Rep. Thomas Massie: Israel Lobbyists, the Cowards in Congress, and Living off the Grid

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Coming soon to Gilroy. welcome to tucker carlson show it's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying they can't die quickly enough and there's a reason they're dying because they lie they lied so much it killed them we're not doing that tucker carlson.com we promise to bring you the most honest content, the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor.

Here's the latest do you know James Carville yes so he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together in New Orleans and had to take a leak and it was on C-SPAN and on the tape which I have seen he's sitting there and he's kind of shuffling in a. All of a sudden he takes this water pitcher off the table and sort of sticks a leak in the water.
Oh, gosh. So what is that thing moving on your lapel, on your pocket? That's the debt.
That's my anxiety generator. So it's actually making me really anxious.
Is that real time? Yes. So it's synced to treasury.
It gets the debt to the penny once a day. And then it looks at what the debt was a year ago.
And it comes up with a rolling average debt per second. And it interpolates on weekends and holidays when the treasury is not paying attention.
I am. So I think you're the only one who wants to know yes and i want my colleagues

to know and it's great to wear this thing in an elevator with like adam schiff and he's got nowhere to look um i once caught a female congresswoman staring at it and had to tell her my eyes were up here she asked me why i didn't make a belt buckle out of it can you say who it was because i like No, I cannot.

Oh, she's funny.

That's very impressive.

So what's the message of it. Can you say who it was? Cause I like, no, I cannot.
Oh, she's funny. That's very impressive.
So what's the message of it? The message is this is urgent. You know, it's, it's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt, but when you see the last five digits are moving so fast, you can't, you know, perceive them with your eyes.
Then you kind of understand, Whoa, we got a problem here. I mean, it's $100,000 a second, roughly.
So imagine we had this catapult and we were launching cyber trucks once a second into the ocean. That's how much debt we're taking on continuously.
Now, there is some good news. I noticed last month it went down.
And I'm like, is my debt clock broken? Why is it going down? And then I realized, oh, it's April 15th. Everybody's paying their taxes.
So the good news is we balanced it for a month. The bad news is April 15th is the only reason that happened.
And now the debt's going back up again. So maybe when it gets so big, it becomes something that you have to ignore ignore it's almost like if you fall off the wagon from drinking you you binge if you fall off your new year's diet you just eat the pizza and a great bet and jerry's like why do you care you know you sort of go crazy and it feels like we're there um i am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable i wear this on the floor of the house yeah and um people literally they'll they'll press the button that says yay or nay i've i've argued we should relabel the voting button spend and don't spend yeah they're red and green if you got that far and can't read i say it's like stop and go but i've seen people press the spend button then turn around look at my debt badge and ask did it just go up but i want them to realize there are consequences to what they're doing because they have been i think as you said just ignoring it putting it off to the side it almost feels like you know it's so big that why even deal with it that's where we are we kind of i think a lot of lawmakers are apathetic they're like well we can't fix it we not going to fix it.
We might as well indulge in it and I'll see what I can get. Well, exactly.
Yeah. So where does it end? Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency.
Right. And when we print more money, which we're doing all the time, the Fed is doing that, we're actually taxing the world.
Everybody in the world who holds dollars gets like a 3% transaction fee. I say we're kind of like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3% because you're using that credit card.
Well, we get 3% from inflation we cause because the world is using our currency. And we can do that as long as they use our currency.
But I think it's going to end at some point, they're going to quit using our dollars as reserve currency. I mean, I watched your interview with Putin.
And one of the things, whether you hate him or not, one of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him, before we sanctioned Russia, 70% of their transactions were in US dollars. And after the sanctions, it's less than 20% of their transactions are in US dollars.
So what we're doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say, you can't use our currency to have a transaction. We're taking away our ability to charge them 3% for that transaction because when we print 3% more dollars, we're just taking that money.
And we're also sending a really clear signal, which is the dollar is not safe for you. Right.
That's the reserve currency because it's a safe haven because it's a stable country. It's the most stable country in the world.
And we're not going to weaponize the dollar because that would be shooting ourselves. But suddenly we are.
And they'll tolerate like 3% because we're not backed by dollars we're backed by aircraft carriers right now so they'll sort of tolerate that three percent but one of the things we recently did in congress we passed something called the repo act where we said we're just going to seize all of russia's sovereign assets in the united states well it turns out a lot of that is treasury debt that they've agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars. And here's the problem with that.
When people see that we've seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these treasury notes, then other countries won't want to buy our debt. It's already happening.
and the price of a long-term bond that the treasury puts out will go, it's already gone above 4%.

It's like over 4.5%.

They don't want to buy them anymore because you know we probably wouldn't seize great britain's assets but i could see a seizing china's assets why would i mean that seems like theft just like take a country's assets i mean that belongs to the people of the country right it's not just putin it is theft it's immoral, but even if you're okay with the amorality or immorality of it, it's short-sighted because eventually it'll catch up with us. So do any of the dumbos you work with understand that? Did you say, wait a second, if we do this, first of all, it's wrong.
And if we're going to be a beacon of light and order and justice in the world, we should abide by those principles. But even if you care about the even if as you said you're right amoral like it's self-defeating to do this do they understand that some of them understand it but it doesn't matter they'll still vote for something like the repo act anyway because it's popular and with whom with voters they think yeah take russia's money like you know let's take yeah yeah that'd be great let's take their money and use it in a war against them it kind of feels good but the problem is it's it's not moral in the long run and it won't work in the long run even if you were okay with it why are we in a war with russia i've never figured that out um why russia it almost seems like they picked it off a map like why would it be a war with russia you know, what's interesting is we were in Afghanistan and I was tracking this.
I talked to the special inspector general, John Sopko, about twice a year about the money that was being wasted in Afghanistan. It was about $50 billion a year.
And I was glad to see us get out of Afghanistan, but kind of like feathering the clutch and shifting gears, we just went from second gear to third gear because as soon as we quit spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, we started spending more than $50 billion a year in Ukraine. There's a military industrial complex, they call it the defense industrial base now in the United States.
They say we have to, they're hungry and we got to keep them fed. And since we don't have any of our own wars and we don't have a reason to deplete our stocks and our bombs and weapons that we have, we engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving.
In fact, the Biden administration even made that argument in a letter to Congress for why we should do this supplemental foreign aid to Israel, to Ukraine, to Taiwan. They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money.
And they gave a list of all the states in the United States that would benefit from this spending, and that's why they said we should do it. But if you're, I mean, look, everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country.
I always have been, and I'm proud of its people still. But if your main export is death you know that i mean what it doesn't work in the long run i mean there is a blowback wrong we're engendering a lot of ill will look 10 years ago even more recently than that the only way we could get to the space station was on a russian rocket right and we you know we had a collaboration with them we were able to get to space that way and um now we don't i mean it's and the bad thing that's you know like in the middle east israel is creating tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of of people who are going to hate the united states and and you know they're going to hate Israel also.
But because we're giving Israel the weapons to do what they're doing, we're creating a lot of people who hate us in this country. But we're told that it's essential to our national security to do that.
Do you believe that? No, I don't see that. I mean, one of the reasons, like I said, the Biden letter said, well, we need to keep our industrial base strong.
So let's fund all these weapons and send them over. But I don't see how it's strengthening our country.
In fact, we're getting weaker by doing it. So you've been, I think, the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes.
How many votes have there been on this question? And where have you voted on them? I i've tried to keep track there were something like 18 votes on ukraine and i voted against every one of them since like 2014 when we started you know saber rattling we do these non-binding resolutions whereas you know russia's evil and you know whereas we support democracy now even then we knew that ukraine was just corrupt as hell but you know like the most corrupt country in europe by far yeah so i started you know there's been 16 or 20 votes on ukraine i've been against all of those just in the last seven months there have been probably 30 votes on israel in Middle East. 30? 30.
How many votes on the U.S. border during that time? Oh, maybe four show votes where we know they're going nowhere in the Senate.
Look, we haven't named 30 post offices. Last month, we voted like 15 or 16 times on issues related to Israel.
And I've been hit because I voted no on all of those. Why do you? Because you hate Israel? Or is there another reason? No, because I'm against sending our money overseas.
I'm against starting another proxy war. I'm against sanctions because it's going to weaken the dollar i'm for free speech like all of these resolutions run afoul of those things and that's why i can't vote for them tell us what the free speech part of it so recently they brought a bill to congress and this was actually a binding bill not a non-binding resolution like this was going to have the effect of law and people would get you know prosecuted if they um engaged in anti-semitism on campuses and the problem with this bill is they use some international definition of anti-semitism on a website somewhere my first question is why don't you just put the definition in the bill why are you pointing to somebody's url in a piece of legislation you are the congress right right we are the right the laws we should be instead we're referencing a website some that's not even you know uh hosted in the united states and so but so i went to this website and it's got a you know fairly short definition but it's also got examples of things that would be considered anti-Semitism.
And some of these are actually passages in the New Testament, if you will, would be banned by this international definition of anti-Semitism. For instance, saying that Jews killed Jesus, which is in the Bible, he was not welcome among his own people, okay? And so that would be anti-Semitism.
And if you engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought, let's say in a classroom, you would be anti-Semitic and you would run afoul of the Department of Education and some federal laws. And there were other examples in there that were hard to believe for instance comparing the policies of israel to to the nazi regime would be anti-semitic but the question is what if their what if their policies ever became the same is this a static definition or what if we just have different opinions and your opinion is now a crime right i mean even if it's abhorrent even if it's wrong and stupid yeah it's still legal it should be you may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between republican and democrat or socialist and capitalists right left the real battles between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth.
It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood.
And we hope we are on the former side. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network.
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You will not regret it. So your colleagues, I think it passed, right? Oh, yeah.
It passed with flying colors. But at least a few people woke up to this.
I mean, so but the members of Congress who church on sunday who've just voted to ban the new testament on campus make it illegal to quote from the new testament the christian bible um like how did they square that um i think their voters let them get away with it i mean they they don't have to square it unless they're why would they want to something like that? Because there's a lot of pressure in Congress to vote for these things. And our Republican leadership thinks they're so smart.
We're in an election year and they want to bring up issues. They want to put them in front of Congress and make us vote on them, whether they're going anywhere in the Senate or not.
And they want to split the Democrats. They want to show that Republicans are united and then split the Democrats.
That's one of the reasons they do it. Another reason they do it is there's a foreign interest group called AIPAC that got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East.
We haven't had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress. So what's AIPAC? AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
And they didn't start out as a PAC in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee. Ostensibly, it's a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of israel they're for anything israel um and they're a very effective lobbying group they get in there they uh they try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate for instance for congress they almost get on what on israel like and i wouldn't do it and they said why and i'm like i don't do homework for lobbyists right i'm like i didn't learn i didn't like writing term papers at college i'm not writing one for you what did they say they said oh well here just copy ran paul's term paper and put your name on it we'll accept that and i'm like no i'm still not cribbing somebody else's homework to do homework i'm not turning in my homework for you and what you're laughing but you know what i bet uh i may be the only republican in congress who hasn't done homework for apac and it's just what it is it's conditioning they want you to do something very simple and benign and you know them.
They don't really grade your term paper. They just want to know that you'll do something for them.
And if you'll do something for them as a candidate, you're more likely to do something for them as a congressman when you get in there. So my rift started out in 2012 when I refused to turn in an Israel term paper.
And how did they respond respond to that um well they kind of got in my race a little too late there in the beginning and because it was hard to tell that i was actually going to win and when they saw i was going to win that's when they tried to get me to do the term paper um they didn't have a political action committee at the time they couldn't spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars against me at that time it was just sort of like a whisper campaign to try to hey don't vote for him blah blah blah that's why because at that point they sensed i wouldn't do what they wanted when what did they whisper against you what were they saying about you well they would do it through for instance churches evangelical churches they've got an organization called Christians United for Israel, where they've sort of co-opted evangelicals. People think it's a grassroots movement in Kentucky.
It's actually a top-down movement from APAC, so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got to support Israel no matter what. And even if it's a secular state that funds abortions, they just sort of forget that part and we've got to fund Israel.
So they have networks. So it's more than just about the money.
So you get elected despite their efforts. And then what happens? Do you talk to them after that? that and by the way let me just put a little

footnote here i'm not against israel i've never voted to sanction israel i've never said anything particularly you know critical of israel you know uh other than for instance right now they're bombing they've killed one percent of the civilian population in gaza that's concerning to me but so what do they do now

yeah you get elected 2012

do you hear from them again i vote my conscience um which they won't tolerate so they ran with their 501c4 before they had a super PAC they were they were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that you know i'm bad on Israel. They didn't say don't vote for him.
They just said he's a bad guy. And so I said, all right, you're not welcome in my office anymore.
Because for years, I invited him into my office. Let's talk this through.
Let me explain to you. I'm a libertarian-leaning Republican.
I don't vote for foreign aid for anybody. So don't be offended when I don't vote for your foreign aid.
I don't vote for wars anywhere. So don't be offended if I do that.
I'm for free speech, even if it's abhorrent. And, you know, we used to talk, but now they're banned from my office.
The situation went from bad to worse. This election cycle, they spent $400,000 against me.
$ ninety thousand dollars last fall running tv ads in my district and facebook ads and whatnot trying to equate me with the squad and then um this most recently in fact as i'm speaking you to you today even though my election is over they're still running hundreds of thousand dollars of negative ads it's a little weird though because as you said you're probably the only republican in the house who hasn't done homework for them who isn't on their side um and but and that's okay i mean you can have you know you're a libertarian oriented republican from northern kentucky you're probably not going to single-handedly determine our foreign policy so you i think you should but you don't thank you and you're not going to so why do they care why not just let thomas massey be thomas massey in northern kentucky like why why the need to crush you i don't know i think it's they don't want one horse out of the barn if one person starts speaking the truth they're afraid it could be contagious perhaps or it's like a new car they they go to mike johnson and they say we want a cadillac you know escalade uh with pearl white paint and here's you know here's the rims we want and mike johnson puts that bill on the floor it passes with the unanimous vote except for one guy votes no and i think they feel like it's a scratch on their car they wanted a brand new car and it got scratched by this guy named Massey.

They were going to drive it over to the Senate and ask for unanimous consent.

But now the senators are saying, wait, why?

This wasn't unanimous in the House.

Why should we do it unanimously in the Senate?

And it starts raising questions.

And I think that's why they get mad.

What I find interesting is it's not just that they disagree with your views, which they do, and I think they have an absolute right to disagree with anybody's views. We all do.
But they've called you a bigot and they call you an anti-Semite and say you're a hater and try to destroy your character. That seems like a very different level of response to me.
Right. There's no need to do that.
I'm not anti-Semitic. I don't have an anti-semitic hair in my head okay it's i i mean i don't like a pack anymore like i used to be neutral toward a pack right but i i have no antagonistic feelings toward jewish people i i am the last thing i think i'm probably the least xenophobic person in congress i mean these are the guys that my colleagues want to sanction everybody you know declare them terrorist states you know come up with these strongly worded resolutions i don't vote for any of that crap right i'll unless somebody does harm to me i'm not going to call them anything so i get called names just for staying out of all of this political posture that's disgusting though isn't it you know i guess that's your character they can they can disagree with your views right but to call you like the worst thing you can be in america like that's disgusting you know i have a thick skin apparently and and here's the good news tucker my my constituents aren't falling for it.
Two weeks ago, I just had a primary and got 76% of the vote with AIPAC running hundreds of thousand dollars of ads. It's not working against me.
I think it's short-sighted on their side to do this. They're just burning money, but they're trying to make an example of me.
But're also exposing their weakness i think they are i think they've exposed a real weakness here and you know it used to be just me voting against some of these resolutions but recently where they tried to ban passages in the new testament i think we got like almost two dozen republicans who said wait hold on there there's a question though there's a fundamental question so the biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating something called farah the foreign agent registration act 1936 ish it's been on the books for you know 90 years um and it's never been enforced ever until recently until really the trump era and biden era so but the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to register. It's that simple.
And this is the largest lobby in the United, most effective lobby in the United States on behalf of a foreign government. Are they registered with Farrah? They're not, but they should be.
Well, how can that, how can that be? How can they put Paul Manafort in jail, which they did on a Farrah violation and a bunch of other people in jail on Farah violations but the largest and most effective and most feared foreign lobby working for a foreign government doesn't have to register under the law that's insane oh man don't make me take their side but i'll explain as best as i can what they're arguing i mean maybe i'm wrong maybe no should take their side i don't know well i'm gonna agree with you in a second but let me at least offer what i think is their argument they they would say we are americans you know the members of apac are americans and that they have the right to free speech paul manafort's an american right right yeah that so there's the good rebuttal is far applies not to foreigners to foreign agents right it's of foreign principles agents of foreign principles americans lobbying on behalf of foreign government correct so this is apac is exactly what far is meant for now they would say and we have a first amendment right okay well i i agree with you there but we also have election laws and to the it's disclosure right Like they're not, Farah doesn't say you can't say thomas massey's you know an ignorant hillbilly you're allowed to say that if you want to but we just want to check where your money's coming from tell us where it's coming from what you're spending it on and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country so they should be now to your point they should be registered with. This is what Farah is, is where there's gray area where it's an American representing a foreign country.
Let's, let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country. Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country? Uh, are you being directed by, for instance, is Netanyahu speaking to your group advising you on your next move those are you getting money from the military industrial complex like because to understand apac i think it's easiest to model them as a military industrial lobby like their biggest thing is they want more equipment more military equipment from the united states going to israel in fact when they used to be allowed in my office the thing they the argument they would make is oh we're just stimulating the u.s military industrial complex because every single penny of the 3.8 billion that they nominally get now they're getting way more than that but that israel nominally gets goes to u.s military contractors now that didn't make me warm and fuzzy okay but that is their argument and if you notice what they advocate for i think sometimes they advocate for things that even israelis wouldn't advocate for i believe that like they would i think be okay with a war with iran like a all-out you know apocalyptic war with iran whereas there are people in israel say whoa hold on a second we we'd rather not have a war with iran but apac does things that lead us in that direction and so they're kind of like what the nra is to gun owners apac is to israel or what the farm bureau is to gun owners, APAC is to Israel.

Or what the Farm Bureau is to farmers, APAC is to Israel.

In other words- Represents a faction.

Right.

They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction.

And they're using the imprimatur of grassroots that they've diluted or confused into bullying

congressmen.

And the NRA does that and Farm Bureau does that.'m picking on some you know other right-wing groups here for for sure and by the way i think there are probably a lot of things that apac is for that i'm for and farm bureau nra same thing right it's i just the idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly openly in that they are showing you they're doing it but opaquely in that you can't track it because they're not registered is there any other republican who has your views on this well i have republicans who come to me on the floor and say i wish i could vote with. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flack back home.
And I have Republicans who come to me and say, that's wrong what AIPAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my AIPAC person.
By the way, everybody but me has an AIPAC person. What does that mean, an AIPAC person? It's like your babysitter your aipac babysitter who uh is always talking to you for aipac they're probably a constituent in your district but they are you know firmly embedded in aipac and every member has something like this every i don't know how it works on the democrat side uh but that's how it works on the republican side and when they and when they come to dc you go have lunch with them and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them so i've had like that's absolutely crazy i've had four members of congress say i'll talk to my apac person and it's literally what we call them my APEC i'll talk to my apac guy and see if i can get him to you know dial those ads back why if i never heard this before it doesn't benefit anybody why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country it doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that so they're not going to tell you that it's it's in have you seen any other country do anything like this like no russia russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections we keep hearing that does anyone have a putin guy that they talk to not only do they not have a putin guy look they don't they they don't have a britain guy they don't have an australian guy they you know they don't have a germany dude like it's the only country that does this that has somebody that like uniformly i guarantee there's some spreadsheet at apac where where you know the the a pack dude is who's matched up with the congressman is there and then all the congressman's votes on the issue oh has the congressman been to israel they they pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to israel i may be i mean i don't i'm not the only republican who hasn't taken the APE trip to israel but i'm probably one of a dozen that hasn't taken that trip and the other ones just haven't got around to it what's the trip like do you know um it's kind of like i think vacationy you go see the wall you go see the you know the sites uh things like that it's such a great i must say it's such a great country jerusalem especially it's just such a wonderful place that that's got to have a big effect you go like swim in the dead sea yeah yeah i've done that yeah not on an impact trip but i would recommend it to anyone are you sure it wasn't an a paid for it myself no i mean it's it's just funny i mean i am like a legit lover of israel of the place Israel.
I like the people and I love the food and like the whole thing is so great. But that's distinct from the government of Israel, which is a foreign government.
My sense is the people are very entrepreneurial. Yeah, totally.
They're publicly minded. You know, they care about their country, that they're generally good people good people right that's certainly been my experience in trips there for sure it's great it's just that's i mean i think it's probably one of my favorite maybe my all-time favorite place to go um with my family but that's just a completely different thing from taking orders from its government right i mean right now though again

they'll say it's these are american citizens who are you know coordinating all his just again this is almost a rhetorical question but in your whatever 12 14 years in congress 12 years um have you ever seen any indication that russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members not not in a quiet way like um you know they'll put out statements russia obviously has russia today rt yeah i think it's been banned but yeah i like i think you know kentucky fried chicken of which i'm a big fan being from kentucky right they realized that fried was became sort of a pejorative and people didn't

want to eat fried food so they changed the name to kfc so you don't have to say fried okay russia today changed their name to rt so you don't have to say russia but there's a strong analogy there but i mean there are efforts you'd be a fool to think that they're not trying to influence things here just like we are there we you know we have uh what is it radio free europe and voice of america we we have i mean we spend a billion dollars oh well over a billion dollars on the foreign propaganda that's out in the open that we know about right so there are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well i don't want to say they're not involved but people don't say oh i need to go talk to my russia guy but you've never like in the cloakroom or on the floor at dinner you've never heard another republican member say i'd love to vote for this but putin doesn't want me to i have never heard that you haven't okay what about china no there's i mean unless it's a spy sleeping with a democrat i'm sure there's some of that going on yeah but that's not that's not in public so how do you think um it's it's just interesting because you're you're clearly not a bigot uh i think it's very obvious and they've called you one and they've spent you know millions of dollars against you over the years and it has had no effect you get re-elected the primary in the 70s so like why are they still spending against you and in your state statewide and can you just continue to serve in congress while disobeying well they say that they don't want me to run statewide they're worried that i'll run for mcconnell's seat and so they're trying to send me a message. That's what they would tell you.

But why?

I don't know what the message is.

Maybe it's a little presumptuous to decide.

I've never said that I'm running for the Senate, right?

Yeah, I I'm pretty much disinterested in it personally and publicly.

But just in case they're running ad statewide. Now, mind you, there are six congressional districts in Kentucky and I only represent one of them.
They're running the ads in all six congressional districts just in case. Amazing.
What do you think of Mitch McConnell after all these years of being in the delegation with him? He's a shrewd guy. He's quick.
let me give you an example of how quick he is so we had a congressman jamie comer who's now chair of the oversight committee he got elected in a special election which means you come in in the middle of a term and you have to boot up with no staff and so it's it's kind of uh you know disorienting so mitch mcconnell had a uh had an event for jamie comer on his first day in congress it was in a townhouse with like 200 lobbyists by the way i'm never going to get invited to one of these now that i tell you the story uh and so jamie's there and mcconnell goes i believe jamie took his first vote tonight and that's such a perfect imitation and i wasn't supposed to speak but i interrupted senator mcconnell who was at the time the majority leader and i said yes uh senator mcconnell he did take his first vote and i know he has no staff so i advised jamie when you walk into the chamber look at how i vote and then vote the other way and you'll be just fine and every you know 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke and they were laughing and as the laughter died down McConnell goes well Thomas I'm glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice and then the place just the walls almost no he's good he's good that way so um but I think it's time for new leadership in the senate i mean he's obviously it's way past time and and this is just a fact i'll say it i'll get in trouble for saying it you know i'm in races in kentucky so we poll things in case you know we poll trump's popularity we poll the senator's popularity in case they get involved in your race.

Yeah.

And Senator McConnell's favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than

our Democrat governor's favorabilities.

Seriously?

Yes.

Lower than Governor Beshear?

Yeah.

Beshear's around 40% among Republican primary voters and McConnell's around 30%.

Well-deserved.

Well-deserved.

So I'm glad to hear that because I like kentucky and i think it's its voters are sensible what do you think it counts for in the final months and years of his public career his public statements that all that matters is ukraine like what is that i have no idea by the way i have so many fights in the house yeah that I try to avoid every fight in the Senate that I can. You're trying to draw me in, and I love you, and I'll indulge these questions.
But for 12 years, my strategy has been pick my fights in the House. Smart.
Let Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and J.D. Vance, Rick Scott, let those guys figure out the Senate.
because I haven't been able to fix the House. So I'm damn sure not going to be able to fix the Senate.
But it's just interesting. OK, taking McConnell out of it and even the Senate out of it.
But some of the committee chairman in the House, for example, seem like Ukraine is all that matters to them. And there's, of course, the question donations from lockheed etc the military industrial complex but it almost seems messianic to me it seems heartfelt to me it seems sincere that they think that this is all that matters winning this war against russia what do you have any sense of why they feel that way i don't and um the hardest ones to understand are people like mike johnson who used to be against the you know sending more money to ukraine but now that he's the speaker he's like you said he seems strongly convicted that uh we should be sending money there almost like it's a religious calling or something i mean it seems totally real to me it doesn't seem fake i've heard the argument i think it's immoral but i've heard the argument that oh this is a great deal we just spend money and we're grinding up russia's uh capacity to wage war particularly lots of russians are dying and so we're told that's that's a good thing you know for since the cold war began we've been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished.
But they've go so far as to say Russians dying to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say, is just such a great thing that we need to keep this thing going. And my answer to that is, why don't you tell us the ukrainian casualties they you know i have been in classified settings with cia uh the secretary of state secretary of defense not not their assistants but those people in the room and they're bragging about how many russians have died and been injured and i asked them how many ukrainians have died and been injured and they claimed they didn't know i mean that's just a flat-out lie and they said they would get back to me and they've never gotten back to me like not only is our americans being fed propaganda about this war congress is being fed propaganda by our state department or and our secretary of defense our intelligence agencies.
And you can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings. If nothing else, my colleagues should be convicted of a lack of curiosity.
They sit there and they believe everything they're told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don't. But you can expose them with two or three questions like how many Ukrainians have died and they refuse to answer.
I've asked that very same question to Mike Johnson actually directly. Don Jr.
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but I've also asked him and a number of

committees but i've also asked him and a number of committee chairmen just in personal conversations do you believe your intel briefings because only a child would believe an intel briefing take it at face value there may be truth in there right maybe largely true but you're being spun you're being manipulated and if you don't know that, then you're a moron. But they seem to believe them.
They, because they have no other reference. And then here's what else happens, Tucker.
When you go into a classified setting, like a skiff, you lock up your phone. You take off your Fitbit.
You take every electronic device. They even make me take off my debt badge.
What? Yeah, I know. Do you feel naked? I feel exposed.
I mean, I do feel naked if I'm not wearing this. I've been wearing it for a year every day of my life.
Okay. But they strip you of every outside reference.
Okay. And now your staff is not allowed in that meeting either remember congressman our primary roles are like raising money being friendly to constituents you know putting on a good face campaigning and then then you know once a day or maybe twice a day we roll in there and press the vote buttons based on what staff advises you well when you go into a skiff you don't have your smartphone so you're not very smart they start using acronyms that you don't know remember what the acronym stands for you can't just like okay what are what's the idgfbz i don't know man i must be stupid like but you know if you were in a regular setting you just pull your phone out and like oh okay that's what that is i know what that is And then you also can't ask your staff a question while you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out and like, oh, okay, that's what that is.
I know what that is. And then you also can't ask your staff a question while you're in that setting.
We have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas. Of course.
You can't bring them in. And then when you go back to the office, you can't tell them what you heard.
So it's really quite an experience. It's a deprivation experience of any outside reference.
So it's really quite an experience uh it's sort of it's you know it's a deprivation experience of any outside reference so it's designed to produce stockholm syndrome it sounds like yes and when you get in there they really don't give you classified information i say there's three levels of classification in the skiff there's facebook level there's a twitter level and there's new york times level like and the new york times level is the highest level of classification i mean it's you're getting to the good stuff when they're telling you what's in the new york times that week have you ever heard anything you thought was genuinely secret occasionally just a few times and obviously i can't say what that is but they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there. And you're like, whoa, I didn't know that.
You know, nothing like what's at Area 51. Right.
But occasionally you're just like, what do people think is at Area 51, by the way? I don't know. I'm not a.
You guys passed this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and then they never disclosed anything. What is that? Not my area of expertise area of expertise yes don't know but do members of congress ever say wait a second we're a co-equal branch we're a legislative branch we have as much power as the president collectively and you can't keep this stuff secret from us you're not allowed to do that but see like i have this in hearings all the time they'll say ls atf director this is this happened just last uh dettelbach or i'll ask merrick garland something or christopher ray like i've asked all them this and they give you the same answer it's long-standing doj policy not to comment on on ongoing investigations and you know what that's fine to tell a reporter but you can't tell the branch of government that created you that that funded you.
You can't tell them that that's why the omnibus was so disappointing to me is the only way these three letter agencies are going to come to heel is if we cut their funding in some specific area. I've joked we could just withhold one toner cartridge for one printer at the FBI and they would come over with a whole binder full of information.
But we can't even bring ourselves to deprive them of a toner cartridge. So we put two hundred million dollars for new FBI building in the omnibus bill.
And, you know, to their credit, Jim Jordan and Jamie Comer wouldn't didn't vote for that. And they're chairman of committees, but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the fbi just thumbs their nose so is that the speaker who allowed that to happen oh he absolutely allowed it to happen so to what extent are members of congress committee chairman leadership controlled by blackmail i really don't think there's much blackmail.
If there is, I'm not aware of it. I have people come up to me.
I travel around the country, Texas and other states, and speak to groups, food freedom groups, First Amendment, Second Amendment groups. And they come to me and they say, did my congressman sell out like i'll just you

bob was such a great guy and i campaigned for him i made phone calls i put up signs and then we send bob to congress and he he votes the wrong way every time why is it what do they have his kids in a basement somewhere does he have kitty porn on him like what is it why did bob go bad and i have to look him in the eye and say bob just wanted to be liked yeah like

yeah Does he have kiddie porn on him? Like, what is it? Why did Bob go bad? And I have to look him in the eye and say, Bob just wanted to be liked. Yeah.
Like, there is a gene inside of congressmen. I think if you look for a common denominator, they like people and they want to be liked for the most part.
And they're likableable if they're not likable then it's hard to get elected okay so this self-selects for likable people but likable people want to be liked and they're not surrounded by their wives and children who usually give them plenty of like right when they're in dc it's like who am i going to go to dinner with tonight well i want to eat food with somebody that likes me right so if you're not going to eat alone and you have to be liked and you generally have to be liked to get elected to congress you you um better be liked and and so it's literally it's almost like kindergarten when somebody says i won't be your friend anymore if you don't you know give me your lunch um congressmen fall for that you know they're in their 30s 40s, 40s, 50s, and they fall for that. How do you have, it's interesting.
You like people. I've asked around.
You don't seem to have any real enemies in the Congress. I don't even think AIPAC hates you.
They just want you to obey, but it doesn't seem personal. You don't seem to be at personal war with anybody.
That's my take on it. I have a mutation.
So you like people, okay? Obviously, you're not some weird autist who doesn't care about other people you like other people i love people i can tell and your colleagues say that but you also don't feel like you need to fit in right same time like what is that it's a mutation that chromosome the like the liking people and likability chromosome usually has another gene on it right next to it which is the need to be liked and i'm missing the need to be like gene i don't know what happened like i can go like on the cares act okay this was under president trump the 11th day to slow the spread of 15 right uh they said we're going to pass a 2.2 trillion dollar package and you all just stay home it's dangerous like we'll just do it by unanimous consent and it was 11 p.m i'm sitting in my living room and they send us this message and i'm like wtf like this is this this is twice the size of the omnibus bill, right? This is going to cause massive inflation. The policies in it are going to cause shortages.
And if we don't show up to vote, we're sending a message to all 50 states that you don't have to show up to vote in this election. So it was like, I got in my car and I drove eight hours.
I slept one hour in a rest stop because I knew I had to be there by 9 a.m this was march 27th 2020 actually the 25th is the day i got to congress to stop it and um i got there and i said it's not going by unanimous consent and i was literally sleeping in my wife's suv eating those uh peanut butter filled pretzels like i had a big jug of those are good yeah for my three days of nourishment i'm sitting in an suv eating that big tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle like waiting just waiting for them to try to call it in session and sneak this bill past and they're like shit massey's gonna do it so they they loaded up congressmen you know the airports were shut down for the most part there were some planes coming from california they only had two passengers and they were both congressmen so they they roll them all back to congress it takes them two days to assemble a quorum because i like they went to the parliamentarian and they're like is there any way around this he's like nope massey's right the constitution requires a quorum if one you know he didn't call me an asshole but if one asshole just shows up objects and says there's no quorum here so they brought every back i go to the floor uh actually got a everybody was hating me i mean everybody did you know what it's like to be in a room of 434 people and they're all staring at you like there i had maybe 10 friends who were like looking at me like that guy is dead like i've never seen harry carrie like this they were worried for me but the rest of them hated me they're they would come up to me and say i i live with my mother and when i go back home you're going to cause me to take covid to her and she's going to die and i'm blaming you for this and i said that's your face yeah oh yeah well like no it wasn't just one it was like when he was done there was a line of people i just like stood there and they're all coming to hate on me and um i was like but what about the guy that's going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to the car does he live with his mother too like what about the trucker who's out there driving and interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be what about the nurse who's going to work every single day taking care of people is she going to kill her parents like where why are you special like you're supposed to you know they they carved a hole in the side of a mountain in west virginia for us in the case of emergency yes that well the sad but but realistic thing is now they don't have a place for us we're so useless right it's like well here's where we were gonna keep them if shit hit the fan but now we we've realized they're like useless we can declare war without them in the event of a nuclear strike so you know they're just a rounding error in the three branches we can operate with two yes i've noticed so anyways these are the kind of people who are supposed to respond in an emergency and they all wanted to stay home they all hated me for for recognize our constitutional duty and and trump called me three times on the floor of the house while i was getting ready to make the motion to object. And I let it go to voicemail three times in a row, which is probably not good.
But I couldn't leave the microphone because I was asking people, would you make this motion if I go to the restroom? They're like, oh, no, no. So I I sat there.
I finally they yielded time for debate. I go off the floor and called the white house switchboard back.
And, and you know, I didn't have his number. I just like, if you want to tour the white house, you call the number I called.
Right. And like the intern is like, Oh, is this Congressman Massey? I'm putting you through to Trump right now.
And so he comes off and he goes, I'm coming at you like you've never seen. Never in your your life before have you seen the way in which i will come at you i'm more popular than you in kentucky and you know it i'm back in your primary opponent and you gotta lose and i'm like oh crap i probably will lose i mean he had 95 popularity in among my my Republican electorate who I had to face in about eight weeks in my primary.
And I had a well-funded opponent and here now Trump was mad at me. So he screamed at me for two or three minutes.
I kept trying to talk and he just screamed louder. Then he repeated it all.
He goes, no, this is the second time you've done something like this. And they took me out of it before, but not this time.
And then you're going to lose. And he hangs up.
And like, the thing is, like, I had, he said, he thought it was the second time. I'd done that like eight times since he was president.
He just started realizing it's the same guy. The time before that was on war with iran the democrats were in the majority and you know he had just vaporized soleimani yeah and we were worried that he would attack mainland iran without a vote of congress so the democrats actually insincerely there aren't too many anti-war democrats left i've noticed but they realized this was a chance to make a statement so they put a bill on the floor saying trump you can't go to war with iran without a vote of congress which is constitutionally obvious so i had to vote for it but i was only one of three republicans to do it so he remembered that time but he didn't remember the fake obamacare repeal and some of the other things that uh i was kind of uh you know the turd in the punch bowl on did did it change your views at all no uh the president tweeted that i was a third-rate grand stander and that like this is before i got back to my seat like i go back from the speaker slobby to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion and uh one of the congress was like you better look at your phone massey look at your twitter and i turn it on he's like tweeting hard and heavy against me said i should be thrown out of the party then he the best one is i'm chairman of the second amendment caucus so his third tweet was he's terrible on guns it's like what where did that come from have you seen my christmas card picture what's your christ card picture? Oh, well, it's a little infamous.
No, I've actually seen it, but I chose for the benefit of those who have not. So, you know, I got my family together for Christmas and we got bluegrass instruments out.
We play music together and we took a Christmas card picture with bluegrass instruments. And I said, hey, wouldn't it be kind of neat if we just like change these all out for machine guns and took a picture and that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity but i had had a couple medical margaritas one night i don't do medical marijuana but i had a few medical margaritas and i looked at that picture and i thought well that's pretty good picture it'd be ashamed if nobody ever saw it and i tweeted it and no i caught all kinds of hate for that the arch it's a great picture the archbishop of canterbury condemned it this is the head of the church of england condemned my tweet i'm like oh my god are you an episcopalian i'm a methodist good so you can ignore him yes yeah he's a disgrace um so so anyways So anyways, the press asked me, we're talking about the need to be liked gene, right? If I had that, I would have been devastated that day.
If I had needed to be liked, I couldn't have carried that through. And I walked out of that chamber.
Everybody's hating me in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance.
CNN called me the most hated person in D.C. John Kerry called me an asshole or something.
And President Trump called me a third-rate grandstander. This is all in the course of a few minutes, right? I walk out of the chamber of the House, and the reporters swarm me like they do.
And I'm just trying to run back to the SUV with the pretzels with peanut butter in them and get out of there. And the press said, what do you have to say for yourself? Your own president just called you a third rate grandstander.
And I paused for a second and I said, I was offended. I'm at least second rate.
So what happened to your your relationship with trump it um you know i think he respects people that stand up yep even if i think you're absolutely right disagrees with you that's correct and um two years later he did endorse me no way yep do you get along with him okay now yeah i mean i did endorse ron des Ron DeSantis, not out of spite or animosity, because we had already patched things up. Just because I served with Ron DeSantis for six years, and he and I were really good friends.
We talked about bills when he was in Congress. He and I fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate congressional pensions.
And he won, and I co-sponsored it. Now I'm the sponsor, now that that he's a governor but i knew he was a good person and he thinks things through and he was smart so i i endorsed him um but you know because i have i call it natural immunity i have trump antibodies at this point they may wear off at some point i don't know do you think if you did run for say just pulling us out of a hat, but governor of Kentucky, do you think Trump would endorse you? I don't know.
You'd probably do some polling and see who was winning. Fair, fair, totally fair.
I wouldn't turn down an endorsement. Yeah.
Yeah. So it's not.
Are you at war with anybody in the Congress? No, I get along with everybody. I mean, and people try to use this against me you know when apac was running those ads that say i always vote with aoc and rashida talib and ilhan omar you know so i introduced an amendment and forced to vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles it's mandated oh thank you yeah well i was losing republicans on that i lost like 20 republicans so i knew i needed some just to be clear for the people who don't know what you're talking about new in new vehicles this has been the case for years they can be turned off remotely by the authorities which is like the most north korean thing ever to happen that's what you're talking about yeah by 2026 every new

automobile sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn't like your driving so i'm like how do you appeal this conviction at the roadside right maybe you swerved to miss a deer and pulled over for an ambulance and you got your kids in the car and it's not one vote for something that evil i don't understand because again they know it's that i'm right but they're worried about for instance mothers against drunk driving or they don't have the bravery wait we're so we just let in millions of illegal aliens who are allowed to drunk drive right and biden has told us that drunk driving is not a big deal it's not grounds for deporting yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So who mothers against drunk driving? As far as I know, I said nothing about this.
Like, who cares what they think?

i i know and but there may be let's say one constituent in your district who gets a hold of you and they lost a child to drunk driving which is terrible and they say well you know

you don't care about me if you vote for massey's amendment and you know they make that personal

phone call that congressman doesn't have the fortitude to say or knowledge to say look this technology can't work i really care about your child i think you're drunk driving is a scourge and i want to fix it but this is a false promise and it's only going to increase the price of automobiles and give the government more control so i'm going to vote with massey they don't have the courage to say that so long story short i lost 20 republicans i needed some democrats so i went over to aoc who i get along with just fine don't hate me for saying that i don't um and i said aoc they're running ads right now that say you always vote or that I always vote with you. Just once, could you vote with me? Could you vote for my kill switch amendment since they're running ads the other way? And she did.
She voted to defund the automobile kill switch. Good for her.
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Grainger, for the ones who get it done. So she ran.
It's interesting. I mean, obviously I don't like her, but I think she's talented.
She is definitely talented. But she ran as a radical as someone from the outside which i'm of course very sympathetic to but she doesn't seem to actually be that person so like for example on the foreign aid stuff how often does she vote with you on quite quite frequently but i had a funny moment you know this 15 or 16 votes we had on israel in april well the squad and i i know this is going to be used in the next ad against me this clip from tucker but i was the only no sometimes sometimes the most of the squad voted with me but i noticed aoc wasn't always there with me so i went over to the squad on the democrat side of the aisle.
Do they literally sit together? They hang out together.

Yeah, they kind of, it's really cliquish.

Even, you know, the Freedom Caucus sits together.

The Texas delegation sits together.

There are different cliques.

The appropriators sit together.

It's the military guys, the intel guys sit together.

You know, sometimes it's by state.

Sometimes it's by clique.

A lot of the Congressional Black Caucus sits together. i can't get the second amendment caucus to sit together that's my car they're too independent independent but so i go over to their this is just high school cafeteria it's high school cafeteria that's what it is and why would you again they need to be liked right they don't want to sit next to people they don't like or who don't like them so i go over i went over squad a few weeks ago and I said, I told AOC for the squad, I said, we're going to kick you out if you don't keep voting with us more consistently.
What did she say? She laughed. She thought it was funny.
I mean, she has a sense of humor. These people are humans.
There are 435, I call them goldfish in the aquarium. You have to get 218 of them to pass a bill.
So it doesn't benefit me to hate on any of them someday that you know on some days they may vote with well they're also people and you shouldn't if you can help it you shouldn't hate people period we've we've formed coalitions on the first amendment on the fourth amendment on war sometimes like to eliminate cluster bombs delivering cluster bombs even though the democrats almost to a person actually to a person want to give ukraine more aid some of them are like well the cluster bombs maybe we shouldn't do that okay and so you can form coalition so i try to do that when i can but why aren't there anti-war democrats since it was the anti-war party for like 40 years I don't know and we've lost a lot of them on privacy and free speech as well um i think with russia you asked this before there's there's this element that i didn't answer it's sort of a proxy against trump for them now they in their in their file folders in their brain trump and russia are in the same file folder yes even though that's a false narrative that's been dispelled long ago um it's still in their same file folder so when they see ukraine is fighting russia they use that as a proxy for their hate for trump and so they'll they'll vote for that and they did they waved i don't know if you saw this they were waving ukrainian flags after mike johnson put their bill on the floor and every democrat voted for it this was premeditated somebody had to go buy you know 200 ukrainian flags and hand them out and um i filmed it which you're not supposed to do but you're also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the house so i'm like all right i'm gonna expose this so i filmed it and i put it on twitter to show what like the humiliation that mike johnson brought upon us by bringing their the democrat bill to the floor without any and it was leveraged too even if you're a republican and you're okay with sending money to ukraine that's a leverage point get do something for our country and require that as a condition of doing whatever that is but he gave up all the leverage i put that video on twitter three days later the sergeant at arms tracks down one of my staffers in kentucky because we're no longer in session and says he needs to delete that video from twitter or we're going to take a fine out of his salary out of his congressional salary and so mr stafford he knew what i was going to do he told me what they had just said i said all right i'm retweeting it did you oh yeah and it got like 8 million views it went from 4 million to 8 million and then you know sometimes you just got to double down and the speaker had to announce on twitter that i wouldn't be fined for that but there but no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on the floor of the house of representatives right and they were taking selfies of of them with their foreign flags too and no none of them got a phone call only i got a phone call because i exposed the humiliation it wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in congress it was a humiliation of our country i mean it's one of the most corrupt countries in the world and they got everything they wanted for them and the democrats are waving the flag even though the ukrainian flag even though they're in the majority and we just have to like sit there and take that it was it was horrible do you think any i mean the leader of ukraine is not elected anymore he had his term has ended he's not having a new election he's the unelected maximum power in some places we call that a dictator and yet they're still hitting us with a democracy pro-democracy talking points do you think i mean have they thought this through at all do they are they just lying like what is that um they're lying yeah i mean they know it and the good news is some republicans are waking up to it remember when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions

even you know as soon as the war started I was the only no there was like this open-ended promise in a in a non-binding resolution that said well give them whatever they need and there were only like two other Republicans that joined me on this but now we've got a majority of Republicans in Congress. You're saying, wait, they aren't using this money like we thought they were.
And we're giving them money to fund pensions of retired politicians in Ukraine who were most certainly corrupt. And we're paying their pensions with this money.
But most Republicans don't support it. So that means that your speaker, the Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is working for the Democrats.

Yeah, it's that simple. I mean, and that's one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate.
Paul Gosar and I co-sponsored Marjorie's motion to vacate. There were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it.
Motion to vacate would be to fire him. to fire speaker johnson just like they had done kevin mccarthy although i thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons they did that to mccarthy but here we had speaker johnson who was doing all the things people were afraid mccarthy might do they they pre-convicted mccarthy for things they thought he would do and here mike johnson came and did all these things he put an omnibus on the floor he passed the foreign intelligence surveillance act re-upped that without warrants built the fbi a new building and gave ukraine all this money so what what happened what marjorie and i and paul decided ultimately is we needed to expose the uniparty and never before have you had democrats vote for a republican speaker and that's why we forced the question nancy pelosi voted for him hakeem jeffries went on national tv and said why would we want to get rid of him he's given us everything we want i mean the the uniparty has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate i know some people got mad

at us that we shouldn't have done it but uh it's a long game which we certainly hope that he doesn't become speaker next january and hopefully people will have seen with nancy pelosi rushing to speaker johnson's aid that he's not the speaker you want when trump wins the white house and we keep the majority.

Do you think you will be?

A lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it hopefully also trump sees it that mike johnson is would be even worse than paul ryan paul ryan put while he was still in the while we were still in the majority paul ryan sent like a dozen crs or omnibus bills to president trump's desk that didn't have any money for a wall in it like he had no intention of ever funding a wall paul ryan did it you know and so i think mike johnson is going to be similarly the same way he's basically working for the deep state at this point in the uniparty how did that happen do you have any idea the uh the paul ryan bit or no well paul ryan is a change you know is a sinister person i happen to know but also you know not just kind of not a genius and an ideologue at the same time which is like a bad combination dumb ideologues are the scariest but mike johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative kind of sincere decent guy you know maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job i'm like paul ryan and but he just and then he immediately just becomes a tool of cia and jake sullivan and the biden administration how did that happen so fast well one of the things he claims which i don't believe is true and i have reason to say this is that he says he went in a skiff like he's had some 180 degree turns on some things like for instance whether you need a warrant to spy on americans using the foreign intelligence surveillance act 702 program well he used to be on judiciary committee with me and jim jordan trying to reform that trying to get so he understood what it was he knew completely what we were talking about he's an attorney too right and he knows the constitution he knows this is required but he claims he spent time in a skiff and he learned things skiff that's secure compartmentalized information facility or something um it's where we go we have to leave our phones locked up you know no staff in there he claims he spent time in skiff and learned things that changed his mind here's the problem tucker i was in skiff with him like we we had we had dni not just the the current dni but the former dni john radcliffe trump trump's dni we had cia we had fbi we even had a fisa judge in there and we spent three and a half hours it was a four hour meeting and after three and a half hours is basically a psyop where they're just trying to beat you down and do the things and i was like this is ridiculous you get you haven't given they didn't give us one example of any time ever since fisa was created that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism they gave hypotheticals but they had no specific and i think fice has been in place since 1978 since the 70s right so almost 50 years and they couldn't give you one example not one example now they also expanded it after uh 9-11 and to to do the the program to go against civilians to spy on civilians and and actually that product came out of the judiciary committee here's another place where the speaker betrayed us uh fisa 702 was created by john conyers and jim sensenbrenner conyers was the chairman and sensenbrenner was the the ranking member and what mike johnson said this year was well even though the judiciary committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it i'm going to let the intel committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it it wasn't even their jurisdiction they have jurisdiction over fisa as long as it's for the cia but not for the fbi so that was frustrating and but it's shocking it's it's shocking it is shocking so he said you know like end of civil liberties level stuff so yes yes but it's not like he learned new information the skiff no he did not i was there so what so that's so that's like that's the problem right the problem the fact that i was there right so that's telling people on your show that i was there for three and a half hours and mike john go ask mike

johnson he'll say yep he was there three and a half hours so what is the truth what do you think changed um i think he's kind of a lost ball in tall weeds i think he's in a position of power he never imagined he would get to at this point in his life he's not done anything in private practice or political arena that's prepared him for this.

He took the job with a very small staff he didn't have people to put in all positions on the field and he had to accept a lot of suggestions in areas he didn't know a whole lot about although he gets no pass on fisa yes um he gets no pass on ukraine because he does as you pointed out he doesn't even know how many casualties have been incurred on the ukrainian side i mean he's the second person in line for president after kamala harris this is this is scary to me he's he's basically getting moved around it's great you said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it um but that itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation because i'm trying to be charitable i mean i got to go back to work with your life prepared you for this so just for those who don't know you went to mit your high school girlfriend joined you at mit you married her whilst while she was still there and then together you started a company based on an a very sophisticated invention that you came up with maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have you ran this company for a long time then you move back to kentucky and a lot of things happen and you end up running for congress so like that's not the background well um so nothing in the political arena but in my private life you know i raised 32 million dollars of venture capital and i swam with the sharks yeah like i had lots of moral dilemmas in the course of creating that company i could have taken money off the table and gone and done other things but instead i felt a commitment to my staff and to other investors i had investors who said if you'll just shit can that guy you hired as president we'll double our investment and i'm like no he's my partner i'm not like he helped me get to this point i'm not going to abandon him good for you and so um you know i had experiences in life that and then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm like so tell me about that so you live tell us about how you live and where you live because i think it's one of the most unusual things about you so i spent um you know i grew up as a hillbilly in eastern kentucky what county lewis county lewis county how many people in your town 13 000 people 13 000 cattle it's a huge land mass um and it's a great county there's it's one of the 21 counties that i represent it's actually the poorest county per capita income that i represent but it's the one i grew up in so it's very unlikely that the congressman for the district would come from the poorest county so i grew up as a little nerd i love taking stuff apart because i was bored there were no malls you couldn't ride your bicycle to any you know store to of and if you did you didn't have any money so i had to find things to do at home i took apart things built things entered science fairs built robots made it to the international science fair as a as a little you know hillbilly um won an award from nasa there and at the age 15 like i won the high school level awards um and got into mit never visited the campus didn't really have the money to go visit it um but i read about it there was no internet seemed like a good place i got there i'd lived in a town of 1900 people all my life and i i was there for six hours in cambridge massachusetts i cross uh massachusetts avenue they had a crosswalk and a stoplight you know i'd never really seen two of those things together i'd seen crosswalks and stoplights but so i walked through the the crosswalk and a car honked like that short little boston me and i thought oh my gosh i've been here six hours and already run into somebody from kentucky and i turned around and waved at the car as big as i could was it people from kentucky i don't think so i think they had one finger up waving back so uh and people are like that's not a true story i said not only is it true it took me a month to quit

waving at cars to beat like it was just 18 years of conditioning you thought beeping was hey hey there i mean that's what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for if you saw somebody and they couldn't see you through the windshield just toot the horn then you throw your hand up and wave and they roll down the window oh that's bob and if you didn't wave i mean you were pariah you were probably an axe murderer who was in our town right or you were just an a-hole i wasn't so i didn't want to be either so i waved at that car in massachusetts uh and and kept waving for about a month but anyways long story short as you said i invented a virtual reality device that lets you touch three-dimensional objects started a company raised venture capital did that for 10 years moved to the live free or die state new hampshire new hampshire my company was in massachusetts i couldn't move the center of gravity too far out of cambridge i got it up to 128 on wuburn and then i commuted 40 miles every day so i could live in a state that let you have machine guns and old cars and you know cool stuff redneck sports um the best the best sports so uh why'd you move back to kentucky after 10 years you know of of doing it it was you know we had three kids and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky. And we wanted to be near their grandparents.
Like both my parents were still alive. Both my wife's parents were still alive.
And you learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just, you know, trying to earn a living or whatever. And if you're lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that's where I think the generational stuff carries on.
Yes. And I had a a great relationship with my grandparents so we wanted our kids to live in that environment and we came back we bought the farm that my wife grew up on we built a house off the grid it runs on a wrecked model s tesla battery it's been running continuously for six and a half so you built the hat like who built the house i did like i we had an ice storm and a lot of trees fell down how big is the property it's um 1500 acres and it's wooded it's all almost all woods like and it's too steep i don't want you to think this is like valuable iowa no no no i know the part of the state yeah pack your lunch if you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge because you're going to be hungry by the time you get to the bottom.
You're going to be grabbing like tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding. But it grows trees and some of it is flat and, you know, in the bottom.
But this is not plantation land. No, these are hollers.
Yeah. So, in fact, interestingly enough, it's been a Republican county since the Civil War, even though all the counties around it have been Democrats since the Civil War.
Because of the geography. Because of the geography.
Yes. The topography did not allow for consolidation of farms.
Right. So there was no scale at which slavery made sense.
Basically, in your holler, you only had enough land that your family, if you had enough kids, could farm. Yes.
And so that's the way people grew up. And by the way it's kind of libertarian you know i'll do my thing in my holler you do your thing in your holler that's right if you need some help let me know i'll come over and help you southwest virginia is like this west virginia is like this yeah because the topography right it's the reason west virginia was republican and and seceded from uh virginia so by the way half my family's from west virginia and half my family's from kentucky my mammals who's 97 right now is still alive her grandfather was union soldier amazing isn't that crazy from west virginia from west virginia yeah she still lives in west virginia but like we're not that far away from the civil war no i know i know you you can talk to people who were alive when people who fought in the civil war i worked with a guy when i was at the newspaper in arkansas the guy shared a desk with bob salee from texarkana arkansas uh he said i knew confederate veterans that's in my lifetime i knew a man who knew confederate veterans or civil war veterans that's just absolutely crazy but my whole point of that was she's a republican she's been a republican my mammal since the civil war and like nobody marries into our family if you're a democrat you got to go see mamaw and she'll either approve or disapprove and she's been had pretty good luck at sniffing out the liberals yeah the liberals so so you had an ice store there

was an ice storm on your property how does that figure into your so i already had a bulldozer so i got a winch so i could drag these trees out i got a sawmill cut these into timbers built a timber frame house what kind of wood it's 17 kinds of wood because we did it was whatever fell down in the ice storm we've got oak yellow, yellow poplar, hickory beach. So hardwood hardwood.
Yep. And, um, then we wanted to be self-sustaining.
Well, how did she know how to timber frame? I found a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee and I bought it now. And I drove to Tennessee and took a one week class and we built a little shed slash cabin.
And I'm'm and I called my wife from a pay phone and I said I want to do this like instead of going to get a job we had just ended like left our company after 10 years of working there and we'd moved back to Kentucky and I said well just build a timber frame house like full-time yes woke up every morning had my coffee and started chiseling away or going up in the woods and dragging more trees out that had fallen down. So you built your house full time, like as a job every day.
And this is what our kids saw too. Like the flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek.
We call it a creek. What do you mean the flooring came out of the creek? There are rocks in the creek that are flat that they look like the stuff you buy at lowe's that's fake and i'm like oh this is what they modeled the fake stuff after we it's free let's just go pick it up now if we had probably have we're paying ourselves about three dollars an hour compared to if we had just gone to you know one of the box stores and bought it in terms of harvesting it but our kids i think in addition to being with their grandparents learned a big lesson that wow mom and dad are growing our food they are uh collecting the materials for the house here from the environment um that you don't have to rely you know neighbors are good though right we actually sent them to

public school which was and we let them ride the bus it was only three miles away but we figured the bus ride was important too because when you get to school they sort of separate you oh yeah but you've got can be 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody right i remember my son he was like 10 years old he traded some yugioh cards on the bus and uh for this like awesome the best yugioh card ever and he showed it to us and was a little plastic thing and we're like well did you want to take it out plastic no no he told me to leave it in here and we take it out and it was a fake and he was so mad but it turns out his dad had sold me a leaky bulldozer and said there was no leaks in it so like it ran in the family the same kid who stiffed my son and stiffed me on this dozer so where i mean but you learn these these are life lessons right they didn't lead a sheltered life and so we grew up you know they grew up there uh what percent of the timbers in the timber frame came from your property all of it in fact they never left the farm really so you milled it there milled it there chiseled it there made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails it was was a lot of work. Yes.
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How did you, you know, cutting a mortise and tenon, cutting a dovetail joint, these are, having done it, very difficult. how did you you know cutting a mortise and tenon cutting a dovetail joint these are having done it very difficult how did you learn to do that i kept telling myself look farmers without calculators pulled this off 200 years ago and so surely if i've got a computer and some you know electricity i should be able to do this as well um just dent of will but she'd been like a electrical engineer software programmer right but not uh nothing that scale yeah nothing i mean the the only thing i had built before that was a tree house right and even that didn't get finished so but i mean some of that stuff is very complex like actually complex timber framing some some of the joints are difficult to cut and the design itself is is complicated yeah you don't like you have to plan it all ahead you don't like hold the timber up there like you would a two by four we need a salt balloon framing right yeah totally right or oh that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle let's you know saw off a little bit more you can't do that while it's you know you're up in the middle of the air on scaffolding trying to get two pieces to fit together it's actually it's a fun math problem so i enjoyed it but is there something honest about it because all the fasteners are wooden too.
So it's one medium that you learn. There's no like bolts.
So it's all pegs. Nails, all pegs.
And once you realize that. So there are no metal fasteners in the frame? Correct.
None. I mean, we had to nail the floor.
I got it. And the walls on it.
Of course. But the frame itself.
No metal fast. Structure.
And it's 46 feet tall yes from the basement slab which i timber framed the basement too i still don't even know how to stick frame like i'm like well i'm going to build one house i'm going to learn one tech which is the framing that your house is if you're watching this it's stick frame it's stick frame so i was like well let's build the basement timber frame too and the dormers like if you paid a company to build timber frame they would stick frame the dormers well of course or or buy them and just bolt them on right yeah um i i timber framed that i'm just like let's just be pure the whole way and there's it's as an engineer i thought well i want to build a house with timbers i like how timbers look but but you know uh uh we'll just bolt them together we'll use iron brackets that's the best way to do it but in the course of this one week class i came to realize wow if you just let go and make everything out of wood it solves problems that you would create when you start using metal fasteners like wood shrinks right it takes like six or eight years for a big timber to fully dry out so how do you deal with metal fasteners and shrinking wood well the metal fasteners can rip out but if you build your fasteners out of wood like it can all work it moves together and there's you know if you go to germany you know there's homes that are four or five hundred years old to show that it can work so so all the timbers came from the property what about the stone there's a lot of stone in the house yep we we got some of it out of the creek we dug some of it out of the ground all of the stone is from the property how did you dig it out of the grant what does that mean you started a stone quarry on your on your own property in my front yard it's now a pond uh but i there was an old logging road and the erosion had exposed this layer of rock and i thought well that layer of rock must go pretty far so i started digging using a backhoe i started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock and i'm like wow there are lots of rocks here and i just i almost giggled out loud when i shoved on that layer of rock with my backhoe and all these rocks started rolling out in front of the blade and they looked like rocks you could buy at the store you know like well why would i go buy them like i can just like shove three tons of them out of here and you know a few minutes um and then i had people coming and visiting Obviously, we looked like a bunch of weirdos building this timber frame house up on the hill and people would come up and where were you living at this point we lived in a mobile home like we just pulled in a mobile home and we i told my wife we don't live in it for like six months we ended up two years in a 900 square foot mobile home with four kids no way it's but i mean it's actually not that bad you get to know your family really well you can hear it's like being on a boat yeah you try to go to the bathroom and if you're gone for more than five minutes like the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom is so thin you're just enjoying private moment there on the throne trying to read a magazine about timber framing or something right and you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying where'd daddy go where daddy where's daddy and then start trying to find daddy anyways it was a good comfy experience and now we actually kept the mobile home and we lease it to deer hunters really yeah it's a double wide and it's

so it's full of deer heads and bunk beds now and uh the hunters call it the lodge which we find amusing my wife calls it the double lodge since it's a double wide do you have a lot of deer on your land we have yeah trophy deer all over what do you charge to rent it just in case people are interested uh we we're booked up

you know i need weird internet people right yeah we are booked up yes so how long did it take you to finish this house it's not finished i've been criticized you know in the campaigns people try to use this against me some guy goes he doesn't even have doors on all his rooms he's some kind What a weirdo.

Great.

Well, we haven't made that door yet, right?

You're making the doors we have made a few of them yeah we're kind of breaking down now and buying a few doors now that the kids are gone so this that was like your kids wait so what year did you start how long has this process been so we started in 2003 so we're 21 years 21 years and we've been that off the grid that long too again now when you say off the grid what do you what do you mean we're not connected to any public utility not electricity not water not sewer not phone the the house is totally disconnected from everything did you build those systems yourself? Yeah. A of it's off the shelf stuff but some of it's improvised field expedient so so like for like the tesla battery the car battery that runs the house you can't buy that out of a catalog you go to a junkyard and say how much you want for that wrecked model s and like i'll sell you the battery for 15,000 why not why can't you just buy the battery separately they won't like tesla wouldn't sell me a power wall i would i tried to buy one for years why because it has to be connected to the grid for some reason their business model involves that so i was like all right well i'll get a battery how much different can it be from the batteries in their car? So I drove to Lake Lanier, Georgia with a little trailer, landscaping trailer.
The battery weighs, I think, 1,200 pounds. But here's the funny thing.
It's considered hazardous material if you pull it on a trailer. But if it's in a car, it's just fine.
So I hurried up and got back to kentucky with the trailer i don't have a hazmat license so it was a wrecked tesla model s and you pulled the battery out of it yeah and what'd you do with it disassembled it i paid 15 000 cash but this is like you know i'm i this probably like 15 or 20 years hopefully it'll last and so i brought it home took it apart actually i made a youtube video of this and what's kind of funny is i had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines you know they were leftovers and he gave to me and so like in the youtube video i try to make sure like i'm using big rubber gloves and stuff and i did like this fast forward you know of the disassembly of the

battery and i forgot like my two little boys are in there helping me and they don't have the gloves

on they haven't earned the right to have gloves don't put stuff on the internet like i once i i

have a tesla model s one of the very first ones made and i've got friends of coal license plates

on it like in kentucky you can get friends of coal it's a totally black coal coal coal

I'll talk to you later. One of the very first ones made.
And I've got Friends of Coal license plates on it. Like in Kentucky, you can get Friends of Coal.
It's a totally black license. Oh, coal.
C-O-A-L. C-O-A-L.
Yeah. Sorry.
Because in Kentucky, if you plug into the grid, that's likely where your electricity is coming. I would think.
Yeah. So I'm driving this thing back from D.C.
This was when gas was getting close to $5 a gallon. It was over $4 a gallon.
And I stopped in West Virginia charge my tesla at a supercharging station just to kind of troll people on the internet and i made sure to get a picture of my friends a coal license plate and i said i'm just charging up with coal here in west virginia and uh within 30 seconds i knew i'd made a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture and my tags were expired and they started tagging the kentucky state police my local sheriff the the dmv in kentucky like they were trying to get me in trouble and i'm like there's no way to stop this now and so they were relentless and um but then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months that i'd actually made it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes. Well, it's your win then.
Yeah. But in Kentucky, I think they make you go back and pay the old taxes.
Anyways, what I learned there is like search everything in the picture before you put it on the end. Well, yes.
And others with zestier personal lives than you have learned this the hard way. Mine's not seem you've got enough minor minor tax evasion issue here you don't have time to be too weird so so you get the tesla battery back to your off-grid house and what do you have to do because it's not made for this it's a car battery it's a car battery it's made to run 400 volts all of my existing system was made to run on 48 volts but there were 16 modules each nominally 25 volts and i realized if you put two of those in series you could make 50 volts so i put uh eight sets of two in series and so we put eight parallel a paralleled eight sets of two in series so i got 50 volts at lot more more amperage than what the tesla car would normally draw it was capable of doing that and how hard is that to do but well i mean it took a few days but it's lasted for six and a half years i wouldn't advise doing this at home like why put it in an outbuilding i mean if it catches on fire it's probably like chernobyl that mini series like don't look at the reactor god cannot put out he created lithium ion but he can't put the fire out if it starts so i would not attach it to your house mine is like is it attached to your house kind of yeah it's like a basement room that's not under the house like i don't want to get into everything under my house right now okay so my wife says our house is my science project and she's the mouse and she doesn't mind that but i keep rearranging the maze on the weekends when i come back from dc and then she has to find the cheese while i'm in dc but it's she's more like the astronaut i think in a rocket i think that's exactly she's the only same trust level required correct yes she trusts me while i'm in dc and i trust her to fly the house while she's in kentucky so what um she's also an mit graduate so i assume she has like kind of understands some of the stuff oh yeah yeah although she would like to have just one thing in the house where if something went wrong she could call somebody but she can't she's got to like call me and then i walk her through it by the way it's good like marriage security but it's just like she needs we ever if we ever broke up or if let's say she put something in my coffee and i didn't wake up you know day, she'd have a hard time running the house.
So you put the nodules, which is basically separate batteries, right? Okay, within the big battery. Then I put a computer on it, a Raspberry Pi, and I made a little graphic screen.
And the Raspberry Pi using an Arduino talks talks to the can bus which is a proprietary tesla communication system so i use the battery management system that's native to the tesla battery modules if there's a nerd listening to this this makes complete sense and they'll be like oh well why wouldn't you do that and everybody else is going to be like he's just bsing so did you have to add new software to this to run it i had to write software from scratch yeah but it's fun like this is what i do look i've been in congress for 12 years my brain has atrophied to the size of a walnut um it actually to a raisin and it it expands to a walnut if i can go home and do these projects and then i go back to dc and it's back down to the raisin i believe i believe that i don't understand how these projects work but i i know what brain atrophy looks like and i know that congress induces it it's not a worm it just shrinks so how does it work like it works great we can run the air conditioner like for the first 11 years we had lead acid batteries and they didn't work that great you had to add water to them oh for sure they put off hydrogen gas which is explosive i know they put off a sulfide gas that can kill you like lead acids are batteries are bad and they're like over 100 years old but by the way i love solar panels like republicans are like they look at me like you have solar panels you have an electric car like are you sure you're one of us i'm like well the solar panels are rocks that make electricity like they are amazing things they they take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use um so you could hate i tell republicans you can hate the subsidies you can hate the bailouts. You can hate the mandates.
I hate all of those things as well. But don't hate solar panels.
Don't hate the technology. Right.
Because it's actually given me given me and can give other people a license to be independent. So let's get specific about it.
So you have this this Tesla battery that allows you to do everything a normal house can do. You can run air conditioning.
You've got a dishwasher.

You've got washer dryer.

I'm assuming all this.

Four deep freezers, refrigerator.

Four deep freezers?

Full of peaches, beef, and chickens.

Running continuously.

Continuously.

So your power draw is significant on all those appliances, obviously.

Yeah.

And the battery handles it fine.

How much propane or how much diesel or what I assume you have a generator to recharge backup generator that runs occasionally in the winter but i keep every time so your solar panels recharge the battery yeah for nine months out of the year the backup generator doesn't run except for it's like test run every friday yeah yeah exactly when we bust out the machine guns like who's in the driveway okay back down to level one that's just the backup generator so your electricity is i mean as long as you know how to operate the system which apparently only you do but if you can do that then you're just living a completely normal life correct with electricity how do you do heat how do you heat your house so in one of the greenest ways possible. Like I think the whole carbon thing is a scam.
Of course it's a scam. But if you do care about carbon neutrality, I wish we had more carbon.
We need more CO2. Yeah.
And at periods in Earth's history, we had more CO2 and plant life was doing better. And we've seen plant life, we've seen the coverage of green on the globe increase as CO2 levels go up.
Crop production goes up as CO2 levels go up. But if you did care about CO2, I am using wood on my farm, like just trees that fall down.
I'm not even going out and cutting a living tree. There's enough trees falling down.
Deadfall. Deadfall.
That if I don't get to them, the termites do. That's right.
And they turn them into CO2 and methane. But I can get to them and cut them up and bring them to my house and burn them in a wood gasifying boiler, which is super efficient.
By the way, once you start cutting wood for heat efficiency, like if you figure out a boiler is twice as efficient, you can cut half as much. So wood, can you, because anyone who's made it this far in the interview is probably interested in wood gasification.
Can you explain what that is? How is it different from a normal wood fired boiler or wood stove? Yeah. And a normal wood stove, you, you put the wood in there.
It can be green. You, you light it on fire, you get it going and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot.
And a lot of smoke comes out especially when it's idling because it's an inefficient combustion process and it's at a relatively low temperature under let's say a thousand degrees right but in a wood gasifying boiler you get the fire started and it basically turns the wood into charcoal and drives the gases out of it into a secondary chamber that's ceramic because it's burning at over 1500 degrees so some of the stuff that what do you get wood to burn that hot you just you deprive it of oxygen at first and and get it hot and then you drive all the gases off and you put more oxygen in in that secondary chamber and it it looks like it's burning gas like it'll be a blue flame

um and then it'll turn into a yellow flame um it starts out actually and this is just oak maple beach this is just conventional firewood i burn near wood nearest wood to the house right like near what i mean i don't remember that near wood yeah near wood nearest you burn softwood in it You can but the bt again if you're doing this yourself oh care about efficiency like if you look at the old timers they were the greenest people on the planet right they didn't waste a thing and they figured out the most efficient way to do things because it was minutes out of their lives yes so you start figuring out how to be more efficient when you're trying to be self-sustaining so i've got on my twitter bio i used to say it may still say this on their greenest member of congress that doesn't mean i just got there and i'm green it nobody i never got any of the fact checkers to come after me on that nobody wants to fact check me because i probably am the greenest member of congress who's who is has self-sustaining food self-sustaining without externalities right uh self-sustaining power self-sustaining water so you heat with wood how much wood do you burn would you say a season the of this table, maybe four stacks of wood the size of this table. So this is about a quart.
A quart is four by four by eight. So it's like roughly that.
So four quarts a year. That's not much.
That's impressive. How do you get hot water? We've got three ways to make hot water.
When our geothermal unit's running in the summertime, doing the air conditioning, it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water we've got three ways to make hot water when our geothermal unit's running in the summertime doing the air conditioning it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water tank so we have free hot water from like may until september when the air conditioner is running and then in the winter when the boiler the wood boiler is running that makes hot water and then if there's ever not the air conditioner running or the boiler running we have an on-demand this is where we cheat on-demand propane hot water heater that makes up the difference amazing but you could pretty easily set up a wood-fired outdoor you could yeah but in in the summer again you get it for free from the air conditioning i actually have a fourth way to make hot water too um so when we're not connected to the grid a lot of people who have solar panels are connected to the grid and if they have extra power they sell it back right i'm always depressed when i have extra power my solar panels just turn off and i'm like run around turn on some lights you know turn on something i don't want to waste this free electricity so i got extra hot water heater elements that run on dc so that when the sun when our house is full the first thing it does is it tries to charge the tesla that's sitting in the garage so the tesla's sitting there at half full and a solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the Tesla charging.

Then when the Tesla gets full and the house battery is full,

I create hot water with the electricity.

So I've got like a fourth way to make hot water.

Hot water is almost as good as water.

I mean, if you've ever gone without water, you know it's bad. But going out without hot water is almost just as bad.

Yeah, I have experience with that yes where do you get your water so i dug a well um and dug not not drill dug it there's there are lots of old dug wells on our farm so i knew it could work yeah the way they would do it they would dig a big pit yes they didn't dig it just straight down they dug a big pit and then they laid up stones in a circle you know the stones you see when you look in an old well but then they backfilled the pit with stones so that extra area becomes like a reservoir and then they put dirt on top of that so that you know when a raccoon poops next to your well it doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir so i did a very similar thing but i hit uh bedrock and i borrowed a friend's jackhammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a jackhammer trying to get even deeper through the bedrock i finally took my friend's jackhammer back and said okay that's deep enough what was the jackhammer like i mean that's the best argument for for public health care that exists because um i don't i i have a new appreciation for somebody that's running a jack hammer those are those would wear your body out quickly like really quickly yeah did you lose a crown i did not lose a crown so does the does the well the dug well work it works um one month out of the year we're kind of short on water yeah august yes august how'd you know that have you ever i have a dug well lived in this situation yes i have a dug well so i'm aware of that but again you can serve right of course if you have if you're connected to city water and it seems what's on the other side is opaque to you you just use as much as you want and what happens is during those peak periods that's when the utility company has to work extra hard that's when the the price and the inefficiency goes way up is in those peak periods when people aren't cutting back in response to the supply because the actual cost of producing it isn't known when you're making it yourself it's known but i've argued that water and electricity even when they come from especially when they come from utilities should have variable pricing based on the instant the cost at that very instant to produce it and then you could have appliances not mandated but smart appliances if you're rich you don't care when the price of power goes up you don't know what it costs you don't know what it costs if you're poor and you got a little screen it says the power just went up you'll go turn it off right 100 you'll you'll say we'll we'll do the dishes tonight right when it's cheaper and if you're middle income you'll probably eventually the market will respond to this and automate these things so that you know if you know the price of electricity your appliance can know the price i don't want the utility company to know what you're doing with it of course not but you can have these smart systems that make a lot more efficient use of our resources so because you're not connected to the grid to any public utility at all i mean you're actually independent in a way that no one outside of alaska i've ever met is and it sounds like you're not giving up anything you're not living in a not too much there are some sacrifices like well you know if it's cloudy for a lot of days and hot we may turn the thermostat up yeah just so we don't have to hear the backup generator run that doesn't seem like a crazy sacrifice there's some people would think the instant they had to turn the thermostat from 72 to 75 was be screw it i'm out of here i'm going i'm going back to the grid it means that the state kind of has no control over your land correct they or me or so when i go to dc and they threaten me or try to bribe me it's like i know once friday comes i'm gonna be back on my farm and i don't need them like it's not that i don't want to do things for people i help my neighbors and my neighbors help me and i i want to you know do public service but because i have this comfort level that i'm going to go back home to this i don't need the job we're self-sustaining it gives you an extra dimension of independence i think when you're in dc what about food they can they starve you out i don't think so like they can cut off my fish supply because we don't raise fish and we don't raise pork but we raise chicken you know meat and eggs we raise beef and we usually raise a pretty good garden and i have an orchard uh peach peaches lots of peaches my first peach is going to be ripe here in a few weeks and my last peach will be ripe in september so i've planted 14 kinds of peach trees so they get ripe different weeks and they taste nothing like the cardboard peaches you buy at the supermarket So you don't need to leave actually your farm no are you trying to talk me out of like i mean this is a crisis i have some weeks i bet oh man on mondays it's like i you know you know you're going to get hit with a two by four as soon as you you know walk in the door in dc um it's like is it weird that i mean, I guess what I'm struck by, I don't live off grid, though. I do have an off grid camp, but the amount of skills you need to build something like that is, is really, really striking.
Like you actually have to know how to do things, complex things. I mean, timber framing is another level, but electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation.

Like you can do all of that, obviously.

So is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can't do shit, who can't operate a micro?

I mean, they're like actually incapable.

And maybe that's why they're in politics, so they canize their their self-loathing is that weird um i don't i really don't think about it that much good i don't think about it where'd you pick up plumbing skills so my rule is buy three books for everything um because you can you can go to a hardware store and buy a book on plumbing but i don't trust one book so you buy two books and then if the two books disagree what are you going to do well you got to have a third book so i've got three books on plumbing three books on wiring three books on septic systems three three books on your septic to roofing yep three i get three books on everything and you read them and i read them and then there's the code book which is like you know the the it's almost like international housing code thing that some municipalities have adopted and you have to abide by i just look at that as like a suggestion manual like so do you think now we're way in the weeds i don't know if anyone's watching but they're like four handymen carpenter general contractors are still in this but do you think that code which really determines how people live in this country the code it's on up to code is it is it real i mean is it knowing what you do about all those different trades, does the code protect people, actually? It protects the contractors. Well, I know that.
And so they help write it. The unions do.
So, for instance, the roofers union and the plumbers union, I think, have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible right because all the venting yeah all the vents right if you try to build a house to code you you likely to have four or five perforations in your roof i've noticed and and that keeps the roofers busy like they're guaranteed to get a call every few years to fix that leak and it's also very expensive it's it's fairly cheap to do roofing but it's all the exceptions that cost money and then if you're a plumber that's one more thing like all the flashing and all the every time you have an aperture in a roof yes like that's a vulnerability so my my roof has no holes in it like i looked at this i'm like well that's a good suggestion but who who benefits if i believe you vent your stove at the side of the building not the no no holes in my roof no holes out the side have you seen that opera house in uh i think it's sydney australia famous is it sydney or melbourne sydney okay the opera house yeah there's no holes in that there's bathrooms in there how do they do it they have the the one-way admittance valves like you have under your kitchen counter they have giant giant ones of those that work for the whole system. And they're not to code, but I think that's stupid because why would I want to put a bunch of holes in my roof? Well, I couldn't agree more.
I'm interested in this topic. But nobody else is now.
Well, but for the four people who are, I've always wondered that. Why with wood stoves? I live everywhere.
There's lots of wood stoves.ves and some of them I have wood stoves that vent out the side of the building like next to a window and then do an L up it's not quite as efficient you know because you've got to turn in the run but you don't have a hole in your roof and in a climate with like lots of snow for example you don't want any holes in your roof. Right.
But how do you vent your furnace, for example? So that I just run in a typical flue and it goes up in the chimney with my pizza oven flue, my wood cook stove flue, and my Rumford fireplace flue. So I have four flues through the chimney.
On the gable end? No, they're in the middle of the house. I put the chimney in the of the house because it it's a big thermal mass and i wanted to smooth out the changes in temperature in the house and so there's where i did accommodate one hole in the roof is the chimney because if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house there's no way to insulate it from the outside so but by the way let me say something.
I know there are some women watching this wondering, like, I want to live in a house like that. That sounds like a lot of fun.
Talk to my wife first. Occasionally, we have some crisis that I have to solve and become MacGyver.
So, the first time I got elected to Congress, for instance, the day before i went to go get sworn in the well pump failed and i'm like i can't leave my wife and four kids at home without water and we have a very unique well pump what do you mean by that well i didn't buy the one at the hardware store so so you couldn't go replace it. So I went down there.

I mean, what did you buy?

It's like in a catalog somewhere.

The engineer in me found the best one.

Okay, it's not the most common one, but I had to fix it.

So what I did is I found one of my drills, like you drill holes with, and I took it down to the well, and I took the motor off the well pump, and I chucked the drill to the well head and because it's not submerged it's off the side in a pump house and i wired this you know had an outlet on it but i just wired it into the well pump wiring and the drill pumped water for our house i believe that long enough for me to go get sworn in i've seen i've seen that i've seen drills run winches

yes well i forgot it was there like i did my congress thing for you had it on continuously yeah and then the the the accumulator uh in the basement that controls the pressure would turn the drill off and on whenever it needed more water pressure and so it ran continuously i forgot about I just got busy and like a year later a freaking water quit working again because the makita died right it was actually a milwaukee hole was the whole hog you know one of those yeah yeah yeah you know i totally do with the handle on the side yeah those are cool drills so you um last night i just want to end with this last night we were having dinner and which was really one of the most interesting amusing dinners i've ever had but you made reference to a story but you we didn't get it you didn't get a chance to finish it because i interrupted you but about putting new plumbing in a county jail i think we can tell that story yeah so quickly i got into politics because we were living off the grid and i read this little newspaper and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund this cronyism in the county the conservation district which was building stuff for themselves and not for other farmers they wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm right it wasn't really about conserving farmers are the biggest best conservationists there are so let's don't punish them anymore okay good call so i fought that tax and then i actually fought zoning in our county they wanted to zone our county i mean zoning is to keep the smokestacks out of the cul-de-sacs right okay my county didn't have any smokestacks and didn't have any cul-de-sacs right we did the the like the neighborhood in et you know that movie where the kids ride their bikes through the neighborhood we didn't have neighborhoods like that so we didn't need zoning but somebody thought if we zoned the county that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning it's like it's cargo cult no totally it's like saying we should import some homeless because then we'll have banks right right jp morgan will move here because in midtown they're homeless right so that was i was fighting that and writing letters to the editor and then um finally i quit fighting the guy who was doing all this he's called the county judge executive in kentucky like the mayor of the county and i decided to run against him so you've never been in politics never my life. Also, there was this guy named Rand Paul who was inspiring, who was taking on the establishment.
It was his first run for Senate and it decided to get involved in his race too. So just like with my house, I didn't go in partway.
I went in all in, okay, on politics one fall, actually one spring because I had to win the primary and Rand did too too and so um actually did a fundraiser for hand at my house when nobody wanted to do a fundraiser for ran paul because he was running against the establishment my house wasn't finished we weren't even living in it yet sorry little sidebar traipsed up from the double wide yes we went to the double wide and we said for a hundred dollars you can come to our pizza party. I did have the pizza oven working.
And you built the pizza oven before the bedrooms. Yes.
Priorities. That's right.
Had to test it out, make sure it was inhabitable. So the funny thing, too, we didn't have doors on the bathrooms at the time.
We had no doors. So we did run to Lowe's the day before paul came and put a door on the bathroom good call because i was like look this guy could be a senator someday and he might need to go to the bathroom and we need something more than a curtain here so we call it the ran paul door on the bathroom it's the one room that had a door from the very beginning anyways uh we did by the way also this was in january and

ran is cheap as hell he had a two-wheel drive suv so i had to plow all my driveway so that he could

get up there and the problem is it's gravel so i had to plow all my gravel off practically just to

get so for what it costs to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for rand paul i like my gravel

costs way more than that anyways i went all in on politics helped ran get elected and he's

Thank you. cost to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for Rand Paul.
My gravel costs way more than that. Anyways, I went all in on politics, helped Rand get elected in his primary.
I was on the ballot the same day in 2010, the primary, May 22nd, 2010. Rand was on the ballot and I was on the ballot, but I was running for this little county executive seat trying to take a Republican out because he's trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government and so i won the election and it was like the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse like it's a small town and if the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler which looked like the african queen right it was like you had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started the sheriff's office wouldn't be heated the clerk's office wouldn't be heated and my office wouldn't be heated if i couldn't get the african queen to start so anyways i it was like the dog that caught the bus and i had promised i wouldn't raise taxes and i was immediately confronted with all these problems that had accumulated over the years in our county government and the jail jailer came to me, who's an elected official in Kentucky.
His name's Chris. And he got elected the same day I got elected.
And he was all in on my, you know, let's reform this county. But he had some bad news for me.
By the way, the state government had sold the county government a bill of goods. They said, if you'll keep our state'll pay you 32 a day and you'll make all kinds of money and the county was a million dollars in debt because this did not work out and i wasn't going to spend another penny you know on this throwing good money after bad and but we had 30 30 state inmates who go out and pick up trash and you know mow around the courthouse and they they get real sweaty and the hot water heater had quit working at the jail oh and so the jailer chris comes to me and says um judge they call me judge even though i'm not an attorney it was the county judge executive he said judge i got some bad news he said what's that he said well hot water heater quit working on the state inmate side and i can't mix state inmates with local inmates you know you get murderers along with non-support you know for child totally in dui cases yeah it's like this we can't have them taking showers together it's not gonna work and i said okay we'll just buy another hot water heater and he said well i tried that i got a quote we only had one licensed plumber in the county and i said well what was the quote he said twelve thousand dollars i said i mean this is a small county for a hot water heater for hot water like all of our property taxes together were like four hundred thousand dollars i mean twelve thousand dollars for hot i'm not paying twelve thousand dollars for a hot water heater you tell that guy to get lost said, well, what are you going to do? I was like, I'll go buy one at the hardware store or something.
So I go look at this hot water heater at the jail. It is not the kind you buy at the store.
It's like a boiler almost. And it's fairly involved.
It's got like inch and a quarter copper lines. It's not household plumbing.
But I had three books on plumbing, plumbing right i felt fairly confident i said well if i can find one of these i'll put it in myself so i got on ebay and i looked for this model hot one there was one buy it now for 5500 and i'm like i can save the county like 6500 so i called an emergency meeting of fiscal court, brought in the magistrates, noticed it to the newspaper, did it all legally, and made a motion to buy it now on eBay. Then I hit the button.
I bought this hot water heater. They bring it in a tractor trailer.
I didn't pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates. The inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out and um there were three inmates in that closet right working on that hot water heater just demolishing everything so they dragged that thing out of there and i had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one in i'm like uh i only want one inmate in that closet with me fair the hot water heater needs plumbed i don't need plumbed so the other two inmates that were smelling pretty rank at this point i said you guys go strip the old hot water heater i want anything of value on that besides you're in here for stripping copper and other things.
You're good at this. We can do this, judge.
We know short iron's bringing this, 10's bringing this, copper will bring this, aluminum. They could quote every price at the salvage.
Seriously? Yeah. So I leave the two inmates stripping the old hot water heater.
And it had a computer on it and stuff. And I'm installing the new hot water water heater and i noticed for instance even like the the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gases from escaping like a safety device so i made sure to do it completely safe by the book or by the three books that i had and um i come out of the closet by the way there's like 30 inmates i had to walk by the rec room that had a piece of glass and they could all watch me changing this hot water heater and there's like 30 inmates like in disbelief with their hands and faces pressed to the glass like we have never seen a county judge executive to get a callous on his hand or do anything so uh i go back out and the inmate said, we got everything of value value there was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there they had stripped the copper they had stripped all of the useful iron off of it and i said guys you left the most valuable thing on it and they said no judge we've done this all our lives we stripped these things there's nothing on here they'll bring anything down at livingston's that was the junkyard place recycling place and um i said no you left the most valuable thing i said come over here and they walk over and i said you see this lime green inspection sticker get it wet and peel it off and glue it on the new hot water heater remember i refused to hire the only licensed plumber in the county they go judge you could go to jail for this i said i'll have a hot shower won't i you actually did that i did that and the only reason i'm telling you this publicly is this was how long was it like 15 years ago or something and uh no 14 years ago i think the statute of limitations you know practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building is probably expired if not the doj will be at my house as soon as this airs but they have also since closed down the jail like a few years later they it was a good move Did they take the water heater with them i have you know it's on my bucket list it may still be in there so what are they using it for now it's uh i think it's just vacant maybe they'll use it for drug rehab or something at some point which would make more sense did it work did your oh yeah oh yeah it booted up the computer came on and everybody got i mean 30 inmates just waiting to take a hot shower and it worked and worked and worked until they shut the jail down so incredible but uh anyways that set the tone like you could say well you're the executive of the county and you shouldn't be wasting your time on that but i i mean i had four hours of effort in and I saved the county $6,500.
And I'm like, no, this is worth my time. And it also shows the inmates like, okay, we're buying you $1.50 lunches instead of the $2 lunches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system.
Totally. And they were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change the hot water heater but it also set the tone for the sheriff and the county clerk and everybody else who sees that and it's like man he is a cheap bastard like i'm not going to go ask him at the next fiscal court meeting for anything why don't you tell the story to apac and maybe they'll leave you it's like it's not personal i'm not against you or your country i just don't want to spend more money by the way i'm traveling there would be some plumbing lobby against me next week after they see this well the one thing i know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby i will one more story about lobbies uh so i introduced this uh raw milk bill in congress and i you know food freedom empower small farmers it's more nutritious i thought there was nothing to hate about it i got 20 co-sponsors i put it in the hopper i got my hr number and that day the milk lobby comes after me like they said there wouldn't be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were going to die from raw milk if my bill passed.
And this is kind of weird. You've got a lobby going after its own product, the milk lobby.
So my wife saw all these things come up on her alerts on her phone, and she texted me. She was worried about me, and she says, OMG, I didn't realize the lactose lobby was this intolerant.
that's brilliant you said that that's pretty awesome

thomas massey thank you hey thank you tucker amazing thanks for listening to tucker carlson show if you enjoyed it you can go to tucker carlson.com to see everything that we have

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