Part Of The Problem - Dave Smith - Vivek Ramaswamy Heads To Iowa
Aired: 2024-01-04
Duration: 48:37


=== Painful Republican Primary Dynamics (10:43) ===

[00:00:08]  We need to roll back the state.
[00:00:10]  We spy on all of our own citizens.
[00:00:12]  Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
[00:00:16]  If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
[00:00:21]  Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
[00:00:26]  You're listening to part of the problem on the gas digital network.
[00:00:33]  What's up, everybody?
[00:00:34]  Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
[00:00:36]  Very happy to be joined once again by Vivek Ramaswamy, who is, let's just say, for the rest of his life, whenever he goes to Iowa, he's not going to need GPS anymore.
[00:00:47]  He's going to know his way around there.
[00:00:48]  How are you, sir?
[00:00:49]  Good to see you again.
[00:00:50]  It's good to see you, man.
[00:00:51]  I could share some embarrassing stats about that.
[00:00:54]  I sometimes need GPS even in Ohio, but that's just because we've all become addicted to it.
[00:00:58]  So I'll probably need it in Iowa, but we've spent a lot of time here.
[00:01:01]  Yeah, fair enough.
[00:01:02]  Well, I know you've been all over the place there.
[00:01:04]  It's kind of, it's really something.
[00:01:06]  This is a presidential primary season that I think is unlike anyone that I've ever lived through.
[00:01:15]  There's so many different factors.
[00:01:16]  And we're less than two weeks away now from the Iowa caucuses.
[00:01:21]  What's it been like?
[00:01:23]  And just you say a president primary like you've never seen.
[00:01:26]  I think we ain't seen nothing yet compared to what's coming in the next six months, I believe, in ways that could be good and bad both.
[00:01:36]  But anyway, put that to one side.
[00:01:38]  It's been a heck of an experience from a personal perspective.
[00:01:41]  The best part about this process is meeting actual people without screens or TV or media intermediation of it.
[00:01:49]  I'm going to have done, I think, close to 330 events, actually over 330 events in Iowa before the Iowa caucus on January 15th.
[00:01:58]  And that doesn't count our other events across the country.
[00:02:01]  I actually love it.
[00:02:02]  I mean, people call it a grueling schedule.
[00:02:04]  Sometimes there's 10 events a day or whatnot.
[00:02:06]  That's probably been my favorite part of the process.
[00:02:09]  I don't enjoy giving a stump speech over and over again.
[00:02:12]  And so that part's like, okay, I've kind of migrated away from that.
[00:02:16]  But just having open and unfiltered conversations with actual people who are coming with thoughtful questions, it's been pretty awesome, actually.
[00:02:24]  And so to do it with our family as well, I mean, my wife is a hero.
[00:02:28]  She's a throat surgeon who takes care of cancer survivors and helps them swallow in the surgery as she does.
[00:02:34]  But she's taken an immense amount of time while keeping her full-time job doing this with me, dragging our two kids along.
[00:02:41]  And, you know, I'd like to think they're having some fun with it too.
[00:02:44]  It's been, you know, it's been a blessing of an experience, to be really honest with you about it.
[00:02:49]  Now, what comes of it, we're going to find out in the next, in the next couple of weeks.
[00:02:53]  I think we're going to deliver a major surprise, but no point in speculating about that.
[00:02:57]  I'd rather preserve the surprise for January 15th.
[00:03:00]  Yeah.
[00:03:00]  By the way, I've seen your wife has done a few interviews.
[00:03:03]  She's a sharp lady too, because usually when...
[00:03:06]  She's smarter than I am.
[00:03:08]  Usually when like they're interviewing a candidate's wife, it'll just be kind of like, you know, questions about like, I don't know, what kind of roses are you going to plant?
[00:03:14]  Like at the thing, they're like throwing gotcha questions at her.
[00:03:16]  And then she's like doing circles around them.
[00:03:18]  So I've enjoyed some of those out of her, like, what kind of roses are you going to, but I'm pretty sure she would just like get out of her seat and slap them.
[00:03:25]  She's not a violent person, but metaphorically, that's what she would do.
[00:03:28]  She is a, she's going to be a badass first lady.
[00:03:31]  I'll tell you that.
[00:03:31]  Yeah, no, that's, that's for sure.
[00:03:33]  It's just kind of different.
[00:03:34]  I don't know.
[00:03:35]  You know, I haven't seen too many times where it's like the candidate's wife who is actually like someone who's very formidable herself.
[00:03:42]  So that was kind of, that was kind of cool.
[00:03:44]  I appreciated that.
[00:03:45]  I do think, to your point, I think some of the best videos that have come out of your campaign have just been the videos that have been going viral of you with voters, like them asking you pointed questions and you actually having really good answers for them.
[00:03:58]  And the ones on the internet, Dave, it's like a tiny fraction of like the total.
[00:04:01]  That's just like every day, actually, which I love.
[00:04:04]  Sometimes there'll be a protester coming into an event.
[00:04:06]  A lot of these don't even get caught on video, but you'll sort of have somebody else who's who's challenging me from something they've heard that somebody else said about me and actually sort out that process.
[00:04:16]  Or yesterday, we had a guy who wore a Trump 2024 hat and he came to one of my events.
[00:04:21]  And, you know, sometimes I like to have fun with the audience too.
[00:04:23]  I kind of, I kind of poke some fun at him.
[00:04:25]  It was like a blatant Trump 2024.
[00:04:27]  And I call him out.
[00:04:28]  And then he comes back.
[00:04:29]  I said, hey, I said, I noticed you're wearing the hat of the other guy in this.
[00:04:31]  And he says, no, I'm actually supporting you, but I wear the hat because of what it symbolizes.
[00:04:36]  And that was interesting.
[00:04:37]  That caught my attention.
[00:04:38]  And we had a pretty deep conversation on the back of that.
[00:04:41]  It's just daily.
[00:04:42]  That's what been the best part of this process, especially been a guy as a CEO of a biotech company and I've built companies.
[00:04:50]  It's a totally different experience than actually having all of the filters taken off and having raw and open conversations with people who generally come to these events.
[00:04:59]  They tend to be the people who are very thoughtful and care about the future direction of the country to take time out of a Saturday afternoon or a Tuesday evening to come show up to a two-hour event and ask questions of a candidate.
[00:05:11]  It's been a pretty good part of this process and I'm enjoying it.
[00:05:14]  Well, so one of the, and that's very interesting that that little anecdote about the guy wearing the Trump hat, because it does symbolize something kind of bigger.
[00:05:21]  And this is something we've been talking about on the show a lot, where there's this very strange dynamic to this race, which is that you have the former president of the United States of America, who is the frontrunner in the polls right now, but he hasn't been to any of the debates.
[00:05:35]  It's kind of almost like he decided he's not participating in this kind of part of the primary.
[00:05:41]  And then you've been in this position of, in many ways, representing kind of the America first position.
[00:05:48]  I'm not saying you're the same as Donald Trump.
[00:05:50]  And I think actually you've had a lot of criticisms of Donald Trump in your books and stuff like that.
[00:05:54]  And I think we could probably sit here for a while and talk about all the things in 2020 that Donald Trump should have done that he didn't do in terms of like getting rid of Fauci and not, you know, supporting lockdowns and this stuff.
[00:06:05]  But it has been an interesting dynamic where you're kind of representing the, in many ways, maybe the next generation of that kind of spirit of like a repudiation of the Republican establishment, a repudiation of the kind of idea that we ought to be this empire involved everywhere in the world and kind of prioritize that over getting our own country together, which is, you know, going through some pretty serious challenges.
[00:06:30]  So that's a very interesting dynamic in this primary.
[00:06:33]  I think it's an interesting dynamic in part because there's a deep divide in searching for what the Republican Party is or will be in the future.
[00:06:41]  I mean, I think that's a big part of what's at stake in this primary.
[00:06:45]  And I think there's a lot of people that want to bring back Dick Cheney 2.0.
[00:06:48]  I think that is still where a majority of the Republican establishment actually is, the overwhelming majority of it.
[00:06:54]  And I think that there's a divide between a managerial class within an institution, in this case, the Republican Party, and the people who consider themselves to be represented by that same party.
[00:07:05]  So that's what makes one of this things that makes this primary all that fascinating and precisely because Donald Trump hasn't been present.
[00:07:11]  You know, I think it's made my, I would say, head-on sparring with the other candidates on some of these issues that much more important.
[00:07:19]  I agree with Donald Trump on probably about 90% of policies.
[00:07:23]  There are the 10% where we disagree.
[00:07:25]  And that's maybe a discussion for a later phase in this race, if it gets down to being between me and him.
[00:07:31]  But 90%, by and large, I agree with him on policy.
[00:07:34]  And even the areas where we disagree, I at least respect and understand where he's coming from on most of it.
[00:07:39]  But I think part of what this is also about is really a divide between the managerial class and the citizen.
[00:07:46]  I mean, I think that the swamp, it doesn't just exist in Washington, D.C.
[00:07:50]  I think it's increasingly crystal clear to me.
[00:07:53]  The swamp exists within the Republican Party.
[00:07:55]  And the dynamic of this race, if you're to really, it's what you asked me about, let me just tell you flat out what I think the most important dynamic is this year.
[00:08:03]  I think the system is not going to let Donald Trump get anywhere near the White House.
[00:08:08]  I just don't think that's going to happen.
[00:08:10]  I think that it's sad.
[00:08:11]  I am fighting against it tooth and nail every way I can.
[00:08:14]  I've said I would remove myself from the ballots of Maine and Colorado or any other state that removes Trump from the ballot.
[00:08:20]  That's the best I can do.
[00:08:21]  Called on every other Republican to do the same thing.
[00:08:24]  which if you think about it, if every other Republican did do it, that would actually solve the problem because then they couldn't, that would nullify any state that tried to nullify one of the candidates.
[00:08:33]  Unfortunately, you have a collective action problem where the Ron DeSantises and the Nikki Haleys and the Chris Christie's of the world are worried about, in their language, collecting delegates.
[00:08:42]  But that being said, I'm going to do everything I can to stand against this.
[00:08:45]  I'm against these politicized prosecutions.
[00:08:47]  I filed a freaking FOIA request against the Biden DOJ for what Biden told Jack Smith and what Merrick Garland told Jack Smith.
[00:08:54]  I'm doing everything I can.
[00:08:56]  But I think if we open our eyes and see the truth, if you think they're going to let this man at this point, having opened your eyes to the last nine months, and you still think they're going to let this man get anywhere near the White House, I'd encourage you to actually open your eyes.
[00:09:12]  I think that this system, these people will stop at nothing.
[00:09:16]  And increasingly, Dave, I'm convinced they will stop at nothing to keep this man away from the White House.
[00:09:21]  They want to narrow this down to be a two-horse race between basically Donald Trump and their chosen puppet.
[00:09:28]  I have a view on who that is.
[00:09:29]  And it's, I used to think it was going to be Gavin Newsom or Michelle Obama.
[00:09:32]  It's not.
[00:09:33]  It's actually within our own party.
[00:09:35]  Get Trump out of the way and then trot out Dick Cheney 2.0 in the White House.
[00:09:38]  That's what you want.
[00:09:39]  You think it's Nikki Haley?
[00:09:41]  I do.
[00:09:42]  Yeah.
[00:09:42]  Well, I think that she's actually a far more convenient puppet than either Biden or Newsom or anybody else from the left, because then the permanent state gets to actually shed its otherwise accusation of partisanship.
[00:09:57]  They'll say, oh, no, there's not a partisanship.
[00:09:58]  They support.
[00:09:59]  There's these people, Larry Fink or Reid Hoffman, the people who are wanting to keep Trump off the ballot, the kings of the woke industrial complex.
[00:10:07]  They say, no, no, no, we're not left-wingers.
[00:10:09]  We're supporting a Republican.
[00:10:10]  Well, it gives them the same air cover, the perfect air cover that they need.
[00:10:15]  But actually, if you double click on it, Nikki Haley's a far better vessel for advancing their agendas than even Joe Biden.
[00:10:21]  If you think about keeping the pro-war machine humming, Nikki Haley's far better bet for that than Joe Biden is.
[00:10:26]  And Joe Biden's have been a pretty darn good bet so far, at least in Ukraine and elsewhere.
[00:10:31]  But Nikki Haley's far better at that agenda, if that's what your priority is.
[00:10:35]  Same thing with respect to the censorship industrial complex in the name of national security.
[00:10:39]  It's the Dick Cheney playbook all over again.
[00:10:41]  Tie your social media accounts to your government-issued ID.
[00:10:44]  Yeah, I think people want the Dick Cheney 2.0 version of the Republican Party.
[00:10:48]  Keep in mind, that wasn't Joe Biden.
[00:10:50]  That was the Republican Party in the post-9-11 era.

=== The Dick Cheney Playbook Returns (14:46) ===

[00:10:52]  If you ought to bring that back, it's a much better vehicle.
[00:10:55]  Nikki Haley offers you a much better vehicle.
[00:10:56]  All you got to do is cut her family in on the rake a little bit.
[00:10:58]  She'll do whatever you need her to.
[00:11:00]  That's actually what's going on.
[00:11:02]  And it's hiding in plain sight.
[00:11:04]  And one of the things that I think is, frankly, painful for me to watch is much of our Republican base fall for that trick in plain sight.
[00:11:14]  Don't be duped by it.
[00:11:16]  I think many people will say, okay, well, if I'm 90% aligned with Trump and I respect Donald Trump's contributions to this country, as I do, I've been more vocal about that than any other candidate in this race.
[00:11:25]  Then why don't you drop out and support him?
[00:11:27]  Open your eyes, people.
[00:11:28]  They are selling us the rope today that they will use to hang us tomorrow.
[00:11:33]  That's the trap they've laid.
[00:11:34]  And the question is, do we fall into it or not?
[00:11:36]  And I'm in this to make sure that we don't.
[00:11:38]  I'm not a passive bystander.
[00:11:40]  I'm here to make sure that that trick doesn't work.
[00:11:42]  And, you know, I think it's going to be, for better or worse, let's just call it a very interesting year ahead.
[00:11:49]  I'm worried about what it portends for our country, but I'm in this for our country to make sure that we're not skating on thin ice that actually cracks to its breaking point.
[00:11:58]  And that's what I worry is at stake.
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[00:13:15]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:13:16]  You know, one of the things, you know, there's like the QAnon conspiracy stuff online, which the corporate media loves to use to hit every Republican.
[00:13:23]  Oh, you're another QAnon supporter.
[00:13:25]  But if you've ever actually seen, they're a small group.
[00:13:27]  They have some wild conspiracies.
[00:13:28]  The thing that pisses me off about them the most is not that like whatever, if you believe in some conspiracy, whatever, it's not as bad as the corporate press's conspiracy.
[00:13:37]  I think it needs to rush, you know, agent or whatever.
[00:13:41]  But almost the problem in their view is that it always involved this conspiracy when then like, and then this hero is going to rise from the ashes and save us.
[00:13:50]  And then Trump will be reinstalled.
[00:13:52]  And then, and, and you're just like, first off, they've been saying for, I think he was supposed to be reinstalled three years ago or something.
[00:13:57]  But it's like, no, look, if your position here is that they stole the election from Donald Trump in 2020, well, Donald Trump was the sitting president of the United States of America in 2020.
[00:14:07]  He doesn't have that power now.
[00:14:09]  And it's very clear that the with the justice system being weaponized against him, with the deep state being weaponized against him, they are sending a signal that we will not allow this man to be president again.
[00:14:23]  Sending a signal, Dave, is an understatement.
[00:14:25]  That's right.
[00:14:25]  Look at this.
[00:14:26]  I mean, last time it was a man-made pandemic, big tech suppression and algorithmic exploitation of the entire electoral process, let alone you could talk about the rest of the election conduct.
[00:14:37]  If you think that was last time around, this time they start with the protests, then they start with the civil suits, then they start with the state level prosecution in New York, then they start with multiple federal prosecutions, one federal prosecution, then multiple federal prosecutions.
[00:14:49]  Now without legal process at all, just removing them from ballots.
[00:14:52]  And that's just 2023.
[00:14:55]  Ratchet that up.
[00:14:56]  What do you think is next?
[00:14:57]  Do the math, people.
[00:14:59]  The system has made, they're not sending a signal.
[00:15:02]  They have made crystal clear blaring sirens in your face.
[00:15:06]  And so I guess the thought experiment I'd ask people to do, Dave, is maybe this might be a little bit clearer for some people.
[00:15:12]  I don't know, is just for a second, something that I do is, you know, so I do this, and I've run my businesses and we're going and embarking on something.
[00:15:21]  We'll do what we call a pre-mortem.
[00:15:23]  People talk about a post-mortem, they look at something that undesirable that happened and then analyze it to prevent it from happening in the future.
[00:15:29]  One of the ways I've led my businesses is let's do a pre-mortem.
[00:15:32]  Imagine that whatever plan we have goes wrong.
[00:15:34]  What are you going to be saying 12 or 14 or 24 or 36 months from now, looking back and saying what went wrong to get us there?
[00:15:43]  Well, let's do a little bit of that exercise here.
[00:15:46]  Fast forward just to January of 2025, okay, when the next president or being inaugurated or after the election and before the inauguration.
[00:15:56]  Do you think you're going to look back and say if Trump was eliminated from contention in some way?
[00:16:01]  Do you think you're going to say, oh, that was a shock?
[00:16:03]  What was I thinking?
[00:16:04]  I fell for that.
[00:16:06]  And now we're looking at whoever else it is, whichever puppet they're trotting out trying to get them inaugurated.
[00:16:11]  Do you think you're going to say, oh, that was a shock?
[00:16:12]  That was surprising.
[00:16:13]  We didn't see that coming.
[00:16:14]  Or do you think you're going to say at that point in time, what the hell were we thinking?
[00:16:17]  And how did we let that happen in this country?
[00:16:20]  I think that you will look back and be saying the latter.
[00:16:22]  Well, let's not do that.
[00:16:24]  Let's opt for a path that allows us to take our America first movement to the next level.
[00:16:31]  In some of the ways, you look at the differences between Donald Trump and myself.
[00:16:34]  I respect the hell out of Trump's contributions to this country.
[00:16:36]  I want to take them further in many of the cases.
[00:16:38]  I believe that we do need a national identity that we're missing in this country.
[00:16:42]  I do believe that we should shut down 75% of federal bureaucrats, send them packing home.
[00:16:48]  I do believe we need to shut down agencies.
[00:16:50]  I want to reform the FBI or the Department of Education.
[00:16:53]  I want to shut them down, return the money to the people of this country.
[00:16:56]  So I want to go further in many cases than Donald Trump did.
[00:16:59]  Begin with where he left off.
[00:17:01]  Give him credit for what he did.
[00:17:02]  He deserves it for this country, but take that agenda to the next level.
[00:17:06]  But first of all, we have to open our eyes to the traps they've actually laid for us in the year that this election is going to be decided to say, you don't want to be looking back a year from now and saying, how did I actually fall into that trap?
[00:17:18]  And yet, that's where I see a majority of the Republican electorate actually is.
[00:17:22]  Believing on one hand, that there's, I think, correctly, a plot to effectively stave off the outcome that many Americans want, which is Donald Trump to be the next president, yet acknowledging that somehow the system isn't going to succeed in doing that when many people acknowledge that's exactly what the system did in 2020.
[00:17:38]  You got to actually use logic to skate to where the puck is going.
[00:17:42]  The other side is always one step ahead.
[00:17:44]  I feel like our side is always a half step behind.
[00:17:47]  Let's actually step it up, understand where this plot leads, and then do the right thing for the country starting now.
[00:17:54]  Yeah.
[00:17:55]  You know, there was this, there was this interview that Trump had with Maria Bertaramo.
[00:18:00]  This is several months back, but I thought it was a really interesting, one of, one of Donald Trump's most interesting interviews.
[00:18:06]  I'm not sure if you saw this, but so she basically said to him at one point, she was like, well, look, you know, you said you were going to drain the swamp.
[00:18:13]  And we got to admit, the swamp isn't drained, right?
[00:18:16]  There's still a swamp in Washington, D.C.
[00:18:18]  And he kind of had a moment of humility, which is rare for Donald Trump.
[00:18:22]  And he was kind of like, well, look, I'd only been to Washington, D.C. a handful of times before I got in there.
[00:18:27]  I kind of didn't know what I was dealing with.
[00:18:29]  And one of the things, and maybe this falls into the 10%, like where you were saying the 90% that you agree with Donald Trump on, but I think one of the things that really, my favorite thing about your campaign is kind of the comment you just alluded to there when you talk about cutting 75% of bureaucrats, these kind of like drastic cuts in the managerial state in government spending.
[00:18:48]  And I think, obviously, I'm a little biased here because I'm a hardcore libertarian, but I do think that one of the elements that was always missing from the America First movement was tying like this concept of drain the swamp to like, well, what would that actually look like?
[00:19:04]  What would you actually need to do to drain the swamp?
[00:19:06]  And I know that Nikki Haley will on occasion say, I'm for small government, you know, like the way every Republican ever has said, but there's a difference between just every Republican ever who says, I'm for small government, and then always increases the size and scope of government and actually doesn't understand it.
[00:19:20]  Right.
[00:19:20]  And actually saying, no, listen, this is what it is.
[00:19:23]  It's, we're spending six plus trillion dollars a year.
[00:19:25]  This is a giant honeypot where money is extracted from the American people and going to politically connected people.
[00:19:31]  That's the corruption.
[00:19:32]  That's the swamp.
[00:19:34]  If you want to drain the swamp, there's no way to do that without drastic cuts in government spending, drastic cuts in government bureaucracy.
[00:19:41]  And I will say, Donald Trump, I think, never made that connection.
[00:19:46]  I never really heard.
[00:19:47]  Just the other day, what did he say something about the FBI getting a new beautiful building?
[00:19:51]  You're like, man, you're going to build them a building.
[00:19:53]  These are the people who framed you for treason.
[00:19:56]  There's one answer for the FBI.
[00:19:57]  Shut it down.
[00:20:00]  There's a slogan that represents the way I'm going to govern this country.
[00:20:04]  It is those three words.
[00:20:06]  Shut it down.
[00:20:07]  You have Washington, D.C. that treats government shutdowns as though they're a bad thing.
[00:20:11]  I think done the right way, it's an absolutely good thing.
[00:20:13]  It's the necessary thing that we actually need for the country.
[00:20:15]  So let me just take this actually, because you're, you know, I mean, I appreciate that you're a thinker as well, comes at this from like, I think a synergistic angle, not exactly the same angle as me.
[00:20:25]  But we can actually have a conversation about like, what do these words mean?
[00:20:27]  America First, right?
[00:20:28]  We use words like this.
[00:20:29]  I'm an America first conservative.
[00:20:30]  What does that mean?
[00:20:31]  I don't think we ever paused to actually say what that means.
[00:20:34]  America First is not.
[00:20:36]  It cannot be whatever comes out of Donald Trump's mouth on a given day.
[00:20:38]  First of all, it will be a day and time where Donald Trump ceases to exist.
[00:20:41]  Second of all, that's not the basis for a movement.
[00:20:43]  A movement's grounded in principles.
[00:20:46]  I think about America First as a libertarian nationalist movement.
[00:20:50]  That's the way I would describe it.
[00:20:52]  Founded on two principles, two very simple principles.
[00:20:55]  Nothing I'm about to say is partisan.
[00:20:57]  They're two very simple ideas that I think every American should have the potential to agree with, actually.
[00:21:04]  The first is that the people who we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government.
[00:21:12]  And the second is that those people who we do elect to run the government, they owe one moral duty, and it is to the citizens of this country, not another one.
[00:21:24]  That's it.
[00:21:24]  I think that every American in this country, in principle, should be able to agree to those things.
[00:21:28]  The people who elect to run the government, we the people create a government that's accountable to us, not the other way around.
[00:21:32]  What does that mean?
[00:21:34]  That actually, actually, Dave, I might just say it's that one principle.
[00:21:37]  We the people create a government that's accountable to us, not the other way around.
[00:21:41]  What does that mean?
[00:21:41]  It means two things in practice.
[00:21:43]  The people who elect to run the government are the ones who run the government.
[00:21:46]  And the moral duty they owe is to the citizens of this country, not another one.
[00:21:49]  I think we as Americans can agree on those things.
[00:21:51]  So then now let's just look at the facts as it compares to those principles.
[00:21:55]  The people who elect to run the government, they're not the ones who are actually running the government.
[00:21:58]  It's the fourth branch of government, the administrative state.
[00:22:00]  They set the policy, they enforce the law, and in many cases, act as the jurist interpreting the law as well.
[00:22:05]  Judge, juror, executioner, prosecutor, all in one.
[00:22:09]  My answer is shut the administrative state down.
[00:22:12]  I think the administrative state, its existence, is itself unconstitutional.
[00:22:16]  And I think one of the differences between myself and Trump is I think Trump had the right intentions.
[00:22:22]  I think they duped him.
[00:22:24]  They told him you can't shut down.
[00:22:26]  For example, I'll give you one on civil service protection.
[00:22:28]  They told him you can't fire those civil service employees because those civil service employees enjoy civil service protections.
[00:22:36]  You can't fire somebody working at the, I don't know, FTC because they disagrees with your views on abortion, something like this.
[00:22:42]  Agree or not, that's what the law says.
[00:22:43]  But read the law.
[00:22:45]  It does not apply to mass firings, mass layoffs.
[00:22:50]  Mass firings are absolutely what I'm bringing to the DC bureaucracy.
[00:22:53]  Just as a thought experiment, I don't say it's going to go like this, but a thought experiment.
[00:22:57]  Day one, you could come in and say, if your social security number ends in an odd number, you're out.
[00:23:01]  If it's an even number, you're in.
[00:23:03]  On day two, the government will literally be half of its size.
[00:23:06]  The federal bureaucracy will be half of its size.
[00:23:08]  And yet not a thing is going to break, by the way.
[00:23:10]  Everything's going to function exactly as it did the day before.
[00:23:12]  The sun will still rise in the east and set in the west.
[00:23:15]  That's the kind of change we require, not only operationally and to move quickly and for effectiveness.
[00:23:20]  And I do think that if you're going to strike that swamp, it strikes back.
[00:23:23]  You got to move quickly.
[00:23:25]  It's also what the law requires, actually, because otherwise they're going to tell you it was political retaliation or civil rights violations for disparate impact, this or that.
[00:23:36]  No, large mass firings, you're clean.
[00:23:38]  Get that done right out of the gate.
[00:23:41]  And the second of those principles, okay, eventually we'll then thin that down.
[00:23:43]  We'll bring the chainsaw first.
[00:23:44]  We'll bring the chisel after that.
[00:23:46]  I'm going to make Javier Millay, I believe, look like a modern.
[00:23:49]  I love Javier Millay.
[00:23:50]  I think he's awesome.
[00:23:50]  I've been following his campaign for a long time.
[00:23:53]  We're going to put that on steroids in the United States of America.
[00:23:56]  And then you get to the second part of this, which is that those people who are elected to run the government, the ones who were left, they owe a moral duty to the citizens of this country, not another one.
[00:24:07]  It's not our job to manage somebody else's conflicts or be a global policeman somewhere else.
[00:24:11]  I think you and I can't remember.
[00:24:12]  I think we may have had an exchange on this where I think we had different points of view, but that's where I come out on some of the questions, you know, really in the Middle East or otherwise.
[00:24:19]  It's not our job to be policemen one way or another.
[00:24:22]  It's our job to look after the citizens of this country.
[00:24:25]  That's what I think America First stands for.
[00:24:28]  America First doesn't come with an asterisk.
[00:24:30]  America First comes with, yes, we have allies.
[00:24:32]  We stand for them diplomatically, just as we expect them to stand for us diplomatically.
[00:24:36]  And I think that's better for our allies, by the way, and it's better for us.
[00:24:39]  But the people we like to run the government run the government and they owe a moral duty to the citizens of this country, not another one.
[00:24:45]  And to me, that's America First.
[00:24:47]  It's not what comes out of my mouth or Donald Trump's mouth on a given day.
[00:24:49]  It's got to be anchored to the next 250 years of the direction of our country.
[00:24:54]  Yeah, I think, well, I think that's right.
[00:24:55]  And I think that it's, it's, that is the America First, like almost, as you said, the idea of putting your own country first, that should just be a given.
[00:25:04]  Like, obviously, it should be a given that the people who are elected by Americans, their first obligation is to Americans, but it's also really, it's, it's really the most conservative sentiment in the truest sense of American conservatives, American conservatism.
[00:25:19]  I mean, look, it was John Adams who said, and I'll butcher this a little bit, but it's one of the greatest quotes of all time, where he said, if we go around the world looking for monsters to destroy, we will become the dicatrice of the world, but we will lose control of our own soul.
[00:25:32]  We go not in search of monsters to destroy.
[00:25:34]  I think it was John Quincy Adams, actually, who said that.
[00:25:37]  Oh, yes.
[00:25:37]  Okay, mind, you're right.

=== Restoring Sanity to Women's Terms (02:07) ===

[00:25:38]  Yes.
[00:25:38]  This was, yes, this was.
[00:25:40]  Secretary of State.
[00:25:41]  Yeah, but you're totally right.
[00:25:42]  We go not in search of monsters to destroy.
[00:25:46]  And look at the state of the country.
[00:25:47]  I mean, look, it's not a coincidence that, look, during the Vietnam War is when you see the cultural revolution over the last 20 years of terror wars, look at what woke progressivism has become in this country.
[00:25:58]  And I think part of this kind of America first versus the establishment neoconservatism is this attempt for the right half of America to kind of figure out where we go from here.
[00:26:09]  And if you want to go the Nikki Haley direction, but like these things are very related.
[00:26:13]  If you want to go the Nikki Haley direction, you're also not going to get this culture like Rain did.
[00:26:17]  You're also not going to restore kind of like the American.
[00:26:20]  And I'm not even saying we have to restore some type of like 1950s.
[00:26:23]  Like you were just talking about your wife's a surgeon.
[00:26:25]  Like I'm not saying like women should be pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen or something like that.
[00:26:29]  I'm saying that we have to restore some type of sanity where like the term woman means something, you know, like I'm not, I'm not like putting it into a box of like old school or something, just something that is sustainable.
[00:26:41]  All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear, the underwear of legends.
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[00:27:34]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:27:36]  I think that follows from actually some basic rules of the road, right?
[00:27:39]  When you have the basic rules of the, you said the idea that the people who are elected to run this country are duty decisions of this country.
[00:27:45]  That's so basic.

=== Basic Rules of the Road (07:26) ===

[00:27:46]  So is the idea that the people who elect to run the government should be the ones who run the government.
[00:27:49]  And yet that's patently not the way it actually works today.
[00:27:52]  And so to me, my candidacy is based on those two simple principles.
[00:27:55]  That's it.
[00:27:56]  That's the ballgame.
[00:27:57]  If we do that, we get our own.
[00:28:00]  We get, first of all, instead of protecting somebody else's border halfway around the world, protect our own border right here in this country.
[00:28:06]  Instead of actually having a bureaucrat decide whether or not a particular educational policy should be the law of the land, vote for it through the front door.
[00:28:14]  And if not, give the money back to the people.
[00:28:15]  We don't need a Department of Education.
[00:28:17]  I'm pretty practical about this stuff.
[00:28:18]  And I think this is where I'm different than probably the entire rest of the Republican field, from Trump to DeSantis to anybody else.
[00:28:23]  I don't think we need an FBI.
[00:28:25]  In fact, I think we patently need to not have an FBI.
[00:28:30]  A book actually, my wife and I actually both, actually, Porva's the one who made her way through most of it, but I got enough of the bits and pieces of it that I took a lot away from it was G-Man.
[00:28:39]  Did you read this one by chance?
[00:28:40]  No.
[00:28:41]  You would love this book because it's really fundamentally about, it's about the FBI and the history of J. Edgar Hoover.
[00:28:48]  G-Man stands for government man.
[00:28:49]  But what it's really about is the tension between bureaucracy, technocracy, and self-governance.
[00:28:55]  And the FBI, its roots were fundamentally hostile to self-governance.
[00:29:01]  It's an organization, you know, you have some organizations that kind of lose their way over time.
[00:29:05]  I put the Department of Education in this category.
[00:29:07]  I don't think it should have been created in the first place, but at least it was created for making sure that southern states weren't misusing federal funds to divert them away from black school, predominantly black school districts and predominantly white ones.
[00:29:18]  Like that's where the Department of Education's origin was.
[00:29:20]  And then it lost its way into these toxic racial and gender ideologies that it's foisting onto our local schools using our money to do it.
[00:29:26]  But put that to one side, the FBI, it's been rotten since its inception and it was designed to actually be rotten to its core.
[00:29:34]  And so what you see today isn't any surprise.
[00:29:36]  It isn't a deviation from the purpose of the institution.
[00:29:38]  It's actually an instantiation of the purpose of the institution.
[00:29:42]  You cannot reform it.
[00:29:43]  Forget about building the new building.
[00:29:45]  Of course, that's a waste of time itself.
[00:29:47]  You have to shut it down.
[00:29:48]  Can't be, you know, DeSantis will, in a practiced way, and I love the way these people get trained, you know, okay, you got to be tough on the FBI.
[00:29:55]  Checkbox, that is what the Republican base is telling us.
[00:29:58]  So look into the camera with various levels of performative vigor and say, fire Christopher Wright.
[00:30:04]  And then like, pause.
[00:30:06]  That's one of these things these politicians do is that you do that.
[00:30:08]  And then there'll be the awkward one second where the audience doesn't know what they're supposed to do.
[00:30:12]  And then it's a full beat.
[00:30:13]  And then you realize, oh, the audience realized I'm supposed to applaud and you'll get some scattered applause to it.
[00:30:17]  Like that's what that looks like.
[00:30:18]  Fire Christopher Wray, pause.
[00:30:20]  And then, oh, I'm supposed to applaud.
[00:30:22]  And then people applaud.
[00:30:24]  That doesn't do anything, right?
[00:30:26]  You fire Christopher Wray, you get James Comey 2.0.
[00:30:28]  You're missing the point.
[00:30:30]  It's a rotten institution.
[00:30:32]  That's what actually you have to understand.
[00:30:33]  You have to gut the leviathan at its core.
[00:30:36]  And, you know, maybe some political person told me the other day not to use that word because people don't know what I'm talking about.
[00:30:42]  But whatever it is, it's the bureaucracy that actually we have to gut at its core.
[00:30:47]  Shut it down is the answer.
[00:30:49]  Now, is this impractical?
[00:30:50]  No, it's deeply practical.
[00:30:51]  There's 35,000 employees at the FBI.
[00:30:54]  20,000 of them are back office bureaucrats.
[00:30:57]  Send them packing.
[00:30:58]  Day one, gone.
[00:30:59]  Bye-bye.
[00:31:00]  Find honest work.
[00:31:01]  We're done with this.
[00:31:02]  J. Edgar Hoover, finally, may he may put, may we actually put the nail in that coffin.
[00:31:09]  Now, for the 15,000 cops on the front lines, okay, well, at least as a next step, move them to the financial crimes enforcement network at the U.S. Treasury or to the U.S. Marshals, which actually hasn't been politicized.
[00:31:20]  That's a law enforcement apparatus that actually enforces the law rather than making it up.
[00:31:25]  At least to date, it's been much better at that and going after child sex trafficking or rings or otherwise more effectively than the FBI.
[00:31:32]  Those are basic changes we can make right out of the gate.
[00:31:35]  I think we'll be more effective at enforcing the laws that actually are on the books.
[00:31:38]  You know, whether you like the laws or not, at least the goal of the federal law enforcement should be to enforce the laws that are on the books, not making up the laws they go along, which is what the current FBI, and I don't say current FBI, it's what the FBI has always been doing since its inception.
[00:31:51]  And so I think it takes anyway, a president who understands that.
[00:31:54]  And I can't remember, Dave, are you, have you started business?
[00:31:56]  Are you an entrepreneur type of person?
[00:31:59]  I mean, yeah, I technically, I run an art technically.
[00:32:02]  Yeah.
[00:32:03]  Right.
[00:32:03]  Okay.
[00:32:03]  I mean, fair enough.
[00:32:04]  So, I mean, you've hired people is my point.
[00:32:07]  You know that different people have different skills.
[00:32:09]  And I think one of the things that's happening right now, people forget this, running for president is a job interview with the American people.
[00:32:16]  In hiring a president, one of the things to look for is does the person have the skills needed to do the job?
[00:32:22]  I think reframing as a job interview, I think, is productive.
[00:32:25]  I certainly find it productive because it, you know, you have a lot of cameras and stuff following around and you can think of yourself as very important at times in the process.
[00:32:34]  You're interviewing for a job and do you have the qualifications to serve the people who you report to.
[00:32:39]  Now, sometimes people forget who they report to because you're spending most of your time with mega donors, calling them licking their boots, begging for money.
[00:32:44]  You might start to think that they're your boss.
[00:32:46]  I think most politicians do.
[00:32:48]  Well, if you just forget that and say, okay, room fulls of 30 people in a pizza ranch in Iowa, okay, these are my bosses, not the big events, like the small event, 30 people in a pizza ranch.
[00:32:57]  Yes, these are my bosses.
[00:32:58]  And I'm interviewing for a job with them.
[00:33:00]  What are the qualifications that I need to say that I have that this country needs?
[00:33:05]  I think it's two things.
[00:33:07]  And they don't go together, which is what makes this tricky right now.
[00:33:11]  One is you need a president who's actually going to have the muscle, the brawn to break things when necessary, coming in from the outside, you know, somebody who isn't going to play by the rules of Washington, D.C. and the traditional norms.
[00:33:27]  And, you know, I bring that, Trump brings that.
[00:33:29]  And so there's that.
[00:33:30]  But it also takes an outsider who knows and deeply understands the law and the constitution in this country.
[00:33:40]  And just as somebody who's hired people, you know, you'd put yourself in that shoes too.
[00:33:44]  Those two skills aren't the kinds that usually go together, right?
[00:33:47]  You might need an academic, nerdy law type over here, and then you get the business guy, the entrepreneur, the doer, the man of action over here.
[00:33:57]  Those two things don't usually go together, right?
[00:34:01]  Like they do in a figure like Thomas Jefferson, perhaps.
[00:34:04]  But we haven't had a Thomas Jefferson in a long time in this country.
[00:34:07]  And I think that that's, if you really believe we'll live in a 1776 moment, by definition, what this country is missing is that type of figure.
[00:34:14]  And so I'm not going to chalk myself up to that.
[00:34:16]  Thomas Jefferson leaves too big of shoes for any of us to fill.
[00:34:18]  But I think we need somebody in this country to lead us forward who can bring both of those elements.
[00:34:23]  And I'm not even talking policy here.
[00:34:25]  I'm talking about cultural and personal attributes.
[00:34:29]  I mean, Thomas Jefferson, he, I'm sitting in a swivel chair right now.
[00:34:32]  Thomas Jefferson invented this, actually.
[00:34:34]  He invented swivel chair while writing the Declaration.
[00:34:37]  And Benjamin Franklin, he invented the Franklin stove.
[00:34:40]  He invented the bifocal spectacle.
[00:34:42]  He worked on a remedy to the common cold.
[00:34:44]  He was a co-signer of the Declaration of Independence.
[00:34:47]  One of the lightning rods of a home was actually a prototype invented by Benjamin Franklin.
[00:34:52]  One of the other co-signers, Robert Livingston, while he's ambassador to France as a side project, is actually a guy who invented one of the key components of the steamship.
[00:35:03]  There was something in the water back then, right?
[00:35:05]  We don't do that anymore in this country.
[00:35:07]  We'd say, you're not an expert.
[00:35:09]  You don't have a degree in that.
[00:35:10]  Shut up, sit down, do as you're told.

=== Responsibility for MAGA Mistakes (13:25) ===

[00:35:12]  And, you know, the political people stay in that lane and the people who are able to be legal scholars are over here.
[00:35:17]  And then there's the doers who are business builders in their own lane.
[00:35:21]  And I think there's some, you know, something to be said for specialization.
[00:35:25]  But when it comes to the next president, I think we need somebody who revives that founding spirit.
[00:35:33]  I think that's what Thomas Jefferson or the likes of him would say if they were alive today.
[00:35:37]  Yeah, no, I really agree.
[00:35:38]  And I think what you're getting at is that, and it's not that we don't have impressive people in our society.
[00:35:43]  I mean, we certainly do.
[00:35:44]  And there's certain, there's people like Elon Musk, who's however you feel about him, a very impressive person.
[00:35:49]  And there's lots.
[00:35:50]  The issue is that we don't have those impressive people in politics.
[00:35:55]  And we're very few of them.
[00:35:57]  Very few of us.
[00:35:58]  And, you know, it's like they, so many of them get sucked into like Wall Street and get sucked into different business stuff, which like, you know, fine.
[00:36:05]  But it is, you know, there's one of these.
[00:36:08]  This is one of my favorite moments of the campaign so far.
[00:36:11]  And I, by the way, I bring up this video that I've played on the show before from this guy, Liam, who works over at the Gray Zone.
[00:36:18]  And he did this thing where he was doing kind of like guerrilla journalism, you know, like asking congressmen questions.
[00:36:23]  And the question he kept asking them was about, because they were all for funding the war in Gaza and or, you know, funding Israel.
[00:36:31]  And he goes, how do you feel about Netanyahu's strategy of propping up Hamas over all of these years?
[00:36:36]  And every one of them, like Dan Crenshaw and a bunch of the other ones are there, every one of them to a T are like, I haven't seen that report.
[00:36:42]  And it's very interesting because they keep saying that report.
[00:36:45]  Like, in other words, they're just living off, I don't know, someone gave me intelligence and they haven't handed me this.
[00:36:49]  And they're like, okay, well, it was in the front page of the Times of Israel, of Horetz, of the New York Times.
[00:36:56]  Like it's, this is mainstream.
[00:36:58]  This isn't like a conspiracy theory.
[00:36:59]  It's like, oh, it's not like a report.
[00:37:00]  It's just something that's been happening.
[00:37:01]  Yes.
[00:37:01]  Right.
[00:37:02]  And so, and, and there's this interesting thing.
[00:37:04]  And, and the moment I was referring to was when you were kept telling Nikki Haley that she couldn't name three provinces in eastern Ukraine that she's willing to fight this war over.
[00:37:15]  I was 100% positive that she was.
[00:37:17]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:17]  I knew it.
[00:37:18]  Yeah.
[00:37:18]  And it's funny because it's like one of those like giving O.J. Simpson the glove type moment.
[00:37:23]  Like you're taking a risk by if she just shoots three provinces at you, then you look like a jerk.
[00:37:28]  But you're just so confident that you're like, I know you can't do this.
[00:37:31]  I know you can't name these.
[00:37:32]  And then look at intellectual frauds.
[00:37:34]  Well, all of her comments, her comments on the civil war the other day, like the media was trying to make it out like the scandal there was that she didn't mention slavery, but the scandal there was that she says no idea.
[00:37:45]  And you realize that like these people, their job is not to read books and know what's going on in the world.
[00:37:53]  Their job is to meet with donors and to do these like events.
[00:37:55]  Like it's just they're operating in a different situation.
[00:37:58]  Literally, I mean, it's almost as I don't know if I don't know if they came this way or they're packaged this way or they or the politics drains it out of them.
[00:38:05]  But these people are literally, they're like sort of walking effigies.
[00:38:10]  Like that's kind of what they are.
[00:38:12]  There's literally sort of like nothing going on inside, but it's sort of a programmed vehicle generally by donors that walks and talks in whatever direction you want to.
[00:38:19]  So I'm glad you pointed that out because I think people lost the plot on the real issue with the Nikki Haley Civil War response.
[00:38:25]  She could have bucked the mainstream media narrative and the standard accepted narrative and uttered the words 10th Amendment.
[00:38:31]  But she didn't say the words.
[00:38:32]  She didn't mention the 10th Amendment.
[00:38:34]  She just went into, I have not been programmed for this mode.
[00:38:38]  So much so that there's a, there's actually her exchange with the guys, he says civil war.
[00:38:42]  Her response is like, it's like a robot asking its programmer back, what do you want me to say about the civil war?
[00:38:47]  It's literally what she just asked it.
[00:38:48]  Like he says, well, it's like, okay, I've not been programmed for this.
[00:38:52]  What do you want me to say?
[00:38:53]  And I will say it back to you was literally the question she asked the guy.
[00:38:56]  That's actually what was most revealing about it.
[00:38:58]  You could be one of the people who said the civil war was fought exclusively over slavery.
[00:39:01]  You could say slavery was the precipitating match that was lit, but it was the catalyst for an underlying set of causes that were more complex and dated back decades from the northern tariffs in 1832 that almost caused South Carolina to secede from the Union, her home state, for God's sakes.
[00:39:16]  None of that really none of that.
[00:39:19]  It was just, what do you want me to say?
[00:39:21]  And until then, I'm just going to utter words that reflect a kind of verbal oral diarrhea that is effectively the state of modern political discourse in the Republican Party, no less.
[00:39:31]  And yet this is the puppet.
[00:39:32]  They want to basically put up to narrow this down to a true two-horse race, eliminate Donald Trump, send that puppet into the White House to be able to send more money to so some Ukrainian kleptocrat can buy a bigger house so that the American kleptocrat, which is Nikki Haley's family, can buy their bigger house as they run a military contracting firm and suppress some free speech in the United States in the name of national security.
[00:39:52]  Business as usual is back.
[00:39:53]  That's what they're playing for.
[00:39:55]  And it pains me to watch many in the MAGA in the America First movement fall for this trick in plain sight when it's just staring us in the face.
[00:40:07]  And I'm not going to let that happen.
[00:40:08]  I'm not going to be a passive bystander letting this happen.
[00:40:11]  You know, many people who are strong Trump supporters or otherwise say, well, why aren't you just supporting Trump?
[00:40:16]  Well, first of all, I believe I'm going to be the best president for this country.
[00:40:19]  But second of all, you're about to fall for a trap that they've laid for you.
[00:40:22]  And about 12 months from now, you're going to say that this was obvious.
[00:40:25]  And yet here we are paving the way for exactly that outcome.
[00:40:28]  We cannot engage in this level of self-hatred and self-logging to engage in our own self-punishment to get us to the very outcome that we all acknowledge is wrong for the country.
[00:40:38]  And I think one of the differences is, you know, I think one of the ways they might backdoor all this discussion about Nikki Haley potentially being Donald Trump's VP and Donald Trump, I think, has taken that off the table.
[00:40:48]  I'll tell you, if I'm president, no one from Nikki Haley to John Bolton to Chris Christie to Lindsey Graham to Karl Rove is coming within spitting distance of, forgetting the vice presidency, any role in my administration.
[00:41:01]  That's what it's going to take if we actually want to get this job done.
[00:41:04]  And so anyway.
[00:41:06]  No, I think you're right.
[00:41:06]  And I do think that, look, I think Donald Trump bears a large amount of responsibility for the dynamic you're talking about, that if there are people in the MAGA movement who are like fooled by Nikki Haley, well, may part of that be that Donald Trump appointed her and like pointed at her and said, this lady is great and she represents, you know what I mean?
[00:41:29]  And I'm not one of these people.
[00:41:30]  Like, I think, and I think, Dave, I don't sit here and like Monday morning quarterback Donald Trump because I think that's such an easy thing to do that Ronald DeSantis is up to.
[00:41:38]  I do quite a bit of it.
[00:41:40]  Yeah, but that's your job to do.
[00:41:41]  But as somebody who's running against him as like a Ron DeSantis, which he's like now found this to be like a fashionable thing, he's trying for something, the next Hail Mary that he's throwing.
[00:41:50]  It's like, it's a such a, I think it's, I think it's sort of a lazy thing to do versus saying that, you know, what, if Ron DeSantis were in Donald Trump's position, he would have made those mistakes and then some, okay, and countless more, whoever else, right?
[00:42:01]  Chris Christie, put, fill in the blank.
[00:42:03]  But what I'm saying is let's acknowledge where we, what we did and what we didn't do.
[00:42:08]  And then how do we move this, take this movement to the next level?
[00:42:11]  And I do think that a good learning would be to say that someone like Nikki Haley should come nowhere near my administration again, that someone like John Bolton would never come near my administration again.
[00:42:20]  Well, that's what I'm saying.
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[00:43:11]  All right, let's get back into the show.
[00:43:13]  You know what?
[00:43:13]  In 2016, if I was coming as an outsider from the world of business, Waltzing into the world of politics, you know what?
[00:43:20]  Maybe any of us would have made those same mistakes, but I'm not going to make those mistakes.
[00:43:24]  And I can tell you now, point blank, and I think I'm the only candidate in this race apparently who can say it.
[00:43:28]  Nikki Haley will not come anywhere near my administration.
[00:43:30]  And not just her, but what she represents.
[00:43:33]  And I think that if people want to actually bet on the person who's going to shut down the deep state, actually speak truth to power, then vote for the person who's going to speak the truth to you.
[00:43:44]  I'm the only candidate in this race who can actually say I'll shut down the FBI, that I'm against the use of eminent domain to seize farmland of farmers to build this carbon dioxide capture pipeline that they're trying to force across the state of Iowa in the name of a climate cult.
[00:43:57]  I'm the only person to say I'd pardon peaceful J6 protesters on day one when I'm in office or pardon Julian Assange for that matter.
[00:44:05]  I mean, it's revealing that, you know, that Ronnie McDaniel should step aside as chairman of the RNC, that I'll repeal liability exemptions for vaccine manufacturers for a special form of crony capitalism that stops them from being sued where normal product manufacturers can be sued.
[00:44:20]  I could just go on.
[00:44:21]  Why am I the only candidate?
[00:44:24]  I mean, Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump to anybody else.
[00:44:26]  Why am I the only candidate who can actually tell you I'm going to do those things?
[00:44:31]  It's fascinating.
[00:44:32]  It's interesting.
[00:44:32]  I mean, I think part of this is I'm not bought and paid for and I don't report to that.
[00:44:35]  I think that's a big part of this.
[00:44:36]  I mean, we put, you know, maybe if you're, you know, my family, maybe you could second guess me on this years from now, but we put tens of millions of dollars of our own hard money, hard-earned money into this campaign.
[00:44:49]  I didn't inherit it, but I want to do that to avoid being somebody else's puppet.
[00:44:52]  Or otherwise, what's the point of going through the motions?
[00:44:54]  But it's an interesting question is literally like for America first or not, why am I the only candidate in this race who can say these things?
[00:45:02]  And I think if we want a fighting chance of actually taking on the deep state and then some, consider voting for the candidate who's, at least if you're going to speak truth to power in Washington, D.C., maybe you might want to ask who's speaking the truth to you right now and make your decisions accordingly.
[00:45:18]  And so I think we're actually quite early in this race, actually, compared to the bulk of what's going to play out this year.
[00:45:27]  We're about halfway through, if you look at it, you know, eight months ago, and then there's about eight months to go now till the actual RNC convention where they officially nominate the nominee.
[00:45:36]  And of course, it goes through November.
[00:45:38]  But I think in substance, compared to what's happened versus what is about to happen this year, I think we're very early in this race.
[00:45:46]  I think we're in about the third or fourth inning right now.
[00:45:49]  And I think that what's going to happen this year, look, I think there could be good that comes out on the other side of it.
[00:45:55]  And I'm in this race to make sure that that happens.
[00:45:58]  But in absence of that, I'm very worried about what happens for the future of our country and what the stakes are right now when we're skating on thin ice.
[00:46:07]  And, you know, I'm in this, Dave, all the way.
[00:46:09]  And we're going to stop at nothing as a family to make sure that we do the right thing for our country.
[00:46:15]  All right.
[00:46:15]  Well, best of luck with it.
[00:46:18]  I think that if nothing else, I think even just getting these ideas out to Republican voters.
[00:46:24]  I mean, look, stated differently, the same thing you were just saying about like, why am I the only one in the race who's saying this?
[00:46:30]  The other side to that coin is, why is it that Republican voters aren't absolutely demanding that every one of their candidates be saying things like this?
[00:46:38]  And so that's.
[00:46:39]  Well, they should be.
[00:46:40]  But I will say this.
[00:46:41]  It's on certain of those things, though.
[00:46:43]  I'll tell you this, Dave, because like the right chain reaction should be then, you know, if you have a candidate who's moving the Overton window, that the voters then demand it and the candidates say it.
[00:46:51]  There's a more powerful force at work here, the actual bosses of these people, the people who in many ways will actually maybe determine the outcome of the election.
[00:46:59]  And so that's why I'm in this race for a reason that's different than the one that you say.
[00:47:04]  Even from Pat Buchanan's to Ron Paul's have played important roles in shifting the conversation.
[00:47:09]  And I respect the hell out of them for it.
[00:47:12]  That's not why I'm in this.
[00:47:13]  I'm in this to serve as the next president.
[00:47:16]  If I want to do that, I can keep writing books.
[00:47:17]  I've written books in the last several years.
[00:47:19]  That's not what I'm doing here.
[00:47:21]  I think there are some major seismic shocks that are coming this year.
[00:47:26]  I think the system as it exists right now has a plan, effectively a plot that's hiding in plain sight, laid out for us to see.
[00:47:33]  They want it to be a two horse race and they're going to eliminate Trump.
[00:47:36]  It's up to us to make sure that we don't go according to their plan.
[00:47:39]  Don't fall for their trap.
[00:47:40]  And I think that I'm here to take our movement to the next level.
[00:47:45]  And I think that's exactly what's going to happen, actually.
[00:47:48]  Well, I sure hope you're right.
[00:47:50]  And I'm very excited and interested to see how Iowa goes and how the rest of this campaign goes.
[00:47:56]  So best of luck.
[00:47:57]  And thank you so much for taking the time again.
[00:47:59]  I can't wait to talk to you again about whatever the next, but the guarantee is when we talk next, something crazy will have happened by that time.
[00:48:07]  I'm not rooting for these things to happen.
[00:48:09]  Of course, because we have to be prepared for what they're doing.
[00:48:12]  All right.
[00:48:12]  Well, Vake Ramaswamy and just give people your website or where they can go if they want to support your cause.
[00:48:18]  The Vake2024.com.
[00:48:20]  If you want to support the campaign, if you want to support our no to neocons pledge, go to notoneocons.com.
[00:48:27]  That summarizes the pledge that I'll ask of everybody who's part of our movement.
[00:48:30]  It's a great pledge.
[00:48:32]  I 100% support it.
[00:48:34]  All right.
[00:48:34]  Thank you again, sir.
[00:48:35]  And thank you, everybody, for listening.
[00:48:36]  Catch you next time.