Nov. 20, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| Right before COVID two years ago, I was a speaker for EFYF, not the president. | ||
| I was speaking at a number of campuses, one of which was Stanford. | ||
| Three of the students who invited me to speak there, I spoke with beforehand. | ||
| I asked them all sorts of questions, but one of them was how you became a conservative. | ||
| Two of the three very normal, but the third gentleman said, oh no, my parents are Democrats. | ||
| I said, well, how'd you become a conservative? | ||
| Well, he happened to be in his dad's truck a number of times by himself, driving places, and would listen on the radio, and he found some Some conservative talk radio folks that he liked listening to. | ||
| He read what they talked about. | ||
| He read books. | ||
| By the time he went to Stanford, his mother's alma mater, he was a full-spectrum conservative. | ||
| He was a believer. | ||
| He got into this. | ||
| That's a great story, but what makes it powerfully optimistic is John's mother, John Rice Cameron's mother, happens to be none other than Susan Rice. | ||
| I look at that and say if Susan's Rice, if only given the opportunity to hear the truth, to hear the facts, can actually become a full-spectrum conservative, there's hope for every young person in America if we can just get to them. | ||
| and I think we can. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is the 45th governor of the great state of Wisconsin | ||
| and currently the president of Young Americans Foundation, Scott Walker. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Great to be back, thanks for having me on. | ||
| I'm glad to talk to you today because we are only a few days out from these very strange midterm elections. | ||
| Strange? | ||
| Do you like my adjective choice there or do you have a better one? | ||
| I do. | ||
| No, I'm with you on strange. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| It's just strange is a great way to say it. | ||
| What's your takeaway? | ||
| I mean, you know, everyone said this red wave was a coming. | ||
| I kind of was saying it myself, but I kept saying, you know, you can't count your chickens before they hatch and all that stuff. | ||
| And obviously we still have a couple of races that haven't been announced as of us taping this right now. | ||
| But what's your main takeaway? | ||
| Well, a couple different things. | ||
| It's not as big of a win for Republicans as many people thought, but taking the House at a minimum, if that's where we end up being, I think is a good thing, because it obviously slows the horrendous terrific and almost existential threat that we have out of | ||
| Washington with the Biden administration and his lackeys there. | ||
| So if for nothing else, if there's at least enough votes to make someone other than Nancy | ||
| Pelosi the speaker, that's a good thing to counter things. | ||
| I think one of the big takeaways, though, I took out of Tuesday was that ideas matter | ||
| and that it's not enough just to say you're against Joe Biden. | ||
| The polls overwhelmingly show dissatisfaction with the way Joe Biden's acting, the way they're | ||
| handling the economy or not handling it. | ||
| So I think, unfortunately, a lot of candidates on the right thought, well, we'll talk about how bad Biden is, and we'll just run as not being Biden. | ||
| And I think voters want him more. | ||
| And to prove that case, I would tell you that where there were big wins is every incumbent Republican governor in the country not only won in the re-elections, they won big. | ||
| And in many cases, saved some of the Senate candidates. | ||
| Ohio's a prime example. | ||
| J.D. | ||
| Vance may not have won that race if it hadn't been for Mike DeWine winning, like, big time. | ||
| Hershel Walker might not have been in a runoff in this Georgia Senate race had Brian Kipp not went going away. | ||
| And, you know, other governors, Sununu in a battleground state where, unfortunately, we didn't get as close as we thought. | ||
| New Hampshire won big there. | ||
| Kim Reynolds in Iowa. | ||
| And obviously, the two big ones, Ron DeSantis in Florida. | ||
| and Greg Abbott in Texas. | ||
| I mean, the big winners on Tuesday were Republican governors in large part | ||
| because they didn't just talk about Biden. | ||
| They actually talked about how to lead and they acted on it. | ||
| Were you surprised that there wasn't more anger to some of kind of the Democrat, | ||
| quote unquote, stars of the pandemic? | ||
| I mean, a Gretchen Whitmer who had some of the worst lockdowns and hypocritical moves in her personal life during it. | ||
| Or, you know, it's not like Gavin Newsom was going to lose. | ||
| But, you know, him in California or even Hochul in New York, who nobody voted for first time around because she obviously came in after Cuomo was taken out, but that they didn't pay any price, really. | ||
| No, I was surprised in that regard. | ||
| I think particularly in Michigan, because we all still kind of hoped that that was a battleground state. | ||
| I think after Tuesday, not just in the governor's race, but you look at even the regent positions in the university system. | ||
| I mean, it has sadly become a solidly blue state in Michigan. | ||
| Almost the flip side of Ohio, which used to be a battleground state and is pretty consistently Republican now. | ||
| Although, you look at other governors, I mean, the Democrat governor in Colorado, who I disagree with on other issues, was arguably one of the better ones when it came to the lockdown, and he got rewarded with a huge win there. | ||
| So yeah, Polis did for sure, and I think obviously the big winners are Florida and Texas are good examples of people who, and I | ||
| would say just governors in general, not just DeSantis and Abbott, but they were the most | ||
| visible ones. | ||
| And remember, the tractors said, oh, people are going to die. | ||
| They had a guy dressed up as a grim reaper on the beaches in Florida. | ||
| And Beto said, oh, people are going to be dead because of Greg Abbott. | ||
| No, they got their states open. | ||
| They only got their economy back on track. | ||
| Their kids, if you look at the scores, are doing arguably much better than kids in states that were shut down. | ||
| But sadly, Michigan, New York, and California are probably now, in the foreseeable future, pretty solid blue states. | ||
| And people there, even though the facts were right in front of them, apparently, at least in these elections, weren't willing to budge from that. | ||
| Do you miss any of the game? | ||
| Obviously, two-time governor, you ran for president, you know, now you're doing your thing with young Americans. | ||
| But do you miss the fights? | ||
| I mean, when it's election night, are you like, ah, I should have got back in, or I should be doing this or that? | ||
| My wife was actually all excited about this. | ||
| She used to hate those nights when I was a candidate. | ||
| She was all excited about it. | ||
| Tuesday, I'm like, who are you? | ||
| What have you done to my wife? | ||
| Actually, I don't miss the campaign stuff, the election night, the nerves. | ||
| Certainly when I saw some of the TV ads in Wisconsin and elsewhere across the country, I don't miss that. | ||
| One of the things I always thought I would miss, and I do, are some of the people. | ||
| I'm blessed at Young America's Foundation to bump into not only in my state, Wisconsin, but across the country. | ||
| Some of the same sorts of folks and obviously being with these brave, heroic high school, college and now middle school students who are trying to stand out on their campuses and schools as conservatives is very rewarding. | ||
| I think the biggest thing I found during COVID, people said to me, Oh, it must be nice not to be governor. | ||
| And that was my initial reaction. | ||
| But after a couple months of fools across the country in my state and elsewhere, locking things down, As you can imagine, I just looked in and said, we can be doing so much better. | ||
| People always ask me, what would I have done? | ||
| I look at not only DeSantis and Abbott, but Kristi Noem is another example in South Dakota, and said, I would have put my trust in the people. | ||
| Give people information, let them know what the circumstances are, but put enough faith in the American people and the people in each state to let them make the right decisions for themselves, their families, their children. | ||
| Governors, and for that matter, mayors and others who did that, their jurisdictions are doing far better than those that locked things down. | ||
| I don't know if you happened to see it, but there was an article a couple weeks ago in The Atlantic about pandemic amnesty. | ||
| Did you happen to catch that or see any of the firestorm around that? | ||
| I did a little bit, I didn't read the article, but I did see that it's interesting looking at all the 2020. | ||
| Yeah, so the idea of amnesty, this idea that we should just sort of forgive everybody who did all of these massive government overreach things and that we let bureaucrats trample on the Constitution and all these things, I suspect from a Yale studio, you're not really in the mood for amnesty. | ||
|
unidentified
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No! | |
| And I think it's, as you and I know, sometimes not only in politics but in life in general, when you come to a crisis, that's when people reveal themselves to be who they truly are. | ||
| And we saw that during the pandemic. | ||
| The people who not only rushed to put the government in control of things, to in many ways disregard the state and federal constitutions, You know, the Constitution doesn't have a clause for an emergency. | ||
| It's there no matter what. | ||
| And there are a lot of people trampled all over that, thinking, oh, it's an emergency, it's an emergency. | ||
| No, that's exactly why you have a Constitution, is so that, you know, self-proclaimed emergencies don't take the day. | ||
| That's what you have in dictatorships and oppressive regimes around the world. | ||
| We don't have that in the United States. | ||
| We should never forget that. | ||
| We should never allow something like this to happen again. | ||
| And again, if you look back, Hindsight's always 20-20, but I think it's very instructive to see the governors, the mayors, the other officials who, again, put their faith in taking this seriously. | ||
| I never once thought it wasn't a serious issue, but who put their faith in the people. | ||
| I have one of the big takeaways, and I think you have seen this in some of the exit polling, was I think post-pandemic there is a shift. | ||
| It's less about conservative and liberal Democrat and Republican as it was post-pandemic about blue-collar and white-collar jobs. | ||
| I think a lot of people like my brother, who's a manager at a convenience store and chain, and my sister-in-law, who sells appliances for Home Depot, great, good, hardworking people. | ||
| They and other blue-collar workers like them, I think, became very turned off towards the heavy hand of the government, because first it was the place they worked at, And then it was their kids' schools, both of which they were upset were closed, versus sadly, in the suburbs in particular, a lot of white-collar employees who were like, eh, I don't have to commute to work, my kids can each hang out in their bedrooms, be on their computers all day in school, we spend more time together, this isn't so bad. | ||
| And they were the ones that kind of bought into giving these freedoms away. | ||
| I think there's going to be a long-term shift that reflects more sovereign voters sadly being open to government control and more blue-collar workers and their families who are like, I don't ever want this to happen again. | ||
| Speaking of shifts, I don't know if you've seen any of this, but a lot of people are saying that, you know, Gen Z, which is now voting for the first time, that they're all coming in, and in essence, you know, they're sort of default leftists. | ||
| They've been taught that socialism is cool, that big government is good, you should just be given stuff and all this. | ||
| It's obviously counter to the work that you guys do, and I've spoke at many Young America's events, and people are excited about freedom and all that, but it is an uphill battle for sure. | ||
| Oh, it totally is, because it's starting younger and younger. | ||
| I mean, we just took over, in addition to the Reagan Ranch out in California this last year, we took over the Reagan Boy at Home in the middle of the country in Dixieland, Illinois, where we have conferences, but we also occasionally have tours and school groups that come through. | ||
| Our director recently told me that some fifth grade students that were there with a class trip loved the tour, but at one point our director was talking about how Reagan, his actions, As we just recognized this past week, you know, November 9th, the 33rd anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down, the fall of communism. | ||
| He's talking about communism. | ||
| And the kid said, well, what's wrong with communism? | ||
| And the guy was like Bill Wilder. | ||
| And he's like, you know, we're taught that that's a system of government that helps people. | ||
| Like, no, this is not it at all. | ||
| But it's sadly what we've seen for years on college campuses. | ||
| We actually have a suit against the administrators at Clovis Community College in Fresno. | ||
| California, where during Freedom Week last year, our chapter there had posters that were pre-approved to put up. | ||
| The posters showed a woman in the old Soviet Union standing in a grocery store where there was no food on the shelves, which sadly is pretty frequent back then, as it is in places like Cuba and Venezuela today. | ||
| And it said, got milk, got bread, got blankets, got anything. | ||
| And it was obviously making a point about communism and socialism not working. | ||
| And the administrators literally took the posters down and claimed the reason for that was because it was offensive to communists. | ||
| Well, hell yeah it's offensive to communists! | ||
| It's because they're wrong! | ||
| It's the truth! | ||
| We gotta get the truth out. | ||
| And it's gotta happen sooner because the indoctrination is happening younger and younger along the way. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's incredible that that's leaking into elementary school at this point, but I suppose at some level none of this should surprise us. | ||
| Going back to a bit of the racehorse politics for a moment, you know, the big thing in Republican politics or in conservative politics, whatever you want to call it, is sort of this Trump-DeSantis thing that seems to be bursting forth whether we like it or not. | ||
| What's your take and what do you think is going to happen? | ||
| Well, I think it'll be interesting just because of Ron DeSantis just having been re-elected. | ||
| He's obviously going to focus on being governor in the short term. | ||
| Someday, whether it's 2024 or 2028 at some point, I think he'll want to be an excellent candidate. | ||
| But that may not be the worst of all scenarios. | ||
| I think it's pretty clear that President Donald Trump is going to announce probably within the next week. | ||
| It'll give him a chance and all the rest of us a chance to see what happens. | ||
| If he catches fire again, it probably makes people like DeSantis and others think twice about running. | ||
| If it's lukewarm or not good at all, maybe it opens the field. | ||
| Not just to DeSantis, but Abbott, Christine Noem. | ||
| Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, you name it, the whole universe out there. | ||
| And I think, you know, as much as I don't talk and tweet the way that Donald Trump does, | ||
| I do think he's earned the right based upon what he did during those four years as president. | ||
| He has without a doubt earned the right to be at least at the top of the list of consideration. | ||
| Doesn't guarantee that he'll win the nomination or be elected president, | ||
| but I think he's at least earned it. | ||
| I was suspect early on, but my goodness, I mean, tax cuts, regulatory reform, some of the greatest judicial nominations I've ever seen, even simple things like doing what nobody else had the guts to do and moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. | ||
| There's a whole cross-section of things that most of us as conservatives Even from a libertarian's point of view, never dreamed it was possible that this guy got accomplished. | ||
| Now, does he always talk or tweet or have the same tone that many of us do? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But, again, I like people who do more than just people who talk, and for that he earns a lot of credit. | ||
| I do think that the flip side of it is, yeah, he's got a little bit of a challenge though, I think, because many of the people that he endorsed in the primaries either didn't win or, like with Vance, wouldn't have won without DeWine. | ||
| And so that'll be part of the equation as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And again, as we're taping this, we still don't know what's happening with Carrie Lake and with Blake Masters and Laxalt. | ||
| So some of this could shake out a little bit better for him, but we'll kind of see. | ||
| But since you mentioned the Libertarians, on Twitter at least, there's always this war with the Libertarians. | ||
| You know, basically, do we remain Hardcore libertarians and only vote for libertarian candidates, or, obviously, we're a bit closer to being Republicans, certainly, than Democrats. | ||
| Do we align there? | ||
| Again, these are all the ideas that Young America's Foundation are talking about all the time. | ||
| What do you think, sort of strategically, for the person that's out there, that just, it's limited government, it's low or no taxes, states' rights, that's it. | ||
| What do you think they should be doing? | ||
| Well, I think the simple answer is don't ever let the perfect be the enemy of the very good. | ||
| And by that I don't mean just universally, if you're a libertarian, vote Republican. | ||
| But I do think don't limit yourself to solely voting libertarian, because while that's great on principle, it doesn't get things done. | ||
| I think Reagan certainly was a great person at bringing different coalitions together. | ||
| During my eight years in office, three elections, of which the recall was one of the biggest in the nation, we were able to do that. | ||
| We reigned in government. | ||
| One of the biggest frustrations to me, I don't even remember this, but a few years ago, Matt Bevin, the governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, arguably at the time the most libertarian-like candidate in the country, a guy who aggressively cut red tape, who aggressively reigned in the government, who cut taxes, Who took on these big issues in Kentucky, and he lost that election just barely, and the margin by which he lost to Brashear, the current governor, was less than the margin of what the Libertarian candidate for governor got in that race, and so to me it's just a great reminder. | ||
| I get it with some of these, what some people might call rhinos, people who aren't like | ||
| a lot of government spending, who are just a little bit less bad than the Democrat running | ||
| in the race. | ||
| But in that case, it was a prime example. | ||
| This is a guy that libertarians should love. | ||
| This is a guy that libertarians should want to replicate around the country, and yet they | ||
| got behind a candidate who effectively set that margin down, and now you've got a full-scale, | ||
| Big government. | ||
| Democrat in there. | ||
| To me it just doesn't make a lot of sense. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Cross the board. | ||
| Make those candidates, those conservative Republican candidates, earn it. | ||
| And then hold them accountable when they get into office. | ||
| And I think libertarians can make some real inroads that way. | ||
| Let's talk about the other side of the coin here. | ||
| The progressives have basically just taken over the Democrat Party, and I think, unfortunately, because of the results that are kind of wishy-washy this week, I think they'll basically feel emboldened. | ||
| Do you think there's any stopping that movement within the Democrat Party? | ||
| I would imagine. | ||
| I'm not totally well-versed in Wisconsin politics, but I would imagine you've probably got some moderate Or had some moderate Democrats in Wisconsin back in the day, but they all seem to be gone at a national level now. | ||
| Well, even in the states. | ||
| I mean, when I was governor, and certainly years before, a long time ago, when I was briefly in the state legislature, but even a few years ago when I was governor, there were still a few of the kind of traditional blue-dog, out-state, somewhat rural area Democrats who were somewhat moderate to conservative on some issues, but, you know, were aligned with unions and other things along the way. | ||
| They're gone. | ||
| They're gone. | ||
| Most of those districts, it's one of the unique phenomenons, while the suburbs moved away from Republicans under President Trump, more, I think, based on tone than on policy. | ||
| The flip side of that is, in a lot of those rural blue-collar areas around my state and around the country, a lot of those Democrats who'd held those seats before, boy, this wave came in and good, solid Republican candidates won those seats. | ||
| So that shift has certainly happened in Wisconsin, but I think arguably elsewhere in the country and nationally. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, think about this. | ||
| Joe Biden, who ran just a few years ago, two and a half years ago, Joe Biden on Super Tuesday was basically positioning himself as a more mainstream alternative to Bernie Sanders. | ||
| He eventually got Mayor Pete and Senator Klobuchar out of his lane. | ||
| The mainstream, more moderate reign, because he knew you had all these other people. | ||
| You had Bernie and Elizabeth Warren and others in the far left-wing reign. | ||
| But the irony was he did that during the primary and then did the opposite of what traditionally happens. | ||
| He then went out in the general and ran hard to the left to get Bernie and AOC's support and basically outsourced his agenda to them. | ||
| Remember Kamala Harris actually had a voting record the year before she was picked that was further to the left Uh, what do you make of Biden? | ||
| What's going on there? | ||
| I mean, is he, is it all there? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| No, and it's not just age. | ||
| I mean, it's a combination, you know, as Ronald Reagan got older, even post-presidency, and | ||
| obviously later, post his presidency, all summers, if you have an inner core, he's still | ||
| clung to certain principles. | ||
| One of my complaints to Joe Biden far before this presidency was Joe Biden would do and | ||
| say anything. | ||
| I mean, quite literally, in 87, he got nailed for plagiarizing a labor leader in England, | ||
| Britain, almost word for word, claiming his words were the words of himself and not of | ||
| that labor leader. | ||
| This guy has consistently done or said just about anything to hold the office of president. | ||
| He ran in the 87-88 election. | ||
| He ran again in 08. | ||
| Obviously ran in 2020. | ||
| I think this guy would gnaw off his arm before he gave up the presidency. | ||
|
unidentified
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But I... | |
| I just think that's all the more reason, per your last question, why he's not going to back away from this radical, radical agenda. | ||
| He can't do it, because if he backs away, he doesn't have enough finesse to avoid a primary. | ||
| I think, looking ahead, that's probably a good thing, if you compare it to 1980, when we had similar circumstances. | ||
| If he did back away, he'd have what Jimmy Carter had with Teddy Kennedy, and that is a primary from the left. | ||
| And if he doesn't, unlike Bill Clinton, and I think he doesn't think he had the same problem Bill Clinton had in the 1994 elections, I think he's gonna have a real problem come 2024. | ||
| But who knows? | ||
| A lot of us thought things would be a little different on Tuesday in the elections as well. | ||
| Right, and as of the last couple of days, I mean, he says he's running again. | ||
| It's just beyond imagination, but okay, so be it. | ||
| So if you guys, if you were showing up at a YAF event at a college campus that was heavily lefty, which is pretty much every single one of them, What are some of the main ideas you would want to get across? | ||
| One of the things that I've been talking about a lot lately are the Federalist Papers and the idea of states' rights and making sure that this experiment can operate differently so that there are different places where things will be different. | ||
| What are some of the ideas that you would want to get across to these young kids? | ||
| Well, first off, one, I think we need to explain it in terms that apply not only to the head, but the heart. | ||
| I think that's one of the mistakes conservatives have made at all ages, that we think and talk with our head, the left thinks and talks with their heart. | ||
| We need to think with our head, but talk in ways that come from the heart. | ||
| And so some of our most powerful speakers at conferences And increasingly on campuses are people who've come from either communist or socialist Marxist based countries in the past because they can match the logic of the argument but tie it into real world experience. | ||
| We just had a woman who came for example and spoke to us who came from North Korea years ago escaped with her mother through China up to Mongolia. | ||
| She's a prime example. | ||
| We're gonna have her out on campuses for us because I love the connection of her telling her personal story. | ||
| It's hard to argue from the left against things that she can vouch for, things that actually happened. | ||
| We have a young man speaking this coming weekend From Venezuela. | ||
| I think we need to do more of that and match the logic with the emotion, tying the two together. | ||
| But I also think we have to get beyond kind of the cookie-cutter approach of talking in political terms. | ||
| I think you're right. | ||
| Freedom isn't just, you know, the opposite of socialism isn't capitalism. | ||
| Certainly, it's free market-based capitalism that takes a much better route than government-driven socialism. | ||
| But the opposite of socialism is more than just an economic system. | ||
| It's fundamental freedoms. | ||
| One of the ways I talk about it is say it's the difference between an Uber and a taxi. | ||
| You know, taxis are highly regulated, highly restricted. | ||
| There's usually a big fee or tax assigned to it, and they try to box people out from getting into it. | ||
| That's like those on the left who want to tell you what to do, when to do, and how to do it. | ||
| They put their faith in the government. | ||
| Our counter should be kind of like Uber or Lyft, which is, you know, they don't care whether you drive once a day or a hundred times a day, as long as you get yourself and your passengers safely from one point to the other. | ||
| They're successful. | ||
| Same view as a conservative slash libertarian point of view is as long as you don't hurt the health and safety of your neighbor, go on and live your life. | ||
| Do your thing. | ||
| I don't want to tell you what you do with your business. | ||
| You go pursue your dream the way you see fit because we believe in you more than they believe in the government. | ||
| And I think the more we get to that fundamental core story of what America is all about, it's not just conservatives, it's American idea. | ||
| Are you guys worried at all that just the entropy of all this will always drag things left? | ||
| I mean, even right now, if you think about it, you know, there's a big movement for school choice happening on the right. | ||
| So more and more parents will select out of the main systems. | ||
| Personally, I obviously think that's a good thing. | ||
| And they'll either homeschool or charter school or pods or whatever it might be. | ||
| But at the college level, That they're either just not gonna go to college, or they will just figure out other ways to go into the workforce, thus leaving the colleges, in essence, to the socialists. | ||
| Yeah, I think it ran both counts. | ||
| I mean, I've said the reaction, if you're a parent, being upset about what we've seen, either taught or not taught in our schools over the last few years, particularly during the pandemic, is one of three things. | ||
| Get involved, run for school board, take your school board over, do something that takes your traditional government-run school and puts it on the right track, Go to a private school if you're in a state like Wisconsin where I expanded school choice options statewide. | ||
| Send your kid to a private school with a voucher or tax credit or other things like that. | ||
| Or, if you've got the capacity and the ability, do homeschool. | ||
| But you're right, in those last two options, and certainly when it comes to colleges and universities, that de facto then leaves a whole mass of people in the government-run institutions that don't have That don't have a counter to all that, which is precisely why what we're doing at Young Americans Foundation is so important. | ||
| YAF.org if people are interested. | ||
| And that is people sometimes say, do you have a, do you have a, a, a YAF chapter at Hillsdale? | ||
| We do, but I'm like, I'm not worried about Hillsdale. | ||
| I'm worried about the University of Wisconsin-Madison. | ||
| I'm worried about, exactly. | ||
| I'm worried about Stanford. | ||
| I'm worried about Harvard. | ||
| I'm worried about Yale. | ||
| You know, I'm worried about so many public government run institutions. | ||
| And so that's why our work is certainly not done even as people send their kids to alternatives to the government-run institutions. | ||
| We've got to fight every single day and every single one of these campuses to get the truth out. | ||
| And remember, the irony is, you know, free speech is something that's protected by our | ||
| Constitution, but it should be revered of all places on our college | ||
| campuses. | ||
| Yet traditionally, that's where we're at the most at risk. | ||
| And so we're going to fight there. | ||
| We're going to fight on campus. | ||
| And when we get there, one of the best things is, we just had Shapiro, Ben Shapiro up the other day | ||
| at one of our campuses. | ||
| He gets not only thousands of kids on campus, even on these liberal campuses, but then we live stream. | ||
| And we put that stuff up on our YouTube page, You Off TV. | ||
| And we literally have millions of people tune into those things. | ||
| And so that's how we get around this other nonsense, Social media ways to get around. | ||
| It's the beauty of not having to go through a limited number of news sources. | ||
| We can put something up on YAF-TV and other social media sites and really have an impact. | ||
| That's where we get right to the students, not only in college, high school, middle school, and younger. | ||
| What would you say to the high school kid, or I guess to the parents of the high school kid, that care about these ideas, but they're not ready to not let the kid go to college or just send them out into the real world. | ||
| They want to send them to one of these schools, but then they're just simply looking at the numbers, and they're going, man, it's now 60 grand a year to go to, I don't know, Syracuse, and it's 20 grand a year to go to a state school. | ||
| Like, this just does not work. | ||
| What do you say to those people? | ||
| Well, I think, one, increasingly there are better alternatives than sending a young person to a four-year undergraduate. | ||
| Certainly if you want to be an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer, those are certain professions where you have to, but I think twice there's a lot of, and I wish I wasn't having to say that, but I think between the cost, the rising cost, which is only going to get worse, the so-called student debt reduction is only going to Open the door towards more of these colleges and universities upping their tuition by 10 grand or more, so it gets offset in that regard. | ||
| But I also think just the radical indoctrination. | ||
| If you're going to go, though, if your kid, your son or daughter, grandson or granddaughter, or you as a student are going to go, one of the most important things, whether it's YAF, College Republicans, some other conservative group, is surround yourself with as many like-minded people. | ||
| Because you're going to get exposed to different ideas over and over again, but you want to have a support network out there. | ||
| The number one thing we hear at our conference is our students say, oh, it's so nice to be around kids that think the same way we do. | ||
| And I know with both of my sons who are 28 and 27 now, one who went to a private Jesuit institution, which sadly was woke as well. | ||
| The other went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which is left to Berkeley. | ||
| Both of them came out conservatives because of the people they surrounded themselves with. | ||
| Who to this day still are allies of theirs. | ||
| I think that's incredibly important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you say to the kids once they get through it, when then they look at the economy and they go, man, these jobs that were being offered, we basically, we can't live in big cities because rent is high. | ||
| And we do want to get out of our parents' basement, but it seems like everybody's going back in there. | ||
| Well, again, that's part of the reason why I say reluctantly, but sadly, that if you don't have to be in a profession where it requires a four-year undergraduate degree, I'd say find some other alternatives. | ||
| A lot of folks, community colleges, apprenticeships, other means to get into decent paying jobs with all that student loan debt. | ||
| On top of it, it's a good reminder, again, why socialism, communism, Marxism might sound good to some on the surface, but it just doesn't work. | ||
| In past history, it doesn't work in Venezuela or Cuba. | ||
| Today, it's certainly a problem in Hong Kong. | ||
| We've seen it not that long ago in the Soviet Union, but even in big cities. | ||
| You see so many big cities with the problems, not only with high prices and out of control rent or housing costs, you see it with cost of living problems, you see it with crime in a lot of our large cities. | ||
| Those are all places where you not just have Democrat or liberal control, you largely have radicals in charge of these governments. | ||
| And I think that's gotta be the constant pushback, the wake up call. | ||
| If you're concerned about all these things, stop voting for people who embrace these ideas | ||
| because you're gonna get more of it. | ||
| What do you think we do about the tension between I think what's growing | ||
| between the urban and suburban communities? | ||
| You know, Lee Zeldin obviously did an incredible job in New York, way better than anyone thought, but he did lose. | ||
| And I looked at the map, you know, everybody was showing the map of New York. | ||
| And if you look at the map of New York, it's red. | ||
| It's almost all red. | ||
| Then there's the New York City metro area and a little bit sort of towards Buffalo. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| But yet they all have to vote for one governor. | ||
| And I think that tension is almost intractable. | ||
| And New York's not the only place with that, obviously. | ||
| No, you see it in variations. | ||
| You see it even in the New York metro area, the citywide. | ||
| You look at the difference the last three gubernatorial elections. | ||
| I was just looking at an interesting map today about that, where Manhattan, the island there, has gotten deeper and deeper blue. | ||
| You see Staten Island's gotten more and more red, and then you see pockets based, interestingly | ||
| enough, based on ethnic trends. | ||
| You see a lot of folks fleeing Russia that have come into southern Brooklyn that actually | ||
| have made it a little bit more open to Republicans. | ||
| You see in the northeast part of Queens where you see, according to this map, it was some | ||
| of the increases in Asian population, and that's made it a little bit more open. | ||
| So you see these divisions out there, not only just political, but by groups of people coming into the country or coming into a given region. | ||
| We see it though nationwide. | ||
| In my state, Wisconsin, part of the reason why the governor's race was not within reach, other than the fact that The Democrat incumbent spent about twice as much money as the Republican. | ||
| But was Madison, where the state capitol is at, where the university is at, got much higher percentages, not only of total votes, but a much higher margin for Democrats. | ||
| The suburbs were still Republican, but not as much as they had been in the past. | ||
| And the outstate was a little bit more open to Republicans. | ||
| But you see this split between urban areas becoming increasingly liberal. | ||
| Not even just suburban, more rural to mid-sized communities becoming strong steady strongholds, I should say, for Republicans. | ||
| There's just a real division in America. | ||
| We got to get past that. | ||
| I would hope one of the things we talk to students about is countering what the left does over and over again, certainly on campus, but even in society. | ||
| If they disagree with you, They call you a series of names. | ||
| You're racist, you're sexist, you're transphobic, whatever it is. | ||
| Sometimes it doesn't even matter if that's the topic you're talking about. | ||
| That's their way of intimidating people out of real debate, real discussion. | ||
| Our counter, for those of us center-right, I can't be coming up with their own series of names, but I think rather pushing this larger nerve that really is about unity, saying, hey, I don't care whether you're black or white, young or old, rich or poor. | ||
| I don't care where you were born here. | ||
| You illegally came here from somewhere else. | ||
| I don't care about your orientation or anything else. | ||
| What I care about is that you should have the same freedoms and the same opportunities as I inherited and others have inherited from our parents and grandparents. | ||
| That's the American dream. | ||
| That's a bigger issue than just conservative or liberal out there. | ||
| And it's the one that truly does bring people together, because then we can start to see, yeah, you know, the why is what matters, not the what. | ||
| The what will cause us to have political and other differences, but if we believe in the why, the idea that all of us were created equal, that the government didn't give us these rights, that God gave us these rights, and it's the role of the government fundamentally to protect those rights, Not the least of which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. | ||
| If that we agree on, then we can debate the specifics of the what. | ||
| But right now, sadly in most places in this country, people don't even agree on what they think the why is. | ||
| And that's a big problem. | ||
| Yeah, it's funny, my audience knows I like to end the show with some hope and we actually play a lot of Ronald Reagan clips at the end to give people some sort of aspirational message. | ||
| I certainly know that that type of thing will work for you. | ||
| But are you, you sort of just answered this, but are you hopeful that if we can teach enough young people that stuff that we will reverse this? | ||
| Because I think what's happening is a lot of people now feel if you believe in freedom, you're hopeful in red states. | ||
| But the blue state people are giving up hope, and maybe they'll just end up moving to the red states, and it is what it is. | ||
| But the hope in terms of a national structure, I think, is eroding. | ||
| I'm 100% hopeful, and I'll tell you one quick story why. | ||
| Right before COVID two years ago, I was a speaker for UFYF, not the president. | ||
| I was speaking at a member campus, one of which was Stanford. | ||
| Three of the students who invited me to speak there, I spoke with beforehand. | ||
| I asked them all sorts of questions, but one of them was how you became a conservative. | ||
| Two of the three very normal, but the third gentleman said, oh, no, my parents are Democrats. | ||
| I said, well, how'd you become a conservative? | ||
| Well, he happened to be in his dad's truck a number of times by himself, driving places, and would listen on the radio, and he found some conservative talk radio folks that he liked listening to. | ||
| He read what they talked about. | ||
| He read books. | ||
| By the time he went to Stanford, his mother's alma mater, He was a full-spectrum conservative. | ||
| He was a believer. | ||
| He got into this. | ||
| That's a great story, but what makes it powerfully optimistic is John's mother, John Rice Cameron's mother, happens to be none other than Susan Rice. | ||
| I look at that and say, if Susan's Rice, if only given the opportunity to hear the truth, to hear the facts, can actually become a full-spectrum conservative, there's hope for every young person in America if we can just get to them. | ||
| And I think we can. | ||
| So the question really is, is Susan Rice's son working on her? | ||
| That's really the question that we must be asking. | ||
| Whether we'll find out. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He loves his parents. | ||
| He just thinks they're wrong. | ||
| And thank God he got exposed to the truth. | ||
| Governor Scott Walker, I appreciate the time and all the work you're doing. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| 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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