In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Dana Rohrabacher to talk about his experience in the 2016 Republican primary and why he decided to vote for Donald Trump in 2016. We also talk about why he thinks a governor should be a better choice than a presidential candidate, why he didn t vote for a governor in 2016, and how he thinks about voting for a candidate who doesn t have a legislative record. Dana also discusses why he doesn t think a candidate with a voting record is a good fit for the 2020 Democratic primary and what he would have done if he was running for president. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and share it with a friend who might be interested in running for President in 2020. Tweet me and Dana if you have any thoughts on this or other topics covered in this episode. Text Me! to +1 (602) 461-7416 and let me know what you thought of this episode! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Why should a governor run for President? 2:30 - Why a Governor have a better voting record? 3:15 - What would you do if you don t have one? 4:20 - How did you vote in 2016? 5:40 - What did you think of the 2016 primary? 6:00- What was your experience with a governor? 7:30- Why did you support a Governor? 8:30 9:00 What are you looking for in 2020? 11: Why is a better candidate? 12:15 13: What do you care about the substance? 15:40 16:20 17: How do I vote for someone who has a better chance of winning the 2020 election? 18:10 - What do I care about a president? 19:10 22:10 What is your vision for the future? 21:30 What s your philosophy? 26:30 Is there a president s role? 27:00 Do you care more about substance or a victim? 24:00 What do we care about? 25:00 How do you want to be a victim of the Woke Impeachment process? 29: What kind of person do you would you vote for? 30:00 Should I care more than that? 31:30 Do you have a problem? 32:00 Are you a politician?
Transcript
Transcripts from "Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. You can also explore and interact with the transcripts here.
00:00:02.000Dana, welcome to the podcast. welcome to the podcast.
00:00:26.000One 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.
00:00:37.000I 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.
00:00:46.000I 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.
00:00:52.000But you did leave me a little curious.
00:00:54.000And I thought we could talk about that in terms of, you said you think about a governor as a president junior.
00:00:59.000He supported a governor last time around when Trump was running.
00:01:02.000Tell me about that and then we'll pick up where we left off in our other conversation.
00:01:09.000In 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.
00:01:25.000And I knew where he stood on, you know, like things like, you know, certain business taxes.
00:01:30.000And there were things I knew he would be good on, certain policies I knew he would be good on.
00:01:33.000But there was a lot that he just didn't have anything, you know, in the bank, so to speak, about it.
00:01:41.000I had no way to measure where he stood on certain issues.
00:01:45.000So I had moved to Texas in 2013. And at the time, former Governor Rick Perry was running for president.
00:01:51.000So that's who I backed initially in 2016 for the 2016 primary.
00:03:09.000We 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.
00:03:17.000But 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?
00:03:28.000Where was he going to be on all of these other issues, like 2A issues or life or all of this other stuff?
00:03:33.000I mean, so we had a lot of questions, and that's kind of – that's how – that was my perspective on it then.
00:03:38.000Yeah, I mean, I think that you could say – it's an interesting axis.
00:03:41.000this, 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?
00:03:51.000Or a policy or a voting record, as you put it, versus kind of purposefully opting for someone who's unshackled by that.
00:04:01.000I 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.
00:04:09.000So, 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.
00:04:25.000I 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.
00:04:36.000But I'll tell you, I actually had an experience in early – so I was in the late stages of writing that book.
00:04:41.000I 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.
00:04:49.000I stepped down in the wake of the George Floyd protests, actually.
00:04:53.000There was a demand that I speak out on behalf of or in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement.
00:05:37.000And then the next month, what happened in February was in my home state here in Ohio, Rob Portman, the U.S. senator, stepped down.
00:05:44.000And 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.
00:05:50.000There 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.
00:05:55.000I thought, I just stepped down as CEO. February, the next month, this happens.
00:06:00.000I'm in the late stages of writing this book about a cultural trend in America.
00:06:04.000It just seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do.
00:06:06.000And I will tell you the reason I didn't do it It was actually really funny.
00:06:10.000A lot of political consultants got on the phone with me and they were like, your book, Woke.
00:06:15.000And this is in January of 2021. They're like, nobody will know what that word means.
00:06:19.000You need to start talking about kitchen table issues and voters in Ohio aren't going to care about this.
00:06:23.000So that was a side show about the, you know, political consultant advice.
00:06:27.000Now 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.
00:06:34.000But, 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.
00:06:51.000I 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.
00:07:18.000For 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.
00:07:26.000Whereas, you know, if you're running for president, you're running for president, right?
00:07:31.000And 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.
00:07:38.000And 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.
00:07:51.000Where 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.
00:08:06.000Here, that other thing, that other feature of being unshackled might be even more important than that record.
00:08:13.000It's just an interesting philosophical question, but I'd be curious, in retrospect, how you think about it.
00:08:20.000Because when you are running for the office of the presidency, it's not just...
00:08:25.000And look, I think it's a separate discussion the way that it's a two-party system and all of that.
00:08:30.000That's a whole other separate discussion.
00:08:31.000Just talking about it in the context of, you know, what we have to deal with.
00:08:35.000When you run for president, it's even more than just, you know, as you know, just running for office of the executive.
00:08:42.000Because then you become the head of the Republican Party.
00:08:44.000I 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.
00:08:54.000Because you are herding cats at that point.
00:08:56.000When 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.
00:09:14.000And it's kind of a quasi-partnership because you ran on your platform and people supported that and they voted it into office.
00:09:22.000But then whether or not your platform gets done is dependent upon all of these cats that you've got to herd.
00:09:27.000And that's where it becomes its own beast.
00:09:44.000Mitch McConnell's and the Lindsey Graham's and you have to deal with the Kevin McCarthy's and some are better than others.
00:09:49.000I 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.
00:10:00.000I 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.
00:10:12.000And of course, there's some of the most hated people in all of Congress.
00:10:16.000And thankfully, they're in pretty red areas because there's no way they would win.
00:10:22.000It 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.
00:10:33.000And I've been around D.C. enough to where I stay in Dallas, Texas.
00:10:37.000I don't like going to D.C. because of all of that.
00:10:42.000And then I would also add that perspective on it too because it is freeing when you come in.
00:10:47.000I would imagine, you know, speculative.
00:10:49.000It's freeing when you come in without any kind of restraints or owing anyone.
00:10:53.000I 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.
00:10:59.000So you can, you know, you have blank you money.
00:11:01.000So you can, you can be freer than most other people who are coming into this race.
00:11:06.000But then when you become the head of the party, it becomes about the health of the party, too.
00:11:18.000So 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.
00:12:20.000They'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.
00:12:32.000They'll tell you don't get this money unless you play by these rules.
00:12:35.000And 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.
00:13:01.000It's got to be like a first few months kind of thing.
00:13:03.000Start a pattern of shutting down agencies that should have never existed in the first place.
00:13:08.000So, 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.
00:13:26.000You just got to level it in one fell swoop.
00:13:29.000And I think that's easier said than done, but I'm running on a campaign pledge to identify specific agencies.
00:13:36.000We won't just reform, but we'll shut down.
00:14:28.000I 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.
00:14:37.000You're going to care more about what people think of you in response.
00:14:40.000Like, 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.
00:14:50.000So, hey, that was actually something that we said, all right, we've doubled.
00:15:42.000The system came back for him with redoubled force.
00:15:46.000But 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.
00:16:09.000The White House itself can be a false idol, a hollowed out husk of a place.
00:16:13.000And 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.
00:16:26.000Yeah, 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.
00:16:31.000I mean, the number of clicks you get on a social media post, the number of likes, the number of retweets, the number of watches.
00:16:37.000But it is this insecurity that relates to human validation, right?
00:16:42.000And so that's kind of almost like a more interesting thing for us to talk about for a second.
00:17:03.000I, 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.
00:17:15.000And 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.
00:17:24.000And so that's what, you know, that's where my heart went.
00:18:15.000But faith was a really important part of my upbringing and part of the upbringing of our children, too.
00:18:20.000But I do think that the loss of faith in God broadly, and we could talk about faith in country, too.
00:18:29.000But 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
00:18:59.000sense of self, that sense of identity and purpose and meaning.
00:19:04.000And 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.
00:19:15.000Second thing is you just annihilate the virus first.
00:20:04.000You 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.
00:20:18.000I was writing about Derrick Bell back in the introduction of critical race theory back in universities in 2012 and before.
00:20:25.000One 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.
00:20:35.000Really, 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.
00:20:46.000I mean, you are one in the same under God.
00:20:49.000And that's that division, that Marxist division.
00:20:52.000I mean, Marx said that, you know, faith is the opiate of the masses.
00:21:08.000You can go to Italy, but you can never be Italian.
00:21:12.000You can go to Greece, but you can't be Greek.
00:21:13.000You can go to France, but you can't be French.
00:21:15.000You 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?
00:21:25.000Then you're our brother and sister here in the United States.
00:21:28.000And 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.
00:21:40.000Our identity is freedom and our identity and faith is being equal to one another in the eyes of God.
00:21:46.000And 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.
00:21:55.000You 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.
00:22:04.000And this is the big hurdle to overcome.
00:22:07.000And that breakdown in society, the culture war, is very, very difficult to deal with policy-wise.
00:22:13.000Because as you were just mentioning, you can't do it top down.
00:22:17.000I think that that is the defining challenge for, you know, even the whole premise of my campaign is reviving this missing national identity.
00:22:25.000Faith in God is, I think, an important part of that national identity.
00:22:28.000I think it was John Adams who said, what our constitution is made for a moral people.
00:22:34.000The principles are set into motion against the backdrop of – You know, a culture grounded in a moral foundation itself.
00:22:43.000And you're right, our identity is freedom.
00:22:45.000My 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.
00:22:57.000But, 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.
00:23:07.000I think part of what's going on in America today is, and I'll say this is a moment of self-reflection, right?
00:23:12.000Like a lot of what I write about in Woke Inc.
00:23:14.000or 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.
00:23:28.000But if we're being really honest, You're just picking up where we're talking about here.
00:23:35.000That trick only works if there's a populace, a culture, really, that's hungry enough to buy up what they're selling.
00:23:45.000And 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.
00:23:54.000The hunger for identity and purpose and meaning.
00:24:17.000And that's part of why it's not just the Pharaoh's fault, whoever that might be.
00:24:22.000It'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.
00:24:34.000And that's not easily solved through politics.
00:24:37.000Maybe not even at all through politics, though I think a president uniquely relative to other politicians like Reagan did can set a tone.
00:24:45.000I think some of it, too, is that there are certain people who...
00:24:49.000And 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.
00:25:05.000Because freedom is also responsibility and freedom means consequence sometimes too.
00:25:10.000And 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.
00:25:23.000And there are people who are afraid of that.
00:25:25.000There are people who don't trust themselves enough to be free.
00:25:28.000Like with the whole thing with the coronavirus and the masking.
00:25:30.000I 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.
00:25:35.000And not just trust themselves and their own guts.
00:25:38.000And also just, you know, their understanding of Science 101 from high school about the way that viruses behave.
00:25:49.000I 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.
00:25:59.000That was a whole new faith that was created that's incompatible with the one that started this country.
00:26:05.000The superstition because it really is what it was in the guise of the religion itself.
00:26:11.000I don't mean to be overly in religious land here, but...
00:26:17.000It reminds me of a story that I actually told recently.
00:26:20.000It 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.
00:26:43.000And he puts him in a prison cell, and the whole chapter is the dialogue between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ.
00:26:48.000And the Grand Inquisitor goes into a, you know, long diatribe where he says, look, we the church don't need you here anymore.
00:26:56.000And your presence here actually impedes our own work.
00:27:01.000And I think that there's a lot in modern America that makes me think of that story in different settings.
00:27:07.000But in the setting you just described, like the scientific method, Became an inconvenience.
00:27:14.000For 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?
00:27:33.000We'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.
00:27:47.000It might just be a really bad outcome and an existential threat.
00:27:55.000COVID, climate change, even Ukraine, there's some dynamics here.
00:27:59.000If Russia takes Ukraine, then, you know, the rest of NATO is necessarily going to fall.
00:28:05.000Where, 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.
00:28:23.000And 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.
00:28:44.000The 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.
00:28:54.000And 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.
00:29:03.000Yes, it's faith and also realizing that you will be equipped if something were to happen that you can handle it.
00:29:12.000I 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.
00:29:34.000Everything that I grew up hearing from the left has done a 180. Literally everything that they've ever said.
00:29:43.000I 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...
00:29:48.000And then that's all been turned, and now we're the outcasts.
00:30:21.000It'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.
00:30:32.000It makes the job of Congress all the much harder.
00:30:34.000And I think to that point, you know, you're talking about how to How to offset those individuals who are afraid of freedom.
00:30:41.000I 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.
00:31:02.000We 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.
00:31:15.000Yeah, 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.
00:31:22.000The reason I'm a Second Amendment supporter.
00:31:23.000Well, 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.
00:31:30.000Yeah, it's just, I'm not gonna fake that.
00:31:31.000It's just not the family or what environment I grew up in.
00:31:33.000The reason I- That's why I don't fake football.
00:32:07.000But 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.
00:32:18.000I know you're the person to have that discussion with, but why don't we save it, actually?
00:32:23.000And this is like the first of, you know, hopefully several conversations you and I will be having over the course of this year.
00:32:29.000But I just want to say, you know, thanks for...
00:32:31.000You 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.
00:32:42.000And 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.