The good news is that Pete Hegseth will be confirmed as the next Secretary of Defense. The bad news is, it was a big day on Capitol Hill, and Democrats did all they could to try to derail him.
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00:04:00.440He is going to be confirmed as the Secretary of Defense.
00:04:03.680I believe he will have at least 50 votes in the U.S. Senate, and today's hearing is a big part of the reason why.
00:04:10.020Democrats tried to come after him, and frankly, in the course of the hearing, I don't think they laid a glove on him very effectively.
00:04:16.280Now, listen, you and I had talked about this before.
00:04:18.480We had predicted it was going to be a political circus, and there were clowns, there were dancing bears, there were ballerinas and trapeze artists.
00:04:33.760What did they choose to go after him on?
00:04:35.500They chose to go after him on political smears or personal smears to drag him through the gutter, and based on a whole series of allegations that the press has covered breathlessly over and over and over again, almost all of which are anonymous allegations.
00:04:52.000So you don't have anyone coming forward being willing to say, I was there.
00:04:57.700They're all anonymous, given to left-wing papers.
00:04:59.680And there's no evidence to back any of them up, and yet the Democrats, in a massive display of hypocrisy, just went after, and they were mean, they were nasty, they were personal.
00:05:18.560You know, look, you look at Pete Hegseth's background.
00:05:22.600First of all, he went to Princeton and Harvard, which I confess I'm kind of partial to that particular combination.
00:06:14.420So I have not talked to him about it today because I learned it like three hours ago.
00:06:17.340And I was like, wow, that's really cool.
00:06:19.500But Princeton and Harvard, and then he served active duty military, deployed, deployed in combat, commanded troops in combat,
00:06:28.060was awarded the bronze star, is a decorated combat veteran.
00:06:35.620And then when he left active duty, he led two veterans organizations advocating on behalf of veterans, advocating on behalf of active duty troops.
00:06:47.480Pete's someone I've known a long time.
00:07:38.040But my take on him the day it was announced is the same as my take on him now, which is Pete Hegseth will be a change agent, that he was nominated and he's going to be confirmed to go to the Department of Defense and to bring DOD back to its core mission, to bring it back to supporting the warfighter, to bring it back to being ready and prepared to defeat our enemies and to kill our enemies.
00:08:07.740And we have seen the Department of Defense and we have seen the Department of Defense under Barack Obama initially and even more so under Joe Biden get mired into the games of political correctness and woke ideology.
00:08:19.960And they're more interested in transgender soldiers than they are actually in defeating our enemies.
00:08:27.920And by the way, one of the consequences of it, the military is suffering a recruitment crisis because it turns out young men and women are not eager to be part of some left wing political crusade.
00:08:45.380And they are eager to be heroes defending America.
00:08:49.440And a prediction that I've made, I believe we will see recruiting and enlistment numbers rise significantly when Pete Hegseth is confirmed as Secretary of Defense because young men and women, many of them in the South, you get a lot of people who enlist in the military from the South, are going to say, that's what I want to be a part of.
00:09:08.460I want to focus on defending our nation.
00:09:11.220I thought Pete Hegseth did a terrific job today.
00:09:13.440One of the things that he said that I thought was also really interesting is he talked about how we hold the men and women that are in combat to insanely high standards.
00:09:23.220But he said we have too many people that are in the bloated upper echelons of the bureaucracy of the Pentagon that get, as he described it, these bigger roles even after big failures.
00:09:38.240And he said if you lose a war, you shouldn't be able to get a better job after you lose a war.
00:09:43.700And he said we have way too many people that are on the payroll and general roles, for example, when we don't need as many.
00:09:51.960And when we won World War II, he compared it to how many we have today.
00:09:54.980It is significant to see the ideas you said about being a change in it where he's like, look, we need to put the fighters first, the soldiers first, and not leadership first all the time.
00:10:05.640Well, and he also talked a great deal about modernizing the military, developing weapon systems to fight tomorrow's war, not yesterday's war.
00:10:14.820And in particular, that's going to involve all sorts of technology like drones and artificial intelligence and hypersonics and modernizing the military.
00:10:25.620Look, the job he's been nominated to is an insanely difficult job.
00:10:29.280It is there are three million people in DOD.
00:12:05.680Because another one, another protester, and I think this one was a member of Code Pink, which, by the way, is a Chinese communist front group these days, said that you support Israel's war in Gaza.
00:12:17.320I support Israel's existential war in Gaza.
00:12:20.200I assume, like me and President Trump, you support that war as well, don't you?
00:12:53.120And in fact, at every stage on and after October 7th, the Biden administration has been urging Israel, stop killing the terrorists, stop killing the terrorists.
00:13:04.540And there's a reason the Democrats didn't want to talk about the job he was nominated to and instead wanted to go to personal spheres.
00:13:15.900I also want to play another clip where he was talking about he was talking about the service members who were kicked out because of the covid vaccine.
00:13:27.940Yeah, this was this was a big flashpoint and a big question you and I have talked about for a long time, which is should the people that were kicked out get their jobs back?
00:13:37.360Well, he answered that and give a listen to his answer.
00:13:40.620We haven't even talked about covid and the tens of thousands of service members who are kicked out because of an experimental vaccine in President Trump's Defense Department.
00:13:51.720They will be reinstated, reinstituted with pay and rank.
00:13:55.500Senator, this goes back to what you said a minute ago about you think that recruitment is going to go up.
00:14:00.040Yep. Part of that recruitment is going to be, I think, a lot of men and women that were kicked out that are going to want to come back and serve under this type of leadership as well.
00:14:23.920And I believe the reason they did so is precisely because they recognized that many of them were conservatives and it was an excuse to purge conservatives.
00:14:32.620By the way, they did the same thing at the Department of Justice, at the FBI, at the Border Patrol.
00:14:38.060And this is an issue, as you know, that I've been leading the fight on in the Senate for the past several years.
00:14:43.360I led the fight successfully to end the vaccine mandate in the military.
00:14:48.400So it's no longer a current mandate, but I've introduced legislation, the Americans Act, that would mandate that those who were thrown out of the military be allowed back in, reinstated with back pay and rank.
00:15:00.040And the Democrats have systematically blocked it.
00:15:03.700Pete Hegseth just promised to do that.
00:16:08.340The disaster of Afghanistan was the first major foreign policy screw up of the Biden administration.
00:16:14.880And it foreshadowed all the other disasters because it told our enemies this commander in chief was weak and ineffective and it was embarrassing.
00:16:23.900And I'll tell you, the servicemen and women I've talked to who fought in Afghanistan, they're angry.
00:16:28.800They're angry at the disgrace and debacle of that withdrawal.
00:16:55.500What were the mistakes that led to one of the most humiliating and disastrous military retreats in U.S. military history that at least to date there's been zero accountability for?
00:17:09.900So let's move to what people are going to see Wednesday, and that's going to be these three confirmation hearings that you're involved in.
00:17:19.060Bondi, Duffy and Rubio, let's start with with Pam Bondi first.
00:17:23.420What can people expect and what should they be looking for?
00:19:26.860And I got to tell you, when I cast my vote, I was a brand new baby freshman still down in the little basement office that they stick brand new senators in.
00:19:37.420And when I cast the vote, there was an audible gasp in the well of the Senate because freshmen weren't supposed to do such a thing.
00:19:46.020And it was actually at the time people, it was regarded as like courageous, which I thought was bizarre.
00:19:51.180I'm like, John Kerry has been wrong on every foreign policy issue every day of his life systematically.
00:23:14.180But then, right after we gavel in, I'll leave, because at 10, I have to gavel in the confirmation hearing for Sean Duffy, and I'm chairing that one.
00:23:23.900So I'll spend most of the day, most of the morning at least, chairing the Duffy confirmation hearing.
00:23:31.300And at some point, I'll leave that hearing.
00:23:33.780I'll go back to judiciary and question Pam Bondi.
00:23:36.400At another point, I will leave the hearing and go to Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where I'll question Marco Rubio.
00:23:41.640I will not be at the chair at gavel for that, because it gavels in at 10 also, and I've got to be chairing transportation then.
00:23:49.440So I'll drop in the Rubio hearing at some point closer to the end when I can get up.
00:24:23.600I want to move to another story you mentioned earlier.
00:24:26.280And this is a story that, on face value, it's something that's in the U.K., and there's some people that say, well, like, this is the U.K., why does this matter to me?
00:24:37.620And I want to connect it to what has happened in this country because of our open borders and the number of minors that we have released in this country to non-family members through the Biden-Harris program.
00:24:52.400And when we go back to check on them, they are nowhere to be found.
00:24:57.020There are tens of thousands of children.
00:25:06.580That's in the United States that the Biden administration has lost, that they do not know where they are, that they came as unaccompanied minors, and they were handed over to adults, and they have no idea where they are.
00:25:18.980And many of them are no doubt being abused, and the corrupt corporate media could not care less.
00:25:34.620But, look, I want to say what's happened in the U.K. and is happening right now is horrifying, and it's a real warning sign here.
00:25:43.320I want to start by reading from an article in the Free Press, because it sums it up really effectively.
00:25:50.440It's entitled, The Biggest Peacetime Crime and Cover-Up in British History.
00:25:57.760The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe.
00:26:10.820It went on for many years, it is still going on, and there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.
00:26:19.940British governments, both conservative and labor, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s.
00:26:29.380And it looked like they had succeeded, until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.
00:26:39.320Britain now stands shamed before the world.
00:26:44.700The public's suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.
00:26:53.420The scandal is already reshaping British politics.
00:26:56.940It's not just about the heinous nature of the crimes.
00:26:59.500It's that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.
00:27:04.880Social workers were intimidated into silence.
00:27:09.440Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities.
00:27:18.260Senior police and home office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called, quote,
00:27:24.600community relations, local councillors and members of parliament, rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children.
00:27:36.180Charities, NGOs, and labor MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia.
00:27:43.580The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes.
00:27:50.300Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain's media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.
00:28:00.360They did this to defend the failed model of multiculturalism and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation.
00:28:12.380They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic.
00:28:18.540They did this because Britain's traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.
00:28:27.560All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s.
00:28:39.260What we do know is that the epicenter was in the post-industrial mill towns of England's North and Midlands,
00:28:46.960where immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh settled in the 1960s.
00:28:52.180White locals say the grooming and rapes began soon after.
00:28:56.620In Rotterdam, the run-down Yorkshire city where the scandal first broke,
00:29:01.500local police and counselors were notified about systematic grooming and sex abuse by 2001.
00:29:09.640The first convictions did not occur until 2010 when five men of Pakistani background were jailed for multiple offenses against girls as young as 12 years old.
00:29:21.700The breadth of what occurred is staggering and the systematic willingness to look aside is truly horrific.
00:29:33.460And let's be clear, the reason why they look the other way, you mentioned it, is really from a PR standpoint.
00:29:39.340They wanted to have, quote, good relations and not have a stigma related to people that were coming from the Middle East that were there.
00:29:47.160So they said, all right, we'll just look the other way and that'll make it easier.
00:29:50.280It's actually less Middle East than primarily Pakistan, Pakistan, and it's Pakistani Muslims.
00:29:57.520And what we've seen, so we have seen since the 1970s the grooming and serial rape of thousands of children.
00:30:06.880And the issue is in particular relevant because Keir Starmer, the prime minister, was England's director of public prosecutions between 2008 and 2013.
00:30:23.720And so he was actively involved in looking the other way.
00:30:28.040And, all right, so let's break down a little bit of the facts of what happened because the story sounds so extreme as to not be credible.
00:30:40.760But the child sex rapes weren't just individual instances done by rogue individuals.
00:30:50.100Rather, in nearly all the cases, there were groups of mostly Pakistani men that cooperated and conspired to groom and sexually abuse girls over decades.
00:31:04.040And they targeted mostly vulnerable girls, poor orphans, children in care homes.
00:31:16.280So raping them one after the other after the other.
00:31:19.540Some of these child rapists had roles in local governments.
00:31:24.560The leader of one of the rape gangs in Oldham, an individual named Shabir Ahmed, worked for the local council as a, quote, welfare rights officer and ran his gang from the council's welfare office.
00:31:41.220And let me give you some of the facts because they're just horrifying.
00:31:46.280One of the victims, a girl named Victoria Agaglia.
00:31:54.540And she was subject to the government's round-the-clock caretaking, but she went missing 19 times in three months for up to two weeks at a time.
00:32:04.200Instead of trying to find her, the welfare workers simply messaged her saying, when are you coming back?
00:32:09.360It turns out she was forced into a Pakistani sex ring by older women who raped her in exchange for cash, alcohol, and hard drugs.
00:32:20.320She was sometimes abused by up to 25 men in a single night.
00:32:25.880Victoria wrote, wrote a heartbreaking letter to the police documenting her abuse, but it was ignored.
00:33:52.460In Oldham in 2006, a 12-year-old girl named Sophie entered a police station and reported that she had just been molested in a graveyard by a man named Ali.
00:34:04.780A desk officer told her to come back with an adult when she was sober.
00:34:11.300Two men accosted her in the police station.
00:34:15.460Joined by a third, they raped her in their car.
00:34:18.780When they dumped her on the street, she asked a man named Sarwar Ali for directions.
00:34:26.280He took her to his home, raped her, and gave her money for bus fare home.
00:34:32.640Sarwar Ali was arrested and remanded to prison over his attack on Sophie.
00:34:36.780However, he was then released following a bail application to a judge, despite being an illegal immigrant in the United Kingdom.
00:34:43.520He subsequently failed to attend his appointment with the immigration service and is still at large.
00:34:50.740Then, a man named Shaquille Chowdhury pulled up at his car and offered to take Sophie home.
00:34:59.360He abducted her, took her to a house, fed her alcohol.
00:35:04.240Soon after, he and four other men repeatedly raped her.
00:35:07.220Only Shaquille was convicted, six years in prison.
00:35:11.400During his trial, Chowdhury named two of the other men involved in the rapes of Sophie as part of his mitigation,
00:35:16.480but these were not followed up by police at the time.
00:35:20.040One of the men named by Chowdhury was subsequently convicted in 2009 of the attempted murder of his wife.
00:35:26.720This pattern happened over and over and over again, and the numbers are staggering.
00:35:37.360We are talking about thousands of girls systematically, repeatedly raped, and the entire British government looked the other way for decades.
00:35:49.100So, Senator, the question that I'm sure everyone listening is thinking to themselves, like, A, has anything changed now?
00:35:56.740And, B, what should happen, the fact that now this is all out in the open?
00:36:00.960Well, what has changed is Elon Musk has started tweeting about it, and Elon has over 200 million followers,
00:36:09.480and it has drawn attention to it in a way that is really important, and it has become, thankfully, a political crisis in the United Kingdom.
00:36:19.580But I want you to listen to Keir Starmer, this is just about a week ago, addressing this crisis, and listen to what he had to say.
00:36:27.220This is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
00:36:28.880And when politicians, and I mean politicians, who sat in government for many years, are casual about honesty, decency, truth, and the rule of law,
00:36:43.960calling for inquiries because they want to jump on a bandwagon of the far right,
00:36:49.860then that affects politics, because a robust debate can only be based on the true facts.
00:36:56.400So there you have it. The sitting Prime Minister is saying that if you're concerned about the ongoing rape of thousands of girls in the United Kingdom
00:37:07.720and the complicity of government, he says you're jumping on the bandwagon of the far right.
00:37:14.320That continues to be the multiculturalism, political correctness that he does not want to acknowledge.
00:37:20.160And by the way, he was the chief prosecutor for many of these years.
00:37:24.280He was the one who was directly involved in looking the other way.
00:37:29.360So naturally, he doesn't want an inquiry.
00:37:32.140Now, I'll give you the response of Nigel Farage, one of the leaders, and actually Nigel Farage we've had on this podcast.
00:37:40.400He's been a guest on this podcast before.
00:37:42.260Nigel Farage obviously led the fight for Brexit in the United Kingdom.
00:37:46.860And listen to Nigel Farage's response to what Keir Starmer said.
00:37:51.380Well, so much talk over the last few days about grooming gangs, or should I say rape gangs.
00:37:56.520And Keir Starmer today saying that anyone who's calling for a full public inquiry is jumping on the bandwagon of the far right.
00:38:37.640Senator, you hear the frustration there from Nigel.
00:38:41.000But it also, and this is where I say, let's bring it back to the U.S.
00:38:44.880Because I worry that we're going to have the same type of conversation in the not-too-near-distant future about all the children that we've lost in this country.
00:38:54.800So the answer to both needs to be the same, which is there needs to be an inquiry.
00:38:58.840There needs to be transparency in the United Kingdom.
00:39:02.020You know, Nigel Farage mentioned that there are allegations of up to 50 towns where these rape gangs were ongoing for years and years.
00:40:12.520Well, until today, Cuba was one of four designated state sponsors of terrorism.
00:40:18.180The four were North Korea, Iran and Syria.
00:40:21.380And they're designated pursuant to determination from the secretary of state that those countries have, quote, repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism.
00:40:31.880Cuba was designated in 2021 by the Trump administration.
00:40:35.380The designation noted that, quote, for decades, the Cuban government has fed, housed and provided medical care for murderers, bomb makers and hijackers, while many Cubans go hungry, homeless and without basic medicine.
00:40:49.340And the Biden administration today delisted them, even though Cuba is today a sponsor of terrorism right now.
00:41:01.760So Cuba is right now refusing requests by Colombia to extradite 10 members of the National Liberation Army.
00:41:10.220Cuba also harbors several American fugitives wanted on or convicted of charges of political violence or murdering police officers.
00:41:27.400Cuba also supports FARC terrorists and props up the Maduro regime in Venezuela.
00:41:34.540Venezuela. And all of those facts are clear.
00:42:38.340You know, when we were in college, we had posters of Che Guevara on the wall and we find communists.
00:42:43.460We just think they're really cute and lovely.
00:42:45.440And it's consistent with their pattern of kissing up to communists across across the world.
00:42:49.820But number two, this is yet another manifestation of Biden and Harris's and Democrats' contempt for democracy in the closing hours.
00:43:02.240They're trying to do everything they can to make it difficult for the Trump administration.
00:43:06.320And to just say, screw you to the voters in November who gave a clear and unequivocal mandate, that there's an arrogance and contempt for the voters that this is just just one of the most one of the latest and one of the most shocking manifestations of.