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Nov. 25, 2021 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
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Episode 17: Stand Your Ground (feat. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) – 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 applause.
So we're going to keep running those stories to keep working.
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?
Like a machine.
Matt Gaetz.
I'm a cancelled 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.
Do you feel the threats?
I do.
I see some of the threats.
Some of the things people say, it's absolutely sickening.
Are you confident that the government will protect you from these threats?
Because that's of course the government's job.
I hope so, but we all know how the FBI works.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
We've got a jam-packed episode.
You can have it playing while you're cooking up the turkey, making those side dishes, maybe even mute the football game so that you can get the jam-packed episode that we have planned for you.
We've got MTG on the show today, a very spicy interview, and she's calling people out, Republicans especially.
You don't want to miss it.
Plus, self-defense in the era of Rittenhouse.
I've got a major legislative announcement coming up regarding the Stand Your Ground law.
But first, take a listen to commentator Crystal Ball point out my lack of Washington DC friends.
I'll try to keep it together.
He's not loved.
He's not going to find any sort of safe harbor where people are going to say, this is totally nonsense and we believe you, Matt.
And so I think that's a little bit of what you're seeing here with Matt Gaetz, where the overwhelming majority of Republicans are happy to just let him twist in the wind and see where this all goes and would be, I think, just as happy to see him gone without them having to lift a single finger.
This is the reporting from Crystal Ball on the Hill's show Rising back in April.
No friends in Washington, no fun dinner parties with the Beltway elite.
Miss Ball was weighing my claims of extortion against the false claims being made about me seven months ago.
On Monday, this man, Stephen Alford, pled guilty to wire fraud for trying to extort my family.
I'll have my reaction and context for how we should think about the Alford guilty plea in a few moments.
It may surprise you, but there is a very clear pattern to identify.
While much of Crystal Ball's reporting about me has been poorly sourced and dependent on now-debunked rumors, on the question of Washington friendship, I cannot quarrel with her take.
This is what I had to say about D.C. friends in my book, Firebrand.
Quote, Once you're in a position of prominence and power, there are always parties you can attend where you'll rub elbows with movers and shakers from various industries and pressure groups.
But I don't know that I'd call those parties themselves much of a temptation for me.
More like a very awkward and phony speed dating session, tedious and boring for most people, these events become the great aspiration for certain Washingtonians.
I hold that view even more stridently today.
I do have some friends.
You've actually heard them here.
Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Mark Meadows.
But I will confess, I don't have many friends, so you'll see some repeat guests.
Based on the hundreds of thousands of you who've downloaded and watched these episodes, I suspect you won't mind hearing from the firebrands frequently.
Now, the Washington Post recently reported on My Friend Group, quote, MAGA squad of loyalists see its influence rise, reads the major Sunday headline.
The Washington Post is uncharacteristically correct about this.
WAPO profiles three dynamic freshmen, two lawmakers expelled from committees, and one guy, unfairly smeared by the Department of Justice, leaks and lies, as the ascendant force among congressional Republicans and the political right.
Here's WAPO's take.
Quote, Traitor Republicans, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia declared, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado tweeted, It was time to take names and hold these fake Republicans accountable.
And this past week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida told a pro-Trump podcast that there was never a situation where the infrastructure debate should result in Republicans working with Democrats.
They were going to win it all, or we were going to win it all.
The continuing turmoil in the House GOP conference over how and whether to punish members who back anything supported by Democrats shows how an emboldened group of far-right House members is gaining influence over the Republican Party in Congress.
These representatives are positioning themselves to further purify the House GOP conference as a branch of Trump's Make America Great Again movement.
Well, they're right about that.
Terrific representatives, I say.
Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar.
These are the firebrands, and I am proud to fight alongside them.
I'm glad the Washington Post notices.
We are neither the pawns nor the favorites of legislative leadership.
We aren't the group that Democrats praise as good people, even if we disagree.
We don't lead lawmakers in renaming post offices or creating nonsense federal task forces for phony election time talking points.
No.
Instead, we attack this job with advocacy, inspiration, and as Steve Bannon would say, action, action, action.
You can check out my Under Fire episode for a deep dive into how we are being hunted by Pelosi and the Cheneistas on the January 6th committee.
Make no mistake, we are the ones they hate most, target most, fear most.
We are a fortress fighting for our constituents who elected us.
Unlike the hundreds of former members of Congress who now get paid to influence the federal government, as lobbyists, we actually fight for the people.
From the previous 116th Congress alone, I found 28 members of Congress who retired and then went right to work for lobbying firms already, just from the last Congress.
Some were Democrats, others were Republicans.
Now, they're all members of the same K Street Uniparty.
Michael Capuano, Democrat from Massachusetts.
Barbara Comstock, Republican from Virginia, if you could ever call Barbara Comstock a Republican.
Joseph Crowley, the one AOC beat, from New York, now a very well-paid lobbyist on K Street.
The Washington Post isn't dedicating time to the MAGA influence in their signature Sunday edition because the lobbyists love us.
Most refuse to donate to any of our campaigns and I've refused lobbyist and PAC checks as a matter of policy for years.
The MAGA Squad, that's what they call us.
We aren't rising because we have the friends in Washington that Crystal Ball would value.
As Marjorie Taylor Greene put it in the WAPO piece, I think I have the support nationally and it's because I speak what regular people say.
I speak what Republicans say at home and, you know, at dinner.
I'm saying what they say in their breakfast meetings before work.
I'm saying what they're saying at church and saying what they're saying in their Bible studies.
I'm saying what these parents are saying when they go to the school boards.
Earlier I spoke to the great firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene about our plan to operationalize our rising role in the Republican conference.
Take a listen.
Here we are huddled up in the judiciary library and you have been taking the action right to the minority leader on some of these critical issues that define how the Republicans fight.
Give everybody an update on the expectations that you have laid out for leader McCarthy and how he's reacted to that.
Well, thank you, Matt.
And you've done such a good job pointing out the things, the failures that we've seen in leadership.
Number one, everyone saw me get stripped of committees as a brand new member of Congress, robbing my district of the ability to have representation working on committees.
There was no action taken, as a matter of fact.
Our leader did nothing to defend me, did nothing to stop it.
Then we saw today Paul Gosar censured, and then we saw him lose a committee.
And this is another failure.
But what do we see happening?
13 traitor Republicans helped Joe Biden pass his agenda, handing their voting card over to Nancy Pelosi, and nothing happens to them.
So here's what we have to have.
I think we feel confident that in 22, we're going to take back the House, but we have to take back the House with Republicans with a plan that are actually going to put it into action instead of talk about it on Fox News.
And that is what I want to see happen.
So here's what leadership is going to have to do.
Right now, we know that Kevin McCarthy has a problem in our conference.
He doesn't have the full support to be speaker.
He doesn't have the votes that are there because there's many of us that are very unhappy Do you think that what happened to Paul Gosar happened because there wasn't a strong enough Republican rebuke of the way they treated you?
Absolutely.
Well, let's get real and let's talk about it.
So here we have Adam Kinzinger and we have Liz Cheney taking a committee assignment from Nancy Pelosi, the whole fake January 6th committee.
It is such a failure of our leadership to hold them off of that.
But they're traitors and they went over there to Nancy Pelosi and they're going on their We Hate Trump mission.
And we want to destroy Trump Republicans like you and I, right?
Here's what I was told.
Let me tell you, when I said, I've demanded it, I want Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney kicked out of the GOP conference.
Do you know the excuse that I was given of why we can't remove them from the conference?
Oh, but Marjorie will lose committee seats.
Our conference will lose committee seats.
Well, guess what?
I lost two committee seats.
And then Paul Gosar lost one committee seat.
So I don't see any reason why we can't kick off these two Republicans kick them out of our conference because what happened in Wyoming?
Well, you're right.
Liz Cheney was essentially stripped of her membership in the Republican Party because Republicans in Wyoming are so offended that she would even have the nerve to call herself a Republican.
So we're in this bizarre circumstance where in the district Liz Cheney represents, she's not a Republican, but in the district in which she actually lives here in Northern Virginia, in the Washington DC area, she's deemed a Republican.
And I think that The majority that a lot of people are anticipating for Republicans is dependent on a lot of the decisions that we are making now.
And you are making things uncomfortable for the leadership because you are being very public about what your expectations are.
What is your expectation regarding the treatment of John Katko after he voted for the abandoned contempt measure?
He voted to strip you from committees.
He voted for impeachment.
He voted for the Biden socialism legislation, and he voted for a January 6th committee that he negotiated stabbing Republicans in the back.
How would you treat Katko?
What's your demand of the leadership?
Well, Katko's not a Republican.
He's a Democrat.
And our conference and the NRCC needs to stop playing this majority maker game.
The majority makers, this is what they say over and over again.
Oh, we have to help these very moderates.
We have to help them hold these districts.
But here's what they actually do with them.
We see it, right?
They put them on these big committee assignments.
They make them ranking members.
They actually reward them and they move them on the steering committee where they're involved in all kinds of decision making, all kinds of roles and leadership.
But they're not actually Republicans.
They're actually Democrats.
And John Katko has showed us that over and over and over again.
What we need to do is we need to hold to our conservative values.
We need to actually give Americans something to vote for.
Because I know a lot of Republicans, they're Republican in their heart, they're Republican in their thinking, but they don't even vote because all they see is a bunch of politicians that never actually do the job.
People want action.
They're tired of words and they're tired of the lies.
I don't think there's any constituency waiting to be inspired by weakness.
It is strength that our fellow Americans need right now while inflation is crushing them.
Gas prices are making life unaffordable.
They are subject to these mandates and these draconian procedures, and they see far too few who are here and willing to fight.
Now, there's one reaction from the leadership I've gotten regarding these 13 Republican turncoats.
Well, Matt, a bunch of them are going to retire and become lobbyists.
And so we in the leadership have no real leverage over them because their leverage now exists with the lobby corps, not us.
So you can't expect us to punish them.
And here's my reaction to that.
I'm dying for yours.
One, immediately they should be stripped of any positions of leadership that they hold on any committees where they serve as a consequence of our conference.
And that's something you could do right now.
And guess what?
That would make them far less attractive as lobbyists one day.
Second thing, we should have an ethic around here That selling out our team, selling out our country, our economy, our constituents means that you don't get to come back making millions of dollars as lobbyists and enjoy the privileges of former membership and floor privileges and coming to people's offices and having meetings to promote an agenda that they're paid to promote.
How would you treat the retiring members who are already picking out their offices on K Street and have already forgotten about their districts?
Well, all I can think about is when you told me that, that's all about writing checks, isn't it?
Totally.
And you and I are two members that we don't take those checks.
Nope.
We're the only two who don't take political action corporate checks.
And I think that's a liberating thing, just as a matter of policy.
Yeah.
So here they are.
They're making this apology for these members who, once they retire and are going to become lobbyists, they don't want to hurt their feelings because they really want their checks.
That's really what that's all about, Matt.
And they want the money from the companies and the people that these members now but future lobbyists will bring to them.
It's all about money.
It always is.
It's the money that brings the power.
But you can't stop the American people.
Matt, you and I have had a lot of fun.
We've gone all over and done rallies and talked to so many people.
And so I feel like the two of us honestly know what the American people want.
We understand our Republican voters because we go and talk to them.
And we listen to them.
And we know that they're so tired of being lied to.
And they're so sick and tired of this town.
They're fed up with it.
I mean, right now, the gas prices are going up.
Grocery prices are going up.
They don't know if they're going to be able to buy certain things for Christmas.
Here's what I'm really ticked off about.
GMC just announced that they're not going to be putting seat heaters in cars anymore because they can't get the microchips from China.
So we're already losing, like, luxury items.
And, you know, It's ridiculous.
Republicans can fix this.
And it happens with leadership.
And here's what I have to say about it.
Respect is earned.
It's earned.
It's not given.
Do you respect the Republican leadership right now?
No.
No, I don't respect them at all.
I can't respect leadership that doesn't hold people accountable, but yet allows people like me and Paul Gosar to be constantly trampled and abused, and then will throw us under the bus at the first given chance.
I'm really sick of it.
If you had to guess right now, is Kevin McCarthy ever going to be Speaker of the House?
Right now, from the people I've talked to, he doesn't have the votes right now.
I think that there's a door open for a challenger, so we'll see what happens.
Our people want to be inspired.
They want to believe that there are folks here who will fight for them.
What hope would you give people that if we get the majority back, that we'll use it to advance their interests?
I think we give them hope because we keep speaking out, doing this like you do constantly every single week.
Us going out and telling the truth and telling here's what's happening behind the scenes.
I mean, here we are sitting in the Judiciary Law Library where we know Kevin McCarthy could go walking by at any moment or even stop in the room, but we're willing to tell the truth and we really don't care.
We're willing to sit on the House floor and call it out and we really don't care because here's something you and I both know and I'm hoping to spread this message and we can bring new people here that we're supporting, you know, new members that will be fearless and we'll see the Capitol as what it really is and it's a glass castle and glass castles can be shattered and I believe that we can do that and we can change it.
The fearless Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Great to be here.
Thanks for being in the fight.
Let's keep these folks really under our thumb and under our watchful eye.
Self-defense.
You have the right to meet force with force.
It's a right anchored in the Constitution.
Life, liberty, happiness.
To preserve these things, we must be willing to defend them if someone tries to take them away from us.
The Constitution isn't self-affecting.
We must act in accordance with it for it to have meaning in our lives.
When we repel an assault with force, the law should be on our side.
The Kyle Rittenhouse verdict reaffirms the commitment of the American jury system to the doctrine and principles of self-defense.
But attacks on self-defense as a concept have been amplified from the actual courtroom to the courtroom of public opinion on Twitter.
Others like NBA woke mobster LeBron James also mocked Kyle Rittenhouse.
LeBron has many bad takes, but this might be his worst.
It's worth mentioning that LeBron is anti-Kyle Rittenhouse, probably because he's pro-rioter.
But the insane irony here is that LeBron loves China and apologizes for anyone in the NBA who dares to stand up to the Chinese Communist Party.
I don't want to get into a word or sentence feud with Darryl Moret, but I believe he wasn't educated on the situation at hand.
And he spoke.
And so many people could have been harmed.
Not only financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually.
So, just be careful what we tweet and we say and what we do, even though, yes, we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that, too.
Does LeBron realize that if anybody protests in China, they get killed?
While LeBron remains busy kneeling for Xi Jinping, stuffing his pockets at the expense of slave labor, elbowing people in the face and getting ejected from NBA games, some people living out here in reality face circumstances where we must defend our livelihood.
Not from millionaires' elbows and fists in the Little Caesars arena, but from guns and weapons in dangerous and lawless riots.
By the way, what are the odds that the people attacking Kyle were otherwise criminals?
What does it say about the people rioting in the streets in the name of BLM or social justice and equality?
The left would have you believe that people in the streets are just ordinary citizens protesting or even rioting genuinely in the name of social justice.
The truth is that the people menacing our communities in these riots are the same people that have always menaced communities.
But now they have a free pass, an endorsement from every leftist institution, from the media to even local and federal governments.
The reality is these rioters are nothing more than criminals and anarchists.
And the Rittenhouse case proves it.
The same guy who robs you on the street is a looting target with the endorsement and permission of the left.
I wouldn't say I'm surprised.
Capitalism bad, broken windows good, right?
If you're wondering where the politically motivated prosecutor lost the jury in the Rittenhouse case, I'm guessing it was probably here.
When the defendant provokes the incident, he loses the right to self-defense.
You cannot claim self-defense against the danger you create.
That's critical right here.
If you're the one who is threatening others, you lose the right to claim self-defense.
You cannot hide behind self-defense if you provoked the incident.
If you created the danger, you forfeit the right to self-defense.
He doesn't get a pass by pulling the trigger fast.
So if Joseph Rosenbaum is running at him, Joseph Rosenbaum is no threat to his life.
And not only is the defendant expected to run, he's expected to yell, push, shove that ragdoll around, run back for help, call 911, call for help, do all sorts of other things besides just turn and fire.
Nobody has to take a beating in America.
The government doesn't get to presume us guilty because we exercise our Second Amendment rights.
It's scary to think that some prosecutors would actually observe otherwise.
Wokeness shouldn't append indictment authority with prosecutors at any level.
The prosecution in the Rittenhouse case was not acting in good faith.
And of course, neither is the mainstream media.
The mainstream media has repeatedly called Kyle a white supremacist.
I hope he gets Nick Sandman money in all of the lawsuits he's going to likely be filing.
Joe Biden even called him a white supremacist on Twitter.
Talk about defamation.
There's absolutely zero evidence of the sort.
The woke media, well, they've run out of cards to play and so they just have to call and label everyone a white supremacist.
Last year, when Kyle had to post a $2 million bail for his release, it was nearly impossible to crowdfund for him.
Not only was the mainstream media doxing people who tried to fund his legitimate defense ultimately a successful defense, but big tech was also deplatforming any attempt to do so.
Never forget that the media doxed, vilified and got people fired from their jobs just for donating to the legal defense of an innocent teenager.
Meanwhile, the Soros-funded district attorneys in major cities across the United States dropped charge after charge.
Kamala Harris, Democrat politicians, celebrities, they all advertised and donated to bail funds for rioters.
These violent criminals ended up back on our streets.
Streets where some committed even more violent crimes.
It's despicable.
Another interesting irony in this whole case is that Democrats want self-styled smart justice reforms to our criminal justice system, but only sometimes when it benefits their politics and conforms to their narrative.
As Glenn Greenwald of Substack put it so eloquently, Democrats are profoundly committed to criminal justice reform.
For everyone but their enemies.
Principles of rehabilitative justice, reform of the incarceration state and liberalized criminal justice evaporate when Democrats demand harsh prison for their political adversaries.
If you think Kyle was guilty, you're either willfully ignorant or politically motivated.
If this is not self-defense, then nothing is self-defense.
This case shouldn't even have been brought to trial.
This shouldn't have been a charge in the first place.
It was done solely for optics and to send a message.
Not only does this leftist government want you to remain powerless to stop the mob from burning your cities to the ground, destroying your businesses, but it wants you to know that you aren't allowed to defend yourself if that happens either.
Even if you're justified, they want you afraid, knowing that they could ruin your life if you don't play for what they designate as the right team.
The left has sent their message.
So let's let Kyle's acquittal serve as ours.
Acquitted and equipped by the law and our choices to fortify the defense of our families and communities.
Thinking beyond Rittenhouse, what should trigger the doctrine of self-defense?
And should law-abiding people have different legal duties depending on where they are attacked?
Now, according to Alexander Shloshkin in his favorite book known as Gulag Archipelago, which exposed the atrocities and absurdities of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union system went so far as to criminalize self-defense.
Spinelessness even became a national characteristic.
The Soviet Criminal Code of 1926, Article 139, stated that you only had the right to unsheathe your knife when the criminal's knife was already hovering over you.
They then tell the story of a Red Army soldier named Alexander Zakrov.
He was assaulted outside a club by a criminal.
Alexander eventually pulled out a folding pen knife and he killed his assailant.
He was promptly charged with murder and received 10 years in prison.
When he asked the prosecutor, and what was I supposed to do?
The prosecutor replied, quote, you should have fled.
Is this really the reality that you want to live in?
Not in the Soviet Union, but in the United States of America?
There's a reason our ideas won out over theirs.
Well, you may be surprised to find out that this Soviet system isn't far away from what some states observe in the present in our country.
Different states have different perspectives concerning self-defense, while nearly every state has adopted a form of the Castle Doctrine, which gives homeowners the presumption of self-defense when inside their home.
Fifteen states like New York, Massachusetts, and Hawaii impose a legal duty on the person who is attacked to retreat when they're not in their home, when they're out in public.
Recently in Hawaii, there was the case of Lu Zhang.
He was confronted by a burglar with a knife trespassing on his property.
When the burglar didn't drop the knife, Lu shot him.
He was then promptly arrested.
See, he was outside the threshold of his house on his property and thus didn't have the protection of any castle doctrine or stand your ground law.
So the castle doctrine presumes that our home is our castle and that if someone enters the home with the intent to commit a felony against us, we can shoot to kill.
No duty to retreat from your own home.
Aim for the center of mass.
The law will protect you.
There's no reason protections for a victim should end at the threshold or the doorstep.
Law-abiding people shouldn't have the duty to retreat from anywhere that they are legally allowed to be if someone is trying to commit a felony against them.
Why should the home be different than the public park or the beach or even the grocery store?
If a reasonable person would believe someone is about to kill or violently beat or rape them, the victim should be able to respond with lethal force.
It's called the Stand Your Ground law.
It takes the legal principles of the Castle Doctrine that protects you and your home, and it allows those to travel with you during your law-abiding activities, regardless of where you are.
Florida has adopted the Stand Your Ground law.
And after the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, many wanted to repeal it.
Like the earlier struggles, the battle to change Stand Your Ground, Sharpton said, is a civil rights issue.
The history of the civil rights movement has been state law versus national federal law.
Trayvon Martin had the federal right to go home.
Jordan Davis had the right under federal law to drive with his friends.
Representative Matt Gaetz, a Republican and chairman of the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee, said rallies don't accomplish much.
Well, I think that the votes tell us a lot more than the rallies do.
We had a vote in the Criminal Justice Subcommittee on whether or not to repeal the Stand Your Ground law.
Every Republican voted against repeal, and a majority of Democrats on the Criminal Justice Subcommittee voted against repealing the law.
And I think that that illustrates the fact that most Floridians support the Stand Your Ground law.
Gates says he'll fight any efforts to water down the law, including a bill currently being considered in Florida's Senate.
See, Al Sharpton didn't like me before I came to Congress and it did improve from there.
Here I questioned him before the House Judiciary Committee.
When you call Greek homos, when you talk about white crackers, those are bigoted states.
I think I made it clear that I was quoting what somebody said.
Yelling and getting upset is beneath your office.
You should calm down.
You're welcome to answer them.
How about- Well, then let me answer, sir.
Let me answer, because I'm enjoying this.
I think that you have- If you're in a committee about policing- Don't get upset.
Calm down.
Calm down.
You're yelling.
Calm down.
I think that I'm trying to answer your last question.
The gentleman will be permitted.
The time of the gentleman has expired.
The witness may answer the question.
What about offing the pigs?
Answer that one.
If I appeared loaded for bear for Al Sharpton, I was.
It was deeply offensive to me and to my constituents that Al Sharpton was invited by House Democrats as an expert witness on the matter of policing.
Of all things, given what this guy said about cops.
It was like an SNL episode had come to life.
Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, see many others of their ilk, they wanted Stand Your Ground repealed in Florida.
It was the cause du jour for all the race baiters.
But I didn't let that happen.
I was chairman of the Florida House Criminal Justice Subcommittee, and my constituents demanded strong self-defense laws.
I do not believe in imposing on Americans a duty to retreat when someone else attempts to commit a felony against a victim.
Here's the argument I made in 2013 as chairman of the subcommittee.
We've been here a long time.
It's dark outside.
And as certain as we are here, Right now, there's a young woman on a college campus, at night, walking home from the library to her college dormitory.
She's probably looking down, checking Facebook as she's doing it.
As we're here today, there's also probably a senior in our state, in a parking lot, in a Walmart or a Publix.
She's probably in her pocketbook, saving a receipt.
Neither are breaking the law, And we're here to answer one question.
If either are surprised by an attack, should they have a legal duty to turn their back and run and hope that they won't be overcome and raped or killed?
And when they have to make that split-second decision, should the government come in behind them and second-guess them and say, you should have chosen flight over fight?
Stand Your Ground simply says that if you're not breaking the law and you have a right to be where you are, you don't have a duty to turn your back and run.
The sponsor of this bill has agreed and committed that he doesn't believe that when you're in your home you should have to run.
And so I'm left with the question, when you walk out of your home onto your street corner, why should you have less rights?
Why should you all of a sudden have a duty to turn your back and run?
I still believe these things today.
And that's why I'm announcing that I will be introducing a national Stand Your Ground law.
You have the right to defend your life from an attacker.
And that shouldn't change whether you're at home, at a friend's home, or on a stroll.
It shouldn't change whether you're in Florida or California or Virginia.
The gun-hating left believed the Rittenhouse prosecution would advance their societal goals of having us all locked down and unarmed, afraid in our homes while they let MS-13 cross the border and live next door.
And it clearly backfired.
The American jury system reaffirmed what most Americans believe.
If someone tries to kill you or beat you or dismember you, return fire and preserve your life.
So let's take advantage of what this jury and the American people are telling us.
Let's reaffirm in law what exists in our Constitution and in the hearts of our fellow Americans.
Stand your ground for America.
Abolish the legal duty of retreat everywhere.
I've had enough retreat.
No more.
I've spent five years overseeing the operations of the FBI and DOJ as a member of the House Judiciary Committee.
There is a paradigm that has aided me in this work.
Pattern recognition.
Follow this pattern.
Step one, create a deep state lie.
Step two, inspire someone else to tell that lie, seed it in a willing host.
Step three, use the publication of the lie as a predicate to do what the deep state wouldn't otherwise be able to do.
This technique, this pattern has been used over and over again.
Case study number one, the Russia hoax.
Special counsel John Durham was appointed to investigate the origins of the Russia hoax.
Go check out my Where's Durham episode to get the deep dive on his work or lack thereof.
Now, we do have Durham indictments though.
A Russian was even indicted for lying to the FBI. According to Durham, these Russians, they lied to the FBI. The FBI was the victim.
The FBI was just trying to make sure Donald Trump wasn't breaking any law, colluding with Russians.
And now, lo and behold, the Russians were not telling the truth.
That frame that we see in the Durham indictments is nonsense.
The FBI and DOJ weren't victimized by the lies of the Russians.
They started the lie of the Russia hoax and then they got these rubes to repeat them to Christopher Steele.
That was then the basis of this dossier and the continuation of the absurd investigation into President Trump.
The whole time, the FBI knew Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, was a known liar with a political axe to grind, a foreign intelligence officer at that.
The lie was the Russia hoax.
The willing hosts to repeat the lie were in the foreign intelligence apparatus, from Christopher Steele to the very Russians getting indicted now.
The goal was to get the predicate to spy on Carter Page in a secret FISA court and to ensnare President Trump in a process crime like obstruction of justice.
As if.
Case study number two.
The school board parents and the domestic terrorism tags we're reading about in the news now.
Step one.
The lie is that parents are somehow a domestic terrorism threat.
We know now that the White House was seeding this lie in the National School Boards Association, in this now infamous and debunked letter that the National School Board Association sent to the Biden regime.
We must designate terrorism as the threat emerging from parents who hate critical race theory and love their kids.
So the story went.
Step two is getting someone else to repeat the lie, and the National School Board Association was willing to oblige, at least at first.
Step three is the threat tag that we now know the DOJ placed on parents.
Here's what I had to say about it in the House Judiciary Committee.
But we must address a searing matter before the Judiciary Committee and before the country.
To label parents Domestic terrorists for showing up at school board meetings and caring about their kids is abhorrent, unpatriotic, and un-American.
But to lie about doing so is even worse.
And somebody knew, as the Attorney General was testifying before this committee saying he couldn't imagine ever appending a label to a parent of domestic terrorism Someone was watching at the FBI and they understood that that was dishonest, that that did not paint a clear picture of what was actually happening because there were threat labels that were being put on folks who loved their kids and who showed up.
So here's my question.
How many?
How many Americans right now?
That went to a school board meeting, that emailed a parent, that confronted a principal, that reached out to their school board members, that ran into a superintendent at the supermarket and expressed their view.
How many of those Americans right now are carrying a threat label with them?
What's next?
Can't fly on airplanes?
Can't access the U.S. financial system?
Get doxxed at their job?
Get deplatformed online?
The Department of Justice has been politicized.
Weaponized and turned against our fellow Americans.
The DOJ used the lie that parents were domestic terrorists to justify their otherwise repugnant plan, to tag and trace people they fear.
Not because of violence, but because of politics.
These folks were organizing.
They were effective.
So DOJ wanted to tag and trace them.
Monday one of the people who tried to extort me and my family on a pile of lies, Stephen Alford, pled guilty to that very scheme.
Pattern recognition.
They came up with the lie that I was some sort of monster.
They got Alford, the useful idiot, to repeat that lie.
Alford conspired with former intelligence official Bob Kent, who's like the Christopher Steele archetype in my story, and former DOJ official David McGee to destroy me on falsehoods.
You can revisit that in our first episode, Open Gates.
Now, they've used these false and salacious allegations to justify what they really want, trying to take me out of the national fight.
I'm glad Stephen Alford is now deemed guilty of crimes against my family.
But he was not acting alone, any more than the National School Boards Association was acting alone.
Russians didn't victimize the very FBI that was feeding them lies to tell in the Russia hoax.
The Russians Durham has charged weren't the masterminds of the Russia hoax.
That was the DNC, Hillary, the folks that were engaging with the deep state.
Stephen Alford, similarly, is a guilty criminal, but he is no mastermind.
He's the rube who got used.
Former DOJ official David Magee, former intelligence official Bob Kent, current Israeli consulate official Jake Novak, they were all involved.
Why are they being protected?
Now that Alford is convicted, I renew my demand that the Department of Justice release the tapes wherein Alford implicates a number of other very powerful people.
The truth shall set us free.
And so will those tapes.
Pew Research tells us that among the world's 35 most developed economies, the United States in math ranks 30th.
In my community, hardworking students and teachers are trying to change that.
Northwest Florida punches above our weight in the classroom.
Not so much in the newsroom, which is reserved for some of Northwest Florida's dimmest minds.
This is John Rapolo.
He's not a product of our school system, and we're rather proud of that.
He's a reporter at WAR3 in Pensacola, my district.
Punching above our weight here would require a lot more punching and a lot more math.
I'll explain.
On Grant Stinchfield's Primetime Newsmax program, I addressed the political targeting of conservatives by prosecutors at every level.
From detainees from January 6th to the Trumps and Steve Bannon, the struggle is real.
And while the jury was deliberating in the Rittenhouse matter, the mainstream media wanted a conviction so bad, so they made Kyle out to be some sort of monster.
I know what it feels like to have the media falsely paint you as a monster.
Even President Biden called Kyle a white supremacist.
I wanted him to feel better, to feel valued.
So I said this through a smile.
Thank you for your advocacy for Kyle Rittenhouse.
He is not guilty.
He deserves a not guilty verdict and I sure hope he gets it because you know what?
Kyle Rittenhouse would probably make a pretty good congressional intern.
We may reach out to him and see if he'd be interested in helping the country in additional ways.
Of course the mainstream media lost it.
In turn, insurrection!
CNN is drafting the docu-series as we speak.
Now, I expect this from the national media.
They're over-soyed and easily triggered.
But the dumbest, most poorly sourced, mathematically inverted take came from WEAR's John Rapolo.
Before we explore the way two-digit numbers torture John Rapolo's reporting, it's important to note he doesn't get to anchor much.
Well, hello everyone.
John Rapolo here.
I'll be anchoring with you tonight in just about seven minutes.
Really looking forward to it.
Don't really get to do this much.
So, I'm gonna enjoy it.
So, we'll see you in a little bit.
But he had this to say about me.
Yeah.
Hi, Bob.
You know, the majority of people that we talked to earlier tonight in downtown Pensacola said the congressman's comments were inappropriate.
We have a poll on Twitter about the congressman's remarks.
Three-quarters of the people who have weighed in so far as of right now do not support the congressman comments he made in that live television interview earlier this week.
WEAR was going to prove the point.
John Rapolo would be armed with the unassailable force of a Twitter poll.
128 initial responses conformed with the media's narrative.
My comments were inappropriate.
Tsk, tsk, Congressman.
The people were upset with me.
So the story went.
Quite frankly, I'm surprised another censure didn't come out of the House Democrat caucus.
This appears to be the new obligation that they owe their constituents.
The fake news story was published before the social media poll that WEAR commissioned had even concluded.
So not after 128 responses, but after 3,831 people participated in WEAR's survey, the results were of course lopsided in my favor.
And humiliating for John Rapolo.
A whopping 84% of my constituents agree with me and support me.
84%.
Look, I know my relationship with the media is complicated, complex, oftentimes even combative.
Frankly, I wouldn't have it any other way.
I don't expect to get the close calls.
I don't expect to get the pitches on the corner of the strike zone.
84%.
The highroads of journalistic ethics are left vacant by the likes of John Rapolo.
We pointed this out and of course have called on WEAR to issue a correction acknowledging the falsity of their initial reporting.
They have not as of the filming of this episode.
I don't know if it's laziness or recalcitrance, but it sure looks pathetic for WEAR to not go back on air and acknowledge that they essentially lied to their viewers.
So if you go to WEAR's digital story, it says, I'm not making this up, you couldn't make this up, quote, around three-fourths of the votes say they do not stand with Gates's statement.
It says this directly below the embedded tweet containing the results of their survey showing 84% support for my remarks.
When it comes to an 84% approval...
I don't really get to do this much.
...but when I do, it would be nice for the feelings and thoughts of my constituents not to be totally reversed by fools like this.
It seems Kyle Rittenhouse has other ambitions beyond Congress.
Good for him.
He deserves a great life like all law-abiding American citizens.
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