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July 13, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
33:52
Episode 59 LIVE: The Will To Fight – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
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 the 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 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.
You guys are spasming into this reflexive response and you call it an emergency hearing, right?
And the basis for the emergency is what happened in Evaldi.
And we all agree it was awful and tragic, but you are not providing the thoughtful solutions that would actually reduce the likelihood of that.
When you make an argument in the Judiciary Committee, For a change in the law, there are two components.
You have to demonstrate a need for the change, and that what you're bringing forward will actually affect that in a positive way.
And it's the second part of the argument where the bills you've presented today undeniably fail.
And in Florida, I would suggest we had a process that's a little bit better than what we've observed here.
In Florida, following Parkland, every Floridian Wanted to reduce the likelihood that that could ever occur again, for precisely the reasons that animate your passions today.
But instead of rushing to town, stumbling bills together, we got our very best sheriffs, our very best police chiefs, former members of law enforcement, people with tactical experience, even parents of slain children.
And we put them on a board to review the school shooting as if it were an airline crash, dispassionately, And then, as a consequence, what we saw was actually a failure in law enforcement, that the sheriff in Broward County was so recalcitrant in not doing the training, that the on-the-ground law enforcement were so derelict in their duties that children died that didn't need to.
And so, Governor DeSantis rightly fired that sheriff, replaced them, put better training in, more money to harden our schools and our synagogues, our houses of worship across the state of Florida, and we're safer as a consequence.
So it's not that we're particularly here to talk about abortion or the border.
We understand we have to make these things less likely, but whether it's...
Are you holding an emergency hearing to respond to a leaked draft opinion that's not even final?
Or now when Congressman Roy from Texas says, gosh, before you have the emergency Uvalde hearing, maybe we ought to figure out what happened in Uvalde so that we can make that frequency less likely to occur.
We are alive now in the Longworth House office building in Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C. And I gave those remarks in the House Judiciary Committee as Democrats brought expansive gun control to the body following the Uvalde shooting.
And I thought to myself, gosh, you know, there seems like there may be more to the story here.
We have a saying, tough cases make bad laws.
And that's because sometimes in people's passion to be responsive and to look alert, they lurch into policy options that end up being really bad for our people.
And oftentimes, those emotion-laden legislative reactions take people's liberty away.
We saw that tremendously during the pandemic, and we certainly see it now.
So I made that argument.
I said, gosh, you know, before we go and deprive law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment during a national crime wave, let's get the evidence.
Oh, no, they didn't want that.
And now, as a result of some records requests made by the Dallas Morning News, we see what happened.
Go ahead and play this surveillance video.
You've probably...
At 11.33 a.m., the shooter's seen in the school dressed in black, his long gun in hand, making the chilling walk down the hall.
Three minutes after the shooter walked into the school, first responding officers run into the building.
A total of seven officers initially inside.
Three of them run towards the classroom and hold just outside of it.
A minute later, the gunman shoots at police, and the officers retreat towards the other end of the hallway.
One looks as if a bullet had almost grazed his head.
No one would approach the classroom for the next 45 minutes.
This time lapse from 11.38 to 12.23 shows you the number of officers from multiple agencies that poured into the school, armed with long guns and plenty of shields.
At 1221, gunshots heard coming from the classroom again, and we see law enforcement move closer down the hall, but they stall there for another 30 minutes.
This time-lapse shows you the activity in that hallway from 1221 until 1250. No apparent attempt to breach the class.
Until 1252, when gunshots ring out.
And law enforcement finally moves in to kill the shooter, 77 minutes after the first officers arrived on scene.
77 minutes.
A more effective law enforcement response would have saved lives.
And oftentimes we have states that are willing and able to craft the more effective law enforcement responses.
I mean, the good here is not going to come out of Washington, D.C. Communities and states can undeniably become more resilient against school violence, and in Florida we've done that.
But here, You could have taken away guns of a whole lot of law-abiding Americans and still not have narrowly tailored a solution to what resulted in just a tremendous amount of senseless and horrific death in the great state of Texas.
Go ahead and play the hand sanitizer video here.
I mean, if there's an enduring image burned in, it's the children being slaughtered, these students in the classroom calling 911, And here you've got this law enforcement response that is shameful and dangerous and horrific.
And we deserve better than this.
And frankly, all Americans deserve better than a government that would, as I said in committee, spasm into a reaction without actually knowing what's going on.
That brings us to today.
Hot action on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Democrats are pushing what they call an active shooter alert bill.
Every time there is a shooting, presumably within any proximity of where you are, within any grouping of people, the left, the Democrats in Congress, want to bombard your cell phone with active shooter messages.
It is insane.
I gave this response just now on the floor.
Maybe someone should have sent an active shooter alert to the police in Uvalde.
Oh wait!
They had the alert.
They were in a school building with an active shooter and didn't take action.
You know, America is at her best when she encourages her citizens to have safe, responsible gun ownership.
But under Democrats, instead, we have a government that instead wants to stigmatize and scare people about guns.
Imagine you're at a concert with 5,000 people and everyone gets an alert on their phone, active shooter, because six blocks away there was a gunfire that went off, maybe an accident, maybe a tragedy.
Would that make the circumstance safer?
Of course not!
It would lead to stampede, tragedy, hysteria, mistake, perhaps even more death.
This bill is like yelling fire in a movie theater, except the fire is in another movie theater across the street.
The bill makes no mention of distance requirements.
Will it be notified of any active shootings within a mile, five miles, ten miles?
What is an active shooter?
A drive-by in an inner city?
A spousal murderer in the suburbs?
If you live in or near Democrat-run cities, it sounds like your phone will likely be buzzing off the hook.
Some of our cities have shootings every day where multiple people are injured and often this happens in the jurisdictions with the most intense and liberty-depriving gun control.
The bill states that an active shooter is defined as an individual, quote, determined to pose an active imminent threat to the people in a populated area.
That sounds like a sizable amount of the people walking around the south side of Chicago every day.
Who's making this determination?
Is it in a millisecond?
By the time the alerts go out, it may be far too late to do any good.
This bill is useless and foolish.
Working on police response times is of course a worthy goal, a worthy goal for the states where the Constitution resides, the police power.
But alerting thousands of people to what may or may not have happened 30 minutes ago or 30 blocks away is in fact dangerous.
And so one has to ask, what is the true purpose of this bill?
Why do the Democrats want to use the power of government to bombard your cell phone with active shooter alerts 24 hours a day, seven days a week?
It's because they want you to be afraid of the Second Amendment.
It's because they want you to be afraid of responsible gun ownership and they hope That if they program you and bombard you long enough, that you'll hate your own Second Amendment rights or that you may tattle on your neighbor who is lawfully and rightfully exercising theirs.
The American people should not fall for this.
I yield back.
The American people shouldn't fall for it.
And the American people deserve a government that will actually stand up for the virtue of safe, responsible gun ownership.
But all you get from these Democrats in Congress today is anti-Second Amendment fear porn.
And they want to plow it into your phone each and every hour of each and every day.
I'm going to vote against this active shooter bill, and I would encourage everyone watching, reach out to your House members, reach out to your senators, let them know that you don't need the government in your cell phone, just...
Evoking fear and trying to create an anti-gun society out of the United States of America.
Certainly the will to fight was not something that we saw in these police responding in Uvalde, a will to even engage in responsible law enforcement.
But the will to fight is actually something that we also have to frequently assess around the world, not just in our own country.
And we've actually been really, really bad at it.
You see, the neoconservatives and the interventionist Democrats, they want you to believe that America can be replicated in faraway lands.
That there's nothing really special about our land or our people or our culture.
That we could just go to some cave in Central Asia or some grouping of sand dunes in Arabia and build Jeffersonian democracies out of sand and blood and oil.
Well, that's not how it works.
And oftentimes, we spend your tax dollars, we spend the treasure of our nation, we deploy the credibility of our society, and we spill the blood of our bravest patriots in conquests that we should not be involved in.
In coups that we should not be supporting, and in the affairs of other nations best handled by them.
It was an interesting point, and we got an interesting admission from truly one of the most despicable deep staters, the former director of national intelligence, James Clapper.
Listen to former DNI Clapper in these remarks.
And I would observe first that we have never been able to accurately gauge will to fight, and that's what this really boils down to.
If you go back to my war, Southeast Asia, I did a couple tours there, and we consistently overestimated the will to fight of our client, the South Vietnamese, and profoundly underestimated the will to fight of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese.
Fast forward to Afghanistan.
Similarly, we underestimated the will to fight of the Taliban and overestimated the will to fight of the Afghan military and the viability of its government.
And that's been a consistent pattern.
And we did it again with Ukraine and Russia.
It's an astonishing admission.
And if we're unable as a country to assess the will of others to fight, maybe we shouldn't try to do it so much.
I had an exchange in the House Armed Services Committee with the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on just this subject and how indescribably bad he is at this.
Take a listen.
Secretary Austin, are you capable of assessing whether another has the will to fight?
No, we're not.
And that's the point that the chairman made earlier.
That's just like an incredibly disappointing thing for the Secretary of Defense to simply say, I can't assess whether someone has the will to fight.
But it is consistent with your record.
I mean, during the Obama administration, I think they gave you about $48 million to go train up Some folks in Syria to go take on the Assad government, and I think your testimony was that only four or five survived first contact with the enemy.
So what confidence should this committee have in you or should the country have in you when you've now confessed to us, and whether it's the swing and a miss in Afghanistan that General Milley talked to the Senate about yesterday, total failure, or whether it was your failures in Syria, you don't seem capable to look at a fighting force and determine whether or not they have the will.
So Clapper knows they can't do it.
Lloyd Austin knows they can't do it.
And so maybe we should like learn how to do it.
I don't know.
We spend a tremendous amount of public money to try to get the best minds, the best theories, the best war fighting strategies, opportunities to win the future before folks who will one day take command in our military or occupy some senior position in our defense infrastructure.
And are we now having recognized that we can't assess this will to fight learning new ways and techniques to do that?
Or are we learning other things that are quite different?
Take a listen.
How should the Department of Defense think about critical race theory?
On the issue of critical race theory, etc., I'll obviously have to get much smarter on whatever the theory is.
But I do think it's important, actually, for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.
And the United States Military Academy is a university.
And it is important that we train and we understand.
And I want to understand white rage.
And I'm white.
And I want to understand it.
Early on in my tenure, I asked the force to conduct a brief stand-down to discuss the issue of extremism in our ranks.
Admiral Gilday, I was glad to hear Congressman Lamborn ask you about your decision to include Ibram X. Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist in your recommended reading list.
Do you expect that after sailors read this book that says that the United States Navy is racist, That we will increase or decrease morale, cohesion, and recruiting race into the United States Navy.
I think we'll be a better Navy from having open, honest conversations about racism.
When I was six years old, one of my moms had an accident that left her paralyzed.
Doctors said she might never walk again.
But she tapped into my family's pride to get back on her feet, eventually standing at the altar to marry my other mom.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an ad for the United States military.
You get that?
Two minutes talking about this woman's two moms and five seconds of her actually being in the military.
I wonder why Putin isn't taking us seriously.
Here's a training video from Joe Biden's Pentagon.
This was released by the U.S. Navy, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Hi, my name is Johnny, and I use he, him pronouns.
Hi, and I'm Conchi, and I use she, her pronouns.
And we're here to talk about pronouns.
What is a pronoun?
A pronoun is how we identify ourselves apart from our name, and it's also how people refer to us in conversations.
Using the right pronouns is a really simple way to affirm someone's identity.
It is a signal of acceptance and respect.
A really good way to do that is to use inclusive language.
Instead of saying something like, hey guys, you can say, hey everyone, or hey team.
So that's the US Navy under Joe Biden.
Why not just make it really clear?
Get right to the point.
We surrender.
Let me use some inclusive language.
I include everyone who accepts this woke pedagogy in the general category of idiots and fools.
How's that for inclusive?
There is something that we absolutely have to be able to do.
When we spend gazillions of dollars, when we deploy our military members to try to train and equip other entities, we have to know whether or not that is going to be used for good, for defense, for America's interests.
And if we don't know how to do that, we shouldn't spend another freaking day on pronouns or critical race theory or what it's like in, you know...
Various forms of non-traditional family environments.
That's not the job of the military.
Do that on your own time.
I'm fine with people reading whatever the heck they want to read, but it should not be part of the precious moments that we have for our military to become more capable.
This is a great country, and it deserves better than men in dresses at the Pentagon trying to convince you that you need to get more in touch with your white rage or your woke-ism.
Thanks everyone for joining us.
We're simulcast streaming right now.
I am catching some criticism on our Facebook stream.
Someone just said that I was a dovish weakling and a double-dealing sellout.
And you know what?
This is a criticism I get quite frequently from the neoconservatives.
Oh, Gates is just a dove.
He's just a weakling.
You know what?
Real strength Is not sending America's best to go and die for some of the world's worst.
Real strength is having the ability to stand up to the military-industrial complex, to be able to face down the woke generals, and to be able to demand a military That is worthy of the greatest nation and the greatest society that has ever existed.
So having a realistic view of foreign policy and America's capabilities does not make one weak.
We don't need the cowboy attitude of trying to go around swashbuckling, saying that we can take on everyone and everyone.
That is exhausting for our country.
That is draining.
That is how empires fall.
So I think that we can demonstrate a lot of strength in our military by learning more about our friends, about our enemies, about our fighting forces, about our allies and what they're capable of doing.
And this terrible rot of woke-ism that Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin have nurtured in the Pentagon must go.
There was an interesting moment yesterday on CNN with Jake Tapper and John Bolton.
I don't think it was the moment that Jake Tapper was quite expecting.
So the January 6th committee concludes and there's this expectation that John Bolton with his long list of government offices held and his regal mustache and his stern voice will go on with Jake Tapper as a Republican and Smear anyone associated with MAGA or President Trump or the America First political movement.
And instead what happens is John Bolton functionally confesses to being involved in coups around the globe.
Take a listen.
It's also a mistake, as some people have said, including on the committee, the commentators, that somehow this was a carefully planned coup d'etat aimed at the Constitution.
That's not the way Donald Trump does things.
It's rambling from one half-vast idea to another, one plan that falls through and another comes up.
That's what he was doing.
As I say, none of it defensible.
But you have to understand the nature of What the problem of Donald Trump is.
He's, to use a Star Wars metaphor, a disturbance in the force.
And it's not an attack on our democracy.
It's Donald Trump looking out for Donald Trump.
It's a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
I don't know that I agree with you.
To be fair, with all due respect, one doesn't have to be brilliant to attempt a coup.
I disagree with that.
As somebody who has helped plan coup d'etat, Not here, but other places.
It takes a lot of work, and that's not what he did.
You cited your expertise having planned coups.
I'm not going to get into the specifics, but...
Successful coups?
Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book, and it turned out not to be successful.
Not that we had all that much to do with it, but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed.
The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition, is laughable.
But I think there's another...
I feel like this other stuff you're not telling me, though.
I think I'm sure there is.
Well, that went off the rails.
Lex on Facebook says Bolton is a leech.
I would agree with that assessment.
Alan on Instagram says keep fighting no one else is.
Remember, we simulcast streamed this show on, gosh, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Getter, Rumble, YouTube, and our podcast is always available anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Make sure if you're listening, give us that five-star rating, especially if you're listening on Apple.
I'm so close to 4,000 ratings, and you guys could really help me get there.
Jake Tapper was trying to help John Bolton get there on the description of the various and sundry coups that he's been involved in.
And I left that conversation really astonished, but also of the view that John Bolton is categorically against any coups That he himself was not a part of planning.
So take comfort in that, America.
Take comfort in that world.
I remember talking with President Trump about John Bolton, and he always kind of viewed Bolton as a mascot when he was in the White House, less a thinker and less an architect of America First foreign policy.
Bolton was a guy that Trump liked to just bring around the Iranians because he knew it drove the Iranians crazy.
And Bolton eventually kind of liked the fact that he was back at the table and People were listening to him because that hadn't happened in quite some time in his career.
But then he got the joke.
Bolton fundamentally understood that Donald Trump didn't really listen to him, didn't really respect his views, but instead just brought him there to troll other people.
And upon realizing that, Bolton left and wrote a book that probably had a bunch of stuff in it that wasn't true because that's what John Bolton does.
He writes books about people who he used to work for.
Maybe that's a lesson for anybody else that might want to hire John Bolton.
Moving on to another issue that's a little closer to home in the state of Florida.
All Americans know that the Dobbs decision has overturned Roe v.
Wade and Planned Parenthood v.
Casey.
We now are a pro-life nation and that's going to give our states the opportunity to embrace life and advance life and create greater ease for adoptions and the creation of families.
And that is something that enhances the humanity of all of us.
A pro-life culture.
It's something very different than we've seen on the radical left with threats of intimidating justices and engaging in nights of rage and violence.
And we've even seen folks go to like the crazy extremes of suggesting novel, new, and innovative ways to kill unborn life.
Take a listen to this report from CBS News.
This is all about bodily autonomy and choice and so you know people have a right to Be pregnant and have a pregnancy, but also not have a pregnancy.
Dr Meg Autry, a UCSF OBGYN, said she's had the idea for a vessel that would provide surgical abortions and reproductive health care services for a very long time.
But it was the recent Supreme Court decision that helped inspire her to kick it into gear.
She's now spearheading the Prowess, which stands for Protecting Reproductive Rights of Women Endangered by State Statutes.
The vessel would be located in federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, near states where abortions are banned.
She wants to offer the services at low or no cost.
People that care deeply about access to reproductive rights know that we have to be innovative and creative in order for patients to We know internationally that when access is limited or abortion is illegal, patients die.
The cost?
At least $20 million.
Dr. Autry said the prowess is looking for donations and ideally a donated boat.
Is a donated floating abortion barge really a place that anyone ought to be getting health care or getting any type of care?
It certainly shouldn't be a place that abortions are being performed.
I mean, I love the kicker at the end where they're like, so we've got this idea.
We're going to go do offshore abortions.
All we need is the boat.
Craziness.
But there is a necessary legislative response here and the Florida legislature ought to look at it because we do not want to be in a world where people are going 3.1 miles offshore to kill unborn life.
There is instructive precedent here with casino gambling boats that used to leave Florida.
So it's actually quite interesting.
It ties back to the Jack Abramoff scandal.
Jack Abramoff was one of the owner investors in an entity called Sun Cruise.
And they would take these old decommissioned cruise vessels and they would float them offshore and they would turn on all the gambling machines and people would do their gambling and then the boat would return.
And ultimately, the Florida legislature gets wise to this and realizes that if there is refueling or docking at ports, you actually have some jurisdiction over those vessels.
And so the Florida legislature, upon learning that there is a desire for floating abortions off our shore, should pass laws making it illegal to Leave a Florida port for the sake of breaking our abortion laws.
And we should not allow vessels to have docking privileges or have any other opportunities to utilize Florida assets.
A lot of our ports are in fact state funded, state supported, state subsidized.
We don't want them to have access to any of those things to have a loophole to break our laws.
As weird as it is to think about donated floating abortion barges, I do think it's something that necessitates a legislative preemptive response on, and the Florida legislature could do just that, following the playbook that we got from the Sun Cruise casino boats.
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Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for being a part of the Firebrand Nation.
Roll the credits.
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