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Oct. 14, 2021 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
42:10
Episode 11: FBI Abuses (feat. Don Gaetz) – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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The embattled Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Matt Gaetz was one of the very few members in the entire Congress who bothered to stand up against permanent Washington on behalf of his constituents.
Matt Gaetz right now, he's a problem in the Democratic Party.
He could cause a lot of hiccups in passing the laws.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep hurting him.
If you stand for the flag and kneel in prayer, if you want to build America up and not burn her to the ground, then welcome, my fellow patriots!
You are in the right place!
This is the movement for you!
You ever watch this guy on television?
It's like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a canceled man in some corners of the internet.
Many days I'm a marked man in Congress, a wanted man by the deep state.
They aren't really coming for me.
They're coming for you.
I'm just in the way.
Ms. Monaco, I want to come back to this extraordinary letter and memorandum that the Attorney General of the United States issued yesterday.
Practically every day brings new reports about this administration weaponizing the federal bureaucracy to go after political opponents.
Frankly, I don't think we've ever seen anything like it in American history.
Is parents waiting sometimes for hours to speak at a local school board meeting to express concerns about critical race theory or the masking of their students, particularly young children?
Is that, in and of itself, is that harassment and intimidation?
Is waiting to express one's view at a school board meeting harassment and intimidation?
As the Attorney General's memorandum made quite clear, spirited debate is welcome, is a hallmark of this country.
It's something we all should engage in.
No, I don't think so, Ms. Monica.
With all due respect, it didn't make it quite clear.
It doesn't define those terms, nor does it define harassment or intimidation.
It talks about violence.
I think we can agree that violence shouldn't be condoned or looked aside from in any way, swept under the rug at all.
But harassment and intimidation, what did those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting?
I mean, this seems to, in the First Amendment context, we talk about the chill, the chill to speech.
If this isn't a deliberate attempt to chill parents, From showing up at school board meetings for their elected school boards, I don't know what is.
I mean, I'm not aware of anything like this in American history.
We're talking about the FBI. You're using the FBI to intervene in school board meetings.
That's extraordinary.
Senator, I have to respectfully disagree.
Point me to an instance.
The Attorney General's memorandum made quite clear that violence is not appropriate.
Spirited public debate on a whole range of issues is absolutely what this country is all about.
Then why is it being investigated by the FBI? You know, all I can say is this is truly extraordinary.
I think you know it is.
It's unprecedented.
You can't point to a single instance where anything like this has happened before.
And I think parents across this country are going to be stunned to learn.
Stunned.
That if they show up at a local school or board meeting, by the way, where they have the right to appear and be heard, where they have the right to say something about their children's education, where they have the right to vote, and you are attempting to intimidate them, you are attempting to silence them.
You are attempting to interfere with their rights as parents, and yes, with their rights as voters.
This is wrong.
This is dangerous.
And I cannot believe that an Attorney General of the United States is engaging in this kind of conduct.
And frankly, I can't believe that you are sitting here today defending it.
That's firebrand Missouri United States Senator Josh Hawley going after the Department of Justice and the FBI for weaponizing federal law enforcement against parents who love their kids and show up to school board meetings.
I've got an interview with a former school board member I know pretty well later in the show.
But it begs the question, where has federal law enforcement gone astray?
Where have there been abuses?
And are there particular abuses that are getting worse?
FISA. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
It creates foreign intelligence surveillance courts.
And they operate in secret.
Why do we have secret courts anyway?
And why would U.S. citizens be at risk from intelligence work being done in a foreign country?
And are they even following their own rules and procedures as they operate a secret spy court?
Spoiler alert, they are not.
The greatest threat we face abroad is a rising, ambitious Chinese Communist Party.
And we'll have upcoming episodes and segments about that in the very near future.
Their hooks into our political, tech, and corporate elite will be exposed.
But today, we will focus on the greatest domestic threat to America, and that is the weaponization of the national security state that has been directed inward against our American citizens, often for the preservation of corrupt institutions or the acquisition of political power.
I made this point on Steve Bannon's War Room recently.
Take a listen.
I believe that there are people who under almost any other circumstance would be out on their own recognizance, but to make a political point are behind bars right now because the Biden administration, the intelligence community, they want to turn these exquisite authorities in the national security apparatus inward to the American people to hunt our people.
Spying, lying, smearing, electioneering, melding the worlds of intelligence collection, criminal targeting and domestic political ambition.
I grew up my entire life thinking the FBI were the good guys, always, top to bottom.
They wanted justice, not success or failure for political movements.
Frankly, the FBI was too cool for politics, I figured.
That perspective informed my worldview until I was seated on the House Judiciary Committee in 2017. The Russia hoax was already in full swing by then.
Trump, prostitutes, pee tapes.
He was a Russian agent, they told us.
Coordinating campaigning with Putin.
I saw clearly what was happening at a politicized FBI during this December 2017 interview with Fox News' Ed Henry.
The problem is, in the swamp of Washington, D.C., the biggest alligator is a politicized FBI and Department of Justice.
And that's why we're fighting hard to make sure that we've got a fair and equal opportunity for all sides to be heard, and that you don't have this pro-Hillary Clinton bias, anti-Donald Trump bias continue to infect our institutions and our systems that all Americans should be able to rely on.
I hate fewer carbs now.
Even some Republicans we looked up to and trusted at the time, like Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, said we should trust the FBI and Robert Mueller.
I told people at the time that Gowdy was wrong.
The FBI was putting their thumb on the scale to try to nail Trump because the deep state despised him, even if our voters elected him.
I made the case that Gowdy and Ryan blew it in this appearance on Sean Hannity.
I'm glad you went through Trey Gowdy's exquisite questions in 2017 to these corrupt officials.
I guess my question, Sean, would be why was it then in late May of 2018 that Trey Gowdy went on Martha McCallum's show and said that the FBI did exactly what all of our fellow Americans would have wanted them to do?
And that it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.
Both of those things have now been proven to be not true.
And it seems that Gowdy's brilliant lawyering back in 2017 that we're only able to see now proves those two statements untrue.
The number one question I get asked from Americans is why no one has gone to jail and been held accountable.
Unfortunately, when Nunes and Meadows and Jordan and I wanted subpoena power, it was Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy that wouldn't give us that subpoena power.
Democrats sent out hundreds of subpoenas when we had control and could have run We made a mistake.
We didn't send out a single subpoena, not one, and that's a failure of our Republican leadership.
Jim Jordan, Ron DeSantis, Mark Meadows, Devin Nunes, we were all not deterred.
We continued to push for investigations.
Then we got a bombshell report from the Inspector General.
In secret courts, our own government officials were doctoring evidence, lying on certifications, not supporting factual claims with required evidence, and violating the very procedures intended to preserve our delicate liberties.
Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy were wrong.
We should have been attacking the credibility of these corrupt investigations into Trump from the start.
We should not have indulged them, even for one moment.
But here is Gowdy in May of 2018, when we were in power.
We could have actually done something.
But Gowdy was just simping for the FBI. I am, I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.
After Gowdy made these statements, House Judiciary held a joint hearing with the Oversight and Government Reform and Accountability Committees, which Gowdy actually chairs OGR. And this happened.
There is no member of Congress who holds the department and the bureau in higher esteem than I do.
There are others who hold you in high esteem, but I would take second place to no one.
And I have defended the Department and the Bureau when, frankly, it was pretty damn lonely to do so.
When my Democrat friends were asking that Jim Comey be prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation about this time last year, they now want him canonized, but this time last year they wanted him prosecuted for a Hatch Act violation.
When your predecessor sat right where you're sitting and was embroiled in a fight with this little tiny startup company called Apple, I was on the side of the Bureau.
When there are calls for special counsel, even today, I reject them because I trust the women and men of the Department of Justice and the Bureau, the professionals that we hired, To do their job.
Gowdy was spectacularly wrong about the FBI in the Russia investigation.
To his credit, he admitted as much to Tucker Carlson after he left office and became a Fox News personality.
That was, I made a lot of mistakes in life, relying on briefings and not insisting on the documents.
Yes.
My mistake was relying on the word of the FBI and the DOJ and not insisting on the documents.
It turns out, Fox News Gowdy had the perspective that Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy lacked.
A lot of good that does us now.
Pundits like Trey Gowdy should get credit for admitting when they make a bad read.
But we must learn and improve.
Jim Jordan put it best, if they can do it to the President of the United States, Just imagine.
And most importantly, this bill is an improvement over what currently exists, over the status quo.
The legislation begins to address the problems that we saw with the FBI's illegal surveillance of Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
On December 9th, 2019, the nonpartisan Justice Department inspector general released a 400-page report detailing the FBI's misconduct and the failures in its warrantless surveillance of Mr. Page.
Congressman Meadows and I urged our Democrat chairman to hold hearings on this report, but they were not interested.
Still, I hope all of my colleagues had a chance to read the inspector general's report because it should concern every single American.
Remember, if our law enforcement agencies can do this to a president, imagine what they can do to you and I. They did it to President Trump.
We caught them red-handed, so we demanded a broader review.
Now we have those results, and they are truly terrifying.
The failures that fueled the corruption of the Trump-Russia hoax are still happening today.
Secret courts are operating in the United States, giving the FBI incredible powers to spy on US citizens.
Here's the critical background.
In 1978, the 95th Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that they were able to get done with overwhelming support from a majority of the United States Senate, including then-Senator Joe Biden.
Now, this provided a statutory framework for government agencies to obtain authorization for gathering foreign intelligence, And they did so through electronic surveillance, physical searches, pen registers, trap and trace devices, and the production of certain business records.
The innocent intention of FISA was to create a check on the executive branch's authority to surveil anyone it deems a threat.
FISA established the Independent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and they claim that the FISC was supposed to protect liberty over this notion of an aggressive, nosy executive branch.
In America, when law enforcement conducts a search, the Fourth Amendment requires that the search warrant is approved by a neutral magistrate, typically a federal judge.
When the NSA and FBI want to eavesdrop on you, they obtain a secret warrant I can hear George Washington gasping from the grave.
Today's data shows that the Fisk is little more than a rubber stamp.
They approve over 75% of the warrants without any modification.
And 99% of all requested warrants approved.
The Fisk has morphed from a neutral arbiter, separate from the executive branch, into a partisan court, which directly threatens your civil liberties.
They aren't partisan for Republicans or Democrats as much as they are partisan toward the government and against the rest of us.
But the left has been pacified.
The days of Occupy, Wall Street, and anti-establishment are over in favor of allegiance to the state and big, woke corporations.
All the powers that B had to do was cloak their regime in rainbow flags and BLM shirts, and the emotionally vulnerable and manipulatable left bent the knee.
The left no longer serves as any type of threat to the regime, but the right is more objective, more aware, and less easily fooled.
Excluding Paul Ryan and Trey Gowdy, of course.
That means the only people fighting this corruption...
It's you and me, America First conservatives.
It's why we feel the deep state is typically targeting us, because they are.
In the early 2000s, as a direct response to 9-11, we had the Bush administration enacting the Patriot Act, which presided over enhanced investigative tools.
Justified by the notion of preventing future terrorist attacks.
You wonder why they want to call everyone associated with January 6 a terrorist?
It's because they want to use these tools.
Even though some people pose no threat to the regime or the government, it's a basis to target a political movement.
Now, Section 215 of the Patriot Act augmented FISA's ability to access business records, and that's what sparked the metadata collection debate of the 2000s.
Remember the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, testifying before Congress that there wasn't bulk collection of data?
Turns out, there was bulk collection of data.
I never understood why he wasn't arrested and charged for lying to Congress, like others might be.
After the extreme criminal abuses of the FISA process during the Russia hoax, the Inspector General at the Department of Justice decided to audit a few cases at random.
Take a look under the hood, peel back the layers of the onion, choose your metaphor.
They were taking a closer look.
In the words of the Inspector General, quote,"...physical search and or electric surveillance pursuant to FISA is one of the DOJ's most intrusive investigative authorities." The IG looked at 29 cases.
Keep in mind, the standards for these applications is one of, and I'm quoting directly from the regs here, scrupulous accuracy.
Guess how many of those 29 files were noncompliant?
All of them.
All 29. You're going to see references to the Woods procedures.
That's important.
Those are the procedures that require documentation and evidence for the claims that are being made by the government.
In the 29 cases reviewed previously, four of the files didn't even have the Woods documents attached at all.
They were totally lost.
Four out of 29. And the full review contained 209 errors.
Some of them the Department of Justice deemed material errors.
And in all 29 cases, a judge in a secret court authorized the spying.
Often without the required legally supporting documentation.
So, the Inspector General looked at even more cases, and now we have a fresh new report from the IG. September of this year, we found the same failures that allowed the Russia hoax to continue Well, they're still failing today.
Those problems exist in huge numbers.
Quoting from the report now, quote, Given the FBI's reliance on wood procedures to help ensure the accuracy of its FISA applications,
we believe the missing woods files represents a significant lapse in the FBI's management of its FISA program.
It sure looks like the FBI and DOJ are getting the procedures wrong more than they are getting them right.
But you wouldn't know that if you listened to the sworn under oath testimony of FBI Director Christopher Wray in March of this year.
We accepted all of the findings and recommendations in the inspector general's report.
I ordered at the time...
Over 40 corrective actions that go above and beyond the recommendations of the Inspector General's report, and those have been implemented.
Those include everything from strengthening our procedures to ensure accuracy and completeness, to make sure the court gets all the information it's supposed to, changes in our protocols for CHSs, Confidential Human Sources, training changes.
I created a new Office of Internal Audit They're specifically focused on FISA auditing.
But according to the IG, what Ray says and what the FBI does are quite different.
The report indicts Ray directly.
The FBI director publicly acknowledged the seriousness of the identified problems and announced numerous steps the FBI was undertaking to address them.
However, we believe certain statements from the FBI failed to recognize the significant risks posed by systemic noncompliance with the Woods procedures.
And during our audit, some FBI personnel minimalized the significance of Woods procedures noncompliance.
In the words of the IG, these chronic failures, quote, can lead to faulty probable cause determinations and infringement of US persons' civil liberties.
This is not a small deal.
Even though the FBI apparently diminishes their violation of our American rights, these abuses and tortured interpretations of FISA over the past 43 years exemplifies well-intentioned policy morphing into a monster.
Section 215 enabled the FBI to ask the FISA court to compel the sharing of books and business documents, tax records, library checkout lists, any other tangible thing as a part of a foreign intelligence or international terrorism investigation.
The required material can include purely domestic records.
Kind of makes you wonder why they're trying to label the political movement they don't like a terrorist movement when there are these tools that, even though they exist under something called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, can result in the production of so many records, so long as they just append a label of terrorism, whether it's appropriate or not.
And so what do we say to those who just claim that FISA's errors are unintentional, in good faith, for the greater good?
I'm not buying the BS. These errors were egregious and systemic and, I believe, possibly intentional.
How do you prove intent?
Easy.
Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over.
And folks, we have been getting roundhoused.
After the Bush abuses of FISA came the Obama expansions and abuses of FISA. Can't say that I'm surprised.
In fact, in 2008, Senator Obama voted for the Bush-sponsored Protect America Act, which extended the government's expanding spying powers for an additional four years.
Bush, Cheney, Obama, Biden, they all hate your civil liberties.
Trump was different precisely because he was targeted.
He knew what it was like.
He may have also been targeted because he is different.
I'm different too.
Barack Obama spent a surprising amount of his presidency extending the Bush-era Patriot Act.
In fact, in May of 2011, the Patriot Act was set to expire, and Obama was abroad.
He cared so much about the government's wiretapping abilities, he became the first U.S. president in history to sign a bill into law using the auto pen.
It wasn't even in the Oval Office.
Now that the FISA framework has been established and preserved by Congress, it's not very surprising to hear of its abusive nature.
Advocates for the defense state say things like, we need these tools to stop the terrorists.
My response?
On a day-to-day basis, I'm not sure terrorists are as capable and dangerous to the American way of life as our own government.
We must amend FISA. We must put a check on the NSA and FBI's ability to summon uncontested warrants through rubber-stamped secret courts.
We can't stand by and watch as the deep state obfuscates the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, so many of the rights enshrined in our Constitution.
And they're just picking who they're going to go after next.
The only crime greater than international terrorism is enabling, promoting, and abusing a system where your fellow countrymen is blatantly surveilled by an oppressive government without the due process of law.
Currently the system is in direct contrast to the principles that the United States of America was founded on.
Period.
Don't get me wrong, FISA can still be used for its original purpose, to fight terrorism, to detect threats before they occur.
That said, metadata collection is misaligned.
And the current process that enables political witch hunts and law enforcement should be reformed.
So let's look at a few of the ideas for reform.
In 2019, Mark Meadows introduced H.R. 4046, the FISA Reform Act.
That would have required periodic reports to Congress about FISA surveillance to include the identity of any individual who is targeted and associated with a presidential candidate of a major party.
The Democrat Congress did nothing with this.
In that same Congress, Representative Justin Amash introduced the FISA Oversight Correction Act, which would have authorized a court to disclose to a person information related to evidence collected about that person using certain foreign intelligence surveillance powers, if that disclosure would likely promote a more accurate determination of the legality of the surveillance.
Tulsi Gabbard, another firebrand, she introduced the Protect Our Civil Liberties Act.
Now that bill would have repealed the Patriot Act and certain FISA provisions.
The legislation would have also prohibited the acquisition of information regarding U.S. persons if they were using Foreign intelligence tools to get that information without a warrant.
That would have reset the balance of liberties.
That would have been effective from a law enforcement standpoint and it wouldn't have created just an ecosystem allowing incredible fraud that was identified during the Russia hoax and which still has not been cured.
Here's the big news.
Even Adam Schiff introduced legislation that would have cleaned up some of the abuses of FISA. Here's the catch.
He did it when Obama was president.
So I figured if Schiff supported reforms to FISA under Obama, why wouldn't he support those same reforms under Trump?
Consistency.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, after all.
So last Congress, I introduced the same bill Schiff had previously introduced.
And he wouldn't co-sponsor his own bill.
I made the pitch and pointed out his hypocrisy on Tucker Carlson's show.
I hope you like the name of the bill.
I think there's a bigger problem in the Congress.
We have to be able to rely on the Intelligence Committee and the leadership of that committee because as the American people know, every member of Congress does not see every piece of intelligence.
Right.
I have filed legislation today sent to the House that Adam Schiff needs to be removed from the Intelligence Committee, because how are the rest of us supposed to be able to rely on a man who you just showed lied to the American people when he said that there wasn't spying, or when he lied and said there was actual evidence of collusion, or clear evidence of collusion?
If Adam Schiff is able to review covert operations and intelligence, and if we have to be able to rely on his representations, our whole system is broken.
I mean, it would be like putting Lori Loughlin in charge of the College Board.
It would be like putting Jussie Smollett in charge of the hate crime division of the FBI. We have got to remove Adam Schiff from the intelligence.
In 35 years of watching Congress, I've never seen a member of Congress with lower personal integrity than Adam Schiff.
And it's shocking to me that he chairs that committee.
Is there any hope of unseating him from that?
I think that Nancy Pelosi and just your rank-and-file Democrats have to feel the pressure from this.
Their constituents have to ask them, how are you going to be able to make decisions in the best interest of our country and our district if it's Adam Schiff that you're listening to to get characterizations and representations on the quality of the intelligence and whether or not it should justify congressional action?
I want to just explain to our viewers we have on the screen the name of this act, the Pencil Act, Preventing Extreme Negligence with Classified Information Licenses.
For our favorite pencil, Tucker.
That's exactly.
Congress must rein in FISA. And I'll work with anyone who believes in our Constitution and has the courage to stand up and fight back against the deep state.
As I mentioned earlier, the Attorney General's recent memo weaponizes the FBI against parents who show up to school board meetings.
Here's my interview with former Florida Senate President, former Florida Superintendent of Schools in Okaloosa County, and former school board member, my dad, Don Gates.
Hope you enjoy.
Grabbing coffee here with my dad in our hometown in Iceville, Florida.
And as I mentioned, my dad was an educational leader in this community for about 12 years, six years on the school board, six years as school superintendent.
And I want to get your reaction to the melding of a school board mission and the FBI mission in just a moment.
But dad, I got to tell you, Something special is going on this year with people's interest in the school board.
Usually when I travel the country, I meet people who are running for Congress or Senate or Governor, but overwhelmingly the people I meet who are interested in politics now view the school board as the front line of the culture war.
And I always give them advice kind of through the lens of your experience, which is if you run for school board, There's no time at night when your phone isn't going to be ringing because if people are contacting you about their kids, there is an intimacy and a passion and a devotion to that cause that is different than other parts of politics like our service in the legislature or my service in Congress.
So before we get to the FBI injection into school board operations, What advice would you give to people who are out there who are interested in running for the school board?
Well, I think it was Ronald Reagan who said that the future of our country will depend as much on who's on the school board as who's in Congress.
And that's because at school board level, you're dealing with people's kids, you're dealing with their schools, and the greatest share of their local tax dollars.
And that gets people worked up and gets some concern, particularly when it's involving your kids.
So I would say to people who have Any interest in their children, their children's education, their community, the direction of this country, that the culture wars are being fought on the front lines of your local school board.
That's where the 1619 Project is being discussed.
That's where critical race theory is being discussed and in some cases pushed.
That's where COVID mandates are really meeting the road.
And if you want to be involved, be on the school board, And it's the greatest job you can ever have because you're involved in trying to help make things better for kids.
Now, you interact with other education leaders around the country, and typically your school board members are former teachers, former school administrators.
You were different.
You took a business background onto the school board.
And now what I see, a lot of the parents that want to run for school board across America, they didn't necessarily have that classroom experience, but they have the parenting experience, which oftentimes is, I think, diminished.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
If in the whole matrix of school board service in America, you actually have fewer educators and more parents with kids in the schools.
That's an essential thing.
Any teacher will tell you that things are better for a child in the classroom if their parents are involved in what's going on in school.
Well, scale that out.
Anything is better in a school district or in a community when parents are involved in what's going on in schools.
And therefore, it's the right thing to do for activist parents, parents who care, parents who are concerned.
I got on the school board and ran for the school board, as you might remember, because I was an angry parent.
I couldn't understand why some things were going on that were going on, so I ran for the school board to fix it, and then ultimately wound up being elected superintendent.
Simpler times.
The stuff you are angry about, you are angry that the bus routes were inefficient, that the purchasing of supplies didn't make sense, that the teachers weren't being compensated to the same degree as administrators.
And I mean, that stuff looks like A pretty easy circle to square compared to the mandates, the COVID restrictions, and the critical race theory that seems to have animated so many parents today.
But you brought this district.
I mean, we're sitting here across the street from my high school, and you brought this district from...
You know, 36th out of 67 counties to number one.
And it seemed to me as an observer that parental involvement was the number one thing that brought a school from a C or a D school to an A or a B school.
Do you observe what's happening now with school board meetings being filled with parents who at times are angry and accosted?
Is that on balance a positive or an negative?
I think that things start to get really better and by better I mean more responsive to the community, better for kids in schools when parents hit a pain threshold and say, you know, I don't understand why my kid can't read.
I don't understand why my kid doesn't understand American history.
I don't understand why my kid, you know, is not doing well in competition with other kids around the country or around the world.
I don't understand why there are rules coming from the school or the school board that don't seem to make sense.
When parents begin to question and even get angry, like I did, then I think things get better because school board members, and I was one, then have to be accountable and respond and dig down inside themselves and say, well, the reason we're doing this is because We've looked at the evidence and we're making the right decision.
But you don't get that kind of interaction until you get people, citizens, saying, why are you doing this?
We disagree.
We've done our own research.
And that means better schools and better communities.
We see more and more parents who are in medicine, in science, who I think are unwilling to just accept What is put before them in the absence of analysis and rigor and the scientific method and a review of data.
And as a consequence of that, we've seen this really chilling reaction from federal law enforcement.
What was your reaction when you saw that the Attorney General had directed the head of the FBI to start analyzing the conduct of angry parents at school board meetings?
Well, I have to tell you that you can certainly find some humor in that, but at the same time, it was reminiscent of some really bad things.
That have happened in history when people from the federal government start showing up, folding their hands, standing in the back of public meetings and keeping track of who is saying what, or going back over the list of people who showed up in a meeting and who said what.
You know, parents have to be really concerned to take time away from their jobs, from what goes on at home, from making dinner and everything else, to go to a school board meeting anyway.
And sometimes parents are afraid of retaliation.
On their kids, if they go to a school board meeting.
When you throw on top of that, the FBI is maybe watching.
That has a chilling effect on parental involvement in their children's schools and the issues that are involving their children, but it also has a chilling effect on free speech.
You can't have people from the government standing in the back of a public meeting with their arms folded, keeping track of who's saying what.
That's the kind of thing that our fathers and our grandfathers and our grandmothers and grandfathers fought against in two world wars.
The National School Board Association requested this action.
Did you have a perspective on that group when you were a school board member?
Yeah, I refused to belong.
I absolutely refused to belong.
I refused to pay dues, and I refused to have dues paid on my behalf.
I mean, again, you know, I think it's good that we have people who have been in education, who want to serve on a school board, who want to continue to help.
But if you have people who are basically a parrot chicks of the union, And they just continue to want to keep things the way they are.
That creates a culture in the school board.
And it creates a culture in school board associations.
And I'm afraid that too many state and national school board associations are populated by people who don't want to make change, who don't want things to be better, who want things to be the same, and they want less time with kids and they want more money.
I don't know that...
You know, parents are going to be arrested as domestic terrorists by the FBI for showing up and sharing their thoughts.
I certainly hope that's not the case.
But I do have concern about the chilling effect you mentioned.
If the intent of this action was to discourage participation, based on your experience being on the front lines of a lot of these battles, do you think it'll work?
Because I almost think it could backfire.
I think as parents are really backed down by the federal government, they will become even more strident and even more active.
It remains to be seen in the weeks and months ahead.
Are the school board meetings going to go back to a dynamic with the tumbleweed rolling through?
Or are these parents going to keep showing up?
I just don't think that the FBI wants to pick a fight with tiger moms and tiger dads who love their kids.
If the intent here is to chill participation, Do you think it'll work?
Well, I think that at the school board level and many other levels, fierce debate, even angry debate at public meetings is kind of the steam release valve in a democracy.
And if you tell people directly or implicitly that they shouldn't show up, they can't show up, they have to be careful what they say, they have to be careful who they sit next to, they have to be careful what kind of sign they bring to the meeting, if you keep saying that, that's not going to stop Americans from being angry or being concerned or wanting to change things.
What it does is it promotes some other way that there can be an explosion, God forbid, of people's concerns.
So that's why our forefathers said, you know, we're going to have free speech.
We're going to have the public square be a place where even crazy people can shake their fists at each other and make speeches about things that don't matter.
Because that's the safety valve in a democracy.
And I've been on both sides of the school board table.
I've been the angry parent shaking his fist at the school board, and I've been a school board member who've had people shake their fists at me.
And I can tell you, that's what democracy looks like.
That is what democracy looks like.
And when you take away the town meeting, when you take away the dynamic of people caring about things enough to show up and speak fiercely, even angrily at each other, but then maybe afterwards go out and have a beer together, Then if you take that away, then you've really chilled democracy.
In Florida, we actually passed a law, you voted for it, you were one of the big supporters of it, called the right to speak law.
Because we had some school boards and some others in Florida who were saying, well, you don't need to speak, or we're only going to have one minute to speak, or you can speak at the end of the meeting, but not before we vote on this.
So now before every single policy decision or appropriation decision is made, At a public meeting in Florida, whether it's the mosquito control board or the school board or any place else, if people want to speak, they have a right to stand up and speak their truth to the power that's in front of them.
If we do that in Florida, we ought to do that in America.
Yeah, Florida man does not abide being shut down from the opportunity to speak, and in a way that is democracy's karaoke.
Everybody gets to kind of get up and sing their own song, and sometimes they're off tune or off pitch, and sometimes it's the kind of magical lyric that can bring people together or can lead to better solutions.
I don't think our schools are going to be better if we drive parents out of them.
I don't believe that education is best as a government-run monopoly, With so many regular folks, we do need public schools to help people move up in the world.
I mean, that's how MOM became so successful, the great public schools here in our community.
And I just have all the best well wishes to the great patriots around our country who love America and their families and their kids enough to step up and make their voices known to school board members, to run for school board.
And my friend Jim Jordan often says that This is actually the bench we're building to take the country back and to take power back in 2024. That these moms and dads who are winning school board races now are going to be leaders in their community and they're going to be future leaders for the country.
And I sure hope that's the case.
So thanks for joining me on the podcast, Dan.
Good to see you, man.
Congratulations on a great podcast.
Thanks.
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