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Oct. 12, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
30:05
We are a Nation under Attack and no one wants to talk about it
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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.
Hey everybody, it's Doug Collins.
Welcome back to the podcast today.
Got a great guest with us today.
Fred Flights is going to be on with us here in just a minute from America First Policy Institute.
I've worked with Fred on several things.
We meet each other in green rooms in New York.
We see each other all over the place.
If you want to go to defense, you're going to go, especially national security, this is a guy that we need to go to.
And I can't think of a better place to begin this conversation, especially with everything going on with Israel.
And then also a little bit, you know, tying that back into the fact that we have some paralysis in Congress as well over a lot of these issues.
So as we go forward today, right after the break, we'll come back and it'll be my conversation with Fred.
Looking forward to it here on the Doug Collins podcast.
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All right, Fred, glad you're with us today, buddy.
Hope all is well in your world.
Good to be here.
For those who know, I have a puppy named Cree.
Cree is a little baby Shih Tzu who's been with us for five years, and somehow she has hurt her paw and her mother is not around.
So she's going to be joining us for the podcast today, as we said.
Fred, look, it's your position as vice chair for the Center for American Security at America First Policy Institute.
I mean, and also in the previous administration with Trump.
Let's just start off on a big picture here.
Have you seen a time recently that we're closer to really a war situation that could involve more than just a few regional players than we have been in a while?
No, I think that's a good observation.
I think the situation in the Middle East is very dire.
It's also very dire in Asia.
And really, there's such a sharp contrast from the stable world that Donald Trump Left Joe Biden when he entered office in January 2021. Look at how bad relations are with China, the invasion of Ukraine, the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Last year, North Korea tested a record number of missiles, maybe preparing a seventh underground nuclear test.
And now we have this unbelievable attack by these Hamas terrorists against Gaza, and we're finding out that Not only was it probably organized by Iran, but in all likelihood, additional funding provided to the Palestinians and Iran from the United States helped make this attack possible.
Yeah, it's bad, and we're going to dive deeper into this.
And I mean, just as we're taping, I mean, reports of coming out of Israel of beheading babies.
I mean, Fred, just take our sort of both your and my sort of policy and foreign affairs hats off for a second.
I do not understand how anybody in this country or any in the world can side with Palestinians.
Not in this case.
I mean, you can side with the fact that they don't think there should be, you know, the...
The settlements or anything else.
We can get all the deal to that.
But when you send people into rape, pillage, plunder, chop the heads off of babies, how does the folks at Harvard, the people in Times Square, I mean, and then the really just funny ones to me, you know, are just, you know, like I saw a sign that said Jews for Palestinians.
How do they do that, Fred?
I mean, I just, I mean, just from a looking standpoint.
I think we need to ask, how would people do this?
Now, Hamas is a terrorist organization.
It's not happy that Saudi Arabia and Israel may be normalizing relations.
It may see opportunities to exploit with a weak American president, some political disarray in Israel, but it's doing this because it hates Israel.
It hates Jews.
It is terrorizing people.
It wants to terrorize Israeli Jewish citizens so they will leave.
It wants to terrorize Jews around the world so they won't settle in Israel.
It wants to terrorize businesses and tourists from coming to Israel.
They want to destroy the Jewish state.
They want to kill Jews.
And the best way to do that, in their opinion, is to put grisly pictures of innocent children and old people and women on television.
This is what terrorism is.
It's evil.
These people are animals.
But, you know, an even more serious question is, how could groups at American universities be backing these horrors?
And here's something I think we need to talk about.
This is the future of the Democratic Party.
Remember in 2016, how many Democratic presidential candidates spoke to the AIPAC conference?
Zero.
Because the far left has an iron grip On the Democratic Party, and these people aren't running it now, but in 10 years, these people at Harvard, huge number of student organizations, they're going to be in boardrooms, they're going to be in Congress, they're going to be in the media.
This hatred on the left is coming up, and today's Democratic leaders, it's desperate for our country that they bat this down.
I agree.
But then they show no sign of it.
You've seen this sort of from the first, and I will still say, muted response from the White House.
I mean, we're coming to find out now that he's had a little bit of a problem at the White House.
He's having to go through two days of interrogation from the special counsel over the issue of his...
Security leaks on his documents.
But still, it is still sort of amazing to me that sort of the silence is coming out of the White House here.
And let's just take it back a step further, Fred.
This is the concern that I have that has been building with Biden.
You know, basically rejected Netanyahu.
He has not invited him to the White House.
We didn't see any real formal...
It took the House of Representatives to invite the President of the Knesset to actually speak during a joint session.
White House really didn't want anything to do with it.
I mean, it's this little build-up, build-up, build-up that has now...
I'm going to take it a step further.
I believe that it's actually, you take Afghanistan from two years ago, two and a half years ago now, and you see the total meltdown of American resolve in foreign policy there.
You see what has been, at best, an inconsistent to no plan in Ukraine except give money with no accountability.
You see When Xi in China will not meet with our Secretary of State, but will meet with the majority leader of the Senate, then it's time to change the Secretary of State.
I mean, because this has just become a problem.
And I've said this on this podcast a lot.
I feel we need to be paying attention to China.
Don't get me wrong.
And there needs to be concern about Russia and Ukraine because it's right there.
But we seem to have forgotten that Afghanistan is now back to pre-9-11 days.
They are better equipped, and some of that equipment ends up in Hamas's hands.
You've got Iran still funding it.
Is this going to maybe focus us back on the fact that the Middle East is still the hottest cauldron in the world?
I guess so, but there's so much instability in Asia.
What I think this comes down to is that elections have consequences.
If the American people elect somebody who's so incredibly incompetent, isn't mentally competent, surrounds himself by foreign policy advisors who are at best yes men, at best third string, this is what happens.
You know, I work with General Kellogg here at the American First Policy Institute, and occasionally we look at each other and say, How much worse can it get?
And we found out last weekend it can get a lot worse.
Will there be an invasion of Taiwan under this president?
We really can't count that out right now.
And, you know, I was glad when Biden said on Saturday, we have a rock solid relationship with Israel.
Well, overall we do, but Biden does not.
Biden, as you said, he snubbed Netanyahu by not inviting him to the White House.
He's ignored the Israeli government on giving aid to the Palestinians, hundreds of millions of dollars through the Palestinian Authority, which the Biden administration knew would go to terrorism from their private emails.
And this has led to a perception of some type of deterioration between US-Israel relations, and it probably contributed to Hamas' decision to launch this attack.
I don't disagree at all with you.
The question I have here, and let's move this to our own national security, because I'm going to ask a question, and I don't try to do this very often, but I do it occasionally, and with Fred I feel like I can, because I don't really know the answer, and I'd just love to hear your answer.
Where have we become, and what do you think has caused what I view as a very isolationist standpoint in the country when it comes to world events?
I mean, I've noticed it while I was in Congress.
I noticed it building.
You see it a lot.
And now some are legitimate consequences.
I mean, 20-year-plus wars, you know, without any consequence, I get that.
You know, I was in Iraq in 2008, 2009. I've been over there.
I get the feeling like Ukraine.
But...
Fred, does it also bother you in a general sense, maybe both parties, that we're becoming...
Because I've seen this, I think it was expressed a little bit with Tucker Carlson, even I think last night and others, that all of this doesn't matter to us.
It shouldn't matter to us.
Let it be as if it won't come home to roots.
Because I'm setting up another question, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
There are some people on our side, Doug, who I think are isolationists.
I think that's a mistake.
The America First Policy Institute promotes the America First approach to national security.
A strong U.S. military, using our military prudently, keeping our military out of unnecessary wars, but getting involved when we have to, working through alliances, but making sure that the members of those alliances carry their own weight, and having a foreign policy that prioritizes the interests of our country, the American people, and our economy.
It is not isolationism, but it's using military force wisely, and this is a consequence of all these conflicts and wars that the neocons got us into since 2000. And there's been a backlash by the American people against that.
That's not where we want to go.
We don't want to support isolationism, but we do want to support the prudent use of military force.
Yeah, and I think that's going to, I mean, this was, I described a couple years ago, especially when dealing with Ukraine, and again, there's a lot of different ways to look at Ukraine, but one of the main things is, I've always asked those who are just adamantly opposed to doing anything in Ukraine, Okay, then where do you stop with Putin?
Is Ukraine your deadline?
Is that your goal?
Or is it if he went to Poland?
And they didn't really have an answer to that.
They said, well, they'll have to deal with it themselves.
This leads to my other question, and I think something from a national security standpoint that AFPI and others have been dealing with.
Our open border, frankly in the south, but also frankly to an extent the north, but the southern border in particular, is a national security risk.
For anybody who believes that the isolation of Hamas in Israel, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the ISIL fighters and others, and all the breakdowns of ISIS since then, are isolated to a certain part of the world and are not coming here.
Are just foolish.
Do you think this could refuel the discussion of why we're allowing an open border situation into our southern border and not addressing it from a national security perspective?
It really should.
The approach to Hamas and Gaza by Israel and the world It was what some people call the mowing the grass strategy.
Just leave them there.
They're going to fire missiles once in a while, but they're isolated in this area.
But that, turns out, was a mistake.
It allowed Hamas to turn Gaza into a terrorist safe haven and to receive all kinds of economic and military aid from Iran.
Frankly, if Hamas is allowed to get away with this, they're going to state similar attacks against Egypt and Saudi Arabia and maybe against the U.S. You and I know that those people who are coming across the border during the Biden administration, they're not all from Central and South America.
Some are from China.
Some are from the Middle East.
I think there's Chinese intelligence agents.
There certainly are potential Islamist terrorists.
I think the damage that Joe Biden did to our security by refusing to secure the southern border may be extreme.
And how many Hamas fighters came across the southern border?
We just don't know.
And here's the part that always amazes me, and it bothers me, and Tom Holm is a dear friend of mine, of course, with our partner there, Chad Wolf, and others have been talking about this for a long, long time.
The part that amazes me is there's two million gotaways, acknowledged gotaways, which means we don't have a clue who they are or where they went.
And then we point to this idea at the border that we've taken a hundred and something actual terrorist watch list people at the border.
I made this comment on the podcast the other day, Fred.
I said, okay, why would they let themselves get caught?
They know they're internationally wanted.
So my question is, if they thought they were going to get caught, that they could even infiltrate our justice system, or they were a blocker for something else happening out here with these gotaways.
And I think that's the concern I have.
Well, you might be right, or it just could be that there are simply so many illegals coming across the border, the U.S. is going to have to catch some.
I don't know whether this was deliberate or it was simply, you know, We were lucky that we caught some of these people who are known criminals or possible terrorists.
But as I said before, I think there's quite a few of these people who got through that we don't know about.
Let's switch gears for just a little bit.
In addition, I mean, because we could spend a lot of time on our lack of foreign policy, which again, and I'll go back to what I said a few minutes ago, at a time when you cannot get a Secretary of State to be acknowledged as a gravitas world leader from the United States, it's time to replace that person.
I mean, and Blinken has shown absolutely no indication he's up to the job.
I mean, from the very first meeting with the Chinese in 21, I mean, they sat there and yelled at him, and he just sat there and looked like he was a bump on the log.
And they left.
Move this thought a little bit to the discussion...
About our military and our security forces now and the degrading state of military readiness as it relates to recruitment and how we see this.
I say this rhetorically, but how much do you think the world is paying attention to the fact now that our recruitment is down and retention is having issues?
I think all of our adversaries are watching this.
They see a weaker United States.
They see an indecisive and incompetent commander-in-chief.
They see a Secretary of State.
And let's not forget the National Security Advisor.
He is just as incompetent, if not more so, than Antony Blinken.
Our adversaries see this.
That's why there's so much instability right now.
You mentioned Blinken going for that first meeting with the Chinese in Alaska.
Sullivan was there.
What they did was they insulted the Chinese by publicly criticizing them in front of the press at the beginning of the meeting.
That led the Chinese to chew them out.
Now, these people are supposed to be the adults in the room, the foreign policy experts.
It's not what they said was wrong.
It was they ruined a diplomatic opportunity and it set the stage for a sharp deterioration in U.S.-Chinese relations because what they did was so tone deaf.
And there's been repeated instances like this and all this criticism.
Of the Trump administration for not knowing how to do foreign policy, no one in the Trump administration ever did anything so stupid.
Yeah, well, it is.
And I think, I've always said this about Donald Trump, and I've take, you know, I'd get criticism of saying, well, Donald Trump's made it unstable, the world doesn't like us.
I said, look, a lot of the world has never overly liked the U.S. because we have, in the short amount of time historically, have vaulted to the top of the heap.
Everybody's going to be punching for the top of the heap.
I said, but what everybody always forgets, and I told many members of the press of this offline, is they would ask me about questions.
I said, you always like to say that Donald Trump says he's going to put America first in dealing with foreign countries and everywhere else.
I said, but you never fail to quote the second part of that sentence that he uses almost every time in which he says, because I expect them to put their country first.
And they do.
And why is this such a hard concept?
I mean, I would love to be a car salesman and have nothing but liberal journalists come buy cars from me.
Because undoubtedly, they're going to put my interests first because they're not going to put their interests first.
I can sell them anything I want to sell them.
When the French deal with other countries, they put the interests of the French people first.
They talk about the French economy, buying goods from France, giving Airbus sales.
You know that from Congress.
They're always thinking about their, but when we make deals, the liberals want us to think about helping other countries and deferring to the United Nations.
The UN would love to run our foreign policy, and to some extent Biden has let that happen.
But the American people don't want that, and President Trump knew that.
You were just up with me.
We were actually up at about the same time when the UN had their UN week and everything up in New York, which was between the rain and UN week.
It's been hard for me to think about going back to New York, but it was just getting around.
But what you saw there and what you've seen from the UN... Which is, frankly, and again, you probably have seen it a little bit closer than I have, I've not seen real definitive statements out of the UN over this Hamas attack.
In fact, it's almost as bad as the Biden administration or the Harvard administration on this coming forward.
When are we just going to finally just realize that the UN in its current form has outlived its usefulness?
We're talking about that at AFPI today because, Doug, there actually have been some recent statements by the UN. It's criticizing Israel from going after Hamas in Gaza, that this would be a human rights violation.
They don't think that Israel has any right to defend itself.
They won't call these Hamas terrorists terrorists.
You know, obviously, the UN wants a ceasefire.
They would like some type of negotiated settlement, and probably they want to buy Hamas off.
So we're talking about that at AFPI today.
I think we'll be putting out some kind of press statement.
We need to, because, I mean, again, this is, again, It's the world upside down.
I mean, when you're putting Iraq or when you're putting Iran or you're putting some of these dictatorship countries on the Human Rights Council, I mean, okay, you got a problem here.
I mean, let's just...
How do I say this in a neat way?
The influence exerted by every country, every person in the world should be honored and respected for the humanity that I believe God gave them.
However, let's be honest here.
Just like every Major League Baseball team is not the same, not every country in the world is the same with influence and structure and power.
And the UN now seems to be dominated by those who barely can control their own countries and Especially the countries like the U.S. and Britain and others, you know, who have led the fight for freedoms and others are the ones that's always, you know, condemned.
Israel is always condemned for something that you couldn't expect from anybody else.
Well, we know the U.N. has been a problem for decades, but let me tell you a related issue.
Joe Biden would like to reform the U.N. Security Council and change how the Security Council veto is used because he's upset That the Russians have used it to basically block resolutions on Ukraine and Russia and China have defended North Korea from testing missiles.
You know, that's not something we should approve of.
But let's keep in mind, the U.S. has used its Security Council veto about 30 times since 2000. 18 of those times it used it to defend Israel.
And we know the UN is a problem, but we make it less bad by using the veto to defend our values and our allies.
And Biden would make the UN even worse.
What is it?
He has the Midas touch, the reverse Midas touch.
Everything he touches does not turn to gold.
It turns to trash.
And I think that's been the problem we've had here.
Just looking ahead, AFPI, one of the things that I know that we do in the organization, looking at the organization, is looking ahead to a more sound conservative governance in the future.
Let me, and this may be a little bit out of the range, but I think it's from national security perspective is important.
We have a, and I served there for over eight, right at eight years.
I know this institution very well.
We have a functionally, a non-functioning Congress right now.
And it has been that way, frankly, for a little while.
But I believe it's taking its toll on our national security as much as anything.
How can we relate getting some of this back to the members of the Congress, but also the voters, to say, hey, this dysfunction, this not having a budget, this using CRs and stuff like that, are actually detrimental to the men and women in uniform and to our border agents and others.
Is that an argument that we can have looking long-term in these election processes forever?
I think those are good arguments, but I'm going to defer to you as a former member of Congress.
I can talk about how to fix the executive branch, how to bring better people in the government to staff national security, how we have to get control of these national security bureaucracies, not just by naming a good secretary or a good CIA director, but by naming people at multiple levels of the bureaucracy and putting in strong people who will implement the president's policies and have them keep politics out of their jobs.
But I'm going to let you talk about how to fix Congress because I was on a congressional stand for five years, the Intel Committee, but this is too big a problem for me.
Yeah, well, thanks, man.
I appreciate that.
You punted that one back really well.
That'll be the next episode of the Doug Collins podcast when Fred punts it back to Doug.
But no, I mean, this is a problem, and I've seen it, you know, coming along.
And, you know, people talk about our budgets.
They talk about our intel.
They talk about our national security.
We've got to get back to a functioning free system of government with the legislative, executive, and judicial all operating as they should within the constitutional realms of what they were put into.
Because if you do right now, As you well know, from the executive side of the House, when the legislator function is broken, the executive power grows and the unchecked executive power grows.
And I think the founding fathers...
And it's just me personally.
I don't think the founding fathers would...
Have nearly gasped at a very strong legislative body as much as they would gasp right now at the functionality or infunctionality of the executive side of the House that we see now that has grown so tremendously over the last few years.
And I guess my experience with Congress was the Intelligence Committee.
You know, the House Intelligence Committee has been criticized over the years.
It has been politicized from time to time.
It was never worse under Adam Schiff.
And Nancy Pelosi was so irresponsible in putting her political hacks on that committee.
I mean, a president was impeached through the Intelligence Committee.
I don't think our founders could have Well, I couldn't have conceived of an intelligence committee, but it was such an abuse of a committee that has a very important purpose to oversee secret intelligence agencies to make sure they don't spy on the American people.
And it was just wasted for all that time under Schiff.
And I'm very proud of Speaker McCarthy, former Speaker McCarthy, for kicking Schiff and that other congressman who slept with a Chinese spy, kicking them off, I think, the first day that he was Speaker.
Yeah, and a reminder to folks, what he just talked about is right here in that book that I wrote, The Clock and the Calendar.
This is the book I wrote about the bad impeachment that came out of Adam Schiff's Star Chamber, basically.
And I had to then do the work in the Judiciary Committee against Nadler, Jerry Nadler, who was completely inept at this as well.
But Fred, you've hit a perfect point.
I have a lot of good friends, you know, going back many years who were on the Intel Committee, and it was in staff members as well who just said that under the Schiff administration, it just became untenable, basically, of what was happening.
It was terrible.
When I was on the committee, the Democrats and Republicans got along.
They went out to lunch.
When I left the committee staff, I was friends with every member of the Democratic staff.
I'm very Republican, but we thought we were working in a bipartisan fashion to defend the country.
We disagreed sometimes, but we weren't personal enemies.
We weren't spying on each other in the staff room, but that's what happened under Schiff.
Yeah, it was.
And basically, it became a wall built down the middle.
And the intel is one of those committees that it was never intended to be.
And look, there's a lot of room for bipartisanship in Congress.
And I know that may sound heretical to some of my more conservative brethren and to more of my left-wing brethren.
But it is the way our country has existed.
We've got to be able to discuss differences, find solutions, and move forward.
One of the things AFPI does is find those solutions.
We look for support across the aisle because we believe there's common sense stuff going forward that can be done.
And Fred, you're one of the ones making that tick.
I'm glad to have you on the podcast today.
Thanks for joining me.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
Folks, that's it for this edition of the Doug Collins Podcast.
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