The Charlie Kirk Show - How the NEW GOP Must Fight Back—with J.D. Vance

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00:00:26.000 Hey everybody, on this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, JD Vance, best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, sold over 3 million copies, joins us for the entire program on the Charlie Kirk show.

00:00:37.000 If you guys want to be able to have big ideas understood quickly, go to thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R dot org slash Charlie.

00:00:47.000 I love thinker.org.

00:00:48.000 It's where I get a lot of my ideas.

00:00:50.000 I'm able to learn things quickly, get big ideas, and understand them at thinker.org.

00:00:57.000 Our thinker.org book of the week is Hillbilly Elegy.

00:01:00.000 Check it out at thinker.org slash Charlie.

00:01:03.000 T-H-I-N-K-R dot org slash Charlie.

00:01:06.000 And if you want to support us, go to CharlieKirk.com slash support.

00:01:10.000 I want to thank Ronald from California.

00:01:13.000 I want to thank Brett from Texas.

00:01:16.000 I want to thank Jennifer from Alabama.

00:01:18.000 I want to thank Jennifer from California and Wayne from California.

00:01:24.000 CharlieKirk.com slash support.

00:01:27.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:01:28.000 JD Vance and I go deep in the issues.

00:01:30.000 Here we go.

00:01:32.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:01:33.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:01:35.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:01:39.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:01:42.000 I want to thank Charlie.

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00:01:52.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

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00:03:58.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here with a special guest.

00:04:00.000 I guess you could call him a co-host.

00:04:02.000 First ever on our program, JD Vance.

00:04:06.000 His reputation precedes him, author of Hillbilly Elegy, sold over 3 million copies.

00:04:10.000 JD, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:04:12.000 Thanks for having me.

00:04:13.000 Here at an undisclosed location, and both of us love our country, and we have that in common amongst many other things.

00:04:20.000 So you're thinking of maybe possibly sort of one day running for something.

00:04:25.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:04:26.000 Yeah, I'm thinking pretty seriously about running for Senate in Ohio.

00:04:29.000 So for all the Cleveland listeners out there, take notes, or at least take notes on the things you like that I say and ignore the things you don't like that I say.

00:04:36.000 Now, it's becoming, if you maybe sort of almost might run, I think I said that right.

00:04:36.000 That's good.

00:04:42.000 There's a lot of people maybe running for that seat.

00:04:44.000 Yeah, yeah, it's going to be pretty crowded.

00:04:47.000 There are a lot of folks running.

00:04:48.000 I mean, it's an open Senate seat.

00:04:49.000 So Rob Portman, current U.S. Senator, he's retiring.

00:04:52.000 Ohio is becoming a writer of state.

00:04:53.000 So I think a lot of people see the opportunity.

00:04:55.000 But, you know, if we pull the trigger, I think we got a really good chance because, frankly, you know, the things we're going to talk about, the message that I have is just, I think, a little bit more where the actual voters are.

00:05:05.000 And I think they recognize that we're getting a little bit screwed by our corporations and somebody's got to do something about it.

00:05:10.000 Well, there's a bunch of topics I want to get to, but let's start there because I think that what you hit on outside of the corporation piece, which I completely agree, is where is the Republican Party right now?

00:05:22.000 And I think that there's a really promising yet depressing trend.

00:05:27.000 The promising trend is the voters are actually on the right side of these issues.

00:05:31.000 Our leaders tend not to be.

00:05:33.000 It seems as if they're a lagging indicator of where the voters are.

00:05:36.000 A great example is Asa Hutchinson, who is bought and paid for by either the Walton family or the Chicken family, whatever it is in Arkansas, right?

00:05:45.000 That somehow Asa Hutchinson wants children to be able to chemically castrate themselves.

00:05:51.000 I think Tucker did a phenomenal job of exposing that.

00:05:54.000 And he's like stunned and shocked that he can't invoke the spirit of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan.

00:06:01.000 And all of a sudden, all the criticism goes away, right?

00:06:02.000 That's basically how that interview went.

00:06:04.000 He's like, I'm going to mention Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley and everyone's going to take it easy.

00:06:08.000 Like, no, actually, our party is a lot different than the pro-corporate party of 1992.

00:06:15.000 Walk us through where you think the voters actually are and how some Republican leaders are still somewhat shell-shocked by this.

00:06:22.000 Yeah, so you're exactly right.

00:06:23.000 There's like a civil war within the Republican leadership class about where the party should go, but there just isn't one among the voters.

00:06:29.000 The voters feel very strongly that there's a direction that we should pursue, call it America first, call it populist, whatever.

00:06:35.000 And so the voters, I think, are very, very awoke to this stuff.

00:06:40.000 The thing that is so weird about the Asa Hutchinson thing or any of these other debates is, you know, people constantly invoke these principles that have sort of become slogans.

00:06:50.000 And when you're using a slogan, you're not really thinking anymore, right?

00:06:52.000 So Asa Hutchinson kept on saying to Tucker Carlson, well, what about limited government, right?

00:06:56.000 The government can't do these things.

00:06:58.000 It can't prevent the chemical prevention of puberty.

00:07:02.000 And it's like, well, if the government can't do that, what can it actually do?

00:07:06.000 And of course, if you think about the entire gender debate in this country right now, it's driven by a lot of government policy.

00:07:12.000 What are we teaching in schools?

00:07:14.000 What are the things that are happening in universities that are funded by the government that are making their way ideologically onto our college campuses, onto our high schools, even increasingly our middle and elementary schools?

00:07:24.000 That's all government power that the left is using to accomplish its vision of society.

00:07:29.000 And I always say the biggest difference between right and left in this country, it's not small government, big government, social conservative, progressive, whatever the case may be.

00:07:38.000 It's that the left is willing to use power to accomplish its vision of society.

00:07:42.000 And conservative leaders are terrified of it.

00:07:44.000 It's like we don't want to use political power to accomplish anything for our voters.

00:07:49.000 And the voters are saying, you've got the corporations on one side.

00:07:52.000 You've got the cultural institutions on the other side.

00:07:54.000 If we can't use political power to accomplish something good for ourselves, then we're screwed.

00:07:59.000 We're going to lose our country.

00:08:00.000 So there's been about maybe half a dozen moments where I watch something and I actually say, when I watch my computer or a podcast, I'm like, that makes sense.

00:08:09.000 And you gave a speech at the Edmund Burke Foundation Society and you said this.

00:08:14.000 And I said, oh my gosh, of course.

00:08:18.000 Of course we have the power.

00:08:20.000 And then you said something, I don't even think you realized how brilliant it was.

00:08:23.000 You said, we didn't take this power.

00:08:25.000 It was given to us by the people.

00:08:28.000 So the people voted for us.

00:08:30.000 We didn't stage some sort of coup.

00:08:32.000 We didn't overthrow the Romanovs.

00:08:35.000 Like we went through the proper channels, as outlined in this amazing document, the U.S. Constitution, to actually improve people's lives.

00:08:43.000 And I also think there's a misunderstanding of what liberty is.

00:08:47.000 Liberty in the American sense is not liberty in the French sense.

00:08:51.000 Liberty is to pursue virtue, not to go seek pleasure endlessly and that you can go redefine your own truth.

00:09:00.000 That's a French value.

00:09:02.000 The American value is to go and pursue virtue and truth, appreciate beauty and wonder and preserve the good.

00:09:10.000 Absolutely.

00:09:11.000 Yeah, we talked a lot, you know, in elementary school, right?

00:09:14.000 What is America about?

00:09:16.000 You hear it all the time.

00:09:17.000 It's about freedom.

00:09:18.000 It's about liberty.

00:09:19.000 Like the freedom to do what, right?

00:09:21.000 Like freedom when I was a seven-year-old boy or a 14-year-old kid was not like sitting at home, you know, playing that or watching Netflix and watching porn and doing all these terrible things.

00:09:32.000 It was actually like meaningfully participating in society, right?

00:09:35.000 That's what freedom was.

00:09:36.000 It wasn't just like sitting at home by yourself and like, you know, not being an especially virtuous person.

00:09:42.000 It was participating meaningfully in society.

00:09:44.000 The founders' conception of liberty was that you get to participate in this project of self-government.

00:09:50.000 Well, how do you participate in the project of self-government?

00:09:52.000 Well, you can start a family.

00:09:54.000 You can pursue happiness.

00:09:55.000 You can work at a good job.

00:09:56.000 You can start your own business.

00:09:57.000 You can do something meaningful in the commercial sector.

00:10:00.000 But it's also you get to speak your mind.

00:10:02.000 That's what the First Amendment, of course, is all about.

00:10:05.000 You get to participate in the public debate about this country.

00:10:08.000 And the freedom that's maybe most under threat in our country right now, it's not like the government not telling you what to do or the government telling you what to do.

00:10:18.000 It's a corporation that's increasingly telling us that if you say the wrong things, you could lose your job.

00:10:23.000 You could be censored on social media, which of course is the modern medium of communication.

00:10:27.000 So the most important American liberty, maybe at least one of them, is the freedom of participation in this democratic society of ours.

00:10:34.000 If you can't speak your mind, you don't have that liberty.

00:10:37.000 Those are the freedoms we should be talking about, not just the freedom to like, you know, smoke a lot of weed.

00:10:43.000 And that's seeking pleasure.

00:10:43.000 Right.

00:10:44.000 Animals seek pleasure.

00:10:45.000 Aristotle famously said, we are the speaking beings.

00:10:48.000 Speech is what differentiates us from a giraffe.

00:10:50.000 A giraffe can go seek pleasure. 0.61

00:10:52.000 Yeah, there's this weird way, and I think this is a pretty modern thing where like the past 30 or 40 years, freedom just meant getting to do whatever you want in the pursuit of freedom.

00:11:00.000 It's a perversion of freedom.

00:11:01.000 It's absolutely a perversion of freedom because if you're enslaved to your basis desires, you're not actually a free person.

00:11:09.000 You're not a virtuous person as our founding fathers would have understood it.

00:11:12.000 So it's not even that it's like not the same thing as founders' freedom or the founders' conception of freedom.

00:11:18.000 It's that it's actually antithetical to it.

00:11:20.000 Yes, Aristotle said that you will become fatted cattle. 0.78

00:11:23.000 And I love that visual. 0.58

00:11:25.000 Like that's basically what America has become.

00:11:27.000 You eat all day and you really don't do much.

00:11:30.000 You have a lot of pleasure, but you're not pursuing the good.

00:11:34.000 And that's what the founders always understood is the moral underpinning.

00:11:38.000 And I want to explore this with you of how this happened because it was subtle at first.

00:11:44.000 It was gradual, then sudden.

00:11:45.000 It was like, oh my gosh.

00:11:47.000 And now we have a group of our leaders of the opposition party, whatever that is now.

00:11:53.000 And I still think it's trying to figure it out, where they are saying, wait a second, I can't just give a press conference on corporate tax cuts and invoke a slogan of defeat socialism.

00:12:03.000 And somehow my voters are still upset with me.

00:12:06.000 They're a little bit confused by that.

00:12:09.000 Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

00:12:10.000 I think people recognize that something is really wrong in our society and the old slogans just aren't going to cut it anymore.

00:12:16.000 People recognize that something's really wrong in our society, right?

00:12:19.000 They see what's happening in our schools and our communities.

00:12:22.000 They see with the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns.

00:12:25.000 There's just this sense that things aren't going the way that they should be going.

00:12:29.000 And in the face of that, you can't just say the same things that people have heard for the past 40 years.

00:12:34.000 They instinctively recognize, well, that didn't work.

00:12:37.000 It's not working anymore.

00:12:38.000 We need to hear something different.

00:12:40.000 You said that saying we stand for limited government is not enough.

00:12:43.000 Yeah.

00:12:44.000 Build that out a little bit more.

00:12:45.000 Well, I think that saying you stand for limited government, it's a principle.

00:12:50.000 It's a good principle.

00:12:51.000 But I think in the Republican Party, it's become a little bit too much of a slogan where we're unwilling to use political power, even when it's been given us by the people to do something for them.

00:13:03.000 Right.

00:13:04.000 And so, you know, like the classic example that's going around in conservative circles right now is what do we do about woke capital, right?

00:13:10.000 Like, well, what is woke capital, right?

00:13:12.000 Well, first of all, these corporations are incorporated by the government.

00:13:16.000 They exist and are able to earn a profit because of the American nation state, our system of law and order, our U.S. Navy that protects their trade routes.

00:13:25.000 And when they interject themselves into our democratic process, there are a lot of people on the establishment right who say, well, we can't do anything about them because they're a private company.

00:13:34.000 Well, they're not really just private companies.

00:13:36.000 They're chartered by the U.S. government and they're charted to affect a social purpose.

00:13:41.000 We decided, as a people, we were going to give these corporations certain protections so that they could accomplish a goal.

00:13:47.000 Well, if they're not accomplishing that goal anymore, why are we still giving them special protections?

00:13:51.000 You can't shout limited government every time somebody says, we want to use political power for the purpose that we were given it for.

00:13:58.000 And I think some of the conservatives that say that, and trust me, I like limited government, but I could tell you why I like it.

00:14:06.000 And that's important.

00:14:07.000 And so I'm trying to use, I never try to use limited government anymore.

00:14:10.000 I'm going to tell you the new phrase I think we should use.

00:14:12.000 But I think some conservatives that say that, they have an understandable fear, this kind of we're going to get into a Soviet state if we were ever to not limit government.

00:14:23.000 Well, a little bit of a newsflash.

00:14:24.000 You've done an awful job limiting government.

00:14:27.000 The fourth branch of government is as more powerful as ever.

00:14:29.000 The civil service controls everything.

00:14:31.000 So what I think they're really saying, and I want to offer an olive branch a little bit of grace, is they're saying, we believe in limited power.

00:14:39.000 We believe that a small group of people controlling something without a check in a balance is a bad thing.

00:14:45.000 So explain to me why you're okay with Microsoft having that kind of power.

00:14:45.000 I agree.

00:14:50.000 And that argument would not have really, wouldn't have really meshed 15 years ago because these companies weren't that powerful.

00:14:58.000 And the people that ran their companies actually loved the country.

00:15:02.000 And so if you go to Palm Springs, if you go to Palm Beach and you go to these retirement communities of the CEOs that used to run these companies, the guys in their 80s and 90s, I know a lot of them.

00:15:11.000 They are stunned at what's happening.

00:15:13.000 I'm talking about the guys that ran waste management, the guys that ran Home Depot.

00:15:18.000 And they say, if I were to have done this in the early 2000s, I would have resigned myself.

00:15:25.000 And so, JD, how is it that we went from an American corporate governing class that quite honestly is now retired and loved the country and the generations that preceded it to now the current class like Ed Bashy and James Quincy that talk no differently than a college professor?

00:15:41.000 How did that happen?

00:15:42.000 I think a couple of things that happened.

00:15:43.000 So, first is in the 1950s, when GM said what's good for GM is good for America.

00:15:50.000 They were, you know, maybe being a little cute, but that was basically true, right?

00:15:53.000 What was good for GM was good for America.

00:15:55.000 They paid their workers great wages.

00:15:57.000 People were having solid families.

00:15:59.000 That was the lead edge of the tech economy of the 1950s, was the automobile.

00:16:04.000 When if Google said what's good for Google in 2020 is good for America, is that actually true if Apple said that?

00:16:11.000 Of course it's not true, right? 0.56

00:16:12.000 Apple actively undercuts American workers by paying slaves in China to make its iPhones.

00:16:20.000 And then it comes back to America and virtue signals and tries to wag its finger at normal American people about their basic viewpoint on the world.

00:16:27.000 And so what's happened is that a lot of these companies have started to realize, think of the NBA, for example.

00:16:32.000 The NBA's biggest new market is in China.

00:16:34.000 Everybody's asking, why is the NBA so anti-American, but it never calls out what's going on in China?

00:16:40.000 Because the NBA has more of a financial upside in China than it does in the United States than it does in its own country.

00:16:45.000 And so 50, 60 years ago, we used to recognize that these companies had some national obligations.

00:16:51.000 They had some national purpose.

00:16:53.000 And now we just see them as purely commercial enterprises, purely disconnected from the American nation state. 0.72

00:16:58.000 And if they make their money in China, they're going to be on the side of the Chinese than the American people.

00:17:03.000 That's a real problem because they're not just commercial entities.

00:17:07.000 They're part of the American fabric of society.

00:17:09.000 And you have companies that are literally called American airlines that fly around with the American flag that pander more to Wuhan than West Virginians.

00:17:19.000 Yeah. 0.90

00:17:20.000 That's absolutely right.

00:17:21.000 The other thing that's going on, and this is part of the answer to the question too, is that our entire educated cultural class has gotten obsessively anti-American, and that's started to import itself into these companies, right?

00:17:34.000 So what was 20 years ago a crazy idea on a college campus is now like mainstream for a 40-year-old upper-level employee at some of these big companies.

00:17:45.000 And I think Trump was an accelerant for that.

00:17:47.000 I want to talk about it.

00:17:48.000 And it's not a critique of him.

00:17:49.000 I just think it's a fact.

00:17:52.000 A few decades ago, private citizens used to be that.

00:17:54.000 Private citizens.

00:17:55.000 What's changed?

00:17:56.000 The internet.

00:17:57.000 Think about everything you've browsed, searched, for, watched, or tweeted.

00:18:00.000 Now imagine all of that data being crawled through, collected, and aggregated by third parties into a permanent public record.

00:18:06.000 Your record.

00:18:07.000 Having your life exposed for others to see was once something only celebrities worried about.

00:18:12.000 But in an era where everyone is online, everyone is a public figure.

00:18:15.000 To keep my data private, when I go online, I always turn on ExpressVPN.

00:18:19.000 Did you know that there are hundreds of data brokers out there whose sole business is to buy and sell your data?

00:18:24.000 The worst part is they don't have to tell you who they're selling it to or get your consent.

00:18:28.000 One of the data points is your IP address.

00:18:30.000 Data harvesters use your IP address to uniquely identify you and your location.

00:18:35.000 But with ExpressVPN, my connection gets rerouted through an encrypted server and my IP address is masked.

00:18:41.000 Every time I turn on ExpressVPN, I'm given a random IP address shared by other ExpressVPN customers.

00:18:47.000 That makes it more difficult for third parties to identify me and harvest my data.

00:18:51.000 And the best part is how ExpressVPN, how easy it is to use.

00:18:54.000 No matter what device you're on, phone or laptop, maybe smart TV.

00:18:58.000 So if you like me and you believe that your data is your business, go to expressvpn.com slash Charlie and get three extra months free.

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00:19:14.000 So we've talked a lot on our program.

00:19:16.000 How do you know who's in charge?

00:19:18.000 Because that's a really important question because we have been trained from a young age.

00:19:22.000 The people in charge are the people we put in charge.

00:19:25.000 Consent to the governed.

00:19:27.000 And what's happening now, and I think a lot of Americans are waking up to this, is that there's a new class of people that are actually calling the shots.

00:19:38.000 Angelo Cotavilla has the best piece of literature on this, ruling class.

00:19:43.000 And I'm sure you've read it or are aware of it. 0.95

00:19:45.000 And he writes commonly very frequently for our friend Chris Buzzkirk's website, American Greatness, which is phenomenal.

00:19:51.000 And Victor Davis Hansen writes on there, I learned so much from that website.

00:19:55.000 But JD, you're looking at this double-page advertisement in the New York Times.

00:19:59.000 Yeah, it's pretty wild.

00:20:01.000 And like, so this is the ruling class, right?

00:20:06.000 If we're looking, if we're asking who's actually in control of our society and why, you know, no matter who the American people elect, there's very rarely significant seismic political change, even when they ask for it.

00:20:19.000 And you sort of think about all of the institutional pushback against Donald Trump for the four years that he was in the White House, which is just crazy, like the constant pressure that he was getting from the corporate folks, from folks in government, from folks in the administrative state.

00:20:33.000 And you start to appreciate what's going on because these folks have the real power.

00:20:39.000 And to me, power is fundamentally about shaping behavior.

00:20:45.000 And who are you more worried about if you're an American citizen?

00:20:50.000 The people on this page who are standing for democracy or the people that you elect to the U.S. government.

00:20:56.000 Of course, you care more about these people.

00:20:58.000 These are the people who can prevent you from buying and selling, from owning a home, from working a decent middle-class job.

00:21:05.000 This is the ruling class.

00:21:07.000 And so you just articulated what Machiavelli and Hobbes pointed as, how do you find out who's in charge and who has power?

00:21:14.000 That which can inflict pain.

00:21:16.000 That's right.

00:21:17.000 I mean, my local congressman, I don't think he's going to inflict pain on me anytime soon.

00:21:22.000 He might say something I don't like, but kind of a non-starter.

00:21:28.000 There's a lot of names, companies, organizations that can inflict pain on you.

00:21:33.000 This is the control of the guillotine.

00:21:35.000 That's right.

00:21:36.000 That's exactly right.

00:21:37.000 And, you know, I was like, I was talking about this with a friend who told me that, you know, her brother-in-law had put something that was pro-Trump on Facebook.

00:21:50.000 And then a few people saw that post and then ganged up on him, got a few other folks involved, called his employer and tried to get the guy fired.

00:21:59.000 This guy, like, you know, is a middle-class guy living in southwestern Ohio.

00:22:04.000 Those people and that platform and the guy he works for have way more power in his life than his local elected officials.

00:22:12.000 And what's really sad about it is that his capacity to push back using our constitutional self-government is incredibly limited so long as these people are in control.

00:22:21.000 And I really do think, I'm not a zero-sum guy.

00:22:24.000 I work in investing in venture capital and technology.

00:22:27.000 I see the world as we're going to build something that's better for everybody.

00:22:31.000 I'm fundamentally an optimist.

00:22:33.000 But when it comes to the control over our own society, we're in a zero-sum battle with these folks.

00:22:39.000 Either they're going to win or we're going to win and there's no real middle ground.

00:22:42.000 So there's a superstructure that's been created outside of anything that is outlined in the United States Constitution.

00:22:50.000 And we know it.

00:22:51.000 We call it the ruling class.

00:22:52.000 But to be more specific, it's the people that sign this.

00:22:55.000 And if you're on radio, you say, what are you talking about?

00:22:57.000 This is a double page ad in the New York Times where it says, we stand for democracy and all these ridiculous platitudes and statements signed by, what do you say, JD?

00:23:05.000 300 names on here?

00:23:06.000 Easily.

00:23:06.000 400 names?

00:23:08.000 Just kind of eyeballing it.

00:23:09.000 Of every type of group, right?

00:23:10.000 There's lawyers, law firms, celebrities, nonprofit organizations, individuals, corporations.

00:23:17.000 Basically, they are flexing their muscle.

00:23:21.000 They are saying, if you keep doing this, the beatings will continue until morale improves.

00:23:28.000 If you're a Georgia legislator, the Georgia governor, any politician in these societies, if you don't do what these people want you to do, they can inflict pain on you.

00:23:28.000 Well, and think about this.

00:23:38.000 That's power.

00:23:40.000 That is how you define power.

00:23:41.000 That's, you know, if you're a legislator, you know, the governor of Ohio once told me the business of the governor is business, meaning the job of the governor is jobs.

00:23:50.000 Like my job is to go to the bottom of the state.

00:23:52.000 Governor Thompson said that?

00:23:53.000 Yeah.

00:23:54.000 That's a strange thing to say.

00:23:56.000 But the idea is you need to bring good jobs into your own society.

00:24:00.000 That's the thing that you do.

00:24:01.000 If these people are threatening you, then you're going to bow down before them because they have the power to decide whether your citizens are in destitution or have a middle-class lifestyle.

00:24:13.000 Of course, these people are in charge.

00:24:14.000 And I think about this, one of the big problems that we have in American society, just generation after generation, is the expanding power of the administrative state.

00:24:23.000 And if it means anything to be in control of the executive, I would think that it means you can fire the people who work for you, right?

00:24:31.000 I was elected president.

00:24:33.000 If you're Donald Trump, if you're Charlie Kirk, elected president tomorrow, and you can't fire the people that work for you, then you're not actually in control of your own government because those are the people who carry out the policies.

00:24:44.000 And I see these law firms, and I guarantee some of these firms were involved in the various court decisions that took power away from the president to fire people in the executive.

00:24:54.000 So it's all just this constant cycle of shifting power away from people, from their constitutional self-government, to our new corporate oligarchy.

00:25:02.000 And again, like we've just got to call it out and we've got to stop it.

00:25:05.000 And the way it needs to be articulated is we have this albatross leviathan of a federal government and then a corporate government.

00:25:13.000 And one of those you sort of vote for.

00:25:15.000 One of those you can sue in the courts.

00:25:18.000 You at least have some taxpayer rights, sort of.

00:25:22.000 And as Tucker famously said, look, they take Arbor Day off in the government.

00:25:28.000 They're not exactly in a hurry to invoke massive social change.

00:25:34.000 I mean that as a compliment.

00:25:37.000 I mean, I don't know if it's a compliment.

00:25:39.000 They're just slow moving, right?

00:25:41.000 And they have a lot of power, but we've been trained in the conservative movement to say that's the only threat of power we should care about.

00:25:50.000 That's the only threat of power.

00:25:51.000 The only threat of power is a federal regulator knocking on your door.

00:25:53.000 By the way, that's a very legitimate thing. 0.79

00:25:55.000 And you're seeing unfair sentencing towards people that are doing one thing and BLM people go fair. 0.97

00:26:01.000 I'm all for that. 0.99

00:26:02.000 And I haven't lost my enthusiasm for that.

00:26:06.000 What I think we're all trying to say, though, is, well, you have to have a much more broader and more comprehensive view of who's actually in charge.

00:26:13.000 And what if I told you that these people are actually a hierarchy above the fourth branch of government?

00:26:19.000 Talk about how these people are actually calling the shots above the FDA, above the IRS, above the SEC, that the celebrities, the corporations, the sports stars, the nonprofit organizations and the lawyers and the academics and the colleges, they actually have muscle over our government.

00:26:37.000 That's exactly right.

00:26:38.000 Yeah, so this happens in a couple of different ways.

00:26:40.000 It happens through cultural power directly, and then it happens through government power indirectly.

00:26:44.000 Because of course, you know, when Google, Twitter, Facebook, when they censor private citizens, they're very often doing it at the whim of these leaders, right?

00:26:57.000 It's not like Donald Trump or Joe Biden is telling Google or Twitter to censor people.

00:27:04.000 They're doing it out of their own accord.

00:27:06.000 And even when the government does get involved, like Richard Burr, I think this, not Richard Burr, Dick Blumenthal, the senator from Connecticut, is constantly telling people that you need to censor folks.

00:27:16.000 Well, Twitter can ignore that or not ignore it.

00:27:19.000 That's ultimately in control of the Twitter sort of corporate hierarchy.

00:27:24.000 And so this concentrated power does have a remarkable effect on how people live their lives.

00:27:28.000 The other piece of this is it also affects like what you're allowed to say.

00:27:31.000 So just to give you an example, very personal to you.

00:27:35.000 When I went on your show a few weeks ago, we had a great conversation.

00:27:38.000 Somebody said, why did you go on his show?

00:27:40.000 He's a white supremacist, which I actually never heard about you.

00:27:45.000 And I've been called a white, I've been called a white supremacist in the Washington Post.

00:27:48.000 When that happened to me, I lost investors over that.

00:27:51.000 I lost in friends, I lost friends over that.

00:27:53.000 No, no, no, no.

00:27:54.000 The Washington Post.

00:27:55.000 But I'm saying the accusation levied against you, it's been levied against me.

00:27:58.000 You lose commercial benefits.

00:28:01.000 You lose your ability to earn a living.

00:28:02.000 Yes.

00:28:03.000 You lose friends over it.

00:28:04.000 Who's levying those accusations?

00:28:06.000 That's not like a primarily a government thing.

00:28:09.000 That's these corporations who use that accusation to silence people who criticize them.

00:28:13.000 Our mutual friend Tucker Carlson, why do they try so hard to destroy them, destroy him?

00:28:19.000 Because they know he's actually a threat to their power.

00:28:22.000 And so every time they start a boycott campaign against him, every time they try to call him something that he isn't, what they're doing is they're flexing their muscles and saying, you need to shut up and sit down.

00:28:32.000 Mercifully, he hasn't done that yet.

00:28:34.000 But this is really what it's about.

00:28:36.000 It's controlling what you think, what you say, where you live, what you can do for a living.

00:28:40.000 That's power, and it exists in our corporate class in a much more significant way than it has in American history, I think.

00:28:47.000 And it seems like it's intensified.

00:28:48.000 And where I get really angry, I pound the table angry.

00:28:52.000 And I just had a Republican congressman here a couple of days ago.

00:28:56.000 He just like failure to compute, right?

00:28:56.000 He just didn't.

00:29:00.000 And he's like, oh, well, you know, the corporations will come around.

00:29:02.000 I say, you really don't understand what's happening right now.

00:29:05.000 Do you?

00:29:06.000 They are on team left or team totalitarian, whatever you want to call it.

00:29:10.000 And you guys cut their corporate taxes.

00:29:13.000 You've defended their oligarchy because you thought deep down they'll contribute to your political campaigns.

00:29:18.000 They're not doing that anymore.

00:29:18.000 Guess what?

00:29:20.000 And so you gave them every handout in the books.

00:29:22.000 Meanwhile, they pillaged our middle class. 0.52

00:29:26.000 They deindustrialized our economy.

00:29:28.000 They sent pink slips to millions of blue-collar workers in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin saying, no, no, we're going to go take a Gulfstream to Wuhan so we can go make, you know, t-shirts for less and go bring in a bunch of plastic that our country doesn't need so that I can go get points on the deal at McKinsey so I can go buy a third yacht in the Bahamas.

00:29:46.000 Meanwhile, the country is going into absolute chaos.

00:29:50.000 And what did our Republicans do?

00:29:51.000 They're like, oh, we must defend it for free trade purposes.

00:29:53.000 Like, I'm not going to take that anymore.

00:29:55.000 That's insane.

00:29:56.000 Absolutely not.

00:29:57.000 Absolutely not.

00:29:58.000 And again, what these corporations are doing, I think, is violating a sacred obligation that citizens of this country have.

00:30:08.000 Yes.

00:30:08.000 We all benefit from this in incredible ways.

00:30:11.000 Like, you've had an amazing life.

00:30:12.000 I've had an amazing life.

00:30:14.000 I came from nothing.

00:30:15.000 I've got a beautiful wife.

00:30:16.000 I've got two kids who I love to death.

00:30:18.000 I've got a cool job.

00:30:20.000 That sense that this country has given you something should come along with a sense that you owe the country something.

00:30:26.000 You owe an obligation for your debt to the people who made this country great.

00:30:30.000 I want to complete the point here, JD, that you talked about of this idea of some sort of loyalty to that which is around you, the sacrifice that was made before you, that you are not the first person to grace the terrain of this country.

00:30:44.000 That there is a system that was built by people for a reason so you can succeed.

00:30:49.000 I live a nice life.

00:30:50.000 You live a nice life.

00:30:53.000 The motivation I have and that you have is actually less about trying to just maximize the amount of short-term pleasure.

00:31:00.000 It actually, it's instead of kind of just trying to save the promise and the experiment of America.

00:31:05.000 That's exactly right.

00:31:05.000 Yep.

00:31:06.000 I think a fundamental conservative principle is that people benefit from and like to be rooted.

00:31:12.000 They like to be rooted in their values, in their faith, in their communities.

00:31:16.000 And, you know, if I could, if I could just sort of segue just a little bit to the way in which the left is attacking American history, right?

00:31:25.000 Why is this such a big problem?

00:31:26.000 Like, I think you and I react viscerally to it, right?

00:31:28.000 I've been trying to think to myself, why am I so mad that the left is attacking American history?

00:31:32.000 And it sort of dawned on me.

00:31:33.000 You know, my grandmother was not an educated woman.

00:31:35.000 She did not even complete high school. 0.98

00:31:37.000 Mamma. 0.99

00:31:37.000 Mama. 0.99

00:31:38.000 But she knew the battles that General Patton had won in North Africa by heart.

00:31:43.000 I mean, she was like a military historian when it came to World War II.

00:31:46.000 In that sense, that she had been part of accomplishing something in World War II.

00:31:51.000 You know, America is not just abstractions, right?

00:31:53.000 It's a people that went and did great things.

00:31:56.000 That was passed on to me, even though, of course, I did nothing to help in World War II.

00:32:01.000 I felt a certain pride, a certain sense of place and obligation that came from that.

00:32:05.000 And I want to pass that on to my son, right?

00:32:07.000 The thing that connects us as Americans, my grandmother to my son, they never met because my grandmother passed 15 years ago, is that sense of a shared common national purpose.

00:32:20.000 And what these corporations are doing and what our ruling class is doing is it's destroying that sense of national purpose.

00:32:26.000 It's delinking us from our past and from our future.

00:32:30.000 And this is why I double and triple down because our history is actually beautiful.

00:32:35.000 Yes.

00:32:37.000 It's, for example, the Northwest Territories, of which Ohio is included, was the first sovereign land that went out of its way to explicitly ban slavery, ratified by the U.S. Congress as its first act of Congress.

00:32:50.000 So, how can anyone say we were founded on slavery?

00:32:52.000 So, if the founders actually wanted slavery, then what is now known as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Iowa, the Northwest Territories, they would have said, no, no, slavery is going to be expanding.

00:33:04.000 No, the founders actually went out of their way.

00:33:05.000 They said, these are going to be three territories that 1777, the year after the Declaration was signed, Vermont abolishes slavery.

00:33:14.000 This idea of delinking us, I love that term, of our connective tissue as Americans, it's intentional.

00:33:21.000 Yes, it is.

00:33:23.000 It's intentional because it makes us easier to manipulate, makes us easier to turn against each other.

00:33:27.000 And I think if I'm being conspiratorial, you know, I'm a Christian and I believe in the devil, it makes us weaker in the face of spiritual challenges to our core as a people.

00:33:37.000 If we're, you know, I'm not a fan of war, I know that you're not either, but we're eventually going to have to fight another battle that will happen in human affairs.

00:33:44.000 I think that there are evil people, and sometimes you have to fight those evil people.

00:33:47.000 But if you want to fight them successfully, you need soldiers who are going into battle believing that they're fighting for something valuable, a sense of connectedness, a sense of purpose.

00:33:58.000 People don't fight for abstractions, they fight for the people around them, they fight for the people back home, they fight for their shared sense of national purpose.

00:34:05.000 If you destroy it, you fundamentally destroy us as a people.

00:34:09.000 I totally agree.

00:34:10.000 And there's no need to be conspiratorial because they're admitting what they're doing.

00:34:14.000 That's right.

00:34:16.000 I say this all the time.

00:34:17.000 I say, I can use their own public sources, their own public comments to make every single one of the points.

00:34:23.000 I always joke around.

00:34:24.000 I say, stay off the message boards.

00:34:26.000 You don't need conspiracy theories.

00:34:27.000 Just deal with what they're publishing in the New York Times every single day.

00:34:30.000 You don't need to go that level deeper of that stuff that's not true.

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00:35:55.000 So JD, I want to talk about something that I think is one of the reasons why we're losing ground, which is the Overton window.

00:36:01.000 The Overton window is a theory, ideas that go on a spectrum or a continuum from unthinkable to public policy.

00:36:10.000 And how do you move things along that window?

00:36:12.000 We see that here today with some of the breaking news.

00:36:15.000 And we can play a little bit of sound here, which I think would be helpful for some of our radio listeners, which is about expanding the United States Supreme Court.

00:36:22.000 Now, they're not going to do this immediately.

00:36:24.000 It's a very radical idea.

00:36:26.000 So why are they doing it?

00:36:27.000 Well, they're trying to open the window so that all of a sudden the American zeitgeist, it's acceptable to talk about expanding the U.S. Supreme Court.

00:36:35.000 Let's go to Cut 83, please.

00:36:37.000 Representative Jerry Nadler, hard to believe he's still in Congress.

00:36:40.000 Cut 83.

00:36:42.000 As our country has grown, so too to the Supreme Court.

00:36:45.000 13 justices for 13 circuits is a logical progression.

00:36:49.000 And that is another reason why I'm glad to join my colleagues in introducing the Judiciary Act of 2021 to establish the Supreme Court size as 13.

00:37:01.000 And it also will enable us to do justice and to rectify the great injustice that was done in packing the court.

00:37:10.000 And some people will say we're packing the court.

00:37:12.000 We're not packing it.

00:37:13.000 We're unpacking it.

00:37:14.000 So that's their justification.

00:37:15.000 They're unpacking it.

00:37:16.000 They don't need to make arguments anymore, though, because they're willing to use their power.

00:37:20.000 They're willing to do what they have vested in them.

00:37:24.000 And therefore, they're saying, what's the difference?

00:37:27.000 Cut 86, Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts.

00:37:30.000 The Republicans stole two seats on the Supreme Court.

00:37:33.000 We undo the damage by restoring the balance.

00:37:36.000 Before I play CUT 86, I hope you guys understand one political party is playing for keeps.

00:37:41.000 The other one's trying to win a coffee shop debate.

00:37:43.000 Cut 86.

00:37:45.000 The Republicans stole two seats on the Supreme Court, and now it is up to us to repair that damage.

00:37:53.000 Our democracy is in jeopardy today because the Supreme Court standing is sorely damaged.

00:38:01.000 And the way we repair it is straightforward.

00:38:04.000 We undo the damage that the Republicans have done by restoring balance.

00:38:10.000 And we do it by adding four seats to the court to create a 13-member Supreme Court.

00:38:18.000 So without getting into the specifics of this, because we know it's a bad idea, let's talk about how, what strategy they employing.

00:38:27.000 JD, moving the Overton window.

00:38:30.000 Republicans' big idea that they've unveiled to the country in the last two months is repealing the estate tax.

00:38:36.000 Meanwhile, Democrats are saying, let's add seats to the Supreme Court.

00:38:39.000 What's going on here?

00:38:40.000 Well, what's going on is that this is like going to be a three-step process, right?

00:38:44.000 So the initial reaction, even from some mainstream journalists, is going to be, this is crazy, right?

00:38:48.000 This is radical.

00:38:49.000 You can't do this.

00:38:50.000 And, you know, step two is going to be, well, this is like a left-wing idea, but the Democratic Party is a big tent.

00:38:55.000 And then step three will be like, this is a totally reasonable proposal and we should just do this, right?

00:38:59.000 And that'll happen super quickly, in part because they'll have the support of our corporate oligarchy all along the way.

00:39:06.000 But yeah, to your point, it also means the Democratic Party just plays for keeps, right?

00:39:10.000 I hate this idea, but I kind of admire the fact that Democrats are trying to win.

00:39:15.000 And I wish our people would try to win for our voters because they're doing something.

00:39:20.000 This is a big idea.

00:39:22.000 And if a Republican pushed a similarly big idea, half of the GOP caucus would run away from it.

00:39:27.000 They would say, this is terrible.

00:39:28.000 This is too radical.

00:39:29.000 This is too uncomfortable.

00:39:31.000 And it's just like, you know, Republicans have this little voice in the back of their heads that says, in the face of big ideas, you should be a coward and run away from it.

00:39:41.000 And we should maybe learn something from the fact that Democrats are willing to use power to accomplish their objectives.

00:39:46.000 It's just, that's what politics is.

00:39:49.000 We're too afraid of it.

00:39:50.000 And there's this belief by some that, oh, they're being so radical, it'll swing back in the election.

00:39:55.000 And that's just kind of this pendulum theory.

00:39:58.000 I don't know if I agree with that.

00:39:59.000 I think they're actually going to move the electorate with them if they're presenting a destination.

00:40:07.000 Yes.

00:40:08.000 If they're presenting a goal, why are Republicans so afraid or unwilling, or the third, they're unable to articulate a big agenda?

00:40:18.000 What should the big agenda be?

00:40:19.000 What do we stand for?

00:40:20.000 Is it corporate tax cuts?

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:22.000 No, no, it's not.

00:40:23.000 Yeah, it's people are willing.

00:40:25.000 I mean, I just want to address this point because it's very important.

00:40:27.000 People are willing to follow leadership.

00:40:29.000 If you articulate a vision of what society should be, people will follow you to it.

00:40:33.000 The Democrats have their vision of society that they're selling to the country.

00:40:36.000 You know, what is our vision of society?

00:40:38.000 I mean, I think that it's very simple.

00:40:40.000 It's if you're a hardworking guy, you should be able to support a family on a good middle-class job.

00:40:47.000 You should be able to raise your children to love their country, to love their family, to share in your values, and you should be able to participate in our shared American society.

00:40:57.000 It's that simple.

00:40:58.000 It's babies, it's kids, it's marriages and families, it's good middle-class jobs.

00:41:03.000 That's our vision.

00:41:04.000 And we get so caught up in these abstractions.

00:41:08.000 Like we're focused on the economic growth numbers, we're focused on the corporate growth, the corporate tax rate.

00:41:13.000 I want a society where a normal person can support a family.

00:41:17.000 That's it.

00:41:18.000 On a single income. 0.76

00:41:19.000 I don't want any more of the, you know, parents have to work at the prime of their kids' lives 70 hours a week.

00:41:26.000 You send them off to some corporate daycare because you can't afford the necessities of life unless you do some.

00:41:31.000 We want people to be able to support families on a good single middle-class American wage.

00:41:36.000 That's our vision.

00:41:36.000 And I think it's simple.

00:41:37.000 Let's get specific about that.

00:41:39.000 So Oren Cass was on our program.

00:41:41.000 I don't think he went far enough yesterday.

00:41:42.000 He's fun, and we had a good time.

00:41:45.000 And it was kind of funny.

00:41:45.000 He's great.

00:41:46.000 He's like, well, we need economic progress.

00:41:48.000 I said, why do we need economic progress?

00:41:50.000 He was kind of like, we had a really good back and forth.

00:41:53.000 I said, I made the argument.

00:41:54.000 I said, if nothing gets any technologically better for the rest of my life, I'll be totally happy.

00:41:59.000 I don't need another iPhone.

00:42:01.000 I actually think that's destroying our humanity.

00:42:03.000 I actually think this idolatry, I don't think I'm accusing him of this.

00:42:06.000 I just think this focus on economic progress for economic progress sake is really destructive.

00:42:11.000 I'd rather rebuild families and character and have certain things decline like opioid rates and suicide and divorce.

00:42:19.000 Anyway, that's a separate thing.

00:42:20.000 But Oren was brilliant, brilliant when he talks about this idea of in the 1980s, you could work 32 weeks a year.

00:42:29.000 Can you talk about this?

00:42:30.000 It's really important.

00:42:31.000 Yeah, it's basically how hard do you have to work as a single wage earner to support a good middle-class American lifestyle?

00:42:39.000 And in the 1980s, that was about 32 weeks a year.

00:42:42.000 And as I understand it, I don't have Oren's exact numbers in front of me.

00:42:44.000 It's 53 weeks.

00:42:46.000 You have to work more than 52 weeks in a year, right?

00:42:48.000 Which, of course, there are only 52 weeks in a year.

00:42:50.000 The other person has to get into debt.

00:42:52.000 You go into debt or the other person has to enter the workforce.

00:42:52.000 Yeah.

00:42:55.000 And I tend to think about this at like the phases of our life, right?

00:42:58.000 Think about like the life cycle that all of us go through, right?

00:43:02.000 We're brought into the world.

00:43:03.000 Are we treated as inconveniences to abort or to ship off to a daycare?

00:43:08.000 Or are we treated as blessings that are welcomed into the world?

00:43:11.000 We build our society around it.

00:43:13.000 We go to school.

00:43:14.000 What do we learn in our school?

00:43:15.000 Do we learn to be devoted to our family, to our country, to our communities, or do we learn to hate all of them?

00:43:21.000 We go into the workforce.

00:43:22.000 Are we treated as people where if we're willing to work hard, we can support a good American family on that wage?

00:43:28.000 We can do something we're proud of.

00:43:30.000 And of course, all of us are going to leave this world at some point.

00:43:33.000 Do we leave this world surrounded by friends and family who we built a life with or in a corporate nursing home surrounded by strangers in masks?

00:43:41.000 We have to build a vision of society that's more oriented around people, around the families they have, around the children they want to have.

00:43:49.000 That to me is like the fundamentally conservative vision of our society.

00:43:53.000 And it's why the Democrats are so different.

00:43:55.000 I mean, the Democrats, you know, we get so caught up in these abstractions and it annoys me because the Democrat, the problem with the Democrats spending bills, right?

00:44:04.000 If you're an establishment Republican, is it spends too much money?

00:44:07.000 Well, yeah, it spends too much money, but what does it spend money on?

00:44:10.000 It spends money on Democrats' corporate priorities.

00:44:13.000 Does it make it easier to have a family?

00:44:16.000 No.

00:44:17.000 Does it make it easier to ship your children off to daycare?

00:44:20.000 Does it make it easier to build a middle-class life?

00:44:20.000 Yes.

00:44:23.000 No.

00:44:24.000 Does it make it easier to work the classic Democratic model of the family in a big city where you have two income earners, maybe one kid, maybe zero kids?

00:44:33.000 They're actively subsidizing their vision of society, which is like, you know, two people living in a pot in New York City, paying $4,000 a month for one bedroom apartment.

00:44:43.000 We should be actively promoting our vision of society, which is marriages, families, children living together in communities supporting a shared national identity and shared national purpose.

00:44:54.000 We just talk too much about spending or too much about tax rates or too much about the abstract things and not enough about our values.

00:45:00.000 Yes.

00:45:01.000 And replicating our values to our children so we can still have a nation.

00:45:07.000 And what I tell people all the time is if you walk down, there's still some neighborhoods like this in Scottsdale.

00:45:13.000 People have American flags flying.

00:45:15.000 That's part of their identity.

00:45:15.000 Why?

00:45:17.000 It gives them a source of happiness, connection, something bigger than themselves, something that they can identify with.

00:45:25.000 They don't have a Coca-Cola flag flying in their yard.

00:45:29.000 Something to think about.

00:45:31.000 So JD, we're going through a lot of different topics here.

00:45:33.000 All of them are really important.

00:45:34.000 I want to get to the two words, the two things that I think people can do.

00:45:38.000 Was there anything in particular you wanted to piggyback on that we were talking about?

00:45:41.000 If not, I have a question of what we can actually do about this.

00:45:44.000 Okay.

00:45:45.000 So corporate oligarchy.

00:45:48.000 People are upset.

00:45:50.000 How do we change this?

00:45:51.000 What are the remedies?

00:45:52.000 Give me action steps.

00:45:53.000 Yeah.

00:45:54.000 So this is really tough.

00:45:56.000 And I think there are a couple of different ideas that I've been kicking around.

00:45:59.000 And, you know, we're just going to chat about them.

00:46:03.000 I've been playing around with this with a couple of friends who work in the policy world.

00:46:06.000 So the first is a lot of the problem with the woke corporations thing, and not all of it, but a lot of it comes from the fact that we have a huge divide in our economy between the digital economy and the real economy.

00:46:17.000 I totally agree.

00:46:18.000 And specifically, let me give you an example, right?

00:46:20.000 So you take like a steel mill that operates in Ohio.

00:46:24.000 Their corporate tax is levied based on where their assets are.

00:46:29.000 Like where are you doing business, right?

00:46:31.000 Now, if you're a steel mill in Ohio, it's obvious where your assets are.

00:46:34.000 It's where your factories are, right?

00:46:35.000 So you pay an American corporate tax rate based on you're doing business there.

00:46:40.000 Now, if you're Google and your assets are on tangible, or in Apple, they're in Dublin or they're in Bermuda.

00:46:45.000 And so basically our tax system and our regulatory system penalizes companies that are working in the real world.

00:46:51.000 It rewards companies that are working in the digital world.

00:46:53.000 Now, who are the biggest offenders on the woke capital problem?

00:46:57.000 Who are the biggest sensor drivers?

00:46:59.000 It's all the digital economy.

00:47:01.000 So I think that if you basically brought our real economy and made it, gave it an advantage, not just it's right now.

00:47:07.000 It has a huge disadvantage, but if we gave our real economy an advantage compared to our digital economy, I think that would be a big, big drive.

00:47:13.000 Let's get more specific.

00:47:14.000 So by the digital economy, you mean the sales forces of the world.

00:47:18.000 You mean Twitter?

00:47:19.000 You mean Google?

00:47:20.000 You mean companies that are quite, that are actually probably really overvalued.

00:47:25.000 I mean, you're in this space.

00:47:25.000 Correct.

00:47:27.000 You know it better than I do, but they're getting multiples on deals that are unbelievable.

00:47:30.000 Even in the public markets, you're talking 80, 90 times multiples in the public markets, which I'm not one to say the market's going to go down.

00:47:38.000 I've been wrong.

00:47:39.000 My timing's been wrong, but you can only be at a 90 times multiple for so long until either inflation or a little sobriety kicks in.

00:47:46.000 And that's just basic economics.

00:47:48.000 So, what do you mean by the real economy?

00:47:49.000 Do you mean people that are producing stuff you can touch?

00:47:52.000 That's exactly right.

00:47:52.000 Yes.

00:47:53.000 So, producing stuff you can touch, goods, construction workers, construction of new buildings, new office complexes.

00:48:01.000 I mean, real things where what's generating the income is a thing that a person can touch and can handle, versus the thing that's generating the income is a digital asset.

00:48:12.000 It exists in the cloud.

00:48:13.000 It's intellectual property, but it's not real.

00:48:15.000 It's not something you can touch and handle.

00:48:17.000 And because it's not real, you can move it anywhere you want to.

00:48:20.000 And this is, by the way, why the corporate tax debate in this country is so jacked up.

00:48:24.000 Like, it's one thing to say corporations should pay lower or higher taxes, but this is why the Democrats, they're so much better at politics than establishment Republicans, because they'll raise the corporate tax rate.

00:48:35.000 But what they'll really do is they'll make it easier for their digital friends, the Googles and Silicon Valleys of the world, to avoid it, to go to Singapore, to avoid that corporate tax rate.

00:48:46.000 They'll make it fall hardest on Republican companies working in Republican areas, the people who are working in the real economy.

00:48:53.000 Even the businesses in the real economy, even big businesses, are much more Republican than folks who are working in the digital economy.

00:48:59.000 So I think if we penalize the digital economy relative to the real economy through our regulatory system, through our tax system, it would actually tamp down a lot on the world capital problem.

00:49:07.000 So, but a strict libertarian would say, who cares if it's in the digital economy?

00:49:12.000 Right?

00:49:13.000 It's intellectual property.

00:49:14.000 They had to take a risk.

00:49:15.000 They had to put something in the marketplace.

00:49:17.000 Why are you going to favor something that's tangible over something that makes people more productive?

00:49:23.000 Because it's good for America.

00:49:24.000 That's my view.

00:49:25.000 As you know, I'm not a doctrine or a libertarian, but I think that people making things, doing things with their hands, having a manufacturing and an industrial base, that's good for America.

00:49:36.000 And importantly, the companies that are in the real economy that depend on middle-class workers in my home state of Ohio and other places all across the country, they're not as insane as the digital economy folks who are driving so much of the problems.

00:49:49.000 Well, and I would also make the argument: if you're in tangible assets, it's by definition less speculative and it's actually better for the economy, better for the monetary system, better for middle-class workers, better for the purchase power of the dollar.

00:50:02.000 Because when you get into these highly questionable deals where all of a sudden a company is 90 times revenue and they're like, oh, no, no, we don't even do revenue anymore.

00:50:12.000 We do users.

00:50:13.000 What kind of crazy town way to do valuations?

00:50:16.000 Oh, users?

00:50:18.000 Really?

00:50:18.000 That's how we're going to value companies now.

00:50:20.000 How about I want to go value someone that makes something I can touch?

00:50:23.000 So I see I was playing devil's advocate, obviously, but that narrative is the dominant of the Washington, D.C. public policy class.

00:50:31.000 I believe the two most important things are courage and truth.

00:50:35.000 And it's famously said that without courage, none of the other virtues matter, right?

00:50:41.000 Without the capacity to stand up and say something and do something, which is why I love the fact that you are not choosing a comfortable lifestyle.

00:50:48.000 You very well could have just stayed in venture capital, kept your head down, probably wrote Hillbilly Elegy number two, right?

00:50:53.000 I'm sure you have plenty of book deals that are clamoring of people that want you to write another one, but you're doing something where you're going to get a lot of hate articles, a lot of things.

00:50:59.000 That takes courage, and you actually have the IQ and the charisma to back it up, which is so rare.

00:51:05.000 Talk about what can be done here because people feel helpless.

00:51:09.000 Yeah, you know, I think that the first thing is we just have to have the courage, the truth, the willpower to actually effectuate our vision of society.

00:51:18.000 And there's so much eggheadery in DC that's really built around complicating this fundamental truth.

00:51:24.000 We can get into the policy details, and we've gotten a little there, and we'll get further interests less.

00:51:30.000 But you've got to be willing to do the things that are necessary to accomplish these things.

00:51:34.000 So, for example, right, we know that woke capital is a huge problem.

00:51:38.000 It's intervening in our democracy, it's making it harder for people to live their lives, they're getting fired or censored for speaking in their minds.

00:51:45.000 You could easily punish the corporations that ship jobs overseas that involve themselves in our political process.

00:51:52.000 Instead, we give them special privileges, we shield them from any political, uh, political thing, and we're surprised that they act like they're completely untethered from reality because they are not to be cynical, but that's not going to happen anytime soon in the U.S. Senate.

00:52:08.000 So, then, what is what is the state-based thing?

00:52:11.000 Should South Dakota say, you know what?

00:52:13.000 If you ship jobs out, I don't even know if they're probably legally out.

00:52:16.000 Why not?

00:52:17.000 We're now going to say if you ship jobs out of South Dakota to a foreign country, you're getting taxed.

00:52:22.000 Is that a mechanism?

00:52:23.000 Yeah, I think there are certainly things you can do at the state level.

00:52:25.000 I think Ron DeSantis in Florida has done a lot of really terrific things on big tech.

00:52:29.000 He's made it harder to implement vaccine passports, made it harder for big tech to censor people within the state of Florida.

00:52:36.000 That's very important.

00:52:37.000 But I do think this requires a national solution.

00:52:40.000 It's very hard if you're a state legislator in South Dakota to tell Amazon, Google, Facebook that you're not going to do what they want you to do because then you could lose broadband.

00:52:51.000 So, your people don't have access to modern communication.

00:52:53.000 You could lose investment capital.

00:52:55.000 They do have a lot of power, and I think this is something the American nation state has to marshal behind.

00:53:00.000 So, it's not going to happen overnight, but like this conversation and conversations you're having with Warren Cass, with Tucker, like these things are starting to germinate.

00:53:10.000 We're starting to build the institutions necessary to fight back against this.

00:53:13.000 Are you seeing momentum, JD?

00:53:14.000 Absolutely.

00:53:15.000 Talk about that.

00:53:16.000 You know, I do a lot of because I am thinking about running for Senate in Ohio, and so I do a lot of events in Ohio.

00:53:20.000 I talk to a lot of people, and what I'm always so amazed by is that I go in there and I've got this voice in the back of my mind saying, Well, you know, you don't want to get too aggressive on this corporate power stuff because these are, again, these are people who care about the things that they care more about limited government than they do about their own livelihoods.

00:53:40.000 They care more about these slogans.

00:53:41.000 That's sort of the voice that I have in the back of my mind.

00:53:43.000 And I go and give these speeches, and I always find that the people that I'm talking to, like normal, hardworking, middle-class people, are far more radical than you and I are on this stuff.

00:53:52.000 It's actually striking.

00:53:54.000 Like, they don't want to live under our corporate oligarchy anymore.

00:53:57.000 They want to punish these people, they want to fight back.

00:54:00.000 They're just looking for people who are leading them.

00:54:02.000 Well, that's part of the charm of Sherrod Brown.

00:54:05.000 Sherrod Brown, for better or for worse, I'd say for worse, generally, he positioned himself as a crusader against the corporate class.

00:54:14.000 And he won pretty convincingly many times in Ohio.

00:54:17.000 Yeah, Sherrod Brown has always been a very effective politician because he's positioned himself as like working man, this everyday guy who's fighting against corporate power.

00:54:17.000 That's right.

00:54:26.000 The thing that I would love to say to Sherrod Brown, I've talked to him a couple times, but very briefly, is like, what do you say now that your party is now the most aligned with these people?

00:54:35.000 We talk about this New York Times presentation where hundreds of corporate leaders are aligning themselves against American democracy.

00:54:44.000 And who is the most like these people are almost all Democrats?

00:54:48.000 So there is this really interesting thing.

00:54:50.000 People call it the realignment, where working people are increasingly on the side of the Republican Party and the elites are on the side of the Democratic Party and they're waking up to it.

00:55:00.000 And I think Sherrod Brown's like his whole shtick is going to get old the more that it's clear that the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world are on his side.

00:55:08.000 They're not on working people.

00:55:09.000 Well, and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

00:55:11.000 But the reason they're quiet, though, is because their ultimate principle is power.

00:55:18.000 And so they're thinking to themselves, we'll regulate and break these companies up after.

00:55:24.000 That word after is the operative word right now in the progressive circles.

00:55:30.000 After.

00:55:30.000 That's exactly right.

00:55:31.000 And you see people like AOC who think of themselves as progressive champions defending some of our biggest tech companies from any type of real type of real action.

00:55:41.000 And we as Republicans, as conservatives, like the ball is in our court.

00:55:45.000 The American people are looking for someone who recognizes that the corporate oligarchy in this country is broken and fights back against it.

00:55:53.000 It's clearly not coming from the left.

00:55:55.000 It has to come from the right.

00:55:56.000 If it doesn't come from the right, it's not going to come from anywhere and we're going to lose our country.

00:55:59.000 So let's talk about the role of faith in your life and in our country.

00:56:03.000 I think it's fundamental.

00:56:04.000 And I recently have given a series of lectures and speeches at churches across the country.

00:56:09.000 And in fact, I think we have Pastor David Engelhardt in there, who's awesome.

00:56:12.000 He's doing a great job in New York City.

00:56:13.000 Anyone in New York, go to his church.

00:56:15.000 I think we've actually driven some people to his church.

00:56:17.000 It's awesome.

00:56:17.000 He's a board member at Turning Point.

00:56:19.000 And Pastor Rob McCoy and so many others have done such a wonderful job for our country.

00:56:23.000 And pastors are starting to wake up and they're starting to take their moral stance as the counselor to the king, which has always been the biblical stance of pastors in our nation.

00:56:32.000 Every great awakening in our country has played a different role.

00:56:34.000 First Great Awakening saved the country, started the country.

00:56:37.000 You know, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Roger Williams, activist pastors in the streets, tens of thousands of sermons that laid the foundation for liberty, as we talked about, the pursuit of virtue, not self-indulgence.

00:56:48.000 Second Great Awakening saved us from really a debauchery crisis in the 1820s.

00:56:53.000 Third Great Awakening abolished slavery.

00:56:54.000 Fourth Great Awakening, Billy Graham doesn't get credit for this.

00:56:57.000 Proudly stopped Soviet communism by himself.

00:57:00.000 No one talks about it.

00:57:01.000 In fact, we've kind of decided not to talk about how Billy Graham said of himself, quote, communism is Satan's religion.

00:57:07.000 The collectivism, too much power and too small a group of people, that's exactly what we're dealing with with corporatism here, isn't it?

00:57:13.000 So now the fifth grade awakening will either happen or not happen.

00:57:17.000 I'm trying my best to try to make it happen.

00:57:19.000 I'm not a pastor, just a Christian.

00:57:21.000 I believe you're Catholic and you converted to Catholicism.

00:57:23.000 I'm super interested in that.

00:57:26.000 Talk about your role of faith, your faith journey, the role of faith in America.

00:57:30.000 And will you talk openly about it in your race if you run?

00:57:33.000 I certainly will.

00:57:34.000 And, you know, my faith journey, I'll try to be brief here, is I grew up in an evangelical Protestant household.

00:57:40.000 Didn't go to church a whole lot, but faith was important to us.

00:57:43.000 We watched a lot of Billy Graham growing up with my mama.

00:57:46.000 She's just phenomenal.

00:57:47.000 She's, yeah, he's awesome.

00:57:48.000 She was awesome.

00:57:49.000 She loved him.

00:57:50.000 And, you know, I kind of did the thing that a lot of, I think, upwardly mobile kids do, where you go to college, you realize that faith is sort of unfavorable.

00:57:58.000 It becomes annoying to go to church.

00:58:00.000 And I really did lose my faith.

00:58:02.000 You know, I read books by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and I thought to myself, yeah, this is too smart for this stuff.

00:58:08.000 Exactly.

00:58:09.000 I'm too smart for this stuff.

00:58:10.000 That the mystics are so 2,000 years ago.

00:58:13.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:58:15.000 And the more that I got through America's class hierarchy, and all these people are obsessed with what's your credential?

00:58:22.000 Where did you go to school?

00:58:23.000 What kind of job do you have?

00:58:24.000 I kept on thinking, there's this voice in the back of my head that doesn't really care what kind of job I have.

00:58:30.000 It just wants me to be a good person.

00:58:32.000 It wants me to be a good husband to this girl that I had fallen in love with.

00:58:35.000 It wants me to be a good father to the children that we're going to have.

00:58:38.000 It wants those kids.

00:58:39.000 It doesn't care.

00:58:40.000 I don't care where my kids go to school.

00:58:42.000 I just want them to be good men.

00:58:43.000 I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old boy.

00:58:45.000 And the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that voice came from that mystical place 2,000 years ago. 0.58

00:58:52.000 And I had to go back to the Christian faith.

00:58:55.000 You know, in Catholicism, you really, you can overthink this stuff.

00:58:59.000 You can over-intellectualize this stuff.

00:59:00.000 The reason I became a Catholic is because it's just the oldest faith.

00:59:04.000 It seemed the most rooted and the most grounded.

00:59:07.000 I hate how our society feels so shiftless and so uprooted.

00:59:11.000 And the fact that it had survived as a faith through all of these trials and tribulations made me think that was the place for me.

00:59:18.000 But I'm not one of these people.

00:59:20.000 One of my dear friends, Chris Busker, we're going to go have dinner.

00:59:23.000 I'm going to go to Presbyterian tonight.

00:59:24.000 He's a hardcore Presbyterian.

00:59:26.000 We have these fun back and forths.

00:59:28.000 But it really is about Christ and it's about grace.

00:59:32.000 And if people are on the right page there, then I think.

00:59:35.000 Oh, I totally agree.

00:59:35.000 And I'm one of the most pro-Catholic evangelicals you'll ever meet.

00:59:39.000 And here's what I love.

00:59:40.000 I'll tell you what I love about the Catholic Church and what I don't like.

00:59:43.000 I love how it doesn't change because there's so much, there's progress and the next self-indulgent.

00:59:49.000 Like, no, I actually like the fact that they have a very structured, they have a structure, something I could touch, something I can feel, something I can attend.

00:59:58.000 I just have some theological differences.

00:59:59.000 And that stuff is, that's a difference I'm never going to pass.

01:00:03.000 But I appreciate that, though.

01:00:05.000 You're a young man.

01:00:06.000 Oh, there you go.

01:00:07.000 The joke.

01:00:08.000 The joke is true. 1.00

01:00:09.000 Evangelicals become Catholics. 0.99

01:00:11.000 Well, you know, you mentioned that not changing. 1.00

01:00:15.000 That was really important to me because you know, and people who read my book know, family instability, family trauma, divorce, those things really did wreak havoc on my life and my sister's life when we were kids.

01:00:25.000 And I really admired the Catholic view that marriage is a sacrament.

01:00:31.000 It is sacred.

01:00:32.000 Providential.

01:00:32.000 Absolutely.

01:00:33.000 And it's not just something that you can sort of willy-nilly get out of, right?

01:00:36.000 And I like that approach because I think that anchoring in the sacrament of marriage is a foundational part of Western civilization.

01:00:44.000 I totally agree.

01:00:45.000 And if you lose it, then kids have miserable lives because of it, and it causes a lot of problems.

01:00:51.000 And so, talk about the role that you think faith needs to play in America today.

01:00:56.000 Well, I think that if we're going to have a country, then we're going to have to have a real awakening of faith in this country.

01:01:03.000 You know, the thing that holds people together, that binds people together, is community.

01:01:07.000 And the community institution that has always worked the best, even if you're not a Christian, the community institution that's always been most important in this country has been the church, right?

01:01:17.000 That's where people get together.

01:01:18.000 That's where people support one another.

01:01:20.000 It's, you know, if you hate big government, as you and I do, you should love the role that the church can play in actually accomplishing some of these things that we rely on the government to do now.

01:01:32.000 And if you don't have stable, powerful, durable faith communities, then people are just sort of shiftless.

01:01:40.000 They're out on their own.

01:01:42.000 They're just consumers living in a commercial economy.

01:01:44.000 They're not people who are sharing a community.

01:01:46.000 But it gets worse than that because they're going to have to find a religion.

01:01:49.000 And the religion they find is this woketopia promise.

01:01:54.000 Yes, that's exactly right.

01:01:55.000 My friend Michael Lynn, he's a political scientist at the UT Austin.

01:01:59.000 He talks about how wokeism is not atheistic.

01:02:04.000 It's religious in nature.

01:02:05.000 It's explicitly religious.

01:02:06.000 It even has its own sacraments.

01:02:08.000 Right?

01:02:08.000 Yes.

01:02:09.000 It's its own theology.

01:02:10.000 Yeah, it has its own theology, its own liturgy.

01:02:13.000 It's way more mystical than Christianity.

01:02:15.000 Absolutely, it is.

01:02:16.000 And when you, you know, it's like G.K. Chesterton said, when you lose your faith, you don't believe in nothing.

01:02:21.000 You believe in anything.

01:02:22.000 And we have a generation of young people in this country who believe in anything, and that anything is a pretty destructive ideology.

01:02:28.000 I tell young people all the time: go read G.K. Chesterton, go read C.S. Lewis, and then tell me how big of an atheist you are.

01:02:34.000 Like, if you haven't at least had that kind of a just slow yourself down a little bit, you're not the first person ever to wrestle with these questions, then maybe you might have some meaning, which is really the crisis we have in our country right now.

01:02:50.000 JD, can you legislate morality?

01:02:52.000 Yes, you can.

01:02:53.000 Tell me why.

01:02:54.000 Well, look, I mean, the choices that people make are fundamentally a consequence of the choices that are available to them.

01:03:01.000 And if you limit the immoral choices that are available to them, you can promote virtue.

01:03:05.000 You can promote morality.

01:03:07.000 You can't do it all through public policy or through legislation.

01:03:10.000 But just think about, you know, my like sons, right?

01:03:14.000 I think about what I want them to become as men.

01:03:17.000 You can make the worst choices, drugs, pornography, less available to them through legislation.

01:03:25.000 And we should, because I want my kids to be good fathers, good husbands.

01:03:30.000 I don't want them to be faceless consumers who just sit at home all the time.

01:03:34.000 The predominant viewpoint of the Republican leadership class is that government must be indifferent on this.

01:03:40.000 That government shouldn't call balls and strikes, that instead we can have our own personal opinions.

01:03:45.000 But why would we tell someone that they can't shoot themselves up with heroin or chemically castrate themselves like Asa Hutchinson?

01:03:51.000 Because we want to live in a society where people are making good choices.

01:03:54.000 And we're fundamentally, you know, people are individuals, but they're very much formed by the community influence around them.

01:04:02.000 That's the key.

01:04:03.000 If you are seeing people shooting up heroin all around you, if you see people gender transitioning all around you, that starts to become a social pressure. 0.83

01:04:12.000 It becomes social pressure to behave a certain way.

01:04:14.000 And we want to put our social pressures on positive behaviors, not negative.

01:04:19.000 So here's the interesting question.

01:04:21.000 How much of what we would call the moral decay in America can be attributed to a material blame?

01:04:28.000 This is something conservatives don't like to talk about.

01:04:30.000 Was Marx right about any of this stuff?

01:04:32.000 That actual, that sometimes if all of a sudden you lose your job in eastern Ohio at a manufacturing plant, does that have a spiritual cost too?

01:04:40.000 Of course it does.

01:04:41.000 Of course it does.

01:04:42.000 People not having something to do, people not being proud of their own work, not having a community of fellow workers that they're participating in, that takes something away from people.

01:04:51.000 And it does destroy, it can destroy your sense of purpose.

01:04:54.000 It can destroy your sense of belonging in the world.

01:04:57.000 And absolutely, we see this again and again.

01:04:59.000 Every time the manufacturing jobs disappeared in an area, you saw heroin overdoses shoot through the roof.

01:05:06.000 You saw family breakdowns shoot through the roof.

01:05:08.000 And what do we care more about? 1.00

01:05:09.000 Cheap Chinese garbage or families that are intact and not dying of heroin overdose. 0.99

01:05:13.000 But JD, why doesn't that person just move to New York City? 1.00

01:05:16.000 What's wrong with them?

01:05:19.000 Well, one, they actually came from a place.

01:05:22.000 If they are from southeastern Ohio and that's where their family is, we should make it possible for people to build a life in the place that made them who they are.

01:05:30.000 They want their children to grow up being taken care of by their grandparents.

01:05:34.000 They want the church that made them who they are to be a part of their life.

01:05:38.000 People can move if they want to, but we can't tell every single person that community doesn't matter.

01:05:43.000 And that's what we tell them when they say, you should just move to New York City.

01:05:47.000 By the way, New York City is really expensive.

01:05:50.000 If the idea is that to have a middle-class job, you have to move to New York City and pay $4,000 for an apartment, then we're not actually promising the American dream to people.

01:06:01.000 We're promising them the American dream of the elite class of society.

01:06:06.000 So if and when, let's say you do run, your message, your sales pitch to the country and the conservative movement and the Republican Party is what?

01:06:18.000 My sales pitch is the American dream is about having a good job and being able to raise your family and being able to say what you want to say about the direction of this country.

01:06:28.000 And all of those things are being threatened by our corporate oligarchy.

01:06:32.000 If we want to have freedom and liberty, as our founders have understood it, we have to fight a bit against the Biden administration, yes, but we have to fight mostly against their corporate enablers.

01:06:43.000 And fight four things with specific objectives.

01:06:46.000 Increased church attendance, opioid use to go down, more children to be born in America, more things you can touch to be made here, wages to go up, and less tech billionaires that have discretionary capital to go influence public opinion in our Republic.

01:07:03.000 We're willing to use public policy to make those things happen.

01:07:05.000 I think children are an objective good.

01:07:08.000 They make men more connected to their families, to their communities.

01:07:12.000 They make people more invested in the future.

01:07:14.000 We should have more children.

01:07:16.000 And if we have to pay people to have more children, then we're going to do it.

01:07:20.000 We're going to do the things necessary to have a country.

01:07:22.000 We should pay people to have children.

01:07:24.000 You could say, oh, Charlie says it, then I could get. 1.00

01:07:25.000 But it shouldn't be controversial to say that we should have more American-born children than imported children coming into America. 0.99

01:07:32.000 100%. 0.77

01:07:33.000 And the people who, for example, Viktor Orban in Hungary has done this and worked.

01:07:38.000 And it worked.

01:07:39.000 And they have more children there.

01:07:40.000 And they're not just building their country off of a bunch of strangers.

01:07:44.000 They're building their country off of families and off of children.

01:07:47.000 There's this sociopathic thing that exists in the left where they think that immigrants and children are interchangeable.

01:07:53.000 I'm married to the daughter of immigrants.

01:07:54.000 I have nothing against immigrants. 0.97

01:07:56.000 But the idea that a stranger coming from South America or Europe or wherever is the same to me as a child in my own family is ridiculous. 1.00

01:08:04.000 You're a ridiculous person if you think. 1.00

01:08:06.000 Morally reprehensible, everybody. 1.00

01:08:07.000 That's JD Vance.

01:08:09.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:08:10.000 Email us your thoughts, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:08:14.000 And if you want to support our program, go to charliekirk.com slash support.

01:08:18.000 God bless you.

01:08:19.000 Speak to you soon.

The Charlie Kirk Show - April 16, 2021

How the NEW GOP Must Fight Back—with J.D. Vance

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