Matt Gaetz and Tucker Carlson expose the ADL’s selective anti-hate focus, dismissing its push to rewrite Indonesian textbooks while framing opposition to Israel as "anti-Semitism," then pivot to Gaetz’s 2024 Syria withdrawal bill—blocked by the military-industrial complex—and his blackmail ordeal involving Israeli official Jake Novak. They link deep state spying on Trump to a broader post-coup narrative, question Seth Rich’s murder motives, and mock "flooding the zone" with weak Russia-Trump collusion theories. Gaetz predicts Cruz’s 2028 bid will fail, warns automation will collapse jobs by 2027, and blames feminism for marriage decline, while Carlson ties economic collapse to UBI and wealth taxes—all underpinned by a system where risk-averse leaders enable decay since the 2016 Russia hoax. [Automatically generated summary]
So I just want to start with a clip that I saw this morning that I think is amazing and tells you a lot about a lot.
This is from the Jerusalem Post-Washington conference this weekend.
The man speaking is a guy called Yehuda Kaplan, who I don't think I'd ever heard of before, but now apparently works at the State Department in the office to fight anti-Semitism, which is part of the State Department.
I am the president's representative, and I am walking off with a yamulka, and I have kosher food, and embassies will have kosher food.
It is a game changer.
The appointment is a game changer.
And it's not about history.
It's about education.
And how do we educate?
Indonesia has 350 million Muslims living in the country.
How do we change their textbooks?
How do we hold the people in Gaza accountable that if America is paying for UN textbooks and supposedly the changes are made, why are those textbooks not being used and why are they using their old textbooks?
We have to teach people it's not okay to educate your kids to be a martyr.
Okay?
And we have to hold those countries accountable.
How do we battle anti-Semitism on the internet?
How are we doing better on algorithms?
What companies can we work with?
We are going to have a whole division within the office of the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism that is going to work on technology and working with the greatest leaders in technology, many of whom are Jewish and have offered their assistance.
The office is going to be revamped entirely to be one of the highest profile offices in the State Department.
So there is truth to the claim that in the pedagogy that is administered in a lot of places, there's incitement.
Maya the martyr is a character.
No doubt.
And that is awful, and U.S. taxpayers shouldn't fund it.
And we ought to hold anyone accountable who does.
At the same time, the definition of anti-Semitism in recent times, according to some of the Israel First Crowd in the United States, has really migrated.
Like this isn't my line, but I certainly associate it with.
Anti-Semitism used to mean somebody who didn't like Jews.
Yeah, but the U.S. ambassador to France, Jared Kushner's father, says that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
And I don't believe that.
I think that you can be critical of foreign policy choices that a country makes without the assumption that you hate the religion or the ethnic group associated with that country.
Like when I was critical of Joe Biden, that didn't make me anti-Catholic.
And when I'm critical of Benjamin Nets and Yahoo, that doesn't make me anti-Semitic.
And I do think there has been a rise, just I can just notice it, in people hating Jews, disliking Jews, anti-Semitism, I think that's real, in the United States.
But I think you could probably fix that in a week.
By getting Jewish groups like the ADL, like the American Jewish Congress, like whatever group Yehuda Kaplan runs, to come out against anti-white hate, which is institutionalized in the United States.
And if you had the ADL and the SPLC and these groups that have fought against anti-Semitism for all these years make the obvious and true point that hatred of anybody on the basis of how they're born is immoral, and we won't stand for it.
And in the United States, the institutionalized hate is anti-white, of course, prevented from getting jobs, prevented from getting federal grants, prevented from getting admitted to college.
Well, there isn't a sufficient monetization path there the way it is when the ADL and similarly aligned groups try to make the American people think that anti-Semitism is hiding behind the people.
Okay, so if I get up, look, if I get up and say it's only wrong when people attack people like me, then everyone knows that I'm not defending a principle.
I'm defending a group interest.
Right.
And I can ignore your group's interests.
I cannot ignore a universal principle.
And the universal principle is that kind of hatred is always wrong no matter who it's aimed at.
So why doesn't the ADL stand up and do that?
I would send money to the ADL if they did that.
I would send money to the ADL.
I would.
And I despise the ADL because that would be a defense of what's true and so needed.
Well, when you're a witch hunter, you have to first convince people of the existence of witches.
And so I think that for the broad goals of the ADL, they have to make the country believe that we are somehow aligned against the Jewish faith and against the people.
They were for discriminating against whites because those kids who've been shafted by anti-white hate as institutionalized in every big company and every government agency in the whole United States and Western Europe, those people are mad.
And where was Yehuda Levin during that?
Where was Bill Ackman during that?
And my point is, come over to the side of universal principles of light and truth, and let's make common cause against all forms of hate.
And if you won't do that, then I'm not taking you seriously.
I think it's also non-white people who see the attack on white culture not as an attack on like colonialism, but as an attack on success and progress and order.
I know a lot of non-white people that are like, actually, this anti-white activity that's going on is going to make me less prosperous and less safe.
And I'm kind of here, like for all the criticisms we as whites have taken, we did an okay job setting up an orderly world and we made some mistakes along the way and you've got to reconcile those.
But at the end, what society would you replace with like what we've set up in the Western world?
Is there some like vision of the way civilizations were built in Africa or the Far East that we would gleefully adopt?
So imagine moving here because it's a white country founded by white people and getting here and being like, yeah, I want to be part of that, which I get 100%.
And then you get here and the first thing you learn is white people are bad.
But I think we all think our dogs are impressive and great and we love them.
And I know that if anything ever happened to this dog, there would be no limit to what I would do to help her.
And so vet bills can really stack up.
Thank heaven she's been healthy.
But for a lot of people, including close friends of mine, it can be crushing.
And so when we started talks with the company we're now in partnership with, Dutch Pet, about how they're approaching veterinary care, $82 a year for unlimited care.
I just thought that can't be real, but it is real.
Dutch Pet, if you're watching this right now, use the code Tucker from this show.
If you care about your dogs, if you care about your animals, if it's, you know, if it's real to you, check it out.
$82 a year for unlimited veterinary care.
You'd pay anything, but you shouldn't have to.
Dutch Pet.
I think you're right.
So I think what you're saying.
So I was, well, I want to get to the thing that really bothered me about the statement from Yehuda Kaplan, who apparently now runs the State Department, he has told us.
I did not vote for this, just to be clear, period.
Any of what I just saw, yeah, that guy.
But you're saying maybe I should calm down a little bit because, like, who cares?
But we see that often, so I don't get too worked up about it.
The bigger issue is that Rabbi Yehuda would probably classify you and I as anti-Semitic because we've been critical of some of the policy choices of the Israeli government.
And that broad application of anti-Semitism, to say anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, to say that even some things in the Bible may be deemed anti-Semitic if they're critical of Jews at any point.
It has created such a curiosity among young people to test those mores and challenge those dogmas.
Like, I think there are a lot of the Mark Levin Israel first crowd who look at us and say, like, we're the problem.
Tucker and Matt are the problem.
Actually, we're not the problem.
The problem is you lost us.
Oh, I know.
They show these old videos of you being very complimentary of Israel and critical of Israel's critics.
You could easily find a lot of my library speaking on the floor of the Congress supporting a strong and robust U.S.-Israel relationship.
So, two people who in our 30s were incredibly supportive of this relationship have come untethered.
And it is because the relationship has become too burdensome.
And friends should be able to tell that to each other.
And when you do, that doesn't make you a bad friend.
I still consider myself pro-Israel.
I think that what the Netanyahu government is doing to Israel is bad for Israel.
Much in the way the United States created more terrorists than we killed during the wars in the Middle East that have consumed most of my life.
I think that is the chapter of the book they're in right now.
This expansionism and the adventurism.
And it ends badly.
It ended badly for us.
Remember, Syria is in the news now because tragically we've lost Americans in uniform in Syria and a translator there as well.
And reasonable people are asking, why are we still in Syria?
Well, it allowed the State Department and the rest of the federal government and its constellation of NGOs to import tens of thousands of Somalis into the United States because all of a sudden – Well, that had been happening under Clinton for some time.
Yeah.
Well, that.
Right.
But that, I believe, Black Hawk Down was at the during the Clinton administration.
Yeah.
Right.
So, yeah.
We now have had military action in this country.
So there's a deep and important connection between our country and whatever country we're killing people in.
And so we need to import whoever it is, the Somalis, the Montagnards from Vietnam, whatever.
And by the way, some of those groups have done well here.
Others have not done well at all.
But the pretext is exactly the same.
We occupy Haiti repeatedly.
All of a sudden, we have a ton of Haitians.
Like, this is how it works.
We're fooling with Venezuela policy, got a ton of Venezuelans.
A lot of the New Testament was written from what's now Syria.
So it had a, you know, it's had an ancient Christian presence.
Of course, Paul was on his way to Damascus when he met Jesus.
So like, this is the Levant.
This is not some faraway, this is on the Mediterranean.
Okay.
This is, and so I know some amazing Syrians, also a lot of like war-traumatized, unemployed, and unemployable, dangerous Syrians, and they happen to be living in Berlin right now.
So like, whatever, it's a mixed back.
The only point is as soon as you intervene in another country, all of a sudden, you know, invade the world, import the world becomes real.
Yeah, I introduced the legislation in Congress to take all of our troops out of Syria.
It was defeated overwhelmingly.
And when was that?
That was in 2024, last year.
And Ana Paulina Luna, others, and I took to the floor to explain that this would result in American deaths, that those deaths would not be worth whatever gain is attempting to be realized in Syria.
In Syria, we had troops funded by the Pentagon fighting forces funded by the CIA.
And Syria is even an example on the limits of Russia's interventionism.
I took note of the fact that them propping up a government and trying to keep it loyal was not something that was ultimately sustainable for Russia.
And so now we ought to get our troops out.
There's no thing that we are fighting for there that is an achievable win.
And what were these guys doing?
You hear it on the news now, key leader engagement.
You know what that means?
That means we've got troops wandering around Syria, figuring out which Bedouin leaders to go bribe as a part of some coalition we can represent.
And that is everything Donald Trump is against.
Donald Trump doesn't want to import a bunch of Syrians.
He doesn't want to control Syria.
And I think that there is a lot of the military-industrial complex that just needs us to be in a state of kind of constant, latent war everywhere.
And I want to ask you an extra- And by the way, just while I'm on the rant, the reason that happens is because in Congress, there's this great sense of deference.
Like if you're not on the Agriculture Committee, you defer to those people.
If you're not on the Intelligence Committee, you defer to those people or the Armed Services Committee.
And under a system where people's specializations were being represented in that way, that might work.
But it's just a function of which special interests are controlling which committees and which members of Congress.
The way you get on the war committee is to be for the wars.
The way you get on the intelligence committee is to be for the intelligence apparatus.
The way to get on the agriculture committee is to be for big food.
The way to get on the natural resources committee is to be against natural resources.
And then when you do all of that, you end up with this highly deferential system to people who were elected by no one, who buy off your leaders.
And those leaders justify it by saying, well, at least I'm moving up in the system.
And thus whatever I do to surrender my agency is justified.
And worth it, because I can have a seat at the table and maybe I can.
I mean, I think the moral justification for the person who makes moral compromises is, well, at least now I'm here and I can potentially make things better.
Are there any sovereign leaders in the world that you're aware of?
Like, does any leader have the ability to say this is the right thing or the wrong thing, and I'm just going to act according to how I feel with the authority vested in me?
I mean, and by the way, like, I know out there among your supporters and mine, there's a lot of angst over like, well, you know, has Donald Trump done every single thing I ever wanted him to do in this first year in office?
And like, if you would have told me back when we were staring at polls showing us that Kamala Harris was going to be the next president of the United States, that here we would be at the conclusion of 2025 with negative net migration in this country.
And some of that indeed is the great work of DHS, but a lot of it is the self-deportation where Trump has set the ethic in this country where if you are not here legally, you are not welcome.
And a bunch of those people are going home.
And I think that is a great credit to the work they've done.
Again, that's simplysafe.com slash Tucker and lock in your discount.
There's no safe like SimplySafe.
So I just want to get back to one more question about the State Department's new office on anti-Semitism and just say, again, I'm opposed to anti-Semitism every bit as much as I'm opposed to anti-white hate, which is much more prevalent.
And all of it, anti-black, anti-Mexican, everything, anti-people.
But in there, he says we need to control what people say on the internet.
And we're going to talk to Jews in the, he just said that.
Yeah, I think he was pointing globally and the U.S. State Department has a long history of trying to control what people see and hear and how they react to that.
When you had people in the Biden administration censoring true information about vaccine side effects and no accountability for that, no action against those officials, it has blown the door open to use powers in government to try to advance the viewpoints that you find comforting and to silence the ideas that you find uncomfortable.
I'm constantly worked up over it as you are because I just think that we have so many different opportunities to communicate now, more so than in the 2010s.
And the censorship regime is only going to backfire on these folks.
And it's sad.
Honestly, I wish people like Jonathan Greenblatt at the ADL and this particular rabbi would see that what they are doing is ultimately to their detriment because more and more people are going to wonder why there is this one group that seems to have primacy in speech and discourse.
Or at least compared to me with no self-control at all, you're seeing the big picture, which is that this is a conversation that can only be counterproductive.
They don't understand the nature of human discourse and of the internet.
No, and how are you going to censor the presidential debate stage in 2028?
Because let me walk through what you're going to see.
You are going to see candidates on the Republican debate stage and on the Democrat debate stage that are going to say, I'm going to cut off all aid to Israel.
I believe the U.S.-Israel relationship is toxic.
I think it is an abusive relationship, and the United States is the abused partner, and we need to leave.
And those people are automatically going to surge to a prominent position in the polling in their parties.
And so then how are you ultimately going to censor a viewpoint that is a rising viewpoint on the left and the right?
This isn't a viewpoint percolating among the elites that maybe the U.S.-Israel relationship is something we have to question in its current iteration and its current form.
But this is coming to a head.
And I saw the deal where, have you looked at the FARA filings where the Israeli government is paying to geo-fence U.S. churches so that they can propagandize evangelical Christians?
I'm watching this saying, it is not going to work.
People are still going to ask questions.
And I still can't find any of Israel's strongest defenders who will defend that conduct.
They've also, I guess, hired Brad Parscale to spoof the AI bots.
I saw that and I thought at least it's like them getting grifted this time.
But yes, no, I mean, literally pathetic, but it's still so dishonorable what he's doing.
But you're absolutely right.
I should have a lighter heart about this kind of stuff.
I guess what concerns me is these are people who are totally committed to violence, who, I mean, for Rabbi whatever his name is to say we need to hold the people of Gaza accountable when they already, the Israelis and the U.S. have murdered tens of thousands of women and children, murdered them.
And the more you know about it, the more shocking it is that it's happened, a first world country doing something, murdering all those kids, murdering them, which they have.
And all these people like Rabbi Whatever and Mark Levin defending it, they're just pro-violence.
They believe in violence.
Mark Levin, when Charlie was murdered three months ago, said, you know, he was murdered because people called him a Nazi.
And that's an invitation to shoot somebody.
Next thing you know, he's running around calling everyone who disagrees with the next aid package a Nazi.
He's espousing violence.
Mark Levin's totally for violence.
A lot of these stronger voices are for violence.
So if censorship doesn't work, it makes me uncomfortable when people who believe in violence and murdering the innocents, as they do, if they can't achieve their goals by peaceful means, like what's the next step?
And it probably is, you know, the next chapter of all of this is that more of that type of violence is visited here in the United States.
And we're against that.
By the way, that's why the speech and the dialogue and the discourse is so important, which is what Charlie Kirk understood.
I know.
And said so.
All the time.
And I mean, when you and I know what few others do, and that is the operational competence of Charlie Kirk in doing everything he could to support the Trump administration to make the best possible decisions on the information that existed.
And Charlie told me something once about President Trump and Twitter.
And he said, you know, man, how many times back in 2016, 2017 did we have someone come up to us and say, we love Trump, but can we get him off Twitter?
Can we just get him to stop tweeting every impulse?
And by the way, I always loved the posts, still do.
But so many people were focused on the information flow from Trump out into the Twitter sphere.
When what we, I think, discounted was when Trump was scrolling Twitter regularly, he was getting bi-directional feedback that does not exist right now.
That avenue is not open the way it was in those years.
And I think it was really special and awesome about Trump that he was able to understand the zeitgeist and what the temperature and mood of the country was.
And I would love to see Trump back on Twitter posting regularly and seeing the feedback from users.
We did an interview with a woman called Casey Means.
She's a Stanford educated surgeon and really one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.
In the interview, she explained how the food that we eat produced by huge food companies, big food, in conjunction with pharma, is destroying our health, making this a weak and sick country.
The levels of chronic disease are beyond belief.
What Casey means, who we've not stopped thinking about ever since, is the co-founder of a healthcare technology company called Levels.
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What role does Twitter X play in the discourse of the nation?
And, you know, I think that people discount the significance of the platform when they say it doesn't have the same user base that you see on Meta or TikTok.
But the reality is the news that is made on X Twitter really pollinates to those other platforms extensively and drives all the action.
Citizen Free Press is one of my daily check-ins for the news as well.
And also, more and more since I've left government life, seeing how the movement of money impacts policy decisions.
I was so into what was on the next committee agenda, what the next witness would be in the chair.
And oftentimes, it's the way money moves in global marketplaces influencing events.
And I also think this is informative on our discussion on the Middle East because for most of your and my life, the principal capital markets that mattered in the world were New York and London.
And I think a lot of people were really comfortable with that.
And then as capital has really flown out of these Gulf monarchies out of the Middle East, you're seeing places like Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Muscat Oman, Riyadh emerge as these very significant capital marketplaces.
And I think Netanyahu is trying to wash that region in blood and chaos and war migrants so that there is a return to New York and London being the principal capital markets.
Yeah, I mean, I saw an Israeli cabinet minister the other day describe, was talking about the Saudis and, you know, go back to whatever, your camels and sleeping with your cousin or whatever, eating lamb in a tent.
And, you know, it was dismissive, of course.
I'm not even taking sides in it, but it was more than dismissive.
It was like idiotic.
I was like, have you been there recently?
You know, there are not a lot of camels in downtown Riyadh, which has like 8 million people in it.
It's like the most modern city this side of China.
I think people don't fully understand how quickly that region has changed.
And I think a lot of those people are the constituency that Netanyahu is serving as he is trying to advance an agenda that will create more war and create more violence.
And like nobody's going to want to do business deals in Doha or Abu Dhabi or Dubai if there are 30 million Iranians that are on the move because they are war migrants.
And by the way, like, no one has ever even made an accusation against me in any forum in which I can depose witnesses, do cross-examination, review records.
So that's how you know the allegations against me are false.
No one is ever willing to make them in any forum where I'm allowed to fight back, where I have any of the tools that you have to do.
You haven't been charged in brought to process sued anything.
Well, for us, the shocking moment was when my father, who's a prominent person in our community, got outreach from someone he had never met that said that there were pictures and images of me with underage prostitutes, and my dad needed to meet with these people right away.
And so my dad, somewhat surprised and concerned, goes and talks to these people and says, what in the world are you talking about?
And they said, well, Mr. Gates, we need $25 million from you to go and rescue a spy that is being held in Iran.
And if you do that, we can make these things about your son go away, which was crazy and wild.
We did what any reasonable people would do.
We went to the FBI and said that we were being extorted by these folks with their false claims.
And we later learned that this consulate official working for the Israeli government was sending text messages to Scott Adams, of all people, the Dilbert cartoonist, saying they were expecting my father to furnish this $25 million payment and that that would be evidence of my consciousness of guilt.
Yeah, and I don't know anything about this person.
I don't know if the person's dead or alive, but it was troubling and concerning to me that someone who was getting paid by the Israeli government was involved in a criminal shakedown of a U.S. congressman.
And someone went to jail for this.
The person who conveyed this message to my father pled guilty to the attempted fraud.
And surprisingly, there was never really an effort to figure out what the government of Israel's involvement was in this matter.
I have attempted to figure out because obviously I still have a lot of unanswered questions about why he was working for a foreign government and trying to shake down my family.
And I saw these wars in the Middle East that my neighbors and friends had fought in as unworthy of our best, unworthy of the disruptions and parenting and the divorces and the injuries.
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, this is the parlance of government.
It's a series of carrots and sticks.
And, you know, I was the only Republican in the entire Congress during my time there who refused all PAC and lobbyist donations because it was like a game I just didn't want to win.
What you have to realize is what most of your Congress is doing most of the time is trying to move up in this system.
And sometimes moving up means a better committee.
Sometimes it's like getting invited to better dinner parties.
You lived in Washington for many years.
You know that there's this like hidden dinner party circuit that is reflective of your influence and your acceptance.
And people who are probably good people when they get elected go there and morally compromise for that.
And I just like reached a point one time when I just thought, I don't even care.
Like, it's like, oh, well, if you do enough favors for the chief deputy whip, they'll invite you to their fundraiser.
And then you could move up.
And the whip could invite you to his foreign trip.
And if you say the right things on the foreign trip and kiss the ring, well, then maybe like the majority leader will want you on a task force.
And at the end of the day, I thought, I'm not here to do any of this stuff.
I even had groups like DNRA or Right to Life that I was largely aligned with say, well, will you take our PAC money?
And I just, the whole thing seemed untoward.
Like, how do you take money from people who have a specific interest at times hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars and then go stand at the fish house in Pensacola, Florida, and tell people you're not influenced by it?
I couldn't perform the act anymore.
Now, there are other, throughout my time in Congress, there are other kind of accommodations you have to make.
Like, I had to be there, willing, able.
Anytime your bookers or anybody else's bookers would call and say, come be on television.
Because my theory was if I wasn't going to have the resources to buy ads, just go be on TV a lot.
And, you know, that comes with its own compromise to your life and your overall operation.
And sometimes you don't know you're falling into them.
It seems like a good trade, but it never is.
So, but just to go back to what happened to you, so this guy or a series of people approached your dad and said, we have documentary evidence that your son likes to.
And he and we were in a big dispute about his unwillingness to enforce some of the election integrity laws.
There was a case in Florida where a Democrat supervisor of elections brought to the U.S. attorney a clear instance of fraud where a Soros-aligned organization was fraudulently creating voter registrations so that they could request absentee ballots that were ghost votes.
And the U.S. attorney asked for resources to pursue that investigation.
And Bill Barr refused and said, I refuse to investigate any of this stuff because it will decrease confidence in the elections.
This was before the 2020 election.
And so I was constantly pestering President Trump and members of his administration.
The Bill Barr had to be dealt with on this.
You can't just say that you're not going to investigate something because the investigation itself will impact people's confidence.
And so he and I were in that big struggle.
And I believe he was angry with me and wanted to leak things that would hurt me.
You can't even go in and out of a casino without people knowing that you're there and without it being on every camera.
And you're telling me that we don't have the video of Epstein killing himself and that we're all just supposed to expect this guy who we know, we know, all those people who are in the admin now, my friends, they know Epstein was Intel.
And he was willing to go and get this compromise at a time when the British and the Israelis and the United States government needed to get people aligned with the Iraq war.
And there was a worry that people would drift off and start opposing an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.
And so they got together a bunch of people in academia, politics, media, business, and tried to get them in a compromising situation so that then everyone would stay on board no matter what.
But when he died, Barr, by his own admission, he said, our job is to convince the American public he killed himself and prevent dangerous conspiracy theories from threatening.
The guy was murdered.
And so Barr is, by definition, corrupt.
Like, you can't, attorney generals can't do that.
That is totally over the top.
So, and he was fighting with you, but you think he's the one who leaked this stuff, which was.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and pearl clutch over some leak when I, you know, when the FBI took my phone away, I assumed this was all, you know, when they first came.
To be clear, I love President Trump and was there to support his transition as a friend, a confidant, someone who had been there during the tough times in his first term.
I mean, the real reason I was hanging around the transition is because I remembered what it was like when you had a good amount of the cabinet hoping that Donald Trump was a criminal and wanting to install Mike Pence.
And just the nightmare that that was.
So I was there to be a trusted friend, and Charlie Kirk and Stephen Miller and I had talked to a number of people who wanted to be attorney general.
And we were presenting some of those ideas to the president.
I was advocating for a different person to be the attorney general on a plane ride with the president.
And he just sort of, as he has a tendency to do, said that that wasn't who he wanted, and he wanted me to do the job.
And I think Trump also believed that someone who had been unfairly accused of something and who had endured the grind of that justice.
Yeah, would be really interested in fixing it.
I mean, I think that's why President Trump asked me to do the job is because he saw that I could empathize with those who had been treated unfairly and that I would approach the position with a true sense of justice.
There were a lot of great people I interacted with in the Senate, but at the end of the day, there was a core block of about half a dozen of them who'd said they would never vote for me.
And I could have endeavored to grind that down, maybe win, you know, one or two of them possibly over an extended period of time.
But you saw the way courts started enjoining the actions of this administration right off the bat.
Pam Bondi did defeat nationwide injunctions as a ruling legal theory.
And had we not had her and her team lined up to do that, I actually think that we'd be in a very different position today with the deportation agenda.
Yeah, how can – But I mean, look, you know how a lot of my conversations went.
I'd be like, yes, Senator, so this is Matt Gaetz.
I'm calling about my confirmation for attorney.
What was tweeted about you?
No, that was a staffer years ago, and they were fired immediately.
I don't know that that's productive, but I think that it would not be difficult to look at the college of senators who have been otherwise problematic for some of Trump's appointees, and that's where I had problems.
Yeah, I didn't think that me doing some multi-week, multi-month fight to try to grind down the last of Mitch McConnell was somehow going to help the administration in the end.
Can I ask, do you think, just since you know the system so well, because you serve within it most of your life, do you think there's anything you could have traded in exchange for their support?
We are a nation of risk takers at our best moments.
That's who we are.
But in government, it's often, you know, how do I avoid any attention or ire?
I do think that, you know, probably the riskiest thing we've seen is what Obama got everybody together to do on December 9th of 2016 when he ordered the Russia hoax.
I think that is really the original sin of a lot of this that has happened.
And, you know, I certainly would have brought a RICO charge against the people who were involved in that decision-making process and participating in the various predicate criminal acts.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's precisely what Pam Bondi does.
When the Biden FBI raided Trump's house, they engaged in a predicate criminal act to try to get information back that was exculpatory as to Trump.
From my standpoint, that would properly venue a RICO charge against the major players in the deep state in the southern district of Florida rather than in Washington, D.C., where they have an administrative and judicial advantage.
So the Russia hoax was predicated on something that I'm pretty sure was a lie, which is that the Russian government stole a tranche of emails from the DNC earlier that year.
One of the most mineral-dense countries in the world, right?
It's basically a Western country produced by Dostoevsky.
Don't tell me otherwise.
Anyway, yeah, I couldn't agree more.
But I just want to get to something I've never gotten past, which is the question of whether the Russian government stole those emails from the DNC during the Democratic primary.
And then this DNC staff record Seth Rich is murdered in Washington, D.C. in a robbery in which his wallet is not taken.
And a number of conservative, conservative people who call themselves conservatives went on TV and said, I think Seth Rich was murdered because he knew too much.
And then those people were either sued or threatened with lawsuits from Seth Rich's family.
So everybody shut up about it.
And then Julian Assange is asked repeatedly, who runs WikiLeaks at the time before they sold him to prison for talking like this, did the Russians send you that information?
And he goes, No.
Did Seth Rich?
And he says, We're not going to talk about that.
So the heavy implication is that Seth Rich, and I don't know the answer, despite knowing Julian Assange, but the heavy implication was that Seth Rich sent this information because he was offended by how the DNC was taking Bernie Sanders out, was basically all behind Hillary Clinton.
It was a rigged election, and they were crushing Bernie Sanders, and he was offended, so he leaked these emails and they killed him for it.
And no one was allowed to talk about that.
Now, I don't know if that's what happened, but I knew someone at a very high level of the DNC who thought that's what happened.
We in Congress had people that were doing various roles within the D.C. police department come and say, we want to be whistleblowers and we want to talk about the way in which this investigation was truncated and we didn't get to really do the FBI took over.
Yeah, do the shoe leather work.
But there's a way that the FBI can involve themselves in these investigations that doesn't strip the agency completely away from their partners to also participate.
And so these whistleblowers were concerned about that.
And then ultimately they weren't really given much of a platform.
Of course, because none of the theories could individually hold water.
And I had a recent conversation with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and I like John, but I chastised him for not answering some of these fundamental questions.
Joseph Mifsud was this professor who was drawn into an intelligence operation against the United States.
He was drawn into that operation either by the United States or one of our allies.
How do we not know the answer to that question?
This was the key thing that we said we were going to uncover when we got power.
And I know they got a lot of work to do to keep the country safe, but I would encourage the director of the CIA to really tell us the CIA's.
Well, I believe that some of this crowd in the Obama administration knew that their direct management of an asset against the Trump administration would create paperwork, payments, complicating things that could be found out.
And so they went to other European countries and said, you know, you do us a favor, we do you a favor, but the favor we want from you is actually to go against our country, our presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
And that is treasonous.
That is straight treason to ask another country to attack your country.
And I think that occurred.
And I think that if we knew who had authorized that, we would have a person to be at the center of this Broad Rico conspiracy.
And now, with the growth of NATO under this war, it's Romania, it's Eastern Europe, it's wherever you have a NATO base, you have there are a lot of other things that come with it, of course.
So you've seen this a lot where American political actors or IC members in the United States use foreign governments to do their work for them.
And I am concerned that that doesn't just happen abroad, that that happens even within the eight square miles of Washington, D.C. Did you feel when you worked there that there was a lot of intrigue?
There's always intrigue, but I think that a lot of the decisions that get made in Washington are detached from the elected leaders.
And there probably should be more intrigue, actually.
Our lawmakers should be more curious and inquisitive and skeptical.
Well, look, take these bills that get written, right?
Like, do you think that anyone who voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was trying to outlaw hemp?
It just was stuck in the bill, and then they voted for it.
And however, you feel about hemp, I think it's kind of crazy that an issue wouldn't even get its own dignity.
Like the lashing together of disparate issues for just an up or down vote that kind of becomes a shirts and skins exercise is a way to detach from the realities of the decision-making.
And those decisions are made by staff, by interest groups, by foreign countries at times.
Whereas we're trying to tell people to reward us for securing the border.
And voting is rarely an exercise in rewarding prior conduct.
It is always about new promises.
What are the new promises you're making?
And right now, a lot of people have economic anxiety around the cost of living.
And I think the Democrats, again, have an elegant presentation to make, which is we're going to take the things that cost you a lot of money and have the government provide those to you.
And then those things won't cost you a lot of money.
And we try to make an argument about economic theory that doesn't always land with the same poignance.
Yeah, I think Hakeem Jeffries becomes the speaker.
I think that they will then become the problem is the candy becomes the poison for them because when they do this big elect us so that we can use all these tools to fight Trump, then once they get that power, they're going to be pressed to continually use the silliest ones.
And think about what they've already used.
They've already used the attempted application of criminal law.
That backfired.
They already used the impeachment process.
That backfired.
And so what I think Democrats believe or what they've recently been conditioned to believe is that shutdowns are good for them under Trump, that that's good politics.
So my prediction is Democrats win the midterms.
They execute a series of ransom-like shutdowns on Trump.
The country gets weary of that and probably elects JD Vance president in 2028.
It's odd to have someone running for president against the organizing principle of their campaign is to attack someone else who is not running for president.
And when you run for president, when you run for president, there's an element of it where the people have to feel like they're a part of something fun.
And that's something Trump understood.
That's something Charlie Kirk understood.
And for Ron and Ted, it is the campaign is sort of something they have to do in order to get the power that they seek.
Despite the fact he signed a hate speech law in Israel, which is like so offensive to me as an American, not because I'm against Israel, but we don't have hate speech laws in the United States.
And when we do, we don't sign them in foreign countries.
And I think that is what Democrats have lacked in this time in the wilderness in the Trump era, is that no one steps up and says, I'm ready to use power effectively.
And when Gavin Newsom stole those congressional seats with Prop 50 in California, it was an effective exercise of power.
And I think voters may reward him for that.
Someone else in the Democratic Party who wants to be president told me that it was actually Kamala Harris who has reignited the prospects of Gavin Newsom.
If they'd have just run Biden and lost, they would have never gone back to another straight white guy.
But rolling out Harris and the embarrassment that that was has people thinking, well, you know, maybe we don't want to try this again.
I think that AOC is going to make a compelling run, and I think she will be formidable as well.
And she do?
If Bernie really does the handoff, like you and I, like Bernie has this like kind of goofy professor persona, but in reality, Bernie's like a deeply selfish person.
When we were ousting McCarthy, she came up to me and was like, you know, I really respect this because I'll be honest, we don't have the guts to do this on our side.
Before January 6th, she was incredibly chummy with Republicans in Congress, would regularly come over to our side, sit down, hang out, talk about her day.
But we are a society that is increasingly built on grievance identity.
You are the grievance that you can access, right?
And so if you are a woman, that can be a source of grievance.
If you're a minority, and then you have people who are just odd and say, well, maybe if I'm trans, then that can be this source of grievance.
And then you have a bunch of men, white men looking around saying, well, I guess I'll be a drug addict because then that can be my source of grievance.
And she was leaning into that.
She wanted to show that she had been aggrieved by this act and should be owed some unique empathy.
Yeah, and I got to a point where I was confident enough with my district where I could say the things I believed that I knew they didn't because even if they disagreed with me on a subject, they knew I came to that view sincerely, that I wasn't holding marijuana legalization is something you and I disagree on.
Yeah.
I disagreed with a majority of my constituents on that point.
I authored Florida's marijuana law.
I support President Trump rescheduling marijuana.
And when people at my First Baptist Church in Fort Walton Beach, Florida came up to me to say they really disagreed with me on that, they did not vote against me as a consequence because they knew that these were views that I sincerely hold.
And I think that's a magic that he knows he needs to reignite on the campaign trail going into these midterms.
The connection directly with the American voter that no matter who you are, if you're the president and behind the resolute desk and in the Rose Garden, it's a different experience than being out on the trail in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
If you care about the lopsided economy where all the wealth is concentrated in too few hands and the country's becoming unstable as a result, it's becoming preach of as Venezuela.
We're going to get a revolution if this continues.
I wrote a book about this.
If you care about that, you have to ask, how did that happen?
And the main way it happened was by unchecked immigration, which devalued labor.
People have less economic power because there are more people willing to work for less.
Well, and that, you know, if you talk about the revolution coming, I mean, housing is as likely to be a part of that as anything else because the way housing is indexed to what people make and what they can afford is insane in this country.
Have you noticed this trend online where all these like lonely women in their 30s are making car selfie videos about their personal anguish that they can't find men?
I posted one recently and got millions of views.
And I feel sad for these women.
My wife has so many friends who are beautiful, accomplished, wonderful people, but they cannot find men.
Well, I think it's important to identify how we got here.
And certain bad ideas played a huge role, feminism, which is like just a total lie on every level.
But also the way the economy is structured, where businesses decided to be a good idea to bring women into the workforce, a better idea than, say, like supporting families or allowing people to have children, like was more important to have female workers than it was to have American family.
But what do you say to the ones who are like, I want to make that choice?
There are millions of women out there that are like, please present me, the guy who isn't spending all of his day playing Fortnite and hanging out at the tattoo party.
Well, look, the first thing to know is men and women need each other.
They can't exist separately or they're destroyed.
They have to change themselves 100%.
They fit together like puzzle pieces and they can't live alone.
Again, there are exceptions to all of these rules, but overpopulations, these are hard and fast rules that have existed since Adam and Eve.
So it's just a fact.
And if you ignore that fact, you'll be destroyed.
And we are because we've ignored it.
So most women, if given the choice between going to work at JP Morgan or staying home and raising their small children, will, of course, choose staying home and raising their small children.
If they're given the choice, they're not given the choice because feminism, total fucking lie.
they think it's their power to get a man like there was this theory that the way you prepare yourself to get the husband you want is to showcase like your linkedin resume and you're and you're who told them that i think you don't think You don't think there are a lot of women who are going to watch this program that may have tuned out by now to say and say, yeah, like I actually thought if I had the big job and had the house that a man would be.
Yeah, but when that class of men is shrinking because testosterone is falling, because of kind of the war on masculinity that we've endured for the last 40 years, when that resource isn't available, then women start to say, well, I've got to put a roof over my own head.
I've got to protect and provide for myself.
And there are a lot of them who would say, where is my protector and provider?
Yeah, and you're not allowed, you're like considered some sort of weird religious freak when you're like, I don't know, unnatural sex acts gives rise to disease.
There are many who will watch this discussion and say, I am that.
I am perfectly suited for marriage.
I have everything.
I've done everything society has asked of me.
I got an advanced degree.
I got a six-figure job.
My LinkedIn is fire.
I do five spinning classes a week.
I look good.
And every man that I find either is on the dating apps and they have so much optionality that there's not really an incentive to anchor your life with someone, or they're losers.
And they can be losers who've inherited money and just have no desire to build something beyond that.
You know, if you had marriage as this thing that gave people financial security, right?
And people, you know, 40s and 50s, people were getting married.
And then you're bound to someone economically and built a life together.
You got married in your 20s and did your thing.
And then when we did no-fault divorce, then marriage really became a contract, like more than anything else.
Just like any other contract, when you're out of the contract, there are certain obligations that you still have to fill financially and otherwise.
And then, you know, the obvious next step is, well, if marriage is a contract, like kind of so is dating in a weird way.
Yes.
Like what you will provide and what I'll provide.
And if, you know, at the end of it, you know, there are women who say, like, yeah, if I'm going to spend my time to go on a date, I want you to pay for it.
I think that's where we are.
And I don't mind that.
Like, when I hear women say that they go out and the guy wants to split the check, to me, there's nothing, there's nothing chivalrous or interesting about that.
I mean, I don't know if you and I are normal, but just like a conventional person goes home and is like, I've got all kinds of views, but like continuity matters to me because I've got descendants.
If you have no descendants, it like ends with you and you don't believe.
Clearly, these people, none of these people believe in God.
So it's like, I don't know.
I got 15, 20 years, five, three years, whatever I have, we don't know.
Well, it was like maybe 10 years ago, some smart friend of mine sent me this list of European leaders.
I'm interested in Europe.
So I feel like I knew a lot.
I didn't know that none of them had kids.
And I remember thinking, that's not, first of all, you can't say anything about that because you want to seem like you're attacking people without kids, which I'm not.
I'm feeling sorry for them.
I'm attacking the idea of childless leadership.
You can't have leaders with no kids because they're not thinking long-term because why would they?
I know a lot of people, but I can't say that there was a single member of Congress I ever interacted with that could talk about any private moment or in-depth conversation they'd ever had with Kamala Harris.
Yeah, I think that Democrats believed that there is this vast part of the population whose dream candidate is some combination of Michelle Obama and Oprah.
And like the closest they could get was like bargain basement Kamala Harris to go and attempt to achieve that archetype and it just didn't work out.
I think that's when you start to see these calls for universal basic income because we will say that there's such wealth being created on a lot of these tech platforms that doesn't get shared broadly.
And I worry that that draw politically is something that will zap the motivation of the country in a bad way.
Just look at this healthcare debate that's happening right now as a microcosm of this trend.
Republicans are trying to cobble together something that they think is a free market approach to healthcare, as if anything in healthcare is a free market.
And Democrats are just saying, we're going to give you free stuff for longer.
And I think that Republicans in swing districts have seen that and said, we can't beat that.
So we have to have our own version of we'll give you free stuff longer.
And you may see these Obamacare credits extended via a discharge petition that does just that.
And that brings the right in America in line with where the right has moved in Europe, which is toward economic liberalism, which I'm not for.
I think you'll see what also has happened in Europe where the richest people, the Bill Ackmans, the bottom feeders like Bill Ackman, non-productive elements of the economy who've just like made billions of dollars shorting stocks.
Those people are totally fine.
They offshore their money.
They find ways around tax compliance.
But it's the level down.
It's the 65-year-old Florida retirees who own some insurance company in Indiana.
Just like the, and I love Steve Bannon, so I don't want our last discussion to come across as a criticism of Steve, but I mean, he's going to run for president on the, on just a straight Elizabeth Warren wealth tax economic agenda.
Yeah, he's going to run for president and say, take the money from those people who have way too much of it, the Bill Ackmans of the world, and I want to give it to you.