Matt Gaetz is a freshman Congressman from Florida who represents the 1st Congressional District of Florida s 1st congressional district. He has been in Congress since 2016 and is a member of the Armed Services and Judiciary Committee. In this episode, he talks about his early days in Congress, how he got to where he is now, and what he thinks about the current state of Congress.
00:00:37.000I didn't do my normal morning segments and we're just going to jump into it and talk about what's going on with Congress because Matt Gaetz is here and he's already told us a whole bunch of crazy-ish that we're like, that can't be true.
00:01:49.000So, Matt, you stood up to Kevin McCarthy, to the GOP establishment, several times as an understatement, and we watched for that week or so, and we were laughing the whole time.
00:02:04.000I am stoked that you're here because I think what you did was awesome, but I'm curious to learn about the details.
00:03:40.000That's just a total joke of a way of governing.
00:03:42.000Like, how can we sit here and honestly say that bills that are thousands of pages long that spend 1.7 trillion dollars and that you get 48 hours before having to cast a vote is really legislating?
00:03:55.000It devalues each individual member and it's insulting to our constituents to suggest that we even know what the hell we're doing when that's the way we run the railroad.
00:04:13.000The youngest member of Congress was not yet born the last time the appropriations process went through regular order.
00:04:21.000And that just means, like, we should vote on the defense stuff separately, and then vote on, like, the education stuff, and then the health and human services stuff, and that it doesn't just all get mushed together so somebody can vote for a bunch of bullshit that you wouldn't otherwise approve, and then say, well, I had to vote for it to fund our troops, right?
00:04:40.000That's what the cartel builds, and lobbyists make a gazillion dollars off of that.
00:04:44.000The final leg of the stool is personnel.
00:04:46.000Like, in order to enforce the deal that we got, we wanted specific people on specific committees, in specific leadership posts, and, you know, what's the saying?
00:04:57.000You rob the banks because that's where the money's at.
00:04:59.000Well, we wanted Far more representation on the Appropriations Committee because that's where the money is.
00:05:04.000And a lot of Americans don't know what the Rules Committee is or why that's important, but it totally governs what we get to vote on and what we don't get to vote on.
00:05:14.000And so we demanded specific people and specific representation on the Rules Committee.
00:05:19.000I think we're going to be in a lot stronger position as a result.
00:05:22.000I heard a few critiques during this process.
00:05:51.000And then like, it's like, oh, no, this took this, you burned your whole first week.
00:05:55.000There are days in Congress where the only thing we vote on is the renaming of one post office.
00:06:01.000There are days in Congress where the only thing we vote on are the rules that govern the next vote.
00:06:08.000And we take six weeks off every year for summer vacation where we do absolutely nothing.
00:06:13.000So to take four days to say, this is the policy, this is the procedure, this is the personnel that is going to drive the Republican team going forward seems like the best use of time since I've been there.
00:06:28.000Why was it only 20 members of Congress willing to stand up?
00:06:31.000Well, I mean, first of all, the frontline members, even the frontline, and when I say the frontline members, I mean members that are in districts that are 51-49, maybe even districts that Joe Biden won by a substantial portion, right?
00:06:43.000They had a loyalty to Kevin and an argument that was something like this.
00:06:48.000Well, Matt, if a guy goes out there and spends, you know, four years Taking money from the lobbyists and giving that money to us, and then in the last minute you knife that person, no one will ever agree to be the valet for those people ever again.
00:07:03.000And we need that delivery system of resources, and so it's not about how much we like or don't like McCarthy, it's about a system that we rely on to resource our campaigns.
00:07:15.000And I mean, that's a pretty astonishing argument, but it at least has a logical construct.
00:07:22.000And then, you know, there are people who fear disrupting the system.
00:07:27.000They think, look, I got here to Congress.
00:07:29.000I've got a staff that tells me I'm always losing weight and that my jokes are funny.
00:07:32.000Like I go home and I'm the big cheese at the Rotary Club, and to every extent that I can have calm waters, the better, and anything that creates turbulence, I oppose.
00:07:43.000And that's actually a pretty big swath of the Republican conference and the Democrat conference.
00:07:47.000That is how the Uniparty gets to groupthink.
00:07:50.000And I hear all this time these geriatric senators talking about, like, oh, the importance of These great bipartisan achievements, but so often in my life, the greatest moments of unity have been the worst for the people.
00:08:03.000There was a shit ton of unity to pass the Patriot Act.
00:08:07.000We never thought it was actually going to be used against patriots.
00:08:10.000We thought it was going to be used against Arabs in faraway lands.
00:08:14.000There was a whole lot of unity over the Iraq War.
00:08:18.000There was a ton of unity for the COVID lockdowns.
00:08:20.000There was a ton of unity for just printing money and sending it to people that weren't working.
00:08:25.000And so, like, whenever they're the bills that are, like, the major bills that have 90-95% support, that's when you need to be most worried at times.
00:08:35.000No, because we built the tools in that would allow us to have the accountability.
00:08:40.000I mean, Nancy Pelosi is going to go down in history as the last of the imperial speakers that centralized power and that then, you know, only doled out to members, oh, well, you can go rename a post office.
00:08:53.000Meanwhile, the macroeconomic decisions, the major cultural and policy decisions, all get centralized in the speaker's office.
00:09:01.000Where a lot of the staff all went to like Northeastern schools and are afraid of things like fried food and guns and, you know, people who enjoy those things, right?
00:09:10.000And Paul Ryan gave an interview on CNN yesterday that was really telling, where he even confessed, like, I had too much power as speaker.
00:09:18.000Like, way too many of those decisions were made without the people who had spent years analyzing policies, seeing which programs had varying levels of efficacy.
00:09:29.000And so While, you know, McCarthy, I think to his credit, at the end of the day was willing to devolve a lot of that power.
00:09:37.000We reinstituted the one-member motion to vacate the chair.
00:09:40.000So, for any reason, at any time, any member can go to the floor and call for a vote to remove the Speaker of the House, and if 218 people vote for that motion, then the Speaker is gone.
00:09:52.000Now, I don't want to use that, I don't intend to use that, but I think having it on the books is healthy for the institution so that there isn't fear of retaliation for doing what's right.
00:10:02.000The Speaker works for us, the people, and should be On a whim, taken out.
00:10:28.000Well, I mean, then we wouldn't be taking many votes.
00:10:30.000I mean, there was a moment during all of this where people were like, Well, Gates, if you and your 20 holdouts stay that way, then we won't even be able to organize!
00:10:40.000And I'm thinking, well, give us a lot of leverage on the debt limit, you know, if we didn't constitute the House.
00:10:45.000So yeah, maybe sometimes, like, you know, a reflexive legislative body isn't what's good for the country.
00:10:51.000Maybe less government is good, which I think historically that point is proven many times over and over again.
00:10:57.000But I think it's fair to say that there was also a lot of contention between you and a lot of other people.
00:11:02.000I know Donald Trump was also calling in specifically.
00:11:05.000Can you get into some of the contention that was happening there?
00:11:10.000And there was also one specific photo of you sitting there, and there was a guy in your face.
00:11:15.000And it was a famous video and a famous picture that had the caption, Exist and you were kind of cool and standing your ground there.
00:11:24.000Can you tell us what was happening there behind the scenes?
00:11:27.000Well, first of all, I don't get rattled when people yell at me in public because it happens like three times a week So for a lot of members of Congress like having your colleagues like upset at you or yelling at you like that's deeply uncomfortable and really that did not affect my week at all because what I knew is that our argument about how corrupt and how Flawed the decision-making is in Washington was getting out and that it was and that was breaking through I think the contention was overplayed because of the cameras.
00:11:55.000The late Don Young almost pulled a knife on me on the floor because I wouldn't vote for a bill that he had regarding sea lions or something like that.
00:12:42.000Look, now, if somebody who's the lead person on financial services or on the Ways and Means Committee just hates you, you're not going to get your idea through, and they can just outlast you.
00:12:53.000Whereas in a term limits environment, those grudges dissolve every time the Congress turns over, the legislative body turns over.
00:13:01.000You mentioned the debt ceiling a little bit ago.
00:13:03.000You guys are about to vote on a debt ceiling?
00:13:35.000Well, you're right that it's a joke because there is no real plan to ensure that we have a cap on that which we will borrow and spend.
00:13:45.000And I think the reason this continues to get worse on the books is because regular Americans don't feel the pain of the national debt in an approximate way.
00:13:57.000If an illegal immigrant runs over your family member, you feel that, right?
00:14:03.000If someone in your household loses their job, there's a direct impact you see.
00:14:08.000If the factory that your mom worked at goes to Chihuahua, Mexico, that is a traceable thing.
00:14:15.000But so long as we're the global reserve currency, we're able to sort of exist in this era of expanding debt.
00:14:23.000Now, we're starting to pay the price with rising inflation.
00:14:27.000But, you know, there is no real lobby or special interest for less spending in Washington.
00:14:55.000So the demand we put with the leverage we had in the Speaker's race was that the House of Representatives must pass a budget resolution at the 2022 spending levels.
00:15:07.000So roll this thing back a couple years.
00:15:10.000And it's similar to like in 2015 when they did cut, cap and balance.
00:15:14.000And so here, all of what we do has to go under those spending levels.
00:15:18.000And look, it's going to mean some cuts in areas that I support, like defense.
00:15:22.000But if we've got to cut defense, maybe we ought to cut all the money we spend defending other nations far away, like Ukraine.
00:15:30.000Hey, Pakistan needs their gender studies, okay?
00:15:32.000I think it's imperative for the world that we finance that, as well as, you know, beagle torture by Dr. Fauci.
00:15:39.000Who else is going to do it unless we do it?
00:15:41.000So, I'm just being facetious here, but obviously there's a lot of wheeling and dealing in Washington, D.C., and we saw that through, of course, this larger vote for the Speaker of the House.
00:16:11.000Sure, I mean Thomas Massey, while he voted for McCarthy on every ballot, he was there with us in the back rooms helping write a lot of the fiscal policy that ended up undergirding the agreement.
00:16:24.000And MTG, you know, she is an inspirational force.
00:16:27.000I consider her Probably my closest ally in all of Congress.
00:16:36.000And what the Democrats did to her was so wrong and so egregious.
00:16:40.000And I think that she had an earlier understanding with Speaker McCarthy that she would get back on committees, that they would be meaningful committees, that they would tailor to her skill set.
00:16:50.000And I think that was sufficient for her to support him.
00:16:53.000We sought some broader structural changes.
00:16:57.000The changes and concessions we got out of McCarthy are only going to endure to the benefit of MTG because she's one of our more dynamic and fearless members.
00:17:07.000I like Kevin's behavior the last week.
00:17:11.000How would you rate him being Speaker of the House this week?
00:17:15.000Well, one of the things that was not in the rules but was part of our addendum agreement was that the 14,000 hours had to be released of the footage from January 6th, and the Speaker has custodial oversight of a lot of those records and he made that
00:17:30.000commitment and then today he reaffirmed it publicly that that's exactly what we're going to do. So
00:17:35.000yeah, you know, trust is a series of promises kept and I believe that McCarthy
00:17:40.000deserves the opportunity to keep the promises he made and so far he's on the right track. Is
00:17:46.000he going to have a grudge against you?
00:17:47.000I don't know that I'm going to be on his Christmas card list, but you know, it doesn't like that.
00:17:52.000That's not really what it's about. You know, he...
00:17:54.000He knows very clearly what my objectives are and what it took to get us to go forward with a speaker, and he is performing to that expectation.
00:18:04.000It's not personal for me, it's business.
00:18:06.000I'd love to get you guys in together to debate live on the show.
00:18:25.000But, you know, it got to a point where there were six holdouts, where we didn't want to drive McCarthy into the arms of the Democrats, right?
00:18:33.000So once the margin gets that low, McCarthy could, in theory, have gone to the Democrats, gotten, you know, four, five, six of them to get instant COVID in exchange for draining our subpoena authority.
00:18:44.000And then he would have ascended to the speakership anyway.
00:18:47.000All of the features of our deal would have dissolved.
00:18:50.000And then every time we didn't send a subpoena to hold government accountable, he could have said, well, that's Matt Gaetz's fault.
00:18:55.000So we didn't want to put him in that position, the country in that position, the House in that position.
00:18:59.000And so that's why we crafted what we thought was a deal that was not reliant on trust, but that had clear enforcement triggers.
00:19:08.000Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, they're getting removed from their committees, right?
00:19:29.000I don't think the grave Swalwell emergency is the Fang Fang thing.
00:19:33.000I think it's more the role he played in the Russia hoax.
00:19:36.000When you go out there and say there's evidence that the President of the United States is a Russian agent, and then you don't deliver on that, you shouldn't get to serve on the major committees that have access to the most sensitive intelligence on the planet Earth.
00:19:59.000But within the Republican conference, I am Swalwell's biggest defender on the Fang Fang thing, and here is why.
00:20:05.000He was a city councilman in the city of Dublin and some chick showed up with money wanting to hook up with him.
00:20:10.000You think that like he's a single guy like running around Southern or running around California and he's supposed to have like the defensive briefing to turn down some like hot Chinese chick that was wanting to like donate money and jump in bed with him.
00:21:52.000But the way he weaponized it, and it really started with a lot of the Obama people.
00:21:57.000Say what you will about Obama, the guy was good at vertically integrating personnel in a lot of these agencies where the bureaucracy would bend to their will.
00:22:06.000Like, if there's a fair critique of Trump, it's that, you know, he was this great visionary, but oftentimes the people that were two, three, four layers down were working against him, and he didn't roll into the presidency with this terrific Rolodex of people that could go and operate at that level.
00:22:21.000Whereas, you know, Schiff, Obama, like, these people were good at getting people in place to drive action, and we should learn from that.
00:22:30.000Is it because they were hooked up with the liberal economic order at the time, and, like, they just had all the backing of Right.
00:22:37.000If you're part of the prevailing way of thinking, the national security state, the neoconservative worldview, there's an entire infrastructure there to build out your career.
00:23:01.000And if that doesn't work, they try to destroy you.
00:23:04.000There's a lot of compromise, especially in Washington, D.C., but how deep does the rabbit hole go?
00:23:10.000Because there's a lot of people talking about, you know, the deep state, the intelligence agencies having a lot of control, using a lot of extortion, special interest groups pulling the strings here.
00:23:19.000What's your understanding of how things really work in Washington, D.C., compared to what the average American kind of sees?
00:23:24.000Well, I think the most corrupt foray into this is freshman orientation.
00:23:32.000Because you show up here, and I mean, imagine showing up from Northwest Arkansas, from Southern Mississippi, and you see the architecture of D.C.
00:23:42.000They take you out to the finest steakhouse, the best wine you've ever had, and co-located at your table are the lobbyists for the major special interests for the committees that you're interested that you want to serve on.
00:23:53.000So, like, I get here and they're like, oh, Gates, you want to be on the Armed Services Committee.
00:23:57.000Have you met these defense contractors?
00:23:59.000These are the key lobbyists that round up the defense money.
00:24:02.000And they put you with them from the very beginning.
00:24:04.000And you sort of get the joke that if you give your vote card to the leadership and your calendar to the lobby corps, you just kind of get enveloped into a system that's there to nurture you and protect you and keep you out of harm's way.
00:24:16.000And all it costs you is your own belief set.
00:24:19.000And I don't think that's compromise so much as selling out.
00:24:22.000Now, you know, so that is like step one.
00:24:25.000And that catches a whole lot of the people who get here.
00:24:29.000And then beyond that, if you kind of resist that system, then they do try to extort you, engage in anything they can do to compromise you, cancel you, find some joke that you liked on Instagram years ago that doesn't fit with the mores
00:24:45.000of this time. Find some email that you were on the forward chain of that's some basis to say that
00:24:51.000you're a white supremacist or you're some sort of unacceptable human that can't be in polite
00:24:56.000company. And then if that doesn't work, it's abject destruction through the political process where
00:25:02.000there are many, many dollars lined up solely for the extermination of those who push
00:25:11.000Yeah, this is detailed extensively in books like The Economic Hitman that I think are definitely worth reading and checking out here.
00:25:17.000But talking to previous members of Congress, it's really kind of daunting to see what they have to go through, how much pressure they have to go through, how much agreement they have to agree to before even getting into some of those positions of power.
00:25:52.000Yeah, if I could ask you, and again, you don't have to answer this, but who do you think is more influential and powerful in Washington, D.C.?
00:25:59.000The lobbyists or the intelligence agencies?
00:26:02.000Well, I mean, the answer to the question is yes, they're one and the same, because oftentimes they are fused with precisely the same personnel.
00:26:10.000Where people will roll out of DOJ and end up at, you know, the law firm that services the lobby corps and the very same clients.
00:26:20.000I mean, there's no better example of the fusion of that than when I learned through a whistleblower that the Perkins Coie law firm, which is the legal wing of the Democratic Party, has within it a secure information facility that is run by the FBI.
00:26:37.000So they literally have a place in their law firm where they can try to convert political dirt into intelligence investigations, counterintelligence investigations, criminal investigations, and the like.
00:26:49.000Yeah, and let's not forget all the Epstein tapes that they have, too.
00:26:53.000And they have all the Epstein tapes, too, but that's another thing.
00:26:55.000Do you have any hope in the Jim Jordan new committee when it comes to investigating the weaponization of government?
00:27:01.000Do you think that's going to be akin to maybe a church committee?
00:27:04.000Yeah, that's our objective and the specific agreement we have with McCarthy is that that select committee will have the budget, resources, personnel, no less than the Democrats' January 6th committee.
00:28:23.000I mean, the Saudis were able to avoid the responsibility that they have in the 9-11 attacks and in a terrorist attack in my district in Pensacola.
00:28:36.000Because they get a nice little report written that is sufficient to absolve them, and then they say, oh well, not nothing to see here.
00:28:44.000You don't need to come back and conduct any further inquiry.
00:28:47.000Do you fear or is that concern when creating committees of, I don't know, because I'm like, well, we need an independent committee, but who's deciding who's on the independent committee?
00:28:56.000How do you ensure that it isn't a sham?
00:29:11.000Are there specific directions that you guys are aiming at thus far?
00:29:14.000Have you decided what departments are going to be investigated or what specific things are being looked for?
00:29:21.000Yeah, you heard McCarthy in his speech single out the FBI, right?
00:29:27.000He did not talk about like a weaponized government in the abstract.
00:29:31.000When he spoke, he spoke specifically about politics at the FBI.
00:29:36.000So one of our first areas of inquiry is going to be This Timothy Tebalt guy who suppressed information that was derogatory to the Bidens and did not allow the normal process of criminal inquiry to continue there.
00:29:52.000And they do everything they can at the FBI to try to supercharge anything that I wonder how it is that, you know, Trump being a wealthy elite and all that stuff still ends up outside the big club.
00:30:03.000And then if it's the Bidens, they function as their defender
00:30:08.000and they suppress the derogatory information.
00:30:37.000He chaired foreign affairs in the Senate, where you interact with a lot of the people who end up in powerful positions in the intelligence community.
00:30:45.000And Trump went in with a goal of reorganizing that and changing it.
00:30:49.000And that's, I think, why they kick back at him so hard.
00:30:52.000What I don't understand, though, is if Trump, or let's say Joe Biden is part of the liberal economic order that's, you know, we're evolving to a new world order.
00:31:01.000Lots of people around the world are realizing we're globalizing.
00:31:04.000A new world order where it's not about American military bases everywhere anymore.
00:31:07.000Now we're going to have a new type of thing.
00:31:09.000But in that instance, I would think that the Americans would want the Russians on their side, not siding with China and the Chinese economic order.
00:31:16.000I don't understand why are people pushing Russia away if they're trying to create a new world?
00:31:22.000I'm concerned it would make America number three.
00:31:25.000Well, I mean, what we're seeing right now is the leveraged buyout of Russia with a lot of Chinese cash.
00:31:32.000I mean, there are more Chinese with $2 million cash in their bank account right now, like US equivalent, than there are total Canadians.
00:31:42.000And so, yeah, you're seeing a lot of the farmland in Russia get just bought out by the Chinese, and it fuses those systems in a way that poses a real substantial threat to the United States, to the West at large.
00:32:01.000Aren't they buying our farmland as well?
00:32:04.000I thought that maybe we could propose some sort of peace deal between Russia and Ukraine because what they're doing, it looks like Putin's trying to take a land bridge to Crimea so that he has warm water access into the Black Sea.
00:32:15.000Russia, basically after the Soviet Union split up, they took it all away from Russia and they gave They gave it to Ukraine, that city.
00:32:23.000What's the big city there, right in Crimea?
00:32:26.000And I think what we need to do is establish... I don't think Russia's ever going to stop until they get a land bridge into Crimea and a warm water seaport.
00:32:58.000I'm not coughing, I just lost my voice.
00:33:00.000Me and Ian are the only ones holding on here.
00:33:02.000But it is a very complex geopolitical situation that I think represents the larger proxy war between the East and the West.
00:33:09.000I think sending in more weapons prolongs this proxy conflict to make sure that, of course, it goes on forever.
00:33:15.000I think this war is meant to be continued and not won.
00:33:18.000There's also a lot of debates now about tanks.
00:33:21.000To me, do you think there's a possibility for any kind of peace deal?
00:33:25.000Because I think it's getting co-opted so many times, including by individuals like Boris Johnson, that literally go to Ukraine and say, no, you're not going to even sit at the table here with the Russians.
00:33:36.000Do you think One year from now, ten years from now, there's some kind of possibility for peace here, or is this just going to be a continued conflict forever?
00:33:43.000Well, who makes money on a peace deal?
00:33:46.000I mean, peace is not nearly as profitable to those who are in the war business.
00:33:55.000I mean, to me, our involvement in Ukraine is directly linked to our diminished involvement in Afghanistan.
00:34:05.000Afghanistan was the money laundering capital of the world for a lot of our lifetime.
00:34:10.000A lot of that cash was run through Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
00:34:16.000And when that was not the corrupt country that we just decided to pour American cash on, we needed another historically corrupt country to go pour American military material and cash into.
00:34:31.000And so I don't believe that anyone's really working toward peace.
00:34:35.000I think that there are very powerful interests that benefit if this is a long-term, low-yield war.
00:34:42.000Yes, CNN is even reporting right now that the United States is running low on some weapons and ammunition because they're transferring so much of it to Ukraine right now.
00:34:51.000So that's staggering and also dangerous for the United States to be in such a vulnerable spot as well.
00:34:59.000There's a lot of bigger interest here.
00:35:00.000BlackRock just signed a deal with Ukraine that they're going to be rebuilding Ukraine, as of course BlackRock also has a lot of deals.
00:35:06.000Is there anything that we could do as people to bring awareness to this?
00:35:08.000military-industrial complex, you see the circle of life there kind of evolving there.
00:35:12.000Is there any way to kind of address this? Is there anything that we could do as people to
00:35:16.000bring awareness to this? Is there any way there could be some kind of peace here?
00:35:20.000Well, the trend lines are coming in my direction when it comes to public perception on this.
00:35:25.000I mean, initially, like the American people were dying to send every American dollar, you know, to Ukraine.
00:35:32.000And increasingly, at least within the Republican Party, you've started to see that shift as our economic conditions are more in the forefront of people's minds.
00:35:40.000Like, we have laws that require end-to-end monitoring of materiel when we send it into a war zone.
00:35:49.000I am not convinced we are following them.
00:35:50.000Is it because we're not technically at war?
00:35:52.000The United States hasn't been technically at a war since World War II.
00:35:55.000Well, we do have regs that define a conflict zone, and whenever we send stuff that kills into one of those places, we're supposed to know who has it.
00:36:05.000If that's like the new thing, is like, oh, well, you know, send the stuff, anything, what was it that Ben Sasse said when he was in the Senate?
00:36:37.000I mean, you had dozens of Democrats signing letters saying that the Azov battalion were a bunch of white supremacists, and while they want to call our own military, who are patriots, a bunch of white supremacists here, they got no problem draining the resources of our country to go and fund who they were just calling white supremacists, you know?
00:36:58.000So if in six years the Azov start exterminating a race because they are happen to be genocidal or racist like then what is the American you gonna use that as evidence to go to war in Ukraine to fight the Azov and now we got more military bases in Ukraine protecting the Suez Canal?
00:38:37.000It is a country that has enough nuclear power to end Earth multiple times over.
00:38:43.000And it's a leader who I don't think is making stable, rational decisions in Vladimir Putin.
00:38:49.000And, you know, to continue to send the Heimars there, to send the Bradleys there from the United States, seems provocative to me. Now, why isn't this Europe's
00:38:59.000problem? Right? You would think that Germany and the other powers in Europe would have the most
00:39:06.000at stake. But what they do, you know, as these European democracies face elections and as their
00:39:11.000reserves go down, like you're going to see them have a different posture towards Russia as their
00:39:17.000mandates expire and as they have to go back for elections. Plus, they rely on us for defense.
00:39:22.000Well, I mean, that was one of the principal critiques that Trump made that I think got a lot of disaffected people to support him is when he said, I'm just tired of being like dead money at the world stage.
00:39:33.000Like being the world's policeman, being the world's piggy bank has not been good for the American middle class.
00:39:39.000Yeah, Trump also made sure that he sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, something Obama was even afraid to do.
00:39:45.000So, I mean, this conflict has been brewing for so long, since 2014, even before that, with the kind of revolution that's happening there.
00:39:52.000But to me, this is just such a sad thing to see humanity go through.
00:41:58.000And what kind of influence do you think they kind of have on the United States since Klaus Schwab openly brags about how he has half of the Canadian parliament being young members of the World Economic Forum?
00:42:10.000Yeah, no, I think that it's part of the, like, political-industrial complex.
00:42:15.000It's the finance wing of the political-industrial complex.
00:42:18.000And so, like, if what you need to keep your power and to win your elections is a super PAC that shows up with, you know, ten million dollars in dark money, like, who do you think cuts those checks?
00:42:31.000You think it's, like, some guy who's, like, a furniture tycoon in Oklahoma?
00:42:38.000And everybody knows, and like, you know, this is an area where the populist right and the populist left need to work together on the way that we fund campaigns in this country, because it like, it always works to the benefit of the uniparty.
00:42:51.000And I don't get why people should be able to put unlimited money without disclosure into manipulating the viewpoints of Americans.
00:42:59.000Do you think politically there's going to be some kind of rift and change here?
00:43:02.000Because there does seem to be, obviously, the Democrats and the Republicans, but there also seems to be a bigger rift amongst the establishment and the anti-establishment.
00:43:34.000He ruined that time, and I think he spurred a situation where now the Democrats have a lot of power.
00:43:41.000You know, when I first got elected to Congress, we could have a lot of collaboration between the populist right and the populist left on things like war powers, the surveillance state, political reforms that don't just empower kind of the PAC structure.
00:43:57.000And then January 6th happened, and those populist leftists would not talk to us.
00:44:02.000I mean, would not collaborate with us on bills, would not engage in any way.
00:44:07.000And it became such a point of personal trauma for some of them.
00:44:12.000And I don't think that was good for the country.
00:44:14.000I don't think that was good for kind of the anti-establishment unity that we need.
00:44:18.000I will say that since Republicans took the majority, they've been a lot nicer to us.
00:44:24.000We saw you talking with AOC during this whole process.
00:44:28.000Was that something relevant or that you can share?
00:44:31.000I mean, I got caught on camera in conversations with AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Pramila Jayapal, like three people who folks have seen me disagree with more than agree with.
00:44:42.000With AOC, I was discussing whether or not the Democrats were going to leave the floor and cut a deal with McCarthy because that would have changed the math on the speaker vote.
00:47:17.000Regarding using the government to protect us from corporations, you were talking about breaking up big tech earlier.
00:47:23.000I think a mistake that we should not make is what they did to Rockefeller with his Standard Oil.
00:47:26.000They broke it up into like seven or eight oil companies and then he made more money off of these new, so like breaking up Facebook into Facebook Prime, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, these different companies.
00:48:18.000to heal the system with big tech as opposed to try and smash up companies
00:48:21.000and make them do what the government says they have to do like let them
00:48:24.000ban whoever they want but if they're not if they have bad terms of service in
00:48:28.000your version of the site as better terms of service they're gonna lose
00:48:31.000yeah go ahead. I got a different question so... I don't know about you but I
00:48:34.000think big tech had a huge influence in this latest midterm
00:48:37.000election I I think they're also essentially controlling what a lot of people see and think with their algorithms.
00:48:42.000They're becoming a huge, powerful entity that, of course, also now we're finding out through the Twitter files work for the private intelligence agencies.
00:48:50.000That curation, that ability to control what people see and listen to, that's a huge power.
00:48:55.000I personally think it had an effect on the election, and I think it's going to continue to have bigger effects on the election, especially in places that took a lot of the Zuckerbucks.
00:49:03.000Florida was one of the states that refused money from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and their elections went totally different than a lot of states that did.
00:49:12.000Is there a way to kind of rein in these intelligence agencies that are controlling big tech, that are essentially asserting their will on everyone else?
00:49:21.000I think that on the election front, the specific algorithmic work to target certain types of voters to push registration, to push vote by mail, to push early voting, to do election day awareness, that is partisan.
00:49:38.000Based on who they are trying to target those messages to, right?
00:49:43.000And if it was transparent, I actually think the right enforcement tool is the Federal Elections Commission.
00:49:48.000Because, you know, when a when Facebook says, okay, well, like, we're going to target this exact population of people with this age range, and this zip code, that is a donation to a political party and a political movement and should be subject to the same caps that any other American would be subject to.
00:50:52.000I mean, right now with the FDA and CDC... What was the Saturday Night Live thing where it was like, the boomers love the... If they're still around.
00:50:59.000But the FDA and CDC just came out and said that they're going to be investigating possible very serious side effects.
00:51:07.000That's an issue that is concerning to a lot of people, especially a lot of Trump supporters.
00:51:14.000CDC, FDA see possible link between Pfizer's bivalent shot and strokes.
00:51:19.000The agency said the surveillance signal is very unlikely to represent a true clinical risk and said they will continue to recommend the vaccine.
00:51:24.000So this obviously has a lot of people worried.
00:52:03.000Hey man, if YouTube's got a problem with Politico, the BBC, CNN all reporting this, well then we're all effed.
00:52:09.000Well, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene got zapped off of social media for saying that if you were really overweight, that was probably a bad idea vis-a-vis COVID and exercise would be helpful.
00:52:19.000And then, you know, lo and behold, you later see CNN and the CDC accept those positions.
00:52:26.000Steven Crowder got a strike for citing the CDC.
00:52:30.000But today's pretty big, especially with this FDA-CDC news that almost everyone in the corporate media is talking about.
00:52:36.000The British broadcasting company even had a cardiologist on that they're getting criticized for having on.
00:52:41.000A doctor, a mainline professional, that was talking about the larger concerns when it came to this, of course, shot and larger health effects that are being correlated here.
00:52:49.000I know Florida is investigating that right now under Ron DeSantis, but I see this as being...
00:52:54.000Yeah, but I see this as being a very key divisive issue, especially when it comes to the Republican primaries, especially when it comes to the possibility of DeSantis and Trump kind of heading, going at each other.
00:53:05.000How do you see that larger battle unfolding, and do you think there's going to be any accountability against Big Pharma for a lot of their kind of egregious actions and a lot of their data that they're hiding from the American people?
00:55:09.000I think the average person, when it comes to the issue matrix like you're mentioning, is just sitting there wondering why cabbage costs $7.
00:55:15.000Yeah, I mean, I looked at the little head of cauliflower that we got at the grocery store, like the shrinkflation is real as well.
00:55:22.000And we were talking before we went live just about how silly I think like the archivist disputes are.
00:55:28.000Like I said in September, probably every one of these presidential, vice presidential libraries and think tanks in America is out of some sort of technical compliance with the Records Keeping Act.
00:55:39.000And For my constituents who have to drive a long way to work and are looking at gas prices, who, if you want to buy a used car today, I mean, good luck.
00:55:48.000I mean, I don't know if you want to drive them or bronze them after you get them based on how much you have to pay.
00:55:53.000The housing market, rent being up so high.
00:55:56.000I mean, already we've made it where millennials can barely afford to buy a house.
00:56:03.000And now what's happening with the cost of rent?
00:56:06.000Those are things that I think, like, people really think about.
00:56:10.000And you turn on cable news and it's all about like, there's an 11th document that they have found in Joe Biden's convertibles glove compartment.
00:56:18.000And we're supposed to clutch our pearls and act like that's like the biggest thing on the planet Earth.
00:56:23.000The 1.7 trillion omnibus that went through a couple was a month ago, three weeks ago, that changed the value of the dollar doing the math 1.7 trillion to our 31 trillion deficit is our debt is took the value of the dollar from $1 to 95 cents.
00:56:36.000Like, every dollar that you have is now worth 95 cents because that bill passed.
00:56:40.000Because that money was printed, I should say.
00:56:42.000Yeah, and you can go, you know, recap the value if you go to the gender studies courses in Pakistan.
00:57:15.000Yeah, it just, it seems as though we haven't yet paid the full price in jobs for what we've done to the dollar.
00:57:22.000And you're starting to see that with, you know, all the, what I call the hoodie layoffs, right?
00:57:26.000All the tech companies laying off people by the thousands, but now we're starting to see it in the productive sectors of the economy too, in manufacturing, In agriculture, stuff's just not creating the same investment confidence, it's not attracting the same degree of capital.
00:57:42.000Now, fortunately, a lot of other places in the world have it worse than we do, so the dollar has not bottomed out, but we cannot drive government spending to this extent.
00:57:53.000So then it becomes like, okay, in this world of divided government, what fight do you pick to try to resolve that?
00:57:58.000And we've got the debt limit coming up, and Republicans typically lose fights over the debt limit.
00:58:04.000If you just look politically, historically, because we're talking about some sort of economic algebra problem and the Democrats are like, yeah, well, your 401k will get cut in half if this doesn't happen, if the Republicans do brinksmanship.
00:58:17.000So as that comes up, what is the thing that we demand to spend less money on?
00:58:23.000represent that work requirements would be the right fight.
00:58:27.000We send so much money right now to able-bodied people who could work but choose not to. And
00:58:34.000we do it through state programs that access federal drawdowns. We do it through Medicaid
00:58:38.000expansion. We do it through different features of Obamacare, voluntary pre-care, all those
00:58:44.000And if you had work requirements in order to access those for able-bodied people,
00:58:49.000then I think that would be anti-inflationary.
00:58:52.000That would reduce some of the mandatory spending and the entitlement spending.
00:58:56.000And I think people could get that, right?
00:58:59.000As opposed to just like trying to walk everybody through an economics pie chart as the Democrats are accusing us of brinksmanship.
00:59:06.000So with the economy tanking, can you please give us some insider congressional trading tips, please?
00:59:13.000By the way, another area where the populist right and populist left should work together.
00:59:17.000I do not believe that members of Congress should trade individual stocks.
00:59:20.000We have information that other people do not, and we have the ability to impact You're talking about big tech bills and potentially breaking up Facebook.
01:00:21.000Someone needs to clip that Paul Pelosi thing and put it on Twitter.
01:00:23.000Have you guys talked about defaulting on the Federal Reserve debt and just telling this quasi-private public company, we're not your bitch.
01:00:32.000You work for us, we allow you to exist, and we can't pay debt that we don't have.
01:00:37.000You borrow $10 trillion, you can't pay back $15, you only have $10.
01:01:19.000Do you guys talk a lot about the Federal Reserve and breaking it up or just Congress taking control of the monetary supply?
01:01:25.000Well, in our lifetime, you've seen Congress devolve more power than it has claimed.
01:01:31.000And so in a lot of ways, it's a way for members of Congress to avoid a great deal of accountability for the economy, to just act as though it's a bunch of nerds with green eyeshades at the Fed that turn dials up or down that cause the economy to react in various ways.
01:01:47.000And it's because they don't want to get stuck with the bag if and when the economy actually does crash.
01:01:53.000Well, I mean, I think that's reprehensible because that's one of the sole jobs of Congress is to protect the monetary supply.
01:02:00.000Well, and instead, you get the $1.7 trillion Omni, which is why this fight we had this last week matters, because it's only ever going to be the way it's going to be until you force change and until you use the leverage you have.
01:02:14.000If a Republican was president, I would have never been able to pull off what we pulled off because people would have said, You're getting in the way of the Trump agenda or the Bush agenda or whatever.
01:02:25.000But because Biden was there, Schumer was in the Senate, there wasn't this intense pressure to organize the House immediately.
01:02:31.000And we have the ability to be more deliberative and to get the structural concessions to stop
01:03:00.000But for some reason, because of this event that happened where people were let into that freaking building by some people, now we have congressional division, which didn't seem similar with Occupy Wall Street.
01:03:16.000We already know, based on the whistleblower interviews that we've done, that there were federal agents and federal assets that were on the ground that day.
01:03:26.000And what we don't know is the extent to which any of those assets or agents increased the level of criminal acuity Coordinated with one another, or purposefully entrapped folks who were otherwise not wanting to hurt anyone or violate any law in some sort of technical violation of trespassing or crossing some barrier that had existed hours earlier, but that had been taken down.
01:03:50.000And it's noteworthy to me that it's been the Department of Justice fighting tooth and nail against the release of a lot of the documentary evidence that would answer these questions.
01:04:11.000I mean, I think a lot of people have assumptions.
01:04:15.000He's somehow connected with feds or he maybe testified or something.
01:04:19.000Well, I just don't, there's no rational explanation for how this guy is sending out message saying he orchestrated the activity is at every critical point.
01:04:30.000He's like the Forrest Gump of the January 6th string of events, right?
01:04:34.000And then when you're able to isolate the people that are pulled off of the FBI's most wanted lists and the people who, you know, seem to be encouraging others and moving others that like, It's like Ray Epps did nothing.
01:04:50.000So they'll go and raid the home of some couple in Homer, Alaska because they think they have Nancy Pelosi's laptop.
01:04:58.000But this guy who was at the center of the action, it's like nothing to see here.
01:05:01.000So I am troubled by the disparate treatment that Epps gets compared to some grandmother that wandered past a barricade that then is facing some intense criminal process from DOJ.
01:05:15.000I'm concerned that those people in detention are becoming radicalized just by being forgotten and left to rot.
01:05:21.000Do you know what the status is of these people that have been in prison?
01:05:24.000Well, we've gotten varying reports on that and not nearly enough information.
01:05:30.000A lot of them have been deprived of just like basic civil rights when it comes to the adversarial
01:05:35.000judicial process. One thing I'm investigating right now is the extent to which the public
01:05:38.000defenders that were assigned to a lot of these folks like hated them and wanted the book thrown
01:05:43.000at them and were posting on social media and texting their friends, you know, about the
01:06:00.000I went there and they were like locked us out of being able to do an inspection.
01:06:04.000And that's unprecedented for a member of Congress to not have the ability to inspect a facility that is under the control of the federal government at some level.
01:06:13.000Could you go to Guantanamo when that was open?
01:07:04.000There's been 950 people charged so far, but the DOJ is saying that the investigation is far from over.
01:07:10.000And recently, through a congressional bill, they even got more funding, and they're saying that they're going to be doubling the amount of people that they already arrested.
01:07:17.000I had a whistleblower come to me and talk about how these specialized units that have FBI, CIA, that were targeted at extremism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, all over the world, that now Those very same teams and those very same tools and those very same national security authorities are exclusively being turned inward.
01:07:47.000Instead of finding somebody that's building a bomb to blow up an embassy abroad, they're analyzing what some guy who lives in his mom's basement is putting on his blog that's read by tens of people.
01:07:59.000And that now, after they were turned inward as a result of this omnibus spending legislation, they are flooded with cash.
01:08:07.000I mean, just so much money that is now in the hands of these people who wake up every day saying, you know, how can I go find a white supremacist extremist to hunt down?
01:08:17.000And, you know, if you create an industry of witch hunters, right, like you're going to find more witches, like even if they're not actually witches.
01:08:27.000And as you mentioned in the beginning of this broadcast, this was originally created, this industry was created by George W. Bush.
01:08:33.000It was created by the Republicans right after 9-11.
01:08:36.000Passing the Patriot Act, allowing Homeland Security to do whatever they want, allowing the TSA to touch you wherever they wanted to.
01:08:43.000And I think this is why there needs to be a bigger call out of this old Republican guard, of these neocons, that created this situation that's literally being turned around and used against the American people.
01:08:54.000The war on terror is now the war on America.
01:08:58.000And it's the intelligence agencies waging it against American citizens, which is crazy.
01:09:05.000We have to have the guts to repeal those authorities.
01:09:08.000And the thing is, any time you get any momentum behind any effort to do that, You get the neoconservatives running in saying, well, you're going to be the reason there's another 9-11.
01:09:21.000Sounds like a threat more than anything else.
01:09:23.000Yeah, well, just it is a way to test people's will.
01:09:26.000And the will often does not rise to the occasion.
01:09:29.000That's why these authorities don't get curtailed.
01:09:32.000Purely because the people are afraid that they'll become... I mean, honestly, I could see why, because if something did happen, then they might feel guilt, but like... Alright, this is going to take another couple hours to talk about.
01:09:43.000I don't think we're going to be able to finish this one right now.
01:10:07.000And the thing we've got to do is build the deterrent against it.
01:10:10.000A lot of these folks, for all their tough talk and for all they're willing to do when they have anonymity, when you drag them before the country and ask them tough questions, as I've done with some of the leading figures in the national security state before the Judiciary Committee, they don't like that too much.
01:10:26.000And when you do it to a few of them, the rest of them get adrift and see that.
01:10:30.000And that works to a point, but it pales When you compare it to these exquisite authorities that have been turned inward and then the extreme resourcing of them that we have just seen.
01:10:43.000So we need the population to speak up and start making noise about repealing the Patriot Act?
01:10:50.000I think that the Patriot Act was a terrible mistake for our country and I would advocate for its repeal.
01:10:57.000You know, how do you convince You know, I'll put it this way.
01:11:00.000We were talking earlier about how you mentioned, Ian, Dave Smith's thing that if you want to see who we're going to go up against next, look at who we're funding now.
01:11:11.000In 20 years, we may be fighting them like we did with the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc., Afghanistan.
01:11:17.000But the kids who vote in favor of those wars, the people right now, the young people who are liberals who are voting for this policy, weren't alive when we were funding these groups.
01:11:29.000I think I was a baby when the Mujahideen stuff was happening.
01:11:33.000And so then I'm 20 years old, I vote, you know, I was 18, I don't know how old I was, I vote for Obama, and then he's just continuing this cycle of war against who we had just been funding.
01:11:42.000With Ukraine, give it 20 years, some young person's gonna be like, gotta vote Democrat, they're the ones who are fighting against these evil Nazis.
01:11:50.000That's the good thing, though, now is there's so much media on this that it may be unforgettable in the consciousness.
01:11:56.000I mean, obviously, there's manip it's being manipulated to show you one or the other, you know, way of looking at the situation.
01:12:01.000But people that are six may be very well aware of what's happening in Ukraine when they're 18.
01:12:09.000Well, in the 90s there wasn't, I mean, other than maybe Pat Buchanan and a few of his buddies, there wasn't an anti-war segment of the political right with any actual power, right?
01:12:24.000And I think that it's because the millennial generation has grown weary of this.
01:12:27.000I mean, all of our lives, our country has been in some state of low-yield war, and we see the people come back with broken limbs and broken hearts and broken minds.
01:12:38.000We see the effect on marriages, the drug abuse, the suicide, and we start to see the real cost of it.
01:12:45.000And now, on the right, there are people willing to ask tough questions about these things, and that scrutiny just didn't exist on a lot of these other misadventures.
01:12:53.000If only we would have listened to Ron Paul.
01:12:56.000When you were younger, when like the Patriot Act was getting voted on and stuff, were you like a young conservative?
01:13:02.000Yeah, I think I adhered to a lot of the kind of Republican thinking on those things.
01:13:06.000I thought Bush was a great president initially.
01:13:10.000And then, you know, as I started to see in my heavily military community the impacts of these wars, I just thought like, man, like trading a bunch of sand dunes around in Iraq like isn't worth like Chris's dad not having legs.
01:13:25.000You know, and you see that over and over and it impacts you.
01:13:28.000And not only that, these interventions also created more future conflicts.
01:13:32.000It not only allowed Iran to have more of a sphere of influence in the region, but because we went in there and overthrew the government, we created ISIS in so many different ways by incentivizing that group to start up there and to also hand over a lot of American military technology and weapons right directly into their hands, giving us a new enemy to fight and use them as pawns to overthrow One thing I told Trump is that no matter what the policy area was, it was always the neocons that stabbed him in the back first.
01:14:02.000If you just wanted to take a crude way to triage the people that stabbed him in the back that were part of his own administration, it was always the neocons.
01:14:11.000Why do you think he kept coming to them asking them for hugs all the time and giving them all these lucrative positions of power?
01:14:16.000I want to ask something for the audience.
01:14:18.000A lot of people are asking about the ATF passing a new rule on pistol braces.
01:14:29.000Yeah, I mean, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms is just what we call a good Saturday night in my district.
01:14:33.000Or it should be the name of a store, not, you know, an agency.
01:14:36.000Yeah, no, I mean, there is a deep state at the ATF, I mean, no doubt.
01:14:40.000And during the Trump administration, it was actually pretty bad.
01:14:43.000A lot of the rules that they were passing were converting people into criminals who had no intention of violating the law whatsoever.
01:14:52.000I honestly don't even think that you should be able to seriously debate gun legislation if you're not from an SEC state.
01:14:59.000When I see the Northeasterners get all worked up and they don't know anything about firearms, they haven't used firearms, they haven't stored firearms, it's quite comical to see David Cicilline from Rhode Island.
01:15:11.000Thomas Massey asked Jerry Nadler of New York, what does the AR stand for, and AR-15, and Nadler said assault rifle.
01:15:46.000I don't know, Luke, if you saw any specific questions in the Super Chats.
01:15:50.000A lot of people are breaking up the ATF thing because essentially what they're calling for is going to make a lot of Americans felons, just like the kind of bump stock ban that passed through Donald Trump that was just ruled unconstitutional.
01:16:04.000So, other than the courts, is there any way to effectively lobby the ATF?
01:16:08.000Is there any way to stop them from essentially making legal law-abiding citizens felons overnight?
01:16:15.000One tool that we got in these negotiations over the Speaker of the House is the reinstitution of something called the Hohmann Rule, where you can zero out the funding for a particular bureaucrat.
01:16:26.000So, like, imagine if you could have just isolated, like, Fauci's salary and zeroed it out and forced a vote on that.
01:17:10.000Would you hire Fauci if you knew that no matter what job it was, he was going to be spending like 20 hours a week in congressional depositions?
01:17:21.000I'd be willing to bet like so many of these other officials who have this, you know, within this revolving door system, he probably cut a deal a long time ago that when he's out, they'll pick him up.
01:17:31.000Speaking of the revolving door, another one of the like ethics things that I just don't understand how it's not the law now.
01:17:36.000If you are a member of Congress, you should never get to be a lobbyist or a registered foreign agent.
01:17:42.000But it is like two of the most frequent jobs that people get when they're done with the job I have is literally being a registered agent for a foreign government or influencing people for money.
01:17:54.000And I don't get why it's not like a total common sense thing to say, like, you've got to choose one path or the other.
01:18:01.000If you want to go be a foreign agent, if you want to get paid money to influence outcomes, then that means you don't get to be one of the lawmakers.
01:18:08.000I believe it was Joe Rogan a couple months ago was interviewing someone that was making the claim that members of Congress were getting different kind of treatment for COVID than the rest of the general public was.
01:18:19.000Do you know if that's particularly true?
01:19:04.000I mean, a lot, you know, though no one should ever worry about members of Congress in our economic standing.
01:19:09.000I mean, people who have, you know, maybe a spouse that doesn't work that's raising a family, you know, maintaining two residences on a congressional salary is challenging for some people.
01:19:20.000I mostly like Airbnb it because I have the like Yasser Arafat theory that you never want to sleep in the same bed twice.
01:19:27.000What's this thing I'm hearing that y'all are getting a $34,000 raise?
01:19:33.000There was an article in the Daily Mail that said that one of the last things the Democrats did before the end of the last session was put in a raise of $34,000 from members of Congress.
01:19:42.000I'm unaware of any raise, but if that's true, the margaritas are on me after the show.
01:19:47.000Elon Musk probably is going to like to hear that the members of Congress are sleeping in their own office.
01:19:52.000There's a lot of rodent activity at night, too, because they're always working on that building.
01:20:26.000I was going to ask you, what do you think about what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter and do you think there's going to be any kind of retribution against him since he did expose how essentially the intelligence agencies were pretty much running big tech social media?
01:20:38.000Is there going to be like some bureaucratic investigations?
01:20:41.000Are they going to try to take away some of his funding from some of his spaceships?
01:20:45.000How do you think that's You already saw Chris Murphy call for reviews of the different foreign investors in the Musk Twitter deal.
01:20:52.000So it's not a question of if that will happen.
01:20:56.000It's just a question of the level of acuity of it.
01:21:00.000And you know, there's so many of my Republican colleagues that are like, Is this what we have to wait for?
01:21:05.000now, Elon bought Twitter, rah rah, you know, wave the pom poms for Elon and I'm glad he
01:21:11.000bought it. I'm glad Twitter's more of a democratized free speech space. But like, is this what
01:21:17.000we is this what we have to wait for? That we have to wait around for some like right
01:21:20.000wing billionaire to come buy stuff so that we can have a playground? I just don't want
01:21:25.000to live in a world where the terms of service on social media become more important than
01:21:30.000the values that undergird the Constitution.
01:21:32.000It's a cultural question though, right?
01:21:34.000It just seems so low-key to sit around and cheer on Elon, while we are the board of directors of the most powerful country in the world and we do nothing, while the digital marketplace of ideas is zapped of any conservative thought.
01:21:50.000Yeah, I don't think relying on any one guy is the right move.
01:21:53.000It's Wade, because his emotions can change his behavior.
01:21:56.000He wouldn't let Alex Jones back on because he's like, no, I don't like what he said about kids, about Sandy Hook stuff.
01:22:06.000I mean he just bought the entire, I don't know the exact history, but because of one billionaire or whatever he was worth, we have Astoria.
01:22:13.000And like we have communities, like one rich guy can build a community.
01:22:16.000It's a little culty, but it's kind of like the history of our species.
01:22:47.000It needs to be broken up in a way that I think needs to be novel.
01:22:50.000And so then the dispute among some working on the issue is, do you use the force of law to break them up?
01:22:56.000Or do you almost do what happened to the tobacco companies in the 90s, where you strip their immunities and then sick the trial lawyers on them?
01:23:04.000Well, they're still acting in the benefit of a lot of government agents, so I don't see them being put in check until they stop actually taking the orders from government and not doing what the government really wants them to do.
01:23:15.000And the people who would be litigating against them in court want their next job to be at Big Tech.
01:23:20.000You know, I mean, the revolving door is kind of a consistent theme of our discussion today, but look at how many people go working from FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and their next job is in Silicon Valley.
01:23:33.000Yeah, if you remove the immunities of what they did in the tobacco companies, then you're thinking maybe, or what might happen is they won't prosecute properly because they want to get jobs there even if they don't have immunities.
01:23:43.000What I've seen so far is that the folks at DOJ want to be like just enough of a parasite that never kills the host.
01:23:51.000So, you know, they want to be just enough of a pain where they maximize their own economic value to then go and work for the big tech companies afterwards.
01:24:02.000Would we use the government to break it up or just strip their immunity and let the law take its course?
01:24:07.000And this is the issue that Jim Jordan and I disagree on.
01:24:10.000Guy, as we've talked about, I have tremendous respect for, but he prefers more of a judicial route and I prefer more of a legislative route.
01:24:17.000I prefer the government stop controlling big tech social media and stop manipulating the platform for their own personal benefit.
01:24:24.000And I think if we stop that, and we also have to understand the government allowed these companies to have a monopoly on the market.
01:24:31.000There's no way to even compete against them because of the unfair advantage that they got from members of Congress.
01:24:36.000And whether it's tax incentives, whether it's Google Maps getting the data from the US military, There's so much of them just working hand-in-hand that I don't even see the big difference between Big Tech social media and the government sometimes, to be honest with you.
01:24:53.000Government, at least, is we the people.
01:24:55.000But they're still acting like a vehicle for the private sector.
01:25:00.000Is it still we the people with government?
01:25:03.000I think members of Congress should have to wear the patches of their PAC and lobbyist donors like NASCAR drivers have to wear their sponsors.
01:25:11.000Yeah, I think Bill Hicks made that joke originally and he was prophetic and I absolutely agree with him 100%.
01:25:16.000We should do like an augmented reality VR app or AR app where you put on the glasses and you can see like the augmented reality of all the donors on all their clothes.
01:25:24.000You can see the lobbyists standing behind them with their hands on their shoulders.
01:25:27.000Like in an aura just like floating above you see like big pharma, big tech, defense contractors.
01:25:32.000That's actually a joke meme that came out, but is very, very, should be.
01:25:36.000Like, on their desk, you should see all the people that have donated to their behavior, because they're supposed to represent their 700,000 constituents.
01:25:43.000Well, it's the most insulting thing when you go try to persuade someone to change their viewpoint or to develop their viewpoint, and they literally refer you to the lobbyists.
01:25:52.000Like I've had that happen with colleagues where I'm like, hey, look, I really want to talk to you about this insurance issue.
01:26:06.000You mentioned before the show that people pay each other for sponsorship.
01:26:10.000Well, I was discussing the dynamic on the House floor.
01:26:12.000So on the floor of the House of Representatives, members enjoy broad immunities as a consequence of the speech and debate clause, and giving each other political donations to campaigns is permissible on the floor.
01:26:25.000And so, I mean, you can observe dynamics where someone is In one sentence, soliciting your vote or co-sponsorship, and then in the very next sentence is handing you a check.
01:26:36.000So they don't directly say, like, hey, I'll give you money if you vote for me.
01:26:39.000They'll say, thanks for voting for me.
01:26:41.000Oh yeah, Tim, I'd really, really like you to consider co-sponsoring this legislation.
01:26:46.000It's real important to me, and I know that you've got a fundraiser coming up tonight, so here, I wanted to just come right to the floor and give you a check for it.
01:26:52.000Oh, so they can't specifically say, this money is so that you vote for me?
01:27:07.000What do you think we were doing this last week?
01:27:09.000You think it was the most comfortable thing in the world for 20 of us to try to send a shockwave through the DC cartel and say it's not just going to go the way it's always been?
01:27:17.000And we shouldn't just Move people forward in a system that, to its core, is fundamentally corrupt with both parties?
01:27:26.000We wanted, we thought it should be about the policy, the procedure, and the personnel, not just the distribution of funds and the alliances that creates.
01:27:34.000And for that, we were called the Taliban 20.
01:28:21.000It's pretty hard to say worse things about me than they already have.
01:28:24.000And when you sort of have faced that down and taken their best shot, it builds calluses that become enduring and valuable in the next fight.
01:28:32.000I'm sure it actually kind of pissed you off and made you push ten times harder.
01:28:38.000You know, when I was watching the McCarthy fight, my attitude was like, the more I heard these stories where he was just like smugly rejecting you guys, I'm like, that probably made him double down.
01:28:51.000We knew what our goals were, and oftentimes there are people in Congress who just want to be in the fight for the sake of being in the fight as an end unto itself, but we knew we had to get out of this system a result that would prohibit the passage of another omnibus.
01:29:10.000And once we knew that, we were able to really direct a lot of our strategic decisions toward that goal.
01:29:15.000Didn't they, like, bring the omnibus, like, two years ago on, like, a wagon?
01:29:54.000That is a function of petitioning your government.
01:29:56.000To me, what's so offensive is that, like, when you've got the former chairman of these committees who hired all the staff that then roll out of their chairmanship, go right to K Street, and then are lobbying the people they hired, we the people aren't in charge.
01:30:10.000The highest bidder is in charge in a system like that.
01:31:10.000And some little group of some College of Cardinals in the Rules Committee doesn't get to prohibit
01:31:15.000members from taking votes on those issues.
01:31:17.000And there are some who are in the very purple seats who are going to be uncomfortable about that, because they're going to have to take a lot more votes than they might want to take.
01:32:12.000Yeah, I remember when I first got here, the leadership sat me down in one of these Dutch Uncle talks and said, well, Gates, you're just not a team player.
01:32:21.000And I said, no, I'm a great team player.
01:32:24.000It's just that you all are not my team.
01:32:25.000My team are the 750,000 people who sent me here from Florida.
01:33:29.000Dimethyltryptamine is a chemical in your body that's basically kind of Responsible for the dream state that we live in, this whole dream of reality, and it's secreted in your body, plants, things.
01:33:42.000But people in modern culture will get it out of ayahuasca.
01:33:44.000Are you familiar with the ayahuasca vine?
01:33:47.000I have friends who swear by it, but any drug that has a predicate that you vomit and shit yourself is really not the type of experience I sign up for.
01:33:57.000That's why you do fasting for a week beforehand, because you're really just purging crap.
01:34:15.000No, what I mean to say is not should, is that the Second Amendment says arms.
01:34:19.000If you don't think that's the case, then we've got to amend the Second Amendment.
01:34:22.000Because when they wrote it, Privateers existed and they had weapons of war to an extreme degree.
01:34:30.000They had, you know, frigates and man-of-war, privateers, corsairs, etc.
01:34:34.000So I don't see how we've decided at some point outside of the Constitution that certain weapons are off-limit to the people when they originally weren't.
01:35:32.000Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, the Grover Norquist view of conservatism was that if we could just cut taxes enough, you could kind of starve the beast, right?
01:35:43.000And that has proven false because we've been pretty successful at stopping large-scale tax increases, but we've substituted Fed policy for it.
01:35:53.000And by the way, Mnuchin was one of the worst.
01:35:56.000Like, if you look at what happened during COVID and all of the different Fed policy that was constructed, then that is badly in need of audit and was undeniably abused in a number of cases.
01:36:06.000And so, yeah, I mean, I think that the Fed failed and it's one, one job.
01:37:47.000Look, the drivers of the debt, the interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
01:37:55.000And so if you're not willing to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from an eligibility standpoint or a benefit standpoint, You're counting the number of angels on the head of a pin.
01:38:06.000I used to be like, you know, people are sick, pay for their health care.
01:38:09.000And now I'm like, I watch people just continually drink poison, eat poison.
01:38:12.000I'm like, I can't keep paying money to keep those people alive.
01:38:16.000The thing that I don't get is why we subsidize the stuff that makes people sick.
01:38:20.000Like what we allow food stamps to pay for poisons people.
01:38:24.000And so we pay to get people into this diabetic state, then they get disabled, then we put them on SSID, then in the final six months of life, the curve on the cost on spending on their healthcare goes through the roof and we do it all over again.
01:38:41.000Because sugar companies and candy confectioners and big food get in there and ensure that we never reduce the amount of unhealthy stuff that we pay for for poor people.
01:38:52.000As well as the subsidies for corn and soy, which help create seed oils.
01:38:56.000We got another $20 Super Chat from AJ that is asking, aside from Fauci, the public would like to see an investigation by the House into Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, Soros, and Gates.
01:39:50.000I'm sorry, I was looking at the weaponization of media from the government.
01:39:53.000Yeah, I mean, because you get all of the features of the weaponization of our government through the Twitter files.
01:39:59.000You get the national security piece, you get the White House officials trying to get information, you know, either enhanced or diminished on Twitter.
01:40:10.000So you could open a lot of doors through that.
01:40:24.000Sean Young has a $50 Super Chat asking, why is it criminal to lie when testifying before Congress, but not criminal to lie when you are holding a seat in Congress?
01:41:13.000Yeah, there's some tension between the name and the sentiment that's expressed there.
01:41:18.000You know, I encounter this actually pretty frequently at our town halls and rallies where people show up and say, you know, I came because I think you're fighting for us, but So there are some who think it's kind of all lost.
01:41:29.000And whenever I get down, you know, Jim Jordan is a guy who gives me comfort when he says, look, there's always a fight worth having in this place.
01:41:38.000I have a job in the United States Congress where there are dozens of files on my desk every morning where it's someone who relies on me to To pick up their cause and to go to battle for it.
01:41:48.000And if that can't get you up and that can't get you focused on being the best version of yourself, then nothing can.
01:41:54.000So that stops me from getting blackpailed because whether it's getting a little old lady your IRS check that she was supposed to get and they screwed her over, whether it's the guy who has 22 EPA agents show up because he wanted to expand his cattle pond and you're able to Get them off his back, or whether it's one of our service members that now we have to advocate for so that they can get their careers and their lives back after this foolish vaccine mandate was repealed.
01:42:21.000You know, there are still good things to do and good people that deserve us to be focused and not so diminished or discouraged that we don't get in the fight for them.
01:44:15.000You know, and so oftentimes we get into this legislation and everybody's after their disparate piece.
01:44:22.000But there's not really a clear vision of what victory looks like on those, you know, must-pass bills.
01:44:29.000And knowing that, I think, on the front end would get more buy-in, where we had more of a populist energy to these reforms.
01:44:38.000Fizzy Bear is asking, has there been any talk to pass a law that will prevent the US government from creating a central bank digital currency or at the very least require the government to always have a form of physical cash that cannot be traced?
01:45:02.000So if you get crypto rewards from a website, and then they're worth a dollar each, every token, but then they drop to 10 cents, the government, from what I can tell, wants to come in and tax you on each of those as if they're still worth a dollar, because that's what they were when you got them, which is unconscionable.
01:45:16.000So I think it should be either they tax at the current value or the lowest value it's
01:45:19.000been in the last year when they're taxing the value of your crypto tokens.
01:45:23.000But not just the taxes, even the regulation of the marketplaces.
01:45:26.000Does FTX function as such a game changer that those marketplaces don't just become some
01:45:56.000I can't tell some days whether I want to see, like, Sam Bankman freed in a jail cell or if we should just pardon him and put him in charge of Social Security.
01:46:03.000Because, like, if we're going to run a Ponzi scheme, like, maybe we should find the guy that's the best at it.
01:46:32.000Yeah, I think the reason Trump won in 2016 is because a whole lot of women who didn't like him voted for him because they could not stand telling their daughters and granddaughters that Hillary Clinton was the first female president of the United States.
01:46:46.000And what I've said to President Trump is, like, you have to create a permission structure where women who do not like you vote for you again.
01:46:55.000And, like, you see the grit of a Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
01:46:58.000You see the directness, the efficacy, really bold steps.
01:47:04.000Her first days as governor, banning TikTok on a lot of the government devices there.
01:47:56.000I mean, I've lived all over the world my whole life, and it's unthinkable to me that you just open your borders.
01:48:00.000But, I mean, you know, not to look at us or anything like that, but... It's like a holdover from when we had very low population in the 1800s.
01:48:08.000It's like, yo, bring your tired, your hungry, and your poor.
01:48:15.000We need great people, but we don't need like masses of people.
01:48:19.000Well, and I mean, it's, it's a misnomer to suggest that America has not increased unrestricted immigration throughout times in our history when it has suited us.
01:48:26.000And whenever we have had mass waves of immigration, it has come with times of strife and conflict.
01:48:33.000And we invite that now without a real appreciation for the consequence.
01:48:38.000Surge, can you go in the beginning, because there's a lot of Super Chats in the beginning, and I'm only seeing the latest ones.
01:48:43.000You're able to see all the ones from the beginning.
01:48:44.000Is the Super Chat like the podcast version of when people pay the dueling pianos guy to play a certain song?
01:49:46.000How about a requirement that folks actually show up for debate?
01:49:49.000Because in the state legislature, your ass had to be in the seat.
01:49:53.000And you had to be there because we took votes when the debates occurred.
01:49:57.000And so you got the benefit of hearing the different sides of an argument.
01:50:02.000The way it works in Congress is all day, like, you know, two, three, five people go debate the issues on the floor.
01:50:08.000And then at night, we come in and take a series of votes on all those matters.
01:50:11.000And there's no real requirement that people even appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the policy choices.
01:50:18.000Marjorie was telling us that Typically on votes, people aren't even there at all, and it's like five people here and five people there, and they just go like, meh, and it's passed, and they bang the gavel.
01:50:27.000Yeah, which was really the mistake Pelosi made in taking Marjorie off committees, because then Marjorie was the warden of the floor.
01:50:34.000She would go down to the floor and demand votes and call the question, and I thought that was a pretty good thing for the process.
01:50:43.000If Pelosi were in charge again, she'd probably put Marjorie on all the committees.
01:50:48.000We've got a question from Ben D. It says, Mr. Gates, you say Congress shouldn't trade individual stocks.
01:50:53.000Does this also include options, futures, FX, and any other type of security or derivatives?
01:50:59.000Yeah, because we can impact the value of those things.
01:51:04.000And we know when the value is changing based on the briefings we get that the rest of the American people don't get.
01:51:10.000A1 has a $20 super chat asking you, Matt Gaetz, does the USA need a third political party?
01:51:28.000I think we need capture of our existing parties by people who are at least ideologically informed.
01:51:38.000Because right now, There are times when it feels like it doesn't even matter which party wins the election, because all you're really deciding is who gets to be the lead valet for the same special interests.
01:51:49.000It's gut-wrenching to see, like, oh, well, we won!
01:51:52.000We've been promising the American people for four elections that we're going to repeal Obamacare, and then Paul Ryan goes and takes $14 million from HMOs in the nine weeks preceding the rollout of our health care bill, And guess what?
01:52:05.000It just repositions it in a way that protects the profits and the guaranteed revenue stream for health insurance companies and health management companies.
01:52:14.000And so, you know, I've seen the power change, but the bosses never really do.
01:52:21.000Did Paul Ryan pocket that money or any of that money?
01:52:24.000Oh, it all went to his political fund.
01:52:27.000You know, the pressures on the presiding officers for fundraising are intense.
01:52:32.000You know, they got to raise like a million bucks a day, you know, when we are in legislative session.
01:52:37.000And Paul Ryan told me, yeah, you know, I have to go to three dinners every night, and every dinner has to do about $300,000.
01:52:46.000But what, just to spend money on people door knocking?
01:52:49.000And what I sort of figured out is, well, I mean, there are these people who whore themselves out for donations from lobbyists and special interests, and then they use that money to go buy 30 seconds on the news programs.
01:53:34.000And why not just do the thing that you would otherwise spend the money on?
01:53:38.000And maybe if we didn't take such crappy positions and put the lobbyists in charge of the agenda, it wouldn't take $10 million to go win an election.
01:53:46.000Jay Lincoln has a $20 super chat asking, what do you think about Texas Pelosi walking back the terrorist claim?
01:54:25.000I am not for this, like, secession stuff.
01:54:28.000I mean, I love this country, and I don't buy into any of that worldview.
01:54:33.000What about a new state in Northern California, Idaho, the state of Jefferson?
01:54:40.000I haven't spent as much time up there.
01:54:43.000So these are areas like Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Northern California, which tend to be more conservative, and they want to be their own state separate from the dense liberal areas, because it's a very different group of people.
01:54:54.000Did you see how many of the recent counties just voted to actually vote on it and actually try to join?
01:55:22.000We got another great super chat by Brandon Hurt, and he's asking, when there's a hot issue in Congress, what is the best way to communicate with my representative?
01:55:33.000It's different for different members, and you need to know what that leverage point is or influential point is for members.
01:55:39.000I mean, I get on Twitter spaces at night.
01:55:41.000I'm real active at responding to comments on social media.
01:55:45.000But for some of my colleagues who are septuagenarians and octogenarians, they get Handwritten reports every day about who called the landline.
01:55:53.000And so, you know, it's important to get some intelligence.
01:55:56.000Part of political tradecraft is knowing what influences people.
01:55:59.000And what frustrates me is like when what influences them is, well, you know, Facebook hired Chuck Schumer's daughter.
01:56:05.000Do you think you're going to have like an honest conversation with Chuck Schumer about regulating meta?
01:56:13.000He asked, Matt, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on the current state of the military and the impact of woke ideologies on service academies in particular.
01:56:21.000No, this is something not a lot of people are talking about, but the diminution in interest in even serving in the military and especially the service academies, it's palpable.
01:56:33.000When I first got this job, The coolest part of it was nominating young people to our service academies, because you get to see the best of your district.
01:56:41.000And so I had every valedictorian, salutatorian, club president, captain of the football team applying for these spots.
01:56:49.000And now the average test scores are lower, the average leadership positions are far fewer, the average GPA, class rank down, because the best of the best No longer want to go to West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy.
01:57:04.000There are a few who do, but the gestation period for that consequence is pretty long, right?
01:57:12.000And we're going to be feeling the effects of this in decades because we weren't getting Patriotic, God-fearing Americans into those positions.
01:57:20.000And, you know, representing the district I do, it's heartbreaking to hear that I've got units that are having less live fire training, fewer jumps, capabilities reduced, and they're spending all their time in DEI.
01:57:37.000You know, sessions, and learning about what pronouns are acceptable and not acceptable.
01:57:41.000In the reserves, there are people reporting to me that you can't say mother and father.
01:57:45.000You just have to say parent, because it's just, you know, too binary.
01:57:49.000They're also walking around in heels in some instances, but that's another story.
01:57:53.000We got a $20 Super Chat by Smashing Random Keys asking, does the GOP plan on training ballot harvesters?
01:58:00.000If not, I fear the GOP won't win a majority for a while.
01:58:03.000In some states, In California, there's more organized effort there in states that allow it.
01:58:09.000Florida does not allow ballot harvesting, so I don't think we should do things that are illegal.
01:58:14.000And by the way, everyone acts like this election integrity problem is unsolvable.
01:58:55.000thousand ballots because you know along the And if they screw it up and aren't complying with those transparency laws you get instant access to an injunction in a courtroom where those
01:59:06.000Offices can be put in a state of receivership by the Secretary of State.
01:59:10.000So we're not going to get screwed over in Florida by this stuff.
01:59:13.000And if other states would model our laws, they would be more protected.
01:59:17.000Now, there are some who say, well, we need national laws on these things.
01:59:23.000You know, you start nationalizing elections, it's not going to go the way you think it might go.
01:59:29.000Schumer and Biden and the like get their say in how states are doing electioneering.
01:59:33.000What do you think about federally legislating that companies using proprietary voting machines where the code is secret so you don't know what the programs are doing behind closed doors that we mandate that they use open source code?
01:59:45.000I mean, the best open source code is a paper ballot.
01:59:50.000I mean, that's what we've done in Florida.
01:59:51.000Like, we don't need your source code if we can go and look at the paper ballots and compare them and do precinct level audits.
01:59:58.000Because you'll get the canary in the coal mine.
02:00:02.000I feel like with hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper that stuff just gets easily lost in the shuffle, literally.
02:00:10.000Not if you have the right chain of custody requirements.
02:00:13.000Have you considered doing like a blockchain backup on top of everything?
02:00:16.000There is a lot of talk about the use of blockchain for that very reason.
02:00:19.000If you do it, use a bunch of different blockchains, like a bunch of them, because one can get hijacked.
02:00:50.000Matt, you're currently my favorite member of Congress after what went down with the Speaker vote because, you know, we had been talking about this for months, for the year before the midterms, that even if the Republicans win, we don't think we're going to see any real change.
02:01:04.000And despite the fact that McCarthy is still Speaker, I think you did a lot of good, so I got nowhere to go but down now.
02:01:10.000I've got nothing to do but disappoint you, Tim.
02:01:13.000Well, you know, nah, I think it'll be alright.
02:02:18.000It's on rumble.com forward slash we are change.
02:02:20.000I just posted one of my videos there from my members area, luconsensor.com, where you get to have a sneak peek at what the kind of videos I do there almost every single day.
02:02:30.000Rumble.com forward slash we are change.
02:02:32.000For the spicy videos that you guys could watch right now.
02:02:48.000I didn't know you guys were such good friends, but we should hear you and Jim go on Tech, talk about tech and how we gotta deal with big tech.
02:03:22.000All right, everybody, become a member at TimCast.com if you want to support our work and get access to our uncensored members-only segments.
02:03:28.000Thanks for hanging out, and we will see you all tomorrow in DC at Freedom Plaza.