Sen. Ron Johnson: What’s Really in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” and Uncovering the Truth About 9-11

Here’s what happened when Sen. Ron Johnson started to ask forbidden questions about 9-11, the COVID vax and America’s looming bankruptcy. (00:00) Introduction (01:19) How Financially Ignorant Is Congress? (09:05) What Happens if the Current Spending Trajectory Continues? (16:34) Are We in a Debt Crisis? (30:29) What Would Happen if We Fall Into a Massive Debt Crisis? (35:09) The Truth About the “Big Beautiful Bill” Paid partnerships with: Levels: Get 2 free months on annual membership at https://Levels. Link/Tucker ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! XX-XY Athletics: Use code TUCKER25 for 25% off at https://thetruthfits.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:25Tucker Carlson?

  You tried the other day to raise science-based questions about 9/11 and you asked, "Building 7 was never hit by a plane. Why did it fall down in exactly the same way the first two towers did?"

• 0:34Speaker 02

  156 witnesses, you know, first responders saying they heard explosions before the buildings came down. There was never a steel building that ever collapsed because of a fire.

• 0:44Tucker Carlson?

  The vaccine injured. So these would be American citizens who obeyed their government and took a shot that they were required to take and then were injured by or killed by that shot.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  To date, worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with COVID vaccine. 24% of those to date either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days. We're right now burning about a half a trillion dollars a quarter just to get us by into next year. That should shock everybody and that's, that's my whole purpose here. We haven't talked about the numbers. We haven't put this in context of, of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves and I'm just going to force that debate.

• 1:44Tucker Carlson?

  So you told me something that made me laugh at breakfast in a dark way, um, which is that none of, or very few of the people you work with, your colleagues, whose job it is to appropriate money to run the US government, have any idea how much they're appropriating. They don't know what the numbers are. Can you walk us through? A description of the ignorance of Congress when it comes to numbers.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  So you want me to throw my colleagues under the bus?

• 2:13Tucker Carlson?

  It was just like, I was amazed by what you told me.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  Of the dollars they appropriate, they know that. But that's only 25% of the budget. The story I told you at breakfast is, a couple of years ago, this was after the COVID spending spree, but we continued on that spending spree. We were in the midst of an omnibus spending debate. And this is where McConnell was doing a deal with Schumer on a massive omnibus spending bill. And we were going to violate, for the first time, our conference's position on earmarks. You know, our conference position is, we do not accept earmarks. All of a sudden, the Republican Senate is going to be accepting earmarks. So I got up in front of the group. I'm generally the skunk in the room, or the kid who says the emperor has no clothes.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  I just asked my colleagues, "Hey, anybody know how much we spent last year in total?"

• 3:06Speaker 02

  Dead silence. I went out to the Washington Press Corps.

• 3:09Tucker Carlson?

  By which you meant what we spent last year?

• 3:11Speaker 02

  The federal government, what the federal government spent in total.

• 3:14Tucker Carlson?

  Just the bottom line number.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  If anybody knew, they didn't volunteer. And I went out to the Washington Press Corps, asked them the same question. And one of the reporters said, "It was over a trillion dollars." Now, that's just discretionary spending. That's about 25% of the budget. I mean, total spending. The answer was, I think, $6.3 trillion.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Understand, the federal government is the largest financial entity in the world. We, in theory, are the 535 members of the Board of Directors. And nobody really knows, in total, how much the federal government spent, because we never talk about it. And as that relates to the current...

• 3:51Tucker Carlson?

  What a weird thing not to talk about, since that's your job.

• 3:54Speaker 02

  Again, that's how it's been set up. Discretionary, which we appropriate, and then mandatory. That just gets spent. It's on automatic pilot. So it's out of sight, it's out of mind, and it's completely out of control.

• 4:07Tucker Carlson?

  May I ask how that works? So I thought the Constitution gave the Congress the responsibility, the duty, to appropriate the money.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  So Congress has written laws like the social security law.

• 4:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Then Medicare and Medicaid, and they've turned, they call those entitlements. So it does make, they're not annually appropriated. It's just you set up a law saying if you qualify, you get X number of dollars. So it's on automatic pilot.

• 4:36Tucker Carlson?

  And there's no cap on that spending?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  No, none. You qualify, you get it.

• 4:40Tucker Carlson?

  So whatever it takes.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  What has, what has happened over the years is in addition to social security and Medicare and Medicaid, they slid what should be, in my mind, discretionary spending into mandatory. And so I'm, I'm the guy that pointed out the conference again, do you guys realize in 2019, other mandatory, again, not social security, not Medicare, not Medicaid, other mandatory, pretty well runs the gamut of other appropriation accounts. That was 642 billion dollars. Last year, fiscal year 2024, that was 1.3 trillion. This year it's a little over a trillion, and that's pretty much as far as the eye can see according to CBO, a trillion dollars. So again, total discretionary spending is about 1.7,

• 5:22Speaker 02

  but they've literally slid about a trillion dollars now ongoing of other mandatory into, or what should be discretionary into what they call now other mandatory. A trillion dollars. And I don't think anybody was really aware of that either.

• 5:38Tucker Carlson?

  So what's right now for 2025, or let's say 2024, what did the federal government spend total?

• 5:46Speaker 02

  So let me, so in 2019, total federal government spending was 4.4 trillion.

• 5:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  This year we will spend over 7 trillion. So better way, I remember somewhere around during the Obama administration, about when I got elected, 2010, 2011, we had our first trillion dollar a year deficit in 2009. You know, and there's 1.4 trillion. And we stopped talking about hundreds of billions, which used to move the needle to now trillions. You know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, it just doesn't seem that, that much. 4,400 billion dollars spent in 2019, 7,000 billion dollars spent this year. Projected to spend 7,300 billion next year. And now let's kind of bring this back to the debate that we're talking about on the one big beautiful bill.

• 6:35Tucker Carlson?

  Wait, may I just one more bottom line number? Okay, so we're going to spend over 7 trillion this year. How much do we take in in tax receipts every year?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  About 5.1. So we've got a structural deficit of around 6% right now. CBO is projecting over the next 10 years, 6%. So federal revenue will be according to CBO 18.1, even though it's about 17.1, but they're they're projecting that we're going to increase or have an automatic tax increase next year. So they bumped that to 18.1 and federal spending is going to be about 23.4, 23 and a half percent.

• 7:08Tucker Carlson?

  So that deficit spending, where does that money come from?

• 7:12Speaker 02

  We borrow it or reprint it.

• 7:15Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  By the way, put this in even better historical context in 1930, less than 100 years ago, the federal government spent 3.1% of our GDP. State and local governments back then spent 9.1%. So that was pretty much the vision of our founding fathers, a limited federal government, you know, within the constraints of the enumerated powers and most governing at the point of the states, you know, state and local governments, where it's more accountable, more efficient, more effective. And we've blown that up. Now the federal government's spending close to 24%. State and local governments are over 16%. So now total government spending is about 40%. It's three times what it was back less than 100 years ago. And I would argue as government grows,

• 8:01Speaker 02

  our freedoms necessarily recede.

• 8:04Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Because government has more claim on your income, or they borrow money, which causes inflation, which is a silent tax.

• 8:11Tucker Carlson?

  Do you, we have any sense of what percentage of the American population, 350 million, or whatever it is in that range, are net receivers, get more from government than they pay in?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  My guess is it's more than 50%. And of course, that's the, that's the death knell of a democracy is when the population, the voting public realizes they can vote themselves benefits at the expense of somebody else. What and what they don't realize, the expenses, it's cost them all because the massive deficit spending, because we're, we're not taking enough revenue to cover the expenditures. That's what has eroded the value of our dollar. That's what caused 40 year high inflation and that hurts everybody.

• 8:50Tucker Carlson?

  So you think that most, at this point, your guess is most Americans receive more from the federal government, from government at all levels?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  I shouldn't even say, because I haven't checked that figure.

• 9:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  My guess is probably more than 50%. I mean, when you consider all the entitlements, whether it's social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and people say, that's my money. Well,

• 9:12Speaker 02

  In some cases it is. Most people probably get more out of social security than they actually did put in. Certainly do that out of Medicare, certainly out of Medicaid. Nobody puts any money into that. That all comes out of the general fund. So we have, we have food stamps, we have all these, you know, trillions of dollars worth of transfer payments.

• 9:32Tucker Carlson?

  Um, why is this not sustainable? You often hear it's not sustainable. What, how, what happens if it continues?

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Well, again, we're, when I ran in 2010, we'd just experienced our first deficits in excess of a trillion dollars. We were spending about 3.5 trillion dollars a year, 3.5.

• 9:53Tucker Carlson?

  So it's more than double just in the, since 2010?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yes. Um, we were 14 trillion dollars in debt. Now, I remember, uh, I announced in April of 2010, started my campaign in basically June 2010, doing parades. And what I was shouted is this is a fight for freedom. We're mortgaging our children's future. It's wrong. It's immoral. It has to stop. That was my campaign theme. Uh, again, we're 14 trillion dollars in debt, spending 3.5 trillion dollars. Now we're almost 37 trillion dollars in debt. We're spending 7,000 billion dollars, 7 trillion dollars. And CBO projects over the next 10 years, we will add

• 10:36Speaker 02

  another 22 trillion dollars to the debt. That's, that's what our projected deficits over the next 10 years is 22 trillion dollars. Again, that's assuming about a 4 trillion dollar increase because of taxes are scheduled to automatically increase. If those taxes don't increase, first of all, I'm not sure you get the full 4 trillion dollars, but again, take, take 4 trillion dollars away if, if we extend current tax law, which is, which is I'm, I'm in favor of that. I don't want to increase anybody's taxes. But I don't think this is necessarily time to do additional tax cuts, you know, particularly when those things aren't focused toward economic growth. But anyway, just so we are projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum of 2.2 trillion dollars.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  And I would argue that is a rosy scenario. And particularly when you take a look at what they've done with the one big beautiful bill, they're not seriously reducing spending to what I've been calling for is a pre-pandemic level.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Again, the danger is spouting out too many, too many numbers here. I just want to put this in perspective. President Obama, over the course of his eight years, his average deficit was $910 billion. Over the last, and I want to quick do this so I'm accurate, over the last four years of his administration is about $550 billion. Okay, so half a trillion dollar deficit over his last four years. President Trump came into office in his first three years, the average deficit was about $800 billion. So he bumped up Obama's four year average from 550 to 800. Then COVID hit, and we had a deficit of $3.1 trillion just

• 12:18Speaker 02

  that one year. Now, what we should have done in 2021, when Biden came into office, is we should have returned to a reasonable pre-pandemic level. The pandemic was over. We didn't have to keep, you know, we had unemployment spike up to, I think, 25 million people. Normal unemployment somewhere between five and six. But within a few months, it was around 11 and then returned to pretty much normal early in 2021. We didn't have to keep stimulating the economy. But Biden did. Biden averaged $1.9 trillion per year in deficit. So Obama, when he left, his last four years, 550. Trump, before the pandemic, a little more than 800

• 12:56Speaker 02

  billion per year. Biden, in his four years, went up to 1.9 trillion. And now CBO is projecting, getting on a rosy scenario, that we'll be averaging $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years. So we'll take our debt from $37 trillion up to 59 trillion. And if we extend the current tax law, take away $4 trillion in revenue, roughly, that add another $4 trillion. The spending cuts they're talking about, they're paltry. You know, 1.5 trillion, some of those are fake, some of those are extended way out. They're offset by

• 13:38Tucker Carlson?

  How far out?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  10 years.

• 13:40Tucker Carlson?

  10 years.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we'll, we'll spend the money upfront for the border, for defense. Uh, so that, that also takes away from that 1.5 trillion in spending. So at most, we're maybe cutting spending 1.2 trillion. Part of that, a few hundred billion, I think, is student loan forgiveness, which the Supreme Court will probably rule unconstitutional. We're not going to spend it anyway, but they count that as savings. So, so, so much of the savings they're talking about in the, the one big beautiful bill is phony, it's fake. Or it's in the out years where if Republicans lose power, Democrats will just restore it. But no matter how you slice it, from my standpoint, CBO's $22 trillion of 10-year deficit is a rosy scenario. It'll, it'll probably be more than that. And what

• 14:25Speaker 02

  happens then is what's happening right now in the bond market. Uh, interest rates are creeping up. You know, you can't control that. If, if global creditors look at the United States as a, as uncreditworthy, our 50-year average interest payment that we've paid on our debt is over 5%. So I think it's, it's as high as 5.8. It's, it's hard, it's not the most exact figure. But right now, we're borrowing probably about 3.3%. That's, that's been the average over the last 25 years, 3.3%. And that's kind of where we're at right now. If we increased that interest, if that interest expense increases to, or rate increases to 4.3%, add another $4 trillion in deficit spending. If it goes up to the

• 15:07Speaker 02

  50-year average of 5.3, add about 8 or 9 trillion dollars to the 22 trillion. So again, you go 22 trillion plus extending current tax law, add another close to 4 trillion. If interest rates start creeping up, and they are, just one percentage point, add another 4 trillion. So you can see very quickly, you go from 22 to 26 to 30 trillion dollars, add down to 37 trillion dollars, we're up to 67 trillion dollars in debt. I don't think we'd ever hit that. I think something's going to happen. We'll have a debt crisis. We'll have failure, failure in our bond auctions, spiking interest rates even more. And again, we're, we're spending more on interest this year than we spend on defense.

• 15:46Tucker Carlson?

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• 18:53Tucker Carlson?

  You often hear the phrase "debt crisis." What does that mean exactly? What would that look like?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Depends whether it's a chronic or an acute crisis. I'd say we're already in a chronic debt crisis. That is what I would consider the devaluation of the dollar. I laid out, and we talked about this, my pre-pandemic options, going back to 98, 2014, 2019. So a dollar you held in 1998 is only worth 51 cents today.

• 19:18Tucker Carlson?

  Ouch.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  A dollar you held when I-

• 19:20Tucker Carlson?

  It's devalued that much just since 98?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  It's been cut in half. When I ran in 2010, that dollar is worth about 68 cents. A dollar you held during Obama in 2014 is worth 74 cents. A dollar we held just in 2019 is only worth 80 cents. So again, that is the devaluation of the dollar. That's inflation.

• 19:39Tucker Carlson?

  This is why everything is so expensive now.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a silent tax.

• 19:42Tucker Carlson?

  It's how you spend 300 bucks at dinner, and you're like, "I didn't even get drunk." Like, how did that happen? That's the effect.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's why you had 40-year high inflation. So now I would consider the chronic debt crisis. It just continues. And it's the danger. We have not tamed inflation yet. We've tamed it, but we haven't conquered it. So I think that's always on the horizon, particularly if we continue to deficit spend. Particularly if the bond markets start, continue to react as they are, keep driving interest rates up higher, and you start increasing the amount of interest expense crowding out other spending. So an acute debt crisis would be where you have a bond market failure. And like what happened to Greece, all of a sudden you can't sell your debt. So you either print the money, which sparses another round of 40, 50 year high inflation,

• 20:33Speaker 02

  devaluing the currency rapidly. You know, we're not necessarily immune to hyperinflation. Other countries have experienced it.

• 20:41Tucker Carlson?

  So a failure to sell your debt in a bond auction. What does that look like? You just put out your, your bonds and nobody wants them?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Nobody buys them. And so again, the, the advantage the US has over any other country is we are the world's reserve currency. So we can print dollars. So we can get by that moment, except for you're printing dollars and inflation is pretty easy to define. It's too many dollars chasing too few goods. So you just print all those dollars and, and again, the dollar devalues, the, the cost of your debt is lowered. Again, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a silent way of addressing these, these massive deficits.

• 21:26Tucker Carlson?

  How far away from a moment like that are we?

• 21:28Speaker 02

  I don't know. I would have, I would have thought we would have experienced it by now, but we've experienced it instead as, again, 40 year high inflation, the devaluation of currency. I mean, I think that's pretty shocking when you take a look at that as a dollar, it just, you know, 11 years ago is only worth 74 cents. You know, six years, it's only worth 80 cents. That's, that's, that's an amazing level of devaluation. Now, it's not even close to hyperinflation where, you know, you've got inflation rates of, you know, hundreds of percent, but.

• 22:03Tucker Carlson?

  So when that crisis comes, what do you do?

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Well, you have, you have a great deal of turmoil in your society. It's, it's, it's, it won't be pleasant. It's, it's what we need to try and avoid. And, and by the way, what, why I'm not in a full blown panic, people like Art Laffer, economist of the Laffer curve, he does correctly point out, America has enormous wealth. I mean, hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth. So 37 billion, 37 trillion dollars in relationship to hundreds of trillion dollars worth of wealth.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  That's manageable. It's just like if you're a billionaire, but you don't work. You can have some pretty large mortgages on homes, but you still have to generate some income to service the debt. And I think that's kind of the point we're making. It's not irrelevant debt to GDP ratio. And we do have massive wealth, but we need to manage the cash flow problem here too. As well as, I mean, just the pernicious impact of all these transfer payments, providing encouragement for people not to work. There's a great article written, I think in 2017 by Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, Our Miserable 21st Century.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  You know, talking about how 20% of working age men are permanently out of the workforce. You know, on Medicaid, using the Medicaid card to buy opiate drugs to, you know, help finance their living. You know, all kinds, all those pernicious impacts of a society where we literally don't require people to work. We actually incentivize them not to. That's, to my mind, that's one of the biggest problems we have with the big welfare.

• 23:50Tucker Carlson?

  And you need mass immigration to fill the gap.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, somebody's got to do the work. And, you know, we were talking earlier, when I first entered this political realm, going to dairy breakfast, the first issue I heard in Wisconsin was, you know, we don't have enough workers. Now, I come from a manufacturing background where for 20 or so years, you couldn't find enough people to work in a manufacturing plant, which is why I always kind of scratch my head. Listen, there are certainly products that we have offshored that we need to reshore. You know, things that are strategic, that impact our national security. But right now, I think our biggest problem is we don't have enough workers. If you bring all this manufacturing back to America, who's going to work the factories? And we certainly shouldn't be bringing back high labor content product.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  I think you need to diversify your supply base. You can't be so dependent on an adversary like China. Spread it around, you know, that would reduce your risk.

• 24:46Tucker Carlson?

  So what you're saying, like the numbers you're describing are the bottom line numbers. This is not like higher math. This should be obvious to everybody. What's the reaction been?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Well, they just ignore it. Again, one of the reasons I'm digging my heels in as the one big beautiful bill comes over the Senate is we haven't had the discussion or the debate. The only number you heard about in the whole House debate here was 1.5 trillion dollars, which sounds like a lot, right? I mean, 1.5 trillion dollars in spending reduction. And of course, they're focusing on programs like Medicaid that the main problem with that is Obamacare, which is now called Medicaid expansion, allowing states to gain the system, putting at risk Medicaid for the truly vulnerable. But that's all you really heard about. You don't ever put that in context. You know, 1.5 trillion dollars compared to 89 trillion dollars spending over the next

• 25:41Speaker 02

  10 years, it's barely a rounding error. You know, we haven't been talking about the massive annual deficits. We don't talk about the debt.

• 25:50Tucker Carlson?

  Why is the, I mean, when you were describing the progression of debt accumulation, it feels like it's been really rapid in a short period of time. Like the federal government's spending almost twice what it was just the other day. Where's all that money going? How did that happen? What is that?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Well, again, it was really sparked by the pandemic. Now, I'll give the Tea Party movement a fair amount of credit. You know, I ran because we were more in kids' future. We were running deficits for, you know, I think three years in a row, over a trillion dollars. But once we got to town in 2011, we started having these budget debates. We had divided government. Obama didn't get everything he wanted. We did something called the Budget Control Act, which literally reduced discretionary spending for three years in a row until we learned how to weasel around it. So we pretty well flattened out federal government spending at about 3.5 trillion for five or six or seven years. And then the last couple of years of the Obama administration started creeping up.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  And then under Trump, it went from about four trillion to 4.1 to 4.4. And then it went to 6.5 and we've never looked back. And the analogy I use there is I don't know of an American family, if they had an illness and they had to borrow $50,000 to pay for the medical bills. If that family member got well, you wouldn't keep borrowing $50,000 and spend at that level. But that's exactly what we've done. And like, nobody, other than, you know, I'm the first guy who wrote the Wall Street Journal article about, we really need to return to pre pandemic levels.

• 27:24Tucker Carlson?

  It doesn't seem radical.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  And I've laid out options, you know, Clinton, Obama, Trump.

• 27:29Tucker Carlson?

  The COVID pandemic, this was just like a couple of years ago.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  So I mean, what Biden should have done, we had, we overspent in 2020. And we first were talking about that CARES Act, it was like $750 billion, which, you know, I knew we had to do something fast and massive so markets wouldn't collapse. But within like a week or two, that that went up to like $2.2 trillion. We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans, three times, way late, way, way after unemployment had already returned from the 25 million person high. Again, 25 million people unemployed. Normally you're at five or six. We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans

• 28:11Speaker 02

  three times. So we way overspent even in 2020. So you had trillions of dollars sloshing around the economy as you come into 2021. The economy is coming roaring back because you have all this pent up demand and all these dollars sloshing around. The last thing you should have done is add more fuel to the fire. That's what Biden Democrats did. Again, on average, $1.9 trillion of deficit spending over the next four years. We never went, came down off that 6.5 trillion dollars, a little bit 6.2, 6.3, but you know, then started going back up again.

• 28:45Tucker Carlson?

  And that's really the moment, that's when a bass boat suddenly cost $100,000, or your car costs 90,000, you know, brand new Suburban is 80 grand or whatever. That's when the country became obviously unaffordable, I think, unless I misremember.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, or your meal deal at McDonald's all of a sudden jumped from five to 10 bucks. When did that happen?

• 29:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 29:08Tucker Carlson?

  I don't understand why there's no will to fix that. I mean, that seems like pretty basic macroeconomics in the Congress. Nobody's.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  I haven't heard McConnell say this, but I've heard the quote attributed to him, and this is one thing I agree with him on. Show me one member of Congress who ever lost because they spent too much money.

• 29:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  There just isn't public pressure. There's not public awareness. You know, we don't educate our young people. We don't, the news media doesn't connect the dots that, you know, why people can't afford things is because of massive deficit spending, which sparked 40-year high inflation, devalued the dollar. I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious. But normal Americans, they just, they just get all surly about it.

• 29:48Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, well, then let's meditate for a moment on the consequences of it. I asked, what happens when there's a debt crisis? Why haven't we had one yet? You said, we probably should have had one. I don't know why we haven't, but we're gonna get one if we keep doing this. I said, what will the effect of that be? You said, massive instability in the society. What do you mean? Like, what will that look like? Maybe it would awaken people to the threat if they knew what would happen in a debt crisis.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Well, so if you're living on different transfer payments or different types of welfare benefits, you know, you may not get those. You know, you can't borrow more money, so you're gonna have to take what money we spend on other government programs, and we'll have to service our debt. You have to pay it off, unless we want to go into full default.

• 30:33Tucker Carlson?

  And that's where you just say to Japan and China and Germany and everyone else who's bought those bonds, like, we're not paying.

• 30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Which means you'll never float more debt. So you can't, you know, other than print more money, which then creates even more hyperinflation. So now people can't afford anything. I mean,

• 30:50Tucker Carlson?

  Has anyone ever defaulted, any country ever defaulted on debt and just said, we're not paying? Come and, come and get it?

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sure they have. I'm not a-

• 30:57Tucker Carlson?

  But that's not common, like-

• 30:58Speaker 02

  I think it happens enough. But what always happens is, you know, companies, countries like US go in there and we help them restructure their debt. I think that's happened numerous times.

• 31:09Tucker Carlson?

  But no one's going to come and help us restructure our debt.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  No, nobody can. We are the, again, we will lose our position to the world's reserve currency and will lose our ability to print dollars that people accept. I mean, it's, it's, it's a marvelous thing that we just print dollars, we can send them overseas and people will produce products and ship them over here. High quality products at pretty low cost. I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to keep inflation in check, producing all these massive deficits over the last couple of decades. Because we do import a lot of products, you know, we've got billions of people either un- or underemployed around the world. We provide the capital, you know, they produce the factories, they produce the goods and then we, we just give them, you know, paper. It's fiat currency. And we print it, we keep printing it and it's been working out pretty well.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  At some point in time, that, that gravy train might stop.

• 32:00Tucker Carlson?

  And then, I mean, then you have like a total collapse of the current system.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Again, I can't, I can't predict, I'm trying to avoid it. It'll be painful, you know, and, who really suffers are people at the lower end of the incomes spectrum that have no, no safety net, they don't have any kind of hard assets that will inflate with inflation. They're, they're just, they just be destitute.

• 32:25Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of them.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:27Tucker Carlson?

  In a country that has no kind of organizing principle or national identity where people are not as united as they were in, say, 1929.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  I had my comm staff put together a video. I asked them to find all these Republican leaders that have, you know, talked about balancing the budget. You know, we, we have a spending problem. It starts out with President Trump saying in the State of the Union, we're, I'm going to do something we haven't done 24 years, balance federal budget. Then every Republican leader, some form of, we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. In those clips, we have Elon Musk saying, if, if we don't fix this, there won't be money left over for anything. And I think that's a pretty accurate statement.

• 33:10Tucker Carlson?

  So how many people can you really trust? Well, if you think about it, probably not that many. Let's say you've got 20,000 Instagram followers. How many of them would show up at your house to help you if you had a crisis? Maybe about eight? That's a high number. The same is true on the internet. Who do you trust with your private information? That question has never been more relevant. Data brokers record every single detail of everything you do online. Then they sell your digital profile to scammers and invasive advertisers who make a living off of harassing you. If you're getting harassed, that's why. Probably are. ExpressVPN can end this cycle. ExpressVPN is a very simple and cool product. The tech is sophisticated. The interface is easy. They have a US ExpressVPN. It's an app that hides

• 33:54Tucker Carlson?

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• 34:30Speaker 00

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 34:57Speaker 05

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• 35:26Tucker Carlson?

  Tucker, does this bill get us closer to fixing it?

• 35:29Speaker 02

  No, it exacerbates the problem.

• 35:31Tucker Carlson?

  How can that be?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Because we're not serious about returning to a reasonable pre pandemic global spending. We picked a number out of the air, 1.5 trillion, totally out of context. There's, you know, it's not really related to the, the moment. It's, it's, it's missing the moment.

• 35:46Tucker Carlson?

  Can I ask you, who came up with that number? Like, whose lie is that?

• 35:56Speaker 02

  I think my best guess is conservatives in the House, who I love, didn't want to be blamed if this thing failed. So they said, well, listen, in order to, in order for us to accept a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, we've got to get at least 1.5 trillion dollars in savings, spending cuts. I don't think they were looking at the big picture. They, I think they just pulled a big, I criticized them at the time privately. I said, listen, you set the bar way too low, you guys. This is completely inadequate. They set the bar way too low that it should have been easy to meet it, quite honestly. But even that was difficult because they didn't go through what I would consider the right kind of process. So maybe we can shift in terms of what we have to do, what I'm trying to accomplish

• 36:41Speaker 02

  here and by digging my heels in. Doge has kind of shown us what we can do here. We've never had a process to control spending in the federal government. We don't have a balanced budget requirement. I didn't realize this, just found out, do you know, they established the appropriation committees because the authorizing committees were big spenders. So the appropriation committees were supposed to be the control on the big spenders. Well, that didn't work. The Budget Control Act of 1974 didn't work. Simpson Bowles didn't work. The Budget Control Act didn't work. It did for three years, but then we weaseled our way around it. So what process could possibly work to control spending? Well, first of all, you have to know the numbers.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  You have to understand, you know, what, what a deep hole we're in and have a commitment to, to address it. But Doge has pretty well shown us how to do it. Now, I come from the private sector. I think we probably, I probably spent more time. Either analyzing my department head budgets or my own overall company budget, then Congress in total spends analyzing the $7,000 billion budget of the federal government. So Doja's showing us if you go line by line, contract by contract, you will discover and uncover spending that if the American public saw it, they'd be outraged by it. If you eliminated it, my guess is most Americans wouldn't even know it's eliminated.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  About the only people that would know would be the grifters.

• 38:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Who have been sucking down the waste, fraud and abuse.

• 38:12Tucker Carlson?

  The NGO community.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  So you have, you have to go step by step. So that's why I've always been supportive of a multiple step reconciliation process here. I was always recommending three steps. First step, give President Trump the funding on the border, defense, bank, $850 billion of real savings, not make believe, you know, now. And Lindsey Graham agreed to this $85.5 billion each year for four years to pay for the four years worth of spending. And then extend that out 10 years, that gives you 850. That's more than half of what the House budget reconciliation supposedly gives us. Second step, I would just extend current tax law. If we would have been smart enough in 2017, had something like Chairman Crapo,

• 38:54Speaker 02

  who really came up with this idea of let's just use current policy for taxes. Then we can make this stuff permanent. You should never pass, in my mind, a tax, tax law that automatically expires. Just creates all these fiscal cliffs and puts all kinds of uncertain uncertainty in the economy.

• 39:11Tucker Carlson?

  Why do they do that?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Because we, so this gets into real budget wonkery, but for spending, to score it, you use current policy, which means if a spending program ends, if you want to extend it, you just, you score it based on, oh, it was going to be extended anyway. So it doesn't cost anything. For taxes, though, we use current law. So if, if the tax cuts are ending and you want to extend them, well, you're scoring that on the fact that they are going to end. So now to extend it, it's going to be a trillion dollar score. So then you got to pay for it and it's hard to pay for it. And so that's how it was all scored back in 2017, where if we would just use current policy. If we use current policy now, we can just extend current tax line and there's no score.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  So that's, that's really what we're doing now. But we have to recognize when you're comparing to the CBO budget, CBO budgets is assuming it does, taxes do increase and bring in about another $4 trillion worth of revenue. So that's why I say the $22 trillion in, in projected deficits is probably a risky scenario.

• 40:14Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, it seems like the core problems are just so familiar. One is short-term thinking.

• 40:20Tucker Carlson?

  And the second is the misplaced belief that you can see what the future will be. And both of those are like silly and unwise. Maybe, are we bumping up against the inherent limits of the system?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Well, I would say we're missing the focusing on the right thing.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  We had to focus on spending. And the reason I say that is spending is pretty certain. Again, who knows what revenue we're going to bring in? It's hard to predict. Spending, that's, that's pretty easy to, you know, predict what that's going to be. Plus, I personally voted for President Trump because I wanted him to defeat the deep state.

• 41:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels.

• 41:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  So again, when you start talking about the control of the deficit, well, you can control the deficit by tariff revenue or selling the gold card. That keeps funding the deep state. You have to focus on spending and we've, we've just gone through an unprecedented level of increased spending other than World War II. And just quick aside on that, we entered World War II spending 11.7% of our economy, of our GDP on federal government, 11.7. That got ramped up to 41% during the war. But by 1948, because we had responsible leaders, you know, the greatest generation, that actually went down to 11.4% of GDP. And we returned to pre-war levels.

• 41:47Tucker Carlson?

  And we had a massive recession too.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the, you know, the war is over. Let's return to a reasonable pre-war level spending. We didn't do that during the pandemic. And that's what we have to, you have to focus on do, it's such a reasonable thing to do. It should have been done in 2021. We didn't do it for four years, but now we're just pretty well accepting that. We're, we're accepting the fact that Obamacare now called Medicaid expansion is putting at risk Medicare for the, the truly vulnerable, even though we all ran on repealing and replacing that and obviously failed in the first Trump term. But now we're all okay with it. Now we're not going to touch that because they renamed it. Are you, are you kidding me?

• 42:24Tucker Carlson?

  Well, this, this is, but this is how it works. Like in 20 years, we'll be like, well, of course you have to protect trans kids. You know, what seems crazy at first becomes accepted and then it becomes the hill to die on. It's just like, your expectations change, right?

• 42:40Speaker 02

  So again, I'm, I'm trying to force the discussion over the real numbers. Okay. And again, 1.5 trillion in abstract seems like a lot, but we've really ramped up from two, from 2019 to this year. That's over 10 years. That's $29 trillion of increased spending over 10 years. 29 trillion. And we're talking about cutting out 1.5 of that?

• 43:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, it's a joke. It's a joke. Um, because people don't want to cut it out. And so I guess that's my question. You said that the problem with democracy is once the majority figures out they can just steal money, then, you know, then you're just like headed to the cliff and there's no pulling back. Are we there?

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Well, again, they're, they're not stealing it. They just don't realize that how it's financed is by printing money and they can't afford things.

• 43:29Tucker Carlson?

  If you're taking other people's money, at the point of a gun, it's called theft.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they try and tax it, but we're not taxing anywhere near enough.

• 43:36Tucker Carlson?

  Right. No, right.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  So we're, we're going to have to borrow 2.2 trillion dollars for the next 10 years, every year, 2.2, at least, at least.

• 43:43Tucker Carlson?

  That's effectively a tax because it devalues the money in your pockets. You're basically paying 10 bucks for a Big Mac and a Coke.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Inflation is a silent tax. It's, it's really nasty.

• 43:54Tucker Carlson?

  Do you have any hope?

• 43:57Speaker 02

  I'm not the world's greatest optimist.

• 43:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  I mean, how can you be? I fear we've passed the point of no return. The reason I'm digging my heels and Tucker, I don't want to.

• 44:09Tucker Carlson?

  I bet you don't.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  I really don't. I mean, I'm not looking for it. Listen, I love what President Trump is doing. He is such a unique individual, unique political figure, unique president. He is doing things that only he would do. Nobody else would do it. And it's things that have to be done. Okay, so I'm so supportive of most of what he's doing. But this is a once in a lifetime opportunity here. We've never had such an unprecedented level of spending. Returning to a reasonable level is just so common sense and not that hard. It's not going to be easy. But what I've done in laying out those pre pandemic options, go back to Bill Clinton, 1998, when we actually had a surplus for the first time

• 44:55Speaker 02

  in 1969. I don't think we spent too little in 1969 or 1998. Obama in 2014 or Trump in 2019. There are three options. Leave Social Security, Medicare and interest as they are. Spend what you need to spend. But for all the other outlays, you just increase them based on population growth and inflation. A very reasonable control, right? You end up somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5 trillion. Now, I would go back to Clinton, recognizing that 9/11 happened after that. So you probably have to plus up defense, although I'd like to hone how we spend our defense dollars. I think we talked about that earlier. I don't think we spend them well. But somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5 trillion

• 45:37Speaker 02

  dollars. And then I've printed out the budgets, a couple thousand lines, and then go through those budgets line by line. You just ask the question, well, this is what Clinton was spending, fully inflated. Why are we spending this much more? Or this is what Obama spent? Why is it, or Trump? Why is it so much more? Explain yourself. Like I said, in businesses, be simple.

• 46:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 02

  Just saying, I'd tell my manager that I said you could increase your budgets based on inflation, the number of customers you serve. You're 10% above that, cut it. Kind of like, I don't care how you do it, just do it. Get back down to that level. You know, to do it is, you know, so it doesn't harm our business, so it doesn't harm people's lives, but just do it. Because what we were spending 1998, 2014, 2019, I think it's probably pretty adequate. And by the way, if you go through it line by line, there'll be lines that I think you look at, scratch your head and go, we probably shouldn't be spending anything on that. I think Doge just taught us that. So again, we, for sure, Trump, again, I think that was brilliant, what Trump and Elon did with Doge. But we haven't realized

• 46:42Speaker 02

  those savings yet. I think we stopped spending on contracts, but unless we set up and pass a rescission package on the discretionary end, unless we take whatever they discovered in mandatory and eliminate that through the reconciliation process, those monies will just be sitting out there unobligated and some Democrat Congress and some Democrat president will spend it without even having to appropriate, appropriate it.

• 47:07Tucker Carlson?

  To ask about the defense budget, so it's in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. We face no invasion threat. We never have. We're separated from the rest of the world by two large oceans. Our standing force is not that huge, actually. It's not like all that money's going to pay for soldiers and Marines and airmen. Why are we spending that much on defense? We haven't won a war in 80 years. So like, I'm a little, and I know that all Republicans are required to take the Liz Cheney position, you know, that's just great. Defense spending is just by its nature inherently good. But what, what is that? What's all that money going to exactly?

• 47:47Speaker 02

  Um, we did not heed Eisenhower's warning. I think the military industrial complex has way too much power. I would love, and we should do this, is we should go back, at least as far back as Vietnam, and analyze each one of these foreign entanglements, each of these foreign wars, and ask ourselves and gathers some basic information. First, what was our goal going in?

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Secondly, you know, what did it cost in human life, ours and our and our adversary, our enemies? What did it cost in terms of dollars? And then the final question is, did we accomplish the objective? I think if you do that, and I hate to say this because I it's true. I mean, this is we're filming this on Memorial Day.

• 48:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  The finest among us.

• 48:38Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I agree with that.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  People who love this country, who've stepped up the plate, willing to serve and sacrifice more than a million have paid the ultimate price. So I don't, I don't even like saying this, but the fact of the matter is, if you did that kind of analysis, you wouldn't walk away very satisfied.

• 48:54Tucker Carlson?

  Well, but doesn't our respect for the men who died in military service require us to do that?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  I think it does. So if you would to do that, I mean, I was just recently in Hanoi a couple of years ago. What wonderful people.

• 49:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  They love Americans. I mean, after even what they love America because they're entrepreneur, they're hardworking, they want like most people in the world, they want what we have. They, they, they respect the values of America, the principles of freedom, individual liberty. Okay. We never should have been to war with them. We never should have bombed those people. But followed all the way through Afghanistan, Iraq.

• 49:34Tucker Carlson?

  Syria.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  I mean, so, so, I mean, what have we accomplished with the Ukraine war right now?

• 49:42Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, I know.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  We have actually solidified the relationship between Russia and China and North Korea and Iran.

• 49:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:51Speaker 02

  That's completely opposite of what our goals ought to be.

• 49:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  So it's just not working. I mean, we have not accomplished these goals. They've been, they've been miserable failures. How many people died in Iraq? Based on that false intelligence?

• 50:04Speaker 02

  The best book I read on Afghanistan is written by special ops folks. They basically made the point that we'd pretty well accomplish what we need to accomplish in Afghanistan before Tommy Frank ever put a boot on the ground. You know, we said, hey, listen, you guys harbored Al Qaeda. Don't do it anymore. Kind of punish the Taliban and that's probably where we should have left that. How many Americans lost their lives? How many, you know, Afghanistan citizens lost their lives? What did that cost? Again, it's, it's almost incalculable.

• 50:37Tucker Carlson?

  So new report, which you may not have seen because it was suppressed, shows the abortion pill is 10 times more dangerous than the FDA claims. Not just dangerous to the baby that it kills, but to the women who take it. 11% of women who take the pill experience, quote, "serious adverse effects." Why is it still on the market? Because it's abortion related and our leaders love abortion. It'd be easy to turn that figure into a rant about abortion, but there's another angle to this debate that's not talked about enough. And that's what a blessing babies are. People scoff about children like they're some kind of plague, but in reality, the exact opposite is true. On your deathbed, you will care only about your children. They are a gift unlike any other gift.

• 51:21Tucker Carlson?

  They are the supreme gift. Our friends at Preborn understand this and they're working around the clock to save as many unborn lives as they can. Their ultrasound helps guide thousands of future mothers to choose life through knowledge. And that's possible because people like you support them. To help, simply dial pound 250, say the keyword baby. That's pound 250, the word baby, or visit preborn.com/tucker. We are proud to partner with Preborn.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 52:19Speaker 05

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• 52:49Tucker Carlson?

  Well, given all of that, and given that no one has ever been punished, no high-ranking military officer I'm aware of has ever been punished for any of these failures. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was humiliating and costly, and it was just a disaster in every way. And the only guy who's punished is Stu Schiller, who's a Marine officer who points out that it wasn't a success. But the architects were rewarded. So, given all of that, why are we sending these people even more money?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Again, it's the military-industrial complex. And there are some just basic metrics people use, like percentage GDP spending on defense, where we're kind of a low level and we should be, you know, we should be, I mean, we've got right now, you know, Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McConnell, they want to dedicate 5% of GDP to defense. So where are you going to get that money? I mean, I realize we're kind of down at historic low levels, but it's still a trillion dollars. Where are we spending it? That's why I would have loved to seen somebody like Eric Prince, who wrote an excellent article, Too Big to Win, become Defense Secretary and really take a look at, how are we fighting these wars? What do we need to do to defend America?

• 54:04Tucker Carlson?

  Somebody said to me the other day, I was talking to an informed person about this grousing about it, like, if you don't win a war for 80 years, why does your budget keep expanding? And this person said, the real reason is, America's industrial base is overwhelmingly military now. So actually, the only real thing we make are weapons. And so that's what that money does.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  I don't think that's necessarily true. There's certainly, again, you still have that industrial base. You spend a trillion dollars out of a $28 trillion economy, $29 trillion economy. It's a pretty good chunk, but it's not the majority of it. We make a lot of stuff. I think that's kind of a...

• 54:44Speaker 02

  mistaken notion as well. Industrial production continues to rise here. Yeah, we don't have, again, we become more and more productive. That's, that's a good thing. Again, right now, we don't have enough workers to be manufacturing a whole lot more stuff. I mean, the last thing we should be doing is trying to attract high labor content product back to the US. We just don't have enough people to do it.

• 55:05Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting. So that, that's probably like a Raytheon talking point then.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I don't know. I'm just, I'm just putting the basic numbers. I mean,

• 55:14Tucker Carlson?

  That's interesting. So what happens to this bill?

• 55:17Speaker 02

  Well, again, what I'd like to do is split it in two parts. Do the, the, you know, quantically, what has to be done now. And that is provide the funding. I think they're asking way too much. I pointed this out with Kristi Noem. They're, they're looking for $46 billion for the fence, right? Or for the wall. Well, in the first Trump term, I can't remember the exact numbers, I think something 485 miles. We spent 6.6 billion. So that's like 14.4 million dollars a mile. Now they want 46 billion. That's built, built over 3,000 miles. So I asked her, square that circle for me. And she, she really didn't. She was actually saying they're projecting $12 million. I was willing to give her 14.4,

• 56:00Speaker 02

  even though I was in Israel when I was chairman of Homeland Security, they built their very effective fence for less than $2 million a mile. But lay that aside. So provide border funding. The price you have to pay for that is more defense spending. Bank, we'll save as we can. You know, take, take the good work the House has done. Bank that savings. Extend current tax law, take an automatic tax increase off the table, provide that certain to the economy, bump up the debt ceiling for a year. To keep pressure on us to come back and then do the big, beautiful bill, we'll consider President Trump's tax proposals. So listen, I'm all for no tax on cash tips. Can't collect it anyway. So why even try?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  And that keeps currency circulating through the economy as well. I think that's a good thing. I don't want to go to a government backed digital security. So that, that's good. I mean, the other tax proposals EP promises to me in the campaign, they're not pro-growth. They're just going to reduce revenue. You know, no, no tax on overtime. Yeah, I ran a continuing shift operation. I think.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  The one time and a half or double time is more than enough incentive. You know, we all, we all live under a tax system. Income is income. Why would we increase the regulatory burden on people that administer payroll to cordon off some of the overtime to don't tax it? I mean, just be a pain in the butt.

• 57:21Tucker Carlson?

  Why doesn't everyone just pay the same rate? I don't understand that. And then everyone has skin in the game. Everyone has a better sense of what their government is spending and on what if it's coming out of your... And that suggests a kind of equality under the law that would be sort of nice if everyone's held... And I mean nonprofits too. I think we should get rid of all nonprofits immediately. Why isn't Harvard's endowment paying taxes? Like, what is this? Why not just the same rate for everybody? Labor, capital, same rate. One rate.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  You can be a nonprofit by not making a profit.

• 57:52Tucker Carlson?

  I've done that too.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  No, honestly, if you're a university or church, something like that, you bring in revenue, you spend it, you get no profit. You're a nonprofit.

• 58:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  So no, the other reason I wanted to split this into two parts is, you know, we need to take the time to go line by line, to do a doge impact on the entire budget, to find, to find the outrageous spending, eliminate what people won't even notice, but also to simplify and rationalize our tax system. We have a grotesquely complex tax system.

• 58:24Tucker Carlson?

  Everyone's out of complaints. Everybody's committing a felony unwittingly. Every single person, you, me, every other American.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  So simplify it, again, using basic principles. Don't try and socially and economically engineer through the tax code. We're terrible at it. You can't, you're not that smart. So raise the revenue you need. Try not to do any economic or social harm. So that, that would imply a very simple tax system. They always say, lower the rates, brown the base. But fair, I don't, personally, I've done well in this country. I don't mind having a progressive tax rate. I really don't. Certainly exempting a certain amount of income. So, you know, people can can live without having to pay tax and stuff, but but within those confines, keep it as absolutely simple as possible. Now, one thing I know is there's nothing simple about simplifying the tax tax

• 59:10Speaker 02

  code. I mean, everybody's got their their little tax break. And, you know, even right now, I one of the reasons I'm not looking forward to this ordeal that's going to come about over the next couple of weeks as I dig my heels in is, you know, there are a lot of people that support President Trump have supported me. They want no taxing overtime. They, by the way, if if all you live on is social security, it the the chance of you paying a dollar tax on that is almost infinitesimal. So we don't tax social security right now. But let's face it, if you have social security and they have income above that, I mean, why should you exempt some of your income? I think us oldsters have stolen enough from younger generations. I mean, you see the wealth transfer. I used to have a chart on this,

• 59:54Speaker 02

  but the the transfer of wealth from young to old over the decades, it's it's literally immoral. It's immoral. So let's not let's not exacerbate that problem.

• 1:00:04Tucker Carlson?

  It's disgusting.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  And again, if you're good, if you can do something on tax, again, I don't think this, I don't want to increase people's taxes, but I don't think this is a point in time to be cutting taxes that aren't incentivizing growth. Again, I don't, I'd rather not be incentivizing, you know, again, trying to use the tax code to try and come up with some way to incentivize growth. Just keep it simple, uncomplicated, rational, income is income, you know, basic principles like wherewithal to pay. I mean, design, approach all of these things with with principles. Because the big problem in the House, what was the goal there? I would think the goal of this Republican budget reconciliation would be to reduce the deficits. Seems like in the House, the only goal was to pass one

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  big, beautiful bill by Memorial Day. Great, you you achieved your goal, but you didn't solve our fiscal situation, didn't even come close.

• 1:00:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not impressed by the people managing this in the House, I'm just gonna say. Um, so I'm not surprised, but, but it of course needs the Senate as well. So

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Well, it needs, it needs presidential leadership.

• 1:01:10Tucker Carlson?

  But, but

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  And he, and he, and he needs to get behind fixing this problem. Now, he said in the State of the Union, he's gonna balance a budget. Fine, but I know in his mind, he thinks he's gonna balance a budget with tariff revenue. I'm sorry, tariffs are a tax. We're not quite sure who pays them. Where's the foreign companies, the foreign countries, uh, the US consumer? I mean, again, the incidence of tax is never particularly certain, but tariffs raise the cost of goods. For what? Again, I, there's no doubt, there's certain products, uh, high-end semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals. We gotta be basic in those. We have to produce these here just from a standpoint of national security. Is there a better way

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  of doing that than just generalized increasing of a tax, which is what a tariff is? I would argue there probably is. How about, how about this? We just give you a tax holiday for five or 10 years. Again, you've got a high-end semiconductor plant in a different country. We're not collecting the tax on it anyway. It's no skin off our, you know, what's to just, well, come on over here, produce that here. We'll just give you a 10-year tax. Talk, talk to the people who are gonna invest in it. What's it gonna take? How long a tax holiday? What's reasonable? You know, incentivize it that way. But don't, don't incentivize it by mucking up our tax code, or I'd say even worse, you know, things like the CHIPS Act where you pay money to grifters that don't really, you know, fulfill their, their

• 1:02:39Speaker 02

  end of the bargain. Again, we're just not good at doing these things. The free, the free market's not perfect, but it is the most efficient allocator of capital. So, I mean, you, you, you provide somebody tax holiday. I think you can bring those things back. You're pretty good. Plus permitting reform. If you want to do precursor chemicals for pharmaceuticals, I mean, you gotta, you gotta permit the refineries. You gotta permit the mines if you're gonna mine rare minerals and if you're gonna refine those things. So, again, we, we, we have to look at this, but it requires presidential leadership to go make the case, the logical case. And that, from my standpoint, in terms of me digging

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  my heels in, I'm a reasonable guy. But you're not gonna sell me just by saying, you gotta pass one big beautiful bill. I'm, I'm tired of the rhetoric. I'm not prone to slogans. It's like, lay out the case. If you can lay out the case that we are promoting growth, and this is what the revenue is gonna be, and this is how we actually shrink the deficit, and this is how we avoid a debt crisis. You know, I want to be on board. I want, I want to see this president succeed.

• 1:03:44Tucker Carlson?

  How many of your colleagues in the Senate have your position on this?

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's interesting. There's a, a fair number that are coalescing around the number. And I've never really, I've laid out options, but I've never dug my heels in on a number for a pre-pandemic level spending. But I've laid it out, I think logically enough, most people are, you know, there's a pretty big group say that it should be no more than $6.5 trillion in the next fiscal year. So that implies about an $800 billion difference between what we're expected to spend, which would be about $8 trillion of spending reduction over 10 years. It's a long ways from the 1.5 trillion.

• 1:04:20Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Again, what I've always said is, I need a commitment to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending, realizing we have to get the votes, but maybe even more importantly, a process to achieve and maintain it. And that's, that's, that's that line by, do the work, but it'll take time to do the work. But we need a commitment. I, I can't do it. I, I don't have access to all the information. We really need, and why I proposed in one of my Wall Street Journal columns was a budget review panel, made up of senators, House members. Staff of the O M B, Office of Management and Budget, I mean, those are the guys that know their stuff, and then have this as a review panel and bring up, just like in business, budget review meeting, bring up the department heads with their budget gurus and stuff and explain

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  it, go line by line. Again, why are you spending so much more than a fully inflated Bill Clinton level, or Obama, or Trump? Explain yourself. Why should we be spending even a dime on this category right here? So you've got, you know, top lines within the federal government, more than 2,000 lines, under each one of those lines is probably hundreds of lines between all those. So you've got a lot of work to do. But it doesn't get done, if you try and rush this thing through, and now by July 4th is what would be the goal for the Senate. So I want to break this up into two parts to give us the time to go through that budget line by line.

• 1:05:43Tucker Carlson?

  Will you get it?

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Right now, I think I've got at least four that will dig their heels in and say, again, we want to see you succeed, we want to pass this, we want to pass something, we'll pass what must be passed now. Again, we've already set this up in the Senate with our budget resolution to provide the defense and border funding plus $850 billion in savings. Tack that on to the House where we extend current tax law and increase the debt ceiling. By the way, that's going to be a massive amount. This, it should, it should shock everybody what we're going to have to increase the debt ceiling for just to get us by another year. Probably two to 2.5 trillion dollars. Because we have to refill the extraordinary measures that, you know, the buckets they've taken from to extend the debt ceiling. We're

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  right now burning about a half a trillion dollars a quarter. So you're talking, you know, if extending next year, five quarters at half a trillion dollars, that's 250, 2.5 trillion dollars, just to get us by into next year. That should shock everybody. And that's, that's my whole purpose here, is we haven't had, we haven't talked about the numbers, we haven't put this in context of, of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves. And I'm just going to force that debate. I'm not trying to be obstinate, I'll probably be accused of grandstanding. I don't want to do, I'd rather not do this. I'd rather have the House having really succeeded and the President totally behind. Again, we turned to pre pandemic level spending, but somebody's got to do it.

• 1:07:13Tucker Carlson?

  Since we launched ALP, we've had four flavors, but we are proud to announce ALP has a brand new flavor, one of several we'll be rolling out over the next year or so, and it is Sweet Nectar. I have personally tested this product, two at a time, and it's excellent. Sweet Nectar, the new flavor out from ALP, really, really good. Go to alpouch.com, go to order it in bulk by the pallet if you want. I have strongly recommended Sweet Nectar. Stay tuned for more.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.

• 1:08:18Tucker Carlson?

  It's interesting, if you pull back a little bit, so as with the defense budget, you don't win a war for 80 years, but you keep getting more money. A primary driver of the deficits and the debt is healthcare spending. Is the country getting healthier?

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  No, we're getting sicker. And again, that's shifting gears into, you know, really the failure of our of our healthcare system, of establishment medicine, of pharmaceutically driven medicine. They call it Rockefeller medicine. This is where I've been so supportive.

• 1:08:48Tucker Carlson?

  Why do they call it Rockefeller medicine?

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  He's really one that really pushed, you know, pharmaceutical drug companies way back when. I don't understand the full history, but.

• 1:08:56Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Again, that's all, you know, petrochemical based, you know, chemistry based. And, you know, rather than really focusing on health, it's all, we've got a pill for this. Here's, here's an example, and I think this is true, but there was a debate in terms of what caused heart disease. You know, is it too much sugar? Is it cholesterol?

• 1:09:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  From pharmaceutical industry standpoint, they had a drug to lower cholesterol.

• 1:09:24Tucker Carlson?

  Statins.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  So guess what they chose?

• 1:09:28Speaker 02

  Cholesterol, the winner, you know, the winner, because we've got a drug to manage that. Now, there are all kinds of emerging serious side effects of statins. One that I read about was sudden hearing loss. Guess who lost their hearing just like that?

• 1:09:47Tucker Carlson?

  Who?

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  Me. Two weeks after I returned from Moscow, I just lost my hearing, just like stepped out of the shower and I lost my hearing, my balance in an instant.

• 1:09:59Tucker Carlson?

  Like all your hearing?

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  In my right ear. So you start researching all this. I mean, you know, NIH reviewed me because it thought it might have been Havana syndrome.

• 1:10:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  But as I got involved in the whole COVID and I got to meet all these doctors who had a second opinion that that weren't going along with the narrative that were, they had the courage and compassion to actually treat COVID patients that took seriously the vaccine injured. It just connects you to just alternate opinions, you know, alternate thinking. And one of them, you know, laid out the listed side effects of statins and one of them is sudden hearing. A lot of people are thinking it could be a main driver of Alzheimer's. But again, they'll never admit it because that's a multi-billion dollar industry right there.

• 1:10:46Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think it's possible that statins are responsible for dementia?

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  People are saying that. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not a doctor now, a medical researcher, but my eyes have been opened.

• 1:10:55Tucker Carlson?

  That's really scary right there. If that's true, that's, I mean, that's a

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  I mean, people are making, are positing that. I will, I will say since I, so I took myself off statins, I've had a number of health conditions that's just improved as a result.

• 1:11:08Tucker Carlson?

  Seriously?

• 1:11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was complaining for years, quite honestly. So they put me on statins when I went in for a CT scan and they saw calcium buildup on what they call the widowmaker. But that's external. It can always bust through the arterial wall and cause real problems. But I had a heart catheterization a couple of years ago. I woke up from that and go, man, I wish my plumbing was as clean as yours.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  So I don't know, because I was on statins all those years, but I know I was going, being treated because I was having pretty severe dizzy spells, almost to the point of passing out frequently, you know, going up a step, whatever. I took myself off statins, I had under a doctor's care. That's gone.

• 1:11:51Tucker Carlson?

  What?

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  I'll give you, I'll give you another one. This is, so I also, this is very personal. This is strange, I'm getting into this, but.

• 1:11:59Tucker Carlson?

  It's a safe space.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  So I, I've always had acid reflux for years. Okay. And so I was on everything, you know, Xantac and Prilosec and then Nexium, which by the way, by the way, were great in terms of relieving the symptoms, but also have some pretty nasty side effects. So I again, you know, reading these alternate opinions on stuff, hydroxychloric, no, hydrochloric acid has been known for decades to be a just of aid. The theory behind what causes acid reflux is you don't have enough stomach acid. You're not, you're not digesting the food properly. You're not providing the signal to the, I guess, sphincter muscle, whatever

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  that closes your stomach off from your esophagus. So what you do to solve it is you introduce more acid in, you know, in, in the form of a natural vegetarian based product, and that's called hydrochloric, hydrochloric acid. So I take one tablet now before my evening meal. I miss it probably at least half the time. I don't have it anymore. So I don't take, I don't take any of that stuff anymore. This worked far better. It's just completely natural. It's complete, it's completely opposite of what all these other patented, patented drugs do for you. So it's just, it's just HCl and they call it baiting or something

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  like that, but it's just an over the counter supplement and it's worked great.

• 1:13:33Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, you would think, given what

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  So I will get all kinds of guff for talking about this stuff, but it's just because that's what that's what they do. This is the

• 1:13:42Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you just described your life improving and health improving, and that's somehow a thought crime?

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  It will be because the pharmaceutical industrial complex, again, it's all about drugs that can can treat chronic illness, which is why you can't talk about these things, which is why they completely sabotaged the treatment of of early treatment of COVID using things like hydroxychloroquine and, you know, particularly ivermectin, which I heard story because, you know, I was the tip of the spear. I got all kinds of people calling me, what doctors treat this? And so I heard the the amazing stories of recovery recovery with ivermectin. You know, we will hold a hearing on this. There's one attorney that got called into Sui Hospital because somebody's loved one was in the hospital

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  and they were begging them to use ivermectin. The hospital just refused. So this lawyer went in there and sued, was successful, saved that person's life. So in the end, because he did this, I think he had something, this is a rough number, something like 200 families that he went to court for to force the hospitals to use ivermectin or budesonide or some of these other drugs, right? He won about half the cases. Of those 100 cases, I think he lost two or a couple of patients. Otherwise, they all survived. Of the 100 cases he lost, they all died.

• 1:15:09Tucker Carlson?

  Whoa.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  So you take a look at these hospital protocols, there's a great documentary, Vax 3, that really goes through this and just talks about the hospital protocols using remdesivir, which the nurses called run death, death is near. The anthe fauci said this is the this is the treatment, even though they whatever study it was, they changed the endpoint from, you know, death to just days in hospital, which I don't think even that was true. The the number of conflicts of the people reviewing that that were associated with gilead, I mean, the who recommended against using remdesivir, and yet we still use it? You see what happened during COVID, thoroughly corrupt. And, you know, we just had our hearing on the signals on myocarditis, which they completely

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  downplayed, hid for months on the COVID injection.

• 1:16:00Tucker Carlson?

  So why are we giving any money to a system that not only fails to improve public health, but actively conspires against it?

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  I would say the primary reason at this point in time is because in 1997, Clinton through regulation allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise. And you look at those ads, you don't have any idea what those drugs do.

• 1:16:23Tucker Carlson?

  But that's common around the world, right? Most countries allow that.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  No, only, only America and New Zealand allow that.

• 1:16:28Tucker Carlson?

  I knew the, I just wanted to evoke that. So only the United States and New Zealand out of every country on planet earth allow drug, pharma companies to advertise.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Right. And so you take a look at those ads, I have no idea what any of those drugs are treating other than they allow dogs to jump higher and people to play around the pool and.

• 1:16:50Tucker Carlson?

  Make your wife hotter, yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Oh, just, you know, I mean, they just, they look wonderful. And then if you listen to the side effects, you know, spoken, you know, possible death, you know, it's like, again, I sold plastic, I'm, I'm used to marketing. There is no way anybody would spend a dollar, a dime on an ad for a product where you got to list out all the horrible side effects. Why do they do it? It's not sell, again, you don't know what the drug is for.

• 1:17:17Tucker Carlson?

  They're not selling those drugs.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  No, they are buying the narrative.

• 1:17:20Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. I worked in the media my whole life.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  And, and that is, and that is what we saw during COVID. I mean, that's what completely opened up my eyes.

• 1:17:29Tucker Carlson?

  They're paying NBC and Fox News and CNN and CBS and everybody else not to criticize the COVID shots.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  I ran in, in 2010 after I'd given a Tea Party speech and two of the things I said, which my campaign guys said, never say that again, is I defended big oil and big pharma. So what, am I the only guy that likes a gas station every corner of this, of the town? Because I run it down to empty or am I the only one that wants a lifesaving new drug? By the way, there are wonderful drugs.

• 1:17:57Tucker Carlson?

  For sure.

• 1:17:57Speaker 02

  There are that we need, particularly in acute care. But we do need, and this is what, again, I give Bobby Candy and Trump so much credit for laying aside their political differences, joining an alliance to focus on a problem that they both agree that needs to be solved, and it's chronic illness. Bobby Candy says 75% of our healthcare spending is on chronic illness. And so I just laid out, you know, I had a chronic condition, acid reflux, GERD, and kept treating with all these pharmaceuticals, because they weren't cheap, you know, Prilosec, Nexium, they're not cheap, alleviated the symptoms, but didn't fix it. I go to the something that just is far cheaper, I think works better. I don't have to even take it every day.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  I think I've probably replenished the acid in my stomach, which declines with age. And just, so, I mean, every other day I take one, if I remember, as an evening meal, and pretty well solve the condition. I have cured a chronic, I'm not treating it anymore. I was treating it with Prilosec and Nexium. I pretty well cured it. Now, I still take this because it's a justative aid. It's like you eat the right stuff.

• 1:19:07Tucker Carlson?

  Why can't, if Clinton allowed pharma to advertise, allowed pharma to buy the media, which they did, I can verify that since I worked there, why can't that be undone as easily?

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Well, it can. You ought to use your influence with President Trump to make sure he supports Bobby if he decides to do that. But we should do that. And again, I'm a free market guy. I mean, I'm.

• 1:19:30Tucker Carlson?

  But we couldn't even have a debate about the most obvious things during COVID because the media wouldn't allow it. And again, I can verify that firsthand since I worked there. And you just couldn't, they did not want in any way to criticize pharma companies, period. So that's where it started. We're not criticizing these people, period. And it's because they pay all the bills. So if you ended that, which you could do, I think with the stroke of a pen. You could have informed consent again. People would have a chance to know what they were being prescribed and decide whether or not to take it, right?

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  That would be the hope. Yeah, I had a, I had a, a, a public event and it's really based on your interview with Casey and Callie Means. And so we put that together. Bobby Kennedy showed up and we had a bunch of social media influencers on nutrition. And one of the witnesses, specializing, he's a psychiatrist specializing in nutrition's impact on, on mental health. I think probably made the, the best little snippet of testimony said, you know,

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  they don't want to know the root cause of chronic illness. Again, who's they? I remember listening to you ask that too. What's that Catherine Witt or you just said?

• 1:20:48Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, wonderful. Yeah. Wonderful woman. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  You asked her, who, who are they?

• 1:20:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  I asked that on my time, myself all the time. My, my guess is they attend Davos, whoever they are, they're there.

• 1:20:59Tucker Carlson?

  They're not invited to my house for dinner.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  But I thought that was very interesting comment. They don't want to know.

• 1:21:05Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  The root cause. Because if they find out it is

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  some pharmaceutical product or some pesticide or some herbicide or some toxin in our food, that's going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models. And those businesses are fully engaged in lobbying, they're fully engaged in having and have captured our regulatory agencies. I'm talking about, so listen, government is power, right? That's a pretty good definition of government. It's power. And as Lord Acton's aptly stated, power corrupts. And so what has happened over the decades is these businesses, I have a great deal of sympathy for them being over-regulated by, by big government, right? But they're smart, especially the big ones. They got smart people there. So not only do they figure out how to survive with over-regulation, they learn how to capture it.

• 1:21:55Tucker Carlson?

  Of course. And then they promote it.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  And then they capture it for their, for their benefit to the detriment of their competitors. Particularly smaller competitors and detriment of the American public. And that is what has happened, I would say, across the board in government, whether it's pharmaceuticals, whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's our big food. That's in my mind, that's the hope, that that's what I want to see Donald Trump defeat. And you first defeat it by exposing it. People have to understand this is what's happened, but certainly what I learned, you learned, Bobby Kennedy learned during COVID, it is very difficult defeat, back then, what I called the COVID cartel. That is a powerful group of interests and they're not going away.

• 1:22:38Tucker Carlson?

  Let's start with a really easy one, and those are the vaccine injured. So these would be American citizens who obeyed their government and took a shot that they were required to take on pain of punishment, and then were injured by or killed by that shot. They've received almost no attention. You're literally one of the only lawmakers who ever mentions them. You've had a bunch of hearings, you know them personally. Describe the scale of the injury and death from the COVID shots, if you would.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Well, just on VAERS alone, I think we're over 38,000 deaths associated with the COVID vaccine.

• 1:23:14Tucker Carlson?

  VAERS is the federally created-

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.

• 1:23:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. So that's a, but that's a government-

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:21Tucker Carlson?

  -reporting system.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  Now, it's, it's, some conditions are mandatory to be reported, but they're still not. The two complaints about, or, you know, hits on VAERS is it doesn't prove causation, but it also dramatically understates the number of adverse events, because people just don't report them. Sometimes you don't connect the dots. So on VAERS system, to date, worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with COVID vaccine. And 24% of those, to date, either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days.

• 1:23:56Tucker Carlson?

  Wow. Yeah, I know someone who was killed by it.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  You know, we saw these athletes dropping like flies on the, on the field. You saw newscasters just toppling over, you know, from their, their anchor chair.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  And like, that wasn't reported. You'd get a, you'd get it through social media. You might have a local news story, but it, there's no national news media that hopped out and say, what is happening here?

• 1:24:22Tucker Carlson?

  No, because that's, that wasn't real.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  It was, it was all denied.

• 1:24:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  It was all denied.

• 1:24:25Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of 23 year old soccer players have heart conditions, it turns out.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  That's, it's all that exercise they do.

• 1:24:34Tucker Carlson?

  I don't know why I'm laughing. It's horrible. So, so 38,000 globally just on VAERS. Is anyone keeping track of the injuries and the chronic illness caused by those shots?

• 1:24:45Speaker 02

  I think they're primarily calling it long COVID now.

• 1:24:47Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:24:48Speaker 02

  That's, you know, that's, that's their excuse. And even those that are vaccine injured,

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  want to think it's just long COVID. I mean, no, nobody wants to admit that they maybe should have taken a little more time, gotten a little more educated about this experimental COVID injection. They don't want to think there may be a ticking time bomb in terms of turbo cancers. And, but again, more and more evidence is coming out that in tumors, there's, they find the spike protein, the spike protein as long as, as well as the modified RNA. It's not true mRNA. It does degrade very rapidly, circulating the body for months, possibly years. Again, they're finding the spike protein in autopsied hearts, in tumors. You know, we know from people like Kevin McKernan that there was DNA contamination. It can integrate into the cell, could cause cancer. Again, there's so, yeah, I even hate talking about

• 1:25:39Speaker 02

  it because I know 70, 80% of Americans got vaccinated.

• 1:25:42Tucker Carlson?

  They don't want to hear about it.

• 1:25:43Speaker 02

  No, no, no, they don't. They want to just move on. That's why it's, it's so difficult to hold people accountable for this.

• 1:25:49Tucker Carlson?

  Well, here's an easy way to do it. So if I sell any product, a food product, for example, and it turns out to kill people.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Get sued.

• 1:25:57Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly. So only the vax makers have this exemption granted to them by Congress, the shield. And I, I've never heard a real argument for why they should maintain that or why Congress continues to protect them. Why?

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  But by the way, so I talked to Barbara, Barbara Low Fisher, who was the mom who really pushed that thing through. That law itself does not provide liability.

• 1:26:21Tucker Carlson?

  This is the 1986 law?

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was regulations, kind of the wink, wink, no, no, to get it passed that they implement, you know, promulgated regulations that actually provide that liability protection. Again, that, it wasn't. It wasn't just for the three vaccines, I think at the time they were on the schedule. It exempted all future vaccines, which has led to an explosion. Because again, the greatest risk-

• 1:26:47Tucker Carlson?

  There's no downside.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you just keep cranking these things out. They aren't tested in a true placebo controlled trial. Sometimes the trial period is meager as it is, only lasts for a week. It's just, it's shocking. This was, you know, Aaron Siri testified at our hearing last week and he's expert at all this in terms of the American public would be shocked at how little testing these vaccines actually receive. But you have this, it's almost a religion around the safety and efficacy of vaccines. I mean, I understand that it's such an elegant solution, isn't it? Just a 100% safe shot in the arm and you never have to worry about this.

• 1:27:30Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's fine, maybe there's-

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  The problem is just not true.

• 1:27:31Tucker Carlson?

  Well, but let's say it is true. They're super safe. Peter Hotez is like a legitimate physician. He's telling the truth. He's not deranged. And okay, then prove it. Then hold them to the same standard that every other product that you buy, certainly every product that's mandated by government is held to. And that's one that's backstopped by the courts.

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:52Tucker Carlson?

  Tort law. Like, I don't, I don't understand, like, why would there be this one thing that's exempt from a process that every other thing is subject to?

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  Because, because there were so many injuries manifesting themselves before that law was passed, that those manufacturers are going to be sued out of existence.

• 1:28:10Tucker Carlson?

  Oh.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  And again, the, the religion faith that these vaccines are just so crucial, even though you, you read a book like Dissolving Illusions, you realize the main reason most of these diseases were eradicated is because we no longer live in squalor. We have, we have-

• 1:28:24Tucker Carlson?

  We have sewers.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  We have sanitation.

• 1:28:26Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Okay. So I mean, you see the chart coming down here and then the vaccines start occurring here and yeah, the tail goes out and we, you know, vaccines may have eradicated some of these diseases. I don't, I don't deny that. But the, the main thing is we, you know, we actually- Improve sanitation. And what we are ignoring now is treatment. And that came out with COVID. It's like, I mean, I couldn't, you know, the reason I got into this is I'm chairman of Homeland Security. I'm the only guy holding hearings on this stuff because none of this stuff makes sense. So why, why are they just pillorering something like hydroxychloroquine? I mean, if it works, give it a shot. I mean, what's the harm? It's incredibly safe. Ivermectin. But that was completely sabotaged.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  All for the purpose of forcing this, this injection, what they call the vaccine on everybody is a solution. Why, why aren't we talking about treating disease measles? Why aren't we focusing on treatment? Yeah, I'm telling these doctors generally a very treatable disease, just about any disease can kill you. Okay, but a lot of diseases can be treated. We ought to be focusing a lot more from my standpoint on treatment as opposed to

• 1:29:36Speaker 02

  loading up our children, our infants with dozens and dozens of doses and not even asking the question. So, okay, have these been thoroughly tested? I mean, have we tested giving multiple vaccines at the same dose? I mean, every time you put a vaccine in somebody's arm, you're messing with their immune system. Why do we have all these autoimmune diseases nowadays? You know, what is causing autism? I mean, we're just not able to ask the question because to get back to my witness in that last event is they don't want to know.

• 1:30:08Tucker Carlson?

  And they attack anyone who asks, including you. Um, and I mean, watching what's happened to you has really been the greatest of all wake up calls for me. Because I would say of the senators I know, which is most of them, you're like the most temperamentally moderate and accountant number based. Like not a wild type radical at all, at all. And there are some crazy people in Congress who are not, who are the opposite, like budgets and stuff. So if they're calling you a wacko, they discredit themselves. That, that's just as an observer, my observation.

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Again, but that's what they do. You know, so during COVID, a quick story here, I was, I was on a telephone town hall. And this is when Omnicrom was ramping up.

• 1:30:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  And this is already by the time we've, we've got a partisan split on COVID, right? I mean, Republicans don't wear masks, Democrats do, you know, Republicans aren't freaked out by it, Democrats are. But again, I'm talking to these doctors. I know they were very concerned for the, for example, on Delta, that variant. It was more difficult to treat. They had to like double and triple the dose of ivermectin to have it actually be effective. So, you know, nobody knew what was going to happen with Omicron. I think people were thinking it looked like it was going to be more mild. I'm on a telephone town hall with my constituents, probably a couple thousand, and say, listen, take this seriously. COVID can still be a deadly disease. So whether you're vaccinated or not vaccinated, you know, there are things

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  you can do. Vitamin D, you know, you can gargle, you know, that helps reduce the viral load. Within 10 minutes, my comms team were being contacted by national news outlets, saying, what's this that we're hearing that Johnson's saying that listerine will replace the vaccine? Now, of course, I said nothing of the kind. I just said, you know, there are things you can do to help protect yourself, you know? And they actually went so far as to go up to the governor of, I guess it was New Hampshire, knocked on his door, Republican governor, and said, hey, what do you think about this wacko Republican senator says that vaccines can, or listerine can replace the vaccines? Said, well, when batshit crazy knocks on your door, slam the door in his face. I mean, that was the... So, again, what they...

• 1:32:13Tucker Carlson?

  That was what Sununu said?

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, what they do, what they do...

• 1:32:16Tucker Carlson?

  Really one of the worst people ever attempt in politics.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  What they do is they discredit people. So then, once they've done that, you know, whether, as falsely as they discredit you, now you're discredited. So now, next time, next thing that comes up that is true, that you're talking about, things, oh, this guy, he's thoroughly discredited. This guy's discredited. He's discredited.

• 1:32:35Tucker Carlson?

  He thinks listerine is...

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  That is, that is what they do. Just like, you know, the CIA used the conspiracy theorist. Just call somebody conspiracy theorist and then don't have to listen to them anymore. This guy's obviously a nutcase. So, no, I've lived this up close and personal.

• 1:32:48Tucker Carlson?

  The problem is that it does, it does make everyone into a nihilist. It's, it's happened to me. I've tried and fight it. It's like, it feels like everything's a lie, so you don't believe anything.

• 1:33:00Tucker Carlson?

  And you know, you just like, don't go to the doctor, for example, which is where I am, or I know a lot of people like that. And that's, you know, you should probably go to the doctor. I mean, you know, get a checkup. That's okay. But they've so devalued their own currency. They've so discredited themselves through lying and just the most evil kind of like blaming you for their problems that it's, I don't know, it's had all these effects on our society that I don't think we've even grappled with.

• 1:33:24Speaker 02

  Well, I try and tell established members of the medical profession that they ought to be concerned that a very large percentage of American people simply don't trust them anymore.

• 1:33:35Tucker Carlson?

  Like at all.

• 1:33:36Speaker 02

  And that's not good. That's not good. You know.

• 1:33:38Tucker Carlson?

  Well, I think they're evil.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  When I was, when I was chairman of the European Subcommittee on Foreign Relations, we had, I think Gary Kasparov come in and talking about Russian disinformation.

• 1:33:46Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  And I thought it was interesting because it's, they're not, Russia is not trying to convince you of something with their disinformation. They just want people not to trust anything. That is the whole purpose of their disinformation.

• 1:33:59Tucker Carlson?

  I feel like Albert Bourla did more to achieve that in the United States, the head of Pfizer, than like any Russian ever could. You know, Joe Biden did that. Susan Rice did that. I mean, all these people, they just lie right to your face. And there's no recourse. So is there even conceivably a chance that Congress would repeal the protections that the vaccine makers enjoy?

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  That'll probably be a stretch.

• 1:34:28Tucker Carlson?

  Then can I ask this? Where's the trial bar in this? The trial bar has kind of like wrecked America by encouraging lawsuits for like the most frivolous possible, I could sue all the time by people like, I don't like what you said, I'm suing you. And you have to deal with it. They come to your house, process servers. But, and that's because the trial bar has gotten rich from this, from the tobacco, asbestos, all these shakedown, these totally fake money-making operations that they Morgan and Morgan, the ambulance chasing and all that. Why aren't they pushing for the repeal of the protections that vaccine makers uniquely enjoy?

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  That's a really good question.

• 1:35:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  So as somebody from the private sector, I avoided lawyers and judicial process like a play.

• 1:35:10Tucker Carlson?

  Me too.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  So it's not, you know, I'm not overly enthused about saying, but we need to expose vaccines to that check and balance. Okay. And we do. I would say we have to, we have to cap awards. I mean, there's got to be something.

• 1:35:25Tucker Carlson?

  I agree.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  Because we do need pharmaceutical companies. You know, I want those lifesaving new drugs.

• 1:35:30Tucker Carlson?

  It can't be a pinata party for lawyers.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  But it's got to be based on solid science. And that's why I really think the root cause, I mean, the thing that Bobby Kennedy must address is we have to restore integrity to science. You know, this is Eisenhower warned us about this in his farewell address. It doesn't give us much coverage, but public financing of science and research would lead to a scientific and technological elite to drive public policy. I would view that corrupt it. So when you pay for science, you get the result you want, whether it's climate change, whether it's vaccines, whether it's, you know, drugs and that type of thing. We need to restore integrity. You know, peer review is a joke. Peer reviewers are basically volunteering so that you'll get peer reviewers who might have a different paper themselves and they just discredit that.

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  So what is truth? So you have to restore integrity to science. There's got to be like, everybody from opposing sides have to be at the table. You've got to make your data available. Some of these studies are published, nobody gets to see the data. So that I think is, is the first step that Bobby has to accomplish is try and restore integrity, particularly for government funded science.

• 1:36:39Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you tried the other day to raise science-based questions about pivotal events in American history, 24 years ago, nine 11. And you asked a question that I think any honest person would ask, like, building seven was never hit by a plane. Why did it fall down in exactly the same way the first two towers did? That shouldn't be verboten. So you asked that question. I want to read the response from a Republican in the House, a new member called Mike Lawler, a guest from New York.

• 1:37:08Tucker Carlson?

  And he said this, I don't know if you know him, you probably don't, you just got there. Quote, Senator Johnson should stop peddling conspiracy theories about the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history and one that forever altered the lives of so many of my fellow New Yorkers. Crap like this dishonors and disrespects the innocent lives lost, our brave first responders, and all families and survivors who still carry the pain of nine 11 each and every day. So I think Lawler was like in high school when nine 11 happened. Um, he doesn't really seem to represent New York anyway, but whatever. The point is, why would he attack you personally for asking like the most obvious question ever, one rooted in science, which is how did this happen? Like, what is that?

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  I don't know, it sure hurt my feelings.

• 1:37:52Tucker Carlson?

  I know you don't care, but I just thought, why Mike Lawler, who literally just got there, got a lot of problems in New York? Why is he mad at you for asking that? You think he would want you to ask?

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  What is so off base about that is the only reason I'm looking at this is because the then chairman of the permanent subcommittee investigation, now I'm chair, but you know, Senator Blumenthal, he wanted to do this investigation on Saudi's negotiation with PGA. And, you know, he's doing it because he's from Connecticut and got nine 11 families. They want to know what Saudi involvement was.

• 1:38:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, fair.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  I didn't agree with that. I thought that this is a private sector negotiation, you know, let them take care of that. Okay. But he did it anyway. So, leading up to a pretty well publicized hearing, I started getting nine 11 family members see me in the hallway. They would literally in the hallway in Congress and they would have a heavily redacted document they got from the FBI in terms of what Saudis, the Saudi involvement was in nine 11, what we knew. And they asked me, can you please get this unredacted? We want to know what the government knows about these things. Now, this is 20 some years after nine 11, it's probably about time. So in the hearing, you know, I asked Senator Blumenthal, would you join me in requesting

• 1:39:09Speaker 02

  from the Biden administration, this information from the nine 11 family? So, well, he had to. But the bottom line is, I got down this road because the nine 11 families want to know the answer. And once I opened up that. Inquiry. Now I start getting all kinds of information.

• 1:39:29Tucker Carlson?

  But man, why is anything still redacted from nine 11? It was 24 years ago. It changed this country completely. Every American has, I mean, Lawler's right in the sense that it really affected every American. Why would our government continue to lie about it?

• 1:39:44Speaker 02

  I can't answer the question. All I can say is it raises my suspicion.

• 1:39:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  And then when you start gaining, again, I'm, I'm just as prone to everybody else going, that's wacko.

• 1:39:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:39:57Speaker 02

  But then you start getting the information and you start going, wow, is that weird? You know, building, building number seven, you see it come down and we've all watched because it's cool to watch, you know, these buildings being demolished. Boom, just, you know, free fall. Well, the only way that happens is if you remove all of their supports at the same time, you blow them all out so that a building can really free fall. If it's collapsing something, something else, it's like, you know, you, you build like a fire and it collapses off to the side or something, right? So that was pretty strange, but you know, the, the more, the more documentaries I look at this stuff, the more information I receive, you

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  talk to guys like Richard Gage, the head of the architects for nine 11 truth, they feed you information and you start asking a lot of questions and you just realize there's, there's a lot here that simply has not been answered. And you know, the firefighters want to know, I mean, there was never a steel structures, building that ever collapsed because of a fire.

• 1:41:03Tucker Carlson?

  Especially building seven. We don't get a lot of buildings that, you know, commercial airliners run into, so you could be like, who knows?

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:41:09Tucker Carlson?

  But building seven was not hit by anything. It's actually quite a distance from the other towers. It's not right next door. It's hundreds of yards away, I think. And debris hit it and it caught fire and then the whole thing collapsed as we saw on camera. That was not even included in the nine 11 report. There's no mention of building seven. It's like, anyway, the point is.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  You also, you also have people, because they never explored explosions, but there, you know, a guy named Graham McQueen researched this. He dug up, you know, footage filmed at ground zero, 156 witnesses, you know, first responders saying they heard explosions before the buildings came down. So what is, I mean, there, trust me, there are a lot of unanswered questions. I mean, things he just.

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Can't explain that. So I'm not sure where it goes. I know you had Kurt Weldon on.

• 1:42:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  He's, he's got a lot of information on kind of the before and after.

• 1:42:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Because he's connected to the firefighting community, firefighters want to know. So there, there are, there are some very legitimate questions, a lot of them that remain unanswered. All swept under the rug. They were, and you look at this, news reporters were talking about explosions. By the next day, nobody was. There, there is, there's a lot of, there's a lot of power.

• 1:42:31Tucker Carlson?

  I'm, I'm interested in your evolution on this. So you said before Blumenthal, your colleague, Senator Blumenthal,

• 1:42:40Tucker Carlson?

  from Connecticut, raised, kind of raised this in a different way. You were not wondering what happened to Building 7?

• 1:42:47Speaker 02

  No, never, don't think I've ever heard of it.

• 1:42:50Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I figured the Twin Towers came down. Again, I'm not a New Yorker. You know, this, it affected all of us. We all saw them come down. We said, the world has changed.

• 1:42:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  This changed the world. And it did.

• 1:43:02Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, more than any other event in my life?

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  Not for the better.

• 1:43:04Tucker Carlson?

  No, not at all.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  This is, this is a seminal event in our, our lifetime. And the, the fact that there's so many unanswered questions that the Bush administration was so resistant to even a 9/11 commission, that the commissioners claimed that it was set up to fail, that you have got a Bob Carey who's, you know, since passed, said this is a 30-year conspiracy. It's, I mean, I could go, I could go on and on.

• 1:43:26Tucker Carlson?

  Senator Carey said that?

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:43:28Tucker Carlson?

  Of Nebraska?

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, the comment, comment.

• 1:43:31Tucker Carlson?

  Received the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, by the way?

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  He's kind of walking away and go, this is a 30-year conspiracy. Well, what do you mean by that? Nobody ever found out. So again, that's, I'm just throwing out little snippets. But as I said, it's, it's, it's, it's amazing, the questions that you see, the legitimate questions that have been raised that remain unanswered. That's all, that's all I can say. All I have is questions right now. I don't have any answers.

• 1:43:52Tucker Carlson?

  I get it, but I, I just, I feel exactly the same way. I have no clue. I have no theory of everything in this at all. But my question is, you just came at this cold, though.

• 1:44:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, this was not something that I was, you know, hankering to, to delve into.

• 1:44:08Tucker Carlson?

  One of the questions-

• 1:44:09Speaker 02

  It's kinda like Bobby Kennedy, how he got involved in childhood vaccines.

• 1:44:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  He was giving all these speeches on the environment and all these moms would show up with their T-shirts and, you know, he kept him at bay for quite some time till one of the moms found out where he lived. Came with him, came to his house with a stack of science, which he knew how to read because he was an environmental lawyer. And said, "I'm not gonna leave till you read this." And to his credit, he sat down and read it. And further to his credit is, once he read it, he couldn't, you know, once his eyes were open, he couldn't, he couldn't close them. As much as he probably wanted to, as much as he realized the morass he was stepping into, "I can't close my eyes. I can't." And, and, you know, particularly with childhood vaccine injuries, it's bad enough with the COVID vax. I mean, I, you know, the Ernest Ramirez, you know, lost his son. I mean, it's just, it's just heartbreaking. I mean, these, Facebook,

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  dissolving these groups that were the only lifeline for some of these vaccine injured and they started committing suicide afterwards because they lost that connection that they didn't have before these groups. But you, I mean, you look at the documentary, just Vaxxed. And you see these parents had a, and they have the video of a perfectly normal child. And they take them in for a well business. So they get a vaccine. That night they spike a fever, have a seizure. Now they got a 26-year-old son who is extremely autistic, can't verbalize, acts up as, I mean, it's just, it's horrible. And you see the stats where you go from,

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  it's hard to verify the 10,000 and one, but I mean, we know by CDC's own, you know, hundreds to one to now 30-something to one. What's, by the way, while they've actually narrowed the definition of autism, they didn't expand it, they narrowed it. What's causing that? And, you know, after the makers of Vaxxed went on a road trip with a, with a bus, premiering this thing. And other parents would come up to the bus, and so they started videotaping their stories. And they got something like 10,000 stories of parents almost identical.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  It's like perfectly normal child, got the video to prove it, go in, you know, within that night or within days. You start looking at the increase in SIDS versus the increase of the vaccine schedule. Again, I'm not a doctor, not a medical researcher. My eyes have just been opened up to how so much true, so much information, so many questions, probably the best way to put it, have just been suppressed. You can't even ask them. Anybody who does gets marginalized, vilified, discredited, and that's how they, that's how they battle this. They don't battle with the truth. They don't, you know, in my public events, I always invited the federal officials, I always invited the executives from the big pharma, you come in and defend

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

  yourself. This is an open forum. I'll give you plenty of time. I'll be very fair. Speak your piece. I want to hear from you. They won't do it. They will, I mean, Peter Hotez, famously, you know, Mr. Vaccine Pusher gets offered, what was finally offered, two points, some million dollars, sit down and argue with not a doctor, a lawyer, you know, just will debate RFK Jr. And he wouldn't even do it. What does that tell you?

• 1:47:30Tucker Carlson?

  He's just calling people names. So just back to 9/11 for a minute. You never really thought about it like most people, me too. I yelled at anyone who asked questions about it myself. So I'm sympathetic, actually, in some ways to people who don't want to hear it. But now that you've looked into it, and you said you don't have a coherent theory as to what it was, but you've got a lot of questions, which questions trouble you the most?

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  Well, it starts with building seven.

• 1:47:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  Where you look at that and it just, yeah, I mean, this, this is really weird. You know, it does come down just like a, you know, building demolition type of project. You get a documentary of this Alaskan structural engineering professor that does a four-year study on it, pretty well debunks NIST's analysis. Again, you don't have to be a structural engineer to say this doesn't, this really doesn't make sense. When you start putting together what temperature steel melts, they had molten steel in the Twin Towers, and I'm not sure we had it in number seven. But if one column, it says that one column expanded, went off kilter, and that's what brought the whole thing down, well,

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  It wouldn't come down so symmetrically. You wouldn't have a free fall. Then you get deeper into it and you know, there's a thing, his name was Barry Jennings. He was there, went up there. They'd already cleared out building seven, even though he went up there to their command center and somebody goes, get out of there. It was predict, I mean, literally predicted to come down, even though again, a steel structured building had never collapsed due to fire because they're protected that way. He heard explosions. He had to got down to the sixth flight, the sixth floor and had to go back up to eight because something had been blown out. And again, what? What caused all this?

• 1:49:23Tucker Carlson?

  This building was not hit by an airplane.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  No, I mean, they did. It was damaged, but even this says, you know, not significant damage by the twin towers falling. So again, there's just so many things. I mean, you could spend quite some time. I mean, the ash contains residual of both burnt and unburnt thermite, which is used to demolish buildings and it's military grade and there's nanoparticle thermite and you have all these metal spheres that you only get these iron spheres with extreme temperatures and again, jet fuel burns at below, I think a thousand degrees of Fahrenheit and again, nothing's adding up. I mean, and you know, just structurally, just basic engineering, basic physics, it doesn't make

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  sense. So I would like to, you know, this took years to conclude, conclude their report. To just a layperson, it doesn't make sense. Particularly when you listen to the, you know, structural engineering professor, just, you know, nuke the, the explanation. They can, they never looked at a plausibility of some kind of controlled demolition. They, they never put in their report, all these reports of people saying there were explosions. Again, there's just so much ignored. I mean, the fact the Bush administration.

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  Drag their feet, obstructed, setting up a 9/11 commission. Again, I could go on and on and on and on. I don't have any answers. I just have a host of questions.

• 1:50:50Tucker Carlson?

  Then if you were upset, if you were Congressman Mike Lawler, and you were upset that someone was a conspiracy theorist, and if you were sincerely bothered by that, by conspiracy theories, okay, I understand that. Then you would know the only way to end a conspiracy theory is with an explanation that makes sense. Why is there no effort to provide one? Why isn't there a study, a government study of Building 7? And just let's put this stuff to rest. Like, defeat it with the truth. Why isn't there?

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  My guess is because they are very effective at marginalizing and discrediting anybody who's answered questions.

• 1:51:28Tucker Carlson?

  But why would they want to hide the truth?

• 1:51:30Speaker 02

  You'd have to know exactly what they're trying to hide to be able to answer that question. I can't.

• 1:51:35Tucker Carlson?

  Of all issues for Mike Lawler to be upset about, this one really caught my eye. Like, why are you mad about it? Again, you just got there, and you're attacking, you know, a senior senator who's thoughtful and sober and asking totally real questions? Who are you covering for exactly, Mike Lawler?

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  And by the way, it wasn't like I went out of my way and had an interview just on this. I mean, I was asked a question, probably wandered into a space I maybe shouldn't have wandered into. But again, I was just describing all the ways the federal government has lied to us. And, you know, I've been...

• 1:52:10Tucker Carlson?

  You're part of the federal government, by the way.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  I've been targeted by the FBI's misinformation campaign on Hunter Biden's computer. I mean, they've given me BS briefings to throw me off the trail. So, I've seen this. I, you know, again, I didn't run for the US Senate because I want to get involved in investigations. I ran because we were more in our kids' future, because I knew Obamacare wouldn't work. But you become chairman of Homeland Security, you know, within, immediately, you've got the Hillary Clinton email scandal, that's in our community's jurisdiction, federal records, plus we're the oversight community. So you start doing those investigations, and just one investigation, just more... And other, the same cast of characters, the FBI that wrote the exoneration memo for

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  James Comey transferring Crossfire Hurricane to, you know, the group that, you know, Vindman and the impeachment inquiry of Trump. You just see it all and your eyes are opened up to the total corruption of these federal government agencies. And you realize we've just been lied to over and over and over and over again throughout history, at least, you know, history that's recent in my past.

• 1:53:21Tucker Carlson?

  I wonder why you haven't just ignored it like everybody else. I met you right in early 2011, right? Almost 15 years ago, when you, when you first got there, you're a business guy from Wisconsin, very closely divided state. You didn't win by a huge margin. You never have won by, you never won by 30 points. So, you know, whenever you talk about something in public, you're taking a bigger risk than say the Senator from Utah or South Dakota, because you could lose an election. I never in a million years thought you of all people would be the guy to like, ask questions about nine 11 or the vax or January 6th, and a whole bunch of other issues. And yet you have been the only guy in a lot of cases to ask those questions. Why? Why are you doing this? Wouldn't it just be easier to talk about tax reform or something?

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  I would ask you the same question. You know, why have you been so instrumental in broadening the Overton window on some of these things? And of course, the Overton window is all about, this is what you can discuss without threat or without, you know, risk. And, but you gotta go beyond that. So.

• 1:54:25Tucker Carlson?

  Cause I was part of the cover up and I feel guilty about it. That's why. And I'm trying to atone for my previous sins. That's the real reason.

• 1:54:31Speaker 02

  In my case, I have a responsibility. Yeah. You know, I was chairman of the Senate Oversight Committee. So again, you start there. Hillary Clinton has this email scandal. That's my committee's jurisdiction. That has to be investigated. I can't, I can't turn a blind's eye toward that. And then like Bobby Kennedy, once your eyes open, eyes are open to this, you also can't turn a blind's eye. But, but I think it's just the empathy you have for the vaccine injured. Again, I didn't reach out to them. You know, because I was holding hearings because nobody else was on early treatment. Uh, when I still had the chairmanship, um, people start reaching out to you and then you become aware of these people that are completely being gaslit or being ignored. I mean, I could not believe in that Milwaukee event I held in June 2021, where I met Brian Dresson and

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  uh, Matty DeGarry and, and other vaccine injured Cheryl Rutgers. Again, I was hoping there'd be some measure of sympathy expressed by the news media. They, they would ask them their stories, you know, tell, tell us about your experience. Now, the first question was, hey, Ken Rutgers, you, you just want to try and make money off of a lawsuit here? Is that why you're doing this? So you, you develop, you develop an empathy for these people. And then, you know, listen, I'm not a New Yorker. I, I wasn't impacted any more than the world was by nine 11. Not anywhere like the firefighters who lost their loved ones or, or the nine 11 families. But then they come up to you and they're literally begging you, please, I just, I, I want some closure here. I, I want to know what happened. The, the government's not being honest.

• 1:56:01Speaker 02

  You combine that with the fact that I know the government just fricking lies through their teeth to the American public all the time. Which is outrageous.

• 1:56:10Tucker Carlson?

  It is outrageous.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  Okay. So, you know, my eyes are opened. Somebody's got to do it. I actually have a responsibility to do it. Now I'm chairman of the permanent subcommittee investigations. That, that's responsibility. Now you have to pick your targets. I've always said I'm, I'm like a mosquito in a nudist colony. It's a target rich environment, but I guess I'm focusing on the things where there are legitimate questions by Americans who are grieving, who are being, who are suffering. Because they don't have an answer because their vaccine injuries aren't being taken seriously. So we're not providing the research for it. So they're not getting treatment. They can't be helped. So I, you take up their cause because nobody else is doing it and you have responsibility to take up that cause.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  So now, I mean, my life would be a whole lot easier if I just ignored this stuff.

• 1:56:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. What do your colleagues think? It's such a rebuke. I know you like them and they like you and I'm not trying to cause you any problems, but kind of a rebuke to them. It's like the vaccine injured show up at their offices too.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was actually, I encourage the vaccine injured to go because I, you know, I like my colleagues. It's collegiate place, you know, they're, you know.

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  Um, so I said, show up, you know, request and be pretty insistent. Meet with the sender, meet with your house members, whatever. In so many, so they showed up in mass and I really felt bad afterwards because they were treated horribly in many cases.

• 1:57:36Tucker Carlson?

  Seriously?

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, horribly. Rudely, staffled them out with them, treated them rudely. Uh, it was, it was, it was not a good experience for the vaccine injured. Again, I, I didn't, I didn't witness it. I just heard the stories. I felt, all I can say is I felt terrible having encouraged them to do that and it ended up being such a bust and such a negative experience in so many cases.

• 1:57:58Tucker Carlson?

  And their only crime was following instructions from the US Congress and the executive branch, just like doing what they were told to.

• 1:58:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they were accused by the most absurd charge level at them that they're anti-vax. I mean, Maddie De Gary, her mother signed her up for the trial. Brienne Dresson, she signed up for the astroZenical trial.

• 1:58:18Tucker Carlson?

  And what happened to them?

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  Well, Brienne Dresson, I mean, close, close to suicide. I mean, she, she couldn't be touched. I mean, she was sensitive to light. She has all these neurological problems. Maddie De Gary has a feeding tube. She was in a wheelchair. I mean, horribly. And, and in her case, the, the drug company said that she has a stomach ache, basically. That's how they reported it to their government reporting. That this girl who'd been in the hospital, you know, dozens of times, uh, her, you know, her young life, I wouldn't say it's over, but it's not normal anymore. Um, no, these people suffered horrible industries. I mean, Ernesto Ramirez, single parent, this, this, his son, I think sixteen year

• 1:59:03Speaker 02

  old son, um, somewhere around that age, it's his life.

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  Died suddenly. Boom. And you just heard, again, you saw that so many times.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  And it's still, it's still being covered up because nobody wants to admit it. I mean, if you're a doctor and you push this or recommend it to your patients, you, you don't want to know that something you recommended or pushed on your patients might have killed them or resulted in permanent industry. Members of Congress who cut videos, you know, get that X. You know, our federal health officials, the news media who relentlessly, I mean, Stephen Colbert, you think he'll ever admit to vaccine injuries after he does his little skits with the little, you know,

• 1:59:45Tucker Carlson?

  hypodermic needles.

• 1:59:45Speaker 02

  Hypodermic needles in background. So, no, I mean, that's the, the whole problem is there's, you've got an entire society that doesn't want to admit they're wrong, including people who got the injection that don't really want to think about it, just move on with their life. And by the way, to provide some comfort, I think there were definitely hot lots. I've, I've written oversight letters on this. It looks like probably about 5% of the, 4% of the injections created about 80% of the adverse events. I can't remember the exact percentages, but

• 2:00:14Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 2:00:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No. And so I write to the CDC that don't reply, reply back. But it's just, to me, manufacturing, this is a process out of control. I mean, you've got, you really do. I mean, I, I don't have the stats right with me, but it's obvious there were hot lots here, which should provide some people comfort. I think about 75% of the vaccine lots, very few adverse events associated with it all. You know, I won't speculate why, but there are hot lots, but you write about them, you lay out all the stats and the response you get from the CDC is, we don't see any hot lots. We don't see, it's just like, we don't see a safety signal. Well, if you're not looking for it, you're not going to see a safety signal.

• 2:00:55Tucker Carlson?

  But these people are in charge of public health. They're supposed to care.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  No, they're, they're, they were, they were fully vested in this vax, in this injection. This was the solution. They pushed it. They ignored the safety surveillance. I mean, the V-safe system. This was set up specifically to track the safety of the COVID injection. 10 million people volunteered on this on their mobile device. Now, the questions they asked were pretty mild. They really weren't designed to really expose serious adverse events. They had a list of kind of mild symptoms, irritation of the arm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The second part was a little bit more serious. Did you lose a day of work or school? Did you seek medical care? That's as serious as it got, okay?

• 2:01:42Speaker 02

  But the results were shocking. And even more shocking, they hid it from the public for two years. It took Aaron Seri two years, suing the government, to release the results of the online mobile application, V-safe data. The results were 25% of the people, of the 10 million people, 25% lost a day of work or school because their adverse event was, you know, they felt bad enough.

• 2:02:07Tucker Carlson?

  25%.

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  25%, 8%, I think 7.8% sought medical care. And I think more than a majority, two or three times. That's a reasonably, because I know people with adverse events that suffered and they never sought medical care. So, well, we'll get over it. Of course, that's what the officials told us. Oh, that just shows you it's effective. Your arm's burning up, you know, you're numb, you can't, you can't, you know, you can't walk. Well, it's working.

• 2:02:36Tucker Carlson?

  It's supposed to make you sick. It's medicine.

• 2:02:39Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:02:44Tucker Carlson?

  Well, you remain cheerful and single-minded and, I think, underrated in many ways as US Senator. So I'm grateful that you spent all this time. Thank you.

• 2:02:54Speaker 02

  Well, thank you. And again.

• 2:02:58Speaker 02

  I've been watching you. You know, I appreciate what you've done, the risks you've taken in your career. I mean, all the issues, you know, going to Russia, questioning what happened on, on January 6th. I mean, all these things. I mean, you are, and this is important, you are expanding the Overton window. You are, you are helping expand what is, can be talked about. And the harm done because we haven't even been able to ask some of these questions. We haven't been able to discuss this. You know, we, we haven't had the type of debate that, that we should have in this country. You're a big part of that. And I, I thank you for what you've done.

• 2:03:39Tucker Carlson?

  It's been easy and fun, but I appreciate it. Thank you, Senator.

• 2:03:42Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:03:47Tucker Carlson?

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