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May 2, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
58:06
The Weaponization of Government, Jan 6 Truth, & MAGA's Missteps | The TRUTH Podcast #45
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Weaponization of government.
We hear that term a lot.
It's become popular recently, particularly in conservative media.
Weaponization.
What does it mean, though?
We say these things.
It's worth pausing to define what we actually mean when we say them.
To me, this is what weaponization actually means.
It means taking a neutral institution, an institution that's supposed to be not partisan in nature, But partisan political forces co-opting that institution to accomplish its own political goals.
That's I think the heart of what we mean when we say the weaponization of or by government.
There's one type of weaponization that I've been intently focused on on the last few years.
That's the weaponization of the private sector.
The two areas of the private sector that we've seen most weaponized by political forces in the government are in the realm of communications and financial services.
Let's talk about communications.
Above all, the free and open internet.
Government actors.
Threatening tech companies with retribution unless those tech companies censor speech that government actors don't want to see on the Internet.
We saw that in spades over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading up to it and also afterwards.
Shutting down a major presidential candidate and U.S. president, for that matter, Donald Trump and his accounts, silencing messages you could send about the origin of COVID-19 or about the Hunter Biden laptop story on the eve of the 2020 election.
That's one type of weaponization, taking a neutral political institution in the private sector, supposedly private companies operating as private institutions, but doing the bidding of government actors who are getting done through the back door what they couldn't get done through the front door under the Constitution.
Or the other type of private sector weaponization, which is in the financial sector, where government actors like California's pension fund at CalPERS or the New York State pension funds, or for that matter, the administrative state in Washington, D.C., are goading financial institutions to push environmental and are goading financial institutions to push environmental and social agendas that they could not get through Congress through the front door through their Green New Deal.
Climate emissions caps, Racial equity audits voted for in the boardrooms of companies from Chevron to Apple by large financial institutions like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard.
Those are the two rails of our private sector, our financial services sector and the communications sector.
And both of those have been weaponized by the government.
Those are neutral institutions that the government has co-opted to advance partisan political goals.
That's one type of weaponization.
And then there's the type of weaponization that we're talking about, of the weaponization of the government bureaucracies themselves.
And it's worth drawing the distinction because there's different solutions for each.
In the first set of weaponization, the first category, the right answer is just competition.
We need Elon buying Twitter to provide a competitor to Meta and to Google.
As soon as he's done that, we've seen the censorship policies roll back at those other institutions because that's what competition brings.
That's why I founded Strive to compete against BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard.
Since the time that I founded Strive and Strive's initially even young life as a company, we've seen BlackRock and State Street and Vanguard begin to roll back their policies.
That's the actual way that we drive change through the weaponization of the private sector is through competition.
That requires brave entrepreneurs to step up and endure the consequences.
But that's one problem with one set of solutions.
That's different from the weaponization of government institutions themselves.
And here we have neutral or supposedly neutral bureaucracies like the FBI, the ATF, the CDC, the U.S. Department of Education, the DOJ, the three-letter alphabet soup in Washington, D.C., the list goes on, that have been co-opted by partisan political forces that use the veneer of nonpartisanship in the bureaucratic state to advance agendas, again, that they could not pass through Congress.
And the reason it's worth drawing that distinction is here the solution is different.
A lot of Republicans believe that the right solution is to reform these agencies.
Fire Christopher Wray, they might say.
Missing the ultimate point that if you fire Christopher Wray, you're just going to get James Comey 2.0.
These institutions cannot be reformed.
And because they're part of the government, they don't lend themselves to competition because there's only one government in the United States.
The right answer here is no longer to just incrementally reform those institutions.
We have to be willing to step up and shut them down.
It's easier said than done.
When push comes to shove, a lot of conservatives get cold feet.
There's a lot of practical reasons why that can be difficult.
And it's easy to sit around here and say that, oh, the right answer is to cut just the right amount.
We don't know what that right amount is.
The question is, what risk are we willing to take?
One risk, and it's the risk we've been taking, is avoiding cutting too much.
Cut a little bit, see if you can reform it.
That doesn't work.
You cut off one head of an eight-headed hydra, it grows right back.
We've learned that time and again.
We live in a moment where we have to take the other risk, the harder risk.
The risk of cutting too much.
Not just cutting the fat, but cutting some muscle as well.
That's a real risk we have to be willing to take if we're to actually reform, because it's not going to be reform, to gut the very institutions that have been weaponized by partisan actors.
That's what it's going to take.
Shutting down those massive bureaucracies.
It's not something that conservatives have done a great job of over the course of the last 20 years.
But the future of the America First movement depends on restoring a government where the people who we elect to run the government are the ones who actually run the government.
What we've seen in the last 10 years is now a merger between those two forms of weaponization.
The weaponization of government agencies, which are in turn the agents to actually weaponize those private sector institutions to create a new form of fascism in this country.
That's what Mussolini called fascism, the merger of state power and private power to together accomplish what neither one could alone.
That's where we are today.
We don't have many voices, even in our own movement, that have dissected what the heck is really going on there.
Today, we're going to actually bring on a guest who's going to pull back the cover on what's been going on in America over the last few years, share some uncomfortable truths for Republicans, for the conservative movement, even for our own movement.
He comes from within our movement.
But even for our own movement, to take a long, hard look in the mirror and see where we might have missed the plot, even in the MAGA, America First Wing of the Republican Party.
I'm pleased to bring on Darren Beattie.
He's going to come on in just a moment.
With that, I'm pleased to bring in an individual who has become a friend of mine, actually.
Over the course of the campaign, I got to know him.
And I would describe him as filling a vacuum in the MAGA movement that I think needs to be filled, which is an intellectual beacon.
MAGA movement has been a great populist movement across this country, but one of the things that I think we need in order to take this movement to the next level is an intellectual foundation of who we are and what we stand for, well above and beyond the traditional confines of the Republican Party.
And one of the people that gave me that inspiration through the course of the campaign was Darren Beattie.
We spoke several times offline.
We've been looking forward to this conversation for a long time.
And Darren, I'm excited to air some of the conversations that you and I have been having by telephone from the back of a campaign bus on my end and on the go from your end when I've called you over the last year to talk about that in the context of a longer form conversation.
So welcome to The Truth Podcast and I'm excited to hear what you have to say.
Delighted to be here, Vivek.
Thank you.
So I thought it might be helpful first just to start with a little bit of your background.
I know many people describe themselves as independent journalists, but what does that mean to you and the areas where you've been focused, and maybe even how you might describe your own political ideology, just so we can get any biases or filters on the table, and then maybe we can go into a little bit of that discussion around the weaponization of the police state.
Absolutely.
Well, my background is somewhat unusual in terms of its trajectory leading to the position that I'm in right now.
I began my career in academia as a scholar of political theory, political philosophy.
I wrote my dissertation on the structure of modernity from the standpoint of Martin Heidegger's I went from that to teaching political theory at Duke,
where I distinguished myself, among other things, from being the only non-tenured full-time academic in the country to have publicly endorsed Trump's candidacy, and I'll say the only faculty member at Duke to have correctly predicted the outcome of the election,
which was Even more scandalous from the standpoint of my colleagues, because I know that in the discipline of political science, there are these sort of renegade, ghettoized folks who do what's called political theory.
So we're reading Plato and Machiavelli and German idealists and so forth, whereas the quote-unquote serious people are applying kind of degraded forms of Practical mathematics in order to achieve some kind of predictive grasp on political outcomes.
And so all of the quantitative folks ran all their models and not a single one got it right.
And I, the theorist, I do have a mathematics background as a math major, but that's not what I was doing in the faculty there.
And I was the only one who got it right.
And that was a very scandalous thing.
And I think very telling for the kind of The moment that we were in, both intellectually and politically in the country.
Long story short, I went from that to the White House, where I had the great privilege and honor of writing speeches for Donald Trump.
I joked that I went from my dissertation on Martin Heidegger in mathematics to my first speech writing assignment, which was writing the turkey pardon speech for Thanksgiving.
Which was a wonderful exercise, actually.
It was one of the best speeches I ever wrote, ironically enough.
So it was a lot of fun.
It was very engaging, but it was also very important because I viewed and continued to view the Trump phenomenon, not just Trump the man, but Trump phenomenon.
There is an interesting and intricate connection between those two things, but as a real Transformational moment in American politics.
So it was a great honor to be a part of that as directly as being in the White House and having some direct influence in it as well.
And so when I moved from that, I ended up basically in the media.
An unlikely step, but it's one that's proven to be quite successful and I think quite important.
For people who don't know about Revolver News, I would state in a nutshell, we have tried to play a role, and I think we've been successful in this, in updating conservatives and people on the right to the reality that our national security institutions are hostile to them and to America.
And I think this is a special kind of exercise when communicating this reality to people on the right.
Not sure if we talked about this in our last conversation, but I have this kind of theory of political psychology whereby people on the right, by disposition, by inclination, want to venerate just and well-functioning institutions of authority.
People on the left, to be charitable, maybe too charitable, They're inclined to criticize corrupt institutions of authority.
People on the right want to venerate just and well-functioning institutions.
That's why there's this traditional connection between the right and law enforcement agencies, even national law enforcement agencies, certainly the military and so forth.
So I thought it's a special exercise and a special challenge Help to induce the software update to the new reality, which is that these authoritative institutions, these bureaucracies are not only not serving America's best interests, but they're actively hostile to the country and also to conservatives and a lot of patriots in particular.
And I think that has been the common thread throughout various thematic reporting that we've done.
On January 6th, which is well known on color revolutions, on COVID, you name it.
That's the internet censorship.
We were one of the first to do a major piece, actually calling for Elon to acquire X when there was no public conversation about this whatsoever.
So that's the common thread throughout our reporting.
And I think that the success in our doing that is that now more or less this idea is simply in the air.
Many people are talking about it to the point that it's almost an assumption now.
There's still some education to be done, but I think compared to where we were even in 2019-2020, this general thematic update has occurred with pretty surprising and welcome efficacy.
So that's sort of where I am now at Revolver.
Yeah.
Now, I think it's a particularly interesting project, because you've isolated a rift in the current Republican Party establishment, and I think in the current conservative movement, that as I take it now, we're having this conversation in the spring of 2024, it's unresolved.
And I do think that on one hand, we are a party and a movement that calls for the restoration of law and order in the country that broadly tell police officers, I say such things, that we have your back at the local level in a way that they don't feel that they actually have from the public at large to be able to combat the crime wave we're seeing across the country.
And yet, on the other hand, experiencing the ways in which that institution of prosecutorial power and police force, particularly at the federal level, has been corrupted in a way that is hostile not only to conservatives, but hostile to the American way of life, the belief that your political ideology should have nothing to do with whether you're prosecuted.
And when you and I spoke, I think one of the earlier long conversations we had, I remember I was in the back of a bus in Iowa and in a rush between one campaign event to another.
And you said something that caught my attention and I hung out in the back of that bus.
You made me late to one of my speeches because I wanted to finish hearing what you had to say.
The expression you used was it's something that goes back a long time, the ugly underbelly of the relationship between law enforcement and the criminal actors who they supposedly are regulating.
And that fascinated me.
And there was a lot to that conversation having nothing to do with January 6th.
I mean, this is years before January 6th that we're talking about.
And I thought it might be helpful to walk through that story from what began as a left-wing progressive concern about a J. Edgar Hoover-led FBI to the concern that you have about the prosecutorial and police state today.
Indeed.
It is a fascinating and instructive history for a number of reasons because I think it helps to illuminate the active question today as to whether and what extent a kind of political alliance is possible with a certain quarter of the left that now finds itself kind of politically homeless given What the left has become
and the merger between the left and all these security bureaucracies that traditionally the left had critiqued.
And that's just one reason it's relevant.
There's a lot of other reasons that we should understand the history.
In fact, with all these committees that you're seeing in Congress to investigate the weaponization of the federal government with the Twitter files and so forth, and they're doing a lot of good work.
And Before these came into being, there was a lot of talk in Revolver, but also other places about You know, what are the historical antecedents to something like this that could kind of condition our expectations?
And a lot of people talked about something called the Church Committee, which arose in the 70s.
And it's recently become relevant because sort of FISA in a way grew out of that and a lot of different things grew out of that.
But basically, this is a major investigation of the corruption of our security establishment, the CIA, the FBI and others.
And I think A lot of these sort of storied events of conspiracy lore like MKUltra and these things kind of came to light through this general process.
And, you know, there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about it.
There are people who say, well, the outcome was not sufficient or satisfactory, but it was a real public clearing and kind of account.
of the abuses nonetheless.
So if we kind of grade on a curve as to what is actually possible, it could be considered somewhat of a success, a qualified success.
But here's the important thing.
The configuration of power in the country was very, very different back then.
There was actually divided government.
Now, when we talk about divided government, Not we, but when you hear it in the media or from the commentary, it's usually the context is a much more superficial one, referring to Oh, Democrats control Congress and Republicans, the White House.
Some people use divided government to refer to that.
Others will refer to the different branches of government generally.
But I don't really consider those things relevant to divided government.
What divided government really is, in the meaningful sense, is that different factions of power And what you had in the 70s was the right.
And keep in mind, the right at this time was very much the Cold War inflected right.
And basically, a lot of the architecture that we see now applied against American citizens, the color revolution architecture, a lot of this stuff finds its origins.
In this sort of Cold War right-wing movement.
In fact, even under Reagan, a lot of these organizations now that are so problematic, causing so much trouble, National Endowment for Democracy all the way down, these are sort of creatures of that that were supported by the right because the idea was these would be the regime change and influence In order to project our power and ideology globally to win the Cold War.
So there was the Cold War right, and that was sort of the determining factor there.
And so the military, of course, the intelligence agencies, they were, you know, it gets more nuanced the deeper you look, obviously, but in a certain general sense, you can say they were friendly to that Cold War right, if not part of it.
And those are powerful institutions, as we now know, because they're directed against us.
And on the other side, you had no surprise there.
You had the media.
You had the academy, you have the culture in terms of like musicians and things, entertainment industry, I guess you could say.
And so it was a real division because you had a real division on these critical issues across institutions that had real power.
And so because there was a division, Church Committee was able to happen because it had the anti-Cold War right Had the support of the media, the entertainment complex and so forth, academia, and those are powerful institutions to some degree, the legal academy even back then.
And so there was a real chance for a reckoning in a way that unfortunately now I think would be challenging and perhaps next to impossible because perhaps part of the legacy of that church committee accounting of things is that the national security establishment realized,
geez, We can't really fully get away with what we want to get away with, with this divided power, so what if we merge with the factions that now animate and control academia and media?
And, you know, superficially it could be something, but ultimately this could be our get-out-of-jail-free card.
Yes, so to speak.
And in some cases, literally so.
And this is what, you know, there's an interesting word that comes out of the Nazi Germany days called Gleichschaltung.
That is a kind of homogenization and equilibration.
And that's what's occurred across all of our institutions to the point that now every single relevant institution in the entire country is Is aligned and hostile to the interests of the American people.
And that's one thing that I found so remarkable about Trump's victory is, in a way, it was a great stress test for democracy because, talking about 2016 now, you had every single powerful institution in the country actuated against one man in his movement who only had the people on his side.
He didn't have any elite institution on his side.
And he won nonetheless, which is like you couldn't have a better laboratory experiment as to whether democracy in its electoral sense works because it worked in that case.
They were kind of caught off guard and they didn't have the mechanisms in place to steal it because they didn't take it seriously for a very long time.
And that, unfortunately, is the position that largely we're in today, in which there's this burgeoning populist movement, and more and more talented people are getting involved, including yourself.
I'm very happy to say you've been involved.
But there's not quite this kind of progress that we'd like to see at the institutional level.
It's still basically the case that every institution is controlled by the other side.
And it's very hard.
You can sometimes win elections within that configuration, but it's very hard to deliver on those elections because you're dealing with bureaucracies that are fundamentally hostile to the platforms that, in this case, Trump ran on and won on.
And so that, I think, is a big problem.
And now, as I said, Organizations like Revolver and myself and you, and we've done a successful job to a degree of alerting the American population, the fact that these national security institutions, these legal institutions are hostile.
So I think we're actually at, you know, there's still room to improve, but we're in a pretty good place in terms of education.
But that is combined with A very difficult place in terms of actually being able to act on the basis of that knowledge.
And that's, you know, there's this assumption that just because you know that this place is corrupt or just because you know this thing is wrong that, you know, it's a trivial step to fix it when in fact it's far from trivial.
It's very difficult and maybe the, you know, 90% of it is actually the implementation.
So I think that's really the area that Needs to improve, needs to become more robust, and that could take some time.
It could take a decade, even.
You know, I wanted to hone in on one part of that narrative where On your telling of it, very interesting.
The basic pivot was when the national security state realized that the parties holding them accountable would be less successful if they actually went on to just share some of their ideology.
Right.
Embedded in that is that that old guard, Cold War era conservative, or at least the people who wielded power atop the institutions that were supported by that conservative movement, Actually weren't fundamentally ideological in nature, and maybe still are not, right?
I think if the point is that they could easily just as well switch from their patrons of the 1970s to a new class of patrons today, when those two sets of patrons had vastly differing ideologies, that suggests that the apparatus of that national security state is actually fundamentally non-ideological in nature, but has a different objective, say something like the preservation of its own power structure.
I think that's something that characterizes J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, I believe, but I think it also characterizes much of the broader national security state.
Do you think that's a fair characterization?
I think it's fair.
Of course, once you get to this level, the institutions are not monolithic, and so they have different players with different animating kind of psychologies, different objectives, and so forth.
I do think now there are certainly genuine believers.
I think there's this tendency to think everything, this kind of cold Machiavellian power considerations.
The fact is there are very few people like the You know, the cigarette-smoking man from the X-Files, if I can use a reference, if anyone.
And a lot of, you know, a lot of the stuff we've seen of these, you know, ideological, radical types in the CIA and other agencies, that's a real thing.
Just as it's a real thing in these tech firms, usually at the lower levels, the middle management and so forth, you have these true believer types, and they tend to get their way because they're the loudest and most vociferous about things.
So that's a component, but also, obviously, the kind of broader logic of any bureaucracy is to preserve its own existence and power, and that's not coeval to the question of ideology.
Ideology can come and go, And then there's an additional consideration, which is these organizations to some degree would still imagine themselves to be advancing American interests.
The only question is, what are the interests that actually What's the interests of America?
Because advancing the interests of America used to mean one thing.
Now you can advance the interests of America by promoting drag queens or the ideological aspects of it through USAID or all these various other NGOs.
And we could say, that's ridiculous.
You're not promoting American interests, when in a certain perverse way they are, because this has become the de facto national religion and national ideology.
And in certain intricate ways, what we would call wokeness is not just stamped on top of American power projection, but is part of the methodology of American power projection.
And that's somewhat a separate conversation, but they're intertwined more intricately than people think.
And so we can't simply dismiss this idea that all of these NGOs and organizations that You know, promote groups like Pussy Riot to undermine Putin or complain about gay rights in Russia in order to, you know, undermine Russia or complain about the Uyghurs in China.
There are all these different ways that we kind of merge versions of narratives that could be considered woke or involve kind of victim-oppressor dynamics and really exacerbate pre-existing ethnic and gender cleavages in other societies.
There is a ready-made ideology to do that, and it's surprisingly effective.
And it's not just effective here, it's effective overseas, and it's become a part of the way that we project power, both deliberately and inadvertently, just through the cultural production process that exists in the country.
And so it can't simply be dismissed to say, oh, these people promoting all of this degeneracy overseas, they're not working in America's interests, when I mean, to put it most provocatively, it wouldn't be entirely absurd at this moment to say that the power and prestige of wokeness globally is very much connected to the power and prestige of America geopolitically and globally.
And that's also a very uncomfortable reality for conservatives and for America first people.
We want to put America first, but what does that mean?
Do we privilege an American company that supports BLM over a foreign company that's politically neutral?
Is that being America first?
So it presents us with a lot of very kind of difficult decisions in that respect, because in many ways, America has become this corrupted thing.
And it's not simply just, oh, it's just one party, or it's oh, this or oh, that.
It's more deeply connected to the nature of what America has become.
I think that that's a powerful question you ask.
I think a lot of people would have a tough time answering that question.
Does America First include supporting an American company that's fundamentally hostile to American values versus a Western European or South American or whatever different company that actually adopts politically neutral principles and provides products without politics attached to it?
Or even, I put it most provocatively, something that people call Chinese.
You know, there's been this, you know, crusade against TikTok.
And I'm not a big fan of TikTok.
I don't really use TikTok.
I know some people use it effectively, and it's great.
And they're using it for, you know, patriotic causes.
And so if they're successful in doing that, I support that.
But the larger point that I've always kind of adopted, and I think you're sympathetic to this in the least, is that TikTok is largely a distraction.
TikTok is by far, it's not by a long shot, the most censorious tech company.
And the censorship that does exist at TikTok is not at the behest of CCP officials.
It's at the behest of the American part of TikTok, the American executives for TikTok, who are forcing it to cater to the political sensitivities of America.
When they call for TikTok to ban Andrew Tate, it's not China behind that.
And the Chinese don't care about that.
And also the point that, again, is that it's kind of a distraction.
TikTok is an easy target because no politician is willing or really capable of going after Google because it's too big to fail.
And most importantly, it's too deeply interconnected.
To our own national security structure, to our own capacity for soft power projection overseas.
So TikTok is kind of the consolation prize, but it's a cheap consolation prize.
So again, we wanted to correct all of these tech companies, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge these are crown jewels in many cases for our ability to project Power and influence overseas.
And so there's this double-edged sword.
And whether unfortunately or not, many conservatives, most conservatives who may even be genuinely concerned about the speech violations always end up deferring to the ostensible national security imperative when it comes to these tech companies and really anything else.
I mean, I think there's a really...
I would say powerful and disheartening point embedded in there, which is that actually the reason we're not going after Google on the same kinds of concerns that allow for conservatives to go after TikTok is that Google is too embedded.
Into the national security infrastructure of the United States.
And it has, what was the German word?
Gleischalten, you said?
Homogenization has already taken place in a way that makes it very difficult to make it a target.
Right.
Or to put it in the terminology of America first.
Google is American and TikTok in some way, it's not.
And even let's pull on that thread a little bit more to bring it full circle of what actually is in the American interest.
If you look at the greatest form, I believe, of internet or social media company that has protected Chinese interests at the expense of U.S. interests.
So I'm not talking about woke interests here.
Let's isolate to the U.S. versus China dynamic that has gone out of its way to engage in censorious behavior, interfering with platform communication, to promote the interests of the CCP. Without doubt, it was the existence of social media companies that censored any speech suggesting that the COVID-19 virus originated in a lab in China.
That was systematically suppressed.
You were unable to send direct messages.
You were shut down from posting videos on places like YouTube, owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.
And that was, I think, probably the greatest form of protection the CCP has received by tech companies in the US and around the world as a consequence of censorship.
Now you look at which companies were doing it.
It actually were the US tech companies, more so than TikTok or any other, which raises a difficult question.
What happens when the so-called American companies who are the products, who are the recipients and the beneficiaries of pro-American policy are the ones that are anti-American in their effect?
And I think we, in our movement right now, are left with, at best, a tongue twisted pause in how we respond to that.
That's where we are, which is why I think we need to backfill that vacuum of an intellectual edifice of our movement.
So I guess you're the person to ask.
I introduced you as somebody who fills that vacuum.
What would your answer to that question be?
Well, we're circling around something that's very important here with your example, with The censorship of the Chinese origins of COVID. Timing is everything when it comes to censorship.
You see this pattern many times of some critical issue being censored when it's really important.
Only several months and sometimes a year later, everyone else comes around and all of a sudden they're talking about it and it's okay.
I think the inflection point there was at a certain point, Jon Stewart, who is basically a court jester of the regime, he came out and he said, yeah, it's Chinese origins, COVID. This was, of course, after Trump had left office and everything.
Then it was okay.
You see this in other contexts as well.
And then people say, oh, see, well, maybe they were a little bit late.
And usually, you know, I hate to say it, but in many cases, a lot of conservatives, we can be Such cheap dates at times where all you need is someone like Jon Stewart to say it a year after when it doesn't even matter and then everyone's saying, oh, wow, this is amazing.
I see this all the time, by the way.
I think you were saying it.
It irritates the hell out of me.
I'll be very honest with you.
Because I think right now people get to cheer once it's become what the cool kids actually say anymore.
The anti-woke stuff that now billionaire businessmen get to spout off about and feel good about themselves.
And two years ago, they didn't have You know, two stones to be able to stand up and say one of the same thing.
You actually make a good point is timing is everything with respect to the...
What these people are doing is arbitraging that timing a little bit, right?
Because if they're two years later, then it's just banal.
But they're arbitraging the timing when it feels like it's actually countercultural to say it, when in fact it is actually completely irrelevant to say it in the first place.
Well, the logic of the timing gestures toward, I think, an even more important point.
Let's look at the COVID example specifically.
Why?
You would think, you know, here's another thing.
Maybe it's a slightly contrarian view.
I think that largely the entire institutional apparatus across all the institutions that I mentioned, they're largely on board with the inevitability, if not the desirability, of a new Cold War kind of with China, soft Cold War with China.
I know there's a lot of stuff in You know, conservative media about obeying Biden.
And there is stuff like that.
There is, you know, cheap corruption.
But at the kind of level of institutional logic and movement, there's pretty much across the board consensus that there's going to be some kind of soft cold war with China.
And so there's no real reluctance to Go after China to undermine China from that perspective.
This was a little bit different.
And the reason that the apparatus that now, of course, it's very easy, even welcome to talk about China and COVID. Because, of course, that distracts from the fact that China didn't hold a gun to our heads and say we needed to lock down our whole country.
So it's a convenient distraction for the regime to focus on China, China, China.
Well, China didn't, you know, That would force us to shut down our whole country unnecessarily.
That was our political leaders and decision makers.
So how much better to point the blame at China, just like the TikTok thing versus Google.
But there's a reason they couldn't do it then, and that was Trump was president and he was blaming China.
So they couldn't be seen to embrace the China theory because that would be a capitulation to Trump.
And what we can extrapolate from this is a really important point that I've been kind of just developing in various conversations.
Our domestic political polarization is so extreme that in the deepest and most meaningful sense, America does not have a foreign policy and cannot have a foreign policy.
Because let's take the COVID example.
In that example, The deep state, I believe, is more or less on board with this Cold War against China.
They didn't lean into it then because Trump, to them, is far more of a threat and a danger than any foreign adversary.
And that is actually something that I can agree with, because I think that the left, or maybe another word is more appropriate, but the corrupt elements that run the American regime are more of a threat to Americans than any foreign adversary.
And so, foreign policy is secondary to that underlying and, frankly, unfortunate reality that is the animated dynamic of our political moment now.
You see this in Brazil, in the Brazil elections.
You had Lula, who was very friendly to China, and geopolitically, there are countless reasons that Lula's It's far worse for the United States than Bolsonaro would have been.
And yet the cultural affinity between the Bolsonaro movement and the Trump movement meant that our national security apparatus not only was not supporting him, but actively went against him.
Again, we see an example of the domestic political dynamics superseding what would objectively be geopolitical interests.
The same thing with Russia, the same thing to some degree with Israel-Palestine.
All of these foreign policy things don't have any independent force in terms of what is the American interest.
They're simply projections and proxies that emanate from these underlying and actually meaningful domestic political divisions.
So that, I think, is a very interesting point.
It's a point that emerges from the example that we discussed about COVID. But it's not unique to that.
Even our posture with respect to Russia.
And I want to think about your China point.
I'm probably naturally more inherently cautious and concerned about the CCP's level of influence over the United States than perhaps you are.
I don't know.
But regardless, I think the more important point is It's an interesting one.
Is it even possible for America to have a foreign policy in a world in which our own domestic polarization and domestic enemies, you could look at it from either vantage point, are a greater threat to the country than any foreign threat could be?
I just want to extend that, though, for a second to maybe draw one further implication of that.
If that's also true in Brazil, and it's also true in Italy and France and much of Western Europe, Right?
I think, in a certain sense, you could say that's true for any country that has that level of domestic polarization, that has a deep divide between the people who control the institutions and levers of power, and that's disconnected from the great uprising of everyday citizens.
And their foreign policy as well may just be a projection of their domestic divisions.
Maybe that just redefines what modern foreign policy is, except The actual countries that are run as autocracies don't actually suffer from that same dynamic.
And so you have sort of a split world.
If your theory is right, and I want to think about it a little bit more, but just to play it out for a second.
According to your view of the world here, it's an interesting theory, the United States or multiple other deeply divided Western democracies cannot have a coherent foreign policy if their foreign policy is nothing more than a projection of domestic political divides.
And yet countries without a meaningful domestic political divide within their government, largely because they're run as autocracies, can have a coherent foreign policy.
Then that actually creates a pretty obvious prediction of who's going to be more successful geopolitically in seizing and wielding power.
If you believe countries that have a coherent foreign policy versus countries that don't are going to be systematically more successful in aggregating power, then that's the prediction you would make for the next 10 years against that backdrop.
Is that sort of the natural consequence of your nascent incipient theory here?
Um, across that variable, yes, I think there are countervailing variables and disadvantages to, you know, places like China, Russia, and so forth, that would have to be weighed against it.
And so in the end, I think the United States is actually, again, it's another kind of counterintuitive position.
I think the United States is in a horrible position in terms of a lot of factors baked into the cake, quality of life, living conditions, a lot of factors that frankly are according to studies, but you don't even need studies, that are very basic to human happiness and flourishing.
America is just disastrous and becoming more so on these.
But I think because those are so relevant to people's kind of emotional concerns and psychological needs, People maybe overly extrapolate from that to saying, you know, America geopolitically is doomed when we don't recognize that it's a relative race.
We can be doomed, but still doing better off than others.
And there are a lot of, you know, Russia has a ton of problems.
You know, Russia is not even part, it shouldn't even be part of the conversation in terms of Where they are geopolitically, Putin is punched well above his weight, but they don't really have an economy.
There's a lot of...
China is a different matter, but even then, they have a lot of problems and we have a lot going for us.
And the structural things that are still in place can be expected to continue for a lot longer than people might think.
I think one of our most interesting and important pieces was we did a piece on why The US dollar is going to be king into the indefinite future, whereas I know that it's a big conversation now, people saying, oh, you know, dollar will be unseated, China will unseated.
I don't anticipate something like that.
So there's a lot of factors involved.
I think the most pressing one, though, is not America's geopolitical position.
It's that America's geopolitical position has never been more radically divorced From the flourishing of the American people.
There's a complete disconnect.
And so, yeah, we can remain the global superpower, but if the standard of living is getting crappier and crappier, if our cities are becoming disgusting embarrassments, if people can no longer easily, you know, form families and all these kinds of things that are, you know, central to human happiness and flourishing, You know, total cultural dysfunction, then so what?
And that's the thing that I think a lot of these national security bureaucracies is they count the ledgers.
You know, I've talked, I know some of these types, and they think of it as almost as just like a board game that they're playing with the other countries' intelligence agencies, and they're using terms like we as though they're very narrowly defined and usually Just unfathomably stupid definitions of victory translate into meaningful victories for the American people.
That's one of the best lines from Trump's first inaugural is that their victories are not our victories and that remains the case.
Well, I have a feeling I know where one of those lines may have come from.
Did you write that speech?
That one wasn't me.
I wish I could take credit.
I think that that's actually a good place to move to, I think, the central topic at hand then.
America first was born as an ideology that responds to this state of affairs.
I think that we still have Lacked a clear statement of the ideology of America First itself.
I think we are at least making room for improvement there.
So against the backdrop of the state of affairs you've laid out, that disconnect of our geopolitical position never being more divorced from the actual state of the country, that lays the backdrop for a statement of MAGA or America First ideology.
Maybe I'll...
You know, I'd love to open the floor to you to provide your vision of what that actually is, what that actually should be.
What is that North Star of what the alternative now looks like?
Yes, it's very hard because, you know, America first, the phrase kind of takes conception of America for granted, but America is transformed in so many fundamental ways.
I think a lot of those ways are Baked into the cake such that it's really difficult.
It's less of a problem formulating it as something that can be successful for the purposes of retail political consumption in terms of political speeches and political rhetoric.
But in terms of the reality behind it, That's a much more difficult question because there is no this kind of fixed America and we're taking it over, it's taking the country back and these kinds of things.
We're kind of on the margins and America is currently controlled at the institutional level by these kind of nefarious forces and simply recognizing the dysfunction of that Is not enough to replace it.
And again, I pointed out earlier in the conversation, I said we're in a state of pretty good education, but before there's education or at the early stages of education, there's this think false assumption that merely knowing a problem is sufficient to address it when that's very far from the case.
So I would start with things like America first, what does that mean?
Well, for one, it means we can't have this embarrassment that's happening through the DHS of just illegals flooding into the country.
And that can't be the case for America first.
It can't be the case that the cities are an embarrassment.
San Francisco, our cities should be crown jewels.
They're no longer crown jewels.
They're disgusting embarrassments.
And the only time we ever fix them is You know, she came to visit and I think Newsom like cleaned up San Francisco.
Well, we could either have she visit more often or maybe, you know, clean it up ourselves without she visiting.
We've seen some examples.
It's hard.
You know, again, it's hard to emulate.
You can't simply emulate Bukele because we're running up against things that he wasn't there.
The stakes are different in America.
You know, that's the other thing is People point to examples of Hungary and these other places, and I fully celebrate and appreciate what these people have done, but the closer you get to the center of power, the higher the stakes are and the different the game is.
You know, I say the game is like when you talk to the mountain climbers and they climb up to Everest and they're in the death zone and They're getting frostbite.
The way that the body addresses this thing is it sacrifices the extremities first, because they don't matter as much.
So these political success stories we're seeing are in the extremities, whereas America is the beating heart.
That's what the body is going to protect.
In this case, the body being the Conglomeration of all the stuff we don't like that's coming from America.
That's why the stakes are the highest here, because it's for all the marbles.
And so it's not the same game as something that you see in Hungary or something that you see in even Brazil or any other place in the world.
So it's one of those things.
There's really no easy answer to it.
There are a lot of kind of politically successful answers, but As an honest reckoning, it's a very, very difficult position to be in, and it takes a lot of time to go through it step by step and build something that is durable and can actually live up to the high stakes that I'm speaking of.
Yeah, I think you paint a Bleak picture.
But I think it is bleak in a way that is devoid of the fake, cheap optimism that political leaders in both parties will conveniently peddle when they're trying to advance their own chosen goals.
And if we want to see truth, I mean, this podcast is about.
Well, I do want to say something about that because there's this There's this term called black-pilled, which basically means like dark or pessimistic, and sometimes people say, oh, this is black-pilled.
I don't mean it as that.
And I think if people, the take-home message is the black-pilling, then I fully endorse kind of more optimistically inflected rhetoric in order to avoid that.
But to me, what's far more demoralizing is operating on the basis of Delusion and self-deception.
I think it's far more invigorating to say, okay, here's the actual challenge.
Here's the actual situation.
It's not hopeless.
It just requires a much more profound kind of effort and response that is not simply a matter of, oh, we win this election, or oh, we do this, or we do that.
It's It's a big challenge, but it's kind of a worthy challenge.
The effect on me of all these things is not a demoralizing one, and I wouldn't want it to be to others.
I think it's very demoralizing to hear a lot of the kind of The fake stuff of, oh, all we need to do is this, and then we're done, because then we're living in a world of fantasy.
And that's, to me, very...
I think there's a difference between seeing a bleak picture and being demoralized by it.
I think we can be heartened to know, for once, we're actually seeing the truth.
I think people have been systematically demoralized by the addiction to a short-term mirage that never was.
And even for traditional Republicans, put that to side, even for the America First movement, it's easy to say things like, our policy is to put the interests of this country first over anybody else.
I've said things like this in the campaign trail.
I mean them.
But that part's easy.
The harder part, which you call for in this conversation, I've said it as well, is to put America first.
We have to really understand and maybe even redefine what America is.
You can't put America first without knowing what America is.
And that's what certainly I mean when I say we're in that kind of 1776 moment right now.
But therein lies the heartening side of it.
What a special time that was to be alive in 1776. So if you're alive in the spring of 1776, you probably saw a pretty bleak picture too.
But as we look back at the spring of 1776, there might never have been a more special time to be alive in the history of this country, dating to the predecessor months to its rise.
And so that's the kind of moment we live in today.
And the bleak picture we see need not be a reason for discouragement, but maybe a reason for actually revival.
So I think that's why you're going to be Just the beginning, I know you were a speechwriter for President Trump and a lot of the messages that he delivered were messages that you developed.
But my prediction and hope is that your voice in this movement and in the future of our country is really still in its infancy.
And so keep speaking that truth unsparingly.
And you know what?
Even people in our own movement may at times find your words or your voice landing oddly on their ears.
I think that even some of the things you said in this conversation may puzzle and befuddle some of the folks in our own positive nationalist movement, but I encourage them to listen to it carefully, to try it on like a set of clothes and see if it just might fit in a way that you might not have expected.
And we're going to have to see the truth if we're actually going to rediscover what America is.
And you're a key part of helping us do that, Darren.
So thanks for taking the time and I have a feeling we're going to be talking again before long.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much Vivek, it's been wonderful.
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