J.D. Vance is the future of the Republican Party, and he did it in a way no other candidate has ever done before. Senator Mike Lee of Utah joins us to talk about it, and why he thinks it was one of the best debates he s ever seen, and what he s looking forward to in 2020. Also, a new documentary about the fall of Joe Biden is coming soon, and it s going to be a lot better than the one you ve ve all been waiting for. Stay tuned for that! Thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink, for sponsoring this special episode of The Dark Side Of, and for supporting us in our campaign fund-raising campaign to support our efforts to elect the President of the United States, Donald Trump. To learn more about our sponsors, go to caff.co/thedarksideof and support their efforts to make sure they get the best products and services they can get the most bang for their buck, visit bit.ly/tuckercarlson and click here to become a supporter. Thanks for listening and share this episode with your fellow podcast listeners! Thank you so much for being a supporter of the podcast, and we hope you enjoy the show and tweet us if you liked it! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What was your favorite part of the debate? 2:30 - What did you think of it? 3:40 - What are your thoughts on the debate performance? 5:15 - What would you like to see in 2020? 6: What's your biggest takeaway from the most? 7:00 8:10 - What do you think about the debate night? 9:20 - What's the biggest thing you re looking for? 10:00 -- What are you looking for from the future? 11:30 -- What s the most important thing about the 2020 Republican presidential candidate? 12:30 13:40 -- Is he the most impressive thing about him? 15:00 | What s your biggest challenge? 16:15 -- what would you want to see from the 2020 Democratic challenger? 17: Is he a good guy? 18:30 | What is the best person? 19:40 | Is he better than you re going to win the 2020 election? 21:40 22:20 -- Who do you see the most powerful person in the 2020 campaign?
00:02:37.800And they're regretting that tonight, as you usually do when you hire people on the basis of irrelevant criteria.
00:02:43.120So we're going to spend the next little while talking about what we just saw.
00:02:46.300And we'll be doing it with a politician, actually, a sitting politician, because really they're the best situated to understand a debate.
00:02:55.340The problem is that most politicians are not worth talking to, particularly members of the United States Senate.
00:02:59.560I first interned there in 1986, and I can tell you almost all senators get worse over time.
00:03:05.040It is a rare, almost unique few who don't.
00:03:08.520And the one who is joining us tonight is one of the very few who has instead of becoming rotten, dying soul death, has instead become wiser, more skeptical of government, and less controlled during his time in the United States Senate.
00:03:22.900And so we are honored to be joined tonight by Senator Mike Lee of Utah.
00:05:04.120But every single time, even when he'd be well within its right to lose his temper a little bit or get frustrated or act annoyed, he doesn't.
00:05:45.020He was raised under circumstances that have caused him to realize how deep and how profound, how important these decisions are.
00:05:53.120And he doesn't have time to mess around.
00:05:54.620He doesn't have any interest in allowing himself to become so emotionally involved in something that he loses his ability to explain it coherently.
00:06:03.400I mean, I would have lost it about 15 different times, particularly, and without focusing on it, but the moderators, I really hope this is the last time in American history that CBS, which I assume will be bankrupt by the next election anyway, but that any so-called news organization like this has any role in a debate.
00:06:50.640Maybe you could find one, but I know both of them.
00:06:53.920I've worked with both of them, actually.
00:06:56.320I thought they, I mean, I can't imagine their bosses can't see that.
00:07:00.800They weren't, that was not a good ad for CBS.
00:07:03.220And then in the commercial break, they start playing some advertisement for a show that is itself an advertisement of a Ketanji Brown Jackson or whatever, however she's pronouncing her name on the Supreme Court, that was a tongue bath.
00:07:18.720They administer tongue baths to the left, and they do it very, very effectively, but in a way that I think is causing the American people to get wise to them.
00:07:27.240And a lot of people, frankly, to become annoyed.
00:07:30.140Even people who historically haven't considered themselves Republicans are looking at that saying, something's not right here.
00:07:35.600Because in the past, they at least wore a mask while doing it.
00:07:42.180So let's start with what I think is going to be the headline, checking my iPhone, it's already the headline, Tim Walls saying he's friends with school shooters.
00:08:20.860But befriending school shooters raises a lot of other questions.
00:08:24.600There are a lot of good people who are friends with NASCAR team owners, but saying I'm good friends with mass shooters, that doesn't really have the same vibe.
00:08:31.400But throughout the—and I don't want to be mean, but Tim Walls, I mean, I don't think I am being mean.
00:09:07.060He came across as that guy in the Gary Larson Farside cartoon who, while talking to a kangaroo, says, you may be a kangaroo, but I know a few things about marsupials myself.
00:09:16.900He just—everything came across as wrong, just a little bit off.
00:09:20.560I don't know whether he had back surgery recently or what, but this was off.
00:09:43.940But look, he badly mischaracterized a number of things.
00:09:46.960Perhaps most crucially, his own record on the Minnesota law that he signed into law, denying that it reversed protections for babies born alive after a botched abortion.
00:10:01.400He just completely mischaracterized it.
00:10:13.560Look, under Minnesota law, before Tim Walsh changed it with legislation he signed into law as governor, it provided protections, certain standards of medical care that had to be given to a baby born alive following a botched abortion.
00:10:30.840And Tim Walsh signed another bill into law saying that's no longer the law, just removing those protections altogether.
00:10:41.040What Walsh was relying on there was language providing some level of care.
00:10:46.940I think they actually used the word care almost unmodified.
00:10:49.800Some people have characterized that, I think, fairly by saying that means that in that circumstance they can provide the equivalent of hospice care for an unwanted baby.
00:11:24.000And so he expected to be able to go on in this friendly environment of these co-opted CBS moderators and say something that just wasn't true and expect that nobody would catch him on it.
00:11:35.420Well, we've got a different world today.
00:11:37.780Sure, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC used to control the entirety.
00:11:42.380But today we've got the Tucker Carlson show, and we've got X, and we've got a few other channels through which people can communicate actual information.
00:12:38.540And so that's why a lot of this is going to end with a thud.
00:12:42.360Like I say, it's consistent with the overall vibe of his debate performance tonight, which is just a lot of weird stuff.
00:12:49.440Weird stuff where he didn't answer the question and where the answer he provided had something terribly wrong with it.
00:12:56.060I can't think of another reason that they would have picked him other than the Kamala Harris people are thinking, you know, they think in terms of race.
00:13:04.020Like, that's how they think about everything.
00:14:06.440I mean, they have a huge problem with a lot of their voters on the question of Israel.
00:14:11.840Their, you know, their view of Israel is not that different from Trump's view of Israel, but a lot of their voters have a completely different view of Israel.
00:14:21.780And the current administration, of which this would be the successor in interest, is itself dancing a very, very delicate dance with regard to Israel.
00:14:35.360On the one hand, they want to be seen as pro-Israel.
00:14:38.960On the other hand, they're constantly telling Israel, cease fire.
00:14:50.160They're doing this as a reaction to a radical element within their own base that is increasingly not only anti-Israel or Israel skeptical, but anti-Semitic.
00:15:00.540Well, I'm glad they didn't choose Shapiro.
00:15:15.020And look, I don't know either one of them personally, so I can't speak to any of those things.
00:15:19.580But what I do know is that the guy they had on the stage tonight surely would have been outperformed dramatically by Josh Shapiro.
00:15:28.240This guy was not ready for primetime, and it showed.
00:15:30.300I was really surprised that nobody brought up this, you know, the salient fact of Tim Walsh's career, which is that he presided over the destruction of a state in its biggest city, Minneapolis, on Memorial Day 2020.
00:15:47.060She opened the windows of their home so she could smell the burning rubber.
00:15:49.620Opened the windows of her home so that they could marinate in the smell of burning rubber from overturned police cars and the lawlessness that was going on.
00:16:01.000Now, this is something you sometimes associate with leftists.
00:16:06.320Marxists like the idea of people who consider themselves oppressed throwing off the established order of things and bringing about chaos and violence.
00:16:16.180But rarely do they actually say it in those terms.
00:16:40.260It didn't come up because they were too busy holding J.D. Vance to account for why Republicans are to blame because, obviously, Republicans caused climate change and climate change caused hurricanes, including the hurricane that Americans have been dealing with for the last few days, especially in states like Florida and North Carolina.
00:16:58.360And they didn't want to have to hold Democrats to account for their handling of those things.
00:17:03.220So, naturally, they blame it on climate change and climate change on Republicans.
00:17:47.460And those projections are extremely costly.
00:17:49.900We're talking about many, many tens of trillions of dollars that will have to be pumped into the economy, out of the economy, out of otherwise productive uses into nonproductive or less productive uses so that they can sort of remake the economy.
00:18:05.280But I don't understand why Republicans more broadly don't challenge the so-called science since there is an actual science behind that.
00:18:12.900I think you could say climate is changing.
00:18:48.820Even as our carbon emissions have, of course, changed significantly, the sea level there and elsewhere has not changed.
00:18:56.920So this is a tall order that they're asking us to carry.
00:19:00.980They're asking us to impoverish ourselves, to rely on less efficient, less stable sources of electric power and means of powering our vehicles and things like that without any proof.
00:19:14.100They're asking us, as it were, to accept an almost religious belief that they have.
00:19:21.060Where we're sitting right now was covered by a mile of ice at a time when this continent had hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people living on it.
00:19:30.100I mean, this was a heavily populated continent during the last ice age.
00:19:33.980And there were no, that we know of, there was no carbon emission, I mean, from people.
00:19:39.440I mean, none of this makes any, and then it warms sufficiently that all that ice melted.
00:19:53.520And, of course, they don't take into account changes in solar activity, sun spots, things like that, that have an obvious likelihood to impact global temperatures.
00:20:06.840And so, when you view all of this as narrowly as they view it, it becomes a little bit like they're holding a hammer.
00:20:13.620Everything starts to look like a nail.
00:20:15.080Well, sure, and if you're telling me that bulldozing forests to build solar farms is good for the environment, cutting off the top of mountains to build windmills is green, you know, I guess there's nothing I won't believe if I accept that.
00:20:36.780Some of which is not all that pleasant.
00:20:38.160But why not plant trees if you think that carbon is the problem, then why are you bulldozing forests, which they are doing, I mean, millions of acres, to why wouldn't you plant trees instead?
00:21:19.860James O'Keefe embedded with the cartels as they moved migrants engaging in human trafficking at the largest scale in modern times from Latin America to the United States.
00:21:30.480He embedded with the cartels, with hidden cameras, and the result is this documentary, Wine in the Sand, which we are proud to run exclusively on TCN.
00:21:41.860Let me ask you specifically, one of the reasons I'm so grateful that you're here, J.D. Vance, of course, is a senator.
00:22:07.500Tim Walls is running with a former senator.
00:22:09.140A lot of the discussion tonight revolved around things that are happening in the body where you've served for a long time.
00:22:14.940There was a moment when Tim Walls described the so-called border bill, the immigration bill that died in the Congress as the toughest ever.
00:22:32.080So here again, Tim Walls is either lying, meaning he knows the truth and he's not stating it, or he's been deceived by somebody else and didn't bother to do his own homework and check it up.
00:22:43.280In the first place, the reason we have a crisis along the southern border has everything to do with the fact that the current administration refuses to enforce laws as they exist on the books already.
00:22:56.580The Biden-Harris team has done a phenomenal job at selling a lie.
00:23:01.060The lie is that we really wanted to fix the border crisis.
00:23:20.360So they came up with this bill, and now this bill was negotiated by two or three people in the Senate, only one of whom is a Republican, my friend and colleague, James Lankford, a great senator from Oklahoma.
00:23:35.640I really do like James Lankford a lot.
00:23:38.480But Mitch McConnell assigned him to negotiate that bill with Democrats.
00:23:42.760And at the time he did that, a lot of us told him, look, the best thing you could do with this bill is find a way to negotiate something that says we want to tie Joe Biden's hands.
00:23:56.120The Democrats really wanted funding for Ukraine.
00:23:58.600A lot of Republicans, like myself, didn't want to do that.
00:24:02.380Republicans really wanted a secure border.
00:24:03.960So the idea was maybe we can force them to secure the border by tying Joe Biden's hands so he can't just continue to have the open borders immigration policy.
00:24:12.760A couple months go by, Lankford puts a lot of time into it, but what he negotiates doesn't tie Biden's hands.
00:24:18.900And if anything, it would make it a lot worse.
00:24:21.900Now, there are some good provisions in there, but there are a lot of provisions that, especially in the hands of a Biden-Harris administration, would have made things a lot worse.
00:24:30.060Like the fact that they would have to, under Section 244B of the bill, there's some indication they'd have to let in about 1,400 people every single day.
00:24:42.520Remember, Jay Johnson, who served in the Obama administration in the Department of Homeland Security, had said that we reach crisis levels at 400 migrants per day.
00:24:51.740This would have systematized it as high as 1,400 per day.
00:24:57.480So this is one of the many examples within this bill.
00:39:23.660They're admitted into the country using that app.
00:39:26.900And it's one of many examples of how this administration has actively nurtured, fostered, cultured this environment in which migrants come up by the millions.
00:39:36.600We're talking at least 10 million people who have entered this country illegally since January of 2021.
00:39:43.600In the meantime, what we've done is we've enriched international drug cartels to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year.
00:39:52.600We've also brought in enough fentanyl potentially to kill many tens of millions of Americans.
00:40:00.380And it's been trafficked in on the backs of women and children, many of whom are being sex trafficked.
00:40:07.360So this is what we have to thank the Biden-Harris administration for.
00:40:12.560And this is really how it's happening.
00:40:14.000But hats off to J.D. for pointing out what this happened.
00:40:17.380We've had this app, the smartphone app, since 1990.
00:40:21.480Okay, the fact that they've had an app.
00:42:17.200But remember, Tucker, this is a man who lives in a home where they think it's beautiful to open the windows so that they can smell the burning rubber.
00:42:24.960And so they do think this is beautiful.
00:42:26.260Now, I've never been to Worthington, Minnesota, but when I hear him say there are 50 languages spoken in the public schools, I think chaos.
00:42:55.280And through this process of social promotion and the teachers' unions facilitating the social promotion, they paper over it and they make it look like everything's okay when we know it's not.
00:43:05.760This is before we even get to the more dire human cause of the people who have been raped, who have been murdered, who have suffered through home invasion robberies, been assaulted and battered as a result of people coming into this country who didn't belong here to begin with.
00:43:20.380Given that there's zero support that I can detect in polls for these immigration policies, which are permanent, change the country forever.
00:43:29.700However, how is democracy functioning if something this central to a nation's identity, who lives in the country, is taking place without any input at all from the citizens who already live here?
00:43:43.800Taking place not only without their meaningful input, but also setting things up so that non-citizens can and will vote in elections.
00:43:54.700That's why I've spent months, the last few months, trying to push the SAVE Act, trying to attach it to the spending bill.
00:44:00.340The SAVE Act would make it so that you can't vote in a federal election without showing some type of proof that you are a U.S. citizen and therefore eligible to vote.
00:44:42.100If it doesn't happen, then we're banning something that doesn't happen, but it's already illegal.
00:44:46.360Yeah, it's already illegal, but there are all sorts of things that are already illegal that are too easy to carry out.
00:44:52.480And that's why you need to have some penalties attached to it, which is what the SAVE Act does.
00:44:57.220It would require the states to ask for some type of proof of immigration status and require the states to cull through their voter registration files to remove non-citizens periodically.
00:45:07.740And then it imposes a criminal penalty for anyone who knowingly gives a ballot or a voter registration to a non-citizen.
00:45:13.920So here again, what we've got are laws that have been easy to circumvent.
00:45:21.820And they said it's not necessary because they don't vote because they can't vote.
00:45:24.660Only every day, Tucker, it becomes more and more apparent that people are getting onto the voter registration files being non-citizens because of the Supreme Court's interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act, where they said the states cannot ask for proof of citizenship.
00:45:40.480And where in all 50 states now, you can apply for and get a driver's license as a non-citizen.
00:45:46.960And when you do that, if you fill out the NVRA part of the form, you check a box and sign your name, then you are a registered voter, even though you're a non-citizen.
00:46:25.740Motor Voter—was to make it easy to fill out a driver's license application and simultaneously register to vote.
00:46:33.180The problem is it makes it way too easier.
00:46:35.380We've now got 30 million-plus non-citizens in this country, and it's so easy to apply for a driver's license today.
00:46:43.760You add to that the Supreme Court's bad ruling, a bad interpretation of the NVRA, saying the states can't ask for voter ID, and you've got a problem.
00:46:52.260You add all of that to this major overhaul of immigration policy undertaken without the consent of the American people, contrary to their will, where the administration is basically just effectively rewriting immigration law by refusing to enforce vast swaths of it.
00:47:11.240I mean, you know, how could a Republican ever get elected if you've got a brand-new electorate brought in by the Democratic Party, given all kinds of free things that American citizens don't get, made dependent on that party for its life?
00:47:28.140Like, how could—I mean, how could you not become a one-party state?
00:48:29.700Once they're in, if Democrats have a clean sweep, meaning they get the White House, they keep the Senate, they take back the House of Representatives,
00:48:40.900Kamala Harris has made known her agenda to nuke the filibuster in the Senate.
00:48:45.460And with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin out of the picture, it'll be easier for them to do that if they've got the majority.
00:48:51.860Once that happens, they will pack the Supreme Court.
00:48:54.600They will pass voter registration and voter reform bills that will take a lot of the discretion to draw legislative districts away from state legislatures.
00:49:04.840They'll add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states and make a couple of other changes, including to our campaign finance laws,
00:49:10.960that together will make an indefinite, perpetual Democratic majority in the United States Congress our new reality.
00:49:20.120They'll be the pre-party, but for the United States.
00:49:23.620You really think they would add Puerto Rico in the district?
00:51:57.820Because, look, first and foremost, if you view the ultimate objective as being democracy, which I don't think they do, but let's just go with me on this.
00:52:08.560If they view the ultimate objective as just democracy, pure democracy, as pure as we can get it, then the Constitution is itself an impediment to that.
00:52:18.080The Constitution is designed to be counter-democratic in its operation.
00:52:22.720It's designed to be an intermediating filter of sorts between pure democracy and the rights of the people.
00:52:30.460In fact, that's the only reason you have a Constitution, is to limit the power of government so that it doesn't become abusive of the rights of the minority.
00:52:39.720That's the Constitution and its purpose in a nutshell.
00:52:42.560So, if the Democrats love this idea of pure unrestrained democracy so much, I don't believe that's really accurately explaining what they want, but if that were what they want, then it would make sense for them to try to trample on it.
00:52:57.820But, of course, what they want is something much more sinister than that.
00:53:01.280They want consolidation of the power of government, whereas the Constitution requires distribution of power.
00:53:08.660It requires it to be diffused so that no one person or group of people gets too powerful.
00:53:16.220And so, as a result of all of that, you see them being doubly contemptuous of the Constitution.
00:53:22.600The Constitution protects the rights of the minority, including heretics like you and me who dare to challenge the assumptions of the governing woke elite.
00:53:33.460And the Constitution is also a threat to their ability to carry out their Marxist-inspired, far-left, radical, progressive ideas.
00:53:41.000But if you're attacking—I mean, the word treason's been thrown around quite a bit over the last eight years.
00:53:45.500But if you're attacking the Constitution, I mean, is that treason?
00:53:54.740Those of us who hold public office in the United States are required under Article VI of the Constitution to take an oath to them.
00:53:59.880And I think if you violate that oath, I do think that is treasonous.
00:54:04.960So, those who are taking this position, I think, are taking an indefensible position, one that I think could fairly be described as treasonous.
00:54:12.520How widespread do you think in Washington is the view that the Constitution is the problem?
00:54:19.840Well, I'm seeing some alarming trends in this regard.
00:54:25.560Democrats are much more forceful about it, much more upfront.
00:54:29.100Sometimes you can feel from some Republicans feeling frustrated about particular provisions.
00:54:35.900But Republicans will at least always pay lip service to it, and I think with some degrees of sincerity.
00:54:41.840What I'm seeing now for the first time—you know, I've been in the Senate now for 13 and a half years.
00:54:47.580When I first got to the Senate, nobody in elected office would dare to be caught dead saying something that could be interpreted as contemptuous toward the Constitution.
00:54:58.520And yet now you routinely hear members of Congress, Democrats, referring to features of the Constitution as incredibly problematic, like, for example, the Electoral College.
00:55:18.340And they will refer derisively to the Senate as a non-representative, as a sort of disenfranchising form of inequality.
00:55:28.720Because the whole point of the Senate is that the Senate has to involve equal representation among the states.
00:55:36.500Even if you amend it to say that each state will have a different number than two senators, Article 5 of the Constitution, which governs the amendment process, says that there's one type of amendment that is presumptively, preemptively unconstitutional.
00:55:51.140You can't change the principle of equal representation.
00:55:56.420Well, because a lot of their voters are focused in a smaller handful of states, heavily populated urban centers, and they think it's profoundly unfair that a smaller state like Utah or Maine will get two votes, while a heavily populated state like California or New York will have only two votes in the Senate.
00:56:18.900Is there anything they can do about that?
00:56:23.380I mean, they could amend the Constitution, but like I say, Article 5 makes that the one type of constitutional amendment that is unconstitutional.
00:56:33.560I had this conversation with Justice Scalia once, who posited to me that maybe they could change it, but it would require two successive amendments to the Constitution.
00:56:42.640First, you'd have to amend out the part that says that you can't change this, and then you'd have to actually change it.
00:56:47.420Regardless, amending the Constitution to undo the Electoral College or to change equal representation in the Senate is something that is nowhere near having the kind of support you would need right now to change it.
00:57:02.260But I do worry, now that you've got one major political party that is openly contemptuous of at least those two provisions of the Constitution and becoming more contemptuous every day of the First Amendment, including not only the freedom of speech protections, but also the freedom of religion protections.
00:57:18.980I worry that a chill wind blows in America when you've got a major political party that is still being taken seriously when it hates the Constitution, especially provisions as fundamental as those.
00:57:31.160So, I mean, packing the Supreme Court would solve the problem.
00:57:34.700You don't have to amend the Constitution.
00:57:40.100And what FDR figured out was that FDR could threaten to pack the court and so threaten the court that some justices would change their votes.
00:57:51.240I write about this in a book I wrote a couple years ago called Saving Nine.
00:57:56.260It didn't work, but one of the reasons it didn't work is that it worked in a different way.
00:57:59.780It threatened the court into adopting lock, stock, and barrel, FDR's loose interpretation of the Commerce Clause, and we've never been the same since.
00:58:27.420Not only possible, Tucker, but if they get the majority in the House and keep the majority in the Senate and they get the White House, they will do it.
00:58:36.760And they will do it within the first hundred days they're in office.
00:59:20.040They just want to increase the number of justices for one simple reason, because they don't like the fact that there is a court now controlled by a majority that's content with reading the Constitution based on what it says, rather than on the basis of what progressive Democrats wish it said.
00:59:37.000In the first hundred days, you'll think they'll do?
00:59:39.120I mean, that's the most radical thing I can imagine.
00:59:41.360Yes, but they are radicals and they're unapologetic about it.
00:59:44.420If they have the opportunity, meaning if they run the clean sweep where they control all three levers within the two political branches, they will do it.
00:59:55.080Well, they're not too far from that, really.
00:59:59.200Well, it wouldn't be all that hard for them to do it.
01:00:02.040And that's one of the reasons why I've been so worried about this election and making sure that it's actual U.S. citizens who are voting is because this election really is consequential.
01:00:10.620Just given how different the two competing visions of these two political parties happens to be.
01:00:17.160We saw that on display tonight in this debate in great detail.
01:00:21.840I mean, I would ask you the same question.
01:00:25.740Do you think that we saw a contrasting vision from the two parties?
01:00:29.320Because in my view, tonight we saw a greater contrast between these two candidates than we've seen in a long time.
01:00:38.180And just the level of thinking, I mean, really, as you know, it's a cliche, but it's true.
01:00:44.000It really was three against one and the one outshone the three with ease.
01:00:50.440Just on something as small as that, well, it's not small, but as specifically as the housing crisis, the increase in the cost of housing in the United States.
01:00:59.260And J.D. Vance makes this very obvious point that, you know, more people means higher costs.
01:01:05.300Because there's this thing called supply and demand.
01:01:08.780If more people want something, it's price rises, right?
01:01:11.020If you've limited supply and growing demand, I mean, it's just like the most, it's first grade math.
01:01:17.000And Tim, Tim Walsh goes, well, you know, can you find a study that shows that?
01:01:21.500And then J.D. says, well, actually, I think the Fed just did a study the other day that shows that in great detail.
01:01:28.720But you don't need to point to a study.
01:01:30.720The Federal Reserve Bank, we'll send that to you.
01:01:32.260Yeah, but then the moderator's like, yeah, do you have a study?
01:01:54.360And especially when they ask for it, and it's already been provided by the Federal Reserve Bank, which Democrats generally love, by the way.
01:02:18.540I also love the fact that he began his answer there by plugging a proposal that I've introduced called the Houses Act.
01:02:24.880And the Houses Act would require, under certain circumstances, for the federal government to sell surplus federal land for the purpose of building single-family affordable housing.
01:02:37.320Now, Tim Walsh immediately pushed back on that.
01:02:47.000And they've been pushing this for 10 years on this horrible program called the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Program,
01:02:53.520where they're trying to make the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development this sort of master planner, master zoning commission for the entire country.
01:03:01.340And giving benefits to local government entities that embrace their zoning, their high-density zoning plans, and punishing those who won't.
01:03:09.760I mean, you could actually solve these problems in a day if you just drew up a list of, and I can give you the zip codes if you want, but let's just say Martha's Vineyard, Aspen, Bethesda, Maryland, Newton, Massachusetts.
01:04:23.080But in a lot of states, there is a lot of federal land.
01:04:26.300In fact, some of the greatest housing crisis that you might find in the United States can be found in the western United States, where the federal government owns most of the land.
01:04:36.220The federal government owns almost 70% of the land in my state.
01:04:40.000And if you took just a tiny fraction of that—we're talking like half of 1% of the federal land in my state—and used it for the Houses Act housing plan, you could, in a fairly short period of time, roughly double the supply of single-family affordable homes just by adopting that legislation.
01:05:03.520And they'll have you believe that all federal land—oh, and then he also threw in this quip about, oh, are you going to be building houses in the same place on the national parks where you're drilling for oil?
01:05:50.420Most of it sits without being used for anything.
01:05:52.900Now, there's not a property owner on planet Earth who can afford to own that much land, especially in a developed country like ours, and let it sit fallow.
01:06:02.120But they get away with it because they don't have to pay taxes on it.
01:06:05.460And that further impoverishes states in the west, like mine, where the federal government owns most of the land because they don't pay property taxes.
01:06:13.140And this is not—these are not national parks.
01:06:21.860The parks are also a tiny, tiny fragment, a tiny segment of a vast empire.
01:06:28.640You know, the federal government owns close to 30% of the total land mass of the United States.
01:06:33.900People east of Colorado are hardly aware of that because the federal government in most cases owns a percentage of land that can be reckoned at the low single digits in those states.
01:06:44.900But in the west, this is a big, big deal.
01:07:11.180Any military base is filled with PCBs and—
01:07:14.400No, that's right, but you don't even have to go to the PCBs, which you'll see something like that on a military installation, before seeing that the federal government's a poor steward.
01:07:23.780Just look at what they do to unpopulated, unused federal land.
01:07:28.740They mismanage it to the point that they allow fuel buildup, meaning trees—
01:08:06.600So, look, if these guys cared about the environment, they would not want the federal government owning 30% of the land of the United States.
01:08:13.920Sure as heck wouldn't want them owning 70% of Utah.
01:08:16.800So maybe it's about power, not conservation.
01:08:21.600They love the idea of something as fundamental as land being managed by distant bureaucrats, not elected by the people, utterly unaccountable to the people,
01:08:31.8602,000 miles away from the people who then become more and more dependent on the federal government for that reason.
01:09:47.220And rest assured, Tucker, that because Kamala is going to be handing out $25,000 checks for anyone who gains access to any of that housing,
01:09:57.020that the cost of housing will end up going up by exactly $25,000.
01:10:01.360Aren't we at a trillion dollars annual debt service at this point?
01:10:15.260When does the merry-go-round stop spinning?
01:10:17.560Well, look, in order to have more money, because we're the world's reserve currency, it's been fairly easy for them to effectively print money.
01:10:26.360Now, there's a little more complicated than that.
01:10:28.260They have to go through a treasury auction process.
01:10:33.020But the problem is, as we get more and more in debt, and as we have to pay, you know, just a few years ago, we were paying $300,000, $350 billion a year in interest.
01:10:44.820It's mushroomed in the last couple of years as we've been spending so much more money.
01:10:49.720Sooner or later, you get to the point where you can't issue enough bonds to keep up with that, not without paying much, much higher yield rates on your bonds.
01:10:59.740And that's where the money really is going to run out.
01:11:02.760And that's where we could, in very short order, see the U.S. dollar's status as the world's reserve currency dropping into the Atlantic Ocean, never to be seen again in our lifetimes.
01:11:15.960Well, then we, as a people, endure one of the single greatest upheavals that our country has ever known.
01:11:26.880And one of the greatest economic upheavals that any group of people could go through.
01:11:31.480Because when you've been used to the blessings, the benefits associated with having the world's reserve currency be your country's currency, all kinds of things happen.
01:11:42.140And it becomes harder and harder for people to gain access to money they need to start a business or start a family or do whatever they need to do.
01:11:48.980Do you think this is why gold is at $2,600 an ounce?
01:14:13.960And not only that, Tucker, it's not just a vindication for those within the Republican Party who are doubters.
01:14:18.900But I think there are a lot of people who are going to be pulled onto the Trump-Vance ticket who are going to vote for President Trump because they saw the debate tonight.
01:14:30.740I think he has the ability to move people.
01:14:32.560Look, remember his background and what he's been through.
01:14:35.660He's lived through circumstances made worse by federal policies, made by people in Washington, D.C.
01:14:42.300who convinced themselves and their constituents that they were making the world a better place by making a small handful of people in Washington, D.C. more powerful.
01:14:50.140He's experienced the pain that that can cause, and he's a living example of somebody who has overcome those things but has overcome them without forgetting from once he came, without forgetting what it is that helped him overcome some difficult circumstances in his life.
01:15:12.880It's those people who animated him in the first instance to run for the United States Senate and then to fight like crazy once he got there for what he sincerely and correctly believes would benefit them.
01:15:25.940And that's a government that's more accountable to its people and more accountable based on core principles embedded in our Constitution.
01:15:34.860So I said that was going to be my last question, but I do have one last question, which is of deep interest to me as a lifelong resident of Washington.
01:15:40.780And you're one of the very few members of the Senate who seems less sympathetic to Washington, more skeptical after more than a dozen years there.
01:16:06.620I became, as a young man, as a teenager, I was a Republican.
01:16:14.380I went on a, served a two-year mission from my church along the U.S.-Mexico border.
01:16:20.840And it was during that time period, even though politics aren't relevant to missionary service,
01:16:26.440I saw and experienced things there that turned me from a Republican into a conservative.
01:16:31.160And it's a lot of the same things that J.D. Vance has experienced and that have caused him to come out a deep skeptic of the federal government.
01:16:40.240Because I saw federal policies that were locking families into poverty for generations.
01:16:45.500Federal policies that were causing people to make rational decisions that were harmful to their families in order to continue in that cycle of poverty, perpetuated by that.
01:16:57.800The longer I've served in the Senate, the more that I've seen Washington, D.C. is perpetuating the very problems that the Constitution was designed to protect us against.
01:17:08.400They all involve the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
01:17:11.940We've seen that power taken away from the people in two steps.
01:17:15.540From the people at the state and local level, moved to Washington.
01:17:18.340Within Washington, from the people's elected lawmakers to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, who now make most of our laws.
01:17:30.300J.D. Vance sees in them, sees in that corrupt system, what I see in it and what has caused me to be more skeptical of Washington, D.C. by the day.
01:17:39.960Which is that the American people are great, they are strong, and they are different than their government.
01:17:45.960And their government is different from the government that our Constitution established.
01:17:50.040But you haven't really answered the question.