Jan. 18, 2025 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
Well, welcome back, everybody, as tonight's inauguration weekend preview show continues in grand fashion.
It is Saturday evening, January the 18th, and we are rejoined now by a man who really needs no introduction, the one and only former Congressman Steve King, 18 years in the United States Congress, and he's become a fast friend in those years since.
And a lot of great times on the radio, and not just on the radio.
But, Congressman, we are nearing the one-year anniversary of that infamous broadcast from the broom closet.
I hope you'll remember that one.
No one could forget experiencing that.
That was not necessarily the highlight of our relationship, but it certainly is something we'll never forget together, James.
That's for sure.
Steve and I were in Florida about a year ago at this time.
I think it was the first week of February, and we were speaking at an event, pretty big event.
And anyway, you can go back and listen to that at the broadcast archives, but that was a fun one nonetheless.
And also, Steve, well, let me first of all just welcome you back.
It's great to have you back.
And God bless you, my friend, and happy new year.
We're still saying that, at least until February, it looks like.
Well, yes, we are.
And we're on the cusp of having a happy new administration.
So we're only about a day and a half to go, and we are on a path.
And this path has already changed, I think.
It's changing the anticipation.
I have got so much I want to cover with you this hour along those lines.
So we're going to go at a breakneck pace here.
But I would just like to say one more thing here before we get into some of the topics, some of the first 100 days things we may can expect from this incoming administration.
But talking about a year ago, I think it was almost a year ago to the very day, perhaps this very week a year ago, you were barnstorming Iowa on a bus with Vivek Ramaswamy and Candace Owens, and he had solicited your endorsement for president back in the primaries.
It's hard to believe that the Republican primaries were only a year ago.
It seems longer than that in some ways, and in some ways it seems like yesterday.
But nonetheless, a lot has happened in the last 12 months, to say the least.
We were talking about this in the first hour, the assassination attempts, the convictions, these trials, and so much more.
As you reflect on the current political realities, Congressman, where do your assessments land?
You're looking back a year ago to today, and now this incoming administration, what do you make of it?
How do you sort it out?
Well, I have to say that, you know, we Americans have received a blessing with the election results of Donald Trump.
And I think back about two years ago, and I'm going to reference one of the top Republican lawyers known, I'm not going to use the name, but said to us in a major Brain Trust conference, I don't know why any Republican running for president thinks that they can be elected to the presidency of the United States as long as we have five states and ten counties that are standing in the way.
In other words, the reference was to the election fraud and the election corruption.
And until we can crack that and put that back into a legitimate place, there was not a belief or a conviction that we'd be able to elect a Republican president.
And that was before, I'll say, much of the lawfare had been unleashed on Trump.
And of all of the things, including the assassination attempt, all of that could be brought against him from the social media side of this thing, on and on and on.
And I look back at that now and I think say that person, hopefully, I have the license to give that name one day, was so responsible for cleaning up a lot of election fraud and putting barriers in place and educating people with booklets for poll watchers so that they knew what the role was going to be.
They knew what the law was.
They knew what to expect and they knew what they could do about it.
That's the untold story.
But all of this together, it took you when you see something that has been accomplished, there are so many people that if you pull them out of the equation, it would not have happened.
And I've just identified one, but there's so many others.
And so I think that you have to believe that the Lord put his hand in this thing and directed this.
And now he's calling upon us to do everything we can do to take advantage of this situation, put our country back on the rails, and steer Western civilization back in the direction it needs to be.
You know, I appreciate you mentioning the Lord's hand in this because I think now looking back, and I could be wrong, that the Lord's hand was in Donald Trump's loss, whether that loss really happened or whatever.
But the result of him not being president in 2020 was a blessing inso much as he comes back now more tempered and more steeled, potentially.
I mean, we'll see.
We'll see.
We don't know because we don't know what the next four years are going to bring us, but we can predict and we can hope.
And that's what we're doing tonight.
And I would like to ask you, Congressman, you know, some of the things that we may see here.
Our mutual friend, your mutual former colleague, Steve Stockman, he was going to be on the show tonight.
He's going to be on next week instead.
He's at a ball tonight in Washington, D.C.
But he had talked about the Republicans getting the bills ready.
How does this work?
How does this work in a transition period from one president to the next?
What should this incoming Republican House, the Republican Congress, have been doing since November to get the ball ready for Trump to drive in for some layups coming up here in the next several weeks?
Well, I think they clearly understand that Trump has a mandate.
And don't push back against that mandate, figure out who you're going to deliver that mandate, because actually we've got some people that are in Congress that are never Trumpers, but it's the American people that elected Donald Trump.
They elected him in significant part because of the policies and the promises that he made.
And so I just recall this.
When Trump was elected the first time in the 2016 election, I was in the Oval Office, well, there too, but this was the side office I'm about to reference.
And it actually was Steve Bannon's office, his war room, which was just some steps off the Oval Office.
And there was a 4x8 whiteboard up there, a gigantic version of Karl Rose's little whiteboard.
And on it were all of Trump's promises that he had made during the campaign.
And so I'm looking at that, and I'm talking to Biden, or excuse me, talking to Bannon and trying to read and think at the same time.
And he stepped out of the room for a little bit.
And I got a better look at that.
When he came back in, I said, where's the balanced budget?
And he said, we don't think we can balance the budget in the first four years, but maybe we can tackle that in the next four years.
That was an interesting piece that was, he'd never make that promise in 2016, I recognize, but we really have to focus on that.
And look what he did this time.
Here's Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, at least up until about yesterday, after dropping $2 trillion out of that budget.
So that's hanging over the heads, especially the House of Representatives.
And they need to have the legislation in place.
They need to have the votes counted.
They need to see what they can possibly do.
And then turn some of those reluctant ones over to Donald Trump to twist their arms a little bit and reach across and find a couple Democrats that want to get reelected to get that done.
So this is these kind of things.
They knew on election day where they needed to go with that path.
It's been, you know, it took quite a while to be sure that Mike Johnson was going to be the returning speaker.
But when that happened, now they've got to circle their wagons together and lay out this agenda, what they can do on immigration, what they can do on renewing the Trump tax cuts and just the foreign policy piece of this thing.
And the list goes on and on.
But there's people there that want those bills and they want to write those bills and they want their name on those bills.
And they're doing that because they believe it.
And they're doing it also because they want some favor from Donald Trump.
And he's got a tremendous, it's almost a tsunami of political support washing over the country.
It goes out well outside the Republican Party and across the Independents and down into the Democrats, including and sweeping in Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom I happen to know a bit and like him and respect him.
And I think he's a gift to this country, too.
I do too.
And thank you for saying that.
And yes, it does seem a vastly different reality, at least apparently so, from 2017.
It looks like the left has taken a silver bullet to the heart right now.
I mean, I guess they will reimagine themselves at some point, and they will recalibrate and reorganize and start a counteroffensive.
But we were talking about this in the first hour.
It hasn't happened yet.
And as Peter Noon of Hermits said, there's a kind of hush all over the world, at least all over the left-leaning world, that we will take advantage of for as long as we can.
Now, I want to ask you this.
I want to move very quickly to some of Trump's biggest campaign talking points.
And we're going to see which one of these you think are going to be acted upon and carried out and which ones may fall flat, whether it's because of recalcitrant Republicans, you know, that narrow margin in the Senate or whatever.
But I would like to spend no more than two minutes on each of these points, and that will carry us into the next break.
But this first one is the biggest one, I think, at least to me, and certainly one of his biggest issues in the campaign, a mass deportation program, beginning a mass deportation program.
What do you see really happening here on that?
I think they're going to see significant success in that.
In fact, it's been reported that we already have illegal aliens that are going south.
I don't know that it's a flood yet.
We don't have a way to count them.
But just that message.
And I remember her testimony before Congress when Democrats said, well, we don't have the resources to deport all these people.
And a witness was Rosemary Jenks, who's head of an immigration organization.
And she said, well, they got here somewhere.
If they got here somehow, they can go back the same way.
And that just caught my ear when I heard her say that.
Of course, I smiled and tried to keep from stickering.
But I think Tom Holman has sent a message.
He's been in the media over and over again.
Just his presence is something that starts to move in that direction.
And they're going to put ICE in a lot of places they weren't before.
They need to double the number of ICE agents.
It's been running on a starvation diet now, too few people, and take away all of the resources that are being spent to change diapers and babysit and transport people into the United States.
Take those same resources, reverse them around, and start the flow the other direction.
I think we've got plenty of money to work with because Biden's been pushing it the wrong direction.
Turn that valve the opposite direction.
And we're going to get a lot done.
I really believe we will.
Remain in Mexico will be a piece of that.
Negotiating with the Mexicans to take people that came through Mexico to the United States looks like that can't happen.
So I'm excited to see how this unfolds.
And we know that Tom Holman's not going to back off.
He is a straight talker, if ever there was one.
I'm glad you mentioned Tom Homan's name, Steve, because we were talking about some people that we like in the first hour, and his name inexplicably escaped us.
But he cast this masculine presence.
And, you know, this is one thing I will say about Trump and Homan.
You know, you can start backtracking some of these campaign promises after you get elected, and they have only doubled down on this deportation plan.
And Homan's even going so far as to say we're going to start it in Chicago because I think, and I quote, your city sucks, I think is what he said.
That's a direct quote.
So, I mean, they have not backed down at all.
They have doubled down, in fact.
And so that leads me to my next question, moving as quickly as we can.
Ending birthright citizenship.
This is a 14th Amendment issue.
That's also something Trump says he's going to tackle.
That seems to be a little more fraught with legal peril in the courts, but I'd certainly like to see it done.
Well, I think it can be done.
I actually introduced that legislation back some years ago, and so I'm fairly familiar with the arguments, the legal arguments along the way.
I would say the lead scholar on that is John Eastman.
Of course, John Eastman was targeted by Lawfare also for giving Trump constitutional advice.
I think John Eastman is the top constitutional scholar in the country that's out here in the arena, any public arena anyway.
And if you go down through that, how did we ever get to the place where we're granting automatic citizenship because a baby is born on the soil of the United States or the jurisdiction of the United States?
And the 14th Amendment says, you know, all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are American citizens.
But if you're an illegal alien, you're really not subject to the jurisdiction.
You're actually subject to the jurisdiction of the country you're a citizen in and your obligation to them.
And John Eastman makes that argument very well.
There's a case in 1898, Kim, oh boy, Kim Jong Ark.
That's pretty close, not exactly right.
A Chinese immigrant whose parents brought him over.
And there was an erroneous decision made by the Supreme Court then.
It's not been litigated, I don't believe, since 1898.
So it's a practice.
It just crept in on us, and they kept handing more and more citizenship papers to babies born in the United States.
Now, so just think if a plane comes through on a through flight and a woman on the plane goes into labor, she goes through the gate and has the baby on them, say in the restroom at the airport, gets back on the plane, that baby should be an American citizen.
This is not.
So I think that he can't administratively stop it.
Just simply say that practice is now ceased.
And then, of course, it'll be litigated.
But this Supreme Court, I think, will agree with John Eastman and me.
I think they will.
Exactly.
I mean, you've got a Trump majority, majority, majority.
A majority.
Excuse me.
Trump appointed Supreme Court.
And even at the very waning days of the first Trump administration, they ruled that military funds could be used for the border.
And, you know, it's still hit or miss.
It's still a crapshoot in some regards.
But, I mean, I think you'll take your chances if you're Trump going forward with this Supreme Court compared to the Supreme Court that was in place at the time of his first election.
So give me a minute on this one, if you could, Congressman.
Tariffs.
This is a word that hasn't been used seemingly in decades.
And of course, the establishment media is talking about how bad it's going to make us because the economy is so good right now, don't you know?
I mean, everything's like doubled or tripled or quadrupled in price.
But tariffs, what can be done?
What will be done?
And how will it affect the average consumer?
Well, that's, boy, that is an interesting topic.
And first of all, the threat that he would put a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada until they got the illegal immigration under control.
That has motivated Canada.
I think also it's motivated Mexico, although I'm not as familiar with that.
Canada's going to have a new prime minister in the next few months.
We know that Justin Trudeau has more or less said, I'm going to tip over my king in about March 24th, and that gives us time to find another liberal that can run.
But the truth is that Pierre Polyev will be the next prime minister of Canada, and he will be tough on immigration, and he's a way smart economist.
So that part, I think that the leverage of those tariffs, Canada will figure out under Polyev how to avoid those tariffs by cooperating and enforcing immigration laws.
Mexico may, but there's so much corruption, so many drugs, and the machinery of illegal immigration, the network of the drug cartels and their involvement in trafficking people into the United States.
There's so much money involved.
That's going to be different.
And you may have to send some people over the border to knock out some of that.
That's not wrong.
It's a war on the United States from there.
So that's part of that tariff.
But there's another bigger thing.
And it's something that I have talked to Trump about and been to the White House to make that case.
And that is the theft of intellectual property, especially by China.
That is an industry that they have created.
And as far back as about 2006 or 2007, I went to China to more or less beat up on those people for stealing our intellectual property.
And I went to five cities.
And after the first two and the third one started out, there's always the same words reading from the same script or memorizing, I think.
And so I sit back, lean back in my chair, and I had my Blackberry then.
And I wrote a text to my legislative director, and I said, draft a bill that directs a U.S. trade representative to conduct a study to determine the value of U.S. intellectual property pirated by the Chinese and apply a duty,
a tariff on all products coming from China and an amount equivalent to recover that loss and an administrative cost and distribute those proceeds to the rightful property rights holders.
And so when I got that to Trump, he thought it was a great idea, but he wanted to put the money into the treasury.
And you've got to give that money to the people that own the intellectual property.
You've got to honor that.
So we went around on that a little bit, but that's something I know they're interested in.
I hope they remember that.
I've talked to Peter Navarro on that and also Bob Lighthizer on it.
And Navarro is going to be involved in this yet.
So I'm hopeful that that's something that they bring.
It's a very simple solution.
You're going to steal from us.
We're going to put duties on all the products coming from your country.
So what you're really doing is buying the intellectual property from us, except we're not really willing sellers, but we are confiscating some of your assets to compensate for it.
And it was a simple solution, I think, and it's still alive.
It's still good.
But I'm finding that it takes about 20 to 25 years for the country and society to get their minds around ideas that seem to be pretty simple when they're offered.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the things that's so incredible about having Steve King on is that so many of us like to imagine what it would be like if we were there.
Steve King has actually been there.
I mean, Steve King knows Donald Trump.
He's worked with him.
He's talked with him.
He's telling us stories about him as we speak right now.
And then he's talking to us about the same issues he has talked to him about and talked with his colleagues in Congress about for 18 years.
And it's just to be able to siphon into that insight is just a treat for this listening audience.
And so I'm looking at the clock now.
Well, thank you.
And thank you for giving us your time tonight on inauguration weekend.
Saturday night is always precious time.
You're a family man.
I had the opportunity to meet your wife last year as well.
And you met mine and some of my kids.
And I guess all of my kids were there.
And so we all have things to do on Saturday night.
So I don't ever take a guest time for granted on a Saturday night, even though I have to do it.
But I have to be here.
You don't.
Well, let's talk about this.
James, just says, please don't tell me the score of the ball games, okay?
Don't tell me the score of the ball games.
They're on tape.
Yeah, no, no, no.
I'm not going to Telling you who won between the Chiefs and the Texans or anything like that.
You're getting too close now.
Okay, not telling you.
But okay, we'll keep that a secret.
All right, we got about three minutes remaining, and I don't think we're going to have enough time to get into all of this, but maybe we can do 60 seconds on this one.
This is an NBC headline.
So I'm reading from NBC here that Trump is going to limit participation in women's sports for transgender women.
And this is what it reads.
Trump has repeatedly referred to transgender women as men.
Now, in a simpler time, Steve, we would have referred to them as cross-dressers or even perhaps transvestites.
But nevertheless, this is an issue you never thought you'd have to tackle.
But nevertheless, here it is.
And I think it's a good thing that a little bit of common sense goes a long way.
How much legislation can be made here to keep men out of the women's locker rooms in high schools and in colleges and wherever else?
At the national level, I'm not sure how that does apply and how broad the legislation might be and targeted.
The folks that are working on that hopefully do have it figured out because this nation does need to put the marker down.
And it's happening at the local level, too.
For example, the United States Congress banned the transgender person that's there in the House from the women's restroom.
And also the same thing happened in the Iowa legislature.
I think that election was crooked myself.
And they put a transgender person into the Iowa legislature, and they banned the utilization of someone with an XY chromosome from going into the restroom or the XX chromosomes.
Let's do that everywhere.
It's nuts.
I remember when we had in 1998, I believe it was 98, we had a bill come before the Iowa Senate when I was there to ban, to establish that the marriage was only between one man and one woman.
And I remember the debate.
It was, this is silly.
Why do we have to do this?
Everybody knows this is true.
But I'm the guy that amended that bill, and I took out one man and one woman, and I replaced it with one male and one female.
And they said, why are you doing that?
It's because I don't want to argue about what a man is and a woman is.
I'm going to be specifically sexually identified as male and female.
But look where we are today.
There's a young man that was in college studying to be a social worker.
I don't remember exactly where it was now.
I read the article a couple of days ago.
And he had said that women are, men need to protect women because they have the babies.
Okay, makes sense to us.
And so they kept pushing on him.
And then he wore a t-shirt on October 10th, which would be 1010 or Roman numerals XX.
And he got a t-shirt that had two X's on it, like Women's Day.
And they kicked him out of school because they just triggered the poor liberals there that he would be pointing out that a woman was XX chromosome, man, XY.
And it's nuts, but it's turning around, and Trump's helping turn it around.
And I think there's a cultural transformation.
Each one of these incidents, look at this.
This flips it over to the other side, and we're moving back towards the society that I think God intended, James.
Hey, folks, SteveKing.com.
That's the easiest website in the world to remember.
SteveKing.com.
You can get his book.
So many of you actually did get his book earlier this year when we had it on offer.
And I actually picked those up at that aforementioned event back earlier, nearly, well, a year ago now.
And we got every single one of those attributed to people who had asked for them.
And really thankful for Congressman King for signing all of those.
So many of you in the audience tonight.
But if you didn't get it, SteveKing.com, you can get it tonight.
Steve, we have just seconds remaining before the music plays.
We may have to carry this one over into the next half hour.
But the big question is pardons.
You know, we were talking about this on the phone a couple of days ago.
I've never seen a president pardon anybody, except in those waning days before he leaves office.
Are we likely to see pardons in the next few days?
We're talking about J6 defendants particularly.
I would hope that happens in the afternoon of January 20th within hours of the time in.
And I've thought about this.
I gave a half answer to a fellow the other day.
I'd want to look at the ones that are convicted of violent crimes.
Okay, fine.
Pardon everybody that's not been in charge with a violent crime.
Look at those other cases individually.
I don't think you're going to see anything egregious enough that you wouldn't want to pardon them all.
And if there's nobody there that committed crimes any worse than Hunter Biden, so it should be an easy slam dunk.
Pardon them all.
I'm not done with this yet.
What an answer.
What an answer from Congressman Steve King.
We're skipping the brakes to make haste and make more of this time.
We'll be right back.
We're going to pair him up with Blue Board.
Stay tuned.
Pursuing Liberty.
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News this hour from townhall.com.
I'm Jason Walker.
Donald Trump ready to get to work.
Trump will become the 47th president after his swearing in on Monday, and he has told the country he plans to take immediate action.
Among his day one promises, launching the largest deportation in history, closing the border, imposing higher tariffs on imported goods, and signing pardons for January 6th riot participants.
He's told lawmakers to expect more than 100 executive orders out of the gate.
Greg Klugston for inauguration 2025.
Montana GOP Senator Steve Dane says restrictive environmental policies putting national forest lands in his state at risk of the same kind of fires we're seeing in California.
I'll tell you what, we've been saying it for many, many years.
Either we better manage our forests and our wildlands or they're going to manage us.
And when these fires erupt in California, they're virtually unmanageable at that point.
Also at townhall.com, Pakistan's imprisoned former prime minister and his wife receiving news sentences that after a conviction on corruption charges, here's correspondent Karen Chamas.
The couple are accused of accepting a gift of land from a real estate tycoon in exchange for laundered money when Khan was in power.
Khan has denied wrongdoing and insisted since his arrest in 2023 that all the charges against him are a plot by rivals to keep him from returning to office.
The latest development came a day after Khan's PTI party held a crucial round of talks with representatives of the government of Prime Minister Sheikhbaz Sharif to demand the release of all political detainees, including Khan and other party leaders.
I'm Karen Chavas.
She was legendary in France, the French paying homage to former resistance activist Genevieve Collaroux.
She has died at the age of 108.
More on these stories at townhall.com.
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We're skipping the flutter breaks tonight to maximize our time with our guests this hour.
And one of the things we like to do here is to do some team-ups.
And every now and then, once in a blue moon, we'll team up two guests and just let them interact with one another.
And I thought two great guests to do that with tonight would be Congressman Steve King and Lou Moore.
So Lou Moore was the, of course, as you know, he's made several appearances.
If you're listening, if you're a regular listener, you know Lou Moore's background.
He's made several appearances since last fall, a few months ago.
But if you're tuning in for the first time, Lou Moore was the chief of staff, congressional chief of staff for Jack Metcalfe, who was a United States Congressman for the 2nd District of Washington, Washington State, from 1995 to 2001.
And Lou was his chief of staff in Washington, not at the home district in Washington, D.C.
And if you look at Congressman Metcalfe's portrait, he looks like the exact blend of Jack Palance and James Coburn.
I mean, he just looks like a guy who should have starred in these 1950s Westerns.
And then you have Steve King.
Steve King in Congress, of course, famously, most famously from 2003 to 2021.
His book tells it all.
And you can get it at steveking.com.
Now, I would not use the pejorative establishment Republican to describe either of these two men, but they have had a great deal of mainstream success at the very highest levels of power in this country.
And we like these team-ups, and I thought it would be great to bring Steve King together with Lou Moore.
Now, Steve was in office when Lou Moore was serving as the national campaign chairman for Ron Paul's 2008 presidential bid.
They have both done it as outsiders, as mavericks.
And here they are now together, maybe talking for the first time together.
Lou, welcome to the conversation.
It's great to have you back.
Well, thank you, James.
Appreciate it.
I appreciate having some time here with the Congressman.
Indeed.
And Steve, we'll let you say hello to Lou, and then we'll get right down to it.
Yes, no, Lou, I appreciate it.
This is the first time I think we've interacted, and I can recall anyway.
But I got to serve with Ron Paul for quite a long time in Congress.
And I would go back and sit with him at night and just sit there and chat away with him.
And I like the way his brain went down into clearly the libertarian side of things, but to look at Audit the Fed, for example, his understanding of that and the way he moved the Libertarian Party in a direction that made a difference in some of the races across the country.
And of course, it's not too bad when you're the dad of a United States Senator on top of that, who ran for president?
Was that four years later?
I believe it was 2012.
So I've interacted with both of the Pauls here in Iowa in the First of the Nation caucus.
And so there's a good history with all of that.
And I wouldn't doubt if we were in the same room together.
Maybe I didn't know it.
Yeah, I think that might have been the case.
But no, thank you for having me tonight.
Well, it's great to have you back as well.
And of course, Lou, I know you're very well familiar with the career of Congressman King and his trials at the hands of the establishment Republican Party and his book and the contents there within.
And actually, I would just like to, you know, for all the shared history there, turn it over to you just for a few minutes, gentlemen, and let you interact and talk about the incoming administration.
Lou, you're joining this conversation.
Steve and I had the first 30 minutes of this hour.
Let's let you take it in any direction you want, but direct it towards Congressman King and let's just hear what happens.
Well, you know, timing is everything in politics and the environment of the moment is pretty dang important too.
And as Trump is about ready to take the oath and get busy, I mean, I just looked at a few data points just in the news.
New York Times, 63% of Americans want every Biden-era illegal alien deported, including 44% of the Democrats.
The protest that they planned, a massive protest against Trump for his inauguration, they say is completely fizzling and there may only be 500 people show up.
You know, it goes on and on.
And then, you know, this fire that's been going on in LA, which has captured, I think, everybody's attention.
You know, the whole display of wokeness and the ungovernable situation that these people create when they get in office is there for everyone to see.
And I just think, you know, I mean, the moment is dang near perfect, at least right at this moment, for him to hit the ground running.
And then, you know, and I'll just mention one other thing.
I was very encouraged by this.
I don't know if you gentlemen saw this, but they have named Matthew Lowmeier.
They're planning to appoint him to be the secretary of the Air Force.
This guy is one of the most vociferous opponents of DEI in America.
He is an extremely outstanding person who was in the military and drummed out of Space Force, I think, because of his DEI stand.
And they're going to send him in there to be running the most woke of the service branches at this point, the Air Force.
I just, there's a lot of things happening that are very interesting and Possibly going to be really significant right out of the gate.
Congressman, your response.
All of those are good observations.
And I just think back at when Barack Obama's initiation of some of these things and then how he laid the foundation for this.
And then I think he was the voice behind, not the sole voice, but a significant voice behind the Biden presidency.
We always wondered who's actually calling the shots there.
And not many people think it was actually Joe Biden.
But this entire social agenda.
Well, you just know that, don't we?
I mean, if you watch that guy, no, they weren't going to hand him the nuclear football and say, go ahead and start pushing buttons and making phone calls.
They'd have tackled him if he tried to do that, I think.
But we have a global phenomenon.
And this, not only is the time right at this moment that you talked about, Lou, but when I look at what goes on in Europe and the way the shift is taking place over there with NATO and how they're rearranging themselves, the shift in Israel and the peace agreement there, which I'm not sure I agree with that, but it's a shift because Trump is moving into the presidency.
And then to just think that maybe only 500 people are going to show up for the inauguration to protest it.
Oh, boy, Marilyn and I were in Washington when Trump was inaugurated the first time, and it was awful.
They had all of a million women in those crazy pink hats.
And they were everywhere.
They surrounded our car and be cursing and foul mouthed and beating on our car with their foul signs.
And Marilyn is saying, step on it to our driver, step on it, step on it.
I didn't want to kill him.
And so he said, just go to the speed that they can get out of the way.
And if they don't, well, I'm not going to wait and be beaten up by these crazy ladies.
But anyway, in the heart of downtown D.C. that night, inauguration night, I hadn't eaten all day.
And well, okay, just I'm tired of asking my staff to do all this, but I'll slip into this McDonald's and then I can at least grab a hamburger and I'll jump out of there and then go to the next event.
I walked into the McDonald's and got in line thinking I was just another anonymous person.
There were about 150 pink hatters in there and they saw me in an instant.
They surrounded me and I backed up to the wall so I only had 180 degrees of them to look at.
And it was like Linda Blair the Exorcist, all of these crazy women screaming at me.
And I decided, all right, well, we'll just see how this works.
So I just kept firing back at them and wore every one of them out.
And I had a cold hamburger to eat.
None of this is going to happen this time.
That's great news to me, Lou.
Yeah, and I mean, we'll see, but it's certainly not going to be on that scale or anything approaching it.
The Democrats are really on the back foot right now.
It is kind of stunning.
But this is just a series of events in the news and then the coalescing around Trump.
I mean, if it's true that 44% of the Democrats are now supporting complete deportation of LA.
I want to talk to y'all about that.
I mean, unbelievable.
Absolutely want to talk to y'all about that.
Thank you for bringing that up, Lou.
But first, I want to just mention louemore.com.
You know, the guys that have their names as their websites, that's easy.
SteveKing.com, louemore.com.
That's L-E-W-M-O-O-R-E.
Lewemoore.com.
You can get his book if you haven't gotten it already.
Like Steve King's book, this is another book that we have offered to our audience this in 2024, Forerunner, The Unlikely Role of Ron Paul.
But Lou, and your most recent podcast, we're going to get back to the resistance or lack thereof in just a moment.
But in your most recent podcast, you wrote as a slightly younger congressional staffer in the 1970s, you toured the Panama Canal.
Let's talk about that very quickly, gentlemen.
All of this stuff going on right now with regards to Mexico, Greenland, the Panama Canal.
Lou, you were down there years ago.
What do you make of it?
Well, you know, this is kind of a part of a piece, and this is a whole nother area.
The intimidating force that Trump appears to be in foreign policy right now.
He's saying, we're going to take Greenland, and Greenland's like, okay, we'll negotiate.
It's unbelievable.
And at Panama, it would be a lot heavier lift.
But, you know, the Chinese stole that canal from us straight up.
And nobody has really said it like that.
But Trump has come pretty close.
And that's why he's zeroing in on these guys right now.
And it's a beautiful thing.
We'll see what happens.
But it's in a strategic imperative of the United States that we control that canal.
It always has been.
Never should have gave it up.
That was a trilateral commission project that David Rockefeller foisted on Jimmy Carter.
And then William F. Buckley and others got involved.
And, you know, the rest is history.
But the story is not evidently over yet.
Congressman, your take on all of this, because there's been a lot of hot talk about sending some troops into Mexico, annexing Greenland or acquiring Greenland, taking back the Panama Canal.
As a former congressman, I mean, this is stuff you couldn't have perhaps even imagined, even in your time in office.
Well, let's put this in perspective.
We're losing 100,000 Americans to fentanyl.
And most of that is illegal fentanyl and smuggled across the border from Mexico.
And the base chemicals are being shipped in from China to Mexico.
There they convert it into fentanyl and they smuggle it into the United States.
That's killing a lot of Americans.
And I happen to remember, no, I wasn't there at the time, but Manchu Villa invaded the United States down there in about 1912, I believe it was.
And it's either 1912 and they killed 17 Americans, or it was 1917 and they killed 12.
I'm not sure which.
But that was a, you know, that was a pretty small invasion compared to what they're doing to us.
100,000 this year, 100,000 next year.
So this is entirely justifiable to go on there and snuff out that source, the sources that are killing Americans.
And then looking at the Panama Canal, Jimmy Carter gave that back.
And you're pretty gentle on him, Lou.
And I know he's just passed away.
He was a fine man.
I'm pretty sure he's on his way to heaven or there already.
Good Sunday school teacher, and he could pound nails and his heart was in the right place.
But that was really stupid to give back the Panama Canal.
And that's the one that just burns me when I think of it.
He gave back the Habsburg Jewels, too, but I've seen them since, and that wasn't that bad a deal.
But the illegal aliens, they're so proud of them over there.
They mean more to them than they ever did to us.
But the Panama Canal, I've been there, and we have illegal aliens pouring through that isthmus.
And there's a center right down there near the Panama Canal that the former American base that has been taken over now by global NGOs whose industry is to hustle people into America, illegal aliens, piled one on top of another.
That's the place to defend the immigration coming through from most of the rest of the world to keep them out of Mexico is Panama Canal.
So it is a national security thing.
And the Chinese don't have any business there.
The Monroe Doctrine should be reestablished.
I'd like to do it without bloodshed.
And I think there's a way to do it.
And Trump can, I think he'll get it done.
I really do.
Just Greenland, I could see the American flag going up over Panama.
They'd be better off anyway.
So would Greenland.
But it's really funny to look up at what he says, well, the 51st state and watch Justin Trudeau put his knees even closer together.
He calls him Governor Trudeau.
I mean, it's hilarious.
You know, it's interesting because, I mean, it's more land area, more territory than the entire United States, but it's less population than the state of California or right at the state of California.
So, you know, it's an interesting, I think that's a little bit more hyperbole, but Greenland, Mexico, Panama, Canal, who knows what to expect over the next four years, and that's what makes it so exciting, especially as a commentator for me tonight to talk to two people like you about these things.
It's just, you know, we haven't been able to dream and imagine for a long time, except nightmares, maybe.
Well, then my mind travels up there about anything, I'll say, west of Thunder Bay, except for Vancouver.
They have a closer affinity to the United States than I think they do, than they do Toronto.
And so I think that it actually is a possibility.
They'd be all better off economically.
Their tax structure would be better.
Their economy would have more dynamics to it.
Of course, like I said, I believe Pierre Polyev will be the next prime minister, and he'll be focused on those economics, and he'll bring Canada back around.
But nonetheless, that reach, to think of the United States from the Panama Canal to the 49th parallel and perhaps above that, that's the, and of course I'd leave the Mexicans out of that for now.
But if I'm going to yield here in just a second, but something, I asked this question down in Mexico City at a dinner table of Mexican, what would they be, monopolists and government top people.
And I said, why did the United States leave when we invaded Mexico?
We won the war.
We controlled Mexico City and anything that mattered in Mexico.
Why did we sign the Treaty of Hidalgo and come back home again?
It was manifest destiny.
Mexico should have been a target of manifest destiny.
The answer I got from, what was his name?
Lawrence, gosh, his last name, I forget now, it was a German name.
And he was the historian, the Mexican historian.
And he said, well, they looked at these 15.8 million indigenous people, and they didn't need to have any more Indian wars.
And so that's why they backed away.
And after the dinner, I talked to him over on the side room, and I said, well, what about the anti-Catholic bias?
And he looked at me and he said, that was the other half.
And I said, why didn't you say so?
Well, I didn't want to bring it up in that table.
So there's interesting things that happen if you have me where you can ask the right questions of the right people.
It was anything.
Lawrence Meyer.
I just think that Trump is displaying strategic thinking in the interest of the United States of America.
There's been plenty of strategic thinking that's gone on in foreign policy circles in the last hundred years.
Go back as far as you want.
Go back to Wilson anyway.
But it's never in the interest of us, the people of the United States.
And I think this is a real departure on a number of fronts.
I totally agree with that, Lou.
Let me ask you this.
Just to quickly change pace.
We have about eight minutes left, and I want to take full advantage of it, especially with you two.
So the conventional wisdom was when the Democrats were riding high, they were going to abolish the filibuster.
It was a racist thing.
It was an antiquated thing.
It was all of this.
But now, the conventional wisdom is they're going to fall in love with the filibuster, except for here now.
Where are we, gentlemen, with so much experience between the two of you, separated by two years, Jack Metcalfe's tenure leading into Steve King's tenure for 18 years and overlapping a little bit with the Ron Paul stuff, but you've both been in Washington for a long, long time.
You know how this works.
You're not insiders, but you know how it works.
This thing with the Lake and Riley Act.
So the House has passed this bill to deport immigrants convicted of violence against women.
Democrats seem to be, as a friend of mine writes, so traumatized from their defeat in the 2024 election that they rightly attribute to their position on immigration that they are putting up a fight to stop GOP immigration bills.
The Lake and Riley Act has already overcome the filibuster in the Senate and is set to pass.
Now, the New York Times and Politico are lamenting this reality.
But, gentlemen, as you know far better than I, the Senate is a graveyard of legislation.
The fact is that this seems to be changing on immigration is a huge white pill.
Normally, the House passes all kinds of bills to throw red meat at their base, which the opposing party predictably kills in the Senate with the filibuster.
But this time, the gridlock in the Senate due to partisan polarization is why nothing ever gets done except for huge budget reconciliation bills.
But now you've got something different.
I mean, you had Kevin Fetterman going on national television a few days ago saying we need to pass this thing, and they're passing it.
Neither Obama, Trump, or Biden have been able to overcome this obstacle and pass most of their agendas because of the Senate.
And now it's happening already with regards to immigration.
Lou, you first and then Congressman King.
What do you make of this?
Well, the first thing, James, is a story that's really not told as much as it should be.
I mean, you're kind of just explaining it there, but the iron discipline, particularly of the Democrats, the lock-step partisanship in the House and the Senate, a total breakdown.
11 Democrats came across on this Lincoln-Riley bill.
And, you know, how far this will go, how much of a tell this is for the future, we'll have to see.
But this is huge.
It's absolutely huge just on that basis.
And then the fact that we are talking about immigration, it even makes it bigger, at least for me.
Congressman King, I mean, if you were still in office, I mean, how would you be reacting to this political climate?
And as a former Congressman, what do you say about it?
Well, again, it is that.
They're back on their heels, and they completely misjudge the politics of America.
They might have believed that they didn't steal the election and that their ideas were the ones that got them where they were.
But there's something I describe as how it's supposed to work in politics, and that is, think of it like a teeter-totter or a seesaw.
And say you've got the Democrats on the left, Republicans on the right.
The Fulcrum, of course, is that pipe that the plank pivots on.
And so you've got ideology from the conservatives on the one end of that seesaw and ideology of the liberals on the other side.
When somebody loses an election, they want to get back to balance at least.
And so the way you have to do that is either adopt some policies that move you closer to the center.
And that's more or less what needs to happen.
The Democrats haven't done that.
They just doubled down on their mistakes.
And eventually, they're so far away from the center, they realize we can't convince more American people of that.
So we're going to have to move our agendas to the right in order to get this teeter-totter to tip back towards them in the elections.
They may not think about it that way, but that is what works.
That's how it works in this arena that we're in.
And while I've got the floor, we have the federal appeals court declares DACA policy unconstitutional ahead of Trump's inauguration, a major blow to leftist immigration agenda.
I mean, the DREAMers have been defeated, at least at the appeals court level.
And if they go to the Supreme Court, I think they'd get another service just the same.
So Barack Obama said 22 times he didn't have the constitutional authority to grant amnesty to this group of people, and then he did it anyway.
Well, he's been proven to be right 22 times, but it was wrong for what he did.
One last thing, gentlemen.
I'll toss this over to Lou first.
And first of all, what you hear on the radio, these guys, their stories, their lives, their careers, to be able to talk to them behind the scenes is just a privilege, an honor, a pleasure, all of those things and more.
I mean, Lou just did a podcast on his time at the Panama Canal in the 70s.
I've talked to Steve King on the air here about his world tour with Sheila Jackson Lee and what a story that was.
I mean, these guys can tell some stories.
They've seen some things.
But you remember that one, don't you, Steve?
But anyway.
I'm thinking about the yak, yeah.
We got two minutes left.
I want to start this with Lou.
We were talking with Congressman King in the half hour preceding your joining us tonight, Lou, about the J6 defendants and the pardons.
So you have 1,580 people charged, 1,270 convicted so far.
The FBI just last week charged somebody in Iowa with some charges for being there on J6 four years ago.
Of course, the summer of 2020 in D.C., it burned like it was the War of 1812.
I don't know if any of those people got arrested.
I don't know if any of them did any time.
You couldn't know, I mean, because they were the pets of the regime at the time.
But so again, J6 defendants pardons.
What do you see, Lou?
I think, well, I think he should pardon practically all of them.
There were a few Antifa folks in that mix that maybe would be the exception.
And I don't think the Republicans would be burned politically by that, even in the intermediate term, because the narrative is totally broken down about this being some kind of insurrection or even really a riot.
There are no weapons.
You know, the attacks on the police were basically non-existent.
There were all kinds of vicious attacks by the police on a lot of these protesters.
And I think he should pardon as many of them as he can, up to damn near every one of them.
Congressman King, seconds remain.
The final word is to you.
What an honor it has been again to pair you and Lou Moore up tonight.
This is something we can do in Talk Radio.
AM 1600 here in Memphis.
Here we go.
Congressman, the final word to you.
Well, of course, I agree with Lou on this.
And I mentioned earlier in the broadcast, but I would think everybody that has been charged with or convicted of a nonviolent crime, that should be an automatic slam dunk in the first hours of his presidency.
And then he should have had staff by now, and hopefully he has gone through any of those that are accused of violent crimes.
And if there's concrete evidence, maybe consider it.
But for me, I would just pardon them all.
As I said, there's nobody that went into that Capitol or there that day on J6 four years ago that committed any crime nearly as bad as Hunter Biden.
If Biden qualified for a pardon, all of them qualify for a margin.
So that's, and let's have a great big day.
I cannot wait for noon.
The morning after the election, it was a new world.
Just because the atmosphere changed, it did.
And now we actually get the official starting gun for this administration.
They're going to do a lot.
Trump's learned a lot.
And we'll be in touch with both of you as it continues to roll out.