All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 17, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
24:43
Episode 27: The Great Lou Dobbs – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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 can 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.
Lou Dobbs has been a clarion voice in American media for a generation.
He was talking about America's corrupt elites, corporate capture, and even the rise of China before the ascendance of Donald Trump.
Now, he's going to be on firebrand shortly.
But first, new information on the Durham indictments that exposes the corrupt Russia hoax and the Biden administration continuing to make America look foolish on the global stage, this time in Ukraine.
So one reason why Joe Biden is losing in Ukraine is his administration's utter predictability.
Here's Jake Sullivan saying exactly what we will defend, NATO territory.
Reinforce, reassure, and deter.
That is, reinforce NATO territory, reassure our allies on the eastern flank, and deter Russia from any action against NATO allies to whom we have a sacred Article 5 commitment to defend.
We will defend every inch of NATO territory, every inch of Article 5 territory, and Russia, we think, fully understands that message.
Well, Russia isn't loading up forces on the borders of NATO countries.
They're doing so on the border of Ukraine, a non-NATO country.
When we are so explicit and specific about what we will defend, then by definition, we are similarly clear to Putin about what he can do without drawing the responses that he fears most.
This is functionally Biden gaslighting an invasion of Ukraine because their administration is saying they won't defend it.
I certainly wouldn't send American troops to defend Ukraine either.
Neither would Trump.
But what Donald Trump understood was the value of not being so predictable.
When we've met in the past and we've talked, you say things like, I'm going to bomb the expletive out of them very quickly.
And when people like me press you for details, like that gentleman just said, on what your plan is, you very often say, I'm not going to give you the details because I want to be unpredictable.
Absolutely, the word is unpredictable.
If I win, I don't want to broadcast to the enemy exactly what my plan is.
And let me tell you, if I like maybe a combination of my plan and the general's plan, or the general's plan, if I like their plan, Matt, I'm not going to call you up and say, Matt, we have a great plan.
Look at her website.
You know what?
It's no different than this.
She's telling us how to fight ISIS. Just go to her website.
She tells you how to fight ISIS on her website.
I don't think General Douglas MacArthur would like that too much.
The next segment, we're continuing the subject of...
Well, at least I have a plan to fight ISIS. No, no, you're telling the enemy everything you want to do.
No, we're not.
See, you're telling the enemy everything you want to do.
No wonder you've been fighting...
No wonder you've been fighting ISIS your entire adult life.
Trump's experience in complex real estate deals made him remiss to draw red lines that couldn't be revisited.
This kept Putin guessing and more cautious than what we're seeing now.
Putin invaded Crimea during Obama.
He may invade Ukraine under Biden, not so under Trump.
And yet for years, they said Donald Trump was a Russian agent.
Why does President-elect Trump Again and again and again, take it upon himself to be Vladimir Putin's defense lawyer rather than listening to and respecting the intelligence professionals of the United States.
Almost as if he's Vladimir Putin's lawyer defending him before a jury, President Trump again recites the Russian president's talking points.
You're a member of judiciary.
Do you believe the president right now has been an agent of the Russians?
Yes.
I think there's more evidence than he is.
Yes.
And I think all the arrows point in that direction.
And I haven't seen a single piece of evidence that he's not.
Well, you know how many countries Putin invaded when Trump was in power?
Zero.
Let's see if the Biden administration can match that record.
Or if playing the game of geopolitics with your cards face up is actually unwise in 2020 diplomacy.
We might learn that too.
They called me Putin's lawyer.
And worse, But if you believe the Durham indictment, we were the ones who were right all along.
It was the Hillary Clinton campaign sending people into the FBI with lies about Trump and Russia.
All funded by the Democrats, of course.
It was the Hillary Clinton campaign seeding the Russians with lies and using people like Bruce Ohr working at the Department of Justice to proliferate those lies through DOJ leaks.
Sound familiar?
It was the Hillary Clinton campaign that paid IT operatives to infiltrate Trump Tower and the White House after Trump had been elected.
It's un-American.
And yet they accuse us of being treasonous insurrectionists.
Well, we didn't spy on Joe Biden's White House.
They're the kind of sore losers who kept the spine going well after they lost fair elections.
And now, how dare these people accuse us of being a threat to the republic?
They think nothing of American democracy if the result means that they have less power.
They lied to you about Trump and Russia, just like they lied to you about Wuhan, just like they lied to you about the 2020 election, and just like they lied to you about the firebrands in Congress who ask the tough questions and expose the truth.
Lou Dobbs is one of the most important voices in MAGA. We spoke to him earlier.
Take a listen.
The great Lou Dobbs.
That is what America's Greatest President always referred to him as.
He is now the host of The Great America Show, a podcast that I am a ravenous listener of and a frequent guest onto.
Lou, thanks so much for joining me.
I guess start with just the podcast project.
You know, your place in journalism, the echelons you've achieved, certainly secure.
But there must have been something in conservative media that you thought still needed an additional voice.
So what hole are you plugging in the media with this great new project of yours?
Well, I'd like to take credit, Matt, for having the prescience to have reached out to do a podcast.
Frankly, Fox sort of helped me along in that regard.
When they canceled my show, I started looking for other ways in which to bring a message to the public arena.
And podcasting has been beautiful, as you know, before me, how much fun it is and how effective it is and what a terrific medium it is.
And one of the reasons that I'm having so much fun on our show is because you do join us from time to time, and I appreciate that.
Well, I went on your show on Fox as much for the advice as the exposure, because, you know, you presented a different Republican voice, you still do, than we typically hear out of the establishment, the neoconservatives, kind of the Wall Street, big business Republicans.
You know, as you look at the conservative movement now, are we becoming more populist, more nationalist in our economics, Or do you fear a reversion to the establishment mean?
Yeah, I think a reversion to, as you call it, the establishment mean, if we're talking about the country as a whole, because the Democrats are decidedly moving us in a direction that is, frankly, it's neo-Marxist, what they're doing.
There is an authoritarian strain to everything that the Democrats are touching.
Biden is ruling by fiat.
He cannot move things through Congress, so he, as Obama famously put it, he has a phone and a pen.
I haven't seen him use the phone, except to talk with President Xi, but he uses the pen for an executive order at every opportunity.
No matter how many times the courts rebuff him, rebuke him, and reverse him, He continues to plow ahead as if we were not a federalist system of government and as if the courts had very little meaning in American life, when obviously the inverse is the case.
Our courts are desperately needed as a check and balance.
The Biden regime is wielding an excessive amount of power through that unchecked force.
And increasingly, they're getting the help of Republicans in doing so.
What Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have done on the January 6th committee to target Americans, to target colleagues in Congress, to have these secret investigations and then leaking things out of context to try to smear a political movement, it's disgraceful enough.
And recently, Mitch McConnell, as well as more than a dozen Republicans in the Senate, actually It rebuked the RNC's censure of Cheney and Kinzinger.
How should the base of our movement think about these Republicans who seem to be embracing the tactics and style and substance of the Cheneistas and the Kinzingerites?
Yeah, which is a little bit like Che Guevara and Soviet-era show trials.
The fact of the matter is, Kinzinger and Cheney should not even be in the Republican Party.
I personally was disappointed that the Republican leadership didn't have the guts to throw them out.
Voting against the president, participating in the January 6th committee, which is outrageous.
And as President Trump himself said, there would have been no need of any kind of System of inquiry, if that's what they can call it, if only Nancy Pelosi had listened and, as he had requested, put 10,000 National Guard troops on the Hill to help maintain order.
That was a huge crowd, as you know.
And the fact of the matter is, they didn't, the Democrats didn't want those National Guard troops there, and I personally suspect, and this is only my opinion, but it's because they had other ideas for the activists that they had On the hill who were there to incite and to cause great, great mischief on that day.
In criticizing the RNC for their censure of Cheney and Kinzinger, a Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said it's not the place of the RNC to be critical of members.
How should we think about Mitch McConnell's statement that the people who constitute our party's activists really shouldn't have a say or a viewpoint regarding the activities of their lawmakers?
Well, I think that what that was was a cry for absolute autonomy on the part of Mitch McConnell.
He has great power in the Senate.
He apparently wants to extend it to the House of Representatives as well and to the broader party beyond.
You know, it was a silly and inane and Un-empirical remark by the good minority leader.
He's out of place as he usually is.
He is on the side of rhinos as he always is.
And it's a shame that he is in that position.
Just as it's a shame, in my opinion, that Kevin McCarthy wants to be speaker when the Republicans win in November.
It's outrageous.
He is too much of a, I'll be kind, if not rhino, a middle of the rotor.
I personally believe him to be outright a rhino.
And the party needs strength, it needs vision, it needs energy, vibrancy, and new blood in leadership.
It's that simple.
Could you be excited about a Speaker Jim Jordan?
You bet I could be excited about Jim Jordan, as you well know.
I think highly of him.
I think highly of you.
I think you should be in there as well.
I really believe that the brightest, hardest working conservative leaders we have in the House should be leading the House.
And I believe most of the members would agree with me on that.
To get some of our firebrands on the front lines, we would need to dispense with seniority as one of the organizing principles for picking leaders.
Do you think seniority has served the Republican conference well in your observation of its deployment, or has it done more harm than good?
Well, I think this.
The seniority system has done an excellent job in creating seniority for a few years.
But what we want is for the entire conference to be re-elected year after year, serving the needs of the people and setting a vision that can be agreed upon beyond the Potomac.
I mean, this is a big old country and we need a Republican Party and leadership in the House Whose vision and whose purpose resonates with the American people.
A populist, nationalist, America first, make America great party.
That party seems to find a lot of unity when we actually stand up and fight for the border and against these immigration policies that have hollowed out our nation.
Under Speaker Ryan and then Majority Leader McConnell, we seem to be willing to fight for just about everything except securing the border.
There are some of us now taking the position that if we hold the majority, we would be willing to shut down the government if we do not get not only the re-imposition of the Trump border policies, but even stronger policies on internal enforcement.
Do you think that border immigration issues are worth the Republicans drawing a line in the sand on to shut down the government?
And if so, why do Republicans always lose shutdowns?
I think the simplest answer to that is that there isn't a unanimity of view amongst the Republicans in the Senate and the House on what is the value of a dollar and what is the value of a trillion dollars and what is the value of sovereignty.
They can't seem to align those issues.
And when Mitch McConnell can move just ahead three and a half trillion dollars, let's raise the national debt ceiling again.
There should be a clear statement by the Republicans about how much debt is acceptable, because we're in a range that is completely uncharted, unexplored, and inadvisable.
We're looking at a national debt that is now greater than our economy.
That is perilous.
It is a danger to every American, Democrat, Independent, Republican.
This is a party that has to find what is most important.
You're suggesting one of the most important, in my opinion.
And that is a government whose fiscal policy is responsible, And targeted for the needs of the American people.
We are right now running behind not one, but two competing economic and military powers, China and Russia, in hypersonic missiles.
But we were the ones who developed hypersonic missiles first in the 1990s, and we put them on the shelf.
And somebody stole, I believe, something off that shelf.
Because they now have advanced programs and hypersonic missiles.
We don't know how much either has.
But we have to put money behind what matters.
Research and development are a strong military, and instead of these silly, asinine, build back better spending boondoggles created by the Biden Marxist Democrats.
They're no longer just radical Dems.
They have gone to places unimaginable, and for me, a place that the American people would never want to go.
Which policies that the Democrats are pushing scare you most?
I mean, you've got the perspective of covering American politics and finance and industry for quite some time, but we're seeing a lot of new stuff that we've really never seen out of our government before regarding deprivations of liberty and the like.
And so, you know, as you look at the landscape, which policy do you identify and say, this is what we've got to extinguish?
Well, we have to extinguish first and foremost a party that is so committed to a lack of sovereignty.
They want open borders.
They want illegal immigration.
They want a communist system of government.
AOC is driving the Democratic Party now.
She may not be leading it, but she is driving it.
And she is picking up alliances and allies Across the spectrum of the Democratic Party, which is now, in total, moved to the left.
There was a time that the party had left-wing fringe Marxists and a time when they actually had, like in the days of Scoop Jackson, Middle of the road, conservative members who were moderate Democrats.
Name a moderate Democrat.
I can't think of one.
These people are committed to changing our system of government, changing the way in which we live, and it is a society that they seek that would be authoritarian.
It would not be egalitarian whatsoever because the result would be disastrous for the people who need a vibrant Healthy capitalist economy.
They mean to turn this thing into not a socialist party.
Let's get rid of the silly words.
They're talking about communism.
They're talking about government in charge of every aspect of our economy.
And the way in which they are acting now, the Democratic Party is exercising a liberal fascism, if you will, and calling it progressive.
It's mindless.
And they have the aid of the corporate national media, the corporate-owned media, concentrated, oligarchical, and absolutely supportive of Those left-wing mandates, initiatives, impulses, executive orders, you name it, that's the direction that the corporate system, the establishment wants to go.
And that's what the Republicans have to fight.
Well, and it's not going to be good for those establishment institutions because it seems like what you're describing is not one policy or one vector, but a total reordering and reset of American society.
And, you know, I don't know if these multinational corporations are going to come out in that as well as they might think.
Now, when we take the majority again, Lou, I believe there is sufficient evidence and basis to immediately begin impeachment proceedings regarding the border and Joe Biden.
I don't believe people should be impeached for incompetence.
I don't believe people should be...
Impeach because they miss things.
But when you purposefully are taking action to destroy the country, I think impeachment is justified.
Republicans, like those we've been talking about, the McConnellites, will say, no, no, no, we need to start with the issues where we can agree with the Biden administration and work for there.
How would you respond to that strategy and paradigm?
First of all, if there is an issue upon which there is agreement between the radical left neo-Marxist Democratic Party And the Republican Party, the home of conservatism, economic nationalism, if you prefer, and populism, then there shouldn't be any doubt at all.
Fight them.
Don't agree with them.
Don't compromise.
Fight them.
Fight them everywhere you must.
But don't fall in line, because that's how we got to where we are right now.
The alliance between corporate America, traditionally conservative, that now has moved far left, endorsing, supporting, and financing in some cases, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, EID. I mean, you go beyond this mad indoctrination.
Initiative on the part of the left and our universities, our schools, that's moved to corporate America and to government itself.
We've got to stop that.
In our schools, we've got to move back to education, not indoctrination.
We have got to remember who we are and defend it unapologetically.
We are capitalists.
We are a constitutional republic, and we are committed to freedom and liberty for the individual with responsibility.
And we have fallen so far from that that it is both disgusting and terribly concerning, I think, to most Americans.
The real question is, are we up for that fight?
Because I got a lot of Americans who feel like their vote was not treated with respect.
They viewed their vote as precious.
And they didn't see officials treat it with respect in the election process.
And they see a Republican Party that they don't feel fights for them enough.
And so, you know, do you think that there's enough energy still out there for us to marshal up and get this thing on the right side?
I think it's a good question.
There was a time I would have said to you it's a question that is answered every day in American society because we are a nation that is vigorous, we are inventive, we are hard-working, and I can't say that now with the same breath that I once could have and as inclusive a breath.
Because we have right now too many people who have been attacked by their government.
We have political prisoners right now as a result of what happened on January 6th and the effort of the left to rewrite history and try to use that as a political lever.
Just as they tried to twice impeach a sitting president with baseless charges carried out a special counsel fraud against him.
They are doing the same thing to ordinary citizens when the Attorney General of the United States says that parents who are concerned about their children and the education they're receiving and the response of those public schools, which is the great equalizer in our society, when the Attorney General can say those parents who are so concerned and so active and participating in their school board meetings and sometimes perhaps even unruly and outspoken that they're domestic terrorists.
Then we're in a hell of a spot, and I think most Americans who are paying attention will be willing and ready to fight like hell to restore those rights.
Hey, the always outspoken, occasionally unruly Lou Dobbs, a great American host of the Great America podcast, which we highly recommend.
The one thing, Lou, that America misses is seeing you react to the news of the day.
And so while we get to hear it on the podcast, I'm going to give you every encouragement to have a video element because it is a different experience for all of us when we get to see you sort of bubble up in your...
And your desire for this country to be the best version of herself and your insistence that we do so.
I appreciate the mentorship that you've given so many of us in Congress just through our nightly sessions that all of America used to enjoy on Fox Business.
And now we get the great podcasting platform to pioneer as well.
Well, thank you very much for those kind words.
And I will follow your counsel and I will indeed add a video component worth with.
Ah, this is the breaking news.
Well, thank you so much, Lou.
Thanks for being with us, and I look forward to continuing to listen to your great show as well.
And vice versa.
Thanks so much, my friend.
Appreciate it.
Thanks so much for joining us on Firebrand.
We've got big new developments coming for the show in the next couple weeks.
▲
Export Selection