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April 11, 2024 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
49:07
EPISODE 712: Sen. Ron Johnson Tells The Truth About Bidenflation, FISA and Biden's Border Bloodbath

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This is what happens when the fourth turning meets fifth generation warfare.
A commentator, international social media sensation, and former Navy intelligence veteran.
This is Human Events with your host, Jack Posobiec.
Inflation rose by 0.4% in March on the monthly basis.
That's the same as the February figure, but here's the key.
Year over year, inflation rose by 3.5%.
More than expected, more than we saw last month.
How concerned are you about the fight against inflation stalling?
And do you stand by your prediction for a rate cut?
Well, I do stand by my prediction that before the year is out to be a rate cut.
This may delay it a month or so.
I'm not sure of that.
We don't know what the Fed is going to do for certain.
A federal appeals court heard oral arguments on whether a new Texas immigration law is at odds with the role of the federal government.
The law, also known as Senate Bill 4, would allow state police to arrest suspected illegal border crossers.
It's currently on hold while judges weigh its legality.
Joe Biden's border bloodbath ends the day I take the oath of office.
It ends.
With this vote, I will seal the border, I will stop the invasion, I will end the carnage, bloodshed, and killing, and we will crush the human traffickers.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has been huddling with his Republican conference for the second time today, this time to try to find a way forward after a failed vote tied to renewing the government's surveillance tools.
This comes as he is facing the very real dilemma of how to do his job without losing his job.
Earlier today, the Speaker met with Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who's threatened to oust him from his post, or at least to try, if he puts any bill on the floor that includes funding for Ukraine.
On this vote, the yeas are 193, the nays are 228.
The resolution is not adopted.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard today's edition of Human Events Daily.
We are live in Washington, D.C.
Today is April 11th, 2024.
Anno Domini, honored to be joined once again by Senator Ron Johnson of the great state of Wisconsin.
Senator, how are you?
Hello, Jack.
I'm doing well.
Hope you are too.
I am doing very well.
It's nice to have the little spring action coming back around here.
So the other nice thing that I've seen is this chart that was put together.
I wish it were nicer, but I like the fact that it's getting attention because how powerful it is.
This illegal immigration chart that, I don't know if everyone knows this, that President Trump has been posting about and tweeting about and showing at his rallies and handing out to people at Mar-a-Lago, is that your office actually put together that chart.
Is that right?
Yeah, I was with the President last week flying up to the Green Bay Rally, and we talked about a number of substantive issues.
Obviously, one of them was the border, and I mentioned the fact that this chart that I've really been updating on a monthly basis since I became Chairman of Homeland Security back in 2015.
And what I've always liked about the chart is it shows the cause and effect.
It shows the magnitude of the problem of Biden's catastrophe, versus even President Obama, You know, back there in 2014, he declared a humanitarian crisis when 2,000 people were crossing a day.
Biden had over 10,000 people per day just in December.
And so I think what President Trump liked about it is it showed also how when he faced his own immigration issue, by the way, caused and sparked by President Obama's deferred action on childhood arrivals.
I mean, that's really the main root cause of all this.
These border crises and now this invasion.
But when he was faced with almost 5,000 people a day, he did something about it, and he did it very successfully.
And so he liked that chart.
He adapted it, made a couple of tweaks to it.
And I'm just glad that it's getting a lot more visibility than when I post it.
Obviously, when President Trump posts it, it does.
I thought one of the commentaries from one of the political pundits just put their chart and said, this ought to decide the 2024 election.
In and of itself.
Again, just describing the catastrophe that is Biden and the Democrats' open border policy.
And this is exactly right.
It's something, by the way, where, you know, I'm always one of the guys who says that, you know, I think we need to tell stories as well as do facts and figures.
But it's something where Republicans as well can just have something out there.
Conservatives, just average folks can look at the numbers on this.
And speaking of numbers, we're going to talk about Biden inflation here later in the interview.
But when you put it out in a very simple way for people to understand that everyone can look at this and say, here's when this thing happened.
Here's when the next thing happened, the cause and effect.
And I'd love to ask you about a lot of these because people don't realize some of these key decision makers, decision moments, I should say, before you.
Even Trump took office, like the Flores reinterpretation, which gave Ketron release, like the tariff threat, like the DHS tools, all of these things that came into effect as President Trump was campaigning.
And then later when he took office, then that hits, then Biden comes in.
We can see it all right there.
Stay tuned, folks.
We'll be right back with a much longer segment.
Senator Ron Johnson, Wisconsin joins us.
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But I got a hankering yearning deep inside for this book called Unhumans.
I just can't.
Unhumans.
Tell the story of C.
Jack Pasovic back live here, Human Events Daily, live Washington, D.C.
We're sitting down with Senator Ron Johnson, who's been very gracious with his time for us.
Senator Johnson, as we're talking about this just monumental chart that you've put through, and there's so many different pieces, we can see the graphs, we can see the troughs, we can see the spikes in so many of these things.
This Flores reinterpretation of 2015 and then the subsequent DHS rule that came out, you've been outspoken on this for years at this point.
Can you explain to the audience, if they're not familiar with Flores and the impact that that's had on our enforcement of the border and these catch and release policies, can you explain to the audience who may not understand what Flores is, the basics behind it and what the current situation is at?
The original Flores decision related to a young girl, and she was an unaccompanied child.
And the agreement that was hashed out was that the federal government would have to turn over an unaccompanied child to HHS within 20 days.
And so when President Obama sparked the latest crisis at the border with his Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, we had a lot more unaccompanied children come in, but we also had unaccompanied children come in with their families.
We're real families, some were make-believe families.
But what Obama did in reaction to that is he detained those children with their families.
Immigrant rights activists took him to court, and a court reinterpreted the Flores decision and said that you couldn't even detain an unconfirmed child with their family.
So then President Obama started splitting up families from the uncompaged children because they had to release the uncompaged children.
That was politically untenable.
Certainly, President Trump was not able to do that either.
So, again, that is what really led to this explosion of people exploiting that Flores reinterpretation.
By the way, D.H. Secretary Johnson at that time completely disagreed with that court decision, saying that uncompaged children couldn't even be detained with their families, which I think is pretty humane action.
But that's what the courts do.
That's one of the things Congress could have fixed.
We should have fixed.
But Democrats don't want to fix that because it helps spark and fuel their open border desires and dreams.
And And in actuality, what it's done is given a signal to the coyotes, the cartels, the human traffickers, essentially, that if you bring children along with you, that they know our system, they know our rules better than the average American does, that if you have these unaccompanied children with you, if you have these minors with you, that it kind of gives them a free pass to be able to walk their way right across the border and right through our system.
Again, the result was we didn't separate families anymore.
What we did is we let the families into the country.
So we didn't detain any of them.
And I should have explained that.
That's the icing on top of the cake here.
The policy result of that was now we don't detain the children or the families they come in with.
So we've seen an explosion of fake families, for example.
We don't do DNA testing, certainly not under the Biden administration.
So this is a huge problem.
Right.
And so it basically created this loophole whereby in that Homeland Security, even if they wanted to, they wouldn't be able to, under the court order, to go in and detain any of them under the rule.
So the question then becomes, how do you fix that?
I know we're going way into the weeds on this, but it's such a key issue.
So does it have to be a legislative fix?
Or is this something that could be done by DHS rule?
No, because it's a court decision, it has to be a legislative fix.
But you'll notice on that chart, You'll see blue are family units, and you'll see that the size of the blue in those bars increases after the floor is reinterpretation because people started exploiting that law.
I've also added one more modification to that chart.
I sent that to President Trump's team.
But I've also added Title 42 expulsions because Trump is pointing out the low point of encounters.
But a lot of people say, well, that's because of Title 42.
They didn't start expelling people under Title 42 till March of 2020.
The low point occurred in April.
But then Trump utilized Title 42 and basically didn't let people in.
And even though Democrat presidential candidates were saying they were going to end deportation, give free health care, that's what increased the, that's what led to the rise of single adults being encountered at the border.
Trump just returned them.
So even though that chart starts going up toward the tail end of the Trump administration, he didn't let them stay.
And even President Biden, for a while, used Title 42, but then he let it expire.
And so we have the complete explosion where we basically don't return anybody.
Great.
And of course, Title 42, that is under health concerns.
And it's amazing that we were locking down our country at one point.
And it's crazy for me to even think about this, that we were locking down our country.
We were locking down our citizens.
We were forcing people to get vaccines.
And we were still letting people in across the border, or at least Democrats were still willing to allow this.
Title 42 simply took all of those same restrictions that we were applying to ourselves and applied them to the border itself.
And by the way, this isn't just about COVID-19 because there's a variety of restrictions.
of diseases and pathogens and communicable diseases that are coming up across the border, even now to this day, like tuberculosis and others that we don't normally, measles, that we don't normally encounter within the United States, but they're coming up because people are coming across from countries and then spilling but they're coming up because people are coming across from countries and then spilling into the interior of our country from places that don't have inoculations
Well, again, some of these diseases are endemic in different parts of the world.
They're not common here.
And they're even drug resistant.
Antibiotic resistant strains of tuberculosis, for example.
And again, the Biden administration completely ignoring that.
It's grotesque.
Right, the Biden administration that is informing us we need to trust the science and we're doing all this for your own health and we're doing this for your protection.
So that's the situation.
And I guess in terms of the chart, we've made it to about the 2020s.
So what happens where this is the situation as the administration, so the Trump administration leaves January 2021 and you can see the explosion.
And I have no idea how else to explain this other than a massive explosion as Trump leaves office, Biden takes in and it's basically in the first month.
You just see it jump up exponentially.
Look at this January and then February.
And by the time you're in March, it's already too late.
Thank you.
Well, again, I think President Biden used the exact same executive authority that Trump used to secure the border to open it up.
And one of the most important things is he stopped the Remain in Mexico or the Migrant Protection Program, which really deterred people from coming.
If you couldn't get in this country and, you know, give a notice to appear in court three, four, five, six, nine years in the future, this just stopped coming.
So that was probably the most effective thing together with the threat of terrorists against Mexico.
So they actually enforced the Remain in Mexico policy.
But when President Biden stopped using that, that was the signal to the world that America's borders are open.
And so you see the explosion in family units coming to exploit that law, unaccompanied children.
Again, single adults were returned under Title 42 under Trump.
They were returned to a certain extent under President Biden, just not as aggressively.
And then President Biden allowed that Title 42 authority to expire when I don't think he really had to because you had, as you said, all kinds of reason of these other endemic diseases that you could have still said was a health emergency if he really wanted to secure the border.
But he doesn't.
I mean, I just cannot point that out enough.
President Biden, Democrats in Congress want an open border.
They caused this.
This didn't just happen.
This isn't just an unfortunate circumstance.
This is exactly what they want.
And I was on an earlier show, and people look at that chart and go, I mean, this is a catastrophe.
I mean, we view this as a problem.
Mayorkas and Biden and Democrats, they view that chart as a success.
That demonstrates to them that they have succeeded in opening up our borders, allowing six, seven, I don't know what the number is, eight million people in this country, a number larger than what, about 36, 37 states' population.
This is success to them.
And that's what I hope more Americans start coming to understand.
We need to defeat these Democrats.
We can't re-elect them.
They want an open border.
They caused this problem.
They can fix it.
They just don't want to.
Now, and the fact of the matter that this is, and we talk about this all the time here on the program, how this is not the unintended consequences of good faith policies.
No, these are the deliberate consequences of bad faith policies.
But that being said, What are some of the reasons?
A lot of people will see Elon Musk has been tweeting, he says they want them to be able to vote.
I'm not sure how true that is in some of these cases.
I'm sure there's illegals voting, it wouldn't surprise me.
I don't know what the numbers would be.
But from your perspective, do you think it's more from that, or is it to play around with these census numbers that we see?
Because, of course, illegals are still counted in the census.
Well, the census numbers will take effect immediately.
It probably already has impacted American voting patterns to a certain extent just from the 2020 census.
But in 2030, you've got 6, 7, 8 million new people here, primarily congregated in Democrat-controlled areas, and so that will mean more congressional seats apportioned to those states.
That will impact policy.
But let's face it, New York, they allow illegal immigrants to vote in their local elections.
The whole push toward mail-in balloting without controls, that's made to facilitate illegal immigrants to be able to vote.
So again, that's their long-term game plan.
It probably won't take effect as rapidly as they'd like, but counting these illegal immigrants in the census count, that takes effect in 2030, and it's already had an impact in 2020.
It takes immediate effect, and it's surprising to me, and I would say a little bit heartening, at least, that you do see more people now that, you know, kind of come from, I guess, the center of the road, more Silicon Valley types, waking up to say, wait a minute, so all you have to do is buy a social security number, you know, in some alley, and that's enough to be able to vote in the election?
You betcha!
We're here with Senator Ron Johnson, state of Wisconsin.
He's joining us for the full hour today.
Hugh and Ben Staley will be right back.
The Hidden Tales of the Communist History.
The Hidden Tales of the Communist Party.
Jack Pasovic, FAQ Live, Human Events Daily, Washington, D.C.
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We're on with Senator Johnson.
Senator, right before the break, we were discussing this idea that there's so much of our Political process and there's so many political direct impacts when it comes to policy that are affected by illegal immigration.
Now when it comes to let's let's talk solutions though.
And before we because I do want to get into the Bidenflation but solution wise, let's say fast forward.
We're now in 2025.
We're now hopefully on the other side of this thing.
Let's let's say, you know, let's say President Trump is back in office.
How do you turn back something like this when we see the numbers where they are?
Well, it's actually pretty simple.
You just, through your actions, communicate to people around the world that we no longer have an open border.
That's what the Remain Mexico policy did, you know, plus some of the agreements with Central America in terms of safe third country.
You simply don't allow people in.
What happens now is people get to the border, you know, through human traffickers.
They pay their thousands of dollars worth of fees.
They get delivered to the border.
Right into the arms of Customs and Border Patrol.
The Biden administration last time was at the border.
CBP told us their directive was to encounter, process, and disperse within eight hours.
In other words, somebody's probably got a plane ticket or a bus ticket or a train ticket within eight hours and they're heading to where their destination was.
Once they get there, they have cell phones, they call down to Central America, they call down these other countries and say, that was pretty darn simple.
Now, those are the people that aren't, you know, sent into involuntary servitude or the sex trade.
But the reality of the situation rules.
So the reality is it's very easy to get in this country.
Once you get here, you stay.
Some of these sanctuary cities, you're put up in hotels, you're fed, you're treated quite well.
And people get on the phone and people tell me that, you know, they talk to their fellow countrymen and incentivizes more people.
If the phone calls are made from the Mexican side of the border and say, oh, they shut it down.
This isn't easy anymore.
We're sitting here in a hot tent now.
I have no idea when we're going to get into America.
People stop coming.
I think the flow will be stopped very quickly.
President Bush faced the same situation.
I think this was with an influx from Brazil, and he had a program called Texas Hold'em.
And that shut down and alleviate that problem by 90 some percent within a month.
So again, these signals will be transmitted at the speed of light with telephone calls.
So you can shut it down, I think, very, very quickly now.
Again, it's such a massive problem right now.
It'll take a little bit of time.
But the first thing is to elect a president who actually wants to secure the border, who's serious about it, who uses full Presidential authority and he is a lot.
Supreme Court said in a 2018 ruling that current law exudes deference to the president.
Again, it's been watered down a little bit by some of these court decisions, but he can still do it and President Trump obviously would.
And not only that, but it also sends a message that, as you say, not only for the phone calls, but it sends a message that for anyone who's currently in the country, that when there's, you know, let's say there's a new sheriff in town, that leads to the point where people start deciding and making the decisions that perhaps it's not time that leads to the point where people start deciding and making the decisions that perhaps Perhaps it's time to pull up chocks and head back where we came from or head somewhere else.
And so this is where you, because when you change the incentives, when you take away this toxic incentive structure that we currently have, it actually leads people and, you know, Joy Reid and all these others will say, oh, Trump wants to have this, you know, this massive deportation force.
And he talks about, et cetera.
But I'll A lot of this is also self-deportation that I think people don't realize.
And to your point, once you change the incentive structure, and a huge facet of that, probably the main facet of that, obviously, is economic, the minute you change that, people will start changing their behavior overnight.
Yeah, the easiest part of this is going to be to stop the flow.
The more difficult part is, you know, what do you do with people here?
And that's not going to be easy.
That's going to be extremely difficult.
A lot of these Yeah, again, I can't tell you how many young women I've seen at the border, you know, eight, nine months pregnant.
Now they've got U.S.
citizen children, which is one of the things that President Trump, I think, intelligently is vowing to end.
Birthright citizenship is insane.
We're one of just a handful of countries that allows that.
That's also a huge magnet.
But again, Democrats always talk about the push factor.
There's no doubt about it.
Some of these people come from countries that, not real pleasant circumstances, but that's not a valid asylum claim.
The main reason people are coming is because we incentivize them.
It's the pull factor.
And that's what we need to end.
I couldn't agree more.
I mean, there's always going to be issues and always going to be other countries out there that aren't quite run as well as the United States, even given our current state of mismanagement.
But simply coming as an economic migrant does not qualify someone for asylum.
And you're right, to your point.
The reason the United States and so much of the new world has birthright citizenship, these are holdovers from colonial times, right?
So the left, of course, loves to talk about colonization and decolonization, but it really is because most of the world only has citizenship through their parents.
And so if your parents are citizens of the country, then you become citizens.
But it was only in the new world, places like Brazil, places like the United States, because they were trying to, at the time, attract immigrants trying to attract people because they wanted people to come from the old world and then and then set up shop.
That's why citizenship was offered at birth.
They said, well, your kids can be citizens.
But at some point, you know, I think we have to realize we're about, you know, we're almost about to hit our 250th here.
I think I think we could probably start moving away from some of those laws at this point.
That would make sense to me.
It certainly would.
So as we're talking about this, we also run into a situation where the housing market is in complete crisis, wages are in complete crisis, and this ties into the numbers report that we saw this week out of the CPI, which came in so much hotter than anyone else did.
And Senator, you were here with us the last time we were on, it was a couple of weeks ago, and you were bounding Pounding the drum about inflation and you said inflation was about to go sky high and here we are today where CPI came in way higher and way hotter than anybody else was saying.
How was it that you were able to make that prediction?
Well, because we haven't done anything to reduce deficit spending, we're still printing money.
And again, inflation is a pretty easy definition.
It's too many dollars chasing too few goods.
And I've always said, to me, the best solution for inflation, stop deficit spending, but also increase the number of goods.
Do everything you can to control the economy.
But instead, what the Fed does is they start cranking up interest rates.
Which has a tendency to dampen the economy.
In the event, you know, eventually by slowing down the economy, you start bringing inflation under somewhat control, but you never can control it as long as you have this massive deficit spending brought on by fiscal policy.
So, again, unfortunately in Washington, D.C., we have a uniparty.
You have people with the attitude, and I've heard it said, that show me one member of Congress who ever lost re-election because they spent too much money.
The public loves the free money from Washington, D.C.
You know, even some of the staunchest conservatives from our states come in, you know, begging for this grant or that grant, claiming, well, that's not real spending.
That's actually an investment.
No, it's all spending money we don't have, all causing us to print money, which has sparked the 40-year high inflation under Biden.
People need to understand, too, that a dollar you held at the start of the Biden administration is now only worth 84 cents.
It's 0.838 to be precise.
That damage has been done.
So no matter how they might lower inflation rates in the future, they're not going to revalue the dollar.
The dollar's not going to spring back up to being fully worth a dollar.
That devaluation has occurred, and that is the pain people are feeling at the pump, at the grocery store, and it, in particular, hurts people at the lower end of the income spectrum.
The wealthy, they maybe won't like it, but they can survive.
But the very people the Democrats purport to represent, people at the lower end of the income spectrum, are the ones most hurt.
By the inflation spark, by their deaths of spending, and most of the spending is all designed to buy votes.
Look at the vote-getting scheme right now with President Biden for giving student loans to people that voluntarily entered these agreements.
It's a small percentage of the American public that has student loan debt, and yet we're going to transfer that debt burden to the rest of Americans, people that didn't go to college, people that paid off their student loans.
And in fact, as Biden has shown, he made this same promise all the way back in 2020.
It's sort of this perennial election year promise.
They said, well, we're going to get it in the first term.
And then student loan relief never came.
They said, well, we're going to get it in the second term.
That's when it'll come.
And then we know that eventually, he's probably either, as you say, number one, not going to give the student debt relief, or two, he's going to give it, which is only going to pass those costs on to everyone else in terms of inflation, or in terms of higher taxation, in terms of prices that we're paying everywhere.
And I've got some of these numbers here.
You're looking at 65% food at elementary and secondary schools, 59% fuel oil Uh, 52% margarine, 49% eggs, basic eggs for Easter are up 50% from last year.
I mean, this is a staple of our American food sources, American diet.
This is something we really need to focus on.
Stay tuned.
Come right back.
Senator Ron Johnson.
I want to know the truth.
What really went down?
So I'm jumping on my computer going to pre-order town.
But I got a hankering yearning deep inside for this book called Unhumans.
I just can't.
All right.
Jack Posobiec here, Washington, D.C.
We are live with Senator Ron Johnson.
Senator Johnson, there's another issue in inflation that I think people don't seem to ever connect.
And this is something where, you know, Republicans and Democrats, I have to say, also have an issue with is when they look at this overseas spending, particularly the military aid that we're providing to so many countries, Ukraine, of course, top of the list.
Yes, actually something that increases inflation and I don't think people realize how this spending does so this massive spending not only the printing that we're doing but the money has to come from somewhere and when the money comes the spending goes out that then in turn increases prices when the government does it.
Do you get a sense on Capitol Hill when you when you're talking about these No, I think most members of Congress, and quite honestly, the public, are just whistling by the graveyard.
They'll look at a particular piece of spending and say, well, this is essential.
Ukraine bill or possibly attaching it to something with Israel aid again.
Do you get any sense that people connect the two, the inflation and this military spending?
No, I think most members of Congress and quite honestly, the public are just whistling by the graveyard.
They'll look at a particular piece of spending and say, well, this is essential.
I mean, we absolutely need this.
So don't worry about the inflationary impact of this.
But no matter where you spend those dollars, when you print them, that's going to have an inflationary impact.
To expand on this a little bit, we really ought to take a look at what we spend on defense.
Now, from a standpoint of percentage GDP, we're down at pretty historically low levels, but when we take a look at total dollars spent and compare it to other nations, we're going to be spending close to $900 billion just in the base defense budget.
China, you don't exactly get good numbers from them, is somewhere around $300 billion.
The next 13 nations combined, that includes Russia, probably in the $600 or $700 billion total.
So you can see that the United States, we spend a lot of money on defense, and what always kind of boggles my mind is every time we're actually in a war, or we're supporting a country that's in a war, We can't dip into the $887 billion that we're allocating.
They're budgeting and appropriated for defense.
We have to do a supplemental.
We need another $100 billion more for this.
I think we have not even come close to heeding the warning of President Eisenhower back in 1961 in his farewell address about the military-industrial complex and how it drives public policy, how it drives deficit spending, We need to do a serious look back.
Be retrospective.
Take a look at what all this spending, where all of our foreign entanglements, what have been the results of these things.
I don't think we're going to be very pleased if we actually do that analysis.
But Jack, we don't do that analysis.
We just want to move on.
Let's not fault ourselves for maybe doing something stupid.
Let's just pat ourselves on the back for good intentions and move forward and continue to plunder and mortgage our children's future.
Which, by the way, in Eisenhower's farewell address, that was his third warning about not plundering and mortgaging our children's future.
We've completely ignored that warning.
Precisely, and you're also obviously referencing George Washington's farewell address, our very first president warning us about foreign entanglement, because there's an interesting take on the revolution that, you know, we don't have time to go all the way down the rabbit hole on, but there's an interesting take on the revolution that The British Empire at the time was sort of the global system, the neoliberal order, the rules-based order, whatever you want to, you know, whatever catchphrase that Tony Blinken is using today.
And it was the colonists and the colonials who were pulling out of that international system and setting up the United States as an independent nation state in which it could conduct its own commerce and its own treaties and its own diplomacy within its hemisphere, do things that were in its interests.
And so it's Washington actually warning us to watch out for becoming part of one of these global systems again because that had led to so many issues in the first place.
And of course, people don't always get their history on this, right?
But it was the British and French war where the United States played this sort of proxy role in that led to the high taxes being charged in the first place that turned over into the Boston Tunes.
Tea Party, et cetera, et cetera, and these interminable acts because Britain and France were in war with each other.
But of course, the Americans started saying, you know, of what impact does that have on us?
Sorry, a little on the historical side, but it's interesting to me how it just kind of parallels some of the debates that we find ourselves in today.
Now, listen, we have to look back at history.
We generally don't.
And again, you know, the famous saying is those who are, you know, refuse to learn history are destined to repeat it.
You know, So these empires, they generally don't fail because of external invasions.
They basically fail from internal rot or an overextension.
And, you know, I think in America here, I think you have to be very careful about us overextending, trying to be the world's policeman.
Listen, I think we do play a role in the world and a very important one.
We can bring stability, freedom of navigation on the seas so they have a global economic system that works.
I mean, these are things we can do and we can do them.
It doesn't have to cost us an arm and a leg.
But right now, what I'm primarily concerned about is the internal rot brought about by radical leftism.
That is what is destroying this country right now, is the internal wrap.
The fourth thing that President Eisenhower warned us about, and again, that was such a prescient speech, it's only 15 minutes, I recommend your listeners go to YouTube and listen to it, but he said we cannot allow global society to descend into a state of dreadful fear and hate.
And from my standpoint, the military-industrial complex, it's one of their calling cards, is they push fear.
You know, fear every adversarial regime.
I'm not saying don't be wary of them, but to what extent does that drive our policy and potentially drive bad policy?
You know, the global hate.
What about hate within our own country?
You know, we're not a nationally divided people.
Why are we so divided?
It's because political figures, political parties, they push the hate.
That's what identity politics is about.
You know, I would say critical race theory, transgenderism, all these things are pushing hate, dividing Americans.
That is what's destroying this country.
There's an interesting corollary between sort of when you see empires that overstretch and at the same time they have rot, it seems they have the moral decay, they have rot on the inside at the same time, and it's a very interesting parallel.
I haven't quite cracked the code on why that is, but you saw this in late-stage Rome, of course you see this in the Weimar Republic, in Germany, and now we're seeing it many times here in the United States as well, and as you say, We've gotten so wrapped up in all of these causes, this cause, that cause, this ism, that ism, and then all of a sudden, you know, my wife comes to me, and I was on with, we had Dr. Ben Carson here on the other day, and I was joking that my wife calls it airport prices.
She says every time I go to the grocery store, it's like I'm paying airport prices.
because everyone knows everything costs extra at the airport, but it's now everywhere does that.
And so she's not worried about, you know, what's going on in this pocket of the world, that pocket of the world.
She's worried about, are we going to be able to afford to keep our boys raised up?
Are we going to be able to afford to keep the refrigerator stocked?
That kind of stuff.
Putting gas in the car.
This is something, obviously, I mean, we're looking at gas prices right now.
I think 371 is the latest national U.S. gas average.
I just pulled that this morning.
And so these are huge questions, especially as we go into the summer.
So if we're at 371 as our national average going into the summer when gas prices always spike, we could potentially be looking at $4 a gallon again.
And oh, by the way, this is at a time where Biden refused to refill the petroleum reserve.
And so, you know, again, we get so wrapped up in these issues that we don't realize that at some point, as you say, Senator, You gotta pay the bill.
The bill's gonna come, and it's gonna come due.
I'd also recommend your listener go back and look at Scottish, I think it was the historian, Lord Tytler.
T-Y-T-L-E-R.
He described the eight stages of a democracy.
And it starts with bondage, going to then great faith.
Great faith leads to freedom.
Freedom leads to prosperity and affluence, which then leads to apathy, that then leads to dependence, and then back to bondage.
I think I might have missed one of the stages in there.
Yeah, I think most people take a look at America.
Obviously, we've been highly affluent.
Are we in the apathy?
We're certainly, in some cases, in the dependent stage.
And of course, once you're dependent, that's bondage.
I remember I had a finance professor say that the reason they call a debt instrument a bond is because when you put yourself into debt, you put yourself into bondage.
That's fantastic.
I never heard that.
That's fantastic.
I never heard that.
That's fantastic.
Most countries don't last more than about 150 years and we're approaching 250.
We're running out of time, particularly with the dangerous path the Democrat government has put this nation on.
One question that I want to get into in the final segment is, and this is obviously a little bit of what's going on on the Hill, a question about FISA reinforcement.
We're going to ask about this here.
Senator Johnson, last segment of the world.
All right, Senator Johnson, final segment here today.
I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about this reauthorization of the House FISA program.
This is something where, of course, President Trump came in at the 11th hour.
He tweeted out, kill FISA.
He related to the original Russiagate situation that he faced all the way back in 2016.
What is the current status of FISA?
Is this set to expire?
And what are you hearing on the Hill?
Well, real quick, obviously, it sprang out of 9-11.
I think most Americans want to give law enforcement the tools to prevent future terrorist attacks.
That's certainly what I wanted.
I voted to reauthorize it last time because we were told to point to one American whose constitutional rights have been trampled on because of FISA.
We couldn't.
Now we can.
A President of the United States.
So FISA absolutely has to be reformed.
A warrant should be required.
It boggles my mind that people in, for example, House Intelligence and other members of Congress Are happy with it pretty much as it is, and they simply won't agree with people like Jim Jordan, Chairman Jordan, that no, we need to put greater controls on this.
So if they're not willing to do that, I'm not going to support it, and it may not pass.
And that's huge.
And I say this, by the way, as a as a prior intelligence officer who, you know, I've sat on the other side of FISA and it is it's incredibly powerful.
It is it is.
And I think this is something which which the great Frank Church talked about years ago about the potential uses and abuses of having that power in the hands of the federal government, who, by the way, was a Democrat.
You know, we used to have Democrats that actually worried about this stuff.
So again, we need those controls, and I think Chairman Jordan has done a good job bipartisan.
I thought he had the votes.
I don't know what's exactly messed up in the House, but we need those types of controls.
We need that kind of reform for me to support it again.
I've supported in the past.
I'd like to support something, but it has to have those controls.
When this was the issue right that that came out under the it was it was the church committee and then later as you say things that we learned during 9-11 was that essentially the NSA and the FBI were able so the FISA court was set up so that people could you know that there would be a secret court that the agencies could could go to but then the problem also became in particularly the 702 that That there were ways around the court system.
And then, of course, you also have FISA authorizations that were being signed where the agencies were basically just cooking the books.
And they were lying to the court as to what was going on.
And you have this guy gets out with a slap on the wrist for altering emails on Carter Page.
We all know the story.
But the second part of it is that in the 702s, there are Americans every single day As a U.S.
that are caught up in incidental collection and two hop issues that I think is something that people and through the Russiagate process have have given a lot of conservatives some consternation over.
And certainly as a U.S. citizen, we have constitutional rights and those have been laid down and understood.
FISA is about foreigners who don't have those constitutional rights.
So you can do more things with foreigners, but then when you, you know, get U.S.
citizens tangled up in those types of searches, you know, that's the issue right now.
And what we're saying is if you're going to go further with U.S.
citizens, you need a warrant.
You can't use FISA as an excuse to trample on U.S.
citizens' rights.
That's what has happened.
That's what needs to be prevented.
I think it's exactly right.
The one I know that most people remember, I think, just because it became so high profile in the news, is General Flynn.
So General Flynn is having these conversations with the Russian ambassador.
He's about to go into office.
Flynn is about to go into office.
And it's picked up by the national security agencies, not because they're spying on Flynn, but because they're spying on the Russian ambassador.
Then that somehow gets leaked.
What they did to General Flynn was unconscionable.
It was a travesty.
by the way, been charged for this.
And you have the contents of General Flynn's conversation with the Russian ambassador splayed out across the pages of the Washington Post.
And right now, to your point, we don't really have a system to address that. - What they did to General Flynn was unconscionable.
It was a travesty.
They had to take him out because he was just too dangerous in a Trump administration.
And they used any means that they had, Pfizer, that's the way they did it, plus just to set up with an FBI interview.
What they did to General Flynn, just unforgivable.
Precisely, and I think that's something where a lot of conservatives and a lot of Trump supporters that I talk to, when they hear FISA, their mind immediately goes to General Flynn, it goes to Carter Page, and this is also obviously I think where President Trump's mind is as well.
Do you think there might even be a, and I'm just kind of brainstorming here, but you know, a way to even just change the entire process itself, like take away FISA and Come up with some kind of court system that has a little bit more transparency, potentially even for Congress.
Well, Jack, you know, what I've been saying is what we've witnessed the corruption in all these federal agencies, whether we're talking about health agencies, law enforcement or intelligence, what we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg.
We're not even scratching the surface.
But, you know, the first thing is we need to expose the truth.
They're just not willing to give us the truth.
It's and we've allowed our congressional oversight capabilities or investigations just atrophy.
I'm I'm ranking member of the permanent subcommittee investigation.
This should be the preeminent investigatory body of the Senate.
I've got five staff members.
My budget was cut under Chairman Peters.
They cut the budget.
That's how unserious they are about oversight, how unserious they are about investigating, particularly the government, under Democrat control.
And, you know, the House right now, I mean, they're like mosquitoes in a nudist colony.
It's a target-rich environment.
The left is just flooding the zone.
I mean, what all can you look at?
But when it comes to corruption in government and these agencies, the corruption, the deep state runs deep.
It's pervasive.
Mosquitoes in a nudist colony.
Senator Johnson, I think you've just come up with the best analogy of the year here on Human Events Daily.
I don't know that anyone is going to be able to top that.
Senator, where can people go to follow you, to get more updates, to get more information?
And thank you so much for being gracious with your time with us today.
Oh, Senate is just ronjohnson.senate.gov, and you can follow me on Twitter.
Just type in Senator Ron Johnson and you'll get to me.
I appreciate it.
All right, Senator Johnson, make sure you're going to follow him, folks.
He's giving you the truth.
He's telling you how the sausage is made, what's actually going on behind the scenes from the cloak room to the lobbyist room, all the way down to the floor, the well of the Senate.
Ladies and gentlemen, as always, do you have my permission?
I want to know the truth what really went down.
So I'm jumping on my computer, going to pre-order town.
Pre-ordering Love, Human.
Can't wait to get my hands on that book.
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