Dec. 19, 2021 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
39:24
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| We have not done anything to the non-governmental organizations that are getting federal grant money, and they're becoming the travel agencies for these illegal immigrants. | ||
| They're the ones putting them on buses, putting them on planes, giving them $1,300 to $1,400 each of taxpayer money. | ||
| And so we should be able to revoke those licenses of these 501c3 organizations like a Catholic charity that is operating and aiding and abetting human and sex trafficking here in the state of Texas. | ||
| So there are many things that a governor could do. | ||
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unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, | ||
| Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, and candidate for Governor of Texas, | ||
| Allen West. | ||
| Welcome back to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Good to be with you, Dave, and Merry Christmas. | ||
| I have to make one correction. | ||
| I stepped down from being the Chairman back in June, right before I announced the run for Governor, because I didn't want any conflict of interest. | ||
| But everything is going very well here in Texas. | ||
| Well, Merry Christmas to you. | ||
| And I like being corrected by the guest on the very first sentence of an interview. | ||
| I feel we're not gonna edit. | ||
| I always tell my guests we don't edit for content, so I like it. | ||
| You're setting the tone. | ||
| I appreciate the fact check on that. | ||
| How are you, my friend? | ||
| You know, I realized like a minute before we started here that we've actually never done the one-on-one. | ||
| You've been on the show once. | ||
| You were on with Chad Robichaud. | ||
| We were talking about all the work that you guys do with veterans, but we've actually never done the one-on-one. | ||
| That was a couple of years ago. | ||
| You've had an interesting couple of years. | ||
| Yeah, it has been an interesting couple of years. | ||
| By the grace of God, I probably should not be here because last year Memorial Day weekend, I had an accident on my motorcycle, 75 miles an hour on an interstate highway. | ||
| And the fact that I'm still alive is very great. | ||
| And so it's a pleasure to be here with you and everything. | ||
| And I'm down here in Livingston, Texas at VFW Post 8568. | ||
| And I love coming, you know, getting out of the big cities and getting down to the small rural areas and especially being with veterans. | ||
| What a great thing to do is, you know, as we go into the holiday season also. | ||
| Yeah, and you guys do some tremendous work with veterans. | ||
| Before we get into everything you're doing now and why you're running for governor of Texas and everything else, could we just do the quick two-minute bio on you and your story, your service, that sort of thing, just so those that don't know you will fully know you, and then we'll go from there. | ||
| Well, I got to tell you, when you think about the American dream and everything that America offers to each and every one of us, I call it the equality of opportunity, not the equality of outcomes. | ||
| You know, 60 years ago, I was born in a blacks-only hospital in the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia. | ||
| I grew up in the same neighborhood. | ||
| They gave us Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. | ||
| there in Atlanta. | ||
| My dad was a World War II corporal, United States Army, and he served this country at a time when he was not seen equal to everyone in the segregated army. | ||
| My mother did 25 years plus civilian service with the Marine headquarters in Atlanta. | ||
| My older brother was an infantryman in Marine Corps and was wounded in Vietnam. | ||
| At the age of 15, my dad challenged me to be the first officer in our family. | ||
| And on 31 July 1982, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant at the University of Tennessee. | ||
| I served 22 years active duty service for the United States Army as a field artilleryman, also as a paratrooper, 13 different countries, three different combat zones. | ||
| The story for our family doesn't end there. | ||
| My nephew, who is my older brother's son, he is now a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army, continuing to serve. | ||
| I've been married for 32 years. | ||
| I have a great wife. | ||
| She's really the brain trust of this couple. | ||
| She has an MBA and a PhD, and I met her when she was a business professor at Kansas State University. | ||
| We have two daughters, Aubrey and Austin, 28 and 24. | ||
| And six months ago, we became grandparents to an incredible A little grandson by the name of Jackson Bernard. | ||
| So that's pretty much so my life. | ||
| And, you know, I had a great opportunity to serve in the state of Florida as a United States Congressman. | ||
| And back in 2004, I got the opportunity to come back to Texas. | ||
| My last duty assignment was Fort Hood, Texas. | ||
| And so here I am now running to be the governor of the state of Texas. | ||
| Well, you definitely handled the resume question well. | ||
| So let's talk a little bit about the states, because you mentioned the sort of big two or the shining stars, at least from where I'm at at the moment. | ||
| As you know, I'm in crazy Los Angeles, California, as we tape this. | ||
| But you mentioned Florida, where you were a congressman. | ||
| You're running for governor in Texas. | ||
| Are you sort of pleased to see the way the states have gone in different directions at this point, that the federalist system is sort of working when you see hubs of freedom like Florida and Texas, and I'll throw Tennessee in there and a couple other states, while you watch some of the blue states kind of crumble? | ||
| Well, the interesting thing is I think we need to reassert that sense of federalism and what we see as far as that understanding of the 10th Amendment, where it says that those powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and to the people. | ||
| And that's where we have a huge constitutional crisis here in the state of Texas, because Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution, there are two things that the federal government is supposed to guarantee to every state in the union. | ||
| Number one, a Republican form of government, not Republican Party, but Republican form of government. | ||
| And number two, they're supposed to protect every state from invasion. | ||
| Well, when you have an administration like we see with the Biden administration that has abdicated their constitutional duty and responsibility to protect the sovereignty of Texas and the sovereignty of the United States of America, Texas has a 1,254 mile border with a foreign country. | ||
| And it is not just an everyday foreign country, it's a destabilized foreign country. | ||
| And we see this transnational Narco criminal terrorist organization known as the cartels really running things along our border. | ||
| And so the founding fathers and their brilliance gave the state the ability to be able to protect itself if the federal government abdicated that. | ||
| And so I think that that's one of the things we see here in Texas and many of the other red states is to once again reassert that ideal of federalism. | ||
| The federal government is supreme over the states by the supremacy clause, but It has to be that they're doing things pursuant thereof to the Constitution. | ||
| And I will challenge anyone when we see this Biden administration, they're not doing too many things pursuant to the Constitution. | ||
| Is the border issue, you think that's the number one issue on Texans' minds? | ||
| I mean, it's a little hard to gauge because on one hand, you can sort of only see the videos on Fox or online. | ||
| Mainstream won't cover it. | ||
| And then it makes it a little hard to see, well, what is the average person seeing? | ||
| Do they even know what they're voting on? | ||
| Because they're not seeing it, depending on what news they watch. | ||
| Well, I will tell you that you talk to people down here in Texas, and especially you talk to people on the border counties, they will tell you that's the number one thing. | ||
| And I think that it really came to forefront nationally as an issue when we saw those airplanes that landed in the middle of the night in Westchester County, New York, that had illegal immigrant minor children, and those planes took off from Texas. | ||
| And we also know that there were planes that had been landed in Florida, where I think you may be looking to come. | ||
| We want you to come here to Texas. | ||
| Don't want you to go anywhere else. | ||
| Who told you to make the hard sell, man? | ||
| I'm fine, man. | ||
| I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. | ||
| But, you know, we've seen those planes land in Florida. | ||
| We've seen those planes land in Tennessee. | ||
| And how interesting, those planes are landing in red states. | ||
| Those planes are landing in suburban areas. | ||
| But most definitely, we need to realize that the United States of America right now has an all-time high in drug overdoses. | ||
| Over 100,000 of our young people, drug overdoses. | ||
| And what is that coming from? | ||
| The fentanyl. | ||
| And how is fentanyl getting to the United States of America? | ||
| From China down to Mexico across the border here. | ||
| So we got a drug trafficking crisis. | ||
| We have a human and sex trafficking crisis. | ||
| Texas is the number one state in America for human and sex trafficking. | ||
| Dallas and Houston, maybe you don't want to move into Dallas, but we can talk about a suburb. | ||
| But Dallas and Houston are the top two cities in the country for sex trafficking. | ||
| And we know about the public health crisis. | ||
| Think about this, Dave. | ||
| I mean, we've got a federal government that's telling us, law-abiding American citizens, what we have to get injected into our bodies. | ||
| But people are coming across 200,000 a month, and no one is telling them they have to have anything injected in their body. | ||
| So we have a public health crisis as well. | ||
| Were you beyond shocked when about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago, when Anthony Fauci was asked about just that and, you know, they're talking about a mandate on planes for domestic travel, on trains, and then the reporter wisely asked him, well, what about the people at the border? | ||
| And he basically was like, ah, that's a separate issue altogether. | ||
| Not for you guys. | ||
| No, it's not for us. | ||
| It's very dismissive. | ||
| And if you want to look at spikes where we've seen COVID here in the state of Texas, you just follow the places where we have a lot of concentrations of illegal immigrants going to, to include out in West Texas. | ||
| They've been busing illegal immigrants out in West Texas, putting them up In hotels and in the man camps for some of the oil and gas field workers. | ||
| And you've seen a spike out there in Midland and Odessa. | ||
| You see it in the major cities like Houston. | ||
| There's an estimation that the population of Houston has increased somewhere between 300,000 to 400,000 because there's a pipeline of folks coming across the border illegally, somehow getting transported, and then they are bunkered down in Houston or some of these other places in these stash houses. | ||
| So we have a huge issue that we have to deal with. | ||
| So the easy version of this for guys like us would be, okay, the Biden administration wants to destroy America. | ||
| You know, the Democrats want to flood the country. | ||
| It's all about demographics or voting patterns or keep the people on the dole, et cetera. | ||
| I mean, do you think it's as simple as all that? | ||
| Or is there something, is this ineptitude? | ||
| Is this that these people just don't know how to govern? | ||
| Don't know what they're doing? | ||
| Or do you think it's something, you know, directly nefarious? | ||
| It is nefarious. | ||
| It's intentional and purposeful. | ||
| Because when I look at this open borders agenda that was implemented unconstitutionally, I mean, you cannot give up the sovereignty of the United States of America by executive order. | ||
| But then you look at H.R. | ||
| 1 and what H.R. | ||
| 1 talks about, because both of them came about at the same time. | ||
| And H.R. | ||
| 1 says that there will be no voter registration There'll be no picture ID that we will be doing voting by unsolicited mail-in ballots and online voter registration, same-day voter registration, same-day voting. | ||
| And it does talk about illegals being able to vote. | ||
| And you look at this infrastructure, the human infrastructure bill, where they're talking about granting amnesty. | ||
| And so by the end of this year, we will be looking at close to 2 million illegal immigrants. | ||
| This is a record high for the United States of America have crossed the border and come into this country. | ||
| So I'm sure some people are watching going, well, wait a minute. | ||
| Abbott's a Republican. | ||
| He's over there. | ||
| Has he dropped the ball on this? | ||
| Without a doubt, you have to wonder why the governor hasn't done a lot better, and we could have seen this coming. | ||
| That's what leadership is all about. | ||
| Leadership is about having vision and being very prescient. | ||
| And so you should have taken all the measures necessary to ensure that you had our own Texas Military Department, our National Guard, ready to secure our border and make sure that we did not see this flood of illegals coming here. | ||
| We needed to make sure that we could stand on our constitutional right, Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3, to be able to secure our border. | ||
| And I think another thing, an executive order from the governor of the state of Texas to declare these cartels as a terrorist organization because, you know, I was in Iraq, I was in Afghanistan, and, you know, in Afghanistan the Taliban uses opium as a means to, you know, fuel their efforts. | ||
| And so what are they doing here? | ||
| They're using fentanyl, methamphetamines, marijuana. | ||
| So it's the exact same thing. | ||
| We're fighting an insurgency and they're shooting across the border into the state of Texas, which is an act of war. | ||
| If you declare them as a terrorist organization, then you go after their resources and their financing. | ||
| You go after their assets. | ||
| You freeze it and you seize it. | ||
| We have not done anything to the non-governmental organizations that are getting federal grant money And they're becoming the travel agencies for these illegal immigrants. | ||
| They're the ones putting them on buses, putting them on planes, giving them $1,300 to $1,400 each of taxpayer money. | ||
| And so we should be able to revoke those licenses of these 501c3 organizations, like the Catholic Charities, that is operating and aiding and abetting human and sex trafficking here in the state of Texas. | ||
| So there are many things that a governor could do. | ||
| Are you surprised how bad everything's gotten under Biden? | ||
| Obviously, you didn't vote for Biden, but are you shocked that, you know, only 11 months in, just sort of across the board, how bad it is? | ||
| No, I'm not, because this is what progressive socialism is all about. | ||
| And, you know, when I was in Congress back in 2011, 2012, you know, I just looked at what they believed in. | ||
| I looked at their policies. | ||
| I looked at their ideological agenda. | ||
| And I called them out as socialists, Marxists, some of them even communists. | ||
| And of course, you remember, I mean, people went sideways on me for that. | ||
| But guess what happens now today? | ||
| They tell you. | ||
| We're socialists. | ||
| We're Marxists. | ||
| And so when you look at that philosophy of governance, I'm not surprised by what they're doing. | ||
| They're doing exactly what they believe in, what they say. | ||
| The fascism, the suppression of free speech and freedom of expression, You know, calling parents who just want to stand up and make sure that their kids get a good education, domestic terrorists. | ||
| And that's even happening here in Texas, where we have had two parents in Round Rock, just north of Austin. | ||
| They were arrested in their homes for just going and speaking out at a school board meeting. | ||
| This is not America. | ||
| This is not the Texas that people want. | ||
| You know, I gotta do a mea culpa here, man, because I remember when you were talking about this stuff way back when, and I was a lefty and I was on the Young Turks at the time, and I'm sure I did videos on their channel. | ||
| It's probably saying that you were nuts, you know, because you saw it early and I wasn't there yet. | ||
| So, times change, I suppose. | ||
| Well, you know, in Ecclesiastes, King Solomon said, there's nothing new under the sun. | ||
| And George Santayana once said, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. | ||
| And I think that's the important thing, again, about leadership and being a statesman. | ||
| You have to say things that people need to hear, not what they want to hear. | ||
| And I was willing to take the heat because, look, in 1985, I went through Checkpoint Charlie. | ||
| And I went over to East Berlin, and I saw what it was like. | ||
| And my background is in political science, political theory. | ||
| And this is textbook stuff, what we see happening here, Dave. | ||
| And I think, you know, kudos to you for having the courage to stand up and say, hey, look, you know, I can't believe in this stuff anymore. | ||
| I mean, you live out there in California. | ||
| You see what is going on. | ||
| This is not what we're supposed to have in a constitutional republic. | ||
| And it doesn't matter. | ||
| R&D, after a name, is starting to mean less and less. | ||
| It's about how you see the relationship of the individual to the institution of government. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| The Declaration of Independence says that the individual is supreme. | ||
| They are sovereign because their rights come from a creator God. | ||
| If you're atheist or whatever, that doesn't matter. | ||
| Your rights don't come from an entity called government. | ||
| Your life, your liberty, your property, as John Locke talked about in the Second Treatise of Government, and your pursuit of happiness. | ||
| And we've got to get back to those basic fundamentals. | ||
| Are you worried that just not enough people care about what you just said there? | ||
| You know, last time I saw you, actually, was at Glenn Beck's museum, where he's put together this extraordinary... Oh, sorry, what's the name of the museum? | ||
| Oh, it's... | ||
| It's the American journey experience. | ||
| The American journey experience. | ||
| It's absolutely incredible. | ||
| He has a trove of artifacts that are unimaginable. | ||
| I mean, I literally held the Olympic torch that was held by Jesse Owens in front of Hitler. | ||
| I mean, I couldn't even believe they would let me touch that thing. | ||
| I mean, that's just amongst the incredible stuff that they have. | ||
| But when I was there and I saw you there, it sort of goes to what you're saying right now. | ||
| There's a history that we have. | ||
| There are documents that we have that freed us. | ||
| But not enough people care about them or seem to be willing to stand up for them. | ||
| Are you surprised by that? | ||
| What can we do to reverse that? | ||
| I think it's starting to happen. | ||
| And, you know, I will say one of the positives that came out of COVID was that parents are actually starting to see what their kids were not being taught. | ||
| And they start to pay attention. | ||
| And now for the first time, you never heard about people going to school board meetings two years ago. | ||
| But now they are. | ||
| And they're challenging the status quo. | ||
| They're challenging the institution of indoctrination. | ||
| And they don't like that. | ||
| And that's why they're fighting back vehemently against it. | ||
| So I do think that there's an awakening moment. | ||
| here in the United States of America. | ||
| But, you know, Alexander Frazier Teitler talked about the cycle of democracies, and he said that a democracy can't last as a permanent form of government. | ||
| It can only last until voters realize they can vote their own largesse from the public treasury. | ||
| And one of the pivot points for that decline is apathy and complacency. | ||
| And so I think that we've seen that, but it's not too late for us to recover from it. | ||
| But this is an ideological war that we're in. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| between constitutional conservatism and progressive socialism and Marxism. | ||
| Where do you think some of the, say, disaffected liberals, maybe libertarians, like the wider group right now that I think, I've been saying for a while, it's sort of woke versus everybody, and it's our job as everybody to kind of figure out how we can work together, how we can disagree and agree to disagree, et cetera. | ||
| How do you think that thing can work? | ||
| Or do you think that thing can work? | ||
| I do think it can work, and it has to be based upon individual rights, freedoms, and liberties. | ||
| I'll give you a case in point. | ||
| Just recently, I was up in New York City and went out to get something to eat after a Fox interview and everything. | ||
| I walked into this diner, and a guy asked me, where's your COVID shot card? | ||
| I said, I don't have a COVID shot card. | ||
| I'm visiting here from Texas. | ||
| He said, well, you can't eat here. | ||
| I think that's going to be the thing that unites people. | ||
| Because I remember my mother and father, once upon a time they were told that they couldn't eat in certain places because of their skin color. | ||
| But now we're being told we can't eat in certain places because someone has decided that we have to get this thing injected into our bodies. | ||
| And I really believe that when people start to hear that they no longer have control over their own bodies, that's going to be a rallying cry. | ||
| Just the same as you've seen when Tara McAuliffe stands up in a debate and says parents don't have a right to decide what their children are being taught. | ||
| Oh man, you brought out people in Virginia that would have never cared about a Virginia gubernatorial race. | ||
| And so a year ago, Joe Biden wins Virginia by 11 or 12 points. | ||
| A year later, They lose Virginia by two or three points. | ||
| So I think that that's the shift that we see happen. | ||
| When you start to touch people's individual rights, freedom, and liberty, when you start to reach inside their homes or affect their bodies, then people are going to wake up to this. | ||
| Yeah, it used to be my body, my choice. | ||
| Not so much for them anymore. | ||
| But you mentioned two to three points. | ||
| Speaking of two to three points, the last senatorial campaign in Texas, Ted Cruz only beat Beto by about three points. | ||
| I think it was two and a half, if I'm not mistaken. | ||
| It was a lot closer. | ||
| Yeah, it was a lot closer than people thought. | ||
| What does that tell you about what's happening in Texas? | ||
| Is Austin getting weird, filtering throughout the state? | ||
| Is that what's happening? | ||
| Well, I think that the Beto effect that happened in 2018 was that he was a new person, and the media built this aura around him, and there was a lot of angst and anxiety against Senator Cruz. | ||
| But now the cat's out the bag, and we know who this Mr. O'Rourke is and what he stands for. | ||
| He's completely antithetical to Texas principles and values. | ||
| But when you look at what is happening in Texas, when you look at what is happening in many red states, California used to be a red state. | ||
| I mean, this was the state that gave us Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. | ||
| What is happening in Texas is that we have had governors going to blue states and saying, Why don't you pick up and move your business or your corporation here? | ||
| Because we have better policies and you can economically thrive. | ||
| But the thing that is happening is that as they bring this workforce with them, no one is talking to them saying, don't screw it up when you move to this new place, okay? | ||
| I got to leave California, Silicon Valley because this place sucks. | ||
| And so they end up coming here and they want to vote the same way. | ||
| Now there are individuals that are leaving California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey for all the right reasons. | ||
| But when you have this mass transplant, and I call it the locust effect. | ||
| I mean, people go to the, you know, very good thriving fertile grounds like California used to be, and they chew it up and destroy it. | ||
| And then they look and see where else they can go. | ||
| But I will tell you, hats off to Elon Musk, because earlier in November, Elon Musk put out a tweet to the people there in Austin saying, admonishing them, saying, don't let Austin become the new San Francisco. | ||
| Because the people in Austin, since they defunded the police, got all woke and everything like that, they've seen a 66% increase in violent crime, 71% increase in homicide. | ||
| The homeless situation there is absolutely disgusting and appalling. | ||
| People don't go downtown in Austin at night, but yet they still voted down a proposition to refund the police. | ||
| And so I think that's, at the core, something that's going to change, because all of a sudden, when people realize that their personal safety and security is at risk, they'll back away from this. | ||
| Can you get those people, though, to change? | ||
| I get that you might be able to get the true Texan that's been there for a lifetime to go, okay, we really gotta vote the right way. | ||
| But the ones that come from Silicon Valley, it takes sort of a little smacking around for them to realize that they're leaving the thing that they voted for. | ||
| It does. | ||
| And I think it's another thing we have to do is teach them about, you know, the history of Texas or, you know, the history of Georgia or Tennessee and why they're successful. | ||
| And, you know, understand that Texas is the only state in the union that fought for and won its independence by itself. | ||
| But I think the other thing that we have to do Without a doubt, is understand that, you know, find out where those strong crossing points, like you and I just discussed, where you get the 60 to 65 percent. | ||
| Because I think it's that 35 to 40 percent, you're probably just not going to get through to them. | ||
| But let's go after the people that understand. | ||
| And that's why we had such success when I was the chairman of the party going down into the Rio Grande Valley. | ||
| And we told the people in the Hispanic community who had never seen a Republican Party chairman in the Rio Grande Valley previous to that. | ||
| Your principles and values are our principles and values. | ||
| It wasn't about the outreach, it was about the engagement. | ||
| Outreach means you show up in a Black History Month, Hispanic American Heritage Month, and then people never see you again until a couple of months before an election. | ||
| But when you're there all the time, 24-7, 365, talking about those common points that you can expand upon, Then people will rally to your cause. | ||
| And again, I think that this is more of a philosophical, ideological, cultural basis that we have to approach things and not just about political parties anymore. | ||
| So I hate to do the identity politics thing, obviously, and I know you don't want to do it either, but it exists whether we talk about it or not. | ||
| That's their battleground. | ||
| That's what they've got. | ||
| As you know, I campaigned with Larry Elder, who's a good friend of mine. | ||
| I saw what the machine did to him. | ||
| For Joe Biden to show up here the day before the election, refuse to say Larry's name, call him a Trump clone, | ||
| a guy who grew up in South Central LA, son of a janitor. | ||
| I mean, it's so extraordinarily evil. | ||
| The stuff that Gavin Newsom did, the evil ads that Reed Hastings from Netflix put out | ||
| about Larry, black face of white supremacy, according to the LA Times. | ||
| You know all this stuff. | ||
| There's obviously gonna be a version of that that's gonna come after you. | ||
| You've been through the game before, but are you ready for it in a gubernatorial thing, which is different than a congressional race and being a talking head on Fox, etc.? ? | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| And one of the things about being here in the state of Texas, the Republican Party of Texas was founded on Independence Day of 1867 by 150 black men in Houston, Texas. | ||
| One of the early chairmen was Norris Raikouni. | ||
| You think about Juneteenth, and you think about how recently they just dedicated a statue to a man who was a former slave, State Senator Matthew Gaines, who was instrumental in establishing Texas A&M University and Prairie View A&M University. | ||
| And he's buried there at Texas A&M University. | ||
| Guess who's also buried there on the campus of Texas A&M? | ||
| You know, President George H.W. | ||
| Bush and his wife. | ||
| And so when you talk about these things and you use history to illuminate people and you talk about the real party of systemic racism has been the Democrat Party. | ||
| I often tell folks there are two ways that you can enslave people. | ||
| One is that you work them for no pay, and the other is that you pay them for no work. | ||
| And tell me which party has done that in the history of the United States of America. | ||
| So I think that as long as you stand strong, and you always go on the offense, not on the defense, you put them back on their heels. | ||
| You know, all this talk about white supremacy and racism, I have yet to see anyone on the left speak out against Margaret Sanger. | ||
| Margaret Sanger, you know, created Planned Parenthood for one reason, because she believed that blacks were undesirables and human weeds. | ||
| And yet we see 71 to 73 percent of Planned Parenthood clinics in minority communities. | ||
| So as long as we are the aggressor, and long as we are pitting them on their heels, we don't let them define the narrative. | ||
| And I think that's the thing that the military taught me, and that's how we're going to make sure that we don't allow them to dictate and define who I am. | ||
| Are there other things going on in Texas that maybe we're not hearing about from a national perspective that you guys are aware of or that you think are the keys to winning and creating a flourishing state? | ||
| Oh sure, without a doubt the property tax system that we have here is sixth highest in the country and it's really Marxist because here in Texas who would have ever thought you can pay off your land, you can pay off your mortgage, you can never own your home. | ||
| So we've got to transition away from that. | ||
| A lot of people maybe remember this past February where Texas looked like North Korea at night on a satellite image map. | ||
| We have such oil and gas resources here, we should never go into the dark, but it was an over-reliance on wind and solar, so that's another big issue for people here, without a doubt. | ||
| Wait, Colonel West, didn't AOC tell me that was because they're not green enough? | ||
| I thought it was because they're not green enough. | ||
| Yeah, well, I would like for her to come down here and spend that time with us. | ||
| You know, green energy may be nice, but it can only give you about 3-6%. | ||
| We had Wind and Solar, we gave them 23-26% of our energy distribution plan, and they just weren't able to own up to that. | ||
| And so on that Valentine's Day in February, we went from 23% down to 3%, and we did not do the winterization for our natural gas, and so those plants weren't ready to fire up as well. | ||
| So that's a big issue also. | ||
| But without a doubt, the border security issue, and then also the election integrity issue, because there are some people here in Texas, Democrats, that should be in jail. | ||
| They should not be walking free based upon some of the things that they did, especially down in Harris County, which is the largest county here in Texas, third largest, third or fourth largest in the country. | ||
| So how do you address election integrity without everyone saying you're a conspiracy theorist or a whack job? | ||
| Because again, when I was out there with Larry, every single person, I'm not kidding you, I think every single person who came up to me to say something would say the same two things. | ||
| They'd say, does Larry have a chance and will it be legit? | ||
| And I would always say yes to number one and I have no idea to number two. | ||
| But once you go down that path, they call you a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| You're, you know, all the stuff, all the stuff. | ||
| So how do you tackle election integrity in a way that's going to actually fix something? | ||
| Well, I think the most important thing you've got to realize is that there are unconstitutional actions that happened in November 2020. | ||
| No one can debate about that. | ||
| In five battleground states, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arizona, you had governors, secretaries of state, and judges changing election law. | ||
| And sadly, we even had that happen here in the state of Texas, where our governor changed early voting from two weeks to three weeks. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| And so that's unconstitutional. | ||
| So that's one thing we have to tackle. | ||
| Then we need to make sure we have Secretary of State's offices that are vetting these voting machines and saying, these are the approved lists of voting machines that we'll have in this state. | ||
| And if you violate that, then there has to be consequences. | ||
| The problem is, you can put all the laws you want on the books, Dave, but if you don't enforce them, if there are no consequences, then the left is going to continue to do exactly that. | ||
| It goes right back to what Joseph Stalin said. | ||
| It is not the person that casts the ballot that matters, it's the person that counts the ballot that matters. | ||
| And so we've got to make sure these machines are not tied up to the internet. | ||
| We've got to make sure we have paper trail audible background to it. | ||
| And we also need to make sure that the people that are supposed to be there as poll workers and whatever, they're able to do their duties. | ||
| But when we look at the Harris County clerk, Chris Hollins, Who opened up curbside voting locations in nine different Democrat precincts in Harris County. | ||
| He's still walking around free. | ||
| He was going to mail out 2.7 million unsolicited ballots. | ||
| He's still walking around free. | ||
| So there has to be consequences. | ||
| I literally tried to show the poll worker my ID to vote, and he would not look at it. | ||
| That tells you all you need to know. | ||
| I could be literally, literally anyone. | ||
| Speaking of the election stuff, so Texas obviously had some election laws that were passed. | ||
| Georgia's had some. | ||
| We're sort of seeing them pop up throughout the country. | ||
| And of course, the way the media treats it, this is to stop black people somehow from voting, because apparently black people Don't have ID. | ||
| Do you have an ID? | ||
| Were you able to figure out how to get an ID? | ||
| Let's not get you doxxed. | ||
| Let's not get you doxxed. | ||
| I'll take your word for it. | ||
| Trust will verify, folks. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| We're going to blur that. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| That's my license to carry card. | ||
| I mean, the leftists, they don't want to see my license to carry card. | ||
| They definitely don't wanna see that. | ||
| We're gonna blur it anyway, Connor, we're blurring that thing. | ||
| Save this guy's career right now. | ||
| Hey, show up at my house and you're gonna meet somebody. | ||
| Ah, fair enough. | ||
| That was a challenge more than a cell phone right there. | ||
| But when you see that, you know, I went through all of the bullet points | ||
| about showing ID, about making sure that we're gonna count things properly and cameras, | ||
| and you can't canvas right there, then in there. | ||
| But they turn the entire thing into this is a bunch of racists trying to stop minorities from voting. | ||
| That's not the case, just not the case. | ||
| Then Southwest Airlines is racist, American Airlines, all these places are racist. | ||
| Mini-golf, mini-golf! | ||
| You need an ID. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Every place that you have to go to show an ID, therefore, is racist. | ||
| And again, that comes back to what I said, Dave. | ||
| We've got to go on offense and we've got to just show the hypocrisy and the real idiocy | ||
| of what these guys are talking about because all they have to fall back on is this racist. | ||
| You know, when Joe Biden gave his inaugural address talking about unity, he was not talking about unity. | ||
| He was talking about conformity. | ||
| And if you don't conform, he said, we're going to call you a racist, a white supremacist. | ||
| And what has happened this entire year? | ||
| If you don't agree with their ideological agenda, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, whatever, you're a racist and you're a white supremacist. | ||
| What about on the mandate side of this, the vaccine mandate side of this? | ||
| Texas has largely remained open. | ||
| The couple of times that I've been to Texas in the last two years have been the rare moments of freedom, that plus Florida and Tennessee, for me at least. | ||
| Do you think Abbott did basically the right thing? | ||
| Could he have done more? | ||
| Should we all have just ignored everything right from the beginning? | ||
| I mean, I think in retrospect now, it's like, man, we just should have told people, if you wanna wear a mask, wear a mask and just get out of our way and that's it. | ||
| We were dealing with the least, most dangerous pandemic the world has ever seen. | ||
| A 99.9% recovery rate. | ||
| But what did we do? | ||
| We destroyed people's individual liberties and freedoms. | ||
| And we can't allow that to happen. | ||
| And yes, we did have a shutdown here in Texas that almost lasts about 11 months. | ||
| About 2.5, 2.7 million Texans lost jobs. | ||
| About 10,000 small businesses closed. | ||
| And right now we still have Texans that are losing their jobs because of some private businesses are forcing them to get a jab in their arm. | ||
| And so we have been a lot of, I think about 30 legislators in the Texas State House and Senate have asked them to have a fourth special session. | ||
| To make sure that they pass a law, not an executive order, but pass a law against these mandates. | ||
| They've done that in Georgia. | ||
| They did that in Florida. | ||
| The legislature came back in the executive session. | ||
| So I think the Texans want to see a little bit more action to make sure that we stay one of the most free and independent states that you have here in the United States of America. | ||
| So what this always comes down to for me, I bring it up on my show all the time, is that the states, it's sort of where we started here, that the states are gonna kind of go in their separate directions. | ||
| And in some ways that's okay because of the federalist system and it gives you more power over your state. | ||
| But what do you think ideologically, those that sort of believe in what we're talking about here, what do you think we do when they just will not leave us alone? | ||
| To me, the more that Texas, Florida, Tennessee, some of those other states flourish, and it's very obvious that they're gonna flourish, because they'll bring in the right people, they'll believe in the right things, The other guys are never going to let them alone. | ||
| They're going to always use them as the scapegoat and everything else. | ||
| And I could see the average person in Texas going, you know, I'm sick of my freaking tax money paid to the federal government being sent to some idiot who's voting for Gavin Newsom in California. | ||
| I mean, that doesn't seem tenable to me for a very long time. | ||
| No, you're absolutely right. | ||
| And that's one of the leverages that we do have here in Texas and other states are the remittances that we send back to the federal government. | ||
| Because if the federal government is not owning up to its constitutional duties and responsibilities, like we see with the border here, then Texas look and say, okay, it's going to cost us X amount of billions of dollars. | ||
| to get this thing rectified. | ||
| And that's what we're not gonna be sending back to you as far as Memphis is to the federal government. | ||
| So everything has to come back to the rule of law. | ||
| Everything has to come back to that Republican form of government, | ||
| which the federal government is supposed to provide to every state in the union. | ||
| And we have to stand on that. | ||
| And I think it's so important that just the same as the blue states came together | ||
| with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact to try to undermine electoral college, | ||
| red states need to form a wall. | ||
| They need to lock shields and make sure that they are doing what is right, abiding by the rule of law, and saying that we're not. | ||
| We're going to put up an impenetrable front if you continue to try to undermine our freedoms and liberties in our states. | ||
| Remember in the Declaration of Independence, it says free and independent states created these United States of America. | ||
| And I think we need to go back and reassert that. | ||
| Have states actually done that? | ||
| I actually don't know. | ||
| They've basically, if the federal government is in dereliction of duty, they can basically say, hey, we're just not gonna pay you that money that you've been collecting from us? | ||
| Or a portion of it or something? | ||
| I think you're starting to see some challenges. | ||
| You look at Oklahoma right now. | ||
| They're saying that they're not gonna allow the federal government to come down and just use their National Guard. | ||
| And of course there's a fight going back there. | ||
| But I think that that's something that we can do. | ||
| It's about the power of the purse. | ||
| And I think states need to understand that power that they have and start strangling | ||
| the resources going back to the federal government. | ||
| Because right now, when you look at what the federal government is doing with our tax dollars, | ||
| you just brought it out. | ||
| It's going to bail out blue states and you can't. | ||
| And so I don't think that we want to see that happen. | ||
| What do you do when you have a state that basically is doing the right stuff? | ||
| And then, you know, we talked about Austin before. | ||
| There's some backwards stuff going on there. | ||
| What would you as governor do if you sat down with the mayor of Austin and you felt the policies were going in the wrong direction? | ||
| When I was there last time, you know, it wasn't quite San Francisco, but there's a lot of homeless, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| What do you do as the governor? | ||
| What kind of leverage do you actually have? | ||
| Well, I think it's first and foremost, you got to educate the electorate that lives within that municipality and get them to understand that this is something that you can do by petition, by referendum and what have you. | ||
| But without a doubt, my responsibility is for all Texans. | ||
| And when I see that you have these district attorneys that are saying we're not going to prosecute people for anything at $750 or less, when you have these judges here in Texas that are releasing You know, when you dig into the Texas state constitution, you find that the governor is able to impeach or start impeachment proceedings against these judges. | ||
| You have to work with the Texas state house, but you have to stay within the rule of law. | ||
| You don't want to be seen as some type of dictator or anything like that, but you got to get people to understand that I will stand up for the rule of law. | ||
| I will make sure that I protect the safety and security of individuals. | ||
| But you gotta empower the people to be able to do these things. | ||
| And again, I think that you see an awakening toward that. | ||
| Do you think conservatives have to use a little more power than they would want to, perhaps? | ||
| Yeah, you know, one of the things I always say is that Republicans have to stop bringing a plastic spoon to a gunfight, because they always just think, nah, they're not going to do anything about it. | ||
| So we cannot continue to allow them to kick sand in our face. | ||
| We've got to stand up, and I think that's what people are looking for. | ||
| And so when we make the case, I mean, we win. | ||
| You look at what happened in Virginia, you look at what almost happened in New Jersey, The left knows that they're going to have an Armageddon, a political Armageddon in the midterm elections that's going to make Barack Obama's look pretty bad. | ||
| I mean, he lost 63 seats in 2010. | ||
| Joe Biden's going to lose even more. | ||
| But we have to understand that we can't have the peaks and valleys. | ||
| We have to have a steady state. | ||
| And I tell people that the most important elections are those elections that are local. | ||
| The city councils, the school boards, the county commissions, the DA races, all of those things that are the closest to the individual citizens down there. | ||
| We gotta start focusing on those. | ||
| In our last couple of minutes here, what else is on your mind? | ||
| Maybe not purely political these days. | ||
| I know you're also a man of faith. | ||
| That frames a lot of your beliefs, of course. | ||
| What else is on your mind in this holiday season? | ||
| Well, you know, college football, I love that being brought up down south and so I always get, you know, honed up for college football. | ||
| But without a doubt, I mean, the blessing of life that came into our family with our new grandson. | ||
| And this will be his first Christmas. | ||
| And on December 1st, we turned on the house lights and just seeing his face light up. | ||
| You know, we have many challenges that we have here, but we're still the greatest nation that the world has ever known. | ||
| But I think that now is the time when you look at a grandson, you look at our children, our grandchildren, everyone. | ||
| Just stand up and fight for what is right and make sure that we are not the first generation that does not pass on something better to subsequent generations. | ||
| Because again, my dad was born in 1920 and my mom was born in 1931 down south. | ||
| And here I am on a national television program talking to you, Dave. | ||
| That's what America is all about. | ||
| The equality of opportunity and not the equality of outcomes. | ||
| Colonel West, we live in a time with very few people who speak as cleanly and clearly and honestly as you do. | ||
| So I'm proud to call you a friend. | ||
| And would you be willing, would you be willing to have a crazy right winger like me maybe open for you on a campaign stop? | ||
| Larry will show you my resume. | ||
| It's pretty decent. | ||
| I think your resume is real decent. | ||
| And I'd love to see you here in Texas because so goes Texas, so goes America, so goes America, so goes the free world. | ||
| So Texas is important for the free world. | ||
| Colonel Allen West, I wish you luck, my friend. | ||
| Merry Christmas to you. | ||
| Merry Christmas. |
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