Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - "Libs of TikTok" & Vivek Ramaswamy | The TRUTH Podcast #38

00:00:00.000 You were, like, on TV all the time, exposing what's already out there.

00:00:03.000 LGBTQ activists, teachers, people in the medical industry, doctors, and they were basically this sexualized agenda onto kids. 0.96

00:00:14.000 Don't let anybody hold you back.

00:00:15.000 Amen.

00:00:16.000 Just do it.

00:00:21.000 We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.

00:00:26.000 Let's talk truth.

00:00:27.000 Most people know you as Libs of TikTok. 0.99

00:00:32.000 But your real name is Haya Reichich, if I got that right.

00:00:35.000 We share something in common with a name that requires teaching people how to pronounce it, so we're already starting from some common ground here.

00:00:43.000 I've been looking forward to this conversation.

00:00:45.000 I have been following you from afar, like literally millions of others.

00:00:51.000 But I wanted to get to the story behind the TikTok account, and it's grateful to me that you've been...

00:00:58.000 I'm really grateful that you have taken the time to come here in Columbus, Ohio, and we're gonna dive into your story if you're cool with that.

00:01:05.000 Yeah, of course.

00:01:06.000 It's great to be here to have this conversation.

00:01:08.000 I think this topic is extremely important, especially for someone who can possibly have more power to do something about this cultural phenomenon that we're seeing.

00:01:21.000 So tell me about you.

00:01:22.000 We'll get into the culture, but I want to know about you.

00:01:24.000 This is a unique opportunity.

00:01:27.000 Tell me about you.

00:01:28.000 Where did you grow up?

00:01:29.000 What was your professional background and the journey that led you to do what you're doing now?

00:01:34.000 So I grew up in LA and then I lived in New York for a number of years after school and I had random jobs.

00:01:47.000 I went through probably like five different jobs.

00:01:51.000 Did you go to college?

00:01:52.000 I did, yeah.

00:01:53.000 Where was college?

00:01:54.000 In New York?

00:01:55.000 No, I did online.

00:01:57.000 Okay, nice.

00:01:57.000 I did one year in person in Israel.

00:02:01.000 Oh, nice.

00:02:02.000 I studied abroad.

00:02:02.000 You were in Israel?

00:02:03.000 Yeah.

00:02:04.000 Okay.

00:02:04.000 Yeah.

00:02:05.000 And then I did online college after that.

00:02:08.000 Nice.

00:02:10.000 How was Israel?

00:02:11.000 Amazing.

00:02:12.000 Israel is one of the most amazing places.

00:02:13.000 Do you have any ties to Israel or how did you choose it?

00:02:15.000 So I'm Jewish.

00:02:16.000 Okay.

00:02:16.000 And I have a lot of relatives in Israel.

00:02:18.000 And in my Jewish circles, it's actually very common after high school to go to Israel for one year to study.

00:02:26.000 So high school was in LA. Then you went to...

00:02:29.000 So I actually went to a boarding school for high school.

00:02:32.000 Okay.

00:02:32.000 Outside LA. Cool.

00:02:34.000 And then one year in Israel.

00:02:36.000 Where?

00:02:38.000 We're in Israel?

00:02:39.000 In Tel Aviv?

00:02:39.000 In Sfat.

00:02:40.000 In Sfat?

00:02:40.000 Okay.

00:02:40.000 I've been there.

00:02:41.000 Yeah.

00:02:42.000 There's not much there.

00:02:44.000 Yeah.

00:02:44.000 There's a factory there.

00:02:46.000 Yeah.

00:02:46.000 The candle factory.

00:02:47.000 Yeah.

00:02:48.000 There's a couple of factories.

00:02:49.000 Yep.

00:02:49.000 So yeah, that's cool.

00:02:50.000 Yeah.

00:02:51.000 It was an incredible year.

00:02:52.000 Really great experience.

00:02:54.000 The culture in Israel is so unique.

00:02:56.000 And just obviously getting to see my heritage in the land of Israel, it was just amazing.

00:03:05.000 So one year there.

00:03:07.000 One year, yeah.

00:03:07.000 Cool, at a young age too.

00:03:09.000 Yeah, 18, yeah.

00:03:12.000 Cool.

00:03:12.000 So then anyway, you came back, finished your degree, and then you found your way into the workforce.

00:03:16.000 Yeah, I just was doing random jobs.

00:03:19.000 I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.

00:03:22.000 And then I was working for about five years.

00:03:27.000 I'm 28 now, so five, six years.

00:03:30.000 I did real estate.

00:03:31.000 I worked in an Amazon-related company.

00:03:36.000 I did marketing.

00:03:37.000 And then COVID happened.

00:03:40.000 Mm-hmm.

00:03:41.000 So my office shut down.

00:03:43.000 The real estate market in Brooklyn shut down.

00:03:49.000 No showings.

00:03:50.000 So I went back home to L.A. and I was never really political.

00:03:58.000 So COVID is going on and we're trapped in our homes and this is L.A. So it's really bad.

00:04:04.000 We literally were not allowed to leave our houses.

00:04:06.000 So I probably left my house twice in the span of two or three months.

00:04:12.000 We had to wear a mask to walk down the street.

00:04:15.000 We didn't go to the store.

00:04:17.000 Nothing.

00:04:17.000 Trapped in our home.

00:04:18.000 So I was like, this is bad.

00:04:22.000 What's going on here?

00:04:23.000 So that's when I started really looking into what's happening.

00:04:28.000 Who's making these decisions?

00:04:31.000 Why are we being locked in our homes?

00:04:33.000 Why are tons of people losing their jobs?

00:04:35.000 And then people started being threatened that they're going to lose their job if they don't take an experimental vaccine.

00:04:41.000 And you knew people who were at risk of losing their jobs.

00:04:45.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:04:46.000 People were terrified because they rely on their livelihood, whether that's a teacher or working in an office.

00:04:55.000 And it was a really scary time.

00:04:58.000 And even for myself, I'm like, when is this going to end?

00:05:00.000 Well, the real estate market, when is it going to start up again?

00:05:02.000 Because this is my livelihood.

00:05:04.000 I rent out apartments in Brooklyn.

00:05:07.000 And that's when I created my Twitter account.

00:05:15.000 And I was like, I started really paying attention.

00:05:18.000 And I started watching the news and listening to podcasts.

00:05:22.000 And that's when I really started getting into politics.

00:05:27.000 And then, obviously, the election happened in 2020. And then I... Over COVID also, I think, is when TikTok got really popular because TikTok has really been around for years.

00:05:40.000 And it's only in the last, like, two, three years that we're really hearing about it.

00:05:44.000 And I think it's because everyone was stuck at home.

00:05:48.000 A lot of people lost their jobs.

00:05:49.000 I think people were looking for entertainment and then people discovered TikTok and it really got very popular then.

00:05:56.000 - You think COVID helped TikTok? - COVID definitely helped TikTok.

00:05:59.000 Maybe it's related to something in China, I don't know.

00:06:01.000 - Did you actually make your account then? - So I made it at the end of COVID.

00:06:05.000 - Okay, you did. - And so there's a few reasons why my account became so popular so fast.

00:06:13.000 It was the timing because like I said, TikTok was all of a sudden like everyone's like, what is this TikTok thing?

00:06:19.000 You know, all of a sudden there's TikToks being posted everywhere on Twitter and on Instagram and everyone's talking about TikTok.

00:06:25.000 And then there was also this other thing we were seeing where Parents all of a sudden were seeing what was going on in their kids classrooms right because their classrooms suddenly was in their dining room and parents are like looking at the teachers and the content and they were like what's going on here because there was a lot of really disturbing things yeah and I think people just weren't paying enough attention before so Then I started talking about the stuff going

00:06:56.000 on in the schools and the classrooms, and I think that really resonated with a lot of parents and a lot of people.

00:07:01.000 So the timing of Libs of TikTok's creation really could not have been more perfect, and I think that's part of its success.

00:07:11.000 So basically, I discovered TikTok, and I started seeing TikToks being shared on Twitter.

00:07:20.000 They would go viral, and I was like, what is TikTok?

00:07:23.000 So I started going on it and at first I was sharing a lot of the COVID-related videos.

00:07:30.000 Like what?

00:07:31.000 Like people singing, how excited they are to get vaccinated.

00:07:35.000 You know, literally while people are losing their jobs for refusing the vaccine, people like praising, like, you know, Lord Fauci.

00:07:42.000 They were like idolizing him.

00:07:44.000 So they would have like candles of Fauci and like cutouts in their homes.

00:07:49.000 Are you kidding me?

00:07:50.000 And like Fauci embroidered pillows.

00:07:52.000 It's a serious cult.

00:07:53.000 It was a Fauci cult.

00:07:55.000 I don't know if you remember.

00:07:56.000 People with embroidered pillows.

00:07:57.000 Yeah.

00:07:57.000 That's very funny.

00:07:58.000 Yeah.

00:07:58.000 I mean, that's next level.

00:08:00.000 There was one, someone named their pet dog.

00:08:03.000 Sounds like a nightmare.

00:08:04.000 Their pet, sorry, horse, Fauci.

00:08:06.000 Huh.

00:08:07.000 Yeah.

00:08:08.000 Was that horse one that like trampled on all of the other horses and like stampeded them to death or was it just like a normal innocent horse?

00:08:16.000 I wouldn't be surprised.

00:08:17.000 I wonder what the name is now after, you know, we're realizing that Fauci lied a lot.

00:08:24.000 Yeah, maybe they're locking up that horse.

00:08:26.000 They should be.

00:08:27.000 So anyway, so you basically were frustrated by a year of, maybe a couple years of being told to shut up, sit down, do as you're told, locked in your home.

00:08:40.000 You said you had a family?

00:08:42.000 Yeah.

00:08:42.000 A family?

00:08:42.000 You're married?

00:08:43.000 No, I'm not married.

00:08:44.000 I'm one of eight siblings.

00:08:46.000 So you were with your siblings and your parents during this period.

00:08:50.000 A couple of them, yeah.

00:08:51.000 And that frustrated the heck out of you.

00:08:53.000 And you decided you wanted to speak up.

00:08:55.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:08:56.000 Okay.

00:08:57.000 And so you opened up a TikTok account and started posting other people's videos.

00:09:01.000 Not even videos you made, necessarily.

00:09:03.000 Right.

00:09:03.000 And they just started taking off.

00:09:05.000 It started exploding.

00:09:07.000 I mean, it...

00:09:08.000 Why did you call it libs of TikTok?

00:09:10.000 I have no idea.

00:09:13.000 Literally, yeah.

00:09:14.000 It literally just came to me.

00:09:15.000 It's such a sticky and catchy name.

00:09:16.000 I know.

00:09:17.000 Sometimes.

00:09:17.000 So you just said Libs of TikTok.

00:09:19.000 It's just like...

00:09:19.000 Yeah.

00:09:20.000 It just came to me.

00:09:21.000 Because you know people talk about owning the Libs and other...

00:09:23.000 It wasn't even...

00:09:25.000 I mean, I was like, look, these are all Libs who are making these videos and they're kind of... 1.00

00:09:30.000 It's like videos on TikTok, so it's just like Libs of TikTok.

00:09:33.000 Okay.

00:09:33.000 And it was just so catchy.

00:09:35.000 So videos of liberals on TikTok was your whole account theme.

00:09:41.000 Yeah.

00:09:41.000 I didn't spend $10 million in brand marketing.

00:09:45.000 Nope.

00:09:46.000 Nothing.

00:09:46.000 No think tanks.

00:09:47.000 Just spur of the moment decision.

00:09:48.000 Libs of TikTok.

00:09:49.000 Okay.

00:09:50.000 And then these things just started taking off.

00:09:52.000 Yeah.

00:09:52.000 So I think it was very entertaining.

00:09:56.000 It was also very enlightening because I think a lot of people felt the same way I did.

00:10:01.000 And then they were able to really resonate with the content.

00:10:06.000 But what actually got Libs of TikTok known nationally was when I started posting the other types of content.

00:10:15.000 So I started veering away from the COVID stuff.

00:10:17.000 COVID was basically ending in a lot of states.

00:10:20.000 And I also was spending a lot of time on TikTok.

00:10:23.000 And I came across this whole cultural phenomenon of activists who are just...

00:10:33.000 LGBTQ activists, teachers, people in the medical industry, doctors, all these types of influencers.

00:10:41.000 And they were basically...

00:10:43.000 It appeared to me that they were pushing this sexualized agenda onto kids. 0.99

00:10:50.000 So I started sharing that type of content.

00:10:52.000 And that's when it really exploded.

00:10:56.000 And what about...

00:10:57.000 I mean, like...

00:10:57.000 You explained what sort of moved you.

00:11:00.000 It was very first personal...

00:11:02.000 On the COVID restrictions.

00:11:05.000 What gave you the motivation to then take this set of issues on?

00:11:11.000 I think it was just...

00:11:12.000 So I don't have any of my own kids yet.

00:11:15.000 And I also never went to public school.

00:11:17.000 So I think for me, it was just...

00:11:21.000 It was less personal and more just the shock factor.

00:11:25.000 And I'm like, how is all this happening?

00:11:28.000 And nobody's talking about it.

00:11:30.000 This was before...

00:11:31.000 We're going back two years.

00:11:33.000 So before everybody started tackling these issues, nobody's talking about it.

00:11:37.000 I'm like, do people even know this was happening?

00:11:39.000 I wonder...

00:11:41.000 If people are just unaware.

00:11:43.000 And I was like, this is absolutely insane.

00:11:48.000 This is crazy.

00:11:48.000 This is dangerous.

00:11:49.000 And I just knew that I had to start sharing it to show people.

00:11:53.000 And from what I've seen in our schools in terms of the sort of cultural indoctrination...

00:11:58.000 Yeah, there's a couple strands to it.

00:12:00.000 One are the vestiges of critical race theory, of being able to teach young kids that they're oppressed based on the color of their skin, based on their genetics.

00:12:12.000 That whole strand.

00:12:14.000 Then there's the version of that that bleeds over into some of those genetic factors are sexual in nature, you know, whether you're gay or not.

00:12:22.000 And then you go into the modern trans thing, which is a whole nother fixation altogether, that then just started getting into outright sexual content that they're foisting onto kids at an inappropriately young age. 0.96

00:12:33.000 Which of those were you kind of focused on the full spectrum or more on the LGBT stuff and less on the race stuff?

00:12:39.000 So it is more in the LGBTQ stuff, but it's everything.

00:12:44.000 So it's basically anything, any insane wokeness happening, not just in schools, but in hospitals, in institutions, in companies.

00:12:58.000 You know, anything that is basically affecting our culture that I think needs to be called out.

00:13:02.000 Yeah, and so that just started getting under your skin a little bit.

00:13:04.000 And again, you're posting just videos that are already out there.

00:13:08.000 So sort of like a news service in a certain way.

00:13:11.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:13:11.000 You became a news service.

00:13:13.000 Yeah, I view myself as a journalist.

00:13:14.000 And how did you get that content?

00:13:19.000 By...

00:13:20.000 Like, what was your sourcing mechanism?

00:13:21.000 Spending hours a day on TikTok.

00:13:23.000 Yourself?

00:13:23.000 Yes.

00:13:24.000 Good.

00:13:24.000 Yeah.

00:13:24.000 On TikTok.

00:13:25.000 On TikTok.

00:13:26.000 Yeah.

00:13:26.000 And so the content you're getting, is it generally other people who are similarly upset about it and putting it on TikTok?

00:13:33.000 Or was it in some cases people who are boasting about it and putting it on TikTok?

00:13:38.000 Mainly people boasting about it.

00:13:39.000 Mainly people boasting about it.

00:13:41.000 That's remarkable.

00:13:42.000 Because I think one of the things that I've noticed happening in this debate, and I think that's maybe what makes your case pretty interesting, like I kind of want to get into this, is The dynamic—and you might have seen this, right?

00:13:55.000 I'm more in the political world now than you are.

00:13:58.000 But the dynamic is if, you know, someone, broadly speaking, the right, is talking about critical race theory or, in a technical sense, the vestiges of critical race theory in schools or talking about the trans indoctrination in schools— I

00:14:29.000 instead of taking that concern seriously and saying this is crazy and we shouldn't be doing this is to say look at these crazy people on the right making up something that doesn't actually exist so we have a manufactured hysteria a manufactured outrage

00:14:46.000 that's the term they usually use a fake outrage manufactured outrage and then that becomes the whole msnbc talk track is don't talk about the underlying issue instead talk about how it's a projection of something artificial that's made up and so that's what i was asking you like if you're drawing mostly from videos of other people on the right who are outraged that still allows the msnbc cover to persist and

00:15:10.000 But if these are people boasting about or even highlighting the fact that this is indeed what we're doing, that completely undercuts that narrative.

00:15:19.000 Which is what probably caused you to take off, actually.

00:15:22.000 And that's why they hate me so much and try to do everything to silence me.

00:15:27.000 Really?

00:15:28.000 Yes.

00:15:29.000 So you start posting these videos.

00:15:31.000 Are you offering commentary with them or are you literally just putting them out?

00:15:34.000 No commentary usually.

00:15:36.000 If I do, it's very minimal.

00:15:38.000 I've seen your account pop up on television all the time.

00:15:42.000 I don't really watch much cable television, but I'm on it a lot.

00:15:44.000 And usually you go on 15 minutes early or 10 minutes early to sort of get your thing framed up, but you can hear and see what's going on.

00:15:51.000 And you were on TV all the time, right?

00:15:54.000 Certainly your account was.

00:15:56.000 And maybe it's because you weren't offering commentary.

00:15:59.000 It's just you're literally exposing what's already out there.

00:16:02.000 Yeah, it's pretty remarkable what could happen when you just shine a light on what other people are saying.

00:16:10.000 It's actually remarkably humble and effective.

00:16:13.000 Yeah.

00:16:14.000 How many followers do you have now?

00:16:15.000 Right now on Twitter, 2.4 million.

00:16:17.000 And what about on TikTok?

00:16:18.000 I don't have a TikTok account.

00:16:19.000 I was banned.

00:16:20.000 Oh, you're not on TikTok anymore.

00:16:22.000 So libs of TikTok is not on TikTok.

00:16:23.000 No, we were banned.

00:16:24.000 When?

00:16:25.000 A year and a half ago.

00:16:27.000 Oh, I didn't know that.

00:16:28.000 Yeah.

00:16:29.000 See, I thought TikTok was your big thing.

00:16:30.000 Oh, we were banned from everything.

00:16:31.000 You name it, we were banned.

00:16:32.000 Why?

00:16:34.000 Like I said- For just reporting what other people said?

00:16:35.000 Yeah, it's too effective.

00:16:37.000 It was way too effective for the left.

00:16:39.000 They couldn't handle it.

00:16:40.000 Unbelievable.

00:16:41.000 So, okay.

00:16:41.000 All right, we're getting ahead of- So you're posting this stuff.

00:16:44.000 Okay, you're just posting what other people said.

00:16:46.000 It's taking off.

00:16:47.000 So then what happens?

00:16:48.000 Keep walking me through this.

00:16:49.000 Right.

00:16:49.000 So like we were discussing before, one of the left playbook is to basically deny that any of this is happening.

00:16:57.000 Right.

00:16:57.000 It's not happening.

00:16:58.000 It's not happening.

00:16:58.000 There's no CRT in schools.

00:16:59.000 There's no gender ideology in schools. 1.00

00:17:01.000 Republicans are making it up.

00:17:02.000 You know, they like to say Republicans pounce.

00:17:04.000 False outrage.

00:17:05.000 We're the ones that have the issue here.

00:17:08.000 And then it's like, I'm coming with these videos and it's literally a teacher, for example, saying like, hi, I teach second grade and today I told my students that they could be transgender.

00:17:20.000 And it's like, how could you defend that?

00:17:23.000 And then how could you claim that this is not happening when I have absolute first-hand proof that it is?

00:17:29.000 So at first they would try to- Like, give me an example.

00:17:33.000 Like literally what I just said.

00:17:34.000 That's an actual example.

00:17:35.000 I probably have dozens of videos similar to that.

00:17:37.000 Dozens?

00:17:38.000 Dozens, yeah.

00:17:39.000 So this isn't some one fringe example somewhere that you're making up that you might have side paid them to do it so that you could have a story.

00:17:46.000 I mean, that's the left wing narrative.

00:17:48.000 So that's one of the accusations that the far left used to use for me.

00:17:51.000 They were like, oh, she's cherry picking or it's just fringe.

00:17:54.000 Manufacturing it.

00:17:55.000 Manufacturing.

00:17:55.000 But it's like, you can't say that if we're two years in to live to TikTok and every single day there is new content that aligns with that.

00:18:06.000 So how can you say that I'm cherry picking and it's fringe?

00:18:09.000 It's like, this is so common, much more common than anybody could ever believe.

00:18:14.000 So yeah, I mean, for example, there was a video that I posted about a teacher in California.

00:18:20.000 And it was sort of a conservative area.

00:18:24.000 And she basically was saying that her students, they were pledging allegiance.

00:18:30.000 And her students said, but there's no American flag here.

00:18:32.000 And she was laughing about how she hid the American flag because she didn't want it in her classroom.

00:18:37.000 And then she told them that they could actually pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag because that was hanging proudly in her classroom.

00:18:45.000 Unbelievable.

00:18:45.000 Insane.

00:18:46.000 When was this?

00:18:47.000 This was a little over a year ago.

00:18:49.000 And she was actually fired the next day.

00:18:53.000 The community came to the school and they put little American flags around the whole property of the school.

00:18:59.000 They stuck them in the grass.

00:19:01.000 So that was a really big story.

00:19:04.000 Obviously, it was good to see that the school took action.

00:19:08.000 But that's the type of thing.

00:19:10.000 And that wasn't a one-off.

00:19:11.000 There was another video I posted just a couple months ago of another teacher saying that she told her students to pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag.

00:19:19.000 So this is something that is not fringe.

00:19:23.000 It's not cherry-picked.

00:19:24.000 This is something that's happening in basically a majority of school districts across the country.

00:19:30.000 Unbelievable.

00:19:31.000 So...

00:19:33.000 Talk to me about what then happened.

00:19:35.000 How many followers did you have on TikTok then by that point?

00:19:39.000 They banned me after like three weeks.

00:19:41.000 So I had probably like 10,000 followers.

00:19:43.000 Oh, are you kidding me?

00:19:43.000 Yeah.

00:19:44.000 I'm like, they should be sending me texts.

00:19:46.000 So your videos are taking off.

00:19:48.000 Your videos are popping.

00:19:49.000 Yeah.

00:19:50.000 And so who made this decision?

00:19:52.000 So walk me through when the banning begins because the details around this I think are just so important.

00:19:57.000 Walk me through the specifics.

00:19:59.000 My first temporary Twitter suspension was a couple months after I opened my account.

00:20:07.000 It had nothing to do with any TikTok video.

00:20:12.000 It was something else that I reported where DuckDuckGo, which is an alternative to Google, was basically they rejected an applicant because he didn't fit their...

00:20:29.000 It was a while ago, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but that was my first temporary Twitter suspension.

00:20:36.000 And I remember I had probably 200,000 followers then, and I remember being terrified.

00:20:45.000 And I was like, I really don't want to lose my Twitter account.

00:20:48.000 And people were getting suspended left and right from Twitter.

00:20:51.000 It was every day another account was getting suspended from Twitter, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Facebook.

00:20:56.000 And then it was just temporary.

00:20:58.000 So I got my account back.

00:21:02.000 And then a couple months later came my next temporary Twitter suspension.

00:21:06.000 So in total, I got about seven or eight Twitter suspensions.

00:21:10.000 All of them for literally just stating facts.

00:21:14.000 Obviously not violating the rules, but it was just inconvenient.

00:21:17.000 And what did they cite was the reason?

00:21:19.000 A variety of things like posting private information, abuse and harassment, With no details?

00:21:35.000 No, no.

00:21:36.000 And you're literally just posting videos that other people had made.

00:21:41.000 It's interesting how the things that actually usually get censored aren't the myriad of things that are false.

00:21:46.000 They don't care about that.

00:21:47.000 No.

00:21:48.000 They care about censoring the truth.

00:21:51.000 Censorship almost isn't required for falsehood because most people are able to sort that out for themselves.

00:21:56.000 I think the fear isn't that people believe what's false.

00:21:59.000 It's that they might actually believe what's true.

00:22:02.000 They'll censor whatever is a threat to their agenda.

00:22:04.000 Yeah.

00:22:05.000 So what do you think that agenda is?

00:22:08.000 You know what?

00:22:09.000 I'll be honest.

00:22:11.000 I don't think they fully know.

00:22:13.000 I think I'm with you on that.

00:22:15.000 I think that they just envision some kind of society where everyone is just confused and it's just chaotic and there's a couple of people who are making all the decisions and running everything and everyone else is just kind of robotic and I don't think they actually have a plan for what comes after that if they achieve what they want.

00:22:39.000 I think it's an interesting observation, right?

00:22:41.000 Because if you think about, like, what is that agenda?

00:22:43.000 And it does seem kind of incoherent, because at least if you knew what the agenda was, but I think you're right.

00:22:48.000 I think it is actually disorder.

00:22:51.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:22:53.000 It's not that they're trying to enforce one orthodoxy.

00:22:56.000 I don't think they particularly care for the racial hierarchy any more than they do to the sexual indoctrination, any more than they do to the climate cult or religion, any more than they do about Ukraine.

00:23:08.000 Yeah.

00:23:09.000 It's just, broadly speaking, a form of chaos and disorder and And the proof is...

00:23:16.000 Is the goal.

00:23:17.000 The proof is that whenever one of these things that they claim to care so strongly about is inconvenient for them, they'll just give that up.

00:23:24.000 They'll sacrifice it.

00:23:25.000 So it's not about a specific...

00:23:27.000 Yep, yep, yep.

00:23:27.000 That's actually a pretty deep point.

00:23:30.000 Is their willingness to turn what was once a cause into a sacrificial lamb suggests that there's something deeper going on?

00:23:39.000 And what do you think drives that urge towards chaos?

00:23:42.000 Yeah.

00:23:43.000 That's a really good question.

00:23:45.000 What do you think?

00:23:50.000 So I think that actually that urge exists within each of us.

00:23:58.000 And I think in some ways the societal introspection is even easier than a deep individual introspection.

00:24:07.000 And I think there's a side to each of us That favors order, what is true, what is right.

00:24:14.000 And then there's an element of us, the fallen nature of man, that calls on us to suppress the better angels in our nature, to choke them to death with...

00:24:28.000 That element of us which has fallen.

00:24:31.000 The sin that resides, or the impulse towards sin that resides in each of our hearts.

00:24:37.000 And I think that there's a kind of spiritual warfare that is eternal.

00:24:43.000 And I think that by suppressing that reality in each of ourselves, or at least the willingness to introspect and engage with that...

00:24:52.000 When that becomes suppressed, it then finds its way out into the societal sphere where you have groups of people who allow that element, chaos, disorder, that which is wrong, to roam free over that which is right and true.

00:25:10.000 And so where does it come from?

00:25:13.000 I guess it is from the loss of Traditional religion, faith.

00:25:19.000 I was going to say God, yeah.

00:25:20.000 Yeah.

00:25:20.000 God, I mean, I think it's the loss of God.

00:25:23.000 I personally don't frame it that way because God is still there.

00:25:25.000 Belief in God, yeah.

00:25:27.000 I think it's probably pretty close to the target.

00:25:31.000 Yeah.

00:25:31.000 I will say that to me...

00:25:35.000 Are you religious?

00:25:36.000 Yeah, I am.

00:25:36.000 Okay, yeah.

00:25:37.000 A lot of times it feels like the people that are pushing this agenda, the teachers, the doctors, the psychologists, the activists...

00:25:46.000 It does feel like a lot of times they don't...

00:25:50.000 They're following a script.

00:25:52.000 And they don't even really know what they're doing.

00:25:54.000 They're just going through the motions.

00:25:55.000 They're going through the motions.

00:25:56.000 And they're just following what they're...

00:25:59.000 Like zombies, actually.

00:26:00.000 Exactly. 0.64

00:26:00.000 It kind of feels like they're brainwashed. 0.64

00:26:02.000 Well, they're sort of like zombies. 0.76

00:26:05.000 Yeah, they're like the, you know...

00:26:08.000 I mean, every sort of fictional epic drama has a version of this, you know, the Game of Thrones, the whites or whatever, the people who are just, you know, hollowed out husks, dead bodies walking around being guided by some sort of deeper force, causing them to be the instruments of whatever philosophy they're purveying, which isn't even a philosophy. 0.81

00:26:29.000 It's just a mechanism for implementing disorder.

00:26:32.000 Yeah.

00:26:34.000 And I think that that makes it easier to identify the cause, which is the fact that they're hollowed out husks.

00:26:40.000 The hollowness is the cause.

00:26:42.000 And I think that that's something I sometimes talk about in the campaign trail, is that we are so starved for purpose and meaning, that when we completely drain the lifeblood out of our core, Belief in God is high on that list, but even for those who don't believe in God, belief in nation, grounding in family.

00:27:06.000 Traditional values.

00:27:07.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:27:08.000 And we call them traditional values for a reason.

00:27:09.000 They're time-tested for a reason.

00:27:11.000 They work, right?

00:27:12.000 Or at least for most of human history, they have.

00:27:14.000 I mean, dating back to Aristotle, the family was the unit around which the state was then built.

00:27:18.000 Individual self-confidence is still part of the foundation that comes from the family.

00:27:22.000 When these things are gone, something is going to pray and fill that void.

00:27:28.000 Yeah.

00:27:28.000 And that's, you could view it in theology as, I mean, that's what Satan is all about.

00:27:35.000 But you could even view it in the context of modern cultural warfare.

00:27:40.000 If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in climate instead, right?

00:27:44.000 If you don't believe in the true equality of man, because we're equal in the eyes of God, made in the image of God, as we say in the tradition I was raised in, God resides in each If you stop, if you abandon these beliefs, then you start seeing one another as an inevitable and inextricable power relationships with one another based on our genetics and that life is nothing more than the aimless passage of time adjudicating these invisible power relationships.

00:28:10.000 It's going to have to be some other comprehensive worldview that fills the void when you actually lack the time-tested ones that are Served up to us by history, but that we reject.

00:28:21.000 And so I think that's what's mostly going on.

00:28:25.000 I cannot agree more.

00:28:25.000 I can't agree more.

00:28:25.000 And it does, you're right, it does feel like it's a spiritual warfare right now.

00:28:29.000 We're in a spiritual warfare.

00:28:31.000 It is.

00:28:31.000 And I don't think it's one that mostly politics is going to fix, actually.

00:28:37.000 No, and you know what?

00:28:39.000 I say this a lot.

00:28:40.000 I don't think most of what I talk about on my account is really it shouldn't be political.

00:28:46.000 Like I don't understand why it's a political idea to not chop off the breasts of young confused teenagers or even the whole thing with like Sound of Freedom and human trafficking and child sex trafficking. 0.64

00:29:00.000 It became so political and it's like this is All of this is stuff that a couple of years ago the entire country agreed on.

00:29:08.000 Like we all agree that it's bad to, like human trafficking is bad.

00:29:12.000 We all agree it's bad to chop off the body parts of young confused kids. 1.00

00:29:16.000 We all agree it's bad to give kids porn in school. 0.98

00:29:19.000 To bring kids to stripper shows. 1.00

00:29:21.000 These were all things that, as a society, we all agreed on.

00:29:24.000 And the left is really the ones that made it.

00:29:28.000 They're the ones that made it political.

00:29:29.000 And they kind of...

00:29:30.000 They made it. 1.00

00:29:32.000 They're a party platform that they promote bringing kids to stripper shows, giving kids porn in schools, teaching four-year-olds that they could be transgender and that they could chop their breasts off. 0.99

00:29:42.000 And it's really sad because it's really not political. 0.99

00:29:45.000 But it became that.

00:29:47.000 Yes.

00:29:48.000 And...

00:29:49.000 I think that there's a danger in that.

00:29:52.000 That might be another trap we're actually being led into.

00:29:58.000 That we need to be careful about on the right.

00:30:00.000 Because I think it has presented itself as a convenient opportunity for the Republican Party.

00:30:08.000 And I think what you have right now is a bunch of professional politicians seizing on that energy, but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against and using it to put their name on some bill that makes their way through a legislature or Congress or but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against

00:30:29.000 Without actually understanding the essence of what's going on, which then turns something that which should be unifying across purpose driven human beings to restore our sense of purpose to becoming some partisan struggle and tug of war.

00:30:45.000 I'm sure some people may, you know, further eyebrows hearing me say this because I'm a presidential candidate.

00:30:52.000 But actually, the way certainly I have aimed to talk about this issue transcends Republicans and Democrats and the partisan stuff.

00:30:59.000 That's about raising taxes and lowering taxes.

00:31:01.000 This is something deeper about answering the question of who we are as individuals and as a people.

00:31:07.000 And this is why I don't think these are issues that congressmen or senators or even governors are necessarily going to be well positioned to address.

00:31:18.000 But the president is a cultural symbol of this nation.

00:31:22.000 Right.

00:31:23.000 And I think the more important job of the next president is more than any policy, actually, is going to be to set a tone of national character of who we are as a people.

00:31:36.000 And that means something in a way that goes beyond any given law or executive order that we sign.

00:31:41.000 And so anyway, that's what calls me into this.

00:31:43.000 I don't think about this as actually a political journey.

00:31:46.000 Yeah, it's a cultural revival.

00:31:48.000 I see what you're saying and I agree.

00:31:52.000 And right now, the person occupying the Oval Office is someone who had a trans person come and shake their breasts in front of the White House at a Pride event.

00:32:05.000 Oh, really?

00:32:05.000 Yeah.

00:32:05.000 Who was this?

00:32:06.000 Oh, some random trans activist?

00:32:08.000 A trans activist.

00:32:09.000 It's the first, they celebrated the first woman who's an assistant secretary of one of the parts of the Navy.

00:32:15.000 Yeah.

00:32:16.000 Who is literally a man.

00:32:18.000 Rachel, yeah, now Rachel Levine.

00:32:22.000 It's interesting what that would say to a women's rights movement.

00:32:24.000 We're celebrating the first woman to occupy this post is actually a man.

00:32:28.000 The president also invited Dylan Mulvaney, who's the poster child for the trans agenda, which is very harmful to kids, to the White House. 0.99

00:32:35.000 And now Dylan is charging, I'm not kidding, you can't make this up, $40,000 to speak about women's empowerment.

00:32:45.000 Really?

00:32:46.000 It's beyond parody.

00:32:47.000 I bet you some people are.

00:32:48.000 Yeah.

00:32:48.000 Oh, of course.

00:32:49.000 I'm sure he's going to have a bunch of people lining up to pay him that.

00:32:52.000 So this man is speaking about women's empowerment by claiming to be a woman.

00:32:57.000 This man is the most expensive women's empowerment speaker in the United States.

00:33:00.000 That's really funny.

00:33:01.000 The most...

00:33:03.000 It's like almost like, yeah, I mean, that's like worse than Ibram Kendi, preaching about the need to fight discrimination with more discrimination.

00:33:10.000 This is, that's really, that's actually pretty remarkable.

00:33:13.000 So I agree that, that...

00:33:14.000 Shame on a culture that allows Dylan Mulvaney to get rich off that.

00:33:17.000 I mean, look, good for him.

00:33:19.000 If people are lining up to pay him $40,000, he's cashing in.

00:33:21.000 Yeah, this dude is a really pretty enterprising entrepreneur.

00:33:25.000 He should win the Young Male Entrepreneur of the Year.

00:33:28.000 Call it a farce on our culture.

00:33:29.000 Young Women's Entrepreneur of the Year.

00:33:31.000 So the socially accepted status of this individual is a man or a woman?

00:33:38.000 I've lost track.

00:33:39.000 So he's a male and now he identifies as a woman. 0.52

00:33:42.000 Okay, got it.

00:33:43.000 So, I mean, I think that they're, just going back to what you were saying before, I think that there are certain policy issues that are really harming kids and are very dangerous that legislators are doing something about and I think should be.

00:33:57.000 So I think that's where they fall into place in all this.

00:34:01.000 Like in Florida, DeSantis banned sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors.

00:34:07.000 Which I think is a good thing.

00:34:08.000 I think that's a good thing.

00:34:09.000 I think it's necessary.

00:34:11.000 I mean, it's obvious.

00:34:12.000 It's so obvious.

00:34:14.000 I'm pretty sure that state, like every other, doesn't allow you to get a tattoo before the age of 18. Because you don't want to make a body-altering change to a minor that the minor will later regret later in life.

00:34:26.000 And yet, it is barbaric to then allow those same minors to undergo genital mutilation and chemical castration that many of them do later regret later in life.

00:34:38.000 In a certain sense, Dylan Mulvaney, I don't know, but that just seems very cynical, or Leah Thomas, but many of these kids are obviously going through a mental health disorder.

00:34:49.000 100%.

00:34:50.000 And we are not helping them go through their mental health struggle by throwing kerosene on it and instead affirming their confusion.

00:34:58.000 I write a lot on my account and I write this and I'm not putting down anyone or demeaning anyone.

00:35:05.000 We have a serious mental health crisis in this country and not enough is being done about it.

00:35:13.000 What do you think is driving that?

00:35:14.000 It's probably the same void, huh?

00:35:15.000 It's the void.

00:35:16.000 It's the lack of belief in a higher purpose.

00:35:19.000 It is social media.

00:35:21.000 It is the way that this is being injected into every single aspect of our lives.

00:35:29.000 This gender ideology stuff that just confuses people. 0.91

00:35:33.000 It is not paying...

00:35:35.000 But the pre-existing condition there is...

00:35:38.000 Social media algorithms or gender ideology as a worldview that only works if you have a subject, a human being, who is susceptible to that trick.

00:35:50.000 Well, they target kids.

00:35:52.000 Yeah, for a reason.

00:35:53.000 And kids are susceptible.

00:35:54.000 Kids are sponges.

00:35:55.000 So they're susceptible to anything you tell them.

00:35:57.000 So what would you do about it?

00:36:00.000 That's a really good question.

00:36:01.000 I think we need to...

00:36:03.000 The goal should be to eradicate gender ideology from America. 0.99

00:36:08.000 Completely eradicated. 0.96

00:36:08.000 Not just in youth. 0.96

00:36:10.000 No, everywhere.

00:36:11.000 It is because it's all based on falsehoods.

00:36:15.000 And particularly for youth, it is so, so dangerous.

00:36:19.000 Let me ask you how you feel about this one.

00:36:23.000 To take that hard line as applied to youth.

00:36:28.000 And then not open ourselves up to sort of the rejection, because I'm a free speech absolutist, right?

00:36:34.000 I mean, the fact that your account is locked down is an affront to me.

00:36:39.000 The path to truth runs through free speech, period.

00:36:45.000 And so where I land on this is, Look, if you're an adult and you want to dress a certain way, regardless of your gender, I'm not going to stop you.

00:36:53.000 I still might think that you need help, mental help.

00:36:56.000 And as a fellow human being, I'll be compassionate in trying to lead you to that help.

00:37:01.000 But if you're 35 years old and want to dress how you want, I'm not going to stop you.

00:37:06.000 But don't...

00:37:07.000 For an iota of a second, think that you're going to voice that onto our kids or change our language or the way we have our customs of which bathrooms we use or how we play sports.

00:37:16.000 No, that is a tyranny of the minority.

00:37:18.000 That's kind of like where I land on it versus...

00:37:21.000 And I understand the intuition versus saying that we need to actually just eliminate...

00:37:28.000 That possibility of behavior altogether.

00:37:30.000 Eradicating gender ideology doesn't mean that we're going to tell adult men that it's illegal to dress up as a woman.

00:37:38.000 That's not what I mean.

00:37:39.000 I mean that eradicating it from our institutions.

00:37:42.000 As a dogma.

00:37:43.000 Exactly.

00:37:44.000 So removing it, it's in basically every school, every corporation, every Fortune 500 company.

00:37:50.000 It's in all the three-letter agencies.

00:37:52.000 I mean, the CDC gave guidance a few weeks ago on Chest feeding.

00:37:57.000 Like, this is coming from the top.

00:37:58.000 Well, that's one more reason we need to, I mean, the CDC is a joke.

00:38:02.000 And we have to shut it down.

00:38:03.000 It has no reason for existence.

00:38:05.000 That actually, that's actually another good point.

00:38:08.000 That example you just brought up about the CDC. We talk about the spiritual vacuum, and that's like at a deep individual level.

00:38:14.000 But part of the thing that I've noticed happens is when you have a bureaucracy that exists for an institution that has either lost its way or has no actual purpose for continued existence, this is one of the things that fills the void of the institution.

00:38:31.000 Take the U.S. military.

00:38:33.000 Where's wokeism in the military coming from?

00:38:35.000 My views is from our military taking on a bunch of other ill-defined causes, wars in Iraq to, you know, now in Ukraine, in my opinion, that they should not be engaged in.

00:38:46.000 When you lose your way, that's what creates the vacuum for some poison to fill the void.

00:38:51.000 And so the CDC... Or the US Department of Education.

00:38:55.000 These things have lost their purpose for existence if they ever had one.

00:38:59.000 And so they kind of make up new purposes instead by latching on to these ideologies.

00:39:03.000 And so in a certain sense, it is a void at the heart of an institution, just like it's a void at the heart of an individual.

00:39:09.000 I don't know what your perspective is on that.

00:39:11.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:39:13.000 I wonder what came first.

00:39:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:17.000 You know, that would be an interesting thing to dissect.

00:39:21.000 But it's, yeah, I mean, would you say that you want to, would you rebuild these institutions, like tear them down and rebuild them, or just do we not need them all together?

00:39:31.000 Well, I think the first step is tearing them down.

00:39:33.000 Tearing them down.

00:39:33.000 And so I believe in the model of the Phoenix, where the Phoenix will rise when it is necessary for it to rise.

00:39:39.000 And so I get specific about some of these things.

00:39:42.000 I mean, when I say shut down the FBI, that's not some sort of just slogan.

00:39:46.000 There's 35,000 employees.

00:39:48.000 Let's divide this up.

00:39:50.000 15,000 of them are agents on the front lines and or investigators on the front lines.

00:39:54.000 Fine.

00:39:55.000 20,000 of them are in back office functions doing more or less nothing, which then creates a vacuum for creating politicized policy agendas that they were never supposed to be coming up with in the first place.

00:40:07.000 Those 20,000 are going to have to go home and find honest work in the private sector.

00:40:10.000 The remaining 15,000, look, it's an agency whose culture is still built in the backdrop of J. Edgar Hoover's legacy.

00:40:17.000 It is literally the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that these people walk into.

00:40:21.000 I say let's put them into agencies that actually have much more specific purposes that haven't yet been politicized.

00:40:27.000 U.S. Marshals doing a good job with busting up child sex trafficking rigs, for example, much better than the FBI is.

00:40:34.000 DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency.

00:40:36.000 Financial Crimes Enforcement Network underneath the U.S. Treasury.

00:40:39.000 Specialization to look after bad white-collar financial crimes.

00:40:44.000 There, they're actually going to be more successful because they have more narrowly defined scopes and purposes.

00:40:48.000 And then we don't need the FBI at all.

00:40:49.000 So in my view, in that case, we'd shut it down and not bring it back.

00:40:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:40:53.000 And then if there's something wrong with that restructuring, fine.

00:40:56.000 It'll be narrowly purpose-tailored to bring back whatever's missing.

00:40:59.000 What about the Department of Education?

00:41:01.000 I'd say shut it down and don't bring it back because the federal government should not be involved in education.

00:41:05.000 There's a narrow sliver that's now come up with respect to at least supporting some kinds of workforce training.

00:41:11.000 You could debate the need for its existence, but that's not something that I'm going to be firmly on the cap of eradicating.

00:41:16.000 Move that to the Department of Labor, which is where it would more naturally sit anyway. 0.57

00:41:20.000 It's a labor participation training grant program.

00:41:24.000 But everything else done because they're using the federal money as a cudgel to get local schools to adopt ideologies that they would or should have never adopted in the first place.

00:41:37.000 I think about it.

00:41:54.000 Part of the problem is the Federal Reserve has too many purposes.

00:41:56.000 Balance inflation and unemployment, trying to hit two targets with one arrow, missing badly at both.

00:42:01.000 I say restore a single mandate.

00:42:04.000 Stabilize the U.S. dollar as a unit of measurement, period.

00:42:09.000 That's it.

00:42:10.000 Well, I don't need 23,000 employees, which is the number of employees who work there to do that.

00:42:15.000 I need, like, way less than 10% of that.

00:42:18.000 That's an over 90% headcount reduction in the existing institutions.

00:42:22.000 That's how we'll take care of that.

00:42:24.000 CDC should not exist right now.

00:42:26.000 They're redundant functions.

00:42:28.000 And then if we discover that there's some narrowly tailored need...

00:42:32.000 I think we've made a bad habit of creating permanent agencies that should have been task forces.

00:42:37.000 A task force has limited time to conduct its task and then it disbands.

00:42:42.000 That's what I would evaluate as the next step if it's necessary.

00:42:45.000 But in some cases, you've got to just be willing to take the risk, yes, that there will be some unintended consequences.

00:42:50.000 I'm honest about that.

00:42:52.000 But the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.

00:42:57.000 The benefits dramatically outweigh the risks.

00:43:00.000 And so we've got to have the courage to say that, yes, is somebody going to blame me if some one small tidbit goes wrong of some piece of research or a grant that somebody got that they didn't get and, you know, something fell through the clunkiness of how we were shutting it down?

00:43:13.000 Okay, that's going to happen.

00:43:14.000 Yeah.

00:43:14.000 But the status quo is really what's extreme, not the extreme of restoring what our founding fathers first envisioned 250 years ago.

00:43:22.000 So that's kind of how I look at it as a matter of philosophy.

00:43:24.000 Yes, I'm coming in to break glass.

00:43:26.000 That's part of the process.

00:43:27.000 And the way you fight the creation of institutionalized chaos is by using some form of entropy in our own favor to restore actual order in this country, in our government, in our culture, in our sense and conception of self.

00:43:44.000 That's how we revive our fortitude and our strength.

00:43:47.000 And then if we're missing some gaps along the way in a narrowly tailored way, we'll fill those gaps.

00:43:52.000 That's the way I look at it.

00:43:53.000 Do you think, a lot of times it seems to me that the left are so good at using power when they have it, and the right not as much?

00:44:04.000 Yes.

00:44:05.000 Yes.

00:44:05.000 So I think that that's obviously true.

00:44:09.000 Yeah.

00:44:10.000 But I think part of the reason why is the left is good at filling the void with their philosophy.

00:44:18.000 Okay.

00:44:20.000 So you have that spiritual void, that black hole.

00:44:23.000 The left gives young people something to latch onto.

00:44:27.000 Race, gender, sexuality, climate.

00:44:32.000 And the right, I think actually the deeper failure is stopping at just identifying all the things that are wrong with that vision.

00:44:42.000 There's an important role for that.

00:44:44.000 Frankly, you're one of the heroes in literally exposing those flaws.

00:44:49.000 But it is the job of other people, right?

00:44:52.000 Not journalists, but of, say, elected leaders or a president or a pastor or a parent to offer a different vision, an affirmative vision to say, okay, this is what we're running from.

00:45:10.000 But more importantly, this is what we're running to.

00:45:15.000 Individual.

00:45:17.000 Family.

00:45:18.000 Nation.

00:45:21.000 So now we actually have a competition.

00:45:24.000 Individual, family, nation, God versus race, gender, sexuality, and climate.

00:45:28.000 You pick.

00:45:29.000 And each of us has a side of our human nature, but I think the better angels of our nature will choose that which is right, that which is true.

00:45:36.000 But the job of leaders is at least to serve up the menu for individuals to have that choice and then to call on the better angels of their nature to select that which is true and right over that which is wrong and false.

00:45:48.000 And at least we as a conservative movement, you know, at least put myself in that bucket because that's what I'm in.

00:45:54.000 This journey is wearing the mantle of the Republican Party or whatever in this journey to be U.S. president.

00:45:59.000 That's where we've fallen short.

00:46:01.000 And I think it is lazy.

00:46:03.000 And I think it is inexcusable.

00:46:05.000 I agree that we have to offer an alternative.

00:46:08.000 And here's the thing.

00:46:09.000 The left is really good at marketing.

00:46:12.000 They really are.

00:46:13.000 They have these incredible slogans.

00:46:15.000 And then we have to come and fight those slogans with actual truth and facts and logic and common sense.

00:46:21.000 And for the average person who has that void, like we've been talking about, The left really, it does appeal to them because they make it sound really fluffy and really great.

00:46:32.000 And we need to do more to offer an alternative to choose from.

00:46:37.000 Instead of just always reacting to what the left is doing and sort of trying to counter that and explain it, we have to actually be proactive and offer them something else to choose from.

00:46:50.000 So I cannot agree more with you.

00:46:52.000 Yeah, and I think that that's hard.

00:46:53.000 Yes.

00:46:54.000 It's easier to sort of play defense.

00:46:57.000 It's hard to play offense, right?

00:47:00.000 And so I frame it slightly differently than many allies and colleagues on the right do, which is the use of power.

00:47:11.000 I think it's less...

00:47:13.000 That we need a more powerful hammer to play whack-a-mole, and more that whack-a-mole is the wrong game to play.

00:47:20.000 We should be playing the game of just saying that that's the wrong sport.

00:47:26.000 We're going over there.

00:47:28.000 Yeah.

00:47:29.000 That's what we're running to.

00:47:30.000 And I think that it's part of what pulled me into this race, actually.

00:47:34.000 I see a lot of other good people, good Republicans, good leaders, some of them are governors, etc.

00:47:38.000 Understanding how to play whack-a-mole and honing the toolkit to do it a little bit more effectively.

00:47:45.000 And then sometimes going, I wouldn't call it too far, but losing the plot a little bit.

00:47:52.000 Versus the real acknowledgement being this is the wrong game.

00:47:58.000 It's a method of short-term survival, but it's a short-run game and it's a losing game in the end because eventually there's going to be too much popping up, too many of the zombies, right?

00:48:09.000 It's like a video game, right?

00:48:11.000 You have the first two zombies you can take, but once you're flooded, it's game over.

00:48:16.000 We've got to be over there doing something very different, offering an alternative vision of the real kingdom.

00:48:22.000 And I don't see that in today's Republican Party.

00:48:28.000 I think the last U.S. president who probably came closest to doing it was Ronald Reagan.

00:48:34.000 He's not around anymore.

00:48:37.000 And I think that in some ways we were set up by the left to To actually make this the dynamic, right?

00:48:46.000 In a certain sense, if we're already playing that game, the left has already won.

00:48:50.000 And I don't think it has to be that way.

00:48:52.000 And I don't even view it—I try not to talk as much as I can between left and right or Republican versus Democrat, but between what are the shared values that ground us as Americans.

00:49:03.000 And I think that's something we've lost, but not permanently.

00:49:06.000 It doesn't have to be permanently so.

00:49:09.000 Let me ask you kind of a question on this.

00:49:13.000 You're 28. Yeah.

00:49:15.000 You're religious.

00:49:18.000 What does that entail?

00:49:19.000 What does that mean to you?

00:49:21.000 In terms of?

00:49:22.000 Yeah, like do you practice?

00:49:23.000 Do you go through?

00:49:24.000 Do you observe the Sabbath?

00:49:25.000 Yeah.

00:49:25.000 Okay.

00:49:26.000 So if you go on Lives of TikTok, you'll never see a post from Friday at sundown until Saturday night.

00:49:32.000 And why?

00:49:33.000 I keep the Sabbath.

00:49:34.000 And why do you keep the Sabbath?

00:49:36.000 Yeah.

00:49:38.000 Well, I... First of all, I was brought up that way.

00:49:41.000 Like, I was born into a religious family.

00:49:42.000 Good.

00:49:42.000 So, your family.

00:49:43.000 My family.

00:49:44.000 And your family is important to you.

00:49:45.000 Yes, very.

00:49:46.000 And the traditions your family gave you are important to you.

00:49:48.000 And I believe it.

00:49:49.000 You know, I believe in God.

00:49:50.000 I believe in the Torah.

00:49:51.000 I believe in God's commandments.

00:49:54.000 So, yeah.

00:49:56.000 So, part of the Sabbath is not using any, you know, electricity.

00:50:02.000 So, I won't be on my phone.

00:50:03.000 What do you think that that...

00:50:07.000 What do you think that commemorates?

00:50:08.000 What do you think is the origin of that?

00:50:15.000 You know, a lot of things in the Torah are There is no...

00:50:21.000 First of all...

00:50:22.000 It's a way of life.

00:50:23.000 It's a way of life.

00:50:24.000 And also, I need to give a disclaimer.

00:50:28.000 I happen to...

00:50:29.000 I am like a religious Jew, but I don't speak...

00:50:32.000 I'm not a spokesperson for the Jewish community.

00:50:35.000 It's part of who I am.

00:50:38.000 But to me, it's...

00:50:40.000 It's the values that I was brought up with, to believe in God, to act in this lifestyle.

00:50:51.000 And that is something that is very important to me.

00:50:54.000 And I think in some ways, the Because religious people, not just Jews, any religious person has that faith, I think that that will actually help a lot in fighting this... 0.80

00:51:17.000 Agenda that we're seeing from the left, like we were discussing the whole time.

00:51:21.000 It's from that void of lack of belief in God and a lack of feeling like there's a higher purpose.

00:51:30.000 So I feel very grateful to have grown up as a religious Jew and to obviously continue In that path.

00:51:41.000 And like I said, I never went to public school.

00:51:44.000 I went to Jewish private schools.

00:51:47.000 And I think that...

00:51:51.000 A lot of the stuff that we're seeing in public schools are not going to make it to the religious schools, you know, the Christian schools, Jewish schools, whatever schools, those private religious schools that people send their kids to because they have that belief in God and in their values and in their traditions and they stick by that.

00:52:14.000 So I'm very grateful and I'm going to raise my kids that way as well.

00:52:19.000 I feel like I'm kind of like...

00:52:21.000 I mean, one of the things I love about many practices in the Torah is that they're Some of them are just good ideas.

00:52:31.000 Imagine what you just described today in the modern world.

00:52:36.000 We live in a world of social media, eroding our social fabric, our own ability to think clearly on a day-to-day basis.

00:52:44.000 And what you just said is, I take one day a week, as somebody who's a social media influencer, journalist, etc., to say that one day a week, I'm not doing that.

00:52:55.000 You won't see posts.

00:52:56.000 That seems good.

00:52:57.000 Yeah.

00:52:58.000 People tell me all the time that they're so jealous of me.

00:53:00.000 And that, to me, strikes me as something that the people who were around when the stories of the Torah came to be, that's the spirit they probably appreciated in their moment of saying there's a day a week where we're just putting it all down.

00:53:16.000 Yeah.

00:53:17.000 It's family time.

00:53:18.000 Exactly.

00:53:19.000 It's family time.

00:53:19.000 It's time for God.

00:53:20.000 Yeah.

00:53:22.000 And it's a way of life, right?

00:53:24.000 In the modern day.

00:53:25.000 Maybe one that we would do better to all observe.

00:53:28.000 I will admit it's hard sometimes.

00:53:30.000 Yeah, that's part of the challenge though, right?

00:53:32.000 Sometimes I'm like, what's going on in the world?

00:53:34.000 Do you always abide by it?

00:53:36.000 What?

00:53:36.000 Do you always observe it without exception?

00:53:38.000 Yeah.

00:53:38.000 Okay.

00:53:39.000 It's hard, but you still stick to it.

00:53:40.000 Yeah.

00:53:41.000 And, yeah, I mean, so I was, as a side of this is neither here nor there, but I was actually part of the Jewish society at Yale when I was in Yale Law School.

00:53:50.000 I was recruited into it, even though I'm not Jewish.

00:53:53.000 Shabtai is what it's called.

00:53:55.000 But, you know, we would go to the Shabbat dinners on Friday night, and then I was almost envious of Saturdays being...

00:54:05.000 Now, in principle, I could have done it and practiced it myself, but I didn't because it wasn't tied to like a faith-based or family tradition.

00:54:13.000 And as you said, it's hard enough for you to do, but you're anchored based on a true family tradition and grounding that was passed on to you, not even just by your family, but by millennia of history.

00:54:26.000 And I was raised in a similar tradition where there's other things that ground me similarly as well.

00:54:31.000 But that's what we're missing.

00:54:34.000 And I do think that this is not a substitute for faith, but it can be a supplement, that we have certain traditions that ground us as Americans, that we had passed down to us maybe not for millennia.

00:54:49.000 But for a couple and a half centuries now, that we're enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and certain traditions we go through, that we pledge allegiance not to some trans flag, but to the United States of America.

00:55:02.000 And that's a tradition that we start our day in the schools by stating that pledge of allegiance to a nation that unites us across our superficial, skin-deep differences, shades of melanin and diversity.

00:55:12.000 That means something to me.

00:55:15.000 That that is true.

00:55:17.000 And I think that is something that it doesn't take—I mean, being a pastor or a rabbi or a priest, that's beyond my pay grade.

00:55:25.000 But that is something that a U.S. president can deliver or that a teacher in the public schools can deliver to say that that grounds us.

00:55:33.000 That is true, that I pledge allegiance to that flag, and that means something.

00:55:37.000 People made a sacrifice and spilled blood for the ideals enshrined in that flag.

00:55:42.000 And that's something that strikes me as easier, even, to bring back than the revival of a national religious awakening.

00:55:51.000 Yeah, and it's interesting because the American flag and what it symbolizes is something that also became really political, right?

00:56:03.000 I've posted so many different videos of people saying that they hate the American flag, the American flag stands for racism, The American flag.

00:56:13.000 There was a video of this mom, and she said that her son, who's a little kid, like a toddler, said something like, oh, hey mom, where did that Trump flag go?

00:56:25.000 And she was like, which flag are you talking about?

00:56:28.000 And he was like, oh, like that one.

00:56:30.000 And she picks up an American flag.

00:56:31.000 And she's like, oh, this one?

00:56:32.000 And she was like so proud of her son that he knew.

00:56:35.000 And it's like, it's weird because For us, it's kind of like a compliment.

00:56:41.000 Like, yes, I want to be known as the person who believes in what America was founded on and what America stands for.

00:56:50.000 But it feels like the left has actually made that political as well.

00:56:55.000 And, you know, every last year, I remember on the 4th of July, there was an MSNBC contributor who went on and said that she's seeing so many American flags and it's making her really uncomfortable.

00:57:08.000 Well, you know, what's interesting is, so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you began with your social media account being locked is that just story just reminded me of this is there's good evidence that actually many of the algorithms or third party monitors of inappropriate so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you Look at elements of the profile of the person who's posting that content, right?

00:57:33.000 So you would have been censored, and you were, you know this well, because you were libs of TikTok, that somebody else posting that same video in the first instance wouldn't, which means it's not just the content, they look at who the speaker is.

00:57:44.000 And this isn't done by a human being at scale, right?

00:57:47.000 This monitoring is done by algorithms, which is where they can shunt that accountability to say, oh no, it wasn't one human doing it, it was the algorithm.

00:57:53.000 Well, the algorithm is trained by the human beings who feed the algorithm what's good and bad.

00:58:00.000 People who have American flags in their profile are systematically more likely to be targeted as purveyors of hateful content than Or to show up even in the Twitter feed as show.

00:58:19.000 You have to hit show and extra show before these comments may contain offensive content.

00:58:25.000 Just in virtue of the American flag being in their profile.

00:58:31.000 So now it's not just individuals who are targeting people with American flags in the real world.

00:58:37.000 But to know that that itself has become a symbol of In the United States of America of subversion of the agenda in the United States of America.

00:58:50.000 Think about that, how far we've come.

00:58:52.000 It's worse than Orwellian.

00:58:53.000 It's worse than Orwellian.

00:58:57.000 50 years from now, we'll have a different word for it.

00:59:00.000 We won't call it Orwellian anymore.

00:59:02.000 We'd call it something else specific to modern America.

00:59:07.000 And that is where we are.

00:59:09.000 That's the moment we're living in.

00:59:12.000 I do think there's an optimistic silver lining to all of this, which is interesting to me, which is, what a moment to be alive, actually.

00:59:24.000 Imagine the people who were alive in 1775, right, on the eve of the American Revolution.

00:59:30.000 They had every reason to point to I feel like we live in a 1775 moment right now.

00:59:55.000 And it's a sort of awesome opportunity.

01:00:00.000 I think that there's going to be a massive cultural revolution sometime in the next few years.

01:00:07.000 I mean, there has to be, because I think that the path that we're on right now is really not sustainable for a...

01:00:13.000 Oh, it's not.

01:00:13.000 This story does not end well if we stay in the current track.

01:00:16.000 No.

01:00:16.000 So there is...

01:00:17.000 And I believe in America.

01:00:19.000 So I know we're going to succeed.

01:00:21.000 We're going to get through this.

01:00:22.000 So there is going to be some insane revolution sometime in the next few years.

01:00:29.000 And I'm ready.

01:00:31.000 And I'll do whatever I can to help.

01:00:35.000 And I think it's going to be really exciting.

01:00:37.000 I think it's exciting.

01:00:38.000 It is very exciting.

01:00:39.000 I think the possibilities are boundless for what we can achieve.

01:00:43.000 We should...

01:00:47.000 Find encouragement and inspiration in that.

01:00:50.000 I think that this is something, I'm saying this primarily, it makes some people uncomfortable when I say it, but there are other good people in the Republican Party or otherwise who want reform, who argue for incremental reform or that we need reform within the institutions we have.

01:01:05.000 And my question is, do you want reform or do you want revolution?

01:01:14.000 And I stand on the side of revolution right now, the American Revolution.

01:01:19.000 I stand on the side of 1776. I think that we have a chance to revive those ideals and what they actually mean today.

01:01:29.000 And I think that's exciting.

01:01:31.000 We don't have to even be angry about it.

01:01:33.000 I think we can be inspired by that.

01:01:36.000 We're fortunate to be born at such a moment as this in human history.

01:01:42.000 I think that 10 years ago, reform would have been great.

01:01:46.000 But right now, it's way too far gone to just reform things.

01:01:53.000 We need a revolution.

01:01:54.000 And we will have one.

01:01:56.000 Yeah.

01:01:56.000 We had one in 1776. I mean, what a time to be alive.

01:02:00.000 Really, right?

01:02:01.000 And so when we view it that way, wow, the possibilities right now abound.

01:02:08.000 They are endless.

01:02:09.000 And you and I have the unique gift to be put on this earth with a purpose to participate in whatever small way each of us does in that revolutionary revival.

01:02:25.000 Yeah, when people ask me about my account and how do I keep going when it gets really tough and even how it started and my journey, I always say I feel like God...

01:02:43.000 Gave me this platform for a reason and there is a purpose of me doing this.

01:02:49.000 And some days I don't even know what the answer is.

01:02:52.000 And then, you know, and I think it could change constantly.

01:02:56.000 So, you know, in some days I'm like, I know what my purpose is with this.

01:03:01.000 And some days it's more unclear.

01:03:03.000 And then I really believe that God put me in this position for a reason.

01:03:11.000 And I'm going to continue trying every day to find out What that reason is because it does keep changing and I'm going to do everything I can to help this movement and to take back our country and take back our culture.

01:03:34.000 You know, and I think that that's actually the way we've got to look at it.

01:03:37.000 Not because it's fake and, you know, it's like a self-help, self-motivator.

01:03:42.000 No.

01:03:44.000 But because it's true, actually, that we live in a time where electricity is in the air, okay?

01:03:55.000 And there's a lot of times where you can try to light a match and then it's just going to burn out.

01:04:02.000 We live in a moment where we light a match.

01:04:05.000 We set something into motion and That's far bigger than each of us alone.

01:04:11.000 There are rare times in history where that's the case.

01:04:14.000 I think we live in one of those moments now.

01:04:17.000 And so when I say it's a 1776 moment, I mean that in the best of ways, in the most hopeful of ways, that there's more to life than just the aimless passage of time through a day.

01:04:31.000 We are here for a purpose.

01:04:33.000 We are here now for a purpose.

01:04:35.000 That moment is ours to seize.

01:04:38.000 And right when we worry about, oh, the cultural degradation of our society, that it couldn't be any worse, we wake up and see, actually, this is our moment, right?

01:04:51.000 As George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams or Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin would have said it in 1775, and again in 1789 when they got together to frame the Constitution, this is one of those moments we have.

01:05:10.000 And they gave us a head start, right?

01:05:11.000 We have that to work with, to revive that.

01:05:14.000 And in certain sense, they had a head start.

01:05:17.000 It was built against the backdrop of a tradition that came before them.

01:05:20.000 And we live in one of those moments today.

01:05:21.000 And I think that people who really truly believe that with their entire heart and who are authentic about it, I think end up being so much more effective and powerful.

01:05:35.000 And I think you're a great example of that.

01:05:37.000 Yeah, thank you.

01:05:37.000 I mean, I think that this isn't about me.

01:05:40.000 This isn't about you.

01:05:41.000 It's not being done by us.

01:05:45.000 It's being done, I believe, through us.

01:05:47.000 Yeah, of course.

01:05:48.000 Let us be the vehicle for the plan that God has.

01:05:52.000 But I think God has a pretty exciting plan for us right now.

01:05:55.000 And it's up to us to be the instruments who execute that will.

01:06:01.000 And lucky us that we get to be here in a time where it happens.

01:06:05.000 I think it's going to happen very soon, actually.

01:06:09.000 I agree.

01:06:10.000 I don't think we're going to be waiting a long time.

01:06:11.000 Mm-hmm.

01:06:12.000 I think this is what 2024 might be about.

01:06:14.000 You know, I'm not attached to any particular result.

01:06:17.000 It's not about me.

01:06:19.000 But my heart, my instinct says this is coming very soon.

01:06:24.000 And I'm ready for the call.

01:06:25.000 And I think you are too.

01:06:27.000 I am definitely ready.

01:06:29.000 I've been ready.

01:06:30.000 Yeah.

01:06:31.000 Well, I think that Spread the word.

01:06:34.000 I will.

01:06:35.000 Every single day.

01:06:36.000 Because I think it's coming.

01:06:37.000 Good.

01:06:38.000 Well, I'm glad you're here, Kaya.

01:06:39.000 It's an honor.

01:06:41.000 I admire your courage.

01:06:44.000 I admire your ability to share in my optimism, in our optimism.

01:06:51.000 Notwithstanding what you've been through, you have every reason to be aggrieved.

01:06:55.000 But I think that we can marshal that grievance into what we will create.

01:07:00.000 I think that when you see how bad it is, like you and I, we both are like in the trenches of what's happening.

01:07:08.000 And when you just see like the sheer extent of it, there is no option to let the dark part of it bring you down.

01:07:21.000 Even when my account started off anonymous and then the Washington Post sent one of the reporters to dox me and they leaked my name.

01:07:30.000 That was the whole story.

01:07:32.000 I think that the purpose of that was to try to silence me and intimidate me.

01:07:41.000 That was obviously the greatest example, but there have been so many other things like all the death threats and people showing up to my house.

01:07:49.000 All of these things, I think, are designed to silence you and to shut you up and to bring you down and to destroy your morale.

01:08:00.000 And then for me, it was never even an option to give into that because there is just so much work to be done.

01:08:08.000 And every single day, I go into the trenches.

01:08:13.000 My location on Twitter, I set as the depths of hell.

01:08:16.000 That's what it is.

01:08:19.000 Where do they drop the pin exactly?

01:08:22.000 In the middle of San Francisco?

01:08:23.000 It might be San Francisco.

01:08:24.000 Inner city San Francisco, yeah.

01:08:27.000 That's really funny.

01:08:28.000 Yeah.

01:08:29.000 So it's like every single day I go into the depths of hell and I expose it and I educate people and I raise awareness about it.

01:08:36.000 And it's just so much worse out there than anyone even imagined because I can only post a certain amount of stuff.

01:08:44.000 I can't just be posting every single thing I see.

01:08:46.000 But There is so much more out there.

01:08:48.000 I'm barely even like covering a tiny percentage of it.

01:08:52.000 And it's like when you have that understanding and when you see it every day, there is no option to give up.

01:08:59.000 There is no option to give in to those dark forces.

01:09:02.000 Well, you are doing your part, Haya.

01:09:06.000 Exactly.

01:09:06.000 I appreciate you, and I have a feeling that we are going to be doing together what the likes of our forefathers did in 1776. It's coming soon.

01:09:19.000 I can't wait.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - September 19, 2023

"Libs of TikTok" & Vivek Ramaswamy | The TRUTH Podcast #38

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