Vivek Ramaswamy on Transgender Pronouns, Election Integrity, and Abolishing the FBI

Liz: 

Hi guys. Welcome back to the Liz Wheeler Show. Today we’re going to do something interesting. We talked a couple of weeks ago, I think this was a day or two after Nikki Haley announced that she was running for president in 2024. We talked about how we can properly vet these candidates because the vetting process in our country, how we vet these candidates who want to be the chief executive is broken. It used to be that they, that candidates for president would sit down with journalists for long form interviews there. It wouldn’t be these 2, 3, 4, 5-minute quick hits on cable news at night that don’t really give you an idea of who this person is and what they stand for. And journalists too were a little bit more ethical. They would ask challenging questions and candidates understood that that was part of what it means to run for president. 

 You’re going to get challenged. You’re going to be asked about the weaknesses of your platform, as well as the strengths. It’s not just something where you just get to come here and make your presentation about your strengths and ignore your weaknesses. And whether this is a commentary on candidates or media or what have you, the fact of the matter is our vetting process is broken. So what I did at the time is I presented a way that you and I can take the place of legacy media and how we can vet presidential candidates by asking them a series of questions, not just about where they stand on certain issues. Like, oh, what’s your policy on Ukraine? Or, what’s your policy on taxation? But so that we can understand their thought process and the way that they form judgment calls. In my opinion, that’s almost as important as seeing on their websites where they stand on certain issues. 

That’s important. I want to know that too. But I also want to get to know the individual so that if they face something, if they face cultural backlash, if they face a cancellation campaign from the left, how are you going to react? Are you going to bend a knee to the radical left, or are you courageous? Are you willing to bear the brunt of the opinions that you feel are so rooted in truth and reality that it doesn’t matter what kind of criticism is levied you, you will answer those questions. So what we’re going to do tonight is we are going to sit down with the latest candidate who’s announced that he is a candidate for the Republican nomination for President that is Vivek Ramaswamy. We’re going to ask him all these questions. And afterward, I’m going to grade him on all of his answers. So let’s get to it. All right. So today I’m going to sit down with presidential candidate. He just announced his candidacy, I guess two weeks ago now. Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur, and Vivek, good, good to have you join me. Thank you. 

Vivek: 

Good to be on. It was last Tuesday, actually, that I announced. 

Liz: 

Okay. Well, you’re counting the days. You’ve done so many media hits. I’m sure you know the exact number of hours and minutes since you announced. But what I want to do today is I want to, I want to ask you a series of questions that were actually, that actually I constructed before you announced your candidacy. And the reason that I constructed this list of questions is because I feel like the vetting process for presidential candidates in our country has been completely broken by the mainstream media, by social media. Everyone’s so scripted and controlled. We look on people’s websites and you can find where they stand on a certain issue. But what’s lacking in the vetting process is an understanding of a candidate’s thought process or their ability to make a judgment call. So I’ve created a list of questions that give potential voters a better idea of how you think about certain issues, and I’d love to get through as many of those as we can, and you can kind of tell me how you think about these issues. 

Vivek: 

Awesome. I that’s more fun for me too. 

Liz: 

Okay. So here’s the first question. The election 2020, what happened in that election? What happened? 

Vivek: 

Well what happened was I think we had a very messy process that wasn’t the interference that I think a lot of Republicans ended up complaining about. I don’t think that was the main issue. The main issue was the scales of debate were tilted. Large technology companies interfered in ways that were historic relative to any election we’ve had in American history where certain topics that were relevant to the election, Hunter Biden’s laptop, I mean, that was in the name of censoring misinformation, actually a U.S. government working with private companies that created misinformation anyway. And I think that that unfortunately undermined a lot of trust in that election result. I have personally not seen any evidence of widespread large scale voter fraud of the kind that you usually get in the stolen election narrative. But actually the real, I think, danger to the democracy is tilting the scales of debate on the basis of forces that nobody elected were, you know, large tech companies and an ideological cartel sitting in Silicon Valley. 

And so I think that that’s, I think, been a pattern of mistrust in our democratic process dating back to 2016. I mean, I think the Trump camp in some ways focuses on the wrong election. The election that was really stolen from Donald Trump was 2016 when he was elected, but wasn’t allowed to actually govern because he was hamstrung by investigations based on false premises, based on politicized decisions made by the outgoing administration. But I don’t think the right answers to look backwards. I think the right answer has got to be to look forward. And if we get 2024 right, you know, I think 2024 can be a landslide election. I think that could be the single most unifying thing that could happen for the country. And I’m running in part because I think we can help deliver that. 

Liz: 

Let me ask you about the differentiation between widespread voter fraud and electioneering, because a lot of people there, there’s kind of this spectrum when it comes to what happened in the 2020 election. There’s those who claim that it was outright fraud, that there was widespread mass voter fraud. Some people claim electioneering, some people are making similar claims to what you just articulated, that big tech censored information that caused people that impacted the outcome of the election. But how would you define the electioneering that took place in the lead up to the 2020 election? What impact do you think that had on the outcome? 

Vivek: 

So, so electioneering referring to the kinds of forces that I’m talking about, which are technology companies and media companies censoring and tilting the scales of debate. That’s what I assume you’re referring to there. I think it’s pretty significant. I actually… 

Liz: 

Let me interject, let me define it. Cause I want, I want people to be able to understand what you think of it. I’m talking about a lot of the laws that were changed, the ballot harvesting the universal mail-in ballots, the round of the clock drop boxes that were unmanned, those sort of things in states and especially swing states across the country. 

Vivek: 

Yeah. So look, I think that that is I, I’m going to be really honest. That has not been my area of focus. Okay. My area of focus, and there’s a lot that I’m going to be educated on in my run for president. This is you know, one of them. But I think the area where I have been focused is on the merger of state power and corporate power to together do what neither of them could do on their own. And that’s the part that bothers me. That’s the part that gets under my skin, which is the coordination between government and tech companies to do through the back door what neither of them could get done through the front door under the constitution. And I do think that had a palpable impact on not just the election, but even perception of fairness in the election. To say that one of the most meaningful and damning pieces of information of one of the two candidates was systematically by way of coordination suppressed on the eve of an election in the name of stopping the spread of misinformation, actually creating, I think a, a large scale misinformation campaign in response, claiming that that was a Russian operation or whatever that was just false. 

We now know that the New York Times and others have owned up to it, but I think that’s part of what people feel in their bones when they also point to other kinds of examples of one-off electioneering as you put it. I think that part of what’s simmering beneath the surface is that deeper sense of unfairness about the way that information dissemination took place heading into the 2020 election. 

Liz: 

And polls of democratic voters after the election certainly substantiate, at least, at least part of what you’re saying, that they may have changed their mind had they known about the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the election instead of not finding out about it until after. when it comes to COVID-19 and government policies both at the federal level and the state level, do you feel that the government mandated lockdowns were ever justified? 

Vivek: 

No, absolutely not. In fact, I think that we would’ve gotten to the right answers more quickly if we hadn’t suppressed speech on social media about covid lockdown policies even in the schools. The fact that we closed down schools for over a year, I think is in public schools in many parts of this country, is a shame. It’s a stain on our history, because we would’ve gotten to those answers to the right answers more quickly if we hadn’t suppressed dissent. That, I think, is the number one lesson. Yeah, the government got it wrong. Many parts of the many state governments and even the federal government got it wrong in the beginning. But, you know, people are human beings. They may make wrong decisions, but the key is how quickly do you adapt from the wrong decisions you make? And you’re not able to adapt if we live in this culture of censorship. 

So I think that’s a, that’s a big problem. I think that ought to be one of the lessons we learned. Even if you think about the news of this week, learning that lo and behold, as we thought all along, as I argued, was likely the case all along COVID began in a Chinese lab. And yet if you said that on social media, even as recently as two years ago, you would’ve been censored again in the name of fighting misinformation, creating actual misinformation. So was the government policy of lockdowns correct? Absolutely not. But even more importantly, why were we so wrong and why did it stay wrong for so long? It’s because of the suppression of speech in this country. 

Liz: 

Yeah. And I think I, especially on Twitter, I mean, we saw that more than anywhere else. So you talk about this merger between government entities and private entities. I think this is really interesting. I want to talk with you in a, in a couple minutes more about the ESG efforts that are essentially what locked this in in our country on the governmental scale. First, before we get to the private sector, the administrative state, on a scale of one to 10, how serious of a problem does the administrative state rank in your mind as part of this problem? 

Vivek:

11. I think that this is the cancer at the heart of the managerial class and, and they’re the linkage between the marriage, between government and the private sector. Soo I see a waterfall of political accountability that, and it’s a real constitutional problem in this country. We set into motion a three-part system of government in this country that said that there’s three branches of government, Congress makes the laws. Well, there was a delegation of responsibility to this alphabet soup of federal agencies, the FDA, SEC, FTC, you know, the whole list, TSA, the list goes on. That was the first step in the waterfall. And the Reagan evolution in 1980 style conservatism at least took that on. They, not completely, it still is a major problem. But now that leads to the second step of the waterfall passing on accountability to a new alphabet soup of AMZN, FB, GOOG, AMZN, right?

And that’s really where you get this managerial class in government that horizontally moves between the public sector and the private sector to do together what neither could do on its own. That is Mussolini’s definition of fascism, the merger of state power and corporate power. That’s what we see today. But this is also part of what makes me want to run for president and successfully run for president because the president of the United States can actually do something about it. The president of the United States is the leader of the executive branch of the government. And I, I intend to do what no president has done in our national history, certainly in modern history, which is to take many of those agencies and shut them down. Now, they will say one of the reasons you can’t do that is there’s civil service protections. One of the reasons you can’t do that is there’s impoundment prevention laws on the books. 

Well, I think it’s strong view of the Constitution and of Article II of the Constitution in particular, if you’re the President of the United States, that means per Article II, you run the federal government, you run specifically the executive branch of the federal government. And so I think a lot of those statutes are unconstitutional. And I’m fully prepared to see that taken all the way to the Supreme Court so we can codify that in judicial precedent. We could go on for hours about this, but I have detailed nuanced views of ex exactly how to get this done. And I intend to. 

Liz: 

Which, gimme an example of some of these federal agencies that you would abolish. 

Vivek: 

Well, the first one I would abolish is the Department of Education. It has no reason to exist. Okay? It is a cancer, it’s an example of the cancerous federal bureaucracy. But a lot of people talk about the rise of woke and critical race theory in schools and so on. Here’s what they don’t know. The invisible fist behind this isn’t the invisible hand of the free market. It’s the invisible fist of the federal government that provides funding. But as a condition for receiving funding, you have to adopt these toxic ideologies. Well, guess what? When we have thousands of bureaucrats, when the federal government doesn’t run our schools that still need to find work to do, what do they do? They try to make up stuff that they really shouldn’t be doing in the first place, but to justify their own existence. Now, I think this is also a big part of the problem with respect to the way the Department of Education gives out money. 

They tilt the scales in favor of four year college education. Even when the market is repeatedly suggesting that many of those four year degree programs are really just a scam where people, you know, if at least as of numbers that are five to eight years old, half of those people or more majority, will not be able to earn a job paying $25,000 or more under certain circumstances. And so that’s a scam. But the Department of Education creates it because they subsidize certain forms of education while not subsidizing somebody who wants to do a two year program to become a welder. So I think a lot of the problems upstream trace to the fact that we have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people in a department who literally are working to advance an agenda from a department that shouldn’t even exist. And so I think a lot of presidents, President Trump included, you know, try incremental reform, put a different figurehead on top, tell them and give them a mandate to reform it. 

But when an agency has become so cancerous within, there’s only one right answer left, you shut it down. And I think that’s what I intend to do as president. Not just for the Department of Education, that’s just the first, but probably taking, you know, double digit numbers of federal agencies and literally taking the, you know, shutting the door, taking the keys, locking the front door and tossing in the Potomac. That’s the level of actual reform. And then some of them, if they’re for functions that still need to exist, you build new ones built from scratch to take their place. That’s exactly how you take on a managerial cancer. Incremental reform is not enough. And I think, you know, I think this is an uncomfortable topic, but I think it’s true that applies to a lot, a lot of the national security apparatus in this country too, that needs to be truly drained and then something else rebuilt to take its place because the existing bureaucracies have gotten so rotten, so cancerous that incremental reform isn’t going to do, isn’t going to do the job. 

Liz: 

What about the FBI? Would you shut that down? 

Vivek: 

I’m strongly inclined to shut down the FBI and replace it with something new to take its place. But I think that’s going to be necessary. That is a cancerous rot that, you know, that’s a 60 year old problem. Actually, yes, it was a problem under Trump, but it’s been a problem for a lot longer of a time. An agency that looks to the person who’s elected to run the federal government, the president of the United States as an inconvenience. I don’t think that’s the way that an administrative state should actually look at the leader who’s elected by the people of this country to run it. They should look to them as their boss. And you know what? If you tell if somebody works for you, I come from the private sector. I can tell you this from firsthand personal leadership experience. If someone’s working for you and you can’t fire them, that means they don’t work for you. It means you work for them. It means you are their slave actually, because you are responsible for what they do without having any power to control it. That’s really the relationship between the president of the United States and the FBI today. I’m sorry to say, I intend to end it. 

Liz: 

So as, as chief executive, you not only preside over the executive branch and these agencies, you also have legislation sent from the legislative branch to your desk. And I want to ask you a couple of key issues that this Congress is going to be debating or has already. What your action would be, whether you would sign this piece of legislation or whether you would veto it. And let’s start with the Equality Act… that crosses your desk as president. Do you sign it or do you veto it? 

Vivek: 

I call it the Inequality Act. I would veto it. However, however, I also think that I’m not the president now. What am I going to do as president? Draw a hard line in the sand, no infringement on religious liberty from here on out. We’re done with the encroachments on religious liberty. And I have a deep understanding of how this works because I’ve come from, you know, I don’t know how much you know about my most recent background. I founded Strive to compete with BlackRock taking on the ESG movement through the front door. They’re going to use the ESG-like vehicle to come after religious liberty to say that, oh, we respect religious liberty because you as a, as a faith-based organization or whatever, are free to do what you want. But people are free to do business with you or not as they choose or as they see fit. 

And if you’re a member of a hate group listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center, then that means a bank can’t give you a loan, which means you pay higher interest from the smaller number of banks that can provide you a loan. So that’s really where this frontier move is next. I understand how that game is played because I’ve studied it, seen it, fought it with clear eyes. And as president, I’m going to, at least even if that is the status quo from which we begin, because I would only take office in January of 2025 and that was passed by Congress. What you can do as a chief executive is put yourself in a position to make sure we draw a hard line to say we are done with any further infringement on religious liberty and at least hold the line firmly. And by the way, in a way that nobody can accuse me of being a Christian nationalist or whatever, I think it makes it easier for me to deliver on that job than somebody else who may have the same intentions but have a tougher time dealing with it. 

And, and that’s an example of the kind of thing where, look, I’ve also said I will end affirmative action in America. No other Republican candidate is actually talking about that issue. Why is that? I think it’s politically fraught for a lot of people. Even Donald Trump. You could have ended affirmative action because Lyndon Johnson created affirmative action in this country by executive order 11246 is the executive order. It mandates that anyone who does business with the federal government and the federal government itself also adopt race-based quota systems in hiring. I think that’s wrong. I think that we have to unapologetically embrace the idea that you get ahead in America, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and contributions. That means getting rid of this new kind of systemic racism through affirmative action. But a lot of Republicans have trouble doing it. 

You could say it’s because I’m young. You could say it’s because you know, I have brown skin. Maybe it’s just that I’m not afraid of the political consequences. But for whatever reason, be it from religious liberty to standing up for affirmative action to abandoning climate religion, a big part of what I’m doing here, part of my role in this campaign and in leading this country if we’re successful, is going to be to do what other, not only conservatives, but Americans broadly agree with, but a leadership class even in the conservative movement that dances around some of these sacred cows from climate, religion, to affirmative action to religious liberty. I won’t, I’m tackling them head on. 

Liz: 

Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about this, this presidential campaign cycle is the candidates are somewhat forced to address some of the more uncomfortable social issues in a way that, that republicans have not been forced to in the past. They’ve just kind of hidden themselves in low taxes and strong economy and national defense, which is all good things, but they’ve, they’ve ignored some of the social issues. So I want to do a couple quick hits on these social issues with you. Roe v. Wade was obviously overturned by the Supreme Court. Do you believe that there should be any exceptions to a ban on abortion? 

Vivek: 

I’m unapologetically pro-life. I am glad that Roe v. Wade was overturned. It was unambiguously the right decision. I’ve been staying that since my years in law school. It’s one of the worst argued Supreme Court decisions in history. So Dobbs got it right. I think it’s now a state’s rights issue. I think it ought to stay with the states. That’s where I land on it. And so, you know, as, as important as that was, I view it first and foremost on constitutional grounds and on those constitutional grounds. Now we’ve gotten to the right place. states actually get to decide this for themselves and that’s where it needs to stay. 

Liz: 

Alright, if you were asked to use the neo pronouns of someone who identified as transgender, would you do that? 

Vivek: 

Look, I’d be really respectful and opening up a conversation that we’re not allowed to have. Especially it’s say if it’s a young person, what’s really going on in this country is nobody’s reaching out to say what’s wrong? Like, what’s going on in your life that causes you to latch onto these identities. That’s really what’s going on. And I think that’s what empathic conservatism really entails is most kids who are suffering from sort of gender identity that by the way was created for them by adults telling them to be confused. There’s something else going on. What’s going on? What’s wrong at home? What’s wrong in family life? What’s wrong when the way your, your educational experience is going at school? What’s wrong in the classroom? Let’s actually help people understand when they’re so hungry for purpose and meaning and identity. And they latch on to these pronouns. 

We actually have to be empathetic and understand there’s probably something deeper going on in either at home or at school, or in between. So I, I think that rather than being hostile, my answer is not just to bend the need to the orthodoxy, but I would want to help that person. You know, gender dysphoria is really rare. It’s existed for all of human history, but that’s extremely rare. Most people who suffer from gender dysphoria today, it was actually just a created gender dysphoria by our culture. And the irony is that the very movement that wants to exhibit empathy, because gender dysphoria is such a source of suffering, is actually creating far more suffering amongst the generation, next generation Americans. And I think we just need to be more empathic to say that, you know, what I care about what psychological struggle someone’s going to, that leads them to think that their pronouns are the most important part of themselves when what we really need to do as leaders is get to something deeper and fill that vacuum of purpose and meaning in the heart of a generation that is missing it. And you know what, this is where I think the revival of faith, the revival of family, the revival of national identity, that’s what I care about in my, in my capacity as president of the United States that can fill this void of purpose and meaning in that next generation. And the reason we latch onto woke or gender identity or climate-ism or COVID-ism or whatever, is really because it’s just a symptom of that deeper hunger for meaning that we’re still missing. So that’s what I would do. 

 Liz: 

Hmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s very interesting. So I think a lot of these children are being influenced at school by our culture, but our culture is sort of this vague, vague idea. A lot of these children specifically are being influenced by TikTok, which is a Chinese data collection app. Not just collecting our phone numbers and our email addresses, but manipulating their algorithm to feed children certain ideologies. If they are vulnerable to that, what would, what would be your move as president of the United States? Would you ban TikTok? 

 Vivek: 

Certainly amongst kids under the age of 16. I’ve been explicit about that. If you can’t smoke an addictive cigarette by the age of 18, I don’t think we have any business letting kids under the age of 15 or 16 use addictive social media products. Certainly ones that are propped up as geopolitical tools by the Chinese Communist Party. And it’s no secret that the version of TikTok that exists in China doesn’t use addictive sexualized content. It actually promotes math and engineering. What does that tell you something about what their objectives are? It’s like the equivalent of pumping fentanyl across the southern border. This is digital fentanyl that they’re using to pollute the minds of the next generation. But I think that, you know what, even for the most principled libertarians and, and I believe, you know, parents have to play a role, the government is never going to be a substitute for good parenting. 

I’m all in for that. But we can’t be inconsistent to say that, okay, if we’re going to take this posture with respect to cigarettes and, and alcohol and for good reason because kids aren’t the same as adults, we got to apply that to the real addictive issue in kids amongst our time, which is addictive social media products like TikTok. And I think conservatives need to unshackle ourselves from the orthodoxies that say that, oh, that’s just the free market. No kids aren’t the same as adults and we need to start seeing that with clear eyes and not apologize for it. 

Liz: 

Yeah. And our, our legal precedent actually follows along exactly what you’re saying. So some of the criticisms that you have been receiving, which is natural given that you just announced the presidential run. I’d like to address just a couple of those. The first of which is have you ever been or are you currently a Soros fellow? 

Vivek: 

Oh, I actually received a fellowship to go to law school when I was 25 years old that allowed me to pay for law school funded not by George Soros, but by somebody else, partially funded by somebody else named Paul Soros, who happens to be a relative of George Soros. And I was 25 and I was going to law school and they were going to help me pay for it. And it was an academic achievement, Scott based scholarship. And you know what? I took it, you know why because I’m smart. Did I accept any of, I don’t even know what, what Paul Soro’s politics are. I know what George Sores are. I don’t know what all of his relatives think, nor did it matter because they helped me pay for first a couple years of law school, put that to one side. What’s interesting to me is that the very people who pointed this out, it kind of cracks me up a little bit say nothing about the fact that Donald Trump, and I don’t, I don’t criticize Donald Trump for this. 

I don’t think it makes sense. But Donald Trump took $160 million loan, not from some relative or distant cousin of George Soros, but from George Soros much more recently, not as a 25 year old kid going to law school, but as an adult. I just think that these are silly games. And, and look, I think my entry into this race did threaten a lot of people on the left and on the right, it’s to be expected. And so I also, you know, look, I think people should be skeptical. I think that if the last few years in this country have taught us anything, it’s to believe nothing and to be skeptical. So I actually embrace and applaud everyday voters who are going to scrutinize every person who asks them to let them lead this country. They should do that. I’m a little less sympathetic to the people who actually you know, I would say traffic and click bait for whatever their objectives are often to make money. But put that to one side, it’s part of the game. And so if you can’t handle the heat, as they say, don’t, don’t get in the kitchen and you know, I’m in the kitchen on this race, so I’ll happy to take any other questions. 

Liz: 

Think for a lot of people, for a lot of people I think it, it’s how they judge presidential candidates, how they respond to questions, not just how they repeat talking points. So I think I like to see presidential candidates honestly answer the criticism. The second criticism that’s been levied. This one went around quite a bit on Twitter. I’m sure you’ve seen this. Is that your company Roivant partnered with a state owned investment company of the Chinese Communist Party. Can you address that? Is that true? 

Vivek: 

Roivant did open a subsidiary in China, and I will tell you this, I understand. And, and by the way, there has been, I don’t like to brag a lot, Liz, I really don’t. Hopefully you know that about me. But I’m just going to say this because I think it’s true. I think there has been no voice in America or in American business over the last five years that has more closely pointed out the dangers of doing business in China and how China co-ops us businesses to advance its agenda than me. And I didn’t make that up in a vacuum by reading it about it on the internet, right? I was an exchange student in China for two springs when I was in Harvard. Not one but two springs. I’ve done business in China, I have seen how this game, this I would say dark and ugly game is played. 

 So when I first started doing business in China, actually people told me about this and I said, ah, okay, it’s all over overblown. I’ll say that I have learned through firsthand experience that the CCP views any business as a vehicle for advancing its geopolitical agenda. It’s true about the largest companies in the US from BlackRock to Apple, all of whom are beholden to the Chinese Communist Party. But it trickles itself all the way down. So I actually led the way in quietly retreating out of China. And when I started my most recent company Strive, I did something that nobody else in that industry had done. Strive is competing against BlackRock. I made a day one declaration and commitment that Strive would never open an asset management subsidiary in China because we couldn’t possibly be a good fiduciary to US clients while still doing business in China. 

So I have seen it, I’ve learned it, and that is why as president, I’m also you know, hopefully as president eventually, but as presidential candidate now I’ve done something that I don’t, no major Republican has done, which is to call for complete and total decoupling declaring economic independence from China. Full stop. This is something that even in this first week actually, the main opposition I get from the on this point is actually from other Republicans. They say, well, you know, you’re under the right track here, but isn’t that a little too extreme? Isn’t that something that’s going to have some short-term sacrifice? Yeah, it’s going to have some short-term sacrifice. I actually don’t think it’s going to be nearly as bad as people think for reasons that I can explain. And this has to do with understanding the geopolitics and the economy in China right now and where this gets us leveraged. 

But we can have that discussion. But on the personal note, I understand this more deeply than most first personally, but the difference is, unlike anybody else who’s actually gone to do business in China, who continues to get addicted to the Chinese market, I went in the other direction and I’ve actually been unapologetic about stating my perspectives here. And you know what, I’m on the short list of people in the United States who, who cannot safely travel in China. Now, I’m not going to be able to go there unless it’s as president of the United States, hopefully with a new party in charge. I do believe the CCP can and should fall in the next five years. But short of that, you know, I’ve made, I’ve taken some risks. I’ve, I’ve made tremendous sacrifices. I can’t travel in China now, but in part because I need to use that insight that I have to speak unapologetically, educate the American population about it. Started a business through strive that refused to do business in China, and now as president of the United States really aiming to deliver what other presidential candidates in both parties are afraid to do, which is to cut the cord. This is a codependent relationship we’ve entered with China. It’s not going to end well. The only question is who ends it first? And the sooner we do it, I think the better for us. 

Liz: 

Interesting, interesting. So you also have been an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry. That’s part of your background. And I know we didn’t talk about a lot of, a lot of your background because that’s been your primary platform for a lot of these media interviews. And I wanted to sort of talk to you about a different side of your beliefs, but you are an entrepreneur in the pharmaceutical industry, the mRNA technology. This is, this is also one of the criticisms that I’d like you to address, whether this is accurate or inaccurate. Are you a proponent of this technology or not? 

Vivek: 

Well, I think that there are, there could be good use cases in treating cancer and other things over the long run from a research perspective. But I think on the, on the issue of what the government did over the last several years and hit it, I will say is, is wrong actually. And I think that that’s something that we have to reckon with. And I think that there’s a lot of issues where I have been ahead of the curve, okay, in big tech censorship to the, the merger of state and corporate power through the ESG movement and otherwise, this is one of the ones I have to admit, like President Trump, like Ron DeSantis, I was not one of the people at the bleeding edge of seeing this before it happened. I give credit to the people who were, I will say this though, man, I was on Dr. Carlson’s show I think in 2021, and, and the first time it started to, I, it started to raise alarm bells for me was where there was this proposal to first actually roll out the vaccines to black communities. First I started to think about this. One of the things I told Tucker on air then was, you know what, this is a powder keg waiting to explode. Imagine if something actually goes wrong there. Okay, that would be like Tuskegee all over again. And that was back in 2021 when that wasn’t a popular thing to say. I was also pretty vocal about this even in my days as a biotech CEO there was way too much focus on the vaccines and without enough focus on actually therapeutics for people who were hospitalized with the disease, right? There were people in the hospital, I’ve had family members who have been in the hospital after getting COVID. 

That’s a real thing. We didn’t focus enough on treatments for the people who actually needed it instead focusing on actually a much more, you know, I would say low resolution and, and dare I say, you know, carpet bombing approach with the vaccinations. I said all of those things all along, but was this one of the issues where I was the leader at the forefront? Like I’ve been on tech and government, tech censorship or the ESG movement or even on China, no, I don’t know. And I give credit to the people who were, I think that President Trump, Ron DeSantis and I probably have been on very similar, you know, similar pattern of waking up to the reality of what actually unfolded here. 

Liz: 

Okay, well there you have it. I find that to be really fun. I enjoyed that a lot. I try during those interviews, just a little behind the scenes here, I try to keep my opinions to myself and just prompt the candidates that I’m interviewing or the politician to answer questions that inform us as the voters not necessarily wet their stance is on a particular political issue. We can look at their website to see that, right? But to understand how they think about things. Because for a, a president specifically, I want to know that in the event of something that happens that we may not have thought of before it happened, I want to have confidence that their judgment in that situation would be sound. So I try to evaluate not just their policy positions, but also how they think. I’m interested to know what you guys think of Vivek, what you think of his stances. 

 I’ll give you a quick take on my immediate reaction that I was having while he was speaking on a couple of these issues and rank some of his answers either strong, medium or weak. I thought that his answer on the administrative state talking about banning the Department of Education, banning the FBI and setting a precedent at the Supreme Court that would allow the chief executive to actually preside over the executive branch. I thought that that was an excellent answer. I thought that was very strong. That was probably his best answer out of everything that he talked about. His answer about neo pronouns also very strong because I’d probably sit here and be like, oh, I would never use someone’s neo pronoun because it’s Marxist, because it’s indulging delusion. It can lead to harm. All of those things are true. But he was correct when he said, well, what we should do is we should sit down and we should unpack the indoctrination and trauma that leads someone to embrace a neo-Marxist identity that is not based in reality. 

I ranked that answer quite strong. He did very well and he managed to tow the line, which sometimes I find annoying as a voter, sometimes I’m impressed with. As someone who is in the business of rhetoric myself, he managed not to, not to spark a headline about how he would respond bombastically or otherwise to someone asking to be called like they them or zi zer. His Equality Act answer saying that it’s the inequality Act, he would veto it. Very strong answer. That’s a tricky one, by the way. You should ask every political candidate, whether they’re a member of Congress, whether they’re a senator or of course presidential candidates, ask them about the Equality Act. This is a bellwether or a canary in the coal mine for how candidates think. There are a lot of Republicans, especially in the House of Representatives who support the Equality Act, Republicans in leadership positions in the House of Representatives who support the Equality Act and the Equality Act would violate religious liberty and force anybody that touches a cent of taxpayer money to allow biological males into women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. 

 Also Vivek’s answer on banning TikTok, I thought it was pretty good. Yeah, he, he talked about, I mean, it’s, it’s a different approach than some of the approaches that, that we’ve discussed on this show or some of the approaches that members of Congress or the Senate have suggested, such as actually banning the app in our country. He suggested an age limit. I’m probably more likely to support an idea of banning the app entirely versus making an age limit, but at least he wants to, at least he understands the risk of it. Anwers that I was a little iffy on his answer about being a Soros fellow, not George Soros. He said, Paul Soros a distant relation of George Soros. I got to give that one a, eh, that one’s kind of medium. His excuse essentially, he didn’t say this because it’s not a strong way to phrase it, but his excuse was ignorance. 

He said, oh, I was 25 and I was in law school. Well, you’re only 37 now. So that’s not that long ago. So I’d write that kind of, eh, on the answer. Another eh answer that he gave was about the mRNA technology in the Covid 19 vaccines. I didn’t think that was a very strong answer, but I do have to give credit to people who at least acknowledge that they were wrong when they held those opinions at the time. So at least he acknowledges that he was wrong because there are a lot of people out there who don’t. So that’s a medium answer. There were two answers that I thought were his weakest and his answer about electioneering. When I ask him, what is electioneering? How would you define that? And what impact did it have on the 2020 presidential election? 

He did not answer that question. He either didn’t know or didn’t want to talk about it, and it’s a critical issue. It’s a critical issue to understand because of the power inherent to those changes in rules and procedures around elections at the state level. So that was his weakest answer. Also, his weakest answer was when I asked him about his company that was linked to the Chinese Communist Party that was not only in China, but partnered with a Chinese Communist Party linked entity. That was a, that was a pretty weak answer. I’m not sure that he gave a direct answer whether he’s still invested in it, whether he’s divested whether he learned his lesson. That was probably his weakest answer. overall, I thought it was really interesting and I’d really like to hear what you guys thought, what you thought his strong answers were. 

His eh answers, his medium answers and his weak answers. And he’ll probably come back again to talk to us because this is a different kind of format than those very quick cable news hits where you just get the very tippy top of your talking points out in three or four minutes. So if you guys are interested in hearing about different topics, let me know so we can, we can ask him those questions. His primary platform, I actually didn’t talk about at all his, his, his issue that he’s running on, which is ESG. You and I talk about ESG all the time and he’s so vocal on ESG, I thought that, you know, if you want to learn about where he stands on that, we could have a whole separate episode on that. Or you can look up some of his other talking points. 

There are some interesting things that he claims about his company that supposedly anti-ESG investing that I think we could address. But let me know what you want to hear from him and in the meantime, make sure you subscribe to the show. My goal and my hope for the upcoming 2024 presidential election is to invite all of the presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle to come and have this longer sit down with us where we can ask these in-depth questions and analyze their thought processes and their judgment and how, who they are, how they think, where they stand on these issues, especially some of the more uncomfortable issues. So presidential candidates, if you are courageous enough to do this, if you are confident enough to do this, if you understand that this is a good faith exchange, answering all these things that are important to us, the voters whose vote you are courting stick around because we’re going to be doing this for the next year and a half. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.