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Aug. 1, 2022 - Timcast IRL - Tim Pool
02:07:12
Timcast IRL - Pelosi Trip To Taiwan Sparks World War Three Fears w/ Rick Santorum & Mark Meckler
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mark meckler
26:47
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rick santorum
51:07
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tim pool
42:46
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hannah claire brimelow
04:49
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
you you
tim pool
I know everybody I heard that I see the chat people are saying Tim you promised
as a civil war, not World War Three.
What's going on with this Nancy Pelosi and Taiwan stuff?
So the trip is confirmed.
We've got U.S.
officials and Taiwanese officials confirming Nancy Pelosi at least is expected to be visiting Taiwan.
China has been posturing rather intensely, putting out a video showing their military capabilities.
And we even had a Chinese state propagandist saying outright they would shoot down or could shoot down Pelosi's plane, particularly if she had a fighter jet escort.
So we'll see how much of that is bluster.
Many people are wondering why she's even doing this.
What's the purpose?
Well, we'll talk all about that.
We've got a couple other stories, too, that are rather interesting, of course.
We've got just chaos as it pertains to the economy, and I'm sure that'll come up.
But we've got a discussion about the Convention of States.
A new article has come out showing conservatives are 15 states away from calling a Convention of States So I know when you say, where's the Civil War, Tim?
I know the big news is Pelosi, but the convention of states thing is here.
You know, maybe they'll lose their minds over that.
And then at the same time, I think what's also equally interesting as well, the corporate press is freaking out that conservatives might actually get a convention of states.
The Democrats are actually rather close to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact coming into play, which would effectively create a popular vote for the presidency.
So, uh, Should be interesting nonetheless.
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Joining us today to talk about all of this and more is Senator Rick Santorum.
rick santorum
Hello, how are you?
tim pool
Would you like to introduce yourself?
rick santorum
I'd be happy to.
I'm Rick Santorum.
The most important thing in my life is I'm a father of seven kids, and I have one grandchild and two on the way, which is really exciting for me.
I am a former United States Senator, served the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for 12 years, four years in the House before that, and Ran for president twice.
I always say you should run for president.
Seriously.
You're saying I should or they should?
It's one of the great experiences.
Anybody that's ever run for president, it's a tremendous experience of learning this country and understanding how the political process works. And for me, as somebody
who came out of it, who went in there and basically had no money and was not given any chance and
ended up winning 11 states and almost winning the nomination, it should, if you put your best
into it, should renew your faith in American politics. But even as far as you got, not everybody could
get anywhere near that. You don't know.
You don't know.
I mean, look, I mean, you got a guy who's the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, almost became, you know, and now is the number one person for president.
Look, you have no idea how America, no one would have predicted Donald Trump doing what he did.
And so don't.
People say, oh, it's only for the privileged.
It's just not.
You have all sorts of opportunities.
And you can have a billionaire like Michael Bloomberg and get nowhere.
And you can have someone who didn't even, who didn't even spend a million dollars on his campaign and won the Iowa caucuses.
tim pool
A lot of that.
rick santorum
So it can happen.
tim pool
A lot of that Bloomberg money went to me, actually, because he was buying YouTube ads.
And so all of a sudden, everyone on YouTube was talking politics, was seeing these Bloomberg ads pop up, and they're getting paid for it.
So I definitely want to talk to you about your time, you know, in the Senate and all that stuff, too.
So thanks for joining us.
We also have Mark Meckler.
mark meckler
Good to be with you.
So my background is legal.
I was a lawyer for most of my professional career.
Ended up stumbling into politics during the days of the Tea Party.
Founded the largest Tea Party organization in the nation.
Ultimately 23 million people.
Sort of changed the political landscape.
And then I bailed on it because it became part of Washington DC.
I watched it get co-opted.
You have the biggest swing election in the history of America since 1938, takes place in 2010.
Literally by 2012, most of the folks that were elected had been eaten by the swamp.
I was getting ready to leave and I had a friend who said, you can't quit politics.
I said, yes, I can.
I can go back to my chickens.
I'm a chicken guy too.
So we're living out in the country.
And he said, look, we can't give up.
The problem in politics really isn't the people that we're electing or not electing.
The problem is we broke the structure of government.
And if you want to repair the structure, there's a constitutional method for doing so found in article five.
That's what we're doing.
Trying to call a convention of states to propose amendments to take power away from DC and give it back to the people.
That's what I spend my time doing now.
I've been in 48 states in the last couple of years.
I'm just on the ground with grassroots all over the country like Senator Santorum.
I love the American people.
I have faith in the people, just not in the government anymore.
tim pool
I dig it.
I like the idea.
There's some pros and there's cons to it, but we'll get into all that stuff.
We're also hanging out with Hannah Clare.
hannah claire brimelow
Hi, I'm a writer for TimCast.com.
My name's Hannah-Claire Brimlow.
I'm filling in for Ian, who is away.
I have no facts about gems for you.
I wish I did.
tim pool
Yeah, or graphene.
hannah claire brimelow
Yeah, Tim had to explain to me what graphene was.
I really feel like somewhere along the line, the American science education has let me down.
mark meckler
You have a bottle of graphene sitting right there though, so it's very impressive.
hannah claire brimelow
Yes, a patent pending product is sitting next to me.
It makes me nervous.
I don't know if it's going to catch on fire.
tim pool
And Lydia's on vacation.
So joining us handling all of the camera work is Chris.
unidentified
Yep.
tim pool
There you go.
All right, let's jump into this first story.
We got this from Politico.
Pelosi Taiwan trip overrides Chinese military threats.
Military and diplomatic efforts limit Beijing to angry bluster.
I mean, simply put, we only need the first opening paragraph here.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will visit Taiwan on Tuesday, decisively ending weeks of wrangling between the United States and China about whether she should make the trip.
Pelosi's controversial stop in Taipei, which would make her the highest-ranking U.S.
official to visit the self-governing island in decades, indicates the Pentagon has downgraded its assessment of a potential credible Chinese military threat to the Speaker's safety.
Beijing has strongly protested Pelosi's Taiwan visit and issued lurid warnings of a stern Chinese response.
A visit to Taiwan by her would constitute a gross interference in China's internal affairs and lead to a very serious situation and grave consequences, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Monday.
I'm assuming you guys saw as well.
You had that guy from Global Times basically say, we'll shoot her plane down.
So I'm wondering, I got a couple of questions.
Why do you think she's going?
Is the threat really, is there really a threat?
Or is the World War III stuff just people posting it because it gets clicks?
rick santorum
Well, once she announced she was going, she had to go.
Because when China reacted the way they did, the speaker, the third-ranking person in our government, the speaker in the United States, can't be bullied to going to an allied country because of China.
China is the big threat to our country.
It will be for For my lifetime and probably a lifetime of everybody listening to this podcast.
China is a serious player.
We don't take them as seriously as we should.
And I'm very happy.
I don't agree with Nancy Pelosi on anything, but I agree that she should go to Taiwan.
I'm glad she's going to Taiwan.
Why?
I don't know why she's going, but I'm glad she is.
And I'm glad she stood up to the Chinese and is going tomorrow.
unidentified
Yeah.
tim pool
What do you think, Mark?
mark meckler
You know, I get a lot of fundraising texts from politicians on both sides of the aisle.
It's a great fundraising ploy for Nancy Pelosi.
I mean, really, you're going to see texts about this, about how she's saving the free world.
And so I think part of it is a political play and she's trying to set herself aside from the Biden administration.
They're going to get their backsides handed to them in this election.
And I think she wants to be able to blame Biden and separate herself from that.
tim pool
Really?
She's running for re-election?
She's going to keep going?
How old is she?
rick santorum
She's 83?
mark meckler
She's already been embalmed already, so she can go for a long time.
tim pool
She's older than I thought she was.
I thought she was just shy of 80.
unidentified
She's 83?
tim pool
I think.
rick santorum
I could be wrong.
mark meckler
Yeah, I think that's correct.
rick santorum
I think that's right.
mark meckler
Yeah, I mean, crazy old.
I think there's a problem we have in our government in general that people just serve literally until they pass away, and it's never the way it was intended to be.
I think this is one of the fundamental problems in our country.
tim pool
I'm worried about military conflict, especially with China.
And I wonder why it is, because, you know, Rick, you mentioned China's the big threat, I think.
I agree.
mark meckler
Absolutely.
tim pool
Why is it Russia 24-7 on corporate press, mainstream media, Democrats, even a bunch of Republicans just scream Russia all day?
rick santorum
Well, because Russia attacked Ukraine.
I mean, no one was screaming Russia.
tim pool
I mean, Trump and Russia and the Russian collusion.
rick santorum
Well, everyone was screaming Russia because of Russian collusion, but they weren't concerned about Russia as a great threat to the country.
China is the great threat.
And candidly, we made China the great threat.
We had a policy, which, by the way, I was supportive of and thought at the time it was a viable policy, which was to try to engage China, Trying to bring China into the 21st century and build up capitalism within China and markets and that that would move China toward a more peaceful and free world.
All we've done is armed them with many more resources than they would have ever had if they stuck in there.
old pre-market days and made them a real threat.
We have to start acting differently.
That's a whole nother discussion, but we're not doing enough to confront China right now.
tim pool
Do you regret your position on China?
rick santorum
Well, do I regret it?
Was it a good idea?
Was it a viable option?
It hadn't been tried before, and you can say, well, we tried it, it didn't work.
I hate going back and saying, well, you know, it was a bad idea.
Well, no, it was actually an interesting idea.
Could it have worked?
Maybe with a different leader in China, maybe with different, I don't know, but it didn't work.
You know, I think we just have to recognize it didn't work.
mark meckler
There's a long term misunderstanding of Americans of culture internationally, I think we're very ethnocentric, with a Western cultural view, the idea that you are going to take a country with a 3000 year history, and change their view of themselves in the world, you know, they call themselves the one sun, there's only one sun in the galaxy.
And that's China.
They've always believed that.
And so I think it's just, and I think we do this, I'm not pointing at you in particular, but I think we do this as a nation that we look at other countries and we think, oh, they have the same aspirations as we do.
You know, they want to be part of the world community.
It was never China's aspiration.
I'm not saying I understood this back then.
I'm saying in hindsight, and I think we need to look at the world more realistically, where are they actually coming from?
What's their history?
What do they really want?
Now, not what can we do?
What will they do if we're nice to them?
Which tends to be our foreign policy.
rick santorum
The only thing I would say is we have to look at it in the context of when this happened.
This was basically the late 80s and 90s.
And the Soviet Union had fallen.
The Iron Curtain had fallen.
And so we were feeling our oats that, in fact, we can affect the course of geopolitics.
If you remember, books were written, the end of history, right?
Democracy and capitalism, that was going to be it.
And that was humorous, but If you look at how things had gone, thanks to Reagan and others who stood up against the Soviets and did infiltrate them with a lot of information about free speech and capitalism, you can make the argument it sort of worked.
Now, what's happened since then has been a cluster, but it was not an irrational thing to contemplate at the time.
tim pool
I think it's the inverse.
I think you had a lot of special interests in the United States that thought, you know, we could democratize China, we could, you know, bring capitalism there.
Instead, what's ended up happening is the weird authoritarian, communist, woke stuff has been seeping into our side of things.
Our movies are being edited to placate China, not the other way around.
mark meckler
Yeah, and I think, look, there's a military power, raw military power, what they do in South China Sea.
The economic power and their understanding of economic leverage has been extraordinary.
The amount of Chinese money that's flowed into this country, it's not that hard to buy most people.
I hate to say that, but when you go to somebody and it's, here's a few million dollars, and people never been able to imagine that kind of money, and all you have to do is be nice about China, censor some stuff about China, people do it.
tim pool
Do you know the stories about how the Chinese would manipulate POWs?
Or, you know, in war?
unidentified
No.
tim pool
What they would do is, they would say something like, if you want to eat today, you need to tell us one thing that you think is wrong with America.
Or something to that effect, like whatever country they were from.
And they would say something like, we've got a homelessness problem.
Right?
Of course America's not perfect.
But it's one small step at a time.
That's the psychological manipulation.
And I feel like we're experiencing that on a grand scale.
I don't know, you know, we've had guests here who are researchers on China who tell us that we know about what they call the 50 cent army.
Are you guys familiar with that?
mark meckler
No.
tim pool
That citizens of China or people who work in propaganda get paid 50 cents every time they post something pro-China or disparaging about its enemies.
So you go on social media and what happens?
You go on Twitter, you go on YouTube, for instance.
And you say bad things, they flag you, they mass flag you, they report you.
You go on Twitter, all of a sudden you're being inundated, ratioed with people being like, you're wrong and you don't understand.
They have these people attempting to manipulate public opinion.
I think we had a lot of politicians who really, really underestimated the future of what warfare was going to be like.
rick santorum
Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.
We are at war with China.
And I know that people say, oh, you're a warmonger and warmonger.
No, no, I'm not saying that we are.
In fact, the problem is we're not at war with China.
We're not treating China the way they're treating us.
The espionage that goes on here, the stealing of technology, I mean, it's just it is incredible how much of American-created ingenuity has been expropriated to China, and yet we allow thousands, maybe millions, I don't know, of Chinese to come here, to go and get educated here in our countries, and bring all that technology back.
hannah claire brimelow
Buy farmland here?
rick santorum
Yeah.
Oh man.
We have to sort of take a step back and say, Why are we letting people come into this country who are here to steal technology, to be educated, to come turn around and then use it against us?
So again, we aren't on a war footing when it comes to China.
We would never during, pick another period of history when someone was attacking us, we would never allow them to come and To have positions of power and authority and education and use it to hurt us, and we do with China.
And I think, again, you hit the point.
A lot of it is money.
I mean, the fact is these universities.
need these students and want these students because they pay cash.
hannah claire brimelow
It's also true of private independent boarding schools.
If you look at the ratio of international students, when a school is about to go under, they start really opening the doors to international specifically, usually China and Korea, because their families have the money to pay tuition.
They don't have to offer scholarships.
I feel like in my lifetime, we've always had sort of been on our back foot with China.
And I increasingly I agree.
It's definitely the economic Chokehold that they have on us.
I mean, when the White House announced they were going to boycott the Olympics this year, it was like, well, we're going to diplomatically boycott.
What's going on with the Uyghurs is really bad.
So we're not going to send Biden.
But also, athletes, don't take your phones because they will be hacking them.
It's just routine.
Like, we took this very strange, like, just boycott.
Just don't go.
Don't send anyone.
And that is definitely a tragedy for a lot of athletes who've worked really hard for that.
But We just always placate China.
We don't take this cohesive stance.
We always sort of say, well, we're sort of against that.
We don't know.
And I think it's just, it's so strange.
It's the worst part of American foreign policy for me.
rick santorum
Because we're economically dependent upon them.
That's just the reality.
tim pool
I just got to say it.
I mean, this is a lot of what we're talking about is indicative of some kind of Western or US cultural or governmental collapse.
unidentified
Absolutely.
tim pool
That's why I think a convention of states, we've already got people who are chatting saying like they think it's a bad idea for a variety of reasons, which we'll definitely get into in a bit.
But what I want to say is, when you take a look at what's going on with China, what do they have?
They have a strong authoritarian structure, a monoculture.
That is, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party.
People like to often point out, like, we're not talking about the Chinese people, we're talking about their government.
And I'm like, yeah, look, I think colloquially it's understood.
We're talking about their government, the stranglehold the government has, the suppression of information they have.
We don't have that in the United States.
To a certain degree we do, obviously.
Big tech censorship, the corporate propaganda press will run lies.
But this show exists, so we're clearly better than China, but that's also, as much as it is a strength, it's something they exploit.
They know there are people in this country that they can pay who will say whatever needs to be said because we don't have a cohesive shared culture anymore.
It used to be, we were talking about this last week with the fall of empires, I think Zuby was bringing this up.
That when you no longer have the idea of, like, God and country.
I don't mean that literally, God and country.
I mean, like, this idea of, like, this is our country, this is what we believe, this is what we share, this is our experience.
When you don't have that anymore, your country can be gutted, ripped apart, and that precipitates the collapse.
So now I see what's happening with China.
They're absolutely exploiting our political divisions.
How much longer can we last when you have the Thousand Talents program?
China goes in and they pay professors to give up our research.
Or you've got stories about Chinese nationals ferrying viruses and vials, getting caught and arrested.
There's no respect for this country.
And the problem is we don't have a unified culture.
We have a culture war, which means they can keep just chipping away at the crack until the rock splits.
mark meckler
Well, that's the intent.
The culture war is at least partially being fostered by the Chinese.
It's part of the reason they censor our culture.
I have a young friend who's on the UC Berkeley campus, one of the most liberal campuses in the country.
She's half ethnic Chinese.
Her mom was ethnic Chinese.
She was raised in her family to hate America.
She was raised to believe that this is a vile, terrible place, that Americans are not to be trusted, and that eventually China would prevail.
And China specifically meaning the CCP.
That's on a mainstream college campus.
That culture, that idea is supported.
She said the majority of the Chinese that she knew on campus believed this.
You know, she's welcome to walk in those communities because of her partial ethnic Chinese background.
And she said, it's just horrendous.
It's totally anti-American and it is at the forefront of culture on our college campuses all across the country.
tim pool
How long can something like this go on for?
Especially, you know, when I look at Pelosi going to Taiwan, my question is, you know, for what purpose does it serve?
Like you were saying just a moment ago, that's a lot of what people are asking.
Is it a distraction?
Is it the Democrats are failing so miserably that she's like, well, this will shake up the news cycle and get us off the recession?
Maybe the idea is like, wartime presidents do well.
Maybe if I go there and confront China on something, it'll be good for the Democratic Party.
mark meckler
Yeah, to me it seems like a distraction.
I mean, it's an excellent political distraction.
They've got no good news that the Democratic Party can run on, right?
The economy is a shamble.
Our industries are falling apart.
Our standing in the international community is at an all-time low.
Their own base despises them, basically, at this point.
If you look at the numbers among Hispanics, we've never seen anything like this in the modern history of the country.
24% approval rating for Biden among Hispanics, lower than among whites.
I mean, it's really extraordinary.
So she needs to do something.
She needs to roll some kind of political hand grenade in the room to try to distract.
rick santorum
I have taken the approach throughout my time in politics.
When someone does something that I think is good for the country, Even though they may be doing it for the wrong reason, I commend them for doing it.
And so I'm not going to say anything negative about Nancy Pelosi going there, because I think it's the right thing to do.
I agree.
The fact that the Biden administration did not want her to go, and it was very clear they didn't want her to go, because they were afraid of China's reaction.
And she stood up to them and obviously said she was going.
Again, there may be politics behind it.
Everybody does everything for a reason.
hannah claire brimelow
What's your theory on why she did that?
rick santorum
I have, I don't know.
I have no idea.
It makes no sense to me why she's doing it other than she under, maybe she understands.
I don't, I can't understand how people don't understand how big a threat China is and how important this conflict is.
And look, we tend to think of everybody on the other side is just horrible, terrible on everything.
And they don't care about America anyway.
Look, I serve with these people and I think 90% of the time that's true.
But there are people that do care about the security of our country and understand that China is a threat on the other side of the aisle.
Maybe she's one of them.
Again, I may be giving her more credit than she deserves, but I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt because she's doing the right thing.
tim pool
I respect her going to Taiwan, but I question it, obviously.
And it's like, I really don't like her as a person, everything she represents, the elitism of politics.
I think she's a bad person.
I think she's manipulative.
I think she's overly emotional.
I think she and her cohorts created untold problems in the United States during the Trump years with the obsession over Russia and the lies they espoused.
And I think it's it's all that's true.
Right.
But I do, you know, respect to going to Taiwan, I guess.
rick santorum
But I look, I know her.
I served with her.
I spent I spent time.
I know Nancy.
I mean, we're not buddies.
But and so this is a real head scratcher for me.
tim pool
But Yeah, you know, look, thinking about the current state of the culture war, and you know, I'm thinking about, we've got the, you know, the first time into the show, we're like, World War Three, China, what's happening?
And now it's like a civil war.
Are we heading in that direction?
Can people trust the politicians?
We've got people in the chat who are saying you're a rhino.
That's me.
rick santorum
And I bet you they've been involved in politics and have worked on conservative causes for 40 years just like I have.
I bet I'm a rhino, right?
If so many people come up to me who have been a conservative for 20 minutes And they say, oh, this guy's a rhino.
Yeah, this guy's a rhino who, if you Google my name, you see what kind of rhino I am, that I've been ostracized for the last 20 years for standing up for cultural truths and for standing up for free markets.
And look, I respect everybody can have their opinion on things.
And one of the things that I realized is you just go do the right thing and don't worry about what other people say about you.
And so I'm out here right now where I'm Teaming up with another guy is called a rhino on occasion, right?
Oh, yeah, because among other things among other things for For standing up for the the ultimate in our constitutional freedoms, which is federalism the idea that America will end up Candidly, in a civil war, if we don't begin to respect that people in some areas of the states are going to live their lives differently than people in other areas of the states.
And by the way, that was the case from the very beginning.
That's what our founders understood could hold a country together as big and diverse even at that point.
We were talking about 13 colonies, but they saw the vastness of what could be the United States and they realized, over a country of this size, you're going to have people who are going to behave and want different lifestyles.
People who are going to live in the mountains are not going to be the same as people who are going to live in the cities.
And the idea that we're going to have a central government that's powerful, that's going to make everybody have the same ideas and philosophies, and not give local control and freedom to states and
communities and families to live their lives the way they want, they realized that that was a loser. And
so federalism was the approach, and that's what we're trying to restore through this
process. Rhode Island. Rogue Island.
tim pool
It's basically a city that has two senators.
hannah claire brimelow
That should have lost a seat in Congress during the last census, but they messed up their data.
tim pool
Oh, wow, really?
unidentified
Yeah.
rick santorum
Wow.
tim pool
I just think it's funny when the Democrats come out and they're like, why does Wyoming get two senators?
I'm like, why does Rhode Island?
It's like, I understand there's a million people there.
unidentified
Delaware.
tim pool
Yeah, right.
Delaware is only a tiny bit bigger.
You know, so I gotta tell you, man, I don't envy, you know, you being in politics.
People are always mentioning, like, will you ever consider politics?
And I'm like, no, never.
There's no way to represent everybody.
And that's exactly what the Founding Fathers understood.
rick santorum
Look, I think that it's a ridiculous idea that you're going to represent everybody.
You have to be mentally ill to be able to represent everybody.
There's such diversity in this country.
I've always, people have always said, you know, how did you do it?
How did you, how did you, you know, go to Washington?
And because I always felt like my duty was to do what, gather as much information as I could, look at the context of which everything was done, and make the best decision.
And then, Make your case as to why it's right for America, and not worry about the electoral consequence, because you can't just go out and jump from whatever the poll says from one time to another.
Look, there's truth, I believe in it, I believe there is a truth, and I believe that our founders put together a process in our Constitution that works, and you just follow those two things, the truth and aligning with the Constitution, and you'll be fine.
tim pool
Yeah, you know, I look at, we often will talk about here, who's right in the culture war?
The left or the right?
What does left and right even mean, right?
I grew up liberal and here I am being called right-wing because one simple reason, I know what's going on in the media.
So a really great example, I know what's going on in politics.
A really good example is we had a guest on the show who claimed, I said, Joe Biden said, if you want the billion dollars, you got to fire the prosecutor.
And he looked at me, smirked and said, that never happened.
And then I pulled up the video and played it for him and he was shocked.
This is what makes you right-wing these days.
That if you show a video in the news that people are talking about, they don't know.
rick santorum
Why?
tim pool
Because CNN's lying.
Because MSNBC is lying.
On occasion, Fox News even.
So when you've got... Here's what I see.
It's the rule for the Democrats that they are misleading you.
It is the exception with Republicans that they're misleading you.
There are a lot of bad Republicans.
They're often misleading you.
But there's a handful of really good ones On the Democrat side, we had Tulsi Gabbard, I thought, was being honest.
I didn't agree with some of her political positions.
Look what happened to her.
Now she's going on Fox News.
Now she's- She's alt-right now.
I know!
Because when you talk about what's true, that clearly makes you right-wing, even if you're political positions.
How do we salvage, I hate to say it, this country?
How do we save it?
When you've got people who believe media lies, that the media can just make something up, Claim you're the one making it up!
And the example I always give, these are the people who believe Jesse Smollett.
These are the people who chase after the Russiagate narrative for years and spent tens of millions of dollars.
These are the people who smeared the Covenant in Catholic kids.
Clearly they got a track record of being wrong.
But there are people who just never break out of those lies.
How do you do it?
Especially when we're talking about for you, you know, or anyone else who's in office, you're showing up and you're like, okay, that's not true, Nancy.
The thing you're saying about Trump didn't happen.
Why do you believe that?
And then she votes on something based on a fabrication.
They vote because Jussie Smollett said something.
rick santorum
The only thing you can do is continue to fight and tell the truth.
I mean, that's all you have.
And I would make the argument, I mean, look at this show as an example.
I got involved in politics a lifetime ago.
I was first elected to Congress in 1990.
I was 32 years old.
And the only way I could ever get the truth out was to buy an ad.
Talk radio didn't even exist.
Rush Limbaugh was just getting started back then.
Everything was whatever the newspaper or the television said and there weren't cable news networks even back then.
So all you had was the national media and then your local media and if you had a dissenting voice You either had to run a campaign and buy ads, or you had to knock on as many doors as you could.
So the idea that we are powerless to fight against these lies, you're at a case in point where that simply isn't true.
The reality is, we have more opportunity to get our point across today than we've ever had.
Now, they have more opportunities to get there because there's more media generally.
The bigger problem we have is not that we can't get our message out.
It's how do you talk to people that don't agree with you?
That's the problem.
The problem is we're siloed.
Everybody just gets, you know, information that agrees with their point of view and they discount to the point of not believing anything that comes from people that they don't agree with.
tim pool
It's true, but it is the rule on the left and the exception on the right.
There's a decent amount of people on the right who believe fake things and they just look for tribal answers.
But on the left, it is the rule.
rick santorum
It's a way of life.
Yeah, so for instance... Because they don't believe in truth.
Correct.
I mean, let's just get to the bottom line.
I completely agree.
They believe in... They have a relativism point of view.
mark meckler
My truth.
rick santorum
It's my truth.
And whatever they think is the truth.
And conservatives by and large, not all, because we have some iTruth folks on our side too, but overall I think you're right.
It's the exception.
We believe there is a truth, there is a right and wrong, there is reason, and through reason you can come to a conclusion.
They don't believe that anymore.
It's how I feel.
tim pool
Exactly.
rick santorum
Go ahead.
tim pool
I was going to say they don't believe in truth, they believe there is no truth but power.
mark meckler
Correct.
rick santorum
That's it.
mark meckler
Which actually, the roots of it, even in our modern culture today, come from Marxism.
I mean, that is the core ideal of Marxism.
And ultimately, one of the things that Marxists do, and they've always done throughout history, is if you can control what people say, you can control what they think.
If you can control what they think, you control reality, essentially.
And you're in total control then.
This is the ultimate aim of totalitarianism and ultimately that is the aim of the modern democratic party.
rick santorum
That's why you see a complete effort to redefine everything.
To make words mean nothing.
tim pool
Didn't they redefine the word definition?
That may have been a meme.
Do you know what the people's mic is?
That there's a reference to?
mark meckler
No.
tim pool
During Occupy Wall Street, this probably predates Occupy, but this is when I first encountered it.
Absolutely.
You're not allowed to use electronic voice amplification in New York.
So what we're going to do is when I say something, everyone repeat it back at me so that everyone
can hear.
Then the speaker stands up and says, mic check.
Everyone yells, mic check.
And then they'll say something that the entire crowd repeats.
Now anybody who knows anything about cults knows that that's a cult and cult indoctrination
mark meckler
technique.
I remember their videos.
tim pool
And the videos are insanely creepy.
There's one where I posted on Instagram where everyone's sitting with their hands up and there's someone chanting like, you know, Black Lives Matter is good and everyone just repeats it after the speaker.
It's like they've... and this is with amplification.
So we're no longer in the space where we need to lie and claim.
We're just trying to make people sound louder so you can hear what they had to say.
Now they have the speakers and they're still doing the same thing because Making you say something over and over again and drives it, drills it into your brain.
I think we're dealing with a cult and their counter is projection.
They say the right is projecting on us.
And then it's like, bro, you, you believe Jesse Smollett.
Spare me.
Okay.
Well, the Trump people are in the Q cult.
And I'm like, that's like 10 people.
Okay.
In all seriousness, there's maybe a few thousand, maybe tens of thousand, but we're talking about 74 million people who voted for Trump.
They don't believe that stuff.
These are people who work in, you know, union steel mills or whatever.
They don't believe all that crazy nonsense.
Some of them do.
And those are the ones that Comedy Central puts on TV.
But when you go to the left, these are the prominent million subscriber channels pumping out nonsense, misinformation and lies.
Rachel Maddow nearly crying when the revelations that Trump didn't collude with Russia came out.
I mean, did you see the video?
mark meckler
Oh, yeah.
And I do think that's the fundamental difference.
You just nailed it, which is they'll pick the fringe on the right and try to make them mainstream.
But the fringe on the left are the mainstream politicians, the mainstream media figures, the Hollywood figures.
They're saying completely insane stuff that if anybody in the right ever said anything equivalent to that, if a Senator Santorum said something equivalent to that, it would be a 24-7 news meltdown.
rick santorum
Yeah, the difference is that when our French people say French things, we condemn our French people and we walk away from them.
And when their French people say French things, well actually, their mainstream people say French things.
hannah claire brimelow
I was going to say, I've learned more about Q from NPR than I have from any right-wing person I've ever met in my life.
I had no idea the details until I heard NPR give me a thorough explanation.
rick santorum
I learned it from CNN, not NPR, but yeah, same thing.
tim pool
Let's talk about the Convention of States.
So, you know, we've been talking about, first, the potential for international conflict, but that leads us into internal conflict, people believing fake news.
We've got a problem in the federal government.
People aren't feeling like they're being represented.
There's a lot of people who wonder if a Convention of States, what is it, Article 5 Convention of States to amend the Constitution, I think?
mark meckler
Yep, that's exactly right.
tim pool
Let me pull up this story from Business Insider.
This is Business Insider.
Trump-tied conservatives are 15 states away from an unprecedented rewrite of the Constitution.
rick santorum
Is that you or me?
I don't know if Trump would call me a tied conservative.
tim pool
I thought you guys were Rhinos.
I mean, I'm surprised to hear that you're base guys.
rick santorum
Now we're Trump conservatives, so there you go.
tim pool
So, 15 states away from an unprecedented constitutional convention.
Now, I bring up this article simply because they're shocked.
They're worried.
There may be constitutional amendments at the state level.
I think it's fantastic.
So, what is this?
They're freaked out.
They think it's a bad thing.
We've had people already saying they're concerned that if you get uniparty establishment types to have the power of a convention of states, it's going to be gutting the Constitution.
My view on that one, my counter before I throw it to you guys, is the state-level guys aren't the federal-level establishment rhinos.
People working at the state level are voted in by much smaller amounts of people.
So when it comes to a convention of states, you've got state reps, state legislators.
So these are local guys.
Why is it that you guys want this?
What are your thoughts on it?
on as a good or bad obviously.
mark meckler
Well I think first of all one of the most telling things about that Business Insider
article there's a statement of absolute horror that Congress couldn't control it, the President
couldn't control it, and the courts couldn't control it.
hannah claire brimelow
You mean the central government could not act?
mark meckler
Oh my god.
hannah claire brimelow
What are we gonna do?
mark meckler
Horror, absolute horror, right?
So I literally saw that article, it's a hit piece against us, and I thought, this is fantastic.
tim pool
It's against you, it's a hit piece against you guys specifically.
mark meckler
Yeah, against Convention Estates.
tim pool
A group with ties to Trump's orbit, and corporate America is leading the push.
unidentified
Meanwhile, Trump is like, get out of here you guys, I don't even want you here.
mark meckler
I love it.
Corporate America.
I do occasionally go to grocery stores owned by corporations and I mean that's my tie to my tie to corporate America.
I drive a car that was produced by, that's about it really.
This is a grassroots group.
There are over 5.2 million people involved, just regular folks all over the country.
They're actually in every single state legislative district in the United States of America.
And I understand why the establishment is terrified of this.
And by the way, there's plenty of establishment on the right that is terrified of this too.
They don't want us taking their power away and giving it back to the people.
That's the entire purpose of this.
The founders intended it for right now.
This gets in the constitution in 1787.
Colonel George Mason from Virginia stands up Two days before the end of convention, he says, this is terrible.
We drafted a document, doesn't give the power to the people to propose amendments, but we gave that power to Congress.
And he asks, are we so naive that we believe that a government that becomes a tyranny will restrain its own tyranny?
unidentified
Wow.
mark meckler
Got to give the power to the people, right?
And in fact, it's really weird.
In Madison's notes, that's where we know everything that happened from the convention.
All it says right there is NINCOM, Latin abbreviation for no comment.
Not one guy in that room said, George, that's such a stupid idea.
Everybody was a forehead slap.
I think they probably laughed in that moment.
So they put in the second clause of article five saying someday federal government's going to get out of control.
We're going to count on you folks in the States to handle it.
rick santorum
Are they gonna?
Yeah, well, let me just a little further that if you read anything about the founding, the founders were fixated on checks and balances.
They wanted to have each branch of government check each other.
They wanted have the states to be a check.
They were concerned about the aggregation of power into a central government or particularly because they came from Places where there are kings and emperors.
They didn't want that power to all be in one place because they knew eventually tyranny would be taken over and the president or leader at the time would do that.
And so they put in the United States Senate as a check and the biggest check was that the United States Senate was going to be appointed by the state legislatures.
And people forget that for the first 140 years of the Republic, Washington, D.C.
was a backwater town with no power.
It was.
mark meckler
Yeah, it wasn't important.
rick santorum
Do you know what the largest source of revenue for the federal government was before the 17th Amendment, which changed the way senators were elected?
Like selling booze or something?
Exactly.
It was the tax on alcohol.
The reason we got the income tax is because of the temperance movement.
Because the temperance movement could never pass in Washington.
Prohibition couldn't pass in Washington because they couldn't give up the tax on alcohol.
So the conservatives traded their vote for the income tax in exchange for prohibition.
So we got the worst of both worlds, in my opinion.
But anyway, they also passed a constitutional amendment to change the way senators were elected, to instead of having the states checking Washington from doing things to take the power away from them and the people, now it's the people that elected the Senate.
So they took away the biggest check on power of Washington, D.C.
And so this is the only other piece of the Constitution left.
To check power from the states is Article 5 and a convention of states.
tim pool
I think it was Ben Sasse who said, maybe like a year ago, that we should repeal the 17th.
mark meckler
Oh, absolutely.
rick santorum
Return the Senate to the— I would—before that, it has no chance of ever happening.
mark meckler
Yeah, I agree.
tim pool
I completely agree.
People need to understand, there's a lot of people who look at single-layer issues, the surface.
The people choose the senators.
It's way better.
mark meckler
Oh, it sounds way better.
tim pool
And they say the idea that only the legislators would be able to appoint their friends.
No, no, listen.
People have lost their connection with their local politics because there's no skin in the game anymore.
And not only did the 17th gut state power to that regard, it weakened Article 5 as well, because people aren't paying attention to their local races anymore.
And the most important, too.
So I'll throw it to, you know, for one, when I first heard him say that, I was like, what?
Why would you want that?
I mean, the initial idea was that better men would appoint senators, and that sounds pretentious and elitist.
And then you think about the math of it, the logic, and you're like, People need to be focused on their states.
We hear it all the time from members of Congress.
They're running for election and they're like, in our town, crime is up X percent.
When I get to Washington, I'm going to clean this town up.
And it's like, no, you're not.
You're going to the federal government to vote on federal policy.
Our local elected representatives are going to fix that problem.
But people lost that connection.
So, I would be for that.
I love the idea of a convention of states.
My one fear is it utopian.
Like, you know, because I'll tell you this, you know what I'd love to see?
I'd love to see a convention of states happens.
The states are all predominantly conservative, which means there's a bunch of things I like, probably a lot of things I wouldn't agree with being more moderate, but gun rights, for instance.
I'd love to just see them be like, hey, you know what we're gonna do?
We're gonna issue an amendment that says, to reaffirm the second amendment, citizens of this country can keep and bear arms of any type, or accessory, or otherwise, there you go, we've spelled it out, and then just like, stamp.
Here's one of the important things.
Well, there's several important things.
that really happened, my fear is you'll get, they'll go in and say, we're going to compromise
on the second amendment and say, okay, we're going to restrict these things and make sure
rick santorum
it's codified now.
The here's the, the, one of the important things, well, there's several important things.
Number one is that the convention is being called pursuant to a resolution that has to
be adopted as you see on that map by, by 34 states.
And the resolution calling the convention is the governing document of the convention.
And that resolution, and Mark can go through it because he knows it inside out better than I do, but that resolution is a is a resolution that says three types of amendments are eligible.
All three types of amendments are limiting Amendments that limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government or spending of the federal government.
So an amendment offered at that convention that compromises, as you say, on the Second Amendment and weakens the Second Amendment would thereby strengthen the federal government and would be out of order at the convention.
tim pool
What if they argued that the Constitution as a facet of government is being limited by taking out some of its protections?
mark meckler
The application, the resolutions themselves specifically say that they're intended to limit the scope, the power, and the jurisdiction of the federal government.
So if it's not taking power away from the federal government and returning to the people, it would be what's called non-germane in legal terms.
And I want to address something much more practical than that.
It's important that people understand.
I hear that people are afraid of convention.
Convention is a place to get together, have a debate and make some suggestions.
Now I can tell you in my entire adult life, I've never had anybody say, Hey, I'd like you to go to a meeting.
We're going to sit around a table.
We're going to make some suggestions.
And my response was, Oh my God, that's so terrifying.
Please don't have a discussion because when it comes out of convention has to be ratified by 38 states.
And I'd throw this out to your people who are watching the podcast right now that might be worried about this.
I've said this to literally millions of people in the air.
My personal email address, mmechler at cosaction.com.
If you're concerned about this, then just in layman's terms, send me the amendment you're worried about, and on the bottom of that, list the 38 states that'll ratify it.
And the answer is, I've offered that to millions of people.
I've not received an email because it's impossible.
We're talking about the Second Amendment.
Today, there are actually 24 states in which you can carry your handgun in the Capitol.
I know I've done it in most of them.
There are 14 states where you can take a loaded AR, sling it across your back, and sit in the gallery and watch the proceedings.
It takes only 13 states to stop any amendment.
Are you telling me we can't get 13 states to limit or to stop an amendment to do anything to the second?
It makes no sense.
tim pool
I'm for convention of states for one simple reason.
This ain't working.
Exactly.
We think we're going to elect these people.
Nancy Pelosi, she can't lose.
She even said, she held up a glass of water and said, you put a glass of water in my or AOC's district, you put a D on it, it's going to get elected.
mark meckler
That's true.
tim pool
Something's got to change.
Something.
rick santorum
The reality is that we know where America's headed, and it is in a pretty place.
We are seeing more and more centralization of power.
We are seeing our freedoms being violated.
We've seen our culture becoming more and more woke.
And the reality is, and let's just, even the more, the biggest reality, we're $31 trillion in debt.
I mean just a few years ago we were like six and all of a sudden we're like 30 trillion dollars and and by the way we're looking at 40 50 at some point this this house of cards falls apart and we're sitting here saying well we'll trust Washington to fix that.
Does anyone actually believe they will fix it?
No, no one does.
So what are you afraid of?
Are you afraid of a group of legislators getting together and offering up proposals?
Because again, you read the constitutional language, the convention can propose amendments.
That's it.
Shall call a convention for proposing amendments.
That's the quote from Article 5.
So they don't ratify anything.
They simply offer up suggestions that go to the states for ratification.
And Do I think we'll have dramatic changes at this convention or proposals that will fundamentally change the Constitution?
Probably not.
Because it's going to be really hard to get 38 states to ratify anything.
But the fact that we would actually call a convention of states and have a national discussion.
I mean, imagine, imagine if next week or next month a convention was being called to by and having all 50 states send delegates to propose amendments to the Constitution.
Everybody would be talking about it.
tim pool
It'd be amazing.
rick santorum
It'd be on the front page of every paper for months.
We would have groups arguing and forming to propose amendments and get behind amendments.
We'd have actually civics taught in our schools about what the Constitution is, what rights actually are federal rights, what rights are state rights, where are they better situated.
At a time when we are so divided and so broken, having a national conversation about Who we are and how we'd like to go forward as a country is really needed.
tim pool
If you guys could propose, in your minds, the amendments that should be proposed, what do you think?
mark meckler
Yeah, I mean, I think some of them are obvious that most people talk about.
One you hear all the time is some form of balanced budget amendment.
And I would say that's got to be, it's got to have spending caps and taxation caps tied to it.
I mean, this is critical.
The folks in Washington, D.C., they're never going to make the hard decisions.
Why would they?
They get punished for making those decisions.
What?
Oh, you want to cut off money to children and widows and that's how it's always presented.
So you put in a structure that forces them to make the hard decisions.
I think that's a no-brainer.
tim pool
Term limits for civil servants.
mark meckler
So this is one of my favorites.
And if you look at our resolution, this is really important.
It does talk about term limits, but it says term limits for members of Congress and federal officials.
And it's exactly because of what you said, because you don't want to empower the bureaucracy.
You don't want to empower the staffers.
If you're going to turn Congress, you better turn federal officials.
And by the way, now we know of this as the deep state, right?
That was conspiracy theory stuff a couple of years ago.
But so you can turn out the deep state when these people are in DC for 30 years, 35 years, they have the power and they have more power than the politicians and they're unaccountable and unelected.
unidentified
Yeah.
rick santorum
I'll throw a couple at you.
One, I think actually could pass.
And I know there are people who might question that, which is to limit the Supreme court to nine members.
Uh, and certainly every Republican would vote for it.
Every Republican.
But I look, there are some fringe people on the Democratic side who are for court packing.
But the vast majority of Democrats out there across the country realize that if we start this game of the Democrats adding four and then the Republicans adding, it's a zoo.
And so putting that in the Constitution would be, if that's the only thing that comes out of the convention, and there's no question that will come out of the convention, if that's the only thing that happens, that would actually be a good thing and a stabilizing thing, something we can all sort of agree on.
By the way, having something that we can all agree on that's a big deal is good for a country every now and then.
You don't see it happen very much.
tim pool
The other thing I think, too, the point you guys made about the 38 states is that these are conservative states that are gearing up towards this.
It's not like New York.
rick santorum
31 of the 50 states right now, the legislatures are controlled by Republicans.
That's going to go to at least 32 or 33 this year and maybe more.
And with Virginia, which is one one house is controlled by Republicans, one is one short in
the Senate.
You could have 34 states controlled by Republicans, and if that happens, we need 34 states to
get to a resolution passed to have this convention called.
We could have this convention called in a year or two.
tim pool
But you'll need 38 to ratify it.
rick santorum
But again, I'd love to see, like I said, I'd love to see the court packing thing.
And I'd love to see, for example, the federal government should play no role in primary and secondary education.
And you'd say, well, that I have no chance of passing.
I don't know if I'm Connecticut or California.
I don't want Donald Trump or Rick Santorum coming into Washington, D.C., telling me how to run my schools any more than if I'm in Alabama.
I want Joe Biden tell me how to run my school.
So you'd be surprised.
Remember, these are state legislators, not congressmen and senators.
You'd be surprised how many legislators would say, you know what, we don't want the federal government telling us what to do.
So don't be surprised that there will be more things that could limit the power of the federal government that actually could be adopted, even when you need 38 states to do it.
mark meckler
Let me give you a real easy one that most people don't talk about.
It's called a single subject amendment.
A lot of states have this and people are furious.
You get these omnibus bills.
They're 2000 pages that no one has read.
No one, no one could read them to be realistic.
And honestly, if you've ever tried what you would find is there's so many references to other statutes and portions of the, you can't, nobody can understand them.
Right.
So a single subject amendment says one thing per bill and the American people, if you ask them, it's 99% of the American people would say, yeah, absolutely.
We can ratify that easily.
tim pool
I wonder, how is it that we get this omnibus spending bill?
It's like 5,000 pages.
Who writes that, and why do people vote on it?
I mean, you've got experience there.
rick santorum
Well, every year the Congress is supposed to pass 13 bills to spend the money, and what happens is that takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of time on the floor of the House and Senate, and they don't want to spend all the time talking about those things, so in the end they put it up all into one bill.
It's called an omnibus bill because they didn't pass all the 13.
They may pass two or three of them.
tim pool
But there's like random weird stuff thrown in these things.
rick santorum
Look, it is a process by which you have to get 218 votes in the House and 51 votes in the Senate and or, or more in some cases, 60 votes in the Senate.
So what do you do?
You horse trade and you say, you want, you know, I don't want to vote for this.
Well, how about if I give you this?
Okay.
I'll vote for it.
unidentified
Wow.
rick santorum
I mean, that's the way things get done.
It's sort of, I don't know if either of you are married, but sometimes you gotta have to, you know, give and take a little bit if you're going to get things done.
And that's, that's how the process works.
tim pool
We like to talk about guns as a really good example of how different people live different lives in different terrains, right?
So if you live in the mountains, for instance, well, we got bears out here.
You know, you certainly want to have some kind of protection for yourself.
I don't know how you deal with an actual bear because you don't need a big giant pinocchio.
But a raccoon or a fox, right?
Maybe we've had raccoons out here and you know, you don't want to be chased by one.
Should it be ravenous or whatever you you know, coyotes, coyotes, for
instance, the chickens, you live in New York City, I get it, you
don't want a gun, you know, and then people are shooting each
other. Fine. I think the Second Amendment, you know, is for the
entire country, including New York and the people who live
there have the right to defend themselves. Yeah, but the idea
we have to bring up is that the people in New York City who
don't like guns vote for people in West Virginia, which makes
no sense. I'll give you a better example is air conditioning. You
got the people in the blue areas who are like, you know, we don't
need air conditioning. It's a luxury. It's bad for the climate
and the people in Miami are like How dare you?
Because they got to say.
mark meckler
You couldn't live in Miami.
tim pool
They got a statue of the guy who invented air conditioning down there.
hannah claire brimelow
Texas just secedes.
They're like, we're out.
rick santorum
We're out.
tim pool
We need it.
We can't live without it.
So, you know, that's, that's, that's not the same as a weapon, but that shows you that if you live in a cooler climate with less hot days, you're probably thinking to yourself, who needs this stuff?
rick santorum
That's fine.
Well, that's fine.
If we're going to get rid of air conditioning in the South, we'll get rid of heat in the North.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Heat burns as much energy as air conditioning, right?
Same process.
tim pool
It sounds like that's the problem with compromise, because you're in office and someone says, I want to spend X amount of dollars in this place for this reason.
You're like, well, that doesn't matter that much to me.
Give me this and I'll do it.
rick santorum
You basically start getting these weird policies that That's why you have to take the jurisdiction away from the government.
You're never going to... Look, that's happened since the beginning of the republic.
They've always been horse trading.
It has to be that way.
And you can make the argument that it actually reflects the needs of the different parts of the country because you horse trade for something that I want in Alabama, that you need in New York.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that.
What's wrong is that they shouldn't have the jurisdiction to do things that are not within the federal government's purview.
mark meckler
Yeah, the question is how much power do they have, right?
rick santorum
If you take the power away, then you limit the amount of horse trading that goes on to the things that are more fundamental to the federal government.
mark meckler
And honestly, most people then wouldn't care about what goes on in Washington, D.C., which is really how it was always intended to be.
What you were supposed to care about were your local politics.
What was the local school board doing?
What's your city council or township doing?
Those were the things that were supposed to affect you as a citizen.
The founders would be stunned that we allow so much stuff to happen in Washington.
rick santorum
The federal government was supposed to take care of making sure that we were safe from foreign threats, that there was interstate commerce that could flow between the two, and that we had some trade policy to make sure that we were able to trade goods and services back and forth.
And we've gone way beyond, and the answer is to pull it back.
tim pool
I want to talk about the other side of this.
So we're reading a story from Business Insider.
It's very critical of this convention of states, where you basically have conservative-leaning states are slowly getting closer and closer to calling an Article 5 convention.
So just for those who missed the segment.
But on the other side of this, you have the more liberal-leaning states getting closer and closer to a national popular vote coalition, which would undermine the Electoral College, and in my opinion, literally just be telling the world, like the moment that happens, Hey, we want to do a civil war here, is basically what you're saying if you do this.
I think it's a terrible idea.
A convention of states is like, well, they'll propose some amendments, maybe they can happen.
But, I mean, if you need 38 states to ratify anyway, that could happen through the Congress anyway, I'd imagine.
A convention of states being called opens a conversation.
Undermining the Electoral College through states agreeing with each other just instantly ends the Republic electoral process for the president.
rick santorum
It fundamentally changes how we elect a president and makes the flyover states Real flyover states.
They become ignored because that's not where the votes are.
The presidential campaigns will be run in California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
That's where it will be decided.
tim pool
And it's not just that, though.
rick santorum
And that's, by the way, every president will be beholding to those big blue population centers because that's where the people live.
tim pool
even in red states.
unidentified
Yes!
tim pool
Yes.
You realize this.
Yeah.
So West Virginia, for instance.
Yeah.
When you go to the cities in West Virginia, they're still more liberal leaning.
And the surprising thing is to me, you know, in the second most Trump supporting state,
you can go to a city and see the rainbow flags.
There's a areas of Virginia, rural Virginia as well.
When you're out in the farmland, when you're out in the rural areas and the houses are
few and far between, what do you see?
You see Trump signs everywhere.
We got one big sign over here.
It's a gigantic sign.
It says the swamp is 40 miles that way.
It's hilarious.
And then you go into a town of 20, 30,000 people, still the city, and you see the BLM flags.
So what's going to happen then is, you got a politician with only so much money.
We go national popular vote, it's going to be, even in West Virginia, the politicians are going to be saying things to pander to liberals.
Because you got 20,000 votes, I can go here, do a rally, get all of them, or I can go to farms?
Come on, that's too difficult.
It's too far away.
So this is just, I think this is the inversion of it.
Of, you know, what we see at the Convention of States.
This is a move being made by the Democrat-Liberal-leaning states.
Which I think.
rick santorum
To centralize power.
tim pool
Right.
rick santorum
Yeah.
As Mark said, I mean, all you have to understand about the left, it's all about power.
Everything they want to do.
Everything.
The motive behind it is to accumulate power and centralize it into the elites who they believe best know how to run everything.
tim pool
So what do you do, man?
I mean, if you've got half the country moving towards this, half the country moving towards a convention of states, you've got it pulling away in opposite directions.
The culture is already fractured.
People have already been talking about civil war long before I ever brought it up.
rick santorum
I think the Convention of States is actually the antidote to a civil war.
I think you're right.
I think this country is increasingly divided, increasingly distrustful of the other side.
Not just distrustful, about right hatred of the other side.
They believe that they have bad motives and want to hurt them and harm them.
That is a Headed toward very ugly things.
And what Mark has been able to do is take a lot of people who maybe feel that way, not maybe, they do feel that way, and channel them into something that the founders provided as the emergency escape clause.
mark meckler
You know, the problem with national popular vote, from a marketing perspective, you said like the easy thing sells, right?
Take away your vote to vote for your senator.
That sounds bad.
You're not going to repeal the 17th amendment.
National popular vote, when you say to people, what's ridiculous?
Somebody wins the popular vote for president and then they're not president?
That's a pretty good marketing tool, in my opinion.
Much harder to counter to explain to people why that doesn't work.
So I think it's a very dangerous movement.
I agree with Rick.
I agree with you.
I think we are headed towards a civil war.
I think the country is decoupling.
Where I differ with a lot of people is I think it's awesome.
And the reason I think it's awesome is because this is how our country has always been.
We have some fantasy that we've been some unified country.
Like, right before the American Revolution, when the colonies hated each other and called each other blasphemers and were ready to go to war.
No, it was that way.
After the revolution, we get together and we decide we're going to form a government.
We hate each other so much.
We form the Articles of Confederation.
Gives the federal government no power because the colonies and then the states don't trust each other.
We come out of that.
There's a fantasy.
We all love each other.
Yeah, so much so in the 1860s, we have a civil war and we force a union.
tim pool
80 years later.
mark meckler
Right.
But after the civil war, we really Yeah, exactly.
That's when things were calm and peaceful.
It's crazy.
tim pool
It's not true.
Was it 1876?
Was it the election was decided by a committee?
mark meckler
Yes.
So we've never actually, as a country, liked each other very much.
rick santorum
Except.
And this is what we forget.
It was really after World War II.
mark meckler
Correct.
rick santorum
That's the only time, if you look at America, where there was a consensus.
And it's because we had just gone through two world wars and a Great Depression.
And people were just tired of fighting and wanted to be at home with their family and raise children and not work.
I mean, it was an idyllic time, but everyone thinks, oh, that was America.
No, no.
America was never like this.
Was it a beautiful time?
It was a great time.
You can say a lot of great things about about about the 50s and 60s, but it didn't take long for us to say, well, you know, look, there's Agitating against injustice.
That's always been the American way.
And by the way, in many cases, certainly in the case of the 60s and civil rights movement, it was a great movement.
We've always been a country that never just wanted everybody get along because we're always agitating for something better.
And unfortunately, the ideology behind what's better since the 1960s, since after the Civil Rights Movement, has been destructive.
Because it's been based on relativism, socialism, Marxism, and trying to bring that to this country.
And now it's up to us to fight back this culture war, and the founders gave us the opportunity to do it.
tim pool
It's about truth.
So, Critical Race Theory, for instance.
It's a lie.
Well, it's an ideology, right?
It's also a lie.
It's twisted.
And, you know, I love when I get challenged by, you know, I'll be on Facebook because I waste time on Facebook periodically.
I have multiple monitors and I'm reading the news.
And I had someone post about critical race theory and saying Republicans, you know, they're crazy and they don't want you to, you know, learn history about racism or whatever.
And so I quoted, I posted saying, the meme was like, it was a picture of the people getting the milkshakes pouring on them.
And then I just said something like, you know, you using these people for your political ideology, blah, blah, blah.
And then someone said, what is critical race theory to me?
So I said, oh, you'd love to know.
Let me tell you, because I do know.
Critical race theory is a derivative of critical theory, Marxist ideology.
The idea that there is an oppressor and oppressed class.
Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in her book, because I read the chapter outlining the thesis, the basis, that Marx did not understand the racial tensions that exist in the United States.
Therefore, the idea of class oppression didn't work, and you needed racial understanding, thus a critical race theory.
And then I went on to quote Derrick Bell, who argued for segregation.
I think he, what is it?
Plessy versus Ferguson was a separate but equal.
He argued in favor of it, saying the overturning of this and Brown v. Board of Education were mistakes.
And I'm like, don't come to me trying to use the civil rights movement to justify your ideology when your ideology is rooted in overturning the civil rights movement.
But these people don't know that.
They don't read these things.
They never actually read where critical race theory comes from.
They follow the lies from the corporate press.
So we're not up against any, you know, there's the truth.
The truth will set you free.
But these people don't want to hear it.
They're in tribes.
They get their marching orders from whatever the TV tells them to do.
And they claim that's not them.
They claim it's the other side.
rick santorum
And that's why it's important for you to speak that's why important for all of us to go out and not be afraid what what's happening in America until recently I give Donald Trump a lot of credit for this because he exposed the national media for the partisans that they were and he did so by just Punching them in the nose and getting them ticked off enough that they dropped any pretense of being fair and wanting to be journalists and they revealed who they really are.
All of us have seen it and we've, look, I was in politics for, you know, been in politics for 40 years and for 30 of those years Republican politicians would stand up to the media on occasion, but we didn't.
We didn't call them out for who they were.
We knew who they were.
We understood that 97% of the Washington press corps voted for Democrats, but we always tried to The idea was, well, you don't get into an argument with someone who prints, buys ink by the barrel.
And so that was the credo of the Republican conservative movement, which is, don't fight against the media because they'll crush you.
And for one who did and got crushed, I was used as an example.
Look, don't stand up and speak the truth because the left will crush you.
Now they can't crush us as much anymore because of avenues like this and other avenues.
And we have an obligation to use these avenues in spite of the limitations that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube put on those to continue to fight that battle and do it smartly.
tim pool
Well, you were on CNN for a short while.
rick santorum
I was, five years.
tim pool
Oh, so a little bit now.
rick santorum
Not a short while.
tim pool
Not a short while.
rick santorum
In my life, not a short while, no.
tim pool
So what happened with, I mean, to be critical of the media, but to be in the machine, I mean, I'll put it this way.
hannah claire brimelow
He's like, I don't know what I can talk about.
rick santorum
I can talk about it.
CNN was an interesting.
I loved working in CNN because I was, generally speaking, the only person on a show or on a panel that had my point of view.
And I knew that the vast majority of Almost all of the CNN audience didn't agree with me.
And so I saw an opportunity to talk to people about what conservatism was because they didn't hear it.
And so I felt like I had to be better than everybody else on the panel.
They could scream at me but if I scream back at them then I'm going to lose that audience out there because I'm what they portray me as.
So it made me be, my wife said, calmer and more thoughtful.
No, I didn't back away from anything I believed, but I tried to make sure that I was communicating.
It's not what you say, it's what people hear.
And so I was trying to say it in a way that people—so for me it was a great opportunity to make arguments to people.
When they put me on, gave me the opportunity to say whatever I want.
So I have no complaints about it.
I can complain that they didn't put me on the shows as much as I would have liked to have been.
But that's that's that's the way it goes.
Having said that, I got fired, canceled because I made a comment that the United States of America, I was I was giving a speech to a group of young conservatives about the founding of a country.
And I made the comment that we were blessed in this country to Uh, have founding documents where we really didn't have a country before this country that unlike France, which had multiple governments and Kings and the history here in America, this was a brand new country.
We started from a clean slate.
And I said, the native Americans were, uh, you know, we're here, but there was no country and that they had no, they had no impact on the, on the, uh, on the, uh, on the constitution and the culture.
And that got me fired.
They canceled me.
tim pool
I saw a meme.
It's been going around and it's, uh, You ever see the meme where it's like, what women would do with a time machine, what men would do with a time machine?
So, there's a bunch of them where it's like, one of my favorites is, it's like, what a woman would do with a time machine, and the young woman says, I'm your granddaughter, and the other young woman says, wow, from the future.
Then it says what men would do and there's one of my favorite is there's a guy with full tactical gear and he's got guns and there's like a World War I soldier and he says, grandfather come with me we're going to Jekyll Island trust me.
Just the formation of the Fed.
So there was one I saw where it's uh they're handing guns to Native Americans and they're saying take these because they're coming and they'll destroy you and destroy your lands.
And then all these, you know, leftists are like, you're like, yeah, hooting, and I just might respond to them.
My question is, do you know anything about the Native American tribes and what it was like here?
Because I'm not in any way justifying the history of colonialism, but I think you need to point out if you went to a Native American tribe and handed them, you know, M-16s, they would just go and massacre their warring tribes.
This idea that all of the Native Americans were like unified and it's like, oh, the evil white settlers are coming to kill us.
We'll stop them.
It's just not the case.
It would be like if you said if we went to Europe and gave them laser guns and fighter jets.
It's like, yeah, they go to war and they kill each other.
Whenever you give weapons to, you know, advanced weaponry to a society that doesn't have it, they will use it to empower themselves.
mark meckler
That's called human nature.
That is truth and reality.
tim pool
So when you talk about the history of the Americas, you had nomadic tribes, you had some tribal governments.
We did learn from and adopt some of their principles.
It's really amazing history, quite in fact.
And then you look at like the Aztec Empire and the brutal human sacrifices and how they oppressed and enslaved local tribes.
And it's like, it's not some utopian world.
But these people believe in this woke psychotic narrative where it's just like whiteness.
Literally from Europe or whatever they want to call it is bad and wrong and that means anyone else is good.
rick santorum
Where in human history have there not been warring people trying to control territory?
Different groups of people who have read the Bible.
I mean you look at the Hebrews and the Philistines and the Moabites and it's throughout the course of human history there have been wars conquering for land and the idea that that that is somehow should not have happened in this
country, that somehow that America is, again, it's not, for me, it's a dystopian view of how the
world and throughout history has worked.
tim pool
Well, so you said a moment ago that you were, correct me if I'm wrong, you were saying you
think Civil War, you were excited for it? No, I'm excited for the division.
mark meckler
And the reason I'm excited for it is because if you go back to the Constitutional Convention, the men in that convention are screaming and yelling at each other.
They're accusing each other of all kinds of horrible stuff.
It's the North versus the South.
Big states versus small states.
There are commercial interests that are fighting against each other in convention.
We look back and we've got some weird fantasy that these old guys sat around had a couple of pints of ale and came up with this beautiful document.
The document is a result of that distrust, that dislike, that hatred.
This is where federalism is born because it's a system designed for people who say, look, I don't really like you.
I don't trust you.
You're going to infringe on my interest.
So what we're going to do is we know there's an existential threat.
You've got England.
You've got Spain.
France is actually an erstwhile ally.
They're a threat.
So we got to band together for a few limited things.
I still don't like you, but I'm going to band together in a federal government with you.
That's the solution for right now.
Because the reality is, look, people in the South, if you're in Alabama, you don't really like people in New York, generally speaking.
Yeah, you could travel to those places, you'll still hear all the same regional prejudices.
They have always existed, they always will.
So this is a chance for us to say, well, how could we live together?
Is there any way we can live together?
And the answer is, yeah.
The founders, the framers, told us, have a federal system where I say, you know what, you can do what you want to do.
If I don't like it, I'm going to go live in New York.
tim pool
I think the challenge is, I don't think, when we talk about the left and the right, the left having the rule and not the exception, the right is the exception, not the rule.
I don't know if there's an acceptable compromise.
I mean, these are people who cost I mean, Kamala Harris was funding their bail.
property damage, rioting and murderous acts in 2020.
And the politicians supported them outright.
I mean, Kamala Harris was funding their bail.
13 Joe Biden staffers, I believe it was 13, contributed to the bail of these individuals
who were committing these crimes.
I mean, I don't know if there's a solution, even through a convention of states.
Because I feel like even if you get the convention of states, you do limit the power of the federal government.
These people still exist.
They still have their tribal culture and bloodlust or whatever you want to call it.
So I feel like A convention of states is good to address the problems of the federal government, but I feel like it would be a catalyst for a lot of these far-left extremists and their cohorts in government who are going to lose power because of it, and then it just triggers conflict.
It just ignites it.
rick santorum
Well, I would say two things.
Number one, the most important reason for convention of states is to limit the power of the federal government to force cultural Marxism and economic Marxism on the entire country.
So if we can stop them from imposing, trying to generally increase the power of the federal government to the point where they can impose that on the rest of the country, which will cause, I believe, if it continues on, there will be conflict.
There's no question there'll be conflict.
The alternative is a convention of states to propose amendments that will limit the power of the federal government or even just having the convention.
Think about having the convention and the states rising up and saying, you know, we're going to check you.
That in and of itself may limit some of what the federal government attempts to do or the left tries to do because they know now there's a viable option for the states to push back, right?
And that it happened, nothing horrible happened, maybe a couple of amendments passed, but now that it's happened once, it's a lot easier to have again.
The idea that We're going to eliminate the left and their grab for power.
That's not going to happen, but it's going to be isolated in the states of California and others.
And we'll see the destruction that is wrought in those states as we're seeing it now.
And so what's happening?
People are leaving those states.
tim pool
I want to pull up this story from the post-millennial.
60% of abortion clinics shut down in red states with pro-life laws after Roe was overturned.
So, for those that are just tuning in, we've been talking a bit about the convention of states.
A couple things that I think are interesting here is, for one, I definitely want to get into your guys' thoughts on abortion.
But I was thinking about this.
For one, this story actually was a meme.
It's a meme because people were saying if Planned Parenthood claims that most of the services they provide are unrelated to abortion, why would they shut down when Roe v. Wade was overturned?
And maybe there's some like political point they make.
But the mainstream press came out and said, the corporate press, I shouldn't call it mainstream, said that it's actually not true.
They're not shutting down.
It was just Planned Parenthood was like moving funds around.
Well, now we see that a large portion actually did shut down when abortions became illegal.
So I'm curious in this regard, one, obviously we'll discuss your thoughts on this stuff, but I was also thinking in terms of convention of states, is it considered limiting of the federal government to codify a restriction on abortion or the inverse?
To codify the restriction on banning abortions, right?
Because that's what the left has been arguing for.
I suppose the argument from the left is, The government was restricting its ability to ban this.
The argument from the right is the government was giving itself the authority over it.
You see how there's kind of like both sides are arguing it's an overreach.
Both sides would be arguing that their move is a limitation.
I'm curious of your thoughts on that or it's let's just say it's a it's a hard segue into the abortion topic but you know.
mark meckler
Yeah, I mean, I would say, generally speaking, if you were to give the federal government the power to regulate or allow abortion, I mean, that's essentially what Dobbs said.
It's like, this is not the federal government's business.
This is a true federalist decision.
It said the Constitution doesn't say anything about this.
It belongs to the states.
So I think that is the correct constitutional position, and I think Anytime, if under our convention, you said we're going to give the federal government more power to ban abortions, I think you're now expanding federal power.
rick santorum
I think either way it goes, whether it's pro-life or pro-choice, it would not be eligible under our rubric.
mark meckler
And to be clear, I want to give my personal bias, I'm completely anti-abortion.
rick santorum
Me too.
mark meckler
So here I am, a guy from the right, anti-abortion, and I just don't think that that's in the constitution for the federal government to deal with.
tim pool
And you know what?
I agree.
I like the idea.
The problem is, I should say the challenges that you've got a side that's willing to have the Constitution be amended to enforce their ideals.
mark meckler
Absolutely.
tim pool
Whereas you are willing to compromise and say, we don't like abortion, but let the states decide.
I've mentioned this quite a bit.
This is conservatives compromising on the issue of pro-life versus pro-choice.
Whereas the left is arguing every state should have to allow it.
The right saying, let some decide for themselves, so it's split.
rick santorum
This is a real example of why a Convention of the States, having the discussion of Convention of the States is important to America because I think as what I'm seeing polls go on and people realize that the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs didn't ban abortion as the left said it did and that this is a decision that the people at the local level and state level can make More and more people, even folks who are for abortion being legal, are saying, well, OK, I'm comfortable with that.
I'm comfortable with me having to say and what these decisions are.
And that's really the argument we're making with Convention of the States is, look, let's just let's not just abortion.
But a whole host of other issues that are really local issues.
Education is a good example.
Really, do we need the federal government telling us how parents should educate and local schools should?
No!
Let the community be able to make these decisions themselves.
tim pool
So we can get an amendment that says no more Department of Education?
rick santorum
Yeah, we could.
mark meckler
Absolutely.
rick santorum
Absolutely.
mark meckler
I mean, that's at the very top of my list, and the majority of the American public agrees with that.
Not just on the right.
There's plenty of people on the left that are like, hey, we want to educate our own kids our own way.
If you live in Texas, which is where I'm from, and people think of it as a red state, well, I live just outside of Austin.
That's about as blue as it gets.
People in Austin want to decide how to educate their own kids.
They don't want the federal government telling them how to do that.
tim pool
Yes, I absolutely agree.
I think, you know, to keep in line with this, one of the things we talk about every so often is that, to put it rather, I guess, crudely, the left is removing themselves from the future of America through the sterilization of their children, through abortion.
And so when you look at education, it's the one venue they have.
rick santorum
Absolutely.
I say this all the time, that the left... I wrote a book 15 years ago now called It Takes a Family.
It was in response to Hillary Clinton's book, It Takes a Village.
And one of the things I realized was everyone said, oh, it takes a village.
It's an African proverb.
And I said, no, it's a Marxist plan because the left, through their sterilization, abortion, they're not having children.
People on the left are not having kids.
So if they're going to win elections in the future, they have to corrupt your kids.
And the way they do that is the village and the village being Why do you think they want to expand daycare?
Why do you think they want to expand preschool and kindergarten and send everybody to government schools for all these things?
hannah claire brimelow
They want to separate you from your kids.
rick santorum
Because they want to separate you from your kids.
They want to indoctrinate them into their point of view.
Why do you think the teachers unions...
Roosevelt, when the issue came up about unions for federal workers, was 100% against it.
And in fact, ultimately, and still the case today, federal unions cannot negotiate wages and benefits.
Why?
Because they knew that if you give the the uh the rights of of of workers in a in a government organization the right to to organize and you gave the power to the governor to people in the government to to to enhance to reap benefits on them then the teachers are going to or the or the federal employees are going to
Shower money on these folks who make their decision and you're going to have corruption and you're going to have control by the union of the government.
Exactly what's happened in the schools, exactly where we are, and so it is absolutely essential for us to fight this battle.
hannah claire brimelow
There was an Education Weekly poll that came out just after the 2016 election that found that half of teachers had voted for Hillary Clinton, but something like 29-30% had voted for Donald Trump.
I mean, the occupation is completely partisan.
You aren't sending the same people.
And in part, I would argue that the homeschool movement has such legs, especially after the COVID pandemic.
You know, if you're interested in education, especially in your own children's education, in your conservative, you're probably willing to try homeschooling.
Whereas that's not true for especially women who have been told your career is everything.
If you have a kid, you've got to get back to work as soon as possible.
Otherwise, you will lose your identity.
I mean, the system is biased towards the flexible parents who are willing to stay involved in their kids' lives.
rick santorum
Yeah, we have seven children.
We homeschooled all of our kids through grade school.
It was the best thing.
My wife is a neonatal intensive care nurse.
She's a lawyer.
And once we started having children, she phased out of that work and She will tell you that it was the best investment she's ever made.
She we have amazing kids.
We feel very very blessed and I would just challenge anybody Anybody who decided not to do that and and went to the workplace Show me your portfolio of what you accomplished in the last 30 years versus what my wife accomplished in the last 30 years And I would be you'd be hard-pressed to outdo what she did This is the craziest thing is that particularly on the left, they don't understand the value of an investment in creating a human life.
tim pool
And it's a really sad prospect of what their lives are going to be like when they're 70 or 80 years old.
rick santorum
I gave a speech in Hungary at CPAC Hungary a few weeks ago.
My first thing I said was, can any of you tell me the name of your great great grandparents?
Can you tell me the name of your great-great-grandparents?
tim pool
Great-great.
rick santorum
Great-great-grandparents.
The point was, in a very short period of time, you're going to be lost.
tim pool
My great-grandfather.
rick santorum
I'm talking about great-great, okay?
So the reality is, in a hundred years or less, no one's going to know your name.
You will be gone, and the only thing you will create in your life that lasts forever and goes on is creating a human soul.
And those children then creating other human souls.
That's your legacy, and so many people just have very misplaced priorities.
tim pool
There's this photo I saw, I can't remember exactly how they did it, but it was like a single grandmother, and then her kids, her grandkids, and her great grandkids, and each of her, she had like five kids, who each had like five kids, who each had like five kids, and it's just insane.
rick santorum
how many impact the impact.
Remember you you're having these children and you're raising and
nurturing and you're preparing them to do the same to the next
generation.
I mean you and you put yourself into your children and you and
and they can then take what you've given them and pour that into their children and their children.
I mean, it's got to come out of those schools.
Yeah, the key and the point is the left doesn't want you to do
that.
They want to convince men and women not to educate their children
not to fight for the souls of their children to give them to
them and they will they will they will rightly educate your What you gotta say to them is, hey, if you have a kid, they could become a child star, and then you're rich!
hannah claire brimelow
Or they can have a lot of followers on Instagram, and that will make you feel immortal forever, because as you know, when you retire and you need assistance, your Instagram followers will come take care of you.
That's what they're known for, I think.
tim pool
Check it out.
There is going to be some influencer today.
They're going to be childless, they're going to be 80, and they're going to be on Instagram, which no one uses anymore.
It's going to be like only old people use.
Everyone's on InstaTalker or something like that.
hannah claire brimelow
On WeChat.
tim pool
Yeah, on WeChat.
unidentified
And they're going to be like, I use Muciplex prunes!
rick santorum
You should get yours today!
tim pool
And then they'll probably get $50,000 per read because of inflation, of course.
And then they'll use that to pay— That'll buy them Mucilex.
rick santorum
Yeah, I would just say take a step back and recognize that this generation, last few generations who've been sold this bill of goods are the most unhappy, depressed generation, most medicated generation in the history of the country.
And there is a reason for that because what you have been sold is a lie.
And you just need to get back to the truth and understand what really makes you happy.
hannah claire brimelow
I mean, I really do hold social media accountable for a lot of this.
I think it gives you a false sense of community.
It's not that it can't be a great tool, and it's not that it can't be very powerful.
But, you know, Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, talks about this.
It's just a complete degradation of community.
If at the end of the day you don't know your neighbors, you are not going to be able to call your many, many Facebook followers.
to help you if you have a crisis with your kids in the middle of the night or if you fall and you need help.
You need to know the people that you live near.
I mean that's the only way to truly feel fulfilled in life.
tim pool
It's a scary prospect of what the future is going to look like for a lot of people on the left because they're going to vote for government to replace family.
They've been doing that.
mark meckler
That is what they're doing.
tim pool
But imagine what it's going to be like when these millennials are all older.
They're going to be out in a massive voting block saying the government should provide for us a young person to change our diapers or something like that.
mark meckler
Well, I think they're already saying that.
And when I travel around the country and I talk to young people and they look at people our age, they're like, hey, thanks a lot for the debt.
Or what did we get for this?
And that's what we've done is we've spent their future.
It's pretty outrageous when you think about it.
We self-justify that.
I say we because of my age, but our generation, we're leaving this incredibly massive debt.
It means their taxes are going to go up.
Their standard of living is going to go down.
And if you ask somebody, hey, are you willing to do that to their kids?
You would say, well, of course I'm not.
That's outrageous.
It's immoral.
But that's precisely what we've been doing.
And that's precisely what Democrats are selling to us today.
tim pool
Yeah, you know, I don't want to say that it's, you know, you mentioned your age.
I'm assuming you guys are both boomers.
Is that your boomers?
rick santorum
Oh, the boomers.
hannah claire brimelow
Boomers and rhinos.
mark meckler
Yeah, we're bad, bad people.
tim pool
No, it's the corruption in government.
Yeah.
It's like the boomer generation for all this, the flack they get from millennials for like gutting our future.
It's like, yeah.
rick santorum
Okay, I'm going to fight back on that.
I mean, I was going to as well.
tim pool
That's my point.
My point was that you've got corrupt elites in government who are deficit spending and selling you a false bill of goods and then to blame the regular working class American person is absurd.
The problem is the elitism that has been selling us out.
Before the boomers, there were other people in government.
It wasn't the boomers who started the Federal Reserve.
rick santorum
Okay, I'm going to fight back on this because Those people get elected because they've convinced the American public that government can solve their problems and they believe it.
Yeah.
And so they're not doing it.
These aren't people who came from outer space and are opposing this.
These are people that you, listening to this, elected.
Because they promised you something and you believed it.
That's the problem.
So I always say, you can point to Washington and say, oh, it's terrible.
It's so divided.
Well, now we're seeing, you know what?
The country's pretty divided and they're just a reflection of that.
And the same thing with this deficit spending.
They're a reflection of a country that wants material goods and services and they don't want to pay for them.
How many times do you, I mean, how many things do you want?
Oh, I don't want to pay that much.
So let's just borrow the money.
And that's what's going on.
So you can blame Washington and I do, but that's why a grassroots movement like this, that awakens America and has a discussion about what the consequences of what we're doing is such an important thing at this time.
tim pool
I wonder if it's just, just a natural ebb and flow, right?
You know, strong men make good times, good times make weak men.
Are you familiar?
mark meckler
Oh yeah, absolutely.
tim pool
And maybe there's, maybe there's no real, it's just something that occurs.
When things get good, you don't have enough people who are calloused and hardened to what's going on.
You're trying to wake up a ton of people to say support a convention of states.
There's a, there's a good argument about, about it, but let the argument happen, I suppose.
rick santorum
Why is the greatest generation, the greatest generation?
tim pool
World War II?
rick santorum
Yeah.
mark meckler
It was hard.
rick santorum
Because it was hard.
mark meckler
Yeah.
rick santorum
I mean, people are made, I mean, everybody wants to avoid suffering, but suffering is part of life.
It's whether you want to suffer for something that's great and worthy and last, or something that makes you feel good for the short period of time.
tim pool
I was saying this earlier today that, you know, people often say, like, maybe we're in hell.
You've heard that, I imagine, from some people.
Like, maybe we're actually in hell.
Look how awful things are.
And I was like, maybe we're actually in heaven.
Because, you know, this world suits us so well, you know, it could just be that we've developed for the world around us or that we were made for the world.
But the way I see it is, There is no happiness without sadness.
There is no light without dark.
The universe is rather perfect in that.
It's a great experience.
It's about how you choose to see it.
I've gone through some really dark days, but I've always just chosen to be like, this is something that I'll remember, and I can always say I've experienced.
rick santorum
And learn from.
tim pool
I've had some really bad moments, like standing out in a thunderstorm, shoes getting soaking wet, car broke down, and I'm laughing.
Heck of a story, man. You know, it's something in life you get to say you've done, I suppose,
and you rack all these things up and it just feels... You know, whenever I would find myself
in these really crazy moments, obviously not having my life threatened, like those obviously
are truly horrifying, but I'm saying in like all the frustrations of a car dying in the middle of
the road, having to get out in the rain. I'm...
I'm like those are things that are supposed to be bad I actually think those are the spice of life, you know Like you put you put habanero peppers in your food it burns, but you like doing it That's where character comes from.
hannah claire brimelow
Yeah, I was gonna say there are Enthusiastic enthusiasts of stoic philosophy who say like you should take a day and fast and just so you know that you can get through it You can be without food You can suffer and recover and it's supposed to be a reminder that you are always able to overcome challenges You have to not be afraid to sort of tackle them It'll work best though if government handles it all for you, right?
Well, I would never do anything without the government's consent, as you know.
mark meckler
Well, and so there's also there's the the philosophy of the left is that man is perfectible, that you can make it through life with no suffering, and that's government's responsibility.
It's flawed to the core.
I mean the reality is you've just described some of the best things that we experience in life come from our suffering.
We become, if we make it through, we can become better people, we become stronger people, we become more empathetic people because we've experienced difficult times that we see other people experiencing.
Frankly, to be blunt, this is just how God designed us, in my opinion.
tim pool
You know, for my career, getting started, I chose to go to places where my life was at risk.
You know, like going to the Ferguson riots, going to Baltimore, going to Ukraine, going to Venezuela.
Venezuela was probably the scariest.
I had to flee the country, actually.
And so, you know, a lot of people think like, you're crazy.
Why would you take these risks?
Why would you do it?
And I'm like, for one, it's like a passion.
It's a drive.
You want to do it.
But I don't want to downplay the experience of the people who have to live it being somebody who just parachutes in.
But the idea is like we pursue conflict, not in the sense that we're trying to fight each other.
Some people do, and there's some bad people, but that we're driven by overcoming challenges and overcoming conflict, embracing it head on.
It gives us passion.
It gives us purpose.
mark meckler
The human desire is baked in for a quest to go out and chase something and do something good and great.
And I think we repress that at our own risk, honestly.
And I was one of the things I think you were saying in a quote earlier about one with men with no chest, right?
If we have a society that that builds weaklings, that builds in weak character, that we end up with what we have right now is really where we're at.
And you know what I want to say?
You know, and I want to tie this back to convention of states, which is, and you're going to have people, I'm sure there are people who are texting.
It's too dangerous.
It's too scary.
And I would say, thank God it wasn't you in 1776.
Really?
Because you would be the ones that are like, you know, it's pretty risky to go against England.
This is the greatest empire in the face of the earth.
And should we really take that risk?
And I just say, Hey, I'm glad it wasn't you.
tim pool
You guys ever watch The Patriot with Mel Gibson?
mark meckler
Oh yeah, absolutely.
tim pool
I always reference his movies, they're my favorite movies.
Because what was, you know, his character, what was his name, Benjamin, I forgot his last name.
mark meckler
I don't remember.
tim pool
He's saying we can't go to war with, he's like, if you're asking me if we should have, you know, if we should be, no taxation without representation, of course.
If you're asking me if we should be an independent nation, of course.
But if you're asking me to declare war and to go to war with England, then I would say no.
And then what happens is kids die.
Right. So, you know, then he's forced into the fray. And the reality is sometimes you can't
avoid the conflict and trying to just makes it come faster, harder, and worse. So I often like
to reference the founding fathers. There's that famous meme or writing about how they swore not
only blood and treasure, but the lives of their families and their sacred honor.
And there was one of the Founding Fathers signers of the Declaration.
His wife was kidnapped and used for a prisoner exchange.
One had his son killed.
Several of their homes were seized by the British.
And so that was them straight up being like, let's do it, man.
Screw them.
We're standing up for this.
It wasn't as bad as these these memes make it out to be like all of these people like no no a decent amount of them suffered and lost they risked everything and that's the reality of fighting for something good.
rick santorum
That was the elites of society these were every founder was a was a person who was accomplished who was wealthy who had.
Uh, was actually doing well under British reign and yet they stood for principle.
And I just, you know, ask all of those who are out there saying, Oh, well, we can't do this because even though it's what the founders intended, and even though, you know, we could, uh, we could try to do something positive.
I, you know, we're, I don't want to risk that.
And, uh, the, the reality is that The risk is much greater to allow Washington to continue to head on this inexorable course to control the future of our nation than to fight that battle.
And yeah, it might be hard and you might not win, but it's worth the fight.
mark meckler
Well, I want to add, and I think it's important for people to look around with open eyes and understand where they stand.
And one of the things we were talking about earlier is truth, right?
And reality and just an acceptance of reality.
So if you're out there and you're thinking well this is way too risky and there could be a runaway convention, that's the only argument we hear against it by the way, then you should know who you're standing with.
And who you're standing with literally is George Soros, Common Cause, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, La Raza, MoveOn.org, Daily Cause, Hillary Clinton.
All these people actually, all these groups other than Hillary Clinton signed a press release saying the Convention of States is horrible.
Over 250 groups have signed this press release.
Every bad group on the American left.
It's the baby-killing Marxist communist America haters all on one side saying this is bad.
You quoted the Business Insider article.
This is the left rising up against us.
And then you've got a few folks on the right that have bought into this and I would ask people like like if I woke up in the morning and somebody told me hey, you're on the side of Lavraza and Planned Parenthood, etc.
I think hmm.
I must be on the wrong side on this one.
So if you've been sold this bill of goods, you need to step back and look in the mirror and see all these people standing next to you and ask yourself, well, is that really the side that I'm on?
tim pool
Let's go to Super Chats!
If you haven't already, would you kindly smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, share the show with your friends, and head over to TimCast.com.
Become a member.
We're gonna have the uncensored After Hours show coming up later tonight.
We post those around 11 p.m.
or so.
Let's read some Super Chats!
All right, there's some superchats.
I'm not going to read that.
Someone wants me to read a very offensive superchat.
But I will read some of the superchats asking questions, some of them rather critical, so I hope you guys are ready.
All right, let's see.
Wootdoo for you.
This one just goes right for it.
unidentified
All right.
tim pool
Santorum was the first political figure I learned about.
He tried to outlaw fellatio and sodomy even between married couples, and the last also supported strict gun control in the 2000s.
This isn't our guy.
Did you support gun control?
I don't know about the other one.
rick santorum
No, I didn't.
I've never supported gun control.
I've gotten A ratings from every gun group that's known to man.
So, no.
I mean, that's first off just inaccurate that I supported gun control because I didn't.
Secondly, I stood for a constitutional amendment to put marriage in the Constitution as a union between a man and a woman.
That was an effort I tried back in 2004, but I never tried to outlaw sodomy or anything else.
In fact, I made it very, very clear that just because something that I consider to be immoral doesn't mean that it should be illegal or the government's role to regulate that.
tim pool
Run on.
So Siri Designs asks a question, as if it was present tense, but you're not in office.
So I would ask you right now, if you were in office, they asked, would you vote to it?
They asked, will you vote to impeach Biden and advocate for hearings into Fauci and Pfizer?
My question is, when it comes to Biden and the Ukraine stuff, would you, if you were in office today?
rick santorum
I guess, look, I'm concerned that we are headed in a time where every president gets impeached if the other party controls the legislature.
Again, that's not to say that the left won't continue to do it.
But I'm not a fan of criminalizing politics.
Joe Biden has been an awful president.
He's made some horrible decisions, and he should be taken out of office.
To me, that's the way to get rid of people who are doing bad things.
But to put the country through a routine impeachment of a president every two or four years, I condemn the left for doing it.
I would condemn the right for doing it.
If there is a legitimate reason that there is a threat that this president is not able to do his duty and should be removed, that's to me the principal reason.
He can't do his duty and be removed.
That's one thing.
Sounds like Biden!
Well, but we have, but we have elections.
That's what we have.
We have elections and, and that's why terms are only two years for Congress, four years for a president.
And, and if, if, if, uh, if he's done something, uh, again, I think nothing, nothing, nothing he's, nothing he's done to date, I would say are impeachable offenses.
They are horribly wrong and policies that have hurt America, but that, that, that should not be the standard for impeachment.
tim pool
So, fair point in that.
Well, I believe the quid pro quo stuff with Ukraine was when he was sitting as vice president.
Do you think that stuff shouldn't play a role into his presidency?
rick santorum
Again, the information is out there and the American public voted for him.
We can't continue to go back.
And again, criminalized political behavior.
There were legitimate reasons for Joe Biden to say what he said from a policy point of view.
And you can say, well, there was that connection.
Yes, but there was legitimate reasons from a policy point of view for him to say what he said.
tim pool
The Ukraine stuff?
rick santorum
Yes, there was.
tim pool
I guess the issue was they impeached Trump for the exact thing, even though he didn't do it.
rick santorum
Again, I'm not the left, okay?
I'm not going to adopt their power at any cost and destroy the democracy so I can control it.
I think we have to stand up and be better than that, and you can say, well, if you don't play their game, you know, they're going to... No!
If you play their game, then we lose everything.
tim pool
Man, it's tough.
I hear you're saying.
I absolutely do.
mark meckler
I would say I come down a little bit in between.
Not necessarily for impeachment, but I think Republicans have to play much harder hardball.
And I think Republicans have been way too soft.
And when the power goes back and forth and we're just under constant assault and then the Republicans don't play some hardball in response, it encourages.
rick santorum
So here's here's a point I would make, which is I agree we should play hardball.
But for example, you have a president who Donald Trump.
When Donald Trump was in office, Donald Trump called for the end of the filibuster in the Senate.
Right?
We just lauded Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for saving the Republic by not overthrowing the filibuster.
But four years before, Donald Trump and a lot of Republicans say, yeah, get rid of the filibuster.
We can't be like them.
I agree.
Yeah, you want to play tough, but don't take out weapons.
They're going to end up shooting you in the head.
tim pool
Yeah, yep, yep.
And that's what's being warned of Democrats right now, because what was it, Harry Reid?
rick santorum
Oh yeah, getting rid of the filibuster for judicial nominations gave us a court.
So be careful what you wish for.
We are a rules-based society and if we say we can ignore the rules and do what we want because we have power, that's what the left wants to do.
That's not what we do.
What we do is we stand by the rules.
tim pool
So the question, I suppose, and we'll move on, is just, you know, irrespective of any actual circumstances, if somebody did something that was either impeachable or illegal in a previous term, Joe Biden as vice president, do you think that should carry into an impeachment into the presidency?
mark meckler
No.
No.
No, I mean, it's supposed to be four things done during the presidency.
rick santorum
Right.
And the American public, by and large, knew everything that he did.
tim pool
I mean, I get what you're saying, and I think ultimately the problem is more so down to culture, in that we have a corrupt media apparatus that's not informing people, and that there are people who are willing to vote for this man even if they didn't know.
But let's move on.
Alright, let's see.
O.M.G.
Puppy says the left doesn't want a convention of states, but if it happens, they will switch gears and take it over.
Bye-bye Second Amendment.
I don't think that's possible.
mark meckler
No, and that's what I would ask, actually, and I laid it out.
rick santorum
How do you do it?
mark meckler
It's literally impossible.
A convention, all they do is make suggestions.
Takes 38 states to ratify.
Even if they could, they can't.
There are currently 31 states, both houses controlled by Republicans.
You're going to be at 33, 34 here in the next cycle or two.
It's literally impossible.
So when people say something like that, it's a weird kind of fever dream fantasy.
And I hear it all the time.
It drives me insane because I just want to say reality, show me how that happens.
And people say, well, I can't necessarily show you.
I just believe that's going to happen.
Well, that's called leftism, by the way, that reality is just what you dream.
It is that you don't have to justify it.
You don't have to demonstrate it.
People who oppose Convention of States, it's some weird fever dream that's been put in their heads.
And by the way, it's important they know where it comes from.
Literally, the idea of a runaway convention comes from Chief Justice Warren Burger.
He's the Chief Justice who gave us Roe vs. Wade.
He was asked a question about the idea of a convention when states were starting to propose a convention to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
And he said, well, that's a terrible idea.
We might lose our beloved Constitution in a runaway convention.
He was protecting Roe vs. Wade.
tim pool
I think people need to recognize that the overwhelming majority of this country is pro-gun.
unidentified
Absolutely.
rick santorum
As much as the Democrats keep claiming... And remember, at the time of the convention, if this happens, if 34 states pass a resolution to have a convention of states to propose amendments to limit the power of the federal government, that means 34 states will be controlled by Republicans.
Why?
Because if a state flips and is controlled by Democrats, they'll repeal the resolution that passed.
So you'll never get to 34 unless you have 34 at the time of the convention.
And so if you're saying that 34 states where Republicans are appointing the delegates to the convention are going to impose, I mean, I just got called an anti-gunner and for what?
I've never voted against, I've never voted for gun control in my life, yet people are afraid and we can't let fear govern us.
mark meckler
Well, and I would add it, and to be even more blunt, stop being a tool of the left.
If you're saying this stuff, you're a tool for the left.
And you can know better, you can go to Convention of States, all the arguments are there at conventionofstates.com, pro and con, read them, decide for yourself.
Stop saying the things that the left has put in your head.
That's where it's coming from.
tim pool
Well, I'll agree with people should do the research and check.
unidentified
Yes.
rick santorum
Yeah, you should know that I was not, up until a year and a half ago, I was not for Convention of States.
So a year and a half.
Why?
hannah claire brimelow
What changed your mind?
rick santorum
I actually read what it did because I was just told by by some folks 10 years ago when this first came up, this is a terrible idea, runaway convention, don't get anywhere near it.
And so I just said, OK, fine.
Well, I was never because this is a state issue, not a federal issue.
So I just said, you know, I'm you know, I'm not I'm not a big fan.
I'm worried about it.
Things like that.
Until Mark finally said, you know, here, read about it.
Look at the actual research.
Look at the history.
Look at the court decisions.
And there have been plenty of court decisions involved with conventions of states.
And it's the biggest no-brainer.
I mean, you just sort of read yourself into the faith.
Now I'm a zealot.
I'm like a reformed smoker when it comes to this.
hannah claire brimelow
Do you get pushback for having changed your opinion?
rick santorum
I get pushed back not because I've changed my opinion.
I get pushed back because people haven't read the information, don't know the truth, and go by what some Supreme Court justice said 20 years ago.
tim pool
Let's read some more.
We got a super chat here from The Janks.
He says, Hey Tim, been thinking about becoming a member for a bit.
Was wondering if you have ever planned to expand out any video game content since you have things like Pop Culture Crisis and Inverted World.
We are currently in production on a video game.
We've shown it several times.
I don't think we've ever said it.
hannah claire brimelow
It's one of my favorite projects that we have going on right now.
tim pool
It's really fun, but you have to be super offensive.
hannah claire brimelow
You have to be in the Timcast lore.
Like we preview it on the vlog or things like that.
Like, yeah, you have to be in the now.
So he should become a member.
tim pool
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's something we're doing in conjunction with Freedom Tunes.
Seamus Coghlan in the style of Freedom Tunes.
Good fun game.
So we'll have more when we can have more, but there is a game in development.
Maybe we should, you know, announce something about it or something like that.
rick santorum
I don't know.
tim pool
Let's grab some more Super Chats.
Alright, we got a lot of people talking about China.
Wyatt Caldenberg says, Tim, Google this.
Chinese buyers snap up U.S.
oil purchases at widest discounts ever.
They are buying timber, land, metals, minerals, and every resource Wall Street will sell them.
That doesn't sound good.
mark meckler
No, and it's true.
I mean, it's absolutely going on.
Farmland is another thing.
Pieces of land near American military installations.
The idea that we're even allowing this.
And you know, part of the reason we allow it is because people are cowed.
Because if you say, well, we shouldn't allow the Chinese to purchase our land.
Oh, well, now you're a racist.
Now you're a xenophobe.
And the Chinese love this.
They're using this against us.
Our good nature.
rick santorum
I'm sure they plant those memes.
hannah claire brimelow
And they look at it saying, oh, we know exactly what their weakness is.
We know exactly where to hit them.
They're going to do anything they can to avoid being called the R word.
We just can't have this.
rick santorum
Yep.
tim pool
All right.
Let's see what we got here.
What do you think of that?
Oh, Illuminati confirms 69 says the Chinese elite are ethnic Han and China is the nation
state of the Han.
They pursue Chinese interests.
Meanwhile, US elite is foreign.
China is at least a real country and an economic zone.
Now what do you think of that?
rick santorum
Do you agree?
Well, first off, America, he is right in this respect that America is not an ethnicity.
It is a set of values and ideas.
That's what makes us who we are.
And that's why the left and the threat that they pose is such a great threat.
When Barack Obama said he wants to transform America, that's what he was talking about.
Changing the values and principles that America was built upon.
And that's why this fight is so important.
So he's right that America is not an economic zone, but it is a values and morals zone.
And that's why, unlike other countries, this battle for the soul of America is in fact real, because we're not an ethnicity.
We don't have a culture that's built on thousands of years of ethnic history.
hannah claire brimelow
And wouldn't you say that, like, China benefits when we're more divided?
I think of, like, the opioid crisis in fentanyl, which is illicitly produced in China, trafficked across the southern border, and just further divides American middle class as well as cultural elites.
rick santorum
We're at war with China.
Excuse me, they're at war with us.
We have not decided we're at war with them yet.
tim pool
All right, we got Ian Smith.
He says, Nancy Pelosi likely in Taiwan to secure TSMC contract.
TSMC most valuable semiconductor fabricator worldwide moving to Phoenix, Arizona.
Semiconductor bill passed by US last Friday.
Have you heard that?
Is that true?
They're moving there?
rick santorum
They have a plant that they're building there.
Yeah, where's that?
Yeah, there's a plant there.
But obviously, they just passed the semiconductor or they're potentially I don't know if it's signed yet or whatever.
But that's that may be part of it.
But again, I don't.
mark meckler
Yeah, I think that's important, though, to point out, aside from the geopolitical consequences of what happens in Taiwan, that's where the chips are produced.
And the Chinese understand that if they get a stranglehold on Taiwan, they control all technology in the world.
They literally can shut down virtually anything that way.
tim pool
Porkins, hold it, says, great to see Rick and Mark on Timcast.
Trumplicans calling them rhinos.
Chill the F out.
Y'all came to the Grand Ole Party in 2016 and 2020.
We're individualists and differ in opinion and policy, not a hive mind like on the left.
mark meckler
Man, I think that's so important.
I haven't been involved in politics as long as Rick.
I go back to 2009, basically.
One of the things that's always driven me crazy about the conservative movement, when we started the Tea Party movement, all kinds of people in the Tea Party movement thought, we're the first conservatives ever to walk the face of the earth.
And they gave no credence to, no respect to those who came before them.
The conservative movement's been around for a long time.
There are a lot of flavors inside of it.
And I think we need to respect all of it.
rick santorum
I was part of the Republican Revolution in 1994.
People don't even remember.
unidentified
The first time they got the Congress... The Contract with America!
rick santorum
I mean, I was part of a group called the Gang of Seven back in 1991 and 92 and we exposed corruption in the House Bank and we threw out the Speaker of the House.
I mean, I was the original bomb thrower back in the day and, you know, now I'm a rhino, right?
Because some guys, like I said, some guy's been a conservative for 20 minutes.
tim pool
All right, let's, uh, let's get this from Wagner.
Oliviera says, Tim, since you liked the Freedom Caucus, I discovered recently that Ron DeSantis is one of the founding members of the caucus.
Is that true?
mark meckler
Yeah, that is true.
And, and I love Ron DeSantis.
He's actually an endorser of the Convention of States Project.
He's actually one of the few politicians I've ever endorsed.
I generally don't endorse politicians because they just betray you and crush your heart.
tim pool
Trump or DeSantis 2024?
mark meckler
Me, I would say DeSantis.
tim pool
What do you think?
rick santorum
Well, number one, I endorsed Ron DeSantis when he first ran for Congress.
I went down to Florida and did a rally for him and he was in a competitive primary and I endorsed him when he ran and I thought he was a strong candidate then and I think he's been as good a governor as I've ever seen in my time in America.
And he's, to me, he's the right blend of having the right policy prescriptions.
He is a MAGA nationalist, conservative, populist.
I wrote a book back in 2014 called Blue Collar Conservative, which Donald Trump would even tell you is what he used as a template for his MAGA movement and did it better than I did when I ran in 12.
And I think DeSantis believes the same philosophy, has the guts to stand up to the national media.
He's shown that repeatedly in Florida and is not as abrasive or as radioactive as Donald Trump.
mark meckler
I want to add a nuance to that, which is, you know, if I were DeSantis or advising him and I don't know him, I don't
talk to him.
But what I would say is if you're end up running against Trump, you don't go after Trump.
He should say, look, Trump was a great president.
I admire Donald Trump.
Trump endorsed me when I ran for governor.
We need eight years.
We need eight years of a good, solid, conservative president.
tim pool
But what if you got Trump, DeSantis, then DeSantis, then DeSantis?
mark meckler
I don't think it's realistic.
That's not generally the way political cycles work.
That's a, that's a powerful, you know, it's hot though because no, I mean like you, you're really hoping like to get, yeah, the idea that you're going to get three consecutive terms just generally doesn't happen.
And I also think, especially because of how Trump is, it's just going to pump up the radioactivity in four years.
It's going to make it much harder for whoever, whoever follows in his footsteps.
rick santorum
Yeah, but the reality is Trump had it for him to lose and he lost.
And you can say, well, they were after him.
They did all these things.
Yeah, but obviously he didn't handle them well because he had handled them well.
It's not like The media didn't go after Republicans.
I mean, go back, I always encourage people if they're in California, go to the Reagan library.
There's a whole display there of how the media just beat the tar out of Ronald Reagan.
They tried to destroy him and he was able to handle it and win.
And Trump fought, I agree, but he didn't handle it and win.
And I want someone who can handle it and win.
tim pool
All right, let's see.
So Moen, I think I'm pronouncing that right, says, Tim only goes hard on the left guests.
Reason why he can't get any more left guests.
You need to gatekeep your people more hard than those you disagree with.
One of the things Moen's been asking is that, arguing, what are your thoughts on Iraq having WMDs?
Would you support war?
And if there was war with China, how would you respond to it?
rick santorum
I would support Israel doing what I think Israel will have to do, and Saudi Arabia will have to do, which is take out Iran's nuclear capability at some point.
Because Iran with a nuclear weapon is an existential threat to the state of Israel.
It's one of those things where you hear the leaders of a country say, we're going to eliminate you, we're going to make sure that Israel doesn't...
And then you can't sit there as a small country like Israel and say, well, they didn't really mean it.
If they have a nuclear weapon that they can drop a bomb and do it, then they'll probably drop a bomb and do it and they'll survive.
Iran will survive it.
And so you have to stop it from happening.
tim pool
Well, how do you do that?
rick santorum
I suppose the issue is... The Israelis can do it.
I have no doubt about that.
Would this not spiral out into a greater international... Not if the international community, as they should, stands behind them and says that they're going to support their ability to maintain their own existence.
And that's what this is about.
mark meckler
Yeah, going back to Iraq, Iraq was a mistake.
Absolutely.
Obviously a huge mistake.
We flipped the balance of power in the Middle East in a way that's been very deleterious to just general world order.
And I agree with Rick.
I mean, I think the biggest problem in the Middle East right now is that we throttle Israel and that we do our best to keep them from doing the things that they need to do for their own security.
And I would argue for the security of the world.
And it's not just the Israelis.
rick santorum
It's the Saudis.
It's basically the Arab world.
Remember, Iran is not an Arab country.
It's a Persian country.
It's a Sunni, it's a Sufi, excuse me.
I'm all of a sudden Shia country.
It's a Shia Shia Muslim as opposed to Sunni Muslim there.
There are it's not just Israel that wants that does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
It is is the entire most of the Middle East and it will not be I said, I suspect it will not be just Israel that will will in the end stop Iran from getting there.
tim pool
What are your views on entering into a conflict with China?
My attitude is, and I'll tell you this too, my attitude on Ukraine, for instance, is I don't think we should be involved at all.
I certainly understand the history of the region.
I went over there and I met a lot of people talking about, you know, Ukraine's desires for entering the EU or potentially NATO.
That came up less.
But I'm wondering, you know, thoughts on Ukraine-Russia conflict and then potential conflict with Taiwan.
Should the U.S.
be involved in either of those?
mark meckler
So in regard to Ukraine, a little strangely, both sides of my family from Ukraine never felt any particular connection to Ukraine.
If I got to draw the line though, and first of all, no boots on the ground, absolutely no American blood should be spilled over there.
If I can use money as a proxy and we can be killing the Russian military on the ground without putting American lives at risk, to some extent I'm in favor of that.
We're weakening a geopolitical foe.
We're weakening a NATO foe by spending money, not by spending our lives.
With limitations.
And part of it for me also is, are we actually there to win?
Are we actually playing a game where we intend to let the Ukrainians or help the Ukrainians win?
If we're not there to win, and this is one of my problems with conflict in general, man, when you go into a war, when you're fighting a conflict, the only reason to go into conflict is to win.
So what's the exit strategy?
What's the end of this thing?
I've not heard anything like that.
And so I think what we've got is an interminable conflict that's draining the coffers of the United States.
And I think that's bad in a general sense.
In regard to China, from my perspective, and Rick said this a bunch of times, we are at war with China.
We're in a conflict with China.
Are we looking for a hot war?
No, I mean, and I don't think that's modern history.
The Cold War is really the model, but that was actually a war.
We were actually at war with Russia in technological ways, in espionage ways.
We're not treating China as that kind of a foe and that needs to be our footing.
tim pool
All right.
Here's a here's a hard one.
Anarcho Booth says, classic Republican impotence.
When the shoe drops and there's a power grab, they make concessions while the left rallies and mobilizes.
mark meckler
Yeah, I'm not sure what concessions we're making.
I'm not aware of any... What is he talking about?
tim pool
It's probably in reference to, like, impeaching Biden, for instance.
So I know you made your point on this.
rick santorum
I voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, by the way, just so you know.
hannah claire brimelow
But we're interested in Biden now.
tim pool
But I'll put it this way.
For a lot of people who are probably not... There's probably a lot of longtime, really staunch conservatives who saw Trump and they were like, to battle!
And there's a lot of people that are probably more in a similar space to me that were like neutral to liberal, moderate.
And then we see the Democrats just trample over everything, take what they want while claiming it's the Republicans doing it.
And then what happens with Trump is you have people begging someone to please just stand up and say no.
And he did.
And DeSantis does it too.
DeSantis.
I think DeSantis does it better in some ways.
I can't remember, he was at a press conference and then the press asks him something and he just laughs at him and insults him.
It was a while ago.
mark meckler
I think the difference is though, what he does is he destroys their underlying premise.
He's actually using logic.
So instead of just saying, you're fake news and I hate you.
And DeSantis, I just saw his press secretary do this two days ago.
Somebody was complaining from Politico saying DeSantis won't deal with any press that's opposed to him because he's scared of negative media.
And he said, we're not scared of negative media.
Everything you do is negative.
It's just, you're not relevant.
We don't care what you think.
And I actually think not caring is a better approach than simply doing combat with them.
The reality is, and this is becoming more and more true every day because of people like you, the New York Times doesn't matter like they used to matter.
rick santorum
Going back to the question, the problem is you can't pick every fight.
You can't fight every fight.
I mean, if you're out there and that's what that's what Trump wasn't able to do.
He couldn't back down from everything was a fight.
And he just every single day was a fight every day.
I mean, there wasn't a day that went by that he wasn't fighting about something that somebody said and and you need to pick your battles.
And so going after a demented guy who's not going to run for re-election and spend two years going after a guy in an impeachment of Joe Biden when he's not going to run for re-election, he's going to be gone.
Why are you wasting your time doing that?
That's fair.
Pick a battle that matters more to the American people.
mark meckler
So, generally speaking, the battle that I would pick is we need to go after all of these offenders inside these administrative agencies.
We need to start investigating the agencies, gutting the agencies.
rick santorum
I'd call foul play.
Tony Fauci.
Investigate the heck out of him.
mark meckler
Fauci should be hauled before Congress.
And I think to be muscular, which is what the commenter is talking about, we ought to hamstring the entire federal government.
That ought to be Congress's approach.
If the Republicans take power, which I believe they're going to, they need to do everything they can to hamstring the operations of the administrative state.
tim pool
Let's grab one more super chat here.
We got Brian Lee who says, I love Rick Santorum.
His book, It Takes a Family, was the first political book I ever bought and read.
He's a sincere Christian and an honest man.
I wanted Rick to become president.
unidentified
Are you going to announce your presidency right now?
rick santorum
Thank you.
I don't think he's related to me.
tim pool
Everybody, if you haven't already, would you kindly smash that like button, subscribe to this channel, and share the show with your friends.
We're going to be heading over to that Members Only Uncensored After Hours show, which will go up about 11.
You can follow the show at TimCast IRL.
You can follow me at TimCast.
Rick, do you want to shout anything out?
rick santorum
Join Convention of States.
I mean, just go to that website and learn about this.
If you oppose it, I plead with you.
Do what I did.
Go read the material.
And if you still feel the same way, fine.
But don't just take some meme that you saw that this is a runaway convention or a gun run.
Read the facts.
And then I think the vast majority of you will end up joining us.
mark meckler
Yeah, two things I would say.
Number one, pick a side.
I mean, we're at war here in our own country for the country.
And frankly, you're either with the Marxists and the leftists who are destroying the country, and you're willing to accede to that or be a tool for that.
Or fight with the patriots, the people who are standing.
And you mentioned the movie, The Patriots.
Stand up, fight, because they're coming for you.
They're coming for your family.
And then last, I want to say to the grassroots that are out there, I know a lot of them are your fans.
I've literally received more texts and emails about being on your show Than anything I've ever done in 12 years of politics.
I got a lot of advice like you're going in to see Tim.
This is like going into the heart of it.
It's so awesome.
I would say to those people, God bless you guys.
I mean, I love you.
Rick and I get to travel the country.
We meet Americans have hope.
There are great patriots out there all over the country.
tim pool
There are a lot of people who are like, you know, Tim, why aren't you challenging them on Iraq and all of these things?
And I'm just like, for one, I think the important thing is if you guys have a difference of opinion on foreign policy, it's like there's only so much I can say when I'm like, I disagree.
And then you say I disagree or like the Biden thing.
What are we going to do?
Just keep talking back and forth where you say no.
And I say yes.
And like, we're not getting anywhere.
When it comes to the people we've had on from the left, it's like they'll say something factually incorrect.
And then I'll be like, that's not true, that's not a real thing.
Your opinion can be something on policy.
I argue with Seamus about, you know, pro-life and pro-choice and stuff, because I lean more towards traditional, old-school pro-choice.
But so we can have an argument about policy positions, but if you have an opinion, I don't agree with, I don't know what else I'm going to say to you guys, right?
It's like, we disagree.
Let's let's, what else do you think?
mark meckler
And look, I think you're good.
You've been challenging us.
You've been putting out the questions where people challenge us.
unidentified
Yeah.
mark meckler
You even said people said he was a rhino and all these weird bills that he sponsors.
So to me to get, I mean, how do you get much harder than that?
tim pool
Those are the fun ones.
mark meckler
I mean, give you a chance to, you know, and I think those are important.
I want to entertain those questions always.
tim pool
So we need the good ones too.
Like people saying your book really helped them and things like that.
We need to, you know, We'll move on.
Hannah-Claire, do you want to shout anything out?
hannah claire brimelow
Yeah!
I'm a writer for TimCast.com, so I encourage you to go over there and click on the read tab.
I'm there five times a day.
I'm also on Pop Culture Crisis Tomorrow with Brett and Mary at 3 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
You can follow me on Instagram at hannahclaire.b.
I just want to say, if anyone has been following the stuff that's going on in Kentucky with the flooding, I really encourage all of you to take action and find ways to donate to those communities, because it's pretty devastating.
tim pool
Right, absolutely.
And a special thanks to Chris for running the show today while ladies on vacation.
Thanks for watching.
Alright, we're gonna head over to TimCast.com.
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