Charlie invites conservative stalwart, Marine Corp veteran, and celebrated author of the bestselling novel 'Hillbilly Elegy'—a man who may have a very bright political future ahead of him in Ohio, should he choose to pursue it—the one and only J.D. Vance to join him for a fascinating episode of The Charlie Kirk Show. Charlie and J.D. tackle the big issues of the day and why the current composition of the conservative movement is seemingly proving themselves either unfit or unwilling to tackle them. Taking it a step further, the duo discusses the need to shift the infamous Overton Window if we expect to have any chance at saving the republic—including a proposal to legislate morality that could make all the difference in America's preservation. This is arguably one of the most important episodes we've had this year. Be sure to tune in, take notes, and take action. America is on the line and it's time to rally behind the fighters like J.D.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, on this very special episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, JD Vance, best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy, sold over 3 million copies, joins us for the entire program on the Charlie Kirk show.
If you guys want to be able to have big ideas understood quickly, go to thinker.org slash Charlie, T-H-I-N-K-R dot org slash Charlie.
I love thinker.org.
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Check it out at thinker.org slash Charlie.
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I want to thank Ronald from California.
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Buckle up, everybody.
JD Vance and I go deep in the issues.
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, his 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.
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Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here with a special guest.
I guess you could call him a co-host.
First ever on our program, JD Vance.
His reputation precedes him, author of Hillbilly Elegy, sold over 3 million copies.
JD, welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.
Thanks for having me.
Here at an undisclosed location, and both of us love our country, and we have that in common amongst many other things.
So you're thinking of maybe possibly sort of one day running for something.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, I'm thinking pretty seriously about running for Senate in Ohio.
So for all the Cleveland listeners out there, take notes, or at least take notes on the things you like that I say and ignore the things you don't like that I say.
That's good.
Now, it's becoming, if you maybe sort of almost might run, I think I said that right.
There's a lot of people maybe running for that seat.
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be pretty crowded.
There are a lot of folks running.
I mean, it's an open Senate seat.
So Rob Portman, current U.S. Senator, he's retiring.
Ohio is becoming a writer of state.
So I think a lot of people see the opportunity.
But, you know, if we pull the trigger, I think we got a really good chance because, frankly, you know, the things we're going to talk about, the message that I have is just, I think, a little bit more where the actual voters are.
And I think they recognize that we're getting a little bit screwed by our corporations and somebody's got to do something about it.
Well, there's a bunch of topics I want to get to, but let's start there because I think that what you hit on outside of the corporation piece, which I completely agree, is where is the Republican Party right now?
And I think that there's a really promising yet depressing trend.
The promising trend is the voters are actually on the right side of these issues.
Our leaders tend not to be.
It seems as if they're a lagging indicator of where the voters are.
A great example is Asa Hutchinson, who is bought and paid for by either the Walton family or the Chicken family, whatever it is in Arkansas, right?
That somehow Asa Hutchinson wants children to be able to chemically castrate themselves.
I think Tucker did a phenomenal job of exposing that.
And he's like stunned and shocked that he can't invoke the spirit of Bill Buckley and Ronald Reagan.
And all of a sudden, all the criticism goes away, right?
That's basically how that interview went.
He's like, I'm going to mention Ronald Reagan and Bill Buckley and everyone's going to take it easy.
Like, no, actually, our party is a lot different than the pro-corporate party of 1992.
Walk us through where you think the voters actually are and how some Republican leaders are still somewhat shell-shocked by this.
Yeah, so you're exactly right.
There's like a civil war within the Republican leadership class about where the party should go, but there just isn't one among the voters.
The voters feel very strongly that there's a direction that we should pursue, call it America first, call it populist, whatever.
And so the voters, I think, are very, very awoke to this stuff.
The thing that is so weird about the Asa Hutchinson thing or any of these other debates is, you know, people constantly invoke these principles that have sort of become slogans.
And when you're using a slogan, you're not really thinking anymore, right?
So Asa Hutchinson kept on saying to Tucker Carlson, well, what about limited government, right?
The government can't do these things.
It can't prevent the chemical prevention of puberty.
And it's like, well, if the government can't do that, what can it actually do?
And of course, if you think about the entire gender debate in this country right now, it's driven by a lot of government policy.
What are we teaching in schools?
What are the things that are happening in universities that are funded by the government that are making their way ideologically onto our college campuses, onto our high schools, even increasingly our middle and elementary schools?
That's all government power that the left is using to accomplish its vision of society.
And I always say the biggest difference between right and left in this country, it's not small government, big government, social conservative, progressive, whatever the case may be.
It's that the left is willing to use power to accomplish its vision of society.
And conservative leaders are terrified of it.
It's like we don't want to use political power to accomplish anything for our voters.
And the voters are saying, you've got the corporations on one side.
You've got the cultural institutions on the other side.
If we can't use political power to accomplish something good for ourselves, then we're screwed.
We're going to lose our country.
So there's been about maybe half a dozen moments where I watch something and I actually say, when I watch my computer or a podcast, I'm like, that makes sense.
And you gave a speech at the Edmund Burke Foundation Society and you said this.
And I said, oh my gosh, of course.
Of course we have the power.
And then you said something, I don't even think you realized how brilliant it was.
You said, we didn't take this power.
It was given to us by the people.
So the people voted for us.
We didn't stage some sort of coup.
We didn't overthrow the Romanovs.
Like we went through the proper channels, as outlined in this amazing document, the U.S. Constitution, to actually improve people's lives.
And I also think there's a misunderstanding of what liberty is.
Liberty in the American sense is not liberty in the French sense.
Liberty is to pursue virtue, not to go seek pleasure endlessly and that you can go redefine your own truth.
That's a French value.
The American value is to go and pursue virtue and truth, appreciate beauty and wonder and preserve the good.
Absolutely.
Yeah, we talked a lot, you know, in elementary school, right?
What is America about?
You hear it all the time.
It's about freedom.
It's about liberty.
Like the freedom to do what, right?
Like freedom when I was a seven-year-old boy or a 14-year-old kid was not like sitting at home, you know, playing that or watching Netflix and watching porn and doing all these terrible things.
It was actually like meaningfully participating in society, right?
That's what freedom was.
It wasn't just like sitting at home by yourself and like, you know, not being an especially virtuous person.
It was participating meaningfully in society.
The founders' conception of liberty was that you get to participate in this project of self-government.
Well, how do you participate in the project of self-government?
Well, you can start a family.
You can pursue happiness.
You can work at a good job.
You can start your own business.
You can do something meaningful in the commercial sector.
But it's also you get to speak your mind.
That's what the First Amendment, of course, is all about.
You get to participate in the public debate about this country.
And the freedom that's maybe most under threat in our country right now, it's not like the government not telling you what to do or the government telling you what to do.
It's a corporation that's increasingly telling us that if you say the wrong things, you could lose your job.
You could be censored on social media, which of course is the modern medium of communication.
So the most important American liberty, maybe at least one of them, is the freedom of participation in this democratic society of ours.
If you can't speak your mind, you don't have that liberty.
Those are the freedoms we should be talking about, not just the freedom to like, you know, smoke a lot of weed.
Right.
And that's seeking pleasure.
Animals seek pleasure.
Aristotle famously said, we are the speaking beings.
Speech is what differentiates us from a giraffe.
A giraffe can go seek pleasure.
Yeah, there's this weird way, and I think this is a pretty modern thing where like the past 30 or 40 years, freedom just meant getting to do whatever you want in the pursuit of freedom.
It's a perversion of freedom.
It's absolutely a perversion of freedom because if you're enslaved to your basis desires, you're not actually a free person.
You're not a virtuous person as our founding fathers would have understood it.
So it's not even that it's like not the same thing as founders' freedom or the founders' conception of freedom.
It's that it's actually antithetical to it.
Yes, Aristotle said that you will become fatted cattle.
And I love that visual.
Like that's basically what America has become.
You eat all day and you really don't do much.
You have a lot of pleasure, but you're not pursuing the good.
And that's what the founders always understood is the moral underpinning.
And I want to explore this with you of how this happened because it was subtle at first.
It was gradual, then sudden.
It was like, oh my gosh.
And now we have a group of our leaders of the opposition party, whatever that is now.
And I still think it's trying to figure it out, where they are saying, wait a second, I can't just give a press conference on corporate tax cuts and invoke a slogan of defeat socialism.
And somehow my voters are still upset with me.
They're a little bit confused by that.
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
I think people recognize that something is really wrong in our society and the old slogans just aren't going to cut it anymore.
People recognize that something's really wrong in our society, right?
They see what's happening in our schools and our communities.
They see with the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns.
There's just this sense that things aren't going the way that they should be going.
And in the face of that, you can't just say the same things that people have heard for the past 40 years.
They instinctively recognize, well, that didn't work.
It's not working anymore.
We need to hear something different.
You said that saying we stand for limited government is not enough.
Yeah.
Build that out a little bit more.
Well, I think that saying you stand for limited government, it's a principle.
It's a good principle.
But I think in the Republican Party, it's become a little bit too much of a slogan where we're unwilling to use political power, even when it's been given us by the people to do something for them.
Right.
And so, you know, like the classic example that's going around in conservative circles right now is what do we do about woke capital, right?
Like, well, what is woke capital, right?
Well, first of all, these corporations are incorporated by the government.
They exist and are able to earn a profit because of the American nation state, our system of law and order, our U.S. Navy that protects their trade routes.
And when they interject themselves into our democratic process, there are a lot of people on the establishment right who say, well, we can't do anything about them because they're a private company.
Well, they're not really just private companies.
They're chartered by the U.S. government and they're charted to affect a social purpose.
We decided, as a people, we were going to give these corporations certain protections so that they could accomplish a goal.
Well, if they're not accomplishing that goal anymore, why are we still giving them special protections?
You can't shout limited government every time somebody says, we want to use political power for the purpose that we were given it for.
And I think some of the conservatives that say that, and trust me, I like limited government, but I could tell you why I like it.
And that's important.
And so I'm trying to use, I never try to use limited government anymore.
I'm going to tell you the new phrase I think we should use.
But I think some conservatives that say that, they have an understandable fear, this kind of we're going to get into a Soviet state if we were ever to not limit government.
Well, a little bit of a newsflash.
You've done an awful job limiting government.
The fourth branch of government is as more powerful as ever.
The civil service controls everything.
So what I think they're really saying, and I want to offer an olive branch a little bit of grace, is they're saying, we believe in limited power.
We believe that a small group of people controlling something without a check in a balance is a bad thing.
I agree.
So explain to me why you're okay with Microsoft having that kind of power.
And that argument would not have really, wouldn't have really meshed 15 years ago because these companies weren't that powerful.
And the people that ran their companies actually loved the country.
And so if you go to Palm Springs, if you go to Palm Beach and you go to these retirement communities of the CEOs that used to run these companies, the guys in their 80s and 90s, I know a lot of them.
They are stunned at what's happening.
I'm talking about the guys that ran waste management, the guys that ran Home Depot.
And they say, if I were to have done this in the early 2000s, I would have resigned myself.
And so, JD, how is it that we went from an American corporate governing class that quite honestly is now retired and loved the country and the generations that preceded it to now the current class like Ed Bashy and James Quincy that talk no differently than a college professor?
How did that happen?
I think a couple of things that happened.
So, first is in the 1950s, when GM said what's good for GM is good for America.
They were, you know, maybe being a little cute, but that was basically true, right?
What was good for GM was good for America.
They paid their workers great wages.
People were having solid families.
That was the lead edge of the tech economy of the 1950s, was the automobile.
When if Google said what's good for Google in 2020 is good for America, is that actually true if Apple said that?
Of course it's not true, right?
Apple actively undercuts American workers by paying slaves in China to make its iPhones.
And then it comes back to America and virtue signals and tries to wag its finger at normal American people about their basic viewpoint on the world.
And so what's happened is that a lot of these companies have started to realize, think of the NBA, for example.
The NBA's biggest new market is in China.
Everybody's asking, why is the NBA so anti-American, but it never calls out what's going on in China?
Because the NBA has more of a financial upside in China than it does in the United States than it does in its own country.
And so 50, 60 years ago, we used to recognize that these companies had some national obligations.
They had some national purpose.
And now we just see them as purely commercial enterprises, purely disconnected from the American nation state.
And if they make their money in China, they're going to be on the side of the Chinese than the American people.
That's a real problem because they're not just commercial entities.
They're part of the American fabric of society.
And you have companies that are literally called American airlines that fly around with the American flag that pander more to Wuhan than West Virginians.
Yeah.
That's absolutely right.
The other thing that's going on, and this is part of the answer to the question too, is that our entire educated cultural class has gotten obsessively anti-American, and that's started to import itself into these companies, right?
So what was 20 years ago a crazy idea on a college campus is now like mainstream for a 40-year-old upper-level employee at some of these big companies.
And I think Trump was an accelerant for that.
I want to talk about it.
And it's not a critique of him.
I just think it's a fact.
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So we've talked a lot on our program.
How do you know who's in charge?
Because that's a really important question because we have been trained from a young age.
The people in charge are the people we put in charge.
Consent to the governed.
And what's happening now, and I think a lot of Americans are waking up to this, is that there's a new class of people that are actually calling the shots.
Angelo Cotavilla has the best piece of literature on this, ruling class.
And I'm sure you've read it or are aware of it.
And he writes commonly very frequently for our friend Chris Buzzkirk's website, American Greatness, which is phenomenal.
And Victor Davis Hansen writes on there, I learned so much from that website.
But JD, you're looking at this double-page advertisement in the New York Times.
Yeah, it's pretty wild.
And like, so this is the ruling class, right?
If we're looking, if we're asking who's actually in control of our society and why, you know, no matter who the American people elect, there's very rarely significant seismic political change, even when they ask for it.
And you sort of think about all of the institutional pushback against Donald Trump for the four years that he was in the White House, which is just crazy, like the constant pressure that he was getting from the corporate folks, from folks in government, from folks in the administrative state.
And you start to appreciate what's going on because these folks have the real power.
And to me, power is fundamentally about shaping behavior.
And who are you more worried about if you're an American citizen?
The people on this page who are standing for democracy or the people that you elect to the U.S. government.
Of course, you care more about these people.
These are the people who can prevent you from buying and selling, from owning a home, from working a decent middle-class job.
This is the ruling class.
And so you just articulated what Machiavelli and Hobbes pointed as, how do you find out who's in charge and who has power?
That which can inflict pain.
That's right.
I mean, my local congressman, I don't think he's going to inflict pain on me anytime soon.
He might say something I don't like, but kind of a non-starter.
There's a lot of names, companies, organizations that can inflict pain on you.
This is the control of the guillotine.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
And, you know, I was like, I was talking about this with a friend who told me that, you know, her brother-in-law had put something that was pro-Trump on Facebook.
And then a few people saw that post and then ganged up on him, got a few other folks involved, called his employer and tried to get the guy fired.
This guy, like, you know, is a middle-class guy living in southwestern Ohio.
Those people and that platform and the guy he works for have way more power in his life than his local elected officials.
And what's really sad about it is that his capacity to push back using our constitutional self-government is incredibly limited so long as these people are in control.
And I really do think, I'm not a zero-sum guy.
I work in investing in venture capital and technology.
I see the world as we're going to build something that's better for everybody.
I'm fundamentally an optimist.
But when it comes to the control over our own society, we're in a zero-sum battle with these folks.
Either they're going to win or we're going to win and there's no real middle ground.
So there's a superstructure that's been created outside of anything that is outlined in the United States Constitution.
And we know it.
We call it the ruling class.
But to be more specific, it's the people that sign this.
And if you're on radio, you say, what are you talking about?
This is a double page ad in the New York Times where it says, we stand for democracy and all these ridiculous platitudes and statements signed by, what do you say, JD?
300 names on here?
400 names?
Easily.
Just kind of eyeballing it.
Of every type of group, right?
There's lawyers, law firms, celebrities, nonprofit organizations, individuals, corporations.
Basically, they are flexing their muscle.
They are saying, if you keep doing this, the beatings will continue until morale improves.
Well, and think about this.
If you're a Georgia legislator, the Georgia governor, any politician in these societies, if you don't do what these people want you to do, they can inflict pain on you.
That's power.
That is how you define power.
That's, you know, if you're a legislator, you know, the governor of Ohio once told me the business of the governor is business, meaning the job of the governor is jobs.
Like my job is to go to the bottom of the state.
Governor Thompson said that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a strange thing to say.
But the idea is you need to bring good jobs into your own society.
That's the thing that you do.
If these people are threatening you, then you're going to bow down before them because they have the power to decide whether your citizens are in destitution or have a middle-class lifestyle.
Of course, these people are in charge.
And I think about this, one of the big problems that we have in American society, just generation after generation, is the expanding power of the administrative state.
And if it means anything to be in control of the executive, I would think that it means you can fire the people who work for you, right?
I was elected president.
If you're Donald Trump, if you're Charlie Kirk, elected president tomorrow, and you can't fire the people that work for you, then you're not actually in control of your own government because those are the people who carry out the policies.
And I see these law firms, and I guarantee some of these firms were involved in the various court decisions that took power away from the president to fire people in the executive.
So it's all just this constant cycle of shifting power away from people, from their constitutional self-government, to our new corporate oligarchy.
And again, like we've just got to call it out and we've got to stop it.
And the way it needs to be articulated is we have this albatross leviathan of a federal government and then a corporate government.
And one of those you sort of vote for.
One of those you can sue in the courts.
You at least have some taxpayer rights, sort of.
And as Tucker famously said, look, they take Arbor Day off in the government.
They're not exactly in a hurry to invoke massive social change.
I mean that as a compliment.
I mean, I don't know if it's a compliment.
They're just slow moving, right?
And they have a lot of power, but we've been trained in the conservative movement to say that's the only threat of power we should care about.
That's the only threat of power.
The only threat of power is a federal regulator knocking on your door.
By the way, that's a very legitimate thing.
And you're seeing unfair sentencing towards people that are doing one thing and BLM people go fair.
I'm all for that.
And I haven't lost my enthusiasm for that.
What I think we're all trying to say, though, is, well, you have to have a much more broader and more comprehensive view of who's actually in charge.
And what if I told you that these people are actually a hierarchy above the fourth branch of government?
Talk about how these people are actually calling the shots above the FDA, above the IRS, above the SEC, that the celebrities, the corporations, the sports stars, the nonprofit organizations and the lawyers and the academics and the colleges, they actually have muscle over our government.
That's exactly right.
Yeah, so this happens in a couple of different ways.
It happens through cultural power directly, and then it happens through government power indirectly.
Because of course, you know, when Google, Twitter, Facebook, when they censor private citizens, they're very often doing it at the whim of these leaders, right?
It's not like Donald Trump or Joe Biden is telling Google or Twitter to censor people.
They're doing it out of their own accord.
And even when the government does get involved, like Richard Burr, I think this, not Richard Burr, Dick Blumenthal, the senator from Connecticut, is constantly telling people that you need to censor folks.
Well, Twitter can ignore that or not ignore it.
That's ultimately in control of the Twitter sort of corporate hierarchy.
And so this concentrated power does have a remarkable effect on how people live their lives.
The other piece of this is it also affects like what you're allowed to say.
So just to give you an example, very personal to you.
When I went on your show a few weeks ago, we had a great conversation.
Somebody said, why did you go on his show?
He's a white supremacist, which I actually never heard about you.
And I've been called a white, I've been called a white supremacist in the Washington Post.
When that happened to me, I lost investors over that.
I lost in friends, I lost friends over that.
No, no, no, no.
The Washington Post.
But I'm saying the accusation levied against you, it's been levied against me.
You lose commercial benefits.
You lose your ability to earn a living.
Yes.
You lose friends over it.
Who's levying those accusations?
That's not like a primarily a government thing.
That's these corporations who use that accusation to silence people who criticize them.
Our mutual friend Tucker Carlson, why do they try so hard to destroy them, destroy him?
Because they know he's actually a threat to their power.
And so every time they start a boycott campaign against him, every time they try to call him something that he isn't, what they're doing is they're flexing their muscles and saying, you need to shut up and sit down.
Mercifully, he hasn't done that yet.
But this is really what it's about.
It's controlling what you think, what you say, where you live, what you can do for a living.
That's power, and it exists in our corporate class in a much more significant way than it has in American history, I think.
And it seems like it's intensified.
And where I get really angry, I pound the table angry.
And I just had a Republican congressman here a couple of days ago.
He just didn't.
He just like failure to compute, right?
And he's like, oh, well, you know, the corporations will come around.
I say, you really don't understand what's happening right now.
Do you?
They are on team left or team totalitarian, whatever you want to call it.
And you guys cut their corporate taxes.
You've defended their oligarchy because you thought deep down they'll contribute to your political campaigns.
Guess what?
They're not doing that anymore.
And so you gave them every handout in the books.
Meanwhile, they pillaged our middle class.
They deindustrialized our economy.
They sent pink slips to millions of blue-collar workers in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin saying, no, no, we're going to go take a Gulfstream to Wuhan so we can go make, you know, t-shirts for less and go bring in a bunch of plastic that our country doesn't need so that I can go get points on the deal at McKinsey so I can go buy a third yacht in the Bahamas.
Meanwhile, the country is going into absolute chaos.
And what did our Republicans do?
They're like, oh, we must defend it for free trade purposes.
Like, I'm not going to take that anymore.
That's insane.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
And again, what these corporations are doing, I think, is violating a sacred obligation that citizens of this country have.
Yes.
We all benefit from this in incredible ways.
Like, you've had an amazing life.
I've had an amazing life.
I came from nothing.
I've got a beautiful wife.
I've got two kids who I love to death.
I've got a cool job.
That sense that this country has given you something should come along with a sense that you owe the country something.
You owe an obligation for your debt to the people who made this country great.
I want to complete the point here, JD, that you talked about of this idea of some sort of loyalty to that which is around you, the sacrifice that was made before you, that you are not the first person to grace the terrain of this country.
That there is a system that was built by people for a reason so you can succeed.
I live a nice life.
You live a nice life.
The motivation I have and that you have is actually less about trying to just maximize the amount of short-term pleasure.
It actually, it's instead of kind of just trying to save the promise and the experiment of America.
Yep.
That's exactly right.
I think a fundamental conservative principle is that people benefit from and like to be rooted.
They like to be rooted in their values, in their faith, in their communities.
And, you know, if I could, if I could just sort of segue just a little bit to the way in which the left is attacking American history, right?
Why is this such a big problem?
Like, I think you and I react viscerally to it, right?
I've been trying to think to myself, why am I so mad that the left is attacking American history?
And it sort of dawned on me.
You know, my grandmother was not an educated woman.
She did not even complete high school.
Mama.
Mamma.
But she knew the battles that General Patton had won in North Africa by heart.
I mean, she was like a military historian when it came to World War II.
In that sense, that she had been part of accomplishing something in World War II.
You know, America is not just abstractions, right?
It's a people that went and did great things.
That was passed on to me, even though, of course, I did nothing to help in World War II.
I felt a certain pride, a certain sense of place and obligation that came from that.
And I want to pass that on to my son, right?
The thing that connects us as Americans, my grandmother to my son, they never met because my grandmother passed 15 years ago, is that sense of a shared common national purpose.
And what these corporations are doing and what our ruling class is doing is it's destroying that sense of national purpose.
It's delinking us from our past and from our future.
And this is why I double and triple down because our history is actually beautiful.
Yes.
It's, for example, the Northwest Territories, of which Ohio is included, was the first sovereign land that went out of its way to explicitly ban slavery, ratified by the U.S. Congress as its first act of Congress.
So, how can anyone say we were founded on slavery?
So, if the founders actually wanted slavery, then what is now known as Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and parts of Iowa, the Northwest Territories, they would have said, no, no, slavery is going to be expanding.
No, the founders actually went out of their way.
They said, these are going to be three territories that 1777, the year after the Declaration was signed, Vermont abolishes slavery.
This idea of delinking us, I love that term, of our connective tissue as Americans, it's intentional.
Yes, it is.
It's intentional because it makes us easier to manipulate, makes us easier to turn against each other.
And I think if I'm being conspiratorial, you know, I'm a Christian and I believe in the devil, it makes us weaker in the face of spiritual challenges to our core as a people.
If we're, you know, I'm not a fan of war, I know that you're not either, but we're eventually going to have to fight another battle that will happen in human affairs.
I think that there are evil people, and sometimes you have to fight those evil people.
But if you want to fight them successfully, you need soldiers who are going into battle believing that they're fighting for something valuable, a sense of connectedness, a sense of purpose.
People don't fight for abstractions, they fight for the people around them, they fight for the people back home, they fight for their shared sense of national purpose.
If you destroy it, you fundamentally destroy us as a people.
I totally agree.
And there's no need to be conspiratorial because they're admitting what they're doing.
That's right.
I say this all the time.
I say, I can use their own public sources, their own public comments to make every single one of the points.
I always joke around.
I say, stay off the message boards.
You don't need conspiracy theories.
Just deal with what they're publishing in the New York Times every single day.
You don't need to go that level deeper of that stuff that's not true.
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So JD, I want to talk about something that I think is one of the reasons why we're losing ground, which is the Overton window.
The Overton window is a theory, ideas that go on a spectrum or a continuum from unthinkable to public policy.
And how do you move things along that window?
We see that here today with some of the breaking news.
And we can play a little bit of sound here, which I think would be helpful for some of our radio listeners, which is about expanding the United States Supreme Court.
Now, they're not going to do this immediately.
It's a very radical idea.
So why are they doing it?
Well, they're trying to open the window so that all of a sudden the American zeitgeist, it's acceptable to talk about expanding the U.S. Supreme Court.
Let's go to Cut 83, please.
Representative Jerry Nadler, hard to believe he's still in Congress.
Cut 83.
As our country has grown, so too to the Supreme Court.
13 justices for 13 circuits is a logical progression.
And that is another reason why I'm glad to join my colleagues in introducing the Judiciary Act of 2021 to establish the Supreme Court size as 13.
And it also will enable us to do justice and to rectify the great injustice that was done in packing the court.
And some people will say we're packing the court.
We're not packing it.
We're unpacking it.
So that's their justification.
They're unpacking it.
They don't need to make arguments anymore, though, because they're willing to use their power.
They're willing to do what they have vested in them.
And therefore, they're saying, what's the difference?
Cut 86, Senator Ed Markey from Massachusetts.
The Republicans stole two seats on the Supreme Court.
We undo the damage by restoring the balance.
Before I play CUT 86, I hope you guys understand one political party is playing for keeps.
The other one's trying to win a coffee shop debate.
Cut 86.
The Republicans stole two seats on the Supreme Court, and now it is up to us to repair that damage.
Our democracy is in jeopardy today because the Supreme Court standing is sorely damaged.
And the way we repair it is straightforward.
We undo the damage that the Republicans have done by restoring balance.
And we do it by adding four seats to the court to create a 13-member Supreme Court.
So without getting into the specifics of this, because we know it's a bad idea, let's talk about how, what strategy they employing.
JD, moving the Overton window.
Republicans' big idea that they've unveiled to the country in the last two months is repealing the estate tax.
Meanwhile, Democrats are saying, let's add seats to the Supreme Court.
What's going on here?
Well, what's going on is that this is like going to be a three-step process, right?
So the initial reaction, even from some mainstream journalists, is going to be, this is crazy, right?
This is radical.
You can't do this.
And, you know, step two is going to be, well, this is like a left-wing idea, but the Democratic Party is a big tent.
And then step three will be like, this is a totally reasonable proposal and we should just do this, right?
And that'll happen super quickly, in part because they'll have the support of our corporate oligarchy all along the way.
But yeah, to your point, it also means the Democratic Party just plays for keeps, right?
I hate this idea, but I kind of admire the fact that Democrats are trying to win.
And I wish our people would try to win for our voters because they're doing something.
This is a big idea.
And if a Republican pushed a similarly big idea, half of the GOP caucus would run away from it.
They would say, this is terrible.
This is too radical.
This is too uncomfortable.
And it's just like, you know, Republicans have this little voice in the back of their heads that says, in the face of big ideas, you should be a coward and run away from it.
And we should maybe learn something from the fact that Democrats are willing to use power to accomplish their objectives.
It's just, that's what politics is.
We're too afraid of it.
And there's this belief by some that, oh, they're being so radical, it'll swing back in the election.
And that's just kind of this pendulum theory.
I don't know if I agree with that.
I think they're actually going to move the electorate with them if they're presenting a destination.
Yes.
If they're presenting a goal, why are Republicans so afraid or unwilling, or the third, they're unable to articulate a big agenda?
What should the big agenda be?
What do we stand for?
Is it corporate tax cuts?
Yeah.
No, no, it's not.
Yeah, it's people are willing.
I mean, I just want to address this point because it's very important.
People are willing to follow leadership.
If you articulate a vision of what society should be, people will follow you to it.
The Democrats have their vision of society that they're selling to the country.
You know, what is our vision of society?
I mean, I think that it's very simple.
It's if you're a hardworking guy, you should be able to support a family on a good middle-class job.
You should be able to raise your children to love their country, to love their family, to share in your values, and you should be able to participate in our shared American society.
It's that simple.
It's babies, it's kids, it's marriages and families, it's good middle-class jobs.
That's our vision.
And we get so caught up in these abstractions.
Like we're focused on the economic growth numbers, we're focused on the corporate growth, the corporate tax rate.
I want a society where a normal person can support a family.
That's it.
On a single income.
I don't want any more of the, you know, parents have to work at the prime of their kids' lives 70 hours a week.
You send them off to some corporate daycare because you can't afford the necessities of life unless you do some.
We want people to be able to support families on a good single middle-class American wage.
That's our vision.
And I think it's simple.
Let's get specific about that.
So Oren Cass was on our program.
I don't think he went far enough yesterday.
He's fun, and we had a good time.
He's great.
And it was kind of funny.
He's like, well, we need economic progress.
I said, why do we need economic progress?
He was kind of like, we had a really good back and forth.
I said, I made the argument.
I said, if nothing gets any technologically better for the rest of my life, I'll be totally happy.
I don't need another iPhone.
I actually think that's destroying our humanity.
I actually think this idolatry, I don't think I'm accusing him of this.
I just think this focus on economic progress for economic progress sake is really destructive.
I'd rather rebuild families and character and have certain things decline like opioid rates and suicide and divorce.
Anyway, that's a separate thing.
But Oren was brilliant, brilliant when he talks about this idea of in the 1980s, you could work 32 weeks a year.
Can you talk about this?
It's really important.
Yeah, it's basically how hard do you have to work as a single wage earner to support a good middle-class American lifestyle?
And in the 1980s, that was about 32 weeks a year.
And as I understand it, I don't have Oren's exact numbers in front of me.
It's 53 weeks.
You have to work more than 52 weeks in a year, right?
Which, of course, there are only 52 weeks in a year.
The other person has to get into debt.
Yeah.
You go into debt or the other person has to enter the workforce.
And I tend to think about this at like the phases of our life, right?
Think about like the life cycle that all of us go through, right?
We're brought into the world.
Are we treated as inconveniences to abort or to ship off to a daycare?
Or are we treated as blessings that are welcomed into the world?
We build our society around it.
We go to school.
What do we learn in our school?
Do we learn to be devoted to our family, to our country, to our communities, or do we learn to hate all of them?
We go into the workforce.
Are we treated as people where if we're willing to work hard, we can support a good American family on that wage?
We can do something we're proud of.
And of course, all of us are going to leave this world at some point.
Do we leave this world surrounded by friends and family who we built a life with or in a corporate nursing home surrounded by strangers in masks?
We have to build a vision of society that's more oriented around people, around the families they have, around the children they want to have.
That to me is like the fundamentally conservative vision of our society.
And it's why the Democrats are so different.
I mean, the Democrats, you know, we get so caught up in these abstractions and it annoys me because the Democrat, the problem with the Democrats spending bills, right?
If you're an establishment Republican, is it spends too much money?
Well, yeah, it spends too much money, but what does it spend money on?
It spends money on Democrats' corporate priorities.
Does it make it easier to have a family?
No.
Does it make it easier to ship your children off to daycare?
Yes.
Does it make it easier to build a middle-class life?
No.
Does it make it easier to work the classic Democratic model of the family in a big city where you have two income earners, maybe one kid, maybe zero kids?
They're actively subsidizing their vision of society, which is like, you know, two people living in a pot in New York City, paying $4,000 a month for one bedroom apartment.
We should be actively promoting our vision of society, which is marriages, families, children living together in communities supporting a shared national identity and shared national purpose.
We just talk too much about spending or too much about tax rates or too much about the abstract things and not enough about our values.
Yes.
And replicating our values to our children so we can still have a nation.
And what I tell people all the time is if you walk down, there's still some neighborhoods like this in Scottsdale.
People have American flags flying.
Why?
That's part of their identity.
It gives them a source of happiness, connection, something bigger than themselves, something that they can identify with.
They don't have a Coca-Cola flag flying in their yard.
Something to think about.
So JD, we're going through a lot of different topics here.
All of them are really important.
I want to get to the two words, the two things that I think people can do.
Was there anything in particular you wanted to piggyback on that we were talking about?
If not, I have a question of what we can actually do about this.
Okay.
So corporate oligarchy.
People are upset.
How do we change this?
What are the remedies?
Give me action steps.
Yeah.
So this is really tough.
And I think there are a couple of different ideas that I've been kicking around.
And, you know, we're just going to chat about them.
I've been playing around with this with a couple of friends who work in the policy world.
So the first is a lot of the problem with the woke corporations thing, and not all of it, but a lot of it comes from the fact that we have a huge divide in our economy between the digital economy and the real economy.
I totally agree.
And specifically, let me give you an example, right?
So you take like a steel mill that operates in Ohio.
Their corporate tax is levied based on where their assets are.
Like where are you doing business, right?
Now, if you're a steel mill in Ohio, it's obvious where your assets are.
It's where your factories are, right?
So you pay an American corporate tax rate based on you're doing business there.
Now, if you're Google and your assets are on tangible, or in Apple, they're in Dublin or they're in Bermuda.
And so basically our tax system and our regulatory system penalizes companies that are working in the real world.
It rewards companies that are working in the digital world.
Now, who are the biggest offenders on the woke capital problem?
Who are the biggest sensor drivers?
It's all the digital economy.
So I think that if you basically brought our real economy and made it, gave it an advantage, not just it's right now.
It has a huge disadvantage, but if we gave our real economy an advantage compared to our digital economy, I think that would be a big, big drive.
Let's get more specific.
So by the digital economy, you mean the sales forces of the world.
You mean Twitter?
You mean Google?
You mean companies that are quite, that are actually probably really overvalued.
Correct.
I mean, you're in this space.
You know it better than I do, but they're getting multiples on deals that are unbelievable.
Even in the public markets, you're talking 80, 90 times multiples in the public markets, which I'm not one to say the market's going to go down.
I've been wrong.
My timing's been wrong, but you can only be at a 90 times multiple for so long until either inflation or a little sobriety kicks in.
And that's just basic economics.
So, what do you mean by the real economy?
Do you mean people that are producing stuff you can touch?
Yes.
That's exactly right.
So, producing stuff you can touch, goods, construction workers, construction of new buildings, new office complexes.
I mean, real things where what's generating the income is a thing that a person can touch and can handle, versus the thing that's generating the income is a digital asset.
It exists in the cloud.
It's intellectual property, but it's not real.
It's not something you can touch and handle.
And because it's not real, you can move it anywhere you want to.
And this is, by the way, why the corporate tax debate in this country is so jacked up.
Like, it's one thing to say corporations should pay lower or higher taxes, but this is why the Democrats, they're so much better at politics than establishment Republicans, because they'll raise the corporate tax rate.
But what they'll really do is they'll make it easier for their digital friends, the Googles and Silicon Valleys of the world, to avoid it, to go to Singapore, to avoid that corporate tax rate.
They'll make it fall hardest on Republican companies working in Republican areas, the people who are working in the real economy.
Even the businesses in the real economy, even big businesses, are much more Republican than folks who are working in the digital economy.
So I think if we penalize the digital economy relative to the real economy through our regulatory system, through our tax system, it would actually tamp down a lot on the world capital problem.
So, but a strict libertarian would say, who cares if it's in the digital economy?
Right?
It's intellectual property.
They had to take a risk.
They had to put something in the marketplace.
Why are you going to favor something that's tangible over something that makes people more productive?
Because it's good for America.
That's my view.
As you know, I'm not a doctrine or a libertarian, but I think that people making things, doing things with their hands, having a manufacturing and an industrial base, that's good for America.
And importantly, the companies that are in the real economy that depend on middle-class workers in my home state of Ohio and other places all across the country, they're not as insane as the digital economy folks who are driving so much of the problems.
Well, and I would also make the argument: if you're in tangible assets, it's by definition less speculative and it's actually better for the economy, better for the monetary system, better for middle-class workers, better for the purchase power of the dollar.
Because when you get into these highly questionable deals where all of a sudden a company is 90 times revenue and they're like, oh, no, no, we don't even do revenue anymore.
We do users.
What kind of crazy town way to do valuations?
Oh, users?
Really?
That's how we're going to value companies now.
How about I want to go value someone that makes something I can touch?
So I see I was playing devil's advocate, obviously, but that narrative is the dominant of the Washington, D.C. public policy class.
I believe the two most important things are courage and truth.
And it's famously said that without courage, none of the other virtues matter, right?
Without the capacity to stand up and say something and do something, which is why I love the fact that you are not choosing a comfortable lifestyle.
You very well could have just stayed in venture capital, kept your head down, probably wrote Hillbilly Elegy number two, right?
I'm sure you have plenty of book deals that are clamoring of people that want you to write another one, but you're doing something where you're going to get a lot of hate articles, a lot of things.
That takes courage, and you actually have the IQ and the charisma to back it up, which is so rare.
Talk about what can be done here because people feel helpless.
Yeah, you know, I think that the first thing is we just have to have the courage, the truth, the willpower to actually effectuate our vision of society.
And there's so much eggheadery in DC that's really built around complicating this fundamental truth.
We can get into the policy details, and we've gotten a little there, and we'll get further interests less.
But you've got to be willing to do the things that are necessary to accomplish these things.
So, for example, right, we know that woke capital is a huge problem.
It's intervening in our democracy, it's making it harder for people to live their lives, they're getting fired or censored for speaking in their minds.
You could easily punish the corporations that ship jobs overseas that involve themselves in our political process.
Instead, we give them special privileges, we shield them from any political, uh, political thing, and we're surprised that they act like they're completely untethered from reality because they are not to be cynical, but that's not going to happen anytime soon in the U.S. Senate.
So, then, what is what is the state-based thing?
Should South Dakota say, you know what?
If you ship jobs out, I don't even know if they're probably legally out.
Why not?
We're now going to say if you ship jobs out of South Dakota to a foreign country, you're getting taxed.
Is that a mechanism?
Yeah, I think there are certainly things you can do at the state level.
I think Ron DeSantis in Florida has done a lot of really terrific things on big tech.
He's made it harder to implement vaccine passports, made it harder for big tech to censor people within the state of Florida.
That's very important.
But I do think this requires a national solution.
It's very hard if you're a state legislator in South Dakota to tell Amazon, Google, Facebook that you're not going to do what they want you to do because then you could lose broadband.
So, your people don't have access to modern communication.
You could lose investment capital.
They do have a lot of power, and I think this is something the American nation state has to marshal behind.
So, it's not going to happen overnight, but like this conversation and conversations you're having with Warren Cass, with Tucker, like these things are starting to germinate.
We're starting to build the institutions necessary to fight back against this.
Are you seeing momentum, JD?
Absolutely.
Talk about that.
You know, I do a lot of because I am thinking about running for Senate in Ohio, and so I do a lot of events in Ohio.
I talk to a lot of people, and what I'm always so amazed by is that I go in there and I've got this voice in the back of my mind saying, Well, you know, you don't want to get too aggressive on this corporate power stuff because these are, again, these are people who care about the things that they care more about limited government than they do about their own livelihoods.
They care more about these slogans.
That's sort of the voice that I have in the back of my mind.
And I go and give these speeches, and I always find that the people that I'm talking to, like normal, hardworking, middle-class people, are far more radical than you and I are on this stuff.
It's actually striking.
Like, they don't want to live under our corporate oligarchy anymore.
They want to punish these people, they want to fight back.
They're just looking for people who are leading them.
Well, that's part of the charm of Sherrod Brown.
Sherrod Brown, for better or for worse, I'd say for worse, generally, he positioned himself as a crusader against the corporate class.
And he won pretty convincingly many times in Ohio.
That's right.
Yeah, Sherrod Brown has always been a very effective politician because he's positioned himself as like working man, this everyday guy who's fighting against corporate power.
The thing that I would love to say to Sherrod Brown, I've talked to him a couple times, but very briefly, is like, what do you say now that your party is now the most aligned with these people?
We talk about this New York Times presentation where hundreds of corporate leaders are aligning themselves against American democracy.
And who is the most like these people are almost all Democrats?
So there is this really interesting thing.
People call it the realignment, where working people are increasingly on the side of the Republican Party and the elites are on the side of the Democratic Party and they're waking up to it.
And I think Sherrod Brown's like his whole shtick is going to get old the more that it's clear that the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world are on his side.
They're not on working people.
Well, and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
But the reason they're quiet, though, is because their ultimate principle is power.
And so they're thinking to themselves, we'll regulate and break these companies up after.
That word after is the operative word right now in the progressive circles.
After.
That's exactly right.
And you see people like AOC who think of themselves as progressive champions defending some of our biggest tech companies from any type of real type of real action.
And we as Republicans, as conservatives, like the ball is in our court.
The American people are looking for someone who recognizes that the corporate oligarchy in this country is broken and fights back against it.
It's clearly not coming from the left.
It has to come from the right.
If it doesn't come from the right, it's not going to come from anywhere and we're going to lose our country.
So let's talk about the role of faith in your life and in our country.
I think it's fundamental.
And I recently have given a series of lectures and speeches at churches across the country.
And in fact, I think we have Pastor David Engelhardt in there, who's awesome.
He's doing a great job in New York City.
Anyone in New York, go to his church.
I think we've actually driven some people to his church.
It's awesome.
He's a board member at Turning Point.
And Pastor Rob McCoy and so many others have done such a wonderful job for our country.
And pastors are starting to wake up and they're starting to take their moral stance as the counselor to the king, which has always been the biblical stance of pastors in our nation.
Every great awakening in our country has played a different role.
First Great Awakening saved the country, started the country.
You know, Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, Roger Williams, activist pastors in the streets, tens of thousands of sermons that laid the foundation for liberty, as we talked about, the pursuit of virtue, not self-indulgence.
Second Great Awakening saved us from really a debauchery crisis in the 1820s.
Third Great Awakening abolished slavery.
Fourth Great Awakening, Billy Graham doesn't get credit for this.
Proudly stopped Soviet communism by himself.
No one talks about it.
In fact, we've kind of decided not to talk about how Billy Graham said of himself, quote, communism is Satan's religion.
The collectivism, too much power and too small a group of people, that's exactly what we're dealing with with corporatism here, isn't it?
So now the fifth grade awakening will either happen or not happen.
I'm trying my best to try to make it happen.
I'm not a pastor, just a Christian.
I believe you're Catholic and you converted to Catholicism.
I'm super interested in that.
Talk about your role of faith, your faith journey, the role of faith in America.
And will you talk openly about it in your race if you run?
I certainly will.
And, you know, my faith journey, I'll try to be brief here, is I grew up in an evangelical Protestant household.
Didn't go to church a whole lot, but faith was important to us.
We watched a lot of Billy Graham growing up with my mama.
She's just phenomenal.
She's, yeah, he's awesome.
She was awesome.
She loved him.
And, you know, I kind of did the thing that a lot of, I think, upwardly mobile kids do, where you go to college, you realize that faith is sort of unfavorable.
It becomes annoying to go to church.
And I really did lose my faith.
You know, I read books by Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and I thought to myself, yeah, this is too smart for this stuff.
Exactly.
I'm too smart for this stuff.
That the mystics are so 2,000 years ago.
Yeah, exactly.
And the more that I got through America's class hierarchy, and all these people are obsessed with what's your credential?
Where did you go to school?
What kind of job do you have?
I kept on thinking, there's this voice in the back of my head that doesn't really care what kind of job I have.
It just wants me to be a good person.
It wants me to be a good husband to this girl that I had fallen in love with.
It wants me to be a good father to the children that we're going to have.
It wants those kids.
It doesn't care.
I don't care where my kids go to school.
I just want them to be good men.
I have a three-year-old and a one-year-old boy.
And the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that voice came from that mystical place 2,000 years ago.
And I had to go back to the Christian faith.
You know, in Catholicism, you really, you can overthink this stuff.
You can over-intellectualize this stuff.
The reason I became a Catholic is because it's just the oldest faith.
It seemed the most rooted and the most grounded.
I hate how our society feels so shiftless and so uprooted.
And the fact that it had survived as a faith through all of these trials and tribulations made me think that was the place for me.
But I'm not one of these people.
One of my dear friends, Chris Busker, we're going to go have dinner.
I'm going to go to Presbyterian tonight.
He's a hardcore Presbyterian.
We have these fun back and forths.
But it really is about Christ and it's about grace.
And if people are on the right page there, then I think.
Oh, I totally agree.
And I'm one of the most pro-Catholic evangelicals you'll ever meet.
And here's what I love.
I'll tell you what I love about the Catholic Church and what I don't like.
I love how it doesn't change because there's so much, there's progress and the next self-indulgent.
Like, no, I actually like the fact that they have a very structured, they have a structure, something I could touch, something I can feel, something I can attend.
I just have some theological differences.
And that stuff is, that's a difference I'm never going to pass.
But I appreciate that, though.
You're a young man.
Oh, there you go.
The joke.
The joke is true.
Evangelicals become Catholics.
Well, you know, you mentioned that not changing.
That was really important to me because you know, and people who read my book know, family instability, family trauma, divorce, those things really did wreak havoc on my life and my sister's life when we were kids.
And I really admired the Catholic view that marriage is a sacrament.
It is sacred.
Providential.
Absolutely.
And it's not just something that you can sort of willy-nilly get out of, right?
And I like that approach because I think that anchoring in the sacrament of marriage is a foundational part of Western civilization.
I totally agree.
And if you lose it, then kids have miserable lives because of it, and it causes a lot of problems.
And so, talk about the role that you think faith needs to play in America today.
Well, I think that if we're going to have a country, then we're going to have to have a real awakening of faith in this country.
You know, the thing that holds people together, that binds people together, is community.
And the community institution that has always worked the best, even if you're not a Christian, the community institution that's always been most important in this country has been the church, right?
That's where people get together.
That's where people support one another.
It's, you know, if you hate big government, as you and I do, you should love the role that the church can play in actually accomplishing some of these things that we rely on the government to do now.
And if you don't have stable, powerful, durable faith communities, then people are just sort of shiftless.
They're out on their own.
They're just consumers living in a commercial economy.
They're not people who are sharing a community.
But it gets worse than that because they're going to have to find a religion.
And the religion they find is this woketopia promise.
Yes, that's exactly right.
My friend Michael Lynn, he's a political scientist at the UT Austin.
He talks about how wokeism is not atheistic.
It's religious in nature.
It's explicitly religious.
It even has its own sacraments.
Yes.
Right?
It's its own theology.
Yeah, it has its own theology, its own liturgy.
It's way more mystical than Christianity.
Absolutely, it is.
And when you, you know, it's like G.K. Chesterton said, when you lose your faith, you don't believe in nothing.
You believe in anything.
And we have a generation of young people in this country who believe in anything, and that anything is a pretty destructive ideology.
I tell young people all the time: go read G.K. Chesterton, go read C.S. Lewis, and then tell me how big of an atheist you are.
Like, if you haven't at least had that kind of a just slow yourself down a little bit, you're not the first person ever to wrestle with these questions, then maybe you might have some meaning, which is really the crisis we have in our country right now.
JD, can you legislate morality?
Yes, you can.
Tell me why.
Well, look, I mean, the choices that people make are fundamentally a consequence of the choices that are available to them.
And if you limit the immoral choices that are available to them, you can promote virtue.
You can promote morality.
You can't do it all through public policy or through legislation.
But just think about, you know, my like sons, right?
I think about what I want them to become as men.
You can make the worst choices, drugs, pornography, less available to them through legislation.
And we should, because I want my kids to be good fathers, good husbands.
I don't want them to be faceless consumers who just sit at home all the time.
The predominant viewpoint of the Republican leadership class is that government must be indifferent on this.
That government shouldn't call balls and strikes, that instead we can have our own personal opinions.
But why would we tell someone that they can't shoot themselves up with heroin or chemically castrate themselves like Asa Hutchinson?
Because we want to live in a society where people are making good choices.
And we're fundamentally, you know, people are individuals, but they're very much formed by the community influence around them.
That's the key.
If you are seeing people shooting up heroin all around you, if you see people gender transitioning all around you, that starts to become a social pressure.
It becomes social pressure to behave a certain way.
And we want to put our social pressures on positive behaviors, not negative.
So here's the interesting question.
How much of what we would call the moral decay in America can be attributed to a material blame?
This is something conservatives don't like to talk about.
Was Marx right about any of this stuff?
That actual, that sometimes if all of a sudden you lose your job in eastern Ohio at a manufacturing plant, does that have a spiritual cost too?
Of course it does.
Of course it does.
People not having something to do, people not being proud of their own work, not having a community of fellow workers that they're participating in, that takes something away from people.
And it does destroy, it can destroy your sense of purpose.
It can destroy your sense of belonging in the world.
And absolutely, we see this again and again.
Every time the manufacturing jobs disappeared in an area, you saw heroin overdoses shoot through the roof.
You saw family breakdowns shoot through the roof.
And what do we care more about?
Cheap Chinese garbage or families that are intact and not dying of heroin overdose.
But JD, why doesn't that person just move to New York City?
What's wrong with them?
Well, one, they actually came from a place.
If they are from southeastern Ohio and that's where their family is, we should make it possible for people to build a life in the place that made them who they are.
They want their children to grow up being taken care of by their grandparents.
They want the church that made them who they are to be a part of their life.
People can move if they want to, but we can't tell every single person that community doesn't matter.
And that's what we tell them when they say, you should just move to New York City.
By the way, New York City is really expensive.
If the idea is that to have a middle-class job, you have to move to New York City and pay $4,000 for an apartment, then we're not actually promising the American dream to people.
We're promising them the American dream of the elite class of society.
So if and when, let's say you do run, your message, your sales pitch to the country and the conservative movement and the Republican Party is what?
My sales pitch is the American dream is about having a good job and being able to raise your family and being able to say what you want to say about the direction of this country.
And all of those things are being threatened by our corporate oligarchy.
If we want to have freedom and liberty, as our founders have understood it, we have to fight a bit against the Biden administration, yes, but we have to fight mostly against their corporate enablers.
And fight four things with specific objectives.
Increased church attendance, opioid use to go down, more children to be born in America, more things you can touch to be made here, wages to go up, and less tech billionaires that have discretionary capital to go influence public opinion in our Republic.
We're willing to use public policy to make those things happen.
I think children are an objective good.
They make men more connected to their families, to their communities.
They make people more invested in the future.
We should have more children.
And if we have to pay people to have more children, then we're going to do it.
We're going to do the things necessary to have a country.
We should pay people to have children.
You could say, oh, Charlie says it, then I could get.
But it shouldn't be controversial to say that we should have more American-born children than imported children coming into America.
100%.
And the people who, for example, Viktor Orban in Hungary has done this and worked.
And it worked.
And they have more children there.
And they're not just building their country off of a bunch of strangers.
They're building their country off of families and off of children.
There's this sociopathic thing that exists in the left where they think that immigrants and children are interchangeable.
I'm married to the daughter of immigrants.
I have nothing against immigrants.
But the idea that a stranger coming from South America or Europe or wherever is the same to me as a child in my own family is ridiculous.
You're a ridiculous person if you think.
Morally reprehensible, everybody.
That's JD Vance.
Thanks so much for listening, everybody.
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