Ep 131 ｜ Dan Crenshaw
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
216.2367
Summary
In this episode, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) talks about growing up in a conservative family and how he became a conservative politician. He also talks about how he got into politics and why he decided to run for Congress.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Friday. I hope everyone has had a wonderful week.
00:00:05.920
Today, I am sitting down with Representative Dan Crenshaw from Texas. You guys already know
00:00:13.000
exactly who he is. He has been making waves ever since he joined Congress, and I'm really looking
00:00:20.460
forward to you guys listening to this conversation. I hope that you have enjoyed the maternity episode
00:00:26.080
so far. I've gotten a lot of good feedback. If you guys would like to ask me any questions,
00:00:32.300
of course, you can email me, ali at the conservativemillennialblog.com. You can
00:00:37.180
send me a message on Instagram. But for now, the conversation with Representative Crenshaw.
00:00:43.580
Representative, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so I don't think I need to give
00:00:47.540
any formal introduction to everyone listening to the podcast, but if you could give us just
00:00:52.200
a brief background on who you are and how you were raised. Well, I was raised in Texas,
00:01:01.280
the Houston area. I was raised in an oil and gas family. So the reason I point that out is because
00:01:08.220
what that meant was I moved around a lot. I grew up in Houston. We also lived in Scotland. We moved
00:01:14.520
back to Houston. We lived in Egypt. Why'd you live in Scotland? You were born in Scotland, right?
00:01:18.500
Yeah, I was. Why were you born in Scotland? Well, there's a big oil industry there. So my parents
00:01:23.660
met at Texas A&M. Gotcha. And, you know, my dad's side of the family goes back six generations here
00:01:30.540
in Texas. My mom came to Texas A&M to study her master's in nutrition. And they met. And his first
00:01:39.040
job was out in Aberdeen, Scotland, you know, working in the, obviously, the North Sea has a lot of oil.
00:01:44.520
Been to Aberdeen, actually. Yeah. And there you go. And actually, the doctor who delivered me was
00:01:50.700
named Clark Kent. It's just a little fun fact. Yeah. Dr. Clark Kent. That is a fun fact. Wow.
00:01:55.560
And so were you raised a conservative? Well, I don't think there was a lot of politics in my
00:02:00.040
family. They were definitely conservative. Yeah. But it was not, you know, and I know this from
00:02:05.200
looking at baby pictures and my dad's wearing a Reagan shirt, of course. And they've always been
00:02:09.060
conservative, considered conservative. But I don't think, my family did not wear politics on
00:02:14.900
their sleeve. It was not something that came up a lot. And frankly, it's not something I even
00:02:19.480
was overly involved with in college. And the military is fairly apolitical. The SEAL teams,
00:02:25.700
the special operations community is going to be a little bit more conservative. Yeah.
00:02:29.200
Generally speaking, but in the military as a whole is for the most part. But we don't talk about it a
00:02:35.380
lot. We're focused on our job. It is not a highly political environment. And it also speaks to the
00:02:43.060
era we're in. I think as social media has gained more traction. And I think, unfortunately, and I
00:02:48.240
think this is a bad thing, politics has seeped into every aspect of life. Your job, the military,
00:02:53.380
your culture, your pop culture, comedy, it's in all of it. Can't escape it. And it's not good.
00:02:59.000
You know, I think we should have some separation so we can share some things together.
00:03:01.880
Yeah. So when did you decide, okay, I'm gonna, you know, you weren't necessarily raised always
00:03:08.220
thinking about talking about politics. My story is kind of the same way. It was during this past
00:03:12.900
election, really, that I was like, okay, I'm noticing that a lot of people my age, a lot of
00:03:17.540
young people, this is 2015, have no idea what the heck is going on. And that kind of created this
00:03:24.140
spark in me where it's like, okay, I got to talk about these values that I was raised with,
00:03:27.800
even though we weren't overtly political. So when was that moment for you?
00:03:32.760
I don't know if there was a moment. I think it happened gradually during my time in the SEAL
00:03:36.780
teams. And, and, and, and, you know, every, here's what it is for me. Every time I would look into an
00:03:43.800
issue, the, it turned out that the headline or the, you know, the, the bottom line that they were
00:03:49.520
trying to tell you up front was not actually true. Right. And that, no, that, and that every time I
00:03:55.060
actually delved into something, it was the conservative side that actually did the work
00:03:59.720
to explain layer upon layer, why this was the way it was. And I became a lot more interested in,
00:04:05.900
in the think tank work that was, that was, say, done by heritage and AI and things like that.
00:04:11.740
And, and when I had to leave the military, I, I wanted to pursue that. I wanted to, I went to Harvard,
00:04:16.840
Harvard Kennedy School. I wanted to be in policy. Like the policy mattered a lot to me. I wasn't
00:04:22.260
necessarily looking at politics. I knew in the back of my mind that if I wanted to make an impact
00:04:26.940
on a lot of different issues and, and, and advocate for an approach to governance that is
00:04:33.280
coherent and based on timeless principles and based on the founding principles that created
00:04:37.940
the miracle we have today, then I would have to get into politics. But that, I didn't have no,
00:04:41.640
I had no avenue into that. So I created an avenue by jumping through a window of opportunity when,
00:04:47.160
when Congressman Ted Pell announced retirement in my district.
00:04:49.760
And what did your wife think about that when you said, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going
00:04:54.500
Yeah. So she, well, she was all for it. Um, that's good.
00:04:57.880
The way it happened was, you know, one day I happened to be in the right place, the right
00:05:02.120
people at the right time who pointed out to me that Pell announced retirement. And I said,
00:05:06.280
okay, yeah, well, you know, I was thinking about this, but maybe, maybe sometime in the future
00:05:10.380
when I have more money and I understand that policy intricacy just a little bit better.
00:05:14.980
And, uh, that's a typical military way of thinking. I think you have to be, you got to
00:05:19.220
be super prepared. And then you realize like you're way more prepared than everybody else
00:05:22.820
because I've been studying a lot of this. I knew what I thought, right. I've been studying
00:05:25.980
a lot of this for a long time. And, um, and voters do appreciate that when you can articulate
00:05:31.580
the best, what they believe. And that that's what voters are looking for oftentimes. And so I came
00:05:36.540
home and asked my wife what she thought. And she said, let's do it. And that was it.
00:05:39.580
That's the support that you need more than anyone else who tells you to run is the people that are
00:05:45.040
close to you and really know you and care about you. Exactly. What's been the biggest thing that
00:05:48.780
surprised you about the legislative process since you've been in Washington? I get asked that
00:05:53.900
question all the time and I don't have a great answer for it yet because I don't, I, I don't feel
00:06:00.500
that I've been overly surprised by anything. I sort of knew what I was getting into. I'd both
00:06:03.640
eyes open, one eye open, you know, going, going into it. Um, but you know, there's certainly
00:06:10.360
disappointments. I think a lot of the arguments being used by the left are terribly dishonest.
00:06:15.780
Yeah. And you knew that going in, but I knew that, but I knew that going in, I just, I think
00:06:21.500
I was a little surprised. I, maybe I believed the moderate Democrats a lot more than I, than I
00:06:25.960
should have believed them in the sense that they truly wanted to work with us and kind of fight back
00:06:30.220
against the leftism of their party. And, uh, I found that to be certainly not the case. I mean,
00:06:35.640
there's, there's, there's still some decent ones. And if it was up to me and them to find solutions,
00:06:40.100
I think we could, but they've got no power and they've got no willingness to actually speak out
00:06:44.660
against that, that far left side of their party. So I really don't know what direction they're going.
00:06:49.680
I would say kind of jokingly, one, one surprising thing was that, uh, I have to pay for the house gym,
00:06:54.920
you know, like, why can't I just use the gym? I don't understand. It frustrates me on a daily basis.
00:06:59.360
It's not included. Maybe that's something that you need. Well, I was going to ask you like,
00:07:03.560
what's one thing that you really want to change? If there's just one thing that you could say,
00:07:08.560
okay, this is my goal on there, but maybe it's the, the gym membership thing. That's probably it.
00:07:13.920
Yeah. A little bit on a serious, bigger policy or how the house works?
00:07:18.360
I would like to hear both actually, because I feel like you do have some beef with how the house
00:07:22.300
works. I watch your Instagram videos and I'm very enlightened by the process.
00:07:26.540
Yeah. And that's, well, in that, well, my beef that I put out on Instagram is,
00:07:30.260
is with a bigger legislative issues. Okay. And that's my beef with the policy. I do have beef
00:07:34.620
also with just the general way things work. Yeah. Um, I'm surprised how little debate we actually
00:07:40.020
do. Like we don't, we don't ever sit in a committee and just go at each other, you know,
00:07:45.180
which I think would be healthy, you know, and there's just, there's not really an opportunity
00:07:51.280
I don't know. Um, probably. And, and because it's, it's difficult to see how it was ever
00:07:56.040
a different way because of the way it's structured. I mean, first of all, in the house, the majority
00:08:00.160
really rules. I mean, you, they really don't have to listen to us at all. And so they're
00:08:05.440
the ones debating amongst themselves what to put forward because they know they don't really
00:08:09.580
care what we think. And, and, and that's a little unfortunate. It's, it's, it's so rare
00:08:13.960
that a, that a piece of legislation will go to the floor and we walk on there unsure of how
00:08:19.080
we're going to vote. It's happened very few times. It's interesting when it does and when
00:08:22.480
we're actually listening for the arguments and engaging.
00:08:25.240
And so it does happen and it's kind of cool when it does happen, but it's, it's, it's
00:08:28.320
very rare that, that, that, that, that compromise just isn't happening. Um, there is, there is
00:08:33.480
a, on a, on a, on another note, that's the way social media works. And like, this is something
00:08:37.460
I've been, uh, I've been thinking me and AOC would have, uh, have some alignment on
00:08:41.420
is, uh, is the rules surrounding social media in Congress are, are, are, are, I think
00:08:47.080
you know what I'm talking about. They're, they're horrible. They, they, they frustrate
00:08:51.580
the heck out of us. They basically take, they take rules surrounding official mail. And I
00:08:58.540
don't want to get into that cause it's confusing for the listeners and it's, it's just, basically
00:09:03.280
you have to separate campaign mail from your official mail that you mail to your constituents,
00:09:07.700
which makes sense, but they try to adapt those laws to social media, which is why, you know,
00:09:13.040
for your listeners, which is why I have like five different social media accounts. I have to have
00:09:16.660
all these different personalities. You don't follow all five of my social media accounts?
00:09:20.360
I just didn't know. Well, now that I know, I'm going to do it right now.
00:09:22.620
Jeez. There's two on Instagram. No, sorry. There's only one on Instagram. I'm battling
00:09:27.740
The one that I follow on Instagram, you post the videos like on IGTV. That's like, here's
00:09:34.540
the truth. I think you did a recent one about an immigration bill. So that's the one that
00:09:38.640
I follow. If there's another one where you are like AOC, where you're drinking wine and
00:09:43.520
putting together a futon, I would love to follow that one too.
00:09:46.120
I have one Instagram. I've been able to maintain one Instagram, but they, but they want me to
00:09:50.220
split it up. And I'm like, no, man, you know, I mean, AOC would agree on that. That's a, that's a,
00:09:54.540
it seems like a small thing, but what it does is it makes it hard for people to see what I'm doing
00:09:58.440
because they have to figure out where to find me, you know, and that's frustrating.
00:10:02.540
And I think people really appreciate that. I've appreciated just the simple videos that you've
00:10:06.440
done explaining what's going on, because like you said, the thing that frustrated you before you got
00:10:11.360
into politics is the thing that I think frustrates me and a lot of just, you know, of your average
00:10:15.760
people reading headlines every day. I mean, this is probably one of the questions that I get asked
00:10:20.520
the most is like, how do you know what's true? How do you know what's true? Where do you go to
00:10:24.100
know what's true? And really all we feel like we can do, unless you have access to an actual politician
00:10:29.200
is okay, I'm going to read as much as I possibly can from both sides of the aisle. And then I'm going
00:10:34.960
to make the effort to piece things together and hopefully find the truth, read the original
00:10:39.400
legislation. But the fact of the matter is young people don't have time or they just don't want
00:10:44.220
to. People have their lives to live and it's not, yeah, it's doesn't make sense to expect that of
00:10:50.780
them. And so what I try to do is not give them the talking points, right? Because people see through
00:10:56.420
that and people can tell if you're coming at them with a simple talking points that you're reading,
00:11:01.440
or if you've got a few more layers of explanation underneath that. And even if they don't trust you,
00:11:07.160
at least they can see whether you're persuasive or not. And I try to be, and I try not to just
00:11:12.260
throw out a bunch of red meat. I want to explain to you why this is wrong. And I don't think our
00:11:17.680
party's done a great job of doing that in the past. And so we're just trying to change that.
00:11:22.800
I don't think so either. I mean, we have obviously so many good people in the party,
00:11:26.780
but I do think that a problem is that a lot of legislators just don't know how to use social
00:11:31.860
media. So when they do, it's really awkward. That's true on the left too. I mean,
00:11:35.240
we've seen that with Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. I mean, it's painfully awkward.
00:11:39.700
There's just a lot of people that don't know how to use it. And also they don't, I think a lot of
00:11:43.860
conservatives especially seem to not be able to get out of the like politician persona. Like
00:11:48.680
they've got the hand motions, they've got the cadence and someone like me or just, you know,
00:11:53.940
your average millennial, whatever is watching that as like, I don't really, you know, I don't
00:11:58.820
really trust you. I might like you and what you're saying, but I don't really feel like that's
00:12:02.420
scripted. You feel like they're, they're robotic about it. And then, and so that's what we're
00:12:07.120
trying to change. And, you know, that's, that's what we can't underestimate AOC too much. Cause
00:12:10.400
she's good at that. She seems very genuine. Now she says nothing when she's wrong every
00:12:15.520
time she says something. Um, and it's my job to be like, yeah, it's my job to be like, Hey guys,
00:12:20.360
this is why she's wrong in a genuine way. Um, and, and you've got to know the issues well
00:12:25.700
enough to be able to speak about them off the cuff, which is maybe another problem. Um,
00:12:30.220
sometimes people have, and you know, I, yeah, there's also little tricks, right? Like
00:12:35.280
have subtitles, have subtitles. Cause a lot of people don't turn on the sound on their
00:12:38.360
phones. A lot of politicians don't realize that. Yeah. Especially people our age, I would
00:12:43.000
say like my dad totally doesn't get that. He was in public the other day and he had, his
00:12:47.620
phone was on loud. And so you heard it ding every five seconds and he just totally doesn't
00:12:51.640
get it. But you're right. For some reason, our generation is like, is different about that.
00:12:56.140
Yeah, exactly. So that's true. Um, okay. You said what bothers you about the process,
00:13:01.800
but what about the biggest policy thing that you want to tackle? You talk a lot about immigration.
00:13:07.080
Would you say that's probably it? That's definitely a priority right now. Um, I'm on Homeland Security
00:13:12.040
Committee. It's something I ran on was border security. This is a frustrating one because it's
00:13:16.160
so solvable. All right. We need, we need to implement whether it's, you know, on the Senate
00:13:20.900
side, Senator Graham has a good bill on amnesty or not amnesty asylum reform. The way we
00:13:26.060
do asylum processing will her just came out with a good bill in the house that we should,
00:13:30.000
that we should look at, um, and get that moving forward. The question is, isn't really on the
00:13:33.720
Republican side, whether we should move forward with that or not. The question is the Democrats
00:13:37.640
want the same things we want or not. This is why this is so frustrating. We know exactly what needs
00:13:42.080
to be done. This isn't rocket science. Um, you know, and it's not just a wall. It's a wall
00:13:47.320
where Border Patrol wants that wall. It's more facilities, uh, to process illegal immigrants claiming
00:13:52.840
asylum. It's a better handle on how we, how we process asylum claims, uh, where they can claim
00:13:58.840
those things. And, uh, we have legislation to address all of that. Democrats fundamentally
00:14:03.540
want, have a different goal than we do though. And that's what I've unfortunately been convinced
00:14:06.880
of over the last few months. And what is, what is it? Yeah. Um, if, I mean, if you can guess,
00:14:12.660
that's a good question, it's, and it's, we used to agree, we used to agree at least on our nation's
00:14:17.460
sovereignty. We might disagree on the methods of how we protect that, but even just a few years ago,
00:14:22.560
I mean, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, they all said that they believed that we should curb illegal
00:14:27.660
immigration. They, if, when you're, when you're the liberal, you tend not to value the sanctity of
00:14:34.920
your nation the way a conservative does. And that's just in the data. That's not me making that up.
00:14:39.480
That's not me assuming that it's, that's like, that's from moral psychology data. Um, and the
00:14:44.020
way people take surveys, the way they answer questions. So they just don't value that the
00:14:47.500
way we value it. So that's the first thing. Okay. And then you get to this other, and this is the
00:14:52.160
more cynical view is, do they just want more votes? Are they, are they trying to overwhelm our population
00:14:56.680
with people who they believe will vote for them? They can tell them that they are for that group.
00:15:00.960
And this is identity politics run rampant. And if you, if this is, this is a toxic kind of, um,
00:15:06.780
situation here where you don't really care about the sanctity, the sovereignty of your country,
00:15:11.100
and you want more votes to have more power so that you can implement the policies you want.
00:15:15.960
Okay. Well, now, now they found themselves in a good spot and, uh, where, where the status quo
00:15:20.760
looks, looks pretty nice to them. Um, and they'll continue to allow this underclass to inflow into
00:15:26.020
the United States. And then they'll make the moral argument that that's an underclass and that we should
00:15:29.980
give them voting rights. Okay. Well, we know what you, you know, the rest of us have to call out the
00:15:35.080
truth that we see here. That's the cynical, that's a cynical view. I don't think all Democrats want
00:15:40.460
that. I definitely don't think Democrat voters want that, that I am sure of. There's no Democrat
00:15:44.400
voters saying this. Yeah. All right. But I think the politicians have somewhat of a, of a different
00:15:49.080
view. I do worry about those who follow in the footsteps of people like AOC, people who are my age,
00:15:58.000
who have just come out of the university system where they're basically just teaching this crazy
00:16:03.260
postmodernism that doesn't have any founding in reality. I worry about those people who for them
00:16:09.440
illegal immigration or basically having open borders is ideological. Like it's truly a moral
00:16:16.100
issue for them to where they buy into this crazy narrative that, well, white supremacy founded this
00:16:22.120
country. This wasn't our land in the first place. So why the heck do we have borders? I worry about
00:16:27.000
those people because how do you rationalize with irrational people? Do you have any advice on that?
00:16:31.840
If they're that far gone, I don't try to rationalize with them. I mean, I don't, I'm not so sure that
00:16:37.540
there's a point to it. Yeah. I think it is about, you know, 7% of the population by some, by some
00:16:43.440
statistics. And so I'm not overly worried about that and I'm not going to waste my time trying to
00:16:47.320
tackle that. I'll debate them in public so that I can, you know, put on display for the rest of the
00:16:53.040
population, like what's going on here. But, um, I mean, cause what you're describing that, that,
00:16:58.200
that postmodernism, they're coming from such a fundamentally different place. There's so much
00:17:02.860
daylight between us that it's, you can't, you can't even get it. You gotta go to, like,
00:17:08.900
they have different goals. I mean, when you have different goals, you can't compromise. You can
00:17:12.980
compromise. If we all want to alleviate poverty, like we can compromise. Okay. There's, you know,
00:17:16.840
they're going to want more transfer payments, more welfare. We're going to want some, you know,
00:17:20.840
institutionalized personal responsibility within that welfare program. See how there's a compromise
00:17:25.700
that we eventually come up with. If we want fundamentally different things, if we, if one
00:17:29.560
side thinks the country is bad, like in a, in a deep core level, it's bad and we think it's good.
00:17:36.400
I'm not so sure we have much in common anymore. And it's hard to have conversations based on that.
00:17:42.120
And it does seem like, and maybe it's, maybe it's amplified what we see in the media, but it does
00:17:47.060
seem like that position of being really anti-patriotism and thinking that America and
00:17:52.320
the West, that they're good places that have done good things. That is somehow racist and wrong and
00:17:56.980
immoral. That does seem to be a more mainstream position on the left. Do you think that's exaggerated
00:18:02.940
or do you think that's true? Do you find that in Congress?
00:18:05.600
Well, so there's, there's that extreme part of them who would, who would openly advocate that
00:18:11.300
America was founded on genocide. Okay. As that's the Ilhan Omar's of the world. This is what they
00:18:15.660
say. I mean, she's in Congress, so it's mainstream. Yeah. In a sense it's mainstream, but it, but I
00:18:20.680
would, and then I would point to the more moderate liberals, the more well-intentioned types, right?
00:18:26.320
The ones I talk about as, as being, you know, they're focused on injustice and inequality and
00:18:30.760
there's, there's, there's a naivete associated with that, but they're not bad. Right. And they do,
00:18:35.000
they do, they love 4th of July parades. Do you have an example of that? Like, like a person?
00:18:39.760
Yeah. If you don't, it's okay. Sure. Sure. Plenty. You know, like, I'll get, I'm friends with Joe
00:18:44.980
Kennedy. You know, I think he's a good person. He still loves the country. Yeah. Like you read his
00:18:49.980
Twitter account and you're like, Oh God, it makes me want to tear your eyeballs. The one remaining eyeball
00:18:53.200
you have out. But like, you know, he, he's a good, he will just have an unemotional political
00:18:58.680
conversation with you and just get to the, get to the point. Right. So there's, and then voters,
00:19:04.480
right? I mean, so I, I try to put this in terms of how I interact with voters also and like people
00:19:09.720
who say that they're Democrats. And then I have these conversations with them about what they
00:19:12.700
believe. They're still going to wave the American flag at a 4th of July parade. So they haven't,
00:19:16.280
they haven't gone into this sort of intersectional left of postmodernism where America is bad.
00:19:20.320
They haven't gotten there yet. Here's the problem with well-intentioned liberalism is they're not
00:19:24.700
willing to defend the values that they themselves live by. They're not willing to
00:19:28.480
defend the fact that they love America. They're not willing to defend the fact that they grew up
00:19:32.820
in person with a sense of personal responsibility and, and love of family and traditional values.
00:19:38.260
They live by those, but they won't defend them. And this is, this is a big problem. So this is why
00:19:44.240
it's actually, you can objectively state what you stated earlier, which is they're all the same thing,
00:19:49.080
because if you're not willing to defend something, then, you know, and if everything you do basically
00:19:54.540
enables the far left, whether it's a vote or whether it's your inability to defend the values,
00:20:00.480
you know, are right, well then that's, you might as well be the far left. And that's actually what
00:20:05.340
I see in Congress. And that's what I see in someone like Joe Biden. I think that we probably would
00:20:09.940
have said at one point, even maybe a couple of years ago, okay, yes, he was a part of a very
00:20:15.100
progressive presidency, but he himself, you know, he probably still loves America, but now we see him
00:20:20.680
kowtow, we see him, we see him totally bend over backwards to appease the far left. So I'll use
00:20:27.480
that to ask you what you think about how 2020 is shaping up. And if you have any predictions or just
00:20:34.300
any, any thoughts on the craziness that's going on there? I don't know. I have no idea, but it's
00:20:40.520
going to be really entertaining. It's going to be really entertaining. Biden obviously looks like
00:20:44.700
he's on top right now. I think your assessment of, of how he will, he will go with the wind, he will go
00:20:49.640
with the political leftist wind is about correct. And heck, even if it wasn't, you'd still end up
00:20:55.700
with an administration full of Obama era officials. I would not, it would be really, really bad. Even
00:21:00.680
if he was still sticking to his guns, he would never govern moderately. No, no, he can't. He has
00:21:05.480
no choice, right? He would, he would govern with, he would, he would bring back the entire Obama
00:21:08.760
administration. That's what would happen. I don't, I don't see any other, um, no, no. Here's, here's our
00:21:14.040
advantage there. He's going to have to answer a very difficult question, which is how is it that you
00:21:18.600
coming back is better? Cause, cause every, by every measure we have, things are better.
00:21:22.900
Now there's a lot of people who just don't like Trump and they believe that character matters
00:21:27.140
in the white house. Fair enough. And they've convinced themselves that actually the country
00:21:30.220
is doing really poorly despite all statistics to the contrary. Right. I mean, cause yeah,
00:21:33.900
once you have that emotional belief, you'll just, you'll, you'll, you'll look to confirm
00:21:36.660
that any way you can. And they do do that. They do do that. But even if they acknowledge
00:21:40.540
that by every measure, every indicator of things are better off, and that includes foreign
00:21:44.240
policy, um, by the way, as well, they'll, they'll still hold onto the idea of they just
00:21:48.880
don't like the person because, and this always goes back to why do you vote? You know? And
00:21:52.920
I would argue that the reason you should vote is not for the person. I mean, that definitely
00:21:56.660
has something to do with it. I know I'm sympathetic to these people who just don't like the president.
00:22:00.600
I get it. Um, but, and I'm, and I'm, I'm less sympathetic to people who just vote on one
00:22:05.900
issue. I don't think that's a good reason to vote. You should vote based on how somebody
00:22:09.920
is going to govern and, and the philosophical approach they bring to that. And conservatism
00:22:14.960
is a coherent form of governments. Liberalism is not, it just isn't. It's a good thing to have
00:22:20.040
in your society because you need to kind of, you know, sometimes blunt the rougher edges
00:22:24.560
of capitalism or whatever it is. It's a good thing for activists to do, to seek out injustices
00:22:29.860
and advocate. That's, that's all good. That is a good democratic thing to have, but it is
00:22:34.120
not a coherent governing philosophy. Right. Okay. One last question. If you can give people
00:22:39.120
some advice, young people, some advice going into 2020, a lot of them are scared to voice
00:22:43.620
any of their conservative opinions because they've got scary aunts and uncles and friends
00:22:47.800
on Facebook who are going to, you know, exactly. You've been called a Nazi about a million times.
00:22:53.200
And I think a lot of them are fearful of that. So if there's any advice or encouragement that
00:22:57.680
you can give to young conservatives who want to speak up, but are nervous.
00:23:01.740
Um, geez, you know, it, it's not like I wasn't in the political debate as a, as a young person.
00:23:08.560
And so I'd be lying if I said that I knew exactly how to do that. All I can say is know what you
00:23:15.600
stand for, know that you have to, to anticipate their argument and, and know a couple more layers
00:23:21.560
deep of an, of, of a particular issue than they do. So go in well-armed, um, listen to a lot of the,
00:23:28.420
especially like the younger political pundits out there, especially me. And yeah, I mean,
00:23:33.560
just totally objectively, you probably want to listen to us the most. Yeah. Just objectively
00:23:39.000
speaking, that makes the most sense. Um, cause what I try to do constantly is provide you with
00:23:43.380
the right arguments, not, not the false talking points. And we always fall into that trap. Like,
00:23:47.580
you know, and, and we always want to make sure that the data we're using is correct. And, um,
00:23:52.160
and then, and then, and then just do it with open arms. Don't show contempt for your opponent.
00:23:56.100
They will show contempt for you. But if you start to show contempt for them, it'll, it'll end any
00:24:01.280
ability to persuade anybody at all. Um, so, so do it with love and show the morality of conservatism,
00:24:08.520
show the morality of conservatism. Which is really the why something that you talk about a lot. I
00:24:12.580
think knowing the why behind what you believe, knowing the why behind conservatism, which really
00:24:17.300
goes back to even knowing why the founder set up this country and the principles that conservatism in
00:24:22.500
America was founded on, I think that can really help guide people a lot. And you do a good job
00:24:27.020
of relaying that. I think so. Thank you so much for what you do. And thank you for being here.
00:24:32.620
Well, I hope you guys enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. I learned a lot from him.
00:24:36.640
I certainly think that representative Crenshaw is someone that we can be proud of fighting for us
00:24:42.200
in Congress. Uh, if you guys enjoy relatable, if you love the show, I would highly appreciate
00:24:48.400
you leaving a five-star review on iTunes. Uh, if not, that's okay. If you just want to listen
00:24:54.960
to the podcast and not tell me how much you like it, I still love you and I still appreciate you
00:24:59.860
anyway. I hope that you guys have an awesome weekend and I will see you back here on Monday.