Morning Wire - Healing America’s Divisions with Vivek Ramaswamy | 9.28.24

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy discusses his new book, Truths: The Future of America First and offers insights on how America can heal its political and cultural divisions. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Birch Gold: Birch Gold: Text "WIRE" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation information kit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

America is experiencing increasing polarization in the political sphere, with a growing divide on key issues like immigration and abortion, and now even once shared values that have long held the culture together. The sense of fragmentation is prompting more people to ask, how do we move forward and begin to mend some of what's been damaged? In this episode, we sit down with entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate, Vake Ramoswamy, to discuss his new book, which seeks to address this divide

and spell out the core values that define not just conservatism but America. I'm Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Vickley with Georgia Howe. It's September 28th, and this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire. With the massive tax hikes proposed by Harris, you might be thinking it's time to make more of your savings, tax-sheltered, and inflation-sheltered. A gold IRA from the Birchgold Group is the ultimate inflation hedge for your savings in uncertain times. And for one final month, it's your last chance, people. Birch Gold is offering the exclusive 24-karrot gold-plated truth bomb on qualifying purchases. But you need a text wire to 9-8-8-98-98 to claim your eligibility before September 30th.

Again, text wire to the number 9-8-9-8-98 to claim your eligibility and make your purchase today. Joining us now is entrepreneur, best-selling author, and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramoswamy. Hey, Vivek. Good to have you back on. Good to be on. Before we get to your book, I wanted to get your response to a recent major development, the second assassination attempt on President Trump. There's been a lot of heated debate about who's to blame for this escalation of violence against him that's now officially a pattern. Legacy media has actually blamed the victim.

Who or what do you think is to blame? Look, I think that there is a sickness in this country right now that pervades American politics and pervades our culture where people are taught to demonize their enemies. and it's in some ways telling that this individual and concerning that this individual used some of the very kind of language you see leveraged by Donald Trump's political opponents against him. I would just want to take a big step back, though, and tell you what my biggest concern is, is the fact that this has become normalized. You think about the way in which this is a history-defining event, the fact that there was an assassination attempt on a U.S. president.

But the fact of the matter is it takes place just a couple of months after the last assassination attempt. This is the first time that's happened in this country in around 40 years. And so this is not only deeply concerning, I think it's even more concerning that we have such a blithe and media-driven, in a reaction of a shrug, just another assassination attempt. I think that in some ways is the greatest danger of all is the normalization of this type of political violence and in some sense the implicit acceptance of it. And that's what I think we have to reject. But I think more deeply, we have to revive our sense of shared identity as Americans. And the idea

that one candidate is a threat to democracy or the threat to the future existence of the country, I think is not healthy. And I think that it results in even people who are bad actors, who might be mentally unstable or deranged to do things that otherwise they wouldn't have thought of doing and that would have been unthinkable as recently as 10 years. And I think that would have ago. That really connects to the theme of your book, What Divides and What Unites Us, the book's titled Trues the Future of America First. And in it, you make the point that so much of conservatism as of late has really been about expressing what conservatives are against rather than what we're for. Can you unpack that for us? Look, that's as much of a self-reflection,

and it's not a criticism as much of anyone else as it is even a self-reflection on my own part. I think the conservative movement has done a good job of articulating what we're against, wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, COVIDism, we're against the power structure narrative of the left, we're against the radical Biden agenda, the radical Kamala Harris agenda, the list goes on, but without offering an alternative vision of who we are and what we actually stand for. And that's what this book is about. I say that the conservative movement should center its vision around who we are and what we stand for, starting with truth. And the book lays out, 10 hard truths, truth statements that would have been so banal that in the 1990s of this book

were published, I would tell you to save your money. You don't need to buy it because these are so obvious. Yet today the warning I have to give readers is that the things that you might read if you repeat them in this book, they might be too controversial and may result in you facing economic consequences or cultural consequences in the country we live in right now. And nonetheless, I think that's why it becomes important to fuse this combination of obviousness and controversy. That really is a strange combination, and yet for the ten truths in the book and the ways in which I explain and unpack exactly what they mean, that's why I wrote this book. It's a little different than my other books. My first book was Woke Inc., which I believe I talked to you all about,

actually, and some number of years ago. Indeed. But this is in some ways a sequel to Woke Inc, but in some ways it's different from Woke Inc and that it's not and doesn't pretend to be an academic exposition. I wrote the book to be as readable as possible. I wanted to really distill for people the ability to make simple arguments at the dinner table with friends. And I hope they are friends who are on the left or friends who have different points of view to be able to have civil conversations at the dinner table and to give people that sense of confidence to say that, you know what, even though you may be dismissed or even though you may be laughed at if you say something like the climate change agenda as a hoax, here are some hard facts that you're armed

with. And I end each chapter with some basic facts and or some basic simple arguments that the reader of the book can take with them to the dinner table, not with just people who agree with them, but with people who don't. And in a certain sense, I do think that's how we get our country back is by all of us starting to speak in the open again to acknowledge that even if your enemy is an ideology, your neighbor isn't your enemy. And to the contrary, your neighbor might be able to change their mind if you're able to actually have a rational, civil, and honest conversation with them. And so on the climate change point, right, facts that I arm people with, eight times as many people die of cold temperatures as warm ones. The earth is more covered by green surface area today

than it was over a century ago because carbon dioxide is plant food. You know, the thing that people used to worry about in the 1970s with climate change, with man-made climate change, was actually not global warming, but a global ice age. You could look at the cover of Time magazine and Newsweek magazine. So you may be familiar with this, but I think many Americans may not be. And the point of this book is to really expose people to simple hard truths that allow them to hopefully change hearts and minds. Now, honesty is a key theme in your book central to obviously the search for truth. A lot of people have grown pretty skeptical and cynical about any person in a political role being honest. Do you think an honest person can actually succeed in today's political sphere? I don't know is the

answer to that question. I hope so, though. And I remain hopeful because I still think that, you know, people go through different periods. And I think for a while the public has been duped by what they've been fed, and I don't attribute this to just one side. We're not making this as a left versus right point. I think right now more than any time I can remember in the last couple of decades, people are pretty hungry to sort out for themselves what's actually going on. There's a rejection of swallowing what they've been forced fed. I think the fact that people are able to access information through alternative means than just traditional linear media, I think, has aided this. But I think part of this is an underlying demand to say, you know what, I know what I'm being forced fed, but I want to

seek out for myself what the actual truth is. And so I am hopeful that the electorate will reward candidates who are willing to do something really radical. They haven't done in a long time, which is just tell the public what you actually think. Yeah. And you know what? Be honest with the fact that you may not agree with 100% of what I say, but I'm going to tell you what I believe 100% of the time. And I think if there's candidates at every level who adopt that philosophy, it hasn't always been the winning strategy. But I think it can be. And I think the winds are certainly blowing in that direction. Well, I think it's interesting, particularly with this election now that it's Kamala Harris versus Donald Trump. This question of authenticity has come up a lot, and especially in

regard to Harris, authenticity, honesty, telling the truth. Do you see that playing out right now in these campaigns? I do. I think it's a really relevant metric heading into this election. It's also why I was intent on publishing this book before the election. Made for a little bit of a in terms of the timeline to bring it to market. But, you know, it was important to me that this came out before the election because, you know, first of all, I do believe that people are intensely focused on the horse race politics, but without enough focus on the why. You're going through the motions, but even for conservatives to step back and ask, why do we support the positions we actually do? That's one of the things I wanted to achieve with this book. But I also think

there's a deeper undercurrent in this election about what are our commitments to truth itself. You have actually I quote her early on in the book, the new CEO of NPR, recently said that one of our problems might be we're too focused on what's true rather than figuring out what actually brings people together. Which I thought was honest, by the way, on her part. But I do think it represents an alternative view that says, okay, the point of speech or the point of debate isn't necessarily to get to the truth of the matter, but to achieve some other goal of bringing people together, which Admiral is that goal, may be is different from my own view, which is that the best path to truth is through free speech and open debate. And that's why I'm a free speech absolutist rather than somebody who would say our goal is something else might be fine with censoring certain content or speech even in a context of a presidential election. So anyway, it was one of the reasons why it was particularly important

for me to publish this book in late September far enough ahead of the election where people could read this in the context of the current electoral divide heading into, I think, obviously high hotly contested election, but whose themes actually go far beyond this particular election cycle that we're in. Did you find yourself surprised by any of the information you uncovered while trying to sort of distill these core truths in the writing of this book? I think that a couple of the surprises I came across, one is in my history of the study of religion. That's like what chapter one is about entitled God is real. Going through some of the best arguments from atheists against the existence of God, actually found from the likes of either Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or thinkers

like this arguments that were deeply sympathetic to the case for a God-centered worldview. One of the things I expose in that chapter is one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God is really the equivalent of somebody walking around in the woods finding a book of Shakespeare, Shakespearean sonnets in the forest. And they could put the pieces together, which is to say, okay, I learned the sentences follow what we might call the law of iambic pentameter. And there's these little dots at the end of these sentences. We'll call that the law of periods. But that doesn't help you answer why the book was there in the first place,

as though just because you identified the law of iambic pentameter and the law of periods, but you can't explain more. You'll have to think the book self-assembled itself in the forest. That's kind of one of the best arguments for something that still argues for all the scientific facts you might observe still don't explain exactly the why. But the thing that surprised me is that entire argument was actually made by an atheist himself, debunking many of the cases for atheism of science, just proving the existence of God. So I really enjoyed that because one of the things I learned growing up is that you don't really understand what your own argument or view is unless you can articulate the best point of view from the other side. And that's something I tried to do in this book.

But one of the things I also tried to do is for people who return the favor, even people have different points of view than mine, but who had real ability. to understand what my views were, I gave them a lot of airtime in the book as well. And that was, I think, one of the more heartening parts of this part of writing this book. I think the most important chapter in the book was the chapter on deconstructing the administrative state. So the chapter in this book is entitled, There Are Three Branches of Government, Not Four, intended to sound banal, because this is historically one of the driest subjects in American politics is the American administrative state. but I think it's actually the most important topic, probably the most important topic in the book as well. Over the course of writing this chapter, over the course of just 2024 alone, I had to revise this all the up to the time the book right went up to print because we had Supreme Court cases that were some of the most important Supreme Court cases of our lifetime that came down this year that really change our ability to dismantle that administrative state.

So it gives you a sense of pretty wide scope of topics in the book from arguments for the existence of God to argue. arguments against the existence of the administrative state. But I think that was the point of this book was to be expansive in empowering everyday Americans with arguments on these diverse ranges of subjects to really bring that to the dinner table and bring friends who may not agree with us right now, along with us for the ride. You call for a return to self-governance. Obviously, the administrative state is a major hindrance to this. It begs the question, are we currently not in a system of self-governance? We're not. No, I mean, the idea that the people we elect to run the government are the ones running the government. That's a myth, right? The people we like to run the government are really, in some ways, puppets for the deeper permanent state underneath them. He even saw this a little bit, the underbelly of this and the replacement of Biden by Kamala Harris, but that's just the more sensational version of it. It's the everyday drudgery of most rules that bind people, that limit people's behaviors. They're not going through the congressional process. of lawmaking, which is what our founding fathers envision, they're going through the stroke of a pen of somebody who was never elected to office, and according to some people can't even be removed by those who were elected to office. That's not a democracy. That's not a self-governing republic. That's an autocracy in new form. And so I think once you see that, you can't unsee it. And certainly, for me, it relates to my own participation in American politics. This is the single most important issue that I care about resolving, which is restoring self-govern

in America, make sure the people we elect to run the government are the ones running the government, not unelected bureaucrats in this unconstitutional fourth branch of a shadow government. And by the way, that is also happens to be the single greatest form of economic stimulus that I think we could deliver to the country as well, which is a rollback of much of that unconstitutional regulatory agenda. And, you know, I think this is one of the core themes I approach in the book in a way that I hope is entertaining, actually. It's hard to write a chapter about the administrative state and make it entertaining. But I'd like to think I achieve that. and, you know, I'd encourage people to read the book and check it out. It's obviously, you know, coming out right now this month ahead of the election. I think it bears on this election, but these themes, I think, will outlive the next 50 days as well. And so I'd be really grateful for everybody, you know, listening to this to take the time to order the book and let me know what you think. You know, for me, it's less about the financial aspect of writing a book. It's not, I've discovered, this is my fourth one. There are better ways to make money than writing books, but I think there's a few better ways to,

explain ideas that don't really come across in two-second interviews on cable television. And that's part of why I wrote this. Final question, we just saw this announcement that you're going to be hosting a new series on Fox Nation that's inspired by this book. Can you quickly tell us about that? Sure. A big part of this was actually focused on opening up dinner table conversations. That's what the book hopes to accomplish. So one of the things we did with this new special was we brought together some of my closest friends from different parts of my life, from my time at places like Harvard and Yale, not exactly bastions of conservatism,

were brought together friends who have worked in the Biden administration, people who have served in the Obama transition. Actually, one of them was a physicist from the energy department under President Obama, to have open dinner conversations where we were able to exchange different ideas. At one of those dinner tables, we had a Muslim woman wore a hijab,

and seated at the same table as a Jewish rabbi, seated the same table as an immigrant from Russia, seated at the same table as a guy who was a journalist in Russia, U.S. journalist for over 10 years in Russia, having debates about topics like the Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas conflict, which are topics where I found today, you don't have people on different sides of these questions

actually talking directly at each other. That's one of the things we accomplish with the special that'll be coming out in conjunction with the book. But it's a demonstration of what I hope this book accomplishes is to create conversations like that across the country. And I do think that is the stuff of how we save a republic. Vivek, thank you so much for coming on and great luck with your book and new series. Yeah, I'll take that. Thank you, guys. That was Vivek Ramoswamy, author of Truths,

The Future of America First, and this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.