A Second Look: Vivek Ramaswamy's Appearances on The Megyn Kelly Show

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's Sunday bonus episode. Today, the latest edition of our A Second Look series. This time, a second look at a GOP politician we talked about last week quite a bit, Vivek Ramaswamy. He is running for governor of Ohio, but before he got into politics, running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he was an author, entrepreneur, and frequent guest on The Megyn Kelly Show. We knew him back before he was a big name and we loved how non-woke he was and how he was pretty fearless in fighting the same forces we were and now he's ahead, I think. It depends on what you look at, but he could be the next Ohio governor or he could lose to Amy Acton, which would be devastating for Ohioans, but we'll see. In any event, here are a few of his appearances from the past five years. Let me know what you think. Enjoy, send me an email after you've watched this and we'll see you Monday. Megyn at megynkelly.com. I saw Elon last week and he was talking about how he really will take this position if Trump wins of slicing and dicing the bureaucracy and trying to cut. The question was, what do you think it'll be like, 4% of the government budget? And he said, it's going to be a lot more than that. And he talked about how we'll find off ramps for these employees to join the private sector. We'll help support them for a year or two while they try to find another job, but that the government's just over bloated unnecessarily so and it's slowing down everything. It's undermining the progress of the United States. This has been a big issue of yours. I remember when we were preparing for that presidential debate with you, we were looking at your proposal to, for example, possibly just cut everybody with an odd ending social security number, like getting rid of all the people who I know. So start with that. Well, and we used to look behind the scenes. I don't have any biases against people would say like, this is ridiculous. Yeah, this is absurd. And I was like, I'm an even you're just upset because you're going to go anyway. But the point is simply we need to cut the size of this government. That's part of the problem that there really are people making massive decisions in these administrative agencies and otherwise that are not elected and who answer to no one. So what do you make of this? I mean, you could be a part of this, but I've also heard the possibility of a vague Ramaswamy in a Trump administration being the new DHS chief, which is actually really exciting. Oh, it's a few paths forward for me. We can we can talk about that. I'll turn to it. You know, after the election, senator, governor, cabinet, all things have been speculated on. My view is let's focus on we've got a job to get done, decisions to make shortly thereafter. But I will say this point about dismantling the federal government. That is something that was the centerpiece of my own presidential campaign. It's the centerpiece of the book that I'm putting out this week as well. We got to be honest. I'm a realist about this. You're always going to be taking a risk. It's not that this is the perfect solution that you're going to cut 75 percent of the federal bureaucrats at the exact right amount. You don't know what the exact right amount is. There may not even be an exact right amount, but there's two risks you take. One risk is the risk that Republicans have typically opted for in the past. Which is that you cut a little bit around the edges and try to reform it. And you get that right. And if it's not enough, you're going to go back and cut some more. That approach doesn't work. The approach of incremental reform, in my view, just doesn't work because it's like cutting off one head of an eight headed hydra. It grows right back after you cut it off. The other risk you take is not the risk of not cutting enough fat, but the risk of cutting so much that you also cut some muscle. And we have to be honest about that. Is that a risk we're willing to take? It's a tale of two risks. Which one? Are you willing to take? For my part, I am willing to take the risk of cutting so much fat that we also cut some muscle and where we are, we can then at least from a blank slate build up what we otherwise might have chopped that we shouldn't have in the first place. That's the honest approach we have to take. Now, you're always taking a risk. That's the risk I think we need to take for the country today, because the reality is most laws today aren't made by Congress. They're made by unelected bureaucrats who write fiats with the strobe. They're made by bureaucrats who write fiats with a stroke of a pen. And those today, historically have carried the force of law. Now, the idea is some of those people, can't they be fired by those who you elect? Not really. The way the system at least has historically worked, according to interpretations, these civil service rules stop you from firing 4 million of those federal bureaucrats. So you bring up DHS, you know, do we need mass deportations of millions of illegal aliens from this country? We do. But my caution would be to don't forget the second mass deportation we also need, which is the mass deportation of millions of illegal aliens from this country. So you bring up DHS, you know, do we need mass deportation of millions of illegal aliens from this country? We do. So if we recognize on immigration, on trade, not so much in foreign policy, but immigration and trade in particular, right? Is it a protectionist objective or is it more of a libertarian objective? We don't touch on that too deeply, but I expose that in the book. But the real question is filling a deeper vacuum. What does the current conservative movement actually stand for? We've gotten very good at criticizing the other side, identifying what we're against, right? We're against wokeism and transgenderism. We're against wokeism and climatism and COVIDism. We're against the race, gender, sexuality, climate agenda. But what exactly do we stand for? And the thesis I offer in this book is we stand for truth, actually. That's what we believe. And the things that I lay out in this book, if I wrote them 10, 20, 30 years ago, I would tell you to save your money and not buy the book because the truths in this book are so obvious that it shouldn't require a book to actually justify them. Today, I'd give you the opposite warning is if you repeat many of the things that you do read, you're going to be potentially taking real risk, risk of losing your job or your kids getting a bad grade in school because that's the cultural environment we live in today. And so my goal in writing this was to arm a lot of everyday Americans with the hard facts and arguments to be able to have the dinner table conversations that they're otherwise not having. And I do think that's how we save the country, Megan, is all of us starting to speak openly again, say in public what you'll say in private at the dinner table. This is my fourth book. I've written is my fourth book in the last four years, but I did things a little bit differently in this one. This book is not and does not pretend to be an academic exposition. At the end of every chapter, there's five hard truths laying out five key facts out of that chapter that somebody can take with them to the dinner table on debates about the trans ideology, to climate ideology, to whether nationalism is a bad word, to the nuclear family, to arm people every day. To probably state what their true beliefs really are, but with the benefit of what some of the facts are that this book helps them bring to those dinner table conversations. That's how I think we ultimately save the country. She's a Kamala Harris voter. And and Charlie did some rhetorical battle with her. And then you did some not battle, but had a back and forth with her. That was very interesting when there was an attempt to force her to say, what exactly is it about the Trump agenda that you don't like or the Kamala Harris agenda that you do? And here's just a bit of how that went. I disagree with the some of the laws that are being pushed in Congress that are against. The LGBTQ community and the trans community. My view is that if you're a fully grown adult, 18 or above, you're free to live how you want, dress how you want, marry who you want, if you want, if you're over the age of 18. I agree. But you are not free to indoctrinate children in schools who are not yet of the age of consent. You are not free. Just as you're a 17 year old or a 15 year old can't get a tattoo on their own. I don't think that you should be able to go. You are not free to do it. should be able to live freely while still treating children differently. If so, we're on the same side of this issue. - I agree with the majority of what you said. However, I don't think that you're understanding the implications of the laws that are trying to be passed. - My only ask is forget the personal attacks or the stylistic attacks, focus on substance. The more we debate that, the stronger we're gonna be as a country. - So I don't know what place platform it was that censored your use of the term chemical castration, but that's what you had said there, that we shouldn't be doing that to minors. This plays right into one of the themes of Truths, the Future of America First, which is there are two genders. Right. And I think that what we see is when we talk about this across the country, most people actually share the same foundational value set on this and comments grounded in hard biological truth. So I sort of unpack a couple of the trans dilemmas that the transgender ideology poses, even for people who may have hard convictions and where they think their beliefs are. So there's two X chromosomes. You're a woman, X and a Y, you're a man. But one of the mysteries here is it is the same LGBTQIA plus ideology that says the sex of the person you're attracted to is hardwired on the day you're born. That now says your own biological sex is totally fluid over the course of your life. That's a paradox. It's a further paradox that actually there is no gay gene, but there are two sex chromosomes. So that's actually particularly an ironic case to say that the one that has no gene is the one that's fixed immutably at birth. But the one that has definitive chromosomes is the one that's totally fluid over the course of your life. There's other contradictions we explore as well, which is the fact that on one hand, if you say that this is a disability or a mental health disorder, you're considered to be transphobic, that if a kid says that their gender doesn't match their biological sex, that that is an evidence of a mental health disorder. That's my belief. But to say that many people will label that transphobic at the same time that they will say it is transphobic not to have public health insurance pay for gender affirming care or actual gender conversion surgery because it qualifies under the Americans with Disabilities Act. So I try to go factually through the chapter in arming people at home with at least these hard facts to be able to have the open arguments at the dinner table that they're not having the public. And one of the things I did in that chapter, Megan, is I closed it out with a personal story from the campaign that I hadn't shared before, which is actually one instance where there was a one of the embeds, one of the media embeds, the press embeds on our following our presidential campaign. She would challenge me on this issue repeatedly in front of the camera. But one of the conversations we ended up having was actually off camera, but I could tell that it was a really meaningful issue to her. Turns out she identified as non-binary. So I don't know if she would even object to me referring to her as she. I thought she was a woman. And, you know, she ended up it was a deeply personal conversation that we had where I actually got to understand from her own experience when did she believe that she was of one gender versus the other, what that struggle was like, a little bit about her family upbringing, some challenges she had overcome. Turned out to be one of the hardest working press embeds in our own press corps that was following us. Somebody I thought actually did a great and did her best to do an amazing job. And that's why we actually built a great personal relationship and bond over the course of the campaign, even though we disagree deeply on my own views or her views on the trans debate and what that means for policy. And I think that that's also one of the paths to unite the country, which is even on issues like this, I'm not going to compromise on standing for what I believe is true. OK, standing for truth. But that still gives us the opportunity to build relationships and we're not going to build our relationship based on settling our difference of opinion on this question. But we can build a relationship based on still agreeing or even engaging on matters outside of this particular debate, which we otherwise decided was an irreconcilable difference. So I was one of my takeaways from the campaign. She remains a personal friend. But let's get real. The most most of the trans community activists will not even speak to this debate. So I'm going to get real. The most most most of the trans community activists will not even speak to this debate. And that's because you won't stand behind the transing of kids in the medical community, minors who can't consent to these procedures. You won't consent to having this ideology thrust upon them in third grade, as was done to my two sons, first, the older at our old school, like that's where the rubber really hits the road, because that's where we're really going to have to fight. It does. And I think the reality is that goes for trans activists, which is a tiny minority of a tiny overall minority. But what's happening in the country is we're not really suffering from a tyranny of the majority in the United States. We are suffering from a tyranny of the majority in the United States. We are suffering from a tyranny of the fringe minority. And the dilemma is our constitution and our republic and the safeguards and the guardrails we have built into our legal system are really good at protecting against a democratic tyranny of the majority. There's nothing really there to safeguard against a cultural tyranny of the fringe minority. That's actually up to us. And, you know, one of the things I've learned, Megan, is that there's two approaches I learned over the course of my presidential campaign and observing other players in that arena as well, is that sometimes what you have, you have two levers you could pull. OK, one is going to have one country and then you're either going to compromise on core principle and policy, or you can actually take a more compromising approach on style without actually being compromising on principle or policy. One of the things I've found is sometimes when we fall into the trap of actually going guns blazing on style, when push comes to shove, look at the Republican politicians in the end. Many of them do actually end up compromising on policy or principle in the end. One of the things I'm trying to do, both with this, the book and the way in which we're going to college campuses like the one you aired before across the country, is to be able to engage in an affable manner with people who deeply disagree with us, but without compromising at all on the core principle of standing for objective truth. So my goal here is not to arrive at a compromise position that, OK, well, maybe we're going to be OK with chemical intervention by the age of 15, but not with surgical intervention at the age of 12. And we call that a day. No, I don't think at the age until you have the full age of consent. I don't think you should be able to undergo genital mutilation or chemical castration. And I'm able to say those words here. Hopefully somebody isn't silencing them out like that other tech platform did as we speak right now. So I'm not going to compromise on the core views that I hold. And I think part of what I try to do in this book is to arm people with hard facts to be able to stay true to that, but at the same time to remember that we're being strong enough to protect our kindness. And we do care about kids who may be confused, who are going through a difficult period of time, who are going through a difficult period of time, who are going through a difficult period in their time in their life, where they may go through all kinds of psychological struggles, including the fact that they lose track of what they believe their gender is. That's a symptom of a deeper psychological issue that we have to have the compassion to also address. And so one of the things I just think we're going to be more successful if we're able to show the country that, yes, it is our inner kindness that we're fighting for, but we're not going to give an inch on truth or our core principles in getting there. I actually think we're going to have to make fewer compromises if we're a able to stylistically reach people in a way that we otherwise aren't maybe doing the best possible job of. And that too is one of the things that I'm hoping to arm people with through this book is hard facts and arguments, but to be able to deliver them in a way that actually might make somebody take their earplugs out and to be able to just reach not just the people who agree with us, but especially the people who don't or think they don't using our style as a way of opening it up rather than compromising. On actual policies, that is definitely you these days. But I have to say I see Trump Bannon and even myself more as the front line next to Braveheart in that movie, you know, with shields in front and forward because there's really no talking to the people who have changed the laws on this. And it's not just the trans activists. It's the lawmakers. Who bend the knee and people who feel like their whatever tax situation, their ability to hire illegals, whatever it is, is more important to them than what's happening to our children as a result of an open border, then what's happening to our children as a result of backing this ideology as though it's something. And those people must be defeated, defeated, not reasoned with. Am I wrong? Yeah, of course. But I think that's a that is a it's an and. And I think the other thing is that if our process of defeating them causes us to actually miss the opportunity of bringing along, I think the vast legions on the other side who aren't really against us but are lost, then I think we also still lose the broader war of the country that we actually care to save and revive. The other thing I have seen, Megan, and I think this is worth calling out, is that oftentimes when we do show up guns blazing, what happens in the end? Let's play that forward. We actually do end up compromising quite a bit on policy when push comes to shove. So I'm proposing a different tradeoff here. And this also the book is called, in a truth, the future of America first. I think this, too, is part of the importance of the future of America first is I don't care about the appearance of appearing pugilistic. I care about achieving the actual goal in an uncompromising way. So I don't care about the appearance either. Yes, but I do think there's a time to, you know, there's a time to inspire people on the importance and on the importance of the issues. And sometimes. Expressing your outrage over what's being done to our children, you know, the castration of them and so on also can be effective. So I like I think you need all different kind of players in the movement and each has their own role. I've seen you be. the other role. I was there. I mean, the second debate in the Republican primary, you were much more feisty and this one and everybody bought and paid for. And then I've seen you sort of change into somebody who talks more the way you're talking today. And I see it. It works for you. I don't think we need it. You need all keys. You need the full you need the full. You know, I think we need leaders who can fight. We need leaders who can fight hard, unsparingly when necessary. One of the things I learned over the course of my campaign, the Megan, a lot of people who even worked for me or my companies in the past, colleagues, close friends, one of the things that they said they were disappointed about through the process. And it landed with me is that they know I'm a fighter and I'm a competitor. And that's what the American people also got to see last year for me and through the debates and through much of the campaign. But there's also an element of me that's in addition to being a fighter, somebody who remembers what I'm actually fighting for strong enough to protect your kindness. And I think that we need leaders who actually can turn on both modes when the right time calls for it. And that's one of the things that I learned from the campaign. But also one of the things that I'm trying to do through this book is you won't see me at the end of a at the end of a hard fight, compromise on principle or policy in the end. And I think Republicans do it too much. But one of the things I've learned is we actually buy ourselves the latitude to hold the line when we're able to use multiple different modes of persuasion to get there. Tech entrepreneur and author of the book, Woke Inc. Vivek Ramaswamy joins me now to explain how Elon Musk can liberate Twitter successfully. Welcome back to the show, Vivek. Great to see you. Good to see you, Megan. How are you? Good. So all show long, we've been talking about something you wrote in a piece for the Wall Street Journal on April 26th. And it was a piece called How Elon Musk Can Liberate Twitter. You and our mutual friend Jed Rubenfeld of Yale Law School. He's married to Tiger Mom, Amy Chua, who's amazing too. Long story. Okay. Anyway, I love the way you put it. So I stole it for purposes of this show with attribution, which means it's not stealing. You write Twitter. Well, thank you. You don't have to do the attribution even next time. Oh, thank you. Spread the ideas and I'm happy. I'll take it. You write Twitter and others smuggle viewpoint discrimination into supposedly neutral content moderation categories, primarily misinformation, incitement and hate speech. Right. So your point is that all they do. All they do is viewpoint discrimination. And there's a reason that it always goes against one side. And they don't want to own up to it. So they just label it as, oh, that's pursuant to our policy against hate speech, against misinformation, against incitement, so they can still look like the good guys. Yeah, I think you've got that right, Megan. It runs just one layer a little bit deeper that allows them to get away with it, which is the classic modern problem of taking a political decision. But wrapping it in the veneer of technocracy. OK, so here's the thing. Much of what they do is viewpoint based discrimination. But some of it is actually the kind of thing that you have to do in order to just operate a functional social media site. So what I wanted to do in the piece, along with Jed, was to clarify what these different categories are so we could smoke the difference out. What do I mean? Even Elon Musk has said that he wants to remove things like spam that litters his feed. I think that's a good thing. It'll improve the user experience for Twitter users. If you didn't have some level of content moderation, all of the feeds would be filled by porn, by just unpleasant content, commercial spam, the kinds of bot driven content. So you need to be able to clean that up, even though that's constitutionally protected while still operating as a free speech platform. So that's the conundrum that Elon Musk faces. So what Twitter has been doing for a long time is that they have been wrapping in viewpoint viewpoint based discrimination by smuggling it into the categories of the supposedly neutral content moderation. And so my first suggestion, Elon Musk is to make sure that he smokes out the different categories and becomes really clear about what's what, because there's a very clear answer about what to do with each of them. Okay, first is genuinely false speech like commercially fraudulent advertising. Well, there's an answer for false speech. You have to prove that it's false. But if you do, you can take it down. But you shouldn't be able to take it down without actually proof of falsity. With respect to incitement. It's a private company, but actually the legal precedents give us a good standard that Elon Musk can use. If there's real proof of falsity, then there's really going to be an imminent risk of, say, bodily harm or unlawful activity. And it meets a Brandenburg versus Ohio test. You know, this is time tested stuff. It's been around for a long time. We don't have to recreate the wheel. If it meets that test of imminent harm, take it down. But it can't just meet the test of what a given Twitter employee thinks on a given day could theoretically lead to violence in the future, because that includes everything. And then there's that third category of hate speech. And this is the category that Elon Musk has to get rid of altogether, where any society that permits free speech has to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a false opinion and there's no such thing as an opinion that isn't allowed in the marketplace of ideas, even if that's an odious opinion, even if that's an opinion that hurts some people. That's part of what it means to live in a society that protects free speech. That's the principle that Elon Musk should bring to running Twitter in recognizing that hate speech is in a different category. And then, Megan, like, look, I mean, do a lot of people want to see racial epithets online? No. Are racial epithets a form of hate speech that express an opinion? Absolutely. So how do you resolve that conundrum? Are you just going to drive all of your users away? And this is where I come up with a really simple solution, along with Jed, that we printed in the pages of the journal today, which was that actually the thing that you got to be able to do is give users the choice. Twitter has this censorship regime. If you really like it that much, let the user opt into it or let the user opt into an algorithm that can show them content that they do and don't want to see. But don't make those decisions centrally, because that's what turns this from a free speech, what could have been a platform for really a centralized form of political censorship and related indoctrination. So that's the high level. I like the plan. However, I see some potential pitfalls with the hate speech policy, right? Because it's if you were to allow like what could be said. So if pursuant to those guidelines, you could say, let's let's make it somebody a fictional character, because I don't know, whatever, you know, Joe, Jane Schmoe, Jane Doe, Jane Doe is an effing C word, whose face should be bashed in, and relatives should be harassed. And then they retweet it. And they retweet it. And they like it, they like it, they like it, and they retweet it. And now it's trending. Jane Doe is an effing C word and all that stuff. It's not incitement. It doesn't call for immediate violence, it's likely to happen. It's definitely hateful. It's got what anybody would consider slurs. But if we're not going to ban them, then it should be okay. But it's going to create a shitstorm in Jane Doe's life, probably, right, because it's going to circulate, it's going to circulate. So what about something like that? Yeah, so just for the purpose of the example, Megan, at least for first discussing, are you okay with dropping the should have her face punched in part, but all of the other odious stuff still included effing C word, all that? You okay to start with that one first? Like, I don't know, I'm still working it out. You want to leave that in there? Okay, if it's, if you and I agree that the government could not ban that that would be a constitutionally the government could not ban it. Yeah, the government, the government could well, let's agree with that. So so for the sake of the example, let's just agree that that does not count as an incitement. It's not right. I agree. Okay, let's just put that in that category. Then let's talk about it. Fine. Because when that goes viral, some people may be on the other side of that. And I don't want to distract from that from the main issue, which is just there's a really odious thing you're seeing about Jane that's going to make her life worse. That's not going to result in her suffering from physical violence, but it's going to make her life worse off. And that's going to trend virally. What do we say about that? Yeah. So here's what I say about it. Most users don't want to see that kind of content on Twitter. They will have the opportunity to opt out of it. Many of them will be able to opt out of it by saying that they want to opt out by opting back into Twitter's pre existing regime, which would have that kind of content taken down. And others through their own user behavior will actually be able to train simple artificial intelligence, AI algorithms that Twitter uses today to effectively show people the kind of content they want to see. That's the other proposal that we make. But at the end of the day, if there are people who really want to opt in to see the kind of content that you just odious content, hateful content, content that doesn't make me feel better in my course of living my day when I see that. So I'm not going to go search it out. But let's suppose there are the kinds of people out there who want to search that out and say, you know what, that's what people say in the real world. And I want to see it unfiltered. Then I say that is part of what living in a free speech culture actually means. We support free speech in this country, not because it is not harmful. Free speech has harm. This was the same debate in 1787 as it is today. But we accept free speech and we embrace free speech, not because we believe it does not cause harm, but because we believe the right way for working out our disagreements is through more speech rather than less speech and through ultimately a free exchange of ideas that democracy and the advancement of truth ultimately depends on. So, you know, push comes to shove. There's a lot of reasons why I think the problem isn't as big as you might be concerned about there. But when the rubber hits the road, yes, I come down on the side that somebody should be allowed to say that and the users shouldn't be forced to listen to it. They should be able to turn that off, should be able to turn their settings such that they don't see that, should be able to opt into Twitter's existing paradigm, which wouldn't allow them to see that. But for those who do want to see it, they should be free to see it. And for those who do want to say it, they should be free to say it. I feel like it's just what bothers me about the way Twitter operates right now is such a statement like that would probably be censored under the present day rules, though. 100% I've been subjected to that on Twitter for years. And all you need to do is go back and look at the tweets at me after the Trump debate to see that. I mean, it was Absolutely vicious. And one of the top executives of Twitter actually told me personally that what happened to me was one of the reasons they started to think about, should we be moderating some of this content more? However, it doesn't make me in favor of these moderation rules. It doesn't make me say we should crack down on speech more on Twitter, because what's happened is they've just chosen their favorite left-wing causes and they crack down on, you know, back to the viewpoint thing, they crack down on the people who touch those sacred cows. So Twitter didn't like what the Trump supporters were saying about me, but they were 100% with all of the liberals on TikTok calling me a racist after I left NBC for trying to get into a discussion about how the society's acceptance of blackface has changed over the past 40 years. They loved it. Twitter amplified it. They let everybody go for it, right? No problem. They had no problem with that. So I don't, I have very mixed feelings about this content moderation thing, because I think it's just going to be employed against one side if we try to say, oh, the balance of decency would prevent this. Well, it hasn't worked out so well. Let's go to the harder question. The easier question is, is Twitter hypocritical in the way they apply those standards in a partisan way? Absolutely they are. The examples are countless. Jed and I pointed out several in our article of the way that certain of President Trump's tweets, were taken down when certain other- Oh my gosh, can I read that? That's a good paragraph. Let me just read that Vivek, and I'll let you finish your point, because that's, I wanted the audience to hear this. You write, "Conservative opinions about transgenderism are censored as attacks on a protected group. Conservative views on COVID are flagged as misinformation. In May 2020, Twitter censored as a quote, 'glorification of violence.' President Trump's quote, 'when the looting starts, the shooting starts' tweet, while leaving untouched Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's tweets calling for the destruction of Israel, and Colin Kaepernick's tweets supporting the burning of police precinct houses. Claims that the Democrats stole the presidency in 2020 are censored, while claims that Russia did the same in 2016 go untouched." And of course, the truthful Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed as misinformation. So such a good point about the Russians versus the Democrats, right? Such a good point. And this is an op-ed, so I can't, we could just go, we could write an entire essay on just the countless- list of hypocritical examples that reveal what's actually happening here is the enforcement of a partisan agenda, rather than a complicated adjudication of what content moderation means. But that's the easy part. I still think the question you're getting at before is, is the harder question, which is interesting to adjudicate and talk about. Let's just set the rules of the road and assume that right-wing people run Twitter in the future, and then left-wing people run it in the future, kind of like our federal government works. I would like to see a platform in which the rules of the road and the kind of content that makes it through to everyday users shouldn't vary as a function of who's actually in charge or the politics of the person who's in charge. And I guess to pick up the strain of our last conversation, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, Megan, is what objection would you have, you know, in having the position that at least you were taking, what objection would you have to the idea that the user can decide for himself or herself whether or not they want to see it? Right? Decentralize the decision. In a way, they already can because you get to choose who you follow and unfollow. So if you, you know, I actually have a very funny story about this, Vivek. You have a very funny story about this. So when I was at Fox News, there was some account and it tweeted out some like thought of the day. It was like some introspective self-help type thing. I'm like, "Oh, this sounds like a good account. I'll follow them." And then I was getting into the elevator at Fox News and they tweeted the same site with which I was becoming familiar, tweeted, and I quote, "Forgive me for going there. The shocking truth about anal sex." I was like, "Okay, I need to unfollow. I'm going to need to unfollow." And I literally went to hit unfollow, but instead I accidentally hit like, and I was getting into the elevator. And so I couldn't like unlike, it was too late. I was in the elevator. I was like, "Oh my God." You know, I was like, I just liked this tweet and I didn't mean to like this tweet. And thank God by the grace of God, the, you know, the black box that is the elevator didn't allow the like the, the mistake to go through. So I dodged a bullet. My point is you might've had some unfollows too, and people will be a little confused about, about your new tastes in, in content. So we do have some control. We have control now to some extent about control now. I mean, I think that, I think that in a certain sense, you didn't have the control to say that, um, there's a person who you decided to follow, but within the people you follow are people who follow president Trump or people who follow Ayanna Presley, who says a lot of things that may be closer to incitement to violence than what president Trump has said in the past. It doesn't matter. You can even have it on a, on a content specific basis. You don't control what someone else retweets. People don't necessarily agree with everything they retweet, but might put it out there for people to see. If you don't want that to disrupt the flow of your day or your experience or your user experience of the platform, you can a set your current settings to be exactly what it is with Twitter today. This would be on my proposal to Elon, at least leave that intact. Don't tear that down. Just create a parallel experience that allows people to see what's on the other side of the veil. And even when you create that parallel experience, you can use your own behavior to further train what's exposed to you and not, but that is different from saying that certain, a certain person who's expressing a viewpoint, however, odious that viewpoint was about Jane Doe. That is still a viewpoint that in our society, there's no such thing as a false opinion. There are false facts. There are no false opinions, but when there are no false opinions, even if it's an odious opinion, there's no such thing as a false opinion, but when there are no false opinions, even if it's an odious opinion, there's no such thing as a false opinion, it's one that a society that protects free speech has to be committed to protecting. And I thought Elon did a good job of this. You know, it's easy for him to say, but I thought he did a good job of it nonetheless to say that he believes that the people who are every bit as critical, harshly critical of him should have a platform on Twitter, just as he does. That's the culture of free speech on which this country was built. It is a culture that involves trade-offs. People got to, people have to remember the free speech advocates included the world of free speech is not a rose colored hunky dory world. It is a, challenging world that exposes us to many trade-offs of the experiences we face, the risks we take by allowing people to say what they want and express the opinions that they want to express that is, that has costs, but starting in 1787 and by my book, every bit holding true in 2022, those are the trade-offs we accept in return for having an open marketplace of ideas that allows the best ideas to win, that allows a democracy to thrive, that allows the pursuit of truth to actually achieve its goal of. Because the thing is, if we, if we have a policy that says you can't say the thing about Jane Doe, like, and you know, we should be bashing in the faces of her friends and relatives or of her. Um, if we ban that, then you're going to open the door to, you know, the trans people saying, I, you put me at risk and my family at risk when you say I'm actually not a woman, right? Like that's what they claim now. This is harm. You do violence to me. You threaten me. You, you know, you're, you're challenging my very right to exist. And that's how they get these sweeping bands. They take something that seems objectively reasonable. Like you shouldn't be calling for the bashing in of somebody's face and say, that's exactly the same as you saying, I don't accept your chain, your claim that you can change biological sexes or you can change genders. So it does become a slippery slope. You almost want to kind of just go with what's what it wouldn't be okay for the federal government to ban Twitter. Can't ban, you know, I liked your original piece with Jed, you know, a year plus ago that we talked about on our show, which is just treat them like they're like they're essentially government agencies and they had to follow the same rules. And then we have jurisprudence that we can just follow to figure out what's okay and what's not. Yeah. And that was an assumption baked into this piece that Elon would not be a steward for the government because historically what's been happening with these platforms is that they're absolutely deputized by the party in power in the United States. Now the democratic party to do through the back door, what government could not do through the front door. And since nowadays we have to describe everything through a rhyme, the way I describe this one is, the, what do you say if it's state action in disguise, the constitution still applies. That's the principle there. Actually, if you're really acting on behalf of the state, then you're bound by the constitution. That was what we published in January, 2021. Now this was, this piece was based on the assumption that Elon Musk is not going to be acting as a pawn for the ruling democratic party in the United States, but he still has some irreducible challenges for how you make it a user-friendly platform that people want to use while still protecting free speech. This was sort of a, how to guide to accomplish that goal. But, but exactly the more fundamental first principle, it should go without saying, but maybe it's worth saying nonetheless, is that the first principle is that Elon Musk should be crystal clear that he will not be censoring content on behalf of the state. And Megan, it's worth remembering. I mean, just think about the context of what's going on in the world right now. Look at what's happening in Russia. Okay. This is in the news. There's a major war plan out in, in Europe, a whole separate topic we could, we could talk about another day, but let's think about what Vladimir Putin is doing in Russia. He has banned the BBC. He has banned all kinds of misinformation, and as the state, the party in power, transparently saying that there's misinformation about the war in Russia coming from the toxic Western media, his people aren't allowed to see it. That is what an autocrat does. That is what gives us the moral standing to be on the other side of that geopolitical struggle. But I worry about living in a society where actually what we're doing here in the name of taking down hate speech and misinformation as decided, or at least influenced by the party in power, isn't that much better. In some ways it might even be worse because at least Vladimir Putin bans it directly. Whereas what we have here in the United States is a government that pretends not to do that, but actually influences private parties through a combination of threats and inducements and joint coordination behind closed doors to effectuate a really similar outcome. And I hope if there's one outcome of this war in Ukraine on the other side of the on the other side of the world, it is that we still look ourselves in the mirror to ask ourselves what it is that gives us the moral authority to stand up to autocratic regimes like Russia and China. If we go through this war ending without us having gone through that cycle of introspection, I think it will be a lost opportunity for the rediscovery of the few strands of national identity that still define who it is that we are as a people. It's not the color of our skin or even our shared heritage, because guess what? In this country, we don't have one. What we do have is a set of shared values. And one of those values was a commitment to one side of the tradeoff that we set in motion in that Constitutional Convention of 1787, when we said that we protect free speech not because it is easy, but because it is worth. Preserving that reminds me, of course, we've had the Biden administration already say they're concerned. They're concerned about Elon's purchase of Twitter. And this is we have both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pushing for the online crackdown on disinformation. Vivek, Hillary Clinton, she's she's the biggest and best purveyor of disinformation. She's the one who came up with the whole Russiagate lie. We know that now. It was repeated by John Brennan, then head of the CIA, to Barack Obama while he was the sitting president. Hey, Hillary's come up with this plan. It's a distraction from her email scandal. She's going to say that he has some ties to Russia to try to undermine the guy's candidacy. She and Barack Obama separately now speaking out about disinformation online, pushing for the for the Europeans to crack down on it with their big tech, which they are. And Barack Obama now making this like the biggest platform of his post-presidency push that we need to crack down on disinformation. What do you make of it? This is a surprising reversal of what used to be a liberal concern. The idea that you might have an Orwellian state that suppress the free flow of information. The idea of fighting against that was a liberal idea. Whether this is a liberal idea or conservative idea today, I don't really care about the label, but it is interesting just to see how far the so-called progressive movements in this country have come. And I also love the shift and the easy sort of, let's just say, conflation of disinformation and misinformation, which is also something that you say the words enough times, people start to view them the exact same way, kind of like equality and equity. But that's a that's a game of language jujitsu. But you know, what I would say here is just imagine the narrative without saying that this is in the United States, that you have a party in power in the United States that adopts a false report from one political candidate to attempt to go so far as to plant a mole in the opposition party. And then when that opposition party takes over, but then when you regain power four years later, you're also working behind the scenes to threaten private companies to take down information that otherwise could prevent the opposition party from getting elected and to take down misinformation that's defined by the party in power and to take down hate speech that the party in power doesn't like. This would be something out of a George Orwell novel. Maybe it will be something out of modern day Russia or China and yet reveal the curtain and ask which country is actually doing it. That's a description of modern day reality here in the United States of America. That's right. That is chilling. I think it is chilling. And it is. Am I disappointed that it has to come to an actor in the private sector or set of actors in the private sector to be able to stand up to this, which is fundamentally a problem with our civic culture and even the state itself? Yeah, it's disappointing that that's where we are. But at the end of the day, I think we're getting pretty close to the last line of defense on basic principles like free speech and open debate is something that we preserve and protect from state intervention or from state corporate intervention. And there's, by the way, a word for the merger of state power. And corporate power. That is the definition textbook definition of fascism. I think that that's something that we have to worry about here on American soil. And as I hear these words come out of my mouth, you know, five years ago, I would I would have listened to myself and thought this sounds like some kind of conspiracy theorist. I wish this were a conspiracy if it weren't a reality that I'm just describing in plain language. It's not even hiding in plain sight. It's a line in plain sight. And I think that that's part of what makes a moment like the takeover of Twitter and otherwise, you know, let's just say mundane topic for M&A takeover news. To have such political importance in where we are as a culture today. And I do think that that's real. I think it's real. Need one more to answer because we're out of time. Do you think the sale will be completed and Elon will buy it? Yes. Okay. All right. Now, listen, Vivek has another book coming out. It's called Nation of Victims. It comes out later this year. You can preorder it right now and you should. The subtitle is Identity Politics, the Death of Merit and the Path Back to Excellence. I presumably had a little time to relax, see your family and you're getting back into the show. How's that going? It's good. I mean, it's a part of a portfolio of things I'm doing in the private sector. I during the campaign did something a little bit unusual, but I enjoyed it actually. And I said that if I was elected president, I was going to continue it from the White House because I think we need more honest conversation. One of the things I loved in the campaign was just speaking my mind freely and speaking my mind in the open. So after having taken a little bit of a pause and a break, I'm going to take a break. I'm going to take a break. I'm going to take a break from public life and time with family and let's just say recalibrating and collecting a year's worth of lost time with the family and kids. I'm now starting a number of activities in the private sector. And this is the first major splash I'm making, which is to relaunch the podcast that we started during the campaign. But I'd like to take to the next level by maybe broaching some frontiers that many other politicians or even others in the conservative media movement haven't really touched. And a lot of the other activities I'm taking on in the business world and otherwise, I'll be able to talk about the reasons why I'm pursuing those through this podcast as well. Great. I love that you're getting back on with it. And people want to hear from you now more than ever. And I would like to hear from you on this Trump trial and where we are, because this judge continues to fine him some $10,000 so far for alleged violations of what is to me clearly an unconstitutional gag order. You went to Harvard undergrad, Yale Law School, and have written some great op-eds that, I thought were so insightful and really genius even before you started to run for president. So here's Trump yesterday saying, you know what? Because the judge there said, if you violate it again, I don't want to do this to you, Mr. Trump, but I may have to put you in jail. And here was Trump speaking to that yesterday. I have to watch every word I tell you people. You ask me a question, a simple question, I'd like to give it, but I can't talk about it. Because this judge has given me a gag order and said, you'll go to jail if you violate it. And frankly, you know what? Our constitution is much more important than jail. It's not even close. I'll do that sacrifice any day. But what's happening here is a disgrace. All right, so I'll get to the media reaction to that. But what do you make of the real threat now? It's a real threat that they may put the former president of the United States and likely, you know, certainly GOP nominee back in. Look, I think that it will all automatically backfire instantly politically, even though they intend it in the other direction. But the question is, is this a First Amendment violation or not? I believe it is. Because when you have a president in the middle of a political election, a presidential election, who cannot defend himself against what are fundamentally political attacks against them, or even debates that have major political consequences in the middle of an election, and then you try to stifle that person from speaking, engaging in political speech in the middle of an election, and they've ultimately made this a relevant issue in the election. So the idea that this is not political speech is nonsense. That is an affront to the Constitution. And if we are a country that prizes one thing, it is a country that allows you to criticize the government. And if they're saying that this man cannot criticize the government, that would be a First Amendment violation, no matter who it is. But it's a First Amendment violation on steroids when it is a political candidate who is unable to criticize the government led by the political party that he's actually running against. So then the question is, are these entire charges themselves politicized in the first place? Or are we talking about this technical legal sphere that's different from the realm of politics? I think if you look at the merits of this case, Megan, frankly, there are none. That's what actually makes this a political exercise in the first place. Just go to the heart of the legal theory that Alvin Bragg is pushing against Donald Trump. It's just worth taking seriously. What exactly is that legal theory? A lot of people have a lot of trouble saying what Alvin Bragg is even pursuing, and for good reason, because the charges are vague. Everybody who's honest has trouble saying it. Nobody has any idea what Donald Trump is exactly being prosecuted for. But I'm gonna give the clearest statement that I think I can, because it's worth smoking out. It's even uglier once you see what it is. The basic theory of this case is the underlying crime, besides the falsifying business records misdemeanor, the thing that makes it allegedly a felony, is that Donald Trump, according to Alvin Bragg's theory of the case, should have used campaign funds to make a personal, hush money payment. Well, let's just try the other foot. If Donald Trump had used campaign funds to make a personal hush money payment, the prosecution would arguably have a stronger case to go after him for that, right? That would be a misuse of campaign funds. People would normally give to political campaigns to advance political causes. Well, if you're using that to advance personal goals, including making personal hush money payments instead, they would be prosecuting him for that. So that's a perfect litmus test for whether a prosecution is politicized or not. If the defendant had done the exact thing that, in this case, the prosecutor is saying he should have done and could have been prosecuted for it, then that means they were going to get him going or get him going coming. And it does not matter what the actual underlying behavior was. And so that's what we're seeing today. That's what this alleged prosecution is about, is really fulfilling, speaking of campaigns, a campaign promise. And it was a campaign promise made by Alvin Bragg before he was elected to the position that he's in, which is to go after Donald Trump. And so if the whole thing's a political exercise, this is just a cherry on top, saying that he can't even respond to those political attacks at behest of imprisonment. Our founding fathers wouldn't be rolling in their graves. They'd be doing backflips. But the ultimate irony on all of this, Megan, is if that does happen, I think most Americans are poised to see right through it. And this will backfire on steroids as well, just as the prosecutions have in propelling Donald Trump to the presidency. I think you're right. I really think you're 100% right. You have a great point about criticizing the government and how that in particular should be allowed, as it is allowed. And this- I think this judge should recognize that it's allowed. But the thing about the jury was really galling to me, because why can't Trump criticize the jury? He didn't say juror number four is a hack. He said, and he got fined for this. He said, and I just pulled it up, that jury was picked so fast, 95% Democrats, the areas mostly all Democrat. And the latter clause seemed to be a modifier because he realized maybe he shouldn't be technically speaking specifically about these jurors. But why shouldn't he? Why can't he say the jury's mostly all Democrats? That's his opinion, having sat there day after day through Wadir. And that too is an attempt to say, you're not allowed to get the public ready for what's going to be a verdict against you, in all likelihood, because they're partisan opponents of yours. He just got fined $1,000 for pointing that out. That can't be okay. Yeah, so a lot of people really, it becomes difficult when you're sorting out what does the First Amendment protect and what doesn't it? So I have a simple rule of thumb here, Megan, but let's just take the different things that people will say. Well, yes, the First Amendment protects speech, but it does not protect incitements to violence. It does not protect fraud. It does not protect making false statements in a commercial context. That's fraud. It does not protect interfering in the proceedings of a court. So if you're going to distill it down to one thing, what is just from a First Amendment perspective, the First Amendment protects all opinions. That's what it protects, right? An opinion, no matter how heinous it is, no matter how much you disagree with it, no matter how unpleasant it is to hear, no matter the context, the First Amendment protects all opinions. And so, so long as Donald Trump is actually expressing an opinion, grounded in facts that he's also citing to bolster his opinions, it's protected speech as far as I'm concerned. That's true if it's Donald Trump or anybody, right? Anybody expressing an opinion about a trial during their own defense. Now, against the backdrop of the political context of this trial, it's unambiguous as you're expecting, you're expressing an opinion in the context of a political election where that trial would not have happened but for that election. That makes this a cut and dry case where he should absolutely be able to say anything he absolutely wants about those jurors. And specifically, he was actually talking about the selection process of those jurors that makes this unobjectionable. And so in many ways, is Donald Trump going to be hurt by that fine? No. I mean, if you think about the amount he's paying per second in legal fees, it's probably in excess of those fines. You know what? The judge indirectly may have actually done him and done all of us and how rotten this entire process is. If he takes that next step and puts him in jail, I think it would be regrettable for this country. I think it would set an awful precedent. I think we should be ashamed as American citizens on the global stage, having other countries looking at us, throwing a former U.S. president in prison for daring to engage in political speech in the middle of an election. If that happened in a different country, we would call that a banana republic or the stuff of autocracy. But happening here as an American citizen, I would be embarrassed as others look at our country. But ironically, I think it will continue to have the effect that all of these sham prosecutions have had, which is to further put Americans on the side of Donald Trump, even the ones who otherwise would not have been. Because it's not that they're on Trump's side, even. It's that they're on the side of justice in this country, one standard of the rule of law, and the idea that you get to speak your mind freely. And if you're going to get put in jail for doing that, if they do it to Donald Trump today, they're going to do it to somebody else tomorrow. And I think it's disgusting. And I think that most Americans see through that as well. Well, I don't think. The media finds it disgusting. Here's a little example of how they reacted. You're going to be shocked. Shocked. Watch. And the judge threatening the ex-president with jail time. It is really clear that the judge is, depending on the seriousness of the next violation, contemplating putting him in jail. And frankly, if that happens, it's not going to be because of anything Judge Mershon did. It's going to be Donald Trump's own choice. I know from my own reporting, I'm sure you do too, that Trump didn't eat on foreign trips. Because he was so afraid of germs. There's no way Trump himself wants to go to jail. Certainly not many black defendants who, if they came this close to the line, would have already been held in contempt of court and would have been incarcerated by now. And so he is getting the doest of process. And the idea that Donald Trump actually would want to go to jail is ridiculous. Anyone who knows him knows that. He doesn't even like to stay in a hotel. He won't eat food when he goes on foreign territory. You have to use the bathroom. His hair, his makeup. His skin. His skin. Like, he will be pulled apart. He doesn't have the metal to do it. So Donald Trump is terrified, you've got to believe, just by his issues with odors and smells and, you know, fear of disease. He threw down the gauntlet. If he doesn't throw Trump in jail, he would look entirely like a paper tiger. And Trump got that message. You know how much bravado, you know, this is not somebody who's thinking, you know what, I'm going to have a really great time at Rikers. Can I just make this the point in the program when we say none of this is normal? Oh, my God. Honestly, Nicole Wallace is the worst. She's the worst. She barely moves her lips when she's speaking. She barely has, it's just like a little hole that words come out of. I can't quite get it. And she's so sanctimonious for vacant. She doesn't know anything. She knows nothing about what Trump's habits are when he travels overseas. None of them does. But they want to pretend like, oh, my God, I'm going to have a really great time at Rikers. They're in the room with him, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, in the dining room with Trump. And they can tell you exactly how he's going to respond if he gets a day in jail. Well, look, she knows nothing about Donald Trump's habits. She probably knows even less about the law or an understanding or care about that as well. And I think that manner of speech is really funny. I don't like to pick on these minor details, but you actually hit the nail on the head there. It's all part of this air of sanctimony, right? The air, the vibe of authority without actually having any of the context. The content of that authority. And I think that's what so many of the modern media have actually become is the air, the genteel sort of atmospherics of having authority in the manner that you speak, the sanctimony that drips from it, but without having the first basis of an understanding of how the law or the Constitution works. And so it's completely backwards versus somebody who actually didn't speak with the right mannerism, but actually knew what they were talking about. That would be far preferable to me. Now, the schadenfreude, the level of rejoicing in somebody else's suffering. This is, I've never seen something like this, but we know that's exactly what we're to expect here from the media. They've been playing for this for a long time. The entire plot has been to really portray Donald Trump as a criminal. That's been, I think, a big part of the Democratic Party's goal in this objectionable pursuit of prosecutions against him. So it's no surprise that the media has played interference for them on so many other topics is going to run interference here as well. I think that's the less interesting part than to examine what is exactly the consequence here? Let's say Donald Trump is, God forbid, I think it'd be bad for the country, but thrown in jail. I do think that they've kind of put themselves in a box here because Donald Trump believes, I believe correctly, that this is an affront to the Constitution. He has a right to speak in the middle of an election. He's running to lead this country to be the commander in chief. So for him to buckle at the behest of what this judge who has no regard for the law or the Constitution on this set of issues, I think would be a bad outcome. So I think Donald Trump should continue to express his opinions because he's running for US president. And both he and the country deserve to hear his opinions on a matter of public importance. But the judge has now put himself in a box going out of his way. He didn't have to do this, but going out of his way to be able to threaten jail time. I think that that is something that unfortunately sets this up as a reasonably likely outcome. And you know what? Donald Trump's made a lot of sacrifices for the country, running for president, serving as US president. This wouldn't be the biggest of them. And so I think it would set a terrible precedent. I think it's gonna be bad for the country, but I think it is reasonably likely. That it does end up there. And as sad as that is, it's exactly what you would predict once you've opened Pandora's box with these prosecutions based on really no figment of the legal theory to back it up against a former president and a man running for US president in the middle of an election. This is just the necessary consequence and all the drama that follows. It's unfortunately what they signed up for in the first place. And I think that this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we're gonna see in the next six months. They're thrilled about it because they want his humiliation. You heard them talking about how he's not gonna be able to have his hair the way he wants it. They want his humiliation. That's why they were so angry that he leaned into his mug shot and went on the mugs and it went on T-shirts. And so they're waiting for him to be humbled, to be humiliated. And they keep waiting for the next chapter. Maybe Judge Marchand will get him there when he throws him behind jail bars and we can watch that and revel. The media, of course, has been a massive problem. You experienced it when you were running and before and after. This is a small ball story, but it's indicative. There was a reporter for NBC News, and she moved on to CNN. Her name is Michelle Kaczynski, and she posted a thread on X last night. She was very well known at both of those outlets. A thread on X last night, revealing her horror at a dinner she recently had with people who turned out to be MAGA. At first, she said, they seemed great on the surface for like an hour. And then, she says, the closeted guests over a few drinks began to slip their true MAGA natures. And she says, she marvels at how a, quote, normal group of people could support a politician like Trump, of whom she does not approve, going here from the Daily Mail report. One of the couples attended top Ivy League colleges, she writes, but now that it was University of New York, she says, she's not a member of the Ivy League. She says, she's not a member of the Ivy League. She says, she's not a member of the Ivy emphasizes their position on, quote, climate change and the fact that they use that term in air quotes, not scientists, clearly, and goes on from there. Now, Vivek, this is a woman who I've been around in the media long enough to remember, left NBC, was pushed out, I believe, shortly after the following incident, which went everywhere. She was doing a report on flooding after a hurricane in some American town. And she did the report from a canoe, as though she was stranded. This is the only way to get around. And in the middle of her live shot, firefighters walked through the live shot with the water up to their ankles. We actually pulled the clip just to show you. I mean, this is the dishonest media in a snapshot. Watch this. NBC's Michelle Kaczynski, I guess she's in the canoe, is in Wayne, New Jersey. This morning, Michelle, good morning to you. Good morning. Well, obviously, we're getting a nice break from the rain, but not the flooding. This is essentially now a part of the Passaic River in this neighborhood. I'll take it. Is there some kind of severe drop off there between the foreground? We still go back. We saw these guys a second ago, Michelle, walking. Are these holy men walking on top of water? What's going on here? Why walk when you can ride, you guys? When you have a ride like this, why would you want to walk? Is your oar hit? Do you have any ground, Michelle? Of course not. That was the end of her career. That's my opinion. At NBC, she was gone shortly there. Now she wants to lecture us all on how evil MAGA is and her horror at being exposed to the closeted Republicans and their views on the IVs and climate change and so on. You know, the people at that dinner party remind me probably likely of the firemen who were just walking right past her. They probably had something more worthy to do that were actually there for a purpose, had little regard for her presence there or whatever antics she was taking on. And, you know, that probably looks like a woman who's been doing this her entire career. So it seems like the same pattern continues. And this is a big part of the reason I'm actually, there's a lot of things I'm looking at doing with my time, but launching, relaunching a podcast, why am I going to take the time to do that is this gives me a motivation to exactly engage in the kind of conversations that American people are hungry for, regardless of what the mainstream media is stuffing out. And I think that's a big part of the reason I'm doing this. I think that's a big part of the reason I'm doing this. Stuffing down their throats. And I think it just typifies how the whole thing has actually become a charade. It's not just a sort of form of lying, Megan. I think mainstream media has lied about a whole range of topics. And I've talked about this extensively during the race. You've talked about it extensively for the last 10 years. Nonetheless, I think it's not just the lie. It's the pageantry around the lie that I think is actually far more bothersome. It's a production. It's almost like it's not just a lie. A lie is any more pretending to be that you're in the interest of objective news, but you're telling something that's not true. And I think that's false information. I think it's become closer to like a Broadway production in the same way that she's putting on a show. She recognizes and they're even talking about it on air. Why would you walk when you could instead be pretending to row? That's effectively what they're doing in the totality of their other reporting, too, is she could just be talking about the actual disagreements, the policy disagreements that she has between Republicans who are in that same room. And there's such a more interesting direction to go. It's like the equivalent of if she had just been reporting and interviewing those firemen. But instead, what they're actually creating is an alternative production that I think historically that business, maybe they think they're entertaining their audience, but it isn't even entertaining anymore. And I think that once you see that, you get closer to the flame of what's going on. It's not just they're spewing falsehood. It's like the equivalent of putting on a theatrical production and one that, like most theatrical productions, is failing. And I think that that's why it's going to come to an end very soon. You've set up my next clip perfectly, which is of Lawrence O'Donnell speaking of NBC. This is him on MSNBC, freaking out about the fact that yesterday at Trump's trial, what they spent most of the day doing was documenting the payments that were ultimately made to Stormy Daniels and the receipts of how that was done. Of course, no one's denying that the payment was made, but they need to get that in in front of the jury. It was not an exciting day in court, but it was to Lawrence O'Donnell. Watch. They wrote it down. A conspiracy was written out on paper. That is rare in criminal prosecutions. Prosecutors are usually left explaining to juries that, you know, criminal conspirators don't write it all down. But that is what they did in the Trump office on Fifth Avenue and in the White House. Today, Donald Trump's jury was shown the handwritten conspiracy. Donald Trump's financial mastermind, convicted felon Allen Weisselberg, put the conspiracy in his handwriting on Michael Cohen's bank statement. And then another financial officer in the Trump shop put the whole thing in his handwriting on Trump company stationery. Final handwriting in the conspiracy presented to the jury today were Donald Trump's signatures. Oh, my gosh. He had a breaking news chyron up the entire time. Breaking news. It's. No one's trying to hide it. We understood that these payments were made. This was a perfunctory day in court. This was not the apex of the prosecution's case. But the media can't get enough of it. It's it's like crack to them. That's right. I mean, it's an addiction. It's a breaking news. He's like breaking the news, like breaking the existence of actually distinguishing what is important to report to the public versus not. And it just bothers me. He has no clue. He's describing this to his audience base. As they wrote down the conspiracy, just if you had any first idea of the backdrop of what this case was about, like let's just see the first clue about this case, this allegation of falsifying business records, right, which is the first and state based the New York based charge that Alvin Bragg is bringing a that's outside the statute of limitations. But B, at most, even if that alleged conspiracy, I think a lot of that is actually also false and mischaracterized. But at most, that would be charged and could only be charged under the law. As a misdemeanor, unless you make up all of this other nonsense about this being a constructive campaign contribution that wasn't recorded as a campaign contribution, which, as we talked about before, rests on a completely flawed legal theory on its own and is completely misleading their audience of creating, again, that atmosphere. It's all about atmosphere. It's all about vibe of pretending like this is some sort of devious conspiracy. And you put up images of different handwritten documents. The audience doesn't know what to make of it. And the whole point isn't that their audience is too stupid to follow. It's the fact that these people were reporting to them or actually too stupid to report on it, but have just created this atmosphere, this vibe, the equivalent of that other woman with her theatrical production rowing across that river when, in fact, somebody could have just walked straight across it as we saw in real time. That's the equivalent of what they're doing with their portrayal of these documents, when, in fact, the average viewer, if what you need is actually somebody explaining to them what's actually going on, it's the equivalent of those firefighters walking straight across. And that's what's missing in most of the media today. But we can't just sit here and complain about what they're doing. They're in a dying business. And what we need is more alternatives to people to be able to explain to ordinary Americans, hey, here's what's actually going on. And more people are hungry to seek that information out for themselves. They've been lied to systematically for the last 10 years. Most people understand the basic premise that, you know what, you fool me once, shame on me, and fool me twice, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. And I think that people are hungry for that information. And I think that people are hungry for checking what they're hearing through MSNBC or through NBC News or CNN. And I think that's a good thing. And so this is part of, I take it to be a growing up of our culture. We, I think, have, I think, in the last 10 years, grown up, Megan, I think that's why we're seeing the decline and the influence of histrionics like this from MSNBC. And, you know, I take that as a mark of progress. It's a good thing. All right. One other point on the media. The president of ABC just got booted. She says she's retiring. She was reportedly, forced out, Kim Godwin. And as she goes, you've got the National Association of Black Journalists criticizing ABC for basically getting rid of a black woman. They're saying, we're concerned over recent media reports that seem to be written with the intention of undermining the leadership of the first black woman to take the helm of a global news organization. So you're because she's the first black woman to head a news organization. Many of the latest articles surrounding her leadership fail to demonstrate basic journalism by providing alternative viewpoints. They want more in the articles about how she was actually the greatest thing since sliced bread, even though her bosses didn't seem to think so, and neither did her underlings, according to the reports I've read, including by Oliver Darcy, who claims to have spoken to some dozens of internal ABCers. There seems to be an intentionality to cite anonymous sources, as Godwin's detractors, coupled with the use of derogatory or stereotypical terms to describe her. Meantime, these reports are totally ignoring sources and facts that speak to Godwin having significant support inside the organization. Now, let me tell you what's happened. She's gone now. This didn't work. She got canned, or she says retired early. This is what this group does. I'll just say for background, when I went over to NBC, the same group came out and threw a fit because the woman who had been in my time slot prior to me was Tamron Hall, who happens to be black. And when NBC called the National Association of Black Journalists to say, what are you, why are you giving us such a hard time about this? We have plenty of black prominent faces at NBC. They said, we're just doing a favor. Somebody called in a favor, which is clearly Tamron Hall, right? So this is what happens now, right? People who ascend to positions of power, whether it's as an anchor or a network executive, or a prosecutor, we've seen some of that in the Fannie Willis, Nathan Wade, Marilyn Mosby, who's just got in trouble. She's just got convicted twice of fraud-related behavior. She was a former Baltimore prosecutor. They rise to these positions of power if they happen to be people of color sometimes. And when it doesn't work out, Vivek, they use the race thing as both a sword and a shield, right? It's something that I'm fine to ride to the top. Like, it's fine if it's a chip for me. It gets me this advanced position. But then, if it doesn't work out, I get to play the race card again, you see. And my termination is 100% because of my skin color. Or your negative reports, in the case of the NABJ, are because of skin color. Meanwhile, as I point out in my case, someone who happens to be black behind the scenes is using skin color as a weapon. It's just, it's everywhere. It's why it's so pernicious. And these promotions based on race don't work out. And then when things settle down, the natural consequences get ignored by these same cast of actors. Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. I think it's starting to get a little bit old. And I think it is fostering, unfortunately, Megan, a new wave of quiet frustration that manifests as anti-black racism in this country that would not have existed but for this actual kind of racialized behavior. There's an article, it's a different type of media, but it's the same type of media treatment of, it's a scientific media. This is back when I was still in the biotech industry. That examined this detailed investigative piece, it was sort of in the healthcare press. It was like, I mean, detailed investigative reporting, bombshell reporting that found that black residents, so people in medical residency, those who are black were systematically more likely to be fired than their white counterparts and didn't finish their residency programs at the same rate, revealing a layer of systemic racism in the field of medicine that had not previously been exposed. And it goes through all of the explanations of the data points of how consistently, no matter what geography, no matter what institution, it was black people who were more likely to be fired from their competitive residency programs midway through. I read the whole article. The journalist, she must've been, I don't know if she was in early stages of her career. I assume she's a young journalist making a big bombshell story here. I just emailed her afterwards and asked her, had you considered the possibility that systematically the people allowed into med school and the systematically people who are allowed into residency programs have lower scores when they're a particular race, in this case, black residents and black med students are admitted systematically at lower scores. Is it surprising then that the people who actually tended on average to have lower scores are the ones that aren't thriving in residency programs? And might that play some role, some impact on actually seeing a disparity in the races of people who ended up getting fired during residency? And her response was, I think it was genuine. She was just saying, I hadn't considered that. Thank you for pointing that out to me. I think it shows, I mean, this must be people who are younger in this profession of reporting on this have become so inculcated by the narrative that I think it just takes basic analysis. Somebody who points a basic obvious fact that her own editors, her own publisher, her own supervisors should have for any base level of reporting for a journalist, at least called out one contrarian hypothesis that didn't have a single mention in a 2000 word investigative bombshell piece. And I think it shows, you know, most people see through that, right? And so I do think it is fostering this kind of new wave of racism, even anti-black racism that we otherwise wouldn't have seen because when you tell people you can't criticize somebody or you can't air your opinion, that manifests itself in new and more toxic ways. And so I think it's unhealthy across the board. And yes, if you have people systematically put into their jobs that wouldn't have otherwise gotten that job on the basis of their genetic attributes, like race or gender or sexual orientation or anything else, then if you apply, if you apply meritocratic criteria afterwards, you are going to see a disparity in who's fired or not. It's not a controversial thing to say if you got your job because of race, but then you're measured based on performance. Yes, I think it is likely that people of, people of certain demographic attributes may be more likely to get fired from those positions. I think the right answer across the board is forget the attribute of race or gender or sexual orientation in the first place and just hire the best person for the job. If it's in journalism, who's actually going to do the best journalistic work and report that to their audiences? If it's in medicine or in science or engineering or whatever it is. And I think that ironically, then you're going to see less of those disparities and firings on the back end. Most people know this intuitively, but when you force them to bottle it up, I think they start to harbor animus, even racial animus. And the very people who are supposedly fighting racism through these anti-racist efforts are the ones actually throwing the kerosene, throwing the fuel on the final burning embers of racism in the first place, starting the whole cycle all over again. And I, sadly, Megan, I think that's where we are. It's so true, Vivek. I feel like we're just in the beginning of this wave where all these DEI programs, which now are being renamed, now they're just changing them to inclusion because DEI has been adequately stigmatized. Now it's just inclusion. Or our old school in New York is now really renamed DEI to belonging, which it's just about belonging, which is a nicer word for a very problematic thing. So as a result of all these programs, all these folks who were, you know, not qualified were elevated based on skin color or their lady parts or their heritage. And maybe some will make it because they have the merit and many won't. And then, and so this is the beginning wave of, let's see how they do. And if they don't do well, they're going to blame that too on race. And what's the end result of that going to be? A hesitancy to hire these people. So this whole game, it does not in order to the benefit of the very people they hope to elevate. Oh, it's self-defeating, of course, Megan. I think that that's why they're codifying a lot of those on the front end as well. It's an interesting jujitsu move that you described. You now are going to see a retreat in the use of the word DEI, different word, same concept. You actually see that in the corporate sphere as well. You know, ESG has earned itself a negative valence, a negative connotation as well. I founded a firm called Strive that competes against BlackRock. We pushed hard on this. Now what are we seeing is a retreat from the use of that term, but they call it sustainable investing or whatever it is instead, adopting the same sort of, the same sort of social criteria. But they know this is going to have a discursive effect on stopping the hiring of those people on the front end on the basis of demographic attributes. And so that's why those are codified in some senses of quota systems. But where that then goes upstream, Megan, is it still hurts the very people it was supposed to help, not because they're less likely to be hired necessarily, because there are still effective, hard quota systems to make sure that they're filled, but in the attitudes that people have towards them. And I think that's the most unfortunate aspect of it at all, right? It's the scariest piece. I mean, it's really sad, actually. I've been in environments, I've built companies, built organizations where I don't look at, I could care less about what somebody's demographic attributes are. I care how good they're going to be at doing the job, which happens to have resulted in hiring multiple Black women in positions of executive power. I didn't hire them for that reason. I hired them because I thought they'd be the best person for the job. But one of the things that happened was you saw a lot of frustration from people around them and would say, you know, and it made me sad. In one of those settings, she happened to be a very, very highly paid person, high ranking in the organization. And you'd have people scuttlebutt around the people who couldn't make it in the same way that she did, saying, oh, she only got her job because of her race and gender. When in fact, in the context that I was operating the company, that was flatly false. And I think that's the sad consequence of this is it does hurt the very people it was supposed to help. Not necessarily because they're not going to get the jobs or whatever, but because they're going to be viewed differently. I mean, somebody like Ben Carson has been through this his entire career, ended up graduating at the top of his class, but wasn't regarded, in the same way, because many of the people who look like him are known to have gotten that position in the field of medicine or whatever else because of these racial quota systems. And I think that in that sense, it leaves us worse off, literally creating a form of racism. I'm not just talking about the anti-white and anti-Asian racism that's embedded into the entire program of affirmative action and the DEI agenda. There's a lot of that, anti-white and anti-Asian racism. And, you know, a lot of people will say there's no such thing as anti-white racism. I disagree. Any discrimination on the basis of race is definition internationally racism and it's problematic. But it's not just anti-white and anti-racism. The law recognizes it as illegal. Keep going, sorry. Yes, it does. It's a good reminder to people it is illegal. But even worse than that, the net consequence of that is it actually fans the flames of even an anti-black racism that otherwise would have retreated to irrelevance. Once you reach the promised land that the civil rights activists wanted in the 1960s, it's precisely that you have this sort of masochistic desire to restart the whole cycle. And that's exactly what's happening, hiding in plain sight before us today. Yeah, I'm going to take a break, but I will say we're on the tail end now of a four-year period where the country lost its mind post-George Floyd and got rid of SAT scores, started to discount actual grades, then went full DEI, then went full DEI. In terms of its admissions to all these IVs. And now they've inflated the grades. So now these same folks who got into Harvard and Yale, who otherwise would not have been admitted, are just getting A's and A minuses as a gift. It's not because they've earned it. And then there'll be a pathway into med school based on those same falsities. And at some point, they're going to hit corporate America or medical America, God forbid. And the realities of all that puffing up are going to hit them and the rest of us. And that's when the shit's really going to hit the fan. All right, stand by. Vivek stays with me. Quick break. Don't go away. You cannot tell me in the United States in 2024 where, shut the f*** up. You cannot tell me where I can or can't walk. These are terrorist supporters. And they are supporting Hamas. What is worse, me saying the F word or them praising Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis? I'm not the problem. You know I'm not the problem. I'm a law-abiding citizen. These people support terrorists. Why are you punishing me? Can we get some space, please? Can we just raise your voice? Okay, I'm not going to raise my voice. I'm not raising my voice. So I can't stop you from calling me. I cannot. And I'm not going to try. But I don't understand what your purpose would be because I think you know where we're going to let you out. And do we want that? Respectfully, I am not the problem. Please, if you need to cover up your face, cover up. I want to let all of you know you are not going to intimidate Jewish people. You can hide behind your masks as long as you want. We will not be scared, okay? Unbelievable scenes. That was MIT, according to the Daily Wire. And one Jewish student handling these protests, the anti-Israel protests, like a boss, I have to say, it was perfectly done. I refuse to pretend that I am the problem. Why are you telling me to not go on my campus, police officer? Why don't you escort me right across my campus and through this encampment, as is your job? And the cop, I believe, was out of line and saying, you can do it, but you're going to be disruptive. Who cares? It's his right. He's going to disrupt their takeover of his campus. Vivek, what do you make of what's happening on the campuses right now? I mean, what's happening on the campus? First of all, we're learning a lot of this is manufactured, Megan. This is not actually students. Second thing is I think what we're seeing is if you look at, I think it was Michigan's graduation, where you saw just the raucous cheer at the commencement, 90 plus percent of people in the audience cheering as a few of the disruptors to the proceedings were removed. I think the reality is most people on the college campuses do not agree with the use of these disruptive tactics to destroy their universities. So I personally think this actually presents a, not to take it to the realm of politics for a second, but a political opportunity for Republicans if they just have the courage to show up this year on college campuses this fall. I mean, you look at swing states, most of them have great college football teams. People are going to be tinged by what ended up happening this spring. There's an opening to say, you know what? You might not have thought of yourself as a patriotic pro-American conservative or whatever, but many people on those college campuses are hungry for the alternative to what they're seeing set up in these artificially set up encampments and artificially constructed building takeovers on their campuses. And so I think that's the first learning is this is not just a supposedly a tyranny of the majority. These people are standing up against chanting intifada when in fact, if you listen to the audio, many of them are chanting infitata. They don't even know the word they're supposed to be chanting. But the majority of people on the campus don't agree with that. This is a tyranny of the fringe minority. And that presents an opportunity for conservatives, Republicans this year if they're willing to step up and seize it. The other thing I would say, though, is even many of those protesters who are supposedly protesting, they don't really know what they're protesting for, especially those who are students. Right. That example of people chanting infitata when in fact, they're trying to say intifada. They don't even know what they're saying. Right. Exactly. It could be gotostata for all we know. And so I think it's just another symptom of, you know, I think that there's a it's understandable that there's the debate about anti-Semitism, but I think it's a symptom of something deeper that's going on, which is a generation that is truly lost for purpose. Not the whole generation, but the fringe minority still. Even that fringe minority is really just hungering for purpose and meaning and identity. And they are looking for it any place they can find it. It's like the equivalent of, you know, you have these commercial parades in Manhattan and one week you'll have the Dominican Republic parade and the other week you'll have the Puerto Rico parade. And the next week it'll be the India Day parade. And when I used to live in Manhattan when I was in my early 20s, one of the things you would notice is it was the same people in each of the parades. They were doing, you know, the same music and backflips. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that in that context. But that's what it reminds me of here, where the same people who are marching for one cause in the aftermath of George Floyd's death are the same people setting up encampments and quasi-violent riots in a different context. They are starving, just as other people are doing it for money in the context of commercial parades. In this case, they're doing it in a perpetual search for satisfying their own hunger for purpose and meaning. And I think that in response to it, we have to, if we really want to fix the problem as a conservative movement here, I'll say, we got to do better than just pointing out their endless hypocrisies because they'll keep giving us endless hypocrisies. And I think we're going to be in this constant cycling churn unless we offer an alternative vision to say, hey, if you're actually hungering for a purpose, there's one of them represented in that flag right behind me, the American flag. If you have a hunger to be part of something bigger than yourself, that's what America actually offers. If you don't play to that flag, you're going to pledge allegiance to quite a different flag instead. I think that's the genesis of the transgender flag, why you'd see more transgender flags on the streets of Washington, D.C. in the month of June than you do see American flags. And so if we want to get out of this sort of cycle of psychologically deranged people latching onto causes, showing up to protest when it's one cause today and a different one tomorrow, and the irony of standing for the transgender cause and standing for the Hamas cause is they're fundamentally incompatible with one other. You know that if you want to try to go to most of the Middle East and hold up an actual transgender flag, see how you're treated. It doesn't even make any sense that you're espousing the same kinds of people, espousing fundamentally incompatible causes on different days of the week. It's a deeper hunger for purpose and meaning. And in that sense, I think it's actually a reflection of a failure of the patriotic, pro-American, pro-conservative movement to offer an alternative vision that's actually able to satisfy these people's search for purpose and meaning. And so I think it's not so much that most of them are anti-Semitic as it is that they're psychiatrically deranged, that they're lost. I don't say that in a disparaging way. I say it in a way that reflects a deep-seated kind of mental illness that has really taken a foot of a generation in America that if we're serious about fixing it, we're not going to do it by scolding it out of existence. We'd have to call out these hypocrisies as they occur, but we've got to do the harder work of actually addressing the root cause of that mental ailment. And until we do, we're just going to see more of this time and again. That's fascinating. I think you're right about that. And we've seen what looks very much like deranged behavior. I mean, the students trying to pretend that they're just like the Selma marchers demanding that we ferret out Plan B and dental dams to them on their patriotic march. Like, no, I think, go back to the history books. This is not how it works. We don't have to fund your abortion while you're in the middle of your protest over your cause. But time and time again, we're seeing these absurd examples of this behavior. But of course, as with anything in America, we overreact to the news of the day. And I think you feel as I do about the latest example of that, which is this so-called anti-Semitism bill that passed overwhelmingly in the House, where we're now trying to redefine in the law the definition of anti-Semitism. It passed 320 to 91, 70 Democrats and 21 Republicans voted against the measure, but overwhelmingly popular. And the new definition of anti-Semitism is going to recognize a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as a hatred toward Jews. And then there are examples, including accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group and making dehumanizing or stereotypical allegations about Jews, such as the power of Jews as a collective. This is It's crazy to me, Vivek, that it is not illegal to be a racist, to be a bigot, to be an anti-Semite, to be a transphobe in America. It's illegal to make hiring-firing decisions based on that, harassment based on that. But we've lost our way if this thing passed as healthily as it did. Absolutely, Megan. And this brings even some of our earlier discussions full circle. We talked about in the context of the Donald Trump gag order, what does the First Amendment mean? It means you get to express all opinions, regardless of the content of that opinion. So then, I see these people on college campuses are hungering for purpose and meaning. There's a great purpose, the United States of America. That's a purpose that can fulfill your hunger to be part of something bigger than yourself. And what is America? It is a place where you get to express any opinion. No, that doesn't mean you get to disrupt the way a college campus operates. No, that doesn't mean that you get to disrupt the way that a college campus operates. No, that doesn't mean that you get to disrupt the way that a college campus commencement proceeding operates or that you're able to be violent. That's not the expression of an opinion. But if you're talking about the basic expression of an opinion, no matter how heinous that opinion is, and I do think it is heinous to be able to make comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany. It's disgusting, but it is an opinion. And what makes America great, what makes America itself, is that you get to express those opinions. And so, in many ways, what the conservative movement should be doing is standing for the ideals that this country was founded on and use that to lead the lost, deranged mentality of the United States. the lost, deranged, mentally ill, Gen Z and generationally lost members of the other side And so, what the conservative movement should be doing is standing for the ideals that this country was founded on and use that to lead the lost, deranged mentality of the United States. And so, what the conservative movement should be doing is standing for the ideals that this country was founded on and use that to lead the lost, deranged mentality of the United States. to say, hey, here's what it means to be an American. Instead, what we're actually doing in response, many of us, I mean, not us, but many people who have a little R after their name and serve in the House of Representatives, is to adopt the same methods of the left in a way that actually erodes our own moral authority to talk about things like free speech, to be able to say there are certain opinions that legally cannot be expressed. And Megan, this is not a bill that was proposed. This is a bill that has passed Congress, the larger of the two chambers of the Congress, now awaiting passage into law in the United States Senate. I think it completely erodes any moral authority that we have to ever preach about free speech if we are literally restricting the content of speech or opinions that can be expressed and codifying that in a federal statute. It's disgusting. It's not that you need the money. It's that the viewers need to listen to the message. That's what's important because you outline the problem brilliantly, brilliantly calling people out on their nonsense and and sort of diagnosing how we got here and how it needs to stop, how it needs to stop. Give us an overview. So my basic thesis in the book is I actually pick up where I left off my last book, Woke Inc., which was about the curious merger of political and social agendas with corporate America's interests. But the conclusion I came to at the end of the book is it takes two to tango, right? Companies cannot get away with politicizing their agendas if their customer bases don't ultimately want to go along with them. And so what I do in the new book is I ask the question of what's actually going on in our culture. And I think where I left Woke Inc off was with the idea that there is a vacuum of national identity in America. There is a hunger for purpose and meaning and identity that isn't filled by the cheap fast food that corporations feed us. But what can we fill that void with instead? Well, right now, the case I make in the book is victimhood narratives. One's identity as a victim has become America's new national identity. Black victims, white victims, liberal victims, conservative victims. As a first generation American, I see it in second generation Asian Americans and Indian Americans too. Victimhood has become America's new national identity. It's a currency. It's like a currency that's trading at a bubble and people are cashing in while the bubble is trading at an all-time high. But the case I make in the book is that what we really need is to fill that void with a different national identity instead, a national identity based on the shared pursuit of excellence. It is the reason why most immigrants come to this country. It is the reason why my parents came to this country. But the path from one to the other is a complicated one, and it runs through some uncomfortable places. And that's a big part of what it took a book to explore. And that's why I chose to write it. I didn't think I was going to write a second book this soon, but I think of it as a sort of sequel to Woke Inc., asking ourselves how we can fill that vacuum of national identity with something more meaningful that doesn't just criticize the poison, but hopefully dilutes it to irrelevance by filling it with something I think far more rich and meaningful instead, which is this shared national identity that I propose built on the shared pursuit of excellence. I'm thinking about Sheryl Sandberg and her book Lean In, which encourage people to work hard and go for it and make sure you have a seat at the table and don't just say like, oh, I can't or, you know, force yourself to raise your hand and be the one. And then Michelle Obama coming out and saying, you know, basically, you know, that shouldn't that doesn't work. Like sort of speaking back, pushing back on behalf of people of color like, OK, rich white lady. You don't understand that that doesn't work. Meanwhile, Cheryl, I think her dad was an orthodontist. It wasn't like she was she couldn't pay her family bills when she was growing up. But she's gone on to become one of the richest women in the world thanks to her own hard work. All right. And with all due respect to Michelle Obama, she wound up at Harvard Law School. She was Princeton undergrad. She was at a white shoe firm in Chicago. She did pretty well for herself in America, too. But, you know, she sort of tried to push back on the push for excellence, being like, it's harder if your skin is a certain color? Well, the problem is it's what I call kind of the Heisenberg principle in quantum physics. It's the social equivalent of that. So what does the Heisenberg principle in quantum physics say? It says that you can't measure a phenomenon like the spin of an electron while also actually not changing the way the electron itself spins. So the two are inextricably linked to one another. This is what we learned from in quantum mechanics. the principle in the social world is effectively you cannot at once describe the social world without actually affecting the way that social reality works. And so that's a long way of saying that when we describe ourselves as victims, victims defined in the form of racial identity politics, or gender identity politics, or even partisan politics, that actually contributes to the world you create. And so in some ways, what Michelle Obama says may become true because the people who listen to her and she herself think of herself that way. And they are a victim of their own self-conception, of their own vision of their own identity. And I think if you deny of the United States. is standing for the ideals that this country was founded on and use that to lead the lost, deranged mentality of the United States. So one way or another, as I say in the book, we see ourselves as victims of one another, but the reality is we're victims of ourselves. And I think it's the question of human agency that's at the heart of the book, at the heart of identity, is to say that either you are an immutable agent on a tectonic plate of group identity, a prisoner of whatever direction that tectonic plate moves, or you're an agent that can define for yourself your destiny in the world through your own hard work, your own commitment, your own dedication. That's the path, right? That's the case for identity I make in the book. It's the case for American identity I make in the book. I think that's actually the vision that unites us or once united us as Americans. I think it can be so again, but the path to get there isn't going to be easy from where we're starting today. Well, while I'm on Michelle Obama, she's kind of a good example of all this because she claimed that she was the victim of racism sort of infamously. While she was first lady, she said that she was in a store and that somebody didn't recognize that she was the first lady. And thinking she was a staffer at what was like a Walmart or something like that, asked her to get the person something off the top shelf. Meanwhile, it's Michelle Obama is tall and she described this woman as short. And it was completely reasonable that the person saw a taller person and said, Hey, would you help me out as many of us have done over time? And Michelle Obama had already told that story in a funny, lighthearted way and apparently forgotten, not claiming to be the victim of racism on a late night show. But she got. In front of one of the historically black college audience for graduation speech and told it like, I, too, am a victim. I have been the victim of racism. And the media on the right wing start, you know, are like who had long memories were like, no, you can't get away with that. And honestly, remember, she she had some negative pushback because she said when her husband got nominated or when he won, it was the first time in her adult life she was truly proud of her country. And even on Friday, Vivek, even on Friday, Thursday, Friday, whichever it was, when they unveiled. The Obama's official portraits, you know, his his painting and hers, even in that setting, she's been first lady twice. Her husband was reelected. He was elected. He was reelected. People want her to be the next president in large numbers. She had to go there about herself and our country. Here she is. This is not 13. So for me, this day is not just about what has happened. It's also about what could happen. Because a girl like me, she was never supposed to be up there next to Jacqueline Kennedy, Kennedy and Dolly Madison. She was never supposed to live in this house. And she definitely wasn't supposed to serve as first lady. To me, it felt unseemly to go. It's an America bash. That's what it is. It was on Wednesday. Well, the thing that she misses is that the woman that looks like her did live in the White House for eight years. And at some point there. It may have been a point in our history somewhere measured in centuries plus decades ago where that may have been an appropriate conversation to reckon with the past. But at some point, we ultimately have to engage in mutual. tool forgiveness and decide that we are going to move on. That's actually the heart of the case I make in the book. The path from victimhood to excellence runs through forgiveness. And that's uncomfortable terrain for a lot of people, but it's very difficult to give up your status as a victim. So there's a game theory problem here, even. I don't mean to be too philosophical about this, but one of the cases I make in the book is, so Immanuel Kant actually talked about a paradox of fishermen, where at the end of the day, if you want to fish, if you have a community of fishermen, if you overfish, everyone ends up with less fish. But every fisherman still has an incentive to be able to overfish himself. But his reason for not doing it is that ultimately the whole community would suffer if he took advantage of that for himself. I draw an analogy to the tales of victimhood that we now tell, because when somebody gets a competitive advantage from seeing themselves or describing themselves and holding themselves out as a victim through an affirmative action program to get into college, whatever the case may be, everyone loses out. Our national identity is the air is sucked out of it. The size of our economic pie is reduced. So everyone is left as a net loser in the collective when we each individually describe ourselves as a victim. But when you have the incentive structure culturally that's been set up that at the end of the day, victimhood is what gives you cultural power. It is what gives you cultural relevance. Sometimes it actually pays literally, quite literally, financially to be a victim. Then it's a collective action problem where everyone has an incentive to describe themselves as a victim. But at the end of the day, it's a collective action problem where everyone has an incentive to describe themselves as a victim. But at the end of the day, it's our national identity and the decline of our nation as a whole that we see as the net result of that game theory problem. And so there's numerous ways the surface does. And you see it, by the way, it's not just Michelle Obama. You see Kamala Harris. I was even just listening to that clip, Megan. I was remembering the moment where she was in that debate with Joe Biden and described herself as that girl in the context of busing and desegregation. People forget this is a woman whose two parents were both tenured professors in the United States. And you know, her own academic achievements, unfortunately, did not match up to actually what the cards that she was dealt is, you know, that wasn't supposed to be a woman that that that ended up in the White House. Michelle Obama says, look, Kamala Harris, that was supposed to be a woman that actually was well-educated and performed academically well, like her older sister did going to Stanford Law School. I mean, unfortunately, Kamala could not actually step into those same shoes herself. So she had to she had to invent this victimhood narrative instead, reinventing liberal arts universities of top tier liberal arts universities. And so, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book, you were just talking about the Duke BYU example earlier. That's going to get dismissed soon as a conservative talking point. There's just a small fake hate crime hoax that was dismissed as a conservative talking point. But actually, in the first chapter of the book, one of the things I detail is how many countless examples we have seen of these alleged hate crime hoaxes of academics who claim to fake their race, who claim to be one race, but not the other. This is an epidemic. And I think the question we have to ask is not to just partisanize it and point fingers, but just psychologically, what is going on in the national psyche that makes this not a one-off incident, but a repeatable pattern, a psychological epidemic of people going to the full length of falsely reporting what happened to them as a victim of a hate crime or falsely reporting their racial identity. It's an interesting moment to take a step back and just reflect on what is it in our national psyche and our collective incentive structure that we've set up that causes this type of behavior to. Oh, I would prefer the fakers to the people who actually like they glom onto something that's real and start cutting off their breasts to seem special. You know, I mean, they're not actually trans, but they're going to say they are because they think they're going to get snaps if they're like, I'd rather somebody just fake it like I'm black. Yes, I am. What do you mean? You know, that works better for neither. But but I could see I could see where you're coming from. You know, so one of the things I discovered making those in the culture, we live in right now, it is very difficult to persuade someone of a point of view that they do not already hold. So one of my one of my methods that I try to bring to bear in this book to accomplish that otherwise, for me, at least lofty goal is to actually look to history, history dating back to the US Civil War, heading to the Reconstruction era, heck, even going back to Roman history. And one of the stories I tell in the book is the story of Septimius Severus. OK, so he was famously known. I studied him in high school as the Black Emperor. That's what he was. Known as. Turns out it was only in the last half century that he started actually becoming described as the Black Emperor, where there was a TV series that they were launching that said it was the advertisement for the TV series was the first black man to walk England wasn't came not as a slave, but as a conqueror. And then they got people all riled up about this about this black conquest of this black emperor. In reality, if you go back to the Roman era, to the era of his contemporaries, people could see they had eyes. They could see he was dark skin, but they never thought of him. As a black man, any different than the color of someone's eyes or the color of someone's hair. Now, the funny cherry on top to this story, though, is that actually he happened to be one of the one of the worst emperors in a very long time. He enslaved a lot of people in Africa. He was brutal as a tyrant, and he needed to do it because he had devalued the currency so much that he needed to plunder other places in order to actually replenish the silver that had otherwise been diluted in the denarius, the Roman currency. So one of these we can talk about that. Incident. That's pretty interesting. But I hope that's a way of bringing insights into the present to say that, look, we can actually talk about what is important about this guy, what his accomplishments might have been and what his failures might have been if we stop having to describe him as the black emperor, because then we're committed to one narrative that is a product of our anachronistic retrospective view through racial identity. When, in fact, the Romans didn't see someone through the color of their skin. They saw them as the basis of either being citizens or not of that nation. Not like they didn't have a hierarchy, but it was a hierarchy because they were based on national identity rather than racial identity. And so my hope is we can use our study of history to at least be a way to break through the otherwise seemingly codified barriers in our dialogue where you can very rare anymore persuade someone who already has it, who had a different point of view anymore. So then you can at least, you know, galvanize the people who already agree with you. And one of my goals with this book is to is to, you know, hopefully do something that I'm not sure I was able to do with Woking, which was to convince someone on the other side. I hope his history is a tool and a vehicle to get there with this one. You know, we'll see if that's successful or not. Well, I think the discussion of Rome in the book is very interesting, and I definitely want to get to that just to touch on two things before we leave them. The BYU Duke investigation. Now, I mentioned the aunt, the godmother, the aunt, Richardson's godmother, Lisa Pamplin. She she refuses to accept BYU's finding. So now they've done a comprehensive investigation. And again, BYU's initial instinct was to apologize. They felt awful. They believed her but they said, we're going to investigate to be fair. And this comprehensive investigation has found that it didn't happen. There's absolutely no evidence of it, to the contrary. So she comes out and says, BYU's statement does not change my position. In fact, the statement and the findings are in keeping with what I and many others anticipated. Keep in mind, Vivek, this godmother, Lisa, likes to refer to white people as crackers and has got several, several racist tweets of her own, which now she's made her account private. Daily Across America, she continues, the burden of proof in instances like these involving people of color, as well as marginalized people, economically disadvantaged people and disempowered people, is shifted unfairly and without hesitation. She feels the burden of proof was shifted upon her goddaughter, who is so far as I can tell, wasn't required to do much, if anything, in this investigation. They just sat and reviewed hours and hours of videotapes, talked to everybody who was nearby. Maybe they took her as well. But the point is, she crosses her arms and says, no, no. And if it comes out against me, you've unfairly shifted the burden of proof on me. So one of the things that I reject wholesale is this post-Foucault worldview of defining all human relations in terms of power structures, OK? And she used the word disempowered. So I reject that worldview. But in this situation, if you're going to embrace a power structure-based description of what happened there, disempowered person was actually the person who was accused. There's no doubt about it. And that might be different. 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, a century ago, the tables may have been turned in a very different direction. But today, in the year 2022, there's little doubt in my mind that the person who was in the disempowered position was no doubt the accused. And even still, with the tilt of that investigation and BYU's initial posture going into it, already ruining that person's life in many measures, still could not find a shred of justice. So this is a guy who faked a hate crime hoax. The prosecutors initially actually closed off the case because it looked like it smelled really rotten, but actually had to be reopened by federal prosecutors. Speaking of Michelle Obama, by the way, I can't resist bringing this back in. She was a friend of Jussie Smollett's, and it was an acquaintance, a chief of staff, I believe, of Michelle Obama who contacted the initial prosecutors in the case to get them to drop charges. It was only after President Trump then directed federal officials to reopen the investigation that any of this even came to bear, came to light. We found a guy who literally was paying two other Black men, with one of whom he had a homosexual intimate relationship, to pose as white supremacists. That is how hard it is to find a white supremacist to beat up a famous Hollywood actor, is to have to pay them to be able to have an intimate relationship with one of them. But the funny thing, the cherry on top is, I don't know if that's the full extent of what happened here in the BYU case or not, but the part that reminded me of it is when the godmother's described reminds me of the defense attorney in the Smollett case, who at the end of the case, she was losing really badly. I mean, the trial was embarrassing, right? If you're in the defense side here, this is Jussie Smollett as defendant for faking the hate crime hoax, that she then claims racism on the part of the judge who she claimed began to lunge at her because she was a woman of color in the courtroom. You remember that? It's amazing how this story, that were a one-off incident that I don't think it would be worth talking about, right? A lot of people do a lot of stupid things. They're not all worth commenting on. This is different. This is part of a pattern that repeats itself. And I think it's more interesting if we bring this up, not to embarrass or call out any particular individual from a partisan perspective, from Michelle Obama to Kamala Harris, to this attorney, to this godmother. It's more interesting if we're just curious about what is the psychological, pathological state of mind of an entire country. That produces this same narrative time and again. And one of the things that's uncomfortable for some of us on the right, I don't know how you feel about this, Megan, is that I actually see that pathology spreading to the right, actually, through the narratives of white victimhood identity or conservative victimhood identity. And I think that's how the woke left wins, is not with a bang, but with a whimper. I think conservatives fall into the narrative of saying, "Well, you're a victim. Well, guess what? I'm going to give you even bigger victim, and we're going to fight off the victim, but Olympics." Wait, I have to say, just one other point, because let's get into that next. But just one other point, because you mentioned how you list in the, I think it's the first chapter of the book, cases like Rachel Dolezal, where people pretend to be sort of a marginalized group, a member of it, in order to get the same status. And you mentioned one who I'd never heard of. Just so people know, this is a book full of interesting nuggets like this one. Neuroscientist, Bethann McLoughlin. Neuroscientist, Bethann McLoughlin, founder of Me Too STEM. Everything gets Me Too'd. Me Too STEM organization used similar excuse or tactic when she admitted to having created, this is amazing Vivek. Do you want to tell the story of what she did? Do you remember? Do you want me to just read it? I actually got the, I was just opening up to the page myself, but you go ahead. You've got the page. Go for it. It's amazing. Okay. When she admitted to having created a fake Native American adjunct professor to defend her, Bethann, on Twitter. So she, she didn't pretend to be the Native American like Elizabeth Warren. She created a fake Native American friend to defend her on Twitter. McLoughlin's followers became suspicious that her defender was not real when, do you want to tell us what Bethann decided to do to her fake Indian friend? So this is during the pandemic. So she created a Zoom memorial for her fake friend who she had managed to kill off. With COVID-19. And Megan, this is part of the book where there, I mean, there are literally like seven examples of these back to back. I mean, this is not a one-off incident, right? The Jussie Smollett thing, you bring that up, they'll say that's a conservative talking point. By the way, questioning his narrative immediately after was victimizing the victim all over again, talking about it afterwards, a conservative talking point. This isn't a conservative or a liberal issue. This is, it's, it's a bizarre pathological state of mind that just repeats itself there. I kid you not actually in the editing process, we had to cut about half of the cases that I initially included in Texas, which is too many of them to include something's going on in the country. Something's in the water. So you, you talk about these institutions in the, in the first book and in this book and, um, and how sort of they've, they've been taken over by people who are just committed to this victimhood. And it's very tightly related to this DEI initiative that we see getting pushed that from corporate America to, you know, to, you know, education. Last week on the show, we talked about Trinity school and some of these public schools as well that James O'Keefe has been getting on camera, certain teachers or administrators from them talking about how at Trinity school, the woman wanted to hire, she was joking, but to even have said the thought, a serial killer to come take out the white boys at her school, who she thought were horrible, especially the conservative white boys who she wanted dead. It's not funny. And I've had a kid in a school just like Trinity in New York city, where they had teachers who are in prison. And I think it's insane like that when it comes to idea identity politics. Um, although I love most of our teachers at collegiate, I I'll tell the truth. Um, it was the administrators who started pushing this nonsense. In any event at Trinity, we covered it. There were some people who came to me and said, MK, don't pretend that it's an individual school issue. You know, the, the national association of independent schools, they're pushing this. You can't even join now, unless you submit to their DEI agenda. Same is true at the college level. And there was a tweet that I saw using the DEI agenda. And it was a tweet that I saw using the DEI agenda. And there was a tweet that you tweeted about that. I also, that also caught my eye on Twitter. That brings home the point. All right. This is from, this is about Ohio state and what it's doing now to address racism and racial inequality. This is just to give an example of what we're dealing with here. Um, this is a guy named, uh, John sailor, who is a fellow at the national association of scholars, who's had a whole thread on what Ohio state's doing. Okay. Uh, they recently released the report from their task force on racism and racial inequities, which recommends far reaching changes throughout the university. Um, they'll likely be adopted. The first step is to create a university wide DEI plan. Okay. Of course they want increased mandatory DEI diversity, equity, and inclusion training throughout the university. Also, um, they want added DEI metrics to promotion and tenure evaluations. So I don't know how you're supposed to get into the DEI group if you're not already for your tenure application, but okay, good luck. Um, they are doing things like at the college of engineering, they've already added a DEI assessment to annual reviews and removed mandatory ACT and SAT math scores. Those are gone college education and human ecology has issued a racial justice and equity action plan, promising a curriculum overhaul and department level DEI plans. They, the university began a massive hiring initiative aimed almost exclusively at faculty whose research addresses diversity, equity, and inclusion. Every faculty job listed by the college of arts and sciences includes this statement over the next few years, the Ohio state university is committed to well coming 350 new faculty hires, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. We want people who are committed to equality and inclusion diversity statement. I could go on Vivek. It's exhaust. It's exhausting, but it's required now to be an independent school, to be a public school, to be a university, to get anybody to apply to you. We could go on. It's the source of our national decline. I mean, that's, that's ultimately the case I make in the, in the book is that, look, at the end of the day, China actually believes in hiring based on merit. So, so the American culture of meritocracy has left oceans to lift up places like China while it's their Maoist victimhood complexes that have in turn, come back and left oceans to depress the United States. And so I think that you take, I mean, this is a very pragmatic effect. And in some sense, Megan, I'm actually weirdly optimistic that it will be the rise of China that forces a reckoning here in the United States to revive the people of China. I mean, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's the pursuit of excellence, not because we wanted to, but because it was necessary for our very self-preservation. Cause that's, what's going to, that's going to come back down to when we ask ourselves 20 years from now, what were we doing when we were selecting our engineers and our doctors based on DEI quota systems, rather than based on SAT scores or MCAT scores or ACT scores are based on their competence. And if you want any further evidence for this, not a lot of people talk about this, Megan, but let's talk about, let's just take one of these stories all the way through with a student. Okay. Who then to get into college did not have to take the SAT or ACT math that was forgiven. And you're filling a quota system into college. Then that person goes to law school where they have the same systems again. Now, or the, oh, let's take medical school as example, where the MCAT may be evaluated differently on the basis of race. So now you have already twice selected. Okay. You already have a 400 point differential. That's a lot on the SATs for people aren't familiar with it between the average, average Asian score required to enter top school versus the average black students score required to enter top school. You already got on college once double count. Number one is then you do the same thing in medical school. Double count becomes a triple count. When you do the same thing with USMLE step one, which is the test required to get your medical certification. The first of three steps required to get your medical certification, which just switched to pass fail recently again on accounts of racial equity. So you now have counted thrice over. So, so there was a really, there's a really interesting story that I saw published recently, which found that among residency programs, there was a, there was a, there was a, there was a really interesting story that I saw published recently, which found that among residency programs, there was rampant racism, supposedly amongst engineering amongst the, amongst the, the fellows and amongst the attending physicians who are cutting the black residents at a higher rate than white residents. So I wrote a note to the author of the story. It relates exactly to the kinds of themes I talk about in my book. I thought it was fitting to ask the author, have you considered the possibility that perhaps what's happening when these residents are actually responsible for treating patients in the hospital, that the thing that might be happening is that they're cutting out the residents who are underperforming, who correlate with the very residents who scored most poorly, starting with their SAT to their MCAT, to their USMLE that were under prepared for their jobs. Might that be a different explanation for what's happening rather than systemic racism, which suddenly popped up only in the residency part of the system when, when, when black residents were being systematically cut at a higher rate than white residents, I kid you not, she hadn't thought of that possibility. So this is somebody who was earnestly- Oh, come on. Curiously curious. She's like, I'm going to have to study that. That's a really interesting point. Oh my God. It's so on the nose. Which, which is, which is staggering, but this is the, this is the tortured framework within which we live. Any racial disparity has to be attributed to some type of invidious form of intention without recognizing that actually we created the very system that selects for that type of apparently disparate behavior. At the end of the day, how are we going to figure this out? It's going to be how many lives are lost at the bedside, how much less competitive are we going to be in the semiconductor industry, in any other area of technology where we're going to be quickly falling behind China and other parts of the world. I hope it doesn't come to that before we wake up. But at the end of the day, we may be so far down the path that one of the things I predict in the book, and this is part of when I trace the parts of Roman history as well, the optimistic part of this, Megan, is that we often think about the fact that there was one fall of Rome. I think the optimistic silver lining here is actually that's a false narrative of history. There were many rises and many falls of Rome. And I think for the folks who say that we're now at the fall of the American experiment, I would say not so fast. I hope that there will be many rises and many falls before our experiment is done. But we're going to have to have something that wakes us up. And usually it's either a war, the rise of a rival, an economic calamity or collapse. But whatever that shock to the system may be, I hope it doesn't come to it, but I predict it might before we have that kind of wake-up call that revives our defining culture of excellence and merit in this country. Yeah, because you're also predicting, guess what? We may not be Rome. China may be Rome. We may be playing a bit part. And that may become all too clear very soon. We'll pick it up there because I love the discussion about Rome in the book. It was very illuminating to me. And I don't really love our supporting role. I hope it's not China, but we'll pick it up there in two minutes. Don't go away. More with Vivek right after this quick break. So let's spend a moment on Republican victimhood, which we touched on a minute ago. I try to stay objective on these things, but, you know, I maybe I'm not. You'll tell me. I actually see a lot of these Republicans forget election deniers. That's the thing in and of itself. OK, but like. I see them as like actual victims. I really do think that the Republicans have been wrongly silenced and excluded from the public square, whether it's media or having their voices silenced or social media, Hollywood, they can't get any sort of purchase whatsoever. Corporate America now doesn't like their worldview. You're a bigot if you're pro-life. You know, you could go down the list. And it's not to say that there's no racism on the side of the wokesters or sexism and all that stuff. I acknowledge that that still exists in the country. It's just nowhere near as massive and widespread as they claim. So I won't say that they're fakers when they when they have their claims of victimhood. I just think there are a lot of fakers who are sort of glomming on to a dark past history to try to make the problem seem much worse than it is. But I know. So so where am I going wrong? Because I know you have an issue that you're going wrong, Megan. I mean, there's 11 chapters in the book. One of them is dedicated to conservative victimhood. I think that, you know, the ratio is it is it asymmetric in the world the way that you that the way exactly that you describe? I think absolutely it is. I mean, I've been a vocal critic of woke culture through Woke Inc. and my other work over the course of the last year. But if I'm writing a book about victimhood culture, it was going to be incomplete without putting a finger on, I think, a rising tide of, you know, if you want to frame it in a way, you know, black victimhood is, I think, a rising narrative of white victimhood. And I think a conservative victimhood response to to liberal victimhood as well. I think it would have been incomplete without staring at that problem with clear eyes. And I think that there's two ways to take this discussion. One is a relative case for justification for victimhood, which which is, I think, an interesting place to go. I think where I prefer to go with the discussion is where we move from here, whether or not you have a legitimate grievance. What does one do when everyone has a grievance emanating in 360 degrees in 360 degree direction? I think that that puts us in a permanently it's an ossified place. We are we're effectively flash frozen in a web of tangled web of victimhood. And the case I make in the heart of the book is is a case for forgiveness. And at the end of the day, I see a greater opportunity to write the chapter. I see a greater opportunity for the Republican Party, conservatives to be the party, the only one of the two major parties that defines itself based on the unapologetic pursuit of excellence, based on the rejection of victimhood identities, based on the revival of meritocracy. And I trace in that chapter many of the ways in which, look, I think a lot of the industrial victimhood narratives, white victimhood narratives, populist conservative victimhood narratives are grounded in in some real economic realities. Look, there are some policy choices we have made in this country. There are some policy choices we have made in the United States over the course of the last couple of decades that Donald Trump had his finger out correctly on the finger on the pulse of. Look, is it did free trade grow the size of the overall economic pie globally? It did. Was it arguably the right policy course for the United States to have taken at a certain point in time? Absolutely it was. But it also contributed to a world in which the dollar was the reserve currency of the world. That's a good thing for many. It is for the United States for reasons I can get into. But one effect of the dollar being the reserve currency of the world is that that makes the United States exports incrementally higher than the actual market clearing price would have made them if you didn't have the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, where there's a certain base, including manufacturers in the United States who are left holding the bag. You layer on subsidies to knowledge based industries through intellectual property in my former industry in biotech, for that matter. That's again, a subsidy from manufacturing industries to knowledge based industries. And then you look at disproportionate representation in the military, whatever. There are strong facts to justify a strong case for conservative victimhood, even in the dimensions that I just described economically that go beyond the elitist discrimination that you laid out. But where from here is the question that I ultimately come to, Megan, is do we want to prove a point or do we actually have a nation left at the end of it? And I make a case for the revival of a shared national identity, because without that, we're just a bunch of human automatons, pounds of flesh roaming the plains of North America. All right, I get it. But we're talking about tactics right now. We're talking about tactics. Okay, so why? Like, we've been having this debate nationwide and on the show as well about, for example, cancel culture, which I know you're 100% against, and you've defended a lot of people who have been swept up in it. Why not fight fire with fire? Why not go after the cancelers? Why not celebrate when Chrissy Teigen gets canceled because she celebrated the downfall of everybody on the right who went down? Like, here's a taste of your own medicine. How do you like it when one of yours goes down? Who's Chrissy Teigen going to try to cancel now? No one, right? Like, how are we going to get them to see the error of their ways without fighting fire with fire? I see the appeal of fighting fire with fire. I just tend to find that water is often more effective at fighting fire. And at the end of the day, you know, if we engage in this victimhood Olympics that I was referring to earlier, the suppression Olympics, victimhood Olympics, there is no gold medalist in the end. It is America. That loses as a nation. And at the end of the day, it's going to fall on someone. We have a vacuum of leadership. I think the best fighting chance is for conservatives in this country to lead the way to filling that void of national identity with something far more meaningful than just an impeachment of the other side by hypocrisy. Because I can tell you from the couple of years of doing that myself, I mean, I'm, I'm talking to myself and preaching to myself as much as you're preaching to anyone else. If I look at even much of what I didn't walk in was impeachment by hypocrisy. Where does that leave us? Are we actually that much better off as a nation without without laying out a path forward? And so I made some cases for some provocative ideas in the book, a revival of civic duty. I think that we talk a lot about freedom and liberty. And I talk a lot about reviving the path to excellence through the system of free market capitalism, where everyone can be the best version of their individual self. But I think we're missing half the discussion. If we don't also talk about the revival of civic duty and civic identity and the revival of the idea of what it means to be a citizen. And the obligations and civic duties that come with that title of the book is entitled A Theory of Duty. It's a play on John Rawls's famous A Theory of Justice. That was a North Star for much of the liberal movement for much of the latter 20th century. I think that A Theory of Duty might be, as I call in the book, to borrow from an expression of David Hume, our missing shade of red in the conservative movement. It is easy to tear something down. It is a lot harder to fill what we've torn down with an affirmative new vision. Instead, I don't promise to have, how could I, to have all the answers in this particular book. But I do think that that's at least the conversation we need to start having more on the right, or else the thing that we actually care about, preserving and having a nation left at the end of it, we may have won the argument on the, what should we say, the fallen shackles of empiric victory. And I think that at the end of the day, that's not what I think any of us want in our capacity, not as conservatives, but as Americans. That's gonna have to start at some point. But at some point, I figured we might as well start today. What, you mentioned forgiveness. You know, how does, you write in the book about a young Indian friend of yours who had like the greatest grades and the perfect SATs and got rejected from everybody. I mean, from all the top institutions. How does this person forgive? How does this person become part of the solution? Like what, what is that person supposed, elaborate on the story if you don't mind, and then tell us what, what is that person supposed to do? Yeah. good writer. And I'll preface this by saying, as best as somebody can tell, there's nothing wrong with this kid. Applies to 15 of the top 30 universities in the country, gets rejected from every single one of them. Now, put yourself in the shoes of somebody who's getting that rejection one after another. I mean, at a certain point, the question is, what's wrong with me? And we've set up the system to work that way because Harvard, for example, my alma mater, and I think one of the worst perpetrators of this anti-Asian discrimination, has set itself up to justify and meet the standards of historical affirmative action laws to say that they're not discriminating based on race. They're just using other attributes like personality scores. Yeah, it's your personality. It's amazing. It's actually just codified. You thought you were making the problem better. You made it 10 times worse. And it's the same thing they did with respect to the so-called Harvard's words, not mine, the Jewish problem that Harvard had only decades ago. And so at the end of the day, put yourself in the shoes of this kid. You know, it's not the end of the world. He's going to get into a perfectly fine state school. He's going to go on and get a great education. He's going to live and live a normal life. Well, look, if you're in his shoes, he's still the same talent that should have gotten into one of the nation's top schools. Maybe we can even reinvent our definition of what it means to be a top school. If the top schools or the schools that we call the top schools 30 years ago aren't meritocratic institutions, why on earth should the places that I went, Harvard and Yale, be permanently crowned as the top schools for the next century when they're not actually behaving that way? So what do we do from here? It's not just forgiveness and some sort of passivity and some sort of, you know. You know, I'm not, I don't aim to be a theological figure here by my mind. That's beyond my pay grade. But I mean, in terms of, I use forgiveness more as a self-interested form of that forgiveness. That's the sort of Kantian case, the Immanuel Kant self-interested rationality. People miss that Immanuel Kant's version of the golden rule came not from a belief in Christ or belief in God, but a belief in cold-hearted rationality, that rationality demanded that you treat others as you want to be treated, because that's ultimately what empowers him to say that, you know what, I might have gone to that state school, but you know what, the state school might actually become what it means to have gone to a good school because they were smart enough to accept me. And I was smart enough to be able to work hard and still make my own way in this world. And so that story is still yet to be written. So the story isn't over yet, but I would prefer to see it go in that direction through the revival of meritocracy, through new structures, through new institutions, rather than to wallow in one's own victimhood and expect recompense or sorrow as a consequence. And in a sense- Yeah, the answer is to reject victimhood at every turn. By the way, tell that guy if he wants a job in media to call me when he's done with his state school education. Be happy to talk to him. So that leads us to what if we don't? What if we go the wrong way? What if we stay wallowing in victimhood? I mentioned this the other day, I heard a great quote in a book I'm reading. It was, suffering is universal, victimhood is a choice. And so if we decide to choose victimhood more and more and more on both sides, we wind up changing the whole American experiment. We find out very soon we were never Rome. We were something else entirely. We were Carthage, which I didn't go to Harvard. So explain Carthage and how we might be Carthage instead of Rome and China might be Rome. Well, so I draw an extended allegory in the book between the Punic Wars, between Rome and Carthage, the two great empires of their day. We indulge ourselves by asking ourselves whether we were Rome. Greg Popovich of the San Antonio Spurs famously said, you know, in a way that was supposed to be a critical assessment of America, that we might be Rome referring to the fall. I think I say in the book is the Roman Empire lasted thousands of years. We should be so lucky as to be Rome. We might actually be Carthage, one of the other empires that Rome went on to defeat at many points along the way. This was one of them. And one of the one of the islands that drew them into conflict was Sicily. I worry that Taiwan might be our modern version of Sicily and that if, you know, there's the famous thought experiment of the Thucydides trap, Graham Allison popularized it, which said that effectively, when you have an empire in decline, another rising empire, they're inevitably destined to enter into physical conflict. Well, that maps on pretty well to where we are, not only with Rome and Carthage a couple thousand years ago, but with America and China today. And so I do spend some time going into the book into some detail on what's at stake. I mean, why does China care about invading Taiwan? It's not just about national pride. It's not just about Putin invading Ukraine. People miss this about Xi Jinping. They're playing a long game. Taiwan is the mothership of the global semiconductor industry, Taiwan Semiconductor Company and many other Taiwan TSMC, as well as many other companies in Taiwan. These are the world's leaders in producing the semiconductors that power our iPhones, that power our computers, that power our refrigerators, that power our modern way of life. And the United States is decades behind. China has, for their part, been decades behind, too. So people forget this is, you know, as much as we might worry about the Chinese revival of meritocracy and they don't have DEI over there, that's a competitive advantage for them and their engineers. You know, they do have a command and control system that doesn't actually work to spawn innovation either. But one of the things they do have increasingly is military might. They might use that, I predict, starting actually next month starts the clock, Megan. I've long said this. Xi Jinping takes his third term, unprecedented third term, as leader of the Chinese Communist Party. It's a two-term system, otherwise. He wasn't going to rock the boat before that. He wasn't going to take the risk of going to Taiwan before that. But I think the window between next month and, say, January 2025, when the next U.S. president could take office, that's the window we're talking about here. When I think China is likely to make a move for Taiwan, and that, I think, may call America's bluff over the course of the last several years, our bluff militarily. I go through some naval analysis in terms of comparing the strength of our Navy versus China's and comparing how that might come to a head over Taiwan. But even then, I think China is likely to make a move for Taiwan. Even our educational bluff in terms of whether or not we were prepared with the technical and technological talent and prowess to be able to compete in a world where China has full control of the global semiconductor supply chain rather than the United States. And so what's at stake? What if we don't? What if we remain committed to victimhood? That's our path to a millennium from now, being a bunch of maybe five centuries from now, maybe two centuries from now, being a bunch of Chinese slaves that look like the ones in Shenzhen today. Shenzhen may be a preview of what's to come in the state of Indiana or the state of California. But I think China is likely to make a move in the state of Indiana or the state of California. I say that to be provocative, but not because it's actually so preposterous. And at the end of the day, I said this before, I'll say it again. It may be necessity that compels us to actually get our act together to revive merit, to revive that shared pursuit of excellence. I hope that my book or other speakers on this topic, I hope efforts through the private sector, like what I'm trying to do through Strive in Our Economy, through others, I hope brave leaders who step up in our different institutions can compel a better return to our path. Towards excellence in the meantime, but if it's not going to happen organically, it's going to happen out of necessity. And I predict that that biggest catalyst that I can see in the next couple of years is the rise of China, particularly catalyzed by its intentions coming to a head through its invasion or else a blockade of Taiwan, which is going to hit us here at home far harder than Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine ever did. I mean, if God forbid we ever find ourselves in a military conflict with China, we'll be well served if we can do more than just sit there and count the number of diverse members of their navy. Well, they don't have as many people of color or trans soldiers as we do, so we should, well, no. Vivek, you have a way of shining a light on all these issues that's unlike anybody else. It's nice and clear. I'm sad we didn't even get to the ESG corporate war that Vivek is single-handedly fighting, but buy the book and support him for reasons that should be obvious to you having listened to him. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. you