Renovation By Arson and The Immigration Crisis ｜ JD Vance
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Summary
J.D. Vance is running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio and is running on a platform of taking on the liberal ruling class. In this episode, we talk to him about why he thinks that's a good idea.
Transcript
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For most people, they go in liberal and they leave even more liberal.
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Some people go in conservative and they leave more liberal.
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And some people, I would put myself in this category, go in kind of conservative and end
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up to the right of Genghis Khan because you see what is wrong with the American establishment
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One of the most exciting political candidates on the right right now is running for Senate
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You would know him from his book, Hillbilly Elegy.
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It was a best-selling book, became a big movie, and talked about this chasm between the American
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ruling class and the working classes and the left-behind Americans and the deplorables and
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the irredeemables or whatever word you want to call them.
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And J.D. has gone through a lot of these elite institutions and he is running one of the most
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So you are, you and maybe a handful of other candidates, Blake Masters would be one of them,
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some others as well, are being considered the symbols of the new right, not the same
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old tired platitudes of the past 20 years where the most important thing is just cutting taxes
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and letting woke corporations and elites destroy the country, but actually standing up and doing
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something about that and bringing corporations into line, rethinking trade policy, rethinking
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I mean, I'd probably give five or ten different answers if you gave me long enough, but I guess
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basically it's, you sort of alluded to it in the question, which is that we have to rethink
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the role that corporations play in our system of government and in our basic constitutional
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republic, and we as conservatives have to wake up to the fact that for pretty much, you
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know, certainly all of my life, and I think people who are, I'm 37, people even who are
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much older than I am, all of their life, that the Republican Party, the conservative movement
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has been the movement of big business, and yet we find ourselves in a situation where big
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business is aggressively and actively aligned against the things that we care the most about.
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They are, you know, very much into critical race theory.
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They're forcing it down the throats of their employees, just the same way that public schools
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are forcing it down the throats of our children.
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When states do pass common sense election reform or pro-life legislation, it is very often the
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woke corporations that are the biggest and most aggressive pushbacks against it.
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And of course, and you think of our most famous and most important liberty, the First
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Amendment right to free speech, it is corporate America, especially the big technology companies
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that are the single biggest threats to that right.
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And unless we actually fight back against those corporate interests, the liberties that
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made this country worthwhile to live in for two centuries will slowly disappear, and they
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So if the biggest enemy of the squishy right of the past 20, 30 years was big government, big
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And any other institution in the country is way downstream or not a big threat at all.
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You're saying that for the new right, the real primary target is big corporation.
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Yeah, I mean, I would say big corporation working in concert with big government.
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Obviously, these things, I mean, you know, one of the arguments that I would make is it's
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very hard to tell when our woke corporate class stops and when our woke government class begins.
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And so when you have somebody like Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, threatening
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Facebook with sanctions unless they censor even more and then Facebook complies, or when
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you have a set of legal protections in our federal laws that exist for big technology companies
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that exist for no other industry in our country, or when you see the Biden administration pushing
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a very, very expensive energy policy, which, of course, harms every single industry except
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for those that donate aggressively to the Democratic Party, Wall Street and big tech, you start
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to realize that people like me, people like you, conservatives for a generation have been
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taught to think of the government over here, the corporate sector over here.
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And what I think we've woken up to is that those two sectors are very, very much aligned.
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It's not even clear to me in what ways they're different.
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And we have to reckon with that fact and frankly, fight back against both.
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You look at a corporation like Google, sometimes the squishes will say, well, build your own
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First of all, Google is not a private company by any stretch of the imagination.
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The connections with the government are massive and longstanding.
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What are the first, I was going to say, what are the first laws you try to pass?
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Yeah, I mean, I guess priority number one, even though it's not the subject of the conversation
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thus far, is, you know, when the House is on fire, you have to put out the House fire.
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And I do think the southern border crisis that we have is the House on fire moment.
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But so bracket that, because that has to be priority number one, you know, finish the
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I think probably double the number of border enforcement agents that we have and actually
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It's actually really disgusting how the president of the United States is so kind to people breaking
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the laws, but will readily attack his own employees, you know, Customs Board and Border
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Patrol, when they do the job of protecting us from illegal immigration.
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But I mean, to take it back to this sort of woke corporate thing, you know, first of all,
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of course, our woke corporations love unlimited cheap labor.
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But to sort of go at them directly, I think that we need to do something pretty aggressively
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to make it easy for us to break up the big technology companies.
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There's an argument that our legal tools are already there, that the enforcement tools
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But I think the fact that they're used so sparingly suggests we're kind of in a moment
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not all that different from the one that Teddy Roosevelt confronted in the very early 20th
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century, now 100 years later, where you have corporations that are literally more powerful
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than the U.S. government, which theoretically is the most powerful entity known to man.
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You know, one of my favorite quotes is, if you can silence the king, you are the king.
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And we learned after January the 6th that the technology companies have the ability to silence
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even very powerful political leaders like the sitting duly elected president of the United States.
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In a republic, in self-government, the way you govern yourself is by speaking,
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So if some entity in or out of the government can control all the speech,
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like Google and Facebook and Twitter can, then they are controlling not just some aspect of
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I like your point, too, that whenever people say, well, you know, just enforce
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repeal Section 230 liabilities or, you know, just enforce antitrust law or something,
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you say, well, if it were so simple, we would have done it already.
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It seems that maybe some further action is actually required.
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On the point of immigration, though, a lot of the liberals and even the libertarians will say,
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We got to keep paying all those entitlement programs.
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And so it is impossible to reduce immigration, including illegal, certainly legal immigration.
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I'd like, you know, illegal immigration down to zero and legal immigration much lower than
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You know, look, our immigration system is always going to be imperfect.
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But at the end of the day, when you have a dying population, when you have a population
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that is not replicating itself, which is true of Americans, it's true of Americans across
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different racial groups, then you have a real problem.
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And you cannot just import a solution to that problem.
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When we raise children as part of the American family, we instill certain values in them.
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They acquire certain language and cultural skills that you can't just assume that somebody who
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There is a real difference between a child that you raise in your family and someone
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Those are those are two different types of people.
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You don't have to dislike the guys who come over for dinner, but you can't build a family
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You have to build a family around the next generation.
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I think that's how we have to sort of zoom back and think about our country.
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And so one, I just reject the idea that you can solve the problem of demographic decline
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I think it's really, really, I mean, it's frankly sociopathic to think that people are
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interchangeable like that, that a child born to an American family is interchangeable with
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somebody who comes in from overseas, however good their intentions might be.
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Now, then the second thing is, you know, one of the crazy things, even if we were to take
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their argument at face value, one of the crazy things that happens is when new immigrants
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come to this country and they assimilate well, they too start to have lower fertility rates.
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Like there's something kind of broken about the American model, about the American structure
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When you have, you know, let's say, say a Catholic immigrant coming from Latin America
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where you'd expect a family to have three children, they get to America and they have
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There's something about our society culturally and economically that's not good for the
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And we have to address that root cause before papering over it with immigration reform.
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Absolutely insightful because what people are going to say is if, if you talk about a
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dying population, you're sending dog whistles to the white supremacists everywhere, but we're
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not, you're talking about a nationwide America problem and you even see it, you even see it
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So then the question is, what do you do about it?
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You know, I think the one we need to send a different cultural message from leaders, you
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know, you want, you can do that through explicit public policy, right?
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You know, Viktor Orban and Hungary and other countries in Central and Western Europe have
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actually done a pretty good job at raising their fertility level.
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Russia actually used to have a major fertility crisis.
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But they basically committed in public policy, instead of having a welfare system basically
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built around the single individual, they have a social welfare system that rewards people
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for having families, for staying married, for doing the things that are necessary and
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But then you also have a cultural signal that comes along with that, where, you know, you
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look at the way that Joe Biden talks about, let's say, his child care proposals.
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And it's like, well, you know, this is so important, because we just need to send those
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kids to daycare as quickly as possible, so that their moms and dads can get back into
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Or is it to have drones in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs?
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They're working 90 hours a week, their children are in daycare 90 hours a week.
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Like, there's a fundamentally different social model that modern progressives have imposed
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They've done so quietly, but we can push back against that on the right so long as we have
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You know, unfortunately, you do have chamber of commerce style conservatives say, you know,
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it's a really terrible thing when a young mother takes three years off of work to care
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Like, if that woman wants to do that, why is that a bad thing?
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Isn't it good for people who want to care for their children to be able to care for their
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The fact that, you know, you hear so many conservatives say we're against social engineering,
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but they love the social engineering that takes children away from their families and puts
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them into corporate daycares makes it makes you realize how much of a joke it all is.
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It was once widely understood that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules
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And now we are told by the progressive left that unless you're doing spreadsheets all
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day, working for some guy so that you can get some money so that your husband can pay
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some woman to raise your kid, seems kind of inefficient to me, that unless you're doing
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that, you're wasting your life and throwing it away.
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So you mentioned Orban, you mentioned Russia and how they have had success despite people
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They have had success turning their birth rate problem around.
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So is the suggestion here that we pay families to have kids and irk the libertarians on the
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I mean, look, we pay families not to have kids.
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You actually make more money from our social welfare system if you don't have children.
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So I think in a lot of ways we have to accept that we're already paying families to do things.
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It's a question of whether we're paying them to make good decisions or we're paying them
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And I'd say staying married, having children is much better than getting divorced and sitting
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And that really, to me, is the fundamental issue.
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I actually, I don't think that the goal here is a massive expansion in the amount of money
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We actually spend a ton of money on social welfare.
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There is no shortage of welfare spending in the United States.
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But you've got to look at what you are incentivizing.
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The program is going to incentivize one behavior or another.
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Now, forget about all that productive stuff for a second.
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Let's get into the nitty-gritty, filthy politics.
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You're in a Republican primary for this Senate race.
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What distinguishes you from your rival in the primary?
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Well, I think all the stuff that we're talking about, right?
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I mean, I think that, you know, most of the people who are running in the primary are good
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people, but they're fundamentally repeating the same tired Chamber of Commerce slogans that
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you've heard from Republicans for 30 or 40 years.
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They're just not going to talk about the things that we've been talking about.
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They're not going to advocate for some of the policies that I've been advocating for.
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And so my argument to primary voters here in the state of Ohio is, look, you can have a
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good person who's going to vote the right way 75% of the time, or you can have a person
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who actually is fighting against the corporate oligarchy, the government oligarchy that's
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making it impossible for normal Americans to live their lives.
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And so I really am trying to make the campaign about, you know, what do we want to be as a
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What kind of person do we want to send to Washington, D.C.?
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Do we want to send her a Chamber of Commerce type, or do we want to send a guy who's going
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Well, because what we had been told for decades is that Republicans need to get out of the
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Republicans need to just focus on lowering taxes.
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And I guess the last five years have kind of blown that out of the water.
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When Donald Trump walked down the escalator calling illegal aliens rapists and murderers
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and some are good people, he obviously was running a culture war campaign.
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Certainly worked the first time you saw a cultural campaign in Virginia.
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So how are you feeling beyond your own Senate race for the Republican Party generally as
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this battle for the soul of the Republicans' wages?
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How are you looking at the chances in 2022 and 2024 for Republicans?
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You know, very optimistic about our party in 2022, 2024.
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I think that, you know, people just had enough, right?
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They're finding out that their kids are learning crazy stuff at school.
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They're being forced to sit through ridiculous trainings at work where they have to, you know,
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disavow their whiteness like some sort of weird satanic religious ceremony.
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I mean, people are just like really, really fed up with how insane things have gotten.
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And yeah, you know, there's definitely some pushback, I would say, from the institutional
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You know, the Club for Growth, I think one of the worst organizations on the right, has spent
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$2 million against me attacking my primary candidacy because I believe that we should impose tariffs
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So, you know, there's definitely a battle to be had.
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And I won't pretend that I know, you know, we're going to win over a two to four year period.
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But if you look at all the people that are running, if you look at where the energy is,
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I feel very confident that we're going to win this battle.
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It may take us a little time, but we're going to win the fight.
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There is this strange fact when you talk about the tariffs as being somehow anti-Republican,
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that the Republican Party was founded on tariffs.
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Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest
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I mean, we talk about, you always hear about how the parties switched.
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Why did the GOP flip and why is it flipping back now?
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You know, I think what happened is that some of the biggest businesses in our country got
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They didn't realize that America's industrial power had been built by free enterprise, but
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They thought we could just, you know, go into China, hand off all of what made America great
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and powerful and just expect that America would somehow make up for it somehow.
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But that was always left as a big question, right?
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We were always supposed to, you know, China would make the rubber duckies.
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We would make the TVs and then China would make the TVs and we'd make the advanced robotics.
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But they were both stealing the technology on one end and stealing the rubber ducky factories
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And the American middle class and frankly, our national greatness got squeezed in the
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So I think a lot of it is just we got fat and lazy, right?
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We were the, think about America 1963 was without question the most powerful country in the world.
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It looked like nothing could possibly challenge us.
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And I think that we forgot that that greatness came from two centuries of very, very wise leadership
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from our private sector, from our public sector.
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We've got to get back to that or we're going to lose the country.
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And I think at least, you know, I'll say this, we're waking up to the fact that we have been
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failed for two generations now in this country.
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Speaking of elite institutions, you have done an amazing thing, J.D., which is you've been
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through a handful of elite institutions and have not been totally cast into the outer darkness
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So, you know, Yale Law School graduate had a very successful Hollywood movie, a very, very
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Shall conservatives go in and reclaim Yale or do we just need to defund it, knock it down
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Yeah, I mean, I think you have to go institution by institution.
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But with Yale in particular, I think that, you know, we need to do a little renovation
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You know, I actually read this interesting article over the weekend.
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It was by Helen Andrews, who's the editor of the American Conservative.
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And, you know, she was just talking about how, you know, for our entire history, we had this
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sort of certain understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction.
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And then that all started to change in our academic departments.
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And I saw a tweet of a history professor at Yale.
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And like, you know, I forget the exact wording of the tweet, but it was something like, oh,
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if this person wants to talk about this, she should have at least taken one of my history
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Like, we've given over the next, the leadership of the next generation to a history professor
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who's whining about the fact that a magazine editor didn't take one of her history courses
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Like, we should accept that these people are so drunk on their own power.
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And the only thing they have really going, right?
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You don't make that much money as a history professor.
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The only thing they have is the prestige that those elite institutions give them.
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But they're so willing to, they die to defend that prestige, that sense of social superiority,
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that they're unwilling to actually do any critical self-reflection, which means I think we have
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I mean, they're not serving any useful purpose.
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I mean, why is it that for the last two years, we've been living in the tyranny of Dr.
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Like, what gave this person lordship over the United States of America?
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It is honestly a set of degrees that are hanging on his wall, conferred by elite institutions
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that make all of us say, well, this person must know what he's talking about because
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This is the lie of our university system, that it teaches people to be boring and conventional.
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It gives them this ridiculous prestige game that they then inflict on the rest of our society.
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I think the universities are basically unsalvageable.
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Right, because what you get out of those, all the places that Dr. Fauci went or all the
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big brand name universities, what you are getting increasingly is a brand name credential and an
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If you want to go to Goldman Sachs, I'm not sure that your degree from Thomas Aquinas College
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A degree from Harvard or Princeton is going to do it.
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But you would very likely get a more coherent education at Hillsdale, Thomas Aquinas, Ave
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Murray, wherever we're talking about these handful of conservative schools.
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So, yes, the prestige does have an incredible amount of value, not just social value, but real
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You can get into these places where you could make a lot of money.
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And so we've got to adjust those incentives as well.
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I guess one way to do that is by winning, by winning power and by wielding power.
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I suspect that's what a lot of your Senate race and other Senate races is about, proving
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can we go in there, can we attain some political power, and can we use that for the good?
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They can learn more about the campaign, support us if they're willing to do so.
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I'm also on Twitter, Facebook, you know, all the normal places you can find political
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And once this airs, I'm sure I'll hear from all of your primary rivals yelling at me and