Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - Why Are GOP Senate Candidates Trailing Trump? | Curt Mills | TRUTH Podcast #64

00:00:00.000 Well, another week, another assassination attempt, apparently, in the United States of America.

00:00:05.000 That's what it's come to.

00:00:06.000 Sad to see.

00:00:07.000 This is a country where this would have been even major defining news for the trajectory of an election.

00:00:13.000 And yet where we are is that has become, in some ways, I'm sad to say, in America, ever so slightly normalized.

00:00:20.000 And that's what worried me most about what happened on Sunday is as tragic as it was that there was a second attempted assassination on President Trump, an attempt on his life in the same summer.

00:00:33.000 The first time, let alone the fact that they'd already escaped the news cycle a month later.

00:00:37.000 The second time, it was just considered another blip in a news cycle as well.

00:00:41.000 And I'm not here criticizing the media for that necessarily, but I am reflecting on where We're skating on thin ice.

00:00:48.000 the fact that this is not as shocking as it ought to be in normal times tells us exactly what's at stake for the future of the country.

00:00:58.000 And, you know, I have deep concerns.

00:01:01.000 I think that there are going to be troubling times between now and November.

00:01:04.000 I hope we get through it stronger on the other side.

00:01:07.000 But to talk about the election in particular, we had arranged this long before even the news of this past Sunday, but it made it all the more timely.

00:01:15.000 I've invited a guy who's become a friend and an intellectual counterpart in the last year, Kurt Mills, who is, among other things, leading the American Conservative.

00:01:24.000 So, Kurt, welcome to the podcast, and I'm excited to have the conversation with you.

00:01:28.000 Thanks for having me.

00:01:29.000 Yeah.

00:01:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:01:30.000 So, you know, just for the benefit of our audience who may not know you, I think they should, but for those who don't, just share with us a little bit of your background, which I think is a little bit heterodox from the world of business into the world of policy think tanks.

00:01:43.000 Take us through that, and then we'll get right into a discussion about what's in store for this election.

00:01:47.000 Sure, yeah.

00:01:48.000 I'm originally from the D.C. area, which in and of itself is a little bit unusual.

00:01:53.000 It's a pretty transient place and people aren't usually from there.

00:01:58.000 You can see that by how poor the fan bases are for the various sports teams.

00:02:05.000 Not much of a fight was put up to rename the Redskins, etc., etc.

00:02:10.000 So it's a place that's That's changing.

00:02:14.000 And so, in and of itself, being from here, I think, has given me a background.

00:02:19.000 And I was pretty much a politics junkie from teens on, so I followed the Bush years pretty closely, and that shaped my view.

00:02:27.000 I was always Sort of on the center right, but very much anti-Bush.

00:02:32.000 And that was very anchoring for me.

00:02:35.000 And then I've worked in a number of places, and I recently worked for a hedge fund.

00:02:40.000 And so I've seen a lot.

00:02:42.000 I lived in California for a little bit.

00:02:45.000 And as we're just kind of talking off air, kind of ready for this election to be over one way or the other, because I think we've got a lot of exciting work to do.

00:02:52.000 And I still remain pretty optimistic about the country.

00:02:55.000 So what do you think?

00:02:56.000 Let's just talk about going on with the election.

00:02:58.000 I've seen a number of your posts on social media and some of your writings.

00:03:02.000 You have studied this in detail.

00:03:04.000 Let's start with the presidential level, and then I want to go to some discrepancies between the presidential race and the Senate races.

00:03:10.000 What do you see actually transpiring as probably one of the more astute observers of the dynamics of this race and whether or not you have a prediction of where this is going to land?

00:03:19.000 Yeah, you know, it's very interesting.

00:03:23.000 I think we're going to rewind a little bit.

00:03:25.000 I think what you saw in 2022 was actually the limits of the anti-woke messaging.

00:03:32.000 So rewind back.

00:03:33.000 I agree with that.

00:03:34.000 Yeah, if we're having this conversation and say, November 2022, after DeSantis robbed and Trump, you know, kind of quickly entered the race, people thought he was Thought he was done.

00:03:44.000 I actually had sort of the opposite read, which is that the monomaniacal focus on the culture wars itself actually accrued weird benefits in places that were helpful in the Republicans keeping the House.

00:03:58.000 So take Southern California or New York State, if you're complaining about how the culture is actually changing very, very, very quickly.

00:04:06.000 In blue states, there was actually something of an audience for this, but it was terrible in these swing states.

00:04:11.000 The Republicans got shot out in Arizona, Nevada, Georgia.

00:04:16.000 They lost the Senate.

00:04:17.000 And I think you've seen that dynamic play out a little bit again with Trump overtaking DeSantis in the primary and also Trump's, in my opinion, superior performance to a lot of the more vanilla Republicans that are running down ballot in the Senate races this time.

00:04:33.000 I will note that if the So for anyone in the audience who's unfamiliar, Trump is running, generally speaking, way ahead of the Senate candidates in any races that's significant.

00:04:46.000 So for instance, he's going to win Montana, probably win Montana by 20 points.

00:04:50.000 It's not a done deal that the Republican there, Tim Sheehy, will win, although I think he's favored.

00:04:55.000 And then in other states that are safe red, like Ohio, the Democrats may yet win.

00:05:00.000 If this occurs, this is the first time split ticketing will have occurred at this level since early the 90s.

00:05:09.000 There was a long-standing history of people splitting their ballots in the 80s and 90s, and it has to do with basically the South and civil rights.

00:05:18.000 So you would have, oh, hey, Walter Mondale, he seems too far left.

00:05:22.000 I'm going to vote for Reagan, but I trust my local Congressman Sam in East Texas or whatever.

00:05:29.000 That is totally evaporated.

00:05:31.000 And if Trump wins or loses, if we have split ticketing reoccurring in America in a major way, and I'm a little dubious that it will actually happen, but if it does, if the polling is vaguely directionally true, it's going to be a watershed that will change politics.

00:05:45.000 Yeah, let's actually talk about that, because I do think it's been under-discussed in this cycle.

00:05:49.000 So you mentioned Ohio, and you know what?

00:05:51.000 I'm heavily, personally, supporting Bernie Moreno.

00:05:53.000 He's a great guy.

00:05:54.000 I think he should be the next senator.

00:05:55.000 But you're right, and fair to point out, right now in the polling, I think there has been pretty much every public poll that puts Sherrod Brown and Democrat ahead.

00:06:02.000 You see the same dynamic in Michigan.

00:06:03.000 You see the same dynamic in Pennsylvania.

00:06:06.000 You see it in Arizona.

00:06:07.000 You see it in Nevada.

00:06:08.000 You see it in Montana.

00:06:10.000 And so that's six states right there where Trump is dramatically overperforming Republican Senate candidates who could well lose.

00:06:19.000 And then even if you look at other states like Texas, where Ted Cruz is running ahead, but it is a lot closer than a lot of people might appreciate.

00:06:29.000 And yet Trump is probably up in Texas by, I don't know what, 20 points, 18 to 20 points.

00:06:35.000 And you've got still a Senate race that's between two to four points.

00:06:39.000 So I find that to be just analytically, I think, pretty interesting.

00:06:42.000 You actually are probably even a better analyst of horse race politics than I am.

00:06:47.000 I'm newer to this.

00:06:48.000 I think more about policy, which I know interests you too.

00:06:51.000 But what do you think is going on there where usually people are blaming the conventional media narrative is blame Donald Trump for the poor performance and the effect that he has on other Republicans.

00:07:01.000 That's the traditional media's narrative.

00:07:02.000 Yet the facts seem to suggest that Donald Trump is actually dramatically overperforming other down-ballot candidates himself.

00:07:09.000 What underlies that?

00:07:11.000 Yeah, I mean, so a lot of internet about the civil wars in the various parties in recent years.

00:07:17.000 So the Bush wing against the Trump wing and the Sanders wing against the Clinton wing, for lack of a better term.

00:07:22.000 But I think what is misunderstood is that if you just read the headlines, you would assume these are 50-50 propositions.

00:07:29.000 And I think on the left, it actually is.

00:07:32.000 I mean, if you look at the 2016 race, Sanders-Clinton was pretty close.

00:07:36.000 And if you look at the 2020 race, Biden-Clinton was a little, sorry, Biden-Sanders a little less close, but still, you know, 60-40.

00:07:44.000 Trump versus the establishment is far, far more of a running away proposition.

00:07:50.000 You know a little bit about this, having run in 24. It's like a four to one thing.

00:07:56.000 If Trump had exited the race, People like you or DeSantis would have eaten a lot of his vote.

00:08:02.000 And I think the perspective represented by the donor class, by the Wall Street Journal editorial board, it's a lot of resources, there's a lot of support, a lot of pedigrees, the people that staffed the Reagan and Bush administrations and were integral to Republican governance for a half century in this country.

00:08:21.000 But there just really aren't that many rich Republicans anymore.

00:08:25.000 And It's a weird thing that both the left and the right are in denial about.

00:08:30.000 The right's in denial of it because they think once they get rid of Trump, they'll be able to go back to 2014 or something.

00:08:35.000 And the left's in denial about it because the left is in denial about controlling corporate America.

00:08:40.000 Oh, interesting.

00:08:41.000 The fact that they actually do have control of corporate America.

00:08:44.000 Yes, they're in charge.

00:08:46.000 I don't know if it's a complicated thing to say in denial about it or want everyone else to fail to see the reality of that.

00:08:53.000 We'll get to that in a second.

00:08:55.000 On the right, though, so still that does not quite account for a lot of these Senate candidates running far behind Trump, because many of them certainly wear the banner of being America First candidates that reject the neoliberal dogmas that had pervaded much of the Republican Party, particularly as it relates to China.

00:09:15.000 And I just think analytically it's just interesting to watch candidates who...

00:09:21.000 At least I think facially appear to and I think actually genuinely do embrace a lot of Donald Trump's policies that are still like not by a little bit, but badly underperforming him in the same states where Trump is dominating, at least in the polls right now.

00:09:39.000 Well, yeah, so I didn't go into the race specifically.

00:09:42.000 So to close out my point, take someone like McCormick, though.

00:09:46.000 So just to push back to McCormick.

00:09:48.000 Yeah, the former Bridgewater CEO who's running in Pennsylvania.

00:09:50.000 And I actually think he's doing better than he was, say, two months ago.

00:09:54.000 But something very, very curious about McCormick.

00:09:57.000 McCormick is on the record opposing Trump's tariffs.

00:10:00.000 Now, if I were running for Senate and I didn't care about anything and I just wanted to win, I don't think of all the things to quibble about in Trump's record in Pennsylvania.

00:10:11.000 I'm not sure I would cut out the tariffs part.

00:10:13.000 And that's the sort of an example of the sort of distance between Trump and some of the older guard on this subject.

00:10:22.000 For McCormick, okay, you gave one example.

00:10:25.000 But I mean, even if you take, let's just take, you know, and these are all people who are many former friends who I respect, but let's talk about Brown in Nevada, Cary Lake, Bernie Moreno.

00:10:35.000 Tim Sheehy, Ted Cruz, they're all on the ballot.

00:10:39.000 They're all running, not by a little bit, but dramatically behind Trump, which means that you literally have people who say, I'm going to vote for Donald Trump, and then I'm going to go over to this column and vote for the Democrat, and then come back and vote for some Republicans.

00:10:51.000 It's just fascinating, and I just want to understand what's going on there.

00:10:54.000 It's not just one state, where it's just one candidate who, you know, McCormick might be the best example of somebody who is on the record having opposition to one of Trump's core policies.

00:11:05.000 But in other cases, I don't know that you see that and you still see the same result in the polls.

00:11:10.000 I think so.

00:11:13.000 Fair enough.

00:11:14.000 I mean, I think in fairness, there are some tough competitors to these.

00:11:18.000 So Brown and Tester in Ohio and Montana are probably two of the most effective Democratic politicians in the country.

00:11:26.000 I mean, it is not easy to win as a Democrat in Montana.

00:11:29.000 Even if you think Tester's shtick is entirely fake.

00:11:31.000 He was in charge of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for a reason.

00:11:35.000 He hasn't proven track of winning.

00:11:38.000 And Sheehy, I think, is probably favored.

00:11:41.000 I mean, they've moved him now to lean on all these political reports, whatever they're worth.

00:11:47.000 I still think remains sort of an enigma.

00:11:51.000 I mean, we just don't know what these Republicans stand for in a way.

00:11:54.000 Marino is probably the closest to someone who's tried to just carbon copy Trump's foreign policy and immigration and trade positions.

00:12:01.000 But again, he's running against Brown, who's been in Ohio politics since the early 70s, since before.

00:12:06.000 You were born in Ohio.

00:12:09.000 And I do think Brown, again, one of the more effective ones.

00:12:13.000 I think Arizona is an example of, I don't want to have this lady come after me, but I don't think Carrie Lake, it seems like she's incapable of winning statewide in Arizona. 1.00

00:12:24.000 And then the brown Nevada.

00:12:26.000 Nevada is very strange.

00:12:27.000 The Republicans always think they're going to win there, and I always think it should be.

00:12:33.000 It's a lot of California emigres.

00:12:34.000 Places like Reno seem very not woke.

00:12:37.000 I remember being in Vegas right before COVID, and I was thinking this is the least COVID-friendly place in America.

00:12:44.000 The entire thing is tactile.

00:12:45.000 I'm not even sure anyone's paying taxes because it's all cash.

00:12:49.000 In theory, the COVID world would be most hostile to the sort of Vegas.

00:12:55.000 It's not a woke place, for lack of a better term.

00:12:59.000 But still, the Republicans haven't been able to overcome the read machine.

00:13:03.000 So I do think there is a situation in which I heard this comparison before that Trump winning in 2016 would have been like Reagan winning in 1968, which is like they take the presidency, but you don't have the cadres.

00:13:18.000 Yeah, well, I think that that is a scenario that's increasingly realistic.

00:13:22.000 I mean, if you take a case like Arizona, I actually do think Carrie Lake has a very good shot there, just because she has been statewide in terms of just media for a long time.

00:13:30.000 But we'll see how the results transpire.

00:13:33.000 But the reality is...

00:13:35.000 I do think that there are scenarios we had to consider where we might have the presidency without a majority in the Senate, which in some ways would be a bit of a travesty in having gone through the long slog of this election only to have kind of policy ambiguity.

00:13:51.000 Let's just talk a little bit more about this question, though, of what actually accounts for that rift.

00:13:55.000 Because I agree with everything you said about where the Republican Party is on policy relative to a neoconservative vision in the 2000s versus the Donald Trump led America first reinvention of the Republican Party from 2016 onward.

00:14:12.000 I'm not sure how much of it, though, is policy centric.

00:14:18.000 And I've grown more dubious of that, actually.

00:14:22.000 Yeah.

00:14:23.000 Because actually, the real debate I see brewing on the right...

00:14:28.000 You and I talked about this briefly when I was in D.C. for, I think it was my NatCon speech, relatively recently.

00:14:34.000 And we spoke shortly before I went on stage.

00:14:38.000 And I'll share this with the audience.

00:14:40.000 I actually see the next rift in the conservative movement as being between those who favor...

00:14:47.000 As I do, dismantling the administrative state, dismantling the regulatory state, getting there, shut it down, slash, burn, 75% headcount reductions or more, shut down agencies that shouldn't exist, take every federal regulation that wasn't effectively passed through Congress to rescind it because it's unconstitutional,

00:15:04.000 to go in and shut the darn thing down versus a competing vision that says, no, we want to use the levers of state power to advance substantive, affirmatively conservative, or if not conservative, at least pro-worker, pro-American manufacturing ends, which I think there's a compelling case for.

00:15:20.000 I just happen to be in the camp of going in there and wanting to shut it down.

00:15:24.000 And being that the most open policy debate that's yet to be adjudicated in the Republican Party, I think part of what Trump brings relative to these other candidates who he's badly overperforming in the Republican tickets in these swing states is actually I think part of what Trump brings relative to these other candidates who he's badly overperforming in the Republican tickets in these swing states is actually just somebody And he's somebody who's going to go and shake things up.

00:15:50.000 He's going to be an executive.

00:15:51.000 He's an outsider.

00:15:53.000 He gets people excited.

00:15:54.000 I think excitement and pride in country is something that we're missing, such that even if you do copy, word for word, Trump's policies as a Republican and run against him, you probably are going to underperform him in absence of actually having the ability to galvanize people Which might matter more in some ways than the specifics of where you land on industrial policy versus trade versus a particular view on whether or not you ban TikTok or whatever.

00:16:24.000 And I use that example somewhat intentionally because Trump, I think, bucked a lot of the consensus last year.

00:16:30.000 I'm just less convinced.

00:16:32.000 It's actually about the divisions and where you're seeing people land in terms of the numbers of going for certain Senate candidates, Democratic Senate candidates, but still voting for Donald Trump might actually just be a question about force of leadership rather than actual substantive policy.

00:16:50.000 I don't know.

00:16:50.000 You studied this more closely perhaps than I have.

00:16:52.000 What do you think?

00:16:53.000 Yeah, well, I think two things can be true at the same time.

00:16:55.000 So first, I agree with you.

00:16:57.000 I'm certainly on, you know, at least among the sort of non-con crowd, I'm definitely on the more restraint, libertarian side of things.

00:17:06.000 I would say it is a serious question that the people that would want to do with any of the capitalist tendencies of the Republican Party, even though it's ridiculous to imagine the United States is not capitalist, It's a serious question with, how do you answer Texas and Florida?

00:17:24.000 Or how do you answer all of the facts that the things that are actually attracting people, like Republicans can't win elections, what they can do is win people moving to their states.

00:17:33.000 And why would you want to throw away that model for some sort of vague control, maybe controlling the administrative state every four years, sort of.

00:17:42.000 It just doesn't seem like an even trade.

00:17:44.000 And I would As a tonic to that, I would say, though, I'm pretty interested in the Europe stuff.

00:17:53.000 To an extent, I think the U.S. is very different than Europe.

00:17:58.000 To another extent, I do think there are some similarities.

00:18:01.000 And something that is similar, I think, is that you are seeing center-right parties win throughout Europe on the issue of migration.

00:18:07.000 So I don't think that's going away.

00:18:09.000 I think it's pretty clear.

00:18:10.000 I mean, even the Democrats at this point.

00:18:12.000 Or have conceded that their policy of 21 to 22 doesn't work or at least isn't popular enough to win elections.

00:18:20.000 And then I also think there is a problem across the political spectrum in the Western world of family formation, young people being able to buy houses, et cetera, et cetera.

00:18:31.000 And just from a pure mercenary perspective, whatever party is able to provide solutions where at least talk about these issues, I think is going to find political real estate.

00:18:41.000 Yeah.

00:18:41.000 Now, I think some of this relates to something I talked about in my campaign, too.

00:18:47.000 I think in the country right now, people have a deep sense of...

00:18:54.000 I think that's actually part of what's going on with the migration issue as well, is the erosion of that great sense of identity.

00:19:02.000 But I do think that we live in a moment where there's two parts of the job of a presidency.

00:19:07.000 One is to be the chief architect of at least a policy agenda for the country, but that's about half the job of the presidency where it's the entirety of the job of somebody who's working in Congress or in the Senate.

00:19:18.000 But the other half of the job of the presidency is actually to provide that sense of national character and fortitude.

00:19:23.000 And I think that the fact that Donald Trump is able to do that, even for people who don't really particularly care about policy one way or another, I think actually accounts for a lot of that support over the policy debate itself.

00:19:38.000 But let's just talk about that policy debate on the right for a second.

00:19:41.000 I think you and I began this conversation when I was in DC for the NatCon conference, but maybe we can pick that up where we left off.

00:19:48.000 What do you make of...

00:19:50.000 Because the thing about Donald Trump is he kind of bridges this divide somewhat effectively.

00:19:54.000 But I think post-Trump, there's going to be, I think, an open question of where we stand on our attitudes towards the nanny state, the regulatory state.

00:20:05.000 I kind of come down on...

00:20:07.000 Let me go on a little diatribe here, and then I want you to react to it here.

00:20:11.000 Because this lays out sort of my view where...

00:20:13.000 I think part of what you've seen happen in America first is you've seen this reactionary response to the neocons, you know, as we call it, on foreign policy.

00:20:25.000 And so no to neocons.

00:20:27.000 OK, but actually part of what you've also seen is the accommodation of a neoconservative concession made on domestic policy.

00:20:33.000 So for a while you had conservatives in the United States that were dead set against the entitlement state, dead set against the rise of the regulatory state.

00:20:40.000 And the neoconservatives on their own admission were not only, I think, more interventionist on the foreign policy, but were also more accepting, accommodating, if not just at least defeatist about, OK, we're going to have the existence of this entitlement state.

00:20:54.000 We're going to have the existence of this regulatory state.

00:20:56.000 Let's accept the existence of it and work within those parameters.

00:20:59.000 That that effectively began what you see in America first as a rejection of the neocon foreign interventionism, but an acceptance of the fact that that regulatory state and the entitlement state may be here to stay.

00:21:10.000 Let's at least use that to direct our industrial policy towards American workers and manufacturers rather than to other substantive left-wing ends.

00:21:19.000 Where, you know, where I land on this is a more substantive rejection of neoconservatism on the whole, to say that we actually not only reject the foreign nanny state, and I do think that that's a kind of a nanny state, is a nanny state where the United States is the nanny of foreign, you know, so-called allies around the world.

00:21:37.000 If we're going to protect you but you don't pay for it, that's a nanny relationship. 0.95

00:21:41.000 But also a rejection of not just that foreign nanny state, Which is, I think, where a lot of the America First movement is today, but also a rejection of the domestic nanny state, both the entitlement state as well as the regulatory state.

00:21:53.000 I'm biased, but I think that that is the way forward for the future of the conservative movement, is that we don't want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.

00:22:02.000 We want to get in there and actually shut it down, both the domestic version of that nanny state as well as the international version of it. 0.92

00:22:08.000 And I think this weird reversal you kind of have where the neocons sort of accepted the domestic nanny state and they were foreign interventionists.

00:22:16.000 The America First movement says, no, no, no, we're not going to be interventionists abroad, but we turn a blind eye to the domestic nanny state, I think is not good enough for where we're heading. 0.63

00:22:24.000 And the shut it down mantra is sort of what I consider to be our most appropriate rallying cry going to the future.

00:22:31.000 But that is very much a divide even on the nationalist America first right today.

00:22:36.000 And I'd just love to get your take on how you see that rift playing out.

00:22:40.000 Man, we could talk about this all day.

00:22:42.000 I mean, it's super confusing.

00:22:44.000 I don't know if you saw the new Reagan movie thing that came out.

00:22:48.000 I probably should.

00:22:49.000 Is it good?

00:22:50.000 Yeah.

00:22:51.000 I've just seen clips, but I was asked to comment on the release of it for The Times.

00:22:59.000 I think people can really disagree on this.

00:23:01.000 It's a really confused...

00:23:04.000 First of all, just for the audience, I think what you referred to, the neocons, right?

00:23:09.000 So the father of William Crystal, who's the now sort of joke artist, Bulwark person, who's very pro-Harris.

00:23:16.000 His father, Irving Crystal, is considered the godfather I think that's self-declared.

00:23:23.000 And he famously said, two cheers for capitalism.

00:23:26.000 So there was always this idea that the neocons were somehow less committed to capitalism.

00:23:31.000 It was a coalition partner.

00:23:33.000 I do think it's a little bit confused, though.

00:23:35.000 I mean, so on foreign policy, particularly, the Republican president Probably more than almost any in the post-war era who declared peace with the New Deal was Nixon.

00:23:47.000 We're all Keynesians now, and he's the bet noire of neocons on foreign policy.

00:23:54.000 The neocons hate Kissinger, or hate Kissinger.

00:24:00.000 But then other people who are on the more restrained side of the Republican side hate Kissinger for Cambodia, et cetera, et cetera.

00:24:08.000 I do think, in a very strange way, for the number of years Republicans have held the White House, for as long as these debates have been going on, really since at least the New Deal, there hasn't been clarity.

00:24:20.000 So let's go back to, say, the 2008 presidential race.

00:24:24.000 Something that nobody ever thinks about, because the Republicans got killed that year.

00:24:28.000 There was a guy called Duncan Hunter, who ran for president that year.

00:24:33.000 He was a long-time congressman from the San Diego area.

00:24:36.000 And he very much fashions himself as an anti-establishment populist.

00:24:40.000 But the way that he did it was by arguing, we've got to be more free market, more neocon, etc., etc., etc.

00:24:48.000 In the exact same race, somebody could go to a Duncan Hunter rally and be mad as hell and go to a Ron Paul rally.

00:24:54.000 And, you know, saying the exact opposite, essentially saying the Saudis did 9-11, et cetera, et cetera.

00:25:01.000 So there was always this inchoate id of the Republican Party that was mad as hell at somebody.

00:25:06.000 And it wasn't fully directed towards anyone and crystallized until Trump.

00:25:11.000 And you're right that Trump has provided, perhaps he's not interested, perhaps it's not important, perhaps it's expedient.

00:25:17.000 He hasn't provided clarity on something such as the administrative state.

00:25:23.000 I mean, he didn't talk about it at all in 16, pretty much, until it became a foil to his presidency.

00:25:29.000 And of course, it's super tied in to foreign policy and was tied into the Russia thing because there's an administrative state or at least a permanent bureaucracy on foreign policy as well.

00:25:39.000 So I didn't directly answer your question, but I think it's not settled and it hasn't been settled in a weird way for eight years.

00:25:45.000 Yeah, I think it's unsettled.

00:25:46.000 I mean, I do think that draining the swamp, I mean, that's what I take it to me, draining the swamp is go in and shut down the administrative state.

00:25:52.000 But I think that that is different from certain policies in the industrial policy right that say that, no, we need to use federal intervention and subsidies to subsidize the kinds of industries that make American manufacturing more competitive.

00:26:10.000 But you're going to need an administrative bureaucracy to administer that. 0.75

00:26:13.000 And part of the reason the CHIPS Act failed, or I think has failed to be a success, is in part because it gets commingled with other objectives.

00:26:19.000 You have bills that are now pending in Congress.

00:26:22.000 The Senate Banking Committee is considering a bill that would empower the CFPB To pass regulations that cap credit card interest rates.

00:26:33.000 That's the same CFPB that's now asking small businesses for information about their, you know, racial or gender quotas, which no one wants to empower the CFPB to do.

00:26:41.000 And yet here we're saying we want to empower that same agency to now cap credit card rates, which by the way is just a different kind of price control relative to the price control we would criticize Kamala Harris for on grocery prices.

00:26:51.000 And so you could go straight down the list.

00:26:52.000 I mean, there's a lot of Republican...

00:26:53.000 I mean, I think an interesting area where the rubber hits the road is on attitudes towards antitrust, right?

00:26:58.000 I mean, do we think that Lena Kahn is doing a good job or failing to do a good job because she's not breaking up people enough or because she's actually too arbitrarily exercising power that the FTC should have never had? 0.98

00:27:08.000 The Department of Education, there's debates about whether it should be subsidizing more two-year or vocational programs instead of four-year programs, or whether we should have a Department of Education at all and return that money to the states.

00:27:20.000 And so I do think that that's a brewing debate on the right.

00:27:24.000 I think that part of What we are missing is, I think in many ways, our America First movement, they're still waiting to be led on those issues.

00:27:34.000 What I've found is I've traveled the country and you could probably have a room full of solid America First patriots in a room where if you went in there and say, hey, we need policies that protect American workers and manufacturers.

00:27:46.000 And we need to make sure that we're investing in U.S. companies for U.S. production and we don't want the effects of foreign labor bringing down the wages for our American workers.

00:27:55.000 You'd get it delivered in the right compelling way.

00:27:57.000 A pretty good cheer for that message.

00:27:59.000 Probably a very good cheer for that message.

00:28:01.000 You could also just go into that same room if you're starting from the same blank slate and say, you know what, I don't want to replace a left-wing nanny state with a right-wing nanny state.

00:28:09.000 I want to shut it down.

00:28:10.000 And you get a good cheer out of that too.

00:28:12.000 But those are somewhat...

00:28:14.000 At least if not contradictory, policies that are deeply in tension with one another.

00:28:17.000 And so I think it's kind of interesting.

00:28:19.000 You see a lot of the same Tea Party sort of anti-government, anti-interventionist folks that in many ways have become part of the modern MAGA movement that's lifted up Donald Trump, even though the policies supported by certain elements of that industrialist policy right are actually completely at odds with what the Tea Party would have wanted back in 2010. And some of this,

00:28:43.000 I think, has to do with human psychology, where maybe it's not even about the substance of the policy quite at all, as much as somebody who at least recognizes and feels the struggle of people who have been left holding the bag and left behind.

00:28:57.000 And that recognition might be actually what people are most interested in and are open to a diverse range of policy solutions to get them out of it.

00:29:06.000 Yeah, man, there's a lot to chew on there.

00:29:12.000 I know you've talked about...

00:29:13.000 Your view that the CHIPS Act just doesn't work at all.

00:29:16.000 It's just a huge...

00:29:18.000 It's a cash bonfire.

00:29:21.000 Yeah.

00:29:24.000 There's a couple of reasons why you're talking about it.

00:29:25.000 When someone like Todd Young goes on and is like, this is the serious thing to do, and goes on Mitt Romney, et cetera, et cetera, why doesn't it work?

00:29:33.000 There's a couple of things.

00:29:34.000 There's the superficial objections that I have, which are...

00:29:38.000 Relate to just importing a lot of baggage, right?

00:29:41.000 You got the vector.

00:29:42.000 Why is that the same act that also says what the National Science Foundation has to do with respect to the racial composition or the gender composition of who wins NSF grants, right?

00:29:52.000 It's in the same act.

00:29:53.000 There's a lot of other baggage exactly in that same way, establishing basic regulatory and hiring standards for the companies who are recipients of that money.

00:30:01.000 So, you know, you could say that that's That's noise and not signal.

00:30:05.000 That's just sort of backdoor woke stuff.

00:30:07.000 It's a cost of doing business.

00:30:09.000 I'm not so sure that it's that easily dismissed.

00:30:11.000 I think that once you create the vectors for government agencies administering funds at this scale, it necessarily becomes a vector for ideological infiltration as well.

00:30:22.000 So I do think it's a little bit of a conservative contradiction in kind to say that, hey, we support those policies by empowering the very agencies that have been vectors for perpetuating a lot of the cultural poison that we stand against.

00:30:33.000 That's the superficial objection.

00:30:34.000 I think the deeper objection is that it actually coddles American industry in a way that makes it less innovative and less productive.

00:30:46.000 You look at the cost of capital of these semiconductor companies.

00:30:50.000 I mean, whatever.

00:30:50.000 As of when we're having this conversation, if it's not the most valuable company in the world, it's still among the very top.

00:30:56.000 Nvidia, right?

00:30:57.000 Right.

00:30:57.000 Was, at least as of very recently, the world's largest company by market capitalization.

00:31:01.000 Look at semiconductor stocks over the course of the last decade.

00:31:04.000 You know, over the last several years, it wasn't the CHIPS Act that propelled them upward.

00:31:08.000 It was increased customer demand.

00:31:10.000 It was massive demand driven by artificial intelligence demanding greater computing power.

00:31:16.000 It was concerns about scarcity relative to that demand.

00:31:20.000 And the lowering of that cost of capital, cost of capital means how much capital you have to raise or dilution you would have to take as a business in order to raise that capital.

00:31:28.000 If your stock is higher, you have to take much less dilution to raise that capital.

00:31:32.000 Pales in comparison to the amount of that federal subsidy anyway.

00:31:37.000 So you've got a company like NVIDIA, if it's a $100 billion company or a $2 or $3 trillion company, the ability to raise $100 billion and the cost at which you do that changed so dramatically that it pales in comparison to what the federal government might be providing through the CHIPS Act.

00:31:54.000 But what it culturally does, I think, for a lot of these management teams is it focuses them on becoming the lobbying of the government for their annual budget, even though the overall cost of capital of the business has come down, the annual budget that they're judged on, lobbying the government becomes that core objective.

00:32:10.000 And I think it actually stifles those companies from being as innovative as they possibly could be when their feet are actually held to the fire.

00:32:17.000 And so my own view is that I think a lot of that industrial policy is self-defeating by the combination of coddling those companies and furthermore using the vector of government bureaucracy to perpetuate more of the very kind of Poison, cultural poison, as well as any efficiency that we supposedly say we want to fight.

00:32:41.000 And I think the right answer is you can't have that industrial policy without expansive power of administrative agencies to administer those funds.

00:32:48.000 Instead, get the hell out of the way, which you could say is a old school pro capitalism kind of point of view.

00:32:55.000 And I don't think that that's something I apologize for.

00:32:57.000 But I do think that Understanding that that is a better policy that better advances the long-run interests of American manufacturers rather than the short-run subsidy model, I think is just something that is a little bit out of favor on the right, but I think the pendulum is actually going to probably swing back in the other direction pretty soon, not going back to going and invading Iraq or just singing pions to global free trade with China and spreading democracy.

00:33:22.000 But understanding that the reactionary response to that probably included more than we thought we were biting off.

00:33:27.000 And I do think that that recalibration is coming.

00:33:32.000 Yeah, the cultural thing strikes me as most likely to sell.

00:33:37.000 I know I just complained about it in 22. But no, I mean, it's just so demotivating, right?

00:33:45.000 I mean, it's just like if you are just a vaguely apolitical person who wants to work hard and make some money in the United States, which used to be like the ideal American, frankly, You just can't escape it in any of the large organizations in the United States.

00:34:01.000 Almost every large organization in the United States is at least tacitly woke.

00:34:05.000 And I don't want to sound just like a broken record on this, but it is ambient.

00:34:12.000 And if the cost of antitrust, the cost of industrial policy is a furtherance of that, I just think that's an argument against it right then and there.

00:34:25.000 And I think it sells.

00:34:29.000 And anyway, it's interesting.

00:34:31.000 It is a point of distinction to both East Asia and Europe.

00:34:39.000 I mean, this has been talked to death, but I mean, European companies and to by and large, especially on the continent and East Asia, don't have anything like this.

00:34:49.000 I mean, so I mean, I just think in a longer timescale, you're just going to lose talent.

00:34:55.000 And then additionally, the antitrust thing is actually pretty interesting because it's not like I'm a big fan of these large companies.

00:35:01.000 I've never actually worked for any of them.

00:35:03.000 But as a matter of global competitiveness, U.S. corporations are actually quite small.

00:35:09.000 The European companies are larger.

00:35:11.000 There's huge ones in Latin America.

00:35:13.000 So it's not even super clear that the concentration is all that bad.

00:35:17.000 So I'm not an enormous conviction on it, but it does strike me as an Like, right-wing defenses of Lena Kahn, when everything I hear about it is, you know, she's fairly culturally left, it's not clear at all that that's a bargain worth making.

00:35:38.000 Yeah, look, I think that that's, it's the easiest place to identify the problem, right?

00:35:43.000 So take this bill in the CFPB, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

00:35:49.000 I don't think that it makes any sense to at once rail against them for imposing on small businesses, reporting the demographic information of their hiring practices on race, gender, and sexuality as they're doing.

00:36:01.000 This is, you know, made in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

00:36:04.000 Elizabeth Warren's the first person who led it.

00:36:06.000 It's been a left-wing agency since its very beginning.

00:36:08.000 While also saying that, hey, we're against that, don't do that, but here's a lot more authority to now cap credit card interest rates and determine who's not compliant with that vaguely worded statute and regulation.

00:36:19.000 I don't think you can believe those two things at the same time.

00:36:22.000 They're contradictory.

00:36:22.000 And I think the same thing goes for the FTC. I think the same thing goes for the SEC. I think the same thing goes for the EPA. It goes straight down the list.

00:36:29.000 And Nixon, as you put it earlier, he was probably one of the most responsible for expanding the scope of regulatory authority of the EPA. You can't have it both ways.

00:36:38.000 And history teaches us that even if in the short run you've installed someone on top of that agency who...

00:36:45.000 It stands for affirmative cultural values.

00:36:47.000 The bureaucracy, once it exists, feeds itself.

00:36:50.000 It's almost a nonpartisan agency, as its highest commitment is to its own self-preservation and existence.

00:36:56.000 But eventually, that has a natural left-wing migration over time, because the left is ultimately, at its core, more committed to state control than the right is.

00:37:06.000 And so, directionally, if you're going to have a bureaucracy that exists, And its sole objective is its continued self-sustenance, then that migration necessarily over time will be to advance a left-wing political ideology over a right-wing one.

00:37:18.000 You mentioned the credit card thing a couple of times.

00:37:20.000 So how do you answer the critique though, which I think is increasingly, I've mentioned before how I think Republicans are increasingly, whether or not they want to be a working class party.

00:37:29.000 You have a lot more working class people migrating to the Republican ranks.

00:37:32.000 It's just a reality of the gravity.

00:37:34.000 How do you answer the critique, then, that you're essentially swapping a public tyranny for a private tyranny?

00:37:40.000 So, I mean, Biden, still the President of the United States, was famously called Senator credit card, right?

00:37:46.000 And he pursued the interests of the credit card companies in his native state, in a certain sense as constituent services.

00:37:57.000 I believe the bankruptcy rules were rewritten about 20 years ago in the mid-2000s that made a lot of this credit card debt harder to discharge.

00:38:05.000 Famously, student loans are not dischargeable because of that law.

00:38:08.000 How do you answer that critique?

00:38:10.000 Yes, you got Uncle Sam's boot off the American working Joe's neck, but you've replaced the MasterCard.

00:38:19.000 Yeah, so a couple of things I would say there.

00:38:21.000 One is that you actually, the reason I support policies that generally Are opposed to the overgrowth of the regulatory state.

00:38:29.000 It's not because I think that's a more important objective than standing for American workers and manufacturers.

00:38:33.000 I actually think it's the best way to actually, in the long run, stand for American workers and manufacturers.

00:38:38.000 A lot of this is just special interest lobbying.

00:38:39.000 I think that it'll be large credit card companies that actually benefit the most because they're able to engineer around what their actual stated credit card interest rate is versus upfront fees to be able to acquire the credit card in the first place.

00:38:51.000 Well, you don't charge in the back end in front of interest.

00:38:53.000 You just charge on the front end in terms of access.

00:38:55.000 So you're going to have actually Many people who are workers, as you say, part of the working class standing for workers, who then have actual lower access to credit themselves for upfront fees that they're charged upfront for what can't be made up for on the back end.

00:39:09.000 And, you know, I think you could say the same thing for price controls, right?

00:39:11.000 I mean, a lot of working class people are struggling at, you know, the grocery supermarket.

00:39:17.000 Well, you know, why not cap the prices?

00:39:18.000 It's the same logic as you can have supply shortages.

00:39:20.000 And, you know, there are some of these laws of economics that I think are just because they've been exploited in ways that have increased our dependence on China, pretending that China is a free market actor when they're not.

00:39:32.000 Doesn't reject the premise as applied to at least a local domestic closed system.

00:39:36.000 You're going to have supply shortages in the market for credit for the same reason you would have grocery supply shortages.

00:39:40.000 If you apply Kamala Harris's price controls to the grocery market, it's not that different than applying a right-wing in any state credit card interest rate cap either.

00:39:50.000 You're going to have shortages in access to credit for the very people who...

00:39:53.000 You know, gonna be harmed by it the most.

00:39:55.000 Well, the folks are gonna be just fine, right?

00:39:57.000 They're gonna find other access to credit that fall outside of the scope of carefully crafted regulations.

00:40:01.000 Every one of these regulations written by not just the CFPB, but any one of these three letter agencies tends to be a captured process.

00:40:09.000 They call it the notice and comment period.

00:40:11.000 And the reality is it's the corporate massage period for a lot of these regulations, effectively making sure that they don't apply in scope to the people who are able to afford to influence the process.

00:40:23.000 And so, yeah, I think that it is a captured process.

00:40:26.000 I do think it's corrupt.

00:40:27.000 And the irony is by wearing the populist mantle, we actually are betraying the very workers who were supposedly the backbone of that movement in the first place.

00:40:38.000 We need to explain that to the people.

00:40:39.000 I think the reality is many people are struggling under crushing credit card debt, but the way we're going to do it isn't by actually increasing the cost of that by saying, okay, next time you get a credit card, you're going to pay an upfront fee because it's exactly what's going to happen if this credit card interest rate cap bill goes through.

00:40:54.000 But instead by actually getting out of a lot of the crony capitalism that enables advantaged corporate behavior that creates a new corporate oligarchy that isn't just corporate in nature, but a mixture of corporate and state power that together is more powerful than either one alone.

00:41:10.000 Where the government's able to dispatch a lot of these companies to advance environmental, social, and governance goals that increase the costs that are passed on to consumers of financial products because they're able to advance policies that Congress couldn't pass through the front door via the Green New Deal.

00:41:25.000 I just think shut the apparatus down and let companies be companies so that the government can actually operate in a way that The people we elect to run the government are the ones who actually pass the laws.

00:41:35.000 And if they are unable to have the popular will to pass those laws, they can no longer turf them to three-letter agencies who then turf them to companies to be able to do a lot of that backdoor bidding for private advantage.

00:41:45.000 So, you know, a lot to sort of dissect there, but that's where I land on it.

00:41:52.000 No, no, no.

00:41:52.000 I mean, no, that makes sense.

00:41:54.000 You know, I think, you know, roving it back a little bit to the history of all this and the foreign policy angle, you know, if you read the old sort of Reagan-era neocon people, so someone like David Frum or Fukuyama,

00:42:13.000 for instance, Fukuyama, the late 80s and early 90s, it was very interesting where they argued that The private industry would encourage social conservative outcomes.

00:42:27.000 So like in order to work effectively in private industry, you'd have to put on a suit.

00:42:32.000 You'd have to not do drugs.

00:42:35.000 You'd have to, you know, people with wives and families. 0.99

00:42:40.000 And this would all sort of take care of itself.

00:42:43.000 And I think it's actually kind of interesting because I think you have seen, this is just me diagnosing the right, but a lot of the people on the right that I think have drifted from market economics or sympathy from it are often more socially conservative because they feel that this gamble has not worked out for them.

00:42:58.000 Because of course, corporations are not bastions of social conservatism.

00:43:03.000 They are in many ways bastions of the direct opposite.

00:43:08.000 Granted, they are within the context of a crony capitalist environment, which you just diagnosed.

00:43:13.000 But the reality is that the felt reality is the felt reality.

00:43:16.000 And it is interesting in which that prediction didn't manifest.

00:43:22.000 And I do think it was tied into the Crystal Essay in 1997 with Robert Kagan.

00:43:32.000 It was towards a neo-Reaganite foreign policy.

00:43:35.000 There really was this sense, especially when I was growing up, and both of us were not that different in age, That, look, we just need to export democracy, and we need to export capitalism.

00:43:45.000 And there is a center-right global majority that wants some form of religiosity, hard work.

00:43:54.000 And, you know, it was it was this sort of strange neocon social conservative Marxist almost Marxist in the sense of like that the history is certain that it's moving in this direction.

00:44:08.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:08.000 There's an end state paradise.

00:44:10.000 And man, I just reject all of this stuff.

00:44:13.000 It's just it's just crazy.

00:44:14.000 None of it worked, of course.

00:44:16.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:44:18.000 So where do you see, I guess let's just do this before we head out too, is as much as we talked about the fissures on the right, where do you see the current defining fissures on the American left and in the Democratic Party?

00:44:30.000 Because I think they have their own version of this soul searching to do as well.

00:44:34.000 Well, you know, it's in some ways more important because it's attached to power.

00:44:42.000 Unless the Republicans take the White House, then the right becomes more important again.

00:44:46.000 And it's attached to a lot of major institutions.

00:44:48.000 But in a lot of ways, it's a lot more quiet.

00:44:51.000 So, for instance, you know, I have observed...

00:44:57.000 So take the Biden fight.

00:45:01.000 Should Biden go in July?

00:45:05.000 And then the August fight, I believe it was August, should it be Tim Walz or should it be Josh Shapiro?

00:45:10.000 And it was extremely interesting.

00:45:13.000 Yeah, it was.

00:45:14.000 Especially the latter one.

00:45:15.000 Yeah.

00:45:16.000 So the elected members of the, quote, hard left, Sanders, AOC, were often Biden's greatest defenders.

00:45:28.000 Biden was not couped by the squad.

00:45:31.000 He was couped by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, who are card-carrying members of the Democratic establishment, if such a thing exists.

00:45:41.000 Meanwhile, though, I found that a lot of the left-wing writers, the hardest-left writers, were actually very, very anti-Biden.

00:45:52.000 The elected officials were pro him, the hard-left elected officials, and the writers were anti.

00:45:57.000 And then a very strange thing also happened in which like a lot of this sort of democratic professional class seemed more deferential to Biden, the sort of campaign workers, the people around Biden, in a very confusing manner.

00:46:14.000 And that was all, you could see a lot of it on X, you could see a lot of it, you know, it buried these magazines, but a huge dynamic.

00:46:19.000 Fast forward, Shapiro versus Walls.

00:46:23.000 So, you know, by all accounts, Josh Shapiro is an elite American and seems like an able enough governor and probably wouldn't have been a complete disaster for Harris.

00:46:37.000 But it does seem as if he would have cratered the Democratic constituency.

00:46:43.000 I mean, I think the conventional wisdom is that Walls is a bad pick and Shapiro would have done better.

00:46:50.000 And we can't run as a counterfactual.

00:46:52.000 But I think what would have been way more likely to happen if Shapiro was this election is that you would have seen major campus protests again this fall.

00:47:02.000 And again, this year's been crazy, but rewind, if we were having this conversation in March, so six months ago, the greatest liability of the Democrats were these protests.

00:47:11.000 So it is this strange situation in which the left has, again, to use a Marxist phrase, the commanding heights, but they're kind of afraid of their own people.

00:47:22.000 And it was the same way with the Biden administration, right?

00:47:26.000 So there was a Biden administration.

00:47:29.000 And he did have people around him.

00:47:31.000 They just weren't on camera.

00:47:33.000 Like, none of these people you'd ever heard of.

00:47:34.000 Like, Ted Kaufman, Anita Dunn, Steve Reschetti, Mike Donilon.

00:47:39.000 How many times were these people on camera?

00:47:41.000 Not at all.

00:47:42.000 The people who ran the cabinet were people who could have staffed a Clinton administration.

00:47:47.000 Jake Sullivan was the favorite to get that.

00:47:48.000 Bill Burns was another favorite to be Secretary of State, CIA director.

00:47:52.000 These guys are just like the Dem all-stars who would have served anyone.

00:47:55.000 And so that always...

00:47:57.000 Draws the question, how much loads do they really have for Biden anyways?

00:48:00.000 And then even beneath them, there is this sort of bureaucracy.

00:48:04.000 We talked about the administrative state.

00:48:06.000 The administrative state is a liability for Democratic presidents because it can now, you know, coup presidents or get rid of presidents if they don't You know, pass muster.

00:48:16.000 So it's an uneasy thing.

00:48:19.000 Versus if Trump does win, everybody knows Trump can fire you.

00:48:25.000 So it's a different dynamic.

00:48:27.000 It is.

00:48:27.000 I mean, I hope this idea that the people we elect to run the government should run the government stops being a partisan concept.

00:48:35.000 I actually think that there's deep nonpartisan appeal to it.

00:48:38.000 And if so, I think there's this conventional wisdom where you're seeing some realignment between the Republicans versus Democrats.

00:48:45.000 I think there could be something bigger going on with a new breed of left-wing, right-wing populism that doesn't manifest necessarily the form of economic populism, which I think the traditional version of this left-wing, right-wing economic populism argument.

00:48:59.000 I think there's a different one that relates more to just restoring self-governance, actually, in the United States.

00:49:04.000 And that one, I think, looks a lot closer to the character of the American Revolution than, I think, the left-wing, right-wing populism.

00:49:13.000 Sort of strange allegiances we're seeing with respect to economic populism.

00:49:16.000 I think we're seeing where we may have a new frontier on the populism of self-governance, which I think is actually, to me, certainly a lot closer to where my flame is.

00:49:28.000 But I think that will be the direction that I predict things go, where economic populism was a reaction to A reaction to, I think, certain kinds of failed policies and a place to relocate, as you put it, the anger.

00:49:42.000 We ought to be angry about something.

00:49:43.000 Tea Party people are angry about something.

00:49:45.000 Economic populists are angry about something, even though many of them apparently are the same people.

00:49:50.000 They're actually, on the face of it, arguing for somewhat contradictory policies.

00:49:54.000 I think closer to the bullseye is really the populism of self-governance, which I think has not yet been brought to the fore in the way that I think it will and should be.

00:50:07.000 Well, I agree with you.

00:50:07.000 It's not super currently fashionable.

00:50:09.000 I've noticed in other of your public comments that you've said that your favorite president was Thomas Jefferson.

00:50:15.000 That's correct, right?

00:50:18.000 That's not something you'll hear Republicans commonly say anymore.

00:50:25.000 I've seen more Republican arguments in favor of his arch rival, Hamilton.

00:50:29.000 And again, I'm the guy who always links it to foreign policy, but Hamilton is the patron saint of the neocons.

00:50:38.000 This is not somebody that you want to pick.

00:50:43.000 Our magazine was co-founded with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell.

00:50:46.000 These guys always get the attention.

00:50:48.000 But the third co-founder is a guy called Taki, the sort of great Greek-American writer, Playboy person.

00:50:55.000 And he always called Thomas Jefferson the greatest American.

00:50:58.000 And I agree.

00:51:00.000 I agree as well.

00:51:01.000 And it's interesting.

00:51:02.000 Jefferson or Hamilton, Coolidge or Teddy Roosevelt.

00:51:06.000 I think this is, I think, the dividing line that will We'll continue to run as an undercurrent on the American right.

00:51:14.000 And right now it's percolating beneath the surface.

00:51:16.000 You've got an election and everyone's supposed to do the, you know, partisan thing for the next 55 days.

00:51:22.000 But I think the, you know, less than that even.

00:51:25.000 But I think the deeper undercurrent here is not going away.

00:51:29.000 And in some ways, I think this is going to boil over in very interesting ways.

00:51:32.000 And I think in ways that can be very productive for strengthening the future of the conservative movement, you know, after this election, which Makes me more understanding of your claim at the start that you just want to get this done and over with so we can get on with it.

00:51:45.000 That's good to remember.

00:51:46.000 Cool.

00:51:46.000 All right, man.

00:51:47.000 Well, thanks for joining.

00:51:48.000 It's always a good conversation with you.

00:51:49.000 You make me think on levels that I often miss doing in the drudge of the day-to-day.

00:51:55.000 So thank you.

00:51:57.000 Thank you so much.

00:51:58.000 Yeah.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - September 18, 2024

Why Are GOP Senate Candidates Trailing Trump? | Curt Mills | TRUTH Podcast #64

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