Rachel Bovard is a technology columnist for the Federalist and a former colleague of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-Mississippi). She also served as the Senior Director of Policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and co-authored the book, Conservative Knowing What to Keep with Senator Jim deMint.
00:00:35.360They subject us to a level of harassment and mockery that they couldn't even imagine, let alone withstand.
00:00:41.700To them, so many people in America are dumb, useless, bigoted, any other number of ridiculous accusations.
00:00:49.580And it doesn't have to be just it could be somebody on the left that disagrees with them.
00:00:53.840They're dumb and ridiculous and racist.
00:00:55.960What they don't realize is that without something that I think is at the center of conservatism, they should be at least, individuals and individual rights, civilization collapses.
00:01:10.560What then would they do if you won the zero sum game with nobody left to destroy?
00:01:16.720Today's guest is one of the brave souls that is standing in front of that tank.
00:01:23.040After she spoke at the National Conservative Conference last fall, Jacobin magazine said, who is this woman and what the hell is going on here?
00:01:33.360They went on to say that she uses, quote, the language of war and enmity and victory at all costs and subordinating means to ends.
00:02:00.080She has had directorial jobs in the House and the Senate.
00:02:03.800She's worked with Senator Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee.
00:02:08.000OK, she certainly currently serves as the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and co-authored the book Conservative Knowing What to Keep with Senator Jim DeMint.
00:02:21.480She is she is a senior tech columnist also for the Federalist.
00:02:27.140She has her thumb on the monster known as big tech.
00:04:54.840So you wrote a article the other day, the 80s called They Want Their Foreign Policy Backer, Republicans Finally to Wake Up.
00:05:02.260And I read that and I thought to myself, I think I completely agree with you, but there is so much swirling around that is vying for attention for the conservatives that I'm cautious.
00:05:20.120I want to always talk to people before I go, you know what?
00:05:46.200So that column was an adaptation of a speech for which I only had 10 minutes.
00:05:50.340So there is so much more that I could have said there.
00:05:53.700But I think, you know, in this sort of new right project that I'm working on, it's this idea not that Reagan was bad, right, or Reagan wasn't a good president.
00:06:03.400It's just that Reagan is not eternal and he's not immortal.
00:06:07.340And the conditions under which he was successful are not our conditions now.
00:06:12.180And I think this is especially true, you know, even today, looking at why Liz Truss failed is sort of case in point, right?
00:06:19.640She was trying to make economic policy for a type of economy that existed 40 years ago.
00:06:24.660And the global order right now is being reshaped.
00:07:09.020But Reagan, the reason why Reagan, because I lived through it, that he was popular was not because he defeated things or turned the economy around.
00:07:21.220Because he could connect with the principles and ideals of America.
00:07:40.400We don't agree on basic foundational questions of whether a girl is a boy or, you know, religion and its role in shaping the country, traditional values.
00:07:51.340All these things are up for just debate and dispute in a way that they weren't.
00:08:07.740I mean, we love the Constitution, but we got things to do.
00:08:11.040I don't know if we're even a constitutional republic today.
00:08:15.960Well, it's interesting, this question of that particular question.
00:08:20.200I touched on a little bit in that piece, but my friend Russ Vogt has written a column for the American Mind saying we are actually post-constitutional.
00:08:28.200Yeah, I think you looked how the left operates.
00:08:30.520Yeah. And so how does the right respond to that?
00:08:33.020And his vision is that you actually embrace radical constitutionalism, like you double down on what the Constitution really means.
00:08:41.240But that requires us to upend, you know, bad precedent that we beholden ourselves to.
00:08:47.080And I think he calls it like, you know, bad, bad precedent and bad statesmen have led us into this place where, you know, he's talking about how his group looked at how do you constitutionally declare an invasion?
00:09:02.400He's like, that's in the Constitution.
00:09:03.520You can make a constitutional argument that the state has a responsibility to do that.
00:09:06.940He's like, but you would be shocked the amount of conservative lawyers that push back against that because, oh, the precedent doesn't let us go there.
00:09:13.280And he's like, no, no, no, I have to tell you, the stakes are this high precedent is not how you judge what's constitutional.
00:09:21.880That'll just dogpile bad rulings after bad rulings.
00:09:24.940Because the problem is, when you're doing that, you're saying all these, you know, conservative lawyers.
00:09:36.120Look, this, this, we're living in an age of radicalism.
00:09:42.200If you want to restore the Bill of Rights as our centerpiece, it's going to take radicals because it's gone.
00:09:52.140So you're, you, you are really fighting for a new system of government that people haven't seen in a hundred years because that hasn't been followed.
00:10:03.080And then it's just been trashed in the last 10.
00:10:07.280So if we can agree on the principles of Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, the Constitution will allow us to rebuild it.
00:10:16.960But I don't know if you'll never get Mitch McConnell, you'll never get Mitt Romney, you'll never get these Republicans.
00:10:26.980I think it's going to take people who either think very young along with the very young or it's just going to take the very young because these people think like it's 1950.
00:10:38.620That's, and I think that is sort of the paradox the conservative movement is living in to some extent because as conservatives or conservatism broadly, right, we're not radicals by definition.
00:10:50.300But we're living in a moment where we are forced to be radicals, to return to or to uncover, you know, Kirk said, you know, find the old values and old virtues and bring them back into the light.
00:11:04.300And that requires a certain amount of radicalism from the movement.
00:11:06.860Because to your point, and I think this is true of all the political right in Washington, they just don't understand this.
00:11:13.080They do not understand the stakes of the moment we're living in.
00:11:15.860They do not understand this is a fight for the soul of America, that if we don't get this right, America is not going to be America anymore.
00:11:22.380It's going to be some sort of, you know, technologically.
00:11:55.060I just always assume, and I'm glad you said they were enriching themselves.
00:12:00.400I look at the things that they should do if they win the Senate and the House, and I'm not sure they'll do it because it will come back on them as well.
00:12:11.740I mean, it's it's not everybody, but a lot of them are in on the game and they just want to take it at a slower pace than the left.
00:12:21.300Well, take, you know, just as a small example, you know, how entangled we are with China, how entangled our economy is, is what prevents us from taking this threat seriously.
00:12:33.840And I see it as a as a global order changing threat.
00:12:38.240We cannot and we are functionally incapable of addressing that as a legislature because so many of these guys and women, right, are tied into making so much money from that system.
00:13:16.680And it's honestly it's been the trend of financialization, I think, which has been the focus of, you know, many Republican and Democratic leaders for the last 30 years.
00:13:28.280Just this high finance, you know, production that doesn't actually make anything for the economy, but it makes a lot of people rich.
00:13:35.980And it's that global financialization that we need to pull back, I think, and really take a critical look at.
00:13:41.460And we are unable, again, to do that because too many people are making money from it.
00:13:44.880So I do think it's going to take a new generation of leaders that aren't connected to that old system and are willing to kind of call it out and call it for what it is and change it.
00:13:53.900But that's got to happen fast because we don't have a lot of time.
00:13:56.160So many people think like Rachel, think like I do and know that we have quite a task on our hands and everybody is going to be needed on the field.
00:14:58.860So I think that there is, you know, these countries, England, they're fighting with austerity.
00:15:04.900And I think there's a portion of America, and they are either the classical liberal that believes in, you know, rights, and has seen that we've just been a, we've become France in the 1700s and makeup and just talking nonsense at, you know, parties in Versailles.
00:15:34.840Those people and conservatives would just like to reset to a normal, reasonable lifestyle where you can get rich or not, but that's not what society is all about.
00:15:49.480And I think the left is destroying us trying to get there while they're taking all of the money.
00:15:59.360Um, and, and I think if we were asked to, and we had a real plan that would say, look, we have got to reset all of this and it's going to mean we all, you know, take it on the chin for a while.
00:16:15.140I think we would do that if we knew that there was no way out of this financial disaster.
00:16:21.140But they're not including us in any of this and they're denying it most times.
00:16:27.700I think that's the really frustrating point about this moment is that we all see what's happening, right?
00:16:36.400I think any reasonable person living in America today understands, you know, the attacks and the assaults that the country is under and the sort of economic precipice that we're living in.
00:16:46.880Well, at the same time, right, you can't, the price of your child's innocence is being corrupted in their public school.
00:16:53.500Conservatives are being debanked by major institutions.
00:16:56.660You know, they're being cut off from the avenues to capitalism, to public life for, you know, saying the wrong thing on Twitter.
00:17:02.800I mean, this isn't hyperbole or exaggeration.
00:17:06.860And yet they are told by their representatives where, again, the great American experiment was that our self-government would reflect our concerns.
00:17:14.680Our self-government would act on our behalf.
00:17:17.220And yet they are being told by those people that your concerns are stupid.
00:17:24.560We don't have time to do that right now.
00:17:27.000Maybe we'll get to it, you know, and we will take incremental steps to address this problem.
00:17:32.100And it's infuriating, you know, and I think why you see people so, you know, the left talks about, you know, how angry the right is and how radical they are.
00:17:56.380And so I do think we are getting to a dangerous point that if you don't have that catharsis, if you don't see yourself reflected in your own representative government, what are you to do as an individual person?
00:18:08.200I think this election is absolutely critical, but I'm not sure.
00:18:56.120So the new right is, I would say, still a nascent and ascendant movement among, I think, younger conservatives that our established sort of policymaking on the right has failed.
00:19:13.140Now, I say in that speech, I think new right isn't necessarily a great moniker because there's been a number of new rights.
00:19:19.500And in reality, a lot of the policies and ways of thinking the quote unquote new right pushes now is simply the conservatism of, you know, Robert Taft or Calvin Coolidge or sort of a historical reemergence of that way of thought.
00:19:35.920But, you know, I think it's it's, again, a recognition that, you know, from where I sit, conservatism as a set of philosophies is dynamic.
00:19:45.660Right. And it's it's resurgent always because it's flexible enough to meet the moment.
00:19:50.600And I think what's what I have looked at in Washington is a conservative movement that's become fat and lazy and attached to dogma.
00:19:57.720And they've they've disrespected conservatism by pushing it into the set of policy prescriptions that have become so rigid and ossified that any movement away from it is like, well, you're not a conservative.
00:20:10.060When in reality, conservatism is supposed to conserve the things that we care about, which is nation, family, community, human dignity.
00:20:18.040And by definition, when you attach yourself to those ideals, the policies are always going to look a little bit different because the threats are different.
00:20:25.680Right. And the moment that we are living in right now, I would say.
00:20:29.100And again, I'm not 40, but I'm like mid 30s.
00:20:32.600So it's the from in my lifetime, I would say it is the highest stakes moment for these set of ideals that I have ever seen.
00:20:43.060Oh, I will. They are under attack in ways I've never witnessed.
00:20:46.520I was born in the 60s, so I've seen a lot.
00:20:50.340And I've I mean, I really thought we were going to be vaporized in my teens.
00:20:54.640I remember waiting because a decision was being made at the White House.
00:22:06.860All of our traditions, everything has been destroyed and nobody is talking about how do we pick it up except.
00:22:17.880The 1950s way, the Mitch McConnell way.
00:22:24.660Well, this is where I think the new right distinguishes itself in some ways, is that it acknowledges everything that you're saying.
00:22:31.260Right. It acknowledges that our way of life is being destroyed or has been destroyed by, I would say, like an over reliance on the market as the end in and of itself instead of a means to an end.
00:22:45.680You know, a over focus on religious liberty as opposed to religiosity going away in American society.
00:22:53.860Right. They go hand in hand, but we've overemphasized one to the exclusion of the other.
00:23:04.040And I think we the fatal conceit there was that, oh, well, the market will correct for the left's long march through the institutions.
00:23:10.800And that has failed. That is a broken way of thinking.
00:23:14.060And it has led us to this moment where conservatives and conservatism is almost a dissident culture at this point.
00:23:19.940And so what the new right says is if we accept that premise that we are a dissident culture, we are by definition, we have to be a little bit more radical in our approach.
00:23:29.480And when we get power, when we are given power through our self-government, we have to use it to actively defend the things that we care about.
00:23:39.540So hang on, hang on, because this is where this is why I wanted to talk to you, because this is where it gets dicey.
00:23:47.900We cannot become everything we despise.
00:23:51.840And there are a lot of people on the right that, A, are angry and like, oh, you're going to do that to us?
00:23:58.640Well, I'll show you what that feels like.
00:24:09.880But as it swings one way or the other, left or right, it gets further and further apart until somebody grabs it and says there's too much chaos, there's too much division, and the people cry out for somebody to come down.
00:24:27.600And quite honestly, after this administration, if the Republicans win, after this administration, if they don't do things, people are going to cry out for somebody to make it stop.
00:24:42.940So please tell me how, what you mean by if you win, you get power.
00:24:52.240So this is, I think, the foundational question for the new right.
00:24:56.020I think you're absolutely right to hone in on it.
00:24:57.940And as a sort of a nascent movement, I think the new right has to iterate very clearly on what it means here, because it can't be, as you suggest, you know, this.
00:25:07.860And there are some people on the new right that will say this, like that we are now the administrative state, right?
00:25:12.200That we now tell you how to live your life.
00:25:18.460But I also think it's not, as a practical matter, possible, right?
00:25:22.520Even if the, even if, let's just say conservatives take all three branches of government, the administrative state is still run by Democrats.
00:25:29.500Like, however you parse it, they are still in charge of the administrative state.
00:25:32.480So as a practical matter, I don't think that works.
00:25:34.600What I have always said is that if the new right obtains power, it has to be a twofold approach of, one, obtaining power, but then using that power to, one, protect the things that we care about, which is necessarily requiring a defunding of things, a decentralization of things, and a divestment of things.
00:25:57.680And what I mean by that is, I want to break the elite power centers so that no elite can use them, right?
00:26:05.700Our new, from where I sit, and there's many views on this in the new right, because again, it's a very nascent sort of movement at this time and fluid.
00:26:13.300But from where I sit, we have to break the concentrations of power that exist within the government and within the private sector so that no one can sort of control those anymore.
00:26:22.900And for me, state power, state power is using the government to create a space in which free people can flourish.
00:26:31.900That's an inherently Lockean idea, and a lot of new right people hate Locke, but I think it's foundational to how our country works and the people that, you know, how we all live together.
00:26:42.040But that requires using the government in a way that, historically, the right hasn't been popular on the right.
00:26:50.540And what I mean is, I'm for strong antitrust enforcement.
00:26:53.520I think we've been way too lax on how our megacorporations have consolidated.
00:26:59.200You know, when people want to defend these companies as American companies, they're not.
00:27:02.500They're multinationals that are interested in one thing, and that is their own self-interest.
00:27:07.520Yeah, tell me the NBA is an American company.
00:28:24.600They're trying to get you a good piece of seafood or steak.
00:28:28.980And they're trying to help America rebuild and become more self-reliant and also give you a good deal.
00:28:35.720Join the tens of thousands of Americans getting 100% American meat delivered to their door.
00:28:42.300Right now, during Good Ranchers October feast sale, you'll get two pounds of Wagyu beef and two and a half pounds of their better than organic chicken free with any purchase of one of their bundle boxes.
00:28:55.140So just go over to GoodRanchers.com slash Glenn.
00:29:10.800They had certain principles that work anywhere in the universe for any problem.
00:29:17.860The one thing that I don't think that they really addressed or thought about was that they never thought a corporation could be more powerful than a government and that it could just rule the world.
00:29:37.120And there's no restrictions on these corporations.
00:29:49.580But when that grocery store owns all of the grocery stores or a large part of them and influences everyone else.
00:29:58.160Because no, and especially if it's taking any money from the federal government, then that's the government funding my rights being taken away.
00:30:42.960Well, the government, you know, the public-private partnership of ESG and all of that stuff.
00:30:48.500This, they have built a digital ghetto.
00:30:53.960I said this a few years ago and I got my head handed to me, but it's true.
00:30:59.700You, in the, in, you know, with Hitler, he had to round the Jews up and then put them in a place and then build walls around that place.
00:31:09.520So, they couldn't do anything with the outside world, but you go ahead and have your little life here.
00:31:14.700Well, that's what's happening with people who, I don't care what side you're on, if you disagree with the state and the power, then you're in a digital ghetto.
00:31:46.780And when I started writing on some of these issues a couple of years ago, I used to get in these debates with libertarians who, I was writing specifically about the tech platforms.
00:31:54.500Sort of foreshadowing what I thought was going to happen, which is that, you know, these are market access points.
00:32:01.700And when you start ideologically weaponizing them, you cut people off from the market, the downstream effects are going to be very dangerous.
00:32:07.580And they would say to me, well, Facebook can't put you in jail.
00:32:10.200The government is still a bigger threat to your liberty.
00:32:12.260The government is, can be a threat to your liberty.
00:32:14.120But as you point out, like we're living in a digital economy, a digital technocracy in many cases, and the ability to cut you off from all the avenues of making money in this country to being successful, to maintaining a job, to having any kind of social capital at all.
00:32:34.040And I deal a lot with people, too, who say, well, you know, if, as we saw recently, J.P. Morgan is unbanking Sam Brownback's Committee for Religious Liberty, he should just find another bank and we should just build a different bank for conservatives.
00:32:49.220And it's like, OK, there is, you know, the alternative economy movement, I think, yes, has some merit, but two things.
00:32:57.400One, it cannot be scaled up at all quickly enough, I think, to meet the kind of crisis that we're in.
00:33:02.920But second, every input in that system is also weaponized, right?
00:33:08.460You saw this with Parler, for instance.
00:33:11.000Remember Parler, the alternative Twitter?
00:33:18.580It wasn't just that they lost access to the app stores, although I would argue that was a huge blow because those are the only two market access points if you are a social media app.
00:33:27.220If you're not in those app stores, you functionally don't exist.
00:33:29.520But it was their web hosting service that they got kicked off of, their email provider dropped them, their lawyers stopped working with them.
00:33:38.780How are you going to build an alternative system when everything you need to make the market work for you is you're cut off from it?
00:33:45.460And that is what I think there's no wider acknowledgement of that phenomenon on the right, the established right.
00:35:02.540Every law, the way we work now, you know, there are bills this big and nobody reads them except the attorneys.
00:35:14.100Nobody really writes them except the people that usually are the on the receiving end of it.
00:35:21.040They're the ones we're trying to regulate.
00:35:22.980Well, I don't really know how to regulate.
00:35:25.040This is why we only have three car companies up until Tesla in America, because FDR went to the big three and say, said, what do we need to do?
00:35:35.140Well, they regulated everybody out of business.
00:35:38.440Who's going to write the tech legislation?
00:35:48.280This is a very, I think, pressing question.
00:35:55.800And I don't have any faith in our legislators to be able to do it, to be totally honest, because in so many ways, you know, we've technology has outpaced us.
00:36:05.140Right. And I think for the last 20 years, the debate in Washington and I think even across the country was tech exceptionalism.
00:36:11.800Right. That the tech is just going to push us forward and do great things and we're never going to have to worry about it.
00:36:16.400And isn't it great that you can do all these things?
00:36:18.540And yeah, your data is everywhere, but that will never come back to bite us ever.
00:38:33.020So they control, you know, the massive information economy, which involves how we think, how we express ourselves, how we vote, you know, all these things.
00:38:41.580So to think that somehow, you know, this is just the information ecosystem and there are a thousand flowers blooming is a joke.
00:38:48.800I mean, people say, oh, well, use DuckDuckGo.
00:38:51.660The fact that DuckDuckGo or Bing exists says nothing to me about the reach of Google's power.
00:39:59.900The leftists after Reagan, they realized they didn't have the corporate boardrooms and you can't win without the corporate boardrooms.
00:40:09.900So they spent 20 years getting into the corporate boardrooms and we see the effects.
00:40:15.700However, people think this is a Marxist, communist movement.
00:40:24.000I think those, I think, I think those people are just the useful idiots.
00:40:30.560Did the left win or did the worst part of corporatism win?
00:40:37.420The, it's almost like they came in to infect and they just taught how, wait a minute, if we destroy this, we can get all the money by using these kinds of ideas and we'll be, we'll be the evil corporation in the end, you know, all for the good of people.
00:41:04.220So this is a very interesting question and I'm curious what you think about, let me lay this out and see what you think.
00:41:10.440So I think the sequencing here is important because I think what you just laid out is kind of what happened.
00:41:17.320And you see this, it's very hilarious to me.
00:41:19.360Like companies, it's so much signaling, right?
00:41:22.000Companies like Apple are like, throw up this huge Black Lives Matter banner on, you know, their homepage.
00:41:28.580And they're, meanwhile, they're like using Chinese slaves.
00:41:30.980Like it's just, it's just, it's like so much signaling, right?
00:41:34.160Like Amazon is like, oh, here are these, you know, 15 movies for Black History Month, you know, don't talk about the fact that we make our warehouse workers, you know, pee in bottles and they die on the floor, right?
00:41:46.000So there's like definitely a component of that.
00:41:49.060But the other side of it is, and this is where I'm interested in what you think.
00:41:54.660I think that the leadership of a lot of these corporations, to your point, they're not ideological.
00:42:02.660And so they've been led down this line and that's what they'll do.
00:42:05.180But, and I think they're largely Gen X sort of boomer generations.
00:42:08.980But what concerns me the most is that you have this mid-level management that is completely ideological and woke and, you know, coming out of the universities on a, just willing to wield power against everyone in really tyrannical ways.
00:42:29.200And they are ascending to leadership of these companies.
00:42:32.320And in many ways, the leadership that exists is terrified of them.
00:42:35.720You know, look no further than the New York Times and what happened to James Bennett and the furor that that newsroom has been in.
00:42:42.840It was the mid-level, you know, woke tyrants overthrowing their elders.
00:42:48.960And so my fear is that unless you have the current leadership that sort of Gen X boomer level have enough courage to tamp that down, and I'm not sure they do, we will actually see tyrants ascend to these boardrooms.
00:43:02.640And it won't be the, you know, I'm painting BLM in my cheek while I, you know, exploit my workers.
00:43:08.760It will be an actual weaponization of the corporate sector that we have never seen.
00:43:13.720So, it's been 20 years now, two decades ago, Covenant Eyes founder, Radihas, faced the same questions many people are facing today.
00:43:28.580How can I teach my kids to use the internet with integrity?
00:43:48.500You can get things that are just downright evil accidentally.
00:43:53.940So, with this mission in mind, Covenant Eyes created their own world-class software and educational resources, which now are used by over a million people.
00:44:04.980Covenant Eyes wants to help equip parents and grandparents, that's you, with the resources that will help you protect your family.
00:44:13.560They want to give you a free parenting e-book called Connected.
00:44:17.060This book explores how a strong family connection can protect children and teens from the dangers of hidden pornography use.
00:44:26.760And this book contains real-life stories, practical tips for maintaining or re-establishing connection in your family.
00:44:33.860This book will help strengthen your relationship with God, your spouse, your children, so that your family can be free of the evils that just spill into your house.
00:44:46.280Get your free copy of Connected by texting GLENN, G-L-E-N-N, to 66866.
00:45:47.640Look, the people your age, the damn hippies have been a pain in my ass ever since I was a kid.
00:45:58.580They came in, they were all about them, me, me, me, me, me, and they did whatever the hell they wanted, and everybody left in their wreckage behind.
00:46:30.740Everything you've done has left wreckage behind you.
00:46:34.960So your generation is a little pissed off if you even know what they took.
00:46:43.040You'll never know what America really was like because they destroyed it probably, you know, right after you were born is when this stuff really started to kick in.
00:46:58.120You're not going to get anything because those people who are almost dead took and destroyed everything, and now you're turning against me and clumping me with them.
00:47:10.140And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, stop, stop.
00:48:13.680But if you can't give me the Bill of Rights, I don't know how to be in a country and run a country that is diametrically opposed to itself.
00:48:31.140This is the great existential question of the age, because, you know, this is the situation where how do you have a self-government with people who literally don't agree on foundational on the foundational aspects of what it's like to live together?
00:48:46.320And the new right, I think, is trying to answer that question by saying we have to upend the left's march to the institutions.
00:48:55.640We have to decentralize all the power centers that have existed that allow one side of the ledger to tyrannize the other, because that is what what is happening right now.
00:49:04.580So this is really this is what's happening at the EU right now.
00:50:11.160They don't want states to assert their own identities.
00:50:13.760They don't want red states to be allowed to make decisions.
00:50:18.400You know, I read this great piece a couple of years ago that talked about this phenomenon where, you know, it talks about how the left pushes you to the margins and then demonizes that spaces, that space on the margins.
00:50:30.940Right. They're never going to leave you alone.
00:50:33.560They're never going to stop coming for you.
00:50:35.660And that's why I think it's if we want to get back to this radical federalism, which I think in the end is what's going to save us.
00:50:41.260If we want to get back to this radical constitutionalism, which we absolutely need, we need a right that is willing to go in and defend us.
00:50:50.420Right. And use the government to dismantle the administrative state, to dismantle this massive, you know, corporate friendly tax code that has amassed so much power into these institutions that hate us and that have sold the American way of life out to China.
00:51:05.440We need to create a policy that supports communities so we can once again say local government can solve problems because our communities have been decimated.
00:51:14.440And yet we sit here and say, oh, the community, your neighbor should look out for neighbors.
00:51:18.280Your neighbor strung out on opioids and lost its job because it got shipped to China.
00:51:22.380Right. We have to have a policy that is defensive and offensive to push forward the way the things that make life meaningful and sustainable in the United States.
00:51:35.440And right now we don't have that. The right over the last 30 years has allowed our public policy to decimate the things that we care about.
00:51:42.680We need a public policy that protects those things. And that's going to mean renegotiating trade agreements.
00:51:49.180I have not I don't want to hear about multilateral trade anymore. I just want to hear about bilateral trade.
00:51:53.420You know, like, frankly, I don't want I want to hear more about rebuilding our manufacturing capacity, not through, you know, some sort of big statist, you know, chips management from Washington.
00:52:08.980Right. But a tax code that actually supports and encourages and incentivizes companies to to stay here.
00:52:15.960I want to see an immigration system that protects American workers, because so much of what we're seeing, again, has been policy choices that we made.
00:52:24.580It's not just the market and the invisible hand. No, no, no. We pushed ourselves down this road.
00:52:29.320Right. We have to haul ourselves back again, not to sort of dictate how people live from Washington, but to create the space and the conditions for families to flourish.
00:52:39.540So middle class workers to do well. You're seeing you're seeing somebody create that space.
00:52:46.840And that's Ron DeSantis. I mean, he is I mean, I'm really I'm kind of a disgruntled Texan because Florida is not supposed to lead the way.
00:52:59.320They got the mouse house. That's enough. That's all they get. We're supposed to.
00:53:03.100You have FOMO. You have FOMO about Florida.
00:53:05.100Yes, I do. And but if more governors would deal with things the way he is, that's why I support the I think the last line of defense is our is our attorney generals and our sheriffs.
00:53:24.220The sheriff is supposed to be notified before the FBI can come in and kick down your door with a team.
00:53:31.780You know what I mean? What are you doing? Operating it back off.
00:53:34.360The the banks are being investigated, not by a single person on Capitol Hill.
00:53:41.940But just this week, 19 attorney generals are calling all those banks and saying, what are you doing here with ESG?
00:53:50.840I mean, so can can the states do it if we shore up our states?
00:53:57.000Yeah, I think this has to be a multi-pronged project.
00:54:03.460You know, I want to get back. And this is what I mean where I say radical federalism.
00:54:07.880Right. But I think it's naive to also think you can just simply do that.
00:54:12.320What Ron DeSantis is doing in a red state and the government, the federal government is not going to aggress against it.
00:54:17.220They will. Right. So this is what I mean.
00:54:20.020They don't want to let you exist. And I think we have to, you know, our federal legislator legislatures have to get control of that.
00:54:27.280And, you know, you look at the Department of Justice right now.
00:54:30.140Dobbs was overturned. Pro-lifers, you know, won a victory.
00:54:33.880And the Department of Justice responds by beginning to arrest pro-life protesters for singing hymns outside an abortion clinic.
00:54:42.900So, you know, but I so we have a two a multi-pronged approach, I think, that we have to engage in.
00:54:48.920And I would actually add to your list, in addition to sheriffs and attorneys general, I would add state treasurers, I think, have a big role to play.
00:54:57.380Yes. And if you if you watch Riley Moore, who's a state treasurer of West Virginia, he's great, has been really creative and inventive and pushing back against ESG, forcing companies out of his state for trying to put the coal companies out of business.
00:55:11.660You know, I think there's a whole number of weapons and tools that state treasurers have available.
00:55:16.380So the one thing that they have, they will have just a whole bunch of new troops all the time because they control the education system.
00:55:28.880I think the Department of Education needs to be abolished.
00:55:35.980And these these teachers unions are the root of of of real evil as well.
00:55:43.580How can what do we have to do to be able to have fresh troops on the horizon?
00:55:55.140Well, I think this goes back to when we were talking about the corporate boardroom and sort of my thesis on the woke millennial middle management takeover that I think is really going to threaten to tyrannize the corporate sector and like even new ways.
00:56:11.840That is the pipeline from the university system.
00:56:15.820Right. And all of these things that the right has ignored on the institutional side, the cultural institutions, the educational institutions, we have to be prepared to deal with that.
00:56:24.360And this goes back to my idea of why the new right has to divest and decentralize and defund.
00:56:29.280And we need to start the university system is a big part of that.
00:56:33.360Right. We have to they benefit in myriad ways from our federal policy.
00:56:40.960Like that, that that that has to be yanked out from under them because they have become far too powerful and they're pumping out.
00:56:48.500You know, it's there was always this joke a couple of years ago, right, where it was like, oh, the gender studies majors.
00:56:54.780Ha ha. Wait until they're going to have to get a real job and then it'll disabuse them of all their crazy ideas.
00:56:59.640Well, you know what? That gender studies major is running your H.R. department now.
00:57:02.800Right. So we have to pay attention to this pipeline.
00:57:07.220And I frankly, I'm very comfortable with our federal policy addressing it the way I just described.
00:57:12.320Yeah. Which is yanking the benefits that they have from the tax code and removing this ideological terror from the heights of our society, because this is where we train our elites.
00:57:21.780Right. I loved, by the way, Jim Ho, a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit, who said, I'm not going to hire Yale law school clerks anymore because these people are crazy.
00:57:31.620These people are we need more of that. Yeah, we do. Right.
00:57:35.460In addition to, you know, cutting them off from the federal benefits, which I think would go a long way in cracking the hold they have on free thinkers running our country.
00:58:14.000Is is there anything like that that is really working and pushing forward this kind of questioning at this point?
00:58:24.920Yeah, it's it's been it's yes, I will say there there is a small bedraggled, scrappy group of people trying to come up with what this looks like in policy and pushing it forward as an actual policy agenda.
00:58:38.520Because the last like two or three years, this sort of new right national conservatism movement has been intellectual.
00:58:45.540Right. It's been an intellectual ferment, I think, among the conservative right.
00:58:49.420But the problem is, OK, you know, we've won the argument now, I would say, you know, in many ways.
00:58:56.680What how do you what do you do now? How do you actually enact policy?
00:59:00.640And so that's the sort of next bleeding edge of this movement.
00:59:03.880And there's a number of us really iterating on this question.
00:59:07.280You know, I don't always agree with some of the solutions that people come up with.
00:59:10.140I think there's a danger. There's a danger, I think, for the new right to simply be sort of warmed over leftism.
00:59:16.640You know, that there's a danger, I think, also on the other the flip side of that, there's a danger for the new right to simply be captured by to be sloganeering and simply be neoliberalism under the guise of MAGA or whatever.
00:59:30.240So there really needs to be a focus on, you know, creatively addressing this moment while maintaining the sort of freedom and sort of, again, radical constitutionalism that I think has to define it.
00:59:47.380So I think the challenge is twofold. You have to come up with a policy agenda, but then you have to actually have leaders with the cojones to actually do it.
00:59:56.160So I've never offered this to anybody ever before, but if you can get that scrappy ragtag team together, I would like to have you over at my house for dinner.
01:00:08.120I'd love to host a dinner just to be a fly on the wall to listen to this conversation.
01:00:14.660I think it is vital, vital that we are having these conversations and thinking for the very first time in my life.
01:00:24.720I mean, I was a I was a Reagan guy, you know, big government, peace through strength, all that.
01:00:30.700Get the hell out of all of these things.
01:00:34.180Stop telling the rest of the world what to do.
01:00:38.980Enough, enough, enough, and there are a lot of conservatives that are no longer they used to be, but they've seen the results of it.
01:00:51.820How many times do we have to learn this lesson?