On today's show, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-GA) joins us by phone to discuss the FBI raid at President Trump's Mar-a-lago resort, and why he thinks it's time to take matters into our own hands. Plus, Dr. Darren Beattie joins us to discuss a new piece from Newsweek titled, "The National Security Agency is Now the Enemy." And, as always, we have our Hot Water, FMK, and FMK FMK. Thanks for listening and tweet us if you liked the show! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - FBI raids at Trump s Mar-A-Lago resort 4:30 - Is this a political stunt? 6:15 - Is the deep state out to get Trump 7:40 - What's next for the Deep State 8:20 - What should we do about it 9:20 11:00 12:15 Is this an act of political revenge 13:30 14:40 15:10 - How should we react 16:00 | Is the FBI now the enemy 17:10 18:30 | Is this really a political act 19:00 // 21:30 // 22:40 | Is there a war on Trump or is it a political smear campaign 22: What s going on here 23:00 / 26:10 | Is it time to impeaching 27:10: Is the Deep state here to get a grip on Trump, or is there a civil war ? 28: Is there any hope for Trump or not 29:00 @ least one of them? 35:00 Can we get a real plan to fix this problem? 36:00 -- Is it possible to fix it? 37:30 -- What s the real plan for a real solution to fix the problem or is this a fix? 39:00-- Is it a fix on the problem we need a real or a fix, or are we going to get better than we can fix it or a real fix? -- Is this just another Watergate or a bigger problem than we know what we're dealing with? & so much more? , 36:40 -- Is there some sort of solution to this problem we're all in a war?
00:04:43.000Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:04:50.000Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
00:04:53.000He can cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:04:56.000So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:05:00.000If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
00:05:35.000Congressman Matt Gaetz joins us by phone.
00:05:38.000Congressman Gaetz, give us your assessment of what went down yesterday and where did we stand this morning, sir?
00:05:44.000Well, they couldn't beat Trump at the ballot box in 2016, so they tried with impeachment and the witness box.
00:05:51.000That failed, so then they ran to the mailbox in the 2020 election, and now they've literally shown up at President Trump's home to take his boxes.
00:06:02.000This was not law enforcement activity, Steve.
00:06:09.000Over 30 FBI agents, heavily armed, The circle around President Trump's beautiful American flag at Mar-a-Lago filled up with black SUVs.
00:06:20.000They rented a rider truck so that people with guns could jump out of the back of it.
00:06:25.000There was even a standoff at the beginning of this raid because there were folks at the Secret Service who were wondering what The hat was my interview with Steve Bannon.
00:06:36.000I gotta get Bannon some better photos of me.
00:06:42.000We're live in the Longworth House office building here in our nation's capital and chaos is the word of the day.
00:06:48.000Democrats are Inflicting chaos on our economy with this terrible spending bill.
00:06:53.000My legislative director, Mike Robertson, has been going through it.
00:06:56.000We're going to have all the updates on that in just a moment.
00:06:59.000Chaos at the IRS, where they are gearing up for something.
00:07:04.000Like, is the IRS gearing up for war in our country?
00:07:07.000Is Nancy Pelosi trying to start a nuclear war in Asia now?
00:07:11.000Is there an effort by the national security state to stoke violence in a civil war here at home?
00:07:17.000We certainly hope not, but here to break it down with us, once again, one of the very favorites on Firebrand, Dr. Darren Beattie, the publisher of Revolver.News.
00:07:26.000Dr. Beattie, I think our last episode has over a million and a half of views on Rumble, so certainly...
00:07:31.000Folks enjoy the conversations we're able to have.
00:07:34.000You have a recently published piece in Newsweek.
00:07:38.000The national security apparatus is now the enemy.
00:08:21.000The ball's in the court of conservatives, Republicans, GOP in particular.
00:08:25.000And really, the only thing to do is to come up with A real plan and implement it.
00:08:32.000And I explore some ideas for how to do that in the piece.
00:08:36.000You specifically talk about a comparison with Hillary Clinton and some of the records retention and records management laws that may be impacted by this investigation.
00:08:48.000How should people think about what's happening to President Trump through the lens of what we saw play out with Hillary Clinton?
00:08:54.000Well it really is bizarre and actually quite ironic because you know one of the major sort of themes of the 2016 campaign was Hillary Clinton's criminality and one dimension of that criminality was the Improper storage of classified material.
00:09:14.000In fact, it wasn't simply that she had a private email.
00:09:17.000She had a private server where she was storing classified stuff, and there are a lot of really disturbing questions as to what was actually going on there.
00:09:26.000It was taken seriously enough that, of course, James Comey famously reopened or reconsidered the email question shortly before the election, and everyone went apoplectic about that.
00:09:39.000Of course, they weren't searching Hillary Clinton's house in New York or anything remotely like that.
00:09:45.000Simply the idea that they were looking into it was considered scandalous enough.
00:09:50.000And then on Trump's side, as we all know, the wonderful chant, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up, that became a staple of the rallies, galvanizing the base, that never materialized.
00:10:05.000That is ultimately sort of rhetorical bluster.
00:10:10.000And nonetheless, the reaction to it was, Oh, the idea of locking her up is that's a step out of bounds.
00:10:51.000One, Hillary Clinton was never president.
00:10:54.000She might have thought she was, but she was never president.
00:10:56.000So this is an unprecedented step to utilize criminal process to try to stop somebody who has literally been the leader of our country That has unique implications globally, like you referenced.
00:11:10.000Second, Hillary Clinton was actually transmitting and receiving classified information improperly, which creates a unique vector of vulnerability.
00:11:20.000What, a few boxes that might have been inadvertently taken to Mar-a-Lago down in a basement in Florida?
00:11:26.000Florida, not the same thing as moving this type of information on and off of your smartphone where there are tools like Pegasus, like other intelligence collection tools that could actually put Americans in danger.
00:11:40.000No American was in danger for any moldy box in the basement in Mar-a-Lago.
00:11:45.000So very different thing with Hillary Clinton.
00:11:48.000And I also think the intent was there.
00:11:49.000You see the bleach bit efforts on her part.
00:11:52.000This holistic effort by Clinton world to try to absolve her of that responsibility.
00:11:57.000Here you had Trump and his team doing everything they could to work with the government and comply with reasonable requests.
00:12:04.000And so I think that that is a really important thing to evaluate when looking at the Hillary Clinton example.
00:12:11.000This notion that technical noncompliance with the Archives Act is the basis for this is so laughable it does not pass the straight face test.
00:12:21.000What do you think they're really after, Darren?
00:12:24.000Well, I mean, I think they're really after taking Trump off the table.
00:12:28.000They want to completely neutralize Trump and the broader Trump phenomenon as a political force.
00:12:37.000They're trying everything in their arsenal to do that.
00:12:39.000And this is just another vector, just like the January 6 nonsense is a vector, just like the tax nonsense is a vector, just like the Russiagate nonsense is a vector.
00:12:51.000They're using a multi-pronged approach, but the objective is the same, and the objective is to completely silence, suppress, crush, and neutralize And if that's the goal,
00:13:16.000my hypothesis is no indictment, no charge, no trial even has to occur for them to largely achieve features of that goal.
00:13:28.000They're trying to use criminal process in politics to try to cloud the prospects of a candidate, in this case Donald Trump, who they're afraid of.
00:13:39.000And you don't even have to indict him to do that.
00:13:41.000You could just try to make people concerned that all the other shoes gonna drop at any moment.
00:13:46.000And in a way, Darren, the national security state is going for the hat trick when it comes to election interference.
00:13:54.000I mean, in the 2016 presidential contest, the national security state interfered with the Steele dossier.
00:14:01.000You point that out in your piece, saying that, oh, well, you know, Trump's a Russian agent, and there are these tapes, and he's going to be totally compromised by Putin.
00:14:10.000By the way, Trump, only president in recent history to serve and not have Putin invade another country anymore.
00:14:19.000Then you have in 2020 them also interfere in the presidential election by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, showing clear compromise of the Biden family, clear financial ties and interests with the Chinese Communist Party.
00:14:36.000And the national security state played a role in suppressing that.
00:14:39.000That was not just big tech and big media.
00:14:44.000And the FBI is now seeing a cascade of whistleblowers come forward to say that any time anything came in about the Bidens that was derogatory, they just labeled it foreign interference and downgraded it.
00:14:57.000And now you literally have the third presidential contest in a row where the national security state is trying to pick the winners and losers by trying to now disqualify Trump and use criminal process against him before he's able to announce his candidacy.
00:15:15.000We're watching it unfold right now in 2024.
00:15:19.000Dr. Bidi, have we seen the last election where the FBI and the national security state isn't actively a participant in the electioneering process?
00:15:28.000Dr. Bidi, have we seen the last election where the FBI and the national security state isn't actively a participant in the electioneering process?
00:15:29.000Well, I think that's a great question, and I think it remains to be seen, but it really invokes a question that I've been asking really since 2016, which is, you know, The national security state is doing everything in its power to make sure that the American people will never meddle in their own elections again.
00:15:53.000And I think everything that you've described is consistent with that.
00:15:58.000It is consistent again with what I've said that politics as we generally understand it will really exist only at a superficial and performative level unless the National security state's role is brought into its proper relation to the will of the people.
00:16:22.000And that's something that everyone who is an elected official who wants to run for office, everyone who wants to do something real has to understand.
00:16:31.000It raises the stakes because if you want to actually do something real in politics, you can no longer subsist in the safe playpen of partisan politics.
00:16:44.000It can't just be, oh, look at the outrageous thing that AOC did, or look what the socialists did, look at this or that.
00:16:52.000If you want to play the real game, you have to ruffle the feathers of the national security state because they're the premier and chief bottleneck to anything meaningful happening politically.
00:17:04.000And if you do that, as you well know, you're playing a very different game with very different stakes, and very few people understandably are willing to get into that.
00:17:13.000But that's just the reality, and if we don't address that problem, We just don't have a country anymore.
00:17:20.000We don't have a meaningful party anymore.
00:17:24.000And we're only going to get more of the same, but actually much, much worse if present trends continue.
00:17:32.000Someone you and I both know well who is involved with some of these alphabet soup three-letter agencies told me recently, you never can be a truly viable contender for the presidency in the United States.
00:17:47.000If you don't have at least one element of the national security apparatus in your corner.
00:17:53.000You know, I mean, maybe it's not the FBI, but then you gotta have the CIA. And if you don't have them, you gotta have the NSA. And if you don't have them, well, you gotta have Homeland Security.
00:18:02.000And if you don't have them, you have to have DOD intelligence.
00:18:05.000I mean, are we now at a point where the principal stakeholders in our politics Are less the traditional interest groups, you know, big sugar, big insurance, big healthcare, and it's actually big intelligence that's driving the train.
00:18:19.000Well, I think all of those stakeholders still exert considerable influence, but absolutely, we're seeing more and more the intelligence apparatus, which used to subsist at a kind of very quiet subterranean level, make its presence felt.
00:18:37.000And I think It's not that this is a new phenomenon.
00:18:45.000It's simply that Trump was the first president in a very long time to pose a meaningful challenge to the authority of the intelligence apparatus.
00:18:57.000And that's why we're seeing the response that we're seeing.
00:19:00.000And that's why politics is very different from what it ordinarily has been.
00:19:06.000And you're seeing such kind of dramatic and otherwise really unimaginable things happening, like the FBI raiding the private home of a former president over some nothing trivial, kind of de minimis record storage violation.
00:19:23.000You've made the argument in a number of your writings and in your reporting that folks can check out at revolver.news that America is a joke nation. And I bristle at that because I don't want to believe it. I think perhaps I'm a bit more optimistic than you are. But there is a Quote from your piece in Newsweek.
00:19:44.000Unless and until a radical change occurs, conservatives must treat the FBI and the rest of the national security apparatus as the hostile and partially illegitimate institutions that they are and not run back into the arms of their national security tormentor whenever the uniparty regime saber-rattles about the threat from some hostile entity overseas.
00:20:10.000It's almost like you're describing battered spouse syndrome, Dr. Beattie, that you have these political actors, as you've described them in Washington, who get abused by the national security apparatus, but at the first opportunity to run back and say, no, no, no, I'll love you more this time, they do so.
00:20:30.000That's a great formulation, and that's exactly what's going on, is that on the one hand, you have All of these national security organizations from the CIA to the FBI to Department of Homeland Security, you name it, that are not only not on the side of American patriots, but are actively hostile to American patriots and not simply incidentally hostile.
00:20:58.000You have the DHS, which even under Trump proclaimed effectively White supremacist domestic terror is the number one national security threat.
00:21:09.000And I think by now, we all know that that's code language for Trump supporters.
00:21:17.000And you see that in the Michigan entrapment operation and everything else.
00:21:21.000And so you have the national security apparatus, which is at war against Trump supporters.
00:21:28.000And Trump supporters more or less are beginning to understand this.
00:21:33.000I point out in the piece that There's something about the conservative political psychology that somewhat resists this because it's so disposed to venerate just and well-functioning institutions of authority, whereas people on the left To put it charitably, want to challenge unjust institutions of authority.
00:21:55.000People on the right want to venerate just institutions of authority.
00:21:58.000But all of these institutions are now hostile.
00:22:01.000And many people are coming to understand this, except the second you hear the same national security apparatus that hates your guts start to say, well, wait a minute, we need your help.
00:22:15.000You know, We need your help with this Russia nonsense.
00:22:25.000We need your help with this largely manufactured threat overseas.
00:22:33.000Largely conservatives that are doing most of the sacrifices on a military level too.
00:22:39.000And I think at a certain point, we need to kind of reevaluate this relationship because the contract seems to have been broken in some decisive degree.
00:22:49.000And I think it's reasonable for patriotic Americans to say, look, national security state, look, stakeholders of the globalist American empire.
00:22:59.000If you expect sacrifices from us, can we at the very least ask you not to use your considerable resources to destroy us domestically?
00:23:11.000And I think they're still kind of catching up to this new reality, but it is frustrating to see.
00:23:17.000It's like the second any kind of alleged foreign threat is mentioned by any of these hostile institutions, you see a lot of well-meaning conservatives just, you know, completely forget about the last beating and say, okay, sign me up.
00:24:00.000And it's time to start demanding some level of reciprocity and respect from these Well, and Darren, the reason that's so important is because their actions are becoming like...
00:24:15.000More acute with each move on the board, right?
00:24:19.000Like, let's go back to 2016. They thought that obtaining some secret warrant for secret surveillance that nobody would know about through illegitimate means would be okay.
00:24:30.000They thought that using the authorized leak structure that the DOJ absolutely has in place to try to get information out so that their hands are clean but so that others are smeared And then in 2020, they didn't use those clandestine tools.
00:24:47.000They actively suppressed the Hunter Biden information.
00:24:52.000They used the strongest possible hand that they could to say, no, we are going to jettison this, to degrade this.
00:24:59.000And as if that wasn't acute enough, now we get to the run-up to 2024, and they're literally now raiding houses of political opponents.
00:26:02.000My colleague Dan Bishop of North Carolina suggested that we just break, quite literally, break up the institutions of the FBI and DOJ, get them out of the beltway of Washington, D.C., and make them go live out in real America so that you don't have this vortex of politics infecting them.
00:26:21.000I think a well-detailed in your piece in Newsweek that people should check out is the counter-investigation strategy, running out the whistleblowers, making sure that when people have the courage to come forward and say that they've seen something wrong, that we're able to follow up on that.
00:26:39.000So starve them of the money, restructure the enterprise, and then follow to ground every investigation whistleblower fact pattern that we can.
00:26:49.000Do you think that's a worthy strategy, and is there anything in that that I'm missing?
00:26:55.000I think that's an excellent strategy to start with, and the question is really in the implementation, because you're one of the stalwarts, you're one of the firebrands, but there aren't very many like you, and I wonder if there's a critical mass to really implement something with teeth.
00:27:17.000I think we're close, but I think for these things, it's all about who's going to have the focus, the determination, and the courage to actually follow through with this when there's so many opportunities to kind of have a way that you can look like you're doing something to the public when you're actually not really doing something.
00:28:00.000I think They could do a lot worse than to dedicate some of that money, a considerable sum, to a fund that would defend and support potential whistleblowers within this national security apparatus we're talking about.
00:28:17.000So, Darren, there is a tool that we're going to have that we don't now.
00:28:21.000Subpoena power, the ability to bring people in for depots.
00:28:24.000So like right now, I get a whistleblower case.
00:28:26.000I can run it to ground with open source.
00:28:33.000But man, when I'm able to take these whistleblower investigations that we are currently running, I mean, these are active investigations that we do work on every day that involve current people who are employees at the Bureau.
00:28:44.000When we can do the document requests, when we can compare those documents to travel logs, expenditures, it really opens the door to the type of investigative work we can do.
00:28:55.000I think in conjunction with control of the house, it can be a very powerful tool.
00:29:01.000I don't think it needs to wait for that.
00:29:04.000I think it's something that could be done now is to start thinking about what the process would be to set up such a fund because if we've seen just in recent months how powerful it is when whistleblowers are willing to step forward and I think there would be a lot more of that or at least there could be if there were a more There's a favorable incentive structure in place for such potential whistleblowers.
00:29:29.000And of course, this is predicated on the assumption that there's still You know, a meaningful number of patriots within these organizations.
00:29:39.000I think there are a lot of good people who are still there.
00:29:43.000And, you know, they probably joined these institutions because they wanted to do the right thing for the country and they wanted to be brave.
00:29:53.000And actually now they have an opportunity, probably not what they thought it was, but now they have the opportunity to actually Do something brave and right for the country, which is the original reason they joined these institutions in the first place.
00:30:06.000And you give a special deal at Revolver.News to employees of the FBI, right?
00:30:11.000Yes, we give them free ad-free subscriptions.
00:30:27.000Dr. Darren Beattie, the publisher of Revolver.News, has a hot piece out in Newsweek about what the Republican Party needs to do to fight back.
00:30:37.000You know, Darren, you covered that race out in Washington's 3rd Congressional District.
00:30:41.000Joe Kent prevailing over Jamie Herrera Butler toward the general election out there.
00:30:48.000Some races feel like they mean a little more than the other ones.
00:30:53.000I get the sense that Joe Kent's presence in the Republican conference will really do what you described in getting us to the point where we're not engaging in just performative lobs back and forth of rhetoric, but we're actually running these investigations to ground.
00:31:09.000Am I right that that one might mean a little more than some of the rest?
00:31:22.000You need the courage, you need the brains, and you need the background, the kind of institutional knowledge.
00:31:27.000And I think he combines all of those things.
00:31:29.000And so I'm very encouraged by the fact that in every expectation, he will be joining the team, The elite few within Congress that actually has the courage and the discernment to take on the national security apparatus.
00:31:50.000The inward turning of the national security state against our people is the greatest domestic threat to our country.
00:31:58.000There's not even a close second from my standpoint, and Dr. Beattie lays it out each and every day at revolver.news.
00:32:10.000I would like to plug a piece at Revolver News that provides definitive proof that the FBI is withholding critical footage of the alleged January 6th pipe bomber.
00:32:22.000So if any viewers haven't seen that, it's really a must-read, a must-look.
00:32:27.000It's proof, and we should start demanding that footage.
00:32:45.000So it's not just the national security state at the FBI and the Department of Justice creating problems in our country.
00:32:51.000We also see a weaponizing of a lot of the bureaucratic entities that we normally would have viewed as more benign or at least less heavily armed.
00:33:03.000It seems more and more that the IRS is gearing up for some sort of war.
00:33:10.000We already reported on the millions of rounds of ammunition ordered by the IRS, and I introduced a bill to stop it.
00:33:19.000Now we see that the IRS, through the legislation that Nancy Pelosi has on the floor of the House right now, is receiving billions more in funding And looking to hire over 87,000 new IRS agents.
00:33:34.000Now, I've been in this job for three terms now, and I have never had an American say, you know what, we need Congressman Gates.
00:33:41.000I'm worried that we just don't have enough authority and manpower and ammunition at the IRS. I'm actually pretty sure that there's not a single member of our elected government that has ever heard that from a single American.
00:33:56.000But now, they're going to need new people at the IRS to engage in this new grant of authority that they have.
00:34:04.000So check out this job description posted by the IRS that was quickly deleted.
00:34:11.000In the description of the job, it says that, The requirements are, quote, maintaining a level of fitness required to respond to life-threatening situations on the job, carrying a firearm, and being willing to use deadly force if necessary, and being willing to participate in arrests, execution of surge warrants, and other dangerous assignments.
00:34:34.000Is the IRS, like, building up an army physically fit enough to engage in deadly force?
00:34:49.000No one has ever been held accountable for their targeting of conservatives, by the way.
00:34:54.000But the IRS did all of that in a day's work.
00:34:58.000The question now is, what does Biden's IRS intend to do with its newly weaponized and expanded powers?
00:35:06.000Why are they hiring these people that they say have to be willing to use deadly force against Americans at the IRS? Who's going to need the massive stores of ammunition?
00:35:17.000When Great Britain was preparing to wage war on the colonies, Patrick Henry gave his famous liberty or death speech, and he famously argued, Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation?
00:35:34.000Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love?
00:36:44.000The weaponization and expansion of the IRS is meant for you.
00:36:49.000No other motive can be assigned, Patrick Henry might say.
00:36:54.000They aren't going after the elites and their offshore holdings.
00:36:57.000No, those folks will have plenty of high priced accountants and lawyers to make sure that they still get out of paying taxes.
00:37:04.000This move by Joe Biden is not to go after the poor because they don't owe any taxes.
00:37:10.000They're going after working class and middle class people.
00:37:13.000They will squeeze every dollar out of you that they can to fund their reckless spending, their payment for interest on a debt that they created, And to keep up with the inflation that they have caused.
00:37:26.000Times are tough, but we need to stay strong.
00:37:29.000We cannot let the IRS further take advantage of law-abiding Americans.
00:37:37.000We're going to keep fighting to rein in the administrative state.
00:37:40.000And when we take back the Congress in 2022, we are going to hold these bad actors accountable once again.
00:37:47.000With this in mind, I have introduced HR 8268, the Disarm the IRS Act, to ensure that the IRS will stop acquiring ammunition upon its enactment.
00:37:59.000Well, that's the trouble that we see from the IRS, but there is much more in this crazy spending bill that Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer have agreed on.
00:38:08.000And here to break it down with me is my legislative director, back on Firebrand, Mike Robertson.
00:38:14.000And Mike, just like, for folks watching at home that...
00:38:18.000I want to understand the complexities of this.
00:39:01.000Yeah, coming off of 9% year-over-year inflation, I just do not understand whether there is some incompetence in understanding basic economics or some deception here.
00:39:12.000Because taxing businesses, double-taxing business for making capital investments because they are already being taxed on their book income, is not what's going to lead us to inflation reduction.
00:39:24.000You know, in fact, A little side note, I just saw on CNN this morning, the headlines everywhere inside the Beltway, House set to pass sweeping healthcare and climate change bill.
00:39:35.000And you know what I'm missing when I see that lower third is inflation soon to be reduced immediately.
00:39:42.000Well, isn't the most recent analysis we got from Wharton that this will actually increase inflation in the short term?
00:39:47.000To me, hearing that we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with the hopes that that will lower inflation is sort of like me saying I'm going to eat my way to weight loss.
00:39:59.000And that's why I have to doubt the authenticity and honesty on behalf of the Democrats.
00:40:05.000Maybe there's a little combination of not understanding what's really at play here.
00:40:10.000We are trying to grasp onto a fertile labor market.
00:40:14.000We want to make sure people can get jobs in this country.
00:40:16.000And by making sure, as you mentioned with the IRS, we're going to—six times the budget is what the $80 billion is for the IRS. So let's make sure hardworking Americans are poorer.
00:40:27.000No agency in Washington, D.C. should ever grow sixfold.
00:40:44.000They probably forgot that some of these programs have been existent forever.
00:40:48.000And so we want to make sure we're collecting more of your money as an American.
00:40:52.000We want to make sure if you have a successful business and you're looking to hire people, you're going to have to fork over more of your income.
00:41:04.000Well, let's keep drilling down on this 15% tax because I could see the argument among some people saying, well, gee, Congressman, these big corporations that don't pay a lot of taxes, I pay taxes, shouldn't they pay taxes on their gross?
00:41:17.000But if you drill down into all 700 and some odd pages as we have...
00:41:22.000What we see is also a complex system of tax credits that are intended for really social engineering more than anything.
00:41:31.000And so there's the 15% tax, which is going to drive capital offshore, which is going to ensure that we don't have investment in our country, which is going to enrich all the accountants and lawyers, but actually hurt regular folks.
00:41:43.000But then they're going to create this system of ESG tax credits.
00:41:47.000Explain to people what ESG tax credits are.
00:41:50.000So this is targeted for a category of self-proclaimed corporations that you may have heard are going to reduce emissions, are going to make sure that their focus is not on profits to hire more folks, but to make sure that they're equitable and that they're,
00:43:07.000$300,000 could be your household income to make sure that you get that tax credit that you deserve.
00:43:13.000Meanwhile, the middle class, the downtrodden that may not be opted into Obamacare because they don't need it, are still paying for all the other taxes that the IRS will come.
00:44:16.000And I mean, my take, first of all, if there is such a racist government entity that requires $10 million to pay to investigate, to hell with the agency.
00:44:29.000I mean, it's a little bit of a double speak here where there may or may not be a lack of equity and diversity in the agency.
00:44:35.000And instead of putting your foot on the table and saying this is ridiculous, this is against American values, we're just going to throw more of the taxpayer dollars and we'll find out.
00:44:45.000So, I mean, in this country, we've seen a broken supply chain over baby formula.
00:44:49.000We've seen fuel costs rise so fast we can afford to get places.
00:44:52.000We've seen those compounding fuel prices affect us at the grocery store every time we want to get stuff for our family to eat.
00:44:59.000But if you're worried about the cost of food or groceries, fuel, any of that stuff, don't The Democrats have $10 million to make sure that the USDA isn't so racist.
00:45:11.000I can't get enough of this, but it's not just the USDA. It's the Department of Transportation, too.
00:45:16.000Now we're talking about $3 billion to stop all of those racist roads and bridges that Pete Buttigieg has been telling us about.
00:45:24.000What is that going to do for Americans?
00:45:27.000It's really code for preferential grants to certain areas that are probably not where you live.
00:45:33.000And we just want to make sure that you as a taxpayer, everybody watching, your money absorbed by the now six times larger IRS is going to be distributed somewhere where you're not going to see any ROI on it.
00:46:10.000Well, and there are regulatory powers that are new and that are going to really increase costs for business.
00:46:17.000It's hard to think of any industry that will not have higher regulatory costs after this bill goes into effect.
00:46:26.000And when business has higher regulatory compliance costs, they pass that on to the consumer, which results in higher prices, which contributes to inflation.
00:46:42.000We haven't gotten there yet, but there are some punitive taxes on the cost of inputs.
00:46:48.000We're talking about how we want, I mean, I get the left doesn't like fossil fuels, but we can't just cut it off immediately.
00:46:54.000For example, in the energy industry, we've got An increase from 9.7 cents to 16.4 cents on the cost and excise tax of importing petrol and crude oil.
00:47:09.000We want to have a strong energy industry in the United States, but this is the cart before the horse.
00:47:14.000We're trying to get over what's now an impending recession or a current recession, if you will, but the Biden solution, within a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act, I'll keep reminding everybody, It's to increase the cost of fuel, even if it's coming from abroad, before we're deciding to unleash our energy capabilities here.
00:47:31.000So if you're following me, we're trying to switch, or they, excuse me, are trying to switch the paradigm of all use of fossil fuel oil, and we know that's the Al Gore motive and the end goal, but what's really a tragedy is they want to do this all in one piece of legislation during a recession.
00:47:58.000I mean, you see that in the public comments of the people in the Biden administration who just don't understand why every American doesn't go buy a $60,000 electric car.
00:48:08.000They want you to feel so much pain that you comply with their worldview.
00:48:14.000When the history is sort of written on this legislation, I think we'll clearly see that it did not favorably impact inflation.
00:48:22.000But that it did centralize a lot more power in Washington, D.C. I mean, all these themes, a militarized, vastly six-toubled IRS, a new climate corps, these sweeping new authorities for the Department of Transportation to think about roads and bridges, not in terms of connecting people and goods, but in terms of whatever the sophistry of racial equity is that they feel at the moment.
00:48:47.000And the choices that businesses make, that states make from a regulatory standpoint, Those seem to really be stolen from the people in this bill.
00:48:56.000And speaking of who this bill really benefits, back to if you have more money, you can afford an electric vehicle, don't worry, there's a tax credit in there.
00:49:05.000So when we tried to simplify the tax code, make it easier on people, double the standard exemption, make it where you can fill out your taxes on a postcard, now this is a way to re-complicate things.
00:49:17.000And regular folks don't need a more complicated tax code.
00:49:22.000The ESG corporate credits here, you're not getting.
00:49:26.000You're just getting the higher prices and the inflation.
00:49:29.000But then somebody in some boardroom is going to be able to say, oh, well, don't worry.
00:49:33.000We were able to find some clever way to obtain some credit or avoid some tax liability.
00:49:39.000And if they don't, then they'll just push their cash, their intellectual property, their manufacturing offshore.
00:49:46.000For all of the investment we saw come back to our country during the Trump economy, How much of that should we expect is going to be reversed with legislation like this?
00:50:26.000You know, I get asked the question all the time when Republicans are able to get sufficient, you know, control over levers of power in our government, will we be able to undo this?
00:50:37.000And frankly, we don't have a great track record of that.
00:50:40.000I mean, we went and promised people were going to repeal Obamacare and then didn't.
00:50:43.000I don't know that the Republicans are going to fire these 87,000 IRS agents, though we should.
00:50:49.000And the last thing the Republicans do when we take power is constrain spending the way we promised.
00:51:52.000know what, if we have to shut this government down in order to bring it to its appropriate level in American life, then you know what, we may have to get ready for some shutdowns.
00:52:02.000Mike, thank you for going through this legislation.
00:52:04.000Thanks for breaking out some of the most troubling points of it for our audience.
00:52:09.000And we look forward to being back with you soon with another episode of Firebrand.