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Dec. 18, 2023 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
32:52
Rocking The GOP: With Special Guest Vivek Ramaswamy!

GOP Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has lit up what would otherwise have been mind-numbingly boring Republican presidential debates by hitting the candidates HARD on their support for the warfare-welfare state. Is Vivek the future of the GOP?

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Government Lies Exposed 00:08:10
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
Today we have a special guest, a presidential candidate, Vivek Raz Ron, I'll get it, I'll get it Vivek, Ron Oswame.
And we've had him on our show before, and I think of Vivek as somebody that he came out of nowhere, and now he's in the finals.
He's in the finals, and very interesting person.
And I think, if I've had the guest, I think he has high respect for liberty.
Vivek, thanks you for being on the program today.
It's good to be on.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
Doing well.
And Daniel, would you like to say hello?
Good morning, Vivek.
Good to see you.
Daniel, good to talk to you.
Good to see you guys.
Okay.
Well, there's a lot of things that we want to talk about.
I'm always fascinated with political philosophy, but I also like to deal with the details and how philosophy is used to sort things out.
And I find you very fascinating because you do have beliefs, which is something that Washington is not immune to, except their beliefs are weird.
And I'm just wondering whether you've run into that at all.
As you've campaigned, what month was your announcement?
I announced in late February.
February.
End of February.
Okay, during this time, you're a candidate, and a lot of things happened in those first six months and still are happening for you, and you're well known.
In that period of time, was there anything that you really learned completely, you know, about politics or about economic policies?
Yeah, well, I mean, yes is the answer on both fronts.
Now, I would say that I began with a much clearer vision of policy and a much clearer vision of what my own political philosophy is.
And so there, I think the learnings have been around the edges, around details, but the basics, I am where I began.
I think about politics I've learned a ton, and it hasn't all been for the better.
I will say that I came in already jaded.
I am far more jaded than I was when I came in about the fact that even many times when people are giving you what they think of as what I would assume are authentic alternative beliefs, those are really just synthetic alternative beliefs.
And what I mean by that is I think every politician, not everyone, but most politicians basically dance to the tune of their biggest donor.
I think that's something that has been eye-opening for me.
I think it's been eye-opening for me how equally true this is amongst Republicans and Democrats.
And I think that I am more, I would say, cynical about the Republican Party than when I began as well.
Those are some examples about politics of where my learnings have come out.
Okay, you know, in campaigning, everybody's mischaracterized and everybody distorts and demagogue and all this.
But what issue or what have your opponents said or the media said that has mischaracterized you?
Because you provide this channel, but which is the one that they're really off base and trying to picture you as believing in something that you don't want any part of.
Is there one thing?
Yeah, I think there's a long litany, but I would say one of the most recent is trying to sort of put into my mouth some of the things that I believe are hard facts about realities where the government has lied to us.
So I've been pretty vocal about certain areas, Dr. Paul, where we know for a fact the government has lied.
The government lied to us about Saudi Arabia's involvement in 9-11.
They lied to us about the Trump-Russia collusion hoax that never was.
They lied to us about the origin of COVID-19 and the role of the U.S. government in funding gain of function research abroad.
They're lying to us now about how money is being spent in Ukraine, about the truth of what happened and at least what is and is not known about January 6th.
And in each of those cases, I've been tethered to facts.
I'm not drawing some grand theory that isn't tied to existing facts, but pointing out what we now know to be true, compare that to what a government previously told us, and identifying a mismatch there.
And I believe that's essential to rebuild trust in our country, is to say that here's the areas where the government, and in many cases the mainstream media, almost every case, along with the government, has lied to us.
We have to acknowledge that to make sure that we don't repeat those same mistakes in the future.
I've been extra careful to be really tethered to the facts as I've done that.
But of course, the media prefers to put words in my mouth that I never said as an effort to sort of create a caricature of it to avoid engaging with the substance of what I have pointed out.
And I think that that's something that, you know, I think is predictable, but it takes somebody who is also able to cut through the nonsense to be able to get the actual facts.
Okay.
Daniel has a follow-up question for you.
Hi, Vivek.
I'm glad you're on the show again.
You mentioned the media.
I mean, I think the networks owe you a big debt of gratitude because if you weren't on that stage, literally there's no reason to have watched the GOP debate.
You know, Trump is in a way kind of a victim of his massive lead.
He doesn't have to show up.
So there really aren't any primaries.
And if it wasn't for you on the stage, nobody would be watching Chris Christie and Nikki Haley talking about which countries they want to bomb first.
But, you know, it was amazing this recent town hall on CNN.
You have to say, when Abby Phillip was interviewing you and everyone is talking about it, it just blew up Twitter X when you touched the third rail and said, as you just said, the government lies.
The government lied about January 6th, and we need to know how many federal agents were in there.
And at that moment, the media took over and said, you're wrong.
Don't say that.
Don't say that.
And it's just fascinating.
I just would love to hear your view about the media as a gatekeeper exposed at that moment, telling us what we can know and can't talk about.
Yeah, it's very fascinating.
I mean, when you're talking about certain topics, maybe they're okay with hearing dissenting views.
But certain third rail topics, they lost their minds.
Actually, I believe they ended the town hall five minutes earlier before the top of the hour, just to make sure that things were under control from their vantage point.
So what I stated were some hard facts.
What do we know?
Several of the kidnappers in the Gretchen Whitmer plot, which actually began as a government, as a FBI informant sort of plan to storm the Michigan State Capitol, what began as the Gretchen Whitman, became the Gretchen Whitmer plot, resulted in several people, these are just hard facts, acquitted at the end of that trial on grounds of government entrapment.
That is to say, the government put people up to do something that those people otherwise wouldn't have done and then arrested them for it.
That's not allowed in our constitutional republic.
And those people were acquitted, so much so that one of the jurors even came up, apologized to one of the defendants, hugged him.
And this was a major point that the media never reported on.
I was talking about those facts on CNN.
And then there's the fact that the head of the Detroit Field Office of the FBI became, under Christopher Wray's watch, Christopher Wray moved him in the fall of 2020 to become the field office director of the DC office right about three months before January 6th happened, after which we now know that there were federal informants, if not agents, in the field.
We haven't been told how many.
We haven't been told how Capitol police officers allowed people to enter the Capitol, including people who were arrested for then being present on the Capitol.
And we had not been exposed to the full video footage that the government had only released tiny slices of it without giving the public the whole picture.
Everything I just told you is hard fact.
But the experience that I had with Abby Phillips was she asked me a question so as to get credit.
The question she asked was, you said January 6th was an inside job.
Actually, on the debate stage, I said the evidence suggests increasingly like it's looking more and more like an inside job, which means entrapment.
The Fed's Role in Business Cycle Misrepresentation 00:15:59
But she mischaracterized what I said, and then hearing me respond to it started to cut me off every time I'm giving what I think she recognizes her audience would see as, oh, this is a reasonable response of facts he's giving me.
I think that's what they fear more.
I think if I was just spouting off unsupported conspiracy theory, garbage, nonsense that was unsupported, then I think that they would have been fine to let me go and then caricature me afterwards with a whole episode they could devote to fact-checking, fact-checking me.
But in this case, I think they viewed it as far more dangerous to their agenda when I'm offering just cold hard facts.
I wasn't, you know, I didn't raise my voice with her.
I would say the same happened in return from her to me.
But if somebody's cool-headedly laying out the facts, I think they find that far more threatening to their agenda rather than somebody who actually is just spouting off unsupported conspiracies.
Very good.
You know, very often they're slow to realize, but economic policy ends up being the most important issue.
I always claim some people say, oh, he votes from his head.
He votes from his mind and all.
And I think people vote from their belly when they're hungry.
Yes.
And I think economics is a big deal.
And you have talked about economics.
But now we have Biden economics, so I guess that's clarified everything.
But I want to ask you about that because it's a truth matter as well.
Do they lie to us about statistics?
Do they do this?
Do they fudge things?
Do they tell us things are better than they are?
Is inflation controlled?
That whole issue.
But the precise question I want to ask is what is your concept of the business cycle?
Where does it come from?
You know, the left generally says it just, you know, that's part of capitalism.
You have to put up with that.
But I want to know where you think the business cycle comes from and what politicians might do.
If you have a different opinion than the conventional wisdom, what would you suggest the president ought to do about the viciousness of so many of our business cycles?
Perfect.
And there's two questions in there.
I'll address both.
Is the government actually fudging the numbers and what they're reporting?
Maybe, but really the way they're fudging it is the selective highlighting of certain numbers versus others, right?
And so you've been hearing this narrative of how job growth has actually outpaced expectations.
Well, the sector with the largest job growth numbers this year was the government that added the most jobs, right?
That's not driven by private sector growth.
It's driven by government growth.
What do we know?
Prices have gone up.
Wages have not gone up at the same level of prices.
Interest rates have gone up in the name of fighting those wages.
And so many people at home aren't buying that Bidenomics myth.
And so it's less that, okay, they miscalculated the numbers and the number was seven, but it was actually three.
But it was more the selective disclosure of numbers that in some ways makes the lie that much more credible.
That's what I think is going on with the government fudging numbers.
Now, on your point about, I would say the more important point about underlying business cycle theory, here's the answer, in my opinion.
I think the Federal Reserve and its behaviors over the last 25 years, especially since a lot of the Phillips curb-obsessed academics sort of took over the Fed in the late 1990s, what happened is that they have created boom-bust bailout cycles that would not have existed without the Federal Reserve's intervention.
And since we're talking maybe, I'll give you maybe a little depth that I wouldn't go into usually on the campaign trail.
But since you asked about it, I think this is a great group for us to do this with.
Here's basically what happens is even if you believe in a slightly attenuated existence of a business cycle, I've run a business.
I've built multi-billion dollar businesses.
Anybody who runs a company knows that wages are often the last thing to go up.
And so the Fed has treated wage growth as a bad thing, as a leading indicator of inflation or the business cycle.
So they tamp that down, but what they do is they're actually tightening monetary policy into what would have been a natural equilibration in the way the business cycle or the economic cycle works anyway.
So that gives us the boom-bust bailout cycle that we've seen in 2000 and 2008.
And in some measure, we saw some of that in early 2023 as well.
And I think that in that case, you've actually seen, in the name of attenuating a so-called business cycle, you've actually seen the creation of these boom-bust bailout cycles by the behaviors of that Fed.
So what can the president do?
I mean, there's another issue here is when the Fed treats wage growth as a bad thing, they're playing God with the financial system.
That's part of why you have not seen real wage growth for the bottom 99% in this country over the last 25 years.
What should the president do?
I think there's something simple the president can do with his appointment power for a new chairman of the Federal Reserve in January 2026, which if I'm president, I expect to exercise, with somebody who with me believes that the Fed should, if it exists at all, have a single mandate.
Stabilize the dollar as a unit of measurement, period.
Peg it to commodities.
No questions asked.
That then ties the government's hands, but that's a good thing.
People say it's tying the government's hands and giving it less flexibility.
Would that be bad for us?
No, that's a good thing for us because it then forces the government to actually run according to real principles rather than artificial principles that it's able to engineer by effectively putting money when it's convenient at the Federal Reserve.
And so I think if we peg the dollar to commodities, that affects, that puts an end to a lot of the abuses that have created the boom-bust bailout cycles, a lot of the abuses that have kept real wage growth flat for the bottom 99%, and also forces the actual economic policy decisions to be driven by the underlying truth of what's happening in the economy rather than the narrative fed to us by the Federal Reserve.
So that's something the President can do.
I would go further than that, but that's a basic step that I would take.
Yes.
You know, the whole idea here is to come up with a plan and a program.
And yes, we can get a new Fed chairman and all.
But it seems so difficult to, well, you know, you're not supposed to interfere.
You know, the Fed argues the case.
Every time I ask for an audit of the Fed, they say, oh, oh, no, we're independent.
I disagree with that view.
They're not, I mean, there's one executive branch in the Constitution.
Article 2 of the Constitution says that the executive power of the government shall be vested in a president.
That's not 100 different executive branches.
There's one executive branch.
And I think part of the problem in this country is the people who we elect to run the government, they're not the ones actually setting government policy.
It's unelected bureaucrats, such as the Federal Reserve.
So I reject that view.
I believe that this falls under the purview of the democratic accountability of the people in a constitutional republic.
And that's a big part of why I've also said we're going to have a 90% headcount reduction at the U.S. Federal Reserve as a first minimal step and a 75% headcount reduction across the administrative state overall.
That's really the cancer at the heart of the threats to liberty today.
It's the overgrowth of the administrative state.
And the good news is, Dr. Paul, I do believe the U.S. President has the authority to do that under the Constitution and under the existing laws of this country.
All we require is a president who understands the Constitution in order to swear an oath to the Constitution.
You better darn well understand it.
I know you do.
I believe I'm the candidate in this race who does.
You know, that's all it's going to take to restore this country.
The whole idea of getting an exposure, you know, doing an audit of the Fed doesn't solve all the problems, but it might expose them enough for the ideas that you have.
We might be able to move them along.
But their argument for the general public, and it's appealing to a lot of people, is they have to be independent.
They don't want politicians and lobbyists and members of Congress at all interfering, which really, really is a big joke.
But I tell people how to clarify that is once the Fed says we want to be independent, it's very, very important that we protect the daughter.
What they're asking for is total secrecy.
So that's what they want.
And I think Daniel has a follow-up question also.
Yeah, I just wanted to mention: I mean, as a foreign policy person, I have to say, for me, the highlight of your entire campaign was that moment.
And it was a heck of a risk.
Dr. Paul and I talked about it as well.
You know what I'm talking about when you turn to Nikki Haley, who the press just fawns over.
She really had her foreign policy chops today at the debate.
They just fawn over her great foreign policy wisdom.
And when you threw out at her, name three provinces.
You want to go to war with Russia and Ukraine?
Name three provinces.
And that look on her face was priceless.
I really would love to have you take us through your thoughts.
And were you thinking, oh crap, I hope she doesn't know.
Oh, I knew, I was fully confident she had no clue, and neither did Chris Christie.
But the answer is: what I wanted to expose was, I mean, there's so much to criticize with someone like a Nikki Haley, the self-interest of making money off of going to war, starting a military contractor that appears to be making money off of wars like this one without disclosing who those clients are, joining the board of Boeing after doing special favors for Boeing as the governor of South Carolina.
There's a lot to go after.
But you actually put your finger on the right pulse there.
I like to go after what's the prevailing narrative, get to the heart of what's false there, and then just expose the hell out of that.
So one of these narratives is that in Nikki Haley and the neocon establishment, they bring a level of foreign policy experience that's going to be required to lead right now.
So again, there are many different places I could have gone after a lot of this neocon movement and Nikki along with it.
But I wanted to pierce through to the heart of that because I think this happened in Iraq.
I think it's happened in Afghanistan.
It's not just the corruption that exists in terms of people making money off of these policies.
It's a deeper intellectual fraud, not just a financial fraud, but an intellectual fraud, where the people who claim to have expertise, so-called expertise, actually have no idea what the heck they're even talking about.
When making decisions that affect our own national debt, affect our pocketbooks, and more most of all, send our sons and daughters to go die in somebody else's war.
So I wanted to expose that.
And so what I said is she's been cultivating this aura of foreign policy experience.
That and her gender appeared to be her two self-stated qualifications to be the U.S. president.
And so I wanted to pierce through both of them.
One is, I pointed out the ways in which she's used identity politics to deflect criticism.
That's wrong.
But the second thing I wanted to pierce through and point out was that the person who's most strongly clamoring for reclaiming the provinces in eastern Ukraine and sending $200 billion of U.S. assets and military equipment and actually increasing the risk of major conflict as a result.
Prepared for that, can you even name three of the provinces that you're fighting for?
And it turns out, not only she couldn't, it turns out Chris Christie couldn't either.
That's the intellectual fraud at the heart of this neocon movement.
It's not just the financial corruption.
It's the fact that they have no idea what the hell they even want to fight for.
It's just the impulse to fight for the sake of fighting.
And that ironically creates the very risk of World War scenarios.
I mean, we're driving Russia further into China's hands, strengthening that Russia-China alliance.
That increases the risk of major conflict in the name of foreign policy experience.
And so foreign policy experience is not the same as foreign policy wisdom.
The people who claim to actually have a grand vision for how we're going to secure peace actually have no idea how the heck they're going to do it, which increases the risk of war.
That's what I wanted to expose in a pithy way.
And so I thought that was an elegant way to do it.
You hit the target, yeah.
I want to know what your opinion is of empire.
I use the word a lot.
A lot of people do.
But is that a word you would use, or is that stretching it?
Is that going too far and claiming that we may well be involved in an empire?
And if you were president today and we had this shipping interference in the Red Sea, would you do anything significant about changing that matter?
Yes, I'd say a couple of things, Dr. Paul.
One is my philosophy is I have a basic guiding vision.
I would call it kind of a libertarian nationalist vision for the country.
A couple key principles.
One is the people who we elect to run our government should be the ones who actually run the government.
And number two is the sole moral duty of those government leaders is to the citizens of this country, not any other one.
That guides basically, you know, there's a few other principles I'd give you, but those two principles guide my worldview.
So against that backdrop, my view is we should not have sitting duck targets in places like Syria or in Iraq, where we have a presence today.
So that's where I would start with a medium-term strategy to get out of places we shouldn't be.
However, I don't get to pick the hand that I inherit as president.
So if I am president, my rule of thumb is this.
If you hit us, then we will have to hit you back harder.
That's not some chain of accountability that goes to some sort of proxy theory that says, oh, because country A funded group C, who then funded Group D, that somehow Group D hits us, that allows us to hit Group A. Not that.
But if you directly hit us, we will hit you back harder.
Now, that, I think, achieves a level of deterrence while also saying at a high level that we should have never been in many of these places in the first place.
And that allows us to make sure that we're exiting parts of the world where we have no strategic reason to be, other than our sons and daughters and our own troops, in many cases, being sitting targets.
I want to get them out, but I'm never going to do that with guns with bullets to our back either.
And so that's how I would strategically lead as president.
And I think being public about that, I think a big part of the neocon foreign policy wisdom is what they call strategic ambiguity.
I reject strategic ambiguity.
I favor strategic clarity.
Draw clear red lines, stick to them, make them credible.
And it's never in any country's interest to end up in world war.
The way you end up in world war is if countries have vague red lines, you accidentally cross them, and then you ratchet up conflicts that otherwise should have never been ratcheted up.
And so that's why I believe in strategic clarity.
And so that's what I would say is wherever our people are, in many cases they shouldn't be there.
We're going to bring them back in certain cases where they don't advance our strategic interests, like in Syria, like in Iraq, and elsewhere.
You could make even arguments for some of that naval presence in the Middle East.
But I don't get to choose the hand that I inherit as president.
I'm also pragmatic.
Anybody who hits us, that group will hit back harder.
But if you're clear about that, that isn't going to happen.
And we allow ourselves to make sure that we're only doing something that advances protecting our homeland rather than going on offensive missions.
It's sort of John Quincy Adams said it well, is we go not in search of monsters to destroy.
I think that's a big part of our mistake is we've been going in search of monsters to destroy when in fact the real monster that we need to destroy is right here at home.
It's the administrative state and the cancerous governmental overgrowth.
That's the one war that I will wage as the president is on that shadow government that pushes for these other foreign wars.
You know, under the circumstances today, you follow that philosophy, if they hit us, we hit them hard, real, you know, hit them real hard back.
Because, you know, modern technology allows them to hit us with a missile or with a drone.
And what was how many of our American people, because they were on bases and things around the world, in so many places, and we've been hit 90 times.
Boy, that's a job and a half.
That's why I think, I don't see how we can tinker with that.
And I think, and I know you favor a lot of changes in foreign policy, but I don't see how this is solved as long as we're an empire.
Shadow Government Wars 00:07:04
But what is your favorite?
We shouldn't be there.
We shouldn't be in many of these places in the first place.
That's the answer.
That's the problem.
Do you think it's too strong for me to use the word empire?
I don't.
I don't think it's too strong for you to use the word empire.
I think that it's a psychology.
It's almost a psychology of empire that I think has actually been what has plagued our foreign policy.
And the ultimate irony in that is as we're focused on the outer periphery of that psychological empire, we're actually weaker than we have been in a very long time right here at home.
I favor strong homeland defenses, border defenses, super EMP, cyber attack defenses, missile defenses of our own homeland.
That's where I think our national defense spending should be going to defending our own homeland from external threats rather than, you know, and you could look at every other, let's take a look at the Roman Empire.
Well, it didn't do very well when they let the center and the core actual country rot while they were focused more on the periphery.
And so that's the way I look at this as well.
The irony is the very national security establishment that has been focused actually on offensive missions in the name of this psychological empire has actually left the homeland far more vulnerable and weaker than we have ever been economically and otherwise.
And I think that's going to change on my watch.
We shouldn't be handing out foreign aid to countries whose national debt per person is less than ours when we have a $34 trillion national debt problem right here at home.
And so that's what I think, you know, true America first principles, we have to define what that means.
And to me, it comes back down to those two North Star principles I shared.
The people who we elect to run the government should be the ones who actually run the government, a government that's accountable to its people, not the other way around.
And that the moral duty of those U.S. leaders should be to the U.S. citizens, not to some other random foreign interest abroad.
And George Washington, I think, would have said the same thing, and that's what I would say today.
Daniel.
Vivek, I have just one last question for you.
And certainly, I mean, it may be premature, don't take it the wrong way, but President Trump is very far ahead, despite how the media tells us that Nikki Haley is biting at his heels.
She's not.
So it does look like he'll be the nominee.
Anything can happen.
You're running a very tough race, that's for sure.
But what I'm curious about, I mean, you seem to represent a generational shift in the GOP.
We're seeing, especially among young members in the House, a different view when it comes to the government and foreign policy.
And there are quite a few of them out there.
And if you look at polling in America, young people certainly are more skeptical about wars.
I'm just wondering, what is the future for Vivek Ramaswamy after this race is over?
It's maybe early to say, but I think a lot of people are curious.
Well, I hope it's leading this country for the next eight years as the next president.
I truly do believe that that's what we set out on this mission to achieve.
I believe that odd as it may sound looking at the current polling, et cetera, I think we have a path to get there.
Specifically, this is a little bit horse race politics here, but since you're asking me, I think we're going to deliver a major surprise in Iowa on January 15th at the Iowa caucus.
I'll tell you why.
Many of the people who support us are not polled.
Actually, Dr. Paul, you get a kick out of this.
I get a lot of people showing up to my events wearing Ron Paul shirts.
I'm not even kidding you.
Actually, it's amazing.
I even take pictures of some of them and reposted some of them.
But it's staggering.
These people are not polled in the Republican caucus going polling.
A lot of them are young people.
As you said, many young people actually find a lot of my message, including foreign policy and economic vision, to be attractive.
We're going to college campuses.
These people are not polled.
And so I think we're going to deliver a shock at the Iowa caucus.
So in many ways, the national narrative right now is I'm in fourth place.
You know, well, I think that if we are sitting exactly where we want to be sitting, you want expectations to be low going into the Iowa caucus.
If we shatter those expectations, I think that could propel this campaign forward.
And so that's what I'm focused on.
I'm not a Plan B person.
I've founded successful companies and I've lived the American dream.
This country has blessed our family and allowed us to live this American dream, but I didn't do it by being a Plan B person.
And I'm not going to start being one today.
We set out on a mission as a family.
My wife is a successful throat surgeon.
She's kept her full-time job saving lives at the cancer hospital here in Columbus, Ohio.
Our kids are three and a half and a year and a half years old.
We're making the sacrifices to do this not because we want to just go through the motions.
We're doing this to achieve the mission we set out to achieve, which is not just to win this election.
That's just the starting point, but to revive who we are.
And so I'm dead set on that mission, and I have a good feeling we're going to succeed at it.
Well, you know, Daniel suggested that you represent generational change, and I think there's some truth to that.
But I also want to point out that I'm very pleased that you were quite willing to come on my program.
Come on on this program.
Right.
The generation.
I love this program.
I love this program because the way I look at it is you can have young people who have old ways of thinking and old people who have older people who have younger ways of thinking.
So I appreciate this.
This is great.
Young at heart and young in ideas.
Exactly.
I want to ask a question.
I think it will be short.
And that is, we've had a couple presidents since George Washington, and some have been good, some have been bad, and some mediocre.
But I want to know if you have a favorite former president.
You know, I would say less on policy grounds, but more on just personality and orientation.
I would say Thomas Jefferson, actually.
Thomas Jefferson is somebody who I respect.
He was, speak, we were talking about generational change.
He was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
He sent the Lewis and Clark expeditions out west.
He was a pragmatist, but also somebody who was an intellectual.
So, you know, if he were alive today, would he and I agree on all policies?
Probably not, actually.
Maybe, who knows?
I mean, who knows what his policies would be.
We'd agree on principles, but I would also respect his character as somebody who cared deeply about this nation more than any other.
He was probably more interventionist than I would be.
He wanted to intervene in the French Revolution abroad when George Washington restrained that impulse.
And Alexander Hamilton, I believe, too.
So it's less about a policy point, but as a matter of character, being the pioneer, the explorer, somebody who's an intellectual who can engage with ideas that he disagrees with while still leading a nation.
I'd say Thomas Jefferson is probably one who I admire a cut above most of the others, probably any of the others, ever since.
And so it's still safe to talk about Jefferson.
They haven't canceled him yet.
Although it should happen, he could.
Make sure they don't.
Yeah, absolutely.
Vivak, I want to thank you very much for coming on the show today because I'm sure we've had a lot of interested viewers and maybe we'll see you again.
We'll see you at least in the debates, especially if you can just pick up something controversial.
At Least Honest 00:01:26
Maybe you'll be able to do that.
One time somebody came up to me after a debate and I hadn't mentioned a Constitution or something.
And it was a young person, a college student, and he wanted to ask me about it.
He was all into it.
And I said, well, you know, the guy next to me, he said the same thing.
He wanted the Constitution, all this stuff.
I said, why don't you go talk to him?
He says, we didn't believe him.
That's funny.
That's funny.
So, truth is something.
Young people, you know, I really think there's a difference.
And I use words that are clichés, and it might be inaccurate to do so.
I says, I like to talk to young college people.
I think they're more open-minded.
And I said, I think I much rather talk to a college crowd that came from a liberal university than I want to talk to the Chamber of Commerce who has all those lobbyists there.
It's more fun that way, too.
At least it's honest and candid.
So, you know, I like that.
Well, I appreciate everything you've done in laying the groundwork, you know, the intellectual groundwork for someone like me to now step in and take many of those ideas, that spirit.
Hopefully, if we're successful all the way through governing this country, but people like you have paved that path.
And as I said, many of the people who come to our events are wearing on-paul shirts.
Very good.
So we hope to carry the torch.
Well, thank you.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Thanks again for being with us today.
And I want to address our viewers to thank them very much for participating.
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