JD Vance recounts the chaotic 2024 RNC nomination, his son’s viral Secret Service moment, and the July 13 Trump rally shooting—where a shooter survived a close-range AR-15 hit without a scope—while dismissing staged claims but demanding transparency on motives. He ties mass shootings to radical ideologies, like pharmaceutical-driven gender transition risks, and critiques media bias, from suppressing Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 to ignoring Harris’s alleged domestic abuse while obsessing over Trump’s controversies. Vance argues Democrats prioritize cheap labor and election manipulation, like the 2021 "catch and release" bill, while Trump’s policies counter systemic fraud, urging early voting by November 5th to secure fair representation. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, actually, what happened is I got a text message from a staff member on his team that says he just missed a very important phone call.
And I don't know, you know, because there's so much inbound traffic that I think it just went straight to voicemail.
So I call him back and I'm like, hey, sir, what's going on?
He said, JD, you just missed a very important phone call.
I'm going to have to pick somebody else now.
You know, I'm about to shit a brick here.
And then he says, no, no, I'm just kidding, obviously.
I want you to be my vice president.
And the funny thing is, you know, my seven-year-old is in the background, and he has no idea what's going on.
And I love that, right?
It's one of the good things about this.
He has no clue what's going on.
He's like, Dad, who are you talking to?
He's talking about Pokemon cards, right?
And, you know, Trump hears my son in the background, and he says, well, who's that?
And I say, that's my seven-year-old son, you?
And he's like, put him on the phone.
And I'm just anxious for him to get this statement out, because in my mind, it's not final until the statement is actually out.
And he talks to my son, and he reads the statement that he is going to put out on Truth Social announcing that I'm the VP nominee of the Republican Party.
And he's like, what do you think about that, Ewan?
And my son Ewan's like, oh, that's pretty good.
That's pretty good.
Gives the phone back to me.
He's like, I have no idea what the hell's going on.
And of course, I remember this story because in particular, the Madison Square Garden rally of a few days ago was the first time that my son actually met Donald Trump.
So he'd spoken to him on the phone, but hadn't actually met him until the rally at MSG. And my seven-year-old really wanted to tell him a joke.
And so he tells him this joke, and Trump kind of chuckles, but also is probably judging me because it was a somewhat inappropriate joke for a seven-year-old to tell, but here we are.
Well, it's like, you know, I have terrible language, and it's one of my many flaws, but I was raised by my very working-class grandmother, and she was actually very, interestingly, she was a very devout Christian, but she also had, you know, a language that would make a sailor blush.
And so I talk like that because I was raised by this woman.
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Everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay.
I get it.
Life is busy.
But sometimes...
You just need...
unidentified
Hey, Joe.
It's the replacer.
Yeah.
No, you.
Hey, I'm gonna take it from here so you can enjoy some Call of Duty Black Ops 6. Great.
Now listen up, folks.
Life can be chaotic, but you shouldn't have to miss out on the latest Call of Duty just because you've got, I don't know, responsibilities.
That's where I come in.
I will handle the boring stuff like work, chores, even podcast ads.
I mean, one of the first times that I sort of spent like a large amount of time with Trump was in 2021. And I was thinking about running for the Senate.
So I was down to Mar-a-Lago talking to him.
And my initial reaction on seeing him was like, oh my God, you look really good.
You actually look healthier now than you did six years ago.
Normally presidents age very, very badly.
Yeah, I mean, look, I definitely thought, okay, obviously, this is a big thing, right?
I talked about it with my wife a lot because she was a working corporate litigator.
She's got a very big career.
She's much smarter than I am.
And we definitely – it was a marital conversation, in some ways a tough one because, you know, even though, yeah, I'm a senator, we're still pretty anonymous, right?
Like we can go on vacation or we were until this happened.
We can go on vacation.
Yeah, you'd have people stop and ask to take a photo or say something, you know, nice.
But most people, if you went somewhere, didn't know who you were.
Right now, it's literally impossible for us to go anywhere.
But it's definitely weird to just not be anonymous at all anymore, right?
And that's taken some getting used to.
I think part of it is also...
Let me just give you an example.
So Sunday morning, we want to go for...
This is the event in Madison Square Garden.
We had a morning where I didn't really have anything going on.
I had a couple phone calls.
So we want to go for a walk with the kids in Central Park.
And normally you would walk out of your hotel and walk into Central Park and hang out with your family.
Now it requires we have to notify Secret Service.
And so then they have to scope out an area where they can make sure that it's going to be properly safe.
And so instead of walking out our hotel room and taking a walk in Central Park, We hop in a car and show up in some random part of Central Park that's 20 blocks away.
And then, of course, as soon as we get out, everybody's like, well, who the hell is this?
Because there are 14-car motorcade there.
So the lack of anonymity is definitely an annoyance that comes along with it.
But, I mean, I'm the kind of person where you just take the good with the bad.
There are a lot of benefits to it.
There are some downsides to it.
It's what I ask for.
I try not to think too much about it or complain too much about it.
I just try to accept it.
I think obviously if we win, which, you know, six days from now, I think we are going to win.
I think we'll have to sort of get into more of a routine with it.
My attitude thus far has been, well, it's only for a few months, so you can do anything for a few months.
Or, you know, like one of the first things that happened, we're back at our house in Cincinnati the weekend after the RNC convention and And we're sitting there watching, like, some stupid show, Emily in Paris, on Netflix or something, which, sorry, I don't mean to call that a stupid show.
I actually think Emily in Paris is a masterpiece, but set that to the side.
Bracket that one for now.
But we're watching some show on Netflix, and, you know, you see one guy walk past your window, and you see another guy walk past your window, and it's just a Secret Service agent patrolling just little things like that.
Yeah.
You know, you recognize that your zone of privacy is very narrow, and that takes some adjusting and getting used to.
And, you know, there are all of these small little adjustments, but by and large, honestly, I love our Secret Service detail.
Our kids are really into them.
They sort of see them as their police protectors.
Our seven-year-old, it's funny, you know, he's in second grade, and one of his buddies, their parents came to us and said, do you know that the kids are playing this game in school called Boss Man?
Where basically one second grader will walk down the hallway or down the playground flanked by two separate second graders.
I started to realize that Trump was thinking pretty seriously about making me his VP nominee probably earlier this year because he would ask me a lot about who I thought the VP nominee should be.
Oh, boy.
Trick questions.
Yeah, exactly.
And I'd give him names of people that I thought would be pretty good at it.
And a lot of the names that I gave him, he would criticize.
And I almost felt like he was inviting me to throw myself out there.
Mmm.
But, I mean, it's funny...
The morning that he was shot in Butler, PA, was the first time that he and I ever talked about it.
So that was a Saturday, just thinking about, I guess it was probably June 13th, because I think the convention started June 15th.
I go down to Mar-a-Lago that morning, Saturday morning, and I'm talking to him for the first time, because the media always asked me, I was like one of the rumored shortlist candidates, I kept on getting these questions from reporters, have you ever had this conversation with Trump?
And the honest answer was no.
Well, Saturday morning that changed because I go down there and he's like, what do you think?
And, you know, he told me that he was talking to the Gardner at Mar-a-Lago about who the vice presidential nominee should be.
And that's one of, I think, Trump's sort of political geniuses is he talks to everybody about everything.
And I was like, well, what did the Gardner at Mar-a-Lago have to say about this conversation?
Because this really directly impacts my life.
And, you know, he basically said, well, I think I'm probably going to pick you.
But I don't know.
And I'm not ready to make a decision.
And then he looks at one of his staff members who's in the room.
He's like, actually, wouldn't it really set the world ablaze if we just made the decision today?
And so why don't you come up with me and we'll just do the announcement in Butler, Pennsylvania?
And I said, and of course not knowing at the time what was going to happen, I was like, absolutely, let's get this over with because I'm sick of not knowing.
Let's just get this thing over with.
And then he's like, ah, no, I'm not going to do it up there.
We need to prepare for it better.
So, look, I'm not saying it's going to be you, but I'm thinking very seriously about it.
Have fun.
We'll see after Butler PA. And then, of course, I go back home to Ohio.
He gets shot.
You know, the initial reaction is I actually thought they had killed him because when you first see the video, he grabs his ear and then he goes down and I'm like, oh my God, they just killed him.
And I was so, I mean, first I was so pissed, but then I go into like fight or flight mode with my kids.
I'm like, you know, all right, kids, you know, we were at a, we were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio.
I grabbed my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns and basically stand like a sentry at our front door.
But no, the Nashville Shooter, I mean, just while we're on the topic, went in and murdered a bunch of children at a Christian school because he or she, like whatever, was motivated by some very radical trans ideology.
Well, you know these signs that are in super woke neighborhoods?
I'm sure there's plenty of them in Austin.
Like, in this house, we believe.
Science is real.
No person is legal.
You know what I'm talking about?
Okay, so I don't know your religious background, but I'm a convert to Catholicism.
I was raised Christian, became an atheist, came back to Christianity, got baptized Catholic like five or six years ago.
And what is so interesting about this in this house, we believe, is it's so similar to the creed that you declare every day at a Catholic mass, right?
We believe And one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
And there's almost a similar cadence between the Christian creed and what these guys are doing with this hyper-woke stuff.
And then there's the rallies.
And then there's, of course, the various rituals.
And it absolutely is a religious faith.
There was this really interesting post that was, you know, I forget exactly who wrote it, but the title was Gay Rights as...
What was it?
It was like gay rights as religious rights, but the second rights was RITES. And it was a guy who was like a pro-gay rights guy, but sort of made the observation that when you get into the really radical trans stuff, you actually start to notice the similarities between a practiced religious faith.
And what these guys are doing.
And it's very interesting.
I actually met earlier with a friend who lives in Austin who's kind of a gay Reagan Democrat.
And he's a very interesting guy.
He's a fascinating guy.
He's one of the smartest political philosophers, I think.
Well, a lot of gay guys feel like the whole movement is homophobic, which is ironic, because they think that people think there's something wrong with being gay, so what you really are is a girl.
Well, and this used to be something that the old left, right?
The criticism that was made of American healthcare, which I always thought made some sense as a conservative guy, is that when you have the profit motive influencing government policy around healthcare, then yeah, okay, sometimes the profit motive can be a good thing, like we're going to develop life-saving cancer drugs.
We want that to happen, right?
And I'm fine with people making a big profit for that.
But then sometimes they'll try to manipulate government policy to make their own drugs more profitable, not because it's good for health, but because these people just naturally, like most people, want to make some money.
Like, I got into a big argument and, you know, this person, you can read about the New York Times, later disavowed our friendship and leaked our text messages to the New York Times.
But the breaking point was I came out against this gender transition for minors when I was running for the Senate a few years ago.
And she's a transgender individual, and she kind of flipped out on me.
And the thing that I never understood, because she's like very much an old school leftist, is...
Are you not at all a little bit worried about how rich people are getting by prescribing experimental therapeutics to 9, 10, 12-year-old kids?
Like, this used to be something that the American left would have gone crazy about.
And now the only people who are raising concerns about it are conservative Republicans.
But we should be concerned when, because it's not just like the lobbying and the influence.
I mean, there's something called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.
It's sort of the manual of psychiatric disorders.
And I think that we're on the DSM-5, as it's called, which is the fifth edition of this manual.
You have drug companies that are making money that are lobbying to have, you know, child dysphoria put into our psychiatric manuals because then psychiatrists will treat that condition and then those pharmaceutical companies will get rich from it.
Somebody should be interrogating whether the political incentives of our country actually align with the financial incentives of the pharmaceutical industry because oftentimes the answer is going to be no, but nobody's asking that question.
Well, we've always known that children are very easily influenced and that children shouldn't be allowed to make life-changing decisions when they're very young.
There's a lot of shit you can't do when you're a little kid.
Yeah.
Why are you letting them just change their gender?
Yeah.
What does this even mean?
That's right.
And then the New York Times thing that comes out where it shows that they had a whole study about these puberty blockers that showed that they do not help the children's mental health.
Yes.
And that they probably have a lot of horrific side effects.
Which shows you the corruption of science is that we're actually not publishing studies that suggest that gender transition craziness has reached the boiling point.
I mean, you know, you have kids.
I have a four-year-old and two-year-old.
Every single day, my four-year-old or two-year-old will come to me and say something that is batshit insane because they're four and two.
Like, my four-year-old will come and say, Daddy, I'm a dinosaur.
I'm going to take them to the Dinosaur Transition Clinic and put scales on them.
Well, the other thing is if you were encouraging them, and some parents, I'm just going to say it, even though it sounds gross, they want their kid to be a part of the LGBTQ thing because it looks like a flag of virtue that they can post in their front lawn.
Oh, look, we have a queer child.
Oh, you're amazing.
There's a weird thing about it with some of these nutty parents.
Where you could imagine them...
There has to be some reason why this enormous percentage of Hollywood kids are trans.
It becomes a social signifier for a lot of parents.
And we have to be honest about that fact.
And if you look at where the gender craziness is the most common, it's most common among upper middle class to lower middle class white progressives.
Now, you could believe, okay, that there's just like something genetic going on in the mind of a wealthy white progressive.
Or you could believe that this is a cultural trend that we should be questioning a lot more than we are right now.
And unfortunately, here's one thing that I really worry about.
Think about the incentives.
People are very good at rationalizing things.
If you are a, you know, middle class or upper middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle class kids.
But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be Trans.
And is there a dynamic that's going on where if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege, right?
That's the social signifier.
The only one that's available in the hyperwoke mindset is if you become gender non-binary.
And again, I think it's important to sort of, you know, most people are not saying, oh, I'm white privileged, how do I become part of the privileged set?
But it's these weird ways in which these ideas creep into the mainstream.
And people are very good at rationalizing these things.
And so what I think 20, 30 years ago, even among very well-to-do white progressives, like an 11-year-old boy says, I think that I'm a girl.
Most of the time we would have said, oh, that's ridiculous and crazy and, you know, ha ha ha, and come back to me in a couple of days.
Now I think there's this massive incentive to try to say, oh my God.
Does that mean that my kid is trans?
And I also think it's, to your point, very warping on the minds of young kids because what they're now doing is taking normal adolescent curiosity and normal adolescent discomfort.
Like, I don't know a single person who went from the ages of 10 to 15 who didn't say, oh, like, sometimes I had some, you know, weird ideas or I dressed weird for a couple of years or something, right?
It's a confused The confusing phase for most Americans, we take that normal adolescent confusion, and then we try to medicalize it, and nobody's saying, oh, when we do medicalize it, by the way, a lot of pharmaceutical companies get very rich off of it.
They'll never be able to have children ever again.
If they change their mind, if they one day decide, oh, I was just going through a confusing time in my life, but now I've ruined my voice with hormones.
So this is where I had the real breaking point with a friend that I mentioned earlier, is she made this argument that puberty blockers are fully reversible.
And so I actually went and looked at it and looked at the data on this.
The idea that if you give puberty delaying, puberty blockers, whatever you're going to call them, to kids who are 11, 12, 13, that that's fully reversible, that is completely and preposterously insane.
Now even the most radical advocates of trans healthcare do not say that, right?
Because look, I mean, you have sexual dysfunction, you have, to your point, you know, hair in weird places that won't go away, you have voice changes that won't go away.
We're experimenting on tens of thousands of American children.
We're making them miserable.
It's not having any long-term health benefit.
It's making a lot of pharmaceutical companies rich.
And it's conservative Republicans are the only ones saying, eh, maybe this is a little crazy.
And again, this gives me faith in the wisdom of the American people, because if you see how radically the Democrats leaned into the stuff four years ago and how much Kamala Harris is running away from it today, most Americans, they don't really care who you sleep with.
They're pretty open minded about most lifestyle choices.
But when you talk about having a biological male compete with their teenage girl in competitive sports.
Well, when you see them in the actual swimming pool competing, it looks like the biological males are running at 1.5x speed and everybody else is running at normal speed, right?
This is just clearly different.
And to your point about it destroys opportunities for scholarships, I mean, go back to the original reason why we wanted girls' sports, why we have Title IX in the United States of America to begin with.
Like, we recognize that competitive sports, like, what does it teach?
It teaches you how to participate on a team.
It teaches you to recognize your own weaknesses and the strengths of your teammates and vice versa.
I'm the father of a two-year-old daughter.
I want my daughter to learn these important life skills.
I don't want her going into athletic competitions where I'm terrified she's going to get bludgeoned to death because we're allowing a six-foot-one male to compete with her in sports where you should not have biological males competing with biological females.
The problem with that is people – there's a psychological condition called autogynephilia, and autogynephilia is where men are sexually aroused by the idea of dressing and behaving like a woman, but they're heterosexual.
Now, all of a sudden, these people with this known psychiatric disorder are allowed to just identify as a woman, and you're a bigot if you don't let them change in the world.
Yeah, and you're expected to empower them at the expense of young women who are very often much more vulnerable for obvious reasons than young men.
And it reminds me of, so the very first congressional delegation trip that I ever took was to Paris.
I think it was to Paris.
And it's part of the Paris Air Show, and Ohio has all these aviation interests, and Anyway, long story short, I was talking to a very conservative woman at the Paris Air Show who was from Mississippi, and she was probably 65, 70. And it was really interesting because I was just like, you know, how do you find the city?
She had never been to Paris before, and I'm just, you know, interested in people.
So I was asking her, and she said, you know what's really interesting is I just feel like...
Paris, I would think of as very liberal, but I actually think Paris is more conservative than some of the big cities in the United States.
And I said, oh, tell me more about this.
And this woman doesn't know me very well, and she's clearly kind of embarrassed to tell me, but she walks through, she says, well...
I just don't see any people, like when you're in Paris, the girls are girls and the boys are boys.
And that's true in Paris, and that's not necessarily true in some of our big cities.
And then she says, Senator Vance, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but when I was in New York City recently, I saw a grown man who was walking around in a miniskirt, and then she gets very quiet and she said, Senator Vance, I could see his balls.
And I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, no, that's weird.
You're not allowed to walk down the street and flash children in the middle of America's biggest city.
And it reminds me, Emmanuel Macron, who's the leader of France, made this observation about Somebody asked him, why hasn't all the transgender stuff made its way into France?
And Emmanuel Macron says, well, in France, we have two genders, and that's plenty.
I kind of wish that was the attitude that we had in the United States of America.
And he talks about how you can be excommunicated from the cult if you don't follow the doctrine, you have to follow religiously to the letter.
That's where all this stuff, like if you're allowing guys to just have their balls hanging out walking down the street because it's empowering, and because you're being inclusive, you're empowering perverts.
It has the excommunication part, but it doesn't have the forgiveness and redemption part.
Most people recognize that even if you violate some fundamental moral value that I have, if you apologize and try to be a good person, we're going to be forgiving.
We want people to be able to live together.
There is this weird thing with the woke stuff, and you see this, and I feel bad when comedians in particular do it, I'm sure you've seen this, but when anybody does this, where they'll go and say, well, I'm really sorry.
They'll sort of prostrate themselves when they make an offensive joke, or they do something they're not supposed to do, and they expect redemption, but no, no, no.
They don't get forgiveness.
What they get is, you need to do even more Of what you've already done.
It becomes this self-defeating, self-flagellating cycle.
And I think that's what's most destructive about this, is you can't be friends with people if you think they're only ever wrong.
They can only ever wrong you.
And if they apologize, your response is not to say, oh, okay, I accept your apology.
If your response is to say, no, I want you to apologize even more and even harder, that destroys human civilization.
Where they haven't come up with these different – like the Ten Commandments or different pathways to – Correct.
To forgiveness.
There's nothing.
So it's this thing that behaves like a religion, but it's not really well thought out, and it's very illogical, and it also combines pharmaceutical drug companies, and there's a lot of other weird shit that's attached to this religion that you kind of need.
If you're going to do this whole woke thing and go guns a-blazin', you're going to have to get drugs involved.
They're going to have to do hormone blockers.
It doesn't just happen on its own.
And that somehow or another is natural to them.
This is how you be your true self.
Your true self is you add hormones that aren't supposed to be in your body?
Yeah, and oh, by the way, instead of your true self, Being, maybe I should be skeptical of some of the crap that I'm putting into my body.
I should lean into the idea that I should put more foreign things into the human body.
That's what, to me, is so fascinating about it, is the true self.
Like, you know, I think all of us, that's sort of part of the human journey for truth.
We're all asking, who are we?
What is our true self?
And maybe we should be asking ourselves, this is sort of more of a Bobby Kennedy point, but Why are we putting all this weird crap into our food, into our water?
Maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical, like my body is a temple, rather than I'm gonna welcome even more pharmaceutical intervention into the human body.
It's very interesting how some religions view the body as a temple and some religions almost invite the pollution.
Well, they're also inviting – see, one of the weirdest things is if you are on the wrong side of their ideology, like if you're aligned with Trump like RFK Jr. is, now all of a sudden I've seen like people on the left that are trying to dismiss a lot of the things that he says.
About additives in food, about atrazine, fluoride in the wall, all these different things.
Because now they're connecting not having toxins in your food with a right-wing idea.
Well, and it raises one of my sort of core political beliefs is that our politics is focused on fake shit and distractions to distract us from the real stuff, right?
And so if I'm looking at the environmental movement in the United States of America, and I don't even have like strong views on what the carbon footprint ultimately does.
I'm sort of skeptical of the experts here, but I'm also skeptical of the other side.
I just don't really know what I think about this.
I think it's insane to try to eliminate fossil fuels.
That's kind of a belief that I have.
But it's interesting that the environmental movement in America, the only thing that it talks about is the carbon footprint.
And it never talks about like, oh, why do we have the highest rates of obesity in the world right now?
Why is it that American kids spend less time outdoors in nature than they ever have in the history of our 250-year civilization?
There's this weird way in which we get distracted by the fake stuff instead of focusing on the real stuff.
And I think there is a really very important environmental conversation to be had.
It was interesting when...
And one of the first things that happened when I was a senator is he had this terrible train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, got a lot of headlines.
And it was a mistake at the time that wasn't obvious.
They basically set off a few of the chemical cars, which, I mean, if you see the images, it looks like a nuclear bomb went off in East Palestine, Ohio.
But it's putting vinyl chloride and all these other pollutants into the water, into the air, into the soil.
And it was amazing.
The environmental movement almost could not have cared less about a chemical explosion in rural Ohio that is potentially poisoning thousands of people.
But they were really, really concerned about the carbon footprint of those same people.
I'm sick of the distraction.
I think we should focus on the real stuff.
And unfortunately, it's true of the environmental policy, but it's true of a lot of other stuff.
The carbon footprint thing is very concerning to me because I'm seeing this concept being pushed out of having an app that monitors your carbon footprint and limiting the amount of travel you can do and limiting the amount of things.
And if you can do that, then you can get away with a lot of things.
You can get away with a lot of policy.
You can get away with a lot of decisions that are made that people wouldn't agree with because you're going to limit so many things about their life they're going to become accustomed to being Governed in that way.
It's disturbing to me that there's also profit that's being made off the green movement.
There's a lot of people who are making a lot of money off of these environmentally conscious things.
The meal that I made her, I'm not proud of this, but I'll tell you, was, you know what crescent rolls are?
Those, like, Pillsbury yeast rolls?
So I rolled out a flat thing of crescent rolls, I put raw broccoli on top of it, I sprinkled ranch dressing, and I stuck it in the oven for 45 minutes.
I'm just very skeptical when someone is promoting things for either global health or for the environment, and then I find out that they have a ton of money invested in companies that could fit those needs.
Yeah.
It's a real problem, this philanthropic capitalism thing.
Well, we were talking about how you asked, why do the Germans shut down the nuclear facilities?
And I know, you know, it's they're shutting down coal, they're shutting down any of their base power.
And leaning really into solar and wind.
But, again, the green energy movement in Europe is heavily funded by the Russians because the Russians want to have, because they produce so much natural gas, they want to have Europe by the balls.
The funniest thing ever was when Elon showed a photo of Bill Gates next to a photo of a pregnant man emoji and he said, if you want to lose a boner real quick.
So there's this thing called the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
Obviously, it's in Munich.
It's kind of like Davos, but for national security.
And I went there and it was like a big deal for me because I went in there as the one skeptic in the entire, this like massive Euro complex.
Kamala Harris is there.
I went as the person skeptical of continued escalation in Ukraine because I think that what we're doing in Ukraine is insane and that we should have a policy effectively of promoting peace in the region.
And we walk in, and one of the people that I'm on this panel with is the leader of the German Green Party.
And, you know, she's like 30 years old, and she really, really cares about Russia, Ukraine.
She's like the youngest person in the German government.
And you realize you are...
You guys are literally Russian influence.
You're accusing me of wanting to do Russia's bidding.
You're encouraging your own country from the perch of government to shut down all baseload power.
And you're not even self-aware about how much of your own propaganda is funded by the country that's benefiting from this.
The lack of ability to interrogate.
I mean, Bill Gates...
Maybe he's a good guy.
I'm highly skeptical.
I don't know him very well.
But he's getting rich off of all of this stuff that he's supporting in the name of health or in the name of climate.
Our inability to just ask ourselves, who's getting rich from this stuff?
Maybe we should be skeptical of the people getting rich from this stuff is one of our big failures as a political society.
Yeah, let's get into this because this is an interesting one.
So one of the things that happened that separated us from the rest of the world other than New Zealand is in the 1990s they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise.
Yeah, the whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken.
I think we have to fix that.
Okay, here's the thing, and I say this as a critic of pharmaceutical advertising, whenever I see a pharma ad, and I pretty much only see them when I'm watching football, I'm always shocked that they actually influence anybody, right?
Because it's like, oh, take this drug for rheumatoid arthritis, and you can have all these positive experiences, and it's like, oh, the side effects are, you know, erectile dysfunction, rashes on your face, suicidal ideation, tumors in your brain, and you'll hate yourself and be depressed, so you'll need this other drug.
You get so many of these weird side effects in the advertisements.
How do they actually work?
So I actually think that the real corruption is not really that they persuade Americans.
I mean, if you're going to take a drug, you're probably going to take a drug based on conversations with your doctor more than a pharma advertisement, but they do corrupt the media ecosystem.
Because if you're getting all that money from the pharma companies, then you're not going to launch investigations into some of the things you should be launching investigations into.
And that's why it's dangerous, because it's not like these are completely innocent companies and have never done anything wrong.
So if you all of a sudden have them removed from your list of people that you're investigating just because they advertise, they've essentially bribed you.
So if, you know, somebody tries to fact check it, I heard this from a friend, but I heard it from a friend I trusted.
So he was a guy I knew, and he worked at the largest industry lobbying organization for the pharmaceutical companies.
And I was in D.C. This is a long time ago, and I just kind of ran into him.
And, you know, I care a lot about the opioid problem.
My mom struggled with opioids for a very long time.
She's been clean and sober for a while, but I'm very proud of her.
I love you, Mom.
I know you're watching this.
So, Jorana, this guy on the street in D.C., and he had just quit his job for this pharmaceutical lobbying organization, or he was talking about quitting.
And I was like, why?
He's like, man, we just did something that's very dark.
And basically, what they had figured out is because American Indian tribes, Native Americans, have tribal sovereignty.
And so they figured out, I guess, that if they gave some Native American tribe some fraction of a fraction of a penny of the royalties from the sale of opioids that they could actually insulate themselves from litigation around the prescription opioid epidemic.
And I guess this guy thought it was so dirty that he was like, I can't work for this organization anymore.
And I was like, holy shit, that is some pretty dark stuff.
So you guys are giving some Native American tribe-like pennies so that you can insulate yourself from pharmaceutical litigation.
I'd be very curious.
I should follow up on this to see if that actually happened.
But again...
Just to be clear, if the media tries to fact check me, this is what I heard from a friend.
it we're good yeah what was that thing you want me to check real quick sorry um former Pharmaceutical companies giving royalty streams to Native American tribes to insulate themselves from lawsuits.
Well, yeah, and this is like one of the things that I think is genuinely different about, and I don't want to get too partisan political here, but about Donald Trump's Republican Party.
I mean, obviously, like, there are corporations that we're more pro certain businesses, and we tend to be more anti certain businesses.
Like, for example, big tech.
I hate big tech.
We can get into that later.
But fundamentally, I think President Trump has changed the mindset of the Republican Party to where it was like instinctively always pro-corporate.
We're now sometimes willing to ask, well, is this corporation's interest in the American interest?
Like there was this famous quote, I believe, from the leadership of GM back in the 1950s.
That General Motors' interest is America's interest.
And I'm probably butchering the quote, but sort of paraphrased.
Can anybody really in 2024 say that Google's interest is America's interest?
Or Apple, which employs thousands of slaves in Shenzhen, is Apple's interest is America's interest?
I just don't.
That's ridiculous.
And the fact that we're at least somewhat skeptical of corporate power in the Republican Party I think is a very good trend for us.
It is kind of weird that one of the wokest companies, if you thought about like woke companies and like super progressive and like on the right side of everything, Apple.
The distraction, like, distraction politics versus real politics.
If Apple says hashtag BLM and gives a few million dollars to a trans rights organization, then the entire political left ignores that they're profiting off of slave labor.
And this is why, look, corporations want to go make money.
They should make money.
Fine.
But my job is public and social policy.
And what really pisses me off, and frankly, what should piss off more Republicans, because if Historically, the Republican Party has been the more pro-corporate party.
We should be saying, the more that these corporations are engaged in social policy, in particular, left-wing social policy, the more that we should be saying, I don't know that I want to give you everything that you want, which is, of course, what the historical party did, but I think is much different in the last few years.
I'm just scared that the tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry are so deeply entrenched in politics and in media that you can't just shake them off.
You can't just say, hey, you can't advertise on TV anymore, or hey, you no longer have exemption from responsibility from the side effects of certain drugs.
Because that whole thing they pulled off with exemption of...
Pharmaceutical companies being responsible for injuries from vaccines.
And I mean, you know, so I took the vax and, you know, I haven't been boosted or anything.
But the moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was...
The sickest that I've been in the last 15 years, by far, was when I took the vaccine.
And, you know, I've had COVID at this point five times.
I was in bed for two days.
My heart was racing.
I was like...
The fact that we're not even allowed to talk about that, even, you know, no, like, serious injury, but even the fact that we're not even allowed to talk about the fact that I was as sick as I've ever been for two days...
And the worst COVID experience I had was like a sinus infection.
I'm not really willing to trade that.
And you don't even, you know, everybody that I know, or a lot of people I know, they talk about the second shot that they got of the vaccine was really, made them really, really sick.
Well, that's a side effect, and not a side effect that we even talk about enough in this country.
No, and it's also, again, we're talking about companies that have a long history of lying and being forced to pay criminal fines, and then we're giving them this exemption from being responsible for any of the side effects.
Well, particularly with RFK Jr. being attached to Trump.
With RFK Jr. comes a lot of, you know, like, there's a lot.
There's a lot that you're going to have to handle there.
But the question is, like, is...
Are they so entrenched that it's impossible to, these things that disturb us, the fact that they have exemption from any responsibility because of the vaccine, the fact that they have the ability to advertise on television, can those things be removed?
I think it's a possible thing, but because I haven't actually done the work to figure out how many of my colleagues would sign on to this, I can't say whether it's like a certain thing or a likely thing or just something that we should be working on.
I mean, here is an interesting thought experiment.
If there was one thing that we could do to rein in the pharmaceutical companies, what would it be?
Would it be liability on the vax stuff?
Would it be advertising?
My intuition is actually it might be the advertising on the healthcare stuff because that's the way in which they engulf the media into this whole scam.
It's a weird one where you're not even allowed to question it.
You're not allowed to discuss it.
And that becomes very religious, just like all these other things that we talked about, where you have this thing that everybody speaks about in hushed tones.
People know people that have been vaccine injured.
Particularly people on the left, they're very reluctant to discuss it, even publicly.
I know people who are public people who have had serious vaccine side effects who do not want anyone to talk about it.
I have a Senate colleague who doesn't want to talk about it, but worries that it's like permanently affected his sort of sense of balance and dizziness and vertigo.
And, yeah, it happens.
I've talked to a number of people who think that they got vaccine injured.
Some of them are public about it and some of them are not.
Like the sickle cell stuff that's coming out now, we maybe have cured sickle cell disease in black Americans because of a gene therapy.
I read about it a couple weeks ago, actually, that the first experimental therapy, and it was hard for the kid who took it, but you had like an 11 or 12-year-old black American just walk out of the hospital, and he's probably cured of sickle cell disease.
That stuff is amazing.
Wow.
But I actually think that in some ways, what we should be encouraging these companies to do is that, right?
We want them to develop the life-saving drugs.
We don't want them to get rich by shielding themselves from liability or working with Native American tribes so that they don't get sued.
And I actually think there maybe even is a harmony between those viewpoints because if they had to get rich by developing life-saving therapeutics, and that's the only way they could get rich, then they'd probably do more of that.
But again, that's where public policy comes in, and that's where my job is to make sure that when the pharmaceutical companies get rich, they get rich by curing diseases, not by doing weird, psychotic things with Native American tribes.
And you can't have this argument that we need exemption from responsibility because otherwise we're not going to be able to profit off of these things.
It's one of the biggest problems with corporate America is socialized costs but privatized profits.
And what you really want is that you want major American companies, and I'm a believer in the market economy, you want them to absorb the benefits but also the costs, and that's often what doesn't happen.
So I talked about this train disaster in East Palestine and, you know, the railroad companies hate me because I kind of went on a crusade against them afterwards.
And what I realized is think of all the costs of that disaster.
Think of the health care costs, the welfare costs from people who lost their jobs, the declining home values in that community, just all of the costs absorbed by that community.
And the railroads are paying slap on the hand fines.
And it sort of occurred to me that the reason they're not more serious about these train disasters is because they're privatizing the rewards.
But when a major train disaster happens, who picks up the tab?
It's the local residents and it's the American taxpayer.
And that's something that fundamentally has to change.
I don't know the number of gallons, but it was a lot.
And I hate to say, the answer to your question, how much can they clean up?
The answer is, I don't know.
And I actually, this is one of my biggest frustrations, probably my single biggest frustration over my time in the Senate, is when this happened, a bunch of the residents came to me It's actually very sweet and even kind of patriotic, but certainly self-sacrificing where they said, look, no one knows what the effect of this shit is going to be 15 years down the road, right?
Because we weren't worried about, okay, a guy drinks the water in East Palestine and drops dead.
The water levels did not have toxins at that level.
But the question was, what happens when you're imbibing the stuff, breathing it in, drinking it at trace levels for 10, 15 years?
Like, do you have weird diseases down the road?
Hopefully not, right?
I pray every day that hopefully not.
But you can only study that in the moment.
And so we actually, working with a public health epidemiologist in North Carolina and some in Ohio, we actually came up with a plan.
Like, here's what you would need to do.
You'd collect samples in the first six months to a year after the disaster.
I'm talking about, like, fingernail clippings, things like that.
You'd establish a baseline of toxins in people's blood, and then five years later, ten years later, you'd try to figure out what the toxins were in people's blood five years, ten years down the road.
And then you'd ask yourself, what weird diseases, if any, are people starting to develop after 5, 10, 15 years, right?
The long-term health effects of this stuff.
And it was, in some ways, a really interesting thing to study because we had never had a chemical disaster where we tried to study the effects of years down the road.
And of course, how much would this cost?
Between $5 and $20 million over the whole lifetime of the study.
We couldn't get Biden-Harris.
We couldn't even get some of my colleagues in the United States Senate to give a shit.
And it's really frustrating to me because the time has now passed, right?
All these people who are saying we are volunteering to be a guinea pig to understand the long-term health consequences.
The time has passed and we're never going to know because we didn't get the money to do the very small amount of money to do that study then.
We won't know, and we may never really know because we didn't collect the samples at the time.
Because you've got to establish the baseline.
That was what my epidemiologist guy that I talked to...
In North Carolina said, you've got to establish the baseline.
Because here's what's going to happen, right?
Fast forward 10 years, people get weird cancers.
Sometimes because of chemical spills, sometimes just because that's human biology.
Somebody will sue the train company, which is Norfolk Southern.
We'll sue the train company and they'll say, I've got this weird cancer because of you.
And what Norfolk Southern will say is, no, you don't.
You don't have this weird cancer because of me.
You have it because of just, you know, you sort of lost the game of Russian roulette that is human biology.
And what we could have said conclusively was yes or no.
And unfortunately, we're not going to be able to say that.
But this is one of the things, like when we're in office...
The first, not the first, but the first disaster that we have, hopefully there aren't any, but there always are, first chemical disaster that we are, we're going to take the infrastructure of that study, and right away, we're going to try to establish a baseline.
To their credit, and you're not going to hear me praising these guys that much, but...
The local EPA folks, I actually think, did a pretty good job there on the water side, because what they basically did is they just ran the water in the creeks through a filtration system, cleaned it, oxidized it, and then got the chemicals out of it and then put it back into the system.
Now, the problem is the stuff that's just in the ground, you can't really get that out.
What you can do is try to, you know, as we did, we passed out bottled water and tried to make sure that people weren't drinking the water until the levels of toxins hit a certain level.
And again, the issue was never like the levels of toxins are going to kill you.
The issue was always, are they going to cause long-term problems?
We got so focused, and I think the media got so focused on, is the water safe to drink?
And it's like, the question is not, is the water safe to drink?
The question is, is the water safe to drink for the next 15 years?
Well, it also, I mean, apparently they couldn't get the encrypted messages that were sent, so I'm pretty careful about making sure I use Signal and iMessage and all that stuff.
I try not to worry too much about shit I can control.
But one thing that came up, by the way, in that, and I'll go back to your question, is about the grid.
One thing that came up in that is the way that they hacked, and it was also President Trump's phone, apparently, too.
The way that they hacked our phones is they used the backdoor telecom infrastructure that had been developed in the wake of the Patriot Act.
And this is something that I think should be a much bigger part of the controversy over the Patriot Act is when the Patriot Act was passed, like AT&T, Verizon, they had to build all of these systems so that if somebody got a FISA warrant and could hack into a particular phone, the infrastructure actually existed.
What I've been told is that that infrastructure was used by this Chinese hacker organization called Salt Typhoon.
If they have anything on me, I can't be too pissed off at them.
At least they named themselves Salt Typhoon.
But the answer to the question about the grid is, this is actually one of these things where if we had a functional government, it's pretty easy to develop the systems.
Because if you do like an EMP attack, right?
Ron Johnson, who's a senator from Wisconsin, is really preoccupied with this.
It doesn't take down the whole grid.
What it really screws with is the power transformer system.
So what we should have is basically a backup power transformer for every major system in the United States of America just sitting in a warehouse that's turned off.
And because it's turned off, it won't be affected by an EMP pulse.
And then if there is an EMP attack, you just get those transformers to swap out the ones that were destroyed, and then the grid is back up and running.
It's actually a scandal, I think, that the federal government has not just at one point, with all the money that we spend on defense and everything else, just said, we're going to spend $15 billion to buy enough power transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country.
Yeah, one of the things that Trump talked about that a lot of people probably weren't aware of was the damage that these wind Turbines are doing to whales.
It's like we're brainwashed to think that these things somehow or another are beneficial because they're attached to this idea of being environmentally conscious.
It's one of those things that, again, is much like a religion where you must stay with the doctrine.
You must follow it by the word because if you step out of line and say, actually, when you look at these studies, it doesn't really show that the world is warming.
It shows that over the last X amount of thousands of years, we're in a gradual cooling period.
And that what's really terrifying is global cooling.
Randall Carlson, who's an expert in asteroid collisions and the Younger Dryas impact theories, fascinating guy, but he says that the periods in history where we came very close to extinction are like when there's an ice age.
Those are the most terrifying.
When there's global warming, you just move to where it's not so warm, and that's what people have done forever.
Well, and you deal with it technologically, right?
This is the thing that the solution to global warming for however long this warming trend lasts is to deal with it technologically, right?
I mean, if you look at the number of people who die from disasters in the United States, it's going down because we've gotten better at predicting stuff and helping people deal with things.
And of course, you still have terrible things like Hurricane Helene, but they are luckily part of a downward trend and people losing their lives from terrible storms.
And, you know, if you really think, like if you really think that carbon, this is another reason why I'm somewhat skeptical of like the carbon obsessives is if you think that carbon is the most significant thing, the sole focus of American civilization should be to reduce the carbon footprint of the world.
Then you would be investing in nuclear in a big way.
And then when you say that, the environmentalists say, well, you've got all these poison rocks to deal with afterwards.
Well, the poison rocks problem is a less significant problem than the carbon problem if you think that we're all going to go extinct in 100 years.
So let's deal with the most pressing problem.
They're all like, no, no, no, no.
And their solution is to buy solar panels that are disproportionately made in China which has the worst carbon footprint and growing of any country in the entire world.
They obviously don't believe their own bullshit which is why I'm somewhat skeptical of what they say.
Also, when you have a movement and your spokesperson is Greta Thunberg and not some insanely intelligent scientist who's done years of research on this stuff, and there's also not a consensus among scientists.
There's a lot of scientists that are heretics, that are stepping outside the lines, that are saying that this is not an issue.
And then they're also pointing out the fact that carbon is what trees consume, and there's more greenery in the world today than there was 100 years ago, which is a very inconvenient thing for people.
It's so not true, and it's also, historically, like, one of the craziest moments in history, in my opinion, is the Mongols and what the Mongols did in the 1200s.
Well, there is a fundamentally, it raises the point, there's a fundamentally anti-human element of the radical environmental movement in the United States of America.
And then when you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I encourage everyone to read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, because it's not just about this crisis that we went through with COVID-19.
It's about a host of different things that were done.
And one of them was a vaccine that was supposed to be a DPT vaccine that they were giving to girls in Africa that was just birth control.
They were giving them HCG. And they were giving them this enhanced schedule.
I don't want to screw this up because my recall is not the best.
But the reality is there was experiments done on unwitting, unknowing African women where they gave them this thing that was supposed to be a vaccine against a disease, but it was really sterilizing them.
Well, just think about that from the perspective of these poor people.
I assume the polio vaccine thing happened in Africa or did it happen somewhere else?
Yes.
Some white dude shows up, says that he cares about you, gives you a shot that's going to, you know, prevent you from getting some disease, and then you become, like, permanently disabled or you even die because of it.
Like, think about what effect that has on how those Africans perceive our civilization.
And are we going to have, you know, are they going to, like...
We're going to have a conflict in 30, 40 years because people are so pissed off about us coming in and giving them healthcare that isn't actually healthcare.
I really worry about that stuff.
I mean, this is one of my big things with the Russia-Ukraine conflict is people don't realize how much of Africa's food supply comes from the Ukraine, like an astonishing amount.
So if you have this war that goes on forever...
And there's not enough food going to Africa.
Are you going to have a bunch of starving, desperate people who are, like, pissed off because they're starving, who hate European civilization because they don't have, you know, they're not getting the food that they were expecting to get?
Like, we never think about the knock-on effects of this stuff, right?
Like, yeah, it's really dark and really evil that we're giving them polio.
I also wonder, the people who live in the village that got polio, what the hell are they going to be doing in 30 years?
And again, this is where I go back to some of the arguments of the old left.
Like, what kind of guardrails do you want these companies to have?
Do you want the guardrails to be that if you donate to the trans pride and BLM organizations, you get to do whatever the hell you want?
Or do you want the guardrails like we're going to protect health and public safety and make sure that you're not like killing people under the auspice of helping them?
There's this movie that's probably like extremely influential to my entire political worldview and I didn't realize until last night because I got into Austin late.
Usually my wife travels with me.
She wasn't with me last night.
She's taking care of the kids today.
So I get in the hotel room in Austin and it's very late and I watch this movie, Boys in the Hood.
I watched the movie a ton when I was, like, eight, nine years old, and I didn't realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night.
Okay, so, all right, Furious Styles, a lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your communities.
Obviously, he's talking about black people in L.A. and not, you know, white people in rural, small-town America.
But I was like, oh, like that's maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea.
Or he talks about like the importance of fatherhood, the importance of especially young boys having a father in the home.
It's like, I got that from boys in the hood.
And obviously it spoke to me when I was a kid because I grew up at the time and I didn't have much of a relationship with my dad.
And it's interesting, man.
He makes this observation, math being racist.
He's criticizing the SAT for being culturally biased.
But then he says the only part that isn't culturally biased is the math.
And it's like, oh, this is like a black nationalist in the mid-80s, because that's kind of the philosophy of this movie is what you might call like old school black leftism.
This movie in the 1980s is saying something that I wish a lot of white liberals would hear today, which is actually math is not racist.
It's one of the things that's definitively not racist is math and numbers.
When he put on the MAGA hat in front of those guys and they all cheered and he insisted on keeping the hat and he took it with him, I think he's very, very resentful that he got ousted in what was essentially a coup.
And by the way, they still all have security clearances, I believe, which is going to change when we win.
But, I mean, also...
This is where I always get pissed about the media conversation around what happened in 2020, is what they'll do is they'll sort of find the craziest conspiracy theory about what happened in 2020. They'll debunk it and say,
oh, look, this shows that nothing bad happened in 2020. There's a nonpartisan organization that actually looked at what would have happened to Americans' votes That was the fun part.
And a nonpartisan organization said that knowledge, which was suppressed by the entire American media and big tech scene, That would have changed millions upon millions of votes.
And we know that the number in four swing states was 88,000 votes that were the difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden winning the 2020 election.
So set to the side all of the other arguments about fraud and all the other rule changes that happened in the midst of COVID, we know that big tech colluded with our own sort of...
I would say colluded.
The one thing I'll say about Zuckerberg is, like, I don't know him super well, I've never had a problem with him, but I do wonder if it's a convenient excuse.
I don't doubt that the FBI said, hey, this is Russian disinformation, but these companies still have to take some agency over this too, right?
So I think it was both the corruption of the FBI and the intelligence services, but also the big technology companies themselves.
Both of them are at blame.
And I think fundamentally, if they had not done what they did, Donald Trump would have won another term as President of the United States.
You're never going to be able to convince me that if millions upon millions of swing voters knew the evidence of Joe Biden's corruption and it was staring them in the face, that we would not have been able to pull that one out.
Well, I think there's, like, socially liberal, like, live and let live, do whatever you want, as long as you're not hurting anybody, which is really what I am.
And this has always been a conservative idea, is that you're really supposed to make your mark in this world and get up in the morning and work hard, and you should be proud of that.
So everybody who really trains hard and gets good has a certain level of just a true understanding of the real relationship, the mathematical equation of focus, time, energy, and discipline versus positive results.
But yeah, I mean, you know, one of my closest friends in the tech world is David Sachs.
And Dave and I have talked about this because we were both like, it's funny, we were both sort of critical of Trump in 2016. But we came, you know, that criticism from a right-of-center perspective.
And both of us by 2020 were like...
This crazy bullshit has to end.
Trump is our guy.
And maybe not only is he our guy, but maybe he was like the only one who could have turned the tide against this insanity.
And David, I mean, he has become so far out there.
And I admire it in a lot of ways.
And sometimes I see what David says, and I'm like, dude, are you going to be like, welcome?
Well, I mean, he's just – look, he's very anti-woke.
He's very, very into foreign – what I would call foreign policy realism.
Like why are we starting these stupid wars all over the world?
We should be – our foreign policy should be more pro-peace.
And it's just crazy to me because he's so inflammatory about it that I'm – And by the way, I love it, right?
You know, I agree with a lot of what David says, and even when I disagree, I know he's a smart guy, but he is just saying, look, I don't give a shit.
If you're going to come after me, come after me, but I'm going to say what's on my mind.
And I think, you know, a lot of people are going in that direction, which is fundamentally a good thing.
People are sick of being told what to think.
And like the First Amendment, obviously, it's a it's a legal document that talks about the role of government and censorship and sort of prohibits government censorship.
But it's also a sort of ethic and an attitude that is endemic or I hope is to American society, which is we're going to think what we want.
We're going to say what we want to.
That's an important First Amendment value, even though it has nothing to do with the First Amendment as a legal document itself.
And a lot of people are sick of being told what to think.
Look, I try not to be too partisan because I know a lot of people watch your show, but this is to me the biggest and most fundamental difference between Kamala and President Trump in the campaign is, you know, whether it's Biden calling people garbage or Tim Walz calling people fascist and Kamala calling people Nazis.
Or endorsing explicit censorship, we're not trying to censor our fellow Americans, right?
We'll attack Kamala and our policies and our ideas, but we're not trying to say you should be silenced because you disagree with us.
That is anathema to everything that I believe in.
And that is what's happened in the modern Democratic Party, at least at the leadership level, is they've gotten really comfortable with the idea of silencing people who disagree with him, such to the point where, like, it's not even that Tim Walz thinks that Hate speech should be censored.
It's that the governor of a state could utter that phrase without recognizing how fundamentally subjective it is.
Or Hillary Clinton saying that we want to censor misinformation.
She has come out and explicitly said that we have to censor disinformation and misinformation.
And they can utter it without the American media Going completely bananas just suggests there's something broken about the political culture of the left.
I mean, there are people on CNN and, you know, CBS and all these other sort of mainstream networks.
I would call them corporate networks.
All these corporate networks that will say, you know, when Donald J. Trump says that if you riot after the election, you're the enemy of the people or you're an enemy within, like that is a major threat to democracy.
But Hillary Clinton saying that we should censor disinformation, they're just Yeah, no big deal.
And the fact that they can get so fired up about what I think is a pretty common sense observation that if you riot, law enforcement should have a response to it, but they think that it's the end of the – they don't care at all.
They don't care at all when Hillary Clinton and Tim Wallace endorse explicit censorship.
It should scare the hell out of you whenever any politician is encouraging censorship.
Especially when it's about things, like we said, about hate speech and misinformation.
Like, misinformation according to who?
because we've already shown that there's a bunch of different factors that have control over what is presented as fact.
And they're not always honest or accurate.
And these things get put out and it harms people and then there's some sort of a correction that comes along.
Well, the only way to find that out, especially like during the COVID times, these things that they called misinformation, how many of them turned out to be true?
Almost all of them.
The Wuhan lab.
It was racist to assume that when Jon Stewart did that bit on Colbert, did you see that?
It's amazing because you see Colbert scrambling and he's trying to like, Jon's like, do you think maybe the lab that was the Wuhan coronavirus lab Maybe it came from there!
I mean, the whole argument for the start of COVID that wasn't from the Wuhan lab was basically, as I understood it, that a bat had gotten a weird coronavirus and had like fallen into a guy's soup.
And that was more believable than there's the Wuhan coronavirus lab.
And yeah, I remember when Tom Cotton was the first major American politician to talk about this.
Tom's like a good friend.
And he was immediately pilloried as this terrible racist.
And, you know, It's just, it's bizarre that we're not allowed to talk about things in the United States of America.
I will say, I think it's gotten better.
This is one of my more optimistic views is, you know, when we're all locked in our houses in the summer of 2020, I think that did weird things psychologically to everybody.
And I think that a lot of people rebelled against it, and we're probably in a better position now in 2024. Like Chamath would not have come out, I love Chamath, would not have come out for Donald Trump in 2020. Right.
Now he's hosting fundraisers and giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to our campaign.
So I think the fact that you have so many old school liberals and old school leftists say, we're done with this bullshit is actually a pretty good sign.
Yeah, there's still social consequences to it, but not nearly as high as they were four years ago.
They run the same way they've run it in the past, where they're being influenced by whatever companies and whatever agencies decide to remove posts or remove people and Ban Donald Trump and ban a bunch of different conservatives and ban a bunch of people that were outcasts and they just decided they were controlling the discourse.
Instead of it being just a place where conservatives can go and talk about things and not be censored like they were on Twitter, then they get infiltrated with all this hate shit, and then it becomes a hateful place, and they don't even want to go, so now they're homeless.
I'm doing an event with Tulsi Gabbard tonight in Pennsylvania.
I love her.
I love her.
She's awesome.
And yeah, I think she basically decided that the left cannot be reformed in this country anymore.
That's what happened with Bobby Kennedy.
That's what's happened with a lot of old school liberals is they say, yeah, you know, we don't care what you do in your bedroom, but we believe in the fundamental right of people to speak their mind.
And the Democrats just don't believe in that anymore.
So I thought a lot about like what's, you know, what is going on there and what's driving it psychologically.
And I think that I think what's going on is the entire modern Democratic Party grew up in an era where there was consensus, right?
Walter Cronkite could say something about the Vietnam War, and it turned out he's probably right about that, actually, and it collapsed public support for the Vietnam War.
Where they grew up in America where social trust was just so much higher.
And I think that a lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that that high level of social trust came organically from the way that American society worked.
And if you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it actually degrades the very thing that you're trying to create.
Because I've seen, I mean, family members of mine who got really radicalized because they were like, wait a second, should we be masking three-year-olds in our schools?
Like, does that do something to their language development?
And then they would get kicked off of Facebook because a person with 900 Facebook friends who has no public profile dared to, like, question the prevailing narrative.
And again, they ended up being right about it.
I actually think that what the left is doing is degrading social trust by trying to create it from on high.
And I kind of get the psychological impulse because, you know, like a lot of great things that we do come from high levels of social trust.
I've always liked him in my interactions with him.
But the problem with the Washington Post is not that their editorial page has been insufficiently conservative.
It's that their entire journalism department is fundamentally engaged in democratic political activism.
I mean, the two, we talk about this a lot.
And, you know, my political guys are, you know, a lot of them are outside and certainly a lot of them will watch.
But we talk a lot about which of the newspapers that have really gone crazy.
And the New York Times is kind of an exception.
Yeah, it's very left wing, but it hasn't totally gone insane.
The Washington Post is...
Might as well be a propaganda outlet of the Democratic Party.
If you look from the Hunter Biden laptop to any number of stories where they just tow the left wing line almost instinctively, the problem was with the journalism at the Washington Post.
It's not with the editorials.
I don't care, frankly, whether the editorial page endorses Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
I care about whether the journalists are lying about Donald Trump.
Or lying about Kamala Harris.
And frankly, they're lying a lot in the negative direction about my running mate, and they're lying a lot in the positive direction about Kamala Harris.
So what I would like to see from Jeff Bezos is a commitment to the Washington Post not just being a Democrat super PAC. I don't give a shit if he hires a few more conservative columnists.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is, do they hold their journalism to anything like a high standard?
And if they don't do that, then to me, it's just window dressing.
But it seems like that's at least a step in the right direction.
You have an argument against Donald Trump on the front page next to an argument for Donald Trump and let two different intelligent people state their cases, one from a conservative perspective, one from a liberal perspective, and let's see what resonates with you.
I just think that unless you change the underlying journalism to make it more fair, it's going to be only a step in the right direction rather than fixing the problem.
There's a journalist by the name of Matt Boyle who writes at Breitbart.
Do you know Matt Boyle?
Yeah, I do.
Have you ever heard of Matt?
Okay, so Matt is, even though he writes for Breitbart, and I know that most people assume that Breitbart is just this right-wing rag...
Matt is, he has one of the best contacts of journalists in Washington.
Like, he knows what's going to happen in the country before most left-wing journalists because he talks to the liberals, he talks to the conservatives, he has allies on Capitol Hill.
I'd love to see the Washington Post hire a guy like Matt Boyle and say, Matt, go and do what you're going to do.
And obviously, it's not going to be able to have a political bias to it, but go and investigate.
If you want to go investigate Kamala Harris's campaign, go and do it.
But that is what it would look like, is empowering conservative and independent journalism in the same way that Jeff Bezos has empowered left-wing journalism.
If I see that happening, then I'll be a little bit more optimistic about his stewardship.
So I think that what happened there, having done some – try to understand that a little bit better is they basically just edited her answer down a lot so that she didn't sound like a total insane person.
Because what aired, I think, on the smaller – what aired on the channels online that had a smaller pickup – Was the rambling.
They changed the answer, but I just wanted to find the statistic from my team because I asked them this last night.
So...
They did change the answer, and they changed it in a way to protect her.
And then, importantly, they refused to release the transcript, right?
So my attitude would be, just release the transcript, let people see what she actually said, so that you at least have some integrity as a journalistic outlet.
But, okay, so here's...
You, of course, I'm sure, paid attention to the kerfuffle over a comedian at the Trump rally at MSG. I think you even know this guy, right?
Well, one difference is that it was a comedian telling a joke, and it's the president of the United States telling what he actually thinks.
Another difference is, again, it's a comedian with, at best, a joke.
A tenuous connection to the Trump campaign.
And on the other hand, you have the actual sitting president at a vice presidential campaign event telling the entire country at an event sanctioned by the Kamala Harris campaign that half of Americans are garbage.
And I guarantee the media is not going to cover this in the same way.
I mean, let me...
I don't know if Jamie can bring this up, but I tweeted about this last night, that Politico, when they have initially tried to write the story about what had been said...
By Joe Biden, they said that Biden had called racism against Puerto Ricans garbage.
Well, who disagrees with that?
I think that racism against Puerto Ricans is garbage, but that's not what he said.
He said that Trump supporters are garbage.
He said it's on video.
So Politico tried to like retcon this.
It turned out there was a video so we could actually see for ourselves what was actually said.
But the amount of dishonesty in the American media really is off the charts.
It is, but also with Joe Biden, I think at this point in time, he's literally that crazy guy on the porch yelling at the neighbors.
I mean, no one thinks he's there, which is also one of the fascinating things when they asked her, when did you know that he was mentally impaired and why didn't you talk about it earlier?
And there's this Joe Biden has always done the amazing work that Joe Biden does.
I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible.
There's actually a certain gift that she has because you listen to her talk – And you're 100, 200 words into it, you're 500 words into it, and you're like, what the hell did she just say?
She didn't say anything.
And that actually, I mean, okay, so yeah, there's a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything, but it actually worries me about her being president.
Okay, there are all these substantive policy disagreements and we could talk about, okay, I don't like her border policies.
I don't like this.
I don't like that.
But what does she do when she's in a meeting with a world leader and she has to, like, know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?
Like, one of the major things that you do as a president is you participate in economic negotiations.
Like, what tariffs are we going to apply on your goods unless you lower the tariffs on ours or vice versa, right?
You have to be able to know a little bit about your job to be the President of the United States.
And I don't know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy in this country.
Well, it's just strange that everyone's accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever...
Is now the solution to the problem and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution and as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she's allowed to talk, they're able to pull this off.
And the fact that it's happening with no primary should be really concerning to people because that's never happened before.
If you could just take two days off for one single interview, that's not pressure.
And also just little things.
I mean, look, there's this story out there.
To be clear, I have no idea if it's true, but there's a woman who has gone on the record and said that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris's husband, smacked her in the face in France.
Okay, that's been reported on the media.
I'm sure you guys can find it if you want to.
Okay, again, maybe it's not true.
Maybe it is true.
But these things take time to actually figure out and investigate.
And here is the thing.
You know this.
I know this.
Most people know this.
If you are a domestic abuser, that usually doesn't stop with one person.
Like, most domestic abusers are serial domestic abusers.
Is it in the public interest to do some investigation about whether the White House The president could be sharing the White House with the person who is engaged in domestic abuse.
That is in the public interest to know.
Not only is the American media not that interested in it, but most importantly, you don't have the time to really investigate some of these accusations.
Meanwhile, every time somebody says anything about Donald Trump without an ounce of evidence, the American media picks it up and runs with and makes an entire news cycle totally and curious about what's going on with Kamala Harris.
But I think over time, what's interesting is most people are becoming aware of this extreme bias, the difference in the scrutiny that's applied to Trump.
But you go back into this question you asked me about Jeff Bezos.
This is why you need good reporters who have the investigatory skills, who are empowered by their employers to go out and do the investigations like, you know, your platform.
You're having more honest and open conversations than anything that's happening in the corporate media.
It's like one of the reasons why I listen to your show, one of the reasons why I'm happy to be here.
But you don't have like a person working for you who's going to go to like France and talk to this woman and investigate whether this is true.
Drew, this is why, you know, I've told Elon this, but like the most useful piece of philanthropy, if you're a right of center American, would be to set up a nonprofit organization where you pay a really good reporter for five years.
You give them complete job security and you just tell them, go off and investigate what's going on in the world and bring it back and report on the truth.
Because if you don't have that, then that is where the media still has a fundamental advantage over us is they've got an army of people investigating me and Donald Trump.
There's no one really investigating Kamala Harris.
And if you just look at, I mean, you and a few others are the only people who can compare with the actual platform size of an NBC or CBS. I mean, yeah, fewer people watch them now than they did 20 years ago.
But if you look, man, like, you're still getting five to eight million viewers every single night for each of the major networks on the nightly news.
That's incredible reach, right?
There's still a lot of power there.
And, you know, to your point about, like, the comparison, you know, Fox News, number one, if you look at Fox News' viewership compared to NBC's, there's just dwarfs, NBC dwarfs it.
But more importantly in some ways is Fox News, which I do think is very important, But yeah, they have a right of center bias, certainly.
I will admit that.
But if you look at how much Fox News is covering the left fairly versus the right, it's much more balanced than like an NBC, right?
Like NBC would never have an interview with Donald J. Trump where the journalist is asking tough questions, but is like sitting down and broadcasting Donald Trump for an hour.
Well, because the expectation is that you're going to interrupt and you're going to fact check and you're going to try to actually do the job of an interviewer.
But the expectation is that if you touch Kamala with anything other than kid gloves, you know, you're not allowed to do that.
So what's interesting to me about toddlers, and I've talked with Tucker Carlson about this, Toddlers lie in a way that's very different from how everybody else lies, right?
So, like, if you're telling a lie, normally, you know, hey, did you do that thing?
You would say, no, no, no, somebody else did it, or they kind of qualified a little bit.
Let me give you an example.
My four-year-old, I'm a big baker, probably surprised by that, but I'm a big baker, right?
And my four-year-old and I are making an Oreo cake a few weeks ago.
And my four-year-old is helping me.
He likes to help me out a lot when I bake.
And I go to the bathroom, and the Oreos that we're supposed to put in the Oreo cake, like crumble them up and put them in the cake, like half of them are gone when I get back.
And I'm like, buddy, what happened to the Oreos?
And he looks at me, and without a hint of irony or shame, he says, I didn't eat the Oreos, you did.
Right?
So that's the way that Kamala Harris lies, is I didn't eat the Oreos, you did.
Not only does she actively brag and has her administration actively bragged about trying to arrest her political opponents, she will go out and say that if Donald Trump is the president, he's going to arrest his political opponents, even though he already was president and he didn't do that.
Eric Holder, who was Obama's attorney general, was found in contempt of Congress, or at least was, you know, there was Congress found him in contempt.
It was never litigated.
He was never tried to put in jail.
There was no court case around it.
The contempt of Congress that Steve Bannon engaged in is that the J6 committee or one of these banana republic committees from the congressional Democrats, they issued him a subpoena.
He, under the advice of his lawyers, felt that he couldn't actually respond to the subpoena because executive privilege applied.
They held him in contempt of Congress and they threw him in prison for it.
A charge that has been levied against multiple Democrats.
Republicans never tried to throw anybody in prison against it over it.
Steve Bannon just got out of prison.
Kamala Harris is literally using the power of government, has already used the power of government to jail her political opponents, and she's saying that Donald Trump is going to do the thing that he didn't do and she did when they were in respective positions of power.
Do you think it's because they're worried that if he gets into power and he gets back in the office that he's going to start investigating a lot of this stuff and the 51 former intelligence agents?
Well, one of the things that he's talked about pretty openly is that he could have gone after Hillary Clinton and he didn't because he thought it would look bad for the country.
So what President Trump has said and what I've said is abortion is now a matter for state legislatures, state voters to determine.
And there's, I mean, one, that's always what the argument was, right?
If Roe versus Wade goes away, then the state legislatures, the state populations are going to make each individual abortion decision.
The same way that, like, you know, California has different laws on a whole host of subjects that Alabama does.
The idea is that, yeah, California would make its own abortion policy.
Alabama would make its own abortion policy.
So there's a basic sort of principle of federalism at work there.
But I also think that, you know, knowing Donald Trump well, I think he's motivated also by desire for us to just stop having a culture war over this particular issue and to let the voters in these states make these decisions while the national government focuses on things like Lowering the cost of groceries and lowering the cost of housing and securing the southern border.
And I think there's actually some great wisdom in that because, you know, think about this.
Abortion has not really been a political issue for 50 years.
Now, we say that it is, and obviously we disagreed about it and people fought about it.
It was always something the Supreme Court said, this is the way it is.
There's no political decision making.
Every European nation has made abortion policy democratically.
And that's what Donald Trump is saying.
Do what every European nation has done.
Let the voters decide what their abortion policy is going to be.
And we're going to focus the national government on different things.
And I say this as somebody who, like, I genuinely, you know, want people to choose life.
And I'm, you know, a big believer in families.
And I think, you know, having children has been like a revelatory experience for me.
And I want our country to be more pro-family, more pro-child.
I think there are all these things that we can do at the federal level to make our country more pro-family and more pro-child, you know, make childcare easier.
You know, stop.
I've actually sponsored legislation to stop the surprise medical bills that happen when people, and I've seen this with my own wife, you go to the hospital, you come home, you've got a beautiful baby, but you've also got a $20,000 unexpected bill because you choose the wrong, you know, the wrong out-of-network healthcare provider when you're at the moment of delivering a baby.
Like, there are all these things we can do.
To make it easier for young women, young families to choose life.
But Donald Trump, I think, wants abortion policy, and he said this explicitly, to be decided at the state level.
For most people, I think one of the issues is, for a lot of people, one of the issues is that men are making decisions for what women can and can't do.
And one of the more concerning aspects of this is, like, say if you live in a state, like Texas, where there's a limit to when you can get an abortion, I think it's like six weeks, which a lot of people think, at that point in time, you can't even tell whether or not you're pregnant, and this puts a lot of women in very vulnerable positions.
Then there's this thought that they could go to another state where it is legal and have an abortion, but they could be possibly prosecuted for that in their state.
That's concerning to me.
There's a place in the country where it's legal to have a medical procedure, and you live in a state where it's not legal, that your state can decide what you can and can't do with your body, which is essentially based on a religious idea.
I'm not criticizing it one way or another, but I'm saying that a lot of what this choose life thing is about, that life is precious, and life is sacred, and life begins at the moment of conception.
And some people agree with this, but other people disagree with this.
And it seems to be a lot of it is based in religion.
My concern is using that to dictate whether or not a person can legally travel to another state.
I don't think the government should be monitoring where you travel or what you do when you travel, as long as that thing is legal.
And I'm concerned with this idea that you could be prosecuted for it in your state for doing something that's legal somewhere else.
I think, so to your point about it being a religious idea, I mean, I would say, I know a number of non-religious people who are very pro-life.
And I think the honest answer is that what we're doing is we're trying to figure out what is the right balance between autonomy and life.
And I say this as somebody who, when Ohio made this decision, I campaigned very aggressively for the more pro-life position in the state of Ohio and my side lost.
In fact, we got our asses kicked.
We lost 60-40.
And I took some learning from that.
I think one of the things that I took as a learning, as a guy who cares about this issue, is Republicans, we've got to earn the people's trust because they don't trust the idea that when we say that we're pro-family, we don't just mean pro-birth.
A lot of people say, you're pro-birth, but you're not actually pro-family.
And I think there's a lot that we can do as Republicans to try to earn back the trust of the American people.
But if I'm trying to represent as fairly as I can, the pro-choice and the pro-life position, here's what I think is really going on, is you have something.
Now, some people would say, maybe religiously motivated and maybe not, that it's a human life.
I would say that it's a human life.
But it at least has the potential to be human life.
And then on the other hand, you have, again, I freely recognize this, you have a woman who wants to make a choice about what she wants to do with her own body.
Those are two very profound values, both of which I think are valuable, right?
I mean, I think autonomy is really important.
I also think life is really important.
And what we're trying to talk about fundamentally, I think, again, I'm trying to be fair to both sides here, is to balance the interest in life against the interest in autonomy.
And I think that the way to do that, at least my view, is to let the American people debate and talk about and argue about this issue and come to this decision on a state-by-state basis.
And again, California, Florida, Ohio, Alabama, we're going to have different solutions to this particular problem.
But that's what we're trying to do, right?
I think life really matters.
And other people are trying to say, I think autonomy really matters.
And the truth is that 95% of Americans would probably say there's some way to strike the balance in the middle.
You know, where most of Europe has ended up here, and it's actually striking because you think of Europe, again, as a more socially liberal place than America.
Almost every place in Europe has ended up effectively where late-term abortion outside of cases of medical necessity is banned outright.
And then, you know, early stage abortion is allowed.
That's how most societies that democratically settle on this.
That's how they strike the balance.
I think my attitude is I'm running for vice president.
I'm not trying to tell you how to strike the right balance, but we want to preserve the right of states to make these decisions.
It's very complex, and people don't want to look at it that way.
I always discuss, when I talk about abortion, I say it's one of these very human issues where it's very strange, where most people think, like, at the moment of conception, if you could just remove those cells and keep them from multiplying, that's less bad than if you wait six months.
And there is a moral intuition there that obviously, like, something that looks and feels like a baby is more valuable than, you know, something that just looks like a clump.
Something that has a heartbeat, sure.
But, you know, I think it's just hard, right?
Because it's not clear to me philosophically where you draw the line here.
It's a very, like, hard question to figure out.
And I think that's why people debate it and disagree about it so vociferously.
But it's interesting, man.
The thing that I find, again, as a person who leans more in the pro-life side of this debate is, okay, so you will sometimes hear people on the left say, well, late-term abortion doesn't happen.
Well, there's an organization called the Guttmacher Institute.
It's a pro-choice organization.
It's a pro-abortion rights organization.
And they found that there are approximately, I think it's 12,000 abortions that happen in the second half of pregnancy.
So this is past 20 weeks.
Maybe it's even past 22 weeks.
About 12,000 abortions past 22 weeks.
They also found that of those, 8,000 of them are purely elective.
There's no medical necessity.
There's no, like, you know, the baby has some genetic abnormality.
It's just pure elective late-term abortion.
I don't know how we can't get consensus that that is not good.
Every European nation has gotten to that point where you say, okay, 8,000 late-term abortions?
Come on.
But again, it's not my decision as the vice president, and that's not President Trump's view.
He's very against a national abortion ban because he wants this debate to happen.
And I think that's kind of our attitude to this.
Now, you're right.
Again, there is a balance to strike here.
But usually in American society, we recognize that the way to strike that balance is to debate it as citizens, and not to have like lawyers and judges make these determinations for us.
And I do think that there's something that is really weird about this whole debate where, you know, thank God, to be clear, this is not true of the gross majority of our pro-choice citizens.
But you do sometimes see people, like, they'll go on TikTok and they'll celebrate having an abortion.
I've known many, many women...
Usually when I was younger, who chose to have abortions because they felt like they didn't have any other options.
And, you know, I don't judge them.
I think that a lot of them just felt like they were completely trapped, and they made the decision that was ultimately right for them.
Again, my argument is we need to try to gain those women's trust back because clearly the Republican Party on this issue has lost a lot of trust.
But none of them were like...
Baking birthday cakes and posting about it afterwards.
They recognize that this is a medical procedure and this is, you know, something that they felt they had to do.
But celebrating something like that is just bizarre to me.
And I'm much more comfortable with the people who say safe, legal, rare than I am with the people who say let's shout our abortion from the rooftops.
Well, it's just this rebellion thing, you know, and it's also rebellion.
Like, the concept in the zeitgeist is that abortion had always been, you know, Roe v.
Wade had always been the law of the land, and then all of a sudden that was taken away, and you have these religious men who are trying to dictate what women can and can't do with their bodies.
But I think you can go, like with so many other issues, you can go way too far about it.
And it becomes trying to celebrate something that at the very best, if you grant, I think, every argument of the pro-choice side, it is a neutral thing, not something to be celebrated.
And I try, you know, this is something that is dangerous about social media.
The danger of social media with me is not to me that I live in my own echo chamber and just have views reinforced.
The danger is that I'm only exposed to the crazy people on the other side who make it easier for me to adopt my own worldview because I'm saying, oh, it's just people celebrating.
When in reality, like you said, most American women, even those who are pro-choice, are not celebrating this thing.
I think that's one of the insidious things about the social media algorithm, is that it highlights things that people engage with, which is more outrageous, more things that they find reprehensible.
They see more of it.
I see so many guys with makeup telling me they're going to take your kids, indoctrinate your kids.
Like, why am I seeing that?
Well, it's because they're highlighting it.
And when you have an app that's owned by China, That is the number one.
Yeah, facilitating the worst of our fellow citizens because it allows us to silo more.
But I mean, the way that I deal with that is I just try as hard as I can to remember that most Americans – this is what really bothered me about what Biden said.
Like most Americans who vote for Kamala Harris are fundamentally good people.
Like I believe that.
And you've got to try to find the people who are reasonable and talk to them.
And that's why I talk about, you know, the importance of regaining trust is just I've had enough conversations with people who don't like the Republican Party's, even their perception of the Republican Party's views here, that if you talk to reasonable people, you gain a different perspective than if you talk to the unreasonable people.
And this is why they have this weird perception of both Republicans and of Trump.
And then they start throwing these terms around, like fascism and white supremacy.
And, well, of course you don't like fascism.
Of course you don't like white supremacy.
You can't be a Republican.
And the next thing you know, you're on the other side.
And you're like, how did you get me?
You railroaded me, you fucks.
You're censoring my Facebook.
What's going on here?
And it's – there's not like a reasonable – and that's the one thing that I think the Republican Party has done poorly is like be a little bit more balanced in some of these controversial social issues.
You know, like the one thing that people are worried about right after Roe v.
Wade was gay marriage and gay marriage laws.
And people are thinking, well, it's religion that overturned Roe v.
Wade, and religion is probably going to overturn these gay marriage laws.
Because, I mean, basically because of the argument that often, you know, sort of Republicans will use about making it a state issue, is she said, look, you can be pro-choice, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, but the avenue to make abortion policy should be legislatures, not judges.
about how the Constitution functioned, where it's funny, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually agreed with Donald Trump that even if, you know, like that this should be a state's issue, that the state should make these decisions among their citizens.
And it's telling that that perspective is not illustrated or highlighted.
But look, I understand like people who aren't, you know, I'm obviously a person of faith, They don't want people of faith to force their values down people who don't agree with them.
But I'm sort of comfortable with every one of us kind of having our zone.
And within that zone, I don't want people to come in and tell me what to do.
Like, in my home, I'd like to be able to raise my kids with my religious values, and I'd like to be able to teach my kids what I think, and you should be able to teach your kids what you think.
And then we recognize that the more public the zone, the less that I get to control what you do.
And that's part of living in a pluralistic society, and I'm very comfortable with that.
I think, unfortunately, the modern left seems to be less and less comfortable, even with people of faith having their own private zone.
Right?
This is the trans thing, where it's like, oh, we're going to take your kids away if you don't consent to gender reassignment.
Or, you know, we're going to tell you that you can't send your kids to a religious school.
You hear people say these things.
Again, I think it's the crazies.
It's not the majority of our fellow citizens.
But Part of living in a pluralistic society is accepting that every man's castle or every woman's castle is his or her own.
You've got to have respect for people within those castles.
And then we should hopefully just have some common sense things that everybody can agree on when we're talking about public spaces.
I think for a lot of people, worst case scenario, when they start thinking about religious influence on The way they're allowed to behave and the way their state is governed.
Worst case scenario is a state adopts Sharia law.
This is worst case scenario.
And I think all these people that would cry against the concept of Islamophobia really need to understand what that means and what you're talking about.
And to say that that's an outrageous and ridiculous idea that's never going to take place, it's kind of already worked its way into some societies.
And when you have people that are openly saying, our goal is, and they've talked about this in Toronto, activists have said, our goal is to outbreed everyone who is not Muslim and vote it out and put Sharia law in place.
Well, and that's what to me is so crazy about some of the hyper left-wing reaction to the idea that somehow I want to force every man, woman, and child to go to my church is ridiculous.
I just don't want to do that.
I've never had any interest in doing that.
But where you see actual real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you've had a large influx of immigrants who don't necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level.
And if you think that won't happen at a national level, you're crazy.
Dude, one of the most controversial things I've ever said is, what is the first Islamist, right?
Because it's important to separate.
There are Muslims who are not Islamists, right?
Islamists are like theocrats, right?
What is the first Islamist country that is going to have a nuclear weapon?
And I sort of joked.
I said, maybe it's going to be the United Kingdom because they're so bad at assimilating sort of newer immigrants into their society.
You have definitely communities in the UK where local leaders are running explicitly on Sharia law and winning elections in cities that are in the United Kingdom.
This is England.
This is like where America came from, right?
It's a bunch of English pilgrims who came to the United States.
That, to me, is really crazy and really scary.
And then, of course, everybody said, well, you know, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.
And my response is, well, Pakistan isn't necessarily an Islamist country.
It's an Islamic country.
They certainly have an Islamic government, and that's the majority religion of the people.
But Pakistan isn't going and saying, we need to, like, conquer the infidels.
At least their government isn't.
We need to conquer the infidels and force them to obey our laws.
You see that more among some of the activists in the United Kingdom maybe than you do in certain Arab countries.
But it goes along with this thing that we've been talking about.
I think essentially people have sort of a built-in mode, a program in their mind that accepts religious doctrines.
And these religious doctrines could be woke or It could be, you know, hardcore right-wing conservative, Christian fundamentalism, or it could be Islamic doctrine.
Again, this is a new thing because this is not Bill Clinton liberalism.
This is something that we're seeing today where they don't even want to talk about...
The quality and the backgrounds and the skills of people coming to our country, somehow it's fundamentally racist to say, well, we don't want certain people of certain backgrounds to be in the United States of America.
No, it's just common sense.
I mean, let me sort of give you a very specific example.
Okay?
So, you know, ask yourself, should America accept 100,000 immigrants from Mexico?
Okay?
Just in the abstract.
Well...
Mexico is a gigantic country with millions upon millions of people.
Who are we talking about?
Are we talking about people who speak English as a second language and don't have criminal backgrounds?
Or are we talking about people who don't even read and write in Spanish and do have criminal backgrounds?
Because those same groups of people, even though they come from the country we call Mexico, are going to assimilate and contribute to America's society much differently.
There's something in the modern liberal mind that doesn't even allow you to ask the question Who does America benefit from bringing into this country?
And if the answer is we don't benefit, then why would we bring them into the country?
Well, it's also the concept of being anti-open border somehow or another became attached instead of safety.
It became attached to xenophobia.
It became attached to racism.
And when, you know, you confront people and say, do you know that Venezuela is literally opening their prisons and instructing people to just cross into America?
Like, no.
One of the wildest ones, I think it was you, were having a conversation with a woman.
Well, you see this in some communities where because they're small towns and because rapid migrant influx can happen very quickly, where the town population has been doubled.
Okay, so you don't even have to assume people are criminals.
What does it do to the local public school when all of a sudden a thousand newcomers show up that don't even speak English?
Right.
What does it do to the hospital system when you now have thousands of people in a small health care system that are showing up to get emergency services because they don't have access otherwise to a doctor?
And now the American citizens have to wait in line for seven hours to get to see a doctor because we've overwhelmed the local hospital system.
What does it do to housing prices?
We've seen this in a number of communities, including those that I represent in Ohio.
When you bring in thousands upon thousands of people, you cannot build enough houses quickly enough to accommodate that.
So the cost of housing becomes unaffordable for American citizens.
It is the craziest thing that we've seen in this country that you don't even allow people to talk about the effects of mass migration anymore.
And that's why I think it's one of the reasons why Donald Trump is going to be elected president or at least should be elected president because he's one of the few guys who's saying, you know what?
No, no, no.
We're going to talk about this problem.
Yes, some immigrants are good.
Some immigrants are not good.
And that is an obvious insight to anybody who knows human nature.
What do you think is the goal behind allowing this to take place?
Now, first of all, one of the things that Kamala Harris has said was that there was a bill that could have fixed the border problem, but that Donald Trump did not want it to take place because he wanted to keep this as a political talking point.
What happened is, okay, let me talk about what the bill does first of all.
Okay.
Number one is it sets a maximum cap on the number of illegal immigrants that we can have before the border shuts down.
That maximum cap is 2 million illegal aliens per year.
It's like 1.85 million to be more precise.
That's number one it did.
Number two, it codified what's called catch and release, where a person comes into our country, they're an illegal immigrant, but they say, no, no, no, I'm not an illegal immigrant.
I'm an asylum seeker.
And so their claim for asylum gets adjudicated.
But because there's a backlog, because we have so many, their claim isn't going to be adjudicated for 15 years.
So rather than having that person wait in Mexico, we give them a work permit.
And we give them legal status and we let them come into the United States of America.
That's called catch and release.
Donald Trump's policy was you have to wait in Mexico.
We're not going to catch you and then release you into the country for 15 years.
It codified that.
In other words, even if Donald Trump became president, this is why he really hated it, is that he would not be able to undo catch and release if he won the election.
It would be codified into American law.
Third thing it did.
Nothing on the border wall, nothing on an immigration system called parole, which is supposed to be a case-by-case, you grant parole to people who are fleeing tyranny.
But Harris has used parole to the tune of millions upon millions.
Mass parole, whole categories of country have been paroled into the United States.
It didn't do anything to solve that problem.
So it wasn't a border security bill.
It was an amnesty bill.
Now, in addition to what I just said, it also gave some table scraps to Border Patrol.
And that is what allows them to hinge onto that one thing and to say it's a border security bill.
No, no, no, no, no.
It was a mass amnesty bill.
It would have made the border problem ten times worse.
And that's why they ultimately pushed it.
And that's why Republicans fought against it.
By the way, like six Democrats voted against that piece of legislation because they thought it was kind of a disaster.
So it was not a bipartisan border bill.
And in fact, it was much more bipartisan, the opposition to the legislation.
But it has allowed Kamala Harris to go around and dishonestly claim that she cares about the southern border, even though when she came into office, they bragged about undoing all of Donald Trump's successful border policies.
They did exactly that.
And then we had the massive migrant invasion that we've seen in the last three years.
And I think it was good on you in the debate with Tim Walz when they fact checked you.
They tried to fact-check you and say that this has always been in place, and you stepped up and said, no, no, no, this app is new, and this app was specifically used for shipping, and now they're using it to schedule people to illegally come into the country.
Here's the question.
Why?
Why is this happening?
What do you think?
I mean, obviously speculation a little bit, but what do you think the motivation of allowing this to take place and the disproportionate number of people that have moved to swing states, which is also like a little suspicious?
We can get real serious about this real quick or pretty crazy very quickly.
Look, I think what is obvious And I've seen this in the halls of Congress.
I've seen it very explicitly.
You talk about lobbying, and we obviously talked about in the context of other industries.
There is a massive corporate lobby for cheap labor in the United States of America.
And that is, I think, the main thing that's going on.
Think about this.
If you've got millions of illegal aliens...
Okay, let me tell you a story.
In 2017, 2018, when I was in the private sector, I was at a business conference dinner.
And I was seated next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in America.
This is, I think, probably 2018. And the guy is going on and on about how much he hates Donald Trump.
And I'm like, oh, that's interesting.
Like, why do you hate Donald Trump so much?
Because, again, I was sort of a Trump skeptic in 2015. And at this point, I was kind of, you know, starting to really get on the Trump train.
And he said, well...
The reason I hate Donald Trump, he says, is because Donald Trump's border policies have cut down the number of illegal immigrants.
And because I can't pay illegal immigrants under the table anymore, I have to pay American workers and they want much higher wages.
And I was like, this guy just admitted it.
I was like, holy shit, this guy just admitted it.
That's a crime.
That is like straight up monopoly man evil shit that this guy admitted to.
And I was like, you know, my wife, who's very apolitical, she was actually at the dinner with me and she's like, come again?
You just said you don't want...
Americans to get decent wages.
Like, that is the best argument for Donald Trump's immigration policy, is that American workers are getting higher wages, and this is why this corporate CEO hates it.
So whatever the industry is, you've got a lot of people who want cheap labor, and they don't want to pay American workers higher wages.
That's a big part of it.
I do think there's also a power dynamic to it.
In particular, I think Kamala Harris and the Democrats, they want to give these millions upon millions of illegal aliens the right to vote.
They want to legalize them.
They want to make it easier for them to participate in our elections.
And that means fundamentally the end of American democracy.
Because you're talking about 25 million people here.
If Kamala Harris gives 10 million of those people legal status and allows them to vote in American elections, then, you know, say 70-30 they go Democrat, Republicans will never win a national election in this country in my lifetime.
Lifetime is probably overstating it, but you'd have to – it would take 30 years for the Republicans to get to a point where we could even compete with these newcomers.
But again, it will have degraded the voting power of the people who have the legal right to be here.
Now, it also – you may not appreciate this, but even if you don't give people the right to vote, it really distorts congressional apportionment and then the Electoral College.
The way that you draw those congressional districts is that you try to draw them evenly based on population so that everybody has equal representation, right?
One person, one vote, fundamental principle of American law.
But you don't just count the American citizens.
You also count the illegal aliens.
And so, for example, the state of Ohio lost a congressional seat in the last census.
and states that have high illegal immigrant populations picked up congressional seats.
So you're actually taking away congressional representation from American citizens and giving it to illegal aliens.
Even if you don't give them the right to vote, you're still destroying the voting power of American citizens.
Well, Donald Trump tried a proposal that Democrats went nuts over and litigated, was litigated in the courts.
So we would have to try again that would ask citizenship status during the U.S. census and The idea being that if you ask more people their citizenship status, you get fewer people who are answering that question.
I think that we should make it, and I do think this would require an act of Congress, but I think that it would be constitutional, is we should just say that illegal aliens are not counted for purposes of congressional representation.
Well, you know, it's basically illegal now in California to ask for voter ID. Which is crazy!
Which is totally insane.
But, you know, my view, and I'm sure you've got many, many listeners in the great state of California, the next time you're pulled over by a police officer, just tell them that you're on your way to vote.
But you can't – if you can't require people to show voter ID, then I think you're inviting fraud into your system.
And there's also something implicitly very racist about this because what they say is voter ID means that black people aren't going to vote.
Well, number one, if you look at polls, the same level of support for voter ID exists in the black community as in the white communities.
It's about 75-80% of blacks, 75-80% of whites support voter ID. But they're basically saying that black people can't get identification.
When they say that voter ID is racist, they're implicitly saying black people can't get identification.
I think that's an actual racist concept.
I actually assume that black citizens are my fellow Americans, and they can do the same thing that every other citizen can do, which is get identification.
They say that they don't want illegal aliens or illegal voters to vote.
The Harris administration right now is litigating a lawsuit against the governor of Virginia because the governor of Virginia, using a state law, kicked about 1,500 people or maybe it was 6,500, but it was some number of people off the Virginia voter rolls because they checked a box That said they were non-citizen.
Well, if you're non-citizen, you can't be on the voter rolls.
So he kicked all of the non-citizens off the voter rolls.
Harris is suing Glenn Youngkin.
The Department of Justice under Kamala Harris is suing him to ensure that those voters go back on the voter rolls.
The American media has barely even covered the fact that in the middle of a very consequential presidential election, Kamala Harris's Department of Justice is suing to keep illegal voters on the voter rolls.
Well, as President Trump says, we want to make it too big to rig.
Look, I encourage all of your listeners, whether you agree with us on all the issues or not, if you agree with censorship, then vote Kamala Harris.
And if you think Americans should be able to say what they want to say, then get out there and vote.
Vote early, vote by mail.
That's obviously part of the reason why I'm here is I want to get people out there to vote because I do think that we need to overwhelm the system with so many voters that we ensure that we get the representative government that we actually deserve as a country.
And that's not going to happen unless people get out there and vote.
Is one of the things that I think is an important issue that kind of gets put aside is I know a lot of veterans in particular and a lot of people with some severe trauma that have had psychedelic therapy.
And they've had to go to other countries to do it.
They've done some of it illegally in America.
But I know far too many guys who have had PTSD, who have had An incredible experience and been alleviated of all these...
But the therapy for people that are suffering from severe PTSD has been incredibly beneficial.
They've shown that with the MAP studies, but they've also shown it anecdotally.
I know a bunch of different guys that have gone down to Mexico and had psilocybin journeys and all these different things where they've encountered...
These experiences that have made them sort of rethink who they are, alleviated them of a lot of the stress and a lot of the trauma that they've experienced, and given them peace.
The concept of Schedule 1 is that there's no medical benefit.
And if these people are experiencing, first of all, cessation of smoking, people that have had issues with addiction, Ibogaine treatments, another one that they've found, which is not something that anyone would ever abuse recreationally.
I've never done it, but apparently it's an excruciating experience.
But the rate of curing addiction is tremendous from it.
And these things have been denied.
People have had denied access to it because of this scheduling issue.
We discussed it yesterday on the podcast.
The LD50 rate was like lethal dose at 50%.
It's impossible to achieve with psilocybin.
And yet it's still illegal.
And that there's all these people that have reported...
The scheduling of these things, in particular like marijuana, like marijuana is legal on a state level with, I think, almost half the country now, if not more, but yet federally illegal.
And if you go to the history of why it was federally legal in the first place, it coincides with what happened with prohibition of alcohol.
Right after prohibition of alcohol, Interesting.
propaganda stuff.
It was to make it illegal, essentially, to make the textile, the hemp, illegal.
And so we're still trapped under this propaganda that was distributed in the 1930s by incredibly powerful people.
And this is why it's illegal on the federal level.
And even though you have medical marijuana that's been showed to help people with chemotherapy and wasting disease, help people that have appetite problems and people in chronic pain, it's still listed as a Schedule I drug federally, which to me is unconscionable.
The thing that I wonder about is if you, you know...
I do, there's a part of me that worries a little bit about kids doing a lot of this stuff.
And I wonder, you know, to your point about consent and the brains development and all these things, I really worry about, do you have an increase in usage among minors?
And so what I'd like to get is some sort of legal regime that, you know, again...
It's not like criminally prosecuting or prosecuting at all people for smoking a joint, but also where we can actually ensure that it's kept out of public spaces.
That's kind of my attitude towards it.
And I think that's the right approach.
I mean, on the psychedelic thing, what would need to be done...
Because I know, to be clear, I know absolutely nothing about this.
So this is me, you know, asking a question, not committing to some public policy.
You have to be careful with this stuff, especially six days from an election.
But I had never heard about, you know, because I'm a veteran, too.
I spent four years in the United Marine Corps, went to Iraq, went to Haiti once.
And is there any, like, what is the pathway, I guess, or what do you think should happen for veterans accessing psychedelics?
John Hopkins did some research on psychedelics, and they found similar benefits.
There's also dangers, like anything that has profound effects on the human mind.
There are certain people that are very vulnerable, and those people should not be taking these things.
There's people that have a hard time with regular reality.
They're barely hanging on regularly.
But I think the people that are not should have access to that because I believe in freedom.
And I believe in the freedom to explore things that have great benefits.
And I keep going back to veterans because I think we require an insane thing of them.
We take regular people who live in civilized society, we send them over to Afghanistan and Iraq and have them engaged in the absolutely most brutal things that people do, which is war.
They see their friends blown apart.
They get shot.
They see people die.
They have to kill people.
And then they come back here and they're supposed to just acclimate.
And there's no guidelines.
There's no way to do it.
No one can coach you through it.
And a lot of these guys wind up killing themselves.
Well, you could get real cynical as to what's the resistance.
You could say the companies that make psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and the like, and companies that have a vested interest in continuing to sell these things would not want something that causes people to have a profound psychological change that doesn't require them to be on these things anymore.
So, the mental health thing in the United States is really, really worrisome.
Because, you know, when I talk about...
Obviously, we have a big gun violence problem in the United States of America.
And I talk about mental health, because obviously that's a part of what's going on here.
It's what they say is, well, every other country has mental health, meaning advocates of strict gun laws say every other country has mental health problems, but they don't have the same gun violence problem that we do.
It's actually not totally true.
If you look at like SSRI prescriptions, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, it's like Prozac, that category of mental health therapeutics.
We take something like six times as much as our peer countries economically.
So clearly there's something with mental health treatment in the United States that is very, very broken.
Prescribed psychiatric drugs and that if you bring that up, you are taking away from this argument they want to say where they want to blame everything on the guns.
It's all about gun control and we need more gun control.
A gun is a tool.
There's more guns in this country than there are human beings.
Because we have so many firearms in the United States of America that even if I bought into the gun control argument, you're never going to be able to get sufficient guns off the streets.
So it's ridiculous.
We have to actually go after some of the root causes here.
It also ignores, like Finland, for example, has a lot of guns.
Does not have nearly the same problem with these mass shooters that we do.
I'd be interested to see what their mental health drug usage rate is, too.
When we talk about gun violence problem, what we're really talking about primarily is gang violence.
That's where a lot of the gun violence, I think a majority of the gun violence is coming from, which is not to say it's not a problem, but it's not the same problem that obviously gathers most of the headlines.
We're doing Veterans Town Hall, as a matter of fact.
I think we're doing Western PA, but I need to check.
I don't know where I'm going from day to day, but...
Yeah, she obviously cares a lot about veterans' issues.
And, you know, the most important veterans' issue is, yeah, the mental health thing really matters, but it's that we shouldn't be sending them to stupid wars.
Tulsi is a legitimate servant to the United States of America, and the accusation that she's not comes from people who want to send Americans To wars that have no connection to our national interest.
I mean, this is the biggest difference, I think, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is actually foreign policy.
And there are three issues, man.
I've learned this in my own brief political career.
There are three issues.
Where you are not allowed to challenge the establishment.
One is trade.
You have to be pro-free trade.
Everything is good.
Let as many Chinese slave labor-made products into your country as possible, even if it destroys native industries.
That is, number one, the most important issue to our establishment.
Number two most important issue is immigration.
And the number three most important issue is foreign policy.
And maybe, actually, foreign policy is the biggest.
Because if you criticize the wars And you criticize American foreign entanglements, that is where people get really fired up.
I mean, Liz Cheney wants her board seat at Raytheon and everywhere else.
That's part of what's driving it.
Of course, her dad was a major owner, or I believe that he owned a pretty significant stake in Halliburton.
But I actually think, I don't want to overstate that, because I actually don't think that's most of what's going on.
And this is maybe a background view that I have that I should interrogate a little bit more, but I tend to think that people aren't expressly financially motivated.
I think they're much better at rationalizing their financial motivation is somehow good.
So I don't think Liz Cheney, to be fair, even though I can't stand her, wakes up and says, oh, I want to get rich, so I'm going to support the Ukraine war so that Raytheon can continue making all these missiles.
I think what's going on is they have convinced themselves that the post-World War II American consensus, this entire idea that we're going to remake the entire world in America's image, they think that that is the most important, the most valuable project.
And they don't care.
They're going to do it as much as they can, even though I think it's run its course.
I think we should have learned in Iraq we can't turn everybody into the United States of America, nor should we want to.
But these guys can't quite give up on it.
It's just a powerful psychological motivation.
If you go back to when the Soviet Union fell, right, when the Berlin Wall fell in the late 80s, early 90s.
There was this sense among American leaders, right?
Bill Clinton takes over in 1992, that we had reached what was called at the time the end of history, that Western liberal democracy was going to triumph.
Everybody was going to be like us.
There was going to be no more ethnic conflict, no more religious conflict, no more regional conflict.
And I think these guys bought the idea so profoundly that That they can't really wake up and recognize that for the past 40 years we've tried their theories and their theories haven't worked.
Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Arabs, certainly thousands of Americans.
The biggest...
World historical catastrophe, I think, in the history of the United States of America was the Iraq War.
Because unlike other mistakes that we've made, it was truly unforced.
There was no reason in hindsight to do it.
There was nothing that we got out of it.
We lost, I mean, so many innocent people.
We spent trillions of dollars.
We, I think, destroyed the social cohesion that we had gotten after 9/11 because remember, like after 9/11, everybody was an American.
We were all on the same team, Democrat or Republican.
We destroyed that and we created in Iraq, effectively a proxy of Iran, which it's telling now that 20 years later.
The biggest foreign policy threat that we face in the Middle East is Iran, and we created a massive ally of the Iranians and the Iraqis, and none of the people who actually presided over that disaster are saying, oh, maybe we really, really screwed up, and maybe we should reevaluate some of our assumptions.
It is close, but I am confident because it's close, but it's close in a way that favors us, right?
The undecided voters tend to be voters who are more aligned with us.
I think the early voting data looks really good.
I think that You know, people just fundamentally don't want to do more of the same, and Kamala Harris is more of the same.
I think some of our arguments that Kamala Harris is the candidate of censorship is starting to really break through.
But, you know, to your listeners, if you agree with what I've said here, get out there and vote.
Because, like, there is something to be said for me and Donald Trump actually sat and had a conversation, and, you know, hopefully I didn't make a complete fool of myself, but they just don't do that.
Right?
Like, why would we make a person who's terrified of talking about what she wants to do and what she believes, why would we make her a president of the United States?
The only way to make that not happen is to vote for me and Trump on or before November the 5th.
So it's very important.
I feel good about it, but I don't feel great about it because there are a lot of ways in which Democrats are going to try to motivate their base down the stretch.
There are a lot of ways in which, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't put it past them.
Maybe they do try to cheat.
I don't know exactly what it looks like in five or six days, but I know that the best thing that we can do to prevent that from happening is to get out there, make our voices heard.