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Dec. 21, 2022 - Doug Collins Podcast
45:19
From BUDS to the Newsroom: My conversation with Carl Higbie
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
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.
Alright everybody, it's good to have you back today on the podcast.
Today we've got Carl Hibby.
Carl, welcome to the podcast.
Hope all is going well with you during this season.
Can't complain.
Racking in the last few days of deer season up here in Connecticut, so I'm up at my cabin.
I was out this morning, last night, saw a couple things, nothing shooters.
Well, that is good.
My deer season has been sort of on and off.
You and I texted a little bit about it.
I started off the year good, going well.
I mean, had it planned out, had an eight-pointer come in.
My neighbor kills the eight-pointer while I'm in the span.
You know, it's just like, are you kidding me?
And I actually see him going to get it.
That's even worse.
And it comes back, and I'm like, oh, golly.
I mean, I've been planning this out in our fields in our neighborhood.
It's actually sort of a suburban area because they're protected.
I live up here on the lake.
And so I've had them planned out.
And there was this one big eight-pointer.
He was going along looking really good.
And he had a couple of two-year-olds with him, you know, a five-pointer and a six-pointer, which wasn't bad, but they were young.
So I waited, waited, waited.
I'm sitting there.
And all of a sudden, I start hearing noise behind me.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
And yes, he done got my eight-pointer.
I was not happy.
And then I ended up hurting my shoulder.
So now, Georgia, fortunately, we go from...
I still got until January 30th, roughly, the end of January, middle of January to go.
So I'm going to try and get back in it and see if we can pick up at least some meat for the freezer.
You know, that qualifies you for a crossbow, because crossbows are for old guys, bad shoulders, and Democrats.
Well, I mean, one or two of those, maybe.
The Democrat definitely...
And I do have a crossbow.
But I did a stupid, I pulled it back, not looking, and anyway, life's a long story.
But that's the way it worked.
But we're getting it all together.
Carl's got a great background.
For those who don't know, Newsmax, Carl and I are on together.
He hosts many shows on Newsmax.
He's the go-to host when others are out on Newsmax.
Plus, he has his own stuff.
There as well, but also has a unique background in the military.
And that's some of the thing at this point of the year, especially toward the end of the year, for folks who are on deployment, folks, Carl, don't you think a lot of Americans forget that even if we're not, quote, actively engaged in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, That our military is working across the world all the time.
I think people tend to forget that.
Oh, you're always ready.
I mean, here's the thing is, I spent nine years in the military.
I spent 18, maybe 20 months of it deployed.
The rest of the time, 11 months out of the year, you're training, you're training, you're training.
So that tempo, especially for SEALs, It doesn't stop just because, you know, there's no war or you're not physically at war.
So it's interesting when people are like, oh, you know, there's a lot of units out there, even SEALs that have never seen combat, not many, but they're out there.
And people say, oh, well, you never saw combat.
It's like, yeah, but they were still ready.
And to your point, I mean, look, you have China on the rise, you have Russia, who knows what they're going to do.
You have a number of global adversaries that need to be ready to be prepared to take on should we have the need.
Well, I think that's the answer.
I want to come back to Russia in just a little bit.
We'll get into the Ukraine issue and China.
But, Todd, you were a SEAL, went through BUDS. What class were you in BUDS? 253. 253. The one thing about it, folks, this is an easy way if you have anybody ever tell you Ask them their BUDS number.
Ask them their BUDS number.
And if they can't pop off their BUDS number, you got a faker going on.
And also, there's no secret BUDS. There's only one BUDS. Exactly.
There's no like, oh, I can't talk about that.
It's like, yes, you can, because it's published.
And there's, oh, it's 37 TAC Alpha.
No, that's not a thing.
And if they pass the initial BUDS test and you're still skeptical, ask them the name of their swim buddy.
And if they can't remember...
They're done, they're done, they're done.
Now, some famous folks, I mean, the SEALs have sort of exploded in the last, you know, like five or six years, you know, from an, and I don't want to say an unknown, but basically from a very, you know, special operator category.
But then you had, you know, some who, you know, they had the Bin Laden raid, you had others, and others started writing books.
You've had others in leadership training, Jocko Willett, you know, a lot of others.
That have come off, interestingly enough, running for office as well.
I mean, you know, Zanke and others I served with in Congress as it goes forward.
Zanke was my XO in Buds.
Oh, really?
Well, I was going to ask you, who was training at that time in training?
Andy Stumpf, I know, is another SEAL. He came in later and did, I think, maybe the year after you got out.
He was doing second phase Buds.
What do you mean?
I mean, everybody takes something different from that.
And I think there's that famous, and I can't remember his name now, Texas A&M, a Texas grad.
He did the speech.
The things I learned, Oh, Admiral McRaven.
McRaven.
Yeah, it was great.
What are some of the things that you took from that?
Because I'm really concerned, Carl, that we're demilitarizing.
And I know that sounds weird, our military a little bit.
We're focused on so many.
But what was the things that you took from your buds and your time in that stick with you to this day?
I would say one of the most important lessons for me is...
That, you know, you have to earn what you got every single day.
And a lot of people say, you know, I learned this at Buds, I learned that at Buds, I learned this in combat or whatever.
One of the things that is ingrained in me, which is, and I take over to corporate life too, because I'm in a number of investments during the week, and then I host the weekend show on Newsmax, you know, on Saturday and Sunday morning.
And I work hard at everything I do because anything you have could be taken from you.
You've got to earn it every day.
There's too many people in society today that have just settled.
Doug, you know this better than anybody.
They just settle.
They achieve one thing, maybe even don't achieve anything.
They just are happy and content.
For many people, that's fine, but if you want to be extraordinary, you have to do extraordinary things.
People want promotions.
They want better things.
They want bigger and better lives.
Like, you have to earn that.
Like, nothing's free.
And that's probably the greatest lesson I have out of it.
I can see that.
Well, and it's also a matter of, you know, working, you know, together.
It's its own you.
But I think one of the things I've heard from my friends, and I've said it before on this podcast, you know, I've been in the Air Force now 20-plus years, and I was with, started at all, actually.
I was a chaplain, although I have a law degree.
I stayed as a chaplain.
I was starting my Navy.
I had a Marine Gunny who was my OTS back years ago.
And you remember little things.
You remember, I think what I get is that precision, that sort of detail stuff.
Your gig line, you know, making sure you're there.
I mean, just little things that get ingrained that do make the difference.
And it's amazing how people, I think the thing from my military going forward, and we don't always get it, but it's always in the back of your mind, is the little things matter.
Yeah, no, no.
The little things matter.
I mean, look at even family now.
And, you know, the irony is the little things are the big things.
There was an instance in my life where I kind of, like, learned that, you know, when everything could be taken away.
And that was my first deployment.
We were hit by an IED, and it killed three of my friends in, like, right close proximity.
And you look at the...
These are guys that, like, I looked at and was like, wow.
They're here and now they're not, you know, with families and things like that.
And you don't appreciate the little things.
Like every little thing of life is a gift.
Like I was sitting out in the tree stand at five in the morning this morning, pitch black.
You can see the Milky Way over it.
And you're just sitting there listening to nothing in the middle of the woods.
And you don't realize how precious things are until you've, you know, come close to losing it.
Well, that and your health.
And for the folks who've been deployed, and you made a great point, Erwin, I'm glad you did.
All service is valuable.
And some never leave the state.
Some never leave.
Some, like you and I, have both deployed into hostile environments.
But it's all different.
Even if you deploy into hostile environments, it's different.
But all that service matters.
And what you said, though, that was interesting, Is if you see how quickly life can be over or changed, radically changed.
It may not be death.
It may be losing a leg, losing an arm, things that are just changing.
Or health, even.
As you get a little bit older.
Your health changes.
It reminds you.
And this is becoming a concern for me as you take it not only from the military perspective, and I think what we're seeing in the military, but as a political perspective.
That I believe we have become too short-term focused.
In other words, we want the instant gratification.
We want the instant answer now.
We want the poll on Twitter, whatever it is, to tell us what to do.
And life is not like that.
Well, Doug, these devices, they give us the instant feedback.
How many likes do I have?
Who cares?
I mean, that's what everybody lives for.
Oh, I did a post with a thousand likes.
Cool.
Like, whose life did you make better from that?
Well, and I think that's where it's coming.
One of the things, and I'd love to get your take on this.
I've had a lot of takes.
We've been talking about it here on the podcast.
I've talked about it on TV and, of course, well.
I'm really concerned.
You talk about one of these long-term issues.
I know that we always have a time in which you have some ups and downs, especially with the all-volunteer service.
I'm concerned, though, that we're...
We're not coming up from this tailspin real quickly.
And then you see some things added on to it.
Talk about that a little bit on the retrenching, recruitment.
It bothers me right now.
Well, it is.
And, you know, I got some buddies up here.
We were talking about this, actually, before we came on this podcast, which basically...
Men are not becoming men anymore.
Testosterone is down by 50%.
You have huge swaths of American children being raised without a father in the household, which is devastating the family structure.
You have A bunch of people that are being told that you don't have to achieve to get a trophy.
You can just do the bare minimum and you'll just get one for showing up.
I mean, there's no competition.
I think it boils down to a couple of factors, one of which most kids don't get hit in the face with a dodgeball anymore in elementary school.
There is no structure.
I'm serious.
There's no structure for children to really learn the roots.
And when you take that away, when you take away the value of winning, competition, and, you know, especially you take away the masculinity.
Look, masculinity is not toxic.
You know probably better than anyone, Doug.
It is needed in society.
And when you have, you know, fertility counts coming way down, you have testosterone coming way down.
Men are afraid to be men because now, you know, men can be women, apparently.
And according to, you know, the liberals, you know, that want Leah Thomas to excel, you know, There's no delineation between the two.
And when I see this stuff, I'm like, well, no wonder kids grow up confused.
And it goes to the same thing with the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It's like the liberal left has taken an issue that is just not at all the way it's perceived.
You have an entire political party that is telling a bunch of kids that are of different skin color, race, creed, religion, or beliefs that they can't succeed unless they're helped up by the government, by the big liberal machine that's going to look out for you.
No kid's going to succeed in that environment.
No.
And you've seen it.
I mean, it goes back to, you know, Justice Thomas in his book that he wrote about his grandfather's son.
I mean, it was just amazing.
That's an amazing book to look at.
But you just hit something well.
And the one thing that the military has always taught me as we were looking at this a little bit, in many ways, It's the great equalizer.
Men, women, you come in, same uniform, you earn what you get.
And I've become concerned that there's this idea of some coming in now that they're taking that outside mentality that I ought to start as a VP of executive services or whatever, bringing it into the military, or not wanting to come into the military because of You know, believing everything just going along and I don't have to be a part of it.
And that's really...
The other part, you talk about getting hit in the head with a ball.
What was it right now?
Was it 20...
Like, some percentage of kids cannot get in simply because they can't pass a physical.
Oh, no.
Doug, it's over 70% of military age-eligible males cannot complete this basic physical fitness standards.
And we're talking like 20 push-ups, 20 sit-ups, like...
You run a mile and a half in like 20 minutes or so.
I tell you, there's a great article, Doug, if you haven't read it.
It was in the Atlantic, probably about 15, 20 years ago.
It's called Why Our Best Officers Are Leaving.
And it talks about the lack of meritocracy the military precedes.
It's a bureaucratic wasteland.
And it talks about how there's a bunch of good men and women who enter the military.
And for a variety of reasons, many of which are the system not promoting meritocracy, and then they're promoting people based on who can put bullets in an eval rather than bullets in a bad guy.
And the better people, look, some stay in, there's no doubt, but the really good guys get out and are like, I'm done with this.
I'm performing above the standard at which I will be promoted.
Therefore, I'm going to go to the private sector and make my way along that.
And then you're stuck with a bunch of people that are, I don't want to insult our upper echelon of the military, you know, broadly, but you're stuck with a vast majority of those people that wouldn't survive in the private sector.
Yeah.
Well, and they stuck in.
And because it does become, you know, a little bit of a...
And the other part, and again, you know, still being in and looking at it, I say this just with an outside look and reflecting what I'm hearing from a great deal of, you know, folks as well.
And this is something that I've seen.
Again, it's under Republican, Democrat, so it's sort of developed under this whole Washington nature.
And you see it at DOJ, you see it at DOD, is this politicization of these higher levels.
And that's the problem.
I mean, that's become a huge issue.
Yeah, but where did we get away from the military's job?
Through all my training, Through all the co-opted training I did with other branches and everything, our job was to kill bad guys and break their stuff.
That's all.
I was not taught how to build schools.
I was not taught to stack up cases of water for foreign international defense.
Some of the Green Berets and some of us were taught how to train other people at higher levels, but we're not in nation builders.
When we are deployed, the US military Keep in mind, we rolled over.
When we first went into Iraq, Saddam was the fifth largest standing army in the world.
We rolled over his entire army in less time than it took Apollo 13 to get to the moon.
Okay?
I mean, four days, we had come in and out and destroyed basically their entire military infrastructure.
We can do that.
The problem is when you have people like, oh, I don't want to offend people.
Case in point, I lost a very good friend of mine who was an EOD guy, a bomb guy.
He found an IED on the side of the road during 2009. This was under Obama.
He said, I'd like to blow this in place.
They put an explosive on top of it, and they blow it up right there so they don't have to mess with it.
There's no danger of moving it.
The commanding general at the time said, hey, look, we're not going to do that.
You're going to take it back and you're going to blow it up at a friendly range, you know, further outside the city limits because the noises are disturbing the Iraqi people.
We picked it up and he died.
And you see that.
And it's like, look, guys, you want to be diplomats?
We'll go home.
You send your diplomats.
You send your caseworkers, your diplomats, your feel-gooders, your Peace Corps.
You send all those guys.
And when they get killed, we'll come back in, and we'll eliminate the bad guys.
We did it in Fallujah.
It's not impossible.
It's hard, but that's what we're there for.
That's why we joined the military.
Yeah, well, that's the same thing that happened if you go back to the whole...
Everybody only focuses on the old Black Hawk Down story that we left.
But what they have to remember there is the reason we were there, and after that, the Marines were there, had cleaned up everything, and then we tried to do this diplomacy thing, and then we left a basically smaller force that ended up having this issue.
It is getting concerning because I had a friend of mine send me the other day, and this was just interesting, and if you've not been out there, folks, you can go look this up.
and I'm, again, just take the comparison.
Don't read 5 million things into this.
But look at the recruiting kind of videos about the Army and China and some of these other things.
And then what they're emphasizing as to what we are emphasizing.
I mean.
Oh.
Cool.
Yeah, 100%.
I mean, you have China and Russia doing military ads about them jumping out of planes, blowing things up, shooting guns, being tough, working out.
And ours are like, look at how intersexual and non-binary I am.
We had an ad for the CIA, Doug, that was like, I am a mother, I am non-binary, I am dyslexic, I am bipolar, and I am intersectionality meets success.
And I'm like, can you find bad guys in caves?
That's all we need to know.
Yeah.
When I was a member of Congress, one of my favorite things in all to do, and it was something I actually put a lot of emphasis on.
I had a retired math sergeant named Bill Coakley who did this for me, and that was our academy appointments.
I took a lot of pride in our academy nominations.
Because I knew one day, probably I would be serving with some of these.
I said, I want to make sure that they're actually good.
But I never was involved in it.
I had a former military board that either had graduated from the academy or were 06, or E8s, E9s, that interviewed these kids.
And he said, look, and what I would always tell them when we gather their families together sometimes is the first thing I'd say is, look, I'm glad you wanted to go to the military academy, but understand something.
No matter what you think you're going to gain from this, your first and foremost job is to fight our nation's wars, period.
That's why you go.
And if you don't want that, please do not ask for my endorsement to get you there.
And that's the other thing, too, is you have a number of people that joined the military for a myriad of reasons outside of joining the military.
And they've incentivized this now.
It's like, look, joining the military is a career move.
It obviously sets you apart from a lot of other people coming out of the military.
But guys are going in now for $30,000, $50,000, $100,000 signing bonuses where it's like...
I'm not opposed to paying our military adequately, but I remember my first paycheck in the military, Doug, was $400 for a two-week paycheck.
So I didn't do it for the money.
Obviously, when you get into the teams and you get ranked, you make substantially more than that.
But at the end of the day, if you incentivize people, the commercials for recruiting now are like, get free college, get this, get that, get this.
How about I get to go kill bad guys who are trying to kill my family and friends?
Yeah, and I think that's the whole functionality move.
I want to switch to it because you brought this up earlier.
And again, I'm not the answer here.
And I've listened.
You've been on the air.
We've talked about it.
You know, there's this whole Russia-Ukraine situation.
And by no means, you know, am I advocating let's go put the 82nd Airborne on the ground there.
That's not, you know, we're not moving first.
But I do have a question on this balance question.
And I'm just sitting out here.
We're developing again, and it's becoming almost everything, Carl, and you see this.
It's a political, either one way or the other, nobody looks in the middle.
And my question is, okay, fine.
I get that we don't need to entangle ourselves in Ukraine.
They've got an issue, and the Ukraine government's got problems.
Look, I firsthand knew that one from Washington, okay?
At what point do you simply say, okay, Putin, get away with whatever you want to get away with?
You know, if we're going to stop it here, would we stop it at Poland?
Would we stop it at...
I'm wondering, where is the appetite in the American public, but also our military guidance here, is because China's watching, of course, Iran's watching, others watching...
Where's the balance, Carl?
Help me out here.
So I actually was in Ukraine this summer.
I went over there and I checked some stuff out with Newsmax.
And we went over there.
I got to meet with Zelensky for a brief time and kind of get the feel of what's going on over there.
Like, look, my diplomacy ended with, you know, at the end of my gun.
However, I've had a chance to now look at the bigger picture and coming over as a media guy And, you know, when I went over there, my biggest question is, like, where's the money going?
And you know, as well as any, is a lot of this money hasn't even gotten to Ukraine yet.
It's stuck in bureaucracy, in red tape, in transferring funds.
The little money, like, I did see direct items over there, like, at Chernobyl, for instance.
Like, there were items that America purchased that were there, okay?
So money is getting there.
The problem is a lot of that money is going to, like, NGOs.
That are not even in Ukraine.
They're on the Polish border.
And the Ukrainians are having a very hard time or at the time were having a very hard time getting into Poland to access the funding that was being given to those NGOs.
So I would say that this is a fault of like the bureaucracy itself not working it out.
The next thing is like Russia has said and they believe that this is their property.
Like let's say all of a sudden you know You have a fence on your property, and your neighbor comes over and says, no, no, no, that fence is on my property, and he's going to go back and forth and fight for that because that's what he believes.
It's the same thing with Russia.
I'm not giving them any credit or anything.
No credence to Russia whatsoever because I think they're a bunch of thugs, but Most of the Russian troops, and even talking to the Ukrainian troops on the front lines, they were like, most of these Russian guys don't want to fight.
They're like, hey, I'll, you know, they surrender when they're found.
One of the top search engines in Russia was how to shoot yourself in the leg or in the foot or something.
They didn't want to be drafted for this.
So, I mean, they've endured 100,000 plus casualties at this point, and that's what we know of.
Um, they're, they're using, I mean, I was in, I was down in Mikolaj at one point and we're sitting around a campfire, you know, it's probably 10, 11 o'clock at night and a mortar just flies into the house next to us from our, it was a Russian mortar and it didn't go off.
And I'm thinking like, well, I'm pretty lucky it didn't go off.
However, it goes to show how antiquated and how un, un, un, I'd say, you know, like, unmature.
They are using stuff from the Cold War.
And a lot of it's not going off.
And then, but the Ukrainians, if we're going to, you know, we want to make sure that those bucks are going to bullets, not NGOs sitting on the border for someone to fly first class.
Like, Randy Weingarten, the head of the Teachers Union in America, is over in Ukraine.
She tweets out after a rocket strike.
We're going to assess this.
I was like, you're in charge of the Teachers Union.
What are you doing in Ukraine?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that's become the whole issue.
But, I mean, you set it up here, right?
I mean, because it's shown very much of the weakness.
I mean, Putin, for all the bravado he puts out, this is a huge embarrassment.
I mean, in the sense of, you know, what he wanted to do.
And that's why you're seeing the more terroristic style, taking out the electrical grids, you know, causing and inflicting pain.
He can't move forward, but he can't literally move back because if so, in Russia, he's gone.
And I think that's the interesting part there as we go forward.
But, you know, again, we're getting into these easy answers, Carl.
And look, I'm looking at it from the new Congress.
I'm being Republican.
I've been there before, but I'm also very worried that Republicans are doing what Republicans do sometimes, and that is overpromise and talk about things that we can't fix.
I mean, I mean, I got onto a couple of guys, and I was out campaigning for some of these guys, and they would say, we're going to do away with all 87,000 new IRS agents.
And I said, no, you're not.
You know, you can try.
You can put something.
And this is where, now, let's take what I just said, move it a little bit forward into media, and what I see as a public that is getting very frustrated about With what they say.
And that is that they're being told one thing.
It doesn't happen.
And it should have never been told that way.
There's other ways to say it.
How are we going to start dividing?
Because it's getting the left and the right are so divided here on this.
Yeah.
Well, Doug, you know, it's funny you brought this up because I was, I think, the same night I had you on.
I was talking about this in Connecticut, my home state, where I am now.
All the government officials, they're like, you know what we're going to do?
We realize that these meetings, these Board of Ed meetings, these town meetings, they're getting very contentious because people are very angry.
So you know what we're going to do?
As government officials, we're going to sign a civility pledge.
It's like, your job is to be civil anyway.
We're not PO'd because of the incivility of officials.
We're PO'd because you shut down our businesses, you masked our kids, a lot of cases forced vaccines on a lot of people that didn't need or want them.
You have terrible fiscal government policies here.
I mean, like, we have one of the greatest exoduses of any state outside of, like, Florida, I think.
It's not Florida, California.
They're going to Florida.
And people are angry because bad government policies are creating problems.
So instead of addressing the problems, the government officials are like, hmm, we should just be more civil while we have bad policy.
This is the problem.
You make a problem, you institute solutions that don't fix the problem that you created.
That's why we're angry.
Yep.
Oh, it is.
And you're seeing that, and you're seeing it just bubble up to where, again, what good, and I say this in clarity, What good government can do in its proper role is now being perverted.
And I think that's the sense, because it is being used for agendas.
It's being used for the causes as we go.
But I think this is something that is really, you know, you've hit it very well.
If we're not honest with the American people, and I say that as a Republican, I say it as a Democrat, They will eventually get this.
Americans are pretty resilient people.
We always have been.
They're getting it, and my concern is, is they're turning off or they're going...
This is when, though, they'll search for answers that may or may not be right, and I think that's the concern I'm having.
We're too easily...
We're in that mode right now.
I'll look for the bumper sticker.
If the bumper sticker sounds good, I'll follow.
Well, and that's the other thing, too, is we've become accustomed to expansive governments.
We're looking to someone, anybody solve our problem, solve our problem.
And the sense of community, Doug, has been largely diminished in the last 20 years.
And that's the biggest thing.
So people look to the government now.
And, you know, I always quote Reagan on this.
He says, in this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem.
Government is the problem.
And he's right now.
He's right then.
He's right now.
The problem is you have a number of people who don't know what they're regulating.
You pick an issue.
Guns.
The people who write these bills have no idea what they're regulating.
They always get it wrong.
And then the bills they pass end up restricting law-abiding citizens from owning guns.
And none of those restrictions would have stopped the actual shooter that created the incident that spawned the origin of legislation.
Next thing is you have too much government.
So you know better than anybody, but for the people listening, Government grows exponentially.
And the way it does that is, let's say you have 15 people in a department.
Well, you have metrics.
You have to be promoted in those positions based on a career path and a trajectory that some bureaucrat also said, like, Well, you've been here seven years.
Never mind the fact you haven't produced anything in seven years.
You must be promoted in seven years.
They promote that person, but then they don't have a job for them.
So they create one.
And then because they've now created a job, the same piece of paper says that you must now have three people working for you.
So they go hire three more people.
And now your departments grow exponentially.
And there's no trimming.
They never get smaller, Doug.
They never get tinier.
They never get less powerful.
And once a government takes a power or a responsibility from you, you never get it back.
You never get it back.
And so when government says...
Why don't you just compromise on this?
Why don't you just give a little?
The compromising is always me giving something and them getting something.
And that's what people are so ticked off about.
And you see this.
Here's where I made a statistic.
I don't know if you've heard this, Carl.
I don't know if I've used it with you or not.
In the last 30 years, last 30 years, since 92 till 2002, roughly 30 years, Republicans have been in control of the United States Congress for 24 of those years.
No, I'm sorry, 22 of those years.
Eight have been Democrat.
Four year blocks in two separate areas.
One in the first Obama administration and right before the Obama administration when they got Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, all these things passed.
Then just in the last four years in which they did all the investigations, then they passed the infrastructure, did everything else.
Democrats get this where Republicans don't.
Democrats understand once they get it in, just like you described, once it's in, it's in.
And, you know, Obamacare is still here.
I don't care how many times you had people say, we will do away with Obamacare.
No, you won't.
It's still here.
Dodd-Frank, still here.
Yeah.
When can we get conservatives to understand that governing is not a four-letter word, but it is a much longer word that actually can change the country?
Yeah, I mean, if I could answer that question, I'd probably take Stacey Abrams' job as president of Earth.
Well, she's real particular about that.
Hang on.
Yeah, exactly.
So the problem is, like I said, I think it goes back to the fact that people think government actually solves problems.
I mean, everybody's been to the DMV and that's pretty much on its face what all government is.
You know, you take it to the military, the military is the DMV with nuclear submarines.
So the problem is we have to get away from this reliance on government.
And the way you do that is obviously you have to trim the government dole.
The family structures, like we were talking about earlier, have been broken up.
And Byron Donald is addressing this in Congress right now.
But, you know, the nuclear family, it's the left has deemed that the nuclear family is somehow bad.
I don't know why, but they think it's bad.
Then you have this massive reliance on governments where an entire group of Americans, I mean, we're talking a huge swaths, and this goes across, you know, political lines, it goes across races, genders, creeds, whatever, that are relying on the government in some faction.
And it's because they can be.
And most of them don't see it as wrong.
Most of them are like, yeah, I'm eligible for these benefits, therefore I take them.
And nobody thinks that you're going to be able to get that top off there, Doug.
Yeah, trying to.
This is why I love live podcasts.
I'm sitting here, and my beautiful bride and I, we're trying to get ready for something, and there's a...
Carl, there's a...
For everybody on the video side, you're getting a big treat right now.
There, I got it off.
Yes, the Air Force guy can do it.
You don't want to hear anything from the Navy SEALs.
Okay, thank you.
Like some cooking oil or something.
I forget what I was...
Oh, yeah.
So, you know, the thing is, the government needs to...
Somebody needs to have the spine to go in there.
And this is the problem.
You have to be elected in order to govern, obviously, you know, better than anybody.
And if you run on policies that are like, hey, I'm going to give the people less access to free stuff, i.e.
take away Santa Claus, the Democrats are going to be...
I mean, look, the Democrats knew darn well, Doug, that this student loan bailout business was complete garbage.
It would never have passed constitutional.
They knew that.
They did it before the election, close enough that they could sell it to a bunch of young people that were going to go vote for them based on that, and then it was going to be shot down by the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court was going to be the bad guys.
They are Santa Claus.
The Democrats are Santa Claus.
They're like, you vote for me, I'll give you all the free stuff in the world.
Never mind on the backs of what.
And if we can break that cycle, if we can make people reliant on people, neighbor and neighbor and the nuclear family structure, we're going to be a lot better off because people will be like, wow, the government really doesn't do anything.
Yeah.
There's a great meme out there that has a guy with a megaphone on one frame and on the other frame has like a mob and it says, what do you want?
And they say, free stuff.
How do you want?
When do you want it?
Now, what do you not understand?
Economics.
I mean, that's it.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I get it.
I mean, and that's the part.
And again, we focus on the things at some point in time.
And we might come back to another podcast on this.
I get very, very frustrated with the fact because being in Congress, you begin to understand exactly what is broken and our appropriation system is broken.
You're going to see that played out this week in Washington with this omnibus and CRs and everything else.
It's a complete mess.
We don't We don't take the hard votes.
There's 12 votes that need to be had.
We don't take...
I was not able to because they didn't allow us to.
That's the other problem.
We didn't get a chance to do this.
I actually heard members...
There's a Labor H bill.
It's one of the appropriations bills.
Labor Health Appropriations.
Which is all of your...
Which, again, had to do with Obamacare.
Had to do with a lot of other things.
Republicans didn't want to take the vote.
Democrats didn't want to take the vote because it was one of those things where that meant I had to make a stand on it.
We had these conversations.
I'm sharing, building secrets here.
Oh, well, we can't get the votes in the Republican Party for this because we either cut too much or we admit that we're still funding this program.
And it's like, guys, if we don't, it's the one thing people don't understand.
Doug, I'm 100% with you.
And I look at this thing from being on the outside.
I have a number of friends who are congressmen who all say they're annoyed at the system.
And I look at it and I'm like, I mean, you were there when Paul Ryan passed the repeal to Obamacare, you know, what, 60-something times?
But the day Trump took office, Paul Ryan did not have a plan to hand President Trump and say, dude, here you go.
Here's our plan.
What do you think?
He didn't do that.
Instead, they voted on it zero times once President Trump was in office.
It's like this stupid game that Republicans always play.
And I say, Democrats do everything right.
They have all the pop culture on their side.
They've got most of the media.
They've got They have the ground games.
The ballot harvesting is legal in, like, what, 36 states or something like that?
They go do it.
They don't care.
Republicans run on policy.
They run on tactics.
They go out there and they say, I don't really care what our policy is.
We're going to convince a bunch of people that we're going to give them free college loan forgiveness, which we can't do.
We're going to go get the ballots.
We're going to send people to knock on doors, make sure that that ballot is filled out for a Democrat.
We're going to take it back, and we're going to make their vote count whether they believe in our message or not.
Republicans just count on the fact that people are engaged enough to, and it works to some degree, but it's a 50-50 proposition.
We're doing just about everything wrong except for policy.
They're doing just about everything right except for policy, and it's still a 50-50 proposition.
Yeah.
Well, it's being there.
One of the things interesting you brought up, and again, being there for, and this goes back, but it goes back, Carl, to the basic, and I call it a lie.
It goes back to the basic premise of people telling the American people, we will do away with Obamacare, when they were going into it with one house, the man who actually is named on the bill, and the San Diego Democrat.
You're not going to.
Yep.
When we did the healthcare in 17, we came in.
First thing we did was healthcare.
We took on healthcare.
And here's the reason.
And if you've never heard this before, this is the actual reason.
We took healthcare first.
Because we needed the savings out of the, what we're going to do in Medicare, Medicaid for the tax bill, which came later, which by the way, we did end up passing, but under totally different circumstances.
So we took up that healthcare first.
Many of us didn't, there was a, because we didn't have the plan.
I asked, okay, where's the plan?
Tom Price went to the HHS. He didn't have, I mean, it was just a whole problem.
And then at the end of the day, McCain, two points here.
Number one, McCain did not kill Health care.
What he killed was the process.
He killed the process of then coming back in so we could do a conference committee.
Well, we could have got a health care bill.
Oh sure, sure.
But number two, what bothered me the most.
This is the part.
If you have 218 votes in Congress, Carl, you can move something.
If you don't have 218 votes or 217, if nobody's out, then you're just making speeches.
And we got to get out and quit making speeches.
It may not be 218 and perfect, but look, they passed Obamacare with literally pages that said to be determined later.
And yet it is still here.
Yeah, we have to pass the bill to find out what's in it.
Exactly.
And that's very true.
You know the sad part about it is, Carl, that was one of the truest statements Nancy Pelosi has ever made.
She's been ridiculed for it forever, but it was a true statement.
Well, and that's the district's right.
But, you know, back to the healthcare, just on this last quick, I don't want to switch to deer here.
But the healthcare issue is we could never find, and this was a problem that we had because we waited almost eight months of this.
Is every time we get to it, our own group, many of our own folks there, I love them to death, but they would move the goalpost and say, guys, you can't get to the end here, hold it hostage, move the goalpost.
And we're seeing some of that right now starting to play out in a very small divided Congress in which we don't have it.
And you're seeing it in the speaker race and that's going to be a whole different issue.
Switch real quick before we get going here.
Deer hunting.
I know it's last week up in Connecticut.
How has the hunting been?
I see the Matthews in the background.
I mean, how's it been up there?
It's been actually, so I have my, you know, I live down in the lower part of Connecticut, but I'm lucky enough to have a farm up here.
And I passed on a couple young ones.
And I passed on one last night.
I was bow hunting.
In Connecticut, landowner rifle season is all of November through December.
But Sundays you have to hunt bow.
So I'm out there with a bow.
And I've been tracking this monster, monster, monster 14-point.
And he's been here since I bought the property a couple years ago, three, four years ago.
And I've seen him just get bigger and bigger.
And I really think this may be one of his last natural years on this planet because he's getting older.
Big, you know, neck sagging, belly sagging, the back is real low.
And I'm like, man, I really want to get him this year.
And I see him.
I see him off like 200, 300 yards through the trees.
There's snow up here.
There's a lot of snow up here, so you can hear him.
Normally you can't hear him.
And so I hear crunching, and I look out there, and I just catch.
It's real dark.
So...
I see him.
It's actually a little bit light by then, but I see him just a little shadow moving.
This other guy walks up.
This is eight point.
He's probably three and a half years old.
So he's got a long way to go, but he's still a healthy, I mean, 250 pound, healthy, healthy buck.
I draw down on him.
He walks right underneath my stand and I'm looking and I can still see the other guy right over there.
Way out of bow range.
And I'm like, you know what?
I'm going to let this guy go for another year, hoping that this other buck comes in, ends up, he starts marching around.
I have no idea where he is at that point.
And I was like, man, I probably should have taken that younger guy.
I walk back.
It gets dark.
You know, you're not allowed to hunt past sunset here.
So, you know, I sit, I pack my arrow up and everything, and I just kind of sit there for another 30 minutes just to see if anything will come back.
So, at this point, I'm pretty close to last light.
Pins have a little bit of light on them, but, you know, couldn't shoot legally anyway.
Start walking back, and my buddy had been hunting another stand that was on the way back, and he, I don't know, he got cold or something.
I don't know if he's going to vote Democrat in the next election cycle, but he got cold, he comes inside, and...
Right in front of his stand, okay?
I'm walking back and I see him.
He's right there!
And I'm like, he's munching on an apple tree.
And I'm looking at this.
I'm like, there's no way.
So I, like, squat down, like, real nice and slow.
And he's looking right at me.
He didn't seem to care.
Looking right at me and never got a shot off.
He kind of just strolled off nice and casually.
Didn't spook him.
He just, you know, I was there.
But he's like, I'm the king of the jungle.
I don't care.
Walked off.
So long story short, Doug, season in Connecticut.
Not been going the way I wanted to.
Now you got what?
Until Sunday or Saturday?
Yeah.
No, I got through the end of the year, but I shot a big monster deer down in Arkansas two weeks ago, so at least there's meat in the fridge.
There we go.
We'll get it out.
All right, Carl, it's great talking to you.
Let's make this a habit because I want to get back and we can talk about a lot of other things going on because we see each other on Newsmax a lot.
But having you here and having this kind of conversation is good because a lot of things, you know, I think the needs fleshing out.
And I think I see this as a pivotal time, you know, in the election, you know, we're back to the House being Republican very narrowly, which bothers me greatly because I know the way the conference, I know a lot of the guys, it's going to be interesting to see.
And then the Senate is the Senate, and of course Biden being Biden.
But then also a lot of just other things going on as well.
But Carl, thanks for joining me today.
I appreciate it.
Doug, appreciate having me.
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