Arizona senator candidate Blake Masters joins the show to discuss everything from how we need to shape the country's future by honoring its past, to the dire need for election integrity, to rebuilding the American family. Take a listen to get a taste of the future of the Republican Party. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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| For decades now, for I guess my whole lifetime, we have been burdened with the same old Republican candidates for president, we have been burdened with the same old Republican candidates for president, well until Trump, for Senate, for president, for Governor, for everything down to dog catcher. | |
| And it's the same old thing. | |
| We need to cut taxes for corporations and we need to let people do whatever they want and abuse themselves however they want. | |
| We've got to outsource all the jobs because that's going to be good for Americans somehow because of some egghead spreadsheet or something. | |
| And it's the same old drone, drone, Drone that just doesn't seem very persuasive. | |
| And then every so often, Something shifts. | |
| And there are candidates who kind of break that mold, and I am very pleased to be joined by one of the candidates who is very much breaking that mold, Blake Masters. | |
| Blake Masters running for Senate in Arizona. | |
| Blake runs Teal Capital and the Teal Foundation. | |
| He has co-authored a number one New York Times bestseller, Zero to One, lives in Tucson, and very, very soon, we hope, will be representing Arizona in the United States Senate. | |
| Blake, thanks for coming on the show. | |
| Hey, Michael. | |
| Great to see you. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| So, Blake, you are not your run-of-the-mill Chamber of Commerce, you know, just wears the exact same Brooks Brothers suit and says the same stale talking points. | |
| You're a little bit of a different candidate. | |
| How are you different from the typical old stodgy Republican we've come to expect? | |
| Yeah, you know, I mean, I learned a lot from President Trump. | |
| I think he came on the scene in 2016, and he busted up the establishment. | |
| He was willing to say things that were true, that we sort of all knew were true, but that you couldn't quite say as a conventional politician. | |
| Like, he was just on the debate stage in 2016 saying the Iraq War was a mistake. | |
| It turned out to be a big disaster. | |
| I think that's how most of the country felt, but that was still not something that Republican politicians could say. | |
| And so I'm out there on the campaign trail trying to Tell people what I think. | |
| I think I've got a beat on what's gone wrong in this country, not just in the last nine or ten months of the Biden administration, although so much has gone wrong, but actually just going back a few decades. | |
| I think the rot in our politics is pretty deep, and I think people want smart, especially young, new leaders that are going to call out problems and not be politically correct and just try to tell people the truth. | |
| I think somehow that's... | |
| I'm glad you've made this point, too, on Biden. | |
| Yes, Biden is an extreme failure as president. | |
| Basically, everything he's touched has turned to ash, and he's been kind of a dunce for his whole career. | |
| But it's not... | |
| Just Biden. | |
| And one of those stale lines that we've heard from Republicans for so long is, you know, everything Republicans do is good, and everything Democrats do is bad, and every problem in the world is because of Joe Biden or just fill in the blank of whatever Democrat. | |
| And what you're pointing out is, in recent decades, Republicans have made a whole lot of mistakes, too. | |
| Yeah, like I think Reagan was a good president, and we rightly look back at Reagan with fondness. | |
| I mean, I think he did what he needed to do in the 80s, right? | |
| We won the Cold War. | |
| We defeated Soviet communism. | |
| That was all great. | |
| And then I think Trump did what he needed to do in 2016. | |
| I think he saved the country from the Hillary Clinton administration, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But what happened in between? | |
| And I think Republicans just got complacent, and they got comfortable playing defense, and it was just sort of George W. Bush, you know, like, I'm a good guy, and we'll have some good-faith disagreements. | |
| And in retrospect, I think the George W. Bush administration was really bad. | |
| Like, we got the Iraq War and trillions in spending, and a centralized education policy, you know, with No Child Left Behind. | |
| In D.C. and we didn't even get a whole lot of cultural or social conservatism because it just led to Obama. | |
| And so with the Republican establishment that's just content to play defense and just kind of more or less mindlessly repeat whatever Reagan said in his time, I think the party just kind of fell asleep at the wheel. | |
| And, you know, we see the results. | |
| It just doesn't work. | |
| And then we got Trump. | |
| And I agree with you. | |
| Trump was so much better than any president in my lifetime. | |
| Unfortunately, I just missed Reagan. | |
| You know, I was born under Bush I. And so, you know, it was Bush I, and then Clinton, and then Bush II. That didn't really work out. | |
| And then Obama was awful. | |
| Then we got Trump, and it was really great. | |
| And I thought, here's the beginning of something new and exciting in the country. | |
| But then he lost re-election. | |
| Or... | |
| Some people think maybe he didn't lose re-election. | |
| I mean, practically, obviously, he's not the president right now, but some people have a lot of questions about the 2020 election. | |
| Well, I'm one of those people. | |
| I think it was messed up. | |
| You know, there's a lot of wild stuff out there, and not every theory is true, of course, right? | |
| But the media, the blue checks, the sort of credentialed, you know, corporate media, they want to gaslight us and insist that this was the most perfect election of all time. | |
| And, of course, it wasn't. | |
| It just demonstrably wasn't. | |
| You can go through six or seven things even before Election Day that just make this thing so messed up. | |
| I started to get really worried in probably August of 2020 when you started to see these headlines, these seemingly coordinated news headlines, because this is how it works. | |
| There's talking points and all these different left-wing outlets just sort of deliver different headline versions of it. | |
| And they were starting to say, Don't expect results on election night. | |
| Michael, you're not expecting results on election night, are you? | |
| What a crazy thing to expect. | |
| They were priming the country to accept the chaos that would come after the election. | |
| And then, of course, you had big tech censorship. | |
| I wrote an op-ed with J.D. Vance in the New York Post about this. | |
| Facebook and Twitter censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story. | |
| Just saying 100 million Americans couldn't read that anymore because that's misinformation. | |
| They did that three weeks before the election. | |
| But that's true information from a true newspaper that was bad for Joe Biden. | |
| And the official margins in this 2020 election were so thin. | |
| We're so small that I think even that one brazen act of corporate censorship could have swung the election, let alone Mark Zuckerberg personally spending $420 million on allegedly neutral election administration. | |
| You look at how that money was farmed out. | |
| It was super partisan. | |
| So I think the scales were super tilted. | |
| I don't think we had a free and fair election. | |
| And some of it was unfair in the way that might be legal, but it really seems to raise a lot of questions. | |
| Some of it was just clearly illegal. | |
| And if you look in Pennsylvania, for instance, the use of widespread mail-in ballots in clear violation of the state constitution, no matter what the state Supreme Court has to say. | |
| I mean, there were all of these problems. | |
| You mentioned big tech. | |
| If three billionaire oligarchs led by hipster Rasputin, Jack Dorsey, if they're going to control speech in a republic, they're not just controlling one aspect of the society, they're controlling the whole way that the government is administered, right? | |
| We govern ourselves by persuading one another and communicating. | |
| So I think you're absolutely right, and the fact that you're willing to risk being called An insurrectionist terrorist or whatever nonsense the blue checks are going to say. | |
| I think that shows a lot of courage. | |
| But one aspect of your campaign that has not gotten a ton of play, and I think it should, it's not just relitigating what has happened in the past. | |
| But you are looking down the line on issues that will affect the country not just a year or two from now, but decades and decades from now. | |
| You're looking at the collapse of the American family and what it is that we as Republicans or conservatives or Americans broadly can do about it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I'm a super pro-market, super pro-business guy. | |
| I really am. | |
| But I think markets are tools for human flourishing. | |
| The free market is not some ultimate goal. | |
| The free market is one of the most powerful ways we have to achieve the ultimate goal, which is human flourishing, which is successful human families, which is a strong American middle class. | |
| And I think for too long, again, Republicans got stuck in this rut where they would just repeat sort of Reaganite economic orthodoxy. | |
| And they'd bury their head in the sand, and it's like a bunch of ostriches just with their head in the sand, and you're failing to pay attention to the consequences of your policies. | |
| Well, with all the offshoring, with all the sort of pro-big business policy that we've had in the past few decades, I think big business has done great. | |
| Increasingly, big business is left-wing, and it's sort of fused with state power in very problematic ways. | |
| But the middle class has not done great. | |
| The middle class has been hollowed out. | |
| And it's harder and harder to start a family. | |
| Family formation is being delayed. | |
| People our age, right? | |
| Millennials. | |
| We're not getting married as much. | |
| We're having fewer kids and later. | |
| And this is kind of a disaster. | |
| Because I think if you can't participate in an economy and, you know, actually have a reasonable expectation of getting married and having kids and raising a family, starting in your late 20s, then, like, what's... | |
| GDP may be, like, super high. | |
| But what good is it for if the middle class in America is just getting hollowed out? | |
| This reminds me of a point that the English writer G.K. Chesterton made, which is one of the things that's gone wrong in the world is not that the vices have run wild. | |
| It's not that the world is too bad. | |
| It's that the virtues have run wild. | |
| And in many ways, the world is too good. | |
| And that's what I'm hearing when you mention the markets. | |
| Yeah, we love the markets. | |
| We want a robust economy. | |
| but you don't want to put the cart before the horse. | |
| You don't want to pretend that that GDP number is the be all and end all and purpose of government and society. | |
| No, the economy is there, the markets are there to support human flourishing. | |
| And that means robust families. | |
| That's the bedrock political unit. | |
| That means making sure, actually, this is another point that you've brought up that sent shockwaves through the Republican establishment. | |
| You think that, you think we ought to go back to the old timey, terrible days when a family could support itself on one income. | |
| It's amazing to me that that's always so controversial whenever I say it. | |
| All I say is, in America, you should be able to raise a family on one single income. | |
| We used to be able to do this. | |
| My grandfather did this. | |
| He weighed nails at a steel mill in Pueblo, Colorado for 30-plus years. | |
| They were able to do that, you know, relatively modest house, but one car, you know, week-long vacation every year. | |
| And that worked. | |
| There was something about the economy where that could work. | |
| And now after decades of inflation and, you know, wage stagnation and offshore and de-industrialization, you can't really do that anymore. | |
| And it may be a hard problem to solve, you know, have some policy ideas on how we get there. | |
| But it's so fascinating because whenever I just articulate that as the goal, the left freaks out. | |
| They want to say that's sexist or they want to say, yeah, exactly your point, right? | |
| That's retrograde. | |
| You're just trying to live in the 1950s. | |
| And it's like maybe both parents in a household want to work. | |
| Like if both really have great careers and they care about that, great. | |
| I'm not trying to tell anyone what they have to do. | |
| I'm just saying, wouldn't it be nice if that was a choice? | |
| And some people don't like that, but I think that's the future. | |
| And the political party that figures out how to actually deliver that reality, I think, will govern successfully for quite a long time. | |
| I know so many young women, young mothers, who... | |
| And when I say young mothers, I'm talking about millennial young, so like 33. | |
| You know, it used to be you'd have kids much younger than that, but because of the problems you're describing, people keep delaying these things. | |
| So, you know, by today's standards, a relatively young mother, say late 20s or early 30s, I have a young child, a 10-month-old baby, and he needs mommy. | |
| It's exhausting. | |
| It's a full-time job to raise a kid. | |
| But now that's very difficult. | |
| And so what happens is you have to send the kid to daycare very shortly after the kid is born in a lot of cases so that I... My wife needs to go out and work for some other guy so that she can make money so that I can pay some other woman to raise our kid. | |
| Does that seem like the most efficient way, the best way to have a family in the United States? | |
| Seems a little inefficient to me. | |
| It doesn't to me, personally. | |
| You know, I mean, my wife, she stays at home and she takes care of the kids. | |
| We have three boys. | |
| They're seven, five, and one and a half. | |
| And she homeschools them. | |
| You know, I try to pitch in on the margin, but I'm busy campaigning and, you know, I still have my day job. | |
| But she feels like that's her highest calling. | |
| You know, she was a preschool teacher before, and that's just what she wants to be doing. | |
| So look, if people disagree, like, fine, go get a job and pay a nanny. | |
| But you shouldn't have to do that. | |
| You know, that shouldn't just be the default assumption. | |
| I think it's weird that it's become that. | |
| And I think Republicans are complicit, too, because, again... | |
| You said, you kind of implied it didn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense from the family perspective, but the way it makes sense is in the GDP, you know, lens. | |
| If you just view everything through the lens of we need to maximize GDP, well, you've got the husband working, that his income's contributing to GDP, now the wife is too, and now we're paying the nanny. | |
| So we've got three incomes. | |
| Look at all this economic activity that's happening. | |
| And it's like, well, is that what the parents want? | |
| Is that what's best for the kids? | |
| You know, these things are a little bit harder to measure. | |
| And we have such a measurement bias, we just gravitate towards things that we can measure. | |
| Well, you can measure GDP. But again, if you just maximize for that and you dial everything else back, maybe you end up with this really weird society. | |
| And I think it looks a lot like the society we have now. | |
| For so long, Republicans would make fun of Democrats and they'd say, the Democrat, the leftist approach to politics is who cares if it works in practice? | |
| Does it work in theory? | |
| You know, we're the conservatives. | |
| We're really practical. | |
| Well, all too often, you've seen conservatives become these egghead, spreadsheet-loving theoreticians who are pushing a vision and a narrative that is really divorced from the reality on the ground. | |
| You know, for so long, especially in the last 20 years, you'd hear Republicans say, everything's going great for the middle-class Americans. | |
| It's great. | |
| Look at my spreadsheet. | |
| Look at my GDP counter. | |
| Well, how about look on the ground in America. | |
| You've got families falling apart. | |
| You've got, for goodness sakes, the average life expectancy declining in the United States because of deaths of despair. | |
| So these are huge generational problems, and I do think you've identified them. | |
| So then what do we do? | |
| Senator Masters makes it to Washington, D.C. What is the first sort of legislation that you start pushing? | |
| Day one is just close the border to illegal immigration. | |
| Bernie Sanders used to be free to talk about this. | |
| He knew that unlimited illegal immigration actually depresses the wages for working class Americans. | |
| For the last five or ten years, he hasn't really been able to talk about that because the left wants open borders, I think, for maybe electoral purposes later down the line. | |
| But, you know, stop the glut of illegal immigration. | |
| I think we probably have too much legal immigration, too. | |
| Most people are shocked on the campaign trail when I tell them that we actually accept more than one million legal immigrants every year, you know, with various kinds of visas. | |
| And I've seen in the Silicon Valley context, the H-1B visa system is completely abused. | |
| You know, of course, Facebook would love to import tens and tens of thousands of software programmers from India and pay them less money than they would have to pay, you know, a U.S. citizen to do those jobs. | |
| But I think we got to, you know, drastically curtail, if not like end that program, because I think American jobs by default should go to American citizens. | |
| But broadly, you need policies that, A, raise wages and B, cut costs. | |
| You know, the costs of health care and education and housing, the step just goes up and up every year. | |
| And we get used to that. | |
| And we start to think of it as like a law of physics. | |
| But actually, when you zoom in on these industries, there's a lot of regulation, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of sort of cartel like monopoly like behavior. | |
| And I think if you go in with the sort of machete and you intelligently sort of hack through the brush, there's a lot we can do to make sure that we can build more housing, that we can deliver health care in less bureaucratic and less expensive ways. | |
| So if we can get people's wages to rise and costs to fall, all of a sudden, five or ten years from now, I think you can get back to a place. | |
| Where you can raise a family on one single income. | |
| I really do. | |
| You know, under the Trump administration, for the first time in a very long time, you saw wages start to tick up again. | |
| Real wages start to tick up. | |
| And then the establishment said, no, that's enough of that. | |
| We can't have too much of that going on. | |
| And so there went Trump. | |
| You make this point, which is... | |
| It's politically controversial. | |
| Among the political class, it's a controversial point. | |
| Among the American people, it's a totally uncontroversial point. | |
| Namely, you think we ought to drastically reduce legal immigration as well as illegal immigration. | |
| There was a poll that came out. | |
| It was a Harvard-Harris poll around 2019 that asked people their views on illegal immigration and legal immigration. | |
| And the phrasing of the survey was such that they were just talking about numbers. | |
| And because, as you know, most people don't realize how many immigrants are pouring into the country every year. | |
| When they were asked what number seemed about right, people settled on around half a million legal immigrants coming in every year. | |
| Now, of course, we know the real number is much, much higher than that. | |
| And so the survey concluded that the majority of Americans, that includes many Democrats, that includes many independents, Want to drastically reduce legal immigration as well. | |
| So why is there such a huge divide here between an issue that is very popular among the American people and unheard of among the political class in either party? | |
| I mean, I think you see this a lot. | |
| I think the political establishment has just grown completely out of touch with everyday reality, with what people actually want. | |
| But I think there's a lot of, you know, the H-1B visa system, right? | |
| Like I mentioned, the corporate interests keep that thing going. | |
| Like, they want that cheap labor. | |
| They just do. | |
| Universities. | |
| There's a lot of Chinese nationals studying in the United States right now. | |
| And they pay full price. | |
| They'll get into Harvard and they'll pay full price. | |
| And of course, there's some low-grade espionage going on there. | |
| It's not James Bond sexy stuff, but they're recording stuff. | |
| They're sending information back home. | |
| And there's a lot of visa overstays. | |
| There's a lot of people who are granted. | |
| You know, status to be here legally after they get educated in the United States. | |
| And I think the incentives of the universities are to keep that gravy train going for as long as possible. | |
| So I think, you know, most of these visa systems... | |
| You know, I like the 01 visa. | |
| If you're like an extraordinary, talented person, like I want the world's best and the brightest to come here. | |
| You know, if you're a rocket scientist that's going to come and start a company... | |
| Great. | |
| Like, let's bring you in. | |
| But I think that's honestly probably like 10,000 to 50,000 people a year. | |
| And that's not just, it's not 500,000, it's not a million. | |
| And so I think we just need to radically reform these systems because I don't think they work to the benefit of the average American. | |
| And that should be the fundamental litmus test of any immigration policy is, does this policy make things better for the average American? | |
| If it does, it's probably a good policy. | |
| And if it doesn't, then throw it to the curb. | |
| Now, this lens, which makes sense to me, this lens is not very common in the Republican Party. | |
| At least it hasn't been in recent years. | |
| Which is, you're saying, what I'm going to do is I'm going to push for good policy and I'm going to oppose bad policy. | |
| And I'm going to push for things that make the real lives of Americans better. | |
| And I'm going to oppose things that make the real lives of Americans worse. | |
| Because it seems to me the lens in the Republican Party for the past couple of decades is... | |
| Deregulate. | |
| Deregulate everything. | |
| Allow the left to deregulate on the social side and don't really push back too hard there. | |
| And then we're going to just deregulate on the business side, on the tax side, on the education. | |
| We're just going to deregulate everything. | |
| It seems to me the pitch for Republican politicians in recent decades is, vote for me and I won't do anything. | |
| I won't govern you. | |
| I'll just do the least I possibly can. | |
| It sounds like your campaign pitch is different. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I feel like I've grown up watching the progressive left just be completely ascendant. | |
| They've taken over almost every single institution in our country. | |
| They run the government right now, but even the social and cultural institutions. | |
| Look at the church. | |
| Look at formerly neutral institutions or center-right institutions like the military. | |
| You've got General Milley up there testifying about white rage and how he reads Mao and Marx, and he's teaching soldiers about critical race theory, and meanwhile, they forget how to win wars. | |
| I think it's just such a disservice to the service members, actually. | |
| But... | |
| The progressive left is ascendant and they intend on concentrating power, on monopolizing it. | |
| They really do want a sort of one party, I think totalitarian state. | |
| That's what they want. | |
| And so if they're going to use political power... | |
| They have no qualms about that. | |
| They don't care about the Constitution. | |
| They don't care about the rule of law. | |
| We do care about that stuff on the right. | |
| Except, like you said, most Republican politicians, they just don't want to do anything. | |
| They just want to play defense. | |
| And if you just play defense, if you don't want to use state power to actually make a safe and functioning society for people, and the left is just going to use that power, then you're going to lose. | |
| And that's why the left has taken over. | |
| And so this sort of libertarian Republican thing, I'm sympathetic to it because I don't, you know, I'm cautious of government power, unlike the left. | |
| But if we don't stand up and defend ourselves, they will take over this country. | |
| And they tell us what they're going to do. | |
| They're going to add states to the union so they can get a lock on the Senate forever. | |
| They're going to pack the Supreme Court. | |
| They're going to federalize elections. | |
| We have to be willing to use power to prevent them from being able to do that. | |
| Otherwise, there's no USA in just 10 or 20 years. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, when you say there's no USA, I mean, people might think that sounds hyperbolic, but, you know, what makes a nation? | |
| Geographically, borders make a nation. | |
| The left is trying to destroy that. | |
| Culturally, something in common makes a nation, but the left wants to tear apart the things that we hold in common. | |
| And very often, the kind of libertarian strain in the Republican Party has also pushed back against the ideas that we have anything in common, that we have mutual obligations to one another, that we actually ought to have some things that are unifying us as a country. | |
| One of the topics that's come up a lot recently is whether or not the country is just going to crack up. | |
| Are we going to have Texit? | |
| Are we going to have CalExit? | |
| What is it exactly that's going to hold us together? | |
| Or are we going to go the way of the Balkans? | |
| I mean, I sure hope we don't, you know, and I guess I'm optimistic because I'm running for office. | |
| I think I can, you know, play a hopefully a pretty important role in trying to keep things together. | |
| But I do think there's some common culture, there's some common bond that we have to have. | |
| It can't just be this ideology of liberalism all the way down where everybody's just an atomistic individual. | |
| And yeah, if you have obligations to your family or your neighbor, you know, you can't just dissolve those bonds. | |
| It can't just be everybody do whatever they want. | |
| Because I think we see that that ends in poverty, that ends in chaos, that does end in balkanization. | |
| And so I think, you know, this is why the schooling issue is so important. | |
| We need to teach young Americans, new generations, to actually respect their past, right? | |
| It's the opposite of this crazy, toxic left-wing stuff that they're teaching in schools, like the 1619 history curriculum, which is actually in some school districts in Phoenix. | |
| It teaches that the country wasn't founded in 1776. | |
| It was founded in 1619 when the first slave ships came. | |
| And kids learned that our Constitution is discardable and evil because the Founding Fathers were racist. | |
| And I just think that's the biggest difference between the progressive mind and the conservative mind. | |
| The progressive sees that, okay, the past wasn't perfect, so you throw out everything. | |
| Society's not perfect today. | |
| We don't live in a perfect country. | |
| I think it's the best that's ever existed, but it's not perfect. | |
| And so they want to say, because it's not perfect, burn it all down. | |
| And that's the Bolshevik mentality, whereas the conservative says, yeah, it's not perfect, but let's work to make it better. | |
| And let's keep and understand and respect everything good that's come before us, right? | |
| That tradition, those bonds. | |
| And so that's the fundamental goal, is which way do we break here? | |
| But that's why I think, you know, my campaign and my political mission, it's this war on progressivism, because I do think it's destroying America. | |
| And I don't think that's hyperbole. | |
| If we don't do our jobs in 10 years, yeah, America is still here. | |
| I mean, the White House will still exist, but, you know, it'll be a one-party totalitarian state. | |
| It'll be California, just worse, and it'll be managed decline like Western Europe, and I think America in its sort of spiritual sense will be gone forever. | |
| And you've hit on this issue of education. | |
| You're seeing that rot go all the way down. | |
| This education issue just cost Terry McAuliffe the governorship in Virginia. | |
| By the end of that campaign, it was all about, do you, the parents, have the right to raise your kids, or do I, Terry McAuliffe, have the right to raise your kids and fill their heads with critical race theory and transgender ideology, neither of which are being taught in schools, but both of which are really great and we should teach them in schools. | |
| They kept going back and forth on their line there. | |
| Right. | |
| So what do we do? | |
| I mean, this is an issue. | |
| Republicans have brought it up every now and again. | |
| Usually their answer is, you know, abolish the Department of Education. | |
| I think that line of thinking has kind of gone away a little bit. | |
| Now we're more focused on what do we do in the classroom. | |
| Why is it? | |
| Why is education becoming the new grassroots issue-driven movement? | |
| Well, I think it's one consequence, one of the only maybe good consequences of the COVID pandemic was for the first time parents actually saw what was being taught to their kids. | |
| Like my kids listening to that crap for eight hours a day. | |
| And so, you know, you see this sort of reaction against that. | |
| Whereas before, I think the bias is to always think, oh, the bad stuff is happening in other schools. | |
| Like, my kid's school is fine. | |
| It's like, no, actually, here's a lot of evidence that says your kid's school is really messed up. | |
| And what we have to remember is that, I mean, McAuliffe in Virginia was dumb enough to say the quiet part out loud, but this is what the whole left-wing education apparatus thinks. | |
| This is what the teachers' unions think. | |
| They don't think that parents should be in charge of their kid's education. | |
| They say, trust the experts. | |
| And it's like... | |
| They're the failed credentialed experts. | |
| The real experts are the parents. | |
| And so you've got to put more power back in the hands of parents. | |
| I think that means school choice. | |
| I think school choice is sort of the civil rights issue of our time. | |
| You should not be relegated to some failing school just because that happens to be your zip code or your state assignment. | |
| I think that if you're paying... | |
| Dollars into the education system, but you prefer to homeschool your kid, I think you should be able to get all that money back, or at least a lion's share of it, so that you can homeschool. | |
| And if you look at the polling, more people would want to homeschool if they could afford it. | |
| And again, you can't really afford it because we live in a society where you need two incomes to make ends meet. | |
| But if parents could afford to, more people would do it, more people would create sort of neighborhood schools. | |
| We want to decentralize You know, the system as much as possible and put power back in the hands of parents. | |
| Again, maybe hard to do, but that's the goal. | |
| And then policies that work towards that are almost, by definition, good. | |
| Well, and so I guess this leads into the broader picture too. | |
| You know, yes, there are some concrete ways to do it, but it's going to be an uphill climb. | |
| What about the broader political problem? | |
| We touched on it a little bit at the top, this problem of election integrity, but really we call it the swamp or the blob or this ugly connection between the government and big tech. | |
| It used to be public versus private enterprise. | |
| It's a little bit of a blurrier line between those two, and the universities, and the media, and the whole liberal blob working in concert with one another. | |
| How is one guy, sharp though he might be, focused though he might be, how is some senator from Arizona going to help to drain that swamp? | |
| You know, I think just going in with clear eyes about it, I know how hard it's going to be. | |
| Like, I know it's probably literally impossible, of course, for me to do it by myself, but I'll try to be a leader and recruit others to the cause. | |
| You know, I do think one individual senator actually has so much more power, even legislatively, than people think. | |
| There's all sorts of interesting procedural rules and hacks that you can really familiarize yourself with. | |
| You have a lot of power in that chamber. | |
| Most people don't use it. | |
| Because the whole pressure is to go along to get along. | |
| You know, just do whatever leadership says. | |
| And I definitely don't intend on doing that. | |
| So I think I can actually be quite effective. | |
| I also want to use the cultural power of the Senate seat. | |
| You know, I think most, there's a handful of... | |
| I've got examples that do this, but most don't do this. | |
| And part of it is, yeah, can I inspire a new generation of people to run for office or to get involved? | |
| Can I be a messenger for the right kind of ideals? | |
| We can learn from the left, like the left advances statement legislation, you know, that might look really crazy or really radical one year, like it's not going to pass. | |
| But then they introduce it the next year and the next year and the next year. | |
| And pretty soon they move the Overton window. | |
| So that that idea is sort of more legitimated in the public mind. | |
| And then all of a sudden, seven years later, boom, it's law. | |
| Like, look, I think the Green New Deal is still really crazy. | |
| But everybody knew it was crazy when AOC first came on the scene and started blabbering about it. | |
| And now, you know, they just kind of beat people down. | |
| And we're at risk of passing that. | |
| And I think that's a problem, and I think Republicans don't use those same tactics. | |
| But we absolutely can. | |
| And so I think you could just get me and J.D. Vance and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz. | |
| We've got a core group, and you throw a few more, and all of a sudden there's sort of a new balance of power in the Senate. | |
| I think that could be very, very interesting. | |
| You know, I'm so glad you brought up the Green New Deal example. | |
| I remember when AOC came out with the Green New Deal, Mitch McConnell said, well, we need to bring this to the floor for a vote immediately. | |
| This is the craziest thing I ever saw, and we're going to get you on the record. | |
| Ha, ha, ha, ha. | |
| Well, who's laughing now? | |
| You know, it was crazy. | |
| It remains crazy legislation. | |
| But through that persistence, through that willingness to wield power, the power that I guess her constituents sent her to Congress to wield, it has been normalized. | |
| And they have moved, as you say, the Overton window. | |
| And it's, I think... | |
| You are demonstrating a clarity of vision here, even among your potential future colleagues who will be more amenable to that view as well. | |
| There is a lot of power, actually, in the Senate. | |
| And Republicans, a lot of Republicans have just derelicted their duty and given that up for ideological reasons or for cowardice or for ignorance or whatever. | |
| But now would be the time to use it. | |
| The time is running short. | |
| We don't have all the time in the world. | |
| Blake, speaking of time, I've taken up too much of yours. | |
| Where can people find you? | |
| Just go to my website, which is blakemasters.com. | |
| Very direct. | |
| Sign up to volunteer. | |
| Very direct, very simple. | |
| Sign up to volunteer. | |
| Donate if you can. | |
| I wish campaigns weren't so expensive, but they are, so every bit helps. | |
| But get in touch and sign up and we'll send you updates. | |
| Blake, I wish you, sincerely, I wish you the best of luck. | |
| Head on over to blakemasters.com to learn more about Blake and we'll have to have you back to check in on the campaign. |