The Michael Knowles Show - Renovation By Arson and The Immigration Crisis | JD Vance

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

JD Vance joins the show to discuss his campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There are two ways to come out of Yale. For most people, they go in liberal and they leave even more liberal. Some people go in conservative and they leave more liberal. And some people, I would put myself in this category, go in kind of conservative and end up to the right of Genghis Khan. Because you see what is wrong with the American establishment and the liberal ruling class. one of the most exciting political candidates on the right right now is running for Senate in Ohio. His name is J.D. Vance. You would know him from his book, Hillbilly Ellogy, was a bestselling book, became a big movie, and talked about this chasm between the American ruling class and the working classes

and the left behind Americans and the deplorables and the irredeemables or whatever word you want to call them. And J.D. has gone through a lot of these elite institutions. and he is running one of the most populist campaigns in the country. So here to talk about it is JD Vance. J.D., thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So you are, you and maybe a handful of other candidates, Blake Masters would be one of them, some others as well, are being considered the symbols of the new right. Not the same old, tired platitudes of the past 20 years where the most important thing is just cutting taxes and letting woke corporations and elites destroy the country, but actually standing up and doing something about that and bringing corporations into line,

rethinking trade policy, rethinking family policy, rethinking all of that. What is the new right to you? Yeah, you know, good, good question. I mean, probably give five or ten different answers if you gave me long enough, but I guess basically it's you sort of alluded to it in the question, which is that we have to rethink the role that corporations play in our system of government and in our basic constitutional republic. And we as conservatives have to wake up to the fact that for pretty much, you know, certainly all of my life. And I think people who are, I'm 37, I think people even who are much older than I am all of their life,

that the Republican Party, the conservative movement has been the movement of big business. And yet we find ourselves in a situation where big business is aggressively and actively aligned against the things that we care the most about. They are, you know, very much into critical race theory. They're forcing it down the throats of their employees, just the same way that public schools are forcing it down the throats of our children. When states do pass common sense election reform or pro-life legislation, it is very often the woke corporations that are the biggest and most aggressive pushbacks against it. And of course, and you think of our most famous and most important liberty, the First Amendment right to free speech. It is corporate America, especially the big

technology companies that are the single biggest threats to that right. Unless we actually fight back against those corporate interests, the liberties that made this country worthwhile to live in for two centuries will slowly disappear and they already are. So if the biggest enemy of the squishy right of the past 20, 30 years was big government. Big government is the cause of all problems and any other institution in the country is way downstream or not a big threat at all. You're saying that for the new right, the real primary target is big corporation. Yeah, I mean, I would say big corporation working in concert with big government. Obviously, these things, I mean, you know, one of the arguments that I would make is it's

very hard to tell when our woke corporate class stops and when our woke government class begins. And so when you have somebody like Jin Saki, the White House press secretary, threatening Facebook with sanctions unless they censor even more, and then Facebook complies, or when you have a set of legal protections in our federal laws that exist for big technology companies that exist for no other industry in our country, or when you see the Biden administration pushing a very, very expensive energy policy, which of course harms every single industry except for those that donate aggressively to the Democratic Party, Wall Street, and big tech, you start to realize that people like me, people like you, you know, conservatives for a generation have been taught to think. think of the government over here, the corporate sector over here. And what we're, I think we've woken up to is that those two sectors are very, very much aligned. It's not even clear to me in what ways they're different. And we have to reckon with that fact and frankly, fight back against

both. Right. You look at a corporation like Google. Sometimes the squishes will say, we'll build your own Google. You know, Google is a private company. It can do what it wants. First of all, Google is not a private company by any stretch of the imagination. The connections with the government are massive and longstanding. And so we need to rethink that policy. So let's say your campaign is doing very well. Pretty soon we've got Senator Vance from Ohio. What are the first, I was going to say what are the first laws you try to pass,

but there's more that you can do as a senator. So I'll broaden it even. What are the top priorities for Senator Vance? Yeah, I mean, I guess priority, Number one, even though it's not the subject of the conversation thus far as, you know, when the House is on fire, you have to put out the House fire. And I do think the Southern Border Crisis that we have is the House on Fire moment. So bracket that, because that has to be priority number of one. You know, finish the border wall. I think probably double the number of border enforcement agents that we have and actually empower those people to do their job. It's actually really disgusting, how the President of the United States is so kind to people breaking the laws, but will readily attack his own employees, you know, Customs Board, Border Patrol when they do the job of protecting us from illegal immigration, that's priority number one. I mean, to take it back to this sort of woke corporate thing, first of all, of course, our woke corporations love unlimited cheap labor. They love it for cultural reasons. They love it for

economic reasons. But to sort of go at them directly, I think that we need to do something pretty aggressively to make it easy for us to break up the big technology companies. There's an argument that our legal tools are already there, that the enforcement tools are already there, but I think the fact that they're used so sparingly suggests, we're kind of in a moment not all that different from the one that Teddy Roosevelt confronted in the very early 20th century, now 100 years later, where you have corporations that are literally more powerful than the U.S. government, which theoretically is the most powerful entity known to man. One of my favorite quotes is, if you can silence the king, you are the king.

And we learned after January the 6th that the technology companies have the ability to silence even very powerful political leaders like the sitting duly elected president of the United States. If you can silence the king, you are the king. That's a really important statement. In a republic, in self-government, the way you govern yourself is by speaking, by persuading your fellow citizens. So if some entity in or out of the government can control all the speech like Google and Facebook and Twitter can, then they are controlling, not just some aspect of politics, but the whole political order. Okay, so I totally agree. That's number one. I like your point, too, that whenever people say, well, you know, just enforce repeal Section 230 liabilities or, you know,

just enforce antitrust law or something, you say, well, if it were so simple, we would have done it already. It seems that maybe some further action is actually required. On the point of immigration, though, a lot of the liberals and even the libertarians will say, we need the immigrants. We have a dying population. We got to keep up GDP. We got to keep paying all those entitlement programs. Who's going to fund my social security? And so it is impossible to reduce immigration, including illegal, certainly legal immigration. What say you to that argument? I think we have to reduce both. I'd like illegal immigration down to zero and legal immigration much lower than the levels that we have it right now. Look, our immigration system is always

going to be imperfect. But at the end of the day, when you have a dying population, when you have a population that is not replicating itself, which is true of Americans, it's true of Americans across different racial groups, then you have a real problem. And you cannot just import a solution to that problem. When we raise children as part of the American family, we instill certain values in them. We instill certain expectations in them. They acquire certain language and cultural skills that you can't just assume that somebody who comes here when they're 40 years old has. They just don't. It's not their fault, but they don't. There is a real different. between a child that you raise in your family and someone who just comes over for dinner, right?

Those are two different types of people. You don't have to dislike the guys who come over for dinner, but you can't build a family around them. You have to build a family around the next generation. I think that's how we have to sort of zoom back and think about our country. And so, one, I just reject the idea that you can solve the problem of demographic decline through immigration. I think it's really, really, I mean, it's frankly sociopathic to think that people are

interchangeable like that, that a child born to an American family is interchangeable with somebody who comes in from overseas, however good their intentions might be. Then the second thing is, you know, one of the crazy things, even if we were to sue take their argument at face value, one of the crazy things that happens is when new immigrants come to this country and they assimilate well, they too start to have lower fertility rates. Like there's something kind of broken about the American model about the American structure of society that is anti-family. When you have, you know, let's say a Catholic immigrant coming from Latin America where you'd expect a family to have three children, they get to America and they have one child,

there's something about our society, culturally and economically, that's not good for the raising of children. And we have to address that root cause before papering over it with immigration reform. Absolutely insightful, because what people are going to say is if you talk about dying population. You're sending dog whistles to the white supremacists everywhere. But we're not, you're talking about a nationwide America problem. And you even see it, you even see it in the recent immigrants to America. So then the question is, what do you do about it? You know, I think that the one, we need to send a different cultural message from leaders.

You know, one, you can do that through explicit public policy, right? The material stuff really does matter. You know, Victor Orban and Hungary and other countries in central and western Europe have actually done a pretty good job at raising their fertility level. Russia actually used to have a major fertility crisis. But they basically committed in public policy, instead of having a welfare system basically built around the single individual, they have a social welfare system that rewards people for having families, for staying married, for doing the things that are necessary and healthy from a family raising perspective. But then you also have a cultural significant. that comes along with that, where you know, you look at the way that Joe Biden talks about, let's say,

his, his childcare proposals. And it's like, well, you know, this is so important because we just need to send those kids to daycare as quickly as possible so that their moms and dads can get back into the workforce. Look, what is the goal of our society here? Is it to have healthy families? Or is it to have drones in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs? They're working 90 hours a week. Their children are in daycare 90 hours a week. Like, there's a fundamentally different social model that modern progressives have imposed upon this country. They've done so quietly, but we can push back against that on the right so long as we have the courage to do it. Unfortunately, you do have Chamber of Commerce style conservatives say, you know, it's a really terrible thing when a young mother takes three years

off of work to care for her young children. And it's like, really? Like, if that woman wants to do that, Why is that a bad thing? Isn't it good for people who want to care for their children to be able to care for their children? The fact that you hear so many conservatives say we're against social engineering, but they love the social engineering that takes children away from their families and puts them into corporate daycares, makes you realize how much of a joke it all is. Right. It was once widely understood that the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world. And now we are told by the progressive left that unless you're doing spreadsheets all day, working for some guy so that you can get some money so that your husband can pay some woman to raise your kid seems kind of inefficient to me. That unless you're doing that, you're wasting your life and throwing it away. And it does seem totally backwards. So you mentioned Orban. You mentioned Russia and how they have they have had success, despite people claiming to the contrary. They have had success turning their birth rate problem. around. So is the suggestion here that we pay families to have kids and irk the libertarians on the right? Yeah, I mean, basically that that's right. I mean, look, we pay families not to have kids. We pay families not to work. We pay families to get divorced. You actually make more money from our social welfare system if you don't have children. So I think in a lot of ways we have to accept that

we're already paying families to do things. It's a question of whether we're paying them to make good decisions or we're paying them to make dad decisions. And I'd say staying married, having children is much better than getting divorced and sitting at home all day. And that really, to me, is the fundamental issue. I actually, I don't think that the goal here is a massive expansion and the amount of money that we're spending on social welfare. We actually spend a ton of money on social welfare. We just spend it on very stupid purposes. It's a great point. There's no shortage of wealth for spending in the United States, but you got to look at what you are incentivizing. And there's no neutrality here. The program is going to incentivize one behavior.

or another. Now, forget about all that productive stuff for a second. Let's get into the nitty, filthy politics. You're in a Republican primary for this Senate race. What distinguishes you from your rival in the primary? Well, I think all the stuff that we're talking about, right? I mean, I think that, you know, most of the people who are running in the primary are good people, but they're fundamentally repeating the same tired Chamber of Commerce slogans that you've heard from Republicans for 30 or 40 years. They're just not going to talk about the things that we've been talking about. They're not going to advocate for some of the policies that I've been advocating for. And so my argument to primary voters here in the state of Ohio is, look, you can have a good

person who's going to vote the right way 75% of the time, or you can have a person who actually is fighting against the corporate oligarchy, the government oligarchy that's making it impossible for normal Americans to live their lives. And so I really am trying to make the campaign about, you know, what do we want to be as a party here in Ohio? What kind of person who is a person Do we want to send to Washington, D.C.? Do we want to send a chamber of commerce type? Or do we want to send a guy who's going to fight back against those people? Because what we had been told for decades is that Republicans need to get out of the social issues. Republicans need to just focus on lowering taxes.

People vote with their wallet. That's all that really matters. And I guess the last five years have kind of blown that out of the water. When Donald Trump walked down the escalator calling illegal aliens rapists and murderers and some are good people, He obviously was running a culture war campaign, and it seemed to work. Certainly worked the first time you saw a cultural campaign of Virginia, flip that governorship. So how are you feeling beyond your own Senate race for the Republican Party generally as this battle for the soul of the Republicans' wages? How are you looking at the chances in 2022 and 2024 for Republicans?

You know, very optimistic about our party in 2022, 24. I think that people just had enough, right? Things have gotten so crazy. they're finding out that their kids are learning crazy stuff at school. They're being forced to sit through ridiculous trainings at work where they have to, you know, disavow their whiteness like some sort of weird satanic religious ceremony. I mean, people are just like really, really fed up with how insane things have gotten. And yeah, you know, there's definitely some pushback, I would say, from the institutional powers

in sort of the conservative movement. You know, the Club for Growth, I think one of the worst organizations in the right has spent $2 million against me attacking my primary candidacy because I believe that we should impose tariffs on companies that make things in China. So, you know, there's definitely a battle to be had. And I won't pretend that I know, you know, we're going to win over a two to four year period. But if you look at all the people that are running, if you look at where the energy is, I feel very confident that we're going to win this battle. It may take us a little time, but we're going to win the fight. There is this strange

fact when you talk about the tariffs as being somehow anti-Republican that the Republican Party was founded on tariffs. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president said, give me a tariff, I'll give you the greatest nation on earth. It was the party of economic protection. Then it became this free

trade party. How did that happen? I mean, we always hear about how the parties switched. How did that happen? Why did the GOP flip and why is it flipping back now? You know, I think what happened is that some of the biggest businesses in our country got a little cocky. They got a little overconfident, right? They didn't realize that America's industrial power had been built by free enterprise, but also by smart public policy.

They thought we could just, you know, go into China, hand off all of what made America great and powerful, and just expect that America would somehow make up for it somehow. But that was always left as a big question, right? We were always supposed to, you know, China would make the rubber duckeys. We would make the TVs. And then China would make the TVs and we'd make the advanced robotics. But they were both stealing the technology on one end and stealing the rubber ducky factories on the other hand. And the American middle class and, frankly, our national greatness got squeezed in the process.

So I think a lot of it is just we got fat and lazy. Right. We were the, think about America, 1963 was without question the most. powerful country in the world, it looked like nothing could possibly challenge us. And I think that we forgot that that greatness came from two centuries of very, very wise leadership from our private sector, from our public sector. We've got to get back to that and we're going to lose the country. And I think at least, you know, I'll say this, we're waking up to the fact that we have been failed for two generations now in this country. Speaking of elite institutions, you have done an

amazing thing, J.D., which is you've been through a handful of elite institutions and have not been totally cast into the outer darkness where there's wailing and gnashing of teeth. So, you know, Yale Law School graduate had a very successful Hollywood movie, a very, very successful book, obviously. Can the institutions be saved? I'll put it very bluntly. Shall conservatives go in and reclaim Yale, or do we just need to defund it, knock it down, and build a new college in its place? Yeah, I mean, I think you have to go institution by institution, but with Yale in particular, I think that, you know, we need to do a little renovation by arson. You know, I actually read this interesting article over the weekend. It was by Helen Andrews, who's the editor of the American conservative. And, you know, she was just talking about how, you know, for our entire history, we had this sort of certain understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

and then that all started to change in our academic departments. And I saw a tweet of a history professor at Yale. I guess Helen also went to Yale. And like, you know, I forget the exact wording in the tweet, but it was something like, oh, if this person wants to talk about this, she should have at least taken one of my history courses at Yale. These people are so pathetic. Like we've given over the next, the leadership of the next generation

to a history professor who is whining about the fact that a, that a magazine editor didn't take one of her history courses at Yale. Like we should accept that these people are so drunk on their own power. And the only thing they have really going, right? They don't have money. You don't make that much money as a history professor. The only thing they have is the prestige that those elite institutions give them. But they're so willing to, they die to defend that prestige, that sense of social superiority,

that they're unwilling to actually do any critical self-reflection, which means I think we have to get rid of them. I mean, they're not serving any useful purpose. I mean, why is it that for the last two years, we've been living in the tyranny of Dr. Anthony Fauci? What gave this person lordship over the United States of America? It is, it is honestly a set of degrees that are hanging on his wall conferred by elite institutions that make all of us say, well, this person must know what he's talking about because he has these degrees. But he doesn't. Right. This is the facade, this is the lie of our university system that it teaches people to be boring and conventional. It doesn't give them real knowledge. It gives them this ridiculous prestige game that they then

inflict on the rest of our society. I think the universities are basically unsalvageable. Right, because what you get out of those, all the places that Dr. Fauci went or all the big brand name universities, what you are getting increasingly is a brand name credential and an entrance into certain elite circles. If you want to go to Goldman Sachs, I'm not sure that your degree from Thomas Aquinas College or Hillsdale is going to do it. A degree from Harvard or

Princeton is going to do it. But you would very likely get a more coherent education at Hillsdale, Thomas Aquinas, Ave, Marie, wherever we're talking about these handful of conservative schools. So, yes, the prestige does have an incredible amount of value,

not just social value, but real monetary value. You can get into these clubs, You can get into these places where you could make a lot of money. And so we've got to adjust those incentives as well. I guess one way to do that is by winning. By winning power and by wielding power, I suspect that's what a lot of your Senate race and other Senate races is about proving. Can we go in there? Can we attain some political power and can we use that for the good.

J.D., I wish you the best of luck. Where can people find you? J.D.Vans.com is the best place to go. They can learn more about the campaign, support us if they're willing to do so. I'm also on Twitter, Facebook, all the normal places you can find political candidates these days. That's great. And once this airs, I'm sure I'll hear from all of your primary rivals yelling at me and demanding that they can come on as well. J.D., great to be with you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Michael. Take care.