Joe Walsh | Will There Be A Viable Third Party In The United States? | OAP #40
Chase Geiser is joined by Joe Walsh.
Walsh was born in 1961 in North Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He earned his bachelor's in English from the University of Iowa in 1985. After graduation, Walsh studied acting, and then earned a master's in public policy from the University of Chicago in 1991.[5]
Walsh worked as a community college teacher, fundraiser, and researcher for private foundations and advocacy groups, including Americans for Limited Government, the United Republican Fund, and the John and Kathleen Buck Family Foundation.[6]
He first ran for elected office in 1996, when he challenged Rep. Sidney Yates (D) for U.S. House.[6]
Walsh defeated Melissa Bean (D) to represent Illinois' 8th Congressional District in 2010 as part of the wave election that saw 63 seats change hands from Democrats to Republicans. Walsh lost his re-election bid in 2012 to Tammy Duckworth (D).[6]
Following his exit from Congress, Walsh launched The Joe Walsh Show, a conservative talk radio show. It debuted on WIND Chicago in March 2013, and began receiving syndication in other major U.S. cities by early 2014. In February 2017, it was picked up for national syndication by the Salem Radio Network, and became part of Newsmax TV in May 2018.
Walsh ran for President of the United States in 2020.
So I know that fairly recently, you've been sort of a cantankerous, I don't even think right-wing is the right word for you necessarily, but I could see how you wouldn't necessarily be the person that would just follow all the party rules, right?
You're an independent thinker.
You have your own ideas, and you're not going to make any sort of compromises about your principles or your convictions for the sake of telling a party line.
So I could see how that would have been something that would have been frustrating for Republicans back in 2010.
Look, when I was there, I came in and there were a group of us young conservatives, and we were probably as pissed off at the Republican establishment as we were the Democrats.
Look, I ran because I was all about the debt and the size of government.
And you know, like I know, Republicans are every bit as guilty when it comes to the debt as Democrats are.
And I do want to specifically talk to you about Trump because I am a Trump supporter, although reluctantly, mostly because everybody I hate hates him.
That's interesting.
So I consider myself a much more fiscally conservative person than obviously Trump behaved.
But I just, I really embraced, and you might have some insight on this that I don't, but I really embraced the populism of Trump.
And even if not in action and rhetoric, it just resonated with me to hear someone who was unashamedly at least saying America first.
This sort of populist kind of nationalist message really resonated with like my upbringing of patriotism and freedom and everything that America, you know, the flag, all this stuff, right?
And so I know that, you know, you can quibble about, you know, Trump, whether or not he actually led or had policy that lined up with that sort of rhetoric, but it was certainly something that got him elected and explains sort of my support for him, my enthusiasm for him.
You know, I struggle with the incitement aspect of it because, you know, I think a lot of our neighbors on the left try to ascribe the inciting of what happened on January 6th directly to the speech before.
And I think it was really more like three hours after election night.
And, you know, I struggle because I am very open to the idea that there was cheating.
I think there's been cheating in our elections for 150 years to some extent.
Not necessarily cheating that resulted in a different outcome.
I'm not prepared to say that.
I'm not confident enough to say that.
But I'm totally open to believing that there was some sort of fraud that happened in the election, just as I think there is in every election.
But what alarmed me about Trump was how certain he was of the fraud night of the election, right?
It's like, all right, well, you know, if there was fraud, it's going to take audits and weeks and months to get to the bottom of it.
So, you know, regardless of whether or not there was fraud, I think I do think that it was inappropriate for him to be so vocally certain that there was before anybody could have known for sure, right?
That speech he gave that morning, that was irrelevant.
When I say Trump incited that attack, I agree more with you that it was what he said from the election on.
The election was stolen.
Biden didn't win fair and square.
And I got to remind everybody, Chase, Trump started talking about this last summer, months before the election, is when Trump first said, either I win or it will be stolen from me.
He was planting the seeds for the big lie even before the election.
Again, I'm in a weird spot because I'm not some crazy liberal or progressive.
I come from the Republican base.
And I engage with hundreds, sometimes thousands of Trump supporters every day.
They all believe the election was stolen.
They believe Trump's lie.
So he did incite, and it is a lie.
And Chase, final thing I'll say is Joe Biden won.
For the first time in American history, we had a sitting president who did not concede, who did not congratulate the winner, who did not participate in that glorious American thing of the transfer of power.
What a son of a bitch.
What a selfish, un-American, dangerous thing to do.
And his people then went to Washington to try to overturn the election.
So let me ask you your thoughts on January 6th specifically.
So I absolutely agree with you that what happened was totally inappropriate.
I think it was criminal.
It was over the line.
No qualms there.
It was not just none of that behavior was justified.
But I really struggle with the rhetoric of an insurrection.
To me, it just seems like a mob that got out of control.
I don't think that it was an actual coup.
I just think it was a protest that was totally unruly.
Unruly is an understatement.
I mean, someone died.
So I understand that this was an astronomical problem, but I don't like hearing Pelosi and the Biden administration throwing around this insurrection language and this white supremacy is the number one threat.
It's a national security.
It seems to me like Justice Trump kind of set up everything for, you know, like in case I lose, I'll have this plan B. It seems to me like the left is sort of setting up like some sort of a narrative that's going to allow for increased domestic security or surveillance.
I don't know.
I'm not conspiratorial, but I'm wary of big government too.
And, you know, I'm really alarmed with some of the language I hear.
Some of the some of the what the left is using, you know, January 6th as an excuse to try to accomplish, it seems like.
And again, I'm not of the left, and I don't know why Pelosi or the Democrats say what they say.
I'm a hardcore Tea Party conservative, and I'm comfortable using the term insurrection.
It was an attack against our government.
It was a violent attack with the direct aim, and you could call them bumbling idiots, but with the direct aim of trying to overturn an American election.
That's a well, they don't want to look into it because they don't want Trump supporters not to vote for him, but they also didn't want to be supportive of what happened on the 6th because they could be associated with insurrection.
Because you notice on the 6th that a lot of the Republicans that were going to have a protest vote and not certify or whatever, they all backed down, right?
They kind of chickened out.
And it's like, it just, it just, you know, not that I agreed with them having a protest vote and not certifying, but it just seemed like, okay, you guys don't actually have principles.
You're just doing whatever is politically convenient.
Yeah, I'm really, I'm generally concerned about the intelligence community in the United States because, you know, one thing I often think about the fall of Rome and try to compare it to what's going on in the United States and there's things like currency debasement, hyper-expansion.
But, you know, one thing that's unique about the United States that we haven't seen in societies really up until the 19th, 20th century is that there weren't these secret police intelligence communities.
And, you know, I think that we have a unique vulnerability in terms of historically in that when the FBI gets caught doing something wrong, they conduct an internal investigation.
You know, so it's like there's no checks and balances on the intelligence community, right?
And they don't have to tell politicians anything unless they have need to know, right?
And so it seems to me like we like, I don't want to use the term deep state just because of its connotations, but it seems to me that we have major elements of our government and our military operating with sort of no oversight.
So people like you and I who fear big government, eternal vigilance is our code.
And we always have to hold the FBI accountable for what they do, the NSA, all of our intelligence agencies.
I agree with you, Chase.
And I generally had a voting record where I was very weary about giving further control and power to our intelligence agencies.
But again, and so there's some truth in what you say, but this is why Trump is so bad.
Our FBI generally, Chase, the men and women who work for, say, our FBI, the 37,000 of them, the vast majority of them are good public servants, just like the vast majority of police officers in this country are good public servants.
But in 2016, we elected a president who like declared war on our intelligence agencies.
Where I come from, Chase, Putin's a bad guy.
Russia's the bad guy.
Our FBI isn't the bad guy.
There are bad apples in the FBI, but they're not the bad guy.
If Donald Trump, after he won in 2016, discovering this story that Russia interfered with our election, if Donald Trump then, as the new president then, had said, time out, that can't happen.
I'm going to appoint a blue ribbon commission or whatever to investigate what Russia did.
Trump would have been a hero and he would have been elected in a landslide.
But he couldn't do that because all Trump cares about is Trump.
So he got defensive about his victory and that started this four-year war with our intelligence folks.
I mean, obviously the details on like the Mueller report and other whether or not it was quote quote quo and those details are, you know, are disputed among avid supporters of Trump.
But, you know, I don't want to like get into details with that because I'm not well versed enough to make the argument.
So I don't know.
I just, I'm just very interested to hear your perspective.
But, you know, but I think of, when I think of AOC, I think of someone who knows exactly what she's doing and doesn't necessarily believe any of the shit that she says, but knows what she's got to do in order to make it roll.
So I recently became interested in TPUSA because of the Brandy Love story, what happened last week in, I think it was at Tampa.
Yeah.
And you're familiar with the story, right?
They kicked her out because she's a game star.
And I actually had her on the show last week.
She's really super nice.
And I wanted to hear your story about what it was like getting involved in TPUSA in the beginning, what it's actually like was supposed to be about, and then why you left.
The problem is, and why I left TPUSA is because Charlie Kirk, the minute Trump came on the scene, he basically went to work for Trump and they became a pro-Trump organization.
Instead of advancing the issues, he was all about advancing Trump and Trumpism.
And I'll just give you one example.
And I have inside knowledge, Chase, because I know Charlie well.
But TPUSA before Trump rightly railed about the debt under Obama every day, rightly.
The minute Trump became president, TPUSA stopped talking about the debt or the size of government.
And Chase, I warned Charlie about this.
I said, if you tie yourself, yourself to a president, you're going to have a hard time criticizing that president.
I would have said the same thing, Chase, when Reagan was president 40 years ago.
TPUSA's unique brand was they're not tied to any politician.
They're about the issues.
And they'll go after Republicans or Democrats if they're bad on freedom, free markets, and limited government.
TPUSA became a Trump organization almost overnight.
So, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, who sold his soul to a guy who had sex with a porn star six months after his son was born, that would be Trump, disinvites a conservative porn star from a conference.
So one thing I've noticed, you know, I'd love to get your feedback on this because one of the things that I think has really hurt the Republican Party among like the millennial and younger generation is just it's got this brand of having been like a very dogmatic party with like a lot of evangelism sort of at the core, you know, going back to like gay rights and the holdouts on gay marriage and things of that nature.
And I think that did a lot of long-term damage to the brand of the party when you those sorts of decisions and positions that the party had.
And I thought that we'd kind of moved away from that, but I've noticed that it seems to be coming back with a vengeance.
And I think that it might have to do with the way that social media works in that when you are trying to be an influencer, whether you're Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, or whomever, you tend to post content that gets the most engagement.
And you learn from the engagements what kind of content to continue to post.
And it seems to me that if you have a social media situation where evangelicals are 10x more likely to engage with content than just sort of average, moderate people, then it can drive the influencers to become more radical in terms of whether it's socialism, whether it's Marxism, whether it's feminism, whether it's evangelism, right?
And I think that we might be witnessing social media actually radicalizing our influencers more than necessarily the people.
And so I think that's why you're seeing weird stuff like TPS, TPUSA, you know, telling people to leave.
It just, it doesn't make any sense.
Like, I don't think it would have happened four years ago or five years ago.
You know, a lot of people throw around, oh, you know, we're going to secede.
And it's like, you guys just don't get how much that sucks.
Like, that's like the absolutely worst outcome possible.
But it could happen.
It could happen.
But I think people, you know, when they think of secession or when they think of revolution, they think of Mel Gibson as a patriot and they don't realize it's like watching your house burn down, you know, or your neighbors like disappearing in the middle of the night.
Like, that's what that looks like.
It's not pretty.
There's no glory.
There's no heroism.
I mean, there is heroism all the time, but it's mostly a tragedy.
And I just, I hope it never comes to that.
But, you know, it's, you know, I don't think our federal government was ever supposed to be as much of a player as it is.
And, you know, I think would have done a couple of things differently in the Constitution had they known how this was going to manifest to restrict that even more explicitly.
But we've gotten to a point where, you know, in 1776, the population in the United States was 2 million, and now the population is 360 million, and the federal government is like basically centralized authority, and it was decentralized back then.
So it's like, I don't know what's going to happen, but hopefully we can get some serious things fixed.
