Vivek Ramaswamy critiques legacy media's focus on trivial soundbites while ignoring government overreach, arguing U.S. intervention in Ukraine prolongs a failed "war of choice" and risks World War III. He opposes $14 to $16 billion in Israeli aid, condemning the hypocrisy of figures like Nikki Haley who censor pro-Palestinian speech despite their own financial ties to military contractors. Ramaswamy asserts that abandoning U.S. hegemony is the true third rail for corporate media, urging a zero-based foreign aid policy that prioritizes American citizens over global moralizing to prevent further conflict. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Media Format Shapes Policy00:10:35
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What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
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All right.
We are joined once again by presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
How are you, sir?
Good to see you, man.
How are you doing?
Good to see you too, man.
I was just literally earlier today, I was watching.
You had a great exchange with one of the people in the corporate press who I cannot stand.
It's at the top of my list of people I can't stand.
I guess this was from yesterday.
And you had this great exchange on CNN with, oh, geez, I'm blinking on his name now.
Jim Acosta was a little bit more like this.
Jim Acosta.
Yes, Jim Acosta.
Sorry.
Not a good way to start.
Yeah, this guy's a piece of work.
But it was a great, it was a great little moment where there was this one exchange where he started, he was grilling you about Donald Trump using the term hostages to refer to January 6th prisoners, which already was so bizarre because first of all, you're not Donald Trump.
So it's like this, this thing where he's like, he's like, well, what do you think about the guy you're running against saying a thing that we don't have?
Using this one word.
Yeah.
It's just like, yeah.
And you just went, you went, aren't you guys like the guys who got this Russiagate thing completely wrong?
Didn't you tell us Hunter Biden's laptop was all misinformation?
But it was a great moment, but it was a great little like kind of microcosm of everything that's wrong with the corporate media is that they will like zoom in to the most trivial thing.
Like Trump was supposed to prisoners instead of hostages.
But since he said hostages, that's the issue we're going to talk to you about.
Meanwhile, the country and the world is on fire, but the story is Donald Trump said the wrong word.
So you did a great job of kind of reframing that.
Thank you, man.
It's at this point, I've become very, I was started cynical about the media.
I think I am deeply jaded is where I'm at right now because we're also in this weird.
So just to pick up on that strand, this happens to me a lot too.
In this case, I was asking about a random thing that Trump man, Trump said.
But like with me, a very similar thing has happened through the course of this campaign where I've done more podcasts like this one we're doing now, probably than any other presidential candidate ever.
And I think it's a good format because we're not constrained to artificial two-minute segments or whatever.
However, as long as the legacy corporate media exists and has continues to have influence, they're in some ways threatened by even the existence of alternative media.
So what they do as their specialty, it could very well happen to the conversation we're about to have.
Take something that I say here as two human beings talking to each other, as two human beings might, with context and with nuance or with perspective or whatever, and airlift that out to then say, well, Vivek, just like they did for John Donald Trump, he said he called the Gen 6 prisoners hostages to say something that you then take out of the context of what is a long form conversation, almost as an assault on that alternative mode of media, actually,
which then creates a disincentive for people who are sitting in the seat that I am as a Republican presidential candidate to show up on podcasts, which is why many of them don't do longer form conversational formats like this anyway.
So it's a broken game.
I think these debates have been a joke.
I mean, the media hosted debates.
But that being said, I'm not here to sit here and complain about it.
Anybody can be a victim.
My goal is to cut through and actually be somebody who is able to lead the country to a better place.
I'm not going to be able to fix the media as a political candidate.
We don't want political candidates doing that, if you ask me.
But the best we can do is at least call it out transparently to people who understand that they're being force-fed garbage.
And the more, as the person who's on the receiving end of what you're force-fed, know what you're being force-fed is garbage, the more likely you are to take at least personal responsibility and accountability to question that, which is something that I'm optimistic about actually today, even relative to 10 years ago.
Yeah, I think you made a really great point there that I hadn't even really thought about that much, but the idea that this would intimidate a lot of people out of doing these long form shows.
Because the truth is, if you're going to have an hour long, a two-hour long, like a really long, honest conversation, it's almost inevitable that you'll say something that could be taken out of context and shown in a very poor light.
Totally.
It is, you know, it's weird for me as someone who I do a show regularly.
I've been doing this for years.
It's all about government corruption and media corruption and things like that.
But even for me, it is kind of fascinating to see.
And I think really you and RFK have been really the only ones who have been doing kind of like the podcast circuit.
I know other candidates have done a couple, maybe one.
And I'm the only one who's actually doing both, though, right?
And maybe they won't have RFK.
Maybe it's a strategy not to.
Maybe he's smart to not do it.
But you could debate that.
But my policy is talk to everybody, right?
So left, right, short term, short form, long form.
But I see what they then do is like the podcast conversations are the ones that get me in trouble when I go on the ultra artificial short two minute segments on cable television.
And in some ways, candidates respond to their incentives, right?
So at first you could say like other candidates and some people are just scared of actually scratching beneath the surface of their talking points.
So there's some of that, but some of it is they understand their incentive where if they actually did do anything other than the pre-Ken talking points, they're going to be actively penalized for it.
And I think we still live in a moment of the transition to newer forms of media that probably politically in the short run, they're actually doing the right thing, right?
Because if in the GOP primary, most of their voters still consume, most of our voters still consume their information via linear TV and radio.
And if that's what most older voters are reaching rather than the long form podcast or whatever, then you want to make sure you don't screw that up as your priority, which means if you had to choose, then don't do the longer form real human conversation.
So in some ways, it's just about people responding to what people do.
They respond to their incentives.
And that's what you see the Republican class of political candidates doing today as well.
But you're probably enough beating that dead horse, but it is something that I've noticed in this campaign and it's real and I see it every day.
And now I'm just, when I go on CNN or whatever, I'm just calling it out at least for what it is.
Right.
Well, I mean, it's hard to ignore how, and it's, you could be the most far left wing or far right wing or anywhere in between person.
But if you're just being an adult, you would go, oh, so we now, almost everybody has the internet.
We don't have the time constraints that used to be a thing in the just television world.
And you're like, well, wouldn't it be just a superior format if you're trying to figure out who you want to be the president of the United States of America to hear an in-depth conversation?
And it's from my perspective, it's kind of wild because here we are.
This is the third time you've been on the show with me.
By the end of this, because last time we went pretty long, we will have spoken for over three hours about a lot of complex topics and where you stand.
Not only of all, and you do all like these shows on the corporate media.
I don't think a single one of the journalists there has any interest in having a three hour long conversation with you.
And by the way, they could.
They have internet, like they have YouTube channels too.
It doesn't just have to be on their television show, but it's just kind of interesting that you have this alternative media where you can really get in depth into topics that are very important topics.
And then you still have the legacy corporate media that really just exists on soundbites.
And as you kind of alluded to, even the official presidential debates are set up to be soundbite festivals.
They're a joke.
And it's, you know, and like you can, not to say you can within a short period of time make a good point.
I thought when you, one of the exchanges you had with Mike Pence before, may his campaign rest in peace, but one of the one of the exchanges you had when you kind of called him out for giving this Morning in America speech and you were like, look, this is the reality for your generation, but for my generation, it's just not.
Like that's not the, like, I thought that was a powerful moment.
You did that in just a few sentences.
But if we really want to get into like the war in Ukraine or the war in Israel or something like that, the idea of doing this in like Vivek, you have 30 seconds.
Oh, and that's where Nikki Haley has actually, you know, managed to build a false credibility on her fraudulent pretenses with the American people.
This is about good versus evil.
But just because Russia is bad doesn't mean that Ukraine is good and not that it's our job normatively to decide who's good versus evil in the first place, but that requires something beyond 30 seconds.
And you have somebody who, you know, privately doesn't have to explain why they're profiting from wartime activities or whatever, but can wear this good versus veneer facade, which is, I don't want to, I don't want to overreach on this thread, but even just talking about it out loud with you, Davis, it's an interesting thing to analyze about whether you can make the case for war more persuasively in short soundbites than you can make the case against it.
And so that would bode very well for the future if alternative media ends up being the way that we adjudicate most of our political discussions.
We're not anywhere near there yet.
I actually think we're in, in some ways, the most dangerous of all worlds where the two coexist, where one can actually take the other out of context for the purpose of deceit, which is what I see happening now.
But it's an interesting question.
I mean, if you look over the cases made about the case to go to Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, what's like an easy phrase, fits within a 30-second soundbite.
And, you know, I think there are certain things that asymmetrically, you're more likely to be able to make a persuasive case, generally for the wrong view, if you're able to only make that case within a short amount of time in a way that the alternative side requires more nuance.
Dangerous Coexistence of Truths00:02:18
It will tilt the scales towards certain outcomes that would not obtain in the world were it not for the format by which you discuss it.
It's sort of like a Heisenberg principle here is the way you're describing it or the format ultimately affects the underlying outcome of the actual policy debate.
I don't know if I'm rambling or if that makes any sense to you.
No, no, I think it's a real, I think it's a really interesting point.
I mean, look, I'd say at the very least, by definition, any argument that requires nuance and thought is going to be on, is going to start out with a disadvantage in that type of environment.
Right.
And so it's a pro-war and anti-war in that particular case.
I think that that automatically, I think in certain cases, under certain circumstances, does tilt the scale to one outcome over another, depending on the modality you're using to make that argument.
And I do think that that's true, actually.
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Putin and Neocon Mistakes00:15:16
All right, let's get back into the show.
So, okay, speaking of war, there's been, since last time we talked, there's been a major shakeup.
We'll get to Israel in a second, but I actually wanted to start with Ukraine because this is one of the things that I think, you know, you have been one of the few voices out there who's been very critical of our policy and funding this war of choice on Russia's border over the last two years.
There was very clearly a major shakeup in the last few days over where the American regime is on this war.
There was a Time magazine piece.
This is usually how it starts.
First, you see something in Time magazine.
And then next, you know, so Time magazine runs this piece that Zelensky has no chance of winning the war.
Everybody around him is saying he's delusional.
His military isn't following his orders anymore.
And then there's been reports over the last few days.
And this is all, you know, under the condition of anonymity, official U.S. sources say, but it does seem like there's a pivot here and that they're pushing for Zelensky to start negotiating with Putin.
It's pretty interesting.
It was only, I think, a couple weeks ago that you were on with Piers Morgan and he was like outrageous, but you're suggesting we give Putin land.
You're saying, by the way, something kind of interesting here.
The whole talking point of all the people who support the war in Ukraine and all the people who support Israel, and there's a lot of overlap.
The whole talking point during Ukraine was, but you can't win territory by force in a war.
And then it's like, oh, by the way, we have to support Israel forever.
So anyway, there's just a little, it's kind of interesting there.
It's like, I don't know.
I'm just going to history of Israel.
I was actually going to go ahead and, I mean, even some other directions, even in terms of like the theories of proxy war, I don't know.
This is just a bit of a mind bender, but like, you know, country A funds actor B to hit country C means that country C gets to hit back at country A.
Well, that's like how it works with, you know, if, you know, whatever, Iran, the justification for a preemptive strike on Iran is they're funding on that justification, Russia would be able to justifiably hit the United States right now, which is nuts.
But the same people talking out of all sides of their mouth have no self-awareness about basic principles that they're bringing to each context.
But just on Ukraine here, just for a second on factual grounding, the thing that's nutty about this one is that, well, there's so many things that are nutty about it, but even if you believed that it were the job of the U.S. to adjudicate who is good versus evil in a complex historical conflict, which I reject this premise that this is the job of the U.S.
But even if you did, in the case of Ukraine, you're talking about a country that has literally banned 11 opposition parties, that has consolidated, talking about media, all state TV media, all TV media into one state TV media arm.
He's threatening not to hold elections this year because it's an emergency or whatever.
But say unless the U.S. forks over more money to fund the elections, they won't hold the elections.
And then the regions of Russia, or the regions of Ukraine that are occupied are Russian-speaking regions that literally have not been in any sense part of Ukraine for the last 10 years.
They haven't been represented in the Ukrainian parliament.
The people who live there don't think of themselves as part of Ukraine.
The people in the rest of Ukraine don't really think of them or care for those regions in the Donbas and the eastern part of Ukraine to be part of Ukraine.
And yet we are now fighting and waging some major indirect proxy war for that region in some battle of good versus evil.
I mean, that itself, those are basic facts that you don't get from the mainstream either, the mainstream candidates in either political party.
And we've created this mythology around a good versus evil about them taking over territory when these territories that Russia occupies now, part of the reason they're able to occupy them is that there was no resistance.
Why is there no resistance?
The people there did not think of themselves as part of Ukraine.
And the rest of Ukraine doesn't even really view them as the rest of part of Ukraine.
They speak a different language and they haven't been represented in the parliament.
The thing's a joke.
And the funny thing is, I don't think the other Republican candidates, like, I don't even think they know that, actually.
Yeah.
Like, I don't, I literally don't, I mean, even Ron DeSantis, who on a given day can be saying the right thing.
It's like he's sort of like Schrodinger's cat.
You never know whether he's Neo Conron or the other Ron.
But even on the good days, I don't think he actually understands the why.
I completely agree.
Listen, I'll say this.
I don't, even when Trump is saying the right things, I'm not convinced he actually knows what happened in 2014 in Ukraine.
The Euromaidan, you know, he knows the ugly hand that we had in Victoria Newland and whoever else from the U.S. stirring the pot, creating a problem that we're now paying for years later.
Look, Joe Biden was instrumental in the Maidan coup.
And I totally think he remembers what 2014.
I would bet my life savings, which is not, you know, it's not your life savings, but it's a decent little pot.
I would bet it that Joe Biden couldn't answer questions about what he was doing in Ukraine in 2014.
But all these other Republican candidates, I'm just convinced, yeah, they just, they don't even know.
But one of the things that kind of, it's like there's always during war, there's this fog of war.
It's the, I don't know who coined this term, but the first casualty of war is the truth.
And so you get all of these narratives that are spun, all of this propaganda.
But as the dust kind of settles, you go, okay, so imagine this is what's actually going to happen now, is that we're going to insist that they negotiate with Putin and Putin takes some of the, keeps some of the territory, whatever the deal ends up being, it ends up being.
But if the war ends up coming to a close, you look back at it and you go, oh, okay, so at least according to Fiona Hill's reporting and several others, in 2022, the U.S. had Boris Johnson go over there and tell Zelensky not to negotiate with Vladimir Putin.
We prolonged this war for another year and a half under with all of this propaganda that if Vladimir Putin wins this, then he moves on Poland next, and then he reconstitutes the Soviet Union.
And so like when that's when this is over, and when none of that happens, when Vladimir Putin doesn't invade Poland, he doesn't reconstitute the Soviet Union because that was all nonsense to begin with.
Yep.
You're left with it and you go, so what did we do?
Even if you're saying we need these Ukrainians, all we did was get them slaughtered and prolong this war for nothing.
Totally.
That's the reality.
I mean, and you're talking about large numbers of young Ukrainian men, young Russian men.
And I don't know if that violates some sort of covenant that you're supposed to have that you're even supposed to care about that as a factor.
But just as a human being, now just not speaking as an American or a leader of this country, like that's a lot of people dying for a really pointless war on either side.
Now, I'm running for the role of U.S. president.
So my question is, how does this advance American interests?
And it does not, other than increasing the risk of significant conflict with Russia at a time where that doesn't advance the U.S. interest at all.
And so the question is, what did we accomplish with this $200 billion of expenditure?
And I guess we look back and the answer to that question will have been almost certainly nothing.
So that's almost a different criticism than the one that I have, which is that we shouldn't be meddling in other parts of the world or otherwise.
But this is almost a failure of efficacy to say that you went all the way around to meddle and literally have nothing to show for it other than having funded a lot of additional deaths, taking additional risk for the United States and spending $200 billion of taxpayer money at a moment where we're $33, soon to be $34 trillion in the hole, closer to 34 than 33 precisely because we funded this.
And we're bankrupt at the time that we're actually spinning away money on these.
So it's almost like even the failure of efficacy is a second order criticism to the more philosophical criticism, which is that we shouldn't be engaging in being the arbiter of disputes on the other side of the world.
Like I've been personally critical of Azerbaijan's, I would say, craven actions on Armenia, but against the backdrop of believing the U.S. should not be intervening.
And so the utter hypocrisy of why the U.S. is intervening in one Russian periphery conflict, but not another, is itself inexplicable to the good versus evil crowd, which would have a stronger case for actually defending Nagorno-Karbak adjacent to Armenia than they do actually in defending Ukraine.
But forget the good versus evil thing altogether.
We shouldn't be playing that game.
So it fails on multiple different levels, Dave.
And it makes you wonder whether there's something deeper going on, right?
It's not like it fails at one level, but at least the argument holds water on another.
It's failing on every level, which makes you, I think, entertain more sinister, at least possibilities of either deep incompetence or else some other form of, I don't know whether it's comforting that incompetence is our best explanation or whether that's actually at least comforting compared to what the alternative is.
But either way, I think what's gone on in Ukraine has really exposed this foreign policy establishment's rot for what it is.
Yeah.
And it's one more of these things where you see this almost with all these wars.
It was true with the war in Iraq and Afghanistan too, where they kind of start out being somewhat popular.
And then as the reality of the situation kind of becomes more and more clear, they lose in popularity too.
So then as like a third order criticism, you know, it's that war ends up being very unpopular.
In the end.
In the end, it does when people actually have to pay the costs for these wars.
But it will be, it'll be interesting to see how they all pivot to some other explanation.
Me and my buddy Rob on our last episode were just joking around about like, so what's when Vladimir Putin doesn't move on Poland, you know, it'll be like, well, it's because we took a stand here in Ukraine and that's why, you know, he was going to.
But now it's like you could argue the same, you will argue the facts did not matter.
You will reach the same conclusion with the facts that you have.
And that's the classic argument.
Or with COVID, you know, as they've just kind of come to now, it's like, well, we were working with, you know, not perfect information and we were doing the best we could.
And so, you know, it's like, oh, okay.
Right.
All right.
Yeah.
That's right.
You got, you kind of got nothing.
That's the close you're going to get to an admission of defeat.
Yeah.
So, okay, so let's talk a little bit about what since the last time we talked was not a thing, but now seems to be by far the biggest story in the world.
And that is the Israeli-Palestinian war, which is currently going on as we speak.
I believe, so I know Michael Rechtenwald, who's running for the Libertarian Party nomination, he certainly would agree with this.
And I'd imagine Cornell West probably would too.
But I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you are the only major party candidate who is essentially a non-interventionist in this conflict, right?
That you don't believe America should be funding this war, that you don't believe we should be meddling in it.
And that's where I'm at on this, actually, from like a slightly different point of view than others who might get to the same place on different grounds, right?
I actually believe in Israel's right to exist.
The whole founding premise of Israel was that Israel has the right to defend itself.
And David Ben-Gurion, the founder of Israel, sort of said the reason we need our own nation is we don't want to depend on the fleeting sympathies of others in the West or elsewhere.
We should defend ourselves.
And so I happen to think that this better respects the founding premise of Israel, but I'm not running for president of Israel.
I'm running for president of the United States.
And my view as president of the United States, or if I'm elected to that position, is I don't support this $14 billion or $14 to $16 billion aid package.
I don't support the whole thing.
I mean, the 61 going to Ukraine, I'm against, but the 16 I'm against too.
I have a general rule of thumb, which is that we should not be providing foreign aid to any country whose national debt per capita is less than ours.
And I think that our foreign aid should be zero-based budgeting, period, asking what's actually necessary to advance the American national interest.
That should be the only form of that foreign aid.
But I could make a strong case that it's neither in the U.S. interest nor even in Israel's interest for us to meddle.
We should not be sticking our nose into the Middle East.
To the contrary, Dave, and this makes some people mad when I say this.
And it's all against the backdrop of, and I've said this countless times, but since maybe I haven't said it to your audience, I think what Hamas did to Israel was subhuman.
It was wrong.
It was dastardly.
It was medieval.
And Israel has absolute right to defend itself.
So this is in zero way providing any justification for that at all.
But it's a factual backdrop for the U.S. to look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves how our own interventions are actually counterproductive to our own stated goals.
I think it is not an accident that that happened on October 7th after a summer in which the U.S. is having what I think are crazy town talks with Saudi Arabia about nuclear technology transfer to Saudi Arabia, arguably the most oil-rich nation on earth.
It is not a coincidence.
Even those in Neocon Media Central have had to contend with the reality that those two things were probably related to one another.
And so we're like a bull in a China shop, like waddling into the Middle East.
It has never done good for the United States or even for some of the very actors that we're supposedly helping like Israel.
It hasn't been good for anybody.
And so I think that we have to take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves, why do we have our sons and daughters now sitting as sitting targets in places like Syria and Iraq?
Last time I checked, we were told that we weren't in those places.
Well, why are we in those places?
If there's no clear strategic reason for why, and I don't think there is, we shouldn't be there in the first place.
And so that's where I come out on this question, which has been, in the short run, very unpopular in certain corners of the Republican Party.
I've taken a lot of heat for it.
I think in the medium term, and I think part of the reason why I'm not trying to boast, but it takes somebody to persuade people, right?
You can't just tell them where they're already at and then feed them like an addiction feeding cocaine to a cocaine addict.
You have to actually lead them to a different direction, which I'm trying to slowly do here in making what I think is naturally persuasive case, but it still requires somebody to make it, that the Republican neocon wing that has made the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan is about to make them yet again and ought not for American interests.
And I think that to the extent that that's not enough to persuade you, I think that it's not even in Israel's interest or other allies' interests for us to waddle in and messily participate in these conflicts.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Free Speech vs Moral Loyalty00:15:10
Well, it's funny, even as you bring up, I mean, obviously, the nuclear assistance is just insane.
I did I did see several articles written about that.
It's also, but particularly when I just hear the justification everywhere we intervene is about democracy or human rights abuses.
And you're like, yet Saudi Arabia, I mean, like, what are we talking about?
The most undemocratic, most brutal regime in the region, which is really saying something.
And like that, but we're to explain that.
And a regime that even dating back, if you want to go back 22 years, I mean, it's not really a country that we have, we ought to have some sort of trustworthy enough relationship to transfer nuclear power to this country.
It's beyond imagination.
And yet, both parties, I mean, it's Biden.
He's certainly the U.S. president, but there's Republican senators going right along with that too.
And the irony is that likely paid some role in catalyzing what happened on October 7th, which hurt our ally, Israel in the military.
So it comes full circle to make absolutely zero sense.
Yet here we are.
And also, I mean, look, one of the things that I think about a lot, and like full disclosure, like I'm Jewish and my family does not particularly care for my views on Israel.
But I will say, and of course I agree with you, the Hamas attack was absolutely horrific and just viciously immoral.
But when you talk about what is in Israel's interest, and this is one of the problems we have when we do intervene in different parts of the world, is there's a tremendous moral hazard that we then kind of are responsible for.
Because for example, even with someone like Zelensky, look, had we not been funding him, well, then of course he would have had to negotiate with Putin.
And there's a lot of he was actually ready to back in back in April or whenever this was before Boris Johnson flew down there.
Yes, before Boris Johnson went and broke up the negotiations on behalf of the American regime.
Exactly.
But with Israel, I mean, you know, as Israel is kind of in the process of leveling Gaza and you see protests all around the world breaking out against Israel.
Now, however, we may feel about those protesters or some of the things that they're yelling while they're protesting, and there's certainly some of them that I'm not a big fan of.
But you would also look and, you know, I hear Benjamin Netanyahu like quoting, you know, passages from the Torah and talking about what they're going to do to Gaza.
And you're like, are you, are you guys not at all concerned?
Like, do you not look around and think this might go very badly for you?
And I wonder if, you know, if it wasn't that the biggest, baddest bully on the block, the American Empire, is like, don't worry, we have your back.
If there isn't some moral hazard here on the Americans' part, that sure, look, if you're taking the position, we shouldn't intervene in Israel.
You have a right to defend yourself however you see fit.
Like, okay, fine.
And I would go one step further even diplomatically stop the UN from intervening or anything else, too, right?
So I don't think it's our job to be the world's policeman.
I think it is the moral duty of the U.S. president to look after the interests of Americans.
And it's the moral interests, moral duty of every nation's leader to look after the citizens of his nation.
But I think that we do everyone a disservice when we're selectively, you know, I would go so far as to call it arbitrarily, arbitrarily interventionist.
I think it creates the absence of clear red lines.
And the absence of clear red lines or predictable red lines are ones that actually provide an escalation path to World War III.
And so, you know, I mean, I'm coming out with this, with this pledge.
You know, we're going to ask all my supporters to get on board with it.
At least if they're supporting me, they should at least know what they're supporting.
And we're going to, you know, say that anybody who serves in my administration, should I successfully secure this nomination and become the next president, make sure that anybody who I'm appointing agrees to these same basic commitments as well.
Avoiding World War III is a vital U.S. national interest.
War is not a preference, only a necessity.
And that the moral obligation of U.S. policymakers is to exclusively look after the interests of American citizens, period.
I don't think that should be controversial, but these are basic principles and tenets that I think the next administration, which is why I'm running to lead that administration, because it's not going to be somebody else that delivers this, really has policymakers both work in the executive branch.
And I think people in Congress should abide by the same.
These are not controversial things to say.
Avoiding World War III is a vital national objective, that war is never a preference.
It is only a necessity.
And that the job of U.S. policymakers is to look exclusively after the interests of U.S. citizens.
I don't think that this should be controversial, but it's not certainly the dominant view in either of the two major political parties today, though I do think that we have an opportunity to make the Republican Party the party that does embody some of those basic principles, but that's what this primary fight's all about.
Sure, sure.
No, well, listen, I would go further and say I think it's that's kind of to me like a basic sanity test.
And if you don't agree with that, I just don't know.
I think you should see.
It's like failing a psychiatric exam.
Yes.
What do you see in this inkblot?
Do you see World War III?
Do you see that as a good thing?
So one of the things that I appreciated that you said during very early on during this recent war, and I will say I've been, it's been really amazing to watch there are a lot of people in the kind of like conservative pundit world.
And I'm not really even talking about like the corporate press.
I'm talking more about like, you know, Ben Shapiros and people like that, who kind of rose to fame off of opposing identity politics and opposing cancel culture and censorship.
And that seems to all change when Israel is involved in a war.
And all of a sudden, if you are, say, critical of the Israeli government's treatment of the Palestinians or you're critical of the war, you are a Jew hater.
It seems very similar to me to the way woke leftists, you know, would dismiss people who make any type of argument.
And there's also been this move to push for censorship.
And again, that's not to suggest that I love everything that's coming out of the protesters' mouths or every chant that they make or things like that.
But there has been this move, particularly in some European countries.
There's been calls for it here at American universities to kind of silence the dissent or the pro-Palestinian voices on this issue.
And I think you had commented something where you were like, yeah, look, I don't agree with these guys, but I'm also like, I still believe in the free speech thing.
Yeah, I like deeply believe in the free speech thing because it's the thing that defines this country.
And this has not been to date a winning political argument or dominant favorably political view in the Republican Party, though I hope to change that because I think people are, the more I'm able to talk about this, I think the more we are persuading people of this.
So I'll note a couple of ironies here.
Okay.
I've always been a free speech absolutist and I will be till the day I die.
If there's one thing, I mean, I've got to change my mind on a lot of things.
I'm not going to change my mind on this one because, and I don't think our country should change our mind on this one.
It's in the First Amendment for a reason.
Now, a couple of ironies here.
Okay.
This is all against the backdrop of these students on campuses.
I mean, these, many of these people are idiots, right?
They're lost.
They're hung.
I mean, there's a deeper thing going on.
They're hungry for purpose and meaning.
And they go to the next ism from COVIDism to climatism to anti-Semitism to whatever, right?
Wokeism, Zelenskyism.
I mean, these are just symptoms of a hunger for something bigger than me that I need to believe in when I no longer believe in the things that used to ground us.
But that's a deeper discussion for another day.
That's what's going on on these campuses, but they say some pretty idiotic things.
So I wrote my first book, Woke Inc., okay, at a time where this was not a popular view to have in the wake of George Floyd's protests, to say when you chant death to America or death to white people, I mean, this existed on college campuses during the wake of the BLM madness a few years ago.
It was never to say that these people should be censored.
Far from it.
I was arguing against their censorship of any opposing view on the campuses using either informal or capital C censorship, which is directly through government intervention, or lowercase C censorship, which is a culture of intimidation that stops universities from fulfilling their own purpose of fostering free speech and open debate, even if it's technically legal, that it's still culturally undesirable.
That was the argument I was making.
The irony, though, there's the first of two ironies I want to point out.
The irony is that the very people who then were among those who either were like perfectly fine with this happening, death to white people, no problem, death to America, no problem, are the ones that are having a conniption now when there's the same kinds of BLM people saying death to Israel, right?
And you have Ron DeSantis passing a law in Florida that requires students for justice for Palestine, which is like an idiotic student group, no doubt.
Many things they say I find offensive, but literally calling for them to disband, requiring them to disband in Florida State Universities, because he said they're part of assisting, providing material support to a terrorist organization.
I mean, this is post-9-11 stuff here.
This is Dick Cheney Patriot Act stuff here in this country.
These kids weren't providing munitions and money to Hamas.
They were tweeting in favor of Palestinians.
And to call that material support and then to ban them, that's a First Amendment violation.
So the irony is where the hell were you three years ago anyway?
Right.
For death to America, death to white people, that's fine.
But now in this other direction, we're going to go censor speech in the other direction.
There's another irony too, though, which is, you know, coming at this from a different angle.
If one of those people with, you know, I don't know, nose rings and pink hair and transgender activists ended up in the Middle East and sort of say want to say even free Palestine, they would be themselves blacklisted.
But the thing that makes us different in the United States of America from jihadist countries or even, you know, strict Islamic countries or any censorious regime is that we allow them to express those stupid opinions.
That's what makes America itself.
And so it does frustrate me that the very crusaders against cancel culture have now made their crusade conditional on whether or not they agree with the underlying speech.
It's sad.
I think it betrays the actual principle at stake.
And I'm insane.
Yeah, DeSantis is what Miss He kind of runs as like Mr. Anti-Woke.
But then when it comes to Israel, you're the wokest out of everybody.
You're like, oh, essentially you're going what he's saying in a different way is like racism is a form of violence.
It's the same like argument.
It's like anti-Semitism is giving aid and support to Hamas.
So what the guy says is, you know, he's not, he's not, I mean, there are many dumb individuals in politics, including presidential politics.
He's not dumb, right?
I mean, he's, you know, I've met many, many, many smarter people in my life.
I have, but he's not, he's not a stupid person, okay?
He enough to understand that what he's saying here isn't, isn't accurate.
He says, this isn't about free speech.
It's about providing material support to a terrorist organization.
So what was that material support?
They said that we are part of the movement.
That's what they said.
We're part of the Free Palestine movement.
With if you're part of the movement and these are, you know, Hamas is doing this and that means you're part of a terrorist group.
On that definition, there's no First Amendment left in the United States of America, right?
So there, I guess, if you, if you say you don't believe the election results of 2020, are you a January 6th?
You know, like, are you, should you go to jail?
I'm with the January 6th resistance.
Even if you're sitting at home watching it on television, you're cheering and saying, I'm with you.
I'm part of your movement.
Boom, you're in jail.
Now, many of the Gen 6 protesters themselves should not have been in jail.
But certainly somebody sitting at home saying that I am with you shouldn't be either.
And yet the lack of astounding selective lack of awareness reveals to me, I mean, you have some dumb people in the Republican Party, some very dumb people.
This exists in politics in both sides.
It's an unfortunate feature of modern politics that it selects for people with, you know, I would say an absence of critical thinking skills.
But what's worse is when you have people who do, I think, have some of those skills, not in the sharpest form, but they have the basic enough skills, the Ron DeSantises of the world, that purposefully abandon their ability to reason this through, to just say what they say to please whoever it is they're pleasing.
That I think is a deeper and more damning indictment of not only the state of the Republican Party, but the state of American politics as we know it.
Well, it also shows it's a window into priorities.
And I think maybe in a sense, that's what you were getting at when you were kind of talking about this, this pledge for people in your administration that America is where your loyalty lies and or that you're where your priority lies.
Because, you know, another one, Nikki Haley had a tweet a week or so ago where she said she said that as president or even she said as president or she called right now for the defunding of all universities.
Selective defunding of defunding where there's anti-Semitic rhetoric, which is again very vague.
I mean, the right answer is if you want to argue against federal funding, shut down the Department of Education.
As I've said, I get behind that.
Listen, I'm the most hardcore libertarian.
I'm for defunding all universities.
But the point about priorities is it's like kind of what the point you were making about like, where were you in 2020?
It's like, Nikki Haley, how, okay, let's just say, because there has been some, and by the way, some of the rhetoric gets labeled as anti-Semitic when it's really not.
It's just critical of Israel's treatment toward the Palestinian people.
Like that's not anti-Semitic, but there is some anti-Semitic rhetoric too, mixed in there.
Fair enough.
But you want to defund these universities now that there's anti-Semitism?
What about all of the anti-white male rhetoric that has completely dominated the universities for at least a decade?
Probably more than that.
But now, and so it does show this weird.
And you wonder, like as somebody who, and I'm saying this as a Jewish person, but as somebody like Jews are 2% of the United States of America and we overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
So like, why is Nikki Haley's line anti-Semitism?
Yet being a, like, being against Christians, being against white men, being against straight men, all of whom majority vote Republicans, like, why is it that your priority is, why is this the line?
It's just it's a very like strange line.
There's probably a lot of answers to that question.
You'd have to ask her for her answer.
I'm not sure she would answer, honestly.
I don't know if she's capable of that.
She's signing her tweets a couple of years ago in the name of George Floyd with signature lines from her tweets a couple of years ago.
But she's like a flag that waves in whatever direction her winds blow on a given day.
Therapy for Tough Choices00:04:41
But it's now in her case, it's a little different than Ron DeSantis.
I mean, she's just straight up corrupt, actually.
I mean, this is a person who left her time at the UN in debt, spending money she didn't have.
She feigns being an accountant.
She never passed the CPA exam and apparently doesn't know how to balance her own personal checkbooks if she's leaving in debt from her time at the UN, but then becomes a multi-millionaire.
How?
Military contractor, board of Boeing, which is a different kind of military contractor, speaking fees at secretive actors that, you know, likely, for all we know, she hasn't disclosed the military contractors' clients overlap with them, has collected corporate stock options in the middle of a presidential campaign, which as far as I know is unprecedented, and suddenly a multimillionaire.
It's not that different than Biden, who gets a $5 million bribe by way of his son from Ukraine to send $200 billion of our taxpayer money to Ukraine.
You got a Republican version of the same thing.
And, you know, there are certain reasons why political consultants will tell you not to go after Nikki Haley about that, who brings full circle back to identity politics.
Interesting how that works for a party that's supposedly against identity politics.
But I don't care for that stuff.
Facts are facts and they deserve to be called out.
And this, you know, this individual is fundamentally corrupt and represents the face of the military industrial complex, has made a lot of money off of war, the prospect of war.
And these are not the people you should want deciding whether to send your kids to go die in somebody else's war.
And yet, that's what the corporate media has decided is their newly chosen puppet.
So, you know, it does give me a greater sense of purpose to make sure I'm successful in this race.
It is increasingly challenging when the corporate media, I mean, there's one thing that I thought I was hitting the third rail.
Dave, a few years ago, when I was writing Woke Inc. and some of these identity issues, I was not anywhere close to the third rail, actually.
I was defecting from, I was, you know, third rail within corporate America, maybe, but not for the media.
It was, it was perfectly fine.
The real third rail is foreign policy.
If you abandon the hegemon role, if you abandon the liberal hegemony, neoconservative vision, that's when you're touching that third rail.
And that, you know, makes it doubly difficult for a political candidate like me.
It's why we want freedom-loving people to, you know, support us as a grassroots movement lifting this up, because that's what's going to take a reformation in the Republican Party that's not organically going to happen.
But, you know, I say just at least, forget even giving the money, at least sign the pledge.
Go to the website, avoid World War III.
Pretty simple.
War should be a necessity, not a preference.
And the job of a U.S. policymaker is to advance U.S. interests.
Everybody who works in my administration is going to have to sign that pledge.
At least everybody in an appointment position, it'll be a litmus test for saying whether you're an appropriate appointment in my administration or not.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Well, let me ask you, because, okay, so speaking of third rails, let's get a little bit dangerously close to one.
I'll try my best to not get you electrocuted.
But speaking of third rails, while certainly, and I have publicly called out some of these left-wing protesters, you know, like there was one group at college, at some college, I think it was at Georgetown, and they were chanting, you know, they have tanks, we have hang gliders, glory to the resistance fighters.
And I'm like, what are you doing?
I think it's idiotic.
It's wrong.
It's offensive.
However, you know, so like, okay, so those people, you're like, this is just, what do you, you lost your humanity?
You're rooting for the people who like killed innocent civilians.
This is insane.
Okay.
So there are some anything where there's left-wing people protesting it, there's going to be some stupid stuff mixed in.
Sensible Response to Atrocity00:07:58
Yeah.
However, look, it was both Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul have referred to Gaza as an open-air prison.
There are lots of intellectuals on the left who have made very strong cases.
And there's just lots of people in general who have pointed out that, look, while clearly there is, there are issues with radical Islam and with terrorism, that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people has been, let's just say, horrifically unfair for a very long time.
And I wonder, how do you feel about some of these figures?
And I mean, like, I like protection to right-wingers that like Pat Buchanan said it and Ron Paul said it.
So this doesn't make you a left-winger to maybe like acknowledge some of this.
I agree with you on the policy and I give you a lot of credit for being like, I believe the only major party non-interventionist on this topic.
That's what really matters is that we're together, that America shouldn't be involved in these conflicts.
But I did see you had that treat that tweet where you were saying something along the lines of like, Israel has a right to do whatever they want.
Israel wants to.
So my view is this, because I'm running for U.S. president.
I'm not running to be God.
Sure.
God will judge you on your morality in the afterlife or whatever, depending on what your belief system is, whatever speaks to you.
I'm not running for God.
I'm not running for president of the world.
I'm not running for Secretary General of the UN.
The UN is a broken institution and I think has good reasons not to exist.
But my view is this, and I say why I'm not running for UN is the UN is trying to make proclamations on this stuff.
I don't think it's helpful.
I don't think it's useful.
I think the Secretary General of the UN is a joke.
So I don't want to commit the same mistakes.
I mean, think about Russia, Ukraine.
Think about the Middle East.
Think about Armenia Azerbaijan.
There's a lot of long history that most people in the U.S. and even most people in other parts of the world don't have the first clue about, let alone trying to get through adjudicating all of it.
So my view is this.
I'm in the humble role of running for a narrow position called president of the United States.
And so I do have a clear-sighted view of what I'm going to be doing in that position, which is to make sure that we stay the hell out.
So what have I said is if Israel determines what it needs to in its own national self-defense to exist, and I do believe Israel has the right to exist.
Sure.
I actually believe it.
I believe the founding vision of Israel is a beautiful thing, actually.
And I think it is fair.
This is now me as a human being, not as a U.S. president.
But I think it is correct that the Jewish people have one state dedicated to their sanctuary place where they're able to go after the aftermath of the Holocaust and otherwise, to say this one little strip of land that in the Jewish religion was promised by God to Abraham, that the Jewish people get to live there.
I think that that is reasonable.
I think that Israel has established that nation on the premise that it has a right to defend itself to the fullest.
So my view is I'm not meddling in either direction.
Israel has the right to defend itself.
Further, I would even go so far as the U.S. is an ally of Israel and vice versa.
We provide diplomatic cover from the U.N. or anybody else intervening and getting in the way.
But we stay the heck out and let Israel get its own job of national self-defense done.
Okay, so I think I get your point.
So I'm with you on the we stay out.
But then it seems to me like there's a little bit of a contradiction between saying it like, look, if I ask you about their treatment of the Palestinian people, you're like, well, look, I'm the American president.
I don't need to make proclamations about this.
But you are making proclamations about the Israeli side and saying they have a right to exist.
Well, I think that we can open up a whole can of worms here, which we can do briefly.
We can briefly do, which is 22 Arab countries.
What is their responsibility to actually take on Gazans?
What's Egypt's responsibilities?
We can go down that road.
But my point is as a policymaker, that's not my job.
But it's not your job to compare it to Munich either.
And so my point is...
Well, no, no, no, but you look at what I actually said.
I said, if Israel decide that's what it wants to do, we're not going to get in their way.
I'm not making recommendations to Israel.
These are questions for Israel to decide.
And I'm not going to get in their way.
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Okay, fine.
But then I guess it leads to the question in my mind that when we say Israel has a right to exist, but like, and defend themselves, then people will raise the question, well, do the Palestinians have a right to exist and to defend themselves?
And in a sense, one could argue that if you're talking about, hey, if Israel decides to go Munich, well, then, hey, you know, we're not going to be able to do that.
And what does going Munich mean, to be clear, is actually a far more contained version than involving the deaths of civilians.
That's a targeted operation for the individuals who are responsible for a killing, right?
So even if you're thinking about that.
Because it involves the death of innocent civilians.
But my, my question is, there's a lot of, I mean, there's bombings are one track and assassinations of the leaders of Hamas are another, right?
Yes, fair enough.
But I guess it's just, in a sense, people wonder, it's like, well, if Israel has a right to do whatever they want in response, then isn't that kind of the same justification that the people who are celebrating the Hamas attack are using saying, hey, we're under siege here.
We have a right to do whatever we can to respond.
Now, I don't agree with that.
I think that killing innocent people is wrong whenever you do it.
And so let's say that.
So look, I think we have international.
Now we get into the territory of having a limited domain of international law for a reason, right?
So there's international law.
There are bodies that are limited set up.
I reject a lot of the premise of the UN's expansionism or otherwise, but in the limited context, we have treaty-based international law and we measure the actions of nations defending themselves against that international law.
But I'm not, as U.S. president, the chair of the International Court of Justice or whatever, right?
And so I come back to the point that I believe that if there's a range of options that Israel wants to pursue for its own national self-defense, that's Israel's call to make, not ours.
I, like you, have some concerns that Israel itself is not even going to be successful in accomplishing its own objectives with a prolonged ground invasion in Gaza, which may risk making some of the same mistakes we've made in our own country in the aftermath of 9-11.
I have concerns that this idea of eliminating Hamas is not really coherent when you think of Hamas itself as an outgrowth of what the Palestinian people elected.
So this gets complicated quickly, but it's not our job to be adjudicating this.
So that's what I say.
And so I think that that is a deeply pro-Israel, Israel-friendly view.
Not all people who consider themselves pro-Israel agree with me on that.
Sure.
But that's okay.
I'm not running to be president of Israel.
It's a reasonable debate to be had whether that's a pro-Israel view or not.
I think it is.
But I'm running for president of the United States.
And all I would say is that I think a sensible approach for Israel to pursue, they don't require my permission on this.
They don't require U.S. or UN or EU permission on this, but I think a sensible approach could be, as I laid out, aggressively take out the top hundred in Hamas, which was responsible for committing that atrocity and achieves a deterrent effect for the future.
Use the resources saved from a broader war in actually achieving border security, which was badly missing in this instance.
I think that could actually be a very sensible way for Israel to go.
But my opinion need not matter in that dispute.
That's Israel's decision to make, not ours.
And I think that that represents both David respects both David Ben-Gurion's founding view for Israel, but more importantly for me, respects George Washington's 1796 view that we should not intervene in foreign conflicts that don't directly relate to the American interest while respecting our allies diplomatically and providing them the diplomatic support to do what they need to do.
Danger in Releasing Secrets00:07:01
Yeah.
So that I completely agree with.
And to be honest, I think if we had had a series of presidents who had that position over the last 50 years, I think the situation would be much, much better over everybody.
Exactly.
All right, listen, before I let you go, I want to completely switch gears because there's just one more topic that I wanted to get your take on because I know you were kind of one of the leading advocates for the release of this transgender mass shooters manifesto that evidently just came out.
This was months ago.
When was this that this happened?
It was quite a while ago.
I mean, this was like early this year.
And then I went in the spring of this year or in the early summer to say, why the heck haven't they done what they do in every one of these cases, which is release it with the city?
Yeah, they always.
They always put the manifesto out right away.
There's this one mass shooting of a transgender individual who killed a bunch of people and then committed to the school.
At a Christian school.
At a Christian school.
It was one of the strangest reactions by the corporate press because they almost immediately pivoted to like transphobia.
Yep.
And almost like, I don't want to overstate it, but we're almost kind of at least signing with this shooter.
Like not that they were agreeing with what the shooter did, but they weren't.
Well, they did.
I can tell you specifically how they did because they were covering the protests at the state legislature where people showed up and cited the number of victims.
And it was not only the number of people that had been killed, but also the shooter who themselves was shot in the middle of the rampage as a victim of that day.
Right.
And so that became part of the narrative.
Yeah, that's right.
Right.
So absolutely they were siding in part with this perpetrator.
And I do want to preface this by saying I do not get into the game of blaming any political ideology for a crazy person doing something in the name of that political ideology.
That's ridiculous.
Like I think we should abolish the IRS.
I talk about it all the time.
But if someone goes and shoots up a whole bunch of IRS agents and they're like, I listened to Dave's podcast.
I don't think I'm responsible for that.
I never advocated anyone do anything violent or something.
And so this happens all the time.
You would advocate that they not do it.
Yes.
Let me be clear, especially for any family.
I advocate you do not.
I advocate you do not use violence against any government officials or private individuals.
But it's clear why this one was downplayed because the corporate press will use those tactics anytime they can paint someone as a right-winger, even if they're not.
They will blame folks news and right-wing commentators for this violence that's happening.
If you haven't seen the manifesto, the long of the short is that it was clearly, it was all woke.
I'm going to get rid of these cisgender white people and blah, blah, blah and all that type of stuff.
I think you used the word crackers in there a couple of times.
Yeah.
So I think it's interesting.
My number one takeaway from it is, I mean, this is like a deranged person, psychiatrically ill.
So I, like you, don't want to make the same mistake that the other side makes by pouncing on the particulars here of blaming somebody who also said the same things, but say they're responsible.
I don't want to do that.
But what I will make is a more basic observation.
There's nothing in here that should have stopped them from releasing it.
Okay.
And I know this because I went to Nashville to call for the public release.
I just think a government that tells the truth to its people is a precondition for having trust in a society.
Okay.
And what I was told was, no, no, no, it's not what you think.
There's some, there's some things in there that really shouldn't be released to the public.
Like sort of a like there's something else, as though there's like detailed plans that somebody else could act on and execute.
Like nobody told me that expressly, but from the ambiance amongst the police to people who were affiliated with the school and otherwise, it was like, no, no, no, trust us.
We've seen it.
And there's something in there.
You just, it's not good to have this released.
I didn't believe them at the time because I'm over people making those kinds of arguments to me, but there might have been a phase in my life where I did.
And I think there's a lot of other people who would.
Now that we see it released, there's nothing in there that would have created a clear and present danger to anybody else.
It was just political defense.
And that fact itself, and I don't know the circumstances by which it was released.
My sense is it was leaked.
Not that it was a formal release.
So you may know more about the facts of this than me.
But the fact that they tried not to release it as I think the most damning thing about it, because it's one thing I still am an absolutist on government transparency would generally come up on the side of saying release it anyway.
We can handle the hard truth.
But let's say it contains something in there about some other person or target, which then puts some other individual at a home address that's doxxed in danger.
In my views, you can always redact these things.
But at least let's say it was that.
Then I would understand that's what the people were thinking about when they said that they didn't want this released.
None of that's in there.
It's literally just political drivel against, you know, against cisgender white people.
And they were clearly protecting that narrative when they were trying to squat on this and claim some sort of security, clear and present danger vibes as their basis for doing it, which was a lie.
And I say to somebody who went to Nashville and got those vibes as the reason why I shouldn't call for this, that's disgusting.
And I think that it's bad when Republicans do it.
It's bad when Democrats do it.
And I see in some ways the post-9-11, you know, Dick Cheney neocon view is now accepted by the left of accepting sort of what the government can and tell its people.
And it's become kind of a bipartisan consensus that I think is a real danger to our republic.
And this is just the latest symptomatic example of it that we saw in action.
Yeah.
No, I completely agree with all of that.
All right.
Vivek Ramas20, always a pleasure talking to you.
What do you got coming up next?
And where can people go support you?
Yeah.
So, you know, people go to Vivek2024.com and support us in every which way.
But I want to get people at least on board with the message we're sending between now and December 7th.
December 7th is the date that the U.S. entered World War II to commemorate the fact that we will not enter World War III.
No to neocons.com.
That's the website.
No to neocons.com.
And sign that pledge and get that going between now and December 7th.
And we will send a powerful message by December 7th, which is to say the date we enter World War II, we will not be entering World War III.