The FBI is investigating a local school board meeting because parents are showing up to ask questions about their children s education. Is this a good or bad thing? And why is the FBI trying to prevent parents from attending school board meetings?
00:00:53.000Ms. Monaco, I want to come back to this extraordinary letter and memorandum
00:00:58.000that the Attorney General of the United States issued yesterday.
00:01:02.000Practically every day brings new reports about this administration weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to go after political opponents.
00:01:08.000Frankly, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it in American history.
00:01:12.000Is parents waiting sometimes for hours to speak at a local school board meeting to express concerns about critical race theory or the masking of their students, particularly young children?
00:01:24.000Is that, in and of itself, is that harassment and intimidation?
00:01:28.000Is waiting to express one's view at a school board meeting harassment and intimidation?
00:01:33.000As the Attorney General's memorandum made quite clear, spirited debate is welcome, is a hallmark of this country.
00:01:40.000It's something we all should engage in.
00:01:52.000I think we can agree that violence shouldn't be condoned or looked aside from in any way swept under the rug at all.
00:01:58.000But harassment and intimidation, what did those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting?
00:02:04.000I mean, this seems to, in the First Amendment context, we talk about the chill, the chill to speech.
00:02:10.000If this isn't a deliberate attempt to chill parents from showing up at school board meetings for their elected school boards, I don't know what is.
00:02:20.000I mean, I'm not aware of anything like this in American history.
00:03:30.000And I cannot believe that an attorney general of the United States is engaging in this kind of conduct.
00:03:35.000And frankly, I can't believe that you are sitting here today defending it.
00:03:40.000That's firebrand Missouri United States Senator Josh Hawley going after the Department of Justice and the FBI for weaponizing federal law enforcement against parents who love their kids and show up to school board meetings.
00:03:55.000I've got an interview with a former school board member I know pretty well later in the show.
00:05:28.000I believe that there are people who under almost any other circumstance would be out on their own recognizance.
00:05:33.000But to make a political point are behind bars right now because the Biden administration, the intelligence community,
00:05:39.000they want to turn these exquisite authorities in the national security apparatus inward to the American people to hunt our people.
00:05:47.000Spying, lying, smearing, electioneering, melding the worlds of intelligence collection, criminal targeting, and domestic political ambition.
00:05:59.000I grew up my entire life thinking the FBI were the good guys.
00:06:26.000He was a Russian agent, they told us, coordinating campaigning with Putin.
00:06:31.000I saw clearly what was happening at a politicized FBI during this December 2017 interview with Fox News' Ed Henry.
00:06:40.000The problem is, in the swamp of Washington, D.C., the biggest alligator is a politicized FBI and Department of Justice.
00:06:47.000And that's why we're fighting hard to make sure that we've got a fair and equal opportunity for all sides to be heard,
00:06:53.000and that you don't have this pro-Hillary Clinton bias, anti-Donald Trump bias continue to infect our institutions and our systems that all Americans should be able to rely on.
00:07:04.000Even some Republicans we looked up to and trusted at the time, like Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, said we should trust the FBI and Robert Mueller.
00:07:14.000I told people at the time that Gowdy was wrong.
00:07:19.000The FBI was putting their thumb on the scale to try to nail Trump because the deep state despised him, even if our voters elected him.
00:07:28.000I made the case that Gowdy and Ryan blew it in this appearance on Sean Hannity.
00:07:33.000I'm glad you went through Trey Gowdy's exquisite questions in 2017 to these corrupt officials.
00:07:38.000I guess my question, Sean, would be why was it then in late May of 2018 that Trey Gowdy went on Martha McCallum's show and said that the FBI did exactly what all of our fellow Americans would have wanted them to do and that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump?
00:07:53.000Both of those things have now been proven to be not true, and it seems that Gowdy's brilliant lawyering back in 2017 that we're only able to see now proves those two statements untrue.
00:08:03.000The number one question I get asked from Americans is why no one has gone to jail and been held accountable.
00:08:08.000Unfortunately, when Nunes and Meadows and Jordan and I wanted subpoena power, it was Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy that wouldn't give us that subpoena power.
00:08:16.000Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas when we had control and could have run this to ground in 2017.
00:08:22.000We didn't send out a single subpoena, not one, and that's a failure of our Republican leadership.
00:08:27.000Jim Jordan, Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes, we were all not deterred.
00:08:33.000We continued to push for investigations.
00:08:36.000Then we got a bombshell report from the inspector general.
00:08:41.000In secret courts, our own government officials were doctoring evidence, lying on certifications, not supporting factual claims with required evidence, and violating the very procedures intended to preserve our delicate liberties.
00:09:01.000We should have been attacking the credibility of these corrupt investigations into Trump from the start.
00:09:07.000We should not have indulged them even for one moment.
00:09:10.000But here is Gowdy in May of 2018 when we were in power.
00:09:16.000We could have actually done something.
00:09:18.000But Gowdy was just simping for the FBI.
00:09:22.000I am, I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
00:09:33.000After Gowdy made these statements, House Judiciary held a joint hearing with the Oversight and Government Reform and Accountability Committees, which Gowdy actually chairs OGR.
00:09:45.000There is no member of Congress who holds the department and the bureau in higher esteem than I do.
00:09:52.000There are others who hold you in high esteem, but I would take second place to no one.
00:09:58.000I would have defended the department and the bureau when, frankly, it was pretty damn lonely to do so.
00:10:03.000When my Democrat friends were asking that Jim Comey be prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation about this time last year, they now want him canonized.
00:10:13.000But this time last year, they wanted him prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation.
00:10:18.000When your predecessor sat right where you're sitting and was embroiled in a fight with this little tiny startup company called Apple,
00:10:29.000When there are calls for special counsel, even today, I reject them because I trust the women and men of the Department of Justice and the bureau, the professionals that we hired to do their job.
00:10:42.000Gowdy was spectacularly wrong about the FBI in the Russia investigation.
00:10:47.000To his credit, he admitted as much to Tucker Carlson after he left office and became a Fox News personality.
00:10:54.000I made a lot of mistakes in life, relying on briefings and not insisting on the documents.
00:11:00.000Yes, my mistake was relying on the word of the FBI and the DOJ and not insisting on the documents.
00:11:32.000And most importantly, this bill is an improvement over what currently exists, over the status quo.
00:11:37.000The legislation begins to address the problems that we saw with the FBI's illegal surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
00:11:44.000On December 9th, 2019, the nonpartisan Justice Department inspector general released a 400-page report detailing the FBI's misconduct and the failures and its warrantless surveillance of Mr. Page.
00:11:57.000Congressman Meadows and I urged our Democrat chairman to hold hearings on this report, but they were not interested.
00:12:02.000Still, I hope all of my colleagues had a chance to read the inspector general's report because it should concern every single American.
00:12:10.000Remember, if our law enforcement agencies can do this to a president, imagine what they can do to you and I.
00:12:41.000In 1978, the 95th Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that they were able to get done with overwhelming support from a majority of the United States Senate, including then-Senator Joe Biden.
00:12:57.000Now, this provided a statutory framework for government agencies to obtain authorization for gathering foreign intelligence.
00:13:06.000And they did so through electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen registers, trap and trace devices, and the production of certain business records.
00:13:14.000The innocent intention of FISA was to create a check on the executive branch's authority to surveil anyone it deems a threat.
00:13:23.000FISA established the Independent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and they claim that the FISC was supposed to protect liberty over this notion of an aggressive, nosy executive branch.
00:13:37.000In America, when law enforcement conducts a search, the Fourth Amendment requires that the search warrant is approved by a neutral magistrate, typically a federal judge.
00:13:49.000When the NSA and FBI want to eavesdrop on you, they obtain a secret warrant.
00:13:56.000FISC, an entirely separate court of 11 judges, reviews FISA surveillance orders outside of the public eye.
00:14:04.000The FISA orders are kept secret, and the court's opinions and transcripts of the proceedings are automatically classified.
00:14:13.000I can hear George Washington gasping from the grave.
00:14:17.000Today's data shows that the FISC is little more than a rubber stamp.
00:14:22.000They approve over 75% of the warrants without any modification, and 99% of all requested warrants approved.
00:14:33.000The FISC has morphed from a neutral arbiter, separate from the executive branch, into a partisan court, which directly threatens your civil liberties.
00:14:43.000They aren't partisan for Republicans or Democrats as much as they are partisan toward the government and against the rest of us.
00:14:55.000The days of Occupy, Wall Street, and anti-establishment are over in favor of allegiance to the state and big, woke corporations.
00:15:03.000All the powers that B had to do was cloak their regime in rainbow flags and BLM shirts, and the emotionally vulnerable and manipulatable left bent the knee.
00:15:14.000The left no longer serves as any type of threat to the regime, but the right is more objective, more aware, and less easily fooled.
00:15:23.000Excluding Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, of course.
00:15:26.000That means the only people fighting this corruption.
00:15:31.000It's you and me, America First conservatives.
00:15:34.000It's why we feel the deep state is typically targeting us, because they are.
00:15:39.000In the early 2000s, as a direct response to 9-11, we had the Bush administration enacting the Patriot Act,
00:15:46.000which presided over enhanced investigative tools justified by the notion of preventing future terrorist attacks.
00:15:54.000You wonder why they want to call everyone associated with January 6 a terrorist.
00:15:59.000It's because they want to use these tools.
00:16:01.000Even though some people pose no threat to the regime or the government, it's a basis to target a political movement.
00:16:08.000Now, Section 215 of the Patriot Act augmented FISA's ability to access business records,
00:16:14.000and that's what sparked the metadata collection debate of the 2000s.
00:16:20.000Remember the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testifying before Congress that there wasn't bulk collection of data?
00:16:27.000Turns out, there was bulk collection of data.
00:16:29.000I never understood why he wasn't arrested and charged for lying to Congress, like others might be.
00:16:35.000Now, after the extreme criminal abuses of the FISA process during the Russia hoax,
00:16:42.000the Inspector General at the Department of Justice decided to audit a few cases at random.
00:16:47.000Take a look under the hood. Peel back the layers of the onion.
00:16:50.000Choose your metaphor. They were taking a closer look.
00:16:53.000In the words of the Inspector General, quote,
00:16:56.000Physical search and or electric surveillance, pursuant to FISA, is one of the DOJ's most intrusive investigative authorities.
00:18:35.000Based on FBI documentation, we determined that there were at least 183 instances where the required Woods file was missing, destroyed, or incomplete at the time of the FBI's inventory.
00:18:47.000Given the FBI's reliance on Wood procedures to help ensure the accuracy of its FISA applications, we believe the missing Woods files represents a significant lapse in the FBI's management of its FISA program.
00:19:03.000It sure looks like the FBI and DOJ are getting the procedures wrong more than they are getting them right.
00:19:12.000But you wouldn't know that if you listened to the sworn under oath testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray in March of this year.
00:19:21.000We accepted all of the findings and recommendations in the inspector general's report.
00:19:26.000I ordered, at the time, over 40 corrective actions to go above and beyond the recommendations of the inspector general's report.
00:19:36.000Those include everything from strengthening our procedures to ensure accuracy and completeness to make sure the court gets all the information it's supposed to.
00:19:46.000Changes in our protocols for CHS's, Confidential Human Sources, training changes.
00:19:52.000I created a new office of internal audit that's specifically focused on FISA auditing.
00:19:59.000But according to the IG, what Wray says and what the FBI does are quite different.
00:20:09.000The FBI Director publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the identified problems and announced numerous steps the FBI was undertaking to address them.
00:20:17.000However, we believe certain statements from the FBI failed to recognize the significant risks posed by systemic noncompliance with the Woods procedures.
00:20:28.000And during our audit, some FBI personnel minimalized the significance of Woods procedures noncompliance.
00:20:36.000In the words of the IG, these chronic failures, quote, can lead to faulty probable cause determinations and infringement of U.S. persons' civil liberties.
00:20:53.000Even though the FBI apparently diminishes their violation of our American rights, these abuses and tortured interpretations of FISA over the past 43 years exemplifies well-intentioned policy morphing into a monster.
00:21:09.000Section 215 enabled the FBI to ask the FISA court to compel the sharing of books and business documents, tax records, library checkout lists, any other tangible thing as a part of a foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigation.
00:21:26.000The required material can include purely domestic records.
00:21:31.000Kind of makes you wonder why they're trying to label the political movement they don't like a terrorist movement when there are these tools that even though they exist under something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act can result in the production of so many records so long as they just append a label of terrorism, whether it's appropriate or not.
00:21:50.000And so what do we say to those who claim that FISA's errors are unintentional, in good faith, for the greater good?
00:22:26.000In fact, in 2008, Senator Obama voted for the Bush-sponsored Protect America Act, which extended the government's expanding spying powers for an additional four years.
00:22:39.000Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, they all hate your civil liberties.
00:22:45.000Trump was different precisely because he was targeted.
00:22:56.000Barack Obama spent a surprising amount of his presidency extending the Bush-era Patriot Act.
00:23:04.000In fact, in May of 2011, the Patriot Act was set to expire and Obama was abroad.
00:23:10.000He cared so much about the government's wiretapping abilities, he became the first U.S. president in history to sign a bill into law using the auto pen.
00:23:49.000We must put a check on the NSA and FBI's ability to summon uncontested warrants through rubber-stamped secret courts.
00:23:58.000We can't stand by and watch as the deep state obfuscates the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, so many of the rights enshrined in our Constitution.
00:24:08.000And they're just picking who they're going to go after next.
00:24:11.000The only crime greater than international terrorism is enabling, promoting, and abusing a system where your fellow countrymen is blatantly surveilled by an oppressive government without the due process of law.
00:24:27.000Currently, the system is in direct contrast to the principles that the United States of America was founded on. Period.
00:24:35.000Don't get me wrong, FISA can still be used for its original purpose, to fight terrorism, to detect threats before they occur.
00:24:42.000That said, metadata collection is misaligned.
00:24:47.000And the current process that enables political witch hunts and law enforcement should be reformed.
00:24:53.000So let's look at a few of the ideas for reform.
00:24:55.000In 2019, Mark Meadows introduced H.R. 4046, the FISA Reform Act.
00:25:01.000That would have required periodic reports to Congress about FISA surveillance to include the identity of any individual who is targeted and associated with a presidential candidate of a major party.
00:25:13.000The Democrat Congress did nothing with this.
00:25:16.000In that same Congress, Representative Justin Amash introduced the FISA Oversight Correction Act, which would have authorized a court to disclose to a person information related to evidence collected about that person using certain foreign intelligence surveillance powers,
00:25:34.000if that disclosure would likely promote a more accurate determination of the legality of the surveillance.
00:25:40.000Tulsi Gabbard, another firebrand, she introduced the Protect Our Civil Liberties Act.
00:25:45.000Now, that bill would have repealed the Patriot Act and certain FISA provisions.
00:25:50.000The legislation would have also prohibited the acquisition of information regarding U.S. persons if they were using foreign intelligence tools to get that information without a warrant.
00:26:02.000That would have reset the balance of liberties that would have been effective from a law enforcement standpoint, and it wouldn't have created just an ecosystem allowing incredible fraud that was identified during the Russia hoax and which still has not been cured.
00:27:13.000I have filed legislation today sent to the House that Adam Schiff needs to be removed from the Intelligence Committee,
00:27:18.000because how are the rest of us supposed to be able to rely on a man who you just showed lied to the American people
00:27:24.000when he said that there wasn't spying or when he lied and said there was actual evidence of collusion or clear evidence of collusion?
00:27:29.000If Adam Schiff is able to review covert operations and intelligence, and if we have to be able to rely on his representations, our whole system is broken.
00:27:38.000I mean, it would be like putting Lori Loughlin in charge of the College Board.
00:27:42.000It would be like putting Jussie Smollett in charge of the Hate Crime Division of the FBI.
00:27:46.000We have got to remove Adam Schiff from the Intelligence Committee.
00:27:49.000In 35 years of watching Congress, I have never seen a member of Congress with lower personal integrity than Adam Schiff.
00:27:55.000And it's shocking to me that he chairs that committee.
00:27:58.000Is there any hope of unseating him from that?
00:28:00.000I think that Nancy Pelosi and just your rank-and-file Democrats have to feel the pressure from this.
00:28:05.000Their constituents have to ask them, how are you going to be able to make decisions in the best interest of our country and our district
00:28:11.000if it's Adam Schiff that you're listening to to get characterizations and representations on the quality of the intelligence
00:28:17.000and whether or not it should justify congressional action?
00:28:19.000I want to just explain to our viewers we have on the screen the name of this act,
00:28:22.000the Pencil Act, Preventing Extreme Negligence with Classified Information Licenses.
00:29:04.000Grabbing coffee here with my dad in our hometown in Iceville, Florida.
00:29:08.000And as I mentioned, my dad was an educational leader in this community for about 12 years,
00:29:13.000six years on the school board, six years as school superintendent.
00:29:16.000And I want to get your reaction to the melding of a school board mission and the FBI mission in just a moment.
00:29:23.000But Dad, I got to tell you, something special is going on this year with people's interest in the school board.
00:29:30.000Usually when I travel the country, I meet people who are running for Congress or Senate or governor.
00:29:36.000But overwhelmingly, the people I meet who are interested in politics now view the school board as the front line of the culture war.
00:29:44.000And I always give them advice kind of through the lens of your experience, which is if you run for school board,
00:29:51.000there's no time at night when your phone isn't going to be ringing because if people are contacting you about their kids,
00:29:58.000there is an intimacy and a passion and a devotion to that cause that is different than other parts of politics,
00:30:07.000like our service in the legislature and my service in Congress.
00:30:10.000So before we get to the FBI injection into school board operations,
00:30:15.000what advice would you give to people who are out there who are interested in running for the school board?
00:30:22.000Well, I think it was Ronald Reagan who said that the future of our country will depend as much on who's on the school board as who's in Congress.
00:30:31.000And that's because at school board level, you're dealing with people's kids,
00:30:36.000you're dealing with their schools and the greatest share of their local tax dollars.
00:30:40.000And that gets people worked up and gets some concern, particularly when it's involving your kids.
00:30:46.000So I would say to people who have any interest in their children, their children's education, their community,
00:30:54.000the direction of this country, that the culture wars are being fought on the front lines of your local school board.
00:31:00.000That's where the 1619 project is being discussed.
00:31:03.000That's where critical race theory is being discussed and in some cases pushed.
00:31:09.000That's where COVID mandates are really meeting the road.
00:31:13.000And if you want to be involved, be on the school board.
00:31:16.000And it's the greatest job you can ever have because you're involved in trying to help make things better for kids.
00:31:22.000Now, you interact with other education leaders around the country.
00:31:25.000And typically, your school board members are former teachers, former school administrators.
00:32:38.000The stuff you are angry about, you are angry that the bus routes were inefficient,
00:32:43.000that the purchasing of supplies didn't make sense,
00:32:46.000that the teachers weren't being compensated to the same degree as administrators.
00:32:51.000And I mean, that stuff looks like a pretty easy circle to square compared to the mandates, the COVID restrictions,
00:32:59.000and the critical race theory that seems to have animated so many parents today.
00:33:02.000But, you know, you brought this district.
00:33:04.000I mean, we're sitting here across the street from my high school.
00:33:07.000And you brought this district from, you know, 36th out of 67 counties to number one.
00:33:14.000And it seemed to me as an observer that parental involvement was the number one thing that brought a school from a C or a D school to an A or a B school.
00:33:24.000Do you observe what's happening now with school board meetings being filled with parents who at times are angry and constant?
00:33:32.000Is that on balance a positive or a negative?
00:33:36.000I think that things start to get really better.
00:33:39.000And by better, I mean more responsive to the community, better for kids in schools,
00:33:45.000when parents hit a pain threshold and say, you know, I don't understand why my kid can't read.
00:33:50.000I don't understand why my kid doesn't understand American history.
00:33:53.000I don't understand why my kid, you know, is not doing well in competition with other kids around the country, around the world.
00:34:00.000I don't understand why there are rules coming from the school or the school board that don't seem to make sense.
00:34:07.000When parents begin to question and even get angry like I did, then I think things get better because school board members,
00:34:16.000and I was one, then have to be accountable and respond and dig down inside themselves and say, well,
00:34:22.000the reason we're doing this is because we've looked at the evidence and we're making the right decision.
00:34:27.000But you don't get that kind of interaction until you get people, citizens, saying, why are you doing this?
00:34:34.000We disagree. We've done our own research.
00:34:36.000And that means better schools and better communities.
00:34:39.000We see more and more parents who are in medicine, in science, who I think are unwilling to just, you know,
00:34:50.000accept what is put before them in the absence of analysis and rigor and the scientific method and a review of data.
00:34:57.000And as a consequence of that, we've seen this really chilling reaction from federal law enforcement.
00:35:05.000What was your reaction when you saw that the attorney general had directed the head of the FBI to start analyzing the conduct of angry parents at school board meetings?
00:35:14.000Well, I have to tell you that, you know, you can certainly find some humor in that.
00:35:18.000But at the same time, it was it was reminiscent of some really bad things that have happened in history when people from the federal government start showing up, folding their hands, standing in the back of public meetings and keeping track of who is saying what or going back over the list of people who showed up at a meeting and who said what.
00:35:39.000You know, you know, parents have to be really concerned to take time away from their jobs, from what goes on at home, from, you know, making dinner and everything else to go to a school board meeting anyway.
00:35:51.000And sometimes parents are afraid of retaliation on their kids if they go to a school board meeting.
00:35:58.000When you throw on top of that, the FBI is maybe watching.
00:36:02.000That has a chilling effect on parental involvement in their children's schools and the issues that are involving their children.
00:36:11.000But it also has a chilling effect on free speech.
00:36:14.000You can't have people from the government standing in the back of a public meeting with their arms folded, keeping track of who's saying what.
00:36:22.000That that's the kind of thing that that our fathers and our grandfathers and our grandmothers and grandfathers fought against in two world wars.
00:36:31.000The National School Board Association requested this action.
00:36:37.000Did you have a perspective on that group when you were a school board member?
00:36:45.000I refuse to pay dues and I refuse to have dues paid on my behalf.
00:36:49.000I mean, again, you know, I think it's good that we have people who have been in education who want to serve on a school board and want to continue to help.
00:36:58.000But if you have people who are basically a pair of chicks of the union and they just continue to want to keep things the way they are,
00:37:05.000that's creates a culture in the school board and it creates a culture in school board associations.
00:37:12.000And I'm afraid that too many state and national school board associations are populated by people who don't want to make change,
00:37:21.000who don't want things to be better, who want things to be the same, and they want less time with kids and they want more money.
00:37:27.000I don't know that, you know, parents are going to be arrested as domestic terrorists by the FBI for showing up and sharing their thoughts.
00:37:38.000But I do have concern about the chilling effect you mentioned.
00:37:43.000If the intent of this action was to discourage participation based on your experience being on the front lines of a lot of these battles, do you think it'll work?
00:37:53.000Because I almost think it could backfire.
00:37:55.000I think as parents are really, you know, backed down by the federal government, they will become even more strident and even more active.
00:38:05.000So, you know, it remains to be seen in the weeks and months ahead are the school board meetings going to go back to a dynamic with the tumbleweed rolling through
00:38:13.000or are these parents going to keep showing up?
00:38:15.000And I just don't think that the FBI wants to pick a fight with tiger moms and tiger dads who love their kids.
00:38:23.000You know, if the intent here is to chill participation, do you think it'll work?
00:38:30.000Well, I think that at the school board level and many other levels, fierce debate, even angry debate at public meetings is kind of the steam release valve in a democracy.
00:38:44.000And if you tell people directly or implicitly that they shouldn't show up, they can't show up, they have to be careful what they say,
00:38:52.000they have to be careful who they sit next to, they have to be careful what kind of sign they bring to the meeting.
00:38:57.000If you keep saying that, that's not going to stop Americans from being angry or being concerned or wanting to change things.
00:39:06.000What it does is it promotes some other way that there can be an explosion, God forbid, of people's concerns.
00:39:15.000So that's why our forefathers said, you know, we're going to have free speech.
00:39:19.000We're going to have the public square be a place where even crazy people can shake their fists at each other and make speeches about things that don't matter.
00:39:26.000Because that's the safety valve in a democracy.
00:39:29.000And I've been on both sides of the school board table.
00:39:32.000I've been the angry parent shaking his fist at the school board.
00:39:35.000And I've been a school board member who've had people shake their fists at me.
00:39:39.000And I can tell you, that's what democracy looks like.
00:39:44.000And when you take away the town meeting, when you take away the dynamic of people caring about things enough to show up and speak fiercely, even angrily at each other,
00:39:56.000but then maybe afterwards go out and have a beer together, then if you take that away, then you've really chilled democracy.
00:40:02.000In Florida, we actually passed a law, you voted for it, you were one of the big supporters of it, called the right to speak law.
00:40:09.000Because we had some school boards and some others in Florida who were saying, well, you don't need to speak.
00:40:15.000Or we're only going to have one minute to speak.
00:40:17.000Or you can speak at the end of the meeting, but not before we vote on this.
00:40:21.000So now, before every single policy decision or appropriation decision is made at a public meeting in Florida, whether it's the mosquito control board or the school board or any place else,
00:40:33.000if people want to speak, they have a right to stand up and speak their truth to the power that's in front of them.
00:40:40.000If we do that in Florida, we ought to do that in America.
00:40:43.000Yeah, Florida man does not abide being shut down from the opportunity to speak.
00:40:48.000And in a way, that is democracy's karaoke.
00:40:52.000Everybody gets to kind of get up and sing their own song.
00:40:54.000And sometimes they're off tune or off pitch.
00:40:57.000And sometimes it's the kind of magical lyric that can bring people together or can lead to better solutions.
00:41:04.000I don't think our schools are going to be better if we drive parents out of them.
00:41:09.000I don't believe that education is best as a government run monopoly.
00:41:13.000But with so many regular folks, we do need public schools to help people move up in the world.
00:41:19.000I mean, that's how mom became so successful.
00:41:23.000The great public schools here in our community.
00:41:25.000And I just have all the best well wishes to the great patriots around our country who love America and their families and their kids enough to step up and make their voices known to school board members to run for school board.
00:41:38.000And my friend Jim Jordan often says that this is actually the bench we're building to take the country back and to take power back in 2024.
00:41:46.000That these moms and dads who are winning school board races now are going to be leaders in their community and they're going to be future leaders for the country.