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May 10, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
36:01
The Assault on Family: How Society is Losing its Most Important Institution | The TRUTH Podcast #25
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We conservatives were pretty good at railing against big government and for good reasons.
I think the government has proven to be disastrous in creating the conditions for our economic collapse in recent years, for cultural poison emerging in American life, and for even oppressing, and I will use that word, oppressing, borrowing the language of the other side, the will of everyday Americans in determining how we're governed.
But I think one of the areas where we don't do well enough is by talking about what we do want to see in ordering our society if it's not going to be government.
It's actually going to be the theme of the discussion today.
We're going to talk on the podcast today with a very thoughtful guy about the best known governing institution to mankind.
That is the family.
Aristotle actually believed that you could not actually be part of a broader polity if you were not first part of a household.
These are fundamental concepts.
I think there's something about human nature that says part of my identity, yes, is believing in a God, you may say.
Believing that you're a citizen of a nation.
I think these things are an important part of our American identity, about our individual identity, that we lack today.
But part of my identity is grounded in the fact that I am a member of this family, the two parents who brought me into this world.
That too is part of what grounds us.
I think it's a big part of what we've lost.
Part of the reason it feels like we're lost in the desert in America today is that we've not only lost our sense of nation, largely in this country, lost our ability to believe in God or do so without apology.
We've also lost our sense that the family is itself a grounding institution, one that matters, one that is worth preserving, not just at the individual level, but at the level of our cultural fabric itself.
That's what we're going to talk about today with a new friend of mine.
It's the first time we're actually having a conversation, Terry Schilling, who is at the American Principles Project.
He's the president there.
Terry, welcome to the podcast.
We only have a half hour together, so we like to just get right into it.
What is it that you think makes the family worth preserving as an institution from the standpoint of the country?
Why is this actually important?
Well, first, thanks so much for having me, Vivek.
I'm a huge fan of yours and I really love how forceful and direct you are with your message and that you're taking this whole country.
It's so needed right now.
The reason that the family is so important to a society is it's because it's the first place that an individual learns that there are things greater than themselves.
The family is where you learn that there are rules, that there are routines, that there's a regiment, that there are other people in this world that exist that are impacted by your actions or your lack of action.
So it's really the it's like the training grounds for building a community.
And I think that the reason we see so much dysfunction across our society today is because we've had decades long of a regime of no fault divorce.
And what that's essentially told these young children that they've witnessed and experienced themselves is that you can make a lifelong commitment to someone, you can promise them the world, and there's no consequence to you or your families from the government or any real penalties.
For breaking that promise, for breaking that commitment.
And it's led to total chaos.
And there are historical examples in the Soviet Union when they attempted to abolish the family, where husbands would knock up their wives, leave them, and you would have whole cities being ransacked by orphans, criminal orphans who would rape and pillage and rob people.
And, you know, you look at the scenes out of Chicago recently, and it's very obvious, like, what the cause is here.
So, you know, that's as short as I can do it.
It's a, you know, that's exactly why the family is so important.
And what do you think animates?
I mean, I know your organization has been vocal about standing up to the progressive or so-called progressive assault on the family as particularly the nuclear family as a unit that matters.
Black Lives Matter, right?
Famously said that they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family structure.
I don't think that that's an objective you hear about much from even the modern left or Democrat Party.
But what do you think is animating that?
Like, if you put yourself in their shoes, right?
Not in the railing against them sense, but in the sense of understanding it.
What do you think is going on there?
Because I just do think we need to get to the bottom of that.
If we're ever going to have hope of reviving family as an institution that matters in this country, not among Republicans, it's going to have to be in this country.
If we actually drive the national revival that I think you and I care about, we have to first understand what's going on with the fundamentally anti-family agenda that we see in the country.
So there are a couple things that I'll point to that's driving this anti-family movement and has been for decades.
The first is the ideology of progressivism, which at its core, the reason it's called progressivism is because they seek to progress beyond all human limits and boundaries, right?
So that's why they want to get rid of your border as a nation.
They think that having a nation that you're attached to inhibits your true human freedom and flourishing.
That's why they want to get rid of capital and property.
It's also why they want to get rid of your family.
These progressives have become so radicalized that they even want to progress beyond your own body and the constraints of your biological sex and reality.
They see a future in which human beings are not inhibited by any rules, laws, institutions, communities, whatever.
They want you to be free to come and go as you please without any obligation.
So that's first and foremost.
That's the ideology that's driving this.
But then there are, you know, the useful idiots, right, who really fundamentally misunderstand all of this.
They come from troubled families themselves.
I heard a story last night, and thank God this guy's not like this.
He went the right way.
But he told the story about how he had three other siblings, and the four of them were split across the country.
And they had to put up with their parents in custody about it.
Other people that have had really bad and harmful and disastrous experiences with their own families, so they don't want anything to do with it.
And basically, if I can't have it, no one else can either.
But then there are the revolutionaries and the people that want to actually destroy America and remake it in their image.
And this is something that we've seen throughout history.
Anytime a tyrant really wants to shake things up and take power over a nation, they have to destroy the family.
And usually they'll start out with economic means, which is Basically how we did it in America was we created an economy where both parents had to work.
So we got mom out of the house and the kids were just left to their own devices and dysfunction ensued with no-fault divorce and everything else.
So those are the three things.
It's the ideologues and the ideas driving it.
They really believe everything we're attached to is harmful.
There's the useful idiots that have come from their own terrible situations.
And then lastly, but most importantly, the guys that are funding all of this are the tyrants.
They're the ones that want to overthrow the United States government.
So, you know, let's talk about what some of those anti-family policies are.
Actually.
Whatever the genesis, I thought the revolutionaries was interesting.
Actually, if you could sort of address that too, is what are some of the examples of the revolutionaries to have an assault in the family?
What does that model look like by way of example?
I thought that'd be kind of interesting actually.
Well, the most recent non-American example is the Soviet Union.
In 1926, in the Atlantic, there was an article about the Soviet attempts to abolish the family in communist Russia.
What they did was they started off by making marriage a five-minute dissolution process.
It was no-fault divorce.
A husband or a wife could come into the constable, get their marriage dissolved, and be free to move on to whoever or whatever they want.
And what we saw there, and they use the same talking points.
Oh, marriage is an outdated institution.
Marriage shackles women.
Betty Friedan, one of the second wave feminists in America, called the family the concentration camp for women in America.
The American concentration camp is what she referred to the family as.
So they all talk about the family as if it inhibits you.
But really what the revolutionaries want is they want utter chaos and destruction.
So 1926, this article comes out in the Atlantic talking about what the Soviets had done with marriage and how they were destroying it.
And it got so bad that criminal orphans were ransacking towns because what would happen is men would, the quote they used was men would change wives with the seasons.
But with the change of seasons, that's how frequently they were getting married.
And so they would get their wives pregnant, abandon them, move on to the next one, and you were having orphan after orphan born all across the Soviet Union.
And they were raping, murdering, committing vast amounts of crime.
And the reporter in The Atlantic actually covered all of the chaos that was arising up in the Soviet Union.
And what's really fascinating is it's a very similar divide.
That we have here in America, where the elites of our nation are all totally crazy.
They want to destroy the family.
They look at it as if it's an oppressive institution for white supremacy, whatever that means.
And then it's the everyday common folk, the people that actually are in their communities and have to put up with these consequences and have to take care of these poor women that were abandoned and their children were Those were all the people that were urging them to revisit this and change that.
So that's the most recent example.
But you go back throughout history.
I mean, it happened in medieval France.
It happened in the French Revolution.
Anytime someone wants to go in and shake up a country, they always turn the children against the families and the parents.
I'm sorry, in communist China, they turn the students against their parents.
It was a student-led movement.
revolution by young people.
And they literally just discarded a lot of their relatives and their own family.
So they want to divide us father against son, mother against daughter.
If you can't have a stable, intact family, how are you going to keep a country together?
When the family's in dysfunction and disarray, your nation's going to be in dysfunction and disarray because we're related by blood.
We were all created through a loving act between two people who are madly in love with each other.
And if that doesn't work out, then how is a nation going to stay together?
I mean, do you think the Soviet Union understood – I mean, this was in 1926, you said, right, when they passed that law?
Yeah, it was 1926. Do you think – I mean, that was when they loosened the path to divorce, which then created easy opt-outs for men.
That's your whole point, was then created this culture of criminal orphans, as you put it.
Did they do something to stop that?
Because that was still a long time before the fall of the Soviet Union.
I'm just really curious on the history, or you've piqued my curiosity.
Yeah, no, it's actually fascinating.
So things got so bad in the Soviet Union with the family situation and with mothers that they actually ended up elevating mothers.
They would honor mothers as like, I forget the exact Russian term they used, but it was the equivalent of like, The worker of all workers.
They ended up having to reverse course because they weren't producing enough workers.
They were having too much crime.
They had too much instability.
So even the Soviet Union and the ideologues that were there saw the real-world consequences and then had to reverse course To the complete opposite degree, right?
Where they're actually no longer denigrating marriage, denigrating the mother and the family.
They're actually venerating mothers, right?
And honoring them.
Now, things obviously weren't always great and they still made a lot of mistakes.
They wouldn't let parents raise their children.
For example, as soon as your kid was three, you had to go to a government-sponsored daycare.
You couldn't even be watched by your grandparents.
And so, look, they did a lot of anti-family stuff, but they ended up You know, honoring mothers as the greatest of all workers, essentially.
And it was a big deal.
So that was, you think, a reaction to their failures?
Yes, exactly.
And what about the role of the fathers there?
You know, I would have to read more about that, but I know that they started to make changes in the marriage policies.
They cut back on the dissolution process and made it more difficult.
Much more difficult than a five-minute process.
But, you know, they ended up realizing that fathers and mothers are both very important because at a minimum, you need new workers to replace the ones that are dying every day.
And so at least from a logical and rational standpoint, they came down on trying to salvage things there.
And what do you think is going on with fatherlessness in particular in America today?
I mean, you think it's still that same trend of viewing the family as passe?
Or do you think it's something else that's more specific?
I read recently that 25% of kids now are born into fatherless homes in America.
What the heck is going on there?
Well, I think what's really happening is the amount of children being born every year is actually at an all-time low.
The birth rate per woman is through the floor.
It's not even at replacement levels.
What we're ultimately seeing is that the people that would be getting married at early ages in their early to mid 20s, they're no longer getting married and having children anymore.
They're putting it off.
They're prolonging it even more.
So it's a little bit misleading.
I would be willing to bet that there are probably fewer children born today to fatherless homes than there were just a couple decades ago just because of how the numbers work out.
But at the same time, we have eliminated the connection between sex and procreation, sex and marriage and marriage and children.
And so all of these things are going to flow together and they're going to create a recipe for disaster.
We now have people that I think something like 43% of Gen Zers I think it's actually millennials.
43% have no intention of getting married.
They've given up.
They don't even want it, which is crazy, right?
Because no man's an island.
We all need each other.
And life's a heck of a lot easier to go through with a dependable and loyal and loving spouse to share all those memories for it.
I look at where we are in America today and the thing is, I go to work not to have a career that I can have on my tombstone.
I go to work so I can go on vacation with my family so that I can have a dinner with them so we can go to the movies so we can create memories together.
Family is the whole reason for life if you're secular, right?
So these people are really missing out on the joys and humanity that you experience through the family, right?
It's not just joy and happiness all the time.
Sometimes it's sadness.
But sadness is a good thing because the only time you can be sad is when you lose something that you really valued, which that's a whole other topic.
Yeah, it's like that movie, Inside Out.
You ever watched that one with your kids?
Yeah, of course.
It's actually pretty good at making these movies that the parents can actually watch with their kids that both of them can enjoy at different levels.
But it was about not suppressing that which is sad because I think you said it probably more elegantly than I've ever heard it is the source of sadness is almost always losing something.
That you valued.
And at least you would rather have been in that state of having lost something you valued than to have never had what you valued at all.
There's more to life than just the aimless passage of time.
It sometimes feels like that way in modern America.
We're like wandering through the minutes of a day, through the geographic spaces we inhabit without any grounding of purpose or meaning.
And I do think that For most of human history, it's probably not that different today.
Family can provide that sense of grounding.
I guess part of what I observe is, and I know this is your purposeful focus as the family, I view it as part of a broader range of grounding institutions that we've lost.
We've lost our sense that I'm a citizen of this nation.
We've lost our sense that I am A child of God, right?
I believe in God.
We've lost the sense that I'm a member of this family.
We've lost the sense of hard work, right?
The idea that I can derive pride from working hard, putting my own effort, mixing my labor with that which is created to establish a sense of ownership and grounding.
Those things have all disappeared at the same time.
Now, of course, they're related to one another.
I'm Like you, a believer in the fact that grounding in the family unit allows us to open ourselves up to the possibility of believing in a higher God, in seeing a greater sense of citizenship to a nation.
It's, what did you say, training wheels for being part of a community?
I quite like that.
So, of course, there's deep connections.
You mostly gain your work ethic as a kid from learning from your family.
I mean, most parents train their kids to understand the values of work ethic.
Certainly, that's what my parents taught me.
But I guess a question that I have, I think maybe I'll be more expansive than you might be on this, which is Alright, fine.
If you really want to live a single, unmarried, childless life...
It's possible you could ground yourself if you double down as a person of faith, nonetheless, as somebody who wanted to serve our country, maybe you join the military, whatever it is that you do, that you work hard in that pursuit, you're proud of what you create in the world.
But you can't lose all of them at the same time, right?
So I kind of think like faith, family, patriotism, hard work.
Pick two, at least.
We're in a moment where you pick zero.
The irony is once you pick one of them, it becomes easier to pick the others as well.
But we probably both know great people who have found purpose and meaning in their life without family.
I don't think we have to say the strong form that this is the only path.
But at a societal level, it's the best path known to mankind to fill our need for purpose and grounding.
And so why would we want to create societal disincentives or an assault on that institution even if it is not possible?
The stronger form of the claim is that it's the only path.
I stop shy of that.
I mean, I know people are born into single parent households.
Even one guy who ran away from home, who works for me now, who's built a great successful career through his own hard work and dedication.
So I'm not going so far as to say it's the only path, but the thing that where I'm with you is When we know it's the best possible path, why would we want to go out of our way to eliminate that or make it more difficult for more people to realize even if there are exceptions that defy that general rule?
That's kind of where I'm at on it.
No, I think that's exactly right.
It's not the only path.
It's not even the easiest path, but it's the most efficient path.
Right.
It's very practical, actually.
Yeah, you're right.
It's very practical.
That's exactly right.
Our chairman, Sean Feiler, refers to it as the crucible of the family.
And what he means by that...
is that when you get married, you're forced to grow up, right?
It's the first time in your life where you have to actually care for another human being, where you love them so much and you try and provide for them and you compliment them.
And then when you have kids, those kids end up just destroying and incinerating any bit of selfishness you have left in your body, right?
You don't go out drinking every night because the hangover is a lot worse when you have screaming children in the morning waking you up on Saturday morning, right?
Or, you know, whatever day of the week it is.
It's a very effective and efficient way to get people to not be so self-obsessed, self-absorbed.
And I look at the world we live in today and everyone, not everyone, but many people talk about themselves as if they're gods, right?
There's this new fad of self-love.
What is that?
I'm not concerned.
I'm so focused on loving my children and making sure they have what they want.
I don't have time for myself.
But guess what?
There's this natural thing in the family where you get love returned just organically.
And I get that there are some people that are raised in abusive situations or are...
Don't have the most ideal or best family situation, but that's even more reason to recognize the importance of the family and the importance of having a healthy family as if you've had a bad experience with it.
So it's just such...
It's a natural and organic way to create selfless citizens who know how to participate in a community and in a larger part of society.
It's interesting.
You're making me think.
I mean...
I may disagree with you or maybe frame it differently from you where selflessness is a hard thing to demand of a person or even expect and in some ways even to desire of a person.
I think self-love is, sounds like a good thing to me, but in a certain way, you get there in a thin version of it by thinking that you are a man on an island and that self-love is a substitute for being part of something bigger than yourself, right? you get there in a thin version of it by
Be it faith in God or a country or a family, when in fact, the path to self-love, like in the true sense of that word, is actually through experiencing and participating and providing the love of a family member, the respect that you give one another as co-equal citizens the respect that you give one another as co-equal citizens in a society.
So I think that in some ways, we have a problem right now in our country, not of too much self-love.
But too much self-loathing.
And I think that when you loathe yourself, actually, when you disguise it perhaps in the superficial veneer of self-love, this atomistic conception of the self.
But actually, self-actualization, even in the self, I mean, that's a very selfish pursuit, not bad kind of selfish.
It is centered on the self, the self-actualization.
You know, those are words that I'm borrowing from what many sort of postmodern progressives would use as a substitute for religion.
But it's just practically a lot easier to get there when you can experience the love and give the love as a family member to be able to actually discover your sense of self.
It's like, you know, I don't know, I give this example at a church the other night when I was speaking, we were a 10-county bus tour in New Hampshire, but it's like you're a bat.
It's like we're all bats.
Lost in some cave.
And we want to find our sense of self.
Where am I in that cave?
Like, not because I care about selfless or anybody's.
I want to know where I am.
But the way you do it when you're blind is you send out a sonar signal.
And then it bounces off something that is fixed.
Something that is true.
Family is one of those things.
I think God is one of those things.
The nation of which I'm a citizen is one of those things.
The things I create in the world through my efforts and hard work is one of those things.
But today it feels like we send out those signals and then nothing comes back.
And so we're lost.
And you don't love yourself when you're lost.
You may begin to hate yourself or lose your sense of self.
And so it's not Terry, for me at least, and we're allowed to have different angles on this.
But for me, about actually even that selfish process of self-discovery is just that much easier when you're doing so from a fixed footing that you can jump higher if you're doing so from a stable foundation rather than from a foundation that's moving or non-existent that's kind of the way i look at it in ways that hopefully might be progress persuasive to some people who might think of themselves as progressive in that atomistic conception of the self
It's easier for you if you're doing it from the standpoint of a nuclear family as a kid of two parents, as a parent of one of two who's raising kids.
I don't know.
That's just kind of the way I look at it.
I don't know if that little stream of consciousness made any sense to you or not, but as I was hearing you, that's kind of how I look at it differently.
No, it definitely makes sense.
I think that, ultimately, we're redefining words every day now.
Yeah.
And I think we've lost all sense of what the meaning of the word love is.
Right?
Like, is there more?
This is just a hypothetical.
I mean...
Is there more love in a relationship where both the individuals are infatuated with each other?
Or is there more love in a marriage where the two spouses really don't get along and they find each other very annoying, but they stick together, they sacrifice for their children, they stay together for those kids and put together, put on a game fit.
I think that there's probably more love in that second relationship than the one where it's super easy to get along.
I think ultimately, like in my world anyway, Love means sacrifice.
Sacrifice is how you prove that there is love there.
And I think that's how I've experienced love is by witnessing my parents sacrificing for us.
And what's really beautiful is a lot of times the love that you're shown as a kid, you don't even realize it's a sacrifice.
Your parents do such a good job of hiding how badly they're struggling.
There's that meme out there of the kid on the way to McDonald's, and he's got no clue about his family's financial situation, but he's just so pumped to be going to McDonald's with his mom.
There's just something sacrificial in what love actually is built around, and I think that That's really the problem with a lot of Americans today is because they haven't witnessed their own parents sacrifice and because their parents, you know, refuse to sacrifice any further for their better, you know, for their, you know, the greater good of their families that they don't want to sacrifice for anyone else.
And, you know, your parents really are in a Christian sense.
I know this is secular.
We're talking about, but in a Christian sense, it can be religious.
Oh, No, that's great.
So your father is an example of God to you, right?
Like he's not God, but it's a few steps away from how God the Father acts.
And there's a lot of correlation.
And if you believe in all this stuff, the thing is the family represents the Trinity.
A love between two individuals is so great that it creates a new life.
And you have that with the Father, the Son, and their love for each other that creates the Holy Spirit.
So, I don't know.
I think there's just something really sacrificial at the heart of what true love is all about, or at least a willingness to sacrifice.
And I think we've lost that sacrificial nature that we've had as a nation.
I mean, we've sacrificed a lot for...
Take, for example, the issue of abortion.
And I've been talking more and more about this, even though it's not really one of our issue sets.
But the left tells us nonstop, you owe it to complete strangers to pay for their college degree that they probably aren't even going to use or need for their next job.
Uh, you owe them a college degree.
You have to pay for their tuition.
You have to pay for their housing, their clothing, their shelter, everything for complete strangers.
But mothers and fathers don't owe their own children nine months in the womb.
Uh, you know, we discard things.
We, and you know why, uh, It's not that adoption costs too much or there's a backlog of baby orphans out there.
It's because adoption is so much more difficult and self-sacrificing than abortion.
You can get an abortion and no one will know.
No one will know besides you and the doctor.
Whereas if you go through with an adoption, lots of people, everyone in your family is going to know, unless you escape or something.
But there's something we're missing that sacrificial nature that is a requirement for true love to exist.
Yeah, you made me think a lot about this.
I mean, I think that part of what we're missing even in our civic culture in this country is that idea – I sometimes talk about a civic duty, right?
We've lost our sense that, okay, we get all these rights.
We get all these privileges.
I get to vote and cast a ballot box.
But what about the duty that goes along with that?
I think family is the training wheel of actually understanding what it means to make a sacrifice.
And you know what?
You can make – what my parents taught me, you can make a sacrifice.
I mean, entering a marriage is a sacrifice.
You're giving something up.
Having children is a sacrifice.
You're giving something up.
You can make these sacrifices if you know what you're sacrificing for.
I think that applies equally at the level of a family as it does in like a completely unrelated topic where this comes up or seemingly unrelated topic is a decoupling from China.
I mean, that's a big economic objective and geopolitical objective, more geopolitical objective of mine as the next US president.
But that's gonna require some short-term sacrifices, or at least it could.
But again, we can make these sacrifices if we know what we're sacrificing for.
There is this thing we call America.
But I think that we never built that muscle memory, especially in an environment where we don't grow up in a family.
Terry, I have so many other questions for you.
I mean, I think you and I kind of pick this conversation up in the future.
I think we should talk about the tough cases of where, as a child, your child tells you that I am, you know, trans or you're born in a Christian family, but your child says I'm gay or whatever.
How does the love of family manifest itself in situations where you also provide a guiding light to your kid that ground them in Their process of self-discovery when they may go awry, or maybe that is who they discover themselves to be, and then when they're grown up.
And what do you do from your perspective as a Christian parent?
I think some interesting questions there that we only got to the doorstep of.
And maybe I'll just give you the final word in teasing maybe a future conversation that we have and what your reaction is to that and what your message would be to parents who embrace your pro-family message but may find that at odds with some of the quandaries that present themselves along the way.
I think one of the things that I really love about the message that you're bringing to the American people with your campaign is that you are tying the fates of America and the family together.
You don't separate those two.
And there is no strong America without strong families, and there's no strong families without a strong America.
Their fates are intrinsically tied.
And I would just urge, because we're conservative, we're right of center, we're skeptical of the government.
And I share that skepticism.
But at the same time, our government's doing a lot to hurt the family, to take away parental rights, to ruin the innocence of our children.
And there's a lot they're not doing that they absolutely should be doing to protect our kids.
Our government regulates the size of our toilets and how many gallons you can flush at a time.
But they don't tell porn companies that they can't target our kids with advertising.
They don't even force them to check the age of the viewers watching.
But we do that with sports betting and all of that.
So we have to get our priorities straight in America.
And I think ultimately, we need to be a little bit more cynical in one aspect.
We need to treat the family like a special interest group.
We call APP. We started the big family, if you can see it.
But it's called the big family.
There's big pharma, big oil, big tobacco.
Clowns have their own lobby.
It's called the National Balloon Society.
We need the family to be the most feared and powerful special interest group in this country.
That's the only way we're going to turn things around.
So...
This is everything, right?
The fight for the family, the fight for America, against our enemies, both foreign and domestic.
It's everything.
And I really, really appreciate you running for president.
It's a big deal.
I love how seriously you're taking it.
And I want as many people to get your message as possible.
So I'd love to work with you and talk with you more in the future and do stuff together.
But it would be really great.
And I'm really appreciative that you're running for president.
Appreciate that, man.
I'm grateful to people like you who are willing to utter four-letter words like God and family in a culture where, you know, that's become increasingly difficult and unpopular thing to do, and I'm doing my part to change that as well.
Not all of it's going to be through policy.
Some of it can be, exactly through what you mentioned.
Some of it's just going to be through leaders having the courage to demonstrate that and not just preach about family values, but I hope whoever it is, me, if it's somebody else, let it be the same too.
It's somebody in the White House who we can look up to and say that, look my son in the eye and say, I want you to grow up to be like him.
And it's not just preaching about family values, but living it too and setting an example that That embodies the kinds of values that we say we stand for.
And to the extent I'm successfully put in that position, I'll do my best, maybe even better than some in our movement, in actually grounding what we preach and align that with how we practice and live our own lives.
I think that's the least we could ask of our leaders.
And so we'll do our best.
I appreciate that, Terry, and we're going to, I'm sure, continue this conversation.
Thanks a lot, my man.
Thanks, Vivek.
I'm Vivek Ramaswamy, candidate for president, and I approve this message.
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