00:04:04.440And he's told that Alabama joke at our Senate Republican lunches, and Richard Shelby was chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and I'm pretty sure he, like, pulled a billion dollars out of Louisiana.
00:04:17.460It cost me millions, but it was worth every penny.
00:04:20.820Well, look, John is, what I said about his cross-examination, that is not an exaggeration.
00:04:27.000I mean, it is a beautiful, look, and to be honest, he has done that.
00:04:33.740He does that mostly to Democrat nominees, but he's done that to Republicans also.
00:04:39.180And one of the things people don't necessarily know, before John was in the Senate, he was a trial lawyer, and he was a hell of a trial lawyer, and he knows how to talk to a jury.
00:04:47.820You know, John is a little bit, he's got a Southern accent, and sometimes he puts it on a little deep, but I sort of analogize John to, like, you know, there's an old rule of never play poker with someone named after a state.
00:05:03.840And John, when the draw gets deep, and he'll be like, well, I don't know much about that, you are about to get robbed.
00:05:13.440It's like at a poker table when someone says, now, remind me, does a straight beat a flush or a flush beat a straight?
00:05:21.200Like, hold on to your wallet and run out of the door.
00:05:24.180And so when John begins cross-examining, all right, is there a cross-examination you've done in the Senate that's your favorite?
00:05:30.480Oh, gosh, that lady, I don't remember her name, Ted, you'll remember, because you beat the living hell out of her, too, that couldn't name any provision of the Constitution.
00:05:41.240Oh, that, okay, she was the one that didn't know Article 5.
00:05:44.120That's right, she's from Washington State, and she, after it was over, she quit.
00:06:06.080And she couldn't answer, and look, if you're not a lawyer, that doesn't seem like a question that, look, the way the Constitution is set up,
00:06:15.000Article 1 sets up the Congress, Article 2 sets up the executive and the president, and Article 3 sets up the judiciary.
00:06:22.000If you cannot answer what is Article 2, you will flunk first-year civil procedure, constitutional law, like, you—
00:09:06.680Yeah, Ben, it was—and she was—her main argument for being controller of the currency, which, of course, is responsible for all the state banks, was to get rid of all the banks and have everybody nominate—or a bank, rather, from the Federal Reserve.
00:09:24.120I want to take a moment and just talk to you real quick about an incredible opportunity for you to continue to expand your mind and learn, no matter what your age is.
00:09:34.740Senator Cruz and I were at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, and one of the people that spoke was the president of Hillsdale College.
00:09:41.500And he talked about meeting with Charlie early on and how he said, you're going to have to work hard, you're going to have to suffer, and you're going to have to continue to learn when he was so young.
00:09:53.000And he talked about all of the classes that Charlie ended up taking at Hillsdale.
00:09:58.860I immediately said, I want the listeners of this show to be able to have the same opportunity to do that.
00:10:05.340There are amazing classes, history, economics, the great works of literature, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
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00:10:23.140Hillsdale College is offering more than 40 free—I want to say that again—40 free online courses.
00:10:30.760That's right, more than 40 free online courses.
00:10:34.200You can learn about the works of C.S. Lewis, the stories in the book of Genesis, the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
00:10:54.520And you can see and explore the design, the purpose of the Constitution, the challenges it faced in the Civil War, and how it's been undermined for more than a century by progressives and liberals.
00:11:06.420This 12 lecture course is self-paced, so you start whenever you want to, and it is truly amazing.
00:14:50.700Well, you say – so if you invite Lindsey to dinner in your home, you may get an intellectual conversation.
00:14:57.140On the other hand, he could get drunk and vomit in the fish tank.
00:15:00.580And you don't know which – you have no idea – or both in the same evening.
00:15:05.900When made you want to write this book?
00:15:08.260I mean, the title's hysterical, but when did you decide you wanted to do this, and what is it that people are going to get if they go buy this?
00:16:13.080It's like high school, but nobody ever gets out of the sophomore year.
00:16:16.020And the second reason I wrote the book, I wanted to help people understand in real time why in Washington, normal is just a setting on the clothes dryer.
00:16:32.640And the third reason I wrote it was to try to make people understand that it doesn't have to be this way if we have a return to common sense.
00:20:43.220This is what happens when you bring a small-town Louisiana boy back to the big leagues, you know, with all the highfalutin donors out there.
00:21:38.460I think small-town America had been overlooked for so long, forgotten, referred to to flyover country.
00:21:46.040I think there's a huge pendulum swinging right now in this country where rural America is mattering now a lot more than it has in my lifetime.
00:21:55.160Small-town America is being listened to now and has a voice that they haven't had in a long time.
00:21:59.780The mainstream media has lost a lot of their power to influence and to try to act like only big cities matter and the rest of the country doesn't.
00:22:10.220And as you look back at your career, your life, where you came from, do you see that there's, I think, a big glimmer of hope right now that small-town America is actually being listened to for once in Washington, D.C.?
00:23:57.860I mean, Trump picked up on that early on, and even though he's a billionaire, and even though he's a New York developer, he doesn't talk down to people.