May 2, 2023 - Firebrand - 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 for 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 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. | |
| Welcome to Firebrand. | |
| We are recording on assignment in the state of Florida, but there are a few topics I've got to give you an update on. | |
| And I've got sort of a strange, bizarre personal story at the end of the episode you're going to want to stick around for. | |
| Trust me. | |
| I've got updates regarding Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security Secretary, who definitely deserves impeachment. | |
| What he said about Mexico and how astonished even Chuck Todd was. | |
| But I do want to begin here in Florida with an update regarding the Florida story that seems to be getting everyone's attention. | |
| That is DeSantis and Disney. | |
| And the operative question in this whole saga between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Walt Disney Corporation is whether this is a true, sincere effort to crusade against corporate welfare Or whether it's just virtue signaling and professional wrestling. | |
| So I'm going to lay out what's going on in this saga and then you decide. | |
| Is this Governor DeSantis really cracking down with an effective effort against that type of corporate welfare? | |
| We oppose. | |
| Or is it something else and is there a willingness to maybe still treat Disney a little different than everyone else gets treated in the state of Florida? | |
| So, the new theater in this fight is a lawsuit that Disney has filed against Governor Ron DeSantis. | |
| They've filed that lawsuit against him in his official capacity. | |
| And the principal claim in that lawsuit is that their First Amendment rights have been violated and they are being retaliated against as a company based on their opposition to the legislation that Governor DeSantis signed that the Florida Legislature passed that stopped some of this radical gender ideology from being taught in taxpayer-funded public schools. | |
| So they go through that change in CEO. But Governor DeSantis takes note of the fact that Walt Disney actually has a very special privilege in Florida that a lot of corporations don't get. | |
| The territory they reside in has been designated a special district, the Ready Creek Improvement District. | |
| And there's a board that typically It's but an extension of Disney. | |
| Typically the board of the Reddy Creek Improvement District, where Disney's parks are, they're just vassal states of Disney. | |
| There's no arm's length relationship between them and the corporation. | |
| They're there to just perform on what the corporation sets forth. | |
| So DeSantis gets the authority, lawfully, to appoint the board. | |
| And he's going to appoint people that have an arm's length relationship with Disney. | |
| Now again, that doesn't sound retaliatory to me to just say, look, this has got to be something where you don't just dictate the terms under your own private government. | |
| There has to be some accountability. | |
| If people don't like who the governor appoints, they can vote against the governor. | |
| That's the beauty of a system that is just not run by corporate technocrats, but with some sense of political oversight. | |
| So DeSantis appoints his new board members. | |
| And in the final moments of the outgoing board, they totally bind the new board and make an agreement with Disney That gives all the power to the Disney corporation that was supposed to reside in the special district. | |
| So what sounds shadier and swampier to you? | |
| Governor DeSantis wanting appointees on a public board performing a public purpose over a private corporation or a private corporation Using its vassal state board members to shred any sense of public oversight of this property and to just allow Disney to do what they want for whatever they want. | |
| Something that regular landowners don't have. | |
| We usually have to live under the regulations of our counties, our cities. | |
| Disney prefers their oversight to be captive like Rapunzel, not responsive, like Governor DeSantis would seemingly have it be. | |
| Now, Disney has had a very large role in the economy, image, brand of the state of Florida for more than half a century. | |
| They, in many ways, have helped Florida avoid a state income tax by generating so much tourism, tourism that then spills over and creates benefit for other parts of the state. | |
| So don't count me among those. | |
| Who simply want to have an adversarial relationship with Disney forever. | |
| We would like to see Disney be a good corporate partner of the state, just like the state wants to be a good partner for all of our citizens. | |
| Nothing political about that. | |
| Just how a representative republic is supposed to work. | |
| But they have had so much influence. | |
| They've been able to wrap the apparatus of state government around their particular business model, so much so that last year I pointed out a few examples of this on Firebrand. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| For quite some time in the state of Florida, if the Walt Disney Corporation opposed a piece of legislation in the state capitol, it was deemed to have a fatal rodent problem and it was unlikely to become law. | |
| Disney had enormous power in Florida legislative politics, in part because they employed an army of lobbyists to dole out millions of dollars in political donations. | |
| I'm talking about millions of dollars. | |
| And in exchange, they expected favorable treatment from lawmakers, maybe a little more than their fair share. | |
| The lobbyists were there to enforce the implicit deal. | |
| I mean, look at what Florida did to bend over backwards for Disney over the years. | |
| Florida created a state agency out of nothing, largely to subsidize Disney's vast marketing budget through an entity called Visit Florida. | |
| It's quite literally corporate welfare. | |
| Florida created an entire municipality, a city, just to give infrastructure grants to Disney directly on Disney property. | |
| Want to know why Florida doesn't have stronger laws against illegal immigration? | |
| Disney supports illegal immigration. | |
| They love that it's downward pressure on wages. | |
| Florida's premises liability laws have basically been written by Disney for 20 years. | |
| So, fast forward to today. | |
| Now Disney is filing suit because they allege this retaliation by DeSantis. | |
| And it's my assessment that DeSantis is entirely within his rights to take the action that he has taken. | |
| And the real challenge is the outgoing board's rush to surrender the rights that should have been transferred. | |
| Now, the question remains, is DeSantis using the right tools here? | |
| And that's what I want to talk about next with Disney. | |
| Or, as I posited in the opening, is this more like professional wrestling? | |
| Vivek Ramaswamy was on Meet the Press yesterday, and he leveled a charge of crony capitalism directed at Disney by Governor DeSantis. | |
| That he was actually creating exemptions to help them. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Let me ask you about the Disney dust off with Ron DeSantis. | |
| On one hand, I assume you agree with pushing back at Disney the way Governor DeSantis has rhetorically. | |
| But is there a point where you think it is too much to use government to punish business? | |
| Here's where Ron DeSantis really lost it here. | |
| He's gone on the wrong path. | |
| He claimed, and this part actually sounded good to me, Disney should have never had crony capitalist lobbying-related privileges in the first place. | |
| Here's the part he doesn't mention. | |
| One of those crony capitalist privileges was, and I think the most relevant one, Was codified into law by none other than Ron DeSantis in 2021. So Florida passed this political anti-discrimination statute, which I applauded at the time. | |
| It said if you operate internet companies, this includes streaming services like Disney does, that you can't engage in viewpoint discrimination. | |
| Now here's the funny dirty little secret of that. | |
| They wrote into a last minute exception into that law for anyone who also operates a theme park more than 25 acres in the state of Florida. | |
| For doubt. | |
| That's crony capitalism. | |
| And so the irony is Ron DeSantis, who's now railing against crony capitalism and rolling that back, was the one who actually passed that into law for the case of Disney. | |
| So I think that undermines the credibility of his crusade. | |
| I prefer to get to root causes rather than doing political stunts. | |
| Special carve-outs for Disney is still happening to this day. | |
| I argued in an opinion piece recently for the Orlando Sentinel that there were special tax privileges that Disney had that needed to be extinguished by the Florida Legislature. | |
| You can look it up. | |
| It was April 8, 2022, about a year ago. | |
| Rep Matt Gaetz closed tax loophole that benefits Disney and others. | |
| And I think that would be a far more effective tool. | |
| Now, the bottom line is that DeSantis has not acted outside of his powers, but there still is a lot of special treatment that Disney is getting. | |
| So, that said, if Governor Ron DeSantis wants to be the great white knight of the anti-Disney culture war, he should not swallow special carve-outs in law like those that Ramaswamy pointed out. | |
| He should also call for a change in Florida tax law, as I pointed out in my piece in the Orlando Sentinel. | |
| The House immigration bills are out of committee. | |
| They're getting ready for the floor. | |
| I've told you on Firebrand, Kevin McCarthy committed to a May floor vote for a tough but fair pro-America, America First immigration plan. | |
| And it looks like we're getting ready for just that. | |
| Kevin McCarthy keeping that promise to move that immigration legislation. | |
| It's out of committee. | |
| It has the E-Verify features. | |
| It has the asylum reforms. | |
| Remain in Mexico. | |
| Safe third country. | |
| But recently I took note, it was actually just on Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Meet the Press, here's what he had to say about Mexico. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| Is it time to deal, I mean, I know some people are calling for more direct military confrontation with these cartels, or to call them terrorist organizations, but is it time for a strategy that is similar to what we did with the Colombian cartels in the 80s? | |
| So, a couple things. | |
| Number one, we are taking it to the cartels with unprecedented strength and focus. | |
| And there's a misperception that Mexico is not a good partner in our fight against Is that government an ally or not? | |
| They don't act like an ally these days. | |
| They are an ally, and we have a very close partnership with them. | |
| Then how come they don't help on this fentanyl stuff? | |
| They seem to just ole this. | |
| That is a misconception. | |
| I will tell you that we have transnational criminal investigative units. | |
| Our Homeland Security Investigations personnel are in Mexico. | |
| AMLO denies it, though. | |
| AMLO himself denies it in public that somehow they're having anything to do with fentanyl trafficking. | |
| Chuck, I can't speak to his public statements. | |
| I can speak to what happens on the ground operationally, and we work very closely with our Mexican partners. | |
| I don't know where Mayorkas gets off saying that Mexico has been some great ally. | |
| Even Chuck Todd pushes back on Mayorkas. | |
| Is Mayorkas covering for Mexico? | |
| What would be in That for him. | |
| It's so obvious what is going on. | |
| The Mexican government is corrupt to the core and it is an open secret that the cartels and the military often provide notice to one another, give permission to one another. | |
| And in some places, the cartels have considerably more operational control even than the Mexican military. | |
| But yet we're calling Mexico this great ally in the fight. | |
| I got a list of just some of what we've seen from Mexican officials and their own operations. | |
| So just this year, Gennaro Garcia Luna, the former Secretary of Public Security in Mexico, was convicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn, New York, five counts, with a superseding indictment charging him with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise that includes six drug violations, | |
| international cocaine distribution conspiracy, conspiracy to distribute and with the intent to possess cocaine, conspiracy to import cocaine, All kind of ties with the Sinaloa Cartel, all kind of references in this trial to the millions of dollars in bribes that slush around between the Sinaloa Cartel and government officials, | |
| so much so that that's often the retirement plan for these government officials, to go work for the Sinaloa Cartel, as happened in this case and as this conviction showcases. | |
| And in this case, Luna, who was the former public security chief, was actually organizing the safe passage of the cartel's drug shipments. | |
| They were passing along sensitive law enforcement information about ongoing investigations into the cartel. | |
| And then to boot, they were helping some cartels in their battles and rivalries with other cartels. | |
| So literally weaponizing the government of Mexico to go and mediate cartel turf battles and drug battles. | |
| Sound like a great ally? | |
| Certainly not. | |
| There was a New York Special Agent that gave testimony in this trial, and I want to read it to you. | |
| Quote, He's right on the money. | |
| Is not a bug in the system. | |
| He is a feature of the system and it is repeatable over and over. | |
| There's another case I want to let you know about, Emilio Lozoya. | |
| Now, Lozoya is the former head of Mexico's state oil company. | |
| He is also under fire now for corruption charges and he has been singing like a bird. | |
| According to a leaked deposition from this particular case, You have this guy, this former head of the cash cow that was the energy entity, saying that three former Mexican presidents were on the dole taking bribes. | |
| And that a lot of those bribes were directly linked to cartel activity, to illegal campaign financing. | |
| The reason that these three former presidents, former head of public security, former head of the energy entity, are able to get away with this for so long, the reason they're able to do so much harm is because they get cover from people like Alejandro Mayorkas. | |
| When he says that Mexico is a great ally, it gives cover to a lot of the very operations that are going to benefit one cartel against another or all of them against us. | |
| Now, as a proof of this dynamic, I can just tell you when I went to Yuma, Arizona, we saw the cartel caravans of people and the military ATVs going back and forth at times within a few feet of each other. | |
| Everybody knows the deal. | |
| Everybody knows that the cartels are moving people through, the military provides a permission structure for that to occur, and it's our country that has all these terrible challenges that result from millions of people coming in without permission or process. | |
| Also, I think indicative of this corruption and this lack of focus on partnerships that would work, AMLO, the current president of Mexico. | |
| We detailed on a previous episode of Firebrand how when he met with Secretary Blinken, they talked about eroding borders between the United States, Mexico, Canada, just creating one unified North America. | |
| It sounded terrifying. | |
| Well, now what AMLO is saying about the fentanyl epidemic is that it results from, quote, a lack of hugs. | |
| So if you're one of the parents out there who's had to revive a child, maybe you didn't get the chance to revive a loved one who died from a fentanyl overdose, AMLO is saying it's your fault for not hugging them enough. | |
| How utterly disrespectful and how Detached from the actual role Mexico is playing as a turnstile with these Chinese component parts manufactured in Mexico, moved across the border to every community in our country. | |
| And now we see the result in our morgues, in our ERs, and in the future consequences of all of our lives. | |
| Right now, these cartels are a very difficult dynamic to control. | |
| And they've been able to get larger because U.S. leaders go down to Mexico, meet with these Mexican officials, act as though everything is hunky-dory. | |
| And the reality is the Mexican government is in unity government with the cartels in far too many cases. | |
| So we'll continue to call out Mayorkas and hope that in the future he's able to call out America's enemies rather than describing them as allies. | |
| So in Northwest Florida right now, it's festival season. | |
| Don't think Coachella or Bonnaroo or Burning Man. | |
| Think more seafood and art and culture and wine. | |
| You see, in the spring months of April and May and in the fall months of September and October, in Northwest Florida, we don't have the usual rush of summer-driven tourism. | |
| And so we call those times in the spring and in the fall our shoulder season. | |
| And during shoulder season, a lot of entities come together to put on a songwriter festival or a seafood festival or a wine festival or an art festival because that brings people in when the weather is warm, when the fish are biting, when life is great and there are hotel accommodations and lodging accommodations usually at a bit of a deal and our world-class restaurants are able to show off and they've got plenty of tables available while people are here. | |
| This past Saturday my wife Ginger and I attended the South Walton Beaches Wine and Food Festival at Grand Boulevard in Sandestin in Walton County, Florida and we were enjoying catching up with new friends and old and folks recognized me and so we were taking pictures and having polite conversations and as I was chatting with one gentleman A lady threw a drink on the both of us and she was promptly arrested. | |
| I want to thank the great folks at the Walton County Sheriff's Office who ensured that this did not escalate and that everyone is kept safe. | |
| And I want folks to know why we press charges in circumstances like this. | |
| It's quite alright for folks to let their voice heard with an opinion or a comment. | |
| Folks can shout and scream all they want. | |
| This is America and people ought to be able to say what they believe, what they desire, even offer criticisms or critiques of people in public life. | |
| But if we start allowing stuff to be thrown or hurled, if we allow people to be harmed, there is a severe risk of escalation and accident. | |
| And we don't want to see anyone in harm's way, whether it's family members, supporters, or even our detractors. | |
| We want them to be safe, too. | |
| But when they Really cross the Rubicon beyond just words to throw in stuff and striking me and striking a gentleman I was speaking with with a drink. | |
| Well, then that really has caused harm to our community and it's something that we want to contain and extinguish and not see going forward. | |
| So as I understand it, the person who was arrested is Selena Chambers. | |
| She was charged with two counts of battery, and of course, she is a left-wing author. | |
| Her stuff is not exactly my type. | |
| It seems after the 2016 election, based on some of her writing, she became very obsessed with Donald Trump, and she engaged in something called a resistance expression. | |
| And I'm quoting directly from one of her works here, quote, Resistance is expression that can take a physical form. | |
| She's also a donor to the Joe Biden presidential campaign. | |
| She talked about her emotional turmoil following the 2016 election and just going through some of the stuff she's written. | |
| It is it is really bizarre. | |
| She writes about feminist surrealism and I had to review what that entailed and she says that women need a surrealist survivor kit and it needs to include psychoanalysis, mythology, memoirs, Satanism, there's connections to Wiccan life in some of this so Very strange, but you know what? | |
| Whenever there's a conservative who acts out of line, it's like the biggest story in the world. | |
| But when you get a radicalized leftist breaking the peace in my community who traveled here, by the way, from Tallahassee, Florida, I doubt it'll get the same pickup, but we'll make sure that there are appropriate consequences through the legal system because that's what the safety of our community demands. | |
| Thanks so much for joining me on Firebrand. | |
| Make sure you are subscribed with notifications turned on. | |
| Leave us a five-star rating if you're listening on one of our listening platforms. | |
| And we'll be back soon with more Firebrand. | |
| Roll the credits. |
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