March 6, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| But here's one of the fundamental things I think people need to understand about what Liz Cheney is doing, is we have a separation of powers. | ||
| The legislative branch writes the laws, the executive branch carries them out, and the judiciary makes decisions, you know, from criminal law to criminal cases to deciding, you know, disputes between neighbors. | ||
| What this commission has done is taken on the role of all of them, but most importantly, this January 6th commission is acting as the prosecutor They're presenting evidence to themselves as the judiciary. | ||
| And then they are going to be making the decision as the jury. | ||
| So they have actually subsumed in themselves all aspects of decision making. | ||
| They will decide what evidence comes in. | ||
| And if it doesn't fit their narrative, we'll never see it. | ||
| It'll never see the light of day. | ||
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unidentified
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[MUSIC] | |
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a US. | ||
| congressional candidate for Wyoming's at-large district, Harriet Hageman. | ||
| Welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me, Dave. | ||
| It's wonderful to be here. | ||
| I'm glad to have you because we met briefly about two weeks ago at a fundraiser at Peter Thiel's house and you were going to give a talk and then unfortunately sometimes it does rain here in Miami and it started to rain so you had to cut your talk just a bit short but I thought there's something interesting. | ||
| This lady's up to something. | ||
| I liked what you started talking about. | ||
| You're running against Liz Cheney. | ||
| There's a lot there. | ||
| So I thought first off, how about you just introduce yourself to the people since, you know, Wyoming, obviously a small state, but an important one, but for the people that don't know you. | ||
| Well, I appreciate that opportunity. | ||
| Yes, I was going to give a bit more background about who I was. | ||
| It was a wonderful event at Peter's home and so many of the people there had never met me before. | ||
| So I wanted to give them just a bit of background so that they knew who they were supporting. | ||
| And why? | ||
| We oftentimes focus on the fact that I'm running against Liz Cheney, but I'm not just running against Liz Cheney. | ||
| I'm running for Wyoming. | ||
| I have deep, deep roots in Wyoming. | ||
| My great grandfather came to Wyoming in 1879 on a cattle trail north from Texas, and he ended up ranching there for many, many years. | ||
| And so I have lots of cousins. | ||
| I have a very large family here in Wyoming. | ||
| And then I come from a large family myself. | ||
| When I was born, I was my parents' fifth child. | ||
| Uh, when they brought me home from the hospital, my oldest sister was five years old and they had just bought a ranch. | ||
| They were over $200,000 in debt. | ||
| They had $35 in the bank and it was 1962. | ||
| So we were, we were land rich, I guess you'd say, but awfully cash poor. | ||
| I grew up on that ranch. | ||
| I grew up fixing fence and moving cows and flipping bales and doing whatever was necessary. | ||
| We all learned to drive when we were about four years old because we helped our dad when he was feeding cows. | ||
| We were very actively involved and our parents ensured that we were. | ||
| And one of the things that they always taught us when we were growing up, and I know that this sounds a bit strange to some people who don't grow up in that kind of a life, but my parents always told us that we had a responsibility to keep ourselves alive. | ||
| From the time we were very, very young, three and four years old, we were told we had to keep ourselves alive. | ||
| They didn't put a lot of constraints on us. | ||
| We rode horseback. | ||
| We did things, we would be gone from the house, you know, for six, seven hours a day. | ||
| We played with snapping turtles. | ||
| We had a rattlesnake that lived under the house for a period of time. | ||
| We did a lot of things out there, but we, but with that, we had a lot of freedom, I guess is what I'm saying. | ||
| And so the flip side of freedom is responsibility and the flip side of responsibility is freedom. | ||
| And right now in this country, that isn't really the way that people view things. | ||
| And I think Thomas Sowell recently said it best when he said, People are no longer responsible for themselves, but they're responsible for what other people did, even if it was a hundred years ago. | ||
| And I think that that's where we're heading in this country. | ||
| And I think it's a really wrong approach. | ||
| And I think that that's why my background really helps me to understand because that freedom is incredibly important. | ||
| And it's part of why I'm running. | ||
| So in terms of my background, you know, I'm a water and natural resource attorney. | ||
| I'm a constitutional attorney. | ||
| I've been practicing law for almost 33 years, and I've been fighting for and working for Wyoming for a long, long time. | ||
| I work and I fight for the people who put food on your table, gas in your car, a roof over your head, and they pave your highways. | ||
| And so I have the credentials. | ||
| I have the background. | ||
| I have the knowledge about Wyoming to be an effective congresswoman for the state. | ||
| But also you mentioned that Wyoming is an important state. | ||
| It's an incredibly important state to the prosperity of this country. | ||
| We're the Saudi Arabia of the United States. | ||
| We're the largest coal producer. | ||
| We're the largest Toronto producer. | ||
| We're one of the top oil and gas producers in the nation. | ||
| We really are instrumental in terms of ensuring prosperity in this country. | ||
| And so that's why it is so incredibly important to have someone with my background, my history, and my knowledge running for this seat because I need to do it for Wyoming and I also need to do it for our country. | ||
| You know, it's funny, you said it quite well there, but when I was listening to you talk at Peters, I was thinking, this is really something, because you were saying a little bit about your bio, and I'm thinking, here I am, I'm Brooklyn-born, lived in New York City most of my life, then Los Angeles for, you know, the last eight years until I moved here to the free state of Florida, and yet the things that you're talking about right now are exactly the things that resonate with me, and that shows you how the ideas of freedom and liberty and all of that crazy stuff really has nothing to do with geography, people just don't understand The issues. | ||
| So one thing that I saw, and I didn't know this till this morning when I was doing a little research on you, that Wyoming's at large district, meaning there is only one congressional district in the entire state. | ||
| That is, that is really, is that the only state to have that? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| And we're the least populated state in the nation. | ||
| So we only have 560,000 people in our state, but we're the ninth largest land wise. | ||
| So I've already traveled since September. | ||
| I've already driven over 13,000 miles in the state of Wyoming, visiting every single county, sometimes multiple times, going to events. | ||
| Last Wednesday, I was at a bull sale in Worland and meeting with our ranchers, meeting with our cattle producers, talking to them about the challenges associated with the supply chain. | ||
| Oh, my goodness gracious, trying to get parts for our tractors, trying to get parts for our trucks to be able to haul our livestock. | ||
| All of those things are being impacted by this horrific administration that we have in place right now with Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Democrats. | ||
| We feel it in Wyoming. | ||
| You feel it in New York. | ||
| You feel it in Florida. | ||
| We feel it everywhere in this country because this is a disaster that has been created in large part because the very first thing that Biden did when he took office was try to choke off our energy supply. | ||
| That affects me personally in Wyoming because, again, we're an energy producing state. | ||
| But it affects every single one of us. | ||
| And just, I've been having to eat out quite a bit lately, because I am traveling so much. | ||
| The cost of food in restaurants is absolutely skyrocketing. | ||
| I had a breakfast the other day at the airport. | ||
| Realize it's a bit expensive at the airport. | ||
| A pork chop, couple of eggs, a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, it's $33. | ||
| Now, that's just astronomical. | ||
| And it is because of this administration. | ||
| So you mentioned that you guys are an energy-producing state, obviously. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about the type of people that are in that line of work, the people that are in the coal mines, et cetera, et cetera, that are doing this stuff? | ||
| Because I think people, especially out of the mainstream left now and what you get out of AOC and the rest of them, is just a complete dismissal of these people and their lives and the work that they do and how, you know, you mentioned generational, how many years they've put into this and everything else. | ||
| Can you just talk about the types of people that are your hopeful constituents? | ||
| Well, absolutely. | ||
| They are the salt of the earth. | ||
| They're independent. | ||
| They're tough. | ||
| They know who and what we are in the state of Wyoming. | ||
| They understand our Constitution, and they really do understand freedom and liberty because they live it every day. | ||
| They do what they want to do, and they produce a fabulous resource. | ||
| So many people want to write coal off and say that coal is an energy of the past. | ||
| That's absolutely stupid, and it's stupid for a lot of reasons. | ||
| One is coal is abundant. | ||
| It's clean. | ||
| It is accessible. | ||
| It's affordable. | ||
| It is absolutely an energy of the future, and we are the largest coal producer in the nation. | ||
| Japan, China, they're building coal-fired power plants like there's no tomorrow. | ||
| The reality is that we have to have fossil fuels or people are going to die. | ||
| They're going to die in the summer from heat. | ||
| They're going to die in the winter from cold. | ||
| And that's why I'm very proud of what Wyoming does because we make everybody's lives better. | ||
| When you flip on that switch, there's an awfully good chance that that electricity is coming from my state because it's coming from our coal. | ||
| So these are great people and it is intergenerational. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Several years ago, I took a tour of the Trona mines over in Wyoming and Trona is a baking soda and what you use to make flat glass and that sort of thing. | ||
| And I took a tour of that and the number of men who followed their mothers into the mines or followed their fathers into the mines. | ||
| We don't often think of women of being miners, but in Wyoming, they absolutely are. | ||
| They're the heavy equipment operators. | ||
| They are very actively involved in the industry and I love meeting with folks like that. | ||
| Up in Gillette, just absolutely a wonderful area to visit. | ||
| You go up there and you can see the magnitude of what we produce in Wyoming. | ||
| Again, with our oil and gas, with our CBM, coal bed methane was something we produced a lot of earlier this century. | ||
| And then also our coal. | ||
| Same with ranchers. | ||
| We're a very independent People in Wyoming. | ||
| What we really want is we want the right and the ability to make the decisions for ourselves. | ||
| We don't need the government telling us what to do. | ||
| We don't need the government telling us to put masks on our kids. | ||
| We look at what's going on with the truckers in Canada and we support them. | ||
| Those are the people who made sure that you have canned goods in your grocery store, that you have meat in your grocery store. | ||
| Everybody in this country ought to be supporting them. | ||
| And if this hadn't become so political over all of the coronavirus, Hysteria. | ||
| We all would be supporting them because they're standing up for what's right. | ||
| They're standing up for independence. | ||
| They're standing up for all of us. | ||
| And I'm very, very proud of them. | ||
| I'm proud of the folks in the United States who are doing the same thing. | ||
| I have a nephew who's trying to get into the trucking business and he's now purchased two 18 wheelers and just trying to get the parts and get delivery on things. | ||
| It's about to crush him. | ||
| And this is a 28 year old kid. | ||
| He's got three daughters. | ||
| He's absolutely the most wonderful person in the world. | ||
| And here you've got an administration that's doing everything in their power to make it so that he can't succeed in that business. | ||
| And one of the things I often talk about when I talk about my upbringing and the fact that I did come from pretty humble beginnings is it's only in the United States that we've always had the freedom to succeed. | ||
| And we now have an administration and a group of people. | ||
| who don't want us to succeed. | ||
| They wanna dictate who prospers and who does not. | ||
| And that is not America. | ||
| That isn't what we stand for. | ||
| We all have the freedom to succeed, no matter what we came from. | ||
| So jumping back for a second, you mentioned sort of small population, sixth largest state geographically. | ||
| Related to the COVID situation, everyone thinks, okay, Florida did it so right. | ||
| I'm a living example of that. | ||
| That's why I moved here. | ||
| People don't really talk about Wyoming related to that. | ||
| What was it like in the midst of all this? | ||
| Because you've got a sort of limited amount of people and a lot of space, and yet you have people in D.C. | ||
| telling you, okay, six feet, mask everybody, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Well, you had Washington, D.C. | ||
| doing it, but I'm also going to be critical of some of the leaders right here in Wyoming. | ||
| One of the things that I think too many governors did is they turned over public policy to public health workers. | ||
| And you don't ever turn over your public policy responsibility to a group of people that only have a very narrow focus of everything that they do. | ||
| And our governor did. | ||
| And so we had some of the mask mandates. | ||
| We had some of the limiting in terms of our schools and keeping kids out of schools and shutting down businesses. | ||
| And it shouldn't have happened in Wyoming. | ||
| You listen to your public health experts, but you also listen to your economists. | ||
| You also listen to your small business owners. | ||
| You also listen to your educators. | ||
| And you also listen to your parents. | ||
| And if you pick just one of those and say, OK, Dr. Fauci, you're going to be the king of all things right now as we figure this out. | ||
| You're creating a disaster. | ||
| And we've lived it. | ||
| Dr. Fauci has been a disaster for many reasons, including, I think, what Senator Rand Paul has exposed, which is an enormous amount of dishonesty coming from that gentleman. | ||
| And when we retake the House and we retake the Senate in November, we're going to investigate that gentleman. | ||
| We're going to investigate What happened in China and what he was doing with with taxpayer funds. | ||
| But the fact is that man wanted to be a hero. | ||
| And you talk about a God complex. | ||
| Oh, my goodness gracious. | ||
| That man really. | ||
| Who would turn over everything to an Anthony Fauci? | ||
| But we did. | ||
| We did it at the national level and we did it at the state level. | ||
| And again, there isn't any one area of expertise that should take precedence during any type of a crisis. | ||
| Our economists should have had more of a say. | ||
| Our small business owners should have had more of a say. | ||
| And I'm also going to go back to something that's absolutely foundational, which is I don't care what kind of a crisis you may be facing at that particular time. | ||
| And especially after two or three weeks when we had a much better understanding of what was going on, six months, even more information. | ||
| Our constitution exists for a reason. | ||
| Our first amendment rights, our second amendment rights, our fourth and fifth and 14th amendment rights, are absolutely sacrosanct. | ||
| They don't come from government. | ||
| They come from God. | ||
| They are natural rights. | ||
| They are inherent in us. | ||
| There isn't a government out there that has the right to dictate that we cannot worship, that we cannot exercise our freedom of speech, that we cannot exercise, uh, you know, that there isn't due process available. | ||
| So that was one of the things as a constitutional attorney, I was horrified by the willingness of people like the governor of New Jersey who came out and said, Adhering to the Constitution was above his pay grade. | ||
| The guy should have been impeached right then. | ||
| I mean, if the guy does not recognize that his oath was to uphold the Constitution, he should have been out on his ear. | ||
| And the fact that we have continued to allow those people to really dictate what we can do is pretty shocking, and hopefully it's a lesson learned. | ||
| Man, you're speaking my language, sister. | ||
| I may have to look into an acre somewhere in Wyoming as a summer home. | ||
| Not a bad idea. | ||
| But, you know, I'm sure some people are watching this going, well, wait, Dave, even if it is the at-large congressional district, why are you talking to a congressional candidate from Wyoming? | ||
| It seems a little obscure from a national perspective. | ||
| But actually, here's the bumper sticker for this episode, you are running against a woman by the name of Liz Cheney. | ||
| Now, of course, Liz Cheney has become a sort of star amongst the CNN, MSNBC crowd as a Republican who pretty much is against Republicans. | ||
| And, you know, she's obsessed with January 6th and the quote unquote insurrection and everything else. | ||
| So I don't want to lead you too much. | ||
| I might have done it already. | ||
| Why don't you give me your feelings on Liz Cheney and how she relates to Wyoming? | ||
| Liz Cheney betrayed our state. | ||
| She betrayed our country. | ||
| And I'll tell you a couple of reasons of why I say that, because I know that's a fairly bold statement, but that's why I made the decision to run against her. | ||
| I've had a successful law practice. | ||
| I've been working for a nonprofit law firm out of Washington DC for a while. | ||
| I love the work that I do, but there needs to be a change. | ||
| And we needed to put someone up who had the ability to take on Liz Cheney and with this battle for Wyoming and for our country. | ||
| Liz Cheney, there are several things that are a problem with her, including the fact that Liz Cheney bought a home in Wyoming in 2012 so that she could run for Senate against Mike Enzi. | ||
| That imploded and she was not able to pursue that any further. | ||
| And then we heard very little from Liz Cheney after that until 2016, when our congressional seat came open and she came back to Wyoming to run for that. | ||
| Liz Cheney lives in Washington, DC. | ||
| That's where her family, or not Washington, DC, excuse me, Northern Virginia. | ||
| That's where her family resides. | ||
| Her husband works for a law firm back there that does work for China, by the way. | ||
| We can talk about that in a moment. | ||
| Liz Cheney has very, very, very few ties to Wyoming. | ||
| I realized that her father represented the state of Wyoming over 30 years ago, but Liz Cheney's had very few ties to Wyoming and very little interest in the state of Wyoming. | ||
| She talks a good game, but if you scratch her, what you find is she's very, very shallow. | ||
| She's very shallow on the issues that are so important to Wyoming. | ||
| Again, our energy issues, our agricultural issues, and then also the regulatory issues. | ||
| Over 48% of our surface estate is owned by the federal government, and 65% of our mineral estate is owned by the federal government, so we have a huge federal footprint. | ||
| And the regulations coming out of Washington, D.C. | ||
| have been crushing us, but she hasn't done much to actually fix that. | ||
| She does not represent Wyoming and she isn't representing our interests. | ||
| As far as the January 6th, I've started describing it this way. | ||
| We have separation of powers for a reason. | ||
| And I know she keeps coming back to that you are either for the Constitution or you're for Donald Trump, but you can't be for both. | ||
| That's a binary that makes no sense whatsoever. | ||
| And especially as someone who is actually a constitutional attorney, it's actually kind of a stupid statement. | ||
| And it's a stupid statement for a lot of reasons, including that it ignores the vast You know, ignores the Constitution itself. | ||
| But here's one of the fundamental things I think people need to understand about what Liz Cheney is doing is we have a separation of powers. | ||
| The legislative branch writes the laws. | ||
| The executive branch carries them out. | ||
| And the judiciary makes decisions, you know, from criminal law to criminal cases to deciding, you know, disputes between neighbors. | ||
| What this commission has done is taken on the role of all of them. | ||
| But most importantly, this January 6th commission is acting as the prosecutor. | ||
| They're presenting evidence to themselves as the judiciary, and then they are going to be making the decision as the jury. | ||
| So they have actually subsumed in themselves all aspects of decision-making. | ||
| They will decide what evidence comes in, and if it doesn't fit their narrative, it'll never see the light of day. | ||
| the fact that they kept that Nancy Pelosi, what probably most likely with Liz Cheney's guidance, | ||
| can have Jim Jordan out of that committee tells you from the very beginning | ||
| that there was a narrative that they were going to pursue and that's what they're pursuing. | ||
| So Liz Cheney spends all of her time, she even said it a couple of days ago. | ||
| Do we know that that was a fact? | ||
| I don't remember that specifically. | ||
| Do we know for sure that she was guiding Pelosi in terms of keeping Jim Jordan | ||
| and some of those people off the committee? | ||
| I don't know that for a fact, but keep in mind how much she disdains- | ||
| I think we have a lot of reasons to believe it, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think that it's reasonable. | ||
| And the fact that she and Adam Kinzinger are the only two so-called Republicans on that committee, they didn't want a Jim Jordan and a Jim Banks asking questions about, well, wait a minute, what about security that day? | ||
| Why wasn't there more security? | ||
| When did you know about this? | ||
| Were there provocateurs? | ||
| In the crowd, and who were those provocateurs? | ||
| Were there any FBI informants? | ||
| Were there FBI employees? | ||
| Were there other people? | ||
| Those are the kinds of things that are never going to be presented as part of this commission. | ||
| So what you've got is you've got a prosecutor who is going to ignore any evidence that doesn't support their narrative, presenting a case to themselves to decide what happened on January 6th. | ||
| And so if you want to talk about being, you know, unconstitutional or extra constitutional, it seems to me that this commission is one of the very first places to start. | ||
| This is a star chamber and their intent is to come out with a report that they can hang around the neck of Donald Trump and that they can try to ostracize those of us who support him and conservatives from now until the end of time. | ||
| That's the purpose of this. | ||
| We know it. | ||
| And that's what she spends her time on. | ||
| And we're embarrassed. | ||
| She's using Wyoming as the launchpad to give her the power to do that. | ||
| What do you think her true angle is with this? | ||
| I mean, obviously she's getting a lot of mainstream cred, right? | ||
| They love her because she's sort of what I call the pet Republican. | ||
| She does whatever the mainstream wants, and then that's the type of Republican they like. | ||
| And then the second she does something that they don't like, then they're done with her and they pick somebody else. | ||
| But do you think her angle is purely because, well, perhaps what you just said, about her husband, but also because, you know, | ||
| her father was the vice president. | ||
| He's so entrenched in the swamp that she's just protecting the thing. | ||
| She's protecting the DC thing, regardless of what the constituents may be in Wyoming want. | ||
| I can't imagine a lot you're hearing when you're out there, you know, a lot of people going, | ||
| "Oh, this is the most important issue of the day." | ||
| Number one, it isn't the most important issue for the day for people in Wyoming. | ||
| I think that there are Democrats in Wyoming who want to continue to bang that drum, but that just further supports the position I'm taking on this. | ||
| As far as her agenda goes, I think that she made the decision in the fall of 2020 and perhaps even before that, that this was basically a battle between her and the President Trump faction of the party. | ||
| She made the decision that she was going to go after him and around November of 2020, She was the very first, especially high up Republican that called for president Trump to concede and that the election was fine, that there was no problem with it. | ||
| So it was at that point that she realized that it was either going to be president Trump and his followers, or it was going to be her. | ||
| And she started rallying the forces, rallying the swamp to try to take him out. | ||
| Keep in mind, she's the one that organized the letter from the secretaries of defense saying that president Trump was unfit for office. | ||
| Why that's really important. | ||
| Is that she, that issue was issued what that letter was issued prior to January 6th. | ||
| It wasn't based on what happened on January 6th. | ||
| I believe that they issued that letter on January 4th. | ||
| So there wasn't even anything to point to. | ||
| So I think that she went all in. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It's either Trump or me. | ||
| And that's where she is. | ||
| And I think that she thought we're going to take him out. | ||
| This is the kill shot. | ||
| This is going to be the end of it. | ||
| And all they've done is they've strengthened him and they've exposed the swamp and exposed themselves for what they are. | ||
| So I don't know what her end goal is. | ||
| I don't know what her long-term plans are. | ||
| Being from Wyoming, I cannot imagine why she would do what she's doing. | ||
| But it obviously has to do with the fact that people in Washington, D.C. | ||
| think very differently than we do out here in the real world. | ||
| And, you know, I think that there is a certain sense of protecting the masses back there. | ||
| It is a blob. | ||
| There has been created in Washington, D.C., a sense of entitlement and a government in and of itself that in many ways is not answerable to us anymore. | ||
| And that's what I want to go back there and fight against. | ||
| We should not be having what we are finding out about the spying on president Trump, both before the election and after the election. | ||
| I, my, my heart hurts. | ||
| I am horrified that we are finding out that the opposition that Hillary Clinton and her minions and the folks in the deep state. | ||
| Have been spying on the president, regardless of which party. | ||
| I don't care if he were a Democrat or a Republican. | ||
| I would be horrified by what has happened. | ||
| And now we're living through this dystopian nightmare of not knowing if we could even trust our institutions right now. | ||
| That isn't the way that I was raised. | ||
| We've always trusted our institutions. | ||
| And Washington, D.C. | ||
| has so undermined them that again, those of us in the real world are awfully skeptical about what's happening back there. | ||
| And we're extremely skeptical of what Liz Cheney is doing and what her motivations are. | ||
| So how do we scale some of that stuff back? | ||
| Because I think you're right. | ||
| Most people at this point don't believe in the institutions. | ||
| They feel something has gone horrifically awry. | ||
| They feel like what comes out of D.C. | ||
| has nothing to do with their day-to-day life, regardless of what you think of the events of January 6th specifically. | ||
| I've just never met anyone in the last year who's really walking around saying this is the biggest issue of the day. | ||
| But they're obsessed with this stuff to sort of keep our eye off the ball. | ||
| I mean, what do you think, from a constitutional perspective, a legal perspective, like what can we do actually to reverse the machine a little bit and get things back to the way the country was supposed to be run? | ||
| Well, one of the things that I've been doing since I made the decision to run for this office is I have reached out to a variety of congressional representatives in Washington, D.C. | ||
| To start building those relationships and the allyships that I'm going to need to be an effective Congresswoman back there. | ||
| And one of the things that I've talked to them repeatedly about are what my priorities are. | ||
| And my priorities are taking power out of Washington, D.C. | ||
| We need to be working with our governors, our good and effective governors, the Ron DeSantis's of the world. | ||
| We need to be working with our good and effective attorney generals. | ||
| And we need to be doing what was intended by our foundational documents. | ||
| And that is there should be very little power in Washington, DC. | ||
| So even Congress, we have got to start divesting ourselves, but we've really got to be divesting, uh, the, the unelected bureaucrats of the power that they have and that they have amassed. | ||
| Over the last 10, 15 years, I've been traveling the country, giving a speech called regulation without representation. | ||
| And I've been exposing what has been happening with our administrative state. | ||
| And that's primarily what I've dealt with as a trial attorney. | ||
| So I'm a trial attorney. | ||
| I've represented a lot of landowners and business owners against the EPA, U.S. | ||
| Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. | ||
| Forest Service, USDA, all of the alphabet agencies, if you will, fighting to protect our private property rights, fighting against their incredible government overreach, attempting to take control of our irrigation infrastructure and those sorts of things. | ||
| I want to take that expertise to Washington, D.C., work with my fellow congressional representatives, and find ways to substantially impact the power and reduce the power that these agencies have over the citizens of this country. | ||
| It was never intended to be that way. | ||
| In addition to which, there's just such an enormous waste associated with it. | ||
| You know, the EPA, tens of thousands of employees, yet every single state has a Department of Environmental Quality. | ||
| Why do we have tens of thousands of employees in the EPA? | ||
| All of whom seem to think that their job is to punish people rather than working with our State Department of Environmental Quality. | ||
| I get along great with the DEQ here in Wyoming. | ||
| I'll tell you what, the EPA and I go head-to-head and I've had to have trials against them and beat the dog out of them in order to keep them back from trying to take control of my client's properties. | ||
| But why would the EPA be able to come into a warland Wyoming and and start attempting to punish people for straightening an irrigation ditch, yet that's what they do. | ||
| We need to expose it, we need to roll it back, we need to bring that power back to the states where it belongs, but it's Congress that's going to have to act to do it. | ||
| Yeah, actually, can you explain that sort of thing a little bit further? | ||
| Because I think a lot of people, they still hear the EPA, the word protections in their environment. | ||
| It sort of sounds right. | ||
| OK, they must be nice people doing these things. | ||
| As you said, there's now thousands and thousands of people that are part of this. | ||
| But can you give me an example of what type of thing would be happening in Wyoming where, you know, someone is living their life as they see fit, whatever water rights they have or whatever other natural resource it is, and what the EPA would want to do Why they would claim they would wanna do it, and then what happens when you get into a fight with them? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you, I'll give you one example of a case that I handled up in Northern Wyoming, and it was outside of Worland, where I was last week. | ||
| I represented a landowner, and he moved an irrigation ditch on his property. | ||
| And the EPA, and I know it was a test case, they came in and claimed that he violated the Clean Water Act by doing that, because that irrigation ditch was a, quote, navigable water of the United States. | ||
| It wasn't. | ||
| It was an irrigation ditch. | ||
| He had the right to maintain it and to move it and do what he did. | ||
| It took us six years. | ||
| They filed the enforcement action against him in 2008. | ||
| We finally had a two week trial in 2014. | ||
| I'm smart enough to know that you always get a jury trial when you're going up against the federal government for many reasons. | ||
| But one is that a lot of judges anymore are federal employees. | ||
| I mean, they are federal employees and they think of themselves that way. | ||
| I had a jury and after a two week jury trial, they came back and ruled in my client's favor. | ||
| He affected 2.1 acres on his own land in cleaning up what had been a terrible disaster. | ||
| Actually, everybody had kind of abused that farm because it had been leased by absentee farmers for many years. | ||
| He took out, he's an engineer, and so he designed a beautiful channel through there to make sure that the water could flow, reduce sedimentation. | ||
| Reduce any type of chemigation going into the Bighorn River and that sort of thing. | ||
| At one point, by moving 2.1 acres, by affecting 2.1 acres on his own property, he was facing penalties of $65 million because the EPA claims that they can impose penalties at that time of $37,500 a day. | ||
| of $37,500 a day. | ||
| That has now gone up to $59,000 a day if you violate the Clean Water Act. | ||
| So what they do is they come into these farmers or ranchers and they say, you violated the Clean Water Act. | ||
| You're facing penalties of $59,000 a day unless you do exactly what we tell you to do. | ||
| Well, obviously two days you're dead broke. | ||
| So nobody can fight back against them. | ||
| And that's the thing is that Congress never should have given that kind of authority to a bureaucracy because giving a bureaucracy that kind of punishment authority They turn into dictators and that's what they've done. | ||
| So right now I'm handling a lawsuit. | ||
| I don't know if you remember when the EPA blew out the Gold King mine in southwestern Colorado and they turned the Animas River orange. | ||
| It was in 2015. | ||
| You can Google it. | ||
| It was one of the worst environmental disasters in our country's history and the EPA did it. | ||
| So they went in and without my client's permission or knowledge, they built a water treatment facility on his property. | ||
| They've operated it for six and a half years. | ||
| And never paid him a dime in rent. | ||
| It's an unconstitutional takings. | ||
| That's the kind of abuse that the EPA visits upon our landowners every day. | ||
| What the EPA is trying to do is they'd like to take control of all water resources in this country. | ||
| Well, we know what happens when the federal government takes control of anything, especially when it is a resource such as water that is absolutely necessary for life. | ||
| You know what happens. | ||
| We're seeing it with medical care. | ||
| They're saying, OK, you don't get the vaccine. | ||
| We're going to take away your job. | ||
| We're going to take away your unemployment. | ||
| We're going to take away your medical care. | ||
| That's exactly what they're moving on. | ||
| And they have been moving on with water. | ||
| This is no longer any kind of a conspiracy idea. | ||
| This is truly what the federal government does. | ||
| One of the most horrific things that happened in this country was Obamacare, because that's when the federal government decided that they could control our decision making by controlling our access to health care. | ||
| And look at what they've done to us in the last two years. | ||
| They want to do the same thing with water. | ||
| I have two personal friends. | ||
| I tell people all the time who were doctors before Obamacare who are no longer doctors because they got sick of doing paperwork. | ||
| So how much more do you possibly want to know after you spent all that money to go to medical school and everywhere else? | ||
| One of the things I've been asking a lot of my guests over the last two months or so, especially since I've moved to Florida, that's been on my mind a lot, Is what do you see as sort of the future of the United States of America? | ||
| I mean, I think one silver lining perhaps in these last two crazy years is that people have started to move to states that are more in line with their values. | ||
| They're thinking about their life a little more seriously. | ||
| I think there's good reasons for that. | ||
| And that's what federalism is all about. | ||
| I don't have to tell you, obviously. | ||
| But on the other hand, I think that's very scary to people because then it's like, well, what makes us united? | ||
| Do you have a vision for that? | ||
| I mean, if we all just go in our separate ways and, you know, say the values of Wyoming will be much more similar to what I'm living here in Florida, but that's going to be very different than New York and Cali. | ||
| What keeps us united at that point? | ||
| Well, I think that the Constitution and our foundational documents keep us united. | ||
| But it's okay for people to have different views of the world. | ||
| I don't have any opposition to that. | ||
| I know that there are people who disagree with me and I'm perfectly cool with that. | ||
| But as you say, we can vote with our feet and we can go places that are more aligned with us politically. | ||
| But even if you don't have the ability to do that, I'll tell you what, my heroes right now are the parents. | ||
| Those parents that are fighting back to protect their babies from these horrible mask mandates, from the things that they've done to our schools. | ||
| These people are heroes. | ||
| And I have said for a long time with the work that I've done, when I started giving my speech regulation without representation, our debt was around $13 trillion. | ||
| It's now $30 trillion. | ||
| And I've been watching it go up and up and up. | ||
| We all have, but I've been watching it in real time because I talk a lot about it and how there's an interconnection between what is going on in DC with these bureaucracies, with the out of control spending, with Congress largely abdicating its responsibility for legislating. | ||
| And that debt and we're the largest debtor nation in world history. | ||
| And that trajectory has got to change. | ||
| And I've said for a long time, we're going to have to really suffer before things get better. | ||
| And I and I and I feel that way. | ||
| And I wish it wasn't true. | ||
| I've tried to, you know, sound the warning bells. | ||
| I've tried to tell people we can't keep going down this road. | ||
| And expect that we're going to prosper. | ||
| You can't attack everything that makes you prosperous and expect that it's still going to be there when you need it to continue that prosperity. | ||
| Yet that's where we are. | ||
| You know, we've got the socialists saying we've got to take over our energy companies and do this and that. | ||
| Yeah, that's not going to work well for anybody. | ||
| And we all know that. | ||
| We all know how that story ends. | ||
| So it is a matter of people standing up for their rights. | ||
| I am very optimistic. | ||
| Because people, after what the government has done to them at both the state and federal level has done to them in the last two years, we're rising up and we're saying, enough. | ||
| When we go back to Congress this time, we're not protecting the status quo. | ||
| We've got 30 to 40 years of really bad policies that we're going to have to roll back. | ||
| We're not protecting the status quo. | ||
| And if the Republicans go in there and protect the status quo, we've failed. | ||
| Do you think that the Democrats and even sort of the pet Republicans that are keeping this thing going as we have this sort of breakdown of the supply chain and crazy inflation and all of the stuff that we've talked about, do you think they think they're doing good? | ||
| I mean, do you think that the people in the administration actually believe that they're doing the right thing as they see all of the breakdown of basic services and everything else? | ||
| You know, that's a very interesting question. | ||
| What I would say about it is that I think that dictators in general often think that they're doing the right thing because they think that they're always right. | ||
| And the reality is that they aren't. | ||
| That's why we have the form of government we do. | ||
| It's why we have the separation of powers. | ||
| Why it's the executive branch that is to carry out the law, not make the law. | ||
| So I think from that standpoint, I'm not sure that they think that they're doing the right thing. | ||
| But one of the things that you find with people who actually believe in socialism or moving down that type of government, They're the elitist who don't believe that they're the ones that will have to live under it. | ||
| And all we have to look at are the mask mandates and the people who won't wear masks right now. | ||
| All of that. | ||
| We refer to them as hypocrites. | ||
| I actually don't like that word because I don't think that it really encompasses what they've done, which is there's rules for thee and not for me. | ||
| And there's a lot of countries in the world where that is how they're run. | ||
| And they are not run well. | ||
| And it's why we don't want to live there. | ||
| We are the most prosperous, the most free country in the history of the world, because we have to all live by the rule of law. | ||
| We're all supposed to live by the same rules. | ||
| And if you don't want to live by those rules, then don't make them for other people. | ||
| And so we now have a segment of society, and I refer to them, I guess, as the elitist, although I don't even think that that encompasses it. | ||
| But they are the people who think that they should tell Harriet Hageman what to do pretty much all day, every day. | ||
| My own parents didn't tell me what to do when I was three and four years old. | ||
| That's what I started out this conversation with. | ||
| They let me do what I wanted to do, but they constantly talked about the responsibility of keeping myself alive as well. | ||
| Responsibility and freedom go hand in hand. | ||
| What these people want to do is take away our freedom. | ||
| And I don't know that I can always get in their head, but I think that we've got an awful lot of examples of how their form of government and their ideas and their ideals fail. | ||
| All we have to do is look at Venezuela. | ||
| And Venezuela is a perfect real-time example of what happens when the government wants to tell you every aspect of your lives. | ||
| And that's why the last two years have been so frightening for people like you and I. Because we know the government doesn't know better than we do. | ||
| I've got great nieces and nephews that are five or six years old. | ||
| They'll go out, they'll work all day long on horseback. | ||
| And you know what? | ||
| Those kids can take care of themselves in a lot of ways. | ||
| And they don't need Nancy Pelosi Or Joe Biden or AOC or Liz Cheney telling them from Washington, D.C. | ||
| how to live their lives. | ||
| They do a pretty doggone good job of it. | ||
| Well, I can tell you from living in Miami for a month, I got plenty of Venezuelan and Cuban neighbors, and they know exactly what they fled in the first place, or usually what their parents or grandparents fled in the first place. | ||
| I'm curious, backing up to the election specifically, your election specifically, what kind of support or non-support are you getting from just sort of the main Republican machine? | ||
| Because obviously this fight between sort of Let's say swamp Republicans or just sort of the more mainstream Republicans, whatever that is, whatever phrase you want to use versus sort of the Trump wing that that still is an internal fight that Republicans or conservatives have to figure out. | ||
| You know, I think it's somewhat of an internal fight, but not one that I necessarily acknowledge most of the time, because I still believe that most of us believe exactly the same thing, which the Republicans need to be the party of freedom. | ||
| We need to be the party of the Constitution. | ||
| We need to be. | ||
| The party of recognizing that individuals are responsible for themselves and it isn't for the government to step in and dictate everything we do. | ||
| We have moved down the road of collectivism in this country in a pretty frightening way. | ||
| And all Republicans need to be pushing back against that. | ||
| Heck, Democrats should be too, but I don't know why they don't. | ||
| But really the Republicans in Wyoming, I've had an enormous amount of support and we have a broad spectrum of Republicans in Wyoming from being very liberal to being very conservative. | ||
| And I have a huge amount of support as I travel around the state. | ||
| I've been extremely pleased with how people have reached out to me and responded to me. | ||
| From a national standpoint, I think the same thing as well. | ||
| I consider myself to be a conservative, but everything I've talked about today really defines who I am. | ||
| And so if that's what people think is conservative, or if they think that that's moderate, however they want to view it, they can. | ||
| I've kind of given you a pretty good idea of how I view the world and how I view our country. | ||
| And a lot of people are really hungry for that message. | ||
| And they're really hungry to understand that there's someone who's willing to go back to Washington, D.C. | ||
| and fight this battle for them. | ||
| And I can tell you that I am. | ||
| I'm willing to go back there and do whatever I can to turn this ship around because we need to. | ||
| We have been so fortunate in our lives. | ||
| We have been so fortunate in what we've been able to do. | ||
| Like I talked about, I came from a very, very humble beginning. | ||
| Um, and now I'm running for Congress because in the United States, you have the freedom to succeed that way. | ||
| Our, our granddaughters, our nieces, our nephews, our great nieces, our nephews, our children, all of them have the absolute same right that we have had to pursue those types of, of endeavors. | ||
| We can't take it away from them. | ||
| We owe it to the next generation and I'm fighting for them. | ||
| I'm fighting for my granddaughters. | ||
| Uh, you know, Jasmine and Kaylee, I'm fighting for everybody in my family. | ||
| I come from a few huge family. | ||
| I'm fighting for everybody in Wyoming and for this country to return to really our foundation of who we are and what has made this country so great. | ||
| Harriet, you're the type of politician we need, because I can tell you don't even want to be a politician, which is exactly what the point is in the first place. | ||
| And because my last question was basically going to throw it to you to say whatever you want and give the final sales pitch. | ||
| But I think you just did it right there, unless you got anything else for me. | ||
| Where can we send people if they want to find out more about you? | ||
| Hegeman for Wyoming dot com. | ||
| There's a lot of information and Liz Cheney has an awful lot of money. | ||
| If anybody wants to support me and help us out to take this message as not only statewide, but nationally and make sure that we return people to Congress or put people in Congress who are going to fight for the everyday man, because it's the everyday man that has made this country as great as it is. | ||
| So I love the opportunity to visit with you. | ||
| I hope I can come back because you're a lot of fun to talk to. | ||
| I can assure you when I go back to Washington, D.C., I'm taking Everything that is Wyoming with me and I'm really looking forward to serve the people. | ||
| Well, I enjoy talking to you and I'm not really kidding about maybe an acre in Wyoming for the summer. | ||
| So we may have to talk. | ||
| I sense you might know a real estate agent. | ||
| We would love to have you here. | ||
| We'd love to have you here. | ||
| I'll take you up. | ||
| If you watch my video, Ride for the Brands, Which is on our website. | ||
| And that's the ranch that I grew up on. | ||
| Those are my family members. | ||
| That's where I come from. | ||
| I think it gives you an idea of who and what I am. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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