Robby Starbuck | How Republicans Can Win Hearts & Minds In 2022 | OAP #15
Chase Geiser Is Joined By Robby Starbuck
Robby is running in 2022 to represent Tennessee in Congress. He believes in reclaiming + expanding our freedoms, letting the common sense of the people drive decision making, focusing on policy that makes our families stronger and ensuring we plan well for our future so that Tennesseans, their wellbeing and the United States of America always come first!
Robby was first known as a filmmaker, directing Oscar winning actors and some of the biggest music stars in the world but his family’s experience of fleeing Marxism in Cuba has always been his fuel to achieve the American Dream. Once he saw that Marxism had come to threaten America with the rise of the socialist far left, he knew he had to stand up and run for office so that he could do his part to ensure America would always be a free country where the American Dream was possible. He owns a production company where he has overseen more than 1,500 workers, he has experience running a staff and dealing with how to get things done while working with people who always think they’re right… Skills that’ll help in Congress!
EPISODE LINKS:
Robby's Twitter: https://twitter.com/robbystarbuck
Chase's Twitter: https://twitter.com/realchasegeiser
Robby's Campaign Website: https://starbuck2022.com/
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://www.patreon.com/IAmOneAmerican
They want to make people desperate because the more desperate you are, the more reliant on government you are.
So that's definitely, I mean, that's that's a feature, not a bug for them.
And that's why their policies are essentially spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.
And so we have a big problem there.
You know, um, I actually talked about this recently.
You know, it's interesting.
When Biden was running, he said, I'm not going to tax the middle class.
There is no bigger tax on the middle class than inflation.
We choose to go to the moon and this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Mr. Gorbachev teared down this wall.
A date which will live in infamy.
I still have a dream.
Good night and good luck.
Good night and good luck.
Um, I've been a fan of yours for some time.
I lived in Nashville for seven years.
And I went to Belmont University, actually.
And um uh I am familiar with Jim Cooper.
So I will I was just excited to talk to you.
I saw you on uh Candace too, by the way, with uh I think you were on the first episode of that news show that she's doing with Daily Wire, right?
Yep, I was on a I've been on a couple, but yeah, that was on that one too.
Yeah, yeah.
So I saw you there, and that was that was nice.
But um, I was doing a little bit of research on you, and I didn't realize um uh how extensive your background was in music video production.
Yeah.
That's pretty cool.
So you uh can you tell me a little bit about um uh sort of your background and and how you got into the music business and and what kind of brought you to Nashville?
Yeah, definitely.
So essentially I always knew what I wanted to do when I was a little kid.
Um, I watched a bunch of black and white movies all the time.
I was addicted to like, you know, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Doris Day, like, you know, stuff people wouldn't expect.
But I was I was absolutely like fascinated with it.
So I knew I wanted to do something that was sort of the same thing.
And then as a teenager, I fell in love with music, and so I kind of fused the two dreams together.
And that's how I started.
So essentially, like I had no Hollywood family or connections or anything.
So what I did is I started going to local shows, and I would film artists and just do it for free and give them a video after.
And eventually I got pretty good at it.
And some of the people were like, hey, we want to do a real music video and we have a little bit of money when you do it.
And it grew from there and it ended up being a company with eight directors, and you know, we did videos for the biggest artists in the world.
And then we also did commercials and we had some uh film contracts with like Paramount Pictures and stuff like that.
Um so you know, it's it was an interesting um career arc, but in around 2015, I came out as a Republican and endorsed Trump.
And that's really, you know, in Hollywood unforgivable.
So, and I knew that going into it.
I knew what would happen.
And so I'm definitely not a victim here that didn't know what they were getting into.
I knew what I was getting into by endorsing him.
Um, but it was the right thing to do because you know, my family comes from Cuba, and I think one of the biggest regrets that a lot of Cubans have is that they didn't stand up when they had the chance, and they ended up losing everything they were worried about losing anyway.
So if they were worried they were gonna make a friend matter, have business, you know, go down or whatever it was, they lost it all anyways.
So um they regret having you know that opportunity passed without them standing up.
I wasn't gonna allow the same thing to happen to myself where 10, 15, 20 years from now, I would look back and say, we let this country turn into a socialist hellhole, and I did nothing.
I didn't stand up, I didn't do what I could have done.
I was selfish and I did what was good for my family.
And instead, you know, I I'm not gonna have that regret.
I'm gonna be able to say that I did stand up no matter what happens, and that I I was willing to burn down everything in the process to make sure that I stood up and did the right thing.
So do you see similarities between um what happened in Cuba and what's happening uh presently in the United States in terms of politically speaking?
Uh what was that transition like into socialism in Cuba?
And are there any uh similarities?
Well, there's there's I'll go straight in here, gigantic similarities.
Okay, number one, Castro never admitted he was a Marxist um when he was, you know, on this path to revolution.
Um, when he was asked about Marxism or communism, he would always say, I'm not a communist, I'm a Catholic.
And they actually, so in South Florida, he wasn't super popular.
So they had some Cubans that were pro-Castro distributing propaganda In South Florida, I actually have one of those pieces of propaganda still.
And essentially, it looks like it could be a piece of like a mailer for a Democrat today.
It says, we are humanist, we believe in justice.
We believe in education for all, we believe in health care for all, things along those lines.
I mean, it literally looks like it could be, if it wasn't so old, you would think, oh, this could be a platform from a progressive, a so-called progressive today.
Um, and it's essentially, you know, a lot of the same linguistic tricks about pretending that, oh, we're not this crazy thing.
But the minute he had consolidated power in Cuba, and the minute he knew there was no way anybody could take him down, he came out as a Marxist.
This is what they do.
The only advantage we have in America right now is that some of these people are being honest about and they're actually saying I'm a Marxist, like Patrice Cullers at BLM.
You know, she she said, I'm a Marxist and Marxism's the goal.
They weren't as lucky in Cuba, they were actually avoiding admitting that.
So I'll say this too.
You know, I think that a lot of people maybe will miss the similarities that occurred with race, but they did a lot of the same thing there, dividing people by race, where they tried to make it seem like Afro-Cubans, they tried to drive a wedge rather between Afro-Cubans and the more Spanish Cubans, and to try to say, Oh, well, you know, you're all treated differently, this and that and the other.
And under Castro, nobody has suffered more than the Afro-Cubans who bought into that lie.
And I'll say this too, you know, Che and Castro themselves were actually very racist, but they never admitted they were, you know, this this didn't become like a topic of discussion when it should have been.
They were very openly racist, actually.
And they saw the Afro-Cubans as lesser than, but they made the pitch to them that oh, life is going to be better and the Spanish Cubans, you know, under this, you know, you know, sort of form of government are going to treat you this way.
And nobody suffered more than them under Castro.
So, you know, a lot of that same racial division and the claim to be on their side, we see that happening with the progressives, where they claim to be four minorities, but all of their policies are policies that hurt minorities.
You know, so that's those are some of the off-the-bat similarities.
Sure.
And well, I think with with critical race theory and our uh um perpetuating our culture, uh, it's it's so funny to me that people buy it because it's so explicitly racist.
It's it's saying, you know, because you are white or white passing, you are inherently privileged, you are inherently biased or racist yourself.
I mean, you're basically making claims with critical race theory, you make claims about the character of a person based on the immutable quality of their race.
And so it's just it's so funny to me that they get away with it.
And I think one of the things that I say about Democrats versus Republicans is that Democrats are really good at winning the emotional debate and Republicans are really good at winning the logical debate.
And they're so good at branding that they can pass the worst stuff through because it's more emotionally appealing than uh the way that Republicans sort of um display their their policies.
Yeah, I was just talking about this actually with somebody today.
And um, my argument was that you know, part of the utility of having somebody like me in Congress is the ability to emotionally connect with people who don't think the way we do, because we we think very logically, very statistically oriented, and like, hey, let's look at a set of facts and make a determination.
Not everybody thinks that way, or it can be won over that way.
And you have to be able to make emotional arguments that that can appeal to people's good senses.
And so, like, let's say we'll take um healthcare for all, okay.
Instead of making the argument about money or about any of these like statistical data points you could point to about how it would fail or how it would, you know, increase the wait times or any number of things.
The really powerful thing that we can do with somebody like me is for me to be able to tell the story of my aunt who died in Cuba not receiving care when she had cancer.
They waited years for her to get the scan that she needed to diagnose her cancer.
And by the time that she was diagnosed, she was terminal and they didn't treat her because she was just a cost analysis, not a human being.
And that's the that sort of story with the emotional aspects of it that you can sort of make a visceral picture for people that she died in a cold metal bed in a hospital room that had blood on the walls that was disgusting.
That's the healthcare that Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ohano Marr, Katie Porter have praised in Cuba.
You know, you think do you think they know that?
Do you think that the Democrats understand that their policies are actually incredibly dangerous and that they're just Pitching them in order to as a power grab.
Or do you think that they're they're sort of ignorant?
Yeah, I think genuinely, I think some of them do believe it.
And I think there's some who do know the failures, and they think that, you know, um it's it's a path towards consolidating power.
And I think in the back of their head, they think, oh, I could do better.
But the reality is the system always turns out the same, even if you think you can do better, it always turns out like this.
And there's a reason for that, you know.
Um, and like someone like Bernie likes to point to, let's say Norway, where they're actually explicitly capitalistic.
Their whole they have large social programs, and there's no denying that.
And they work for Norway.
And the reason why is because they have the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, which invested early on in fossil fuels in the United States, which is sort of the beautiful irony of all of it.
Okay.
And so if you want to be able to recreate what they did in Norway, you would literally need to find a planet that is extremely capitalistic, who is going through a fossil fuel boom, and the United States would have to invest in that planet's boom of fossil fuels to be able to afford the types of social programs they have successfully in Norway.
But in Norway, even they, you know, and in Sweden and some of these other places, they've actually come out very firmly to say that no, we're not what Bernie Sanders is selling, is not us, we're not socialists.
We don't believe in socialism.
And Bernie Sanders is using them as a way to distract people from what socialism really looks like, what it really, what the outcome really ends up being.
And even to have some of those people, even former prime ministers come out and say, no, this is not or an inaccurate reflection of what socialism is and we are not what he's selling.
That's something that we need to be able to message more poignantly to people.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um I think is really interesting is how these uh the left is uh, especially recently, they've been coming out and saying, you know, it's not fair that billionaire Jeff Bezos, you know, increased his wealth by 200% last year while everybody suffered.
And there's no way that they don't know that even if we liquidated all of the billionaire assets, it would just be a drop in the bucket in terms of our our national overhead every year.
Um what do you think is that just is that just one of those emotionally manipulative uh approaches that sort of the left sort of takes in order to uh push through um tax increases?
Yes and no.
Um, yes, on the elected official level.
Yes, they know that the elected officials know that the actual amount that you would be able to pull from that is margin, you know, it's it's really not much once you break down our budget all the time.
But the complaint from people that that guys like Jeff Bezos are raking in money hand over fist and that they barely pay taxes is something that really actually should be taken more seriously by us as a party because you know, let's say somebody like Jeff Bezos, okay.
If his career and his money was just the free market at work and he just he made all this money on his own, I would say, okay, you know what?
This is a system.
This is he won, you know, it good for him.
Hopefully he turns that over and does good things with his money.
But that's not how he gained his wealth, actually.
He ran Amazon intentionally at a loss.
Um, and did that for years and years and years, knowing that the stock market was really what mattered in terms of Amazon's future and its growth.
And so what they did is they ran the company to loss purposefully so that they could gain market share in all these different markets and kill small businesses.
So they could undercut price on every small business because they were at scale.
By doing that, they killed all these small businesses along the way.
They got this incredible market share.
And then once they cleaned out all competition, then they raised the prices.
Now their profits soar every quarter after quarter after quarter, their profits are insane.
And so the way he got there is not a reflection of capitalism.
And I think that's something that we actually have to be able to communicate really well to young people because they're incensed seeing someone like him make money on on the backs of essentially small business owners that he killed.
You know, so we need to not that he killed the business owners, but the businesses, you know, and so we need to be able to make that argument and be able to reach out to those young people who are incensed rightfully by that and show them that hey, this is actually not a reflection of capitalism.
This is a reflection of somebody taking advantage of the system.
And we are able to close these loopholes so that somebody can't do this again and kill small businesses along the way while ripping us off as a country.
Because that's what Bezos did.
He saw a hole and he took advantage of it.
Um, and it's a hole that you could even make a lot of arguments is not legal, because I think that my belief is he violated uh a lot of our antitrust laws along the way.
And by doing so, all of that is essentially, you know, illegal.
One thing people forget is that the Republican Party used to be the trust busting party.
We used to trust busts like nobody else.
And so I think that we have to get back to that spirit of really fighting for the small business instead of big business.
You know, the Mitt Romney corporatist era is gone where they attached themselves to every big corporate behemoth that they could.
There was that was a really misguided thing to do.
Number one, because it's not a reflection of the people, and we're supposed to be a party that represents the people.
But number two, because those companies we should have known and I knew at the time could never be trusted.
They would ultimately kneel down to whatever political pressure was popularized by media.
And anytime you have that, that's a recipe for disaster.
Small business owners is where it's at because they're a reflection of the heart and soul of our country.
So our policy and our initiative needs to be focused on how do we strengthen small business owners, how do we fight for them?
And I think one of the ways we do that is trust busting again to get rid of these monopolies.
One of the things that's um overwhelmingly bothersome to me, and this is something that's really only bothered me the last couple of years.
I was just sort of unaware of it.
But the the extent to which we import all of our goods from China uh really bothers me for a couple of reasons.
Um, obviously there's the labor manufacturing issue where we, you know, we've outsourced all of our jobs for in terms of blue-collar jobs.
But also, I mean it's practically slave labor over there.
If you look up the if you look up the the average income.
Yeah.
So I mean, you're talking about people who live, sleep, eat, and work in the same building, right?
For months and months and months at a time for pennies.
And and how are we supposed to rectify that or justify that?
And it seems like what we've done is we've basically just turned um turned uh a blind eye uh and just sort of exploited the situation over there for our own benefit.
And I I really wish that there was some leadership and maybe you're the guy to do it.
But what are your thoughts in terms of how do we move away from uh importing from China?
Because, you know, on the Bezos note, uh, a lot of his wealth is because of the cheap labor in China.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there's there's a number of things here.
Number one, off the out of the gate, the first thing we need to do differently as a party is behave as if we have the moral high ground on issues because we do.
And we haven't done that for a long time, where we've been more interested in playing defense than getting on offense and just going after each one of these issues, wave after wave after wave until our opponents on these issues are so demoralized that they step back and realize they can't stop us.
That's something that's number one, because the strategy of playing defense all the time has done nothing but lose us ground for over a decade.
Okay.
We have to be on offense.
But when it comes to China, you know, let's just take national security.
I mean, there's a bunch of different areas we can go through here, but let's take national security, okay.
About 70% of our pharmaceuticals have some sort of uh part of it produced in China, okay, from a national security perspective.
Imagine China wanted to go to war with America without firing a shot.
Poison every single one of those.
This is the job of legislators.
They have to think of the unthinkable and you have to think about situations that really pose a threat.
That's one right there.
70% of pharmaceuticals touching China in some way with the opportunity for them to do something to it.
I don't even care if it was 30%.
That's a national security threat.
You have to get that out of there.
So I think number one, you use the DPA and put pressure on the president, whoever's president at the time to use the DPA to force companies to not manufacture in China because of the national security threat.
And you could do that through the DPA, the Defense Production Act.
So that's that's number one.
But on a wide scale in terms of China, um, you know, I think we have to be able to make the argument again, like you said, we're very we're very focused on facts, logic, statistics.
We have to be able to make the emotional argument to people about why getting away from China is in our best interest and in the best interest of humanity.
And so the way you make that argument is talking about the fact that it's slave labor and exposing exactly what China does in these these, you know.
I mean, I there's nothing you call them but hell holes.
I've been to China.
There's no question that slave labor is happening.
Okay.
Um, if you get any person who's of Chinese descent, you know, that that has lived there and you talk to them about it, they they they know about these things.
You know, there's a reason some of these factories have suicide nets outside the windows because they're locked in there day and night, 24 hours a day, and sometimes get so overwhelmed with hopelessness that they jump out a window.
You know, I mean, that's something that is very, I mean, that's that's visceral for people.
You can you can see that when you hear it.
And so I think we we need to be able to sort of make that argument to people, but on the flip side of it, make the argument that number one, not only is this wrong from this perspective, but it's wrong from this perspective.
Now let's look at what's happening to our people, our Americans on our streets who are homeless, our veterans on our streets who don't have jobs.
And this is why.
And we're sending jobs over here and being able to break that out for everybody in multiple different ways.
I think, I mean, we have every good argument for it from uh a national security perspective, from a you know, sovereignty perspective, from a let's look at COVID.
What happened in the beginning when we we didn't have enough of anything?
We got sort of a taste of socialism in a way where all these shelves were bare because we had an issue with being able to import items that were not coming in fast enough from other countries because they had slowed their exports.
That that should tell us everything in terms of, you know, like, do we want to be able to be self-sufficient or not?
Your goal as a country should be able to operate if you had to without the help of other countries and to keep your citizens safe.
Getting away from China, you know, kind of checks all those boxes.
Here's another one that would make things very simple and would be very popular with people and would be very difficult for lawmakers to vote against.
And that is making it illegal for the Chinese government or for Chinese-owned entities to buy farmland in America.
There's no reason why we allow them to do this.
They've bought more farmland than just about anybody but Bill Gates.
Okay.
That again, national security threat, our food supply should be protected above all else.
You know, our food supply, our medicine, these are things, it's not a mistake that China's going after grabbing power in those areas, food supply, medicine.
We need to protect those areas and say, no, you know what?
We're putting America first.
We're not allowing China to do this.
China would never allow us to buy farmland in China.
Make no mistake.
It's illegal there.
They would never allow it for any reason because they're not stupid.
Okay.
We need to get smart and make sure that we don't allow this on our soil either.
One of the things that's interesting to me about China is um not only economically have they um dominated us, but culturally they dominated us too.
And that um, you know, they're so particular about what media can be um it's uh uh presented to their their population that um, you know, it's it's totally warped Hollywood in terms of how our um uh our movies are made, right?
So certain cuts are made to certain movies, certain elements are added to certain movies.
And it seems to me that over a long period of time this can have a tremendous impact on the zeitgeist and the culture and the psyche of our population that we've sort of catered to catered toward China because Hollywood wants to uh have that market share when they when they release um feature films.
Yep, it's a you're absolutely right on.
China is putting so much money into Hollywood, it's sickening.
Um, I've seen it myself, the effect it has on major studios, where they're making choices in the cutting room floor in terms of what gets in a movie, what doesn't, in script writing, in casting based on what is the preference of our Chinese investors.
That has a very serious effect on the culture of our country.
I mean, this is something that's already a problem for us in terms of leftists doing the same thing.
Because really we have no representation in Hollywood.
I mean, for all intents and purposes, we have none.
There's a couple small, you know, deals, but in general, we have pretty much no representation.
So we already have that problem.
Now, on top of it, you add to that that we have communists putting more money into Hollywood than almost anybody.
And those communists are now making editing, casting, and script writing decisions.
They're literally giving creative control in many of these cases to those investors to be able to say yes and no to things.
Okay.
Um, I've talked to talked to directors who've directed big films where there's Chinese money in and they can't believe the things they're asked by studios to do to bend to the Chinese clients.
And these Chinese clients Are just a conduit for the government, and everybody's aware of that involved in this.
I mean, the US government's aware of that, the studios are aware of it, the director, everybody's aware that this is all a conduit built for the Chinese communist party to sort of push their propaganda.
And it can be little things.
I mean, this is the thing about Hollywood that a lot of people don't understand is that how did we get here today where we have drag queen story hour at US military bases?
We got here because the subtlety of Hollywood slowly introduced ideas to us.
China's doing the same thing.
They're slowly introducing the idea that their systems are actually okay.
And then eventually it'll be that they're good, and eventually it'll be that they're better.
And that's how you get there.
You know, so they they understand that.
So it's subtlety.
They're subtly changing that overton window of acceptability and desire, so that it falls on the side that they wanted to fall on, which is you know, explicitly communistic.
So that's definitely something that we have to um, you know, also tackle on a legislative level to get that money out of Hollywood.
And essentially, that's that's something that's just a patriotic thing.
You know, if you love this country, it doesn't matter if you're a Democrat or Republican, you shouldn't want the Chinese communist party meddling and having creative control over what type of content your children, your families view.
That's something I think everybody should be able to agree on.
Well, and if you think about what happened with the cold war, um, you know, with the Soviet Union's collapse, we weren't doing business with the Soviet Union during that whole entire period.
And that's that's sort of what I see as the big difference between China and Russia in terms of how the communism is playing out.
I know there are other differences as well.
I know that in large China has adopted very capitalistic practices um where it's convenient, but we weren't subsidizing communism in Russia the way that we subsidized communism in China.
It just it just seems totally bizarre to me that from a national security standpoint and just from a self-respect standpoint, we have allowed ourselves to be in this position with China.
And I don't I don't really know how it started.
I don't know if it was in the 70s, I don't know if it was Carter, I don't know who it was.
But man, I and the fact that basically I call COVID, I call COVID China's Chernobyl because you know, I think it was an accident, and I think it was because of incompetence, and I think that they let it leak from the lab.
Um, and it's a major disaster, just like Chernobyl was.
But why is it that no one is holding them accountable?
Why is it that no one has the courage to stand up?
And I I just I really wish we had leadership that would it's fear that we're on the precipice of a war in all-out ground war with China.
That's that's the fear.
That's why nobody's responding.
They they are afraid that that's where we're headed.
And you know, you give them a lot more credit than I do.
I'm not sure it was a mistake, you know.
And yeah, and I don't know either.
I don't know either.
And here's why.
You have to understand for them for the Chinese communist party, nothing was more dangerous than another Trump presidency.
Okay.
For the first time, they were getting crushed on GDP from where they were at in terms of growth, and their economy was not doing well.
She president Xi was getting a lot of pushback privately about policy and how they were negotiating with the US.
They were negotiating a trade deal with the US during a lot of this, okay, right before COVID came out.
And so you have to think about for them, if they're looking at the future and they're looking at us going towards a future where the US is more independent, which is where we were headed, and that was part of the trade negotiations, they saw the direction we were headed.
And you look at your own country being held accountable more often and being put in a weaker position, and they were able to make the calculation that you know what we weakened the US right now and crippled them, our economic problems would not look like as big of a deal to our people.
They would look like something the whole world's going through.
We could get rid of Trump with it, and this is something that will serve our purposes because we'd much rather deal with the Democrats who will be easy on China.
And so you put all that together, the motivations are very clear for them why COVID would be a good thing for them because they don't care about body counts, they don't care about lives, they don't care about any of that.
Just look at the Great Leap Forward, they killed 100 million people.
They care about power.
That's it.
And so from that perspective, it's a calculation that you know, for a communist is is I think pretty easy for them to make.
And so that's definitely something, you know, I'm not so sure that it was an accident.
I think we have to obviously investigate it.
But here's another thing.
We actually have a have you heard about the whistleblower from the CCP?
Which one?
The one that recently that came over like just a couple of days ago.
And uh just a yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've heard about that.
So they're actually very high level.
That's not like a scientist or you know, a disgruntled, that's somebody very high level who has access to almost all of China's intelligence, if not all of their intelligence.
Okay.
Um, and the stuff that he's giving the defense intelligence agency right now, serious stuff.
And I I would say, you know, if if I was being really honest, the stuff that he's bringing, and everybody knows I'm very anti-war.
I'm like, I'm like the most I don't want to send our people to die.
I hate wars.
I think that in many cases we've made big mistakes with Afghanistan, Iraq, you know.
In this case, if this stuff that is being given to the DIA is is legit, and I think it is 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, there would have been no question that it would be reason for war.
It would have been considered acts of war by the Chinese communist party, and the whole world would have would have rallied along with us to go after China and to cut them off economically and then go after them militarily.
I don't think that happens today, because I think that there's there's fear for good reason that that war with China means real destruction for everybody, just a really horrible world for everybody involved.
And so I think that there's a lot of people who are making this sort of calculation that okay, what do we do then?
You know, and for me, that answer is very simple.
I think you know, you essentially have to go at economic war with them, and you have to bring on enough countries and convince them that China's not only responsible for COVID, they knew what was going on, and that they've been doing a lot of other things that are very, very concerning.
So economic war is a very clear, you know, sort of direction we can go to hold them accountable without a you know, giant body count.
But my fear is that's the right thing to do, and we should do it.
But my fear is that China's response to it will be to want all out war.
And I hope that's not the direction we go in, because again, I'm I hate war.
But this is also another reason why we do have to be prepared for it because China's at this place where if she really feels like his power is threatened, or that Chinese uh that China's rise is threatened.
Um especially with Joe Biden in the White House.
I I think that they would see that as an opportunity while all our military is more concerned with you know what gender and and having drag queen story hour than they are with fighting wars and having a prepared military.
They may see that as the the opportunity of opportunities to go after us, and so you know, we'll see what happens, but I do think that the intelligence that is being brought forward should be very concerning to everybody, you know, and I'm choosing my words very carefully here because it's it's a really serious situation.
Some of the stuff that's been brought forward.
Um, I mean, it's unforgivable.
I don't know how you could ever have any sort of normal relations with China after some of this stuff, you know.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's um it's one of those things where for me where it's I've always been very good at identifying what the problems are, but terrible at uh figuring out what the solution should be.
And so it's it's just one of those situations where it's very obvious to me that the CCP is a terrorist organization, it's Marxist, it's communist, it has no um uh respect for human life.
Um it's in my opinion.
I mean, uh the left likes to throw around the word Nazi all the time, but there is nothing that there is nothing close to as evil as communism has been in the 20th century.
Um, and you know, I'm I'm sort of baffled as to why we don't have Gwen Tarantino movies that are, you know, Stalin's the villain, right?
You know, and it just doesn't happen.
I I think that well, the reason why is obvious Hollywood doesn't want to tell that story, but you know, I do think that um Hitler's a lot closer to a communist than a lot of people ever draw that parallel.
Um, in terms of evil and um ruthlessness, I think that it's definitely, you know, horrible, horrible situations, you know.
Well, there was a there was there was uh with with the Third Reich, there was totally a sacrifice of the individual to the party.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it's the same thing in Marxism.
Similarity.
That's the biggest similarity.
I mean, there's obviously there's social tenants that they sold or socialist tenants they sold the people in terms of when they were campaigning and all that, when they were kind of selling their ideas to German people.
But that sort of abdication of individual rights and responsibility is right up there with what communists love that, you know.
So I think there's parallels there.
People don't want to draw because it's just it's it's uncomfortable to kind of compare anything to that, you know, because it's any any sort of atrocity, people have a lot of trouble using it as a barometer for other atrocities.
And I think that's fair, you know, because like, say, you know, in my case, I'll say this with what happened in Cuba, because I can sort of like credibly go after that.
I want people to draw parallels.
At least in my case, for what happened in Cuba and what Castro and Che Guevara did, I want people to draw parallels so that it never happens again.
You know, um, and I think that anybody who who I talk to comes from these places like communist China, same thing.
Like they want people to know what happened.
They want people to draw those parallels.
They want it never to happen again, desperately, because they know the damage it did to their families.
And so um, you know, I hope that's a place where we can get out where we can we can, you know, sort of have those voices heard more.
So you're running in district five in Nashville, Tennessee.
What are you gonna do when you win?
Um, I'm gonna be on the hunt.
I'm gonna be on the hunt for, you know, all of these ideas that are being pushed by Marxists in America.
I'd say some of my big priorities though, is um going after critical race theory, um, banning the Chinese from being able to buy farmland in America, um, getting border security tightened up because that's something that's really, really important.
And we've just totally abdicated our responsibility to the American people to keep our borders safe.
Um, and then again, pushing on whoever's in in office, whoever's in the White House, pushing on them to use the DPA to bring our pharmaceutical manufacturing entirely to the United States and force the hand there.
Um, but then healthcare, you know, we need to have this battle on healthcare.
And too many Republicans have been afraid to talk about health care because they they frankly they don't, you know, have like a very cohesive plan everybody can agree on.
I have a healthcare plan, I put it out there that keeps us away from government health, um, you know, government run healthcare.
And I think that, you know, part of that is obviously opening things up.
We also have to across state lines for insurance, but we also have to open things up on the pharmaceutical side of things so that we say this, and I think this is a very easy thing for people to understand.
We have to essentially have a rule that says that pharmaceutical companies in the United States cannot charge the United States and people in the United States more than they charge people in Canada or Europe.
Okay.
Very fair says essentially whatever you're charging them, you need to charge us.
All of their, you know, actually, to be really honest, what would be fair is charging less because the vast majority of these drugs are made in the United States and are they use government grants as part of that process.
So we're literally helping fund them create the drugs, and then they charge us more for it than they charge Canada.
Okay.
That's not a function of government-run health care, it's a function of stupidity.
And so this should have been a law a long time ago that we don't allow this, we're not stupid people in America, we're not paying more money for something we helped pay for than you charge Canada.
So get it together, or you can't sell your drug here.
Um, I think things like this that are very common sense, we need to go after a little bit harder.
And they're very like, you know, this isn't a right-left thing.
This is a what is good for America thing, you know, and I think that we we've got to sort of have that mindset more of like, how do we fight for this country for freedom for people?
And that's one of those areas where I feel like we should be able to get broad bipartisan support for that.
But um, it's gonna be a fight, you know, and we have to be able to viscerally tell the story of why government run healthcare as the alternate option is is not a good thing.
Um, and so beyond that, you know, another one too would be um, you know, very clear law with critical race theory that says that if you are a company that receives government funds, whether that be through a grant or whatever process, or you have a government contract, you will not be able to have any of those funds.
You won't ever be able to get a government contract or any of that money if you train your employees with critical race theory.
And same thing with public schools.
You receive government money.
You can't receive that government money unless you don't train your teachers with CRT and you don't teach it to students.
These are things on a federal level we can do to say, hey, this violates existing discrimination laws.
So we're not allowing this.
And this is the, you know, this is what happens if you do.
This is the natural consequence.
If you violate discrimination laws in our country, we're going to do this.
And so, you know, there's there's a myriad of other things, but I'm basically, you know, one of my big focuses is sort of being a voice for our party that can explain our policies in a new way that I hope will connect with more people.
I hope we'll connect with a broader audience of people that can see us a little bit differently than they have in the past.
Because I don't think that we've always put our best foot forward or our best sort of marketing approach forward to let people know who we are.
For too long, we've let Democrats do our marketing for us and they've marketed us as bigots, racists, and you know, crazy things that none of us are.
Okay.
Um, and so taking control, you know, like people can count on me to be in the driver's seat and be on the offensive all the time.
And that's going to offend some Democrats, but that's just too bad because that's what they've been afraid of for so long is having representatives there who are on offense, not defense, who are not going to apologize or make stupid mistakes, but who are going to be on the hunt for you know getting rid of these these Marxist policies.
One of the things that um I think about a lot, and I'd be interested to hear your thoughts, uh, because I'm by no means an economic expert.
Um, you know, I've read Wealth of Nations and John uh or and uh Milton Friedman, but um my biggest concern is inflation.
Yeah, and not not just inflation in the trendy sense where everybody's talking about it in 2021, but inflation in uh as sort of like an inherent feature of our system.
Yeah.
Uh and it seems to me that ever since we went off the gold standard in the 70s, um the inflation issue can explain the increasing the increased wealth gap between the wealthiest and the poor, and the um uh sort of uh uh direction of desperation among our our poorest uh in the United States.
And I don't think that people realize that inflation is a poor tax.
So when the government overspends and has to sell bonds to the Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve prints the money to buy the bonds, and that increases the money supply uh in the economy.
And if you don't have any money in the market uh because you're a paycheck to paycheck person, that means that you just lose buying power.
So it's a poor tax, right?
Whereas, you know, Bezos gets rich because all of his money is an assets, right?
And I'm really concerned about how this is gonna play out long term, because it seems to me that if we don't get our spending in check, um, we are gonna we are gonna make our poor very desperate.
And that's that's and I I think we're kind of what we've seen the last year has been a little bit of uh a little bit of the symptoms of that.
Um I I don't I just I'd be interested to hear what your thoughts are in terms of monetary policy.
Yeah, that's their plan.
They want to make people desperate because the more desperate you are, the more reliant on government you are.
So that's definitely, I mean, that's that's a feature, not a bug for them.
And that's why their policies are essentially spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.
And so we have a big problem there.
You know, um, I actually talked about this recently, you know, it's interesting when Biden was running, he said, I'm not gonna tax the middle class.
There is no bigger tax on the middle class than inflation.
And it's why I've been calling, you know, and this is very political, but I'm calling it Biden inflation because it is his policies that are responsible for for where we're going trajectory-wise, if we keep on this path of spending as much as we're spending.
Um, and it's not just him, though.
I mean, this is definitely something that for a long time has been um an issue.
You know, I mean, we've overspent, we've overextended.
And I think that, you know, it's one of the reasons I love Rand Paul so much, um, is that he talks about this all the time in terms of our waste, the stuff we've wasted money on.
If you've never seen if people have never seen this before, his um he does a thing every year on Festivus where um which if you're not familiar with is the data from Seinfeld.
Um, but okay, so he does this thing every year on Festivus where he lists his grievances with the US government and what we've spent our money on.
And um, it's not only hilarious, it's very informative.
And I mean, some of this stuff that our government spends millions on is like giving cocaine to monkeys, you know, like millions.
This stuff is nuts.
Like we have to, we have to have some common sense injected into our monetary policy.
And I think that in the Trump administration, we saw some of that.
What I would like to see more of though is, you know, I do think that with the Fed, you know, this may sound very Ron Polish, but I do think that, you know, at some point we need to audit the Fed and figure out what the hell's going on because there's there's a whole lot of murkiness there that we just don't have answers to.
And without those answers, you really don't know what you need to know about our system.
I mean, whenever you do something that can make people really desperate, um something comes along that will have to sort of be able to fill the gap for the desperate people.
And I think that crypto might be that, and it may be the reason why some whales have been trying to make it fluctuate so wildly recently, because all of the big market moves recently on crypto, the big crashes and rises and all that, it's it's pretty much been predicated on whales doing it.
And whales for people who don't know in the investment world is people with big money who are like they're just they're making huge buy and sell um deals.
So that's definitely something that I think is a concern.
My concern is can the people get enough power over the crypto to where it can sort of fill the gap on inflation for some people.
I do it's gonna play a role, you know, it's gonna play a role in whatever happens in monetary policy over the next 50 years.
So we have to be cognizant of that, and we can't pretend it's going away, it's not going away.
And I think that's probably just about the most ignorant thing I've seen in monetary policy is people pretending that cryptocurrency is not going to be here in 50 years, it will be.
In fact, I think crypto in many forms is going to be adopted by governments.
Um, not maybe not the existing ones, they'll make their own.
But I think that we're gonna see a lot more governments adopting their own cryptocurrencies, and it's going to have a part to play in what happens in the future.
I just don't know a hundred percent how that's gonna affect inflation, but I do think that we're headed to a really dark place with inflation if we don't get control of our spending.
At the end of the day, you can control inflation if your spending is in control.
Um, no matter what the other factors are outside of it.
If your spending is in control and you're making good decisions there, you're gonna be able to control that.
But if not, and the spending stays where it's at and gets higher and higher every year, um, we're gonna be in really big trouble.
And I think you know that.
I think it seems to me that there should be a constitutional amendment that just says federal government can't spend in any given year more money than it isn't is expected to take in.
Good luck getting any Democrat to get on board with that.
Well, you just have to have it ratified by two-thirds of the states, right?
It seems like the people would support something like that.
I know, but uh you know, with the exception of of war, maybe, you know, when you need emergency money.
Um, but it just it's it seems to me that there's no incentive for anyone to actually solve the problem, except for out of conscience.
Um and these politicians that we have are are professionals at kicking the can down the road, and they know that someone else is gonna have to uh deal with the problem that's being created today.
Yeah.
So anyway, um, do you have any debates uh scheduled with your opponent?
Um, no, because um I don't I don't even know that Cooper is gonna run, honestly.
I think he may retire.
I think he may retire rather than lose because the district is being redrawn, you know.
So um we don't know what exactly we don't know exactly what it's gonna look like yet, but I I've seen enough angry statements from the Democrats that I think it's not gonna be good for them.
Um, but our district is too big right now, so it's it's not even like I think they know this isn't something that they're gonna win in court or anything like that because this isn't gerrymandering.
That this isn't like trying to draw a district for somebody.
This is the district is too big compared to the other districts.
You have to redraw it.
I mean, there's no way around it really.
So um, you know, it's gonna look very different.
And I think that Cooper may decide to retire.
I don't know.
If he runs, though, I don't think he makes it out of his primary against um Odessa Kelly.
Odessa Kelly's a progressive, she's endorsed by AOC, she's endorsed by Justice Dems.
She's gonna be his first really serious primary threat he's had in a long time.
Um, and he almost lost last time to his, you know, I mean, it wasn't like he didn't almost, he was very close.
You know, for the person that ran against him last time had almost no money and no significant backing, and they got really close.
I think they were at 44% or something at 45%.
Um, now Odessa's gonna have a lot of money on her side and a lot of organizing power from Justice Dems and AOC.
So I think he's gonna have a lot of trouble because on the left, that's where their energy is right now.
It's on the far left.
So we'll see.
Um, you know, the interesting thing with people like like Cooper is that he pretends to be a moderate, but he literally goes along with everything that the left pushes forward.
I mean, he goes along with everything.
We gotta stay in those committees.
Yeah.
So I think he's gonna um he's gonna have some trouble, but I do think that you know, we're um whoever we run against, I I will debate them left, right, and sideways every day of the week.
As often as they want to debate, I'll debate them.
Whoever wins that race.
Well, that's great.
So, where can people find you, follow you, and uh contribute to your campaign?
Absolutely.
Starbuck 2022.com.
This is Starbuck2022.com.
The most important thing for us right now is fundraising because we have to have the money to take on both the left and the establishment at the same time.
So uh we've got to build a winning campaign, have a great campaign team and infrastructure in place.
We have a ton of volunteers, but we still have to be able to pay for ads and um, you know, TV ads, online digital.
We have to pay for signs and door hangers and all types of stuff.
So we do need your help on that end of things.
Um, so that's that's where people could go.
It makes a huge difference.
You know, at the end of each quarter, um, a lot of very, you know, important organizations and stuff that can get behind you.
Look at how much money did you raise, you know, how are you doing?
So that helps a lot.
Our first reporting is at I think the 30th or something like that.
Um, so it's it's important for us, and that's uh a big help.
Well, I wish you the best of luck, and uh, you certainly have my support.
Um, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today about who you are and sort of what your thoughts are on all these issues.
And um, I really appreciate it.
It's been a real joy.
Absolutely.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
We choose to go to the moon in this decay and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
