Gavin Mario Wax | Why did Nick Fuentes Get Banned? | OAP #30
Chase Geiser is joined by Gavin Wax.
Gavin's website bio is as follows:
"Hi, I’m Gavin Wax. I am a New York-based conservative political commentator and columnist.
I am the 74th President of the New York Young Republican Club, Chairman of the Association of Young Republican Clubs, Digital Director of the Young Republican National Federation, National Spokesman of Republicans for National Renewal, Ambassador for Turning Point USA, Associate Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, and a Writing Fellow for America’s Future Foundation.
I have appeared on Fox News, One America News, Bold TV, Newsmax, America Voice News, The First TV, and Compound Media.
My articles have been published in Townhall, Newsweek, The Daily Caller, Human Events, The Hill, The Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, RealClearPolicy, Foundation for Economic Education, Mises Institute, The Federalist, Western Journal, American Greatness, and Newsmax."
EPISODE LINKS:
Chase's Twitter: twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Gavin's Twitter: twitter.com/GavinWax
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Hey, man, it's good to have you.
Thanks for coming on the show today.
Thank you for having me, man.
It's great to be here.
Absolutely.
So tell me a little bit about yourself.
I obviously found you on Twitter, and I've just been impressed with your tweets and your sort of self-described populism.
And I wanted to hear a little bit about your background and what you've been working on, what you are working on, and where you're headed.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm based here in New York.
I'm a populist, as you said.
I run the New York Young Republican Club.
We're the largest and oldest in the country.
So we've been growing the movement here behind enemy lines, so to speak.
I'm also involved in a variety of other organizations, the National Young Republicans, Republicans for National Renewal, which is also a populist organization, the Bull Moose Project.
I'm a fellow at the London Center for Policy Research.
I'm an ambassador for TPSA.
I write for a whole variety of publications like American Greatness, Newsmax, where I'm an insider, Town Hall, etc.
And yeah, I'm just trying to spread the message and take over the party and shift the Overton window to the right.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so tell me a little bit about the London Policy Center.
That's a Tony Schaefer organization, right?
Yep, that's Tony Schaefer.
He's a great guy.
It's named after Herb London, who was an American conservative.
He based in New York.
He was a great man, and we're basically advocating for a lot of typical views of the right.
It has more of an international focus, but I've been working with them, helping them out with a lot of different causes and initiatives that they've been doing and trying to obviously work with them to put out more, I don't even know how to say it, how to kind of institutionalize populism, so to speak, which I think they're doing a decent job at.
But that's one of the organizations I'm involved.
Tony's a great guy.
He was one of our first speakers at our annual gala when I took over the club, along with Steve Bannon and Eric Prince.
So that was a good, that was a good year back in 2019.
So good people.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And I'm still here.
I'm just making an adjustment to my camera.
So what would you say is the difference between populism versus nationalism, or are they the same thing?
And do people just avoid the term nationalism because of its association with the Third Reich?
Obviously, I don't associate you with the Third Reich, but from a branding perspective, nationalism kind of has a hard time.
Of course.
Look, I'm proud to say I'm a nationalist.
I have no problem with nationalism.
I support nationalism in our country.
I support nationalism abroad.
I think competition between nation states is good.
So British nationalists, French nationalists, Israeli nationalists, Italian nationalists, whoever they are, I support them.
I support American nationalism.
I think the terms could be used together, but they're also somewhat distinct.
You know, you could have left-wing populists, you could have right-wing populists, right-wing populists are generally nationalists.
Left-wing populists depends.
They don't necessarily need to be nationalists.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
More of the old school form of them may be.
So there are differences here in the U.S. I think the emergent kind of populist right-wing movement, national conservative, nationalist conservative, national populist, new right, whatever you want to call them, they like to use both terms.
So we have a lot of terms that are floating around, a lot of different descriptors, that being one of them.
But there is certainly a difference.
I think the nationalism component pertains strictly mostly to sovereignty, our borders, how we approach globalism, how we approach issues on the world stage, how we put America's interests ahead of global interests.
I think populism could be focused more domestically if this is a good way to describe it.
It has a lot of economic components, has a lot more cultural components, social components.
They go hand in hand, but they do cover different areas.
I think populism could be looked at more as the domestic platform and nationalism, how we reflect those policies across borders and on the world stage.
So what kind of stories, excuse me, what kind of policies rather do does populism advocate for domestic issues?
Well, my version of populism advocates for a high protective tariff to protect domestic industry, to bring jobs back onto our shores.
It advocates for strong borders and reducing the level of immigration.
We see immigration as both mass migration, as we're seeing now, as a threat to our culture, to our national identity, and also domestic wages, which helps, which mass migration helps, you know, lower domestic wages.
It reduces your purchasing power and it's harmful to American label and American workers.
I think we're pro-American labor.
We're not necessarily anti-labor.
We view that there is a role for the state in the economy.
I think we should be busting up the trusts.
I think we should be breaking up big tech.
I think we should be regulating them.
We need to ensure that there is an open and free exchange of ideas on the public square, which is the internet.
I think that's a plank of populism that a lot of people pick up the mantle for.
I think we understand that globalism is a threat.
So we reject global institutions and globalist forces, which are seeking to, you know, tear down our borders, tear down trade protections, weaken our culture, weaken our identity.
I think we want to hold institutions accountable.
We're not necessarily pro-institution.
I think we need to reform the institutions of our government.
We need to create new institutions.
This also goes into the party.
We need to reform the Republican Party.
We need to reject the kind of feckless, corrupt leadership that we've seen in our party, in our government, and even in private institutions.
I think there's a lot of rot in corporate America that we need to weed out.
I think that's part of the populist agenda.
So I think there's an economic component, then there's also a social component.
I think we believe in the traditional family.
I think we believe in traditional gender roles.
We want to encourage people to have families, to start families, to have more children, to have their own home, to live a traditional, quote-unquote, American dream lifestyle that has been unavailable for so many, including many in the younger generations, whether they be millennials or Zoomers.
So I think the traditional social policies are also part of the populist plank.
That includes being strongly pro-life, rejecting the radical transgender, big gay lobby that's seeking to fundamentally destroy the foundations of our Christian Western society.
And I think that's kind of the broader view, both in terms of domestic policies, foreign policies, economic policies, social policies, et cetera.
But we can dive into them specifically.
So, what do you think about Nick Fuentes getting banned from Twitter and some of his ideas?
Because obviously, he's a very controversial figure, and I don't think he's controversial just because of his sort of populism, but I think that might be a component.
Are you familiar with his work, what he does, what his kind of background is, and what happened recently with that on Twitter?
Fuentes?
Yes.
Yeah.
Look, he says things that I could agree with, and I think a lot of people on the right should agree with.
And sometimes he says things I don't agree with, but I view a lot of people like that.
I think there's a lot of hysteria surrounding Nick Fuentes.
I think a lot of people lose their minds over him for whatever reason.
He has a right to free speech, right to a platform.
He has a right not to be added to a no-filest.
He has a right not to have his bank account seized.
His bank account was seized?
I think he was locked out of his bank accounts.
That stuff scares me.
That scares me.
That happened to the CEO of Gab, too, right?
Exactly.
And this is why, you know, you may not agree with him.
You may find some of the things he says reprehensible.
You may not like what he says or how he says it, but you should be able to have a principled stand, which I have, to say that what's happening to him in these aspects are wrong.
And then if you let it happen to him, it could happen to you.
It could happen to other people.
So you need to stand your ground and you need to be firm.
And I think that's it.
And I think, look, he makes a name for himself by being edgy, by being out there, by saying controversial things.
And you could say you're pro-free speech.
You could say you're anti-big tech.
You could say you're anti-censorship all you want.
But unless you're willing to take a controversial stand and defend a controversial person, which I did, it really doesn't mean much because it's very easy to say, oh, I support free speech for people who are saying non-controversial things.
That's how I always viewed it.
And listen, I mean, I'm Jewish and I reject anti-Semitism.
But if there was someone who came out and was like a neo-Nazi, I would fight for that person's right to free speech.
I would disagree with what they're saying, but I could still take a nuanced principle stand and say, listen, I disagree, but they have a right to say it.
And let's defeat whatever they're saying through other forms of free speech.
That's part of the debate.
That's part of the discourse.
That's part of the dialogue.
But I think there's a lot of people on the right who engage in right-wing cancel culture.
I think they inadvertently push people into the fringe or into more radical thinking, if you want to describe it as that.
And I think what they did with Nick Fuentes is case in point.
And I think a lot of them like to talk a big game about what the left is doing, but they engage in the same tactics on the right.
They like to gatekeep.
And it doesn't even mean it's Nick Fuentes.
It could be people less controversial than Nick Fuentes.
They've done it twice a year.
Well, we only hear about the controversial ones, right?
Because the ones that they've following, about how many million.
I think it was over a million Twitter accounts were suspended last year alone.
And I think it was in relation to COVID plus election conversations that were happening.
Obviously, Twitter's always suspended accounts for threat and violence and doing things that are actually illegal.
But I think that was the first time.
I think last year was the first time that they actually suspended any accounts for political reasons specifically, including like the pandemic.
And so I think that's particularly interesting.
I actually tweeted about this just the other day where I was tweeting about how it's really interesting when you consider nationalism how And your mute's might have muted by the way.
Your mic's muted by the way.
So if you if you have something to say you want to unmute it but yeah, I just wanted to mention that I was tweeting about nationalism.
I was like, look, all a nation really is, is a civilization that comes together in a geographic area and agrees to establish policies to protect itself from the rest of the world.
Like that's the only purpose of a nation itself, right?
And so to say that nationalism is inherently immoral is to say that people don't have a right to defend themselves and that their rights should be sacrificed to like a globalist agenda, right?
And when I say globalism, like a lot of people think that it's some sort of like Bill Gates controversy or something.
And I'm not, you know, I'm not a big fan of Bill Gates, but I'm also not like a conspiracy theorist where I think, you know, I'm not sold yet on, you know, that there's like this group of multi-trillion dollar people that run the world.
And maybe there are, and I'm sure that they have a disproportionate amount of influence by all means.
But, you know, globalism is just, it's sort of like death by committee to me in my mind.
It's like you have these organizations and these institutions that come together and they're able to enact policy that has international repercussions without representation by any individual nation, really, or certainly a watered down representation.
It seems to me very antithetical to human rights that we would centralize power like that, because I can't think of an instance throughout history where power was centralized and rights were protected.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, globalism, like you said, I think it's part of the destruction of the nation state.
People are inherently tribalistic, whether it's their family, their broader tribe, their nation, their ethnic group.
Humans are social creatures.
I think this libertarian idea that we're all these atomized individuals that only look after our own self-interests is just wrong.
It's just a wrong premise to base your views on society.
I think we've started to really grasp that notion on the American right, which has been obsessed with this hyperized individualism.
And I think, you know, a lot of the problems of today have become, are because in part of the atomization of our society, our society has grown further apart.
We've lost these social bonds, these social connections, the social fabric, whether it's through the church, whether it's through family, whether it's through voluntary organizations, whatever it is.
I think that's been leading to a breakdown of a lot of the traditional American values.
And that could be looked at the macro level with the nation state.
I think a lot of people have lost faith in the nation-state.
They've lost their own faith.
They've lost belief in a higher purpose and higher values in society, a transcendence, which can manifest itself either through religion or through a belief in your nation.
And I think that's a good thing.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
I think it's good for people to live for a higher purpose.
And I think globalism kind of destroys that.
And that's the more philosophical side of it, why I'm opposed to globalism.
But some of the more just fundamental, nitty-gritty details of globalism is, you know, when you wipe out the nation states, when you wipe out the competition between states, you're only centralizing power more.
And centralization of power has always led to tyranny.
It's always led to societal rot, to decay, to stagnation.
The founders of our nation were smart enough to embrace a federalist style system, which of course in our country is kind of being whittled away.
That's a separate discussion.
But the federalist view of our republic is based on the same principles, why you should avoid globalism, because centralization of power in the hands of a few is inherently tyrannical.
And even if it doesn't appear so off the bat, it will lead down that path.
I think, and if you look at Europe, you look at the history of Europe, I think a lot of people talk about why the West was best and why the West succeeded in many ways and developed like they did, like we did, and how the West was able to grow economically, technologically, whatever sense you want to say,
is because the competition of these different states, these sovereign, independent states in the Westphalian order were able to compete with each other through commerce, militarily, in every sense of the word, compared to many, many states in the East, which were larger empires.
They were multi-ethnic empires, the Ottoman Empire, the Chinese in many regards, these different Islamic empires.
And they were basically very centralized states that took over huge swaths of land.
They never really developed their own identity.
And those states basically lagged behind Europe as Europe really began to expand rapidly post-Enlightenment, post-Renaissance, or even earlier, if you want to have that historical debate.
But the point is the same is that the competition between these states was a good thing.
I think the competition between our own states and our federal system is a good thing, as you can see with Florida, v.
New York, in terms of population shifts, economy, policy.
We did just have a lot of Texans moved to DC last night.
Yeah, that may be different.
I mean, I hope they get arrested and dragged back to Texas, but we'll have to see what happens.
So I saw that the House, I guess, in Texas voted that the sergeant of arms is to go make those arrests and bring them back, but I couldn't tell based on what I read whether or not those arrests are meant to be carried out in DC or just immediately upon their return.
Are you familiar with that story at all?
I am.
I'm not sure the technicalities.
I would hope that they just arrest them as soon as possible.
I think, you know, it's absolutely ridiculous if you're an elected representative being paid for by the state, elected to represent your constituents, that you could simply just flee the state when you don't like how a vote will go.
I think that should be a crime.
I think they should be arrested.
So I'm glad that the sergeant of arms is being tasked with that.
How they're going to enforce it, I don't know, but I hope it happens soon.
And it just goes to show how cowardly and pathetic these Democrats are.
They like to talk about democracy.
They like to talk about majority rule, but then they engage in these antics when they suit them.
I mean, I know the hypocrisy argument that the right makes is kind of tired, but it always is interesting just to see how hypocritical they are at every step along the way.
And even in this instance, the story in Texas, it just goes to show once again that they have no values.
They have no principles beyond, you know, control, beyond control, beyond consolidating power and expanding their political reach and influence.
So it's unfortunate what's happening, but it's good to see that Texas is going to continue to push ahead with their bills, with their reform.
I'm glad to see a lot of these efforts are happening at the state level.
We've lost power federally, at least for the time being.
I think that's going to change in the midterms.
I'm an optimist on that front.
But I'm glad to see that the state legislatures are picking up the mantle of the right-wing movement, of the conservative movement, and passing bills to fight critical race theory, to fight the transgender issue, to fight for election reform and integrity, and a whole slew of other issues that are in vogue right now.
So it's good to see that's happening because I think for far too long we've ignored state-level politics.
Now that we've been out of power federally with the loss of both chambers in the presidency, it's good to see that there's some efforts being put at the state level and the local level, including even with school boards, because these are fights that we can win easily, that we can expand our influence easily.
They're low-hanging fruit and it's things and it's types of fights and political fights that we've ignored for far too long and they've had disastrous consequences as a result.
You know, it's amazing to me how little the Democrats have been able to accomplish despite how much power they grabbed in 2020 with the elections.
How is it like none of their initiatives have really passed?
What have they done in the first six months?
Can you think of anything?
I mean, I guess they incited all the resistance in Cuba, or one could argue.
I don't know.
I mean, it just seems to me that whenever any sort of coup happens in South America or Latin America, rather, that the CIA is involved historically.
And Darren Beatty talks a lot about this, and it's true.
I mean, there is the color revolutions, and it's the CIA playbook.
It's the State Department playbook.
And I think, you know, there's some nuance here.
I think, obviously, there are underlying issues, of course, in places like Cuba and many of these nations against their government, against their oppressive regime, particularly in Cuba.
And organizations like the CIA and the State Department take advantage of those underlying issues and discontent to promote their own agenda.
Now, that's not to discredit the people in those countries, their polite, what they're going through.
But sometimes I have a skeptical view of what's happening and how this is being abused, how it's being utilized to the benefit of a select few to a certain agenda over the will of the actual people.
Now, I wish them all the best, and I hope they do take down the communist regime in Cuba.
I hope it's not replaced by a Washington-supported woke liberal state.
That's not, I don't think, would be better.
I think that would be a different type of tyranny.
I think it would be some kind of corporate woke tyranny.
I don't think that necessarily would be a massive improvement for the people of Cuba.
But, you know, there's a lot of complexities with these things.
And sometimes there are genuine uprisings and revolts.
And sometimes they are, in fact, manufactured, as we saw through Eastern Europe and many other countries with those color revolutions.
And the same tactics were almost applied, were essentially applied to the U.S. in 2020 to take down Trump.
There was a whole slew of different institutions and individuals and factions and interests that were working in conjunction to take him down, to sabotage his movement, to sabotage his political coalition.
And they were successful in many ways, in all ways, essentially.
So I think it's something to be said.
But look, the Cuba situation is interesting.
And I think everything's very cyclical.
I think they're hitting maybe an anniversary point since the overthrow of the Batista regime, which was also a pretty bad regime.
It was a lot better than what they've had now.
But I think we're going to see maybe some changes in Cuba, hopefully for the better.
But I'm a bit skeptical.
And I think whatever happens is either going to be very chaotic and it may be worse, but we'll have to see.
Yeah, I'm interested to see as well.
Historically speaking, has there ever been an instance of a people rising up against a domestic communism and then successfully overthrowing it?
Obviously, the Soviet Union fell and collapsed, but have the people ever taken a country or nation back from a state of communism?
I mean, maybe you could say that there were a lot of revolutions in Eastern Europe during the same period of time where the Soviet Union was separately collapsing in Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc.
And those happened because the Soviet Union itself was collapsing and couldn't respond.
We obviously saw with the Hungarian Revolution in the 50s.
There were some revolts in Poland where at some point the Iron Curtains were opened.
Those were all suppressed violently by the Soviets because it wasn't so much the domestic, the Polish Communist Party or the Hungarian Communist Party that was in power as it was this foreign government, the Soviets.
So, but your question is interesting.
I don't really know off the top of my head.
And the fact that I don't know off the top of my head probably leads me to believe that there isn't really an authentic example of a domestic revolution overthrowing a communist regime.
I think either the system itself completely collapsed, especially with outside influence like we saw with the Soviet Union, or the foreign entity that's propping up a local communist regime, as was the case with the Warsaw Pact, that regime falls that paves the way for local revolutionaries to replace the local Communist Party, which we saw in places like Poland, Hungary, Romania, etc.
Those are the only examples.
But again, communism has not been around that long.
Well, there have been a lot of pivots too.
Like, if you go on the Marxist Wikipedia page, there's like 8 million different types of Marxism now, right?
And then they shift.
China's in shining a lot.
It's not Maoist China.
Yeah, they adopted capitalism, but they have sort of communist programs.
China is a nationalist communist state.
And that's a good point.
Some things of the free market in order to prop themselves up and advance them in a very strategic, well-thought-out way.
And they've adopted a sort of nationalist approach, which has been able to unite the Chinese under the common banner of being Chinese and being nationalistic.
So they've definitely redefined a lot of their internal, a lot of their national ideology to cater to the times, to cater to the changing demands, and to keep their regime afloat.
So you're seeing that.
And even then, I still think that there's things underlying in China that make it in some regards a paper tiger.
And again, I still think in the grand scheme of things, a lot of these regimes, communist or not, or just communism in general, have not been around that long.
There are people that were born before people alive that may have been born pre-communist revolution in Russia.
So they're pretty old now, but it just goes to show that it hasn't been that long in the greater human experience.
So we still have a lot of time to really see how these things play out, Cuba being an example.
So we'll see.
Do you think it's possible to have a state of nationalism with term limits on a nation's leader?
Are there examples of the people who are not afraid of states that had term limits?
I think term limits are stupid.
That's a good reason why.
I mean, I think all of it is really, just totally.
I think term limits, all they do is they shift power to unelected bureaucrats in the capital, in this case, DC, because they have the institutional knowledge to keep the gears going.
If you have an elected official who's been there a while, they don't necessarily need these unelected staffers and these unelected bureaucrats to run, to manage, to operate within the system.
They know how to do it themselves.
Many cases, you're going to get people that come in like Trump.
And he only has four years.
In his first four years, he was still learning how things work.
Work.
That's why his second term would have been great.
And if he was able to do a third term or third term, it would have been even better.
So I think term limits are dumb.
I think, you know, if you want a term limit, then just remove them from office by beating them at the polls.
I think term limits are a dumb issue.
It doesn't really do anything.
It doesn't really help anyone.
It just, again, it just cedes more power to unelected staffers and bureaucrats in D.C. And I, and to your question, whether or not you could truly have a nationalist state with term limits, I mean, yeah, I think term limits would certainly hurt the ability of someone like Trump to shift the movement, to shift the party in one direction.
I'm using him just as an example.
I think if there weren't term limits, say he won his second term and ran for a third term, every term he ran, he would have solidified and strengthened his vision of the Republican Party, which is kind of this national populism, in the same way that FDR shifted the Democrat Party to the left.
And he had, you know, four terms to do that.
He didn't complete his fourth, but he did have four terms to do that.
And I think that was probably good for the Dems in the grand scheme of things.
I think term limits are bad for a variety of reasons, this being one.
You know, I'd rather see single terms with longer time periods than frequent term limits.
Like, I'd much rather have a presidential term that was six years, but without the second term, just because it frustrates me that politicians are constantly running for a reelection and as a result, not really doing any work.
And they constantly feel like they have to cater to people.
And sometimes that's a good thing, but sometimes it's unhealthy as well when you know what the right decision is, but you won't make it because you're worried about re-election.
So I'd rather see longer terms with one limit.
But I understand what you mean by if you have one term, the guy gets elected and he could run on one mandate, but there's nothing to hold him to that.
He could just get elected and then do whatever the hell he wants.
Right.
There's less accountability.
Yeah, you lose accountability.
If there's a second term, he has an incentive to deliver on what he promised, because if he doesn't, he'll lose his second term.
You have one term that removes it.
So I think that I think the single term idea is kind of neither here nor there.
I know the problem is the Constitution.
They proposed, the Confederate States of America, they proposed a single six-year term for the presidency along the lines of what you just said.
Again, I may, you know, maybe swap the Senate and the presidency.
Maybe you have the Senate be four years and the presidency be six, but I still wouldn't like the idea of a single term.
I think you need to have multiple terms.
I think that holds people to it.
I think it makes them accountable.
I think it allows input.
I think, you know, if anything, you know, I don't think necessarily elections are bad.
I don't think them running for elections are bad.
Maybe you could argue that the House of Representatives, the elections are too soon, but I think that's also a good thing because it keeps it, because there's a short time span for when people remember things, when they remember controversies, when they remember betrayals, when they remember, you know, whether they delivered on their message or not.
That's why having two years is good because there's more of an instant feedback loop for people to vote them out.
Senators, you know, you're going to have many senators who voted for impeachment, and then six years later, maybe people forget and they get away with it.
So there's a balance to be made.
And I think that's why you have a bicameral system where you have one house, which is elected every two years, one that was originally appointed every six years by the legislatures.
We should return to that.
But they both encapsulate different things.
They both have different setups.
And as a result, the makeup of those bodies is different.
And I think that's a good thing.
Yeah, I agree with you.
I think one of the things that is bizarre, though, about our system is I think that the forefathers, in all of their wisdom, which I mean that in a genuine sense of that expression, I think they were very wise for the time, especially.
But I don't think they foresaw how much the federal government would gain influence.
Right.
So can you imagine Benjamin Franklin, for example, ever conceding that the United States would have a Department of Education or a Department of Energy?
Well, obviously not energy because the tech wasn't there, but I don't think that they ever envisioned a federal, at a federal level, those types of things happening.
I think that that was always intended to be at the state level for them.
And that was sort of the whole point was that the federal government would protect the states from other nations and the states would do whatever sort of customizations they wanted to as far as policy and programs are concerned at the state level.
People could vote with their feet and certain inalienable rights would always be protected by the federal government so that a state couldn't get out of hand.
But now you see the situation where they sort of ignore the part of the Constitution where anything not delineated in the Constitution is supposed to be delegated to the states.
It's like, dude, nowhere were you ever supposed to make all these departments.
I don't know.
Maybe I'm just ignorant on the matter, but it seems to me that we've created an America much different than the one that the founding fathers had intended.
You're absolutely correct.
And the Constitution was great and it got us through a lot of time.
It got us to the point of being a superpower, being the most prosperous free country in the world.
But it's not without its problems.
That's why I hate civic religion in America because they think they worship institutions, they worship the Constitution, they think it's without flaws, they think it's an inherently perfect document, which is just simply not true.
The founders never would have thought it was true.
It was a pragmatic document.
It was a document that was crafted because of various, various competing factions trying to make a united government work and to improve upon the previous government of the Articles of Confederation.
But I never thought that they would have viewed it being perfect.
And a lot of the things you're describing, you know, the growth of the federal government, the growth of the federal bureaucracy, you can say that happened because of some failures of the constitutional framework.
I think, you know, a simple fix for the very specific problem you brought up of these different departments, having a codified list of departments from the get-go would have, just like we have the enumerated powers of Congress, if we had a simple enumerated list, codified departments for the executive, I think that would have gone a long way to minimizing the size of the federal government.
I don't think that's a radical change.
I think that would have been a simple textual fix to the Constitution.
And that would have prevented a lot of the growth we saw in the 20th and 21st century with these federal bureaucracies and these departments.
But if I were to suggest that, I think there would be a lot of constitutional conservatives and constitutionalists who would say, oh, we don't need it because the Constitution is perfect as is.
That's why I support the Convention of States projects.
That's why I support a lot of amendments to the Constitution.
I think there's a lot of conservatives, right-wingers, Republicans who rest on their laurels and who don't want to reform things.
They don't want to actively fix things.
They don't want to wield power when they have it.
And I think that's part of the reason we're in the place we're in today because they think, oh, we've had it so good for so long.
Things must be perfect, but they're not perfect.
The left has, over the years, figured out how to manipulate our system, how to use the system, whether it's the courts, whether it's the federal bureaucracy, whether it's the legislative process, in order to slowly whittle away at our freedoms, at our American system, at our culture, at our tradition, at our economy, at our prosperity, whatever it is, at our sovereignty.
And we've had very little counter to that.
And I think part of the reason is there have been some failures with the constitutional framework.
I think it needs to be reviewed.
I think it needs to be reformed.
And I think, you know, the founders would have believed the same.
I think it was Thomas Jefferson who really wanted to have a more regular convention process every few decades in order to make sure that the Constitution keeps up with the times and can keep up with the different forms of creeping tyranny.
Because the tyranny of big tech didn't exist in 1776.
A lot of the tyranny we're seeing from globalists, from mega corporations, from big tech, as mentioned, from the mass media, those didn't exist in 1776.
And where has the Constitution really shined in areas where we have, they did understand where tyranny could exist.
So we do have strong religious freedom protections, and that was tested during COVID when they tried to shut down the churches.
The Supreme Court actually stepped up and defended that right.
If you look at the Anglosphere, if you look at other Commonwealth countries with a similar common law English tradition, they didn't have a codified Bill of Rights, and many of their churches are still shut down.
Many of their rights are still being trampled on.
And they don't have codified constitutions.
They have unwritten constitutions.
They don't have Bill of Rights like we do.
So that just shows that even in that sense, our system is better.
And the areas where our system is better is places where that issue still existed in 1776.
So religious liberty, I think, is one area we do a lot better than most of the world.
And even in this country, we still have our issues.
But without those written, codified protections in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution, those wouldn't exist.
So I think that's an argument to be made that there should be some revisions.
We should look at it again and we should use it as a tool to fight back against the left.
What revisions or amendments do you advocate?
A whole slew of things.
I mean, I mentioned one just now.
I just pulled that out of my backside.
But a balanced budget amendment, I think, would be great.
An amendment to ban abortion, I think would be great.
An amendment to define marriage would be great.
An amendment, I would support an amendment.
You think that we should, at a constitutional level, outlaw gay marriage?
I think at a constitutional level, yeah, I do.
I think we should, I think marriage is an institution that needs to be protected.
I think it's part of the fundamental basis of our society.
And I think it's something that could be regulated at the federal level.
They already regulated against it at the federal level, and we all go along with it.
It's been taken away from us.
Well, he just got booted.
I promise I didn't kick him off.
I think he's having some internet troubles.
So great conversation going on.
Oh, let me bring him back right then.
You're back.
And you're muted again, though, by the way.
That's your default.
So you got to unmute.
I believe your mic's muted.
There you go.
No, no, no, no.
Try again.
How am I?
Oh, there you go.
I can hear you.
Yep.
Sorry.
So I promise I didn't boot you.
I didn't boot you for talking about making gay marriage illegal.
No, no, no, no.
I do disagree with you, but I'm not going to boot you for it.
Well, my point was going to be made.
They've already regulated at the federal level that states have no rights in this question.
So that's why.
Well, I don't understand why the government's involved in marriage at all.
You know what I mean?
I just don't, I don't get it why you have to have a license to get married.
And I get that's been the libertarian argument, and I believed in that in the past.
Sorry, I lost you.
Am I still here?
Hello?
It was, you were saying it was traditionally a libertarian argument.
Can you hear me?
I'm here.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Okay, yeah.
Sorry, you were saying it was traditionally a libertarian argument.
Yeah, I used to support that view.
I used to support that view.
I think at this point, what we're seeing is that it's never live and let live.
It's accept our form of lifestyle is the first step.
And then the second step is we're now going to force that lifestyle on your kids and we're going to force it at society at large.
And it never stops.
And it's been a, every time we've ceded ground on the cultural social fight, we've lost more and more ground and we've had to give up more and more.
And the type of deviancy and anti-traditional lifestyles have become more and more the norm and they're being forced on us.
So that's why I support a federal marriage amendment.
I mean, those are just a few.
I mean, I would also support returning to states picking their senators.
I would remove presidential term limits.
I would remove the income tax amendment.
I would return to a position where most of our revenue is from tariffs, not from income taxes.
I would expand the House of Representatives.
It's kind of been stuck at a certain size and it's kind of a dumb size.
It's arbitrary.
So, I mean, there's a whole slew of things we could go through and fix.
I mean, I can't think of them all off the top of my head, but there's certainly a ton of them out there, and they would certainly make things better.
I think they would certainly improve the situation in our country for the better.
So I think if there's ever an opportunity to pass something like that at the amendment level, I think we should rally behind it and fully support it.
Right.
That makes sense.
Well, obviously, the beauty of constitutional amendments is that they're much more difficult to overturn.
But it's also the challenge of them is that they're much more difficult to establish.
I think it's, what is it, two-thirds of states have to ratify all amendments to the Constitution?
Is that the current setup in the system?
Yeah, it's a high bar, but we have so many trifecta states, and we've had even more in the past.
I mean, states that have a Republican governor and two Republican chambers, we could have passed plenty of stuff at the state level.
We could have called the Constitutional Convention.
But again, they're all.
Is it the state legislators that vote on the amendments?
Is it the state House and Senates and governors that once it goes to Congress?
It goes to the state.
So yeah, it would be the states.
But if the left had that number of states under their control from a political standpoint, they would have to do it.
It wouldn't be done.
Yeah.
It would have been done.
No problem.
I think that's why we need to.
They would have amended the Constitution that all Supreme Court judges have to be registered Democrats.
They would have done something ridiculous like that.
Well, you know, I think we should have an amendment that says that the Supreme Court is set at nine justices or whatever it is.
Just set a cap.
I think that's an easy reform because that would prevent packing of the courts.
So that just removes a pathway for the left to pack the courts.
Why don't we support that?
That would be great.
So that's, I just came up with that right now.
I mean, that's been around.
I mean, I think that's a simple reform that would make a big difference.
And that's not in the Constitution as it is.
Yeah, well, that makes sense.
I really appreciate you coming on.
Where can people find you if they want to follow you?
You guys can follow me on my Twitter at Gavin Wax, G-A-B-I-N-W-A-X.
That's the same on Instagram, on Getter, on Facebook, on whatever.
I use the same.
And you can follow my club, the New York and Republican Club, at nyyrc, www.nyyrc.com.
