper class white lady. And then

And then Joe Biden ran that campaign again in part in 2020, but it was already failing by 2020. He had to sort of run as the moderate in the room, despite everything that was going on with the Black Lives Matter riots and everything. He sort of tried to ignore what was going on and then throw a stop to his supporters by picking Kamala as his vice president. And then by 2024, one of the things that's actually quite fascinating about the way that Kamala is running this campaign is she's not talking about race at all. Everybody on the left is begging her to talk about race. You're the first female black woman, you know, who's going to run for president and

win and all this. And she doesn't want to talk about it. She keeps avoiding it, which I think is a smart strategy because I think this is played out. I think they're moving back toward the sort of class based economic Marxism. If there are only a few games that they can play here, then one of them is played out. They're going to turn to the others. And those right now seem to be class based Marxism and sex based Marxism in which they're stacking up women against men. And you're seeing the largest gender gap in American history breaking out in this election.

Yeah. And in the last debate, the two moderators from ABC, right? I think it was David Muir was the one who did it, brought up the Trump comments about the race, about Kamala's race. And I remember telling my students right before that debate, I said, Trump in this debate can't do anything really stupid, like bring up her race. That would be a really dumb thing to do. Well, he was pretty disciplined. He didn't bring it up. They did. They brought it

up. And by the way, when they did that, I bet about 20 million Americans went, oh no, don't, please, please don't bring race into this. We're so happy race hasn't been a part of this. And to Trump's credit, he said, I don't want to talk about it. He even said something like she's the one that brought it up and then he zipped it. And then they went to her and she just got the knife out.

Right. And she just started talking about how divisive he is, hateful he is, pits people against each other over race. And then they said, Mr. President, they went back to him, zip. He didn't say anything. So he was very smart, very, very disciplined on that. But yeah. And the what could be more divisive, literally divisive, right, which is what Marxism is. It's about dividing people.

Dividing according to class, bourgeoisie versus proletariat. What could be more divisive than telling everybody in America, hey, the world is this simple. You're either black or you're white. You're in one of these two blocks. My youngest son, who's adopted, is black. He's half black. I mean, he's as black as Obama because Obama's father was black and so was his father. Both of them have white mothers.

He's technically considered black. But if we did DNA tests on everybody in my family, which we have, they're all over the place. I mean, my wife has every ethnicity in the Middle East, including Jewish, right? Jewish, Syrian, Lebanese, Greek, right? Italy, everything. So to tell people in modern America, the most diverse melting pot in history, very simple. You're black or you're white, all right? Then you're oppressed or you're the oppressor. And so then you go up to somebody and say, now, Kobe Bryant...

Or Oprah, okay? I want you to know that you're oppressed. You may have billions of dollars. You may have this amazing life. Kobe, you had wealth ever since you were a young kid. But you're oppressed. They're like, why? Well, because you're black. And that white homeless guy over there, all right, he's your oppressor.

Well, he's your, why? Because he's white. And everyone, no one in America wants any part of that gobbledygook, divisive, vicious nonsense. But that hails, descends from Marxism.

race-based in this case. To shift topics slightly, but it's still part of the same overall conversation, you've written extensively, obviously, on Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan is the last Republican president to have won broad majorities. You could say George H.W. Bush won a broad majority. That was really on the back of Ronald Reagan. By 1992, obviously, he loses to Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, which is not exactly like a duo of tremendous performance. But in any case, the Reagan era

you know, does raise questions for how conservatives can win going forward. Because Donald Trump won what can best be described as, you know, statistically, at least, a fluke election in 2016. That is a fluke election in which you lose the popular vote by 3 million, but you win by just enough votes in just the right places in order to win. And it looks very much as though he's going to have to pull off the same feat if he wishes to win this year. It looks as though, you know, the...

popular vote gap is going to be, I would think, relatively significant. I'd be shocked if he wins the popular vote in this year's election. He might just win in just enough places, just, you know, just 10,000 votes here in North Carolina and 12,000 in Georgia and all the rest of that in order to pull off the presidency.

It's been a long time since a Republican won sort of a broad sweeping victory. Even George W. Bush's victory in 2004 against John Kerry was a near run thing. That was a very close election coming down to basically Ohio and Florida. And so when you look back at the Reagan era, one of the things that is clear is that because he has the Soviet Union to run against,

where he can say, look, this is the thing, right? We have to beat this thing. This thing is out here. It's really bad. And the only way we're going to beat that is by getting rid of the ineffective, right? The argument that he was making against Jimmy Carter was that Jimmy Carter was a fool and an ineffective fool.

It wasn't that Jimmy Carter was actually deeply immoral. It was that Jimmy Carter was deeply ineffective. He almost became a figure of jocularity. And because the Soviet Union was out here, you had this dual threat. You had the dual threat from within of weakness, and you had the threat from without of a powerful and aggressive state that actively sought to destroy America's interests. Well, now we fast forward to 2024. I think there's been an attempt by Republicans and some Democrats to say that China is sort of like the USSR. That parallel hasn't gone quite as well because of the deep

and abiding economic relations with China. But the argument by a lot of conservatives has shifted from this sort of dual threat of inefficacy from the Democratic Party and deep and abiding threat on the foreign front to ignore all problems on the foreign front. The real threat is the internal threat. And I just wonder if that's a winning electoral message, because I don't think that most Americans look at Kamala Harris and want to see Kamala Harris

as a sort of crisis level red alert threat. If she's elected, we're all going to die. It's going to be Castro's Cuba. I think, in other words, that the Reagan message, which is Democrats are misguided, wrong, cowardly and ineffective. And over here, we have some real threats we have to face. It's probably going to be a better electoral message than ignore everything that's going on over here. Nothing really important is happening outside our borders. The real threat is Kamala Harris or Barack Obama, even as deeply as we may feel that that is a real threat.

Yeah, you know, in our print edition of the American Spectator, I'm the editor of the American Spectator, I have a piece called Reagan Conservatism is Alive and Well. It's a special print edition on conservatism. And I'm hearing a lot of conservatives today saying, well, Reagan conservatism is dead. It's not. In fact, I have a book called 11 Principles of a Reagan Conservative. I lay out the 11 principles. Faith, freedom, sanctity, dignity of human life, anti-communism, belief in the individual. I won't go through all of them here, but

I've said that Trump can check the box on probably 11 out of 11, certainly in terms of how he governed as president, right? Even if you don't think that he's maybe in his heart a pro-lifer, I mean, he did more for the pro-life movement than Reagan did as president. The difference though, it's not the message, it's the messenger. And Reagan was just so likable. Now he did have the Soviet Union to run against, right?

But people liked him. They just liked him. Even the left who didn't vote for him liked him. I quote in one of my books Walter Cronkite. And Walter Cronkite was CBS's news anchor and America's news anchor. He's also very liberal. And he said, I've never seen anything like this. Everybody loves Reagan. Nobody hates him. I was alive for Franklin Roosevelt. I never thought I'd see a president as liked as Roosevelt.

Reagan has it. He's even more beloved than Roosevelt. So because of that, and keep in mind, 1984, Berlin Wall didn't go down yet, right? Cold War isn't over yet. Mikhail Gorbachev didn't even come in yet. So at that point, Reagan can just run on restoring America's strength, make America great again. That was originally a Reagan statement. Economy's taking off. So even without the crash of the Soviet Union, he won 49 out of 50 states.

He took the electoral college 525 to 13.

The only state he didn't win, Minnesota. By the way, this is interesting. The only state Reagan never won was Minnesota. He didn't win Minnesota in 1980 either. Reagan twice won California, New York, New Jersey, my home state of Pennsylvania. Reagan twice won Massachusetts. Okay. So it's, I think the message still works. I think it's the messenger and Donald Trump is hated because

just absolutely and utterly loathed by over 50% of the population. And if your ceiling is like 47%, right, it's going to be a 1% to 2% race. By the way, if he loses a popular vote by 1% to 2%, I think he'll win the electoral college. But

I'd be amazed if he got 50%. But my thesis argument here, Ben, is you got somebody else with Reagan's kind of background, like ability. I think the conservative message can win big like that again, but it takes the right messenger to pair with the message.

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Do you think that the country has fundamentally changed so much since that year that it's a bit of a different math, meaning that, you know, it's almost impossible to see any Republican winning, say, New York or California. Right. Absent some serious existential threat, even George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9-11 had to run a super competitive race against John Kerry in 2004 that came down to a few different states. We're seeing that.

We're seeing it, obviously, with President Trump. This is coming down to a few different states. It's almost impossible for me to imagine as a transplant from California to Florida, the idea that a Republican would ever win, say, California again or New York or Massachusetts. Are the divides in the country just too wide? And if so, what can be done about that? I think that's right. But I think a Republican could win 40 out of 50 states. And also,

and I'm not trying to say this to dump on Donald Trump in this interview, but 2016, 2020, and 2024, I mean, your opponent is Hillary Clinton.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, that should be an easy sweep for any remotely decently likable Republican. And I know people on our side will say, you know, but Trump gets out the vote, has his core of supporters. He does. Absolutely true. You know, Nikki Haley couldn't do that. I don't I don't know who would be right. Well, actually, I do have some ideas of some of the people who could be.

I won't go through it because then we'll end up arguing about each of those people. But those are three easy to beat opponents. They really, those should be slam dunks.

And I think if you get somebody, if you had somebody who was more likable, they'd beat him fairly easily. I mean, I think that one of the things that President Trump had for a moment in this election cycle when he was running against Biden particularly, and then in the aftermath, the assassination attempt, what since basically 2014, I think the American people have been craving

Both two things that seem to be in conflict. One is is normalcy and the other is change. They want to change from the direction of the Obama years, but they also want some semblance of normalcy. They just don't want to think about what's going on in the presidential race.

three years in advance of an election. They don't want to be dealing with whatever is the crazy level. I think that's what was behind whatever desire there was for Joe Biden in 2020 was more like, OK, fine, he's dead. What bad could happen? I mean, he's a corpse. And they did get a dead person. The problem was that he did things and they didn't like any of the things that he did. He actually made incredibly controversial moves. He governed like a far leftist. He basically took Bernie Sanders' agenda and then just tried to run the table with it. And on foreign policy, he set the world on fire.

fire. But I think that the thing that most Americans right now are craving, this was true. I think Trump was doing a good job of this for a little while in the election was was just a sense of, OK, you know, we need everything to just go back to normal, leave everything alone, calm down, take a breath and

And so there was a period between that debate and and the assassination attempt and then the RNC when Trump really went silent. And that was the best point of the election for him, because he was just allowing the story to be Joe Biden and not be Donald Trump. And then the assassination attempt happened and then the RNC happened. And I think there are a couple of tactical errors at the RNC. I think J.D. Vance incredibly smart. I'm not sure that J.D. Vance added anything to the ticket that Donald Trump didn't already have going for him on the ticket. I would have picked somebody like Glenn Youngkin if it had been me.

and tried to make some sort of play for the middle, tried to make some play for women voters. And then I think that Trump's speech at the RNC was a very bad move for him. I think that he had a unique opportunity a week after the assassination attempt to do something almost Reagan-esque. I mean, obviously, Reagan was shot by Hinckley, and there was a unifying kind of rally round Reagan moment because of that, because Reagan treated that with such geniality and joviality and let's come together.

And Trump could have done that. He could have given a speech where he said, listen, you know, I've said divisive things in the past. I'm going to keep saying things that piss some people off. That's just who I am. But when a bullet whizzes past your ear and kills somebody behind you, that makes you start to think about the things that are important in life. The thing that's important to me is making America strong. That's the thing I've always cared about. That's the thing I care about you and your family. Like that would have been a moment when he could have done that. He didn't do that. And so people asked me at the RNC when he was up in the polls what I felt like. And I said, I feel like

a baseball fan who is in the sixth inning and we're up three runs and we just left bases loaded, no outs. And you know that it's going to come back to haunt you. And that's kind of what I felt like ever since then. I felt like 30, 40 minutes into it, I was telling my kids, I'm like, this is fascinating. This is just great.

This is this is a grand slam to baseball. But then he just went on too long. And then I mean, hour and a half, almost two hours. And then he started taking some shots of Biden, not as harsh as usual, but he but he should have stopped there. By the way, the most meaningful thing to me in that speech, especially being a Reagan scholar after Reagan was shot March 30th, 1981.

and Reagan says to a number of different people, he wrote this in his diary, said it to Billy Graham, said it to his son Michael, he said it to Mother Teresa, he said it to Terrence Cardinal Cook, whatever time I have left is for him. Capital H-I-M, him, right? My life has been spared. Tells this to John Paul II a year later when they meet at the Vatican after both had survived assassination attempts. And Trump said,

bed that night in Milwaukee. And he said it, I'm a scholar of this stuff. I'm writing these down. There's about 12 examples now where Trump has said, God spared my life. God spared my life. So that's a very humbling thing. But unless the humility is further, and I think he has softened up. He doesn't seem as harsh as before, but he still has that edge to him that

I don't think is going to push him over 48, 49%. Even after the shooting in Butler, by the way, you've probably done this. Butler, Pennsylvania is my hometown. Do you believe that? Is that great? Now we're in for this. Butler High School, class of 84, which is only a 25-minute drive from where I am in Grove City, Grove City College. But yeah, I mean, he was, that's probably about the peak of where he got,

I'm going in probably too many directions. He's also lost the edge he had with Hispanic voters, which was looking—I don't think he was going to win 50%.

I thought he should have picked somebody like Cruz or Rubio. I hate doing identity politics, but those guys are the future of the party. Not that JD Vance isn't, but that would have really done something for him. And I think one of the areas where Kamala has really taken a step up on him is with Latino voters.

because they weren't voting for Biden, at least not in the numbers they usually were. She seems to have pulled a good number of them away from Trump. So I think that was kind of a strategic electoral political mistake by Trump. I think the other thing that is really fascinating about how Trump has campaigned, and this is true since 2016, he took the sort of position against the field in 2016 that the Iraq war was inherently bad. He said some things that you would have expected to hear actually on the Democratic stage in 2016 with regard to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Toad Pink, international answer, right? Bush lied. He lied. He lied. Exactly. He was using that kind of language. And because by that point, the country turned on the Iraq war, that allowed him to be the insurgent inside the candidacy. But that also has meant that there's been this growing wing inside the Republican Party. When you talk about the rejection of Reaganism,

I would say that the rejection of Reaganism has come in a couple of flavors. It's not on the socially conservative front. I think that the rejection of Reaganism has come in the economic flavor and it's come in the foreign policy flavor. And I'd say more on the foreign policy flavor than on the economic flavor. There's been a new sort of Papu canon isolationism that is cropping up in the Republican Party. It's always been there. I mean, to pretend that it wasn't there in the 30s, 40s, 50s,

is to be ignorant of sort of the split in the Republican Party that has been there for a very long time. But it was sort of in abeyance for a while. And now it seems to have come back with a fair bit of alacrity, this sort of antithesis

anti-hawkishness, anti-muscularity in foreign policy. And it's been exacerbated by sort of the bifurcated way that Trump has dealt with foreign policy. He talks like Pat Buchanan, and then he actually acts like Ronald Reagan. His foreign policy is extremely Reagan-esque. It's build up the military. He's through strength. Yeah, exactly. Let's

let's threaten our enemies. If they decide that they want to, you know, try and threaten us, we will back them off that point. And I remember I did a fundraiser for president Trump and, and in that fundraiser, he was, we were in the back room and he was saying that he had, that the reason that he says the reason Vladimir Putin never went into Ukraine is because I said to him, Vlad, Vlad, if you go into Ukraine, I'm going to bomb the out of you. And Vlad looked at me and he said, no, you won't. And I said, well, I might. And then, and then Trump looks at me and says, if you, if you're the United States and they think there's a 5% chance, you're going to blow the out of

out of them, then they don't want to. I mean, that's like pure kind of Reagan back them off the back them off the point with deterrence. And so what he did as actual president is very Reagan-esque. The way he talks about foreign policy is very not Reagan-esque. And so it's led to this bizarre split in the Republican Party where people who are perceived as too hawkish on foreign policy are now considered sort of hyper interventionists who are willing to get involved anywhere, as opposed to what most of the battles in the Republican Party are, which are really about, you know,

sort of which it's more situational. Like, does this fall into a we shouldn't be involved category or not involved category, not into a democracy building Woodrow Wilson category? I don't see a lot of people who are in that sort of George W. Bush 2005 mode. Yeah. In fact, Reagan told Gorbachev directly to his face. He said, we're going to challenge you to an arms race and you know you can't win it. Right. And Gorbachev knew that and he understood that. And when you look at

A lot of conservatives, Trump supporters are angry that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won't endorse Donald Trump. But I mean, when you say about the primary issue of their foreign policy, that Bush lied about that stuff that Ted Kennedy, Code Pink, International Answer was saying in those days. Reagan's former arms negotiator, Ken Adleman, endorsing Kamala Harris and even saying that if Reagan were alive, I think he would endorse Kamala. Well, that's that's

That's absurd. OK, but I can see why they wouldn't support Trump because of that. All right. You don't need to take the step and endorse Kamala. I mean, do you think she's your peace through strength? Anti-communist? I mean, come on. But but, you know, you say things like that, like Trump did in a very unsophisticated, uncouth kind of vulgar way. You're going to have to take your lumps and expect people like George W. Bush, who you accused of lying about WMDs.

You're going to have to expect them not to support you. So when you look at sort of the future of the Republican Party, I agree with you that I think that the sort of the Reagan is dead. What did what did Reaganism ever do for you is just ignorant of history. And also, when you look at sort of his platform, his platform still resonates with the vast majority of the Republican Party. By every polling metric, Americans tend to be very inflexible.

in favor of a muscular foreign policy. They're not in favor of intervention or boots on the ground everywhere, but neither was Reagan. They're very much in favor of a private property-based free market economy. They're not in favor of heavy interventionism and subsidization of the economy. And they tend to be more socially conservative, certainly than the left is at this point. When you look at that,

You know, it's bewildering to me, I think, why there's been this attempt to to pare away from Reagan. Why do you think there has been this attempt to say by many in sort of the MAGA movement, as opposed to kind of grasping onto the Reagan legacy and saying, yeah, we're a continuation of that. There's been this attempt to say, no, no, we're something completely new. We have nothing to do with that. Forget all of that. Yeah, I think it's kind of almost an anger that they feel, you know,

Hey, you know, we're following some of these Reagan principles and they're not working for us the way that they did for Reagan. But that gets back to my point of it's not the message. It's the messenger. All right. You know, Ronald Reagan running on those things today could still win. And I mentioned those 11 principles of Reagan. You just mentioned a few of them there. Right. Limited government.

Lower taxes, peace through strength, belief in the individual, anti-communism. Those are all winning issues. I mean, you beat the Democrats in every election on that. Even sanctity and dignity of human life, you know, maybe not on the abortion issue, depending on how you frame it and so forth, fair.

Freedom, family, those are still socially conservative. People still support the family generally. So you might lose on certain cultural, social issues, maybe same-sex marriage, maybe IVF, right? Although on gender issues, gender ideology, I mean, that's, I think even Bill Maher said, if I was a Republican, I'd run on drag queen story hours.

in every campaign. In my state right now, Pennsylvania, Dave McCormick, who's running against Bob Casey Jr., is constantly hitting him on gender transitioning for teenage girls. That's a winning issue. So those are still winning issues. It's still the right message. You just need the right messenger. Can you win 49 out of 50 states?

Probably not. But can you win 40? Yeah, I think so, with the right messenger. It really is interesting the way that the left has sort of retconned Reagan. So the usual critique of Reagan now, and it was at the time, but they've really sort of amped this up, is the idea that Reagan was an idiot. And if you read Reagan's diaries, if you read anything that Reagan ever wrote—

If you listen to his speeches from the GE circuit, you know that that is one of the stupidest contentions ever. I mean, this idea that Ronald Reagan was some sort of complete moron. First of all, I would just point out that if you play even a George W. Bush Al Gore debate now, it sounds like Demosthenes debating Socrates. It's insane. I mean, like every political debate from 25, 30 years ago sounds like people who actually know things.

And George W. Bush was ripped as like the dumbest person in America. I was there. I mean, in 2000, they were talking about how he was a complete moron. He couldn't pronounce it. He said nuclear instead of nuclear. And then you watch the debates, you see him and Gordon, you're like, these are fairly substantive. And they seem like they actually know about issues. I mean, he and John Kerry, that was only 20 years ago. That's it. I mean, it's crazy. Watch that debate. And with Reagan, yeah.

So my book, The Crusader, Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, lays out that this had been a strategy for Reagan to take down the Soviets dating back to the 1960s. And our Reagan movie focuses on that. And so for people who say, even some people on our side,

Well, you know, it's kind of hagiographic. I mean, what's hagiographic? Do you want us to not say that we didn't win the Cold War? Do you want it to end with a mushroom cloud over Manhattan? Do you want us not to have the tear down the wall speech? Do you want Reagan and Gorbachev not to be shaking hands peacefully ending the Cold War together? Do you want him not winning 49 out of 50 states?

I mean, that actually happened. And then you and I, we both into the Reagan ranch, the end of that film where he rides off into the Reagan ranch, the sunset with John Barletta, and they overplay his November 5th, 1994 Alzheimer's letter describing getting Alzheimer's as now I will ride off into the sunset of my life. Everyone's bawling in the theater while they're watching it. Guess what? That,

actually happened. He actually said that. This was a time of unity. It's a good story. That story can happen again, I think, with the right leadership. I think it also can happen

If there is a left that is no longer as radical as it was. Yeah, that's right. That's right. They're so vicious today. I mean, it really has gotten so much worse. Maybe we'll talk about it in sort of, again, hagiographic terms, the sort of Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan relationship, the fact that they would get together and that they were friendly with one another. But that was a real thing. They did hold hands together and pray.

Yeah, I mean, can you imagine Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump holding hands together and praying? Like, that is not a thing that's ever going to happen. Impossible. And by the way, the worst vicious reviews we've gotten on the movie from leftists, I've tried to look up the birthdates of some of them. They were born after the 80s or in the 80s. And I think a lot of them just can't comprehend that.

See, I came of age in the 80s. I was 17 years old in 1984, 1984 presidential election. And these people can't imagine that it actually was a time of unity. And everybody didn't hate the guts of the president. And in those days, just because the president had an R next to his name didn't mean that you needed to hate him and call him a racist, right? So you give them today a message of unity, which they claim that they want, and they hate it.

they want to divide. They say they want inclusion and diversity, right? No, they want to divide. So that's a good point. Even if you had the right Reagan today, there'd be a lot more hate of him regardless from the left. That's one of the things that's sort of fascinating about the transition from Carter to Reagan is that Carter, who I think was one of the worst presidents in American history. I think that Joe Biden and Carter are the two worst presidents of the last hundred years by far, not close.

And when you look at Carter, however, Carter was in 1976 campaigning as a cultural conservative. Carter campaigned as a church going man who wanted to restore honor and normalcy to the White House, almost in the same way that George W. Bush tried to campaign that way in 2000 against the Clinton legacy. And so in 76, by the time you get to 80, there is this backlash that has materialized almost on both sides of the aisle against the McGovernite

1960s left-wing far-radical coalition. And so in certain kind of cultural ways, Carter almost

presages Reagan. So in terms of policy, for sure not. And in terms of policy, Reagan reverses everything Carter does. But in terms of sort of the persona, which is the I'm I live on a ranch. I like, you know, I I'm a farmer. I like God. I like I like talking about the Bible. Really? That was the thing that like, can you imagine a Democrat campaigning in 2024 on? I live on a ranch and I like the Bible like that would not even be remotely thinkable.

Yeah, in fact, Mark Rudd and those guys created in 2008 the group Progressives for Obama, right? And in fact, they really were ex-Weatherman Marxists for Obama. And they said that Obama was really the first candidate they could support. Right?

Jimmy Carter was a hick and a hayseed. They didn't like RFK Sr. In fact, Prairie Fire, the manifesto of the weather underground, has among the dedications in the beginning to Sirhan Sirhan, the shooter of RFK Sr. So for them, they've needed a Democratic Party that could move to the far left, which it has. It's no longer the Jimmy Carter 1977 Democratic Party. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's sort of my hope for for the backlash that is to come. I think it is not fully materialized specifically because of all the incoming fire that Trump has taken and Trump's pugnaciousness and all of that. Because of that, I think that no one has really been able to take advantage of the fact that the Democratic Party has moved this far to the left. And so I think that Trump positionally has tried to occupy the middle in this election in some ways that, frankly, I don't particularly like as a conservative. Right. On abortion, he has moved far.

fit really far to the center. On economics, he's basically now throwing out proposals, various subsidies to various groups, depending on where he's campaigning. But it's very obvious what he's trying to do. He's trying to positionally grab the center and take it away from Kamala Harris. It's just he's sort of prohibited by the amount of hatred against him from ever being able to be perceived as sort of the centrist candidate in the election. But what that does say is that whatever comes next, again, God willing, Trump wins.

And some sense of normalcy is restored and he governs well. And then whoever comes after him is the person who sort of picks up both the Trumpian enthusiasm, but also campaigns in the more optimistic and warm way that you've talked about. Whatever comes next for the Republican Party, the Democrats have moved so far to the insane left. It's hard to see them recovering. And I, for the life of me, would be kind of shocked if Republicans

I'm a little scared of the primary process, I'll be honest with you, just because it seems to be selecting for, in many cases, some of the worst candidates. But the opportunity is right there for somebody to grab. Yeah, in fact, the left is so radical about it that if Trump wins in November 2024, they should calm down because he'll be out by January 2029, right? He'll have only one term left.

But they're so radical and they've so radicalized themselves with slogans like Hitler, dictator, fascist, Trump's going to destroy democracy, that they're making it sound like he's going to barricade himself in the Oval Office with the Marines.

and somehow not be able to be removed, right? They're so radical. And here, to return to where we started the conversation, not Marxist, but just extreme radical leftists, right? That they can't even accurately portray the scenario in front of us, right? They're that divisive and hateful.

Well, Paul, thank you so much for taking the time. Folks, you can go check out all of his books. They're all fantastic. Paul, again, thank you. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks for all you do. It's great joining you.

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