Fortitude: American Resilience | Dan Crenshaw | EP 214

Well, you let these diverse people be free so that they can think up ideas that might be appropriate for the next problem, and then you let them talk, which is why free speech is so important. It's like without that, we do not have a problem-solving mechanism. We can't capitalize. This is biological diversity; this is the manner in which organisms themselves have adapted to the entire structure of reality. You don't mess with that. You certainly don't do it politically, and you need free speech, you know, and it's part of that. Part of that is also opponent processing. You know, if I want to move my hand as smoothly as possible this way, I put this hand up to stop it and push, and then I can do it. A lot of the processes that occur biologically are like that—opponent processes. They make for precision and control, and a lot of our political structures in the West, because we allow for free discussion, are opponent processes. So we have a problem; we get a diverse range of opinions. God only knows which is right, and then we can talk them through. Then maybe we don't implement something catastrophically stupid.

And so I think the other point to extract from what you said is it's diversity; it's also the decentralization principle. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. This is a key element of conservatism: first of all, a sense of humility. Conservatism is about a sense of humility—a sense of humility about what you can really know and what you can control. In my experience, dealing with my colleagues on the Democrat side, they have no such humility. They do believe that they can solve every problem, and sometimes I think that's well-intentioned and sometimes it's not. I think it's just important to kind of extract, you know, what they want, but then let us figure out how to get there.

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Hello everybody, I'm very pleased today to have with me Congressman Dan Crenshaw. Dan and I have talked before, but here we are talking again. Originally from the Houston area, Dan Crenshaw is a proud sixth-generation Texan. From an early age, he knew that he wanted to serve his country with the most elite fighting force in history, the U.S. Navy SEALs. His father's career in the Texas oil and gas industry moved his family all over the world, including Ecuador and Colombia, where he attended high school. As a result, Dan is fluent in Spanish.

In '06, Dan graduated from Tufts University, where he earned his naval officer commission through Navy ROTC. Following graduation, he immediately reported to SEAL training, had something very difficult to do, by the way, in Coronado, California, where he met his future wife, Tara. After graduating SEAL training, he deployed to Fallujah, Iraq, to join SEAL Team Three, his first of five deployments overseas. On his third deployment in 2012, after six months of combat operations, he was hit by an improvised explosive device blast during a mission in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. He was evacuated and awoke from a medically induced coma, learning that his right eye had been destroyed in the blast and that his left eye was badly damaged. He was medically retired in September of '16 as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. after serving 10 years in the SEAL Teams. He left with two bronze stars, one with valor, the Purple Heart, and the Navy Commendation Medal with valor, among others. Soon after, he completed his master's in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In November of '18, Dan was elected to serve the people of Texas' second congressional district in Congress. He serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has the broadest jurisdiction of any legislative committee in Congress. He also serves on the House Select Committee on Climate Crisis, among others. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today.

Well, thank you for having me; it's an honor. As I've noted many times, one of our intellectuals appreciates, I appreciate it. Something—yeah, well, that's really something to hear from someone like you. I can tell you that. So, we just had an election in Canada, and one of the things that wasn't discussed was what happened in Afghanistan because Canadians served there as well. I've been putting together this idea that I'd like to put four or five people who served there together on a podcast and get a ground-eye view of the situation. But I've got you right now, and so what in the world were we doing there, and what happened, and was it any use? What's your opinion about that? Because I just don't know. So anything you can tell me would be real helpful.

Yeah, it's a complicated one, but at the same time it's not that complicated. You know why. Let's start with some of the first questions: I mean, why do we go in there in the first place? I went there in the first place because of 9/11, and the United States invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which is how Canada gets involved because you're our friends. If we get attacked, we ask you to come help; you say "sure." Americans have a long history of working with Canadians in special operations. You know, actually, where I was stationed in Kandahar, at least for a while, that was a purely Canadian base. That's why there was a hockey rink, for instance. And so, you know, long-time partners. But why we were there? Well, because of 9/11.

We decided that, and I think rightfully decided that there needed to be a response to the attacks on 9/11 because they originated from Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda was being harbored by the Taliban in Afghanistan. So we decided that the Taliban no longer should be in control of Afghanistan. That was Day One, and basically everybody agreed with what we should do on Day One. Now, Day Two—and I'm speaking in kind of general terms—but let's call it Day Two—the question becomes, now that we kicked some butt, do we leave? This was always a difficult question, and this kind of gets to the rest of the questions as far as what we're doing there, why. This is a question people have been wrestling with for 20 years, and there's been disputes about it. It's not exactly a simple question or a simple answer because your alternatives are basically walk away with the win. You know, call it a win. I don't know if it's a win, but it's certainly retribution; call it revenge. But the next question is, okay, do we have an interest in preventing future attacks? And the answer to that question became yes, we do, which is why the global war on terror became the buzzword for 20 years.

The difficult question was always, do we let Afghanistan just fall back into the hands of the Taliban, or do we stay and try to create some semblance of a government that will be our partner, that we can align with, and that we can conduct counter-terror operations with and prevent another 9/11? And that became the choice for 20 years, and that's what we chose to do. We can argue, and people like to sort of take easy swipes at that and say, well, look, they were never really prepared; it seemed like an endless war. We're just institutionalizing the war; we're just doing the same things over and over again. But they forget what the alternative is. Life is always about assessing what the alternatives are. It's easy to be disenchanted with the present or the current choice; it's a little bit harder to actually think about it and assess what the alternative is. And it turns out there aren't really good alternatives in a situation like this. So you can stay at war, or you can say that you ended it and refuse to acknowledge that there's actually an entire ideology out there that has no interest in ending that war with you.

What I tell people is—and you can kind of get what side of the debate I'm on—you know, call it an endless war; call it what you want. The fact is, you send guys like me over there as an insurance policy so that there's no more 9/11s. And you know what we got for 20 years of war in Afghanistan? Well, we got no more 9/11s, and that's certainly not nothing. It's actually pretty significant.

And do you think that's a reasonable causal link? I mean, you did get us—or we did, I suppose is another way of looking at it—not that I'm taking any credit for that—but so that did happen. And as you said, there hasn't been another major attack, and the incidence of terrorism worldwide—or that sort of terrorism—does seem to have declined. It's always a trick to attribute the cause of that correctly. So it's hard, I mean, but Al-Qaeda is an organization that exists primarily to externalize their operations—meaning they exist to attack homeland, whether that's Europe or the U.S. or Canada. ISIS, for instance, is an organization that exists to build an Islamic caliphate. Now, they're all kind of under the same umbrella, I mean, and the Taliban, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, to the extent that they fight with each other, it's mostly about power structures as opposed to, you know, ideological differences; they're all on the same team there; they just might have different strategies.

And so we decimated Al-Qaeda, and Al-Qaeda tried to move to Iraq, tried to move to Yemen, and we just go after them now. What that does is—is it an endless war? Yes, because these people are in an endless war with us. You know, we weren't at war on September 10th, 2001. We weren't at war in the year 2000 when the USS Cole was hit. We weren't at war when our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were hit in 1997, and we weren't at war in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. But somebody was at war with us, and this is what I have to remind people. We can say we ended a war a couple of months ago, but we didn't end any war. The intel suggests that Al-Qaeda is rapidly reforming, and now they have the space and the time because somebody like me is not going after them anymore. And that's the key ingredient—are they on the run, or are they kicked back and planning the next big operation—the next really, really glamorous operation, the really dramatic attack that they like to do? You know, that's better than just an underwear bomber going on an airplane.

And so, do you think they have that space now in Afghanistan? And so, I got to tell you a brief story. There was a Canadian federal election just not too long ago, and maybe a month before that or so, one of the cabinet members of our Prime Minister's government, he was re-elected with the minority government, Justin Trudeau—she referred to the Taliban, the new government in Afghanistan under the Taliban, as our brothers. And you know that wasn't so different, in some sense, from some of the missives that have been coming from the U.S. State Department, but many people weren't too thrilled with that description. The feeling of more hard-headed people—and maybe they're wrong—is that, you know, it's the same old characters now that have obtained power, and we better watch the hell out. So, is that over-suspicious? Should they be offered an olive branch? What's your sense about the right way forward with that new government?

Well, I don't think it's overly suspicious at all. These are certainly the same people that took my eye. These are the same people. Now, granted, I get to wear a cool eye patch as a result of it, so I'm not complaining too much.

Yeah, you do look good; you look cool. There's no doubt about that. I read a comedian's comment about you. I think he apologized for it. It was something like, it looked like what was it? A private eye in a porno flick or something like that, which is a good joke. But it made it important. That was—that part was the good joke. That actually was pretty funny.

That kind of sparks the history of my—or the birth of my political career, I guess we could talk about that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, let's finish off with the Taliban and then let's get that finished. So, Taliban. Yeah, Taliban are terrible, and they haven't changed one bit. If anything, they're emboldened and ruthless, like the Haqqani network—again, a ruthless, ruthless terrorist organization and drug-running operation. You know, the head of that, I think, is the second-in-command for the Taliban right now. The people in charge, you know there are groups that we have intel—there are groups in charge of security around the Kabul airport. The Taliban groups were suicide bombing experts. I mean these people all come—they're all cut from the same cloth. Nothing has changed.

We're seeing plenty of videos of them hanging people, murdering people, executing people, rounding up women, selling them off. You know what? Women are under attack in Afghanistan in a very serious way, so unfortunately, yeah. And yet the State Department is calling on them to be diverse, inclusive, and equitable. And it's something nasty about that, I think.

You did. I think it's just—it's like, I mean, I'm not opposed to working with, you know, questionable characters around the world. I mean I come from the special operations community; I also come from the intelligence community. This is what you have to do sometimes. But this isn't necessarily one of those cases. This was the time to put your foot down and refuse to let this happen.

Now, when you let it happen, the question is what do you do after the fact? Because we're not going to go back in and invade, so you do have to work with them to an extent, and it was the sort of deal with the devil, and I do understand that. But you don't have to speak so favorably about them either. I mean, come on. I mean there's at least some dignity that we might preserve, I would hope.

But you also maybe might not—you might also not say things that would lead them to overtly mock you. Like, yeah, diversity, inclusivity, and equity missives—that's a bit naive, let's call it that.

Yeah. It's how locism has infected serious people, I mean to say the least. It's infuriating, and it's caused quite a bit of angst in the United States. People on both sides of the debate, in both sides of the aisle, are deeply unhappy about it, and we feel deeply embarrassed, and as we should, especially because it was so preventable.

One of the key takeaways from the hearings this week where General Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary of Defense were testifying before the Senate and the House in front of the Armed Services Committees. I'm not on those committees; I didn't get to ask them questions. But one thing that really came out—and that I hoped would come out—was, you know, our Defense Department told them very clearly, you need to leave at least a few thousand troops there. There's a very—it's almost guaranteed that if we go down to zero—because, you know, slogans, alright? This is where I get very upset with the debate about all this because I feel like the push to remove troops is effectively based on a slogan—an emotional slogan, maybe two. You know what slogan means? The derivation of that word—it's very interesting. It's from "slough garum." It's Welsh "slough garam." It means "battle cry of the dead." Well, that's interesting.

Yeah, perfectly. And it fits perfectly with how I'm using the word slogan now because I think it caused these— I think these emotional slogans were effectively political battle cries that caused death.

And when you say, you know, this emotional cries to bring the troops home, as if I need your help, right? As if I am not a smart individual that volunteered to go and defend America, as if I need somebody's sympathy. I don't.

And the other slogan, no more endless wars, you know. It just reduces a very complex and important topic into a very foolish debate, and I think that's how we ended up in this place where the number had to be zero. It couldn't be 2,500; it couldn't be 5,000; it couldn't be something reasonable, right? Because I'm not saying we have a hundred thousand troops there, like when I was deployed in Afghanistan, it might have been 120,000 troops there, and you know maybe as a surge, it's debatable whether that's necessary or not, but it's certainly not sustainable forever.

And I think what people became unable to do is distinguish between this enormous resources being expended on nation-building—let's call it. I think that, again, is an overly simplistic term, but they don't like hundreds of thousands of troops there indefinitely. Fair enough. I mean, why would you? I totally get that. I don't think we should do it either, and I also don't think that we should be trying to export democracy.

But that's been a bit of a straw man argument or a red herring, really—obviously related terms—but it's, you know, this whole idea that we're trying to export democracy—that was never the point. You know, and it's an unfair criticism of the Bush administration. Their goal was not to export democracy. Now, you might make a different argument on Iraq. I think they got over their skis on that one, but let's set that debate aside.

Well, in Afghanistan, it was never the point. It was just that on Day Two, like I said, you have a question: do you try to build some semblance of a government that you can work with, or do you just let the Taliban take it over, and then you're right back to where you were right before September 11, 2001. And what have you gained?

So what do you think would have happened if you would have left five or ten thousand troops there?

We'd be in a very good situation right now. The Afghan government would still be up and running, and there'd be little skirmishes, little combat operations for a while. There just would.

And why do you think that that small number of troops—sorry, we have a bit of a lag so I'm being a bit rude here—but why are you convinced that a number—five thousand, ten thousand, something like that—why are you convinced that that would have been sufficient?

Well, because it's sufficient enough to hold certain airfields, commit certain air power to our Afghan partners, and honestly give them the morale boost that they need to go fight it on their own.

It also provides logistical support to them. I mean a truly modern army is, you know, five percent combat, 95 percent logistics. That's what makes the American military so unbelievable, is that we can deploy anywhere in the world, and our logistics are second to none. And, you know, that's something that's not quite realized. And we're also—it's not all that experience. I watched an extensive series on World War II that concentrated—and it was narrated by Eisenhower. It concentrated a lot on logistics, which I found absolutely fascinating, and it stunned me as well just the sheer difficulty of supplying tanks and men with gasoline once the English Channel was crossed. That was amazing operation—they built these huge spools out of—as much steel in them as battleships—and unrolled pipelines across the English Channel. It's like—and that was like one amazing—got someone absolutely beyond comprehension. And that it was possible and that it worked, so the logistics, the supply of the army, all of that—that is really something, and people don't know how complex that is.

So you figure five to ten thousand, and, and that was killed by slogans. It was killed by slogans. It was killed by emotional slogans. Because, I mean, like you can't overstate the importance of logistics, and if you ex—you know and people say, well, we've been there for 20 years. I mean, why can't they handle it? I mean you handle it being a new country after 20 years; that's not exactly a long-standing, a long time, you know? It's difficult.

You know, give these guys some slack; I mean, they've been trying to build a plane while it's falling through the air for years, and it's not easy. And you've got an insurgency that's ruthless and doesn't play by the same rules. Now they've got IEDs set up everywhere; you know this stuff is hard, and it takes time. You got to remind people—we were in South Korea since the '50s; they didn't have an election until the '80s. You know, it takes a while. And would anybody say at this point that it wasn't worth it, that we should have just left and let that fall to communist China control the way North Korea is? I don't think so. I mean South Korea? South Korea is quite a place, man.

Yeah, absolutely. Look at it thrive away, man. Hooray! And that would have never happened without our presence there—just never. And it's not like they ever stopped the war either; they're technically still at war. So I just think they are now—now, look, are we losing Americans there? No, but we also haven't lost an American in Afghanistan for a year and a half—until these Marines were killed just a few weeks ago. So, you know, and before that—people are like, well, that's because of the treaty with the Taliban; it's possibly—I don't know, they have time on their hands; they're strategic thinkers.

But before that, when we didn't have a treaty, we had an average of six to seven deaths in Afghanistan every year. I'll tell you what, the U.S. military loses a hell of a lot more than that to suicide and random accidents.

So, you know, I wouldn't call this a war in the traditional sense. It was not like what I was dealing with, and even what I was dealing with in 2012 was certainly not like 2010. War is relative. I don't see what was going on since about 2014 as a full-blown war by any stretch.

So let me summarize what you said and see if I got it right. So you think that 20 years of involvement kept terrorism at bay pretty effectively, and now that's done with, and whatever was there before is mounting again, and has been emboldened? That was your word—emboldened by what exactly?

Well, by the fact that they took over the government of Afghanistan instantly and are back in control.

And then I have some parallel questions along with that if I got that right. What is this endless war that we're in apparently about and who's underneath it? Because I have been watching American foreign policy for a long time, and I keep wondering about Pakistan, and I keep wondering about Saudi Arabia, which has all this immense wealth and has the proclivity to fund rather radical ideas all around the world continually. And so I know those are terrible things to ask you about or even to talk about, but—

Well, and I'm not an expert on this, but I know enough. You know, what we're dealing with is Islamic extremism that really originated from Saudi Arabia, the madrasas of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabi Islam, which is a very extreme form of Islam. And that materialized over time, and I think what's interesting is—and I'm going to get the year wrong and the exact attack wrong—there was a major Islamic extremist attack in Saudi Arabia decades ago, and ever since that moment, the Saudi Arabian government sort of had this deal with the devil with them—leave us the hell alone, and we'll at least harbor you, right?

So that's why people kind of look to Saudi Arabia as this culprit, even though at a governmental level they're an ally, and again, it deals with the devil. Because it's like strange. It's: why are we allies with Saudi Arabia? Well, because they're the only geostrategic deterrents to Iran, and they're worse. This is life; this is realism as opposed to who we wish people were. But that's sort of where it came from, and this has been around for a while, and they hate us because they hate us. You know, and Westerners are always looking for this sort of logical reasoning—why do they not like us? It must have been something we've done; it must be our foreign policy.

And so I asked, like, okay, well, let's take our biggest example—let's take Osama bin Laden. What exactly did we do to this guy? I mean, was it us aligning with him and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets in the '80s? We helped him. And was it—or was it when we defended his homeland of Saudi Arabia from invasion from Iraq, from Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War? We stopped Saddam Hussein from invading Saudi Arabia, and that was actually—a he claimed that our mere presence there was enough to radicalize him and start Al-Qaeda. This doesn't make any logical sense, right? Because we're always looking for this sort of transactional relationship to help us understand as Westerners, but they're not Westerners—they don't operate off the same logic. They think we're infidels, and they hate us because of who we are, and you need to accept that. And that's why it's an endless war; they will always be at war with us, and we'll never snuff it out. It's a reality that we have to live in.

And do you think about it as a religious struggle or as a criminal enterprise that's essentially organized against the West, U.S. in particular?

I mean it certainly seems to me like a religious struggle; at least that's how they paint it. And, you know, I could only go off of how they operate and how they think—yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, I don't know that I distinguish too much. I mean, you know, in a sense, it operates like an organized crime enterprise for sure. I mean, that's how we track them—we track them through financing; we track them in all the traditional ways that you might hunt down an organized crime unit. So in practical purposes, we kind of see it the same.

And, you know, the religious side gets into it because it goes back to the old adage—winning hearts and minds; and you know, it turns out that, yeah, that ain't that easy. And we're never gonna win over Muslims in this sense; it's just not gonna happen. I mean, the alliances that we get when we're in a place like Iraq or Afghanistan, they're, you know, they're based on practicality. And look, the vast majority of Muslims there are just not that extreme, so they're fine aligning with us. They don't necessarily subscribe to this idea that you can't even speak to a Christian.

So it's complicated; it's complex. Life is complicated.

So tell me about life as a congressman. You've been a congressman now for three years, and I spent some time in Washington, and I was surprised by many things and overwhelmed by many things and impressed by many things. But what's your day-to-day life like in your—

So I guess maybe what we first should do is describe the difference between a congressman and a senator for everybody that's listening. And then I'd like to know what you do day to day and what your fellow congressmen do mostly.

Senators are just much older. Look, the American system, and I guess I'm just—you know what I'm speaking to the whole audience because, you know, there's probably not a lot of Americans that quite understand the origins of our system—but it's not a parliament, you know. And the reason being our founders, in creating a republic, they wanted it to move slowly. They didn't like this idea, this notion that the decisions over an entire country could be made very easily. So they created sort of these national structures and federal structures, and the House is a national structure; the Senate's a federal structure, and we've kind of changed that over time, and we've sort of destroyed that by changing the Constitution.

But it was originally intended where, in the House, you really represent the people. It's the people's house; your election is every two years; it's very emotional. The majority rules absolutely. I mean, Nancy Pelosi only has four votes—a majority—and she just kicks our butt. We can't do—we have no power in the House because it's majoritarian, and it's emotional, and it just is the people. It really is the people.

The Senate was supposed to be this sort of—it’s like the House of Lords, sort of, in Great Britain, the U.K., and it's supposed to be this sort of slower or methodical decision-making process. And the Constitution was actually written where there is no popular vote to elect senators, where your state legislatures actually choose your senators, because the entire point of the senator—you get two per state—and this is important too when I say federal and national, right? Because national implies that you're representing the people so you represent just based on numbers of people, but the Senate isn't like that. You know, there's two senators per state, and the reason it's like that is to give more power to states that are less populated, so they don't just get run over by everybody else, because the foundation of our country—it's the United States of America— the foundation of our country is this idea that we can all kind of live together peacefully if we leave each other the hell alone for the most part and let states do what states do.

I kind of like that idea; I think it would get us out of a lot of our problems. But the idea was then that states have representation, and then they choose that. Now that got changed in the early 1900s in an amendment, so now it's a popular vote, so the Senate got a little bit more populist. It got a little bit more nationalized, but still a federal entity—still two votes per state. That matters.

The other big difference in the Senate is a senator has more power—an individual senator has more power to block legislation than, say, I do in the House. You know, with that power comes more responsibility, so you hope that senators believe in that responsibility. One of the worries I have is that we’re getting a little bit more of a kind of a Wild West type of senator getting elected to Congress and a little bit more radicalized—the kind of people you see in the House because it's easy to be a purist; it's easy to be a little crazy when you just have no responsibility, and it's easy to kind of— the diffusion of responsibility is quite significant in the House. There's 435 members, but in the Senate, there's only 100, so your status actually matters there a little bit more. You'd act like an adult.

For the most part, that's how it's operated. You also do—that's a four-year—that's a four-year term.

Six years.

Six years! Oh, sorry. Yes, a lot of people don't know this. It just allows you to kind of escape the political ramifications, you know, the emotions of the people for a while and just kind of make adult decisions, and that's maybe that's a good thing.

And I think the House should probably be a little bit more—you know, if I were to change something, I'd say the House should be three years because we're running for election constantly, it seems like.

Yeah, well that is something I wanted—that's something I really did want to ask you about. I just—when I went to Washington and met a number of congressmen, both Democrat and Republican, the first thing I thought was there is no way I would want to have this job. Part of it was, well, when are you not running for office? And that's really hard, and it's really expensive, and it's really demanding. And then, but you're also supposed to be working, but then also you have to fundraise constantly—and that was really shocking to me.

My sense of it was that congressmen were spending like 25 hours in an office that wasn't their primary office on the phone raising funds for their party. So that's like 20 hours a week, and then you have to campaign for like, who knows, 10, and then you have to fly because, you know, you don't live in Washington necessarily. And then there's your job, so that's got to take up a few hours as well. So I have no idea—I have no idea how you do it. And can people do it?

It's not—it's definitely not glamorous. And people ask if I enjoy it, and I say, well, what do you mean by that? Because I don't enjoy it the way I enjoyed the SEAL teams. I mean I got blown up in the SEAL teams, and I still rather enjoyed it quite a bit. This is not enjoyable in the same way.

Now, I personally—people who follow me, they know I do a lot of fun things associated with my campaign that make it enjoyable, like we throw big parties; we have a big Fourth of July celebration; we do a youth summit, which, of course, you were a guest on. I do fun things to make it enjoyable. And the reason I say it's not quite as bad as people realize—you are correct that a lot of folks would say it's about 20 hours a week that I spend on the phone fundraising.

Now, for me, it's not correct; I don't do that at all.

How do you get away with that? And why do other people do it? If you can get away with not doing it, why does anyone do it?

Because I put so much effort into trying to—I try to be somebody that somebody just wants to donate to. Does that make sense? So I put a lot more—it makes sense if it works, and if it works.

I was under the understanding that congresspeople were under—congressmen were under tremendous pressure from their party brass to do that sort of work. And you can understand why, because it's so expensive to run.

Maybe it doesn't have to be, you know—that is a question, but—and that gets into a whole other set of questions.

So, to answer your—it does work. Now, I'm very—it works for me. It’s hard to replicate it, to be perfectly honest.

It works for me because, hell, I don't know; I know how to use social media pretty well. I do things like this, right? Like I have my own broadcast. I know—

Well, that's—I want to ask you about that too, because you wrote a book just a couple of years ago while you were doing all this, and then you have this podcast as well. And so you are using this new media to speak directly to people, and so that begs one question, which is how in the world do you have the time to do all that as well? And, but I would like to talk—ask you about your experiences with social media. It's like, how is that working for you politically, and what do you think it signifies, let's say, for the future of politics? Because who needs the legacy media and 30-second sound bites? It doesn't look to me like anyone does.

Yeah, and look, the entire point of being a representative is to—well, there's a couple points to it—craft legislation, vote on that legislation. So I'm in the minority, which means I'm not really crafting any legislation. I mean, I have legislation I'd like to craft, but I have no power. So my duty is effectively just to vote on it. That doesn't take up a whole lot of time.

And I think a lot of members are going to mislead the public a little bit when they say, I don't have any time to read anything. Like, look, there's ways that we digest these massive bills. We're following their development over time; staff is combing through it. You know, the reason they're so long, too? They're filled with legal jargon. You know, and then you have to break apart the substantive part of it. But there's ways to absorb it, so I never use that as an excuse for why I'm voting against something, because you basically know what's in it.

Anyway, that's sort of a side point, but—

But it's a relief that that's true.

Yeah, I just—I don't like using that as an excuse. I could use it as an excuse; I just don't like using it. But another big part of your job is simply to communicate with people because you're representing them. So you need to communicate both up and down. Right? You need to communicate their voices—what you said you would run on—so obviously you don't perfectly represent everybody. There are lots of Democrats in my district who don't feel that I represent them; that's fine. But I represent a majority of the people in my district, and I represent them based on what I ran on—a set of values—conservative, limiting principle values.

And my job is to explain things better than they can themselves, which is sort of why they elect you. They kind of want you to be like them, but just explain it better. And I knew that's what I wanted because I wasn't—I was never political. The first moment I got involved in politics was the moment I declared running for office, and I always knew—and I was a normal guy, is my point. I think being involved in politics and being an activist can kind of change the way you think about politics, and I think it gets you detached from regular people who aren't thinking about it all the time.

But I was just one of these regular people, not really thinking about it all the time. I was very interested in policy, but which is slightly related but different than politics. And so the point is, I was kind of a regular guy, and I knew what I wanted, and I just wanted people to explain why the hell they were doing what they were doing and don't talk to me in talking points.

So, and to do that, you do need long-form discussion. And then you got to communicate with people where they're at. So why do a podcast? Well, so I can dive deep into issues and be willing to know things well enough so that you can have a long-form conversation. A lot of people will struggle with that.

And so that's number one. But not everybody listens to podcasts, and not everybody wants to listen to anything for an hour. And so you also have to be able to communicate your points on Twitter. You know, and that's not great, but it is something, and that's what some people follow you on. So communicate something there. Instagram is probably one of my favorites because I can kind of do everything on Instagram, and I have the biggest following there.

And, you know, you put out videos. I put out explainer videos. I'm not giving you a 20-minute, you know, informational episode on issue X, but I'm trying to do it in a couple minutes and go a little deeper than just, "Democrats are bad, and they want to kill jobs." Well, why do they want to kill jobs? You know, let's just explain it a few layers deep—just a few more layers, and that's what people are looking for, and it's been very successful.

So I can spend my time doing that, which is also my job because my job is to communicate. I can spend my time doing that and being creative with that and being good at that, and that takes away all those hours of fundraising that I have to do.

It's not like I don't do anything, and I'm like—and I'm like one of the number one fundraisers in the House.

Oh, so that's part of the reason why you can get away with it, because what you're doing is very effective?

Right, right.

Yeah, so tell me about this youth summit. More about the youth summit and how that got started and why you do it and what you saw there. I know I did this Q&A, but my staff gives me things, and I do it, and I don't know the context as much as I would like to, especially with something like that. I wish you could have been there.

Me too! I'd love to get you there next time. We'll do it every year, and it's a very cool thing. If you're a conservative, you know that one of the biggest electoral problems you have is young people. This isn't all that surprising. I think the promises of the utopian left are very endearing to a young person, and to a certain extent, you'll never escape that. But my goal is to give them the tools of conservatism.

There's a lot of youth groups out there. You're probably familiar with—you've spoken at a Turning Point event, and maybe you've dealt with YAF too. It's a young America Foundation—both good organizations. But this isn't what I'm doing. I'm not doing either one of those things; I'm trying to do a mix of both.

What YAF does is a very intellectual—we've seen Ben Shapiro's pretty much their main headliner, of course you know Ben well. And so it's a bit more intellectual; there's not a lot of fanfare to it. It's just somebody on a stage, and let's give a speech and let's answer some questions. And then you got something like Turning Point, which is a very high production lot. It's like a kind of a concert-like—very much a rally.

And what I try to do is a mix of both, because I want to give you that experience. And I'm also 100% only focused on high school and college kids. So that's—and you have to have an age limit, so mine was 24. And I want to give them both intellectual tools that they can come away with, which is why I invite somebody like you to speak.

And I want to also give them a good time because I know I need to grab their attention. I need them to have fun. I need them to have an experience that they're not going to forget. So we just have—I mean, it's a high production fun event. There's even a concert in the middle of it. You know?

Yeah. I don't know what's going on with the conservative types, because you've got comedians now and you've got entertainment, and you're talking to young people. It's like this is very strange. So hey, I've got a question about this issue of you young people, because I've been talking to lots of conservative folks in Canada, because we have a conservative party and they're about as popular as our government, but not quite.

And I've mentioned that I believe that their fundamental problem is that they can't figure out what they have to offer to young people. But it seems to me that what they have to offer is this notion—it's something like encourage—something like paternal encouragement. It's like we really think you could be something if you behave properly in some essential sense, and we really believe in you as an individual in alignment with your traditions more than we believe, let's say, in the utopian promises of government per se, as a problem-solving enterprise.

And I think one of the things I've really noticed, and I get a lot of letters from people, is that—and this just about killed me when I was on my tour—because I'm offering people words of encouragement as individuals, and I had no idea how much starvation there was for that. And that was particularly true of young men, but not only true of them.

And that is something conservatives can say. It's like, look, you know, we really believe in you, and we are skeptical of the claims that big organizations per se, especially government, can do what they promise, whereas you as an individual, especially if you get your act together, man, you're really something deadly. So in the best possible sense.

And that's a really attractive message, especially to young people now because they don't really hear that. You know, they hear that they're just spoilers of the environment or some guy wrote me. I just opened his letter today. He'd been in prison; he'd been suicidal; he wasn't a good guy. And he sorted his life out when he was 30, about, he said he encountered my lectures and he stopped regarding himself as intrinsically like an intrinsically bad despoiler of the planet, something like that. I'm not exaggerating. And he had no idea that maybe there was something to the idea that he had intrinsic value, and he quit all his idiocy, stopped drinking, and stopped taking drugs, and he got married, he had a kid, and he got a job. And you know conservatives have something to offer young people, and they just don't know how to get it across. There's something about what you're doing that does that.

It's partly why I’m so interested in talking to you, and why do you think the Turning Point thing is working exactly? You know, it’s just—it’s different than what I do. I mean, what Turning Point does, what Charlie does is—they're just—they just were the first ones to give conservative kids a place to go hang out with each other, frankly.

Which is pretty meaningful because people are just looking for—especially in a university setting—people are desperate to find like-minded individuals who feel the way they do. They give them that. You know, the Republican clubs were just kind of outdated. Young people don’t go joining these clubs anymore, so we sort of just look for different ways to do it.

And I think that's what it gives them. I mean, I don't think it's much more complicated than that.

But to jump off of what you were saying about what conservatives deliver—well, somebody asked a question like that always; it kind of depends on my audience on how I want to answer it. But jumping off of what you said, you know, because you said you used the phrase paternalistic encouragement, encouragement—I guess of course, yeah.

Which is different, of course, than paternalism. Which is, I think, a leftist attribute. But what we do and what I want to jump off of there is what I often say—and actually it was a speech I gave to that youth summit—because I'm always trying to explain to kids how can I—I'm giving you a tool; I'm giving you a way of explaining something simply. So that when you're confronted by your classmate, you can have this tool now—you've got a tool in your toolkit that you can use.

So I'm like, here's a way to think about the difference between conservatives and liberals. It goes something like this: the conservative ideology is about love, okay, and it's about the kind of love that your parents give you. And it's a little different than the kind of love that your crazy aunt gives you. She loves you, but she kind of wants to just spoil you, right? She just wants you to love her; it's really important to her. She doesn't really have a lot of responsibility over you either, so your parents create rules around you and they tell you that your actions matter. They tell you that you're accountable. They tell you that you better work hard if you want to succeed, and they're not always that nice about it.

You know, it doesn't feel like love, but it is in a very profound way—that's love. And then your crazy aunt's like—you’re perfect the way you are; you know, you don't have to change, and it's not your fault that you got a bad grade. And I want to do things for you, like let me take you to the shopping mall. It doesn't mean she's a bad person; it just means that—it’s that there's nothing worse that you can tell young people, especially around 16 or 17, that they're fine the way they are; it's like they might as well just die right there.

Because they've hit perfection. It's like, no, you've got lots more to learn. There's way more to you than you've explored, and it's really necessary that you find that out and develop it. And that's way more encouraging than you're okay the way you are.

But you know, I get it in some sense because it's associated with the idea that people have intrinsic value, and if you have children, in some way, they are just perfect the way they are. But in some way, they're not because they're not everything they could yet be.

So, yeah, so the message—it's easy to get the message mixed, yeah. And it's like there's a difference between not being perfect and being bad, you know? And we shouldn't tell kids that they're just bad, but you also have to give them some room to grow and something to aspire to. And that’s...

Yeah, well, that’s the thing, right there—that issue of something to aspire to. You know, and part of the woke, what would you call it, pathology that we're all engrossed in at the moment, is the idea that there's something wrong with judgment, per se. And that's such a preposterous idea, because to do it—and I could speak about that psychologically, because to do something like look at a room, you have to make judgments about what you're looking at and why. You can't do anything without judgment; there's a hierarchy of values. It's tied to our perception, and there has to be—there has to be something at the top, in some sense, that unites us, and we should strive for that.

And that is the sort of thing that conservatives can—along with warnings about the overreach of government, because people who are conservative tend to be more concerned about that. And so I think the two things that I like to say are foundations of conservatism—one, we just hit on, which is effectively personal responsibility—a sense of accountability. It's a very—I think that's important. It's an important bedrock for any civilization.

I would also say that it's the precursor to freedom. I don't think you can be a free society if you don't at least have this sort of sense of personal responsibility ingrained in it. I don't see how it's possible, right? Because for the simple reason that freedom requires a sense of responsibility; otherwise, you're just asking other people to be taking care of you. And if you're asking other people to be taking care of you, by definition, you're infringing on their freedoms, or you're asking a politician to infringe on their freedom.

So these are necessary foundations, and this is what conservatives have to offer: freedom. And we kind of—you’re also depriving yourself of the adventure of your life, because one of the things that's been so successful for me, in some sense, is to draw a connection between responsibility and meaning. It's like, you want some meaning to set against the suffering? Well, where are you gonna find that?

Well, reliably, one place to find it is in responsibility, because that means you're shouldering something worth shouldering, and it's a burden that's actually somewhat significant. And you can comfort yourself with some sense of your own utility in the face of all your sins and stupidity, and that's—you can't—how can you live without that? It's not possible.

Yeah, one of the struggles I have is how that's not more persuasive, because there's a lot of people who just, I think fundamentally disagree with what we're saying right now. They would disagree that freedom, as a virtue, in and of itself, is even a virtue. In and of itself, they would also define freedom very differently. They would say, well, it can't be free unless you have housing, unless you have health—free health care, unless you have at least, you know, some living wage. Then you can’t go be free.

So, we're defining the word freedom completely differently, right? Because it's troublesome on the edges too, because, you know, you can certainly see that there are levels of absolute privation that are so severe that your freedom is restricted in many ways—not in all ways and maybe not in the most important ethical ways. I mean, a lot—I read a lot of literature written by concentration camp survivors who were in pretty damn rough situations and still insisted on their own, what would you say, ethical responsibility. Certainly, Solzhenitsyn's conclusion, in some sense, he thought that was all you really had when everything was stripped away from you, and Viktor Frankl, who I wouldn't regard particularly as a conservative, he pretty much came to the same conclusion.

And those are pretty powerful books; it's hard to read through them without being, you know, somewhat convinced. So, and I think one of our challenges is convincing people that freedom is actually a good thing, and maybe not just not libertine freedom—I mean like ordered liberty freedom, you know, freedom within a moral framework, which is what makes me a conservative and not a libertarian. And it's just difficult.

Is it more difficult than you might think to convince people?

Well, I don't know. I think you understand it; I think it's a conversation you have pretty often, but it's convincing people that freedom is indeed—even though it's risky and even though it's messy and even though it can allow you to fall on your face sometimes and even induce suffering, and even in suffering that you might think is unjust—it’s still, in the aggregate, improves things. It improves everything, and it's harder to see that at the moment.

And so what people are swept up by is the sort of false promises of immediate action—immediate action to save something, to fix something, and to take that paternalistic government view, that statist view of something. But the thing is, if we actually took a step back and saw the forest for the trees and looked at the long span of history, it is always true that more freedom leads to more prosperity over time, and less of it leads to less, if not complete and utter decay, in fact.

Well, I think the diversity argument is actually a weird, what would you call it, a weird warped version of that, in some sense. Because speaking as a scientist, I hope part of the reason that freedom works is that we don’t actually know what problems are going to come up next because things actually change, and they change in an unpredictable way.

And so we have our traditions to guide us, and thank God for that, because we'd be making endless decisions all the time otherwise, and we wouldn’t be—we would be in complete disunion, but we still—that's not a perfect structure for moving ahead into unknown territory, okay?

And so you don't know what the problems are, and you don't know what the damn solutions are because you're not that smart, so what do you do about that? Well, biologically, what has happened is that human beings are possessed of very diverse individual temperaments, and that's the diversity argument. That's why diversity is necessary, but it's temperamental.

So there are creative and non-creative people; there are extroverted and non-extroverted people; there are compassionate people, and there are tough-minded people; there are conscientious people, and there are people who aren't burdened down by duty, and sometimes that frees them up to be artists, let's say.

Who's right? Well, the answer is it depends on when.

So, okay, so how do you cope with that structurally? Well, you let these diverse people be free so that they can think up ideas that might be appropriate for the next problem, and then you let them talk, which is why free speech is so important.

It's like, without that, we do not have a problem-solving mechanism. We can't capitalize; this is biological diversity. This is the manner in which organisms themselves have adapted to the entire structure of reality. You don't mess with that. You certainly don't do it politically. And you need free speech, you know. And part of that is also opponent processing. You know, if I want to move my hand as smoothly as possible this way, I put this hand up to stop it and push, and then I can do it.

A lot of the processes that occur biologically are like that—opponent processes. They make for precision and control, and a lot of our political structures in the West, because we allow for free discussion, are opponent processes.

So we have a problem. We get a diverse range of opinions; God only knows which is right, and then we can talk them through. Then maybe we don't implement something catastrophically stupid.

And so I think the other point to extract from what you said is it's diversity; it's also the decentralization principle. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. This is a key element of conservatism: first of all, a sense of humility. Conservatism is about a sense of humility—a sense of humility about what you can really know and what you can control.

In my experience, dealing with my colleagues on the Democrat side, they have no such humility. They do believe that they can solve every problem, and sometimes I think that's well-intentioned and sometimes it's not. I think it's just important to kind of extract, you know, what they want, but then let us figure out how to get there.