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Jan. 12, 2024 - Firebrand - Matt Gaetz
34:58
Episode 141 LIVE: Military Mishaps – Firebrand with Matt Gaetz
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Thank you.
the biggest firebrand inside of the House of Representatives.
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 Gates, for holding the line.
Matt Gates is a courageous man.
If we had hundreds of Matt Gates 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 Gates.
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.
I'm sending the Firebrands.
Welcome back to Firebrands.
We are live this Friday afternoon broadcasting out of room 2021 of the Rayburn House Office Building here at the Capitol Complex in Washington DC and we are going to be answering some really important questions regarding our military We're going to look at how audits have shown this Ukraine fiasco to be a real nightmare when it comes to accountability.
And we're also going to cover a very important hearing that happened With the vaccine injured more broadly here on Capitol Hill, we are streaming on Rumble where Natalie says, is the U.S. going to be involved in another war?
Ellie notes that everyone said that Trump was going to get us into all these wars, but it turns out we had...
A lot of peace in the Trump era, and that has been shattered by the weakness and poor decision-making of the Biden administration, and we will get into what's going on in Yemen.
But first, here on the Hill today, Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene, Senator Ron Johnson, and others had an important hearing regarding the vaccine injured, and I want to play you this clip.
You're going to hear from Dr. Kirk Milhawn, Dr. Ryan Cole, and of course Dr. Peter McCullough talking about how The pharmaceutical industry has a grip on the medical community and it's a fearful one.
Take a listen.
What is happening throughout our medical establishment?
I don't know what's going on because when I look at the Cleveland Clinic data, when there are 51,000 employees that are looked at, and they study and they say, what's your risk of getting COVID? And it looks at how many vaccines you had.
The lowest risk for getting COVID is if you've had zero vaccines.
As you add vaccines, your risk to get COVID goes up.
I've never seen a vaccine like this.
That's not the basis of vaccines.
They shouldn't have what we would call negative efficacy.
That is a peer-reviewed, beautiful study from Cleveland Clinic, completely ignored.
We have a booster for something that's extinct, and it's still being pushed by our government agencies.
XBB 1.5 is now 0.0% prevalent.
We're at JN1, which is 62% prevalent.
We have a booster vaccine from Pfizer for something that doesn't exist, and we still have a government pushing it.
But we have physicians and we have health care systems that are dependent on the government teat.
And they're nursing that teat for every dollar they get.
And anybody that speaks against that cash flow gets the hatchet.
I think the body of practicing physicians and nurses and medical technologists and all the allied health professionals, the vast majority took the vaccines and were under mandates, under Biden's mandates to take the vaccine.
They all have a deep Conscious or subconscious fear themselves of what's in their bodies.
They likely had their families vaccinated.
They likely promoted these vaccines with their patients.
Once doctors have taken the vaccine, they simply can't be objective.
And what we're hearing from patients is that they're being ignored and what's going on is called gaslighting.
That they're told that this is in their head because the doctors themselves and the nurses Do not want to come to their own personal recognition that they themselves have taken the vaccine.
This is a unique problem that is going to bear out over time, and I hope that these individuals, in a sense, become aware.
Now, clearly, I have doctor after doctor, nurse after nurse coming to me saying, I've developed myocarditis.
I've developed a blood clot.
Now I'm regretful.
But I'm hoping that they themselves don't have to develop a personal medical problem to become aware and be activated because they have a duty to warn others.
We are back live, and what I learned from that testimony is that the cover-up is part of the COPE. Because the medical industrial complex did so much to push the vaccine among their own members, among the people who are on the front line providing care,
now you've got a circumstance where when those people are seeing some sort of disproportionate impact, or as we're analyzing whether there's a disproportionate impact, the reckoning that someone has to come to regarding being a vax pusher, and then the impact that's had on themselves, the health of their family, It's really something.
There is another critical feature of this VAX mandate, and we continue to beat the drum for our service members who are driven out, who deserve reparations.
There was testimony from Dr. Milhawn on specifically this VAX mandate in the military.
Take a listen.
How do we take care of not just myocarditis, but building the data set to show the level of injury to these service members?
Thank you, Congressman.
As someone who proudly wore the uniform back in the 1980s in the Air Force, and my colleague Dr. Milhone was also former Air Force, so we appreciate the line of questioning because it's near and dear to our hearts having proudly served this country.
And I think it's tragic that we rolled it out on that young, healthy cohort, this experimental investigational product early on.
And Senator Johnson brought up early, the Department of Defense has a database.
Their medical epidemiology database is the best in the world.
And after the hearing we had December or January, a year or so ago, they froze that.
We had the data at that point.
We know who was being injured, and we saw marked rises in all sorts of conditions.
And when he tried to request the information from them, they said, oh, we've got to update our database.
And then they basically, a glitch, a glitch, and erased it.
So yes, I mean, there should be, I mean, 231 Uniform service members, present or previous, just filed for court-martial against Secretary of Defense and others, and I think that's a reasonable action based on forcing our troops into something investigational that hampered the readiness of our nation.
I get calls from military positions around the country every week.
Reporting to me the clotting they're seeing.
Lost another pilot today.
Got another one sidelined.
Myocarditis.
Another 40-year-old had a heart attack.
Another 27-year-old had a heart attack.
Another 22-year-old has an 18-inch clot.
I get calls every week from medical physicians around the country reporting to me what's happening.
I appreciate, you know, not only, you know, I love what you did with the defense authorization, but we should restore their back pay in addition.
And restore them to full honor and duty if they even want to come back to a government that harmed our own soldiers that were defending our own country.
So this is obviously I'm passionate on this one, obviously.
We are back live.
Jan on Twitter says don't forget that there was the anthrax vaccine subject to a good deal of scrutiny and recall.
And Donna on Facebook says that I need to mind myself.
And she had some suggestions on how to do that.
Now we're going to look at what's going on in Yemen in a little segment we call Around the World.
Around the World.
U.S. and British combined strikes have been hitting Houthi targets in Yemen following the Houthis being warned week after week, month after month, to stop attacking the free flow of shipping that is running through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, Nassau.
Now you've got the United States moving substantial naval assets into the Red Sea to execute on these strikes.
The Brits are actually having to execute them from Cyprus, a 3,000 mile plus round trip from where they're striking in Yemen.
Yemen is a failed state.
The Houthis control the northern portion of it.
They were at war with Saudi Arabia for years about this.
Saudi Arabia wasn't really able to decapitate them or limit their capabilities to be able to have these cheap drone strikes, where a lot of energy and goods moving through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to Europe, to Asian markets.
These are now subjected to very cheap attacks, and the attacks are growing even more dangerous.
You've seen Houthi assets landing on ships, taking them over, and that has a major impact on the economy in Europe and throughout the Mediterranean.
Here's my take.
I do not believe that we ought to have a Gulf of Tonkin moment emerge in the Red Sea by having so many vessels there that they're basically bumping into each other.
I think that the United States has to recognize that when you look at the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, the principal stakeholder there for energy and other goods is Europe.
I think if NATO forces want to work together, the United States can contribute to that.
But us just doing this bilaterally with the Brits, to me, shoulders the burden for a lot of other European countries that need to see the Houthis not completely torturing the free flow of navigation through that narrow waterway.
We've had a good amount of reporting on this, so ABC's taking a look and take a listen.
Tonight, U.S. and British forces unleashing a massive retaliatory strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen after months of costly attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea.
A U.S. official confirming the strikes hit multiple Houthi targets in Yemen and involved a mix of Tomahawk cruise missiles and fighter jets.
Moments ago, President Biden releasing a statement saying these targeted strikes are a clear message, adding the U.S. will not tolerate attacks on our personnel or allow hostile actors to imperil freedom of navigation, and the president not ruling out taking further measures to protect our people.
Since mid-November, the Houthis have launched at least 27 attacks, claiming it's in retaliation for Israel's war against Hamas, disrupting one of the most vital shipping routes in the world.
The latest attack coming overnight.
The Houthis firing a ballistic missile towards a commercial ship in the region, just hours after American and British forces repelled the rebels' largest attack yet, intercepting a barrage of 21 Houthi drones and missiles.
One of the Houthi's most brazen attacks coming in November when terrorists hijacked a cargo ship co-owned by an Israeli businessman, landing a helicopter on its deck in the Red Sea.
The ship and its 25-man crew still being held by the rebels.
Tonight, a Houthi leader warning any U.S. attack will not go without a response.
We are back live.
So there are now three fronts in this war.
You've got Israel fighting Hamas on the south and Gaza really steamrolling Gaza in large part there.
And then in the north you've got Hezbollah increasingly active out of Lebanon.
And now you have Yemen and the Houthis.
And you can tie Hamas...
and Hezbollah and the Houthis back to Iran and when the Biden administration made Iran flush by pulling back some of the maximum pressure of the Trump campaign you saw this bad activity increase in nature and in violence and in impact there's an important discussion to be had here in Yemen about war powers as well you'll recall many debates that we've broadcast on this program We're good to
states cannot go to war without the congress taking some authorizing action and i've held that view whether biden was president trump was president it's just it's just too this nation makes too much of an impact for one person to be vested with that decision That's a decision that has to be shared with the elected leaders.
And so, while I do not believe that this initial strike from Biden was illegal, per se, because there was force protection to consider.
You can't leave our service members as sitting ducks.
Extended hostilities against the Houthis in Yemen would require the administration to come to Congress and lay out a vision.
Tell us what's going on.
What are the objectives?
How do we ensure this doesn't become an ensnaring event where for decades now we're going to be the block captain of Yemen?
Certainly something that we don't want to do.
In one place we already are excessively entangled, Ukraine.
Now you will recall I have had many circumstances where I've laid out the concern with dropping these billions of dollars in assets, cash, weapons, into one of the most corrupt countries in the world, even if they're getting better.
Pretty grisly track record.
You couldn't do that without some of this falling into bad hands.
You couldn't do that without departures from requisite accountability.
And you heard time and again from administration officials, national security experts, even the guy you're going to hear from in this next clip, the Inspector General of the Department of Defense, Mr. Stork, all saying, no, no, no, no, we've got this, we've got this.
So what you're going to hear is from the spring of last year, and listen to how confident everybody was that nothing was going to fall into bad hands.
As you testify here today, you cannot testify, truthfully under oath, that the DOD has complied with the policy and law regarding end-use monitoring during all times of this conflict.
Isn't that right?
We are conducting a series of evaluations that look at the controls that DOD has in place to ensure that they are taking the steps that are required.
I get all that, but here's the operative question.
We haven't complied with end-use monitoring according to the law with everything we've sent to Ukraine to date, have we?
So our 2020 report, which is our last public report on this, made a number of recommendations.
All of those have been made.
I know, I know, but you're sort of dodging the question.
You cannot testify that we have complied with the end-use monitoring requirements at all times during this conflict, can you?
So, look, this is an active war zone.
There are always going to be things that you don't know are happening or you don't see, but we are not seeing any evidence of systemic diversion of the equipment that the United States has provided.
Secretary Austin and DOD leaders have repeatedly discussed the importance of protecting our contributions with our Ukrainian counterparts.
As you know, we also have a small team within the U.S. Embassy there that works closely with the Ukrainians.
Thank you.
We have adapted our accountability practices for the combat environment to address the risk of illicit diversion using mechanisms that go above and beyond our standard practices.
The U.S. Government has not seen credible evidence of any diversion of U.S.-provided weapons outside of Ukraine.
Can you give us assurance that none of that money that's being sent to arguably one of the most, if not the most, corrupt country on the planet is being misused, misspent, lost, malfeasance, gone to oligarchs or special individuals connected to the government, etc.
What assurance can you give the American people?
We work every day to ensure that we're doing robust oversight.
I get it.
Both the sort of programmatic reviews and the investigations.
So we get no assurance.
And I understand you're working with your partners, but you can give us no assurance.
Is that generally the answer?
Well, so what I've testified to, Congressman, is that based on our completed work, we have not substantiated any instances of diversion of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.
That was then, this is now.
And indeed, there are substantial concerns now about the taxpayer resources that we are sending oceans away.
This report now from the Financial Times.
Pentagon failed to track Ukraine arms worth more than $1 billion, says Watchdog.
The Pentagon failed to properly track more than $1 billion worth of weapons the U.S. provided to Ukraine.
According to a Watchdog's report that could fuel concerns about whether the arms have been diverted from Kiev at a time when Congress is weighing whether to send more military aid, the article continues.
The U.S. did not appropriately monitor at least $1 billion of the $1.7 billion in weapons sent to Ukraine since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of its neighbor two years ago.
The exports covered by the report include, so this is what we're not tracking, Shoulder-fired missiles such as the Javelin and Stingers, Switchblade or Kamikaze drones, and night vision goggles.
Remember the night vision goggles.
The equipment that was designed for so-called enhanced use monitoring covers only a small portion of the more than $44 billion in lethal aid the U.S. has provided to Ukraine.
So these night vision goggles, here's why that's so important.
I was talking to Eli Crane about it.
We've had him on fire, Brand, former Navy SEAL congressman from Arizona.
He said the number one thing we cannot let out of our hands are the night vision goggles because we own the night, the United States of America.
These places where there's urban environments, challenging conditions, daytime, very, very difficult.
Very, very contested.
But at night, oftentimes we're able to execute because of these goggles.
And you give those to the enemy and you create parity.
It's not good.
It's going to result in people getting killed.
And you don't know if that's going to be in Israel, on our southern border, in some other conflict when this stuff gets out and around and is not exclusively for the use of the United States of America.
But it's not just...
Abroad, where there's a lack of accountability in our military and in the dollars that they have, we get this report out of the Daily Mail UK. We're good to
of swindling the U.S. Army out of $100 million over six years by putting cash into her fake military youth businesses and splurging it on homes and cars.
Janet Mello, 57, allegedly took military funds and spent millions of dollars on jewelry, clothing, luxury vehicles, real estate in one of the biggest fraud cases the military has ever dealt with.
Mello worked for the U.S. Army at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas as a financial program manager in 2016. She creates a shell company, allegedly, which she then uses to fraudulently collect money that was otherwise intended for 4-H military partnership grants.
Man, there's a special layer of hell for the people who steal the money that was intended for military 4-H But that is the report that we see from the Daily Mail on that front.
And more bad news from the Army we get from Military.com.
Army sees sharp decline in white recruits.
So keep in mind the Army had a 10,000 recruit shortfall last year.
10,000 short.
And so you start digging into what's going on, what's going right, and what you largely see is that the minority groups are staying the same in terms of their percentages, but then the white boys that used to make up a lot of the United States Army, I mean, you're seeing that plummet at a level never seen before for any demographic group.
It's a precipitous decline.
It's actually a year-over-year 6% dip from 2022 to 2023, and While 6% doesn't sound that much, when you're having these massive recruiting shortfalls and then the largest demographic group is having the biggest fall off of that, it certainly should raise additional questions about how we're going to ensure that we have an all-volunteer force and that we're able to meet the needs of securing the country.
The Army declined Military.com's request to share its regional recruiting data, which could show what specific parts of the country are struggling.
I found this a very interesting part of the piece.
Because I think I know what the regional data would show.
The regional data would show that it's the white boys from the SEC states in the South that made a very large contribution to the United States Army's recruiting pool, and that that's where you're not seeing that same pull factor.
And there's an argument here that the Army makes that, oh, some of this data may be off, there may be a coding error, but I think it's the wokeness.
I think it's things like the compounding impact of the pandemic, the vaccine mandate, the critical race theory, the embrace of socialism, throwing drag shows on military bases.
I think that's the kind of stuff that depresses the important recruiting activity that we've got to have in the United States military.
There's a new report out on the productivity of Congress.
And New York Times reports on it, House dysfunction by the numbers.
724 votes, only 27 laws enacted.
So the critique from the New York Times and others is that we have not, you know, had all these new bills, new programs, new laws.
But we took more votes, actually.
So in 2022, the House of Representatives took 549 votes.
And it's a pretty substantial jump from 549 to 724. And by the way, who brought you that?
The firebrands.
We were the ones, down on the floor, demanding votes, putting up amendments.
And a ton of them lost.
But in times of old, you didn't even get the chance to present your ideas.
So yeah, we had all these votes, but then it funnels down to not that many bills passing.
And so people say, oh, well, the Congress was so ineffective, you didn't pass that many bills.
Maybe effectiveness in Congress isn't all the new laws you can make.
It's some of the things that you block and stop from happening that are hurting people, that are devaluing the dollar.
And like, it ain't exactly like we're drawing up the Magna Carta here on the legislation that's passing.
Keep this in mind.
Of the 27 bills that we've had become law, two renamed federal buildings, one created a stamp, one created a coin, One moved the boundaries of an Indian tribe in the San Diego area?
Is this the cowbell you want more of?
Is this the winning you aren't tired of?
If we aren't going to do anything serious on the border and on the spending and on the bureaucrats and on the weaponization of the government, I'm not here to do a bunch of Mother's Day resolutions and coins and stamps and building renamings.
That's a bunch of crap.
We have to do the real work.
Most unproductive Congress.
Maybe this is how to be productive.
Maybe you have to send a shock to the system that can be highly productive because it ultimately gets people thinking a different way.
And that's what needs to happen.
So let me bring you into the room on this current government funding fight.
Okay, we have to cut spending.
We cannot continue to put budgets and government funding bills on the floor that spend more money than Nancy Pelosi was spending during the pandemic.
And rescissions, just pulling money out of accounts, that doesn't count as cutting spending.
Cutting spending means programmatic cuts.
Things go away that we're spending money on now.
That's how you could tell if we've actually had a reduction in spending.
So then you have to visit what the American people want from a priority standpoint.
And while, I mean, we could talk all day about, we want to defund Planned Parenthood, we've got to defund Jack Smith, we've got to defund what's going on at the ATF, all those critically important fights, we talk about them frequently.
But right now, America is being invaded.
And on that border, just as we're talking, you've got CBP and Texas Border Patrol, or Texas National Guard, functionally in a standoff in Eagle Pass, Texas, where The Texas National Guard aren't letting the CBP in because the CBP were cutting the fences.
We showed you on Firebrand's episode yesterday how CBPP is cutting the fencing and letting the illegals into our country.
So that's all really in bad shape right now.
And I've said we need to close the border or close the government.
That is the leverage we have.
And in the words of my friend Chip Roy, we should take this Republican majority for a spin.
We shouldn't just leave it in the garage.
So that means within this government funding dispute, we have to demand that the border be closed.
Not some promise that can be abandoned or memoed over later.
We have to stop this wave of people.
The best description to me is like, it's like if you have a fire hydrant that is overflowing.
You're not going to solve that problem by resourcing buckets.
You have to cut off the flow.
And right now, you've got the Biden administration just running around asking for more buckets.
When we know what to do.
Remain in Mexico.
Public Health Title 42 authorities save third country agreements that President Trump's administration made with other nations so that all those folks don't think they can just illegally cross our border and wait here forever for an asylum hearing that they're never actually going to go to, that's never going to result in any removals.
And even when they get their deportation orders from the asylum hearings, which over a million people have now, they still aren't removing those folks.
No deportations, no border, no government funding.
That's my position.
Now, let me tell you what argument and strategy others are deploying.
I have a lot of great friends who we consider kind of the national security hawks, right?
And I care about national security.
I want to make sure we have top-line funding to meet the needs.
That's not to say that every dollar we've ever sent to the Department of Defense has been a good idea.
I've just shown you the mishaps that occur when there is not a careful hand watching over these things.
So what the defense hawks want Is more money for Ukraine.
And they kind of get the drift that a majority of Republicans don't want to send more money unchecked to Ukraine.
Actually, the majority has been voting against the latest iterations of Ukraine aid.
So what they want, I believe, is to not really resolve the border in the context of the government funding dispute because they want to take a border solution and lash it to Ukraine money.
And then to guys like me, to guys like Eli Crane, Andy Biggs, they'll say, well, here's the deal.
You have to vote for Ukraine money if you want the outcomes that will protect our nation on the border.
But see, if we resolve the border issues now, before addressing Ukraine, maybe we never do, then We've got the chance to utilize our leverage effectively.
So that's what's important.
That's what we're fighting for.
I know it's a little wonky, but you guys can handle it.
And finally, I want to congratulate the amazing team who puts this podcast on in 2023. One of our episodes, DEI in the Sky, was one of the top streamed programs on the entire Rumble platform.
3.2 million views for that episode on Rumble.
And so to Joel, Sasha, Jacob, John, the rest of the team, everyone who puts in effort to Firebrand, you are among the very best and we're crushing it, especially on Rumble.
So make sure you're subscribed.
We'll have more updates as we get into the potential partial government shutdown that's coming.
And we'll have your back because we know you've got ours.
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