The Anchormen Show with Matt Gaetz - October 21, 2021


Episode 12： The Weaponized DOJ (feat. Dr. Darren J. Beattie) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz

Topics
wokeness and economy integration
Hosted by
Matt Gaetz
Mentioned
Darren Beattie Merrick Garland Steve Bannon Donald Trump Stuart Rhodes Robert Mueller Biden Benny Thompson Oleg Deripaska Mark Meadows Oath Keepers Dan Scavino Roger Stone Lois Lerner Kash Patel Proud Boys Jim Jordan Jack Ma Woketopia Borat and 3 more
Episode 11： FBI Abuses (feat. Don Gaetz) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz Episode 13： Who Is Ray Epps？ (feat. Dr. Darren J. Beattie) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz

Episode Stats


Length

28 minutes

Words per minute

156.84

Word count

4,543

Sentence count

259

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss Rep. Matt Gaetz's decision to defy a subpoena from a select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, and the implications for the ongoing investigation. We also hear from the head of the panel investigating the incident, Professor Darren Beattie, and Rep. Merrick Garland's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:01.000 The embattled Congressman Matt Gaetz.
00:00:03.000 Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress
00:00:06.000 who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
00:00:10.000 Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem for the Democratic Party.
00:00:13.000 He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing applause.
00:00:16.000 So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
00:00:20.000 If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer,
00:00:23.000 if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground,
00:00:26.000 then welcome, my fellow patriots.
00:00:29.000 You are in the right place.
00:00:31.000 This is the movement for you.
00:00:33.000 You ever watch this guy on television?
00:00:35.000 It's like a machine, Matt Gaetz.
00:00:38.000 I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
00:00:41.000 Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
00:00:46.000 They aren't really coming for me.
00:00:48.000 They're coming for you.
00:00:50.000 I'm just in the way.
00:00:54.000 Death unaddressed, this defiance may encourage others
00:00:58.000 to follow Mr. Bannon down the same path.
00:01:02.000 He knows that there are consequences for outright defiance,
00:01:06.000 and he's chosen the path toward criminal contempt by taking this position.
00:01:12.000 Mr. Chairman, I move that the committee favorably report to the House
00:01:16.000 the committee's report on a resolution recommending that the House of Representatives
00:01:22.000 find Stephen K. Bannon in contempt of Congress for refusal to comply with a subpoena
00:01:28.000 duly issued by the select committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol as amended.
00:01:36.000 The question on the motion is favorably report to the House.
00:01:40.000 Those in favor say aye.
00:01:42.000 Aye.
00:01:44.000 Those opposed no.
00:01:46.000 In opinion of the chairs, the ayes have it. 0.88
00:01:48.000 The clerk will report the vote.
00:01:50.000 Mr. Chairman, on this vote, there are nine ayes, zero nos.
00:01:54.000 The motion is agreed to.
00:01:58.000 Welcome.
00:01:59.000 And in our conversation today, back on the program, the publisher of Revolver News,
00:02:04.000 Professor Darren Beattie.
00:02:06.000 Darren, we've got Merrick Garland later today coming before the House Judiciary Committee.
00:02:12.000 And my expectation is that he already knows the news he wants to make on the heels of action against Steve Bannon,
00:02:21.000 on the heels of subpoenas to Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Kosh Patel, many others.
00:02:27.000 Preservation demands even involving members of Congress.
00:02:30.000 Merrick Garland, in a few hours, wants to make the news that he will use criminal process
00:02:36.000 against those who defy the January 6 committee, your reaction.
00:02:41.000 Well, it's outrageous.
00:02:43.000 And it's entirely in keeping with the scam that is the entire January 6 commission.
00:02:49.000 As readers of Revolver.News will know, we've been extremely critical of the commission.
00:02:54.000 But originally, we liked the idea of a commission.
00:02:57.000 It's just that it could never have been implemented correctly.
00:03:00.000 They're asking the wrong questions.
00:03:02.000 They're not even asking the questions that the chairman of the commission itself would seem to be interested in.
00:03:08.000 Just one really interesting tidbit.
00:03:11.000 The chairman of the commission, Benny Thompson, he, in his personal capacity,
00:03:16.000 launched a lawsuit against Roger Stone, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Donald Trump.
00:03:23.000 And in this lawsuit, he adduces his theory of the case.
00:03:29.000 And in the theory of the case, these militia groups played a huge role, including the Oath Keepers.
00:03:35.000 And he even addressed this lawsuit directly to the head of the Oath Keepers organization.
00:03:41.000 Now, in his capacity as the head of the January 6 commission, he's interested in everything but these militia groups that he pretended to care about in the lawsuit.
00:03:52.000 He's interested in grandstanding and going after Steve Bannon and really anyone else who was remotely connected with Donald Trump and his inner circle and so forth.
00:04:03.000 So it's a big sham and that's a shame because they're really important questions that a legitimate commission should be asking and getting to the bottom of.
00:04:13.000 It seems that this is coordinated from a Washington theater standpoint.
00:04:19.000 They want to have action against Bannon.
00:04:23.000 They want Merrick Garland saying he will use the Department of Justice to enforce the actions of the January 6 committee.
00:04:30.000 But we know, Darren, that the real reason they need Garland in this act, in this play, is because the founders never vested in the United States Congress any real authority or any real power to enforce its subpoenas.
00:04:45.000 It's very interesting in the balance of powers we have.
00:04:48.000 If someone simply defies Congress, there is no inherent consequence to that.
00:04:54.000 What does it tell you that at this stage of the game, they are trying to supercharge the use of criminal process rather than the normal political tools that a congressional committee would use in the media or with the collection of documents and legislation?
00:05:11.000 Well, it tells you that all the normal procedure is thrown right out the window.
00:05:15.000 This is a power consolidation.
00:05:17.000 It's been a power consolidation from the beginning.
00:05:20.000 So, you know, theoretical consideration like, you know, separation of powers and so forth, the founders intention.
00:05:27.000 This is irrelevant from the point of view of the regime, the Biden regime.
00:05:32.000 It's certainly irrelevant from the point of view of Garland, who has a long and storied history of covering up the crimes of the intelligence community.
00:05:43.000 Now, you were often a critic of the Republican Congress in the majority, present company excluded, of course, because they would not use the tools even that the Congress had, for example, to issue subpoenas.
00:05:56.000 I mean, a lot of people will reflect on the fact that when we had the House and the Senate and we could have blown up the Russia hoax before it took off and consumed our country for two years, we didn't issue a single subpoena.
00:06:09.000 But now the Democrats, they're jumping right over kind of the normal outlay of foundation and the development of a factual case.
00:06:19.000 They're going right to contempt before Congress and then criminal action from Garland.
00:06:25.000 You know, what's interesting to me is that when Republicans actually last used these tools, it was against Lois Lerner when conservatives were being targeted at the IRS.
00:06:34.000 And it was something like 300 days that Republicans took to hold hearings, develop evidence.
00:06:39.000 Here, we're seeing this happen in a real snap.
00:06:42.000 Does it tell us something about how Republicans fight versus how Democrats fight, that they're willing to actually do what we only talked about?
00:06:52.000 Well, it certainly says something.
00:06:55.000 And I think partially it says that when the Democrats are operating, they're swimming in the same direction as the larger current determined by the vast bureaucracies, the intelligence apparatus, the media, basically every major institution in the entire country.
00:07:13.000 And therefore, it's not simply an issue of, oh, should we do this or not?
00:07:18.000 The underlying conditions are just fundamentally different from the Democrat side.
00:07:23.000 From the Republican side, this is not to excuse any inaction.
00:07:27.000 I think that we need to be as aggressive and proactive as possible.
00:07:32.000 And there are many occasions when I think subpoenas would have been appropriate.
00:07:36.000 And I think simply drawing attention to issues can be better than nothing.
00:07:40.000 And so I would say I would have to give mixed reviews, to put it generously, to the broader kind of congressional sector in the Republican side and how they've approached 1.6.
00:07:57.000 I think they've kind of been lagging behind and really should have taken an aggressive approach in particular on the question of FBI involvement in 1.6 in order to reshape the narrative from the defensive to the offensive.
00:08:13.000 Now, that is going to be a question area that I expect to be developed during Attorney General Garland's presence before the House Judiciary Committee.
00:08:23.000 I get to ask some of those questions.
00:08:25.000 Darren, obviously you don't.
00:08:27.000 I've just stepped out of a strategy session with my colleagues.
00:08:30.000 There are many who want to discuss FISA and the recent report showing just extensive abuses that continue to persist.
00:08:37.000 Folks want to talk about the border.
00:08:39.000 Folks want to talk about the use of the FBI to target school board parents who show up at meetings and wag their fingers in the face of their duly elected members of the school board.
00:08:51.000 But undoubtedly, you would be asking questions about the FBI's assets that were there on January 6th.
00:08:58.000 Now, here, I'm bringing folks into the room a little bit here, but, you know, what occurred, what has to occur, I should say, is that we've got to get around the standard answers to these types of questions.
00:09:08.000 So, Darren Beattie, if you're sitting there on the dais, you've got five minutes.
00:09:13.000 What's the first question you're asking Merrick Garland?
00:09:15.000 The first question I'm asking Merrick Garland is, how many informants do you have present or did you have present in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters in the three, four months leading up to 1-6?
00:09:33.000 And if his answer is, well, you know, that is the subject of ongoing investigations and we never talk about ongoing investigations and we don't reveal FBI assets, what's the follow up?
00:09:46.000 The follow up is, the founder and head of the Oath Keepers, Stuart Rhodes, what do you know about him?
00:09:56.000 What's in your file on him?
00:09:57.000 Why has it taken eight, nine months after the event and nobody's touched him versus others, the smaller fish that they've touched?
00:10:07.000 How do you explain this seeming reverse RICO structure of the 1-6 prosecution cases in which the little fish are indicted and in many cases wallow in prison, whereas many of the big fish and in some cases the biggest fish swim free?
00:10:26.000 How do you explain this?
00:10:27.000 Well, it is concerning that we haven't gotten responses from the Attorney General regarding the conditions of those, I would say, you know, lower level criminal trespassers, federal property destructionists who normally would be released on some sort of, you know, bond or bail.
00:10:44.000 Right.
00:10:45.000 But many of whom are now still facing some of the really the harshest tools that our government has.
00:10:50.000 And I believe the reason those folks are facing those tools is because we have to maintain this construct that there is an ongoing threat.
00:10:58.000 And I think that is a theme you'll also hear from the Attorney General that like the threat isn't over, that an insurrection may may pop up in the Judiciary Committee just because Jim Jordan and I are in the same room with each other.
00:11:08.000 It may occur like spontaneous combustion.
00:11:12.000 Here's how I think it might be effective to get around the answers like, oh, well, Stuart Rhodes, I can't talk about a particular case or that may inform on an ongoing investigation.
00:11:23.000 Mr. Attorney General, can you assure the country that there were no FBI informants, assets or agents that animated any violence on January 6th, that instigated in any way?
00:11:37.000 And my suspicion is that will elicit the same response that I've been sort of giving you in our strategy session here.
00:11:45.000 And if he's unable to give the country the assurance that our own government wasn't a part of animating that violence, that will be the news of the day.
00:11:56.000 They want the news of the day to be that the Attorney General will go after the Steve Bannons of the world.
00:12:01.000 But I think if he cannot deny the activity that really would be the most extreme activity, then I think that that would be really the news.
00:12:11.000 Now, you think there's a reasonable basis to ask that question because of Stuart Rhodes, because there is leadership that has been able to escape.
00:12:20.000 Not only Stuart Rhodes, I think there are many people and I think that's a good approach.
00:12:26.000 I think the right approach.
00:12:27.000 I think the right approach is to basically anticipate the fact that he's not going to give a straightforward answer to anything.
00:12:33.000 And so ask the question that really can generate that kind of attention and interest from the point of view of the public in this narrative that is become a national narrative, but still remains under explored.
00:12:50.000 And something like saying, Mr. Attorney General, can you assure us that that that maybe even ask him, can you assure us that none of the individuals named in the charging documents are not prosecuted on the basis of a prior relationship with the federal government?
00:13:11.000 Oh, that that is a very, very precise question.
00:13:14.000 That's a very precise question. And I think it's it's precise for a reason. It's very pointed. And that goes back to the Revolver News original thesis.
00:13:22.000 Now, just another thing as we're kind of plotting plotting the question to keep in mind is, well, we know, you know, I've I've zero doubt that the FBI is involved.
00:13:33.000 And in fact, as you know, The New York Times came out and did a damage control piece acknowledging that the one member of the Proud Boys who was in the Capitol,
00:13:43.000 the Capitol was texting his FBI handler throughout the day. So we know for a fact that there's this.
00:13:49.000 And in fact, I might even reference that in one of your questions, perhaps just because we have confirmation now from the time of some handler who was from the FBI.
00:13:58.000 And I just wanted to add sort of an addendum that is somewhat technical, but it's important in how he might try to weasel his way out of questions.
00:14:07.000 And that is this is that I strongly suspect that the informants involved, especially in the militia groups won't just be involved with the FBI.
00:14:17.000 And in fact, there's more likely a relationship with various counterintelligence equities, including army counterintelligence and the JTTF.
00:14:27.000 And so I would hate to have them weasel out of the technicality and say, well, actually, I know three or four guys, but they're technically army counterintelligence.
00:14:37.000 They're not FBI. You know, it's like it's not just the FBI who does things.
00:14:41.000 And when it comes to militia groups, actually, it's more likely the army counterintelligence and JTTF.
00:14:48.000 And they've been running infiltration operations into militia groups for a long, long time.
00:14:53.000 And none other than Merrick Garland, as I alluded to earlier, has a storied history in this very theme.
00:15:03.000 Certainly, it will be interesting.
00:15:06.000 Folks might be listening to this podcast as we're having the hearing, as a matter of fact, and can toggle back and forth.
00:15:11.000 Now, Darren, Revolver News has covered the breaking events around Oleg Deripaska that occurred this week.
00:15:20.000 Oleg Deripaska is, of course, a Russian oligarch.
00:15:24.000 He is someone who the FBI under Robert Mueller had actually reached out to for collaboration in the past.
00:15:31.000 But the FBI raiding his property this week.
00:15:36.000 What do you think is really going on there with Oleg Deripaska and the FBI?
00:15:40.000 You know, on that, I shouldn't pretend to have more inside and visibility than I do.
00:15:46.000 I'm just as puzzled as most.
00:15:48.000 I find your observations extremely interesting regarding the kind of parallelism and how they approached him and how they approached you.
00:15:57.000 And you were a wiser.
00:15:59.000 You're consistent in how you deal with Borat and how you deal with Mueller.
00:16:08.000 And so I give you credit for that.
00:16:10.000 But as to what's really going on, I could I could only offer vague speculations.
00:16:16.000 And I'd really defer to your it's just it's just really interesting, Darren, that the FBI goes to this guy seeking twenty five million dollars to free an American spy named Bob Levinson, who's busted in Iran.
00:16:29.000 And they pitched to Deripaska that his problems with the U.
00:16:36.000 And that he'll be lauded as this great hero if he only pays this twenty five million.
00:16:41.000 So I guess to a Russian oligarch billionaire, that's not that much change.
00:16:46.000 So he forks over the cash and then Mueller accuses him anyway in the Russia hoax for somehow like being the handler of Donald Trump in this crazy fiction.
00:16:56.000 The Donald Trump is a Russian agent.
00:16:58.000 Someone someone should have warned Oleg the fate that defaults anyone who in good faith does business with the United States government.
00:17:08.000 It is quite something.
00:17:10.000 But then for it to be like a deep state mad lib where then this sort of local con man fool pitches this notion, you know, to my family and to me that somehow I've got these problems and I've got to pay twenty five million dollars to free Bob Levinson.
00:17:25.000 It's just really interesting that like the these ops get repeated.
00:17:29.000 Right. The pattern recognition here is that just like the Bob Levinson twenty five million dollar op is sort of repeated on Deripaska and then me.
00:17:39.000 You see this sort of like infiltration of militia groups storming a capital like was kind of the original plan in Michigan.
00:17:47.000 And then lo and behold, you're able to sort of catch some rubes in the whole scheme.
00:17:52.000 I think that that is the pattern recognition that we're seeing.
00:17:56.000 No, that's an excellent insight. They they're not especially ingenious when it comes to these things or creative.
00:18:02.000 And the sad part is, is in most cases they don't really need to be.
00:18:06.000 They can keep running the same dumb operations and usually they get what they want because they have entire control of the media and they have control of a lot of institutions. 0.77
00:18:16.000 So usually they're able to get away with it. Luckily, with opposition voices rising in the media and so forth, people are kind of wising up to it. 0.96
00:18:25.000 But it the the lack of creativity is actually something that I find especially astonishing.
00:18:32.000 Yeah. Like, do they teach this in the FBI Academy, twenty five million dollars, Bob Levinson?
00:18:36.000 Like, do they do they teach, you know, the storming the Capitol thing? Same operations.
00:18:40.000 Well, speaking of dumb people getting their way, you've got a piece up on Revolver News that I'd encourage folks to check out regarding Tesla and litigation they've been in that has resulted in this sort of sort of bizarre outcome. 0.74
00:18:56.000 You know, even with this company that we view as rejecting some of the woke ism of the day, walk folks through that that piece you've got on Revolver. 0.84
00:19:05.000 Right. Well, it's it's an interesting case and I could go through the details, but I'll just focus on the general context of it and why it matters.
00:19:16.000 So just very briefly, in fact, it wasn't even an employee of Tesla was a contractor and a contractor for Tesla had some kind of racial complaint, discrimination complaint against other contractors.
00:19:31.000 They said the other side said supposedly offensive things to them.
00:19:36.000 It turns out that the offending parties weren't even white, which is an interesting detail to it.
00:19:42.000 But long story short, the aggrieved party in this case, the African-American aggrieved party.
00:19:50.000 It's a judgment of something like one hundred thirty million dollars, some insane, some over one hundred million dollars for suffering such terrible fate at his job that he had to endure impolite remarks.
00:20:06.000 Which, first of all, for perspective, that one hundred thirty million dollar judgment is more than people have gotten in in previous cases for just becoming completely paralyzed as a result of workplace injuries.
00:20:22.000 And so this guy gets far more money than even quadriplegics have gotten in similar types of cases.
00:20:29.000 But I think beyond the typical outrage of a case like this, which sort of combines out of control litigiousness with out of control wokeness and so forth, is it really, I think, helps to refine our notion of what type of economy that we're in.
00:20:46.000 Because there's this notion, I think, that a lot of conservatives sort of cling to almost as an opiate that, oh, you know, if you get woke, you go broke.
00:20:55.460 And in a way that makes sense, because a lot of this woke stuff is so divorced from any ordinary common sense conception of reality that we think that you can't carry these fantasies on in the business world.
00:21:09.480 You get crushed because the business world is, you know, hard and logical and there's a direct cause and effect relationship that anyone would would think of.
00:21:19.420 And if you prioritize wokeness over efficiency and competence, you'll produce inferior products and you'll get crushed by the competitor.
00:21:28.000 Now, that all sounds very nice and it would make sense in a econ 101 theoretical course.
00:21:33.640 But I think what this shows and really anyone paying attention to the economy over the past, say, decade, maybe even more, is that this isn't really how the economy operates.
00:21:43.480 And the Tesla case in particular shows how deeply embedded civil rights law is into the economy such that if you are a major corporation operating at the highest level, your downside risk from some kind of, you know, racial agreement case is existential.
00:22:03.480 And the Revolver.News article goes through cases of major mergers that got held up because of seemingly trivial racial offenses and so forth.
00:22:16.820 And so I think this really underscores that we need to understand that wokeness is not just some hysteria that's sort of attached on to an otherwise coherent and functioning economy.
00:22:29.660 Wokeness, the tentacles of wokeness are integrated into the very foundation of the economy at this point through the vehicle of law, through the vehicle of NGOs and the media and other institutions such that it's actually the reverse.
00:22:50.380 Unless you go woke, you cannot operate at the highest level of the American economy, similar to in China. 0.99
00:22:58.220 If you're Jack Ma and you're a great businessman, but you offend the CCP, you get crushed.
00:23:03.380 It's similar here.
00:23:04.540 If you want to operate at the highest level in business or anything else, you have to bend the knee to what amounts to really the official ideology of the American regime, which is wokeness.
00:23:15.860 You know, and we've got a great episode, Welcome to the Woketopia, that really breaks down some of the goals and objectives of this movement.
00:23:24.060 And the conclusion is we have to take it seriously.
00:23:26.520 You know, the left wants us to believe that America is systemically racist.
00:23:30.540 But unfortunately, this piece that you have on this one particular litigation event shows how systemically woke the country is from the judicial system to the economy, to even the way that we resolve what might otherwise be pretty pedestrian disputes.
00:23:46.560 And if I could add something that I think is just so bizarre, but fascinating that we uncovered and we excerpt it in this Tesla piece at Revolver.News, but it's really from a previous piece.
00:23:59.080 And you mentioned systemic racism. 0.87
00:24:00.980 And of course, in the ordinary context, this is completely ridiculous.
00:24:05.540 The statistics, in fact, simply don't bear out the sort of progressive understanding of what systemic racism is.
00:24:14.680 However, in a very literal sense, there is a systemic racism.
00:24:18.840 And this is another element of how wokeness and sort of the diversity agenda is deeply integrated into the nature of the economy.
00:24:28.540 And that is that there are so many perks to being a minority in terms of getting business loans, in terms of getting all sorts of other deals.
00:24:37.280 And people ask, well, why don't people just go, you know, become trans minority and just identify as a minority in order to get these perks? 0.73
00:24:45.960 Well, actually, you can't do that.
00:24:47.500 There's an official board that is authorized to certify whether someone is actually a minority or not.
00:24:55.940 And there are different groups.
00:24:57.240 And some of those groups are entitled to the perks within the economy, and some of them aren't.
00:25:02.660 And I just found this incredibly interesting and bizarre and really kind of conflictual with any understanding of how the economy works.
00:25:12.840 But there's actually an official board that certifies whether someone is a minority.
00:25:16.760 Maybe that's what awaits some of us after the United States Congress.
00:25:20.960 He is the publisher of Revolver News, Dr. Darren Beattie.
00:25:24.580 Thanks for being with us on Firebrand.
00:25:26.220 And look forward to chatting with you soon again, my friend.
00:25:28.720 Thank you so much.
00:25:31.020 January 6th was not a good day.
00:25:34.360 But to my knowledge, there's been no charge of insurrection or terrorism.
00:25:40.400 Largely, the charges that have been levied against those who are involved in breaking the law result in property damage charges.
00:25:47.120 And it's my expectation that if there are folks who broke the law, they should be treated no better or no worse than anyone else who breaks these particular laws. 0.67
00:25:57.580 But all of this is ridiculous.
00:26:01.500 Mr. Chairman, the American people are in trouble.
00:26:04.060 I was recently in Qatar on a bipartisan delegation led by Mr. Issa, and we learned directly that thousands upon thousands of Afghans were let into our country with principally no vetting, no screening.
00:26:17.360 The general we met with at the base in Doha said that refugees were merely handed a blank sheet of paper and whatever they wrote on it was deemed their paper passport.
00:26:28.740 And people are concerned about that on our border.
00:26:33.300 We functionally have a turnstile.
00:26:35.640 I never believed that President Biden could be worse than President Obama on the border.
00:26:40.380 But we've gone from the Obama days of catch and release to the Biden days of import and release,
00:26:47.440 where people are being really beckoned across the border as a consequence of our policies and then shuttled around the country.
00:26:55.640 And our supply chain issues have come to the forefront of the minds of so many of Americans.
00:27:01.300 I mean, supply chain used to be something people learned about in economics class.
00:27:05.380 And now the supply chain issues are resulting in inadequate access to things that people need.
00:27:11.780 And we see the Washington Post tell Americans to just lower their expectations regarding the American economy.
00:27:21.920 I was recently at the Port of Long Beach.
00:27:23.860 I saw just, you know, cargo ship after cargo ship.
00:27:27.700 You could about walk from the Port of Long Beach to the Channel Islands in California without ever having your feet touch the water on cargo ships that cannot come into port because of a total failure of the U.S. economy.
00:27:40.120 Our country has been humiliated abroad in Afghanistan, where reliance on this strategy of an Afghan government being left to facilitate American departure and withdrawal turned out to be a total fiction.
00:27:55.460 And yet here we are reviewing Steve Bannon's podcast.
00:27:59.340 You know, the average American, when they wake up, I don't think one of the first hundred things they think about is Steve Bannon's podcast, the things he said before or after January 6th.
00:28:13.820 I think that is a uniquely Washington obsession.
00:28:17.080 And it wouldn't be so damaging to our country if it wasn't absorbing the capacity of the Congress to meet the actual challenges that the American people are facing.
00:28:25.980 Do you really think that your constituents are out there hoping that you guys are here sharing your hot takes on Steve Bannon's podcast rather than dealing with the inflation that is crushing them, the border crisis that is concerning them, the problems we have abroad?
00:28:41.860 It's truly shameful that this has got the focus and the obsession of so many in the Congress.
00:28:55.980 Thank you.
00:28:56.980 Thank you.