April 2, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
52:42
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The other thing, too, we should look at why didn't the red wave come? | ||
| And we should be very honest with ourselves. | ||
| There's a couple different reasons why, and I'll tell you. | ||
| Look, as leader, I'm fortunate in both terms we've won. | ||
| But could we have won more? | ||
| Yeah, we could have. | ||
| I had three candidates in Pennsylvania that overperformed the Republican gubernatorial candidate by 2014 and 2011 and did not win. | ||
| This idea that We're just going to pick whoever and think we're going to win in November? | ||
| No. | ||
| The top of the ticket's going to hurt you below the ticket. | ||
| And this idea that we're, it almost happens that we're better at attacking other Republicans | ||
| than standing up for the policies we believe in. | ||
|
unidentified
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["The New York Times"] | |
| Guys, give a very nice welcome to the speaker. | ||
| And let's give him a big hand. | ||
| ["The New York Times"] | ||
| We did a press conference in here, and it wasn't like you to for like the membership | ||
| and we invited parents and kids And we invited parents that had the challenges, right? | ||
| One was, you'll remember the father from Loudoun County, that his daughter got arrested. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah. | |
| He comes and tells his story. | ||
| Then you have a young mother from Rhode Island. | ||
| Her child went to kindergarten, and all she wanted to know was what's on the curriculum. | ||
| They said, well, you've got to ask us. | ||
| You've got to put it in written form. | ||
| She goes, well, OK. | ||
| Well, then I had 100 questions. | ||
| Then they had a meeting to sue her for she was asking questions. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| And you think at times these stories that they just happen in one little place. | ||
| You hear about that male swimmer against the women. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| When you start having the discussion, it's happening everywhere. | ||
| And so we like to bring more people in. | ||
| And the other thing we're doing, taking our hearings out of Washington. | ||
| We've had them along the border. | ||
| We've had them in different parts of the country. | ||
| Make the committees go out to listen to the public. | ||
| You can make some noise for that. | ||
|
unidentified
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There you go. | |
| I also like the way we started that. | ||
| I didn't even have to ask a question. | ||
| You could just talk. | ||
| I'll just sit here with my legs crossed for an hour and we'll make it work. | ||
| We've been interviewed before. | ||
| He's like most people in California. | ||
| He used to live there, now he lives in Florida. | ||
| But I'd go down to his house and we'd do a show. | ||
| Well, let's start, actually, since you talked about the parental rights vote, which did pass, but not one Democrat voted for it. | ||
| Five Republicans voted against it. | ||
| Transparency. | ||
| That's all it was about. | ||
| And I find when I talk to these guys, I listen to my audience, that's what most people want right now out of government, whether it's the schools or whether it's here in D.C. | ||
| Show us what's going on, be honest with us, don't treat us like children. | ||
| Are you shocked that not one Democrat could vote for it? | ||
| And, because I can't go, you know, more than a minute without talking about AOC, unfortunately, that in her speech where she was railing against it, she called it fascism. | ||
| She called it fascism. | ||
| I take it nothing probably surprises you at this point. | ||
| No, you know what's interesting, and this is what people have to understand, and I've come to understand now with these Democrats, they're very extreme in their beliefs. | ||
| I mean, think about, in Congress, when you put a bill across the desk, HR is the House resolution number, right? | ||
| And it gets stamped by the order in which you go, but the majority reserves one through 10, and the Democrats get 11 through 20, okay? | ||
| So you can pick what's most important. | ||
| Now, our number one bill is gonna be HR1, which we'll vote on this week, and that'll be for energy independence, okay? | ||
| The Democrats were in the majority. | ||
| Their number one bill was election law reform. | ||
| That they wanted to rig the system. | ||
| That'll make taxpayers pay for it and have a czar and all that. | ||
| We made the Parents' Bill of Rights, H.R. | ||
| 5, for a couple different reasons. | ||
| One, that's when kindergarten starts you're five years old. | ||
| But it really had five pillars. | ||
| Parents should know what's being taught in the school, give us the curriculum, don't make us go have to find it, send it to us, and what books are there to read. | ||
| They say we're banning books. | ||
| We never said anything about it. | ||
| Just tell us what you want us to read, right? | ||
| Shouldn't we know? | ||
| The next thing we thought, we should know, how do you spend the money? | ||
| It's taxpayer money. | ||
| What's it being spent on in schools? | ||
| Is it going just to administration? | ||
| Where's it going? | ||
| We want to protect our children's privacy. | ||
| Are they selling the data? | ||
| Right? | ||
| We want to know, is there a violent activity? | ||
| Because what will happen is, a child may be hurt on campus, but you're only telling those two children. | ||
| That father, what happened to him, he went and told, but the person who molested his daughter had already done it before. | ||
| And, the last part is, a parent has a right to be heard. | ||
| You should be able to go to a school board meeting, And not say you're a terrorist. | ||
| I'm a big conservative, federalist and all that. | ||
| That's not getting in the school board. | ||
| That's just respect in the process. | ||
| And that's just transparency. | ||
| I'm very big on transparency. | ||
| The Democrats try to attack me all the time when I provide information when they try to only show certain parts. | ||
| Well, let the public make that decision. | ||
| That's the difference, I think, when we had this discussion before. | ||
| I was born into a Democratic family but never a Democrat. | ||
| So I really think my philosophy and beliefs are stronger than others because I chose to reject what I heard for something different. | ||
| And what I believe in a philosophy, I trust you. | ||
| I'm going to give you the information, but I also trust you to fail or succeed. | ||
| I'm not going to predetermine that. | ||
| So I don't want to do just policy here, because I'm guessing, how many of you is this the first time either in, well, in the Capitol itself? | ||
| I assume many of you, right? | ||
| So, yeah, so how weird is it on just a day-to-day basis that you're in this building right now, where pretty much everyone's here right now for the most part, right? | ||
| And you're in this building with these people that the ideas are just so diametrically opposed with each other, and you know, they say some pretty nasty things about you, and you've got to say some things about them, and sometimes they're on your side of the aisle doing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Look, if you follow the speaker's race, most people win on the first round, okay? | ||
|
unidentified
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It's kind of tough. | |
| He had a rough week. | ||
| He had a rough week. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm Irish and Italian, so it's okay. | |
| I have the best fights in my neighborhood, right? | ||
| And most fights go 15 rounds, so that's okay. | ||
| But I'll tell you a story. | ||
| So if you watched the speakers race, there was this one staffer who sat next to me, a John Leganski. | ||
| Everybody wants to know, he's a really smart kid. | ||
| He went to Stanford. | ||
| He interned for, he's the youngest guy ever to run the floor. | ||
| And his brother is about to become an ordained priest. | ||
| His brother sent him a book of prayers, you know, before it all. | ||
| And he went and we would keep a tally sheet of everybody's name that he'd keep voting in. | ||
| Before the speaker votes, he just put a handful down there. | ||
| And when the speaker race was over, he said, you know what? | ||
| We always knew it was gonna go to 15. | ||
| I said, well, how did we always know? | ||
| He goes, you know, I didn't get a chance to finish all the prayers in the book, and this weekend I did. | ||
| You know how many prayers were in that book? | ||
| 15 prayers. | ||
| He goes, you know how many ballots I just grabbed a handful and put down there? 15. | ||
| So sometimes God has a plan for you, you just don't know it yet, right? | ||
| I could have been Speaker before. | ||
| We're in the majority. | ||
| It was going to be handed to me, but I made a mistake on an interview and lo and behold, pulled back. | ||
| We went back into the minority and an interesting thing happened. | ||
| So four years ago, I became leader of the Republican Party and Pelosi became Speaker. | ||
| We have a five-seat majority. | ||
| In those four years, We picked up six more seats. | ||
| Six Democrats lost their congressional seats in California. | ||
| No one writes about this. | ||
| She lost her majority in her home state that people think is really blue, right? | ||
| But we were able to win. | ||
| If anyone ever wants to run for office, this is what I would tell you. | ||
| And how long should the member stay in office? | ||
| If you don't get goosebumps looking at that Capitol, walking into this building, it's time for you to leave. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I feel so privileged to even have this opportunity, right? | ||
| I get goosebumps now just talking to you about it. | ||
| Think about it. | ||
| We're sitting in the Rayburn Room, right? | ||
| The Chambers is right there. | ||
| Those Chambers were opened in 1857. | ||
| George Washington was never sworn in here, right? | ||
| George Washington was sworn in on Wall Street and in Philadelphia, okay? | ||
| Every president since has either been sworn in on the East Side, Over on the west side. | ||
| The first president to be sworn on the west side was Reagan. | ||
| He'd tell you he wanted to look towards California, right? | ||
| But my favorite place in this whole building, if you go and take a tour, is that room right there. | ||
| It's Statuary Hall. | ||
| So when the building was first built, the country wasn't 50 states. | ||
| It wasn't as large. | ||
| People had desks. | ||
| This dome is the second dome. | ||
| They had to enlarge the dome when they enlarged the building. | ||
| Like, the Supreme Court was over on the Senate side. | ||
| So that was the chambers. | ||
| And it's really a nice floor. | ||
| It wasn't then. | ||
| It was platoons, people spitting, people had fights. | ||
| This was before the Civil War, right? | ||
| They put a tile with anyone who had ever been a member of Congress and became president, so you could see where they sat. | ||
| So if you go all the way in the back, there's a tile there, like Father Sierra. | ||
| There's a tile in front of it, it's where Abraham Lincoln sat. | ||
| He was a one-term congressman. | ||
| That's all he served. | ||
| And so he sat in the back. | ||
| And he was kind of, He was kind of a quiet man. | ||
| And if you go in the back, back there, they had like a mail room, and we call it the Lincoln Room. | ||
| He'd go back there and tell his stories. | ||
| But I like to stand right where that tile is. | ||
| Stand there and look front, like at the front of it. | ||
| Envision it being loud, you know? | ||
| They didn't have microphones. | ||
| And then look back. | ||
| And look at the lady above the clock. | ||
| She's supposed to be inscribing what happens there. | ||
| And just look at the clock and pause and look at the time. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Look at the time. | ||
| Say, oh, it's 2.30. | ||
| And you want to know why that's my favorite spot? | ||
| That's the same clock, the same view Abraham Lincoln had. | ||
| And I'll promise you, he's looked at it many times, and you're standing right where he is. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Runs for Senate, loses. | ||
| Runs for President. | ||
| And this is one of the things that drives me as a Republican. | ||
| He's the first Republican president. | ||
| Here's a nation, not even know if it's going to sustain itself. | ||
| He builds the Intercontinental Railroad. | ||
| That's like inventing the internet, right? | ||
| During the time that he's looking that the future is going to be brighter. | ||
| But this is what I think all Americans should pause. | ||
| Did you see that poll in the Wall Street Journal where we're not patriotic anymore? | ||
| We don't want to have children. | ||
| We're not religious. | ||
| That concerns me. | ||
| And what I would say is, Look at Lincoln's words, right? | ||
| And what I believe, if Lincoln, if he was interviewing Lincoln today and Lincoln was here, Lincoln would first take off his top hat, he'd be a tall man, he has a high voice, but he would tell you about the Gettysburg Address. | ||
| You know, four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, right? | ||
| Conceived in liberty and dedicated the proposition that we're all equal. | ||
| He goes on to say, but if we fail government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from earth. | ||
| But think about when he wrote this and why he said it, okay? | ||
| We're not the world power. | ||
| We're not even a country we're divided. | ||
| But he knew America is more than a country, an idea, that we would still sustain ourselves the concept We're not a perfect nation. | ||
| We strive to be a more perfect nation. | ||
| anything else. But name me one other nation that's conceived in liberty and dedicated | ||
| a proposition that we're all equal. We're not a perfect nation. We strive to be a more | ||
| perfect nation. But we should be more patriotic. I mean, this idea, and this goes, long answer | ||
| to your short question. | ||
| I will put bills on the floor. | ||
| I don't even remember the question. | ||
| I just now did! | ||
| I think I asked you what it's like to work in a place where people don't like you. | ||
| We had a resolution on the floor denouncing socialism, okay? | ||
| This is not a college campus. | ||
| This is not Berkeley. | ||
| This is people elected to the U.S. | ||
| House of Representatives in all the history of America, and a hundred Democrats couldn't vote no. | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| So it goes back to your question. | ||
| Could I believe that not one Democrat would stand up? | ||
| That's an extreme position. | ||
| And I say this with all due respect. | ||
| The Democrats when I grew up, they were not that way. | ||
| You would find places. | ||
| And look, we have passed, I'll get this wrong, in the last week, somewhere about 43 or 48 bills. | ||
| Like 37 of them have all been bipartisan. | ||
| There's been more than 4,000 Democrat votes on these, right? | ||
| And so you can find common ground with both sides, but how can it not be common ground that parents can know what's being taught in their kid's school? | ||
| No way do they get to say what the curriculum or what the books are being read. | ||
| Just tell us what you're doing. | ||
| And that's wrong? | ||
| So how do we get over that? | ||
| Because I think that that seems to be probably the first, there's a lot of problems, but that seems to be the first one. | ||
| That when you look back and you go, okay, well these guys aren't, you know, they are afraid to denounce socialism. | ||
| Many of them do view the founding of the country as a net negative to the world, things of that nature. | ||
| How do we get past that before we get into the battles of, okay, you want this tax break and you want that spending bill? | ||
| Well, it's tough, too, because It's just like in D.C. | ||
| crime. | ||
| Now, all of you stay safe here, but, you know, D.C. | ||
| is not a state. | ||
| They want to make it a state. | ||
| And the city council went and decriminalized carjacking, even forms of murder. | ||
| So we could do something about it. | ||
| We put it on the floor to not allow that to happen. | ||
| One member on the Democratic side got mugged on her way to work, and she lives in a really nice area. | ||
| But it's not unusual, right? | ||
| You talk to staff, it happens all the time. | ||
| Rand Paul's, one of his staff members, was stabbed two days ago. | ||
| I think he's in critical condition. | ||
| Or the other weekend before, in broad daylight, in the middle of the weekend, at a gunpoint, Robbed and the phone and everything else taken. | ||
| Carjackings, we did this in February. | ||
| At that time, we were only about 30 some days into the new year and there were 65 carjackings. | ||
| When we passed this, the president said he would veto it. | ||
| Only 31 Democrats voted with us. | ||
| That's not a partisan issue to be safe. | ||
| So what is it you hear from them? | ||
| What do you hear privately when they vote against it? | ||
| They think they have to lock together, that somehow, oh, that I'm agreeing with the Republicans. | ||
| No, you want your streets safe. | ||
| And they said, but D.C. | ||
| should be a state and we should have our hands off. | ||
| Now the delegate for D.C., Norton, she did a rally before it was going to come back, right? | ||
| And she had it at Union Station in the middle of the day at 3 o'clock. | ||
| And if you watch the video of the rally, somebody gets carjacked during the rally. | ||
| You can't make this up! | ||
| You can't make it up! | ||
| But this is the other thing, and this is what scares me. | ||
| It wasn't just about D.C., it's about what's happening across this nation in crime, from Chicago and others. | ||
| And I believe there are some waking up, but the majority are not, because they think they can't stand up to them. | ||
| D.C. | ||
| also says anybody can vote. | ||
| Okay, we're in pretty much an international city, are we not? | ||
| Because you have all these embassies. | ||
| So you can belong to the Chinese Communist Party, be a Chinese, and work at that embassy, and D.C. | ||
| now said you can vote in your elections here. | ||
| What do you think they would want to vote for and embarrass our nation's capital? | ||
| That's what concerns me. | ||
| That's beyond common sense. | ||
| That's an extreme position that goes beyond the foundation of the nation. | ||
| So what do you think Republicans can do better than? | ||
| One of the lines that these guys hear me say probably five times a week is, you don't have to be a Republican, but you cannot be a Democrat. | ||
| And the reason I frame it that way is it's obvious they've, for the most part, gone off the deep end. | ||
| But there clearly is some sort of branding issue or something that I think might be changing. | ||
| I do believe that. | ||
| That, you know, for example, the Republicans obviously didn't get that red wave in the midterm. | ||
| So people clearly are stepping away from the Democrats, but they're kind of, ah, I don't know, these Republicans. | ||
| The other thing, too, we should look at why didn't the red wave come? | ||
| And we should be very honest with ourselves. | ||
| There's a couple different reasons why, and I'll tell you. | ||
| Look, as leader, I'm fortunate. | ||
| In both terms, we've won. | ||
| But could we have won more? | ||
| Yeah, we could have. | ||
| I had three candidates in Pennsylvania that overperformed the Republican gubernatorial candidate by 2014 and 2011 and did not win. | ||
| This idea that We're just going to pick whoever and think we're going to win in November? | ||
| No. | ||
| The top of the ticket's going to hurt you below the ticket. | ||
| And this idea that we're... It almost happens that we're better at attacking other Republicans than standing up for the policies we believe in. | ||
| Well, that gets us nowhere. | ||
| And the other thing, too, is if you want to be in the majority, and this is what Reagan said, if you agree with us 80% of the time, you're there. | ||
| Somebody who wins in Texas is going to be different than someone who wins in California. | ||
| And if you want to sit back and, where did we win the majority? | ||
| We won five new seats in New York. | ||
| We won in California. | ||
| We won in Oregon. | ||
| We won in Arizona. | ||
| Places that other Republicans lost, and to be frank, in the last two cycles we've lost the presidency. | ||
| Both cycles lost in the Senate. | ||
| We've lost governors. | ||
| The only place we've won is in the House. | ||
| And the one thing I will say, the determining factor, the quality of the candidate. | ||
| We have extraordinary candidates who've won. | ||
| And sometimes it's very important to get the right person through the primary. | ||
| And you shouldn't just say, okay, well, this person is the most conservative. | ||
| Well, who's the most conservative who can win in November? | ||
| That's another thing we have to think, because you've got to have the gavel to govern. | ||
| The uniqueness, like we have a five-seat majority, they don't hand the gavels out in small, medium, and large. | ||
| We get the same size gavel. | ||
| And this is a place where Republicans should wake up. | ||
| So I look back at the vote saying, where could we have done better? | ||
| Top of the ticket hurt. | ||
| Supreme Court decision made a difference, too, in different places where the Democrats played it, it did. | ||
| So you think it hurt more than anticipated, maybe? | ||
| Yeah, much more than the polling showed. | ||
| It determined turnout and motivation. | ||
| In 2012, we had 234 members, and we didn't even win the popular vote in the House. | ||
| In 2016, we peaked. | ||
| and we didn't even win the popular vote in the House. | ||
| In 2016, we peaked. | ||
| We had 242 members, and we won the popular vote by one point. | ||
| Today, we have 222 members. | ||
| You know what our popular vote was? | ||
| We won it by three points. | ||
| Two points better than the time before. | ||
| Seven points better than we did two years prior. | ||
| So what it means is, it's more competitive. | ||
| We've had redistricting. | ||
| So it's not that you're going to have these big majorities that you think things are just going to happen. | ||
| And people look through different points, right? | ||
| I mean, think for a moment. | ||
| How many of you are from Pennsylvania? | ||
| The one thing I learned is Democrats will vote for whoever, as long as they're a Democrat. | ||
| You know? | ||
| But I will tell you... Where is John Fetterman? | ||
| Where is he? | ||
|
unidentified
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Where is he? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| But, I'm just, you know, all due respect, I mean, it's just very difficult. | ||
| But Republicans, and this is where I say we've got to be honest with ourselves, and we've got to do it before you get to election, If we have a poor candidate, rightfully so, we won't all walk and lock, step and vote for that person. | ||
| Rightfully so. | ||
| So what we really should do in the primary, not beat up on each other, but pick the very best person who's going to be able to win and carry it. | ||
| And sometimes we say, no one's going to be 100% with each other, but do we have a core foundation with one another? | ||
| I'll tell you guys something funny about John Fetterman. | ||
| I actually saw Dr. Oz a couple weeks ago at Jordan Peterson's house at a party, and he looked like he got punched in the face. | ||
| The guy cannot believe that he lost to Fetterman. | ||
| It is still... Anywho, what do you make of, as you know, I lived in Cali, I made a very public exit to the free state of Florida, things seem to be... I'm not giving up. | ||
| I'm not giving up. | ||
| You know I didn't want to leave that house, but that was the only thing that was keeping me there. | ||
|
unidentified
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I didn't want to leave that house, but I couldn't afford to buy that house. | |
| But what do you make of the general idea now that the states do seem to be going their separate way, and that is what federalism's all about? | ||
| I mean, I feel like I move to a new country, not a new state. | ||
| Each state is a pilot program. | ||
| And if there's one thing you look in the nationwide, every 10 years we do a census. | ||
| This is the first time in the history of California that we've lost a congressional seat. | ||
| The time before we stayed equal. | ||
| And what states lost? | ||
| New York, California, Illinois. | ||
| What states gained? | ||
| Texas and Florida. | ||
| It's a pilot program that's telling the country, right? | ||
| And how many you have friends that have moved? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of the policies. | ||
| And it should wake the other states up. | ||
| I mean, do you have any hope for Cali? | ||
| I mean, obviously, you're still a representative in Cali. | ||
| I mean, do you hope that that thing can move? | ||
| Yeah, because, look, I've won five seats in the last four years in California Republican in Congress. | ||
| They make the system harder. | ||
| The other thing you have to remember, too, California has, when it comes to election law, they mail everybody a ballot whether you ask for one or not. | ||
| They don't clean up their rolls. | ||
| They make it legal that you can harvest somebody's ballot, and we still win. | ||
| So, it doesn't matter what state you live in. | ||
| Find what the rules are, and go out and fight for what you believe in. | ||
| The hard part is, most people who are leaving California have a more conservative view. | ||
| And, you know, these other states say, oh, we don't want the government. | ||
| I want them back! | ||
| You know, there are a lot of the other voters, but we're learning. | ||
| And also, the other thing, too, is if you look at the Republican Party now in the House, More women? | ||
| More minorities? | ||
| The most black Republicans since Reconstruction. | ||
| So don't think we can't compete anywhere in the country. | ||
| We can. | ||
| But I believe it's the policy. | ||
| and so I don't give up because the pendulum always swings. | ||
| How much do you view the mainstream media as an impediment to what you're trying to do at this point? | ||
| They obviously are losing control to a certain degree, but you know, every day on the show, | ||
| I'm putting out the lies of The View and the lies of Meet the Press | ||
| and the lies of CNN and MSNBC and the whole thing. | ||
| They're never with you guys. | ||
| They don't mind lying over and over and over again. | ||
| Do you view it as a problem still or in some ways is it a win because we can expose it now? | ||
| Well, I think the American public on both sides of the aisle | ||
| do not trust what they're being told most of the time Because they've found that it hasn't been, there's lots of times that it hasn't been right. | ||
| I live it each and every day. | ||
| I can walk up and do a press conference, I'll tell you, right after passing the Parents Bill of Rights, and they'll ask me something about something else, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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But to tell you the secret is, I kind of enjoy it. | |
| I don't know if you watch any of my press conferences. | ||
| I decided when I became Speaker, I'm going to do something different. | ||
| I do a lot of things different. | ||
| Hakeem Jeffries' office is right where that used to be my office. | ||
| But I treat Hakeem the way I want it to be treated. | ||
| We should be the first ones that respect people who have difference of opinion of us. | ||
| Because we get upset if people don't give us the respect of our opinions. | ||
| Well, how can you do that if you don't respect... So I try to provide there. | ||
| But I don't go down and do a press conference in the press room. | ||
| I do it in Statuary Hall. | ||
| I do it out here. | ||
| And they all come around me and they ask me some... They'll ask me this one question when I was dealing from the beginning about... On Intel. | ||
| I removed shift and swallow. | ||
| I did it for... | ||
| A purpose, not for a political purpose. | ||
| And this one reporter asked me the question, and then as soon as I start to answer, she says, I'm not answering the question. | ||
| So my point is, you have a right to ask me the question, but you do not have a right to say whether I answered or not. | ||
| My answer is your answer. | ||
| But, I mean, think about it. | ||
| I was really concerned about Intel committees different than all the other committees. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is where you get the security clearance, okay? | |
| The members who sit on there only get appointed by their leaders. | ||
| They find things out that other members don't, right? | ||
| And we make decisions in there to protect all of us with information we know, and because of source and others, you really can't let other people know. | ||
| Well, Schiff used that position to lie about what he knew, which, you can't be there. | ||
| Swalwell got on as a sophomore, and the minute he gets on, the FBI comes and tells us he's got a relationship with a Chinese spy. | ||
| No disrespect, I just don't think that qualifies you, right? | ||
| No disrespect, no disrespect. | ||
| But, there's 200 other members she could have appointed, right? | ||
| I never knew about this until I came later and I read the papers. | ||
| I had the FBI come and give me the briefing. | ||
| There's no way he should have been on there and he was kept on there. | ||
| And so, I just said, no, anybody that has a relationship with any spy, you can't be on the committee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, it's not a high bar. | |
| Wait, I have to pause you for a sec, because when I had you at the house in Cali, you told me about that for the first time. | ||
| It was the first time I had heard about it. | ||
| And we then clipped that a million times and it got millions of views and people were sharing it before you were speaker and now. | ||
| But he's still here. | ||
| He's still in this building. | ||
| If you have a relationship with the Chinese spy, no disrespect, isn't that just like, you gotta go now, you can't stay here, you don't have to go home. | ||
| I believe in the rule of law, the voters decide who their member of congress is. | ||
| I could dislike that person, I could think that person did something wrong, but there's nothing that disqualifies him. | ||
| From being a member, that's why I, he's a member and I give him committees. | ||
| But I'm not giving you a security clearance. | ||
| He cannot, if he was to leave this job and he went to the private sector, he could not get a security clearance because he had a relationship with a Chinese spy. | ||
| So why would we give him a government security clearance? | ||
| And they attacked before. | ||
| And so what I did, I went down when the Intel Committee first constituted, and I had Hakeem come with me. | ||
| And I told all the members, look, I want you to work together. | ||
| I don't want partisanship in this office, because this is a committee that should think just as Americans, right? | ||
| And this is the other thing I'm doing. | ||
| Which country captures AI and quantum first, okay? | ||
| And we should be really concerned as Americans of what's happening with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. | ||
| If you study history, this is very similar to the 1930s. | ||
| They're creating an axis of power of supporting one another against the West, democracy and freedom. | ||
| The only two times President Xi has left his country since the pandemic was to meet with this group. | ||
| It's very concerning to me. | ||
| And so, MIT teaches a course in quantum and AI that they actually provide to the generals in our military. | ||
| I'm having everybody on the intel take it together. | ||
| So they think like a SWAT, right? | ||
| A Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threats. | ||
| You think as an American, not as a Republican or Democrat, right? | ||
| Because whatever happens, if we fail, it's not one party failing, it's a nation that's failing. | ||
| And I'm gonna have them come in and teach it to the entire Congress. | ||
| You know, the only time we really get together outside of committees and cameras is when we have classified briefings, and it's usually about a thread, a balloon, or something else, right? | ||
| And so, I recently had one where all the Republicans and Democrats went together in the auditorium, and you know what it was about? | ||
| Our debt. | ||
| And I didn't make it partisan. | ||
| I had the Congressional Budget Office come in and tell, because this is what you should be worried about, too. | ||
| Look, we have a lot of problems. | ||
| We have a border that's not secure. | ||
| We have fentanyl coming across. | ||
| We have inflation, all that. | ||
| But the three greatest, biggest challenges, I think, to our nation going forward is our debt, our education system, and China. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And we're not going to tackle those unless we tackle them together. | ||
| And what I wanted to do is not in a partisan way, but really look at this debt. | ||
| The CBO tells us in the next 10 years, we'll have to pay $10.5 trillion just in interest, okay? | ||
| But let me put it in perspective. | ||
| $10.5 trillion in the next 10 years. | ||
| Do you know how much we paid in interest since 1940 until today? | ||
| In those 83 years? | ||
| $9 trillion. | ||
| This is the interest on your credit card, okay, people? | ||
| This is what makes you upset. | ||
| And for the first time in the next 10 years, three of the trust funds will go broke. | ||
| Highway, Medicare, and Social Security. | ||
| And the president all yells, oh, Republicans want to cut it. | ||
| No, by him doing nothing, it automatically gets cut. | ||
| He's cutting it by ignoring this problem. | ||
| And if you look at 50-year averages, on 50-year average, we normally spend about 21% of GDP, okay? | ||
| Right now he's spending 23.7 on his way to 25%. | ||
| On average, the amount of revenue we bring in on 50 years is usually about 17.1%. | ||
| Do you know how much revenue per GDP we're bringing right now? | ||
| 20%. | ||
| You know how many times we've done that in the history of America? | ||
| Only twice. | ||
| So it's not a revenue problem. | ||
| We have more money at any given time. | ||
| Coming in. | ||
| But we're spending. | ||
| They added $5.9 trillion, and they wonder why inflation was... And what happened when inflation came? | ||
| Interest rates went up, and now it causes a banking problem. | ||
| And then he wants to ignore the debt ceiling, like someone should just pass that without changing it. | ||
| And to me, the debt ceiling is you give your child a credit card. | ||
| They charge it up. | ||
| You're responsible for paying it. | ||
| But do you just raise the limit, or do you look at what they're spending it on? | ||
| So, that's the approach I'm taking, and it's pretty hard that the President tries to ignore it. | ||
| Do you admire sometimes the fact that they can get away with this kind of stuff? | ||
| I mean, the Inflation Reduction Act, which had nothing to do with inflation. | ||
| It literally caused inflation, but they get away with it. | ||
| The media runs cover for them, and then you have to come out here and explain things about growth and GDP, and people are like, but the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| You know, you've got to be strong-willed in this, and you've got to have a willingness not to give up. | ||
| Because you could work as hard as you can, they could say something that's not true, but you've got to wake up the next day and come back. | ||
| You know, this country is too great for small ideas, right? | ||
| And I just believe, even in the last election, maybe it didn't turn out exactly as you wanted, but think about had we not won the majority in the House, what would be happening? | ||
| And sometimes, we've got to thank for what we got right then, and work harder. | ||
| That's exactly what we have to do. | ||
| I'm thankful if you get out and tell the story. | ||
| We're trying. | ||
| I mean, we're trying. | ||
| And what's interesting, I think, that you'd find from this audience, if I polled these guys, you know, my audience is kind of all over the place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's probably a couple Democrats in here. | |
| Two, maybe. | ||
| Maybe, at most. | ||
| Democrats. | ||
| There might be two in here. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| You see that? | ||
| Everybody kind of froze. | ||
| Not me, not me. | ||
| There might be Democrats who listen. | ||
| There are definitely former Democrats. | ||
| How about former Democrats? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's alright. | |
| Ronald Reagan was a former Democrat. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Let me ask you about the hearings. | ||
| We're always watching hearings, I'm always playing clips of hearings, and we're dragging out Twitter executives, and all of these people, and Fauci, you know, can lie about vaccines, or what we funded, and all of this stuff. | ||
| We play these clips, and people are like, oh, it's great, Rand Paul got him, and this happened, that happened, Ted Cruz got him, but then no one gets fired. | ||
| Nothing seems to actually change, and I think that that is now Something that you guys, that's my personal advice, would be that that's something that you guys should be focusing on. | ||
| Like, what happens after the hearing? | ||
| It's not enough for us to just be like, oh, Fauci lied, Twitter executives lied, etc. | ||
| Okay, so let's think about this. | ||
| Let's also look at what has happened since we won the majority. | ||
| We won the majority and weren't sworn in yet, but we were able to get in the NDAA. | ||
| That those in the service no longer mandate that they had to have the vaccine so they weren't going to be kicked out. | ||
| That's a victory, right? | ||
| So they stopped firing people who lived there. | ||
| Is it a coincidence that Fauci then announced that he wasn't going to stay around? | ||
| Do you know something else that we created? | ||
| We created a select committee on COVID. | ||
| Is it a coincidence that once we start the hearings, then they acknowledge, well, there is information that it could have come from the Wuhan lab of the Wuhan COVID, right? | ||
| Who was the guy that used to have the nighttime show, the comedian? | ||
| Oh, Jon Stewart, when he brought it to Colbert. | ||
| Yeah, he brings it up. | ||
| They named a lab after him. | ||
| It's interesting, now they're providing certain information as we're going after. | ||
| They make it very difficult now that we have subpoena power. | ||
| But I think you'll find at the end of the day when we get the information, now we're not going to predetermine if we don't have all the facts, we're going to take people through and see all the facts. | ||
| And I think another thing that's happening in this country that's a problem, there's no consequences for people's action. | ||
| That's what's happened with crime. | ||
| That's what's happened in our schools, right? | ||
| And when they see it happening in government, then why should they not? | ||
| And I think that's part of the point. | ||
| Look. | ||
| So how does that actually change? | ||
| I mean, do you need a Republican president to then do something about it? | ||
| Let's say you expose these guys. | ||
| Okay, Fauci lied under oath. | ||
| Let's just say. | ||
| Is Fauci the job anymore? | ||
| Right, so okay, but one of these, or if we found out who exactly the government was guiding towards. | ||
| We also changed Some of the rules in the house we took over. | ||
| So, I mean, it's hard for us. | ||
| You get mad at somebody, okay, defund the whole department. | ||
| Well, that doesn't work. | ||
| You don't have to defund. | ||
| Now we have a specific place we can go. | ||
| So we can go there. | ||
| But what's interesting to me, you brought up Twitter. | ||
| And I think Elon's doing a fabulous job there, to be honest with you. | ||
| And what Elon is doing, not picking sides, he's just letting the information out, and the Democrats are getting mad. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But we watched what happened, that it's even worse than we imagined, that government was in With business now, going after people on what their beliefs were. | ||
| But then he had some Democrat reporters write, what happened to Matt the other day? | ||
| The IRS comes to his house. | ||
| So sometimes our hearing shows light stops actions. | ||
| We're not prosecutors, so we can't prosecute somebody. | ||
| We can defund certain jobs, but we don't have the ability to prosecute someone. | ||
| We have the ability to show the light and give all the information and also control purse strings. | ||
| So we'll take every power we have to try to correct actions. | ||
| What else is on your mind that may not be on our mind? | ||
| And by our mind, I mean the things that I'm talking about on the show, the things that these guys are talking about. | ||
| What else is coming down the pike that you're either worried about or excited for? | ||
| Look, if you're not excited as an American, Do you want to live somewhere else? | ||
| It may not be perfect here, but we have an opportunity to make it better, right? | ||
| So every day, I'm an optimist. | ||
| I wake up every day. | ||
| If there's one current thing I'm worried about, I'm worried about how the President's handling the debt ceiling. | ||
| He's ignoring it. | ||
| He's walking us in to some type of debt problem, because he's just ignoring the problem. | ||
| I'm worried about the next generation. | ||
| We're at 120% of GDP in debt. | ||
| We've only been here during World War II. | ||
| That means our debt's larger than our economy, with another 20%. | ||
| So what are you doing to the rest of the nation? | ||
| So when you say that to your colleagues on the other side, what do they say? | ||
| I mean, do they fundamentally just believe you can just print money? | ||
| I mean, we've got a printer. | ||
| Yes, because they've been doing it. | ||
| Yeah, they fundamentally, that's the belief. | ||
| That's actually the belief. | ||
| That's what caused, look, Milton Friedman was my favorite economist. | ||
| He says there's only one entity that can create inflation, government, when they spend too much. | ||
| And he also says there's only one way out of inflation, is that the interest rates have to be higher than the inflation rate. | ||
| Well, we can't afford that. | ||
| You're gonna be interest rates over six, seven percent? | ||
| It's gonna be good. | ||
| Then I'm worried about the future. | ||
| I look at these other four countries creating access of power. | ||
| I've watched what, I've watched what a lack of leadership has happened, okay? | ||
| Think about when the president got in. | ||
| Afghanistan. | ||
| Creating 13 new Gold Star families. | ||
| So you know what? | ||
| We had a hearing on this. | ||
| For the whole time, they never went and had a hearing. | ||
| Because they were afraid of what they were going to find out. | ||
| Why would you do that to our military? | ||
| You want to never repeat that. | ||
| He didn't listen to the military leaders. | ||
| He made his own decision. | ||
| We actually had a sniper that had the bomber In his sights, okay? | ||
| But where did that bomber come from? | ||
| Take it a step back further. | ||
| He was in the prison in Bagram. | ||
| So had he not moved out of Bagram, where we caught the worst people for the last decade, that person would have never got out and put a bomb on to kill the Americans. | ||
| And then they wouldn't look at the system. | ||
| But what happened after that? | ||
| It set us back two decades. | ||
| The Chancellor of Germany now goes to China. | ||
| China has now just brokered a deal in the Middle East between Saudi Arabia and Iran. | ||
| That used to be the leadership of America at Camp David, right? | ||
| So what he's done is he's lowered the standards of America to our allies and to our adversaries, pushing them further there. | ||
| It also brought upon Ukraine, right? | ||
| Because then he goes and meets with Putin. | ||
| Putin saw what happened in Afghanistan. | ||
| And what does he do when he meets with Putin? | ||
| He lifts the sanctions off North Stream 2. | ||
| He gives him a welcome map. | ||
| Back in 2015, I met with then-Vice President Biden, trying to encourage him to sell the Javelins to Ukraine so they can stop if any Russian tanks come in. | ||
| He says, no, Merkel won't like that. | ||
| I said, well, let's train them on it and keep it in Poland so it's their close. | ||
| No. | ||
| Remember when he spent too much and he told us inflation was transitory? | ||
| That's the worst punishment you can ever do to your own citizens. | ||
| It takes money directly out of you. | ||
| And he told us it was transitory. | ||
| Then the interest rates went up. | ||
| Then banks got in trouble. | ||
| We're weaker around the world. | ||
| Then he comes out and he picks one form of energy, makes our energy cost higher, cuts jobs out of America, it harms emissions. | ||
| Let me tell you this. | ||
| American natural gas is 41% cleaner than Russian natural gas. | ||
| If we sell American natural gas, not just to our allies, to our adversaries, global emissions will go down further than any Democrat bill out there. | ||
| And you know what else will happen? | ||
| Geopolitically, the world will be safer. | ||
| There'll be more American jobs. | ||
| You'll have a better environment. | ||
| You'll have a stronger America. | ||
| You'll have a safer world. | ||
| And he tells us, I'm going to veto that on demand. | ||
| What? | ||
| Makes no sense. | ||
| Don't you care about the country? | ||
| Don't you care about the world? | ||
| And all he does is empower his IRA bill, inflation reduction. | ||
| That's a stimulus bill for China. | ||
| Mandating one form of energy. | ||
| Where are you going to buy the windmills? | ||
| Where are you going to buy the solar panels? | ||
| China. | ||
| And if you watch, what he's done is he's shut down our minerals. | ||
| China controls 90% of all critical minerals. | ||
| They control 95% of the processing. | ||
| So when we open up a new mine in America, we've got to send them over there to be processed. | ||
| One thing we did do when we took the majority, I've been wanting to do this for four years, I created the Select Committee on China. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| The things that we have failed at, we have not spoken with one voice about China. | ||
| China has systematically, we used to, copper, key and all these renewables and everything else. | ||
| Back in the 90s, we produced three times as much. | ||
| They now produce eight times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| Because they've gone around the world collecting it, why we shut ours down. | ||
| Why are we empowering them? | ||
| We shouldn't be dependent upon them on anything. | ||
| We should bring it back to America and back to just North and South America as well. | ||
| And what he's done is make us weaker on that stage and it's only been two years. | ||
| So what keeps me up is that leadership. | ||
| Who do you think is driving that? | ||
| He is. | ||
| So you believe that this is really Joe Biden himself driving? | ||
|
unidentified
|
and I know you're not. | |
| Now, I get asked this question a lot. | ||
| Note how he had to shift his seats. | ||
| Yes, yes, okay, sit up. | ||
| I've met with him quite a few times. | ||
| It's him. | ||
| And remember, when he was running for president, he was about to be beat and they all collapsed, right? | ||
| And then he had to go and publicly sign an agreement with Bernie Sanders. | ||
| When he gave the State of the Union, one of my toughest jobs was just to sit behind there, right? | ||
| And I was respectful. | ||
| I did not tear up the speech. | ||
| I could disagree with anything else. | ||
| There's a difference in speakers. | ||
| I respect the office I have. | ||
| I respect his office. | ||
| I respect him in his office. | ||
| I heard Democrats yelling to Bernie Sanders, you wrote that speech! | ||
| You wrote that speech! | ||
| And Bernie's smiling. | ||
| Remember what he pledged. | ||
| To get their votes. | ||
| That's where he went so far. | ||
| That's the extreme position. | ||
| And remember, Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. | ||
| He's a socialist. | ||
| And he's never balked away from that. | ||
| Did you happen to see the clip of Bernie on Realtime with Bill Maher a couple weeks ago, where he asked him the difference between equity and equality, which is the entire socialist program, and Bernie literally said he didn't know, and then Bill had to walk him through it. | ||
| I mean, it's incredible. | ||
| Bill Maher's been pretty interesting. | ||
| We're trying to get him there. | ||
| Do you ever get the call? | ||
| You ever get the call? | ||
| You know, I'd been on that show before. | ||
| I was on that show before I was ever elected. | ||
| What were you doing? | ||
| It was when I was on HBO. | ||
| I was a young Republican. | ||
| Now don't go back and try to find the kid. | ||
| But not getting the call these days. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Was it Diane von Furstenberg? | ||
| The designer? | ||
| She was on that? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| One of the guys that was on a... He had a hit show at the time. | ||
| And then I think a comedian. | ||
| Well, what do you think you gotta do to get those last liberals? | ||
| These guys, no, I focus on that group, because I always say there's not that many people that can shift right now, right? | ||
| You have your hardcore Republicans, you have your hardcore Democrats, but I think the disaffected liberal is the group that you can still shift. | ||
| It is the Bill Maher types, which is why I focus on him so much. | ||
| What do you think you have to do there? | ||
| You know, we'd sit back and we'd say, like, what am I doing to shift them? | ||
| I actually think the Democrats are doing more to shift them. | ||
| I think if you asked Bill Maher about me four years ago, he'd say, Kevin doesn't have anything nice to say, right? | ||
| He'd say, I don't believe anything he says. | ||
| I think he's so disgusted by these Democrat policies. | ||
| And what's really happened is when the Democrats took control of everything, what brought us inflation? | ||
| What brought defunding of the police? | ||
| What brought us crime, you know? | ||
| And then they try to just give talking points like they're strong on crime. | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| I mean, did you put anyone in jail that was burning our federal buildings? | ||
| No. | ||
| And what's really concerning to America now, too, is We respect the rule of law. | ||
| We respect equal justice. | ||
| But when justice is only weighed on one side, that's what we don't like. | ||
| That is what gets us infuriated. | ||
| And I really think what the Democrats have done has moved Bill Barr more that he said, this is no longer where I stood. | ||
| And I really wonder in time, if you look back in history for many a times, would John Kennedy be a Democrat today? | ||
| No. | ||
| His policies are not where the Democratic Party is at. | ||
| Anti-war, low tax. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What would America have looked like had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated, right? | ||
| Malice towards none. | ||
| We wouldn't have waited until the 1950s for civil rights. | ||
| And this is something, for people who are Republican and conservative, don't let the Democrats take this away, okay? | ||
| The Democrats had a bill on the floor last Congress to remove some statues. | ||
| I walked down the floor and the Republican said, oh, I'm all for it. | ||
| I think you should remove more statues and I think you should change your name. | ||
| There's not one Republican statue we ever have to remove. | ||
| The Jim Crow law was brought to us by Democrats. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Think about what happened. | ||
| In my office, you have a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, but you have a portrait of Joseph Rainey. | ||
| You know who Joseph Rainey is? | ||
| The first black American to get elected to Congress. | ||
| He was a Republican in 1870. | ||
| You know when the first black American Democrat was elected? | ||
| Sixty years later. | ||
| You know, Joseph Rainey wasn't the only black Republican elected. | ||
| A number of them were elected. | ||
| So then we had a presidential race that was close. | ||
| And so the Democrats partnered with the Republicans and said, you won. | ||
| But only on one condition. | ||
| You remove the federal troops from the South. | ||
| And when they removed the federal troops from the South, lo and behold, Democrats then defeated Republicans. | ||
| And what did they do when they defeated Republicans? | ||
| They changed the election law and brought Jim Crow laws in and picked people based upon who can go there. | ||
| Remember the Republican Party, what it was founded upon. | ||
| So when the Democrats, they removed five portraits of Democrat speakers. | ||
| Okay, you should. | ||
| But every statue they wanted to remove was of a Democrat, sent to us from a state that a Democrat majority was in, that voted for it, that was accepted by a Congress that was a majority of Democrats. | ||
| Well, why do you keep your name then? | ||
| Change the name of the party. | ||
| We don't have to change the name of the Republican Party, because we were founded on the idea that we're all equal. | ||
| We fought for the idea that people were equal and fair. | ||
| And at times, I've watched when you say, how can you change? | ||
| They don't know the history. | ||
| They don't know the story. | ||
| And we need to tell it more often. | ||
| So is that education, fundamentally? | ||
| I mean, is that why we have to get the schools back more than anything else? | ||
| Because people believe now that 1619 Project was, you know, the true story of America? | ||
| It's trying to recreate our history. | ||
| I mean, the idea that Columbus is bad? | ||
| The idea that, you know, you can't say Christmas? | ||
| I mean, our founders were some of the most religious people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We believe in religious freedom, though. | ||
| I mean, the idea in our schools, what I'm most worried about is nobody in the Taliban or in the Chinese army are worried about a pronoun. | ||
| Nobody. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| With all respect, they just want to fight to win. | ||
| At the end of the day, we may have the right pronouns, but if we lose the war, we're out, right? | ||
| And they only understand fear. | ||
| But also, the idea of our children, I'm not worried about my kids competing with your kids, I'm worried about our kids competing with India and China. | ||
| And the great equalizer in America is the education system. | ||
| And why it's the Democrats who fight charter schools. | ||
| And this is the other thing that's so great about states. | ||
| What Arizona has done, what Florida has done, that allows your tax dollars to follow your students so they can go to a better school. | ||
| It's your choice. | ||
| You know, that's going to change. | ||
| And who does that help the most? | ||
| Really, those who are lower income in America, and many times, many more minorities than others. | ||
| I'll tell you, today I was very excited. | ||
| I had a school group that was from my hometown here. | ||
| And it's a charter school that was developed by this one family, the Grimms. | ||
| Any of you ever eat these baby carrots? | ||
| Okay, they just sold, but there was two families in my district that grew 80% of all the carrots in the country. | ||
| And you want a secret? | ||
| There's no such thing as a baby carrot. | ||
| They're regular carrots. | ||
| We chop them, charge you more, and you buy them. | ||
| We love you for that, okay? | ||
| But... Good night, everybody! | ||
| But what they were doing is, you know anybody, these families that own businesses, and it became a very big business, well they would put all this money away to give scholarships to their employees' children to go to college. | ||
| And they thought, well you're not taking them up. | ||
| Well they weren't getting into college. | ||
| Well we've got to go further down. | ||
| Well they found the school district. | ||
| So they were going to pay to put in a charter school. | ||
| The school district fought them. | ||
| But when they finally got the charter school came in, and this is Ninety percent will be immigrants in this community. | ||
| They wear uniforms, they take extra classes, right? | ||
| And the thing I will tell you, in the first two years, this school's scores are competing with the highest scores of anywhere in the county. | ||
| And we just had, for the first time, the eighth graders have been there. | ||
| They just came and had a picture with me in the rotunda. | ||
| And the excitement on these kids' faces, that one little girl said, you could tell, man, she was the class president. | ||
| She would get right up on, so and so, I want a picture with you. | ||
| And I'm thinking, you're going to be speaker one day, right? | ||
| I mean, but how proud, an opportunity. | ||
| That's the great equalizer in America. | ||
| We talk about everybody being equal, but let's give them an equal opportunity. | ||
| And let's not hold people back. | ||
| We got three minutes left and then you got to get back to work. | ||
| So I will ask you one tough one at the end. | ||
| You've talked a lot about civility here. | ||
| The audience obviously knows my feelings about what's going on in Florida and Governor DeSantis. | ||
| Obviously I supported Trump. | ||
| Trump supported you in the speakership. | ||
| This seems to be coming to a head one way or another. | ||
| I've been concerned about the civility also, because I don't want to see mutually assured destruction. | ||
| If Trump ends up president and DeSantis stays as my governor, that'll be just fine with me. | ||
| If DeSantis is president, that'll be fine with me. | ||
| But I don't want to destroy the whole thing. | ||
| And I sense we really are in a dangerous spot where we have A lot of the momentum that you've talked about here and civility and the right ideas and things of that nature, but it's like a tinderbox in a way, maybe because of some of the personalities. | ||
| I always think we should do this. | ||
| Whenever I sit down, like I was sitting down with some members yesterday, we were talking around each other and I said, well first, what do we want to achieve? | ||
| Okay, you take everybody out of running, what do you want to achieve? | ||
| You want to stop the bad policies. | ||
| So you want somebody else in the White House, right? | ||
| So you've got to understand, too, what's the debate going to be about? | ||
| All the things that Biden has done that somebody else could do better. | ||
| I think that resonates more with the public. | ||
| It gets more people to vote. | ||
| It's about addition, not subtraction, okay? | ||
| And so it's tough when you get in a competition, but members should really see that whoever runs. | ||
| And lots of times, whoever the frontrunner is today is not the nominee. | ||
| And whatever we think the issue is today is probably not going to be the issue in another November from now. | ||
| But I think the democratic policies will always be the issue, right? | ||
| And I just don't think The country wants another four years of Joe Biden. | ||
| I just don't believe we can sustain that. | ||
| And don't do damage to one another that allows him to get in, because they're going to give you a lot of bait. | ||
| Don't take it. | ||
| Note he did not say Trump nor DeSantis in that entire thing. | ||
| That was very slick. | ||
| Guys, please make some noise for the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. | ||
| Thank you, my friend. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless dribble, 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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