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May 8, 2024 - Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy
01:05:27
Ann Coulter on the N Word: Nationalism | The TRUTH Podcast #46
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There's an N-word that you're not allowed to say anymore, but I'm going to say it.
Nationalist.
It doesn't have to be a bad word.
We've got to distinguish between two different kinds of nationalism.
The first is ethno-nationalism.
That's the kind people usually think of.
And it's natural because most nations' identities have been built around an ethnicity or a religion or a monarch.
And in that case, the track record of history hasn't been great for what that type of nationalism produces, either for a country or for its neighbors.
Distinct from that, though, is civic nationalism.
And that's the kind of nationalism that I think is relevant in the United States of America because our country is defined not based on an ethnicity, not based on a language or a monarch or cuisine or religion, for that matter.
Our country is defined on the basis of a civic set of ideals that brought together a divided polyglot and, yes, religiously diverse group of people 250 years ago.
I don't think that's the kind of nationalism we need to run from.
I think we believe in the exceptionalism of those ideals.
That's what American exceptionalism is about.
It is a belief in the exceptionalism of the ideals that made this country great the first time around.
And I think we're reaching an interesting fork in the road for the future of our conservative movement.
You can leave behind the neocon interventionist surveillance state past of the conservative movement.
But let's talk about where we're headed.
The pro-nationalist, positive nationalist vision for the future.
I think there are some interesting Divides that haven't yet been smoked out between, say, a libertarian nationalist movement that I particularly find appealing for the future of our country.
Believing in the libertarian ideals of freedom from a government.
A government that we elect, not an unelected class of bureaucrats.
And yes, believing in the exceptionalism of those ideals at the same time that we believe in a national identity.
The idea that a nation without borders is not a nation.
A libertarian breed of nationalism.
Versus the revival of what I see as a different kind of reactionary nationalism.
One that says that we can expand and use the tools of the state when necessary to achieve our pro-American or nationalistic goals.
And yes, one that does believe that there is some element of ethnic heritage that defines what it means to be an American.
I'm sympathetic to that view, though I disagree with it.
And that's why on today's podcast, I wanted to bring on somebody who's a fellow conservative, a fellow nationalist, though she frames it in forms of citizenship, and somebody who actually believes in the ideals of this country, but on whom I think we still have some disagreements about the role that ethnicity plays in grounding the identity of the United States of America.
Somebody I've been curious about, following, haven't met in person yet, but we're going to bring her on the podcast today.
That's Ann Coulter.
Nationalism.
It's a touchy word.
You're not supposed to say the N-word anymore, but I'll say it.
Nationalism.
I don't think it has to be a bad word, not in the American context.
But there's two kinds of nationalism that I think we need to distinguish between.
Historically, nationalism has been associated with ethno-nationalism.
Why is that?
Most nations are founded on the existence of a single ethnicity, at least as the backdrop of that nation's identity.
A culture, a religious set of institutions, maybe a religion itself as a state religion, a monarch.
These are the things that have historically grounded the identity of a nation.
Well, nationalism refers to the idea of effectively viewing the exceptionalism of your nation relative to those around you and your national pride as a anchoring of your own identity.
And that's led to, I would say, consequences throughout the course of human history that haven't always been great as judged by posterity.
You could think about Single-handed dictators for much of American history and global history that have been defined on the back of being nationalist.
Well, I don't think that's necessarily the definition that needs to apply in the American context of civic nationalism.
Beautiful thing about America is that we're not a country defined on the basis of necessarily a single cuisine or a single ethnicity or a single religion, but we're a nation defined on a single set of ideals that brought together a divided polyglot and yes, even religiously diverse group of people 250 years ago.
And so I think that's what's at stake in the context of being an American nationalist, is whether or not you're committed to those civic ideals.
That's a different question from being an ethno-nationalist.
Now, I do think that there are many now in our conservative movement, as we look to the future of a conservative movement that puts aside The historical neocon baggage of interventionist foreign policy and a domestic surveillance state.
Put that to the past.
I think we're headed to a future where we still have to define what the different branches of a pro-nationalist conservative vision are here in the United States.
I see the emergence of a strain that's skeptical of civic nationalism.
Believes that civic nationalism is really just a siren song, something that we can't really hang our hat on.
It's too thin to anchor our identity to.
A vision that says, you know what, somebody who has been here as long as fourth or fifth or sixth generation as an American, descended from people who have been here a long time ago, have a different claim on this country than somebody who may have come here as an immigrant.
Yes.
Yes, went through the oath of pledging allegiance to this country, but nonetheless haven't yet vested in citizenship in the same way as somebody who inherits a country that's more than just an economic zone.
I think it's an interesting discussion to have.
I think the future of the conservative movement depends on where we land here.
On one end of our nationalist movement, a libertarian nationalist movement, That says that, you know what, you can subscribe to the ideals of this country, that you should achieve anything you want, and you're equally American as long as you pledge allegiance to those ideals.
But I think a subtext and a strain on the other side that's skeptical of that, that says, you know what, we should be open to using government as an instrument to advancing pro-nationalist ends.
And there is a difference in how American you really are, depending on how long you've been here.
And I think we ought to smoke that discussion out and have that open dialogue in a way that's been Uncomfortable because of the Overton window that we accept around these topics.
And I think we would be best served taking a truck and driving it through that Overton window so we can actually have an honest discussion about the future of where the conservative movement is headed from here, not just on the issue of national identity or nationalism or immigration, but more broadly.
And that's why I brought on today somebody who I think has some thoughtful perspectives on the future direction of our country, of our conservative movement, and on this question of nationalism and national identity.
Somebody I've been fascinated by for a long time and have interacted with on social media, but for the first time we're having at least a live form conversation in the offline sense of it.
It's Ann Coulter.
So Ann, thanks for coming on and I'm looking forward to our conversation today.
Me too.
Thanks for having me.
That was a fantastic opening monologue.
I too am a fan of yours.
I'm going to make a point of disagreeing with you so that it will be fun.
You are so bright and articulate, and I guess I can call you articulate since you're not an American Black.
Can't say that about them.
That's derogatory.
And that was a great opening segment.
Lots of things to talk about there.
Oh, and I agreed with many, many things you said during, in fact, probably more than most other candidates when you were running for president, but I still would not have voted for you.
Because you're an Indian.
We'll get back to that.
And it's directly related to what you were just talking about.
You know, the thing about nationalism, you're totally right.
It is like, to use the word nationalism, oh, it's Hitler, it's Hitler.
You know, Hitler had soup.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have soup.
Hitler loved dogs.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't love dogs.
So I think we have to move past this.
If Hitler did it, it must be bad.
But I do notice when I was listening to your monologue, I don't think I do use the word nationalism.
I would use a word you used in your monologue, which I liked quite a bit, and that's citizenship.
There's citizenism.
How about Americanism?
I'd also point out that the only people who are not allowed to be proud of their ethnic group do tend to be Anglo-Saxons.
Oh boy, you can't be proud of being white.
Whereas, you know, watch a soccer game.
You know, it's Venezuela.
We're Mexicans.
It's funny.
Hispanics don't even think of themselves as Hispanics.
They think of themselves as the country they're from.
I think French feel very proud to be French.
We saw Macron expressly objecting wokeness on the grounds that this is an American institution.
We're not going to import this.
So you do see basically every other ethnic group very proud of their ethnic group.
And the thing I'd say about America, okay, no single cuisine, but you can get Chinese food and Mexican food in Paris and Tokyo.
Food has definitely migrated across countries.
There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP, and that doesn't mean we can't take anyone else in, a Sri Lankan or a Japanese or an Indian, But the core around which the nation's values are formed is the WASP. We've never had a president who didn't have at least partial English ancestry, never.
We've only had one Catholic president, There was only one Catholic sign, signatory to the Declaration of Independence.
They were all not only Protestants, but pretty much Presbyterian.
King George referred to the American Revolution as that Presbyterian War.
So there is a lot in the whole, in the freedom thing.
Samuel Huntington of of Harvard has written about this, a fantastic book I recommend to everyone, Who Are We?, and he describes how, you know, back in colonial times, interestingly enough, for example, Jews could vote, but Catholics couldn't because people thought that was, they would be more loyal to Rome once they became more American Catholic and less Roman Catholic, then they were just, you know, part of us and part of Americans.
But you do notice, and he describes why so many countries that have not done very well are dominated by Catholicism.
It's much more from the top down.
It lends itself to authoritarian governance.
Whereas, you know, Calvinists, it's between you and God.
And moreover, because of the Presbyterian, I think every ethnic group has this, you know, the WASP. We're good to go.
In Catholic countries, not so much this country because American Catholics have basically become Protestants.
And that is this worship of being poor, as if you are closer to God because you're poor.
That's not the way to create an on-the-go developing country.
No, I think that that's an interesting tour through that historical lane, but I want to pick on one point you said, which is citizenship, right?
Let's talk about what does it mean to be a citizen of a nation.
And it's interesting, if a lot of people trip up on this, they'll say, well, it means what you get, right?
Do I get to vote or do I get some other claim?
And that doesn't really work.
Actually, if you look through most of American history, for example, women were citizens long before women could vote, right?
And so it's not about what you get.
In my book, and I think that this is true with the American conception of citizenship, I think it's true of the Roman conception of citizenship, is it's about your loyalty, actually.
Yes.
To whom do you actually pledge loyalty?
And so I think you and I share that in common, actually.
I don't know, I've never asked you this, Dan, but I assume from seeing the things you've said, tell me if I'm right about this, you're probably against the existence of dual citizenship as a concept.
Is that fair to say?
Yes.
Yes, you and I share that in common.
It's incoherent.
It's not just outrageous, it's incoherent.
It's oxymoronic.
How could you possibly have a loyalty to two different nations where the essence of citizenship is which nation to whom you had your undivided loyalty?
That's what the essence of citizenship is all about.
So you and I agree on so much there.
But where I, I wouldn't say lose you, but I may fail to fully understand you, Is on that axis of citizenship, what does ethnicity have to do with the matter?
And I think you'd be well served, and maybe this could be a great platform for you to do it, to make the case for why that, what you put it, WASP basis for the American identity.
How is that relevant against a backdrop of which you got the WASP Seventh generation descendant of some rich guy on the Upper East Side in Brooklyn that pretends to hate this country because it's the cool thing to do, versus somebody who came here is the kid of immigrants, but pledges loyalty to this country.
If loyalty was the access for citizenship, aren't you actually committing a bit of a sin reverting back to a conception of citizenship that has nothing to do with loyalty in the first place?
Well, I will say many of those seventh generations wasps I definitely hate.
I know we have a lot of really, really bad ones.
But like I said, anyone can adopt this.
I guess what I just said, if any of your children marry a DAR, I would definitely vote for them for president.
It's not so much...
It's more...
President is different.
You have to be natural-born, as you know, which, by the way, Ted Cruz is not, basically because of what you were just describing.
Where is the loyalty?
So ambassadors' children born actually in the United States are not natural-born, but that's a total sidebar.
It's actually not a sidebar at all.
I mean, the fact that ambassadors' kids born in the United States are not citizens is actually an overlooked fact.
The kid of an ambassador from Mexico does not enjoy birthright citizenship, neither does somebody who's in this country illegally.
Yes.
Right.
So that's actually a quite important logical chain.
But I go back to forget even the because you get to this constitutional, you know, legalistic and I like that stuff.
But we'll just put that to one side for a second.
But the essence of American identity, I think there's a part of you that believes.
I think you basically said so.
That part of that identity is tied to a certain Anglo-Saxon heritage of this country and that you're more American if you vested into that over the course of generations that are descended from that rather than somebody who came here with a civic commitment to the country.
Went through the naturalization process and then their kids made some real sense of the word.
And the reason I respect you is that you actually have the, so to speak, the stones to be able to say it, is that you think that there's a difference in the status of the Americanness of that person.
And that's where I think I disagree with you, but I want to give you the opportunity to air the case for that strand of national identity that I think we ought to just smoke out and be able to have a discussion about.
Well, the reason I mentioned the national-born citizen is I'm only talking about president of the United States.
So obviously the framers thought there was something different about being president, the one man who holds one entire branch of government in his hands.
It isn't to say anything about who could be a Supreme Court justice, and they have a little more power than the president, by the way, or secretary of state, or governor, or obviously senator, or any other position, but president, and I guess by extension, vice president.
That is something that the framers didn't think was, it was so important that you had this deep Generation-wide loyalty, and why would they think that?
Well, as many said at the time, freedom is a wonderful thing, but it's a very hard thing to learn.
And one of the things, and I cite these polls in my book, Adios America, it's striking and depressing that lots of our very best immigrants just do not understand the Second Amendment.
They do not get the First Amendment, and you take polls of them, You know, should you have a right to bear arms?
Should hate speech be banned?
And it's noticeable that large percentages of immigrants and children of immigrants really don't get that.
And I think that is the point of having natural born citizen only for president, that this is This is a really delicate thing we have, this freedom to bear arms and there being no such thing as hate speech.
And it's just an additional little safeguard.
Here's my question for you on that is, because the left is actually very good at using what I call proxy logic.
I reject proxy logic, but the left is actually very good at this.
They'll say, we need diversity in a corporate institution.
So we're going to select for diversity of thought, not by screening candidates for the diversity of their thoughts, but by screening them for the diversity of their skin color, which is a really curious thing.
If you care about diversity of thought in a boardroom, why do you care about diversity of shades of melanin or the diversity of your X or Y chromosomes?
You could have a room full of people that look really similar to one another and think very differently, or a room full of people that look really different and think the same, which is much of what you get in corporate America today.
So that's what I call reasoning by proxy, where one of the things I've often said to the left is if you want to select for diversity of thoughts, screen candidates for the diversity of their thoughts.
If you want to select for diversity of experience, screen candidates for the diversity of their experiences.
That might be a better way of achieving your stated goal than to use the logic of proxy.
So again, the constitutional questions decide.
I think we're talking about a cultural matter relating to national identity.
My question for you is, I worry that you may, I say this respectfully, maybe making Some of the same category error that our friends on the left make to say that, yes, it is shameful that immigrants and kids of immigrants often have no idea what the heck the Bill of Rights is actually about.
The Second Amendment exists not to protect some guy who wants to go sport hunting, but it's the one amendment that puts the teeth in all of the other ones.
The First Amendment, the right to free speech, means nothing if hate speech is carved as a category because the definition of free speech is the right to express any opinion, no matter how heinous it is.
And that's protected and backstopped by your ability to protect yourself physically, if necessary, from a tyrannical government that otherwise will be prone to overreach.
And so these are basic concepts that many immigrants, first-generation Americans, and for that matter, I could say it from having gone to school with many of the waspy varieties that populate places like Harvard, too, where I've gone.
Goes for any sixth or seventh generation American, too.
It's shameful, the level of civic absence of knowledge, a black hole of understanding of the history of our country.
And I guess my question for you is, why solve for that through what I would argue is a pretty poor proxy, whether or not you're talking about a safeguard.
If there could be a safeguard to ensure that you have leaders in this country or citizens of this country that have a better understanding of that, I would love that safeguard.
I personally believe that every high school senior should have to be able to pass a basic civics test, the one we ask immigrants to pass, before becoming a voting citizen of this country.
Before you cast that ballot in a ballot box, you better darn know what branch of government the president leads.
And yet, You actually have more people would fail the test that naturalized citizens are likely to pass who aren't even naturalized citizens.
Why not solve for the actual target that you and I both care about, which is loyalty and an understanding of what you're actually pledging loyalty to, rather than using what I would argue is a left-like false proxy target that you use to solve for the same thing.
First of all, what you just said, what you started with there.
Liberals, you say you love diversity so much, but it's diversity of ethnicity and not diversity of thought.
If what you want is diversity, you need to have diversity.
You should be focusing on diversity of thought.
That was the essay I wrote for my law school application essay, and my mentor at Cornell read it and just threw it over his shoulder and said, fine, take the flamboyant route.
So anyway, that's what I argued, lo, these many years ago.
Yes, couldn't agree with you more.
And no, of course, they don't care about diversity.
Number two, I mean, it isn't really true that That the seventh generation WASPs are voting worse than the immigrants.
One of the problems with the immigrants we've been taking in, actually probably any immigrant, but definitely 90% of legal immigrants come from the third world.
They're used to authoritarian governments.
They block votes.
And every four years, I have to hear about how, no, I think we're going to take the Hispanic vote this year.
I think we're going to get the Asian vote.
No, you're not Republicans.
Every election is decided by slight movements of the white vote.
Now, the fact that the white vote is that close, yeah, okay, I hate 50% of them.
But they're the ones who, you know, change their mind and look at the different candidates.
It's much more easy to boss around people who've come from an authoritarian culture.
And yes, take your point that this is at least for this one position, president, you are looking at something other than just what the person actually believes.
Nobody really knows what a person actually believes, so why not have a fail-safe?
I want to hear you say it, and I'd also be more comfortable if you're third generation and have some English or British blood in you.
I understand the view.
I think I understand the view.
I think it's a far less effective way of achieving the same goal.
My question on the immigration point, though, is how do your views change on that legal immigration paradigm if we actually did a better job of selecting for who actually gets to come to this country?
It would be something totally...
Yes, it would be something totally, totally different.
I want to go back to pre-Teddy Kennedy's 1965 Act rules, where, as I've said many times, I'm so sorry if I'm boring you at this point, pre-1965 immigrants were So much better than we are.
We ought to be bringing in people.
I mean, immigration is just a government policy like any other taxes or import, export fees.
It's just a government policy.
It ought to be used to help the people already here.
So I keep saying, we ought to be getting our average up.
Let's bring in people better than us.
And that's what pre...
It actually kicked in around 1970. So pre-1970 immigrants were better educated, made more money, bought more houses.
Oh my gosh, did that change after Teddy Kennedy's Immigration Act?
Now, 90% of, as Trump says, legal immigrants are from the Third World.
There isn't that much difference between legal and illegal in terms of the cultures they're coming from.
And why is that?
Because at the same time, the 1965 immigration passed, we also got immigrants.
LBJ's Great Society programs.
So if you came here basically at any point from, I don't know, 1632 up until 1965, if you couldn't make it, you went home or you starved to death.
There was no warm bath of welfare benefits that you would be sunk into.
And most people don't know this, but about 30% of the prized Ellis Island immigrants went home.
60% of Southern Italian immigrants went home.
So that's how, without having any laws or having to pick this one or that one, we just naturally got the best the world had to offer.
We were skimming the cream.
And I think when most people, like Trump, talk about legal immigrants versus illegal immigrants, that's what they're thinking of.
They're thinking of Ellis Island versus, but really what they mean is pre-1970, post-1970.
Now, we're not going to get rid of the welfare state.
That is clearly the best way to do it.
Just, yeah, sure, anybody can come.
If you can't make it, go home or you're going to die.
And no one will help you.
But we can't get rid of the welfare state.
We could, you know, repeal the laws of gravity first.
So now we really do have to be really, really, really picky and choosy and look these immigrants over.
Though I will say, I offered...
When I was speaking quite regularly to Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign, I told him he could get rid of the entire immigration apparatus and just send me pictures of every immigration applicant, and I could decide them all with a picture before breakfast.
How would you do that?
Mine would be better.
Oh, I'm a luxist, Vivek.
You know, what's that?
I'm a luxist.
So I want young, healthy, good-looking.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, there might be a few who would slip through, but oh my gosh, it would be better than what we have now.
Yeah, and your point is you want to build a championship team.
I'm not sure you could have better proxies.
I believe we could talk about other proxies, but your point is we want to select for an immigration policy that best advances the interests of the citizens who are already here.
Yes.
Now, suppose we had such a policy.
Roll that forward.
And by the way, I don't have the same fatalism that you do with respect to that great society, the greatest misnomer in American political history of a set of policies.
I think it is incumbent on us.
Whatever we do with our immigration policies, irrespective of that, we're doomed unless we Ultimately do the hard thing and take aim at Lyndon Johnson's destructive great society that we're paying for 60 years later.
I'm not fatalistic about that.
I think that the future existence of our country depends not just on tinkering around the edges of immigration policy, but doing the right thing at the heart of what's going on right here at home.
Okay, maybe I will.
I mean, it's just incumbent.
It's a future requirement for the continued existence of our country.
But my view is on the other side of that, and the reason I'm actually very Empathetic to your point of view on probably this narrow sliver.
I mean, rather than picking the 99% of things we already agree with, which would be rather boring, I thought it'd be interesting to focus on the sliver.
But the reason I'm very sympathetic to the sliver and where we disagree is that I understand it's the product of failed policies, of an immigration policy, even legal immigration policies that reward.
I mean, what do we say we reward?
We reward chance?
We reward people who are willing to break the law.
We reward people who are willing to lie, right?
If you lie on an immigration application or an asylum application, that's the quality that's rewarded.
So if those are the qualities rewarded in an immigration policy, stochastic randomness, willingness to lie, and then through illegal immigration, willingness to break the law, you get what you actually incentivize.
So that's not surprising that that's what we have today.
I worry that the reaction, maybe the understandable reaction, but the reaction unless of folks like yourself, bluntly, is to embrace an artificial vision of American identity that serves as an antidote to the thing that we actually are trying to solve in this country.
But actually then may miss the real target, which is to know this is who we are.
And it's manifest itself through failed immigration policies and failed domestic policies in this country that we would rather confront by actually reviving the Constitution that our founding fathers set into motion and the beliefs of our founding fathers.
And Thomas Jefferson said, what is it?
The tree of liberty is fed every generation by the blood of tyrants.
That we suggest that our founding fathers weren't.
You either believe they were crazy or you believe they were right.
And I believe they were right.
Not crazy.
That's what we should focus on rather than this, I think, understandable but somewhat regrettable reinvention of an American identity that I just don't think Thomas Jefferson particularly shared at the time he wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Oh, I would disagree with you there.
But yes, I think we should be doing both at once.
And I wish you all the luck in the world overturning the Great Society programs and also repealing the laws of gravity.
I will totally root for you all along the way.
But until we do that...
We, as you said, do have to pick and choose who the immigrants are.
And it isn't to say, look, at this point, we're never going to go back to what the ethnicity of America was pre-1965 Immigration Act.
And nor am I necessarily saying that that would be preferable.
We'd have a lot more Republican presidents.
But at this point, I mean, even the good...
Good.
The smart, successful, making more money, contributing more than your Native American is, even those immigrants, you, Vivek, you don't want to take in too many at once, and this really doesn't apply to you, but you do create, I mean, you see it in Detroit, and I think Dearborn now, where one of my friends was a U.S. turning up, or a citizen of U.S. turning up there, and he drove me through.
There are Arab street signs, Vivek!
When you take in that many immigrants from one area of the world at once, and we're taking them in from all kinds of different areas, we've already taken in one third of all Mexicans.
One third.
Let that sink over you.
So they create their own little Mexicos, their own little, you know, whatever.
Enclaves.
Absolutely.
And so we do, I think...
It's disgusting, actually.
I think it's disgusting.
We need a moratorium is what I'm drawing on.
I'm not saying never, ever let in people from these countries again, but I think we need...
To dust off the books.
I mean, obviously, the wall, number one.
And then just, you know, just take a pause in immigration for a while.
Give us some time to assimilate the ones who have already come in here to turn them into these great Americans that you are, that Miguel Estrada is, that many of my immigrant friends are, and I believe at least the ones I know are better Americans.
The many people I know.
And yeah, I mean, I see your point that in theory they could be president, but I can't meet every one of them and vet them.
I just don't have time, Vivek.
The electoral process, believe me, you could say a lot about that Iowa process, but that's a discussion for another day.
So let's talk about this question of dual citizenship, if you will.
Right?
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
I mean, if somebody's working in Washington, D.C. or somebody's working as a federal bureaucrat, should they have to disclose whether they are loyal to a different country?
Is that something that you think should be done in the United States today?
No, it's appalling.
I have a section on this in my book, Adios America.
And, I mean, we have American citizens who are holding political positions in other countries.
That's crazy.
Or serving even in the military of other countries as well.
Yes, yes.
No, that's crazy.
That's crazy.
No, no.
And at the beginning of Adios America, I mean, it's a beautiful quote.
I won't remember it exactly, but Justice Brandeis, I think the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice.
Or was it Frankfurt?
Anyway, he used to preside over an Americanization ceremony for new immigrants.
Point one, can you imagine having something called an Americanization ceremony today?
No, that would be a hate crime.
But anyway, he gave this beautiful speech.
I don't know if he did it every year.
But this beautiful speech about how becoming an American involves more than adopting the language, the clothes, the customs.
You must align your interests.
100% with the interests and the values of Americans.
And I'm not doing it justice, but it's a beautiful quote.
And like I say today, if you said that without saying I'm quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, you would be accused of hate speech.
Let me ask you this.
What does it mean to be an American?
You talked about adopting the way of Americans.
You've thought a lot about this.
To you, Ann, culture, what does it mean to be an American?
It means, well, in long form, read de Tocqueville, there is definitely a very clear American culture.
When America started, we were probably the most honest people ever.
In the world.
And you know, to this day, they may have stopped doing it because it got embarrassing.
But they still do rankings of the most corrupt countries and the least corrupt countries.
And actually, you did have a lot of corruption in European countries.
This isn't Western Europe against the rest of the world.
Obviously, Italy, Greece, Asian countries, beyond corrupt.
African countries, beyond corrupt.
But Americans, I mean, among the things that de Tocqueville said, Huge respect for women.
I hate listening to feminists talk about these brutal, sexist American men.
Whoa, wait until the third world has moved in.
You're going to see that this is the best you ever had at American women.
So rape was punished like murder in colonial times.
This was Absolutely something that Tocqueville noticed.
The equality, the social equality, to use my friend Mickey Kous's term, and that was, you know, it's a violation of the Constitution for the government to confer titles on you.
So, you want to become a lord in Great Britain?
Give up your American citizenship first.
It's against the law.
And I like that.
So no matter what rank you were, and a rich person may have a really big house, a poor person may have a smaller house, but there was a sense of what you were saying before.
We were all citizens.
We were equal in that sense.
And respect for one another.
No, like, looking down on no Indian castes.
Very opposite of that.
Very opposite of British, the British class system.
And freedom.
So, okay, I'm giving you three very quickly.
Respect for women, children, plants and animals.
Real generosity of spirit.
The equality thing.
And then the freedom thing.
Because the first people who, the first Western Europeans who landed and created the country known as America, well I guess it was still a colony America, the United States of America, they were heavily fleeing religious persecution.
We got the Presbyterians or Protestants from France and they fled to the Netherlands.
You had Well, a lot of people, the crazy Puritans, and they were crazy, but it was kind of a great, great opening for this country.
So that's why the freedom of religion was so important to the framers of our Constitution.
This freedom is just so deeply ingrained From the founding of our country, and I think it could be said without contradiction, America remains the freest country in the world.
And so you think those attributes, the honesty, the compassion, generosity of spirit, social equality, the absence of caste or lordship or title or an honor system of hierarchy, and of course freedom, you think that those are distinctly American ideals.
Yes, and the massive respect for women.
I agree, actually.
It was the Supreme Court that overturned.
You know, it used to be a death penalty offense.
Not all rapes, but rape was allowed to be a death penalty offense.
And the liberal Warren Court overturned that.
And I think we should go back to that.
Was that unique to the United States?
You don't think it's the case?
I have no idea.
Is it a case like in Iran or some country elsewhere in the world that you would also face the death penalty by stoning for rape?
It's interesting.
I don't know the answer to that, but you bring it up.
Actually, in those countries, it's the rape victim who gets stoned.
But even in Western Europe, I mean, this is certainly what, and I'll believe Alexis de Tocqueville on this, that the American respect for women and opposition and seeing women as pure, and feminists may sneer at this and say it's putting women on a pedestal, but women would live up to it.
And would live up to another thing de Tocqueville said that the reason American women were so much better than European women was that, you know, they had to come to this continent and, warning, hate facts coming, and fend off the Indians and go conquer the West rather than, you know, these European women sitting on their couches eating bonbons and suffering the vapors.
It was, women were stronger in the United States of America They were extremely respected, and probably that thing Trump said when he came down the escalator about how we're bringing in rapists.
Look, a lot of that is from Adios America, which I wrote, and sorry if I'm boring you because you've heard this before.
Immigration was just going to be one chapter in another book, and then I'm just trying to get the basic facts on immigration and crime.
And I'm kind of a fanatical researcher, and the information is not there, Vivek.
So I thought, oh my gosh, I've uncovered this huge conspiracy to hide immigrant crime from us.
So I did do a...
There are other things you can look at, like prison populations.
I'd have to wait for trial transcripts in a lot of cases and just search, you know, control F for the word interpreter to find out if this was an immigrant legal or illegal.
And whoa, no other cultures do not have...
Our respect for women.
In fact, there was one case that I mentioned in Adios America, a couple of, a rocking man had, and they were like, you know, 50 years old, and they had a couple of 13-year-old girls sold to them by the girls' parents.
They got prosecuted.
This is someplace in the upper Midwest, maybe Wisconsin.
And the attorneys for the men said, Our clients had no idea this was against law.
It was statutory rape.
The girls were beneath the age of consent.
They had no idea it's not in the old country, and you have to understand that America is unique in the world this way.
Yeah, I think we are unique in the world this way, and I think we're going to lose that.
And so, how do we preserve it?
Wall and immigration moratorium.
And a massive assimilation program.
And I also think...
Let's assume that's the starting line.
Because that seems to me...
Okay.
That's basic.
Suppose debating the merits of it, we could talk about the implementation of it.
That's almost boring by comparison.
What then?
I mean, you look at a lot of people occupying the grass of Columbia University or wherever it is, we're having this.
They're not actually...
The majority of them are not immigrants.
A lot are.
All a lot are.
I think actually a lot hangs on the answer to that question, actually.
What percentage of the deranged anti-American spirit in this country is the consequence of somebody who immigrated to this country or is the kid of one?
I personally, from what I see, this may be an empirical question, so I'm not giving you empirics, I'm giving you my impression.
Believe that of the total set of people who are deranged in their anti-American conviction and passion for their ideology being guided by anti-Americanism at its core, and I think that is what's at work in this country, I think it is a minority, maybe a small minority, that are themselves either immigrants or the kids of immigrants.
Do you think that that contention is false?
I think it is completely false.
Now, they aren't immigrants like Indian immigrants, by and large.
And you can't look at the group of, you know, just count up the numbers for who the protesters are, though, at least from all of the protests I've seen throughout Manhattan.
No, it has heavily been Do you think the people watching the BLM protests...
And who knows, they can be first or second generation, but they are heavily, heavily Muslim, but it's per capita, Vaik.
I mean, there are a lot more Americans in America, or white Americans, let me put it that way.
So, you know, how many Arab immigrants or Muslim immigrants do we have in the country compared to how many are participating in these protests?
And wow, the ones I've seen, yeah, I mean, it's sort of arresting when you see just some douchebag white American kid doing it.
What are you doing here?
No, you're right.
They totally hate America.
If we could deport them, I would totally deport them.
You know, one interesting fact there is And this is an empirical question, and it might be more true for this wave of post-October 7th stuff that's going on in the United States as distinct from what I saw in this country in the aftermath of George Floyd's death in 2020. And this is really what, I wouldn't say radicalized me, but certainly motivated me to take a different direction in my life in the business career that I was on.
I was the CEO of a biotech company.
Somehow there's an expectation that I make a statement on behalf of BLM, which I refuse to do.
Oh, I remember that.
Good for you.
It was a firestorm of controversy, and, you know, that took me on the journey that I've been in.
But I remember looking at this very closely at the time.
Who is actually showing up at these BLM protests across the country, the mostly peaceful protests that were somehow riots that were burning down cities?
And I think that, I mean, push back on me if you see it differently, but I have some conviction in this.
That was not in any sense of the word any majority or even significant plurality or even significant minority led by immigrants.
I mean, these are self-hating people who have been in this country for generations, whether they're of black or white skin.
The BLM riots in this country in the middle of COVID-infested America, COVID policy-invested America, really, in 2020, was really something that has very little to do with illegal migration or even legal migration, but something else of a national self-loathing that exists in this country.
And even when I visited the South Side of Chicago, and this is where I went to interface with people who don't agree with people like you and I, The kind of comments I got there were interesting, which was, you know, these are people who are pushing me on my policies on racial reparations, which I'm dead set against in this country.
Maybe there was a time for racial reparations in 1866 or in 1870, a time of reconstruction, but not the year 2024. That is no place in America.
I'm dead set against affirmative action of every kind.
And the thing I was told more than once, and not particularly in civil terms, was that this country was built on the back of my ancestors and not yours.
Which I think is really interesting.
It's fascinating.
That, I think, was a better representation of what was represented in the violent riots of the post-George Floyd death, BLM riots of 2020. And yet there's an element of that that, to me, feels familiar in at least a strain of what underlies your own vision of American identity too, which is what I think is fascinating and just worth exploring.
I don't think that that BLM... Do you agree with me on the BLM piece?
No.
The summer of 2020 was not immigrant.
So you don't agree with me even on that?
Well, I would never have said it was particularly immigrants, but there were two different groups.
First, you had the...
And I think it would often go...
There's Antifa, i.e.
mentally ill white people, some immigrants.
Actually, there were a fair number of immigrants, by the way.
I don't know about the...
You might be right about that.
I just...
Give me my impression.
They are definitely...
The main distinguishing feature wasn't immigrants or non-immigrants.
It was mentally ill.
That's the Antifa group.
And then you had, again, warning, hate facts coming.
Then you would have just straight-out black criminals.
And I'm sorry, but for whatever reason, you and I, I think, would blame the Great Society program in...
And paying women to have children out of wedlock.
But African Americans commit, per capita, a disproportionate amount of crime.
And then you'd see them coming through and doing the looting.
And I'm not sure it would always go, Antifa smashes the windows, black criminals do the looting.
But it was something like that most of the time.
A fair number of the mentally ill ones, at least out in the Pacific Northwest, were definitely immigrants.
Main distinguishing factor was mentally ill.
And then what was the second thing you said?
Oh, we built this country.
No, no, no, no.
The 1619 Projects.
Slavery was such...
A drag on this country.
Thank God the North won the Civil War, which of course they were going to.
I mean, it's like Israel versus Gaza right now.
Not that I'm comparing Southerners to these bloodthirsty Hamas types.
But The South was incredibly backwards, and it was backwards because of slavery, much in the same way cheap illegal alien labor or cheap foreign labor is holding America back now.
Instead of using more AI, instead of farmers learning to use robotics, ah, no, let's just farm the way we did in, you know, 1880. We have all this cheap labor, cheap labor, so they're bringing it in, bringing it in.
They make money short term, but But it's a disaster for the country long term.
The South was so far backwards, so much behind the North.
Of course the North was going to win.
The North was, you know, literate, on the go, had factories.
And slowly, you know, we brought the South into it.
But this idea that America couldn't have been built without slaves, no, it has been a black mark, I mean, especially morally, on this country.
From the moment it began, and it began for the same reason we're bringing in masses and masses of third world immigrants, because the rich want cheap labor.
That's an interesting thesis.
So you think that that's actually the real guiding force behind modern immigration policy?
For the Republicans and the Republican donors, oh, they love their cheap nannies and butlers and chefs.
For the Democrats, and I really want to stress this, you are absolutely right, they just hate America.
I mean, not all of them.
Some Democrats are just...
Just eating it.
But there's always been a portion in America, and there probably is in any country, of people who just hate America.
I mean, there were communist spies working in the State Department, Vivek.
Oppenheimer was a member of the Communist Party.
That's why he had to have his security clearance taken away.
Don't totally believe the movie, by the way.
We've always had some segment of Americans who hate America.
Why?
I don't know.
We'd have to, I don't know, interview their shrinks.
But they do, and they used to help foreign countries try to take down America.
Well, now they can do it without leaving home.
Now they can, and they make a lot of money doing it.
These NGOs, this business about, oh, we will volunteer.
No, they're not, none of these groups.
The Lutheran immigrant group, the Catholic immigrant group, the Jewish immigrant group, they are getting check after check from the government and paying themselves quite hefty fees.
And in your view, and I wanted to get to this before we wrap, too, because I think you have such a, at least, coherent view of national identity.
Say, agree or not with particular tenets of it.
It's interesting because it's coherent.
What role does Christianity and religious identity play in that American national identity as well?
Well, again, it's not...
And particularly because the original Americans were fleeing religious persecution.
You can be any religion you want to.
And observing that freedom and holding to it is part of what should be imbued in you as an American.
Absolutely respect.
You can worship an earthworm, whatever.
But it's what I was saying about The wasp being the template.
That's the word for it.
The template that everything else grows around.
So, I'm sorry I'm repeating myself, but there just is a lot about Presbyterianism or Protestantism.
That supports, that dovetails with a free country, that believes in freedom of speech, that believes in freedom of religion, that I won't say worships success, but admires success instead of revering poverty.
The refusal to bow down to authority.
Could you vote for a non-Christian for U.S. president?
I think so.
Yeah.
So that's for you less on the hierarchy of backstop security policies versus taking a look at lineage, at least, from a birthright citizenship perspective.
Yes, only because...
Like I say, it's hard to learn what Americans kind of take for granted.
And yes, you probably have it.
I know my friend Miguel Estrada had it.
I know a lot of first-generation immigrants are already somehow deeply imbued with the American creed, with the American ideal, but it's a backstop.
The longer you've been here, the more it just...
it enters you by osmosis.
And I think that's why the framers wanted the president to be natural born.
Yeah.
So interesting.
I mean, I think...
I find you fascinating.
I think we view each other through a very interesting prism.
You know, I may take some liberty here, but I think you see in me or the other friend you've referred to, oh, what a good exception to the rule and what about somebody to actually help do a good job for this country and let me help you even though while I couldn't have voted you free for president, let me root for your success in a good-hearted kind of way.
And the equivalent of that emotion or reaction or view that I have of you is Gee, how terrible it is that we have become a country where our national identity is completely gone, we have immigration policies that have contributed to it, we have domestic self-hating policies like the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson that have contributed to it,
that has led otherwise Thoughtful, patriotic, country-loving, history-understanding Americans to have missed the mark ever so slightly on what actual American identity is as part of an understandable reaction to an assault on this country.
And I think that the counterpart to your, I'd say, favorable but couched reaction to someone like me being the U.S. president or running for U.S. president is my reaction to, I think, What you represent is a view of many Americans who rightly,
if we were having this conversation against the backdrop of sensible immigration policies, whose sole goal was to advance the national interest of the citizens who were already here, the backdrop of a shared language that we could all share in common, English, as the single national language of the United States,
which I think is a no-brainer, against the backdrop of actual policies that embody those basic Protestant values, including the value of hard work, Embracing and lionizing success, and maybe not worshiping it, but lionizing it rather than vilifying it.
Against that backdrop, I suspect deeply that your own views of what constitutes the most American somebody could be, even in the office of U.S. President, might be different than what they are today.
I think you could be right, and I'll give you...
Your response is guiding our conversation a little bit.
I think you could be right, and the example I would give to back up, I'm not necessarily agreeing, but this is something I'd give you to back up your position.
JFK was the first Catholic president, and like I say, there was actually...
A couple of centuries of, no, we don't trust the Papists.
But that was before his brother Teddy's 1965 Immigration Act, and I think people were perfectly comfortable with that.
There's a President Kennedy joke that asked if the Pope and the Constitution disagreed, which would you defer to?
And his answer was, neither.
Did he actually say that?
No, it's just what we think he would have said, based on his policies.
But no, I don't think there was, and I think I'm right, has there been a Catholic president since then?
I don't think so.
I don't believe so, no.
And I think it's very interesting.
Joe Biden, I mean.
Oh yeah, well he's, you're right.
Okay, that's like JFK, neither.
Yeah, there you go.
But since then, it's been Biden and Kennedy.
You know, I think that if it was against that backdrop of an America that reflected the America that both you and I want to see in our manifestation of our actual core values, then I think the discussion we'd have about what actually comprises American identity would be even, I think, a more pure version of that than one that is tainted by reactionary impulse.
And this is how I worry that we lose to the left in part.
Is that we lose not with a bang, but with a whimper in many ways, allowing our own vision of our nation to be defined by our reaction to them rather than by, you know, turning the page and starting with a blank slate and actually asking ourselves, as our founders did in 1776, who are we?
Irrespective of what these people on Columbia's lawn, immigrant or not, Black Lives Matter protest or not, who are we and what do we stand for today?
And I think that that's part of what I see missing in our conservative movement.
We either have the blithe, donor class, Republican, puppet master control types, foreign interventionists and domestic surveillance statists, Dick Cheney 2.0, wing of the Republican Party today.
But we might have even in what I may call our wing, if I may take that liberty of the future conservative movement, One that is accidentally defined by the threat we're reacting to, rather than affirmatively defined on our own terms, right?
Individual, family, nation, and God serving as the alternative vision to race, gender, sexuality, and climate.
And I think it's a hard thing to do, but You know, that's a wish that I have, and I'd love to hear you, in closing, maybe react to that to say that so much of our energy, I've done this, I think you've done this, many of us in our movement do this, allow ourselves to be defining ourselves in opposition to the thing we're trying to defeat,
as opposed to creating some space to just say, you know, that flag independently behind me stands for something else in its own right, on its own terms, regardless of what some anti-American Left-wing person who hates this country has to say on a given day, it's irrelevant to the way I define American identity.
And my definition of American identity has nothing to do with what that person has to say.
It's gonna be independent and stand regardless of it.
And I just worry, we've had such a candid conversation and I'll just close in candor, I worry that a little bit of, even a deep, thoughtful, philosophically grounded and committed person like your vision of our national identity may itself Be, in part, a projection of a response guided by people who hate this country, who should have nothing to do with defining what a person like you believes it means to be a citizen of this nation.
Sometimes an overreaction, or a reaction, I'd say, is necessary, and I don't think these...
I haven't had a Nicorette for an hour now, so I'm not coming up with the best examples.
But for many years, federal judges, especially after a lot of Democrat appointments, they were doing what New York judges, California judges and DAs are doing now.
They were not imposing proper punishments.
This is the last time we tried this experiment with releasing criminals and the streets ran with blood.
At least it could be done at the federal level.
If you're not going to follow the law, if you're always going to, you know, let off these rapists and murderers or give them a slap on the wrist for murder, you get, you know, 15 months in prison.
Well, that's when we have the Sentencing Commission, which I think Justice Stephen Breyer was the head of.
If he wasn't the head of, he was part of it.
Instead of allowing judges discretion, they said, no, no, we gave you discretion.
You couldn't be trusted with it.
Here, we're setting the rules now.
These are mandatory minimums.
Now, discretion with judges is obviously preferable.
The judge is sitting.
You can hear the case.
There might be, you know, extenuating circumstances that the law isn't aware of.
But if we can't trust you, we have to have an overreaction.
And we can't trust...
We can't trust, number one, the people running immigration, not Republican, not Democrat, not any place up or down the entire system.
And we can't trust a lot of the immigrants they've brought in.
I mean, again, manifestly present company excluded, but the polls of immigrants, including second generation immigrants, they have not imbued the belief in freedom, freedom of speech, freedom to own guns.
And so sometimes you need the overreaction for a while to get back to what the center is.
There's a time and place for everything, I suppose, right?
It's this Ecclesiastes concept.
I think it shows up in many faiths.
I do believe that you can't win a war unless you recognize that you're in one.
And we are in a kind of war for the future of this country right now.
And our only chance of winning it is to first recognize that we're in a war.
I also think that it is worth preserving clarity of purpose of what we're actually fighting for, rather than just clarity of the enemy that we seek to defeat.
And I think part of what's going on is many of those people on the other side, and here we're not going to draw the immigrant, non-immigrant distinction.
I think this may even be more true of the non-immigrant variety than the immigrant variety, is that it's not that the other side actually even stands.
Their anti-Americanism does not stem from conviction.
It stems from an utter absence of purpose in the first place.
And I think that that's part of what you see when you see the random guy whose father was the billionaire private equity guy on the Upper East Side showing up on Columbia's lawn.
Like, what are you doing here?
It's a, not even a self-hatred, but a sense of lost purpose, right?
You're unmoored from faith.
You've rejected your family identity, or maybe your family never took the time to foreground one in the first place.
You don't think of yourself as a citizen of a nation.
You're some nebulous global citizen somewhere fighting climate change.
And, you know, hard work and success has itself been penalized in the culture you grew up in.
And so all you've been taught is to hide your own gifts or achievements.
You're unmoored from purpose since you're latching on to the most easy one that's available.
And I worry that for that segment of it, when we win this war, half the enemy is really not particularly, at least half the enemy is not even ideologically opposed to us, but is just lost and going through the aimless passage of time and going through the motions.
That if we define ourselves in response to the things they were saying, the things they were saying were rather arbitrary in the first place, and we lose the opportunity to actually ground them in who we are in the first place.
Grounded in, I think, what I open with is that civic nationalism that I do think is a real basis for national identity.
And you can't do that if you're Georgia Maloney or, you know, maybe not even, Maloney isn't even the right example in Italy anymore, but, you know, Georgia Maloney 1.0, in Italy it's a hard thing to do because Italian identity is a hard thing to nail down.
It's tied to You know, the shadow of, you know, Roman history and how do you think about a civilization defining itself in the shadow when it was at the peak of the world but no longer is.
And there's a deep ethnic component to that and a linguistic component to that.
That's a hard question.
Or you're Viktor Orban in Hungary.
Complicated as well in terms of what Hungarian identity is, but it's grounded something relating to being the only language spoken on earth and that specific small space.
That's part of what grounds them.
The history of the palace is built on the riverbanks of the Danube and Budapest and remembering an era that's once bygone.
Those are part of Hungarian identity or Italian identity in a way that's just different here, which is a set of ideals that were enshrined in a declaration of independence manifest in an operating manual known as the Constitution.
That should be accessible to those very enemies on the other side who are really lost, just need to be moored in purpose, and it's sitting right here.
I worry we will miss our opportunity to do it if we take too seriously our reactionary response to something that actually doesn't deserve to be dignified with that reactionary response, but instead just an alternative vision of our own.
Could I say one more thing in defense of ethnicity having something to do with this?
Yeah, please.
Please.
Because you're absolutely right.
Yes, these are ideals accessible to anyone.
The Statue of Liberty, the genuine purpose of the Statue of Liberty, not what socialist Emma Lazarus slapped on it 50 years later.
That poem has nothing to do with why France gave us the Statue of Liberty.
It's supposed to be liberty Lighting the world.
It was our country being an inspiration to the rest of the world.
We have certainly deployed troops and money and aid and pamphlets and Voice of America around the globe trying to get other countries to adopt this country's ideals.
And yet, No other country's really been able to do it.
The closest you have is Australia, Canada, obviously, you know, basically British colonies.
It hasn't taken...
But not even Britain is part of my point.
Not even the WASP countries have...
That's why we're the ones lighting the world and not Britain anymore.
No, they've totally fallen and we may be the next ones to fall.
But I mean, look, we spent 13 years in Afghanistan.
I didn't think that was going to work from the beginning.
That nation building, turning them into good Jeffersonian Democrats.
I had my doubts, Vivek.
So, okay, it didn't work in Iraq.
I mean, I was for Iraq.
I was for Afghanistan.
But they were never going to become us.
So there does seem to be some mystery secret sauce by giving these ideals to Anglo-Saxons or at least a culture that is dominated by Anglo-Saxons.
Yeah, and that's just...
That identifies that otherwise thin gap space of daylight between our otherwise synchronous views.
I just disagree with you on that.
And I think that part of that, I don't mean to be your analyst here, but I think part of that comes from a reactionary response to a left-wing assault in this country that you need not dignify with that reactionary component to your vision of American identity.
That I think would be different.
If we had a different circumstance, and I think I'm focused on creating that different circumstance so that we can actually be clear-headed about who we really are, which I think is grounded in civic ideals that are pretty much devoid of that actual ethnic grounding.
And, you know, somebody would have to be blind to not look on the screen and predict what each of us would say on the matter.
But, you know, we each have our vantage point there.
At the very least, I want to thank you for a thoughtful conversation and the courage to voice opinions that other thoughtful people like you, it's not the intelligence they lack, it's the courage they lack.
And I want to thank you for showing a bit of what we could all use more of in this country is exactly that courage.
Thank you, and thank you for running for president, even if I wouldn't have voted for you.
You were absolutely the most articulate Republican running in that race, and I had so much fun watching you.
Well, thanks.
Oh, especially your attacks on Nikki Haley.
Yeah.
If for nothing else, I suppose.
Okay.
Well, take care.
Thank you, Adam.
Thank you.
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