00:00:45.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:54.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:05.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
00:01:14.000Vivek, to his great credit, is coming to speak in West Palm Beach, Florida.
00:01:21.000We have three presidential candidates, and to his great credit, he said, I'm all in.
00:01:25.000That's one of the reasons why I think Vivek, not because he's speaking at our event, I wish we were that powerful, but one of the reasons why he's ascending in the polls is he wants to win.
00:01:34.000I don't know why these other candidates, we just got a couple new rejections of a couple candidates that obviously have foreign countries to go visit or something else to go do.
00:01:43.000Not really sure why, but Vivek Ramaswamy will be there, tpaction.com.
00:01:47.000Vivek, I've been looking at the polls.
00:01:49.000And again, I'm not a big poll guy, but I like looking at trends.
00:02:52.000And I think that people across this country, I think they're attuned to the distortions from media or what they're fed from others that have a pretty good sixth sense over the last decade to be able to tell the difference between somebody who's given them political platitudes and poll-tested platitudes versus somebody who's actually sharing their bone-deep convictions.
00:03:11.000And one of the things I'm seeing from our supporters, Charlie, is that not all of them agree with 100% of what I'm saying, but they may agree with 90% of what I'm saying, but still know that I mean it 100% of the time.
00:03:24.000And so in many ways, our campaign strategy is to not be too strategic about what I say.
00:03:29.000You and I have this relationship as well.
00:03:33.000But what people really want is the truth.
00:03:35.000And I think that that's what we're giving them.
00:03:36.000Well, and you can't have the truth if you're a coward.
00:03:38.000And that's why Aristotle believes that courage is the greatest of all the virtues, because you might believe in the truth or you might want to know the truth, but you have to have the courage to actually say it.
00:03:48.000So just to recap it, the team is resending me the poll, but you kind of saw this spike.
00:03:52.000So let's just kind of go back in time.
00:03:53.000I don't know if this is a cause and effect, but Vivek, you were the only candidate to show up in Miami with the arraignment of Donald Trump, and you had a true thing there as your press conference.
00:04:28.000We have to stand on the side of principle to say that the United States of America should not be a country where the party in power uses police force to arrest its political opponents in the middle of an election, full stop.
00:04:41.000And I don't care whether that's good for me politically or not.
00:04:45.000I will say that at the time, there were a number of people who actually maybe more wise as political scientists than I. I'm not a political scientist or a poll predictor that predicted that we were going to see a massive spike in the polls about two weeks afterwards, which is what they say the trailing indicators are.
00:05:02.000But I do think that Americans are hungry for leaders who stand on principle rather than on the base of self-interest.
00:05:10.000Another thing I'll just lift the curtain on, Charlie, let's just talk openly.
00:05:14.000I got calls from many donors, and I know almost certainly those same donors are calling the other major Republican candidates as well with the advice to say, do not touch that.
00:05:49.000But I've taken, you know, eight figures now over $15 million and counting of my own hard-earned money, put it into this campaign precisely because I don't want to listen to somebody else and what they have to say, viewing me as a puppet.
00:06:01.000And the voters, I think, can tell a difference.
00:06:02.000We have you for the full hour, Vivek Ramaswamy.
00:06:04.000You know, we sent out that tweet saying, hey, you know, whoever wants to show up, I think it's a good idea.
00:06:09.000And you listened and, you know, you saw it in the public thing.
00:06:33.000America is the first nation in history founded on the idea of a natural God-given rights and on political principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence of liberty, equality, and limited government.
00:06:44.000That's what my friends at Hillsdale College want you to join them in remembering our founding principles on our nation's birthday this July 4th.
00:06:51.000You can do so by taking three simple steps.
00:06:53.000Go to charlieforhillsdale.com and sign your pledge to read the Declaration on July 4th.
00:06:58.000Then read the Declaration on the 4th, either on your own or with your family and friends.
00:07:04.000Look, I'm going to take this pledge, and I hope you will too.
00:07:06.000If we are going to save our country in its current crisis, we need to remind ourselves, our children, and our fellow citizens of the founding principles that are a source of America's greatness.
00:07:16.000When you sign your pledge today, you'll receive a free commemorative copy of the Declaration of Independence from our friends at Hillsdale College.
00:07:41.000You have a former vice president not really registering, governors not registering, but a businessman with new ideas and a willingness to tell the truth is polling very, very well.
00:07:53.000In fact, the field looks, it's Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Vivek, Ramaswamy.
00:08:19.000In January of 2021, I was actually the first person to advance this legal theory on the page of the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.
00:08:26.000And in my book, Woke Inc., that government actors cannot threaten private companies to do through the back door what government could not get done through the front door under the Constitution, censoring protected speech.
00:08:39.000And at the time, Charlie, legal scholars across this country dismissed that legal theory, saying this Rafiat is thinking that the First Amendment applies to a private company.
00:08:48.000Has he not even gone to high school, let alone law school?
00:08:51.000It was dismissed as a conspiracy theory to think that the government was even doing this.
00:08:55.000Well, two and a half years later, what do we now know?
00:08:58.000Another conspiracy theory is vindicated yet again.
00:09:01.000Sometimes I think people need to rhyme.
00:09:19.000If Vladimir Putin was doing it, and we would call it a threat to democracy, then it's a threat to so-called democracy when we're doing it here at home as well.
00:09:28.000And we would not look kindly on some foreign autocrat deputizing and threatening private companies to silence political expression.
00:09:43.000I continue to think that our judicial system is the last backstop for protecting our constitutional freedoms in this country.
00:09:51.000And it gave me, frankly, a lot of gratitude to see that legal argument from two and a half years ago invoked by this federal judge to see that injunction through today.
00:09:59.000You know, you have Alexei Navalani, who is facing decades in prison, and the United States State Department is issuing press releases.
00:10:07.000This is yet another inhumane and terrible action by the Putin government who would dare to use police power to go after their political dissidents.
00:10:15.000Simultaneously, that very same regime that is issuing virtue signaling press releases about Alexei Navalani is like, oh, yeah, by the way, Donald Trump might spend 40 years in jail.
00:10:45.000They are their own government with they march the beat of their own drum, their own cadence, and their own rhythm.
00:10:51.000How would you as president, from a policy perspective, reign in the Leviathan?
00:10:57.000So, Charlie, because I know you can handle the detail, I'm going to go into detail with you.
00:11:00.000I think I'm the single presidential candidate in the last 30 years who has the deepest understanding of how to actually shut down the administrative state.
00:11:28.000I'm glad other candidates are now taking it up as well.
00:11:31.000List of the agencies we'd shut down, from Department of Education to ATF to FBI to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to a range of other agencies.
00:11:40.000I've said that I would shut them down.
00:11:42.000The top reason Republican presidents haven't done it in the past is they point to so-called civil service protections, which are these protections that say you can't fire members of the bureaucracy.
00:11:52.000Well, Charlie, read the law carefully, as I've done.
00:11:56.000Turns out those civil service protections apply to individual firings.
00:12:01.000The whole point is they don't want a politically accountable president firing based on political motivations and individual employee.
00:12:07.000We can debate whether we like that or not, but that's what the law says.
00:12:24.000There's a law, little-known law, Charlie.
00:12:26.000Not a single Republican president has had the spine or knowledge to use it.
00:12:30.000It's the Presidential Reorganization Act of 1977.
00:12:33.000It says you can actually shut down or reorganize agencies if it either stimulates the economy or reduces redundancies in agencies.
00:12:41.000Well, when the DEA is pursuing some of the same cases that the FBI is in parallel, when you have, at the local level, you have local police and local prosecutors.
00:12:49.000You don't have a separate FBI in between.
00:12:51.000You meet the letter of that law when I will say as U.S. president, without asking Congress for permission or for forgiveness, we will shut down that same J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI, the same J. Edgar Hoover FBI that was corrupt in the 1960s that's equally corrupt today.
00:13:07.000We will shut it down because the law already gives me the authority to do it.
00:13:13.000And Charlie, I think one of the positions that people don't pay attention to in the federal government, there's actually two of them.
00:13:18.000People always ask me about my cabinet secretary appointments.
00:13:20.000Yeah, we'll get to that, and I'm going to say who those are before the end of this year.
00:13:24.000But the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, the person who runs that, that's like the human resources department of the federal government.
00:13:31.000The person who runs the Office of Management and Budget, OMB, it's like the CFO of the federal government.
00:13:37.000Those are the most important positions.
00:13:39.000And if I'm learning from President Trump's tenure, here's what I'm learning to build on that foundation and maybe not repeat some of the same learnings is that you need people in that position who aren't trying to be ambassadors of the administrative state, mediating the interests back and forth between the president and the administrative state.
00:13:56.000I'm putting people in those positions that I know that are bulldogs that are seeing this through with one direction to actually shut this down without being ambassadors back to me.
00:14:05.000So I can go into more detail, Charlie.
00:14:07.000This is the most important topic domestically is shutting down that regulatory administrative state.
00:14:39.000But you have to simultaneously do the other thing.
00:14:41.000I believe you actually have an obligation, which is to support women in need and babies in need that are at risk of being aborted.
00:14:49.000Look, when you introduce a girl to her baby by providing an ultrasound, you're giving her the truth at the most critical and important time in her life.
00:14:58.00085% of the time when they actually see the baby, they choose life.
00:15:04.000Now, mind you, pre-born provides resources.
00:15:09.000And I encourage you, if you're pro-life, to pray about this, are you giving money to actually support the unborn if you're voting for pro-life?
00:15:16.000Look, $140 gives five mothers a free ultrasound and saves babies.
00:15:20.000$280 can save 10 babies, and just $28 a month can save a baby a month for less than a dollar a day.
00:15:25.000I'm a donor to this organization, and you should be too.
00:15:27.000A $15,000 gift will provide an ultrasound machine that will save lives for years to come.
00:15:32.000Whether you want to save one baby or five or hundreds, this opportunity is just a phone call or click away.
00:15:38.000I think the world of pre-born, I give money financially.
00:15:41.000And every one of you that are pro-life, I believe you have a duty and an obligation to go to preborn.org slash Kirk and give as you can, give your best gift or call 833-850-2229.
00:16:56.000And the answer is that the president is absolutely constitutionally empowered to do it.
00:17:00.0005 U.S.C. 3302 says the U.S. president sets the regulations governing the Office of Personnel Management, the 1977 presidential reorganization statute, the mass firings not applying to the civil service protections.
00:18:01.000We codify that vision into judicial precedent so that the next guy who comes along after me isn't going to have to start with that same handcuffs on his hands.
00:18:48.000Well, and this is so fresh, Vivek, because, you know, there I am, a 25, 26-year-old walk into the White House, and I'm just rationally like, well, why don't we just get rid of this agency and this?
00:19:00.000And, you know, I could say the names on air.
00:19:01.000They would be names that people would recognize.
00:19:03.000But effectively, there was a false operating premise, the whole Trump White House, that all the civil service lifelong bureaucrats said, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that, can't do that.
00:19:15.000And it really makes you think we need this kind of fresh problem-solving, entrepreneurial approach to say, no, no, actually, you could just go scorched earth, close this down, close that, close this, do that, close that.
00:19:28.000And it really kind of makes you think.
00:19:30.000So the FBI, is it time to close it down completely?
00:19:33.000Is it time to relocate it out of D.C.?
00:19:53.000It is something about the institutional nature of that institution and that bureaucracy itself that is by design a formula for corruption.
00:20:01.000It shouldn't have existed in the first place because you don't need something sitting in between the DOJ, which has its own problems, and we could talk about that separately, and the U.S. Marshals, which sit over here, which are like the cops, the actual federal cops.
00:20:14.000When you put those tens of thousands of bureaucrats today still reporting into the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI, it is almost a formula for the creation of that form of corruption.
00:20:25.000So I think it's a false promise for anybody to say, oh, you're fired the head of the FBI and get the bad apples out.
00:20:30.000I using language that I hear from some of the other candidates that now want to check this box and feel good about checking that box.
00:20:38.000I couldn't get that job done because this is a beast that was created in the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover that's doing exactly what it did to Martin Luther King.
00:20:55.000I mean, we've gone through government shutdown periods where they threatened national security risk if they actually couldn't get paid or their employees were put on furlough.
00:21:05.000To the contrary, I think we're actually going to have greater efficiency if the DEA has more accountability for its own drug cases rather than the FBI competing with it to take on those same cases.
00:21:45.000Just when you thought the government would stop trying to take over health care, Senator Bernie Sanders, that socialist Marxist communist, is pushing something that is no good.
00:21:55.000I'm urgently asking you to support the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste to stop the Senate from passing the Sanders Bill S1339.
00:22:03.000It would raise the price of prescription drugs by making it harder for pharmacy benefit managers to continue to save an average of $1,000 per year for 275 million Americans just like you.
00:22:12.000Bernie Sanders, he does, he is a sneaky commie.
00:23:51.000They're in a military partnership with one another.
00:23:53.000So my simple deal is Putin gets what he wants out of Ukraine.
00:23:57.000No NATO membership, keep the land that he currently sits on.
00:24:00.000But that he has to get out of his deal with Xi Jinping.
00:24:03.000Now, this makes Xi Jinping have to think twice before he invades Taiwan, because Xi Jinping's bet right now is that the U.S. won't want to go to war with two different allied nuclear superpowers at the same time if Russia's in his camp.
00:24:16.000But if Russia's not in his camp, Xi Jinping doesn't have that confidence.
00:24:20.000Couple of other things I'd demand in the deal that are easy gives for Putin are that he moves his nuclear weapons out of Kaliningrad.
00:24:26.000That's the region that borders Poland.
00:24:28.000Get the military of Russia out of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, will restore normalized economic relationships with Russia.
00:24:35.000Those are things you're not allowed to say out loud, Charlie.
00:24:37.000Certainly in the neocons and the Democratic Party, but even most of the Republican Party, you can't say those words out loud either.
00:24:43.000But that is how we achieve peace, not only in Ukraine, but achieve the top job of the next president, which I understand how to do, is to deter China from going after Taiwan without going to war over it.
00:24:57.000And it's really kind of sad that the almost entire Republican Party, with the exception of Trump and myself in this race, are lined up lockstock and barrel with the Biden position on continuing to go to war in Ukraine, on actually NATO expanding even more today when NATO was actually created to deter the USSR.
00:25:21.000Now, after the USSR has fallen, NATO has expanded more than it ever has.
00:25:25.000Now thinking about NATO supposedly was created to avoid the risk of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, its actions are actually driving us closer to nuclear war with Russia.
00:25:36.000We have to find a path out in a way that advances American interests.
00:25:40.000I think I'm the only candidate that has offered a clear vision of the deal that I would do and a clear reason why Putin would say yes to that deal.
00:25:48.000He doesn't actually enjoy being Xi Jinping's little brother either.
00:25:52.000This is a deal that he would do, and it is a deal that absolutely advances American interests while promoting peace, not only saving us the money, but also getting Russia out of China's camp instead of driving them into each other's arms, which is exactly what we're doing today.
00:26:07.000We are doing that and it's making America in a compromised position and it's not putting our country first.