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Aug. 12, 2022 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
52:15
Episode 66 LIVE: Agents of Chaos (feat. Dr. Darren J. Beattie) – 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 applause.
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 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.
Congressman Matt Gaetz joins us by phone.
Congressman Gaetz, give us your assessment of what went down yesterday and where did we stand this morning, sir?
Well, they couldn't beat Trump at the ballot box in 2016, so they tried with impeachment and the witness box.
That failed, so then they ran to the mailbox in the 2020 election, and now they've literally shown up at President Trump's home to take his boxes.
This was not law enforcement activity, Steve.
This was a performance.
It was a political performance.
Over 30 FBI agents, heavily armed, The circle around President Trump's beautiful American flag at Mar-a-Lago filled up with black SUVs.
They rented a rider truck so that people with guns could jump out of the back of it.
There was even a standoff at the beginning of this raid because there were folks at the Secret Service who were wondering what The hat was my interview with Steve Bannon.
I gotta get Bannon some better photos of me.
I was like 30 pounds heavier then.
Welcome to Firebrand.
We're live in the Longworth House office building here in our nation's capital and chaos is the word of the day.
Democrats are Inflicting chaos on our economy with this terrible spending bill.
My legislative director, Mike Robertson, has been going through it.
We're going to have all the updates on that in just a moment.
Chaos at the IRS, where they are gearing up for something.
Like, is the IRS gearing up for war in our country?
Is Nancy Pelosi trying to start a nuclear war in Asia now?
Is there an effort by the national security state to stoke violence in a civil war here at home?
We certainly hope not, but here to break it down with us, once again, one of the very favorites on Firebrand, Dr. Darren Beattie, the publisher of Revolver.News.
Dr. Beattie, I think our last episode has over a million and a half of views on Rumble, so certainly...
Folks enjoy the conversations we're able to have.
You have a recently published piece in Newsweek.
The national security apparatus is now the enemy.
Walk through that piece for us.
Well, it's simply my reaction to the pretty outrageous escalatory episode we saw with the FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago.
And it explores the implications of that.
You know, in a nutshell, it says, yeah, we can be outraged.
We can point to the hypocrisies, but we shouldn't be cheap dates about it.
They overstepped their bounds.
They know it.
They overplayed the hand.
That's why they're engaged in frenetic finger pointing.
So the ball's in our court.
The ball's in the court of conservatives, Republicans, GOP in particular.
And really, the only thing to do is to come up with A real plan and implement it.
And I explore some ideas for how to do that in the piece.
You specifically talk about a comparison with Hillary Clinton and some of the records retention and records management laws that may be impacted by this investigation.
How should people think about what's happening to President Trump through the lens of what we saw play out with Hillary Clinton?
Well it really is bizarre and actually quite ironic because you know one of the major sort of themes of the 2016 campaign was Hillary Clinton's criminality and one dimension of that criminality was the Improper storage of classified material.
In fact, it wasn't simply that she had a private email.
She had a private server where she was storing classified stuff, and there are a lot of really disturbing questions as to what was actually going on there.
It was taken seriously enough that, of course, James Comey famously reopened or reconsidered the email question shortly before the election, and everyone went apoplectic about that.
Of course, they weren't searching Hillary Clinton's house in New York or anything remotely like that.
Simply the idea that they were looking into it was considered scandalous enough.
And then on Trump's side, as we all know, the wonderful chant, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up, that became a staple of the rallies, galvanizing the base, that never materialized.
That is ultimately sort of rhetorical bluster.
And nonetheless, the reaction to it was, Oh, the idea of locking her up is that's a step out of bounds.
That's not who we are.
That's not what democracies do.
That's something that dictators do.
And they threw out a number of comparisons with people like Mugabe and Myanmar and things like that.
But it's one of those things.
For better or worse, Trump never went through with it.
It was all sort of Well, I blame Jeff Sessions for that.
I actually think that with an attorney general focused on the facts and the law, Hillary Clinton should have faced punishment.
But there are three key distinctions.
One, Hillary Clinton was never president.
She might have thought she was, but she was never president.
So this is an unprecedented step to utilize criminal process to try to stop somebody who has literally been the leader of our country That has unique implications globally, like you referenced.
Second, Hillary Clinton was actually transmitting and receiving classified information improperly, which creates a unique vector of vulnerability.
What, a few boxes that might have been inadvertently taken to Mar-a-Lago down in a basement in Florida?
Florida, not the same thing as moving this type of information on and off of your smartphone where there are tools like Pegasus, like other intelligence collection tools that could actually put Americans in danger.
No American was in danger for any moldy box in the basement in Mar-a-Lago.
So very different thing with Hillary Clinton.
And I also think the intent was there.
You see the bleach bit efforts on her part.
This holistic effort by Clinton world to try to absolve her of that responsibility.
Here you had Trump and his team doing everything they could to work with the government and comply with reasonable requests.
And so I think that that is a really important thing to evaluate when looking at the Hillary Clinton example.
This notion that technical noncompliance with the Archives Act is the basis for this is so laughable it does not pass the straight face test.
What do you think they're really after, Darren?
Well, I mean, I think they're really after taking Trump off the table.
They want to completely neutralize Trump and the broader Trump phenomenon as a political force.
And they tried everything.
They're trying everything in their arsenal to do that.
And this is just another vector, just like the January 6 nonsense is a vector, just like the tax nonsense is a vector, just like the Russiagate nonsense is a vector.
They're using a multi-pronged approach, but the objective is the same, and the objective is to completely silence, suppress, crush, and neutralize And if that's the goal,
my hypothesis is no indictment, no charge, no trial even has to occur for them to largely achieve features of that goal.
They're trying to use criminal process in politics to try to cloud the prospects of a candidate, in this case Donald Trump, who they're afraid of.
And you don't even have to indict him to do that.
You could just try to make people concerned that all the other shoes gonna drop at any moment.
And in a way, Darren, the national security state is going for the hat trick when it comes to election interference.
I mean, in the 2016 presidential contest, the national security state interfered with the Steele dossier.
You point that out in your piece, saying that, oh, well, you know, Trump's a Russian agent, and there are these tapes, and he's going to be totally compromised by Putin.
By the way, Trump, only president in recent history to serve and not have Putin invade another country anymore.
In our last few decades.
Then you have in 2020 them also interfere in the presidential election by suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop, showing clear compromise of the Biden family, clear financial ties and interests with the Chinese Communist Party.
And the national security state played a role in suppressing that.
That was not just big tech and big media.
That was big government.
And the FBI is now seeing a cascade of whistleblowers come forward to say that any time anything came in about the Bidens that was derogatory, they just labeled it foreign interference and downgraded it.
And now you literally have the third presidential contest in a row where the national security state is trying to pick the winners and losers by trying to now disqualify Trump and use criminal process against him before he's able to announce his candidacy.
So, I mean, they did it in 2016.
They did it in 2020.
We're watching it unfold right now in 2024.
Dr. Bidi, have we seen the last election where the FBI and the national security state isn't actively a participant in the electioneering process?
Dr. Bidi, have we seen the last election where the FBI and the national security state isn't actively a participant in the electioneering process?
Well, I think that's a great question, and I think it remains to be seen, but it really invokes a question that I've been asking really since 2016, which is, you know, The national security state is doing everything in its power to make sure that the American people will never meddle in their own elections again.
And I think everything that you've described is consistent with that.
It is consistent again with what I've said that politics as we generally understand it will really exist only at a superficial and performative level unless the National security state's role is brought into its proper relation to the will of the people.
And that's something that everyone who is an elected official who wants to run for office, everyone who wants to do something real has to understand.
It raises the stakes because if you want to actually do something real in politics, you can no longer subsist in the safe playpen of partisan politics.
Finger pointing.
It can't just be, oh, look at the outrageous thing that AOC did, or look what the socialists did, look at this or that.
If you want to play the real game, you have to ruffle the feathers of the national security state because they're the premier and chief bottleneck to anything meaningful happening politically.
And if you do that, as you well know, you're playing a very different game with very different stakes, and very few people understandably are willing to get into that.
But that's just the reality, and if we don't address that problem, We just don't have a country anymore.
We don't have a meaningful party anymore.
And we're only going to get more of the same, but actually much, much worse if present trends continue.
Someone you and I both know well who is involved with some of these alphabet soup three-letter agencies told me recently, you never can be a truly viable contender for the presidency in the United States.
If you don't have at least one element of the national security apparatus in your corner.
You know, I mean, maybe it's not the FBI, but then you gotta have the CIA. And if you don't have them, you gotta have the NSA. And if you don't have them, well, you gotta have Homeland Security.
And if you don't have them, you have to have DOD intelligence.
I mean, are we now at a point where the principal stakeholders in our politics Are less the traditional interest groups, you know, big sugar, big insurance, big healthcare, and it's actually big intelligence that's driving the train.
Well, I think all of those stakeholders still exert considerable influence, but absolutely, we're seeing more and more the intelligence apparatus, which used to subsist at a kind of very quiet subterranean level, make its presence felt.
And I think It's not that this is a new phenomenon.
It's not like this influence is new.
It's simply that Trump was the first president in a very long time to pose a meaningful challenge to the authority of the intelligence apparatus.
And that's why we're seeing the response that we're seeing.
And that's why politics is very different from what it ordinarily has been.
And you're seeing such kind of dramatic and otherwise really unimaginable things happening, like the FBI raiding the private home of a former president over some nothing trivial, kind of de minimis record storage violation.
You've made the argument in a number of your writings and in your reporting that folks can check out at revolver.news that America is a joke nation. And I bristle at that because I don't want to believe it. I think perhaps I'm a bit more optimistic than you are. But there is a Quote from your piece in Newsweek.
Unless and until a radical change occurs, conservatives must treat the FBI and the rest of the national security apparatus as the hostile and partially illegitimate institutions that they are and not run back into the arms of their national security tormentor whenever the uniparty regime saber-rattles about the threat from some hostile entity overseas.
It's almost like you're describing battered spouse syndrome, Dr. Beattie, that you have these political actors, as you've described them in Washington, who get abused by the national security apparatus, but at the first opportunity to run back and say, no, no, no, I'll love you more this time, they do so.
How do we break that cycle?
That's a great formulation, and that's exactly what's going on, is that on the one hand, you have All of these national security organizations from the CIA to the FBI to Department of Homeland Security, you name it, that are not only not on the side of American patriots, but are actively hostile to American patriots and not simply incidentally hostile.
You have the DHS, which even under Trump proclaimed effectively White supremacist domestic terror is the number one national security threat.
And I think by now, we all know that that's code language for Trump supporters.
And that's how it's played out.
And you see that in the Michigan entrapment operation and everything else.
And so you have the national security apparatus, which is at war against Trump supporters.
And Trump supporters more or less are beginning to understand this.
I point out in the piece that There's something about the conservative political psychology that somewhat resists this because it's so disposed to venerate just and well-functioning institutions of authority, whereas people on the left To put it charitably, want to challenge unjust institutions of authority.
People on the right want to venerate just institutions of authority.
But all of these institutions are now hostile.
And many people are coming to understand this, except the second you hear the same national security apparatus that hates your guts start to say, well, wait a minute, we need your help.
You know, We need your help with this Russia nonsense.
We need your help with this largely manufactured threat overseas.
We need you to come in line.
Largely conservatives that are doing most of the sacrifices on a military level too.
And I think at a certain point, we need to kind of reevaluate this relationship because the contract seems to have been broken in some decisive degree.
And I think it's reasonable for patriotic Americans to say, look, national security state, look, stakeholders of the globalist American empire.
If you expect sacrifices from us, can we at the very least ask you not to use your considerable resources to destroy us domestically?
And I think they're still kind of catching up to this new reality, but it is frustrating to see.
It's like the second any kind of alleged foreign threat is mentioned by any of these hostile institutions, you see a lot of well-meaning conservatives just, you know, completely forget about the last beating and say, okay, sign me up.
I want to help.
I want to fight for your interests.
Well, who are you really fighting for?
I think as things progress, this will become more and more of a pronounced problem.
And it's a problem that the stakeholders in the national security state will have to take seriously.
So I think it's time to get rid of this beaten spouse syndrome.
It's time to stop being cheap dates.
And it's time to start demanding some level of reciprocity and respect from these Well, and Darren, the reason that's so important is because their actions are becoming like...
More acute with each move on the board, right?
Like, let's go back to 2016. They thought that obtaining some secret warrant for secret surveillance that nobody would know about through illegitimate means would be okay.
They thought that using the authorized leak structure that the DOJ absolutely has in place to try to get information out so that their hands are clean but so that others are smeared And then in 2020, they didn't use those clandestine tools.
They actively suppressed the Hunter Biden information.
They used the strongest possible hand that they could to say, no, we are going to jettison this, to degrade this.
And as if that wasn't acute enough, now we get to the run-up to 2024, and they're literally now raiding houses of political opponents.
We're in a country right now where...
We got grandmothers being attacked on the streets in broad daylight.
We got people being carjacked in our cities.
And we have political opponents being raided by the regime in power.
That sounds more like Venezuela than it does the United States of America.
I want to bring us to the moment in January 2023 when Republicans take control of the Congress.
I believe that you have to have a three-vector attack on the national security state's worst elements.
First, power of the purse, funding.
We cannot continue to fund the institutions that get turned against our people.
Not one more damn penny if we find out that this is what it certainly appears to be from our initial inspection.
Second, structural changes, authorities.
That's stuff like FISA repeal.
My colleague Dan Bishop of North Carolina suggested that we just break, quite literally, break up the institutions of the FBI and DOJ, get them out of the beltway of Washington, D.C., and make them go live out in real America so that you don't have this vortex of politics infecting them.
I think a well-detailed in your piece in Newsweek that people should check out is the counter-investigation strategy, running out the whistleblowers, making sure that when people have the courage to come forward and say that they've seen something wrong, that we're able to follow up on that.
So starve them of the money, restructure the enterprise, and then follow to ground every investigation whistleblower fact pattern that we can.
Do you think that's a worthy strategy, and is there anything in that that I'm missing?
I think that's an excellent strategy to start with, and the question is really in the implementation, because you're one of the stalwarts, you're one of the firebrands, but there aren't very many like you, and I wonder if there's a critical mass to really implement something with teeth.
I hope there is.
I think we're close, but I think for these things, it's all about who's going to have the focus, the determination, and the courage to actually follow through with this when there's so many opportunities to kind of have a way that you can look like you're doing something to the public when you're actually not really doing something.
A whistleblower issue.
I think that's very important.
It's something to explore.
It's something that doesn't even, at the present moment, doesn't even require Republican control of Congress.
The GOP is sitting on a ton of money.
We all see those emails of solicitation.
They're sitting on a lot of money.
I think They could do a lot worse than to dedicate some of that money, a considerable sum, to a fund that would defend and support potential whistleblowers within this national security apparatus we're talking about.
So, Darren, there is a tool that we're going to have that we don't now.
Subpoena power, the ability to bring people in for depots.
So like right now, I get a whistleblower case.
I can run it to ground with open source.
Our staff can conduct interviews.
We can expose certain things.
But man, when I'm able to take these whistleblower investigations that we are currently running, I mean, these are active investigations that we do work on every day that involve current people who are employees at the Bureau.
When we can do the document requests, when we can compare those documents to travel logs, expenditures, it really opens the door to the type of investigative work we can do.
Absolutely.
I think in conjunction with control of the house, it can be a very powerful tool.
I don't think it needs to wait for that.
I think it's something that could be done now is to start thinking about what the process would be to set up such a fund because if we've seen just in recent months how powerful it is when whistleblowers are willing to step forward and I think there would be a lot more of that or at least there could be if there were a more There's a favorable incentive structure in place for such potential whistleblowers.
And of course, this is predicated on the assumption that there's still You know, a meaningful number of patriots within these organizations.
But I think there are.
I think there are a lot of good people who are still there.
And, you know, they probably joined these institutions because they wanted to do the right thing for the country and they wanted to be brave.
And actually now they have an opportunity, probably not what they thought it was, but now they have the opportunity to actually Do something brave and right for the country, which is the original reason they joined these institutions in the first place.
And you give a special deal at Revolver.News to employees of the FBI, right?
Yes, we give them free ad-free subscriptions.
No leaks required.
This is just out of the generosity of our souls at Revolver because we know we have so many fans within the Bureau.
We just wanted to give back.
Dr. Darren Beattie, the publisher of Revolver.News, has a hot piece out in Newsweek about what the Republican Party needs to do to fight back.
We need backup.
You know, Darren, you covered that race out in Washington's 3rd Congressional District.
Joe Kent prevailing over Jamie Herrera Butler toward the general election out there.
Some races feel like they mean a little more than the other ones.
I get the sense that Joe Kent's presence in the Republican conference will really do what you described in getting us to the point where we're not engaging in just performative lobs back and forth of rhetoric, but we're actually running these investigations to ground.
Am I right that that one might mean a little more than some of the rest?
Absolutely.
I think...
Mr. Kent is a very courageous individual.
He has the right background.
And that's something that's needed.
You need the courage, you need the brains, and you need the background, the kind of institutional knowledge.
And I think he combines all of those things.
And so I'm very encouraged by the fact that in every expectation, he will be joining the team, The elite few within Congress that actually has the courage and the discernment to take on the national security apparatus.
The inward turning of the national security state against our people is the greatest domestic threat to our country.
There's not even a close second from my standpoint, and Dr. Beattie lays it out each and every day at revolver.news.
Check it out.
Darren, thanks for joining us on FireBrain.
Thank you, and just one quick thing.
I would like to plug a piece at Revolver News that provides definitive proof that the FBI is withholding critical footage of the alleged January 6th pipe bomber.
So if any viewers haven't seen that, it's really a must-read, a must-look.
It's proof, and we should start demanding that footage.
Why would they hide it from us?
I'll leave it to the audience to speculate, but they are hiding it, so everyone should check that out.
Thanks, Darren.
We'll push people there, and we'll definitely send out the link.
Thank you.
So it's not just the national security state at the FBI and the Department of Justice creating problems in our country.
We also see a weaponizing of a lot of the bureaucratic entities that we normally would have viewed as more benign or at least less heavily armed.
It seems more and more that the IRS is gearing up for some sort of war.
I hope they're not.
We already reported on the millions of rounds of ammunition ordered by the IRS, and I introduced a bill to stop it.
Now we see that the IRS, through the legislation that Nancy Pelosi has on the floor of the House right now, is receiving billions more in funding And looking to hire over 87,000 new IRS agents.
Now, I've been in this job for three terms now, and I have never had an American say, you know what, we need Congressman Gates.
I'm worried that we just don't have enough authority and manpower and ammunition at the IRS. I'm actually pretty sure that there's not a single member of our elected government that has ever heard that from a single American.
But now, they're going to need new people at the IRS to engage in this new grant of authority that they have.
So check out this job description posted by the IRS that was quickly deleted.
In the description of the job, it says that, The requirements are, quote, maintaining a level of fitness required to respond to life-threatening situations on the job, carrying a firearm, and being willing to use deadly force if necessary, and being willing to participate in arrests, execution of surge warrants, and other dangerous assignments.
Is the IRS, like, building up an army physically fit enough to engage in deadly force?
That's crazy.
Now, the IRS has a bad history of targeting conservatives.
Think about Obama and Lois Lerner.
No one has ever been held accountable for their targeting of conservatives, by the way.
But the IRS did all of that in a day's work.
The question now is, what does Biden's IRS intend to do with its newly weaponized and expanded powers?
Why are they hiring these people that they say have to be willing to use deadly force against Americans at the IRS? Who's going to need the massive stores of ammunition?
When Great Britain was preparing to wage war on the colonies, Patrick Henry gave his famous liberty or death speech, and he famously argued, Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation?
Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love?
Let us not deceive ourselves.
These are the implements of war and subjugation, the last argument to which kings resort.
I ask, gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission?
Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it?
No, sir, they are meant for us.
They can be meant for no other.
That was Patrick Henry in his time.
But is the massive expansion of the IRS the work of a government that really wants to reconcile us?
Do they need five million rounds of ammunition for their reconciliation?
Does deadly force some element of national unity?
Wasn't Joe Biden the guy that ran for president because he promised he was going to make everything normal again?
There's nothing normal about IRS agents armed to the gills punishing regular Americans.
And by the way, that's exactly what they intend to do.
Force regular folks into submission.
The weaponization and expansion of the IRS is meant for you.
No other motive can be assigned, Patrick Henry might say.
They aren't going after the elites and their offshore holdings.
No, those folks will have plenty of high priced accountants and lawyers to make sure that they still get out of paying taxes.
This move by Joe Biden is not to go after the poor because they don't owe any taxes.
They're going after working class and middle class people.
They will squeeze every dollar out of you that they can to fund their reckless spending, their payment for interest on a debt that they created, And to keep up with the inflation that they have caused.
Times are tough, but we need to stay strong.
We cannot let the IRS further take advantage of law-abiding Americans.
We've seen it before.
We do not need to see it again.
We're going to keep fighting to rein in the administrative state.
And when we take back the Congress in 2022, we are going to hold these bad actors accountable once again.
With this in mind, I have introduced HR 8268, the Disarm the IRS Act, to ensure that the IRS will stop acquiring ammunition upon its enactment.
Well, that's the trouble that we see from the IRS, but there is much more in this crazy spending bill that Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer have agreed on.
And here to break it down with me is my legislative director, back on Firebrand, Mike Robertson.
And Mike, just like, for folks watching at home that...
I want to understand the complexities of this.
Hold up the bill.
Just what you've been going through.
Everyone on Firebread can see my colleague Mike.
Whoa.
Hit the mic there.
There you go.
Sorry to everyone listening on podcast.
It's quite a heavy load.
How many pages is that?
730 pages.
Bring that mic a little closer so folks can hear you.
So, 730 some odd pages.
730. Wow.
And you've read them.
So one of the elements of this bill is this 15% minimum tax.
Why is that a bad idea for Americans?
Bring that mic a little closer to you.
Right now we're coming off of 9%.
Here, if you twist this one right here.
Alright, there we go.
That bill wore me out a little bit.
I hear you.
Alright, 15% minimum tax.
Yeah, coming off of 9% year-over-year inflation, I just do not understand whether there is some incompetence in understanding basic economics or some deception here.
Because taxing businesses, double-taxing business for making capital investments because they are already being taxed on their book income, is not what's going to lead us to inflation reduction.
You know, in fact, A little side note, I just saw on CNN this morning, the headlines everywhere inside the Beltway, House set to pass sweeping healthcare and climate change bill.
And you know what I'm missing when I see that lower third is inflation soon to be reduced immediately.
Well, isn't the most recent analysis we got from Wharton that this will actually increase inflation in the short term?
To me, hearing that we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars with the hopes that that will lower inflation is sort of like me saying I'm going to eat my way to weight loss.
Exactly.
And that's why I have to doubt the authenticity and honesty on behalf of the Democrats.
Maybe there's a little combination of not understanding what's really at play here.
We are trying to grasp onto a fertile labor market.
We want to make sure people can get jobs in this country.
And by making sure, as you mentioned with the IRS, we're going to—six times the budget is what the $80 billion is for the IRS. So let's make sure hardworking Americans are poorer.
No agency in Washington, D.C. should ever grow sixfold.
Exactly.
And they're never going away either.
And speaking of going away, the Democrats, the people voting for this legislation aren't thinking, hey, we want to get rid of inflation.
We're going to get rid of programs.
They probably forgot that some of these programs have been existent forever.
And so we want to make sure we're collecting more of your money as an American.
We want to make sure if you have a successful business and you're looking to hire people, you're going to have to fork over more of your income.
So you're going to have less of it.
To give people bonuses to hire.
So that's just one part.
That's only one part.
Well, let's keep drilling down on this 15% tax because I could see the argument among some people saying, well, gee, Congressman, these big corporations that don't pay a lot of taxes, I pay taxes, shouldn't they pay taxes on their gross?
But if you drill down into all 700 and some odd pages as we have...
What we see is also a complex system of tax credits that are intended for really social engineering more than anything.
And so there's the 15% tax, which is going to drive capital offshore, which is going to ensure that we don't have investment in our country, which is going to enrich all the accountants and lawyers, but actually hurt regular folks.
But then they're going to create this system of ESG tax credits.
Explain to people what ESG tax credits are.
So this is targeted for a category of self-proclaimed corporations that you may have heard are going to reduce emissions, are going to make sure that their focus is not on profits to hire more folks, but to make sure that they're equitable and that they're,
you know, We're good to go.
Those receipts and reappropriate them via tax credit to companies that claim they're just more ethical than you or than a large business.
So it's very much a favoritism bill.
And by the way, what does this have to do with inflation reduction?
Nothing.
Yeah, nothing at all.
It does also, the bill does create some Obamacare extenders.
I know when you're thinking about inflation, you're thinking...
I know.
What I really need to solve my inflation issues is more of an Obamacare extender.
Explain to folks what the bill does in that regard.
Yeah, so they want to renew subsidies, credits for enrollees in Obamacare making up to 400 times above the poverty line.
And my calculations are showing...
$300,000 could be your household income to make sure that you get that tax credit that you deserve.
Meanwhile, the middle class, the downtrodden that may not be opted into Obamacare because they don't need it, are still paying for all the other taxes that the IRS will come.
We've got 50% minimum tax.
There's a 1% punitive excise tax on buying back stocks.
And we've got the IRS. And that's just the first portion of this bill.
We can move on to healthcare negotiation and price controls.
But it doesn't end there.
I mean, again, we've...
We're probably only 200 in at this point.
Well, when you have a bill of this size and complexity, there's always going to be some real crap in it.
And you've highlighted some of it for us.
Now, there's a $10 million appropriation to, quote, address racial equity issues within the Department of Agriculture.
I've got it here.
Now, I just thought that was how crops grow.
Does...
White supremacy invariably affect the growing of the food weed?
Not at all.
It's unrelated.
And I mean, my take, first of all, if there is such a racist government entity that requires $10 million to pay to investigate, to hell with the agency.
Let's get rid of it.
I mean, it's a little bit of a double speak here where there may or may not be a lack of equity and diversity in the agency.
And instead of putting your foot on the table and saying this is ridiculous, this is against American values, we're just going to throw more of the taxpayer dollars and we'll find out.
So, I mean, in this country, we've seen a broken supply chain over baby formula.
We've seen fuel costs rise so fast we can afford to get places.
We've seen those compounding fuel prices affect us at the grocery store every time we want to get stuff for our family to eat.
But if you're worried about the cost of food or groceries, fuel, any of that stuff, don't The Democrats have $10 million to make sure that the USDA isn't so racist.
I can't get enough of this, but it's not just the USDA. It's the Department of Transportation, too.
Now we're talking about $3 billion to stop all of those racist roads and bridges that Pete Buttigieg has been telling us about.
What is that going to do for Americans?
Nothing at all.
It's really code for preferential grants to certain areas that are probably not where you live.
And we just want to make sure that you as a taxpayer, everybody watching, your money absorbed by the now six times larger IRS is going to be distributed somewhere where you're not going to see any ROI on it.
That's the Buttigieg code.
$87 billion for the Civilian Climate Corps.
Yeah.
What is the Civilian Climate Corps?
Good question.
We're still trying to discover what they're up to over there.
But we just have all these fancy terms.
We're running out of acronyms and syllogisms, I think.
And so now we just have new team names.
Is this like just a bunch of angry Karens, like waving their fist at the sky, telling the earth not to warm?
Yeah, and maybe your wallet.
Well, and there are regulatory powers that are new and that are going to really increase costs for business.
It's hard to think of any industry that will not have higher regulatory costs after this bill goes into effect.
And when business has higher regulatory compliance costs, they pass that on to the consumer, which results in higher prices, which contributes to inflation.
Absolutely.
What are the industries you think are going to be hardest hit?
Energy?
Energy, definitely.
We haven't gotten there yet, but there are some punitive taxes on the cost of inputs.
We're talking about how we want, I mean, I get the left doesn't like fossil fuels, but we can't just cut it off immediately.
For example, in the energy industry, we've got An increase from 9.7 cents to 16.4 cents on the cost and excise tax of importing petrol and crude oil.
We want to have a strong energy industry in the United States, but this is the cart before the horse.
We're trying to get over what's now an impending recession or a current recession, if you will, but the Biden solution, within a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act, I'll keep reminding everybody, It's to increase the cost of fuel, even if it's coming from abroad, before we're deciding to unleash our energy capabilities here.
So if you're following me, we're trying to switch, or they, excuse me, are trying to switch the paradigm of all use of fossil fuel oil, and we know that's the Al Gore motive and the end goal, but what's really a tragedy is they want to do this all in one piece of legislation during a recession.
We need cheap gas prices.
Why is it the idea of the Democrats to increase excise taxes on them right now?
Well the pain is the point.
I mean, you see that in the public comments of the people in the Biden administration who just don't understand why every American doesn't go buy a $60,000 electric car.
They want you to feel so much pain that you comply with their worldview.
When the history is sort of written on this legislation, I think we'll clearly see that it did not favorably impact inflation.
But that it did centralize a lot more power in Washington, D.C. I mean, all these themes, a militarized, vastly six-toubled IRS, a new climate corps, these sweeping new authorities for the Department of Transportation to think about roads and bridges, not in terms of connecting people and goods, but in terms of whatever the sophistry of racial equity is that they feel at the moment.
And the choices that businesses make, that states make from a regulatory standpoint, Those seem to really be stolen from the people in this bill.
And speaking of who this bill really benefits, back to if you have more money, you can afford an electric vehicle, don't worry, there's a tax credit in there.
So once again...
So when we tried to simplify the tax code, make it easier on people, double the standard exemption, make it where you can fill out your taxes on a postcard, now this is a way to re-complicate things.
And regular folks don't need a more complicated tax code.
The ESG corporate credits here, you're not getting.
You're just getting the higher prices and the inflation.
But then somebody in some boardroom is going to be able to say, oh, well, don't worry.
We were able to find some clever way to obtain some credit or avoid some tax liability.
And if they don't, then they'll just push their cash, their intellectual property, their manufacturing offshore.
For all of the investment we saw come back to our country during the Trump economy, How much of that should we expect is going to be reversed with legislation like this?
I would say billions.
Billions.
I mean, we have $433 billion, I think, is the total top line on the spending.
Now, when you search on the internet, that'll be scrubbed because they're counting all...
They're counting all of these offsets in spending and why it's reducing inflation to projected tax revenues.
So they're claiming that this is reducing spending because the spending is coming from you to pay for the bill.
So billions is my answer.
Unbelievable.
You know, I get asked the question all the time when Republicans are able to get sufficient, you know, control over levers of power in our government, will we be able to undo this?
And frankly, we don't have a great track record of that.
I mean, we went and promised people were going to repeal Obamacare and then didn't.
I don't know that the Republicans are going to fire these 87,000 IRS agents, though we should.
And the last thing the Republicans do when we take power is constrain spending the way we promised.
You and I have discussed this a lot.
This is not an impossible problem to solve with inflation.
This is not Vladimir Putin visiting it on you.
This is not some global, inescapable economic condition.
Joe Biden's policies and the policies of this Democratic Congress did this to you.
They caused this harm.
They hurt your business, they hurt your pocketbook, and they hurt your family.
And I believe that when Republicans get in control, we have to start dismantling this brick by brick, stone by stone.
My friend Senator Rand Paul says when Democrats are in charge, Republicans are the conservative party.
And when Republicans are in charge, there is no conservative party.
Well, you know what?
We have to defy that history to save our country.
I'm going to be voting against this terrible spending bill.
I'm going to be doing everything I can to encourage my Republican colleagues to actually exercise some fiscal discipline.
And you know what?
know what, if we have to shut this government down in order to bring it to its appropriate level in American life, then you know what, we may have to get ready for some shutdowns.
Mike, thank you for going through this legislation.
Thanks for breaking out some of the most troubling points of it for our audience.
And we look forward to being back with you soon with another episode of Firebrand.
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