New Ideas and New Faces in the GOP with Hillbilly Elegy’s JD Vance
Charlie is joined by author of the mega bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance, whose memoir about growing up in in the Rust Belt sold over 3 million books and was later turned into a feature film. His story gave voice to millions of "forgotten Americans" who had been left behind by globalization and the offshoring of millions of middle class jobs that once secured the families and futures of American industrial heartland. J.D. and Charlie discuss his meteoric rise as both an author and a political voice for conservative populism that is increasingly mainstream within the conservative movement as he seriously considers a run for Senate from the great state of Ohio. This is a can't miss episode. Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk Show, we have an amazing conversation with JD Vance.
He's thinking of running for office in Ohio.
He wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which sold over 3 million copies.
That's right, 3 million copies.
And we have a very in-depth and detailed conversation about his potential run in Ohio, the ideas we must be focused on, how to rebuild the American family, the need for faith.
It is a provocative conversation that every person involved in politics should listen to.
If you'd like to email us your questions, please do so at freedom at charliekirk.com.
If you want to come to our upcoming campus tour, go to tpusa.com slash genfree.
We will be in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, Nashville, Vegas, San Jose, tpusa.com/slash genfree.
And please consider supporting our program at charliekirk.com slash support.
These interviews, these discussions, these conversations are made possible when you support us at charliekirk.com slash support.
JD Vance is here.
Buckle up, everybody.
Here we go.
Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.
Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.
I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.
I want to thank Charlie.
He's an incredible guy.
His spirit is love of this country.
He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created.
Turning point USA.
We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
That's why we are here.
Hey, everybody.
Today on the Charlie Kirk show, a very special guest, someone who I've admired for quite some time.
He is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, and he is entertaining a run for the Senate in the great state of Ohio.
I think if he runs, he'd be terrific.
But that's all we'll say with that.
JD, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks, Charlie.
Thanks for having me.
So let's start with your book.
I am a big admirer of the, not just the book, but the way that you presented it.
And it seems that the media first treated you kind of as a darling, and then you became a villain a couple of months after.
They looked at you as kind of the intermediary to the Trump's base, as if tell us about the rural Appalachia voters that we've never met and we kind of hate.
But here's kind of a smart guy who could tell us all about them.
Let's just talk about the book because I believe it will go down as one of the most culturally impactful and important books of the last 50 years that helps explain a very unique moment in American history.
I'm not sure if you planned it while there was going to be a president who happened to communicate to that part of the world.
Tell us about the book.
Yeah, so the book came out in 2016 and it's basically a family story.
So it starts with my grandparents who grew up in Southeast Kentucky coal country, migrated to southern Ohio to work in the steel mills.
And it's really the story of my family and how my grandparents were able to achieve a middle-class lifestyle for the family.
But when the steel mill went downhill, when the paper mills started to disappear, the struggle in our family started to become pretty substantial.
And so my mom struggled with heroin addiction.
I ended up getting raised by my grandparents.
And really the book is my effort to explore what's going on in the industrial heartland of the country.
What happens when all these factory jobs disappear and what effect does it have on the people who are left behind?
And that's kind of the story that I told.
And like you said, it got picked up for there was like a two-month period, you might remember after Trump was elected where everybody was like, oh, we're going to understand the other half of the country.
We're going to try to empathize with these people.
And it was always a little bit weird to kind of appear before the liberal media and serve as the spokesman for like this whole population.
But I tried to do as good as I could.
And then like two months went by and the new line was, well, these people are all racist and terrible.
And it was kind of funny because when everybody decided that the reason Trump won is just because all of his voters are racist, you know, I got kind of like thrown in there.
And it's like, clearly, JD is just an apology for apologists for racism and he's a terrible guy.
And, you know, the thing I always try to do is just, you know, always maintain my view that the people who voted for Trump are fundamentally good, decent people.
They just don't want their country to get lost.
They don't want to see their communities decimated.
So yeah, it was a weird thing, but I definitely think it was a little bit of a weird education in the way the media actually works.
So I'm glad I have it.
Yeah, it was fascinating to watch from afar.
And I've become an admirer of yours of you on the Tucker Carlson program.
And I think you are talking about a new brand of conservatism that's very exciting.
And it's still kind of going through its formation in some ways.
And I really want to explore that with you.
But before we do, I want to talk a little bit more about your book.
You're Scots-Irish.
I'm Scots-Irish.
My family lived in the same parts of the hills that your family lived in, very similar to the Scottish Highlands.
And there's a theory that that's why a lot of Scots-Irish settled there, because it kind of reminded them of home, close to their kin.
And just a side note, there's a phenomenal book.
There's a lot of books that have been written about the Scots-Irish.
And the one in particular, though, was by Senator Webb from Virginia, where he talks about every war has a disproportionate amount of Scots-Irish serving in it.
So I've always, it seems that us Scots-Irish love a good fight for a good cause.
But talk a little bit about in the book, you talk about this intergenerational dynamic.
And I believe her name was Mama.
Is that correct?
That's exactly who you raised you.
Yep.
And she was a tough woman.
She almost killed your grandfather by pouring kerosene or gasoline on him at one point because she said, if you come home drunk again, I am going to light you on fire.
And she made good on that promise basically.
But that offered for you a disciplinary aspect.
And JD, I am reminded in some ways of the stories of some young black people in America where there was almost this missing generation.
And I think that there's a through line here that I want to explore with you where your parents' generation were the victims of mass globalization, both in rural Appalachia and the inner cities of our country for different but similar reasons where the factories just disappeared.
Talk about what it was like being raised by your grandparents and then the pressure it put on you.
I mean, you write in the book that your grandmother saved up just to get you, I believe it was a Texas Instruments calculator where she said, if I can get you this, then you can succeed.
Just walk us through a little bit of that.
Yeah, you know, that's a really important part of my story.
And, you know, my grandmother was just this incredibly powerful woman, right?
She loved, she cursed like a sailor.
She loved the F-word.
She was not a classical grandma in a lot of ways.
But, you know, what she provided for me was just love and stability.
And I've talked to a lot of people about the book.
I've talked to child psychologists about the book.
And the thing they consistently tell you is the thing that most kids need in order to succeed is just one person in their life that they feel like they can really rely on.
And for me, that was my grandma.
And my grandparents' generation was really classical, patriotic.
They were blue dog union Democrats.
The first Republican my grandfather voted for was Ronald Reagan.
And then he didn't vote for another Republican for the rest of his life.
And so their politics were, you've got to work hard, you've got to play by the rules.
And if you do, you can succeed in this country of ours.
And there was this incredible optimism, even though they had had very hard lives.
My grandma grew up in deep, deep poverty.
I mean, eating, you know, eating coals out of the fireplace poverty in eastern Kentucky.
And she just loved the country.
She cared about it.
Thought that it was the greatest place on earth.
And because of that she said, look, if you just play by the rules and do the right thing, you're going to be able to have a good and successful life.
It's not easy for us.
We've definitely, you know, got more, more hardships than the average American, but you've got to do the right thing and if you do, this country will reward you, and it's it's definitely.
The thing that you know really is kind of a sad part of the book is, I feel like the.
The past 40 years have been so hard on that region of the country that I think a lot of folks have lost that optimism about the future of the country.
Uh, my grandparents had it.
I think I was better off for it.
But things are tough and if, if they're tough for too long, then people start to think that this is no longer a place where the American dream can really happen.
Uh, thank god my parent, my grandparents, still had that classical faith in the American future.
Uh, because without it I think I would have gone in a pretty negative, negative direction, and one of the reasons why I think your book is so incredible and it's again Hillbilly Elegy, over 3 million copies sold, if i'm my my research is correct, which is unbelievable.
I mean congratulations, Jd.
That's a lot more books than i've ever sold.
I can tell you.
That's a phenomenal accomplishment.
And you sold just to sell.
Yeah, we sold hundreds of thousands, not millions, and so you know congratulations, that that's.
That's a really big deal.
And the argument you make and I don't think you it's really funny Jd, because I don't think you actually wrote it for this purpose.
You wrote it as a family story and you thought it was an important thing to introduce to kind of the American zeitgeist.
But it quickly turned into this, you become a broader spokesperson, as you mentioned, for the economic impact that mass globalization and the idolatry of free trade brought to that part of the world and, kind of segueing to Trump, Trump was able to talk to that part of the world, that northeast Kentucky region, all of West Virginia, southeast Oio and southwestern Pennsylvania.
If you look at the most dramatic shift towards Trump and Republicans, it was in that part of the world.
Now Jd, you say it's not because these people are bigoted or racist, which I don't believe at all.
I think it's the exact opposite.
I think they're actually decent tolerant, wonderful people, but finally they saw someone get on the national stage and say he's diagnosing the problem correctly.
Can you, can you help build that out for us?
Yeah absolutely, you know.
I I think that when you grow up in a community that's just been constantly declining, right, the businesses on main street are closing, more and more people in your community are dying of heroin overdoses.
It's harder and harder to get a good job and support a family on on a good decent, middle class wage.
You start to get sick of hearing the same old things and I think people were hearing the same old slogans from both political parties.
And here's Donald Trump who comes on the stage and says, why are we losing our manufacturing base to China?
Why are we losing our manufacturing base to Mexico?
Why do we keep on allowing our country to get taken, taken advantage of?
And you know the the the China issue in particular was so powerful and I don't think people ever appreciated why.
I've seen it in polling, i've certainly seen it in the conversations i've had with people, and it's because if you are a blue collar worker in the heartland, you hear every single year there's a new factory that's closing its doors in your community and it's going overseas to somewhere Else, usually that place is China.
You hear that same story for 20 years, and nobody talks about why it is that we're getting our clock cleaned economically by China.
And then all of a sudden, this guy from Queens, New York comes out of nowhere and says, we're sick of losing.
We're constantly losing.
We're losing our manufacturing base.
We're losing our values.
And that message just really, really appealed to people.
And I think, you know, there are many, many things that I think we'll be talking about the Donald Trump presidency for the next 100 years.
But the thing that was most impactful, in my view, is that he revealed that the conservative base, you know, those classic blue dog Democrats like my grandparents, they didn't care about the old Republican slogans of the past 20 years.
They actually recognized that we needed to go in a new direction.
And I think he ripped the band-aid off of that conversation that we're finally having now in this country.
And that's really where I want to take our conversation.
So I was raised in a conservative movement like you were, 2010, 2011, 2012, where it was Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Frederick Bastiat, F.A. Hayek.
And I have a lot of respect for that literature.
And a lot of those ideas I think are very fun to talk about.
They actually made me a better thinker.
And I do agree on some of the warnings of how a society could descend into collectivism and socialism.
And I think Hayek does a good job of that.
However, in the last couple of years, I have become enlightened.
The left would call it becoming woke.
To all of a sudden realizing how there is almost a uniparty created where on the Democrats, they would espouse socially liberal ideas where all of a sudden they would allow awful content to spread throughout the internet and our culture, post-birth abortion, and the Rockefeller Republicans and the couple things that they never actually had spirited conversations about were ending endless wars, challenging the corporate oligarchy,
or even having any sort of concern whatsoever for the manufacturing decay in our country.
So JD, let's start with the manufacturing decay, because this is one in particular that I have completely changed my opinion on.
If you would have asked me five years ago, I would have given you an informed data, factual argument about Milton Friedman economics and how we're getting lower cost goods.
It's good for the American consumer.
I've completely changed my opinion.
And I believe that if you are not in hardware development, if you do not have a muscular class, if you do not have the trust, the promise of a middle-class worker or family that their job has some form of stability, then something will replace that.
And that something is probably going to be addictive to you chemically and destroy the country.
Help walk us through, there's a lot there, but let's talk specifically on manufacturing.
Why is it important for a nation to have a robust and strong manufacturing base?
So this is a pretty, this is a super important question, and we can riff on this for a while.
But here's the way that I think about this, Charlie.
You need to produce things and you need to consume things, right?
That's just basic economics.
If you want to consume something, somebody else has to make it.
And the economic dogma that you said was adopted by both parties was that we could have a services sector based economy here in the United States.
We could borrow from China and then buy the things that were being made in China so that they could be consumed here in the United States.
The problem with that, of course, is that if you are consuming cheap goods from China all the time, you become a society that's good at consumption, but isn't good at production anymore, isn't good at making things, isn't good at building things anymore.
And, you know, the U.S. trade ambassador, Bob Lightheiser, I think is one of the best people to work in government a long time.
He was the trade ambassador under President Trump.
The way that he puts this is the economic conceit that we had is that you could do, you could separate the making of things from the designing of things, right?
We're going to design the iPhone in California.
We're going to make it in China.
But what happens over time is that if you're making everything in China, the people who are making it start to get pretty good at designing it.
And the people who are designing the iPhone start to lose their ability if they're not involved in the manufacture.
And so you have an entire economy where we're just not as good at making things as we used to.
And that's bad for a couple of reasons, right?
The first reason it's terrible is because you need a manufacturing base to support a middle-class economy.
It's been true, every middle class across the world has been built around manufacturing.
You can't just have an economy where people make subway subs and service people at McDonald's and at the higher end work as lawyers and bankers.
Those are all service sector jobs.
You can't build a middle class just on those types of jobs.
The second reason is we've learned during the COVID pandemic is you've got to be able to make the things that are critical to you, critical to your infrastructure, or you're fundamentally reliant on another country.
And it's kind of crazy.
You read the literature even 20 years ago, what the elites were saying about China is that it's totally fine.
If China makes everything, we'll just buy it from them.
We can always just buy it and have it shipped.
Well, what if China becomes a hostile power?
What if China doesn't have our best interest at heart?
And now it's pretty obvious they don't have our best interest at heart.
We just didn't think nearly enough about that.
And so now, you know, we have an economy where our industrial base really has been hollowed out.
The statistic that I always throw people is that from the late 90s to the mid-2000s, we lost 7 million manufacturing jobs in this country, primarily in East Asia, primarily in China.
Now, you think about the effect that it has on a community.
That's people's dads losing their sense of livelihood.
That's men who were previously building things, who are proud of what they were doing at work.
Now, all of a sudden, they're unemployed or they're doing work at a much lower wage that doesn't give them nearly their same sense of place in the world.
You take away that critical lifeblood in a community and you just make everything weaker.
And that's really the story of what's going on in our, in our, in the center of our country, is that we've totally removed, not totally, but we've mostly removed the manufacturing base of the country.
We've allowed China to build a middle class on the back of the American middle class.
And of course, we should have been doing this totally in reverse.
The final point that I'll make there, Charlie, is that this was our fault.
This was the fault of the American ruling class.
They knew that this trade was out there.
Cheaper consumer plastic, cheaper junk from China at the cost of an American middle class.
They said that it was going to be worth it and it wasn't.
So we've got to reverse course.
We've got to go back to the basic American system that we had in this country for 200 years, bipartisan consensus that you've got to be able to make things in your own country.
And I can prove it to people at how bad of a deal it has been.
If we valued the piles of garbage we got from China, why are there $1 Dollar Tree stores at every corner?
Why do people have garage sales?
Why is the fastest growing real estate market in the country self-storage?
I need extra square footage to be able to store my stuff that I can't have within my home.
And this living on the excess of mountains of plastic of things I don't value made with quasi-slave labor halfway around the world to try to pursue some sort of bumper sticker free market utopia is not moral.
It's not patriotic.
And the cost is significant.
And let me be very clear.
I love small business.
I love entrepreneurship.
I think markets generally work when they're allowed to be implemented domestically.
And I'm by no means making an anti-private property argument.
The argument I am making, and this is my question for you, JD, is what do you have to say for the conservative who says there will always be a cost to our markets.
The people in Southeast Ohio should pick up and move, go to New York City and Philadelphia.
Kevin Williamson had this ridiculous thing where he said, the jobs are gone.
It's a good thing they're gone.
JD, why don't your people, or our people, Southeast Ohio, why don't they just move?
Yep.
Yeah, no, I think it's a really terrible way to look at building a community and building a country.
If you want to have a successful, viable, vibrant society, you want people to be invested in the places where they're from.
You want them to raise families near their kin.
You want them to be able to build a life for themselves in the place that made them who they are.
Now, of course, some people are going to move for opportunity.
That's always been a part of the American story.
But some people want to be able to build a good life for themselves in their home.
And we should be able to do that.
I'll also say the logic of this of just move if you can't find opportunity.
Of course, it applies globally too.
Are we going to get to the point where the software engineers in San Francisco can't find a good job in San Francisco?
We'll just move to Bangalore.
We'll just move to Beijing.
At a certain level, you've got to say community actually matters.
And we've got to protect the communities that make our country so strong.
Now, another point about this, you mentioned small business.
I think the conservative movement is always going to be the movement of small business.
But think about this from the perspective, I'm in Cincinnati right now, small business, downtown Cincinnati, employing local people.
They're dependent on the local labor market and the local economy, right?
They are invested in their community in a very powerful way.
Now, what's different about them compared to Apple?
Well, you mentioned Apple can just, if the government says you've got to treat your workers better, if the government says you've got to pay your workers more, you know what the small businesses in our communities will do?
They might complain about it a little bit, but they'll follow the law because they care about the people in their own communities.
You know what Apple will do?
Apple will send a few more jobs to Uyghur slave camps in China because they can pay those people $2 an hour a day or sorry, $2 a day or nothing to do the same job at a lower quality.
But if you can take advantage of slave labor, if you can rely on the Chinese government instead of your own citizens, a lot of companies will make that choice.
And so what we've done is we've made it easier and easier for these global companies that don't give a damn about their own citizens, about their own communities, about their own nation's future.
We've made it easier for them to do business and we've made it harder for our own people to thrive.
That's a terrible way to run a country.
And so you hit on something perfect because they don't actually look at America as their home.
They look at America as a temporary colony to maximize profit margins.
And honestly, if you presented that, they'd say, yeah, why wouldn't we move to Bangalore?
Why wouldn't we?
And it's part of this, we are all citizens of the world, which Eric Weinstein, who I disagree with him on plenty of things, but I think he's really smart on two things, which is the ego and the gin, the gated, the gated institutional narrative,
and then the expected growth obligation, which is if you don't actually care about your fellow countrymen, and the argument he makes, and you've probably heard it multiple times, is that, which is that the phrase or the moonshot ideal of the time is usually the disguise for the theft that's occurring.
So yeah, we're all citizens of the world.
And so this is a very interesting point that I don't think is talked about enough.
And only Tucker Carlson and mass media has had the courage to speak about this.
I think I've seen you on television talking about this and watching enough Tucker over the last couple of years.
It really challenged some of this pure libertarian ideology that I was introduced with.
And I'm glad I had a start in that.
It got me thinking at least, but I'm a little bit upset that it was that it was that binary as if you either want libertarianism or we're going to be in a Marxist state.
It was basically that was the framework I was always operating from.
I've become more convinced, JD, that the Goldman Sachs people, Google, Apple, they really don't have a reverence or a love of our home.
This is our home.
Absolutely.
And that's why they're so quick to say, just move.
Why not?
And I always say that America is our country that has an economy within it, not an economy that is our country.
Absolutely.
A completely different way.
Just riff on that.
Yeah, you know, I did an event at the Aspen Institute and I talked to a person, very senior.
I saw your speech there.
Sorry, go ahead.
You know, a very senior person in banking, and I was talking about this very issue that, you know, you are an American company.
You owe things to the American nation and the American people.
Why aren't you more invested in the United States of America?
And the response was in private.
It was a private conversation.
So I won't reveal the guy's name.
But the response says a lot about how our global economic elites think about their own country.
The guy said, look, I've got more customers overseas.
I've got more employees overseas.
I've got more investors overseas.
In what sense am I an American company?
And I think about that, and it really, really pisses me off if you think about the attitude that that reveals.
Who protects the global trade routes that allow our businesses to thrive?
The American Navy.
Who ensures that people are safe in their person?
Who ensures that we have a safe and vibrant country where you can conduct commerce?
The American military.
How do you have access to capital markets so that you can fund and grow your business?
It's the American legal system and the American rule of law.
Who built your company in the first place?
It was American workers who actually made it possible for your company to get off the ground.
It's totally unacceptable.
People care about their nation.
They care about where they came from.
And if you're a corporation that doesn't do the same, you're ultimately, I think, just going to be really, really deranged in how you think about the future.
I mean, you know, these companies have persuaded themselves, and it's really, really crazy.
You know, I think that this was Christine Lagarde, who was the head of the International Monetary Fund for a long time.
I may be forgetting the exact organization she led, but she said something to the effect of Zhi Shangping, the leader of communist China, is now the leader of the free world.
She said that in the wake of Trump's election in 2016.
That's so bizarre.
And this idea that you don't owe anything to your own country leads to that type of thinking.
I think it's just morally disgusting, but it's also predictable.
It is.
And so, and this entire multi-decade pillaging and plunder of the American middle class has finally been called out.
And I have realized, like, let's just take Mitt Romney, for example.
Mitt Romney was one of the architects of this form of labor arbitrage.
Bain Capital, he was an expert of going into Indiana and going into Pennsylvania and saying, okay, 600 manufacturing jobs for an air conditioning plant, you're done.
And now we're going to go make those in Wuhan or we're going to go make them in South, you know, somewhere in Ho Chi Minh City.
Right.
And again, I'm not against people in Ho Chi Minh getting wealthier, but that's not my mission statement is not trying to make the rest of the world wealthier.
That's not, it's not the idea of a nation.
It just isn't.
I hope they make good decisions.
I hope they buy our products.
And God bless them.
I mean, I wish them well and I mean that non-sarcastically.
And so what we've come up against here is an exposure of the true intentions of the people in charge.
And this is a new development.
This is the first time in our country's history.
And I think the first time in modern Western history, the wealthiest people, the most powerful people in America actually are kind of indifferent or antagonistic to the well-being of the nation.
Is that true?
That's absolutely true.
This is a huge, huge problem.
And it's, you know, it's insightful, and I'm glad that you brought it up.
I mean, we are always going to have an American elite.
We are always going to have people who are richer, who have more power, who have more prestige.
I think that's true in America.
It's true all across the world.
You know, China is a communist country, but it still very much has an elite.
The question is: what does your elite do?
What's their function?
And what are their obligations?
And for a host of complicated reasons, we now have an American elite who think that they're owed their position, not that their position brings obligations to them.
And in a healthy society, I think this is a classic Christian ethic.
This is why Christian countries, I think, help built Western civilization, because the idea is that you were chosen by God so that you could then serve the people who you are leading.
And that ethic is totally gone.
I think it's partially because our elite isn't religious anymore.
I think it's partially just because the idea of the modern meritocracy is that they got the best test scores, they went to the best schools, so they've earned it, they deserve it.
But whatever the cause is, you cannot have a functioning country if the people who are ruling your society look at the rest of the country with scorn.
And that's how they look at the rest of the country.
You mentioned Trump voters being treated as racists and bigots.
One of the craziest things that happened after the 2016 election is we have university paper after university paper coming out and studying the racial resentment levels of Donald Trump's voters.
Think about the purpose of that.
Think about a PhD, a business leader talking about folks who are dying of heroin overdoses in the heartland about how racist and terrible they are.
That's nothing but power.
That's their effort to try to dismiss people who are struggling, who have real complaints and real grievances and say, you know what, you don't matter.
You're racist.
Shut up and go away.
This is all about our ruling class subjugating the rest of the country as opposed to leading it.
And there's a very, very real and important difference.
And I, you know, I don't know what the solution is, right?
It's one thing to say we need to replace our ruling class.
You know, okay, we kick one president out, we add another president, we kick some politicians out, we add some more.
But the locus of our ruling class, the center of the American elite, of course, is the university system.
And until you completely transform our universities, I think you're going to continue to have this American leadership that thinks that it's owed something instead of being obligated to the citizens that they lead.
That's perfectly said.
And my next book is actually going to be encouraging people not to go to college.
Just I never went to college and I'm pro-learning.
That's why I'm against college.
And so it doesn't occur there.
And you went to Yale, I believe.
So you have way more credibility to make that argument than I do.
Okay.
So now I want to talk about how some of these other issues relate one to the other and how all of a sudden we have been liberated as conservatives to be able to talk about them.
For example, trade, immigration, culture, language, religion.
I am seeing some positive trends in the conservative movement.
And I think you are really representative of that, which is why I'm so excited that you are running for this.
I don't know if you're running for anything.
I'm sorry.
You're thinking about running.
You could correct me.
Whatever you're doing, JD, you're talking.
I like it.
Because now all of a sudden we're able to have these robust discussions.
And I said this earlier kind of sarcastically, but I mean it.
The conservative movement has awoken.
We are now more woke in the sense, not woke industrial complex woke, which I do want to get to and really have fun with you on that.
But for years, I think there is kind of this realization that, hey, our think tanks were funded by companies that hate us.
Our politicians were given talking points from experts that were completely indifferent about the welfare of the people in Tennessee or Oklahoma.
And so now, and at CPAC, I was really optimistic.
I spoke at CPAC.
Matt Schlapp is a friend of mine, and also at our Turning Point USA Student Action Summit.
Neither of our events did we script one person on stage.
Yet, interestingly, JD, almost everyone was articulating a very similar nationalist, pro-American, and pro-family agenda.
So, JD, you're getting now into the highest level of potential leadership of our country.
What should the focus of the conservative movement be?
Should it be these think tanks that say free trade for everyone always, or let's make Wuhan great again?
Or is it something more fundamental and exciting than that?
Yeah, you know, first of all, in the Senate, let me put my very serious voice on, Charlie, and just say I'm thinking very seriously about taking a run for the Senate, and you'll be the first to know if I end up pulling the trigger.
I might have said something I shouldn't have, so I'm glad you corrected me.
But on, you know, this question of what the conservative movement will be, I just say I'm very excited because you spend a lot of time with young people, and I think people who are under the age of 30 are, like you said, they're really woke to a lot of this stuff.
They're getting pretty radical, and they're willing to talk about ideas and think about things that I think even three years ago, no one would have discussed.
Of course, the president, you know, President Trump deserves a ton of credit for that.
Now, I guess one way I'd frame this is just to say, what's the biggest difference between the left and the right?
And I think there are all of these sort of slogan ways of doing it.
You know, the right is for small government, the left is for big government.
You know, the left is for, you know, it's anti-American.
The right is pro-American.
But, you know, where I think this is true of the establishment right, its biggest difference from the left is that the left is willing to use power to punish its enemies, to reward its friends, and to enact its vision of society.
And the establishment right is terrified of it.
And a lot of young conservatives are not on board with the establishment right approach.
So we want to have families with more children.
Let's make that happen.
Let's enact that through public policy.
We want to have a manufacturing base in our country.
Let's make that happen through public policy and whatever levers that we have.
We think that you should stop teaching bogus critical race theory at woke universities.
Let's do something through public policy to make that happen.
And I think that's where I'm most excited about the conservative movement: we're starting to get a sense of our vision of what we want the country to look like.
And we're starting to lose our fearfulness, our terror at actually using politics and political power to accomplish it.
It's just a really exciting development.
And the one misconception about political power, and I remember your speech that you gave at the, before the lockdown, the conservative summit, Tucker spoke there, and Edmund Burke Society.
And everyone needs to read Burke right now because Burke is just awesome.
And he should be one of the, you should be on like the philosophical Mount Rushmore.
I would like to take, and I, oh my goodness, the libertarians are going to lose their mind.
Von Mises off Mount Rushmore and Edmund Burke on.
Let's just put it that way.
That's going to annoy some folks.
That's fine.
Von Mises is great on monetary policy, but we don't live in Narnia.
Okay.
We live in the real world.
That's right.
You know, with families and human beings and love the Austrians to death, but there's limitations to that.
No, I do too.
They're fascinating.
These are fascinating people.
And they're really smart and decent.
So you spoke at that Edmund Burke Foundation deal, and you said something really fascinating to me.
And I want to build on what you, not to me, to the, it spoke to me, I should say.
And you said, why should conservatives be unafraid about the power that was given to us?
And a light bulb went out in my head.
I said, it's the consent of the governed.
We did not execute a coup to get this power.
We were given that power, right?
People voted for us to fix these problems.
And then all of a sudden, we've been given this political power.
I'm like, sorry, there's nothing I can do about it.
So, you mentioned we should pay people to have children.
I completely agree.
We should have restriction immigration.
We should end the endless wars, which I want to explore with you, which is a really exciting new bipartisan development I think we can do.
And we should crush the corporate oligarchy and all of those things our voters want.
Can you talk about how conservatives have talked a good game when they run for office and they get into office or in their positions of power?
Like, I don't have the power to do that.
When in reality, it's like, no, no, that's the precise reason why you won that election.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
I mean, it's, I think it's pretty straightforward.
You know, conservatives have for so long thought if it happens through the natural occurrence of civil society, if it happens from what corporations are doing, their free decision making, then it must be okay so long as free decisions influenced it or free decisions produced it.
And at the end of the day, no corporation is making totally free decisions.
And that's the thing we have to recognize: that all of us live in a society together.
We're all influenced by the laws.
We're all influenced by public policy.
So, you know, we can say that big tech, that Facebook and Twitter are private companies making censorship decisions.
Well, what about when Senator Richard, or excuse me, when Senator Dick Blumenthal threatens Twitter and Facebook with penalties if they don't censor in the way that he wants them to?
What about the special government protections that big tech has been given that's made it much easier for them to operate their business?
What about all of the internet infrastructure that they're building on top of that was created by public policy that they're now using to censor, by the way, the 45th duly elected president of the United States.
We have to get out of this frame of saying if it was produced by private decision makers, it's good, or at least it's something that we can't touch.
There's a lot that happens in the private sector that is influenced by the public sector, and we should be willing to influence it in the other direction.
And if we are in the mission, or if we're on the mission to try and preserve first principles and freedom of speech and strong families, and you're not even allowed to talk about where all the conversation is happening, those are not private companies.
If you're the Chicago Skyway from Gary, Indiana to downtown Chicago, which is a private public partnership, you all of a sudden can't pull over cars and say Trump supporters aren't allowed to drive on this.
That's the equivalent of what Google and Facebook are doing.
So let's say, JD Vance, that you become a U.S. senator.
Are you willing to break up these companies?
Absolutely.
I think we absolutely have to break up these companies.
Awesome.
And I think finally, a direct answer.
That's why you should be a senator.
All these guys I have on my show.
Well, Charlie, I'm going to look at all the papers and real geese, Louise, if I have to hear that one.
No, go ahead.
Break up the companies, reduce their power.
It's the only way we're going to save our democracy at the end of the day.
And it's not just break them up.
I think that we can do other things too to provide additional protection.
So I'll just tell you like a very brief story.
A friend of mine wrote something on Facebook a few months ago.
Pro-Trump was not, I looked at it.
It's not offensive.
It's totally innocuous.
Even if it was offensive, it wouldn't matter, of course.
And a bunch of people who he was Facebook friends with actually ganged up on him, called his employer, small business, and tried to get his employer to fire him.
I think that we need to make it so that if you're a conservative, you're protected from losing your job just because your political viewpoints.
Because corporate America has gone so hard for the left that we're getting to the point where speaking your mind as a conservative is going to become a firewance.
We should say conservative political viewpoints, for that matter, liberal political viewpoints, that's a protected class.
You can't fire people for expressing their vision of how the country should be run.
Because again, I think our vision as conservatives is simple and clear.
It's we want people to be able to raise their families on a single good wage to support a solid middle class lifestyle.
And a middle class lifestyle, it's one, it's a good job, but it's also participating meaningfully in American society.
It's being able to speak your mind without threat of losing your job, without threat of being censored.
You can't get to that middle-class American dream unless you're willing to confront the big corporations.
And if we're not willing to do it, then we're not actually defending anything.
And I think that there are a couple issues that the conservative movement will have.
And this is the biggest complaint I have.
We talk about this on our radio program every day, that there is a disconnect between Republican voters and Republican politicians.
And Republican politicians, I sent out this tweet the other day.
I texted it to you, which is we have open borders right now.
We have tech companies at our control, a corporate oligarchy that is just making off like robber barons on us.
So we all get a bunch of plastic garbage delivered to our home from Amazon.
So Bezos can have another space station on Mars or whatever, why he needs another $10 billion.
Right.
And so all this stuff.
And what is the priority of the Republican Party?
It's to institute a repeal of the estate tax.
Now, in defense of them, which they don't deserve, they say it's because of small family farms.
But then you read the bill and it's nothing to do with small family farms.
It has to do with lifting the multi-billionaire estate tax.
And if you ask me, Charlie, do you think you should go to estate tax?
I'm like, yeah, sure, I guess.
And so, so, JD, what are you going to do to change this conversation?
Because we're actually not in a political moment.
We're in an Overton window moment with everything we have to do should be about moving ideas from unthinkable to sensible to popular to policy.
That's really the moment we're in.
There's no committee work getting done.
There's no markups.
People say, oh, you can only be a senator if you've been there.
None of that's true.
This is a PR stunt is really what's happening.
What are you going to do to help contribute positively to that problem?
You know, I think it's simple.
And I'll go back to something I said earlier about we need to reward the things that we think are good and punish the things that we think are bad.
So you talk about tax policy.
Let's tax the things that are bad and not tax the things that are good.
If you're making $100,000, $400,000 a year and you've got three kids, you should pay a different lower tax rate than if you're making the same amount of money and you don't have any kids.
It's that simple.
I totally agree.
We talk about the big corporations.
You know this, Charlie.
I think a lot of people don't appreciate that our tax code right now, it penalizes people for hiring American for building companies in the United States of America.
I saw Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, said just a few days ago, I believe, that like, you know, she was talking about tax policy.
And it's like, well, what are you going to do about the biggest tax sheets in our country?
Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon.
You build a medium-sized business in my hometown and employ American workers.
You pay every cent of taxes that you owe to the government.
Apple pays almost nothing to the American government.
Why does that make sense?
We want to be making it easier to hire American, and we want to be making it harder to shift your entire manufacturing supply chain to Uyghur slaves in China.
It's just that simple.
Labor arbitrage.
It's just totally simple.
We should tax the things that we think there should be less of, like labor arbitrage in China, and reward the good things like hiring Americans in my hometown.
It's just that simple.
And I think once you break down that door, a whole set of public policies become available that Republicans have been too terrified to actually advocate.
So, JD, Peter Thiel has recently given $10 million in a pack supporting your candidacy.
Peter's great.
He's a friend of mine.
I think he's one of the best thinkers on this.
And I just want to make our audience aware of that, that you're a very serious potential candidate because it's a very robust primary in Ohio.
And something that Peter has been talking about for years, and I know you have as well, is talking about how the Chamber of Commerce and the Woke Industrial Complex have almost had this marriage of the last five or 10 years.
They want the same thing for different reasons.
For example, the Chamber of Commerce wants Indian and Chinese programmers to come into America because then they're able to have lower wages and maximize profits.
The woke industrial complex wants Chinese and Indian programmers because eventually that will result in a different America politically or culturally.
And this is not, and people accuse me all the time, this is not a xenophobic thing.
It's a fact that if you are not able to replicate your values and control who comes into your country, your country will cease to exist.
Okay.
I love all people, but my first obligation when it comes politically is to my nation.
As Aristotle said, politics is the highest form of community because it reflects morality and sociability.
If you have no sociability, you don't have a politic.
You have some sort of a mess of some sort of colonized city-state.
Can you talk about how you'll be fighting actually interest in the Chamber of Commerce and the woke industrial complex?
Yeah, so this is a really important, this is a really important point, Charlie.
So I'm told all the time when I say, look, we need more American children because American families, American children are good for us.
They make fathers more invested.
I mean, there's all kinds of research on this.
They make our economy more dynamic.
They make fathers more empathetic, more invested in their communities.
And the thing I'm always met with is accusations of racism.
Well, why does it matter if you have a baby to an American family versus a new immigrant who comes in at the age of 35 or 40?
And I just, I think people who say that must just be totally insane.
Do we, are we really comparing?
Like, if they even heard themselves speak, are we really comparing a child brought up in a family where values are transmitted, where people are creating sociability, where it's connecting moms to the next generation, to the previous generation through extended family?
There's just no comparison between the positive effects of children and the positive effects of an immigrant.
And I'm like you.
I think people are great.
I love that people want to come to the country, but you can't have so many people coming to the country at a time when our own families aren't replicating themselves.
And by the way, of course, it's not just white American families we're talking about.
It's important to say that.
It's families of all racial groups, but the thing that unites them is they're American.
We need more American children and more American families.
And the idea that you can just replace children with immigrants is a preposterous, it's a sociopathic way of looking at the future and at the next generation.
They're just totally different.
And you're right.
I'm going to get fought by the corporations.
I'm going to get fought by the woke industrial complex.
And, you know, I think that it's a worthwhile fight because people need to know what we're actually up against.
I don't think conservatives appreciate, you know, the younger conservatives do.
I think a lot of conservatives get it instinctually that the corporations in this country have totally abandoned the long-term interests of the country.
If they can get more cheap labor, if they can get easier consumers for their products, they're willing to do whatever they can for a short-term profit, even if it means destroying the American country over the long term.
That's why, by the way, we have a border crisis right now.
Why do we have a border crisis?
Totally.
Because Joe Biden's donors want more cheap labor.
That's it.
That's all this is about.
So do Mitt Romney's.
And that's where you're going to be up against, right?
Is that the UNA party, they want an open border for different reasons.
Mitt Romney's donors want cheap labor to go work at Hilton hotels or Hyatt hotels or amusement parks or working whatever's low-wage job they want.
Whereas Joe Biden wants it for a pure political purpose to remake America into a permanent Democrat state.
And I believe that public opinion is quickly shifting in your opinion in your direction.
So I want to talk about, and I know that I want to be respectful of your time here, the corporate oligarchy.
I'm really excited about this kind of new trust-busting moment that we're in, channeling the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt, which if you hate socialism.
The best thing you can do is to crush these corporations because you will get a so can you talk about that?
If we agree with all the people on the center right of this country, they say, well, no, no, you can't break up Amazon because that would be socialism.
No, no, no.
That's what will actually prevent us from going to Leninist style revolution.
You have no idea what's about to happen if we don't break this up.
Well, Charlie, you know the history here.
We don't have to invent hypotheticals.
We all know what happened in the 1920s and the 1930s to Western civilization.
There were basically two countries that avoided the waves of communism and fascism that crept across the Western world, the United States and England.
And why were they able to stop that tyranny?
It's because they had political leadership that recognized the corporations were becoming too powerful.
The people were becoming weaker.
The sense of national solidarity was becoming weaker.
And that allows really, really crazy, dangerous political outcomes to follow.
That's why the United States endured through the 1930s.
That's why we won World War II and frankly, we saved the world in World War II is because we didn't go the way of the communists in the 1920s and 30s.
And why didn't we do that?
It's because Teddy Roosevelt and others recognized powerful corporations, weak middle class creates dangerous, combustible societies.
We're heading in that direction.
And unless we rein in this corporate power, we're going to find ourselves with a really, really weakened country.
And who the hell knows what happens after that?
So Teddy Roosevelt, you're so right.
He was able to manage the transition from the farms to the factories better than any other.
The Russians screwed this up.
And that's why they had 15 million angry people for Vladimir Lenin to mobilize to overthrow the Romanovs.
And so now if we do not manage this transition from the farms to the screens, then all of a sudden we are going to have, I don't know what it will look like, but it's going to be ugly and it will be disjointed and it will be divisive.
And no one's going to like what's going to come next.
It'll be a very depressing form of totalitarian, despotic wokeism mixed with universal basic income for not working and really depressed people, but a super powerful ruling class like Brazil, which is why I think that the conservative movement's best days are really ahead of us because people are, they know something's wrong.
They believe in their mind that Republicans generally kind of bumble around this, and yet they know that they're waiting for someone like you to come around and articulate it and put these pieces together.
So I want to close, JD, talking about what you mentioned briefly, which is the secularization of America.
We have an audience that is not necessarily of one religious belief, but we do have a lot of church attenders.
I speak at a church almost every weekend, and I'm a bigger, bigger, bigger and bigger believer that the church must become active and engaged.
Can you talk about how your faith informs your action and your belief and how critical that is to the defense of Western civilization?
Sure, sure.
Yeah, you know, Charlie, you know, I've talked about this, but I'm a devout Christian, and I think it's obviously a very important part of how I think about these things.
And, you know, one of the earliest directives from God to Adam and Eve is be fruitful and multiply, of course.
And I think about that in the context of our society.
Are we building a place that's easy for families, that's easy for children, that's easy for grandparents?
Like, are we building an economy or are we building a society?
And I think about this throughout the entire life cycle.
What happens when our kids are born?
Are they welcomed into families that can take care of them, that can ensure their prosperity, that can pass their values on to those children?
Are they brought up in a school system that teaches them to love their country and admire it, to feel invested in its future?
Or are they taught to hate their country?
Are they entering the workforce with good jobs that give them the sense of dignity and purpose?
And this is a tough thing to talk about, of course, Charlie.
But, you know, do they leave their life?
Do we leave this life surrounded by loved ones who care about us, who we built life with?
Or do we leave it surrounded by faceless, you know, masks at this point, masked strangers and warehouses for old folks?
I think that I want to build a society that's very consistent with the type of demands that I think the Christian faith places on me, which is it's people first.
We respect people, we respect life, we protect it from the date of conception all the way to the end.
And that to me means building an American society with solidarity and a sense of shared purpose.
It's not just building an economy where we consume cheap Chinese garbage and sit in front of our iPhones all day.
Totally.
And eat food that is full of big ags, nonsense they fill into it and destroys the family farm and it destroys a sense of community.
And what I really hear in your message, JD, which I believe is our message, I actually believe more in the American middle class worker than the ruling class ever does.
I think there's more potential there.
I believe that every job will be filled if all of a sudden you opened it for Americans to say, hey, high schoolers might have to go back to work at 15 or 16, like it used to be in the 60s or 70s.
Not that you're going to have some low-wage worker that border jumps into the country so he can go serve popcorn at the local movie theater.
And I think what you will find is a sense of community and a connective tissue that will get reborn in the country, which is very exciting.
Where the corporate oligarchs in the open border woke industrial complex, they will be telling their children, hey, if you got to move one day to Wuhan, that's okay.
West Virginia is not really our home.
I refuse to accept that in no way whatsoever.
And you said early on that one of the reasons why America was different is that people believed they had a sense of God.
There's a reason why we called the first American settlers pilgrims, because usually a pilgrimage is when you go to Israel.
They thought they were going to build new Israel here.
They had a vertical relationship with their creator.
And we have plenty of people that listen that aren't religious.
But if you do not have a sense of at least a belief that there was a creator that put you on this planet for a reason, then good luck trying to find that purpose in the endless sea of plastic that's imported from China.
JD, anything else you want to say about your potential candidacy, the great state of Ohio?
The floor is all yours.
You can promote anything you want.
Well, I just want to echo what you just said, which is the American middle class is much healthier and much more stable than the American ruling class.
And, you know, I see this all across the state of Ohio.
I see it when I travel to various places.
You know, people love their homes.
They love their communities.
They love their children.
And they want to build a society where they're connected to their past and their values, where they're invested.
in their future and ensuring the next generation can survive, thrive, and build something that's even greater than what they have right now.
That is such a powerful foundation from which to build on.
I know a lot of conservatives are depressed right now.
You know, President Trump isn't in the White House.
We don't have either House of Congress.
But I think this is a remarkable opportunity for us to build a movement that can thrive and endure for the next generation.
And we just got to get to work.
I totally agree.
And I said this yesterday.
I said, we're going to win.
I can't give you a date or time, but when I see these ideas that are rooted in truth, in family creation, in first principles, and protecting the American nation, I know that there is an inevitability that they will win because they are rooted in what is right in the world.
So, JD, I just want to encourage you and commend you.
If you ever run for anything, please come back to this program.
But this has been a lot of fun talking about these ideas.
Our listener base will be very supportive of you if you decide to do something or don't decide to do something.
But I just think even if you don't decide to do something, the fact that you're given a bigger platform and an even more serious platform around this is a gift to our country.
So, God bless you, JD, and best wishes moving forward.
Thanks, Charlotte.
Take care, man.
See ya.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
Please email us your questions, freedom at charliekirk.com.
And if you want to support us, go to charliekirk.com slash support.
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God bless.
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