Vivek and Ira talk with the President of the American Principles Project, Terry Schilling, about why the family is so important to a society and why it should be prioritized in order to maintain a solid foundation in the modern world. We talk about the importance of the family as a grounding institution, why it's important to our society, and why we should all work together to protect it. We also discuss the role of the nuclear family structure in our society and the role it plays in shaping our children's understanding of the world and how they should be shaped by the family structure. And we talk about why we need to revivify the family, not just as an institution, but as a way of keeping our society stable and stable in the face of economic and political chaos. It's a must listen for every conservative who wants to see the family restored in America. You won't want to miss this one! The Family Matters Podcast is produced and edited by Vaynerchuk@australianprinceproject.org. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise stated by our employees. If you have a dilemma you d like us to address, please reach out to us via our social media. We appreciate the support. Thank you so much for all the support we ve gotten so far this year, we really appreciate it. Thank you. -Vetchek@vivekandrews.org/thefamily v=a7Vyfjr/the_family_p&q&q=a&qid=8q&t=1&qref=3&qtr=3q&ref=the_t&q_t=3s&q Subscribe to the podcast and thank you for supporting the podcast! Subscribe? Vyndr & thank you, Vaynthek&qw=a=thefamily? Vayndr&qx&qt=the family Thankyou&qb=the-the-family_s=the&q? &q=3 You can also join us Thanks, Vyand=the Family Matters? The family matters! VYNN&q%3s=The Family matters And thank you to Vaynshiv&q]
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.
00:00:02.000We conservatives were pretty good at railing against big government and for good reasons.
00:00:28.000I think the government has proven to be disastrous in creating the conditions for our economic collapse in recent years, for cultural poison emerging in American life, and for even oppressing, and I will use that word, oppressing, borrowing the language of the other side, the will of everyday Americans in determining how we're governed.
00:00:50.000But I think one of the areas where we don't do well enough is by talking about what we do want to see in ordering our society if it's not going to be government.
00:01:01.000It's actually going to be the theme of the discussion today.
00:01:04.000We're going to talk on the podcast today with a very thoughtful guy about the best known governing institution to mankind.
00:01:54.000I think it's a big part of what we've lost.
00:01:55.000Part of the reason it feels like we're lost in the desert in America today is that we've not only lost our sense of nation, largely in this country, lost our ability to believe in God or do so without apology.
00:02:06.000We've also lost our sense that the family is itself a grounding institution, one that matters, one that is worth preserving, not just at the individual level, but at the level of our cultural fabric itself.
00:02:19.000That's what we're going to talk about today with a new friend of mine.
00:02:23.000It's the first time we're actually having a conversation, Terry Schilling, who is at the American Principles Project.
00:03:00.000The reason that the family is so important to a society is it's because it's the first place that an individual learns that there are things greater than themselves.
00:03:11.000The family is where you learn that there are rules, that there are routines, that there's a regiment, that there are other people in this world that exist that are impacted by your actions or your lack of action.
00:03:25.000So it's really the it's like the training grounds for building a community.
00:03:30.000And I think that the reason we see so much dysfunction across our society today is because we've had decades long of a regime of no fault divorce.
00:03:42.000And what that's essentially told these young children that they've witnessed and experienced themselves is that you can make a lifelong commitment to someone, you can promise them the world, and there's no consequence to you or your families from the government or any real penalties.
00:04:00.000For breaking that promise, for breaking that commitment.
00:04:06.000And there are historical examples in the Soviet Union when they attempted to abolish the family, where husbands would knock up their wives, leave them, and you would have whole cities being ransacked by orphans, criminal orphans who would rape and pillage and rob people.
00:04:25.000And, you know, you look at the scenes out of Chicago recently, and it's very obvious, like, what the cause is here.
00:04:31.000So, you know, that's as short as I can do it.
00:04:33.000It's a, you know, that's exactly why the family is so important.
00:04:40.000I mean, I know your organization has been vocal about standing up to the progressive or so-called progressive assault on the family as particularly the nuclear family as a unit that matters.
00:05:19.000Because I just do think we need to get to the bottom of that.
00:05:21.000If we're ever going to have hope of reviving family as an institution that matters in this country, not among Republicans, it's going to have to be in this country.
00:05:30.000If we actually drive the national revival that I think you and I care about, we have to first understand what's going on with the fundamentally anti-family agenda that we see in the country.
00:05:42.000So there are a couple things that I'll point to that's driving this anti-family movement and has been for decades.
00:05:47.000The first is the ideology of progressivism, which at its core, the reason it's called progressivism is because they seek to progress beyond all human limits and boundaries, right?
00:05:58.000So that's why they want to get rid of your border as a nation.
00:06:01.000They think that having a nation that you're attached to inhibits your true human freedom and flourishing.
00:06:08.000That's why they want to get rid of capital and property.
00:06:11.000It's also why they want to get rid of your family.
00:06:15.000These progressives have become so radicalized that they even want to progress beyond your own body and the constraints of your biological sex and reality.
00:06:27.000They see a future in which human beings are not inhibited by any rules, laws, institutions, communities, whatever.
00:06:35.000They want you to be free to come and go as you please without any obligation.
00:07:00.000But he told the story about how he had three other siblings, and the four of them were split across the country.
00:07:07.000And they had to put up with their parents in custody about it.
00:07:10.000Other people that have had really bad and harmful and disastrous experiences with their own families, so they don't want anything to do with it.
00:07:17.000And basically, if I can't have it, no one else can either.
00:07:20.000But then there are the revolutionaries and the people that want to actually destroy America and remake it in their image.
00:07:27.000And this is something that we've seen throughout history.
00:07:29.000Anytime a tyrant really wants to shake things up and take power over a nation, they have to destroy the family.
00:07:37.000And usually they'll start out with economic means, which is Basically how we did it in America was we created an economy where both parents had to work.
00:07:44.000So we got mom out of the house and the kids were just left to their own devices and dysfunction ensued with no-fault divorce and everything else.
00:09:22.000Betty Friedan, one of the second wave feminists in America, called the family the concentration camp for women in America.
00:09:29.000The American concentration camp is what she referred to the family as.
00:09:33.000So they all talk about the family as if it inhibits you.
00:09:36.000But really what the revolutionaries want is they want utter chaos and destruction.
00:09:41.000So 1926, this article comes out in the Atlantic talking about what the Soviets had done with marriage and how they were destroying it.
00:09:48.000And it got so bad that criminal orphans were ransacking towns because what would happen is men would, the quote they used was men would change wives with the seasons.
00:10:01.000But with the change of seasons, that's how frequently they were getting married.
00:10:03.000And so they would get their wives pregnant, abandon them, move on to the next one, and you were having orphan after orphan born all across the Soviet Union.
00:10:14.000And they were raping, murdering, committing vast amounts of crime.
00:10:18.000And the reporter in The Atlantic actually covered all of the chaos that was arising up in the Soviet Union.
00:10:26.000And what's really fascinating is it's a very similar divide.
00:10:31.000That we have here in America, where the elites of our nation are all totally crazy.
00:10:38.000They look at it as if it's an oppressive institution for white supremacy, whatever that means.
00:10:44.000And then it's the everyday common folk, the people that actually are in their communities and have to put up with these consequences and have to take care of these poor women that were abandoned and their children were Those were all the people that were urging them to revisit this and change that.
00:12:57.000So even the Soviet Union and the ideologues that were there saw the real-world consequences and then had to reverse course To the complete opposite degree, right?
00:13:07.000Where they're actually no longer denigrating marriage, denigrating the mother and the family.
00:13:15.000Now, things obviously weren't always great and they still made a lot of mistakes.
00:13:20.000They wouldn't let parents raise their children.
00:13:22.000For example, as soon as your kid was three, you had to go to a government-sponsored daycare.
00:13:28.000You couldn't even be watched by your grandparents.
00:13:30.000And so, look, they did a lot of anti-family stuff, but they ended up You know, honoring mothers as the greatest of all workers, essentially.
00:13:46.000And what about the role of the fathers there?
00:13:48.000You know, I would have to read more about that, but I know that they started to make changes in the marriage policies.
00:13:56.000They cut back on the dissolution process and made it more difficult.
00:14:01.000Much more difficult than a five-minute process.
00:14:04.000But, you know, they ended up realizing that fathers and mothers are both very important because at a minimum, you need new workers to replace the ones that are dying every day.
00:14:14.000And so at least from a logical and rational standpoint, they came down on trying to salvage things there.
00:14:23.000And what do you think is going on with fatherlessness in particular in America today?
00:14:28.000I mean, you think it's still that same trend of viewing the family as passe?
00:14:32.000Or do you think it's something else that's more specific?
00:14:35.000I read recently that 25% of kids now are born into fatherless homes in America.
00:14:55.000What we're ultimately seeing is that the people that would be getting married at early ages in their early to mid 20s, they're no longer getting married and having children anymore.
00:15:10.000I would be willing to bet that there are probably fewer children born today to fatherless homes than there were just a couple decades ago just because of how the numbers work out.
00:15:21.000But at the same time, we have eliminated the connection between sex and procreation, sex and marriage and marriage and children.
00:15:33.000And so all of these things are going to flow together and they're going to create a recipe for disaster.
00:15:39.000We now have people that I think something like 43% of Gen Zers I think it's actually millennials.
00:15:49.00043% have no intention of getting married.
00:15:59.000And life's a heck of a lot easier to go through with a dependable and loyal and loving spouse to share all those memories for it.
00:16:07.000I look at where we are in America today and the thing is, I go to work not to have a career that I can have on my tombstone.
00:16:16.000I go to work so I can go on vacation with my family so that I can have a dinner with them so we can go to the movies so we can create memories together.
00:16:24.000Family is the whole reason for life if you're secular, right?
00:16:29.000So these people are really missing out on the joys and humanity that you experience through the family, right?
00:16:36.000It's not just joy and happiness all the time.
00:16:39.000But sadness is a good thing because the only time you can be sad is when you lose something that you really valued, which that's a whole other topic.
00:16:48.000Yeah, it's like that movie, Inside Out.
00:16:51.000You ever watched that one with your kids?
00:16:54.000It's actually pretty good at making these movies that the parents can actually watch with their kids that both of them can enjoy at different levels.
00:17:02.000But it was about not suppressing that which is sad because I think you said it probably more elegantly than I've ever heard it is the source of sadness is almost always losing something.
00:17:17.000And at least you would rather have been in that state of having lost something you valued than to have never had what you valued at all.
00:17:26.000There's more to life than just the aimless passage of time.
00:17:29.000It sometimes feels like that way in modern America.
00:17:32.000We're like wandering through the minutes of a day, through the geographic spaces we inhabit without any grounding of purpose or meaning.
00:17:42.000And I do think that For most of human history, it's probably not that different today.
00:17:47.000Family can provide that sense of grounding.
00:17:50.000I guess part of what I observe is, and I know this is your purposeful focus as the family, I view it as part of a broader range of grounding institutions that we've lost.
00:18:06.000We've lost our sense that I'm a citizen of this nation.
00:18:09.000We've lost our sense that I am A child of God, right?
00:18:16.000We've lost the sense that I'm a member of this family.
00:18:19.000We've lost the sense of hard work, right?
00:18:23.000The idea that I can derive pride from working hard, putting my own effort, mixing my labor with that which is created to establish a sense of ownership and grounding.
00:18:34.000Those things have all disappeared at the same time.
00:18:36.000Now, of course, they're related to one another.
00:18:38.000I'm Like you, a believer in the fact that grounding in the family unit allows us to open ourselves up to the possibility of believing in a higher God, in seeing a greater sense of citizenship to a nation.
00:18:49.000It's, what did you say, training wheels for being part of a community?
00:18:56.000So, of course, there's deep connections.
00:18:58.000You mostly gain your work ethic as a kid from learning from your family.
00:19:03.000I mean, most parents train their kids to understand the values of work ethic.
00:19:08.000Certainly, that's what my parents taught me.
00:19:10.000But I guess a question that I have, I think maybe I'll be more expansive than you might be on this, which is Alright, fine.
00:19:21.000If you really want to live a single, unmarried, childless life...
00:19:29.000It's possible you could ground yourself if you double down as a person of faith, nonetheless, as somebody who wanted to serve our country, maybe you join the military, whatever it is that you do, that you work hard in that pursuit, you're proud of what you create in the world.
00:19:43.000But you can't lose all of them at the same time, right?
00:19:46.000So I kind of think like faith, family, patriotism, hard work.
00:20:28.000I mean, I know people are born into single parent households.
00:20:31.000Even one guy who ran away from home, who works for me now, who's built a great successful career through his own hard work and dedication.
00:20:40.000So I'm not going so far as to say it's the only path, but the thing that where I'm with you is When we know it's the best possible path, why would we want to go out of our way to eliminate that or make it more difficult for more people to realize even if there are exceptions that defy that general rule?
00:21:19.000is that when you get married, you're forced to grow up, right?
00:21:22.000It's the first time in your life where you have to actually care for another human being, where you love them so much and you try and provide for them and you compliment them.
00:21:33.000And then when you have kids, those kids end up just destroying and incinerating any bit of selfishness you have left in your body, right?
00:21:43.000You don't go out drinking every night because the hangover is a lot worse when you have screaming children in the morning waking you up on Saturday morning, right?
00:21:51.000Or, you know, whatever day of the week it is.
00:21:53.000It's a very effective and efficient way to get people to not be so self-obsessed, self-absorbed.
00:22:01.000And I look at the world we live in today and everyone, not everyone, but many people talk about themselves as if they're gods, right?
00:22:21.000There's this natural thing in the family where you get love returned just organically.
00:22:27.000And I get that there are some people that are raised in abusive situations or are...
00:22:34.000Don't have the most ideal or best family situation, but that's even more reason to recognize the importance of the family and the importance of having a healthy family as if you've had a bad experience with it.
00:23:04.000I may disagree with you or maybe frame it differently from you where selflessness is a hard thing to demand of a person or even expect and in some ways even to desire of a person.
00:23:20.000I think self-love is, sounds like a good thing to me, but in a certain way, you get there in a thin version of it by thinking that you are a man on an island and that self-love is a substitute for being part of something bigger than yourself, right? you get there in a thin version of it by
00:23:38.000Be it faith in God or a country or a family, when in fact, the path to self-love, like in the true sense of that word, is actually through experiencing and participating and providing the love of a family member, the respect that you give one another as co-equal citizens the respect that you give one another as co-equal citizens in a society.
00:23:58.000So I think that in some ways, we have a problem right now in our country, not of too much self-love.
00:24:08.000And I think that when you loathe yourself, actually, when you disguise it perhaps in the superficial veneer of self-love, this atomistic conception of the self.
00:24:19.000But actually, self-actualization, even in the self, I mean, that's a very selfish pursuit, not bad kind of selfish.
00:24:27.000It is centered on the self, the self-actualization.
00:24:30.000You know, those are words that I'm borrowing from what many sort of postmodern progressives would use as a substitute for religion.
00:24:37.000But it's just practically a lot easier to get there when you can experience the love and give the love as a family member to be able to actually discover your sense of self.
00:24:48.000It's like, you know, I don't know, I give this example at a church the other night when I was speaking, we were a 10-county bus tour in New Hampshire, but it's like you're a bat.
00:25:36.000And you don't love yourself when you're lost.
00:25:38.000You may begin to hate yourself or lose your sense of self.
00:25:41.000And so it's not Terry, for me at least, and we're allowed to have different angles on this.
00:25:46.000But for me, about actually even that selfish process of self-discovery is just that much easier when you're doing so from a fixed footing that you can jump higher if you're doing so from a stable foundation rather than from a foundation that's moving or non-existent that's kind of the way i look at it in ways that hopefully might be progress persuasive to some people who might think of themselves as progressive in that atomistic conception of the self
00:26:16.000It's easier for you if you're doing it from the standpoint of a nuclear family as a kid of two parents, as a parent of one of two who's raising kids.
00:26:27.000That's just kind of the way I look at it.
00:26:28.000I don't know if that little stream of consciousness made any sense to you or not, but as I was hearing you, that's kind of how I look at it differently.
00:26:52.000Is there more love in a relationship where both the individuals are infatuated with each other?
00:26:57.000Or is there more love in a marriage where the two spouses really don't get along and they find each other very annoying, but they stick together, they sacrifice for their children, they stay together for those kids and put together, put on a game fit.
00:27:11.000I think that there's probably more love in that second relationship than the one where it's super easy to get along.
00:27:17.000I think ultimately, like in my world anyway, Love means sacrifice.
00:27:25.000Sacrifice is how you prove that there is love there.
00:27:29.000And I think that's how I've experienced love is by witnessing my parents sacrificing for us.
00:27:37.000And what's really beautiful is a lot of times the love that you're shown as a kid, you don't even realize it's a sacrifice.
00:27:43.000Your parents do such a good job of hiding how badly they're struggling.
00:27:49.000There's that meme out there of the kid on the way to McDonald's, and he's got no clue about his family's financial situation, but he's just so pumped to be going to McDonald's with his mom.
00:28:01.000There's just something sacrificial in what love actually is built around, and I think that That's really the problem with a lot of Americans today is because they haven't witnessed their own parents sacrifice and because their parents, you know, refuse to sacrifice any further for their better, you know, for their, you know, the greater good of their families that they don't want to sacrifice for anyone else.
00:28:26.000And, you know, your parents really are in a Christian sense.
00:29:26.000Take, for example, the issue of abortion.
00:29:28.000And I've been talking more and more about this, even though it's not really one of our issue sets.
00:29:33.000But the left tells us nonstop, you owe it to complete strangers to pay for their college degree that they probably aren't even going to use or need for their next job.
00:30:00.000We, and you know why, uh, It's not that adoption costs too much or there's a backlog of baby orphans out there.
00:30:09.000It's because adoption is so much more difficult and self-sacrificing than abortion.
00:30:16.000You can get an abortion and no one will know.
00:30:19.000No one will know besides you and the doctor.
00:30:23.000Whereas if you go through with an adoption, lots of people, everyone in your family is going to know, unless you escape or something.
00:30:30.000But there's something we're missing that sacrificial nature that is a requirement for true love to exist.
00:30:39.000Yeah, you made me think a lot about this.
00:30:41.000I mean, I think that part of what we're missing even in our civic culture in this country is that idea – I sometimes talk about a civic duty, right?
00:30:49.000We've lost our sense that, okay, we get all these rights.
00:31:15.000You can make these sacrifices if you know what you're sacrificing for.
00:31:19.000I think that applies equally at the level of a family as it does in like a completely unrelated topic where this comes up or seemingly unrelated topic is a decoupling from China.
00:31:28.000I mean, that's a big economic objective and geopolitical objective, more geopolitical objective of mine as the next US president.
00:31:36.000But that's gonna require some short-term sacrifices, or at least it could.
00:31:40.000But again, we can make these sacrifices if we know what we're sacrificing for.
00:31:46.000But I think that we never built that muscle memory, especially in an environment where we don't grow up in a family.
00:31:52.000Terry, I have so many other questions for you.
00:31:53.000I mean, I think you and I kind of pick this conversation up in the future.
00:31:56.000I think we should talk about the tough cases of where, as a child, your child tells you that I am, you know, trans or you're born in a Christian family, but your child says I'm gay or whatever.
00:32:07.000How does the love of family manifest itself in situations where you also provide a guiding light to your kid that ground them in Their process of self-discovery when they may go awry, or maybe that is who they discover themselves to be, and then when they're grown up.
00:32:25.000And what do you do from your perspective as a Christian parent?
00:32:29.000I think some interesting questions there that we only got to the doorstep of.
00:32:34.000And maybe I'll just give you the final word in teasing maybe a future conversation that we have and what your reaction is to that and what your message would be to parents who embrace your pro-family message but may find that at odds with some of the quandaries that present themselves along the way.
00:32:53.000I think one of the things that I really love about the message that you're bringing to the American people with your campaign is that you are tying the fates of America and the family together.
00:33:23.000But at the same time, our government's doing a lot to hurt the family, to take away parental rights, to ruin the innocence of our children.
00:33:31.000And there's a lot they're not doing that they absolutely should be doing to protect our kids.
00:33:37.000Our government regulates the size of our toilets and how many gallons you can flush at a time.
00:33:41.000But they don't tell porn companies that they can't target our kids with advertising.
00:33:46.000They don't even force them to check the age of the viewers watching.
00:33:51.000But we do that with sports betting and all of that.
00:33:53.000So we have to get our priorities straight in America.
00:33:56.000And I think ultimately, we need to be a little bit more cynical in one aspect.
00:34:01.000We need to treat the family like a special interest group.
00:34:04.000We call APP. We started the big family, if you can see it.
00:34:51.000I'm grateful to people like you who are willing to utter four-letter words like God and family in a culture where, you know, that's become increasingly difficult and unpopular thing to do, and I'm doing my part to change that as well.
00:35:05.000Not all of it's going to be through policy.
00:35:07.000Some of it can be, exactly through what you mentioned.
00:35:09.000Some of it's just going to be through leaders having the courage to demonstrate that and not just preach about family values, but I hope whoever it is, me, if it's somebody else, let it be the same too.
00:35:19.000It's somebody in the White House who we can look up to and say that, look my son in the eye and say, I want you to grow up to be like him.
00:35:25.000And it's not just preaching about family values, but living it too and setting an example that That embodies the kinds of values that we say we stand for.
00:35:35.000And to the extent I'm successfully put in that position, I'll do my best, maybe even better than some in our movement, in actually grounding what we preach and align that with how we practice and live our own lives.
00:35:47.000I think that's the least we could ask of our leaders.