On today's show, we have a special guest from the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington D.C. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GA) joins us live from Room 2021 to speak about his opposition to the uniparty in the House of Representatives. We also hear from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Representative) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D,N.J.C.) on the Iran nuclear deal and the Iran hostage crisis. Finally, we hear from a Georgia woman who is suing the state of Georgia for what she claims is institutional racism in her own local government and the treatment of her after a night out gone wrong. And we have an update on what's going on in the Middle East with the UN and what they teach our young people in their schools. We also have a call for the U.S. to withdraw all funding to the United Nations and all of their programs that promote anti-Israel hate and incitement in the education system. And we finish the show with a call to action on what we should be doing to combat anti-Semitism in our schools and other forms of hate and violence in our public schools and public schools. Thank you for being a part of the Firebrand family! Firebrand - Your Support is so Generational, Thank You, Firebrand! - The Firebrand Crew Subscribe, Share, and Share, Share and Retweet us your thoughts on this and any other stories you'd like to be featured on the next episode of Firebrand. - Firebrand: Alyssa or . and we'll get a shoutout on Firebranding in next week's episode of , Firebrand Radio on our next episode on the new episode of the podcast! and & ! Thanks for listening Tweet us your responses to this episode! Timestamps: Thank you so much for your support and your thoughts and your support is so we can keep spreading the word out there about the show! Thank You! Love, , Peace, Love, Blessings, - Timeless, Ben -- Firebrand, Ben and Blessings - Jack - EJ, -- - Sarah - Rachel - AKA Firebrand Media - Emily @ Firebrand . - Jon
00:05:29.000We're live broadcasting out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington, D.C. And the devil went down to Georgia.
00:05:39.000Not looking for a soul to steal, but maybe a county commission seat.
00:05:42.000That is the allegation in a recent lawsuit.
00:05:45.000From Felicia Franklin, who was the vice chair of the Clayton County Board of County Commissioners.
00:05:52.000She was running for chair to lead that local government when she had an unfortunate encounter with law enforcement.
00:06:50.000The woman you just saw having the mother of all episodes is Clayton County Commissioner Felicia Franklin.
00:06:58.000What appears to be a wild night out gone wrong, however, could turn out to be far more complicated once she's coherent enough to share her version of how everything went off the rails.
00:07:08.000But, regardless of how she got to this point, the consequences Felicia will ultimately face will not be fun.
00:07:18.000Gene on Rumble says, now I know what the devil looks like.
00:07:21.000So the allegation here is that this county commissioner was somehow given the date rape drug rather than the five drinks that witnesses indicate that she had had at a nearby sports bar that she was found outside of.
00:07:38.000But now she is suing, claiming institutional racism for how she was treated by those...
00:07:46.000So always interesting to check in on what is going on in the state just north of mine in Georgia.
00:07:51.000That is apparently the state of your local government.
00:07:55.000From that to global government, we have increasing concerns about what is being taught to students in Gaza and in other areas where the United Nations is really pushing a curriculum that drives incitement.
00:08:08.000And if there is any hope for a Middle East without this type of intergenerational You've got to break that cycle with young children, with minds that are not somehow lashed to all of these historical grievances and religious strife.
00:08:31.000The UN schools that exist in Gaza, in parts of Judea and Samaria, are part of the problem.
00:08:40.000And the best evidence for that is what you hear directly from the young people who are attending those schools.
00:08:47.000Listen to these really troubling, hateful pronouncements from children directly as a result of the flow of your tax dollars to the UN to this very hate.
00:10:25.000With Allah's help, I will fight for ISIS, the Islamic State.
00:10:33.000We're back live, and many of you on the live stream are just as concerned and saddened by this as we all are.
00:10:40.000A lot of calls to defund the UN. Annie on Facebook calling for a U.S. withdrawal of all participation in UN programs.
00:10:51.000Star Traveler saying we need to disband the UN. Look, it would disband if we just stopped paying for it.
00:10:57.000If it wasn't the U.S. being the world's piggy bank and dead money, probably the U.N. would have a very different shake.
00:11:05.000So when we see children out of the mouth of babes expressing this violent hate, this desire to harm and kill and even die, you really start to see how grave the challenge is and how much the Calls for the UN and international involvement and globalist institutions have really failed the people there and likely will lead to even more years of death and strife.
00:11:36.000We continue with our coverage of international events and how people are reflecting on them.
00:11:40.000And this brings us to some reporting that we got out of the One America News Network, OAN. Now, OAN's chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rian, committed an act of felony wrongthink recently when she tweeted a link to a State Department memo concerning election fraud in Ukraine.
00:12:01.000And she compared that, obviously, to To the standards that we would think that we hold here in the United States of America.
00:12:09.000But not living up to our own standards is nothing new.
00:12:14.000There is hypocrisy in condemning other countries while simultaneously we fail to meet the bar that we set for ourselves.
00:12:41.000We had work to do at the state level in Florida to ensure we had paper ballots, the ability to audit, check, recount with sophistication, but not so much so that we were overly reliant on technologies that we weren't sure we could entirely control.
00:12:57.000So let's look at what 2004 Ukraine and 2020 United States have had in common.
00:13:06.000So, the illegal use of absentee ballots, election observers ejected from polling stations, abnormally high turnout, turnout that doesn't match any voter roll voting machines, Potentially having a lack of clarity regarding whether or not they were connected to the internet or otherwise vulnerable to any type of manipulation.
00:13:27.000It was in fact Democrat U.S. Senators who signed letters saying that they were really concerned about these Dominion Smartmatic machines.
00:13:37.000So the report That Chanel Rion is talking about could similarly indict the state of Georgia alongside the government of Ukraine.
00:13:49.000Every one of these critiques was present in the 2020 election.
00:13:52.000If you so much as mentioned concern about the election or evidence we were observing, you were kicked off of social media and branded a conspiracy theorist.
00:14:01.000Now you've got Zelensky in Ukraine actually disbanding political parties, canceling elections.
00:14:10.000Losing confidence in the republic, the democratic process, elections, this is a bad sign for any country.
00:14:18.000And as you can see with the current situation in Ukraine, things can devolve quickly.
00:14:23.000Possibly the eeriest line in this report that Chanel Rion shared is straight from the American ambassador himself.
00:14:32.000He says, quote, Let me say again that the US wants to see Ukraine develop as a secure, independent, democratic, and economically prosperous country that increasingly draws closer to the European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.
00:14:48.000It's a national embarrassment that we're not holding elections indistinguishable from corrupt, budding Slavic democracies.
00:14:58.000High-trust countries are fragile and they are a privilege.
00:15:03.000And without trust in free and fair elections undergirded by actual election integrity, who knows what situation we may find ourselves in in the next 20 years.
00:15:14.000There's a moment in a congressional hearing I want to draw your attention to as well during the program today.
00:15:20.000This comes from Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana.
00:15:23.000He had the opportunity to question FBI Director Christopher Wray regarding January 6th.
00:15:34.000If you are asking whether the violence at the Capitol on January 6th was part of some operation orchestrated by FBI sources and or agents, the answer is emphatically not.
00:16:30.000This is a very significant hearing, Mr. Chairman.
00:16:34.000These buses are nefarious in nature and we're filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters and deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.
00:17:07.000Butch on Getter says, time to vacate Johnson.
00:17:11.000Well, that's not going to happen before we give him his first month.
00:17:17.000If Mike Johnson continues to govern by continuing resolution without a sincere commitment to our single-subject spending bills, then he will likely face the same fate as Kevin McCarthy.
00:17:28.000This is about the work, not the person, and the work has to be done.
00:17:33.000Kevin McCarthy had seven months and produced one single-subject spending bill and then sent us all on like a seven-week vacation.
00:17:41.000Mike Johnson has moved these bills and admittedly passed a continuing resolution that I opposed, that 95 Republicans opposed.
00:17:50.000But keep in mind, whether you like it or don't, and I don't, A majority of Republicans voted for that CR. So this wasn't something that Mike Johnson forced down everyone's throat.
00:18:04.000You had a majority of the majority backing this piece of crap legislation that didn't provide wins for the people in this country that extended the spending of Joe Biden and the policies of Nancy Pelosi.
00:18:16.000So what Mike Johnson has done here has bought himself tens of days, 74 days remaining.
00:18:23.000And in that time period, We have to pick the fights and deliver the wins on the border, on spending cuts, and defanging this weaponized government.
00:18:34.000And it's not going to be easy because we don't exactly have like the 300 in the Republican conference.
00:18:40.000You just watched Republicans work with Democrats so that We didn't impeach Mayorkas.
00:18:56.000This might not be the Republican fighting force that all of us would have hoped, but we got to go to war with the army we have, not the army we want.
00:19:05.000And when I went to try to get the FBI headquarters, the brand new building larger than the Pentagon, out of the budget, prohibited from being constructed, 70 Republicans voted with the Democrats and the FBI. So like, you know, We are going to hold Speaker Johnson to account on spending reductions, the border, and doing everything we can to defang this government.
00:19:33.000But keep in mind, he is the speaker, not the dictator.
00:19:38.000And if you've got a lot of these so-called Republican members Working with the Democrats on these things, it's going to be very difficult.
00:19:46.000This continuing resolution was not the right approach.
00:20:04.000And that'll be the fight where I'll need all of you to try to put some sort of courage and rigor into the Republican effort that I think has been rightly critiqued as lackluster to date.
00:20:18.000One thing that I wanted to have as a centerpiece of this report to you is a growing concern I have about what's going on in the sky.
00:20:28.000You don't have a choice when you participate in air travel in the United States as to the quality of your air traffic controller.
00:20:38.000There's not like an option for you to say, I'll pay extra to make sure that the people directing my plane into the airport are competent and capable and trained.
00:20:51.000You get whoever the government put there.
00:20:54.000And increasingly, that is leading to very dangerous skies.
00:21:19.000We are joined now by one of Firebrand's favorite guests, Dr. Darren Beattie.
00:21:24.000He is the publisher of Revolver News, which you can find at revolver.news.
00:21:28.000And recently I was reading an incredible investigative report, a styled crash landing.
00:21:35.000The inside scoop about how COVID and affirmative action policy gutted aviation safety.
00:21:41.000And after I read this piece at revolver.news, I turned over to my wife and said, I never want to fly in an airplane in the United States of America again.
00:21:50.000Dr. Beattie, I want to get into the causalities in a moment.
00:21:53.000But before that, how would you describe the current state of aviation safety?
00:22:03.000Well you know it's it's a complex because on one hand we've gone a very very long time without a major catastrophic commercial aviation disaster so that's one part of the equation but the other part of the equation which we address in this comprehensive and very uh in-depth piece is that the number of close calls Events that aviation professionals call runway incursions,
00:22:34.000where two airplanes almost collide into each other on the runway, or what they call loss of separation events in the air, near midair collisions, both of which as a result of air traffic control error, these incidents have skyrocketed and in fact have doubled in the past decade.
00:22:59.000On the one hand, we don't have any catastrophic accident.
00:23:04.000But on the other hand, the close calls are multiplying and doubling over the past decade.
00:23:10.000And in recent months, there have been just a series of absolutely incredible close calls In the Austin airport and other airports across the country of just really shocking incompetence displayed by our air traffic control professionals.
00:23:31.000You talk about the dangers in Austin, Texas, and I think you even quoted one of the pilots in the piece who said they're trying to kill us in Austin.
00:23:46.000You're supposed to listen to air traffic controllers, but the confidence that the pilots have in the air traffic controllers is absolutely diminishing and justifiably so because of this series of near catastrophes that have resulted directly and very starkly from egregious and almost unfathomable Incompetence from air traffic controllers.
00:25:02.000McCormick, who is willing to answer some questions, but the level of obfuscation, really delusion, was quite remarkable.
00:25:09.000But we did get him to admit that COVID hiring freezes played a dramatic role In the understaffing epidemic in the air traffic control profession.
00:25:21.000So, you know, long time ago, we've spoken about this on Firebrand.
00:25:26.000Revolver did a major investigative piece using the life years metric as a means of analyzing whether the lockdown policies made sense.
00:25:35.000Well, we didn't even take into account the fact that these unnecessary hiring freezes due to COVID could have resulted in, you know, the next major Aviation disaster.
00:25:48.000The spokesperson was much more tight-lipped and I would say deceptive maybe when it comes to acknowledging the role of the vaccine mandates in particular.
00:26:01.000But even if we set those aside, simply the effect of the hiring freezes I think is a loan to really Further condemn the COVID hysteria, which, you know, we're still feeling the ramifications of that.
00:26:20.000As for the quality, we trace a lot of the diminution of quality to pretty dramatic changes that were put in place by the Obama administration effectively to court more diversity.
00:26:33.000They entirely dispense with the merit-based test That was sort of like an SAT, but for air traffic controllers.
00:26:40.000They got rid of that entirely in favor of a test that gauges what they call bio data, which is a huge scam.
00:26:49.000We track its source to this woman who's a professor of AIR. Believe it or not, that actually exists.
00:27:13.000And the pilots that we spoke to and aviation professionals pretty much all said, yes, this has led to a discernible and conspicuous decline in quality from what we had before.
00:27:26.000It is a perfect storm of danger, because on one hand, whether it was the vax mandates, whether it was the hiring freeze, or frankly, whether it was just the cultural adoption of working from home, it hollowed out all this experience that we had.
00:27:46.000These experienced air traffic controllers would leave for one reason or another, and then the backfill Or all these DEI hires who didn't have to do the rigorous merit-based testing.
00:28:00.000I read this and I am wondering why there is not a long line of whistleblowers coming to Congress, going to the Aviation Committee to express their concern.
00:28:10.000I mean, you detail in the piece how reticent people were to speak candidly with you about this.
00:28:16.000Why aren't more people sounding the alarm?
00:28:20.000Well, it's unfashionable and it's career death for many.
00:28:25.000They have benefits, they have their careers on the line for this and nobody really wants to hear it because by now it's a very systemic problem and it takes a long time actually to train air traffic controllers.
00:28:40.000For the understaffing is there was the COVID hiring freeze, but then there was also a massive surge in retirements as a result, you know, in the COVID era.
00:28:51.000Now they could pretend like that has nothing to do with the vaccine mandates, but I think given the available evidence and there were studies of pilots were extremely reluctant to take the vaccine in numbers that were significant.
00:29:07.000Attribute any reason you want, but there was a marked increase of retirements as a result of the COVID policies enacted in addition to the hiring freezes.
00:29:17.000So it's kind of cutting it from both sides there.
00:29:20.000And as you point out, the ones that remain Very low quality, hired on the basis of these new effectively diversity mandates.
00:29:29.000And just to give you a sense of how absurd it is, we opened the piece with one of the most egregious near accidents, the runway incursion, they call it, of a Southwest plane that almost ran into a FedEx plane.
00:29:47.000And the air traffic controller who's responsible for this, and this isn't just like, oh, this is super complicated, but he made a mistake.
00:29:54.000But it's like, no, no, this is very, very avoidable mistakes.
00:31:11.000We're not even able to maintain, let alone innovate.
00:31:15.000The complex systems like aviation, like electric grid, transportation, there are a number of different systems that depend not necessarily on geniuses to keep it running, but to competent, responsible, Professionals with institutional knowledge.
00:31:37.000And our system breaks down at the point of being able to pass down that institutional knowledge To the next generation of competent professionals.
00:31:46.000And we see that in the aviation industry.
00:31:48.000Revolvers address this general issue way back when, remember, when the Texas power grid was having issues?
00:31:56.000I mean, ultimately, this results in a South Africa-type situation.
00:32:01.000Now, to get back to the aviation example, which I think is the most shocking because, you know, air traffic Disasters really kind of sees us on a visceral level in terms of how terrifying they are.
00:32:17.000You point out there's no way to get around this.
00:32:21.000Normally, the answer to the collapse of these complex systems is, okay, have the tragedy of the commons.
00:32:28.000Every common space is sort of gutted and devolves to the lowest common denominator.
00:32:32.000The very wealthy in society, the ruling elite, are the diminishing numbers of them, but they're able to kind of buy their way out of it.
00:32:42.000The interesting thing about the aviation example is, Even if you fly private, you're not able to buy your way out of it because the problems with the air traffic controllers And in fact, some of the examples that we've given, several actually, involve private aircraft.
00:33:01.000So interestingly, it's one of these things that even the ruling class isn't able to buy their way out of unless they start to just operate out of entirely different airports.
00:33:10.000But even then, they're dependent on air traffic coordination with the plebs and their commercial aircraft.
00:33:17.000So it's really quite remarkable in that respect that it's not even one of those things that You know, if it were an airline issue, say, okay, we're left with crappy pilots, crappy flying experience, all the rich people flying private, but for this particular issue, there's no buying your way out of it.
00:33:47.000You talk about solutions in the piece, and you essentially say throw the baby out with the bathwater, that the public sector, government-funded...
00:33:57.000Air traffic control system is unsavable and that you believe privatization is something that needs to be seriously considered in order to raise the level of competence.
00:34:07.000Have I overstated how stark you think the options are for us going forward?
00:34:13.000No, I think that needs to be seriously looked into.
00:34:16.000And my understanding is President Trump actually suggested something along these lines, although I'm not sure if he seriously pursued it.
00:34:26.000But I think that's something to look into aggressively.
00:34:29.000But ultimately, the issue is even when you go private, a lot of these laws and pressures remain in terms of the diversity We've covered this independently in a discussion of the implications of certain areas of civil rights law.
00:34:51.000For instance, disparate impact law means that any kind of test that leads to a differential impact across racial or gender lines that doesn't correspond exactly with the distribution of the population, any such test for an employer is considered to be Presumptively illegal on the basis of corporate impact.
00:35:14.000So that's a civil rights law that applies to the private sector as well.
00:35:19.000And so you can't really avoid the underlying pressures even by going private.
00:35:25.000And the remarkable thing is, you know, you think Okay, there's this diversity imperative that exists within our society.
00:35:32.000It's effectively the ideology of the American empire.
00:35:36.000But you would hope there would at least be enough sense to say, okay, let's get the, you know, the diversity hires and have that maybe in the commercials or in, you know, areas that are not ultra critical.
00:35:51.000But the fact that we've Gotten to the point where we're doing that to the air traffic control indicates that there's a level of insanity and recklessness that really defies the notion that there's something kind of cynical and strategic about the diversity.
00:36:55.000As far as solutions, this isn't going to be a long-term solution, but something that's worth considering.
00:37:01.000There is technology that can compensate to a large degree for the incompetence of the air traffic personnel.
00:37:10.000And not all of our airports have this technology.
00:37:14.000And the FAA has said this is a result of a lack of funding and all these things.
00:37:20.000Oh, I'm sure there'll be a government contractor who will say that because of the COVID laws that we passed and the corresponding DEI that we backfilled it with, we now need to go spend a bunch of taxpayer money to create a technology system to overlay the human incompetence.
00:37:37.000They're already saying that, but assuming that there is technology that works, it's pretty amazing that we've directed $100 billion to Ukraine, and yet we have airports that lack what the FAA is describing as critical technology to avoid the next aviation disaster.
00:37:55.000So it's just incompetence and corruption piled on top of each other, you know, up to the stratosphere.