Ep 159 | Hey, GOP: It's Time to Become 'RADICALS' | Rachel Bovard | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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What does it mean to be a conservative now?

What is the purpose of a conservative?

It is to conserve, to rescue those things worth rescuing, to save the things that we love and let go the things that don't work.

Our task is to stand in front of the leftist and institutionalist steamroller.

and protect what we can and save what we must.

Every single day, a conservative will take a beating from the fashionable snobs on the left.

They're cozy in their lawlessness.

They subject us to a level of harassment and mockery that they couldn't even imagine, let alone withstand.

To them, so many people in America are dumb, useless, bigoted, any other number of ridiculous accusations.

And it doesn't have to be just, it could be somebody on the left that disagrees with them.

They're dumb and ridiculous and racist.

What they don't realize is that without

something that I think is at the center of conservatism, it should be at least, individuals and individual rights, civilization collapses.

What then would they do if you won the zero-sum game with nobody left to destroy?

Today's guest is one of the brave souls that is standing in front of that tank.

After she spoke at the National Conservative Conference last fall, Jacobin magazine said, who is this woman and what the hell is going on here?

They went on to say that she uses, quote, the language of war and enmity and victory at all costs and subordinating means to ends.

Wow, she sounds dangerous.

She sounds kind of like the left in some ways, the way you described her.

Well, she has plenty of credentials that make her a threat to the left.

And a lot of people will misunderstand her, but she is clear.

She has had directorial jobs in the House and the Senate.

She's worked with Senator Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee.

Okay.

She currently serves as the Senior Director of Policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute and co-authored the book Conservative, Knowing What to Keep with Senator Jim DeMint.

She is a senior tech columnist also for the Federalist.

She has her thumb on the monster known as big tech.

We talk about it in today's podcast.

She just wrote an incredible article that caught everybody's attention

and mine.

This is why I wanted to get her on.

The 1980s called.

They want their foreign policy back and Republicans finally to wake up.

That's what it's called.

It is scathing.

It has some backbone, which is exactly what we need right now.

Please welcome today's guest, Rachel Bavard.

You know, every day as we dance that country dance just a little closer to that cliff's edge, only God knows when we're going to plunge over the side.

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Hello, Rachel.

Hey, how are you?

Have we ever met before?

I can't believe we haven't met.

We've met one time, but it was like three or four years ago at this point when DeMitt and I were in your studio.

Oh, okay.

All right, yeah.

It was a while ago.

Because you've worked with everybody.

You worked with Jim DeMitt.

You worked with

Mike Lee,

I think Rand Paul as well.

I mean,

you're heavy hitter.

Heavy hitters, right?

Oh, thanks.

Yeah.

So

you wrote a article the other day, the 80s called They Want Their Foreign Policy Back and Republicans Finally to Wake Up.

And I read that and I thought to myself, I think I completely agree with you, but there is so much swirling around

that is vying for attention for the conservatives that

I'm cautious.

I want to always talk to people before I go, you know what, I think this is a really good idea.

So

you said that

you weren't even born when Reagan was in office, and

we got to get over Reagan.

Explain what you're talking about in your article.

So I think it's fair to say there's so much going on.

And I want to point out, so that column was an adaptation of a speech for which I only had 10 minutes.

So there's so much more that I could have said there.

But I think, you know, in this sort of new right project that I'm working on, it's this idea not that Reagan was bad, right, or Reagan wasn't a good president, it's just that Reagan is not eternal and he's not immortal and the conditions under which he was successful are not our conditions now.

And I think this is especially true, you know, even today, looking at why Liz Truss failed is sort of case in point, right?

She was trying to make economic policy for a type of economy that existed 40 years ago.

And the global order right now is being reshaped, right?

Neoliberalism is over.

Okay, so So how do we make policy for that?

Right.

And so Reagan, I completely agree that conservatives kind of live in the past.

And then by definition, you kind of do that.

But they live in the past.

There isn't any really new idea.

And quite honestly, the only part of going backward in time that I want is our history, good, bad, and ugly, because we can learn from it, our Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights.

Everything else, we've screwed it up, and I want a new vision.

But Reagan, the reason why Reagan, because I lived through it, that he was popular

was not because he defeated things or turned the economy around, because he could connect with the principles and ideals of America.

Are those still relevant?

That's the great question because right now we're living in a country, I think, where we don't even agree on the foundational things.

No, we don't.

Right?

We don't agree on sex.

We don't agree on basic foundational questions of whether a girl is a boy

or

religion and its role in shaping the country, traditional values.

All these things are up for just debate and dispute in a way that they want to.

I think it's even deeper than that.

We don't agree on the Bill of Rights anymore.

Good point.

We don't agree on American rights.

We know it.

And

then

there's probably half the country that does know it, and they're like, yeah, yeah, I mean, we love the Constitution, but we got things to do.

I don't know if we're even a constitutional republic today.

Well, it's interesting this question of

that particular question.

I touched on it a little bit in that piece, but my friend Russ Vogt has written a column for the American mind saying we are actually post-constitutional.

Yeah, I think.

If you looked how the left operates.

And so how does the right respond to that?

And his vision is that you actually embrace radical constitutionalism.

Like you double down on what the Constitution really means, but that requires us to upend, you know, bad precedent that we've beholden ourselves to.

Right.

And I think he calls it like, you know,

bad.

bad precedent and bad statesmen have led us into this place where you know he's talking about how his group looked at how do you constitutionally declare an invasion these states at the the border?

How do you declare an invasion?

He's like, that's in the Constitution.

You can make a constitutional argument that the state has a responsibility to do that.

He's like, but you would be shocked the amount of conservative lawyers that push back against that because, oh, the precedent doesn't let us go there.

And he's like, no, no, no.

I have to tell you.

The stakes are this high.

Precedent is not how you judge what's constitutional.

That'll just dogpile bad rulings after bad rulings.

The problem is

when you're doing that, you're saying all these

conservative lawyers,

look,

we're living in an age of radicalism.

It is all radical.

If you want to restore the Bill of Rights as our centerpiece, it's going to take radicals because it's gone.

So

you are really fighting for a new system of government that people haven't seen in 100 years because that hasn't been followed.

And then it's just been trashed in the last 10.

So if we can agree on the principles of Declaration of Independence Bill of Rights, the Constitution will allow us to rebuild it.

But I don't know if you'll never get Mitch McConnell.

You'll never get Mitt Romney.

You'll never get these Republicans.

It's going to take,

I think it's going to take people who either think very young along with the very young,

or it's just going to take the very young.

Because these people think like it's 1950.

And I think that is sort of the paradox the conservative movement is living in to some extent, because as conservatism or conservatism broadly, right, we're not radicals by definition, but we're living in a moment where we are forced to be radicals to return to or to uncover, you know, Kirk said, you know, find the old values and old virtues and bring them back into the light.

That's where I think we're living.

And that requires a certain amount of radicalism from the movement.

Because to your point,

and I think this is true of all the political right in Washington, they just don't understand this.

They do not understand the stakes of the moment we're living in.

They do not understand this is a fight for the soul of America.

That if we don't get this right, America is not going to be America anymore.

It's going to be some sort of, you know,

biologically.

How do they not know that?

How do they not know that?

I think it's a willful denial to some extent.

They've been enriching themselves on the back of the old system for so long that it's self-preservation.

Acknowledging that it needs to change is cutting their own legs out and admitting that they have been part of the problem and they just are unable to do it and aren't willing to do it.

That's why they need to go.

It is.

I just always assume, and I'm glad you said they were enriching themselves.

I look at the things that they should do if they win the Senate and the House, and I'm not sure they'll do it because it will come back on them as well.

I mean, it's not everybody, but a lot of them are in on the game, and they just want to take it at a slower pace than the left.

Well, take, you know, just as a small example, you know, how entangled we are with China.

How entangled our economy is is what prevents us from taking this threat seriously.

And I see it as a global order changing threat.

We cannot and we are functionally incapable of addressing that as a legislature because so many of these guys and women, right,

are tied into making so much money from that system.

And that's why Wall Street's entangled.

That's why the hedge funds are

so tied into it.

It's why the technology firms want to be over there.

We can't take on China because everyone's making too much money from China.

And that's a huge, insurmountable problem right now unless we dump over the leadership role.

You can't even talk about it.

I mean, we just sold the port of Miami to China.

It just happened this week.

Nobody's talking about that.

Really?

And it's honestly, it's been the trend of financialization, I think, which has been the focus of many Republican and Democratic leaders for the last 30 years.

Just this high finance, you know, production that doesn't actually make anything for the economy, but it makes a lot of people rich.

And it's that global financialization that we need to pull back, I think, and really take a critical look at.

And we are unable, again, to do that because too many people are making money from it.

So I do think it's going to take a new generation of leaders that aren't connected to that old system and are willing to kind of call it out and call it for what it is and change it.

But that's got to happen fast because we don't have a lot of time.

So many people

think like rachel think like i do um and know that we have quite a task on our hands and

everybody is going to be needed on the field everybody needs to be you can't sit in the stands and go well i'm just going to see which one's going to if you do that you're going to be on the wrong side and we need you on the field if you think I'm in too much pain, I can't do anything, I can't even concentrate.

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So I think that there is, you know, these countries, England, they're fighting with austerity.

And I think there's a portion of

America, and

they are either the

classical liberal that believes in, you know, rights

and has seen that we've just been a grotesque, we become...

France in the 1700s and makeup and just talking nonsense at parties in Versailles.

We're ugly.

We've become ugly.

Those people and conservatives would just like to reset to

a normal, reasonable lifestyle where you can get rich or not, but that's not what society is all about.

And

I think the left is destroying us

trying to get there while they are taking all of the money.

And I think if we were asked to, and we had a real plan that would say, look, we have got to reset all of this.

And it's going to mean we all, you know, take it on the chin for a while.

I think we would do that if we knew that there was no way out of this financial disaster.

But they're not including us in any of this, and they're denying it most times.

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I think that's the really frustrating point about this moment is that we all see what's happening, right?

I think any reasonable person living in America today understands

the attacks and the assaults that the country is under and the sort of economic precipice that we're living in while at the same time, right, you can't, the price of your child's innocence is being corrupted in their public school.

Conservatives are being debanked by major institutions.

They're being cut off from the avenues to capitalism, to public life, for saying the wrong thing on Twitter.

I mean, this isn't hyperbole or exaggeration.

This is actually what's happening.

And yet they are told by their representatives, where, again, the great American experiment was that our self-government would reflect our concerns.

Our self-government would act on our behalf.

And yet they are being told by those people that your concerns are stupid.

That isn't really happening.

We don't have time to do that right now.

Maybe we'll get to it.

And we will take incremental steps to address this problem.

And it's infuriating.

And I think why you see people so, you know, the left talks about how angry the right is and how radical they are.

Well, they're angry because of this.

They're angry because where is their outlet?

Self-government is supposed to be responsive and it's supposed to be their outlet.

Self-government is what prevents violence in the streets.

It's the cathartic element of American government and yet it's not functioning.

And so I do think we are getting to a dangerous point that if you don't have that catharsis, if you don't see yourself reflected in your own representative government, what are you to do as an individual person?

I think this election is absolutely critical, but I'm not sure.

And I've said this to people,

I've said, you've got to go out and vote.

You've got to go out and vote.

And I think people get that message, but so many say, I have zero faith the Republicans will do anything.

I just want to stop the madness,

but they're not going to fix it.

And I think that's probably true.

And that makes me tell my friends in Washington: pitchforks and torches will come for you

because

the status quo is not good enough.

You have to stop it and reverse it.

So how do we do that?

What is, start with this, define the new right.

So the new right is, I would say, still a nascent and ascendant movement among, I think, younger conservatives that

our established sort of policy making on the right has failed.

Now, I say in that speech, I think new right isn't necessarily a great moniker because there's been a number of new rights, and in reality, a lot of the policies and ways of thinking the quote-unquote new right pushes now is simply the conservatism of, you know, Robert Taft or Kelvin Coolidge or sort of a historical re-emergence of that way of thought.

So it's not new in that sense, it's old.

But I think it's again a recognition that

from where I sit, conservatism as a set of philosophies is dynamic, right?

And it's resurgent always because it's flexible enough to meet the moment.

And I think what I have looked at in Washington is a conservative movement that's become fat and lazy and attached to dogma.

And

they've disrespected conservatism by pushing it into these set set of policy prescriptions that have become so rigid and ossified that any movement away from it is like, well, you're not a conservative.

When reality, conservatism is supposed to conserve the things that we care about, which is nation, family, community, human dignity.

And by definition, when you attach yourself to those ideals, the policies are always going to look a little bit different because the threats are different.

And the moment that we are living in right now, I would say, and again, I'm not 40, but I'm like mid-30s.

So

it's the, from, in my lifetime, I would say it is the highest stakes moment for these set of ideals that I have ever seen.

Oh, and I will tell you.

They are under attack in ways I've never witnessed.

I was born in the 60s, so I've seen a lot.

And I've, yeah, I mean, I really thought we were going to be vaporized in my teens.

I remember waiting because a decision was being made at the White House.

I remember that.

But I felt secure that even if that happened, those ideals would be preserved and we would move on.

This now,

I think our stuff could be preserved, but all of our ideals, our meaning

gone.

Because

they have destroyed.

our history.

They've destroyed our traditions.

I go to 4th of July now.

That used to be so moving for me.

I almost hate 4th of July now because it seems empty and

it's meaningless now.

You see the flag.

I've never had a flag on my set from the beginning because I saw after 9-11 everybody saying you're not an American if you don't have a flag on your lapel.

And I thought, this is nuts.

That flag is going to be something that turns into something that it's not.

You know what I mean?

All of our traditions, everything

has been destroyed.

And nobody is talking about how do we pick it up except

the 1950s way,

the Mitch McConnell way.

Well, this is where I think the new right distinguishes itself in some ways is that it acknowledges everything that you're saying, right?

It acknowledges that our way of life is being destroyed or has been destroyed by, I would say, like an over-reliance on the market as the end in and of itself instead of a means to an end, you know, a over-focus on religious liberty as opposed to religiosity going away in American society, right?

They go hand in hand, but we've overemphasized one to the exclusion of the other.

We've abandoned the institutions.

We've seeded them to the left.

And I think the fatal conceit there was that, oh, well, the market will correct for the left's long march through the institutions.

And

that has failed.

That is a broken way of thinking.

And it has led us to this moment where conservatives and conservatism is almost a dissident culture at this point.

And so what the new right says is if we accept that premise that we are a dissident culture, we are by definition, we have to be a little bit more radical in our approach.

I would say a lot more radical, frankly.

And when we get power, when we are given power through our you know self-government we have to use it to actively defend the things that we care about because so hang on hang on because this is where this is why i wanted to talk to you because this is where it gets dicey

we cannot become everything we despise And there are a lot of people on the right that A, are angry and are like, oh, you're going to do that to us?

Well, I'll show you what that feels like.

We are at a place in our society.

I talked about this in 2006 with a pendulum.

It's swinging.

That pendulum, we're good in the center.

But as it swings one way or the other, left or right, it gets further and further apart until somebody grabs it.

and says there's too much chaos, there's too much division, and the people cry out for somebody to come down.

And quite honestly, after this administration, if the Republicans win,

after this administration, if they don't do things, people are going to cry out for somebody to make it stop.

So please tell me how, what you mean by if you win, you get power.

What does that mean?

So this is, I think, the foundational question for the New Right.

I think you're absolutely right to hone in on it.

And as a sort of a nascent movement, I think the New Right has to iterate very clearly on what it means here, because it can't be, as you suggest, you know, this, and there's some people on the new right that will say this, like, that we are now the administrative state, right?

That we now tell you how to live your life.

And I just don't think that's.

That's not America.

It's not America.

But I also think it's not, as a practical matter, possible, right?

Even if the Republic, even if, let's just say conservatives take all three branches of government, the administrative state is still run by Democrats.

Like, however you parse it, they are still in charge of the administrative state.

So as a practical matter, matter, I don't think that works.

What I have always said is that if the new right obtains power, it has to be a two-fold approach of one, obtaining power, but then using that power to one, protect the things that we care about, which is necessarily requiring a defunding of things, a decentralization of things, and a divestment of things.

And what I mean by that is I want to break the elite power centers so that that no elite can use them.

From where I sit, and there's many views on this in the New Right because again, it's a very nascent sort of movement at this time and fluid, but from where I sit, we have to break the concentrations of power that exist within the government and within the private sector so that no one can sort of control those anymore.

And for me, state power.

State power is using the government to create a space in which free people can flourish.

That's an inherently Lockean idea, and a lot of new right people hate Locke, but I think it's foundational to how our country works and the people that it, you know, how we all live together.

But that requires using the government in a way that historically the right

hasn't been popular on the right.

And what I mean is, I'm for strong antitrust enforcement.

I think we've been way too lax on how our mega corporations have consolidated.

You know, when people want to defend these companies as American companies, they're not.

They're multinationals that are interested in one thing, and that is their own self-interest.

Yeah, tell me that.

Tell me the NBA is an American company.

Bull crap.

Right.

But the same with

tech companies, the same with half of our major banks and institutions.

So, you know, there's a lot of people on the right that say, well, we don't want antitrust enforcement.

I do.

I think that's law enforcement for the market.

I think we need to be much more critical of how private power is amassed.

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Well, here's the one thing that people always say: oh, the founding fathers, they didn't see a time when we went to space.

No, they didn't have to.

They had certain principles that work anywhere in the universe for any problem.

The one thing that I don't think that they

really addressed or thought about

was

that they never thought a corporation could be more powerful than a government, and that it could just rule the world, and there's no restrictions on these corporations.

I don't care, you as a grocery store, you don't want to serve anybody named Glenn.

Fine, whatever, I'll go to another grocery store.

But when that grocery store owns all of the grocery stores or a large part of them and influences everyone else, no.

And especially if it's taking any money from the federal government, then that's the government funding my rights being taken away.

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This is exactly.

Yeah.

This is the issue.

And a lot of times I'll debate this issue with progressives who are like, well, you just, then why can you

Jack Phillips should bake the cake, right?

Bake the cake, bigot.

How is this any different?

And because of what you just laid out, it's fundamentally different.

The issue is one of scale.

Right.

Right?

And it's there's a million other cake bakers.

There's one massive tech platform.

There's three mega banks.

Yes.

Right.

When they start cutting you off, you lose access to public life.

Correct.

And we've allowed that to happen.

That has been a function of policy choices, not the market somehow.

Well, the government, you know, the public-private partnership of ESG and all of that stuff,

they have built

a digital ghetto.

I said this a few years ago, and I got my head handed to me, but it's true.

With Hitler, he had to round the Jews up and then put them in a place and then build walls around that place so they couldn't do anything with the outside world.

But you go ahead and have your little life here.

Well, that's what's happening with people who, I don't care what side you're on, if you disagree with the state and the power, then you're in a digital ghetto.

Well, yeah, I'm not doing anything to you.

You still drive around.

Really?

Can I have a bank?

Can I have have a credit card?

Can I have social media?

Can I speak anywhere?

Can I have a job if I don't get vaccinated?

You've put us in a ghetto.

No, I think that's exactly right.

And when I started writing on some of these issues a couple of years ago, I used to get in these debates with libertarians who I was writing specifically about tech platforms, sort of foreshadowing what I thought was going to happen, which is that, you know, these are market access points.

And when you start ideologically weaponizing them, you cut people off from the market, the downstream effects are going to be very dangerous.

And they would say to me, well, Facebook can't put you in jail.

The government is still a bigger threat to your liberty.

The government can be a threat to your liberty, but as you point out, we're living in a digital economy.

a digital technocracy in many cases.

And the ability to cut you off from all the avenues of making money in this country, to being successful, to maintaining a job, to having any kind of social capital at all, it's all completely in private hands and it's increasingly weaponized.

And I deal a lot with people too who say, well, you know, if, as we saw recently, JP Morgan is unbanking Sam Brownback's Committee for Religious Liberty, he should just find another bank and we should just build a different bank for conservatives.

And it's like, okay.

There is, you know, the alternative economy movement, I think, yes, has some merit, but two things.

One, it cannot be scaled up at all, quickly enough, I think, to meet the kind of crisis that we're in.

But But second, every input in that system is also weaponized, right?

We saw this with Parlor, for instance.

Remember Parlor, the alternative Twitter.

It was doing really, really well when it got kneecapped out of existence.

And what happened?

It wasn't just that they lost access to the app stores, although I would argue that was a huge blow because those are the only two market access points if you are a social media app.

If you're not in those app stores, you functionally don't exist.

But it was their web hosting service that they got kicked off of.

Their email provider dropped them.

Their lawyers stopped working with them.

How are you going to build an alternative system when everything you need to make the market work for you is you're cut off from it?

And that is what I think there's no wider acknowledgement of that phenomenon on the right, the established right, right?

They're still acting like we live in a country where we all agree on the foundational things, like the market can solve these problems.

No, you can't when the market is weaponized this way.

Yeah, I agree with you.

I actually agree with the alternative market theory, but I also am smart enough to know, I mean, that's why I built the Blaze.

It was an alternative to the media, and at the time, the internet was still the Wild West, okay?

And fine,

at that time, you can't be on these platforms.

You can't say these things on the mainstream media.

Okay, I'll come over here.

Well, great.

Build your own thing then, not thinking that we would.

We did.

Everybody's now.

but now

that you're effective, now they want to kick you off this and say, well, just you can't use this, build another one.

You can't build all the infrastructure, you could in 40 years, but you can't build the separate infrastructure.

And all of it, and this is, in my opinion, from the World Economic Forum and the

corruption there, it's all connected.

So now, here's the question:

Every law, the way we work now,

you know, there are bills this big, and

nobody reads them except the attorneys.

Nobody really writes them except the people that usually are on the receiving end of it.

They're the ones we're trying to regulate.

Well, I don't really know how to regulate.

This is why we only have three car companies up until Tesla in America, because FDR went to the big three and say, said, what do we need to do?

Well, they regulated everybody out of business.

Who's going to write

the tech legislation?

Who knows it well enough?

And how do you contain it?

This is a very,

I think, pressing question.

And I don't have any faith in our legislators to be able to do that.

I don't either.

To be totally honest.

Because in so many ways, you know, we've, technology has outpaced us, right?

And I think for the last 20 years, the debate in Washington and I think even across the country was tech exceptionalism, right?

That the tech is just going to push us forward and do great things and we're never going to have to worry about it.

And isn't it great that you can do all these things?

And yeah, your data is everywhere, but that will never come back to bite us ever.

You know, they can have it.

They're good companies, right?

They're never going to misuse it.

And now we're living in a digital economy that has been completely restructured.

The internet is not the internet of the 90s, right?

It's not the internet I came up in, which was like chat rooms and, you know, just an open forum.

It is a balkanized, commercially driven system that's commoditized by people, right?

We are the commodity.

And we still make policy like it's the internet of the 1990s.

And so this is why, you know, down the road, we do need to kind of get control of these companies and what they do with us and to us.

I think that involves,

frankly,

much more stringent regulations on what can be targeted at kids.

I think it involves massive legislation on privacy and how they keep your data and what they do with it.

But I think those are 10 or 15 years down the road.

We don't have the technical expertise.

What I focused on in the short term is decentralizing the heck out of these companies.

Because for me, a lot of the speech concerns, a lot of the privacy concerns, it's all downstream of market power.

google is so powerful because it controls the flow of information for 90 percent of the world

right what google chooses to suppress or amplify literally shifts opinion around the world no company should have that much authority

and i care far less what google does if it's only doing it for 20 of the world and not 90.

can you imagine

any company having 90 of the control of water

can you imagine that we'd all go crazy they have 90% of the world's information, ingoing and outgoing.

That's right up there with water, but we don't see it that way.

No, we don't, and we should.

Because that changes how people take in information, speak to one another.

Because remember, Google owns YouTube as well, which is this, Google is the number one search engine in the world.

Do you know what the second biggest search engine in the world is?

YouTube, also owned by Google.

So So they control the massive information economy, which involves how we think, how we express ourselves, how we vote,

all these things.

So to think that somehow

this is just the information ecosystem and there are a thousand flowers blooming is a joke.

I mean, people say, oh, well, use DuckDuckGo.

The fact that DuckDuckGo or Bing exists says nothing to me about the reach of Google's power.

They exist, and that's it, right?

If just 2% of America is using DuckDuckGo, it doesn't matter because 90% of America is using Google.

Correct.

So I think you have to break the concentration here.

And that's the only thing I'm confident right now that Washington can do in the short term because, frankly, there's no expertise.

You've watched enough.

There's so much more than that.

You know, you've watched enough movies to know.

I mean, I love people like, you know, that's what happens in the movies.

Yeah, and this is probably worse.

And what do you think?

I mean, movies sell people because they recognize some truth in it occasionally.

Yeah, this is what happens in the movies.

And what happens in the movies is anybody who tries to break up that amount of power and money will be destroyed.

Are you telling me that Skynet was just foreshadowing?

Yeah, seeing that China,

they actually named their monitoring service Skynet.

Let me ask you, did the

leftists after Reagan, they realized they didn't have the corporate boardrooms and you can't win without the corporate boardrooms.

So they spent 20 years getting into the corporate boardrooms and we see the effects.

However,

people think this is a Marxist

communist movement.

I think those

I think I think those people are just the useful idiots.

Did the left win or did the worst part of corporatism win?

It's almost like they came in to infect and they just taught how, wait a minute, if we destroy this, we can get all the money by using these kinds of ideas and we'll be...

we'll be the evil corporation in the end, you know, all for the good of people.

So who won here?

Who's using

So, this is a very interesting question, and I'm curious what you think about.

Let me lay this out and see what you think.

So, I think the sequencing here is important.

Because I think what you just laid out is kind of what happened.

And you see this, it's very hilarious to me.

Like, companies, so it's so much signaling, right?

Companies like Apple are like throw up this huge Black Lives Matter banner on their homepage, and they're meanwhile they're like using Chinese slaves.

Like, it's just, it's just, it's like so much signaling, right?

Like Amazon is like, oh, here are these, you know, 15 movies for Black History Month.

You know, don't talk about the fact that we make our warehouse workers, you know, pee in bottles and they die on the floor, right?

So there's like definitely a component of that.

But the other side of it is,

and this is where I'm, where I'm interested in what you think.

I think that the leadership of a lot of these corporations, to your point, they're not ideological.

They're just sheep, right?

And so they've been led down this line and that's what they'll do.

But, and I think they're largely Gen X sort of boomer generations.

But what concerns me the most is that you have this mid-level management that is completely ideological and woke and coming out of the universities,

just...

willing to wield power against everyone in really tyrannical ways and they are ascending to leadership of these companies and in many ways the leadership that exists is terrified of them.

You know, look no further than the New York Times and what happened to James Bennett and the fur that that newsroom has been in.

That's exactly what happened.

It was the mid-level, you know, woke tyrants overthrowing their elders.

And so my fear is that unless you have the current leadership, the sort of Gen X boomer level,

have enough courage to tamp that down, and I'm not sure they do, we will actually see tyrants ascend to these boardrooms.

And it won't be the, you know, I'm painting BLM in my cheek while I, you know, exploit my workers.

It will be an actual weaponization of the corporate sector that we have never seen.

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I think you're accurate on that.

I think that's absolutely right.

And I think, you know, you've read The Fourth Turning, I'm sure.

The Fourth Turning talks about the Gen X.

I'm the last year of Gen X.

And I just kind of feel like it's my job to go, hey, the next one's coming up.

Can you just like chill?

Just chill a little bit.

You know what I mean?

I don't want to take, they took all the stuff.

They screwed it all up.

I'm just here going, you got to stop taking stuff and you got to stop wanting to kill people for taking stuff.

You know?

And if we this is the Gen X moment, we need Gen X to rise up.

We do.

We do.

I just don't know if they'll do it, but

we do.

We need to, look,

people your age,

the

damn hippies have been a pain in my ass ever since I was a kid.

They came in, they were all about them, me, me, me, me, me, and they did whatever the hell they wanted, and everybody left in their wreckage behind.

Then they got to power, they became the person that they said they hated the most.

They took it all, they won't leave.

They're so arrogant, they won't leave.

The 90 years old and they're all still up there.

I'll tell you what we're going to do.

What?

Everything you've done has left wreckage behind you.

So your generation

is a little pissed off if you even know what they took.

You'll never know what America really was like

because they destroyed it probably,

you know, right after you were born is when this stuff really started to kick in.

So you're pissed off.

You're not going to get anything and because those people who are almost dead took and destroyed everything and now you're turning against me

and lumping me with them and I'm like no no no no no

stop

stop

let's

let's just have a discussion this doesn't work anymore This is the moment that Ronald Reagan said would come.

If you keep going down this road, you're going to enter a time where there are no good options none of them are good because you've burnt every bridge

well here we are now how do we how do we hold ourselves together how do we live i hear this all the time

i can live with people all i need can you give me

Give me eight of the Bill of Rights.

Give me eight.

Okay, we can argue about guns and, and, I don't know, quartering soldiers in your house.

But can you give me eight of those?

If you can, okay, I can live next door to you.

But if you can't give me the Bill of Rights,

I don't know how to be in a country and run a country that is diametrically opposed to itself.

Yeah.

How do we fix that?

How do we get there?

This is the great existential question of the age because, you know, this is the situation we're at.

How do you have a self-government with people who literally don't agree on

the foundational aspects of what it's like to live together?

And the new right, I think, is trying to answer that question by saying

we have to

upend the left's march to the institutions.

We have to decentralize all the power centers that have existed that allow one side of the ledger to tyrannize the other.

Because that is what what is happening right so this is really

this is what's happening at the eu right now they've cobbled these countries well we used to be like independent countries believe me when i moved in texas in 1982 it was a different country okay but we used to have pride in those individual countries just like europe did and they're sick and tired of being told you're not special and you'll do what germany says and greece you'll have all that stuff paid for by whatever.

It's not that they hate the other countries.

They just want to be themselves.

So are we seeing the dismantling of all of that at the same time we're seeing new framework that's even worse being built?

Well, this is why I think the old solutions of, you know, that the old right says, well, just let federalism work, just let the market work in theory those things work when you don't have the other side trying to bludgeon you out of existence like they don't want to your point they don't want states to assert their own identities right they don't want red states to be allowed to make decisions

um you know i read this great piece a couple of years ago that talked about this phenomenon where you know it talks about how the left pushes you to the margins and then demonizes that spaces that space on the margins right they're never going to leave you alone They're never going to stop coming for you.

And that's why I think it's, if we want to get back to this radical federalism, which I think in the end is what's going to save us, if we want to get back to this radical constitutionalism, which we absolutely need, we need a right that is willing to go in and defend us.

Right?

And use the government to dismantle the administrative state, to dismantle this massive, you know, corporate-friendly tax code that has amassed so much power into these institutions that hate us and that have sold the American way of life out to China.

We need to create a policy that supports communities so we can once again say local government can solve problems because our communities have been decimated.

And yet we sit here and say, oh, the community, your neighbor should look out for neighbors.

Your neighbor strung out on opioids and lost its job because it got shipped to China, right?

We have to have a policy that is defensive and offensive to push forward

the things that make life meaningful and sustainable in the United States.

And right now we don't have that.

The right over the last 30 years has allowed our public policy to decimate the things that we care about.

We need a public policy that protects those things, and that's going to mean renegotiating trade agreements.

I don't want to hear about multilateral trade anymore.

I just want to hear about bilateral trade.

Like, frankly,

I want to hear more about rebuilding our manufacturing capacity, not through some sort of big statistical management from Washington,

but a tax code that actually supports and encourages and incentivizes companies to stay here.

I want to see an immigration system that protects American workers because so much of what we're seeing again has been policy choices that we made.

It's not just the market and the invisible hand.

No, no, no, no, we pushed ourselves down this road.

We have to haul ourselves back again, not to to sort of dictate how people live from Washington, but to create the space and the conditions for families to flourish, for middle-class workers to do well.

You're seeing somebody create that space, and that's Ron DeSantis.

I mean, he is,

I mean, I'm really,

I'm kind of a disgruntled Texan because Florida's not supposed to lead the way.

They got the mouse house.

That's enough.

That's all they get.

We're supposed to lead the way.

you

um and it but if more governors would deal with things the way he is that's why i'm i support the um

i think the last line of defense is our um is our attorney generals

and our sheriffs The sheriff is supposed to be notified before the FBI can come in and kick down your door with a team.

You know what I mean?

What are you doing operating?

Back off.

The banks are being investigated, not by a single person on Capitol Hill,

but just this week, 19 attorney generals are calling all those banks and saying, what are you doing here with ESG?

I mean, so

can the states

do it if we shore up our states?

Yeah, I think this has to be a multi-pronged project.

You know, I want to get back, and this is what I mean where I say radical federalism, right?

But I think it's naive to also think you can just simply do that, what Ron DeSantis is doing in a red state, and the federal government is not going to aggress against it.

They will.

So this is what I mean.

They don't want to let you exist.

And I think we have to, you know, our federal legislatures have to get control of that.

And, you know, you look at the Department of Justice right now.

Dobbs was overturned.

Pro-lifers, you know, won a victory.

And the Department of Justice responds by beginning to arrest pro-life protesters for singing hymns outside an abortion clinic.

So we have

a multi-pronged approach, I think, that we have to engage in.

And I would actually add to your list, in addition to sheriffs and attorneys general, I would add state treasurers, I think, have a big role to play.

And if you watch

Riley Moore, who's the state treasurer of West Virginia,

has been really creative and inventive in pushing back against ESG, forcing companies out of his state for trying to put the coal companies out of business.

You know, I think there's a whole number of weapons and tools that state treasurers have available to.

So, the one thing that they have,

they will have

just a whole bunch of new troops all the time because they control the education system.

I think the Department of Education needs to be abolished.

And

these teachers' unions are the root of

real evil as well.

How can

what do we have to do to be able to

have fresh troops on the horizon?

Well, I think this goes back to when we were talking about the corporate boardroom and sort of my

thesis on the woke millennial middle management takeover that I think is really going to threatens to tyrannize the corporate sector in like even new ways.

That is the pipeline from the university system.

Right.

And all of these things that the right has ignored on the institutional side, the cultural institutions, the educational institutions, we have to be prepared to deal with that.

And this goes back to my idea of why the new right has to divest and decentralize and defund.

We need to start.

The university system is a big part of that.

We have to,

they benefit in myriad ways from our federal policy and our tax code and all these things like that.

That has to be yanked out from under them because they have become far too powerful and they're pumping out, you know,

there was always this joke a couple of years ago, right, where it was like, oh, the gender studies majors, ha ha, wait until they're going to have to get a real job and then it'll disabuse them of all their crazy ideas.

Well, you know what?

That gender studies major is running your HR department now, right?

So we have to pay attention to this pipeline.

And frankly, I'm very comfortable with our federal policy addressing it the way I just described, which is yanking the benefits that they have from the tax code and removing this ideological terror from the heights of our society because this is where we train our elites, right?

I loved, by the way,

Jim Ho, a federal judge on the Fifth Circuit, who said, I'm not going to hire Yale law school clerks anymore because these people are crazy.

These people are, we need more of them.

Yeah, we do.

Right.

In addition to, you know, cutting them off from the federal benefits, which I think would go a long way in cracking the hold they have on free thinkers running our country.

Rachel,

who are you meeting with?

Who is there a, please?

Tell me, there is a group of people like you that are

meeting and pushing

this

policy.

I mean, I can't take the right and their think tanks anymore.

I don't care what you think.

What are you doing?

What are you doing?

Is there anything like that that is really working and pushing forward this kind of questioning at this point?

Yeah, it's been...

It's, yes, I will say there is a small, bedraggled, scrappy group of people trying to come up with what this looks like in policy and pushing it forward as an actual policy agenda.

Because the last like two or three years, this sort of new right national conservatism movement has been intellectual, right?

It's been an intellectual ferment, I think, among the conservative right.

But the problem is, okay,

you know, we've won the argument now, I would say, you know, in many ways.

What do you do now?

How do you actually enact policy?

And so that's the sort of next bleeding edge of of this movement.

And there's a number of us really iterating on this question.

You know, I don't always agree with some of the solutions that people come up with.

I think there's a danger.

There's a danger, I think, for the new right to simply be sort of warmed over leftism.

You know, that there's a danger, I think, also on the other, the flip side of that, there's a danger for the new right to simply be captured by, to be sloganeering and simply be neoliberalism under the guise of MAGA or whatever.

Right.

So there really needs to be a focus on, you know,

creatively addressing this moment while maintaining the sort of freedom and

sort of, again, radical constitutionalism that I think has to define it.

So I think the challenge is twofold.

You have to come up with a policy agenda, but then you have to actually have leaders with the cojones to actually do it.

And that's always a challenge, too.

So I've never offered this to anybody ever before.

But if you can get that scrappy ragtag team together, I would like to have you over at my house for dinner.

I'd love to host a dinner just to be a fly on the wall to listen to this conversation.

I think it is vital, vital that we are having these conversations and thinking for the very first time in my life.

I mean, I was a Reagan guy, you know, big government, peace through strength, all that.

Get the hell out of all of these things.

Stop telling the rest of the world what to do

enough.

Yes.

Enough.

And there are a lot of conservatives that are no longer,

they used to be, but they've seen the results of it.

How many times do we have to learn this lesson?

It doesn't work.

And there's a laundry list of those things.

And somebody who begins to articulate those things, it will catch on quickly.

So, anything I can do to help you and others, please let me know.

That's so gracious and amazing, and we will take you up on it.

Okay, good.

I hope we can talk again.

We're not very, yeah, I would love to.

I would love to.

We need friends in this moment more than ever.

And they will prove to be strange bedfellows a lot of times.

But as long as they, um,

as long as they're not advocating violence or um revenge,

they're a friend of mine.

They're a friend of mine.

Here, here.

Thank you.

God bless.

Thanks, Ben.

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