Congresswoman Lauren Boebert argues leftist policies, including gender dysphoria encouragement and marijuana legalization, are escalating the mental health crisis and fueling Denver's homelessness. She attributes youth deaths to abortion rather than gun violence, advocates arming teachers, and criticizes Governor Jared Polis for extreme mandates despite his likability. Boebert calls for subpoenas against federal censors, supports Trump and DeSantis, and blames Biden for inflation and border failures, asserting bipartisan engagement is essential to stop suppression. [Automatically generated summary]
No, you know, Republicans are in the majority, so we have a little more power, but I'm not as powerful as Tony Gonzalez, who can shut down entire border security bills just with the power of his words.
No, I was stuck in airports all day long.
I mean, if you're just going to count Eastern time, 8 a.m.
to midnight.
And I had two of my boys with me.
Um, which some people would think that that causes for more stress, more of a headache, but it was awesome.
I had my 15-year-old and my 10-year-old and, uh, we walked the airports together.
We snuggled on airplanes.
We went and ate good food in the airport.
They wanted McDonald's.
I vetoed that.
And listen, you get McDonald's anytime you want.
But, uh, you know, it was really great just spending the day with them and a unique experience.
Got home, you know, we got home at, 12.30.
I put my 10-year-old in the shower.
I said, I have been with you all day.
You smell?
I made you shower before we got on the airplane, and I don't think you use soap.
We still didn't get to bed till after 1 a.m.
unidentified
Do you ever want to do that with some of the Democrats you're debating?
Yeah, so I'm pretty much on my own for the most part, but when their schedule allows it, they certainly come up here.
We pulled them out of school to have weeks up here before because I had been traveling so much and just missed the heck out of them and said, why don't you come out here and They act like they own D.C.
when they come here.
They go throughout the Capitol, the office buildings.
They know which members of Congress have dogs in their office.
And, you know, they go and storm their offices and hang out.
But this is spring break, so I have two boys with me.
So, I mean, obviously I'm a Christian and, you know, there are standards that we like to uphold, but none of us do it perfectly.
You know, one of the biggest things that I look to is Him who knows to do right and doesn't, it's sin.
And, I mean, there's things all throughout the week that I know is right to do, and sometimes, you know, I don't do them.
And, you know, so we can nitpick what the Bible says is right and wrong, but I think just having That heart posture of wanting to serve God and do the right thing is so important.
Would I have chosen a different path?
Of course!
But this is where we're at, and we're all embracing it, and we're so happy.
He was going to graduate and go to college in Florida.
Now, you know, he's looking at petroleum engineering classes, courses at our community college.
It's a great community college in Rifle.
But, you know, I get to have him home with me longer and, you know, I get to be Gigi So certainly there are some beliefs that you, you know, like, wait, this isn't exactly right and exactly what we have taught you, but this is where we're at and we're going to teach you about redemption and how to move forward.
So I'm happy that he's close to me and I get to instruct him now on, you know, how to be a loving father and how to raise a baby.
Let's do a couple things about Colorado specifically, and then we'll get to the rest of the country.
When I did my book tour back in May, I did Denver, I'd stop in Denver, and I was shocked at the amount of homeless people there.
You expect it in Seattle, you expect it in San Francisco and Portland, et cetera, but I was shocked by what was going on in Denver, which is such a gorgeous city, and the people are great and all that.
Because as a general rule, I'm more libertarian, and I do believe in legalizing this stuff, and I'm not against people doing what they want with their lives, but even seeing in New York what's going on right now, the whole city just smells like weed, basically.
What do you think of, well, I guess I know what you think, but so Polis, it seems to me that people say when I'm always like, oh, there's no moderate Democrat, people are like, well, Polis is kind of, he's not completely insane, but it doesn't sound like the policies are that far from what we think.
No, the policies are very extreme and I do like Governor Jared Polis on a personal level.
I mean, we've had some interactions and he's been very kind to me, but his policies do not match that moderate or libertarian mantra that people have about him.
Even hearing stories of him serving in the House of Representatives is very different than what I'm seeing as him being our governor.
And maybe it's his cabinet members.
Who are pushing these extreme policies, and he's kind of going along with it.
There is a supermajority, the Democrats have a supermajority in Colorado, and the state legislature pushes extreme policies.
And unfortunately, those get signed into law, whether that's gun control laws, or comprehensive sex ed, or vaccine mandates for our children in order to go to school.
Absolutely.
And so all of this is so extreme.
And from, from the top down, it affects everyone everywhere.
The lockdowns affected our businesses.
So many were shut down.
Our churches were shut down.
Our schools were shut down.
People were masked up and, and just lost so, so much.
We didn't have a statewide vaccine mandate for the COVID vaccine.
And maybe that's why people look and say, oh, look, he wasn't that bad.
Right, because I'm telling you, I mean, his name is on that very short list of like not insane Democrats and I would love to interview him and discuss some of this stuff, so we shall see.
And like I said, he and I have had great conversations together.
He came into my Washington, D.C.
office, and we talked about water.
And it was a very productive conversation that we had about water.
Colorado doesn't have a lack of that resource.
We have an overallocation problem.
And so he and I are trying to work together to see how we can store more of that water.
It's a low-hanging fruit, and you just came from California.
Well, California takes a lot of our water, and it's really frustrating when you see hundreds of billions of gallons of water being dumped into the ocean rather than stored in California after we sent that precious resource downriver.
Do you sense that Colorado's gonna just sort of have what now, although Colorado I think is somewhat purple, it's gonna have what the blue states have, which is that the big cities, so mostly Denver, will just go increasingly blue, and the rural areas will just go increasingly red, and then we'll just have that nonstop tension?
They're coming to Colorado for a lifestyle that they're accustomed to, and even policies that they have voted for in the past, but they don't recognize that they failed them, and that's why they're leaving.
So they think, oh, if we try a new form of socialism, right?
This type hasn't been tried yet, so we'll try it over here in this state.
Can we just put personal responsibility on people?
and say this was a terrible person who did a terrible thing.
I mean, I do think that we have a mental crisis here and a mental health crisis in the United States
that's being, that's growing and really being encouraged.
But I don't want to go after an entire group of people for something that one person did.
Just like the left goes after all gun owners when something like this happens.
Look, I'm from Colorado, we're at the epicenter of these school shootings and it's absolutely terrible.
But you don't disarm law-abiding citizens because of one nutjob who did a horrible, heinous act.
And so, also looking at Nashville, who stopped this crazed shooter?
A good guy with a gun.
And so, I mean, this has to be something that we focus on.
I was actually just in a committee hearing, and let me say, I was in the airport yesterday when this broke, and my boys and I prayed together.
Just the families and everyone affected.
I know the left goes after that, we don't want your thoughts and prayers and this and that, but I believe in prayer and that works.
I know the power of the wraparound presence of the Holy Spirit and how he can just comfort and heal broken hearts.
That's something that we did together when we heard about this.
But there's so much.
I was in a committee hearing on the ATF rule with the pistol brace, and I actually got completely sidetracked because I wanted to say something that I had said in years past and used to believe.
I wanted to start off and say, we don't differ in our hearts, we differ in data.
But I stopped myself and I said, no, we do differ in our hearts.
I don't want any child killed.
And they're talking about this as the leading cause of death for our youth is gun violence.
I said, no, not even close.
Actually, it's abortion.
unidentified
You know, we're aborting nearly one- That's the new meme that they're using constantly now.
But yeah, I mean, we're up to, I mean, nearly a million a year, and that's never discussed.
And so we do differ in our hearts because every life is valuable.
This is why I'm so proud of my son and his girlfriend for choosing life.
Even in, if you look at rural and urban areas, The teen pregnancy rate isn't much different, but the teen abortion rate is much higher in urban areas than it is in rural areas because we value life.
We care about that and do have personal responsibility.
So we want to look at data and see what we can do to protect life.
And I want to arm teachers.
I want to have secure schools.
There was an idea I proposed in the last Congress to take some of the unspent COVID money and Secure schools, protect our children.
We protect Congress with fences and miles of razor wire and tens of thousands of armed national guards because walls work and armed security works.
Let me ask you about the arming teachers thing, because I'm not, there's part of me that's not inherently against it, but then when you see how many teachers are actually left-wing activists.
How many teachers are actually teaching this woke craziness?
How many teachers are clearly not good at their job or actually quite negligent in their responsibilities?
What do you do about that?
Because it's not as if you're just gonna handgun people, train them, and they're gonna be ideologically lined up with you in a way that's gonna make any sort of sense.
Well, I don't think most of those woke teachers are going to be volunteering to be armed.
You know, there's certainly circumstances that are always beyond my imagination.
But in Colorado, we actually have a law that allows teachers to be armed.
It's up to the school board.
If the school board says teachers can be certified, then they go through the certification.
And we have an organization, Faster Colorado, that trains teachers.
And it's a very extensive tactical training course that they're taught how to be responsible with this firearm.
Most have had experience.
You have retired military personnel, retired law enforcement.
And I think that having some presence there, able to defend the students is a really good thing.
It doesn't have to be every teacher.
It doesn't have to be the majority of teachers.
But even knowing that there is someone there to stop an imminent threat.
I think that is a large enough deterrent because even we're hearing reports, I don't know how true they are, but we're hearing reports that the shooter in Nashville, whom I won't name nor give pronouns, said this was a soft target.
This person knew that this school was not going to be able to stop the shooting.
Everyone gets in on it for clicks and all that stuff.
But at what point do you think the Democrat rhetoric, and this is what they do to you guys all the time, the Republicans are always defending guns and it's their fault, so I don't wanna do that same thing.
But at what point, when you constantly tell this group of people that they're oppressed, That there's a trans genocide that, you know, all of this stuff that is just patently untrue.
At what point do you have to look at your colleagues and be like, do you see there?
There is a problem here.
You actually are radicalizing a certain set of people.
clock up Yeah, so this is a problem and it is radicalizing a group.
I saw a CNN article that says if you've ever tweeted a meme of a black woman, well then that's digital blackface.
This is the new Oprah.
Oppress me of the day.
Oppress me please.
And when you're telling someone you're not good enough, you are oppressed, you are the lesser person, you are the lesser class, well then that's going to get inside of them and cause depression and more mental health crises.
So it is something that I believe that the left is radicalizing and encouraging.
Were you worried that, I mean, ultimately you guys got some concessions, but were you worried as one of the most outspoken people sort of against McCarthy that you were going to pay a price just personally?
But that wasn't going to be what determined what I was doing.
I couldn't say, you know, oh, I'm never going to be reelected again.
If that's my only thought is my next election, then I have no business being here.
I need to do what I believe is right.
That's what I was sent here to do.
I convinced and promised hundreds of thousands of people that I'm a leader, that I'm strong, I'm principled, I'm going to stand for them and fight for them.
And so I wasn't going to sit back and go along to get along and say, oh, my committee assignment, oh, I don't want a primary.
I don't want leadership spending money against me in a race or any kind of repercussions, whatever you could think of.
I knew to do what was right.
And this was all about these negotiations that we had started in the summer and in good faith.
And I'm glad that Speaker McCarthy saw the merit in what we were asking for and gave them to us.
I'm interviewing him later today at the Capitol.
Is there anything I can push him on for you?
It's just not time for him yet.
Like the Holman rule, that'll come up more in appropriations.
But I don't want to only admire what we've received.
I think Speaker McCarthy's doing a really great job.
And I'm not just saying that.
He is very aggressive on this.
Even the January 6th videos that he released, wasn't part of the concessions. That was a bonus.
Um, you know, and so this is amazing.
Um, if there's anything that I want to be more aggressive on, it's subpoenas.
Um, we, we had, um, and this isn't anything against, um, chairman Comer or, or Pat Fallon, who's a subcommittee chair and the subcommittee, we had the ATF hearing.
We had an ATF hearing without the ATF.
Um, I want the ATF in and they are coming in April, but, um, I want to start issuing these subpoenas, um, and being very aggressive with it.
So I'm glad you mentioned that because you were part of the Twitter hearings and there was a great viral moment where you basically were like, you guys did this to me.
Like you did it to me and I'm a Congresswoman.
And this is what I've asked everyone else who has sat here over the last couple of days.
What actually comes of this stuff?
Other than, okay, we can expose some of it.
So you bring out a Twitter executive, he kinda did some bad stuff, sorta, sometimes did some decent stuff.
But what about the government side of it?
Like, when are we, when are we gonna drag, or when are you guys gonna drag out the government agents who actually were communicating with them, as opposed to the Twitter guys who, it's not that I have sympathy for them, but they're private employees who were probably in over their head and whatever.
Yes, and so we did have former FBI agent Baker that was in there, but he was working for Twitter, correct?
We do need to bring in these people, but we called those hearings Twitter File Hearings Part 1.
So we are going to have more.
Unfortunately, Dave, I do think that these next two years are two years of exposure.
And I want to expose the federal employees who are involved in this more than anything.
And then hopefully the inspectors generals look at this and there's some sort of referral that we can actually get criminal referrals for some of the things that have been done.
But I don't know if we can do that in this administration.
Not to beat a dead horse, but were there any Democrats on that, in that hearing, that were like, oh, actually, even though I'm a Democrat, and they were mostly going after conservatives, this is a violation of the First Amendment.
unidentified
Maybe, like, even on the DL, did anyone say You know, if there were, I didn't hear of it.
And, you know, I did set the record straight and said, listen, we are not extreme MAGA Republicans.
It is ultra MAGA.
Um, but, uh, we, we were exposing how, um, you know, the, the federal government worked with Twitter to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.
They didn't want to touch that.
And they, they, everything is January 6th and they're, they're using what they know works because it did work for them in the last election.
But now we're exposing what happened during January 6th, what happened with the censorship, what happened with the lockdowns, the fraud, the waste abuse with the COVID funds.
And Afghanistan, other committees are having hearings on that.
We had a soldier that had the bomber, the suicide bomber in his sights, and he was not allowed to neutralize that threat in his sights.
And now we have 13 of our soldiers killed I mean absolutely disgusting but we are exposing what was going on and the American people are going to see it and I hope in the next two to four years we have actual accountability.
I don't want any show pony hearings like Benghazi.
I want people to be held accountable and so do the American people.
Do you think it's kind of funny when Biden keeps saying, you know, the extreme MAGA Republicans or ultra MAGA or whatever, like he's sort of talking about your wing of the thing as if you guys are completely running the show.
And the whole point is that you guys were on the outside and had to fight for a lot of that.
But he's basically trying to paint everybody as if you and Matt and Gates and a couple of other people are in charge.
If they want us to run the show, let's run it because we have some really great ideas.
I mean, look at even the debt ceiling proposal.
It was the House Freedom Caucus that came out and said, we have a plan.
We aren't going to default on our nation's debt, but we're going to claw back some of this stuff.
Some of the unspent COVID funding, the student loan program, we're taking that back.
You know, I mean, if you want to just do pennies on the dollar, we're not building your $500 million FBI building that you need, that you're brand new building.