The Newsroom Revolution & Trump Breaks the Media, plus Breaking Down School Choice, and The Border, a Question of National Security the Week In Review
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Summary
Ted Cruz's new book, Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, details how Donald Trump broke the media, and why he should be a presidential candidate in 2020. Ted Cruz and Ben Ferguson discuss the importance of school choice and border security.
Transcript
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And these are the stories you may have missed that we talked about this week.
00:00:13.740
First up, Senator Cruz's new book is out, Unwoke, How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.
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And there's a very interesting conversation in this book about how Donald Trump broke the media.
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And how big of an issue should it be in this presidential election?
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Senator Cruz and I break that down and why Republicans should double down on the issue of school choice.
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We bring in Rick Grinnell, who is in the job of dealing with national security under the Trump administration.
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So just how bad and how dangerous is our broken border?
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It's the Weekend Review, and it starts right now.
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You mentioned what we're up against, and one of your chapters is about the newsroom revolution.
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And you start with a great story of a former colleague of mine that is hard to deal with, Jake Tapper.
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In a fight, he's in essence calling you a liar.
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And this is the new thing that the media has done.
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They've become so sanctimonious that they are always looking for a moment to tell you why you're wrong and why they're brilliant.
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We've seen this in the last several days as they've been demanding a ceasefire to protect the terrorists in Gaza,
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who the Israelis are trying to eradicate from the face of this earth with good reason after what they did just one month ago.
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Israel, we knew, was on an artificial clock the day the terrorist attack happened before the media, before the left,
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started going to the aid of Hamas and the Palestinian people that were backing Hamas, many of them that were,
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and saying, okay, all right, you had a few days now to go after these terrorists, now you've got to stop it.
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Now it's your obligation to stop trying to protect yourself.
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And this is our media now, and it goes back to this idea that they have, which is they're better than everyone else.
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They're here to go after people like you and others that they don't like,
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and indoctrinate a nation to believe in socialism and communism and Marxism.
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Look, that is exactly right, and the media has fundamentally changed.
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And so the chapter on journalism, I talk about how when I was first elected to the Senate 11 years ago,
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and I actually focus on CNN as really a case lesson.
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11 years ago, CNN, they aspired to be journalists.
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If you asked them, they'd say, we want to be journalists.
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And we want to focus on facts and not our opinion.
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They leaned hard left, and they couldn't help themselves.
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Number one, they would articulate to you they were trying to achieve.
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But number two, I think they believed in their heart they were trying to do that.
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And so when I was first elected to the Senate, you may find this hard to believe,
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and they would give you a chance to lay out a conservative argument.
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Now, they'd attack you from the left, and they'd be unfair, and they'd play gotcha questions.
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But they would give you a chance to present the other side.
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And what happened is when Donald Trump became president, I think it fundamentally broke the media.
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They hated him so much that today the media no longer views its vision as being journalists,
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as being fair and impartial and presenting both sides.
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Instead, they have embraced a vision that they are advocates.
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And what they mean by democracy is left-wing radical policies.
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And, you know, so the story I tell in the very beginning of the journalism chapter
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is during the presidential race, I was out on the campaign trail.
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I was actually in our campaign bus, and I was doing an interview with Jake Tapper.
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I've known Jake since he was a cub reporter on the George W. Bush 2000 campaign,
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And he was interviewing me for his Sunday show.
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And we did an interview, and it was, I don't remember, probably 10 minutes or so.
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And I had learned a lesson, and it's something that I do with every Sunday show,
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which is that I insist that the Sunday show either be live or it be live to tape.
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And the reason I learned that is I had done, just a few weeks earlier,
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And Bob Schieffer, I hadn't insisted on that, and he'd done the interview.
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And then afterwards, his show had edited it, and it basically cut out every good argument I made,
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and just put this slash job where he decimated me because he excluded all my good answers
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and just edited it in a way that was really deceptive.
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If we do one of these, they must air what I actually say.
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And I said, look, if you want to give me five minutes or six or eight or 10 or 12 or whatever,
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But when we film it, you air exactly what happens during that time.
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And in the course of the interview, we were talking about the shooting at Fort Hood
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and Nadal Hassan, who was the radical Islamist who had walked through
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and murdered 14 innocent souls yelling, Aloha Akbar.
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And I mentioned that the Obama administration knew that Hassan was a radical jihadist.
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They knew that he had been in email communication with Anwar al-Awlaki,
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that he'd asked al-Awlaki about the permissibility of waging jihad on his fellow soldiers.
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And yet the Obama administration did nothing until he committed that act of mass murder.
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And when I said all of that, Jake immediately interrupted and he said, that's not true.
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And he said, what you're saying is fundamentally false.
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And, you know, I just kind of smiled and I said, well, you know, Jake, as John Adams said,
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And, you know, when you research the issue, that's exactly what you're going to find out.
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And I don't know, five, ten minutes later, there's a knock on the door of the bus.
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And he says, hey, can you come in and talk for a second?
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And he said, look, after we did the interview, he said, I went and got on the Internet and I researched it.
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I just had not seen the revelation that the Obama administration knew it.
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He said, I agreed we would do this live to tape.
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And so if you want, I will air it exactly as it happened.
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And then after I air it, I will come on live and I'll say, after the interview, I researched it.
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And it turns out I was wrong and Cruz was right.
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What he said was exactly right and I was in error when I said he was not telling the truth.
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He said, option number two, which he said I'd really much prefer, is that we just edit out that segment.
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We just remove it from the interview and we air everything else and just not include that segment.
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And I describe in the book that, you know, I thought about it and it was obviously in my self-interest to pick option number one.
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That like having CNN, having Tapper admit he was full of crap and I was right.
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But I also expected that I would be doing a whole lot more interviews with Tapper and with CNN.
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And I frankly respected how he approached it, that he came to me and he admitted he was wrong and he gave me that option.
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I thought it was an honorable way to handle it.
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And so I made what I would say is a long-term play rather than a short-term play.
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And I said, OK, you can go ahead and cut the segment out.
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So the story I recount in the book, that segment never aired because CNN cut the segment out.
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I focus on Tapper in particular because I think he's a smart guy and I think he wants to be a journalist.
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And I think in his heart right now, he knows that he's not, that Trump broke Tapper, that now CNN will have a panel of five experts there to discuss, true or not, Donald Trump is the devil.
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And all five of them agree, of course he's the devil.
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Right. And, you know, look, CNN used to be a place, if you go back to 2017, in 2017, I did three town hall debates on CNN with Bernie Sanders.
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We did one on health care and two on tax policy.
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I think they were among, if not the highest rated shows on CNN that whole year.
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Bernie is an unapologetic defender of socialism.
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And we had a real and substantive debate that CNN doesn't exist anymore.
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It's bad for the world that we don't have functioning journalism.
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But I also describe how, because journalism, corporate media is broken, it's part of what makes the radical Democrats so extreme.
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Why they vote for such ridiculous policy positions that are so out of the mainstream.
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Because they know they will never, ever, ever get asked about it by reporters back home.
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And so it's radicalized the Democrat Party in Washington.
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I also am waiting for the restraining order because he's absolutely obsessed with you.
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Your new book that is out, Unwoke, How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.
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He gave it a primetime promotion on his show last night.
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He's, um, you can tell it's Ted's book because the dust jacket doesn't quite fit.
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The last one was called Ted Cruz, A Time for Truth.
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Um, he wrote Glued Pubes, The Guide for Guys Who Can't Grow a Beard.
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Of course, the New York Times bestseller, A Partially Digested Rat, and other things I found
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There are many interesting musings and revelations in the books.
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Uh, he says, The Princess Bride is his favorite movie, and he's seen it hundreds of times,
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And apparently, he's not a big fan of late night television.
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He wrote, A late night TV is virtually unwatchable.
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I love comedy, but watching angry leftists scream about how much they hate Donald Trump
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Well, all I'll say is, it's an honor to be called pitiful by a man who abandoned his
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And seriously, I do want to say, you know, writing a book like this is a huge accomplishment,
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You know, it's very difficult to type with hoops.
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I mean, Senator, doesn't it prove your point that you just wrote in your book?
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That was the part that made me laugh is as he's forcing this comedy on the audience and
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It's like, yeah, thanks for proving the point of what you just wrote about in your book.
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Look, I mean, it was when he did that last night.
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I actually tweeted his monologue out this morning and I said, hey, thanks for pitching
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And I sent the link and I did something that is fairly obligatory also, which is Kimmel
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regularly blasts me in his late night monologues.
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And every time he does, I respond and I point out that ever since I whipped Jimmy Kimmel's
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ass in one on one hoops, it seems that I'm living rent free in his head.
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And so I sent a video of me scoring on him and blocking him just to remind him of that
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moment that I think he probably still wakes up in tremors about.
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What he read there was an actual excerpt from the book and he put put up the book book cover.
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But I do wish the substantive point that late night humor I wish was actually funny.
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I like real comedians who are funny and they used to be funny.
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And now it's one of the many examples that I discuss it at length in the book on woke how
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how Trump broke the media, Trump broke the Democrat Party and Trump broke late night comedy because
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they just it's a partisan primal scheme instead of good comedy makes fun of both sides.
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I'm perfectly fine with making fun of me, but they never, ever make fun of the Democrats.
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Now, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation, you can go back and listen to
00:13:51.360
Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their elected
1.00
00:13:58.440
And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:14:04.560
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women, entrepreneurs, artists,
00:14:09.680
athletes, politicians and newsmakers all at different stages of their journey.
00:14:14.060
So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:14:17.060
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcast.
00:14:25.580
Before we get into Q&A, I want to ask you one other thing, and it's the issue, and I have
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a feeling a lot of people are going to like this idea here.
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It's been something that you have been a champion of for years, but it's also become
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They say a third rail, don't touch it, don't talk about it, don't deal with it in politics.
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Do you believe in this next election cycle that conservatives can win on the issue of
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school choice, and how would they best do that nationwide?
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There is no domestic issue I care about more than school choice.
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I think school choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
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And listen, it is worth noting that school choice has been around from the dawn of time.
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The rich and the middle class have always had school choice.
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If you were a student at the Bethesda Public Schools in Maryland, Bethesda is this very
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wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., if that school had a 50% dropout rate, if among the
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students that remained there, fewer than half of them graduated reading at grade level, if
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drug dealers were walking in the hallways, if little girls were getting sexually assaulted
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in the bathrooms, the Bethesda Public Schools would be empty immediately because the parents
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They would either write checks and pay tuition at a private school, or they would move to
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another neighborhood that had a better public school, and they would exercise choice through
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That's what the rich have always been able to do.
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That's what the upper middle class have always been able to do.
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It is low-income Americans, it is single moms in inner cities who are trapped with failing
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schools, and those numbers I've described are true in school after school after school in
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this country, and it predominantly hurts low-income kids, it hurts African-American kids, it hurts
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Hispanic kids, and the Democrat Party is bought and paid for by the teachers' unions.
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If you look at African-American communities or Hispanic communities, systematically, 60, 70,
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as much as 80% of African-American parents, as much as 60, 70, 80% of Hispanic parents support
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school choice, I believe every child in America deserves a right to have access to an excellent
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education, regardless of their race, of their ethnicity, of their wealth, of their zip code.
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I've got to say, we are sitting in actually an extraordinary place, because I want to say
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to the men and women here, thank you for your leadership.
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Arizona has led the nation in providing choice to your students.
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It has been extraordinary, it has been inspirational, it has been powerful, and the Goldwater Institute
00:17:45.900
And if you look nationally, the two states at the front of this fight have been Arizona and
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Florida, and I will say something, you and I are both Texans, and look, Texans, we are known
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Look, as Texans, I hate that there is anything Texans are not leaning on.
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But when it comes to school choice, Texans have been lagging behind.
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And I can tell you there's a major battle playing out in the Texas legislature right now.
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We have the single best moment we have ever had in our lifetimes to pass real and meaningful
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The governor, Greg Abbott, has said he's going to keep calling special sessions until they
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And I'll tell you something that I do in Texas that is unusual, Ben.
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So virtually every U.S. senator stays out of state primaries in their own state.
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And the reason is, getting involved in a primary in your own state is just stupid.
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But if you make an endorsement in your own primary, in a primary in your state, the rule
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of thumb is you get half of their friends and you get all of their enemies.
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To the best of my knowledge, I don't know another U.S. senator that does.
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To the best of my knowledge, 99 of my colleagues do not.
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I have my staff prepare an Excel spreadsheet of every vote that a state legislator has cast
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And my rule is, if you voted in favor of school choice and you're otherwise relatively conservative,
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If you voted against choice, the chances of getting my support are essentially zero.
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And it is very likely that I will endorse your primary opponent.
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I come in and I cut radio and TV ads and I come in.
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You going gently in a political time is not one of them, sir.
00:20:02.760
And so we had last election cycle seven runoffs with the teachers unions on one side and me
00:20:12.540
And the reason I do that, and listen, it hurts me politically to do that.
00:20:22.320
But the reason I'm doing that is that I want for the state legislators when they're thinking
00:20:27.240
about what do I do on this, for it to be a carrot and stick.
00:20:31.540
That if there is a Republican House member that's on the fence, do I support it?
00:20:39.720
I want them to say, you know, I really don't want Cruz to screw around in my primary.
00:20:47.920
And I'll tell you something, and it's something why I'm so inspired by the men and women in
00:20:53.960
When I was first elected to the Senate in 2012, here's what I told Heidi.
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I said, sweetheart, if when I die, if my tombstone says Ted played a meaningful role in bringing
00:21:07.520
about school choice to every child in Texas and every child in America, I will die a
00:21:15.620
As before, if you want to hear the rest of this conversation on this topic, you can go
00:21:20.520
back and download the podcast from early this week to hear the entire thing.
00:21:24.260
Canadian women are looking for more, more out of themselves, their businesses, their
1.00
00:21:31.580
And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast.
00:21:37.720
And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women.
00:21:41.480
Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of
00:21:47.220
So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.
00:21:50.200
Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
00:21:56.080
I want to get back to the big story number three of the week you may have missed.
00:22:00.680
I want to ask you about another question that deals with the southern border.
00:22:04.960
And I want to go back to putting your, you know, taking the ambassador hat off, going back
00:22:10.320
You look at our southern border right now, and it doesn't take a very bright human being
00:22:16.680
to understand that an open border, the way it is now, is a national security threat.
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There are more and more people that are saying this.
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We saw the FBI director, Ray, saying that we're at the highest level, in his opinion,
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since 9-11 for the prospect of an attack in this country.
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We know that terrorists are coming across the border.
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They're on the terrorist watch list that have been caught.
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These terrorists are not trying to turn themselves into Border Patrol agents.
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We have no idea how many terrorists have made it into this country undetected so far.
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But when you look at the warnings now, and you look at what just happened, and you look
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at the warnings of possibilities of the same type of style attack that we just saw in Israel,
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and yet we still have an open border, and we still have Mayorkas before Congress, what
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was that, yesterday, day before, saying that, no, he doesn't believe we need a border wall.
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What is your reaction from an intelligence standpoint?
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Yeah, Ben, it's a good question, because, you know, I've got to believe that all of the
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intelligence officials who are collecting raw intelligence see it on a daily basis.
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I mean, how else do we know that someone from the terrorist watch list is crossing the border?
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We're figuring it out, but I think that it's being hidden.
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When they report it, it's not being analyzed and talked about.
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It's not being put into the president's daily briefing.
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All of that information is completely being suppressed.
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And once again, we should be asking these questions of Averill Haynes.
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And, you know, she's just not getting pushed on it.
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You're not going to have a country if you have an open border.
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But I find the most outrageous thing is that the media are complicit in this problem, because
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Democrats would have to face the music if they were hearing from the media in their home
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states, if they were being pushed and held to account like they used to.
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When I would sit around and watch the news with my dad as a kid, the news was kind of holding
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Well, Rick, this is a point that we've made a lot on this podcast and that I make in my
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brand new book, Unwoke, which is that the corruption of the media and Donald Trump, I believe, broke
00:24:52.760
That has played a critical role in driving today's Democrat Party to such extremes.
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You go so crazy left because they never, ever, ever get questioned on any of it.
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So there's no downside to giving in to the radical extreme in their party.
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They never fear that they will get a hard question at home.
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They never fear they'll get a bad story at home.
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And so I think the abandonment of any effort at journalism by the corporate media has been
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one of the most destructive developments in recent years.
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As I watch Avril Haines and, you know, she got into office and immediately in order to
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please Iran, one of the first things she did was manipulate past intelligence to pretend like
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And they went after the Saudis and the Khashoggi issue all over again.
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They literally, there was nothing new in that report.
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It was repackaged to hit the Saudis hard after we had basically looked at them and tried to
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make some changes and were trying to heal that relationship.
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And the Saudis were on the verge of signing the Abraham Accords.
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And they, I look back now and it makes sense to me.
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The reason they did it is because they wanted to show the Iranians that somehow that they
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were going to play more fair and that they were going to be nicer to the Iranians by beating
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And then why aren't we talking about the fact that they took the Houthis off the terrorist
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watch list and the Houthis are the ones who just shot down the drone?
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Well, I think, again, it's a, it's a gift to the Iranians.
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They're, they're trying to please them because they want to get back and, you know, they will
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spin that somehow the international sanctions was, were pressuring the Iranians.
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And therefore we, they were closer to a nuclear bomb because of the sanctions and the grip
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And again, this is the same strategy that they had with Russia.
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When you go and you see Democrat senators making the case for dropping the sanctions on Nord Stream
00:27:25.480
2, it is, in summary, they keep saying, well, we don't want to stick it in the eye of the
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This pipeline and us sanctioning it, making it not come online, is creating problems.
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So we must, therefore, let the pipeline flow through with gas because things are going
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to be better if we don't stick it in the eye of Putin.
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It invites bullies and tyrants to be aggressive, to invade.
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I mean, Joe Biden inherited peace and prosperity.
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We now have the biggest land war in Europe since World War II and the biggest war in the
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I mean, I mean, that is, and, and, and, you know, you're talking about the Saudis.
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Look, in my view, the dominant foreign policy objective of Joe Biden and his team has been
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to reenter an even worse Iran nuclear deal and everything in the Middle East hinges on
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why do they go after the Saudis so, so ferociously?
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For the same reason that I am largely pro-Saudi, which is that the Saudis are the most important
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regional counterweight, other than Israel, to Iran.
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So I describe the Saudis as a problematic ally, but we want them to be an ally.
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We want them to be strong as a counterbalance to Iran.
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That's precisely why the Biden administration wants the Saudis to be weak, because everything
0.91
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is subservient to getting in another deal with Iran, including in the middle of this
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Ukraine war, after Biden's weakness causes the war in Ukraine, it has now become the
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ultimate Democrat virtue signal to wear a Ukrainian flag and commit that we must be in the war until
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And even while they say that, they continue to flow now roughly $100 billion into Iran, much of which goes
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into Iranian drones, that Iran becomes the top weapons supplier to Russia.
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And so Biden is funding both sides of the Ukraine war.
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And this goes back to what my original point on Iran was.
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It sounds crazy, but they trust the Iranians.
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There's some belief, Jake Sullivan, maybe it's just a white paper intellectual exercise that if
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you're nicer to them, somehow they're going to give up a nuclear weapon.
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And we call it appeasement, but they're trying, once again, engagement.
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And this is one of my problems with the foreign policy community, is that we should be able to
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try engagement, try sanctions, try all sorts of things, but we should quickly evaluate whether
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We could talk all day about Venezuela, because I think that's a failure of a policy.
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You know, it's worth also underscoring that the Biden administration's top Iran diplomat,
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Rob Malley, who's been fired and had his security clearance pulled and is nonetheless in a cushy
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job at my alma mater at Princeton, which is really disgraceful.
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His inner circle included three individuals who were Iranian operatives recruited by the
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Iranian government, reporting directly to the Iranian foreign minister and advancing Iranian
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policy agendas within the United States government, within the Biden administration, one of whom,
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as far as we know, is still a chief of staff in the Department of Defense to this day.
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And they've been caught asking the Iranian diplomats for sign-off.
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But once again, you don't see any of these national security reporters at the New York
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Times or the Washington Post or Politico or anywhere else putting pressure, asking the
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So you were the director of national intelligence under Trump.
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Supposed to be three months, but it was about four and a half.
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It was the most consequential tenure at DNI that I have seen.
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And you really shook that place up in a very short time period.
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And I guess what I would ask is, number one, how did you do that?
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How did you take on the deep state, which is real throughout government, but especially
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in the intelligence community, is a persistent problem?
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And lots of conservatives sometimes feel frustrated and say, well, you can't take on the deep state.
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And I think you managed to do it remarkably during that tenure.
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And what I would say as a second part of the question is, what advice would you give to the next Republican
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cabinet member coming into office and facing career bureaucrats that are ideologically and
00:32:54.120
passionately opposed to the next Republican president and the agenda of the next White House?
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I think the reality is, is you can't hire someone whose livelihood is Washington, D.C.
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If you're hiring somebody who needs a job later in the Washington system where reporters go to church
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with politicians and lobbyists, they live in the same communities, they're never going to make big,
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bold decisions because they'll have the ire of their friends and their church acquaintances.
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What I believe that you have to do is, is hire people also who really don't care about their
00:33:36.120
New York Times profile piece, who somehow have the ability to make the right decisions.
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The, I've told President Trump, we're going to fix the personnel problem when he's, when he's president.
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And the first thing is, is to look at every resume.
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And if the resume has a Washington, D.C. address on it, throw it away.
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We can hire people from outside of Washington, D.C.
00:34:00.140
What, what happened with me at D&I is actually pretty simple.
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When I came into D&I, one of the first things they did is they gave me four reports that had
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been done over the last 10 years of how to fix the intelligence system.
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I read the reports and I thought, well, a lot of this makes sense.
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We've got people who, uh, it's supposed to be a, a coordinating body and yet it's no longer
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And so I just started sending people back to their, their home agencies.
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D&I, uh, the OD&I had become the, the, the wasteland.
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If, uh, intelligence agency didn't like somebody rather than fire them, they sent them over to
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And so I just started sending people back and getting rid of every possible person that we
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I did this in, in, uh, Germany as well and forcing people to rethink this.
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You got to be able to play the system, but you got to know the system.
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And I've worked at the state department and I knew how the federal government works to
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where you can come in and manipulate it and start using its own rules against it.
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I do think though, that in order for us to make big, bold decisions, Congress is going
00:35:31.120
to have to somehow change the way the labor force, uh, is, is legally allowed to, to, you
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know, be cut as you know, and I'm preaching to the choir here, but when we come up with
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new technologies and we decide to spend on a different program, by definition, other things
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Uh, the program should be eliminated and that's not happening.
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As always, thank you for listening to verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you.
00:36:03.640
Don't forget to download my podcast and you can listen to my podcast every other day.
00:36:07.280
You're not listening to verdict or each day when you listen to verdict afterwards, I'd love
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to have you as a listener to again, the Ben Ferguson podcast, and we will see you back