Trump picks his VP pick, and it could have a big impact on the future of the Republican Party. We talk to J.D. Vance, the writer of Hillbilly Elegy, about what it means for the future direction of the party.
00:00:43.620This is the theocratic faction, which believes in a deontological theocratic morality and wants to enforce that morality on the general public.
00:00:55.120In other words, we're talking like performative cultural conservatism, what a lot of people think about when they think about traditional conservatives, like religious and typically very Christian.
00:01:08.320No, the other faction is religious and Christian as well.
00:01:13.100Yeah, that's what I that's why I didn't say religious, because that's not the important part.
00:01:17.360The important part is that they are theocratic and morally deontological.
00:01:21.960So what I mean by that is these are the types of people that wants to do things like you saw in Project 2025 in their mission, ban pornography, force young men to do programs that basically put them on military enlistment lists.
00:01:35.500This is very different from the ideology that Trump represents, right?
00:01:41.500Yes, it's much more socialist leaning, much less libertarian, much less classically liberal, too.
00:01:47.460Yeah, but yeah, it's very much like the government's role is to enforce a moral system.
00:01:53.360And this was the party that Mike Pence, his last running mate, represented very, I can't be in another room with a woman without my wife there sort of stuff.
00:02:06.600And it's not that we have anything against being in an alliance with this group or anything like that.
00:02:10.800But there is always or up until I would say really just two days ago, there was always a chance that the conservative party post-Trump reorganized around this group.
00:02:23.460OK, but then there's been a new conservative faction growing.
00:02:27.600This is the faction that's represented by individuals like Elon and Vivek and Kamath, and they are the tech conservatives, I guess some people would call them, where they're-
00:02:46.120They've been around for a while, but they have been growing in terms of their ability to actually interact with mainstream conservative politics.
00:02:54.020And I think that if Elon wasn't a foreign national, he would be the obvious person to take over American conservatism after Trump.
00:03:04.460He's just very lined up to do that in terms of public sentiment these days.
00:03:11.340But I think when I talk to the base, I see much more, yeah, way to go, fight the man, you be you, which is also the difference between these two factions.
00:03:19.860The theocratic faction is very much we should have an authoritarian system or authoritarian in the way it relates to the people, culturally speaking.
00:03:28.960It's just we don't like who's running it now.
00:03:31.360Like when we were at NatCon, something we kept hearing is bureaucracy is good.
00:03:34.920It just needs to be a conservative-controlled bureaucracy enforcing conservative cultural values.
00:03:43.740Then you have the other faction, which is much more fight the man.
00:03:46.640It's an anti-authoritarian faction where it does implement controls.
00:03:52.480The controls are generally designed to prevent authoritarian cultural overreach.
00:03:58.500So they would promote ideas like there should be some restrictions around what schools should teach and show children when that stuff is literal pornography or literal like brainwashing.
00:04:48.300In a very interesting way and in a way where a lot of people, when they look at what Trump is doing right now, they're like, how could he support this guy?
00:05:01.860This guy said he hated Trump, that he was an idiot.
00:05:04.700This guy said all sorts of horrible things about Trump.
00:05:06.800And Trump said horrible things about him.
00:05:08.500And I would note here that when I first heard of this guy, when I first heard that he had been elected to office, I was mortified because I hated him from my first impressions of him.
00:06:12.040He is fighting against fascism, I think, in terms of everything I see.
00:06:15.300Yeah, but he was, essentially the role that he played at the time that Trump was elected was to explain to the NPR Americans, the liberal educated elite that was out of touch with middle America, why less educated white voters could possibly vote for Trump.
00:06:33.760Yeah, and he, I believe, was thoroughly dehumanizing of these groups in the way that he saw them.
00:06:41.240It was like, how could anyone possibly be this stupid?
00:06:43.620Now, I, so I disagree, because I actually read Hillbilly Elegy while we were in Peru.
00:07:05.360So just, she's not talking about Scots-Irish culture more generally.
00:07:08.220She's talking about the backwoods, Scots-Irish culture, as described in Albion's Seed.
00:07:14.060Yeah, which ultimately became hillbilly culture.
00:07:17.280Modern, when people refer to hillbillies, like the progenitor of that culturally in the United States was this wave of Scots-Irish immigration in the early colonies.
00:07:37.200I just want to, let me lay it out for you, just how poetically and narratively perfect this combination is.
00:07:43.120So what do we have now on the ticket for the Republican Party for the 2024 election, all right?
00:07:49.580We have got a man who is masquerading as a classy billionaire, who in the end is ultimately super trashy by like WASP-y standards.
00:08:00.060And we have a super WASP-y guy, Princeton Law grad, ex-military, the perfect politician, extremely WASP-y coded, essentially, who's cosplaying and masquerading as a hillbilly.
00:08:13.580And they're both these like classic American stereotypes, the billionaire businessman, the backwoods hillbilly.
00:08:19.800But they're also both classically American and that they're cosplaying these roles that they actually don't hold in the name of political or commercial expediency.
00:08:34.140But I think that it's more than that because there's also an understanding of how did he transform into somebody who today I actually really see myself as culturally aligned with.
00:08:46.140Because I look at J.D. Vance today and I'm like, he is one of the major players of this tech conservative faction.
00:08:54.660How did and I think the only really big one who held the currently high office, which made him the perfect pick for the ticket.
00:09:27.480The urban monoculture, Trump basically saw what was happening and one spoke to the real conservative base.
00:09:34.400And once the tech faction learned and began to understand the real conservative base, they realized they had much more in common with them than they thought.
00:09:43.620So the old conservative base, the old theocratic conservative base, this basically like socialist, deontological ethical system thing that still exists within many upper echelons of the Republican Party, they were very much about control and motivated by disgust.
00:10:00.200The new conservative base is motivated primarily by anti-authoritarianism and a feeling that their lives are being controlled, their children are being taken from them.
00:10:11.160And they don't like the way the government has stepped in and attempted to erase their personal cultural autonomy and their ability to raise their family and live the ways that they want to live.
00:10:23.360And when they began to realize, and I think that this has been a realization process, it's been for me as well.
00:10:30.700Like, I was very suspicious of Trump the first time he ran.
00:10:33.080But now, as I understand who he represents and what he is, I was like, wait, those are things I can get behind.
00:10:41.500That is a cultural movement that I 100% support.
00:10:45.900And I think that transition is where he's like, oh, wait, I still was so influenced by the urban monoculture.
00:10:53.620I still had this lingering trust in legacy media that I believed aspects of their narratives and framings about Trump, which breaking yourself out of a cult is hard.
00:11:05.180And the urban monoculture has become a cult.
00:11:07.740It is very hard and it's a transitional process to break yourself out.
00:11:11.980Now, it's getting easier now as they are becoming more extremists.
00:11:16.900When I say that this is an anti-fascist faction, what is the urban monoculture?
00:11:20.980We've done other videos on this, but, like, literally Nazism reinvented at this point.
00:11:26.740They are a group that ranks humans into a class system where different ethnic groups are deserving of different levels of human dignity.
00:11:33.540You saw this, for example, in PA, our home state, where the COVID drugs that they believed were saving lives were given to people not based on their need, but based on how historically discriminated their ethnic group was.
00:11:45.920So they were literally allowing people to die to play this game of some human ethnic groups deserve more dignity than other ethnic groups.
00:11:53.860And at the bottom of this pyramid recently is the Jews.
00:11:57.460Like, they are just, like, literal Nazis now.
00:11:59.720They want to use the government to promote their ideology.
00:12:02.680And they have specifically called out, if you look at what a lot of people are like, they're not out there rounding up people yet.
00:12:10.840And it's, yeah, but they're calling for it.
00:12:13.060They just tried to assassinate a president.
00:12:15.720They hit him with a bogus felony charge.
00:12:18.380Like, this is, like, third world country stuff that we're dealing with now.
00:12:24.880This assassination attempt didn't come out of nowhere.
00:12:27.260It came out of more than a decade at this point.
00:12:31.460This guy was 20, so he was 12 when Trump was first elected.
00:12:34.300All of his formative years, he was in an educational system and exposed to media that tried to frame Trump as an existential threat to our democracy when he is a 50% support of, like, the American public.
00:12:46.120And somebody who historically was a progressive New York lefty and his positions really haven't changed that much from those days.
00:12:57.140It's the progressive party that has changed pretty dramatically.
00:13:03.080But anyway, what are your thoughts on this?
00:13:06.140What I find promising about, also, the sort of vanguard of which J.D. Vance is a part is that it isn't monolithic in its stances.
00:13:18.300I would say it's more pragmatic in its stances.
00:13:20.160And to say that you couldn't just be like, these are the party's stances, I think it's much more selective and targeted.
00:13:30.200For example, when you look at J.D.'s foreign policy stances, while he has been against intervention in Ukraine, he has been in favor of intervention to protect Taiwan, for example.
00:13:43.380Because he has differing opinions on the utility for the United States on those stances.
00:13:48.660And it's nice to see that someone's not just categorically yes or no to foreign government.
00:13:52.480I'd also add some nuance to his Ukraine stance.
00:13:56.000His Ukraine stance has been framed by some individuals as anti-giving them support, when it is much more focused on ending the conflict as quickly as possible, through land grants, stuff like that.
00:14:09.040Which is a stance I personally don't think it's in our best interest.
00:14:13.500I can understand it from a human cost perspective.
00:14:16.380Whereas he's also taken, because I do think you could get peace in that region, through some form of compromise, that would be meaningfully lasting due to the demographics of that region.
00:14:27.580Russia just can't afford, demographically speaking, another war.
00:14:31.300All these people who are like, oh, they'll attack NATO.
00:15:07.200Because apparently, he's like, of course, this means that McDonald's, for example, will just fire more people and just have a lot more kiosks.
00:15:13.360And that the people who are left will have a lot more responsibilities.
00:15:16.260But that means those people who get fired will get retrained and have new jobs.
00:15:49.580And so when you have someone who has been trained professionally to look at second and third order consequences about long-term impacts, about how markets will be affected, and they're doing this from the perspective of a more long-term perspective.
00:16:03.920And also, like, you are directly punished if your long-term bets don't play out, which totally is not how politics works, right?
00:16:39.320He's in favor of building more natural gas pipelines, of course, as green as possible, but not going too far.
00:16:43.940He's in favor of reducing regulatory burden.
00:16:46.220Like, this guy, now, of course, when someone's a vice president, I feel like the role that I would most like, his first lady, and then the second role that I would love is vice president.
00:16:55.940Because, like, it's the most, like, chill role ever.
00:16:58.780I'm going to get you there one day, Simone.
00:17:10.880But anyways, another thing I want to note here about him is there is an episode that this episode is unfortunately going to be superseding that's on the history of the internet atheist community and how the community basically fractured into the community that cared about what was true and what was good.
00:17:26.900And the community that just hated conservatives and was into dunking on them.
00:17:31.400And that's where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye went into that community.
00:17:34.660And then you had Armored Skeptic and a bunch of the early, like, internet voices that moved into this other community and ended up being very influential in the anti-feminist community, which then spawned the Red Pill movement, which then spawned a lot of what became internet conservatism today.
00:17:50.120And that is why I think that transition is what pulled and generated this sort of tech conservative mindset, because a lot of these individuals have become increasingly red-pilled over time about many things, including religion.
00:18:09.160As you've seen, if you look at, like, the foreheartsmen of the atheism, like New Atheist Movement, the ones who didn't go woke are now unanimously saying religion is a good thing and it was bad to roll it back.
00:18:20.680And then you have individuals like us who are moving from the young, angry atheist phase to religion was good after all.
00:18:29.180I've got to play my Starship Troopers thing here.
00:19:23.580But anyway, big words, I don't like them.
00:19:25.040But he was writing that, and when he first hit the public faith, I think he was still in this angry atheist phase.
00:19:30.660And he has been transitioning, and recently he converted to Catholicism, which was not his birth religion, interestingly.
00:19:35.960Because he said he was convinced that it was true.
00:19:38.600And I think that this is something we're increasingly seeing, is people developing their own religious beliefs or reconnecting with religious communities because they see the value in them.
00:19:50.780And that's really what you had from this old atheist community, which was the faction that sorted for truth.
00:19:55.620And at first it pushed them away from religion because they were like, I can't see how this is logical.
00:20:01.940And then they realized largely, oh, society is worse without religion.
00:20:09.520And then there was the other group that's just like urban monoculture, let's dunk on conservatives, right?
00:20:14.580Even if it means we have to take insane stances.
00:20:17.760And so there's been this reconvergence.
00:20:19.760And that's also really interesting that he has followed this journey that's so similar to ours, venture capitalists or former venture capitalists, former angry atheist phase.
00:20:30.820And then we begin engaging with this culture.
00:20:33.100You start off being very suspicious of Trump, or in his case, outright hating Trump, and begin to realize, oh, Trump is really the savior of our country.
00:20:42.860And the one sort of political hope we have of uniting the various factions in opposition to the urban monoculture right now.
00:20:50.940But yeah, and you could say, why does it matter so much who's Trump VP pick was?
00:20:58.920And it's because Trump's VP pick is by far the candidate most likely to win or be running as the Republican presidential candidate in the next viable election cycle.
00:21:12.860Which means that the party is going to naturally be coalescing around this mindset.
00:21:17.900Now, he is going to really LARP the traditionalist parts of his perspective, because I think he feels he needs to.
00:22:12.980It's just that they were isolated due to the way the conference system works.
00:22:16.320But the other thing I want to note on the point that you're making here is who does J.D. Vance specifically appeal to?
00:22:24.080He appeals to the people who were critical and scared of this change that Trump represented when Trump was first coming in, particularly from a progressive perspective.
00:22:37.400And I think he's going to pull a lot of them over because he can think and model like them.
00:22:43.560And he is the person who explained to them why people were voting for Trump in a way.
00:22:48.520He did what Louise Perry did in the U.K. and to a certain extent in the U.S. before she did it.
00:22:53.080In that there are these people who sort of act like these emissaries from the other side that speak articulately to progressives and honestly speak much more to progressive audiences than they will ever speak to conservative audiences.
00:23:06.820And I think we also need to consider the integrity that Trump showed in choosing somebody who had spoken so derisively about him historically.
00:23:16.660That required, I think, swallowing a lot of pride on Trump's part.
00:23:20.960And I think a lot of people thought him incapable of doing something like that.
00:23:28.080But I also think it's new Trump, which is something that's been noted in our discord and we've noted it in the debate video is this is not the Trump from two cycles ago.
00:23:36.940It is he's much more aligned with his base than he was historically.
00:23:40.880He really seems to understand them now.
00:23:43.260He he understands the tomfoolery of the old GOP intellectual classes, and he's not going to stand up for it unless they are willing to actually serve him instead of their own secretive agendas.
00:23:54.800He is really not over bombastic this time.
00:24:00.720He still knows how to play to a crowd, but he is not he doesn't come across as unhinged.
00:24:06.400And I don't even think the unhinged narrative works anymore because no one's really afraid of that anymore.
00:24:10.600And he's also playing to an audience now that is much more open to how aggressive media manipulation has been.
00:24:27.600And again, just narratively, because I'm the kind of person who loves a VP and president pair that is cute and narratively poetic.
00:24:39.040I think this is great and the fake classy businessman.
00:24:43.540There's also the other thing to note about this that was really shrewd of Trump if you're thinking about the long term health of the Republican Party is J.D. Vance's age.
00:24:51.640Could have chosen a lot of old people who may have had more mainstream.
00:25:28.440And I see this as a largely positive sign.
00:25:30.480But it was very shrewd of Trump because to choose a contemporary of you and me means that Trump is choosing to uplift people who relate to younger conservatives and this new conservative movement and who can run things when he's gone.
00:25:50.380And I think that if Democrats don't do that, if Biden sticks with Kamala, who is detested by the young base, she is really just there as a diversity play and because she follows orders.
00:26:03.560Yeah, but not even like just a diversity play that nobody's wanted.
00:26:06.660It is so stupid that they are forced into choosing her if Biden's not the one running because she does not appeal to anyone.
00:26:56.520But I also think this shows Trump recognizing rightly the people who Mike Pence appeals to are no longer a politically relevant faction.
00:27:10.240They'll vote conservative no matter what at this point.
00:27:12.800And they're not as big as they were historically.
00:27:15.420And they're especially not big among the youths votes.
00:27:18.740And actually, this is something I was having a really interesting conversation with a Mormon about today.
00:27:22.620Because I don't even think they matter from a fertility standpoint.
00:27:26.140Like they're just not going to exist in the future.
00:27:28.300He was saying that for a while, so people who aren't familiar with Mormon history, Mormon culture, because they believe in this sort of iterative prophecy idea, that you would have a group of like philosophical elite Mormons who were having this discussion.
00:27:42.820And that discussion determined what the most recent Mormon theology was.
00:27:49.240And then Mormonism went through this period of intense hardship from like the 20s to the 50s, where it was hemorrhaging members.
00:27:59.480And what ended up happening was during that period, they transitioned to a completely hierarchical system where like the only one talking from God was the prophet or was the head of the church.
00:28:12.240And it was not this active philosophical conversation.
00:28:16.800And instead of every Mormon basically being commanded, like in the old Mormon church, to be like, or at least the Mormon males, to be like part of this, even on the fringes, this active philosophical theological conversation, it was much more, you know, here's what's ethical, here's what's not ethical.
00:28:33.060They moved to this deontological system.
00:28:35.400And during a period where that deontological system worked really well.
00:28:39.440We see this in terms of Catholic fertility rates during this period, which was operating off of a deontological system as well during this period.
00:28:45.780And it was just very easy in this sort of before modern contraception and stuff like that to motivate really high fertility rates with this system.
00:28:54.140But the problem is it is a uniquely susceptible system to the urban monoculture and the type of people who genetically seem to really have a strong disposition towards it are uniquely susceptible to like all of the rules that come with modern wokeism and seem to deconvert at a higher rate.
00:29:11.780And it has just been completely ravaged in terms of low fertility rates within those communities.
00:29:18.480And we were talking about how what he was noticing was in the Mormon culture, you see this new rebuilding of the active theological conversation.
00:29:25.720And those communities are the ones that are the ones that are doing really well fertility rate wise in the modern Mormon movement and the ones who were seduced by this deontological.
00:29:36.760And so people wonder, they're like, what's an example of a deontologically moral old Mormon?
00:29:42.600Girl Defined, I think, represents a perfect example of this.
00:29:45.980She was constantly using this deontological signaling.
00:29:48.640We hate X, don't do X, live like this, live like this, live like this.
00:29:54.040Instead of do this with these consequences for God, it was like this set of rules that you had to really strictly follow.
00:30:02.240They're in the process of deconverting.
00:30:04.080That is what happened to those individuals when it was follow these rules without the active theological engagement of let's understand these rules.
00:30:13.260And so I think we're probably going to also see something in the Catholic system is a reemergence of the active theological conversation, because these are the Catholics I know that still have a lot of kids.
00:30:24.540It's not the old deontological ones like Nick Fuentes, right?
00:30:27.860It's the new ones who are just like really studious and interested in the actual theology.
00:30:35.060Converts like J.D. Vance can represent, I think, a good part of this conversation, because he seems like the type of person who would be part of that.
00:30:45.320And I forgot why I originally was making this point.
00:30:48.140But, oh, yes, it's this old deontological system that ruled in the age of the GOP, Inc. theocrats, in the age of the satanic panic, in the age of gays, ick.
00:30:59.860Therefore, we can't, even if it helps us win an election, say, OK, it's OK if you guys, I might think gay marriage is immoral, but if it helps me win an election, it's OK for gays to marry.
00:31:19.400So all of this other stuff doesn't help.
00:31:21.520Adjudicating morality doesn't help the country.
00:31:24.000And as we've shown, it actually seems to lower fertility rates in the countries that are more prone to doing it.
00:31:27.840And I think this transition is necessary for most of the conservative cultural frameworks that are going to survive fertility rate wise.
00:31:37.740And it is actually very shrewd from that perspective as well.
00:31:41.600Instead of clinging to the pearl clutchers, moving to the people who are working on solutions and actual tactics to beat the urban monoculture before it castrates our kids.
00:32:41.180It'd be great to see him, you know, run in a new state law and stuff.
00:32:46.060But he also seems like he would be very competent within the administration and pretty loyal to Trump and his base agenda, given this personal transformation that he has undergone this last decade.
00:32:58.260And keep in mind, it's been a decade since he came out against Trump.
00:33:33.940But I was also going to say, one thing that I hope that we can continue to become for this new faction is become sort of what Curtis Yarvin was for the last iteration.
00:33:44.580Before we move into large, hard politics positions, work on pushing the philosophical envelope and better understanding sort of the game plan, how we win and how we beat this monolithic, basically Nazi group that has taken over our country.
00:34:02.920And taken over our school system and taken over media, particularly children's media, which is what's most disturbing.
00:34:09.180And has led to the cultural rot of our country.
00:34:10.980One thing I'd say is that you watch videos today, you watch movies, you watch what's coming out of Hollywood today, and there's just no light behind their eyes anymore.
00:34:17.940It feels so soulless, is the only way to put it.
00:34:23.300You go talk to Amish people, and they have this spark in them.
00:34:26.300And it's something that we're just not seeing that much in society anymore.
00:34:30.720And I think that the only people who can reignite it, because the force that's blowing out the candle is the urban monoculture, is this progressive force.
00:34:38.840And so if we want to carry the light through the darkness of the frontier, we need to go all in and ensure that they can win this election cycle.
00:34:47.700And obviously we're doing our part with running right now and offering our services to anyone who's working on campaign stuff.
00:34:53.140And we're talking to the various campaign groups.
00:34:54.660And I think that we've seen divine providence, I think, being shot through the ear.
00:34:59.660If Trump had his head turned, even just like this, just a little split, he would be dead now.
00:35:04.660And that is, I think, divine providence.
00:35:06.960And you know what he was looking at that saved his life?
00:35:09.740Was a graph of immigration statistics, illegal immigration statistics.
00:35:15.180So illegal immigration saved Trump's life.
00:35:35.600Because I've seen some people in our comments are like, I hate this plan he has to allow immigrants who get advanced degrees in the U.S.
00:35:41.700And has God personally done something like that for you recently?
00:35:44.780I think that incredibly strict immigration restriction combined with allowing and becoming a brain drain, especially of countries that we have conflict with.
00:35:55.140I don't know if we should do it for everyone who gets a degree, but especially if you get a degree at a top 10 college in the U.S., like it is nuts that we kick out like our Harvard PhDs.
00:36:09.200Kick them out if it's anything other than a STEM degree.
00:36:11.300I'd also say, like, our immigration policy, one area where I think Trump could do better on the immigration policy, is I think patrolling the southern border is unrealistic.
00:36:23.100And it's unnecessary, given that we have net migration out from Mexicans specifically right now.
00:36:30.040I should note that this trend actually reversed recently, and I misspoke.
00:36:35.000While we did have a period of net migration out of Mexican immigrants, we are now dealing with a migration in of Mexican immigrants, but small when contrasted with other countries, likely due to the cartel violence right now.
00:36:48.660Instead, we should work with the Mexican government and patrol their southern border because, one, they hate immigration as well, and it is a much, much easier border to police.
00:37:00.060And I would also argue that we should work with Panama to develop a U.S. military base at the Durian Gap to prevent immigrants from going through there, which would cut off a huge chunk.
00:37:14.360Because right now, a lot of our Latin American immigration is actually coming from South America.
00:37:18.520So if you can cut off the Durian Gap, which is actually very easy to do.
00:37:23.980Sorry, I just realized that some listeners might not have any idea what the Durian Gap is or why it would be so easy to cut off.
00:37:31.220But between Panama and Colombia, there is an area that has no infrastructure and no roads.
00:37:40.960As to why it has no infrastructure and no roads, it's an incredibly hard area to build in.
00:37:46.880So there is actually no direct infrastructure connection between Central America and South America.
00:37:55.200It is considered the hardest part of the South American migration route.
00:38:00.160And it would be, it's also a very, very tight choke point that would be very, very, very, because the actually viable path through the Durian Gap are few.
00:38:11.080There's only, like, four viable pathways through it.
00:38:16.880If you've cut off something like 30% of the immigration, you cut off then further the southern Mexico border, then we can begin military intervention against the cartels, which I think is going to one day be necessary for the U.S. to do.
00:38:33.740And let's just get it handled right now before it spirals out of control and we need to do it because of some sort of mass killing in the U.S.
00:38:44.580And then people will be like, so you think that Mexico should live as a basically United States run police state?
00:38:51.160And I'd say, I think you need to realistically look at the situation on the ground in Mexico these days, the ways that people are being tortured and killed, what's happening, and ask, would that genuinely be better or worse?
00:39:04.720It would be cheaper for us and it would help more people.
00:39:07.620And Mexico, by the way, in Arizona, when we freaked out about the progressives, we're like, how dare you do an immigration policy where the cops can just ask for your proof of birth at any time?
00:39:22.240And I was like, when they were freaking out about that, when they were freaking out about what was his name, sheriff, whatever, immigration plan and him being this racist guy, that was actually less strict than Mexico's exact same policy at the time.
00:39:35.720If we begin to adopt more of Mexico's immigration policy, which I think would be optically an interesting path to go is say, let's stop immigrants at the Mexican southern border and then adopt Mexico's immigration policy, which progressives don't know is actually extremely strict compared to America's immigration policy.
00:39:54.500I think that we could realistically and at a real cost snuff out most of the illegal immigration of low-skill immigrants that are coming into this country, which I do think is where we need to target.
00:40:08.440Because that's just an economic drain.
00:40:10.180If we're having people come in on, actually, somebody tried to get me for this.
00:40:13.960They were searching for quotes from my grandfather.
00:40:17.520Context, my grandfather was a Republican congressman.
00:40:19.980And they found one of him using a term that was commonly used to describe Hispanic immigrants at the time, but today is not.
00:40:28.640And he said in the quote, because they didn't tweet the full quote, they were trying to say that, oh, this is proof that Malcolm's family is just the worst.
00:41:09.920I should note here, we have an episode that we filmed that goes over all of our political positions, but we filmed it three times already, and just none of them really caught us.
00:41:18.400Because I want it to be a really, really solid, tight, punchy, like, this is our entire political philosophy.
00:41:24.660And so we haven't fully gone into our perspectives on immigration in any of the videos.
00:41:29.580And I think that people can misinterpret, because we're pro-pluralism, that we are pro-unconstrained immigration, which we are absolutely not.
00:41:38.940I think it's common sense that you cannot have lightly constrained immigration in any system that offers social services, like Social Security, Medicare, police protection, etc., because those cost money to deliver.
00:41:56.380And you also cannot have uncontrolled or immigration that is overly politicized in a system where recent immigrants can vote, as we have seen progressives pushing for again and again and again, because then you have a political motivation to promote immigration, which is a bad thing to bring into a country.
00:42:17.140And in a world where we have any form of social services in our countries, we need tight restrictions on unproductive immigrant groups.
00:42:27.040So basically, any immigrant who's not going to come in and be an active and large participant in our economy, that's just going to hurt everyone.
00:42:38.500But that doesn't mean that we are anti-immigration entirely.
00:42:40.920If somebody is going to be paying tax dollars, especially more tax dollars than me that are paying for my social services, yeah, sure, I'm fine with that.
00:42:50.440And in that case, we are open to high-skilled immigrants, particularly people with elite STEM degrees.
00:42:58.200And in addition to that, we are open to policies that would allow people to immigrate into the United States while voluntarily adopting more aggressive personal tax schedules.
00:43:13.220No one has seriously pushed this forward yet, and I'm kind of surprised because I think it's a good idea.
00:43:19.660I.e., you know, you opt to pay – you show, one, that you are a decent earner, and two, you opt to pay, you know, 25% more in taxes than a natural-born citizen, and you get a fast track to becoming a citizen.
00:43:34.360I think a lot of people would take that, and I think that's a very fair trade.
00:43:37.520If your pushback to this proposal is, yeah, but what about the culturally – the cultural dilution effects of these high earners?
00:43:46.300If you know they won't integrate or assimilate well with the native population, I would just ask you to think about the immigrants you know who assimilate quickly and the ones who assimilate poorly.
00:43:57.860It's almost a direct line graph on how productive they are.
00:44:02.660Individuals who are more economically productive assimilate very quickly.
00:44:06.780It is actually fairly rare for an economically productive immigrant to not assimilate within two generations, whereas it is – if you look at the immigrants who just are not assimilating at all, often the thing that allows them to not assimilate is not being an active participant in the local economy.
00:44:26.560I love that they tried to get me to disavow him.
00:44:28.920I was like, imagine you live in a world where you have to disavow your grandparents because you hear a racial slur from them.