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

Hi, I'm Dustin, your friend and jeweler at Shane Company.

If you're shopping for an engagement ring, we want you to feel like a kid in a candy store.

All of our diamonds are in stock, in store, and online, so you get to use your eyes, not your imagination.

Come in and look at marquee-shaped diamonds right next to ovals and pairs.

As your friend and jeweler, you can trust you'll get your dream diamond at an everyday competitive price.

We have the widest selection in store and at Shaneco.com because a friend knows choosing a diamond is personal.

Shane Company, your friend and jeweler.

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?

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.

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.

To date, worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with the 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 my whole purpose here.

We haven't talked about the numbers.

We haven't put this in the context of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves.

I'm just going to force that debate.

So, you told me something that made me laugh at breakfast in a dark way,

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 U.S.

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?

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

It was just like,

I was amazed by what you told me.

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 is 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's position is we do not accept earmarks.

All of a sudden, the Republican Center 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.

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

Dead silence.

I went out to the Washington Press Corps.

By which you meant what we spent in total.

In total, the federal government.

What the federal government spent in total.

Just the bottom line is.

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, well, it's over a trillion dollars.

No, that's just discretionary spending.

That's about 25% of the budget.

I mean, total spending.

The answer is, I think, $6.3 trillion.

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...

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

Again, but 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.

May I ask how that works?

So I thought the Constitution gave the Congress the responsibility, the duty to appropriate the money.

So Congress has written laws like the Social Security law,

then Medicare and Medicaid, and they've turned, they call those entitlements.

So it doesn't 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.

And there's no cap on that spending.

No, none.

You qualify, you get it.

So whatever.

What has happened over the years is in addition to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, they've slid what should be, in my mind, discretionary spending into mandatory.

And so

I'm the guy that pointed out the conference again.

Did 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.

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,

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.

So

what's right now

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

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

Yes.

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, I think it was $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 much.

$4,400 billion spent in 2019, $7,000 billion 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.

May I just say 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?

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 projecting that we're going to increase, have an automatic tax increase next year.

So they bumped that to 18.1.

And federal spending is going to be about 23.4%, 23.5%.

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

We borrow it or we print it.

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.

You know, we've blown that up.

Now, the federal government is 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, our freedoms necessarily recede.

Of course.

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

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Do you 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?

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: My guess it's more than 50%.

And of course,

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.

And what they don't realize is that they're not going to be able to do that.

The expenses, it's costing them all because the massive deficit spending, because 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.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So you think that most, at this point, your guess is most Americans receive more from the federal government

from government.

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

My guess is probably more than 50%.

When you consider all the entitlements, whether it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and people say, oh, that's my money.

Well,

in some cases, it is.

Most people probably get more out of Social Security than they actually did put in.

Surely do that out of Medicare, certainly out of Medicaid.

Nobody puts any money into that.

That all comes with the general funds.

So we have food stamps.

We have all these trillions of dollars worth of transfer payments.

Why is this not sustainable?

You often hear it's not sustainable.

What happens if it continues?

Well, again,

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 a year.

$3.5.

So that was more than double just since 2010?

Yeah.

Yes.

We were $14 trillion in debt.

I remember I announced in April of 2010, started my campaign in basically June of 2010 doing parades.

And what I would shout 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.

Again, we were $14 trillion in debt, spending $3.5 trillion.

Now we're almost $37 trillion in debt.

We're spending $7,000 billion, $7 trillion.

And CBO projects over the next 10 years, we will add another $22 trillion

to the debt.

That's what our projected deficits over the next 10 years is, $22 trillion.

Again, that's assuming...

About a $4 trillion 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, trillion, but

again,

take $4 trillion away if we extend current tax law, which is 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, particularly when those things aren't focused toward economic growth.

But anyway, just real quick, so

we are projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum of $2.2 trillion.

And I would argue that is a rosy scenario.

Particularly when you take a 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 as a pre-pandemic level.

Again,

the danger is spouting out 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 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 billion per year biden in his four years went up to 1.9 trillion and now cb cbo is projecting and again a rosy scenario that we'll be averaging 2.2 trillion dollars over the next 10 years so we'll take our debt from 37 trillion dollars up to 59 trillion

and

if we extend the current tax law take away four trillion dollars in revenue roughly That add another $4 trillion.

The

spending cuts they're talking about,

they're paltry.

$1.5 trillion, some of those are fake.

Some of those are extended way out.

They're offset by

10 years.

10 years.

Yeah.

I mean, we'll spend the money up front for the border, for defense.

So 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 few hundred billion, I 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 much of the savings they're talking about in the one big beautiful bill is phony.

It's fake.

Or it's in the out years where if Republicans lose power, Democrats would 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 probably be more than that.

And what happens then is what's happening right now in the bond market.

Interest rates are creeping up.

You can't control that.

If global creditors look at the United States as

uncreditworthy, our 50-year average interest payment that we've paid on our debt is over 5%.

So I think it's as high as 5.8%.

It's not the most exact figure.

But right now we're borrowing probably about 3.3%.

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 50-year average of $5.3,

add about $8 or $9 trillion

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 add on to $37 trillion or up to $67 trillion 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 in our bond auctions, spiking interest rates even more.

And again, we're spending more on interest this year than we spend on defense.

Here's an alarming statistic.

Only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy.

That means 88% are not.

It's not a healthy country.

Friend Friend of the show and Donald Trump's surgeon general nominee, Dr.

Casey Means, is working to solve that crisis.

She's got a new healthcare technology company.

It's called Levels.

It's got an easy-to-use app, simple and effective programs.

It helps you get a clear picture of what's going on inside you, inside your body.

It helps you maximize your energy, manage your weight, exercise more effectively, and it works.

We've heard a ton of stories, people on our show who work here, changing their lives, getting their cholesterol under control, improving their diets, making their movement much more efficient, their exercise better.

Levels membership comes with a 28-marker cardiometabolic blood test.

It gives you a comprehensive view of your health and clear guidance for how to make it better.

You can also get the extended panel, which gives you an even more detailed view with 100 plus biomarkers.

We just received word that Levels is offering this show's listeners annual memberships with an additional two months free through the website levels.link slash tucker.

We're not sure how long this is going to last.

We recommend you take advantage of it.

The address, levels.link/slash Tucker.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime.

From streaming to shopping, Prime helps you get more out of your passions.

So, whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail-biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast-free delivery, Prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into.

Visit amazon.com slash prime to learn more.

Football is finally back, and so is the hard-hitting gridiron action on PrizePicks.

With millions of members and billions of dollars awarded in winnings, PrizePicks is the best place to put your takes to the test.

Download the PrizePicks app today and use code Spotify and get $50 instantly in lineups when you play $5.

That's code Spotify on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly in lineups when you play $5.

Win or lose, you'll get $50 in lineups just for playing, guaranteed.

PrizePicks, run run your game.

Must be present in certain states.

Visit prizepicks.com for restrictions and details.

You often hear the phrase debt crisis.

What does that mean exactly?

What would that look like?

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, 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.

Ouch.

A dollar you held when I...

It's devalued that much since 1980.

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 you held just in 2019 is only worth 80 cents.

So again, that is the devaluation of the dollar.

That's inflation.

This is why everything is

expensive.

Yeah, that's a silent tax.

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.

Yeah, and that's why you had four-year high inflation.

So, that 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 in Greece, all of a sudden, you can't sell your debt.

So, you either print the money, which sparks another round of 40, 50-year high inflation,

devaluing the currency rapidly.

You know, we're not necessarily immune to hyperinflation.

Other countries have experienced it.

Aaron Powell,

failure to sell your debt in a bond auction, What does that look like?

You just put out your bonds and nobody wants them.

Nobody buys them.

And so, again,

the advantage the U.S.

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 again, the dollar devalues, the cost of your debt is lowered.

Again,

it's a silent way of addressing these massive deficits.

How far away from a moment like that are we?

I don't know.

I would have thought we would have experienced it by now,

but we've experienced it instead is, again, 40-year high inflation, the devaluation of the currency.

I mean, I think that's pretty shocking when you take a look at that: a dollar, just

11 years ago,

is only worth 74 cents.

six years, it's only worth 80 cents.

That's an amazing level of devaluation.

Now it's not even close to hyperinflation where

you've got inflation rates of hundreds of percent.

So when that crisis comes, what do you do?

Well,

you have a great deal of turmoil in your society.

It won't be pleasant.

It's what we need to try and avoid.

And by the way, why I'm not in a full-blown panic, people like Art Laffer, you know, 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 trillion in relationship to hundreds of trillion dollars worth of wealth,

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.

I mean, 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 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,

talking about how 20% of working-age men are permanently out of the workforce

on Medicaid, using the Medicaid card to buy opiate drugs to

help finance their living.

All those pernicious impacts of a society where we literally don't require people to work.

We actually incentivize them not to.

To my mind, that's that's one of the biggest problems we have with a bigger picture.

It's a massive immigration to fill the gap.

Yeah, somebody's got to do the work.

And 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 scratched my head.

Listen, there are certainly products that we have offshored that we need to reshore, 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.

I think you need to diversify your supply base.

You can't be so dependent on an adversary like China.

Spread it around.

That will reduce your risk.

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?

Well, they just ignore it.

Again,

one of the reasons I'm digging my heels in

as the one big beautiful bill comes over to 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, which sounds like a lot, right?

I mean, $1.5 trillion in spending reduction.

And of course, they're focusing on programs like Medicaid.

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.

$1.5 trillion compared to $89 trillion spending over the next 10 years, it's barely a rounding error.

We haven't been talking about the massive annual deficits.

We don't talk about the debt.

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?

Well, again, it was really sparked by the pandemic.

You know, I'll give the Tea Party movement a fair amount of credit.

You know, I ran because we were mortgaging 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.

And then under Trump, it went from about $4 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 it 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.

It doesn't seem radical.

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

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

So, I mean, what Biden should have done,

we overspent in 2020.

When 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 went up to like $2.2 trillion.

We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times,

way late,

way after unemployment had already returned from the 25 million person high.

Again, 25 million people unemployed, but normally you're at five or six.

We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans 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 and Democrats did.

Again, on average, $1.9 trillion of deficit spending over the next four years.

We never came down off of that $6.5 trillion, a little bit $6.2, $6.3, but then it started going back up again.

And that's really the moment that's when a bass boat suddenly costs $100,000 or your car cost $90,000.

You know, brand new suburban is $80,000 or whatever.

That's when the country became obviously unaffordable, I think, unless I missed a lot of it.

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

When did that happen?

Yeah.

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.

I haven't heard McConnell say this, but I've heard heard the quote attributed to him, and this is the one thing I agree with him on.

Show me one member of Congress who ever lost because they spent too much money.

Yeah.

There just isn't public pressure.

There's not public awareness.

You know, we don't educate our young people.

The news media doesn't connect the dots that why people can't afford things is because of massive deaths of spending, which sparked 40-year high inflation, devalued the dollar.

I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious.

But normal Americans, they just get all surly about it.

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 going to 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.

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 going to 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.

Plus we want to go into full default.

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.

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, has anyone ever defaulted, any country ever defaulted on debt and just said, we're not paying?

Come and get it?

Oh, I'm sure they have.

I'm not.

But that's not common.

I think it happens enough.

But what always happens is

countries like the U.S.

go in there and we help them restructure their debt.

I think that's happened numerous times.

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

Nobody can.

Again, we will lose our position as the world's reserve currency and we'll lose our ability to print dollars that people accept.

I mean, it's a marvelous thing that we can 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, is we do import a lot of products.

We've got billions of people either or underemployed around the world.

We provide the capital.

They produce the factories, they produce the goods, and then

we just give them

paper.

It's fiat currency.

We print it, we keep printing it, and it's been working out pretty well.

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

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

Yeah.

Again,

I can't predict.

I'm trying to avoid it.

It'll be painful.

And who really suffers are people at the lower end of the income spectrum that have no safety net.

They don't have any kind of hard assets that will inflate with inflation.

They'd just be destitute.

A lot of them.

Yeah.

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.

I had my comm staff put together a video.

I asked them to find all these Republican leaders that have talked about balancing the budget.

We have a spending problem.

It starts out with President Trump saying, in the state of the union, I'm going to do something we haven't done in 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 we don't fix this, there won't be money left over for anything.

And I think that's a pretty accurate statement.

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.

You 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 Express VPN that's an app that hides your IP address and reroutes 100% of your online traffic through secure encrypted servers.

That means no one can see it.

No data hawks, internet providers, big tech conglomerates can see what you do online.

It's fast, it's easy to use, it works on every device you've got, your laptop, tablet, phone, your television, your smart TV, anything that connects to the internet.

You get an extra four months for free when you use our link.

Scan the QR code on the screen right now or go to expressvpn.com slash tucker, get four extra months of expressvpn for free.

That's expressvpn.com/slash.

Crystal clear waters, white sandy beaches, tropical drinks with little umbrellas.

Stress doesn't exist here, but it could back at home where an undetected water leak can turn into costly water damage.

But with Mo and Flow, you can enjoy your vacation with no worries.

It detects leaks and stops your water main automatically from anywhere.

So the only thing on your mind is having nothing on your mind.

Moen.

If you work as a manufacturing facilities engineer, installing a new piece of equipment can be as complex as the machinery itself.

From prep work to alignment and testing, it's your team's job to put it all together.

That's why it's good to have Granger on your side.

With industrial-grade products and next-day delivery, Granger helps ensure you have everything you need close at hand through every step of the installation.

Call 1-800 Granger, clickGranger.com, or just stop by.

Grainger for the ones who get it done.

Tucker.

Does this bill get us closer to fixing it?

No, it exacerbates the problem.

How can that be?

Because we're not serious about returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic global spending.

We've 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 moment.

It's It's missing the moment.

Can I ask you,

who came up with that number?

Whose lie is that?

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 for us to accept a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, we've got to get at least $1.5 trillion in savings, spending cuts.

I don't think they were looking at the big picture.

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 here in my digging my heels in.

Doju's 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.

You have to understand

what a deep hole we're in and have a commitment to address it.

But Doge has pretty well shown us how to do it.

I come from the private sector.

I think I probably spent more time

either analyzing my department head budgets or my own overall company budget than Congress in total spends analyzing the $7,000 billion budget of the federal government.

So Doge has shown us if you go line by line, contract by contract, you will discover and uncover spending that if the American public saw, they'd be outraged by it.

If you eliminated it, my guess is most Americans wouldn't even know it's eliminated, about the only people that would know would be the grifters.

Yeah.

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

The NGO team.

So you have to go step by step.

So that's why I've always been in support 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 somebody like Chairman Crapo 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 law that automatically expires, just creates all these fiscal cliffs.

It puts all kinds of

uncertainty in the economy.

Why do they do that?

Because we so this gets into real 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 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 them, 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 law and there's no score.

And so that's really what we're doing now.

But we have to recognize when you're comparing to the CBO budget, CBO budget is assuming it does, its taxes do increase and bring in about another $4 trillion worth of revenue.

So that's why I say the $22 trillion in projected deficits is probably a rosy scenario.

I mean, it seems like the core problems are just so familiar.

One is short-term thinking,

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?

Well, I would say we're missing the

focusing on the right thing.

We had to focus on spending.

And the reason I say that is spending is pretty certain.

Again, who knows what revenue you're going to bring in?

It's hard to predict.

Spending,

that's pretty easy to

predict what that's going to be.

Plus, I personally voted for President Trump because I wanted him to defeat the deep state.

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

Yeah, I know.

So again,

when you start talking about controlling 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 have 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 the 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 a pre-war level spending.

And we had a massive recession, too.

I mean,

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 focus on doing.

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 accepting the fact that Obamacare, now called Medicaid expansion, is putting at risk Medicare for 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 kidding me?

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?

So again, 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 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.

Yeah, it's a joke.

It's a joke.

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?

Well, again, 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.

When you're taking other people's money

at the point of a gun, it's called theft.

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

Right, no, right.

So we're going to have to borrow.

$2.2 trillion for the next 10 years, every year.

At least every trade trade.

But that's effectively a tax because it devalues the the money in your pockets.

Paying 10 bucks for a Big Mac and a Coke.

Yeah, inflation is a silent tax.

It's really nasty.

Do you have any hope?

I'm not the world's greatest optimist.

Yeah.

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.

I bet you.

I really don't.

I mean, I'm not looking forward.

Listen, I love what President Trump is doing.

He 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 had 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 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.

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?

Or Trump?

Why is it so much more?

Explain yourself.

I said, in business, this would be simple.

Yeah.

I 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.

To do it is 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 will be lines I think you look at, scratch your head and go, we probably shouldn't be spending anything on that.

I think Doge has taught us that.

So again, we're Trump.

And again, I think that was brilliant, what Trump and Elon did with Doge.

But we haven't realized those savings yet.

I think we stopped spending on contracts, but unless we set up and pass a rescission package on the discretionary end, and 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 it.

Can I 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 is 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 con, 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 is that?

What's all that money going to exactly?

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 gather some basic information.

First, what was our goal going in?

Secondly,

what did it cost in human life, ours 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 it's true.

I mean, this is, we're filming this on Memorial Day.

Yeah.

Like the finest among us.

Oh, I agree with that.

People who love this country, who've step up the plate willing to serve and sacrifice more than a million, have paid the ultimate price.

So

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.

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

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.

Yeah.

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 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.

Syria.

I mean, so,

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

Oh, I know.

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

Yes.

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

So it's just not working.

I mean, we have not accomplished these goals.

They've been miserable failures.

How many people died in Iraq based on that false intelligence?

The best book I read on Afghanistan is written by special ops folks, and they basically made the point that we'd pretty well accomplished what we need to accomplish in Afghanistan before Tommy Frank ever put a boot on the ground.

We said, hey, listen, you guys harbored al-Qaeda,

don't do it anymore, kind of punished the Taliban, and

that's probably where we should have left that.

How many Americans lost their lives?

How many

Afghanistan citizens lost their lives?

What did that cost?

Again,

it's almost incalculable.

So, a 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.

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 pound250, say the keyword baby.

That's pound250, the word baby, or visit preborn.com/slash Tucker.

We are proud to partner with pre-born.

Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game, Day Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question.

Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly.

Must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.

Now at Chipotle, our all-new Chipotle Honey Chicken brings Chipotle heat with a touch of sweet.

Seared smoked peppers and savory Mexican spices blended with a hint of pure honey for a perfectly balanced sauce.

All combined with fresh tender chicken hot off the grill, served up in your favorite burrito or bowl.

New Chipotle Honey Chicken takes heat and sweet to a whole new level, but it's only at Chipotle for a limited time.

Order now in the app for pickup or delivery.

Chipotle, for real.

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?

Again, it's the military-industrial complex.

And, you know, there are some just basic metrics people use, like percent of 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 get that money?

I mean, I realize we're kind of down to historic low levels, but it's still a trillion dollars.

Where are we spending it?

That's why I would have loved to have 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?

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.

Yeah, I don't think that's necessarily true.

You know, there's certainly, again, you still have that industrial base.

You know, 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

mistaken notion as well.

Industrial production continues to rise here.

Yeah, we don't have, again, we become more and more productive.

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 U.S.

We just don't have enough people to do it.

Interesting.

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

I don't know.

I'm just putting the basic numbers.

Oh, that's interesting.

So, what happens to this bill?

Well, again, what I'd like to do is split it in two parts.

Do the,

you know, quite honestly, 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 Christy Noam.

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 over 3,000 miles.

So I asked her,

square that circle for me.

And she really didn't.

She was actually saying they're projecting $12 million.

I was willing to give her $14.4, 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

savings we can.

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 certainty 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.

Which, listen, I'm all for no tax on cash tips.

Can't collect it anyway.

So why even try?

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's good.

I mean, the other tax proposals he promises he made in the campaign, they're not pro-growth.

They're just going to reduce revenue.

You know, no tax on overtime.

You know, I ran a continuing shift operation.

I think

the one time and a half for double time is more than enough incentive.

We all live under a tax system.

Income is income.

Why would we increase the regulatory burden on people who administer payroll to cordon off some of the overtime to don't tax it?

I mean, just be a pain in the butt.

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, and that suggests a kind of equality under the law that would be sort of nice if everyone was 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.

You can be a nonprofit by not making a profit.

I've done that too.

No, it's honestly.

I mean, if you're a university or church, something like that, you bring in revenue, you spend it, you got no profit.

You're a nonprofit.

Yeah.

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 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.

Everyone's out of compliance.

Everybody's committing a felony unwittingly.

Every single person, you, me, every other American.

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're not that smart.

So raise the revenue you need.

Try not to do any economic or social harm.

So 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 people can live without having to pay tax and stuff.

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 code.

I mean, everybody's got their little tax break.

And, you know, even right now, 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 there are a lot of people that support President Trump, that have supported me.

They want no taxing overtime.

By the way, if all you live on is Social Security,

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, but the transfer of wealth from young to old over the decades,

it's literally immoral.

It's immoral.

So

let's not exacerbate that problem.

It's disgusting.

And again, if you can do something and tax, again, I don't think this is the point.

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.

And again, I'd rather not be incentivizing,

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.

Basic principles like wherewithal to pay.

I mean, design, approach all of these things with principles.

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 is to pass one big, beautiful bill by Memorial Day.

Great.

You achieved your goal, but you didn't solve our fiscal situation.

You didn't even come close.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not impressed by the people managing this in the House, I'm just going to say.

So I'm not surprised.

But it, of course, needs the Senate as well.

Well,

it needs presidential leadership.

And he needs to get get behind fixing this problem.

Now, he said in the State of the Union, he's going to balance the budget.

Fine.

But I know in his mind, he thinks he's going to balance a budget with tariff revenue.

I'm sorry, tariffs are a tax.

We're not quite sure who pays them.

Whereas the foreign companies, the foreign countries,

the U.S.

consumer,

again, the instance of tax is never particularly certain, but tariffs raise the cost of goods.

For what?

Again,

there's no doubt there are certain products,

high-end semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals.

We got to be basic in those.

We have to produce these here just from the standpoint of national security.

Is there a better way of doing that than just generalized increasing a tax, which is what a tariff is?

I would argue there probably is.

How about this?

We just give you a tax holiday for five or ten years.

Again, you've got a high-end semiconductor plan 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 to the people who are going to invest in it.

What's it going to take?

How long a tax holiday?

What's reasonable?

You know, just incentivize it that way.

But 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

fulfill their end of the bargain.

Again, we're just not good at doing these things.

The free market's not perfect, but it is the most efficient allocator of capital.

So, I mean,

you provide somebody tax holiday, and I think you can bring those things back here pretty good.

Plus, permitting reform, if you want to do precursor chemicals for pharmaceuticals, I mean,

you got to permit the refineries, you got to permit the mines if you're going to mine rare earth minerals and if you're going to refine those things.

So, again,

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 my heels in, I'm a reasonable guy,

but you're not going to sell me just by saying, you've got to pass the one big, beautiful bill.

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 going to be, and this is how we actually shrink the deficit, and this is how we avoid a debt crisis,

I want to be on board.

I want to see this president succeed.

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

Well, it's interesting.

There's 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.

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 line bottom, do the work, but it'll take time to do the work.

But we need a commitment.

I can't do it.

I don't have access to all the information.

We really need, and what I proposed in one of my Wall Street Journal columns was a budget review panel made up of senators, House members, staff of the OMB, 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 it.

Go line by line.

Again, why are you spending so much more than a fully inflated Bill Clinton level or Obama or Trump?

I mean, explain yourself.

Why should we be spending even a dime on this category right here?

So you've got

top lines within the federal government, more than 2,000 lines.

Under each one of those lines, there's 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.

Now by July 4th is what would 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.

Will you get it?

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 onto the house where we extend current tax law and increase the debt ceiling.

By the way, that's going to be a massive amount.

It should shock everybody what we're going to have to increase the debt ceiling for just to get us by another year.

Probably be $2 to $2.5 trillion

because we have to refill the extraordinary measures that, you know, the buckets they've taken from to extend the debt ceiling.

We're right now burning about half a trillion dollars a quarter.

So you're talking, you know, if you extend in next year five quarters at half a trillion dollars, that's $2.5 trillion

just to get us by into next year.

That should shock everybody.

And that's my whole purpose here:

we haven't talked about the numbers.

We haven't put this in context 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 it.

I'd rather not do this.

I'd rather have the House having really succeeded and the President totally behind, again, returning to pre-pandemic level spending, but somebody's got to do it.

Since we launched ALP, we've had four flavors, but we are proud to announce ALP has a brand new flavor, one of several will 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 AlpPouch.com.

You can order it in bulk by the palate if you want.

I I have strongly recommend Sweet Nectar.

And stay tuned for morning flavors.

Nearly home.

Isn't home where we all want to be?

Reba here for Realtor.com, the pro's number one most trusted app.

A dream home isn't a dream home if it comes with a nightmare commute.

That's why Realtor.com has Real Commute, so you can search by drive time.

Download the Realtor.com app today because you're nearly home.

Make it real with Realtor.com.

Pro's number one most trusted app based on August 2024 proprietary survey.

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?

No, we're getting sicker.

And again, that's shifting gears into, you know, really the failure of our healthcare system, of establishment medicine, of pharmaceutically driven medicine.

They call it Rockefeller medicine.

This is where I've been so supportive.

Why do they call it Rockefeller medicine?

He's really one that really pushed pharmaceutical drug companies way back when.

I don't understand the full history, but again, that's all petrochemical-based,

chemistry-based.

And rather than really focusing on health, it's all

we've got a pill for this.

Here's an example.

And I think this is true, but there was a debate in terms of what caused heart disease.

Is it too much sugar?

Is it cholesterol?

Yes.

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

Statins.

So guess what they chose?

Cholesterol.

The winner.

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?

Who?

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.

Like all your hearing?

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.

Yes.

But as I got involved in the whole COVID and I got to meet all these doctors who had a second opinion 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...

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 now.

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

People are saying that.

I don't know.

I'm not a doctor, not a medical researcher, but my eyes have been open.

That's really scary right there.

If that's true, that's, I mean, that's a

people are making, are positing that.

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

Seriously?

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 build up on what they call the widowmaker.

But that's external.

Now 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.

So I don't know.

Is it 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 the point of passing out frequently,

going up a step or whatever.

I took myself off statins under a doctor's care.

That's gone.

I'll give you another one.

So I also, this is very personal.

This is strange that I'm getting into this, but

it's a safe space.

So I've always had...

acid reflux for years, okay?

And so I was on everything.

Zantac and Prilosec and the Nexium, which

by the way, were great in terms of relieving the symptoms, but also have some pretty nasty side effects.

So again,

reading these alternate opinions on stuff,

hydrochloric acid has been known for decades to be a digestivate.

The

theory behind what causes acid reflux is you don't have enough stomach acid.

You're not digesting the food properly.

You're not providing the signal to the, I guess, sphincter muscle, whatever, that closes your stomach off from your

esophagus.

So what you do to solve it is you introduce more acid

in the form of a natural vegetarian-based

product, and that's called

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 any of that stuff anymore.

This worked far better.

It's just completely natural.

It's completely opposite of what all these other

patented drugs do for you.

So it's just HCL, and they call it baiting or something like that.

But it's just an over-the-counter supplement, and it's worked great.

I mean, you would think given what.

So I will get all kinds of guff for talking about this stuff, but it's just because

that's what they do.

This is the well, you just described your life improving, your health improving, and that's somehow a thought crime.

It will be because the pharmaceutical industrial complex, again, it's all about drugs that can treat chronic illness, which is why you can't talk about these things, which is why they completely sabotaged the treatment of

early treatment of COVID using things like hydroxychloroquine and particularly ivermectin,

which I heard story, because I was at the tip of the spear.

I got all kinds of people calling me,

what doctors would treat this.

And so I heard the amazing stories of recovery with ivermectin.

We will hold a hearing on this.

There's one attorney that got called in to sue a hospital because somebody's loved one was in the hospital 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 has something, this is a rough number, something like 200 families that he went to court for to force the hospitals to use ivermectin or butesonide 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 patients.

Otherwise, they all survived.

Of the hundred cases he lost, they all died.

Whoa.

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 anthephology said

this is the treatment, even though whatever study it was, they changed the endpoint from

death to just days in hospital.

which I don't think even that was true.

The number of conflicts of the people reviewing that that were associated with Gilead, I mean, the who recommended against using room destivir, and yet we still use it.

I mean, you see what happened during COVID, thoroughly corrupt.

And, you know, we just had our hearing on the signals on myocarditis, which they completely downplayed, hid for months

on the COVID injection.

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

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 are doing.

But that's common around the world, right?

Most countries allow that.

Only America and New Zealand allow that.

I knew that, yeah, I just wanted to

evoke that.

So only the United States and New Zealand out of every country and planet Earth allow drug pharma companies to advertise on television.

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 make your wife hotter, yeah.

Oh, just, you know, I mean, 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 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 all the horrible side effects.

Why do they do it?

It's not selling.

Again, you don't know what the drug is for.

They're not selling those drugs.

No, they are buying the narrative.

Exactly.

I worked in the media my whole life.

And that is what we saw during COVID.

I mean, that's what completely opened up my mind.

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

I ran in 2010 after I'd given a tea party speech.

And two things I said, which my campaign guy said, never say that again, is I defended big oil and big pharma.

I said, what?

Am I the only guy that likes a gas station in every corner

of the town because I run it down to empty?

Or am I the only one that wants a life-saving new drug?

By the way, there are wonderful drugs

there are that we need, particularly in acute care.

But we do need, and this is what, again, I give Bobby Kennedy 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 Kenny 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, good.

And

kept treating with all these pharmaceuticals, and they weren't cheap.

You know, prylocycnexium, they're not cheap.

Alleviated the symptoms, but didn't fix it.

I go to something that just is far cheaper.

I think works better.

I don't have to even take it every day.

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, is an evening meal and pretty well solved the condition.

I have cured a chronic, I'm not treating it anymore.

I was treating it with prilocyconexium.

I pretty well cured it.

Now, I still take this because it's a digestive aid.

It's like you eat the right stuff.

Why can't if Clinton 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?

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.

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 a 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?

That would be the hope.

Yeah.

I had a

public event, and it was 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 mental health, I think, probably made the best little snippet of testimony.

He said, you know,

they don't want to know the root cause of chronic illness.

Again, who's they?

I remember listening to you asked that too.

What's that, Catherine

whipped?

Oh, oh, wonderful,

wonderful woman.

Yeah, exactly.

You asked her who are they?

Yeah.

I asked that on my time myself all the time.

My guess is they attend Davos, whoever they are.

They're there.

They're not invited to my house for dinner.

But I thought that was a very interesting comment.

They don't want to know

the root cause.

Because if they find out it is

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, listen, government is power, right?

That's a pretty good definition of government.

It's power.

And as Lord Acton

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 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.

Of course.

And then they promote it.

And then they capture it

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'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 to defeat back then what I called the COVID cartel.

That is a powerful group of interests, and they're not going away.

Well, 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.

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

VAERS is the federally

vaccine adverse event reporting system.

Yes.

So that's a government reporting system.

Now,

some conditions are mandatory to be reported, but they're still not.

The two complaints about or 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 VAYER's system, to date worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with the COVID vaccine.

And 24% of those to date either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days.

Wow.

Yeah, I know someone who was killed by that.

You know, we saw these athletes dropping like flies on the field.

You saw newscasters just toppling over from their

anchor chair.

And like,

that wasn't reported.

You'd get it through social media.

You might have a local news story, but

there's no national news media that hopped on and say, what is happening here?

No, because that wasn't real.

It was all denied.

Yeah.

It was all denied.

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's all bad exercise they do.

I don't know why I'm laughing.

It's horrible.

So 38,000 globally just on VARES.

Is anyone keeping track of the injuries and the chronic illness caused by those shots?

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

Okay.

That's, you know, that's, that, that's their excuse.

And even those that are vaccine injured

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.

But again, more and more evidence is coming out that in tumors, they're finding the spike protein.

The spike protein,

as well as the modified RNA, it's not true mRNA that does degrade very rapidly, circulating the body for months, possibly years.

Again, they're finding the spike protein in autopsied hearts, in tumors.

We know from people like Kevin McKernan that there was DNA contamination.

It can't integrate into the cell,

could cause cancer.

Again, there's so, yeah, I hate talking about it because I know 70, 80% of Americans got vaccinated.

They don't want to hear about it.

No, they don't.

They want to just move on.

That's why it's so difficult to hold people accountable for this.

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.

Get sued.

Exactly.

So only the vax makers have this exemption granted to them by Congress, the shield.

And I've never heard a real argument for why they should maintain that or why Congress continues to protect them.

Why?

By the way, so I talked to Barbara Lowell Fisher, who was the mom who really pushed that thing through.

That law itself does not provide liability.

This is the 1986.

Yeah, it was regulations kind of the wink, wink, nah, nah, to get it passed that they

promulgated regulations that actually provide that

liability protection.

And again,

it wasn't just for the three vaccines, I think, at the time that were on the the schedule.

It exempted all future vaccines, which has led to an explosion.

Because, again, the greatest risk.

There's no downside.

Yeah, I mean, you just keep cranking these things out.

They aren't tested in a true placebo-controlled trial.

Sometimes the trial period, as meagre as it is, only lasts for a week.

It's just, it's.

Shocking.

This is, you know, Aaron Seary 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 army.

You never have to worry about this.

This problem is just not true.

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, court law.

Like, 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?

Because

there were so many injuries.

manifesting themselves before that law was passed that those manufacturers are going to be sued out of existence.

And again,

the religion and faith that these vaccines are just so crucial,

even though 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 sewers.

We have sanitation.

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 deny that.

But 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 the chairman of Homeland Security.

I'm the only guy holding hearings on this stuff because none of this stuff makes sense.

It's like,

why are they just pillorying 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 all for for the purpose of forcing this injection, what they called a vaccine, on everybody as a solution.

Why aren't we talking about treating disease?

Measles.

Why aren't we focusing on treatment?

Again, 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

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?

What is causing autism?

I mean, again, 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.

And they attack anyone who who asks, including you.

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-eyed radical at all, at all.

And there are some crazy people in the Congress.

You're not.

You're the opposite.

You like budgets and stuff.

So if they're calling you a wacko, they discredit themselves.

That's just as an observer, my observation.

Again, but that's what they do.

You know, so during COVID, quick story here.

I was on a telephone town hall, and this is when Omnicrom was ramping up.

Yes.

And this is already by the time 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,

there are things you can do, vitamin D,

you can gargle.

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 a 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's New Hampshire, knocked on his door, Republican governor, and said, hey, what do you think about this wacko Republican Sanders says that vaccines can or Listerine can replace the vaccines?

Well, when batshit crazy knocks on your your door, slam the door in his face.

I mean, that was the.

So again, what they do is what Sununu said?

Yeah, what they do, what they're really one of the worst people.

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 is discredited.

He's discredited.

He thinks Listerine is discredited.

That is what they do.

Just like, you know, the CIA used the conspiracy theorist.

Just call somebody conspiracy theorists and they don't have to listen to him anymore.

This guy's obviously a nutcase.

So, no, I've lived this up close in person.

The problem is that it does make everyone into a nihilist.

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.

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.

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.

At all.

And that's not good.

That's not good.

Well, I think they're evil.

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

Yeah.

And I thought it was interesting because

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.

Well, I feel like Albert Burla 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?

That'll probably be a stretch.

Can I ask this?

Where's the trial bar on this?

The trial bar has kind of like wrecked America by encouraging lawsuits for like the most frivolous possible.

I get sued all the time by people, 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, with the ambulance chasing, and all that.

Why aren't they pushing for the repeal of the protections that vaccine makers uniquely enjoy?

That's a really good question.

Yeah.

You know, so as somebody from the private sector, I avoided lawyers in the judicial process like a play.

Me too.

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

cap awards.

I mean, there's got to be something to

because we do need pharmaceutical companies.

I want those life-savings.

It can't be a pinata party for lawyers.

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, you know, 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 corrupted.

So when you pay for science, you get the result you want, whether it's climate change, whether it's vaccines, whether it's drugs and that type of thing.

We need to restore integrity.

Peer review is a joke.

Peer reviewers are basically volunteering.

So you'll get peer reviewers who might have a different paper themselves, and they just discredit that.

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.

So many of these studies are published, nobody gets to see the data.

So, that I think is the first step that Bobby has to accomplish: try and restore integrity, particularly for government-funded science.

Well, you tried the other day to raise science-based questions about a pivotal event in American history 24 years ago, 9-11.

And you asked a question that I think any honest person would ask, like,

Building 7 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.

And he said this.

I don't know if if you know him.

You probably don't.

He 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 9-11 each and every day.

So I think Lawler was like in high school when 9-11 happened.

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?

Oh, it sure hurt my feelings.

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'd think he would want you to ask.

What is so off-base about that is the only reason I'm looking at this is because the then chairman of the permit subcommittee investigation, now I'm chair, but you know, Senator Blumenthal, he wanted to do this investigation on Saudi's negotiation with PGA.

And he's doing because he's from Connecticut and got 9-11 families.

They want to know what Saudi involvement was.

Yes, fair.

I didn't agree with that.

I thought 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 9-11 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

the Saudi involvement was in 9-11, what we knew.

And they asked me, can you please get this unredacted?

We want to know what the government knows about these things.

And now, this is 20-some years after 9-11.

It's probably about time.

So in the hearing,

I asked Senator Blumenthal, would you join me in requesting from the Biden administration this information from the 9-11 families?

Well, he had to.

But the bottom line is, I got down this road because the 9-11 families want to know the answer.

And once I opened up that

inquiry, now I started getting all kinds of information.

Why is that thing still redacted from 9-11?

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 affected every American.

Why would our government continue to lie about it?

I can't answer the question.

All I can say is it raises my suspicion.

Yeah.

And then when you start getting the, again,

I'm just as prone to everybody else going, oh, that's wacko.

But then you start getting the information and you start going, wow, is that weird?

You know, 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 else, it's like

you build like a fire and it collapses off to the side or something, right?

So that was pretty strange.

But

the more documentaries I look at this stuff, the more information I receive.

You talk to guys like Richard Gage, the head of the architects for 9-11 Truth.

They feed you information and you start asking a lot of questions.

And you just realize

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 structure

building that ever collapsed because of a fire.

Especially Building 7.

Well, you don't get a lot of buildings that commercial airliners run into.

So you can be like, who knows?

But Building 7 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 9-11 report.

There's no mention of Building 7.

It's like, anyway, the point.

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 that you just

can't explain that.

So, I'm not sure where it goes.

I know you had Kurt Weldon on.

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

Yes.

Because he's connected to the firefighting community.

The firefighters want to know.

So

there are some very legitimate questions, a lot of them, that remain unanswered.

They're all swept under the rug.

I mean, they were, and you look at this, news reporters are talking about explosions.

By the next day, nobody was.

There's a lot of power.

I'm interested in your evolution on this.

So you said before

Blumenthal, your colleague, Senator Blumenthal

from Connecticut,

kind of raised this in a different way, you were not wondering what happened to Building 7.

No,

I don't think I ever ever heard of it.

Really?

Yeah, I figured the Twin Towers came down.

Again, I'm not a New Yorker.

It affected all of us.

We all saw them come down.

We said, the world has changed.

This changed the world.

And it did.

Oh, more than any other event.

Not for the better.

No, not at all.

This is a seminal event in our lifetime.

And

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've got a Bob Kerry who's since passed said this is a 30-year conspiracy.

I mean,

I could go on it.

I don't know if you're already said that?

Yeah.

Of Nebraska.

Yeah, the comment request.

He receives the Medal of Honor in Vietnam by the time.

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, I'm just throwing out little snippets.

But as I said,

it's amazing the questions that you see, the legitimate questions that have been raised that remain unanswered.

That's all I can say.

All I have is questions right now.

I don't have any questions.

I get it, but 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 with this cold, though.

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

One of the questions.

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

He was giving all these speeches on the environment, and all these moms would show up with their t-shirts.

And he kept him at bay for quite some time until one of the moms found out where he lived,

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 going to leave till you read this.

And to his credit, he sat down and read it.

And further to his credit, once he read it,

once his eyes were opened, 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, you know, particularly with childhood vaccine injuries, it's bad enough with the COVID vaccine.

I mean,

the Ernest Ramirez, you know, lost his son.

I mean, just, it's just heartbreaking.

I mean, these

Facebook

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 look at the documentary, just vaxed, 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 visit.

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,

it's hard to verify the 10,000 and one, but I mean, we know by CDOs, CDC's own hundreds to one to now 30-something to one.

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

after the makers of VAXT went on a road trip

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.

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 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 battle this.

They don't battle it 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 farm.

And, you know, come in and defend yourself.

This is an open forum.

I'll give you plenty of time.

I'll be very fair.

Speak your peace.

I want to hear from you.

They won't do it.

They will.

I mean, Peter Hotez, famously,

Mr.

Vaccine Pusher gets offered what was the final offer, $2.7 million?

Sit down and argue with not a doctor, a lawyer.

Yeah.

You know, just

debate RFK Jr.

And he wouldn't even do it.

What does that tell you?

Of course.

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?

Well,

it starts with Building 7.

Yes.

Where you look at that and it just,

yeah, I mean, this is really weird.

You know, it does come down just like a

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.

And again, you don't have to be a structural engineer to say this really doesn't make sense.

When you start putting together at what temperature steel

melts, they had molten steel in the Twin Towers, and I'm not sure they had a number seven.

But if one column says one column expanded, went off kilter, and that's what brought the whole thing down.

Well,

it wouldn't come down so symmetrically.

You wouldn't have a free fall.

Then you get deeper into it.

And, you know, there was a, I think 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 could get out of there.

It was predicted, 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 get down to the sixth flight, the sixth floor, and had to go back up to eight because something had been blown out.

And it's, again, what?

What caused it?

The building was not hit by an airplane.

No, I mean, they did, it was damaged, but even NIST 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 we 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

nothing's adding up.

I mean, it's just structurally, just basic engineering, basic physics.

It doesn't make sense.

So I would like to, you know, NIST took years to

conclude their report.

To just a layperson, it doesn't make sense, particularly when you listen to the structural engineering professor just, you know, nuke the explanation.

They never looked at a plausibility of some kind of control demolition.

They never

put in their report all these reports of people saying there were explosions.

There's just so much ignored.

I mean, in fact, the Bush administration

dragged their feet, obstructed setting up a 9-11 commission.

Again, I could go on and on and on and in.

I don't have any answers.

I just have a host of questions.

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?

My guess is because they

are very effective at marginalizing and discrediting anybody who even asks the questions.

But why would they want to hide the truth?

You'd have to know exactly what they're trying to hide to be able to answer that question.

I can't.

Of all issues for Mike Lawler to be upset about, this one

really really caught my eye.

Like,

why are you mad about it?

Again, you just got there and you're attacking

a senior senator who's like thoughtful and sober and asking totally real questions.

Who are you covering for exactly, Mike Lawler?

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.

Yes.

And, you know, I've been.

You're part of the federal government.

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.

Again, I didn't run for the U.S.

Senate because I wanted to get involved in investigations.

I ran because we were mortgaging our kids' future because I knew Obamacare wouldn't work.

But you become chairman of Homeland Security.

Within immediately, you've got the Hillary Clinton email scandal that's in our committee's jurisdiction, federal records, plus we're the oversight committee.

So you start doing those investigations, and just one investigation, just more than another, the same cast of characters, the FBI that wrote the exoneration memo for James Comey,

transferring Crossfire Hurricane to the group that

Vinman 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 history that's recent in my past.

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 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 a huge, 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 9-11 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?

I would ask you the same question.

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 risk.

But you got to go beyond that.

Because I was part of the cover-up and I feel guilty about it.

That's why I'm trying to atone for my previous sins.

That's the real reason.

In my case, I have a responsibility.

I was chairman of the Senate Oversight Committee.

So again, you start there.

Hillary Clinton has this email scandal.

Well, that's my committee's jurisdiction.

That has to be investigated.

I can't turn a blind's eye toward that.

And then, like Bobby Kennedy, once your

eyes are open to this, you also can't turn a blind's eye.

But I think it's just the empathy you have for the vaccine injured.

Again, I didn't reach out to them

because I was holding hearings because nobody else was on early treatment when I still had the chairmanship.

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 Breanne Dresslin and Maddie DeGuery and other vaccine-injured Cheryl Rutgers.

Again, I was hoping there'd be some measure of sympathy expressed by the news media.

They would ask them their stories.

Tell us about your experience.

Now, their first question was, hey, Ken Rutgers, you just want to try and make money off of a lawsuit here?

Is that why you're doing this?

So

you develop an empathy for these people.

And then, you know, listen, I'm not a New Yorker.

I wasn't impacted any more than the world was by 9-11, not anywhere like the firefighters who lost their loved ones or the 9-11 families.

But then they come up to you and they're literally begging you, please.

I just,

I want some closure here.

I want to know what happened.

The government's not being honest.

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

It is outrageous.

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 on investigations.

That's responsibility.

Now, you have to pick your targets.

I've always said 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 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

you take up their cause because nobody else is doing it.

And you have responsibility to take up that cause.

So, no, I mean, my life would be a whole lot easier if I just ignored this stuff.

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 it's kind of a rebuke to them.

It's like the vaccine injured show up at their offices, too.

Yeah, that was actually, I encourage the vaccine injured to go because I, you know, I like my colleagues.

It's collegiate a place.

You know, they're, you know,

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 cases, so they showed up in mass.

And I really felt bad afterwards because they were treated horribly in many cases.

Seriously?

Yeah, horribly.

Rudely.

Staff only met with them, treated them rudely.

It was not a good experience for the vaccine injured.

Again,

I didn't witness it.

I just heard the stories.

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.

And their only crime was following instructions from the U.S.

Congress and the executive branch.

Just like doing what they were told to do.

Yeah, I mean, they were accused

the most absurd charge leveled at them, they were anti-vax.

I mean,

Maddie DeGarry, her mother signed her up for the trial.

Breanne Dressen, she signed up for the AstraZeneca trial.

And what happened to them?

Well,

Breanne Dressen, I mean,

close to suicide.

I mean,

she couldn't be touched.

I mean, she was sensitive to light.

She has all these neurological problems.

Manny DeGari has a feeding tube.

She's in a wheelchair.

I mean, horrible.

And in her case, the drug company said that she has a stomachache, basically.

That's how they reported it to their government reporting.

This girl who'd been in the hospital dozens of times,

her young life, I wouldn't say it's over, but it's not normal anymore.

No, these people suffered horrible industries.

I mean,

Ernesto Ramirez,

single parent.

His son, I think 16-year-old son,

somewhere around that age.

It's his life.

Died suddenly.

Boom.

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

And 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 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 the vax.

You know, our federal health officials, the news media who relentlessly, I mean, Stephen Colbert, you think he'll he'll ever admit to vaccine injuries after he does his little skits with the little, you know,

hypodermic needles in the background?

So, no, I mean, that's 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 through life.

And by the way, to provide some comfort, I think they were definitely hot lots.

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 really.

Oh, yeah.

No, and so I write to the CDC, they don't

reply back.

But

it's just, to me, in manufacturing, this is a process out of control.

I mean, you've got, you really do.

I mean, 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 at all.

I won't speculate why, but there are hot lots.

But you write about them, you lay out all the stats, and the response they get from the CDC is:

we don't see any hot lots.

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.

But these people are in charge of public health.

They're supposed to care.

No,

they were fully vested 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 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?

But the results were shocking.

And even more shocking, they hid it from the public for two years.

It took Aaron Siri two years

suing the government to release the results of the online

mobile application, vSAFE 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.

25%.

25%,

8%, I think 7.8% sought medical care.

And I think more than a majority, two or three times.

That's a reasonably sick, 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 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, that's just, it's working.

It's supposed to make you sick.

This works medicine

so

well you remain uh cheerful and single-minded and um i think underrated in many ways um

as a u.s senator so i'm grateful that you spent all this time thank you well thank you and again uh

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

January 6th.

I mean, all these things.

I mean, you are, and this is important, you are expanding the Overton window.

You are helping expand what 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.

We haven't had the type of debate that...

we should have in this country.

You're a big part of that.

And I thank you for what you've done.

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

Thank you, Senator.

Thank you.

We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.

We know the people who run it, good people.

While you're here, do us a favor: hit, follow, and tap the bell so you never miss an episode.

We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter.

Telling the truth always, you will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell.

We appreciate it.

Thanks for watching.