We are currently witnessing a huge tension in the Republican party.
MAGA, and before that its predecessor, the Tea Party, are challenging the establishment wing of the party.
All of this at a time when the next Presidential election should be a shoe in for the Republican candidate against a weak and doddery Biden, but have the Democrats gone too far in their destruction of the American Dream? Is there a way back using policy and the political system?
Bob McEwen, who served five terms as a Congressman and is the Executive Director of Council for National Policy shares his insights on all this and more.
Bob McEwen is Senior Advisor with the nationally recognized law firm of Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald. As such he maintains offices in Cincinnati and Washington, DC. An Ohio native, Bob McEwen represented Ohio in the United States House of Representatives for six terms. Prior to his Congressional service, he operated a successful Ohio Real Estate and Development firm as well as serving three terms in the Ohio General Assembly as the Senior Republican on the Financial Institutions and Insurance Committee.
Rep. McEwen served as Chairman of the Environmental Affairs task force of the United States delegation to the European Parliament. McEwen was selected by the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Congress as the chief spokesman for the United States in discussions with European Green Party and other Environmental Organizations.
In 2005, McEwen and two others, Members of Congress, hosted the third conference of Balkan Prime Ministers for the purpose of facilitating dialogue and reconciliation in that troubled region of the world.
On August 23, 1989, Congressman McEwen and United States Senator Robert Dole participated as United States observers in Warsaw, Poland to the first ever Parliamentary election of a non-Communist leader of a Soviet bloc country. Hours later, the new Prime Minister, in his first official act, received the Congressman and Senator prior to meeting with the Soviet representatives of the regime that had occupied that nation for fifty years. This action was the spark that encouraged the collapse of Soviet dominated governments throughout Eastern Europe culminating in the destruction of the Berlin Wall ten weeks later. Senator Dole and Rep. McEwen met the following day with the President and U.S. National Security team in Kennebunkport, Maine to fashion the United States response and position in support of Warsaw Pact nations seeking to break away from Soviet domination.
Representative McEwen served as an official United States observer in Moscow during both the 1991 Soviet Coup attempt and to the Kremlin in January of 1992 when the Soviet Union was dissolved.
Mr. McEwen was elected by his colleagues to the two most coveted positions in the U. S. Congress; the Select Committee on Intelligence which oversees all of our nation’s secrets, and the powerful House Committee on Rules which has jurisdiction over all legislation in the Congress. As one of only four Republicans on the thirteen member Rules Committee, Mr. McEwen managed nearly one-third of all legislation on the House floor for the Republican side of the Congressional aisle.
McEwen legislation approved by the Congress included the National Strategy Act that realigned the chain of command during times of hostilities, directly from the Theater Commander to the National Command Authority in Washington. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and General Norman Schwarzkopf have credited this change with playing a major role in the success of Operation Desert Storm.
He was selected by Administration and Congressional leaders to floor manage such critical national security legislation as the B-2 bomber authorization, the nuclear freeze debate, and to give the closing arguments before the vote to authorize military action by the United States in Desert Storm.
Mr. McEwen has often been selected as negotiator to bring resolution to Senate/House conference committee impasses on dozens of pieces of legislation, particularly affecting Public Works, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and International Relations.
Connect with Bob...
WEBSITE: https://bobmcewen.com/
TWITTER http://www.twitter.com/bobmcewen/
FACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Bob-McEwen/211135982248187
Council for National Policy...
WEBSITE: https://cfnp.org/
Interview recorded 15.5.23
*Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast.
Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20
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(Hearts of Oak)
Hello, Hearts of Oak, and welcome to another interview coming up in a moment with Bob McEwen.
Bob McEwen is the executive director of Council for National Policy and I had the privilege of meeting him whenever I was over there stateside at their conference in February.
He's also was elected five times as member of Congress for Ohio and anyone who has won five elections deserves to be listened to.
So we discuss a whole range of issues. his time as congressman, what that was like, what it means to be a conservative and a Republican in the US, those have always been the same thing but seem to be separate in many ways and we discussed that separation.
And then looking at the clash between, I guess, the establishment and a more conservative orientated group in the Republican Party, the Tea Party and now Trump, and what that means.
With the Democrats being so reckless, is there a way back using policies and legislation?
And then we end up, of course, with the upcoming elections. And I ask Bob for his thoughts on that and where we may be 18 months on during that.
So I know you'll enjoy listening to Bob as much as I do speaking with him and giving his insight on all these range of policies.
And hello, Hearts of Oak. It is wonderful to have an individual who was elected to Congress at the age of 30 in 1980, won re-election five times there. And I've seen him described as a textbook Republican, opposed to abortion, gun control, high taxes, and as the Executive Director of Council for National Policy. Bob McEwen, it's wonderful to have you with us.
(Bob McEwen)
Peter, it's my pleasure. Thank you so much.
Not at all. And the website there, Council for National Policy, is on the screen. And Counter for National Policy stands for Limited Government, Traditional Values, and Strong Concerted Defence, which which is conservative values, which we all hold dear to.
If I could be ask you about yourself, your time as a congressman, that nonstop, I guess, political campaign.
We don't understand that in the UK, because we have every five years, where I know you did every two years.
But maybe you can let us know what made you so successful? You won time and time again.
Maybe just let us into what made you successful standing for Congress.
Well, you're exactly right. The United States, it's only 240 years ago, but that was a real transition into the idea that individuals would decide, set the course of their policy.
We didn't have a template.
We set up three tiers. We set up an individually elected leader or president, individually elected members of Congress accountable to no one else but the voters.
We had a turnover every 24 months, the House of Representatives, everyone is up for re-election, And then we had an independent judiciary.
That morphed into the parliamentary system, where most of the democracies of the world, when they choose a majority in the parliament, that's the person that then chooses the prime minister. So there's a coordination there.
So it's really hard for people to fully grasp as to how is currently the situation.
We have a Democrat president, independently elected. And yet the majority of the House of Representatives is Republican.
We have a Republican speaker, and they're the ones that pass the laws.
It creates for a dynamic tension, and it was designed for that purpose.
The US Constitution was designed for one reason, one, only one, only one, that was to prevent tyranny, period, end of discussion.
It wasn't there to be efficient. It wasn't to have a strong anything.
It was there to prevent tyranny, so that even when Franklin Roosevelt could carry all but two states in an overwhelming landslide, and that he wanted to add members to the Supreme Court.
He couldn't do it because the Congress stood. There's an independent tension there that prevents tyranny and that allowed freedom, and that's why this little 4% of the population of the world, more books, plays, symphonies, copyrights, inventions, and the rest of the other 96% combined.
Not because those people are smarter or because they work harder.
But because they're freer and the degree to which freedom accelerates is when prosperity accelerates, when you impose socialism and take away freedom you can make any place when I was young the richest city in the world was a place called Detroit Michigan and they elected some socialists that said we can put a stop to this and so currently Detroit Michigan is the poorest most corrupt city north of the Rio Grande in all of North America so it's the freedom that creates the wealth not the geography, it's the ideas. And our political system was designed for that purpose, that people would constantly have input, that the second a person thought they are entitled to it, they had to stand for re-election. So every January, a member of Congress either files for re-election or gets sworn into office, one or the other.
Well, I want to get more into US politics, but I saw that you're just back from Hungary, CPAC in Hungary. I was trying to go myself, and in the end, it didn't happen. But maybe you want to just touch on that, kind of that sets in the context our European audience before we move over to the US. But what was that like over in Hungary at CPAC?
Well, first of all, Peter, under the free enterprise system, the only way that I can achieve wealth, the only way that people can voluntarily reach in their pocket and hand money to me is if I do something for them that is greater, that is more beneficial than the money they have in their hand.
And so we, we stay awake nights, dreaming up ways how to do something good for a person, such that they'll slam on their brakes and pull in and say, you're going to wash my car and clean the carpet and watch the windows and throughout the day. I'd much rather have that than have this $10 bill.
I'd much rather have that parachute than $60.
And so therefore, the freedom and creation comes from free people.
So for the Soviet Union controlled two thirds of all the land mass on the planet, but they couldn't make a hairdryer, they couldn't make an automobile, they couldn't make a washing machine.
They had to go steal from the ideas, so they made their airplanes look like the airplanes were created by the free people, and et cetera, et cetera.
So in the idea of conservatism, that is to preserve and protect the freedom that allows for abundance. Now I said there are two ways to get money from a person.
One of them is that I figure out ways to bless them, so they say, oh that, that, that, that app on my phone. Oh, I'd like to have for 99 cents, I can have that app.
Well, the person that dreams that up, doesn't hope that a million people down and become a millionaire.
So that's why over virtually all of the apps come from only free countries.
The other ones have to steal because socialism does what?
Socialism redistributes. Now that's a fancy term for stealing.
So when you walk into a store and you grab things off the shelf, put them in your pocket and walk out, you are redistributing them.
You redistribute them from the shelf of the owner into your pocket.
Now, have you created any wealth?
No, no. Have you redistributed? Yes, because the degree to which you benefit is the degree to which the other person is diminished.
And under socialism, that's why they're always poor. And the more socialism that you have, the greater the poverty you have because you're stealing from the productive, therefore they're disincentivized to produce because they don't get the reward.
And you reward people who didn't produce it, And why should they produce when they get it for free?
And so you go into a country like Venezuela or Rhodesia or all these great abundant countries and you turn them into absolute hell holes because of a thing called socialism.
Socialism and in the scriptures it was referred to as covetousness.
Covetousness is when I wanna take something that someone else has.
Stealing is when I actually take it. Covet is when I want to take it.
And so the Ten Commandments that were put on the walls of all of our classrooms for all these years, it said we didn't have to have magnetometers because people didn't bring guns to work, because we said we shouldn't kill. And we didn't have to have locks on their bicycles because we said thou shalt not steal. But then we had the prosperity because number 10 is on every wall, thou shalt not covet. I don't want to win. So my wife, when we travel around, people often say, you know, I've been to America, I've been to America. And she would often ask them, What is the thing that startled you or surprised you or was the most surprising about America?
The answer that comes back more than anything else is, well, in America, you don't have walls around your property. You don't know where your backyard stops and where the neighbour starts.
Well, the reason for that is because we didn't covet. Now, when you go into Latin America, you not only have walls around everybody's property, you have cut glass over top of the property because you covet.
In America, when you saw a beautiful home, you didn't say, I want to take that house.
You would say, someday I want to have a home like that.
Or a nice car. We were in one of the nicest countries in Central America.
I was waiting to go to dinner with the attorney general.
And we were standing outside, our wives went in to eat, and he just kept talking and talking, not going in the restaurant. I got frustrated. What's going on here, Wanegger?
And finally, a person appeared, and he handed him some money, and we went in to eat.
Well, what happened was he hired a person
to watch his car while we were at the restaurant. Now that is a result of covetousness. Now when Moses was having a hard time, Jethro, his father-in-law, came to him and he said, you know, Moses, God and I've been talking here and we think you've got in over your head and you have to divide these people up into federal, state, and local government. You need to have thousands, hundreds, and tens. And Moses, here's three things you need to look for.
Three things. That is, there's only two choices. Either man thinks he's God or he recognizes God. Number one is those that fear God. And I'll just tell you, you don't want to marry a person who thinks they're God. You don't want to go into business with a person who thinks they're God. And you don't want to elect a person who thinks they're God. I said Moses, those that fear God. Number two, lovers of truth. Okay, what does that mean? That means a free enterprise system in which you sign a contract and you keep your word. You look a guy in the eye and you shake your hand you honour it. If you're dishonest, if you're the Middle East, if you're much of Asia, if you're a place you have to have contracts that are six inches thick in order to go to the grocery store because that they're going to lie and cheat at every opportunity. He said therefore you want those people who fear God, lovers of truth, and, Moses, get this straight, haters of socialism.
That is, if this guy's going to want what somebody else has, you don't want a person like that in power. He used the term covetousness in Exodus 18, 21. It says, fear God, lovers of truth, hating covetousness. And so the purpose of the conservative political action committee is to support conservative values, which respect private ownership, as opposed to socialism, which promises that, you know, if a thief comes and takes something, we say that that guy's bad, he's a thief. If he runs for office and he gets a mob to come and take it, that's called socialism.
And so if you vote for me, you don't have to go in and steal your car insurance. I'll just, we'll just make the car insurance do it, etc. So the political action committee.
The opportune conservatives get together periodically and all these folks and all all these various issues, encourage one another.
And this most recent one was in Budapest.
And that was an opportunity because the prime minister there is fighting the tides of socialism in Europe.
And he welcomed us with opened arms. We were pleased and happy to be there.
I love Budapest. I've been there many, many times. It is a beautiful city and a country that strives for freedom looking after its own identity. But you mentioned socialism and I know you have travelled over to Eastern Europe before during the fall of communism and that's something which you've been passionate about, freedom for those in Eastern Europe and Russia. Tell us about those trips, why would an American go all the way over there to speak on freedom?
Well, it's the constant fight. There's a desire to control other people, and under free enterprise, you can be honoured by inventing something, or creating something, or writing something, or building something.
That's why in free countries, we honour those people.
Under socialist countries, the only way that you get power is that you take it.
When you do that, you have to control people. For example, in the Baltics, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, periodically, they would go through and they would just take the largest farmers, people that were successful, and they would ship them off to Siberia, or they would disappear in one way or another.
There's this constant lack of freedom. That is that you're at the mercy of what the state decides to do.
That's a horrible thing, and that's a fight that is there all the time.
We are experiencing right now at this moment, and it ebbs and flows, in the 1930s, it swept almost completely encompassed Europe, as you know, the National Socialist Party went all the way from the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to the Soviet border.
It took Americans and Canadians and Brits and Australians landing at Normandy to begin to punch that back.
Now we have this competition, always, as Anne Rand says, that you can vote socialism in, but you have to fight, shoot your way out.
And so what we see is this constant effort to have, when people get their choice, when they have a freedom, they have the opportunity.
They always choose freedom.
But that's why totalitarians, and we are sympathetic to them, we have come through a time of the last 40 years of tremendous, tremendous explosion of growth and prosperity.
And now we see it trying again. They always have a new idea.
Sometimes it was racism. Other times it was religion.
And now it's environment. And so the reason that I have to tell you what kind of house to live in, and how far you can travel and what kind of car you can drive and what kind of is is not because I'm a communist and you're not or because I'm a Nazi and you're not it's because I'm an environmentalist and you must do what I say. There's always an excuse for why people want to control other people and that gets back to a concept spiritual as to whether or not people should be allowed to do that and that's why when you abandon God, the God part then it's just a a matter of the most powerful against the weakest. When you do the God part, that is that every person has a unique skill and talent and creation because of Almighty God, that makes it such that you do not have a right as a group to come in and tell people what to do. So that's why Moses was correct when he had God first, then the freedom of the political system, and then the economic system of not coveting.
Absolutely, a relationship with God gives everyone value an equal purpose and merit and gives that responsibility.
And Peter, without God, people will literally tell you that the rocks and stones and the weeds are more important. The bugs take priority. Now, you only do that, if you tell me that, see, if you tell me every, the fork in the road, the fork in the road for every political decision comes from this question. If you believe that man created God.
Or you believe that God created man.
And when I sit there and listen to you tell me how I should eat bugs because you think I should, because you don't want me to produce the oil, the gas that's there in abundance, then I can also tell you where you stand on God.
You think that you're God. You do not believe in God. You believe that you're the supreme and you're going to dictate to other people.
So our freedom is dependent upon that. And I love the libertarians, they're wonderful people, but they think that it's innate in people to do what's right.
History has shown us that that's not correct, that there is a godly standard that we must abide by. As you do that, there's abundance and peace and prosperity.
The degree to which you abandon it is which you have death, destruction, and poverty.
With that clash we are now seeing, what does it mean to be a conservative, and I guess a Republican, in the US?
Is it different now than during your time in Congress?
Well, I probably, and that's a very good question. I haven't given it that much thought and so as I as I analyse it I tend to think not, There's always this desire for people to control other folks. Yeah, this socialist is national socialism It's this Union of Socialist Republics and the USSR and if see the same thing in China There's always this idea that I'm going to control what you can see and what you and if you don't agree with me then I'll shut you off, I'll burn your books.
Only the left burns books.
Only the left, you know, we don't fear. And let me just explain why that is, Peter.
If you and I are in, if I walk into the room where you are, and I say that room is 25 feet wide, and somebody else says, I think it's 20, I think it's, another guy says, I think it's 30, I think it's 29, we can all sit there and we say, oh, isn't that wonderful?
We can all debate it, and we can write white papers, and we can sit around the faculty lounge and talk about it, and everybody's content until someone comes in and measures it. And when they measure it, here's what the measurement does. The measurement is the truth and it reveals error. So a person comes in and measures it and find out it's only 18 feet wide. That means that everybody in the room knows what I said was wrong. And here's the person that said it was 25, the person said it was 30, the person said it was 32. They all hate the person who said it was 18, because that's truth. Error hates truth. Now, conservatives don't fear.
We have the truth, so therefore we can let a thousand liberal speakers come and speak. We don't care, but they can't let one. They can't let one conservative get up and speak, because the truth will reveal the error.
Let me just hit it again. Let's suppose that you're prosecuting a fellow for stealing an automatic teller machine out of the bank drive-in.
And so you're in the court and the defence counsel says, why, he wouldn't do such a thing, why he loves his mother and he was off having dinner with his sister and here's the receipts from the restaurant.
You don't care what she says because when you're finished, you're going to show the security camera of him driving his pickup up to the ATM. You see him put the chain around the ATM.
You see his face on the camera as you lean over the camera and the fingerprints and the truth will overcome the error such that, here's the point, the only way they can succeed is to prevent the presentation of truth. Your Honour, I object. Your Honour, I object. I object because the truth will overcome the error. That's why they have to shout. That's why they have to burn books. That's why they have to cancel people. That's why they have to deny them access to TikTok.
That's why they have to tell that Donald Trump can't speak on television. Because the truth overcomes the error. Therefore, they have to band together. And in the course of this, has that changed? It's always been that way, but I'm increasingly optimistic that people are beginning to see it. And the thing is that truth always wins, because the whack-a-mole, you just can't whack it enough times. And you might succeed for a while. And, you know, Adolf could have his book burning sessions all across Europe, but eventually it comes through.
And then he had the Soviet Union, but eventually with technology, people could see the truth.
And so now, what the Chinese have done is they've begun to infiltrate the various communication systems so that they can shut off people from Twitter and they can shut off people from Facebook but they constantly have to go down and shut down truth because truth overcomes error. We and conservatives, we do not fear that. You say anything you want to say because when you're finished work, all you have to say is, here's the measurement, it's 18 feet, here it is.
And truth eventually wins, and that's why I'm optimistic about the future.
But I repeat, there's always and always will be a battle.
Well, on truth, it's a question that's been in my mind over the last three years.
What is truth? When Pilate asked Jesus.
I think traditionally, if you look back in history, generations have been able to understand that and answer that.
And we now live in a society where actually people don't know what truth is. Truth is subjective, it's no longer objective. How does it, and we are having the same battle in the UK, in Europe, as I know you're having in the US on that. Where does the conservative movement, the Republican Party, how does it fit into that confusion and chaos, I guess, of what is truth, what is right and wrong.
And that is the question of the age, that absolutely it is, and that's why God told Moses, the first thing is settle that, because there's only two definitions of truth.
One is what I think is true, and the other is what God says is true.
Those are the only two options.
And so those that don't want to do what God says, then they talk about my truth.
And my truth says that a man is a woman.
And the absurdity of that is naturally overwhelming, such that in the first chapter of Romans, when they folks went after, they set themselves up as God, and they said, professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And so Paul said, no, we need to get back to God. We need, there has to be a standard. So I am privileged to be a part of the Turning Point USA, and Charlie Kirk went around to these college campuses where these indoctrination things were going on from all the professors, and he would just set up a card table and share truth.
And of course, that's very distressing because truth overcomes error. And so as people began to see the truth, and they began to read and discuss and talk about the fact that socialism has never worked. And if socialism worked, by now it would have found a spot where it did.
And so when they can see it doesn't work. The next thing, Peter, here's the interesting thing.
When they began to think with truth economically, then they began to think truth politically, and then they began to ask questions spiritually, because it's a value system.
It's a God made us and we have rights, and all of those things are anathema to socialism.
And so now, all across America, and now starting around the world, in high schools elsewhere, are starting these Turning Point USA faith, because there were so many young people asking about these spiritual, that the woke churches, the woke effort had gotten into the pulpits by saying that we don't want to offend anyone.
Well, you know, if Jesus Christ could have gone around without offending a person, he probably would have tried it.
The idea that truth offends, it's not the person that offends, truth.
And evil will be offended by truth.
And so what we've seen is that there is this great uprising of folks that it begins to follow across the board, of a worldview, and it gets back to that first one, Either I'm God.
Or he's God. And every one of us face that decision at some time in our lifetime.
I love being at Counter for National Policy in February and listening to the conversation, I think with James Lindsay and Charlie Kirk. That was a phenomenal insight. But tell us, because Counter for National Policy is maybe a more traditional conservative group. You've got Turning Point and what they're doing with American Fest, and I watched at their conference in December or targeting or going after the younger vote, the younger group.
It's interesting to see those alliances, because it's not either or.
It's groups working with certain areas of society, others working with others.
Tell us about that kind of connection, because as I said, I was blown away by that conversation with Charlie and James.
Well, what happened was that the conservative movement in America was successful once in 1964 in nominating a nominee for president, and then it was overwhelmingly stomped.
The Republican leadership said, I cannot support this person, and so Barry Goldwater was tremendously defeated.
When Ronald Reagan made another attempt, then they felt that they were going to try to do the same thing.
That is, the liberals of both parties would team up to prevent him from restoring, because he was anti-communist. And deep down inside, the communists had penetrated most of these folks, just as you see the Chinese penetrating Africa and elsewhere.
And so in the beginning of the first year of the Reagan administration, a handful of folks got together to help get him to get elected and said, what we need to do is you don't have to change what you're doing if you're a national defence group, or if you're an agriculture group, or if you're a pro-life group, or if you're an education group.
But periodically we should get together and say what can we agree upon.
And they formed a group called the Council for National Policy, and it meets three times a year.
I emphasize that one of the things that gets people's attention is that we don't do anything.
But it's like the Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber of Commerce doesn't sell shoes, and doesn't sell cars, and doesn't sell houses, but it has people that do. That's what CMP does.
It has people that do everything, even though CMP does nothing. What we do is we bring people together to encourage one another and what happens when, for example, the CRT, the critical race theory, there were many people that didn't realize that that was rather significant. I thought that was just a left-wing racist policy in college campuses. And when we began to probe deeper, we found out that they had penetrated the seminaries of most of the major religions and to begin to teach, to supplant the scriptures with race in many of our pulpits, and then the educational books as well, and across the board in the military, until now we have a head of the U.S.
Military that says the number one threat to America is not the the Chinese threat and the nuclear threat, the number one threat is white nationalism. Now you would think how in the world, you could ask any kid on the street corner watching the guns shooting, what's the number one threat?
Number one. Nevertheless, CMP was able to bring that to the fore to say, see how CRT has aggressed.
Now we have the same thing with the government and environment, ESG society, where they're trying to give ratings to corporations who fit their global agenda.
Of course, the global agenda is not slavery. They don't say that.
That's rather people would be repulsed at that.
They say climate, and everybody's in favour of climate. Therefore, if you do these ESG, if you do these certain things, if you spend money with, communist groups in China and oppose freedom folks in Hungary or the US, then you get this higher rate and ostensibly, it's because it had to do with the environment.
That's where CMP brings people together for the educational purposes.
Why? Because truth overcomes error. We let everybody present, but we see that truth wins and that's what we're up to at the moment and delighted about it.
I love bumping into so many of my guests who I'd seen virtually. And then I met in the flesh, in the person. So that was one of my highlights coming away from CNP. But maybe I'll ask you about the kind of tension in the Republican Party with the clash of, I guess, a more establishment grouping and a more conservative-oriented grouping, which is the Tea Party and now Trump.
In the UK, we don't really have that. We have the so-called Conservative Party resting on old laurels.
We don't really have that agitator making them think of what actually it is to be conservative, but you have that in the US.
Maybe let us know a little bit more about that, because it's always good to be reminded, I think, of what you're there for and what your principles are.
Well, this might not be 100% correct, but part of it, I think, has to do with the fact that when people are really concerned about something that doesn't fit in, they can form their own party.
If they just suddenly, one day, they're fine, but six months later, Brexit takes over the whole country because policies.
Now, in America, we have a thing called the Electoral College, which says this, no one can become president, no one can become the leader of the country if they don't carry half of the country.
Now, that provision meant such that you have a two-party system, because the second you have a third party or a fourth party, you're out of the ballgame.
That electoral college has kept a two-party system. Now, you say, well, what's the point of bringing that up?
Well, that's because then you have the tensions at the edges.
When a Brexit comes along in America, it has to fit into one of the two parties, and the party begins to move in one direction or another.
That's simply the way it works, quite frankly, I think it's ingenious, it's wonderful.
I think it's virtually divine inspired, because the poor folks under the parliamentary system in Israel or in Italy, it was 60 governments in 48 years and things, I don't have the full affection for that.
The poor folks in Israel, I've gone for four years was virtually, they finally righted it recently. In America, you have to have a 50%, which means that when you have these tensions, you're always going to have these tensions, that there's always be at the margin, what is the new issue?
Those that want to sit on their laurels can sit there, but they will constantly be in competition with the new idea.
It seems to have worked well and will continue to, but I repeat, it's because you cannot have, you can sell a party in a parliamentary system that might get only seven or eight votes in the parliament and you can't sell that in America because brother if you can't win, we're not interested in hearing from you.
I love it. Can I ask you about legislation, obviously your time on Capitol Hill in Congress and I kind of look at what the Democrats are doing being so reckless in so many ways. And I wonder, is there a way back using policies and legislation?
Oh, yes, there always is. The Democrat Party tends to be more socialist. What is a socialist?
A socialist is a person that says, if you vote for me, I will take what that person has and give it to you.
That's just all there is to it. Now, when you do that, you destroy things.
When they take over New York, they turn it into a mess.
Periodically, fortunately, Giuliani and Bloomberg came back and put it back on the rails.
Twelve years ago, it was the safest, cleanest, largest city in the world.
Of course, they bring in the Democrats and immediately they do, I'm going to tax those people, we're going to steal from the productive, we're going to run them out, and it's back into the hellhole that it was 20 years ago.
Socialism only fails every time. The Democrats, well, they run for office trying to do that.
You question periodically that they'll destroy the economy and then you have to go back and reproduce and build things.
We just hope that they don't do any permanent harm, but as you know, freedom, when Donald Donald Trump became president
the the entire nation was energy independent within 18 months see freedom works.
Okay, and of course when when when Biden came in we were dependent within five months Because he shut down all the pipelines and increased it and shut down the drilling and things, So it doesn't take long to screw things up. It usually takes longer to try to repair them, But nevertheless they can be repaired. So Margaret Thatcher came in the country was just in a mess It was the IMF had taken over control of the pound sterling, everybody felt that Britain was finished.
When she left 11 years later, had the fourth largest economy on the planet.
Freedom works every time, socialism fails every day.
Yeah, strong leadership is essential. I'm intrigued watching over in the States, the different US states that actually want freedom and the ones that don't.
The transfer going back and forward.
I think I'm talking to a friend who lived in Florida, and he said, actually, house prices are off the scale.
You can't even rent a car anymore. The huge demand, similar in Texas.
There seems to be a migration of people going from states that you're punished for your freedom moving towards those states that actually, they want their freedom.
It seems to be a bigger and bigger divide happening in the US from those who actually want freedom and those who want to be subjugated.
Well, that's the specialness of the federalist system, that we have individual states and they can do their own policies. I would just take Florida, for example, in that Florida is just bursting at the seams in every area, and surpluses in the budgets in the city councils and people are happy and everything, they're expanding and building.
It's just a wonderful place, but the governor only won by 30,000 votes, 30,000.
The fellow that he beat was as loony as you wouldn't trust him to run a lemonade stand.
He's a thug, literally, he's in jail now, I believe. Had he won instead of DeSantis, then he would have said, socialists always want control.
So they're going to tell you that you have to have to take this jab and you have to cover your mouth and you have to cover your paper, toilet paper on your nose is going to keep you safe and put up the plastic and put it and they would have shut down the churches.
Now it didn't shut down, shut down the Planned Parenthood headquarters and didn't shut down the gay bars, but shut down the churches and all the things that they, and that's what they do in California. That's what they do in New York.
And so what do you see? You see New York and California in a state of collapse, and you see the free states, the Republican states, they're prospering.
I just saw today that to rent a U-Haul to go from Los Angeles to Dallas is 10 times what it costs to rent a U-Haul to go from Dallas to Los Angeles.
Everybody that they'll pay you to take them to California because everybody there is leaving And then you can't get your hands on one. So it, like I say, freedom works.
Will Democrats wake up, because I remember when I was in California for the first time, in April last year, and then I went again in June, I realized why I didn't really want to go to the West Coast. But you had people talking who lived just outside LA, and they said, well, this is why we live outside. But the crime and the destruction of the cities actually moves and spreads. And I wonder, will Democrat voters actually get it sometime?
Well, let's pray that they do. I mean, they do this intentionally.
When Giuliani became mayor, there were these people that would come out, they're called squeegee people, and they would come and sprinkle dust on your windshield and sprinkle water on it, and then they'd hold their hand out. If you gave them some money, then they would wash your window, and otherwise, you had dirt on your window, or they key you when you drove off. He said, we're not going to do that. I want those people arrested. The second they step off the sidewalk, they're jaywalking, we're going to arrest them, and we're going to fingerprint and mugshot them, and find out who, here's the principle. Here's the principle that Democrats seem to not grasp.
That is a lawbreaker, is a lawbreaker, period. They want to focus on the big law. No, no. It's only a handful of people that do this. And so the very first guy that they took for doing that, he had 25 warrants. He went away forever. Why? Because he's a lawbreaker. He's a thief.
And so the next thing that they did was Giuliani said, we're not going to have people, or jumping the turnstile to get on the subway.
If you jump the turnstile and you don't pay, then you're going to be arrested.
And what do you do when you're arrested? You're going to get a fingerprint and a mugshot.
And so they did that. The very first day they saw the first guy they caught, they had fingerprints of five murders. Now they had the five fingerprints were clear.
They didn't know who they belonged to.
But when they mugshot and fingerprinted this guy, they found that the guy who voted jumping the turnstile was a murderer and they put him away. And so when you look at what happened, that crime didn't diminish, crime collapsed.
Because when you take the one to 3% of the troublemakers and you put them behind bars where they can't behave, that the rest of the people can prosper.
Now what happened when de Blasio came in, when the new Democrat came in, first Democrat mayor in 16 years?
They said, look how clean and nice and everything is, let's just screw it up as fast as possible.
So what he said was, we are not going to enforce the law.
Get this, we're not going to enforce the law for those jumping the turnstile.
That means that every thug can go in there and can sleep on the subway 24 hours a day.
He can rob the people when they come on.
They don't have to get on. Now people don't want to ride the subway, the places of mess, where you have the fights.
They said, we want to do more than that. We want to allow people to urinate on the sidewalk and to defecate in the middle of the street and to sleep. So then we will not arrest them for doing that.
And so now you walk up and down the streets, you see it covered with people that are just hanging out doing those. And they said, oh, furthermore, people should be allowed to steal.
And so as long as they don't steal more than 1,000 at a whack, as long as they take 950, we'll allow them to do that. And so now when you go into some of the stores, they're all boarded up, or they're empty, or they're behind bars. You have to have someone come to open it up.
Now, your question was, will they see it? People voted for that. People voted in New York 4 to 1, 4 to 1, 80% voted to do that. They voted for these incompetent folks. So I'm probably not as good a politician as I should be, because it just doesn't make any sense to me.
Could I end off just with asking you about Sleepy Joe and the elections coming up, and I had the privilege of being on the front row at CMP and listening to Governor Ron DeSantis, and I love what he's doing in Florida. I also love what Donald Trump has done as a wrecking ball in tearing up the whole system and doing things differently. But when you look as someone who, has their finger on the pulse, what are your thoughts of how the next, I don't know, is it 18 months will transpire? What are your thoughts as you look into that? We don't have any of those big figures in the UK, so that's why it's intriguing looking over to the US.
Well, Now, the difficulty we face is when you're on the left, you never say, look what a great job I did in education.
Didn't we do a wonderful job in cleaning up the streets, and oh, aren't people so nice and safe now? Look at how efficiently we handled the border.
And didn't we do a marvellous job in bringing the price of gasoline down to 28% of what it was 10 years ago. They can't point to anything.
So what they do is they scream, he's a racist, he's a bigot, he's a murderer, he's a he's a and all they do is just vomit on anyone who wants to get into office. And one of the reasons that I am so strongly in favour of of Donald Trump at this point is because almost anybody else has, does not have the rhinoceros hide to stand against the abuse that they will shovel at anyone because they said McCain was a maverick and he listened to people and he worked across the aisle until he got nominated. Second he got nominated, the New York Times ran articles just like they did against Kavanaugh of these women that claimed that they had affairs with him and when they checked it out they weren't even close. They were just making this stuff up just like they're doing doing with Trump, with this woman that claims she couldn't even tell in the court, she couldn't tell within three years of when this events took place.
Within three years.
So they're going to do that to people.
And Donald Trump has the backbone for the benefit of our country and for freedom to take it.
And as we've seen, he can bring peace and prosperity. People don't remember that prior to 2016, this entire world was in the hands of the Chinese.
We were doing everything that they asked. We were giving them every privilege.
The President of the United States signed waivers so that the chips in our military equipment and in our fighter jets would come from China.
They were able to control everything.
We were sleepwalking over a cliff.
One man.
Donald Trump came along and said hey, this isn't the brightest thing in the world, He went to the Mercedes and says you can't build an, you can't build a car without their approval what kind you Germans are stronger than that and in the entire world began to break out of a stupor and those people who had put all of their money New York and Silicon Valley all of their money in China, became furious because those factories began with the withdrawal the stock market in China went down 47 percent, half of its wealth was diminished. In the United States, the stock went up 55 percent. America began to grow and prosper and those that hate freedom in America were furious and they were and they continue to be.
But I don't think the world's going to go back to sleep and all we need is a person strong enough to do it and we can go back to peace so the countries aren't overrunning each other as they are in Ukraine, where we go back to peace again where there's stability, and we have a strong surgence of freedom, which I anticipate we're going to have shortly.
Well, Bob, it is an honour speaking with you, someone who has their finger on the pulse and is involved in such an influential organization like the CNP, so I appreciate your time today and sharing your thoughts.
Well, it was indeed an honour to be with you as always, and we're honoured to have you whenever you can be with us, Peter. All the best.
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