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Jan. 27, 2022 - One American - Chase Geiser
53:28
America Is Reawakening With Eric Matheny & Chase Geiser | OAP #64

Attorney • Podcaster • Social Commentator • Cohost of “Bob & Eric Save America” • iTunes: http://rb.gy/ckwpnf | Google: http://shorturl.at/fnyJ5 Pronouns: AK/47

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Hey, hey, hey, it's One American Podcast live with Eric Mathini.
What's up, Eric?
How are you, Chase?
Thank you so much for having me, man.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for coming on.
I've been wanting to have you on the show for a long time just because I've been following your work and what you do.
And obviously, we're both close friends with Matt Couch.
And so I've always been grateful for the content that you produce and your input.
So thanks again for coming on.
I appreciate it.
It's my pleasure.
There's no shortage of stuff to talk about, especially today.
I know.
So just kind of enlighten my followers a little bit.
Can you talk a little bit about what your background is and how you sort of came on the scene?
Well, I'm a defense attorney.
I'm a criminal defense attorney.
I live here in South Florida.
I'm a former prosecutor.
As far as politics and podcasting, I got into it just a couple of years ago with my co-host, Bob Dunlap.
We do Bob and Eric Save America every Saturday at 1230.
We record and we show it at 2.30.
But we just saw what was going on and we wanted to have our voices heard.
We're at a turning point in this country, especially now.
We see how things can go, how bad they've gotten.
And we just want to use our voice to try to fix it.
I think optimistically speaking, the tide is starting to turn.
And I attribute that a lot to what people like you and I and independent podcasters are doing because nobody trusts the legacy media anymore.
They're looking to people like you.
They're looking to shows like Bob and myself to tell them what's going on and to give them the information that mainstream media is not going to give them.
So I think there's just this unquenchable thirst for knowledge and for truth.
And I think that's why you see people like Joe Rogan who are dominating media.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm curious, what was it like being a prosecutor?
What were some things you learned about the judicial system from that experience?
You know, I loved being a prosecutor.
I really liked it.
The only thing I didn't like about it was the pay and the bureaucracy.
It pays nothing.
I couldn't rub two nickels together.
I would seriously, I would end the month with like $20 in the bank.
I was making such little money as a prosecutor.
And I'm coming out of law school.
So I had law school loans.
I had friends of mine who were working in firms already making six figures.
I was making nothing.
And between my wife and I, she was a teacher at the time.
I mean, we had nothing together.
I liked the, I guess, the morality of it.
I mean, you're quote unquote the good guy and you're in a position to do justice, which I think I really liked.
I saw a lot of people in the business who were there to get their convictions and everybody who came in the door was a bad guy.
I saw it a little differently.
I think I had a little more compassion.
And maybe that's one of the reasons I didn't stick around is I didn't have enough hatred in my heart to see humankind as just this evil thing and see that decent people can make mistakes.
But really what led me out of it was the money and the bureaucracy because like all government work, they take the people that are marginally competent and they make them your boss.
So all of a sudden, you've got people above you who have no trial experience or haven't tried a case in 15 years telling you how to do your job and you're in the courtroom every day.
But I've been defense attorney since 2009 and that's my life's work.
I'm never turning back.
So not to ask you too personal of a question, but just out of curiosity and feel free to neglect the question if you'd prefer.
Do you think you ever prosecuted anybody who was innocent?
No, I don't because I was very cautious about that.
And if I thought somebody was innocent or even if I thought they shouldn't be prosecuted, I took the initiative to drop the case myself or do something to dispose of it properly.
I had cases that came across my desk where it was determined through our investigation that the person didn't do it.
And I did the right thing.
I dropped the case, but never, ever, unknowingly, at the very least, have I ever convicted anybody who was innocent.
But by and large, let me tell you, the people that come through the door on criminal defense or criminal prosecution, the ones that are actually factually 100% innocent, a lot rarer than you think.
People are overcharged all the time.
Maybe they're not guilty of what they're charged with.
They're guilty of some lesser included.
That you see a lot more of, but someone who's actually 100% innocent, I mean, in my career as a defense attorney, I've maybe only seen that a handful of times and gotten the right result, I believe.
Sure.
So do you think that people are, do you think that our system inadvertently catalyzes people pleading guilty for crimes that they didn't commit because they're afraid of a higher sentence?
100%.
100%.
If everybody went to trial, the system would come to a grinding halt.
We wouldn't know what to do.
But you're up against a measurable force.
You're up against the U.S. government, your state government, whoever it may be.
They have more resources and more power than you do.
And ultimately, people just cave, especially defendants that are in custody.
You're sitting in jail.
You sit in jail 10 months, a year.
All of a sudden, you're like, hey, they're offering me 36 months state prison.
With my gain time, I'm only here about another 14, 15 months.
I'll just bite the bullet and do it.
And maybe you'd have a chance of winning at trial.
But again, that's just the way it works.
The gears have to keep turning.
We need 95% of people who are charged with crimes to take pleas.
That's interesting.
So I had Jack Maxie on my podcast for about almost three hours, a few months ago.
And of course, he's got Hunter Biden's laptop and he was going through all the details of that laptop.
And I was totally taken aback and taken by surprise.
I thought I was just going to hang out with this guy, you know, and it was going to be a regular conservative leaning conversation.
And he absolutely blew my mind in what ended up being nearly a three-hour monologue of all the crimes on that laptop between Hunter and Joe and the corruption.
And so my question for you as a former prosecutor is, why do you suppose it is that we're not seeing the prosecution of political leaders on either side of the spectrum?
Because it's a big club and you're not in it.
They're not going to prosecute their own.
They're not going to prosecute their friends.
They're not going to prosecute people who have dirt on them.
I mean, I think that's how Washington works.
I think it's a system of bribes and back scratching and kickbacks and everybody has dirt on everybody else.
I mean, it's the same thing that happened with Epstein, but for public outrage, you know, he would have fallen off the radar as well.
With Hunter, the stuff on his laptop, and I'm glad you brought up Jack Maxie because I've been in contact with Jack to get him on my show.
And hopefully we'll be having him soon.
The crimes that the Biden families committed, the crimes that the Clinton families committed, the crimes that the Bush families committed, they will never see the light of day.
They will never see the inside of a courtroom.
There will never be justice.
But, you know, Joe Schmo off the street or whomever you may be, or even the January 6th defendants, these people that the best glorified misdemeanors who are sitting in jail without a bond.
And by and large, the Republicans in Congress, with the exception of a few, leave them alone and turn their backs on them.
I think that it's just the way the system is.
And I talked about this.
I was on Matt's show yesterday.
We talked about it.
The government's just too big.
It's just too big and too bloated and not fit for purpose.
And it's really an oligarchy when you think about it.
You have very powerful people at the top that are running things, rules for them, no different rules for us.
And I just think that's unfortunate.
Is there ever going to be change?
I mean, we thought we'd see change when Trump was in office, but I mean, he had Bill Barr.
He had Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions.
So I think we have a long way to go.
And I'd like to see that happen, but I don't remain optimistic that Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, is ever going to see justice.
I think they'll get away with their crimes just because that's how DC works.
Yeah, I think you're right.
One thing that I do credit to Trump is mixed as my feelings are about him.
And I am someone who voted for him both times.
So I am a Trump supporter, but I do have very mixed feelings about him, just in hindsight.
But one thing that was remarkable about his presidency, perhaps may go down in history as his greatest accomplishment, is that he really, really made it abundantly clear how corrupt the system is, both the media and the private sector, the big tech private sector, as well as the actual government bureaucracy itself.
And, you know, my curiosity is stimulated in that.
I wonder how long it's been this corrupt and we've just been sort of blissfully ignorant.
Probably since its inception.
I mean, that's the way government works.
I mean, power, we're human beings.
We're frail.
We're fallible.
We succumb to pressure.
We succumb to greed.
We succumb to our desires.
So I think anybody in that position and people like you and I just can't even fathom what that world is like.
I mean, the world of insider trading and bribes and hit men on speed dial.
I mean, that really exists.
There really is a world where that happens.
Has Hillary Clinton had people killed?
Yeah, she's had a lot of people killed, but it's kind of an open secret in Washington.
I don't think she's the only one that's done it.
I just think that's the way power structures are.
And I don't even think that's something unique to the United States.
I think if you just study the history of humanity, if you give any one person or any group of people power over another, they will inherently abuse it.
I think that's just how we're chipped.
We're just not, we're not cooperative beings in that way.
We always are self-interested.
We're always going to be greedy.
If I tell you, Chase, you're now in charge of this or you're going to oversee this many people.
I'm going to give you these powers.
Well, with that comes special treatment.
And, you know, I don't care if you're the president of the Rotary Club or the president of the United States.
It's going to go to your head to some degree.
Yeah.
Well, I was elected student body president when I was in college and as small and insignificant of a role as that was, it totally went to my head.
I look back in hindsight and I'm embarrassed at the way I acted.
Of course, I was a kid, but just to think, man, like that little bit of title was enough to make me act like that.
Like imagine how I would act if I was a senator.
Well, I was the president of my fraternity.
So I was even worse than you.
And I was 21 and with a bunch of loud frat guys and I was the president of the chapter with like 130 members or whatever we had.
And we had fun and we enjoyed ourselves.
Yeah, like little things.
You go to your head.
You think you were something special.
Now, granted, I want to chalk that up to immaturity.
And maybe I wouldn't do it now, but who knows?
Who knows how I'd respond?
I think the important thing is that you hit it on the head.
Trump exposed it.
Trump made us aware of it.
And we always knew it was there.
We just didn't understand the extent of it.
And I have always said that Donald Trump started a movement.
He's the foundation upon which it is built.
He's not necessarily the pillar upon which it stands, meaning that that mantle will be assumed by others.
And it has to be.
Otherwise, the movement dies with Trump.
And it shouldn't because that's not a testament to the man's legacy.
I think what he's done will survive in perpetuity.
I think he's changed the political landscape.
I think he's changed it top down forever.
He's changed it worldwide.
And yeah, one of the things he did, if one major thing he did, was he exposed the swamp.
He exposed what DC is on both sides.
Remember, him winning in 2016 was not a Republican victory.
If we had a Republican victory in 2016, Jeb Bush would have been president.
Or Ted Cruz.
Or Ted, I think Jeb Bush was like the era apparent.
I think everyone thought, like, if you would have talked to me in like 2013 or 2014, I'd say, oh, 2016 is going to be Hillary Clinton versus Jeb Bush.
And I probably back then would have been fine with it because I was just a party line Republican.
I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
I voted for John McCain in 2008.
I just kind of went with it.
And then Trump came along.
And the first thing, you know, when Trump came along, I didn't like him.
I'm like, oh, God, he's loud.
He's boisterous.
He's unpresidential.
How dare he say that?
And then I'll never forget it.
I had to come to Trump.
I wasn't like, there were people I remember because we were very involved in Republican politics back then in our county, Broward County, where we live.
And we used to go to events.
And we were on Team Marco Rubio and we'd sit at the table with the Trump supporters.
We thought they were loud and obnoxious.
And there are people that were with Trump the day he came down the escalator and I know plenty of them.
And then there are those of us who had to come to him on our own.
And I'm one of those.
I'll never forget the day.
It was 2016, March of 2016, the bombing at the Belgian airport, the ISIS bombing at the Belgian airport, and Barack Obama was sitting watching a baseball game with Raoul Castro.
At that point, I'm like, something's got to change.
And I was a Trump supporter ever since.
So what do you think about this whole dynamic that we have with Ukraine?
You know, there's a part of me that's sort of isolationist in my views in terms of military activity overseas.
But on the other hand, I understand that these things are very complicated.
What are your thoughts on whether or not Russia is actually going to invade Ukraine and what we should do in response to that?
You know, I have multiple opinions on that issue.
I mean, first and foremost, I don't believe we should be getting involved in a war in Europe or getting involved in any incursion between Russia and Ukraine.
I understand there's somewhat of a moral obligation for us to make sure there's peace in the world.
And here's the thing.
Here's the kicker that not many are talking about it other than the right.
When we're strong and when we project strength, stuff like this doesn't happen.
Russia, Putin, could have made this move anytime over the last four years.
He didn't because he respected Donald Trump.
Maybe didn't like him, but I'd rather be feared than loved.
Joe Biden falling up the stairs, botching Afghanistan, eating ice cream, his transgender military TikToks.
That's not inspiring a lot of confidence in our allies and it's not putting fear into the hearts of our enemies.
So what I see in Ukraine, I don't want to see us get involved there.
Now, mind you, I have nothing but love and respect for Ukrainian people.
My great-grandmother was born in Odessa.
I mean, there are family connections to that country.
But for us to involve ourselves after we just botched a withdrawal from Afghanistan basically wasted 20 years there and we're no better off in Afghanistan than we were in 2001.
We left all our weaponry, thousands of American lives, limbs, PTSD gone.
I mean, the toll that that's had without getting the outcome we were looking for.
And I don't think we really ever should have been there for nation building.
I think we should have gotten bin Laden, who was in Pakistan and gotten the hell out.
But as far as Ukraine, you know, Putin's going to do what Putin's going to do.
Now, our impact on that, I don't know.
Is he afraid of an American response?
No.
And that's what terrifies me the most is that these bad actors in the world.
And look, Xi Jinping's got his eye on Taiwan.
They're not afraid of American consequences.
They're not looking at us going, we better not because we don't know what America is going to do.
We're laughing at Joe Biden.
They're laughing at Joe Biden too.
And that's the problem with having someone like Biden in office.
That's the real trade-off here.
You know, they wanted to get rid of the orange guy with the mean tweets, but look where we are now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, when I think about the history of the United States in nation building, first of all, I believe that the United States should be a superpower.
And I think if you're not a superpower, somebody else will be, right?
So I'm on Team USA.
I think that we should be a superpower.
I'm not a globalist.
I don't think it should be balanced out and evened out by any means.
However, it seems that the only instances in which nation building has actually worked from the U.S. toward another, helping another country build is in instances like after World War II, when we're rebuilding a nation that already has like a cohesive culture or was a very successful nation prior, right?
So, you know, Germany is a first world country again.
We were involved in nation building there.
South Korea, you know, it's been, it's been successful.
I don't know how, I don't know how stable it was before the Korean War, but certainly Japan was very stable before World War II.
We engaged in nation building there and that was successful.
But it seems like when we go into a place that's already in a state of chaos and has never had a state of order or hasn't had a state of order in a very long time, or if it had a state of order, it was just because of a totalitarian regime.
That when we try to impose our culture on them within a single generation, that's just something that's not going to manifest in the way that we desire.
Well, I think it also depends on the culture.
I mean, culturally, we have a lot more in common with Germany than we would have with Afghanistan.
It's just, you know, we come from that European Western school of thought.
We don't come from Islam.
We don't come from that background.
They're a theocracy.
Their politics and their religion are intertwined.
They cannot be separated.
We come from a school of thought.
We come from the age of enlightenment where religion is over here and politics are over here.
Now, are there areas in which they intersect?
Are there certain moral fibers that tie us together?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, our Bill of Rights, Ten Commandments, I mean, you can make the connection between the two, but it's not injected into culture the way it is in Islam.
And they've been living that way in Pakistan, Afghanistan, that part of the world since the seventh century.
So for us to come in there with this American-style democracy that maybe would work in Europe, maybe would work in Germany, even Japan to some degree, that's a very different culture, obviously.
But it doesn't work in the Middle East.
So not saying we have to nation build in Ukraine.
Ukraine's a nation that's already built.
It doesn't need to be rebuilt.
Russia, for that matter, is a nation that's built.
They just have a totalitarian leader who wants to recapture this glory of the Soviet Union.
You know, speak softly and carry a big stick.
I mean, that worked for us for a long time with Russia.
I mean, even during the Cold War, I mean, other than the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, we really didn't get that close, like head to head, that we're going to actually have a hot war with Russia.
And here we are decades after the fall of the Soviet Union.
And it seems like we're there.
And it's there primarily because of who we have in the White House.
Had we a Reagan, even had we a Bush, even an Obama, even a Trump, projecting that level of strength onto the world makes our enemies, and Russia's our enemy, believe it or not, makes our enemies think twice about doing anything because they're afraid of what we may do.
And they no longer have that fear.
And that makes the world a dangerous place, is that we don't have that authority.
Not saying we're going to do anything, not saying that we want to do anything, but the thought that we could was enough to keep these bad guys at bay.
So I want to bring up something kind of controversial.
Do you know what percentage of married couples in Afghanistan are married to their first or second cousin?
Couldn't tell you the percentage, but I know it's a high percentage.
It's 47%.
Yeah, it's about right.
And can you imagine what that does to the mental health of a population over generation after generation after generation of cousins having children who marry cousins having children who marry cousins having children?
I honestly have the hypothesis that a lot of our terrorism that we've experienced in the 20th century and into the 21st century is a result of mental illness from birth defects from cousin marriage.
And it's not a race thing.
This is a behavior thing, right?
So I know that it's controversial, but I don't really know why I mentioned it, but I'm just thinking of like nation building and culture differences.
It's like, how can you go into a situation like that where it's so drastically different from Western culture and Western values and expect to have a positive outcome without addressing major factors like that?
Like there wasn't even a whisper that I had to look it up on Wikipedia and there's studies.
I mean, these are real studies on Wikipedia that have been done.
And so honestly, I think the first step we should be taking to peace in the Middle East is the international outlawing of consanguinity, which is cousin marriage.
I agree with you, but my thought on that is as revolting as it is.
I rather it's just have nothing to do with that part of the world.
If not for oil and for energy, we really would have no interest in them politically.
Let them do what they want to do.
Leave us alone.
Don't commit acts of terror here.
I'm really, I think at my core, I'm kind of an isolationist.
I'm an America first guy as much as I can be.
And I don't want to see us committing military action to protect the Ukrainian border when our border is wide open and we have problems at home.
Get your house in order, Joe Biden.
Get your house in order before we do anything.
And it's a double-edged sword because on one hand, you don't want to do anything, but on the other hand, it's like, what do we do if he does?
Then are we kind of in a position where we have to?
Do we have to kind of regain that authority in the world and say, hey, look, if you mess with one of our allies, we're going to come at you.
But then what?
Are we going to be mired in Ukraine for the next 20 years?
It's a horrible situation.
I don't think there's any right way out of it.
And we're here wholeheartedly because Joe Biden's in the White House.
If Trump would have been designated the winner in 2020, which I firmly believe he won, if he would be in the White House as sitting president right now, this would not be an issue.
This would not be happening.
Yeah.
That being said, I was disappointed.
And I'm interested to hear what your sentiment is on this.
I was very disappointed in Trump's leadership from about March of 2020 until January 20th of 2021.
You know, in terms of allowing the lockdown to happen for extended periods of time, you know, an abundance of spending.
Most of the inflation that we're feeling now is actually a result of that.
We haven't even begun to feel the Biden inflation yet, which is going to be terrible.
But there's latency between money entering the market and then inflate prices, right?
And so it just seemed like he was overly cautious because he was trying to win the election that he failed to lead in the way he should have led much of the time of his last year in office.
What are your thoughts on that?
Am I misguided?
No, you're not misguided at all.
I felt the same way.
Everything was going really well.
I mean, obviously we had the impeachment and things like that.
And, you know, that was all political theater.
We saw right through it.
COVID changed things.
It changed the world.
I mean, look, it's not, I don't think one president necessarily got it perfectly because we didn't know what to do.
So I have to give Trump a pass as far as nobody was prepared for that.
Nobody.
I think that he did what he could with the information he had.
Now, granted, many of us figured out really quickly what was going on.
And I think he was being given some really bad advice.
I think one thing you probably saw today is that Robbie Starbuck, a guy we all know, is running for Congress in Tennessee.
And he's been working his butt off for the last year.
He got into the race very early on.
And he's been out there.
He's a grassroots America first conservative, great guy.
Those are the people we need to see.
And Trump goes out and he endorses Morgan Ortegas, who's just gotten in the race and is running against him.
Bad, bad endorsement.
It really should have gone to Starbuck.
I heard Sebastian Gorka said that Trump is going to rescind it and he's going to endorse Starbuck.
I don't know.
I'll believe it when I see it.
But Donald Trump's big Achilles heel is that he mistakes platitudes for loyalty, platitudes for loyalty.
So if I say, Chase, I think you look great today, you could go, Eric Matheny's a great guy.
Everything he says, he's wonderful.
He's smart.
He's tremendous.
He's got a great brain.
But I could be giving you bad advice, but because I've fluffed you up a little bit and I've plumped that ego, you think I'm a good person.
So the people that are around him are not always giving him the advice that he needs.
And he really, he needs to be surrounded by people who tell him maybe not what he wants to hear.
The problem is, I mean, he's, you know, he's done things this way for so long.
I don't anticipate he's going to change.
I think he just has the habit of surrounding himself with people he perceives as loyal when they're not.
And I think with COVID, I'm sure his instincts were to fire Fauci.
I'm sure his instincts were, we're not locking down.
We're not doing this.
We're going to be proactive.
We're going to put therapeutics on the ground.
We're going to put all our efforts into that.
We're not shutting down our economy.
I think going back, he would have done it that way.
But I think people around him were saying, if you don't do this, you're ruined in 2020.
You're ruined in the election.
You're going to kill 10 million people.
They're going to blame you.
You're not going to win.
You got to keep this guy Fauci.
I know you don't like him, but he's been here for 40 years.
And if you fire him, they're going to say it's political.
They're going to impeach you again.
You're going to lose the election.
So I think that was coming in one ear.
What really upset me is when the riot started in May, that he didn't invoke the Insurrection Act.
I thought if there was a time to do it, it should have been them.
But I know what he was doing.
He was sitting back saying, let the Democrats dig themselves a hole.
And he was getting political advisors around him, telling him that, let the Democrats dig that hole.
Let them burn down these cities.
Let people watch, sit and watch what Democrats do.
He kept going on TV going, this is Biden's America.
This is Biden's America.
Well, it wasn't Biden's America.
It was Trump's America.
He was still in the White House.
He still let the cities burn.
He let the cities burn, thinking erroneously that it would come back to him in the election.
But he failed to realize that the people willing to burn down this country are also willing to steal an election.
You're dealing with the same evil.
And he failed to see that.
I really wish, you know, I think that his perhaps biggest mistake of his entire presidency was when he let Bannon go, because I really think that he would have lost in 2016 if it weren't for Bannon.
And I think that Bannon may be that type of advisor that you just suggested that President Trump needed and that Bannon was willing to, you know, say the unpopular thing if he wholeheartedly believed it and give the good advice, even if it was a bad message.
Don't shoot the messenger type situation.
And I think that if he would have kept the strategic mind that is Bannon on the team, that things might have played out much differently.
I think so.
I think he was given bad advice and I think he didn't keep the right people around, unfortunately.
I really wish he would have kept some of those old advisors who had left him.
I really wish he wouldn't have gone on with Reines Priebus and Ron and Paul Ryan and those guys.
I wish he would have been a little more follow your gut because that's what put him in the White House is following his gut, following his instincts.
And unfortunately, he was a political novice and he had to take guys like Mike Pence with him.
He had to take these political powerhouses, these guys who had been in the system for 40, 50 years, who understood it, not only to guide him in this new landscape, but to give a lot of voters that assurance that he was going to be okay.
Remember, you have guys that love Trump, but then you have these Midwestern evangelicals who are like, oh, I don't know.
And that's why Mike Pence balanced off the ticket.
That's why Mike Pence was brought on board.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think he was a pretty good vice president up until the very end.
I didn't really have an opinion about him one way or the other.
I thought he was just kind of a vice president.
I mean, vice presidents by our constitution really don't do a whole lot.
So I thought he was a good guy to kind of balance out the ticket.
But I saw why they picked him.
Midwestern evangelical, like the elder statesman.
I knew why they put him on the ticket.
I would have rather seen a guy like Newt Gingrich.
I always wish Newt Gingrich came with him if they wanted to put someone like a veteran in the role of vice president to kind of guide him politically.
I think Newt Gingrich would have been a lot better, but it is what it is.
Let's see what happens in 2024.
He's definitely not taking Mike Pence next time around.
We know that.
Yeah.
Well, I think Newt Gingrich is a brilliant politician.
I think that my fear of having him on a ticket would be that it would, it would intuitively feel like a bygone generation.
You know what I mean?
It would just kind of feel like, are we still in the 90s?
You know, because that was his peak, right, in the 90s.
And he had some good debates in 2008 or 2012, whenever he ran.
But from a branding perspective, just because I'm in advertising, despite how competent he is, that would have been my concern that it would have alienated some people that are like, who the hell is Newt Gingrich?
You know, who are voters that might have been 12 years old when Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the House, right?
Yeah, but he was effective.
I mean, he was the one that brought Clinton to the middle.
Clinton's first term was a disaster.
He brought Clinton to the middle.
He really reined him in and his political instincts are second to none.
I understand what you mean, but I think Mike Pence the same.
I mean, Gingrich is a bit older than Pence, but I look, I understand why Pence was on the ticket.
And that was fine.
And I think we would have voted for Trump regardless of who was on the ticket.
I think it's going to be a lot more important in 2024.
But I'm looking in the chat here and the sentiment is with a lot of people, 2024 will be, I guess, will not be legit unless we fix 2020.
Interestingly, going forward, I mean, how do we do that at the same time looking to elections in the future?
I mean, I'm of two minds of that.
I mean, yeah, 2020 was stolen, but are we going to relitigate that or are we going to prevent it from ever happening again?
I don't know if we can do both at the same time.
Well, if you look at the history of the United States and just hypothetically assuming that there was an issue in 2020, I haven't landed on a decision on how I feel about that yet because I haven't looked into it deeply enough.
And I'm reluctant to say either way because there's so many implications of either opinion.
So I bounce back and forth, just to be totally frank.
I don't think it's absurd to think that it was stolen.
And I also don't think that it's totally absurd to think that it wasn't from a very surface look.
So I haven't looked at all.
Okay.
So just humor me for a second there.
But that being said, it certainly wasn't the first election in the United States in 1776 that was thrown.
Correct.
You know, I mean, there's all sorts of shit that was going on after the Civil War that was very sketchy.
And so I don't think, I don't believe that you have to fix a prior election in order to have a legitimate one in the future.
You know, you can have somebody cheat at one hand of poker and then not cheat the next.
But we do have to identify whatever vulnerabilities there were the first time and fix those so they don't happen again.
But I don't think that I think that going back and seeking justice for whatever wrong may or may not have been committed in 2020 is a waste of energy and focus.
In my opinion, what we need to do is just figure out where the vulnerabilities were, regardless of whether or not there was cheating and just make sure that those vulnerabilities never exist again.
Well, it was the mail-in voting.
And with the writing, the writing was on the wall when Nancy Pelosi had that 1400-page COVID relief bill already in her desk drawer ready to go and it had mail-in voting where in the guise of a pandemic.
Oh my God, voting is death.
You have to vote from home.
Meanwhile, two months later, seven months of rioting going on.
And it seemed okay.
If you're shoulder to shoulder with someone setting an autozone on fire, you're good.
But God forbid you stand in a polling line for an hour.
So where we are now, and now they're trying to make that the law of the land where unsolicited mail-in voting is going to be the way it's done.
And I think that's a big reason why they've kept this pandemic going.
Now, I think that the tide has shifted.
I think even the hardcore COVID addicts are going like, I can't do much more of this.
And I speak from a position of great privilege because I live in Florida where we really don't even notice that COVID is going on.
I don't have to wear a mask.
I don't even keep a mask in my car.
I don't have to wear a mask anywhere.
I could go where I want.
I'm not vaccinated.
Nobody cares.
Nobody asks me.
I don't have to show a passport anywhere.
But there are a lot of pockets in this country that are not like that.
And the liberals want mail-in voting to be the law of the land.
Now, these mail-in ballots, who knows who filled them out?
Who knows where they came from?
Who knows how many of them were filled out by that person?
Who knows if it's the right person that filled them out?
Voting should be done in person.
Look, everybody could get vaccinated and have it show an ID.
Why can't they do that with voting?
It was racist to make people show up to vote with a voter ID card or a driver's license, but it's we could have them show up for a vaccine and have to show the ID.
I just don't get the logic.
And I think people are starting to realize that it's really inconsistent.
So that's what we need to be fighting for.
And we need to make sure that these bureaucrats can't circumvent what your state legislature has passed under the guise of a pandemic.
If you want to change the voting laws in your state, that has to come from an act of Congress.
Your state house, your state legislature has to vote on it and pass it.
It can't just be some mayor or some governor or some committee person going, this is how it's going to be, because this is a pandemic and it's life or death and we're all in this together.
It can't be that way.
And going forward, look, we can relitigate all we want, but I don't know if we're going to get necessarily the outcome that we want.
Never before in history has a sitting U.S. president halfway through their term been determined not to be president and the former president then walks in.
It wouldn't even work that way constitutionally.
If Joe Biden is out, you know, then who becomes president?
Kamala Harris?
Well, if her election, if she's on the ticket and her election wasn't proper, then who becomes president?
The speaker of the house.
Do you want Speaker Pelosi to be president?
I think that we have to keep in mind and stay hungry, given the fact that we watched 2020 stolen from us.
We watched it real time, four in the morning, 128,000 unanswered Biden ballots all of a sudden found.
So can I ask you about that?
Can I ask you about that specific thing?
So the fluctuation of vote counts in the middle of the night.
And I'm just asking.
I'm not like being critical or arguing at all because honestly, I don't really care either way what's true.
I just want to know what's true, right?
When it comes to election integrity.
So I'm legitimately just asking friend to friend.
Okay.
Sure.
So the rebuttal I've heard to the spike in votes for Biden in the middle of the night is that the election day ballots were counted first and that the mail-in ballots were counted later.
I do know that historically speaking, and I know this because I've worked on campaigns, mail-in ballots are left and election day votes are right.
So is it possible that the spike in ballots that came in, again, I'm asking from a position of ignorance, is it possible that the spike in ballots that came in in the middle of the night for Biden were just mail-in votes that were counted after the election day votes were counted?
128,000 for one candidate with absolutely no deviation.
What are the chances of that happening?
Look, I agree with you.
People who vote from home tend to skew as Democrats.
People who vote in person tend to be Republican.
If that's the case and you're legitimately, okay, we have a box of ballots that came in from the mail.
You're going to have some that are for Trump.
You're going to have some that are for a third party.
You're not going to have 128,000 unanswered for Biden.
So no, the math doesn't make sense.
It doesn't make sense that you had these hundreds of thousands of unanswered ballots that were for no one else than Biden.
Mathematically, it doesn't make sense.
And you'll never convince me otherwise.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'm not trying to convince you.
And I didn't realize that it was just 128,000 solid votes all the way 100% Biden without a single Trump win in there.
So I didn't realize that.
And I'd be interested to look more into that.
It's just, it's one of those things that it's one of those issues where you see a lot of very foolish people on the left insisting for very foolish reasons that the election was 100% legitimate.
And simultaneously, you see a lot of foolish people on the right.
for a lot of foolish reasons insisting that the election was stolen, right?
And so it's really hard to know what's true because you can, because one of them is correct, but a lot of the noise in this space comes off just like just that noise, right?
And so it's like, well, who do I listen to?
I listen to Mike Lindell.
Do I listen to Eric Matheny?
Like, where do I look?
Do I look at the walk-in stuff about the Dominion voting machines?
Does that have anything to do with it?
Like, I just don't even know as a normal person who really isn't biased in the matter.
You know, I'm biased in the sense that I wanted Trump to win, but I'm not biased in the sense that I want it to be true either way that the election was stolen or that it wasn't.
I just legitimately want to know whether it was or wasn't.
And it's so hard and obscure to try to get to the bottom of what's really going on because these things are always complicated.
They're always nuanced.
Just like, you know, as a former prosecutor and as a criminal defense attorney now, like things are not always as they seem on the surface.
And it's very easy to have one impression and then after you dig, come to a completely different conclusion than the initial impression, right?
No, you're 100% right.
And nobody wants to think that an election was stolen because we have to have faith in the institution.
And I think that if it were a transparent election, if you didn't have the mail-in voting, you didn't have everything that happened as a result of COVID.
As long as we have faith in the institution and the procedure is honest and there's integrity in the process, if Biden legitimately won and everybody I've talked to is on the same page, we wouldn't like it, but we'd accept the outcome.
I don't think this was going to be a Russia Mueller thing where we're going to litigate something for three years into a presidency without any evidence behind it.
I think we would just do everything we could to obstruct the Biden agenda.
But no, we don't have faith that this was a proper election and we don't have faith that he's the legitimate winner.
So going forward, I don't think we're going to fix what happened in 2020 and undo it, so to speak, but we need to prevent and make sure it never happens again.
And that's 2022.
I mean, don't even look to 2024.
We have an election coming up in nine, 10 months.
I think that the Democrats know they're going to lose the midterms.
And I think that's why they pushed the Supreme Court justice to retire prematurely.
Yeah, I was saying that earlier.
What I think they're trying to do is they're trying to get some enthusiasm among their base.
I mean, remember Kavanaugh, how fired up the right was.
Like, oh, we're going to nail these guys in the midterms because the midterms were coming up.
We're going to nail them.
We're going to do this.
This is great.
And then all of a sudden, you know, what happened happened.
So I think they're trying to get people fired up.
It's obviously going to be contentious.
Everything in Washington is contentious these days.
You know, Biden's going to pick someone super far left and it's going to be party line.
I think we're going to be looking at cinema and manchin, what they're going to do.
But regardless of what happens, regardless of whether this nominee even makes it on the court, just to have that fight, I think the Democrats just want to get people fired up and try to, hey, remember what the Republicans did at the confirmation of so-and-so.
Don't forget that come November.
I think that's what they're doing.
So what do you think is going to happen in the fall?
I think it's going to be a massive sweep of Republicans.
I think Republicans are going to probably get 20, 30 seats in the House.
I think they're probably going to get five, six seats in the Senate.
But what do they do with that majority?
That's what concerns me.
That's what keeps me up at night.
Are they going to play nice?
Are they going to reach across the aisle?
Are they going to be bipartisan?
Are they going to fall into their old habits?
Are they going scorched earth?
I don't know how many of them have it in them to go scorched earth.
I think there's a handful of them, but I think by and large, these are people that go along to get along.
Do you think that we're going to get any rhinos out of the party?
Because it seems like we need to do some serious house cleaning.
I think Liz Cheney's gone.
Kinzinger is not even running again.
Is Crenshaw?
Crenshaw's kind of been exposed as a rhino.
He's being primaried.
I don't know.
He's got a lot of money and he's got a lot of people behind him.
He may squeeze his way back in, but I do see Republican majority, maybe even a super majority.
But what they do with that is a whole other story.
I hope they don't squander that opportunity.
Yeah.
And, you know, the older I get, the more obscure the difference between the parties seems to be.
I mean, traditionally, conservatism is about small government, low spending, low taxes.
But it seems to me that if you look at the last 20 years in the United States, the Republicans have been just as reckless and irresponsible in many ways as the Democrats have been.
And I know the Democrats are a lot more overt about it.
I think they're overtly racist, frankly, with critical race theory.
I think that the language that they use is very inflammatory.
I think it's Marxist.
And I think that it ultimately catalyzes violence if the policies associated with that language manifest.
I think that it's a very, very dangerous rhetoric that we don't really see from the right.
So the right's comforting in that sense that they don't speak like the left.
But then when we get in there, we see things like the Patriot Act is still in place.
And we see these massive, I mean, as much as I love Trump, I never ever in my life would have thought that a Republican president would have written everybody a check for $1,000.
No, I never thought you'd see that either.
And I never thought you'd see a time when people would be so dependent upon that.
And I think one of the things we learned from COVID is just how prepared you need to be.
I mean, we always watched those shows years ago and made fun of those preppers and go, these people are crazy.
They had it right.
Are you kidding?
If you're not preparing, if you don't have money stashed away, if you don't have food, if you don't have guns, you're crazy because I think we learned just how unstable the world is.
And it was a very sobering time, but hopefully we come out of it stronger than we were before.
Mentally, I don't know.
It's exposed a lot that we didn't know about our country or maybe some false impressions we had.
I didn't think people would be so easily led the way they were.
Misled, I should say.
Yeah, there was a certain cowardice, I think, that was revealed.
And what really, really struck me about this, this entire pandemic, just in terms of even just close friends and family, was the tendency for people to respond emotionally, particularly out of just raw fear, without actually looking at any of the data, right?
So I'm an emotional person.
I'm not a particularly data-oriented person.
I'm like an average guy, okay?
I can look at data when I have to, but it's not like my favorite thing in the world.
I'm not like on the spectrum, right?
And so, but when I'm looking at this data, I'm like, all right, this is two and a half times deadlier than the flu.
So that means that what we're going to experience is going to be like three flu seasons in a row.
Doesn't seem like a justification for shutting down the entire world economy.
Like, it's dangerous.
We should take it seriously.
We should protect the vulnerable.
I'm like, if the death rate is only two and a half times worse than the flu.
I'm like, what, like, this is not the Spanish flu by any means, by any stretch of the imagination, is this, is this the Spanish flu?
And if we look at the Spanish flu, a lot of people don't know this.
It's an H1N1 flu is what it was.
And everybody got herd immunity.
And now every year you get the flu, it's, it's like nothing.
It's like Omicron, right?
And so honestly, it's like, if you've looked at the data without an emotional bias in the beginning, I think there was enough evidence fairly early on.
I mean, like within 90 days of this pandemic to know that we weren't dealing with a monster.
We were dealing with a big problem, but not a monster.
And the response that we had to this pandemic, in my opinion, was possibly worse than the pandemic itself.
I was looking at data and not to be just, not to be drawn on and on, but I was looking at data, hospital data from 2019 to 2020.
And in 2020, there were 500,000 more deaths in the United States than there were in 2019, but only 330,000 of those were attributed to COVID.
So there was 170,000 excess deaths.
So then I looked at that.
I'm like, huh, I wonder what's going on.
I looked at the hospital admissions data.
Fewer people checked into the hospital in 2020 than in 2019, even though there were half a million more deaths.
And so what happened was everybody was too scared to go to the hospital when they needed to because they didn't want to catch COVID or deal with it, that they, that they like were dying of random stuff.
Like, I don't know if I'm having a heart attack or I'm not going to go check this lump out or this melanoma.
And so there were fewer hospital admissions in 2020 than 2019, but more deaths and 170,000 excess deaths unrelated to COVID.
And it's because of the way that we responded.
The climate that we set up in this country had unintended consequences and ramifications.
And I think that's the wisdom of the founding fathers is they knew that government was not going to have the knowledge or the wisdom to manage an entire people from point to point in every single individual facet.
And that's where you're supposed to err on the side of liberty.
Like, all right, you know, if you die because you make a mistake, that's your fault.
It's not our responsibility as a government because freedom, right?
Well, I think if you look at the flu numbers, the fact that the flu virtually disappeared in March of 2020, if it weren't for the media and it weren't for our government, honest question, would we have even noticed there was anything going on?
Would it have been any different than the annual flu, the flu that kills tens of thousands of people every year?
Would we have noticed a difference if we weren't being fed this fear porn?
I don't think we would have.
I don't think we would have noticed it.
Well, China was pushing those fake videos of people collapsing.
Do you remember that?
I remember randomly collapsing on the subway in China.
They were trying to make it seem like it was real and it was like this new thing.
And nobody ever held them to account for that.
Like, whatever that wasn't even a side effect, like that never happened.
So, obviously, they were trying to stoke the flames of fear.
Yeah, absolutely, they were.
And fear is a very powerful influence over people.
And people do things when they're afraid.
They react, they listen when they're afraid.
And if they see what they perceive to be authority or someone who knows what they're doing, they'll follow it.
And I think we're just very comfortable in this country.
I don't think we've ever really had to struggle or work for anything.
I mean, we don't chop wood anymore.
We don't have hard winters.
Everybody's got a thousand-dollar phone, regardless of your income bracket.
So I just think we're like these docile house cats.
And all of a sudden, we've been thrown this curveball.
And the reaction of so many is just look to government for help.
And those that planned this, because make no mistake about it, this was all by design.
There was a reason why it was released at the time.
It was, I think, they saw that the indicators were there, that this is a subservient, compliant culture.
And by and large, they're going to do what we tell them.
If Dr. Fauci said, stick your finger up your butt, you know, Vaseline would be off the shelves.
I mean, the bottom line is that people are going to do what they're told.
People like you and I are the outliers.
Even a lot of conservatives.
I mean, even present company included, when they first told you 15 days to slow the spread, we all kind of believed it.
We were like, okay.
And we should have known.
We should have seen the writing on the wall.
And I regret that I wasn't a louder voice or I didn't use what platform I may have to sound the alarm.
I was like, okay, 15 days to slow the spread because Trump forced it.
The fact that it was mandated was the red flag.
If they would have just politely asked people to stay home for 15 days, everybody would have done it.
They didn't have to mandate it.
But it's the fact that they mandated it that implies malice, in my opinion.
Well, it's part of a bigger picture.
It's part of this great reset.
It's part of this idea of reimagining society, this top-down globalist government where you own nothing and you're happier than ever.
You don't have a house.
You rent an apartment.
All your stuff comes to you.
Your government takes care of you.
It's just this idea of reimagining society.
And unfortunately, what COVID's done, even if we try to come out of it, there's irreparable harm that's been done, namely to the human spirit, namely to the you know, you see a lot of it with young people coming out of school.
I mean, a lot of that motivation, a lot of that drive has just been beaten out of people.
And now they're just comfortable, like they just want to work from home and they just want to kind of be by themselves.
I think there's just an epidemic of loneliness.
I think there's an epidemic of mental illness.
And I just think there's an epidemic of laziness.
And I don't know how we rebound from this.
I really don't.
And that's going to be the big challenge going forward is kind of reinvigorating the American spirit and saying, look, we need to remember life before this.
And the problem, big problem with COVID, not speaking to our audience necessarily, primarily on the left, is it gave people purpose.
It gave them a reason to be alive, a reason to wake up.
I could take a picture of myself in a mask and I could get the dopamine feedback when I put it on Facebook and you tell me how wonderful I am.
I could show you a picture of my vaccine passport.
I can post a photo of me vaccinating my crying five-year-old.
Go, we're doing our part.
And I could get a thousand retweets and I could feel good about myself.
So this emptiness, this void that existed inside you before that, because liberals by and large are going to be unhappy no matter what happens, it did something for them.
It gave them purpose in life.
It was basically, and I've said it for a long time.
I'm not the only one who said it.
Fauci was God for people who don't believe in God.
He was that deity.
And, you know, the mask was your sacrament and the vaccine was a ritual.
And this is, you are part of this.
You're part of that community.
And it kind of poked at that inherent tribalism that we as human beings have and we crave.
And that's in our DNA.
That's always been in our DNA.
We're tribal creatures.
And COVID created a tribe that people could belong to.
And you're going to have a hard time breaking people of that because they invested so much of their identity in it.
That's really interesting.
You know, a lot of people misunderstand the famous quote from Nietzsche when Nietzsche said, God is dead.
He's, you know, famous for saying that line.
And a lot of people think that he was saying that because he was an atheist or because he was antagonistic toward God.
And really, it was part of his larger prediction about Western culture that as society becomes less faithful and less religious, and fewer and fewer people believe in God, then they will look to other means to fill the void that God filled.
And it was the state ultimately.
And we see that with the with the Marxism and the spread of communism in the 20th century and what happened with the Third Reich.
And we see that today.
And I think that you hit the nail on the head and inadvertently sort of reiterated what Nietzsche is so famous for observing himself, that when a people loses faith in a higher power,
it doesn't even necessarily have to be Christian, just any sort of higher power, higher moral standard, higher faith, higher hope, then they seek to fill that void in more worldly and worldly ways, right?
And I think that's a lot of what we're seeing play out today.
I agree 100%.
And that's a hallmark of socialism is that they get rid of government, they get rid of God because there is no God higher than the state.
You can't go to church.
You can't worship.
You look at any communist country and there is no religion there.
And that's a reason why, because nobody tells you what to do other than the government.
You can't look to any other higher power.
And you want government to be your God.
And too many people here subscribe to that ideology, the church of government.
The government is there to help and government gives you power.
And nothing comes from government.
Remember, government can't take away what they don't give you.
They don't give you freedom.
Freedom comes from God.
We've never been a culture that believes that.
And unfortunately, too many people are starting to.
We forget the fact that this country was founded on the idea that government is a necessary evil.
And this great document, this constitution we're creating, the sole purpose of it is to limit this great evil, limit what this great evil can do.
And the Bill of Rights is not a granting of rights.
It's restriction on the government.
This tells the government, you cannot do this.
You cannot do that.
Read the Bill of Rights.
How many times shall not appears more than shall?
And too many people don't understand that.
You go ask anyone, even ask educated people, say, hey, where do your rights come from?
Go go government.
Right.
So before we wrap up here, what are some things?
What are one or two things that you're optimistic about?
Because we got to end on a good note.
There's hope.
We got to end on a good note.
I am optimistic.
I've been saying it on my show.
I've been saying it wherever I can.
I'm optimistic because I see the tide turning.
I sense it when I'm out.
I see it.
I feel it.
It's in the air.
It's palpable.
It's real.
The veil has been lifted and people are awake to what's going on.
And I credit people like Joe Rogan for doing that.
These mainstream, yeah, I guess he's mainstream to the tune of 11 million listeners per episode, absolutely eclipsing the legacy media.
The fact that people are turning to him and he's getting 11 million listens and not Brian Stelter and not Don Lemon is predominantly because people have lost faith in these institutions.
And I think that's a good thing.
I think once people absorb that knowledge elsewhere, not even absorb the knowledge, just hear a different viewpoint.
Because what it does, I don't want to change your opinion.
I just want to pique your interest enough that you go do the research and realize that I'm correct.
I mean, that's all it is.
We're starting to realize that like the guys on Twitter two years ago that were saying, hey, this is what's going on right now.
And CNN's like, don't listen to them.
They got a tinfoil hat on.
They're conspiracy theorists.
Now, we're realizing that we're true.
It's true.
I mean, these conspiracy theories for 2020 are coming true.
Alex Jones is right.
And for wars.com.
I love him.
I love them too.
So where can people find you?
Follow you at Eric M. Matheny, Twitter, Getter, CloudHub, Gab, and Instagram at Eric M. Matheny.
And my show every Saturday, 2:30 p.m.
You can download us on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, Bob and Eric Save America.
And, you know, thank you, Chase, for having me on.
This is really great.
I didn't expect to do a show in the afternoon, but it's really nice.
It's really cathartic to be able to talk about what's going on.
And I'm glad platforms like this exist because if not, I'd be standing on my roof just screaming at my neighbors.
Well, it was an honor and a pleasure to have you.
Let's stay in touch and I'll love to have you again soon.
Absolutely, man.
Thank you so much.
You too.
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