The Great America Show - December 16, 2022


MCCARTHY HAS NO PATH TO THE SPEAKERSHIP. HE IS THE DEFINITION OF WHAT THE CARTEL IS, HE IS THE CARTEL’S SPEAKER


Episode Stats


Length

28 minutes

Words per minute

149.84248

Word count

4,233

Sentence count

225

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Former Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russ Vogt joins Lou Dobbs on The Great America Show to discuss the race for House Speaker between Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and Andy Biggs (D-Illinois).

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello everybody, I'm Lou Dobbs and welcome to the Great America Show.
00:00:04.180 We'll be taking up the battle for the Speaker of the House,
00:00:07.960 pitting rhino Kevin McCarthy and the rhino rest against Congressman Andy Biggs
00:00:12.960 and the best of the rest as they contend for the speakership.
00:00:16.940 And of course, there's the chair of the RNC, Ronna McDaniel.
00:00:21.340 She's been losing since she took the job. 0.95
00:00:23.820 President Trump made what I'm sure he would call a mistake
00:00:26.500 when he kept her as chair going into the midterm elections.
00:00:30.000 No matter, she keeps losing and she keeps grinning. 0.94
00:00:33.860 I like her personally, but Republicans have got to grow up.
00:00:37.760 It is time for effective, original, energetic, committed leadership in the RNC.
00:00:43.720 And yes, I know Ronna McDaniel is the perfect tool for the GOP establishment. 0.99
00:00:48.860 Read rhino.
00:00:50.140 And that is exactly the problem.
00:00:52.620 But if she stays, the Republicans have again sold themselves cheap
00:00:56.580 and they've sold themselves out.
00:00:58.340 They might as well sign up for a Marxist Dem ID card.
00:01:02.500 And the same goes for Kevin McCarthy.
00:01:04.680 If he's still Speaker, something wicked will follow.
00:01:07.960 Republicans must overcome themselves and their silly idea
00:01:11.920 that somehow the Marxist Dems don't really mean to destroy them and the Republic.
00:01:18.480 Because they do.
00:01:19.480 And the GOP is only helping in their own demise at the hands of the Marxist Dems, 0.65
00:01:25.520 the establishment elites, global corporatists, and the deep state.
00:01:30.060 Despite all the conflict and contention, we have remarkable clarity, at least in this moment.
00:01:35.280 We know, no matter what the corporatist media says, that our president is a pretend leader,
00:01:42.020 an impaired 80-year-old who is massively confused in most public moments
00:01:46.620 and takes vacations that add up to three months out of each year so far.
00:01:52.140 That is, the president, the Marxist Dems, would have us pretend is perfectly normal.
00:01:57.480 Well, we have clarity on all that, don't we?
00:02:00.740 We have a Marxist Dem cabal driving the Democrat Party, running the White House,
00:02:06.340 and they are the masters of our puppet president.
00:02:09.540 What could possibly go wrong?
00:02:11.880 We also have clear, certain knowledge of the madness that the Marxist Dems have unleashed
00:02:16.880 in our nation's capital.
00:02:18.380 A $31 trillion national debt, vast deficits for years to come,
00:02:23.200 and the interest the government must pay for all of that rising debt, is crippling.
00:02:29.280 50% higher now than a year ago to service that debt.
00:02:34.020 And last month's federal spending amounted to a record half trillion dollars.
00:02:39.120 In one month, a half trillion dollars.
00:02:42.320 The monthly deficit last month soared to a record quarter trillion dollars.
00:02:46.900 We're all watching, folks, a fiscal train wreck, and it's not in slow motion.
00:02:51.900 And it's far from over.
00:02:54.080 So hang on.
00:02:55.320 We've got at least two more years of madness ahead of us, at least.
00:02:59.940 One of the few people trying to bring sanity to the swamp is our guest today.
00:03:04.600 He's Russ Vogt.
00:03:05.860 He's former director of the OMB and the Trump administration.
00:03:09.800 A great American, he's building an important D.C. think tank,
00:03:13.820 the Center for Renewing America.
00:03:15.840 That center is addressing some of the biggest issues of our time.
00:03:19.640 Fiscal responsibility in the federal government, ending runaway illegal immigration, pun intended.
00:03:26.700 Border security, stopping sex trafficking and smuggling of deadly drugs, especially fentanyl.
00:03:32.840 Runaway inflation that is crippling our middle class and all who aspire to it.
00:03:38.440 And, of course, small business.
00:03:40.160 And restoring integrity to the FBI and the Department of Justice and our judiciary.
00:03:45.680 Total government reform is required now.
00:03:50.900 Russ Vogt.
00:03:51.740 Great to have you back with us here on The Great America Show, Russ.
00:03:54.580 We're all watching this great drama play out in the nation's capital.
00:03:58.880 The fight for the speakership between Congressman Andy Biggs and Kevin McCarthy, at least right now.
00:04:05.220 And the fight for the soul of the Republican Party.
00:04:08.060 How do you think all of this plays out?
00:04:11.400 Well, I do think it's a battle for the heart and soul of the party and the conservative movement,
00:04:15.240 because, as you know, the America First agenda is something that, with President Trump not being in office,
00:04:23.780 the establishment would very much like to move on from.
00:04:26.440 And right now, Congress would like to move on from it as well.
00:04:31.740 And we need a speaker that fully understands with it, accepts it, sees it as the corrective that it was,
00:04:39.660 and wants to have an agenda for House Republicans that is actually over the target about where the country views the most critical issues right now.
00:04:49.420 And so I view Kevin McCarthy as the definition, symbolically, of what the cartel is.
00:04:56.920 He is the cartel speaker.
00:04:59.460 We need a paradigm-shifting speaker.
00:05:02.260 If you had said if the Republicans had a red wave, this would not have been an opportunity.
00:05:07.060 It's now an opportunity.
00:05:08.520 And thankfully, House conservatives appear to be seizing it.
00:05:12.140 And I am not willing to predict that he won't be the speaker, but I don't see the math for him.
00:05:16.720 He lacks the 218 votes, and I don't know how he's going to get it.
00:05:20.480 So I think that this is going to be something that we are increasingly seeing good results from.
00:05:25.440 But this is a moment that we're not going to get very often, and we've got to seize it.
00:05:29.780 I think you're exactly right.
00:05:31.420 If there had been the red tsunami, there would have been few options available.
00:05:37.240 But instead, we now know the role of Kevin McCarthy in many of these races,
00:05:43.420 and we know the role certainly of Mitch McConnell and the relationship with Karl Rove,
00:05:50.960 campaigning actively against Republican candidates, running attack ads on them,
00:05:56.260 and in the case of Mitch McConnell, actually supporting Republican opponents.
00:06:02.060 This is outrageous, and it's never, to my knowledge, it's never been discussed in background, I would say, in the swamp.
00:06:11.700 But now it's right out in front.
00:06:13.600 We know who these people are.
00:06:16.100 And Rove attacking a former Republican president outright.
00:06:22.280 Yeah, I mean, they're not making any bones about where their allegiances are.
00:06:27.380 They want to turn the page on an entire movement, and President Trump represents that movement
00:06:33.060 because he is someone that saw certain things that the entirety of the Republican side,
00:06:40.980 including the conservative movement, was not talking about and led a movement to change that.
00:06:47.420 And that's very destabilizing to the cartel and to the status quo.
00:06:52.220 And we have very few leverage points, and that's really what, for me, this is all about,
00:06:57.560 is I get asked all the time about leverage points, the debt limit, the appropriations process,
00:07:03.940 and they're all leverage points.
00:07:05.660 But unless you have a leadership that actually seizes these opportunities,
00:07:09.940 you're just kind of just talking and being able to criticize when,
00:07:15.080 if you're given an opportunity to change things,
00:07:18.520 you've got to seize that opportunity with everything you've got.
00:07:22.180 And that's what we're trying to do at our center in being able to educate the members,
00:07:28.620 the country, about the fundamentals of this vote.
00:07:31.800 And we did that right after the election, and it is coming true.
00:07:35.820 The mainstream media, the Hill Rags, are now starting to grapple with the reality that he has no path.
00:07:40.960 And so conservatives in the House are in the driving seat,
00:07:44.500 and I hope they continue to make wise decisions about how they play the next few weeks.
00:07:50.460 Well, the strategizing, I suppose, is at a fever pitch right now,
00:07:56.600 from K Street right into the House floor and the offices beyond.
00:08:04.320 It's a very interesting moment because it's very clear, I think, to the public now
00:08:14.520 that what the Republicans have done for now decades is elect every Republicans,
00:08:22.580 conservatives, America First MAGA representatives to put into the House,
00:08:29.360 and now they want to turn it over to a rhino.
00:08:34.060 That's the way I think most of America sees it.
00:08:36.320 In what sense does that make?
00:08:37.560 Would Democrats go out and suggest that they take, I don't know, Scott Perry to be their speaker?
00:08:47.220 This is madness what the Republican conference does.
00:08:50.660 And how do you break this sickening absurdity?
00:08:54.600 It is maddening.
00:08:56.900 It is the extent to which the real enemy for the establishment is always, you know,
00:09:04.520 the conservatives fighting in the House or the Senate.
00:09:08.000 And my belief is that the end result of this must be to have a true power-sharing dynamic
00:09:15.100 with the House conservatives who treat themselves not as backbenchers,
00:09:20.720 but as a coalitional partner like you would see in another country,
00:09:24.400 where perhaps the leading part of that coalition doesn't get to make all the decisions,
00:09:33.080 nor does the minority partner,
00:09:34.740 but they do not move without consulting each other and moving in tandem with great respect.
00:09:41.460 And what has not existed in this town is respect for the voters of the Republican Party,
00:09:47.200 the voters and the activists of the conservative movement,
00:09:50.200 certainly the activists of the America First movement.
00:09:53.280 And that has to change.
00:09:54.700 And I think that's what this needs to lead to.
00:09:57.660 And my hope is that Kevin McCarthy is rejected out of hand because he's the cartel speaker
00:10:02.460 and that they essentially put out a power-sharing arrangement with control of the Rules Committee,
00:10:07.820 which is essential to ensure control of the floor,
00:10:11.040 to be able to then say, all right,
00:10:12.800 who's willing to accept this on our terms and then go from there.
00:10:16.360 That's my hope for where we go from here.
00:10:19.400 In the meantime, a lot of work needs to be done to be able to put out the notion of what the cartel is basically going out there
00:10:27.120 and saying possibilities that are not real possibilities.
00:10:31.000 They're trying to scare conservatives to saying Democrats will vote for a moderate
00:10:36.100 or moderates will vote for a Democrat.
00:10:39.760 None of those things are going to happen.
00:10:41.720 And the way that you know it is that it's the Kevin McCarthy people that are putting it out there.
00:10:46.600 And right now there's too many people in conservative ink right now that are falling for it.
00:10:52.200 And we've got to put those fires out there.
00:10:54.580 But we're ahead of schedule in this fight.
00:10:58.120 And I think we're making a lot of progress.
00:11:00.540 Yeah, the Mark Levin's in media who are sitting here saying you've got to have Kevin McCarthy.
00:11:05.060 It's as if they have been suddenly – and I think Mark Levin is a bright and terrific guy.
00:11:12.220 But where he gets the idea that there should be a ceding of authority as the first act of having won the majority is maddening to me.
00:11:21.220 And it is representative of all of the folly that has preceded by decades, as I said, the Republican Party.
00:11:28.180 And it's one of the reasons the swamp not only exists and survives, but it is thriving.
00:11:33.520 I would like to take up this issue of what would be an agenda for whomever is to step forward as the leader of this pluralistic Congress that you're envisioning.
00:11:52.380 Yeah, I think the agenda needs to be rallied – to be centered about what I call a return to self-government.
00:12:00.320 And the reason we don't have self-government in this country is that the regime is both woke and weaponized against the American people.
00:12:10.000 And too many of our policymakers don't understand it's a regime.
00:12:15.120 It's not just – there's a hard edge to it.
00:12:19.920 It's woke.
00:12:21.200 It's funding gay pride events in Prague.
00:12:24.580 It's funding the training of LGBT activists in Senegal.
00:12:29.340 It's funding the training of Marxist education in our universities so that they then go as teacher training funds into our schools to create and recruit young Marxist revolutionaries for a true cultural revolution.
00:12:45.740 And it's weaponized.
00:12:46.680 It's not just the national security apparatus, although it is with the FBI, with the NSA surveillance, but it's agencies like the EPA and the Department of Interior where the Interior denies the renewal license for an oyster company so that they go out of business.
00:13:04.880 Or putting a 77-year-old Navy veteran in jail for constructing four ponds on his ranch land.
00:13:13.120 That's the tenor of what the American people are now finding.
00:13:18.180 And I think the agenda needs to be, first and foremost, going at that concept with every fiber there being and building an America First agenda around that.
00:13:29.920 So you're touching on the border issues, the trade issues, the issues with regard to our manufacturing, the ability to scale towards the fight with China.
00:13:41.440 All of these things come out of the central recognition that our policymakers need to have about what time it is in this country.
00:13:51.320 And you have a different agenda when you're answering that question versus where we were with the 1990s or where we were in the 1980s.
00:13:59.920 Let me ask you, you've used the expression regime, you've used the word cabal.
00:14:05.980 Do you have an adjective precedent to give us a better idea of what cabal, what regime we're speaking of here?
00:14:17.680 Yeah, it is the governing authorities, and it's not just the government.
00:14:23.680 It is the government, it's the non-profits that are part of the revolving door, it's the institutions, it includes the media, the cultural high ground, it is the ideas, it is the paradigms.
00:14:39.820 And so it's really the governing apparatus that has put into place that which controls us as the American people.
00:14:50.800 And it explains when you understand this, you understand how could the president of the United States been in office and yet not control the Department of Justice.
00:15:00.520 It helps you understand why is it that Congress, congressional leaders have so much power through the administrative state and the president does not.
00:15:13.260 And so we don't have just an Article I problem, we don't have just an Article II problem.
00:15:18.400 We have a massive overall blending of the two, of kind of an administrative state and imperial Congress, but it's really just the imperial nature comes from the leadership and the rest is largely put on the backbench to not be able to do any kind of policy entrepreneurship.
00:15:42.040 When I talk about the cartel, what I'm really getting at is the extent to which there is a bipartisan establishment that largely views the same things, same paradigm, same viewpoints.
00:15:57.180 The Republican part of it doesn't want to ever accomplish the policy objectives that they communicate to their voters that they largely hate if it's going to do anything to destabilize their power and make it slightly less risky.
00:16:13.360 So I think on our issues, there's a supermajority out there of Democrats, independents and Republicans, but the party that we've had, the establishment that we've had never lets it get to that point because they know that these issues are cartel busting.
00:16:26.620 And so their job is to manage away from these fights instead of managing toward them, because not only what they might be successful and accomplish our policy objectives, but they will certainly have more risk.
00:16:40.480 And that is something that that, you know, President Trump was always willing to have manageable risk.
00:16:45.600 And as a result, he was a successful politician, a successful president.
00:16:49.400 He could take a punch and he could punch back.
00:16:52.040 These are politicians that have largely grown up not wanting to ever punch.
00:16:55.600 They just want calm waters at sea.
00:16:58.440 And unfortunately, you don't go anywhere with calm waters at sea.
00:17:01.740 You need a little bit of wind.
00:17:04.220 I think one way to express it is that they want absolute control.
00:17:09.780 They don't want dissidence.
00:17:11.600 They don't want any kind, rule brook, no kind of resistance to their agenda.
00:17:17.500 And that takes me to an issue that I'm curious about your thinking, because you said a president can't control his Justice Department.
00:17:28.100 Well, President Trump could not.
00:17:30.320 But we're watching President Biden control it absolutely.
00:17:33.700 So the question becomes one when we talk about control, particularly the Justice Department, it means is there, first and foremost, alignment between the Justice Department, FBI complex and the White House?
00:17:51.500 Or is there absolute revolution, dissidence and resistance in the case of Trump between the deep state, the administrative state and the White House?
00:18:02.160 I think that those are the I think those are the fair descriptions of what the difference was rather than some sort of template that we could lay over each one.
00:18:14.240 Right. And I think that's the complexity of it.
00:18:16.520 Right. Is that you had a president that really was not a part of the governing regime.
00:18:20.240 He was the elected elected head of the executive branch, for sure.
00:18:25.920 But in terms of those governing paradigms and set of expectations, we saw what happened.
00:18:33.400 You had a Department of Justice and an FBI that essentially participated in a coup d'etat to destabilize him, get him removed from office.
00:18:42.520 And that's not what we see under the Biden administration that is fully part and parcel of that governing regime.
00:18:50.320 And I think that's what makes this moment so difficult is is the it's to the outside world.
00:18:58.200 There is certain logic to it, but it is not the easiest thing to align on the board as to from an institutional standpoint to figure out how to fix this.
00:19:10.440 And and and so our organization has been hard at work to help educate the country on where where things are.
00:19:16.880 But you kind of need a very granular contextual ability and you need perspective to kind of get some height to figure out where where are we and what needs to be done.
00:19:27.640 And I applaud everything you're doing.
00:19:30.600 I have I have a question that I think, though, is also, again, fundamental here.
00:19:36.700 Can Republicans and conservatives ignore the fact that this country is under attack by the Marxist Dems who make up the deep state, the administrative state, the Marxist Dem party?
00:19:51.540 First, don't we have to attack those institutions that have been weaponized, politicized to the point of utter corruption or all else will be for not?
00:20:04.180 I agree with you, Lou. I think that's the central penning that needs to be dropped with our policymakers and our elites is on the on the right, is that you can't have this notion of of just being able to kind of on a bicameral ability to work with the other side, like Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan.
00:20:26.800 That's just not what we're dealing with. We're dealing with stone cold Marxists, and we've got to go after where they're being funded in the federal government.
00:20:37.840 We've got to take away the benefits that they have long relied on.
00:20:41.140 We need to challenge paradigms about where and how, from a public policy standpoint, we can address these issues.
00:20:50.980 I'm specifically referring to big tech or or changing how much money is going to schools or universities or thinking that these are some kind of islands of free thought.
00:21:01.660 When they're not, they're about Marxist training. There's a whole set of policy options that flow downstream from the fundamental recognition of the question you asked.
00:21:12.780 And if we don't adopt that that kind of that that realistic view, we're going to continue to be frustrated by the policy debates and options that are given to us by our statesmen.
00:21:27.440 I know you've got great ideas, great plans, and a great agenda to constrain federal spending, to reduce the budget dramatically.
00:21:38.980 Can any of that be done without that beta confrontation between the, for want of a better word, the Republican Party and the Marxist Party, recognized broadly as the Democrat Party?
00:21:55.820 One of the things that we're trying to do with the budget that we just put out is really meant to be a framework from an America first perspective for all of the budget battles that come is we're trying to provide the moral high ground for conservatives to fight budget battles.
00:22:12.300 Previously, most of the budget debates would be about affordability.
00:22:16.620 Well, you know, you can't spend this much money in a given year, but we both agree on these two programs as opposed to changing it so that we fundamentally get a sense of what do we want to spend money on and what don't we want because they're ruining our committees or our communities.
00:22:33.720 I want to spend on a huge Navy.
00:22:35.100 That's one of the things that I think is vital from the standpoint of our country.
00:22:39.860 I want to have a lot – I want to have strong and robust nuclear modernization.
00:22:45.680 That's something that I think is vital.
00:22:47.300 On the other hand, I don't want to spend money on HUD subsidies that ruin communities and a whole fair housing network that is designed to push the notion that single-family zoning and neighborhoods with single-family homes are a problem and we're going to then have upzoning where you have more and more apartment buildings and duplexes and things like that.
00:23:11.360 That just changed the credibility of the neighborhood, changed the nature of the neighborhood.
00:23:16.300 And in my neighborhood, Arlington, Virginia, very liberal, this is the most bipartisan of issues.
00:23:22.600 Everyone's opposed to upzoning.
00:23:24.560 It's an example of let's actually figure out Section 8 housing spreads crime and lower property values.
00:23:31.740 And yet this is largely something that conservatives would have run away from.
00:23:35.980 Our belief is that this is something you go into and you say, no, we want to cut the spending and we want to be able to fund stuff that we like, real infrastructure, real expansion in the naval fleet.
00:23:49.900 So this is something that is – and our view is paradigm shifting is that we can't approach our budget battles just from the standpoint of an accounting or an austerity basis.
00:23:59.340 Let's be honest with what we want to spend money on and let's defund what the left wants to spend money on based on our recognition about its impact on the country.
00:24:10.920 And then the other paradigm that we're really trying to shift is stop focusing on the cul-de-sac of entitlements, Social Security and Medicare retirement.
00:24:20.740 This is the notion that the only way you can be a serious fiscal reformer is to take on those two issues.
00:24:27.540 When there is a lot of bureaucracy and changes to welfare that are also mandatory entitlement spending that you can go after that allows you to balance the budget and, oh, what?
00:24:39.020 Be successful.
00:24:40.460 Be successful on something you have a vote on every year instead of these things that you don't have a vote on every year.
00:24:46.820 So that's what we're trying to do by injecting some realism, some practicality, and, oh, by the way, it's consistent with the most serious and direct threats to the country that we face in the immediate moment.
00:24:59.280 And one of the conflicts that needs to be rationalized, small potatoes, I suppose, given the vast expanse of your ambitions.
00:25:10.040 But Democrats want to defund police departments all over the country, but they want to fund that FBI for some reason.
00:25:19.020 And that's more than a curiosity, isn't it?
00:25:21.500 It is.
00:25:22.460 It's also interesting.
00:25:23.940 Have you ever – the amount of shows on the mainstream media at night devoted to the FBI, it's like you've got an FBI for every particular hour during the week.
00:25:36.420 I mean the regime clearly understands the degree to which the FBI is understanding of national security is to protect the regime as opposed to protecting the American people.
00:25:48.740 And that's one of the reasons why in this budget we begin the process of cutting and restructuring the FBI, getting them back to actually focusing on federal crimes.
00:25:58.600 We actually increased money for federal crimes while dramatically reducing where we think the rot has been, which is in the intelligence and the counterintelligence side of the House.
00:26:08.920 And that is something that's a first step because we think there needs to be a church committee.
00:26:13.640 Another reason we're opposed to Kevin McCarthy is he has been unwilling to adopt a church committee to deal and study and have real oversight on the national security apparatus over the next two years.
00:26:27.640 And what that would show was where the detailed set of reforms that are necessary for us to ensure that this can never happen again and restore the country's respect and trust for their national security apparatus because that trust has been decimated.
00:26:45.860 Absolutely.
00:26:47.180 And rationally so, if I may say.
00:26:51.400 Russ, we appreciate you being with us.
00:26:53.840 We thank you, and we applaud everything you're trying to achieve here, and we wish you good luck and Godspeed.
00:27:03.000 Thanks for being with us here on The Great America Show, and God bless you.
00:27:06.860 Thanks, Lou.
00:27:07.480 Appreciate you.
00:27:08.540 Russ Vogt, President, Center for Renewing America, a Great American.
00:27:13.580 We'd love to hear from you.
00:27:14.700 Send us your thoughts to lou at loudobs.com.
00:27:17.500 That's lou at loudobs.com.
00:27:19.740 Follow me on Twitter and Truth Social, at Lou Dobbs.
00:27:23.780 That's at Lou Dobbs on both Twitter and Truth Social.
00:27:27.920 Our guests coming up include Senator Marsha Blackburn, Congressman Bob Good.
00:27:32.960 The Republicans may not be in a civil war, but they have a heck of a Cold War going.
00:27:39.080 Have a great weekend.
00:27:40.440 Thanks, everybody, for joining us.
00:27:42.240 God bless you, and may God bless America.
00:27:45.000 God bless you, and may God bless you, and may God bless you.