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Sept. 21, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
50:15
AS GOES TEXAS… Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep669
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Coming up, I have Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
This is the guy who really runs the state in studio today.
We're going to do a special episode.
I'm going to ask him about the Ken Paxton impeachment trial and acquittal, Republican infighting in Texas and around the country, what states can do about the border crisis, State efforts to block digital censorship, school choice.
It's going to be a very interesting show.
Hey, if you're listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the channel.
So if you're watching on Rumble, this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I'd like to welcome for a special episode of the podcast, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick.
He was elected in 2014, re-elected in 2018.
You can follow him on social media at exits at Dan Patrick and his website, danpatrick.org.
Dan, great to have you.
Good to be here, my friend. This is fun to have you in studio.
We can talk side by, you know, across the way.
It's kind of funny. Are you a native Texan?
Were you born in Texas? I was born in Baltimore.
Oh. And came here 40, now, four years ago.
So I've been here. I'm a Texan.
When you've been here 44 years, that's a long time.
And once I got here, I truly made the decision that the rest of my life would be in Texas.
I was in the television business.
I came here with the CBS affiliate as a sportscaster before the other Dan Patrick.
There's another one out there, a little younger.
But I'd been a newscaster, weathercaster, sportscaster.
My background was in that.
And when that ended in the mid-80s, I just decided that I wanted to stay here.
As you know, in the media business, you could end up taking a job anywhere in the country.
But I decided to stay in Texas because there's no place, and now more than ever, I say in my speeches, Texas is the America that all America used to be, and that's why a thousand people a day move here.
There's no place like Texas on God's green earth.
I mean, this is, you know, I raised my daughter mostly in California before she went off to college.
And she was visiting San Diego recently.
And she goes, and she's married to a Texan.
In fact, her husband's family has a ranch in the Abilene area.
She goes, I blame Brandon and Debbie for bringing us to Texas.
She goes, what happened to the beach?
What happened to the mountains? You know, so...
So we're getting a little bit of family pushback here for this relocation to Texas.
But make the case about it.
It's probably, I think you'd admit, it's probably not the prettiest state in the union.
Depending on where you are, there are some pretty sparse areas, but I've been in all 254 counties, and whether it's Big Ben or the coastal areas or the Hill Country, I mean, it's beautiful.
I think the reason...
I can remember this.
The first week I was on the air at Channel 11 in Houston, back in 1979, someone said, Dan, in Texas you can make a mistake and people will forgive you and give you a second chance.
And I believe that. I also think that we are the most giving state in the country.
And I've lived in a number of other states, Maryland, Georgia, Pennsylvania.
I believe we're the most giving people.
We give more men to the military than anyone else, and women, for example.
We give more of our charitable givings, I think, in most states.
We're a very strongly rooted Christian state.
The church has a very big presence.
And I think... Dinesh, that in Texas, once you get here, you become a Texan.
I like to say, even though a thousand people a day come to Texas, that no one moves here.
They arrive here and Texas moves into them.
country music. They buy the cowboy hat. They go to the rodeo.
They know it's rodeo and not rodeo if they come from California. So they learn about the Alamo and suddenly you have the DNA of Crockett and Bowie and Travis in your own DNA and that's for freedom and liberty and independence.
That's what you're about. I mean I have noticed this. You know I started out by noticing small things like for example I suddenly noticed I used to like Italian restaurants and I would typically the meat I would eat was veal. I never ate steak until I came to Texas and then I began to eat steak and I was like it's not that I hadn't tasted before but it tastes better in Texas.
I was like, this is really good.
So goodbye veal, hello steak.
The other thing is I go to speak at events and I suddenly noticed people are saluting the Texas flag.
And our own pledge.
And our own pledge. That's right.
This doesn't happen anywhere else in the union, I don't believe.
Maybe a few states, but not many.
In fact, I passed the legislation to put under God in our state pledge in 2007.
Oh. And in God we trust in the Texas Senate.
So, honor the Texas flag of pledging to the Texas, one state, under God.
There wasn't even an amendment for a comma in there, so we get the grammar right.
I mean, there might be progressives who go, well, that just shows you these Texans, you know, they're secessionists and so on, but they forget that Texas was, in fact, an independent republic, separate from Mexico and separate from the United States.
Yes, yes. For 10 years.
Yes. I like to say, Dinesh, when you travel around the world and people say, where are you from?
If you're from here, you say, I'm from Texas.
You don't say, I'm from America. I mean, you really do.
I mean, we love America, but we're from Texas.
I mean, if you travel around the world and say you're from Delaware...
Nobody knows where that is unless you have a Corvette in the garage with a lot of documents.
Oh yes, exactly, exactly.
Well, would you say that Texas is kind of America in italics, or is it America the way things used to be?
Because it just seems that Texas is bigger, more dramatic, has a certain flair that other states don't have.
I call it pride.
We have a pride in our state.
And most other people really don't have a pride in their state.
And I grew up in Maryland again as a kid.
And there was not a connection to the state of Maryland.
Or when I lived in Pennsylvania or in Georgia, my television or business career.
So we have a certain pride in Texas that I think people instantly...
Grab hold of. And it's one of the reasons, again, people come here.
Again, a thousand people or more a day.
When I did my campaign last year, I did a 133-city bus tour.
And everywhere I went, literally everywhere I went, I met someone from somewhere who was visiting Texas to find a home.
Everywhere, whether it was Oregon, Washington State, California, New York, Hawaii.
And of course, and the reason people recognize me is because my big head was on the side of the bus that said Dan Patrick, and I'm on Fox a lot.
But they came here because they want to be part of this great state.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with Dan Patrick.
The website, danpatrick.org.
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I'm back with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
You know, Dan, when I lived in California, I would go into the DMV to get something done with my car or get something renewed.
You have to sort of take the day off.
Because you're sitting there for about two hours before they call you.
And then I come to Texas and it's like 30 minutes later you're out.
And I only mention that because it does seem like this is a better run state than certainly a lot of the blue states.
Yes. And for people who have not been here a long time, Republicans have only been in charge of Texas since 2003.
That was the first time we had a Republican governor, lieutenant governor, and all the other statewide officials, and a majority in the House, and a majority in the Senate.
Up until then, we were a blue state from the beginning of our history, and then you had Bill Clements, the first Republican elected governor, then George W. Bush, but they didn't have a Republican legislature.
And so it wasn't until 2003, and I give a lot of the credit to Rick Perry for building a foundation of our business community.
We passed the strongest tort reform law a few years later.
That really was the basis of our economic growth because it did away with frivolous lawsuits.
I didn't join the legislature until 2007, so I wasn't there for that.
But that was a major piece that brought doctors to Texas because they were getting sued out of the state, that brought businesses to Texas.
And so that began the economic boom.
And then we moved from basically, I don't want to say a totally oil economy, but it was largely dependent on that.
And today we're diversified.
I mean, we're number one in the world, I believe, for medicine.
There's nothing like the medical center in Houston with all the hospitals and the thousands of employees that work down there.
You can find a specialist, you know, on anything that ails you.
I had a horse fall one time and I busted my arm in 17 places and I had to have my elbow rebuilt.
And I said to the doctor, I said, what would have happened?
I said, I didn't know there were elbow surgeons.
He said, well, in the medical center you have elbow surgeons.
You wouldn't find them in many places.
And so we're just a great state and now we're into space travel and of course the Johnson Space Center has always been here.
We are into Silicon Valley is moving here because of the cost of energy in California compared to the cost here.
So, Texas is very diversified.
We're second in the Fortune 500 companies.
We're also number two in live seats for live theater next to New York that people don't think about.
So, we're a very diversified state, but we still love our boots and we love our cowboy hats.
We love our country music. I'm also struck by the fact that, well, take the city of Houston, for example.
Look at the cuisine of Houston.
It matches New York.
In fact, I think maybe alongside New York, I can't think of another city.
And coming from California, you might expect a lot more Asian Americans in California.
You'll get a lot more Asian Indian restaurants.
Not so. You come here, and in fact, kind of on a funny note, when I noticed so many Indians in the greater Houston area, I was like...
That's really odd. Could it be the medical center?
Could it be a lot of Indian doctors?
And then I realized, you know, it's also the weather because it's exactly the way we grew up in India.
It's kind of humid. It's really hot.
It rains a lot. You know, the monsoon season.
I have avoided talking about the weather in Texas until now.
But I think the Indians don't mind it.
They're used to it. And there's something also about our weather in Texas that people who don't live here don't know.
For six months a year, we're a lot like California.
You don't need air conditioning or heat.
Now, it's still hot in September this year, but once you get to October through December and then March through May, I mean, it's very pleasant, convertible weather if you have one.
Yeah, it is hot in the summer, but you try to stay in air conditioning areas.
No, Texas is a fascinating place.
I remember when I was first campaigning for my Senate seat back in 07, and I was doing a lot of block walking.
And this is really true, particularly down in the southwest Sugar Land area, where a lot of different communities from different parts of the world.
And I would go door to door, and I could smell the aroma of the food coming from the kitchen.
Literally. And it was different, you know, house to house to house.
Big Indian, obviously, community there.
Asian community there.
And I believe Houston is one of the most diversified cities in the country, and it's the most diversified school district.
It's the third largest school district in the country, Houston Independent School District.
I think they speak 68 languages in the school district.
Unbelievable. You said earlier something that really struck me, and I want to pick up on it.
You said that Texas did not actually fall into Republican control until 2003.
Now, this to me is important for a couple of reasons, but one reason it's important is that the left says, they've been saying this in academia and in the media for a long time, that it was...
It was the Democrats who became the party of civil rights in the 1960s.
And that pushed all the racists into the Republican Party.
And that's why the South went Republican.
Now, in reality, you see these Southern states moving into the Republican fold, not in the 1960s, but in the late 80s and 90s.
And it seems to be far more a response to Reaganism and the big economic boom of the Sun Belt.
And look at Texas, a perfect example.
If it was going to be the racists who made Texas Republican, that would have happened a long time ago, but it didn't happen until this century.
Yes, and what's interesting about race in Texas also, and again, I came here in 79, and As a sportscaster, I've seen lots of championships for lots of teams.
Unlike any other city that wins a championship, when Texas won a championship, Houston, Dallas, whatever city it was, we didn't have riots in the streets.
We weren't setting cars on fire.
We weren't having just total chaos.
People in Texas, for the most part, black, white, brown, whatever, behave in an orderly way.
It's kind of that Southern...
It's a Southern way of life, I think.
We're so friendly in Texas.
A friend of mine once said, the reason people in Chicago aren't friendly is because the winters are so bad.
And I lived in Scranton, Pennsylvania for a while, my first TV job.
The winters were really bad there as well.
But when the winter is tough, you're walking everywhere with your head down against the wind.
You're not looking at people.
In Texas, every day of the year, whether it's 100 degrees or 75 degrees, Every person you walk by, you look them in the eye, you see them.
And I think there's a friendliness.
That's part of the South in general.
But Texas is just such a friendly place to be.
And that's why people come here.
They just love it.
They just love it. We'll be right back with Dan Patrick.
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You'll get 35% off Your first preferred order by using discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
You can follow him on x at danpatrick, his website danpatrick.org.
Dan, let's talk about something that's been in the news recently, the impeachment trial in the Senate, the Texas Senate that you presided over with Ken Paxton.
Now, It must have been an odd feeling for you to be, because you weren't really a participant in the trial, but of course you were observing, you were kind of managing it to a degree.
What is your sort of post-mortem take on that?
Well, first of all, I'm going to overrule your objection.
No, maybe I'll sustain it instead.
Just come up to the bench and let's discuss this.
First of all, I'm not a lawyer, and so the experience of being a judge With, under impeachment rules in the Constitution, I had the same power of a district judge.
I could hold someone in contempt.
I could fine them. I could send them to jail.
Obviously we didn't. But it was a daunting task.
And when you're in the media, as I've been for most of my life, and in politics, you get to do a lot of interesting things.
Nothing in my life ever matched being a judge in an historic case.
Only the third statewide impeachment in the history of the state.
Last one was in 1917.
So the good news was my son, Ryan, was a prosecutor and a criminal court judge.
So he gave me some good tips.
He said, Dad, the best judges don't talk too much.
They let both parties lay out their case, and when they talk over each other, they just say, gentlemen, stop.
The court reporters can't report when you're both talking, and that will settle them down.
And that's pretty much what I did.
I have a great legal team on my staff that helped, and then I brought in a judge, Lana We're of Dallas, and she was terrific, just terrific, and she assisted me along the way.
So it was an interesting experience, not something I ever want to do, but I'm proud of what the Texas Senate did.
This should, in my view, the Texas House We're good to go.
Witnesses testify under oath.
That didn't happen this time.
They had cross-examination.
Didn't happen this time. They actually had witnesses and hearings before all the members.
I think they had 21 hearings.
Didn't happen this time. This was done very rushed, again, based on hearsay and double hearsay and triple hearsay, not under oath.
And the members, it was the last week of session at the last minute, and the members until two days before didn't even know what they were voting on.
That impeachment was coming.
And they ended up sending a case to the Senate that there was no record.
There's a great video on YouTube, if people are interested, John Smithy, Paxton Floor speech.
And if you go to, that's S-M-I-T-H-E-E. If you watch that on YouTube, you will see every mistake that the House made.
He's a very distinguished lawyer in the House, as well as other lawyers in the House.
And this is wrong. This is indefensible.
And so they sent us a case I mean, could it be that, you know, at the federal level, if you try to impeach the president, there are... There's criterion in the Constitution that says high crimes and misdemeanors.
In other words, you can't just say that the House and the Senate are both Democratic.
We don't like this guy.
We're going to get rid of him. Is it the case that in Texas, impeachment doesn't necessarily require you to prove anything other than just, we think this guy is worthy of impeachment?
Well, that's what it seemed like in the House.
And I want to change the Constitution.
I mentioned this in my remarks after the verdict was reached that Ken Paxton was acquitted.
And my criticism of the House, by the way, has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
It's about the process. You just can't...
You can't... Take testimony from someone if there's no accountability because of the threat of perjury.
They'll say anything. And witnesses in this case that the House sent over said extraordinary things that they couldn't back up when they were actually under oath on the witness stand or didn't want to back up because they couldn't tell the truth on it.
And one of the things we have to change is in the House, again in 1917, there was a precedent of almost like a trial.
I think you have to put people under oath.
If you're going to impeach someone, you need to put people under oath.
And the House didn't do it this time.
So that needs to change the Constitution.
Also, when Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were impeached, they didn't get thrown out of the White House until it was over.
Here in Texas, you immediately are gone.
Ken Paxton was gone for three months.
And without pay.
But that disrupts the whole office.
Now he has to go back and kind of rebuild it after three months.
So, again, John Smithy on YouTube, looking up, Paxton Floor speech, he said on the floor, what we're doing in the Texas House this year is hang them now and judge them later.
And that's how impeachments work in Texas, and we need to change that.
Whether it's Republican, Democrat, or Independent, this should not happen to anyone.
This process that happened in the House.
So what you're saying is that quite apart from the vindication of Paxton, you think that there needs to be some institutional reform so that this doesn't occur in this way.
Yeah, this is why it hadn't happened in a hundred years.
We've only had two. One in the 1890s, one in 1917.
Because the House was serious about it.
They weren't serious about it. Maybe they were serious about impeaching him, but they weren't serious about the process.
Let's take a pause. We'll be right back with Dan Patrick.
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I'm back with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
His website, danpatrick.org.
Dan, you know, I mean, I didn't watch the whole trial, but I watched excerpts of it.
A lot of it was cross-examination by Busby on social media, Busby being the attorney representing Ken Paxton.
And it seemed like each of these things brought out the fact that there was no fundamental evidence there other than, I suppose, you know, Ken Paxton had an affair, which is disagreeable and unpleasant and wrong, but not impeachable and certainly not illegal.
And what you really had is a bunch of guys who sort of wanted to, for whatever reason, get rid of Ken Paxton.
So this, to me, raises the bigger question.
I mean, when we look at impeachments, you know, Clinton was impeached by a largely Republican Congress.
Trump was impeached by really a Democratic legislature.
Here, you've got Republicans who are in control of the House, and yet they're impeaching a Republican attorney general.
Now, first of all, that would, I think, be very rare if it would happen at all on the Democratic side.
And so it demands some explanation.
If someone outside of Texas is going, well, what's going on in Texas?
I thought you guys are a red state.
I thought Ken Paxton was pretty effective in what he's doing.
Sure, there are going to be some personal disagreements and so on.
But why would it reach such an extraordinary level?
Well, why did it? In my view, it was led by the Speaker.
He's in charge. He appointed, handpicked the people on the investigation committee that started investigating back in March because Paxton came and asked for $3.3 million to settle the whistleblower suit.
So they said that was the catalyst to start the investigation.
Well, what did we learn in testimony under oath that they didn't because they took nothing under oath?
We learned that Paxton didn't come forward with the settlement.
It was the whistleblowers that came and wanted to settle because they had discovered that the Supreme Court may issue a ruling that would stop them from getting any financial reimbursement.
So they reached out to the Attorney General's office and they appointed a mediator and they settled the mediator, settled between both sides at $3.3 million.
Now, if If the lieutenant governor's office gets sued, I don't get sued personally.
The office gets sued. The attorney general, Ken Paxton, wasn't sued personally.
It was the office. So the only one that can pay that claim...
Is the state of Texas.
We have a, I don't know if it's a law or a rule or kind of a standard, but we, you know, the state gets sued a lot, okay?
It just happens in life. They can settle on a claim up to about $250,000.
Above that, the legislature has to step in.
So they used the fact that Paxton asked for $3.3 million to settle the lawsuit as a reason to start this impeachment investigation.
And they hired investigators to come in.
And again, all they did was tell stories of what other people said.
Let me give you a couple of glaring examples.
There was a high-profile witness who said Ken Paxton gave an envelope to one of his aides to give to Nate Paul the subject of this in the middle of the night in the back alley.
So that's one of the things the House built their case around.
With no under oath.
Under oath in the Senate, that person, that witness said, well, I didn't know it firsthand.
Well, then how did you know? Well, five or six people told me.
Well, who were those people? Why I don't remember.
Well, that discredits a witness immediately.
There was another key part of evidence where the Paxton defense side found text where they said, we've got to cook up something about the Attorney General.
Well, that will make a jury kind of question that witness.
Another piece of evidence on a text from one of the whistleblowers, we have to indict him by the spring.
It looks like someone was out to kind of create this.
For whatever reason, I don't know.
I knew a lot of those, not all of them, but I knew a few of the whistleblowers because they were on the staff and we'd have meetings.
They're good people. Somewhere, somehow, They got all wrapped up and went to the FBI. And one of the key pieces of evidence, again, none of the House members, 150 members and the 60-some Republicans who voted for this, none of them heard any of this when they voted on impeachment.
And one of the whistleblowers actually said, under oath and testimony, when we went to the FBI, we didn't have any evidence.
Except our personal experience.
And that can be evidence.
But do you impede someone on no evidence?
Except my personal experience?
I think he did something wrong.
And the whole thing about the house and the kitchen.
I was going to say, not to mention the infamous kitchen, you know, the new countertop story.
I mean, that was, you almost laugh out loud.
Because it's like, you know, I heard Mrs.
Paxton talking about some new countertops.
And then, was this the way the kitchen looked?
Yeah, pretty much. Well, this was taken a month ago.
He's got the same countertops he had before.
And had they allowed Ken Paxton or his attorneys in the House to answer those questions, they could have been answered.
They could have shown them the receipts.
They could have shown them the checks.
But they didn't even allow his attorneys in.
This was... I can't think of another word.
This was a sham from the beginning.
So how does it happen in a Republican state?
Real close. I know you were close on time in the segment.
The speaker needs 76 votes or 150 members.
Every Republican speaker, the last three, have always gone and made a deal with about 75 Democrats.
And if you've got 75 Democrats, or 65 Democrats, excuse me, that's been about the number, then you only need a dozen or so Republicans to become speaker.
But who do you owe your soul to?
The Democrats who put you there.
I mean, this is actually...
Now we're getting into very scary territory, and because we need time for this, let's take a pause.
We'll be right back with Dan Patrick.
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You need to use the promo code DINESH. I'm back with Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas.
Dan, you were saying something very striking, which is that here's Texas.
It's a conservative state.
And even so, you were saying that in the House, you've got a majority of Republicans, but you've got a significant minority of Democrats.
And so what this speaker, but he's not the first one, has done is essentially cut a deal with the Democrats.
Now, am I right in thinking that the Democrats say to themselves, listen, you know, we don't have the majority, so having leverage over the majority is our best bet.
Of course. So, we'll offer our votes as a block to this guy who wants to become Speaker.
Now, he's going to need some Republicans, but not that many.
And that puts him over the top.
And then, I think you were saying, you have a Republican Speaker beholden to the Democrats.
I mean, that's unbelievable. Yeah, when Joe Strauss became...
Tom Craddock was the first Republican Speaker.
And in 2009...
Joe Strauss followed him, and about 12 Democrats, as the story goes, met themselves and tried to pick who's going to be the speaker between them.
And Joe Strauss, who I think at that time only served two sessions or so, he kind of ended up being the guy.
Because other people were fighting with each other.
Well, I want to be, you want to be, we'll settle on this guy.
Now, was he a Republican? He was a Republican.
And they got 60-some Democrats.
And about a dozen Republicans.
And he got to 76. And he became Speaker.
Now, once they actually have the Speaker vote, all the other Republicans are going to vote for him because they know he's the Speaker.
They want their bills passed. They want a shot at being a committee chair or whatever.
And that's how it happened.
When Dennis Bonin came in, who has been the best Speaker I've worked with...
Dennis had been there a long time.
He didn't need that big block.
He still had Democrat support, but he really kind of muscled his way through there with mostly Republicans.
And then when Dave came in and we went back to this, you know, a lot of Democrats.
And what happens, let's just say there are four Republicans who want to be Speaker.
Whoever can get the biggest block of Democrats is going to end up being the Speaker.
And the Republicans have a rule in the House.
And right now there are 80-some Republicans, so a big majority out of 150 members, that the caucus must pick the Speaker.
So the Republican caucus should pick the Speaker.
You know, like picking the new Pope.
You know, stay in there until you get the right one.
But they never do it.
Someone always breaks away and goes against the Democrats.
And it says, hey, I've got the votes.
You all want to join me? And so that has really undermined it.
Our conservative agenda in the House, you know, the Senate, and I'm proud of this, we're the most conservative body in a big state anywhere.
We drive the agenda.
When Texas passes, like the heartbeat bill or whatever it might be, other states follow what we do.
Other states follow the textbooks or the various policies we enact because we're Texas.
And if Texas can do it, when Donald Trump was president, he followed a lot of the things that Texas did.
He said, hey, if it's good enough for Texas, it's good enough for America.
Thank you, Donald Trump.
We are up against it all the time.
We pass out conservative legislation on conservative legislation.
When I became lieutenant governor...
We changed the rules.
The senators changed the rules to benefit the majority party.
When our country was first founded, there was discussion.
How does Congress vote?
The simple majority is at two-thirds.
And I believe it was Madison who said, if you require two-thirds to pass things, then you have tyranny of the minority.
And in the House, the Democrats really pretty much run the show for the large part.
And that's what happens. And it's very tough to break that hold, but the Republicans need to honor their caucus rules and let the Republicans caucus choose the speaker.
What is the ideological divide in the House?
Some people say it's between the RINOs, who are Republicans in name only, and then the sort of hardcore Republicans.
Is that really the problem or is it the problem that this is a division between a kind of MAGA, make America great again, leading a group versus an establishment that is not RINO. They are conservative, but they don't like this kind of way.
In other words, they don't like the Trumpian style.
They don't like the Trumpian rhetoric.
They don't like the kind of populist thrust of the whole thing.
How would you put your finger on where's the real split that needs to be addressed?
Of the 80-some Republicans, I would say a third are rock-solid conservatives.
Now, in the Senate, I have 19 Republicans.
They're all rock-solid.
Now, it's changed over the years.
It reflects the voters.
A senator in Texas represents a million people.
You know, three senators would represent the whole state of Iowa, for example.
It's a lot of people. So you have to reflect your million people.
A House member represents about a couple hundred thousand, so you can have smaller pockets.
But I would say it's the third hardcore conservative About a third that are pretty conservative, and then about a third, or maybe less, that's pretty moderate.
The moderates seem to always be the ones in power who make the deal with the Democrats.
And what's interesting, if you look at our makeup now, Dinesh, in Texas, we don't have many Republican House members from the cities anymore.
It's almost all Democrat.
So our Republicans who are elected to the House, the ones who are blocking school choice right now that we're about to have another special session on.
I've passed out of the Senate three times, never passed the House.
Texas is a rural red state.
So these members, some of these moderates and so-so conservatives, actually represent rural Texas, which is very conservative.
It's very MAGA country.
Very MAGA country. So they don't, in many cases, they say the right thing to get elected in rural Texas, and then they go and kind of get blended in with the mushy middle.
Or they're elected with conservative rhetoric, and then they notice that the balance of power is such that an alliance with the Democrats actually benefits them, although it may not be beneficial to them.
We have lots of really great House members in the House.
You have to have the right leadership.
We have got conservatives and other people who would be, but you have to have the right leadership.
And when the Democrats are picking the leadership, there you go.
We'll be right back with Dan Patrick.
We honor you father for all that you've done for us.
Chief Division Counsel and DOJ have approved a no knock breach.
BOOM!
We want the subject to be on display.
Doing the walk of shame, full visual impact.
Any questions? Are we becoming a police state?
Government told American citizens they couldn't go to church on Sunday.
For the first time in my life, I'd say to myself, am I going to get a knock at the door?
FBI war! Come to the door now!
The Patriot Act and FISA were used against Donald Trump.
These individuals have commissioned the biggest propaganda play in U.S. history.
They don't go after the people that rigged the election.
They go after the people that want to find out what the hell happened.
We don't need to have a crime.
What we need is a person to look at.
And then we go find out what crime you did.
FBI! Our focus is shifting.
Our main priority as a bureau is going to be domestic terrorism.
It really paints anybody who's right of center.
If you're a pro-life, pro-family Catholic, they define you as radical.
These are anti-government.
We have freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
Violent extremists, and they must be dealt with.
We can do anything we want.
I'm back with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
Dan, let's talk about the border, because here's Texas, a border state.
Debbie grew up on the southern part of Texas, the Rio Grande Valley.
It just appears like it's, you know, a free-for-all.
And by that, I mean, you know, it's not just poor, starving Mexicans coming across the border.
You have people coming from Iran, from China, from India, from other parts of South America.
It's almost as if the word has gone out Well, I don't know who the Biden administration is.
We know the man out front is not thinking of these things.
He's not thinking in general a lot of times.
Is it the Obama team behind them doing things that Obama didn't want to do himself as president because he didn't want to look this leftist?
I'm not sure. But this is the left that wants to destroy the country, and they want to dilute the country by having millions and millions of people coming here illegally.
In many cases, the health issues are a concern.
It cost us a lot of taxpayer money to address that.
Education. You know, these children come here maybe without any schooling or way behind, so you can't put a 15-year-old in the fourth grade, but if a 15-year-old is only about the sixth grade level, what do you do?
They come to school, they drop out because they can't keep up.
It is about diminishing this nation.
And that's the only way you can explain it.
For Mayorkas and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden who say the border's secure, the most dangerous thing to me, Dinesha, is a politician who will look at you in the eye and lie to you.
But above that is the one who will look you in the eye and lie to you, and they know you know they're lying to you, and they still don't mind lying to you.
That's a dangerous person.
And when they sit up there and look America in the eye and say, the border's secure, you see thousands of people crossing every day.
I mean, we had video yesterday.
We put concertina wire across lots of areas.
The Border Patrol was cutting the wire and letting the people through.
We now have an influx like we've never seen.
Let me give you some quick numbers.
So in 2002 or 2003, the Chamber of Commerce said there are 11 million people here illegally.
And we heard that number forever.
Every time I'm on Fox News, I'd say, it's not 11 million anymore.
That was 20 years ago.
We were apprehending about 450,000 a year, every year, from San Diego to Brownsville, two-thirds in Texas.
We have two-thirds of the border.
Our border with Mexico, by the way, is further than Atlanta to Portland, Maine.
Okay? It's a little zigzaggy, but that's how many miles we have to cover.
So if you take 450,000 every year, year after year, and by the way, that's the ones we catch.
Law enforcement will tell you for everyone you catch, two or three more get in.
The gotaways that we see, but we can't get them before they disappear.
So you could say a million a year since 2003.
So you're 20-some million.
MIT did a study in 2016, and their numbers kind of matched mine.
They estimated somewhere between 22 and 30 million in 2016.
So add another several million to when Biden came in.
And Trump finally had it pretty secure the last year.
So under Biden, we're apprehending about 2 million a year.
Apprehending? Another million or so, million and a half gotaways over his four-year term.
So that's 9.5 to 10 million that we apprehended and saw.
How many more got through that we didn't see in that border that's longer than Atlanta to Portland, Maine?
So you're talking about 15, 20 million people under the Biden administration, and that 15 or 20 million, let's call it 15, be conservative.
15 million plus the 25 to 30 million that were here, you're now talking about 10 to 15 percent of the population of the United States here illegally, without any foundation in our history.
Maybe they don't share our values.
They come from another part of the world that They want to come to America to get all the freebies, but they don't share maybe our values and our principles.
And so that's what the left's doing, and it will only take them about two decades to accomplish it, because all these people who are coming here may not be allowed to vote, but their children, when they're born, are American citizens, and they will be voting.
And who let them in?
The great Joe Biden.
The George Washington of illegal immigration.
That's what I was going to ask you, is what's the endgame?
And presumably the endgame is not just destroying America, but transforming the demographic composition of the country in such a way that they have essentially a permanent hold on the political system, correct?
Absolutely. If we lose Texas, you can never win the White House again as a Republican or any other person, any other party that might pop up one day.
Because the electoral votes of New York and California and Texas combined, the math doesn't work.
The math is hard now with Texas.
And so we are the target.
And we're going to talk, I know, a little bit coming up here about this community that has suddenly become in the news near Plum Creek that has 50,000 to 60,000 estimated illegal immigrants living in it now, about 30 minutes from where we're doing this podcast, and is estimated to have 200,000 people in the next 10 years.
And that's a city of people here illegally And see, I won my election last time by 800,000 votes.
So project out 20 or 30 years from now, if you have two or three of these cities pop up that are all cities with people here illegally, whether they get the right to vote at some point by a Democratic Congress or whether their children one day vote, you're talking about Texas in the bullseye.
I mean, it's scary either way, right?
Because one way is, okay, they're not going to be able to vote, and so you have this giant population living at the margins of society.
The other possibility is you let them vote, and then you've just created a, you've essentially changed the country.
And without the consent of the American people, because no one's agreed to this.
No one said, okay, well, this is what we really want.
We have a legal system in place, but this is a way of putting a wrecking ball even into legal immigration.
It's one of the brilliant things about our bus policy here in Texas, and it costs us a lot of money to send the bus around the country.
But now in blue cities and blue states, they're feeling the pain.
And when the president, who's a Democrat, won't even listen to Democrat governors, when they see people sprawled out on the streets of New York and everywhere else, You know it's a plan that Joe doesn't even realize what's going on and someone tells him it's a good thing for America.
And look, you know, the humanitarian issue on this is terrible.
I worry about Texas and America first, but women and children being put into sex trafficking, women being raped to come here, the bounty they pay to send part of their wages back to the cartels or others in other countries, the whole smuggling ring.
It's almost like we're creating another indentured servant population in this country.
So, We also, you know, we had a three-year-old drown in the river yesterday.
Joe Biden says, come on, come on, come on.
He doesn't care if people are drowning in the river.
He doesn't care. Whatever the price to be paid, the ends justify the means.
We'll be right back for a final segment with Dan Patrick.
I'm back with Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. His website is danpatrick.org. You can follow him on x at Dan Patrick. Now Dan, here's something that's really strange and that is that you've got these blue cities and of course we have some blue cities in Texas but there are blue cities around the country. The Democrats import all these illegals. You also have Soros type prosecutors so you've got rampant crime.
Who are the victims of all this?
Very often the people who live in the blue cities, right?
So you've got crime rates soaring, you've got the homeless encampments.
Look at the wreckage in cities like LA, for example, or San Francisco, but also others.
And my question is, at some level, I think to myself, well, this is horrible.
We're ruining these sort of...
You know, monuments to Western civilization.
On the other hand, a little part of me goes, well, these people kind of deserve it because these are the policies that they're voting for.
I mean, they know that this is what the Democratic Party brings you.
How do you assess what's happening in our cities and why the people in the cities are seemingly politically okay with it?
I don't think they're okay with it.
And in Harris County, where Houston is, the third largest, I think, county in the country, and the third or fourth largest city now in the country, the elections were very close this time.
Very close for judges and pro-police candidates.
And I think those were comparison.
Trump, Abbott, and I, or Trump didn't run an A team, but we lost Harris County, Blue County, by about...
We lost 160,000 votes the election before last.
This time we lost it by about 100,000.
But some of our judge candidates down ballot only lost by 1,000 or two.
So people are waking up.
But I've always looked at the Republican-Democrat party this way today.
You've done so many, you know so much about this and what you've studied and all the documentaries you've done.
But if you look at the parties, the Republicans are a party of independent people.
Don't tell me to vote early.
I'll vote when I want. Don't tell me to vote on election day.
I'll vote when I want. Don't tell me who I should vote for.
I'll make up my own mind. The Democrats are a party of groupthink.
So you have big blocks of voters.
And it's pretty much whatever the leader of that block says, they pretty much vote that way.
There's not as much independence in their party.
And I think what you're seeing now in the Hispanic population in Texas is We won several seats in the Valley this time.
We almost flipped the first Republican Senate seat down there.
We lost by 600 votes out of 60,000.
That was unheard of a decade ago.
So I think the Hispanic population is breaking away from this group think.
And I think that's the difference of the parties.
And eventually, when you start destroying people's lives, when it's dangerous to walk down the street, When criminals, murderers are let out with no bail, eventually people wake up.
It might take another election cycle or two, but I think people will wake up.
And if we flash back to the FDR era, where, initially, America was kind of a one-party state, right?
You had Republicans, but they had very little power in the House or the Senate, at least for most of that period.
But nevertheless, there were conservative Democrats.
Right. And so if someone goes, well, I don't like the left, okay, that's fine.
There were all kinds of Democrats who were sort of right-leaning, but now the Democratic Party seems so homogenous that basically, well, take a Hispanic family.
You can't say, I'm going to vote for the conservative Democrat, because if you vote for the Democrats, this is what you get.
So the only remedy is, I'm going to exit the Democratic Party and vote for the other guys.
Absolutely. And, you know, Texas...
Again, it was a Democrat majority.
Again, we didn't have full control until 2003.
But those were Democrats who were pretty darn conservative.
In fact, and they were very short on time, when I first became a senator in 07, And I was traveling at a county not too far from here, and there was a group in a meeting room in the back, and I thought, well, you know, I'm a new senator.
It's not my district, but I'll go say hi.
You don't always feel good about yourself when you get elected.
I walked back there, and they were all Democrats.
The sheriff, the county judge, well, today they're all Republican.
So what's interesting in Texas, we have 254 counties, about 235 are rural.
Those were all blue counties 25 years ago.
Sheriffs, county judges, commissioners, everybody!
Today, they're all red.
They're all red. So it's been interesting how it's flipped over.
And if you look at the map, electoral map, look on election night when Bill Hemmer's up there looking at the map.
Pennsylvania's all red except Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Ohio's all red except Cleveland and Cincinnati.
North Carolina's all red except Charlotte and Raleigh.
Georgia's all red except Atlanta and maybe one other town, Savannah or whatever it might be.
So America is a red country.
Conservative. Family values.
God first. Patriot.
Support our military.
Put the thugs in jail, etc., etc., etc.
It's those blue cities that control a lot of those states.
And once we make inroads, and once we get more of our churchgoers out to vote, only about one out of every four churchgoers votes by the data, once we make that happen, then we save the country from these leftist, Marxist, socialists running the Democrat Party that many people...
Who vote for them don't realize yet.
Yeah, and Patrick, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you. It's been fun. It's been a real pleasure.
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