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00:00:26.000Hey 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.
00:00:37.000If 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.
00:01:52.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:04:26.000Yeah, I'm thinking pretty seriously about running for Senate in Ohio.
00:04:29.000So 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.
00:04:36.000Now, it's becoming, if you maybe sort of almost might run, I think I said that right.
00:04:53.000So I think a lot of people see the opportunity.
00:04:55.000But, 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.
00:05:05.000And I think they recognize that we're getting a little bit screwed by our corporations and somebody's got to do something about it.
00:05:10.000Well, 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?
00:05:22.000And I think that there's a really promising yet depressing trend.
00:05:27.000The promising trend is the voters are actually on the right side of these issues.
00:05:33.000It seems as if they're a lagging indicator of where the voters are.
00:05:36.000A 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?
00:05:45.000That somehow Asa Hutchinson wants children to be able to chemically castrate themselves.
00:05:51.000I think Tucker did a phenomenal job of exposing that.
00:05:54.000And he's like stunned and shocked that he can't invoke the spirit of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan.
00:06:01.000And all of a sudden, all the criticism goes away, right?
00:06:02.000That's basically how that interview went.
00:06:04.000He's like, I'm going to mention Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley and everyone's going to take it easy.
00:06:08.000Like, no, actually, our party is a lot different than the pro-corporate party of 1992.
00:06:15.000Walk us through where you think the voters actually are and how some Republican leaders are still somewhat shell-shocked by this.
00:06:23.000There'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.
00:06:29.000The voters feel very strongly that there's a direction that we should pursue, call it America first, call it populist, whatever.
00:06:35.000And so the voters, I think, are very, very awoke to this stuff.
00:06:40.000The 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.
00:06:50.000And when you're using a slogan, you're not really thinking anymore, right?
00:06:52.000So Asa Hutchinson kept on saying to Tucker Carlson, well, what about limited government, right?
00:07:14.000What 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?
00:07:24.000That's all government power that the left is using to accomplish its vision of society.
00:07:29.000And 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.
00:07:38.000It's that the left is willing to use power to accomplish its vision of society.
00:07:42.000And conservative leaders are terrified of it.
00:07:44.000It's like we don't want to use political power to accomplish anything for our voters.
00:07:49.000And the voters are saying, you've got the corporations on one side.
00:07:52.000You've got the cultural institutions on the other side.
00:07:54.000If we can't use political power to accomplish something good for ourselves, then we're screwed.
00:08:00.000So 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.
00:08:09.000And you gave a speech at the Edmund Burke Foundation Society and you said this.
00:09:21.000Like 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.
00:09:32.000It was actually like meaningfully participating in society, right?
00:09:57.000You can do something meaningful in the commercial sector.
00:10:00.000But it's also you get to speak your mind.
00:10:02.000That's what the First Amendment, of course, is all about.
00:10:05.000You get to participate in the public debate about this country.
00:10:08.000And 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.
00:10:18.000It's a corporation that's increasingly telling us that if you say the wrong things, you could lose your job.
00:10:23.000You could be censored on social media, which of course is the modern medium of communication.
00:10:27.000So the most important American liberty, maybe at least one of them, is the freedom of participation in this democratic society of ours.
00:10:34.000If you can't speak your mind, you don't have that liberty.
00:10:37.000Those are the freedoms we should be talking about, not just the freedom to like, you know, smoke a lot of weed.
00:10:52.000Yeah, 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.
00:11:47.000And now we have a group of our leaders of the opposition party, whatever that is now.
00:11:53.000And 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.
00:12:03.000And somehow my voters are still upset with me.
00:12:06.000They're a little bit confused by that.
00:12:51.000But 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.
00:13:04.000And 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?
00:13:10.000Like, well, what is woke capital, right?
00:13:12.000Well, first of all, these corporations are incorporated by the government.
00:13:16.000They 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.
00:13:25.000And 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.
00:13:34.000Well, they're not really just private companies.
00:13:36.000They're chartered by the U.S. government and they're charted to affect a social purpose.
00:13:41.000We decided, as a people, we were going to give these corporations certain protections so that they could accomplish a goal.
00:13:47.000Well, if they're not accomplishing that goal anymore, why are we still giving them special protections?
00:13:51.000You can't shout limited government every time somebody says, we want to use political power for the purpose that we were given it for.
00:13:58.000And 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.
00:14:07.000And so I'm trying to use, I never try to use limited government anymore.
00:14:10.000I'm going to tell you the new phrase I think we should use.
00:14:12.000But 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.
00:14:24.000You've done an awful job limiting government.
00:14:27.000The fourth branch of government is as more powerful as ever.
00:14:29.000The civil service controls everything.
00:14:31.000So 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.
00:14:39.000We believe that a small group of people controlling something without a check in a balance is a bad thing.
00:14:45.000So explain to me why you're okay with Microsoft having that kind of power.
00:14:50.000And that argument would not have really, wouldn't have really meshed 15 years ago because these companies weren't that powerful.
00:14:58.000And the people that ran their companies actually loved the country.
00:15:02.000And 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.
00:15:13.000I'm talking about the guys that ran waste management, the guys that ran Home Depot.
00:15:18.000And they say, if I were to have done this in the early 2000s, I would have resigned myself.
00:15:25.000And 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?
00:16:12.000Apple actively undercuts American workers by paying slaves in China to make its iPhones.
00:16:20.000And 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.
00:16:27.000And so what's happened is that a lot of these companies have started to realize, think of the NBA, for example.
00:16:32.000The NBA's biggest new market is in China.
00:16:34.000Everybody's asking, why is the NBA so anti-American, but it never calls out what's going on in China?
00:16:40.000Because the NBA has more of a financial upside in China than it does in the United States than it does in its own country.
00:16:45.000And so 50, 60 years ago, we used to recognize that these companies had some national obligations.
00:16:53.000And now we just see them as purely commercial enterprises, purely disconnected from the American nation state.
00:16:58.000And if they make their money in China, they're going to be on the side of the Chinese than the American people.
00:17:03.000That's a real problem because they're not just commercial entities.
00:17:07.000They're part of the American fabric of society.
00:17:09.000And you have companies that are literally called American airlines that fly around with the American flag that pander more to Wuhan than West Virginians.
00:17:21.000The 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?
00:17:34.000So 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.
00:17:45.000And I think Trump was an accelerant for that.
00:19:27.000And 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.
00:19:38.000Angelo Cotavilla has the best piece of literature on this, ruling class.
00:19:43.000And I'm sure you've read it or are aware of it.
00:19:45.000And he writes commonly very frequently for our friend Chris Buzzkirk's website, American Greatness, which is phenomenal.
00:19:51.000And Victor Davis Hansen writes on there, I learned so much from that website.
00:19:55.000But JD, you're looking at this double-page advertisement in the New York Times.
00:20:01.000And like, so this is the ruling class, right?
00:20:06.000If 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.
00:20:19.000And 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.
00:20:33.000And you start to appreciate what's going on because these folks have the real power.
00:20:39.000And to me, power is fundamentally about shaping behavior.
00:20:45.000And who are you more worried about if you're an American citizen?
00:20:50.000The people on this page who are standing for democracy or the people that you elect to the U.S. government.
00:20:56.000Of course, you care more about these people.
00:20:58.000These are the people who can prevent you from buying and selling, from owning a home, from working a decent middle-class job.
00:21:37.000And, 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.
00:21:50.000And 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.
00:21:59.000This guy, like, you know, is a middle-class guy living in southwestern Ohio.
00:22:04.000Those people and that platform and the guy he works for have way more power in his life than his local elected officials.
00:22:12.000And 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.
00:22:21.000And I really do think, I'm not a zero-sum guy.
00:22:24.000I work in investing in venture capital and technology.
00:22:27.000I see the world as we're going to build something that's better for everybody.
00:22:52.000But to be more specific, it's the people that sign this.
00:22:55.000And if you're on radio, you say, what are you talking about?
00:22:57.000This 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?
00:23:10.000There's lawyers, law firms, celebrities, nonprofit organizations, individuals, corporations.
00:23:17.000Basically, they are flexing their muscle.
00:23:21.000They are saying, if you keep doing this, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
00:23:28.000If 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.
00:23:41.000That'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.
00:23:50.000Like my job is to go to the bottom of the state.
00:24:01.000If 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.
00:24:13.000Of course, these people are in charge.
00:24:14.000And 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.
00:24:23.000And 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?
00:24:33.000If 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.
00:24:44.000And 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.
00:24:54.000So it's all just this constant cycle of shifting power away from people, from their constitutional self-government, to our new corporate oligarchy.
00:25:02.000And again, like we've just got to call it out and we've got to stop it.
00:25:05.000And the way it needs to be articulated is we have this albatross leviathan of a federal government and then a corporate government.
00:25:13.000And one of those you sort of vote for.
00:25:15.000One of those you can sue in the courts.
00:25:18.000You at least have some taxpayer rights, sort of.
00:25:22.000And as Tucker famously said, look, they take Arbor Day off in the government.
00:25:28.000They're not exactly in a hurry to invoke massive social change.
00:25:41.000And 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.
00:26:02.000And I haven't lost my enthusiasm for that.
00:26:06.000What 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.
00:26:13.000And what if I told you that these people are actually a hierarchy above the fourth branch of government?
00:26:19.000Talk 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.
00:26:38.000Yeah, so this happens in a couple of different ways.
00:26:40.000It happens through cultural power directly, and then it happens through government power indirectly.
00:26:44.000Because 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?
00:26:57.000It's not like Donald Trump or Joe Biden is telling Google or Twitter to censor people.
00:27:04.000They're doing it out of their own accord.
00:27:06.000And 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.
00:27:16.000Well, Twitter can ignore that or not ignore it.
00:27:19.000That's ultimately in control of the Twitter sort of corporate hierarchy.
00:27:24.000And so this concentrated power does have a remarkable effect on how people live their lives.
00:27:28.000The other piece of this is it also affects like what you're allowed to say.
00:27:31.000So just to give you an example, very personal to you.
00:27:35.000When I went on your show a few weeks ago, we had a great conversation.
00:27:38.000Somebody said, why did you go on his show?
00:27:40.000He's a white supremacist, which I actually never heard about you.
00:27:45.000And I've been called a white, I've been called a white supremacist in the Washington Post.
00:27:48.000When that happened to me, I lost investors over that.
00:27:51.000I lost in friends, I lost friends over that.
00:28:06.000That's not like a primarily a government thing.
00:28:09.000That's these corporations who use that accusation to silence people who criticize them.
00:28:13.000Our mutual friend Tucker Carlson, why do they try so hard to destroy them, destroy him?
00:28:19.000Because they know he's actually a threat to their power.
00:28:22.000And 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.
00:29:28.000They 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.
00:29:46.000Meanwhile, the country is going into absolute chaos.
00:30:20.000That sense that this country has given you something should come along with a sense that you owe the country something.
00:30:26.000You owe an obligation for your debt to the people who made this country great.
00:30:30.000I 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.
00:30:44.000That there is a system that was built by people for a reason so you can succeed.
00:31:06.000I think a fundamental conservative principle is that people benefit from and like to be rooted.
00:31:12.000They like to be rooted in their values, in their faith, in their communities.
00:31:16.000And, 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?
00:31:38.000But she knew the battles that General Patton had won in North Africa by heart.
00:31:43.000I mean, she was like a military historian when it came to World War II.
00:31:46.000In that sense, that she had been part of accomplishing something in World War II.
00:31:51.000You know, America is not just abstractions, right?
00:31:53.000It's a people that went and did great things.
00:31:56.000That was passed on to me, even though, of course, I did nothing to help in World War II.
00:32:01.000I felt a certain pride, a certain sense of place and obligation that came from that.
00:32:05.000And I want to pass that on to my son, right?
00:32:07.000The 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.
00:32:20.000And what these corporations are doing and what our ruling class is doing is it's destroying that sense of national purpose.
00:32:26.000It's delinking us from our past and from our future.
00:32:30.000And this is why I double and triple down because our history is actually beautiful.
00:32:37.000It'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.
00:32:50.000So, how can anyone say we were founded on slavery?
00:32:52.000So, 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.
00:33:04.000No, the founders actually went out of their way.
00:33:05.000They said, these are going to be three territories that 1777, the year after the Declaration was signed, Vermont abolishes slavery.
00:33:14.000This idea of delinking us, I love that term, of our connective tissue as Americans, it's intentional.
00:33:23.000It's intentional because it makes us easier to manipulate, makes us easier to turn against each other.
00:33:27.000And 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.
00:33:37.000If 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.
00:33:44.000I think that there are evil people, and sometimes you have to fight those evil people.
00:33:47.000But 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.
00:33:58.000People 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.
00:34:05.000If you destroy it, you fundamentally destroy us as a people.
00:34:27.000Just deal with what they're publishing in the New York Times every single day.
00:34:30.000You don't need to go that level deeper of that stuff that's not true.
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00:35:55.000So 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.
00:36:01.000The Overton window is a theory, ideas that go on a spectrum or a continuum from unthinkable to public policy.
00:36:10.000And how do you move things along that window?
00:36:12.000We see that here today with some of the breaking news.
00:36:15.000And 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.
00:36:22.000Now, they're not going to do this immediately.
00:36:27.000Well, 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.
00:36:42.000As our country has grown, so too to the Supreme Court.
00:36:45.00013 justices for 13 circuits is a logical progression.
00:36:49.000And 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.
00:37:01.000And it also will enable us to do justice and to rectify the great injustice that was done in packing the court.
00:37:10.000And some people will say we're packing the court.
00:39:31.000And 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.
00:39:41.000And we should maybe learn something from the fact that Democrats are willing to use power to accomplish their objectives.
00:40:25.000I mean, I just want to address this point because it's very important.
00:40:27.000People are willing to follow leadership.
00:40:29.000If you articulate a vision of what society should be, people will follow you to it.
00:40:33.000The Democrats have their vision of society that they're selling to the country.
00:40:36.000You know, what is our vision of society?
00:40:38.000I mean, I think that it's very simple.
00:40:40.000It's if you're a hardworking guy, you should be able to support a family on a good middle-class job.
00:40:47.000You 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.
00:43:30.000And of course, all of us are going to leave this world at some point.
00:43:33.000Do 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?
00:43:41.000We 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.
00:43:49.000That to me is like the fundamentally conservative vision of our society.
00:43:53.000And it's why the Democrats are so different.
00:43:55.000I 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?
00:44:04.000If you're an establishment Republican, is it spends too much money?
00:44:07.000Well, yeah, it spends too much money, but what does it spend money on?
00:44:10.000It spends money on Democrats' corporate priorities.
00:44:13.000Does it make it easier to have a family?
00:44:24.000Does 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?
00:44:33.000They'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.
00:44:43.000We 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.
00:44:54.000We 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.
00:45:56.000And I think there are a couple of different ideas that I've been kicking around.
00:45:59.000And, you know, we're just going to chat about them.
00:46:03.000I've been playing around with this with a couple of friends who work in the policy world.
00:46:06.000So 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.
00:47:01.000So I think that if you basically brought our real economy and made it, gave it an advantage, not just it's right now.
00:47:07.000It 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.
00:47:27.000You know it better than I do, but they're getting multiples on deals that are unbelievable.
00:47:30.000Even 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.
00:47:53.000So, producing stuff you can touch, goods, construction workers, construction of new buildings, new office complexes.
00:48:01.000I 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.
00:48:13.000It's intellectual property, but it's not real.
00:48:15.000It's not something you can touch and handle.
00:48:17.000And because it's not real, you can move it anywhere you want to.
00:48:20.000And this is, by the way, why the corporate tax debate in this country is so jacked up.
00:48:24.000Like, 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.
00:48:35.000But 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.
00:48:46.000They'll make it fall hardest on Republican companies working in Republican areas, the people who are working in the real economy.
00:48:53.000Even the businesses in the real economy, even big businesses, are much more Republican than folks who are working in the digital economy.
00:48:59.000So 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.
00:49:07.000So, but a strict libertarian would say, who cares if it's in the digital economy?
00:49:25.000As 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.
00:49:36.000And 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.
00:49:49.000Well, 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.
00:50:02.000Because 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.
00:50:18.000That's how we're going to value companies now.
00:50:20.000How about I want to go value someone that makes something I can touch?
00:50:23.000So I see I was playing devil's advocate, obviously, but that narrative is the dominant of the Washington, D.C. public policy class.
00:50:31.000I believe the two most important things are courage and truth.
00:50:35.000And it's famously said that without courage, none of the other virtues matter, right?
00:50:41.000Without 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.
00:50:48.000You very well could have just stayed in venture capital, kept your head down, probably wrote Hillbilly Elegy number two, right?
00:50:53.000I'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.
00:50:59.000That takes courage, and you actually have the IQ and the charisma to back it up, which is so rare.
00:51:05.000Talk about what can be done here because people feel helpless.
00:51:09.000Yeah, 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.
00:51:18.000And there's so much eggheadery in DC that's really built around complicating this fundamental truth.
00:51:24.000We can get into the policy details, and we've gotten a little there, and we'll get further interests less.
00:51:30.000But you've got to be willing to do the things that are necessary to accomplish these things.
00:51:34.000So, for example, right, we know that woke capital is a huge problem.
00:51:38.000It'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.
00:51:45.000You could easily punish the corporations that ship jobs overseas that involve themselves in our political process.
00:51:52.000Instead, 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.
00:52:08.000So, then, what is what is the state-based thing?
00:52:11.000Should South Dakota say, you know what?
00:52:13.000If you ship jobs out, I don't even know if they're probably legally out.
00:52:37.000But I do think this requires a national solution.
00:52:40.000It'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.
00:52:51.000So, your people don't have access to modern communication.
00:52:55.000They do have a lot of power, and I think this is something the American nation state has to marshal behind.
00:53:00.000So, 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.
00:53:10.000We're starting to build the institutions necessary to fight back against this.
00:53:16.000You 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.
00:53:20.000I 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.
00:53:41.000That's sort of the voice that I have in the back of my mind.
00:53:43.000And 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.
00:53:54.000Like, they don't want to live under our corporate oligarchy anymore.
00:53:57.000They want to punish these people, they want to fight back.
00:54:00.000They're just looking for people who are leading them.
00:54:02.000Well, that's part of the charm of Sherrod Brown.
00:54:05.000Sherrod Brown, for better or for worse, I'd say for worse, generally, he positioned himself as a crusader against the corporate class.
00:54:14.000And he won pretty convincingly many times in Ohio.
00:54:17.000Yeah, 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.
00:54:26.000The 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?
00:54:35.000We talk about this New York Times presentation where hundreds of corporate leaders are aligning themselves against American democracy.
00:54:44.000And who is the most like these people are almost all Democrats?
00:54:48.000So there is this really interesting thing.
00:54:50.000People 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.
00:55:00.000And 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.
00:55:31.000And 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.
00:55:41.000And we as Republicans, as conservatives, like the ball is in our court.
00:55:45.000The American people are looking for someone who recognizes that the corporate oligarchy in this country is broken and fights back against it.
00:55:53.000It's clearly not coming from the left.
00:56:19.000And Pastor Rob McCoy and so many others have done such a wonderful job for our country.
00:56:23.000And 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.
00:56:32.000Every great awakening in our country has played a different role.
00:56:34.000First Great Awakening saved the country, started the country.
00:56:37.000You 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.
00:56:48.000Second Great Awakening saved us from really a debauchery crisis in the 1820s.
00:56:53.000Third Great Awakening abolished slavery.
00:56:54.000Fourth Great Awakening, Billy Graham doesn't get credit for this.
00:56:57.000Proudly stopped Soviet communism by himself.
00:57:50.000And, 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.
00:59:40.000I'll tell you what I love about the Catholic Church and what I don't like.
00:59:43.000I love how it doesn't change because there's so much, there's progress and the next self-indulgent.
00:59:49.000Like, 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.
00:59:58.000I just have some theological differences.
00:59:59.000And that stuff is, that's a difference I'm never going to pass.
01:00:11.000Well, you know, you mentioned that not changing.
01:00:15.000That 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.
01:00:25.000And I really admired the Catholic view that marriage is a sacrament.
01:00:45.000And if you lose it, then kids have miserable lives because of it, and it causes a lot of problems.
01:00:51.000And so, talk about the role that you think faith needs to play in America today.
01:00:56.000Well, 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.
01:01:03.000You know, the thing that holds people together, that binds people together, is community.
01:01:07.000And 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?
01:01:18.000That's where people support one another.
01:01:20.000It'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.
01:01:32.000And if you don't have stable, powerful, durable faith communities, then people are just sort of shiftless.
01:02:22.000And we have a generation of young people in this country who believe in anything, and that anything is a pretty destructive ideology.
01:02:28.000I 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.
01:02:34.000Like, 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.
01:04:03.000If 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.
01:04:12.000It becomes social pressure to behave a certain way.
01:04:14.000And we want to put our social pressures on positive behaviors, not negative.
01:04:21.000How much of what we would call the moral decay in America can be attributed to a material blame?
01:04:28.000This is something conservatives don't like to talk about.
01:04:30.000Was Marx right about any of this stuff?
01:04:32.000That 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?
01:04:42.000People 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.
01:04:51.000And it does destroy, it can destroy your sense of purpose.
01:04:54.000It can destroy your sense of belonging in the world.
01:04:57.000And absolutely, we see this again and again.
01:04:59.000Every time the manufacturing jobs disappeared in an area, you saw heroin overdoses shoot through the roof.
01:05:06.000You saw family breakdowns shoot through the roof.
01:05:19.000Well, one, they actually came from a place.
01:05:22.000If 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.
01:05:30.000They want their children to grow up being taken care of by their grandparents.
01:05:34.000They want the church that made them who they are to be a part of their life.
01:05:38.000People can move if they want to, but we can't tell every single person that community doesn't matter.
01:05:43.000And that's what we tell them when they say, you should just move to New York City.
01:05:47.000By the way, New York City is really expensive.
01:05:50.000If 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.
01:06:01.000We're promising them the American dream of the elite class of society.
01:06:06.000So 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?
01:06:18.000My 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.
01:06:28.000And all of those things are being threatened by our corporate oligarchy.
01:06:32.000If 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.
01:06:43.000And fight four things with specific objectives.
01:06:46.000Increased 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.
01:07:03.000We're willing to use public policy to make those things happen.
01:07:05.000I think children are an objective good.
01:07:08.000They make men more connected to their families, to their communities.
01:07:12.000They make people more invested in the future.