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March 23, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
50:43
The Death of Journalism: A Conversation with John Soloman
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It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey, John Solomon here with us today on The Duck College Show.
John, you and I have been sort of moving in the same circles now for a number of years, especially on these ideas of some of the craziness that has went on in Washington, D.C., from impeachment to, you know, the spying issues to the Hunter Biden, all those kind of things.
It's just, you know what, the only good thing I can say is, John, I can look at you and say, and we saw each other at CPAC, which was so good, hey, we were right!
We were.
We're not the crazy ones.
They made us out to be.
But it's good to have you with us this morning.
You know, one of the things I like to do on the podcast is let folks who listen get to know sort of, you know, maybe what they see you, they see me, they see others of us on TV, they see us on things like that, and they see us only in what we do.
They don't know who we are.
So, John, give us a little background of where you came from, you know, sort of what got you to where you're at now.
Absolutely.
So I grew up in Connecticut.
I was the son of an Irish cop.
My brother was a cop back then.
I'm the only male in my family who didn't become a police officer.
But I wanted to go into journalism, do investigative journalism, and started at the Associated Press when I was very young.
I was 19 when I started at AP. Did 20 years there, rose to be their deputy bureau chief in Washington, so kind of ran The Bureau in Washington, and really just dug into investigative reporting.
I think I got my dad's detective love, but I love to write, and so I combined those together.
And over the years, I continued to grow.
I became the lead investigative reporter for The Washington Post, editor of The Washington Times, went to The Hill, And then about two years ago, I decided to start my own news organization.
And that's been the greatest blessing in my life, the ability to kind of swim against the grain of a news media that locks into a story whether the facts are there or not.
And my dad used to always say as a detective, never lock yourself into a theory of the case.
Follow the facts because you'll get blinders on if you lock into a theory of the case too early on.
I've used that to guide my reporting in the days right after 9-11 when most of the reporters in the country were saying we were sucker punched.
I worked on the theory that we weren't sucker punched, that we just failed to put together the facts and did a lot of stories that illuminated what the Bush administration and Clinton administration before them had missed.
And that served me well during the Russia collusion and all the way through Hunter Biden to the current day.
Well, that is amazing.
You know, I knew you and I had a connection, and it was something that, you know, it was just one of those things that, you know, you get people, you know, you have kids.
We're both kids of cops.
Yeah, isn't that amazing?
Yeah, my dad was a state trooper for 31 years down here.
Wow.
You know, you and I both know, we should, you know, for the folks out there, you know, on a side personal note here for both you and I, I mean, we remember, you know, all this discussion on defund the police, you know, police are bad, you know, it's been going on all over our lives, you know, everybody making fun of the police.
You and I had the privilege, and I still have my father, he's still alive, my mom's bad, is I had the privilege of growing up in a household where I watched my dad go out And put his self in front of danger.
And, you know, I saw him come home with a tore shirt, his badge gone, his blood.
And, you know, and those kind of things, you know, make a difference.
And so, you know, these men and women out there who do this every single day, they deserve to be lifted up.
When they do it wrong, call them out.
But when they, you know, the 99.9% do it right, this should be something.
So, John, this has been, you made my morning already.
I knew there was a connection.
We just had to find it here.
It's an amazing thing growing up blue, isn't it?
It really is.
It is.
It was amazing.
For me, it was the funny part of having to go get picked up from high school in the back of a Georgia State Patrol car and everybody thinking I'd done something wrong.
Really?
It's my dad, okay?
I love it.
Yeah, he always wanted to put me in the backseat.
That's great.
I love him.
Well, let's lay the foundation.
In your story, you sort of laid out an interesting first and foremost issue of how you got here.
And the 9-11, I'm glad you brought that up because I believe 9-11 and a lot of what we're dealing with...
I'm doing a podcast.
I'm finishing up one on the final speeches of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower.
And sort of what does the past say about where we're at?
And Eisenhower...
A lot of people overlook this in the military-industrial complex part of that speech.
He talks about tinkerers.
He talks about those inventors, which I say now, the military-industrial complex has become more about guns, boats, and it's expanded into the cyber part of it.
It's expanded into the spying part of it.
9-11, in what you just said, explain to people who may, and I know this sounds hard to believe for us, 20-plus years now.
What have we forgotten?
If I was to ask you a question, what have we forgotten about 9-11 that concerns you today?
Well, listen, we had all of these spy tools back in the 90s, and yet we couldn't connect the dots because agencies weren't talking to each other.
Bureaucratic rivalries occurred.
People were looking under the wrong rocks, even though they had the right facts.
And the 9-11 period gave us a watershed moment where we stopped for a second and said, hey, wait, if we have these awesome spying tools, they should be worked in such a way that the entire Intelligence Committee works together.
We protect American civil liberties.
But we've connected that.
You come to just two years ago, back to the January 6th, or sorry, a year ago, January 6th, 2021, the very same concerns that we saw before 9-11 manifested themselves.
The FBI, the Homeland Security Department all had evidence that there might be trouble at the Capitol that day, and none of them forwarded that information to Really, to the authorities.
Even though President Trump was offering people to get troops, the Intelligence Committee had not put together the threat levels that were sitting in their own buckets of information and do something proactive.
They waited until after the thing.
When you look at January 6th now, the overwhelming evidence is just like it was at 9-11, it could have been prevented.
Good intelligence, good information sharing, proactive, would have probably protected January 6th, just like we could have stopped 9-11 The thing about bureaucracy, if you let them go unchecked for any period of time, they always fall to their least common denominator capabilities, and that often lets us down.
Meanwhile, we spent four years chasing a Russia collusion story.
Had nothing to do with Russia collusion.
Well, this is, again, John, this is where you and I, you know, again, we've, you know, sort of our paths have crossed a lot in the last few years.
But what, you know, I want to take this a step further because I believe listeners need to understand that what you just talked about is a dysfunction of government, but it also was opportunity because when we threw the Patriot Act, we authorized a lot of stuff.
And Jim Sensenbrenner, who, you know, I worked with and knew Jim was adamant.
It was really interesting.
I watched Jim Talk about the Patriot in his later years, and he became a friend to me and a mentor.
He looked back on it and he was saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is not what we intended for this to be.
So as you look at it, that compartmentalization, look at how many things in the last, say, 10 years Have resulted out of a 9-11 mindset that said, let's put it all together, silo it though, and give intelligence communities far more access to really, I think people would be shocked at what they really have access to.
There's no doubt.
We traded civil liberties for a sense of security after 9-11, and I think now, 20 years later, we're sowing the results of that.
There is hardly anything that the FBI and Homeland Security Department or CIA can't access in real time.
And the prohibitions That we're not going to look at Americans unless we have a warrant from the court.
We now know that to be untrue.
There's a thing called unmasking.
Anytime a government official wants to see your intercept overseas, they just simply unmask you.
That's how we started the Russia collusion case.
Sarah and I got a tip that there was this mass unmasking going around with people like Mike Flynn, and we started to dig in, and that began the long journey that we had in unraveling Russia collusion.
So once you give government power, if you don't constantly check it, the natural tendency of government is to usurp that power and then to use it not for need, but often for convenience.
And I think that's what you saw in the Russia case.
You see people unmasking conversations they had no business looking at, then leaking the contents to the news media to gain political advantage, not security advantage.
And I think the big change in the last 10 years of the intelligence community Is the safeguards to protect people from political or personal invasion have been blown away.
There's just no prohibition.
It's whatever I want to look at, one I want to look at it, and the courts be damned, the public be damned.
And I think that is a very chilling moment.
And it's a reminder that our founding fathers always wanted the smallest possible federal government.
They knew the bigger you gave it, The more likely they would to intrude on our liberties.
And in 2022, our liberties are infringed in so many ways.
Even the idea that parents could be investigated as domestic terrorists just for expressing their opinion at school board meetings, that's exactly what the founding fathers feared about a large federal government.
Well, because the founding fathers said, you know, it's amazing.
You know, we say, you know, all that's ancient history.
They experienced the same thing.
They experienced being spied upon by their government, you know, and the agents and the spying on each other and everything that's going on.
One of the things, though, that disturbed me greatly, and you touched upon it, and let's touch on it a little bit more.
We saw coming out of the Patriot Act, as you said, out of that first few years of W's and George Bush's administration into the Obama administration, you know, one of the things that I think is so underreported is, you know, Obama administration, and we're transitioning this into a little bit later, was so, oh, we're going to get along with the world, we're using this.
They were one of the head Heaviest users of drones and, I mean, how does the Obama administration continue to be so insulated from scrutiny from the mainstream media, even after he's been out of office now?
Yeah, it's a mindset.
Listen, I remember the summer of 2008 like it was yesterday, and the media was cheering on Barack Obama.
There was no chance for John McCain to win that election because the media had fallen in love with the idea that the first Black president was going to be elected and that he had this great new liberal progressive agenda that would take us away from the policies of George W. Bush and the wars.
In fact, Obama sustained those wars continuously.
Continued to exercise, in some cases, extend the powers of the Patriot Act, and became a regular consumer of information that had been unmasked.
And in fact, the unmasking request under Obama went way up.
So did the violations of civil liberties.
That's one of the most important things.
In November of 2016, as Barack Obama is about to head out the door, he drops on the FISA court, oh, we forgot to tell you about five years worth of violations.
Sorry about that, Judge.
And they drop all of these violations as they're going out of the door so they wouldn't get in trouble if the Trump administration came to the court.
Five years of just chronic violations of American civil liberties.
They had less regard for civil liberties than the Bush administration.
The record in the FISA court is now ultimately clear about that.
Let's dive into that because I want to sort of put a pin in the what Obama knew kind of category, which is massive, especially when you get the fact that Obama, Biden both knew the Clinton strategy of Russian disinformation, this Russia hoax thing, and the fact that the intelligence community is telling them this.
I mean, I remember when we first, you know, myself and, you know, you on the outside and others, and then us on the inside with Devin, myself, with Mark and Jim and Radcliffe, they thought we were crazy.
And we said, no, these are actually happening.
But you've made an interesting point here that I think needs to be understood.
The FISA court in and of itself, and I'm glad we brought this up, many of us felt the need for a large amount of systemic change to the FISA court, and we were pushing for that in my last year in Congress, and we were running up against the, quote, hawks who said, oh, you're going to destroy it, and we never could sort of get the understanding.
You've got to understand that the corruption in DOJ by a few people You know, at the very top, which filtered out, was corrupting the very essence of the FISA court.
I, for one, believe the FISA court needs to be almost revamped, if not redone.
What are you seeing from that, from your perspective, investigating?
And, you know, like you just said, Obama just dropped and didn't really care.
It is remarkable that in the summer of 2017, the Patriot Act was up for renewal and a lot of the disclosures of the Snowden era, all the leaks that we had.
If you remember that moment, there was a possibility before Russia collusion really caught fire.
That the Intelligence Committee was going to lose a lot of its spy powers, or they were going to be restrained, or one of the ideas that was being discussed in the summer of 16 into the beginning of 17 was the idea that anyone who was a FISA court target, there would be a secret advocate that would sit before the court and argue your side, because you don't know you're being spied upon.
All of that fell apart the second Russia collusion came in, because the idea that our president might be in lockstep or in collusion or cahoots with Vladimir Putin, oh, of course we need all those spy powers.
A lot of people I've talked to have wondered whether, you ask yourself, why would the FBI continue to keep looking at an allegation that they knew by January, certainly January 17 was false, Some of the people I've talked to recently have posited the idea that the longer they can keep the President on defense, the longer they can almost certainly get the Congress to extend the Patriot power.
And that's exactly what happened.
The Patriot Act powers were extended by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Who really fell for the Russia collusion story.
They believed it.
I remember Paul Ryan telling me I was nuts at the very end of his tenure in late fall of 2018. He finally gave me a statement saying I think there were terrible abuses.
But he bought into the theory as much as the media did.
And the intelligence community got pretty significant renewals under the guise that the President of the United States might have been colluding with Russia.
We now know that was bogus, but people looking back now wonder whether part of the motive, not the only motive, but part of the motive was to get the Patriot Act through when it was actually facing the largest amount of opposition since 9-11.
It had, and being a part of it at that point, one of the things at the end of the day, we had gotten some changes actually made, and we were in that last minute fighting to keep some of these changes that were there in there, and it was amazing.
But you go back to this story, and this is, again, and people out there, all I will say is if there's somebody out here wanting to say, oh, here's Solomon Collins going at it again, I just want to say, look, Show us where we've been wrong.
I mean, at this point, that's all I'm saying.
Show us where we've been wrong.
But I made a statement the other day that really, I think, surprised me, but they started looking at it.
They started to push back, but then they couldn't.
And that all of this, whether it goes back to the Russia disinformation, it goes back to a 2016 election in which...
You had a coordinated effort, and I think this is, you know, for all of the stuff that everybody accused Donald Trump of doing, he never did.
I mean, you think about all the unconstitutional stuff, and none of it he ever did.
He may have said it, you know, he was very boisterous about it, but he never did anything.
He followed the law and actually encouraged law.
But in that last, that 2016 year of Biden, Obama, and Clinton, It is really concerning that all of this Russian information stuff started when you had a federal government pick sides in an election.
And it all started with the Clinton emails, which I want you to take for just a second here because everybody's, oh no, Clinton emails.
I'm in the Air Force still, John.
If I did what she did, even if an airman did and intentionally did what she did, he's going to be or she's going to be discharged.
No doubt.
How did we make the buffer in the intelligence communities and the DOJ there for that, from probably like from 12 to 16 in particular, until where you actually, they thought it was okay in the Oval Office to tell the sitting president, here's what they're going to do and here's the information that they've got.
Yeah, and not only did they tell the sitting president, they told the FBI that, hey, watch out, there's a dirty trick under where the CIA literally wrote a memo to the FBI because they couldn't figure out.
So they tell the president in July of 16 that the FBI is told verbally then, we're told, and then the FBI continues to go down this path of Russia collusion.
The CIA is so shocked by it, they send a memo, which you never see happen, saying, hey guys, remember we told you this could be a dirty trick, and they still watch him carried out for months more.
It's a head-scratcher.
As I've looked back now, one of the things that I think may be the greatest explainer of this very dark era of the Intelligence Committee, the Law Enforcement Committee, Barack Obama inserted into these agencies naturally political animals and agencies where we always try to keep professionals, intelligence professionals, people who stayed above the politics.
James Comey, Andrew McCain, John Brennan, Three of the most politically oriented or political animals ever to hold the jobs of CIA, FBI director, and deputy director.
How do we know that?
Well, we know that Andy McCabe's wife was running for office and he was helping her run for office and actually approaches Terry McAuliffe, the governor of Virginia, at the time his office is investigating McAuliffe.
No FBI G-men would ever have approached the target of one of your investigations and asked him for help for your wife's campaign.
So he's a political animal.
James Comey, we saw the politics all along, the writing of the memo.
And John Brennan, clearly one of the most political CIA directors in American history.
Once the idea that the leadership believed in politics, you see that trickle down.
How do we know that the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, they talk about politics, about politics inside the CIA, the politics of the situation, of course, their derisive comments about Trump supporters.
All of a sudden, once the top starts playing politics at these agencies, It filters down and all of the long-term prohibitions in your mind, your training, don't ever go into politics, do things by the book.
Once you see your bosses do it, everybody relaxes.
And I think that's how the Russia Collision story ultimately came down.
You see, I think the most important document ever released is the The interview with the FBI agent named Barnett who said we knew what was going on.
It was like a bad game of Clue.
You could put any two people in a room and say that's collusion and you know these trained FBI agents knew that their bosses were just playing a game of politics and it sickened them and they had no way of stopping it.
They couldn't even even when they tried to close the Flynn investigation down all of a sudden the magic hand of the seventh floor of the FBI that's where McCabe and Comey were, reversed the decision.
And all of a sudden, these line agents realized that they were being overruled, not in the facts of the case, but on the politics.
Those three men, I think, will go down in history as three of the most corrosive beings in the intelligence community that America has ever had.
I don't disagree.
You just give me a thought as I was sitting here thinking about this.
You could call the summer of 16, 90 days that have changed the world in many ways.
Because you go back to May, June of that year, this was when Donald Trump was finalizing the Republican nomination.
Clinton had already basically bought the democratic nomination.
So it was done.
And then it started coming out with this, you know, again, it all goes back or maybe the title of the book could be John.
It all goes back to a laptop, you know, the Anthony Weiner laptop everybody has forgotten now.
Yeah.
The first laptop.
Yeah.
So we've got laptops.
They were a hundred and Anthony, you know, Wow.
And then, think about what happened.
I think there's a piece missing here.
I'd love to hear your topic of this.
I also think you also had a very weak leadership at Attorney General.
Oh, no doubt.
And I think that paved the way for Comey to be emboldened.
I mean, when Lynch basically said, I'm out of here.
You know, I'm whatever you tell me.
I mean, we're cop kids.
The police investigate, the police do the investigation, and they hand it over to the prosecutor.
Without a doubt.
The cop don't say, hey, we don't have enough to prosecute here.
Not unless you've got a state interest in it and you're trying to avoid it.
But look at that.
And I'm taking this from May, then to June, then the end of June, 1st of July, you have the Comey speech.
The, I can't believe anybody would do this.
Lynch saying, I'm not.
Oh, by the way, she met with Clinton on the former president on the tarmac.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Can't forget that meeting, which precipitated all this.
And then by the end of July in Cleveland, when I was there, you were there.
Guess who was actually having a meeting with not then President Trump, but candidate Trump?
Peter Strzok.
Yeah.
Peter Strzok was the one who went to there to, you know, to quote, give the briefing and all.
And we see this, how?
Those text messages.
Yeah.
Then it's just, I mean, and then you take that and you ball it all up, the first, and then the one thing that surprised me, though, John, was Comey's, now, number one, he signed these FISA warrants.
Let's just get back to the hemorrhage.
He signed knowing why, two things, this is why people hate right now justices.
Why has Comey not been held accountable there?
Yeah.
Yeah, or McCabe or Page, all the way down the line.
You know, listen, I think they're trying to build a conspiracy case against some of the leaders of the FBI in this.
Whether John Durham will get there, I don't know.
Six years seems an awful long time to wait for punishment for the egregious level of misconduct.
And you know, I think you said something very profound, because I think it is really true.
90 days that changed the world.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict that we are in now is really a long-term story that starts with the fact that Hillary Clinton, during the reboot of Russia, when she reset relations with Russia, and I put reset in quotes because Russia got everything and America got nothing.
Russia got uranium.
They got oil deals.
They got goodwill.
And then they went into Crimea in 2014 and started the first of the two Ukraine invasions.
Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and John Podesta, they were all gathering money from Russian sources.
Bill Clinton's $500,000 speech, big money to the Clinton Foundation from the Uranium One supporters.
John Podesta has a clean energy company, or he's on the board of it.
It suddenly gets a Russian investment, like the Russians care about clean investment, clean energy.
They don't.
And then Ukraine was the piggy bank of the Democratic Party.
Viktor Pinchik, an oligarch, one of the largest funders of the Clinton Foundation.
Hunter Biden there at Burisma cashing in.
When 2016 comes around, you have two potential scandals.
You've got Hunter Biden in the...
The offing.
And you've got all the money that Peter Schweitzer in his book, Clinton Cash, has exposed.
And the Clintons need to make sure that Russia can't be used against them.
And that's how they concoct the story.
In our book, Fallout, Seamus Bruner and I, we found this poll that Hillary Clinton did in the summer of 15, telling her, The two biggest liabilities she had in her long career of scandals, and they were the email, ongoing email controversy, and the fact that her and her husband had gotten so much money from Russia.
We interviewed Clinton campaign staffers who said the origins of the Steele dossier were to neutralize those two issues, to keep those two issues from being used against her.
So they put, they concocted a story to pin on Donald Trump That changes the world.
It alienates Ukraine.
It alienates Russia.
And it leads to this really dysfunction that ultimately ends up with, on Joe Biden's watch, a second invasion of Ukraine in eight years.
Exactly.
Well, and you move on to this.
Now, let's think about this, though.
You're a...
Gifted journalists.
You've been investigative journalists.
You've been doing this for years and years.
And you've also done some at what we'll call the motherships of journalism.
AP, Washington Post, Washington Time.
What is their...
John, looking back on this, and now with Just the News, and before we end today, I want to talk about that.
I'm fascinated by what you're doing there.
But in your time in those organizations, and you were working through those organizations, the complicity over the last five to six years, it's often downplayed.
Why?
Because they're their own mediator.
They're the ones that talk about it, except for you and I do it here.
Could the Clintons, Obama, Bidens, any of these ever pulled any of this off without a complicit media?
No, no.
And that's the check and balance that was blown up.
I mean, you really have two check and balances.
Suddenly intelligence and police law enforcement start practicing politics instead of what they were trained to do.
And then the media sanctioning and in some cases censoring the truth.
So they had their own version of the truth, and whatever that truth was, they were going to impose it, social media, news media.
I saw the moment of change.
I go back and I remember in the summer of 2007, I'm sitting in the Washington Post newsroom.
I had been in the Associated Press my whole life before that, and politics just don't enter the conversations in the newsroom.
You keep your politics outside, or you got fired at the AP back in those days.
I'm not sure whether that's the case today.
But Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff, was convicted in the summer of 2007 crimes related to unmasking a CIA agent's identity.
When the verdict got announced, I watched large numbers of the reporters in the Washington Post newsroom stand up and applaud the verdict.
They were cheering for Scooter Libby to be convicted.
I was floored.
I had never seen such a political expression made in what I thought were the sacred grounds of a newsroom.
I remember walking into the editor and saying, you can't let this happen.
And to his credit, he came out and scolded everybody.
But that was the period, that period where Barack Obama was starting to come to power and the Democrats were Really making inroads in the media.
That was the point that the switch flipped.
Then social media gave everybody their opinion voice, and they started expressing opinion on Twitter.
And before long, the media became complicitous in picking one winner, the Democratic Party, and imposing one loser, the Republican and conservative movement.
And truth became whatever the news media wanted.
The news media wanted Russian bounties to be on the heads of American soldiers, even though it wasn't true.
They did.
If the media wanted the Hunter laptop to go away, they simply called it Russian disinformation, even though the Director of National Intelligence said publicly there's no evidence it's Russian disinformation.
That power of the intelligence community, news media community, and Democratic Party working together has given us the last seven years of history.
And unless it's broken, America has a very difficult path ahead.
Well, and let's take this, John, because you and I look at this from a political, you know, from a journalist, but also from mine as a political perspective and yours as well.
There's a lot of people out there that say, yeah, yeah, this is just y'all, you know, this is just Republicans.
You know, I had a, you know, in doing things like you do and I do, you get emails all the time.
And I had a guy call me, you're nothing but a hack.
You only go on these, you know, certain elements in TV and everything else.
And I thought to myself, how do you take that in moving forward?
Knowing what we know, seeing what we've seen, how are we going to overcome that, John?
I think that's what's going to become the question because we can point to the problem.
My concern is, is how do you begin to overcome that and to get back to a functioning government that actually can do big things?
I believe our founding fathers believed in free market competition, that that was the ultimate panacea to everything.
So for a period of time, Republicans were at a disadvantage because Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were owned by liberals and run by liberals.
But the advent of an entire new ecosystem of voices and delivery systems and news organizations and opinion sites, Your podcast is going to reach as many people as an old radio station did in the days.
The fact that you can reach that many people without going through the establishment media tells you that there's an extraordinary opportunity.
Competition for the marketplace of ideas, competition for the marketplace of facts is the quickest and fastest way to do it.
Devin Nunes leaving Congress and going to run True Social, I think was a profound statement.
A guy who was Yeah, I think.
I think long-term competition creates the counterbalance that ultimately fixes the system.
And I can see the impact in the last 20 months.
I've given a couple speeches on this recently.
Critical race theory was completely ignored by the mainstream media, yet 70% of Americans know about it and oppose it.
How did that happen?
Well, because an entire ecosystem got them the information around the original blockades of information that the mainstream media had.
Americans are open to abandoning the news media.
They saw the shenanigans at CNN, at the New York Times, and they're willing to trust people like you or trust sites like mine or trust Truth, a social platform.
That competition is going to be the only way to counterbalance the extraordinary advantage that Democrats had in the media from, I'd say, about 2010 to 2022. This is the year you see it beginning to rebalance, and we'll have to see how history works out.
But I believe competition, the creation of an alternate and this powerful ecosystem of information, is ultimately how this gets fixed.
Well, and I think you're exactly right there, and coming up, I mean, we're on, like you, on multiple platforms, Truth.
We've been on now for the last month or so on Truth, and it's slowly getting there.
I think it'll be interesting to see how President Trump uses it as we go forward, so that's going to be good.
Right now, he's not really using it, so we'll see how that develops.
But one of the things, though, in getting back in sort of the substance of what we've been talking about here and how we get to where we're at right now, In this media issue, maybe I'm too optimistic on here, John.
I'm believing this New York Times, Hunter Biden laptop issue is their Achilles heel.
And maybe I'm overplaying it right now, but it's like a sore.
You get a scratch.
You don't pay attention to it.
Then it gets infected.
Then you lose it.
I'm hopeful that this is that Achilles heel.
This is that scratch, if you would.
Because think about what happened here.
They, it's not just we don't like the story.
It's, you know, it's untaught.
You know, sometimes media don't want to touch it.
I don't want to get into family disputes kind of thing.
This had nothing to do with this.
This was a story.
New York Post, the legitimate story that many of us had talked about.
In the sense of it had the potential to change elections.
And you had the, quote, most venerable organizations, NPR, New York Times, whatever you want to call it, saying this is disinformation.
I mean, not just saying we're not going to report it, saying it's disinformation actually going on the offensive.
Could this be a chink in the armor?
And if so, how do we manifest it to put that back in place, if you would?
Listen, I think there's been a boy cries wolf phenomenon that has really happened over the last three years, starting with Russia collusion, because everybody in America fell hard for Russia collusion, right?
And when you suddenly realize, oh my God, it wasn't true, I'm going to be a little more cautious, but I still like my New York Times, I still like my CNN. And then you go through all the stories during the Trump years that went into reversal.
And people say, all right, wait a second.
And then the Hunter Biden laptop, which everybody was suppressed from.
And now the New York Times just comes out last week and says, oh, it was always real.
And it's at the center of a criminal investigation.
I think Americans have this buyer's remorse in trusting this news media.
It isn't the Walter Cronkite media.
It wasn't like you could turn on your news organization and say, that person is just trying to give me a basic set of facts.
They got nothing in it.
If you turned on CNN at any moment during the presidency of Donald Trump, you saw an effort at propaganda, anti-Trumpism shoved down your throat.
You were becoming suspicious, but you assumed, all right, they got a point of view, but they're giving me facts.
Once Americans realize they got false facts, they got false information, they were misled.
I think you're right.
I think it's larger than a chink.
I think the armor has been cracked in half.
Now the question is, what is done to make sure that that armor breaks in half, there's full transparency, and we create a system of rebalancing the news and social media platforms?
A lot will depend on how conservatives and Republicans play their hand in this moment.
They've had some victories.
The big tech companies are, I think, very vulnerable.
Twitter had 66 million users in the United States in 2019. Today, it's way below 40 million.
The market has begun to speak that people didn't like Twitter.
They moved from it.
Donald Trump can move people to his platform.
People are moving to your platform, my platform, others like it.
If that system continues to be invested in and grow, I think there's a balanced system that we come out of in the 2024 election that if the New York Times has a blaring headline, and it isn't true, Doug Collins' radio show, John Solomon's Just the News, Sean Hannity's show.
They're going to be able to be as trusted as the New York Times, and people are going to weigh both sets before making their mind up.
That's what was missing in the mob mentality of the media in 2015, 16, 17. Yeah, and I think that's what you're going to see even more, John, as we look at this as we move forward and looking at it to provide that reasonable thought.
The one thing that does concern me, though, is...
This is where liberal ideology and I think conservative ideology sort of differ.
Conservative ideology, and I'll take first, is a more independent streak.
It's more free market.
Everybody's out, you know, and look, I've experienced this in eight years in Congress, okay, and look at it on a national full NFL level, okay?
And it's gotten a little bit worse.
In fact, social media has probably perpetrated this more on our side in some ways than it has in others.
I'm concerned...
I wrote the book about the impeachment.
I call it the clock and the calendar because I kept saying it's all about the clock and the calendar.
And one of the things I talked about was 2019 Democrats came in with only one agenda.
I hate Donald Trump.
Okay?
That was the only agenda that they had.
And you could see it in their legislating.
I sat next to Jerry Nadler.
There were a lot of things we could have done together.
We didn't.
He wanted to have, you know, Matt Whitaker.
He wanted to have Mueller.
He wanted, you know, just all these, you know, things.
And I watched them sort of pay the price, and they sort of paid that price in the fact that they can only get, they got two or three things done, some massive things that should never have happened.
But then when they finally, their main goal was to defeat Donald Trump, and they sort of at that point said, okay, what do we do next?
What I don't want to see Is a conservative response that sort of mimics that.
I think there needs to be balance.
And this is really the interesting, you know, and talking about this Eisenhower speech that I'm going back on.
If you remember in there, he said everything ought to have balance.
Balance to the cost to the good.
Balance to the people versus government.
We've got to have an agenda that actually reports that.
And I think that's where outlets like mine and yours and others can do that, is we hold accountable what needs to be held accountable in Congress.
And then we put forward an agenda that is workable.
Are we willing to do that?
Pelosi has shown she's willing to do that.
She's willing to give up power and position to gain a policy.
I don't see that as much in conservatives, John.
What about it?
Listen, there is not a Newt Gingrich in the party right now like there was in 1994 when we faced a similar moment in American history.
I do think there's all these brave folks like yourself and Devin and Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan that were able to crack the egg open so we could see what was inside.
But the current leadership doesn't seem to have the ability to put an agenda.
Of course, when conservatives are best, it's when they're leading with ideas.
And right now, I mean, Glenn Young can have an idea.
Parents' rights ought to be...
Preeminent in our education system.
And he swept an entire blue state out of power.
And he went in.
I don't see the same discipline to ideas and concepts that I saw in the Youngkin campaign or I saw in the Contract American.
Now, there's plenty of time.
There's a lot of great ideas out there.
I think the Republican Party's winning on some things, like the little decals that are going up on gas stations.
I did that.
Joe Biden pointing to the prize.
Very effective.
It works.
But I think in addition to that, you need to say, I stand for the following 12 things, because Americans want to know what the alternative is.
All right, they've already had a bad date with Joe Biden.
It stinks.
They don't want any more Joe Biden.
What's my next date going to look like?
And I don't think the Tinder profile is completely written out by the Republican Conservative Party.
They need to get their ideas and then stay disciplined and stick to them.
What happened during the years of Donald Trump is the personality of Trump.
Became the object for the medium.
And his amazing policies, which by the way, had 60, 70, 80% approval rating, got pushed to the background.
That is a very powerful lesson for Republicans.
Don't let personality win.
Let your ideas win.
And right now, there just isn't a...
I get that.
That's the Republican agenda of 2023. Jim Jordan talks about it a little bit.
But I think the people like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell and the leadership, they need to get there.
Lee Stefanik, I think, is a great idea as a woman.
Get those ideas solidified.
Get them in front of the people so that not only are they rejecting Biden's record, they're embracing a very clear agenda.
And then deliver on the agenda.
That's the only other thing Americans want.
Exactly.
And also my concern, and I'm hearing from a lot of old friends on the Hill, and we talk, we have them on the show.
I'm concerned that also we're maybe spreading ourselves into everything.
Look, you've got to have...
That's why the contract was so catchy.
It was so...
Ten things.
Here it is.
Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
I can say it in a speech.
If you start having an agenda on five different major topics, people sort of lose the focus.
But I'll bring it back into something that you just said.
And I'm an old school.
I love to read.
That's why I do some of these speeches and go back and try and bring them back out into life.
Remember, frankly, the 40s, 50s, 30s, 40s, 50s time frame, conservatism was actually believed to not be an ideology.
It was really strange.
And there was one person in particular who stood up and said, no.
We're the ones who actually have thought and ideas.
It was William Buckle.
It was.
He came forward.
He threw that out there.
We're needing that again now because I see conservatism fracturing into itself, the libertarian side, the moderate side, if you would, the middle side, the conservative side, and I'm beginning to believe we don't have that singular That was then modified by some by Goldwater, but then crystallized by Reagan.
Is that a concern or do people notice that anymore?
Because liberalism has become, well, you make everybody happy.
What is conservatism?
Well, they've been branded as you make everybody miserable.
Yeah.
Listen, I think at its heart, the battle of the next 20 years is, are we going to put individuals first?
Are we going to put government first?
The Democrats have said, we are a government first party.
We see how good that works.
Government almost always fails us.
That's why the founding fathers wanted it to be so small, a central government.
You now see Ron DeSantis and Texas and the Attorney Generals putting people first and liberty first.
I think if the Republicans rally that we are the party, the people first, government second, the contrast will be there.
People are beginning to see the Democratic Party as sort of socialism light or maybe socialism heavy even.
Depending who you listen to and what's going on in a given time.
They see the surveillance state, they don't like that.
They've seen the failed foreign policies.
Put America first, put individuals first, because that's what our founding fathers did.
That's the brand sweet spot for the conservatives.
And then all of your 10 ideas, your 12 ideas you're going to run them, can flow from that.
Parents' rights is putting the parents before government.
Tax reform is putting your personal wallet ahead of the government's bloated wallet.
There's an enormous opportunity for the Republicans to be the party of liberty, of individual freedom, of trusting individuals to make the right decision, because Democrats have made a lot of government decisions that didn't work well for us, whether it was on COVID or surveillance, all these things that we've talked about.
You know, one of the things that will be written, I believe, and people may laugh at this, but I think will be written in the future.
When you take and strip away the emotion of the moment, especially when you have such a very overt personality as Donald Trump, even today, even out of office, even today.
Yep.
Going back to look at what he actually did, and I was a part of several things, the big things that I actually did.
We did the thing called the Cloud Act, which determined how law enforcement and across country lines, actually, we actually, how we share information, how that's protected on the individual side, and I'm very proud of that, that we're actually, Britain is actually using that bill as a treaty part of it.
Isn't that amazing?
Wow.
That was Donald Trump.
I mean, we did that under the administration there, and we did that, you know, through, and frankly, we did some through Obama as well, but we were actually doing big things.
That actually stopped in 2019. One of the things, though, that's affecting cities right now, and you're seeing this from an investigative, is this run amok criminal justice reform of liberals.
But yet it was Donald Trump who took a bill that I wrote, the First Step Act.
I had help from Democrats, Hakeem Jefferson, that actually began to show what true criminal justice reform will look like.
Absolutely.
But yet we have conservatives running away from these very ideas.
Think about this.
Bush, W, was the one who came in and said, compassionate conservatism.
Look at what Donald Trump did.
Historical black colleges and universities.
He did the criminal justice reform.
He did trade.
He did...
This is the kind of things that I want Republicans to start actually owning, instead of the noise media, actually earn the idea media.
Yeah, it's when Republicans have fared best.
It's when they own the idea discussion.
And quite frankly, all the ideas are out there.
What you did with the first step back, the Trump doctrine in general, putting America first, defining the American interest in foreign policy.
That doesn't mean you're a wimp.
You can be strong as heck, but define the American interest before deploying military power.
Give the people back their money.
Give freedom first to America.
It's all sitting out there between Yunk and Trump.
All the great ideas are there.
I think there's a marketing problem of someone not putting it together and then imposing discipline.
Let's not get off on 50 ideas.
Stick to the 12. Americans like a checklist.
That's why we make a shopping list and why we make a to-do list for the honey list, like my wife calls it on the weekends.
We're best when we have concentrated ideas and lists.
That's all that's missing from our Republican landslide in November.
I agree.
John, you've got a great thing, Just the News.
Real quick, I know you've got to go, and I as well, but before we close the podcast, I can't not let others know about Just the News.
Tell us about it real quick before you've got to go.
We started about two years ago.
It's justthenews.com.
We have about 25 reporters.
We generate about 60 stories a day from investigative to breaking news of the day.
We have a podcast network.
We have about six or seven podcasts, and now we have a nightly show on Real America's Voice called Just the News, Not Noise at 6 o'clock on Real America's Voice Monday through Friday.
Very excited.
We're growing.
We're babies.
We just came out of the crawl stage and we're beginning to walk, but we have millions of readers and listeners and we're grateful and we love talking with you as well.
It's always an honor to have you on our show as we always learn something when you come on.
Well, I look forward to doing that with some more folks.
John and Solomon, this won't be the last time you hear him here and I'm going to be on with him as well, hopefully, and we'll continue this conversation.
John, thanks for being with us.
Thank you, Congressman.
Good to see you.
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