The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh Has An Honest Conversation With Vivek Ramaswamy

00:00:00.000 We're joined by Vivek Ramaswamy, of course, a former presidential candidate, also now the host

00:00:04.940 of a new podcast called Truth, available wherever you get your podcasts. Vivek, this is our first

00:00:10.320 time speaking, I believe, and thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, it's good to finally talk to you,

00:00:17.740 follow a lot of your commentary, especially over the last year, but I think it's the first time

00:00:22.140 we're sitting down. Yeah, absolutely. So let me just start with a question you've gotten a million

00:00:26.780 times, I'm sure, and are tired of. It's always a good place to start. Obviously, there's been a lot

00:00:31.060 of speculation that you could be on the list for vice president in the Trump administration. There

00:00:34.980 was a report a couple months ago that you were being considered instead for a position in the

00:00:39.400 cabinet. Do you think you'll land somewhere in the Trump administration, potentially?

00:00:46.820 I mean, look, my top focus is making sure he wins the election, and I think that Republicans win

00:00:50.880 up and down the ballot so we can actually implement the agenda. But if he is successfully elected,

00:00:55.820 and I'm doing everything in my power at this point to make sure that he is, then I hope to have a big

00:01:00.220 impact in some way or other. And President Trump and I have built a pretty close relationship,

00:01:05.080 especially over the last several months after I dropped out of the race. But even we had known

00:01:08.980 each other for years before that, and I'm confident his second term can actually be even more successful

00:01:15.180 than the first. And I'm going to look at however I can have the biggest possible impact on this

00:01:19.800 country. And so we've had some great conversations, but I think the focus right now is not to put the

00:01:24.620 cart before the horse, actually make sure that we're successful in winning the election.

00:01:28.640 I personally believe that we're actually at risk of some complacency right now. You got a lot of

00:01:33.780 people who are looking at the polls and celebrating and patting ourselves on the back. I actually think

00:01:38.480 the real race has not even yet begun in the sense that you look at the first presidential debate that's

00:01:44.720 on June 27th, I think it is. That's the earliest ever presidential debate ever held. It's before even the

00:01:50.360 Democratic National Convention. That's not an accident. I think that is the final audition

00:01:55.180 before Biden actually becomes christened as the nominee, if he will be. So I think there's going

00:02:00.500 to be a lot of twists and turns left this year. And so I'm taking it one step at a time and seeing

00:02:05.840 how I can maximize my own impact along the way. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the debate,

00:02:09.680 but before we get there, let me just ask you this. If you could do anything at all

00:02:14.880 in any presidential administration, have any job you wanted, what would you take? I mean,

00:02:21.260 obviously you'd take president, but if you can't have that- Well, I was laughing because I ran for

00:02:24.600 U.S. president for the last year. Except for that. Except for that. Yeah, so look, I think that one

00:02:31.280 of the things about me is I come from outside the world of politics. I am used to being an executive.

00:02:35.400 That's part of why I have not considered running for Congress or Senate. And those are important roles,

00:02:40.520 but being a legislator is definitely not for me. But when you're thinking about my ability to use

00:02:45.280 executive talent, how could I put that to use? Two of the issues I focused on most during the campaign

00:02:51.080 were, number one, shutting down large swaths of the administrative state. That was probably the

00:02:57.560 signature issue of my presidential campaign. It's part of what pulled me in. How do you shut down

00:03:02.680 large numbers of federal bureaucrats? How do you fire them, send them packing, downsize the government

00:03:07.640 by 75% or more? That's one category of issues that I think that largely you have to be a president

00:03:13.020 or maybe a vice president or something like that, that's above any one agency to be able to implement.

00:03:18.880 The other category that I was intensely focused on is once and for all, actually fixing the issue

00:03:24.320 holistically of immigration in this country in a principled manner. How do we actually set up an

00:03:30.060 immigration system that actually advances the interests of U.S. citizens who are already here?

00:03:35.400 That means your first act of entering this country can't break the law. That means that if you do

00:03:40.040 have something of value to add to this country and you are actually embracing the values of this

00:03:45.640 country, there should be an efficient process for the best of those people to get in. But that if you

00:03:51.320 have entered this country illegally and we're going to correct the mistakes of the past, we're going to

00:03:54.840 have practical ways to do it. So those are two of the categories that I was certainly focused on most

00:03:59.480 intently over the course of my presidential campaign. But I'm a big guy believing in,

00:04:04.940 how do you maximize impact and have fun while you're doing it? I got a good piece of advice

00:04:09.360 pretty early in my career, which is, and it's true advice, which is it takes about as much effort to do

00:04:15.880 something small and do it well as it does to do something big and do it well. And so if you're going to

00:04:22.060 put the same amount of effort in, you might as well make it something big. And so that's why I ran for

00:04:25.480 president. The beauty of this country is the people get to decide who leads and they went with the

00:04:29.680 tried and true option who I support, Donald Trump. But the number one thing I'll be looking

00:04:33.700 at is scope of impact. And that's what guides me. You know, I tend to think, I actually didn't want

00:04:38.620 you to be a vice president because I tend to think it's a waste to put anyone talented or interesting

00:04:44.120 in the vice presidential spot. It just, to me, there's no real function. It ends up being sort

00:04:51.000 of a wasted, if it is someone interesting, it's a waste of time to have them there. Do you think

00:04:55.840 I'm a, is that too cynical of you of the vice president presidency? Oh, I don't think it's

00:05:00.660 cynical. I think that part of what you're doing is just looking at American history, right? And so

00:05:04.440 I don't think that your, your assessment is unfair when you look at most vice presidents in American

00:05:10.160 history, but it doesn't have to be that way either. I do think it all comes down to how you want to run

00:05:14.820 the show as an executive. The top dog is the U S president. And I think the beauty of having a U S

00:05:19.560 president that isn't a professional politician, I put Donald Trump in that category of course,

00:05:23.620 is that he does like to do things differently. And so it's up to him. What does he want out of a

00:05:27.880 vice president versus a cabinet secretary versus a special advisor versus, you know, any, any number

00:05:33.200 of other positions in the government? I think the beauty is if you have a president who's actually

00:05:37.300 going to run the government, you could think about that a little bit differently. The thing that

00:05:40.900 bothers the heck out of me is the people we elect to run the government, usually even including

00:05:44.620 the U S president are not actually the people who run the government, right? It's the permanent

00:05:48.520 state that sits underneath the rotating cast of musical chairs on top that they view as cute

00:05:53.880 little puppets that come and go every few years. So in that context, the, the typecast that you would

00:05:59.400 put for vice president. Yeah. I don't think your comment is unfair, but I don't think it has to be

00:06:03.380 that way. If you have an actual commander in chief and chief executive, who's the one running the show

00:06:08.840 rather than just a pawn on the chessboard of the deep state that is usually there long after

00:06:14.120 president arrives long before president arrived and long after they're gone. My hope is it doesn't

00:06:18.880 have to be that way. And, and, you know, if there's a president who I'd bet on to do things

00:06:22.320 a little differently, it would be somebody coming from the outside, like Trump. You mentioned the

00:06:27.000 debate. So there's obviously kind of two schools of thought on this. One is that it's a mistake for

00:06:32.500 Trump to do the debate playing right into Biden's hands. Biden is the one who needs it because he's

00:06:37.180 desperate and he's flailing. Then there's the other side that says, well, this is to get a shot at

00:06:43.680 Biden on the stage alive on camera. You can't pass that up, especially because the guy is,

00:06:49.020 as we know, half senile and can barely string together two coherent sentences. I'm, I'm,

00:06:54.140 I'm in the, probably in the second school of thought. I think that even though they're,

00:06:56.760 they're stacking the deck against Trump, cutting the mics off after a minute, you know, obviously

00:07:01.560 we know the moderators are gonna be on Biden's side. It's still, it's just, you got to take that

00:07:05.440 chance if you get it. Where do you stand on that? Yeah, look, I think Trump should absolutely do

00:07:10.880 the debate. I mean, between the world we were in, which is Biden effectively refusing to debate

00:07:15.780 and showing up on the debate stage. The right answer is show up on the debate stage. And it's

00:07:20.020 one of the things I've liked about the approach that president Trump has taken. And he and I've

00:07:24.040 had a lot of good conversations and anything I would say certainly points more in this direction,

00:07:28.340 show up in the places where you're not expected to show up. He went to the Bronx. I spoke at the

00:07:33.060 libertarian convention last Friday. Trump obviously spoke there Saturday night, not to an entirely,

00:07:37.640 entirely friendly audience, which I think is a good thing. If you're going to be the U S president,

00:07:41.960 you got to be willing to face off with people who may not necessarily agree with you on everything.

00:07:46.900 And the irony is they would criticize Donald Trump for talking to sycophants only. That's what the

00:07:50.600 press criticized him for. And yet he's actually the person who's showing up from the South Bronx

00:07:54.240 to places like the libertarian convention and nominating convention of a different political party.

00:07:59.080 So given that that's the approach that Donald Trump has taken, I do think it would be

00:08:03.000 totally consistent. I mean, it would be the only consistent thing to say that I'm actually going to

00:08:07.360 debate the other guy who's been ducking those debates. Now, Biden, not so much Biden, but probably

00:08:12.380 his handlers around him, I think played it quite strategically. Right. So give credit to the puppet

00:08:17.440 masters, whoever was the right puppet master to pull this string, the idea that you make it an early

00:08:22.280 debate. And that wasn't even smart for Biden. That's smart for the Democratic Party, because I think it

00:08:26.820 is obvious. I think it's three months earlier than they've ever held a televised presidential

00:08:31.580 debate in U S history. It is the first time to my knowledge that it's occurring before the

00:08:36.000 nominating convention of either major party. This is obviously the final audition, the final hoop

00:08:41.940 they're making the old man jump through before they nominate him. And they've set itself up for

00:08:46.520 a win win. Right. So one win is the one you mentioned is they make him look better than the

00:08:51.560 expectations that have been set for him. They like that the expectations that have been have been set

00:08:55.880 low. I think they're actually leaning into that, but they've set up the best possible showing

00:08:59.760 CNN home turf, no audience, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, one minute responses. And if he exceeds

00:09:08.160 expectations, which they're trying to set him up for, then their hope is that resets the race

00:09:12.060 because the whole narrative was he was too senile to be president. His expectations have been set low

00:09:16.120 that he set up for success. But if he doesn't, which I actually think is likely to happen, then it's

00:09:21.340 a win win for them because they still have ample time to be able to replace him as the nominee

00:09:25.160 that under these most favorable of circumstances, if he can't even hold his own, and we're talking

00:09:30.140 about June, there's no way he's then going to get to November. So was the other side absolutely

00:09:34.480 strategic and clever and even diabolical in the way they set this up? Absolutely. But does that

00:09:41.000 mean it was the wrong decision for president Trump to do it? No, it was absolutely the right decision.

00:09:45.180 It's exactly the ethos he's cultivated as the guy who's going to man up, show up, be the commander

00:09:49.760 in chief in a way that Joe Biden wasn't. And so I don't think that skipping that debate was ever an option.

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00:10:51.160 Do you really think it's plausible that somehow Biden at this point is not actually the nominee?

00:10:57.040 And if it is a plausible scenario, then who... I kind of figure they're stuck with him because who

00:11:02.680 else are they going to put in his place at this stage of the game? Everyone always says Michelle

00:11:06.740 Obama, as far as I know. Not that I have any insight into it, but she has no interest. So

00:11:11.340 do you think it's a plausible scenario? And then who else would it be if not Biden?

00:11:17.900 Yeah. So look, I tend to look at things in life and when you're making predictions as,

00:11:22.720 you know, none of us is God. None of us is going to divine some theory of what's going to happen.

00:11:26.240 But what you can do is look at the collective incentives that are on the board, right? And

00:11:29.700 what are the incentive they have? This system has made clear that they will do anything.

00:11:34.580 And I increasingly believe it is anything to stop Donald Trump from getting back

00:11:37.780 into the White House, right? First, it was civil suits, then it's state-level prosecutions,

00:11:41.780 then federal prosecutions, then you've got extrajudicial attempts to remove him from a

00:11:46.400 ballot. I mean, they stop at nothing. So at this point, they have evidence that suggests that across

00:11:51.900 all of the swing states across this country, Biden is performing very poorly and the trends are

00:11:57.460 actually going in the further wrong direction for him. So if that's their top objective, how are they

00:12:03.520 going to achieve that objective? Who would be the candidate that they would put up? Who's going to

00:12:06.800 maximize those odds? Do I think it's plausible? Yes, it is. If you look into the Democratic National

00:12:11.680 Convention nominating rules, it's plain as day that they have plenty of time, even between now

00:12:17.100 and the convention, to be able to switch who the nominee is. There's an election lawyer I spoke to

00:12:21.400 to pressure test this, just out of my own curiosity to understand, is this actually, as a technical

00:12:25.520 matter, legally feasible? The answer is, hands down, the rules allow for it. Turns out, even after the

00:12:31.680 convention, if it's in cases of disability or voluntary stepping aside of the candidate, there's also

00:12:36.440 procedures for the way they could swap out who's on a ballot. The only time it becomes really hard

00:12:40.520 for them to do it is when the ballots are actually printed. When the names are on the ballot, then I

00:12:45.100 think we're entering a zone where it becomes impossible. But until then, we've seen nominees

00:12:49.320 change far later than this over the course of American history. And one of the traps sometimes we fall

00:12:54.520 into in the present, I think it's probably true of all people ever, but it's definitely true of us now

00:12:58.760 too, is somehow believing that we're immune from the trends of history. You read about crazy stories

00:13:03.540 in history and then somehow believe that can't happen in the present. Well, what do you think

00:13:06.980 history was when that transpired too? So this would be far from the craziest thing in US history,

00:13:11.140 wouldn't even rank in the top 10 of presidential races to be able to see Joe Biden ousted as the

00:13:17.460 nominee in the month of June. Like that would go down in the annals of US history as maybe a footnote

00:13:22.660 at most. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. So is it possible? Yes. Who would they put up? I do think

00:13:28.340 then you look at the collective incentives. Most people they put up, their bench is not very good. I mean,

00:13:32.340 I think they're going to have some pretty poor candidates to choose from. You got Gretchen Whitmer.

00:13:36.900 I don't think that she's a particularly compelling leader. You got other people who are hungering

00:13:40.580 for it. Gavin Newsom, he's unfortunately saddled with the albatross of his record as governor of

00:13:46.020 California, that and being a straight white man or whatever it is that the Democratic Party might

00:13:50.020 have nominating in lieu of another straight white man, which actually hangs out to dry a lot of their

00:13:55.060 far left identity, a politic obsessed progressive wing. So I think it narrows down the options that are

00:14:00.260 available to them. I think the most compelling option, especially if you're talking about a late

00:14:06.020 switch, would likely be Michelle Obama. And I say this because it goes with the timing of the matter,

00:14:12.580 which is you get all of the sheen, right? You get the initial pop in popularity, but you don't exit

00:14:19.620 the honeymoon period. The honeymoon period just continues from August straight through November.

00:14:23.540 The nominating convention is in August. That's when the DNC is. From August to November,

00:14:29.380 you're just in the honeymoon phase. You don't quite enter the scrutiny phase. You don't quite

00:14:33.460 end the falling out of love phase. And so if you're them, that's how you kind of put together

00:14:37.940 the timing and the momentum of it. You bring up a not irrelevant objection, which is let's just

00:14:42.260 presume what they say is true is that she doesn't want to do it. The assumption baked into that is that

00:14:47.220 she has any choice in the matter, right? And as I told you before, most of the time,

00:14:51.780 the people who we elect to run the government, they're not the ones actually running the government.

00:14:56.660 They are pawns on a chessboard. I think that's true largely for most of the history of the

00:15:00.580 Republican Party. I think it's largely even more true in the modern Democratic Party.

00:15:04.820 And so, yes, I have no idea. I don't know her whether she wants to or not. The fact that her

00:15:09.940 preference might have anything to do with it is an assumption that I think is largely false. The machine,

00:15:16.340 once it decides that somebody is going to be put up to the job, they're going to be able to put the

00:15:19.940 person up to the job who the machine demands. What I think is the better counter case to it

00:15:25.220 happening is part of that machine operates on the self-interest of the cogs in it, right?

00:15:29.220 The lobbyists, the people who have cultivated relationships with Joe and actually more

00:15:33.220 relevantly even Jill Biden, right? I think that there's two things that would keep the status

00:15:38.020 quo intact. And it's not the fact that Michelle Obama doesn't want to do it because that's irrelevant.

00:15:41.620 I think the two things that would keep the status quo intact are number one is,

00:15:44.820 it does appear that Dr. Jill Biden is very attached to the position that she has. And she's certainly

00:15:51.300 got more of her wits about her than the man who we call the president of the United States.

00:15:55.540 But I think the other thing working for him and for that first couple is there are a lot of people

00:16:01.060 who have cultivated vested interests of being close to that hoop, right? They've been circling that hoop

00:16:06.420 for a long time. Lobbyists and other special interests that are really tied in, that have invested.

00:16:10.500 Think about a business that you might run as an industrial business. You think about capital

00:16:14.500 expenditures or CapEx. In the world of politics, it's the CapEx that those lobbyists and their

00:16:19.700 firms have put in to really spend a lot of money, hard money and political capital along with it,

00:16:24.660 to say that we're finally close to the inner sanctum. They have a vested interest and they

00:16:29.140 are already part of the machine. So I think it's more deeply, Matt, a conflict between two different

00:16:34.020 parts of the machine, the parts of the machine that have a vested interest in the status quo,

00:16:38.260 even if it comes at the expense of trading off their overall probability of success.

00:16:43.940 On a probability adjusted basis, it's still worth it to them because the payoff of having their guy

00:16:48.580 who they've cultivated the relationship with Biden still makes their expected value worth it to take

00:16:53.940 the lower shot with Biden versus people who are a little bit on the outside looking in, don't have

00:16:58.580 as direct control over Biden, but still have enough control over the machine to say that,

00:17:03.220 hey, the payoff of having somebody else I'm closer to plus the probability of even getting our guy

00:17:07.940 rather than Trump, that's going to be the debate, not whether it's Joe Biden or Michelle Obama who

00:17:12.900 does or doesn't want it. That's just what the public gets to see, which I think is mostly a distraction.

00:17:17.060 I think an unpopular theory that I've thought about, at least unpopular on the right, is when it became

00:17:27.620 clear to me that they were going to at least try to ride with Biden on this thing, which they're at least

00:17:32.660 attempting to do on the Democrat side of it, I started thinking about there's sort of a third possibility here,

00:17:40.660 which is, like you said, it seems as though they're doing everything they can to stop Trump.

00:17:47.460 Obviously, with all the criminal trials, it's unprecedented what they're doing.

00:17:51.700 But at the same time, is there a feeling among the real power brokers in the Democrat Party,

00:17:58.020 the machine, as you say, that, hey, maybe they're okay just letting, you know, just, okay, Biden loses,

00:18:05.940 we give it, Trump wins, and this is the real cynical view, where they say, well, it doesn't matter anyway,

00:18:14.340 because the deep state and the bureaucracy is so fundamentally left-wing that it's completely arranged

00:18:25.220 against whoever the president is anyway, if the president's a Republican. So, fine, he's president for four years,

00:18:30.980 then he's gone, and then the bureaucracy comes in, undoes everything he did in about 30 seconds,

00:18:36.500 and just continues back right along like it never happened. Is that too cynical of you?

00:18:42.980 No, no, I don't. You're talking to a guy who's never going to give you the answer that that's too

00:18:48.820 cynical of a view, almost any question. You could press, you could try me, and maybe we'll get there,

00:18:53.220 but I think it's unlikely. I think you could get, I mean, it's a question of how cynical you want to get, right?

00:18:58.420 You have a system that I said is hell-bent, has an anaphylactic reaction

00:19:03.460 to Trump, but more than Trump, what he represents, actually. Like, that's really the essence of what

00:19:09.380 the system has the anaphylaxis to, right? The anaphylaxis is an immune system response to an

00:19:13.460 allergen. The allergen is, it's pretty darn close to the man, but even closer, if you're really right

00:19:19.540 over the target, it's actually what he represents. So, how do you eliminate that risk? The full menu of

00:19:25.940 options is available, right? One is you beat him through the front door. They gave up on that

00:19:30.100 option long ago. The other is that you change the system to be able to beat him on an unfair

00:19:34.100 version of that system. The other is to take him out of the race one way or another. You have that

00:19:38.340 whole menu of options. They've tried many ways already so far, but whatever that menu of options

00:19:43.460 is, take him out of the race. And then you can get increasingly cynical. What you just talked about

00:19:47.620 is maybe a kick the can down the road, hold your nose for four years, but acknowledge it as a

00:19:51.700 temporary passing cloud. You could get even darker and more cynical than that, which is to say that,

00:19:56.100 okay, well, we captured Biden. Why don't we play a new game of capture? I think that there's,

00:20:01.620 this is all, you know, I'm not to say, I like when people like you are brave enough to challenge

00:20:06.660 people in our own, our own movement to think outside of the linear boxes that sometimes any human

00:20:13.460 being is trapped to think it. So I think you should be doing more of that. But if you look at the overall

00:20:18.260 set of incentives and what the goal is, what are they against? They're against what Donald Trump

00:20:21.220 represents. And they've decided by hell or high water, they're going to make sure that what he

00:20:25.640 represents does not come to exercise power in this country again. And so there's various ways they may

00:20:31.620 go about undoing that, right? Their menu of options is beat him through the front door, beat him through

00:20:35.820 the back door, prevent him from being able to run. You propose a weighted out theory. There could be a

00:20:40.840 different cynical theory that somebody offers, which would be a theory of, if you can't beat him,

00:20:44.680 you know, join him in a certain sense of the word. And so I think any of those would be a loss for the

00:20:50.660 American people. I think for the American people, the right answer is how do you actually dismantle

00:20:54.740 that machine, the machine that underlies that entire system. And if that job were done, then

00:21:00.820 we wouldn't be in the place where we are right now. Now, one of the things I like about President

00:21:05.360 Trump is he has the ambition to run for the second term. If he had gotten everything he wanted to get

00:21:09.280 done in the first term and done it all perfectly in a way that only God could, then he wouldn't need that

00:21:14.080 second term. But he's going back for that second term with the spirit of saying, look, we learned

00:21:19.020 a lot from that first term of being in there, from having the first two years hobbled by a Mueller

00:21:23.420 investigation that stopped him from governing as an outsider president who still was the first time

00:21:28.180 in a political role. Yes, we have a lot of learnings. And this time around, we're going to

00:21:32.060 use those learnings to go further than we ever did to break that machine. That's what excites me about

00:21:37.960 a second Trump term is I think the possibility of actually changing the game. And that's something

00:21:42.360 that's bringing a lot of those Democrats and libertarians and independents along too. That's

00:21:46.340 not a partisan point, Matt. When you think about a lot of our own agenda or the fractures even within

00:21:51.880 the Republican Party, opposing the ever-expanding surveillance state through the not expansion,

00:21:57.100 not the reauthorization, but the expansion of FISA 702, forking over more money like it's candy to

00:22:01.960 foreign countries with no end or accountability. All of that is a product of a managerial machine in

00:22:07.960 Washington, DC, that that's the machine that we actually need to break. And so are there many

00:22:14.280 ways they could do this? One of which is to say that, okay, if you can't beat them, we'll join them.

00:22:19.020 Yes, I think all of that's on the menu. But I think that ultimate victory looks like not only putting

00:22:24.040 Donald Trump in the White House, but doing it with such a mandate and with the right people who are

00:22:29.220 part of that movement to break the machine itself. And I think that Donald Trump will be the one man

00:22:34.560 right now who's best positioned to do that for the next four years. Well, it's 2024. And if you're

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00:23:47.340 So I want to switch gears here and ask you about, there was recently a controversy that you were

00:23:54.560 involved in. It's a couple weeks old now, but I find it really interesting. So I wanted to ask you

00:23:58.240 about it. I believe it was the first episode of your new podcast, you were interviewing Ann Coulter.

00:24:03.420 And at one point she said that she likes you a lot, but wouldn't vote for you because you're Indian.

00:24:09.300 And there was a lot of outrage over that comment from Ann, of course, but also a lot of outrage at you

00:24:14.800 because I guess you failed to scream at her and call her racist and give her a DEI lecture.

00:24:21.840 So first of all, what's your take on what Ann said, but also the reaction

00:24:26.000 towards you from people on kind of the left and right for not calling her a racist?

00:24:34.600 It was fascinating. I mean, I am driven by my curiosity. And so we did this podcast during the

00:24:39.860 presidential campaign where once a week, or at least as often as I could manage, we'd have an

00:24:44.000 interesting conversation that I intended if I was elected president to continue. Because I think

00:24:48.280 that that could be the modern fireside chat that I think we're missing from our leaders who we don't

00:24:52.400 get to authentically really interact with anymore. So if I had been president, we would have continued

00:24:57.440 that practice. But anyway, after the campaign ended, took a couple of months, you know, recalibrated

00:25:02.260 how I wanted to spend my time. And one of the many things I'm doing is I said, you know what,

00:25:05.940 once a week, we'll restart that podcast. And so that was the first relaunch of the truth podcast.

00:25:11.880 And I wanted to get a guest who, particularly in the campaign, I had seen her surface, right? It

00:25:17.140 would pop up from time to time, different comments from Ann Coulter that were varying degrees of,

00:25:23.020 I guess, passive aggressive towards me. Okay. She likes things I'm saying, but she clearly has some

00:25:27.840 issue with me. I've never met the woman. So, you know, I said, let's have a conversation. I'd be

00:25:32.740 interested to see what's going on there. I'm very interested in the theme of American nationalism.

00:25:37.000 I do consider myself a nationalist. I think Ann Coulter, I don't want to put words in her mouth,

00:25:41.240 but probably considers herself a nationalist in a certain sense of the word too. But yet we have this

00:25:47.320 differing vision of what that means. And so I thought it could be a useful and productive

00:25:50.960 conversation. Turns out it was. She kind of came in with the very first comment that you mentioned,

00:25:56.420 which is, I love a lot of what you have to say, but I couldn't vote for you because you're an

00:26:00.080 Indian. Those are her exact words. And so that I thought was an interesting prompt to talk about

00:26:06.060 American national identity. And so we spent the next hour diving deep into what it actually means

00:26:10.320 to be an American. And to be clear, there are two competing views. And I know that Ann Coulter is the

00:26:15.300 only one who holds her view, which is why I think it was important. If it was just her, then it's just

00:26:19.280 an idiosyncratic person who has an opinion like anybody else has an opinion. But I think she has an

00:26:23.140 opinion that represents the intuition of a lot of people, including people I encountered during the

00:26:26.700 Republican primary who felt the same way she did, that they couldn't quite vote for me because of

00:26:32.200 one of two factors, either my religion or my lineage of not having been enough generations vested

00:26:40.820 into this country. And I was genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of that view. My view of

00:26:46.800 American identity is different. I think citizenship is about loyalty. That's what citizenship is

00:26:50.860 fundamentally about. I think there are many people who have sixth generation, seventh generation,

00:26:54.400 eighth generation Americans who lack the fundamental loyalty or even the knowledge that's a prerequisite

00:26:59.560 for loyalty to qualify for citizenship. I personally think every high school senior should be able to

00:27:04.500 pass the same civics test that we require of every immigrant before they become a naturalized citizen.

00:27:10.740 That's what I think. And that's a super controversial view that was called a new Jim Crow during the

00:27:15.020 presidential campaign at me. So we've each taken our own criticisms, but they're very different views.

00:27:20.500 And so that was my conversation with Ann. And by the end of the conversation,

00:27:23.440 people actually missed this probably about 40, 45 minutes in, we were in the depths of one of our

00:27:28.960 back and forths, at which point she kind of came out and said, okay, maybe I would vote for you,

00:27:33.960 right? Which is interesting. And she said, I'm not committing to it. But then she said some things

00:27:37.800 towards the last five minutes of the conversation that said, all right, well, I agree. What I basically

00:27:43.120 told her by the end, which I think is true, is I don't think Ann Coulter would have that view.

00:27:46.980 I don't think she would have been in a position to say that to me if we had actually had sensible

00:27:50.920 immigration policies in this country in the first place. If we did not have 10 plus million people

00:27:55.080 entering this country illegally, fundamentally changing the American character and way of life

00:27:59.200 in a way that I believe that English should be the national language of the United States in a way

00:28:02.920 that unites us. I actually do believe that anybody who's in this country illegally should be returned

00:28:07.280 to their country of origin and that we can and should have borders that we can secure and a national

00:28:12.340 identity that we're missing, not just in the physical sense of it, but even in the sense of a civic

00:28:17.020 revival of actual commitment in this country. I think we should eliminate dual citizenship.

00:28:21.580 I think it is nuts that you have US citizens that are also citizens of another country when

00:28:26.060 citizenship is about loyalty. Dual citizenship is an incoherent concept. And even worse, that you

00:28:30.920 have people who may have dual citizenship that are elected leaders in this country.

00:28:34.660 So after we had gone through that, I shared with Ann that if we had gotten each of those

00:28:37.960 actual principled positions right, I don't think she would have the view that she did.

00:28:42.300 She basically agreed with me, which allowed me to tell her the truth,

00:28:45.440 which is it is a shame when conservatives like her, and I think there are many like her,

00:28:49.520 who effectively allow their own views to be defined by the left. What do I mean by that?

00:28:54.580 If your own views, your own most closely held views, or what you think are your most closely

00:28:59.080 held views, are really just emotional knee-jerk responses to the people who are actually

00:29:03.720 ruining our country, then the people who are ruining our country have defined what our own

00:29:09.520 movement actually stands for, which is actually a success for them. Versus the way I like to do it is say,

00:29:14.560 okay, you've got a lot of other people who are antithetical to the United States of America,

00:29:18.260 but my own views aren't going to be determined as a backlash response or a reactionary response

00:29:23.420 to them. I'd prefer to have an alternative vision of who we are and what we actually stand for.

00:29:28.680 And that's what we're fighting for rather than just reactionarily responding

00:29:32.000 to certain fringes of the left. So that's what came out of that conversation.

00:29:35.140 Of course, were there a lot of people who said that, oh, well, you know what? There's this guy

00:29:39.760 who is, you know, supplicating to white supremacy and he's the, they didn't in this particular

00:29:46.560 incident, called Uncle Tom before, but it was the equivalent of whatever epithet was used in

00:29:51.340 response. Sure. Do I care about that? No. Did those people stop to actually listen to the exchange of

00:29:56.080 our conversation or how we were actually even able to evolve Ann's own perspective where she ended

00:30:00.960 rather than where she began? Of course they didn't, but that's a feature of, it's a feature

00:30:05.520 of modernity where people collect their information through 60 second sound bites. But I do think it

00:30:10.060 actually was a productive conversation and I would encourage everybody to go listen to that hour

00:30:15.000 because it gets to the heart of two different competing visions on the right. And not just like

00:30:21.140 on the right in the sense of neocon right versus nationalist right, even within the nationalist right,

00:30:26.800 competing visions of what it actually means to be an American. And right now, Matt,

00:30:30.880 those are some of the questions that are interesting me most, right? Cause you got the

00:30:33.580 Republican versus Democrat divide that mostly bores me just because there's not too much new to add to

00:30:39.320 that conversation. Yeah. I care about getting the right result for the country. But you got the

00:30:43.300 Democrat versus Republican divide. Then within the Republican party, you of course have the neocon

00:30:47.800 wing of the Republican party, generally more sympathetic to a surveillance state, foreign aid and

00:30:51.960 foreign intervention. And then you've got the America first wing, which believes that the first and sole

00:30:56.460 moral duty of U.S. leaders is to U.S. citizens. But if we play the puck forward a little bit, right,

00:31:02.360 skate to where the puck is going, even just fast forward this four years from now, I think there's

00:31:06.600 an actual really interesting, fissure would be an overstatement, but a really interesting

00:31:11.780 diversity of flavors within that America first direction itself that I think is largely underexplored

00:31:19.680 because people are too busy with the other two layers of division that I just laid out. And I

00:31:26.040 think that there's two different visions of nationalism. I think there's a strain of

00:31:30.060 nationalism tied to ethnic identity and lineage. I think there's a strain of nationalism that is

00:31:35.260 uncompromisingly tied to loyalty and civic commitments to this country. And then I also think

00:31:41.360 that there is a tension between a libertarian strand of this nationalism, which I happen to deeply

00:31:46.400 share, that believe that our country is founded on a fundamentally constitutionally grounded vision

00:31:52.780 where there's three branches of government. The people we elect to run the government run the

00:31:55.980 government. They're responsive to us and the Bill of Rights means something. And then there's an

00:32:00.520 alternative version of saying that, you know what, the left wing nanny state was a really bad idea, but we

00:32:04.420 might need a right leaning alternative to that in order to implement via government a vision of what is

00:32:11.400 right and what is good. And that there is a vision of the good that we espouse, not just in our

00:32:16.460 religious or family lives, but ought to embrace through the levers of government as well. And I

00:32:21.900 think that's a really interesting and productive discussion that we are definitely going to have

00:32:26.420 in this country. I don't think 2024 is going to be the year where we mostly do it, but I am increasingly

00:32:31.960 interested in, even for myself, just framing the terms of that debate. And so that's why I enjoy having

00:32:38.220 conversations with folks like Anne that don't relate to just railing against the, you know,

00:32:43.380 radical Biden agenda or whatever it is that Republicans are normally supposed to talk about

00:32:47.040 on television. Yeah, I think you mentioned loyalty, which obviously is extremely important factor. I

00:32:53.620 would add to that, which is related, is gratitude as well. And I think one of the problems that we have

00:33:00.620 now is, first of all, we're importing a lot of people that have absolutely no gratitude whatsoever

00:33:05.860 to the country that they're coming to. You see these videos of immigrants showing up to whatever

00:33:10.520 city and complaining about the accommodations. There was a hearing in New York and you had

00:33:15.640 immigrants from, I forget which country, but they were complaining that they were not being

00:33:20.960 provided the right accommodations. But then you also find that among natural born citizens who are,

00:33:28.700 have this lack of gratitude ingrained in them and instilled in them very explicitly and very

00:33:35.100 intentionally from birth, from the school system. And that's why you get a lot of this,

00:33:40.260 this, this, what really troubles me is this like deep feeling of both guilt among many Americans,

00:33:47.080 especially white Americans, and also resentment towards their own ancestors. We live on stolen land.

00:33:53.160 We committed a genocide, was committed against the natives and so on and so forth. Of course,

00:33:57.300 that isn't true. But all of that plays into this, doesn't it? And, and, and...

00:34:02.960 Totally. Absolutely. What do we, what do we do about that? Like that's, that's... How do we address

00:34:07.460 that? How do we get people to actually have some real gratitude for the country they live in and

00:34:13.740 everything that's been provided to them and all the people that made that possible for them?

00:34:18.240 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, and I think that's the way we've got to be looking at this in terms of

00:34:22.780 loyalty and gratitude. I do think that we have a mass illegal migration problem and a mass immigration

00:34:28.880 problem in this country we need to deal with. But I think it's, I'm going to draw an abstract

00:34:33.880 parallel here. I sort of see this amongst folks on the right in the same way that I'll talk to like

00:34:37.120 the Bitcoin crowd or the crypto or crypto audiences, where just because you're advocating for a good

00:34:43.360 thing doesn't mean that all problems are going to be solved by that good thing. Okay. And so like

00:34:47.440 that's when I talk to many of my pro Bitcoin friends and largely views that we share in common,

00:34:52.820 I'll say, okay, but this is not going to necessarily automatically solve the problem of whether or not

00:34:56.540 we get involved in foreign wars, right? You're putting too much on the shoulders of this one

00:35:00.420 issue. I'll draw a parallel piece of advice that I give to a lot of my friends on the nationalist

00:35:04.600 right is that we absolutely need to uncompromisingly go outside the Overton window of the past to do what

00:35:13.320 is required to fix this mass immigration problem in the United States of America, or we won't have a

00:35:18.060 country left. But that alone is not going to be sufficient to revive our own missing national

00:35:24.420 identity, even amongst the people who are native born for generations in this country that also

00:35:29.240 contribute to the complete dissolution of our national identity too. And so you can't get in

00:35:34.540 the business of fetishizing one solution when in fact there's a deeper vacuum of identity and purpose

00:35:42.420 in this country. And the immigration problem is really a symptom rather than just alone a sole cause

00:35:49.200 of that actual problem. So how do we do it? There's not a policy I'm advocating for in any

00:35:54.700 sense, but it's a thought experiment, right? Obviously you want to seal your border to anybody

00:35:59.200 who's entering this country illegally. Anybody who's coming to this country should know something

00:36:02.720 about the country, bring the citizenship test upfront, even for getting a green card,

00:36:06.700 even getting into the country. You think about actually people who are getting citizenship should

00:36:10.060 have even more civic commitments that they're buying into, maybe financial commitments.

00:36:13.720 That's for the immigrants. But for the people who are already here are a counterpart to that

00:36:16.920 as a thought experiment. I'm not advocating this as policy, but as opening our minds to the kind of

00:36:23.100 way we should be thinking. If somebody would accept a $75,000 check and leave and renounce their U.S.

00:36:31.180 citizenship and go to another country and their only condition was they never get to come back

00:36:35.360 and they would actually take that.

00:36:37.340 I'm not sure that they should be a citizen of this country in the first place, really.

00:36:44.980 I mean, the reality is I think there's many people in the United States of America who are completely

00:36:47.820 agnostic to their citizenship, who viewed the United States as some type of economic zone that

00:36:52.220 gives them something that they're supposed to be entitled to. So if somebody were going to go just

00:36:56.020 as happily to Canada or to England or Western Europe and live a particularly happy life with some

00:37:02.740 startup life investment and to go do it, I don't think that that person is in any sense loyal in

00:37:09.860 the sense that our founding fathers envisioned as citizens as being loyal to the United States of

00:37:13.660 America. Capital C citizenship is missing. And so should we implement some large mass scale program

00:37:18.680 like that in this country? I don't think that that's practical or advisable, but we have to bring

00:37:22.360 back what citizenship is about. I think we have to revive some sense of civic duty. I go back to it's not

00:37:28.300 one solution, but it was why one of the policy proposals I did advance in my campaign was that

00:37:33.300 literally every high school senior has to vest fully into their citizenship. Obviously, the government

00:37:38.560 can't come knocking on your door or censor you from speaking no matter who you are. But if you want

00:37:42.900 the privileges of citizenship, if you want the privilege of selecting who actually leads this

00:37:47.280 country, you should know something about the country. If you're casting a vote at the ballot box,

00:37:51.620 you should probably know if you're casting a vote for president, what branch of government the US

00:37:56.080 president actually leads. I don't think that's too much to ask. I think you should probably know who

00:38:00.520 wrote the Federalist Papers. And both of those, by the way, are questions on the naturalization exam,

00:38:05.600 the 100 question pool that they draw from, which I think should actually draw from far more knowledge

00:38:09.940 of the country than we demand even today. So that's not a one size fits all panacea, but it's an example

00:38:15.380 of the kind of thing we need to think about to cultivate civic duty in this country. Do I favor a mandatory

00:38:21.260 draft? No, I don't. The libertarian in me would never allow for me to compel or have a government

00:38:27.340 that compels you to serve, because in a certain sense, it's not even service then. But is the spirit

00:38:32.420 of people who serve their country and actually gain allegiance to their country through service something

00:38:37.140 we need more of in this country? Yeah, I think so, actually. And I think we also need to restore

00:38:43.020 a government that people feel inspired to swear that allegiance to. Right now, as I said earlier,

00:38:48.240 the people we elect to run the government, they're not running the government. They're not engaged in

00:38:51.840 public service. They're engaged in self-service. So when you see congressmen effectively lining

00:38:55.860 their pockets or bureaucrats lining their pockets versus adopting simple policies that most Americans

00:39:00.820 agree with, like the idea that you should not be trading stocks as a congressman or a senator or

00:39:05.140 bureaucrat, why is that serving the interests of the American people? Answer, it's not. Implementing

00:39:09.900 things like term limits, shutting down large swaths of the federal bureaucracy, returning that money

00:39:14.500 like a dividend to the American taxpayer. That loyalty is a two-way relationship, right? The reason

00:39:20.040 citizens don't have a loyalty to the country, one of the reasons is that the people who lead the

00:39:23.900 country don't have their exclusive loyalty to our own citizens either. I mean, I went to places like

00:39:27.940 the south side of Chicago during the campaign. I went back to Chicago more recently. I went to mostly

00:39:32.880 minority neighborhoods. We were in a mostly black bar that I happened to be hanging out at,

00:39:37.860 meeting some folks. They came up to me, said, hey, I'd have voted for you, and I'm going to vote for

00:39:41.520 Trump this year. He said, how do you usually vote? He said, mostly Democrat. Number one issue on this

00:39:45.860 guy's mind was actually Ukraine. He could not understand why we're actually sending over

00:39:49.720 hundreds of billions of dollars more to Ukraine. I didn't get his views on the surveillance state,

00:39:54.520 but I suspect he might have agreed with me on that one too. And so I think that part of what we're

00:39:59.640 missing in this country is it's this downward spiral where because the elected leaders of this country

00:40:07.540 have abandoned their loyalty to the citizens, the citizens of this country have in turn begun to

00:40:14.880 abandon some of their loyalty to the country. And so how do we reverse that downward spiral? I guess

00:40:20.900 you might as well start at the top to at least put people in charge who behave like and actually mean

00:40:27.640 it like they owe their sole duty to the citizens of this country. And it's amazing how trust and loyalty

00:40:32.700 are a two-way relationship. I think part of the distrust and the lack of loyalty comes from the

00:40:37.680 fact that the government doesn't trust its own people. The fact we have a government that has

00:40:40.540 systematically lied to its people about a lot of complicated and uncomfortable topics, both from

00:40:45.340 the left and from the right, over the last 25 years, and for all we know, probably the last 100 years

00:40:49.720 doesn't help the matter either. I think a government that got into office and did what I think, by the

00:40:53.980 way, a major media company should do, but the same thing I would say about a government is to get in there

00:40:57.840 and say, here, here's where we lied to you. It's inexcusable. Go back all the way from, you could

00:41:04.300 pick your favorite, the basis for the 2008 bailouts, the basis for entering Iraq, the Steele dossier,

00:41:09.860 the investigations around how the Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed, whatever, the COVID origin,

00:41:14.940 everything we knew about COVID-19 or the vaccines or the risks thereof before they were rolled out,

00:41:18.640 whatever it is, pick the topic, be comprehensive and say, we lied to you. And it's unacceptable and you

00:41:24.440 should never trust us again. But here's how we're at least going to give you a basis to rebuild that

00:41:29.300 trust. And the people we're going to put in charge are no longer going to be people who are unaccountable

00:41:33.180 to you. All those bureaucrats, most of them are gone anyway. And the people you elect are the ones you

00:41:38.480 actually have responsive to you. And Thomas Jefferson, I think, said it well, I'm going to get it

00:41:43.500 approximately right when he said, what is it? The government you elect is the government you deserve.

00:41:48.980 Well, that's not really true right now because the government you elect has very little to do with

00:41:52.440 the binding edicts that are issued. Most binding edicts onto Americans today don't come from

00:41:56.680 elected representatives. They come from bureaucrats. But if you restore a system in which the binding

00:42:00.860 edicts that actually bind you come from the people you actually elect, you have a greater sense of

00:42:05.060 loyalty, especially when those people you elect owe their loyalty back to you rather than to some

00:42:09.340 Ukrainian kleptocrat or bureaucrat or Azerbaijani invader of 120,000 Armenians sitting in Nagorno-Karabakh

00:42:15.640 outside of Armenia. I mean, we could go straight down the list of where our elected leaders have

00:42:21.580 demonstrated their actual loyalties lie, including their own pocketbook. Changing that, I think,

00:42:26.820 will set into motion, I think, a positive loop, right, a virtuous cycle. And then you build that

00:42:36.440 type of civic knowledge and identity and the hard requirements attached to it, starting at a young

00:42:41.600 age for people who vest into citizenship in this country. And I think those would be

00:42:45.380 some serious steps in the right direction. Well, I got to let you go, but let me, I want to follow

00:42:51.040 up on one last thing that you kind of alluded to there. I get in trouble sometimes because I'm pretty

00:42:59.460 skeptical about this idea of a kind of universal right to vote and that what we need to do is make

00:43:08.060 sure that as many warm bodies are in the ballot, you know, casting a ballot as possible. And you

00:43:15.540 mentioned if you want to vote and, you know, take part in deciding who runs the government, you should

00:43:23.140 have some basic knowledge on, you know, about what the government is and how it's run. Would you support,

00:43:30.060 and it would never ever happen in a million years, but just in theory, would you support some sort of

00:43:35.960 policy that, okay, here's five, like third grade level civics questions that you have to answer

00:43:42.820 correctly in order to vote? Would you support something like that in a crazy world where it

00:43:46.900 actually happened? You realize I came out with this in the presidential campaign and it got me a lot

00:43:50.660 of trouble actually, right? So this is, I mean, this is exactly, I think, a direction that we ought to

00:43:55.080 be talking about in this country at the very least. And here's the thing, Matt, a lot of people who

00:43:59.420 might, before those who hear that and get all up in arms about it, just to pause for a second and

00:44:04.360 realize we already do that. We actually already do it. We do it for anybody who's a naturalized

00:44:09.480 citizen in this country. If you want to come to this country, you're paying taxes. You might

00:44:13.760 have people who are paying millions of dollars in taxes, but cannot vote at the ballot box for

00:44:18.220 good reason, because we demand two things of you before you vote in this country. If you come here

00:44:23.620 legally through the front door, at least when the system's working as it's supposed to.

00:44:28.120 Number one is that you know something about the country. You got to pass the civics test with a

00:44:32.700 passing score of 60% that most existing US adults right now would fail. And number two is you have

00:44:38.380 to swear an oath of allegiance exclusively to this country, which is why the concept of dual

00:44:44.500 citizenship makes no sense, because that completely negates the oath of loyalty. But those two things,

00:44:49.820 we already ask you to do it if you're a certain class of person. So if we already ask certain classes

00:44:54.280 of people in this country to do it, why on earth don't we ask the rest of the people in this country

00:44:58.180 to do the same thing? It doesn't actually make any sense. And our founding fathers,

00:45:03.180 and not just the founding fathers, but the framers of each of our constitutional amendments,

00:45:06.220 they knew exactly what they were doing. I mean, the Bill of Rights is really expansive.

00:45:09.940 Not a little expansive. It's really expansive in terms of the scope of protections that it gives you.

00:45:14.260 You have the right to express any opinion. People forget that. That's what the First Amendment

00:45:17.860 protects. Not to express some opinions. Any opinion. People talk about misinformation or

00:45:22.320 would talk about threats or violence. None of those are opinions.

00:45:25.340 Any opinion, you have the right to express in the United States. Any religion, you have the right

00:45:30.500 to practice it or not in the United States of America. Or the right to arm yourself, something

00:45:35.320 that's unheard of in most other nations that even guarantee you some of the same rights on paper as

00:45:40.180 the United States. Do not offer you that same set of protections. You go straight down the list,

00:45:44.180 First Amendment on down. Get to the 14th Amendment. You're talking about 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment,

00:45:49.320 the Reconstruction Amendments. You're talking about no discrimination on the basis of race when it

00:45:53.800 comes to the right to vote. You move further down the list of amendments. No discrimination on the

00:45:57.620 basis of gender when it comes to the right to vote. And yet, so our framers of the Constitution

00:46:02.800 and the Amendments knew they were doing. There is not a single line in the U.S. Constitution that

00:46:07.040 offers some type of universal right to vote. I mean, what would that even mean?

00:46:10.960 The people who are in the country, do you get to vote if you're not a citizen? No,

00:46:14.140 you have to be a citizen to vote. Well, how do you become a citizen? You have to pass a civics test.

00:46:17.540 You have to actually take an oath of loyalty to this country. So the concept that you're talking about,

00:46:21.420 the notion that it's controversial, I think you should, of course, in some superficial sense,

00:46:27.340 it will be. But I would dispense with that because that is literally the status quo as it exists right

00:46:32.800 now. The only question is, should we expand the scope of people to whom that already applies

00:46:37.500 against the backdrop of a constitution that effectively contemplated some basis of civic

00:46:42.980 duty to be a basis to vote? Back at our founding, that was land ownership. Many states required land

00:46:48.380 ownership. The idea that you had to have some skin in the game in order to vote. I do not think that's

00:46:52.640 a good idea. I don't think that makes any sense in the modern United States of America to be a land

00:46:55.960 owner, just because you own a plot of land. You could have had somebody come to this country from

00:46:59.680 another country, doesn't really swear an oath of loyalty, doesn't know the first thing about a

00:47:02.740 government that buys a plot of land. Should they be able to vote? No. But is the intuition a basic

00:47:08.600 idea that you have to have some level of attachment and loyalty and exclusive allegiance to your

00:47:14.640 nation as a precondition for deciding who governs? Yes, actually. And I think that that would actually

00:47:20.680 dissolve a lot of the concerns that many of the left have about racism or ethnic conceptions of

00:47:26.720 superiority or whatever. You look at ancient Rome, what they really cared about was whether or not

00:47:32.120 you were a citizen. Right? I mean, they looked at people like you and me, and on the basis of our skin

00:47:37.040 color, the difference between the color of each of our skin, our shades of melanin, our shades of tan,

00:47:42.680 was no different than, say, the color of your eyes or the color of your hair. In ancient Rome,

00:47:47.600 it came down to whether or not you were a citizen. And I think the United States is the one country

00:47:51.880 in history, other than the ancient Roman Republic and empire, that has the potential to, and has for

00:47:59.580 most of our history at least, adopted a similar principle that what matters is, are you an American?

00:48:04.800 It's not what kind of American are you? Are you an American? And if you're an American,

00:48:08.700 you're fully vested with the privileges and immunities of citizenship, but that has to mean something.

00:48:12.680 It can't just be an accident of history that, because a certain person was happy to be born

00:48:16.580 here or a certain person happened to be born there, one of them was American vested with

00:48:20.000 these privileges and immunities and another one wasn't. It was a consequence of whether or not

00:48:23.260 you exhibited that loyalty to this country and that undying allegiance to this country that got

00:48:28.220 you those privileges and immunities of citizenship as the necessary corollary of a citizen who pledges

00:48:34.260 allegiance to that nation. Now, again, it's unfair to demand that of citizens at a time where the

00:48:39.520 elected leaders in Washington, D.C. do not owe their sole allegiance back to those same citizens.

00:48:44.100 So it's broken on both levels. But to fix it, we're going to have to fix it on both levels, too.

00:48:49.440 And so anyway, I've been having a lot of much more superficial and mundane conversations,

00:48:54.740 but it was fun to kind of get a little bit more philosophical or first principle today. But I do feel

00:49:01.520 like we just scratched the surface of that. And it will surely be misrepresented and lends itself to

00:49:08.580 being misrepresented without going into further depth. But I don't really care. I think that we

00:49:11.960 got to be having deeper conversations about our American identity to reunite and revive this country.

00:49:20.000 And that's my calling and what I feel called to do and feel compelled to do as somebody who does have,

00:49:27.000 what you said, a lot of gratitude to this country. When my parents came here 40 years ago with no

00:49:32.180 money, I've lived the iconic American dream written on paper. We want to pass that on to our kids.

00:49:38.920 I have a deep sense of gratitude to this country. Everything from here on out, I'm 38 years old.

00:49:44.840 We've raised the beginnings, at least, of our two kids in their lives, four years old and another one

00:49:50.620 soon to be two. I've run for U.S. president after building successful companies, married my wife,

00:49:55.860 Apoorva. Every day I have left in life is literally just, I look at it as bonus, right? That's just,

00:50:03.400 we've already lived a life that I am so grateful for that this country gave me.

00:50:09.040 But I am worried that country is about to cease to exist. And so I'd like to

00:50:13.280 play whatever role I can, however big or small, to reviving that sense of American identity that I

00:50:19.540 think we're missing today. And I think if we can, if we get leaders who are able to do that,

00:50:25.800 I think that like there were many rises and many falls of Rome, which we were just talking about

00:50:30.600 a moment ago, I think this could be one of the many valleys as there'll be many rises and many

00:50:36.560 falls of this American experiment we're in too. And I hope that this isn't our last volley,

00:50:42.500 if I have anything to do with it.

00:50:43.520 Well, I think that's a great note to end it on. Of course, as you said, this is particularly on

00:50:50.140 this topic of, you know, rethinking just our approach to some of these basic concepts that

00:50:56.080 people take for granted. This is a conversation that could go on for hours and maybe we could

00:51:00.240 follow up sometime in the future about it. But for now, got to let you go. Vivek Ramaswamy,

00:51:04.440 thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.

00:51:07.840 Good to see you, man. Nice to finally meet you.

00:51:10.020 You too. Thank you.

00:51:13.520 John Bickley here, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief. Wake up every morning with our show,

00:51:22.480 Morning Wire, where we bring you all the news that you need to know in 15 minutes or less.

00:51:27.540 Join me and my co-host Georgia Howe for daily coverage of all the biggest stories on Morning Wire.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 30, 2024

Matt Walsh Has An Honest Conversation With Vivek Ramaswamy

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