RICHARD NIXON MAXXING and JD VANCE

Nixon Maxxing is all the rage with Generation Z. It has led to the Renaissance of Richard Nixon really taking hold, and it went viral in June when Vice President J.D. Vance spoke out about how Richard Nixon was treated for all the world to hear. 

It got a lot of attention. 

We here at this podcast are very proud to have played an early role in the renaissance we see taking hold now across the nation with the first generation who have not been skewed by the full out effort  of the Democratic Party and its liberal allies in the media, to damage the reputation of Richard Nixon. 

A new day seems to be here, and we plan to spend the new season of The Richard Nixon Experience, delving into why and how and aiding it all along. This episode we look at the evidence that Nixon was the victim of forces within the government bureaucracy to topple his administration, and we listen to the speech by Vice President Vance at the Nixon Library, who was actually there to discuss his new book, and how his remarks set a fire under the trend of Nixon Maxxing. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:17

It looks like Nixon was a victim of the deep state, and the evidence is piling up and it looks pretty convincing. Um, and so people are starting-I mean, have you seen the ball cap that's online right now? It says Nixon max maxing. I mean, kids born 30 years after Watergate, buying crew necks with, you know, Nixon now swit slogans and everything else. They're cutting art archival footage of the 37th president over biggest mall records and posting it. And the hat sold out in hours. Wall Street Journal has covered this, uh, The Hill this week, Douglas McKinnon, a former White House and Pentagon official, he said the fascination is real and it's growing, and JD Vance has noticed. I want to be really clear on some things. So we listen very carefully on this. Vance sat down at the Nixon Library on the 25th of June, long conversation about the country and about his uh new book on faith. Um, and uh McKinnon said, well, he's going to the Nixon Library to do this because he's reading the tea leaves of the younger generation. Okay. Before anybody in any party starts measuring the drapes, let's be clear on what's happening here. Gen Z has not fallen in love with Richard Nixon. Gen Z has fallen out of love with everybody in politics. And quite honestly, I think all of us, okay? In 2016, 42% of that generation called themselves liberal. 42% in 2016. What is that number today? From 42 to 30. 12 points gone. Where'd they go? Well, conservatives picked up six. Moderates picked up eight. More of them walked to the middle than walked to us. And that's not a conversation or a conversion, that's an exit. They think the American Dream has a lock on the door, and their name isn't on the list. They can't buy a house, they can't they can't afford their groceries or gas, rent eats their paycheck up. That's what they're thinking. And both parties have been telling them a story about the future that doesn't match the bank statement. That's the problem. And the GOP, I just talked to the president about this. I said, Mr. President, you know, it they don't understand. They're not hearing and they don't understand. They're suffering and feeling real pain right now. And he he is really good at understanding this. He really is. I've never seen a president more in touch with the average person, but for some reason this is not translating here. And the GOP sucks at it and always have. So, when you're presented with a closed door, what do you do? Well, these people start looking into the past, and some of them landed on socialism, and some landed on Richard Nixon. And here's the part I didn't know until this week. We've been here before, exactly here. The voting age uh had just dropped to 18, and overnight, millions of new voters, listen to this, millions of new voters, the Woodstock generation, the campus generation, were handed a ballot. They lowered it to 18. Why? Because the progressive left knew we got the kids. George McGovern's top strategist looked at it and said, Nixon just handed us the presidency. 13 million kids, it's over. McGovern's gonna win. Nixon's people didn't argue. They organized against him. Okay? They built an outfit called Young Voters for the President. Please, America, learn from this. GOP learned from this. 400,000 members, and they made one decision that changed everything. They stopped chasing the campus. They went after the kids who weren't in college, the apprentice, the enlisted men, the young married, the kids with a job and a car payment. They went after them. The man who ran it, Ken Wright's, he put his theory in a sentence. He said, most young voters do not want a president who's one of them. And then he compared it to fatherhood. Most kids don't want a dad who's a pal, they want a dad who's steady. So November came. Remember, progressives are thinking they're gonna win because they have the kids locked. November comes, McGovern, the anti-war candidate, in the first anti-war generation's first election, carries voters under 25 with 52%. 52. He barely split the generation that was supposed to be his birthright because they were the ones that were gonna be drafted and go to war. So that's a hopeful story if you're a GOP and you care to learn from it. But it's also a warning if you're paying attention. Because both halves are true, and only one of them ever gets repeated. Nixon didn't win those kids by being cool. He was never going to be cool. He won them by taking their material lives seriously. The draft, the job, the price of things, the refusing to flatter them.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Take a listen. That may be true. So could there possibly be anything else to the story that we don't already know? And it's not the only decades-old issue suddenly being thrust back into the spotlight. Earlier today, lawmakers held a hearing on the CIA's MK Ultra program. The two aren't related, but we have questions about both. So joining us to answer those questions, Jeff Shepard, Associate Director of the White House Domestic Counsel under Nixon and a member of the Watergate Defense Team, along with Jonathan Gilliam, former Navy SEAL and former FBI special agent. Great to see you both, gentlemen. Thank you so much. So, Jeff, you're the perfect person to have on this story. You, of course, served on Nixon's defense team. Why do you think that we're seeing this uh the storyline coming up at this point in time?

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Well, more information has come out that changes and challenges the whole narrative. Uh uh the the when when Nixon resigned in disgrace, there was very little known about the forces arrayed against him, and that's become clear. Uh, lots of documents from National Archives uh show the the uh conspiracy against Nixon and the effort to take him down. And they were they were successful. And of course, the other part that that comes up is the comparisons to Donald Trump. Uh the president has suffered from the same concept. See, there are four phrases that didn't exist during Watergate. Uh deep state, fake news, false narrative, and most of all lawfare. And the American public is is starting to understand the misuse of the criminal law to destroy a political opponent. That's what happened to Richard Nixon. And the most amazing thing, Katie, is they left a paper trail that documented what they were doing, secret meetings with the judges, uh, suppression of uh exculpatory evidence, and a specially recruited, highly partisan uh uh group of Nixon haters who who took the president down, sent 24 members of his administration to jail, and forced him to resign in disgrace. And I I've discovered uh all of these documents, and they're publicly available from uh from the National Archives.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Do you believe do you agree with the Vice President when he says today this would be a 12-minute news cycle and we would move on?

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Well, that part of his comment was a political statement. He said it that way to get attention, and heaven knows he got attention. But his point is perfectly valid. People are having a really rough time understanding how a man who just won the biggest landslide in the nation's history can be driven from office two and a half years later. It doesn't make sense, and it wouldn't be uh that big of a thing today. Maybe longer than twelve hours, but nothing like the mess that was made of it. They announced at their first press conference, this specially recruited group of Nixon haters, the prosecutors, they would investigate every single allegation made against Nixon since he took office.

SPEAKER_01 10:17

Yeah. Well, you like you said, you these documents are available. You you've done you're on the defense team, you've done great investigative work on this, and you have a book about it, so certainly people should uh check that out. But Jonathan, I want to get to a different topic.

SPEAKER_02 10:31

Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Richard Nixon Experience. And this episode, we're gonna take a look, or we're taking a look at Nixon Maxing, which is this new phenomenon that was begun by the Richard Nixon Foundation and their Instagram account, where they've been taking all these kind of trendy songs and putting the clips from Richard Nixon uh um uh on the on them on Instagram, and it has it has exploded of interest with the Gen Z generation. Uh and it is just the most rewarding thing to see happen uh uh as someone who uh began this podcast a couple years ago, and of course, this podcast is a rebroadcast of our show that ran in 2022 and 2023 looking at Richard Nixon. And back then we were accused of being, you know, conspiracy theorists, we were attacked a lot. But I told uh folks that that work in this field, uh the Nixon Foundation, and uh and some of the folks that were helping me with my own work, which is one of which is Jeff Shepard, I said, guys, y'all are on to something. People are interested in learning about Richard Nixon and hearing the other side of the story, and I see it in my own show because I the you know the the bulk of what put us on number one on f on uh on uh feed spot was the Richard Nixon story that we told, using the material, of course, that we were allowed access to by Jeff Shepherd to show Richard Nixon, this truly great president, I think he's he ranks in the top four, um, was maligned and attacked and smeared, and a lot of what happened in Watergate wasn't fair. And um, and if we contributed anything, we took the oral histories of three of the Worldgate prosecutors and a fourth uh off of a presentation that he did, Phil Locavara, but we also took Richard Ben Vanisti, uh Henry Ruth, and Jill Weinbanks, and we sh and we laid out along with the oral histories uh the materials that Jeff Shepherd had, and there they were talking about what they had done. And you know, she had the nerve to get on C-SPAN and say uh that the that all this all this material had been debunked. Well, what's been debunked? Here you got all this stuff about your secret meetings that that are talked about uh in these files, and Henry Roos on the on his oral history bragging about having met with John Dore in private. Uh, you know, and and and you know, the the stuff with with the judge, it's all documented, it's all there. And so what I would do is tell any of you to go to ShepherdonWatergate.com and read it for yourself. Go through that materials, go to known unknowns with the Nixon Foundation and listen to Jeff Shepard and Hugh Hewitt go through it. It's all documented and it's all right there. And if we did anything with the Richard Nixon Experience and with uh the Randall Walterson's podcast, it was take oral histories and combine it with all that, and then you get to hear the prosecutors admitting it basically in their oral histories back when they didn't think anybody was going to know this kind of information because those documents weren't out in 2008, 9, and 10 when they were doing these oral histories. That said, this is the most exciting thing I've seen in my in my years, because I have been a fan of Richard Nixon's since I was a uh a middle school kid, um since 1980, uh when when my mother's scrapbook came to the surface, and I I got so fascinated with it from the 1960 election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. Um I've been a Nixon fan, and I've been saying peep to people that something didn't seem right, because when you really research Richard Nixon, what you find out is most everything he ever gets accused of isn't exactly the way it's being presented. Perfect example that he did some terrible things to J uh to Jerry Voorhees in their house race. Truth was Voorhees completely underestimated him and got outworked. That the the 52 Senate or the 50th Senate race between him and Helen Cag and Douglas, that he ran this really nasty campaign. Well, the truth was she started it. She was the one who was so nasty and d disgusting towards him at the beginning of that race. The fact that she got her ass beat doesn't mean that he did anything wrong. That's just politics. The fund scandal had no merit. The 60 election was stolen. The the fact that the IRS uh uh, you know, ran tax audits on him from 1961 to 1966 or so, you know, those that all that's when you start researching it, the Chenaud affair, there's no real it doesn't hold any water when you research it. So what you find is when you look at Richard Nixon, you see this man who was hated by the left, and more and more everything you hear isn't true. And at the same token, as you read his books, his last book, Beyond Peace, a psychic could have written it, um, for the things that he predicted were gonna happen that have come true. Including saying that if we didn't help Russia, we didn't help finance their democracy and get them a capitalist society uh going, that they would return to Russian despotism, maybe not communism, but despotism, and look at what we've got there. Vladimir Putin. I mean, that's like just he just called that perfectly. And I say all that because this is exciting to me as a lifelong fan. You know, you're not listening to a show hosted by uh like Mr. Shepherd, a former a lawyer for him or a former Nixon administration official or somebody that even knew him. I'm just a guy in South Carolina with a history degree who has always been fascinated by Richard Nixon, who's always said, this guy there's more to this story, and he is more innocent than it looks, and he's a great president. And we've told that story, and it's led to close to 75,000 downloads on these shows, but it's also we were on the f the cutting edge right there at the beginning of Nixon Maxing. Now that the the the credit goes to the Nixon Foundation and these young people that put those uh those Instagram accounts together. But the fact is people have hungered for learning about Richard Nixon and the truth about him, and they always misensed because the man was the most popular president in the history of the country, even more popular than Ronald Reagan, uh, vote-wise statistically, and yet he he's he's removed from office two years into his term. Well, the truth's coming out and it's exciting. And this season, you know, we we've kind of become a show that does special shows like this one. We're gonna start looking at Nixon maxing and looking at this story as it unfolds, uh, maybe not every week or but maybe once a month or something. But we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna start looking at what I believe has become the renaissance of Richard Nixon, and I'm excited about it, and I make no bones about it. This is wonderful because my hope is that one day the Justice Department's gonna wake up and they're gonna say, these convictions are wrong about Watergate, and we're throwing them out because these people broke the law in order to convict and railroad a president and all of his staff. That's the first thing that really needs to happen. And I hope that people will let the Justice Department know that you want the special prosecutors held to the standard. They deserve the black eye of history, not Richard Nixon. The other thing I want to see is Richard Nixon assume his rightful place with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, the four greatest presidents in American history. And that journey is really beginning. And one of the things that really brought this to the forefront, this led to a Wall Street Journal uh article, this led to uh uh The Atlantic doing a big story on it, and the pure panic. Let me tell you something about Jill Weinbanks. I contacted her when I was working on these podcasts, and she sent me a laughing woman emoji, the one with Lee's kind of spitting out the coffee, laughing at me. Well, who's laughing now, Miss Winebanks, if you tune in? Ha ha ha. You are on the back side of history. Richard Nixon's on the coming back coming back now. But um when I think of that, it just makes me so angry, and I I don't mind gloating a little bit here, but what's changed is that people are listening, and what took this on the map was our vice president J.D. Vance, went and spoke to the Nixon Library, and that's what we're gonna end this show with. We're gonna let you hear J.D. Vance talking about his book on faith, his role as a vice president, but he's gonna talk about Richard Nixon, how much he admires him, how much he has in common with him, and the fact that Richard Nixon is experiencing what I what my what was originally our tagline for this show, the renaissance of Richard Nixon, it's at hand. And it began at the Nixon Library a month and a half or so ago when Vice President J.D. Vance went there to speak. So let's go to the Nixon Library and relive that moment and let you hear the speech and the conversation between J.D. Vance and the Nixon Foundation here on the Richard Nixon Experience. Nixon Maxing is taking hold and it's exciting.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

Welcome back into Live Now from Fox. I'm your host, Santa Marsick. Let's head out to California. This live event is a live event where Vice President JD Vance is going to be delivering marks at the Nixon Library. Let's lift up the audio and listen in as it looks like they are singing the uh Pledge of Allegiance right now.

SPEAKER_07 19:55

What's so groundly at the twilight must be whose broad stripes and bright stars through the pairs fly or the rail parts we watch were so gallery?

SPEAKER_06 21:39

Thank you. And thank you, Robert, Mr. Vice President. Welcome to the Nixon Library. It is an honor to have you here. Communion, Finding My Way Back to Faith, is your second book, and it has reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list. So congratulations.

SPEAKER_05 22:00

Thank you. A few weeks ago, some reporter asked me what was the difference between me and Gavin Newsom as political figures, and one of the things I can now say is that people actually. Bought my book and not his.

SPEAKER_06 22:24

Well, and and and your book is incredibly candid. It's very introspective, and it is largely devoid of politics. Instead, you focus on faith. And there are a few things more personal than someone's faith. You take us through the arc of losing and rediscovering your faith. So let's let's jump into it. You talk about the beginnings of your crisis of faith in the earliest pages of this book. There are a few seminal moments when you were a boy, your faith was shaken, most notably involving your grandmother, who uh you write, quote, hardly fits the stereotype of a sweater-knitting, kindly old grandmother. She loved to say the F-word, and when she died, she owned 19 loaded handguns. Correct. But she lost her health care, and then her ultimate passing helped lead you to a crisis. Let's start there. Talk about that.

SPEAKER_05 23:12

Sure. So, you know, my grandmother was in many ways not a stereotypical grandmother. And, you know, she did have 19 loaded handguns when she died. And I remember when my aunt and I and my sister were going through her things after she had passed away, we would find loaded revolvers all around the house, you know, in like the knife drawer and in her dr dresser and her wardrobe. And we sort of were trying to think about why she had guns stashed everywhere. And we realized it was because Mamma was a particularly, well, let's just say she believed in the Second Amendment and she believed in the right of self-defense. And so she didn't get around that well towards the end of her life. And so she made sure that no matter where she was, if somebody walked in her door, she would have a loaded revolver within arm's reach. And that was the kind of woman that she was. And she cussed very, she cussed a lot. I mean, I, you know, there are so many stories I could tell about um the ways in which her language was passed on to me and my wife, who grew up in very middle-class Southern California family, you know, there are times where she'll be like, you can't say those things around our nine-year-old, our six-year-old, our four-year-old, because they repeat them. Like, for example, I'll tell you a story that one of the earliest flights that I had after I got elected to the Senate, I was flying back from um from Cincinnati to DC. And because my kids were so young at the time, like sometimes I would just take a kid with me and hang out with me in DC. And that was one of the ways I made sure uh, you know, that I stayed connected to my kids. We eventually moved the whole family to to Washington, but for those first six months, I would only see my kids on weekends, and so I'd bring them to D.C. And I remember I was on a on a on a plane on a Delta flight from CVG to Washington, Reagan Airport, and my son drops one of those Delta I I like had this moment of of sort of panic because I realized everybody around, I mean, think about it, flight from Cincinnati to DC, literally every person knows that I'm a United States Senator, and also that I have apparently a terrible father because I've raised my kids, my three-year-old, to use that language. But anyway, this that's the weave. We'll get back to the question. But here's the the thing is, despite the fact that she was very non-conventional in a lot of ways, my grandmother was a person of very deep religious faith. And so when she died, I'll never forget this, and I still get a little bit emotional when I think about it. She had this practice where she had a little notebook and she would say prayers and write her prayers down when she said them for each member of her family. And so you could actually see this almost as a diary of her conversations with God through the months or even through the years, where, you know, she'd pray for my safety, or she'd pray for my strength, or she'd pray, you know, that something would go right in my sister's life. And you just realize that this was a woman who was constantly talking to God, despite the fact that her religion is what you might call unchurched. She was she loved the Lord, she believed in Jesus Christ, she also didn't go to church that often. And looking back, I think one of the things that I realized about my own faith is that I was attached to Christianity via my grandmother. She was the anchor. She was the person who taught me about God, she was the person who constantly was encouraging me to think about God, she was the person who was encouraging me to read the Bible and to pray. And because I didn't have a great church community myself, you know, I would bounce around to various churches. Sometimes we'd go once a month, sometimes less than that. When my grandmother died, just a couple of months before I left for Iraq in 2005, I sort of lost my faith. And I think there was a there was a sort of lesson in there for me, you know, and I'm sure we'll talk about this, but I came back to my faith, and part of the thing I was trying to think through with this book is why is it that kids who are raised in the faith fall away from it? I think most of us in this audience are probably people of faith. We raise our children to be Christians. I take my kids to church every Sunday, you know, even when they're misbehaving and they don't want to go. And I'm thinking to myself as I'm writing this book, what makes it take and what makes it not take? Why do some kids who are raised in the faith have this very, very strong connection to Christ? Whereas some kids it just doesn't ever really take root. And that's one of the things I was trying to think of. And, you know, one of the answers I came up with myself is while it's very important to have a parent or a grandparent or somebody who raises you in your faith, I think that if that's it, if your only connection to faith is a loved one rather than something deeper and broader, then your faith is always going to be at risk, like mine was when that person passes away. And so that is definitely like one of the things that I I write about, and one of the things that motivated me to write the book in the first place.

SPEAKER_06 28:10

Well, and that's kind of where this debate which you write about between reason and science, right, and then the mi versus the mystery of faith. And you say that this is playing out on Reddit threads, and and you know, we we we've all heard those theological debates, and you're having these debates with yourself. Sure. So uh you you then begin classifying yourself as an atheist. And you write, quote, I was severing myself from my roots. How and why did that happen?

SPEAKER_05 28:36

Yeah, so you know, I I grew up in a working-class family in southwestern Ohio, and to lose my faith when I was, you know, 21 years old, 22 years old, so I'm in the Marine Corps, I go to Iraq. By the time that I I leave the Marines, this would have been 2007, I was now calling myself an atheist. And to do that was it was this very sad thing in some ways, because I was disconnecting myself from the family that made me who I was, right? To sort of say that I wasn't a Christian anymore was to say that I wasn't connected to my grandmother anymore, because that was one of the most important things to her. I would say it was the most important thing to her. And so there was a certain amount of tragedy there. But there also was a certain amount of arrogance. And I think that a lot of us have gone through this phase, and I certainly did, where you start to think that you know everything. And one of the ways that that reflected itself in me is that I just assumed that anybody who had faith, anybody who was a person of deep religious roots, was superstitious. And I started to think of myself as I was motivated by reason, and I was motivated by smarts, and I was motivated by, you know, honest and open debate. And the people who believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, like my grandmother, yeah, it was kind of tragic that I didn't share that belief with her. But one of the ways that I expressed it was she's superstitious. She was a simpleton. And that arrogance that came from rejecting my faith, frankly, made me a much worse person. And it made me much more open to ideas that were, that were far crazier and far more radical than anything that I had rejected when I was a Christian. And that was one of the things that I kind of realized is, you know, G.K. Chesterton once said that when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything. And there was something really profound about that because what I saw around me was a bunch of people who saw themselves as hyper-rational, as motivated by science, as motivated by reason, but in reality, having discarded faith, they just adopted a whole new set of ideas that I think was, frankly, a lot crazier than anything that I had derided as superstition or as simple when I was a kid. And that, you know, that that was an interesting realization for me that you you become an atheist in part because you assume that you're smarter than everybody else, and then you realize that the people who assume that they're smarter than everybody else believe some very stupid things.

SPEAKER_06 31:14

Well, that's certainly true. But during this time, you start to read C.S. Lewis. I do. And you write that you wish that God was more like Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia. What did you mean by that? And what are you what are you learning? What are you taking away from C.S. Lewis?

SPEAKER_05 31:29

Well, one of the things that, you know, I think all of us come to God in our own ways. And some of us, it's through a loved one, some of us it's through a relative, some of us it's it's because we belong to a church that's very meaningful to us. I think one of the ways that I always engage with my faith, and was certainly true then, you know, and and is definitely true now, is is through ideas. Is the idea that there was there was some truth built into the Christian faith that maybe I discarded, but was very profound and very moving and can motivate people to do amazing and inspiring and courageous things. But I was definitely interested in the intellectual elements of Christianity. And what C.S. Lewis did for me, and what, you know, I talk about in the book about being, you know, really, really attracted to this Aslan figure in a child's book and encountering God in a children's book in a way that I had never encountered God when I was being raised by my grandmother in southwestern Ohio. And what I what I meant by that is that there were all of these things, you know, that that Aslan would say that I later found out were basically just C. S. Lewis copying from the Bible and putting them in his books. I mean, he was it was fundamentally, if if you don't know the backstory of the the C. S. Lewis's novels, what he was trying to do was imagine what would Jesus Christ look like in the context of a children's novel. That's who Aslan is. It's not a metaphor or an allegory of Christ. He's actually trying to say this is what Christ would look like, would sound like were he in this you know very rich children's novel that he wrote. And what I found so compelling about it is that you know that there was something deeply smart about C.S. Lewis's Christianity. And I I think, by the way, that led me astray in some ways. And what it what I mean is there was a part, there was a point in my life where my faith was very much of the head, but not of the heart. And so I think you can overthink these things, you can overintellectualize these things. But the way that God sort of started to pull me back in is I realized that there were a lot of really interesting ideas at the core of Christian philosophy and at the core of Christian theology that I had cast aside but were far richer than what I'd realized. And that kind of, again, that was the hook that started to draw me back in. And there were other hooks, of course, but that was a very, very important hook for me, realizing as a kid who thought of himself as very smart and very rational, realizing that there was a brilliance to the Christian faith, there was an insight into the Christian faith that I had never really taken seriously, but was very much there.

SPEAKER_06 34:18

And as you are getting reeled back in, you write that it was a Catholic saint that provided the first proverbial crack in my atheist armor. Who was that? What were the circumstances?

SPEAKER_05 34:31

Well, so when I got baptized in, I guess, 2019, I took the name of St. Augustine because there was there were a couple of things that I, again, was in this sort of arrogant atheist phase. And I look back on it now and I think to myself, I'm kind of embarrassed by it. I'm st I I I cringe when I think of the things that I said back then. This is one of the great things about being a millennial as opposed to a Zoomer. All most of the stupid stuff that I've said is not on the internet. Right? I like I feel bad for the teenagers out there that a lot of the stupid stuff you say, guys, unfortunately it's gonna live forever. But, you know, for me, most of it was just, you know, the cringy stuff that I said was interacting with my friends and talking to professors and classmates and so forth. But, you know, say St. Augustine, first of all, there was this book that I read in a philosophy course that I took at Ohio State, right? So I'm an undergrad, and it's called The City of God. And again, going back to this idea that the Christian canon, the set of ideas that laid the foundation for the Christian religion, that it was way more interesting and way smarter than anything else that I had ever been exposed to. That was very, very important for me. But there were also things that St. Augustine said where he would talk about the importance of humility and that certain ideas that maybe I had adopted when I was a Christian were actually my pathway to discarding my Christian faith. And, you know, for example, like I remember when I was a teenager, and I would go on like online messaging chats and argue with scientists about this or that scientific question and how this was incompatible with the Christian faith, or that was incompatible with the Christian faith. And there's actually, and I don't have the quote right in front of me, but there's this quote from St. Augustine, literally 1700 years old, 1600 years old, where he talks about assuming that you're smarter than other people, and uh taking what you believe and assigning it as Christian doctrine is actually discrediting Christian doctrine. Because, you know, who who are you to go out there as a teenager and argue with people and assume that you know more about the Christian faith than everybody else, and you're gonna try to whack people over the head with the truth of the Christian faith? And having a little bit of humility and accepting that something that you assume is unchristian, maybe a Christian thinker like San Augustine said 1700 years ago was not totally consistent. And I there was this way where it sort of forced me to say, okay, I've discarded a Christian faith that I had, but maybe it was a very simple Christian faith, and maybe it was a very arrogant Christian faith, and maybe the thing that I had discarded was actually arrogance. It wasn't the truth of Christianity, but it was my own arrogance and my own sense that I knew things more than other people.

SPEAKER_06 37:36

Sort of keying off of that, you title a chapter More Money, More Problems. Why does more money sometimes cause more problems?

SPEAKER_05 37:43

Well, I again I'm a millennial, and so I believe that's uh that's the wisdom of the great Christian theologian uh P. Diddy, who, as we found out over the last couple of years, is very much not a Christian or a theologian. But the uh see, I'm gonna get in trouble for all kinds of things. That'll be one of them. That will be an attack ad at some point in the future. But what what I okay, so again, to set the stage here, I was a Christian and then I wasn't. And I was arrogant and I assumed that I knew everything, and I assumed that the faith of my grandmother was based on superstition. I was very arrogant about what I thought I knew. So what I think all of us in our lives were searching for something, we're orienting our lives around something. And for me, the thing that I started to orient my life around was status, was prestige, was money, was getting ahead. And by the way, there's a legitimate basis for that impulse. Like it's not bad if you grow up in a working class family to want to be able to provide your kids things that you didn't have, or to want to be able to provide your children stability that you didn't enjoy. Those things are all totally reasonable. But I turned it almost into an obsession. I turned it into an idol. I started to care so much about where I went to school and what my credentials were that I started to focus less on the things that actually mattered. And I realized that, I mean, that probably came from somewhere deep in me. I tend to think that both our virtues and our vices are programmed a little bit from the very beginning, but I recognized that I'd become a striver. I'd become a person who cared about success, not because I was trying to achieve something important, but because I wanted to be better than other people. And that was a fundamental flaw in my character. And then something kind of crazy happened. I won the game, I won the competition of life, I got into Yale Law School. Nobody in my family had ever known anybody who had gotten into an institution like that. And so I'm at this school and and and I notice a couple of things. The first thing that I notice is that in this institution where I assume that everybody is super smart and super rational, these are the best and the brightest. Something kind of crazy happened. I noticed that a lot of them had some pretty crazy ideas of their own. And then if I had dismissed the Christians in my life as being simpletons, there were things that my classmates at Yale Law School believed that were pretty crazy. Like, for example, men should play in women's sports. But but but there there was a certain intellectual arrogance there, okay? Even though most of my classmates were good people and I liked a lot of them and were still very good friends, there was a sense that I realized that these people had beliefs that were as religious and as orthodox as anything I had ever experienced in the Christian family that raised me, but these people didn't root it in faith, they rooted it in the idea that they were smarter than everybody else. And I realized that was dangerous. But then there was something much more personal and frankly much more important that happened, which is that I fell in love. And so the the woman who is now the second lady of the United States and 36 weeks pregnant with baby number four. Um thank you. Congratulations. So I I fall in love with this girl, and I realize she doesn't care really about how much money I make or what my status is. She doesn't care about whether I become vice president of the United States. She just wants the things that are good out of life. She wants to have a nice family. She wants to have a bunch of babies, and she wants to build a life with somebody that she loves that is that is rooted in the things that matter. And it kind of hit me, all of the things that I've been orienting towards, all the things I've been focused on, the striving and the obsession with credentials, she doesn't care about that. She cares about whether I'm a good person. And I hadn't built my life to be a good person. I had built my life to get ahead. And the more that I started to think, how do you build your life to be a good person, to be the kind of man this woman wants me to be, it sort of hit me that that Christianity that I had discarded as a superstition was actually much wiser and much truer than what I had discarded.

SPEAKER_06 42:07

So you devote much of the second half of communion to exactly that, your family.

SPEAKER_05 42:11

Sorry.

SPEAKER_06 42:11

Uh how you raise your children, their continued important roles in your life and along your faith journey. Uh you write that you want to teach your sons to be virtuous men. What is it like to be both vice president and a young father raising virtuous children simultaneously?

SPEAKER_05 42:27

Well, they're not virtuous yet, I tell you. They're very sweet kids, they're very good kids. Uh we're working on the virtue part. I mean, so so one thing, you know, I like one thing I love about American Christianity is that it's very dynamic. You know, you have Catholics and evangelicals arguing about this or that doctrinal question, you have the mainline churches, and you have the Orthodox Church, and you just have this very interesting, very dynamic hodgepodge. But I think it's actually, I love it because I think it leads to a lot of interesting conversations. I had so much, so many interesting conversations with people of different denominations. And one of the differences between the evangelical church that I grew up in and the Catholic church that we take our kids to now, and you know, I'm I'm a baptized Catholic, is most of the time Catholic churches encourage you to take your family into the Mass with you. Like that's a very big difference. When I was a kid, you would drop your kids off, the little kids off at the youth group, and then you'd go into the main congregation with everybody else. Now, there are like downsides to this, right? Because we've got a nine-year-old, a six-year-old, and a four-year-old. And so sometimes, you know, my like six-year-old is blabbering on about dogman, which is these you know these comic books that little kids are really into, while the priest is saying like the most important part. And and the the thing that I I realized is that the ritual of going to church is a very, very good thing for our family. And that's one of the things. We talk about inculcating virtue. Okay, one of the most important virtues for kids to learn is they have to learn when it's appropriate to speak or not to speak, or when it's appropriate to sort of interrupt or not to interrupt. And they're just all of these little ways. Now, that's something small. And something all kids eventually, at least most kids eventually figure out. But there's something also, you know, where I'll notice, I'll look at my nine-year-old and sometimes he's daydreaming when the homily is being said, but then sometimes he's actually thinking, oh, that's really interesting. Or, oh, because Christ sacrificed himself for us, maybe I should be a little bit more patient with my six-year-old little brother who wants to steal one of my toys. And you realize there are these ways in which just a connection to the gospel is forming their minds and ways big and small. And that is the thing that I really, really love about the church. And it's a thing that I really, again, going back to my own formation, as much as I love my grandmother, and as much as she was a person of very devout faith, and as much as I believe that we will be reunited in heaven when all this is over, we didn't have that kind of church community. I didn't have that kind of day-to-day exposure to what the gospel was saying and what it required of me. And that is a thing that I just think is very good for kids. I happen to believe it's true, but I also think, completely aside from the truth of it, it's very good for my kids to be forced to reflect on this very, very ancient set of traditions and ancient set of faiths. And I already seeing it having a very profound effect upon them.

SPEAKER_06 45:44

One of the themes that you address in communion is the value of debate. Yes. And dissent and challenging long-held perspectives. Of course, your own debate in the 2024 presidential campaign helped to introduce you to most Americans. That was fun. It was fun to watch, too. Uh and and and in communion. Can I tell you a story about that? Please.

SPEAKER_05 46:03

Okay. So you never really know how these things are going. There's adrenaline. I mean, Robert knows this, and you know, you're you're fundamentally you might think things are going well and they're going terribly, or you might think things are going terribly and they're actually going well. So I finish this debate and I think things have gone pretty well. But of course, I don't know. And I'm sitting there on stage next to Tim Walsh, and there's this point where they're kind of cutting to credits, and then my wife comes on stage, and then Tim Walsh's wife comes on stage. So I look over at Usha and she's like glowing. She's got the biggest smile on her face, and I'm like, okay, that's a good sign. And then I look over at Glenn Walsh and she looks like she's just showed up to her dog's funeral. And that was the moment where I realized if my wife is really happy and Glenn Walsh is not so happy, things must have gone pretty well.

SPEAKER_06 47:02

I think you've just answered my question, which inadvertently talk to us about the importance of writing. Because you mentioned that uh the first manuscript of this book was completed when Mrs. Vance was expecting your second child in 2019, and that was before you were elected vice president. So how do you write? Talk us through your creative process.

SPEAKER_05 47:21

Yeah, so you know what one of the things that I think is very frustrating to my speechwriter, who's an amazing guy and an amazing writer in his own right, is that I I can't say something unless it's in my own words. It has to be in my own words. And I think one of the ways, you know, even when I was a young kid, one of the ways in which I think through things or I puzzle through issues or I try to think about what do I actually you know, what do you actually think about something is you almost have a a debate with yourself, right? You try to take two sides of a question and figure out which side is the right side. And I've always done that, and I've always tried to put that down on paper. Again, going back to when I was very young. And, you know, one of the things that's it's kind of crazy in the you know the era of Chat GPT, where I just don't think that, you know, this sort of very age-old thing of writing, of actually forcing yourself to convert a thought in your brain to a thought on paper that other people will sort of absorb and respond to, whether they love it or they hate it, I I think that's always just been a very important part of the way that I've done persuasion. And, you know, when we do just going back to the debate, when we did debate prep, yeah, we did a sort of traditional session, Tom Emmer, a great congressman from uh from the the Minnesota, the state of Minnesota, you know, he played Tim Walsh and he did a great job. He was a lot tougher than Tim Wals, if I'm being honest. But, you know, one of the ways that I actually did debate prep is someone would send me, here are the things you might get asked about. And then I have to write out an answer for myself. And I just think that, for me at least, that process of forcing thoughts from your head to the paper is very, very important. And, you know, one one other one other thing about just if you look at my entire life in the in the public eye, a big part of it has been through writing, right? I I became at least a reasonably well-known figure because I wrote Hillbilly Eology, but I also always like to write op-eds, I always like to make arguments, I always like to debate ideas. It's one of the ways I've always tried to find truth is by seeking it out and engaging back and forth with it. And again, to give Christianity a lot of credit, one of the things that I sort of figured out is Christian societies are much better at absorbing dissent than highly secular societies. And that was like when I realized that, it's like a light bulb went off. If you go back to the really big transformative moments and 2,000 years of Western civilization, what you find is despite the stereotype that I think progressives have of Christians, is Christians are much better at tolerating dissent and absorbing dissent and in some ways encouraging dissent than highly secular societies. And I think that's actually one of the secrets to why we're so dynamic. It's one of the secrets to why we've had such great technological innovation in the West, is because, yes, of course, you know, when somebody challenges the status quo, even in a Christian society, they sometimes get pushback from it. But Christians, because they're rooted in the fundamental truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, I think they're much our societies are much better able to tolerate the kind of dissent that creates scientific brilliance and advancement in philosophy and politics. We're not afraid of people disagreeing with us because we we know that we have the real truth in our heart.

SPEAKER_06 50:55

So we're here at the Nixon Library, and uh President Nixon was the consummate statesman. And uh just a few days ago, you completed a major peace negotiation, and just a few minutes ago you paid respects at President Nixon's memorial site, where the epitaph on his marker reads, The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. Was that the mentality that you embraced? Uh were you thinking of that sentiment as you were representing our country in Switzerland?

SPEAKER_05 51:23

Well, first of all, uh just because you brought up uh Nixon, I gotta say thank you to you and to Robert and to the entire Nixon Library folks. This is an amazing thing, and I'm very proud to be here. So thank you. Not just for welcoming me, but for everything you do. So we were talking about this a little bit backstage, but I'm actually fascinated by Nixon as a character in history. I think that his historical legacy is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, but I think deservedly so. As I joked with Robert backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. Like the idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy. And by the way, if you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions tried to do to Donald Trump and the first Trump administration. There is a parallel. I also just, at a personal level, you know, okay, young senator, vice president, writes some best-selling books, is hated by the media, it kind of sounds like JD Vance. So I'm a little, you know, I've always liked, I've always liked Richard Nixon. But okay, one other thing about Richard Nixon that I think is fascinating is okay, the two biggest historical um electoral college landslides in American history are, of course, Ronald Reagan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972. Okay. What you may not know, and you know, some of my political data guys who are very into this have have drilled into me, is that Nixon's coalition in 72, though if you look at the top-line numbers, you would say, well, that's exactly what happened in 1984, it's much different. Nixon's coalition in 72 is actually durable and much more closely resembles the Trump coalition of 2024 than the Reagan coalition of '84. So what Reagan did in 84 is he ran up margins basically with white Americans. And of course, you know, he won a historic landslide, but the country is much less white today than it was in 1984. Nixon's coalition was unbelievably durable to the demographic change that we've seen in the United States of America. So this is a guy who couldn't, he, you know, Reagan could not have won his landslide in 2024. Richard Nixon maybe could have won his landslide in 2024. And I think that there's a very important political lesson in that for all of us in the Republican Party. He was actually like a political genius. And I'm just fascinated by the guy's historical figure. So anyway, so very, very happy to be here. But okay. So it says that the greatest what is it, the greatest honor that history can bestow is to call someone a peacemaker. And I think thank you. And you know, what was I thinking about that quote when we were in Switzerland? No. Was I thinking about that sentiment? Absolutely. Because, you know, one of the other lessons of Richard Nixon is it's not just that he got out of Vietnam, but that he got out of Vietnam from a position of strength. Okay? It's one thing to tuck tail and run, it's another thing to clearly define an objective, to accomplish that objective, and then to ensure that you don't allow mission creep to transform a victory into a defeat. And one of the things I've seen with the president of the United States in the last few weeks, and frankly, some of the criticism that we've gotten, even from our friends, is they're constantly trying to change the mission that Donald Trump set us up to achieve. And what does he say? He said at the outset, I want to destroy their conventional military, I want to eliminate their ability to project power, and I want to ensure that they never have a nuclear weapon ever again, ever. Okay. And what I've seen is some people try to say, you know what, well, you that that's great, but you should have a different objective. And I think the reason why the president has been so successful is because he refuses to give in to that impulse. He says, We came what we set out to do, we we created incredible diplomatic, economic, and military leverage. Let's use that leverage to go and accomplish an even bigger win for the American people. That's what he's asked us to do. It's not over yet, but so far, so good.

SPEAKER_06 56:06

That's great to hear. Finally, Mr. Vice President, you are a walking, talking embodiment of the American dream. And as you write in Communion, you came from the lowest fifth income bracket, and you are now only one step away from the top of American public life. How are you reflecting on America on its 250th birthday?

SPEAKER_05 56:34

Yeah, you know, I I I guess I just can't help but look back at my life. 41 years. I'm the vice president of the United States, but most importantly, I've got three beautiful kids and a fourth on the way. I'm married to the love of my life. We're able to give our kids things that I never thought that I would be able to give my kids. And I just can't help but feel incredible gratitude to the United States of America. Nowhere but here would this be possible. And I think that when when I consider, just to make a slightly partisan point here, as we've you know got people waving the Palestinian flag outside and hollering at us in Spanish, by the way, the vice president can understand what you're protesting about if you don't speak the language of everybody else here. So if you want like note to protesters, if you want the vice president to hear what you're protesting about, you've got to use a language I actually understand. Anyway. But I I think that what has what I've noticed about politics in my lifetime is I look, I was raised by blue-collar socially conservative Democrats. My papa was a Union Steel man his entire life. He voted for Republicans like once ever, and otherwise he was a Democrat. And whatever your politics, whether you were a Democrat or Republican, I grew up in a world where everybody, every politician was expected to have some basic gratitude for the United States of America. So when I think about 250 years of American history, what I think about is that the entire greatness of this country was built by all of us together. When we went to the moon in Nixon's administration, yeah, it was the astronauts, but it was also the scientist who designed the rockets. It was the janitor who was making sure that the place where they were building the rockets was a clean place to come to work. It was every single person working together to make a great achievement possible only in the United States of America. When I think about what happened just in the last few months, yes, it's the vice president and Steve Woodcall negotiating, but it's it's junior enlisted folks who signed up and didn't know what the hell they were getting themselves into, but made it possible for us to win something great for the American people. The story of this country is that the foundation is laid by normal, common, good people who make the great achievements of American civilization possible. And when I think about what bothers me so much about partisan politics in 2026 is I don't hear the sense of gratitude that all of us should have. Whether you're black or white, rich or poor, we should be grateful to the people who built this country. We wouldn't have such a great life or a great civilization without them.