Ted Cruz and Ben Fergusons discuss AOC, Gretchen Whitmer and Gavin Newsom's foreign policy flub at the Munich Security Conference, and the sewage problem on the Potomac River. They also discuss why AOC should know something about foreign policy.
00:00:52.400And boy, all three of them wish they could do a take two and reset.
00:00:56.000As you noted, Barack Obama also, I guess he was feeling lonely, you know, laying back at his mansion, collecting the millions of dollars Hollywood has paid him.
00:01:06.000And so he decided to get back in the political fray by unleashing a flamethrower, attacking ICE, attacking Trump, just viciously engaging in the partisan battle.
00:01:18.280We're going to break that down for you as well.
00:01:20.280And finally, as you noted, we're going to give an update on the billion gallons of sewage that Democrats have dumped into the Potomac River.
00:01:28.840And the latest update on that, as bad as that story is, the latest update's even worse.
00:03:31.060A lot of Europeans go and people more broadly go.
00:03:34.880And it can be a very productive time because when you go, there are these panel discussions and conferences.
00:03:40.460But you also do a whole series of one-on-one meetings.
00:03:43.680And so you can go to one place and meet with a half dozen different heads of state.
00:03:47.940So it can be very efficient in terms of having productive national security and foreign policy conversations.
00:03:54.160Now, two people who went, I believe, for the first time were AOC and Gretchen Whitmer.
00:04:00.740Now, it is no secret that both of them are looking quite seriously at running for president as a Democrat, only because the Communist Party is not having a contested primary.
00:04:11.460But they're thinking of running in 2028.
00:04:13.960And if you run for president, you presumably should know something about foreign policy.
00:04:18.900You should be able to, say, spin a globe and have some clue about some country that is further out than Brooklyn.
00:04:52.040Yeah, but, you know, in terms of being ready for prime time, listen to this exchange she had when asked about one of the most pressing foreign policy questions across the globe right now.
00:05:04.540Would and should the U.S. actually commit U.S. troops to defend Taiwan if China were to move?
00:05:11.340You know, I think that this is such a, you know, I think that this is a, this is, of course, a very longstanding policy of the United States.
00:05:32.340And I think what we are hoping for is that we want to make sure that we never get to that point.
00:05:39.400And we want to make sure that we are moving in all of our economic research and our global positions to avoid any such confrontation and for that question to even arise.
00:05:51.160All right, Senator, look, I've had the privilege of working on quite a few campaigns and some presidential campaigns.
00:05:59.700This would be one of the first questions.
00:06:01.900And you when you do prep, whether it's a debate prep or a major get on stage event, we call it, you know, rolling out the agenda of a candidate.
00:06:11.040How was she not prepared to answer that question?
00:06:13.720And the scary part was the whole room was like she has no idea what she's saying right now.
00:06:17.900Yeah. Yeah. Look, everyone knew that, you know, several things come to mind.
00:06:21.620Number one, you know, the popular gif online of Carrie Elwes kind of kind of fluttering his eyelashes.
00:06:28.100That's what I immediately think of, like looking at that, like, well, that's that's something.
00:06:34.440I also am hearing in my head Kamala Harris going, wow, that's a word salad.
00:06:40.700Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not it's not even I mean, it was a it was a blunder that I would argue would probably come up in a campaign.
00:06:48.840Right. Like, even if you try to fix this now, it's out there how unprepared she is for national security issues.
00:06:55.440And this would have been if you and I were doing debate prep or or this prep for her in a meeting, like, hey, what do you think you're going to ask?
00:07:02.200Immediately, I would have said Iran. I would have said Ukraine and Russia.
00:07:04.840And you would have said Taiwan and China. Like, those are the top of the list without even having to make a list.
00:07:08.900Yeah. Look, it's one of the things Democrats and particularly those on the far left, they're used to being in environments where everyone agrees with them, where they're just kissing their behind.
00:07:19.780Oh, you're so wonderful. You're so cool. You're so awesome. You're so hip.
00:07:24.200Most Democrats, they don't do hostile media interviews. They won't go on Fox News.
00:07:28.960They go on MSNBC or CNN or even the networks and they just just get slap slabbering praise and never get challenged.
00:07:38.740So so that was clearly a problem. And I got to say, OK, so Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, considered a serious presidential contender by by many observers.
00:07:51.080She had a similar problem. Listen to Gretchen Whitmer getting asked a question on Ukraine.
00:07:56.020And what does victory look like? Ambassador?
00:08:00.660Oh, please. I'd love to hear your answer.
00:08:05.800Yeah, it is. I the two the two that I am on the panel with are much more steeped in foreign policy than as than a governor is.
00:08:14.080But, you know, I do think that Ukraine's independence, keeping their their landmass and having the support of of all the allies, I think, is is the goal for my vantage point.
00:08:29.420Go ahead, ambassador. Do a better job.
00:08:31.020You and I, by the way, know who the ambassador is that she's looking at asking to bail him out or like begging for a conservative to bail her out.
00:08:41.840I laugh because his his response center was exactly what I would have done.
00:08:45.800I think what you would have been. You're like, no, no, please. I want to hear your answer.
00:08:48.300Like, by all means, ladies, first, you go ahead. Tell us what you think here.
00:08:51.840And the ambassador, Matt Whitaker, who's the U.S. ambassador to NATO, was Donald Trump's acting attorney general in the first term.
00:09:02.640So so he is close to the president. He is a conservative.
00:09:06.260And the idea that she looks to him and is like, ah, can I call a friend?
00:09:48.200You know, it's interesting that there was an article written on Fox News Digital by David Marcus, who writes for them,
00:09:56.300that I actually thought was a very interesting article. I retweeted it this week.
00:09:59.820I read it and I just thought it was interesting.
00:10:02.280It was Democrats Munich meltdown exposes less intellectual void.
00:10:07.260AOC is cringe inducing word salad on world stage should embarrass old school liberals.
00:10:12.300I want to read a little bit of it because I thought he made very good points.
00:10:15.040When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a galaxy of left wing, even socialist intellectual stars such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Foucault and Gore Vidal,
00:10:26.600whose works were like an inkwell that politicians and commentators could draw from.
00:10:33.660Judging from the Munich Security Conference this weekend, that inkwell has run dry.
00:10:38.560Take this gem of a comment on global order from AOC, queen of the democratic socialists.
00:10:47.520Quote, what we are seeking is a return to a rules based order that eliminates the hypocrisies around when too often in the West,
00:10:54.800we look the other way for inconvenient populations to act out these paradoxes.
00:11:07.120Quote, the West is bad and mistreats the marginalized rest of the world.
00:11:12.380The use of 25 cent words and highfalutin sentence structure cannot hide the banality of what AOC is saying.
00:11:19.620Not even the assuring allure of assonance would help, given the asinine simplicity of her word salad.
00:11:28.940Not to be outdone, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, after apologizing for being less well-versed in foreign policy than AOC,
00:11:37.600offered this take on the war in Ukraine.
00:11:39.500Ukraine's independence, keeping their landmass, I mean, the support of all allies, I think is the goal from my vantage point.
00:11:45.180There is just nothing here but empty words that paint a picture of the facile, progressive worldview,
00:11:54.460completely divorced not only from reality on the ground, but from any sound intellectual framework whatsoever.
00:12:01.760The American right has a core of intellectuals, from Christopher Rufo, who we've had on this show on Verdict,
00:12:08.760to Victor Davis Hanson, who's a good friend, to Mark Dubovitz, who's another good friend, and on and on,
00:12:13.500who can be referred to or drawn on in policy debates, both foreign and domestic.
00:12:19.340In fact, about a decade ago, we had intellectual dark web phenomenon with figures like Jordan Peterson and Barry Weiss,
00:12:28.720who are broadly seen, if not as conservative, as right-leaning.
00:12:33.880Who are their counterparts on the far left?
00:12:36.060Who is the contemporary socialist intellectual who AOC could have referenced to support or claim that what is needed is massive global redistribution of wealth?
00:12:47.960I would posit that outside of the very narrow corridors of race and gender,
00:12:52.800such far left public intellectuals no longer exist, and for two very important reasons.
00:12:57.720The most obvious cause for the current dearth of popular far left socialist intellectuals
00:13:03.720is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.
00:13:07.620At least for the next two decades, the game was up.
00:13:10.300The experiment had failed, and nobody wanted to be called a socialist.
00:13:13.980The second reason is that what took the place of outright socialism
00:13:18.140was the cultural Marxism specifically in the form of critical race theory,
00:13:24.900and essentially they've replaced their foreign policy with just it's all about race and gender
00:22:48.360This is my favorite part of the show, by the way.
00:22:50.000When you say you're about to make a prediction, because if we're keeping records, you've been pretty, you've been, you've been getting on the All-Star team every season.
00:24:42.460So I guess he's sitting there resting on his hundreds of millions of dollars and just getting angry and decided he wanted to take some swings.
00:25:32.800Here, let's give a listen to what he had to say.
00:25:34.920The rogue behavior of agents of the federal government is deeply concerning and dangerous.
00:25:45.840The sort of behavior that, you know, in the past we've seen in authoritarian countries and we've seen in dictatorships, but we have not seen in America.
00:25:57.120I mean, you're calling ICE agents who are just enforcing the law rogue agents.
00:26:03.060That is from a former eight-year president and the leader of the Democratic Party still.
00:26:34.340And 700 active duty Marines sent not overseas, but to the second largest city in the United States of America, militarizing the streets of my city.
00:26:42.680Masked men, masked men showing up, unaccountable.
00:28:55.160By the way, I love that he's just admitting there.
00:28:56.920Yes, this is a smart political move to have a political statement at the Super Bowl during halftime.
00:29:02.780He's admitting what we were saying, that it was a political decision.
00:29:06.300And he's like, it's a brilliant political operative move for the NFL to do this.
00:29:11.260Well, look, I mentioned that what Obama was doing there is judo and judo is is is flipping and using your opponent's weight against you against them.
00:29:21.200But but but it is also it is classic Orwellian.
00:29:25.060And it is accusing the other side of doing what you are doing.
00:29:28.500Barack Obama, I think, in any fair history, he will not go down in history as this because most historians are leftists.
00:29:34.600So they will they will carve him into Mount Rushmore.
00:29:37.800But but but if you were fairly assessing his legacy, he is one of the most bitterly partisan leaders our country has ever had.
00:29:45.280And I think much of the the rage, the anger we have of the two sides screaming at each other finds its origins in the Obama presidency.
00:29:56.300And I got to say, I my principal reaction to that is is is one of of regret of the lost opportunity.
00:30:03.540Listen, Barack Obama was elected as the first African-American president ever for a country that that that that that for us for for a century plus had slavery.
00:30:16.060To elect a black president was a big damn deal.
00:30:19.500And Obama was given by history the opportunity to be what he claimed to be, to be coming together, to be a healing president.
00:30:30.880He chose he chose to just rub salt in the racial wounds to divide.
00:30:36.360If you remember early on the beer summit he had where he demonized law enforcement right at the beginning of his presidency, you remember he described people in small towns in America as, quote, bitter and angry and clinging to their God and their guns.
00:30:51.280You remember Michelle Obama saying that when Barack Obama was elected president, it was the first time she'd ever been proud of a country.
00:31:12.540But I think he is steeped in cultural Marxism.
00:31:17.640Now, when he was president, he was not vocal about all of that because the country at the time was not ready for it.
00:31:24.740But but I think AOC is the spiritual grandchild of Barack Obama.
00:31:30.540I think Mondami is the spiritual grandchild of Barack Obama.
00:31:35.080And as you and I have talked about on the pod before during the Biden presidency, maybe the most frequent question I got asked is who is running things?
00:31:44.620And the really terrifying answer, I don't, in fact, know.
00:32:29.560By the way, the disastrous foreign policy, the embrace of Iran.
00:32:34.440Iran sending cash on pallets, literally.
00:32:36.680And listen, Obama sent $1.7 billion of cash on pallets and planes in the middle of the night.
00:32:44.060Joe Biden said, hold my beer, and flowed $100 billion to Iran.
00:32:49.320Now, when I say Joe Biden said it, really, the person who said, hold my beer, was Barack Obama.
00:32:53.940He said, now I'm just really going to do it using the puppet Biden.
00:32:58.380But for him to accuse Republicans, the bitterness Obama has shown over and over and over again as he's using rhetoric, you know, he's just demonized ICE and called them, called federal law enforcement agents, totalitarian agents.
00:33:17.060And then he says, gosh, it's the other side that's mean, not like us.
00:33:21.700And actually, the word that I love that he says in that little clip is exclusionary.
00:34:55.440Because American exceptionalism is recognizing there's something unique and extraordinary in the United States of America.
00:35:02.440There's never been a nation in the history of mankind that has been a greater force for good on planet Earth than the United States of America.
00:35:09.620And lightning would strike Barack Obama before he could utter that sentence.