Best of the Program | Guests: Gov. Ron DeSantis & Vivek Ramaswamy | 11/15/23

43m
Glenn analyzes the current worldwide conflicts and gives a possible reason why all these are occurring simultaneously. Xi Van Fleet joins to discuss her new book, "Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning." 2024 GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy joins to discuss the issue of cryptocurrency and how he would handle the new currency as president.
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Transcript

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Great podcast today.

There is so much on the plate today.

We went to San Francisco and China.

We went into Nikki Haley and we had Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy on with us today.

So they both got into that statement from Nikki Haley, who we have invited on the program so she can defend herself on it.

But both of them had the same reaction.

That is China stuff.

Jada.

And can anyone break

the back of the Trump campaign?

He seems to get stronger and stronger and stronger.

Is he the candidate?

And is there anything any other candidate could do to change that?

We talked about that and so much more.

Here's today's podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

Okay, let's go back to our premise here.

And this is a very

hopeful premise.

Remember,

as

an action-adventure fiction writer, if you had to figure out what the heck was going on in the world and you didn't know that it was just, you know, progressives, early 20th century progressives that, again, for some strange reason, hate the Jews and love eugenics,

you might say well wait a minute what have we learned in the last few years we have learned that we cannot take on China with Taiwan we can't do that in peacetime okay there's no way to do it we are not prepared to do that it's too far away from all of our bases etc etc

We've also found the endless wars are draining.

And we certainly could not take on three fronts because you know the Middle East will be on fire.

You know that Russia would get involved.

And China, we would be fighting.

So we can't do three fronts.

So if you are really, really sharp and you love America

and you believed what everybody was saying

and you knew we couldn't let Taiwan go because we won't be able to make the supercomputer chips

because Taiwan has the clean rooms and the highest quality to make all of the supercomputer chips.

We don't make them.

Taiwan does.

We can't lose Taiwan.

Okay, so what do you do?

You look at everything and you say, okay, China's economy is failing.

They're close.

But they've just upped their spending with the Navy, et cetera, et cetera.

And everybody knows this is going to happen.

So you think, okay, how can we do this?

Hear me out on this.

You pick Iran

because Iran can get involved.

They want to defeat America.

They continue to sell oil to China.

China imports about 70% of its energy supplies.

Much of that is from Iran via sanctioned and illegal oil sales.

Plus, China might promise to help Iran finish their nuclear bomb, right?

Then you have Russia, the other ally that we would worry about.

There's a chance they want to weaken America.

In fact, a very good chance.

And level the playing field.

They

need to level the playing field, especially against our aircraft carriers.

And they need to also keep selling oil to Europe and to China.

That's just the China is about half their GDP.

Now if you war game this, when the U.S.

goes to war with China, we lose.

But we also have to fight Russia in Europe and Iran in the Middle East.

Those are three theaters of war.

We can't handle that.

But what?

What if Iran and Russia

could not come in on China's side in three years down the road?

Everybody looks at you and you're sitting there in the briefing room and you say, hear me out.

What if Russia and Iran had already been taken out?

What if they'd already been neutralized before we had to fight China?

Everybody looks at you like you have lobsters growing out of your ears.

We don't have any political support here in the U.S.

for wars with Russia and Iran, especially in this election cycle.

No way Congress would approve this.

The administration won't approve that.

The American people wouldn't support it.

You say proxies.

We don't have to fight Russia and Iran.

We get proxies to take them out for us.

All they need is a little push and a ton of weapons.

Just the right motivation and they'll take them out for us.

The room gets silent and you're sitting there and you say,

so who's dumb enough to fight two land wars in Asia?

You smile and say, well, NATO.

NATO can take out Russia.

Israel can take out Iran.

You have to do it just right.

NATO and Israel could never know we're using them like that.

We can't just go out there and bribe them.

They have to be so motivated that they'd risk their own survival and beep up their own military budgets to take Putin and the Ayatollahs out for us.

We supply the weapons.

They do the fighting.

Everybody's in on the great game all of a sudden.

The trick is

we have to get Russia to invade.

How do we do that?

Why don't we just say Ukraine is going to be part of NATO?

That's been a red line forever.

Everybody knows that.

They'll feel threatened.

Putin invades Ukraine.

NATO will come to the rescue with guns and money.

Ukraine does the dirty work, but we make sure they have enough to win.

Yeah, but Israel.

Well, Israel is going to need to be attacked and much worse than ever before.

Why don't we just release all of the funds

to Iran so they have all of the money to plan an attack on Israel that is so large and so heinous that they'll be forced to use their own military to take them out, which

will then force Iran to join in and then Israel takes them out.

We just need the weapons, guys.

Because we need the weapons in three years when

we're going after China.

And all of our weapons are outdated and old.

We need a whole new generation, but we have all of these weapons sitting here.

And there's no way with cost overruns, you know,

with everything that comes with giant military production, how are you going to get the American people to do it?

Well, we'll just tell them the truth.

We're out of armaments.

And then we will have to rebuild our army.

Maybe we could even convince China in the end if Russia and Iran falls.

They have no real allies.

Don't take Taiwan.

Thoughts?

I think

the only reason why I don't believe this

is because I...

I mean, we're evil enough to do it, but I don't believe it because I don't think we're smart enough to do it.

I don't think there's enough, hey, we all love America here.

Let's do it.

You know what I mean?

There's the evil, you know, generals and the war planners and everything.

I think there's enough of those in Washington.

You know, the Lindsey Grahams that are like, yeah, we got to get them.

At any cost, we get them.

I think those guys exist.

There's a lot of that type of stuff that you were talking about there where you throw things out like, well, and then Israel will take out Iran.

Like, think of what that

looks like, right?

Like, these little assumptions that you make in one half sentence is like

hundreds of thousands, millions of people dead.

What is the difference?

This is the way the elites always do.

Yeah, no, I know.

They did it in World War I, World War II.

It's real-time strategies.

Those old games where you just used to like drag your troops around and you'd have them attack the little base and then you'd rebuild and you wouldn't think about the little guys that are going in there and dying.

That is the way this is thought about.

I mean, it's a nice risk.

I thought of this.

I'm reading a book, or I was reading a book on JFK.

I can't even remember the name of it, but it was the JFK assassination.

And it's just documenting how many people

hated him.

Okay.

They hated him.

The military, CIA, he really had a problem with those guys, just like Donald Trump.

really had a problem with those guys.

And he did not like the way we were fighting the Cold War.

And he's like, We are not going to keep escalating this war.

And one of the generals, I can't remember his name, but he was in charge of maybe NATO strategy, or he was

big.

And he absolutely believed that thermonuclear war was inevitable.

And he was pushing hard.

Launch first.

Launch right now.

It's inevitable.

So launch now.

They'll never see it coming.

We can take them out.

Launch now.

This is not Cuban Missile Crisis time.

This is when he first gets into office.

Launch.

And he actually goes around Kennedy's back and is calling him weak for not doing this.

I mean, it was a legitimate campaign inside the Pentagon.

to just launch our missiles.

Did you know that?

I think maybe you've told it to me or I've heard it maybe once, but

it's impossible to believe.

And of course, these people, there's always somebody like that.

I guarantee you think it's bad here.

How many people are doing that in Russia right now?

How many people are going behind Vladimir Putin's back and saying, hey, like, this guy won't even fire the nukes?

I mean,

they're giving weapons to Ukraine.

They're killing our people.

How is he not firing these things?

There is a huge faction inside of Russia who's pushing that hardline approach.

And God forbid one of them wins an argument one day over vodka's.

God only knows what happens.

Wait until you see.

Wait until you see what is what we're going to show you tonight about Russia and Iran and what they're actually doing and saying to one another and the language they're sharing with one another.

It is

spooky.

It is

they are serious.

They are serious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so

this is the biggest worry, right?

There's just this instability everywhere right now.

It's instability combined with a bunch of really incompetent people who don't know what they're doing and don't know how to manage this sort of instability at the helm here in America.

And you, of course, have...

I mean, our share of instability has been well documented here over the past few weeks, especially.

So you put all that together and like, it's just at some point, you wonder if it's all going to spiral out of control.

So let me ask you.

Have you ever seen our government

pay for hostages?

I think the only time we did it was the Iran-Contra thing, right?

I mean, I don't know off the top of my head, I mean, that one pops to mind.

I think so.

There may be more.

So we had that one, but we paid, didn't we pay the Contras and they brokered the deal?

So we weren't really paying Iran.

We were paying the revolutionaries in South America.

And they would kind of say the same thing

now, right?

I mean, they would kind of say, well, no, we're not really paying for hostages.

We're in this program and this is going this way.

These dollars are going.

You know, they always have some way of getting around it technically.

Have we ever.

Have we ever rewarded a terrorist state?

Have we ever, like another,

I don't even know.

I keep seeing reports that say billion and million and no, no money from the government ever seems like real money.

So I have no idea.

But I think it's $10 billion.

And we released it yesterday.

The State Department did.

And they said, well, it's because it's for medical stuff.

Yeah.

What was their excuse?

What?

Well, they're going to do terrorism anyway.

You know, they're going to fund terror no matter what.

So we might as well give them an extra 10 billion because, I mean, they really said

did they're going to do this anyway So it doesn't matter if we give them a bunch of extra money in what world does that make sense Jeffrey Dahmer is going to kill Laotian teenagers anyway So we gave him a we sent him over a bunt cake like what are you talking about?

That's not a good argument.

He's not gonna want a bund cake.

I've been pushing for the extra double-size refrigerator freezer

Bunt cake.

I just feel like that's not a good idea.

Like just because it's like you know, well, you know, these people are really bad actors, so therefore, the reward isn't going to incentivize more bad acting.

So let's give them the reward.

That's not a good argument.

And you don't use that in anything.

No.

It would be a terrible, terrible thing to do.

And it is.

And of course, we all know, as the Iranians last time we tried to do this, pointed out to us, this money is fungible.

It'll go wherever we want it to go.

They told us that.

They said it publicly.

Like they're going to give their people medicine.

Oh, it's a huge concern for them.

They're really worried.

You know what?

Oh, gosh.

Do we have enough Robotussin for the population?

I don't know.

Their God says, wipe out Israel, bring the Mahdi back,

and we'll start the end of the world war.

That's our top prior.

God is telling us that.

Yeah, but we don't have enough Robotusin.

Yeah, I don't know.

Come on.

No, I don't think so.

I don't think so.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

Xi Jinping is now in San Francisco because we cleaned it up for him, you know, so it's nice.

What is happening in our country is truly frightening.

We're doing things that I've never seen in America ever before, and that's one of them.

Xi Van Fleet is

somebody who grew up in communist

China.

She lived through the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

She was a schoolgirl,

and she was forced into the countryside along with other young Chinese for re-education after high school.

She escaped communism, came to America.

30 years later, she sees the signs that are exactly the same as Mao's Marxist Cultural Revolution.

She's just written a new book called Mao's America, a survivor's warning.

She, welcome to the program.

Thank you so much for having me back.

Oh, you're welcome.

I like talking to people who lived in communism or under dictators because they have completely clear eyes on what we are seeing today.

Yes.

You say that

wokeism is Maoism.

with American characteristics.

What does that mean?

Yes,

that's what I mean is that what you just said that you've seen things happening here you've never seen before?

Yes.

It's because you,

like many, many Americans, don't know what happened in China and what happened in cultural revolution.

And we know because we lived through it.

And that's the exact same thing.

Why I say smallism with American

characteristics, it's the same thing.

The identical

identity politics, cancel culture, weaponization of young people, indoctrination in school, all this happened in China and happened to me.

And it's a little different here is that in China, Mao use class to divide people and divide people into red class and a black class.

Basically, one is the enemy of the state and one is the ally of the the government and the party.

And here they use something different.

They use race and then use gender.

They use sexuality.

And

it looks like it's different, but it's the same.

Well, this is indoctrination of children.

It's exactly the same.

This is something that the communists learned in the 1960s when honestly the Beatlesong Revolution came out and said, if you're walking around with posters of Chairman Mao, nobody's going to to listen to you anyhow.

And they realized that class would not do it in America.

They had to do it based on race.

But tell me about the

four olds.

I don't think most people understand this.

And this, to me, shows how close it is to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Yes.

That is Chinese style pencil culture.

And they are very specific.

It is the old culture, old idea, old habits, and old custom.

Those things are to be eradicated, to get rid of, to be destroyed, including statues, names of streets, name of stores, name of food labels, names of

institutions, all have to be changed to be politically correct.

Why they do that?

Why they do cancel culture?

Because they want to replace the tradition with something new.

And in China, that is Maoism.

And here is Maoism with American characteristics.

So Mao was much more open about what he was bringing in, wasn't he?

I mean, here they keep denying that any of this is happening.

And it's all there, we can see it, but they deny it.

Mao was open in saying this is what the new China will look like.

Yes, and that's

the part that is very deceptive.

Mao had power.

What he was doing is to have absolute power.

He feared that he was losing control of the party.

But he was in control.

So

he can be open about many, many things.

But here, they have to

hide their true intention.

since they use this

very well,

very attractive slogans.

And then a lot of people fall for it.

And that is the problem with Marxism.

It

gives you a beautiful picture of what it stands for.

And people don't know, they fall for it.

And I tell people.

We fall for it too in China.

And what we got?

We got slavery.

And we got

really the absolute tyranny and that's what's going to happen here so people wake up and how you wake up not to find out yourself if you find out yourself that'd be too late and I hope they are wise enough to hear from people like me who lived through it and and and then

really learn from history so that's what we don't have here people help us out with this because

I think

Antifa BLM, social justice warriors on the campus, et cetera, et cetera, I think those are like the brown shirts or the red guards

from China.

But people will say, no, these are just honest people trying to X, Y, Z.

What is the difference between BLM and Antifa and the social justice warriors?

and the Red Guards?

Yeah, no difference because they're all indoctrinated to believe what they were told.

And so Red Guards, you think they are just monsters?

No.

They were a lot of them from elite universities and

middle schools and they are from

well-families.

They were not monsters, but they turned into monsters because of indoctrination.

The first killing that took place during the Cultural Revolution was done by a group of young girls in the most prestigious middle school in Beijing, and they were like 12 to 16.

They beat, tortured, and killed their principal, and there's no consequence.

And after that, killing become commonplace.

And then, why they go after the teachers?

Because they were told those in control and those in power were the ones who want to

take us back to the capitalism.

And so, for young kids, what are the people

in power?

They're teachers, they're principals.

So they were the first one to be the target.

So

here in America,

you just said

they weren't held and they paid no price for it.

Here in America, our justice system has been completely dismantled.

You know, defund the police, all of this stuff.

Crime is on the rise.

It doesn't seem like anybody's punished.

If you're on the right side, you're not punished.

In China, did they do the same thing that they dismantle the justice system and the police?

Yes, it's called smashing the justice system.

The whole justice system, including police and the court, were dismantled.

And so there's no consequence.

No one can stop or dare to challenge the red guards.

And that's the Chinese version of defund the police.

So she,

I have been,

I've been talking about this coming for two decades almost now.

I know.

And

it is now here.

How much time do we have?

What period

is this like in China?

How far away from

losing it are we?

We are very, very close, actually.

We are losing.

But I do think that there is a hope.

and i

just three years ago i was a quiet shy asian american i don't share my opinion with people

yeah i was just quiet i became a voice and because i know if i don't speak up and and stand out and to fight back we're going to lose our country and i do not want to live under communism again

during my uh speeches across the country, I met

all sorts of people, parents, just like me.

Three years ago, they were quiet, never pay attention to the school board,

they never got involved in local politics or any politics.

I met so many of them.

Now they are committed.

Because we cannot, they are committed and to fight to save this country.

So that's our hope.

And that's exactly how we save this country.

We have to be did

those people exist in China?

No.

Because at that, no, if you wait by then, it's too late.

Because those people

don't exist.

Because you can only find them in prison, in gulags, or in the graves.

Xi, I can't thank you enough.

What do you think, just

on another subject?

What do you think of President Zi's trip to

San Francisco and how San Francisco cleaned itself up for that?

I know.

I just tweeted out and

then they have people

welcoming him with

a Chinese flag, which to me, that is a murderous flag.

And I said, where are the social justice warrior protesters

against the genocide by Xi Jinping of the Uighurs, Muslims in China?

Where are they?

They're not to be found.

They're not to be found.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Shi Van Fleet, the name of her book is Mao's America, a survivor's warning.

She compares the cultural revolution to the cultural revolution here in America, to the Chinese one.

And it is well worth a read and share with somebody that you know who maybe has a possibility of waking up.

By the way, she was at the pro-Israel rally yesterday in D.C.

So thank you so much.

She Van Fleet, Maus America.

You're listening to the best of Glenn Bach.

Need a little more?

Check out the full show podcast.

Vivek Ramaswamy, how are you, sir?

Doing well, Glenn.

How are you?

I am.

Well,

I'm coming down with something, but

other than that, great.

Other than that, great.

So, Vivek,

let's talk a little bit about CBDCs because you are coming out today, if I am not mistaken,

with your digital currency

policy.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it's something that I think is important for us to understand as we go forward as a country.

Where are the threats to liberty?

Where are they emerging?

Because many of them are backdoor threats, Glenn.

They're not the same front door threats of big government in the past.

So you and I have talked for years at this point about the threats posed by the ESG movement in the capture of capital markets through ordinary dollars.

Well, part of that whole agenda was about using the market to advance agendas that the government could not implement through the front door under the Constitution.

Same thing as their capture of big tech.

Well, think about the combination of those two now when it comes to the capture of our own currencies.

There's a push in the United States and in other Western countries like the UK as to adopt what are called central bank digital currencies.

Well, I'm dead set against it.

The reason they're saying they want to do it is that China's doing it and that we need to catch up to them or else we're going to fall behind technologically.

We have to ask ourselves why the heck China is doing this in the first place.

And here's the answer.

It's to be able to penalize citizens in their bank account with the ultimate social credit score, the amount of money you have in your bank, if you're doing something that the government doesn't like, if you're engaging in speech or in a protest that the government does not approve of, like the white sheet revolution in China, for example, wiping out the amount of financial assets you have as a way of exercising power and dominion.

So I don't want to see that happen in the U.S.

And one of the things they'll say is, isn't that going to lead the dollar to be less strong?

No, it's actually the opposite.

The dollar will be more strong if it is actually a currency that cannot be taken over by the whim of the government.

And so while I'm dead set against central bank digital currencies, I am for the rise of alternative currencies that people are able in a freedom-loving country and world to be able to avail themselves of a decentralized private cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and otherwise, that the government is threatened by.

That's good.

And I think that we should want more competition to the existing system without the government regulating it out of existence.

But what we should be against is the government creating a central bank digital currency of its own.

And Glenn, I think these are new threats to liberty.

And I do think it's going to take someone from the next generation, if I may say from my generation, to lead us forward to understand where the new threats to liberty present themselves because it's not 1980 anymore.

And we need to wake up to these new threats today.

I will tell you, you know, I'm a fan of yours.

That's not an endorsement, obviously, but I am a fan of yours.

And I do like the fact that you are from a younger generation that

sees what's coming over the horizon, especially with your background.

So what do you suggest happens with digital assets?

Because right now,

if I had Bitcoin, but I lost it in a boating accident,

I wouldn't want to pull it out because honestly, I don't know exactly the tax thing.

It is such a hassle.

And I think they're doing that intentionally.

Of course they're doing it intentionally.

Correct.

Of course they're doing it intentionally.

So, Glenn, this is another example of the cancerous administrative state.

If the people of this country want to vote through the front door and say, hey, we don't want this, we don't want Bitcoin or other alternatives to the dollar to be traded in the U.S., which I don't think most people in this country would ever say.

But if they did, fine, that's the law of the land.

But that's not the way it's working right now.

It's the administrative state, those three-letter agencies like the SEC, that are through the back door deciding that they want to shadow government utilize legislating them out of existence, but not through the front door.

So they're applying a set of regulatory standards that Congress never actually authorized to backdoor silence the new kinds of currencies that people use as alternatives to the U.S.

dollar.

And I think that that's a violation of the cardinal rule of our Constitution.

The laws are passed through the front door, not through the back door.

So what we need is regulatory clarity.

It's shameful that you have a chairman of the SEC right now, Gary Gensler, who refuses even in his testimony before Congress to say whether Ethereum is or is not a security for the purpose of securities laws.

Ambiguity is the friend of tyranny.

And so when you have regulators that get to make up after the fact the regulations that they're enforcing, That's what we're seeing in the energy sector.

It's what we're seeing in the healthcare sector.

It's what we're seeing across the U.S.

economy.

It's something that would make our founding fathers roll over in their graves.

We're a nation of laws.

And if you want to ban something, ban it through the front door.

Don't use the regulatory shadow government of people who are never elected to their positions to do it instead.

One of the things that I'm actually going to, I swear an oath to the Constitution as the next President Glenn, if I'm elected.

Well, one of the things that's the most important Supreme Court case of our lifetime, it came out last year, was West Virginia versus EPA.

And that held that if Congress has not given a three-letter agency the power to issue a regulation, but they're doing it anyway, that regulation is unconstitutional.

Well, the good news is on day one of my administration, we rescind all of the regulations that fail that test.

That's a majority of the regulations that are on the books today.

And by the way, we're going to fire 75% of the people who are working in that apparatus, too.

That's how we restore our constitutional republic.

And I know that might sound scary to some people or extreme, but if somebody's not offering an extreme proposal or a proposal that sounds extreme, it means they're not really serious about taking on the deep state.

And I think that's what it's going to take to get the job done.

So you are announcing today freedom to code, freedom to financial self-reliance, and freedom from regulatory overreach.

That's right.

And I'm going to be speaking tomorrow at the Bitcoin, at the blockchain summit in Texas, and offering what I think should be not just a Republican vision.

It's a pro-liberty vision to say that, you know what, I'm the U.S.

president.

I want the dollar to remain the reserve currency of the world.

Our national debt is creating a lot of doubt about that.

But one of the best ways we do it isn't by stifling competition to the dollar.

It's by saying that we actually like holding our feet to the fire through accountability.

So people who do want to opt out of that system by holding Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies can do so without fear of regulatory

fundamental regulatory tyranny.

And I think that that's good for the U.S.

dollar in the long run.

It's good for our country in the long run.

That's what Thomas Jefferson, he was a big proponent of financial self-reliance.

That's what Thomas Jefferson, who was, by the way, 33 years old when he signed the Declaration of Independence, inventing the swivel chair while he was at it.

These were innovators.

And I think that the innovators who founded this country would embrace the exact policy agenda that I'm rolling out tomorrow morning to say that more competition is good, not bad.

And we shouldn't want these regulators choking currency alternatives to the U.S.

dollar out of existence.

So it's a little unfair because I haven't asked Nikki Haley to come on and actually explain this to me,

but we're reaching out to her today.

She just recently said that all the code for social media should be transparent.

It's a little ambiguous if she meant it just for the government or for everybody.

And the other is she, for national security purposes, believes everyone should have to be verified as a user, and your name should be, you know, your name on social platforms.

What do you think of that?

That sounds like something Xi Jinping would say.

And I think that there is a deep ideological divide right now in the GOP, and I think it's good for us to smoke it out.

It's not an attack on anybody.

And even people listening may disagree with me on this.

That's okay.

This is a good debate for us to have in our party.

Do you want to go to the Dick Cheney version of the post-Patriot Act surveillance state where, you know, our founding fathers, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, they wrote the Federalist Papers under pseudonym.

I think you should have the freedom to do that in this country.

It's part of what it means to be free, especially in an increasingly tyrannical government environment.

Nikki Haley disagrees with that.

She thinks you should be required to actually identify yourself before you post something on the internet or online and disclose to the government for national security reasons.

Anytime somebody's using those words, national security, for an infringement on liberty domestically, I'm dead set against it, whether it's a Republican or a Democrat saying it.

Same thing when it comes to the questions of censorship.

I think there are other candidates who believe that if there's speech we disagree with, that the right answer is to censor it.

I say a lot of the speech we're seeing is heinous in this country, even in recent weeks.

But the right answer is never censorship.

It is always more speech, not less speech.

And I think this is all in the backdrop of a divide when it comes to foreign policy in our country, Glenn.

I think that there are some who believe that it's the job of the U.S.

to be the global hegemon in places like Ukraine and elsewhere, making the decisions of intervening in somebody else's conflict that doesn't advance the American interest.

And I'm dead set against that.

I believe that my sole moral duty as the next U.S.

president is to the Americans right here at home in our homeland.

And those things go together because it's that foreign policy vision that also allows them to invoke national security as an excuse to really infringe on our liberty here at home.

And I think it's good for us to have this debate in this GOP primary season now.

Do you want to go the direction of the George Bush-Dick Cheney vision of the Republican Party, as some do?

I'm not in that camp.

I want to lead us to the Republican Party of the future, where the Republican Party stands for standing for the interests of American citizens here at home by reviving the founding ideals.

And yes, that includes the First Amendment above all, and that we will stand for that without apology.

And so it's very to say, she and I have a very different vision on this.

And, you know, I personally believe that mine is more consistent with the founding vision of this country.

And if we revive that, that's how we reignite and reunite our country.

That's why why I'm in this.

When we look at our founding vision, it required us to have a moral center.

We don't really have a moral center anymore.

Everything is up for grabs.

Our police are in disarray.

There was a huge mob in Detroit.

I think it was last night or night before.

Firefighters arrived to use the jaws of life to get these people out of a horrible car wreck.

The people started throwing rocks at them

and the driver died.

I mean, you know,

we have decayed.

So

how do we get this back

to where we all feel we have personal responsibilities, not just rights?

Absolutely.

And rights and responsibilities go hand in hand together, but we've forgotten the responsibility part of that, Glenn.

So some of this isn't going to be done by the president.

I mean, they think the president, half the job is policy, but half the job is also the national character that we create, the example that we set.

I think it's been a long time since we've had a president where I could look my sons in the eye and tell them, I want you to grow up and be like him, frankly.

And I think that

that's the standard I want people to hold me to.

If I'm the next president, that's a high standard.

But I also think that part of this comes from pastors, parents, teachers, coaches across the country stepping up as well.

The conservative movement, I think we've fallen short where for a long time we will complain about the left's agenda of race, gender, sexuality, climate.

I want us talking more about the individual, family, nation, God.

See, individual, family, nation, God, that beats race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for something, not just against what the other side puts up.

And what I've seen, Glenn, I've traveled in college campuses.

I've probably been to more college campuses than any Republican candidate who's run in our history.

And you think that people in that next generation, the assumption that many people have is they're against these shared American values and they're leftist progressives.

What I see is something that's slightly different.

They are lost.

They are directionless, rudderless, hungry for some direction and purpose and meaning.

And so if we can have the courage to actually not just condemn what the left is filling that vacuum with, and I've done that too.

I'm not criticizing other people.

This is a self-reflection.

I've done a lot of that, including in the books I've written that you know and otherwise.

Now we need to level up and say, here's a vision of our own.

And young people, especially, Glenn, will flock in our direction if we actually give them something to believe in.

And that's part of what I'm trying to do in this race and hopefully in leading this country.

That's how we actually revive that moral core.

I've got about 40 seconds.

I just have to ask you, there's an editorial in the Wall Street Journal today, an op-ed that says, we need to take Gazans into America.

We haven't taken our share of those fleeing from the Middle East, and those Palestinians from Gaza need to come here.

I'm against it.

And I think that we have our own issues to deal with here at home.

The number one lesson we need to learn is if that can happen to Israel, what happened was wrong, it was subhuman, and it was a failure of defense and border defenses.

That could happen right here at home with 70,000 special interest alien apprehensions from Middle Eastern countries on our own border.

So I'm far more concerned with protecting our own borders in this country than to increase what already is too high of a refugee and humanitarian intake of immigrants to this country.

It's wrong.

That would be a step in the wrong direction.

My view is that, to the contrary, though, Israel needs to be able to defend itself to the fullest.

We should stand diplomatically for Israel's right to do so.

But that's different from saying that we need to bring a bunch of Gazans to the United States of America.

That's wrong, and we have our own issues to deal with here at home.

And that's my moral obligation as the next president to look after American interests here.

Vivek Ramaswamy, thank you so much.

As always, Vivek 2024, V I V E K.

People call it Vivek all the time.

It's Vivek2024.com.

Vivek, thank you so much.

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