Vivek Ramaswamy is the founder of Turning Point USA, a powerful youth organization dedicated to fighting for freedom on college campuses across the country. He is also the husband of Dr. Kelly, a very accomplished throat surgeon, and a great American patriot. He joins us to talk about the upcoming mid-term elections, and his thoughts on the current state of the country as a whole. He also talks about his new book, Truths, which is out now, and why he thinks college students should vote in the mid-terms. He also gives us some great advice on how to make sure you re voting on the issues that matter the most to you and the people you care about, and how you can be a voice for freedom and freedom for all of us. This is a must-listen episode, and you won t want to miss it! If you like what you hear here, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and become a Member at Memberscharliekirk.org/joinnow! You'll get access to all of the great resources mentioned in the show, including the latest episodes, as well as special shout outs, polls, news and everything else you need to know to vote on November 6th. Thanks so much for listening and supporting the show. Thank you so much to everyone who has been a supporter of the show and spreading the word to the world. Peace, Blessings, Cheers. Cheers, Charlie and God Bless, Kristy, Kristian - Kristian and Andrew, EJ & Chris, Chris Cross - The Charlie, Chuck, and the Crews, Kristian & Andrew, Andrew, and EJared, and Sarah, Sarah, and everyone else at The Charlie Kirk Show. - Thank you for listening to this show, and God bless you, Thank you, Lord Bless You, Thank You, God bless, Bless, Bless you, Bless You All, MRS and Good Luck! - EJee, P.S. - Charlie, Sarah and Thank You For Your Support, Thank U, Thank Ya'll, Thank Me, Lord, Lord & Good Luck, Bless Me, Bless U, Gave Me, Good Bless, Good Night, Good RAY, Good Morning, Good Love, Good Day, Good MRS, Good Gotta See You, Good N Night, Bless Ya, Love You, Bye, Bye.
00:00:42.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA. 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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00:02:54.000And then, you know, then I stopped back in Ohio.
00:02:56.000Then we did the event here in Arizona, in Phoenix yesterday, in Las Vegas yesterday, a lot of Filipino Americans, big Asian American theme last night.
00:03:04.000So I think what you're seeing is a lot of people just saying that I don't care what I've been force fed for a long time.
00:03:10.000I'm going to do what's actually been better for my family, better for my life.
00:03:13.000And also, it's not just that, hey, I want to vote for the better economy and the sealed border.
00:03:18.000But there's an added element which I sense, and I'm sensing it with the young people on the campuses, but I was even sensing it with the boomer crowd last night.
00:03:25.000Some sense of liberation of just saying that, you know what, this is my way of sticking it to the system.
00:03:31.000And I think that that could turn what would be a victory into something of a victory we haven't seen in our lifetimes.
00:03:38.000In our adult lifetimes, I don't think we're going to have seen a victory like the one that we have coming if we continue to execute.
00:03:43.000If we don't drop the ball on the one-yard line, which we can play a piece of tape here.
00:03:46.000I think it was actually against the Bengals.
00:03:51.000But I'm seeing this tube of ache where I think that everyday Americans that aren't completely left-wing, they've developed antibodies to the media.
00:04:01.000Where the attacks of the media doesn't attach anymore?
00:04:13.000You see that in the crowd a little bit last night.
00:04:16.000He was talking to this Filipino-American grandmother.
00:04:19.000She said she's gone Democrat in the past.
00:04:21.000It's almost like this is my moment of liberation where, yes, I love what's good for the country, but it was also a little bit of liberation energy last night, too.
00:04:29.000And I just want to make sure everyone is clear about this, that the tone of the country is screaming and begging for rejection of the left.
00:04:47.000I don't know that Kamala had fully formed wishes or not.
00:04:51.000I don't think I don't really think she is like a free agent as a human being.
00:04:56.000I think she is somebody who is manipulated and played like a pawn on a chessboard, but certainly her handlers.
00:05:01.000That's what they didn't want out of her.
00:05:03.000I think they made a mistake in choosing her because she made it a lot harder for them to achieve that objective versus, you know, someone like Kelly, even from Arizona, I think could have ended up, in retrospect, being a more compelling candidate for the Democrats if they weren't so beholden to their philosophy of identity politics.
00:05:28.000I think the border crisis is an extension of the woke crisis, by the way.
00:05:30.000But all of that, I think, is what's on the table.
00:05:33.000And that's part of why I think we have a chance, if we don't drop the ball in the one-yard line, as you said, to deliver probably the most decisive win of our lifetime.
00:05:40.000And I think that could be the single most unifying event this country has seen in the 21st century.
00:06:42.000Now, just to be an equal opportunity offender here, because we know we have to win Philadelphia, or win Pennsylvania, by the way, looking at this is like a flashback to my childhood.
00:06:52.000This is Donovan McNabb throwing to, I think, Deshaun Jackson, and Terrell Owens is looking on.
00:07:56.000I don't want to fake optimize, make people optimistic either.
00:07:59.000But the truth of where we stand is that we are within striking distance of the most decisive win of our lifetime.
00:08:05.000We're going to have to execute to get there.
00:08:06.000You guys are doing a great job laying the pipes and plumbing and work that, frankly, our party has not been great at doing for a very long time.
00:08:13.000But with that execution all the way, sprinting through the tape at the finish...
00:08:17.000I think November 6th could actually be the start line for making, as I said last night, four years from now, I don't want to say make America great again.
00:08:25.000I just want to say make America greater.
00:08:27.000And I think we're about there for a four-year period where we're done with the need to revive the past.
00:08:33.000But the four years ahead, I think, is what we're required to do it.
00:08:35.000So yeah, none of that stuff we just saw, I would tell you that.
00:08:56.000First truth in the book is the same as I started with in my list of the ten principles of truth in my campaign, which is God is real.
00:09:04.000And I think that that's—why is that important right now?
00:09:07.000And then we can get into the content of it, which is pretty interesting, considering that I come from a nontraditional faith against the backdrop of—the Christian backdrop of the U.S. But I think the reason I put that number one is that I think we suffer a crisis of faith right now.
00:09:20.000I think secular atheism has become the new religion of the country, and for the worse.
00:09:25.000I think it's deeply linked to the spread of depression and anxiety and a mental health epidemic that's spread across this country and especially our generation like wildfire.
00:09:34.000And people are hungry to talk about God in the open again.
00:09:44.000Bernie Moreno, we've got to get him across the finish line.
00:09:45.000And we've got this issue one thing, which I don't want to derail us on, but I've been very focused on that in my home state as well, which we've got to defeat and vote no on.
00:09:51.000But I was at an event where a guy tells me, he says, I'm a Democrat in my whole life.
00:09:57.000And I read this chapter of your book and I am now a believer.
00:10:01.000And I said, wow, I did not intend to actually, with one chapter of this book, you know, convert, you know, bring an atheist along.
00:10:07.000But one of the things I do in that chapter is to make some of the best arguments for the existence of God while airing some of the strongest secular atheist arguments that are out there as well.
00:10:16.000A few facts that people may not know, Charlie, is when the Big Bang Theory came out, first of all, it was actually a Catholic who was a scientist and physicist who unearthed it, but the Catholic Church was thrilled because this actually suggests that That there is actually a divine creator.
00:10:30.000Time, place, and matter actually had a beginning, therefore a beginner.
00:10:34.000So this idea that the Big Bang Theory or modern science somehow proves the existence of God, it's actually for most of our human history has been viewed actually in reverse with respect to things like the Big Bang Theory.
00:11:10.000Wherever they want to get it, honestly.
00:11:12.000I'm in this to spread the message of the book, but I would be grateful if people, as many people read it, and especially shared it with their kids as possible, too.
00:11:26.000K-A-L-S-H-I. It's the first legal exchange where you can trade and bet on any event.
00:11:32.000For the first time in 100 years, they got approval to list markets to trade on the outcome of the upcoming election, making it legal to trade on the U.S. presidential election and see who's going to win, Trump or Kamala.
00:11:41.000They have markets on who will win each election, who will win swing states.
00:11:44.000They also have markets on inflation, interest rates, will the government shutdown, and more.
00:11:47.000What's really cool about this platform is you can trade on your opinions to make money or hedge risks that may impact you.
00:12:28.000Yeah, I mean, it's deeply intertwined with the Judeo-Christian values that undergird this country.
00:12:34.000And the reason that, you know, I didn't have necessarily the Ten Commandments as the Ten Truths, but the reason I model it, and I'm a big fan of lists as well, is I do think that we as human beings Need to take that divine order and make it very practical in the way we live our lives.
00:12:46.000I read the Ten Commandments for the first time when I went to St.
00:12:49.000X High School in Cincinnati, where I went to high school, but it didn't feel like I was reading them for the first time because that was the same value set that I was raised in, the same worldview that this country, I think, was built on, the same view that our founders had of God.
00:13:01.000That's the view that I share as well, that there's one true God, and He puts us here for a purpose, and it's our duty to realize that purpose.
00:13:08.000And I think it helps me a little bit reach people who are at least secular atheists with at least reinstilling a belief in God, like that man in Ohio.
00:13:16.000Even though my belief system and at least my value system, I should say, theology may be a little different, but the value system is deeply aligned with the Christian worldview.
00:13:24.000I think that if I'd called myself a Christian, I don't think I would have been able to bring that guy along to at least faith and the idea of God.
00:13:31.000But the idea that I'm able to do this as somebody who's looking at this from a different perspective, I hope puts me in a position to open more hearts and minds in this country to the idea of God and also to living a moral life grounded in the idea that these ideals aren't just secular inventions, but are divinely inspired.
00:13:47.000And so that's something that I talk about in the book as well.
00:13:50.000Let's comment on one of those elements, which is a society's need to believe in God.
00:13:55.000Can you comment on how America has become more secular and how we have lost our rootedness, almost as if we're cut flowers, if you will?
00:14:04.000It's like the first of the Ten Commandments got it right for a reason, and my own worldview and the religion I was raised in sees it the same way.
00:14:11.000There's one true God, but when you stop believing in the real thing, you start believing in false gods instead.
00:14:16.000You could take the biblical analogies of the golden calf.
00:14:20.000Well, it didn't take very long for them to build the false idol.
00:14:22.000You could take even Blaise Pascal, who's a famous scientist.
00:14:25.000He famously said about 400 years ago, if there's a hole the size of God in your heart and God does not fill it, something else will instead.
00:14:34.000That's exactly what's going on in our country.
00:14:35.000The climate change movement, which is also the second—actually, it's the second chapter of this book.
00:14:39.000It falls after the God chapter for a reason.
00:14:50.000You're going to wear a hair shirt in the form of limiting your use of fossil fuels or flog yourself.
00:14:55.000And it's funny, almost every religious tradition has one of these types of sacrificial ritualistic actions.
00:15:02.000That's what the modern climate religion's about.
00:15:04.000There's a chapter in this book entitled, Boringly, There Are Two Genders.
00:15:08.000I expose some of the best arguments for the so-called trans view of the world.
00:15:12.000But that too is a religion, because it rests on all kinds of contradictory suppositions.
00:15:17.000But from the climate movement to the trans movement to the woke movement to – you could think about even why is it that we pledge allegiance to other countries?
00:15:24.000Why are more people pledging allegiance to the flag of Ukraine than that of the United States of America?
00:15:28.000When you stop believing in something, be it God or in this case you could even talk about believing in your own nation, you start pledging allegiance to new idols, praying to new idols, pledging allegiance to new flags instead.
00:15:39.000And that's exactly what's going on in our country right now.
00:15:51.000We're in the midst of a heated election season, so I don't know if it's getting the attention it deserves.
00:15:56.000But this U.S. study on puberty blockers, they are not releasing it because they basically found that puberty blockers don't help the mental health of children.
00:16:06.000In fact, they might hurt it, and they're not releasing the findings because of politics.
00:16:47.000But one of the common threads through the first half of this book is when you stop believing in the real thing, you start believing in false versions of it instead.
00:16:54.000And the second half of the book is the same thing as it relates to national identity.
00:16:58.000And one of the chapters is nationalism is not a bad word.
00:17:01.000And the civic revival and that civic deficit, I think, is an important part of what we're missing in the country as well.
00:17:07.000And so there's a lot of different subjects the book explores, but in some ways the thesis is if we revive faith and if we revive patriotism and belief in our own civic self, then actually a lot of our other problems are automatically going to melt away because they're just symptoms of that deeper crisis of meaning.
00:17:21.000We could spend infinite time on that topic.
00:17:24.000Let's talk about the climate change one, if we can.
00:17:27.000You have a very eloquent and precise take on the climate change agenda.
00:17:33.000And in fact, we've done now three campus events, two during the day, one in the evening.
00:17:38.000Every single one climate change has come up.
00:17:52.000So Wittgenstein formally said that most major philosophical problems are just problems of language.
00:17:57.000I think the same thing is true of the climate discussion is this question of is climate change real?
00:18:02.000There's so much packed into that versus dissecting the actual questions underlying it.
00:18:07.000The first is our global surface temperatures going up.
00:18:10.000The answer to that question, I review the data as dispassionately as I can.
00:18:14.000The answer to the question actually ends up being yes, slightly.
00:18:16.000Global surface temperatures in general are going up.
00:18:19.000I highlight some intellectual dishonesties where we had a five-year streak in the early 2000 teens where nobody said anything about it when they actually went down.
00:18:25.000But if you look over the course of the last 60, 70 years, it is an upward trend in global surface temperatures.
00:18:31.000Now the second question is, are we sure that's as big as we say?
00:18:34.000Well, actually a lot of those temperature measurements are taken in areas of cities where you actually have ground heating, which is not the kind of climate change that would worry you anyway.
00:18:40.000But the real question to ask is, A, is it a consequence of man-made behavior?
00:18:50.000But what I do in most of that chapter is ask the question that nobody's asking is, even if global surface temperatures are going up, and even if man-made causes, and even if carbon dioxide is one of them, though the evidence for that is less than you might think, Are we sure that that is a bad thing for humanity?
00:19:05.000And it turns out if you look at the evidence and the effects that it has on human life, there are actually surprisingly positive effects for flourishing of human beings on planet Earth as a consequence of global surface temperatures going up by a little bit.
00:19:21.000Bjorn Lundberg has been great on this issue, pointing out the facts.
00:19:24.000Eight times as many people die of cold temperatures rather than warm ones, and yet we're sitting here worrying about a microscopic, right now, increase in global surface temperatures.
00:19:34.000The right answer to all temperature-related deaths is more plentiful and abundant access to fossil fuels, the very thing that climate fanatics are telling us not to do.
00:19:42.000And the Earth is more covered by green surface area, plant life today, than it was 100 years ago because carbon dioxide is plant food and they tend to grow in slightly warmer temperatures.
00:20:05.000The climate disaster-related death rate, it's because fossil fuels have actually powered increased improvements in technology.
00:20:13.000I don't want to bring red herrings into this, but I think they're all connected.
00:20:16.000Even when we think about being pro-life, right?
00:20:18.000You and I, we share, all three of us at this table, deep pro-life commitments.
00:20:22.000Well, it's not an accident that a culture and a country that abandons its value on life in all of its forms, including in the womb, in unborn life, Also completely disregards the impact on actual life.
00:20:36.000That isn't part of the climate change discussion at all, because actually what we're seeing is a decline in mortality, not only because of greater use of fossil fuels, but in part, and this will make a lot of people mad, but it's a fact, in part because of slight increases in global surface temperatures.
00:20:51.000What is the ultimate objective aim and goal of the climate change agenda?
00:20:55.000The ultimate aim is to make the United States of America the third world nation that the rest of the world is not abiding by.
00:21:00.000So they want the rest of the world to catch up.
00:21:16.000You've rarely ever find, there are Marxists who are not crazy about the climate change thing, but you almost never find a climate change zealot that isn't a Marxist.
00:21:25.000And here's the thing with the new Marxism, right?
00:21:27.000And I'm always careful about trying to overuse these words.
00:21:31.000The old Marxism used to be about economic equality, right?
00:21:34.000So the idea that you're the proletariat, you need economic equality with the bourgeoisie.
00:21:39.000What happened with the new forms of Marxism is they completely abandoned the economic vision and the foundation of it to say instead it's based on race or gender or sexuality.
00:21:47.000And now using climate change as a vector to force that equality, it's almost like the old school OG Marxists felt like they got a little left behind.
00:21:53.000And so that's a funny evolution that I talk about in this book as well.
00:21:59.000Okay, everybody, I'll have something to offer you today, something absolutely free.
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00:22:47.000They'll put it in the mail for you with free shipping.
00:23:17.000And the reason it doesn't rank in the top 100 issues facing America is I would focus on issues that are unambiguously negative for us unless we fix them.
00:23:24.000It is not yet clear to me, it is far from clear to me, that anything relating to global service temperatures going up is even bad for us.
00:23:30.000What is actually going on is young people are lost.
00:23:32.000It's not just true of young people, Charlie.
00:23:34.000It's true of people of every generation.
00:23:35.000But especially young people are hungry for purpose and meaning and identity right now.
00:23:41.000We want to belong to something bigger than ourselves, yet we can't even answer what it means to be an American.
00:23:47.000Individual, family, nation, and God beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate.
00:23:54.000But in some ways, we as a conservative movement, while we've been really good at identifying the hypocrisies on the other side, we haven't yet been as good as I think we need to be in articulating our own alternative vision.
00:24:05.000And I think that's how we actually defeat the poison in the end, is by melting it to irrelevance, dilute it to irrelevance.
00:24:24.000In a first among Christians, young men are more religious than young women.
00:24:30.000And so I want to ask you about why do you think, and Charlie has made some great points, that we have so many, and you saw it firsthand, we have so many young women that are coming along to this stuff.
00:24:40.000But we, I mean, it's undeniable that young men are seemingly getting this earlier.
00:24:45.000And I think the women are going to catch up.
00:24:46.000I think they are, actually, but this is true.
00:24:49.000But what is behind this, and do you address it in your book?
00:24:52.000Why is the America First movement resonating with these young men?
00:24:55.000Why is God, religion, purpose, all this stuff hitting them first?
00:24:59.000Look, I think young men have been told to shut up, sit down, do as you're told for a really long time, to apologize for who we are, apologize for masculinity.
00:25:07.000And I say this not only as a, you know, not young anymore, but relatively young man myself.
00:25:29.000And a lot of young men, I think, as a consequence of being told that their masculinity is toxic, that they have to apologize or hide who they are, or that we have to somehow pretend that everything is exactly biologically the same between men and women, which, by the way, is one of the foundations of the trans movement anyway.
00:26:01.000It's funny we're able to say this because any normal media, if you're talking about the difference between men and women, if you're not saying something negative about the men, it's not going to get the airtime.
00:26:09.000Here I think it's actually a good trend started by young men that I think is going to have a positive impact on all young people, and I'm proud of that.
00:26:14.000I would say that the trend I've seen is that if you're going to talk about genders at all, you have to sort of go over the top and be so complimentary about how empowered women are.
00:26:25.000You have to so overdo it on one side, and then either you say, well, men are important too, and it's kind of a throwaway thought, or men obviously have toxic masculinity and they've been part of the problem.
00:26:56.000If all this empowerment for young women, why does every single poll research study indicate that they are more anxiety-riddled, they're taking more antidepressants, they're more nervous, they're more unsure?
00:27:08.000Because women are not better off in a world in which men are also taught to hide who they are.
00:29:02.000Like, it goes to the stuff that we fought the American Revolution for.
00:29:04.000And I know that that sounds crazy to say for a seemingly dry subject.
00:29:08.000The American Revolution was fought to say that we the people create a government that's accountable to us.
00:29:12.000Turns out that's not the government we live in today where most rules, most enforcement actions are taken by bureaucrats who were never elected to their positions and historically have been viewed as unfireable even by the people we actually do elect.
00:29:24.000Millions of federal bureaucrats and three-letter agencies.
00:29:27.000That was worsened by a doctrine, and a little-known fact is even Scalia was, I think, one of his poorest decisions in favor of this doctrine at the time, the Chevron Doctrine, where they said that federal courts defer to the administrative agency's interpretations of the law that Congress passes, which ultimately puts them in the driver's seat.
00:29:43.000That was overturned this year in a case called Loper-Brite.
00:29:57.000So this one basically said that if this is if anything has a major economic impact or policy impact, thousands of dollars per person in the country, if that's the threshold they set.
00:30:08.000If that's kind of impact it has and the agency is writing a rule, that rule is unconstitutional because it had to go through the process of democratically elected lawmakers.
00:30:17.000So just the combination of those two cases alone, and then there's a third one I've got to mention, which is SEC versus Jarkacy.
00:30:24.000That one said that, you know, what happens with these agencies is they write the rules, they enforce the rules, but they also have these judges that sit within their agencies that decide the cases.
00:30:33.000Sometimes, usually 99% of the cases go in favor of the agency.
00:30:37.000That completely violates the separation of powers.
00:30:39.000The Supreme Court shot that down this year as well.
00:30:41.000And agencies like the SEC and the EPA have a horrendous track record over the last several years in the Supreme Court and in the federal courts losing their cases.
00:30:51.000If the top law enforcement agencies are failing to actually follow the law themselves, that breeds a distrust of the rule of law in our country.
00:30:58.000But the good news is the game has now changed because of the Supreme Court.
00:31:01.000So this book exposes what that post-Chevron, post-Loper, post-West Virginia versus EPA world looks like.
00:31:09.000And it turns out if you combine that with the second Trump term, and I have to include this, include that with a second Trump term, not just to say that Trump got elected, but actually the values that got Trump elected get translated into action, which I'm keen on.
00:31:23.000Then this is actually the stuff of reviving 1776 principles in America.
00:31:28.0001789 principles, the Constitutional Convention, we actually turn that back into reality.
00:31:33.000And that's bottom up through litigation, where you have a lot of people who are unfairly persecuted by the regulatory state, able to now go to federal courts for actual respite and rescue.
00:31:43.000But also President Trump, and I have my views on how we ought to do this, top down being able to say, The executive branch has way overreached in its power.
00:31:53.000The administrative state technically sits under the executive branch.
00:31:57.000We're going to rescind all these regulations.
00:31:58.000We could fire millions of bureaucrats to go along with it.
00:32:02.000Personally, that's the mass deportation that I think is at the top of the list is the mass deportation of millions of unelected bureaucrats out of Washington, D.C. to the rest of the country in the private sector where they could probably do better work anyway.
00:32:14.000And I think that we are, to your point, go vote now, we're within striking distance of making that true, both bottom-up and top-down.
00:32:22.000And certainly, when I think about a second Trump term, that's the thing I'm most passionate about, is gutting that administrative state.
00:32:28.000I'm a little, you know, I think there's two visions of America first here.
00:32:31.000And I talk about this in the book, too.
00:32:34.000The book is Truths, the Future of America First.
00:32:37.000There's a strand of America First that says, you know, good people, people we respect who I love, or colleagues, who might say that we need to use some of these regulatory agencies to advance a pro-worker, pro-American agenda.
00:32:49.000And I understand the temptation to do it, but I come down on the other side of this.
00:32:54.000I think the right answer is just to get in there and shut it down, shut it down fast, shut it down bigly, in a big way.
00:33:00.000And if you end up cutting some muscle, fine.
00:33:02.000You can always add that back, but don't take the risk of not cutting enough fat.
00:33:06.000I think that makes our movement stronger when we're able to have that kind of debate, and I expose a little bit of that daylight even within the America First movement in this book as well.
00:33:17.000Everyone, I want to tell you to vote no on Amendment 3.
00:33:19.000On November 5th, Florida residents will vote on Prop 3, which is to legalize marijuana.
00:33:25.000Look, Amendment 3 does not have time, place, or manner restrictions.
00:34:19.000There's a lot more authority the president has than people realize.
00:34:21.000Of course, because the executive branch sits under the U.S. president.
00:34:24.000So most of the New York Times pages will say President Trump's going to rule by fiat, rule like a dictator because he wants to constrain the power of these agencies.
00:34:32.000The Supreme Court has said these agencies do not have the power to be writing these rules, and so President Trump can exhibit humility For the executive branch to say, we never had the power to promulgate this nonsense anyway.
00:34:45.000Put a constitutionally trained lawyer in every one of these agencies and say, which regulations failed the Supreme Court standards in the Chevron case and in the West Virginia versus the EPA case?
00:34:55.000That would be most federal regulations.
00:34:57.000Roll that up into one executive order and say those are null and void.
00:35:00.000On day one, we're not enforcing any of those, and we put them into the process for rescinding those regulations.
00:35:23.000I talk about this in detail in the book.
00:35:25.000Those civil service rules do not apply to mass firings, especially if they're done with an organizational logic.
00:35:32.000So if the organizational logic is the Supreme Court's told us these regulations are already unconstitutional, 75 percent of them are done by an executive order, say we're not enforcing them and we're rescinding them.
00:35:41.000Well, then what the heck are these four million people doing sitting around here either?
00:35:45.000I'm not discriminating based on your political ideology or certainly your race or your gender.
00:35:49.000No, it's just a mass firing across the board rationally tied to the number of regulations that you rescinded as well.
00:36:00.000I think it's going to take a combination of both having an understanding of how to massively streamline an organization, but to combine that with a little bit of the constitutional law here.
00:36:10.000So it takes a special sauce to, I think, get this done right.
00:36:13.000But personally, that's what I'm most passionate about.
00:36:22.000This is the stuff of how you save a country.
00:36:25.000I think that if we go the other direction of saying that, hey, we got to replace some of these people at the FCC or pick your favorite agency, EPA, FTC, CFPB, and maybe get them to do some good stuff, Department of Education.
00:36:39.000No, we have failed if we take that road.
00:36:42.000I think we see that temptation sometimes arise in our movement.
00:36:45.000I say forget about that, get in there, break it, burn it, burn the ashes, and save a country.
00:36:50.000And if there's duplication, right, between certain cabinet agencies, you can just eliminate them.
00:36:54.000It's what I call deleting, the delete function.
00:37:00.000The Presidential Reorganization Act of 1977.
00:37:02.000We talk about that in the book as well.
00:37:03.000There's certain provisions of that act that are unexpired, which say that if it promotes efficiency of operations and government, promotes economy...
00:37:12.000The president already has the authority granted by Congress under that statute to shut down and reorganize that.
00:37:17.000So we could merge Department of Education, Department of Energy, just, you know, what would that look like?
00:37:23.000You could shut down the Department of Education, move a couple of the workforce training functions to the Department of Labor, and then the loan collections that are outstanding move it to Treasury.
00:37:43.000I think the Supreme Court's on our side of this.
00:37:45.000I think that if it falls under the category, as I believe it does, in promoting the efficiency of operations in government, promotes economy, and also actually eliminates redundant agencies through those redundancies, that's absolutely on the table.
00:37:57.000Where are there other redundancies that are obvious?
00:37:59.000We could talk about this a lot in the national security state.
00:38:01.000Now, this gets into territory that we probably...
00:38:24.000So Charlie has gone viral recently for saying, you're not electing just a president.
00:38:28.000You're electing the 5,000 people that he's going to appoint to positions of power.
00:38:33.000How do you put that idea together with the power that they would flex, that they would use, combined with the fact that we are sort of admitting that we want, ultimately, these agencies to have a limited power?
00:39:21.000You saw it in the first Trump term where these ideas or the policy agendas would get pushed down and they would fall apart somewhere along the way.
00:41:31.000Any other truths here you definitely want to hit that we haven't had a chance to talk about?
00:41:34.000Yeah, look, the nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
00:41:37.000I make the case for that in this chapter.
00:41:39.000I know that's not going to be controversial with conservative audiences, but...
00:41:42.000What is the actual opposite view on the table is that there are co-equal, equally good ways to live one's life.
00:41:49.000And I think that that is a pervasive view, that you could raise kids in equally good family structures as long as you check certain boxes.
00:41:58.000And I make a pretty firm case in this that, no, no, the nuclear family structure is...
00:42:03.000It's unambiguously the superior way to do it.
00:42:05.000That doesn't mean that your opportunity in this country to get ahead as a kid is shot if you're in a single-parent household or a different type of family structure.
00:42:12.000But I make the affirmative case for the nuclear family structure from a personal vantage point as well.
00:42:17.000Then I talk a little bit, I close the book out with a reflection on the U.S. Constitution.
00:42:21.000And the final chapter is called, The U.S. Constitution is the Greatest Guarantor of Freedom in Human History.
00:42:28.000But I don't just make the case from the standpoint of the constitutional principles, but one of the things I think we don't talk about enough in our movement is the culture that produced that constitution in the first place.
00:42:40.000And what I call for in this book, certainly closing the book out with, is a revival of the constitutional culture, not just the founding principles, which I'm all in favor of.
00:42:49.000But the culture of the guys who were pioneers, explorers, the unafraid, the people who wouldn't Particularly look kindly upon a U.S. president apologizing for who we are at every step, but to say that we're not going to apologize for our exceptionalism.
00:43:02.000CNN, yeah, Biden making formal apology to Native Americans for government's role in abusive Indian boarding school system.
00:43:23.000The real abuse was when they basically said to Native Americans, you know, your culture, you've got to assimilate, you've got to sort of cast off, stop learning your language, whether it be Navajo or whatever.
00:43:34.000Paiute is some of the tribes that we knew, but...
00:43:37.000But the question is not whether the thing he's talking about is true or not, because there are millions of true things you could choose to talk about.
00:43:43.000But when your filter is always the filter of what causes you to apologize for who we are as Americans, that actually ends up creating a falsehood, even if it's not about the Native Americans here.
00:43:52.000The falsehood is somehow that we're a flawed and permanently damned nation, and we're not.
00:43:56.000So this book Truths, it's doing very, very well, and people are talking about it.
00:44:01.000And so Vivek, what is a truth that is not in the book, that since publication you wish you would have added or you think is very important?
00:44:10.000So there's a chapter that ended up just for space and for a lot of reasons having to sort of condense, which is my chapter in the book called Facts Are Not Conspiracies.
00:44:20.000And I go through, I had to pick which ones I wanted to go deep on.
00:44:25.000The spiciest example, let's just say, that I go deep on is actually the details and some of the underbelly of the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot or the alleged Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot and what was actually going on in many of the people who were acquitted at trial on the basis of government-led entrapment.
00:44:41.000And I think that we get to the doorstep in that chapter of the book of What is really an ugly underbelly of a lasting decades-long relationship between particularly federal law enforcement and supposedly the bad guys who they're going after.
00:44:57.000And I think we don't talk about that enough in our country, and probably I didn't talk about it enough in this book itself.
00:45:02.000But it didn't feel like now was exactly the time and place to do it, though I probably do more of that in this book than anybody else has done in a book written in the last decade.
00:45:10.000And so I couldn't write a book called Truths without at least touching on that set of issues, and I used the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot.
00:45:19.000Oh man, that's a great one to talk about.
00:45:21.000I mean, it's part of the public record in cases.
00:45:24.000So you could stick to the hard facts without having to extrapolate or speculate.
00:45:27.000There's nothing that I think anybody who is even inclined to say that I'm extrapolating or stretching facts is going to be able to point to something in that chapter and say that, oh, I was sort of speculating.
00:45:37.000But I started with the hard factual record there to at least open people's eyes to ask questions in other situations where they may have been taught to keep it to themselves.
00:45:46.000Vivek Ramaswamy, the book is Truths, The Future of America First.
00:45:48.000I can say Vivek is spending a lot of his time, his money, his treasure, and energy to get Trump elected.