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|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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- Hi, and welcome to a special edition of Culture Wars. | |
| I am not Tim Poole. | ||
| My name is Hannah-Claire Brimlow. | ||
| I'm filling in because Tim is sick. | ||
|
unidentified
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I think it's gonna be a great conversation. | |
| We're here tonight with Joe Kent. | ||
| Hey, how's it going? | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Yeah, I'm glad you're back. | ||
| You were here one of the last times I did IRL. | ||
| Do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So, retired Green Beret, did a little over 20 years in the military, 11 combat deployments, worked for the CIA for a little bit, and now I'm running for Congress in Washington State's 3rd District. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| And we're also joined tonight by one and only Shane Cashman. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| Yep, Shane Cashman, staff writer for TimCast.com. | ||
| Happy to be here. | ||
| I'm happy to have you. | ||
| Well, to start off, I was wondering if you could give us a rundown of Washington's third congressional district. | ||
| I feel like last time you were on, I'm pretty sure we were like, oh cool, are you joining Idaho? | ||
| And you had to be like, no, not us. | ||
| Yeah, we actually get that quite a bit now because that's taken up a lot of the news. | ||
| But Washington's third district is Southwest Washington, So we're just kind of in the shadow of Portland, Oregon on the northern side of the Columbia. | ||
| We go all the way out to the Pacific Ocean and then a little bit to the east in the Columbia River Valley and then kind of up north almost to Olympia. | ||
| So it's still a very rural district, timber country. | ||
| Our major city is Vancouver. | ||
| Right now Vancouver is on the cusp of becoming what Portland used to be, which was like a great beacon for small businesses. | ||
| A lot of the tech that's fleeing the rot of California. | ||
| In Oregon, we're just trying to fight that back and keep it on that side of the river. | ||
| But the rest of the district, really, it's timber country. | ||
| The Columbia River with the fishing industry drives a lot of the economy as well. | ||
| So yeah, it's definitely a red district, but we're in a very, very, very blue state. | ||
| And you've had a lot of population growth over the last 10 years, right? | ||
| We have, yeah. | ||
| Washington state, right now the Democrats in Washington are trying to take this away, but we used to have no income tax. | ||
| Jay Inslee and the Democrats are trying to erode that as much as they can. | ||
| So we were a beacon for a lot of folks to come and start businesses. | ||
| A lot of retirees would flock up to Washington because we were kind of, as California imploded, Oregon imploded, people were coming up to Washington as well. | ||
| They're running away from the debris? | ||
| Running away, yeah. | ||
| So what's the justification for taking away the income tax? | ||
| Oh, there's no justification. | ||
| They simply just want more money. | ||
| And that Democrat desire to absolutely destroy your taxpayer base, but then the combination of destroying your taxpayer base economically, but then also letting law and order erode to the point that people just say, hey, I can't deal with the crime economically. | ||
| There's no more reason for me to live here. | ||
| Jay Inslee will say things, the Democrats will say things like, oh, we need to get housing equity for everyone. | ||
| Just general kind of lofty pie in the sky talking points. | ||
| But really, at the end of the day, they're just putting more money in their own pockets. | ||
| And are you having to deal with the homelessness in Portland and Seattle? | ||
| Does that affect your district? | ||
| Oh, certainly. | ||
| Because you're sort of right between the two. | ||
| We're right between the two. | ||
| I mean, Portland is, I mean, we sort of share a metropolitan area with Portland. | ||
| A lot of folks that live over on the southern part of the district, they used to pre-COVID, a lot of them used to commute into Portland. | ||
| Um, but the homeless issue and just really the anarchy that post 2020 came out of Portland, came out of Seattle. | ||
| It's definitely affected the, uh, the district and then also the wide open Southern border. | ||
| I mean, uh, Seattle, Portland, these are sanctuary cities. | ||
| The state is a sanctuary state. | ||
| So the uptick of violent crime, fentanyl deaths that we've had, it's just been off the charts. | ||
| The homelessness has absolutely exploded. | ||
| A big issue we're fighting is the reconstruction of the bridge that connects Oregon and Washington and The Democrats on both sides of the river are destined to put light rail on it, and that would connect Portland right into our district. | ||
| So we're fighting that tooth and nail. | ||
| The woman that I'm running against, Democrat Marie Perez, she fully supports putting light rail from Portland into downtown Vancouver. | ||
| I mean, it's been on the ballot three different times in the district, and we've rejected it because obviously that puts, we call it the Antifa expressway, essentially Antifa and homelessness just right into downtown Vancouver. | ||
| So we're going to continue to fight that. | ||
| What was the police presence like now, post COVID? | ||
| Did that change in the cities? | ||
| Yeah, I mean like so I think for one police are having a hard time recruiting police officers because there's a huge war on police officers, especially in Washington State. | ||
| I mean Washington Democrats passed a handful of laws that basically tie the cops hands behind their backs. | ||
| They can't pursue. | ||
| We for a while there had basically no limit on how much drugs you could possess individually. | ||
| So again, everything This became a sanctuary for drug dealers, for the fentanyl trafficking and all that. | ||
| And so COVID as well with the mandatory vaccines that Jay Inslee put on all of our first responders, that took away from police recruiting. | ||
| And then also just a lot of guys are saying, like, why would I go risk my life when I actually can't go make a difference? | ||
| And if I do try to make a difference, I'm going to be, you know, villainized and potentially have my livelihood taken away from me. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So do you think it's time to, I think you called for this the last time you ran for Congress, but an immigration moratorium. | ||
| Is that how we address some of these issues? | ||
| Well, we have to fix the southern border. | ||
| I mean, like right now we had, I think 5 million illegal immigrants that we know of enter into the country. | ||
| Enough Fentanyl to kill every American multiple times over. | ||
| So yeah, I think securing the southern border, ending the flow of illegal immigrants is absolutely key. | ||
| And then look, I understand why some farmers and folks in the agriculture industry say, Hey, we need to bring in immigrants. | ||
| I think we need to slowly roll that back. | ||
| But then also like the fact that we're just giving out visas for people to come into our country. | ||
| And take jobs that Americans should have. | ||
| I think that's wrong, because at the end of the day, what's the purpose of our government? | ||
| Is it to provide the best economic opportunities and the most secure environment for our own people? | ||
| Or is it just for us to have an open border and no rules whatsoever? | ||
| And, you know, really whatever is good for the economy, you know, air quotes there on the economy. | ||
| What's good for Wall Street and the people that own these corporations? | ||
| Is that what is in the best interest of the American people? | ||
| I think it's not. | ||
| So I think we really have to look at who we let into our country, which makes me some sort of a radical, I suppose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, didn't Donald Trump just call for the end of birthright citizenship? | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things that lures people across the border, which by the way is cruel and inhumane. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| I think that's right on. | ||
| I mean, because really between the dreamers and then just the fact that like most of those people that came into our country illegally, they're looking for economic opportunity. | ||
| I don't fault them because we have these crazy rules where you can break our laws, you can come here, you can get a job, you can work under the table. | ||
| And then, hey, if you have a kid, The kid automatically becomes an American citizen. | ||
| And then now you have this whole DACA issue. | ||
| So, yeah, I think taking away that incentive is just that would take care of a ton of the problems. | ||
| It's also inhumane, really, to say that, hey, if these pregnant women that are coming across the border, like if they get here and they can have their child, like they're going to automatically get American citizenship. | ||
| We're just incentivizing just absolutely the worst behaviors and then also inviting this wave of illegal immigration, human trafficking, drug trafficking, all that. | ||
| Is illegal immigration a major point for the voters in your district? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| How often do you hear about it? | ||
| All the time. | ||
| So, I mean, the I-5 corridor goes right through the heart of our district. | ||
| And so the crime, the illegal immigration, and then just Washington State being one of the key places that illegal immigrants want to go to because they know that they're going to get pretty much all the benefits of being an American citizen. | ||
| They're not going to have their citizenship challenged and they're going to be able to not be deported in case, you know, if a Republican gets into office or whatever. | ||
| I went down to the southern border with Representative Paul Gosar about two years ago, and I got to see firsthand down at the Yuma Crossing just how out of control things were. | ||
| And I was talking with one of the border patrol officers, and she didn't know who I was or where I was from. | ||
| And I said, hey, once all these illegal immigrants leave, because there was a ton of them in Yuma, they were filling up every single hotel. | ||
| I was like, once they leave this border area, where do they go? | ||
| And she was like, without missing a beat, she was like, the ones that are here and in California, They all go right up I-5 to West Coast sanctuary cities because there's so many to choose from. | ||
| And I'm like, yeah, that's our district, right between Portland and Seattle. | ||
| So whenever I talk to law enforcement, too, they just talk about the amount of fentanyl, the amount of illegal immigrants they're dealing with, and the fact that they're getting zero support right now from the federal government whatsoever. | ||
| Yeah, that's wild. | ||
| Do you think that you could ever count on the federal government? | ||
| Or do you think you'd have to take action as a state to really get the fentanyl crisis under control? | ||
| I think that it's tough for Washington because I think unless we drastically change the state, we're going to have sort of a activist culture in Olympia in our state capital. | ||
| So I do think we need the federal government to come in and at least stop the bleeding, so to speak, like stop the flow of illegal narcotics coming across the border, especially the fentanyl. | ||
| Right now we hear from Biden and all these Democrats that the number one threat to American citizens is Vladimir Putin or racism or something like that, when in fact the number one killer of Americans is fentanyl coming across the border. | ||
| So for our federal government not to be taking proactive steps, I just think that's incredibly wrong. | ||
| And regardless of what side of the fence you're on, I don't see why everyone's not screaming at the top of their lungs right now. | ||
| At their elected officials to say like, I'm paying all this money to taxes. | ||
| We all just paid our taxes back in April, right? | ||
| So it's like, where's my money going if it's not going to at least stop the murder that's being conducted on the southern border and then flowing into the entire country? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It feels like it should be the bipartisan issue of the year. | ||
| Do you think the people in the cities even care? | ||
| Are they leaving the cities and going out to the more rural areas? | ||
| Yes, they are. | ||
| They are? | ||
| So that's good. | ||
| That's the same thing you're seeing in New York where they're leaving the city. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But I feel like they're still voting the same way. | ||
| Is that something? | ||
| That's something we're fighting. | ||
| Worried about? | ||
| No, it's definitely something I'm worried about for sure. | ||
| Yeah, a hundred percent. | ||
| I mean, especially a guy like me, I lost my last election by less than a percentage point. | ||
| So it's, it's, it's going to be a hard knife fight. | ||
| And do these people who were fleeing some of these cities, do they remember why they left? | ||
| And then a big thing for us too, is can we mobilize folks that we know share values with us? | ||
| We had about 60,000 Republicans who voted Republican in 2020 that just sat out 2022. | ||
| Which is kind of typical, people don't tend to vote unless there's a top ticket, unless the presidential race is going on. | ||
| If we can change that culture, especially for these municipal races that happened this year, the school boards, all the non-sexy things that affect people's day-to-day lives, if we can start flipping some of those and getting our people to vote, we literally could change the entire country. | ||
| That is one thing I was thinking about post-COVID. | ||
| People should hopefully be learning that the politicians closest to you are the ones you really need to be paying attention to. | ||
| Obviously, vote for everyone, but They're in control of your life. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| Like you watch the way they shut down our schools and for kids, your jobs, you know, that was terrifying. | ||
| So we have to make the, yeah, somehow make that more appealing to people and be like, you really got to vote in these elections because they matter more to you than most. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When we do the IRL After Show, sometimes people call in saying, you know, I'm discouraged, which I do. | ||
| And the answer is you should keep voting because your sheriff elections, your school board elections, those things really matter. | ||
| And it's where your voice is heard, even if your state doesn't flip entirely. | ||
| Yeah, go to your city council meetings, go to your school board meetings. | ||
| Those are really important. | ||
| I mean, especially in a state like Washington. | ||
| And this is coming everywhere. | ||
| We just passed SB 5599 in Washington state. | ||
| And that basically means the state can take your children away from you if you're not giving them, if you're not affirming their gender. | ||
| So if the school indoctrinates them enough to the point where they're confused about whether they're a boy or a girl, and they say, "Hey, my mom and dad don't support this," the state can basically kidnap the kids away. | ||
| And so we've actually had, it's pretty inspirational, we've had a couple of different school boards at the local level that have said, "I will not do that." Like the parents are who I communicate with first and foremost. - That's good. - And that's been a response to parents actually showing up at the school board meetings. | ||
| But I think that's a warning to the rest of the country. | ||
| That's not just crazy Washington State. | ||
| That is the mainstream of the Democrat Party right now. | ||
| At what point does the state step in for that? | ||
| Does a school then reach out to the state, being like, this kid's not getting affirmed by his parents, and then the state steps in? | ||
| Essentially. | ||
| It just got passed, so it's written in a very murky way, but it cuts the parents out. | ||
| If you read the bill, I'd encourage most people to read it, SB 3599, it cuts the parents completely out of it. | ||
| And it's designed basically that we think the parents don't know what's best, You know, like the language that Biden uses, especially during Pride Month, when he's saying like, there are, there are kids, like that basically got codified into law in Washington state. | ||
| I mean, right now we have a referendum process. | ||
| If you're in Washington state, find out where you can sign, reject 5599, because if we can get 200,000 signatures, then we will get it put on the ballot come this November to completely cut out the legislature and repeal it. | ||
| But yeah. | ||
| Scary stuff. | ||
| It's really scary. | ||
| I mean, I have young kids. | ||
| We are out of public schools. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Actually, we're never in public schools, right? | ||
| But it's scary to think that you can send these kids to schools and a lot of parents just kind of trust the schools. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because a lot of parents are not plugged in as much as we might be. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's right. | |
| To what's going on in schools. | ||
| And they might see stuff online and think it's a caricature and it doesn't really exist. | ||
| But it's in a lot of schools. | ||
| I mean, I walk by bookstores, indie bookstores, I'm looking at the books they're selling to kids. | ||
| And they're depraved. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cause it's, it's sexual stuff for young kids about the queer ideology. | ||
| And I'm just like, how, if you're not paying attention, you're, you're, you're going to lose your kids to the ideology because you're leaving them to the teachers to beat them over the head with that thought. | ||
| And then in a place like Washington, probably other States too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If that doesn't go the way the school likes and the state steps in and yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is really, really terrifying. | ||
| Where do you think we went wrong? | ||
| Why do you think we're at the point where people are even entertaining this kind of legislation? | ||
| I think even 10 years ago, you wouldn't have seen a bill like this. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think a lot of conservative-leaning people, like we sort of checked out, we trusted institutions. | ||
| We said, like, I'm going to send my kids to school. | ||
| I went to public schools. | ||
| When I was going to public schools, I was like, you know, what kind of a snooty person sends their kid to private schools? | ||
| And what kind of a weirdo? | ||
| I mean, I homeschool my kids now. | ||
| What kind of a weirdo homeschools their kids? | ||
| That was the kind of the way I grew up thinking, you know, but that's because I had this just baseline of trust in those institutions. | ||
| And then just because of like, kind of the way my life has gone, I started to question institutions more now. | ||
| But I think that's kind of been the conservative model as we put our Nose in the grindstone, we work, we go to church, and we trust the school system. | ||
| Why wouldn't you trust the school system? | ||
| That nice teacher, why would she want to groom or indoctrinate my child? | ||
| But then you see what the left did in the universities in particular, and they specifically targeted education, they targeted the libraries, and so now they've had this total control and people for years didn't show up, or even know they could show up at their school board meetings, their city council meetings. | ||
| Do you think conservatives have an obligation to launch their own ground game? | ||
| Should they be the ones infiltrating? | ||
| I feel like the answer, you know, in both of you, our dads, have to be fully deposited. | ||
| And so they, they go all in. | ||
| And unfortunately, like we're the side that wants to be left alone and the side that wants to be left alone, I think we'll, we'll always get beaten by the side that is just, you know, this is ideologically where they're at. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you think conservatives have an obligation to launch their own ground game? | |
| Should they be the ones infiltrating? | ||
| 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
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I feel like the answer, you know, in both of you, our dads have you fully departed. | |
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that you pull your kids, you homeschool, you find them all out of your own thing, but but on the other hand, that leaves children whose parents aren't in the most vulnerable position. | |
| Insurgents have an obligation to intercede in the institutions that they feel they've lost. - Yes, I think so. | ||
| I mean, a lot of the folks that consistently go to school board meetings in my district, they've pulled their kids out, but they still go to the school board meetings. | ||
| A lot of it, too, is just like, your taxes, our taxes still go to fund those schools. | ||
| So it's like, hey, go be a good steward of your own taxpayer dollars and hold these people accountable. | ||
| But yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| You need to protect your kids, obviously, first and foremost, but then also realize that, look, If we just completely let these guys go, a lot of parents who probably share values with us, but just like economically, they can't afford it. | ||
| Both parents are working. | ||
| They're busy. | ||
| Like they put their kids in those schools. | ||
| We can't leave those kids behind. | ||
| So I think we got to continue to fight on that battlefield. | ||
| That was the one pleasant way COVID backfired. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| On the authorities and the elites, right? | ||
| Is like a lot of people woke up to the idea of, whoa, we can't trust any institution, you know, which is, that's a beautiful thing. | ||
| It's unfortunate that people, it took that to happen, but it was, I saw a lot of people who were also in New York unplugged from politics, you know, when they were young parents and, but they were left leaning. | ||
| And they saw the way the schools are messing with the kids or just shutting down. | ||
| And they're like, well, we can't survive like this. | ||
| So they turned away from the institutions. | ||
| But the right has seeded culture for so long where there was a universities, public schools, obviously the government, like all these things. | ||
| So you got to find a way to get in there and change it. | ||
| I think the universities are lost. | ||
| Oh, it's tough. | ||
| I was a professor for a long time. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So in New York too. | ||
| And I mean, I saw a lot of crazy stuff that they were teaching. | ||
| I just taught writing classes. | ||
| But like, you see a lot of history being taught in a certain way, you know, you're skewed a certain way, right? | ||
| And are talking about the cultural revolution a certain way, like a positive way, instead of a negative way. | ||
| So you're, they're producing like this, this is a factory of these ideologues. | ||
| And I don't know how you're gonna change that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I remember being in university and taking a Communication, gender, and culture class. | |
| You know, you get these questions and you know there's an answer they want you to give, but you question it. | ||
| And if you want to get a good grade, you write the answer down. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| If you want to be true to who you are, you take the failure, which when you're spending a lot of money on university, that's a very hard position to be in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that's really the problem. | ||
| You wear kids down from having, or young adults even, from having their own critical thought and being able to fight back. | ||
| Because instead of rewarding those who push against the system, they're not for compliance. | ||
| Which is, I think, anti-American. | ||
| I don't feel like that's a value. | ||
| I think if we can erode away at the institutional, I guess, requirement for basically every job to have a bachelor's of some sort, regardless of what the bachelor's is. | ||
| I mean, that's them. | ||
| That's all I got. | ||
| I'm 43 That's all I got told in high school was like saying if you don't go to college Like you are gonna be homeless on the streets. | ||
| You won't be able to get a job But they never said like what to get a degree and it was always like just go get a degree go pick something that you like and just go there At any cost. | ||
| Mass amounts of debt. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Unpopular conservative opinion. | ||
| I don't fault a lot of the people that are in a bind right now of college loan debts. | ||
| It's because they did exactly what they were told. | ||
| And now we're going to come back later and be like, sorry sucker, we were wrong. | ||
| Pay up. | ||
| It seems incredibly unfair. | ||
| But then also, if we can change that part of the regulatory system as far as corporate America goes, or even in the government. | ||
| When I get to Congress, I don't want to have a degree to work in my office. | ||
| If you have experience and you have drive, that's it. | ||
| It doesn't matter where you went to college, especially to do something like work on the hill. | ||
| It's not exactly like rocket science. | ||
| But if we can get rid of that, we'll take away a lot of those institutions' power to start that indoctrination process. | ||
| We'll just kind of kill it root and branch. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's definitely true. | |
| There's an increase in community college enrollment too, which I find interesting. | ||
| I feel like the students I know who go to community college tend to be more passionate, even if they only get an associate's degree. | ||
| It's because they have plans. | ||
| They have things they want to do. | ||
| Cause I taught at a private college and I taught at a community college. | ||
| And when I was at the community college, I felt like I was actually giving to the community. | ||
| It was all ages from all over the country and South America, a lot of like a Mexican kids sent from Central America. | ||
| And, uh, that I felt like I was actually, these kids are going to go back out or adults go back out into the world and do something at the private school is just like, we're just here. | ||
| Cause we've been told and we're not taking anything that seriously. | ||
| And, uh, "My parents can afford it, you know, whatever." - Yeah, and it felt like it just went nowhere. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure there's some students that did something with it, but that was the thing though. | ||
| Like I feel bad having left it, as horrible as it was, as I was trying to give them like an alternate view on history or writing or freedom of expression. | ||
| But then once the mandates came in, I couldn't be a part of the college, right? | ||
| They effectively got rid of anyone who disagreed, you know, any type of dissent was gone. | ||
| So I can't even imagine what this college has looked like today. - Why are students today to think the only place Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Not at all. | |
| It is. | ||
| or any of your interests in school. | ||
| And that's just not true. | ||
| Not at all. | ||
|
unidentified
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The factory mandate of you have to go to college or do anything is pretty recent. | |
| It is, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's not what built this country. | |
| And I think that's interesting as we see more people pursue trades. | ||
| We have a snobbish culture that says you go to trade school, you go to college. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, you couldn't make it anywhere else. | ||
| But really, I think more often than not, it's the people who are in college who couldn't make it working. - Right, right, right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And the trades are absolutely essential, too. | ||
| I mean, like, I think we need to have much more trades programs in high school. | ||
| Because when I was in high school, it was like, go to college where there's nothing else. | ||
| I knew I wanted to join the army, and so that was, like, how I rebelled. | ||
| But, like, there was no one saying that, hey, you can make a lot of money if you know how to be an electrician, you know, be a plumber, a mechanic. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| Most of my friends I live around now, like, these guys work in the trades. | ||
| They make really good money. | ||
| Most of them are their own bosses. | ||
| By the time they're in their, like, mid-20s to 30s, they just kind of go independent. | ||
| So, It's a huge, I think, bridgeway to actually having some some real freedom. | ||
| But I think there's a huge tie in there, too, with what we're talking about with immigration. | ||
| I mean, we have this issue that our ruling class left and right, they always want to import workers that take away jobs from American citizens. | ||
| So you always hear like Bernie Sanders and some folks like on the, I guess, the more populist left that say we need the minimum wage, we need to fight for workers, but they'll never touch immigration because they know they're always going to undercut the actual American worker and import Cheap labor, whether it's illegal immigration or whether it's like H-1B visas to work in the tech sector. | ||
| That's been another big issue in our district is the tech sector that's been overran by us, corporate America, importing massive amounts of foreigners to take away jobs from the kid who like, I thought I did the right thing. | ||
| I went to college. | ||
| I learned, I literally learned to code, you know, like I did what you told me to, and now I don't have a job. | ||
| So I think without, without fixing the immigration component, I think it's going to be very challenging for us to, for all these different trades programs to actually have the effect they're supposed to have. | ||
|
unidentified
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thing from their own perspective, right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you really want other countries to thrive and do well, you wouldn't rob them of their best and brightest by immediately importing them to work in our tech sector. | |
| If you're a foreign student, you come get a degree in America. | ||
| The best thing you can do for your community is to return home. | ||
| Here's a visa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We're like, no, never leave. | ||
| Take jobs away from... | ||
| Here's a visa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Also leave your own country. | |
| There is such an easy way for Democrats to argue in favor of immigration, in my opinion, and they just choose not to because they ultimately know they're doing it for the shift to voter balance. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that they like those corporate checks, too, coming from from all the major corporations. | ||
| I mean, Bernie Sanders a long time ago said that, like, open borders was a Koch brothers scheme. | ||
| He didn't say that anymore. | ||
| The Democrats are all in on open borders. | ||
| Like, there's no dissent whatsoever to, like, just flooding the zone of as much cheap labor as possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think what you're saying about the working class is really interesting. | |
| And I was thinking today about how over the weekend Biden had his first Formal campaign event in Philadelphia. | ||
| He's got all he's it wasn't it biggest coalition of unions who endorsed yeah AFL Yeah. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| If you go talk to anybody, I mean, just like right now, inflation. | ||
| I think inflation is the number one issue in my district, but probably throughout the entire country. | ||
| I mean, Americans are losing well over one month of wages. | ||
| I think it's between like $7,000 and $8,000 just due to inflation. | ||
| Cost of fuel. | ||
| And then Biden has the audacity to look us in the eye and say, like, I'm the most pro-union, pro-worker. | ||
| president ever when it's like, this is the guy that killed off our natural, our natural resources industry, but especially made us less energy independent. | ||
| And now the cost, the price of the pump goes up, the price of all goods go up. | ||
| And that affects folks that are in the working class first and foremost. | ||
|
unidentified
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- If you're a for all working man, bring back manufacturing. | |
| - Bring back, yeah, exactly. - I've never heard him talk about that. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| No. | ||
| Was that the thing with Fetterman? | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| Yes, Fetterman was there. | ||
| Fetterman called him like a broken bridge or whatever. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| I don't know if you have a chance in politics because you actually can make a sentence. | ||
| That's rough. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That was one of the funny things. | ||
| I was watching some, uh, I think local broadcasts from Washington with you and it was interesting. | ||
| The qualifiers they use for your, I guess your previous opponent, they call her working class. | ||
| It was always working class and it was with you. | ||
| They might've said you were a green beret, but it was always with Trump supporter and it was with the same connotation, right? | ||
| I always think that's the way they do that with the language isn't saying they do with Biden. | ||
| Like they all do that. | ||
| But meanwhile, it's the exact opposite of how they perform in politics. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How is your campaign differing from the last time around? | |
| Do you feel like you've made major changes or do you feel like this is like round two, bigger and better? | ||
| Probably a combination of both. | ||
| I mean, last time I primaried a 12-year incumbent Republican, which is always nasty when you're going against your own party. | ||
| We have a very late primary, too. | ||
| And we actually have a jungle primary system. | ||
| Our primary is in August. | ||
| So jungle primary, too. | ||
| Multiple Republicans were on the ballot and only one Democrat was on the ballot. | ||
| So there was just an absolute knife fight for a year and a half on the Republican side. | ||
| I raised about three and a half million dollars. | ||
| They spent about 14 million against me in the primary. | ||
| So it was, yeah, it was pretty ugly. | ||
| And so we kind of limped out of that as the Republican nominee. | ||
| And so we were fresh out of cash. | ||
| And so the Democrats are smart. | ||
| I mean, I give it to the Democrats. | ||
| They have horrible ideas, but their organization and their discipline is very impressive. | ||
| They rallied around one candidate, and then they saved all their fire until that short general period. | ||
| I just didn't have enough time to really unify the Republican Party. | ||
| So right now, a big push for me is unifying the Republican Party. | ||
| I've gotten four endorsements from county-level GOPs, should have another one here pretty soon. | ||
| We only have seven counties in the district. | ||
| So unifying the party is big. | ||
| I'm already doing outreach of a lot of the more moderates. | ||
| I mean, 12-year incumbent, she had some supporters. | ||
| There were some people that were very loyal to her, were very not happy with me for taking her down. | ||
| But right now, really what I'm doing is highlighting my opponent's radical record because she'll say, I'm working class, I'm a moderate, all these types of things. | ||
| She could say that last time because she didn't have a record. | ||
| This time she's been voting for the last six months and there's not a lot of daylight between her and like Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries and these guys. | ||
| I mean, the big, what we're really trying to do is highlight her record. | ||
| I mean, she voted to let biological men into women's spaces and sports. | ||
| I mean, she's just bad vote after bad vote. | ||
| So we're gonna really just continue to highlight that, how radical she is. | ||
| - Do you think she is representing people in district or do you think she's playing to like Seattle and maybe the more blue areas in your state? - She's got a tough balancing act because in order for her to get funded, she has to take votes. | ||
| If you look at her record, like I said, it's very much an activist type of record, especially when it comes to gender ideology, everything regarding the economy, crime, border security. | ||
| She just voted to make 29 million Americans felons with the pistol-brace ban, while at the same time she says, I'm a pro-2A Democrat. | ||
| You just said these guys deserve to have the ATF kick in their door. | ||
| I think it's challenging for her and she has chosen not to be moderate whatsoever. | ||
| I think she's relying heavily on her getting a lot of money and then having a lot of friendly left-leaning media that's just going to Yeah, I mean that's great! | ||
| They're gonna say moderate and they're gonna say, you know, working class enough that it sticks. | ||
| Just, you know, it's a game they play with me too. | ||
| Like he's a right-wing extremist or whatever. | ||
| But I mean, again, she has to defend her record and we're really gonna be able to present her record and make her defend it. - Yeah, I mean, that's great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How are the, there are 10 congressional districts in Washington and there are two elected Republicans right now. | |
| How are they responding to your campaign? - They're responding positively. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is the number one seat to flip. | ||
| If you talk to Kevin McCarthy, he'll say this is the number one seat. | ||
| Lost but less than a percentage point. | ||
| It's still technically is like an R plus three or four leaning district. | ||
| So we have a lot of good Republican unity as sometimes I think things in Republican internet world seem like very, very divided, but I've got Matt Gaetz and the more MAGA wing, but I've also got Kevin McCarthy and just the, I'd say the more rank and file of the Republican party supporting my, my. | ||
| Is the Democratic Party in lockstep with the unions out there like they are in other places like New York City? | ||
| I think at the top levels they are, but I went out and I participated in the Weyerhaeuser strike. | ||
| I went out and hung out on the strike line last year with a lot of those guys, one of our big timber processing centers. | ||
| Union people are our people. | ||
| I mean like they're very conservative. | ||
| Most of them, you know, we're wearing their, you know, yeah, whatever FJB t-shirts in there, you know, and there's a pro-Trump t-shirts and stuff like that. | ||
| I think that a lot of them are starting to get it a lot more. | ||
| That's why I think you see Biden and the Democrats relying heavily on things like the Pro Act where they want to force union membership. | ||
| Because right now, a lot of these unions at the more senior levels, AFL, CIO, they're endorsing the party that is 100% in lockstep with Wall Street, with shipping away jobs overseas. | ||
| Everything that we talk about that affects blue collar people. | ||
| So I think the blue collar working class union folks are very much our people as long as we can continue to mobilize them and just sort of show them that, hey, what you're hearing from your union boss, it's kind of like what you hear from CNN or the mainstream media. | ||
| They don't have your best interests at heart. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| Right now, I think the two big things is the economy, obviously, and what inflation's done. | ||
| The very basic question of like, are you better off now than you were two, three years ago? | ||
| I mean, I think that one kind of answers itself. | ||
| But then also, I mean, a lot of Republicans are saying that we should shy away from the cultural issues, but literally, the Democrats right now want to send biological men into your women's locker room. | ||
| I mean, they want to have state-sanctioned kidnapping. | ||
| And again, what I like to point out all the time is that this is not the fringe of the Democrat Party. | ||
| If you look at, especially in Congress, who voted to let men into women's sports, every Democrat did. | ||
| There wasn't one who was like, guys, I can't do this. | ||
| Maybe he said that behind closed doors and they were like, no, you're gonna get your butt out there and you're gonna hit no, you know, like to prevent the Republicans from blocking that. | ||
| So I think that that's going to bring out a lot of folks over to our side. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| Look at what happened in Virginia with that last governor election. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Moms really showed up because they realized how terrible. | |
| Do you think it's like a lot of people just don't want to confront it? | ||
| Because when you look at what this is going on, it's like, how could it be that depraved? | ||
| You know, just a person who's working a regular job. | ||
| It's hard to stomach some of this stuff. | ||
| We're saying state-sanctioned kidnapping. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| I mean, New York was trying to pass a law to take you out of your home if you were a threat to your community through health, right? | ||
| Like, uh, and put you in a camp. | ||
| Uh, it didn't pass, but they've been trying to pass that same bill for 10, like 10 years or something. | ||
| And when you tell people that you sound like a lunatic, I'm like, this is the document from the website, the government website. | ||
| It literally says that. | ||
| I think a lot of people just don't like to even acknowledge that that's a reality. | ||
| So somehow you got to like tap dance around it, but also be like very bold about it. | ||
| You know, it's like, depends who you're talking to, but I've noticed that a lot with people are like, I just don't want to hear anymore. | ||
| I think it's getting forced. | ||
| I think that the left really overplayed their hand. | ||
| I think it's getting forced down people's throats so much. | ||
| I mean, we were just talking before we started recording about how like pride month is over now. | ||
| Like it's, it was only pride two weeks because people are like, we're sick of this crap. | ||
| But like, I think, you know, through the law fair, what they're doing, like to actually codify these things in the law and then Biden releasing, I mean, if you just look at his social media, it's been nonstop. | ||
| He had the, the, the folks going topless at the white house. | ||
| I mean, like your average American is going to see that and be like, what is this freak show on the, on the white house? | ||
|
unidentified
|
flag up everyone. | |
| It seems crazy to me that a radical statement would be you should only fly the American flag at the White House. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By adding this flag, people are already upset. | ||
| And then we get this video of this transgender activist, topless. | ||
| I mean, I thought for sure it was fake. | ||
| But remember when they were like, yeah, it seemed crazy. | ||
| Also that no one there would be like, please stop. | ||
| Like stop. | ||
| But this is the same crowd of people that would, one of their biggest arguments against Trump was that he was not presidential enough. | ||
| He didn't have decorum. | ||
| He was not classy enough. | ||
| It's also the same crowd of people who were donating money to arsonists during the riot summer. | ||
| Like Kamala was literally, her staff was giving money to the arsonists, right, to get out of jail. | ||
| So it's really not that surprising, I guess. | ||
| But did Biden get pushback for the, did he, he said, I didn't like having a topless lady? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They like walked it back. | |
| They were like, did they push back on him? | ||
| Like, how dare you? | ||
| I think there was a little bit. | ||
| I mean, we saw this again with like the Bud Light thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But like, boycotted by conservatives who were upset, and I think rightly so. | ||
| And then also, Gabor stopped selling Bud Light because they said, how dare you not completely back Dylan Mulvaney? | ||
| And so, I don't feel bad for Anheuser-Busch, but they really did shoot themselves in the foot. | ||
| And that was May, right? | ||
| Or April. | ||
| That was going into Pride Month and now we have all of these corporations that are like, I really just can't take a stance on this. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So again, it's interesting to hear you say that the Republican Party is saying, let's shy away from this when this seems to be like the silver bullet issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you can get behind the culture war stuff, it is in some ways a bipartisan issue because we're starting to see, especially with women's sports. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Just protecting our kids. | ||
| I mean, look, at the end of the day, if you look at the polling on gay marriage and all these different issues, most of us, I think, we're just like, hey, you do you. | ||
| Whatever makes you happy, that's fine. | ||
| We don't care. | ||
| Have a great time consenting adults. | ||
| Consenting adults. | ||
| That was always the caveat. | ||
| But then now they're coming after the kids. | ||
| And so I think you've got a lot more folks. | ||
| I mean, the Gays Against Rumors group is pretty active in Washington State. | ||
| They come out to a lot of our different events, too. | ||
| And they're basically like, whoa, don't, don't, don't do this in our name. | ||
| Like we're not, we're not part of this at all. | ||
| Like we have kids as well that we care about, like, this is absolutely wrong. | ||
| So that's where I really think that they've, they've overstepped. | ||
| Was the 12 year incumbent into the culture war stuff at all? | ||
| Is that something like. | ||
| She was not, no. | ||
| She was very much a, um, like the centrist, moderate leaning. | ||
| I mean her politics I think kind of harken back to like maybe the 90s when like Republicans and Democrats could just sort of like disagree on you know what the tax rate is, maybe some sort of foreign policy stuff, but really at the end of the day we all wanted the best things for our community. | ||
| Just kind of generally not knowing what time it is and not knowing just how aggressive the left is. | ||
| Do you feel like Since you ran last time or maybe since your incumbent was last having to have a serious challenger American values have shifted so that there are conservative values and there are left values, but there are not common values. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think, unfortunately, we are losing that common, like, monoculture, you know, where people on different, you know, Republican, Democrat, whatever, could come together. | ||
| I do think we are losing some of that. | ||
| I think it's incumbent that we get that back. | ||
| I don't think that's going to be done in any, like, one election. | ||
| I think it's going to take a lot of effort from From all of us. | ||
| But yeah, things are incredibly polarized right now. | ||
| There definitely is much more of a right-wing culture, which is good now because I think for a long time the Republicans, whatever, conservatives, however you want to label us, we didn't have much of a culture. | ||
| And I think that led to us not having much of a fight or much of a game plan. | ||
| Whereas the Democrats, I mean, they had a culture and they had a game plan. | ||
| Like I said, I disagree with their ideas, but I respect their discipline. | ||
| But there is no more middle ground. | ||
| I think we're getting a lot more middle ground people, like that meme pushed over to our side, where it's like, hey, you don't have to agree with us on everything. | ||
| I've become friends with Tulsi Gabbard. | ||
| She came out and campaigned with me. | ||
| And she's fantastic. | ||
| I mean, but if you listen to the big problems that she has with the Democrat Party, with corporate America, military industrial complex, I mean, she's very much aligned with us and always get people to be like, but what about this one vote vote that Tulsi took in the in the mid 2000s about guns or whatever? | ||
| And it's like, OK, look, we can have a conversation about these different things, but we agree on the big picture items, you know, and I think we have another opportunity here. | ||
| With RFK jr. | ||
| Because I think he's saying a lot of things that a lot of us agree with But I think the Democrats are gonna trash him in a very bad way And so I think we're gonna have an opportunity to bring a lot of those folks over to our side to say hey We we want to hear your ideas. | ||
| You know, we we appreciate you guys as well. | ||
| We won't We won't treat you like crap like the Democrats. | ||
| Well, do you feel like we have a disappearing moderate class? | ||
| Because you were saying before the show, you know, there are no moderates. | ||
| I just don't think there are. | ||
| I think most Americans right now, especially like people of my parents' generation, they would say, well, I'm a moderate. | ||
| Well, I'm an independent. | ||
| You know, and what they mean is that they don't like politics. | ||
| But if you really sit down and you talk with them, most of them, I think, are conservative. | ||
| Like, they don't want, you know, biological men, you know, going into their daughter's bathroom. | ||
| Like, they want us to have a southern border. | ||
| Like, they don't want us being involved in a new war every five minutes. | ||
| Like, I think these are basic kind of common sense conservative issues. | ||
| But I think we have a lot of education to do and I think showing how radical the left is and they're helping us like we talked about but I think we have to really stay on that and show just how radical these people are because all these folks that want to say like I'm a moderate like okay well then tell me what you like about the Democrats and usually when they talk though they're talking about like the JFK era you know or they're talking about Martin Luther King jr. | ||
| or something like that like Tell me what you like about the modern Democrat Party and show me what's moderate about that. | ||
| They're sort of nostalgic for days gone by in the Democratic Party, which is sad. | ||
| This is an old chorus, but the Democratic Party moved so far left, they left people behind. | ||
| I think there are, like you're saying, a lot of people who identify as moderate or independent. | ||
| Because they're just not that into it. | ||
| They've got other stuff going on. | ||
| There maybe is one or two issues that they feel strongly about, but we don't leave space for them anymore. | ||
| I would actually be happy to have a huge, independent, moderate class if we had common values. | ||
| But as it is, you have to pick your sides. | ||
| And I would rather be on the sides that doesn't make biological males compete against women. | ||
| And that's radical, apparently. | ||
| Yeah, apparently that's radical. | ||
| Seeking harm when you're kids. | ||
| I mean, I can't believe you have to navigate that minefield. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Deciding who my kids get to see because there's such a mind virus with some of these ideas that I don't want to rip out the reality from underneath my kid's feet. | ||
| Obviously, he's going to have to contend with that, and I want to give him a good foundation as he grows up to make a defense against those things, but it's so prevalent everywhere we go. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, in Martinsburg, we had a drag show recently, and this state is fairly red. | ||
| It was a public West. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And like, you know, we, there are churches with pride flags, you know? | ||
| So it's interesting that, you know, it's, it's, they've infected every level of your life, which unfortunately has made it. | ||
| So you have to talk about politics, which is like, I know people don't want to talk about it, but I'm constantly doing it. | ||
| What I'm finding is maybe the best thing sometimes is I'm trying to strip away like the labels. | ||
| You know, like Republican, Democrat. | ||
| Like what you were saying, if you just talk about the actual ideas, you're probably going to agree on a lot of stuff. | ||
| But it's like people are so brainwashed until they hear one word, left or right, and they're like, oh, I'm drawing a line here. | ||
| I hate that. | ||
| I hate this. | ||
| So people, I hope, can get past certain labels. | ||
| And hopefully doing that will bring us hopefully closer together. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| You guys have kids who are similar ages, so I'm going to ask you both. | ||
| When you guys became dad, did you think this was the culture you would be raising your kids in? | ||
| Did you see it coming, or did it kind of hit you like a ton of bricks? | ||
| It hit me like a ton of bricks. | ||
| I didn't get married until I was 35, didn't have kids until I was 30, didn't have kids until I was 35. | ||
| So I was very much in the military, deployed a lot. | ||
| I was in a bubble, you know? | ||
| I kind of was in this, I think, more of a traditional America, you know? | ||
| And that was my focus and I just figured, hey, I grew up in Portland, Oregon, for God's sakes. | ||
| I figured, hey, I'll just, you know, wherever we end up moving, we'll raise our kids there in the public schools. | ||
| Like they'll go to schools with people I work with. | ||
| Like everything's, some things on TV seem bad, but overall things are probably okay. | ||
| So yeah, it was a rude awakening. | ||
| Was there like a moment that you felt like you noticed you had to intervene? | ||
| Just the COVID era. | ||
| Especially, I was living in Portland because, long story, my late wife was in the military. | ||
| She was killed as well. | ||
| She was killed in the military. | ||
| And so I moved back to Portland briefly, right as COVID happened and right as the riots happened. | ||
| And just talking to the people that I lived around, who were nice people, good people, good neighbors, but they were like, hey, there needs to be a riot. | ||
| We need to give them space to have riots every night. | ||
| I'm pretty experienced from my background. | ||
| I understand what anarchy and violence is pretty well. | ||
| I'm like, this is not the direction this is heading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mr. Former CIA is like, it's a no from me. | |
| After it went on for a couple days, I'm like, this very much has the hallmarks of a violent revolution, a color revolution, however you want to categorize it. | ||
| It reminded me of the post-Saddam era in Iraq early on. | ||
| And the fact that I couldn't get that through to my neighbors, because if I brought up any of these things, they'd be like, you don't think black lives matter? | ||
| I don't think that's what I said. | ||
| That's not what we're talking about. | ||
| We're talking about the fact that we don't want our city to burn. | ||
| And so that's when I was like, I'm getting the heck out of here. | ||
| I'm going to a more rural environment. | ||
| And then just everything that happened with COVID when I started looking at it, because my kids were My oldest was getting ready to go into kindergarten, so I really started looking at the public schools and I was like, oh my God, this crap is everywhere. | ||
| And I didn't realize how much it had just penetrated, even in the rural school districts, but they still are controlled by the state to a certain extent. | ||
| They're obligated to meet state standards. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing about being a parent. | ||
| I mean, you really can't, as a parent, you can't just sort of like tune things out. | ||
| You kind of have to start paying attention. | ||
| Oh yeah, it's funny because we closed on our first house that we bought on the day that New York locked down. | ||
| So it was like, we inherited this mad world with this new house. | ||
| And now it was outside more than ever, like going to get stuff to work on the house. | ||
| And that's, so you're seeing these lines of people spaced out and it was like dystopian. | ||
| And we moved to this area because the schools were good, like the school rate. | ||
| So we still were buying into public schools, but they're good. | ||
| They're well rated, right? | ||
| We'll be fine. | ||
| And then when COVID happened, you know, I was just one of those people like, oh wow, you can't, I can't trust even that. | ||
| I can't trust anything. | ||
| And, uh, and also my wife was pregnant with our daughter during that first COVID summer. | ||
| So then you're seeing the hospitals turn to these tyrannical places. | ||
| We're like, I might not even be allowed. | ||
| When I, when I met Shane, he had told me, well, I brought handcuffs in case they wanted me to leave the hospital. | ||
| I could just handcuff myself to my wife's hospital bed. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And they, they happened to lift it right before our daughter was born. | ||
| So all those things made me realize like, well, we have to first get out of New York because I have no control over my family here. | ||
| You know, like, and not even like the state level, the local level, it was all pretty bad because we were still fairly close to New York City. | ||
| It's just an hour outside. | ||
| So yeah, that definitely changed the way I saw most things, most institutions that I thought I could trust. | ||
| And I was a professor, like I said, so I quit that because COVID destroyed that. | ||
| And then I wasn't going to go through with the The mandate to get the vaccine. | ||
| So yeah. | ||
| Then watching how people reacted, like playdates changed, you know, people all of a sudden didn't want to hang out. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| We lost lots of friends because I didn't denounce or, you know, I didn't denounce Trump or I didn't, I didn't put a black box on my Instagram, you know, or, or I didn't get the vaccine and now my kids were a danger to them. | ||
| So we're very happy with, there's flaws everywhere, but we're very happy here compared to where we were. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you took a stand, you actually spoke out a little bit. | ||
| You found out who your friends were pretty quick. | ||
| I mean, you guys deal with this all the time because you give your opinions out. | ||
| The same thing when I started running for office, I was like, oh, those people were actually my friends. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think my friends who don't agree with me just like willfully turn a blind eye. | |
| They like me as a person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're just like, we'll let you go on your podcast and do whatever you need to do. | |
| So when you... | ||
| It's interesting to hear you both say, basically, COVID was this moment. | ||
| Again, you're young parents, so that makes sense. | ||
| You're having to confront these issues. | ||
| But why is it then, if we have people like you who are waking up to the dangers of these institutions, everything's gone wrong, what happened during midterms? | ||
| Why did we not see this red wave that we were promised? | ||
| I think, unfortunately, there's still a lot of folks that are hoping that somebody else will take care of it. | ||
| And also, I do think, I mean, there's some nuts and bolts stuff, like we had a low turnout, they spent a bunch of money against me, all that type of stuff. | ||
| I do think there was a lot. | ||
| But it wasn't just you. | ||
| I mean, there were lots of races that we felt like we'll probably see that one flip, and it didn't. | ||
| And it was not terrible, but not the best. | ||
| We only have a thin majority in the House, and we didn't even take the Senate. | ||
| So I do think there also was a lot of happy talk. | ||
| About like, there's going to be a red wave. | ||
| There's going to be a red wave. | ||
| And so, I mean, I, I run into people in the district all the time who were like, Hey, did the election happen yet? | ||
| Like, I thought you were in there. | ||
| Like, didn't you win? | ||
| And I'm like, you know, did you, did you like, Oh, I'll vote for you next time. | ||
| I didn't vote this last time. | ||
| I mean, I hear that all the time. | ||
| And so it's like, I do think there was a, like a false sense of security. | ||
| I think that, that factors. | ||
| Do you think there's apathy too? | ||
| Like people, I feel like even in myself, I don't, I want to believe the system. | ||
| I don't trust it. | ||
| That's another institution that's just out the window. | ||
| So I wonder if that's a thing. | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| I mean, post 2020, and we've been doing massive unsolicited mail-out ballots and machines and all that stuff in Washington State for a very long time. | ||
| And so I hear this from conservatives all the time, like, I'm not going to vote because it's all pointless. | ||
| And I'm like, well, if you do that, you're making it so they don't even have to pull any kind of shit out of you. | ||
| You still got to vote. | ||
| If nothing else, vote out of pure spite because they're trying to demoralize you right now. | ||
| Don't let them have that win. | ||
| This is the best campaign slogan of all time. | ||
| Vote out of pure spite. | ||
| Vote out of pure spite. | ||
| I'm just saying, like, don't give them that easy win, you know? | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I mean, I was at Carrie Lake's election trial, the first one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're watching them through machines. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| And to me, I feel like I was in a different reality because I'm there with other writers from different papers and they're looking at it like, Well, they did nothing wrong and the machines are all perfect. | ||
| Kerry's crazy. | ||
| I'm like, are you watching the same thing as me? | ||
| Like we are an alternate dimension. | ||
| And I go outside and we're walking and see this older man who had peeked into the election and left. | ||
| And I asked him, I was like, what'd you think? | ||
| He was like, it's a. | ||
| It's everything I thought it would be. | ||
| And I couldn't tell what side he was on. | ||
| And he just was like, Carrie's just an insane person. | ||
| She's lying about this and that. | ||
| I don't think people are really listening to what they're saying about this stuff. | ||
| So when it comes to me and voting, I have a hard time trusting how they're dealing with the voting these days. | ||
| And that demoralizes a lot of people. | ||
| It's really rough, but I agree. | ||
| You have to go out and show force by voting and be like, show up, do your vote, and then we can complain about it later and hopefully change these things. | ||
| Not trusting other people to do it is why we're in this situation. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And ballot harvesting is another real big one too. | ||
| I mean, as a Republican candidate last cycle, I did like 300 in-person town halls. | ||
| I very much had the attitude of like, hey, if somebody wants to hear what I have to say, I'll tell you what I have to say. | ||
| And my ideas and my stances on the issues, that will win them over and they will be inspired to vote for me. | ||
| And that works for some people. | ||
| However, there's a lot of folks out there that like you do need to go and you need to get the ballot in front of them and you need to make sure the ballot gets dropped off. | ||
| And in Washington, we have no rules about ballot harvesting. | ||
| The Democrats have it down to a science, so it's completely legal. | ||
| But that was just like the opposite of conservative culture. | ||
| Like all of us were saying like, we hate to mail out voting, so we're all going to vote on election day, you know? | ||
| But actually show up. | ||
| You have to show up then. | ||
| You got to show up. | ||
| Nothing can happen. | ||
| You can't have a scheduling conflict. | ||
| Sick kid. | ||
| But we had three, you know, three plus weeks, I think almost four weeks to collect the ballots. | ||
| The Democrats were out there every day hustling, collecting ballots and Republicans weren't. | ||
| I wonder why this isn't something Republicans do with their young people. | ||
| I mean, I regularly hear of young conservatives, you know, 18, 16, whatever. | ||
| You could send a 17 year old who sees themselves as the future Republican to go collect ballots. | ||
| I mean, The question from a lot of young people is, how do I get involved? | ||
| And that's the first step. | ||
| And I don't understand why we don't see more conservative young people or organizations that champion conservative young people organizing these things. | ||
| This is the key way that we fight back because that's what Democrats did first. | ||
| I mean, they always make the young people take care of their ground game because what's more convincing than a, you know, a bright-eyed 19-year-old being like, please, let's do whatever the Democrats think is good. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And that's how you win. | ||
| I wonder, sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Oh, no, we're working on that right now. | ||
| So we've actually had a good deal of leadership changeover in like the county level parties. | ||
| And so ballot harvesting has become like the battle cry at the state level and the county level. | ||
| So we're getting more folks involved. | ||
| But the young people, you're right, too. | ||
| The Democrats do a great job. | ||
| They mobilize young folks. | ||
| And unfortunately that's just a battlefield that we are not doing that great on. | ||
| I think we need to get more active. | ||
| We're saying don't go to college, do other things, including be active in your community. | ||
| This seems like an easy fix to me, but of course I'm saying it having not done it myself when I was 18 and from, you know, from the internet. | ||
| Are you into like a national holiday type situation for voting to make it easier for people? | ||
| Like is that the reason people just have to... | ||
| I think that'd be good. | ||
| I mean, I'd like to get back to all in-person voting. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Show an ID, you know, it's on a piece of paper. | ||
| You want them to show an ID? | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| You radical? | ||
| That's why they call me a far right wing guy, you know? | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| How dare you, sir? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I mean, we're a long ways away from being able to change those laws in Washington state, but I think that'd be good. | ||
| I mean, look, national holiday. | ||
| I mean, people are like, but what about shift workers? | ||
| I'm like, fine. | ||
| Like, let's compromise. | ||
| How about two days of national holiday? | ||
| Whatever it takes to get us back into voting in person and just get rid of this nonsense mail out ballot stuff. | ||
| And the machines too. | ||
| I just, I don't understand the argument behind the machines. | ||
| You know, people are like, oh, you're a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I'm like, well, that's cool. | ||
| Then let us out of the machines. | ||
| They're like, well, no one can out of the machines. | ||
| When people say that though, didn't Elizabeth Warren also put out a thing like years ago saying she didn't trust those exact machines? | ||
| So it's okay for them to say that years ago, but now we say it's a problem. | ||
| There's something wrong with the machines. | ||
| Well, didn't YouTube just change its terms of service on talking about election fraud? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, we know exactly where this thing is going. | ||
| When you guys talk about it, it's not okay. | ||
| But when the other team does, it's because they're saving the democracy, I think is the battle call. | ||
| Do you think that People are more ready for or like what a year and some change out from the next election Do you think that there's a different energy maybe in your district or just generally? | ||
| Uh going in there definitely is I mean because we had the hard-fought republican civil war, but then the democrats capitalized on that There's a lot of republicans in my district that are like, okay, we we understand what happened here We didn't unify and the unthinkable happened now. | ||
| We have a democrat representative. | ||
| So for that that's probably um, the most prevalent, uh, I think sentiment i'm getting from like the The activists, but then for your average person who we need to turn out and vote, who probably didn't vote last time, the state of the economy, crime. | ||
| And then I really think this trans ideology that's targeting our children, I think that's going to get a lot of folks that probably would have sat out of an election because they don't care and they don't want to hear about Biden and Trump anymore. | ||
| But now they're like, wait a sec, you guys just did what? | ||
| Like you're telling my kids what in school? | ||
| Like we're going to let guys go into my daughter's dressing room? | ||
| Like I think that's going to bring folks out. | ||
| Yeah, I think that makes sense. | ||
| Is the state kidnapping rule, is that something that's in the news a lot? | ||
| Like local news out there? | ||
| Like are people talking about it? | ||
| They try and suppress it. | ||
| Luckily, it's so crazy that like Fox and a lot of the more, I'd say, mainstream right-leaning outlets have covered it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But locally you don't hear much about it because unfortunately our local media is by and large like very left-leaning and they'll say, oh, it's a conspiracy theorist, you know. | ||
| Well, and I'm sure they don't use the term kidnapping. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're more supportive of young people who are being oppressed by their parents. | |
| Gender-affirming care. | ||
| Which is the most misleading term of all time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, 100%. | |
| Our editorial team doesn't use it, which I love. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| That was just the rule that they put out. | ||
| They're like, we're not going to use gender-affirming care because it's inaccurate and our job is to present. | ||
| Evenly sided information. | ||
| Even if there's stuff that you don't personally agree with, you are supposed to represent the other side. | ||
| But since they create the rules, now you step outside of the rules, they look at you and the editorial team as bad. | ||
| Well, and I will say, gender affirming care is easier to write than, like, gender-related medical intervention. | ||
| That's a little bit lumpier. | ||
| So when did you get into politics? | ||
| Like, were you going to school board meetings, you know, back when you were leaving the CIA? | ||
| Like, when did this become the thing that you wanted to do? | ||
| I kind of got thrust into it when, like I said, my late wife was killed in Syria. | ||
| She was killed a month after Trump tried to get our troops out. | ||
| I was actually deployed at the same time, too, and so I wasn't in Syria. | ||
| I was in Africa. | ||
| And you had young children at this point? | ||
| We did, yeah. | ||
| They're with my parents, one and three. | ||
| And so I was like, okay, I have to step aside from deploying and getting shot at for a living to take care of our kids and be a responsible father. | ||
| But I had a front row seat to basically the way the administrative state, the deep state, whatever you want to call it, was actively working against President Trump. | ||
| So I was in the military for the last two years. | ||
| The last two years of my career were the first two years of the Trump administration, and then I switched right over to the CIA. | ||
| And so I got to see the DOD, State Department, CIA, a lot of these folks at the mid to senior levels basically just say, we don't care what the Commander-in-Chief has to say. | ||
| Which to me was a shocker because I'm here. | ||
| I am a guy thinking that like I've been around for a while. | ||
| I've been in for 20 plus years. | ||
| I remember when Obama came in. | ||
| I didn't vote for Obama. | ||
| I didn't like Obama, but there was no part of me that thought like, well, we're just not going to do what the president says. | ||
| Who did you enlist under? | ||
| I enlisted under Clinton. | ||
| So I went in in 98. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I served all through Republicans and Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it was the first time you had ever... This was the first time, yeah, a hundred percent. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, when Obama first came into office, I had just switched over from being an enlisted guy to being an officer. | ||
| And, you know, we got read the riot act because I was at Green Beret and they were like, hey, we know a lot of you guys didn't vote for Obama, but like, remember he's the commander in chief. | ||
| And we, a lot of us were kind of insulted. | ||
| We're like, of course, like we took an oath to support and defend the constitution. | ||
| The American people might not have picked the guy that I like, but of course I'm going to. | ||
| You know, I'm going to salute and move out and do my job. | ||
| When eight, fast forward eight years later, Trump comes in and there was a brief, I think honeymoon period with Trump, especially when, because ISIS was so out of control, where Trump was like, okay, we're going to kick these guys asses. | ||
| And so there was some, there was some desire to like, you know, support the president when he was saying like, we're going to go and we're actually going to continue to fight. | ||
| We're going to fight even harder. | ||
| So Trump took the gloves off. | ||
| We beat ISIS. | ||
| We took away all the ground they controlled. | ||
| But then Trump did the unthinkable when he was like, yeah, and we're getting our troops out because that's what I ran on as a candidate. | ||
| And that's when the entire system melted down. | ||
| And so I got a front row seat to that. | ||
| And so after my wife was killed and I decided to resign. | ||
| I had an opportunity to meet Trump at Dover and I just told him, I was like, you know, you don't know who I am, but I've been fighting these wars for 20 plus years and you're getting it right. | ||
| I became a Trump supporter. | ||
| I recently got some more coverage back in the primary when Trump went after Jeb Bush on the debate stage and he was like, you know, your brother lied. | ||
| We got it wrong. | ||
| I was like, man, I have no idea how the guy from The Apprentice gets it. | ||
| Like, I don't know how the game show guy gets this better than all the so-called adults in the room. | ||
| But I'm hooked. | ||
| I like that guy. | ||
| But sometimes I wonder if it's because he felt like he could say it, whereas everyone else is like, no, we've got to play nice and we can't talk about it. | ||
| Yeah, the beauty of an outsider who's somebody who's not just emotionally invested, but then also the financial interest. | ||
| Like Trump knew that he wasn't getting a fat check from Lockheed or Raytheon anytime soon, so he was free to go after it. | ||
| So, you know, when I actually met Trump, I just told him like, yeah, you don't know who I am. | ||
| I've been fighting these wars for 20 plus years. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Your gut instincts don't listen to what you're being told by all the people in the Beltway. | ||
| And I thought nothing else was gonna come for that conversation, but he reached his team reached back out to me a little while later And so I did some advisory stuff with Trump worked on the Trump 2020 campaign veterans for Trump So when like the Atlantic magazine said Trump like Trump hates all the gold star families and stuff I do the rebuttal you were like that. | ||
| No, I was like, nope, actually, you know, what is that? | ||
| Like is like someone who worked closely with Trump to hear that he's anti-military or else you just throw it out or do you feel like you have to really undo some sort of terrible rumor? | ||
| I like to defend it because I think especially if you look at Trump's record of actually like respecting the American people and the American military enough to not have us bleed out on every single foreign battlefield like that to me like I don't care what your record is I don't care like if you were prior military or whatever like if you think that we should be continue to be involved in all these different wars like you're not supporting the troops like whereas like Trump at the end of the day he's the guy that said like we don't need to be in all these different places we need to put our own country first So I like to set the record straight. | ||
| And the guy's also very compassionate, very caring, which I got to see that side of him. | ||
| Not a lot of people did. | ||
| So yeah, I think it's good. | ||
| But I like to talk like substance, because there's a lot of people right now that are just like, oh, you know, the world was crazy under Trump. | ||
| And it's like, well, actually, no, it really... Point it out to me. | ||
| Tell me how it was crazy. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Tell me how it was crazy. | ||
| And especially, is it crazy for us to be out of these foreign entanglements? | ||
| If you look at the fact the guy started no new wars, The situation in Ukraine is a great example. | ||
| I mean, it was peace through strength. | ||
| It wasn't just Trump's bravado. | ||
| Yeah, some of that helps, I guess. | ||
| But at the end of the day, Trump made us energy independent. | ||
| He blocked, through diplomatic measures, he blocked Putin from being able to have a pipeline right into Europe. | ||
| And so Putin straight up didn't have the money in the bank. | ||
| But Putin also knew that Trump wasn't a globalist. | ||
| Trump had zero desire to expand NATO every five minutes up onto his border because Trump was worried about America. | ||
| So those things I think are important to really point out, especially as we're trying to, I think, develop a new ideology on the right that's not just the Bushes and the Cheneys, especially with foreign policy. | ||
| I think it's really important to have those discussions and Ask people what they think and why they think it, especially the guys that are like, hey, we need to be involved in this war in Ukraine or, you know, pick a country, you know, Lindsey Graham wants us to go to war there. | ||
| Knowing what you know now about the military, having been in it so long, has it like, do you want your kids to be in the military at some point? | ||
| Like, has it changed the way you saw that? | ||
| It's a tough question. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's actually my least favorite question. | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I grew up at a military base and I looked up, I was raised by cadets. | ||
| Mostly, you know, my parents were coaches and someone asked me this question of the day and I was like, I go back and forth. | ||
| As it is now, I'm like a no. | ||
| There's so many pros to having been in it, I'm sure. | ||
| I mean, for me, it was all I ever wanted to do. | ||
| I mean, so I highly recommend for people that they have that dream, you got to chase your dream. | ||
| The military is still, there's still good parts of it. | ||
| You just got to be very deliberate. | ||
| However, right now with the Biden administration, I have told people like right now, if my kids were 18, I would say, just go do something else. | ||
| It's not going to go anywhere. | ||
| Let's get Biden out of office and then go back in the way that when Biden came in and he basically said, we need to have an extremist stand down because half these people that I've been sending off the war for my entire career, I mean, Biden's voted for every single war as long as he's been in office. | ||
| He just comes in day one as commander in chief is like, and it turns out half of you guys are Nazis, you know, and then the VAX mandate, you know, and then the nonsense in Afghanistan. | ||
| It's just such a disgrace. | ||
| And then him putting in all the different whatever diversity, equity and inclusion czars at every level. | ||
| Like I've seen the decay of even the Military Academy, you know, over the years and how my parents have been coaches seeing, you know, what they're teaching crazy stuff at that school, which is baffling to me, right? | ||
| At West Point, right? | ||
| At West Point. | ||
| But then I also look at it, you know, when someone asked me that question, I was like, well, you learned discipline, right? | ||
| I looked up to these kids growing up, these young soldiers, and they had a discipline and a work ethic that I didn't see anywhere else, right? | ||
| Outside of that place. | ||
| So that's the pro I saw. | ||
| My brother enlisted when he was... the summer he turned 18, he still had to finish senior year of high school, but what he said at the time was like, I am not going to make it in college, I don't want to go, I'm going to fail out, I'm not interested in being there, and I want to be somewhere where I feel like I'm learning skills and developing as a person. | ||
| He enlisted in the Marine Corps and it really did change his whole life. | ||
| And I think for the best, he did ultimately feel like he was getting passed by people who had gone to college and didn't keep going. | ||
| But it is an interesting question because in today's day and age, I remember at the time, the conversation in our house was like, well, don't deploy. | ||
| We don't want you to deploy to Afghanistan, which he ultimately did. | ||
| But if you were going to, you know, if we're going to invade Mexico and defend the southern border, maybe that would be a worthy cause. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| We weren't going to do, but I think this is an interesting question because military recruitment is down. | ||
| People don't want to be in the military. | ||
| I've always wondered if that is part of the progressive culture's anti-military sentiment and I see it so often where, you know, especially young liberal women are like, I don't respect the military. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| There's a lot of issues and it's complicated, but it seems bizarre to have a blanket statement like that, especially when it comes from what to me is a classist perspective. | ||
| They're saying that basically they look down on you because they think they're smarter than you are, which is sort of crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we're having a crisis now of recruiting because like that same pool of like young patriotic, Americans who want to go forth and fight for their country, they right now are saying, like, wait a sec, these are the same people that look down on me, that talk down to me, that are doing everything they can to destroy our culture and our way of life. | ||
| Like, how about no? | ||
| How about I'm not going to enlist? | ||
| And you're getting generational military families that are telling their kids, like, maybe wait, maybe don't go in right now. | ||
| And they wonder, now they wonder why, like, oh, why is recruiting down so much? | ||
| And then another big issue too, that doesn't get covered as much as recruiting is retention. | ||
| I mean, the military runs on professionals. | ||
| Our military right now, because we don't have a draft, it runs on professional soldiers. | ||
| And the vast majority of guys I knew who were going to stay in to 20, 25 years, right when Biden came in, after about a year, they were like, I'm done. | ||
| As soon as I can get my retirement or as soon as I can see a window for me getting the heck out of here, I'm gone. | ||
| And that's experienced senior special operations guys. | ||
| Same thing with my friends that are pilots. | ||
| I mean, the crazy thing is Biden inherited the most battle-hardened military That we've ever had because every other war we fought up to the global war on terror, we had to have a draft and then we had to like demobilize it at the end of the war. | ||
| We had the same, I did 11 combat deployments. | ||
| I don't know very many people that did just like one or two. | ||
| We had a group that went over consistently and Biden inherited that and he is in just three years, not even three full years, he has gutted that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What I'd always read about military recruitment, I knew the thing about professional soldiers because already it's a narrow path, people leave more often than ever, but in terms of new recruits, very few young Americans are qualified to join the military. | ||
| And so the like 10% of people who are, Half of them are willing to do it. | ||
| So we are never going to make any recruitment goals. | ||
| But I found it interesting that, you know, the Marine Corps does tend to make its recruitment goals. | ||
| Branches of the military with a strong identity and set of core values, in my anecdotal observation, tend to be the ones that are successful. | ||
| And I think that speaks to this desire to have culture and community that I think really progressive culture doesn't have. | ||
| We're talking about this a little bit. | ||
| I'd asked you earlier, are there two sets of values And to me, one of the core tenets of being conservative is building these blocks of community at the family level and then your local community and then it goes up from there, whereas a lot of progressive energy is devoted to pursuing individual and basically selfish desire. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| A hundred percent. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, the Marines are definitely the smallest branch. | ||
| So I think it's like numbers wise, it's a little bit easier for them to hit their numbers, but you're right though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Special Forces. | ||
| But they do, Marines have an amazing culture. | ||
| Like they do as a guy that was in the Army. | ||
| I was in Ranger Regiment and then I was in Special Forces. | ||
| So we have our own culture too, but it's, you go in and you still go in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because you're an enclave of a larger branch, you tend to be able to stay in culture. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You go into general population too. | ||
| And that there's not as much of a culture. | ||
| The Marines have their, if you're, I was deployed a lot with the Marines, like they have their own very unique culture. | ||
| And there's a lot of legacy families in the Marine Corps too. | ||
| There's a lot of people who like their dad was in the Marines, their uncle was in the Marines, like they have a familial tie to it. | ||
| And so it's like, it is part of their identity very much. | ||
| And so now you're seeing, I think just because America is getting fatter and dumber too, like that's an issue. | ||
| Cause like the Marines don't play around. | ||
| They actually have really high standards. | ||
| The Army and the Navy, cause it's a bigger machine. | ||
| They'll tend to kind of play with the standards a little bit. | ||
| Well, I think the Army is the only branch you can get into if you have hand tattoos. | ||
| All the other branches you can't get into. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I could be slightly off on that one, but that's what I've heard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For a while there, the Marines wouldn't even let you have like sleeves, like you had to have. | ||
| Says the man with full sleeves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I was like, yeah. | ||
| I'm never going to make it. | ||
| I had to go with the Army. | ||
| But yeah, so the Marines still have pretty high standards. | ||
| I mean, and... But do you think that's what people want? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They want this call to like be higher than yourself? | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| And they want that culture. | ||
| Everything that we're told nowadays is toxic. | ||
| They want that toxic masculine culture. | ||
| And that's basically what the Marines are. | ||
| I hope they don't lose it with all this nonsense. | ||
| I think they're fighting it silently as hard as they possibly can. | ||
| But that probably speaks to why they're actually hitting their recruiting numbers. | ||
| Because people are still like, okay, that's something I can put my fingers on. | ||
| That's a real thing. | ||
| I want to be part of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do you feel like you're both dads of sons? | ||
| Do you feel like the culture of toxic masculinity is something you have to prepare them for? | ||
| Like being told that you are the problem because you're a man? | ||
| Just raise them like a good man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if someone defines that as toxic masculinity, I think that's... | ||
| Absurd, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And just keep them away. | ||
| I mean, I think you have to build your own culture. | ||
| I mean, I like to, uh, compare my childhood of my, my, like to my, the way my parents raised me. | ||
| I think parents like, uh, my parents are, uh, they had to be less deliberate. | ||
| They could just send their kids to a public school. | ||
| Every neighborhood had like boy scouts, there was football teams. | ||
| It was just like, that's, you know, it was, it was pretty easy to find. | ||
| There was masculine male role models everywhere. | ||
| Whereas now I don't think it's that way at all. | ||
| Like you've got to build your own community. | ||
| Like we have a jujitsu gym that we go to with our kids that specifically has a class for all the homeschool kids so they can interact. | ||
| But there's a lot of families there that we almost all share values with and same thing with our church. | ||
| So I think being deliberate is absolutely key and just shielding them from that nonsense until they're old enough to like filter and understand that like, Hey, this is propaganda coming from the people that want to make you weak. | ||
| That's an interesting line of dance when you're raising the kids. | ||
| It's like, you don't want to completely shield them because you don't want their brains to break when they enter this like other dimension. | ||
| You're like, what? | ||
| So it's like, I'm not telling them about it, but I'm also like, I'm preparing them. | ||
| I think what's changed for me the most is I didn't expect to, uh, become, uh, make religion so important in my life because I spent years without it. | ||
| And then I'd be like, this is the only anchor I have to give my kids in this crazy reality. | ||
| So hopefully that plus, you know, building that community and finding people that share values. | ||
| Yeah, you have to supply them with the blocks of community because otherwise they're just adrift on their own. | ||
| Really? | ||
| - Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| I didn't, that was one of the bigger changes that came through me. | ||
| Like my wife was a Christian. | ||
| I was not until recently, right? | ||
| And I was like, I need this for me. | ||
| But my son who's seven has been a Christian longer than me, right? | ||
| Which is funny, but like I knew that it needed to happen because it was getting so dark in the world that I keep saying it's like a non-reality. | ||
| And having that like a God-centered life was the only thing I think I know that is going to give him and my daughter A future to like, you know, ward off all this crazy stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think the churches are definitely key. | ||
| I mean, I grew up going to church, but I never considered myself to be like an overtly like super religious person. | ||
| I mean, I've always believed in God, always believed in Jesus, but, uh, but having kids, it's like, we've got to find a good church. | ||
| We've got to get them involved in the kids group, the jam group, whatever it is. | ||
| And just keep them in that community. | ||
| Cause we at least know that we share the most fundamental values with, with the people that they're going to be around. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Do you think that there's a relationship then between a culture that says, don't have kids and the culture that is non-religious? | ||
| I mean, they're kind of encouraging people to not find a church. | ||
| Cause I've heard this, you know, for a lot of people that when you have children, you go from being like, Oh, I go to church on Christmas and Easter with my parents to being like, we're going every Sunday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were being involved in this. | ||
| I feel like it's interesting to hear it from, from both of you that you guys chose to have children. | ||
| And again, it had that renewal of faith effect. | ||
| I mean, or complete creation of faith. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I had to. | ||
| It was just becoming too depraved everywhere else. | ||
| And we kind of had to, I don't want to say interview churches, but we had to scope out a lot of different ones. | ||
| There's pride flags on certain churches. | ||
| I'm not seven foot in those, but I have to make sure these are right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I send emails. | |
| I'll be like, please give me your stances on these things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you're not going to write them on your website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have to. | |
| I've done it once in person, and I will say I get a little bit awkward about it because you can't Yeah. | ||
| You wanna be like, I wanna keep coming here with an open mind, but also I know that these are fundamental values that I will not break. | ||
| And you know, 'cause I grew up Episcopalian. | ||
| So the Episcopalian church and the Church of England have shifted a lot, especially when it comes to transgender issues. | ||
| They are now saying like, well, maybe we should support kids to transition at any age and things like that. | ||
| And I just know that is against the doctrine, that's against theology. | ||
| And you're seeing the break in these things. | ||
| You'll see it a little bit with the Methodist Church or the Congregational Church. | ||
| They're starting to split. | ||
| And it began with the conversation around gay marriage. | ||
| And culturally, that's been the fastest changing issue in our generation, right? | ||
| Most people are like, have a great time, be married. | ||
| You know, we can't force churches to marry you, but if you want to be married in the eyes of the state, you know, we don't care about it. | ||
| But if you have a fundamentalist view of marriage, then, you know, it begins these conversations about like, well, what is marriage? | ||
| What is gender? | ||
| What is sexuality? | ||
| And things like that. | ||
| And churches are really falling apart at the seams as they try to debate these things. | ||
| I think seeing a lot of people who cared the least about lockdowns were also ones that didn't have kids. | ||
| You know, like, so I saw a lot of people who were saying, I just let the government steamroll all of us. | ||
| But meanwhile, we're like, you're almost hyper, you're, you are hypersensitive to all this tyranny because your kids are literally losing their future. | ||
| So like, you're, you're fighting that. | ||
| And, uh, this would be interesting to see how, cause I think the, The map has changed. | ||
| I mean you're talking about people moving from cities. | ||
| I saw people leave New York City to come where we were. | ||
| We left that part of New York down here and it's like every people you see people who are leaving California or going to Florida or whatever. | ||
| So it's gonna be interesting to see how that all changes in the next 10 years. | ||
| I mean I'm sure you felt it a little bit in the election. | ||
| Did you have people leave Seattle or did people flock to Seattle during COVID? | ||
| Oh, they left. | ||
| Yeah, they fled. | ||
| They fled the cities, especially after riots, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, big time. | ||
| There was a big exodus out of Seattle, Portland. | ||
| And then also, unfortunately, we've had a big exodus of conservatives from the state that are just leaving, going to Montana, Idaho. | ||
| I mean, I probably talk to conservatives, folks that are in my district that I know or share my values. | ||
| They're like, yeah, we were just out for the weekend in Montana looking at houses. | ||
| Like, don't go! | ||
| I'm like, where are you going to go? | ||
| I need your vote! | ||
| I was like, just wait, you know? | ||
| But we were talking about Texas before and it's like, I ask people like, where are you going to go? | ||
| I mean, because look, a lot of these folks, a lot of the people that voted for these bad policies, they're going to the same place as you are because they destroyed one area and now they're going to go to, I mean, I've heard people saying that, hey, there's a whole movement in some of the bigger cities in Montana to flip them blue as well. | ||
| So it's like, It's coming to your front door. | ||
| So I think you should just make a stand. | ||
| Obviously, like, if you got to get out of a big city like New York, Portland, like the big ones, I would get out of those. | ||
| But you do need to find your community and make a stand. | ||
| Especially if you have young children. | ||
| Like you were saying, you grew up not that far from the district you now live in. | ||
| So probably, if you have young children, you want them to be near family and people you know. | ||
| I think it's a lot easier to be like, well, I'll just leave when you're single, basically when you're unmarried or you're only married and you don't have any kids. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure you've had to make similar choices, Shane, about being like, we need our kids to be around the building blocks of a community that we would want to be a part of. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You can't do that if you're just picking them up and moving all the time to flee the blue wave. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're just, at that point too, you're just hoping for like an election or for someone, some other policymaker to save you, which I don't know. | ||
| I think you should just stay and get involved where you're at and fight. | ||
| Obviously there's some, some lost causes here and there, but for the most part, I think people got to get a digging heels. | ||
| You got to make a community. | ||
| And unfortunately it kind of, you know, it's, it's, it's a, it's a lot more work cause you have to be more deliberate, but it is, I feel much more connected like right now with my community. | ||
| And I feel like if we continue to be deliberate in the way that we are, like our kids will grow up in a great environment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That was one of the other kind of great things about COVID is like, I have to really set an example now for my kids. | ||
| And I didn't talk politics publicly, really. | ||
| I wrote other things for other magazines and then the riots happened, the lockdowns happened. | ||
| I was like, if I don't say anything now, I'm setting a bad example for my kids. | ||
| So I'm going to lose all my friends now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to speak out and we're going to move and all that stuff. | |
| But I'm glad I did. | ||
| I wouldn't change anything. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| It was just so bad. | ||
| This is a moment in history. | ||
| If we overcome it and we keep pushing, we actually stabilize the ship and bring back some sort of a common culture, people are going to say, hey, what did you do? | ||
| What were you doing in all those years where it seemed like we're going to lose the Republic? | ||
| And so people got a choice to make. | ||
| So what is the common culture? | ||
| If we could define our ideal common culture, knowing that not everyone's going to see eye to eye on everything, what would be the core values, in your opinion? | ||
| I mean, I think the core values of us taking care of our family and our country are huge and they're very fun. | ||
| And you can completely disagree on like, you know, political issues or whatever. | ||
| But at the end of the day, if you want to take care of your kids and you want people to actually get married and reproduce and have kids, I mean, I think it says something about the society. | ||
| When there is an entire movement that says, like, don't have kids, you know, kill your children, don't have kids. | ||
| Like, that just means your society's dying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or wait. | |
| That's what I always say. | ||
| Continue to wait. | ||
| Yeah, wait until it's... Freeze your eggs and just push it off. | ||
| Yeah, freeze your eggs and wait until you have, like, what, a four or five year window? | ||
| And then, like, I mean, that's just insane, you know? | ||
| But I think having a culture where it's like, hey, we value the family and we value our country. | ||
| Like, family and country are very, very real things that we fight for, we protect, and we help each other out, you know? | ||
| It's funny, because as you're saying that, I'm thinking of the Kennedy family, because this was something that I've read was a big part of this now, as we know, very Democrat family, right? | ||
| They're Catholics, so they had a lot of kids. | ||
| They were very family-oriented, and then they were also very service-oriented. | ||
| They were trained to be, you know, to think of their community and how they could serve it. | ||
| Obviously, I don't know that I would have picked the ways they chose to, but on the other hand, I would like to have neighbors who also value family and community service. | ||
| It's wild to see. | ||
| I mean, I'm just, we're seeing a lot of kids in our neighborhood who have meaninglessness. | ||
| Like they're not taught anything about, you know, I'm not even just talking about God. | ||
| I'm just talking about like in terms of work ethic or, you know. | ||
| Caring at school or everything is very nihilistic, which is one of those things that I'm trying to shield my son from now because it seems like a lot of his friends who aren't at his school or in his church, they're very, you know, down and out and they're young, right? | ||
| And I don't know if they're absorbing that from their parents or from being on the TV too long, but that is one thing that's really bothering me. | ||
| It's like, Are those kids going to be able to turn around? | ||
| So I'm trying to set an example for them as much as I can. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Right. | ||
| But do those kids just get worse growing up or is it nihilism? | ||
| Do they flip it somehow? | ||
| Is their rebellion going to be to rebel against nihilism growing up? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| There is an increase in young people who are going to church. | ||
| I mean, we are seeing a sort of strange conservative echo chamber as people look for community in a way they never had it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it is interesting to see these very small shifts. | |
| I think it was 2019 I started seeing the reports of Gen Z is the most conservative generation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When you look at it, it's like they are slightly more conservative. | |
| They are majority so left-leaning, but that's still in some ways an interesting progress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We always I always hear the term the pendulum swings, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now what does that mean when we start to see a church going to a interested like young people? | ||
| You know, you're going to have these hippie parents who are like, no, are you sure you don't want to change your gender? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And their kids are going to be like reading the Bible, like, please, I want to save you. | |
| I mean, I joke around all the time that like growing up in Portland, the most rebellious thing I could do was like enlist in the army and go to the ranger regiment or whatever. | ||
| But I think there's a fact, there's a degree of that. | ||
| But I think you're right though. | ||
| If you, if you look at like what culture is feeding people, it's hopeless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's hopeless. | |
| I mean, like, what, what do you, I mean, you can't even convince people right now to like do basic things, like join the military, like have a family, like we're attacking, like having a family, we're attacking serving your country. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| So then if, if we take those things off, what, what's left? | ||
| Like to become a TikTok, YouTube star, materialism? | ||
| You constantly seek affirmation from the internet, the vague and faceless internet. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, it's crazy. | ||
| And then we wonder why we have a mental health crisis, you know, we just continue to feed people drugs. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| That's it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Here, have some drugs or whatever. | ||
| That'll make everything better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some of these to balance you out a little bit. | ||
| But yeah, I think if we, if we can really just highlight how there's nothing else there, like that's, that's all they have. | ||
| And over here on this other side, there is some hope. | ||
| I think we could eventually get back some kind of a common culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sometimes I think the best thing conservatives could do is just, like, have more fun. | |
| True. | ||
| Like, there was that list that came out, do you remember this? | ||
| A couple months ago, and it was, like, reasons to have kids, reasons not to have kids, and the reasons not to have kids is by some, like, feminist. | ||
| It was, like, 250- Chelsea Handler? | ||
| Maybe, I can't even remember. | ||
| But it was, like, 250 things wrong, and the reasons to have kids were, like, sometimes they'll mow your lawn for you or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, goodness. | |
| It's, like, very self-serving. | ||
| And I find this to be, like, The opposite. | ||
| Like, if you get lost in the Instagram algorithm of, like, young moms who will be like, yeah, it's hard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
These children cry and are difficult at times. | |
| They always say it's worth it. | ||
| They always find value in this. | ||
| And I think that's what we don't stress enough to people, like the positivity and the optimism. | ||
| Even when, you know, you don't have the freedom you might have when you're young, enjoy it while you're young, but then don't feel like having children or even a step back, getting married. | ||
| I think so many people look at marriage as this Trap, you know that you are suddenly shackled to this person who is just always going to be a disappointment to you and that that I mean, I'm not married but that pot that can't be true, right? | ||
| No, it's sad. | ||
| Yeah, it's sad that people think that way. | ||
| Oh, yeah, and I think most that's just propaganda too because if you look at just like none of us would be here if people didn't get didn't get married and reproduce and have kids like the human figure out a way. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| No, my heart unfolded infinitely after getting married and then having kids like the hearing your kids like voice and laugh for the first time. | ||
| So I try to have hope despite all the darkness because it's it's dark. | ||
| Yeah, nothing having those kids and having a wife. | ||
| It makes it all like you're you're fine, you know, and I think of my grandparents who they fled terrible stuff like they let they fled like the pogroms right or they came here and they were raising kids during all the assassinations of the 60s. | ||
| So I know it's bad, and it's bad now, too. | ||
| Maybe worse in other depraved ways, but you have to have that like I think I think that's the big threat to this culture of like serve the self and and look for affirmation online if you have core people who you love and whose opinion you value your spouse your children your family the people you actually interact with every day in your community | ||
| Then you don't need the affirmation of you know hundreds thousand of online followers who don't really know you and I think that Structure of having this this dopamine injection in your pocket every five seconds is sort of one of the biggest challenges to family and moving forward Because if you could find value on the internet, which is not real value, then you aren't wiring yourself to seek it in real life. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's very true. | ||
| I'm really lucky, my parents, they just had their 45th wedding anniversary, so they'd been married for a very long time, had lots of kids, and it's funny, like, the older you get, the more you realize, man, my parents actually had it figured out. | ||
| Like, when I was a teenager, I thought they didn't know anything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But I bet they didn't! | |
| Like, that's the craziest thing. | ||
| I think so many people feel like they have to have life figured out to move forward. | ||
| There's an anxiety about it, but really, like, You were you figure things out as you go along these things are you're supposed to build community around you in a positive way right yeah and that's part of it having someone who you figure out life with. | ||
| Exactly my parents were just like well you know find someone that you love and then have kids like that and i was like what kind of advice is that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Like, what about my career goals and all that other stuff? | ||
| But like now, now that I'm in my forties, I'm like, they were right. | ||
| Actually, that's like the most simple, basic advice. | ||
| Figure out all the rest, all the other stuff, you know? | ||
| But then other than that, like that's, that's the really important thing is building a solid foundation of family. | ||
| It's the greatest risk I ever took was having like taking that leap of getting married and having kids. | ||
| And meanwhile, I'm surrounded by a lot of people who, They're just, my friends from like college are just now having kids. | ||
| - Yeah. - You know, I've been a dad for seven years now, but now they're starting and they're starting late, but they have to like get all these other things in order first. | ||
| - Yeah. | ||
| - And I was like, when we had a kid, we only had a few hundred dollars in the bank, right? | ||
| We left with very little. | ||
| - Yeah. - And I was driving all over the New York to work at various jobs, but we made it work, right? | ||
| And people keep telling me, oh, I don't have enough money. | ||
| I'm like, trust me, you will make it work somehow. | ||
| Yeah, you'll never be fully ready. | ||
| Nothing will always be something else. | ||
| Exactly, exactly. | ||
| Well, and that's what I hear a lot with all of the steps towards what's called adulthood, even though I actually don't like that word at all. | ||
| You know, I do feel, we were talking about this earlier with student loans, like, I feel sad for people who are, like, stuck with these massive student loans because they were told this is the way forward, right? | ||
| I mean, similar to the military, it's also true of, like, firefighters and everyone else, like, people join unions. | ||
| There were steps that people were supposed to be able to take to join the middle class and to have these, like, moments of the American dream, buying a house, being able to start a family, being able to, like, leave your kids a little better off than you were, right? | ||
| And now, It is a depressing state of the world to be like, I don't know if I'm going to be able to buy a house and this one millionaire saying I make avocado toast and that's why I can't, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's just, it is a difficult thing to go into. | ||
| On the other hand, you shouldn't live in fear of them. | ||
| You can make things work. | ||
| You can make things better. | ||
| Yeah, you make it work. | ||
| But we do need to hold accountable the people that that sold that dream out. | ||
| I mean, because literally the the environment that like our parents were raised in is completely different. | ||
| Because at the time, you could leave college, you could leave high school and get a decent paying job you can support a family on. | ||
| But that all got shipped overseas for the most part, you know, and then all these other all the other institutional rot that I think really just a lot of greedy elites have taken advantage of. | ||
| Now it's like we're at this point where it is very, very challenging. | ||
| People can make it work. | ||
| But you're right, it is very challenging. | ||
| If you Played by the rules and he went and took a bunch of student loans. | ||
| Like now you kind of are screwed. | ||
| Like you're not going to be able to purchase a house or start a family at the same time that your parents did. | ||
| So kind of like all their old advice, it's like, I can't bootstrap my way out of this one. | ||
| Maybe you can, but like good on you. | ||
| But for the most part, everybody can't. | ||
| And then like your traditional institutions of like, well, then you can just join the military and say, well, great. | ||
| Well, what am I getting myself into now? | ||
| You know, like, so I do see, I can see why it's dark out there for sure. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I think it's so interesting to see, we had this generation of learn to code, but now it's like learn to farm, learn to be an electrician, learn to wire something. | ||
| Then you would be able to buy a house right now because you'd be making actual money. | ||
| And that was a secret that we did not talk about because, again, we were sold this idea that college is really the thing. | ||
| After all of these steps towards trying to move into the middle class, it's It is disheartening. | ||
| I think for some people look how good the trace people did during lockdowns. | ||
| Oh, yeah Killing it. | ||
| Yeah, they were great and the people who went to college and got some BS degree. | ||
| Yeah, we're hurting waiting for their stimulus check exactly The crazy thing is it's all it wasn't a force of nature that did it It wasn't like it didn't have to be this way and because it was done it can be undone I think that's the thing for folks to To concentrate on and vote and organize accordingly. | ||
| We can make systemic fixes. | ||
| It's not going to happen overnight. | ||
| It's not going to happen in one election cycle. | ||
| But if we identify what the key problems are, I think especially if we get the economics right and we start bringing back a lot of the manufacturing, we have more protectionist trade policies, immigration, those types of things. | ||
| We can create that economic environment, but then we have a lot of work to do in the culture. | ||
| Where we say, hey, look, the opportunity is there, like, let's get back to actually valuing family because you can have all these things. | ||
| And I think in some ways, like, trusting young people to become good adults. | ||
| Like, I think about, probably this is an issue that comes from Washington, the long haul trucking industry, you can't get into it when you're 18, you have to be 20 to start. | ||
| But that means if you leave high school, not wanting to go to college, You have to do something else for two years. | ||
| And at that point, you've already started a career. | ||
| You're unlikely to then turn into this industry that is now dying off. | ||
| They desperately need people to join. | ||
| And I find this fascinating because the justification for not letting 18-year-olds drive semi-trucks is they're not good drivers, we don't trust them. | ||
| Which is sort of bizarre because let's just send men who have families on the road for long periods of time and make their home lives unstable and then create all kinds of problems. | ||
| And if there's a war they'll give him a tank to drive. | ||
| They'll give him a tank to drive! | ||
| Then it's okay! | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| I think this is the strange thing about our culture. | ||
| It's like we say that we love the young people and at the same time we don't hold them to a standard of being able to be effective. | ||
| We were talking a little bit earlier about, you know, you were saying the kids at community college. | ||
| had something they wanted. | ||
| And the four-year institutions and the private schools, you know, they're there kind of being babysat. | ||
| That was my experience in college. | ||
| There were some people who were really passionate, were driven, had something to do. | ||
| And then you had other people, I remember talking to this one girl and she was saying, "Well, I'm gonna get my master's 'cause I don't really wanna be an adult yet." You wanna be like, "You're gonna spend how much money getting a master's degree to then what?" - It's procrastination through debt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But we did in our legislation laws, with the example being long haul trucking, tell them, well, we don't really trust you to do the work. | ||
| We don't trust you to do the things. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's so much that is excessive government regulation. | ||
| I mean, even when I was a kid, which wasn't that long ago, you could get summer jobs. | ||
| I think from the time you were like 14 on, you could work fast food, you could go stock the shelves at the grocery store, but now kids can't do that. | ||
| And so like they don't get to take these intermittent steps into adulthood. | ||
| Or go and like, hey, if a 16 year old wants to eventually be a long haul trucker, like why isn't there a program where he, you know, learns how to inspect the vehicle? | ||
| He learned some basics of driving, like those types of things, you know? | ||
| We have a real issue right now that most of our, you know, electric grid and everything we rely on is heavily, you know, digitized and the Chinese can hack into all that. | ||
| And so why don't we have backup analog systems? | ||
| Like, why aren't we teaching people these types of things that a long time ago were Offshore, or yeah, offshore. | ||
| Why don't we just bring those back? | ||
| I mean, I think that's key, but also let young kids actually get out there and work. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Do you think there's a nimbyism to it? | ||
| Like with manufacturing jobs, no one wants the factory to be in their neighborhood. | ||
| Do you think that feeds into the resistance to bring it back? | ||
| Or do you think American culture would be happy to see manufacturing jobs return? | ||
| I mean, I think American culture would be happy to see him back in the areas where they were taken from, in particular. | ||
| Because when those factories leave, we had a paper mill in one of our cities that basically got bought up by Koch Industries. | ||
| The Koch brothers gutted it out. | ||
| It used to employ about a thousand people. | ||
| Now it only employs about a hundred. | ||
| But with that, it's like a vacuum when those leave. | ||
| It's because it's not just the factory jobs. | ||
| It's everything that supported the factory. | ||
| And so you have people who, you know, they ran the restaurant across the way for it. | ||
| They provided the uniforms for the work. | ||
| Like all of that just gets sucked out in one, one sweeping blow, essentially. | ||
| So if there was a way to start bringing those jobs back, I think most of these communities would be like, Oh, absolutely. | ||
| This is jobs. | ||
| This is money for our, for our people. | ||
| This is like, this is going to give my 18, 19 year old a way that he can actually get a job and start saving up for a family. | ||
| Yeah, and again, I'm gonna go back to, I don't understand why the left isn't screaming for them to come back because, as we know, China doesn't observe environmental or human rights standards when it comes to work, so why are we letting them do this? | ||
| Like, this is the thing that bothers me about, and I hate to get too, like, partisan about it, but if you're left-leaning and you're not screaming to get the manufacturing jobs back to America, Purely on humanitarian reasons, because we are harming children in other countries, then what are you doing? | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| How can you say that you're this compassionate party when you don't hold yourself accountable to a global standard? | ||
| If we're a globalist world, which I personally hate, then why don't you apply these standards to children outside of the US? | ||
| Because it's false compassion. | ||
| Yeah, if you don't already know. | ||
| And financial incentives, too. | ||
| This is why we gotta flip the paradigm on the conservative side, where conservatives are like, we can't go after these big businesses, because if we do that, we're socialists and we're communists. | ||
| Well, these guys are destroying the country. | ||
| And the vast majority of them are hardcore, progressive, woke, globalist Democrats, and they're not doing anything for the country. | ||
| They're benefiting from our system. | ||
| They're shipping our jobs overseas. | ||
| They're using hedge funds like BlackRock, essentially, to rob us of our pension funds. | ||
| And then they're investing it overseas. | ||
| So what are they actually doing for the country? | ||
| So I think if we can actually flip that paradigm on the right. | ||
| And then also, I mean, the left is like the progressives, the squad, all these guys. | ||
| It's like, okay, so now you guys are pro-war. | ||
| You don't want to go after the major global corporations. | ||
| You don't want to protect American jobs. | ||
| What are you progressive about? | ||
| And then they'll just put up a rainbow flag with a little trans thing on it. | ||
| That's the one thing I got, you know, I want to I want to send men into your daughter's bathroom like that's okay I guess that's where the progressive left is at. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's men into your bathroom, but then also we're talking about migration issues earlier I've known people to pull kids from their school districts because the schools are then opening classes for adult male migrants and you want to say like I don't want to take any risks with my child. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like It's not worth the gamble and I'm sorry that you, school district, have decided that it is. | ||
| I think we don't see these things because we're told to question them is to be bigoted or racist or whatever. | ||
| There's so much fear of these labels that we restrict the conversations we have and we suspend logic to allow these things to happen. | ||
| And it's a, I mean, it's like kind of a elite privilege to, to not say anything about that because the people that are affected first by all the illegal immigrants coming in, it's the lowest part of the working class. | ||
| It's the folks that are struggling to get out of poverty already that have their job undercut by the illegal immigrant. | ||
| They can't afford to homeschool. | ||
| They can't afford to send their kids to a private school. | ||
| So their kids are now in school getting resources taken away from them because now there's illegal immigrants in the school. | ||
| So, I mean, the Democrats always take the moral high ground and say, like, oh, we have to be more compassionate. | ||
| It's like, well, none of you guys are affected by it. | ||
| They're saying you have to be more compassionate. | ||
| Yeah, they're saying you guys have to deal with this. | ||
| It's just like with the riots and all that. | ||
| Most of them are living in gated communities. | ||
| They're like, yeah, defund the police. | ||
| It's like, well, this isn't your shop that's getting busted up. | ||
| It's not your daughter that's getting assaulted on the streets. | ||
| You're not paying the price for the choices you're making. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Yeah, that's why the federal government needs to be reined in. | ||
| I was listening to an interview with you recently, or maybe it was a few months ago, but the federal government trying to tell you people in your district that can't take care of the sea lion problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So like they don't have any idea. | ||
| What's your sea lion problem? | ||
| Well, there's a sea lion problem. | ||
| Sea lions come in from the Pacific. | ||
| Would you call it a form of illegal immigration? | ||
| It is illegal immigration. | ||
| They're a predatory species. | ||
| So because of the Endangered Species Act, the sea lions, a long time ago, in the late 70s, got put on the endangered species list. | ||
| And since then, they have drastically reproduced. | ||
| They're no longer endangered? | ||
| They are no longer endangered. | ||
| Now they come and they eat up our salmon. | ||
| And so they're an absolute menace to the fishing industry. | ||
| However, no one's allowed to kill them. | ||
| Some of the Native American tribes are allowed to kill a handful every year. | ||
| But when I was a kid, you wouldn't really see them too far east in the Columbia River, but now they swim up all the major tributaries and they're just out there because there's great food sources. | ||
| So they're just out there chowing down on all the salmon that our fishermen rely on. | ||
| So it's a big issue, but we have bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. | ||
| who, number one, want to control how many fish we can actually pull out of the river, who have no idea about how the salmon runs actually work. | ||
| But then we also have bureaucrats that are like, hey, you guys can't go and take care of this sea lion problem. | ||
| Bureaucrats who probably have no ties to your state. | ||
| No ties whatsoever. | ||
| It's all coming from the federal government. | ||
| There was a time I was covering pretty intensely Maine's lobstering industry because the federal government said this huge portion of the Gulf of Maine, you can't fish in. | ||
| You can't do this during peak season. | ||
| And they're like, you're actually killing our industry. | ||
| And then a couple months later, Biden had lobster from Maine served at their state dinner. | ||
| And you want to say, like, you obviously do not understand, like, you want our product, but you will not let us sustain... I mean, a lot of people who work in these lobstering industries, it's a family business, and I'm sure it's similar with the salmon industry. | ||
| My favorite justification for this in Maine was, there have been deaths of the right whale, that's the breed, and we have to stop it. | ||
| Well, the deaths only occurred in Canada, and the Canadian government did nothing about it, and they also happened more than a decade ago. | ||
| So literally nothing caused them to restrict the biggest industry in Maine. | ||
| And that seems crazy to me. | ||
| And it sounds similar. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right. | ||
| With no thought. | ||
| I mean, I don't want the sea lions to die, but if they're not in danger anymore, it makes sense. | ||
| There has to be a relationship between nature and people who live there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's a big issue. | ||
| And then also just the way that the salmon runs are regulated. | ||
| Like every year, the federal government will put a cap on how many fish can be pulled out of the river. | ||
| What's it based on? | ||
| It is based on an estimate that they make about a year out. | ||
| And so if they're wrong, but the thing is with technology, we count them, we count the salmon that are coming through the different dams, different fish ladders. | ||
| So we get like day to day. | ||
| And so like this last year, we had a historically huge run, but the federal government made their projection like a year ahead of time. | ||
| And so right before Labor Day, which is like people had plane tickets bought, like it's a big fishing destination. | ||
| They said no more fishing. | ||
| So we lost, I think, millions of dollars going to the district. | ||
| Commercial fishermen, a lot of our river guides were just absolutely furious because people who had invested in coming up and fishing during Labor Day, all that was taken away. | ||
| All the hotels, all the basic tourism economy that these people rely on for the rest of the year cut off because Washington, D.C. | ||
| couldn't bother to have their systems updated to what the current head count of fish was. | ||
| Well, and why should they get to set the standard? | ||
| Is this where the REINS Act comes in? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Is that passed? | ||
| Pretty much every Democrat voted against it. | ||
| Do you want to give a rundown of what that is? | ||
| REINS Act, I can't remember off the top of my head exactly what it stands for. | ||
| It's like reining in excessive government regulation, but basically this would restore the power back to Congress because Congress, the legislative branch, You know, they're elected by the people and they're supposed to make the laws, but what we've had in our country for far too long is unelected bureaucrats in our agencies basically passing laws through regulation. | ||
| So the Reins Act says if you exceed a certain price tag, I think off the top of my head it's like a couple million, I think it's like three or four million dollars. | ||
| If your regulation is going to cost three or four million dollars, then it's not a regulation that is, the agencies don't have the power to make that regulation. | ||
| It has to go before Congress and actually be passed as a law. | ||
| So it would start to claw back a ton of government overreach. | ||
| It's very similar to the EPA versus West Virginia Supreme Court case. | ||
| That's a Rand Paul. | ||
| I think he's backing that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It'd be great. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's insane how they can control something that has no effect on their lives or they know nothing about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| That's how the government is run. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| For now. | ||
| The fourth French government. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| I feel like Washington, D.C. | ||
| is the bureaucratic state of America. | ||
| There's just so much regulation coming out from people you'll never know or vote on. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they know that, too. | ||
| They know that they endure. | ||
| They know how the system works. | ||
| They know the sausage is made. | ||
| I mean, that's why the fiscal responsibility is another thing we've got to bring back. | ||
| Not only are we running out of money, and that's the main issue, but also it's just like we keep funding all these agencies that basically, like the Department of Defense, they haven't passed an audit, I think, in the last two decades. | ||
| They can't tell us where our money is actually going. | ||
| But they would like more of it. | ||
| But they would like more of it like right now. | ||
| And if you don't want to give them more money right now, then you probably love Vladimir Putin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So it's just like crazy how they find out who loves Vladimir Putin but who won't give them money. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think fiscal responsibility where we actually make the government present to us like we are going to take in this much money and we are going to spend this much money specifically in these different areas. | ||
| I don't feel like that should be something that you need a special decoder ring to figure out. | ||
| So if and when you go to Congress, is this what you see yourself pursuing? | ||
| Like, what do you see as being your biggest objective? | ||
| Or where do you see yourself? | ||
| Look, I think the fiscal issues are massive. | ||
| The debt crisis, I think, is very real. | ||
| And number one, I think that affects people's everyday lives. | ||
| Like, I mean, people are having a month of their wages stolen by inflation. | ||
| So we've got to figure that out. | ||
| We've got to get back to being energy independent. | ||
| We've got to be fiscally responsible. | ||
| We have to stop printing all that money. | ||
| Just to make sure that people can actually have a decent standard of living. | ||
| But also because I think that's one of our biggest national security threats right now. | ||
| If you look at everything that China is doing on the world stage to erode the power of the dollar, what they're doing right now with OPEC killing off the petrodollar, this is a major threat. | ||
| If we lose our status or if our status as the prime reserve currency holder is even eroded, that's basically all we export right now is dollars because of what we've done for our manufacturing base. | ||
| So we've got to get serious, I think, about fiscal responsibility. | ||
| Do you see anything that you could possibly have a bipartisan deal with with people on the other across the aisle? | ||
| I think that's massive. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then rolling back government regulation and protecting kids, I think is huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you see anything that you could possibly have a bipartisan deal with with people on the other across the aisle? | ||
| Like, is there anything, any avenues you could see work with them? | ||
| You know, Matt Gaetz has made some pretty impressive, I think, headway with getting the Democrats back to some of them being a little more anti-war. | ||
| The War Powers Resolutions that he's put forward, I think, have been really, really important. | ||
| My Democrat opponent, who never served a day in her life, she voted to keep our troops in Syria. | ||
| And then like not a month later, we lost an American contractor to hostile fire. | ||
| We just had a helicopter crash there, where we had to have 15 service members evacuated. | ||
| And so it's like, I think there's just this group think right now in the Democrat party where they've become the war machine very much. | ||
| And there's still enough Republicans that are a part of it too. | ||
| So I think that there's some good bipartisan cooperation we could have on, hey, like, let's, let's form a coalition. | ||
| And it might be like the far right and the far left, like where we come together and just say, Hey, we're going to stop funding the war machine. | ||
| We're going to hold them accountable. | ||
| I think that's huge. | ||
| I think there's some potential if we could get them back to some of their populist roots of like, Hey, let's do the right thing for the American workers. | ||
| You know, like, It's going to be hard though. | ||
| I don't think it's going to happen overnight. | ||
| I think things are very polarized right now. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| Would you join the Freedom Caucus if you, yeah? | ||
| I would, yeah. | ||
| I was endorsed by the Freedom Caucus last time. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Hopefully I'll be endorsed by them again this time if they're watching. | ||
| But yeah, I would definitely. | ||
| Those are the types of guys I'm aligned with. | ||
| That's where you see yourself. | ||
| Is that helpful, like going into Congress, kind of seeing where your allies are? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| I mean, you want to know who's 100% ideologically aligned with you, and then who the other guys are. | ||
| You're going to have to compromise more and bring them over to your side. | ||
| The cool thing, I think, about the Republican caucus writ large is that we do have different wings of it, and we do disagree, and you do see Republicans vote in different ways, whereas the Democrats are like a military unit. | ||
| Some of them will use different rhetoric here and there, but when it comes time for them to whip a vote, man, they whip a vote. | ||
| You know, which sort of impresses me, but at the same time, like, is that exactly what you want to be a part of? | ||
| Like, I want to be a part of the group that includes multiple different points of view, and we're attempting to do the right thing for the American people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Finding strength through compromise. | ||
| I've wondered at times, I always hear in the media, oh, Republicans are falling apart and there's so much infighting. | ||
| And it does feel that way, especially if you live on, like, conservative Twitter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I have wondered if we're more public with our disagreements because we're more open about what we disagree about. | ||
| I think there is a lot of infighting with the Democrats. | ||
| They just hide it better. | ||
| They do. | ||
| And you have Republicans that have, I think, a lot stronger courage of their convictions where they'll be like, I will not vote that way. | ||
| And I will go out in front of the cameras and I will say I'm not going to vote that way and I'll explain why. | ||
| And then the Democrats, they might have their disagreements behind closed doors and maybe there's some snarky tweets here and there. | ||
| But when it comes time to whip that vote, man, those guys are a military unit. | ||
| Which plays to their strengths on a lot of occasions. | ||
| No, it totally does. | ||
| With the politics of pure power, it 100% plays to their strengths. | ||
| Because I think a lot of the Democrat machine is just like, we have power. | ||
| We will use it. | ||
| We will wield it. | ||
| We don't need to explain it. | ||
| We don't even need to have someone with any charisma go out there. | ||
| We can put Biden and Fetterman out there and just show you guys. | ||
| That's just like a power flex of how organized we actually are. | ||
| We can put these two knuckleheads out here. | ||
| When Biden went to Northern Ireland, or I think it was just Ireland, and he said at the end of his speech, I don't want to go home. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was like, okay. | |
| How about when he said God save the Queen, man? | ||
| Yeah, in Connecticut. | ||
| He mixed up England and New England. | ||
| He's in Connecticut saying God save the Queen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it is a power play. | ||
| Just put them out. | ||
| We can do anything. | ||
| We can ballot harvest. | ||
| We got this, man. | ||
| We control who counts the votes. | ||
| Just keep propping Biden out. | ||
| It's totally wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do you see as being your biggest challenge the next about year out from your election? | ||
| So fundraising is always a challenge. | ||
| That's always an issue. | ||
| I mean, because we rely a lot on small dollar donors and the economy right now is really hurting a lot of our small dollar donors. | ||
| Talk to people all the time that are like, hey, you know, I gave you 500 bucks last time. | ||
| I can't do that this time. | ||
| So that's a challenge. | ||
| Another challenge, the biggest fear that I have is Republican apathy, to be honest with you. | ||
| I mean, after 2020 and 2022, a lot of our people either saying they're going to move or just like, you know what, I invested too much last time. | ||
| Like, I just don't care. | ||
| It's all rigged. | ||
| I think that that's a challenge. | ||
| So I pretty much work every day on trying to tell people that, hey, there's, if we keep pushing hard, like we can actually turn the ship around. | ||
| Don't let them win by you not participating. | ||
| That's a, that's a big challenge. | ||
| And then the media is always a challenge. | ||
| That's why I appreciate you guys. | ||
| Cause you guys help us punch through the nonsense of the mainstream media and the more the mainstream media like be clowns themselves, which they do frequently, the more powerful you guys get. | ||
| And so that actually gives us a voice, but just punching through the media because they will just, they'll barrage anybody who speaks out against them with like, you know, Far right wing extremists. | ||
| And then that like low information voter, they're like, I don't want to vote for an extremist. | ||
| You know, they, you scare them, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They use the labels to, to peel people away. | ||
| Especially when the labels don't, these, these words stop meaning things to me. | ||
| They don't mean anything. | ||
| They killed language. | ||
| We have experienced a death of language. | ||
| And that's why it was interesting to me when I was watching the local broadcast with you out there, the way they qualify all of you, right? | ||
| Didn't you tell them that you would only do live interviews with some of those? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why. | ||
| We've had to set some pretty harsh parameters with it. | ||
| Lessons learned. | ||
| Live interviews, or I know people who will only do interviews if they can also record and post a copy of the transcript. | ||
| It's like you get taken out of context. | ||
| I mean, it's, I hate to say this because I'd love to have a media that really did give information. | ||
| It's just not the media that we have in today's day and age. | ||
| That was one of the first institutions to die with COVID. | ||
| Except for TimCast News, which you should all look at immediately. | ||
| You guys have grown. | ||
| We have. | ||
| It's been a wild ride. | ||
| But OK, so I have to ask, it is a major election year. | ||
| Who are you voting for in 2024? | ||
| President Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm a Trump guy. | ||
| Happy to tell people why. | ||
| I mean, basically kind of outlined it, especially with the foreign policy. | ||
| I mean, he's tried and he's tried and true. | ||
| I mean, the guy's got his faults 100 percent. | ||
| I think he's uniquely suited for this era that we're in right now. | ||
| This would be the last time that he could run and hold office so he doesn't have to worry about his next election. | ||
| He is independently wealthy and so he has been able to absorb a lot of the attacks in a way that I think someone like Ron DeSantis or myself, we just couldn't because DeSantis is not independently wealthy. | ||
| He has young children. | ||
| The administrative state is going to try and rip apart the next person who is a threat to them. | ||
| We've already seen what they're trying to do to Trump and he's still continuing to stand in the breach. | ||
| And so for me, That alone, you know, is why I'm voting for Trump. | ||
| That said, whoever the Republican nominee is, I'll gladly support. | ||
| Especially for my last race, we learned that if Republicans are divided, the Democrats win. | ||
| So I know there's a lot of back and forth of like, Trump, DeSantis, not really with the other candidates, you don't hear too much about them, but the polarization that's growing between those two camps really concerns me. | ||
| I got nothing bad to say about DeSantis. | ||
| If he ends up being the nominee, I will gladly vote for him, help him campaign or whatever. | ||
| Did your incumbent that you defeated, did she endorse you? | ||
| She didn't endorse you. | ||
| She did not endorse me. | ||
| Did she endorse anyone? | ||
| No, she just kind of faded off. | ||
| She's teaching a Harvard course now with Adam Kissinger. | ||
| Well, that says a lot. | ||
| That's what everyone who stops being in politics does. | ||
| They go into academia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think Liz Cheney's doing the same thing at UVA. | |
| Is there anything that you want to see happen in 2024? | ||
| Do you have any big predictions in Washington or outside of Washington? | ||
| Well, I want to see me win, obviously. | ||
| But I would like to see the red wave that we were supposed to have in 2022. | ||
| I hope that we can get folks out there more mobilized. | ||
| I hope we get our ballot harvesting game down. | ||
| I also want to see us, hopefully, and this is probably more of a national Republican thing, I want to see us be more prepared. | ||
| For legal challenges the Democrats are really good at election fortification as they as they call it And they've already started a lot of it like in New York right now in Washington State. | ||
| They're trying to get rid of signature verification Because you know it's not bad enough that we send out ballots now. | ||
| We're we want to get rid of signature verification So I think we need to be much more prepared to wage lawfare. | ||
| Yeah, so that we don't have to just accept a loss that we know is There might have been some shenanigans on the backside. | ||
| But I think the Republican unity and the mobilization is absolutely key in 24. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And are you feeling good about it? | ||
| What are the early signs from someone who's on the campaign trail? | ||
| I feel good about it. | ||
| I mean, I've already gotten four county level endorsements. | ||
| That wasn't happening at this time last cycle. | ||
| The counties were really kind of divided on which Republican candidates to support. | ||
| I think everybody realizes now that unity is a big thing. | ||
| And then Everybody from like the local county levels all the way to the state levels and the national levels, they're talking about ballot harvesting. | ||
| I've been to multiple events now where we actually have activists come in. | ||
| I think Scott Pressler is going to come out to the district and help us out with some round game there as well. | ||
| So people are saying the right things. | ||
| I feel like that mentality has taken like a 180 in the last year of like, we hate mail-out voting. | ||
| We're all going to vote on election day to like, we need to ballot harvest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is really, which is a very good thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a proactivity now that maybe wasn't there before. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So is there anything you don't think will happen in the next year? | ||
| Like are there any things that you are confident about? | ||
| That I don't think will happen? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, do you think that we're going to see another Republican flop? | ||
| Do you think that we're going to see any... I'm basically alluding to, do you think that we'll see another COVID or some kind of major play? | ||
| Look, if they can get away with it, I think they'll try it. | ||
| I mean, it's sort of like, you know, when people are splitting hairs about what Trump's been indicted with, my attitude is they're going to keep indicting him for everything and anything until something sticks. | ||
| And if nothing sticks, then they'll just use that narrative that he's been indicted And so I think it's the same thing with any kind of national emergency. | ||
| If they can find another reason, I don't know if the American people right now would buy off on another pandemic, but the Democrat Party showed how authoritarian they can be, and it worked for them in 2020. | ||
| So why wouldn't they try it again? | ||
| I mean, I'm not making a prediction. | ||
| I don't know if they will. | ||
| You don't have to make a prediction. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if they will, but I'm sure there's a room like this somewhere right now, if Democrat operatives are like, what can we cook up? | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| What do you think, Shane? | ||
| I feel like you're the best one to coach. | ||
| In terms of, well, I just keep thinking of that apathy and I just don't think our country can actually survive in our election with our media being as weaponized as it is, like the corporate media and people being so unplugged. | ||
| Like there's a lot of us who understand what's going on on both sides, you know, understand. | ||
| But I don't know if people can actually withstand, I don't know if people have the bandwidth. | ||
| Like I just did a, I went out to East Palestine a month after that train wreck happened, right? | ||
| And when I'm there, the shooting in Nashville happens, right? | ||
| And you're seeing a government completely falter. | ||
| Like, they're not taking care of anything. | ||
| They already forgot about the people in East Palestine, right? | ||
| Who they got $1,000 or something. | ||
| But they're now living in this chemical bubble. | ||
| Sorry to poison your water. | ||
| So yeah, it's like I see the country. | ||
| I see that, unfortunately, the country is collapsing, if not already collapsed. | ||
| So I'm scared to see how we're even going to get through an election. | ||
| Because you know how the media ramps everything up. | ||
| I remember growing up, it felt like we had election cycles. | ||
| They'd be inflated, it'd be crazy. | ||
| They'd be like, okay, someone elected. | ||
| They'd forget about it. | ||
| We'd chill for a little bit. | ||
| I feel like we've been in election cycles since 2014, 15, right? | ||
| And it's made us insane. | ||
| So I just worry about that. | ||
| I worry about people actually having the bandwidth to survive this election. | ||
| It does feel like a very serious pressure cooker. | ||
| I mean, you were talking about the economy before. | ||
| There's a lot of things that people are having to bear up against. | ||
| And at a certain point, it does seem like You can't withstand everything. | ||
| I just hope the country can withstand it. | ||
| I don't know if people have the fortitude. | ||
| We're talking about not wanting to look at the culture war stuff. | ||
| It's just going to get crazier in the next few months, year. | ||
| So hopefully they can find a way to look at it. | ||
| Do you think there are positives though? | ||
| Like if we're saying culture war stuff, we're starting to see a Save Women's Sports Act proposed in at least every state. | ||
| We'll see these boycotts that are Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic? | ||
| I'm thinking Shane is pessimistic. | ||
| I'm psychotically optimistic. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
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Always. | |
| Because that's a pretty pessimistic statement. | ||
| I think as dark as it gets, it will test you as an individual and it will test the country and at some point it will bounce back. | ||
| I might not get to see it, but I'm doing my best so that my kids can and hopefully their kids can. | ||
| So you have to be. | ||
| I think if you buy into the pessimism, you're done. | ||
| There's no future in that. | ||
| If the situation was hopeless, the propaganda wouldn't be necessary. | ||
| And I mean, they are definitely concerned, I think. | ||
| They being, like, just the government apparatus in general, but especially the far left wing, like, they're concerned that people are waking up. | ||
| I think they did overplay their hands with COVID. | ||
| I mean, they got lucky, I think, this last cycle, because I think Republicans got cocky and kind of got lazy. | ||
| But I think, again, this transgender sexualization of our children, I think that that's, like you said, there's all kinds of different Ripples that that's had right now that that's waking folks up. | ||
| So yeah, I think that's huge I mean something else I'm worried about too is like the World War three factor I mean we are driving towards a major crisis with with Ukraine like basically Ukraine right now has one play and that's to get the US more involved and In that conflict and so and we just don't have sober rational people right now and control the national security state. | ||
| We just have the military industrial complex licking their chops and that that could be the crisis that the Biden administration uses because wartime presidents tend to get reelected regardless of how horrible they are like Bush no for But I think Ukraine is sort of a black belt for a lot of people, especially moderate people. | ||
| They want to be compassionate to people who are living through wartime. | ||
| On the other hand, they don't understand why during a period of high inflation we're sending so much money overseas. | ||
| I mean, it's hard to then say, I'm going to run on my record and my record is great. | ||
| Now pay a million dollars for eggs. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Meanwhile, our cities are littered with homeless people who need help. | ||
| We have vets who need help. | ||
| I don't know who the VAs are, but it seemed like they were not doing so well years ago, and I don't know if they're any better now. | ||
| VAs are terrible, yeah. | ||
| Right, so it's like all these things we need to fix. | ||
| Like our backyard is literally and figuratively on fire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| And meanwhile, we're just sending all the stuff, all the weapons and money we can overseas. | ||
| Yeah, that is terrifying. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And that's another thing that could ramp up. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| Closer to the election. | ||
| Easily, yeah. | ||
| And then you get the whole narrative of like, Who's side are you on? | ||
| We all gotta reunify the country right now. | ||
| We're at war. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think the country wants to be unified through service to one another. | ||
| I think they would rather see, you know, a hundred million dollars go into fixing things that will support people at home than go abroad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's not because they are not compassionate to people who live in challenging situations. | ||
| It's because we owe each other as our first community Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Support and service. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I say all the time, I'm willing to entertain and have a discussion about the crazy left-wing stuff of UBI and healthcare for all. | ||
| If you want to have that discussion, let's have it. | ||
| I don't think the government's the best vector for that. | ||
| However, if we can agree to stop spending money on all these overseas conflicts, secure our own border, and we want to talk about, hey, we take in this much money in taxes, let's figure out a way to best serve our people. | ||
| That's the discussion I want to have. | ||
| That's a productive discussion, because there's somebody on the left who's like, I agree with you on that premise. | ||
| I want to spend it on UBI and, you know, health care for everybody. | ||
| Then we're actually having a real back and forth, because at the end of the day, both of us are then trying to do the best thing for the American people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right now, I think that's completely off kilter. | ||
| You know, you've got one side who's like, you know, they haven't found a foreign war they don't want to spend billions of dollars to, whereas at the same time, the American people are a complete afterthought. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's the kind of conversation I Feel like a presidential debate would have you see this like reckoning of ideas. | ||
| But unfortunately, in today's day and age, there's so much divide. | ||
| They're sort of useless spectacles. | ||
| I mean, we got some great sound bites from Trump when he was on the debate stage. | ||
| But the only way now I think you could see these big public conversations is if you had a candidate like R.F.K. | ||
| Jr. | ||
| on stage with, you know, any Republican. | ||
| Unfortunately, any institutional Democrat really isn't going to be there to find solutions or to really talk through things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the media would blackball it. | ||
| They'd be like, this is disinformation. | ||
| They'd make it hard to access. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, we didn't even get into it, but everything that's happening with Robert on the Joe Rogan Show is a proposed debate. | ||
| I forget who it was. | ||
| Some journalist, I think overseas, he said, I wrote a book on debate. | ||
| But you can't debate these people. | ||
| You can't debate these ideas. | ||
| You're going to lower yourself to their standards. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| You give them credibility. | ||
| You give the conspiracy theorists credibility when the answer is like, come to us with your facts and reasons and you should be able to defeat us. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I find it so interesting that in a culture of free speech, you know, you're silencing people. | ||
| If you can't talk to me, right, right, right. | ||
| If you're so afraid of me, if you think I'm so obviously wrong, then why don't you just talk to me? | ||
| It should be easy. | ||
| It should be easy. | ||
| Your facts should be so far superior than anything I can come up with. | ||
| They don't want us to have those conversations though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So much for the marketplace of ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| Can't have those. | ||
| Those are bad things. | ||
| No ideas. | ||
| No independent ideas at least. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Only our ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's true. | ||
| Read from our party line and that's it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's been awesome having you here. | ||
| I'm so glad that you were back. | ||
| Thanks so much for having me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there anything we should know? | ||
| Any events? | ||
| Anything you've got coming up? | ||
| If you want to support the campaign, we're approaching the end of quarter two, so joekent4congress.com. | ||
| Any kind of amount that people can give is greatly appreciated. | ||
| We're having a great event with Matt Gaetz out in the district. | ||
| He's coming out to support the campaign. | ||
| So that's on July 1st. | ||
| So you can get your tickets at joekent4congress.com slash Gaetz. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| Those are the big ones. | ||
| And people can follow you on Twitter? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| Follow me on Twitter, joekent16jan on Twitter and Gitter and then all of them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| I'm at Shane Cashman on Twitter, on Instagram, and the latest book we did for Temcast Media is through the Inverted World Series. | ||
| That's at ghostofthecivilwar.com. | ||
| That's me going down to Georgia looking for the Confederate gold and then talking to people about a lot of ridiculous stories down there. | ||
| But yeah, it was awesome talking to you, man. | ||
| Yeah, you too, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Thank you so much for being here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Thanks for having me, guys. | ||
| I'm Hannah-Claire Brimlow. | ||
| I'm a writer for TimCast.com. | ||
| I'm so grateful I got to fill in for Tim tonight on this special episode of Culture War. | ||
| If you want to follow at TimCastNews on Twitter, on Instagram, it's the best. | ||
| It's my favorite place to have media, partially because they publish my work, publish Shane's work, publish all of our other journalists too. | ||
| If you want to follow me personally, you can find me on Instagram at hannahclaire.b and on Twitter at hcbrimlow. | ||
| Again, thanks you guys so much. | ||
| Tim will be back as soon as he's feeling better and hopefully Joe will be back too as soon as he can. |