The Michael Knowles Show - Republicans Who Fight Back ｜ Blake Masters

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00:00:43.720 For decades now, for I guess my whole lifetime,

00:00:47.640 we have been burdened with the same old Republican candidates for president, well, until Trump,

00:00:58.860 for Senate, for governor, for everything down to dog catcher.

00:01:02.560 And it's the same old thing.

00:01:03.640 We need to cut taxes for corporations, and we need to let people do whatever they want

00:01:08.660 and abuse themselves however they want.

00:01:10.480 We've got to outsource all the jobs because that's going to be good for Americans somehow 1.00

00:01:13.800 because of some egghead spreadsheet or something.

00:01:16.400 And it's the same old drone, drone, drone that just doesn't seem very persuasive.

00:01:21.820 And then every so often, something shifts.

00:01:24.880 And there are candidates who kind of break that mold.

00:01:27.200 And I am very pleased to be joined by one of the candidates who is very much breaking that mold.

00:01:32.140 Blake Masters.

00:01:33.480 Blake Masters running for Senate in Arizona.

00:01:36.840 Blake runs Teal Capital and the Teal Foundation.

00:01:39.640 He has co-authored a number one New York Times bestseller, Zero to One, lives in Tucson,

00:01:45.340 and very, very soon, we hope, will be representing Arizona in the United States Senate.

00:01:50.660 Blake, thanks for coming on the show.

00:01:52.880 Hey, Michael.

00:01:53.320 Great to see you.

00:01:53.940 Thanks for having me.

00:01:54.680 So, Blake, you are not your run-of-the-mill Chamber of Commerce,

00:02:01.280 you know, just wears the exact same Brooks Brothers suit and says the same stale talking points.

00:02:05.760 You're a little bit of a different candidate.

00:02:07.720 How are you different from the typical old stodgy Republican we've come to expect?

00:02:14.620 Yeah, you know, I mean, I learned a lot from President Trump.

00:02:17.920 I think he came on the scene in 2016 and he busted up the establishment.

00:02:21.700 He was willing to say things that were true, that we sort of all knew were true,

00:02:26.660 but that you couldn't quite say as a conventional politician.

00:02:30.280 Like, he was just on the debate stage in 2016 saying the Iraq War was a mistake.

00:02:35.040 Turned out to be a big disaster.

00:02:36.340 I think that's how most of the country felt, but that was still not something that Republican politicians could say.

00:02:41.760 And so I'm out there on the campaign trail trying to tell people what I think.

00:02:45.560 You know, I think I've got a beat on what's gone wrong in this country,

00:02:48.080 not just in the last nine or ten months of the Biden administration, although so much has gone wrong,

00:02:53.580 but actually just going back a few decades.

00:02:55.520 You know, I think the rot in our politics is pretty deep.

00:02:58.480 And I think people want, you know, smart, especially young, new leaders that are going to call out problems

00:03:04.780 and not be politically correct and just try to tell people the truth.

00:03:08.100 I think somehow that's really kind of contrarian today.

00:03:12.580 Well, I'm glad you've made this point, too, on Biden.

00:03:15.860 Yes, Biden is an extreme failure as president. 0.98

00:03:20.060 He's basically everything he's touched has turned to ash and he's been kind of a dunce for his whole career. 0.98

00:03:25.960 But it's not just Biden. 0.83

00:03:28.500 And one of those stale lines that we've heard from Republicans for so long is, you know,

00:03:32.680 everything Republicans do is good and everything Democrats do is bad.

00:03:36.840 And every problem in the world is because of Joe Biden or just fill in the blank of whatever Democrat.

00:03:42.440 And what you're pointing out is in recent decades, Republicans have made a whole lot of mistakes, too.

00:03:48.960 Yeah, like I think Reagan was a good president and we rightly look back at Reagan with fondness.

00:03:53.720 I mean, I think he did what he needed to do in the 80s, right?

00:03:56.340 We won the Cold War.

00:03:57.360 We defeated Soviet communism.

00:03:59.640 That was all great.

00:04:01.420 And then I think Trump did what he needed to do in 2016.

00:04:04.600 I think he saved the country from the Hillary Clinton administration, right?

00:04:08.500 But what happened in between?

00:04:10.160 And I think Republicans just got complacent and they got comfortable playing defense.

00:04:16.020 And it was just sort of George W. Bush, you know, like I'm a good guy and we'll just we'll have some good faith disagreements.

00:04:21.800 And in retrospect, I think the George W. Bush administration was really bad.

00:04:25.860 Like we got the Iraq War and trillions in spending and they centralized education policy, you know, with no child left behind in D.C.

00:04:33.800 And we didn't even get a whole lot of cultural or social conservatism because it just led to Obama.

00:04:39.480 And so with the Republican establishment that's just content to play defense and just kind of more or less mindlessly repeat whatever Reagan said in his time, I think the party just kind of fell asleep at the wheel.

00:04:53.200 And, you know, we see the results.

00:04:55.380 It just doesn't work.

00:04:56.120 And then we got Trump.

00:04:56.940 And I agree with you.

00:04:58.400 Trump was so much better than any president in my lifetime.

00:05:03.060 Unfortunately, I just missed Reagan.

00:05:04.480 Reagan, you know, I was born under Bush the first.

00:05:07.920 And so I, you know, it was Bush the first and then Clinton and then Bush two didn't that didn't really work out. 0.95

00:05:12.240 And Obama was awful.

00:05:13.480 Then we got Trump and it was really great.

00:05:14.780 And I thought, here's the beginning of something new and exciting in the country.

00:05:17.740 But then then he lost reelection or some people think maybe he didn't lose reelection.

00:05:23.800 I mean, he practically, obviously, he's not the president right now, but some people have a lot of questions about the 2020 election.

00:05:31.180 Well, I'm one of those people.

00:05:32.460 I think it was messed up.

00:05:34.740 You know, there's a lot of wild stuff out there and not every theory is true, of course.

00:05:38.800 Right.

00:05:40.260 But the media, the blue checks, the sort of credentialed, you know, corporate media, they want to gaslight us and insist that this was the most perfect election of all time.

00:05:50.240 And of course, it wasn't.

00:05:51.780 It just demonstrably wasn't.

00:05:53.080 You can go through six or seven things even before Election Day that just make this thing so messed up.

00:05:57.820 Like I started to get really worried in probably like August of 2020 when you started to see these headlines, right?

00:06:04.080 These seemingly coordinated news headlines, because this is how it works, right?

00:06:07.080 There's talking points and all these different left wing outlets just sort of, you know, deliver different headline versions of it.

00:06:12.380 And they were starting to say, don't expect results on election night, right?

00:06:18.540 Like, Michael, you're not expecting results on election night, are you?

00:06:21.180 What a crazy thing to expect.

00:06:22.500 They were priming the country to accept the chaos, you know, that would come after the election.

00:06:29.500 And then, of course, you had big tech censorship.

00:06:31.760 I wrote an op-ed with J.D. Vance in the New York Post about this.

00:06:36.000 Facebook and Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

00:06:40.280 Just saying 100 million Americans couldn't read that anymore because that's misinformation.

00:06:45.000 They did that three weeks before the election.

00:06:46.500 But that's true information from a true newspaper that was bad for Joe Biden.

00:06:51.740 And the official margins in this 2020 election were so thin, were so small, that I think even that one brazen act of corporate censorship could have swung the election.

00:07:01.580 Let alone Mark Zuckerberg personally spending $420 million on allegedly neutral election administration, right?

00:07:07.720 You look at how that money was farmed out.

00:07:09.080 It was super partisan.

00:07:10.080 So I think the scales were super tilted.

00:07:12.520 I don't think we had a free and fair election.

00:07:14.040 And some of it, you know, some of it was unfair in the way that might be legal, but it really seems to raise a lot of questions.

00:07:22.660 Some of it was just clearly illegal.

00:07:24.880 And if you look in Pennsylvania, for instance, the use of widespread mail-in ballots in clear violation of the state constitution, no matter what the state Supreme Court has to say.

00:07:33.280 I mean, there were all of these problems.

00:07:34.960 You mentioned big tech.

00:07:35.960 If three billionaire oligarchs led by hipster Rasputin, Jack Dorsey, if they're going to control speech in a republic, they're not just controlling one aspect of the society.

00:07:46.960 They're controlling the whole way that the government is administered, right?

00:07:51.420 We govern ourselves by persuading one another and communicating.

00:07:55.140 So I think you're absolutely right.

00:07:57.020 And the fact that you're willing to risk being called an insurrectionist terrorist or whatever nonsense, you know, the blue checks are going to say, I think that that shows a lot of courage.

00:08:08.140 But one aspect of your campaign that has not gotten a ton of play, and I think it should, it's not just a relitigating what has happened in the past, but you are looking down the line on issues that will affect the country, not just a year or two from now, but decades and decades from now.

00:08:25.320 You're looking at the collapse of the American family and what it is that we as Republicans or conservatives or Americans broadly can do about it.

00:08:34.560 Yeah, I mean, I'm a super pro market, super pro business guy.

00:08:40.300 I really am.

00:08:41.760 But I think markets are tools for human flourishing like the free market is not some some ultimate goal.

00:08:50.280 You know, the free market is one of the most powerful ways we have to achieve the ultimate goal, which is human flourishing, which is successful human families, right, which is a strong American middle class.

00:09:00.760 And I think for too long, again, Republicans got stuck in this rut where they would just repeat sort of Reagan economic orthodoxy and you, you know, they bury their head in the sand and it's like a bunch of ostriches just with their head in the sand and you're failing to pay attention to the consequences of your policies.

00:09:17.480 Well, with all the offshoring, you know, with all the sort of pro big business policy that we've had in the past few decades, I think big business has done great.

00:09:29.100 Increasingly, big business is left wing and it's sort of fused with, you know, with state power in very problematic ways.

00:09:35.520 But the middle class has not done great.

00:09:37.220 The middle class has been hollowed out and it's harder and harder to start a family.

00:09:41.380 Family formation is being delayed.

00:09:43.740 People our age, right, millennials, we're not getting married as much.

00:09:47.480 We're having fewer kids and later.

00:09:49.600 And this is kind of a disaster because I think if you can't participate in an economy and, you know, actually have a reasonable expectation of getting married and having kids and raising a family starting in your late 20s, then like what's good?

00:10:02.800 That's GDP may be like super high, but what good is it for if the middle class in America is just getting hollowed out? 0.65

00:10:09.460 You know, this reminds me of a point that the English writer G.K. Chesterton made, which is one of the things that's gone wrong in the world is not that the vices have run wild.

00:10:19.280 It's not that the world is too bad.

00:10:20.720 It's that the virtues have run wild and in many ways the world is too good.

00:10:25.020 And that's what I'm hearing when you mention the markets.

00:10:28.340 Yeah, we love the markets.

00:10:29.420 We want a robust economy.

00:10:30.760 But you don't want to put the cart before the horse.

00:10:34.300 You don't want to pretend that that GDP number is the be-all and end-all and purpose of government and society.

00:10:40.740 No, the economy is there.

00:10:42.600 The markets are there to support human flourishing.

00:10:46.060 And that means robust families.

00:10:47.480 That's the bedrock political unit.

00:10:49.580 That means making sure – actually, this is another point that you've brought up that sent shockwaves through the Republican establishment.

00:10:56.020 You think that – you think we ought to go back to the old-timey terrible days when a family could support itself on one income.

00:11:04.640 It's amazing to me that that's always so controversial whenever I say it.

00:11:08.660 All I say is in America, you should be able to raise a family on one single income, right?

00:11:14.460 We used to be able to do this.

00:11:16.300 My grandfather did this.

00:11:17.420 He weighed nails at a steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado for 30-plus years.

00:11:20.940 They were able to do that, you know, relatively modest house, but one car, you know, week-long vacation every year.

00:11:30.180 And that worked.

00:11:31.920 There was something about the economy where that could work.

00:11:33.940 And now after decades of inflation and, you know, wage stagnation and offshoring, de-industrialization, you can't really do that anymore.

00:11:41.360 And it may be a hard problem to solve.

00:11:43.240 You know, I have some policy ideas on how we get there.

00:11:45.460 But it's so fascinating because whenever I just articulate that as the goal, the left freaks out.

00:11:51.080 They want to say that's sexist or they want to say, yeah, exactly your point, right?

00:11:54.140 That's retrograde.

00:11:55.000 You're just trying to live in the 1950s.

00:11:56.620 And it's like maybe both parents and a household want to work.

00:12:00.240 Like if both really have great careers and they care about that, great.

00:12:03.600 I'm not trying to tell anyone what they have to do.

00:12:05.400 I'm just saying wouldn't it be nice if that was a choice?

00:12:08.480 And some people don't like that.

00:12:10.560 But I think that's the future.

00:12:11.600 And the political party that figures out how to actually deliver that reality, I think, will govern successfully for quite a long time.

00:12:17.100 I know so many young women, young mothers who, and when I say young mothers, I'm talking about millennial young.

00:12:23.640 So like 33, you know, it used to be you'd have kids much younger than that.

00:12:27.080 But because of the problems you're describing, people keep delaying these things.

00:12:30.680 So, you know, by today's standards, a relatively young mother, say late 20s or early 30s, wants to stay at home and raise her kid.

00:12:38.780 I have a young child, you know, a 10-month-old baby, and he needs mommy.

00:12:43.940 And, you know, it's an exhausting, it's a full-time job to raise a kid.

00:12:47.260 But now that's very difficult.

00:12:49.280 And so what happens is you have to send the kid to daycare very shortly after the kid is born in a lot of cases.

00:12:55.560 So that I, my wife needs to go out and work for some other guy so that she can make money so that I can pay some other woman to raise our kid. 1.00

00:13:05.360 Does that seem like the most efficient way, the best way to have a family in the United States?

00:13:10.940 Seems a little inefficient to me.

00:13:13.540 It doesn't to me personally, you know.

00:13:15.620 I mean, my wife, she stays at home and she takes care of the kids. 0.54

00:13:19.160 We have three boys.

00:13:20.420 They're seven, five, and one and a half.

00:13:22.800 And she homeschools them. 0.99

00:13:24.340 You know, I try to pitch in on the margin, but I'm busy campaigning.

00:13:27.720 And, you know, I still have my day job.

00:13:29.500 And, but she feels like that's her highest calling.

00:13:34.380 You know, she was a preschool teacher before, and that's just what she wants to be doing. 1.00

00:13:39.480 So, look, if not, if people disagree, like, fine, go get a job and pay a nanny.

00:13:43.560 But you shouldn't have to do that.

00:13:45.500 You know, that shouldn't just be the default assumption.

00:13:47.760 I think it's weird that it's become that.

00:13:49.480 And I think Republicans are complicit, too, because, again, you said, you kind of implied it didn't make sense.

00:13:54.340 And it doesn't make sense from the family perspective, but the way it makes sense is in the GDP, you know, lens.

00:14:00.000 If you just view everything through the lens of we need to maximize GDP.

00:14:03.340 Well, you've got the husband working, that his income's contributing to GDP.

00:14:07.180 Now the wife is, too, and now we're paying the nanny.

00:14:09.420 So we've got three incomes.

00:14:10.460 Look at all this economic activity that's happening.

00:14:12.760 And it's like, well, is that what the parents want?

00:14:14.820 Is that what's best for the kids?

00:14:16.920 You know, these things are a little bit harder to measure.

00:14:18.900 And we have such a measurement bias, we just gravitate towards things that we can measure.

00:14:22.100 Well, you can measure GDP.

00:14:23.900 But, again, if you just maximize for that and you dial everything else back, maybe you end up with this really weird society.

00:14:29.320 And I think it looks a lot like the society we have now.

00:14:31.760 For so long, Republicans would make fun of Democrats.

00:14:34.960 And they'd say, the Democrat, the leftist approach to politics is who cares if it works in practice?

00:14:40.220 Does it work in theory?

00:14:41.620 You know, we're the conservatives.

00:14:42.740 We're really practical.

00:14:43.460 Well, all too often, you've seen conservatives become these egghead, spreadsheet-loving theoreticians who are pushing a vision and a narrative that is really divorced from the reality on the ground.

00:14:58.240 You know, for so long, especially in the last 20 years, you'd hear Republicans say, everything's going great for the middle-class Americans.

00:15:04.720 It's great.

00:15:05.100 Look at my spreadsheet.

00:15:06.440 Look at my GDP counter.

00:15:07.820 Well, how about look on the ground in America.

00:15:10.040 You've got families falling apart.

00:15:11.460 You've got, for goodness sakes, the average life expectancy declining in the United States because of deaths of despair.

00:15:17.340 I mean, so these are huge generational problems.

00:15:21.040 And I do think you've got, you've identified them.

00:15:24.140 So then what do we do?

00:15:25.360 Senator Masters makes it to Washington, D.C.

00:15:28.460 What is the first sort of legislation that you start pushing?

00:15:31.980 Day one is just close the border to illegal immigration.

00:15:36.380 You know, Bernie Sanders used to be free to talk about this.

00:15:39.020 He knew that unlimited illegal immigration actually depresses the wages for working-class Americans.

00:15:45.820 For the last five or ten years, he hasn't really been able to talk about that because the left wants open borders, I think, for maybe electoral purposes later down the line.

00:15:54.540 But, you know, stop the glut of illegal immigration.

00:15:58.040 I think we probably have too much legal immigration, too.

00:16:00.460 Most people are shocked on the campaign trail when I tell them that we actually accept more than one million legal immigrants every year, you know, with various kinds of visas.

00:16:09.940 And I've seen in the Silicon Valley context, the H-1B visa system is completely abused.

00:16:15.560 You know, of course, Facebook would love to import tens and tens of thousands of software programmers from India and pay them less money than they would have to pay, you know, a U.S. citizen to do those jobs.

00:16:27.240 But I think we've got to, you know, drastically curtail, if not, like, end that program because I think American jobs, by default, should go to American citizens. 0.90

00:16:35.780 But broadly, you need policies that, A, raise wages and, B, cut costs.

00:16:40.060 You know, the costs of health care and education and housing, this step just goes up and up every year.

00:16:44.400 And we get used to that.

00:16:45.280 We start to think of it as like a law of physics.

00:16:48.260 But actually, when you zoom in on these industries, there's a lot of regulation, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of sort of cartel-like, monopoly-like behavior.

00:16:55.520 And I think if you go in with the sort of machete and you intelligently sort of hack through the brush, there's a lot we can do to make sure that we can build more housing, that we can deliver health care in less bureaucratic and less expensive ways.

00:17:09.700 So if we can get people's wages to rise and costs to fall, all of a sudden, you know, five or ten years from now, I think you can get back to a place where you can raise a family on one single income.

00:17:19.080 I really do.

00:17:19.620 You know, under the Trump administration, for the first time in a very long time, you saw wages start to tick up again.

00:17:25.380 Real wages start to tick up.

00:17:27.160 And then the establishment said, no, that's enough of that.

00:17:29.000 We can't have too much of that going on.

00:17:31.040 And so they're with Trump.

00:17:32.580 You make this point, which is politically controversial.

00:17:37.720 Among the political class, it's a controversial point.

00:17:40.380 Among the American people, it's a totally uncontroversial point.

00:17:43.200 Namely, you think we ought to drastically reduce legal immigration as well as illegal immigration.

00:17:50.020 There was a poll that came out.

00:17:51.440 It was a Harvard-Harris poll around 2019 that asked people their views on illegal immigration and legal immigration.

00:17:59.360 And the phrasing of the survey was such that they were just talking about numbers.

00:18:04.420 And because, as you know, most people don't realize how many immigrants are pouring into the country every year.

00:18:09.060 When they were asked what number seemed about right, people settled on around half a million legal immigrants coming in every year.

00:18:16.560 Now, of course, we know the real number is much, much higher than that.

00:18:18.980 And so the survey concluded that the majority of Americans, that includes many Democrats and includes many independents, want to drastically reduce legal immigration as well.

00:18:29.000 So why is there such a huge divide here between an issue that is very popular among the American people and unheard of among the political class in either party?

00:18:39.060 I mean, I think you see this a lot.

00:18:41.440 I think the political establishment has just grown completely out of touch with everyday reality, with what people actually want.

00:18:48.320 But I think there's a lot of, you know, the H-1B visa system, right?

00:18:50.760 Like I mentioned, the corporate interests keep that thing going.

00:18:54.400 Like, they want that cheap labor.

00:18:56.900 They just do.

00:18:57.960 You know, universities, like there's a lot of Chinese nationals studying in the United States right now.

00:19:03.720 And they pay full price.

00:19:05.180 You know, they'll get into Harvard and they'll pay full price.

00:19:07.220 And, of course, there's some low-grade espionage going on there.

00:19:09.960 It's not James Bond sexy stuff, but, like, they're recording stuff.

00:19:13.500 They're sending information back home.

00:19:15.400 And, you know, there's a lot of visa overstays.

00:19:17.580 There's a lot of people who are granted, you know, status to be here legally after they get educated in the United States.

00:19:25.200 And I think the incentives of the universities are to keep that gravy train going for as long as possible.

00:19:32.440 So I think, you know, most of these visa systems, you know, I like the O-1 visa.

00:19:36.500 If you're, like, an extraordinary, talented person, like, I want the world's best and the brightest to come here.

00:19:41.620 You know, if you're a rocket scientist that's going to come and start a company, great.

00:19:45.640 Like, let's bring you in.

00:19:46.840 But I think that's honestly probably, like, 10,000 to 50,000 people a year.

00:19:50.400 And that's not just, it's not 500,000, it's not a million.

00:19:56.220 And so I think we just need to radically reform these systems because I don't think they work to the benefit of the average American.

00:20:01.680 And that should be the fundamental litmus test of any immigration policy is does this policy make things better for the average American?

00:20:08.420 If it does, it's probably a good policy.

00:20:10.260 And if it doesn't, then throw it to the curb.

00:20:12.700 Now, this lens, which makes sense to me, this lens is not very common in the Republican Party.

00:20:19.320 At least it hasn't been in recent years, which is you're saying what I'm going to do is I'm going to push for good policy and I'm going to oppose bad policy.

00:20:27.180 And I'm going to push for things that make the real lives of Americans better.

00:20:30.020 And I'm going to oppose things that make the real lives of Americans worse.

00:20:33.160 Because it seems to me the lens on the Republican Party, in the Republican Party for the past couple of decades is deregulate.

00:20:41.980 Deregulate everything.

00:20:43.140 Allow the left to deregulate on the social side and don't really push back too hard there.

00:20:47.440 And then we're going to just deregulate on the business side, on the tax side, on the education.

00:20:54.400 We're just going to deregulate everything.

00:20:56.520 It seems to me the pitch for Republican politicians in recent decades is vote for me and I won't do anything.

00:21:02.800 I won't govern you.

00:21:04.580 I'll just do the least I possibly can.

00:21:07.780 It sounds like your campaign pitch is different.

00:21:10.860 Yeah.

00:21:11.020 I mean, I've you know, I just I feel like I've grown up watching the progressive left just be completely ascendant.

00:21:17.060 They've taken over almost every single institution in our country.

00:21:20.380 Right.

00:21:20.540 They run the government right now.

00:21:21.680 But even the social and cultural institutions look at the look at the church, look at formerly neutral institutions or center right institutions like the military.

00:21:29.980 You know, you've got General Milley up there testifying about white rage and how he reads Mao and Marx and he's teaching soldiers about critical race theory.

00:21:37.900 And meanwhile, like they forget how to win wars.

00:21:40.640 You know, I think it's just such a disservice to the service members, actually.

00:21:45.460 But the progressive left is ascendant and they intend on concentrating power on monopolizing it.

00:21:55.820 They really do want a sort of one party, I think, totalitarian state like that's that's what they want.

00:22:02.820 And so if they're going to use political power, you know, they have no qualms about that.

00:22:06.720 They don't care about the Constitution.

00:22:08.040 They don't care about the rule of law.

00:22:09.340 We do care about that stuff on the right, except, like you said, most Republican politicians, they just don't want to do anything.

00:22:15.080 They just want to play defense.

00:22:16.500 And if you just play defense, if you don't want to use state power to actually, you know, make a safe and functioning society for people and the left is just going to use that power, then you're going to lose.

00:22:27.340 And that's why the left has taken over.

00:22:29.580 And so this sort of libertarian Republican thing, I'm sympathetic to it because I don't, you know, I'm cautious of government power, unlike the left.

00:22:37.680 But if we don't stand up and defend ourselves, they will take over this country and they tell us what they're going to do.

00:22:42.480 They're going to add states to the union so they can get a lock on the Senate forever. 1.00

00:22:45.860 They're going to pack the Supreme Court.

00:22:47.480 They're going to federalize elections. 0.64

00:22:49.620 We have to be willing to use power to prevent them from being able to do that.

00:22:53.280 Otherwise, there's no USA in just 10 or 20 years. 0.90

00:22:56.460 Right.

00:22:56.660 Well, when you say there's no USA, I mean, people might think that sounds hyperbolic.

00:23:01.000 But, you know, what makes a nation?

00:23:03.320 Geographically, borders make a nation.

00:23:05.080 The left is trying to destroy that.

00:23:06.640 Culturally, something in common makes a nation, but the left wants to tear apart the things that we hold in common.

00:23:14.240 And very often that the kind of libertarian strain in the Republican Party has also pushed back against the ideas that we have anything in common, that we have mutual obligations to one another, that we actually ought to have some things that are unifying us as a country.

00:23:28.480 One of the topics that's come up a lot recently is whether or not the country is just going to crack up.

00:23:33.240 Are we going to have Texit?

00:23:34.460 Are we going to have CalExit?

00:23:36.860 What is it exactly that's going to hold us together?

00:23:39.260 Or are we going to go the way of the Balkans? 0.83

00:23:42.000 I mean, I sure hope we don't, you know, and I guess I'm optimistic because I'm running for office.

00:23:46.520 I think I can, you know, play a hopefully a pretty important role in trying to keep things together.

00:23:51.980 But I do think there's some common culture.

00:23:53.740 There's some common bond that we have to have.

00:23:56.420 It can't just be this ideology of liberalism all the way down where everybody's just an atomistic individual.

00:24:02.420 And, yeah, if you have obligations to your family or your neighbor, you know, you can't just dissolve those bonds.

00:24:09.700 It can't just be everybody do whatever they want.

00:24:11.820 Because I think we see that that ends in poverty, that ends in chaos, that does end in balkanization.

00:24:17.180 And so I think, you know, this is why the schooling issue is so important.

00:24:20.060 We need to teach young Americans, new generations, to actually respect their past.

00:24:26.420 Right.

00:24:26.740 It's the opposite of this crazy, toxic left-wing stuff that they're teaching in schools, like the 1619 history curriculum, which is actually in some school districts in Phoenix.

00:24:36.060 It teaches that the country wasn't founded in 1776.

00:24:39.300 It was founded in 1619 when the first slave ships came.

00:24:41.860 And kids learn that our Constitution is discardable and, you know, evil because the founding fathers were racist.

00:24:49.240 And I just think that's the biggest difference between the progressive mind and the conservative mind.

00:24:53.500 The progressive sees that, okay, the past wasn't perfect.

00:24:56.400 And so you throw out everything or the, you know, society is not perfect today.

00:25:00.200 We don't live in a perfect country.

00:25:01.740 I think it's the best that's ever existed, but it's not perfect.

00:25:04.280 And so they want to say, because it's not perfect, burn it all down.

00:25:06.800 And that's the Bolshevik mentality, whereas the conservative says, yeah, it's not perfect, but let's work to make it better.

00:25:12.400 And let's keep and understand and respect everything good that's come before us, right, that tradition, those bonds.

00:25:18.800 And so that's the fundamental goal is which way do we break here?

00:25:21.280 But that's why I think, you know, my campaign and my political mission, it's this war on progressivism because I do think it's destroying America.

00:25:29.460 And I don't think that's hyperbole.

00:25:31.320 And if we don't do our jobs in 10 years, yeah, America is still here.

00:25:34.340 I mean, the White House will still exist, but, you know, it'll be a one-party totalitarian state.

00:25:38.860 It'll be California, just worse, and it'll be managed decline like Western Europe. 0.91

00:25:43.600 And I think America in its sort of spiritual sense will be gone forever.

00:25:47.440 Well, and you've hit on this issue of education.

00:25:49.840 You're seeing that rot go all the way down.

00:25:52.600 This education issue just cost Terry McAuliffe the governorship in Virginia.

00:25:57.420 Yeah, I mean, by the end of that campaign, it was all about do you, the parents, have the right to raise your kids or do I, Terry McAuliffe, have the right to raise your kids and fill their heads with critical race theory and transgender ideology, neither of which are being taught in schools, but both of which are really great and we should teach them in schools.

00:26:13.540 They kept going back and forth on their line there.

00:26:16.120 Right.

00:26:16.820 So what do we do?

00:26:17.900 I mean, this is an issue.

00:26:19.820 Republicans have brought it up every now and again.

00:26:23.280 Usually their answer is, you know, abolish the Department of Education.

00:26:26.040 I think that line of thinking has kind of gone away a little bit.

00:26:30.000 Now we're more focused on what do we do in the classroom.

00:26:32.640 Why is it?

00:26:33.260 Why is education becoming the new grassroots issue-driven movement?

00:26:39.320 Well, I think it's one consequence, one of the only maybe good consequences of the COVID pandemic was for the first time parents actually saw what was being taught to their kids. 0.97

00:26:50.020 It's like, my kid's listening to that crap for eight hours a day. 0.75

00:26:54.020 And so, you know, you see this sort of reaction against that. 0.99

00:26:57.840 Whereas before, I think the bias is to always think, oh, the bad stuff is happening in other schools.

00:27:02.740 Right?

00:27:02.860 Like, my kid's school is fine.

00:27:04.500 It's like, no, actually, here's a lot of evidence that says your kid's school is really messed up. 0.97

00:27:07.660 And what we have to remember is that, I mean, McAuliffe in Virginia was dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud. 0.60

00:27:13.980 But this is what the whole left-wing education apparatus thinks. 0.91

00:27:17.600 This is what the teachers' unions think.

00:27:19.280 They don't think that parents should be in charge of their kid's education.

00:27:23.020 They say, trust the experts.

00:27:24.720 And it's like, they're the failed credentialed experts.

00:27:28.460 The real experts are the parents.

00:27:30.320 And so you've got to put more power back in the hands of parents.

00:27:32.780 I think that means school choice.

00:27:35.780 You know, I think school choice is sort of the civil rights issue of our time.

00:27:39.540 You should not be relegated to some failing school just because that happens to be, you know, your zip code or your state assignment.

00:27:47.360 I think that if, you know, if you're paying dollars into the education system, but you prefer to homeschool your kid, I think you should be able to get all that money back.

00:27:56.060 Or at least a lion's share of it so that you can homeschool.

00:27:58.620 And if you look at the polling, more people would want to homeschool if they could afford it.

00:28:03.320 And again, you can't really afford it because we live in a society where you need two incomes to make ends meet.

00:28:07.980 But if parents could afford to, more people would do it.

00:28:10.900 More people would create sort of neighborhood schools.

00:28:13.200 We want to decentralize, you know, the system as much as possible and put power back in the hands of parents.

00:28:18.660 Again, maybe hard to do, but that's the goal.

00:28:20.960 And then policies that work towards that are almost, by definition, good.

00:28:24.080 Well, and so I guess this leads into the broader picture too.

00:28:28.440 You know, yes, there are some concrete ways to do it, but it's going to be an uphill climb.

00:28:33.440 What about the broader political problem?

00:28:35.940 We touched on it a little bit at the top, this problem of election integrity.

00:28:38.780 But really, we call it the swamp or the blob or this ugly connection between the government and big tech.

00:28:47.140 You know, it used to be public versus private enterprise.

00:28:49.900 Now, it's a little bit of a blurrier line between those two and the universities and the media and the whole liberal blob working in concert with one another.

00:28:59.980 How is one guy, sharp though he might be, focused though he might be, how is some senator from Arizona going to help to drain that swamp?

00:29:09.520 You know, I think just going in with clear eyes about it, I know how hard it's going to be.

00:29:16.340 Like, I know it's, you know, it's probably literally impossible, of course, for me to do it by myself, but I'll try to be a leader and recruit others to the cause.

00:29:25.800 You know, I do think one individual senator actually has so much more power, even legislatively, than people think.

00:29:30.860 There's all sorts of interesting procedural rules and hacks that you can really familiarize yourself with.

00:29:37.880 You have a lot of power in that chamber.

00:29:39.580 Most people don't use it, right, because the whole pressure is to go along to get along, you know, just do whatever leadership says.

00:29:47.660 And I definitely don't intend on doing that.

00:29:50.320 So I think I can actually be quite effective.

00:29:52.100 I also want to use the cultural power of the Senate seat.

00:29:56.180 You know, I think most, there's a handful of examples that do this, but most don't do this.

00:30:01.080 And part of it is, yeah, can I inspire a new generation of people to run for office or to get involved?

00:30:07.700 Can I be a messenger for the right kind of ideals?

00:30:10.760 We can learn from the left, like the left advances statement legislation, you know, that might look really crazy or really radical one year, like it's not going to pass.

00:30:19.960 But then they introduce it the next year and the next year and the next year.

00:30:23.080 And pretty soon they move the Overton window so that that idea is sort of more legitimated in the public mind.

00:30:28.760 And then all of a sudden, seven years later, boom, it's law.

00:30:30.940 Like, look, I think the Green New Deal is still really crazy. 0.94

00:30:33.720 But it was, but everybody knew it was crazy when AOC first came on the scene and started blabbering about it.

00:30:38.860 And now, you know, they just kind of beat people down and we're at risk of passing that.

00:30:43.780 And I think that's a problem.

00:30:44.800 And I think Republicans don't use those same tactics, but we absolutely can.

00:30:49.400 And so I think you could just get me and J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz.

00:30:53.780 Like, we've got a core group and you throw a few more and all of a sudden there's sort of a new balance of power in the Senate.

00:30:59.340 I think that could be very, very interesting.

00:31:00.940 You know, I'm so glad you brought up the Green New Deal example. 0.97

00:31:03.580 I remember when AOC came out with the Green New Deal, Mitch McConnell said, well, we need to bring this to the floor for a vote immediately.

00:31:10.340 This is the craziest thing I ever saw and we're going to get you on the record.

00:31:13.620 Ha, ha, ha, ha.

00:31:14.860 Well, who's laughing now?

00:31:16.200 You know, it was crazy.

00:31:17.160 It remains crazy legislation, but through that persistence, through that willingness to wield power, the power that I guess her constituents sent her to Congress to wield, it has been normalized.

00:31:28.220 And they have moved, as you say, the Overton window.

00:31:30.140 And I think you are demonstrating a clarity of vision here, even among your potential future colleagues who will be more amenable to that view as well.

00:31:41.060 There is a lot of power, actually, in the Senate.

00:31:43.660 And Republicans, a lot of Republicans have just derelicted their duty and given that up for ideological reasons or for cowardice or for ignorance or whatever.

00:31:51.180 But now would be the time to use it.

00:31:54.020 The time is running short.

00:31:55.460 We don't have all the time in the world.

00:31:57.220 Blake, speaking of time, I've taken up too much of yours.

00:32:00.240 Where can people find you?

00:32:02.600 Just go to my website, which is blakemasters.com.

00:32:06.620 Very direct.

00:32:07.500 Sign up to volunteer.

00:32:09.020 Very direct, very simple.

00:32:09.960 Sign up to volunteer.

00:32:11.200 Donate if you can.

00:32:12.300 I wish campaigns weren't so expensive, but they are.

00:32:14.560 So every bit helps.

00:32:15.740 But get in touch and sign up, and we'll send you updates.

00:32:19.300 Blake, I wish you, sincerely, I wish you the best of luck.

00:32:22.560 Head on over to blakemasters.com to learn more about Blake.

00:32:26.440 And we'll have to have you back to check in on the campaign.

00:32:29.260 Sounds great.

00:32:29.860 Thank you.

The Michael Knowles Show - November 20, 2021

Republicans Who Fight Back ｜ Blake Masters

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