April 5, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Jordan Peterson came to Senate lunch about a half a year ago. | ||
| And the point he made, he said, you know, conservatives were just terrible at defending conservative values. | ||
| Then he granted us immediate absolution. | ||
|
unidentified
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He said, because we never thought we'd have to. | |
| Whoever thought we'd have to defend the benefit of having a mom and a dad? | ||
| Okay, listen, there are other ways, okay, but can we at least acknowledge it's really nice for children to have, you know, a father who provides discipline and, you know, the mother that, you know, again, that's a good arrangement. | ||
| It stood the test of time. | ||
| We never thought we'd have to defend that. | ||
| We never thought our daughters would have to compete against biological males, then be expected to take a shower in the same locker room and then have a judge order The biological male take showers in the girl's locker room. | ||
| Never thought we'd be pushing back on school administrators that want to administer gender blocking drugs | ||
| to our children and not tell their parents. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and we are once again in DC. | ||
| and joining me today is the Republican Senator representing the great state of Wisconsin, Senator Ron Johnson. | ||
| Finally, welcome to The Rubin Report, Dave. | ||
| Well, appreciate you having me on. | ||
| I think I've had basically everybody. | ||
| You're a rookie on The Rubin Report. | ||
| Didn't realize I was so elusive. | ||
| Well, I told you right before we started, you have nothing to fear because I am un-vaxxed and this has become one of your hardcore things, what has happened with these vaccines. | ||
| Well, it's tragic what's happened. | ||
| And, you know, the pandemic has exposed so many problems in this country. | ||
| The capture by Big Pharma of our federal health agencies, but also of the media and the big tech social media giants as well. | ||
| And the American public has not been given the truth. | ||
| The agency has not been transparent. | ||
| So the big pharma companies haven't been transparent. | ||
| And, you know, I'm certainly not an anti-vaxxer, but based on what's happened here, I've certainly started asking a whole lot more questions. | ||
| So when you ask those questions, specifically in the hearings here at the Capitol, and you know, congressmen and senators get out there. | ||
| It seems like we catch people in lies and Fauci will be caught saying, we didn't do gain of function. | ||
| We did. | ||
| I didn't say masks. | ||
| I did, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| I think one thing that people are getting very frustrated with now is that it doesn't seem like anyone pays a price at the end. | ||
| Nobody gets fired. | ||
| Nobody gets removed for their job. | ||
| You know, it's like we live in this time of cancel culture. | ||
| We'll cancel a comedian for a joke. | ||
| And yet the people that are really doing some nefarious stuff, it's almost irrelevant. | ||
| Well, as it relates to the pandemic and the coronavirus, you've got the COVID cartel, and that is the Biden administration, the federal health agencies, Big Pharma, then the legacy media and the big tech social media giants. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There's the COVID cartel. | ||
| They're the ones, collectively, that sabotage early treatment. | ||
| I can't tell you the exact moment the decision was made that the only solution to the pandemic was going to be vaccines, vaccines, vaccines. | ||
| And as a result, we better not have any therapies because it might be difficult to get an emergency use authorization if there is those types of therapies. | ||
| Because you actually can't, right? | ||
| Technically, you can't get the emergency use. | ||
| You know, in Washington, D.C., there are rules that tell that people don't want to follow the rules, right? | ||
| But the fact of the matter is, I totally believe the doctors who say that hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives, they didn't have to, because they weren't being treated early. | ||
| And it is bizarre. | ||
| I'm almost 68 years old. | ||
| As long as I've been alive, the medical advice has always been early detection allows for early treatment, produces better results, right? | ||
| Do that with everything. | ||
| That's why we try and go in there, detect cancers early, so we can treat them. | ||
| But now with COVID, we were happy to spend tens of billions of dollars on tests, and we did spend tens of billions of dollars on tests, and you can argue about the PCR tests, okay? | ||
| And then, so what good did that do? | ||
| I mean, once the horse was out of the barn and the cat was out of the bag, we weren't stopping the spread. | ||
| So the testing didn't stop the spread. | ||
| And then we told people, well, don't do anything. | ||
| Go home. | ||
| Be afraid. | ||
| Isolate yourself. | ||
| Hope you don't get so sick. | ||
| They have to check yourself in the hospital where they'll inject about $3,000 worth of remdesivir in your arm that might take out your kidneys, put you on a vent. | ||
| Eighty to ninety percent of the people that put on a ventilator never came off it, not alive. | ||
| This was insane what we did. | ||
| I'm thoroughly convinced that this, I always call it a cornucopia full of widely available Proven safe, generic drugs, used both on-label and off-label. | ||
| They worked. | ||
| I had enough people come to me. | ||
| I could refer them to doctors. | ||
| I followed up on the case. | ||
| I mean, some remarkable results. | ||
| But it's all being denied. | ||
| Now they're, you know, doctoring different studies, underpowering, for example, use of ivermectin to give it for three days on an empty stomach, well into the course of your disease. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| It's sick when you're aware of what's happening here and how the COVID cartel continues to cover up for its miserably failed response to COVID. | ||
| But again, the body count is way too high. | ||
| They can't admit they are wrong. | ||
| And I just described who's in the COVID cartel. | ||
| They have the power to make it almost impossible to prove them wrong. | ||
| So that's why they're out taking away people's, you know, doctor's certification that had the courage and compassion to treat COVID. | ||
| They're destroying these people. | ||
| They're vilifying them. | ||
| It's sick. | ||
| So is there anything we can do about it? | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started, I saw you a few weeks ago at Governor DeSantis. | ||
| He's doing these blueprint events. | ||
| I think the one that we were at was an education one, but you know, he's done one on COVID. | ||
| He's got this panel that it seems to me some states might start doing some things, but maybe at the federal level. | ||
| Well, you know what a lonely voice I am here in Washington, D.C. | ||
| Most of my colleagues push the vaccine on their constituents. | ||
| They don't want to admit they're wrong. | ||
| Doctors don't want to admit they're wrong. | ||
| Again, the COVID cartel will never admit they're wrong. | ||
| So the only solution I have here is uncovering and exposing the truth, and that's what I'm dedicated to doing. | ||
| I can't call them hearings or events. | ||
| I did that after I lost my chairmanship. | ||
| Now, as a chairman, this is odd, too. | ||
| Nobody else is holding hearings on early treatment. | ||
| I'm the guy that holds a hearing, first of all, in February at Roundtable with Scott Gottlieb. | ||
| We found out we don't make drugs here. | ||
| We spent trillions of dollars. | ||
| We didn't solve that problem. | ||
| We wouldn't spend a dime on on-shoring drug manufacturing, okay? | ||
| May of 2020, I held a hearing with John Ioannidis, trying to put things in perspective. | ||
| You know, he did the analysis of the Princess Cruz, which pretty well stood the test of time now, right? | ||
| The infection fatality rate of COVID across the For anybody under 70 is actually less than a bad flu season, okay? | ||
| This was not a disease that we should have been freaking out about. | ||
| Yeah, serious if you're elderly, if you had certain comorbidities, but we never should have shut the economy down. | ||
| So I held that hearing in May of 2020. | ||
| I also had Pierre Corey there talking about corticosteroids. | ||
| He was savage on that until all of a sudden a UK study with dexamethasone, which is a corticosteroid, proved those were effective. | ||
| I had the hearing with Peter McCulloch and George Farid and Harvey Risch on early treatment in November. | ||
| We were labeled the snake oil salesmen of the Senate by Dr. Jha, who never treated a COVID patient. | ||
| Followed that up with a hearing with Pierre Cory and Ivor Macton. | ||
| Then I got connected with the vaccine-injured community, held events. | ||
| Again, I don't have the power, but anyway, those early hearings, those weren't conducted by the health committees. | ||
| Or I was doing that as chairman of Homeland Security Governmental Affairs. | ||
| Again, I thought this was insane that we were shutting down our economy, but everybody seemed to be on board with that. | ||
| Did you feel that really from day one? | ||
| Because I always say to people, and as I mentioned, I'm un-vaxxed, I've become sort of, I'm not an un-vaxxer as you said in that traditional sense of the phrase, but once they started with mandates and after two weeks, to me that was it. | ||
| Once the two weeks became 15 days, I was like, uh-uh, something else is going on here. | ||
| Were you feeling that really from day one? | ||
| Well, as soon as I heard about it. | ||
| Because I grant everybody a certain leash. | ||
| I don't expect you to follow my clips, but I'm the guy who said, probably in March of 2020, it was in March, that, listen, we tragically lose 36,000 people a year on the highway, but we don't shut our highways down. | ||
| We need a transportation system. | ||
| We can't shut the economy down. | ||
| We can't shut it down. | ||
| Fauci heard that comment and said it was way out there. | ||
| No, it was actually a pretty good analogy. | ||
| We never should have shut our economy down, not even for a couple of weeks. | ||
| Again, I understand the fear back then, and maybe that's what separated me from others. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm asking. | ||
| I wasn't freaked out about this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was concerned. | ||
| I mean, you see, you know, the folks in moon suits, you know, doctors treat COVID patients. | ||
| They're dropping like flies. | ||
| Yeah, it was something to be concerned about. | ||
| But, you know, once John Ioannidis did that analysis on the Princess Cruises, that certainly calmed me down. | ||
| But I also, I was, I understood the reality situation. | ||
| You can't shut the economy down. | ||
| And look at how we shut it down. | ||
| Let liquor stores open, shut down churches. | ||
| Shut down all the mom and pop main street businesses, let the big box stores open. | ||
| I mean, this was sick. | ||
| Bobby Kennedy writes in his letter to Liberals, quotes a study conducted in 2021, said there was about a $4 trillion transfer of wealth. | ||
| From the middle class to the big tech social media giants. | ||
| Gee, why were they censoring information? | ||
| Why were they pushing the shutdowns? | ||
| And be so supportive of, again, what I always call our miserable, our miserably failed response to COVID. | ||
| Right, and basically we're all sitting at home ordering everything on Amazon instead of going to the few mom and pop stores that might have fought it. | ||
| So by shutting down our economy, by printing trillions of dollars, I mean, the economic devastation of the pandemic and how we mishandled it, I mean, I don't know if we'll ever really fully dig ourselves out of it. | ||
| And then the human toll, too. | ||
| I mean, people died that didn't have to die. | ||
| You mentioned following some of your clips. | ||
| You had a clip about two months ago now on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd, where he was going after you and you really threw it back to him. | ||
| So I'm going to throw to the clip. | ||
| Do you have a crime that you think Hunter Biden committed? | ||
| Because I've yet to see anybody explain it is not a crime to make money off of your last name. | ||
| So, Chuck, you ought to read the Marco Polo Report, where they detail all kinds of potential crimes. | ||
|
unidentified
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You know, Senator Grassley... Oh, let me just stop you there. | |
| Potential. | ||
|
unidentified
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This is... Well, Senator, potential is innuendo. | |
| About $30,000... That's why you need an investigation. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, Chuck... | |
| Chuck, is it a crime to be soliciting and purchasing prostitution in potentially European sex trafficking operations? | ||
| Is that a crime? | ||
| Because Chuck Grass and I laid out about $30,000 paid by Hunter Biden to those types of individuals. | ||
|
unidentified
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Over December 2018-2019, about $30,000. | |
| to those types of individuals. | ||
| Over December 2018-2019, about $30,000. | ||
| That's about the same time that President Biden offered to pay about $100,000 of Hunter | ||
|
unidentified
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Biden's bills. | |
| I mean, again, that's just some information. | ||
| I don't know exactly who's the crime. | ||
| Here's what I don't get. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right, Senator. | |
| It doesn't really look on the... It sounds sleazy as you know what. | ||
| I'll take your word that you're ethically bothered by Hunter Biden. | ||
| I'm curious, though. | ||
| You seem to have a pattern. | ||
| Are you not? | ||
|
unidentified
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Are you not, Chuck? | |
| Part of the problem, and this is pretty obvious to anybody watching this, is you don't invite me on to interview me. | ||
| You invite me on to argue with me. | ||
| I'm just trying to lay out the facts that certainly Senator Grassley and I uncovered. | ||
|
unidentified
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They were suppressed. | |
| They were censored. | ||
|
unidentified
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They interfered in the 2020 election. | |
| Conservatives understand that. | ||
| Unfortunately, liberals in the media don't. | ||
| And that's part of the reasons our politics are inflamed, is we do not have an unbiased media. | ||
|
unidentified
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We don't. | |
| It's unfortunate. | ||
| I'm all for a free press. | ||
| It needs to be more unbiased. | ||
| Seems like you like fighting people on television. | ||
| You were ready! | ||
| I kind of like to argue. | ||
| Unfortunately in America today, we don't have an unbiased media. | ||
| We don't have journalists anymore. | ||
| We have advocates for the left. | ||
| Chuck Todd doesn't invite me on to interview me. | ||
| He invites me on to argue with me or set me up. | ||
| Use me as a foil to make his leftist point. | ||
| That was two years since I had a similar situation with him after January 6th. | ||
| Where he said, you know, I think he accused me, you know, Senator, you're lighting the fuse, you're starting the fire. | ||
| I said, no, Chuck, you are, you are, okay? | ||
| And it's true, I mean, four years. | ||
| Conservatives have to watch the Russian hoax, where, let's face it, the media set aside any pretense of being unbiased. | ||
| And they said, no, we can't be unbiased because we've got to take down Trump. | ||
| We noticed that as conservatives. | ||
| So you go all the way through, and then all of a sudden, there are all kinds of irregularities in the election. | ||
| There just were. | ||
| That's indisputable. | ||
| But you couldn't talk about them. | ||
| If you did, now you're one of the insurrectionists. | ||
| Which, by the way, there weren't thousands of armed insurrectionists. | ||
| I'm the guy that asked the FBI witness at the Joint Committee, the Senate Committee, okay, if this was an armed insurrection, how many guns did you confiscate? | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| She might have told me a thousand. | ||
| Zero is what she told me. | ||
| They also didn't have plans. | ||
| That's what I kept saying. | ||
| Was there anyone with a piece of paper that had a plan? | ||
| Also, we saw the video that day of people walking between the rope lines. | ||
| That's not what an armed insurrection would look like. | ||
| Plus, we were back in business within a few hours. | ||
| I didn't see any fires being started. | ||
| So again, listen, we all condemn the violence, you know, and it's tragic that that happened, okay? | ||
| But the vast majority of people came here on January 6th, were here to protest peacefully, exercise their First Amendment rights, petition their government. | ||
| They are not domestic terrorists, and yet they're being treated as such. | ||
| And now we're seeing this multiple tier system of justice we have where the Justice Department and the FBI are putting Record number of resources to persecute and prosecute individuals that weren't engaged in violence, but just to make an example of them, while at the same time, they're completely ignoring, by and large, the 570 riots that occurred during the summer of 2020. | ||
| 2,000 law enforcement officials injured, a couple billion dollars worth of property damaged, a couple dozen people killed during those. | ||
| A couple people killed in Kenosha. | ||
| We're supposed to ignore that and focus all on one day of rioting, which we all condemned. | ||
| You can also go out and protest without a mask. | ||
| What members of the left are condemning all the riots in the summer of 2020? | ||
| No, they were condoning them. | ||
| Well, they were encouraging their followers to bail out the rioters. | ||
| Again, the double standard drives us nuts. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's what I was pointing out to Chuck Todd. | |
| It's, you know, you are so blatantly unfair, so blatantly biased, that inflames the situation. | ||
| You're the one lighting the fuse here. | ||
| If the press were fair and unbiased, I think our politics would be a lot calmer and a lot less divided. | ||
| Do you think anything's shifting there? | ||
| So for example, you go on, you fight him back rather effectively, that clip goes viral, and then I think a certain amount of people do wake up a little bit and they go, wait a minute, wait a minute, Chuck Todd was acting like a Democrat lawyer here, not an honest interviewer. | ||
| So is that, does that show you that something's shifting at all, or is that a little Pollyannish? | ||
| Well, again, I think truth has its own power. | ||
| The problem is the truth is being suppressed and censored. | ||
| And, you know, what I've been telling audiences recently is I don't think the conservative movement has really grasped how pervasively and effectively the radical left has infiltrated every institution, not only of America, but globally. | ||
| It's not a fair fight. | ||
| It's not a level playing field. | ||
| I mean, the massive stroke in the U.S. | ||
| of the left was they took control of the university system during the Vietnam War protests in the 60s. | ||
| So now they control colleges of journalism. | ||
| So they're cranking out a bunch of radical leftists, you know, advocates and education. | ||
| And that is where they really are exercising their power. | ||
| So now we're, what we're pushing K through 12. | ||
| It's obscene in some cases, okay? | ||
| We're trying to tell little boys, maybe a little girl, or vice versa. | ||
| I mean, you don't do that to children. | ||
| Listen, we have compassion. | ||
| I understand there are people that are conflicted, and we have all kinds of compassion. | ||
| We want to help folks like that. | ||
| But at this point in time, all of a sudden, transgenderism is just exploding in our society. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| I think it's being pushed on our society. | ||
| And again, I don't think I've said this on camera before, But the fact that we have doctors and nurses that are mutilating children? | ||
| I mean, that's a serious operation as an adult. | ||
| To be that, I guess, tormented that you actually undergo a sex change operation. | ||
| I don't see how any adult can approve of that. | ||
| You know, for a child. | ||
| Did you happen to see the clip? | ||
| I'm seeing how you can do that. | ||
| Did you see the clip, I think it was about a week ago, where somebody unearthed the clip | ||
| of Rachel Levine, you know, the deputy health secretary, whatever, where he, she, whatever | ||
| says that, I hate this pronoun, I think it's so annoying, but he basically says that he's | ||
| glad that he didn't have a sex change until after he had kids because his kids are the | ||
| love of his life. | ||
| And at the same time now, he's saying kids should undergo these surgeries. | ||
| He's pushing that, again, for minors. | ||
| Can a minor get a tattoo? | ||
| Minor can't drink. | ||
| Again, there's a reason that we protect minors that way. | ||
| Again, counsel people, but don't push it on them and don't mutilate them. | ||
| It's irreversible. | ||
| Now, of course, there are some celebrated cases of people, transgender individuals, who had the sex change and they'd kind of like to get their They're all gender back. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's just so hard to watch. | |
| I mean, my wife, she's always looking at these things and she wants them shown to me and I, you know, Jane, please don't. | ||
| It's too awful to look at. | ||
| It's just too tortuous. | ||
| So when you talk to, or if you talk to your colleagues on the other side about this stuff, and this is what I ask literally every Republican, Do the Democrats pushing it believe it? | ||
| Do they? | ||
| First of all, I don't talk to them about this. | ||
| I think this is the first time I've ever been recorded talking about, you know, this is mutilation of children. | ||
| I talk about it and we were just doing a bunch of events this weekend. | ||
| I'm talking about Jordan Peterson came to Senate lunch about a half a year ago. | ||
| And the point he made, he said, you know, those conservatives were just terrible. | ||
| At defending conservative values. | ||
| Then he granted us immediate absolution. | ||
| Because we never thought we'd have to. | ||
| Whoever thought we'd have to defend the benefit of having a mom and a dad? | ||
| Okay, listen, there are other ways, okay, but can we at least acknowledge it's really nice for children to have, you know, a father who provides discipline and, you know, the mother that, you know, again, that's a good arrangement. | ||
| It stood the test of time. | ||
| We never thought we'd have to defend that. | ||
| We never thought our daughters would have to compete against biological males, then be expected to take a shower in the same locker room and then have a judge order The biological male take showers in the girl's locker room. | ||
| Never thought we'd be pushing back on school administrators that want to administer gender-blocking drugs to our children and not tell their parents. | ||
| And then I literally go on to say, and this is very uncomfortable to talk about, but I never thought. | ||
| I mean, I revere doctors and nurses. | ||
| They saved my daughter with a serious heart defect. | ||
| You know, open-heart surgery at the age of eight months. | ||
| I never thought I'd hear doctors and nurses would actually mutilate children. | ||
| Because that's what's happening. | ||
| What else can you call it? | ||
| I mean, you take away your God-given body parts. | ||
| Again, as an adult, I guess that's your right. | ||
| Nobody should have the right to approve that for a child. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, I don't know if you know, but I toured with Jordan Peterson for a year and a half. | ||
| We did about 120 shows, 20-something countries. | ||
| So I do know who he is, so the reference didn't go over my head, but one of the other things he says about the transgender issue is that he says even for the people that clinically have gender dysphoria, that truly at the end believe they are in the wrong body, just switching the body parts doesn't mean you're going to be happier or more fulfilled on the other side, because you often end up with a series of other health problems and psychological problems that come with that. | ||
| That's unfortunate. | ||
| We all have compassion. | ||
| We do. | ||
| We have compassion for people like that. | ||
| But let's not force that onto children. | ||
| Kids are kids. | ||
| You can throw all kinds of weird ideas into their head. | ||
| You can destroy children if you're not educating them properly. | ||
| And I would say that's pushing transgenderism on children is not educating kids properly. | ||
| So let's just go deep into a couple things, because I can sense you're not holding back here, and you normally don't, so I'm not surprised. | ||
| I got re-elected. | ||
| I did not want to run again. | ||
| I'm so sick of the dysfunction in this place. | ||
| The primary reason I ran again was because nobody else was advocating for the vaccine-injured. | ||
| I could not turn my back on them. | ||
| But having One this six-year term, what I've dedicated myself, and I tell crowds this, you know, I am dedicated to tenaciously pursuing, uncovering, and exposing the truth. | ||
| Pick your, what is the truth? | ||
| So let's do it. | ||
| So, so this administration to me seems either the most generous version of it would be that they are sort of willfully ignorant of economics and reality when it comes to science, gender, COVID vaccines, whatever, or they're actually malicious. | ||
| I'm veering towards the malicious at this point, that they cannot be that inept. | ||
| Do you think that that's a fair... Is that a fair premise? | ||
| So I was able to spend some time with David Horowitz one time, I went out to one of his events. | ||
| I like David a lot, yeah. | ||
| I know his answer would be... So I'm talking to him and go, so, you know, David, you were a communist, your parents were communists. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He saw the light when his communist buddies murdered somebody, that's why... Yeah. | ||
| I said, so... | ||
| What is it with these folks? | ||
| What are they thinking? | ||
| I mean, they see where socialism, communism has been tried in the past. | ||
| It's failed miserably. | ||
| Didn't work economically. | ||
| Resulted in totalitarianism. | ||
| Tens of millions of people murdered. | ||
| I mean, what don't they get? | ||
| No, they're utopians. | ||
| They just think if you give them the power, they're smarter and better angels than the Stalins or the Castro's or the Chavez's. | ||
| Just give them all the power. | ||
| So, I mean, I guess I'll take them at their word. | ||
| They're do-gooders. | ||
| I think they're utopians. | ||
| They think they're just so much smarter. | ||
| And, of course, obviously, by extension, we're stupid. | ||
| We can't be expected to live our own lives. | ||
| I mean, we will destroy the planet. | ||
| So, they're going to be the better angels that are going to tell us exactly how we need to live our lives, how many times, what kind of cars we ought to drive. | ||
| Never mind the fact that we don't have the rare earth minerals to produce the batteries or the generating power to, you know, it's all, it's insane. | ||
| I mean, what, what policy of the left works? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I can't think of one. | ||
| I mean, their economics don't work. | ||
| A dolly held at the start of the Biden administration is worth 87 cents today. | ||
| That's a pretty rapid decline in the value of the dollar you held in your savings account in a little over two years. | ||
| But I thought it was the Inflation Reduction Act. | ||
| Doesn't that mean it reduces inflation? | ||
| It's so brilliant! | ||
| So now you had Goldman Sachs do a study published in the Wall Street Journal. | ||
| They wrote a column on this saying that the $300 billion of tax credits for the green energy boondoggles is really going to cost about $1.2 trillion. | ||
| And of course Janet Yellen was before a finance committee a couple weeks ago and I laid out, listen, these bank failures obviously are caused by the inflation, caused the Fed to increase interest rates, devalue the bonds, put them into bankruptcy. | ||
| Let's talk about inflation. | ||
| From my standpoint, the three primary causes. | ||
| Massive deficit spending, that's the biggest one. | ||
| Of course, your war on fossil fuel doesn't help, driving up cost of energy. | ||
| And then, of course, the slightest locations from these idiotic shutdowns, right? | ||
| She came back, so I don't think deficit spending is a major cause of inflation. | ||
| Well, she also said inflation was transitory. | ||
| But when she says that, do you want to say to her, well, do you understand like econ 101? | ||
| Well, unfortunately, you only have five minutes, which is a real problem with hearings. | ||
| You can't get into a back and forth dialogue. | ||
| You got five minutes. | ||
| You got to figure out, which is one of the reasons I like my events. | ||
| You know, like on COVID-19, a second opinion. | ||
| I'm there and I can ask as many questions for as long as I want to and you actually have a good dialogue. | ||
| You can make sure it's a good dialogue. | ||
| But no, I was pretty well shocked by that. | ||
| Again, I don't think the public understands basic economics, but it's kind of frightening when the Treasury Secretary doesn't really acknowledge the harm that all this massive deficit spending has caused. | ||
| Again, now we're concerned about the money supply. | ||
| That was the problem with the Great Depression, is foolishly they allowed the money supply to decline, to be reduced. | ||
| Which probably took a really bad recession, turned into a, you know, how many year of depression. | ||
| So we need to understand these things, but we need to be honest and transparent about them. | ||
| So what would you have done if you were in charge of the Fed and they tell you, okay, Silicon Valley Bank is going down, and this could trigger now, you know, 20 other banks to go down, and then that triggers the big one. | ||
| Well, first of all, I wasn't voting for all this deficit spending, so I don't think we'd have the inflation we had. | ||
| But, you know, in that particular circumstance, let's go back 2008, 2009. | ||
| What I would have done there is I would have said, we're going to suspend this mark-to-market rule because it's destroying these banks for no reason. | ||
| The mortgage-backed securities weren't worth zero. | ||
| I know the market froze, so nobody could sell them. | ||
| So in effect, short term, they were worth zero. | ||
| By the way, I asked one of the Federal Reserve presidents recently, I'm not going to name, I said, did we ever determine what You know, what percent of value those mortgage-backed securities had, and I don't think anybody's done a study on that, but it's probably about 90%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But we forced banks to mark all those assets down to zero, put them into bankruptcy. | ||
| Well, the same thing kind of happened here. | ||
| Held to maturity, those bonds will be worth, you know, full value, but they were, you know, because of the duration risk, they had to write those things down. | ||
| What I would have done is I would have come into the Fed, And I would have opened up a lending authority to the depositors where you could, okay, we're not gonna have your deposits held up in a bankruptcy. | ||
| You can borrow against that up to a certain percent. | ||
| Pick your number, 80, 90%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically so they could stay in business. | |
| So they can stay in business, but if they were so stupid and negligent not to have sweep accounts, I mean, people don't realize, okay, my deposit only insured up to $250,000, you know, when I had my manufacturing account. | ||
| You know, we also had a compensating balance, so I was taking probably risk above that, but beyond that compensating balance for the things, you know, it would sweep into overnight CDs or, you know, whatever. | ||
| So there is a way to materially do this. | ||
| There's a way of doing that, and people weren't willing to do it, so for their negligence, for their stupidity, they should take a haircut as well. | ||
| I mean, obviously the shareholders are wiped out. | ||
| That's capitalism. | ||
| If you don't have a consequence for stupid and risky behavior, well, you just can get stupider and more risky behavior. | ||
| So the way the Fed has done this, and by the way, do you think they would have bailed out depositors if those depositors were, oh, I don't know, Oil drillers. | ||
| Right, of course. | ||
| Refineries. | ||
| Farmers, probably. | ||
| Or, you know, gun manufacturers. | ||
| So, you know, these are all the little businesses in Silicon Valley. | ||
| They were doing everything, you know, green energy. | ||
| You know, these businesses have probably never made money. | ||
| You know, we're probably going through cash sooner than they needed to. | ||
| So, again, all the way around, the way the Fed has handled this has been, has mismanaged. | ||
| And what it'll probably do is it'll probably hasten the next banking crisis and make it worse. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| So is that sort of what the Fed wants, do you think? | ||
| Again, going to sort of the maliciousness versus incompetence thing, that to me it seems like the Fed always wants to get bigger, the machine just wants to get bigger, right? | ||
| So, okay, the more big things that we have that are too big to fail, we'll just keep making them bigger, and then there'll be one bank, and it'll be in this town. | ||
| I mean, there are people, yeah, there are people saying this is just the game plan, the strategy to move toward a central bank digital currency. | ||
| Which would give me cause for concern. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's long past arguing whether or not we should have a Federal Reserve or not. | ||
| I think that's been decided. | ||
| They're not going to go away. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But you're far better off with decentralized power. | ||
| You're far better off with a lot of smaller banks. | ||
| Now, you do need some big banks. | ||
| You know, do the big international transactions and do things that need big businesses, too. | ||
| Some things only big businesses can do, OK? | ||
| But what I've seen, for example, my plastics manufacturing plant, when I started that business in late 70s, early 80s, we probably had a couple hundred potential customers. | ||
| My guess is that's shrunken down to about 12 major ones, because everything's consolidated. | ||
| All these little individual manufacturing, plastics manufacturers, thermoformers and stuff, great little businesses for little towns and stuff, they get gobbled up and that manufacturing goes from theirs into a much larger plant. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| It's small businesses that are the engines of innovation in our economy and provide the kind of competition you really need in a competitive system. | ||
| So I don't like to see all this consolidation. | ||
| I think that's something that the federal government does have a role to play in terms of antitrust. | ||
| I think we need to rethink and rework the antitrust laws. | ||
| It's all around benefit consumer and that makes sense, but how do you handle these big tech social media giants where it's all free? | ||
| So it's almost impossible to prove consumer harm, but then you can prove societal harm. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| When you start seeing the cooperation with government officials to censor information, I mean, something has to be done about that. | ||
| But again, Democrats won't help us legislatively on that because it... | ||
| Is that the weird thing that we find out things like the Twitter files where we know without question 100% proof positive the government was coordinating with Twitter and Facebook. | ||
| Saki even admitted a year and a half ago, but nobody cared about Facebook, that they were censoring people at the behest of the government. | ||
| It is, that is, it's a violation of the First Amendment. | ||
| That's, that's basically it. | ||
| The show just goes on. | ||
| Well, you're seeing the mainstream media screaming about that, right? | ||
| Oh, I guess we're not. | ||
| No, exactly. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Yeah, so we know about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, Fox News covers it, you know, a couple of conservative outlets, but by and large, the vast majority of American public is completely unaware of what happened there because they're being distracted on their little news feeds by the Kardashians or, you know, whatever you're getting. | ||
| Is that a push and pull that you always have to deal with as a senator, that you probably could get more done on the ground just focusing on Wisconsin, but you're part of the federal machine too, obviously, as a senator, so that it's almost distracting from where you can get concrete things done? | ||
| Well, again, the things I want to get Get done or reduce the burden of the federal government. | ||
| So when people come into my office, if you're looking for a government handout, I'm proud to go to the, you know, the Democrat senator from Wisconsin. | ||
| If you're looking to help get the government off your back, you've come to the right office. | ||
| So I'm here, you know, Freedom is the essential ingredient in America. | ||
| You know, yeah, we need some government. You can't live in anarchy, can't live in chaos. | ||
| So you need some government, but it needs to be limited. | ||
| Because our founders, they came from tyrannical regimes. | ||
| They realized as government grew, their freedom recedes. | ||
| And let's face it, freedom is the essential ingredient in America. | ||
| It's the freedom that people use to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel we call America. | ||
| It's not big government. | ||
| Big government crushes those dreams. | ||
| Big government takes away that freedom. | ||
| My goal here isn't to bring home the bacon to Wisconsin. | ||
| My goal is to shrink the size of the federal government so Wisconsinites can aspire and dream and build and create. | ||
| Let's do a couple of other, the big ones. | ||
| This Ukraine situation, which we are, I think it's around $160 billion now. | ||
| It's weapons, it's not a declared war, but at some point, in my opinion, if you're funding a war forever, you're kind of at war. | ||
| I think you're pretty much in the same spot as that. | ||
| What do you make of this? | ||
| Is there any off-ramp every week? | ||
| We have spokesmen telling them, no, there'll be no negotiation. | ||
| I mean, it's all very bizarre, to say the least. | ||
| I'll give you a little more fulsome answer because I think it requires one. | ||
| Yeah, I was chairman of the European Subcommittee on Center Foreign Relations, ranking member. | ||
| I've probably been over Ukraine as much as just by name of my colleagues, right? | ||
| I was at Poroshenko's inauguration. | ||
| I was the only member of Congress at Zelenko's, or Zelensky's. | ||
| Zelenko's the doctor that, but yeah, so it was Zelensky's inauguration. | ||
| I thought he was the real deal. | ||
| I know the Ukrainian people are. | ||
| I mean, they want to shed themselves of the legacy of corruption. | ||
| And to describe it for you, his prosecutor general, When I was over there, he said, here, let me describe corruption in Ukraine. | ||
| We have something like 22,000 prosecutors in Ukraine. | ||
| We don't pay them well, but they live like kings. | ||
| I mean, that's the endemic corruption. | ||
| OK, so the Maidan, that was a scream. | ||
| And we want what you have in the West. | ||
| I mean, I have nothing but sympathy for that, right? | ||
| I have nothing for sympathy for a country and for its people that are invaded by an evil, War criminal. | ||
| And that's who Putin is. | ||
| So I don't want to give any aid and comfort to Putin whatsoever. | ||
| And I want to support the courageous people of Ukraine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| I think there was certainly a way of preventing that invasion to begin with, but not under Biden, obviously. | ||
| So once invaded, the one opportunity we might have had when Russia felt the resistance, because of the courage of the Ukrainian people and the support of the West, which I supported that first tranche, partly because we had to replenish Our munitions that we, you know, the commander-in-chief can just deplete our stockpile, so we had to replace those as well. | ||
| There was a moment in time, it was a glimmer of hope, where maybe Russia would say, well, we've been out for you more than we can shoot, let's return back and let's end this. | ||
| But that was quite a while ago. | ||
| Now the reality of the situation is, you know, You don't have a fair fight here. | ||
| Putin can continue to send in cruise missiles and bomb population centers, infrastructure. | ||
| I mean, this war just continues to grind on, and just more and more of Ukraine is destroyed. | ||
| Now, both sides are losing individuals, but certainly when I've asked people in the State Department, well, what's the public opinion polls in Russia? | ||
| They're highly supportive of the war. | ||
| Well, why wouldn't they? | ||
| They've got Putin's propaganda. | ||
| They're not getting their cities bombed. | ||
| So, it's a completely unfair fight. | ||
| There's no way Putin gives up on this. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| It's existential for him. | ||
| So, it's a reality I hate. | ||
| But at some point in time, everybody's going to have to face the reality. | ||
| Every day that this goes by, The eventual outcome just gets worse and worse and worse and worse. | ||
| It doesn't get better. | ||
| So when you hear our State Department or even Biden saying the Ukrainians don't have to negotiate, which is what they've said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, I mean, what do you make of that? | ||
| How does this get better? | ||
| Give me a scenario in terms of where we turn this thing around and you end up with a better result than what you have right now. | ||
| If you were to just stop fighting right now, how does it get better by continuing the fighting? | ||
| Again, it's a horrible reality. | ||
| I hate saying this because I don't want to give any aid and comfort to Putin. | ||
| I guess I would just ask everybody, including Putin, right now this is a lose, lose, lose situation. | ||
| There is no other than maybe China wins, okay? | ||
| But I guess I would just ask everybody to kind of temper what they're thinking. | ||
| We shouldn't be contemplating going to war with either Russia or China. | ||
| There's no good outcome on that. | ||
| They're kind of coming together right now. | ||
| There is no good outcome on this. | ||
| I mean, we've got to recognize the reality of the situation. | ||
| I mean, China is growing their military, their navy. | ||
| They get a lot more bang for the buck than what they spent on military. | ||
| So again, it's maybe not a reality I like to contemplate, but it's a reality you have to | ||
| accept. | ||
| So I mentioned that I saw you a couple of weeks ago at this Blueprint event in Florida, that Governor DeSantis was holding a bunch of governors and senators and congresspeople. | ||
| Obviously, a lot of your message definitely resonates with the Trump side of things. | ||
| What do you make of this push and pull over the last week or so and what's going on there? | ||
| Well, I've always been a firm believer in Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment. | ||
| And I've always thought, no matter whether it's for a school board position or a primary in a state race or for a national one, your best strategy as a candidate in a Republican primary is show Republican voters how you would defeat the radical leftists you're going to be running against. | ||
| Show people what you bring to the table, your qualifications, and don't denigrate the other guy or gal who just might be our candidate. | ||
| It's a team sport, and whether you're the candidate or somebody else's, we want the eventual nominee, Republican or conservative nominee, to win. | ||
| And by the way, talking to enough Republican voters, most people agree with that. | ||
| They want to hear the positive things about you. | ||
| They want to hear the negative things against the Democrats and the Radicals, okay? | ||
| How are you going to defeat the Democrats as opposed to how are you going to rip your Republican opponent? | ||
| So I just personally don't think that's a particularly good strategy. | ||
| Yeah, I keep saying to people, the two things that I'm looking for and that I think my audience is looking for are competency and the ability to communicate it. | ||
| You give me those two, even if we disagree on some of the periphery, it's like, that'll be just fine. | ||
| Would you say you're hopeful that we can You know, turn this America back around to what these guys were fighting for. | ||
| So I would say the number, normally when I start out speeches, I just warn audiences I'm not the most uplifting individual. | ||
| I've heard you say it! | ||
| I've also, I've also said too, yeah, you're much better off getting me as a speaker, like, where there's cocktails around, you know, kind of take the edge off a little bit. | ||
| We can make that happen right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, the, Again, I'm big into reality. | |
| I've come from a manufacturing background. | ||
| It doesn't do you any good. | ||
| You can't solve problems if you're not willing to acknowledge that you have a problem. | ||
| Deluding yourself is never a good strategy. | ||
| I've been pointing out to your audiences that Venezuelans voted themselves into poverty. | ||
| An oil-rich nation, a successful South American nation, One election, they voted themselves and put themselves on this destructive path. | ||
| Right now, America is on a very destructive path. | ||
| Again, picking up the theme that conservatives haven't truly grasped how effective and pervasively the left has infiltrated these institutions. | ||
| You know, we, our eyes are open. | ||
| We think we see the truth. | ||
| This just looks like Governor Sanders said, this is normal versus crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
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I mean, we know, we know we're normal, okay? | |
| But we have to, we have to understand this crazy It's not been defeated. | ||
| If anything, it's still on the rise. | ||
| You got to give the devil his due. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So we're going to have to devise strategies and how can we effectively push back on this because it's all the stress being done on the radar. | ||
| Remember how, obviously the left is teaching our children critical race theory. | ||
| Obviously, obviously they're pushing transgenderism on our children. | ||
| They'll never admit it. | ||
| Quite honestly, it's only probably COVID and online learning that brought it to the surface and brought it to the attention of parents. | ||
| The pandemic was an awakening for a certain percentage of the population, but probably not a majority. | ||
| And again, the majority of Americans still get their news from Legacy Media. | ||
| They're not gonna be talking about this stuff. | ||
| I mean, you don't see 60 Minutes leading with an expose on transgenderism being pushed on our children, or critical race theory inflaming the divide between racial... No, they actually put, they'll do a lie, a hit piece about someone pushing back on it. | ||
| I mean, right now we've got a Wisconsin Supreme Court race going on. | ||
| It's crucial. | ||
| I mean, the left realizes, because this will flip the court if the radical leftist judge wins this thing, okay? | ||
| So the left realizes that, that she'll become a super legislator, and Wisconsin Supreme Court will become a super legislature. | ||
| And they'll overturn whatever gains we've got. | ||
| They'll redistrict. | ||
| And we may lose two House seats. | ||
| And so the left is pouring millions of dollars into this race. | ||
| There are credible charges against the liberal justice, okay? | ||
| She married when she was young, an elderly, I think it was a judge. | ||
| She apparently had a drinking problem. | ||
| Abused him. | ||
| Elder abuse. | ||
| These are credible allegations from people, you know, a stepson. | ||
| Other people that are willing to put their, you know, name behind this stuff. | ||
| Freely uses the N-word in her official capacity in the court. | ||
| Now, what I'm saying- The fact that I haven't even heard about this at all tells me everything you need to know. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| If those credible allegations were attached to a Republican candidate, local news stations, they'd be breaking into the first moon landing to bring you this important news. | ||
| Instead, what local news is doing is they are covering the fact that she is saying she's going to Sue these journalists for defamation. | ||
| So again, you're completely marginalizing the charge, and you're not covering the charges, you're just covering that she's being defamed. | ||
| So, it's not, again, it's not a fair fight, it's not a level playing field. | ||
| And the sooner we come to that realization, then start developing strategies around that, it's the only hope we do have. | ||
| But no, I'm I'm not the world's greatest optimist. | ||
| When I hear some of my colleagues, oh, I'm a big optimist, well, okay. | ||
| Good luck with that. | ||
| Where's your head? | ||
| I always say to people, I'm a world-weary optimist. | ||
| I don't think, and I suspect you probably are, too, in a certain way, that you probably couldn't really do this every day if you didn't believe you could affect change. | ||
| I mean, again, I have to believe the truth has its own power, which is why Yeah, my dedication over the next six years literally is pursuing, uncovering, and exposing the truth. | ||
| All right, then I got two more for you in short order. | ||
| If your phone rings and it's maybe one of those guys that we talked about earlier, either Trump or DeSantis, or maybe somebody else, and they say, hey, I could use some help here, you know, VP, something like that. | ||
| Does that have any interest to you? | ||
| I mean, clearly you're a fighter. | ||
| I mean, that's obvious. | ||
| I would not expect that. | ||
| Maybe in helping out the administration, that'd be hard. | ||
| Listen, if you get called on by a president-elect or something like that to serve your country, I think I was called on here. | ||
| That's why I did it. | ||
| That'd be kind of hard to turn down, but I certainly don't expect to be offered something like vice presidency. | ||
| Then I got one more. | ||
| If your phone rings and it's Chuck Todd and he says you want to do Meet the Press again, what are you going to do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| Last time I was on there, Chuck was saying, you know, it's hard to do this remotely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Bring me in the studio, Chuck. | ||
| Just, you know, pick up the phone. | ||
| Was it their offer to only do it remotely? | ||
| Well, I wasn't available. | ||
| But I offered right on there. | ||
| Yeah, let's do it. | ||
| The phone hasn't rung yet. | ||
| So he had me on and it kind of blew up after January 6th. | ||
| It was two years later. | ||
| Blew up again. | ||
| It wasn't my intention to blow it up, but at some point in time you go... So you're looking at a... Every two years, you know. | ||
| I've got a regular gig. | ||
| I meet the press, I guess. | ||
| But no, listen. | ||
| I'm not afraid to defend what my beliefs are. | ||
| Truth be told, I do like to argue. | ||
| I think it's a really good way to flesh out the issues. | ||
| And by the way, if in the end I'm defeated in an argument, I'll change my position. | ||
| You made some pretty good points there. | ||
| I mean, that's the way life is. | ||
| You have to have a flexible mind. | ||
| You have to have an open mind. | ||
| I think that's one of the things I found most disturbing during the pandemic still is just the lack of open-mindedness. | ||
| It's like, here's the narrative. | ||
| Here's what the COVID cartel is telling us. | ||
| So, again, the disappointment in doctors, not primarily being responsible to their patients. | ||
| I've heard the tragedies in hospitals of family members going, please, God, just try ivermectin. | ||
| Just please give it to them. | ||
| Won't do it. | ||
| Won't do it. | ||
| And then just watch their loved one die. | ||
| And they couldn't even be by him. | ||
| They're prevented from visiting. | ||
| That has not been exposed to the extent it should be. | ||
| I mean, what happened in hospitals, the lack, the loss of freedom when you checked yourself in the hospital, which is why a guy like Paul Merrick in my second opinion event just said, you know, I hate to say it, but the hospital's like the last place he would go. | ||
| And again, he was a critical care specialist. | ||
| I mean, here's a guy, just real quick. | ||
| Because it's really powerful. | ||
| I'll tell you, you should put the link onto my Rumble account in a second. | ||
| But his testimony, he's a critical care specialist, so he's taking care of patients way later than he should. | ||
| But he has a 50% Death rate of the other people, because he's using all these things. | ||
| So his death rate is 50% of his colleagues. | ||
| So what do you think the hospital did? | ||
| Pin a medal on him? | ||
| Kick him out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| No, what they did is they took away his tools. | ||
| They forbid him from using ivermectin, these things, including vitamin C. But they locked him with seven patients. | ||
| And this is a powerful testimony. | ||
| So they tied my hands. | ||
| They took away my tools so all I could do is sit by and watch my patients die, including a 30-year-old mother. | ||
| That's what hospitals, that's what the COVID cartel did. | ||
| And now they're out destroying people. | ||
| In the end, they took away his hospital privileges. | ||
| So here's a world-renowned critical care specialist Really can't practice in a hospital anymore. | ||
| I mean, they're taking away certifications of these doctors, suing people like Peter McCulloch, terminating their employment. | ||
| They're going to make an example of them. | ||
| Of course, that's how they kept everybody else in line. | ||
| I'm sympathetic with that. | ||
| Doctors, they spend a decade plus getting trained, getting their certification. | ||
| They've got $300,000 worth of student loans to pay off. | ||
| They have to make a living. | ||
| Plus, they want to be doctors to help people. | ||
| They just couldn't step out of line or else they risk losing it all. | ||
| And that was purposeful. | ||
| I can see why Chuck Todd only does this once every two years, but I'll do it more than that. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Happy to come back. | ||
| Pleasure, Senator. | ||
| Nice to have me on. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of mindless drivel, 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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