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Sept. 19, 2023 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:09:19
"Libs of TikTok" & Vivek Ramaswamy | The TRUTH Podcast #38
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Time Text
You were, like, on TV all the time, exposing what's already out there.
LGBTQ activists, teachers, people in the medical industry, doctors, and they were basically this sexualized agenda onto kids.
Don't let anybody hold you back.
Amen.
Just do it.
We should not be apologetic to stand up and speak for the truth.
Let's talk truth.
Most people know you as Libs of TikTok.
But your real name is Haya Reichich, if I got that right.
We share something in common with a name that requires teaching people how to pronounce it, so we're already starting from some common ground here.
I've been looking forward to this conversation.
I have been following you from afar, like literally millions of others.
But I wanted to get to the story behind the TikTok account, and it's grateful to me that you've been...
I'm really grateful that you have taken the time to come here in Columbus, Ohio, and we're gonna dive into your story if you're cool with that.
Yeah, of course.
It's great to be here to have this conversation.
I think this topic is extremely important, especially for someone who can possibly have more power to do something about this cultural phenomenon that we're seeing.
So tell me about you.
We'll get into the culture, but I want to know about you.
This is a unique opportunity.
Tell me about you.
Where did you grow up?
What was your professional background and the journey that led you to do what you're doing now?
So I grew up in LA and then I lived in New York for a number of years after school and I had random jobs.
I went through probably like five different jobs.
Did you go to college?
I did, yeah.
Where was college?
In New York?
No, I did online.
Okay, nice.
I did one year in person in Israel.
Oh, nice.
I studied abroad.
You were in Israel?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
And then I did online college after that.
Nice.
How was Israel?
Amazing.
Israel is one of the most amazing places.
Do you have any ties to Israel or how did you choose it?
So I'm Jewish.
Okay.
And I have a lot of relatives in Israel.
And in my Jewish circles, it's actually very common after high school to go to Israel for one year to study.
So high school was in LA. Then you went to...
So I actually went to a boarding school for high school.
Okay.
Outside LA. Cool.
And then one year in Israel.
Where?
We're in Israel?
In Tel Aviv?
In Sfat.
In Sfat?
Okay.
I've been there.
Yeah.
There's not much there.
Yeah.
There's a factory there.
Yeah.
The candle factory.
Yeah.
There's a couple of factories.
Yep.
So yeah, that's cool.
Yeah.
It was an incredible year.
Really great experience.
The culture in Israel is so unique.
And just obviously getting to see my heritage in the land of Israel, it was just amazing.
So one year there.
One year, yeah.
Cool, at a young age too.
Yeah, 18, yeah.
Cool.
So then anyway, you came back, finished your degree, and then you found your way into the workforce.
Yeah, I just was doing random jobs.
I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do.
And then I was working for about five years.
I'm 28 now, so five, six years.
I did real estate.
I worked in an Amazon-related company.
I did marketing.
And then COVID happened.
Mm-hmm.
So my office shut down.
The real estate market in Brooklyn shut down.
No showings.
So I went back home to L.A. and I was never really political.
So COVID is going on and we're trapped in our homes and this is L.A. So it's really bad.
We literally were not allowed to leave our houses.
So I probably left my house twice in the span of two or three months.
We had to wear a mask to walk down the street.
We didn't go to the store.
Nothing.
Trapped in our home.
So I was like, this is bad.
What's going on here?
So that's when I started really looking into what's happening.
Who's making these decisions?
Why are we being locked in our homes?
Why are tons of people losing their jobs?
And then people started being threatened that they're going to lose their job if they don't take an experimental vaccine.
And you knew people who were at risk of losing their jobs.
Yeah, for sure.
People were terrified because they rely on their livelihood, whether that's a teacher or working in an office.
And it was a really scary time.
And even for myself, I'm like, when is this going to end?
Well, the real estate market, when is it going to start up again?
Because this is my livelihood.
I rent out apartments in Brooklyn.
And that's when I created my Twitter account.
And I was like, I started really paying attention.
And I started watching the news and listening to podcasts.
And that's when I really started getting into politics.
And then, obviously, the election happened in 2020. And then I... Over COVID also, I think, is when TikTok got really popular because TikTok has really been around for years.
And it's only in the last, like, two, three years that we're really hearing about it.
And I think it's because everyone was stuck at home.
A lot of people lost their jobs.
I think people were looking for entertainment and then people discovered TikTok and it really got very popular then.
- You think COVID helped TikTok? - COVID definitely helped TikTok.
Maybe it's related to something in China, I don't know.
- Did you actually make your account then? - So I made it at the end of COVID.
- Okay, you did. - And so there's a few reasons why my account became so popular so fast.
It was the timing because like I said, TikTok was all of a sudden like everyone's like, what is this TikTok thing?
You know, all of a sudden there's TikToks being posted everywhere on Twitter and on Instagram and everyone's talking about TikTok.
And then there was also this other thing we were seeing where Parents all of a sudden were seeing what was going on in their kids classrooms right because their classrooms suddenly was in their dining room and parents are like looking at the teachers and the content and they were like what's going on here because there was a lot of really disturbing things yeah and I think people just weren't paying enough attention before so Then I started talking about the stuff going
on in the schools and the classrooms, and I think that really resonated with a lot of parents and a lot of people.
So the timing of Libs of TikTok's creation really could not have been more perfect, and I think that's part of its success.
So basically, I discovered TikTok, and I started seeing TikToks being shared on Twitter.
They would go viral, and I was like, what is TikTok?
So I started going on it and at first I was sharing a lot of the COVID-related videos.
Like what?
Like people singing, how excited they are to get vaccinated.
You know, literally while people are losing their jobs for refusing the vaccine, people like praising, like, you know, Lord Fauci.
They were like idolizing him.
So they would have like candles of Fauci and like cutouts in their homes.
Are you kidding me?
And like Fauci embroidered pillows.
It's a serious cult.
It was a Fauci cult.
I don't know if you remember.
People with embroidered pillows.
Yeah.
That's very funny.
Yeah.
I mean, that's next level.
There was one, someone named their pet dog.
Sounds like a nightmare.
Their pet, sorry, horse, Fauci.
Huh.
Yeah.
Was that horse one that like trampled on all of the other horses and like stampeded them to death or was it just like a normal innocent horse?
I wouldn't be surprised.
I wonder what the name is now after, you know, we're realizing that Fauci lied a lot.
Yeah, maybe they're locking up that horse.
They should be.
So anyway, so you basically were frustrated by a year of, maybe a couple years of being told to shut up, sit down, do as you're told, locked in your home.
You said you had a family?
Yeah.
A family?
You're married?
No, I'm not married.
I'm one of eight siblings.
So you were with your siblings and your parents during this period.
A couple of them, yeah.
And that frustrated the heck out of you.
And you decided you wanted to speak up.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
And so you opened up a TikTok account and started posting other people's videos.
Not even videos you made, necessarily.
Right.
And they just started taking off.
It started exploding.
I mean, it...
Why did you call it libs of TikTok?
I have no idea.
Literally, yeah.
It literally just came to me.
It's such a sticky and catchy name.
I know.
Sometimes.
So you just said Libs of TikTok.
It's just like...
Yeah.
It just came to me.
Because you know people talk about owning the Libs and other...
It wasn't even...
I mean, I was like, look, these are all Libs who are making these videos and they're kind of...
It's like videos on TikTok, so it's just like Libs of TikTok.
Okay.
And it was just so catchy.
So videos of liberals on TikTok was your whole account theme.
Yeah.
I didn't spend $10 million in brand marketing.
Nope.
Nothing.
No think tanks.
Just spur of the moment decision.
Libs of TikTok.
Okay.
And then these things just started taking off.
Yeah.
So I think it was very entertaining.
It was also very enlightening because I think a lot of people felt the same way I did.
And then they were able to really resonate with the content.
But what actually got Libs of TikTok known nationally was when I started posting the other types of content.
So I started veering away from the COVID stuff.
COVID was basically ending in a lot of states.
And I also was spending a lot of time on TikTok.
And I came across this whole cultural phenomenon of activists who are just...
LGBTQ activists, teachers, people in the medical industry, doctors, all these types of influencers.
And they were basically...
It appeared to me that they were pushing this sexualized agenda onto kids.
So I started sharing that type of content.
And that's when it really exploded.
And what about...
I mean, like...
You explained what sort of moved you.
It was very first personal...
On the COVID restrictions.
What gave you the motivation to then take this set of issues on?
I think it was just...
So I don't have any of my own kids yet.
And I also never went to public school.
So I think for me, it was just...
It was less personal and more just the shock factor.
And I'm like, how is all this happening?
And nobody's talking about it.
This was before...
We're going back two years.
So before everybody started tackling these issues, nobody's talking about it.
I'm like, do people even know this was happening?
I wonder...
If people are just unaware.
And I was like, this is absolutely insane.
This is crazy.
This is dangerous.
And I just knew that I had to start sharing it to show people.
And from what I've seen in our schools in terms of the sort of cultural indoctrination...
Yeah, there's a couple strands to it.
One are the vestiges of critical race theory, of being able to teach young kids that they're oppressed based on the color of their skin, based on their genetics.
That whole strand.
Then there's the version of that that bleeds over into some of those genetic factors are sexual in nature, you know, whether you're gay or not.
And then you go into the modern trans thing, which is a whole nother fixation altogether, that then just started getting into outright sexual content that they're foisting onto kids at an inappropriately young age.
Which of those were you kind of focused on the full spectrum or more on the LGBT stuff and less on the race stuff?
So it is more in the LGBTQ stuff, but it's everything.
So it's basically anything, any insane wokeness happening, not just in schools, but in hospitals, in institutions, in companies.
You know, anything that is basically affecting our culture that I think needs to be called out.
Yeah, and so that just started getting under your skin a little bit.
And again, you're posting just videos that are already out there.
So sort of like a news service in a certain way.
Yeah, exactly.
You became a news service.
Yeah, I view myself as a journalist.
And how did you get that content?
By...
Like, what was your sourcing mechanism?
Spending hours a day on TikTok.
Yourself?
Yes.
Good.
Yeah.
On TikTok.
On TikTok.
Yeah.
And so the content you're getting, is it generally other people who are similarly upset about it and putting it on TikTok?
Or was it in some cases people who are boasting about it and putting it on TikTok?
Mainly people boasting about it.
Mainly people boasting about it.
That's remarkable.
Because I think one of the things that I've noticed happening in this debate, and I think that's maybe what makes your case pretty interesting, like I kind of want to get into this, is The dynamic—and you might have seen this, right?
I'm more in the political world now than you are.
But the dynamic is if, you know, someone, broadly speaking, the right, is talking about critical race theory or, in a technical sense, the vestiges of critical race theory in schools or talking about the trans indoctrination in schools— I
instead of taking that concern seriously and saying this is crazy and we shouldn't be doing this is to say look at these crazy people on the right making up something that doesn't actually exist so we have a manufactured hysteria a manufactured outrage
that's the term they usually use a fake outrage manufactured outrage and then that becomes the whole msnbc talk track is don't talk about the underlying issue instead talk about how it's a projection of something artificial that's made up and so that's what i was asking you like if you're drawing mostly from videos of other people on the right who are outraged that still allows the msnbc cover to persist and
But if these are people boasting about or even highlighting the fact that this is indeed what we're doing, that completely undercuts that narrative.
Which is what probably caused you to take off, actually.
And that's why they hate me so much and try to do everything to silence me.
Really?
Yes.
So you start posting these videos.
Are you offering commentary with them or are you literally just putting them out?
No commentary usually.
If I do, it's very minimal.
I've seen your account pop up on television all the time.
I don't really watch much cable television, but I'm on it a lot.
And usually you go on 15 minutes early or 10 minutes early to sort of get your thing framed up, but you can hear and see what's going on.
And you were on TV all the time, right?
Certainly your account was.
And maybe it's because you weren't offering commentary.
It's just you're literally exposing what's already out there.
Yeah, it's pretty remarkable what could happen when you just shine a light on what other people are saying.
It's actually remarkably humble and effective.
Yeah.
How many followers do you have now?
Right now on Twitter, 2.4 million.
And what about on TikTok?
I don't have a TikTok account.
I was banned.
Oh, you're not on TikTok anymore.
So libs of TikTok is not on TikTok.
No, we were banned.
When?
A year and a half ago.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah.
See, I thought TikTok was your big thing.
Oh, we were banned from everything.
You name it, we were banned.
Why?
Like I said- For just reporting what other people said?
Yeah, it's too effective.
It was way too effective for the left.
They couldn't handle it.
Unbelievable.
So, okay.
All right, we're getting ahead of- So you're posting this stuff.
Okay, you're just posting what other people said.
It's taking off.
So then what happens?
Keep walking me through this.
Right.
So like we were discussing before, one of the left playbook is to basically deny that any of this is happening.
Right.
It's not happening.
It's not happening.
There's no CRT in schools.
There's no gender ideology in schools.
Republicans are making it up.
You know, they like to say Republicans pounce.
False outrage.
We're the ones that have the issue here.
And then it's like, I'm coming with these videos and it's literally a teacher, for example, saying like, hi, I teach second grade and today I told my students that they could be transgender.
And it's like, how could you defend that?
And then how could you claim that this is not happening when I have absolute first-hand proof that it is?
So at first they would try to- Like, give me an example.
Like literally what I just said.
That's an actual example.
I probably have dozens of videos similar to that.
Dozens?
Dozens, yeah.
So this isn't some one fringe example somewhere that you're making up that you might have side paid them to do it so that you could have a story.
I mean, that's the left wing narrative.
So that's one of the accusations that the far left used to use for me.
They were like, oh, she's cherry picking or it's just fringe.
Manufacturing it.
Manufacturing.
But it's like, you can't say that if we're two years in to live to TikTok and every single day there is new content that aligns with that.
So how can you say that I'm cherry picking and it's fringe?
It's like, this is so common, much more common than anybody could ever believe.
So yeah, I mean, for example, there was a video that I posted about a teacher in California.
And it was sort of a conservative area.
And she basically was saying that her students, they were pledging allegiance.
And her students said, but there's no American flag here.
And she was laughing about how she hid the American flag because she didn't want it in her classroom.
And then she told them that they could actually pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag because that was hanging proudly in her classroom.
Unbelievable.
Insane.
When was this?
This was a little over a year ago.
And she was actually fired the next day.
The community came to the school and they put little American flags around the whole property of the school.
They stuck them in the grass.
So that was a really big story.
Obviously, it was good to see that the school took action.
But that's the type of thing.
And that wasn't a one-off.
There was another video I posted just a couple months ago of another teacher saying that she told her students to pledge allegiance to the Progress Pride flag.
So this is something that is not fringe.
It's not cherry-picked.
This is something that's happening in basically a majority of school districts across the country.
Unbelievable.
So...
Talk to me about what then happened.
How many followers did you have on TikTok then by that point?
They banned me after like three weeks.
So I had probably like 10,000 followers.
Oh, are you kidding me?
Yeah.
I'm like, they should be sending me texts.
So your videos are taking off.
Your videos are popping.
Yeah.
And so who made this decision?
So walk me through when the banning begins because the details around this I think are just so important.
Walk me through the specifics.
My first temporary Twitter suspension was a couple months after I opened my account.
It had nothing to do with any TikTok video.
It was something else that I reported where DuckDuckGo, which is an alternative to Google, was basically they rejected an applicant because he didn't fit their...
It was a while ago, so I'm fuzzy on the details, but that was my first temporary Twitter suspension.
And I remember I had probably 200,000 followers then, and I remember being terrified.
And I was like, I really don't want to lose my Twitter account.
And people were getting suspended left and right from Twitter.
It was every day another account was getting suspended from Twitter, from Instagram, from YouTube, from Facebook.
And then it was just temporary.
So I got my account back.
And then a couple months later came my next temporary Twitter suspension.
So in total, I got about seven or eight Twitter suspensions.
All of them for literally just stating facts.
Obviously not violating the rules, but it was just inconvenient.
And what did they cite was the reason?
A variety of things like posting private information, abuse and harassment, With no details?
No, no.
And you're literally just posting videos that other people had made.
It's interesting how the things that actually usually get censored aren't the myriad of things that are false.
They don't care about that.
No.
They care about censoring the truth.
Censorship almost isn't required for falsehood because most people are able to sort that out for themselves.
I think the fear isn't that people believe what's false.
It's that they might actually believe what's true.
They'll censor whatever is a threat to their agenda.
Yeah.
So what do you think that agenda is?
You know what?
I'll be honest.
I don't think they fully know.
I think I'm with you on that.
I think that they just envision some kind of society where everyone is just confused and it's just chaotic and there's a couple of people who are making all the decisions and running everything and everyone else is just kind of robotic and I don't think they actually have a plan for what comes after that if they achieve what they want.
I think it's an interesting observation, right?
Because if you think about, like, what is that agenda?
And it does seem kind of incoherent, because at least if you knew what the agenda was, but I think you're right.
I think it is actually disorder.
Yeah, exactly.
It's not that they're trying to enforce one orthodoxy.
I don't think they particularly care for the racial hierarchy any more than they do to the sexual indoctrination, any more than they do to the climate cult or religion, any more than they do about Ukraine.
Yeah.
It's just, broadly speaking, a form of chaos and disorder and And the proof is...
Is the goal.
The proof is that whenever one of these things that they claim to care so strongly about is inconvenient for them, they'll just give that up.
They'll sacrifice it.
They'll sacrifice it.
So it's not about a specific...
Yep, yep, yep.
That's actually a pretty deep point.
Is their willingness to turn what was once a cause into a sacrificial lamb suggests that there's something deeper going on?
And what do you think drives that urge towards chaos?
Yeah.
That's a really good question.
What do you think?
So I think that actually that urge exists within each of us.
And I think in some ways the societal introspection is even easier than a deep individual introspection.
And I think there's a side to each of us That favors order, what is true, what is right.
And then there's an element of us, the fallen nature of man, that calls on us to suppress the better angels in our nature, to choke them to death with...
That element of us which has fallen.
The sin that resides, or the impulse towards sin that resides in each of our hearts.
And I think that there's a kind of spiritual warfare that is eternal.
And I think that by suppressing that reality in each of ourselves, or at least the willingness to introspect and engage with that...
When that becomes suppressed, it then finds its way out into the societal sphere where you have groups of people who allow that element, chaos, disorder, that which is wrong, to roam free over that which is right and true.
And so where does it come from?
I guess it is from the loss of Traditional religion, faith.
I was going to say God, yeah.
Yeah.
God, I mean, I think it's the loss of God.
I personally don't frame it that way because God is still there.
Belief in God, yeah.
I think it's probably pretty close to the target.
Yeah.
I will say that to me...
Are you religious?
Yeah, I am.
Okay, yeah.
A lot of times it feels like the people that are pushing this agenda, the teachers, the doctors, the psychologists, the activists...
It does feel like a lot of times they don't...
They're following a script.
And they don't even really know what they're doing.
They're just going through the motions.
They're going through the motions.
And they're just following what they're...
Like zombies, actually.
Exactly.
It kind of feels like they're brainwashed.
Well, they're sort of like zombies.
Yeah, they're like the, you know...
I mean, every sort of fictional epic drama has a version of this, you know, the Game of Thrones, the whites or whatever, the people who are just, you know, hollowed out husks, dead bodies walking around being guided by some sort of deeper force, causing them to be the instruments of whatever philosophy they're purveying, which isn't even a philosophy.
It's just a mechanism for implementing disorder.
Yeah.
And I think that that makes it easier to identify the cause, which is the fact that they're hollowed out husks.
The hollowness is the cause.
And I think that that's something I sometimes talk about in the campaign trail, is that we are so starved for purpose and meaning, that when we completely drain the lifeblood out of our core, Belief in God is high on that list, but even for those who don't believe in God, belief in nation, grounding in family.
Traditional values.
Yeah, exactly.
And we call them traditional values for a reason.
They're time-tested for a reason.
They work, right?
Or at least for most of human history, they have.
I mean, dating back to Aristotle, the family was the unit around which the state was then built.
Individual self-confidence is still part of the foundation that comes from the family.
When these things are gone, something is going to pray and fill that void.
Yeah.
And that's, you could view it in theology as, I mean, that's what Satan is all about.
But you could even view it in the context of modern cultural warfare.
If you don't believe in God, you're going to believe in climate instead, right?
If you don't believe in the true equality of man, because we're equal in the eyes of God, made in the image of God, as we say in the tradition I was raised in, God resides in each If you stop, if you abandon these beliefs, then you start seeing one another as an inevitable and inextricable power relationships with one another based on our genetics and that life is nothing more than the aimless passage of time adjudicating these invisible power relationships.
It's going to have to be some other comprehensive worldview that fills the void when you actually lack the time-tested ones that are Served up to us by history, but that we reject.
And so I think that's what's mostly going on.
I cannot agree more.
I can't agree more.
And it does, you're right, it does feel like it's a spiritual warfare right now.
We're in a spiritual warfare.
It is.
And I don't think it's one that mostly politics is going to fix, actually.
No, and you know what?
I say this a lot.
I don't think most of what I talk about on my account is really it shouldn't be political.
Like I don't understand why it's a political idea to not chop off the breasts of young confused teenagers or even the whole thing with like Sound of Freedom and human trafficking and child sex trafficking.
It became so political and it's like this is All of this is stuff that a couple of years ago the entire country agreed on.
Like we all agree that it's bad to, like human trafficking is bad.
We all agree it's bad to chop off the body parts of young confused kids.
We all agree it's bad to give kids porn in school.
To bring kids to stripper shows.
These were all things that, as a society, we all agreed on.
And the left is really the ones that made it.
They're the ones that made it political.
And they kind of...
They made it.
They're a party platform that they promote bringing kids to stripper shows, giving kids porn in schools, teaching four-year-olds that they could be transgender and that they could chop their breasts off.
And it's really sad because it's really not political.
But it became that.
Yes.
And...
I think that there's a danger in that.
That might be another trap we're actually being led into.
That we need to be careful about on the right.
Because I think it has presented itself as a convenient opportunity for the Republican Party.
And I think what you have right now is a bunch of professional politicians seizing on that energy, but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against and using it to put their name on some bill that makes their way through a legislature or Congress or but without a deep understanding of what they're actually up against
Without actually understanding the essence of what's going on, which then turns something that which should be unifying across purpose driven human beings to restore our sense of purpose to becoming some partisan struggle and tug of war.
I'm sure some people may, you know, further eyebrows hearing me say this because I'm a presidential candidate.
But actually, the way certainly I have aimed to talk about this issue transcends Republicans and Democrats and the partisan stuff.
That's about raising taxes and lowering taxes.
This is something deeper about answering the question of who we are as individuals and as a people.
And this is why I don't think these are issues that congressmen or senators or even governors are necessarily going to be well positioned to address.
But the president is a cultural symbol of this nation.
Right.
And I think the more important job of the next president is more than any policy, actually, is going to be to set a tone of national character of who we are as a people.
And that means something in a way that goes beyond any given law or executive order that we sign.
And so anyway, that's what calls me into this.
I don't think about this as actually a political journey.
Yeah, it's a cultural revival.
I see what you're saying and I agree.
And right now, the person occupying the Oval Office is someone who had a trans person come and shake their breasts in front of the White House at a Pride event.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Who was this?
Oh, some random trans activist?
A trans activist.
It's the first, they celebrated the first woman who's an assistant secretary of one of the parts of the Navy.
Yeah.
Who is literally a man.
Rachel, yeah, now Rachel Levine.
It's interesting what that would say to a women's rights movement.
We're celebrating the first woman to occupy this post is actually a man.
The president also invited Dylan Mulvaney, who's the poster child for the trans agenda, which is very harmful to kids, to the White House.
And now Dylan is charging, I'm not kidding, you can't make this up, $40,000 to speak about women's empowerment.
Really?
It's beyond parody.
I bet you some people are.
Yeah.
Oh, of course.
I'm sure he's going to have a bunch of people lining up to pay him that.
So this man is speaking about women's empowerment by claiming to be a woman.
This man is the most expensive women's empowerment speaker in the United States.
That's really funny.
The most...
It's like almost like, yeah, I mean, that's like worse than Ibram Kendi, preaching about the need to fight discrimination with more discrimination.
This is, that's really, that's actually pretty remarkable.
So I agree that, that...
Shame on a culture that allows Dylan Mulvaney to get rich off that.
I mean, look, good for him.
If people are lining up to pay him $40,000, he's cashing in.
Yeah, this dude is a really pretty enterprising entrepreneur.
He should win the Young Male Entrepreneur of the Year.
Call it a farce on our culture.
Young Women's Entrepreneur of the Year.
So the socially accepted status of this individual is a man or a woman?
I've lost track.
So he's a male and now he identifies as a woman.
Okay, got it.
So, I mean, I think that they're, just going back to what you were saying before, I think that there are certain policy issues that are really harming kids and are very dangerous that legislators are doing something about and I think should be.
So I think that's where they fall into place in all this.
Like in Florida, DeSantis banned sex change surgeries and puberty blockers for minors.
Which I think is a good thing.
I think that's a good thing.
I think it's necessary.
I mean, it's obvious.
It's so obvious.
I'm pretty sure that state, like every other, doesn't allow you to get a tattoo before the age of 18. Because you don't want to make a body-altering change to a minor that the minor will later regret later in life.
And yet, it is barbaric to then allow those same minors to undergo genital mutilation and chemical castration that many of them do later regret later in life.
In a certain sense, Dylan Mulvaney, I don't know, but that just seems very cynical, or Leah Thomas, but many of these kids are obviously going through a mental health disorder.
100%.
And we are not helping them go through their mental health struggle by throwing kerosene on it and instead affirming their confusion.
I write a lot on my account and I write this and I'm not putting down anyone or demeaning anyone.
We have a serious mental health crisis in this country and not enough is being done about it.
What do you think is driving that?
It's probably the same void, huh?
It's the void.
It's the lack of belief in a higher purpose.
It is social media.
It is the way that this is being injected into every single aspect of our lives.
This gender ideology stuff that just confuses people.
It is not paying...
But the pre-existing condition there is...
Social media algorithms or gender ideology as a worldview that only works if you have a subject, a human being, who is susceptible to that trick.
Well, they target kids.
Yeah, for a reason.
And kids are susceptible.
Kids are sponges.
So they're susceptible to anything you tell them.
So what would you do about it?
That's a really good question.
I think we need to...
The goal should be to eradicate gender ideology from America.
Completely eradicated.
Not just in youth.
No, everywhere.
It is because it's all based on falsehoods.
And particularly for youth, it is so, so dangerous.
Let me ask you how you feel about this one.
To take that hard line as applied to youth.
And then not open ourselves up to sort of the rejection, because I'm a free speech absolutist, right?
I mean, the fact that your account is locked down is an affront to me.
The path to truth runs through free speech, period.
And so where I land on this is, Look, if you're an adult and you want to dress a certain way, regardless of your gender, I'm not going to stop you.
I still might think that you need help, mental help.
And as a fellow human being, I'll be compassionate in trying to lead you to that help.
But if you're 35 years old and want to dress how you want, I'm not going to stop you.
But don't...
For an iota of a second, think that you're going to voice that onto our kids or change our language or the way we have our customs of which bathrooms we use or how we play sports.
No, that is a tyranny of the minority.
That's kind of like where I land on it versus...
And I understand the intuition versus saying that we need to actually just eliminate...
That possibility of behavior altogether.
Eradicating gender ideology doesn't mean that we're going to tell adult men that it's illegal to dress up as a woman.
That's not what I mean.
I mean that eradicating it from our institutions.
As a dogma.
Exactly.
So removing it, it's in basically every school, every corporation, every Fortune 500 company.
It's in all the three-letter agencies.
I mean, the CDC gave guidance a few weeks ago on Chest feeding.
Like, this is coming from the top.
Well, that's one more reason we need to, I mean, the CDC is a joke.
And we have to shut it down.
It has no reason for existence.
That actually, that's actually another good point.
That example you just brought up about the CDC. We talk about the spiritual vacuum, and that's like at a deep individual level.
But part of the thing that I've noticed happens is when you have a bureaucracy that exists for an institution that has either lost its way or has no actual purpose for continued existence, this is one of the things that fills the void of the institution.
Take the U.S. military.
Where's wokeism in the military coming from?
My views is from our military taking on a bunch of other ill-defined causes, wars in Iraq to, you know, now in Ukraine, in my opinion, that they should not be engaged in.
When you lose your way, that's what creates the vacuum for some poison to fill the void.
And so the CDC... Or the US Department of Education.
These things have lost their purpose for existence if they ever had one.
And so they kind of make up new purposes instead by latching on to these ideologies.
And so in a certain sense, it is a void at the heart of an institution, just like it's a void at the heart of an individual.
I don't know what your perspective is on that.
Yeah, it's interesting.
I wonder what came first.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, that would be an interesting thing to dissect.
But it's, yeah, I mean, would you say that you want to, would you rebuild these institutions, like tear them down and rebuild them, or just do we not need them all together?
Well, I think the first step is tearing them down.
Tearing them down.
And so I believe in the model of the Phoenix, where the Phoenix will rise when it is necessary for it to rise.
And so I get specific about some of these things.
I mean, when I say shut down the FBI, that's not some sort of just slogan.
There's 35,000 employees.
Let's divide this up.
15,000 of them are agents on the front lines and or investigators on the front lines.
Fine.
20,000 of them are in back office functions doing more or less nothing, which then creates a vacuum for creating politicized policy agendas that they were never supposed to be coming up with in the first place.
Those 20,000 are going to have to go home and find honest work in the private sector.
The remaining 15,000, look, it's an agency whose culture is still built in the backdrop of J. Edgar Hoover's legacy.
It is literally the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI that these people walk into.
I say let's put them into agencies that actually have much more specific purposes that haven't yet been politicized.
U.S. Marshals doing a good job with busting up child sex trafficking rigs, for example, much better than the FBI is.
DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency.
Financial Crimes Enforcement Network underneath the U.S. Treasury.
Specialization to look after bad white-collar financial crimes.
There, they're actually going to be more successful because they have more narrowly defined scopes and purposes.
And then we don't need the FBI at all.
So in my view, in that case, we'd shut it down and not bring it back.
Yeah, exactly.
And then if there's something wrong with that restructuring, fine.
It'll be narrowly purpose-tailored to bring back whatever's missing.
What about the Department of Education?
I'd say shut it down and don't bring it back because the federal government should not be involved in education.
There's a narrow sliver that's now come up with respect to at least supporting some kinds of workforce training.
You could debate the need for its existence, but that's not something that I'm going to be firmly on the cap of eradicating.
Move that to the Department of Labor, which is where it would more naturally sit anyway.
It's a labor participation training grant program.
But everything else done because they're using the federal money as a cudgel to get local schools to adopt ideologies that they would or should have never adopted in the first place.
I think about it.
Part of the problem is the Federal Reserve has too many purposes.
Balance inflation and unemployment, trying to hit two targets with one arrow, missing badly at both.
I say restore a single mandate.
Stabilize the U.S. dollar as a unit of measurement, period.
That's it.
Well, I don't need 23,000 employees, which is the number of employees who work there to do that.
I need, like, way less than 10% of that.
That's an over 90% headcount reduction in the existing institutions.
That's how we'll take care of that.
CDC should not exist right now.
They're redundant functions.
And then if we discover that there's some narrowly tailored need...
I think we've made a bad habit of creating permanent agencies that should have been task forces.
A task force has limited time to conduct its task and then it disbands.
That's what I would evaluate as the next step if it's necessary.
But in some cases, you've got to just be willing to take the risk, yes, that there will be some unintended consequences.
I'm honest about that.
But the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.
The benefits dramatically outweigh the risks.
And so we've got to have the courage to say that, yes, is somebody going to blame me if some one small tidbit goes wrong of some piece of research or a grant that somebody got that they didn't get and, you know, something fell through the clunkiness of how we were shutting it down?
Okay, that's going to happen.
Yeah.
But the status quo is really what's extreme, not the extreme of restoring what our founding fathers first envisioned 250 years ago.
So that's kind of how I look at it as a matter of philosophy.
Yes, I'm coming in to break glass.
That's part of the process.
And the way you fight the creation of institutionalized chaos is by using some form of entropy in our own favor to restore actual order in this country, in our government, in our culture, in our sense and conception of self.
That's how we revive our fortitude and our strength.
And then if we're missing some gaps along the way in a narrowly tailored way, we'll fill those gaps.
That's the way I look at it.
Do you think, a lot of times it seems to me that the left are so good at using power when they have it, and the right not as much?
Yes.
Yes.
So I think that that's obviously true.
Yeah.
But I think part of the reason why is the left is good at filling the void with their philosophy.
Okay.
So you have that spiritual void, that black hole.
The left gives young people something to latch onto.
Race, gender, sexuality, climate.
And the right, I think actually the deeper failure is stopping at just identifying all the things that are wrong with that vision.
There's an important role for that.
Frankly, you're one of the heroes in literally exposing those flaws.
But it is the job of other people, right?
Not journalists, but of, say, elected leaders or a president or a pastor or a parent to offer a different vision, an affirmative vision to say, okay, this is what we're running from.
But more importantly, this is what we're running to.
Individual.
Family.
Nation.
So now we actually have a competition.
Individual, family, nation, God versus race, gender, sexuality, and climate.
You pick.
And each of us has a side of our human nature, but I think the better angels of our nature will choose that which is right, that which is true.
But the job of leaders is at least to serve up the menu for individuals to have that choice and then to call on the better angels of their nature to select that which is true and right over that which is wrong and false.
And at least we as a conservative movement, you know, at least put myself in that bucket because that's what I'm in.
This journey is wearing the mantle of the Republican Party or whatever in this journey to be U.S. president.
That's where we've fallen short.
And I think it is lazy.
And I think it is inexcusable.
I agree that we have to offer an alternative.
And here's the thing.
The left is really good at marketing.
They really are.
They have these incredible slogans.
And then we have to come and fight those slogans with actual truth and facts and logic and common sense.
And for the average person who has that void, like we've been talking about, The left really, it does appeal to them because they make it sound really fluffy and really great.
And we need to do more to offer an alternative to choose from.
Instead of just always reacting to what the left is doing and sort of trying to counter that and explain it, we have to actually be proactive and offer them something else to choose from.
So I cannot agree more with you.
Yeah, and I think that that's hard.
Yes.
It's easier to sort of play defense.
It's hard to play offense, right?
And so I frame it slightly differently than many allies and colleagues on the right do, which is the use of power.
I think it's less...
That we need a more powerful hammer to play whack-a-mole, and more that whack-a-mole is the wrong game to play.
We should be playing the game of just saying that that's the wrong sport.
We're going over there.
Yeah.
That's what we're running to.
And I think that it's part of what pulled me into this race, actually.
I see a lot of other good people, good Republicans, good leaders, some of them are governors, etc.
Understanding how to play whack-a-mole and honing the toolkit to do it a little bit more effectively.
And then sometimes going, I wouldn't call it too far, but losing the plot a little bit.
Versus the real acknowledgement being this is the wrong game.
It's a method of short-term survival, but it's a short-run game and it's a losing game in the end because eventually there's going to be too much popping up, too many of the zombies, right?
It's like a video game, right?
You have the first two zombies you can take, but once you're flooded, it's game over.
We've got to be over there doing something very different, offering an alternative vision of the real kingdom.
And I don't see that in today's Republican Party.
I think the last U.S. president who probably came closest to doing it was Ronald Reagan.
He's not around anymore.
And I think that in some ways we were set up by the left to To actually make this the dynamic, right?
In a certain sense, if we're already playing that game, the left has already won.
And I don't think it has to be that way.
And I don't even view it—I try not to talk as much as I can between left and right or Republican versus Democrat, but between what are the shared values that ground us as Americans.
And I think that's something we've lost, but not permanently.
It doesn't have to be permanently so.
Let me ask you kind of a question on this.
You're 28. Yeah.
You're religious.
What does that entail?
What does that mean to you?
In terms of?
Yeah, like do you practice?
Do you go through?
Do you observe the Sabbath?
Yeah.
Okay.
So if you go on Lives of TikTok, you'll never see a post from Friday at sundown until Saturday night.
And why?
I keep the Sabbath.
And why do you keep the Sabbath?
Yeah.
Well, I... First of all, I was brought up that way.
Like, I was born into a religious family.
Good.
So, your family.
My family.
And your family is important to you.
Yes, very.
And the traditions your family gave you are important to you.
And I believe it.
You know, I believe in God.
I believe in the Torah.
I believe in God's commandments.
So, yeah.
So, part of the Sabbath is not using any, you know, electricity.
So, I won't be on my phone.
What do you think that that...
What do you think that commemorates?
What do you think is the origin of that?
You know, a lot of things in the Torah are There is no...
First of all...
It's a way of life.
It's a way of life.
And also, I need to give a disclaimer.
I happen to...
I am like a religious Jew, but I don't speak...
I'm not a spokesperson for the Jewish community.
It's part of who I am.
But to me, it's...
It's the values that I was brought up with, to believe in God, to act in this lifestyle.
And that is something that is very important to me.
And I think in some ways, the Because religious people, not just Jews, any religious person has that faith, I think that that will actually help a lot in fighting this...
Agenda that we're seeing from the left, like we were discussing the whole time.
It's from that void of lack of belief in God and a lack of feeling like there's a higher purpose.
So I feel very grateful to have grown up as a religious Jew and to obviously continue In that path.
And like I said, I never went to public school.
I went to Jewish private schools.
And I think that...
A lot of the stuff that we're seeing in public schools are not going to make it to the religious schools, you know, the Christian schools, Jewish schools, whatever schools, those private religious schools that people send their kids to because they have that belief in God and in their values and in their traditions and they stick by that.
So I'm very grateful and I'm going to raise my kids that way as well.
I feel like I'm kind of like...
I mean, one of the things I love about many practices in the Torah is that they're Some of them are just good ideas.
Imagine what you just described today in the modern world.
We live in a world of social media, eroding our social fabric, our own ability to think clearly on a day-to-day basis.
And what you just said is, I take one day a week, as somebody who's a social media influencer, journalist, etc., to say that one day a week, I'm not doing that.
You won't see posts.
That seems good.
Yeah.
People tell me all the time that they're so jealous of me.
And that, to me, strikes me as something that the people who were around when the stories of the Torah came to be, that's the spirit they probably appreciated in their moment of saying there's a day a week where we're just putting it all down.
Yeah.
It's family time.
Exactly.
It's family time.
It's time for God.
Yeah.
And it's a way of life, right?
In the modern day.
Maybe one that we would do better to all observe.
I will admit it's hard sometimes.
Yeah, that's part of the challenge though, right?
Sometimes I'm like, what's going on in the world?
Do you always abide by it?
What?
Do you always observe it without exception?
Yeah.
Okay.
It's hard, but you still stick to it.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I mean, so I was, as a side of this is neither here nor there, but I was actually part of the Jewish society at Yale when I was in Yale Law School.
I was recruited into it, even though I'm not Jewish.
Shabtai is what it's called.
But, you know, we would go to the Shabbat dinners on Friday night, and then I was almost envious of Saturdays being...
Now, in principle, I could have done it and practiced it myself, but I didn't because it wasn't tied to like a faith-based or family tradition.
And as you said, it's hard enough for you to do, but you're anchored based on a true family tradition and grounding that was passed on to you, not even just by your family, but by millennia of history.
And I was raised in a similar tradition where there's other things that ground me similarly as well.
But that's what we're missing.
And I do think that this is not a substitute for faith, but it can be a supplement, that we have certain traditions that ground us as Americans, that we had passed down to us maybe not for millennia.
But for a couple and a half centuries now, that we're enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution and certain traditions we go through, that we pledge allegiance not to some trans flag, but to the United States of America.
And that's a tradition that we start our day in the schools by stating that pledge of allegiance to a nation that unites us across our superficial, skin-deep differences, shades of melanin and diversity.
That means something to me.
That that is true.
And I think that is something that it doesn't take—I mean, being a pastor or a rabbi or a priest, that's beyond my pay grade.
But that is something that a U.S. president can deliver or that a teacher in the public schools can deliver to say that that grounds us.
That is true, that I pledge allegiance to that flag, and that means something.
People made a sacrifice and spilled blood for the ideals enshrined in that flag.
And that's something that strikes me as easier, even, to bring back than the revival of a national religious awakening.
Yeah, and it's interesting because the American flag and what it symbolizes is something that also became really political, right?
I've posted so many different videos of people saying that they hate the American flag, the American flag stands for racism, The American flag.
There was a video of this mom, and she said that her son, who's a little kid, like a toddler, said something like, oh, hey mom, where did that Trump flag go?
And she was like, which flag are you talking about?
And he was like, oh, like that one.
And she picks up an American flag.
And she's like, oh, this one?
And she was like so proud of her son that he knew.
And it's like, it's weird because For us, it's kind of like a compliment.
Like, yes, I want to be known as the person who believes in what America was founded on and what America stands for.
But it feels like the left has actually made that political as well.
And, you know, every last year, I remember on the 4th of July, there was an MSNBC contributor who went on and said that she's seeing so many American flags and it's making her really uncomfortable.
Well, you know, what's interesting is, so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you began with your social media account being locked is that just story just reminded me of this is there's good evidence that actually many of the algorithms or third party monitors of inappropriate so this brings us full circle to the conversation where you Look at elements of the profile of the person who's posting that content, right?
So you would have been censored, and you were, you know this well, because you were libs of TikTok, that somebody else posting that same video in the first instance wouldn't, which means it's not just the content, they look at who the speaker is.
And this isn't done by a human being at scale, right?
This monitoring is done by algorithms, which is where they can shunt that accountability to say, oh no, it wasn't one human doing it, it was the algorithm.
Well, the algorithm is trained by the human beings who feed the algorithm what's good and bad.
People who have American flags in their profile are systematically more likely to be targeted as purveyors of hateful content than Or to show up even in the Twitter feed as show.
You have to hit show and extra show before these comments may contain offensive content.
Just in virtue of the American flag being in their profile.
So now it's not just individuals who are targeting people with American flags in the real world.
But to know that that itself has become a symbol of In the United States of America of subversion of the agenda in the United States of America.
Think about that, how far we've come.
It's worse than Orwellian.
It's worse than Orwellian.
50 years from now, we'll have a different word for it.
We won't call it Orwellian anymore.
We'd call it something else specific to modern America.
And that is where we are.
That's the moment we're living in.
I do think there's an optimistic silver lining to all of this, which is interesting to me, which is, what a moment to be alive, actually.
Imagine the people who were alive in 1775, right, on the eve of the American Revolution.
They had every reason to point to I feel like we live in a 1775 moment right now.
And it's a sort of awesome opportunity.
I think that there's going to be a massive cultural revolution sometime in the next few years.
I mean, there has to be, because I think that the path that we're on right now is really not sustainable for a...
Oh, it's not.
This story does not end well if we stay in the current track.
No.
So there is...
And I believe in America.
So I know we're going to succeed.
We're going to get through this.
So there is going to be some insane revolution sometime in the next few years.
And I'm ready.
And I'll do whatever I can to help.
And I think it's going to be really exciting.
I think it's exciting.
It is very exciting.
I think the possibilities are boundless for what we can achieve.
We should...
Find encouragement and inspiration in that.
I think that this is something, I'm saying this primarily, it makes some people uncomfortable when I say it, but there are other good people in the Republican Party or otherwise who want reform, who argue for incremental reform or that we need reform within the institutions we have.
And my question is, do you want reform or do you want revolution?
And I stand on the side of revolution right now, the American Revolution.
I stand on the side of 1776. I think that we have a chance to revive those ideals and what they actually mean today.
And I think that's exciting.
We don't have to even be angry about it.
I think we can be inspired by that.
We're fortunate to be born at such a moment as this in human history.
I think that 10 years ago, reform would have been great.
But right now, it's way too far gone to just reform things.
We need a revolution.
And we will have one.
Yeah.
We had one in 1776. I mean, what a time to be alive.
Really, right?
And so when we view it that way, wow, the possibilities right now abound.
They are endless.
And you and I have the unique gift to be put on this earth with a purpose to participate in whatever small way each of us does in that revolutionary revival.
Yeah, when people ask me about my account and how do I keep going when it gets really tough and even how it started and my journey, I always say I feel like God...
Gave me this platform for a reason and there is a purpose of me doing this.
And some days I don't even know what the answer is.
And then, you know, and I think it could change constantly.
So, you know, in some days I'm like, I know what my purpose is with this.
And some days it's more unclear.
And then I really believe that God put me in this position for a reason.
And I'm going to continue trying every day to find out What that reason is because it does keep changing and I'm going to do everything I can to help this movement and to take back our country and take back our culture.
You know, and I think that that's actually the way we've got to look at it.
Not because it's fake and, you know, it's like a self-help, self-motivator.
No.
No.
But because it's true, actually, that we live in a time where electricity is in the air, okay?
And there's a lot of times where you can try to light a match and then it's just going to burn out.
We live in a moment where we light a match.
We set something into motion and That's far bigger than each of us alone.
There are rare times in history where that's the case.
I think we live in one of those moments now.
And so when I say it's a 1776 moment, I mean that in the best of ways, in the most hopeful of ways, that there's more to life than just the aimless passage of time through a day.
We are here for a purpose.
We are here now for a purpose.
That moment is ours to seize.
And right when we worry about, oh, the cultural degradation of our society, that it couldn't be any worse, we wake up and see, actually, this is our moment, right?
As George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams or Alexander Hamilton or Benjamin Franklin would have said it in 1775, and again in 1789 when they got together to frame the Constitution, this is one of those moments we have.
And they gave us a head start, right?
We have that to work with, to revive that.
And in certain sense, they had a head start.
It was built against the backdrop of a tradition that came before them.
And we live in one of those moments today.
And I think that people who really truly believe that with their entire heart and who are authentic about it, I think end up being so much more effective and powerful.
And I think you're a great example of that.
Yeah, thank you.
I mean, I think that this isn't about me.
This isn't about you.
It's not being done by us.
It's being done, I believe, through us.
Yeah, of course.
Let us be the vehicle for the plan that God has.
But I think God has a pretty exciting plan for us right now.
And it's up to us to be the instruments who execute that will.
And lucky us that we get to be here in a time where it happens.
I think it's going to happen very soon, actually.
I agree.
I don't think we're going to be waiting a long time.
Mm-hmm.
I think this is what 2024 might be about.
You know, I'm not attached to any particular result.
It's not about me.
But my heart, my instinct says this is coming very soon.
And I'm ready for the call.
And I think you are too.
I am definitely ready.
I've been ready.
Yeah.
Well, I think that Spread the word.
I will.
Every single day.
Because I think it's coming.
Good.
Well, I'm glad you're here, Kaya.
It's an honor.
I admire your courage.
I admire your ability to share in my optimism, in our optimism.
Notwithstanding what you've been through, you have every reason to be aggrieved.
But I think that we can marshal that grievance into what we will create.
I think that when you see how bad it is, like you and I, we both are like in the trenches of what's happening.
And when you just see like the sheer extent of it, there is no option to let the dark part of it bring you down.
Even when my account started off anonymous and then the Washington Post sent one of the reporters to dox me and they leaked my name.
That was the whole story.
I think that the purpose of that was to try to silence me and intimidate me.
That was obviously the greatest example, but there have been so many other things like all the death threats and people showing up to my house.
All of these things, I think, are designed to silence you and to shut you up and to bring you down and to destroy your morale.
And then for me, it was never even an option to give into that because there is just so much work to be done.
And every single day, I go into the trenches.
My location on Twitter, I set as the depths of hell.
That's what it is.
Where do they drop the pin exactly?
In the middle of San Francisco?
It might be San Francisco.
Inner city San Francisco, yeah.
That's really funny.
Yeah.
So it's like every single day I go into the depths of hell and I expose it and I educate people and I raise awareness about it.
And it's just so much worse out there than anyone even imagined because I can only post a certain amount of stuff.
I can't just be posting every single thing I see.
But There is so much more out there.
I'm barely even like covering a tiny percentage of it.
And it's like when you have that understanding and when you see it every day, there is no option to give up.
There is no option to give in to those dark forces.
Well, you are doing your part, Haya.
Exactly.
I appreciate you, and I have a feeling that we are going to be doing together what the likes of our forefathers did in 1776. It's coming soon.
I can't wait.
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