J.D. Vance was announced as Donald Trump's vice presidential pick, and the reaction has been mixed and divided. Is it a good or bad pick? And what does it mean for the future of the Republican Party and the country?
00:00:47.940He doesn't secure some kind of obvious advantage for a lot of people.
00:00:52.760He doesn't bring you necessarily the swing states that some people were hoping for.
00:00:58.080Or he's not somebody from a minority group that could shore up Trump's chances to win over a certain percentage of people who don't often vote for the Republican Party.
00:01:09.980He does, in some ways, show you that being a senator from Ohio and the fact that he kind of shores up some of that rust belt.
00:01:17.540He does identify with a certain percentage of Americans that are part of the Republican base.
00:01:23.540But he doesn't add to the ticket in the way that some vice presidents are meant to do.
00:01:28.400And you really have two styles of vice presidential picks.
00:01:31.540You have vice presidential picks who are chosen because they fill in some hole that the candidate is lacking.
00:01:39.320You saw this from Mike Pence when Donald Trump ran the first time.
00:01:43.940However, Mike Pence turned out to be less popular by the end of Donald Trump's administration with the evangelical Christians that he was supposed to shore up for Donald Trump.
00:01:53.560And Donald Trump actually ended up being far more popular.
00:02:03.500He smooths over some kind of strategic error that the candidate would have, some hole in that candidate's appeal.
00:02:12.800The other version of this, of course, is kind of the Dick Cheney style pick of vice president, someone who is going to bring some level of practical knowledge or political cunning.
00:02:25.840Now, I think that J.D. Vance doesn't fit in either one of these.
00:02:29.720He does have a certain level of political cunning, practical knowledge.
00:02:33.080But I think more importantly, J.D. Vance represents a direction that Trump's ideology might be moving towards.
00:02:43.660Trump really doesn't have necessarily an ideology.
00:02:47.680That's one of his advantages is that as a non-ideological actor, he often is able to choose outside the box things that wouldn't be popular otherwise.
00:02:57.140With a highly ideological, say, neoconservative establishment inside the Republican Party.
00:03:07.440He can say things about immigration because he's not ideological.
00:03:11.160But eventually, the general American first principles that he's talking about do coalesce around a movement, a direction that you're going.
00:03:19.980These are the sets of things that, at least for now, benefit Americans or would seem to benefit Americans long term.
00:05:00.460But, yeah, that would be it would be great if the Buchananites had won something.
00:05:03.820However, my friend Jeremy Carl was quick to point out that Buchanan himself was a Reaganite.
00:05:09.560He worked in the Reagan administration and simply tried to hold true a lot of principles that had otherwise been discarded or mutated over time by the Republican Party,
00:05:22.020who was creating the zombie Reagan rather than anything close to the actual organic coalition of Ronald Reagan, which included the moral majority, the religious right and many others.
00:05:34.300You know, I think Reagan is far from the deity that many Republicans hold him up to be.
00:05:39.600But he's obviously a president who I think ultimately did a lot of good, you know, being presiding over the fall of the Soviet Union,
00:05:47.820whether you're entirely responsible for that or not, is enough to go ahead and put you up there pretty high on the list of solid presidents.
00:05:55.560But Buchanan is, you know, is is obviously somebody who came out of that revolution.
00:06:00.920And the fact that Erickson said, oh, well, now it's the Buchanan strain of this that is dominant.
00:06:08.900Couldn't be happy to hear this. Charles Koch, another one of these guys from the National Review, had a lot of problems with J.D. Vance, said he was just unelectable.
00:06:16.320Again, didn't understand the purpose of Vance on that ticket.
00:06:19.940Vance represents the possible future of the project, puts somebody behind Trump that is theoretically at least scarier than Trump for the left.
00:06:29.540And as we can, we're going to see from many of these articles that we're going to talk about today.
00:06:33.800But what they're really scared about, again, is Vance's assertion that America is not just an economic zone.
00:06:41.520It's not just a collective collection of ideas. It's not just a propositional nation.
00:06:46.240It's a real nation. It's a real people.
00:06:49.240This is something that was very scary to both the left and the right.
00:06:52.560Ben Shapiro also, I wouldn't say was scared, but at the very least was hesitant, concerned, confused about the way that Vance posed the idea of America as a real nation.
00:07:05.620So what I want to do today is dive into a couple of clips, understand a little bit what each of these people were talking about, why they opposed Vance's idea of America as an actual nation and not just a collection of ideas, not just a proposition.
00:07:21.420But and I also want to go ahead and explain the problems with the concept of the propositional nation.
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00:08:48.700So like I said, there were many people who were worried about J.D. Vance, scared about J.D. Vance, hesitant about J.D. Vance as the pick for Donald Trump's VP.
00:09:00.600Now, the left have to demonize everybody, right?
00:09:14.300They would have tried to destroy whoever Donald Trump had put in the vice presidential slot.
00:09:19.920But it's interesting that there was a consistent theme about J.D. Vance.
00:09:24.760There was a lot of things they didn't like.
00:09:26.000They talked about, you know, his attitude, his demeanor, where, you know, maybe he's not really a hillbilly.
00:09:32.900Maybe he didn't really grow up poor, all this stuff, right?
00:09:35.700They tried to denigrate his life story, everything about him.
00:09:40.580But one thing that consistently came up across both left and right, like I showed you in that Atlantic article at the beginning,
00:09:47.180was the idea that there was something dangerous about America as a nation.
00:09:53.380There is something dangerous about the idea that America is a people united together with a shared identity, a shared past, and a shared future.
00:10:04.020Specifically in the Atlantic article, they talked about how he gets rid of pluralism, how he may vaguely gesture towards pluralism,
00:10:12.100but ultimately he really wants to go ahead and create this very sinister situation where there are certain people that belong in America and certain people who don't, that kind of thing, right?
00:10:22.380And again, this was echoed through a lot of different commentators.
00:10:27.080This was a very common criticism of Vance, and his kind of assault on the propositional nation seemed to rile some feathers across both aisles.
00:10:36.500So I want to begin here with a clip from Alice Wagner of MSNBC.
00:10:40.280We're going to see that Vance and his identifying America as a place where people belong is a problem for her, of course,
00:10:48.120along with the fact that he's both white and male, the worst things that could ever exist in all of it.
00:10:54.960Six generations of his family are buried, and his hope is that his wife and he are eventually laid to rest there,
00:11:05.220And I sort of understand the idea of sharing the burial plot, but it also reveals someone who believes that the history that the family should inherit,
00:11:13.760and indeed the history that should be determinative in the story of the Vance family,
00:11:18.940is the history of the Eastern Kentucky Vances.
00:11:21.180So her first problem is the idea that J.D. Vance and his family have a history.
00:24:39.920When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:24:49.560Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
00:25:10.940The nation state, as we understand it, the Westvalian order, as we understand it, is relatively new.
00:25:17.980It's only a few hundred years old, which in the range of history is not that long.
00:25:26.760And because we are so used to the nation state, we understand these as the same thing.
00:25:33.860This gets particularly difficult sometimes, unfortunately, for Americans because we call the regions of our country states because they used to be states.
00:25:44.840They used to be their own governmental entities.
00:25:47.840So we have a weird relationship with the word state.
00:25:51.640Normally, state means the government and a nation means the people.
00:25:56.620And the nation and the state are not the same thing through most of history.
00:26:01.960For instance, you used to have city states.
00:26:05.920And in a lot of ways, city states saw themselves as nations.
00:26:10.560The peoples were confined only to really those who lived in or around a particular city.
00:26:16.260Your level of social organization that was possible was often only the size of a city.
00:26:20.920And so in that case, the nation, the people were the city and the city and the state were the same thing.
00:26:28.160The government and the city were the same thing.
00:26:29.960The government and the people were the same thing.
00:26:32.140However, as human organization expanded, we started to get empires.
00:26:37.040And empires meant that you had one state often, one set of government that is ruling many different peoples or nations.
00:26:49.260And so the definition usually of an empire are nations, multiple nations ruled by one government, one state.
00:26:56.680And now, not to get into the, we don't want to get into the weeds of like, yes, in a lot of empires, obviously, you had multiple sub-governments.
00:27:05.780Often peoples were governed by their traditional kings who then just kicked things up to the empire.
00:27:12.820Let's not get bogged down in that, though.
00:27:14.440I'm just trying to give us a general understanding of a problem with the idea of the nation state as we understand it right now.
00:27:19.800And so often, you know, a king, for instance, or an emperor would govern multiple peoples that would be brought under the rule of a particular government.
00:27:31.060You often had peoples who sometimes saw themselves as individual and sometimes as one nation.
00:27:39.780For instance, you know, Hellenic society, Greek society.
00:27:43.560Originally, they only saw themselves as individual nation states, the Athenian and the Lacedaemonian, the Spartan.
00:27:52.100They didn't see themselves as the same people in some ways.
00:27:55.780They were very different peoples unless they were united against the Persians, in which case they understood that the Hellenic culture was different.
00:28:18.080The idea of the nation, the people, can often shift and change a little bit.
00:28:24.120It tends to have a lot of things determine it.
00:28:27.380Of course, the heritage is a big one, but also language, religion.
00:28:32.860In fact, Samuel Huntington focuses very much on religion as the key binding agent for civilizational blocks, which I think is a reasonable point.
00:28:44.420The thing being is that the identity of nations can shift somewhat.
00:28:49.780It's not hard built on just one thing.
00:28:52.640It's not simply a relation, a familial relation.
00:29:02.460But all of these things tend to define what a nation is.
00:29:06.860And the idea that a nation and a state, that a nation and a government are the same thing, is not necessarily true throughout most of history.
00:29:18.400In fact, one of the big things that happened after World War I and the dismantling of so many of these kingdoms was to create a lot of nation states, which seemed like a good idea at the time.
00:29:32.540Every people gets its own state, and then every people has its own self-determination.
00:29:38.400The nation and the state become the same thing.
00:29:54.700But what has happened is that now we have focused and we've created the state as the defining feature of what the actual people are.
00:30:07.080And that is, ironically, in many ways, somewhat fascist.
00:30:12.840I know, not to be too particular about the term, but it subordinates the identity into the state rather than the organic identity of the people.
00:30:23.100And this is something that I don't think is super healthy.
00:30:27.600This particularly becomes a problem when you try to identify the state with an ideology, with a proposition.
00:30:37.640Because now what identifies you with a state or without a state is the propositions, the ideas of that state.
00:30:47.900But that's not what happens for the vast majority of other countries.
00:30:50.980A Frenchman is not a Frenchman because of his ideas, right?
00:30:55.060Someone from Japan is not Japanese because of his principles.
00:30:59.820Someone from, you know, I don't know, Saudi Arabia is not Saudi Arabian because simply because of their religion.
00:31:07.160There are plenty of people who have their religion.
00:31:09.500There's something more to this, right?
00:32:12.280The idea that these ideas are universal, that they can be exported to a foreign nation and build that nation like there's little Thomas Jefferson's and, you know, George Washington's running around Afghanistan or Iraq.
00:32:25.720Or that we could just take any idea from another nation and bring it in with the people.
00:32:32.400And then suddenly that becomes an American idea.
00:32:36.920But the thing that Ben is saying reveals something deeper, even though he doesn't recognize it.
00:32:43.560The thing Ben is saying says something important.
00:32:47.180These ideas aren't universal for a reason because they don't apply to everyone.
00:32:53.640If the ideas were universal, if it was just the ideas that made America the best, then you could just take the ideas somewhere else and make that country the best.
00:33:03.580So if Afghanistan or France or, you know, Ethiopia went ahead and adopted America's ideas because they're the best ideas and that's what makes America the very best land, then those would become the very best land.
00:33:16.820But he just says here that that's ridiculous.
00:33:40.320And what Ben is really explaining here is this very classically liberal idea that peoples are blank slates, that there's nothing particular about any group of people, that they don't carry with them any folk ways, traditions, any kind of heritage, ancestry, any kind of religion or any of these things.
00:34:02.380They don't carry those things with them.
00:34:05.280And so, you know, the ideas are the only thing that matter, but they're not.
00:34:10.840That can't be true for the very reason that Ben Shapiro just said.
00:34:15.000He said it's ridiculous to believe that if we have the very best eyes in America and we take those very best ideas and put them into Iraq or we put them into Liberia or something, that all of a sudden it creates a perfect nation, just like the United States.
00:34:33.340If that was true, then Liberia would have been great, right?
00:34:37.860Because they copied so many of the ideas from the United States.
00:34:41.220My buddy Ernst Van Zell from South Africa often points to the fact that the South African constitution has been called a masterpiece.
00:34:51.620It makes all these amazing promises about what the country is going to be.
00:34:55.340And South Africa is still a mess because the ideas are not enough.
00:35:00.100It is not the ideas by themselves sealed away somewhere in the constitution of South Africa or the United States that makes the country what it is.
00:35:10.500It was the people of the United States who went ahead and enshrined their way of being, their life, their understanding of who they were as a people into the constitution.
00:35:23.340Those ideas look great because the people made them great.
00:35:28.200Because the lifestyle of those people, that folk way, that moral vision, that understanding of who they were mattered.
00:36:23.700Now, I don't think that in general, most people who went to war for either the Soviet Union or for the United States in any given conflict did so for the ideology.
00:36:37.860Like, yes, they said, oh, we're brothers, we're comrades.
00:36:42.680You know, we're fighting for the glorious revolution of the Soviet Union.
00:36:46.880You know, the Americans were fighting for liberal democracy.
00:36:51.200But you notice they both managed to, despite these very different ideologies and theory, fight the same enemy, which was the Axis powers, which was mainly, obviously, Germany and Italy and Japan.
00:37:04.940And despite the fact that they had radically different ideas and ideologies, they still managed to fight.
00:37:11.040And the Soviet Union lost way more people.
00:37:23.100But the point is that there's something beyond those ideas that those people fought for.
00:37:27.560Otherwise, they wouldn't have found a common enemy if their ideas are so radically opposed to each other that they later on created the Cold War, which,
00:37:39.300But the idea that that's what they primarily fought for, I think, is just incorrect.
00:37:43.140I think both sides fought for their homeland.
00:37:45.480And whether you feel that their homelands were in danger or not, whatever, that's not the debate here.
00:37:51.040The point being is they both believed, both of those nations and the people who sacrificed on their behalf believed that their nation mattered, that their people mattered, and that the safety and freedom and future of the people that they had at home mattered.
00:38:09.640And so some of them were directly defending their homelands, and some of them were defending areas that they felt connected to because so many of, say, people in the United States felt the connection to Europe, felt a special relationship because so many of them had come from Europe.
00:38:25.240But either way, they were most certainly not just dying for an idea.
00:38:30.020Now, the Cold War was more ideological.
00:38:32.860But again, I think this is more of an aberration.
00:38:35.400And again, to appeal to Samuel Huntington and his clash of civilizations theory, one of the things he points out in that book is that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we started to see a return to real politics again, the politics of who are we?
00:38:54.080That was what everyone was trying to figure out.
00:38:56.540And reminder, Samuel Huntington is a very mainstream, down-the-middle guy.
00:39:00.360He's not some radical right guy, some radical historian on the right, some way-off political reactionary thinker.
00:39:08.400He's somebody who held a chair at one of America's premier universities.
00:39:12.520So this is a guy who's well-respected.
00:39:14.240But his point was, the Soviet Union, the United States, they're kind of locking down the entire world around these two ideas of kind of capitalism versus communism.
00:39:27.300That was a very particular moment in history that only lasted a few decades.
00:39:31.780And then we started going back to what history has been through most of the centuries, which is more a question of who are we, what do we believe as a religion, what do we share as a culture, what is a civilization or our goals?
00:39:47.160These are the things that people really return to.
00:39:49.760And so once again, it's more about the people and the nation than it is the ideology.
00:39:54.700So it's not correct to say no one dies for an idea, but I think it is correct to say that people rarely die just for an idea.
00:40:03.080And that means that America, simply as an idea, is insufficient to go ahead and motivate people to go ahead and fight for the country.
00:40:11.540And in case you were wondering if that's true, check out the military recruitment right now, particularly among heritage Americans.
00:40:18.920People of European descent tend to now enter the military at a much lower level after everything that has been happening, especially them being demonized.
00:40:30.200So America, as an idea, is no longer sufficient to motivate them.
00:40:35.240They no longer feel part of the country.
00:40:40.920And so therefore, they are not as motivated to defend it.
00:40:43.860The ideology itself, the ideas, the propositional nation is not sufficient.
00:40:48.920To go ahead and motivate those enlistment numbers.
00:40:52.240So I think there's plenty of evidence to point out that while Ben makes somewhat of a good point there on the, you know, not just the idea, ideas are not sufficient to explain the behavior of people here.
00:41:05.380There is something much deeper in the nation.
00:41:07.040Otherwise, it would be like most European wars, which are wars of territory.
00:41:10.280Turns out that people fight for America fought a lot of wars of territory.
00:41:16.100America fought a lot of wars of territory.
00:41:19.220Sorry, but if you think like the Spanish-American war is a war of ideology, if you think the American, the Mexican-American war, these are wars of ideology.
00:41:28.540You know, yeah, there's some ideological window dressing on a lot of these.
00:41:31.980But America fought plenty of wars of territory.
00:41:36.040The idea that the only war that America has ever fought is the Cold War, the one, like, somewhat ideological war, which never even actually broke out to a hot war between the major combatants.
00:41:48.820That's quite a bit of history that we are forgetting here.
00:43:50.440You've touched the magic soil, you've said the magic words, everything is done.
00:43:54.940But no, being part of a nation, being part of a people, again, is many things.
00:44:00.300Heritage is one of them, but it's also language, it's also religion, it's also folkways, custom.
00:44:06.660All of these things are what makes the people who they are.
00:44:09.540And so if over several generations an immigrant is dedicated to becoming part of a new people, that can eventually happen.
00:44:22.300They often have to intermarry, they have to join the religion, they have to know the language,
00:44:26.480but most importantly, they have to live the life of the people who are in that region, the area, that nation for their entire lives,
00:44:36.500and often their children, and their children's children also have to be kind of on the outside until they eventually integrate.
00:44:43.460That's what real integration looks like.
00:44:45.320Real integration is a multi-generational project.
00:44:49.020And especially in the United States, where unfortunately we went very far down the road of this poisonous multicultural ideology.
00:44:57.140If we're ever going to come back together as a people, we will need to have some level of understanding of assimilation and integration that will have to happen.
00:45:05.680However, that assimilation has to be to something.
00:45:15.700It is religion, it is custom, it is language, and it is so much more.
00:45:20.300And the only way you can do that is, again, by having a majority culture, a majority identity for people to go ahead and assimilate to.
00:45:28.780If you don't have anything to assimilate to, if America is simply a list of things that I learned in civics class that I read out loud, then you can never have assimilation.
00:45:39.900And the founding culture of the United States is undeniably both Anglo and Protestant.
00:45:45.440Now, that does not mean that everyone in the United States was Anglo or Protestant, and it doesn't mean that many people who joined later were not able to go ahead and become American despite not being Anglo or Protestant.
00:46:01.220But they had to go ahead and conform to this baseline understanding of an Anglo-Protestant United States.
00:46:12.120And that is how, even if you were, say, a Catholic coming in, you still had to understand this was going to be an Anglo-Protestant country, and it was going to go ahead and lead you in a particular direction.
00:46:22.860It was going to live in a certain way.
00:46:24.540Now, everyone, again, in the country is not entirely Anglo or Protestant.
00:46:28.160I'm a Protestant, and I'm a little Anglo, but I'm also German and Irish and Native American.
00:46:35.360These things, you know, it's not everybody, right?
00:46:38.120Most Americans are not just those things.
00:46:41.040But that was still the core of the American identity.
00:46:44.020And if you want to go ahead and assimilate to the United States, you have to assimilate to that way of life.
00:46:50.740And slowly over time, the different parts of you that aren't, you know, conforming to that culture do, because you get used to living in this way.
00:47:01.640That's why the propositional nation is not sufficient.
00:47:05.640It does not actually allow even immigrants to assimilate, because there is nothing for them to actually join.
00:47:12.580You've destroyed the culture, telling people that all that matters is the ideology.
00:47:17.480The ideology is the only thing that defines us.
00:47:19.760And I think that's why Ben is confused here, because I think he believes in the propositional nation.
00:47:24.680And so he's like, well, it's what the left says, that's not who we are, and that we can bring all these other things in.
00:47:29.980But he never thinks about kind of the implications of what that means.
00:47:57.420And in fact, many people in the conservative movement have been very clear that they don't think it's self-evident.
00:48:03.740That they do think that America is simply a set of ideas.
00:48:06.860That anyone can come in and join at any time.
00:48:09.180And it doesn't matter as long as you go ahead and choose to be part of the nation, you choose the proposition, then the ideology, then you can be an American.
00:48:20.160But here's the problem with the propositional nation.
00:48:22.820And if you would like to, I'll give you the quick argument tip.
00:48:27.080But in 30 seconds, dismantle anybody who believes in the propositional nation.
00:48:32.500When they tell you, okay, I believe in the propositional nation, America is an idea, America is a set of principles, not a nation in the European sense or anything like that.
00:49:48.980So you have a contradiction inside the heart of the propositional nation.
00:49:53.400You can't have a propositional nation and say, well, the nation is just a set of ideas.
00:49:58.360But also say, but one of those ideas is anybody can go ahead and, you know, crap on those ideas, discard these ideas at any time.
00:50:06.920But they still get to hang out and be here.
00:50:08.940Because what you're saying is, well, basically everyone's an American all the time.
00:50:12.800The entire world is just, they're just potential Americans who just haven't crossed the border yet.
00:50:18.340Because they don't need to hold the ideology of the United States.
00:50:21.660And if they manage to hold it for 10 seconds and raise their hand and then immediately go back to living their lives with the beliefs and the principles and everything else of the foreign nation.
00:50:32.120Well, it doesn't matter because they're already American and they're still here.
00:50:34.480And this is a real problem because that is actually happening in the United States.
00:50:39.380We have country, we have areas in this country where the flag is being switched basically to the Somali flag because of the number of people being imported into that area who still hold the identity of the countries they came from.
00:50:53.560And when you are only a propositional nation, when you're a nation is just an idea or just a land with the best ideas, then you have no idea what's happening to you when you are being replaced.
00:51:06.840When the federal government, as J.D. Vance pointed out in a speech later in that speech, brings in to a town of 60,000 people, 20,000 Somalis.
00:51:18.300So 60,000 people live in the city and they drop 20,000 Somalis into that city.
00:51:25.660I don't care if every one of those people loves the American dream, which they don't, to be clear.
00:52:41.880And again, if we had a nation that was defined by our ideas and adherence to those ideas, that ironically would be the most fascist nation available.
00:52:52.640Because it would subordinate identity and community to the ideology of the state, which is basically like the definition of this totalitarian central government that we don't want.
00:53:06.000So the idea that everyone needs to adhere to this ideology, this proposition to maintain their citizenship, to maintain their membership in the community, is itself a terrifying and very anti-American way to understand us as a country, as a nation.
00:53:25.360So let's play the rest here, just in case.
00:54:17.280A basic familiarity with any point of history will tell you that's not how it works.
00:54:23.860So asserting that, well, we have to be an ideological country if anyone's ever going to be able to join, that's just not the case.
00:54:29.800And also, I would like to make it very clear, the ability of people to join the United States is not what makes it a good country or a moral country.
00:54:37.500Now, I think it is possible for people to join.
00:54:39.300I think it is possible for people to assimilate.
00:54:41.240But a very small amount of people, if any at all, over generations, it should not be some instantaneous thing.
00:54:48.780And it is not incumbent on the United States to be a place where everybody can join.
00:54:55.240That's not how any other nation works.
00:54:58.020That's not how any other nation exists.
00:55:01.440And I'm sorry, but this aspect is not what makes America great.
00:55:05.380America is not made great by everybody's ability to join ideology, ideologically.
00:55:10.460And if that was the case, then you would simply be able to export that ideology to a foreign country, and it would be as great as the United States.
00:55:37.160I assume that's what he means by that.
00:55:38.860Again, I think he means a lot more than that.
00:55:42.080Hopefully, that's clarifying for people the problems with the propositional nation.
00:55:47.080I think the points that Ben was missing here.
00:55:49.020Again, I just thought this was interesting because across the spectrum, there are several different ways that Jay Vance was opposed.
00:55:58.560But we saw this through line left and right about the problem of him approaching the nation as a real nation, as a real people, and not just an economic zone or an ideological community.
00:56:12.480And I think that the confusion from Ben here really underlies, and again, he's not openly hostile to Vance.
00:56:21.340It's not like a leftist who's screaming at Vance the whole time about his racism and sexism or whatever.
00:56:26.120But the inability to kind of grasp Vance's point, or at least, you know, Ben's a pretty smart guy.
00:56:34.260I've got a feeling he knows what Vance was hinting at.
00:56:37.360But the fact that he's not addressing really what Vance was saying there, that's why I wanted to drill down into this.
00:56:43.360Because I think it's important to go ahead and talk about what does make a nation.
00:56:48.360Because as we try to figure this out, as we try to heal, hopefully, after the defeat of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, then I think it's critical to be able to identify what binds us together and what will allow us to heal if that's going to be able to happen.
00:57:04.300All right, let's go ahead and move over to the questions of the people real quick here.
00:57:24.740Once you pass into America, you get all these rights.
00:57:27.500And that's what makes you an American.
00:57:29.380Again, those things are not, that's not how it works.
00:57:32.540You don't suddenly obtain the rights by passing onto the magic dirt.
00:57:35.700The rights were something that the American people demanded due to a long history that was attached to a particular way that they lived their lives and a tradition.
00:57:46.340Should have gone into more explanation there.
00:58:31.000People change what ideas they believe all the time.
00:58:33.800The only thing that really doesn't change is where people live and where they tend to fight for.
00:58:39.000Again, this is so much so true, right?
00:58:41.480There's been large ideological shifts.
00:58:44.180I mean, just think about the shift between czarist Russia and Soviet Russia, right?
00:58:50.080That is literally the biggest revolution you can imagine.
00:58:53.020The most radical change from kind of this peasant farmer society attached to this longstanding czar, that structure, that feudal structure into this kind of radical attempt at egalitarian modernization and centralization.
01:00:46.580Our warriors need a place at the table.
01:00:49.640Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, Ben is probably not a guy who's been involved in a lot of physical conflict.
01:00:57.900But to be fair, I've never served in the military.
01:00:59.780So I'm not here to rag on anybody for that.
01:01:03.080I would say that ultimately you are right, though.
01:01:05.380Even though I am somebody who comes from, obviously, a little more of the intellectual bent, I do think that more often we need a warrior's understanding of certain scenarios.
01:01:15.860I think we do need more lions at the table.
01:01:18.960It should not just be it should not be foxes all the time.
01:01:23.880Life of Brian says Shapiro embodies the neocon paradox.
01:01:26.820Pump patriotism cynically to push useless foreign wars.
01:01:30.920Now the woke push anti-patriotism to enlistees to destroy the nation, including the United States.
01:01:36.520Yeah, again, I think Shapiro is far more comfortable than with foreign adventurism than I am.
01:01:42.760Certainly one of the things that he opposes Vance on, at least to some degree.
01:01:48.220And it is very clear that the United States military has shifted ideologically to promoting all kinds of things that attack the core of the American identity.
01:01:59.920And we saw recently the DOD presentation where they were saying that pro-life groups are a problem.
01:02:06.060Why is the American military talking about domestic American politics and who might be an enemy of the state?
01:02:12.220There's only reason, only one reason for them to do that.
01:02:55.480Ronald McNugget says America should look at the U.S. government as subject nations.
01:02:59.000looked at the U.S.S.R. as a hostile regime over them rather than identifying with and supporting it.
01:03:05.920There's a level of truth to that, though I will say this.
01:03:09.880I think that there are still factions inside the U.S. government, or I should say inside the wider American political complex,
01:03:19.200that do still care about the country and are still fighting for American well-being in a way that the Soviet Union probably did not have.
01:03:28.480I think you're right that in general people are too invested in the idea that the American government is actually serving the well-being of the American people.
01:03:39.680But I would say, for instance, the left would not be going to the lengths it's going to, to basically wipe out all of the choices that Americans had,
01:03:50.840both for the Democratic and Republican candidates, if there wasn't still some truth to the American system,
01:03:57.880some animating principle behind the government elections.
01:04:01.080Otherwise, they would just, you know, they would just drop Joe Biden down a chute and, you know, put Donald Trump in prison.
01:05:29.120We know why Benny is willing to trade away America for a few extra dollars, but Eric Erickson is the actual trader here.
01:05:34.880Always willing to cut his own flesh and people off at the knees to benefit Third World and Libs.
01:05:40.960You know, I really don't know a whole lot about Eric Erickson other than he's constantly just kind of pouting old National Review neocon talking points.
01:05:51.960So I can't really speak a lot to Eric Erickson's past and everything he's believed in.
01:05:57.920I just know that whenever I encounter Eric Erickson, he's saying something that is very much the classic, like, you know, we can just export democracy and maybe open borders are good for the country.
01:06:08.660And maybe we should, you know, fight every war we see out there.
01:06:12.160Talking points that are old, that are dead, that are no longer part, I think, of the right, thankfully.
01:06:16.840Points that have lost all of their real power on the right, which is a fantastic development.
01:06:23.140Something I didn't know if I'd ever see in my lifetime.
01:06:25.600And I'm very happy to see as a positive movement in our direction.
01:06:31.240All right, guys, I'm going to go ahead and wrap this up.
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