Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - May 10, 2023


The Assault on Family: How Society is Losing its Most Important Institution | The TRUTH Podcast #25

Topics
family worth preserving family's grounding institutions crucible of the family love and sacrifice in relationships sacrificial nature of love running for president
Hosted by
Vivek Ramaswamy
Mentioned
Terry Schilling Betty Friedan Gen Xers Aristotle
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Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

174.97

Word count

6,302

Sentence count

364

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:02.000 We conservatives were pretty good at railing against big government and for good reasons.
00:00:28.000 I 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.
00:00:50.000 But 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.
00:01:01.000 It's actually going to be the theme of the discussion today.
00:01:04.000 We're going to talk on the podcast today with a very thoughtful guy about the best known governing institution to mankind.
00:01:13.000 That is the family.
00:01:15.000 Aristotle actually believed that you could not actually be part of a broader polity if you were not first part of a household.
00:01:24.000 These are fundamental concepts.
00:01:26.000 I think there's something about human nature that says part of my identity, yes, is believing in a God, you may say.
00:01:33.000 Believing that you're a citizen of a nation.
00:01:35.000 I think these things are an important part of our American identity, about our individual identity, that we lack today.
00:01:42.000 But part of my identity is grounded in the fact that I am a member of this family, the two parents who brought me into this world.
00:01:50.000 That too is part of what grounds us.
00:01:54.000 I think it's a big part of what we've lost.
00:01:55.000 Part 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.
00:02:06.000 We'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.
00:02:19.000 That's what we're going to talk about today with a new friend of mine.
00:02:23.000 It's the first time we're actually having a conversation, Terry Schilling, who is at the American Principles Project.
00:02:29.000 He's the president there.
00:02:31.000 Terry, welcome to the podcast.
00:02:32.000 We only have a half hour together, so we like to just get right into it.
00:02:38.000 What is it that you think makes the family worth preserving as an institution from the standpoint of the country?
00:02:47.000 Why is this actually important?
00:02:50.000 Well, first, thanks so much for having me, Vivek.
00:02:52.000 I'm a huge fan of yours and I really love how forceful and direct you are with your message and that you're taking this whole country.
00:02:58.000 It's so needed right now.
00:03:00.000 The 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.
00:03:11.000 The 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.
00:03:25.000 So it's really the it's like the training grounds for building a community.
00:03:30.000 And 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.
00:03:42.000 And 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.
00:04:00.000 For breaking that promise, for breaking that commitment.
00:04:03.000 And it's led to total chaos.
00:04:06.000 And 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. 0.52
00:04:25.000 And, you know, you look at the scenes out of Chicago recently, and it's very obvious, like, what the cause is here.
00:04:31.000 So, you know, that's as short as I can do it.
00:04:33.000 It's a, you know, that's exactly why the family is so important.
00:04:38.000 And what do you think animates?
00:04:40.000 I 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.
00:04:56.000 Black Lives Matter, right?
00:04:58.000 Famously said that they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family structure.
00:05:01.000 I don't think that that's an objective you hear about much from even the modern left or Democrat Party.
00:05:07.000 But what do you think is animating that?
00:05:10.000 Like, if you put yourself in their shoes, right?
00:05:13.000 Not in the railing against them sense, but in the sense of understanding it.
00:05:17.000 What do you think is going on there?
00:05:19.000 Because I just do think we need to get to the bottom of that.
00:05:21.000 If 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.
00:05:30.000 If 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.
00:05:42.000 So there are a couple things that I'll point to that's driving this anti-family movement and has been for decades.
00:05:47.000 The 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?
00:05:58.000 So that's why they want to get rid of your border as a nation.
00:06:01.000 They think that having a nation that you're attached to inhibits your true human freedom and flourishing.
00:06:08.000 That's why they want to get rid of capital and property. 0.97
00:06:11.000 It's also why they want to get rid of your family.
00:06:15.000 These progressives have become so radicalized that they even want to progress beyond your own body and the constraints of your biological sex and reality.
00:06:27.000 They see a future in which human beings are not inhibited by any rules, laws, institutions, communities, whatever.
00:06:35.000 They want you to be free to come and go as you please without any obligation.
00:06:40.000 So that's first and foremost.
00:06:42.000 That's the ideology that's driving this. 0.99
00:06:45.000 But then there are, you know, the useful idiots, right, who really fundamentally misunderstand all of this. 1.00
00:06:51.000 They come from troubled families themselves. 1.00
00:06:55.000 I heard a story last night, and thank God this guy's not like this.
00:06:58.000 He went the right way.
00:07:00.000 But he told the story about how he had three other siblings, and the four of them were split across the country.
00:07:07.000 And they had to put up with their parents in custody about it.
00:07:10.000 Other 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.
00:07:17.000 And basically, if I can't have it, no one else can either.
00:07:20.000 But then there are the revolutionaries and the people that want to actually destroy America and remake it in their image.
00:07:27.000 And this is something that we've seen throughout history.
00:07:29.000 Anytime a tyrant really wants to shake things up and take power over a nation, they have to destroy the family.
00:07:37.000 And 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.
00:07:44.000 So 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.
00:07:53.000 So those are the three things.
00:07:55.000 It's the ideologues and the ideas driving it.
00:07:58.000 They really believe everything we're attached to is harmful. 1.00
00:08:01.000 There's the useful idiots that have come from their own terrible situations. 1.00
00:08:04.000 And then lastly, but most importantly, the guys that are funding all of this are the tyrants. 1.00
00:08:09.000 They're the ones that want to overthrow the United States government.
00:08:11.000 So, you know, let's talk about what some of those anti-family policies are.
00:08:20.000 Actually.
00:08:22.000 Whatever the genesis, I thought the revolutionaries was interesting.
00:08:27.000 Actually, if you could sort of address that too, is what are some of the examples of the revolutionaries to have an assault in the family?
00:08:34.000 What does that model look like by way of example?
00:08:37.000 I thought that'd be kind of interesting actually.
00:08:39.000 Well, the most recent non-American example is the Soviet Union.
00:08:43.000 In 1926, in the Atlantic, there was an article about the Soviet attempts to abolish the family in communist Russia.
00:08:54.000 What they did was they started off by making marriage a five-minute dissolution process.
00:09:01.000 It was no-fault divorce.
00:09:03.000 A husband or a wife could come into the constable, get their marriage dissolved, and be free to move on to whoever or whatever they want.
00:09:11.000 And what we saw there, and they use the same talking points.
00:09:15.000 Oh, marriage is an outdated institution. 0.98
00:09:18.000 Marriage shackles women. 1.00
00:09:22.000 Betty Friedan, one of the second wave feminists in America, called the family the concentration camp for women in America.
00:09:29.000 The American concentration camp is what she referred to the family as.
00:09:33.000 So they all talk about the family as if it inhibits you.
00:09:36.000 But really what the revolutionaries want is they want utter chaos and destruction.
00:09:41.000 So 1926, this article comes out in the Atlantic talking about what the Soviets had done with marriage and how they were destroying it.
00:09:48.000 And 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.
00:10:01.000 But with the change of seasons, that's how frequently they were getting married.
00:10:03.000 And 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. 0.85
00:10:14.000 And they were raping, murdering, committing vast amounts of crime.
00:10:18.000 And the reporter in The Atlantic actually covered all of the chaos that was arising up in the Soviet Union.
00:10:26.000 And what's really fascinating is it's a very similar divide. 0.95
00:10:31.000 That we have here in America, where the elites of our nation are all totally crazy. 0.95
00:10:37.000 They want to destroy the family. 0.97
00:10:38.000 They look at it as if it's an oppressive institution for white supremacy, whatever that means.
00:10:44.000 And 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.
00:11:00.000 So that's the most recent example.
00:11:01.000 But you go back throughout history.
00:11:03.000 I mean, it happened in medieval France.
00:11:05.000 It happened in the French Revolution.
00:11:08.000 Anytime someone wants to go in and shake up a country, they always turn the children against the families and the parents.
00:11:15.000 I'm sorry, in communist China, they turn the students against their parents.
00:11:19.000 It was a student-led movement.
00:11:21.000 revolution by young people.
00:11:23.000 And they literally just discarded a lot of their relatives and their own family.
00:11:28.000 So they want to divide us father against son, mother against daughter.
00:11:35.000 If you can't have a stable, intact family, how are you going to keep a country together?
00:11:40.000 When the family's in dysfunction and disarray, your nation's going to be in dysfunction and disarray because we're related by blood.
00:11:46.000 We were all created through a loving act between two people who are madly in love with each other.
00:11:53.000 And if that doesn't work out, then how is a nation going to stay together?
00:11:58.000 I mean, do you think the Soviet Union understood – I mean, this was in 1926, you said, right, when they passed that law?
00:12:04.000 Yeah, it was 1926. Do you think – I mean, that was when they loosened the path to divorce, which then created easy opt-outs for men.
00:12:12.000 That's your whole point, was then created this culture of criminal orphans, as you put it.
00:12:18.000 Did they do something to stop that?
00:12:20.000 Because that was still a long time before the fall of the Soviet Union.
00:12:24.000 I'm just really curious on the history, or you've piqued my curiosity.
00:12:28.000 Yeah, no, it's actually fascinating.
00:12:30.000 So things got so bad in the Soviet Union with the family situation and with mothers that they actually ended up elevating mothers. 0.96
00:12:40.000 They would honor mothers as like, I forget the exact Russian term they used, but it was the equivalent of like, The worker of all workers.
00:12:49.000 They ended up having to reverse course because they weren't producing enough workers.
00:12:53.000 They were having too much crime.
00:12:55.000 They had too much instability.
00:12:57.000 So 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?
00:13:07.000 Where they're actually no longer denigrating marriage, denigrating the mother and the family.
00:13:12.000 They're actually venerating mothers, right?
00:13:14.000 And honoring them.
00:13:15.000 Now, things obviously weren't always great and they still made a lot of mistakes.
00:13:20.000 They wouldn't let parents raise their children. 0.97
00:13:22.000 For example, as soon as your kid was three, you had to go to a government-sponsored daycare.
00:13:28.000 You couldn't even be watched by your grandparents.
00:13:30.000 And 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.
00:13:38.000 And it was a big deal.
00:13:40.000 So that was, you think, a reaction to their failures?
00:13:44.000 Yes, exactly.
00:13:46.000 And what about the role of the fathers there?
00:13:48.000 You know, I would have to read more about that, but I know that they started to make changes in the marriage policies.
00:13:56.000 They cut back on the dissolution process and made it more difficult.
00:14:01.000 Much more difficult than a five-minute process.
00:14:04.000 But, 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.
00:14:14.000 And so at least from a logical and rational standpoint, they came down on trying to salvage things there.
00:14:23.000 And what do you think is going on with fatherlessness in particular in America today?
00:14:28.000 I mean, you think it's still that same trend of viewing the family as passe?
00:14:32.000 Or do you think it's something else that's more specific?
00:14:35.000 I read recently that 25% of kids now are born into fatherless homes in America.
00:14:39.000 What the heck is going on there?
00:14:42.000 Well, I think what's really happening is the amount of children being born every year is actually at an all-time low.
00:14:49.000 The birth rate per woman is through the floor. 1.00
00:14:53.000 It's not even at replacement levels.
00:14:55.000 What 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.
00:15:05.000 They're putting it off.
00:15:06.000 They're prolonging it even more.
00:15:08.000 So it's a little bit misleading.
00:15:10.000 I 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.
00:15:21.000 But at the same time, we have eliminated the connection between sex and procreation, sex and marriage and marriage and children.
00:15:33.000 And so all of these things are going to flow together and they're going to create a recipe for disaster.
00:15:39.000 We now have people that I think something like 43% of Gen Zers I think it's actually millennials.
00:15:49.000 43% have no intention of getting married.
00:15:52.000 They've given up.
00:15:53.000 They don't even want it, which is crazy, right?
00:15:55.000 Because no man's an island.
00:15:57.000 We all need each other.
00:15:59.000 And 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.
00:16:07.000 I 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.
00:16:16.000 I 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.
00:16:24.000 Family is the whole reason for life if you're secular, right?
00:16:29.000 So these people are really missing out on the joys and humanity that you experience through the family, right?
00:16:36.000 It's not just joy and happiness all the time.
00:16:38.000 Sometimes it's sadness.
00:16:39.000 But 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.
00:16:48.000 Yeah, it's like that movie, Inside Out.
00:16:51.000 You ever watched that one with your kids?
00:16:53.000 Yeah, of course.
00:16:54.000 It'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.
00:17:02.000 But 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.
00:17:14.000 That you valued.
00:17:17.000 And 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.
00:17:26.000 There's more to life than just the aimless passage of time.
00:17:29.000 It sometimes feels like that way in modern America.
00:17:32.000 We're like wandering through the minutes of a day, through the geographic spaces we inhabit without any grounding of purpose or meaning.
00:17:42.000 And I do think that For most of human history, it's probably not that different today.
00:17:47.000 Family can provide that sense of grounding.
00:17:50.000 I 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.
00:18:06.000 We've lost our sense that I'm a citizen of this nation.
00:18:09.000 We've lost our sense that I am A child of God, right?
00:18:15.000 I believe in God.
00:18:16.000 We've lost the sense that I'm a member of this family.
00:18:19.000 We've lost the sense of hard work, right?
00:18:23.000 The 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.
00:18:34.000 Those things have all disappeared at the same time.
00:18:36.000 Now, of course, they're related to one another.
00:18:38.000 I'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.
00:18:49.000 It's, what did you say, training wheels for being part of a community?
00:18:52.000 I quite like that.
00:18:56.000 So, of course, there's deep connections.
00:18:58.000 You mostly gain your work ethic as a kid from learning from your family.
00:19:03.000 I mean, most parents train their kids to understand the values of work ethic.
00:19:08.000 Certainly, that's what my parents taught me.
00:19:10.000 But 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.
00:19:21.000 If you really want to live a single, unmarried, childless life...
00:19:29.000 It'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.
00:19:43.000 But you can't lose all of them at the same time, right?
00:19:46.000 So I kind of think like faith, family, patriotism, hard work.
00:19:52.000 Pick two, at least.
00:19:54.000 We're in a moment where you pick zero.
00:19:56.000 The irony is once you pick one of them, it becomes easier to pick the others as well.
00:20:01.000 But we probably both know great people who have found purpose and meaning in their life without family.
00:20:06.000 I don't think we have to say the strong form that this is the only path.
00:20:10.000 But at a societal level, it's the best path known to mankind to fill our need for purpose and grounding.
00:20:17.000 And so why would we want to create societal disincentives or an assault on that institution even if it is not possible?
00:20:24.000 The stronger form of the claim is that it's the only path.
00:20:27.000 I stop shy of that.
00:20:28.000 I mean, I know people are born into single parent households.
00:20:31.000 Even 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.
00:20:40.000 So 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?
00:20:55.000 That's kind of where I'm at on it.
00:20:57.000 No, I think that's exactly right.
00:20:59.000 It's not the only path.
00:21:00.000 It's not even the easiest path, but it's the most efficient path.
00:21:04.000 Right.
00:21:04.000 It's very practical, actually.
00:21:06.000 Yeah, you're right.
00:21:06.000 It's very practical.
00:21:08.000 That's exactly right.
00:21:09.000 Our chairman, Sean Feiler, refers to it as the crucible of the family.
00:21:17.000 And what he means by that...
00:21:19.000 is that when you get married, you're forced to grow up, right?
00:21:22.000 It'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.
00:21:33.000 And then when you have kids, those kids end up just destroying and incinerating any bit of selfishness you have left in your body, right?
00:21:43.000 You 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?
00:21:51.000 Or, you know, whatever day of the week it is.
00:21:53.000 It's a very effective and efficient way to get people to not be so self-obsessed, self-absorbed.
00:22:01.000 And 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?
00:22:10.000 There's this new fad of self-love.
00:22:13.000 What is that?
00:22:14.000 I'm not concerned.
00:22:15.000 I'm so focused on loving my children and making sure they have what they want.
00:22:19.000 I don't have time for myself.
00:22:21.000 But guess what?
00:22:21.000 There's this natural thing in the family where you get love returned just organically.
00:22:27.000 And I get that there are some people that are raised in abusive situations or are...
00:22:34.000 Don'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.
00:22:45.000 So it's just such...
00:22:47.000 It's a natural and organic way to create selfless citizens who know how to participate in a community and in a larger part of society.
00:23:01.000 It's interesting.
00:23:01.000 You're making me think.
00:23:02.000 I mean...
00:23:04.000 I 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.
00:23:20.000 I 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
00:23:38.000 Be 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.
00:23:58.000 So I think that in some ways, we have a problem right now in our country, not of too much self-love.
00:24:06.000 But too much self-loathing.
00:24:08.000 And 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.
00:24:19.000 But actually, self-actualization, even in the self, I mean, that's a very selfish pursuit, not bad kind of selfish.
00:24:27.000 It is centered on the self, the self-actualization.
00:24:30.000 You know, those are words that I'm borrowing from what many sort of postmodern progressives would use as a substitute for religion.
00:24:37.000 But 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.
00:24:48.000 It'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.
00:24:57.000 It's like we're all bats.
00:24:59.000 Lost in some cave.
00:25:01.000 And we want to find our sense of self.
00:25:04.000 Where am I in that cave?
00:25:05.000 Like, not because I care about selfless or anybody's.
00:25:07.000 I want to know where I am.
00:25:09.000 But the way you do it when you're blind is you send out a sonar signal.
00:25:13.000 And then it bounces off something that is fixed.
00:25:17.000 Something that is true.
00:25:19.000 Family is one of those things.
00:25:20.000 I think God is one of those things.
00:25:23.000 The nation of which I'm a citizen is one of those things.
00:25:26.000 The things I create in the world through my efforts and hard work is one of those things.
00:25:30.000 But today it feels like we send out those signals and then nothing comes back.
00:25:35.000 And so we're lost.
00:25:36.000 And you don't love yourself when you're lost.
00:25:38.000 You may begin to hate yourself or lose your sense of self.
00:25:41.000 And so it's not Terry, for me at least, and we're allowed to have different angles on this.
00:25:46.000 But 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
00:26:16.000 It'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.
00:26:27.000 I don't know.
00:26:27.000 That's just kind of the way I look at it.
00:26:28.000 I 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.
00:26:35.000 No, it definitely makes sense.
00:26:38.000 I think that, ultimately, we're redefining words every day now.
00:26:42.000 Yeah.
00:26:42.000 And I think we've lost all sense of what the meaning of the word love is.
00:26:48.000 Right?
00:26:48.000 Like, is there more?
00:26:50.000 This is just a hypothetical.
00:26:51.000 I mean...
00:26:52.000 Is there more love in a relationship where both the individuals are infatuated with each other?
00:26:57.000 Or 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.
00:27:11.000 I think that there's probably more love in that second relationship than the one where it's super easy to get along.
00:27:17.000 I think ultimately, like in my world anyway, Love means sacrifice.
00:27:25.000 Sacrifice is how you prove that there is love there.
00:27:29.000 And I think that's how I've experienced love is by witnessing my parents sacrificing for us.
00:27:37.000 And 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.
00:27:43.000 Your parents do such a good job of hiding how badly they're struggling.
00:27:49.000 There'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.
00:28:01.000 There'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.
00:28:26.000 And, you know, your parents really are in a Christian sense.
00:28:30.000 I know this is secular.
00:28:31.000 We're talking about, but in a Christian sense, it can be religious.
00:28:35.000 Oh, No, that's great.
00:28:36.000 So your father is an example of God to you, right?
00:28:43.000 Like he's not God, but it's a few steps away from how God the Father acts.
00:28:49.000 And there's a lot of correlation.
00:28:51.000 And if you believe in all this stuff, the thing is the family represents the Trinity.
00:28:58.000 A love between two individuals is so great that it creates a new life.
00:29:05.000 And you have that with the Father, the Son, and their love for each other that creates the Holy Spirit.
00:29:09.000 So, I don't know.
00:29:10.000 I think there's just something really sacrificial at the heart of what true love is all about, or at least a willingness to sacrifice.
00:29:18.000 And I think we've lost that sacrificial nature that we've had as a nation.
00:29:23.000 I mean, we've sacrificed a lot for...
00:29:26.000 Take, for example, the issue of abortion.
00:29:28.000 And I've been talking more and more about this, even though it's not really one of our issue sets.
00:29:33.000 But 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.
00:29:44.000 Uh, you owe them a college degree.
00:29:46.000 You have to pay for their tuition.
00:29:47.000 You have to pay for their housing, their clothing, their shelter, everything for complete strangers.
00:29:52.000 But mothers and fathers don't owe their own children nine months in the womb.
00:29:58.000 Uh, you know, we discard things.
00:30:00.000 We, and you know why, uh, It's not that adoption costs too much or there's a backlog of baby orphans out there.
00:30:09.000 It's because adoption is so much more difficult and self-sacrificing than abortion.
00:30:16.000 You can get an abortion and no one will know. 1.00
00:30:19.000 No one will know besides you and the doctor.
00:30:23.000 Whereas if you go through with an adoption, lots of people, everyone in your family is going to know, unless you escape or something.
00:30:30.000 But there's something we're missing that sacrificial nature that is a requirement for true love to exist.
00:30:39.000 Yeah, you made me think a lot about this.
00:30:41.000 I 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?
00:30:49.000 We've lost our sense that, okay, we get all these rights.
00:30:52.000 We get all these privileges.
00:30:54.000 I get to vote and cast a ballot box.
00:30:56.000 But what about the duty that goes along with that?
00:30:58.000 I think family is the training wheel of actually understanding what it means to make a sacrifice.
00:31:04.000 And you know what?
00:31:05.000 You can make – what my parents taught me, you can make a sacrifice.
00:31:09.000 I mean, entering a marriage is a sacrifice.
00:31:11.000 You're giving something up.
00:31:12.000 Having children is a sacrifice.
00:31:13.000 You're giving something up.
00:31:15.000 You can make these sacrifices if you know what you're sacrificing for.
00:31:19.000 I 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.
00:31:28.000 I mean, that's a big economic objective and geopolitical objective, more geopolitical objective of mine as the next US president.
00:31:36.000 But that's gonna require some short-term sacrifices, or at least it could.
00:31:40.000 But again, we can make these sacrifices if we know what we're sacrificing for.
00:31:44.000 There is this thing we call America.
00:31:46.000 But I think that we never built that muscle memory, especially in an environment where we don't grow up in a family.
00:31:52.000 Terry, I have so many other questions for you.
00:31:53.000 I mean, I think you and I kind of pick this conversation up in the future.
00:31:56.000 I 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.
00:32:07.000 How 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.
00:32:25.000 And what do you do from your perspective as a Christian parent?
00:32:29.000 I think some interesting questions there that we only got to the doorstep of.
00:32:34.000 And 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.
00:32:53.000 I 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.
00:33:02.000 You don't separate those two.
00:33:04.000 And there is no strong America without strong families, and there's no strong families without a strong America.
00:33:09.000 Their fates are intrinsically tied.
00:33:12.000 And I would just urge, because we're conservative, we're right of center, we're skeptical of the government.
00:33:21.000 And I share that skepticism.
00:33:23.000 But 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.
00:33:31.000 And there's a lot they're not doing that they absolutely should be doing to protect our kids.
00:33:37.000 Our government regulates the size of our toilets and how many gallons you can flush at a time.
00:33:41.000 But they don't tell porn companies that they can't target our kids with advertising.
00:33:46.000 They don't even force them to check the age of the viewers watching.
00:33:51.000 But we do that with sports betting and all of that.
00:33:53.000 So we have to get our priorities straight in America.
00:33:56.000 And I think ultimately, we need to be a little bit more cynical in one aspect.
00:34:01.000 We need to treat the family like a special interest group.
00:34:04.000 We call APP. We started the big family, if you can see it.
00:34:08.000 But it's called the big family.
00:34:09.000 There's big pharma, big oil, big tobacco. 0.98
00:34:11.000 Clowns have their own lobby. 0.97
00:34:13.000 It's called the National Balloon Society. 0.97
00:34:16.000 We need the family to be the most feared and powerful special interest group in this country.
00:34:21.000 That's the only way we're going to turn things around.
00:34:22.000 So...
00:34:24.000 This is everything, right?
00:34:25.000 The fight for the family, the fight for America, against our enemies, both foreign and domestic.
00:34:29.000 It's everything.
00:34:30.000 And I really, really appreciate you running for president.
00:34:35.000 It's a big deal.
00:34:36.000 I love how seriously you're taking it.
00:34:39.000 And I want as many people to get your message as possible.
00:34:41.000 So I'd love to work with you and talk with you more in the future and do stuff together.
00:34:46.000 But it would be really great.
00:34:47.000 And I'm really appreciative that you're running for president.
00:34:50.000 Appreciate that, man.
00:34:51.000 I'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.
00:35:05.000 Not all of it's going to be through policy.
00:35:07.000 Some of it can be, exactly through what you mentioned.
00:35:09.000 Some 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.
00:35:19.000 It'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.
00:35:25.000 And 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.
00:35:35.000 And 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.
00:35:47.000 I think that's the least we could ask of our leaders.
00:35:49.000 And so we'll do our best.
00:35:52.000 I appreciate that, Terry, and we're going to, I'm sure, continue this conversation.
00:35:55.000 Thanks a lot, my man.
00:35:57.000 Thanks, Vivek.
00:35:58.000 I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.