Col. Douglas Macgregor and David Gornoski on What Makes America Great
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Hi, I'm Colonel Doug McGregor, CEO for Our Country, Our Choice. And in our studio here at Our Country, Our Choice, we have an interesting guest today.

This is a podcaster, columnist, I would say political and spiritual gadfly. We're going to talk about a range of issues that I think you'll find very interesting. He's also a native of Florida. Don't hold that against him. He lives somewhere, somewhere out in the distant swamps from here. Maybe he'll tell us where. So it's David Gronowski. David Gronowski.

Happy to have you with us. Well, I'm glad to be here. It's a real honor to be here. And, you know, it's been a few years since we've done an interview in person. Many years ago, many administrations ago, it feels like now. That's right. But a lot of things have happened since that. But I've always enjoyed having you on my show, A Neighbor's Choice. And I love the name of your group here, Our Country, Our Choice. It's all about choice, isn't it? That's right. We're really about choice. Exactly. And we want Americans...

to live in the freedom to make choices. We don't want to constrain Americans at all if we can avoid it.

Yeah, that core concept of having freedom and having the right to be a sovereign human being and not be a puppet moved around from whatever forces or special interests pull people one way or another. Really, it's all about that free will, that free choice that's really at the core of America, isn't it? I think so. I think we also really, really want to emphasize our American identity.

so that we can unite as one people. Seems like everyone is interested in dividing us. The current government over the last four years has tried to create new categories of human beings, new genders, new sexual orientations. We want to get past all of this. We want to get back to we're American men and women.

And we want to have reasons to work together as opposed to fight with each other. Right. And I think it really comes down to you can't have freedom if you don't have proper boundaries. You know, that's the whole problem that our culture is in. Like you were just talking about with the gender thing. If you can't define what is this or what is that.

You have nihilism and that's something you know, you can't you can't work in that. You can't operate. You can't make business. You can't have contracts. You can't have proper foreign policy. That's what I've always asked you about. Well, how should we have a proper foreign policy? That all goes back to having proper respect for boundaries, right? Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing that's always motivated my interest in your work is the fact that you're saying there is not an unlimited printing of money that's going to continue to go on forever for foreign policy. Yeah, well, we don't have unlimited resources. We don't have unlimited money.

We are not a military power with limitless power. We have to live within our means. That's something that we Americans have not done for a long time. And each successive government has seduced us into moving beyond our means. And that's the problem right now. We're spread out all over the world and we continue to proselytize that without us, the whole world collapses. Well, I'm sorry, that's not really true.

The world existed for a long time before we came along. It'll be here long after we vanished. What we need to do is be a role player. We need to play the right role in the world. And historically, that role was not about intervening in other people's countries. It was about building prosperity. And the theory was, if we did it right, we could be the nation's and the world's engine of prosperity.

that people would want to emulate us because we were successful. We weren't carrying our concepts of government and political rule into other people's countries on the points of bayonets. We seem to have gotten lost with that. And we've got to get beyond that. I think this election is a very positive development in a sense. I don't know how much success

the president will have in the months ahead we hope he will have great success but we also know from experience that the forces uh arrayed against him are pretty substantial and this thing about republicans versus democrats is misleading yeah that half the republicans turn out to be as troublesome as the democrats so we don't know what's going to happen but we think it's a it's a good turning point we need to get behind the president i'm sure we all will

Well, we have to be realistic. It's not going to be an easy road, is it? It's not. My expectations, my background, I recently did some work in social media and a kind of lightning bottle opportunity and kind of helped connect Ron Paul to Elon Musk in terms of this idea of getting government accountable and so forth. But really, what I see is the bigger picture. It's not about personalities. It's about what's right and wrong. And, you know,

There's a saying from Jesus, the truth will set you free. If you can't live in a society that tells the truth about itself, you will be in bondage. You will be enslaved to the tyranny. You came into our Country Yard Choice headquarters here, and you look on the wall, that's everywhere. The truth will set you free. We believe that. It's absolutely fundamental to our Country Yard Choice. But it's not easy, especially when you realize that

that lying is almost institutionalized inside this country. Getting to the truth is not easy if the truth is denied to you. You turn on the mainstream media and you're not hearing truth, you're hearing narratives that someone in the CIA or the MI6 or somewhere else has devised

that are then fed into the media people do not know what's happening in eastern Ukraine they do not know what's really going on in the Middle East they do not understand what's really happening in China they're treated to narratives designed to drive us in a certain direction same thing's true with the border illegal immigration this is this is wrong and these are all the problems that confront us right now there's no easy solution

But as I said, I think we've turned a corner at this point. Right. We'll see how far we get. And politics is all about perception. It's all about the momentum. And right now there's a lot of momentum in the culture about this recent crisis.

Trump win and what that means. A lot of the ideas on the table with a second administration provide a lot of opportunity for people who are motivated by things like getting healthy foods, healthy ways of growing our foods, healthy food items in our foods.

all of that's being brought to the table in the perception of the public. And that's an ultimate win that you can't put that cat back in the bag. Once it's out, there's not like they're going to go back with a new administration that comes and goes and say, I want that nasty seed oil anymore. It could be like, no, I don't want that. We were talking before we came in about these kinds of things and the

And the three pillars of our country, our choice when it comes to economics are very straightforward. Number one is energy, energy of all types and kinds. And that includes coal, minerals, nuclear, rare earths, liquefied natural gas, natural gas, all of it. Everything is involved in that. We have to do a better job.

of husbanding those resources and exploiting those resources. We also talk about agriculture, which I want you to talk about a little bit about what's happened right here in Florida. Because we think we're not effectively exploiting our capabilities in that sector, not just to feed ourselves, but to feed the world. We haven't handled it well. This Department of Agriculture is almost a carbuncle on the neck of the nation. We've got to release agriculture, let it boom.

And then of course you've got, after all of these things, high-tech manufacturing. High-tech manufacturing is something that is really not appreciated. We've got to get back into that business. We used to build all the high-end microcircuitry. We're not doing it anymore.

it's sitting on Taiwan right now. Yeah. And I'm not interested in destroying Taiwan or anybody else's industry, but we have to have the capacities here to build these things. Yeah. But talk a little bit about your experience with agriculture here in Florida. Yeah. You know, I, I, when I was a kid, I grew up in, uh,

Central Florida, and I remember a backyard Valencia orange tree we had that was generationally in the family. And I remember also being able to kind of smell orange blossoms wherever you went. We were playing baseball, whatever you'd smell, that beautiful smell around this time, actually, winters when we have the Florida citrus season really take off. But over the years, I've watched it systematically be destroyed

Ironically, because of a kind of effect of globalism, it's not saying this is intentional, but you had this virus come in that was really, it's called citrus greening disease. HLB is what we call it in the industry. And it came in through the Miami port, people believe, and it kind of worked its way over the years, starting in South Florida, all the way to the point where what was once an $11 billion thriving industry of beautiful Florida orange juice and fruit

beautiful tangerines and so forth has been completely decimated because they don't have the answer to stop this scourge of what was an icon of Florida and the world. We were the, we were the Hollywood of citrus back in the day. And now that's completely shunted. It's become completely a shell of itself. And it's,

It touches on a lot of things. It's got the global trade aspect of it. It's also got the soil problem. I know Nicole Shanahan, Robert Kennedy, a lot of these folks who have been really big in the MAHA world have talked about you got to heal the soil. And that's exactly right. You have to heal the soil if the soil is dependent on chemical fertilizers and inputs.

over fertilizing, all these things, you're going to be completely captured to any kind of bacteria or virus that comes along and decimates your tree. It's kind of like with your body when you have pandemics and things come along. If you've got a good immune system, you've got a good strong metabolism, you can take it. The PCR test might say you got something, but you're fine. You don't even have a little runny nose or anything, you know? And that's the same thing with our agriculture. So they're right exactly where

And on the money, when you talk about getting the soil right and because they haven't got the soil right as an industry, and it's going to take some real innovative, hungry farmers, the young generation to get in there and get do the hard work. Because a lot of the older farmers, they know they kind of know what they could do to get back to the soil. But their time horizon is a little bit different. They're winding up.

And getting out, looking to maybe sell their land for developments for some bank, you know, community or whatever to put up subdivisions with backyards as long as my arm. Look, you could stick your window out and you put your hand out the window and you're there at the other yard, at the other window. But all of that is part of that business.

big picture conversation that we're having right now. And I think I'm glad to know that, you know, you're bringing that into the conversation here at your organization. Yeah. In our country, our choice, we're very concerned about health. And we talked to Bobby Kennedy about it. One of the things that,

that we tell people before we were an industrial power, we were an agricultural power. Today, we need to become a health power, a health superpower. We have to have a healthy population. Bobby's very eloquent when he talks about the state of our youth today. When he and I were growing up, I was born in 1953. When he and I grew up, he was 54. We never saw

any of these fat people in grade school. There were no fat children. There were no fat girls. It just didn't exist. In fact, if anything, we all looked skinny. When I go back and I look at the pictures of us in youth, we were all sort of skinny kids. The notion that we could have a population that is as obese as we are

It's simply incomprehensible. Previous generations of Americans can't imagine it. And obesity is a huge problem because it affects everything else in the human body. So- Yeah, and that goes to another point. Bobby Kennedy has often said, and you know, gotta give him credit for this, that one of the first politicians I've ever heard say this, let's make beef tallow great again. Let's put it in the fries again. And people were demonized for decades to use tallow that it was bad for your heart. Turns out there's a story behind that.

You know, American Heart Association, still the authority on this apparently, but they go back to their origins. And it seems to me from the doctors and the scientists that have looked at this, that at one point, you know, they were in the business of a fat that was just coming on the market at the time, Crisco. Crisco came out and they said, who's this American Heart Association? It's a little small group. And they said, hey, let's make a deal.

The fat of the future. Crisco, the fat of the future. Do you know the problem with grandma getting heart disease? It's because grandma's using traditional fats. That must be what's causing it. Turns out the science has continued to demonstrate that was incorrect because they measured one little thing about it lowering cholesterol, but actually the seed oils, these vegetable oils, I was early on this. 2018, I was the only guy talking about this on broadcast radio just down the road from us here at WFLA Orlando, iHeartRadio.

And I was hitting that every day. And it's important for us to take responsibility, first of all, for our health.

If you have learned helplessness, you're not going to get out of a problem. That's what I've been working my way in my own personal life to work on this problem as I go. But at the same time, we have to realize that if we have subsidized things that should not be in the human body, that will destroy your metabolism. That will literally impair your thyroid. And when your thyroid, which is your master regulator of your energy, when that goes down,

all your mitochondria, all your energy aspects of your body starts to go down with it. It's a process they talk about. You can look up folks, my friends, Dr. Chris Kenobi, a medical doctor who has talked about seed oils for years, Brad Marshall, other folks that I know, you know, that Tucker Goodrich, who have been really early on the seed oil knowledge, have helped me along the way understand how this works.

And what it really comes down to is when you eat these seed oils, these omega-6 fatty acids that are in them, they tend to shut your body down as if it's preparing for winter. It's literally called torpor. And torpor is the state that when bears want to go into hibernation, they start eating lots of nuts and things like that that do the same thing. It makes you store on body fat, makes you grumpy and sleepy so that when you go to hibernation, your body's eating off of that fat while you're sleeping. Well,

Well, guess what? We don't hibernate, folks, but we sure act like it, don't we, when you look at the results of our culture. We might benefit from feeding that to some people on the Hill in Congress. We might be better off if they simply hibernated and didn't pass any more bad legislation. Well, I want to turn to something else, and that is the

Another issue for us, we really think that the Department of Defense should be the Department of Defense, not the Department of Interventionist Services. We are all oriented here in the United States militarily on going somewhere else to intervene in someone else's business and to beat down whomever doesn't agree with us. We really have to get back to the idea of defending the United States, defend our borders, defend the American people.

and stop intervening in other people's business. What do you think we need to do as an American people to get that point across to our leaders in Washington? I think we just got to tell the truth. I mean, I recently wrote an article touting you as an example of the kind of folks that, you know, I put this in the American Conservative, make way for the Colonel if you want to check it out. And you didn't even know I was doing it, but I've just interviewed you over the years and

And I've seen that you're one of the few guys in military who's been in those circles and interacted and worked in D.C. who keeps the message consistent. Strategic independence. No exceptions. Right. With no entangling alliances. That's what John Quincy Adams said. He said America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but he is what she is, the well-wisher.

of liberty for all so if you don't have liberty at home nobody's going to want to imitate that or they do they're going to imitate it in a bad direction and if you're always involved in everybody's affairs you're doing the opposite of the family well you know you just touched on something that's very important that most people don't understand everyone thinks well alliances are good well alliances are double-edged swords in most cases the alliances in which we are playing a role today

include lots of small powers, lots of small nations who want desperately to ensure that we will come to their aid, but they do not necessarily add to our security.

In other words, if you're going to make an alliance with someone, go back to World War II. We were fighting Germany and Japan. With whom did we ally? We allied with the British Empire, which at the time was one of the most powerful nations in the world. We allied with the Soviet Union, again, another powerful nation.

they added to our power, our influence, our capability. Right now, most of the people with whom we are closely aligned add nothing to us. What they do is add burdens. They add commitments. They add requirements that we have to meet on their behalf. So it's not a two-way street. And it is a double-edged sword. Unfortunately, our edge is dulled and their edge is sharp.

which doesn't work to our advantage. I've always been told growing up and you know I grew up coming of age around the Bush era and everything there was always this mantra and I want to ask you this because you've been over there you've worked in the ground there and many other situations you understand this you know I was always told well we have all these reasons why I'm going to be over there but one of the last ones that I always hear is kind of like the final line was

We need to make sure those oil markets are stable for our interests. And I'm thinking to myself, don't we have enough oil to produce our own cells here? What do we need? Why do we have to have this? Well, you have a couple of things. If you look at the financial system, the dollar has to be weak and the consumer has to be very strong. That's kind of an imbalance. And that drives us in a particular direction. We've financialized our economy.

In other words, most of the income is not a function of what we actually produce in tangible concrete terms. It tends to be a result of transaction fees. It's not a real economy. So the first question we need to ask about the economy in general is what do we produce that other people need? What do they have that we want to buy? Nobody's asking those questions. That's a key question that has to be answered.

I think that's part of the answer. The rest of it is a little more nuanced. And again...

I think we have to understand that we really don't need to be everywhere. Today we live in a world where we can view most of the world within seconds because of satellite-based surveillance. There's very little that can escape our attention. So it's not a question of having somebody there. The other thing is that we've been told we're actually tripwires.

well today being a tripwire is very dangerous right because all of the weapons that we once monopolized are in the hands of others which means that we could lose everything overseas very quickly because we really don't have the means to defend everything like with the afghanistan withdrawal right with the equipment that's kind of a real world example right and and why why did that happen is another strange question and the last piece is on this business of oil you're right we have a great deal of energy

and we don't necessarily have to be dependent upon anybody but we want to be part of the market so that the world market is fungible oil is fungible it can come from many sources and it can go to many places we we want to participate in that but I think we have to understand that we don't need to go to war to access oil one of the things that I learned in the Middle East is

You don't have to park your tank on top of an oil well to get the oil out. The people there will be happy to sell it to you. But this goes to something else that we've discussed before, sanctions.

and tariffs the problem with those is they tend to bully people if you bully people long enough they get tired of it we've tried to bully Russia and bully China using sanctions and tariffs what's happened they don't need us anymore right they built their own markets they built their own consumer base

So we're no longer vital or essential to them. If you want to be part of the world, that's a different story. But we've argued you have to pay a certain entrance fee to be part of the world we control. And right now everyone has said, we're not paying that anymore. You can go off by yourselves. And we're ending up increasingly with each passing day by ourselves. Some of that is for the reasons that I just discussed, the tariffs and sanctions. Some of it is because of these policies that we have where we've said,

We are going to harm Russia. Why? Well, Russia is the enemy. Really? Where's the evidence for that? This is a Russian Orthodox Christian country. They haven't threatened us. We're not interested in threatening them. Why are we in Ukraine trying to destroy them? Why are we so resistant to

to neutrality for Ukraine which quite frankly would be the path to prosperity and peace for them look at Austria look at Finland how they benefited and grown and prospered as a result of neutrality then you go to the Middle East yes we want to help Israel defend itself

Israel is not defending itself. Israel is waging an offensive war and wants us to participate because it's the only way they can win. Is this really what we signed up for so that we're at war with the entire Muslim world? I don't think so because we still want to do business with everyone who is there.

There is no balance or moderation to our policy. That's the problem. Right. There's no, it's just constantly looking for monsters to destroy, it sounds like. I guess my question, again, for you, kind of going, drilling into some of that, what you said further, they keep saying, people will say they agree with us. We need to stop being the policemen of the world. But then they'll caveat and they'll say, but we can't leave a vacuum.

So the question I have is, you talk about, you know, winding down our policemen of the world actions, but what about these ungovernable spaces that we hear about that we've got to have a presence or else there'll be a vacuum? That's an important question. You know, one of the things we've got to keep in mind is that if you go to a place like Somalia, it's analogous to sticking your hand in a bucket of water.

You displace the water while your hand is there. As soon as you remove your hand, the water goes back to where it was. There is this underlying assumption that wherever we go, we can turn the country, the society, the people there magically in a short space of time into some sort of liberal democratic paradise.

This of course is insulting because you're ignoring culture, ethnicity, language, religion, all the things that make us who we are. So it's a kind of arrogance that really destroys our reputation overseas because we walk in and we make a mess out of everything. And that's essentially what we've done in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is a cultural mean in every region.

You want to know what Poland or Germany or Austria are going to look like in 20, 30, 40 years?

Well, look at the countries that are next to them. France on one side, Poland on the other, Austria and Switzerland. They're going to be similar. When you move further east, you have a similar experience. What's Poland going to look like? Well, it'll look a little bit like Russia, a little bit like Ukraine, a little bit like Germany, and perhaps Lithuania. The notion that you could just wave a magic wand, or in this case, come in with a gun and a bayonet and change everything is absurd. It doesn't make any sense.

The other thing is they talk about, well, we can incentivize certain behaviors, but a lot of people can't be incentivized because what you think is important and what they think is important are not the same. Yeah. You know, look at the times people have failed miserably in China or South Southeast Asia, trying to market a product that's sold like wildfire in the United States. Nobody wants to buy it. Yeah. Well, you know, how about talking to some Chinese, some Vietnamese, some Thais and Cambodians, ask them what they think.

And if you'd done that, then you might have changed your product to make it appealing to them. This is the same problem we have everywhere. So first of all, the ungoverned space is ungoverned for a reason. The people there aren't ready to be governed in most cases. What makes you think you're going to change that? And then secondly, if you stay out of it, is there a chance that they can sort it out on their own? Yes. That's history. Things do have a tendency to sort themselves out.

I feel like a lot of the folks in the Middle East, like you just said, and what you mentioned, are

I remember an interview Tucker Carlson did with he I think it was in Qatar or something. One of those countries where they asked what we're waiting for America to come alive again and reclaim its birthright values. And I thought about it and he leaned into that when they asked and he gave a really poignant answer. But he kind of touched on what is that the heart, which is that what made America special was its.

fidelity and lack thereof has also been a big part of this to Christian values. These ideas like habeas corpus, these ideas like respecting human life, we have fallen short of that standard countless times that we're reminding ourselves of a lot, and that's good. But at the end of the day, it's still a standard that makes a difference. And you can't just take

those concepts and principles and try to like attach them to humanism or something. And then, like you said, drop them into a country that has a different, doesn't mean that their tradition's bad. It's just, there's a certain through line that's literally historically documented that

that America is borrowing from, even in the structure of the government and the ability to restrain it. The idea that you have a right to a fair trial. These are principles that are beyond and exist prior to this government's founding. And the best of it is when we've adhered closer to that direction rather than away. Well, I think that's true. There's an unwillingness to recognize a fact.

If you want to draw a straight line to understand America and America's development, it begins with Luther, Martin Luther. It moves from Martin Luther to Cromwell in England, who displaced the king and founded the republic, from Cromwell to George Washington, who essentially is a more modern Cromwell. Cromwell was not the most tolerant man in the world, as we know. Washington is actually quite tolerant. And you go from Washington to Abraham Lincoln.

and from abraham lincoln into the 20th century when we talk about values those values evolved from their origins in the british isles to the kind of society we have which is a society that says we want you to live in freedom

You know, you can embrace whatever faith you want as long as your embrace of that faith does not harm others. You can practice whatever profession you'd like to practice, provided it does not harm others. In other words, you talked at the beginning about guardrails, limits. We had good guardrails and limits and boundaries. And that's one of the things that I hear all the time from immigrants from other countries.

And I have friends that have come here from Turkey, some who've come from Bulgaria, some that have come from South America. They all say the same thing, though. I love this country because I can do business here.

So what do you mean? I don't have to bribe anyone. Yeah. Yeah. In other words, we can put a price on something and sell it and the deal is closed. I don't have to pay somebody to do fix my plumbing. I don't have to pay the electrician extra to come over and fix my electricity.

This is the goodness of our society. This is what de Tocqueville talked about when he traveled across the United States in the late 1840s, 1850s. Alexis de Tocqueville talked about it. He said, we're an invention of the middle class. Well, there's a lot of truth in that. Now, there are some downsides, but the point is this was a livable place. Throwing the gates open as we've done at the border

allowing everyone and anyone who wants to come here to pour in has been catastrophic for us because there is no price to be paid for entry. Something given has no value. This is a problem not just with illegals, in my judgment. Increasingly, citizenship in the United States has been cheapened.

We see it as a ticket of admission to the consumption machine. We don't longer value it as something special that's bound up with our identity as Americans, something that people have fought to preserve, that we have an obligation to uphold, to defend, to protect, to preserve. I don't know how we fix that, but that has a lot to do with our educational system. It has a lot to do with our society.

You know, again, you cited biblical text. This was essentially the message that Jesus delivered to the Jews when he said, "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's," recognizing there is a government. There is a structure with laws. You have obligations under that structure. They don't have to conflict with your religious beliefs, but you have to live within that framework.

We've kind of said to people, there is no framework. You can be whatever you want to be. Sounds great, but it doesn't work in practice. We've no longer said, you must be an American. They say, well, what's that? This is the problem. We've got to answer that question. We've got to make it very clear what we are and what we stand for. We've got to get out of this murky 1960s.

I'm okay. You're okay. We're all cool. That's crap. You can't brainwash people into moral virtue. You have to practice it through embodied action, right? And that's the difference between true religion, which James talks about, is helping the widow and helping the orphan, as opposed to ideological shortcuts to try to get the same result, which is what secular humanism has tried to do. It's tried to reject the foundation.

of Jesus Christ and say, well, we can kind of manufacture a distilled version that makes human beings the ultimate arbiter of reality, of the center of the universe for that matter. And that doesn't work. I think you're right. The only thing I would add is that anyone who takes their religious orientation seriously ends up with that question. Right. You know, and this is what we need to emphasize.

You know, the problem I see though more than any other is this question of what does it mean to be an American? What do you have to do to be an American citizen? Sometimes I toy with the idea that perhaps when you reach the age of 18, there should be some sort of requirement, something that you have to fulfill, some commitment to something more than yourself. You know, the problem is we have too many people in the United States who

who think of no law as being higher than their own. They think they're higher than other people simply on the basis of how much money they make. You know, this is another tragedy of our civilization. It's been a huge benefit in the sense that we have offered people the opportunity to come in and enrich themselves. Everyone should be fine with that. But if that is your measure of value, of human worth, you're in a lot of trouble. I remember people saying to me all the time when I was growing up,

all work has dignity. The only indignity lies in not working. It didn't matter what you did as long as it was honest, decent, and you were trying to make a living. But if you refused to work and you were lazy, the attitude was, well, then you probably ought to starve. I mean, it was that stark. We've lost that. And now we look down on somebody who does something. We were talking about education.

It's so important that education be a path to employment. People look down on electricians, on plumbers, on construction workers. That's outrageous. These are the people that make our society work. Without them, everything would fall apart. Just like policemen, firemen, people who work in hospitals.

If you take nurses out of hospitals, we'd all die. Have you had much experience with doctors lately? I don't know how many times I've had a nurse intervene and say, no, no, doctor, I think you should do this. Oh, yes, of course. Thank God for nurses. We don't say those things. We don't value those things. We've got to get out of this thing that everybody has.

has to wear a $2,000, $5,000 suit, sit behind a stupid desk and look into a computer.

That is not the future. Yeah, it's got to stop. It's so true. And, you know, I think what you're getting at goes to something that does make, in my point, you know, and I'm not talking about this on even a political level. I'm talking about it deeper than that. There is a late anthropologist who taught at Stanford University named Rene Girard. His most famous student was Peter Thiel, the one who...

who used his theory, it's called mimetic theory, as a guiding principle to understand things like to invest in Facebook before anybody saw something there or other big bets that went against the grain. And what Girard says in his work, he says, everything I learned about human nature, I learned from the Bible.

Everything I learned about what I kind of gave people an underpinning of how culture works, I learned from the biblical tradition, including the Gospels especially. And so in having that, that secret sauce of America, that is it. Now, the first thing people do when they hear that, they say, don't impose that by force.

You don't have to. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. That's Jesus' word. So he comes in in a manger. He doesn't come in with a hammer. He comes in as the manger. He comes in in a different way that allows the culture to flourish. We are not a theocracy. There is no secret priesthood that governs us and decides our future. There are no high rabbis telling us how to live, how to think, and what to do. And we don't want that. Because

Christianity has always been about choice. It's your choice. Even Mary, right? She had to have the choice. You know, the angel comes and there's no force there. There's no, you're doing this. There's a consent that's required. And that's the secret sauce that made the West what it is right there. Well, I think every civilization rests on the foundation of the previous one. The foundations that we had at the beginning were very good.

and i think we've gotten into trouble because we've forgotten those foundations and what you're describing is part of the foundation western christian civilization is baked in to our foundation to deny it to cast it aside to spurn it to degrade it castigate it is a mistake

you don't necessarily have to agree with it you don't necessarily have to believe in all of it but you have to recognize this is a key feature of our existence it makes us who we are it's back to this issue of why do you love it here why do you think you you can do business here and you can't elsewhere it goes back to those people that founded this country and their insistence upon these values you know this was the the notion of the virtuous businessman

Years ago in business schools in the 30s and the 20s, before the Second World War, people talked about building the best product at the best price for the consumer. That all vanished by the 1950s. Everything was refocused on shareholder value. Yeah, for sure. We want to enrich the shareholder. Wait a minute. Porsche is an organization I've always admired.

I'll tell you why, because Porsche never builds more than about 40,000 vehicles a year. Then they shut down in August and they reopened in September. Now, what has that done for Porsche? Look at it. Porsche is a gold standard automobile.

Can you compete with Porsche and Ford and, you know, everywhere else? And I think the answer is obviously no. They built a certain product. They built it a certain way. They continue to improve it over the years. But you can still trace the lineage all the way back to the original automobile. I think that's very important. And that's what we need to do. We need to become more Porsche-like instead of what's the latest car?

craze in the latest fashion and you end up producing junk. And we've been through that with cars in this country. They've gotten a lot better lately, but it was a big problem in the 60s and 70s. That's for sure. You know, you bring up, we're in Florida, so I have to give a little credit to Hometown Heroes for

here in Florida. One of those is George Jenkins, the founder of the Publix Corporation, which you see all over Florida and the Southeast and all over the place, the Publix grocery store. You know, one of the things that Mr. Jenkins did such a great job of, he kept it a private company. He didn't keep, he didn't go out on the stock. He kept it right. And he made sure that the employees had opportunities

options to have ownership in the company. And that was such a brilliant idea that still needs to be fully rethought about and really leaned into, you know? Well, I'm glad you said that because the last couple of minutes here in this discussion, I want to talk a little bit about this Republic platform, this social media platform and its interaction with Our Country, Our Choice. Our Country, Our Choice was founded by people that finally concluded there wasn't enough

difference between Republicans and Democrats to justify calling oneself a Democrat or Republican. We began to see it increasingly as a uniparty. We're all going to watch very carefully now that President Trump has won to see whether or not we're still dealing with a uniparty or something better finally.

As a result, they said, wait a minute, we don't want any more of these interventions overseas. We want to defend America. We want a healthy country, healthy food, healthy values. What does that mean? We've been talking about these things. All of that is bound up with it. And then this platform came along, the social media platform. People tell me, don't call it a platform. Well, what do you want to call it? A social media medium? I don't know.

But it is a way for people to communicate, organize, act within their community as well as across the country. And this is an information highway. Now, it costs money to join it, but you can go and surf it, look at what's there, and spend nothing to do so. In other words, it's free to come on and look at the Republic platform.

But if you want to take action, if you want to write something, you want to post a video, you want to register a complaint about something in your community, you have to pay the fee to get on there. Now, it's normally $180 on an annual basis, but there is a discount code. And that discount code, you go to a splash page and then you can get on for $120.

Now, you're going to have that. I've got that. And we'll run that on this video. But what I'm trying to get people to understand is this is a free speech platform. No one is going to cancel you. No one is going to eliminate you. No one is going to censor you. Now, if you argue for the overthrow of the United States government, you're going to be thrown off. If you're pornographic, you're going to be out. If you insist on all these nasty words, you know, these various epithets, you know, we'll censor some of it.

But you can say whatever you like. You can believe whatever you like. No one is there to stop you. And we think this is important. Now, there's no advertising on this Republic platform. Why? Because we don't want to be hostage to big corporate money. We want this to be accessible to everyone.

So you need to get on there. I'm going to check it out, yeah. And we need to get other people on this because this could become a way for Americans who are like-minded, who agree with many of the things we've been discussing, to communicate all over the country. And increasingly, we're getting a lot of feedback from people in Scandinavia, Germany, even in France, Italy. And now increasingly, we're hearing from people in Northeast Asia.

I think this is a way ahead because this is your platform. This is the people's platform. It's eventually going to have the people's news on it. News that is not censored, news that is not a narrative.

We're going to have a streaming service. We're going to arrange for that. That just tells you what happens, period. All of these things are coming, but it's very good right now, particularly in the United States. For those of you who want to know what's happening where you are, who's the sheriff, who's on the school board, who sits in the city council.

Because that's where change begins. That's where you can intervene and put an end to things that you think are wrong and ensure that the right things are done. So that's my speech. That's my story. I'm sticking to it.

I mean, I got a chance to take it a little bit of a test drive. I haven't done the whole process yet, but just in my initial thing, I thought it was interesting how it does seem to have this focus on local action, this local kind of, you can find out what's going on in your County or your city or

two hours down the road, whatever you want to put your parameters and find out if there's a meeting at a city council that has to do. I mean, I just heard from a lady who did a wonderful job getting fluoride out of her local city water. Right. And so if you didn't, I didn't know that was going on. I saw about it in another town here in Florida. I didn't know that was going on, but if you had that kind of local focus, you know,

I could get a notification. Oh, wait, there's something not too far. I'm willing to drive an hour or 20 or whatever and see what this is all about and see how I can play a role. And I like that. A lot of people think that their position is hopeless because they have not got access to millions of dollars to buy support on the Hill or in their state legislature or anywhere else, but they're wrong. Because what does every congressman and every senator want? Another term. They want to be reelected.

This is a tool now where you can make it very clear to them what you do or do not like. And they need to understand that you're in a position now to organize on your own at the grassroots level. And if they don't do what they said they would, if they are not fulfilling their obligations, if they're corrupt, because we know that half the people in Washington live on Epstein Island as it is, then you're going to throw them out. This is a tool for that.

It's very important. I can't stress that enough. So don't be discouraged. Listen, David Gronowski, thanks so much for coming in today. Pleasure. Thank you. Wondered to see you. And we'll see you soon again, I hope. All right. That sounds great. Thank you for having me. Sure.