March 29, 2024 - The Tucker Carlson Show
41:39
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This fall, during hunting season, I was getting a slice of pizza at a general store in a small town in the mountains of western Maine. | ||
| And I was standing in line, and I ran into a guy I know, a guy I like a lot, called Esau Cooper, who was a local excavator. | ||
| And he said, I've been watching you, interviewing all these people. | ||
| Why don't you interview me? | ||
| I've got interesting stuff to say. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I thought, you know, I bet he does. | |
| Esau Cooper is an interesting person. | ||
| Esau Cooper is not only... | ||
| A good upstanding citizen of his town, to remain unnamed, in the Western Maine Mountains, but he's also the local lawnmower racing champ. | ||
| Every year, this town, in August, has a lawnmower race, and Esau Cooper often wins it, sometimes at great personal risk. | ||
| Here's a video of it. | ||
| Esau is the one in the green John Deere that runs into the camera. | ||
|
unidentified
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We'll be right back. | |
| We'll be right back. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| That video, by the way, is shot by Toby Wenzel. | ||
| Esau Cooper, the man on the green John Deere, joins us now in studio. | ||
| Esau, it's great to see you. | ||
| Good to be here. | ||
| Wasn't joking. | ||
| So, first lawnmower racing, how fast do those go? | ||
| The sky's the limit. | ||
| It depends on... | ||
| How fast you make it go. | ||
| Our particular track in Andover, 25-30 miles an hour is probably too fast to make turn one. | ||
| So not particularly fast, but because the track's small and tight, it looks like you're flying. | ||
| It certainly does. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| The straight stretch is only 100 feet long. | ||
| So if you gear your tractor to pull for 100 feet, you're good. | ||
| So how do you get a ride-on mower to go 30 miles an hour? | ||
| Change the pulleys. | ||
| And get rid of the governor. | ||
| How do you get rid of the governor? | ||
| You just unhook a few springs and pull it back. | ||
| And so the motor turns, pushes as fast as it can all the time. | ||
| It's not good for longevity of the motor, but... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could you do that in any vehicle? | ||
| You can get rid of the governor. | ||
| On a lawnmower engine, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So you do that over the where? | ||
| No. | ||
| Winter, I log, snowmobile, hunt. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's springtime when you can't cut wood and it's too early to start digging. | ||
| That's when the lawnmowers come out and we start tinkering them up. | ||
| For people who don't live in an area where logging's big, why can't you log in the spring? | ||
| It's mud season. | ||
| They post the roads so you can't drive big trucks on the roads and the snow melts and the ground gets really soft. | ||
| The frost goes out and it's just the ground is soft. | ||
| You can't do much other than go in the garage and fix equipment. | ||
| Tinker on lawnmowers. | ||
| How long have you been logging? | ||
| 30 years. | ||
| A guy from your town got killed last year logging. | ||
| Good friend of mine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How'd that happen and how do people get killed logging? | |
| Well, generally speaking, people get complacent. | ||
| He was actually taught logging and he knew how to do it. | ||
| He was considered a considerable logger. | ||
| I looked at the site. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He went and cut another tree while a tree got hung up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he went and cut another tree in the line of sight of that tree that was hung up, and the tree fell on him and killed him. | ||
| So he, I mean, by reputation was, and you just said, knew exactly what he was doing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Do you ever worry about getting herd logging? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you just... | ||
| I mean, especially after that, you just don't take those chances. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this is all, you know, everybody takes chances now and then, you know. | ||
| So how did you end up living in a little town in western Maine? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| Well... | ||
| My mom is from Livermore Falls area. | ||
| She grew up in Maine. | ||
| My dad was from all over the Northeast. | ||
| I was born in New London, Connecticut. | ||
| We moved to a little trailer park in Peru when I was really young. | ||
| Peru, Maine. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then we moved to another small town in Western Maine. | ||
| What town? | ||
| Rumford Center. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Very small town. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And when I was 10 years old, my father died when I was 6. And shortly thereafter, my mom got remarried and we moved to Andover when I was 10. And I was disgusted. | ||
| I actually ran away from home. | ||
| Where'd you go? | ||
| An old Girl Scout camp on the Whip-Wool Road, me and a buddy of mine. | ||
| I ran away on my 10th speed and disappeared for a day or two until they finally found us, you know. | ||
| At that time, we were into Rambo. | ||
| Outdoor survivalists and stuff. | ||
| I don't know what we were thinking. | ||
| I just was making a statement, I guess. | ||
| This town sucks. | ||
| I'm from Rumpet, and I'm going back to Rumpet. | ||
| You thought Andover was bad. | ||
| Yeah, it was not. | ||
| I didn't know anybody. | ||
| Shortly thereafter, though, I met two guys that I consider brothers. | ||
| Now, one of them's gone to heaven. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the other one I consider a brother, you know. | ||
| It was the three of us, me, Mike, and Mike. | ||
| And we grew up together, and one of the Mikes died when I was 19. Oof. | ||
| Died in a car accident. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So, yeah, that changes you. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep. | |
| Did you stay in the town? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yep, I did, until I was 25. Where'd you go? | |
| Traveled all over the country. | ||
| Putting in natural gas pipelines. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Running from myself. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, I was, you know, I played too hard, you know, work hard and drink even harder on the weekends. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Each town, there were temporary jobs. | ||
| You go into a town, you lay a pipe and you leave. | ||
| And each time I go into a town, I say, it's going to be different this time, you know. | ||
| And it was never any different. | ||
| Just the partying? | ||
| Yeah, the partying and it progressed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I started just drinking and then got into drugs and just, you know, it was a time in my life when at one time I was going to make a career of pipelining. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then at 31 I sobered up and I tried to keep pipelining. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I realized that it's just, when I quit drinking, I had to let things go. | ||
| How'd you sober up? | ||
| Well, they first tried to put me in rehab at 13, and I wouldn't go. | ||
| 13 years old? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| They wouldn't take me up to Bangor because the doctor says, the doctor's talking to me, so I don't got a problem with alcohol. | ||
| I love alcohol. | ||
| At that time, it was just drinking at that time, I believe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then at 15, I went in and I spent... | ||
| Three or four days in detox because I ate too many Valiums. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ended up in rehab for a month. | ||
| It's a 28-day program. | ||
| On the 21st day, I got kicked out. | ||
| For what? | ||
| Well, I had been reprimanded for something. | ||
| I don't remember what. | ||
| But one of the ways they punished you was at that time, you could smoke right in rehab. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No cigarettes for you. | ||
| So I was like, yeah, okay. | ||
| And so I got in the line to get my daily cigarette or whatever it was a long time ago. | ||
| And got up the line, got the cigarette, went back to the smoking area and had a lighter. | ||
| I was just about to light it. | ||
| And the nurse realized that I wasn't supposed to have a cigarette. | ||
| So she bolted over to me and took my cigarette and said, you can't have that. | ||
| You're being punished. | ||
| I said, oh, really? | ||
| And she's walking away. | ||
| I said, take your effing lighter, too. | ||
| And I threw it at her. | ||
| And had I hit her with that lighter, I would have had to go to NYC, Maine Youth Center. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I missed. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| And they booted me. | ||
| That was the end of that. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you go to rehab again after that? | ||
| Ten years later. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Twenty-five. | ||
| And I checked myself in. | ||
| I had a massive cocaine problem. | ||
| And all I really wanted to do was quit that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So when I got out of there, I stayed sober for a little while and of course started back. | ||
| And that's when I started Pipeline. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I actually got hired. | ||
| I got hired in the paper mill in Rumford while I was in rehab. | ||
| And I told them, I said, well, I'm in rehab right now because I had passed all their testing and they wanted me and they called me up and said, okay, let's come to work. | ||
| I said, well, small problem. | ||
| I'm in rehab right now. | ||
| Oh, that's okay when you get out. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| So I did. | ||
| I went to work from where I lasted 10 days and quit. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I went backlogging. | ||
| I couldn't stand it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was inside. | ||
| It was toxic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All my coworkers were overweight and bald and unhappy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think it makes you bald working on a paper mill? | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| I probably, you know, that was probably mean, but it just didn't look happy. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| I was an outdoor enthusiast, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I just, so I left, you know, I left. | ||
| And I went back logging, and shortly thereafter, I jumped on. | ||
| They were laying a natural gas pipeline in Peru. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And I got hired on that, and that was a godsend. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The wages were high. | ||
| The outdoor, it was grueling. | ||
| It was hard work and the mud and equipment and laying pipe across, like, how are we going to lay a pipe across that, you know? | ||
| Like a granite ledge or something? | ||
| Swamp, yeah, river crossings, just unreal stuff. | ||
| Tying crews, you know, where all the prestige is on a pipeline. | ||
| Tying crew. | ||
| They're the ones who connect the pipes. | ||
| Connect the pipes in the hard spots. | ||
| Mainline lays it in the easy spots, and the tying crews come in and connect the pipe in all the difficult areas, the swamps. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, I got on that and started working that, and it was my thing. | ||
| I loved it. | ||
| I was going to make a career out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I did it for seven years until I realized it was killing me, you know. | ||
| Not so much the work, but the nightlife. | ||
| Because with Pipeline and in a different town every six months came bar life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Living in a motel and lots of drugs. | ||
| Do all the guys go out together at night? | ||
| Not all of them. | ||
| Not all of them, no. | ||
| There was sober, good, hardworking, normal people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, I wasn't one of them. | ||
| I was a party animal and they liked that, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They liked you to work hard and play even harder. | ||
| Well, when you're working hard, you can party hard for a while. | ||
| How did you end up stopping? | ||
| It sounds like you've been trying to stop for a long time. | ||
| Yeah, I knew. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I left South Chicago on a job and I headed east to another job. | ||
| I quit. | ||
| One job was headed to another. | ||
| I wanted to make a change. | ||
| When I got to the East Coast, it was either head south to that job or head home and try to straighten my ass out. | ||
| And I was in trouble. | ||
| I was afraid my mom was going to go to my funeral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was really in my mind, you know. | ||
| And at that time, I didn't know I had a heart condition. | ||
| But you could just feel there was something wrong? | ||
| Yeah, I was living hard, you know, doing a lot of drugs, snorting a lot of cocaine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Putting chunks of, you know, graham chunks of cocaine in my coffee in the morning. | ||
| Does that work? | ||
| Party all night, smoke crack all night long, sleep for 10 minutes, go to work six days a week, sometimes seven. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It was intense. | ||
| It sounds intense. | ||
| I made a ton of money. | ||
| I had, at the end of it, I had my apartment, my room would be paid, my truck would be paid. | ||
| I'd had top hours of working foreman. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they'd just throw money at you. | ||
| You try real hard and I just, I didn't want to die. | ||
| I didn't want my mom going to my funeral because I knew it would kill her. | ||
| So you've been to rehab three times at this point. | ||
| Did you quit in rehab a fourth time? | ||
| No. | ||
| Really? | ||
| No. | ||
| By this time I had been taught enough I knew where the help was. | ||
| It was a 12-step program that I had been to before. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| One Monday morning I woke up and things were different. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| To this day, I don't know what happened, but things just were different. | ||
| I knew I was in trouble. | ||
| And instead of going to the store and buying beer, because that's what I wanted to do that morning, I woke up on my stepfather's couch. | ||
| I was living at the time on my stepdad's couch. | ||
| I had a pickup, and that's it. | ||
| I didn't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I... I just went to a meeting. | ||
| I went to a meeting that Monday night, and I've been sober ever since. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| How long has it been? | ||
| It'll be 20 years in March. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| How have you been able to stay sober all that time? | ||
| God. | ||
| Yeah, I made a decision shortly after that. | ||
| I met a gentleman. | ||
| He's deceased now. | ||
| His name was Kip Cummings, and he became my sponsor, and he saved my life. | ||
| I could relate to him. | ||
| He was a grumpy old man, and he was black and white. | ||
| If you do this, you get that result, and I responded to that. | ||
| He'd say, there are clear-cut directions in this book, and you'll get this result. | ||
| I've always been able to read directions and do something. | ||
| That's how my mind works. | ||
| And it made sense to me. | ||
| And he reminded me of like my grandfather or my father. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I kind of, you know, I like old, mean old men who are, you know, you can tell they've worked hard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they've been through the ringer and I could relate to them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've always been around people like that. | ||
| So he helped me. | ||
| He just taught me how to become a man, how to stay sober. | ||
| He died a few years back, but he just taught me how to be a grown-up. | ||
| Was he right? | ||
| I mean, did your life change for the better once you got sober? | ||
| Well, it slowly has. | ||
| I'm in the process of changing my life. | ||
| It's been a long journey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I quit drinking, doing drugs. | ||
| I was straight up for a year and a half. | ||
| And not everybody knows this. | ||
| But I couldn't take the pressure of life. | ||
| I started smoking pot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it took me a long time. | ||
| I didn't want to be. | ||
| I felt like a hypocrite trying to help people get sober. | ||
| You know, talk at a meeting. | ||
| Then get high on the ride home. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I had a lot of hypocritical feelings towards myself. | ||
| But... | ||
| March 13th, 2021, I was able to kick that. | ||
| Shortly after they legalized it. | ||
| I was about to say, it's legal in your state. | ||
| It's the worst idea ever. | ||
| I voted no. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's just not sending a good message. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| Do we want to promote drugs? | ||
| Do we really want to? | ||
| Or do we want to just... | ||
| I don't know what the answer is. | ||
| I don't want to chase around a bunch of potheads and spend a bunch of money on it. | ||
| I also don't want to just have it be okay. | ||
| You know the tobacco campaigns that they have? | ||
| Why don't we have weed campaigns? | ||
| Well, you tell me. | ||
| You've used a lot of drugs. | ||
| You've smoked a lot of weed in your life. | ||
| It made me dumber. | ||
| It put me in a little bubble so I couldn't relate with people. | ||
| Instead of relying on my higher power, God, Jesus Christ, I relied on marijuana. | ||
| And before that it was alcohol, before that it was cocaine, all this stuff. | ||
| My higher power now is God. | ||
| God. | ||
| God. | ||
| That has evolved. | ||
| It started out as I wasn't a godly person when I quit drinking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I learned through a 12-step program and eventually through the Bible that that is the answer to all our problems, I believe. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| So, as someone who smoked a lot of marijuana, you think it is bad for people. | ||
| Yes, I do. | ||
| That's an unpopular thing to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because people don't want to hear it. | ||
| They don't want to hear it. | ||
| I have a lot of successful friends that smoke daily. | ||
| If you don't ever see the insanity, it's like cigarettes. | ||
| Where's the insanity? | ||
| It's easy to see how bad alcohol is for you, or cocaine, or crack, or heroin. | ||
| But marijuana is so insidious. | ||
| It's so mild. | ||
| It's hard to see how it's holding you back. | ||
| I mean, myself personally, I became a better businessman, a better parent. | ||
| I can remember numbers now. | ||
| It's just better. | ||
| I'm not in that bubble. | ||
| I can relate to people. | ||
| I can see people in mills market and start up a conversation with them instead of running out the door because I smell like a skunk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Where did you get your politics from? | ||
| I'd say my Uncle Esau. | ||
| Your Uncle Esau? | ||
| My Uncle Esau. | ||
| I think that's a song, isn't it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I have never met another Esau except for people in my family. | ||
| And then just the other day, I was listening to a podcast on the radio, and there was this dude named Esau. | ||
| A black guy named Esau who was a pastor, and he's in, like, Massachusetts. | ||
| And I was listening to Bible-thumping radio, and this dude was on there. | ||
| His name was Esau, and I was like, wow. | ||
| That was amazing. | ||
| The first time ever. | ||
| What was your Uncle Esau like? | ||
| He was a staunch Republican, free market guy. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where is he from? | ||
| Auburn. | ||
| Maine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| He's still in Auburn. | ||
| He's a paver. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| My whole father's side of the family were all pavers. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Asphalt pavers. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Cooper Paving. | ||
| There's a whole bunch of them. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Bred to pave. | ||
| Pave driveways, paved roads, paved parking lots. | ||
| Yep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pave. | |
| Pave, pave, pave. | ||
| I worked for them for two years out of us. | ||
| When I first got sober, I went to work for my cousin, Cooper Paving, LLC. And I lasted a couple years and had to move on. | ||
| Well, what happened, I bought an excavator to fix up a piece of land of mine, and it kind of evolved, and I started getting side jobs, and I finally said, you know what? | ||
| Screw it. | ||
| I'm going on my own. | ||
| That's how I became, that's how I got into the business. | ||
| Do you like it? | ||
| The business I'm in? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love what I do. | ||
| I don't necessarily like the business aspect of it. | ||
| But you like excavating? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I like taking raw land. | ||
| And creating something out of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I can stand on the side of a road and look at the contour of the land and some folks want it cleared and they want to put a house and I can see, you know, you can see, you know, how it should be and you get a vision and you do it and it's awesome. | ||
| It's very rewarding. | ||
| I believe that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's kind of artistic. | ||
| Do you... | ||
| Do you notice the difference between the town you grew up in, which you still live in, the way it was when you were a kid and it is now? | ||
| Other than there's a lot of people I don't know now. | ||
| As far as the politics goes, it's basically the same. | ||
| What about the country you grew up in? | ||
| and how is it different? - Ugh. | ||
| I'm distraught about my country. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because... | ||
| Our freedoms are just being taken away from us daily. | ||
| What the federal government is doing to Mr. Trump with the political persecution and what is it called? | ||
| Lawfare. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just gross. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| It's gross. | ||
| And I believe that this is what happened. | ||
| This country has turned from God and now we're cursed. | ||
| And this is what we got. | ||
| That's my theory. | ||
| Do most people you know like Trump? | ||
| Most people I know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is Trump so popular in rural America? | ||
| Because of blue-collar workers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's very few educated elites. | ||
| And actually, there's a couple in our town, and they don't like Trump. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So it's a class thing, as far as you can tell. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I have a friend. | ||
| She's a lady. | ||
| She's a liberal, you know. | ||
| She's a progressive. | ||
| She loathes Trump. | ||
| And that's cool. | ||
| We're still friends. | ||
| You know, I don't talk politics with her. | ||
| Except sometimes I just kind of throw in a little jab, like, you know, just to get her goat. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| Oh, she might try being... | ||
| She may try to express... | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do I put it? | |
| A desire to be compassionate of the gender baloney and stuff like that. | ||
| And I'll totally state where I am. | ||
| I guess I recent... | ||
| She accused me of being a sexist, and I was like, yeah, I am, I guess, a sexist. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| What did she say? | ||
| She laughed, you know, she knows me. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| You sure she wasn't trying to say sexy? | ||
| No, I don't think so, because she's like 70-something. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| But she's... | ||
| Yeah, I just think she's crazier than the shithouse rat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's okay. | ||
| There's a lot of crazy people in Andover. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know what I mean? | |
| I weren't supposed to use that name. | ||
| What percentage of your town do you think will vote for Trump? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| 50, 60. Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there's a bunch of people that just refuse to see the truth. | ||
| I have a... | ||
| Someone in my family is all... | ||
| H-Trump, gonna vote Democratic, and he just... | ||
| I'm not gonna say his name, but it just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like... | |
| If you go principle, if you stand there and you talk on principle, okay, we believe in this, we believe in this, we believe in this, we're just the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when it comes voting day, check the Democratic box. | ||
| How do you... | ||
| So a lot... | ||
| You live in Maine, which is run by... | ||
| Socialists. | ||
| Oh, you don't like the leadership of the state? | ||
| I don't like our current Secretary of State. | ||
| He got on the bad side of me with the whole trying to take Mr. Trump off the primary ballot. | ||
| But it seems like that's very far away from where you live. | ||
| It's a totally different world. | ||
| Well, not if you... | ||
| I watch the news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you watch the news, I'm kind of a news junkie. | ||
| So where do you get your news? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like what? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you live hours from the nearest airport, so it's pretty far away, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| How do you find out what's going on in the world? | ||
| What do you read? | ||
| What do you watch? | ||
| TV. Yeah. | ||
| I used to watch a lot of Fox News. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As a matter of fact, I watched it as often as my family would let me. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You know, I'd turn Fox on and my wife and my kids would be like, oh, here we go again! | ||
| You know, because they just had it. | ||
| They don't want it. | ||
| But I listened to the news two, three nights a week, maybe four. | ||
| So the day they fired your ass was the last day I have not watched. | ||
| Ten seconds of Fox since they fired you. | ||
| Have you caught your way for kids watching? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| Just on principle. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| Just on principle. | ||
| Just because I just think it was wrong. | ||
| Because it was obvious that they were putting pressure. | ||
| You were telling the truth. | ||
| In my opinion, you were telling the truth about a bunch of stuff, and you got too close to the truth, and they got rid of you. | ||
| So that's just my thing on that. | ||
| So where do you go? | ||
| Now I'm watching Newsmax. | ||
| Now I'm a Newsmax guy. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Well, it's alright. | ||
| It's grown on me. | ||
| You go on the internet? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not for news. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| What's your shirt mean? | ||
| This is a direct retort to Joe Biden's speech that he gave last week where he basically called all Trump supporters domestic terrorists. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let's brand domestic terrorism as cool. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh? | |
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Because I'm a Bible-thumping, hard-working, blue-collar, you know, I got a few guns. | ||
| I'm no gun expert, but I got a few. | ||
| You know, I hunt fish. | ||
| I will die for my country. | ||
| Oh, that's a good story. | ||
| I tried to go into the service. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I scored, like, in the 99 percentile of my ASVABs. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| My junior year. | ||
| So my senior year, and I was all advanced entry or whatever you call it, right there in Desert Storm. | ||
| So I was all enlisted my junior year. | ||
| My senior year, this general... | ||
| Where'd you go to high school? | ||
| Telstra. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Bethel, Maine. | ||
| My senior year, this general comes in, and he wants to get inside my head and see what I'm good at. | ||
| I'm like, yeah. | ||
| So I get in the room with him, and I start being honest with the guy. | ||
| I told him what I had going. | ||
| I wanted to get out of here. | ||
| I want to change my life. | ||
| I told him I had, you know, I was partying and, you know, I was honest with him. | ||
| And at the end of that meeting, he's like, we don't want you. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You know, the partying, the drugs, the drama, you know, yeah. | ||
| It wouldn't take me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Their loss. | ||
| Maybe that was God. | ||
| Maybe he didn't want me to go because I might have popped. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I might have got in there and tried too hard and just exploded on the thing and I wouldn't be here sitting with you, talking with you, embarrassing my kids. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you partied too hard for the U.S. Army? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, they wouldn't take it. | ||
| I was honest. | ||
| I didn't realize I was supposed to lie. | ||
| If someone would have said, don't tell the guy that you, don't tell him about your personal things. | ||
| Just say yes or no, sir. | ||
| No one told me. | ||
| I just, I told him what I had going on. | ||
| It was my ticket to ride. | ||
| I'm getting out of here. | ||
| I'm going to go straighten my life out and be somebody. | ||
| And he's like, no, we don't want you. | ||
| So obviously you changed your view, though, because you did leave for a while in the pipeline, but then you came back to your town. | ||
| Are you happy that you did that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, mainly because my mom, she's aging. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I live a thousand feet from her now. | ||
| And that's why I live in Andover. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I found a few cool places in the country that I could have stayed at, you know. | ||
| But I basically came and lived where I live because my mom. | ||
| I have two sisters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One's deceased. | ||
| One's still with us. | ||
| But they had moved away. | ||
| One lived in New York. | ||
| One lived in Virginia. | ||
| And she, you know, my mom and my stepdad were getting age, up there in the age, and I felt obligated to come home and help them live out the rest of the years. | ||
| Are you glad you did? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you think of the cities now? | ||
| Well, it's atrocious. | ||
| It's atrocious. | ||
| I don't even know what to say about it. | ||
| They've gone so far crazy town that, you know, the real estate prices in our town are stupid now because everybody wants to get out of the city. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're all moving up this way. | ||
| And, you know, that's good for business, but don't bring your friggin' laws with you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't mind people. | ||
| I like people. | ||
| I actually do like people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I don't like their rules and regulations and all that. | ||
| It creeps me out. | ||
| It does. | ||
| Do you think they'll bring them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, most likely. | |
| You know. | ||
| One thing you can count on in life and then it's gonna change. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that liberals are going to show up and wreck everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep, yep. | |
| Maybe we'll have to move north. | ||
| You know, maybe we'll have to. | ||
| You live pretty close to Canada already. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I had a cool story about Canada. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I went to Canada on my 18th birthday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We went to Shabrook. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Went to the, yeah. | ||
| And had a really good time. | ||
| That's all I'm going to. | ||
| Did you wind up in jail? | ||
| Can you go back to Canada? | ||
| No, but I should have gone to jail, but I didn't get caught. | ||
| Anything related to cows, or what did you do? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| No, just a bad parallel parking job and intoxicated behind the wheel. | ||
| Nothing too serious. | ||
| I think you can parallel park any way you want in Canada, I think. | ||
| Is it okay to move the vehicle and take the spot? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not if it's not your vehicle, it's not. | |
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's just been so many things that have... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have a lot of lives. | |
| Not so much now, but back in the day, I am lucky to be alive. | ||
| Well, now, though, too, though you're sober and you're going to church and you've got a family and thriving business and everything, ride-on-mower racing and then stock car racing? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So have you... | ||
| You've had, like, just let's start with the ride of mowers. | ||
| You've had mishaps, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Crashed, got hurt a little bit, and just kept doing it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You just make pretend it don't hurt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| I mean, I got bum knee, bum arm, bum neck. | ||
| But that's not just from that. | ||
| I've crashed and smashed a lot on a lot of stuff. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Snowmobiles. | ||
| Back when I used to drink, I'd wreck a snowmobile every winter, just basically every winter, and have to get another one. | ||
| On trees? | ||
| Trees and rocks and brooks. | ||
| A lot of people in Maine died in snowmobiles. | ||
| People die on snowmobiles, yeah. | ||
| I can't believe I'm not one of those people, actually. | ||
| So, now you race at a big track in Oxford, Maine. | ||
| Well, I used to. | ||
| I did it for two years. | ||
| They got rid of the trucks this year. | ||
| They canned them. | ||
| No more trucks racing at Oxford this year. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| My wife never really liked it, so I'm just kind of going to back away from it. | ||
| You had a pretty bad crash, though, didn't you? | ||
| Yeah, but it didn't hurt. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| I got out of the truck and did a bow, and the crowd loved it. | ||
| What happened to your truck? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I mean, it dented it, but... | ||
| Broke some bent spindles and broke a few rims and smashed a windshield. | ||
| But my stepdad, in his garage, with one leg, fixed it in a week. | ||
| We raced the following week. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, while I worked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At the end of the day, I'd go there in the evening. | ||
| He'd be pounding and smashing on. | ||
| He'd be all bloody knuckled. | ||
| Got it ready. | ||
| And we went and we raced again. | ||
| And the following week, I did it again in practice. | ||
| And that was embarrassing. | ||
| That wasn't cool like the first time. | ||
| The second time was embarrassing. | ||
| What did you do the second time? | ||
| We were in practice and a guy came underneath me and poked me. | ||
| And I spun sideways and rolled like four times. | ||
| Did an endo and crashed. | ||
| You did an end over end? | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I didn't see it. | ||
| But they told me if last week's crash was an 8.5, this week's was a 10. That's what one guy told me. | ||
| So I was like, oh, alright, yeah. | ||
| But it was embarrassing. | ||
| This time it was embarrassing. | ||
| So when you're in a vehicle on a track at high speed and it's going end over end or side over side, what are you thinking? | ||
| Please stop before I run into something. | ||
| That's what I was thinking the first time. | ||
| When I was barrel rolling, I was barrel rolling down Victory Lane. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was like, it took forever. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| And then when I came to stop, I was on my roof. | ||
| And I'm like, oh, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| The lady come over and she said, you alright? | ||
| I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. | ||
| So I put my hand down. | ||
| I could smell gas. | ||
| I put my hand down and it was all wet with gas. | ||
| So then I'm like trying to freak me out. | ||
| Were you smoking? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| But I was afraid, you know, one little spark. | ||
| You know, the truck's hot. | ||
| You've been racing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's a chance of fire. | ||
| So I kind of got a little nerfed up. | ||
| And I couldn't get my belt undone because I was kind of tripping out a little bit. | ||
| And finally when I got done, I went smash down on the roof. | ||
| And I got out and I was all covered with gas, but there was no fire and it was all good. | ||
| And I got out. | ||
| And I was a little discombobulated, and I turned towards the crowd, and I did a bow, and they just went nuts, and they loved it, and it was awesome. | ||
| Was your wife there? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| She wasn't. | ||
| So let me just ask you finally about Trump, a little more specifically. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I asked you what you were mad about in America, and the second thing you said was they're persecuting Trump on political grounds. | ||
| What do you like about Trump? | ||
| He tells it how it is. | ||
| He's pro-business and he's anti-swamp. | ||
| What do you mean anti-swamp? | ||
| In our government, there's a bunch of people that all they do is keep making the government bigger and bigger and bigger to give themselves jobs. | ||
| They have a budget and they make sure they spend every penny of it. | ||
| So that they can get more. | ||
| Instead of trying to save some money. | ||
| Because they're all worried that they won't get as much in the next year's budget. | ||
| So they spend every dime. | ||
| Every year. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| And that's what happens to bureaucracy. | ||
| Job one of a bureaucracy is to make itself bigger. | ||
| And Trump recognized that. | ||
| And he tried cleaning it out. | ||
| Tried making it work right. | ||
| Work like a decent business. | ||
| And they... | ||
| That's why they hate him so much. | ||
| That's why the left hates Trump is because he was trying to make our government honest and work for the people. | ||
| Beneficial to you and I. He wanted to do that and he exposed the lies. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| He exposed the corruption and That's why they're doing what they're doing to him. | ||
| Could you imagine how successful his presidency had been if he hadn't had all the pushback by the left, by the powers that be, by the press? | ||
| Imagine what we could have gotten done in the past, because it would have been eight years. | ||
| He would have got elected the second time if it weren't for the press. | ||
| And that's another thing. | ||
| I lay blame to them. | ||
| There's no free press anymore. | ||
| They're not... | ||
| They used to be... | ||
| They used to hold the politicians accountable. | ||
| Now, only if you're a Republican do you get held accountable. | ||
| If you're a Democrat, they just ignore you. | ||
| Only talk about... | ||
| It's so... | ||
| It drives me up a wall. | ||
| If Trump was here, what would you say to him? | ||
| I'd shake his hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'd ask him if he was looking for any help. | |
| And then I'd tell him he's got my vote in the fall. | ||
| I wouldn't bother making any suggestions on what I think he should do to win because I know he wouldn't listen. | ||
| That's about it. | ||
| Isak Cooper. | ||
| It was great to see you at lunch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm glad you came. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I'm humbled. | ||
| Well, I'm humbled that you will come. | ||
| Yeah, it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. |
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