00:01:15.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:23.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:54.000I think we're in the middle of this national identity crisis, Charlie.
00:02:58.000You and I have talked about it on this show before.
00:03:00.000We're so hungry for a cause and purpose and meaning at a time in American history when faith and patriotism and hard work have disappeared.
00:03:10.000That's what allows wokeism and transgenderism and climatism to fill the void.
00:03:15.000But I think we conservatives can do better if we fill that void with a vision of American national identity that runs so deep that it dilutes this woke agenda to irrelevance.
00:03:26.000Yes, most people my age, your age, really any age today in America, what does it mean to be American today?
00:03:34.000I have a vision on what the answer to that question should be, a policy agenda that backs it up.
00:03:39.000And I am running for president to revive the ideals that actually set this nation into motion 250 years ago.
00:03:47.000And with a firm belief that we can't take for granted, but a firm belief that I have that we actually can be one nation again.
00:03:53.000Not by showing up in the middle and saying, hey, guys, can't we all compromise kumbaya?
00:03:58.000But to the contrary, by embracing the extremism, the radicalism of the ideas that made America itself 250 years ago in the American Revolution.
00:04:09.000What is that radicalism and that extremism?
00:04:11.000Well, these are extreme ideas in most of human history, that you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, as Martin Luther King said it, but on the content of your character and contributions, that you have free speech and open debate as our mechanism for settling political questions rather than centralized aristocracy and censorship.
00:04:45.000Okay, we were the weird guys on this side of the pond in 1776 that set that experiment into motion.
00:04:51.000Turns out it created the greatest nation in human history, known to mankind.
00:04:55.000Today, we're taught to apologize for those ideals.
00:04:58.000And I'm running for president, not just to revive those ideals, but with a pretty clearly defined policy agenda to turn that back into reality today.
00:05:06.000And there's one more piece to it, Charlie, which is that I don't think we have the luxury of time on our side anymore for a lot of reasons.
00:05:11.000But one of the reasons is the rise of communist China, where if we don't get this right now, we will be subservient to China 10 years from now.
00:05:19.000It will require some sacrifice to do things like declaring independence from China.
00:05:24.000I'm the first candidate who's on the record saying we need total decoupling, declaration of independence from China.
00:05:30.000That is the true declaration of independence of this century.
00:05:33.000But I'm also honest about the fact that that will involve some sacrifice, a sacrifice that makes a lot of establishment Republicans upset.
00:05:40.000But that's what we're going to need to do.
00:05:42.000But it is my belief that we can make that sacrifice if we know what we are sacrificing for.
00:05:50.000That is this thing that calls this that we call the set of ideals that bind us together across our different shades of melanin, which is all we know how to celebrate today.
00:05:59.000So it gives you a taste of how I look at this.
00:06:01.000I think you're correctly diagnosing the problem.
00:06:04.000We are in the midst of a national identity crisis.
00:06:06.000When I ask college students the question I'm about to ask you, they will kind of stare into the distance in confusion.
00:06:13.000They've never thought deeply about it.
00:06:15.000So Vivek, let me ask you, what does it mean to be an American?
00:06:20.000Yeah, what it means to be an American is you believe, first of all, in merit and the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.
00:06:27.000The American dream isn't just about money.
00:06:28.000It isn't just about green pieces of paper.
00:06:30.000It is about the pursuit of excellence itself.
00:06:33.000It means you believe that the people who get into this country ought to get in this country on the basis of merit.
00:06:38.000It means the people who get ahead in this country get ahead based on their own hard work, their own commitment, their own dedication, not based on the genetic characteristics they inherited on the day they were born.
00:06:48.000It means you have the right to express and speak your mind freely as long as your neighbor has the same right in return, that you don't have to choose between speaking your mind freely and putting food on the dinner table.
00:06:59.000That we're the quintessential nation on earth that allows you to do both of those things at once.
00:07:08.000It means that you don't have to apologize for those ideals.
00:07:11.000It means you can embrace the view that is grounded in truth, that these are the ideals that form the backbone of the best nation known to, most successful nation on this earth, known to mankind in human history, not having to apologize for it.
00:07:27.000That too, American exceptionalism, is part of what it means to be American.
00:07:36.000There's a lot of beautiful, naturally beautiful places around the world.
00:07:39.000The thing that made America beautiful was the idea, the set of ideals that set it into motion.
00:07:45.000And at the top of that list was this idea we call sovereignty.
00:07:49.000It was this radical idea that the people of this country, the citizens of a nation, could be trusted to sort out their problems, to sort out their differences.
00:07:59.000Back in old world Europe, they had a division.
00:08:02.000You had to decide those questions in the backs of palace walls.
00:08:05.000Church leaders, labor leaders, business leaders had to get together behind closed doors and decide what was right for the rest of society at large because the people could not be trusted.
00:08:19.000For better or for worse, in the short run, that is how we settle our questions on this side of the Atlantic.
00:08:27.000And I think we live in this 1776 moment where actually the defining political divide as I see it today isn't actually even between Democrats and Republicans.
00:08:35.000That mostly bores me because, especially on the Republican side, the party label has come to mean nothing.
00:08:40.000It is a 1776 moment of whether or not you believe in self-governance or whether you believe in aristocracy, whether you believe in the existence of nations or whether you believe in the existence of global governance.
00:08:53.000Fundamentally, whether or not you believe in America, whether you are pro-America or whether you're anti-American.
00:08:58.000But there's an optimistic note in that, Charlie, which is this.
00:09:01.000When you divide up the political boundaries that way, not by Republican and Democrat, but by pro-American and anti-American, and I do think it's important to say that as many times as we can, it is an anti-American agenda.
00:09:17.000It might be 80-20 in the other direction, which actually means that I think 2024 should be a landslide election.
00:09:25.000I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say right now, but I believe deep in my bones that if we make this election about those basic rules of the road, okay, not whether corporate tax rates should be high or low or whatever.
00:09:39.000Different people can disagree about that.
00:09:40.000But in the basic rules of the road, do the people we elect to run the government actually run the government?
00:09:45.000Whether or not they're the guy I voted for, and at least better be the guy that somebody voted for, rather than a permanent state that's an aristocracy that actually runs the show.
00:09:52.000Whether or not we reject the demands of a global climate religion that shackles the United States while leaving nations like China untouched to say that, no, no, we're going to declare independence just like we did in 1776, whether we're Democrat or Republican or black or white.
00:10:05.000If we make the election about that issue, this is a 1980-style or 1984-style landslide election.
00:10:29.000If we get that right in the next 10 months, then next year it's up to the voters to decide who's going to be the best standard bearer for that message.
00:10:35.000I wouldn't be running for president if I didn't think that I was going to do that best job.
00:10:39.000I think there's a lot of reasons that I believe that.
00:13:19.000I am yet to get an objection from anyone to one of the things that I plan to do as president, which is make a proper use of the U.S. military to, who would have ever thought, protect our own turf and soil.
00:13:31.000I want to use it to decimate the cartels.
00:13:34.000The defense establishment doesn't like this for some reason.
00:13:37.000They do like sending money to Ukraine by the tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars.
00:13:41.000For a tiny fraction of that, we can actually defend this place we call our land.
00:13:46.000And I think that enthusiastically agree with that.
00:13:48.000So, you would use the U.S. military as president of the United States, you would mobilize tanks and drones and troops and say, we're no longer going to be invaded 8,000 people a day.
00:14:04.000There will be, as safely as possible, for sure, there will be some casualties.
00:14:08.000You just got to be honest with people that you don't take on an action like that without casualties.
00:14:12.000But there are casualties today, 100,000 fentanyl-related deaths on our side of the border, 80% of which, probably more than 80% of which, but at least 80% of which is the product of crossings on the southern border, Swiss cheese of a southern border, if we can even call it that.
00:14:27.000Now, I think that is a national security issue.
00:14:29.000Republicans sometimes talk about turning them into domestic terrorist organizations and classifying them as not as domestic terrorists, that's Biden, but terrorist organizations for the purpose of freezing their assets.
00:15:36.000If you're not going to do it yourself, we're coming in and we're doing it for you.
00:15:40.000That's what the U.S. military is supposed to do: protect American interests on American soil, not fighting for somebody else's soil somewhere else where there's no actual clearly identifiable American interests.
00:15:50.000And I just think foreign policy is all about prioritization.
00:15:53.000For me, the top two priorities are declare independence from China, total decoupling.
00:15:59.000I want to hear the other Republicans say it too.
00:16:01.000Yes, that involves some short-term sacrifice, but that's what it's going to take to make sure that we have a nation still left 50 years from now.
00:16:08.000And the second is this radical idea of actually protecting our border.
00:16:13.000If there's one good use case for the U.S. military, it's not to fight a pointless war somewhere else, but actually to use it to protect our border and our soil, because that too is part of what it means to have a nation.
00:16:23.000Vivek, why is this not widespread public opinion with Republicans?
00:16:28.000They say we need to kind of get more funding.
00:16:30.000No, you're saying, no, We want Marines, we want drones, we want tanks, we want missiles.
00:17:23.000It's what I call emergent conspiracy, where somehow we have this mentality that the only thing you're supposed to use the U.S. military for is something that doesn't directly protect American soil, when in fact, that was the thing that was created to protect in the first place.
00:17:34.000Ukraine, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, all far lower priorities than whether or not Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are being invaded every single day.
00:18:22.000Check it out right now: relieffactor.com, relieffactor.com.
00:18:28.000Vivek, I want to talk about your affirmative action stance, and then I do want to go through some of the recently surfaced objections, which I know you'll be a good sport to just kind of go through.
00:18:37.000I actually think it's helpful for you to kind of clear them up.
00:18:40.000But let's, I do want one of the things that just got me actually applauding, literally, in my living room when I heard it.
00:18:46.000I was like, did he just say that on television when you were having your interview with Tucker Carlson and you said you're just going to repeal affirmative action via executive order?
00:18:56.000As Tucker Carlson accurately responded, he said the entire federal government is built on affirmative action.
00:19:03.000So are you running for the presidency with a promise and a pledge that you are going to eliminate all forms of affirmative action in the government?
00:19:12.000That is a pledge, and I will start on day one because the U.S. president can actually do it.
00:19:18.000Not a lot of people know this, Charlie, but there's a Lyndon Johnson-era executive order that mandates that anyone that wants to do business with the federal government, and that's read very broadly.
00:19:28.000It comprises 20% of the entire U.S. workforce has to adopt race-based quota systems.
00:19:34.000That is one of the original sins that gives us this race-based woke religion.
00:19:53.000And Charlie, again, it's like the Mexican drug cartel use of military.
00:19:56.000I don't understand why Republicans hide from this stuff.
00:20:00.000Every Republican president since Lyndon Johnson could have taken a pen and crossed it out and begin to rid ourselves of this national cancer that has unleashed hell on the American spirit through the actual systemic racism in America today.
00:20:14.000You want to talk about systemic racism?
00:20:16.000It is affirmative action in America as we know it.
00:20:19.000I will tell you, you hold my feet to this fire.
00:20:24.000Day one, first thing I do, 11246, it's out.
00:20:28.000And that's the beginning of eliminating race-based affirmative action in every sphere of our lives.
00:20:34.000I was giving a speech here in Scott County today, okay, to a room that actually had a lot of different looking faces in it, different shades of melanin.
00:20:40.000I could care less for how people look.
00:20:56.000I can't wait because, again, every candidate's welcome to my show.
00:20:58.000I'm going to ask Nikki Haley if she comes on our show, like, hey, are you going to eliminate affirmative action day one by the stroke of a pen?
00:21:15.000So, let me ask you, just as a follow-up here, and just to reinforce this, by the way, the idea of going after affirmative action is so unbelievably popular.
00:21:25.000Every time it goes up on a ballot referendum, people reject racial preferences.
00:21:41.000I think one of the reasons why you're so willing to talk about using the military to declare war on the cartels and go after affirmative action is you are not plagued with what I think is one of the biggest issues in American politics, which is white guilt, which is white demography.
00:21:59.000So that's what I, I mean, I don't think of myself as the color of my skin or whatever, but in politics, you know, your age, your demographic, these things tend to matter.
00:22:06.000And so, and so the reality is, I feel uninhibited to say the quiet part out loud.
00:23:06.000I was actually okay at sports and basketball and whatnot.
00:23:09.000But other than that, I was a nerdy kid with funny-looking glasses, funny last name, dad who had an accent, who went to a mostly black public school through eighth grade and then went to a mostly white Catholic high school after that.
00:23:38.000The assault on American merit based on affirmative action, that is an assault on the American soul itself.
00:23:43.000We're talking about what it means to be American.
00:23:45.000This goes to the heart of what it means to be an American, that you get ahead based on your hard work and your commitment and your dedication, not on your genetics.
00:23:54.000And so it's also not, the sad part is it's actually fueling more anti-black racism now because there's no better way to cause racism against a group than to take something away from a different group on the basis of the color of their skin.
00:24:06.000That's exactly what affirmative action does.
00:24:09.000And again, I'm going to say really clearly: the president can solve this problem.
00:24:26.000This is something that is in need of addressing.
00:24:28.000All right, Vivek, I'm going to go through just some of the kind of chattering class objections.
00:24:32.000Okay, let me start with one that I'm going to personally need clear.
00:24:35.000I think there's some really silly ones, but you said here that, and I want to make sure I get the quote, the most important step in fighting COVID-19 pandemic was the distribution of vaccines.
00:24:45.000That's an unpopular opinion running in the Republican primary.
00:24:51.000And what is my position on it today is a key question, Charlie.
00:24:53.000And I want to say something about this.
00:24:55.000I'm actually proud, I don't like to brag a lot, but I'm proud of being ahead of the curve on a lot of things over the last few years, from government tech censorship, which was initially rejected as a conspiracy theory when I proposed it, to fighting the World Economic Forum's agenda, stakeholder capitalism, ESG, you name it.
00:25:10.000I've actually been ahead of the curve now on the climate religion.
00:25:24.000And on this one, I didn't foresee actually the reality as it unfolded.
00:25:28.000I will tell you this, though, and it's up on my social media now, actually.
00:25:31.000In 2021, I was on with Tucker Carlson when he asked me about, you know, what do you think about the distribution plan of vaccines based on race-based criteria, as the Biden administration was proposing?
00:25:41.000I said at the time, this is a powder keg waiting to explode.
00:25:44.000Imagine if something goes wrong, this would be like Tuskegee all over again.
00:25:50.000Also, even before, when I was a biotech CEO in 2020, I said there was too much of an emphasis on vaccines relative to treatments for people who were in the hospital.
00:25:59.000I also put my money where my mouth was by attempting to develop a treatment for people who were in the hospital.
00:26:05.000And I don't think anybody objects to that if somebody's on a ventilator to try to save their life with a therapy.
00:26:10.000We didn't emphasize that enough in this country.
00:27:18.000You find somebody in America who has been a more vocal opponent of the globalist agenda of the World Economic Forum and who has actually done something about it in the market than me.
00:27:37.000He shows up on that same website on the World Economic Forum Young Global Leaders website that they posted my name on, or Peter Thiel or anyone else they post their pictures on.
00:28:22.000Actually, the only way to get somebody sometimes is actually to embarrass them publicly, which I did, which eventually led them to take it down.
00:28:28.000And you could probably find those tweets that eventually I had to put out.
00:28:30.000Someone was on one of my Twitter threads.
00:29:06.000Now, in both of these cases, all right, I just want to say something.
00:29:09.000This is not a criticism of Donald Trump.
00:29:11.000I think these would be stupid reasons to criticize Donald Trump, but it does say a lot about these sort of clickbait conservatives that are trying to, I don't know, make a buck for themselves in the process.
00:29:44.000I don't hold that against him because if you're Elon Musk or me or Donald Trump or people who have been successful, that's just what you get invited to.
00:29:51.000The fact that somebody invited you to something is a silly reason, but I think that's a fair response.
00:29:55.000Clickbaits conservatives are hilarious.
00:29:59.000And I will defend, though, that some of the people that are asking these questions of Vivek are doing it from a position of, we've been betrayed so much.
00:30:18.000And then, look, you got to have prudence and you have to always be factual.
00:30:21.000You cannot allow yourself to get into deception or lies, which is why I'm offering you an opportunity to clarify it.
00:30:26.000But I also just want to defend, you know, some of the people that are asking these questions, albeit very shaky, it comes from a good-hearted place of like, hey, man, we don't want to get swindled again.
00:31:24.000I would say intentional immigration policies over accidental ones.
00:31:29.000We should be unapologetic about who gets in.
00:31:31.000Meritocratic immigration, a points-based system.
00:31:35.000Points for both contributions you are likely to make to this country in areas where we need it, as well as your commitment and loyalty to this country.
00:31:44.000So, I think that's actually really important, too.
00:31:46.000You want to pledge allegiance to this country.
00:31:48.000There's so many immigrants who actually do want to be part of this nation in some ways, shamefully, more than people who are many generations into this country who are so apathetic towards it.
00:31:57.000If we're getting the right kind of immigrants, I'm all in favor of it.
00:32:00.000So, if we're getting the wrong kind of immigrants, I'm not intentional rather than actual.
00:32:04.000Just in the spirit of time, so currently there are 1.1 million green cards issued.
00:32:18.000So, I don't have a number right now, but I think that that's because focusing on the number is the wrong question first before we've actually decided on the criteria of who we want to let in.
00:32:27.000So, once you decide on the criteria, here are the people who are actually going to contribute to America's industrial base, which we need to shore up to get economic independence from China.
00:32:35.000Here are the people who are going to lead America to be more economically successful while also pledging allegiance to this country, including being willing to serve it, even militarily or otherwise, should the need eventually ever arise.
00:32:45.000Let's see how many of those people actually line up.
00:32:47.000And then, out of that falls the question of the number.
00:32:49.000So, I'm not in this camp of believing that you set a number when you don't have even an idea of who you even want to allow to come in.
00:32:55.000If that number is zero, then let it be zero.
00:32:57.000If that number is over a million, let it be over a million.
00:32:59.000But if it's the right type of people come into the country as Americans in the way that I described and are actually going to contribute to what this country needs, let's figure out that number.
00:33:24.000I'm going to do that with the stroke of a pen.
00:33:25.000Fire people in the federal government, shut down agencies.
00:33:28.000I went on record in the last 24 hours, shutting down the Department of Education, shutting down a number of other parts of the national security apparatus, committing to actually replace them with something new.
00:33:40.000Once managerial cancer has gotten so bad, you can't actually reform it.
00:33:45.000The other thing I would say is eight-year sunset clauses, where if I'm assuming the presidency and I can't be a federal employee for more than eight years, most federal bureaucrats should not be employees for more than eight years either.
00:33:57.000Now, they will say that there's congressional provisions that override this.
00:34:01.000I believe in Article II of the Constitution, and those statutes and civil services protections are unconstitutional when measured against that.
00:34:09.000Like Elon did at Twitter, I'm going to release the state action files from the federal government.
00:34:14.000Anytime in the last five years that a government bureaucrat or a government official pressured a private company to do something that the government actor couldn't do directly, we got to expose that and put sunlight on it and eventually actually press charges on the back of it.
00:34:29.000Twitter will just be the tip of the iceberg.
00:34:31.000We're going to roll that log over, see what crawls out.
00:34:34.000The other thing I'm doing on day one, it's one of these sacred cows.
00:34:36.000Even if you're a Republican, you're not supposed to touch, is abandoning climate religion in America, the climate religion that shackles America while leaving China untouched.
00:34:47.000We're not going to apologize for that.
00:34:49.000We're going to deregulate a lot of the unnecessary constraints applying to nuclear energy.
00:34:53.000It's an American energy revival that rejects the demands of this globalist climate religion without apology.
00:35:00.000I think as it pertains to social media in this country, think about the depression and anxiety epidemic across this country.
00:35:05.000The federal government can tell you you can't smoke an addictive cigarette till the age of 18 or drink alcohol till the age of 21.
00:35:11.000I don't think you should be able to at least use an addictive social media product like TikTok until the age of 15 or 16 either.
00:35:17.000That's not a partisan proposal, but I think it's something that makes sense when you think about the next generation of Americans and what's actually holding them back.
00:35:39.000Then we build the wall and we're in good shape.
00:35:41.000And I'm just giving you, Charlie, even just scratching the surface.
00:35:45.000That's anywhere between day one and month one on the Mexican drug cartel proposal, the first three to six months.
00:35:51.000Just a taste of what my administration will look like.
00:35:55.000I think that the piece of bureaucratic reform, though, is actually probably at the heart of it.
00:35:59.000Because if you're the executive and you run the show, if someone's working for you and you can't fire them, that means they don't actually work for you.