May 10, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:03:14
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I was talking on the phone with my brother who's stationed in Fort Bragg, and they have a 9 p.m. | ||
| curfew. | ||
| What on earth is a 9 p.m. | ||
| curfew doing to stop the spread of a pandemic? | ||
| Bars are already closed. | ||
| This doesn't make any sense. | ||
| This is just something for simple-minded people to express how much they did to combat the pandemic. | ||
| You didn't do anything. | ||
| You infringed on people's freedoms for no reason. | ||
| You have to have a good reason for implementing the restrictions that people are going to implement. | ||
|
unidentified
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[MUSIC PLAYING] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is the Rubin Report. | ||
| Reminder, guys, you can get all of our episodes days early and totally ad-free at rubinreport.com. | ||
| And joining me today is a former Navy SEAL, the Congressman from Texas's 2nd District, and author of Fortitude, American Resilience in the Era of Outrage, Congressman Dan Crenshaw. | ||
| Finally, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to be with you, Dave. | ||
| We've been trying to pull this off for a long time, but I guess it took a pandemic for us to accept Skype as the only way we could make it happen. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| I was supposed to come through LA for my book tour. | ||
| As you know, we had some events planned together, but you know, life happens. | ||
| Life happens. | ||
| Indeed it does. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, let's start with the stuff that we got to get out of the way, no matter what, before we get into the book and your story and everything else. | ||
| Which is just coronavirus, sort of where we're at. | ||
| I'm really curious your thoughts on the stimulus package and the way we watched it sort of unfold. | ||
| But just generally, can you talk about what it's like to be in Congress right now in a time of truly unprecedented happenings? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's odd in the same way that it's probably odd for everybody else. | ||
| You're trying to continue doing your job. | ||
| Hopefully you still have your job, but you're trying to do it from home. | ||
| You're trying to be as effective as you were before, but you're doing it from home. | ||
| And that's difficult. | ||
| More psychologically than logistically. | ||
| We can make it happen logistically. | ||
| Our office is still operating as normal. | ||
| The frustrating thing about how this has played out from a congressional standpoint is how the partisan games didn't really stop, whereas we maybe thought they would. | ||
| I think I had some hope that they would, mostly because they were stopping to an extent. | ||
| I'll never forget Chuck Schumer on TV that Saturday in late February talking about how bipartisan this rescue package was going and it was going well, good talks. | ||
| He said he said surprisingly good bipartisan talks and then it all blew up the next day and he quickly shifted tax and and and went right along with Pelosi's demands of this crazy progressive wish list. | ||
| Ultimately the package went through days later after millions of jobs have been lost. | ||
| but ultimately went through and it was basically the same package. | ||
| Anybody who argues otherwise is being totally intellectually dishonest. | ||
| The changes were minor and could have been agreed to that weekend prior. | ||
| That was extremely disappointing. | ||
| That was also a turning point. | ||
| I think we all noticed a turning point right then that came from the left-wing media. | ||
| And that turning point was Trump is to blame for millions of deaths or thousands. | ||
| That was the new, that's been the new narrative and it hasn't stopped. | ||
| In fact, it shifts slightly. | ||
| You saw it shift from saying, hey, Trump's travel restrictions from China weren't really travel restrictions. | ||
| He could have done more. | ||
| Well, that's a dishonest talking point because the reality is the people coming from China after January 31st were American citizens or green card holders. | ||
| So now you're going to have to explain to me why we shouldn't be repatriating our own citizens. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| These are just really disingenuous remarks. | ||
| Now the new talking point is that they didn't do anything in February. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| So the travel restriction was good. | ||
| We agree with that, even though we didn't at the time. | ||
| And even though Democrats were in charge, they never would have put those travel restrictions in. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| But Trump didn't do anything in February except deny the whole thing. | ||
| Well, again, is this really an honest talking point? | ||
| With 20-20 hindsight, could we have done more? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| But with the facts that we had at the time, I question what exactly you think they should have done. | ||
| More PPE production and ventilator production? | ||
| More testing production? | ||
| I agree with all that. | ||
| I just don't think it's reasonable to be looking back in time and saying, You made this decision differently than I would have made this decision. | ||
| Is that the toughest part of doing what you guys have to do in terms of preparing for something like this? | ||
| Because right now, the hindsight thing is just driving me crazy when you hear it from the media that, oh, suddenly they're saying everybody knew this was coming in February. | ||
| And it's like, you know, there were, I think, three, possibly four Democratic debates in February. | ||
| The last one in February, I believe, was February 25th. | ||
| Coronavirus was not mentioned in any of them. | ||
| It wasn't mentioned until the one where they only had Biden and Bernie in a room alone because of coronavirus. | ||
| That was already into March. | ||
| So you see everybody, it's like, yeah, now that we see the score of the game, yeah, we can tell you everything that you did wrong before, but that's not really how you can prepare as a government. | ||
| 100% true. | ||
| I'm about to release a video on this exact thing. | ||
| I did a podcast on this. | ||
| And where I think it was a week and a half ago where I really, I do 30 minutes of timeline on exactly who was saying what at what time. | ||
| I'm not trying to make excuses for Trump here. | ||
| I just want people to understand the truth. | ||
| And you made another good point. | ||
| I didn't even bring up that point in my timeline of like, they weren't talking about this. | ||
| Nobody was talking about this. | ||
| In late February, Pelosi and de Blasio were telling people to go celebrate the Chinese new year, go out, don't be afraid. | ||
| And I'm not blaming them. | ||
| They had the same set of facts that we all did. | ||
| I don't think they're responsible for people's deaths either. | ||
| I think this is a bad situation that we didn't quite expect. | ||
| I also point out, you know, in Italy, they didn't shut down their society until March 10th. | ||
| Spain, not until March 14th. | ||
| That's way later than February, as it turns out. | ||
| We did our 15 days to slow the spread on March 16th. | ||
| Iran didn't even start until April 4th. | ||
| Sweden still hasn't started and probably never will. | ||
|
unidentified
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Um, you know, there's just, these are really disingenuous attacks. | |
| And as it pertains to something like PPE, even with hindsight, you know, it's not obvious that the PPE shortage was going to be there. | ||
| It's not like, I think people simplify what information government officials truly have and are capable of having. | ||
| It's not like, it's not like there's this final tally of N95 masks and the government just knows what they are and knows what they'll need. | ||
| Well, no, I mean, hospitals are also responsible for stockpiling. | ||
| In Houston, We're well stockpiled. | ||
| Maybe because we've been through a lot of, we've been through pandemics before, we've been through hurricanes before. | ||
| Our hospital system operates a little bit differently than maybe another hospital system that doesn't feel they need a bunch of N95 masks. | ||
| That's not necessarily the federal government's fault. | ||
| And again, if we really want to point fingers, if we really want to go down this road, I will point you to all the fact checkers that have confirmed that it's really the Obama administration that | ||
| didn't replenish our national stockpile than one of 95 masks after the H1N1 virus. | ||
| But should I really blame them? | ||
| I mean, that's another question. | ||
| Should I really blame the Obama administration? | ||
| What crystal ball do they have? | ||
| They spent that money on different things. | ||
| They spent it on radiological protection and things like that. | ||
| There's no ill intent here. | ||
| And I would also point out that our hospital systems have been strained, but not broken. | ||
| Nobody has been denied a ventilator, unlike in places in Europe. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because, well, it turns out our profit-driven healthcare system has an excess of things like ventilators and ICU beds. | ||
| I went through the numbers on this. | ||
| On a per capita basis, the U.S. | ||
| has way more, orders of magnitude more, ICU beds and ventilators than any of these Western countries or countries of Europe, any of them, including Germany. | ||
| And that's a product of our health care system. | ||
| It's an imperfect health care system. | ||
| I wish it was different in a lot of ways. | ||
| But socialized medicine means less supply because you're basically saying price controls and people need to understand these basic facts as we as we judge what could have been done and what should have been done. | ||
| So speaking of what could have been done, what should have been done, can you just explain a little bit about how information actually gets to you guys? | ||
| Like, how does it get to a member of Congress that, say in January, there's sort of these initial reports of something going on? | ||
| Trump does the initial shutdown, I think it was on last day of January, I think. | ||
| But like, when does something actually get to your desk and how do you actually decide Oh, now this is something I got to talk to somebody about? | ||
| Or do you pass it on to somebody and say, does this study make sense? | ||
| Or is anyone else seeing these reports? | ||
| Like, how does some of that information actually turn into something actionable? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's an interesting question. | |
| We don't have a whole lot of secret lines of information that the public doesn't have. | ||
| Oftentimes, members of Congress are really operating off of the same set of facts that most people in the media are. | ||
| or most members of the public. | ||
| The difference is we have sets of professionals that we can rely on to sift through all of the information and place that against prior policy, compare that against prior legislation, and talk about it in legislative terms. | ||
| I just have a team that helps me do that so that, you know, I'm not a journalist trying to do it all myself. | ||
| And so that's a huge advantage as far as sifting through the information and making sure that we get it correct. | ||
| As far as what you do with that information, that can be wildly different for every member of Congress. | ||
| Every member of Congress is representing their district, and as such, they tend to have priorities and things that they think that should be made more important than other things. | ||
| And so, because in theory, in theory, a given member of Congress could do nothing. | ||
| For two years. | ||
| There's not some obligatory schedule that anybody is on, right? | ||
| In theory, they don't even have to vote, okay? | ||
| Now, I'm sure their constituents wouldn't like that very much, and they would vote them out of office in two years, but it's really up to you. | ||
| I mean, you've got a lot of freedom as an elected member to prioritize and make things happen accordingly. | ||
| And information comes to us, again, it can come directly from the White House, of course, Especially being a Republican, if it was a Democrat White House, I would hope that we would still see those kind of things. | ||
| I know my Democrat colleagues still get a lot of updates as well. | ||
| But it's different for every issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so that's why I'm kind of fumbling that question a little bit, because there isn't a given set of rules that dictate how that information flows. | ||
| It's relationships. | ||
| It's you watching the media. | ||
| It's you seeing what other members are saying. | ||
| Yeah, no, that actually does strike me as a pretty clean and honest answer because I think people think it's as if you guys just all get a report in the morning and then it's like, oh, now this is what we got to do about this thing here. | ||
| But before we move on from Corona, though, and I want to obviously talk about the book, You mentioned the stimulus before and can you just talk a little bit about what that process is like and when you suddenly see everybody on every side, although in this case I think the most egregious examples were by the progressives, about just all the pork they stuff in there and all these things that have nothing to do with | ||
| with helping the economy because of coronavirus. | ||
| And then it helped, you know, it's things like, you know, Nancy Pelosi happens to be on the board of the Kennedy Arts Center and like all of these things that we all know are terrible. | ||
| And when, when limited government people see those things, it's like, man, if you guys can't even help us now, if you can't even do it right now, then even the little bit of the limited part starts to become really freaking irrelevant. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, as far as the process on this particular bill, and unfortunately a lot of bills, it is a closed group of leadership that's doing that. | ||
| And that's for the sake of expediency. | ||
| It doesn't mean people don't have a say. | ||
| There's a constant conversation and ways to get input into there. | ||
| Of course, it's hard to put input into a bill if you're not really sure how the bill is being formed anyway. | ||
| Um, our leadership does a pretty decent job of keeping us informed in a private way. | ||
| So like, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's conference calls or whatever it is so that we can say, hold on, we're, we're not in favor of this. | ||
| Just like I was outspoken against, you know, direct cash payments. | ||
| I don't think that made any sense, uh, for a lot of reasons. | ||
| Um, and, uh, and, and in the same way, progressives and some more populous conservatives were against any kind of, uh, helped big to big businesses at all, even if it's just loans. | ||
| And so people still get their voice heard on that. | ||
| But the reality is, yes, a lot of this is negotiated in closed-door sessions. | ||
| And I'm not so sure that's the wrong way, because you could debate it publicly on the House floor, I suppose, but where would we get? | ||
| How long would that take when this is an emergency? | ||
| So whether that's good or bad is I think truly up for debate. | ||
| As far as the pork goes, yeah, it's frustrating. | ||
| You didn't see me making a huge fuss about it, mostly because we're talking about millions of dollars when we passed a $2 trillion stimulus package. | ||
| So I try to look at everything through a lens of perspective. | ||
| And also, I tried to interpret the best of intentions from the people who wanted that in there, which was these particular organizations, like the Kennedy Center, They will shed jobs if we don't fund them because they make their money off of events. | ||
| Now, the frustrating part for everybody was they still shed jobs. | ||
| Right, two days later. | ||
| Like many businesses are. | ||
| This isn't something that made me angry. | ||
| Especially since I just wrote a whole book about not engaging in outrage and having some perspective and looking a few layers deep into why something happened as a method to sort of temper your own emotions So, you know, it's generally hard to get me emotionally upset and I don't understand it from either side of the aisle, frankly, when people get emotional about things. | ||
| It doesn't mean they're wrong to show concern, but I wouldn't let it keep you up at night. | ||
| All right, so just one more on this then. | ||
| What else should the government be doing right now? | ||
| I mean, we're all still in lockdown. | ||
| Yesterday I went to my local hardware store and I saw that I could buy seeds to plant some things, which I did buy, but I know that in Michigan you actually can't buy seeds right now. | ||
| I mean, we've got a series of kind of crazy things and I'm all for the The governors and the states doing what they want. | ||
| I think you mostly are as well. | ||
| But there are some strange things happening. | ||
| But what do you think the role of the federal government and the states should be right now? | ||
| And are they basically working together pretty well? | ||
| Yeah, I think the balance is about right. | ||
| I think every once in a while, even the president says kind of the wrong thing about whether he's talking about forcing a reopening or forcing a national lockdown. | ||
| Neither is okay. | ||
| You can't do it. | ||
| That's up to the states. | ||
| And in states like Michigan, where the governor is making up stupid rules, they should be held accountable. | ||
| I hope voters are holding, I think it's a her, right, deeply accountable for these completely foolish policies that are really just based in virtue signaling, not based in any actual, even two seconds of logical thought. | ||
| It's like what, you know, I was talking to him on the phone with my brother who's stationed in Fort Bragg, and they have a 9 p.m. | ||
| curfew. | ||
| What on earth is a 9pm curfew doing to stop the spread of a pandemic? | ||
| Bars are already closed. | ||
| This doesn't make any sense. | ||
| This is just something for simple-minded people to express how much they did to combat the pandemic. | ||
| You didn't do anything. | ||
| You infringed on people's freedoms for no reason. | ||
| You have to have a good reason for implementing the restrictions that people are going to implement. | ||
| Okay, so what's next to your question? | ||
| What's next is we have to start having a real conversation about how to reopen the economy, alongside battling and reducing the risk of the pandemic. | ||
| And this looks a lot like what Harvard economists and political scientists are calling a mobilizing transition phase. | ||
| I know our governor here in Texas is going to come out with his plan soon. | ||
| I think the federal government is as well. | ||
| I've just written an op-ed about it. | ||
| And it basically looks like this. | ||
| We have to dispel this myth that there's a binary choice between a perpetual lockdown and just letting people die in the spread of the pandemic. | ||
| Neither of these things are true. | ||
| You can do both, OK? | ||
| And we have to do both. | ||
| This is not an option. | ||
| We have to do both. | ||
| And I think along three factors, we have to be focused on testing capacity, which we're a little behind on, but I think we can rather quickly ramp up to the right standard. | ||
| Public health capacity, meaning our hospitals, our ventilators, our PPE. | ||
| I think we're getting to a much better place on that. | ||
| And then public education on how to deal with it, whether that's standing six feet away from each other, wearing a mask to work, you know, just making those micro changes in your life and in your business so that we can live alongside a pandemic for a period of time until there's a vaccine. | ||
| That's the new normal. | ||
| And it doesn't involve shutting down the economy indefinitely. | ||
| This is the last thing I want to say. | ||
| I get really worried when we become obsessive over the nature of the curve and the peak. | ||
| Those are important data points, but they're not the data points. | ||
| There's other data points, like our sense of preparedness along those three lines that I just mentioned. | ||
| You know, when I hear our mayor talking about how we can't open up Houston because we haven't reached the peak yet, I find that to be absurd. | ||
| Because if you put our numbers that we have here in Houston, which is very, very small, Like very, very small. | ||
| We're the fourth largest city in America. | ||
| We barely have any cases. | ||
| Um, you know, comparatively speaking, if you put our numbers in place, those in New York city right now, New York city would be celebrating and they'd open up everything. | ||
| So if that's, if, if, if that can be true, then it tells you that our logic isn't correct. | ||
| As we think about what our, our, our, our, um, you know, our goal posts are to open up the economy. | ||
| Yeah, it's one of the reasons, actually, that I'm kind of hopeful for the future when we get out of this, that some of the right ideas that I think you're writing about in this book will break forth. | ||
| I mean, things like states' rights, like we're actually talking about states' rights right now. | ||
| For the first time in this country in God, I don't know, maybe since Roe v. Wade, we never talk about states' rights and suddenly people are like, oh, governors are supposed to do things and the president doesn't have ultimate authority and a whole bunch of other things. | ||
| So since the book is about American resilience in the era of outrage, One thing on American resilience related to Corona specifically, are you worried that as this has gone on and maybe as some of the states get back to work and some take longer and it looks like New York will take a really long time, but just the longer that we're in our houses, the longer that the economy is shut, the longer that we kind of sputter along, that thing, the American resilience that you write about here, that's the special thing we have in America that every other country wishes they had, but the more | ||
| That we sort of just let government do things and, oh, the peak didn't happen yet, we'll stay in our house for another month. | ||
| That we'd actually start forgetting what that spirit of American resilience is. | ||
| I see a lot of silver linings here, as I just mentioned, but that's the thing I'm worried about. | ||
| That over time, we would just start accepting more and more rules and accepting that more and more experts know what to do when perhaps they don't. | ||
| And then, you know, the bad actors in government that just sort of want to control all of us. | ||
| Yeah, those are definitely reasonable fears. | ||
| I think, unfortunately, the reality is we shifted towards that acceptance a long time ago, and I'm actually seeing... I think this entire experience might bring us back to normalcy to an extent, where we do see that experts don't have all the answers. | ||
| Their data is important, their opinions are important, but it takes a leader to To sift through all of those opinions and then make a bold decision and then get people to rally behind that decision and mobilize. | ||
| We are seeing some terrible infringements on freedom. | ||
| It's not so much a problem for me that government is telling you to avoid the beach. | ||
| Well, that's silly. | ||
| It doesn't make any practical sense. | ||
| But my point is I don't mind that they're telling you that. | ||
| What I do mind is that they'll arrest you for it. | ||
| That's a bridge too far, and we're not dealing with that in Texas. | ||
| I know you are in California and in other places, but that's not okay. | ||
| I think you're going to see some terrible lawsuits after all this is done. | ||
| You have to have the lightest touch possible. | ||
| The government does have a place in ensuring public health, but with a light touch, and we're getting it wrong. | ||
| In some places, people are getting it wrong. | ||
| Because there's such a temptation to keep people safe, right? | ||
| Like, that's what every politician wants to say the most of, and they say it because it works. | ||
| And, you know, to your point, we have to resist that urge as Americans to always want to be kept safe, to believe that it is the government's duty to not just allow us to pursue our happiness, but to make us happy, and to keep us safe at any cost. | ||
| You know, when you see this debate play out, when people try to genuinely talk about opening up the economy, well, the most disingenuous counter to that is, oh, well, how many lives is it worth to you to save that job? | ||
| That's not the right question. | ||
| You know it's not the right question, because I can flip that right back on you. | ||
| I can say, well, I'm a more moral person because I want to keep 40,000 people a year alive. | ||
| And you know how I'm going to do that? | ||
| No more driving. | ||
| It's done. | ||
| Driving is done. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, but that's not reasonable. | |
| But I can make a completely objective argument that I would save that many lives, you know, and you're not moral because you're not a good person because you don't want to agree with me. | ||
| Well, that's not how we live our lives. | ||
| We have risks and we mitigate those risks. | ||
| And it's time that we'd be bold enough to confront those risks with the new tools that we have. | ||
| And now we've, the way I describe the coronavirus issues, we've taken a tactical retreat and And in that tactical retreat, which is, you know, in SEAL terms means we get shot away from the target. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We didn't know what hit us. | ||
| We went back, we retreated a little bit, we reload, we call in some air support, and then we move back to confront the enemy. | ||
| There is no perpetual retreat. | ||
| That would just be failure and defeat. | ||
| And that's how we have to look at this too. | ||
| And, you know, and I have a lot of faith in the American people on a micro level to do that. | ||
| What I'm seeing is a, What I'm not seeing is the ability of our more public discussions to also engage in that kind of, in that sense of fortitude and avoid the political opportunism that we've seen thus far. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, listen, that's why I've got you on right now. | ||
| So let's fix it. | ||
| Let's fix it together. | ||
| So let's go back to the beginning. | ||
| The thing that sort of made you a national figure, although you were a Congressman already, Let's talk about Saturday Night Live. | ||
| I'm sure you've never talked about that before, right? | ||
| Maybe once, maybe twice. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about that night, you see the Pete Davidson sketch, and then just sort of all the fallout, and then what you did ultimately, was it literally, I think, the next week when you went on the show? | ||
| And just talk about how that then sort of set you up to be a more national figure instead of just a congressman from Texas. | ||
| Well, obviously I wasn't really watching it that night, of course. | ||
| Nobody is, right? | ||
| I think most people digest Saturday Night Live from the next day's YouTube videos or something, if it's a good skit. | ||
| And that was no different on this one, of course. | ||
| Stories started getting written about it. | ||
| I had not seen it. | ||
| I had some funny text messages from my buddies that were just giving me a hard time for it. | ||
| We have a very dark sense of humor in the teams. | ||
| It became apparent rather quickly that it was a bigger deal than maybe I thought, because I was mostly just annoyed that I had to deal with it at all. | ||
| There was a lot going on that day. | ||
| It was the Sunday before the election. | ||
| We were doing pretty well, but I had a lot of events I had to get to, and it felt more like an annoyance. | ||
| I was not used to having to respond publicly to things, probably the way I'm more used to that now. | ||
| You want to give people the one-sentence recap of what the skit was or what the line was there? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So yeah, Pete Davidson was basically going down a list of quote-unquote gross people, all politicians, all except for one were Republican, and he basically just makes fun of everybody. | ||
| But with me, you know, at first he's like, this guy looks kind of like a hitman at a porno. | ||
| And that was pretty funny, to be honest. | ||
| But then he goes, sorry, like, you know, he lost his eye in war or whatever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it was that it was that single line that that seems so dismissive of a war injury that just injured people nuts. | ||
| And and understandably so. | ||
| And now the way I analyze this and the way I analyze it in my book is is It was pretty obvious that he was trying to take a dig at conservatives, right? | ||
| It's Pete Davidson, it's Saturday Night Live. | ||
| They dig at Democrats plenty too. | ||
| But on this particular skit, it was a very clear swipe at conservatives. | ||
| It's obvious, just watch it. | ||
| But it was not as obvious that he was trying to insult wounded veterans. | ||
| And so the thought process the next day was, OK, how much grace can we give here while still acknowledging that many veterans are hurt by this? | ||
| Genuinely, they're pissed off, and maybe they have good reason to be. | ||
| But also, I don't want to unleash this outrage, Mob, because one, I don't feel it. | ||
| I just genuinely don't feel this sense of being offended, and it's just not who I am. | ||
| And so I don't want to express something that I'm not really feeling either, which seems to be the norm. | ||
| And the surprising thing about all this was that it was so surprising to people that I wouldn't unleash the outrage mob. | ||
| And I said something, you know, my main quote from that was, you know, a quote that I actually stole from a Harvard professor, which was, try hard not to offend people. | ||
| Try even harder not to be offended. | ||
| You know, the joke wasn't very funny, but like, I'm not going to call for this guy to get fired. | ||
| I'm not going to like, you know, Demand that everybody cancels Saturday Night Live. | ||
| It's just it seems it just that felt wrong. | ||
| And so we didn't do it and That gave Saturday Night Live the space to actually apologize the way they wanted to and have me on And I talked about this in my child chapter about the right sense of shame. | ||
| Mm-hmm And this is the only time I bring up the Saturday Night Live thing in the book that the book Kind of came about because of the fame that I got from Saturday Night Live, but the book isn't really about that Um, it's just, it just so happens that I, I was directly involved in sort of an outrage culture moment. | ||
| And so I decided to write a whole book about the solutions to outrage culture. | ||
| And, but that moment takes up like three pages of the book. | ||
| Um, not even, um, but what I point out is that there's a right way to show shame in our culture and there's a wrong way. | ||
| And more and more and more, our culture is going the wrong way where we have like these two extreme options on the one hand. | ||
| People will bow down to the outrage mob. | ||
| I'm so sorry. | ||
| I can't believe I did that. | ||
| And I bring up some examples in the book on that. | ||
| One, because this one just drove me nuts, was Mario Lopez, when he makes the all too understandable comment that three-year-olds should not choose their gender. | ||
| I mean, oh my God, I can't even believe he said that. | ||
|
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Yeah, what a radical. | |
| But what does he do? | ||
| He doesn't say, hey, hold on. | ||
|
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What's wrong with that? | |
| You know, come on, guys. | ||
| He doesn't do that. | ||
| He says, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. | ||
| I'm so, so sorry. | ||
| Please, please forgive me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's the wrong sense of shame. | ||
| And there's on the other extreme, there's another wrong sense of shame, which is showing no shame at all. | ||
| And there's plenty of examples like that, mostly in the political world, but other but but in other places as well and other public figures. | ||
| And and then I diagnosed, like, why is that? | ||
| Why is there this incentive for one or the other? | ||
| And it's an all of us problem. | ||
| It's not just our terrible politicians or silly celebrities. | ||
| It's an all of us problem. | ||
| We all engage in this shaming in the wrong way. | ||
| We overreact to such an extent that we force people to bow down when they shouldn't. | ||
| Or we overreact to such an extent that public figures realize there's no incentive to apologize because there's no forgiving. | ||
| There's no redemption. | ||
| There's no forgetting. | ||
| And so we have to get back to this sort of middle ground. | ||
| And there's good examples that I bring up in the book of that good middle ground, too. | ||
| And we just have to do more of that, be more nuanced in our thinking. | ||
| Nuance is a huge part of solving this problem. | ||
| Yeah, so you go back on SNL, and there's humor, and there's nuance, and decency, and all of those things, and that kind of propels you. | ||
| And one of the things that I think is sort of interesting about you is it's like we've sort of got these cartoon characters on the left with the squad. | ||
| Like AOC and Ilhan Omar and Tlaib and a couple others. | ||
| And then there's sort of you on the other side of that. | ||
| And when you take you and the eye patch, there's sort of like, you're kind of like Nick Fury. | ||
| Like if we're looking at this through a marble lens, it's like- As we should, as we should. | ||
| As we should, right? | ||
| But I mean, we're sort of like, there's like all the politicians now, and Trump and everybody, it's sort of like characters in a movie or in a video game or something like that. | ||
| But I mention this because it's like it seems like there's this young crew from the lefties. | ||
| And then there's sort of you on the other side of that. | ||
| Are there some other guys that you, guys, girls, whatever, that you think are in your crew that are sort of the younger, more get it, more willing to open up, talk about these things? | ||
| I mean, you know, I've done events with you where like, you know, you can be out there with the students and it's not this stuffy thing, but it seems like it's kind of just you holding that for the sort of new, more maybe open-minded conservative, something like that. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good question. | ||
| I do get asked that a lot, and it's a difficult question because I don't want to try and analyze the minds of my colleagues who maybe don't put themselves out there as much. | ||
| I think maybe a lot would be willing to, but they don't have the same ability to, or they're not sure how. | ||
| There's some really great members of Congress who are our age, like Mike Gallagher, Elise Stefanik, and they're out there. | ||
| They have their own style. | ||
| They're not on social media the way I am. | ||
| They're not out there the way I am. | ||
| Everybody does have their own style. | ||
| I'm excited about sort of a new squad coming out of Texas. | ||
| We've got a lot of great new candidates running. | ||
| Very diverse set. | ||
| Very young. | ||
| I'm really excited about it. | ||
| You know, I've got Wesley Hunt here next to me, an African-American Army helicopter pilot. | ||
| I've got Tony Gonzalez running for Will Hurd's seat. | ||
| Uh, old master chief, not, not old, sorry, but prior master chief. | ||
| Um, you know, Beth Van Dyne, she's a prior mayor. | ||
| Again, young, like got a lot of like very intelligent, got a lot of spunk. | ||
| Um, uh, Genevieve Collins, another great one. | ||
| Again, young woman, a millennial like me. | ||
| Um, you know, very successful, got a great shot at that seat. | ||
| There's, there's a lot of really good, uh, candidates. | ||
| And I think the Republican party does have a chance to like really remake itself. | ||
| in a really big way that connects with a lot of different people. | ||
| So I'm excited about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is the biggest challenge there just getting over sort of the old stereotypes? | ||
| I mean, just the old stereotypes. | ||
| Conservatives care about money and care about war and, you know, Democrats like poor people and peace. | ||
| Like these basic sort of very factory setting things. | ||
| When in reality, I mean, we spoke at the Turning Point Student Action Summit and Trump spoke that morning and it was right after the impeachment hearing. | ||
| And you wanted to get up in the middle of his speech. | ||
| You were trying to show him your vote, that you voted against it. | ||
| And it was like, it was a totally impromptu moment. | ||
| Trump looks at you in the crowd. | ||
| He's like, Dan, come on up here. | ||
| The Secret Service guys were all looking like, oh God, now we have to get this guy from the crowd, even though he's a congressman, get him on stage. | ||
| But my broader point is that it was like fun and real, which is so the reverse of what politics is presented to us as. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it's totally changed in the last few years and I think it's exciting. | ||
| Now we have to be responsible with how we manage this new train that's just like lurching forward, right? | ||
| Because it is this sort of interesting combination of like showmanship with some deep thinking and some real actual statesmanship. | ||
| It is up to us as leaders to make sure that we maintain those bonds and that balance in a very coherent way. | ||
| And that's what I try to do. | ||
| That's why I do more than just the showy stuff. | ||
| We've got to have fun and we've got to show that we can have fun. | ||
| We also have to show that we care deeply and not fall into that very simplistic mindset that you just And where, you know, these guys are for poor people and these guys are for rich people, right? | ||
| And like, you're totally right. | ||
| There's these stereotypes that we have to resist and move past. | ||
| And for too long, the Republican Party has been unable to do that because we didn't quite take the time to understand the left, I think. | ||
| And I think what I'm excited about, the younger generation of conservatives takes a lot more time to try and understand the left and how they think. | ||
| Maybe what they're right about, but how to confront their policy prescriptions to those problems that they try to expose. | ||
| And thinking more deeply about our foundations, about why we think what we think. | ||
| Young people especially, because they're so well informed, and that's a careful word to use, because they're informed but they don't have experience with which to with which to process a lot of that information. | ||
| But generally what you see with young people is they want more information. | ||
| They wanna listen to an hour long podcast. | ||
| They want a deeper explanation, not just a talking point, | ||
| of why you're saying what you're saying, which is why I do these, here's the truth videos. | ||
| And I still have to make them really short because it's social media. | ||
| I see the percentage of the people who watch. | ||
| It's still short. | ||
| It's small steps. | ||
| But I also do a podcast for the same reason so that I can access people that way as well. | ||
| You've got to meet people where they're at, and so that is the new future of politics. | ||
| It's not just getting that news hit or getting that op-ed written, because again, only certain people read that stuff, only certain people watch that stuff. | ||
| Everybody else is over here on YouTube and Instagram, and then you've got your Facebook crowd, and you've just got to be everywhere if you want to be effective. | ||
| So I love the inner flap of the book. | ||
| It says, Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life meets Jocko Willink and Leif Babin's extreme ownership in this tough love leadership book from a Navy seal and rising star in Republican politics. | ||
| So obviously, you know, I know Jordan quite well. | ||
| And of course I've had Jocko on as well. | ||
| Was that sort of the, the idea there to fuse together these people that were sort of about putting your life together first, and then also blending your experience, being in the Navy, now being in politics, or being a SEAL, now being in politics, that it's about sort of fixing yourself first, which is very consistently a Jordan-type message. | ||
| It is, and I think the fact that it did become this combination of Jordan's book with Leif and Jocko's book, That was a bit more of an after the fact thought. | ||
| But that was the point for sure. | ||
| And I think that's a very accurate description of it. | ||
| I'm not quite sure that I would call it a leadership book. | ||
| I might edit that little part out on the next set of copies. | ||
| Next round. | ||
| It's fundamentally a mental resilience book and how to be a stronger person and therefore a stronger culture. | ||
| And so it's meant to be both. | ||
| It's meant to be a personal journey. | ||
| But as well as a cultural journey. | ||
| I am fighting the culture war in this book as well. | ||
| You know, this culture war against victimhood ideology. | ||
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That's a prevalent theme throughout the book. | |
| But I'm also bringing it down to very practical terms to your daily life. | ||
| But I'm also doing so with not quite the extensive philosophical underpinnings that Jordan Peterson does, But I'm still doing that. | ||
| I'm still diving into psychological research and all the literature to back up what I'm saying. | ||
| Because one thing I point out in the book quite often is these are not new ideas, but that's kind of the point. | ||
| The best ideas are the old ideas. | ||
| They've been around the longest for a very good reason. | ||
| They've been through trial and error. | ||
| They've been passed down for generations because they work. | ||
| Personal responsibility is a cultural foundation because it works. | ||
| Because it means all of these things that are very important for a society to thrive. | ||
| Thinking through your emotions before you react, that's an old piece of advice. | ||
| Like your mom said, count to ten before you start to say something. | ||
| There's a reason that these sort of idioms exist in our culture, because they're old and they work. | ||
| I reference the Bible quite a bit in the book. | ||
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Wow. | |
| It's like these ideas, they're not new. | ||
| They're not new. | ||
| And then they're backed up by science. | ||
| They're backed up by our intuition. | ||
| They're backed up by personal experience. | ||
| And so I, I wanted to write, because my mind goes a lot of different directions. | ||
| And so I wanted to write this sort of multidisciplinary book and then try to draw those disciplines together in a single theme with that is, that is simultaneously very entertaining. | ||
| And also speaks to people in a modern way too, because I reference pop culture a lot, I reference movies a lot, reference people that you would know in politics a lot. | ||
| Not until the end of the book do I really get into, I think, a political philosophy discussion. | ||
| Are you saying that people before you and before me actually had good ideas and we should possibly listen to maybe the founders and people even before that that maybe helped us get here and it shouldn't just be whatever we think on any given day and that our grandparents weren't all idiots? | ||
| Are you saying that? | ||
| I might be saying that, yeah. | ||
| To a large extent, conservatism means gratitude. | ||
| It's gratitude for things that work, like philosophies that work, cultural foundations that work, policies that work. | ||
| If we're meaning to conserve anything, it's conserving the things that work. | ||
| And what the left fundamentally stands for is radical change. | ||
| This sort of reaching for utopia, this constant reach for utopia. | ||
| And a constant tearing down of our current status in order to justify the really extreme measures that they need to take in order to get to this supposed utopia. | ||
| And that's dangerous. | ||
| It's dangerous because it leaves out so much of the equation. | ||
| Like, how did you almost get to the utopia in the first place? | ||
| Because you have to admit, we have it better than anybody ever in history. | ||
| It doesn't mean things are perfect. | ||
| But that is the nature of our being. | ||
| And what does perfect look like? | ||
| So these are deep questions, but they treat them as if they're not. | ||
| That's the problem with progressives. | ||
| These are very fundamental questions, but they treat them very casually. | ||
| And conservatives are the ones that say, hold on, guys. | ||
| Think. | ||
| Think through this. | ||
| Think of the second and third order effects of what you're saying when you want to implement something simple like a $15 minimum wage. | ||
| You know, there's deeper consequences to every action you take, and conservatives, I think, fight to recognize those things. | ||
| So, as a guy that has fought in actual wars, and then you referenced the culture war a couple times here, what are some of the lessons you learned, just through discipline and training and everything else, through actual, physical war, versus the sort of war that you're fighting on the ideological front now? | ||
| Well, every job I've had, there's somebody who threatens to kill me. | ||
| So it hasn't changed all that much. | ||
| Dark humor. | ||
| Twitter, man, it's rough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just a real war, you know, so to speak, is very honest. | ||
| Your decisions, your attention to detail, they have these life or death consequences. | ||
| The culture war is... | ||
| It's less honest. | ||
| It's about opportunism, oftentimes. | ||
| Political warfare is about opportunism, for sure. | ||
| It's about trying to interpret the worst of intentions based on your opponent's actions, even if that's not what they meant. | ||
| It's a blood sport in and of itself, just not literal blood. | ||
| And so that was the premise for a lot of me wanting to write this book, because I see | ||
| how damaging that is. | ||
| It's causing anxiety on a micro level. | ||
| It's causing people to see the doctor more. | ||
| It's making people upset. | ||
| You see these happy people, but how could a happy person write what you just wrote on Twitter? | ||
| That's a terrible thing to say. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Why are students so upset? | ||
| Why do they feel like their physical safety is in jeopardy? | ||
| Just because somebody's speaking an idea that they don't like, that's a really strange thing. | ||
| I don't diagnose that problem too much in my book. | ||
| I leave that to better authors, and I just reference their work, because fundamentally I'm trying to find the solutions to that. | ||
| I'm hoping that, one, I'm hoping that the people I'm describing would actually read the book, instead of the people who generally probably don't need the book, the ones buying it. | ||
| But I'm hoping that one thing will speak to you and just cause you to sort of shift your thinking on something and maybe see some of that problem in yourself when you didn't even realize it and change accordingly. | ||
| Even writing the book, I probably figured some things out about myself. | ||
| This book is not about how perfect I am. | ||
| I just happen to write about the standards by which I think I should live. | ||
| As someone that just finished my first book, too, I hear ya. | ||
| It unearths stuff within you, and that's actually the cool part. | ||
| So I know we could agree on most of our frustrations with the left all day long, and we could talk about it for 20 hours in a row, no problem. | ||
| What would you say are some of the frustrations that you have with, say, your side, or the conservative movement, or the Republican Party? | ||
| And when you talk to somebody like me, who you know we have some political disagreements, How wide do you think that tent on the right can get without losing those core principles? | ||
| I've had people like Heather McDonald on the show from the Manhattan Institute who's a totally secular conservative. | ||
| She's an atheist conservative. | ||
| But a lot of conservatives think, oh no, there has to be a religious attachment. | ||
| Or is there even any room for, you know, I describe myself as begrudgingly pro-choice, and I get into it in the book pretty heavily, but how do you figure out what room there is on this side for people that have sort of marginal differences, let's say, but mostly believe in individual rights, liberty, freedom, all the stuff that really is the important stuff? | ||
| Yeah, that's an eternally debated question. | ||
| I don't know that I have a great answer for it. | ||
| It largely depends, I think, on your own temperament. | ||
| And my personal temperament is I'm certainly more accepting of people who disagree with, you know, 10% of my views and say that fine, that still makes you a Republican. | ||
| I'm not going to yell and scream at you because we disagree on a couple of things here and there. | ||
| I think it's possible to wrap conservative ideology into most of our views. | ||
| And it takes, I think, a sophisticated thinker to go through that. | ||
| When you ask my frustrations with conservatives, what I point out in the book a lot, because I try to be fair, as fair as possible, as fair as I can in the book, when I'm criticizing liberals And I also criticize conservatives. | ||
| If I have a liberal politician example of something bad that happened, I try to have a conservative one as well, to point out it's the same. | ||
| As it pertains to outrage culture, specifically with this tendency to elevate passion and emotion above sophistication, replacing sophisticated arguments with attitude, I have a problem with that. | ||
| And conservatives certainly do it. | ||
| So where does Trump fall into that for you then? | ||
| Because I know you are a, I always hate the phrase Trump supporter. | ||
| It's like people, you want to support the president, he's flying the plane. | ||
| We don't want this plane to crash. | ||
| But I mean, as a guy that basically you like Trump, you support his agenda pretty much from what I can tell. | ||
| Where does he factor in to exactly what you just said there? | ||
| Uh, not exactly with what I just said. | ||
| I mean, he's definitely, he's not perfect, right? | ||
| Like his style gets in his own way for sure. | ||
| Uh, and it's not my style, but, but as far as specifically tying it to what I just said, that's more prevalent among activists to, to like try and own the left, like in this, like kind of disingenuous way. | ||
| And sometimes it's not disingenuous. | ||
| Sometimes it's a great own. | ||
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Okay. | |
| But we just have to be smart enough to distinguish between the two. | ||
| And sometimes I see us not distinguishing correctly. | ||
| If I can immediately say what the left would say to that argument, then you haven't thought through your argument very well. | ||
| This is why I like Ben Shapiro so much, because he's very airtight with his argumentation. | ||
| You have to anticipate what the other side is going to say. | ||
| That's what makes you good, right? | ||
| Because you're right. | ||
| Because you're actually directly confronting what the other side is saying, as opposed to building a | ||
| straw man argument. And when I say elevate passion above substance, generally speaking, it | ||
| means kind of making a disingenuous straw man argument. And like, maybe I've done it. I'm sure | ||
| I have. But we should avoid it. | ||
| We should avoid it. And what I also talk about in my book is, I'm not mad that that happens. | ||
| I guess what frustrates me is that that's what gets the most clicks. | ||
| And I talk about this in a chapter. | ||
| It's a really deep discussion, I think. | ||
| I don't know if Jordan Peterson would agree, because he's like, yeah, how can you be deeper than Jordan Peterson? | ||
| But it's actually about something that he talks about quite a bit, which is hero archetypes and what we view as good. | ||
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And that's a good place to start. | |
| If we're trying to be better, well, we have to define what better actually looks like. | ||
| And what works. | ||
| And so what we've done in our culture is we've sort of elevated the wrong heroes over time. | ||
| Like we've elevated victims instead of victors. | ||
| And I use Superman as an example of like this sort of heroic archetype that we should look up to. | ||
| You know, Jesus is a hero that we look up to. | ||
| It's like everything he did was just perfect. | ||
| These days, these days, Superman would have to be a victim. | ||
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Right? | |
| If we were to actually look at him as a hero, He would have to have been victimized in some way. | ||
| So there's a real change there. | ||
| And there's a change in what we view as good. | ||
| And as it pertains to that sort of extra attitude, passionate, own the libs type thinking, well, shouldn't we be elevating the smartest person in the room? | ||
| Shouldn't we be elevating that think tank piece that just in detail debunks what the other side thinks on a given policy? | ||
| But that doesn't get any clicks. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| It's not emotional. | ||
| It's not fun. | ||
| It's not entertaining. | ||
| But maybe we should rethink that. | ||
| Maybe we should be giving these think tanks a little bit more juice instead of our activists who have the snarkiest comment. | ||
| And again, I'm not dispelling the importance and the fun behind a lot of the memes that we like to make and share. | ||
| I share them too. | ||
| I just want us to think twice and just to balance it out. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny because when I've been asked something like that, I think of it in a war perspective. | ||
| It's like the memes and some of that, that's like the ground troops, the ideas, is the Air Force. | ||
| You do need to hit this from a multi-pronged approach. | ||
| So it all sort of is part of it. | ||
| So we've talked this far about outrage and culture war and everything else, and we haven't really mentioned the media at all. | ||
| Now, you know my feelings about most of the mainstream media. | ||
| I think you share many of my opinions. | ||
| Right now, as it stands, what do you make of what is left of the mainstream media? | ||
| Does it even matter anymore? | ||
| Partly, I think it's just sort of the show must go on. | ||
| It's the last thing that keeps us all cohesive as a nation, to have something thought of as mainstream. | ||
| We would all completely splinter off into our own echo chambers and our own ideologies and all that. | ||
| Is there anything that can be redeemed when you see what the New York Times is up to, what CNN is up to? | ||
| Is it worth redeeming or do we just need new institutions? | ||
| You know, I had Dana Perino on my podcast last week and I was really pressing her on this question about the behavior of the media. | ||
| And she was really pushing back against me, which I wasn't quite expecting. | ||
| Um, and she, she felt obliged, uh, to rightfully point out to me that there's, there's a lot of other media, right? | ||
| And it's not just the CNN and MSNBCs, which are, which are truly in an information warfare against the president. | ||
| But that's, that's what, that's what they see their mission as the New York times. | ||
| Similar, similarly, uh, Washington post is somewhat more balanced, but overall the same thing. | ||
| But what she had to point out to me was like, there's all these other, um, uh, Uh, shows or networks and what's the right, I'm going to screw up the exact terminology, but it's like the difference between cable and broadcast. | ||
| I'm not really sure. | ||
| Um, but you know, like ABC and NBC and CBS and she's like, and she, and she sent me, um, this wall street journal article. | ||
| Uh, I think that came out today and the wall street journal article says, wow, what, what happens when you watch these other programs for 22 minutes on any given day in America? | ||
| Like, And then they point to CBS. | ||
| Not that any of these are faultless, like these organizations screw up too, but for the most part, as this Wall Street Journal article emphasizes, they're just talking about American stories across the entirety of America. | ||
| You know, a business owner that just lost everything. | ||
| Somebody whose father just died of COVID-19. | ||
| Like, just American stories that, and they don't really mention Trump throughout any of this reporting. | ||
| And I thought that's really interesting and maybe that's a sense of perspective that I need because, you know, maybe I don't see that as much because I live in this sort of political bubble. | ||
| And I just, you know, I think what we need in America is better definitions and clear lines between left and right wing media and between opinion journalism and news. | ||
| And if we can collectively educate ourselves on the differences and And if journalists can be responsible enough to kind of self-report what they're actually doing and who they're actually representing, I think that might go a long way. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're probably a little more hopeful for some sort of resurrection than I am. | ||
| I'm also worried just because, you know, young people just don't watch the NBC Nightly News or the ABC Nightly News or CBS Nightly News, so they might be more fair. | ||
| I'm actually not saying they aren't, but I just don't know any 22-year-old, if I was to poll at any event that I went to, you know, who's watching Lester Holt on NBC. | ||
| I just don't know. | ||
| They're not watching Fox either. | ||
| Conservatives aren't watching Fox or MSNBC. | ||
| They're watching this show on YouTube and they're watching, they're looking at my Instagram account. | ||
| So yeah, that goes back to what I was saying before, you gotta meet everybody where they're at. | ||
| Yeah, so gimme, I know no politician likes being in the prediction game, but sort of try to lay out the next couple months as we roll into this coming election. | ||
| I think we still have an election coming, it hasn't been canceled yet. | ||
| God knows what's gonna happen with Biden. | ||
| Well, actually, let's just talk about that for a minute. | ||
| What do you make of what has happened here with the Democrats and that ultimately, you know, everybody fell in line behind Biden. | ||
| As we're taping this right now, Obama finally did endorse, you know, way later than it seems sensible. | ||
| I mean, truly, do you think Biden has the mental capacity to do this? | ||
| And do you think the DNC is just sitting there with some card in their back pocket That either is the VP replaces him at the convention or right after, which would be the most, you know, right after an inauguration potentially, which would be the most perverse thing. | ||
| But at this point, it's like, I feel like all rules are off. | ||
| That's sort of where I'm at with them at this point. | ||
| Oh, the second question is fascinating. | ||
| I would have loved to pontificate about it. | ||
| I just have no idea. | ||
| I mean, if I were them, I would be thinking of a way to do that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's just the sad truth, right? | ||
| Yeah, because to answer your first question, there's been a very clear decline and it happened very recently. | ||
| You know, when you have no pressure on you, all you have to do is go down to your game room or study or whatever he's filming in and simply look like a leader with no responsibility on your shoulders at all. | ||
| I can't imagine an easier thing to do. | ||
| But he can't do it, and he's not making any sense when he's speaking about things that he should really understand and should be able to talk about. | ||
| Add to that the very disingenuous criticisms that he's often leveling are usually just things that he says he would do better, but they're things the administration is already doing. | ||
| That's a more substantive argument, but as part of the decline, it's very clearly happening, and they can't ignore that. | ||
| That being said, if they were to try to disrupt that at the convention, I mean, if I'm them, if I'm a fly on their wall in their strategy session, I'm sure they're weighing that option. | ||
| But the problem is, if they do that, how does that other person gain any momentum in time to actually win the election? | ||
| And the question of are we still going to have elections? | ||
| Yes, I believe we will. | ||
| I mean, we should definitely be prepared for another uptick in cases in November because it will be fall. | ||
| But I think we'll be better. | ||
| I think we'll be well prepared for it. | ||
| And I hope that American resilience shows through. | ||
| We have to be willing to live with risk. | ||
| We have to stop listening to politicians that tell us that when the flattening of the curve, all of a sudden there's no risk. | ||
| That's not going to be true until there's a vaccine. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| This is a real thing. | ||
| in our history that we are fighting. | ||
| And we can do it. | ||
| We just got to be smart about it. | ||
| This idea that we need to completely revamp our election system to have an election and to have only mail-in ballots for everybody across America, I find that argument to be a bit absurd. | ||
| I'm only bringing it up because I want to give your viewers the simple counter argument to that. | ||
| When a Democrat demands that everybody does mail-in ballots, ask them a very simple question. | ||
| Functionally speaking, what is the difference between standing in line at the grocery store and standing in line to vote? | ||
| Is there any difference? | ||
| No, there's not. | ||
| There's just not. | ||
| What's easier? | ||
| Making sure that people stand six feet away from each other and sanitize the screen that they use to vote or the pencil that they use to vote? | ||
| or completely revamping our entire election system. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And also when you hear them talk about this, I mean, Ilhan Omar has been tweeting up a storm about this, that we should have mail-in voting. | ||
| I mean, I'm pretty sure she's against having ID to vote in the first place. | ||
| So how, so can you, can you not have an ID and still mail in a vote? | ||
| I mean, what are you even, how in the world are you possibly even pretending to be who you are at that point? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's, it's, it's so absurd. | ||
| And that would, of course, that's the other counter argument. | ||
| Then everybody has to register in person at some point between now and then with an ID. | ||
| And of course they'll say no, which is the strangest thing. | ||
| That's racist. | ||
| Isn't that racist? | ||
| That's what they say. | ||
| The voter ID debate is just, it's one of the strangest coming out of the left. | ||
| I mean, it's so utterly strange. | ||
| They want so many rules and regulations around so many things in our life, but this one thing, this one thing that matters to such a huge extent, They want it to basically be, oh, no, let's just trust everybody, and let's just, basically, they want it as easy as ordering a coffee on your phone. | ||
| We should be able to vote that easily. | ||
| They see voting totally differently, and it's hard to imagine why, except that they want, you know, I won't go there. | ||
| I won't try to interpret their intentions, but it's really strange. | ||
| Yeah, you don't have to say it if you don't want, but I think everyone's thinking exactly what you were about to say. | ||
| How about I'll say it, right? | ||
| I mean, you can either nod or you could cover your camera, but the basic idea being that they want illegals to vote or they want people to be able to double vote for their people or the rest of it. | ||
| I mean, there can't be, because I know what you're trying to give them the best of intentions here, right? | ||
| Like that's exactly what you were just saying. | ||
| And yet, It seems fairly obvious. | ||
| It's like they believe in driver's licenses, they believe in licenses if you wanna become a beautician or cut somebody's hair, but for some reason with this one thing that's like the core thing for democracy? | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| It's so weird because, I mean, and you've seen probably plenty of videos where somebody will go out into a minority neighborhood and just start asking everybody if they have an ID. | ||
| And everybody's like, of course I have it. | ||
| Why are you asking me that? | ||
| What's wrong with you? | ||
| Like, of course I have an ID. | ||
| How would I live without an ID? | ||
| Everybody has an ID. | ||
| You gotta have an ID to get on a plane, to buy a rated R movie ticket if you walk up to the booth at the theater. | ||
| I mean, come on. | ||
| Democrats are very good. | ||
| Voter ID and any kind of rules or regulations around voting, they get in the way. | ||
| Here's the best possible interpretation of their intentions. | ||
| It gets in the way of what they are good at with respect to ballot harvesting, with respect to getting a lot of people on a bus and moving them to the voting polls. | ||
| They're very good at this. | ||
| Remember, the old Democratic Party was a labor party, so they were good at unionizing. | ||
| They were good at activating. | ||
| We've never been good at that as Republicans. | ||
| Um, it's not really in our nature, but Democrats are activists by nature, which is the problem with their entire governing philosophy. | ||
| By the way, you can't have a governing philosophy based on basically activism. | ||
| That's a different discussion. | ||
| It's a deeper discussion, but they're good at certain things. | ||
| And if you put basic rules around this institution of elections, those things become harder to do. | ||
| And so it's, it's, it's really about, they really are playing for advantage in that sense. | ||
| All right, well, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, I'm glad we finally did this. | ||
| Unfortunately, digitally, but we will do it in person eventually. | ||
| The book is Fortitude. | ||
| We're gonna link to it right down below. | ||
| And stay safe, and we need you out there. | ||
| So you really gotta stay safe. | ||
| I'm not just saying it, right? | ||
| You're one of the few guys we need. | ||
| So really, six feet from everybody, all right? | ||
| I've been through worse. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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