Nov. 6, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Well, one of the main themes I have in Only the Strong is that the decline sensed by so many Americans is not an accident. | ||
| It's a decline by design. | ||
| The left has had a plot to sabotage American power going back 100 years. | ||
| You see that in so many facets of their actions. | ||
| Again, look at what they've done to weaken the military. | ||
| It's almost like birds migrating south for the winter. | ||
| Every time a Democrat takes office, he cuts the defense budget. | ||
| They've also begun to distract the military from its core mission, which is preparing for and winning wars using all kinds of critical race theory, indoctrination, or gender ideology obsessions, as opposed to focusing on war fighting. | ||
| Or take a look at what they've done to energy production in America. | ||
| Energy is vital to our way of life. | ||
| It literally powers our economy. | ||
| And we're the world's energy superpower when it comes to oil and gas and coal. | ||
| Yet Joe Biden and the Democrats have promised to eliminate fossil fuel production in America. | ||
| Not curb it, not make it cleaner, but to eliminate it. | ||
| At the same time, they're dedicated to so-called green or clean technology. | ||
| Who's the world's superpower when it comes to so-called green technology? | ||
| China. | ||
| And they may march under the banner of climate change, but the progressives' banner looks a lot like China's five-star flag. | ||
| These are not accidents. | ||
| These are things that they have done on purpose. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a senator from the great state of Arkansas as | ||
| well as author of the new book, Only the Strong, Reserving the Left's Plot to Sabotage American | ||
| I think you nailed it with the title. | ||
| Senator Tom Cotton, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey Dave, thanks for having me on. | ||
| It's a real pleasure and I look forward to talking to you about Only the Strong today. | ||
| Well, I've wanted to talk to you for quite some time, and basically this book is a layout of an awful lot of the history of the lunacy that I've been fighting against on this show. | ||
| So first off, what caused you to write this book? | ||
| I mean, you're a senator, you're fighting the madness in D.C. | ||
| all the time. | ||
| What made you say, hey, I want to go back and look at where some of this came from and where it's going? | ||
| Well, David, it all started last year in the aftermath of the Afghanistan fiasco. | ||
| At first, I was astonished at Joe Biden's bumbling. | ||
| Then my team and I spent a couple weeks in August trying to do everything we could to get Arkansans and other Americans out of Afghanistan. | ||
| But as we reflected on it in the days after our departure from Afghanistan, I had so many people ask, how could this happen? | ||
| How could we lose to a medieval band of savages? | ||
| But it also went deeper to that, to things they had seen in recent years. | ||
| BLM riders rampaging in our streets and tearing down statues of our heroes trying to defund the police and at least attacking the police when they couldn't defund them as somehow illegitimate. | ||
| Calling America systemically racist and oppressive, which led to a crime wave all across our country. | ||
| America being a laughingstock at the hands of our adversaries around the world. | ||
| And at the bottom of all those questions, I thought was, how did it get to this point? | ||
| Why doesn't America win anymore? | ||
| And I wanted to lay out for my readers exactly how the left in America has for over a hundred years plotted to sabotage American power. | ||
| Now, I'm not claiming that Liberals and Democrats are necessarily un-American. | ||
| They hate our country, although plenty are and plenty do. | ||
| But at best, they're ambivalent about America. | ||
| They're anguished about our past and uncertain about our future. | ||
| And that's why they've taken the steps over the last hundred years that they have taken to weaken our military, to entangle us in a network of globalist international institutions, to bring American sources of energy Offline while we make ourselves more dependent on China. | ||
| All these steps are part of their effort to make America just another country, a more normal place that doesn't view itself as exceptional or special or that has any special role attributed to it by God and by our founders. | ||
| And I want to lay out that case in Only the Strong as well as a roadmap for the future. | ||
| So before we dive too much into the specifics and everything that you just said there is exactly what the book is about, since you mentioned Afghanistan and that was sort of the genesis of why you decided to do this, can you talk a little bit of what it was like to be a senator the few days before, when the withdrawal is happening, and then after? | ||
| How much information did you have? | ||
| Did you guys try to push back on the withdrawal, at least how it was done perhaps? | ||
| And were you just ignored or were there any other plans laid out that wouldn't have been as messy as what we all saw? | ||
| Yes, a lot of us did try to explain that what we saw in August was likely to happen. | ||
| We didn't necessarily predict the exact timing or fashion, but the reason why Donald Trump never withdrew from Afghanistan in four years, despite the fact that he obviously wanted to, was because he was worried that it would lead to a collapse of the Afghan government and a return of the Taliban to power, which would imperil America's interest and threaten Americans here and abroad. | ||
| Joe Biden came into office, and he said, to hell with all that. | ||
| Remember in 2009, as I lay out in Only the Strong, he had insisted then on cutting and running immediately. | ||
| And as Barack Obama's own Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said, he subjected President Obama to something like Chinese water torture. | ||
| When everyone else was trying to get Barack Obama off the dime to make a decision on Afghanistan, to commit the troops necessary to achieve the strategy he himself had proclaimed in the 2008 campaign, Joe Biden kept nattering in his ear, ceding mistrust with our military, saying this mission could never be accomplished. | ||
| And he carried a chip on his shoulder for 12 years that Barack Obama didn't listen to him. | ||
| And I think he got into office in 2021, and his toxic combination of incompetence and insecurity led him to want to prove that he had been right all along, that Barack Obama | ||
| and the generals and all of those Republicans and Democrats who had criticized | ||
| him for 12 years were wrong. So in April 2021, when he said we're gonna rip the | ||
| Band-Aid off, it doesn't matter if the Taliban has fulfilled the conditions that | ||
| President Trump set for them in the withdrawal agreement from 2020, we're just | ||
| gonna get out. | ||
| And most perversely of all, we're going to get out by 9-11, as if that were somehow a great way to honor the sacrifices and the losses that we suffered on that day and in every day since then. | ||
| And as time passed from April to August, it was clear to me, partly based on public reports, partly based on the intelligence we were receiving, that President Biden had not taken the steps necessary to get all Americans out. | ||
| to get their family members out, to get out green card holders, to get out the loyal Afghans who'd served alongside us, and they were trending towards a disaster. | ||
| And when people ask me, how did we see the scenes from August 2021, where Afghans were running onto the tarmac, they were jumping on the aircraft wheels, trying to fly out of the country, they're handing babies over the barbed wire topped walls of the airfield. | ||
| It's Joe Biden's rank Uh, incompetence that caused all that. | ||
| We knew this was coming. | ||
| He was warned that it was coming. | ||
| He was warned by members of his own administration, warned by senior military officials, and he simply did not listen to them. | ||
| In fact, just five weeks before the fall of Afghanistan, he was saying there was no way we would see a scene like we saw in Saigon in 1975, where we had to shamefully take off from our embassy in helicopters. | ||
| That's exactly what we saw, and it was because of Joe Biden's weakness. | ||
| What do you think a clean, effective withdrawal would have looked like? | ||
| So for those of us that, you know, it was the longest war in American history, in essence, over 20 years, it was unclear to a lot of people why we were there at this point. | ||
| Certainly my more libertarian side thought we shouldn't have even been there in the first place. | ||
| But at some point, if you're gonna wrap these things up, it seems like it always is gonna be somewhat messy. | ||
| What do you think a decent withdrawal actually would have looked like? | ||
| Well, Dave, first, I want to go back to the beginning of the Afghan war, which was almost universally supported in the Congress by the American people, since that's the land from which Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda had attacked us, having been given safe harbor by the Taliban. | ||
| There's no question that we took a lot of twists and turns in Afghanistan, as we did in Iraq, that we shouldn't have taken. | ||
| Our main interest in Afghanistan was to ensure that it couldn't be used as a training ground and launching pad for further attacks. | ||
| Our interest there was not to try to remake Afghan culture. | ||
| It wasn't trying to improve literacy or bring economic development. | ||
| All those are good things for the Afghan people, certainly. | ||
| But it's not in America's core interest that those things happen. | ||
| So there are many points along the way when we should have taken stock and said we're no longer serving our vital national interests here. | ||
| One was in 2009 and then again in 2011 when Barack Obama announced a new strategy but Telegraphia wasn't committed to it. | ||
| I'd been there right before that announcement. | ||
| I'd heard a lot from Afghans about their traditional proverb, you have the watches but we have the time. | ||
| Unfortunately that proved to be right. | ||
| What a final departure from Afghanistan could have looked like and probably should have looked like under the circumstances that President Trump and later President Biden inherited. | ||
| was ensuring that there was enough technical and logistical support to the Afghan army to make sure it didn't collapse. | ||
| As I write in Only the Strong, President Biden didn't just withdraw our troops, he withdrew the Western mechanics and contractors that kept the Afghan Air Force flying. | ||
| These kinds of troops, or even these kinds of civilian contractors, they're not frontline trigger pullers, they're not door kickers, they're not going out on raids against the Taliban. | ||
| But their presence did give the Afghan army a lot of moral support, a lot of material support that would have allowed them perhaps to maintain conditions across the country that would have forced the Taliban to negotiate some kind of political outcome as opposed to enable the Taliban to seize the entire country in a span of just a few weeks last summer. | ||
| Do you know if Biden had anyone in his, I mean, look, he's probably not going to listen to Tom Cotton, but do you know if he had anyone in his ear in the administration that was going, hey, Joe, this thing is not going to go as planned. | ||
| We're going to get horrific images. | ||
| They're going to take all our weapons, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| He did. | ||
| Almost everyone, frankly. | ||
| Certainly his uniformed military leaders, but also a lot of his fellow Democrats, the people he appointed to high positions. | ||
| They wanted to get out of Afghanistan just like Donald Trump, just like Barack Obama for him, but they also knew the dangerous consequences that would follow. | ||
| If we did what Joe Biden did, which is simply pull up stakes without any plan to keep the country and the government stable there. | ||
| And it's not just Afghanistan. | ||
| You saw within weeks of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, Vladimir Putin beginning to marshal troops on the border of Ukraine. | ||
| There's a dangerous Afghan effect now, just like there was a dangerous Vietnam syndrome after Vietnam that will reverberate and harm our country's interest at least as long as Joe Biden is president. | ||
| Do you think that Putin basically that day was thinking, all right, this is my move now because they'll have no appetite for stopping me? | ||
| Oh, there's no question. | ||
| I mean, Joe Biden spent his first year in office appeasing Vladimir Putin, enticing him and tempting him to a trial of strength to use Churchill's famous line that I quote in Only the Strong. | ||
| You know, when he came into office, he granted extension of the only arms control treaty we have left with Russia with no concessions whatsoever, something Donald Trump refused to do. | ||
| That was the first signal of weakness. | ||
| The second signal of weakness was to allow the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to go forward. | ||
| Again, something that Donald Trump had refused to do. | ||
| Last April, when Vladimir Putin began to build up troops on Ukraine's border for the first time, Joe Biden pleaded to have a fancy summit in Europe to elevate Vladimir Putin's stature internationally. | ||
| When you combine all those along with the Afghan effect, I think Vladimir Putin saw the window of opportunity to achieve what he's always wanted to achieve, as I explained in Only the Strong, which is to reassemble the Russian Empire, which starts in Ukraine. | ||
| I think Joe Biden's weakness throughout 2021 tempted Putin to go for the jugular there. | ||
| And now we, and especially Ukrainians, are living with the consequences of that weakness. | ||
| You mentioned some of Biden's motives and making up for some of the Obama stuff, that sort of thing. | ||
| How much of what's going on generally speaking right now, whether we're talking about this withdrawal or the economy or now Russia, Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera, do you think is intentions like actually intended to harm us, which is partly what you're talking about in the book, versus just complete mismanagement and hiring of the wrong people? | ||
| Well, one of the main themes I have in Only the Strong is that the decline sensed by so many Americans is not an accident. | ||
| It's a decline by design. | ||
| The left has had a plot to sabotage American power going back 100 years. | ||
| You see that in so many facets of their actions. | ||
| Again, look at what they've done to weaken the military. | ||
| It's almost like birds migrating south in the winter. | ||
| Every time a Democrat takes office, he cuts the defense budget. | ||
| They've also begun to distract the military from its core mission, which is preparing for and winning wars using all kinds of critical race theory, indoctrination, or gender ideology obsessions, as opposed to focusing on war fighting. | ||
| Or take a look at what they've done to energy production in America. | ||
| Energy is vital to our way of life. | ||
| It literally powers our economy. | ||
| And we're the world's energy superpower when it comes to oil and gas and coal. | ||
| Yet Joe Biden and the Democrats have promised to eliminate fossil fuel production in America. | ||
| Not curb it, not make it cleaner, but to eliminate it. | ||
| At the same time, they're dedicated to so-called green or clean technology. | ||
| Who's the world's superpower when it comes to so-called green technology? | ||
| China. | ||
| I mean, they may march under the banner of climate change, but the progressives' banner looks a lot like China's five-star flag. | ||
| These are not accidents. | ||
| These are things that they have done on purpose. | ||
| They want to have $5 a gallon gas. | ||
| They want a military that is not capable of taking the kind of assertive, confident action that Ronald Reagan, for instance, took. | ||
| They want America to be enmeshed in a globalist network of international organizations and one-sided treaties. | ||
| That's, again, to get back to one of the main themes of Only the Strong. | ||
| They're deeply ambivalent about American power and America itself. | ||
| So I want to get into that hundred-year march that got us to all of this. | ||
| One other thing on the international front specifically, since we've sort of briefly discussed Russia and Ukraine, I mean, in effect, are we at war right now? | ||
| I know there's been no war declared, Congress isn't being called to discuss it, but at some point when you are endlessly funding something, when you are training troops, when you are sending weapons, I mean, what are you and your colleagues saying about this at this point? | ||
| And should we be calling Congress to talk about this, make some sort of declaration, if that's what we're doing? | ||
| And what do you think Biden would do about all that? | ||
| I mean, the fact that we're not even discussing that seems rather bizarre to me. | ||
| Well, the United States is not at war, but we are certainly supporting Ukraine in its right to defend itself and its territory and its homes. | ||
| It's regrettable that we got to this point, which we did again because of Joe Biden's weakness in 2021, which tempted Vladimir Putin to do exactly what he's always wanted to do, frankly, what he did in 2014 as well, the first time he invaded. | ||
| Ukraine. I have to note, as I do sometimes with my Democratic friends in the Senate, | ||
| which always sticks in their crawl, that Vladimir Putin has a habit of invading Ukraine when | ||
| Democrats are presidents, not when a Republican... | ||
| Somehow there was a four-year blip where it didn't happen, huh? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Uh, But we're not at war, nor should we be at war. | ||
| I, for instance, agree with the decision that we're not going to commit American troops to fight in Ukraine. | ||
| I disagree, as I write in Only the Strong, that Joe Biden should have announced that in advance. | ||
| It's a bad thing in a contest of wills to keep telling your adversary what you won't do. | ||
| It screams hesitancy and timidity and extreme caution. | ||
| By contrast, look at Ronald Reagan. | ||
| Ronald Reagan, almost his entire presidency, supported Afghan guerrillas against Soviet Russia. | ||
| He never considered putting American troops on the ground in Afghanistan, but he also didn't rule it out publicly. | ||
| He frankly didn't say much at all publicly. | ||
| about our efforts in Afghanistan against the Soviets. | ||
| That's because he understood that you don't want to simplify your adversaries planning. | ||
| You want to keep them on their toes. | ||
| You want to make them uncertain about what's going to happen next. | ||
| So while we're not at war with Ukraine, or I'm sorry, in Ukraine, we are standing by Ukrainians who are simply fighting for their primordial right to defend their homes and their territory. | ||
| And we have vital interests at stake there, not just in Europe, but around the world. | ||
| For instance, imagine the signal it would send to Xi Jinping and the Chinese communists if Western efforts in Ukraine falters after just eight or nine months. | ||
| I think you could expect them to go for the jugular in Taiwan very soon after it, just like Vladimir Putin did after he saw Joe Biden's weakness in Afghanistan last summer. | ||
| I said I was going to only ask you one more on the international thing, but just extending that real quick. | ||
| I've had Senator Rand Paul on a few times and, you know, one of his big things is, hey, if we're going to give them this money, which I know he's not thrilled about in the first place, but if we're going to do it, can we at least get some receipts? | ||
| And basically, no, there seems to be no receipts to any of this. | ||
| What do we do about that? | ||
| I mean, because I think a lot of people, when they see that, another 10 billion here, meanwhile Florida, you know, is crushed with this hurricane and could use some money or whatever it might be, or just give the people back their money. | ||
| I find that that's one of the things that people are really upset about, that we don't even know who we're giving the money to. | ||
| Dave, I hear similar views at home and across the country on the campaign trail. | ||
| I do think we can impose some tighter controls on how this aid is being provided to Ukraine. | ||
| I expect a Republican Congress will. | ||
| I think we can also demand that our European partners do more to support Ukraine as well. | ||
| Now, much of our aid that you read about in the newspapers is the in-kind value of the military transfers that we are making. | ||
| A lot of that money in the end gets spent here in the United States on high-paying jobs in our defense industry. | ||
| Some of our European partners don't have that kind of mature defense industry. | ||
| They don't have that many weapons they can supply. | ||
| They should be stepping forward and providing more of the direct financial support to the government in Ukraine, so it can not just support its military on the front lines, But it's people as well. | ||
| But I do think that we can have more accountability for what has happened in Ukraine and certainly what will happen in the future. | ||
| And we can demand a greater contribution from our European allies. | ||
| Okay, so let's back up to something that you mentioned about the book earlier. | ||
| You said about a hundred year march. | ||
| And you know, a lot of people, when they ask me, Dave, when did this crazy woke leftist progressive thing happen? | ||
| You know, people talk about, okay, maybe in the sixties, you know, more communist or socialist leaning professors got into the universities and that's really where it started. | ||
| But you're really painting a picture that began beyond that. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson, can you get into some of the beginnings of this? | ||
| Sure, Dave. | ||
| So, in Only the Strong, I explain that much of modern left-wing thinking goes back to the progressive era, specifically Woodrow Wilson, who was a professor of political science before he became president. | ||
| You know, for the first 100 years or so of American history, both parties consistently appealed to our founders. | ||
| They claim that they were the one carrying the true banner of our founding of the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson was the first politician to explicitly repudiate our founding in terms that no politician today would do. | ||
| I mean, Democrats today certainly will condemn certain aspects of our founding, but they always claim to be living up to its truest calling. | ||
| Not Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| You can see in his writings, which were prolific as a professor, But he explicitly repudiated the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. | ||
| He said that the Declaration was outmoded, it was fixed in its own time, that we all know that people aren't created equal. | ||
| He said the Constitution was too rigid. | ||
| He called it Newtonian, that it appealed to the law of gravity, opposed to Darwinian, appealing to the law of evolution. | ||
| And that it was time that we be able to evolve our system of government and our way of life. | ||
| You know, that's where the term in legal thinking comes from. | ||
| The evolving or living constitution. | ||
| Which really just means the constitution is dead because the constitution is supposed to be permanent and fixed. | ||
| Based on our permanent and fixed human nature. | ||
| And that's where our founders based their politics, where they based their foreign policy views as well. | ||
| That man is a fallen and sinful creature, but we can still in the right kind of system, built on the right kind of moral principles, achieve a degree of freedom and safety and prosperity heretofore unknown in the world. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson and the progressives Rejected all of this. | ||
| This is when you begin to get the administrative state with which we're so familiar today, but it's really an innovation only going back about 100 years when Woodrow Wilson was president. | ||
| He started creating agencies like the Federal Trade Commission. | ||
| Now you have this entire alphabet soup. | ||
| Of bureaucrats who are unelected, yet they presume to write regulations for us. | ||
| They presume to enforce them. | ||
| They presume to adjudicate disputes involving those regulations, which James Madison said in The Federalist is the very definition of tyranny, when you accumulate legislative, executive, and judicial power in a single set of hands. | ||
| So you don't get to the extreme left-wing views, the extreme anti-American views that you mentioned until the 1960s, but it's not a very long step from repudiating our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our founding principles, which happened with Woodrow Wilson and the progressives, to having outright rejection of America itself as I lay out, and only the strong. | ||
| Yeah, do you think his full intention with the deep state or whatever you want to call it, but these bureaucrats and these departments that live on forever, well past the people who founded them, that that really was in some ways to subvert the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, meaning if you could just staff these people, these institutions with enough of your own people, then actually the founding documents wouldn't matter that much? | ||
| Yeah, there's no question about that, and it's not even my opinion or your opinion, Dave. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson wrote about this in his essays, in his books. | ||
| He spoke about it in some of his speeches. | ||
| He believed that our Constitution, with its systems of federalism and separated powers and checks and balances, was outmoded for modern times. | ||
| It couldn't move fast enough. | ||
| It couldn't move with enough detail. | ||
| Instead, he envisioned a rule by supposed nonpartisan, neutral, scientific experts Who could carefully distinguish all the competing interests, rise above those interests, and set the rules for our society according to some abstract notion of right and justice. | ||
| As opposed to politics being a system that recognizes our imperfect nature, That recognizes that while man's fallen nature means the government has to be able to control the government, has to be able, for instance, to police crime and ensure civil justice, that those same people are going to be running the government itself. | ||
| The same people running the government also are fallen and sinful creatures. | ||
| Therefore, the government has to be able to control itself. | ||
| That's why we have things like federalism, why we have things like separation of powers, why we have things, most importantly, Like regular elections. | ||
| All of these things were innovations at our founding. | ||
| They may seem unusual now, but they're innovations at our founding. | ||
| Woodrow Wilson wanted to get beyond all that. | ||
| He had this idea that there was going to be this elite cast of scientific, nonpartisan experts who would help set the rules for our society. | ||
| And, you know, maybe back then you could have seen Or you could have thought, well, this needs to happen. | ||
| But after 100 years of experience with these bureaucracies, who thinks that's the case anymore? | ||
| I mean, Tony Fauci may be the perfect example to steal of Woodrow Wilson's ideal of a neutral, nonpartisan, scientific bureaucrat. | ||
| Anything but what he has behaved like over the last year. | ||
| Or think about Lois Lerner at the IRS and the Tea Party controversies. | ||
| Or think about Peter Stroke and Lisa Page at the FBI trying to take down the Trump presidency. | ||
| Who really has faith that these bureaucrats, without any checks, without any balances, without any oversights, are operating for the public good as opposed to their own narrow interests or the partisan interests of the Democratic Party? | ||
| Yeah, it actually sounds far more like a dystopian Philip K. Dick novel than it does something that a future president would eventually write. | ||
| When do you think the Democrats as a party completely tipped over into that? | ||
| Because if you think only 40 or 50 years, 50 some odd years ago, JFK as a Democrat, ask not what the country can do for you, ask what you can do for the country, is very reverse of, oh, just bow to the state all the time. | ||
| When do you think they actually fully tipped into what we now see with the modern Democrats? | ||
| You see it progressing steadily from Wilson through FDR and Truman and then getting to the 60s. | ||
| About JFK, I write a lot about Kennedy and only the strong. | ||
| No doubt he was capable of soaring rhetoric, but it masked a terrible record. | ||
| JFK very much subscribed to Woodrow Wilson's conception of the administrative state and technocratic expertise. | ||
| He had all these so-called best and brightest tinkering with the economy, most especially in the Department of Defense, tinkering there, disregarding the wisdom of the men who had helped win World War II. | ||
| And as I write in Only the Strong, you see this most importantly in Vietnam. | ||
| JFK turned Vietnam into what was a local conflict in which we had one side, South Vietnam, that was capable of fighting and defending itself with our support. | ||
| But thanks to his weakness, thanks to his indecision, thanks to his belief in this kind of enlightened scientific tinkering, he and LBJ turned the Vietnam War into an American war whose legacy has distorted So, is there any Democrat that's left? | ||
| I mean, when you're talking to your colleagues in the Senate, I mean, I was a Democrat for most of my life. | ||
| Most of my, you know, that's what put me on the map. | ||
| I was a Democrat, I was a lefty, and I started, you know, seven or eight years ago saying, hey, something's not right here. | ||
| And then I kind of just followed that path down the road. | ||
| And now when I look at the modern Democrats, it's like, man, there is nobody left that I think would represent perhaps a government that maybe would be a little bigger than you want, but not a completely totalitarian government. | ||
| There seems like there's nobody left. | ||
| Are they secretly around? | ||
| I mean, do you privately meet with these people? | ||
| And they go, boy, the squad's out of control, but I'm afraid of them. | ||
| I wish I could say I did, Dave, but no. | ||
| Democrats like the squad members in the House are fully in the saddle, responding in many cases to the large activist base of the Democratic Party. | ||
| I mean, when you think about Democrats who believe in a strong, confident, powerful America, the last one I can really think of is Joe Lieberman. | ||
| And what happened to him? | ||
| The Democrats voted him out in their own primary in 2006. | ||
| People before him who were somewhat anomalous, like, say, Scoop Jackson. | ||
| But for a long time, there just hasn't been many strong Democrats. | ||
| Now, when it comes time to go to the polls, they sometimes might like to present themselves as strong or caring about your concerns, in the same way Democrats have been making a lot of noise over the last couple months, worried about gas prices. | ||
| But it's all a facade. | ||
| What they're really worried about is their own electoral future, not about the future of America. | ||
| So if we flash forward this, I know nobody wants to be in the prediction game, especially a sitting senator, but if we flash forward this to the midterms that are, you know, basically in a week or 10 days at this point, I mean, do you sense this red wave that everyone senses? | ||
| And what do you think about sort of the overconfidence feeling that, you know, you gotta worry about? | ||
| Well, I believe Republicans are gonna win control of the House and the Senate. | ||
| I don't wanna hazard a guess of how many seats we'll have, but I think most Americans now, Are looking at where their lives are now versus where they were two years ago. | ||
| They're making less money. | ||
| They're spending more money. | ||
| Their streets are less safe. | ||
| We've had 5 million illegal aliens enter our country. | ||
| There's a major war. | ||
| In Europe, China now has an aggressive dictator, unlike anything they've had since now, who's shooting missiles over Taiwan. | ||
| And I think they're very worried about the future of our country. | ||
| And they realized that, again, this is not an accident. | ||
| This is not a mishap. | ||
| It all goes directly to the Democratic Party's choices. | ||
| And in many cases, their intentional desire, for instance, to see higher gas prices, and they want to check and balance on Joe Biden. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible the intentions part of it. | ||
| I'm just so amazed by that they actually say it in front of us. | ||
| You know, we want to end fossil fuels and then we watch these prices go up and then they say, but the price going up has nothing to do with us. | ||
| It's all because of Putin. | ||
| You have to sort of admire that because then the media runs cover. | ||
| Does that ever, does it ever make you jealous that they have a whole mainstream media to run cover for them that I would say doesn't run cover for guys like you as much? | ||
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Well, we have reality on our side. | |
| I mean, look, we had inflation while we had a pandemic. | ||
| And we had inflation before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. | ||
| It wasn't caused by supply chain shortages brought on by the coronavirus. | ||
| It wasn't caused by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. | ||
| It was caused by the Democrats spending trillions of dollars we don't have, and as I explained earlier, the strong waging war on America's energy production. | ||
| Those are the two main reasons we have record high inflation and why so many American families struggle to make their budgets meet at the end of the month. | ||
| So what would you want, oh, I almost said Obama, who might be pulling the strings, what would you want Biden to do today? | ||
| If you sat down with him today and said, hey, with this energy crisis, we have to fix this, what would you want him to do right now? | ||
| Well, Rod, a little bit about this and only the strong, because it can't be stressed enough that energy literally powers America. | ||
| That's why we call it the power, power zone. | ||
| Oh, the power's back on. | ||
| That's what makes a difference in modern life, going back 250 years, is the energy we get from sources like coal, oil, gas, and now nuclear power as well. | ||
| We have to recognize that those energy sources are going to power America for the rest of our lifetime. | ||
| It is a fantasy to think that wind power and solar power is somehow going to replace those sources. | ||
| I mean, we still get seven-eighths of all of our energy from fossil fuels and nuclear power in America. | ||
| And even among so-called renewable or clean energy, we get a lot more from water and wood and crops than we do get from wind and solar combined. | ||
| So, as I write in Only the Strong, we have to reinvigorate the fossil fuel industry in America. | ||
| Now, there's no single thing that Democrats have done to strangle fossil fuel production in America, so there's no single thing we can do to help unleash it, but there's a lot of steps we can take. | ||
| For instance, we can start building critical infrastructure, most importantly new pipelines. | ||
| I was in Western Pennsylvania a couple weeks ago with Mehmet Oz on the campaign trail. | ||
| We visited a natural gas pad. | ||
| There's enough natural gas in Pennsylvania and Ohio and the rest of America To essentially replace all of the energy that we import into this country. | ||
| Yet, New England is paying sometimes quadruple the rates for natural gas this winter as the rest of the country does. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because New York won't let pipelines be built across its territory to provide American gas to American citizens. | ||
| Think about the LNG, liquefied natural gas, that we could export to other countries. | ||
| Wouldn't it be better if Europe was relying on America for American gas rather than Russia for Russian gas? | ||
| Look at the amount of permitting that has not occurred on federal lands, which is almost 30% of this entire country, to allow oil and gas exploration or federal waters. | ||
| So there's a lot of steps we could take to make sure that the federal government Some of those are also simply rhetorical or even economic. | ||
| There are many left-wing banks on Wall Street that are part of the Democrats' campaign against fossil fuels in America. | ||
| We should be celebrating the fact that we have Roughnecks and coal miners who are helping achieve energy independence here and providing energy to our allies around the world. | ||
| We shouldn't be trying to cut them off from access to the credit and the equity markets. | ||
| If we take those steps, if Biden would simply appeal to sanity when it comes to our energy sources here in America, we could bring gas prices down, we could bring your electricity bills back down, and we could help rebuild American power around the world as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think I can speak for everyone watching this right now. | ||
| They're going, they just know he's not going to do it. | ||
| Like it's just not in the cards. | ||
| But speaking of energy and pipelines and all of these things, do we have any sense of what happened to Nord Stream? | ||
| I mean, we basically just don't talk about it. | ||
| You know, these, these, I think it was four explosions. | ||
| We just don't know what's going on and we're just letting it be. | ||
| I probably shouldn't comment. | ||
| Dave on what happened in the North Stream Pipeline. | ||
| I will say that it never should have gotten that far in the first place. | ||
| Donald Trump was right to try to stop it before it got near conclusion, and I'm glad that it's not going to be brought online. | ||
| This is something that Democratic administrations before President Trump should have stopped in its infancy, so it wasn't able to be used as leverage against the West. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| All right, let's shift a little way from energy to what seems to be driving the progressives of today, which is the woke stuff, the gender stuff, the race stuff, all of that. | ||
| I guess that doesn't surprise you either, like that was just going to be the next sort of cultural extension of the deep state in some sense, or the administrative state. | ||
| It doesn't surprise me. | ||
| Most alarming, as I write in Only the Strong, is it seeping into our military as well. | ||
| This is done largely at the behest of the civilian appointees at the Department of Defense under Joe Biden. | ||
| The idea that there's a sexist or racist or extremist lurking around every corner, hiding behind a highly polished and creased veneer, which is simply not the case. | ||
| Our military is exceptional. | ||
| They recruit from a very select group of young men and women. | ||
| You're much safer and you're much more likely to be judged on your merits in our military than you are, for instance, at some left-wing college campus in America. | ||
| That hasn't stopped, down to the lowest level, an effort to indoctrinate our troops with things like critical race theory or gender ideology. | ||
| I'll tell you a story that I tell in Only the Strong as an example. | ||
| A friend of mine with whom I served recently became a battalion commander, so he's in charge of about 800 to 1,000 troops. | ||
| He has to ensure that his troops all go through something called the Healthy Sexuality Briefing. | ||
| Now this is a lot more than what troops got back in World War II about the threats of STD and things like that. | ||
| This is all about gender identity and transitioning and so on and so forth. | ||
| And he says that this is tracked all the way up to the division headquarters and presumably submitted to some higher command at the Department of Defense. | ||
| So he says, put yourself in the shoes of one of my company commanders who's in charge of about 125 of my troops. | ||
| He knows that he's got some bureaucrat up at higher headquarters looking over his shoulder to ensure that there's a little green checkmark next to every soldier's name on the healthy sexuality briefing. | ||
| He doesn't have that same bureaucrat looking over his shoulder on things like shoot, move, and communicate tactical training at the squad level. | ||
| So what is he going to take a risk on in his quarterly training plan? | ||
| Is he going to take a risk on not achieving 100% briefing on healthy sexuality? | ||
| Or is he going to take a risk that not all of his troops will go through the appropriate kind of tactical training to have them ready to fight and win on the battlefield? | ||
| I think the question answers itself. | ||
| And now maybe they won't go to war, and maybe their lives won't be put at risk because our military prioritized the wrong things in training, but do we really want to gamble our national security on that? | ||
| More to the point, do we want to gamble their safety on it? | ||
| I suggest not. | ||
| All this can end in a stroke, but it takes a new president and new secretary of defense to put an end to it. | ||
| So is that what it would take? | ||
| I mean, literally, so if we got, let's say, a Republican president, we now have a different Secretary of Defense. | ||
| I mean, in essence, you're saying you have to fire a tremendous amount of the top brass at the military, right? | ||
| No, I don't think that's necessary, Dave, because, I mean, the military is different from, say, the Department of Labor or the Department of Health and Human Services. | ||
| There is a chain of command and there's an ethos of moving out when you've received a lawful order. | ||
| And I think it would only take a new president, Republican president, Republican Secretary of Defense, to say all this ends today. | ||
| So, for instance, Dave, when I was in the Army, I frequently, I shouldn't say frequently, once every six months, we had a lot of mandatory briefings. | ||
| You normally set aside a morning of training for it, and it was on everything from equal opportunity policies, to motorcycle safety, to personal finances. | ||
| And that briefing made clear, albeit shortly, that the Army is an equal opportunity organization. | ||
| It does not tolerate any kind of harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, or sex, or religion, or nationality, or what have you. | ||
| And that was that. | ||
| And I never saw anything like that when I was in the Army, Dave. | ||
| All it takes is one Secretary of Defense to say, we're going back to the old ways of reminding our troops that this is an equal employment organization, equal opportunity organization, and we have zero tolerance for any kind of harassment and discrimination. | ||
| Here's one PowerPoint slide that states that policy. | ||
| A soldier will get briefed on that once a year, once every six months. | ||
| And if I find out any command is using anything other than this single statement of policy, that commander will be removed. | ||
| That will end the nonsense right there, I promise you. | ||
| Because that's what most of these commanders want to do. | ||
| You think my friend, who just became a battalion commander, who's achieving the pinnacle of his professional career, wants to spend his time on a healthy sexuality briefing? | ||
| No. | ||
| The vast majority of officers and senior enlisted troops want to focus on training their troops, being ready to fight a war. | ||
| They don't want to have to focus on all these distractions. | ||
| When you're back home in Arkansas and you're talking to constituents and they're seeing all of this craziness with the with the gender stuff and we just covered it on my show where the president is, you know, sitting at the White House with the trans A journalist who, you know, in essence, he's saying that the states shouldn't have rights when it comes to whether these procedures should go through. | ||
| I mean, just the litany of crazy things. | ||
| I would suspect in a place like Arkansas, there is very little tolerance for this kind of thing. | ||
| Yeah, Dave, I've learned over the last 10 years what I kind of sense growing up is you can never underestimate the good, decent, common sense of hardworking Arkansans. | ||
| And when they hear things like kids being exposed to transgender ideology in kindergarten or second grade, of doctors performing double mastectomies on healthy teenage girls or using drugs to block normal pubescent development in boys and girls. | ||
| They just think it's insane. | ||
| Our legislature has in fact taken action to stop that kind of abuse of children, which I think any decent civilized society should. | ||
| It's one thing when someone becomes 18 years old and is an adult and can make decisions for themselves. | ||
| But just like we take a lot of other steps to protect children from fads and fashions and from irresponsible adults, I think this is a reasonable step that we take as well in my state and hopefully a lot of other states to protect young children. | ||
| Do you sense that, the direction that America's going in, where the states are now feeling very, very different than each other? | ||
| I know you appreciate federalism, so, you know, look, I was in California, it went off the deep end, I now live in Florida. | ||
| As I tell everyone, I feel like I live in a different country, actually. | ||
| But do you think that this trend where the red states seemingly will be more red, the blue states seemingly will be more blue, do you think there's a danger there that we will have nothing that will unite us at some point if we keep going down that route? | ||
| Well, Dave, I think the real danger is more of these liberal states and cities trying to impose their views and their values on the more conservative areas of our country. | ||
| Take California and Arkansas as an example. | ||
| I love California. | ||
| It is a beautiful state. | ||
| It's got a great history. | ||
| It's got great people. | ||
| I don't agree with much of the political turn it's taken over the last 20 years, however. | ||
| It's lost a lot of great people like you who want to get away from the higher taxes and the regulation and the lack of housing and the high costs. | ||
| At the same time, I wouldn't presume to set the laws for California from Arkansas. | ||
| I wouldn't think that I get a say or that my fellow Arkansans get a say in dictating what are traditional state and local matters to a state like California. | ||
| That's not the case the other way around, though. | ||
| California, like other states, have tried to impose their views and their values on other states. | ||
| Sometimes they even do things like adopting travel bans. | ||
| Saying that California officials can't travel to a state like Texas or Arkansas, unless of course you're Gavin Newsom, then you can travel to places like Idaho and Montana to go to your multi-million dollar resort lodges with your security detail. | ||
| But I think federalism is not just a way to protect our liberties as our founding fathers understood it. | ||
| It's also a way to account for the large continental nation with a genuine kind of diversity. | ||
| Economic, geographic, historic diversity that allows people to govern themselves in the ways best suited to their environments. | ||
| You know, Maine, for instance, is going to have a lot of interest and a lot of focus on the lobster trade. | ||
| Not exactly something we spend a lot of time on in Arkansas. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then again, Arkansas has a very large forestry industry. | ||
| You know, not again, something that you see in the great plain states. | ||
| These views extend to social and cultural questions as well. | ||
| And I think it's fine for states to have very different approaches to the way their citizens want to live. | ||
| It's not fine when some of these left-wing states try to then begin imposing those views and those values on more conservative areas of the country. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's the great challenge we have going forward, is that a certain set of people are going to want to be left alone, and a certain set of people won't want them to leave alone. | ||
| And I don't know how you arbitrage those two things. | ||
| Away from the book for just a moment, what would you want people to know about Arkansas that maybe they don't know? | ||
| You know, we talk a lot about Cali, now we talk about Florida or New York or some of the bigger states or coastal states. | ||
| We don't talk about Arkansas that much. | ||
| What should people know about Arkansas? | ||
| Arkansas is a great, beautiful state with wonderful people. | ||
| If you don't like so much heat and humidity in the summer as you get to Florida, you should come to Arkansas. | ||
| We have four beautiful seasons. | ||
| There's a lot of opportunity all across the state, a real rich diversity across the state. | ||
| In eastern Arkansas, we have some of the most fertile farmland. | ||
| In the country, South and West Arkansas has some of the great timber forests that we have across the country. | ||
| Beautiful mountains, both the Ozarks and the Ouachita's. | ||
| Especially in Northwest Arkansas, there's a rapidly growing economy that has about a thousand people moving in every month. | ||
| So there's just a lot of rich and rewarding reasons to move to Arkansas or at least come and try it out for a visit. | ||
| There's no bad time to Come to Arkansas. | ||
| We'd welcome you up there, Dave, just like we'd welcome a lot of your California refugees coming in as well, as long as they don't bring their politics with them. | ||
| That seems to be the key to the entire thing. | ||
| I basically have to walk around here with a DeSantis hat to make sure that my neighbors aren't freaking out about me. | ||
| Senator, I appreciate your time. | ||
| The book is Only the Strong. | ||
| We'll link to it right down below. | ||
| And I'm going to be in D.C. | ||
| a little bit after the election doing some live interviews. | ||
| So I have a feeling you'll be in a good mood for a couple of days after that. | ||
| So if you're in D.C., maybe we can connect then. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Swing by in between your meeting with all the large number of new Republican senators and congressmen. | ||
| Sounds like a plan. | ||
| Senator Tom Cotton, thank you very much. | ||
| 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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