Rep. Dan Crenshaw faces a primary challenge from Steve Toth, who accuses him of abandoning Texas values—ignoring the border crisis (Medicaid costs surged to 58% due to illegal immigration) while fixating on Ukraine and trading stocks during COVID. Toth, backed by grassroots donors, calls Crenshaw part of a "Washington cartel," enabled by lobbyists like Karl Rove, and contrasts his own conservative record with Crenshaw’s perceived hypocrisy. With Crenshaw’s favorability at 43-44% unfavorable, Toth aims to unseat him in March, while also targeting Sen. John Cornyn for insincere Trump alignment. The episode ties Texas’ domestic decay—homelessness, infrastructure collapse—to political corruption, ending with Tucker Carlson’s push for a new 9/11 Commission, alleging official foreknowledge and suppressed truths. [Automatically generated summary]
So how does that, the biggest, I'm just kind of guessing, one of the biggest Republican counties in the United States get Dan Crenshaw as a member of Congress.
So I encouraged our local Tea Party to mail into the district to spend money into the district and help them raise money to move mountains to get Dan Crenshaw elected.
So I feel a sense of responsibility for this major screw up because no sooner did he get there than he became part of the problem.
I'm sure he has official opinions on issues related to Texas or the United States, but it's also very obvious to me watching him carefully that his real interests, all his main interests are outside this country.
It doesn't seem like his agenda really has anything to do with America.
Well, not only does he not go against the lobby, I mean, his campaigns are the most, we pulled the numbers, the most recent one that I saw suggested that his two biggest donors are giving him money because of his foreign policy views.
One is a foreign lobby, I think is his biggest donor, one of them, literally a foreign lobby, and the other is a hedge fund guy called Clifford Asnes, who's, you know, I would say one of the sleazier people in American business.
There's that, but also is not paying Dan Crenshaw for anything related to the United States.
This only has to do with influencing his vote on questions pertaining to other countries.
It's been my greatest heartburn is his total disregard for the border and what we've been dealing with at the Texas border, and yet his obsession with Ukraine's border.
Tucker, he came to a town hall meeting three years ago when the Senate bipartisan, which anytime you hear a Senate bipartisan border bill, run, run fast, right?
Democrats are not looking for any kind of solution on the border.
20 years ago, a friend of mine that grew up in Toronto said, the great thing about America is that you're a melting pot, where Canada is more like a quilt and we're tearing apart at its seams.
You see it, especially see it in the classroom right now.
We keep hearing the left say we're losing teachers in public education because they're not being paid enough money.
Well, it's not what the polling's telling us.
I sat down with the Texas Classroom Teachers Association in 2019, and I said, quality of life, violence in the classroom, teacher pay, what's the most important issue?
Teachers are being assaulted like you have never seen before.
I mean, there is one school in the state of Texas.
And I think it was on TikTok, 72 assaults, or I'm sorry, 72 fights that were recorded.
So that's basically two fights a week in the school that were recorded and that were on TikTok.
And those are just the ones that they've caught.
And you see this in classroom after classroom after classroom.
So you're bring, you bring children together that can't speak the language and then you poison them with critical race theory to tell them that the children of color are oppressed and the white kids are oppressors.
Not your necktie or a pair of socks, but things you wouldn't want to replace or maybe couldn't.
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You're going to dig it.
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And yet, Crenshaw, every time I've seen him speak, it's about Ukraine's sacred borders, its territorial integrity, standing up for democracy, fighting Putin Hitler or whatever.
What is why the emphasis?
I mean, I think it's fair to have views on all kinds of foreign questions, but in his case, it's so much the center of his focus.
You know, and I get that you can go from Trump was, you know, Russia went into Crimea, right?
Under Barack Obama and his silly line in the sand.
And Trump came in and where Obama had given them blankets and band-aids, Trump came in and gave them, you know, anti-tank missiles and he gave them serious weaponry to stall the Russians.
And then Biden comes in and does the exact opposite, right?
But starts talking tough.
And so I guess I can get initially saying, okay, I want to get back to doing what Trump did.
But the obsession that he displayed in the midst of it was sickening, was absolutely sickening, especially, again, when you call into account the fact that we have an open border in the South and he was doing nothing to help us.
In fact, when the Senate deal came about, he held a town hall for elected officials in our district.
And I put my hand up and I said, Dan, you're allowing 5,000 people into the country a day.
And he just absolutely was totally pissed.
Really?
That I was bringing this up.
And I'm not the only one.
Senator Creighton also was like, we cannot do this.
And he said, you guys should be absolutely thankful that we're doing something now to close the border because you can't do it.
I'm like, we have done it.
We just need you guys to stay the hell out of the way.
We could close, Texas on its own could close the border.
We just need you to keep out of our business.
If you're not going to help us, get out of the way.
And he was just emphatic that we couldn't do it.
We needed to pass this legislation.
Meanwhile, Trump was saying, you don't need any legislation.
You just need to close the border.
Need to show some stones, some backbone, and close the borders from the wait.
I've seen this with him a lot, and it suggests that there's something.
I think he's mentally ill.
I'm just going to say that.
I'm not saying that as an attack.
I'm saying that with sympathy.
There's something really wrong with him.
I think he was damaged by his service.
I think it's partly our fault as a country for sending these guys into these horrible positions and then not helping them when they come home.
I know that you help run Mighty Oaks, which is a group dedicated to helping servicemen when they come back so they don't kill themselves.
So I know you spend a lot of time on this.
I don't want to attack him too much personally because I want to be compassionate, but boy, I've never seen any elected official respond to criticism the way he does.
I mean, it's like anyone who asks him a question, it's like, you're evil.
I saw him recently say, if you don't agree with me on this foreign policy issue, you're evil.
So they come after conservative Republicans every two years.
I've got one of the most conservative voting records in the Texas House, like in the top five, top four my last four sessions.
I've passed some really important, critically important, comprehensive legislation that's part of the Republican priorities, banning critical race theory in the classroom, banning the social transitioning of children.
And yet this group comes after me every two years.
Two election cycles ago, they spent $300,000, $400,000 against me and were able to get 36% of the vote.
This last election cycle, the Associated Republicans of Texas spent $700,000 against me and got 34% of the vote.
So he takes his lobbying money and he writes checks, tens of thousands of dollars to the Associated Republicans of Texas that isn't doing anything to help us expand the majority in the Texas House.
Carl Rove, every time I ask someone involved in Texas politics, how does this conservative, this great state, get such horrible, like, how does a John Cornyn or Dan Crenshaw get elected in Texas?
But at the end of the day, if you're going to say this is state-sponsored and we're only going to give out two or three licenses and we're going to give them out to our friends that have given tons of campaign money, right?
And this past session, the past two sessions, they've been trying to do it.
And I got a call from the lobbyists, which they assigned two lobbyists to me.
So there are 150 house members.
Each of us had two lobbyists assigned to them for gambling.
And it became the no lobbyist left behind session when it came to gambling.
And they're like, hey, we want to write you a $25,000 check for your reelection campaign.
I'm like, I don't want it.
We're not asking for your guaranteed vote in favor of it.
And I'm like, I don't want it.
If Planned Parenthood wanted to give me money so I could vote against abortion, I would take that money so I could vote against abortion.
But I'm not going to take your dirty money that came at the hands of somebody that lost their house or lost their marriage or lost their business as a result of it.
We're sorry to say it, but this is not a very safe country.
Walk through Oakland or Philadelphia.
Yeah, good luck.
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So it typically, and I appreciate Dan Patrick over in the Senate because he pretty much guaranteed that as long as he's going to be the like of, and hopefully Brandon Creighton will come in after him.
We'll do the same thing.
I think he will, but I don't think it has a future in Texas, thankfully.
The last time I talked to him, the last time I talked to him was at that town hall three years ago when he dismissed myself and Senator Creighton for not accepting and not, you know, wholeheartedly buying into this crappy Senate bipartisan bill that they wanted to push through.
And again, they blamed President Trump, who was out of office at the time, saying, you know, Trump is just torpedoing this thing and they're all angry about it.
And Trump was just saying, you don't need legislation to close the border.
And when I've sat and listened to some of his podcasts and some of the different things, he's a really smart guy, but he completely lacks the wisdom to know what to do with all those smarts.
And so he's doing this podcast with this guy.
And they're talking about, he brings up, well, the American people need archetypes.
Spider-Man, Superman, and Jesus Christ.
And he says, and then real ones too, like Rosa Parks and Abraham Lincoln.
You not only lied about Jesus not being real, but you lied about being a Christian.
To give context to anyone who hasn't heard, Crenshaw said, quote, the most important thing here is that we have important hero archetypes that we look up to.
Jesus is a hero archetype.
Superman is a hero archetype.
Real characters, too, too.
I could name it thou.
Rosa Parks, Rama Reagan, end quote.
I can't wrap my head around this.
I'll help you.
Put a period of word Jesus and don't question my faith.
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That means you can speak openly and honestly without fear about what you actually believe.
The government doesn't own you.
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That's the premise.
And for 250 years, we've lived it.
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I want to play one other clip, um, that I think reveals a lot, not just about his.
His.
About his temperament, but about his agenda.
So he was asked by a reporter, um, whom I respect, called Liam Cosgrove.
Uh, well, coming out of Congress, this was earlier.
This was the spring, early summer.
And he was asked about legislation that he had voted for.
Um, and basically his position was the intel agencies are not in any way playing in American politics.
Here's the exchange.
unidentified
With data and with access to your, you know, app that you're addicted to, you can vastly manipulate, um, an entire population, which the Chinese have done.
Are you worried that our intelligence agencies are doing the same thing domestically?
Am I worried that, um, well, I know that they're not.
They're not manipulating Americans.
They're not controlling a flow of information.
Yeah.
Do you have some evidence otherwise that you'd like to share?
I mean.
Okay.
Any serious?
Congressman, you asked for an example of the U.S. intelligence agencies meddling in our information.
What about before the 2020 election when 50 members came out and said the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation?
Does that count?
No, because I mean, they were, they were retired.
They were retired, but the FBI, the FBI had the laptop frozen.
You can do things like that at the state of Texas level because we haven't turned, um, the fourth branch of government into anything that can hurt people it's been done at the federal level there's still democratic control too like the people still have a voice as screwed up and corrupt as the state may be and it is in my opinion yeah there's still like a possibility Especially in the text education agency where you see a lot of this stuff, but you still can make change, right?
But at the federal level, like if you were to call immigration or something like that, they'd laugh at you.
So how could, I mean, he was asked specifically, the intel agencies have basically nullified democracy because they are playing a role in American politics, a very big role.
And that's documented.
It's not a matter of guesswork at this point.
We know that.
And it's, as you just said, anyone who works in Washington sees it every single day.
So like if he's denying that angrily, what does that say about his role?
Well, they put the people who had it in jail for the crime of having Ashley Biden's diary in which she said she showered with her dad and it screwed her up sexually.
So why do you think, I just am fascinated by the very first thing you said when we sat down was, I have to confess my role in Dan Crenshaw's victory because he made this really compelling case that he was going to fight the corruption in D.C. And I understood that.
But there was this kind of amazing moment right after COVID when people started taking a look at the performance of various members of Congress's stock portfolios.
And, you know, I personally know hedge fund managers who've underperformed the market.
People who do this for a living, maybe billions, some years, they just don't, you know, it's very hard to beat the market.
But Dan Crenshaw did somehow.
He made a lot of trades, including after getting classified briefings on COVID policy.
And he was called out on this.
And he wasn't the only one.
I mean, Nancy Pelosi famously, but Dan Crenshaw did pretty well.
And, you know, I don't think there's any evidence to suggest he's like a market expert.
So like, how exactly did that did that work?
And this was his response.
He didn't, you know, he immediately started attacking anyone who asked him.
And he said, you don't let us trade stocks.
You don't let us make any money either.
We haven't gotten a pay raise since 2008.
So, I mean, I don't think members of Congress are overpaid exactly, but they're paid multiples of what the average person makes and they get a lifetime pension.
So it's a pretty good deal and free health care and dental.
The simplest thing would be to file legislation and then dump your portfolio or dump it into a blind trust.
At the very least, if you're going to say, okay, you can't own stock, at the very least, we should be encouraging these guys to dump them into a blind trust so that they can't manipulate the market or manipulate their own portfolio as a result of what they know.
As well with the quorum busters that while we were trying to do redistricting, they went to Illinois and they went to California and we heard lock them up, lock them up.
And we're going to lock them up.
We're going to throw them off.
No one's going to get thrown out of office.
And it's just, it feeds the cynicism that we all rightfully have right now because it's so fake.
But I mean, someone like Crenshaw or Nancy Pelosi, they don't believe in the system.
They're grifters, obviously.
But like the people who do believe in the system and are the victim of this just serial decades-long betrayal, those people, and I feel like I'm one of them, being honest.
It just makes me so mad.
I can barely see because you feel like you're betrayed by your own leaders.
And it's harder because when you're in office, you're kind of like, okay, because of what you're doing right now, I'm going to get painted with that same brush.
Look, Republic, Democrats, Democrats are like trail horses.
Each one sticks his nose in the ass of the horse in front of him.
And Republicans are like Mustangs.
We're biting each other.
We're kicking each other.
We're fighting.
They work in lockstep together.
And they take people out that don't believe in their radical views.
There was a woman in the Texas legislature last session, Sean Theory, Democrat, that voted with us and against the gender mutilation of little girls and boys.
And the Democrat Party responded by running somebody against her and spending a million dollars to take her out.
Honestly, I think we need a spiritual renewal in America.
And we need to get back to our founding principles.
And our constitution was meant only for holy and religious people.
And we're starting to see our nation and our society just fray and tear apart right now.
And as a result of that, we're raising up people that should not be in office, that are serving and have no place in serving within the Republican Party.
There's never been one public opinion poll in the last two years that said, number one issue for me is Ukraine.
And yet all the money is going to Ukraine or to all these other foreign countries.
It's like, why are we giving all this money to Egypt?
Is there some, are there a lot of people in your district who are like, we need to add another billion dollars to the national foreign aid budget this year?
So I just feel like, well, let me ask you, do you feel like we're at a point where people are becoming, I'm feeling way more radical than I've ever felt in my life.
Well, but the real reason I want to talk to you is I don't want Dan Crenshaw to get reelected, not because I hate Dan Crenshaw or think he's actually going to make good on his promise to kill me.
It's just that if you keep electing people who are transparently corrupt and insincere, like Dan Crenshaw, then after a while, like your country falls apart.
Not because he's so bad, but because it's such an obvious lie.
And scripture says where there is no hope, people perish.
And that's where we're at today in America.
I think one of the things that I love about Trump, and I think the reason why people have overwhelmingly flocked to Trump is Trump leads with actions and not words.
He leads with words to capture the news cycle, right?
Incumbents almost always get re-elected, especially from Republican districts, it feels maybe not especially, but they definitely Republicans, bad Republicans.
So I have, I mean, the reason I want to talk to you is because I've talked to a lot of people in Texas about it just because I think it's so important to make good on your promises.
If you say you're going to put America first, you have to have people who put America first.
Amen.
And we need it badly, so badly.
And everybody I've spoken to has said you have the best shot at unseating him.
This is not directly related to you, but since you swim in the same pool, where is Cornyn's reelection right now?
I mean, I'm so Karl Rove tried to take out Ken Paxton, your attorney general, in a, in a, I mean, tried to put him in jail, basically, helped run this impeachment against him trial.
But I think it, I think it mainly, it's mainly through Karl Rove.
They don't support the president.
They refuse to support Trump, which is an embarrassment, should be an embarrassment to them at their lack of support and everything that he's doing for our country right now.
How can you look?
How can't you look at everything that Trump is doing right now and say what he's doing with the border, what he's doing with Doge, what he's doing with public education, and on and on and on.
And look at it.
I do not look at that and just say, wow, this is all the crap that you guys said you were going to do.
He just did it.
Like you said you wanted to do away with the Department of Education because of the way they're destroying public education in America.
He's doing it.
You want to root out the corruption through these government agencies that are blindly giving money to their Democrats so that they can, they literally are funneling and laundering money through the United States government.
I mean, you, there's a, you know, there's a lot of gossip and stuff, but, you know, and I feel badly because I feel like there are some really good people that get accused of it where it's not true.
And I feel badly for them, but that's, you know, that's what you sign up for when you go to the business.
And so you think there are people who arrived with the intent of doing good, joining the swamp, representing their constituents who were caught up in some sort of immoral behavior and that has been used as leverage against them.
In fact, I can remember one of them said, we were called for such a time as this, quoting Esther, the book of Esther.
Of course.
And the reason why they hate us now, this is what we, this is what one of them said, the reason why they hate us is because we remind them of what they used to be.
And I look at most of those guys that said that and shook their head like I am and say, yeah, and that's who you are now.
Basically, that was legislation, I'm guessing, that was passed to protect corruption, but it sounds in the telling like a good government move, like it was designed to expose corruption.
So other words, like under my election integrity bill, every candidate will have to hold that data for 22 months.
What they don't tell you is they can't look at it.
And so myself and Paul Betancourt, Senator Betancourt, have introduced legislation that the president supports, fully supports.
And these guys know it.
The Republicans all know it.
But what's the piece of legislation that Democrats say when they're going to get behind a speaker?
They're like, there are these things that are not going to pass this year.
Toast legislation and Betancourt's legislation on doing audits and the transition of kids.
So like I had a bill this year, House Bill 2258.
I think it was 2258.
I had like 70 pieces of legislation, but they sent it to Ken King's committee where Ken King killed the bill.
I had three members of his committee that became joint authors on the bill to stop the social transition of children, and they never gave the bill a hearing.
I think they basically are against it, but they compromise and say, the only way I can do good things for my people back home is if I maintain my chairmanship.
And the only way I can maintain my chairmanship is to cut a deal with Democrats.
And Democrats don't want this piece of legislation to pass.
And so they kill it.
They just kill it.
But we turned it into an amendment and we stuck it on in Senate Bill 12 at the end of session.
And now social transitioning of kids is illegal in the state of Texas.
Here's the hard part about it: we knew that we were going to try and pass it as an amendment.
And so I didn't make a big deal about it during session because I didn't want the Democrats to blow it up.
I didn't want them to know that we were still going to try and put it on something.
So we just stayed kind of quiet, quietly kept looking for the right bill to put it on, found it in Senate Bill 12.
We worked with Brandon Creighton to make sure that he positioned 12.
It's different in Texas than it is in the United States in that if you're going to pass legislation at the federal level on ice cream, you can't put something on it that has to do with bicycles.
In Texas, our legislation, the amendment has to be absolutely germane to the bill.
And so we worked with Senator Creighton quietly behind the scenes to make sure that when the bill came over from the Senate, it would.
So if that bill had come over from the Senate with banning social transition of kids, they would have killed his bill.
They never would have let that bill onto the House floor because the rhino Republicans and the Democrats would have killed the bill in committee or they would have killed it in calendars and it never would have made it to the House floor.
So the bill came over, and I was able to put the amendment on it and it passed.
foreign national was caught celebrating as the World Trade Center fell and later said he was in New York, quote, to document the event.
I didn't know there would be an event to document in the first place because he had foreknowledge.
And maybe most amazingly, somebody, an unknown investor, shorted American Airlines and United Airlines, the companies whose planes the attackers used on 9-11, as well as the banks that were inside the Twin Towers just before the attacks.
They made money on the 9-11 attacks because they knew they were coming.