J.D. Vance VP Pick: How Trump's Choice Will Permanently Transform the Republican Party

This episode delves into the implications of Donald Trump's choice of J.D. Vance as his vice-presidential candidate, exploring how it signals a significant shift within the Republican Party towards a "tech conservative" faction.

1. Trump's selection of J.D. Vance as his VP candidate marks a strategic pivot towards the tech conservative faction within the Republican Party.
2. Vance's political evolution and alignment with tech conservatism suggest a new direction for the party's future.
3. The episode discusses the ideological divides within the Republican Party, highlighting the potential decline of traditional theocratic conservatism.
4. Vance's varied stances on issues like foreign intervention and economic policies reflect a nuanced approach to governance.
5. The hosts speculate on the broader cultural impact of this shift, suggesting it could influence the party's approach to key issues and voter demographics.

1: Introduction

Hosts introduce the topic and set the stage for discussing the significance of Trump's VP choice. Malcolm Collins: "There are two paths Trump could take with his VP pick... which path he takes is going to set the future of republican politics in this country."

2: The Factions within the GOP

Detailed discussion on the two core Republican factions: the theocratic conservatives and the emerging tech conservatives. Simone Collins: "The important part is that they are theocratic and morally deontological."

3: J.D. Vance's Role and Background

Exploration of Vance's background, his public persona, and his fit within the tech conservative ideology. Malcolm Collins: "JD Vance, the writer of Hillbilly Elegy... in doing this, he basically threw in 100% with the tech faction."

4: Political Implications

Analysis of the political and cultural implications of Vance's selection for the future of the Republican Party. Simone Collins: "It's really favorable about him as a candidate."

5: Closing Remarks

Hosts conclude with reflections on the potential shifts in American conservatism and the upcoming election strategies. Malcolm Collins: "It was very shrewd of Trump, because to choose a contemporary of you and me means that Trump is choosing to uplift people who relate to younger conservatives."

1. Engage with diverse political perspectives to understand the evolving landscape of American conservatism.
2. Consider the long-term implications of political choices on party ideology and voter base.
3. Evaluate the role of technology and innovation in shaping political ideologies and alliances.
4. Reflect on the importance of nuanced stances on complex issues like immigration and foreign policy.
5. Foster discussions that bridge ideological divides within political communities.

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they break down the significance of Trump choosing J.D. Vance as his running mate for the 2024 election. This in-depth analysis covers the shifting landscape of conservative politics, the rise of tech conservatives, and what this means for the future of the Republican party. The Collins couple offers their unique perspective on Vance's background, his transformation from Trump critic to ally, and the implications for upcoming elections.

People

Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel

Companies

Leave blank if none.

Books

"Hillbilly Elegy" by J.D. Vance

Guest Name(s):

Leave blank if no guest.

Content Warnings:

None

Malcolm Collins
Hello, Simone. It is so exciting to be here with you today. Again, the world has changed and in an incredibly positive direction, I should think. In a previous episode, I had said that there are two paths Trump could take with his VP pick, and which path he takes is going to show which team he is on, and it is going to set the future of republican politics in this country. Would you like to know more?

And right now, there are two core republican factions that are like cultural groups. One is the GOP, Inc. Remnants. This is the theocratic faction, which believes in a deontological theocratic morality and wants to enforce that morality on the general public. In other words, we're talking, like, performative cultural conservatism.

Simone Collins
What a lot of people think about when they think about traditional conservatives, like religious and typically very christian, that. No, the other faction is religious and christian as well. Well, but in a very different way. Yeah, that's why I didn't say religious, because that's not the important part. The important part is that they are theocratic and morally deontological.

Malcolm Collins
So what I mean by that is these are the types of people that wants to do things like you saw in Project 2025 in their mission. Ban pornography, force young men to do programs that basically put them on military enlistment lists. This is very different from the ideology that Trump represents. Right. It's much more socialist leaning, much less libertarian, much less classically liberal, too.

Yeah. But, yeah, it's very much like the government's role is to enforce a moral system. Yeah. And this was the party that Mike Pence, his last running mate, represented. Very.

I can't be in another room with a woman without my wife there sort of stuff. Oh, the horror of this. And it's not that we have anything against being in an alliance with this group or anything like that, but there is always, or up until I would say, really, just two days ago, there was always a chance that the conservative party, post Trump, reorganized around this group. Okay. But then there's been a new conservative faction growing.

This is the faction that's represented by individuals like Elon and Vivek and Tamath. And they are the tech conservatives, I guess some people would call them. Where. Peter Thiel's in there, too. Yeah, Peter Thiel's in there.

They've been around for a while, but they have been growing in terms of their ability to actually interact with mainstream conservative politics. And I think that if Elon wasn't a foreign national, he would be the obvious person to take over american conservatism after Trump. He's just very lined up to do that in terms of public sentiment these days. Now, talking heads don't think, though. But I think when I talk to the base, I see much more.

Yeah, way to go. Fight the man. You be you. Which is also the difference between these two factions. The theocratic faction is very much, we should have an authoritarian system or authoritarian in the way it relates to the people, culturally speaking.

It's just we don't like who's running it now. Like, when we were at Natcon, something we kept hearing is, bureaucracy is good. It just needs to be a conservative controlled bureaucracy enforcing conservative cultural values. Yeah, they just want to be the man. Yeah, they just want to be the man.

Then you have the other faction, which is much more. Fight the man. It's an anti authoritarian faction where it does implement control. The controls are generally designed to prevent authoritarian cultural overreach. So they would promote ideas like, there should be some restrictions around what schools should teach and show children when that stuff is literal pornography or literal like brainwashing.

Yeah. Okay. You're trying to mess with people's kids and stuff like that. But anyway, so there were these two large factions. They have different ideologies.

We will lay out this divide more in another episode. But Trump really had the choice which faction is his successor faction or crowned as his successor faction. Right. In his VP, he chose JD Vance, the writer of hillbilly ethogy. Elegy.

Elegy. Sorry, not effigy. Hillbilly. Effigy, hillbilly Elegy. In doing this, he basically threw in 100% with the tech faction.

Simone Collins
Thank goodness. In a very interesting way, and in a way where a lot of people, when they look at what Trump is doing right now, they're like, how could he support this guy? This guy said Trump was a Nazi. This guy said he hated Trump, that he was an idiot. This guy said all sorts of horrible things about Trump, and Trump said horrible things about him.

Malcolm Collins
And I would note here that when I first heard of this guy, when I first heard that he had been elected to office, I was mortified because I hated him from my first impressions. Of him, who Trump. JD Vance hated Vane Vance. So my first introduction to JD Vance was through NPR segments on hillbilly Elegy. I saw him, and this is who he was.

He was the real east coast elite type guy going into the environment where he was born, because he was born into these poorer communities. And he was raised in, like, rural Ohio, right. Mostly by his grandmother. Mom was at a rehab that wasn't really super. There he was translating this experience to the NPR audience.

Simone Collins
Yes. To help them understand how anyone could have ever voted for this fascist monster, Trump. In their eyes, the Trump is obviously not that he is fighting against fascism, I think been in terms of everything I see. Yeah. But he was essentially the role that he played at the time that Trump was elected was to explain to the NPR Americans, the liberal, educated elite that was out of touch with middle America, why less educated white voters could possibly vote for Trump.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah. And he, I believe, was thoroughly dehumanizing of these groups in the way that he saw them. It was like, how could anyone possibly be this stupid? Now, I. So I disagree because I actually read hillbilly elegy while we were in Peru.

Simone Collins
Tell me about it. 2016. Tell me your take. It's an autobiography. He talks about his life growing up.

He talks about the stories and everything. And he leans heavily into that Scots irish culture, which is in some ways pretty freaking awesome. Part of our cultural background as well. Yeah. Like a little crazy.

A little, yeah. So just. She's not talking about Scotch Irish culture more generally. She's talking about the backwoods, Scott. Irish culture as described in Albion's seed.

Yeah. Which ultimately became hillbilly culture. Modern when people refer to hillbillies like the progenitor of that culturally in the United States was this wave of Scots irish immigration in the early colonies. But anyway, to take a step back here. So I genuinely think who he was when he first hit the public spotlight was a detestable person.

Here's the thing. All right, Malcolm, I just want to. Let me lay it out for you just how poetically and narratively perfect this combination is. So what do we have now on the ticket for the republican party for the 2024 election? All right, we have got a man who is masquerading as a classy billionaire, who in the end is ultimately super trashy by, like, waspy standards.

And we have a super waspy guy, Princeton law grad, ex military, the perfect politician, extremely waspy coded, essentially, who's cosplaying and masquerading as a hillbilly. And they're both these, like, classic american stereotypes. The billionaire businessman, the backwoods hillbilly, but they're also both classically american. And that they're cosplaying these roles that they actually don't hold in the name of political or commercial expediency. I just find that really satisfying.

Malcolm Collins
I agree. But I think that it's more than that because there's also an understanding of how did he transform into somebody who today I actually really see myself as culturally aligned with? Because I look at JD Vance today and I'm like, he is one of the major players of this tech conservative faction. How did. And I think the only really big one who held currently high office, which made him the perfect pick for the ticket.

So how did he make this transition? And I think that this transition was pushed by a few things, because he's not the only person who made this transition. When Trump was first running, did Elon support Trump? Oh, and they still cast shade at each other. I don't think you'd see Vivek supporting Trump in his first run.

I don't think you'd see Chamas supporting Trump in his first run. The cultural situation has changed. The urban monoculture. Trump basically saw what was happening, and one spoke to the real conservative base. And once the tech faction learned and began to understand the real conservative base, they realized they had much more in common with them than they thought.

So the old conservative base, the old theocratic conservative base, this basically, like, socialist, deontological, ethical system thing that still exists within many upper echelons of the republican party, they were very much about control and motivated by disgust. Like, this grosses me out. Stop it. The new conservative base is motivated primarily by anti authoritarianism and a feeling that their lives are being controlled, their children are being taken from them, and they don't like the way the government has stepped in and attempted to erase their personal cultural autonomy and their ability to raise their family and live the ways that they want to live. And when they began to realize, and I think that this has been a realization process, it's been for me as well.

Like, when I was very suspicious of Trump the first time he ran. But now, as I understand who he represents and what he is, I was like, wait, those are things I can get behind. That is a cultural movement that I 100% support. And I think that transition is where he's like, oh, wait, I'm. I still was so influenced by the urban monoculture, I still had this lingering trust in legacy media that I believed aspects of their narratives and framings about Trump which.

Breaking yourself out of a cult is hard, and the urban monoculture has become a cult. It is very hard, and it's a transitional process to break yourself out. Now. It's getting easier now as they are becoming more extremists. When I say that this is an anti fascist faction, what is the urban monoculture?

We've done other videos on this, but, like, literally Nazism reinvented at this point. They are a group that ranks humans into a class system where different ethnic groups are deserving of different levels of human dignity. You saw this, for example, in PA, our home state, where the COVID drugs that they believed were saving lives were given to people not based on their need, but based on how historically discriminated their ethnic group was. So they were literally allowing people to die to play this game of some human ethnic group. Groups deserve more dignity than other ethnic groups.

And at the bottom of this pyramid recently is the Jews. Like, they are just like literal Nazis now. They want to use the government to promote their ideology. And they have specifically called out, if you look at what a lot of people are like, they're not out there rounding up people yet. And it's.

Yeah, but they're calling for it. They just tried to assassinate a president. They hit him with a bogus felony charge. Like, this is like third world country stuff that we're dealing with now. This isn't what America used to be.

This assassination attempt didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of more than a decade at this point. This guy was 20, so he was twelve when Trump was first elected. All of his formative years he was in an educational system and exposed to media that tried to frame Trump as an existential threat to our democracy. When he is a 50% supportive like the american public and somebody who historically was a progressive New York lefty.

And his positions really haven't changed that much from those days. It's the progressive party that has changed pretty dramatically. Isn't that wild? But what are your thoughts on this? What I find promising about also the sort of vanguard of which JD Vance is a part, is that it isn't monolithic in its stances.

Simone Collins
I would say it's more pragmatic in its stances. And to say that you couldn't just be like, these are the party's stances. I think it's much more selective and targeted. For example, when you look at JD's foreign policy stances, while he has been against intervention in Ukraine, he has been in favor of. Of intervention to protect Taiwan, for example, because he has differing opinions on the utility for the United States on those stances.

And it's nice to see that someone's not just categorically yes or no to. I'd also add some. Some nuance to his Ukraine stance. His Ukraine stance has been framed by some individuals, is anti, giving them support when it is much more focused on ending the conflict as quickly as possible through land grants, stuff like that, which is a stance I personally don't think it's in our best interest. I can understand it from a human cost perspective, whereas he's also taken.

Malcolm Collins
Because I do think you could get peace in that region through some form of compromise that would be meaningfully lasting due to the demographics of that region. Russia just can't afford, demographically speaking, another war. All these people who are like, oh, they'll attack NATO. They will not. They don't have the people anymore.

They have exhausted themselves. Yeah. Whereas you contrast his comments on things like Israel, where he goes, you cannot long term have a safe Israel and a Gaza. And that is, I think, for people who are being realistic, probably true. Yeah, no, and I think that's really interesting about many of his stances.

Simone Collins
Like, when I read some of his stances at face value, I'm like, oh, what? He at one point was in favor of a higher minimum wage, but then when you dig deeper, you're like, oh, shit, like, you're just hardcore. Because apparently he's. Of course this means. Means that McDonald's, for example, will just fire more people and just have a lot more kiosks and that the people who are left will have a lot more responsibilities.

But that means those people who get fired will get retrained and have new jobs. And it's just, oh, he gets it. Like, he understands the policies. Whereas most people who are in favor of, for example, raising minimum wages are like, we just need better pay for the workers. They don't realize that a bunch of people are going to get laid off when that happens.

And he's, oh, I know, I know they're going to get laid off. It's fine. It's fine. And I think that's really interesting. He shows that he thinks through things and that, I think is more of the, it's more indicative of this class of politician.

Now keep in mind, he, like Vivek, has been involved in investment. He's done venture capital. Yeah, exactly. And so when you have someone who has been trained professionally to look at second and third order consequences about long term impacts, about how markets will be affected, and they're doing this from the perspective of a more long term perspective and also, like year, you are directly punished if your long term bets don't play out, which totally is not how politics works. Right?

Everything's like very short term. Like either you get reelected or you don't. Either you immediately get blowback or you don't. Either the political machine spits you out or it doesn't like, it's. None of the incentives are aligned properly.

You've got this different political class in this faction that is trained around that, and I find that so exciting and promising. And of course, he does show a lot of the things that we highly agree with. Like, he's one of the few politicians out there, especially among the conservative party, that's in favor of trust busting, and. I love, which we are super aggressive about. Yeah.

And he's pro nuclear. He's in favor of building more natural gas pipelines, of course, as green as possible, but not going too far. He's in favor of reducing regulatory burden, like this guy. Now, of course, when someone's a vice president, I feel like the role that I would most like is first lady, and then the second role that I would love is vice president, because, like, it's the most, like, chill role ever. I'm gonna get you there one day, Simone.

Malcolm Collins
You will be vice president one day. Oh, that'd be cute. That'd be super cute. Cute. If a husband and wife.

Simone Collins
That'd be so adorable. Either that or, like, brothers, I think, could be really. Oh, that'd be great. Yeah. But anyways, another thing I want to note here about him is there is an episode that this episode is unfortunately going to be superseding.

Malcolm Collins
That's on the history of the Internet atheist community and how the community basically fractured into the community that cared about what was true and what was good, and the community that just hated conservatives and was into dunking on them. And that's where Neil degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye went into that community. And then you had armored skeptic and a bunch of the early, like, Internet voices that moved into this other community and ended up being very influential in the anti feminist community, which then spawned the red pill movement, which then spawned a lot of what became Internet conservatism today. And that is why I think that transition is what pulled and generated this sort of tech conservative mindset, because a lot of these individuals have become increasingly red pilled over time about many things, including religion. As you've seen, if you look at, like, the foreheartsmen of the atheism like, new atheist movement, the ones who didn't go woke are now unanimously saying religion is a good thing, and it was bad to roll it back.

And then you have individuals like us who are moving from the young, angry atheist phase to religion was good after all. I got to play my starship troopers thing here, and God is real. He's on our side, and he wants. Us to win across the federation. Federal experts agree that, a, God exists after all, b, he's on our side, and c, he wants us to win.

And moved back into genuinely, a place of religious fervor. Some people are like, you guys actually come off as genuine bible thumping fundees. And the interesting thing, too, is you also see this with JD Vance, where he became a Catholic, what? In 2019 or 20, just become a Catholic. He pointed out that he had an angry atheist phase.

He started when he was moving into all this, I'd bet when he wrote hillbilly eulogy, elegy. Elegy. Okay, yeah. Elegy, hillbilly, elegy, effigy, hillbilly eulogy, hellbelly, effigy. Like, how many variations of this are we going to get?

I don't know. I don't know. But anyway, big words. I don't like them. But he is.

Was writing that. And when he first hit the public face, I think he was still in this angry atheist phase. And he has been transitioning. And recently he converted to Catholicism, which was not his birth religion, interestingly, because he said he was convinced that it was true. And I think that this is something we're increasingly seeing is people developing their own religious beliefs or reconnecting with religious communities because they see the value in them.

And that's really what you had from this old atheist community, which was the faction that sorted for truth. And at first, it pushed them away from religion because they were like, I can't see how this is logical. And then they realized largely, oh, society is worse without religion. What were we doing? That was illogical.

And then there was the other group that's just like, urban monoculture. Let's dunk on conservatives. Right? Even if it means we have to take insane stances. And so there's been this reconvergence.

And that's also really interesting that he has followed this journey that's so similar to ours. Venture capitalists or former venture capitalists, former angry atheist phase. And then we begin engaging with this culture. You start off being very suspicious of Trump, or in his case, outright hating Trump, and begin to realize, oh, Trump is really the savior of our country and the one sort of political hope we have of uniting the various factions in opposition to the urban monoculture right now. But, yeah, and we could say, why does it matter so much whose Trump VP pick was, like, which faction he came from?

And it's because Trump's VP pick is by far the candidate most likely to win or be running as the republican presidential candidate in the next viable election cycle, which means that the party is going to naturally be coalescing around this mindset. Now. He is going to really larp the, the traditionalist parts of his perspective because I think he feels he needs to. But I think, no, I think he's going to code switch. I think he's going to do both.

Simone Collins
He's going to do tech elite when he's with the tech elite. He's going to do hillbilly when he's with the hillbillies. So they don't call themselves that anymore. And that's something. It's really favorable about him as a candidate.

And he's not going to speak as much to this old guard, conservative, performative, traditional Christian, or as you say, GOP Inc. But GOP Inc. Is already bought in to voting Republican. They, Trump may have disavowed Project 2025, but they're still, well, maybe he's not that organized and he'll use it anyway. A lot of people associate and we'll.

Malcolm Collins
Probably apply through it. I would love it if it works out. I think it was started with a good mindset. They just are a little disconnected from the base. But we've talked to the Heritage foundation.

They're open to reconnecting with the base. They're very curious. It's just that they were isolated due to the way the conference system works. But the other thing I want to note on the point that you're making here is who does JD Vance specifically appeal to? He appeals to the people who were critical and scared of this change that Trump represented when Trump was first coming in, particularly from a progressive perspective.

And I think he's going to pull a lot of them over because he can think and model like them. And he is the person who explained to them why people were voting for Trump. In a way, he did what Louise. Perry did in the UK and to a certain extent in the US before she did it, in that there are these people who sort of act like these emissaries from the other side that speak articulately to progressives and honestly speak much more to progressive audiences than they will ever speak to conservative audiences. And I think we also need to consider the integrity that Trump showed in choosing somebody who had spoken so derisively about him historically.

That required, I think, swallowing a lot of pride on Trump's part. And I think a lot of people thought him incapable of doing something like that. And I think it shows his character. But I also think it's new Trump, which is something that's been noted in our discord and we've noted it in the debate video is this is not the Trump from two cycles ago. It is.

He's much more aligned with his base than he was historically. He really seems to understand them now. He, he understands the tomfoolery of the old GOP intellectual classes and he's not going to stand up for it unless they are willing to actually serve him instead of their own secretive agendas. He is really not over bombastic this time. He still knows how to play to a crowd, but he is not.

He doesn't come across as unhinged. And I don't even think the unhinged narrative works anywhere because no one's really afraid of that anymore. And he's also playing to an audience now that is much more open to how aggressive media manipulation has been. Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's promising.

Simone Collins
It's a good development. I'm excited for it. And again, just narratively, because I'm the kind of person who loves a VP and president pair that is cute and narratively poetic. I think this is great. Still, Billy and the fake classy businessman.

Malcolm Collins
There's also the other thing to note about this that was really shrewd of Trump. If you're thinking about the long term health of the republican party is JD Vance's age. Could have chosen a lot of old people who may have had more mainstream. And he's one year older than you. JD Vance is just one year older than you.

Yeah. Not to make you disappointed in your lack of being a VP right now. Sorry. You know that annoys me, Simone. I'm sorry.

Simone Collins
I should not have. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. That was bad. I will be president one day.

Malcolm Collins
I will. It's a long game, Malcolm. It's a long game. We're playing the long game here. Okay.

Yes, but I do. I. Look, we've been gaining public traction. We've been gaining public mind share inch by inch. We will get there one day.

And I know that things will play out. And I see this as a largely positive sign. But it was very shrewd of Trump, because to choose a contemporary of you and me means that Trump is choosing to uplift people who relate to younger conservatives and this new conservative movement and who can run things when he's gone. And I think that if Democrats don't do that and Biden sticks with Kamala, who is detested by the young base, she is really just there as a diversity play. And because she follows orders.

Simone Collins
Yeah. But not even like just a diversity play that nobody wanted. And that, yeah, it is so stupid. That they are forced into choosing her. Biden's not the one running because she does not appeal to anyone.

Malcolm Collins
She is Hillary plus. But they can't do anything at this point because they weren't thinking long term and in the best interest of the party. And I feel like almost to an extent, Trump hurt his electability a little bit with this decision. I think it was the right choice. What I would do to techno vc elite.

I think that there were other choices he could have made. So I think that JD Vance helps Trump's odds of getting elected when contrasted with someone like penniless, but when contrasted of all potential vps Trump could have chosen, there were probably better choices. But I cannot imagine a better choice if what you were optimizing for was the long term health of the republican party in this country. And that was really smart. But I also think it shows Trump recognizing, rightly, the people who Mike Pence appeals to are no longer a politically relevant faction.

They'll vote conservative no matter what at this point. And they're not as big as they were historically, and they're especially not big among the youth vote. And actually, this is something I was having a really interesting conversation with a Mormon about today, because I don't even think they matter from a fertility standpoint. Like, they're just not going to exist in the future is. He was saying that for a while.

So people who aren't familiar with Mormon history, Mormon culture, because they believe in this sort of iterative prophecy idea, you would have a group of, like, philosophical elite Mormons who were having this discussion. And that discussion determined what the most recent, like, mormon theology was. And then Mormonism went through this period of intense hardship from, like, the twenties to the fifties, where it was hemorrhaging members, it almost went extinct as a church. And what ended up happening was during that period, they transitioned to a completely hierarchical system where, like, the only one talking to God from God was the prophet, was the head of the church. And it was not this active philosophical conversation.

It was like this commandment system. And instead of every Mormon basically being commanded, like in the old Mormon church, to be like, or at least the Mormon males, to be like, part of this, even on the fringes, this active philosophical, theological conversation, it was much more, here's what's ethical, here's what's not ethical. They moved to this deontological system. And during a period where that deontological system worked really well, we see this in terms of catholic fertility rates during this period, which was operating off of a deontological system as well during this period. And it was just very easy in this sort of before modern contraception and stuff like that to motivate really high fertility rates with this system.

But the problem is, it is a uniquely susceptible system to the urban monoculture. And the type of people who genetically seem to really have a strong disposition towards it, are uniquely susceptible to all of the rules that come with modern wokeism and seem to deconvert at a higher rate. And it has just been completely ravaged in terms of low fertility rates within those communities. And we were talking about how what he was noticing was within the Mormon culture. You see this new rebuilding of the active theological conversation, and those communities are the ones that are doing really well, fertility rate wise, in the modern Mormon movement and the ones who were seduced by this.

So people wonder whether they're like, what's an example of the deontologically moral old Mormon girl defined, I think represents a perfect example of this. She was constantly using this deontological signaling, we hate x, don't do x, live like this, live like this, live like this, instead of do this with these consequences for God. It was like this set of rules that you had to really strictly follow. And what are they doing now? They're in the process of deconverting.

That is what happened to those individuals when it was followed these rules without the active theological engagement of let's understand these rules. And so I think we're probably going to also see something in the catholic system is a reemergence of the active theological conversation, because these are the Catholics I know that still have a lot of kids. It's not the old deontological ones like Nick Fuentes, right? It's the new ones who are just like really studious and interested in the actual theology. Converts like JD Vance can represent, I think, a good part of this conversation because he seems like the type of person who would be part of that.

And I forgot why I originally was making this point, but oh yes, it's that this old deontological system that ruled in the age of the GOP, Inc. Theocrats in the age of the satanic panic in the age of gays, ick. Therefore, we can't, even if it helps us win an election, say, okay, it's okay if you guys. I might think gay marriage is immoral, but if it helps me win an election, it's okay for gays to marry. That doesn't affect me.

They're part of a different cultural framework. Right. I don't. To adjudicate their salvation using the state government because that doesn't even get them into heaven. They need to actually believe.

So all of this other stuff doesn't help. Adjudicating morality doesn't help the country. And as we've shown, it actually seems to lower fertility rates in the countries that are more prone to doing it. And I think this transition is necessary for most of the conservative cultural frameworks that are going to survive fertility rate wise. And it is actually very shrewd from that perspective as well.

Instead of clinging to the pearl clutchers, moving to the people who are working on solutions and actual tactics to beat the urban monoculture before it castrates our kids. Yeah, yeah. And he just to go back to JD Vance, he definitely seems to be one of these people who's very tapped in to the danger of modern culture. He met his wife at Yale, I think, in a social club talking about America's social decline. Yeah.

He's absolutely represents a recapturing of this sort of person and bringing them over to the new conservative Party. He knows about. He was also largely about this culture is broken in the United States. A lot of things aren't working. So, yeah, he seems to be very awake to it, very aware.

Simone Collins
It's more what he represents, obviously, because vice presidents don't do anything, but whatever. Vice president is the next person running in an election, often it's, it's who's. Yeah. And that, that's a good tone setter. It'd be great to see him, you know, run in a new cycle and stuff.

Malcolm Collins
But he also seems like he would be very competent within the administration and pretty loyal to Trump and his base agenda, given this personal transformation that he has undergone this last decade. And keep in mind, it's been a decade since he came out against Trump. About. That's a lot of time to have this sort of personal transformation. By the way, he has three kids, I believe.

Simone Collins
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're all about, like our kid's age. His youngest was born in December 2021, so we should put them in the index. Not that he would ever respond to our emails, but I think the odds. His kids could date our day positions in the administration have risen dramatically with JD.

Their names are good. It's, it's Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel. Nice. I actually like the name Vivek. I was thinking about that.

Malcolm Collins
Yeah, it's a good name. But I was also going to say one thing that I hope that we can continue to become for this new faction is become sort of what Curtis Yarvin was for the last iteration before we move into large, hard politics positions, work on pushing the philosophical envelope and better understanding sort of the game plan, how we win and how we beat this monolithic, basically nazi group that has taken over our country and taken over our school system and taken over media, particularly children's media, which is what's most disturbing and has led to the cultural rot of our country. One thing I'd say is that you watch videos today, you watch movies, you watch what's coming out of Hollywood today, and there's just no light behind their eyes anymore. It's. It feels so soulless is the only way to put it.

And yet we live in Pennsylvania. You go talk to amish people and they have this spark in them, and it's something that we're just not seeing that much in society anymore. And I think that the only people who can reignite it, because the force that's blowing out the candle is the urban monoculture, is this progressive force. And so if we want to carry the light through the darkness of the frontier, we need to go all in and ensure that they can win this election cycle. And obviously, we're doing our part with running right now and offering our services to anyone who's working on campaign stuff.

And we're talking to the various campaign groups. And I think that we've seen divine Providence, I think, being shot through the ear, Trump has had his head turned, even just like this, just a little bit. He would be dead now. And that is, I think, divine Providence. And you know, what he was looking at that saved his life was a graph of immigration statistics.

Illegal immigration statistics. So illegal immigration saved Trump's life. There you go. Well, I mean, I would see it as sort of, you could argue, a divine blessing or approval of his plan on illegal. A God wink, if you will.

Yeah, a God wink. Because I've seen some people in our comments are like, I hate this plan. He has to allow immigrants who get advanced degrees in the US. And it's like, has God personally done something like that for you recently? I think that incredibly strict immigration restriction combined with allowing and becoming a brain drain, especially of countries that we have of conflict with, I don't know if we should do it for everyone who gets a degree, but especially if you get a degree at a top ten college in the US.

Like, it is nuts that we kick out, like, our Harvard PhDs. Like, why are we doing this? That's insane. Especially in STEM degrees, maybe not the liberal arts. Kick them out of anything other than a stem degree.

I go with that. I'd also say, like our immigration policy, one area where I think Trump could do better on the immigration policy is, I think patrolling the southern border is unrealistic and it's unnecessary, given that we have net migration out from Mexicans specifically right now. I should note that this trend actually reversed recently, and I misspoke. We did have a period of net migration out of mexican immigrants. We are now dealing with a migration in of mexican immigrants, but small when contrasted with other countries, likely due to the cartel violence right now.

Instead, we should work with the mexican government and patrol their southern border, because, one, they hate immigration as well, and it is a much, much easier border to police. And I would also argue that we should work with Panama to develop a us military base at the durian gap to prevent immigrants from going through there, which would cut off a huge chunk, because right now, a lot of our latin american immigration is actually coming from South America. So if you can cut off the durian gap, which is actually very easy to do. Sorry, I just realized that some listeners might not have any idea what the durian gap is or why it would be so easy to cut off between Panama and Colombia. There is an area that has no infrastructure, no roads, that is called the durian gap.

As to why it has no infrastructure and no roads, it's an incredibly hard area to build in. So there is actually no direct infrastructure connection between Central America and South America. It is considered the hardest part of the south american migration route. And it would be. It's also a very, very tighten choke point.

That would be very, very, very. Because the actually viable path through the durian gap are few. There's only, like, four viable pathways through. It would be very easy to cut off. You've cut off something like 30% of the immigration.

You cut off, then further, the southern Mexico border, then we can begin military intervention against the cartels, which I think is going to one day be necessary for the US to do. And let's just get it handled right now before it spirals out of control. And we need to do it because of some sort of mass killing in the US. I think that's where we need to go. And then people will be like, so you think that Mexico should live as a basically United States run police state?

And I'd say, I think you need to realistically look at the situation on the ground in Mexico these days. The ways that people are being tortured and killed what's happening? And ask, would that genuinely be better or worse? It would be cheaper for us and it would help more people. And Mexico, by the way, when Arizona, when we freaked out about the progressives, were like, how dare you do an immigration policy where the cops can just ask for your proof of birth at any time.

That's racist. And I was like, when they were freaking out about that, when they were freaking out about what was his name, sheriff, whatever immigration plan, and him being this racist guy that was actually less strict than Mexico's exact same policy at the time. If we begin to adopt more of Mexico's immigration policy, which I think would be optically an interesting path to go, is say, let's stop immigrants at the mexican southern border and then adopt Mexico's immigration policy, which progressives don't know is actually extremely strict compared to America's immigration policy. I think that we could realistically, and at a real cost, snuff out most of the illegal immigration of low skill immigrants that are coming into this country, which I do think is where we need to target because that's just an economic drain if we're having people come in on. Actually, somebody tried to get me for this.

They were searching for quotes from my grandfather context. My grandfather was a republican congressman, and they found one of him using a term that was commonly used to describe hispanic immigrants at the time, but today is not. And he said in the quote, because they didn't tweet the full quote, they were trying to say that, oh, this is proof that Malcolm's family is just the worst. When we spent generations fighting racism, like, we're obviously not racist, he said, you cannot have porous borders and social services at the same time. You cannot have a socialist like system and porous borders because it's just economically unfeasible.

It will cause tons and tons of unproductive immigrants to come into the country. And he was saying this before the Republican Party was anti immigration, this was actually a pretty spicy take at his time. And I was just reading this being like, way to go, granddad. Like, seeing this coming before it hit us, maybe using language at the time. I should note here we have an episode that we filmed that goes over all of our political positions, but we filmed it three times already and just none of them really caught us because I want it to be a really, really solid, tight, punchy.

Like, this is our entire political philosophy. And so we haven't fully gone into our perspectives on immigration in any of the videos. And I think that people can misinterpret because we're pro pluralism, that we are pro unconstrained immigration, which we are. Absolutely not. I think it's common sense that you cannot have lightly constrained immigration in any system that offers social services like Social Security, Medicare, police protection, etcetera, because those cost money to deliver.

And you also cannot have uncontrolled or immigration that is overly politicized in a system where recent immigrants can vote, as we have seen progressives pushing for again and again and again, because then you have a political motivation to promote immigration, which is a bad thing to bring into a country. And in a world where we have any form of social services in our countries, we need tight restrictions on unproductive immigrant groups. So basically any immigrant who's not going to come in and be an active and large participant in our economy, that's. That's just going to hurt everyone. You know, it's insane.

It's insane. But that does not mean that we are anti immigration entirely. If somebody is going to be paying tax dollars, especially more tax dollars than me that are paying for my social services, yeah, sure, I'm fine with that. And in that case, we are open to high skilled immigrants, particularly people with elite stem degrees. And in addition to that, we are open to policies that would allow people to immigrate into the United States while voluntarily adopting more aggressive personal tax schedules.

No one has seriously pushed this forwards yet, and I'm kind of surprised because I think it's a good idea. That is, you know, you opt to pay, you show one, that you are a decent earner in two, you opt to pay, you know, 25% more in taxes than a natural born citizen, and you get a fast track to becoming a citizen. I think a lot of people would take that, and I think that's a very fair trade if your pushback to this proposal is, yeah, but what about the culturally, the cultural dilution effects of these high earners? You know, they won't integrate or assimilate well with the native population. I would just ask you to think about the immigrants, you know, who assimilate quickly and the ones who assimilate poorly.

It's almost a direct line graph on how productive they are. Individuals who are more economically productive assimilate very quickly. It is actually fairly rare for an economically productive immigrant to not assimilate within two generations, whereas it is if you look at the immigrants who just are not assimilating at all, often the thing that allows them to not assimilate is not being an active participant in the local economy. I love that they tried to get me to disavow him. I was like, imagine you live in a world where you have to disavow your grandparents because you hear a racial slur from them.

That's like normal grandparents stuff. Like, everyone knows the grandparents do that and you're like, okay, we don't talk like that anymore. But anyway, sorry. That really got me this idea that people are disavowing their heritage like that. Not everyone.

Not everyone. Some people, yeah. I love you, Simone. You are a picture of human perfection. And I cannot wait for the day when you become vice president.

Simone Collins
I'd much rather be first lady, too. Okay. Okay. I'll work on it. I'll work on it.

Vice first lady. I love this vice word. We can put the vice and president. You want to put the vice in? Vice president?

Yes, let's. You're already running against a party that dedicates an entire month to one of the seven deadly sins. Well, you know, right? You got a fight back. Okay.

We'll find a way. All right. Malcolm. I love you. Love you to death.

By the way, what do you want for dinner? What do you suggest? I can make you. We can use your leftover miso soup. I can heat that up in a pan and make you potato stickers.

I can be good, but I feel. Like I want to use the onions and tomatoes. Would you like to use that stir fried chicken from Trader Joe's? I can do that with white rice with you and miso soup on the side. Why don't I use the things that I made deep fried.

Malcolm Collins
And then we froze. And then I'm going to cook that up with some onions and tomatoes and put it on rice. We. We did a. Like a three day deep cooker.

We shared it with guests and then you. The slow cooker meat. Yeah, the slow cooker meat. Second. Okay.

Simone Collins
I can microwave it to thought, and then you want to stir fry it? Okay, let's put some in the fridge to saw. And then tonight what I'll have is miso soup and guilloza. Okay. Love.

Malcolm Collins
Love.

Simone Collins
Love.