Russ Vought
speaker
409 appearances
6 recordings
5 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 18 Apr
Russ Vought’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
To economics. So you're not a socialist. I know you're not. No, I'm a free market conservative, right? Of course you are. But I don't believe that just because... Facebook is a corporation, that means that they get to not have to answer questions about how big they are, what they use, what the impact is on our country. Whether they're wrecking my kids' brains.
Amazon giving me, you know, same day service on a book or a, you know, a product is awesome. I love it. But that doesn't mean that everything that Amazon does is something that we shouldn't be thinking through and that our, our, our, Our normal disposition of free market economics may make us bad at assessing companies once they get too big.
Did you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. I mean, they do in the foreign policy. You're a useful idiot for Russia. Wait, they call you a useful idiot for Russia? Well, they're saying that about Tulsi. They say that about Tulsi, right? Yeah. I've lived that, yes. You've seen that? I have, yeah.
In every one of these things, when they don't want to have the conversation, they shut it down with a slur. Of course.
And that's where if the coalition was working, you'd have a lot more interesting conversations. You'd have your Christian conservatives being upset with that, having debates with the free market coalition to say, where's a place that we can land in ways that previously the conversation wasn't? Because in this to say, okay, that's something that would come out of the mouths of our adversaries.
And we need more of that, I think. And you're going to see it in trade, right? Like, yeah, trades like the one big domino that president, I think, finally has now toppled with his election.
But there will be a sizable number of Republicans that are very grudgingly going along or opposed to what he wants to do with what I think is a no brainer policy with regard to, you know, universal tariffs and higher tariffs for China. And I want the money to be able to balance the books. But I also want this country to be a manufacturing producing hub.
And what I found, Tucker, is that even I can win arguments with those who are free traders because they themselves have ceded the ground of independence. You know, if you're comfortable with other countries making your stuff, that may or may not be important from a national security standpoint or just period because we don't want to have to wait for six months to have a, you know, a refrigerator.
You know, if you want independence, you got to make it here. if you don't want to have to rely on China and have Xi shut down his whole economy because he's dealing with the COVID, then the answer is independence. And how do you get to making things more here?
And like, there is a balance in every community. We're not all going to be carpenters or plumbers or electricians, right? Like, you're not going to be independent as a person or a community across the board. But you would kind of hate it if we didn't have any carpenters in your community, right? You'd hate it if you didn't have any plumbers in your community.
And we've gotten to the point as a country where we don't make this stuff anymore. And that's a real problem. And I think it's just kind of an intuition way of getting at something that has been suppressed for decades.
50?
How old are you, Russ?
That's right. You know, get that 50 on. Look, I think this is what is needed is new institutions. That's why we created the Center for Renewing America, because we wanted to make sure there was a home to give elites, both in D.C. and in the grassroots, this is actually how you do what's necessary to be done.
So, like, if President Trump gives a speech in the first term or you from your show are articulating something that must be done, we felt there needed to be an institution to actually take that and turn it into the regulations, translating into actually public policy. And that has to be new. Some exceptions exist.
I mean, Kevin is doing a great job at Heritage, but that's the exception rather than the rule. My view is that you've got to create new institutions that are scrappy, are hungry, It doesn't take them two weeks to write a paper. It takes them one day to write a paper. You get it out there. And if that paper is not read, you go and you like get it in front of people so that they understand it.
And then when they have read it and you figure out why haven't you acted on it? What's you know, like you have to work it hard. And that's going to come from from not sitting around a board table at a prestigious organization. That's going to come from. people who are hardened, battle-tested, and really awesome in their mind as to what they think and what they know.
Look, there's a lot of awesome conservative donors. There are? Yeah. You would know. And many of them are coming to our banner over time. I think the issue is, you know, do they know about your organization, the impact? And there's a lot of grift on the, and that's the problem is like, you've got to kind of show yourself. There's so much grift. It's unbelievable.
So you kind of have to acknowledge, yeah, there's a lot of grift out here. But at the same time, do everything you can to just get up in the morning and do your job and do it effectively. And then people come. Where I feel like the issue is, is that... With everyone, you're educating them on the same journey that I think you have.
I think you've talked about it, and I know I have, of this trying to—like, what has been off about conservatism for a while and been, I think, the reason why we have lost and been on the edge of tyranny? And sometimes there are folks that still have viewpoints on that. Like, when we took Ukraine, we were the first organization out to oppose Ukraine funding. Right. That was risky, right?
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