Ned Ryun warns that Biden’s policies—$36 trillion debt, uncontrolled immigration (tens of millions undocumented), and global weakness—threaten U.S. sovereignty, framing Trump’s return as a "restorationist" fight to dismantle the "administrative state." He calls for defunding the FBI ("Praetorian Guard"), pardoning January 6 defendants, and replacing agencies like Education entirely, while praising Kash Patel’s potential to turn the FBI into a "museum." Skeptical of GOP leaders like Mike Johnson, Ryun champions J.D. Vance as Trump’s successor in a 12-year plan to revive constitutional governance, dismissing progressives’ state-driven ideologies as delusional and warning AI and algorithmic bias could erase civil liberties. The debate hinges on whether systemic collapse or radical reform will define America’s future. [Automatically generated summary]
So just name three trends that are, well, I guess Biden's still president, that have been in progress the last four years that we could not sustain for another four years.
I mean, we're seeing what we've seen over the last four years.
Not only the wide-open borders.
We don't even really know who's come in.
We know there's tens of millions of illegals that have come in.
Millions of getaways.
I still don't understand why we haven't had a deeper conversation about the tens of thousands of Chinese national males that have come in over the southern border.
Like, what the hell is going on with that?
Whoever else has come in.
At the same time, conversation about the fact that for four years they've been importing new voters.
I would hope that every Republican, regardless of where they are on the spectrum, because again, we know that not all Republicans are created equal.
That even the Chamber of Commerce Republicans understand over the next four years for their own self-preservation, they should be wholeheartedly behind Donald Trump's deportation efforts.
We start with the hard criminals.
We start with those illegals that have criminal records.
And we keep right on going and deporting all of the new Democratic voters that they've imported over the last four years for the sake of self-preservation.
If you want to have a two-party system instead of a single-party state, the immigration has to be fixed.
And I would argue to the point of if we do not have, if Donald Trump does not unleash Tom Homan and Stephen Miller to go all the way to actually deport everybody that is needed to be deported, to fix the southern border, it calls into question who we are as a country.
I mean, this to me is one of the things that, again, if you don't have a border, you don't have sovereignty, you don't have citizens.
What does it actually mean to be a country?
What does it mean to be a citizen?
What does it mean to be America?
What does it mean to be an American citizen?
What does it mean to have a constitution?
We're very unique people.
We have a very unique way of life.
And with everything that has been taking place in regards to immigration, if it was to have continued for another four years, again, I think all bets are off on who we are as a people, who we are as a country.
I mean, that to me, what are we even doing on a whole host of fronts in regards to Ukraine?
That whole mess is still going where we're still apparently sending billions of dollars over to Ukraine before they shut the lights out on the Biden White House.
But the foreign policy, again, getting us to the point, and also the weakness that we have demonstrated on the international stage for the last four years, at a certain point, that was going to cause even more serious implications if it was another four years of that.
At some point, I hope that we can restructure the Republican Party in the primaries of 2026. That's another topic that we'd love to discuss with you.
But yeah, at some point, Donald Trump won on an America First message.
It'd be really nice if the rest of the Republicans fell in line with that and understanding that the people voted for change and the change is what they want with America first.
And that includes Donald Trump's approach on foreign policy.
That does not include more shooting wars with Iran and others across the globe.
At the same time, there is a certain approach that I think Donald Trump brings to foreign policy that brought us peace.
He has the ability to do that, and it does not involve starting new wars or foreign intervention.
So I would say that's one of the other topics.
One of the other issues that I think has been a blessing for us with Trump winning, the economy.
I mean, can you imagine if we had another four years of this economy, where we'd be?
When they tell us, they gaslight us and tell us the economy's fine, inflation, all these things are figments of your imagination, everybody's doing just fine.
And you look at, and that's what I do with American Majority.
I work with the grassroots.
I'm out there with everyday people.
It is not fine.
And I couldn't imagine another four years of them being devastated economically where we would be.
Okay, so sorry, I just wanted to, because I think it's just a win, you know, stopping the destruction or slowing it down is itself a win, as you noted.
But then the next step becomes, Donald Trump to me, listen, nobody's perfect.
We all have many imperfections and nobody's a perfect person, but I think Donald Trump's a man for the hour.
He has shown and demonstrated political courage.
I cannot even begin to imagine.
The last four years of the political, the lawfare that has been put on him, used against him, the incredible pressure to try and destroy him.
And I've told people this, and I'll say it here.
Donald Trump knew what he was going up against.
He didn't run away from it.
He ran at it.
That, to me, is one of the most amazing parts of this story.
In some ways, I think back to the story of David and Goliath, and this is one of my favorite stories out of Scripture.
If you go back and look at it, David, Didn't run away.
He didn't kind of slowly approach Goliath.
He ran at him.
And that kind of, to me, is Donald Trump knows exactly what he's up against.
He's up against very powerful forces.
I mean, as much as we despise the administrative state and the deep state and the corporate propagandists and all these things, these are very powerful forces.
And they can do a lot of damage to your life.
He didn't have to do this.
He could have been enjoying a very good life somewhere else in the world playing golf for the rest of his life every day in the lovely spot in the world.
He ran at them.
And he took incredible pressure, incredible body blows, kept running at them, and in many ways triumphed over these people that were trying to destroy him.
And now he's back in a position of power to be able to implement, I think, a vision for this country that will begin a restoration.
This is...
I don't consider myself a conservative, necessarily.
Because what are we actually conserving?
This, to me, is one of my great frustrations with the conservative movement writ large.
Explain to me again what we've actually been conserving over the last 40, 50, 60 years.
I'm more interested, and it's a very reactive term too, conservative.
I'm far more interested in restoration, in being a restorationist, in restoring the republic, in restoring a constitutional republic, in restoring a government of, by, and for the people that actually promotes the interests of the American people, which is kind of the premise of the American republic, right?
All power flows from the American people, from the people to their duly elected representatives, who they make the stewards of the power and money given to them, to put together a government that actually promotes and protects the interests of the American people every day on every issue.
And we've kind of lost sight of that.
And Donald Trump's, the great temerity of Donald Trump back in 2016 was that he kind of showed up and said, hey, I think a government of by and for the people should actually promote the American people and their interests.
And that's why I think he was considered such a great threat by permanent D.C., the administrative state, however you want to define it.
This, to me, is a moment in time where we have a shot, where we have an actual shot of restoring the republic, of restoring a government of and for and by the people, to the people, to promote the people, to protect their interests.
That, to me, is one of the most interesting things over the next four years, but it's going to require someone like Donald Trump, with this political courage, instilling into others.
I'm a little nervous about Mike Johnson as speaker.
I have my doubts about John Thune.
But I think if he can actually instill the political courage necessary into Republicans on the Hill, but also into his various nominees, who I think will actually have what it takes to do what they should be doing in the various departments and agencies, we could be in for a singular moment in American history.
In which we look back and go, this was the turning point where we actually began to restore the republic.
Nobody really talks about OMB outside of D.C. I'm telling you, one of the most important vehicles that Donald Trump will be able to use to deconstruct and dismantle the administrative state is OMB. And you've got to have somebody like Russ Vogt.
Ed Martin's going to be the chief of staff.
Bishop has his deputy.
And then I'm hoping he gets Eric Ulan in as deputy director of management.
That's a rock star team at OMB. Marty McCary, FDA. Amazing.
Yeah, that would be huge.
Paul Atkins at SEC. I feel good about that.
So I think a lot of these people are going to be...
You get choice A, choice B, very different approaches to government and to the future.
There was no real illusion about, like, there's no confusion about what people were voting for.
And they voted definitively for Donald Trump.
You know, first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004. First Republican to win 311 electoral votes since 1988. First non-consecutive president since Grover Cleveland.
I mean, this is a historical election.
He wins.
Agent of change.
Agent of change gets his change agents in the various departments and agencies.
But where's the cleansing sort of justice where you call up certain senators, I'm not going to name names, and say, not only will we primary you and make certain you lose your Senate seat, we'll make certain you don't get a job after you leave the Senate.
And then we're going to unleash some of the toughest people in the Republican Party to take a really close look at you.
We're going to do to you what you plan to do to our nominees.
But also, if you're going to attack, if you're going to sit back and allow people to call Bobby Kennedy a nutcase and Tulsi Gabbard an agent of a foreign power, really?
I mean, I'm thinking of one senator in particular from the Northeast.
The corporate lobbyists and all of these various interests have way too much say in how a senator actually or congressman actually operates instead of the people that actually voted them into office.
and you and I both know this because the lobbyists are in there every day pressuring making sure there's a lot of money coming in for the re-election campaign so they can get re-elected the idea of self-preservation it's it's a pretty I mean there's a whole host of things wrong with our system today but this is one of them what the bell that rings that they respond to is not the right bell it's been over a decade since Edward Snowden who is a hero exposed the US government for spying on its citizens
He didn't commit the crime they did, but he, of course, was punished.
Now, you would think that the information that he brought to the public would cause permanent Washington to pause, reflect, apologize for violating the Constitution to the United States, the privacy and the rights of American citizens.
But that's not what happened.
No, Ed Snowden is still in exile.
And in fact, just this year, the House of Representatives extended the rights of government agencies to spy on you.
This is happening in public.
It's infuriating to watch.
American citizens have lost, as of today, the battle with their government to have privacy and freedom.
You're being watched.
So what can you do?
Congress is not going to help you.
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So J.D. Vance said something I thought so I'd never have forgotten it during the election.
And he said, the Republican Party needs to be like a legit opposition party.
And needs to oppose the other side.
Like, we need two parties, okay?
We need to be in balance.
And one of the things that the other side does, and this is the key to Pelosi, you know, Pelosi's like kind of an idiot, but she's really tough.
You're talking with hundreds of millions every election cycle to have a proper enforcement mechanism of, you said you were going to do this, this is what the people voted for.
If you do not toe the line on this, we will find a competent, credible, primary candidate for you, and he or she will be well-funded, and we will crush you.
I mean, I look at people, including some in leadership, who clearly have had a hard conversation with someone who's like, we've got your online porn records, or we know who your boyfriend is, or, you know, you got wasted on a Kodal to Croatia and acted like a pig, and we know that.
I mean, clearly, these are people who are being blackmailed.
Like, I can think of one in particular who's clearly being blackmailed.
And I'm against blackmail, but I'm also in favor of serving your constituents, of restoring democracy to the United States.
One of the arguments I make in American Leviathan is we're not really a constitutional republic anymore.
Do you think?
We got a shot at restoring it.
The republic is at stake.
Liberty is at stake.
The future of your kids, your grandkids, future generations is at stake.
We are in a cold political war.
We have been in a cold political war for decades with the un-American left.
At some point, are you going to figure out the reality of what time it is, Republicans in D.C., before it's too late?
If you understand where we're at in our nation's history and the singular moment that we have and what is at stake, I would hope they would find it somewhere within themselves to go to the mats and to fight with everything they have for their future, for their children's future, for their grandchildren's future, and understand it might make you feel a little queasy in the moment, like this is really hardcore, we're using some pretty brutal tactics.
Freedom.
Future of the country, there are a lot of things at stake.
And not only for this country, for the world.
I mean, think about who we are for the rest of the world.
Dear God, find a backbone and understand if it's street-style brawling tactics that are necessary to win, I think it's justified in doing that because, for God's sake, they just tried to abuse our entire legal system.
No, I told people, I told my staff, and I told others that I was working with this last year and, you know, pretty significant project.
There is a sense of urgency coming from me, specifically, and there should be urgency from other leaders of organizations because if they win again...
The next people that are going to show trial and lawfare are us.
And I think we actually have to have that conversation about where these people on the left are.
They are deeply un-American.
They are antithetical to freedom.
They are antithetical to liberty.
If they had the political power to do whatever they wanted to us, I think they would.
I don't think I'm overstating that at all.
And so people have asked, how do you think we get back to normal with this un-American left in this country?
And my argument to them has been, we beat them into political submission and send them into the political wilderness for generations.
That's the only way you get back to normal.
But you have to frame the entire, you have to build the entire conservative movement around political power with the right people, achieving political power, maintaining political power, and keeping it for long enough that you can actually achieve all the reform while putting them into the political wilderness.
And I don't think we're actually organized or structured that way at all right now.
I'm a great admirer of the left in regards to achieving political power and how they structure themselves and how they've structured themselves to achieve political power for all the wrong reasons.
All their policy ideas are terrible for this country.
But they have structured themselves to achieve that.
And in fact, based off all the numbers and statistics I've seen, the left is in the minority in this country, and yet they have an undue influence in politics and the various institutions because they have structured themselves to achieve power in the institutions and politically how they've invested their time and money into doing that.
We, on the other hand...
I mean, I know some people love a good white paper and like some of the things that the think tanks do.
We are not structured correctly to achieve and maintain political power.
And I think that's one of the things that I hope that I can achieve over the next four, five, six, seven, eight years, however long it takes, for people to understand if we do the right things in the field, in the various states, we can achieve and maintain political power for years to come.
But you actually have to be doing the right things.
But you're always going to be disappointed the closer you get to the political process, the more horrified you're going to be that you grew up around it.
I should say – I mean your father was – Yeah, he was in the house for 10 years.
Yeah, famous congressman.
So you know the system better than anybody.
And I think people who don't know it, once they get a glimpse of it, they're like, oh, that's repulsive.
I'm interested in shattering this administrative state into a million pieces.
I think Donald Trump has figured out I think he truly showed up in D.C. January of 2017 as the duly elected representative, president of the American people, shows up in D.C. and goes, I'm the duly elected president.
I get to decide a lot of the foreign and domestic policy and ran into a system of government that said, yeah, we don't think so.
We think we decide.
And I think it was a startling moment for him when he realized I thought we were a constitutional republic, representative democracy.
And then folks in D.C. are like, no, we're not really that.
We're an administrative state.
The unelected bureaucrats and their allies, we're the ones that actually decide these things.
A lot of these things were settled years ago.
Foreign policy, for example.
This is the crazy part to me.
Donald Trump's, one of his great sins, was showing up and thinking, I want an election.
People voted for change.
One of them was different approach in foreign policy.
So we're going to actually enact that.
Like, no, we already settled that years ago.
You don't get to decide that at all.
It's already been decided by the smart people of the State Department, like Victoria Nuland.
And I think that, for him, was a moment where he realized, we have a real problem.
And then, of course, he became a target of his own government.
The DOJ and the FBI and all these people trying to take out the duly elected President of the United States with fake FISA warrants and fake dossiers and all this stuff.
And he realized, we have a serious problem here.
Leading up to now, and then the four years of lawfare, in which, on the most spurious of charges, they literally, I don't know the exact figure, but I have to guess it was hundreds of millions they soaked out of his campaign in regards to legal fees, and not only trying to destroy him as a person, but also just suck cash out of him.
This month and being sworn in for another term and fully understanding we have a form of government that is running this country that has nothing to do with the Constitution Republic.
So I hope, I sincerely hope that he understands who the enemy is, that he has to go at them.
They've already declared war on him.
This is not about him declaring war on the administrative state.
They declared war on him years ago.
And it's him responding in kind and going, we are not going to...
Take this sitting down.
And I hope on day one, I've got a few thoughts on this, I'm glad you asked, that he would go out and fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees day one, GS-12s, GS-13s, just pick out random names, fire them.
Federal employee unions are going to sue back, stays, they're going to go back and forth through the courts to get to the Supreme Court, probably 18 months, two years.
To ask a fundamental question, does the head of the executive branch, the duly elected president of the United States, the Article 2 branch head, get to hire and fire whoever he wants to inside of this branch?
Is the question, is it yes or no?
And I would hope this Supreme Court says yes.
And at that point, Donald Trump becomes the demolition man for the administrative state, because that's where most of the administrative state resides, is inside the Article 2 branch, the executive branch of our government.
Donald Trump goes for broke and he starts firing people.
My hope is that he's also told some of these new nominees that are going to be secretaries, you're going to go in and on day one announce, I'm Linda McMahon.
I'm the new Secretary of Education.
I'm going to be the last Secretary of Education because by the time I'm done here, we are going to shut down this department and then...
On top of that, we're going to not only shut down this building, we're going to implode it, we're going to raise it to the ground, and we're going to build freedom parks over this.
I mean, that is the approach that has to be taken by Trump day one of going right at the administrative state.
I'm not interested in making it more efficient.
I'm not interested in cutting regulations.
I'm not interested in cutting spending.
Those are all in effect.
The cause is the state.
You have to shatter it into a million pieces.
So that's my biggest hope, and I think he actually has the moral and political courage to actually do that.
My hope and prayer, quite frankly, is that all of his various nominees have the exact same political and moral courage to do the same thing, because that is the issue.
I'm telling you, Tucker.
Every issue that we are experiencing today in this country, in D.C. specifically, but in some ways in other aspects of the country, comes from a deeply unconstitutional administrative state that I think has nothing to do with advancing and promoting the interests of the American people.
No, my concern is that these secretaries, these new nominees who are going to be confirmed, the secretary is going to walk in and go, oh my gosh, I'm secretary of this department.
Isn't this wonderful?
And then how can I be as effective as possible as the new secretary of this various department and all the power that I have to actually enact change?
No, no.
The whole point is for you to make this thing go away, to make it end, to make it cease to exist.
Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, they're not going to become federal employees, but they're going to oversee what they're saying is the most transformative effort ever to shrink government, to do to the federal government what Elon did to Twitter.
It has got so many reinforcing loops inside of this massive leviathan.
You're not going to absolutely...
First of all, I don't think you can get the fundamental question answered about, does the head of the executive branch get to hire and fire whoever wants to in 18 months?
I think it'll probably be two years.
I've actually talked with Sean Davis, who's a good buddy.
He's like, dude, I think you're lucky if it's answered in two years.
I think there's some fundamental questions and things that have to be answered and done that are going to take some time.
I don't think you can declare victory in 18 months.
This has been 100 plus years in the making.
And there are so many people with so many vested interests in the status quo.
Various people in government, outside of government, the entire system, they're going to fight tooth and nail.
To make sure that this system of government does not go away.
So you're going to be up against...
I think we're going to be involved.
If Donald Trump goes down the path of I'm going to destroy the administrative state, it could be that the previous nine years of the craziness that we have seen as a warm-up act for maybe one of the coldest political wars we'll see in D.C. ever.
Because of what's at stake.
I mean, you're talking about regime change politics here.
We're, I mean, two very different governing philosophies of how you approach government on a whole host of fronts from basic human rights to how government actually operates.
And there are a lot of people with vested interest in maintaining the status quo of the administrative state.
And they're going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that it doesn't go away.
So I think in some ways I love the fact that he has put brilliant minds like Elon and Vivek to do this with an outsider's approach.
I just don't think it's going to happen.
I don't think meaningful, fundamental change that is long-term and lasting is going to take place in 18 months.
And I'm being realistic, having been in D.C. for 25 years.
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I don't want them to go, we've cut, I mean, first of all, it'd be great if they cut X number of dollars of spending and cut X, you know, hundreds or thousands of regulations.
Wonderful, wonderful victories.
Again, those are the effects.
The cause is the state.
All of this stuff that we've seen, the out-of-control spending, the out-of-control growth of government.
All of these things are because of the administrative state.
In whatever approach it takes in the short term to stop the madness.
I talk about this a little bit in the book where you've got system dynamics and inside of this massive sprawling system you've got these reinforcing loops that continue to grow and grow and compound.
It's almost like compounding interest and then just explode in size and strength.
Yeah, I think you've got to start stopping these little reinforcing loops like revoking security clearances.
When you're young and you go to D.C. and you're kind of new to what you think, all Republicans are created equal.
All the red guys are good guys and all the blue guys are bad guys.
And then you start to realize, like I said earlier, not all Republicans are created equal.
There's definitely different shades along the way.
I remember my dad having to take some pretty strong stances in the House and voting against a lot of these major initiatives from George W. Bush because he strongly believed they were not conservative at all in the least bit.
In fact, one of the biggest ones was Medicare Part D. This is one of the...
I think it was 2003, right before the 2004 election.
They really wanted it because they felt that it would help the senior vote.
And there were about...
24, about two dozen holdouts in the House, in the Republican caucus.
I said, we're not going to vote for this.
We're just not going to.
They brought him down to the White House.
They had Dick Cheney and all the senior White House staff kind of have a little chit-chat with them.
They all came back and said, we're still not voting for this.
And then Bush was overseas and started lobbying them directly.
And I remember him calling my dad and saying, I really need this vote.
And my dad was like, you know, you're doing a great job representing us overseas, sir.
Jim, I really need this vote.
I'm not giving you this vote.
Click.
That was it.
It was the end of the conversation.
And yeah, my dad fighting tooth and nail to try and prevent that from passing.
It actually passed by one vote because they kept the house floor open for an additional I don't know how many hours and eventually got someone to switch their vote in the like 3 a.m., 4 a.m.
And uses them as the mouthpiece to then take out the duly elected president of the United States, who was an existential threat to the administrative state.
Flip side of the coins, Russiagate.
Same thing.
Because the first Republican president since Reagan to reject the premise that the administrative state is legitimate was Donald Trump.
George W. Bush.
George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush were like, we're okay with it as long as we get to run it.
And this is what always worries me a little bit about Republicans who are like, well, it's okay as long as we're running it.
That's such a smart description of the difference between Donald Trump and Richard Nixon is that Trump said aloud what was actually happening, and I think that's why they tried to assassinate him in Butler, Pennsylvania, among other places.
So, thank you for that.
Let me ask about something you alluded to, which is...
The amount of courage that it simply took to say something out loud that people would consider verboten.
That's part of Donald Trump's great power.
He'll say stuff out loud to people that you shouldn't say that.
You can't be saying that.
But he needs to say it, and he should say it.
Because of situations like this, where he has the ability to say it.
And sometimes, he says things that maybe are not the most helpful, but a lot of times he says things out loud that in the past people would have said, you can't say that.
But it would be interesting to know what the control mechanisms are.
And if you...
The last thing...
I'll shut up.
But the last thing I would just recommend anyone watching is to go pull the audio of Richard Nixon in the Oval Office speaking to the then CIA director about, among other things, the Kennedy assassination and the...
And the fear, or the sort of deference that Nixon has is very striking.
Nixon's a pretty brave guy in a lot of ways, but you're talking to your employee.
No, I mean, in American Leviathan, the people have to understand, progressives hated...
The Constitution.
They wanted to destroy the political and moral authority of it.
They wanted to do away with the machinery of the republic.
They wanted to do a separation of powers.
All of these things.
And in its place, put in this massive administrative state, this massive bureaucracy filled with unelected bureaucrats who they thought are elected representatives should subdelegate governing and legislating to because they thought the bureaucrats should actually be doing the business of governing and running the country.
So people...
I think people are a little perplexed when they see behavior like this of where the unelected bureaucrats, like Chris Wray, remember that hearing with Grassley, with the Oversight Committee hearing, and Wray informs him, hey, I gotta go.
I gotta get on my plane.
I've got an important trip to be at.
It was a family vacation, by the way.
He told off the Senate that was supposed to be providing oversight, I have to leave, and he goes on the FBI jet to his private vacation home to enjoy a little downtime.
He was telling off...
The people that were supposed to be providing oversight, because it's not really how it works anymore.
Can we just, okay, let's just be totally blunt now.
What is that?
The Republican Speaker of the House, who strikes me as like an out-of-the-closet liberal, out-of-the-closet liberal, more than weak, working for the other side.
I'm not a fan, and I kind of understand some of the political dynamics of why Trump is pushing for him to avoid, what was it, 17 votes or whatever it was, let's get down to business that we had last time.
So I kind of understand some of that.
At the same time, I mean, could Democrats hope for a better speaker right now with them being in the minority?
I don't think so.
Mike Johnson is one of the best things they could hope for right now.
He gives them whatever they want to.
I think this recent spending bill, the initial version of it, really shows the true nature of who someone is that allows something like that to come out and be in public with this 1,500, 1,600-page monstrosity.
I think that was the true illustration of how weak he actually is.
These guys have been performing Political lawfare inside of our government against not only the president, but I would argue members of Congress for years.
And you're going to go ahead and reward them with...
I can't even remember the cost for a new FBI headquarters, but it's not millions.
Why are you rewarding these people that have badly abused our system?
Who, by the way...
I don't think right now in the current iteration, the DOJ and the FBI, you know, we always consider them the guardians of the rule of law, and one of the basic pillars of our society was rule of law and the equal enforcement of justice that all stood equal before the law, and the DOJ and the FBI were going to enforce that and make sure that happened.
Now they're just a Praetorian Guard of the administrative state.
Why are you funding them?
Why are you rewarding them for this behavior in which...
Quite frankly, I would go back to self-preservation.
If you really do believe in self-preservation as a party and as an opposition party, because the DOJ and the FBI and the various parts of the administrative state are protecting the administrative state and they view Republicans, for the most part, as a threat to that.
Why are you funding them to continue doing more damage to you and trying to destroy you?
I think he has to go out and not only pardon them, I would hope that they get good lawyers and they get massive settlements from the government for all the abuse they've taken over the last four years.
They didn't apologize for using a fake dossier and saying this is proof of Russian collusion when, quite frankly, I think a lot of them, well, some of them didn't because they're not smart enough.
Some of them knew that it was fake.
They just viewed it as a useful weapon to take out someone they hated.
I think some of them actually believed it because they're dumb.
Yeah, I would think that he can go through and just go for the last four years or quite frankly, eight years, everybody that has been abused by this political lawfare, who's been abused by the DOJ and the FBI and every other aspect of our government, full pardon.
And again, go back to not just the pardons, not only do you get your freedom back and your lives back, but I hope that there's significant settlements.
I mean, I hope that these people get paid out significantly and I don't like to see more taxpayer money being sent out to people, but in this situation, I'm all for it.
I think we came to that point a long time ago, actually.
But now it's becoming unsustainable.
I mean, at one point this last, was it last year or two years ago, we were growing it by a trillion in a hundred days.
Every hundred days or something in the national debt, it's just, it's exploding.
I think Trump thinks he can grow us out of some of these situations.
I don't think that's the only, I don't think that's the solution.
At some point you have to address the underlying of What are we actually doing with this government that continues to grow, that the DNA and its DNA is perpetual growth?
Again, going back to, if you believe government, if you believe the state is salvation, and it should invade every aspect of your life, well, until every aspect of your life is saved, government will continue to grow.
You have to completely destroy this to stop the spending, to stop the growth.
So I think he has to go down that dual path.
Yeah, we can, you know, growth in our economy.
But at the same time, the underlying cost for the debt, the spending, has been this state.
And I think we have to have a conversation.
This is the one thing where it feels like the American people, we never actually had a conversation with the American people about what form of government they wanted.
It was just a slow-moving regime change, I would argue a slow-moving revolution against the republic over the last hundred years.
People are under the illusion we have some representative democracy, constitutional republic, when in fact we don't.
What is the government that we think best fits?
That is best suited for a government of buying for the people, that provides the most amount of freedom and liberty, and the most amount of prosperity for the American people.
And we've really, I don't think we've really had that conversation over the last hundred years.
It's just kind of been slow moving, and all of a sudden we wake up to find ourselves in 2024, 2025 now, going...
I don't think we ever had a conversation about this.
Former FBI agent, was running for Senate, was a member of the House.
Former FBI, was a member of the House, I think, Intel Committee?
Then was running for Senate this time around, lost narrowly, and then someone was pushing him to be FBI director, which I think was the wrong take by, like, a country mile.
You don't need an institutionalist to go in and run what I think is one of the most corrupt institutions in our country today.
And I told Trump, I was like, as much as you need a loyalist running DOJ, times it times a hundred running the FBI. It's a pit of vipers.
And you need somebody like Kash Patel.
We talked about Rick Grinnell, Kash Patel.
But you need somebody that's going to go in there and be fearless to say, we are not doing this anymore.
In fact, I would kind of like, I know Cash has said this.
Again, we'll see what happens.
But, you know, he said that day one he'd shut it down and turn it into a museum for the deep state.
The FBI in its current form, its current iteration needs to cease to exist.
And I think Cash Patel has not only the intelligence and the skills, the courage.
What has been the point of the FBI? They started, what, 1908, I think, is when they originated?
What are they actually doing?
What is their purpose right now?
Besides being Praetorian Guard for the administrative state.
Right, and looking at potential people like Donald Trump as existential threats and trying to destroy them.
And then we continue to fund it blindly.
This is...
Writ large with our government administrative state.
What I find one of the most interesting things about Republicans today and have for, quite frankly, years.
Elect me.
I'm going to go to D.C. I'm going to change D.C. They get to D.C. They accept budget recommendations from these very department agencies.
Go ahead and pass those.
Fund them.
Do these four or five thousand page bills.
Send them over to the bureaucrats.
I know those...
People at the EPA or the FDA made some terrible regulations that are ruining your lives, but send me back, I'll fight the system, and I'll make sure that doesn't happen again as they get re-elected to then fund those people again to then send them forward 5,000-page bills to then do the statutes and regulations that actually govern us.
The whole system is completely bonkers, and it's actually very beneficial to most of these elected representatives, experts in self-preservation, because they don't have to make the hard choices.
They don't actually have to do the really hard decisions on legislating because the statutes and regulations that have the binding effect of laws is what's being done over here in the Article 2 branch by these administrative state bureaucrats.
At some point, I do have some hope that we're going to have a chance, not only with Donald Trump but the Supreme Court.
The last summer there were a couple cases that I think gave us real hope.
Where the Supreme Court said 40 years, this is a disaster.
We're not going to have judicial deference to these bureaucrats' regulations and statutes.
I think the other one that wasn't discussed as much as it should have been is when the Supreme Court said the SEC tribunals, you can't have those anymore.
The SEC cannot have its own private administrative law tribunal in which 90% of the time that SEC tribunal ruled in favor of the SEC. The Supreme Court said First of all, it calls into question the idea of an independent judiciary because you're taking the judicial role inside the Article 2 branch, not the Article 3, and even annihilated our Seventh Amendment, which is right to trial by jury.
We're not going to do this anymore.
Which was, by the way, I mean, you look at some of these things that we're dealing with today and look at where the founders started.
They wanted an independent judiciary because they saw what the British courts were doing and rubber stamping King George III and his ministers and parliament's edicts that they viewed as very deeply unfair to them, but they were just acting as a rubber stamp.
So they said, we're going to have an independent judiciary.
And then with the administrative state, obviously it's annihilated the separation of powers and you have Article 2 branch doing a lot of the legislative and a lot of judicial.
I think Supreme Court stepping up and saying we're not going to do this anymore is another step in the right direction.
But at some point, I would hope that members of Congress would find it within themselves to have just the smallest bit of political curse to say, I'm not going to blindly fund this stuff anymore.
And that's a step in the right direction.
For example, with the FBI. We're not going to do this anymore.
It feels like she has completely, even though she's still vice president for a few more weeks, it feels like she has already been relegated to obscurity.
And I think that's going to be the rest of her...
Yes, it's going to be the rest of her existence.
I'm sure that somewhere someone will find her a nice gig at a foundation, but I think this is the last time you're going to see any serious conversation about her.
I think the scary part to me over the last four years is that we knew, some of us knew sooner than others, but I think a lot of people knew this guy had Early cognitive decline.
Republicans aren't used, again, going back to what we discussed earlier, they're not used to fighting bare-knuckled brawling style, and they think that would have been beneath them and undignified.
And these people were, these people for four years, and this was not, I mean, I think we have to have the, you know, when we talked about immigration and our foreign policy and the inflation and economy and all these things were taking place.
When there's a series of coincidences, it ceases to be a coincidence.
It was all systematic.
We're just going to continue to destroy this country.
We're going to completely remake it with massive illegal immigration.
This to me is why I can't understand.
These people hate this country.
They hate the country as originally founded.
They hate the original constitution.
They hate the idea of the freeborn American people.
And Republicans, a lot of Republicans in D.C. are going along with it, going, oh, they're really not that bad, are they?
Yes, they are.
They truly are.
And they would hope, their goal, I think, is to see this country cease to exist as it once was and to create some new order for this country that has nothing to do with where we came from.
Obviously lobbied a little bit for him to be VP. I know you and Don Jr. did a lot more on that front, but it was like, this is the future of the country.
I texted him.
The most impressive part to me is, having known him, seeing where he's come from, you get put in pressure cookers like he was put in over the last year.
You either collapse, you rise.
He's gone next level.
I mean, this to me is, I mean, obviously he's an intelligent person.
He's very talented.
But you get put into those situations, you either collapse or rise.
He's gone to the next level, which is extremely impressive.
And I think the thing that was really important for me in who Trump picked as his VP was the future of what does America first look like after I'm gone.
He's got four years, he's done.
That's it.
And I think a lot of people in D.C., permanent D.C., establishment Republicans, corporate, you name it, we just have to outlast him for another four years.
And then he goes in, and now JD's 40, but he was 39 at the time, and goes, tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to pick a 39-year-old VP who's going to be the heir to America First.
When I'm gone, he's going to be around for a long time.
I'm pushing all my chips in.
This is an all-in move on America First.
You're not going to just outlast me for four years.
I'm going to make this into a permanent, long-term political movement.
That, to me, was what he did with JD. And JD got put into that situation, pressure cooker, rose to the occasion, and I think he has really, it's been extremely impressive to me.
I mean, everything that he has done, I mean, having done a lot of TV, what he would do on the Sunday morning shows, not one or two, but sometimes three on a given day, going in and dismantling each one of those antagonistic hostile hosts, I'm...
I spent my life on TV. I can tell you that, I mean, I don't think that beating someone, a lot of these people are stupid, like beating George Stephanopoulos or Margaret Brennan or something.
But what I found amazing, as someone who did it for a living my whole life, was not just that he won the arguments, he's smarter than they are, is that he did something that I could not do, which is...
Remain kind of cheerful, charming, calm.
She has enormous self-control.
I couldn't do that.
I could probably beat Margaret Brennan in an argument, I hope.
But I would come off as sneering and angry and anti-women.
But I think that to me is, again, going back to what Trump did with him, we're all in on this.
A young VP who hopefully we're going to have a very successful four years with Trump.
He's going to use JD effectively, set up JD in the future, and then all of a sudden, because going back to what I said earlier, you don't fix what we've been going through for the last 100 years in 18 months.
You don't even fix it in four years.
I think we need no less than 12 years of political power with the right people in D.C. to actually bring about the fundamental change necessary.
So you have to set yourself up for at least 12 years of political power.
Four years of Trump, eight years of J.D. And then all of a sudden you've got the ability with the right people doing the right things to actually bring about the right reform necessary to restore the republic.
This is about, going back to, and I totally agree with you, about political power has to be in the right hands doing the right things to achieve the right ends.
But this, to me, is why we have to achieve and retain political power for no less than 12 years in T.C. If you're still using Verizon, AT&T, or T-Mobile, obviously our condolences, but you're going to want to hear this.
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Can I just use this opportunity because I can't control myself to throw out something that I'm legit concerned about?
Not directly related to Trump or even politics, but I... So we've had all these problems with the labor market and COVID made them much worse, paying people to stay home, so they did.
So a lot of the service industry is being replaced by robots, like you check out at the airport.
So, I've watched for the past four years as the left systematically has destroyed law enforcement and order in our cities.
And, like, who would want to be a cop at this point?
It's too hard a job.
You don't have the legal protections you had.
It's physically dangerous, and everyone hates you, and you don't get paid anything.
So, you're going to have a massive crisis.
You have a massive crisis in law enforcement because no one wants to be a cop.
That void will be filled by technology.
It'll be filled by drones.
And it'll be filled by other technology.
It'll be basically replaced by a tech surveillance state that will make civil liberties absolutely impossible.
You can't have civil liberties in a pan-omnicon or whatever they call it, in a world where technology knows everything that you're doing and saying and maybe even thinking.
And I don't feel like people are worried enough about that.
Like, you could make New York City safe with drones.
You could prevent any traffic violations whatsoever with robots.
So that, to me, is there is nothing neutral in life.
At all.
And so whatever influence is going behind the AI and the technology will be biased in one direction or another.
And then you have a situation of who's controlling the controllers, who controls that technology, what is their end goal, what do they believe about human rights, what do they believe about civil liberties, what do they believe about basic freedom.
Yeah, Michael Crichton wrote a great book, State of Fear.
I actually cite him in the book, in which he was talking about the political science of global warming, and how it puts people in the perpetual state of fear to achieve the certain political goals of people, what they want to achieve.
But the whole idea of keeping people in a perpetual state of fear to manipulate them into getting what these people want to achieve the future they want, which might or might not be, typically not, beneficial to the rest of the people.
But it's fear.
It's a tactic of fear.
Like, COVID's going to kill you all.
So you should stay inside your house and wear a mask and be six feet apart, which was all made up, by the way.
Which isn't that funny where they say, trust the science, and then they go, well, yeah, men can be women, women, men.
But we only trust the science when we say what science is.
Science is what we say it is.
But in that situation, it's not.
The intellectual incoherence of the left drives me nuts.
But that's what happens when you kind of...
When you cut the cord to the transcendent, this idea of a transcendent creator and natural inherent rights and something above and beyond is infinite.
And then you all just devolve into this theater of the absurd because whatever you say at the moment is right.
If there's no absolute, society becomes absolute.
So whatever society says in that moment becomes absolute so men can be women and women men.
And you just make it up as you go along.
And that's why I think kind of some of the stuff is being exposed.
Fauci, well, six feet.
Well, you just made that up.
The vaccine wasn't a vaccine.
I remember being castigated on a certain network that I think people would have been surprised for saying that I thought the shot at best was a therapeutic shot and you would have thought I shot somebody's dog.
I have to tell you, I think the COVID test was a test that many people failed on the conservative side of things because they believed the lies told by the so-called experts.
It was a test.
They failed miserably.
And I actually got texts from people a couple weeks in when I realized this is not...
I have real questions here.
I don't think this is what people are cracking it up to be.
And they were texting me, what's up with all your boomer tweets?
What's going on here?
Like, this is serious stuff.
I said, why do you accept blindly that the CDC and the NIH are suddenly pure as driven snow, when over the last several years we've seen the DOJ and the FBI and other parts of this state be weaponized against and used for political purposes, and now suddenly a different branch of the same tree is somehow pure as driven snow?
Like, I'm sorry, I just think in my...
If you think through this in a reasonable, rational way, I think you should really strongly question anything that's coming out of the CDC and the NIH or anything else because I think there's a certain political element to what they're actually pushing.
And I think that's how you had, like, I was kind of stunned when so many conservatives fell forward.
Like, why can't you just step back and go, this is heavily politicized.
This is probably heavily politicized.
I'm not sure.
I don't trust them.
So why should I trust?
I don't trust them either.
This is another thing that I think we need to start really emphasizing with a lot of us.
I mean, this is why the Bobby Kennedy nomination is essential.
It's like, whatever you think of Bobby Kennedy, I love Bobby Kennedy, but don't agree with him on everything, of course, but Bobby Kennedy was the opposition to that, and he should be rewarded.
It's just funny that the people who make Xanax, who should be imprisoned for making Xanax, in my opinion, kills a lot of people, destroys so many lives.
Those people are lecturing me about how Bobby Kennedy is bad.
You make Xanax, and you're telling me Bobby Kennedy is bad.
I hope that the American people over the last nine years, especially, everything that's taken place, would have a healthy dose of skepticism about anything coming out of our government and our corporate propagandists moving forward and go, I'm not going to accept you at face value until you can prove, be verifiable proof of what you're saying.
I think that'd be a very healthy approach for us moving forward.
I was in a mood of my rights as a free-born American, and the country I was promised, constitutional republic, government of, by, and for the people, has been annihilated, has been destroyed.
We have an illusion of it.
We are being lectured that somehow our betters, who are these unelected bureaucrats, who are a credentialed idiocracy, somehow are the ones that should be governing us and ruling us.
And I wanted to have a conversation.
I wanted to start a conversation with the American people with the book of these people do not have your best interests in mind.
They have taken away your birthright as a freeborn American people.
They have annihilated the Constitutional Republic.
They have destroyed the machinery of the Republic, which is the best protector of your natural inherent rights.
And they did it intentionally.
I mean, the progressives don't believe in natural inherent rights.
They're actually vehemently opposed to a rights-based government.
I mean, Frank Goodenow, who was really one of the guys that structured the administrative state through administrative law.
Said that an individual does not possess rights from his creator, but from his society.
His society is the one that gives an individual his rights.
Because they believe the state should give rights back to the people if it was a benefit to the state.
You can't have natural, inherent, God-given rights.
Because it becomes a monkey wrench in their progressive idea of the state of salvation, efficiency towards progress.
All of these things that have taken place, and I was just like, we have to have this conversation.
I mean, it goes back to what I was saying earlier.
We have not had this conversation about who we are as a people, what our birthright is, what our rights are, what our God-given rights are, what government should actually look like today.
And let's have that conversation and then have the conversation about how we get back to where we started.
I mean, the Constitution is the greatest document, political document, the world's ever seen.
And it was written by men who are not perfect, by the way.
They had their own share of faults.
They got it.
They nailed it.
They realized they were imperfect human beings in an imperfect world.
They were optimistic realists, though.
They realized that God had given rights.
They were optimistic that even though we knew they were imperfect human beings who should never have consolidated power, they could form a government that protected those natural God-given rights and took none of them away.
And it provided for this amazing, small agrarian country, kind of on the edge of that Eurocentric world in the late 1700s, to become, honestly, I would say the greatest nation the world has ever seen.
How does that happen?
It's not by chance.
It's because these guys knew, they understood human nature, they fully understood a transcendent creator with natural inherent rights.
We're going to create this constitutional republic.
We're going to create the greatest amount of freedom as possible for the flourishing of freedom and prosperity.
And the progressives completely fundamentally rejected that turn of the 20th century and said, no, we don't believe in that.
We don't believe that that has the answers to the 20th century.
We believe we should put together this massive bureaucracy filled with these unelected bureaucrats who through applied science will lead us to a greater future who truly believe in the apotheosis of mankind.
They believe that history was on this upward linear progress at the end of history would be the perfection of mankind.
Dead serious.
No, so these are some of the poisonous ideas behind what's taking place in this country today.
Rantings of deluded madmen is what I describe in the book of Wildrow Wilson and Herbert Crowley and Frank Goodnow and all of these founders of the progress.
John Burgess, who by the way was the founder of political science in America, vehemently rejected a rights-based government and he's considered the father of political science in America.
So we should probably have questions about the whole exercise of political science.
So yeah, I was writing this book and we are called...
Deplorables and irredeemables and disruptive simply because we're asking for a restoration of our rights.
We're asking for a restoration of what we had.
In some ways, and that's why I consider myself a restorationist, not a conservative.
But going back to what the founders were trying to do during the American Revolution, they were simply asking that we have our rights as Englishmen restored.
What I think could happen over the next four years, we could be in for one of the more interesting periods in time that makes the last nine years look like a warm-up act.