Join us as we celebrate the end of the year and the start of the new year with a bunch of amazing guests! This episode features Phil Labonte, Ian Crossland, Michael Knowles, and Luke Rutkowski of We Are Change.
00:02:34.000And it is an honor and privilege to have this gentleman joining us.
00:02:40.000Matt Gaetz Is gonna be awesome We have so much to talk about.
00:02:57.000And we're also going to be joined by Lisa Reynolds, Libby Emmons, and Charlie Kirk at some point as well, because there's a lot of voices we want to hear from.
00:03:04.000So right now, this is the crew we got going.
00:03:06.000And the first thing I want to say, this year started off with a lot of uncertainty.
00:03:11.000We didn't even know who was going to be the nominee for the Democratic Party.
00:03:15.000There was speculation across the board.
00:03:17.000I would say that with this past November, we now do have certainty, especially considering it appears that our movement is the popular mandate, which is refreshing.
00:04:04.000And Matt, I gotta say, We heard that you were going to be the top cop, and the moment I heard this, if you guys watched the show, you saw it, I immediately ran to Allison and Richie, and I said, do we have any champagne?
00:04:51.000And now I know, dammit, you went and popped the champagne before I had the chance to be confirmed by the Senate.
00:04:57.000Look, Donald Trump has changed our politics.
00:05:00.000The movement that we have built that is multigenerational, multiracial, is changing the way we are fielding candidates and winning elections.
00:05:09.000But don't kid yourself into thinking that in early November you changed Washington yet.
00:05:15.000Because there remains a repository of people in that town, some of them Republicans in the United States Senate, who actually want Trump to fail.
00:05:25.000They don't want this to be a durable, lasting enterprise.
00:05:29.000They're hoping this is like a kidney stone that they just have to painfully move through the system, right?
00:05:35.000And when you look at some of these folks, and we can talk about who they are, They had calcified a good deal of opposition against me, and the Attorney General position is unique in this regard.
00:05:45.000It's not the Ag Commissioner, though that's important, it's not the SBA or the Department of Labor, because day one Donald Trump has a plan on the economy, on the regulatory climate, on the bureaucratic state, and on the largest deportation in American history, and he had to have an Attorney General there day one, and I am proud that Pam Bondi is going to be that Attorney General, and I think she's going to do a splendid job For this administration and for our country.
00:07:17.000Big Pharma, the big defense industries, were worried that I would animate the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice to go after some of the excesses in corporate power.
00:07:29.000I think the number one threat to your liberty is big government.
00:07:33.000The number two threat to your liberty is big business, and obviously the number three threat to your liberty is homeowners associations.
00:07:39.000So Matt, just really quickly, Al Qaeda started as a homeowners association.
00:07:45.000I absolutely believe that, especially in Florida.
00:07:47.000But really quick, if you were the Attorney General, what would be your first piece of business?
00:07:54.000Well, actually, I think that the first thing you have to do is effectuate the deportation.
00:07:58.000And you're going to have all kind of states and municipalities doing everything they can to achieve some injunction in, like, the northern Mariana Islands that they try to spread around the country to freeze the presidency in that effort.
00:08:12.000And so I think the number one thing you have to do is build resilience against some of the plans that these blue state governors and blue state attorneys general have.
00:08:20.000Now, is there any part of you—I don't want to be the glass-half-full guy, but I guess I am here—you've been in elected office since you were about 11 years old, I think, and you've been through all these brutal, bloody fights.
00:08:32.000There's so much awful nonsense that goes with being an elected official.
00:08:45.000And so I understand the AG job would be extremely fun and cool and awesome, but is there any part of you that says, wow, I'm not in the government anymore?
00:08:56.000Any part of me that thinks that understands that Madison...
00:09:01.000Held the role of citizen as the top role in our society, not congressman or senator or president.
00:09:08.000And so I have very much enjoyed the promotion from congressman to citizen these last few weeks.
00:09:14.000But here's what we know about our movement, and it's distinct from what we've seen in politics in yesteryear.
00:09:21.000This is not a movement that is driven by some cabal of special interests in Washington or New York.
00:09:27.000There's not power brokers who centralize who gets to run or who gets to win.
00:09:43.000Look at the way you activate people to go and engage with their beliefs and actually challenge a lot of the dogmas that have kept people paralyzed.
00:09:52.000And so I think we need those voices throughout.
00:09:55.000And who knows, Michael, maybe one day I'll run for the United States Senate and you and I can make a podcast together and then I won't be so damn poor.
00:10:04.000No, even on this point, it's kind of funny because, you know, you've made the shift now to political media, which is great, by the way, as someone in political media.
00:10:53.000I don't know what you're going to do, but...
00:10:55.000Maybe being in the private sector for a while, maybe that will be enjoyable as well.
00:10:58.000And I do think that when you get people who never live under the laws they've written, it creates a disconnect that builds resentment appropriately among all of us.
00:11:08.000I think, like you say, you take your turn in, you do your work, and you live an honest life beyond that, and you never know when the bell rings again.
00:11:21.000I just have to ask, because he's teed it up.
00:11:24.000You floated the other day a plan that I really, really loved on Twitter.
00:11:29.000You said you're an elected member of the next Congress.
00:11:32.000So what you could do, if the members of Congress still want to mess around with you, you could vote, you could enter Congress on January 3rd, you could get involved in the speaker race, you could start maybe pulling out some of the dirty laundry from the current and former members, and then you're still ready to start your show on January 6th.
00:11:51.000You can nominate Elon Musk to be Speaker of the House.
00:11:54.000It would be the most entertaining thing that had happened in Congress, at least in the past six months.
00:11:59.000Since the last time I did something like this.
00:12:01.000No, the thought has crossed my mind, because in the way organizing Congress works, first, the clerk calls the roll of everyone who shows up with an election certificate, and I'm pretty sure mine still works, and then after, The role is called for the speaker.
00:12:19.000The speaker is sworn in and then swears in the body.
00:12:22.000And so some have suggested that if the speaker races are kind of my thing, it's kind of what I do.
00:12:28.000And so maybe we'll be in Washington that day to see that there's a speaker election that serves the country well.
00:12:40.000You know, I think what I largely appreciate about that whole battle was this machine of IOUs and backroom deals and spending billions of dollars to put someone in power over the House.
00:12:50.000And that was dismantled overnight through your efforts and the others who joined you.
00:12:56.000I'm curious how you think that's gone so far, considering where we are now with the continuing resolutions.
00:13:00.000Man, the corrupt muscle memory of Washington is very strong, and it is difficult to break through, and even things I thought would be more effective at rattling that system have shown its capability to respond.
00:13:14.000But look at what we just saw happen this last week.
00:13:17.000All the lobbyists wanted this 1,500-page bill that had every pork barrel project, funded the censorship industrial complex, gave every giveaway to the Democrats they wanted, and Rhythmically, Congress always approves the multi-thousand page December omnibus bill.
00:13:38.000It's never been defeated before since I've been around.
00:13:41.000And because of Elon Musk and Donald Trump and the X universe and our willingness to roll up our sleeves and actually get into the details of this stuff and shame the people who are willing to vote for it, that bill went down and every iteration of the government funding bill got better.
00:14:32.000If we wanted to mobilize in some rogue established order and then challenge the United States government, the technology is available for people to reach a million people tomorrow.
00:14:55.000I mean, doesn't it speak to the, actually, the empowerment of the American people?
00:15:01.000You get someone like Musk that can actually put out a call to his whatever many million followers he has, and then you see real tangible results.
00:15:11.000And it's something that, that's the whole point of representative government, is the people that read Musk's tweet and agreed with him went ahead and they were calling their representatives and they said, hey, we don't want this, and it actually made a tangible change.
00:15:25.000But I'm I want to say, you know, you mentioned Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and I definitely want to shout out Elon Musk for buying Twitter and fixing it.
00:15:32.000But I do want to say, you know, now the corporate press, the established narrative is that Elon is the secret president pulling the puppet strings of Donald Trump.
00:15:42.000And it's because they don't want to admit that the reality is Elon Musk is just agreeing with all of you when he makes a tweet.
00:16:12.000I'm just really happy Ron Paul's in there, because if you look at all the roads that are leading to Ron Paul was right, there's a lot of them, and it's very significant.
00:16:23.000And I think truly this is something that isn't a radical idea.
00:16:27.000It's an idea that our money should actually go to the American people and not to the special interest groups and not to the lobbyists and not to bioweapons facilities and not to the censorship of Americans and not to the torture of small animals.
00:16:40.000And this kind of larger revolution is something very indicative of things to come in 2025, which I think will be a larger unraveling of a lot of the dirt, of a lot of the establishment, of a lot of the secrets that used to go on in Washington, D.C., but can't any longer because of Twitter, because of us, because of everyone speaking up in unison, saying enough is enough. because of everyone speaking up in unison, saying enough is But that is not self-activating.
00:17:14.000But if we are not diligent on these things, pointing out those frailties in the government decision-making process, they will persist.
00:17:21.000Yeah, it's a great point because the left doesn't stop just because there was a victory.
00:17:27.000We had a great victory this fall, but it's a victory in a much larger war.
00:17:32.000So my fear, which I've been talking about the past couple of weeks, is that as we all mock these cable TV news channels that are collapsing in the ratings, they're getting 30,000 viewers in the keynote.
00:17:47.000But come on, if they can afford to pay Rachel Maddow $25 million for one year with that low of ratings, they're going to come back and say, who do we give $25 million to?
00:18:45.000Because a Bitcoin reserve coming in Trump's administration, we're all excited, but what can we do right now As we know, the corporate press is going to pull an empire strike back.
00:19:24.000But this is an information war that all of us are involved in.
00:19:28.000So people here that are watching, your part is essential here to getting activated, to getting engaged, to paying attention, and reaching out to your elected representatives and saying, this is what I want, this is what I demand.
00:19:40.000What do we think, what do you guys think the next move is going to be from a corporate press knowing that they've lost the narrative control and they have to regain it?
00:19:57.000They could not do the sufficient lawfare.
00:19:59.000And so there will be an intense effort at co-option.
00:20:02.000You see that underway now with who's paying money for the inaugural.
00:20:06.000And ABC News inadvertently is spending $15 million on the presidential Trump library and casino that is going to be built in Atlantic City, I hope.
00:20:16.000I think, Matt, I think you're totally right.
00:20:17.000A lot of people said after 2016 that had Schumer and Pelosi been able to control themselves, had they played their cards right, they would have tried to suck up to Trump.
00:20:41.000So this time, your point, Matt, seems is, well, maybe they've learned their lesson.
00:20:45.000And actually, maybe their back's just against the wall, and this is the only move they have.
00:20:48.000That's a dangerous move that they could make, though.
00:20:50.000Think about where we were at this point in 2017. They were saying that Trump was a Russian agent and that we were all convinced to vote for him by Vladimir Putin from $180,000 in Facebook ads.
00:21:03.000That was the official narrative of the last time Trump was going through this process.
00:21:08.000And now, oh, they're just lapping praise on him.
00:21:14.000And this whole effort that you saw today in these last few days where Democrats have said, oh, you know, it's Elon pulling Trump's strings.
00:21:21.000Alphas want to be around other alphas.
00:21:46.000The applications they've gotten for Doge, people wanting to use their skills to take a meat cleaver to the excesses of government, has actually given us a lot of hope.
00:21:55.000Man, they really should not have banned the Babylon Bee.
00:22:07.000I feel like in addition to the co-option of Trump, or at least the attempted co-option by the, whatever you call it, deep state media apparatus, I don't know.
00:23:28.000Because if you have them and you were to give them to someone else in person, there's no record of it.
00:23:33.000Whereas if you transfer most, not all, but if you transfer most cryptocurrencies and you have the technology to do it, you know how to do it, you can look at the ledger and it's all written out there.
00:23:44.000And for millennia, that's been a good thing for people to bypass tyranny, is they can still trade.
00:23:51.000But if there somehow locks down into this uber...
00:23:58.000I think this is something important to talk about, because I don't know about you guys, but one of the biggest fears I have for 2025 is the Federal Reserve, is the Ponzi scheme banking system finagling and doing a lot of dirty tricks against Donald Trump, against the US dollar, against the best interest of America.
00:24:14.000If there ever was an opportune time to kind of go after the dollar, go after America financially, it would be under Donald Trump's presidency.
00:24:21.000And I think that's why this larger conversation about Bitcoin and other alternatives is so key and so important right now.
00:24:26.000But do you guys share that fear or no?
00:24:28.000Well, I think that you'll see that manifest first when the Fed goes after crypto.
00:24:34.000There's going to be some effort to disrupt that marketplace even more, but I am encouraged by how resilient crypto has been.
00:24:40.000I like an asset class that has actually suffered some dives and has shown rebound.
00:24:46.000The resiliency of things like Bitcoin in particular is built into the blockchain, if I understand correctly, and that's a benefit for all people, like not just Americans, which, I mean, obviously I want to see America do better than any other country in the world, but it is a good thing that it's decentralized and that it's something that is outside the control of any one nation state.
00:25:10.000Well, so you said something really scary in that they would tokenize the dollar.
00:25:15.000That means every dollar is tracked, no matter what you do.
00:25:18.000By the way, you don't think that's happening to a pretty large extent now?
00:25:22.000You go withdraw $5,000 in cash from the bank, there's going to be a suspicious activity report, there's going to be a review of where those dollars moved, where they changed hands, where they were deposited.
00:25:33.000So you're already living in that world.
00:25:34.000I think it accelerates rapidly with a tokenized dollar.
00:25:37.000I was wondering, in terms of the coins, you say some of them were resilient, like Bitcoin.
00:25:42.000All of my Hawk Tua coin holdings have not been resilient to market forces.
00:26:45.000Well, does it harken back to the dot-com bubble, where you would just see roses, dot-com, and you'd see some massive spike in valuation, and then there's actually no business behind it.
00:26:56.000So we went through this exact cycle before in the 90s, and what happens is there's three or four winners that emerge out of the space that dominate the marketplace and then...
00:27:23.000If somebody's putting their life savings into the meme coin, is that like a certain feature of economic Darwinism that we're willing to tolerate?
00:28:05.000The way I know Ian's right about this, I hate that I have to be 100% on Ian's side here, but I think, look, I'm not saying I'm a Rhodes Scholar.
00:28:17.000And if there were no financial regulation, if I were left to invest to my own devices, I would be broke and destitute and naked in the streets.
00:28:25.000And we might be a better place for that.
00:28:34.000There's a sliding scale of how much protection do we give?
00:28:38.000How much does the government step in to intervene in people's lives because they're not smart enough?
00:28:43.000Bloomberg had that speech he gave on stage where he said we should tax the poor because they don't know what they need, so we're going to take their money from them and buy what they actually need.
00:28:51.000Look, the actual failure in markets is an integral part of markets.
00:28:55.000The big part of the problem that we see, the big part of the problem with government bailouts is there's no failure.
00:29:02.000I mean, we have a phrase for it, too big to fail with banks and stuff.
00:29:07.000It's an important piece of information that you get from markets.
00:29:11.000And so to take away that failure by whatever means, whether it be government fiat or whatever, that's a terrible idea.
00:29:18.000And responsibility and accountability.
00:29:20.000Failure teaches people that they did something wrong.
00:29:23.000The only difference between the mafia and the government is that the mafia actually turns a profit.
00:29:27.000The U.S. government doesn't turn them off.
00:29:28.000And they're in the business of screwing you over, taking away your freedom, robbing you of your wealth, and robbing you of any potential free liberty that you are entitled to by God-given rights.
00:29:37.000And I want those God-given rights, and I don't want a government telling me what I can and cannot do.
00:30:40.000Not that I'm an economist, but it's my sense that the prices will stay around where they are and wages will kind of rise to meet them.
00:30:48.000That's the kind of the way that inflation has been dealt with historically.
00:30:53.000The wages rise to meet, to kind of equalize it.
00:30:57.000And that's the problem with inflation is a leader and wages are a laggard.
00:31:01.000What I was trying to get to earlier was...
00:31:05.000If we're seeing these big businesses like Bud Light back way off, they lost so much, a third of their market share, whatever it was, Target did, Disney lost a billion dollars, now Disney's announcing that they're removing a transgender storyline from their latest series.
00:31:18.000All of these massive cultural victories, what are they going to do next?
00:31:23.000I mean, is it fine to say that we can just sit here and lament the latest meme token because we've won so handily that there's nothing left to fear?
00:32:14.000But at the end of the day, we have to understand there still is a big force out there that doesn't want to relinquish its control over the American people.
00:32:24.000We take it back with personal responsibility.
00:32:25.000We take it back by taking our own health into our own hands and understanding that the power lies within the individuals, not within the government.
00:32:32.000So maybe not putting all of your hope in the government and putting your hope in your fellow man is the right solution, is the cultural revolution that they can't stop that is really going to echo through America with Donald Trump as the larger messenger of this because there's going to be a lot of problems for him Let's admit it.
00:32:48.000I think this drone stuff, this whole Luigi manifesto thing, I think all of this is crescendoing towards larger problems that all of us are going to have to deal with soon.
00:32:57.000I think one of the things that's got me worried is, you know, just the other day, someone tried to murder Nick Fuentes.
00:33:03.000And I know a lot of people have strong feelings about the guy.
00:33:05.000I'm not going to sit up here and use it as an opportunity to talk about why we agree or disagree or we don't like that guy.
00:34:46.000There's viral videos already of people on TikTok.
00:34:49.000There's a woman, she's on TikTok, this video went viral, and she said, I don't care if I get banned anymore because they're going to ban TikTok.
00:34:54.000And then she vowed Trump will not make it to office.
00:34:57.000You have people saying, you have one viral video where a guy's saying, we're going to send 11 million people to DC. My question then is, is there a fear of escalating violence or anything like this?
00:35:08.000Or is the imaginary effect, is this nothing?
00:35:11.000You always got to keep it in your mind as a possibility, but not be afraid of it.
00:35:15.000Because your antidote is to create positive energy.
00:35:18.000It's to create awesome shit that just blows people's minds and refocuses their attention on something creative.
00:35:32.000And the Democrats were telling folks that they had to live with less.
00:35:36.000And so there is a unifying feature to that.
00:35:38.000When we go out and build our coalition for the future, I think it's really important that the positivity be what we lead with.
00:35:50.000I think, Matt, where you're aiming, the idea that we have to be aiming at something positive is absolutely true.
00:35:56.000But I also regularly say that we have a serious problem with the leftists In the country, that the notion that success is bad or people that are rich are the reason why there are poor people, these narratives are poison to a society.
00:36:12.000And the more we can do to push back against them, the better off all of the country is going to be.
00:36:19.000And like I said, the positive narrative that you're talking about is a great way to push back against them.
00:36:29.000You know, this is an insight of classical political philosophy, is that avarice, envy is really the evil, the beginning of evil in the cities.
00:37:54.000What better way to subvert Donald Trump's agenda, especially his economic agenda, than to not make it left and right, but to make it top versus the bottom, the bottom versus the top?
00:38:04.000And I think this is the landscape that's being shaped right now by the intel agencies through social media, through this particular case, whatever involvement they had particularly in it, in order to set the next kind of battle for Donald Trump, who is this billionaire, who is this businessman, who is talking about getting rid of regulations and taxes, which is extremely important.
00:38:22.000But now that agenda, culturally, will be stopped by all these Luigi fans that are normalizing political violence.
00:38:29.000Michael Knowles, I want to thank you for joining us tonight.
00:40:09.000Through a fake anarchistic Joker-like kind of scenario that unfolds under Trump's presidency that goes after businessmen, business leaders, and CEOs.
00:40:38.000When the Joker movie comes out, the corporate press across the board was saying that this movie is for incels and white supremacists and, you know, weak-willed young men cheering on Joker shooting the TV show host.
00:40:48.000Someone who, he says, you get what you effing deserve.
00:42:11.000Remember, they tried to kill Brett Kavanaugh.
00:42:12.000Just by the grace of God, there was a U.S. marshal there that actually stopped the guy.
00:42:16.000He had all the configurations, the rope, the weaponry, right in his driveway.
00:42:20.000It's so easy to threaten one night of the Supreme Court.
00:42:24.000For someone in their driveway, and then the psychological damage that does to the human that has to make these grandiose decisions for 360 million people, that's kind of a psychological vulnerability I'd rather not have.
00:42:36.000I'm not saying we need an AI as our Supreme Court, but maybe...
00:42:39.000Maybe we could have seven AIs all giving us advice, and then the legislation could be like, I will listen to the AIs.
00:42:45.000But still, you've got humans making the decisions.
00:42:48.000There's a little devil on Ian's shoulder right now.
00:42:52.000Humans, you do need to upgrade to machines in certain processes.
00:42:57.000Not all of them, but some of them, this is anti-human tech stuff.
00:43:02.000You used to have a dude dragging your sled.
00:43:06.000Now you have an automotive vehicle doing the work for you.
00:43:09.000Hey, look, that's the answer on the immigration front.
00:43:11.000It's only the automation that's going to get you to your immigration goals.
00:43:15.000Because once we're able to automate a lot of the things that illegal immigrants are doing in this country, you're not going to have the corporate capture of lawmakers trying to get more people across the border illegally.
00:43:37.000Ian, as soon as you start adding people or opening the idea up to adding people, then the Democrats come in and they just add more, and then the Republicans add more, and you end up with 165 members of the Supreme Court.
00:44:25.000Yeah, where like 700,000 people will vote on something yes or no, goes to a smart contract that then sends the yes or the no vote to the system, and then we don't have the humans there.
00:44:59.000We protect our banks and our sports stadiums, events like this, with armed guards all the time.
00:45:04.000I think every Supreme Court justice needs U.S. Marshals or whatever that do reconnaissance work, that work at the Secret Service, and most of them do a great job.
00:45:11.000Matt, you think that's reasonable, right?
00:45:12.000I mean, we spend money on the stupidest stuff.
00:45:15.000That's like 10 million bucks a year to make sure these nine justices are safe.
00:46:48.000I'm in one of my final weeks in Congress, and they bring us out on the Armed Services Committee to Silicon Valley.
00:46:54.000They say, we're going to bring you to the most serious defense contractors doing the most high-end stuff that's going to make sure we win all the wars in the future.
00:47:01.000They take us in this room, take all our cell phones away.
00:47:04.000They say, okay, this is very, very important.
00:47:06.000What's going to save us completely is graphene.
00:47:38.000They were proposing making a good amount of our military materiel out of graphene and then using it as a way to ensure greater battery capability.
00:47:47.000Let's put the pedal to the metal on this.
00:47:49.000Batteries, walls, we're going to have touchscreen wallpaper.
00:47:51.000I'm surrounded by all these generals and colonels and people, and I was like, you guys have got to meet Ian Crossland.
00:48:02.000I just want to say to everybody who's a consistent viewer of Timcast IRL, I just want you to imagine what it's going to be like in 15 years when Ian was completely right about everything.
00:48:10.000That's why I stay calm when you laugh.
00:48:18.000Oh man, the country that steps on this, because the process of flash-jewel heating, where they collect carbon and then they electrocute it and turn it into graphene, is very easy to do.
00:48:27.000So every country on Earth will start doing it at some point, and then they'll start converting their hydrogen fuel systems at some point.
00:48:41.000The US needs to be an innovator in new materials and energy, innovation, etc.
00:48:47.000We are currently competing on the global stage.
00:48:49.000We are facing down the barrel of very serious wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
00:48:54.000Are we, with this new incoming administration, going to be leaders of industry and innovation?
00:49:00.000We lost our last major war against a bunch of goat herders.
00:49:04.000Okay, we are not in good shape in the military right now, and that is no criticism of the brave patriots who are willing to step forward and be the best among us and serve, and their family members who support them.
00:49:15.000But we do not have what we need because of corporate greed.
00:49:19.000These defense contractors, they go out and buy up all the innovators, they shut down anything that could result in a competing contract, and the generals, in a good number of these cases in the Pentagon, They are more worried about their board seat on Raytheon's board or on Lockheed Martin's board.
00:49:35.000They're more worried about getting a contract when they get out than making sure that we have stuff that can work.
00:49:51.000If something costs $100 million, it should definitely work more than 29% of the time.
00:49:58.000But we tolerate that because they've got the lobbyists and they've got capture over a lot of the folks in Congress.
00:50:04.000And those were some of the folks who didn't want to see me as the Attorney General because I would have called them out, I would have busted them up, and I would have liberated the innovators of this country to make sure that America always holds the high ground.
00:50:14.000You're saying that the people that are running this military industrial complex are more concerned with planned obsolescence to make extra money?
00:50:41.000We must understand how to get drone operators laid.
00:50:47.000Because the mentality in the Air Force is you've got to be a fighter pilot to achieve all of the machismo and be super impressive.
00:50:56.000And then if we vaulted the 280-pound drone operator living in his mother's basement to the same level, I don't know the solution on that, but if you come up with it...
00:51:07.000We could get him in VR. I have a crazy idea.
00:51:13.000How about we just don't invest all the money in murder and death and we actually allow America to be free and not be burdened by the military-neutral complex?
00:51:21.000Can we just do that for a second and imagine a world where maybe free trade and enterprise leads the way instead of...
00:51:28.000American foreign policy that has been hijacked by the neocons?
00:52:03.000The answer is to have the most badass military that the world has ever known and then to use it appropriately and sparingly and have it as a functioning deterrent.
00:52:12.000But that doesn't produce a sufficient amount of the money laundering and other ails that Luke pointed out.
00:52:18.000And so you have that tension that typically resolves in some patriotic call to relive World War II politics in the modern era where we are more interconnected and more, I think, capable of creating peace if we will allow it to blossom and emerge.
00:52:35.000So, Luke, how would you feel if we were not involved in any foreign wars?
00:52:38.000We said, no, no, no, we're not sending our U.S. troops to some faraway land for some intervention, nation building, whatever, but we did invest in, train, develop, and then we had our troops on the southern border.
00:52:49.000That seems reasonable, especially with the invasion.
00:52:51.000We get the anarchists to agree, and we can make some movement on this one.
00:52:56.000There's nothing wrong with strong defense, but the problem is it's not defense, it's offense.
00:53:01.000The problem is it's human trafficking, it's drug trafficking.
00:53:04.000I mean, I understand what you're saying about human trafficking and drug trafficking.
00:53:07.000I think that's something that we all condemn and something that we all want to avoid.
00:53:10.000But the tools to defend and to use for offense are the same, generally.
00:53:17.000Keeping the military industrial complex, keeping the reins on them is necessary, but making weapons that make the United States stronger are the weapons that make the United States safer as well.
00:53:29.000Having a weak United States military is not good for peace.
00:53:37.000We already have the strongest military in the world, overwhelmingly.
00:53:40.000One of the issues, though, is with the fog of war, if you don't know what's going on in their territory, they might be building up an armada to sneak attack you.
00:53:49.000Well, that's intel agencies that you're talking about.
00:53:50.000So they put military bases in other countries so they can't sneak up on us?
00:53:54.000We learned our lesson in World War II. So the idea is do we descale these military bases?
00:54:00.000Do we just have a spy satellite system that you can see underground through everybody's buildings?
00:54:05.000Think about all the lobbyists that have contracts tethered to every foreign military installation and the effort that they put to keep...
00:54:13.000You know, selling the toilet paper, to keep the moving costs, everything you can imagine.
00:54:19.000There's a special interest associated with it.
00:54:21.000A lot of those have become vertically integrated.
00:54:23.000And so the economic incentives are to spread our troops and our capabilities as thin as possible.
00:54:29.000So Luke says we have the strongest military in the world.
00:54:32.000Matt says we just lost to a bunch of goat herders.
00:54:41.000I mean, look, obviously it depends on the military campaign, and I'm not suggesting that tomorrow China could invade the United States, but if we continue on the trajectory we're on, and China continues on the trajectory they're on, with AI... With their next generation of fighter aircraft, with all that they're able to do in space and offensive and defensive cyber, China will be a more capable enterprise than the United States military.
00:55:16.000Only Lockheed Martin can build it, and then only Lockheed Martin can service it.
00:55:20.000And there's no opportunity for other people to come and say, well, hey, we've actually got a software upgrade package that will get the planes in the air, and that will improve the radar system.
00:55:28.000But we purposefully use the law to restrain what has always made us the envy of the world.
00:55:35.000since the time of the Revolutionary War.
00:55:37.000Military technology, the musket, right, delivered victory.
00:55:42.000It was when we had the revolving munitions.
00:55:45.000And now we are getting away from that so that the next general can get their fifth vacation.
00:55:50.000But the objective was never to win these wars.
00:55:57.000And as soon as that ended, we, of course, have Ukraine.
00:55:59.000As soon as Ukraine ends, there's going to be something else.
00:56:02.000Whether it's Romania, Georgia, Syria, whatever it is, there's always going to be something because of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned during his farewell address about the takeover of the military industrial complex.
00:56:14.000That's what I'm trying to get to the root of that I think we really need to address.
00:56:17.000If we're going to have a competent military, that's not going to take advantage of us.
00:56:37.000That we need to extract from the military.
00:56:39.000This industrial complex is where it went wrong.
00:56:42.000Like, when we were liberating, you know, in the Spanish-American War when we liberated Cuba, that's cool.
00:56:47.000When we stopped the Barbary pirates, that's cool.
00:56:49.000You know, you want to protect and prevent horror.
00:56:53.000So I'm thinking we do like a festival where we just get a bunch of drones to simulate attacks on like cities or whatever, or wherever at this festival, and people can come bring their anti-drone weaponry technology and just take turns blasting the drones out of the sky.
00:57:06.000But the problem is if we do it publicly, then the world will see the technology, and that might be a problem.
00:57:12.000So how do you open source a secretive weapons campaign to build weapons?
00:57:16.000There's going to be a member of Congress, as I was sitting down at a defense meeting, and they explained the drone festival that they're going to be working on, and he goes right the whole time.
00:57:22.000The reason that Native Americans often wouldn't suffer grave death when they would fight one another before the Europeans got here is because both sides would go down to the river.
00:57:35.000One tribe sends up their two or three toughest guys.
00:57:37.000The other tribe sends up their two or three toughest guys.
00:57:39.000You know, maybe you get some broken bones.
00:57:41.000Maybe a person dies, but you don't have this mass slaughter, right?
00:57:44.000And so if the way warfare is going to change is it's going to be our robots against their robots, maybe instead of having the wars and the death, we just run the simulations and be like, oh, hey, Russia, we ran the simulation of your drones against you, you know, Country X's drones.
00:58:01.000Their robots won, so you don't get the territory.
00:58:51.000We could speculate what they're doing, but the one obvious truth here is that the U.S. government is deliberately freaking out the American people.
00:59:27.000A big American flag and all these drones are going to light up the night sky and they're going to propel the message of liberty and freedom.
00:59:36.000A drone light show nativity scene is going to take over the entire eastern city.
01:01:15.000Like, I think his take on Iran is, I don't know exactly what it is, I haven't talked to him about it, but after the attempted assassination on him, and they said, a couple days later, they leaked out, like, it was an Iranian ploy.
01:02:17.000It's the Iranians that hacked his campaign.
01:02:20.000It's the Iranians that hacked also Kash Patel and conveniently will be handing over all the information during his Senate confirmation hearings to the corporate media.
01:02:28.000How very convenient that it's always the Iranians here.
01:03:56.000We are doing our best to make sure that Trump's cabinet is in its best and tip-top form.
01:04:03.000At least what Turning Point Action will be doing on the political side, and we've said this and we mean it, we will be launching primaries against any senator that gets in the way of President Donald Trump's cabinet or agenda.
01:04:16.000We are measuring twice and cutting once, and we are finding our targets.
01:04:21.000Bill Cassidy is on the top of the list in Louisiana, who voted to impeach President Trump, and so he is a political dead man walking, metaphorically, of course.
01:04:32.000Mike Rounds in South Dakota is on the list.
01:04:35.000Either Crapo or Rish in Idaho, I can't remember which one is which.
01:05:44.000And the U.S. Senate stands in the way of President Trump's agenda and will not get better until some of these old crows are primaried and removed.
01:05:55.000The Joni Ernst situation, which I'm not convinced if it's a good idea to primary her just because you have to be careful about the general, but she deserves it, for sure.
01:06:02.000Where she was fine about voting for Lloyd Austin, for Joe Biden's Department of Defense Secretary, and yet she was giving Pete Hegseth this hard time.
01:06:14.000If you vote for Joe Biden's nominees and you will not enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump's nominees, After we won the popular vote and electoral vote landslide and the greatest American comeback in history, and you, Joni Ernst, who do you think you are exactly?
01:06:27.000She thinks she's better than you and she doesn't represent the people of Iowa.
01:06:32.000What drives these people, it's shocking to me, to see them outright and publicly just say we defy the popular mandate.
01:06:38.000Well, it's certainly not a care for their voters, and that's where we come in, is that the way that Donald Trump has configured the Republican Party, they now know they can't survive a primary.
01:06:47.000They can get through a general, there's enough money.
01:06:49.000And Matt will agree at this, the Republican primary is very treacherous for some of them.
01:06:52.000And look, we're not here to cause problems for majorities.
01:06:55.000The way that we're going to do this at Turning Point Action and Turning Point PAC... We will only engage in comfortably red states.
01:07:00.000That means states where Senate races are won by 15 plus points, okay?
01:07:03.000We're not going to do this on the margins in states like North Carolina.
01:07:08.000We're not here to all of a sudden get someone who's more conservative that can't win a general election.
01:07:11.000That doesn't do anybody any good, right?
01:07:13.000However, there are plenty of people that are in these deep red states that don't represent their voters.
01:07:18.000In fact, some of the most moderate people are from the reddest states in particular.
01:07:22.000Mike Rounds, Crapo, Rish, Jerry Moran, Roger Wicker, Shelley Moore Capito, Lindsey Graham, whatever.
01:07:29.000And what we have is a very powerful political operation that is maturing, and we're not just going to go the traditional Republican way.
01:07:36.000And what we need is, look, we were very instrumental, I believe, and Matt would agree, in removing Ronna McRomney from RNC chair, which was instrumental in Donald Trump's victory.
01:07:53.000But the opportunity here for the exponential enhancement of our capability is lashing Elon's resources and interest in saving the country with the army that Charlie and so many have built here at Turning Point.
01:08:10.000Elon and others see what happened on the ballot chasing and on registering voters and on the way that you were having events in Detroit, Michigan.
01:08:19.000You'd never even had an event in Detroit, Michigan before.
01:08:45.000I know, like, during this last election, it really started to seem like every race was a national race to a certain extent, and I think that was a lot to do with turning point action, just really isolating and focusing on every single race that was key for, you know, the federal government.
01:09:02.000And so our hope in this next kind of primary season is not to cause unnecessary problems or shrink majorities, as I say, but you guys deserve better.
01:09:11.000And these U.S. senators need to be put on notice that at any time, the metaphorical, political sword of Damocles could fall upon their senatorial campaign and leadership.
01:09:18.000And if they do not do what the voters have wanted.
01:09:20.000So, for example, stop sending money to Ukraine.
01:09:22.000If you keep on sending money to Ukraine, we're going to get rid of you.
01:09:23.000I'm sorry, it's just end of the story, okay?
01:09:30.000And secondly, this confirmation is, by the way, Bobby Kennedy better sail through.
01:09:34.000Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, and of course, Tulsi Gabbard.
01:09:39.000And Tulsi's the very interesting one, because I've said for this entire time, and I love Matt's thought on this, I think Tulsi was always going to be the toughest confirmation fight.
01:09:47.000You remember, I've said that repeatedly, and I think it's heading that way.
01:09:50.000And this is how you know we are winning.
01:09:53.000There's this ridiculous story, Reuters or whatever published it.
01:09:56.000Eight senators are opposing Tulsi Gabbard.
01:10:33.000Well, Senate races are super expensive.
01:10:35.000House races you can win with half a million bucks.
01:10:37.000But the primaries aren't actually as expensive, and that's where it's kind of this really interesting high ROI. But look, Bernie Moreno, who's great, and he won the U.S. Senate race in Ohio, it was $120 million they had to spend on the Republican side.
01:11:18.000Once there's an open seat, we can fill it with a good one.
01:11:20.000not worried about that the bigger issue is these remnants of a republican party that doesn't exist anymore these are relics these are antiques they're like where are you from and you think russia is like this terrible problem and like roger wicker from mississippi is talking about how we need to spend more money on ukraine like who are you exactly and it's like he's been grandfathered in who are you a vessel exactly of the lobbyists and special interests who benefit off of forever wars 100
01:11:44.000and and again we are if you will that if you will change your voting pattern and you will become more populous nationalist then you can be marked safe from But the Ukraine thing, I'm not going to let go.
01:11:55.000These ridiculous people have been sending money there while our own border was being invaded by a foreign adversary, the Sinaloa drug Mexican cartels.
01:12:05.000And I think it's outrageous that we allow that to happen for the way we did.
01:12:41.000So when he started to wake up to the excesses of the intelligence community and the threat that they pose, he had to be vanquished in a very specific, unique way.
01:12:50.000And I think that you're going to see a lot of the ire for Tulsi and Bobby coming from the Democrats.
01:12:56.000And I am so excited about Bobby Kennedy because it is so nice to actually think about a healthcare policy discussion in Washington that is actually built around making people healthier.
01:13:07.000Everything else that we have endured has just been about who's paying for it.
01:13:11.000Well, and it's been about making more drugs to give the American people, just to give us more and more drugs to, like...
01:14:21.000But that's okay, because the way the Senate composition map is, you're right.
01:14:24.000And this is actually a profound point that Matt makes, is that they're going to get wise to this because we're talking about it publicly, and what they're going to do is horse trade.
01:14:31.000This is called James Lankford trademark, TM, okay?
01:14:48.000He was sent as an emissary by Mitch McConnell because he's not up for election until 2028. So what they do, here's the ingredient.
01:14:55.000You find someone from a red, red, red state who is the furthest away, the most amount of time until you have to face the voters.
01:15:02.000And you dispatch them to go do the ugliest dirty work so that even if you get blamed, you're betting on the fact that people are going to forget.
01:15:09.000You put you on cable TV, you run a bunch of TV ads, oh, look how James Langford is in 2028. So what they'll do is they'll horse trade.
01:15:16.000So people that just got elected in this cycle, in the 2024 cycle in comfortable seats, they're the ones that are going to do the tough bargaining for the Trump cabinet, where people that are in cycle are going to act all tough.
01:15:27.000That's why Tom Tillis was your Sherpa, right?
01:15:29.000Tom Tillis was like the best friend for Matt Gaetz.
01:15:45.000You mean all those love letters he wrote me weren't real?
01:15:48.000The point being is that Tom Tillis knows that Donald Trump could remove him in a nanosecond, and so he wanted to make good because he's in cycle in 2026. So for the senators that are not up for 2028 or 2030, they're the ones that you have to watch out for because they're the furthest away from the voters.
01:16:05.000By the way, this whole system is stupid.
01:16:07.000We need to get rid of the 17th Amendment and go back and get away from the direct election of senators.
01:16:12.000The founding fathers never wanted senators to be celebrities.
01:16:34.000Well, they were supposed to be ambassadors of the states, and if the legislature said, wait a second, you're not representing our interests anymore, we're calling you back and sending someone else to do that.
01:16:41.000Because that way they're representing the state, not just their district or whatever.
01:16:44.000People don't know who's representing them at their state level anymore.
01:17:33.000Let's just use, for example, Lankford, because he's not up until 2028. So let's say that all of a sudden Joni Ernst starts to feel the heat, which she is.
01:17:42.000She will go to Lankford and she will say, I need you to vote against Hegseth, even though I want to, but I can't.
01:18:15.000So they're obviously coordinating, and so it's just transparent.
01:18:18.000So what you have to do, and this is the only way to beat it, you have to condense the universe of people that are willing to trade.
01:18:24.000So it gets down to, like, no people, eventually.
01:18:26.000Otherwise, if the body politic is 15 people, they're all going to be up in different years, and they're constantly going to be trading, and you're never actually able to change the composition of the U.S. Senate.
01:18:35.000We got a bunch of bad senators, as you pointed out.
01:18:37.000We've had this problem for a very long time.
01:18:39.000I feel like most of my life, I have seen exactly what you're describing with no action being taken, no one knowing what to do.
01:18:46.000And we sit here at the end of this year at this massive and amazing event that you have put on, Charlie.
01:18:52.000And first of all, I just want to say this is absolutely incredible.
01:18:56.000Everything you've been saying about how we're actually going to see action taken against these people who have been selling us out, voting trades, etc., It's cathartic.
01:19:06.000Is there a concern that we see something comparable among the Democratic Party or any political rivals to try and bring in maybe some further left opposition?
01:19:18.000Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say this braggadociously or pridefully, but I don't think a turning point machine exists on the left right now.
01:19:27.000It doesn't, and they've been complaining about that.
01:19:29.000They've been writing about that in the New York Times, lamenting the fact that they cannot pull something like this off.
01:19:34.000They need to get Beyonce out there, and they need to get Megan Thee Stallion out there and whoever else to parade them around just to get enough people to come to the stadium.
01:19:45.000And here's Charlie, who's doing it all, sitting here, raw conversation, no script, is in front of a crowd explaining exactly what he's going to do and how he's going to do it, and they have nothing.
01:20:04.000But who's left in the Democratic Party?
01:20:06.000Because as I look at the landscape, we've got the alpha males, we've got such a historic degree of the black vote and the Hispanic vote now for Republicans, and the Democratic Party has been reduced to beta males, transsexuals, lesbians, and the ugliest of angry, lonely women.
01:20:26.000And I say that because the hotties came our way at the end.
01:20:29.000The hotties were late-breaking for the Republicans because they looked at what was going on on the left and they didn't want to be a part of that.
01:20:33.000It's a mystery why you didn't get your confirmation.
01:21:03.000It sounds like one, but it is actually, I think you're correct.
01:21:06.000In all seriousness, you are seeing many women on the Democratic side who vote deferring to males who identify as women instead in a lot of circumstances, in sports and now in Congress.
01:22:29.000That insurgencies will be quelled by Democrat leadership, and they build their political party how they eventually want to build the country.
01:22:37.000They build it as Mao would build his government, which is, it is pure totalitarianism.
01:22:42.000It's a pull-it bureau that if you dare to defect, we are going to pull your parking pass, your wife will be off the board of the Kennedy Center, you're going to get an audit, and your businesses all of a sudden have OSHA and the FTC visit next week.
01:22:57.000Well, there's another feature, and it's bipartisan.
01:22:59.000It's for folks who you think may deviate from the leadership narrative or those directions, you have to dangle something just out of their reach that they're trying to get but don't quite get.
01:23:11.000AOC will be the Democrat lead on oversight in short order or something else, but you have to maintain the fiction that it's the Pelosi echelon of political leadership that actually doles out power.
01:23:24.000And additionally, this is what's important.
01:23:26.000The Republican Party, for all of our problems, is that we have a representative element where we can primary people.
01:23:33.000We are a true political party where if you want to run, you can get rid of the ossified old guard.
01:23:40.000It's so much more interesting, and honestly, what democracy should be is far more alive and well in the Republican Party.
01:23:52.000Now, the question remains, And I don't know the answer to this, is where did the energy go and will it ever come back of that Bernie Sanders rebel, what do they call themselves, our revolution?
01:24:04.000What was the name of the group that drafted AOC? It was a very, very well...
01:24:24.000And we're going to discuss this because I actually think he's on to something.
01:24:27.000And he's been the only one saying it honestly on social media, which is like the Democrat Party has become disgusting and really corporate.
01:24:33.000And I think he's been really consistent about it.
01:24:35.000I don't know if you've been following any of this.
01:24:46.000There's a debate here with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks in that you can take a look at some of these prominent personalities, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, start to sing a different tune once they see what the election ended up being.
01:24:56.000All of a sudden, they realize they're on the wrong side of history.
01:24:58.000And you start hearing them say, well, maybe we do need to shake things up a little bit.
01:25:02.000Maybe, you know, and they're chilling out.
01:25:04.000Or Bill actually going as far as to say, I can't do this anymore.
01:25:07.000Maybe I should quit or something like that.
01:25:09.000So the criticism then becomes that Cenk Uygur is only saying this because his viewership is down and he's been chasing the minority market share and he's realizing he's on the wrong side of history, something that many leftists fear the most.
01:25:20.000Do you think he's sincere when he says that he wants to meet in the middle with populists?
01:25:25.000That would be only with intimate amount of time spent with him would I be able to know the motives.
01:25:30.000What I do think, though, is that he's very smart as a business person, this I totally think, because there's this untapped Democrat media pool of people that are very just like temperamentally left-wing that have no economic populism outlet at all.
01:25:45.000I mean, so at least as a business person, he's communicating to a growing portion.
01:25:49.000Again, I'm not just saying he's just in it for the money or not, like whatever.
01:25:51.000But I think that what he's saying is profoundly interesting, where if Kamala Harris, for example, which of course she wouldn't because she's a technocrat, she's not very smart.
01:26:01.000Would have come out and she would have said, I'm going to secure the border and give you UBI. I'm going to say there's no more billionaires in America and we're going to be able to say that I'm going to relieve your student loan debt and give you a house.
01:26:11.000That would have been very hard to run against.
01:26:13.000In the sense, again, I'm not one to give them ideas.
01:26:17.000You have the world's richest man and a billionaire running for the presidency.
01:26:19.000If the Democrat Party would have ran an anti-billionaire, economic, populist, restrictionist immigration message, that would have been lethal.
01:26:26.000And it would have been very hard because no one would have believed it from Kamala.
01:26:28.000But if that would have ever manifested at the top of the Democrat Party this cycle, that is the only way they could have defeated Donald Trump.
01:26:33.000They could have only defeated populism with populism and done it.
01:26:36.000The immigration thing, they would have had to go to the right.
01:26:39.000If they would have done that, Free stuff populism would have been incredibly hard.
01:26:44.000And that's what I... Cenk has been preaching that message to his, you know...
01:26:48.000I'm not a big Cenk fan, but let's give him a little bit of credit because he did call out Barack Obama's drone program when everyone on the left was acting like he never heard of it.
01:26:57.000And he was canned and fired by MSNBC for not going along with the war propaganda.
01:27:04.000I was just going to say that they didn't realize that that could even be a strategy because they're all stuck in their own echo chamber.
01:27:10.000But now, just like Cenk is kind of turning around, so is AOC. She did a whole live stream saying, hey, the people that voted for me and the people that voted for Trump, come talk to me.
01:28:12.000I was supporting Bernie Sanders in 2015 and 2016. Joe Rogan was supporting Bernie Sanders up until a couple years ago.
01:28:17.000And the Democratic Party has gone insane.
01:28:20.000And you see RFK Jr., you see Tulsi Gabbard, you see Elon Musk.
01:28:24.000You see Donald Trump, you see a bunch of former Democrats leading the Republican charge, and you see over and over again, I love this, they say in the media, where's our version of Joe Rogan, or so help us at Tim Poole.
01:28:35.000We all had that populist energy back then, and they went insane.
01:30:26.000It is not inconceivable if we remain humble and work our tail off and improve the party and stay in a grassroots posture and continue our games with black Hispanics, with young people.
01:30:35.000We keep on owning the internet as we have and we're willing to embrace differences and different ideas and actually have freedom of speech.
01:30:42.000If the Democrat Party continues on their current trajectory with very little changes, which is going to be hard for them to shed some of the trans stuff, it's very, very embedded.
01:30:51.000That is in the DNA of the Democrat Party.
01:31:11.000In the new era, digital stuff, people forget stuff.
01:31:13.000If they get serious, the biggest threat for us is a Bill Clinton-esque Democrat.
01:31:19.000Not a Josh Shapiro, but more like Fetterman, who is cool, understands the free stuff populism, and stands up to the Democrat Party on three things.
01:31:27.000Bill Clinton stood up to the Democrat Party on three things in the 1990s.
01:31:30.000He said, you guys are wrong on crime, on welfare, and immigration.
01:31:33.000He ran on all three, and he basically said to the go take a hike base of the Democrat Party.
01:32:14.000Look, Pete Buttigieg is a little bit worrying in some sense, because...
01:32:18.000He's like so creepily automated that I think to a certain extent he would be, I don't want to say difficult, but different than Kamala.
01:32:27.000But Buttigieg is going to try some of this stuff and he has the biography, but less than the person that we shouldn't get too high on our own supply because if the Democrats really want power back, if we fulfill our mandate and we start doing stuff, they're going to get Jesus very quickly, metaphorically.
01:32:43.000They're going to be like, okay, we have to wise up.
01:32:45.000And by the way, let's just be clear, we as Republicans, We are very, very pro-life, but we also read the room on abortion this last year, right?
01:33:17.000We shouldn't be too prideful to say they won't do that.
01:33:19.000On the abortion issue, it was actually fairly easy for someone like me.
01:33:22.000They went to the extreme end in the other direction.
01:33:24.000There was no compromise on that side, and there was compromise with conservatives on the issue.
01:33:29.000I look at these Democrats outright either denying that they want abortion to the point of birth or being openly for it and telling me that saying maybe there should be restrictions In the first, you know, after the first few weeks or something like this, they said, that's a hard pro-life, far-right position.
01:33:43.000And the celebrating of it was what I think turned a lot of people on.
01:33:55.000And that's not allowed anymore because the Democratic Party, and we were talking about this earlier in terms of You know, how they behave in Congress.
01:34:01.000The one thing that they are super good at is being unified in their message, whatever new fashionable garbage message it is.
01:34:09.000And they're really good at being unified, you know, in their votes.
01:35:01.000As Charlie has taken off, we'll give him a round of applause.
01:35:03.000I just want to say this is incredible, man.
01:35:08.000Listening to what Charlie was saying and primarying these people is a dream come true because I have talked about how I despise these people who run for office and play dirty backroom deals knowing that we can't vote them out for six years and they're hoping that we forget everything they did six years later.
01:35:27.000But our memory gets shorter, not longer, unfortunately.
01:35:32.000And that's why creating the infrastructure around the movement, like Charlie suggested, is the key to success.
01:35:38.000What I encountered was that there was a bastion of senators who felt as though they owed nothing to Donald Trump, that they owed really very little to their voters, and were going to hold their position regardless.
01:36:29.000I think that it would have been a pretty bad situation.
01:36:32.000You know, and I think the Democrats also should look back at that time period because one thing that they did was they launched this resistance, right?
01:36:40.000And the idea of the resistance was not that they were going to consider any specific policy.
01:36:44.000They weren't going to look at Trump and say, oh, he's doing this.
01:36:59.000And they had no consideration for the will of the American voters.
01:37:02.000And this is, I think, what's going on now with, like, Chank and Morning Joe and all of these people, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, who are sort of like, well, maybe we should look at it a little differently.
01:37:12.000Because they spent this whole time just being blatantly oppositional without any substance behind that oppositionalness at all.
01:37:18.000They only care that they're on the wrong side of history.
01:37:20.000Joe Scarborough's been around so many times, it's like a revolution.
01:37:24.000I mean, Joe Scarborough and I both represented the same district in conservative North Florida.
01:37:30.000And then when, you know, MSNBC wrote the $10 million check, he went the other way, and now the advertisers are starting to see the diminished viewership with that myopic view, and he's coming back home, maybe.
01:38:07.000And by the way, at the beginning, I was just like the rest of them.
01:38:11.000I showed up there in Washington and I said, how do you win this game?
01:38:14.000And it's, okay, well, it's this lobbyist who's helping you now, but you could parlay that into this PAC and then this special interest group.
01:38:22.000And then you go from this dinner party to a better dinner party that can get you more money.
01:38:26.000And then a committee, subcommittee chairmanship if you do everything they want.
01:38:30.000If you give your vote card to the leadership and your calendar to the lobby corps, you know, in four years, they'll call you Mr. Chairman and you'll get bigger staff.
01:39:28.000We didn't see the old neoconservative John Bolton bloodthirsty warmongers like we used to see there.
01:39:34.000And we saw a new kind of evolved Republican political party where individuals like Matt Gaetz represent, I think, the exact opposite of what George W. Bush represented.
01:39:43.000So I do have to say it is amazing to see you guys Come along the side of all the liberty-minded people, all the conspiracy-minded people, all the people that love capitalism, that love individuality, that right there, love health, love taking care of themselves.
01:39:58.000That revolution right there is something worth noting because this change allowed us to be where we are here today.
01:40:10.000But Luke, I give you guys credit, too.
01:40:12.000The libertarians, the anarchists, it was very hard at times to maintain a coalition with a group of people who resist coalitions by their very nature.
01:41:03.000And truly, I've been working with the Russell Burke case for a very long time.
01:41:08.000seeing him walk free in the next few days is going to be something that's going to have a huge ripple effect amongst all the American people that will understand that freedom is capable.
01:41:20.000The wrongs could be fixed just because we all came together and decided to put our differences aside, which is huge.
01:41:26.000The other day, Donald Trump was giving a press conference, and one of the reporters says, are you considering a preemptive strike against Iran?
01:41:31.000And he's like, how am I supposed to answer a question like that?
01:41:36.000Because normally you'd get some stock garbage answer.
01:41:40.000This is a guy who is completely willing to just talk like a person.
01:41:44.000So when we saw him at the Libertarian Convention, reading from a prompter saying, like, here's what I want to do, and then he's getting laughs, then he's getting boos, he goes, fine, then you get 3%, you lose.
01:42:06.000Well, if you're always trying to obtain the front row seat, the chairmanship, the leadership title, then you become compromised because you're willing to give away a little bit more of yourself to achieve that objective.
01:42:20.000And these people work themselves into a psychological just mystery where...
01:42:26.000If they advance, they believe in their own virtue so much that any non-virtuous thing you have to do to support your own advancement is justified.
01:42:36.000And after a while, you're nothing but a valet for the lobbyists and special interests who are destroying the country.
01:42:43.000And so I joked with my little crew that sat with me that we were making backbenching great again because we didn't owe anyone anything.
01:42:50.000We were willing to communicate directly to the people, and also we weren't afraid of losing.
01:42:55.000I was so inspired by Congressman Eli Crane of this fine state when he walked in to the Speaker's office and said, I have face down, like, you know, the...
01:43:17.000That is really the hope with Trump coming back, is that all of these husks of humans I served with in the United States Congress will actually grow a spine and stand up and fight for the people who are counting on them to deliver the results that we've all been promised.
01:43:32.000I was just going to say, I think that you were kind of exceptional because you have a big personality and things like that.
01:43:38.000I know members of Congress that I've worked for, they came in and they wanted to do the right thing.
01:43:43.000They said, I'm coming down here, I'm going to do the right thing.
01:43:46.000And then, you know, they didn't make the right vote for leadership.
01:43:49.000And all of a sudden, they were getting no committee assignments and nobody wanted to co-sponsor their bills.
01:44:22.000And so if you hold that as yours, right, that is empowering.
01:44:26.000What I found is that I own my five minutes.
01:44:28.000When I had one of these dirtbags in front of me from the Biden administration or even some of the bad ones from the Trump administration, I had five minutes to ask whatever questions I wanted and no one could take that away from me.
01:44:39.000And I used that as a way to expose a lot of the problems going on.
01:46:09.000I'm going to stop spending my money on this.
01:46:11.000Everything changes because you're able to see things clearly.
01:46:14.000I mean, getting rid of the fluoride from the drinking water, which RFK Jr. is promising, could unleash the full potential of the American public to be finally unleashed and have their pineal glands decalcified.
01:46:24.000That larger potential, that neurotoxin being cut away from the water drinking supply could essentially allow America to be a leader on the world stage when it comes to intelligence, when it comes to health, and when it comes to being the change that you want to see in this world.
01:46:37.000And that's beautiful, and that's amazing to see.
01:46:39.000Well, pharmaceutical companies, their big goal is to make sure that we're all lifelong medical patients.
01:46:44.000That's why they love the concept of trans child so much.
01:46:46.000Because they put you on drugs when you're 12 years old.
01:46:49.000They start cutting up your body at like 14. And then by the time you're like 50, 60 years old, you can't do without the drugs that they are feeding you.
01:46:56.000They've infiltrated the medical schools too.
01:46:59.000They're the ones that are paying the medical schools.
01:47:02.000They're the ones that are writing the textbooks.
01:47:04.000And so even the doctors are now brainwashed by the big pharma companies.
01:47:09.000There's a larger narrative here that we're actually discussing, and that's the idea of agency for the individual, which is something that is very common on the right that the left really doesn't have.
01:47:24.000Add fuel to that fire inside of people that want to take responsibility for themselves, whether it be taking responsibility for your own life as in your health or taking responsibility for your own income by starting a business.
01:47:36.000These are things that the right needs to be...
01:47:39.000We need to remind the right that this is the home of that kind of mentality.
01:47:58.000They want the government to lock everything down when they're scared.
01:48:00.000But these are also people who don't follow the news, don't pay attention.
01:48:04.000They just follow whatever line they're told, whatever talking point, because they don't want or have the agency to do it themselves.
01:48:13.000It's scary to take responsibility for yourself.
01:48:16.000If you are responsible, then you're the one that's to blame when things go wrong.
01:48:20.000And that's a hard thing for a lot of people to deal with.
01:48:23.000But the founders of this country and the people that make America actually great are the people that will stand up and say, I've got this great idea and I can go do it.
01:48:34.000And it's that attitude of self-reliance and Belief in yourself that makes America stand head and shoulders above every other country in the world.
01:48:43.000It's a lot better than being ruled by a death cult.
01:48:45.000Yeah, I'm often asked, though, well, Matt, you know, the Democrats, they always just do whatever Pelosi says or whatever Schumer says, and the Republicans, it's like herding cats with all you going every direction, and this is why.
01:48:57.000Because they value the collective, and oftentimes we rejoice in an individual expression of courage or intellect or creativity or beauty, and they don't have the same appreciation for it.
01:49:08.000You know, we're in this massive convention center.
01:49:39.000UFC, as popular as it is with the entire country, it's on the big screen at every sports book and casino and every wing stop or whatever restaurant, and there is Donald Trump walking out as a part of this massive cultural institution.
01:49:54.000Seeing stuff like this and then thinking about what is even existing on the other side, it's...
01:49:59.000I can't help but feel extreme optimism for what's coming next year with Charlie talking about how we're going to primary all these bad Republicans.
01:50:07.000The conversation wasn't even about how we stop bad Democrats.
01:50:10.000It was, now that we've done that, we're going to go for the bad Republicans.
01:50:14.000We are building the cultural institutions.
01:50:21.000We are swinging everything in our direction, and now we're going to clean up everything on this side, too.
01:50:25.000It's But we have to hold their feet to the fire, because we always say this, and then it comes time to get rid of Obamacare or whatever, and the Republicans do nothing.
01:50:33.000But don't you feel hope from what you just saw this last week?
01:50:46.000It's not great, but it is better than they have ever.
01:50:49.000What they do, they back members up against the Christmas holiday, and they say, if you want to go see your family for Christmas, you're going to vote for what the swamp wants.
01:50:56.000And they've done it every time until now.
01:50:59.000And Lisa, you know better than most people, considering your work with Congress and stuff, the idea that with the margins that we have now, that we're going to get in there, and Republicans are going to be able to get everything they want, you know that because of just the way the numbers work, you have to do some kind of deal to get anything done at all.
01:51:40.000I look at people like Eli Crane, and Ana Paulina Luna, and Corey Mills, and, you know, Andy Biggs, and I am heartened that there are patriots who put the congressional pin on every day and go do that job.
01:52:05.000It is remarkable how when all that fighting is going down in the House, hopefully again on the 3rd when you're there to cast that vote, that it seems so obvious to all of us here that this is a broken machine and none of these people are operating honestly.
01:52:22.000There's a lot of retaliation that goes on.
01:52:50.000I've seen McCarthy do some horrible things to people, and like, yeah, because they didn't vote for him for a speaker, and they held this person down and made them a laughingstock and wouldn't let anybody sign on bills.
01:52:59.000I remember when things were going on with Madison Coulthorn, and he had a great bill, and people were like, no piece of pride, don't put your name next to it.
01:53:06.000Same thing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, and it was disgusting.
01:53:09.000So it was like Congress is like, Like, even if they were 100% a part of the bill, like, they loved it, they left everything in it, just because it had Marjorie's name on it, or just because it had Cawthorn's name on it, nope, they didn't even want to be a co-sponsor.
01:55:10.000She came up to me when we were making the demands on McCarthy for stuff that even the Democrats wanted, the ability to have votes on our amendments, single-subject bills, so stuff isn't all jammed together.
01:55:22.000And she came up to me after the first time...
01:55:43.000Well, yeah, and you know what she got for it?
01:55:44.000She got the Financial Services Committee and the Oversight Committee.
01:55:48.000And so the most dangerous thing you can do if you're a new member of Congress coming in is to let them know what you want.
01:55:54.000Right, interesting, because then they'll hold it against you.
01:55:57.000Or give it to you in exchange for a compromise that is so deep that it even has somebody that was rooting for her to prevail in that election utterly discouraged.
01:56:07.000We have about five minutes left, so I want to give everybody the opportunity to give their final thoughts and just, you know, shout-outs or whatever.
01:56:18.0002024. It's the year that the deep state failed.
01:56:22.0002024, it's the year that the corporate prostitute media is done and finished.
01:56:28.0002024 is the rise of the populist, America first, silent majority that said enough is enough.
01:56:34.000Liberty and freedom over all over the woke world.
01:56:39.000Which was freaking amazing and beautiful to see.
01:56:42.000This larger coalition that we're building is incredible.
01:56:44.000Let's keep it moving forward, and let's keep it moving forward, not with government, but with individuals taking direct action by making themselves the best version of themselves.
01:57:00.000I just want to say that I'm really grateful to you guys for coming out, and I'm really grateful to Tim for having me on tonight.
01:57:07.000And coming to Turning Point, I've been coming for four years, and it always just gives me so much hope that there's so many people out here who are passionate, who have so much going on in their lives.
01:57:17.000Who are so excited about the future, about their kids, and about their families.
01:57:22.000And I'm really, you know, I'm just so impressed with everybody that I've met here this time around and, you know, in the past years.
01:57:28.000And I just want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.
01:57:30.000I hope that if you're celebrating with family or eating the Christmas special at Denny's, you have a great day.
01:58:25.000And it was because of things like X, because of free speech, because of people like you being involved.
01:58:35.000Like, it's great that you're here at AmFest, and it's great that Charlie puts this on, but the fact that Actual, tangible results are real and possible is probably the best white pill that you can have, right?
01:58:48.000So, for everybody out there that thinks that it's not possible to affect the government or impact the government, it has never been more possible than it is right now.
01:58:58.000So, if you've been blackpilled or you've had a bad outlook, remember, Donald Trump did win.
01:59:22.000One of the original sins of the censorship industrial complex was that One America News was taken off of DirecTV, not because of any legitimate diminution in people watching their program because they didn't like the viewpoints that were expressed.
01:59:39.000I'm going to have a show on One American News because they are a feisty network.