Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Did the FBI lie about the Trump Shooter? Is the GOP ‘Weird’? With Matt Taibbi | TRUTH Podcast #57

00:00:00.000 So my guest today is Matt Taibbi, one of the few actual journalists left in the world, and I was looking forward to this conversation.

00:00:06.000 It wasn't going to be tied to the news, but it turns out that a lot of news has happened in the last 24 hours, and even as this recording is happening within hours of it, that I can't help but make that the focus of what we're about to discuss.

00:00:20.000 The first is the appearance that the FBI has, big surprise, not been honest with the public.

00:00:26.000 Certainly not fully straightforward based on some recent facts that we've learned about what they know about the Trump would be assassin or the person who at least attempted the assassination on Donald Trump.

00:00:40.000 What we've learned, and it's still in real time coming out, is that at least Gab, one of the organizations, social media networks that received an emergency document request from the FBI, suggested that they knew or believed that the account that belonged to Crooks, the alleged assassin, Actually was posting very different things than what the FBI publicly stated.

00:01:02.000 So it's interesting to get to the bottom of what's going on there.

00:01:05.000 And it's all against the backdrop of a week where leveling the term weird has become the Democrats' principal political strategy, which I think is actually not only a little bit weird in its own right, but more importantly, it's anti-American at its core and rankles me in ways that I think we ought to discuss in greater depth than just knee-jerk reactions.

00:01:27.000 So, a lot to talk about, but instead of the usual conversation we were about to have, Matt, I'll bring on my guest, Matt Taibbi, who I had a chance to meet recently at the Republican convention.

00:01:37.000 We struck up conversation, and this is an outgrowth and a follow-up to that.

00:01:41.000 But, Matt, welcome to my podcast, and I'm excited to chat with you about some subjects that might have been a little bit different than what we were planning on.

00:01:49.000 No, thanks for having me on, and good to see you again, Mr. Ramaswamy.

00:01:53.000 That was a pleasure to meet you last week, or I guess it was two weeks ago now.

00:01:56.000 A couple weeks ago, yeah.

00:01:57.000 Time flies.

00:01:58.000 So what do you make of this, you know, obviously we don't have all of the facts yet, but the appearance that we didn't really get necessarily the full truth of what the FBI knew or even what their full beliefs were.

00:02:10.000 What do you make of that?

00:02:11.000 And in particular, from your vantage point as a longer-time journalist studying Government transparency goes at the heart of a political journalist.

00:02:20.000 How does this fit into a broader history of what we know about how the government really does or doesn't tell the truth to us about issues of public importance?

00:02:29.000 Well, I think it says a lot about a lot of things, actually.

00:02:33.000 The FBI has Transformed itself into a different kind of organization, really since the beginning of the war on terror years.

00:02:44.000 After the hearings in the 70s about the reform of the intelligence community, the FBI essentially became almost entirely a law enforcement agency.

00:02:58.000 It could not conduct investigations without some kind of predicate that had to demonstrate that.

00:03:06.000 That changed really in the Bush years.

00:03:09.000 There was a series of directives that allowed them to essentially conduct investigations without any real important cause.

00:03:18.000 And the agency has really become much more of a counterintelligence, intelligence gathering agency as opposed to a law enforcement body that just investigates crimes and tries to gather evidence.

00:03:35.000 When they give...

00:03:36.000 Basically a general purpose investigative agency as opposed to responsive to a particular alleged violation of the law.

00:03:42.000 That's what you're saying, which is absolutely, I think, spot on.

00:03:44.000 Right.

00:03:45.000 That's what you're saying.

00:03:46.000 Yes.

00:03:46.000 And the problem for us as journalists is that the FBI, I mean, I've dealt with them a few times over the years, the FBI, DOJ. Once upon a time, you know, if they could, they would give you information, but it would always be, you know, here's what we found out.

00:04:01.000 Here's what evidence we can disclose.

00:04:03.000 Uh...

00:04:04.000 They were not being political very often in the way that they would disseminate information.

00:04:10.000 That wasn't really part of their mission.

00:04:12.000 That wasn't the way they wanted to be perceived either.

00:04:15.000 Now, in the wake of the Trump assassination, there's this crazy symbiosis between a press that doesn't really do any work and the FBI, which You know, issues these completely nonsensical, off-the-record statements, well, they'll tell people, like, we've done 100 interviews, but we have absolutely no information about what the possible motive is, which is completely impossible.

00:04:41.000 Anybody who's done 100 interviews with people who've known the suspect will have some kind of idea.

00:04:46.000 They'll have a theory, at least.

00:04:47.000 Yeah, they'll have a theory, and now this new thing where they, you know, they affirmatively tell the public, they're trying to convince us that Oh, absolutely.

00:05:08.000 I mean, I think that The deeper issue that animates my own pursuits, whatever they are going forward, is the people we elect to run the government are absolutely not the ones running the government today, which creates a complete loss of accountability that rejects the project of the American Revolution.

00:05:25.000 But as it relates to the FBI in particular, I actually agree with almost all of your telling of it.

00:05:31.000 The only part where I depart from this As a student of the history of this institution is actually the idea that it began this pivot in the aftermath of 9-11 and the Bush-Cheney new neoconservative national security state.

00:05:47.000 I think you're right about the shift from being an investigator of a specific alleged crime or an enforcer or an enforcement body to being a general purpose investigative unit.

00:05:59.000 I think that that's largely accurate as I understand it as well.

00:06:01.000 There's a longer history, though, that the lawless nature of the culture of the institution, one that views the law as a constraint rather than a motivator.

00:06:13.000 Let me just put it that way, right?

00:06:14.000 It's one thing if you're a law enforcement body, maybe you view the law as your motivation.

00:06:17.000 Your motivation as an organization, your organizational raison d'etre, reason for existence, is to enforce the law.

00:06:23.000 That might be what most Americans think is the purpose of federal law enforcement.

00:06:28.000 But it's a different thing if you have a federal law enforcement body that views the law as a constraint, an inconvenience on its behavior, but its reason for existence is something else altogether.

00:06:36.000 That I don't think is just uniquely true post the Bush years, though it's true certainly after the Bush years.

00:06:42.000 That dates back to J. Edgar Hoover and an FBI that largely has existed the way that you and I know it probably is, probably the closer to the better part of the century.

00:06:53.000 Yeah, I should have been clear.

00:06:54.000 I meant sort of at post church committee hearings.

00:06:56.000 Okay.

00:06:57.000 So in the 70s, I mean, but you're right, absolutely.

00:07:00.000 If you go back to the 60s, you know, the politicized surveillance of, you know, American politicians, you know, infiltration of Dissident groups, all kinds of things that have nothing to do with law enforcement.

00:07:17.000 J. Edgar Hoover building files on, you know, OPPO files on every politician that came up through the pipeline.

00:07:26.000 That's absolutely part of the Bureau's history.

00:07:29.000 I just think, you know, after the 70s, you know, I got to know some FBI agents over the years.

00:07:37.000 A lot of people who were kind of like...

00:07:41.000 More on the traditional investigatory bank robbery side, that kind of stuff.

00:07:50.000 And they saw their jobs as being basically cop jobs.

00:07:56.000 And then there was a disenchantment, and I've known some people more recently who left the FBI, who I don't like this new direction that the Bureau is taking, where they're going very heavily in the direction of just counterintelligence.

00:08:12.000 One agent talked to me about having to post up outside of some January 6th defendant's house, and he's like, this is a misdemeanor crime.

00:08:22.000 I could be out there doing...

00:08:24.000 Oh, this is interesting.

00:08:25.000 This is an actual kind of off-the-record sort of journalistic conversation you've had with somebody who was actually...

00:08:29.000 On the record, actually.

00:08:30.000 I've had a few of them, yeah.

00:08:32.000 So I interviewed a whole bunch of FBI agents.

00:08:34.000 When some of them became whistleblowers and testified in the House, I guess it was a couple of years ago now.

00:08:42.000 I see.

00:08:43.000 I interviewed guys like Steve Friend.

00:08:44.000 I went down to visit him, talked to some other folks.

00:08:48.000 But I've known FBI people going back to the war on 9-11, and there's been frustration for a lot of reasons, just in the changes within the Bureau.

00:09:00.000 There's been this tension, but now the Bureau is completely a different organization.

00:09:05.000 Yeah, and anybody who might at least have visceral doubts about the kinds of views you're sharing here or views I've shared, I'd just say history is actually a pretty interesting lens through which to view the present.

00:09:17.000 There's actually a pretty cool book.

00:09:18.000 I don't know if you've read it.

00:09:20.000 My wife is the one who got me on it. 0.80

00:09:22.000 It's called G-Man.

00:09:23.000 Have you read that book?

00:09:25.000 No.

00:09:25.000 It sounds interesting.

00:09:26.000 Is it a history of the Bureau?

00:09:27.000 Yeah, it's a history of the Bureau.

00:09:28.000 History of J. Edgar Hoover particularly.

00:09:30.000 And it's not some politicized screed.

00:09:32.000 Out there's this woman, Beverly Gage. 0.92

00:09:34.000 She's a Yale historian.

00:09:35.000 It won a Pulitzer.

00:09:36.000 It's just a pretty down the fairway, very interesting, detail-rich account of a lot of the history of this institution that once you read that, all of the things that you would think that are unimaginable are not only true, It's far more expansive than you could ever imagine, which then raises the question of why one...

00:09:58.000 It's not a left or right thing, but why one would believe that at this unique point in history, the very institution that was built...

00:10:07.000 And institutions have a culture about them.

00:10:08.000 It's still the J. Edgar Hoover Building of the FBI, for example.

00:10:10.000 That's their main office in D.C. Why it is you would believe that in this moment, the unthinkable is something that actually has been the normal part of the history of this institution for...

00:10:21.000 You know, a century, it causes you to sort of check some of your own present-oriented biases.

00:10:27.000 But anyway, put that aside, I just recommend that as a book that I think is pretty cool and interesting.

00:10:32.000 I like it, G-Man.

00:10:32.000 I'll take a look.

00:10:32.000 Yeah, just take a look.

00:10:33.000 I mean, you don't have to read the whole thing, but you'll get a good amount even just reading through some of it.

00:10:38.000 You know, I guess my question is, in your own experience, because you have been certainly a journalist and observer of the relationship between government and its citizenry for a longer period of time than I have.

00:10:51.000 I took a detour away from paying attention to these issues.

00:10:53.000 I was in the world of business for a while.

00:10:55.000 I've kind of come back to it now.

00:10:57.000 What is your estimation of the scale of abuse, civil libertarian abuse?

00:11:04.000 Through non-transparency going along with that, in the immediate post 9-11 aftermath, sort of in the Bush years, versus like where we are today.

00:11:13.000 Forget the partisan nature of which way it leans, but more just the magnitude or the magnitude of concern about the lawlessness or the fundamental absence of commitment to being constrained by the rule of law.

00:11:27.000 Like how would you rate that in the 2000s versus your estimation of where we are today?

00:11:32.000 I'm curious.

00:11:35.000 There's only limited evidence to go on, and I think it's a great question, but my sense is that it's epidemic now and that it wasn't maybe even five, six, seven years ago.

00:11:47.000 But we've had stories come out in the Trump era that have suggested all kinds of problems.

00:11:55.000 I think you can see with the unmasking requests with FISA, right?

00:12:00.000 That's sort of domestic political surveillance, abuse of that system.

00:12:04.000 We had already seen that there were massive violations of FISA, you know, going back to Inspector General reports, even dating back to the Bush era.

00:12:14.000 But now it seems like that system is completely out of control.

00:12:18.000 The Twitter files showed that the FBI is engaging in wholesale meddling in the domestic speech environment.

00:12:28.000 They're representing to the public that they're worried about foreign interference, but they're watching domestic Twitter accounts that have eight followers.

00:12:37.000 And that was part of the shock that we all felt when we were looking through those emails.

00:12:41.000 Like, why are they doing this?

00:12:43.000 So I think there's all kinds of problems.

00:12:45.000 And this thing that happened today, it's another example of Wow, they're really getting involved in domestic politics in a way that I don't remember happening in my lifetime.

00:12:57.000 So, it's funny you bring up the domestic interference in our own body politic.

00:13:05.000 Think about the TikTok debate, right?

00:13:07.000 The debate about whether to ban TikTok.

00:13:09.000 At first, they'll say it's not a ban or whatever it is.

00:13:11.000 But anyway, the premise was we don't want foreign governmental interference in our own domestic politics or our own domestic polity, what tilts the scales of what people can or can't see.

00:13:26.000 And yet, if you go back to that era, and this goes back to one of your, you know, obviously hallmark contributions in the last several years, which is the Twitter files— But if you look back at what happened there, was there a government coordinated cover-up job on a question such as the origin of COVID-19 from China?

00:13:45.000 Yes.

00:13:45.000 Was China protected from public understanding of where COVID-19 likely originated?

00:13:52.000 Yes.

00:13:52.000 Was the public protected or restricted from seeing that information by a government actor using these tech companies as a backdoor to effectuate it?

00:14:00.000 Yes.

00:14:01.000 But it wasn't really the CCP and TikTok.

00:14:04.000 It was actually, in that particular case, the U.S. government effectively pressuring U.S.-based companies through the back door to not only censor all kinds of information, but in this particular instance, one that actually had the effect of protecting the CCP from its own accountability, which I just thought was a reversal of what our own expectations are.

00:14:23.000 I guess the way I would say it, Matt, is we tend to be far more alert as a people To some sort of foreign government messing around with us.

00:14:32.000 And I say this as a citizen who doesn't want some foreign government meddling in what I can or cannot do on my own soil of my homeland.

00:14:39.000 But I think that balance is right.

00:15:09.000 I think that's absolutely right.

00:15:11.000 I mean, I lived in Russia for 11 years.

00:15:15.000 Oh, that's right.

00:15:15.000 Yeah, I forgot that.

00:15:16.000 Okay.

00:15:17.000 Yeah, and so I was always confronted by, you know, Russians. 1.00

00:15:22.000 Russians have no illusions about What the various institutions of the government are for.

00:15:29.000 They don't think that the GRU or the SVR or the FSB, that these are just law enforcement bodies.

00:15:38.000 They know exactly what the deal is.

00:15:41.000 When you talk about the Secret Service or what the Interior Ministry does.

00:15:47.000 They understand that abuses happen and they know basically where they're coming from and they have this kind of sanguine understanding of what government does.

00:15:59.000 Americans are completely, they have this sort of almost virginal belief in the purity of their system.

00:16:09.000 I think it's eroding now, quickly.

00:16:12.000 But I mean, I remember Russians just laughing at me when I would, you know, describe, for instance, what the FBI or CIA did or rules that we allegedly followed, like, you know, how naive are you?

00:16:23.000 And so this whole period, you know, I think in the Trump era, for me as a journalist, it's been disillusioning.

00:16:31.000 I think for the general public, it has been too.

00:16:33.000 I mean, you brought up the COVID situation.

00:16:37.000 When we were doing the Twitter files, we found evidence of the government trying from multiple angles to influence the COVID story.

00:16:46.000 They did it through The Virality Project, which was sponsored by a number of different government agencies through Stanford.

00:16:53.000 There was the Global Engagement Center, which is a Technically, it's part of the State Department, but it was pressuring Twitter to take down certain posts that it didn't like, sent them lists of 6,000 accounts that it wanted taken off the platform.

00:17:11.000 There was pressure from the DHS, pressure from the FBI. I mean, it was coming from all different angles.

00:17:18.000 For me, it was shocking.

00:17:19.000 I remember growing up, it was a big story when the FBI wrote one letter to the record company that put out NWA asking them not to put out a certain single.

00:17:31.000 And here you have thousands of these letters, right?

00:17:34.000 So it's a completely different ballgame.

00:17:37.000 Americans haven't caught up to that yet.

00:17:38.000 They haven't It hasn't registered.

00:17:40.000 It's rare that you get to talk to somebody who spent 11 years in Russia as a journalist.

00:17:46.000 That's pretty fascinating.

00:17:48.000 So I've never been to Russia.

00:17:50.000 So in some ways, I don't want to exaggerate my level of knowledge here to draw this theory.

00:17:59.000 But do you think this is a matter of I'm going to offer it as a theory and you tell me whether you think it's just true or off the wall?

00:18:06.000 Do you think that in some ways, right, I'm going to assume that the magnitude of government overreach from legal or constitutional constraint, like the amount of that overreach is far greater in Russia in the time you spent there than here.

00:18:18.000 I'll assume that as a baseline.

00:18:20.000 But do you think that even against that backdrop, the danger to the citizenry Might actually in certain ways be worse here because we are conditioned not to already be in on the game, right?

00:18:33.000 In a certain sense, you know, you watch the movie The Lives of Others or whatever, like it's kind of a depressing state when the...

00:18:39.000 You've seen that movie?

00:18:41.000 Absolutely, yes.

00:18:42.000 It's a great movie.

00:18:42.000 It's like an all-time great.

00:18:44.000 It's like an awesome, well done, not too heavy, not on the nose, but just like there's a certain existential melancholy where you just know that like you're being surveilled, but you've just sort of accepted it.

00:18:55.000 I actually think that's an important movie for Americans to watch now.

00:18:58.000 Oh, such an important movie.

00:18:59.000 I can't even remember.

00:19:00.000 Is the movie in English or not?

00:19:01.000 I can't even remember.

00:19:02.000 I think it's in German.

00:19:03.000 It landed so much in your heart that you even forget the medium of transmission.

00:19:06.000 It's that good.

00:19:07.000 I think it might have been in German.

00:19:08.000 But anyway, it's like what East Germany was like, you know, back in the day.

00:19:14.000 But here, you know, we don't have that melancholy spirit, but in a certain sense, we're just then, like, oblivious that, okay, maybe the magnitude of government overreach beyond the limits of legal constitutional restraint are greater in Russia, but people know what's going on, so there's no lie, right?

00:19:27.000 There's no fundamental dishonesty, but the slate of hand, in some ways, actually leaves us, through the blitheness of our ignorance or willful blindness, to our own government's non-zero overreach, as Actually, in some ways, is more liberty restraining just because of the sheer absence of knowledge of it.

00:19:46.000 Is that a bridge too far, or do you think that that's not a crazy point?

00:19:49.000 No.

00:19:49.000 I think you're absolutely right.

00:19:51.000 So when I first went to Russia, I went as a 19-year-old.

00:19:55.000 I'm old enough that I actually studied during the Soviet era.

00:19:59.000 Oh, wow.

00:19:59.000 So I went to a Soviet institute to study Russian.

00:20:03.000 When was this, just a time mark of this?

00:20:05.000 1989. 1989. Okay, got it.

00:20:08.000 Yep.

00:20:08.000 So, when I got there, I remember this very vividly.

00:20:13.000 There was a Russian student in my dorm, and he had bought a newspaper, and I was curious what he was reading, and he's like, oh, I didn't buy this to read.

00:20:24.000 He went upstairs, and he was stuffing his winter coat with the pages of the newspaper because he wanted extra insulation.

00:20:33.000 Nobody reads...

00:20:35.000 Nobody read Soviet newspapers.

00:20:38.000 They used them for other things.

00:20:40.000 They covered their windows to keep the sunlight out or they put them in the bottoms of birdcages.

00:20:47.000 The idea of reading a newspaper and actually expecting to get real information out of it was laughable.

00:20:55.000 Even people who were I would say good communists, right?

00:21:00.000 Like the people who believed in the system, they were like, yeah, whatever.

00:21:03.000 We don't have that in America.

00:21:05.000 We are not conditioned to look at our systems of media with the same kind of suspicion that is drilled into people who've lived in a society like that and they know how it works.

00:21:19.000 We think we have this very functional free press.

00:21:22.000 And I think we did have a very relatively strong press for a long time.

00:21:28.000 It's just that it's slid so much in the last 10 years.

00:21:32.000 And we're in this place where, as you say, Americans are just defenseless against this kind of thing because they've never seen it before or they don't think they have.

00:21:40.000 And so I think you're right.

00:21:42.000 It's that.

00:21:43.000 And also, you know, the American intelligence services and our systems of media, we're just much more They're much more powerful, sophisticated, you know, they have more resources than a country like Russia does to pull off certain things.

00:21:58.000 So that's why I worry here.

00:22:00.000 I mean, the best case scenario is you have a constitution and you follow it.

00:22:04.000 The worst case scenario is that you are, you have, you know, Well, I guess we could debate what the worst case scenario is.

00:22:13.000 Is the worst case scenario that you have no constitution, you don't follow it?

00:22:16.000 Or that you do have one and you don't follow it?

00:22:18.000 Because in a certain sense...

00:22:19.000 I mean, it could be either, right?

00:22:21.000 You could actually make the case for the latter, which is sort of interesting.

00:22:25.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:22:27.000 So what were attitudes towards Stalin, by the way, when you were there, right?

00:22:31.000 So we were talking 89 through the 90s.

00:22:33.000 That's an interesting question to bring up.

00:22:35.000 So there were a few sort of holdovers.

00:22:38.000 Like every May Day, there were a few Stalinists that would come out.

00:22:42.000 But the average Soviet citizen was, I would say, pretty cosmopolitan.

00:22:48.000 They would listen to Voice of America and And they liked European pop culture and all that.

00:22:57.000 And once the wall fell and they were able to experience Western culture, they caught up pretty quickly, I would say.

00:23:06.000 And by the way, the Russian free press for the brief period that they had it kind of between 1990 and when Putin took over...

00:23:14.000 And you would think it was like, you would call that a free press, yeah.

00:23:17.000 Well, it was a dangerous free press.

00:23:20.000 But it was nonetheless, it was, you know, you mean that's when you were a journalist there, right?

00:23:23.000 So, yeah.

00:23:24.000 Yes, but, you know, reporters were being shot, blown up, you know, beaten all the time, even before Putin.

00:23:31.000 But they were great journalists.

00:23:33.000 I mean, they had really excellent investigative journalism during that 10-year period.

00:23:39.000 And they caught up very quickly.

00:23:41.000 But the lasting impression for me is just that when those rights went away, when they were unable to do that anymore, it doesn't come back.

00:23:51.000 And I think that's another thing Americans don't realize, is that when this stuff ends, you can't just turn on a switch and go back to having a free press again.

00:24:00.000 It doesn't work that way.

00:24:01.000 Yeah, interesting.

00:24:02.000 How does it work?

00:24:05.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:24:06.000 I mean, it goes away and it stays away.

00:24:08.000 It stays away, right?

00:24:08.000 Yeah, the cultural expectation and demand for it in some ways is dampened, too.

00:24:14.000 That's probably true all over the world.

00:24:16.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:24:17.000 That's my only experience, but I would imagine.

00:24:19.000 Do you think that actually raises an interesting question right now?

00:24:23.000 As much as we complain about, people like you and I maybe at least complain about Some of the governmental abuses and everything you see in the Twitter files, the backdoor government action to evade accountability.

00:24:35.000 Is part of the problem anymore that actually the ordinary citizenry just doesn't actually maybe care as much as we once might have?

00:24:46.000 That might have been the greatest check on government power as a citizenry that actually cared about its liberties.

00:24:53.000 Do you sense a greater sense of It's a vast generalization, but a greater sense of acceptance or a greater sense of agnosticism to say, okay, well, I'd still rather...

00:25:08.000 Be controlled in this way as long as I'm getting the advertisements I want to look at and my life is a little bit more convenient.

00:25:13.000 And if part of this trade-off is I don't have to pay a monthly credit card fee to access these platforms.

00:25:18.000 If the rest of this is just part of what I'm trading off in that bargain, like, I guess I don't love it, but I'm kind of cool with it.

00:25:24.000 And I'm certainly not going to start an American Revolution over it in a way that our founding fathers might have in 1776. Well...

00:25:33.000 It's frustrating for me.

00:25:34.000 I was a lifelong Democrat.

00:25:38.000 I gave to the ACLU my whole life.

00:25:41.000 I didn't really know conservatives growing up.

00:25:44.000 I grew up in Boston.

00:25:45.000 I'm one of those.

00:25:47.000 What did your parents do?

00:25:48.000 My father was also a reporter.

00:25:50.000 My mother was a lawyer.

00:25:54.000 But, you know, free speech was everything, you know, on the left, once upon a time.

00:25:59.000 I mean, think about all the pop culture stuff, you know, People vs.

00:26:02.000 Larry Flint, the Maplethorpe story.

00:26:05.000 I mean, every single, you know, sort of political thriller, you know, the villain was a speech-suppressing Republican, and, you know, the hero was the civil liberties lawyer.

00:26:18.000 That's right.

00:26:19.000 Right?

00:26:20.000 You know, fresh out of college and all that.

00:26:25.000 Somewhere between the Bush years and now, all the people who had those beliefs completely flipped.

00:26:32.000 They changed their attitude towards the First Amendment.

00:26:36.000 People would have done anything to protect it, I feel like, 20, 30 years ago, and that's all gone.

00:26:42.000 Now, you see It's been kind of amazing and heartening for me to see that, you know, conservatives are up in arms about threats to the Bill of Rights.

00:26:53.000 And, you know, I'm glad they are.

00:26:56.000 They need to be.

00:26:57.000 If they weren't, you know, I think the situation would be so much worse right now.

00:27:02.000 I think my assessment, I mean, speaking as sort of, you know, right of center, you know, myself, Republican candidate for president, Republican, whatever that label means.

00:27:10.000 You know, I think...

00:27:13.000 I would say that the left's abandonment of its interest in free speech protection is far more pronounced than the conservative embrace of it.

00:27:27.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:27:28.000 It's just like a net loss for the country.

00:27:30.000 It's not like a flip-flop.

00:27:33.000 You have one flip, for sure.

00:27:34.000 It's been a decided flip.

00:27:37.000 The commitment to free speech is no longer a Democrat or liberal or progressive value in America.

00:27:43.000 To the contrary, if you had to pick what the progressive value is, it is the protectionist instinct, information protectionist instinct to the public to say that too much free speech is actually going to be dangerous.

00:27:54.000 I think that is a committed, now left-wing position, where the committed left-wing principle position used to be free exchange of ideas.

00:28:00.000 I think on the conservative side, I think you've seen...

00:28:03.000 Part of this is like, okay, well, if they're doing that, then, you know, it's a reactionary response.

00:28:08.000 Second is conservatives, it so happens in the latest iteration of it.

00:28:11.000 Study history, it hasn't always been this way, but the latest iteration have been the victims of it, so then there's a reactionary response there, too.

00:28:17.000 But I think it is an open question, if I'm being, you know, kind of calling it straight from where I see it, of what the modern conservative movement's actual push-come-to-shove level of commitment to True free speech actually is.

00:28:30.000 I am on the right as a, I would say, unapologetic, unrestrained advocate for making this part of the Republican Party's vision and platform, not just the Republican Party, but the modern conservative movement.

00:28:43.000 But I think it is an open question, right, how committed they are.

00:28:48.000 So I think it's just a deadweight loss where the left has abandoned it and the right has not totally embraced it, but it's partially embraced it, which I'm glad about.

00:28:54.000 And I do think it's heartening.

00:28:55.000 But I just think that an honest appraisal of where we are, I think that's what it is.

00:28:59.000 So it's interesting that you say that because There is a schism, right?

00:29:04.000 We just saw Mike Johnson pass the FISA enhancements bill, which is something that...

00:29:10.000 Thank you for calling it the enhancements.

00:29:12.000 It's not a reauthorization.

00:29:14.000 It was an expansion.

00:29:15.000 That's what it was.

00:29:15.000 Right.

00:29:16.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:29:17.000 And a lot of the free speech folks were very upset about that.

00:29:22.000 Myself included.

00:29:24.000 And I agree with you.

00:29:26.000 I think there's an opportunity here, not just like a moral...

00:29:31.000 But there's an opportunity politically for the Republicans to own this issue, you know, to be champions of something that's always been popular in America.

00:29:41.000 Americans, you know, this is a core value of this country.

00:29:47.000 One of the reasons that we never had this happen before is because Republicans and Democrats, people just didn't like meddling with the basics of the First Amendment.

00:30:00.000 It was politically not terribly possible, right?

00:30:03.000 It's part of who you are.

00:30:04.000 It's your identity, right?

00:30:05.000 All the other stuff just doesn't matter if you don't have a First Amendment left, right?

00:30:09.000 Yes, and I think it's very much part of the American character.

00:30:13.000 We're an outspoken people.

00:30:14.000 We don't like to be told what to do, what to think.

00:30:16.000 Yeah, we're weird.

00:30:17.000 We're weird.

00:30:18.000 Yeah, I'll get to that in a second.

00:30:19.000 We Americans are weird, right?

00:30:22.000 All of us, that's who we are.

00:30:24.000 That's right, that's right.

00:30:25.000 We like that.

00:30:27.000 So, yeah, and conversely, the other thing is just not in our tradition and, you know, The bulk of people are not going to be for that.

00:30:37.000 Because the idea of having a vanguard class that decides what you can and cannot see, what you're smart enough or able enough to handle, it's so insulting to the bulk of people.

00:30:51.000 I think getting on the other side of that only makes political sense.

00:30:57.000 Yeah, it makes political sense, I think.

00:30:59.000 I think it does.

00:31:00.000 But I just think it makes like normative sense.

00:31:03.000 Like it's sure we are, right?

00:31:05.000 So if this, no one's defending this, like we have to defend the essence of what this country is.

00:31:09.000 It's in the first amendment for a reason.

00:31:10.000 You get to say anything.

00:31:12.000 And I say anything means you get to express any opinion, right?

00:31:15.000 I can't sell you, you know, a medicine bottle and say it's not poison when it is, or, you know, whatever.

00:31:21.000 You can't, commercial fraud is not the expression of an opinion or the issue.

00:31:24.000 Threats.

00:31:26.000 But the expression of an opinion, any opinion goes.

00:31:29.000 Which, though, if we're really prepared to, if you will, swallow that pill, I think, you know, Burning the flag is protected speech, right?

00:31:39.000 I think the campus protests, even standing up for heinous views of Hamas or whoever, if you're expressing that opinion, you're not free to commit violence, you're not free to physically obstruct people from going to classrooms.

00:31:52.000 But the expression of the opinion is kind of...

00:31:57.000 If it doesn't feel unfortunate at times, you're not doing it right.

00:32:00.000 It is protected speech.

00:32:01.000 And so I do think that that is a question where I think conservatives are really grappling with where we land.

00:32:07.000 And I'm not sure that it's going to be unified necessarily.

00:32:09.000 I think that we live in a moment where there are sort of weird And alliances, even if we're unwilling to admit that in the open between people who may think they're on the left or on the right on some of these questions relating to, you know, from foreign interventionist policy to the domestic surveillance state, I think those are probably some of the biggest areas for some realignments that I think are still very much in process, actually.

00:32:39.000 Don't you think that the traditional ideas of left and right are kind of meaningless now?

00:32:44.000 Right now they're meaningless.

00:32:45.000 It does feel pretty meaningless right now.

00:32:47.000 I feel like it's going to land in a new equilibrium, but we're not at all in a stable equilibrium right now.

00:32:52.000 I think we're in a moment of real shift, actually, real movement.

00:32:58.000 And I think it's fascinating.

00:32:59.000 It's an exciting time to be an observer and participant, if I may say, I guess, in this.

00:33:07.000 I find it just, it's more interesting that way, rather than once it's sort of settled.

00:33:12.000 It's scary a little bit, but it's also interesting.

00:33:16.000 I mean, like, if you're an anti-war advocate now, which party do you support?

00:33:22.000 I mean, it's confusing, right?

00:33:24.000 If either, right?

00:33:26.000 Or maybe you can be a force for change within either, too, I think.

00:33:29.000 And actually, same if you're a true civil libertarian.

00:33:32.000 I think right now that is undoubtedly, I think, more of a...

00:33:38.000 For sure.

00:33:39.000 I mean, even in the Republican primary, some of the people I was running against at the time was a real source of ideological division even within a party.

00:33:51.000 And I think that that makes it just an interesting time to be in American politics, actually.

00:33:56.000 Yeah.

00:33:58.000 Absolutely.

00:33:58.000 Of course, it makes you a pretty weird guy for raising that.

00:34:00.000 I want to come back to that.

00:34:01.000 What do you think of this, this Democratic strategy of sort of labeling the Republican Party and Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and whatever?

00:34:10.000 That's just weird.

00:34:11.000 What's your reaction to that?

00:34:13.000 What's your guttural response to that?

00:34:16.000 So I'm on the, you know, I get the DNC talking points mailers, right?

00:34:24.000 They send out these, you know, these little email lists.

00:34:28.000 Oh, really?

00:34:29.000 All right.

00:34:30.000 It's like, here's our talking points, you know?

00:34:33.000 Yeah, well, they call them talkers.

00:34:35.000 I mean, they're publicly available.

00:34:36.000 Anybody can find them.

00:34:37.000 But, you know, they send them out and, you know...

00:34:41.000 Talkers.

00:34:42.000 Yesterday, yeah, they had a story yesterday where the headline was, I think it was J.D. Vance and his Silicon Valley billionaire weirdos want to cut taxes.

00:34:51.000 Before that, it was, you know, Vance's downright weird was in the headline.

00:34:58.000 And then, you know, almost on cue, you'll see, you know, every Democratic politician using that phrase.

00:35:05.000 But the really damning thing for me is seeing all the people in the media Use the same words.

00:35:13.000 And, you know, you just can't have that.

00:35:16.000 It's such a bad look for the news media to not appear to be independent from a political party.

00:35:22.000 To play along with the talkers, right?

00:35:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:35:25.000 Like, okay, fine.

00:35:26.000 If a politician wants to do that, that's their job.

00:35:28.000 But, you know, reporters, I'm not going to use some word that you scripted for me.

00:35:32.000 Are you kidding? 0.98

00:35:34.000 Like, that's ridiculous. 0.92

00:35:35.000 And so that's what this...

00:35:39.000 The sort of comic compilations that you've seen, I think Dave Rubin posted it today, right?

00:35:44.000 Of everybody using that word.

00:35:46.000 They must know how absurd it is.

00:35:49.000 Oh my gosh.

00:35:49.000 It's not credible.

00:35:51.000 Yeah.

00:35:52.000 So why do they do it?

00:35:53.000 I mean, who's being convinced by that?

00:35:57.000 I guess it's a very interesting question.

00:35:58.000 I think it comes back to this question of who's being convinced by that.

00:36:02.000 I think part of the problem, Matt, might be that a good number of people are convinced by it, actually.

00:36:07.000 And I just think the problem comes back...

00:36:10.000 People like you and I are often so focused on institutional failure that we forget just broader, pervasive civic failure of our citizenry.

00:36:19.000 It's like Jefferson's famous quote, you get the government, whatever, the government you deserve is the government you elect, and the government you elect is the government you deserve.

00:36:27.000 And in some sense, I think that the fact that people do fall for it is kind of what makes it work, is a sort of kind of pervasive laziness and lethargic tendency in the American civic spirit right now.

00:36:41.000 I don't mean to be a downer about it, but I just think that that kind of is true even outside of institutional failure.

00:36:48.000 I guess so.

00:36:49.000 There's just so much of that now.

00:36:52.000 It's probably self-fulfilling.

00:36:53.000 It recycles.

00:36:55.000 Again, I grew up a Democrat.

00:36:59.000 Democrats...

00:37:00.000 Once upon a time, they used to pride themselves on being independent thinkers.

00:37:06.000 The prototypical Great Democrat was a stand-up comic.

00:37:10.000 It was somebody who had fresh material, used brash language.

00:37:16.000 Now you have this thing where everybody's like a herd animal.

00:37:19.000 I remember reading zoologists talking about how when 51% of the deer decide to bolt, they all go.

00:37:27.000 That's how this weird thing happens.

00:37:29.000 Somebody gets a cue, everybody goes.

00:37:32.000 There are no holdouts.

00:37:35.000 The entire news media environment speaks as one voice.

00:37:40.000 It's just embarrassing.

00:37:41.000 It's just a terrible look.

00:37:43.000 Embarrassing is probably the right word, especially you coming from that profession.

00:37:46.000 It is sort of embarrassing.

00:37:48.000 Can you imagine Cy Hirsch doing that and saying, you know, he's really weird.

00:37:55.000 It's just like, you know, I'm going to tell you what I think, not regretting what somebody else thinks.

00:38:01.000 So that's in the media aspect, which I think is a great point, actually.

00:38:05.000 I mean, if you look at the number of times within a concentrated 48-hour window that that individual word has been used.

00:38:10.000 It's not even like they use other words like bizarre.

00:38:13.000 It's just like, that word, we're sticking to that word, does reflect that type of weird conformity.

00:38:21.000 Now, like on the content of it, 'cause I'm also just interested, So why did they do it?

00:38:28.000 Yeah, why did they do it?

00:38:30.000 But, hmm, not even from a political analysis, just like from my own opinion about it, is, I think it is...

00:38:38.000 An argument of the wrong kind, right?

00:38:41.000 It is a disappointing form of American political argument to make.

00:38:46.000 Because A, it's actually just anti-exceptionalism, right?

00:38:49.000 It's against exceptionalism on its own terms.

00:38:51.000 Like a guy like Pete Buttigieg, when I saw him on the weekend, right, on one of these shows, talking about J.D. Vance and Donald Trump is weird.

00:38:58.000 It just felt disappointing to me, right?

00:39:00.000 Because this is a guy I knew in college.

00:39:02.000 He was a senior when I was a freshman, so I knew him and knew of him better than he knew of me.

00:39:07.000 But I remember being like, okay, I respect this guy.

00:39:10.000 He wasn't somebody who would say, okay, somebody who disagrees with me is weird.

00:39:15.000 And yet, part of the reason why is he was obviously, probably like me too, right?

00:39:20.000 Like weird in a sense of just being, in his case...

00:39:24.000 In Indiana, in the 90s, hyper-achieving, scholastic overachiever, shockingly articulate, gay, at a Catholic school that went to Harvard. 0.99

00:39:36.000 And you substitute Indian American for gay and Ohio for Indiana. 0.65

00:39:40.000 It's not that different than my own background, right?

00:39:43.000 Right.

00:39:44.000 Like, that was weird.

00:39:45.000 And now to just say, oh, no, no, we're not one of the weird ones.

00:39:48.000 They're weird.

00:39:49.000 It's just weird referring to what reference point, right?

00:39:52.000 Normal relative to what reference point.

00:39:54.000 Whereas America is a country where we are unafraid to be weird.

00:39:58.000 Our founding fathers, I wasn't joking before, were weird relative to the mores of their times because that's part of what American exceptionalism is about.

00:40:04.000 So it just seems like such a particularly un-American expletive or disparaging comment to level against your opponent, as though it's like less about, I'm worried about Republicans.

00:40:18.000 I'm worried about like that word being deemed a bad thing.

00:40:21.000 America's weirdness relative to human history is part of what makes us us.

00:40:26.000 I mean, one of my heroes, Hunter Thompson, he said, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

00:40:30.000 That was like a cool thing back in the day.

00:40:32.000 Say that again?

00:40:33.000 When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

00:40:35.000 I like that.

00:40:37.000 That's kind of who we are a little bit.

00:40:39.000 It's a statement of that, of American exceptionalism, right?

00:40:42.000 Yeah, and being weird and far out is very much in the American character.

00:40:50.000 The thing that's even more unusual, though, is that the current incarnation of the American left They don't even like the word normal.

00:40:59.000 They think the word itself is bad somehow.

00:41:08.000 You know, they're into transgender boxing and, you know, everything you see, if it's not transgressive, it's not okay.

00:41:17.000 So for them to turn around and try to make weird an insult...

00:41:21.000 It's particularly weird, actually.

00:41:23.000 It's particularly self-contradictory.

00:41:27.000 But I also just think that even...

00:41:29.000 So even the Republican tendency, right?

00:41:31.000 Because I'm a little bit...

00:41:32.000 I do chafe at some of the version of this from the right.

00:41:36.000 Like other people I ran for against you as president, right?

00:41:39.000 Some of them made, like on the debate stage or whatever, we just want America to be normal, right?

00:41:43.000 That's what they would say.

00:41:44.000 And I actually think...

00:41:47.000 Don't agree with that because I favor American exceptionalism and I also think about normal relative to what standard.

00:41:53.000 And so like my issues with some of the trans overreach or whatever relate to the negative effects it has on children or increasing the rates of gender dysphoria. 0.67

00:42:03.000 So if by premise gender dysphoria is a condition of suffering, then if you're going out of your way to create more of it, that is by definition then or by obvious logic a bad thing. 0.94

00:42:13.000 Like that I think is the form of argument.

00:42:15.000 Not that you're weird, right?

00:42:18.000 Like that alone is not...

00:42:20.000 And I think that part of what's happening right now is you're actually seeing a lot of that Republican response to say, oh, you're calling us weird?

00:42:25.000 Well, look at all of these things that you're doing that are weird in return.

00:42:28.000 It feels to me just like the wrong form of argument rather than like an argument of the wrong kind.

00:42:34.000 If national unity is at all something we remotely care about, right?

00:42:38.000 If the election gets decided, and it acknowledges about 70 million people on each side of this, if the election gets decided based on one side winning, the argument of which other side was weird, and Republicans, I believe, and be advised to have at least as strong of a claim in return, it just doesn't seem like a good place to go in the character of national discourse or the future direction of a nation, right?

00:43:03.000 As opposed to a nation that isn't one nation anymore and might be two nations of, you know, weird, seen as weird from the other side, but normal from within.

00:43:11.000 I don't think that's what we want to see the country become.

00:43:14.000 No, probably not.

00:43:17.000 I mean, is it possible?

00:43:19.000 I mean, here's a question.

00:43:21.000 I'm curious to know what you think.

00:43:24.000 I've heard it theorized that The Democrats realize that the constant accusations of racism, sexism, misogyny are beginning to fall on deaf ears, that people don't like that as a campaigning tactic.

00:43:38.000 So they're rolling this out as a new way of trying to Put the public relations ick on the Republican Party.

00:43:48.000 You know, it's a different kind of word shaming.

00:43:52.000 Less potent, right?

00:43:55.000 But more diffuse and irrefutable, yeah.

00:43:59.000 Right, right, yeah.

00:44:00.000 How do you counter it?

00:44:01.000 I would embrace it if I were to get events.

00:44:04.000 I'd be like, hell yeah, I'm weird.

00:44:05.000 That to me feels like the right answer versus like, oh, you're weird. 0.90

00:44:10.000 No, you're weird.

00:44:10.000 Reference to what reference point?

00:44:12.000 Americans, like our exceptionalism is weird in the course of human history.

00:44:16.000 Right?

00:44:17.000 Like you got like founding fathers inventing Lightning rods and bifocal spectacles and people who signed the Declaration of Independence.

00:44:27.000 Livingston, actually, he was a guy who literally invented the steamship along with Fulton while he's an ambassador to France.

00:44:32.000 That's weird, right?

00:44:34.000 It's the kind of thing where you see somebody who's hyper-successful in middle school.

00:44:38.000 Yeah, that's weird.

00:44:39.000 Well, those are the people who actually go on to create things that improve humanity in our lives at times.

00:44:45.000 And that's America, the place where you get to thrive.

00:44:49.000 Joseph Priestley came to this country because he had weird beliefs by the standards of the Anglican Church, and he was received by Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in Pennsylvania.

00:45:01.000 He came here for the freedom to be weird, and they welcomed him because that's America.

00:45:06.000 And so to level that as a charge, as a disqualifying charge, I just think is disappointing, actually, to me, is how I feel about it.

00:45:16.000 Yeah, we've had that streak all through our history.

00:45:20.000 How many different kinds of You know, kooky, utopian thinkers came to America to try to build societies that anybody would characterize as strange.

00:45:33.000 Yeah.

00:45:34.000 Elon Musk fits that description, right?

00:45:36.000 For example, a guy you got to know.

00:45:38.000 Sure, yeah.

00:45:40.000 He came to this country. 0.94

00:45:42.000 He is weird, actually.

00:45:42.000 He came to this country, right?

00:45:44.000 I mean, like, I consider myself, you know, I'm a weird person in a lot of ways.

00:45:48.000 So are you.

00:45:49.000 So are most people who aspire To greatness.

00:45:52.000 And like America as a nation is proudly weird against the course of human history.

00:45:57.000 So no, I just don't.

00:45:58.000 I just think that that's probably the right answer is it's not a pejorative, right?

00:46:02.000 And even if you think about the stuff JD was talking about.

00:46:05.000 The sad part about this is in the wake of this, nobody actually will talk about anything other than the actual fertility crisis, which is we're well below replacement rate.

00:46:14.000 You're going to have two workers for every retiree, which is considered crisis level, by 2060, which is, you know, God willing, within our own lifetimes.

00:46:23.000 Although that is a disaster for a country, and nobody has a plausible or the first beginnings of a plausible solution to that question.

00:46:30.000 And so maybe you like J.D. Vance's solutions and maybe you don't.

00:46:32.000 If you don't like him, debate the solutions.

00:46:33.000 But instead we've ignored the entire question by calling the whole thing weird.

00:46:37.000 And I still think that's constructive, just in a very pragmatic sense, for a country that wants to solve some major problems that it's up against. 0.82

00:46:45.000 Yeah, it's silly, though.

00:46:48.000 And also, going after what's clearly kind of a joke line about childless cat ladies. 1.00

00:46:54.000 I mean, Rick Wilson said about Trump that his followers were childless cats. 0.99

00:47:04.000 It was like childless men who masturbate to anime or something like that. 0.99

00:47:09.000 You gotta give people some license. 0.98

00:47:12.000 You know, even when Biden, like I'll pick an example, right?

00:47:15.000 Like it's easier to sort of pick on the other side, but like even when Biden said something like, if you don't vote for me, then you ain't black.

00:47:22.000 I mean, it's kind of annoying, but he was also speaking in jest, right?

00:47:27.000 And so that did not become the cultural phenomenon in the same way as like childless cat ladies did. 0.84

00:47:33.000 And so it sort of is a bit of an evisceration of the possibility of humor, at least in certain contexts, too, which I do think is actually a separate cultural risk that we face, too.

00:47:47.000 I also think it touched a nerve because there's a little bit of discussion within the Democratic left about this issue.

00:47:55.000 Remember, James Carville brought it up.

00:47:56.000 Oh, really?

00:47:57.000 About how there's too many preachy females. 1.00

00:48:01.000 So it maybe touched a nerve a little too close to home, actually.

00:48:05.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:48:05.000 It's been a thing that people have been arguing about, so maybe that's part of it.

00:48:10.000 I don't know.

00:48:10.000 People don't lash out.

00:48:13.000 I mean, you might be annoyed, but you don't lash out unless you actually acknowledge some level of truth to the claim, usually.

00:48:21.000 That's kind of interesting.

00:48:22.000 Yeah, jokes don't land unless...

00:48:24.000 Yeah, there's truth to it.

00:48:25.000 Some level of truth to it, yeah.

00:48:27.000 Right.

00:48:27.000 Interesting.

00:48:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm just curious, you don't have to share with me, or maybe you haven't decided yet, but do you have a sense for, just as a citizen, taking your journalist hat off, do you have a sense for how you might vote amongst the options available this year?

00:48:45.000 Well, I can say I'm not going to vote for the Democrats, I think.

00:48:49.000 I think I'm done with them.

00:48:51.000 You know, the last eight years have just been impossible.

00:48:54.000 You know, other than that, I don't know.

00:48:56.000 I didn't vote last time, which was hard for me.

00:49:00.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:49:01.000 You did mention that to me.

00:49:02.000 I forgot.

00:49:03.000 So you, not because you were lazy, but you, like, couldn't bring yourself to...

00:49:08.000 Yeah, I mean, I wrote an article about it.

00:49:11.000 It was kind of a hard situation.

00:49:13.000 I think, you know, voting is important.

00:49:15.000 You know, it's a right we...

00:49:19.000 You know, you need to exercise it or else you're going to lose it, right?

00:49:22.000 So, yeah, I don't know.

00:49:23.000 It's difficult.

00:49:25.000 But I also try not to talk about it because as a journalist, you know, you don't want to...

00:49:29.000 Yeah, wearing your journalistic hat, I think that's fair.

00:49:31.000 Maybe a little bit of an unfair topic for us to, you know, I don't want to, you know, undermine what you do.

00:49:36.000 But did you actually vote while you were in Russia?

00:49:39.000 Did you vote for, like, absentee mail-in?

00:49:42.000 Yes.

00:49:43.000 Yes, I think I voted in both the 96 and 2000 elections from there.

00:49:51.000 That's an interesting thing too because I remember how rigorous the absentee ballot process was and I'm just now having to learn.

00:50:03.000 One of the things I'm going to start working on is You know, election security, because I know it's going to be so controversial no matter what happens in November.

00:50:11.000 Totally.

00:50:12.000 I think every journalist needs to know all the laws.

00:50:14.000 And mechanics, even.

00:50:16.000 Yeah.

00:50:16.000 And mechanics, because we don't, frankly.

00:50:19.000 One interesting place to look, just to the extent you're taking an interest in that, is actually Puerto Rico.

00:50:26.000 It's a U.S. territory.

00:50:28.000 They actually have single-day voting, make Election Day a holiday.

00:50:32.000 They have a lot of levels of protections.

00:50:35.000 I think often when you go to the sites, they make you put your finger in a die such that if you go to another site to know that you didn't vote on that same day.

00:50:45.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:50:46.000 I picked this up when I traveled there earlier this year and met with a lot of leaders locally just to understand how things work.

00:50:55.000 And one of the biggest takeaways is, even for people who say, oh, this concern about election integrity is overblown.

00:51:01.000 What I'll wait for is, what is the best counterargument to, in a moment where there's at least a loss of public trust, to at least taking certain basic steps that would shore up public trust?

00:51:11.000 And I think that there's something to be said for a case for ritual.

00:51:15.000 A, for actually what the ritual accomplishes.

00:51:17.000 I mean, it's not like we're not asking people to, I don't know, do cartwheels and take, you know, foot showers before they vote.

00:51:24.000 We're asking them to show their ID, which relates to the act of voting.

00:51:27.000 But I think having it as a national holiday and a ritual that you go through almost creates a greater sense of civic duty and commitment.

00:51:35.000 It's also something that enhances the public trust itself.

00:51:39.000 Like, even if, for those who, I'm not one of them, but even for those who would argue that it doesn't improve the actual integrity of the results by that much, at a moment of doubt, why not take a unifying, non-controversial step?

00:51:53.000 And then, you know, take every increment you can.

00:51:55.000 It's something so important that you might as well want it to be as accurate as you possibly could want.

00:52:00.000 That, to me, I think is as much the question of The solidarity we get in moving past what otherwise is a very risky issue is public concern and trust in elections, that I'm open to the best arguments for the other side, but I haven't yet heard them in terms of moving to single-day voting on Election Day, make it a national holiday, make government-issued ID a requirement to vote.

00:52:30.000 And, you know, I think if we ever got there, I certainly would commit for my part to be as loud of a voice as I could to the Republican base or any other that we are done complaining about concerns about election integrity if we get to that, if we get to that place where we say we've taken the steps that one recently can to be confident.

00:52:51.000 Are you in favor of automatic voter registration?

00:52:55.000 I'm not, actually.

00:52:56.000 I think that there's something to be said for the civic act of going through the process of, you know, largely for practical reasons, because then you can be registered in multiple places.

00:53:06.000 Puerto Rico does not have that either.

00:53:08.000 So it's a good case study of Puerto Rico.

00:53:10.000 Interesting.

00:53:11.000 I think that I am in favor of debureaucratizing anything that does not actually help the ultimate act of Knowing whether the right person voted in the right place.

00:53:23.000 I don't want an iota more of bureaucracy than is required to achieve that goal.

00:53:27.000 But I want enough verification to know that the person who's actually voting is voting in one place is alive and is indeed the person who shows up at the ballot and is a citizen of this country.

00:53:37.000 I actually come around to being in favor of English as the sole language that appears on a ballot as well.

00:53:45.000 And I think there are deep discussions to be had of saying that Look, if we require, like think of what we require of an immigrant, a legal immigrant, before they can cast a ballot.

00:53:54.000 You could have paid millions of dollars in taxes sitting in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.

00:53:57.000 You're still not able to cast a ballot legally until you have taken an oath of loyalty to the United States of America and passed a civics test that says you know the first thing about what's going on in the United States of America.

00:54:06.000 And I think that's a good thing.

00:54:09.000 I don't think it's crazy to talk about whether these should be basic requirements to graduate from high school in the country to become a full citizen in the United States either.

00:54:18.000 And so I think that that would unite the country, actually.

00:54:21.000 And I do think that the revival of like civic ritual, even a day where we say that this is the day where we carry out our civic duty, and then attach all of the integrity-enhancing components, not as like box-checking exercises for just technical confidence in the results, but actually even a unifying civic ritual that brings us together.

00:54:39.000 I think there's an opportunity to do both of those things at once.

00:54:43.000 And I don't think it's as far out of reach as we make it out to be.

00:54:48.000 I think it would have broad appeal, too.

00:54:51.000 I think it would.

00:54:54.000 It's drilled into Democrats when you're coming up and you're young and an activist that any kind of Any step that might slow down someone's ability to vote is like dog whistle, racism, any kind of voter ID requirement. 0.92

00:55:20.000 But really, when you think about it, it's ridiculous.

00:55:24.000 We require now very hardcore ID to get on a plane.

00:55:31.000 Drive a car.

00:55:33.000 You've got to have insurance to rent a car.

00:55:35.000 There's all kinds of things.

00:55:36.000 The requirement, it shouldn't be a big deal that you should have to prove who you are to vote.

00:55:43.000 And also, I don't think it's a big deal to ask somebody to go vote.

00:55:48.000 Neither of those things seems like a huge ask to me.

00:55:52.000 And then there's the further, we're getting into spicier territory, but whatever we require of an immigrant, if you believe in that logic, should we ask more of ourselves as well? 0.95

00:56:04.000 And do we think our nation will be better off for it?

00:56:06.000 I think that these are at least questions worth discussing.

00:56:09.000 Sure, sure.

00:56:10.000 I mean, yes, if they have to go through all these different hoops, Conversely though, I think that there should be something stronger than just having to check a box that you're a citizen.

00:56:22.000 At least there should be some kind of post-factum process for reviewing that and making sure that the person who checks that box actually is one.

00:56:34.000 I don't understand why that's controversial.

00:56:37.000 I also think that even if you voted in the election of another country, you shouldn't be able to vote in the election of the United States as well, right?

00:56:43.000 Dual citizenship as a concept, right?

00:56:44.000 If somebody has an allegiance to a different country, it's what citizenship is.

00:56:48.000 I think that there should be serious questions about their ability to cast a ballot in the United States.

00:56:54.000 You should have to choose, shouldn't you?

00:56:55.000 Yeah, I think you should have to choose.

00:56:56.000 You don't today, actually, mostly under current law.

00:57:01.000 You generally don't.

00:57:02.000 For people who are dual citizens.

00:57:03.000 But I think you should have to choose, right?

00:57:05.000 I think you should be a civic participant who selects the leadership of one country, not multiple countries.

00:57:11.000 And I don't think that's too much to ask either.

00:57:13.000 I've known a lot of people who are dual citizens, you know, either from former Soviet countries and the United States.

00:57:22.000 And, you know...

00:57:25.000 It's okay for traveling.

00:57:27.000 I mean, I sort of understand the logic of that, but you can't be voting in two places.

00:57:30.000 I just don't think it makes sense to vote in two places, right?

00:57:33.000 And just as I don't think it makes sense to serve in two militaries, right?

00:57:36.000 It doesn't make sense.

00:57:38.000 But anyway, I'm having too much fun, man.

00:57:39.000 We're over time already, but let's continue this.

00:57:42.000 And I like smart people like you who are...

00:57:48.000 I'm untethered with respect to the ministerial partisan politics-ness of it, but care a lot about ideology, and I love that.

00:57:57.000 So thanks for taking the time today.

00:57:59.000 I really appreciate it.

00:58:00.000 I had a lot of fun discussing all this with you, so I'm happy to talk anytime.

00:58:04.000 We'll continue.

00:58:04.000 Let's do more.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - July 31, 2024

Did the FBI lie about the Trump Shooter? Is the GOP ‘Weird’? With Matt Taibbi | TRUTH Podcast #57

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