Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - Timcast IRL - Matt Gaetz Joins, Discussing Biden Special Counsel and GOP Investigations

00:00:00.000 So that speaker vote in the house was something else.

00:00:28.000 And, uh, we watched, I think McCarthy lose, what was it, 15 times?

00:00:32.000 Fourteen.

00:00:33.000 Fourteen times.

00:00:33.000 The 15th was when he won.

00:00:35.000 So anyway, I'm losing my voice.

00:00:37.000 I didn't do my normal morning segments and we're just going to jump into it and talk about what's going on with Congress because Matt Gaetz is here and he's already told us a whole bunch of crazy-ish that we're like, that can't be true.

00:00:48.000 And he's like, yeah.

00:00:49.000 And I'm like, okay, so let's just jump into the show.

00:00:52.000 Smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, become a member at TimCast.com.

00:00:56.000 Let's do a quick run of introductions.

00:00:56.000 We got everybody here.

00:00:58.000 We're hanging out with Matt Gaetz.

00:00:59.000 Good to see you guys.

00:01:00.000 Thanks for having me.

00:01:01.000 I think everybody knows who you are, but brief introduction for those who maybe don't.

00:01:04.000 I represent Florida's 1st Congressional District, been in Congress since my election in 2016.

00:01:09.000 I'm on the Armed Services and Judiciary Committees.

00:01:12.000 Well done.

00:01:13.000 For now.

00:01:14.000 For now.

00:01:15.000 Hey guys, my name's Zuckerdowski here of wearechanged.org.

00:01:17.000 Today I'm wearing a very eloquent, polite statement perfect for dinner parties that says Joe and the blank got to go.

00:01:25.000 A shirt that you can get on TheBestPoliticalShirts.com because you guys do that.

00:01:29.000 That's why I am here.

00:01:30.000 Thank you again so much for having me.

00:01:31.000 I'm really glad you're here, man.

00:01:33.000 An hour away from D.C.

00:01:34.000 we are.

00:01:35.000 This should be happening frequently to get the word of the people out from our representatives to the people.

00:01:41.000 Let's keep using this tech.

00:01:42.000 Anyway, let's keep going.

00:01:43.000 Serge, what's happening?

00:01:43.000 Hey, I'm Serge.com.

00:01:44.000 What's up, guys?

00:01:45.000 Stoked that you're here.

00:01:46.000 It's going to be a good one.

00:01:47.000 All right, let's just jump into it.

00:01:49.000 So, Matt, you stood up to Kevin McCarthy, to the GOP establishment, several times as an understatement, and we watched for that week or so, and we were laughing the whole time.

00:02:04.000 I am stoked that you're here because I think what you did was awesome, but I'm curious to learn about the details.

00:02:09.000 I heard about this Shadow document.

00:02:11.000 Apparently you and several others cut some kind of deal or finally got McCarthy to cave in and give you guys something.

00:02:18.000 Then we heard there's going to be a floor vote to abolish the IRS.

00:02:22.000 Just tell us what's going on because, you know, we're getting it all secondhand.

00:02:27.000 Look, we believed that Washington was broken.

00:02:30.000 The normal system of selecting leadership in both parties is based on the redistribution of lobbyists and special interest money.

00:02:39.000 If you want to be the leader of your party, you basically have to raise and redistribute North of $100 million.

00:02:46.000 And Kevin McCarthy was so good at that, he raised and distributed about half a billion dollars over the course of the last election cycle.

00:02:54.000 And so it creates a covenant that's not really built on trust or merit or vision, but trading money for political support.

00:03:06.000 And we wanted to send a shock to that DC cartel system and say, no, guess what?

00:03:11.000 There's gonna have to be a different way you get there.

00:03:13.000 And the concessions we sought principally fell into like three buckets.

00:03:19.000 Policy.

00:03:20.000 We wanted specific bills coming to the floor.

00:03:23.000 We wanted commitments on when they would come to the floor.

00:03:26.000 We wanted adherence to specific spending levels with a budget resolution.

00:03:33.000 And the organizing principle of our policy goals was really to make sure that we would never again get an omnibus bill.

00:03:39.000 Like we had to vote on?

00:03:40.000 That's just a total joke of a way of governing.

00:03:42.000 Like, how can we sit here and honestly say that bills that are thousands of pages long that spend 1.7 trillion dollars and that you get 48 hours before having to cast a vote is really legislating?

00:03:54.000 It's not.

00:03:55.000 It devalues each individual member and it's insulting to our constituents to suggest that we even know what the hell we're doing when that's the way we run the railroad.

00:04:04.000 So we had policy concessions.

00:04:05.000 Second was procedure.

00:04:07.000 You know, having those 72 hours to read the bill.

00:04:10.000 Having open amendments.

00:04:13.000 The youngest member of Congress was not yet born the last time the appropriations process went through regular order.

00:04:21.000 And that just means, like, we should vote on the defense stuff separately, and then vote on, like, the education stuff, and then the health and human services stuff, and that it doesn't just all get mushed together so somebody can vote for a bunch of bullshit that you wouldn't otherwise approve, and then say, well, I had to vote for it to fund our troops, right?

00:04:39.000 That's the game.

00:04:40.000 That's what the cartel builds, and lobbyists make a gazillion dollars off of that.

00:04:44.000 The final leg of the stool is personnel.

00:04:46.000 Like, in order to enforce the deal that we got, we wanted specific people on specific committees, in specific leadership posts, and, you know, what's the saying?

00:04:57.000 You rob the banks because that's where the money's at.

00:04:59.000 Well, we wanted Far more representation on the Appropriations Committee because that's where the money is.

00:05:04.000 And a lot of Americans don't know what the Rules Committee is or why that's important, but it totally governs what we get to vote on and what we don't get to vote on.

00:05:14.000 And so we demanded specific people and specific representation on the Rules Committee.

00:05:19.000 I think we're going to be in a lot stronger position as a result.

00:05:22.000 I heard a few critiques during this process.

00:05:25.000 One is like, this was chaos.

00:05:27.000 You showed the country how rough and tumble this is and you should have done this behind closed doors. 0.97

00:05:34.000 To hell with that, man. 0.99

00:05:35.000 Behind closed doors is where the American people have been getting screwed. 0.98

00:05:38.000 And so I wanted to level my complaint on the House floor specifically.

00:05:43.000 I wanted to cite the people that I was objecting to and their ascension to leadership.

00:05:48.000 And so I didn't, that didn't mind.

00:05:51.000 And then like, it's like, oh, no, this took this, you burned your whole first week.

00:05:55.000 There are days in Congress where the only thing we vote on is the renaming of one post office.

00:06:01.000 There are days in Congress where the only thing we vote on are the rules that govern the next vote.

00:06:08.000 And we take six weeks off every year for summer vacation where we do absolutely nothing.

00:06:13.000 So to take four days to say, this is the policy, this is the procedure, this is the personnel that is going to drive the Republican team going forward seems like the best use of time since I've been there.

00:06:24.000 So that was the general construct.

00:06:26.000 I mean, that's amazing.

00:06:28.000 Why was it only 20 members of Congress willing to stand up?

00:06:31.000 Well, I mean, first of all, the frontline members, even the frontline, and when I say the frontline members, I mean members that are in districts that are 51-49, maybe even districts that Joe Biden won by a substantial portion, right?

00:06:43.000 They had a loyalty to Kevin and an argument that was something like this.

00:06:48.000 Well, Matt, if a guy goes out there and spends, you know, four years Taking money from the lobbyists and giving that money to us, and then in the last minute you knife that person, no one will ever agree to be the valet for those people ever again.

00:07:03.000 And we need that delivery system of resources, and so it's not about how much we like or don't like McCarthy, it's about a system that we rely on to resource our campaigns.

00:07:15.000 And I mean, that's a pretty astonishing argument, but it at least has a logical construct.

00:07:22.000 And then, you know, there are people who fear disrupting the system.

00:07:27.000 They think, look, I got here to Congress.

00:07:29.000 I've got a staff that tells me I'm always losing weight and that my jokes are funny.

00:07:32.000 Like I go home and I'm the big cheese at the Rotary Club, and to every extent that I can have calm waters, the better, and anything that creates turbulence, I oppose.

00:07:43.000 And that's actually a pretty big swath of the Republican conference and the Democrat conference.

00:07:47.000 That is how the Uniparty gets to groupthink.

00:07:50.000 And I hear all this time these geriatric senators talking about, like, oh, the importance of These great bipartisan achievements, but so often in my life, the greatest moments of unity have been the worst for the people. 0.79

00:08:03.000 There was a shit ton of unity to pass the Patriot Act.

00:08:07.000 We never thought it was actually going to be used against patriots. 0.85

00:08:10.000 We thought it was going to be used against Arabs in faraway lands.

00:08:14.000 There was a whole lot of unity over the Iraq War.

00:08:17.000 Everybody was for that.

00:08:18.000 There was a ton of unity for the COVID lockdowns.

00:08:20.000 There was a ton of unity for just printing money and sending it to people that weren't working.

00:08:25.000 And so, like, whenever they're the bills that are, like, the major bills that have 90-95% support, that's when you need to be most worried at times.

00:08:33.000 You fear retaliation?

00:08:35.000 No, because we built the tools in that would allow us to have the accountability.

00:08:40.000 I mean, Nancy Pelosi is going to go down in history as the last of the imperial speakers that centralized power and that then, you know, only doled out to members, oh, well, you can go rename a post office. 0.99

00:08:51.000 You can go create a task force.

00:08:53.000 Meanwhile, the macroeconomic decisions, the major cultural and policy decisions, all get centralized in the speaker's office.

00:09:01.000 Where a lot of the staff all went to like Northeastern schools and are afraid of things like fried food and guns and, you know, people who enjoy those things, right?

00:09:10.000 And Paul Ryan gave an interview on CNN yesterday that was really telling, where he even confessed, like, I had too much power as speaker.

00:09:18.000 Like, way too many of those decisions were made without the people who had spent years analyzing policies, seeing which programs had varying levels of efficacy.

00:09:29.000 And so While, you know, McCarthy, I think to his credit, at the end of the day was willing to devolve a lot of that power.

00:09:37.000 We reinstituted the one-member motion to vacate the chair.

00:09:40.000 So, for any reason, at any time, any member can go to the floor and call for a vote to remove the Speaker of the House, and if 218 people vote for that motion, then the Speaker is gone.

00:09:52.000 Now, I don't want to use that, I don't intend to use that, but I think having it on the books is healthy for the institution so that there isn't fear of retaliation for doing what's right.

00:10:02.000 The Speaker works for us, the people, and should be On a whim, taken out.

00:10:02.000 Yeah, it is.

00:10:08.000 I mean, I think that those people are there to represent us.

00:10:10.000 If they're not representing us, they should be removed instantly.

00:10:12.000 Thank you.

00:10:12.000 I love that idea.

00:10:13.000 I mean, they should at least read the bills, right?

00:10:15.000 If you're going to pass a bill, if you're going to pass a law, read them, for freak's sakes.

00:10:20.000 One of the things Ian's brought up is that it should be illegal to vote on a bill that you didn't read.

00:10:26.000 What do you think about that?

00:10:28.000 Well, I mean, then we wouldn't be taking many votes.

00:10:30.000 I mean, there was a moment during all of this where people were like, Well, Gates, if you and your 20 holdouts stay that way, then we won't even be able to organize!

00:10:40.000 And I'm thinking, well, give us a lot of leverage on the debt limit, you know, if we didn't constitute the House.

00:10:45.000 So yeah, maybe sometimes, like, you know, a reflexive legislative body isn't what's good for the country.

00:10:51.000 Maybe less government is good, which I think historically that point is proven many times over and over again.

00:10:57.000 But I think it's fair to say that there was also a lot of contention between you and a lot of other people.

00:11:02.000 I know Donald Trump was also calling in specifically.

00:11:05.000 Can you get into some of the contention that was happening there?

00:11:07.000 Because it looked pretty intense.

00:11:09.000 It looked pretty crazy.

00:11:10.000 And there was also one specific photo of you sitting there, and there was a guy in your face.

00:11:15.000 And it was a famous video and a famous picture that had the caption, Exist and you were kind of cool and standing your ground there.

00:11:24.000 Can you tell us what was happening there behind the scenes?

00:11:27.000 Well, first of all, I don't get rattled when people yell at me in public because it happens like three times a week So for a lot of members of Congress like having your colleagues like upset at you or yelling at you like that's deeply uncomfortable and really that did not affect my week at all because what I knew is that our argument about how corrupt and how Flawed the decision-making is in Washington was getting out and that it was and that was breaking through I think the contention was overplayed because of the cameras.

00:11:55.000 The late Don Young almost pulled a knife on me on the floor because I wouldn't vote for a bill that he had regarding sea lions or something like that.

00:12:06.000 There are always contentious moments.

00:12:08.000 But usually if you just have that one C-span camera angle and not the dynamic angles to

00:12:12.000 see how people are interacting, you don't capture a lot of it. So look, any body where you've got 435

00:12:18.000 people, you've got a variety of different alliances and opinions and grievances that change over time.

00:12:24.000 I think that one of the interesting arguments for term limits, and I'm very glad we're getting an

00:12:30.000 actual vote on term limits because everybody talks about it in their campaigns, but they

00:12:33.000 never vote on it, is that the churn ensures that long-standing boomer grudges don't become

00:12:40.000 a governing principle.

00:12:42.000 Look, now, if somebody who's the lead person on financial services or on the Ways and Means Committee just hates you, you're not going to get your idea through, and they can just outlast you.

00:12:53.000 Whereas in a term limits environment, those grudges dissolve every time the Congress turns over, the legislative body turns over.

00:13:01.000 You mentioned the debt ceiling a little bit ago.

00:13:03.000 You guys are about to vote on a debt ceiling?

00:13:05.000 In the next four months.

00:13:06.000 So my whole life I've been watching them incrementally raise the debt ceiling over and over and over.

00:13:10.000 And the thing is, from my point of view, it's supposed to be a ceiling.

00:13:14.000 That you don't print more money than that, because that's the ceiling.

00:13:16.000 So can we make a realistic debt ceiling of 1.4 quadrillion?

00:13:20.000 Just say, we're going to get there eventually?

00:13:22.000 We can survive this amount.

00:13:24.000 We're going to print another $7,000 trillion.

00:13:27.000 Because I think we are going to.

00:13:29.000 I don't know.

00:13:30.000 Do you think maybe we won't?

00:13:31.000 What do you think about that idea?

00:13:33.000 Is that just too far out?

00:13:35.000 Well, you're right that it's a joke because there is no real plan to ensure that we have a cap on that which we will borrow and spend.

00:13:45.000 And I think the reason this continues to get worse on the books is because regular Americans don't feel the pain of the national debt in an approximate way.

00:13:57.000 If an illegal immigrant runs over your family member, you feel that, right? 1.00

00:14:03.000 If someone in your household loses their job, there's a direct impact you see.

00:14:08.000 If the factory that your mom worked at goes to Chihuahua, Mexico, that is a traceable thing.

00:14:15.000 But so long as we're the global reserve currency, we're able to sort of exist in this era of expanding debt.

00:14:23.000 Now, we're starting to pay the price with rising inflation.

00:14:27.000 But, you know, there is no real lobby or special interest for less spending in Washington.

00:14:34.000 Like, that's the problem.

00:14:35.000 Go on K Street, throw a rock, and you're going to hit someone who's paid a lot of money to get more spending in one way or the other.

00:14:43.000 And so, like, the way we compromise is just by doing all of it.

00:14:47.000 Whether it's defense, non-defense, discretionary, non-discretionary, mandatory.

00:14:52.000 And that is how the Uniparty works.

00:14:55.000 So the demand we put with the leverage we had in the Speaker's race was that the House of Representatives must pass a budget resolution at the 2022 spending levels.

00:15:07.000 So roll this thing back a couple years.

00:15:10.000 And it's similar to like in 2015 when they did cut, cap and balance.

00:15:14.000 And so here, all of what we do has to go under those spending levels.

00:15:18.000 And look, it's going to mean some cuts in areas that I support, like defense.

00:15:22.000 But if we've got to cut defense, maybe we ought to cut all the money we spend defending other nations far away, like Ukraine.

00:15:30.000 Hey, Pakistan needs their gender studies, okay? 1.00

00:15:32.000 I think it's imperative for the world that we finance that, as well as, you know, beagle torture by Dr. Fauci.

00:15:38.000 We need to finance that.

00:15:39.000 Who else is going to do it unless we do it?

00:15:41.000 So, I'm just being facetious here, but obviously there's a lot of wheeling and dealing in Washington, D.C., and we saw that through, of course, this larger vote for the Speaker of the House.

00:15:51.000 You saw a lot of it.

00:15:52.000 We saw a lot of people like MTG, also a lot of individuals like Thomas Macy, not really kind of join your cause there.

00:15:58.000 Are you able to speak about some of the deals that were being made there and what was being negotiated behind the scenes?

00:16:05.000 Because we know publicly there was a lot said, but there was also a lot of closed door meetings that we didn't get to see.

00:16:10.000 Are you able to talk about those?

00:16:11.000 Sure, I mean Thomas Massey, while he voted for McCarthy on every ballot, he was there with us in the back rooms helping write a lot of the fiscal policy that ended up undergirding the agreement.

00:16:24.000 And MTG, you know, she is an inspirational force.

00:16:27.000 I consider her Probably my closest ally in all of Congress.

00:16:32.000 And she deserves to be on committees. 1.00

00:16:36.000 And what the Democrats did to her was so wrong and so egregious.

00:16:40.000 And I think that she had an earlier understanding with Speaker McCarthy that she would get back on committees, that they would be meaningful committees, that they would tailor to her skill set.

00:16:50.000 And I think that was sufficient for her to support him.

00:16:53.000 We sought some broader structural changes.

00:16:56.000 We achieved those.

00:16:57.000 The changes and concessions we got out of McCarthy are only going to endure to the benefit of MTG because she's one of our more dynamic and fearless members.

00:17:07.000 I like Kevin's behavior the last week.

00:17:10.000 McCarthy.

00:17:11.000 How would you rate him being Speaker of the House this week?

00:17:15.000 Well, one of the things that was not in the rules but was part of our addendum agreement was that the 14,000 hours had to be released of the footage from January 6th, and the Speaker has custodial oversight of a lot of those records and he made that

00:17:30.000 commitment and then today he reaffirmed it publicly that that's exactly what we're going to do. So

00:17:35.000 yeah, you know, trust is a series of promises kept and I believe that McCarthy

00:17:40.000 deserves the opportunity to keep the promises he made and so far he's on the right track. Is

00:17:46.000 he going to have a grudge against you?

00:17:47.000 I don't know that I'm going to be on his Christmas card list, but you know, it doesn't like that.

00:17:52.000 That's not really what it's about. You know, he...

00:17:54.000 He knows very clearly what my objectives are and what it took to get us to go forward with a speaker, and he is performing to that expectation.

00:18:04.000 It's not personal for me, it's business.

00:18:06.000 I'd love to get you guys in together to debate live on the show.

00:18:09.000 It'd be hot.

00:18:10.000 What would the best outcome of that have been?

00:18:13.000 Jim Jordan or Byron Donalds?

00:18:15.000 Look, I think that Jim Jordan is our most talented member.

00:18:20.000 I think he's our hardest working member.

00:18:22.000 He is one of my mentors.

00:18:23.000 He inspires me.

00:18:25.000 But, you know, it got to a point where there were six holdouts, where we didn't want to drive McCarthy into the arms of the Democrats, right?

00:18:33.000 So once the margin gets that low, McCarthy could, in theory, have gone to the Democrats, gotten, you know, four, five, six of them to get instant COVID in exchange for draining our subpoena authority.

00:18:44.000 And then he would have ascended to the speakership anyway.

00:18:47.000 All of the features of our deal would have dissolved.

00:18:50.000 And then every time we didn't send a subpoena to hold government accountable, he could have said, well, that's Matt Gaetz's fault.

00:18:55.000 So we didn't want to put him in that position, the country in that position, the House in that position.

00:18:59.000 And so that's why we crafted what we thought was a deal that was not reliant on trust, but that had clear enforcement triggers.

00:19:08.000 Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, they're getting removed from their committees, right?

00:19:11.000 Yeah.

00:19:12.000 Do you think that's a good thing?

00:19:14.000 Yeah.

00:19:14.000 I think that the Democrats kind of, you know, crossed the Rubicon on this when they threw MTG and Gosar off committees without a basis.

00:19:22.000 And there is sufficient basis with Schiff in particular.

00:19:26.000 I agree.

00:19:26.000 And, you know, Swalwell.

00:19:29.000 I don't think the grave Swalwell emergency is the Fang Fang thing.

00:19:33.000 I think it's more the role he played in the Russia hoax.

00:19:36.000 When you go out there and say there's evidence that the President of the United States is a Russian agent, and then you don't deliver on that, you shouldn't get to serve on the major committees that have access to the most sensitive intelligence on the planet Earth.

00:19:49.000 I agree.

00:19:50.000 And Adam Schiff... But like the Fang Fang thing.

00:19:52.000 Poor Fang Fang. 1.00

00:19:54.000 Listen, listen, the Internet is not going to like what I have to say.

00:19:59.000 Maybe.

00:19:59.000 But within the Republican conference, I am Swalwell's biggest defender on the Fang Fang thing, and here is why.

00:20:05.000 He was a city councilman in the city of Dublin and some chick showed up with money wanting to hook up with him.

00:20:10.000 You think that like he's a single guy like running around Southern or running around California and he's supposed to have like the defensive briefing to turn down some like hot Chinese chick that was wanting to like donate money and jump in bed with him.

00:20:23.000 He wasn't a member of Congress.

00:20:24.000 He didn't have access to intelligence.

00:20:26.000 What most sensitive information he was working on was like the sewage system of the city of Dublin.

00:20:30.000 Was he with Fang Fang while he was in Congress?

00:20:31.000 give the guy a break for that, what you don't give him a break for is then coming here and

00:20:36.000 weaving these whole lies onto half-truths to try to destabilize the presidency in the

00:20:42.000 country.

00:20:43.000 That's far more egregious than the Fang Fang thing.

00:20:44.000 Was he with Fang Fang while he was in Congress?

00:20:46.000 No!

00:20:47.000 That was when he was on the city council somewhere in nowhere California.

00:20:51.000 But there's also with Adam Schiff the release of phone records of private citizens and Nunes.

00:20:56.000 Yeah, well Schiff is truly the worst member of Congress.

00:21:02.000 It's like looking into the eyes of evil with that guy. 0.94

00:21:04.000 I was going to say, I think he's an evil man.

00:21:05.000 He has no reflection.

00:21:08.000 What is going on?

00:21:09.000 And if you bring garlic around, his skin starts to burn.

00:21:12.000 I haven't talked to him, but I think he's got that same mindset that he's like, these people are evil.

00:21:15.000 And then other people are like, he's evil.

00:21:17.000 Like, what is going on?

00:21:17.000 Is this a breakdown in communication or something?

00:21:20.000 He held up an envelope on TV saying that it was proof Trump colluded with Russia or whatever, and that he couldn't show anybody.

00:21:25.000 That's what happened.

00:21:26.000 It's been a while.

00:21:27.000 Yeah.

00:21:27.000 Well, and then he like made up.

00:21:29.000 a construct of a transcript between Zelensky and Trump that just didn't happen.

00:21:35.000 It was just willed into existence by his imagination.

00:21:39.000 And I mean, he's done such damage to our intelligence community.

00:21:43.000 And like, there is a place for the United States to like, know what's going on in the world.

00:21:50.000 Usually knowledge is power, right?

00:21:52.000 But the way he weaponized it, and it really started with a lot of the Obama people.

00:21:57.000 Say what you will about Obama, the guy was good at vertically integrating personnel in a lot of these agencies where the bureaucracy would bend to their will.

00:22:06.000 Like, if there's a fair critique of Trump, it's that, you know, he was this great visionary, but oftentimes the people that were two, three, four layers down were working against him, and he didn't roll into the presidency with this terrific Rolodex of people that could go and operate at that level.

00:22:21.000 Whereas, you know, Schiff, Obama, like, these people were good at getting people in place to drive action, and we should learn from that.

00:22:30.000 Is it because they were hooked up with the liberal economic order at the time, and, like, they just had all the backing of Right.

00:22:37.000 If you're part of the prevailing way of thinking, the national security state, the neoconservative worldview, there's an entire infrastructure there to build out your career.

00:22:47.000 There are endowed professorships.

00:22:50.000 There are think tanks that are ready to give you six-figure jobs.

00:22:53.000 There's a career progression of jobs on the Hill.

00:22:55.000 But if you think differently, you're kind of hunted.

00:22:58.000 You're hunted, canceled.

00:23:00.000 They do everything to compromise you.

00:23:01.000 And if that doesn't work, they try to destroy you.

00:23:04.000 There's a lot of compromise, especially in Washington, D.C., but how deep does the rabbit hole go?

00:23:10.000 Because there's a lot of people talking about, you know, the deep state, the intelligence agencies having a lot of control, using a lot of extortion, special interest groups pulling the strings here.

00:23:19.000 What's your understanding of how things really work in Washington, D.C., compared to what the average American kind of sees?

00:23:24.000 Well, I think the most corrupt foray into this is freshman orientation.

00:23:32.000 Because you show up here, and I mean, imagine showing up from Northwest Arkansas, from Southern Mississippi, and you see the architecture of D.C.

00:23:42.000 They take you out to the finest steakhouse, the best wine you've ever had, and co-located at your table are the lobbyists for the major special interests for the committees that you're interested that you want to serve on.

00:23:53.000 So, like, I get here and they're like, oh, Gates, you want to be on the Armed Services Committee.

00:23:57.000 Have you met these defense contractors?

00:23:59.000 These are the key lobbyists that round up the defense money.

00:24:02.000 And they put you with them from the very beginning.

00:24:04.000 And you sort of get the joke that if you give your vote card to the leadership and your calendar to the lobby corps, you just kind of get enveloped into a system that's there to nurture you and protect you and keep you out of harm's way.

00:24:16.000 And all it costs you is your own belief set.

00:24:19.000 And I don't think that's compromise so much as selling out.

00:24:22.000 Now, you know, so that is like step one.

00:24:25.000 And that catches a whole lot of the people who get here.

00:24:29.000 And then beyond that, if you kind of resist that system, then they do try to extort you, engage in anything they can do to compromise you, cancel you, find some joke that you liked on Instagram years ago that doesn't fit with the mores

00:24:45.000 of this time. Find some email that you were on the forward chain of that's some basis to say that

00:24:51.000 you're a white supremacist or you're some sort of unacceptable human that can't be in polite 0.99

00:24:56.000 company. And then if that doesn't work, it's abject destruction through the political process where 1.00

00:25:02.000 there are many, many dollars lined up solely for the extermination of those who push

00:25:09.000 back against the narrative.

00:25:11.000 Yeah, this is detailed extensively in books like The Economic Hitman that I think are definitely worth reading and checking out here.

00:25:17.000 But talking to previous members of Congress, it's really kind of daunting to see what they have to go through, how much pressure they have to go through, how much agreement they have to agree to before even getting into some of those positions of power.

00:25:29.000 On the dues, it's money.

00:25:30.000 I mean, there's specific dollar amounts.

00:25:33.000 I mean, I remember, you know, going in and saying, well, I want to be on the Armed Services

00:25:36.000 Committee and someone looked me dead in the eye and said, well, that'll be $75,000 that

00:25:41.000 you owe to the leadership funds and to the Republican Congressional Committee. 0.97

00:25:46.000 And so, you know, I go home and think, well, you know, part of you wants to say screw you 0.95

00:25:51.000 or like, are you wearing a wire? 0.63

00:25:52.000 Yeah, if I could ask you, and again, you don't have to answer this, but who do you think is more influential and powerful in Washington, D.C.?

00:25:59.000 The lobbyists or the intelligence agencies?

00:26:02.000 Well, I mean, the answer to the question is yes, they're one and the same, because oftentimes they are fused with precisely the same personnel.

00:26:10.000 Where people will roll out of DOJ and end up at, you know, the law firm that services the lobby corps and the very same clients.

00:26:20.000 I mean, there's no better example of the fusion of that than when I learned through a whistleblower that the Perkins Coie law firm, which is the legal wing of the Democratic Party, has within it a secure information facility that is run by the FBI.

00:26:37.000 So they literally have a place in their law firm where they can try to convert political dirt into intelligence investigations, counterintelligence investigations, criminal investigations, and the like.

00:26:49.000 Yeah, and let's not forget all the Epstein tapes that they have, too.

00:26:51.000 And it's up and running today.

00:26:52.000 It's up and running today.

00:26:53.000 And they have all the Epstein tapes, too, but that's another thing.

00:26:55.000 Do you have any hope in the Jim Jordan new committee when it comes to investigating the weaponization of government?

00:27:01.000 Do you think that's going to be akin to maybe a church committee?

00:27:04.000 Yeah, that's our objective and the specific agreement we have with McCarthy is that that select committee will have the budget, resources, personnel, no less than the Democrats' January 6th committee.

00:27:19.000 Well, what do you think?

00:27:19.000 Do you think it'll work out?

00:27:21.000 Look, it's hard to promise outcomes when we don't have the ability to throw handcuffs on anybody or put anybody in jail, right?

00:27:30.000 All we can do is expose facts.

00:27:33.000 And so it relies on other features of our system to kind of go end to end on that accountability. And so I don't

00:27:41.000 want to promise people like, yeah, you know, you're gonna see

00:27:43.000 Hunter Biden hauled off in cuffs, you're gonna see the Joe Biden, University of Penn, like China, money laundering 0.93

00:27:50.000 stuff, and you know, because that may be out there, but it may not

00:27:55.000 result in precisely what people would hope upon encountering the

00:28:00.000 Ian, do you want to ask about, you made that point about sometimes no investigation is better than an investigation.

00:28:04.000 Oh, yeah, especially like with the NIST investigation for 9-11.

00:28:07.000 I mean, there's so many holes in that thing, if you look at it objectively.

00:28:10.000 Like, I'm concerned that they would put forth an investigation, but it ends up being a sham.

00:28:15.000 And then they're like, Okay, we did it.

00:28:17.000 Our investigation's over, everyone.

00:28:18.000 We didn't find anything.

00:28:19.000 Don't ask again.

00:28:20.000 As opposed to no investigation.

00:28:22.000 This is the Saudis' playbook, right? 1.00

00:28:23.000 I mean, the Saudis were able to avoid the responsibility that they have in the 9-11 attacks and in a terrorist attack in my district in Pensacola. 0.56

00:28:36.000 Because they get a nice little report written that is sufficient to absolve them, and then they say, oh well, not nothing to see here.

00:28:44.000 You don't need to come back and conduct any further inquiry.

00:28:47.000 Do you fear or is that concern when creating committees of, I don't know, because I'm like, well, we need an independent committee, but who's deciding who's on the independent committee?

00:28:56.000 How do you ensure that it isn't a sham?

00:28:58.000 Personnel.

00:28:59.000 That's why we know that the people who will be on that committee will be people like Jim Jordan, Chip Roy, Thomas Massey.

00:29:07.000 People who actually ask tough questions.

00:29:09.000 What is the goal exactly?

00:29:11.000 Are there specific directions that you guys are aiming at thus far?

00:29:14.000 Have you decided what departments are going to be investigated or what specific things are being looked for?

00:29:21.000 Yeah, you heard McCarthy in his speech single out the FBI, right?

00:29:27.000 He did not talk about like a weaponized government in the abstract.

00:29:31.000 When he spoke, he spoke specifically about politics at the FBI.

00:29:36.000 So one of our first areas of inquiry is going to be This Timothy Tebalt guy who suppressed information that was derogatory to the Bidens and did not allow the normal process of criminal inquiry to continue there.

00:29:52.000 And they do everything they can at the FBI to try to supercharge anything that I wonder how it is that, you know, Trump being a wealthy elite and all that stuff still ends up outside the big club.

00:30:03.000 And then if it's the Bidens, they function as their defender

00:30:08.000 and they suppress the derogatory information.

00:30:11.000 So that'd probably be where we start.

00:30:12.000 I wonder how it is that, you know, Trump being a wealthy elite and all that stuff still ends up outside the big club.

00:30:20.000 That, you know, Joe Biden seems to get away with everything, but

00:30:23.000 Donald Trump is the target of everything.

00:30:25.000 Do you think that it's a function of elitism?

00:30:29.000 Or do you think it's a function of like Joe Biden just being of

00:30:33.000 I mean, he is of this place.

00:30:37.000 He chaired foreign affairs in the Senate, where you interact with a lot of the people who end up in powerful positions in the intelligence community.

00:30:45.000 And Trump went in with a goal of reorganizing that and changing it.

00:30:49.000 And that's, I think, why they kick back at him so hard.

00:30:52.000 What I don't understand, though, is if Trump, or let's say Joe Biden is part of the liberal economic order that's, you know, we're evolving to a new world order.

00:30:58.000 They say George Bush Sr.

00:30:59.000 Klaus Schwab's intimated that.

00:30:59.000 said that.

00:31:01.000 Lots of people around the world are realizing we're globalizing.

00:31:04.000 A new world order where it's not about American military bases everywhere anymore.

00:31:07.000 Now we're going to have a new type of thing.

00:31:09.000 But in that instance, I would think that the Americans would want the Russians on their side, not siding with China and the Chinese economic order.

00:31:16.000 I don't understand why are people pushing Russia away if they're trying to create a new world?

00:31:22.000 I'm concerned it would make America number three. 0.90

00:31:25.000 Well, I mean, what we're seeing right now is the leveraged buyout of Russia with a lot of Chinese cash.

00:31:32.000 I mean, there are more Chinese with $2 million cash in their bank account right now, like US equivalent, than there are total Canadians.

00:31:42.000 And so, yeah, you're seeing a lot of the farmland in Russia get just bought out by the Chinese, and it fuses those systems in a way that poses a real substantial threat to the United States, to the West at large. 0.97

00:32:01.000 Aren't they buying our farmland as well?

00:32:03.000 Yeah.

00:32:04.000 I thought that maybe we could propose some sort of peace deal between Russia and Ukraine because what they're doing, it looks like Putin's trying to take a land bridge to Crimea so that he has warm water access into the Black Sea.

00:32:15.000 Russia, basically after the Soviet Union split up, they took it all away from Russia and they gave They gave it to Ukraine, that city.

00:32:23.000 What's the big city there, right in Crimea?

00:32:26.000 And I think what we need to do is establish... I don't think Russia's ever going to stop until they get a land bridge into Crimea and a warm water seaport.

00:32:35.000 So has that come up in Congress?

00:32:36.000 You guys are like, can we... I've got a pretty cynical view on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

00:32:41.000 I've been voting against sending more weapons there.

00:32:45.000 Hold on, let me get this cough drop. 0.82

00:32:47.000 Yeah, dog.

00:32:47.000 I'll give you guys a...

00:32:48.000 Well, the geopolitical situation, especially... You got an extra one of those?

00:32:51.000 A lot of people in the comment section are saying this is coughcast unfolding right now.

00:32:57.000 I think I'm the only one.

00:32:58.000 I'm not coughing, I just lost my voice.

00:33:00.000 Me and Ian are the only ones holding on here.

00:33:02.000 But it is a very complex geopolitical situation that I think represents the larger proxy war between the East and the West.

00:33:09.000 I think sending in more weapons prolongs this proxy conflict to make sure that, of course, it goes on forever.

00:33:15.000 I think this war is meant to be continued and not won.

00:33:18.000 There's also a lot of debates now about tanks.

00:33:21.000 To me, do you think there's a possibility for any kind of peace deal?

00:33:25.000 Because I think it's getting co-opted so many times, including by individuals like Boris Johnson, that literally go to Ukraine and say, no, you're not going to even sit at the table here with the Russians.

00:33:36.000 Do you think One year from now, ten years from now, there's some kind of possibility for peace here, or is this just going to be a continued conflict forever?

00:33:43.000 Well, who makes money on a peace deal?

00:33:44.000 That's true.

00:33:45.000 Yep.

00:33:45.000 Right?

00:33:46.000 I mean, peace is not nearly as profitable to those who are in the war business.

00:33:55.000 I mean, to me, our involvement in Ukraine is directly linked to our diminished involvement in Afghanistan.

00:34:05.000 Afghanistan was the money laundering capital of the world for a lot of our lifetime. 0.81

00:34:10.000 A lot of that cash was run through Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

00:34:16.000 And when that was not the corrupt country that we just decided to pour American cash on, we needed another historically corrupt country to go pour American military material and cash into.

00:34:27.000 And gain-of-function research, too.

00:34:30.000 Ukraine fit the bill. 0.99

00:34:31.000 And so I don't believe that anyone's really working toward peace.

00:34:35.000 I think that there are very powerful interests that benefit if this is a long-term, low-yield war.

00:34:42.000 Yes, CNN is even reporting right now that the United States is running low on some weapons and ammunition because they're transferring so much of it to Ukraine right now.

00:34:51.000 So that's staggering and also dangerous for the United States to be in such a vulnerable spot as well.

00:34:56.000 So I think you're absolutely right.

00:34:59.000 There's a lot of bigger interest here.

00:35:00.000 BlackRock just signed a deal with Ukraine that they're going to be rebuilding Ukraine, as of course BlackRock also has a lot of deals.

00:35:06.000 Is there anything that we could do as people to bring awareness to this?

00:35:08.000 military-industrial complex, you see the circle of life there kind of evolving there.

00:35:12.000 Is there any way to kind of address this? Is there anything that we could do as people to

00:35:16.000 bring awareness to this? Is there any way there could be some kind of peace here?

00:35:20.000 Well, the trend lines are coming in my direction when it comes to public perception on this.

00:35:25.000 I mean, initially, like the American people were dying to send every American dollar, you know, to Ukraine.

00:35:32.000 And increasingly, at least within the Republican Party, you've started to see that shift as our economic conditions are more in the forefront of people's minds.

00:35:40.000 Like, we have laws that require end-to-end monitoring of materiel when we send it into a war zone.

00:35:49.000 I am not convinced we are following them.

00:35:50.000 Is it because we're not technically at war?

00:35:52.000 The United States hasn't been technically at a war since World War II.

00:35:55.000 Well, we do have regs that define a conflict zone, and whenever we send stuff that kills into one of those places, we're supposed to know who has it.

00:36:03.000 And we don't.

00:36:04.000 And that is concerning to me.

00:36:05.000 If that's like the new thing, is like, oh, well, you know, send the stuff, anything, what was it that Ben Sasse said when he was in the Senate?

00:36:12.000 If it shoots, send it.

00:36:13.000 And so we've been doing all of that, and I think that, in some ways, prolongs conflict.

00:36:19.000 It doesn't bring us to a faster resolution to continue to pour cash and weapons into a historically corrupt country that is fighting.

00:36:26.000 Yeah, Dave Smith would say, and has said, if you want to see who our next big enemy is going to be, look at who we're funding right now.

00:36:31.000 And I'm concerned that the Nazis, I don't know if they're, technically, are they considered Nazis?

00:36:35.000 Let's be, what is it?

00:36:36.000 Democrats thought so.

00:36:37.000 I mean, you had dozens of Democrats signing letters saying that the Azov battalion were a bunch of white supremacists, and while they want to call our own military, who are patriots, a bunch of white supremacists here, they got no problem draining the resources of our country to go and fund who they were just calling white supremacists, you know?

00:36:57.000 A couple years ago.

00:36:58.000 So if in six years the Azov start exterminating a race because they are happen to be genocidal or racist like then what is the American you gonna use that as evidence to go to war in Ukraine to fight the Azov and now we got more military bases in Ukraine protecting the Suez Canal? 0.88

00:37:11.000 Yep.

00:37:12.000 Well, there's a lot of Intel reports of a lot of advanced U.S.

00:37:15.000 military hardware being sold on the black markets as well.

00:37:18.000 And a lot of the weapons, even according to CBS News and Aid, not making it to its official destination.

00:37:24.000 And I think that's such a travesty because there's so much human suffering in that country.

00:37:28.000 There's so many people used as pawns.

00:37:30.000 There's so many people hurt with this larger conflict.

00:37:33.000 There's such a bigger immigration crisis here.

00:37:35.000 How do you see all of this going?

00:37:36.000 Because you have a lot of, you know, you're in Congress, you talk to a lot of people there.

00:37:40.000 How do you see this kind of unfolding here with this never-ending war?

00:37:44.000 Where are we going to be a couple years from now with this continuing the way it is?

00:37:48.000 What worries me is, like, you cannot overstate the gravity of some of the worst potential outcome sets here.

00:37:55.000 I mean, you know, Russia, much like a Bond villain, sort of becomes more and more dangerous during its demise.

00:38:02.000 It's a kleptocracy in a lot of ways.

00:38:05.000 I mean, a lot of people have gotten out of Russia with whatever they could steal on their way out, right?

00:38:09.000 To your point about the materiel and the black market. 0.95

00:38:13.000 And so I think that for us to go and play a game of nuclear chicken over which guy in a tracksuit gets to run Crimea is foolish. 0.96

00:38:23.000 And it's not how serious a serious country ought to behave. 0.89

00:38:26.000 You think World War III could result from recklessness?

00:38:30.000 Of course.

00:38:31.000 This is a tinderbox.

00:38:33.000 And it's not Syria, right?

00:38:35.000 It's Russia and Ukraine. 0.93

00:38:37.000 It is a country that has enough nuclear power to end Earth multiple times over.

00:38:43.000 And it's a leader who I don't think is making stable, rational decisions in Vladimir Putin.

00:38:49.000 And, you know, to continue to send the Heimars there, to send the Bradleys there from the United States, seems provocative to me. Now, why isn't this Europe's

00:38:59.000 problem? Right? You would think that Germany and the other powers in Europe would have the most 0.57

00:39:06.000 at stake. But what they do, you know, as these European democracies face elections and as their

00:39:11.000 reserves go down, like you're going to see them have a different posture towards Russia as their

00:39:17.000 mandates expire and as they have to go back for elections. Plus, they rely on us for defense.

00:39:21.000 Right.

00:39:22.000 Well, I mean, that was one of the principal critiques that Trump made that I think got a lot of disaffected people to support him is when he said, I'm just tired of being like dead money at the world stage.

00:39:33.000 Like being the world's policeman, being the world's piggy bank has not been good for the American middle class.

00:39:39.000 Yeah, Trump also made sure that he sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, something Obama was even afraid to do.

00:39:45.000 So, I mean, this conflict has been brewing for so long, since 2014, even before that, with the kind of revolution that's happening there.

00:39:52.000 But to me, this is just such a sad thing to see humanity go through.

00:40:00.000 I don't know.

00:40:01.000 I just hope this kind of ends somehow.

00:40:03.000 I don't think it is.

00:40:04.000 I don't know if we should potentially even change topics.

00:40:06.000 What do you think when you see your leaders in Congress wear the American flag, Ukraine flag pin around?

00:40:13.000 Wasn't McCarthy doing that?

00:40:14.000 Yep.

00:40:15.000 I saw a photo.

00:40:16.000 I don't know if it was real or not.

00:40:17.000 It seems like they don't understand that Russia needs a warm water or wants a warm water port in the Black Sea.

00:40:22.000 Like if that if that was understood and it's like, yo, this is about trade.

00:40:25.000 This is about Russia.

00:40:26.000 You think it's just a real estate play?

00:40:27.000 Yeah, I think he takes that.

00:40:28.000 Energy, gas prom, natural gas, etc.

00:40:31.000 It's real estate.

00:40:32.000 Yeah, I think it is 100% real estate.

00:40:34.000 And I don't know why there's not more American English media of Putin talking.

00:40:37.000 Well, real estate, but energy, right?

00:40:40.000 Yeah, transportation of oil and transportation.

00:40:41.000 Gas ground controls a large portion of the natural gas from Russia into Europe.

00:40:45.000 Western powers want to control it.

00:40:47.000 Direct access to the Suez Canal, which is all of the Indian Ocean and things like that.

00:40:51.000 Put some weights on Russia. 0.89

00:40:52.000 Russia doesn't like it.

00:40:52.000 Russia says, we're going to go and take the port back.

00:40:55.000 I'm against war.

00:40:56.000 I think that it's one of the reasons why I'm a little more dovish in my views.

00:41:00.000 blockade their perception is being blockaded by emotions because it's always horrible to

00:41:05.000 see someone get killed or to see a house get blown up or invasion or anything that's horrible.

00:41:09.000 I'm against war.

00:41:10.000 You know, I mean, I think that it's one of the reasons why I'm a little more dovish in

00:41:15.000 my views.

00:41:16.000 I think oftentimes both sides lose.

00:41:20.000 I wonder if like, you know, the World Economic Forum Davos group types have substantial influence when it comes to the wars we declare.

00:41:29.000 Have you been asked?

00:41:30.000 Yeah.

00:41:31.000 Is that an open question in your mind?

00:41:33.000 No, I think they do.

00:41:34.000 Of course.

00:41:35.000 What I mean is to what degree, right?

00:41:38.000 Because obviously the goals they have, the actions we take align with them.

00:41:42.000 So it's like the US has no reason to be involved in Ukraine.

00:41:45.000 Like you said, it's Europe's problem.

00:41:47.000 Yet for some reason we're acting like one body.

00:41:49.000 Yeah, we're the military arm of the liberal economic order, the British Empire, basically.

00:41:53.000 That turned out well.

00:41:55.000 Have you been asked to be a part of the World Economic Forum?

00:41:57.000 I have not.

00:41:58.000 And what kind of influence do you think they kind of have on the United States since Klaus Schwab openly brags about how he has half of the Canadian parliament being young members of the World Economic Forum?

00:42:10.000 Yeah, no, I think that it's part of the, like, political-industrial complex.

00:42:15.000 It's the finance wing of the political-industrial complex.

00:42:18.000 And so, like, if what you need to keep your power and to win your elections is a super PAC that shows up with, you know, ten million dollars in dark money, like, who do you think cuts those checks?

00:42:31.000 You think it's, like, some guy who's, like, a furniture tycoon in Oklahoma?

00:42:34.000 It's not.

00:42:36.000 Bank for International Settlements.

00:42:37.000 And everybody knows it.

00:42:38.000 And everybody knows, and like, you know, this is an area where the populist right and the populist left need to work together on the way that we fund campaigns in this country, because it like, it always works to the benefit of the uniparty.

00:42:51.000 And I don't get why people should be able to put unlimited money without disclosure into manipulating the viewpoints of Americans.

00:42:59.000 Do you think politically there's going to be some kind of rift and change here?

00:43:02.000 Because there does seem to be, obviously, the Democrats and the Republicans, but there also seems to be a bigger rift amongst the establishment and the anti-establishment.

00:43:10.000 Totally.

00:43:11.000 There's a lot of populists.

00:43:13.000 There's also a lot of statists.

00:43:14.000 There's a lot of rhinos.

00:43:15.000 There's a lot of neocons.

00:43:16.000 It's like a civil war within a civil war within a civil war, politically speaking, not violently speaking.

00:43:22.000 Do you see the political landscape changing in the future?

00:43:24.000 Because I think a lot of people are sick of these neocons, of these kind of rhinos, and they don't really represent the American people.

00:43:31.000 We had enough of George W. Bush.

00:43:33.000 He had his time.

00:43:34.000 He ruined that time, and I think he spurred a situation where now the Democrats have a lot of power.

00:43:41.000 You know, when I first got elected to Congress, we could have a lot of collaboration between the populist right and the populist left on things like war powers, the surveillance state, political reforms that don't just empower kind of the PAC structure.

00:43:57.000 And then January 6th happened, and those populist leftists would not talk to us.

00:44:02.000 I mean, would not collaborate with us on bills, would not engage in any way.

00:44:07.000 And it became such a point of personal trauma for some of them.

00:44:12.000 And I don't think that was good for the country.

00:44:14.000 I don't think that was good for kind of the anti-establishment unity that we need.

00:44:18.000 I will say that since Republicans took the majority, they've been a lot nicer to us.

00:44:24.000 We saw you talking with AOC during this whole process.

00:44:28.000 Was that something relevant or that you can share?

00:44:30.000 Sure.

00:44:31.000 I mean, I got caught on camera in conversations with AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Pramila Jayapal, like three people who folks have seen me disagree with more than agree with.

00:44:42.000 With AOC, I was discussing whether or not the Democrats were going to leave the floor and cut a deal with McCarthy because that would have changed the math on the speaker vote.

00:44:50.000 Wow.

00:44:50.000 And so she was actually doing everything possible to make sure that they didn't.

00:44:53.000 And that there were 212 Democrats voting for Jeffries on every ballot.

00:44:57.000 Wow.

00:44:58.000 With Jayapal, we've worked together on legislation to break up big tech.

00:45:02.000 And I was talking to her about the prospects in a Republican Congress and a

00:45:06.000 Republican house of getting some bipartisan bicameral solutions to reshape a lot of

00:45:12.000 these companies.

00:45:13.000 And the Jayapal legislation from the 117th Congress, like was not, you know,

00:45:18.000 taking immunities away and all that.

00:45:20.000 It said, no, like Meta has to alienate their Instagram asset.

00:45:25.000 Google has to alienate email from search and literally breaking up these companies.

00:45:30.000 And then with Omar, we were actually talking about war powers.

00:45:33.000 And I was teasing her a bit.

00:45:35.000 I was like, you guys showed up here and said the military was racist.

00:45:39.000 And before you were done being in the majority, you were voting for NATO.

00:45:45.000 What went on there?

00:45:49.000 What did go on there?

00:45:50.000 Hypocrisy?

00:45:52.000 Tribalism? 0.56

00:45:53.000 I think that they got drafted into that establishment Democrat thinking.

00:46:00.000 I don't think that the Squad really believes that like NATO is advancing the interests of their

00:46:06.000 constituents on a day in day out basis, but yet they were still willing to vote for all these like

00:46:11.000 NATO strengthening endeavors.

00:46:13.000 Oh, go ahead.

00:46:15.000 Are there some issues that could bridge the kind of populist left and the populist right

00:46:19.000 together? Are there some things that we could actually agree upon that could bring this

00:46:23.000 country back together? The first thing that comes to mind personally is the Epstein scandal. I think

00:46:27.000 everyone on the left and right agrees on that. But are there some issues that you think could,

00:46:32.000 you guys could work together. How about abolishing Pfizer?

00:46:35.000 I mean, why wouldn't the populist right and populist left agree to take down some elements of the surveillance state?

00:46:35.000 Right?

00:46:41.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:46:43.000 Another idea would be cleaning up the environment, like the atmosphere, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere.

00:46:47.000 You can convert it into graphene.

00:46:48.000 Here we go.

00:46:49.000 Everyone drink directly.

00:46:51.000 No, I'm all about the carbon capture stuff.

00:46:53.000 And also, this is a part of like the libertarian thing that I don't get.

00:46:56.000 Like, why would we as Americans give carte blanche to a bunch of powerful

00:47:01.000 businesses to pollute our air and our water. To me, America first means that you actually have to

00:47:06.000 want this to be a beautiful place.

00:47:08.000 And so I do think that making sure that we don't completely sell out to people to

00:47:13.000 trash our nation would be important.

00:47:17.000 Regarding using the government to protect us from corporations, you were talking about breaking up big tech earlier.

00:47:23.000 I think a mistake that we should not make is what they did to Rockefeller with his Standard Oil.

00:47:26.000 They broke it up into like seven or eight oil companies and then he made more money off of these new, so like breaking up Facebook into Facebook Prime, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, these different companies.

00:47:36.000 Mark would still have the code.

00:47:37.000 He'd still be able to run software like that.

00:47:39.000 So I'm thinking we need to make them free their software code.

00:47:42.000 So that other people can spin up versions of those websites, interlock them.

00:47:46.000 My version of Facebook can interoperate with Mark Zuckerberg's version.

00:47:50.000 Decentralization, I think.

00:47:52.000 The interoperability of data is really what you're talking about.

00:47:55.000 Yes, force the companies.

00:47:56.000 And it's sort of like breaking up Monopoly, but we're not actually breaking the company apart.

00:48:01.000 But where I disagree is giving a proprietary code up is basically your intellectual property.

00:48:09.000 But releasing the algorithmic code, how they manipulate the public with algorithms, I think is extremely important.

00:48:15.000 I think that's the path for big tech.

00:48:18.000 to heal the system with big tech as opposed to try and smash up companies

00:48:21.000 and make them do what the government says they have to do like let them

00:48:24.000 ban whoever they want but if they're not if they have bad terms of service in

00:48:28.000 your version of the site as better terms of service they're gonna lose

00:48:31.000 yeah go ahead. I got a different question so... I don't know about you but I

00:48:34.000 think big tech had a huge influence in this latest midterm

00:48:37.000 election I I think they're also essentially controlling what a lot of people see and think with their algorithms.

00:48:42.000 They're becoming a huge, powerful entity that, of course, also now we're finding out through the Twitter files work for the private intelligence agencies.

00:48:50.000 That curation, that ability to control what people see and listen to, that's a huge power.

00:48:55.000 I personally think it had an effect on the election, and I think it's going to continue to have bigger effects on the election, especially in places that took a lot of the Zuckerbucks. 0.63

00:49:03.000 Florida was one of the states that refused money from Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, and their elections went totally different than a lot of states that did.

00:49:10.000 Is there a solution to this?

00:49:12.000 Is there a way to kind of rein in these intelligence agencies that are controlling big tech, that are essentially asserting their will on everyone else?

00:49:21.000 I think that on the election front, the specific algorithmic work to target certain types of voters to push registration, to push vote by mail, to push early voting, to do election day awareness, that is partisan.

00:49:38.000 Based on who they are trying to target those messages to, right?

00:49:42.000 And that should be transparent.

00:49:43.000 And if it was transparent, I actually think the right enforcement tool is the Federal Elections Commission.

00:49:48.000 Because, you know, when a when Facebook says, okay, well, like, we're going to target this exact population of people with this age range, and this zip code, that is a donation to a political party and a political movement and should be subject to the same caps that any other American would be subject to.

00:50:04.000 I got a question for the audience.

00:50:07.000 DeSantisGates2024?

00:50:08.000 2024? I'm for Trump. You're for Trump? Yeah, I'm for Trump.

00:50:12.000 I think the world of DeSantis, I...

00:50:14.000 Trump gates 2024. Well, I would do anything the president asked, but I think he's got better

00:50:19.000 choices. I like what I'm doing now. You know, I was very involved in DeSantis' first campaign.

00:50:24.000 I was his transition chairman when he came into the governorship in Florida. I helped him hire a

00:50:29.000 lot of the folks that shaped the policy that make Florida the envy of the country right now.

00:50:34.000 I think Ron DeSantis will be president one day, but in 2024, it's my hope and expectation it'll be Donald Trump.

00:50:40.000 What do you think about Donald Trump still telling everyone to get vaccinated?

00:50:44.000 That's been one of the core issues that kind of been a big kind of shock to a lot of people, especially a lot of his people.

00:50:51.000 Dude, the boomers love the vaccine. 1.00

00:50:52.000 I mean, right now with the FDA and CDC... What was the Saturday Night Live thing where it was like, the boomers love the... If they're still around. 0.96

00:50:59.000 But the FDA and CDC just came out and said that they're going to be investigating possible very serious side effects.

00:51:07.000 That's an issue that is concerning to a lot of people, especially a lot of Trump supporters.

00:51:11.000 Let's pull this up, actually.

00:51:12.000 We have this from Politico.

00:51:14.000 CDC, FDA see possible link between Pfizer's bivalent shot and strokes.

00:51:19.000 The agency said the surveillance signal is very unlikely to represent a true clinical risk and said they will continue to recommend the vaccine.

00:51:24.000 So this obviously has a lot of people worried.

00:51:26.000 You knew what the tell was.

00:51:28.000 It was when the number one thing Republicans were lobbying for was were

00:51:31.000 immunity protections and liability protections for the vaccine

00:51:33.000 manufacturers.

00:51:34.000 I mean, you knew at the very beginning this was going to be an issue because

00:51:38.000 they had to they had to lay out all of their immunities and protection.

00:51:41.000 And because YouTube was censoring anybody who brought that up.

00:51:43.000 How are you still on YouTube?

00:51:45.000 Like, you know, my thread.

00:51:46.000 I'm telling you, man.

00:51:47.000 We argue with each other.

00:51:48.000 If I say anything about COVID, for the most part, Tim will be like, no, no, no.

00:51:53.000 And then we'll go at it.

00:51:54.000 And we never make definitive claims.

00:51:56.000 Very, very rarely make definitive claims about things we don't have proof of.

00:51:59.000 It's basically just like, look, we're reading Politico here.

00:52:02.000 You know what I mean?

00:52:03.000 Hey man, if YouTube's got a problem with Politico, the BBC, CNN all reporting this, well then we're all effed.

00:52:09.000 Well, I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene got zapped off of social media for saying that if you were really overweight, that was probably a bad idea vis-a-vis COVID and exercise would be helpful. 0.97

00:52:19.000 And then, you know, lo and behold, you later see CNN and the CDC accept those positions.

00:52:26.000 Steven Crowder got a strike for citing the CDC.

00:52:29.000 Yeah.

00:52:30.000 But today's pretty big, especially with this FDA-CDC news that almost everyone in the corporate media is talking about.

00:52:36.000 The British broadcasting company even had a cardiologist on that they're getting criticized for having on.

00:52:41.000 A doctor, a mainline professional, that was talking about the larger concerns when it came to this, of course, shot and larger health effects that are being correlated here.

00:52:49.000 I know Florida is investigating that right now under Ron DeSantis, but I see this as being...

00:52:54.000 Yeah, but I see this as being a very key divisive issue, especially when it comes to the Republican primaries, especially when it comes to the possibility of DeSantis and Trump kind of heading, going at each other.

00:53:05.000 How do you see that larger battle unfolding, and do you think there's going to be any accountability against Big Pharma for a lot of their kind of egregious actions and a lot of their data that they're hiding from the American people?

00:53:16.000 No.

00:53:16.000 I mean, there are multiple big pharma lobbyists for every single member of Congress.

00:53:20.000 You want to talk about a special interest that has a death grip on the political process, it is big pharma.

00:53:27.000 And I don't know that the VAX mandate in the 2024 primaries will still be Like at the top of the issue matrix.

00:53:34.000 I think this economy is about to go through a serious contraction.

00:53:39.000 I think that people are going to see their 401ks experience real problems.

00:53:43.000 I think that as interest rates rise, and that has such an impact on our nation's debt service, And how far the dollar can go.

00:53:52.000 Purchasing power, business confidence, consumer confidence.

00:53:56.000 I think, like, that's going to be the issue matrix along with the border in 2024.

00:54:00.000 And a lot of places are getting rid of the vax mandate.

00:54:02.000 I mean, I'm grateful that the Department of Defense is ditching the vax mandate.

00:54:06.000 The fight's not over.

00:54:07.000 We've got to reinstate people who saw their lives ruined.

00:54:10.000 But I don't see it being a big... Yeah, you still need a vaccine to enter the United States if you're not a citizen.

00:54:14.000 You need one to get it.

00:54:15.000 So tomorrow I'm on CNN.

00:54:17.000 I'm on Smirkonish's show.

00:54:19.000 So I was going to come into the studio, do the shtick there.

00:54:21.000 And they're like, produce your vaccine, your booster.

00:54:26.000 Were you triple boosted?

00:54:27.000 Did you get a booster this morning?

00:54:29.000 Do you have a negative test?

00:54:30.000 And I'm like, I'm not doing any of that stuff.

00:54:32.000 So I've got to shoot the segment remote.

00:54:34.000 But then every time I see like my Republican colleagues now on set in the studio, I'm like, You know.

00:54:41.000 We hit on the Krasensteins the other day. 0.99

00:54:43.000 They're Democrats.

00:54:44.000 And I asked them if they thought the economy was good, fairly good, bad, and they said somewhere between fairly bad and fairly good.

00:54:51.000 And if you look at the polling, the majority, the plurality of people, the majority think it's fairly bad or worse.

00:54:57.000 40% say very bad.

00:54:59.000 So we got the story about Joe Biden and the documents in his garage.

00:55:03.000 Meanwhile, it's like $9 in some places for a carton of eggs.

00:55:07.000 You know, milk is really expensive.

00:55:09.000 I think the average person, when it comes to the issue matrix like you're mentioning, is just sitting there wondering why cabbage costs $7.

00:55:15.000 Yeah, I mean, I looked at the little head of cauliflower that we got at the grocery store, like the shrinkflation is real as well.

00:55:22.000 And we were talking before we went live just about how silly I think like the archivist disputes are.

00:55:28.000 Like I said in September, probably every one of these presidential, vice presidential libraries and think tanks in America is out of some sort of technical compliance with the Records Keeping Act.

00:55:39.000 And For my constituents who have to drive a long way to work and are looking at gas prices, who, if you want to buy a used car today, I mean, good luck.

00:55:48.000 I mean, I don't know if you want to drive them or bronze them after you get them based on how much you have to pay.

00:55:53.000 The housing market, rent being up so high.

00:55:56.000 I mean, already we've made it where millennials can barely afford to buy a house. 0.97

00:56:01.000 So many are forced into rental life.

00:56:03.000 And now what's happening with the cost of rent?

00:56:06.000 Those are things that I think, like, people really think about.

00:56:10.000 And you turn on cable news and it's all about like, there's an 11th document that they have found in Joe Biden's convertibles glove compartment.

00:56:18.000 And we're supposed to clutch our pearls and act like that's like the biggest thing on the planet Earth.

00:56:23.000 The 1.7 trillion omnibus that went through a couple was a month ago, three weeks ago, that changed the value of the dollar doing the math 1.7 trillion to our 31 trillion deficit is our debt is took the value of the dollar from $1 to 95 cents.

00:56:36.000 Like, every dollar that you have is now worth 95 cents because that bill passed.

00:56:40.000 Because that money was printed, I should say.

00:56:42.000 Yeah, and you can go, you know, recap the value if you go to the gender studies courses in Pakistan.

00:56:47.000 Exactly.

00:56:48.000 And I think the financial problem is going to be very significant.

00:56:51.000 I think a lot of people saw it during the beginning of COVID.

00:56:54.000 I personally was calling it out, but we still haven't seen the full ramifications of it.

00:56:58.000 There's going to be a lot of responsibility when it comes to printing so much money, spending so much money that we don't have.

00:57:04.000 What are you seeing down the pipeline?

00:57:06.000 How do you think this is going to unfold?

00:57:07.000 Some people are saying in the corporate media that this is going to be just a little temporary recession.

00:57:13.000 I don't think so myself.

00:57:14.000 How do you see it unfolding?

00:57:15.000 Yeah, it just, it seems as though we haven't yet paid the full price in jobs for what we've done to the dollar.

00:57:22.000 And you're starting to see that with, you know, all the, what I call the hoodie layoffs, right?

00:57:26.000 All the tech companies laying off people by the thousands, but now we're starting to see it in the productive sectors of the economy too, in manufacturing, In agriculture, stuff's just not creating the same investment confidence, it's not attracting the same degree of capital.

00:57:42.000 Now, fortunately, a lot of other places in the world have it worse than we do, so the dollar has not bottomed out, but we cannot drive government spending to this extent.

00:57:53.000 So then it becomes like, okay, in this world of divided government, what fight do you pick to try to resolve that?

00:57:58.000 And we've got the debt limit coming up, and Republicans typically lose fights over the debt limit.

00:58:04.000 If you just look politically, historically, because we're talking about some sort of economic algebra problem and the Democrats are like, yeah, well, your 401k will get cut in half if this doesn't happen, if the Republicans do brinksmanship.

00:58:17.000 So as that comes up, what is the thing that we demand to spend less money on?

00:58:23.000 represent that work requirements would be the right fight.

00:58:27.000 We send so much money right now to able-bodied people who could work but choose not to. And

00:58:34.000 we do it through state programs that access federal drawdowns. We do it through Medicaid

00:58:38.000 expansion. We do it through different features of Obamacare, voluntary pre-care, all those

00:58:42.000 different social service programs.

00:58:44.000 And if you had work requirements in order to access those for able-bodied people,

00:58:49.000 then I think that would be anti-inflationary.

00:58:52.000 That would reduce some of the mandatory spending and the entitlement spending.

00:58:56.000 And I think people could get that, right?

00:58:59.000 As opposed to just like trying to walk everybody through an economics pie chart as the Democrats are accusing us of brinksmanship.

00:59:06.000 So with the economy tanking, can you please give us some insider congressional trading tips, please?

00:59:13.000 By the way, another area where the populist right and populist left should work together.

00:59:17.000 I do not believe that members of Congress should trade individual stocks.

00:59:20.000 We have information that other people do not, and we have the ability to impact You're talking about big tech bills and potentially breaking up Facebook.

00:59:30.000 authorize or that we pull.

00:59:33.000 And so it's just crazy to me that that was ever allowed.

00:59:38.000 You're talking about big tech bills and potentially breaking up Facebook.

00:59:43.000 And just imagine if you're about to even vote on that and then you go and get put option

00:59:48.000 That's not a hypothetical.

00:59:49.000 That happened.

00:59:50.000 I mean, we had bills that were moving through the Judiciary Committee, that passed out of the Judiciary Committee, that broke up big tech.

00:59:56.000 And we were all getting ready for them to come to the floor.

00:59:58.000 And on the dip, Paul Pelosi bought a bunch of those stocks.

01:00:01.000 And then guess what?

01:00:02.000 Guess what, Tim? 0.99

01:00:03.000 They never fucking came to the floor. 0.99

01:00:05.000 Wow. 0.99

01:00:06.000 What a surprise. 1.00

01:00:06.000 These people are evil. 1.00

01:00:07.000 That's like what they did about Napoleon, the British, where they said Napoleon lost the war or won the war.

01:00:07.000 What?

01:00:12.000 Everyone sold their British stock.

01:00:14.000 A bunch of rich British businessmen bought it up.

01:00:15.000 And they're like, actually, he's still fighting.

01:00:17.000 So you're saying go long or short on Tesla stocks?

01:00:20.000 I'm taking notes here.

01:00:21.000 Someone needs to clip that Paul Pelosi thing and put it on Twitter. 0.98

01:00:23.000 Have you guys talked about defaulting on the Federal Reserve debt and just telling this quasi-private public company, we're not your bitch. 0.88

01:00:32.000 You work for us, we allow you to exist, and we can't pay debt that we don't have.

01:00:37.000 You borrow $10 trillion, you can't pay back $15, you only have $10.

01:00:41.000 We ain't got it.

01:00:42.000 Will you take a post-dated check?

01:00:44.000 Where are we going to get the money for the debt ceiling thing?

01:00:47.000 What about we just don't pay the Federal Reserve?

01:00:50.000 Do you know what?

01:00:51.000 The answer is I don't have it.

01:00:52.000 I'm all about small business. 0.96

01:00:53.000 But I do feel like it's like, how do I get this parasite out of my brain without killing myself? 0.97

01:00:57.000 The Federal Reserve. 0.98

01:00:58.000 It's in our system right now.

01:01:00.000 It has been in control since 1913.

01:01:01.000 And they had one job.

01:01:04.000 And it was not to let the economy overheat so that we got to this level of inflation.

01:01:07.000 And they did it in 1928.

01:01:09.000 Right.

01:01:09.000 It happened in 28.

01:01:10.000 I mean, the Great Depression was a direct result of these banksters, you know, deciding when and how we can run our lives.

01:01:18.000 So does that ever come up?

01:01:19.000 Do you guys talk a lot about the Federal Reserve and breaking it up or just Congress taking control of the monetary supply?

01:01:25.000 Well, in our lifetime, you've seen Congress devolve more power than it has claimed.

01:01:31.000 And so in a lot of ways, it's a way for members of Congress to avoid a great deal of accountability for the economy, to just act as though it's a bunch of nerds with green eyeshades at the Fed that turn dials up or down that cause the economy to react in various ways.

01:01:46.000 So the answer is no. 0.99

01:01:47.000 Damn. 0.99

01:01:47.000 And it's because they don't want to get stuck with the bag if and when the economy actually does crash. 0.99

01:01:53.000 Well, I mean, I think that's reprehensible because that's one of the sole jobs of Congress is to protect the monetary supply.

01:02:00.000 Well, and instead, you get the $1.7 trillion Omni, which is why this fight we had this last week matters, because it's only ever going to be the way it's going to be until you force change and until you use the leverage you have.

01:02:14.000 Think about it.

01:02:14.000 If a Republican was president, I would have never been able to pull off what we pulled off because people would have said, You're getting in the way of the Trump agenda or the Bush agenda or whatever.

01:02:25.000 But because Biden was there, Schumer was in the Senate, there wasn't this intense pressure to organize the House immediately.

01:02:31.000 And we have the ability to be more deliberative and to get the structural concessions to stop

01:02:38.000 that and to regain that power.

01:02:39.000 You mentioned earlier how you guys were like kind of working, the populists were working

01:02:42.000 together and then January 6th comes along and we talk about like, who let those people

01:02:45.000 into that door?

01:02:46.000 Like, who, who hit the magnetic unlock and like let those people walk in from the inside?

01:02:51.000 And now we're seeing because of January 6th, the populist right and the populist left are

01:02:55.000 at odds.

01:02:56.000 It's as if division was sown.

01:02:58.000 By whom?

01:03:00.000 But for some reason, because of this event that happened where people were let into that freaking building by some people, now we have congressional division, which didn't seem similar with Occupy Wall Street.

01:03:10.000 We were all there together.

01:03:12.000 To elaborate on that, talk about the Fed's erection.

01:03:14.000 You talked about this a year ago.

01:03:16.000 We already know, based on the whistleblower interviews that we've done, that there were federal agents and federal assets that were on the ground that day.

01:03:26.000 And what we don't know is the extent to which any of those assets or agents increased the level of criminal acuity Coordinated with one another, or purposefully entrapped folks who were otherwise not wanting to hurt anyone or violate any law in some sort of technical violation of trespassing or crossing some barrier that had existed hours earlier, but that had been taken down.

01:03:50.000 And it's noteworthy to me that it's been the Department of Justice fighting tooth and nail against the release of a lot of the documentary evidence that would answer these questions.

01:04:01.000 And who is Ray Epps?

01:04:04.000 Ray Epstein is the only person involved in January 6th that Adam Kinzinger will continuously defend.

01:04:10.000 Isn't that something?

01:04:11.000 And why?

01:04:11.000 I mean, I think a lot of people have assumptions.

01:04:15.000 He's somehow connected with feds or he maybe testified or something.

01:04:19.000 Well, I just don't, there's no rational explanation for how this guy is sending out message saying he orchestrated the activity is at every critical point.

01:04:30.000 He's like the Forrest Gump of the January 6th string of events, right?

01:04:34.000 And then when you're able to isolate the people that are pulled off of the FBI's most wanted lists and the people who, you know, seem to be encouraging others and moving others that like, It's like Ray Epps did nothing.

01:04:50.000 So they'll go and raid the home of some couple in Homer, Alaska because they think they have Nancy Pelosi's laptop.

01:04:58.000 But this guy who was at the center of the action, it's like nothing to see here.

01:05:01.000 So I am troubled by the disparate treatment that Epps gets compared to some grandmother that wandered past a barricade that then is facing some intense criminal process from DOJ.

01:05:15.000 I'm concerned that those people in detention are becoming radicalized just by being forgotten and left to rot.

01:05:21.000 Do you know what the status is of these people that have been in prison?

01:05:24.000 Well, we've gotten varying reports on that and not nearly enough information.

01:05:30.000 A lot of them have been deprived of just like basic civil rights when it comes to the adversarial

01:05:35.000 judicial process. One thing I'm investigating right now is the extent to which the public

01:05:38.000 defenders that were assigned to a lot of these folks like hated them and wanted the book thrown

01:05:43.000 at them and were posting on social media and texting their friends, you know, about the

01:05:49.000 nature of those proceedings.

01:05:50.000 So that's a big area of concern for me, how they were treated in prison and in jail, in the DC jail in particular.

01:05:57.000 I went there, it was pretty crazy.

01:06:00.000 I went there and they were like locked us out of being able to do an inspection.

01:06:04.000 And that's unprecedented for a member of Congress to not have the ability to inspect a facility that is under the control of the federal government at some level.

01:06:13.000 Could you go to Guantanamo when that was open?

01:06:15.000 Still could, yeah.

01:06:15.000 Is it still open?

01:06:16.000 If you got the plane, we could go tonight.

01:06:18.000 That's hardcore.

01:06:20.000 Get an authentic mojito.

01:06:21.000 Oh, I'm so into it.

01:06:23.000 Have you been there before? 0.94

01:06:24.000 I don't want to go to Gitmo, you crazy? 1.00

01:06:26.000 Are you insane, Ian? 1.00

01:06:29.000 I'm not falling for that one status. 0.98

01:06:32.000 You ever see the meme that said, waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay sounds really fun if you don't know what it is?

01:06:39.000 Yeah, horrible.

01:06:41.000 Yeah, no thank you.

01:06:41.000 What are you trying to set me up here, Ian?

01:06:43.000 Yeah, man, bring your camera.

01:06:44.000 I don't know, are you allowed to bring a camera inside there?

01:06:46.000 There's a number of these cases where people were engaged in journalism and are facing charges that are more akin to insurrection.

01:06:55.000 Like people who are there trying to film and capture the event and then, you know, are getting multi-year prison sentences.

01:07:02.000 Is this like patriotic stuff?

01:07:04.000 There's been 950 people charged so far, but the DOJ is saying that the investigation is far from over.

01:07:10.000 And recently, through a congressional bill, they even got more funding, and they're saying that they're going to be doubling the amount of people that they already arrested.

01:07:17.000 I had a whistleblower come to me and talk about how these specialized units that have FBI, CIA, that were targeted at extremism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, all over the world, that now Those very same teams and those very same tools and those very same national security authorities are exclusively being turned inward.

01:07:47.000 Instead of finding somebody that's building a bomb to blow up an embassy abroad, they're analyzing what some guy who lives in his mom's basement is putting on his blog that's read by tens of people.

01:07:59.000 And that now, after they were turned inward as a result of this omnibus spending legislation, they are flooded with cash.

01:08:07.000 I mean, just so much money that is now in the hands of these people who wake up every day saying, you know, how can I go find a white supremacist extremist to hunt down?

01:08:17.000 And, you know, if you create an industry of witch hunters, right, like you're going to find more witches, like even if they're not actually witches.

01:08:27.000 And as you mentioned in the beginning of this broadcast, this was originally created, this industry was created by George W. Bush.

01:08:33.000 It was created by the Republicans right after 9-11.

01:08:36.000 Passing the Patriot Act, allowing Homeland Security to do whatever they want, allowing the TSA to touch you wherever they wanted to.

01:08:43.000 And I think this is why there needs to be a bigger call out of this old Republican guard, of these neocons, that created this situation that's literally being turned around and used against the American people.

01:08:54.000 The war on terror is now the war on America.

01:08:58.000 And it's the intelligence agencies waging it against American citizens, which is crazy.

01:09:05.000 We have to have the guts to repeal those authorities.

01:09:08.000 And the thing is, any time you get any momentum behind any effort to do that, You get the neoconservatives running in saying, well, you're going to be the reason there's another 9-11.

01:09:18.000 And then people fold.

01:09:20.000 Oh my gosh!

01:09:21.000 Sounds like a threat more than anything else.

01:09:23.000 Yeah, well, just it is a way to test people's will.

01:09:26.000 And the will often does not rise to the occasion.

01:09:29.000 That's why these authorities don't get curtailed.

01:09:32.000 Purely because the people are afraid that they'll become... I mean, honestly, I could see why, because if something did happen, then they might feel guilt, but like... Alright, this is going to take another couple hours to talk about.

01:09:43.000 I don't think we're going to be able to finish this one right now.

01:09:45.000 Do you repeal the Patriot Act?

01:09:47.000 Well, do you have the power to actually put a stop to this J6 nonsense? 1.00

01:09:52.000 Unilaterally, no.

01:09:53.000 The House won't have the power to do that.

01:09:55.000 I do believe that substantial elements of the national security apparatus and these prosecutions need to be defunded.

01:10:01.000 Do I think there's a critical mass of Republicans who are willing to shut down the government over it?

01:10:05.000 No.

01:10:05.000 But we have to go make our case.

01:10:07.000 And the thing we've got to do is build the deterrent against it.

01:10:10.000 A lot of these folks, for all their tough talk and for all they're willing to do when they have anonymity, when you drag them before the country and ask them tough questions, as I've done with some of the leading figures in the national security state before the Judiciary Committee, they don't like that too much.

01:10:26.000 And when you do it to a few of them, the rest of them get adrift and see that.

01:10:30.000 And that works to a point, but it pales When you compare it to these exquisite authorities that have been turned inward and then the extreme resourcing of them that we have just seen.

01:10:43.000 So we need the population to speak up and start making noise about repealing the Patriot Act?

01:10:50.000 I think that the Patriot Act was a terrible mistake for our country and I would advocate for its repeal.

01:10:55.000 It seems so esoteric.

01:10:57.000 You know, how do you convince You know, I'll put it this way.

01:11:00.000 We were talking earlier about how you mentioned, Ian, Dave Smith's thing that if you want to see who we're going to go up against next, look at who we're funding now.

01:11:09.000 We fund Ukraine.

01:11:10.000 We fund Azov.

01:11:11.000 In 20 years, we may be fighting them like we did with the Mujahideen and then the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, etc., Afghanistan. 0.63

01:11:17.000 But the kids who vote in favor of those wars, the people right now, the young people who are liberals who are voting for this policy, weren't alive when we were funding these groups.

01:11:29.000 I think I was a baby when the Mujahideen stuff was happening.

01:11:33.000 And so then I'm 20 years old, I vote, you know, I was 18, I don't know how old I was, I vote for Obama, and then he's just continuing this cycle of war against who we had just been funding.

01:11:42.000 With Ukraine, give it 20 years, some young person's gonna be like, gotta vote Democrat, they're the ones who are fighting against these evil Nazis.

01:11:48.000 The difference?

01:11:49.000 They're the ones who funded it.

01:11:50.000 That's the good thing, though, now is there's so much media on this that it may be unforgettable in the consciousness.

01:11:56.000 I mean, obviously, there's manip it's being manipulated to show you one or the other, you know, way of looking at the situation.

01:12:01.000 But people that are six may be very well aware of what's happening in Ukraine when they're 18.

01:12:09.000 Well, in the 90s there wasn't, I mean, other than maybe Pat Buchanan and a few of his buddies, there wasn't an anti-war segment of the political right with any actual power, right?

01:12:24.000 And I think that it's because the millennial generation has grown weary of this.

01:12:27.000 I mean, all of our lives, our country has been in some state of low-yield war, and we see the people come back with broken limbs and broken hearts and broken minds.

01:12:38.000 We see the effect on marriages, the drug abuse, the suicide, and we start to see the real cost of it.

01:12:45.000 And now, on the right, there are people willing to ask tough questions about these things, and that scrutiny just didn't exist on a lot of these other misadventures.

01:12:53.000 If only we would have listened to Ron Paul.

01:12:56.000 When you were younger, when like the Patriot Act was getting voted on and stuff, were you like a young conservative?

01:13:02.000 Yeah, I think I adhered to a lot of the kind of Republican thinking on those things.

01:13:06.000 I thought Bush was a great president initially.

01:13:10.000 And then, you know, as I started to see in my heavily military community the impacts of these wars, I just thought like, man, like trading a bunch of sand dunes around in Iraq like isn't worth like Chris's dad not having legs.

01:13:24.000 Wow.

01:13:25.000 You know, and you see that over and over and it impacts you.

01:13:28.000 And not only that, these interventions also created more future conflicts.

01:13:32.000 It not only allowed Iran to have more of a sphere of influence in the region, but because we went in there and overthrew the government, we created ISIS in so many different ways by incentivizing that group to start up there and to also hand over a lot of American military technology and weapons right directly into their hands, giving us a new enemy to fight and use them as pawns to overthrow One thing I told Trump is that no matter what the policy area was, it was always the neocons that stabbed him in the back first. 0.52

01:14:02.000 If you just wanted to take a crude way to triage the people that stabbed him in the back that were part of his own administration, it was always the neocons.

01:14:11.000 Why do you think he kept coming to them asking them for hugs all the time and giving them all these lucrative positions of power?

01:14:16.000 I want to ask something for the audience.

01:14:18.000 A lot of people are asking about the ATF passing a new rule on pistol braces.

01:14:22.000 Do you see this, Luke?

01:14:23.000 Yes, yes.

01:14:23.000 They're saying they're NFA items now.

01:14:25.000 Basically, they're banning them.

01:14:27.000 I'm curious.

01:14:27.000 Abolish the ATF?

01:14:28.000 What do you think?

01:14:29.000 Yeah, I mean, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms is just what we call a good Saturday night in my district.

01:14:33.000 Or it should be the name of a store, not, you know, an agency.

01:14:36.000 Yeah, no, I mean, there is a deep state at the ATF, I mean, no doubt.

01:14:40.000 And during the Trump administration, it was actually pretty bad.

01:14:43.000 A lot of the rules that they were passing were converting people into criminals who had no intention of violating the law whatsoever.

01:14:52.000 I honestly don't even think that you should be able to seriously debate gun legislation if you're not from an SEC state. 0.65

01:14:59.000 When I see the Northeasterners get all worked up and they don't know anything about firearms, they haven't used firearms, they haven't stored firearms, it's quite comical to see David Cicilline from Rhode Island.

01:15:11.000 Thomas Massey asked Jerry Nadler of New York, what does the AR stand for, and AR-15, and Nadler said assault rifle.

01:15:19.000 Oh no!

01:15:21.000 What's SEC states?

01:15:22.000 Like the Southeastern Conference, you know, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas.

01:15:28.000 Well, you got New Hampshire up there, too.

01:15:30.000 West Virginia's constitutional carry.

01:15:32.000 I don't know if it matters.

01:15:33.000 It's 914.

01:15:34.000 Did you want to keep going?

01:15:35.000 Honestly, I felt bad for the audience because I knew I was going to cough a bunch.

01:15:39.000 So I thought by now it would be full cough.

01:15:41.000 I can barely explain.

01:15:41.000 Sounds good to me.

01:15:42.000 If they'll hang with me, I'll hang with them.

01:15:44.000 People are loving it.

01:15:45.000 They're so excited.

01:15:46.000 I don't know, Luke, if you saw any specific questions in the Super Chats.

01:15:50.000 A lot of people are breaking up the ATF thing because essentially what they're calling for is going to make a lot of Americans felons, just like the kind of bump stock ban that passed through Donald Trump that was just ruled unconstitutional.

01:16:04.000 So, other than the courts, is there any way to effectively lobby the ATF?

01:16:08.000 Is there any way to stop them from essentially making legal law-abiding citizens felons overnight?

01:16:15.000 One tool that we got in these negotiations over the Speaker of the House is the reinstitution of something called the Hohmann Rule, where you can zero out the funding for a particular bureaucrat.

01:16:26.000 So, like, imagine if you could have just isolated, like, Fauci's salary and zeroed it out and forced a vote on that.

01:16:33.000 Couldn't do that before.

01:16:34.000 You're now going to be able to do that.

01:16:36.000 I suspect that some of us in the Second Amendment caucus will be visiting the bureaucrats at the ATF with that tool.

01:16:44.000 What's the rule called?

01:16:45.000 The Holman?

01:16:46.000 Holman rule. 0.76

01:16:47.000 How do you spell that?

01:16:48.000 H-O-L-M-A-N? 1.00

01:16:49.000 H-O-L-M-A-N. 1.00

01:16:50.000 Holman.

01:16:53.000 Oh man, we didn't even talk about Fauci.

01:16:56.000 Is he well-loved in Congress?

01:16:57.000 Is it divisive?

01:16:59.000 What's his next gig?

01:17:00.000 University president?

01:17:02.000 Big Pharma CEO?

01:17:03.000 Podcaster?

01:17:04.000 He's gonna be the CEO of Pfizer.

01:17:07.000 How can he not, right?

01:17:08.000 Yep, something like that.

01:17:10.000 Would you hire Fauci if you knew that no matter what job it was, he was going to be spending like 20 hours a week in congressional depositions?

01:17:20.000 I think he got a deal.

01:17:21.000 I'd be willing to bet like so many of these other officials who have this, you know, within this revolving door system, he probably cut a deal a long time ago that when he's out, they'll pick him up.

01:17:31.000 Speaking of the revolving door, another one of the like ethics things that I just don't understand how it's not the law now.

01:17:36.000 If you are a member of Congress, you should never get to be a lobbyist or a registered foreign agent.

01:17:42.000 But it is like two of the most frequent jobs that people get when they're done with the job I have is literally being a registered agent for a foreign government or influencing people for money.

01:17:54.000 And I don't get why it's not like a total common sense thing to say, like, you've got to choose one path or the other.

01:18:01.000 If you want to go be a foreign agent, if you want to get paid money to influence outcomes, then that means you don't get to be one of the lawmakers.

01:18:07.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:08.000 I believe it was Joe Rogan a couple months ago was interviewing someone that was making the claim that members of Congress were getting different kind of treatment for COVID than the rest of the general public was.

01:18:19.000 Do you know if that's particularly true?

01:18:20.000 I know we talked about this Yeah.

01:18:22.000 Do you remember who the guest was?

01:18:23.000 Because I can't remember that off the top of my head right now.

01:18:26.000 But that was the accusation.

01:18:27.000 Is that accusation true that Congress gets a different kind of health care system than the American people do when it came to COVID?

01:18:33.000 Nah, man.

01:18:33.000 We're like, most of us are on the D.C.

01:18:35.000 Obamacare exchange.

01:18:37.000 So you got Obamacare.

01:18:39.000 What's up with this?

01:18:41.000 I hear like members of Congress sleeping in their office.

01:18:43.000 Yeah, more than 100 of the 435 members of Congress, when they're in Washington, DC, actually live inside of their office.

01:18:53.000 And I did that until I met my now wife, and she made it very clear that That was not an arrangement that she was going to be tolerant of. 0.50

01:19:00.000 Just because they want to save money?

01:19:02.000 It's the money.

01:19:04.000 I mean, a lot, you know, though no one should ever worry about members of Congress in our economic standing.

01:19:09.000 I mean, people who have, you know, maybe a spouse that doesn't work that's raising a family, you know, maintaining two residences on a congressional salary is challenging for some people.

01:19:20.000 I mostly like Airbnb it because I have the like Yasser Arafat theory that you never want to sleep in the same bed twice.

01:19:27.000 What's this thing I'm hearing that y'all are getting a $34,000 raise?

01:19:30.000 Is that true?

01:19:32.000 No one's told me that.

01:19:33.000 There was an article in the Daily Mail that said that one of the last things the Democrats did before the end of the last session was put in a raise of $34,000 from members of Congress.

01:19:42.000 I'm unaware of any raise, but if that's true, the margaritas are on me after the show.

01:19:47.000 Elon Musk probably is going to like to hear that the members of Congress are sleeping in their own office.

01:19:52.000 There's a lot of rodent activity at night, too, because they're always working on that building.

01:19:57.000 Wow.

01:19:58.000 Pay bump.

01:19:59.000 There you go, man.

01:20:00.000 It just could give, could give.

01:20:03.000 Oh yeah, no, that's a per diem.

01:20:05.000 Congress was like weirdly cut out of the GSA per diem.

01:20:09.000 And so that would allow Congress to access the GSA per diem.

01:20:12.000 Which is like while you're working away from home, that'll be your budget.

01:20:15.000 Right.

01:20:15.000 So if I bring an employee from Pensacola up to Washington to work on a legislative issue for a week, they get a per diem, but we don't.

01:20:24.000 So this would equalize it.

01:20:26.000 I was going to ask you, what do you think about what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter and do you think there's going to be any kind of retribution against him since he did expose how essentially the intelligence agencies were pretty much running big tech social media?

01:20:38.000 Is there going to be like some bureaucratic investigations?

01:20:41.000 Are they going to try to take away some of his funding from some of his spaceships?

01:20:45.000 How do you think that's You already saw Chris Murphy call for reviews of the different foreign investors in the Musk Twitter deal.

01:20:52.000 So it's not a question of if that will happen.

01:20:54.000 That is happening now.

01:20:56.000 It's just a question of the level of acuity of it.

01:21:00.000 And you know, there's so many of my Republican colleagues that are like, Is this what we have to wait for?

01:21:05.000 now, Elon bought Twitter, rah rah, you know, wave the pom poms for Elon and I'm glad he

01:21:11.000 bought it. I'm glad Twitter's more of a democratized free speech space. But like, is this what

01:21:17.000 we is this what we have to wait for? That we have to wait around for some like right

01:21:20.000 wing billionaire to come buy stuff so that we can have a playground? I just don't want

01:21:25.000 to live in a world where the terms of service on social media become more important than

01:21:30.000 the values that undergird the Constitution.

01:21:32.000 It's a cultural question though, right?

01:21:34.000 It just seems so low-key to sit around and cheer on Elon, while we are the board of directors of the most powerful country in the world and we do nothing, while the digital marketplace of ideas is zapped of any conservative thought.

01:21:50.000 Yeah, I don't think relying on any one guy is the right move.

01:21:53.000 It's Wade, because his emotions can change his behavior.

01:21:56.000 He wouldn't let Alex Jones back on because he's like, no, I don't like what he said about kids, about Sandy Hook stuff.

01:22:05.000 John Astor started Astoria, New York.

01:22:06.000 I mean he just bought the entire, I don't know the exact history, but because of one billionaire or whatever he was worth, we have Astoria.

01:22:13.000 And like we have communities, like one rich guy can build a community.

01:22:16.000 It's a little culty, but it's kind of like the history of our species.

01:22:19.000 I don't know if we need that.

01:22:21.000 Like I think that we can legislate away the problem sometimes, but a lot of times I think it's in the private sector.

01:22:25.000 I don't know.

01:22:26.000 Like, government's really good. What I really love the government for is to tell us when

01:22:29.000 something has gone too far and to stop it from happening, as opposed to making all these

01:22:33.000 things happen all the time. Like, that's up for the populace to do.

01:22:35.000 Yeah, but wouldn't you agree that these tech companies getting more power than most of

01:22:40.000 the governments that have ever existed in all of human history is that threshold where

01:22:46.000 Yes.

01:22:46.000 It's gone too far.

01:22:47.000 It needs to be broken up in a way that I think needs to be novel.

01:22:50.000 And so then the dispute among some working on the issue is, do you use the force of law to break them up?

01:22:56.000 Or do you almost do what happened to the tobacco companies in the 90s, where you strip their immunities and then sick the trial lawyers on them?

01:23:04.000 Well, they're still acting in the benefit of a lot of government agents, so I don't see them being put in check until they stop actually taking the orders from government and not doing what the government really wants them to do.

01:23:15.000 And the people who would be litigating against them in court want their next job to be at Big Tech.

01:23:20.000 You know, I mean, the revolving door is kind of a consistent theme of our discussion today, but look at how many people go working from FBI, DOJ, CIA, NSA, and their next job is in Silicon Valley.

01:23:32.000 It's a huge percentage.

01:23:33.000 Yeah, if you remove the immunities of what they did in the tobacco companies, then you're thinking maybe, or what might happen is they won't prosecute properly because they want to get jobs there even if they don't have immunities.

01:23:43.000 What I've seen so far is that the folks at DOJ want to be like just enough of a parasite that never kills the host.

01:23:51.000 So, you know, they want to be just enough of a pain where they maximize their own economic value to then go and work for the big tech companies afterwards.

01:24:01.000 Man, that's a good question.

01:24:02.000 Would we use the government to break it up or just strip their immunity and let the law take its course?

01:24:07.000 And this is the issue that Jim Jordan and I disagree on.

01:24:10.000 Guy, as we've talked about, I have tremendous respect for, but he prefers more of a judicial route and I prefer more of a legislative route.

01:24:17.000 I prefer the government stop controlling big tech social media and stop manipulating the platform for their own personal benefit.

01:24:23.000 That's me.

01:24:24.000 And I think if we stop that, and we also have to understand the government allowed these companies to have a monopoly on the market.

01:24:31.000 There's no way to even compete against them because of the unfair advantage that they got from members of Congress.

01:24:36.000 And whether it's tax incentives, whether it's Google Maps getting the data from the US military, There's so much of them just working hand-in-hand that I don't even see the big difference between Big Tech social media and the government sometimes, to be honest with you.

01:24:50.000 Well, Big Tech is owned by someone.

01:24:53.000 Government, at least, is we the people.

01:24:55.000 But they're still acting like a vehicle for the private sector.

01:25:00.000 Is it still we the people with government?

01:25:03.000 I think members of Congress should have to wear the patches of their PAC and lobbyist donors like NASCAR drivers have to wear their sponsors.

01:25:11.000 Yeah, I think Bill Hicks made that joke originally and he was prophetic and I absolutely agree with him 100%.

01:25:16.000 We should do like an augmented reality VR app or AR app where you put on the glasses and you can see like the augmented reality of all the donors on all their clothes.

01:25:24.000 You can see the lobbyists standing behind them with their hands on their shoulders.

01:25:27.000 Like in an aura just like floating above you see like big pharma, big tech, defense contractors.

01:25:32.000 That's actually a joke meme that came out, but is very, very, should be.

01:25:36.000 Like, on their desk, you should see all the people that have donated to their behavior, because they're supposed to represent their 700,000 constituents.

01:25:43.000 Well, it's the most insulting thing when you go try to persuade someone to change their viewpoint or to develop their viewpoint, and they literally refer you to the lobbyists.

01:25:52.000 Like I've had that happen with colleagues where I'm like, hey, look, I really want to talk to you about this insurance issue.

01:25:55.000 And they're like, okay, great.

01:25:56.000 As soon as I hear from the State Farm and all state lobbyists that like your change is an appropriate one, then I can be with you.

01:26:02.000 That sounds like an application of power.

01:26:04.000 It's so insulting to the member.

01:26:06.000 You mentioned before the show that people pay each other for sponsorship.

01:26:10.000 Well, I was discussing the dynamic on the House floor.

01:26:12.000 So on the floor of the House of Representatives, members enjoy broad immunities as a consequence of the speech and debate clause, and giving each other political donations to campaigns is permissible on the floor.

01:26:25.000 And so, I mean, you can observe dynamics where someone is In one sentence, soliciting your vote or co-sponsorship, and then in the very next sentence is handing you a check.

01:26:36.000 So they don't directly say, like, hey, I'll give you money if you vote for me.

01:26:39.000 They'll say, thanks for voting for me.

01:26:41.000 By the way, here's $2,000.

01:26:41.000 Oh yeah, Tim, I'd really, really like you to consider co-sponsoring this legislation.

01:26:46.000 It's real important to me, and I know that you've got a fundraiser coming up tonight, so here, I wanted to just come right to the floor and give you a check for it.

01:26:52.000 Oh, so they can't specifically say, this money is so that you vote for me?

01:26:55.000 They can't do that specifically?

01:26:57.000 But they can be like, thanks for voting for me, here's money?

01:26:58.000 Yeah, it's always with a bit of a wink and a nod.

01:27:03.000 Wow.

01:27:03.000 Are we still in control?

01:27:04.000 The government?

01:27:05.000 The people?

01:27:05.000 What's your vibe, man?

01:27:06.000 That's what I'm saying.

01:27:07.000 What do you think we were doing this last week?

01:27:09.000 You think it was the most comfortable thing in the world for 20 of us to try to send a shockwave through the DC cartel and say it's not just going to go the way it's always been?

01:27:17.000 And we shouldn't just Move people forward in a system that, to its core, is fundamentally corrupt with both parties?

01:27:26.000 No.

01:27:26.000 We wanted, we thought it should be about the policy, the procedure, and the personnel, not just the distribution of funds and the alliances that creates.

01:27:34.000 And for that, we were called the Taliban 20.

01:27:38.000 We were called the Insurgency Caucus.

01:27:41.000 Terrorists.

01:27:42.000 And that was members of our own party.

01:27:43.000 That wasn't even what the other party was calling us.

01:27:45.000 Outside of McCarthy, do you fear retaliation in any other sense?

01:27:48.000 Like, there's a machine at play and you're throwing a wrench in the spokes.

01:27:53.000 You know, I swim fine in turbulent waters.

01:27:56.000 So, personally, I don't.

01:27:58.000 But we all watch out for each other.

01:28:00.000 You know, if someone were to retaliate against one of my colleagues who might have less notoriety, I would be there to have their back.

01:28:08.000 And I would marshal every force that we have to ensure that that did not happen against the people that showed courage.

01:28:15.000 But I don't even mean politically.

01:28:17.000 I mean just politics can be a dirty game depending on how serious things get.

01:28:21.000 Tim, Google me.

01:28:21.000 It's pretty hard to say worse things about me than they already have.

01:28:24.000 And when you sort of have faced that down and taken their best shot, it builds calluses that become enduring and valuable in the next fight.

01:28:32.000 I'm sure it actually kind of pissed you off and made you push ten times harder.

01:28:37.000 Liberating in a way.

01:28:38.000 You know, when I was watching the McCarthy fight, my attitude was like, the more I heard these stories where he was just like smugly rejecting you guys, I'm like, that probably made him double down.

01:28:48.000 Well, we knew what we wanted.

01:28:51.000 We knew what our goals were, and oftentimes there are people in Congress who just want to be in the fight for the sake of being in the fight as an end unto itself, but we knew we had to get out of this system a result that would prohibit the passage of another omnibus.

01:29:10.000 And once we knew that, we were able to really direct a lot of our strategic decisions toward that goal.

01:29:15.000 Didn't they, like, bring the omnibus, like, two years ago on, like, a wagon?

01:29:18.000 They, like, wheeled it in.

01:29:19.000 It was, like, 5,000 pages.

01:29:21.000 Nobody read that.

01:29:21.000 That's crazy.

01:29:23.000 And I'm like, who wrote it?

01:29:25.000 Well, I mean, the lobbyists wrote it.

01:29:28.000 Literally, like, lawyers that work for Pfizer and things like that?

01:29:31.000 Who do you think writes this stuff?

01:29:33.000 The lobbyists come and bring it to members.

01:29:35.000 Members slap their name on it.

01:29:37.000 It goes into the system.

01:29:38.000 That should be illegal.

01:29:39.000 And they never read it.

01:29:40.000 They don't even know what's in the bill many times.

01:29:42.000 Sometimes they try to read them.

01:29:44.000 And there's many stories of people sneaking in stuff last minute and it becoming law as well.

01:29:48.000 We can't make it illegal to be a lobbyist because people have a First Amendment right to petition their government.

01:29:53.000 But to write a bill for someone else.

01:29:54.000 That is a function of petitioning your government.

01:29:56.000 To me, what's so offensive is that, like, when you've got the former chairman of these committees who hired all the staff that then roll out of their chairmanship, go right to K Street, and then are lobbying the people they hired, we the people aren't in charge.

01:30:10.000 The highest bidder is in charge in a system like that.

01:30:13.000 Fair point, then.

01:30:14.000 So what do we do?

01:30:16.000 I think we need broad ethics reforms.

01:30:18.000 And the only way we get them is by uniting the populist right and the populist left.

01:30:24.000 There's no reason why we shouldn't be working with the squad on a stock trading ban.

01:30:29.000 There's no reason we shouldn't be working with leftists on banning members of Congress from becoming foreign agents or lobbyists.

01:30:38.000 People have got to get over their egos.

01:30:39.000 People have to know that they've got to Get over January 6th or whatever it takes, but to me, that's the path.

01:30:50.000 Is it possible right now, you think?

01:30:52.000 It's never been more possible because we get individual votes on stuff.

01:30:55.000 When you don't get individual votes, there's no accountability.

01:30:58.000 Now by House rule, there have to be individual votes.

01:31:01.000 And the other thing is that our amendments have to be made in order.

01:31:03.000 If we go get 20% of the House to sign on to an amendment, and that amendment is germane

01:31:07.000 to the bill, it gets a vote.

01:31:10.000 And some little group of some College of Cardinals in the Rules Committee doesn't get to prohibit

01:31:15.000 members from taking votes on those issues.

01:31:17.000 And there are some who are in the very purple seats who are going to be uncomfortable about that, because they're going to have to take a lot more votes than they might want to take.

01:31:25.000 But that is what the job requires.

01:31:27.000 I want to go to Super Chats, but I asked the audience a poll.

01:31:30.000 I said, is Matt Gaetz the best member of Congress?

01:31:34.000 85% said yes.

01:31:35.000 So there you go.

01:31:36.000 My mom wants the IP addresses of the other 15%.

01:31:41.000 But Luke and Ian, do you guys want to read superchats?

01:31:44.000 I don't have them pulled up.

01:31:46.000 Ian, do you have them pulled up?

01:31:46.000 I can go through just from the YouTube page itself, yeah.

01:31:50.000 Let's start off with David Berg.

01:31:52.000 This is from more recent to older, which is the reverse of what we normally do.

01:31:57.000 But David said, David Berg from Destin, Florida.

01:32:00.000 Could not be more proud of my congressman, Matt Gaetz.

01:32:02.000 You did what we elected you to do.

01:32:04.000 It's great to hear from one of my actual bosses in Destin.

01:32:07.000 That's in my district.

01:32:08.000 Thanks, David.

01:32:09.000 Yeah, let's keep taking these.

01:32:12.000 Yeah, I remember when I first got here, the leadership sat me down in one of these Dutch Uncle talks and said, well, Gates, you're just not a team player.

01:32:21.000 And I said, no, I'm a great team player.

01:32:24.000 It's just that you all are not my team.

01:32:25.000 My team are the 750,000 people who sent me here from Florida.

01:32:29.000 Serge, try to find one as well.

01:32:31.000 I got one here from GOP Gamer who asks, can Congress label the ATF a state-sponsored terror organization?

01:32:39.000 Dogs everywhere will thank you.

01:32:41.000 So that's a super chat by GOP Gamer.

01:32:43.000 And Serge, pick up the next one.

01:32:46.000 Give me a second here.

01:32:47.000 No, no, no, that's a question if anyone wants to answer.

01:32:49.000 Can it be a state sponsor of terror?

01:32:52.000 Let's just defund it.

01:32:54.000 Let's just isolate the bureaucrats there that make the bad decisions, zero out their salaries, and take away their authorities. 0.99

01:33:00.000 I like the isolate bureaucrats thing.

01:33:02.000 It's kind of like sanctions on an opposing, on an enemy.

01:33:06.000 And think about it.

01:33:06.000 You don't have to do it to all of them.

01:33:08.000 You do it to a few, and it has a strong deterrent effect on the rest.

01:33:12.000 That if they are promulgating some rule or advancing something that is indefensible, we're going to make them a star.

01:33:18.000 Sloppy DMT Joe has a super chat that is asking, legalize DMT?

01:33:23.000 What's DMT?

01:33:26.000 I've been for legalizing a lot, but I don't know.

01:33:28.000 What is that?

01:33:29.000 Dimethyltryptamine is a chemical in your body that's basically kind of Responsible for the dream state that we live in, this whole dream of reality, and it's secreted in your body, plants, things.

01:33:42.000 But people in modern culture will get it out of ayahuasca.

01:33:44.000 Are you familiar with the ayahuasca vine?

01:33:46.000 Not personally. 0.80

01:33:47.000 I have friends who swear by it, but any drug that has a predicate that you vomit and shit yourself is really not the type of experience I sign up for. 0.98

01:33:57.000 That's why you do fasting for a week beforehand, because you're really just purging crap. 0.96

01:34:01.000 Here's the next important question.

01:34:03.000 Should American citizens have the right to own nuclear weapons and biological weapons?

01:34:07.000 No.

01:34:07.000 You don't think so?

01:34:08.000 I think they should.

01:34:09.000 Well, should is the wrong answer.

01:34:10.000 Is that what that silo was that I walked by on the way here?

01:34:13.000 The two silos, you mean.

01:34:15.000 Oh, man.

01:34:15.000 No, what I mean to say is not should, is that the Second Amendment says arms.

01:34:19.000 If you don't think that's the case, then we've got to amend the Second Amendment.

01:34:22.000 Because when they wrote it, Privateers existed and they had weapons of war to an extreme degree.

01:34:30.000 They had, you know, frigates and man-of-war, privateers, corsairs, etc.

01:34:34.000 So I don't see how we've decided at some point outside of the Constitution that certain weapons are off-limit to the people when they originally weren't.

01:34:42.000 You see what I mean?

01:34:44.000 Yeah, if there weren't nuclear weapons then.

01:34:45.000 No, I get it.

01:34:46.000 I mean definitely if that were going to start it would be in Florida.

01:34:50.000 I mean, the Florida man would be the first.

01:34:52.000 Wasn't there a guy who was taking Americium and he made a death ray?

01:34:57.000 I think that was in Florida, wasn't it?

01:34:59.000 I could be wrong.

01:35:00.000 We got another super chat by Dana Costello, who's asking, what does Matt feel about auditing the Federal Reserve?

01:35:07.000 I'm for it.

01:35:08.000 I'm on Massey's bill to do that.

01:35:10.000 Massey picked that up from Ron Paul, and I support it.

01:35:14.000 And actually, every Congress, we get more people on that bill.

01:35:18.000 That's awesome.

01:35:19.000 Serge, you got one?

01:35:21.000 Yeah, I got one.

01:35:23.000 Matt, what is being done to curtail the Federal Reserve's rapid march towards Weimar Germany-style inflation?

01:35:28.000 What is America's breaking point?

01:35:29.000 This is from Hyatsobo.

01:35:32.000 Yeah, it's a great question because, you know, the Grover Norquist view of conservatism was that if we could just cut taxes enough, you could kind of starve the beast, right?

01:35:43.000 And that has proven false because we've been pretty successful at stopping large-scale tax increases, but we've substituted Fed policy for it.

01:35:53.000 And by the way, Mnuchin was one of the worst.

01:35:56.000 Like, if you look at what happened during COVID and all of the different Fed policy that was constructed, then that is badly in need of audit and was undeniably abused in a number of cases.

01:36:06.000 And so, yeah, I mean, I think that the Fed failed and it's one, one job.

01:36:12.000 It's only directed.

01:36:13.000 Yeah.

01:36:14.000 Of pushing against inflation.

01:36:16.000 And it's yet another institution that continues to have less and less trust.

01:36:23.000 We got another $5 super chat from David Troutman.

01:36:26.000 He says, Please don't cancel tomorrow.

01:36:28.000 I'm driving up from Charlotte with guitars to play with for you guys.

01:36:33.000 Tomorrow is not cancelled, but Luke and Ian are too lazy to get up on time.

01:36:38.000 I feel assaulted at that early.

01:36:40.000 Unnecessary.

01:36:41.000 They're doing a meet-up tomorrow at 10 o'clock in the morning in Washington, D.C.

01:36:47.000 I got one here from Kevin Malone.

01:36:48.000 Sounds like an insurrection.

01:36:50.000 Insurrectingly good time.

01:36:52.000 Will there be a zero-based balanced budget amendment?

01:36:56.000 we will have a budget that balances over 10 years that all members will have to vote on.

01:37:01.000 I think we should have the balanced budget amendment vote with that and we may.

01:37:06.000 How do you balance a budget with inflation clawing up the back of our necks? Because I don't know

01:37:11.000 what the, or I should say with the interest, with interest.

01:37:14.000 Right, right. But they're related, right? Because as you have the interest rates increase,

01:37:18.000 that the cost of that debt service balloons, and then that eats up a greater and greater

01:37:22.000 share of the budget, and it's not discretionary.

01:37:24.000 You have to do it.

01:37:27.000 But how do we pay off the interest to the Federal Reserve?

01:37:31.000 Actually, this is a real question.

01:37:33.000 How much of the debt that we owe to the Federal Reserve is interest?

01:37:37.000 Was accrued by interest, and how much of it is base principal?

01:37:39.000 I used to know this, but I don't now.

01:37:42.000 Because the rates have changed.

01:37:47.000 Look, the drivers of the debt, the interest on the debt, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.

01:37:55.000 And so if you're not willing to attack Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid from an eligibility standpoint or a benefit standpoint, You're counting the number of angels on the head of a pin.

01:38:06.000 I used to be like, you know, people are sick, pay for their health care.

01:38:09.000 And now I'm like, I watch people just continually drink poison, eat poison.

01:38:12.000 I'm like, I can't keep paying money to keep those people alive.

01:38:16.000 The thing that I don't get is why we subsidize the stuff that makes people sick.

01:38:20.000 Like what we allow food stamps to pay for poisons people. 0.98

01:38:24.000 And so we pay to get people into this diabetic state, then they get disabled, then we put them on SSID, then in the final six months of life, the curve on the cost on spending on their healthcare goes through the roof and we do it all over again.

01:38:39.000 And you know why?

01:38:41.000 Because sugar companies and candy confectioners and big food get in there and ensure that we never reduce the amount of unhealthy stuff that we pay for for poor people.

01:38:52.000 As well as the subsidies for corn and soy, which help create seed oils.

01:38:55.000 But that's another thing.

01:38:56.000 We got another $20 Super Chat from AJ that is asking, aside from Fauci, the public would like to see an investigation by the House into Klaus Schwab, the World Economic Forum, Soros, and Gates.

01:39:07.000 Make it happen, Matt.

01:39:09.000 Winky face.

01:39:10.000 That's the $20 Super Chat.

01:39:12.000 Well, let me flip that on you guys.

01:39:14.000 I mean, you know, all right, the weaponization against the American people select subcommittee meets for the first meeting.

01:39:22.000 Who's your first witness?

01:39:25.000 What was the question again?

01:39:27.000 Elon Musk.

01:39:28.000 That is a very popular choice right now among some Republicans.

01:39:33.000 Now, the Dems then get to take their shots at him because we're not like the Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson thing.

01:39:39.000 We'll put actual Democrats on the committees because we want to have real debate.

01:39:43.000 But Elon would be a stellar first witness.

01:39:48.000 Wow.

01:39:49.000 Witness for?

01:39:50.000 I'm sorry, I was looking at the weaponization of media from the government.

01:39:53.000 Yeah, I mean, because you get all of the features of the weaponization of our government through the Twitter files.

01:39:59.000 You get the national security piece, you get the White House officials trying to get information, you know, either enhanced or diminished on Twitter.

01:40:10.000 So you could open a lot of doors through that.

01:40:11.000 You get the DOD.

01:40:12.000 Think about that, how the DOD was involved in different like foreign policy narratives.

01:40:18.000 I think he'd gladly do it.

01:40:20.000 He'd be like, yup, tell me when to come talk.

01:40:22.000 Yeah.

01:40:23.000 That's a good one.

01:40:24.000 Sean Young has a $50 Super Chat asking, why is it criminal to lie when testifying before Congress, but not criminal to lie when you are holding a seat in Congress?

01:40:34.000 Tradition, mostly.

01:40:35.000 Huh, I see.

01:40:37.000 We got another $10 Super Chat by Gunface11 saying, can you abolish the NFA?

01:40:44.000 We could.

01:40:45.000 We won't.

01:40:47.000 But I mean, we have the powers.

01:40:49.000 Yeah, yeah, let's do this one.

01:40:49.000 Ian?

01:40:49.000 Serge?

01:40:51.000 Oh, did I read this one?

01:40:52.000 All right, here we go.

01:40:54.000 This one's actually kind of nice, although it's sad.

01:40:57.000 Divine interventions.

01:40:58.000 Is there anything that can be done at all?

01:40:59.000 Is there any hope?

01:41:00.000 Sounds like we're just going to end up in a dystopian dictatorship like China by the end of the decade. 0.66

01:41:04.000 I'm severely blackpilled.

01:41:09.000 Who was that?

01:41:10.000 That's Divine Interventions.

01:41:11.000 Divine Interventions.

01:41:13.000 Yeah, there's some tension between the name and the sentiment that's expressed there.

01:41:18.000 You know, I encounter this actually pretty frequently at our town halls and rallies where people show up and say, you know, I came because I think you're fighting for us, but So there are some who think it's kind of all lost.

01:41:29.000 And whenever I get down, you know, Jim Jordan is a guy who gives me comfort when he says, look, there's always a fight worth having in this place.

01:41:38.000 I have a job in the United States Congress where there are dozens of files on my desk every morning where it's someone who relies on me to To pick up their cause and to go to battle for it.

01:41:48.000 And if that can't get you up and that can't get you focused on being the best version of yourself, then nothing can.

01:41:54.000 So that stops me from getting blackpailed because whether it's getting a little old lady your IRS check that she was supposed to get and they screwed her over, whether it's the guy who has 22 EPA agents show up because he wanted to expand his cattle pond and you're able to Get them off his back, or whether it's one of our service members that now we have to advocate for so that they can get their careers and their lives back after this foolish vaccine mandate was repealed.

01:42:21.000 You know, there are still good things to do and good people that deserve us to be focused and not so diminished or discouraged that we don't get in the fight for them.

01:42:31.000 Yeah, we got two real fast.

01:42:33.000 We got Fat Bar Mujah, who says Matt Gaetz rocks, which is a good one.

01:42:37.000 There's a lot of people congratulating you and thanking you, by the way, in the chat and the super chats as well.

01:42:42.000 And then the second one, Matt, if the IRS abolishment fails, we need you to move to end all federal withholding.

01:42:53.000 Make people realize the taxes they pay.

01:42:55.000 End quarterly payments and make them pay once a year.

01:42:57.000 This is the way to change things in regards to taxes in the IRS.

01:43:01.000 That's a key leverage point.

01:43:02.000 The withholding absolutely is.

01:43:04.000 Let me ask you guys this question.

01:43:06.000 So the House gets in, our first bill, Abolish 87,000 IRS agents.

01:43:11.000 But like, we know that that has no chance of a hearing in the Senate.

01:43:15.000 It's never going to get signed by Joe Biden.

01:43:18.000 And so how we use our floor time, like, I guess there is a role for those messaging bills that just lay out what our principles are.

01:43:28.000 But like, there's a part of me that where there's like, a little disingenuousness to it, right?

01:43:33.000 Where all my colleagues are putting out press releases and social media statements, you know, we We did it!

01:43:38.000 you know, we abolished the 87,000 IRS agents.

01:43:40.000 It's like, man, no, you didn't like be straight with your constituents that we are in divided government.

01:43:46.000 And the way to be successful in divided government is you have

01:43:49.000 to lay out a vision with one hand, but you have to use specific leverage points.

01:43:53.000 And so what I've encouraged Republicans to do is develop a battle plan, right?

01:43:58.000 On the debt limit, what is it that we are demanding in that fight?

01:44:02.000 On the National Defense Authorization Act, is it the reinstatement of our military?

01:44:06.000 Is it zeroing out the Ukraine funding?

01:44:07.000 What is it that we're fighting for there?

01:44:09.000 On the farm bill, what is it that is most critical there?

01:44:13.000 Is it food stamp reform?

01:44:15.000 You know, and so oftentimes we get into this legislation and everybody's after their disparate piece.

01:44:22.000 But there's not really a clear vision of what victory looks like on those, you know, must-pass bills.

01:44:29.000 And knowing that, I think, on the front end would get more buy-in, where we had more of a populist energy to these reforms.

01:44:38.000 Fizzy Bear is asking, has there been any talk to pass a law that will prevent the US government from creating a central bank digital currency or at the very least require the government to always have a form of physical cash that cannot be traced?

01:44:54.000 No.

01:44:57.000 Where do you guys fall on the crypto reg stuff?

01:45:00.000 I think that we're in a new place.

01:45:02.000 So if you get crypto rewards from a website, and then they're worth a dollar each, every token, but then they drop to 10 cents, the government, from what I can tell, wants to come in and tax you on each of those as if they're still worth a dollar, because that's what they were when you got them, which is unconscionable.

01:45:16.000 So I think it should be either they tax at the current value or the lowest value it's

01:45:19.000 been in the last year when they're taxing the value of your crypto tokens.

01:45:23.000 But not just the taxes, even the regulation of the marketplaces.

01:45:26.000 Does FTX function as such a game changer that those marketplaces don't just become some

01:45:31.000 offshore abyss?

01:45:33.000 They will always be offshore.

01:45:34.000 There's nothing we can do to stop.

01:45:35.000 We can only hamper our own ability to create new currency if we start, because of Sam's

01:45:39.000 horrible misuse of funds at FTX.

01:45:43.000 What that guy did is worse than what Bernie Madoff did.

01:45:46.000 That's not a reason to destroy the market.

01:45:48.000 Although, this is the thing, man.

01:45:49.000 We're talking about inflation.

01:45:51.000 When you create a new cryptocurrency, that's adding to more inflation.

01:45:54.000 We're making more and more money.

01:45:56.000 I can't tell some days whether I want to see, like, Sam Bankman freed in a jail cell or if we should just pardon him and put him in charge of Social Security.

01:46:03.000 Because, like, if we're going to run a Ponzi scheme, like, maybe we should find the guy that's the best at it.

01:46:07.000 I mean, he wasn't that good.

01:46:08.000 He kept doing a lot of different stuff and having a lot of different parties.

01:46:12.000 We've got another Super Chat by K-Ben.

01:46:13.000 Yeah, we got it from K-Ben really fast. 0.63

01:46:16.000 That's the same one.

01:46:17.000 Yeah, that's the same one.

01:46:18.000 But yeah, Matt, who do you think Trump's VP pick should be?

01:46:25.000 Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

01:46:26.000 Assuming she does a good job as governor of Arkansas, which I believe she will. 0.97

01:46:30.000 Is there a reason why?

01:46:32.000 Yeah, I think the reason Trump won in 2016 is because a whole lot of women who didn't like him voted for him because they could not stand telling their daughters and granddaughters that Hillary Clinton was the first female president of the United States.

01:46:46.000 And what I've said to President Trump is, like, you have to create a permission structure where women who do not like you vote for you again. 0.75

01:46:55.000 And, like, you see the grit of a Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

01:46:58.000 You see the directness, the efficacy, really bold steps.

01:47:04.000 Her first days as governor, banning TikTok on a lot of the government devices there. 0.86

01:47:10.000 She's the kind of person I'd look at.

01:47:11.000 Kristi Noem, also, I think would be a pretty stellar pick.

01:47:17.000 We got another $50 super chat by n7wolfarchive asking, I am a Brit.

01:47:22.000 I want to live in the United States, but I am stopped by the VAX mandate.

01:47:26.000 Is there a way Congress can stop it?

01:47:29.000 We want you to stay in Britain. 0.99

01:47:32.000 We're tired of Britain being overrun.

01:47:34.000 My God, I mean, you think about the way immigration has fundamentally changed the country. 1.00

01:47:40.000 How is what has happened there not a more prescient warning sign?

01:47:47.000 To our country.

01:47:48.000 For real.

01:47:48.000 I watch all the Lotus Eaters episodes.

01:47:50.000 Shout out to the Lotus Eaters.

01:47:51.000 I'm sure you're cool with that, Tim.

01:47:52.000 Big fan.

01:47:52.000 Oh, yeah.

01:47:53.000 Good friend.

01:47:53.000 Carl Benjamin.

01:47:54.000 Yeah.

01:47:55.000 And I watch all of it.

01:47:56.000 I mean, I've lived all over the world my whole life, and it's unthinkable to me that you just open your borders.

01:48:00.000 But, I mean, you know, not to look at us or anything like that, but... It's like a holdover from when we had very low population in the 1800s.

01:48:08.000 It's like, yo, bring your tired, your hungry, and your poor.

01:48:11.000 We need a population.

01:48:12.000 Now we're like oversaturated population.

01:48:14.000 We don't need more people.

01:48:15.000 We need great people, but we don't need like masses of people.

01:48:19.000 Well, and I mean, it's, it's a misnomer to suggest that America has not increased unrestricted immigration throughout times in our history when it has suited us.

01:48:26.000 And whenever we have had mass waves of immigration, it has come with times of strife and conflict.

01:48:33.000 And we invite that now without a real appreciation for the consequence.

01:48:38.000 Surge, can you go in the beginning, because there's a lot of Super Chats in the beginning, and I'm only seeing the latest ones.

01:48:43.000 You're able to see all the ones from the beginning.

01:48:44.000 Is the Super Chat like the podcast version of when people pay the dueling pianos guy to play a certain song?

01:48:51.000 I got one here from Ben Avalone.

01:48:51.000 Yeah.

01:48:54.000 Says he's compromising my rule of never posting on YouTube for this Super Chat.

01:48:58.000 Small tech business owner in Pensacola here.

01:49:00.000 Didn't vote for Gates in recent midterm.

01:49:02.000 Always vote third party as middle finger to the system as a matter of principle.

01:49:05.000 Consider my mind changed, sir.

01:49:06.000 Well done, sir.

01:49:08.000 I appreciate that very much.

01:49:10.000 I will be your middle finger, Ben.

01:49:10.000 Ben Avalon.

01:49:13.000 The appendage.

01:49:15.000 I assure you a vote from me will still send a middle finger to plenty.

01:49:19.000 My promise to you.

01:49:21.000 We got a $10 super chat by Wattman13 asking, how about a time on the floor to read bills longer than 50 pages?

01:49:28.000 No one can leave until it's been read through.

01:49:31.000 Yeah, that's a good one.

01:49:32.000 Oh, Massey does that sometimes. 1.00

01:49:34.000 So it's usually by unanimous consent that the bill is not read aloud.

01:49:38.000 And so Massey has gone down in times of frustration and required the reading of the bills, which really only punishes the clerk, right?

01:49:45.000 Because members aren't there.

01:49:46.000 How about a requirement that folks actually show up for debate? 0.99

01:49:49.000 Because in the state legislature, your ass had to be in the seat. 0.96

01:49:53.000 And you had to be there because we took votes when the debates occurred. 0.99

01:49:57.000 And so you got the benefit of hearing the different sides of an argument.

01:50:02.000 The way it works in Congress is all day, like, you know, two, three, five people go debate the issues on the floor.

01:50:08.000 And then at night, we come in and take a series of votes on all those matters.

01:50:11.000 And there's no real requirement that people even appreciate the subtleties and nuances of the policy choices.

01:50:18.000 Marjorie was telling us that Typically on votes, people aren't even there at all, and it's like five people here and five people there, and they just go like, meh, and it's passed, and they bang the gavel.

01:50:27.000 Yeah, which was really the mistake Pelosi made in taking Marjorie off committees, because then Marjorie was the warden of the floor. 0.60

01:50:34.000 She would go down to the floor and demand votes and call the question, and I thought that was a pretty good thing for the process.

01:50:43.000 If Pelosi were in charge again, she'd probably put Marjorie on all the committees.

01:50:48.000 We've got a question from Ben D. It says, Mr. Gates, you say Congress shouldn't trade individual stocks.

01:50:53.000 Does this also include options, futures, FX, and any other type of security or derivatives?

01:50:59.000 Yeah, because we can impact the value of those things.

01:51:04.000 And we know when the value is changing based on the briefings we get that the rest of the American people don't get.

01:51:10.000 A1 has a $20 super chat asking you, Matt Gaetz, does the USA need a third political party?

01:51:17.000 What are your thoughts?

01:51:19.000 I don't know.

01:51:20.000 I mean, what?

01:51:21.000 The first two we have are so bad.

01:51:23.000 We need a third one.

01:51:28.000 I think we need capture of our existing parties by people who are at least ideologically informed.

01:51:38.000 Because right now, There are times when it feels like it doesn't even matter which party wins the election, because all you're really deciding is who gets to be the lead valet for the same special interests.

01:51:49.000 It's gut-wrenching to see, like, oh, well, we won!

01:51:52.000 We've been promising the American people for four elections that we're going to repeal Obamacare, and then Paul Ryan goes and takes $14 million from HMOs in the nine weeks preceding the rollout of our health care bill, And guess what?

01:52:04.000 It doesn't repeal Obamacare.

01:52:05.000 It just repositions it in a way that protects the profits and the guaranteed revenue stream for health insurance companies and health management companies.

01:52:14.000 And so, you know, I've seen the power change, but the bosses never really do.

01:52:21.000 Did Paul Ryan pocket that money or any of that money?

01:52:24.000 Oh, it all went to his political fund.

01:52:27.000 You know, the pressures on the presiding officers for fundraising are intense.

01:52:32.000 You know, they got to raise like a million bucks a day, you know, when we are in legislative session.

01:52:37.000 And Paul Ryan told me, yeah, you know, I have to go to three dinners every night, and every dinner has to do about $300,000.

01:52:43.000 What are they raising money for?

01:52:44.000 What's the point?

01:52:45.000 Campaigns.

01:52:46.000 But what, just to spend money on people door knocking?

01:52:49.000 And what I sort of figured out is, well, I mean, there are these people who whore themselves out for donations from lobbyists and special interests, and then they use that money to go buy 30 seconds on the news programs.

01:52:49.000 Well, in advertising.

01:53:06.000 And so instead of doing all that, why not just go be on the news programs?

01:53:10.000 Start a YouTube channel?

01:53:11.000 Exactly.

01:53:12.000 Do you have a YouTube channel?

01:53:12.000 Well, yeah.

01:53:14.000 I do, actually.

01:53:15.000 I do.

01:53:20.000 I got a podcast called Firebrand.

01:53:23.000 America's 57th favorite political podcast.

01:53:25.000 That's great.

01:53:26.000 But this could actually be a solution to a certain degree of getting money out of politics.

01:53:30.000 Yes.

01:53:32.000 You can promote yourself.

01:53:33.000 Right.

01:53:34.000 And why not just do the thing that you would otherwise spend the money on?

01:53:38.000 And maybe if we didn't take such crappy positions and put the lobbyists in charge of the agenda, it wouldn't take $10 million to go win an election. 0.97

01:53:46.000 Jay Lincoln has a $20 super chat asking, what do you think about Texas Pelosi walking back the terrorist claim?

01:53:54.000 Oh, man.

01:53:57.000 That is quite the moniker.

01:53:58.000 That was good.

01:53:59.000 I am glad that Congressman Crenshaw clarified that he was using hyperbole when using the terrorism label.

01:54:07.000 I know Dan Crenshaw doesn't think I'm a terrorist.

01:54:09.000 I know they were frustrated with the tactics we used.

01:54:12.000 They were hardball tactics.

01:54:13.000 Sometimes that's what the job requires.

01:54:15.000 Bonnie Svevlik asks, what are your thoughts on Texxik?

01:54:21.000 On what?

01:54:21.000 Tex-It.

01:54:22.000 Oh, Tex-It.

01:54:23.000 Oh, no, we are one country.

01:54:25.000 I am not for this, like, secession stuff.

01:54:28.000 I mean, I love this country, and I don't buy into any of that worldview.

01:54:33.000 What about a new state in Northern California, Idaho, the state of Jefferson?

01:54:40.000 I haven't spent as much time up there.

01:54:43.000 So these are areas like Eastern Oregon, Idaho, Northern California, which tend to be more conservative, and they want to be their own state separate from the dense liberal areas, because it's a very different group of people.

01:54:54.000 Did you see how many of the recent counties just voted to actually vote on it and actually try to join?

01:54:59.000 Jefferson?

01:54:59.000 Yeah, not to join Jefferson, but to join Idaho, like the Greater Idaho Movement.

01:55:03.000 It's like a lot of Eastern Oregon.

01:55:05.000 I didn't know Idaho was so hot right now.

01:55:08.000 As a Florida man, I live in the best state in the country, so I'm unfamiliar with these gripes.

01:55:18.000 Ditto.

01:55:19.000 Same.

01:55:19.000 I'm a Florida man as well.

01:55:20.000 I'm going back there in a few days.

01:55:22.000 We got another great super chat by Brandon Hurt, and he's asking, when there's a hot issue in Congress, what is the best way to communicate with my representative?

01:55:31.000 Email?

01:55:31.000 Voicemail?

01:55:32.000 What is it?

01:55:33.000 It's different for different members, and you need to know what that leverage point is or influential point is for members.

01:55:39.000 I mean, I get on Twitter spaces at night.

01:55:41.000 I'm real active at responding to comments on social media.

01:55:45.000 But for some of my colleagues who are septuagenarians and octogenarians, they get Handwritten reports every day about who called the landline.

01:55:53.000 And so, you know, it's important to get some intelligence.

01:55:56.000 Part of political tradecraft is knowing what influences people.

01:55:59.000 And what frustrates me is like when what influences them is, well, you know, Facebook hired Chuck Schumer's daughter.

01:56:05.000 Do you think you're going to have like an honest conversation with Chuck Schumer about regulating meta?

01:56:11.000 I got one from Patrick.

01:56:13.000 He asked, Matt, I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on the current state of the military and the impact of woke ideologies on service academies in particular.

01:56:20.000 What are your thoughts?

01:56:21.000 No, this is something not a lot of people are talking about, but the diminution in interest in even serving in the military and especially the service academies, it's palpable.

01:56:33.000 When I first got this job, The coolest part of it was nominating young people to our service academies, because you get to see the best of your district.

01:56:41.000 And so I had every valedictorian, salutatorian, club president, captain of the football team applying for these spots.

01:56:49.000 And now the average test scores are lower, the average leadership positions are far fewer, the average GPA, class rank down, because the best of the best No longer want to go to West Point, the Naval Academy, the Air Force Academy.

01:57:04.000 There are a few who do, but the gestation period for that consequence is pretty long, right?

01:57:12.000 And we're going to be feeling the effects of this in decades because we weren't getting Patriotic, God-fearing Americans into those positions.

01:57:20.000 And, you know, representing the district I do, it's heartbreaking to hear that I've got units that are having less live fire training, fewer jumps, capabilities reduced, and they're spending all their time in DEI.

01:57:37.000 You know, sessions, and learning about what pronouns are acceptable and not acceptable.

01:57:41.000 In the reserves, there are people reporting to me that you can't say mother and father.

01:57:45.000 You just have to say parent, because it's just, you know, too binary.

01:57:49.000 They're also walking around in heels in some instances, but that's another story.

01:57:53.000 We got a $20 Super Chat by Smashing Random Keys asking, does the GOP plan on training ballot harvesters?

01:58:00.000 If not, I fear the GOP won't win a majority for a while.

01:58:03.000 In some states, In California, there's more organized effort there in states that allow it.

01:58:09.000 Florida does not allow ballot harvesting, so I don't think we should do things that are illegal.

01:58:14.000 And by the way, everyone acts like this election integrity problem is unsolvable.

01:58:18.000 How will we ever resolve this?

01:58:21.000 And Florida used to be the laughingstock of the country.

01:58:24.000 We had the hanging chads and the dimpled chads and the pimpled chads 0.99

01:58:28.000 During the 2000 election and then we got our shit together and we had chain of custody requirements for the ballots 0.99

01:58:35.000 and we had Transparency over how many people had voted in real time 0.68

01:58:39.000 every eight minutes Every supervisor of election in Florida has to publish how

01:58:44.000 many people have voted who those people are What their party affiliation is and then when you get to

01:58:50.000 there's not like an opportunity for a hundred fifty thousand ballots to be willed into existence or ten

01:58:50.000 the end?

01:58:55.000 thousand ballots because you know along the And if they screw it up and aren't complying with those transparency laws you get instant access to an injunction in a courtroom where those

01:59:06.000 Offices can be put in a state of receivership by the Secretary of State.

01:59:10.000 So we're not going to get screwed over in Florida by this stuff.

01:59:13.000 And if other states would model our laws, they would be more protected.

01:59:17.000 Now, there are some who say, well, we need national laws on these things.

01:59:20.000 And that is perilous.

01:59:23.000 You know, you start nationalizing elections, it's not going to go the way you think it might go.

01:59:29.000 Schumer and Biden and the like get their say in how states are doing electioneering.

01:59:33.000 What do you think about federally legislating that companies using proprietary voting machines where the code is secret so you don't know what the programs are doing behind closed doors that we mandate that they use open source code?

01:59:45.000 I mean, the best open source code is a paper ballot.

01:59:50.000 I mean, that's what we've done in Florida.

01:59:51.000 Like, we don't need your source code if we can go and look at the paper ballots and compare them and do precinct level audits.

01:59:58.000 Because you'll get the canary in the coal mine. 0.92

02:00:02.000 I feel like with hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper that stuff just gets easily lost in the shuffle, literally.

02:00:10.000 Not if you have the right chain of custody requirements.

02:00:13.000 Have you considered doing like a blockchain backup on top of everything?

02:00:16.000 There is a lot of talk about the use of blockchain for that very reason.

02:00:19.000 If you do it, use a bunch of different blockchains, like a bunch of them, because one can get hijacked.

02:00:24.000 So like all of them will verify.

02:00:26.000 Yeah, that is the next level of election integrity.

02:00:30.000 You guys want to try and find one more real good one?

02:00:32.000 Yeah, I got one more from Rob Hess, the Rob Hess himself.

02:00:37.000 Gates should have Ilhan Omar get together and put something forward to repeal the Patriot Act.

02:00:41.000 How do you feel about that?

02:00:42.000 I would do it.

02:00:43.000 Ilhan, I'm ready when you are.

02:00:44.000 Oh, great.

02:00:46.000 All right, everybody, I can barely talk, but this has been an absolute blast.

02:00:46.000 Right on.

02:00:50.000 Matt, you're currently my favorite member of Congress after what went down with the Speaker vote because, you know, we had been talking about this for months, for the year before the midterms, that even if the Republicans win, we don't think we're going to see any real change.

02:01:04.000 And despite the fact that McCarthy is still Speaker, I think you did a lot of good, so I got nowhere to go but down now.

02:01:10.000 I've got nothing to do but disappoint you, Tim.

02:01:13.000 Well, you know, nah, I think it'll be alright.

02:01:13.000 I hope I don't.

02:01:16.000 It is what it is.

02:01:17.000 But smash the like button, subscribe to the channel, share the show with your friends.

02:01:20.000 You can follow the show at TimCastIRL.

02:01:22.000 You can follow me at TimCast.

02:01:23.000 I am taking this weekend to rest my voice, obviously.

02:01:26.000 But we will be in DC tomorrow at Freedom Plaza.

02:01:29.000 I just probably won't be talking.

02:01:30.000 Matt, do you want to shout anything out?

02:01:33.000 Give me a follow, at repmattgates, and check out my podcast Firebrand.

02:01:37.000 We'd love to have some cross-pollination of this terrific audience.

02:01:40.000 Where's Firebrand?

02:01:41.000 Where can people find it?

02:01:43.000 Anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

02:01:44.000 We're pretty much everywhere.

02:01:46.000 Most of our audience is Apple.

02:01:48.000 And was that your Twitter account?

02:01:49.000 And what was it again?

02:01:50.000 Matt, thank you so much for coming here and answering our questions.

02:01:57.000 Thank you so much for being here for two hours.

02:01:59.000 Where is here?

02:02:00.000 Where am I?

02:02:01.000 Middle of nowhere.

02:02:01.000 By the way, it was super weird that you made me put the blindfold on on the way here.

02:02:05.000 I thought that was too much.

02:02:08.000 Everyone does that.

02:02:09.000 Was that a goat next to me?

02:02:11.000 All right.

02:02:12.000 But a lot of people appreciated it, especially in the comment section, and thank you so much for doing it.

02:02:16.000 I just started a new Rumble channel.

02:02:18.000 It's on rumble.com forward slash we are change.

02:02:20.000 I just posted one of my videos there from my members area, luconsensor.com, where you get to have a sneak peek at what the kind of videos I do there almost every single day.

02:02:30.000 Rumble.com forward slash we are change.

02:02:32.000 For the spicy videos that you guys could watch right now.

02:02:35.000 Thanks for having me.

02:02:36.000 Thanks for coming, man.

02:02:37.000 More of these.

02:02:38.000 This is fantastic.

02:02:39.000 More Congress people coming to shows like this, speaking the word of the American people from the voice of the representative.

02:02:45.000 I'm bringing backup next time.

02:02:46.000 Yeah, bring your friends.

02:02:47.000 We gotta bring Jim.

02:02:48.000 I didn't know you guys were such good friends, but we should hear you and Jim go on Tech, talk about tech and how we gotta deal with big tech.

02:02:54.000 That's really fascinating.

02:02:55.000 I'll make the pitch. 0.93

02:02:56.000 Hell yeah, dawg.

02:02:57.000 Or Ilhan.

02:02:57.000 Maybe we'll bring Ilhan and talk War Powers.

02:03:00.000 I'm Ian Crossland.

02:03:00.000 Sure.

02:03:00.000 Absolutely.

02:03:01.000 Find me anywhere on the internet.

02:03:02.000 Serge, talk me out.

02:03:03.000 I am at Serge.com.

02:03:05.000 Also find me anywhere on the internet.

02:03:07.000 I appreciate your time.

02:03:08.000 This is really, really cool.

02:03:10.000 I also appreciate you nominating Donald Trump.

02:03:13.000 I just love hearing the groan.

02:03:14.000 It was just so hilarious.

02:03:16.000 A little discussion in the den.

02:03:17.000 It was just like, you can't make that up.

02:03:19.000 The president vote was my favorite.

02:03:21.000 Yeah.

02:03:22.000 All right, everybody, become a member at TimCast.com if you want to support our work and get access to our uncensored members-only segments.

02:03:28.000 Thanks for hanging out, and we will see you all tomorrow in DC at Freedom Plaza.

02:03:32.000 10 a.m.

Timcast IRL - Tim Pool - January 14, 2023

Timcast IRL - Matt Gaetz Joins, Discussing Biden Special Counsel and GOP Investigations

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