Rising Cancer Rates, the Globalist Agenda, and the Big Business Land Grab Making You Poor
Tucker Carlson examines Iowa’s 25% farmland owned by out-of-state investors and corporate seed monopolies (Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta) exploiting farmers with skyrocketing chemical costs—glyphosate up 150%, corn prices down just 2%. He links rising rural cancer rates to pesticide use like Paraquat, tied to Parkinson’s, while criticizing regulatory capture and "woke" anti-nature policies. His campaign for Iowa governor on June 2nd targets land consolidation, corporate dominance, and cultural erosion, framing it as a fight to restore Christian heritage and neighborly stewardship over profit-driven globalism. [Automatically generated summary]
But I went to my dad's cousin, Peter, and he just kind of had the repository of great grandma's photos.
And so I got this palette of boxes of photos.
And I spent, I'm not kidding, hundreds of hours going through photos.
And I was looking for every photo I could find of this old farmhouse.
And I'll tell you, to anybody who wants to be radicalized on what we've lost as a culture, spend that much time going through your great-grandmother's photos and you'll realize the community, the traditions, the pride.
And I put the house back together board by board, counted every single piece of sighting, make sure it matched.
And now we live in the home that was built by my great-great-grandfather.
And I told people, I didn't do that so I could run for governor.
I mean, I started doing this over 10 years ago.
I did it because I wanted my children to understand their story and that their heritage and their culture, what built them, the man who built this house, who I bet hoped someday my kids would live in it, but knew he would never meet them, that that story matters deeply.
You know, when we were looking at this, my wife said, you know, the seat hasn't been open in 20 years.
And there are issues in our state that are not dealing with taxes, that are not dealing with regulations, that are systemic, deep issues that are really causing our people to be hurt.
And I talk about them all the time.
And it was kind of from her this moment of, hey, you know, put up or stop talking about it because this is an opportunity to go make real change.
Well, I think, you know, I've spent my life in large part as an entrepreneur and in businesses, organization I've run or started, I have key metrics that I'm tracking to know the health of my companies or the health of an organization.
And, you know, I think, I think on that list for a state is the physical climate of it.
But there's other deeper issues that I think are more long-term in focus that we, you know, because of this like constant news cycle of what's happening right now that we all have to respond to, which thank God I'm not running for a federal office because it's like never ending and always changing.
But because of because of that, often we're distracted or our eyes are taken off the ball purposefully from the big issues.
And a couple of them are this.
Iowa's number four in the nation for net out migration of our kids, 25 to 29.
Another one would be, you know, 25% of our farmlands now owned by out-of-state investors in funds that don't live in our state.
So our farmers who have had this ancestral connection to the land are now becoming tenants again, something we left Germany in large part for.
You know, just to take a side quest here for a second, I remember when I was doing a lot of that research in my family to understand a lot about the history and what drove them to leave this homeland of theirs, you know, because Iowa's made up, you know, 35, 40% German immigrants came over.
Very industrious people, very family-oriented people, people that had pride in the work that they do.
And so in Germany, when they're defeated, many of them got exiled.
And then many others just left.
Well, what state came online in 1846 was Iowa.
And it was also very agrarian, just like where they came from.
And so many of these people came over.
And I like to talk about this: that, you know, one of the key points in Iowa's history that I'm most proud of is how Iowans responded during the Civil War.
So, you know, we had the Missouri Compromise.
We had the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
And with that, with that decision of, you know, they sort of get to decide whether or not they're going to be free or slave.
There was a lot of wealthy landowning elites that were rushing to the Midwest to try to lobby to create slave states.
You know, but one of my favorite stories in 1861, the governor of Iowa, his name was Governor Samuel Kirkwood.
He was on his plow in his field when a messenger from the Department of War brought a message on horseback to him.
And in it, the president said he needed to put together a company of 750 troops to be ready in two weeks.
And you mind you, this is 15 years after Iowa became a state.
We were in our infancy.
And he said, 750 troops in two weeks, how can that be done?
And two weeks later, 10,000 islands had signed up.
By the end of the Civil War, more islands fought in the Civil War than any other state per capita.
Why was that?
I believe, and there's some evidence, of course, I haven't read deeply in this, that they had just left a country that they saw oppression in, and they fled that, left everything, and they were saying, this isn't going to happen here.
And so I think when you talk about land and you talk about now 25% of our land is now owned by people that don't live in our state, they're not contributing to our communities.
And so one of the things as governor that I want to do is require human-level disclosure of land ownership because I would bet that it's actually more than 25% of our lands.
By the way, if you don't, you know, have to bear the consequences of your actions, then you're much more likely to exploit and degrade the community that you're taking money from.
So like, why wouldn't you?
I mean, why do you care about long-term best practices?
We'd be driving and say, look at what God made for you.
And I still think those things to this day of just like those little pieces that made me appreciate creation.
And one of my favorite clips from your show ever, ever, is when you were on with Bobby Kennedy and he was having that discussion about how nature is how we connect deeply with God.
And you get a dividend, like you rent out the land.
And so one of the things I kind of complain or opine about a lot is that our land isn't an asset class.
It actually was meant as the inheritance for the sons and daughters of our state to build their lives, their communities, and their families.
And when they're tenants on that land and they're paying high dollar rent, because the only way you can justify a high price like that is very high rent, you're stripping away a lot of, and go back to say it's like kind of the spiritual aspect of this, and that land is best when it's owned and farmed by the same person.
We know this.
We know this from if you own rental properties or whatever it may be.
Like there's a connection of stewardship.
that comes with that to know that I'm passing this piece of ground on to my grandkids and their kids and their kids.
And that's what it should be.
But that, that is being actively taken away in our state.
And so two other things that I think are big systemic issues that are on my scorecard, as I'd say, is one is our farmers are actively being exploited by big ag companies.
When I was growing up, born in Iowa, we had over 300 seed and input companies, you know, fertilizer and agrochemical companies that were selling to our farmers.
Today, that number's three that control 85% of the market.
Over 90% of seed technology is owned by two companies.
Yeah, they're sure mentioned a lot in court still, but they're not a company.
But so if you look at the long-term trend, that anytime there's a rise in commodity prices, these input costs go up, even though there's not a direct correlating factor.
You know, there's a study out of the University of Illinois, and this study compared the cost of farming in Brazil to the cost of farming in Illinois, Iowa, basically.
And you have to understand that the three big companies in America that provide these inputs are also the same three big companies of Brazil, Bayer, Corteva, and Syngenta.
That study said that for growing corn using the same application rate, that they're charging Brazilian farmers about $150 less per acre than they are Iowa farmers.
Well, the real answer is because they're an unchecked monopoly and competition doesn't exist.
There's tacit collusion.
But here's how it actually works.
They have what they call regional-based pricing.
But what it really is, is this.
When they look at their pricing, they base it on the yield that you're going to create.
So let's say you have more productive land, even though you're using the same amount of product, they're going to take more.
You have less productive land, even though you use the same amount of product, they're going to take more.
It's wrong.
And I'll give credit to Brooke Rollins and Donald Trump and the administration.
They're talking about bringing antitrust and investing in this with the Department of Justice.
And one of the things I pledged to do, that if I'm governor of Iowa, I'm going to lead the charge to bring antitrust suits against these companies that are exploiting our farmers because they're taking every dollar they possibly can.
Well, I mean, it just depends on the most common product for fertilizers inhydrous ammonia.
It's used in the fall.
It's where a lot of the nitrogen comes from.
But then you have other products that are products from earth, potassium, potash, those things.
But you look at the trend of the pricing in these, you know, I think it was five years ago, in the past five years, nitrogen fertilizers went up 150% and the price of corn is down 2%.
So farmers are, they're really being, I would say, extorted in this process.
The prices are low, despite the fact they're American-made.
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Tell you something I was really surprised by, and I don't know much about it, but I was hunting on a farm in November, right before Thanksgiving, a big, big, big working farm.
And I was with the ranch manager in a truck, and he said, this is the truck we used to spray Roundup.
But when you can research this, your listeners can research this.
It is used to induce Parkinson's in research settings.
I mean, so when I talk about these products, you know, I think what farmers want is to understand the truth, to like know that their government is telling them the truth about these products.
But as with many other things, the corporate capture is so heavy.
And so when you talk about glyphosate or glyphosate-based herbicides, Roundup is one of them.
There's many glyphate-based herbicides.
The EPA has studied this for years.
We know way more than we've ever known about this.
And we also know that there are significant risks associated with its use.
And so, for example, one of the most known cases is the case of the Groundskeeper in California, the first major lawsuit against Monsanto.
And this was a man who was his job was to work for the school districts and spray glyphosate.
And the hose broke on his pack or in his little cart, and it ended up showering him with this product.
In a matter of months, he had lesions all over his body.
And he sends emails to Monsanto asking, what should I do here?
I mean, they're very like, I need help.
Like, not, I'm trying to blame you.
He's like, what do I do to solve this problem?
Well, if you fast forward in that trial, when they were in the discovery process, the judge agreed to make a large portion of the discovery confidential, meaning that it wasn't, you know, wasn't to be released.
But the plaintiffs could challenge something or request the disclosure of it, and they could request a meet and confer to talk about them.
And they requested it at one point.
And the Monsanto attorneys, I think, literally said the words, go away.
And so, but there was a stipulation there that said if they didn't, if Monsanto didn't put in there another request to continue the confidentiality within 30 days that the confidentiality was waived, they forgot to respond.
And so now we have millions of pages of documents called the Monsanto papers, millions.
And in those documents, it is an absolute masterclass in corporate capture to the effect of, you know, that email that he sent to the company, they opened it.
They read it.
They forwarded around.
What should we do here?
And they just didn't respond to him.
I'm a man who's like hurting, who's the initial email.
But in there, there's also things like there was a time and place where another governmental body was going to be doing a study on the safety of glyphosate or Roundup in this case.
And the EPA official that Monsanto was working with at the time got wind of this.
And in the email with the Monsanto official, he's recounting his conversation with this EPA official.
And in it, he said, the official said to him on the phone, he quotes it in the email, if I can kill this, I should get a medal.
And he did.
He prevented this other governmental body from doing their own independent research on the safety and effectiveness of glyphosate of Roundup.
And other egregious examples of, and I say this to say this, very often I'm talking to farmers who I love, who are my friends and my neighbors and my family.
And I am one of them.
We actively farm our own land.
I work with young farmers to help them have an opportunity to be on land.
We share crop, but I'm in there.
I'm doing this.
The most common comment I get from people is if it wasn't safe, they wouldn't let me use it.
And I'm just here to say that's a lie.
Just like they were captured during COVID and the medical establishment captured agencies, just like Bobby Kennedy is fighting right now and Donald Trump is fighting right now.
These agencies have been captured for a long time and they've been lying to the consumers about the safety and efficacy of their products.
And my whole goal here, I'm not here to sit and say we should ban X, Y, or Z. That's not what I'm talking about.
I mean, I think there's certain things like Paraquat probably should not be used.
But what I want is good science so farmers can say, do I want to use this product?
And we can say, should this product be allowed?
And also know, if I'm going to use this product, this is how it should be used.
I mean, when you have commercials, I mean, we know how glyphosate enters the bloodstream.
We know that if it's on your skin, about 30% enters your bloodstream.
About 10% of that is through cardiac output.
About 10% goes into your bone marrow.
In bone marrow, glyphosate disrupts the replication of hematopoietic stem cells.
They're differentiating from red to white.
It's genotoxic.
There's 50 studies that show this.
Like we know how it happens.
And yet there's commercials showing people using this products in flip-flops and shorts, just saying, like, be cavalier about it.
We have many products we use.
You go into my shop at the farm.
There's many products in the shelf that, if they're used improperly, are bad for your health.
And they warn about that on the label.
These do not, not in that same way.
But in these papers were also examples like this.
In 2000, there was a study called the Williams study.
It's the most cited study on the safety of glyphosate, the most cited.
99.9% of all papers that cite the safety of glyphosate cite this study.
Last month, that study was retracted because it was found that Monsanto executives wrote it, wrote the study.
But here's maybe even the worst part.
We found that out in 2017 and it was retracted in 2025.
The Monsanto executive actually said when he's sending this back, he better not have any revisions.
That's what he said.
And so, look, you know, I think oftentimes when you talk about this subject, especially in my home state, there's this desire to paint you as some liberal hippie that doesn't like farming.
One of the reasons you love it is because of its physical beauty, the landscape.
I mean, America is great because it's got great people and because it's inherently great, just beautiful.
And anyone who's despoiling nature is an enemy of the country.
Super simple.
Anyone building ugly buildings, spraying poisonous chemicals, those are our enemies.
Those are not our friends.
I don't think it's complicated at all.
And that's not the liberal position.
The liberals are the ones who are putting solar, bulldozing trees to build solar farms.
Let's just be clear about what this is.
It's an aggressive, coordinated effort to defile God's creation by people who hate God.
Not hard.
Abortion is directly related to building strip malls.
Sorry.
They're both destructions of beauty and of God's creation.
That's what I think.
And I'm not a liberal.
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And of course they're looking to say, like, look, number one, many of these guys would like to try different things, but when you're operating in razor-thin margins, the idea of trying a new method of farming is not that appealing because like, what if it doesn't work?
And I actually can't, you know, keep the farm next year.
And so these, these are our people that enjoy hunting, enjoy fishing, enjoy nature, want to be outdoors.
So you can say that people who are spending the day outside getting physical exercise 12 months a year, when those people have higher cancer rates than someone working in a cube in Des Moines, then you start to think, hmm, maybe there are external factors we should be looking at.
And that's that's, you know, and I'll talk to farmers about this, or I'll talk to people that maybe are big in the ag community and they hear these talking points.
They'll say, like, applicators of these products have lower cancer rates.
And they're not wrong.
That's actually an accurate statement, meaning farmers in general as a whole can have lower cancer rates.
But when you hone in specifically on non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, leukemia, they have much higher cancer rates.
The lifestyle of the job is going to give you more exercise.
It's going to put you out.
And so there are these things that lower it, but you hear these industry talking points about like, actually, there's lower in total.
It's like, yeah, but your chance of getting these specific cancers linked to these products is much higher.
And so even with the rate of cancer in our state, you know, I'm in a governor's race right now.
And even with the rate of cancer in our state, there's not one person talking about these things that I'm talking about right now with the likely causes of the cancer in our state.
I fear most that it's not a fear, but most I think that the ag associations, especially the ones that are not member-driven, you know, that are constituted by actual farmers that take large checks from the companies that I'm mentioning right now.
I think the most likely scenario that everybody's warned me about is they're just going to come and try to destroy me.
I'm literally here because I could get into tears thinking about the people that I know that have gotten cancer.
My own father got it.
He was a crop consultant.
So his job was to go into fields, check for pests, weeds.
I used to do this with him as a child.
I had a lot of fun doing it.
He'd write a report and he'd bring it back to the farmers.
And this is part of his job.
He did it very well.
And this is just the norm.
It's what you did.
And he'd recommend this is what you should apply.
He did that for over two decades.
And he was diagnosed with one of these exact types of cancer.
But this is where I think this hits home spiritually too, is that I think Iowans, and myself included, about three and a half months ago, I went back to my hometown that I grew up in in Iowa for the funeral of my best friend from high school for his father.
He died of cancer again in the 60s.
And I tell people, like, I don't know how many more of these funerals of men and women in their 60s I can go to when their parents lived to be 80.
Like we're losing the wisdom of an entire generation of people.
I often tell people, I'm not running for office because of policy.
I'm running because of culture.
And they say, well, what does that mean?
And I'll say, look, ask a Republican in Dearborn, Michigan, how much he cares about his tax rate.
Or does he care that the Muslim call to prayers on the loudspeaker five times a day and he doesn't know where he's waking up anymore and his culture's gone?
We have to protect our culture.
Our founders intended that to be the case.
We have a huge amount of talk about founders, primarily when it comes to fiscal issues and things like this.
We forget that I think it was John Adams that said something along the lines of public virtue is dependent on private virtue and public virtue is the only foundation of a republic.
And so we hear these things and this is a bit of a bit of a tangent here, Tucker, but I've had to have a bit of a realization on this and to understand better what's going on because I grew up in an era where libertarian thinking was very pervasive.
It was all over the place.
I agreed with much of it, and there's still things I do agree with.
I was a fellow at the Cato Institute, so you don't need to apologize in my presence.
No, I know what you mean.
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People are recalculating, unfortunately, because they have no choice.
The last few years have taught us that.
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I have to tell you, the amount of arguments that I hear from this generation that has subscribed to this religion of economic thinking, which by the way, our founders did not support.
They were in favor of tariffs.
The states all had laws, but primarily all of them had laws to protect moral virtue.
Like this is a part of what they did.
They knew it.
And they knew because the state has a role in that.
And we are a Christian nation with a Christian form of government.
Like our constitution could not have been created by any other religion.
You're not endowed by a creator.
You don't have inalienable rights.
In Christianity, you do.
The divinity of the individual is real.
We're made in the image of God.
And so I have these arguments with people where I'm saying, look, 25% of our lands owned by ISIT investors.
I'd like to raise their property taxes.
I'd like to disincentivize this thing that's been happening in our state and create a new category of tax for investment land for people that are coming in and prospecting.
And so when I, but when I say this, it's oftentimes people that were, you know, that were, oftentimes it's people that were really affected by the economic thinking that came out of the Chicago School of Economics.
And when I trace much of this back, I look at what happened in the 1980s.
I think Ronald Reagan did a lot of great things.
But there's also this market fundamentalism that really took over.
And then you look at what's been the repercussions of that, this idea that unrestrained capitalism is what we worship.
It's like even the fathers of modern economics, Adam Smith, even David Ricardo, who was a person that basically developed the idea of comparative advantage.
It's a big thing.
Yes, free trade is good if you protect your national interests first.
Like, for instance, the silicon microchip was invented by a man from Iowa, Robert Noyce, who's with Intel.
And then you look at what's happened now in our country from a product that was invented in our country.
We produce 10% of them.
And all, basically, all of the high-tech versions of this, we can't produce.
We don't have the technology.
So the ones that would be a military application are coming from somewhere else.
So there's this idea that the market matters overall.
I'm saying, no, that's not.
We don't worship the market.
Like the most egregious example of this, I think, is when you look at what happened through free trade in the Rust Belt and throughout the Midwest, where you had people that were told that their jobs are being shipped overseas, but they'd be replaced by high-tech jobs that then they'd be trained by, which by the way is a lie.
It didn't happen.
Matter of fact, the biggest benefits that came from that were for the leaders of large companies that chose to do what Adam Smith said not to do, which was, you know, free trade was about, was about one country doing something really well, another country doing another thing really well.
I mean, the hundreds of thousands of deaths that have come from this, when you take work in purpose away from people and you sell them a lie, that then it's going to be replaced by these high-tech jobs or high-tech training for jobs, and it doesn't happen.
And then you have these practices where people, you know, like, here's a new customer.
And this is where I believe that we get bogged down in the like the policy and the politics of this whole thing.
And we forget about the grander story of who we are as a people, that we're endowed by our creator, that we're here for a big purpose.
You know, I spent a number of years building schools.
And one of the things we'd say is that we believe every young person is a hero on their journey to find a calling and change the world.
Like that was the inspirational line that we would say basically every day.
Like that's who we are.
That's why we're here.
And a lot of this creation has been is being taken away, as you mentioned.
And AI is not the least of which.
I tell my kids all the time: look, use AI for research, never let it write for you.
Writing is how you organize your thoughts.
It's how you can think something through to separate the wheat from the chaff, to understand how to think critically, to test your ideas, and then get in debate and things like that.
You can't have a machine do that.
This uniquely human thing is for us to come up with these ideas based on our unique life experience.
Actually, this I say, it's like for the longest time, we accepted technology.
And look, farming is a big in this too.
It's like, look, it reduced the burden of labor.
And there's a certain part of the point to that, that's probably good.
Meaning like hand plowing a field is a really difficult task.
Using a tractor, okay, that's probably okay, right?
It is okay.
Obviously, I'm joking.
But then when you start to see what it's being used for now to replace human beings, meaning you can continue to have conversations with this grandmother long after she's passed away and she'll give you her unique thoughts.
Well, that's completely stripping away the divinity of humanity.
This idea that we're creating God's image, that we each have something unique to share, and that humanity is something to be protected and is very special in the history of, in the history of the universe, it's very special.
You know, I, I maybe shouldn't say this on here, but I drive a Tesla and it has an autopilot feature.
And there's a period of time when I'd be driving with my kids and somewhere and I might like, you know, pull, pull out the Wendell Berry poem book and give them.
I would actually have the kids take turns in the car reading a poem to each other.
Because, look, understanding these ideas, I don't know if there's other than faith and they're tied in together, inextricably woven together are the ideas that Wendell Berry puts forward in the ideas of our faith.
You can't separate them because it's about creation.
It's about protecting that and understanding that we were told to tend the garden.
We're told to subdue, but not destroy, of course.
And so I would have the kids read this because it's like, I want you guys to know, like, look, if I'm gone tomorrow and you knew two things about me, that I loved my savior and I loved the creation.
If you're listening to Wendell Berry poems in the car with your kids, like I'm, tell me where the fundraiser is because I'm going because I just, we need more of this in America.
And we don't ask ourselves enough, how will this change us and our relationships and our understanding of God and the world?
And I think that of labor-saving devices, I find myself, I'm the product of, you know, America and at its peak, and there's not enough labor, actually.
And I find myself trying to eliminate labor-saving devices from my life merely so I will have the experience of labor.
And I would say this: it's a feeling that brings pride that also, if you understand your own history of your family and your story, that you can connect it to what's happened generation and generation and generation before.
I think so much of where we've went wrong is that, you know, I was at a, gosh, I was at a funeral for a woman that I loved dearly.
Her name was Becky Elder, and she was an agrarian from Kansas and, you know, lived in Kansas for a while.
And she was somebody who started schools.
She was an amazing woman.
I mean, like, this could get me emotional, but I was at her funeral about a week ago.
And she was, I would call a daughter of the prairie, like loved creation, tended it, had their own farms, all these things.
And her son was reading something about her.
And he said, one of the most common sins is forgetting, forgetting where we come from, forgetting our heritage, forgetting that these places really matter.
And so, like, when I'm in my community and I'm seeing the people I'm surrounded with, in large part, you know, it's like many of many of these places feel forgotten, especially by our politicians who didn't ask these questions of what will these changes do to our community.
I have a defensive mechanism that comes up in me to say, like, I'm going to hear it.
I'm going to fight for you.
I'm going to do it.
And I don't know what that is.
I don't know where that came from, but I would just say that God put something on me to say, look, maybe I win this governor's race.
Maybe I don't.
My whole life is going to be focused on these issues because they're issues of caring for your neighbor.
And it's the one of the two commands I've been given by Jesus.
And so, you know, that's why we work with, you know, we could do farming a different way and I could make more money on that.
I have a family that I love that I want to like work with specifically because it's additive to the whole equation.
You know, when my great-grandparents were living on the farm, I found all these documents and I hear stories about them from the community.
You know, it's so interesting is like we talk about we don't know who owns our land.
You know, before when I was growing up and I talk about these pieces of land, we've bought some of these pieces because the people have passed on and oftentimes they'll want to sell to us because they know where my heart is and they don't want it to go into an auction and they don't want it going to somebody from out of state out of the country.
We don't know.
We call the pieces of land by the last name of the people that lived there forever.
And so when I was talking early on about this idea of something lost, I remember hearing some of these stories.
And one of the stories I really loved was that my great-grandmother, my great-grandpa, when they were on this farm, these Iowa communities used to be dotted with these small farmsteads all over.
Many of them have just been bulldozed and farmed over because people are growing and growing and growing farm.
It's a, you know, it's foundational, not just to the state, but to us as a people.
I think it's something in like our soul that like working with our hands in the dirt with animals, with family, with multiple generations.
There's a book by a guy named Alan Carlson, I think it was.
It's called The Natural Family and Where It Belongs.
And I had another basically radicalizing moment for me was reading this and realizing this man said so many things that I didn't know how to say.
Just that that setup of farmstead and neighboring farms that care for each other and that did a lot of life together was the most in-tuned and connected.
I think spiritually we could probably say we have been as a society or community.
You know, in longer form discussions, I find that it's very, very good.
But I think that politics has been so overtaken with this like bumper sticker ideology, which is like, I think somebody once said a bumper sticker is a substitute for thought or something like that.
I really like, I've really worked hard to, you know, be on our farm, to farm it, to have my kids understand that, to work in education and these types of things.
I've really worked hard to do that.
This was not something that I had just like saying, you know what?
Timing's like, I've been waiting for this forever.
We're doing this.
It was more that I thought, you know, there's no term limits on the governor of Iowa.
The longest serving governor in the history of America is Iowa's former governor Terry Brenstead.
So in my head and in my heart, as I was talking to my wife about this, it's like the next person who gets elected governor could be governor till I die.
Because I think if it was, you'd require people running for office to connect with you at a deeper level to actually understand what you're going through and to know that they care about those issues.
Because, you know, I don't care how low our taxes are.
If I would say this, if our kids are leaving and our people are dying from cancer, we are not in what I'd call successful territory.
And the beauty of economics is it's supposedly a species of science, which means it can be tested.
So if you have an economic system in progress longitudinally over a period of time, then you can assess with the highest degree of accuracy whether it worked or not, right?
Because you look at the outcomes.
And by that measure, socialism, communism is like the worst possible failure.
Our current system is not anything like that, but it's not a, it's not a win.
It's a failure because look around.
So like what we're doing isn't working.
I don't care what they tell you at some think tank or what should happen.
I've lived long enough to see what actually happened and no.
And look at some of these new ideas that are coming out, which by the way, it's like the fact that these have to be stated is kind of crazy.
And then the fact that we get pushback on it.
Like I'm somebody who firmly believes that the priorities of my government and my economy should be solely focused on making life better for the people that live in my state and my country.
Like not racist.
Not for big business, not for foreign countries.
And I think so many people just thought that was the case.
And then meaning like people that were not really paying attention, but it's like the politicians are all telling me, like, we're going to work on this low tax.
We're going to work on this thing.
It's like, but hold on.
What, just a day ago, 81 Republicans voted to keep $315 million of spending for the national endowment for democracy?
And it's like after everything that Elon Musk went through, after all of what these people did, all of what they took in the news, all of like the conflicts and relationships that broke down of this, that one thing that we know is a front organization in large part is now getting hundreds of millions of dollars from our government and Republicans are voting yes on it.
But, you know, like somebody asked me the other day, what do you think the most pressing issue facing America is?
And I like taking out the spiritual, because spirituality is intertwined, but taking that out, I said, I think it's that our government is run by unelected people and we don't know who they are.
It seemed as if something spiritual happened at that point within our country.
And it has to do with the complete disregard for truth, honesty, or like the American public deserving to know what's happening.
And then, you know, I read a tweet one day.
I don't know who said it.
Maybe it's Russell Brand or somebody that said something along the lines of like the future success of our country and the Kennedys is like intertwined in some way.
And I would hear these baby boomers say that was the day everything changed.
And they were silly, not, they were not serious people, but they could feel something that was true.
And that was clearly true, that a lot did change.
Everything changed when he was assassinated in a way that I did not appreciate till I was much older.
But they were right.
They were right in saying that.
And the fact that 63 years later, you know, CIA still will not, this is a fact, will not divulge all the information that it has on his murder, despite a bunch of laws from Congress, despite a executive order from the president of the United States a year ago.
They're still hiding it.
Clearly, there were, you know, probably a lot of people involved, probably a foreign country clearly involved.
Our own government clearly involved.
So like, and they're still lying about it.
It's wild, but if the truth sets you free, then lives and slay lies enslave you.
Imagine what we could have done for our children and our communities.
So when you look at this and you're, and you're, you're called this conspiracy.
I'm not called that because I don't ever talk about this, but people are called conspiracy theorists for bringing up this idea of replacement migration.
So again, we can just bring science to bear on this.
Is the native population being replaced?
I don't know.
Let's check the census.
Answer, yes.
How about we do it by zip code?
I'm 56, so let's go back to 1970, the census of 1970.
Just spend an afternoon reading that.
And so anyone who tells you you're a bigot or you're engaging in conspiracy theorizing is, you know, is not, is lying and probably lying in order to hurt you.
As you could probably imagine, I'm going to go over there and dig as deep as I can in all this stuff because it's, you know, some people get the bug for learning this about their family.
I am that human.
Like, I love this.
Like, I love learning about my history and heritage.
And, you know what?
Like 150 years in America is a thing to be very proud of.
Yes.
But also, like, they likely did not want to leave where they were at.
They didn't want to go three weeks on a boat in the stowage.
And so these voices of people who understand the culture that our ancestors created, and it's something to be so proud of.
It's so inclusive.
It reduces suffering.
It is welcoming to people.
But the idea that you can come in and try to put something else over top of that.
And Charlie Kirk said this beautifully.
He said something in my butcher's words.
And I'm sorry for that.
I first met him in 2011.
I think we were both speaking at the same event.
I said something along the lines of the reason we're in a constitutional crisis is because we have a Christian form of government, but we have elected people that are not following that custom and religion.
I'm intentionally not going to ask you about the politics of it.
You're going to have plenty of time to talk about that.
But I think this gives, you know, anyone who has, again, watched to this point is either, you know, like, oh my gosh, I'm sending this man money or stop him.
But I am interested, like, when really quick, last question.
And so I believe we have a really, really good shot at this.
And I believe our message, the time for the message that we're saying is now.
And that there's been a, I think there's been a void that's been there, and people are wanting politicians and people running for office because I've never ran for office.
I'm not a politician.
They're wanting people that will speak truth to them and that will talk about the big issues, even if the donors in the special interests say, I've told them, I don't want your money.
I'm not looking for your money.
I'm actually here to stop a lot of the practices that you're putting in place.
And so I've said, I'm my own biggest donor to this campaign.