Dave Rubin hosts a Tallahassee roundtable with Buck Sexton, Carol Markowicz, and John Cardillo to analyze Governor DeSantis's anti-"woke" inauguration and the GOP civil war over Speaker Kevin McCarthy. While Sexton dismisses internal fighting as harmless, Cardillo fears defections to Democrat Hakeem Jeffries would install a "radical leftist," contrasting Republican animosity with Democratic unity. The panel critiques Adam Schiff's congressional hearings as ineffective accountability, yet Sexton supports releasing COVID vaccine data. Finally, Markowicz condemns Democrats' border leniency while Sexton labels the crisis a welfare-driven plan and Cardillo warns of cartel-fueled synthetic meth flooding the U.S., predicting felony-level administrative failures under Biden. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, people of the internet, we are live and we've got a Friday,
Florida freedom extravaganza.
I couldn't think of an F word that worked with extravaganza.
Joining me today is the co-host of the nationally syndicated radio show, Clay and Buck, Buck Sexton, a Fox News and New York Post columnist, Carol Markowitz, and a former NYPD officer and political commentator, John Cardillo.
Buck, Carol, John, Good to see you guys.
We all took a private flight up to Tallahassee.
I was in the cockpit and John handed me champagne.
We're all still here.
So, pretty good start to the week, wouldn't you say?
Got to land the plane and relay that to you, if in fact, and this was just so everyone's clear, this is one of those, you know, brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr It was one of those planes, which always feels a little more, I don't know, to me.
It was a little prop plane, but we made it to Tallahassee.
And of course, the reason we were in Tallahassee, we weren't just going for nothing, was for Governor Ron DeSantis's inauguration and the ball and a couple other events that were going there.
So let's let's start with that, because I think as everyone watching this knows, all four of us are Floridians, three of us Buck Carroll and I are new Floridians.
John's been here for about 20 years so we got to give the shout out to the OG.
But good things are happening down in Florida and that's in strong contrast to just sort of the endless dysfunction that is happening in DC as we speak at this very moment.
So let's throw to just a little bit of Governor DeSantis's inauguration speech.
This bizarre but prevalent ideology that permeates these policy measures purports to act in the name of justice for the marginalized, but it frowns upon American institutions, it rejects merit and achievement, and it advocates identity essentialism.
We reject this woke ideology.
unidentified
We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy.
We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to become optional.
Look, there's a reason why I think the number is over 300,000 left New York, my home state.
in the last year.
And so not all of them moved to Florida, but a huge portion of them did.
Florida, Texas, Tennessee, these are all states where you have more freedom, where you have more sanity in general at the state government level.
You do have good cities in all of those states.
So, you know, one of the challenges, I think, in a lot of the red states is you go, OK, well, you know, if you if you move to Montana, which isn't even that red as a state, by the way, Um, but you're not really going to be able to have a, any kind of a city to live in.
Whereas here we got Miami, obviously Nashville and Tennessee and then Dallas slash Houston slash, well, Austin's a little too commie, but I do love it.
That's the problem.
Like I want anarchists covered in tattoos making my latte because they're really good at it.
Like, so I have to find that.
That mix between constitutional freedom and sane government and, you know, police that are backed up.
You are definitely, you are definitely not spending enough time in Miami because if you get like a really anti-communist Cuban to make you a cafecito, forget your latte, my friend.
I mean, when you call someone a commie here, which I've been doing for years, by the way, it is, Gets people fired up.
They really don't, they know what communism actually is.
And so they really don't like it here.
I think that this is, this is the after effect of COVID that many of us talked about for a while.
I mean, Carol, weren't you, were you on that?
Remember when they had the thing where it was like a big phone call where everyone could clubhouse, right?
We did like a club.
Were you on that clubhouse?
And there were all these, there were all these dead enders in New York and there, and there was sort of this attitude of like, none of you are going to leave.
Actually, that's not what ended up happening.
So I think there's good reasons why.
And Carol had a line that really stuck with me.
I've told her this many times, because it was what I was feeling too, in the communist enclave of Manhattan during COVID, which was, at one point you cross over from being mad at the people in charge to being mad at the people who vote for these people and keep what they say.
And once that happens, once you can't respect your neighbors enough to stop being crazy, you gotta go.
I'm glad that Buck brought it up, because that's what I was feeling in L.A.
I obviously was frustrated with Newsom and Garcetti and these ridiculous bureaucrats.
But then I would go to the supermarket and I was angry at random people.
And that was part of the transition.
You also went to during the day, I think between the inauguration and the and the ball, you went to a it was like a parents conference or a mother's conference.
And I'm guessing it was just more sanity.
Right.
Like not just hardcore.
No conservative political thought, but just basic sanity.
Dave and I and some other people were at the governor's mansion meeting the governor for the first time.
And I just remember thinking that night that, like, he has a lot of things at stake very similar to me.
The fact that he has small children, it shows.
It really shows.
He has to fight for a certain education system that they're going to grow up in.
He has to, you know, really just fight for a society that they're going to live in.
I think it's so important to him for, you know, very similar reasons as it is to me.
And just moving to Florida, the comfort that I feel with my kids, like I just, I worry about what they're getting in school so much less.
I worry about just general indoctrination so much less.
It's really been a weight lifted off of me.
I was not sleeping like towards the end of our New York stay because of those, you know, insane neighbors who I just saw pushing this ever crazier agenda.
John, if it turns out that DeSantis' speechwriter stole from Blanche Devereux, Golden Girls, Season 7, I think it's Episode 2, 1992, does this take down the whole thing?
I was a big Golden Girls reruns fan back in the day, along with, you know, Charles in Charge.
There's like a whole slate of these shows that I feel like I was watching in their second run.
Golden Girls had some great writing, but you know, it is a throwback.
I did start, I've seen, I haven't seen Golden Girls since I moved down here, but I will say that I have watched some Miami Vice, which I'd never really watched before.
And you see what the Florida of the 80s was like and what it's turned into now.
It's a pretty fascinating transformation.
I still tell Cardillo that I want to wear the sunglasses with the connects and like neon flip-flops.
It's not like we're missing some great opportunity to pass amazing legislation.
When was the last time that happened anyway?
And there should be some sense that it's not always, I think that there are a lot of people that just, they at least want disruption in the debate, if not disruption, you know, within the GOP, if not disruption in the actual process that goes on.
And I think they'd like to see both.
So I'm fine with it.
I don't want to like, let them fight.
I also have been telling everybody, Cause you know, some people get a little too, uh, you know, if you agree with somebody on 95% of political issues or 90% of political issues, and then you start calling them a rhino or a squash or a bad person over who's going to be speaker of the house.
I'm like, where do we think this Republican primary is going?
Cause let's just say, I know there are, there are two heavyweights.
Everybody thinks about Nikki Haley is definitely going to be running.
A few other people are definitely going to be running.
It's going to get a little messy.
You know, sometimes it's gotta be like Thanksgiving after everyone's had three glasses of wine, you know?
And usually you're a little bit of a better fighter when you've fought some better opponents.
That's kind of how it works.
And don't forget, guys, just as of this morning, John Bolton and his mustache are running for president as Republicans.
But I got two clips here.
So I want to show you kind of both sides of where the Republicans are at at the moment.
First, here's Chip Roy.
This is yesterday when he was calling for the nomination of Byron Donalds, who, as my audience knows, is a congressman from down here, southwest Florida.
Exporting a little bit of what we got in Florida, and I think Byron Donalds is a great example of that, that would be pretty sweet, even though I guess at this moment it sounds like it's not going to happen.
Yeah, look, Byron Donalds, to me, is an absolute rock star.
They got one of the best public speakers, extemporaneous public speakers I've ever seen.
He understands the issues incredibly well.
He gets it.
The man loves America.
I'd love to see Byron Donalds as speaker, but Chip Roy is right about something else.
D.C.
is badly broken, and it's a town that runs on money.
And Kevin McCarthy, Has raised so many members, so much money, and I'm getting beat up on Twitter because I'm like, hey, look, this is kind of a pointless fight, right?
It's a good fight to have.
Don't get me wrong, but you can't get everything right now.
And here's my fear.
I don't trust in that in that group of 200 to 203, depending on which ballot you're looking at, that voted for Kevin McCarthy and won't waiver.
I don't trust.
And it's a bet I would never take.
That you don't have six Liz Cheney's or Adam Kinzinger's in there.
That if this thing goes long enough, are going to move over, cut a deal with Dems, and vote for Hakeem Jeffries.
Because the part of this we're all ignoring is on every vote, on every ballot, Hakeem Jeffries, a radical leftist, a true communist, Hakeem Jeffries has gotten 212 votes.
Six more.
Six Cheneys or Kinzingers.
Move over.
We've got the most radically far-left Speaker of the House the United States has ever seen.
He makes Nancy Pelosi look like Bill Clinton or a moderate R. That's my fear.
So I do want to see this thing close quickly.
I think it's going to be very difficult for somebody besides McCarthy to get the votes.
I just don't trust today's Republican Party.
You know, the Chiproys and the Byron Donalds are anomalies.
They're in the vast minority of true conservatives.
I don't trust this Republican Party to hold the line that Democrats are far better at the political blood sport as it is today.
than are Republicans.
They better close the thing quickly or Jeffries is going to make his move.
We all served in different ways, but we mostly served for the same reason, so that we would take the fight to the enemy, and the enemy would no longer take the fight to the American people.
We had purpose.
We had mission.
That was our mission.
We have mission up here.
Some people have different priorities.
Some people want to cut spending.
Some people want to fix our mandatory spending problems.
Some of us want to fix the border, deal with the Mexican drug cartels that are Murdering tens of thousands Americans a year by poisoning them with fentanyl.
There's a lot of missions that we have up here.
I don't think that the American people care about any of these so-called missions happening this week.
Rules changes, who gets more power, who gets on what committee.
I can't think of one American who gives a damn about any of that.
They care about the mission.
And the conservative agenda is one that will accomplish the mission for the American people the best, but we can't start that agenda until we start governing.
That's why we're up here, because we care about mission, we care about service, and we care about the American people, we care about getting things done.
Carol, what do you think about that take, that it's sort of like, suck it up, U-20, like, we've got the majority, it'll be better than the other guys, let's just play through.
I'm like, uh, go back, go back at his Twitter feed like a month and tell me, tell me who else is, is throwing the kind of punches that John, but anyway, put that aside for a second.
Somehow there's just this carve out where it's fine for Donald Trump to push for McCarthy.
And this is where I say to people, come on now, come on now, if we're going to do this I agree with a lot of what Crenshaw said about how this doesn't really matter.
and their fakes, and by the way, I haven't come, I'm a proud fence sitter on this issue.
I'm like, look, I think there could be a better speaker.
I think McCarthy would probably be more or less, you know, maybe with some concessions, okay.
I don't really care.
I actually think, I agree with actually a lot of what Crenshaw said about how this doesn't really,
I agree that it doesn't really matter.
I don't think it's fair that people don't know what's going on, but I don't think
it changes all that much.
But the fact that Trump is able to come out in favor and basically tell everybody, we'll vote for McCarthy.
And no one's saying, well, Trump is a rhino squash who's a big Trump supporter.
I mean, that just goes to show you here that I think people this is about emoting.
Our side doesn't doesn't do that very often.
But after a really disappointing midterm election and after the recognition that we have, look, we have fights ahead.
I mean, I just think this is the first of many battles like this.
Where it's not going to be so clear to everybody what the agenda should be, who should be in charge of that agenda, and the best way to get it through.
I don't believe there's all this clarity on the right.
I think people need to throw some elbows and figure this out.
Yeah, we don't do emoting, but we do a lot of personal, like a lot of the interactions that we have on the right are personality based and very, very personal.
I just think that the left often puts aside differences and just joins together.
And we don't do that.
We're like, I hate that guy.
He did something bad to me once in 1986, and there's no way I'm voting with him.
And there's just a lot of that on the right.
And I wish we would sort of stop all the personal kind of feelings.
McCarthy just people just don't like him.
Some people just don't like him and it has nothing to do with how good he can pull together the caucuses or any of that.
It's about they just don't personally don't like him.
And you see this in the interviews that they give on TV.
It's like it is personal and I wish we wouldn't do it.
It is interesting, though, the Trump portion of this, as Trump has sort of been, you know, neutered to where he just posts things on Truth that then get shared elsewhere with his, you know, capitalization and sort of crazy way of talking, where he basically is backing McCarthy, where it seems like his own base doesn't really like McCarthy.
And the guys that he's trying to convince are not really listening to him, even if there's a deal there.
So that might signal a little bit of the sort of squandered influence of Trump.
I got beat up for saying that they should close this thing quickly.
And then I put out a tweet the other day, yesterday or the day before, saying, look, one of the one of the stories not being told is that Trump's political capital clearly isn't what it used to be.
Because to the point of Carolyn Buck and you, Dave, Trump has been pushing for McCarthy pretty hard, actually, and behind closed doors from people I know very close to him even harder.
And it's falling on deaf ears.
Matt Gaetz is a Trump loyalist in every other respect.
But on this, he's not budging and he's not listening to the former president.
Trump supporters, as Carol noted, are not listening to Trump.
And so it's an interesting tale about where Trump's political capital sits today.
Yeah, the other thing they do, the other thing they say is he's keeping his enemies closer.
It's for DHS, which is just stupid and really, really is annoying.
But, you know, his followers are going to make excuses.
But I do think this says quite a bit about where he stands and it might be telling going into 24 about his capital value, and it might be really telling going into 24.
Well, you know, in terms of my service on the Intelligence Committee, this was one of the promises I think Kev McCarthy gave, one of the great many in the growing list, to try to placate the hardliners like Marjorie Taylor Greene and get their support.
unidentified
But, you know, there are much bigger concerns, frankly, I have with what they will do.
Carol, is McCarthy showing up on these shows, particularly The View, which has become a complete caricature of what Barbara Walters, who just passed away, wanted to create 20 years ago, is that just a perfect example of what sort of the swamp and the machine and the monster is?
These people who lie about everything, never get fired, never get called out, all of the stuff, it just endlessly happens over and over.
And usually they actually just get promotions out of it or better TV gigs.
No, I, you know, I, of course it is, of course Schiff is just part of the absolute swampiest swamp, but he says that, like, MTG wants to get rid of him.
And I want to know which Republican wants to keep Schiff.
Like, who is the Republican who would like to have him stay on?
So the idea that it's some hardliners who are anti-him, like, no, that's a pretty all-around idea that we all share, that Schiff is just the absolute worst and that he's reduced to talking on The View about his plans and how much he hates various Republicans.
Do you think that's what people want, whether it's COVID or whether it's looking into the January 6th commission or any of all the nonsense they put us through?
Is that the best use of their time or would you rather them go in another direction?
The Benghazi effect, I think, is where this becomes most apparent.
The Benghazi hearings—look, once Barack Obama won re-election, the idea that there was going to be accountability for Benghazi to anybody who understands the bureaucracy—I mean, I come out of the CIA, right?—was laughable.
It was just not going to happen.
There was just no way.
Because what happens when you look at a failure like that, You have all these different people who just point the fingers at a hundred other people and no one's really responsible for anything, right?
The only accountability comes for the person at the top, whether the State Department or the President, and that didn't happen.
So it was great for people to audition for cable news shows after they finished their congressional terms, but it had no actual effect whatsoever.
I think that you are likely to see Uh, some of these investigation, the one, the one where I would say it's different because we really do need the information and more information is on anything COVID and vaccine related, um, on, on that data internally, because that fight, as we all know, is still going on to convince more people of how wrong the Fauci Democrat side was on this and also how dishonest they were.
So I'm in favor of getting that information out there.
So I'm not saying it's useless, but this idea that we're going to have hearings and hold them accountable.
Accountability comes with the ballot box.
I mean, the other side will start spending.
Are we going to get a special counsel?
No.
Do they ever appoint special counsels?
No.
Does anyone really think they're going to prosecute Hunter Biden?
Clay and I have a bet on that one.
I already won, but we're going to do another bet on that one.
You know, once you understand the nature of these people and this machinery, you know where it's all going.
So, you know, investigations, it'll give us something to talk about.
On the COVID side, I think the information is necessary to get on the public sphere, but we're not going to own the libs.
By having a bunch of members of Congress, you know, have some terse questioning sessions.
And John, isn't it interesting because not only, OK, we have these investigations, nothing really goes anywhere, but I don't know if you guys have noticed this the last couple of days on Twitter, but there have been a ton of ads from HHS and the CDC Where their messaging on COVID has significantly changed.
They are now saying stuff on Twitter that a year ago would have gotten all of us banned.
Basically saying, if you're under 50 and young and healthy, you don't need the vaccine.
That's what their ads are saying.
Cause they're trying to get older people vaxxed.
If we would have said that a year ago, we would have been booted.
So they, they, it's not just that the investigations don't do anything.
They actually changed their narrative in real time.
So you completely forget all of the stuff that they botched all along.
Get the information out there because the one thing we need to do is have doctors, even Bill Maher, there was a clip on Twitter today of Bill Maher saying doctors are afraid.
His doctors tell him very different things in private than they're willing to say in public.
Let's get this information out there so doctors are no longer afraid to speak publicly and give their patients the proper advice on these vaccines.
And I think if anything comes out of any hearings and that's the thing, then we took a step forward.
Especially because he did add, don't come to the border to be coming.
So like at the Holocaust, it would have been like, don't come, do not get on the ships.
You know, it's so just disheartening to me that Republicans will not fight on the border.
It is such a popular issue to stop the flow of illegal immigration at our southern border, and I just continue not to understand why Republicans won't make it a political issue.
It is not racist.
It is not in any way racist.
It is absolutely about the rule of law.
And I say this, of course, as an immigrant, as somebody who had to wait to come into the United States as a refugee, and I don't understand why Republicans won't use it.
Last month, Chuck Schumer said, That he wants to legalize every single person in the U.S.
illegally.
Not like dreamers who were brought here with their kids.
No, every single person.
And yet, that wasn't used in ads in Georgia for the Herschel Walker runoff.
That would have been a really powerful ad.
And so, we can blame Biden and we can blame Democrats for the mess, the continuing mess.
But until Republicans step up and grow a pair and start fighting on this, it won't change.
Buck, are we missing something on the media side of this thing?
I mean, you probably saw last week, they had this video out of the El Paso airport with just, you know, dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of illegal aliens just sleeping at the airport.
And it's like, nobody's going to cover that on mainstream media.
You know, we showed it, you probably talked about it, but it never bubbles up.
And because of that, the average person doesn't have a freaking clue what's going on.
And then they hear Chuck Schumer say, make everyone legal.
We talk about it, but I think we also sometimes on the right get pulled down into the weeds of, oh, well, it's Title 42 and they're going to change and they're going to do some shifting of resources.
They want as many illegals to come into the country as possible.
The moment that you actually look at the reality of policy.
I've been to the border many times.
I've spent a lot of time down there with Border Patrol and the amount, the sheer volume of the scams that are constantly being run.
These are not asylum seekers.
This is the whole thing.
So we sit here talking about, oh, how do we process the asylum seekers?
Carol talked about coming here as a refugee.
Refugees apply in a foreign country to come into this country because of Clear oppression from a tyrannical government.
It's not a tyrannical government if you just want access to a better jobs market or better welfare.
That's not the same thing.
People that are leaving countries that have gang violence, we have gang violence.
Lots of countries have gang violence.
That doesn't make you an asylum seeker.
They use the system to get into the country and then they don't actually show up for their hearings.
And if they do show up for the hearings, there's usually an additional hearing about deportation.
We have to start talking about what we're going to really do, not just stop people from coming in now, but also, are we going to remove people or encourage self-deportation of people who have come in recent years in this flood of now 5 million under Biden?
So I think Republicans talk about it, but they're sort of using the framework of the Democrats of, oh, well, it's border security.
No, this is A mass illegal immigration plan that has been playing out really for decades, but accelerated dramatically in the last four years, and Democrats lie about it at every step and at every stage.
Yes, and by the way, just to add to what you said, even if they were all fleeing the most horrific repression and all of the worst stuff that we can all imagine, that's not a reason for us not to have a border.
We still should have a border that's protected and then figure out how to... And we take a small number of real asylum seekers as it is, right?
I mean, if a hundred million people in China said, well, we all want to come here because the Chinese Communist Party is totalitarian, Chinese Communist Party is totalitarian.
But America's not America if 100 million foreigners show up in one year.
Over the last 48 hours, if you've been watching some of these videos, the Mexican army launched a full-blown military assault in Cuyacán.
Now, what Cuyacán is, for those who don't know, it's the home of Mayo Zimbada.
Well, who is he?
Ismael Mayo Zimbada was El Chapo's partner.
He was really El Chapo's padrón, his godfather, his rabbi, the guy that got him started.
In the cocaine game, in the drug trafficking game.
You hear my dog barking because he somehow got out.
But they caught El Chapo's son.
Well, those Sicarios, those killers that work for the cartels, are now fleeing like little rats and like fleas.
Where are they going?
They're going to come here.
And what are they going to do?
Now, this isn't speculative.
This isn't Cardillo, ex-law enforcement guy, being a fear monger.
This is what happens.
Talk to anybody at ICE.
Talk to anybody at Homeland Security Investigations.
Anybody at DEA.
DEA Intelligence.
South of the border.
They're gonna tell you these guys come here and where do they go?
They go to Miami, they go to Texas, to Houston, to Dallas, really go to Chicago, New York, Los Angeles.
They align with MS-13, with the Mexican mafia and the drug gangs that are already murderers, that are already vicious, that are already flooding the streets with synthetic meth.
By the way, everybody worries about cocaine and fentanyl.
As it's analyzed right now, DEA intelligence feels that Zambada has somewhere in the neighborhood of six to eight billion dollars in synthetic meth in tunnels in Mexico ready to bring into the U.S.
I cannot end a show on a Friday with brutal death and mass drug overdosing.
You asked for it.
Well, I'm going to let Carol finish this up, but Buck, you've got just enough of a smile there that I feel you can get us out of that mess, and then I'm going to have Carol bring us home.
Say something nice before the weekend, for God's sake.
That my favorite part of Ron DeSantis' speech is, you know, again, I'm an immigrant, I'm a super America lover, and I love the part where he said that we have to fight for this country, and we can't just be like, oh, America's over, that's it, what are you gonna do?
I hate that, I think, I love that we're fighting, I love that the fight starts in Florida, and there's nowhere else to go, we have to fight for this place, let's do it.
I was gonna say, Carol stalked the landing, I'm gonna go out into my 80 degree weather and drink Something made with fruit with a little umbrella in it, because Florida.