'Life, Liberty & Levin' on Democrats' 'scare tactics'
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This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," October 3, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello America. I'm Mark Levin, and this is LIFE, LIBERTY, & LEVIN. We have two great guests tonight: Gordon Chang, expert on Communist China. I want to ask him about these phone calls Milley to the head of the Communist Party military, if actually Milley defused something or may have created incredible confusion among the two countries, as well as other aspects of what Communist China is doing.
Also Stuart Varney of "Varney & Company," we want to talk about what Biden and company are doing to the economy and what they want to do on this budget.
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But before we get to these two great guests, I keep hearing Nancy Pelosi and others say, if we do not vote to raise the debt ceiling, then what will happen is the full faith and credit of the United States will be destroyed because we will default on our debt.
Now, I want to walk you through this. It's very, very important, because this is your country. These are your taxes, and these are more scare tactics and that's what the Democrats use all the time in order to change this country, in order to push their agenda, this is what they do. So, let's unravel this. Okay?
First of all, we're not going to default on our debt service. Here's why. Whether the government shuts down or goes on, you keep paying your taxes. The Treasury keeps collecting your taxes via the I.R.S., to the tune of approximately $320 billion every month, $320 billion dollars every month.
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So I went and I looked, what part of that goes towards that service every month? Approximately $44 billion. Now, wait a minute, if the Federal government is receiving all forms of income taxes and user fees, $320 billion a month, and $44 billion a month is what the debt service costs, how will we default? We won't default. That's the point.
Then they say if we don't raise the debt ceiling, then we are not paying for all the expenses that took place in the prior administration. That's another bald faced lie. That money is already gone.
In order to raise the debt ceiling, we're talking about forward spending on additional programs, that's what we're talking about. They want to raise the debt ceiling in order to pay for their massive, massive reengineering of society, redistribution of wealth, and the imposition of their socialist agenda. That's what they're talking about.
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Now, how do we know this? Number one, it's a fact. And number two, every single House Democrat just voted to do exactly that. Those of you who live in these districts that are marginal, or slightly Republican, slightly purple, and you have a Democrat who claims when they go home that they're moderates, they're not moderates, they just voted to blow the lid off the debt ceiling, and they voted to do that up until December 22, 2022.
So in other words, they want to do it to get through the midterm election, so they don't have to vote on it again. That'll probably be defeated in the United States Senate, but that's what these phony moderates in the House are all about.
Number three, what do I think they're going to do? I think in the end, and I could be dead wrong, but I think in the end, what the Democrats and Biden are going to do is they are going to push most of what they want, their agenda in this bill and just slice the cost, just slash it, but these people are Ponzi schemers anyway. These people don't care about debt and all the rest.
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So if it's $3.5 trillion, they lower it to $2.5 trillion or $2.2 trillion, and just keep the vast majority of the redistribution of wealth, these massive expansion of the welfare state and so forth in there, and they'll just say, okay, they're paid for.
Now, if in fact, all of this is paid for, like Nancy Pelosi says, there is no cost like Joe Biden says, like "The New York Times" reporters say, and so forth, and so on, then why have a debate about the debt ceiling at all? It's all paid for. We don't have to raise it, right?
All right, some additional points I want to make on this, too. There is a requirement that if we get to the net that is $320 billion a month, right, minus the $44 billion a month for the debt service, that there is a priority in which the money has to be spent. That includes Social Security, Medicare, the VA, Federal pensions, among other things.
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So those will be paid no matter what. They're the first in line after the debt service, and the reason you have to pay the debt service first is because the 14th Amendment compels it. It says: "The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services and suppressing insurrection or rebellion ..." remember, this was passed right after the Civil War, " ... shall not be questioned."
So those come first the debts service, then you have the entitlement programs, we call them, and then the rest that's left, well, Congress and the President have to work out priorities. They have to live within the budget. They can't borrow any more money.
And so what Nancy Pelosi and Biden, the others are telling you as the economy will collapse, that we will default on our debt, which we certainly will not, that people won't get paid Social Security, they certainly will, and they are trying to scare the hell out of you. Because this is what they do, they play chicken in order to massively expand the expenditures and the budget. And so I wanted to point that out.
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Now, let's look at a few other aspects of this. Nancy Pelosi has said and James Clyburn, the number three has said and others have said, well, if the Republicans don't raise the debt limit, the President of the United States can under the 14th Amendment. A couple of things, I already said, there is no reason to raise the debt limit to pay the debt service. One has nothing to do with the other. So they confounded and they confound you when they say that. That's number one.
Number two, what they really want is for a President, one of theirs, to lift the cap altogether to be able to do it unilaterally. Why? Well, think about this, think about how totalitarian this is. If the President of the United States has the power himself to raise the debt limit, he has the power to make sure under that theory that the debt is paid. I don't mean the debt service, but the debt is paid, right?
So he can raise taxes, he can borrow money, he can raise the debt limit. He can do whatever he wants. And that's what Nancy Pelosi says they're going to threaten if they don't get their way.
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So think about how totalitarian this mindset is on the left in the Democratic Party. Again, the 14th Amendment says: "The validity of the public debt of the United States..." The public debt of the United States, " ... authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services suppressing insurrection or rebellion shall not be questioned." Okay, it won't be questioned, $44 billion a month.
What the Democrats are saying and they're mouthpieces in the media is the debt, not the debt service, the debt.
Now, if in fact, Biden or Pelosi or any of them try that, they would be clearly violating the Constitution of the United States. Why? Because the core function of Congress is financial. Article I, Section 8 Clause 1, so you're a smart people, you're a smart audience.
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You know, this isn't NBC or ABC or CBS, or CNN or MSNBC, this is FOX, we have smart people in our audience, Article I, Section 8 Clause 1, "The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."
Congress? Nothing in here about the President. Now the second clause right behind it, "Congress shall have the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States." The President doesn't have the power to do any of that.
This is the same Democratic Party, the same Congress that was suing Donald Trump left and right to prevent him from building the wall, from moving funds from one account to the other. And the court said he had the absolute constitutional authority to do it.
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But when they're in power, they don't want any limits whatsoever. So, I just wanted to make this as clear as I could, again, recap very simply. We get $320 billion a year into the Federal treasury, $44 billion goes towards debt service. Plenty of money to cover it. This has nothing to do with the debt. They want to increase the debt ceiling to nothing, which is what the House just voted to do, so they can pour their trillions and trillions of dollars in mostly unconstitutional spending into that system.
The Republicans have said, no, we're not participating in that. Good for them.
What do I think is going to happen? I could be wrong. I think the Democrats are going to draw down the budget, I think their proposal to about whatever, less than $3.5 trillion, which is really $5.5 trillion to something like $2.5 trillion, but keep all the stuff in there, so they can get a leg in the door on those things, if they can, and then the so-called moderates can say, oh, man, we cut a trillion dollars off this or so, but just keep an eye out for that. I hope, I'm absolutely wrong.
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Nancy Pelosi said the other day, this is for the children and women. I have no idea what she is talking about. If it's for the children, we are bankrupting the children. Our children, grandchildren, and generations yet born, we're spending wealth that's not even created yet. And why? There is no need for any of this, 50/50 Senate, they've got a three or four vote majority in the House. They have no mandate for any of this. So we're going to turn the country inside out and upside down for generations to come -- a disaster.
We already have inflation, product shortages, the price of gasoline and food going up. Can you imagine adding several trillions of dollars to that? But it's more than that. They have put every radical idea they can possibly think of, whether it relates to critical race theory, whether rates to the de-growth climate change movement, whether it relates to an attack on the capitalist system, on and on, and on and on.
They've put everything they can possibly think of into this Omnibus Bill, which is 2,500 pages. Twenty five hundred pages is like this. It's like this. And we ought to fight this tooth and nail, not just for financial reasons that would be enough, but for every other reason in this bill. And among other things, there are billions and billions of dollars in this bill for radical left community activist groups.
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What are they going to do with the money? What do you think they're going to do with the money? They're going to build an army of electoral volunteers. So every election, they will be out there and they will have the ability, thanks to you, subsidizing them to affect the outcome of an election.
I've told you before. The Democratic Party is a very diabolical political organization, very diabolical. It supported slavery, it supported segregation. It led the way on Jim Crow. It doesn't embrace Americanism. Now they claim, it is Democratic socialism when it's truly American Marxism -- a very, very diabolical party.
And they lie. And they lie and their media surrogates lie.
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Now, a 2,500-page bill, how are we, the people supposed to know exactly what's in it? We know some of what's in it. During committee hearings, we don't get to participate. We can't even get into the Capitol Building if we wanted to contact our members. What would we contact them about? If we can't get into the specifics other than to tell them to kill the whole bill.
That's not representative government, ladies and gentlemen. That is behind closed doors, smoke filled room in this case, not cigars, probably marijuana, where they're trying to force their will on the American people in fundamental ways.
This bill has to be killed, whether they bring it up next week or the week after or whenever, in whatever form it is.
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When we come back, Gordon Chang and Stuart Varney.
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LEVIN: Welcome back, America. We have one of the great experts on Communist China, Gordon Chang of the Gatestone Institute, a senior fellow. His latest great book, "The Great U.S.-China Tech War."
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Gordon Chang, welcome. I have a question for you right out of the box. There's a lot of controversy about the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had two phone calls with the head of the Chinese military who is a very aggressive militarist, as a matter of fact.
And, among other things, according to reports, Milley told this general this Communist General one way or another, that the United States, we're in a stable situation, that you don't have to be concerned about us launching a war. And there's some debate over this, but something to the effect that, and of course, if something like that would occur, I'd give you a heads up.
Now, let me ask you something. What would the Communist Chinese make of such a call from the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States?
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GORDON CHANG, SENIOR FELLOW, GATESTONE INSTITUTE: I think the Chinese military and the Chinese political leadership just thought the United States was in complete disarray and in terminal decline, and that would have made the Chinese, and I think it will make them more aggressive, more belligerent, because they think that the U.S. will not be able to oppose them.
Now, I know some people actually say that General Li Zuocheng, when he heard that actually thought Milley was threatening to attack China. You know, we just don't know how the Chinese reacted. But whatever was the case, I'm sure that this did not work to the benefit of the United States because it either made the Chinese more aggressive one way or the other.
LEVIN: And I'm a little perplexed by this, too, because I think back in history, and of course, we don't know every call that was made from the head of the Joint Chiefs to anybody else. But I cannot imagine under President Reagan that he would have had the head of the Joint Chiefs call the Soviet Union, at some point or the head of the Joint Chiefs on his own without talking to the Commander-in-Chief, perhaps in coordination with the Secretary of Defense and told them, United States is stable, don't worry, we're not planning to attack you. And if we do, I'll kind of give you a heads up.
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I just think what General Milley did was an absolute disgrace, and there's absolutely no justification for any of it since there was no indication that President Trump was prepared to go to war with anybody.
CHANG: Yes, President Trump was the least warlike President in decades, and there are no objective indications in China that they thought they were going to be attacked. There were no unusual movements of Chinese forces. There were no civilian preparations. And most indicative of all, Mark, there was nothing in Chinese propaganda that signaled that they felt that there was a war-like United States.
So when General Li heard that from General Milley, I'm sure that General Li thought, what the devil is going on? And he probably -- General Li probably thought that Mark Milley was acting on Intelligence that the U.S. had, which is what Milley said before the Senate. And I think that essentially that the Chinese are thinking there must be an American spy in China, if Milley thinks that we think we're about to be attacked, because there were no objective indications of that.
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LEVIN: So what you're suggesting is it could have created instability rather than the stability that General Milley is talking about and wouldn't General Li go up the chain to Chairman Xi and let him know about the conversation with General Milley.
CHANG: Absolutely, because in China's structure, first of all, Xi Jinping is the head of the Chinese military because he is the Chairman of the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, and the military is very tightly controlled in China because the Communist Party civilians are very worried about the military because there have been a number of attempted coups there.
So certainly, Xi Jinping knew about this immediately.
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LEVIN: And yet, President Trump did not because General Milley didn't go to President Trump to let him know about the conversation that he initiated twice with the head of the Communist military and this is quite appalling to me.
CHANG: Yes.
LEVIN: So the head of the Communist Party in China, the head of the government would have known, but the Commander-in-Chief of the United States did not know. Does that bother you?
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CHANG: It bothers me because this is insubordination. This is breaking the chain of command. This is a military officer usurping the Constitution. So, yes, this is an extremely serious matter.
LEVIN: And General Milley says, look, I told Secretary of Defense Esper, and I told the Acting Secretary of Defense, Miller, I guess his name was. He was there about three days. So that's that.
I don't think that's that when you're making a comment to the Secretary of Defense, and so forth. I looked at the statutory powers of the head of the Joint Chiefs, and of course, he reports really to two people, the Secretary of Defense and the Commander-in-Chief. There was nothing that prevented him to inform the Commander-in-Chief about what he was doing.
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And then you see this as a part of constant leaking to reporters who are writing hostile books against the President of the United States. And he says the other day, that's because he believes in free speech and freedom of the press.
So he goes to hostile reporters who are writing hate Trump books to talk to them, but when it comes to two crucially important calls to the Communist Chinese regime in China, and let's face it, they are our number one enemy, he doesn't feel it necessary to tell the President of the United States. I'm not buying any of this, Gordon Chang.
CHANG: I'm not buying it either. And also, you know, we know from a number of people that they did not believe that Milley actually talked to, for instance, the Secretary of State.
This is really important because it goes to first of all the truthfulness of the chief military officer in the U.S., and it also goes, as I said, to usurping the chain of command.
President Trump should have known about this immediately, and he should have known about it beforehand, given the sensitivity of talking to China in these circumstances. So I believe that General Milley should no longer the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
LEVIN: Yes, the problem is the President of the United States currently is going to keep him there. And the Democrats in Congress, while they do complain, to some extent about people being left in Afghanistan, they have no intention of removing Milley because they were all praising him to the hilt.
When we come back, Gordon, I want to ask you this: What do the Communist Chinese take away from the way we withdrew from Afghanistan?
I'll be right back.
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JON SCOTT, FOX NEWS CHANNEL ANCHOR: Welcome to "FOX News Live." I'm Jon Scott. President Biden heads to Michigan Tuesday to try to rally support for his packages on infrastructure and social spending. The President met with congressional leaders last week and then spent the weekend home in Delaware to prepare for the crucial days ahead.
Democrats now seem to be in agreement the social spending package will cost somewhere between $1.5 trillion to $3.5 trillion. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders however, thinks $3.5 trillion should be a starting point.
A major cleanup operation underway off the Southern California coast, about 126,000 gallons of crude oil spilled closing miles of beaches in Orange County. An oil pipeline is to blame. It is no longer leaking, but divers have yet to pinpoint the source of the leak.
I'm Jon Scott, we take you back now to LIFE, LIBERTY, & LEVIN.
LEVIN: Welcome back, America. Gordon Chang, so we've pretty much established that it is overwhelmingly likely that Xi, the head of China, knew about these phone calls, whereas our Commander-in-Chief, President Trump did not, purposely.
So you have to assume Milley knew that his counterpart would run it up the flag. And yet he and perhaps the Secretaries of Defense kept it from the President of the United States. If that's not undermining the chain of command, I don't know what is. If that's not a military individual going rogue and stepping all over the toes of the Commander-in-Chief, I don't know what is.
Now my question to you now is this: Given what's taken place in Afghanistan, including the leaving of American citizens in enemy territory and patriotic Afghan allies in enemy territory who have been picked off and brutalized and murdered. Given what took place, how is Communist China digesting this?
CHANG: Well, this -- the debacle in Afghanistan reinforced the notion among the Chinese elite that the United States is finished as a great power, and we can see this from their propaganda, which I think reflected what the elite members were thinking.
First of all, they were saying, you know, Mark, the United States couldn't deal with the ragtag insurgents of the Taliban, how could they hope to counter magnificent China? And the other thing that Beijing was saying was, they were telling Taipei, look, once we invade, you will fall within a couple days, and the United States won't come to your rescue.
So Beijing was feeling that deterrence was breaking down, and we know that deterrence is breaking down when China's top two diplomats came to Anchorage in the middle of March and they said, we could no longer talk to China from a position of strength. Those were chilling words, Mark.
LEVIN: And what they're doing to Taiwan now. These overflights into Taiwanese airspace, the direct threats to Taiwan. They got away with what they did in Hong Kong. They don't really see -- they see the United States as a paper tiger now, don't they?
CHANG: Well, they do, and they actually use that phrase, paper tiger in the images that are circulating around Chinese media, especially after the release of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei Chief Financial Officer, President Biden did that. This just shows the U.S. in an inferior position.
This is really a dangerous moment because the Chinese know -- you know, they shouldn't invade Taiwan or they shouldn't invade Japan or something like that. But I think that they're starting to feel that they can do this and the U.S. won't react.
Now, I'm not saying that their perception is correct, but what I'm saying is that's what they think and what they think is important because what they think will impel them to act and they could act in ways that could trigger history's next Great War.
LEVIN: This is very, very important. And so what General Milley said he was trying to avoid, which is a provocation with the Communist Chinese, they just created in the way that they left Afghanistan and their failure to stand up to Communist China even when it comes to one of their spies. And so I think the Biden administration foreign policy, which is really impossible to define other than appeasement and sell out and so forth that that is the provocation that the Chinese may act upon. Isn't that your point?
CHANG: Absolutely. Because as Donald Rumsfeld said, weakness is provocative. And we know that deterrence is breaking down from what the Chinese are saying and what they are doing.
And clearly the fall of Afghanistan reinforced in their minds the notion that the U.S., first of all, is just feeble, but also is incompetent, leaving more than what -- $83 billion worth of equipment there, leaving more than a hundred Americans, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 to 400 Americans maybe more, leaving our Afghan allies there, leaving and not doing very much about our British and other NATO allies.
China looks at that and says that, well, the United States is finished.
LEVIN: And meanwhile, Gordon Chang we've effectively frozen our defense budget, despite the trillions and trillions that we're spending on other projects. And the Communist Chinese are going full bore ahead with nuclear missiles, with conventional weaponry, with a Navy with submarines and pushing up in all fronts. It looks like Xi now is doing an imitation of Mao, the way he is taking control of his society, and imposing his will on everyday life of the people there.
So this is a very, very risky period for the reasons you said. We have a President in my view, who is incapable of being a Commander-in-Chief and the enemy knows that better than anybody else.
Gordon Chang, I want to thank you very, very much. Keep your voice out there, my brother. It's very, very important.
CHANG: Thank you, Mark. I really appreciate it.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
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LEVIN: Stuart Varney, and "Varney & Company" is well known around here. He is really an expert when it comes to finance and economics and budgets. So it's a pleasure to have you, Stuart and I want to jump right in.
The Democrats, they're working on it. They're fighting with each other, but they'll get there. They want to propose or they want to vote on what is the most massive spending, social engineering, welfare expansion bill in American history, if not human history. What kind of impact will that have on a society?
STUART VARNEY, FOX BUSINESS NETWORK HOST: In my opinion, disastrous in many respects. Look, I do business, money, and economics. That's my field.
So let me address that first. You go out there and you spend $5 trillion on these social programs, and you really change the culture, and you really change the economy.
Can you imagine -- we've never done this before, of course -- can you imagine just throwing out there all these trillions printed by the Federal Reserve, more trillions borrowed and spent by Congress, and now maybe another $5 trillion coming from Congress, just essentially to create a socialist economy?
I've lived in a socialist economy, Mark, and I don't like it. It is, frankly, awful. So let me just address the economics for a second.
When you spend all this money, and you tax so highly, you depress the economy, and you depress the dynamism, the vitality of an economy. As I said, I've lived in a socialist society. I lived in Britain in the 1970s and it was absolutely awful. Back then, the British government owned and ran the coal mines, many of the car companies, the airlines, the trains, the water production.
They owned -- like it used to be called owning the means of production. While that was the case in the 1970s in Britain. They even controlled the wage levels that you were allowed to be paid. So you're depressed any entrepreneurial activity, you can imagine, totally depressed it, and you ended up with inflation, because the government doesn't produce stuff very efficiently, and productivity goes down.
So point number one, economically, the result of this massive program, if they actually get it in place, I think is an economic disaster. But I'd like to also address the cultural side of things. How does it feel like to be in a socialist economy? Mark, it is bloody awful. That's what it is. It is awful. There's no scope.
If you feel yourself dynamic, upwardly mobile, you think you've got some brains, talent, drive and ability, well, first of all, Britain was a class society back in those days, so you knew that there was a ceiling that you have to break above. But also, there was just this awful culture of something for nothing. That's what socialism is. It really depresses your spirit, if I can put it like that, and it is appallingly dull.
You have no idea how dull it is to live in a society, which is thoroughly controlled by the government. It's awful. So on those two counts, I would suggest, Mark, that if we get this $5 trillion deal, it is awful economically, and depressing culturally.
LEVIN: Beautifully put. Very well put. And also, I noticed as I try to go through aspects of this because the final thing hasn't been printed yet, but we know it is 2,500 and some pages long. It's going to change people's individual lives in ways that they cannot even imagine. It's an attack on private property rights. It's attack on mobility. It's an attack on individualism, massive red tape, as you infer. So people are going to have great difficulty doing things that they want to do.
But it fundamentally alters the United States of America. It fundamentally alters our constitutional construct. It is a war on capitalism, everything that has made this country strong, the principles on which this country are founded are going to be thrown away in one big omnibus bill. Did you ever think when you came to this country that you could have a 50/50 Senate, a three or four majority vote in the House and fundamentally alter a Constitutional Republic?
VARNEY: No, I couldn't. I would be astonished. I mean, just six -- no, I'll tell you what? Two years ago -- two years ago, go back two years, and I would be astonished to look to the present and see how far we've gone down the socialist road.
I mean, it's amazing. I'd like to know where on Earth this came from. I think it came from the success of the progressives and getting elected in 2020. There are now a group within the House, certainly within the House. There's a very slim majority for Nancy Pelosi in the House, so they have great influence.
Speaker Pelosi needs the votes of progressive to do just about anything. So, they call the shots. That's how we got here. Not to mention the fact that our universities are essentially turning out activists, leftist activists. That's what they're doing. That's how they've upset the whole educational culture of this country. Turned it on its head.
You're right, Mark. I would be -- I'm just amazed at what's happening because when I first came to America, now we're talking the 1970s. Yes, it wasn't a great place to be. I mean, Jimmy Carter was the President. You've got wage and price controls from President Nixon. It was a controlled economy.
But please, Ronald Reagan set us free, didn't he? Just like Margaret Thatcher set us free in Britain. Ronald Reagan set us free in the United States. And we had this glorious economy, where we really were growing strongly. We had strength, we had profits, we had capitalism, and I absolutely adored it.
And to go from there to where we are now, I find astonishing. I am shocked at this. And very surprised by it. And I think you are, too.
LEVIN: I am disgusted by it. And also, Stuart, when you look at every aspect of this culture now. Joe Biden has his finger in it. And he is a one-man wrecking ball. You look at the border, immigration. We don't have immigration anymore. It's not immigration. It's a lawless border. You look at what he has done --
VARNEY: Forgive me, may I interrupt you, Mark?
LEVIN: Yes.
VARNEY: I'm sorry, I know it's your show.
LEVIN: Absolutely.
VARNEY: But I've got to break in here. When I first came to the United States, now, this is the 1970s, we all knew that if you overstayed your visa, you're in deep trouble. We all knew that if you were here illegally, you didn't have a political leg to stand on, but suddenly you do. Now, you come in illegally, and you've got all the support that government can possibly give you and the Democrats urging you on, come on in. This is a deliberate open border policy, and it reverses what we're all about.
We do not have a Constitutional Republic if we don't have some control of the border and who comes in. And that's the way it is. And I am shocked that we've come to this.
I seem to be using that word a lot, Mark, but I am. I am truly shocked at what this country has come to in a very short period of time.
LEVIN: You're right on, and to massively expand the welfare state and redistribute wealth and then massively open the border to illegal immigrants. That is a recipe for a complete disaster because now, people are coming into this country for the benefits, the American citizens will not be able to afford the benefits for themselves, let alone illegal aliens.
We'll be right back.
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LEVIN: Welcome back. Stuart Varney, let me ask you something a little bit out of your known area. Among other things in this budget and elsewhere with Biden, with his executive orders, we have all kinds of social issues being rammed down the throats of the American people, among them critical race theory. What's your thought about that?
VARNEY: Oh, I'm glad you asked. Let me backtrack a little. I have a multiracial family, of which I'm very proud. In my family, that my immediate family, we have three races, African, Caucasian, and Asian.
We have two religions: Christianity and Judaism. We have seven ethnic nationalities. I won't go through them all, but suffice it to say that is a multiracial family. It is a very American family, actually.
And there is nothing that drives me up the wall more than critical race theory and this equity movement, which essentially is divisive. How am I supposed to have my grandchildren? I have a young black grandchild who has four white sisters? How am I supposed to encourage him to go to school and stand up and complain about his sisters who are privileged? I mean, can you imagine this, Mark? How divisive can you get?
And this equity thing. The way I read it is that African-Americans need more equity in everything, whether it is jobs, or money, or housing, or COVID, whatever it is. That too, is divisive. That's pitting this group against this group. I think it's entirely un-American.
It is basing so many things on the color of your skin and your ethnic background. I don't think we should do things like that. I don't think that's the way the Constitution is written. But that's the way we're going.
LEVIN: Because I wrote a book on this called "American Marxism." And what you have to have at all times is forces fighting each other, oppress- oppressor; victim-victimhood, and that's the only way Marxism -- it doesn't work. That's the construct.
And you have people, you talk about AOC and her ilk. These are out of the closet Marxists. You have people like this who hate their country, hate the economic system, and they look for ways whether it's climate change which is a de-growth movement, whether it's immigration, whether it's race -- critical race theory, Americans have to be at each other's throats.
Because let me ask you this, Stuart, if we're not fighting with each other, if we're not attacking the country, if we're not demeaning this society, then what purpose does the far left and the Democratic Party have because they exploit these things. That's what they do.
If we're happy, if we're productive, if we're unified, and we get along, there is no need for a $5 trillion budget and all these other things. What do you think?
VARNEY: The socialists are never happy. Have you ever seen Bernie Sanders laugh or smile? Maybe he will laugh at somebody else, laughing the horrible billionaires. But the man has got no humor. He is angry.
Essentially, the socialists are jealous. You've got it. I don't, I'm taking it. That's the nature of socialism. They're angry all the time. It's such a negative movement, isn't it?
You know, it would be nice if we could -- if we could just get together and go forward, dynamically, profitably, efficiently, the American way, you know, you climb that food chain, use your brains, drive, talent, and ability to the best effect. We all benefit if we can do that.
But once we're divided and unhappy and jealous with each other, and fighting with each other, that's the exact opposite. That sends us backwards. It's a terrible thing, Mark.
I said, we're using that word all the time in tonight's show, and I do apologize. But I am so incensed of what's happening to my adopted country. I have the choice to live here. I made the choice to become an American citizen, because I wanted to be and I wanted to be a part of a society that was going forward dynamically, and I loved it. I still love it.
But I'm damned if I'm going to see it handed over to a bunch of jealous, angry socialists, and that might be my last word.
LEVIN: Well, not here. I hope not. Stuart, I want to thank you very, very much. First of all your show is excellent, "Varney & Company." It is nice to meet you for the first time, and I wish you and your family all the best, sir.
VARNEY: Thank you very much for having me, Mark. I really enjoyed it.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: welcome back, America. What Stuart Varney is talking about is this, "American Marxism." How it wants to create societal, economic, cultural dislocation and it is working. That's exactly what's taking place. I think that's why almost 1.1 million copies of this book have been sold. People want to inform themselves about it. People want to spread the word. People do not want to lose their country.
So where are we taking this country? We can talk in the abstract about different theories and so forth. But I want you to look at your children and your grandchildren. Some of you have great grandchildren. Look at them, too.
Where are we dragging this country? Into racial strife, open borders? What happens with open borders? More strife, basic economic conditions are going to be deteriorated because no society can have a massive welfare state in an open border.
Our military is being undermined by political decisions that are very, very destructive. The Democrats want to spend in a way that will destroy the currency, it will drive up inflation.
What are we leaving to our children and grandchildren? What kind of a generation are we? Why would parents and grandparents do this to their own flesh and blood?
Do they think it's not going to happen to them that somehow it's going to skip generations? That somehow the laws of economics don't exist? They exist as much as the laws of Physics.
So, when politicians tell you like Biden and Pelosi, they're going to spend $5 trillion, $5.5 trillion and there is no cost. Is that believable? Are these responsible people?
Why would you allow your children and grandchildren and their futures to be destroyed with the weight of our debt? Because of AOC or Pressley or Tlaib or Omar? Or because of Sanders and Markey and all the rest? They're going to be long gone when your children grandchildren and generations yet born have to struggle with this debt, have to struggle with what they've done to our constitutional system, undermining unalienable rights.
No generation should do this to future generations. The last generation didn't do it to us, and we need to stand up for our children and grandchildren and defeat what's being proposed.
Let's do it.
LEVIN: I'll see you next time on LIFE, LIBERTY, & LEVIN.
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