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All right, everybody, we are back. I am live. We are live. We are joined today by JD Vance, the Senate candidate from Ohio, author of Hillbilly Elegy, and an experienced capital and private equity investor. JD, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. How are you doing, bud,
good man, thanks for having me. Yeah, it
is my pleasure. I am just going to assume that everybody knows who you are. You're an author, your experience, you've been out there, you're running for office, and we got a lot of things to get to, so we're just gonna jump right in this time instead of waiting into the water as I do, as I do often enough so let's get right to it, and we're not gonna hold back anything. I was reading your your your main web page, and there was a very clear statement about who you thought, what you thought the American dream should be, and what you think that the American people should be able to achieve in their life. And it got me thinking to a question that I've asked of many people, and that is going around in my circles, which is, what exactly does it mean to be an American today, who is an American? Who should be an American? I'm going to read you a quote from John Jay from the Federalist Providence has been pleased to give us this one connected country to one united people, people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint councils, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence. Americans are a band of brethren united to each other by the strongest ties. Now that was around the time of the Constitution being ratified in 1790 the Naturalization Act said that any alien being a free and white person of good standing and character could become a citizen. Then in the 60s, we've got heart cellar, which changed around the way in which that we bring in immigrants and refugees to the United States. And it's been often posed to me that the defining question of our time is, who is an American? What is an American? Who should be an American? And my question to you, first off, JD said, let's get to it is, who should be an American? What is an American? What is your vision for what an American citizen is, based on that contextual history and where we are today and the legislative changes that we've had, I think this is a good place to start.
Yeah, no, it's a very important question, obviously pretty fundamental to who we are as a people. I mean, I guess the way that I've always thought of it, and I won't pretend to be an especially deep thinker on this question, is that anybody who follows the rules for what's required to become an American, who comes here, who works hard, who plays by the rules, who sees, feels a sense of duty and obligation to the country, not just like they're owed something to the to the country or the country owes something to them, but like they feel really duty, bound and obligated towards it. Those people are Americans, and I think the question of who should be an American is a more complicated question because, you know, obviously, I think we sometimes let in people into the country that don't make great Americans. And this is one of the fundamental problems. You know, I've been talking about this Afghan refugee question over the past the past few weeks, and what I find so weird is this, this assumption that the American citizenry can't control who it welcomes into its body politic, and that's really the underlying assumption of any of the liberal conversations about the Afghan refugee question. I think it sort of highlights what's really sort of going on here, right? So one of the things I talked about recently is that if you look at data, approximately 40% of people who live in Afghanistan believe that suicide bombing is sometimes they're always acceptable to solve a problem. And then it's something even crazier, like 95% or 98% of people believe that it's, it's reasonable for a husband to stone his wife to death when she does something that the husband doesn't, doesn't like. And I think about that, and I really think there's, there's a difficult question here, like, are the people who believe those things, are they going to be successful at becoming American citizens, and is our country actually going to be enriched by them becoming American citizens? And to me, the answer is pretty straightforwardly, no, right? If you let in 100 people into your community and say 6060, of them are good people, and 40 of them believe that you should blow yourself up if you disagree with somebody, if they do something you don't like, that doesn't make our country better, and that doesn't make our country stronger, and it doesn't even even if they ultimately don't act. I think it makes our country just much more a much more miserable place to live. But. When you share a community with people who believe those things, and there's this whole idea like, you know, well, you know, Jay can't say that, or nobody else can say that, because that's racist. But I frankly, don't care about the color of the skin of the people who are coming. It's a question of whether they believe it's okay to blow yourself up in a mall if you disagree with somebody. And isn't that just obvious. I was talking to a buddy of mine a couple of weeks ago who was sort of explaining, he's from Minneapolis, and he's talking about, I've never been to Minneapolis in my life, but he was talking about, because the large wave of Somali refugees, some of whom haven't assimilated, you have parts of Minneapolis that people call little Mogadishu, and you know, you have crazy things happening, like some guy hatchets another person to death in little Mogadishu like, is it racist to not want that to be part of your community, to be that not to be part of your city? I don't think it is. I don't think it has anything to do with the color of people's skin. And I think it has something to do with I don't want people to get hatcheted to death in a community where I live, in a community where I call home, and I think those questions of, what do we want our shared American citizenry to think, to believe? What do we want our common obligations and duties to be? Those were just natural questions, I think, for the majority of our history, and now they're considered totally unacceptable to talk about. And I think the more interesting question, in some ways, is, why is it unacceptable to talk about this? Who benefits? Which powerful people gain more power by ignoring this fundamental question of what type of country do we want to live in? Because that's at least in part, a consequence of what type of people live here. Who
do you think made those changes? Why did they make those changes? Why have we or describe, please, the difference in our approach to who we decide to let into America who can become an American? What changed? Who changed it, and what was the purpose and what is the negative side effect?
Yeah, you know, I think it's one of these things that's evolved over time, right? So, so obviously you had this massive wage wave of Italian and primarily Italian, Irish and German immigration, right? And that had had its problems, right? It had its consequences. You had higher crime rates. You had these sort of ethnic enclaves developing. You had inter ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before. And so there were downsides, so obviously there were upsides too. And one of the cool things that we did in the 1920s is we just sort of slowed down immigration a little bit. We let those, those sort of populations who had come to the country as new citizens really incorporate themselves into the broader American fabric that obviously was turned on its head in the 1960s with some of the things we did with our immigration laws. But but even even in the 1980s I think that if a new immigrant came to the United States, wherever they came from, they received a pretty straightforward message from the leadership of the country, this is a wonderful country. Obviously, it has its problems, but it's a good place. It's a good place to live in. You have chosen to come here. You owe something to this country, and this country owes something to you. This is sort of common bond of citizenship that binds us to this fundamentally good land that all of us call our home. And something happened in the 1990s and the 2000s where, like even the assumption that we live in a good country, our leaders no longer shared. I think Consequently, a lot of our population stopped believing that. And then from there, I think, came this idea that it was, it was reasonable as a new immigrant not to feel a duty to assimilate or incorporate yourself into the body politic, but to basically, sort of see this country as something to be taken advantage, taken advantage of. And I think a lot of I mean, my sort of conspiracy theory version of this is that this was a consequence of very direct decisions by very powerful people who recognized that one way for them to exploit people. One way for them to acquire more power was to divide us against each other. And if you have a country where people hate one another, as opposed to feeling some common bond of citizenship, it's really easy for power people, powerful people, to do what they want to do. So just give a concrete example of this. So, so one of the things that happened in my home, I grew up in Middletown Ohio, southwestern Ohio, sort of classic industrial steel mill town, and it was, you know, sort of place where, like, a guy like my grandfather did not graduate from college, not even go to college, worked hard, played by the rules, was able to support a family of five on a single wage, right? Okay, so that that disappeared very quickly. In the 80s and 90s, we shipped millions of manufacturing jobs off to China and other countries, families like mine really struggled as a consequence, in a lot of parts, in Ohio and all across the country, it's incredibly hard to support a family on a single middle class wage. For a lot of people, unless you go to college, it's impossible, right? One way to think about that problem is, you know, why do we do that? And don't we owe something to all of these people in our heartland who have found their livelihoods, the jobs they depended on, the industries they depended on destroyed? Don't we owe them something? Another way to look at it is those evil people should stop complaining. They've had it very good. They're white supremacists, and they should shut up about the conditions of their own country, and which of those. Narratives. Which of those stories serves powerful people? Well, the second one, right? And so I think a lot of our leaders exploited those divisions because they made it. They realized that if they were able to do it, they would be able to shut up large segments of the population. They would be able to make them deplorable, and consequently, not actually have to deal with their problems as the way that you should in a constitutional republic, but basically treat them as fundamentally second class citizens, which is, you know, I think a lot of if you look at liberal elite discourse today, a lot of it is fundamentally about turning, you know, normal middle working class Americans in the heartland into second class citizens. That's why, that's how I see the vaccine mandate stuff. That's how I see the way that Biden talks about people who are unvaccinated, a lot of the COVID stuff, a lot of the, you know, the white supremacy critical race theory, accusations that are leveled against people in the heartland. Very often, it's just about making them second class citizens, making it unacceptable for them to actually complain about the conditions of their own country, which is fundamentally what we should want citizens to do in a democratic republic.
Indeed. Recently, I tweeted out that quote, wanting a better life isn't a sufficient enough condition for someone to become an American. I got a lot of hate for that. What do you how do you respond to that is, quote, wanting a better life, sufficient enough condition for someone to become an American?
No, absolutely not, right? I think that you have to have some recognition that there is a linguistic, a cultural tradition here that has spanned for not just a couple of 100 years, but goes back. You know, even many years beyond that, and you should want fundamentally to participate in that tradition, right? It doesn't mean I think, I really do believe this. I don't think you have to come from that tradition in a lot of ways. You know, my ancestors are Scots Irish. We were not, sort of, you know, we were not like Anglo, you know, we weren't people who sort of came from the English nobility. Five or 600 years ago, we were sort of Highlanders, right? But I think our family has done a lot for this country. A lot of my relatives have served in the military during our wars. We look at the heroes and the traditions, you know, a bunch of English guys and wigs from 222 30 years ago. I don't see them as bad Englishmen. I see them as my Founding Fathers, right? So I think wanting to participate in that shared tradition as it's evolved, of course, over time, is a really critical part of wanting to be an American, and this is, by the way, one of the reasons I worry about immigration period now, in a way that I didn't you know, of course, I was born in the 1980s so who knows how I would have felt back then. But I think that when the leadership of the country looks at its own traditions, its own cultural history and heritage and says that is an evil thing. It's bad. You shouldn't have to assimilate into it. That means that it's really, really hard to successfully incorporate your new, new waves of immigration into the shared American nation. That that's a thing that I just really think conservatives even, but certainly you know good faith liberals under appreciate about the constant reflections on American history, the constant accusation that American history is racist. I shouldn't say reflections. Of course, reflecting on our history is a good thing, but constantly putting it down, putting down the Founding Fathers, putting down the cultural traditions that makes newcomers to this country much less likely to see the country as their own, see the country as something they should build themselves into. And if you don't have that from the new generation of immigrants, like, what do you have? You have a balkanized country where everybody hates each other. Again, I think that's pretty good for powerful people. It's not good for people who want to build a good life in this country. You jack in some ways, the more sorry, go ahead. No man, please continue. Well, I was gonna say in some ways, the more difficult question is like, what is the shared American creed that actually unites us when our leaders have decided that this is a fundamentally racist and evil country, right? Like, like, to have a nation together, you need something that unites people, right? So, like, when the Spanish sort of first landed, what we now call Mexico, and built the modern nation of Mexico, there was a shared creed. It was the Catholic Church, right? There was something that, like they all kind of participated in and became part of that, unified people together. There was intermarriage. There was this evolutionary process where they became part of the same people. Like, what is that creed in America today? You know, it used to be, certainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was very, very robust Christian tradition in this country. I think we really started to lose it in the midway point of the 20th century. You know, there was, I think even in the late 20th century, it wasn't explicitly religious, but there was like, Okay, we're all part of the same team. This is a good country. We're committed to certain values. That seemed to be enough, at least when I was growing up in the country. But like, now, what is it? There's no shared American creed, and our leaders seem totally. That interested in creating one, or in rebuilding one, or even in recalling one from the past. It's hard to have a country when people don't believe some common set of values, and right now, that's unfortunately true in this country again, thanks in large part to our leaders.
You bring up a dirty word, assimilation, assimilation, I wrote a few years ago saying that we should, maybe we should end immigration. It's been a 20 year program called a one America trying to get everybody on the same page. It's funny, as I did the Claremont fellowship earlier this summer, I was doing a lot of reading of original documents and contextual documents and communications from not only the Constitution, the federal constitution, but also the state constitutions. And all of them said together that there needed to be the establishment of public schools in order to cultivate a patriotic spirit in the people and to teach them about Republican government. Abraham Lincoln goes so far as to say that we need something called a political religion. George Washington himself as well, in his farewell address, also addressing this like energy of American spirit and patriotism that is required, Ronald Reagan said the same thing. Even James Lindsay just the other day, said we need a resurgence in American common sensibility. I think that there's a common theme running through all of this, obviously, that it's a proactive engagement to create the American spirit. It just doesn't happen by itself. How would you propose to assimilate all of the recent newcomers here to America. I read recently that in Montgomery County in Maryland, which is just outside of DC, darn near 40% of the citizen residents there are not native born. People are bringing their cultures and their language and their histories from all over the world. They're coming here under the promise of just a better life. How do you propose to assimilate these forces, these people, these cultures, into this American spirit that has been clearly emphasized by our great leaders throughout time in history as an essential component to keep the country together?
Yeah, so, so I'm going to answer your question first, and then I'm going to offer a pessimistic thought for why my answer is so hard and so difficult, right? So the answer that I'll offer you is, look, this has been done in the past, right? With other waves of immigrants, and what we do is we teach important truths about a shared American culture. We get people proud of the same historical traditions, you know, again, like my ancestors were not drafting the Founding Fathers documents they were fighting in the Founding Fathers wars, which I think makes them part of that founding generation. But a lot of people have have, even though they don't have a direct, you know, ancestral lineage, they say, these are our founding fathers to the things that this country did. I am necessarily going to participate in it, feel proud about it, teach my children to honor those things. I'm gonna send them to schools. And instead of teaching them that the founding fathers are evil people, send them to schools that teach that the founding fathers are good people. And importantly, if you don't have some shared historical symbol, some sense of a shared past, I think it's very impossible to have any shared future. And so I really do think that we have to stop this non stop assault on American history, tearing down statues of people from the past, making everyone think that we should judge people by their worst flaws and not by some of their greatest ideas and their greatest deeds. These are all things that you can do as a political body, in your public schools and your universities, in the curriculum that you pass down to children, in the way that your leaders talk about these issues. Now here's my concern, I guess, and this is sort of the more pessimistic spin on this is everything that I just said. It's not rocket science, but there are, like very few American leaders who would even be willing to do that. Be willing to teach real civics and patriotism, a true and honest and patriotic assessment of American history. A very few people are actually willing to do this. We you know, a lot of our people don't like critical race theory, but a lot of them are very uncomfortable in the next step and say, Well, what we should we teach, if not critical race theory? Because this is, this is the tough part. Call it critical race theory, Critical Theory. Call it wokeism, or social progressives. I don't care what word you put on it, but at the end of the day, the most powerful ideology among the leadership of this country is not Christianity or American Political Theology or Abraham Lincoln's political religion. It is wokeism. It is social progressivism. It's globalism. Again, I don't care what word you put on it, and this is sort of the worry that I have with assimilation is like when you and I. Talk about assimilation, okay? 1980s style assimilation. Everybody believes in their shared country. They all feel a certain obligation to it. They feel a certain duty to build it. Okay, that's good. What does assimilation mean in 2021 right? In some ways, what it means is, you come to America, you learn that America is an evil place. You go to Harvard, you put your preferred pronouns in your biography, and you learn to hate the people who live in the American heartland, right? There's this weird way where elite culture is so garbage right now and again, like, I'm a, you know, I'm a populist at my core. But I think any populist movement has to have, you know, leaders who are actually willing to get the things done that the people want done. Our leaders right now are so corrupt and so vile that if you assimilate into their culture, you're assimilating into like garbage liberal elite culture. You're not assimilating into traditional American culture. And so I, you know, this is a tough, tough pickle for me. I don't even know what the right answer is here, because you can't just teach these things. You can't teach that we live in a great country if the leaders are actively aligned against it. So almost the thing that you need to do, step one in the process, is to totally replace, like, rip out, like a tumor, the current American leadership class, and then reinstall some sense of American, you know, political religion, some sense of shared values. And then from there, then you can have successful assimilation. I don't want, you know, like I think about this with with my son. I've got two, two boys, you know, four year old, 18 month old. In the same way that I think I was sort of being assimilated into elite American culture. You know, when I went to Yale Law School, 2013 2014 I graduated. 2016 this book comes out like there are all of these weird ways in which I was being assimilated, but into something that was really ugly and disgusting. I don't want my kid to assimilate into that. And without that, what is there? And this is sort of, I think, the task. This is why I think conservatism has to be a counter revolutionary force. At this moment, we're not just talking about assimilating new immigrants into a American culture. We're talking about replace, replacing garbage elite culture with traditional American culture. That's, that's, in some ways, a hell of a lot larger of a lift. I
had several follow up questions loaded, but you said something that I would like to zero down on. How do we effectively quote rip out the disgusting leadership class?
Oh, man. I mean, you know,
because let me expand on that just a second, because it's and I'm gonna give you a little cover here, because it's not just, I mean, obviously elections, that's one thing, okay? But unfortunately, this evil leadership class has already taken over all of our institutions, all the media, all the academy, all of our corporations, every educational institution, every arts and culture institution, even every freaking sporting institution that we've had. So how and I agree with you. I agree with you and everything that you said in terms of, we're assimilating people into a garbage culture that's teaching them to hate America. So that is, that is our current pipeline, right from K through 12 through the universities, the current pipeline is to turn them into those people that we just called evil and disgusting. How do we, aside from elections, how do we rip out this leadership class? What do we do? Is it even possible to renovate or rehab these institutions from the from the inside. And the reason why I ask that particular angle is because, from my perspective, I've seen these institutions taken over from the ground up. It was just an adjunct professor. They had some classes, then they get tenure, then they become department head, then they're the University Professor, University president. The corporations, they hire these new kids. The new kids demand the change. The Change goes to HR. HR makes a policy. And then the CEOs are woke. The government official staffers, they start demanding woke from their candidates. And before you know it, it's in the halls of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh hearings radical feminism. And then Joe Biden addresses the joint session of Congress and says white supremacy terror, which is just any white guy being upset the government is the number one domestic threat that we face. So these institutions are corrupted and routed to the core. This elite ideology is everywhere, and in all the things, what other options do we have besides voting them out, which we're seeing is ineffectual?
Yeah. So again, this, this is, like a tough question, but this is maybe the question that confronts us right now, right? So, yes, okay, so one model is, you know, what happened to Germany after the Nazis lost, or what happened to the Iraqis after Saddam Hussein, after we threw Saddam Hussein out? And you know, de nazification, debatification, there was this massive recognition. That you couldn't just put, you know, replace the bad people, replace the bad Nazis with the good Germans. There was this entire effort to de institutionalize that ideology. And by the way, I think that a lot of the lessons learned in the 40s are being applied to the United States. There's this weird way where you're kind of like, completely de americanizing American culture. That's really what's going on. So, I mean, I think that there, there are two different ideas here, right? So, so one is, is like, you know, I there's this guy, Curtis yarvin, who's written about some of these things. And so, so one is to basically accept that this entire thing is going to fall in on itself, right? And so the task of conservatives right now is to preserve as much as can be preserved, and then when the inevitable collapse of the country comes, ensure that conservatives are able to sort of help you build back the country in a way that's actually better, not Joe Biden's build back better, but actually some sort of reconstruction of the country. I think that's too pessimistic and too defeatist. I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left and turn them against the left, right? We need like, a de bafication program, but like a de wocification program in the United States, right? So like, let me give you a couple examples. So one of the things I've always been very sympathetic to is this idea that we don't have a real constitutional republic anymore. What we have as an administrative state, right? The administrative state controls everything, right? So to the point that, like, when Donald Trump wins, he can't even sometimes get his people in core positions of authority in the administrative estate. It's like, well, do we have a constitutional republic? The Founding Fathers actually created a very powerful chief executive, a very powerful president, but if he can't even fire the people in his own administration. Like, is this really a successful Republic? So a lot of conservatives that said we should deconstruct the administrative state. We should basically eliminate the administrative state. And I'm sympathetic to that project. But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for own purposes. We should fire all of the people. I mean, you know, like it. I think Trump is going to run again in 2024 I think he'll probably win again in 2024 and he'll win by a margin such that he will be the president united states in January of 2025
I think that what Trump should do like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire every single mid level bureaucrat, Every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people. And when the courts, because you will get taken to court, and then when the courts stop, you stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, the Chief Justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it, because this is, I think, a constitutional level crisis if we continue to let bureaucrats control the entire country, even when Republicans win elections, then we've lost. We've just permanently lost. We've permanently given up. And so that's sort of how I think about this, is that, you know, okay, so you do that, and then what do you do at the Department of Education? Well, you do what Victor Orban has done in Hungary, which is basically say you're not allowed to teach critical race theory anymore. You're not allowed to teach critical gender theory anymore. You're not allowed to teach your doctors that they should experiment on 10 year old children with hormonal therapy. You're not allowed to do those things and get $1 of federal money or $1 of state money. And that funding will dry up very quickly. And then you actually just, I think, go down American institutions and make it possible for conservatives to actually govern and succeed in these institutions in a way where they're currently cut out. That's basically my strategy. Is like, de institutionalize the left, re institutionalize the right. It is very hard. It will require men of incredible men and women of incredible courage. But I don't see another way out. I mean, I really can't get over how crazy things have gotten. And if you're not recognizing in this moment how crazy things have gotten and how outside the box, we need to think, then I think you're ultimately not really serious about taking back the country. I agree. And I gotta say, JD, I'm very happy to hear some of this energy coming out of you. Very muscular, very aggressive. These are, these are the exact kind of things that we need. I've been saying that we need a critical conservative theory. And by that I mean the critical part, which is to say action. Or, you know, words without action are irrelevant. Philosophy without action is irrelevant.
Man, you said so much. We're jumping around in my agenda here, but let's just you mentioned, you mentioned the administrative state. Hello, Jennifer law, by the way, in the super chats. Thank you very much. You had mentioned the administrative state. That is something I wanted to ask you very clearly about. We Christopher Caldwell and others have put forth an argument that says that we are under the control basically, of two competing constitutions. We have seen very clearly examples where the Civil Rights Act has been used in a way that was unconstitutional to affect laws that were never passed by a legislature. We've seen recently. The CDC has been issuing foreclosure bans. Very odd where OSHA is now requiring vaccine mandates. We're seeing direct administrative rule making that appears on its face to be as powerful as legislation, but it's not going through a legislative process. The administrative state makes a rule. The judiciary rules on it. It becomes effectively law at that point, totally outside of the scope of the legislature. You're running for Senate, sir, how do you make the Senate more robust? How do you return the Senate to lawmaking? How do we strip the power away from the administrative state to take away our liberties on a whim with a rule that the President himself even comes out and admits and says this is probably unconstitutional, but we're going to do it anyway, okay, which is a muscular progressivism, and in some ways I got to tip my hat to the guy, okay, but how do we bring lawmaking back to the legislature? How do we strip the administrative state of its power? How do we end the crisis of the two constitutions if you're going to the Senate? Man, this is something I think is very, very high up at the top of the list.
Yeah, no, I think we need a muscular conservatism. And before I answer your question, I actually just want to, want to try to give you some sense of how I think about this, because Caldwell's book is very good and certainly influential in how I thought about these problems. I mean, if you understand what the Civil Rights Act was aiming to do, and then what it did, and you compare them, it's kind of insane when you actually just put it in like when I realized this, the light bulb went off. This is what I realized. The United States passed a law that said you're not allowed to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin, and the bureaucracy that was set up to enforce that law has forced private and public sector entities to discriminate against people based on the color of their skin. This is how crazy this is, and this is how muscular progressivism is. Is that they take a law that is meant to accomplish one thing, and they use that law to accomplish the exact opposite of what it was meant to accomplish. Like, this is crazy. You do have to tip your hat to these people. Like, I don't know, no conservative in my lifetime has ever had like the goal to say, well, the law says this thing, we're going to use the bureaucracy to accomplish the opposite of that thing that it says, I'd be happy if a conservative just said we're going to seize that bureaucracy and make it do what the law actually says it's supposed to do. Like, let's just do that. Let's start there. And I guess to me, the fundamental problem here of the administrative state is that civil servants have no real consequence, and elected officials, specifically, the President, has no real recourse when the civil servants get out of line. Now, the left doesn't care about this, because the civil servants are all on their team. But we should really care about this, because the civil servants are like 90 to 10 not on our team. And so I think the thing that you can do in the Senate is push the legal boundaries, as far as the Supreme Court will let you take it to basically make it possible for democratically accountable people in the executive, in the legislature to fire mid level, up to high level civil servants, like that, to me, is the meat of the administrative state. Now, that doesn't mean you're going to have, like, civil servant Turner, like, every time you have a new president, they're going to fire everybody, but just the knowledge that they can be fired can actually bring a lot of these administrative bureaucracies to heal that is that is like the fundamental fact of the federal government is that the people who implement the policy are very often totally unaccountable to the the people that we elect to actually do policy like that is crazy. That's not a real constitutional republic when that happens. But that is, unfortunately where we are these days.
How do you force your fellow senators and congressmen to actually write laws that have teeth and are specific and detailed? I remember reviewing early legislation in American history, and it's like there will be 65 tons of this and 42 pounds of that, and they're very, very specific. We've had 18 months to debate the effect of COVID on the United States. Has there been open debate on the floor of the Senate about how to approach the Coronavirus crisis? Was there an open debate on the floor of the Senate on whether or not we should ban landlords from protecting their own property rights or restricted corporations from hiring whomever they want whenever they want? Was there an open discussion, how do you drag the senators back to work and get the legislature, which, you know, you mentioned that the founders created a powerful chief executive, but you know what? They created a powerful, you know the powerful break, that was the legislature. Okay? How do we revive the legislature? So that when I vote for a guy, the guy goes down there, or woman, what ups, goes down there and advocates on. My behalf and gives me a voice and and bring things like Thomas Massie wanted, brings things to light and makes people put their names on it. How do we do that?
Well, this is tough one. So I think the first thing is you need enough people in the Senate who actually want to legislate and actually care enough about public policy to do something about it. And, you know, I don't know the number is in the United States Senate right now. You know, maybe it's, maybe it's 10 Republican senators. Maybe it's even fewer, but I think that if you get a critical mass of 10, 1215, guys, it can really put a ton of pressure on the other ones, right? You know that that group can go directly to the people and say, Hey, this is really important. Get mad and convince these other people to do it. It's very hard when there are two or three people fighting for an issue. It's a lot, lot easier when you have a critical mass. So I think step one is getting a critical mass. I know you're going to have, or already had, Blake Masters on the show. There are some, some really solid people, I think, that are running, that are trying to create, you know, like I said, a center of gravity in our party of legislators who actually want to legislate for the people they were sent to serve. But again, I think that, like, the reason legislators don't like to legislate is a consequence that we just got an institutionally lazy, right? Because legislators, to your point about COVID, they don't really legislate anymore. They give, they've given so much of their power to the administrative agencies through rulemaking, to do all the real work. But I think a lot of people like they get to Congress because they want to have Senator, they want to have congressman or Congresswoman next to their name. They don't get there because they really want to do something, and so I think procedurally, you have to reform the administrative bureaucracy so that Congress is actually making these decisions. Congress is actually forced to do the things that the Constitution tells them to do. Another thing that's interesting here, and I don't know how to solve this problem, but we have a very real staff problem. I've talked to enough members of the Senate that I that I that I admire, and so like, what normally happens with Capitol Hill staff is you get somebody who's, like, really young, and you pay them for Washington, DC, you know, a pretty low amount of money. So they work there for a couple of years. Maybe they go work at a lobbying firm after that, maybe they stick it out on Capitol Hill for another few years, but you have this like revolving door between Hill staffers, between lobbyists, between industry and so you don't have people who actually know how to write bills, who know how to read bills, who know how to do the work that the Constitution asks the Senate or demands that the Senate and The house actually do, and I again, I don't know how to solve this problem. My instinct here is that we need to do a lot more. We, meaning me as a future senator, need to do a lot more with our staff people and a lot less with lobbyists. Because one of the things that happens is the lobbyists end up writing the legislation. They can manipulate the administrative agencies that actually enforce and give teeth that legislation. And so there's this weird cycle where senators pretend like they're doing something, when really what they're doing is passing off their entire constitutional authority to lobbyists who write the bill and then administrative agencies who actually apply it
Indeed, indeed. And I had literally just circled down on my note here. I wrote staff issue, underlined, circled it and then, and then you spoke to it there. But I'd like to expand that. I've interviewed cash Patel National Security Council and Chief of Staff at Department of Defense. I've interviewed Josh diamond National Security Council, Amanda Milius, Trump appointee, and they all say the same exact thing. There was not enough people to staff up all the appointments in Washington. And I just said, I just said to cash yesterday. I said, you know, if Trump wins in 2024 man, I can't wait to see you come back. And he looks at me, and he goes, Well, I'm bringing you with me next time. And I was like, Oh man, I don't, I don't know if I'm going to pass through opposition and all of that, but the point is clear that there are not enough people to even staff up all of the appointments, and the failure to do that was one of Trump's biggest failures in team building and institution building. So what is the plan for building up the bench? What is the plan for building up the reserve of these people that could come to Washington and make a difference. I'll just give you a piece of color on the difference between the Democrats and Republicans. I've lived in DC since 1990 I've seen the changes. When George Bush came to town, steak houses popped up everywhere. He saw cowboy hats and stuff in the street. It was crazy. Obama comes all of a sudden there's fusion feud restaurants everywhere, and the town is just overwhelmed, overwhelmed with newcomers for the for NGOs, living in group houses, working on the hill, doing all kinds of work. Overwhelmed. Trump comes into office. Did not notice a single change in the city at all. I. How do we solve this problem of actually not even having enough of an army to govern?
Yeah, well, this is, again, this is one of these things that makes you realize how difficult our challenge is. Because, you know what I think the failure is here was really a failure of the movement. Right? Trump wins. I mean, a lot of people didn't expect him to win, certainly, even people on his own campaign staff didn't expect him to win. And then what happened, I think, is that the only people available to staff the administration, or I shouldn't say, the only, but a disproportionate share of the people willing to staff the administration were the people who would have staffed it in like, the Jeb Bush administration, right? And so like, Yeah, you had some senior hires, people like Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, like people who, I think, really made a big difference in policy, but there were not enough institutions and enough people to staff an administration that were actually consistent with Trump's worldview. And that was a big problem, I think, a big failure of the consumers conservative movement writ large. I mean, I think the only answer is to do the difficult work of actually institution building in our country, right? This is, this is a thing that we don't do on the right. The right tries to win elections. The left tries to tries to build institutions. So I saw a story, probably, I don't know, a month after Biden was sworn in, and you know what the story said was basically that there was this entire administration in waiting. There was, like, this think tank or lobbying firm, or, you know, some DC firm that was basically just war gaming. The Biden administration had a lot of the people higher level, but also mid level people that would go in and work in the Biden administration, like, we need to be building something like that, right? And I actually know a couple of my friends who were who were working on that very project, because we sort of looked at the last five years and were like, You know what? Why is it that there were so few people willing to staff this administration, given the electoral mandate that Trump had just won? Isn't this just a terrible reflection on the entire political system of political conservatism and so, yeah, I mean, I think the we got to do the hard work of institution building. And again, I've got friends who are working on this very problem right now, such that if there is a Trump administration round two, or a DeSantis or a Hawley administration, that we actually have the bureaucracy in place so that that person can govern effectively and not be constantly undercut, right? I mean, like, remember that crazy guy who wrote that New York Times article and he was positioned as, like a high level staff, right? I forget the exact fact, but it was like the resistance inside the Trump administration was the name of it. Can you imagine any other administration in American history, where actual officials of the administration would have been leaking stories to the New York Times at that level, trying to undercut the people who had actually hired him, like, it's just, it's just crazy, like even if you disagree with Trump's policies, like he won, right? He hired you to do a job. The American people hired him to do a job. You cannot undercut the chief executive by leaking stories to the New York Times about how you're undercutting it's just crazy to me how much the bureaucracy doesn't see itself as accountable to the American people at all. They do not see themselves as public servants. They see themselves, in some cases, actively aligned against the public interest.
Indeed, I think that we're going to have to come to the elephant in the room here at this point. Tell me how you perceive the Trump administration. What were some of its successes, some of its failures? What work is left undone? But before you do that, tell me how you came to change your perspective on Donald Trump, a litmus test. Oh, let me. Let me just set this up a little bit more. I am not interested in a litmus test of, did you support the guy in 2016 or whatever? Because I have written a book called Democrat to deplorable I understand about political transformations, which was very heavily influenced by Hillbilly Elegy. By the way, love your writing style, so clean, so clean and crisp. I really enjoyed it. And so a litmus test like that is not is not useful for me. But there are definitely people in my audience and people in my network and people that you know that also are curious, like, how can we please explain your mental thought process that went from, if I understand correctly, advocating for Hillary Clinton, not supporting Donald Trump, being actively anti Donald Trump. How did this change happen to where you voted for him or supported for him in 2020 and would support him in 2024 now, what do you think? What do you say? Please help us understand. Yeah, so
just just to clarify, was not a Hillary Clinton person. I did a write in in 2016 I was stupid to do that. I certainly should have voted for Trump in 2016 but like, recognize, especially after the deplorables comment, like, how dangerous. Of a person Hillary Clinton was, but I think what she represented was, was, was really, really disgusting. It's sort of the worst of this, like creating a second class, tier of citizens among our own country. I really, really didn't like Hillary Clinton, but yeah, look, I was wrong about Trump, and I think that you know what, what did Trump do? Or what changed your mind about Trump? I think it's, this is such a complicated and long conversation that we could have, but I really don't think it was primarily about Trump, right? So there were these policy wins. There were things that he did that I really liked, you know? I really liked the China policy. I really liked that he went after their manufacturing theft against the American worker. I really like that. Just rhetorically, he changed the conversation on China in a way that even Joe Biden is picking up on some of some of Trump's themes, even if, unfortunately, I don't think he's going to replicate the policy successes. He's at least picking up on Trump's rhetoric. You know, there you like, I really liked, you know, I really liked the immigration policy. I liked the fact that we actually had control of the southern border, that we were starting to have a real conversation about, what do we do with our legal immigration system, which I think is broken, just as our illegal immigration system is. So there were these policy victories where I was happy about, like, I didn't really think that you deliver on these things. And they actually did deliver on these things, and that was meaningful and important. But really it was about like I saw and realized something about the American elite and about my role in the American elite that took me just a while to figure out, right. And I, you know, I was red pilled. And frankly, there are a lot of people, I think, who see what I said in 2016 and say, well, fundamentally this guy, we don't trust them, right? And frankly, if I was in their shoes, it would take me a little bit to trust JD Vance as well. But if I'm trying to explain this, so the personal biography here is I came from more or less nothing, right? It came from a working class family. Nobody in my family had gone to college. I get to Yale Law School. I write this best selling book. I have my own, like, you know, business that's doing very well, and I'm like, all of a sudden, have been dunked into this elite world in a way that I never even fully realized, right? And I think that a lot of the influences of that elite world were making me basically a less happy person, but were also making me not as mindful about how broken our elite culture was, right? Because they bring you into this world. You know, they have you at their Sun Valley Conference, which people call billionaires boot camp, and they have you do these speeches in front of all these chief executives. And it feels really good to be included in these circles, and you start to lose sight of where you came from and who you were. And I think that really is something that started to happen to me. And thank God, by the grace of God or by luck, I started to realize that was happening, and I started to just push back against it in a very explicit and public way. And this is one thing I'll say, is like, it's not like I said I voted for Donald Trump two weeks before I decided to run for Senate. Like, I've been very open about the fact that I've had this sort of transformation in how I think about the American elite, and that Elite's reputation and its relationship to Trump. I was born on Tucker Carlson three years ago, talking about how Republican elites leadership hated their own voters. Like, this was something I've been talking about, thinking about for a few years now. Like, let me give you just one, one crazy story. So we did this event, my wife and I, you know, dinner with a lot of these very fancy, very wealthy people, and we were seated next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in the world. And this guy was just like, full on monopoly man evil, complaining about how Donald Trump's immigration policies were forcing him to raise the wages of his workers. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. Explain this to me a little bit. And he said, Well, look, I work in the hotel business. When I need workers, I can just go to the southern border and import a lot of low wage foreigners into my hotel chain. They'll work their butts off under the table for $8 an hour, but if I've got to pay American workers, they want $16 an hour. They want $18 an hour. They want $20 an hour. And it made me realize that, like all of this garbage about immigration and Trump's immigration rhetoric, it was about a hotel CEO not wanting to pay his workers more money. And I knew that, like, I've been an immigration Hawk for a while now. I've talked about how immigration depresses the wages the American worker, but when you see it before your eyes that these people hate Donald Trump because he is trying to make them pay higher wages to Americans, it's like, oh my god. Like, I don't want to be part of this group. Like, I don't want to be involved in this. I'll make a lot of money. I'll earn a lot of accolades. I'll never have a hard minute. I'll never have the mainstream media calling me morally depraved, which is what they call me today, but at the end of the day, I'll be a terrible person who turns his back on where he came from. And I just slowly realized, like, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be the guy. Teams up with the hotel chain CEO to depress the wages of American workers. I'd like to maybe play a role in saving this country that I love so much and so really, you know, again, as much as I think Trump had a lot of policy achievements that surprised me, a lot of it was just realizing how corrupt the establishment is in this country, and how much I was being recruited into that establishment, and I didn't want that.
Well, I appreciate that answer that sounds authentic to me, there's going to be time and place for you to reconfirm that for other people, plenty coming up I can imagine. And again, like I said, I've literally written a book on political transformations, and I understand that as more evidence comes up and your life experience changes, it's okay to change your position. You supported Trump in 2020 support him in 2024 I don't know that he's even the greatest president that we could have. I don't know that he's the best guy that we could have. I do know that I voted for him very clearly in 16 and 20 and supported him and thought he was the best choice at that time, and he's perhaps the best choice at this time. But there are other leadership positions which have a lot of influence in what happens the United States. Mitch McConnell. Should he retain his leadership position? If not? Who should replace him?
Look, I have no idea who, who should be the Majority Leader of the Senate. I think that McConnell has clearly shown that he's a little, you know, sometimes a little out of touch with where the base is. And I worry, I worry a great deal about having a Republican leadership that's been in power for effectively 40 years and is really, really disconnected from where the base is, you know, I have, actually, it's an interesting question. I have no idea how even the leadership election works. You know, is it the sort of thing where, like, do you need 50 plus one to get a majority leader, or is it just a majority within the Republican caucus, which hopefully, you know, would mean 27 or 28 votes? So I have no idea how that election even works. But look, I think that it's time that we moved beyond the very old leadership class that's dominated the Republican Party for a long time. And I think, you know, it's just, we got to do it. We had to bring some new blood in. We got to get people that the base is actually excited about. Because, you know, the thing that I really worry about is I do a lot of events out there. You know, most days I'm on the road talking to voters in Ohio. And by the way, if you want to support the campaign jdvance.com you can sign up for our email list and support us otherwise. But one of the things that really worries me is between the election integrity issues of 2020 and just the current leadership of the party, and also, I think, the fact that Trump is booted off of social media, there's a real depression that exists in our population and among our people. You know, I can get people to come out to our speeches and they're excited and they're engaged, but there's also, like, our people are still in mourning in a certain way, and we got to get something that gets folks excited and engaged about 2022 and then 2024 and I don't think it's possible to do that with the same leadership that we've had in this country. The other thing it's interesting is that, you know, you asked sort of what went right about the Trump administration, what were wrong about the Trump administration? I mean, the one thing that is just very clearly a problem, is what we were talking about earlier, which is that too many of the actual bureaucrats who would turn Trump's instincts and policy preferences into actual policy for the American people. There's a massive breakdown there. And we saw that from 2016 to 2020 like Republican elites, some of our biggest think tanks, I mean conservative think tanks supported by conservative donors that are supposed to turn ideas into policy. A lot of the fellows, a lot of the leaders of these institutions, don't like the voters who make the Republican Party as viable as it is. Like we've got to change that. I think, up and down the movement, we need some new leadership. Absolutely, who
would you caucus with in the Senate? Who do you see as an ally? Who's, who's somebody that you can work with?
You know, Josh Hawley just endorsed me a couple of days ago. Josh and I become pretty good friends. And I think, you know, he's, he's very thoughtful about, not just like the big tech issue, which I care a lot about. You know, he's got some interesting thoughts about how to become a senator in DC without losing your soul. And as somebody who's seen how corrupting the American elite can be from the inside, I think he has some good ideas for how to avoid that. You know, I like, I like Rand Paul a lot, I think especially on on some of his foreign policy ideas. He's got some interesting thoughts. I like Tom Cotton, like Ted Cruz. There are a few people there. I think we've got a pretty good core group of senators, but we need to get that core group to like, 15 or 20 before we can really, I think, start making waves in this party. Yeah,
I think that's about right on your Twitter bio. The very first word that you have in there is Catholic. And. And and I've read recently as well that there was a time in your life where you were sort of just a Christian, but with no denomination, and that you had a personal experience or journey that led you to becoming baptized, and becoming or maybe not baptized, but going through the process of becoming Catholic. I'm not one, so I don't know. Yeah, could you? Could you? Could you describe that process for you and what? How, how your belief system impacts the way that you would participate in government? And I asked this for a couple of reasons. One, I've interviewed folks like so rabamari, who has a very clear idea of what his political Catholicism should look like. There are folks like Dineen and vermeul out there, who have much stronger claims. And myself, I have been on a journey where I've gone from, let's say, I guess, straight up atheist, to the point now where I would call myself Bible curious. I've been reading the Bible and I've been participating, and I feel a calling. I feel an urge towards this. Then I read The founders, and I read folks like John Adams very clearly saying that our government is suited for a moral and religious person. People I see George Washington have said the same thing. It's all over the Federalist Papers. It's all over the time of the founding. Describe for me why Catholic was the very first thing in your bio, how that impacts your perspective on government and the nature of religion in our republic.
Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I went through, like a lot of kids who go to, you know, good schools who were raised Christian. I went through this sort of angry atheist phase where I think I knew, you know, knew better than my family and knew better than the tradition that I came from. We were not super institutional in our Christianity. We didn't go to church that much. We went here and there, and then we watched a lot of Trinity Broadcasting Network. When I was growing up with my grandma, we watched a lot of Billy Graham, you know, a lot of Kenneth Copeland people like that. And you know, to me, what really brought me back to Christianity, and then from Christianity, Catholicism is a separate story. What really brought me back to Christianity is, you know, again, it goes back to this point I was spending all this time in the American elite. And you know, what were the virtues, what were the character traits that that group of people was trying to indoctrinate me into right? Still need to think about the politics. The politics is secondary to all this stuff. But what I was being asked, what I was picking up socially, the things that mattered were credentials, were the respectability and the prestige of your job and achievement in a very worldly way, right? Like I would be judged not on whether I was a good, you know, husband to this girl that I had recently fell in love with, not on whether I was a good father to the children that we ultimately would bring into the world. I would be judged on, did I get a Supreme Court clerkship? Did I work in a fancy bank or consulting or law firm? Did I keep on getting more and more and better and better degrees, and I just realized to myself, this is an incredibly hollow and even gross way to think about character and virtue, like, why is it that the most powerful institutions in our society care more about whether you went to Harvard Business School than whether you're a good father? But that is true, and you pick up on it's like the oxygen you breathe, that obsession with academic credentialing. And so to me, it was like, Okay, well, what is, what is the creed that I've been exposed to in my life that makes, makes me ask the more fundamental questions, right? How do you be a better husband, a better man, a better father? Like, how do you build a sense of masculinity that's protective and defensive and aggressive, but isn't just showing right? You know, elites don't care at all about the difference between men and women and how we need to inculcate masculine virtues and feminine virtues, but Christianity really does. And just the more that I thought about it, the more that I thought there is this creed out there that asks all of these questions, and, in fact, answers all of these questions in a very profound way. And that's the Christian faith that I thought I was too good for when I started going to school. And so that got me back to Christianity. And then it's like, okay, well, I, you know, I believe in Jesus. I believe that He is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind. I was not, you know, it's not like I was a hardcore Pentecostal or Baptist or Methodist or whatever. I sort of had some exposure to all these churches growing up, but, but there were a couple of things that really attracted me to the Catholic Church. I think one is just on core moral questions, like the life issue, like the sacramental nature of marriage, you know, the fact that there was a lot of family dissolution and breakdown in the community that I came from, and there was this one religious institution saying, you know, like you can't change your husband or your wife, like you change your underwear. It's really important to sort of see this as a lifelong commitment. Obviously, it doesn't always work out, but that, like that recognition of the sacramental nature of marriage. Church. All of these things are sort of pointing me towards the Catholic Church. And then I started going to the Catholic Church, you know, in sort of various places that I was spending time in, started to talk to some Catholics. Realized that people in my life who had been in bringing me back to the Christian faith, that they were themselves Catholic and that, and that just sort of got me, you know, to the point where I was like, I feel at home in this church. Theologically, I think that it's more right than wrong, but, but I think it's always, you know, easy to over intellectualize this stuff. It wasn't really about the fact that I went line by line and compared Catholic doctrine to reformed Presbyterian doctrine. It's that it started to feel like the place that God wanted me to be. So I was, you know, baptized in the Catholic church a few years ago, and that's, that's, that's where me and my family call home. Now,
I really appreciate that perspective. I share the similar sense of just being concerned about the creation of our values, the morals, what virtues are being taught, and how, and are we facilitating the type of citizen that we need, not only to live a good life, but to be a good citizen as well. And the conclusion that I've come to is that we're not doing that virtual in any capacity, in any way. Basically, our education system is corrupted from what I've understood, that there's a number of Christian churches and institutions that aren't exactly on point anymore when it comes to this stuff. You can see Black Lives Matter flags at churches all over here in Washington, DC, even in the Maryland suburbs, where that black sign is the only black thing in the entire neighborhood, still throwing that out there. And then, you know, my experience, my experience in reacquainting myself with the founding it makes it very clear, you know, that if you give people the license to just do whatever they want, without the moral guidelines and sort of guard rails, then people run amok, and you have licentiousness and you have major problems, which I think is where we are today. So thank you very much for that honest answer, and it resonates with me deeply, and I continue to read my Bible and say my prayers and try to come to some sort of moment. I don't know if there's ever going to be a moment, but I'm opening daily. And I gotta tell you, it feels good. It really does.
Yeah, that's good, man. And I'll be praying for you. And I'll tell you, you know, one of my favorite movies is this movie, Pulp Fiction. And of course, you know, one of the one of the core themes of Pulp Fiction is that Samuel L Jackson believes that he has experienced a miracle when a guy shoots at him and he doesn't get hit. And, you know, the there's a line from that movie that I've always really loved. He said, whether what we experienced was an, according to Hoyle, Miracle doesn't matter. I'm paraphrasing a little bit. What matters is that I felt the touch of God. And I, you know, I remember there was this, this moment, I was traveling a lot for my business, and I wasn't as home as much, you know. And I, you know, really, really miss my wife, my wife and kid at the time, we didn't have a second. And, you know, I was really in to this, this chanting of a particular psalm by an old Orthodox priest. He's this beautiful voice, and he's chanting this Psalm. And I go to meet with a Catholic priest. I was in DC at the time. I go to meet with a Catholic priest at the Dominican house of studies, and he invites me in for their like, you know, their regular chanting they do midday. And I go in and they're chanting. And I say, what, you know, what are they chanting? Because I think it was, it was either in Latin or it was just, I could just, I couldn't tell what they were saying, because the way they were saying it, and he says, it's this, it's this Psalm. And I was like, Oh, my God. Like that feeling, that feeling of being touched by God, is, I think, that something that every Christian eventually hits. And I really do believe that it'll eventually happen if it hasn't happened already. But remember, it doesn't have to be an according to oil miracle. Just listen to Samuel L Jackson there indeed.
And you know, Spencer Clavin said it another way to me. He said that, you know, I don't have to go around knocking on the door, looking looking for, God, he's already there with me as I'm looking for the door in and of itself. And you know that's that stuck with me too. And just as an aside, Man, am I lucky? I've talked to some tremendous people. I just feel fortunate being able to reflect on these conversations I've had with such wonderful people and cutting edge thinkers yourself as well. Let's move on to something that I know is very important to you. I watched your remarks to the Claremont center for the American way of life here in Washington, DC. I'm very sorry I missed that event. Arthur and I are friends, and I want to support that that work as much as possible. Arthur milk, also someone else who was on who was on the podcast. Oh, cool. Yeah. He's a great guy. He. Is I've had Ryan on as well, and Michael Anton, and that's been a great part of the show. And in there we you were talking about woke capital. And I think I thought I had an idea of what you meant by woke capital before you started talking about it, but actually it expanded to something much bigger that I hadn't really considered. So would you be able to make your case here in a few minutes about what is woke capital, what is the problem, and what are you going to do about it?
Yeah. So basically, the idea is that is that capital, money in our society has gone in with the left and the culture wars, and I think that's almost this point, a totally uncontroversial observation. You saw this with a response to the Texas law the couple of weeks ago. Nearly every major corporation speaks out against the Texas law. A couple of corporations start funding very major plans and resources to help people get around that law. And one guy that I saw at a mid level tech company spoke out in favor of the law, and he was fired a few days later. Right? That, to me, is woke capital, capital, money itself, is increasingly taking a side in the culture war, and I hate to say it's not our side. It's not the side that I want to win preservation of a traditional American value set that is actively against where a majority of our business community, where a majority of our financial community is coming from. Now, I think it's really interesting to understand why this has happened, and I wouldn't pretend to have a totally full explanation, but look, one of the things that's happening is that the capital allocators themselves have become woke, right? So, you know, I invest money in a venture capital firm. It's a combination of my own money, but also you go and raise money, well, you go and talk to people that you raise money from, and you find that increasingly, you have to fill out these diversity surveys. You have to commit to certain socially progressive values in the people that you hire, but also in the companies that you're investing in. Who are you talking to when you're raising money from people? You're raising money from the Ford Foundation, one of the biggest funders of left wing radicalism in the world. You're talking to the Harvard university endowment. $41 billion of money, a lot of that is going to aggressively promote left wing radicalism at Harvard University itself. You're talking to some of the biggest companies, like Larry Fink at Black Rock, who is pushing environmental and socially progressive ideology on the companies he's investing in and the folks that he's dealing with. It's basically like the people who control the purse strings in our society are aggressively taking the side of the left. That's one thing that's happening. Another thing that's happening is that American capitalists, American businessmen and women, have become totally divorced from the American population. So you know, I'm thinking of a banker, one of the elite leaders of one of our big investment banks in the world, who once said, I heard these remarks, you know, I'm not an American bank. I have American clients, I have American investors, I have American American or, sorry, I have non American clients, non American customers, non American investors, non American shareholders. I'm an international firm. I have no commitment to America. Why would I do business with America instead of China? Well, the Chinese, we know they like America, becoming socially liberal, because they think it makes us culturally weaker and will eventually make us easier to beat in the long term, I think conflict that we are likely to have with with China. So they love it when we go woke, and so they are actively promoting, often very bad ideas, and in some ways, you know, smuggling them into American businesses, because these American businesses are so dependent on business for the Chinese so, so you know, the pushback against some of the COVID, Coronavirus craziness that would get censored on YouTube, right? Well, YouTube is Google. Google is actively in bed with the Communist Chinese in a whole host of ways. So I think the fact that American businesses aren't as responsive to American consumers, you know, if Nike goes really woke, they don't have to care as much, because a lot of their businesses in China. And even if China wasn't actively putting pressure on Nike. Nike knows it can make money in China. It doesn't have to rely on American consumers. So when American consumers say, maybe we wouldn't like to be sort of, you know, have have Colin Kaepernick forced, in our face, to teach social justice values to us. Nike doesn't care as much because they're not as dependent on American consumers. You see this with the NBA, more invested, in some ways, in future growth in China, they don't care as much what happens to the American consumers and their American customers. So I think that's another thing that's happening. And then I think the third thing that's happening is sort of, what, what, what Christopher Caldwell has talked about that the universities have taught a particular. Critical Race ideology that has made it into our biggest businesses via the corporate HR departments, right? And so we've in some ways weaponized the civil rights laws that were supposed to be about not discriminating on the color of skin, and now we've turned them into a bureaucracy that actively discriminates if you don't discriminate on the basis of color, or, sorry, that actively discriminates against people based on the color of their skin, and all of these things have made our corporations actively aligned with the left instead of the right. And I think that the basic argument that I make in that speech, and I continue to make to voters across Ohio, is that unless you're willing to make these people feel economic pain. There's no serious way to fight back against it. Google, Apple, Delta, they're not going to stop beating up on Georgia for passing common sense voter integrity measures just because we complain about it, or just because a congressional committee man sends a strongly worded letter to their CEO. The only way to push back against this stuff in a real way, is to make these companies feel economic pain. And so, you know, there are a lot of ideas out there for how to do it. One idea is to basically end the preferential tax treatment that we give to Google, as opposed to American manufacturing companies. If you're a Google you actually pay a lower tax rate than you do American manufacturing companies that are employing American workers. Harvard university endowment pays a 0% tax rate. Maybe it's time to tax that endowment sees the endowment actually penalize these endowments for being on the wrong side of some of these cultural war issues. But the basic idea here is the left sees an entity that's aligned with the right. The left punishes it. The right sees an entity that is aligned with the left. We run away. We refuse to do anything. That is what we have to stop. We have to be willing to actually fight these companies with fire if we don't want to lose our entire country. Because at the end of the day, you know, this is not to me, you know. And I would say this is a new insight, or at least a new view that I have. You know, what really worried me, if you asked me about this question six months ago, is the woke capitalists are funding all the social justice movements, right? Like Amazon, Jeff Bezos is sending 10s of millions of dollars to the Black Lives Matter movement. Okay, that's bad, and that really bothers me. You know? What bothers me more that mid level employees at these companies feel like they can't speak their mind without getting fired, right? That is the way in which woke capital is turning our society into a socially progressive hell hole. It's making it impossible to speak your mind without losing your job. And look, we got a lot of brave people out there, but when you've got somebody with a family of four to feed, and they know they're going to lose their job if they speak their mind. A lot of them aren't going to speak their mind. We've got to change that incentive and make these companies actually feel a little bit of pain for aligning with our enemies in the culture war. Indeed,
I personally got fired because Antifa doxxed me, called me a Nazi and a racist, and one of the things that they specifically fired me for was I had written an essay under a pseudonym, just questioning the logic of having illegal immigrant adult, 18 year old males in our high school with freshman girls, because there was just a there was a sexual assault case that had happened, and I got fired. They cited that. They literally cited that. And I was working for like, a government agency which was actually, technically, literally, a violation of my First Amendment rights. And the ACLU director in Washington, DC reached out to me at that time, and he said he supported me. He said, hey, you know you should be able to speak your mind. You're protected underneath the Constitution as well as the District of Columbia Human Rights Act. And he took it to their legal committees at ACLU, and they rejected it, even though this was the legal director saying that he wanted to take this case. He then took it to national they rejected it there too. Why? Their, their their legit response was, is they didn't want to offend their coalition partners of the Human Rights Campaign, and Black Lives Matter. So when we say that our institutions have been corrupted, even the freaking ACLU, which, when I was growing up, they my dad, made me really believe that the ACLU was on the side of the good guys. But now we know clearly that all these institutions are totally corrupted. Now you used a phrase that I believe my good friend will Chamberlain coined, and it is representative of this muscular conservativism that we've been talking about, or a critical conservativism, which means action. It is also reflective of this sort of philosophy that you've just put forth here, which is treat your friends kindly and your enemies harshly, which we which we don't, do you said, seize the endowments. I'm open to that. Is that something that's actually possible, or is that just rhetoric? Could you explain?
Well, you can certainly seize them through through taxation, right? I mean, look, if my, if my middle class sister, has to pay a higher tax rate than the Harvard university endowment, I think that's. Ridiculous, and it's unfair, even, even aside from the fact that Harvard university endowment funds some of the most radical anti American stuff that's out there. That's just not fair, right? And this is, this is the crazy thing about tax law and about the way that left and the right talk about taxes, right? So, like, I'm a conservative, I want lower taxes. Democrats want higher taxes. Okay, that's like a basic principle that we've been arguing about for 30 or 40 years. But if you actually look at the details, the Democrats don't want higher taxes. They want higher taxes on their enemies, and they want lower taxes on their friends. And Republicans just were not yet ready to wake up to this reality, you know, if we really so, there's talk of the Biden administration raising taxes if we really wanted to call their bluff. And this would be so fun to do if I was actually in the US Senate, I'd say here are all of these left wing institutions that pay a 0% tax rate. Let's raise their taxes before we raise an ounce of tax on American middle class taxpayers. But Republicans are just terrified to do it. I even had a donor once written, this is not too long ago, since I started my campaign, who said, you know, I don't like the Harvard university endowment either, but why would we tax them? That's just going to grow the size of government. One it doesn't necessarily have to. If you raise 10 billion of taxes on the Harvard university endowment, you could cut 10 billion of taxes somewhere else. But aside from that, that's not the right way to think about it. The Harvard university endowment is ammunition that the left uses to penalize conservatives. We need to give them less ammunition. It's like a basic principle of warfare. Don't give your enemies all the weapons and ammunition. Conservatives have got to wake up to this reality. So yes, I think there are ways for us to seize the endowments. We just have to be willing to actually do it,
right? I like that answer. Also, you can seize 10, you know, seize money from the endowment, and then, you know, not print more money. That's, yeah, that's another way. That's another way that you could do it. I've got two more questions for you. We're going to get to these real quick. I was reading a wonderful essay in the American mind by Josh hammer just came out the other day, and it's titled the subjugation of the deplorables. They know it's illegal, they just don't care. Is the subheading and one of his and his list of recommended actions and postures are this first at the most level, a basic level, understand what time it is in this late stage Republic? Man, that's a terrifying word. If you know anything about Rome, the oligarchs of our ruling class are not going away. They've seized an enormous amount of control over what was our once robust system of government. Quote, The hour is late, a good Claremont phrase throated there. Awesome second And relatedly, re conceptualize our side's own approach to the rule of law, to borrow from David azerod, we need to get comfortable wielding the levers of state power as our opponents do. To quote, reward friends and publish enemy, punish enemies. And third, use familiar litigation processes to strategically advance our causes. When opportune moments to push back against COVID, hysteria arise and they will. What is your reaction to those three points? Do you agree with them? Is this a spirit or an energy that you will bring with you? What is your reaction?
Yeah, look, I like Josh a lot. We've, I don't think we've ever actually met in person, and if we have, it was only briefly, but I think you know he, too, is a guy is, interestingly, who was not there on Trump in 2016 but I think really recognized what we're up against and had a, I think a similar evolution is thinking and so Josh and I are very aligned on a lot of this stuff. Look, I guess I, the way that I think about this is we are in late Republic like we're very clearly close to a point where the people don't have nearly as much power. The oligarchy has seized most of it, and it's going to take a lot of very fundamental transformation to give the people anything like the power back. But, I mean, look, I haven't read that particular piece, but, but generally the COVID stuff, the further along we get down this pathway, the more I really do realize this is pure punitive stuff, right? So I think, I think it was yesterday there was a video circulating of the San Francisco Mayor. San Francisco has one of the most draconian COVID policies, partying indoors without a mask with a bunch of people. I think one of them was the co founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. Like, it's really clear with the mask stuff in particular, that this is all about control. They don't follow their own guidelines. They don't even pretend to care about as much they want us to care about it. And like, this is, like, one of these things that's really radicalized me, you know, like, like, I, you know, you asked me a year ago, it's like, okay, you have to wear a mask to go into a grocery store. Like, that's kind of stupid. But whatever, right, this kind of, kind of, you know, like, this doesn't make a ton of sense of. But, you know, I'm not going to raise hell about this particular issue, but you talk about putting masks on school children indefinitely, like, a year ago, that enraged me. Now it's like, radicalized me. This is insanity. This is bad for kids. It has no benefit to them. Probably doesn't even have any benefit to the adults, but like, there are all of these weird ways where what they're doing doesn't just seem stupid to me anymore. It seems actively malevolent and evil. The masking of children is maybe the worst example of it, because I can't think of a single good thing that comes out of it. And I think, I mean, it's like, literally, the most innocent and best part of our society. We're not letting them see the faces of other kids. We're teaching them to see their other school children as like disease vectors instead of friends that they can make. You know, I mean, even just the mask itself constantly reminds them that this pandemic is in the background. It makes them anxious. I just this thing in particular feels so egregious and so punitive and so evil and, yeah, look, I agree we are in the late Republican period. If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty, pretty wild and pretty far out there and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable
with. Indeed, I got to say, among some of my circle, the phrase extra constitutional has come up quite a bit, and truly, that is just by merely observing the Democrats in action, as they clearly state to our faces that they are operating outside of the bounds of the Constitution until such time as they get drawn back in. Maybe, if that happens, maybe if it doesn't. And at the end of the day, when people are fighting against you with tactics like this and their strategy seems to be winning overall. We do need to take a much more aggressive stance, a much more muscular stance, and acknowledge exactly what Josh said, that the hour is late, and that if we want to, and in my mind, I believe, re found the country, re found the country back to its founding principles that we're going to have to, you know, become a little bit more robust in our behavior.
Yeah, that's, that's exactly right. And look, you know, I, I think that what's so difficult about this moment for conservatives is that we love the country so much that we don't want to admit to ourselves how far gone things are, right? And I hear this from a lot of conservatives. Look it is still the best country in the world. It is still the last best hope of man. It is still a great place to live and raise a family compared to some of the other options that are out there. But we are accelerating very, very quickly to a place that none of us want to go. It's really time to wake up. It
is and my last and final question, you mentioned it briefly. It is essential to what I am doing. In the liminal order, we have gathered up men from all across the country. We have 750 active members. We have 8000 people waiting to get in the door. We can't process them fast enough to get them in. This organization that we've built is based on the idea that masculinity as a core value is valuable to America. The masculinity and brotherhood together equals sovereignty. This is what we're doing in the liminal order, because masculinity is under attack by the entire woke apparatus, who say very clearly in their literature that all societies have been oppressive. All oppressive societies have been patriarchal. The patriarchy is funded by mass is fueled by masculine energy. In order to implement their feminist utopia, they have to literally, specifically destroy any notion of masculinity. Our response to that is to double down and enhance our masculine energy. We're working on this every single day. 750 guys, 8000 men waiting to get in. We don't market anywhere. We don't advertise anywhere. This is a grassroots phenomenon. What does JD Vance think about masculine energy? How do we, or should we, or can we create more of it in America? And by this, I mean virtues like honor, strength, courage, loyalty, to build, to protect, to provide, to instruct. How do we? Should we, and how do we create more of that in America? And is that even the role of a senator?
Oh, absolutely, it is. I think it's a role of the senator in in the public remarks that I make, but also in the policies that I pursue. I mean, one of the things that worries me most about the decline in manufacturing, you know, it makes our economy less self sufficient, it makes our people less able to support themselves with good middle class wages. But we also know that a disproportionate share of the manufacturing workers were men who had families. And one of the things that happened when the decline of male workforce participation happened is you took a lot of fathers and a lot of husbands outside of homes, which I think is a disaster. It's been a disaster for the men. It's been disaster for the women. It's been a disaster for the kids too. I. I find this so weird, and I'm, you know, so grateful that we had two boys, because I've seen this and I've experienced this in a very particular way. So, you know, my son is a four year old boy. I don't do have kids.
I do. I have three kids, including a son. Great. Okay,
so, so our four year old boy is, you know, I just obviously love the kid to death. And his, his thing right now is that he wants to, like, defend his home and fight off the monsters, right? So when he plays a lot, I notice, you know, that he's, he's playing, he's fighting the bear, he's fighting the dragon. He wants to stab the monster, right? He's, like, really into this idea, and it's and I really do believe it's spiritual and biological, like this is not something I've been like, hey you and here's the sword, go and fight the dragon. You know, I'm just his dad and I'm hanging out with him, but, but I love that, and I try to encourage it. And I found that even sometimes, like you go to a playground, or you talk to other parents and they're like, Well, you know, maybe the dragon is coming because he's hungry. Maybe we should try to feed the dragon and try to appease the dragon. And it's made me realize that, you know, even from that early age, we see kids trying to do masculine things, and we're already trying to suppress it. We're already sort of training ourselves not to allow that kid to kind of explore and discover what I think is a very masculine trait, this desire to sort of defend your home and defend the family and the people around you. And I didn't realize until I had kids, how firmly entrenched in our culture it was that we're just uncomfortable with some baseline level of masculinity. I think, you know, look to me, like, you know, I love American history. I love reading about the Civil War and about Grant and Lee and mathematics and the founding generation. But to me, the proudest moment of American history, if I had to pick a single moment, it was D Day, right? I mean, I'm getting chills just just thinking about this, that we went and liberated a continent from some of the most evil and disgusting stuff that was out there. And you know, the people who were born who were storming the beaches at Normandy, they were kids who grow up thinking about defending their home and thinking about defending their family. They were young men that we asked to sacrifice an incredible amount if you don't have and you don't promote that healthy masculinity, you're either going to have, on the one hand, no masculinity, or on the other hand, a completely fake masculinity that's not ready to do the things and make the sacrifices and do the service that's necessary to sustain a civilization. I worry, unfortunately, we've got both of those things. We've got fake masculinity and we've got no masculinity, and that that is just not a way to build a civilization. In fact, it's a way to destroy one.
I couldn't agree with you more on that, Whatsoever a 100% thank you for confirming that with me. I appreciate it, guys. If you're interested what I'm talking about, if you want to become one of the 750 sign up on the mailing list, liminal, hyphen order.com, new emails every week. 50 new slots every month. We do interviews, we vet. There's an onboarding process. We're not just letting anybody in. So come down and check it out. Mr. Vance, thank you so much for your time and energy today and your thoughtful and Frank answers. I really, truly appreciate it. Is there something you'd like to leave people with? You want to send people somewhere. What do you want to say here at the end? Yeah.
So definitely, look, we need all the help we can get in the campaign, especially if you're in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, any place close by where you can drive. We're going to be building a really robust ground game. And so we need volunteers, jdvance.com to volunteer for the campaign. If you've got resources, certainly you know, throw us a few bucks on jdvance.com you can learn a little bit about me and what I stand for. That's great. I mean, I guess the thing I'd leave you with Jack and with your audience is, you know, history is not made by people who've given up. And I won't pretend to have all of the answers, and I won't pretend to know exactly what to do, but I think that we live in a moment, and thank God we we were given this moment in history where I think we have an opportunity to save this country. I'm not saying it's not hard. This is one of the reasons I love the landing at Normandy, because talk about incredible odds, these these young kids, really we're up against but, but don't lose heart. Don't lose faith. Don't become depressed. I say this to audiences all across Ohio. If we become discouraged, the enemy wins. Take heart. Have courage. Have a willingness to fight for this country. It's worth saving. Amen
to that. JD, thank you very much. Once again, everybody, go down. Check it out. JD, vance.com, support him. Follow him on Twitter. JD, Vance, one and do what we can to support candidates that appear at least so far to support our own agenda. And I appreciate you submitting yourself to these questions. And I did note, after most of them, you said, Ooh, that's a tough one. So I was definitely, definitely doing my job here. So thank you very much, sir. Have a wonderful day, and I will see you very soon. All right, guys, that was jet was JD Vance, and that went very well. I'm very pleased with a lot of his answers, and I know that he has been very thoughtful and giving a lot of consideration to his evolution. We're wrapping this up right now. I just want to bring something to your attention, guys, Jack brunch tour is ongoing. We are going to be in New York City on September the 26th please come down to Jack brunch.com or go to Jack brunch on Twitter and follow us there. We have a few tickets left. Come break bread with us. Come drink some wine with us. They're open to everyone and anyone, women, children, your girlfriends, your wives, bring your kids, your friends from everywhere. We would really appreciate that if you'd come on down, if you're interested in the liminal order, if you're a man, if you believe in masculinity, brotherhood and sovereignty, come down to liminal hyphen order.com. Join the wait list. We take 50 guys a month. All these issues we talked about are things that are very important to us. We take these theories and these ideas and we put them into practice and we execute on them. Liminal, hyphen order.com, Jack brunch.com, follow me on Twitter at Jack Murphy live and share this show all over the place so we can beat the algorithms. I really appreciate it. And with that, guys, we are out. Blake Masters is next week. See you guys. Then on this show, we're driven by curiosity. Want to chart a path forward, best people, best conversations. We're on a journey, and it's just getting started.
