Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Fear Leads to Submission with Dana Loesch | The TRUTH Podcast #20

00:00:02.000 Dana, welcome to the podcast. welcome to the podcast.

00:00:25.000 We spoke earlier.

00:00:26.000 One of the things that I'm looking to do is actually learn from everybody who comes in here from their experiences of, such as in your case, watching other presidential cycles play out.

00:00:37.000 I actually didn't stop you on the radio show earlier, but you made a comment that you had actually in 2016 You supported a governor.

00:00:46.000 I got to confess, when we're live on radio, I don't want to interrupt you, but I didn't even know who you supported or what you had in mind.

00:00:52.000 But you did leave me a little curious.

00:00:54.000 And I thought we could talk about that in terms of, you said you think about a governor as a president junior.

00:00:59.000 He supported a governor last time around when Trump was running.

00:01:02.000 Tell me about that and then we'll pick up where we left off in our other conversation.

00:01:05.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:06.000 Well, Vivek, congrats on the podcast.

00:01:08.000 Thank you so much for having me.

00:01:09.000 In 2016, it was weird because there were some really bad choices and then some choices that could be amazing, but they were kind of wild cards and you had no idea because there wasn't Like with Trump, he didn't have a voting record.

00:01:25.000 And I knew where he stood on, you know, like things like, you know, certain business taxes.

00:01:30.000 And there were things I knew he would be good on, certain policies I knew he would be good on.

00:01:33.000 But there was a lot that he just didn't have anything, you know, in the bank, so to speak, about it.

00:01:41.000 I had no way to measure where he stood on certain issues.

00:01:45.000 So I had moved to Texas in 2013. And at the time, former Governor Rick Perry was running for president.

00:01:51.000 So that's who I backed initially in 2016 for the 2016 primary.

00:01:56.000 It was Rick Perry.

00:01:57.000 And then after he left the primary, after he got out, I ended up supporting Senator Ted Cruz.

00:02:03.000 And then, you know, obviously in the general, nobody wanted Hillary Clinton.

00:02:05.000 So I voted for Donald Trump.

00:02:07.000 And then I voted for Donald Trump again in 2020. And we ended up with Joe Biden.

00:02:11.000 So that's kind of how I looked at it.

00:02:14.000 Because I was just cautious.

00:02:16.000 Yeah.

00:02:17.000 We ended up...

00:02:18.000 I mean, I think that he was a great president.

00:02:20.000 He accomplished a lot of really good things.

00:02:22.000 But at the time, we didn't know.

00:02:24.000 You couldn't look into the future and see.

00:02:27.000 And a lot of us...

00:02:28.000 I came from the Tea Party sphere.

00:02:31.000 A lot of us were already pretty disillusioned, not just by politicians in general, but by Republican politicians as well.

00:02:40.000 More so because these were the people who were supposed to be delivering for us, the voter, and we really felt that they haven't been.

00:02:48.000 That's one of the reasons why that movement launched, you know, actually really technically before the 2008 election.

00:02:54.000 It really launched and that's how you saw the House Freedom Caucus founded.

00:02:58.000 It's how people like Ted Cruz even got into the Senate in the first place and a number of other elected officials.

00:03:03.000 So you have to understand, at that point, too, we were really disillusioned.

00:03:05.000 We were already very nervous.

00:03:09.000 We liked the fact that, as you had said, and I like the way that you put it on my program, that he had taken kind of a bat to the administrative state, which was well needed.

00:03:17.000 But at the same time, before all of that, we wondered, was he going to be the same person Was Trump going to be the same person then, you know, that we saw on Apprentice and all of that in the presidency?

00:03:28.000 Where was he going to be on all of these other issues, like 2A issues or life or all of this other stuff?

00:03:33.000 I mean, so we had a lot of questions, and that's kind of – that's how – that was my perspective on it then.

00:03:38.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that you could say – it's an interesting axis.

00:03:41.000 this, we could probably get into some policy topics, but this idea of going for an unknown where you don't have a legislative record, right?

00:03:51.000 Or a policy or a voting record, as you put it, versus kind of purposefully opting for someone who's unshackled by that.

00:04:01.000 I think it's a big part of my candidacy here is that sometimes that voting record can be, you know, I've written books in this case.

00:04:09.000 So, and these are, you know, these are policy oriented, culturally, you know, I would say- Yeah, you have a little bit more in your gas tank than Trump did in the primary with a lot of these issues than he did in the 2016 primary, I think.

00:04:21.000 Yeah.

00:04:21.000 Well, I care about the substance.

00:04:23.000 I care about the substance.

00:04:24.000 Yeah, to inform people.

00:04:25.000 I mean, more people have watched The Apprentice than have read Woke Incarnation of Victims, but Woke Incarnation of Victims relate to my governing philosophy and my approach to what actually needs to happen in this country for a cultural revival.

00:04:36.000 But I'll tell you, I actually had an experience in early – so I was in the late stages of writing that book.

00:04:41.000 I had just stepped down from my job as a biotech CEO. I didn't talk about my background that much, but it was in business before.

00:04:49.000 I stepped down in the wake of the George Floyd protests, actually.

00:04:53.000 There was a demand that I speak out on behalf of or in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement.

00:05:00.000 I don't know.

00:05:03.000 I don't know.

00:05:22.000 Or I could speak through the filter of corporate self-interest, but not really all that honestly.

00:05:26.000 And so I stepped aside in January of 2021, actually is when I stepped down.

00:05:33.000 I was in the late stages of writing Woke Inc.

00:05:35.000 and the final chapters of it.

00:05:37.000 And then the next month, what happened in February was in my home state here in Ohio, Rob Portman, the U.S. senator, stepped down.

00:05:44.000 And by that point, I wasn't a national figure or anything, but I had started writing regularly in the Wall Street Journal, making my voice heard.

00:05:50.000 There were a lot of people who picked up the phone and said, hey, this is an opportunity you should run for the U.S. Senate.

00:05:54.000 So I considered it, actually.

00:05:55.000 I thought, I just stepped down as CEO. February, the next month, this happens.

00:06:00.000 I'm in the late stages of writing this book about a cultural trend in America.

00:06:04.000 It just seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.

00:06:06.000 And I will tell you the reason I didn't do it It was actually really funny.

00:06:10.000 A lot of political consultants got on the phone with me and they were like, your book, Woke.

00:06:15.000 And this is in January of 2021. They're like, nobody will know what that word means.

00:06:19.000 You need to start talking about kitchen table issues and voters in Ohio aren't going to care about this. 1.00

00:06:23.000 So that was a side show about the, you know, political consultant advice.

00:06:27.000 Now those same political consultants show up with saying the word woke as many times as they can in a deck without defining what it actually means.

00:06:34.000 But, you know, I was sort of serious about it, but I felt like it was constraining, actually, at the time, where it felt like the things that I would have had to say or at least been coached to say as a candidate for the U.S. Senate going through a primary in Ohio was a new kind of constraint.

00:06:51.000 I just stepped aside from a CEO because I didn't want these corporate constraints, but it felt like there was this new kind of partisan constraint in running for a position in the U.S. Senate to be a sort of a legislator, really.

00:07:03.000 And I think that's not unique to me.

00:07:06.000 I think that's true of most people who enter partisan politics pretty much at any level other than the presidency.

00:07:12.000 And I say that because I don't feel that constraint whatsoever in this race, win or lose.

00:07:17.000 And I think that's part of it, right?

00:07:18.000 For me, it would have been like if I was going to run for Senate, Well, if I lose, I don't know, that would just be, that would be sort of a sucky thing to have happen.

00:07:26.000 Whereas, you know, if you're running for president, you're running for president, right?

00:07:29.000 You just take the shackles off.

00:07:31.000 And I can tell you right now, I'd rather lose this race and speak truth at every step than to win by playing a game of snakes and ladders. 1.00

00:07:38.000 And that's, I guess, a long way of saying it was a lens for me that gave me conviction in saying that when you're talking about the president, maybe we actually want someone like Trump in 2015 or like I'm trying to be in this race.

00:07:51.000 Where you just don't have those constraints, and that's what it takes to actually run this complicated alphabet soup of a federal bureaucracy that otherwise eats the person who sits in the White House, versus in other positions where you do want somebody with a policy record or a voting record.

00:08:06.000 Here, that other thing, that other feature of being unshackled might be even more important than that record.

00:08:13.000 It's just an interesting philosophical question, but I'd be curious, in retrospect, how you think about it.

00:08:18.000 Yeah, it's a double-edged sword.

00:08:20.000 Because when you are running for the office of the presidency, it's not just...

00:08:25.000 And look, I think it's a separate discussion the way that it's a two-party system and all of that.

00:08:30.000 That's a whole other separate discussion.

00:08:31.000 Just talking about it in the context of, you know, what we have to deal with.

00:08:35.000 When you run for president, it's even more than just, you know, as you know, just running for office of the executive.

00:08:42.000 Because then you become the head of the Republican Party.

00:08:44.000 I mean, you're de facto head of the GOP. And this is where I'm like, you know, for the people who can stomach this stuff, you know, high five to you because there's no way I could.

00:08:54.000 Because you are herding cats at that point.

00:08:56.000 When you were the de facto head of the GOP, you inherit all of the awesome fun stuff that comes with it, including all of the parlor games and keeping everybody in line and sending people out to whip boats and making sure that your agenda is being fully realized By these people.

00:09:14.000 And it's kind of a quasi-partnership because you ran on your platform and people supported that and they voted it into office.

00:09:22.000 But then whether or not your platform gets done is dependent upon all of these cats that you've got to herd.

00:09:27.000 And that's where it becomes its own beast.

00:09:32.000 I think that's where Trump got...

00:09:38.000 Yeah.

00:09:44.000 Mitch McConnell's and the Lindsey Graham's and you have to deal with the Kevin McCarthy's and some are better than others.

00:09:49.000 I think honestly, out of all of the people in DC, and I was actually thinking about this on break before we started have our discussion on your podcast.

00:10:00.000 I was thinking maybe I can probably count on one hand the number of people that I think really just don't care how they're perceived and don't care what they don't have any special interest to cater to.

00:10:12.000 And of course, there's some of the most hated people in all of Congress.

00:10:16.000 And thankfully, they're in pretty red areas because there's no way they would win.

00:10:19.000 But it is tricky.

00:10:21.000 I mean, it really does.

00:10:22.000 It relies on a whole entirely different skill set to deal with all of those people because then you're dealing with all of their egos and their special interests and it becomes a give and take.

00:10:33.000 And I've been around D.C. enough to where I stay in Dallas, Texas.

00:10:37.000 I don't like going to D.C. because of all of that.

00:10:40.000 So I agree with you.

00:10:42.000 And then I would also add that perspective on it too because it is freeing when you come in.

00:10:47.000 I would imagine, you know, speculative.

00:10:49.000 It's freeing when you come in without any kind of restraints or owing anyone.

00:10:53.000 I mean, I, you know, I think that you have, and if you forgive me for being completely forthright about it, I'm like, you got blank you money.

00:10:59.000 So you can, you know, you have blank you money.

00:11:01.000 So you can, you can be freer than most other people who are coming into this race.

00:11:06.000 But then when you become the head of the party, it becomes about the health of the party, too.

00:11:10.000 And if the party suffers, you suffer.

00:11:13.000 If the party loses seats in Congress, then you suffer.

00:11:16.000 And that's tackled onto you.

00:11:18.000 So I think the only benefit of it is that you are agreeing to take on that chain under your own terms as best you can, if that makes sense.

00:11:28.000 Yeah, I agree with you.

00:11:29.000 And I think that I said this earlier.

00:11:31.000 I'll say it again.

00:11:32.000 I think you only get to be an outsider once, right?

00:11:35.000 I mean, that system, it does change you.

00:11:37.000 I think that I expect not to be the same person four years in or eight years in.

00:11:42.000 How would you inoculate yourself against that?

00:11:45.000 You know, you ask the question of how do you inoculate yourself?

00:11:48.000 It's a good word.

00:11:48.000 I mean, it is a little bit of a virus, right?

00:11:50.000 The administrative state is a virus.

00:11:52.000 It eventually comes for you.

00:11:55.000 So, I think there's a couple things, if we're to use the biology analogy here.

00:12:00.000 I think you've got to kill the virus before it has a chance to mutate and adapt to you, okay?

00:12:06.000 So, it's one thing to believe that you can reform the administrative state through top-down change, right?

00:12:15.000 Like, take Trump's approach here.

00:12:16.000 The Department of Education is a problem, no doubt about it.

00:12:19.000 Got it.

00:12:20.000 Yeah.

00:12:20.000 They're funding, you know, I would say toxic gender and race ideologies that they use as sort of a, you know, kind of holds you hostage is what they do as local schools.

00:12:32.000 They'll tell you don't get this money unless you play by these rules.

00:12:35.000 And they tilt the scales to a four-year gender studies major in California, but nothing for a two-year program to be a welder or a carpenter in this country. 0.98

00:12:43.000 So that's a problem.

00:12:44.000 Trump recognized that's a problem.

00:12:45.000 What does he do?

00:12:46.000 He puts someone good in charge on top, Betsy DeVos. 1.00

00:12:50.000 Let's put her in charge and reform this thing. 1.00

00:12:53.000 Answer, it doesn't work, right?

00:12:55.000 As I think you need to have the willingness and the early willingness.

00:13:00.000 It can't happen later.

00:13:01.000 It's got to be like a first few months kind of thing.

00:13:03.000 Start a pattern of shutting down agencies that should have never existed in the first place.

00:13:08.000 So, you know, I think if you're going to use the inoculation principle, You know, you don't give the virus here, the administrative state, enough cycles and time to adapt and decide how it's going to come after the new antibody, you know, in the White House that's coming for the administrative state.

00:13:26.000 You just got to level it in one fell swoop.

00:13:29.000 And I think that's easier said than done, but I'm running on a campaign pledge to identify specific agencies.

00:13:36.000 We won't just reform, but we'll shut down.

00:13:39.000 I think that's part of it.

00:13:41.000 I think part of it is you also got to know when you're ready to drop the mic and get out of the way.

00:13:45.000 I mean, I don't think Trump is the same person today as he was in 2015. He had fresh legs back then.

00:13:51.000 He was, by all measures, having fun, coming in as an outsider.

00:13:55.000 There's nothing about the actual job probably that's all that fun.

00:13:58.000 He seemed to care less then than now about perception of him.

00:14:02.000 I think so, right?

00:14:04.000 I mean, I feel that way now.

00:14:06.000 I feel a lot of kindred spirit, not with Trump, but with 2015 Trump.

00:14:11.000 I really mean it.

00:14:13.000 I'm living a good life.

00:14:14.000 Certainly have been for the last several years.

00:14:17.000 Go back to doing that.

00:14:18.000 Got two kids at home.

00:14:19.000 Got great businesses that I've started.

00:14:21.000 I've really enjoyed writing books.

00:14:23.000 I've written three books now.

00:14:24.000 I'm cranking one out about every six months.

00:14:26.000 This is a pretty good life for me.

00:14:28.000 I think that if we're going in to do this, If it stops being fun at a certain point in time, you're also going to be less successful at it.

00:14:36.000 You're going to feel more inhibited.

00:14:37.000 You're going to care more about what people think of you in response.

00:14:40.000 Like, right now, as of the moment you and I are having this conversation, I think the last poll I saw is I'm polling at 2%, which sounds like a little bit to you, but for me, it's double what I was polling at two weeks ago.

00:14:50.000 So, hey, that was actually something that we said, all right, we've doubled.

00:14:53.000 But, you know, I don't...

00:14:56.000 I really don't care, right?

00:14:57.000 I feel true.

00:14:58.000 I'm speaking truth.

00:14:59.000 I'm saying what needs to be said from transgenderism in the country to the climate cult to whatever else.

00:15:04.000 There's no sacred cows we're not going to touch.

00:15:06.000 If it gets to be at a certain point, either in the campaign, maybe it's even before I get elected, You know what?

00:15:12.000 If you see me behaving a little bit differently, even 15 months into this thing, just call me.

00:15:18.000 I'll drop out of this thing.

00:15:19.000 There's no reason for another practice politician.

00:15:22.000 There's plenty of others who at least have records then who can find their way in.

00:15:26.000 But the same thing is four years in or eight years in.

00:15:28.000 You got to know when to drop the mic and actually just pass the torch and move on.

00:15:32.000 And, you know, if I were Trump, I would, and I've seen him, you know, in more recent months as well.

00:15:39.000 I empathize with him.

00:15:40.000 It's a tough position to be in.

00:15:41.000 I mean, he came for the system.

00:15:42.000 The system came back for him with redoubled force.

00:15:46.000 But at a certain point, you pass the torch, you move on, drop the mic on your accomplishments, celebrate those for what they were, and then give somebody with fresh legs the chance to carry the torch the next way forward.

00:15:59.000 And I think...

00:16:00.000 Are you religious, Dana?

00:16:02.000 Yes.

00:16:03.000 Okay.

00:16:03.000 I mean, I think that sort of like an attachment to...

00:16:08.000 Sort of false idols, right?

00:16:09.000 The White House itself can be a false idol, a hollowed out husk of a place.

00:16:13.000 And the approval of, I think, maybe chasing high approval in polls, too, because that's something that I think that can be used as a false idol.

00:16:26.000 Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a false idol in our culture that we see every day, even if you're not a political candidate.

00:16:31.000 I mean, the number of clicks you get on a social media post, the number of likes, the number of retweets, the number of watches.

00:16:37.000 But it is this insecurity that relates to human validation, right?

00:16:42.000 And so that's kind of almost like a more interesting thing for us to talk about for a second.

00:16:48.000 Are you Christian?

00:16:49.000 Yes, yes, Christian.

00:16:51.000 Non-denominational.

00:16:52.000 Raised?

00:16:52.000 Or you came to it?

00:16:53.000 I was actually raised Baptist and now non-denominational.

00:16:56.000 We're Church of Christ.

00:16:58.000 And why'd you make the...

00:16:59.000 Talk to me about that transition, actually.

00:17:01.000 I'm curious about it.

00:17:03.000 I, I mean, I, I met my husband, my husband's family is non-denominational and there, but there were, I just, I, I just liked the, the doctrine of absence of division, I guess.

00:17:15.000 And I, you know, really took to heart, you know, Paul telling the church and the New Testament that, you know, you're focusing on all of these little things and, You know, really, we're all one in the kingdom.

00:17:24.000 And so that's what, you know, that's where my heart went.

00:17:27.000 That's where my mind followed.

00:17:29.000 So that's why I made the switch.

00:17:31.000 And I think when you're also...

00:17:32.000 I didn't ask questions when I was younger and I was raised.

00:17:34.000 And I mean, my family's from a very small town in southern Missouri.

00:17:37.000 They were literally...

00:17:38.000 It was three...

00:17:40.000 I actually think it's like 301, might be 302. Three now.

00:17:45.000 I don't know.

00:17:45.000 The town doesn't really grow.

00:17:46.000 Very tiny town.

00:17:47.000 Three churches.

00:17:48.000 So you have Church in Nazarene, Pentecost, and then you have Baptist.

00:17:51.000 Those are the three you get to pick.

00:17:52.000 If you want to go anywhere else, the nearest one's probably like an hour and a half away, two hours away.

00:17:56.000 It's a convenience thing, too.

00:17:57.000 Yeah.

00:17:58.000 Nobody's going to...

00:17:59.000 So that's your pick.

00:18:00.000 You get one of those three.

00:18:01.000 So that's...

00:18:02.000 When you're young, you don't ask questions.

00:18:05.000 You're doing what your family's doing.

00:18:07.000 Yeah, fair enough.

00:18:08.000 Fair enough.

00:18:09.000 Well, I asked that question just because, so I'm Hindu.

00:18:12.000 I was raised in a Hindu household.

00:18:13.000 We're practicing Hindu today.

00:18:15.000 But faith was a really important part of my upbringing and part of the upbringing of our children, too.

00:18:20.000 But I do think that the loss of faith in God broadly, and we could talk about faith in country, too.

00:18:29.000 But the disappearance of the things that used to give us a sense of identity, God, country, family, the importance of family, hard work I think plays a role in this too, creates this vacuum of insecurities where that's what allows us to be vulnerable to someone algorithmically picking on your insecurity and say that actually the number of likes you get or the validation in the eyes of others is really what gives you that sense of That

00:18:59.000 sense of self, that sense of identity and purpose and meaning.

00:19:04.000 And so I guess like part of the answer, I'll kind of wrap it back to your other question, now that I'm thinking about it, is one of the inoculances, maybe you can't inoculate it.

00:19:15.000 Second thing is you just annihilate the virus first.

00:19:17.000 Inoculate yourself with faith.

00:19:18.000 But inoculate yourself with faith, exactly.

00:19:20.000 And I think that as we're talking through this, I don't know where Trump is on God.

00:19:26.000 I don't believe in trying to virtue signal and try to criticize somebody for where they are or aren't on belief.

00:19:31.000 You have to come to it yourself.

00:19:33.000 But I do think belief in God is an important part of that for me and belief in a strong family foundation.

00:19:42.000 I mean, we're in this together when we committed to run for president.

00:19:45.000 We're doing it as a family.

00:19:47.000 It's not me running and my family coming along with me.

00:19:49.000 It's The same family unit that brought me into this world, a stable two-parent household.

00:19:54.000 That's what we're giving to our children, too.

00:19:56.000 And so I think that's probably a pretty powerful inoculator as well that I don't know if Trump had.

00:20:03.000 I don't know.

00:20:04.000 You brought up something, if I can interject, because you brought up something interesting, especially because you've written about, I mean, you wrote a book literally called Woke, and you've talked about CRT, which is, you know, it's a Marxist creation.

00:20:18.000 I was writing about Derrick Bell back in the introduction of critical race theory back in universities in 2012 and before.

00:20:25.000 One of the reasons it's been able to spread so much is because of that, because of the breakdown of faith, because really, ultimately, it does not matter.

00:20:35.000 Really, your faith, because one of the things that is, I think, common in each unique faith is that everyone under God is, you know, they're God's children.

00:20:46.000 I mean, you are one in the same under God.

00:20:49.000 And that's that division, that Marxist division.

00:20:52.000 I mean, Marx said that, you know, faith is the opiate of the masses.

00:20:56.000 I mean, honestly, really, Marx was.

00:20:58.000 Mm-hmm.

00:20:58.000 But to divide that and remove that commonality, because if everyone sees themselves, because that's ultimately how it's supposed to be.

00:21:05.000 I mean, it's particularly in the United States.

00:21:07.000 I've said it before.

00:21:08.000 You can go to Italy, but you can never be Italian. 0.91

00:21:12.000 You can go to Greece, but you can't be Greek. 1.00

00:21:13.000 You can go to France, but you can't be French. 1.00

00:21:15.000 You can go everywhere else and you can't be that, but you can come to the United States of America and you can be an American because we recognize, do you want to be free?

00:21:25.000 Then you're our brother and sister here in the United States.

00:21:27.000 That's e pluribus unum.

00:21:28.000 And now melting pot is even a bad word, but that's always been our strength because we don't put anything in identity politics, even from the onset of the creation of this republic.

00:21:38.000 It's always been about freedom.

00:21:40.000 Our identity is freedom and our identity and faith is being equal to one another in the eyes of God.

00:21:46.000 And when we get away from that and allow Marxism to drive that wedge in between people and faith and people and freedom, well, then you see everything that you've been writing about.

00:21:55.000 You see the CRT, you see the DEI, you see the wokery in every single aspect of American culture all the way down into finance and now our schools.

00:22:04.000 And this is the big hurdle to overcome.

00:22:07.000 And that breakdown in society, the culture war, is very, very difficult to deal with policy-wise.

00:22:13.000 Because as you were just mentioning, you can't do it top down.

00:22:16.000 Mm-hmm.

00:22:17.000 I think that that is the defining challenge for, you know, even the whole premise of my campaign is reviving this missing national identity.

00:22:25.000 Faith in God is, I think, an important part of that national identity.

00:22:28.000 I think it was John Adams who said, what our constitution is made for a moral people.

00:22:32.000 That was almost an assumption, right?

00:22:34.000 The principles are set into motion against the backdrop of – You know, a culture grounded in a moral foundation itself.

00:22:43.000 And you're right, our identity is freedom.

00:22:45.000 My parents came here to pursue freedom, live and give the arc of that free American dream to me and my brother, which we enjoyed and we each founded companies that help people in their own right.

00:22:57.000 But, you know, faith I think is a precondition for fully enjoying the fruits of freedom because you can be enslaved not just by a government.

00:23:07.000 I think part of what's going on in America today is, and I'll say this is a moment of self-reflection, right?

00:23:12.000 Like a lot of what I write about in Woke Inc.

00:23:14.000 or a lot of what I've been railing against over the last several years is this merger of state power and corporate power that together do what neither can do on its own and that poses grave, and I believe this is true, grave threats to liberty.

00:23:28.000 But if we're being really honest, You're just picking up where we're talking about here.

00:23:34.000 It relates to this.

00:23:35.000 That trick only works if there's a populace, a culture, really, that's hungry enough to buy up what they're selling.

00:23:45.000 And that's something that requires each of us not to just point the finger at big government or the external threat to liberty, but the threat to liberty that starts from within.

00:23:54.000 The hunger for identity and purpose and meaning.

00:23:57.000 It's like when the...

00:23:59.000 You know, Israelites were lost in the desert.

00:24:01.000 It's Exodus stuff, right?

00:24:02.000 What did they say?

00:24:03.000 They want to go back and bend the knee to Pharaoh. 0.87

00:24:05.000 They want to bow to Pharaoh. 0.88

00:24:06.000 They want to be ruled by a master when they're lost in the desert and can't see where they're going.

00:24:11.000 And I feel like that's what America looks like to me today is we're lost in the desert.

00:24:15.000 We can't see the promised land.

00:24:17.000 And that's part of why it's not just the Pharaoh's fault, whoever that might be.

00:24:22.000 It's the fact that there's something within us as a people that makes us want to bend the knee to some new authority or religion or cult when the real thing doesn't fill that void.

00:24:34.000 And that's not easily solved through politics.

00:24:37.000 Maybe not even at all through politics, though I think a president uniquely relative to other politicians like Reagan did can set a tone.

00:24:43.000 But this is tough stuff.

00:24:45.000 I think some of it, too, is that there are certain people who...

00:24:49.000 And I don't think this is a shared trade amongst everyone, but I definitely think with perhaps some of the most hardcore members of the left, there are some people who their thought process and they're just incompatible with freedom.

00:25:05.000 Because freedom is also responsibility and freedom means consequence sometimes too.

00:25:10.000 And that is in the freedom to be able to celebrate and embrace the fruits of your labor and celebrate your achievements, but also to bear the consequences when you mess up and when you make a mistake and feel the burden of that.

00:25:23.000 And there are people who are afraid of that.

00:25:25.000 There are people who don't trust themselves enough to be free.

00:25:28.000 Like with the whole thing with the coronavirus and the masking.

00:25:30.000 I mean, I can't tell you the number of people who would be like, oh, let me check what the CDC requirements are for this.

00:25:35.000 And not just trust themselves and their own guts.

00:25:38.000 And also just, you know, their understanding of Science 101 from high school about the way that viruses behave.

00:25:46.000 Thank you.

00:25:49.000 I mean, it's just it was amazing to see so many people actually throw science and reason for people who say they love science and reason for the superstition of believing in government.

00:25:59.000 That was a whole new faith that was created that's incompatible with the one that started this country. 0.64

00:26:04.000 I love that.

00:26:05.000 The superstition because it really is what it was in the guise of the religion itself.

00:26:11.000 I don't mean to be overly in religious land here, but...

00:26:17.000 It reminds me of a story that I actually told recently.

00:26:20.000 It was a story of Christ, but came from Dostoevsky's book, The Brothers Karamazov, in this chapter entitled The Grand Inquisitor, where what happens in that story is that Christ comes back to earth according to the parable in the middle of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century or whatever, and he's walking the streets of Spain in Seville, Spain, and the Grand Inquisitor spots him and he arrests him.

00:26:43.000 And he puts him in a prison cell, and the whole chapter is the dialogue between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ.

00:26:48.000 And the Grand Inquisitor goes into a, you know, long diatribe where he says, look, we the church don't need you here anymore.

00:26:56.000 And your presence here actually impedes our own work.

00:27:01.000 And I think that there's a lot in modern America that makes me think of that story in different settings.

00:27:07.000 But in the setting you just described, like the scientific method, Became an inconvenience.

00:27:14.000 For the new temple of science, capitalist science itself in this country, holding the scientific method hostage, sentencing the scientific method which relies on free speech and open debate and skepticism and the exchange of ideas, even iconoclastic ones, to death, right?

00:27:31.000 And so it's a movie.

00:27:33.000 We've seen that plot several times over, but there's something tempting about it where, like, we just – I haven't talked about this with anybody, but we see this pattern repeating itself where there's some – Fear of a distant unknown.

00:27:47.000 It might just be a really bad outcome and an existential threat.

00:27:55.000 COVID, climate change, even Ukraine, there's some dynamics here.

00:27:59.000 If Russia takes Ukraine, then, you know, the rest of NATO is necessarily going to fall.

00:28:05.000 Where, like, the average person, maybe any of us, there's a part of us that says, okay, that doesn't really make sense, but the thing that's being presented is such a calamitous alternative that I can't be sure that, okay, fine, that'll be what causes me to just submit and bend the knee.

00:28:23.000 And I think that It's a tough question about how do we give fortitude to a culture to resist that siren song where I think many people who bent the knee to those COVID orthodoxies or whatever over the last several years, you can see the same thing in the gun control debate on the back of what happened in Nashville, which was a tragedy, but we see this debate again.

00:28:44.000 The fear of something really bad as the unknown can cause people to do things that even they never would have otherwise do if they were operating exclusively according to principles of reason.

00:28:54.000 And in this weird way, I think if people actually had faith to fill that vacuum, they would be less likely to bend the knee to that authority.

00:29:02.000 I don't know.

00:29:03.000 Yes, it's faith and also realizing that you will be equipped if something were to happen that you can handle it.

00:29:12.000 I mean, I do think it comes under an absence of faith, as you were saying, but this inability to trust themselves with it also and take the responsibility of being their own stewards.

00:29:25.000 I mean, it is...

00:29:27.000 Really something to see.

00:29:29.000 And Kane and I have talked about it before my producer on my radio program.

00:29:32.000 It is really something to see.

00:29:34.000 Everything that I grew up hearing from the left has done a 180. Literally everything that they've ever said.

00:29:43.000 I mean, they used to be the open-minded people, and as you were saying, the science and reason, and the scientific method, and we're just going to go by the...

00:29:48.000 And then that's all been turned, and now we're the outcasts.

00:29:52.000 I mean, it almost is...

00:29:53.000 You don't even know where right and left is hardly at all anymore, because everything has been...

00:29:57.000 All the political order has been upended by people who are terrified, and it's wild.

00:30:01.000 There are people who...

00:30:02.000 Like Matt Taibbi.

00:30:03.000 Matt Taibbi sounds like he is someone on the right.

00:30:07.000 He's not.

00:30:07.000 The first time I ever...

00:30:09.000 Met him.

00:30:09.000 We argued on CNN. We were at each other's throats on Anderson Cooper's program.

00:30:13.000 And now he puts stuff out where I'm like, wow, I agree with that.

00:30:17.000 And I know he agrees with something that I've said.

00:30:19.000 This is weird to see.

00:30:21.000 It's just, it's unbelievable what this has done to, I think, the order of the political world and the policy with that, which makes the job of the presidency all the much harder.

00:30:32.000 It makes the job of Congress all the much harder.

00:30:34.000 And I think to that point, you know, you're talking about how to How to offset those individuals who are afraid of freedom.

00:30:41.000 I think that people who aren't afraid of freedom, I think that we have to be civilly, you know, and even lovingly when applicable, that much stronger and that much louder and to exercise those freedoms that much more to offset that.

00:30:55.000 I love that, Dana.

00:30:56.000 Well, we're actually running out of time today.

00:30:58.000 I know your schedule was also constrained.

00:31:01.000 Hopefully, this is the first of many.

00:31:02.000 We didn't even get to the Second Amendment, which I know is a passion of yours and I think something that I think is near and dear to my heart, but we'll save that.

00:31:10.000 Are you a firearm owner?

00:31:11.000 I have to ask you before I let you let me go.

00:31:12.000 I'm not a firearm owner.

00:31:14.000 I'm a constitutionalist.

00:31:15.000 Yeah, I mean, like, it's just, I'm not gonna, I've never been someone to sort of, like, I'm not gonna, you're not gonna see me in the campaign trail just sort of, like, fakely holding some guy.

00:31:22.000 The reason I'm a Second Amendment supporter.

00:31:23.000 Well, I like that you're not patronizing about it, because I see a lot of, I have seen a lot of politicians who I'm like, I know you didn't, I know you couldn't even shoot that and you're holding that.

00:31:30.000 Yeah, it's just, I'm not gonna fake that.

00:31:31.000 It's just not the family or what environment I grew up in.

00:31:33.000 The reason I- That's why I don't fake football.

00:31:35.000 I don't know anything about football.

00:31:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:31:36.000 I live in Texas.

00:31:37.000 But the Second Amendment is more important than football because it's the one amendment that puts the teeth in all the others.

00:31:42.000 It's the constitutionalist in me that actually brings me to that.

00:31:45.000 But you would go shooting.

00:31:46.000 You would go to a range just to experience them.

00:31:47.000 Yeah, of course.

00:31:48.000 I mean, I've gone to a range, gone shooting.

00:31:49.000 Yeah, we skeet shooting.

00:31:51.000 Arizona, we shoot some automatic machine weapons.

00:31:53.000 I'm actually not that bad at it, I've discovered.

00:31:55.000 I've actually hit a target.

00:31:57.000 And just to be perfectly honest, even in my career in business, we have security that we take.

00:32:02.000 We handle security in the home through...

00:32:04.000 24-7 paid security.

00:32:06.000 So that's just been our situation.

00:32:07.000 But I'm not like a sport gun person and enthusiast, but I believe in it because of the importance that it has for all of the other amendments enshrined in our Constitution, which is a deep discussion.

00:32:18.000 I know you're the person to have that discussion with, but why don't we save it, actually?

00:32:23.000 And this is like the first of, you know, hopefully several conversations you and I will be having over the course of this year.

00:32:29.000 But I just want to say, you know, thanks for...

00:32:31.000 You know, making this open, opening up a little bit, I think that we're going to need more open discourse, even in our party, letting go of these silly labels, even the partisan labels, I could care less for them.

00:32:41.000 Let's get to actually the substance.

00:32:42.000 And I know you're one of the people who does that, gets to the heart of the substance rather than, you know, tiptoeing around partisan dances.

00:32:50.000 So, love it.

00:32:51.000 Well, good discussion.

00:32:52.000 Thanks so much for having me.

00:32:53.000 And thanks for coming on my program earlier.

00:32:54.000 Yeah, we'll do more of it in both directions.

00:32:57.000 I look forward to it, Dana.

00:32:58.000 Yeah.

00:32:58.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - May 01, 2023

Fear Leads to Submission with Dana Loesch | The TRUTH Podcast #20

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