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Nov. 1, 2023 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
37:17
Episode 125 LIVE: Fauci Frauds & Foreign Wars – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
You're not taking Matt Gaetz off the board, okay?
Because Matt Gaetz is an American patriot and Matt Gaetz is an American hero.
We will not continue to allow the Uniparty to run this town without a fight.
I want to thank you, Matt Gaetz, for holding the line.
Matt Gaetz is a courageous man.
If we had hundreds of Matt Gaetz in D.C., the country turns around.
It's that simple.
He's so tough, he's so strong, he's smart, and he loves this country.
Matt Gaetz.
It is the honor of my life to fight alongside each and every one of you.
We will save America.
It's choose your fighter time.
and send in the Firebrands. - Welcome back to Firebrand.
We're broadcasting live out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building in the Capitol Complex here in Washington, D.C. Fauci has been naughty in Montana.
We've got new investigative reporting on the coronavirus research that we were exporting from the United States of America.
That's coming up.
News from the Colorado courtroom, which has totally gone off the rails regarding the effort to get President Trump off the ballot, despite being just by far the leading Republican candidate.
And if we're having any issues on Rumble right now, let us know.
We're working out a new rig here, as you can see.
We began in Israel.
Let's get this Bloomberg piece up.
Israel showing that we've got some folks coming out of Gaza.
We've got Jordan recalling their ambassador here.
Jordan puts out a statement recalling its ambassador to Israel, quote, in rejection and condemnation of the ongoing war in Gaza.
That's from the foreign minister of Jordan.
And we're also getting word that there is some progress in the Rafa crossing, getting people out of harm's way.
This from the Bloomberg report.
Some foreigners and wounded Palestinians were allowed to leave Gaza Wednesday and have arrived in Egypt.
In the first such development since Israel began its ground invasion in the territory, The Qatar-mediated deal intends to lead around 500 people leaving each day.
This will be the wounded, the injured, the civilians, and we certainly want them out of harm's way.
And it brings us to really the debate in Washington regarding legislation and funding.
As you well know, we have a memorandum of understanding with Israel to maintain their qualitative military edge Israel maintaining a qualitative military edge is something that has been part of U.S. foreign policy for decades.
It's something I support and it's something that has put Israel on a $3.8 billion auto pay to build the Iron Dome and David Sling and Arrow and other systems that not only benefit Israel but really contribute to a lot of research and development of military equipment in the United States.
But there is politics all over this Israel funding bill, and that's what I want to talk to you about.
So Mitch McConnell wants to use the fact that Israel is a place with a 4,000-year connection to our faith to drag more Ukraine money across the line.
Money for Ukraine that has lost the support of a majority of the majority in the House of Representatives.
I spoke with a key senator over the weekend who said that in the Senate, standalone Ukraine money may have lost a majority of Republicans there as well.
That would be a lagging indicator, but very telling and very significant.
So what Mitch McConnell wants to do, because he's putting Ukraine first in all these negotiations, is he wants to combine the question On Ukraine and Israel.
Now I have advised House Speaker Mike Johnson to separate the question.
That way we can isolate Ukraine and deal with it on, I think, a more sober and honest and thoughtful paradigm than we have in the past when we've simply allowed a blank check to go out the door to Zelensky and whatever his whims are.
So you've got McConnell wanting to combine them.
You've got Johnson wanting to separate them.
Lindsey Graham has become the front man to stop whatever money is going to Israel from being offset in the budget.
Take a listen.
Do you side with the top Democrat in the Senate or the top Republican in the House?
I side with Israel and I want to get them as much money as they need, as quick as they can get it.
So to the House.
I understand we need to start paying for things around here.
I get that.
But this is truly an emergency.
And I don't think we've ever offset an emergency aid before.
When we have a disaster, when there's a hurricane that hits South Carolina, We don't have payfors because it's an emergency.
What I don't want to happen is that the support for Israel become partisan, right?
I think there's probably 400 votes in the House to support Israel.
And when you start putting things like payfors on the table, then you break that coalition apart.
That's what I worry about.
I cannot believe we just heard a Republican senator say that it is against the concept of bipartisanship to have budgetary offsets and pay-fors.
Of course, that is the way to drive down the inflation that is crushing so many Americans to ensure that we're not just printing more money, sending it abroad, and then diluting the dollars that are held by U.S. citizens.
I was recently at an event in Northwest Florida and I talked about Mike Johnson's pay-for for the $14 billion Israel fund appropriation that we're sending into that conflict.
And folks were pretty excited when they learned what Speaker Johnson's idea was.
Johnson would pay for the Israel money by taking it right out of the hide of the IRS. And that is something I can undeniably get behind.
The IRS used to have a $12 billion budget.
That swelled to an $80 billion budget as a consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act.
And so this would peel back $14 billion of that and I think let our people off the mat when it comes to excessive government weaponization and that is exactly what these IRS agents would be intended to do.
You heard Kevin McCarthy promise the repeal of the 87,000 IRS agents.
That never happened.
But if the IRS functioned as the pay-for for Israel, well then we take a meat cleaver to the IRS and at the same time, Israel doesn't become The engine that has to haul the Ukraine money politically.
So I think it's quite a dev strategy by the speaker.
Also, as we're looking at issues around the world, I want to go to China because there are things happening in China that we should be very concerned about.
Given this U.S. involvement in the war in Ukraine and growing involvement in the Middle East as Israel defends itself, you have to monitor the activities and the rhetoric of the CCP and the People's Liberation Army in China.
There would be a perfect storm.
With the United States distracted, overstrained, to have a Taiwan invasion while our focus was elsewhere.
The CCP and its military counterpart, the PLA, recently made military movements that could signal pending conflict over Taiwan.
We could be in that envelope of a potential invasion.
Let me walk you through the timeline.
So back in August of 2023, they added 26 planes and 13 ships to the patrols and to the sorties that were around Taiwan.
And I mean, this was the biggest increase that we had seen throughout the summer.
Then in September of 2023, Taiwan says China bolstered its nearby coastal military bases.
Here's the quote.
The information we have received is that all important military bases along the coast are being continuously updated.
Now keep in mind these are oftentimes the military bases that they have carved out of reefs.
They've constructed these islands to be able to project power and to be able to maintain air superiority in the event of some sort of conflict.
Then on October 16, 2023, Xi Jinping signals that continuity is critical to his political agenda.
He did this at the Chinese Communist Party Congress speech stating, quote,"...reunification definitively must be achieved and reunification will be achieved." On October 20th, 2023, a record number of Chinese fighter planes, about 100, flew around Taiwan in just one day.
Imagine that, this tiny little island, and they got 100 plus Chinese fighter planes almost blanketing the sky.
Also, October 2026, 2023, a Chinese J-11 fighter conducts a dangerous intercept of a U.S. B-52 bomber at night in international airspace over the South China Sea.
Watch and listen to that encounter.
The U.S. military has released video of yet another Chinese fighter jet harassing and flying dangerously close to a U.S. military plane.
Officials say this happened Tuesday over the South China Sea, the Chinese jet coming within 10 feet of the American B-52.
The Pentagon says the Chinese military has made similar reckless maneuvers on U.S. planes more than 180 times in the past two years.
China claims most of the sea as theirs, but the U.S. Now, all of this is going on seemingly in a very short period of time.
Also, late October, you get the Chinese moving the Shandong Carrier Strike Group into the Bashi Channel, entering the Western Pacific adjacent to Taiwan.
This is the Chinese aircraft carrier system that they would use to project power and to maintain air dominance.
Then, on October 30, 2023, the vice chairman of the PLA said that an invasion and a war on Taiwan would be, quote, just and legitimate.
So I cover these things because as you see a lot of the mainstream media focusing on what's going on in Ukraine and certainly what's going on in Israel, we cannot forget that America's pacing challenge is China.
They are making aggressive moves and they're doing so, I think, with a keen eye to the distractions that we are facing, particularly in Ukraine.
We should not borrow money from China to go fight wars in Ukraine or in the Middle East.
And fortunately, Speaker Johnson has given us the ability with these offsets with the IRS, so we don't have to do that.
I think as China sees us borrowing more money from them, They see us as weaker.
They see us as more conquerable.
And they see us as less likely to prohibit their ambitions in the South China Sea and certainly as it relates to Taiwan.
I want to deal now with matters closer to home and here in the House of Representatives.
And I couldn't help but notice how here in the last few days, the New York Times has really moved.
I mean, they have really proliferated their viewpoint about the changes we've made in the House.
Let's put up this first headline from the New York Times.
October 4th, 2023. How Gerontocracy Explains the Matt Gaetz Clown Show.
So October 4th, it's the Matt Gaetz Clown Show going on in Congress.
And this printed in the New York Times.
You can analyze the circus in the House of Representatives in terms of personalities, the bland ambition of Kevin McCarthy coddling with the antic made-for-television career of Matt Gaetz.
What they have in Matt Gaetz, who in his own way is truth-telling when he criticizes the can-kicking style in which McCarthy has tried to negotiate between his own members and the Democrats, or when he tells reporters gathered for his performances that the leaders of both parties are custodians of American decline.
Here's the operative sentence.
But Gaetz has, of course, no politically plausible vision of his own.
So beginning of the month, It's a clown show that I run.
What I'm saying about spending and the need to reform Congress, those are all performances, and I have no vision.
No opportunity for success.
Fast forward to October 26th.
Matt Gaetz created a win-win situation for himself.
Also published in the New York Times.
And here, we even get a reference to Firebrand.
Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, and McCarthy's Bette Noir, confirmed this week on Firebrand, quote, If we end up with a more conservative speaker, then we will have achieved an upgrade at the position, and if not, you will know why.
This implicit threat, that you either have to accommodate Mr. Gaetz and his allies or fulfill their grievance narrative, was not lost on a weary conference looking to make peace, however fleeting.
Enter Mr. Johnson, who is broadly acceptable to the conference, even as Democrats blanch at his statements and record.
Taking cue from Mr. Gates, the hardliners have decided to take the win, at least for the time being.
There are early signs that Mr. Johnson may be treated with a level of political grace not afforded to other hopefuls.
So we've gone from the clown show with no vision to the win-win situation.
They're setting it up.
And now that we've actually seen Mike Johnson's plan, a return to single-subject spending bills, we have a whole new perspective published in the New York Times.
Here October 31st, just yesterday, on this issue, Matt Gaetz actually has a good point.
This from Peter Suderman.
Just days before winning the race for House Speaker last week, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent a letter to his colleagues laying out a plan to complete the budget process by bringing 12 individual appropriations bills to the floor.
Mr. Johnson built his plan as a way to, quote, allow us to demonstrate good governance.
It put him firmly in the camp of the GOP rebels like Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the revolt against Speaker Kevin McCarthy and has been called a whack job by their own colleagues.
Whack jobs, I remember that.
They've been likened to economic terrorists for their actions during budget negotiations.
But in one way, the whack jobs have a point.
The federal budget process is broken.
It has been broken for decades.
What the Republican rebels say they want isn't congressional chaos, but the opposite.
Good government, legislative transparency, and real democracy.
And real democratic accountability when it comes to the power of the purse.
They want to achieve this through a return to regular order, which means passing individual appropriations bills and allowing for a more open debate and amended process on the bills.
That is what Mr. Johnson has promised.
For years, sober budget policy experts on the right and left have called for a return to regular order, viewing the current process as broken and corrosive.
The closed-door nature of this process leads to distrust within the Congress.
So what a movement!
From the clown show, to the win-win, to the actual good substantive point that we are making.
And what's most important is not just that we are articulating a vision for a budget process that returns to regular order, but that our new House Speaker Mike Johnson shares that vision.
It is his vision.
It is what he has promised the country, the Republicans in Congress, and it is the only way to ever create any type of downward pressure on spending.
But, of course, predictably.
Because Mike Johnson isn't bought and paid for by the swamp.
Because he hasn't spent his entire career thinking about what decorations he would have in the Speaker's office.
Because he hasn't bent knee to every special interest group in this town.
The knives are out for Mike Johnson.
And perhaps the most ridiculous critique we have seen to date comes from the Daily Beast.
Does the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, have a bank account?
And essentially this Roger Sullenberger piece from the Daily Beast criticizes Mike Johnson because he is not rich, he is not corrupt, and he is not rich as a consequence of being corrupt.
Here's the piece.
What's more likely is that Johnson lives paycheck to paycheck.
Oh, see at the Daily Beast, I guess they look down their nose at the 61% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.
So much so that he doesn't have enough money in his bank account to trigger the checking account disclosure rules for members of Congress.
You see, the Ethics Committee requires you to submit any account that at a particular date has more than $5,000 in it.
So if Mike Johnson is living paycheck to paycheck, well then, he likely...
Could fall below those disclosure requirements.
Oh, this has got the Daily Beast quite animated.
Back to their writing.
It's certainly not uncommon for Americans to have less than $5,000 in their bank account.
Most Americans couldn't handle an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to a report earlier this year.
And the median amount that Americans keep in their bank account is $5,300.
But Johnson's household income puts him in the top 12% of earners in the United States and it's extraordinarily rare for members of Congress to not list a qualifying bank account, let alone zero assets whatsoever.
So Mike Johnson doesn't trade stocks.
He's not involved in shady business deals.
He's a father of five kids who, by the way, I think a good number of them have gone through LSU. And even though that's a state school, it ain't cheap to send kids to college.
And the fact that this guy lives paycheck to paycheck and doesn't have all these exquisite sources of income because he's not trading stocks to come in a pauper and leave a prince from the United States Congress.
The Daily Beast says that he is vulnerable to exploitation.
You know who I think is vulnerable to exploitation?
The people who are trading the stocks and who do get their ne'er-do-well relatives a bunch of no-show jobs.
So I think Mike Johnson is a man of great character, and the fact that the Daily Beast is attacking him for not being rich, I think will only endear him to more of our fellow Americans.
We also today want to give you an update from the Colorado Courthouse.
Now, in Colorado, you're seeing a play that Democrats tried previously in Georgia when they tried to get Marjorie Taylor Greene disqualified from the ballot because they didn't approve of her language or rhetoric or behavior leading up to January 6th.
You know, we have elections in this country Where the voters are supposed to be empowered to make the decisions about who governs them.
Not some judge deciding that in their eyes someone isn't worthy to stand for election.
That is an incredible abuse of the Article III courts and it is a diminution in the rights of all Americans ensconced in the Constitution and in our general principles of self-government.
So this decision in Colorado Is going to be made in a courtroom on a petition from Colorado voters to exclude Donald Trump from the ballot.
To just say as a consequence of January 6th, people in Colorado shouldn't be able to vote for him.
And of course, they've chosen Colorado with the hopes that they would get a biased liberal judge to set precedent that they would then carry to the states that really matter.
And it just turns out that in Colorado, The leftists who want to limit your choices in an election got exactly the judge they wanted.
They got a judge who actually personally politically donated to a Colorado campaign to try to get people to defeat Lauren Boebert, Ken Buck, Doug Landborn, other Republicans.
And so, as you might expect, the Trump team Filed a motion to get the judge's ruling on recusal.
Because if it is even the appearance of impropriety, there's supposed to be recusal.
Sasha, what I want to do, I want to go first to what the Colorado Turnout Project was.
Let's get that on the screen.
So the Colorado Turnout Project is the campaign that this judge, Judge Sarah Wallace, donated to.
And I'm going to read you their mission statement.
The Colorado Turnout Project is a coalition of Colorado students, activists, veterans, and Coloradans from all walks of life who are fed up with the complicity of Colorado's Republican representatives in our nation's venomous political atmosphere.
So already, sentence number one, they're saying that Republicans...
Are contributing to a venomous political atmosphere.
The mission statement continues.
We formed shortly after Colorado Republicans refused to condemn the political extremists who stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. In fact, Republican Representative Lauren Boebert even encouraged the violence.
That is such nonsense.
The Colorado Turnout Project aims to prevent violent insurrections by addressing the problem at its source.
If we vote out pariahs like Representative Boebert, we can turn Colorado blue once and for all.
We aim to strengthen Colorado's Democratic congressional majority and expand it by taking the remaining three Republican seats in our state.
Can you join us in our fight to remove hate mongers like Boebert From Colorado's House delegation.
We are hate mongers.
We are venomous.
We are insurrectionists.
That's the Colorado turnout project.
And the judge, overseeing the case about whether or not Trump is going to be able to be on the ballot, gave money to support that politics.
That just naked partisanship.
And when she ruled on the recusal motion, This is what she said.
Take a listen.
The court has reviewed the motion to refuse that was filed yesterday, as well as the exhibits.
I do not dispute that in October 22nd, prior to taking the bench, I apparently made a $100 contribution to the Colorado Turnout Project.
That being said, prior to yesterday, I was not cognizant of this organization or its mission.
It has always been my practice, whether I was entirely successful or not, to make contributions to individuals, not PACs.
While I have no specific memory of this contribution, it was my practice and my intention to contribute to an individual candidate, not PAC.
I can assure all of the litigants in this litigation that, prior to the start of this litigation and to this day, I have formed no opinion.
Whether the events of January 6th constituted an insurrection, or whether Intervenor Trump engaged in an insurrection, or for that matter, any of the issues that need to be cited in this hearing, if I did, I would That is the worst analysis on a recusal matter I have ever seen.
This judge, Sarah Wallace, donated to an entity that wanted to categorize Republicans as venomous insurrectionists, and now she is having to preside over these proceedings where they're making those precise claims against President Trump.
It is blatant.
It is lawfare.
And one of the questions we got, what are you going to do about it?
I think the Congress has equities in a federal election that we have not defended.
I think we need to have Jack Smith.
Before us, I think that we need to pass legislation to protect the rights of voters from out-of-control judges and proceedings like you just saw there in Colorado.
That is like having the referee of the game wear the jersey of the other team.
It's like having the referee of the football game one of the paid boosters of the team that you are playing against.
And it shows how illegitimate it is, and I think getting that information out is essential to our mission here.
We've also got to get some information out regarding the inappropriate actions, potentially unlawful actions, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
There's an article from Daily Mail that we've just seen that discusses an investigation into the NIH under Fauci's leadership.
They were conducting experiments involving coronavirus more than a year before the global outbreak of COVID-19.
They were doing so with this Montana lab in concert with the Chinese.
Here are the key facts.
In 2018, the NIH under Dr. Fauci infected 12 Egyptian fruit bats with a SARS-like virus called WIV-1.
That was at this Montana lab.
The WIV-1 coronavirus was obtained from the same Wuhan lab, which is suspected to be the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The bats were acquired from a Maryland zoo, and the experiment was aimed to determine whether or not the virus would cause robust infection.
The research found limited evidence of virus replication and concluded that the virus did not cause robust infection in the bats.
But there are also key issues regarding funding and collaboration.
The investigation revealed that U.S. taxpayer money was used for these experiments.
Between 2015 and 2023, at least seven U.S. entities supported NIH grant money, totaling $3.3 million.
That went to labs in China performing animal experiments.
The research was a joint venture between the NIH's Rocky Mountain Laboratories and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically with their collaborator Ralph Barrick at the University of North Carolina.
This has not come without substantial concerns and criticisms.
The investigation was brought to light by a campaign led by a group called the White Coast Coat Waste Project.
They aim to stop American tax dollars from funding dangerous experiments that involve animals.
White Coat Waste's founder says, quote, Our investigation has uncovered the real-life horror story of how a shady roadside zoo curated experiments with an NIH animal experimenter and shipped off bats to a deadly government virus lab overseen by Dr. Fauci, which infected coronavirus that came from the Wuhan lab.
The zoo from which the bats were sourced, the Kakatan Wildlife Preserve, has had a history of animal welfare violations.
The public has responded to this information.
The White Coat Waste Project is now using the Freedom of Information Act to request more details about these particular experiments.
Of course, we will follow those as well.
And this is why the individual single-subject spending bills now are so important.
Because it gives us the opportunity to go program by program, line item by line item, to find where we're engaging in these inappropriate foreign collaborations, to force votes on them, to root them out.
And you know what?
There'll be times when we lose the votes.
And when we do, maybe we need to be replacing the lawmakers who aren't putting the needs of our people first and who aren't serious about the impact of this federal spending and the deficits and the debt and the ultimate impact that that has on inflation.
There's a lot more coming up this week.
We've got our single-subject spending bill on the Department of the Interior, so I'll be breaking down some of the provisions of that.
You are going to be shocked at some of the ways we spend money in the Biden administration through the Department of the Interior.
It is nowhere near what you think, and we're going to be exposing it, forcing votes on it.
And we're glad you joined us.
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