American Thought Leaders - Sen. Johnson: Why Trump Needs a ‘Secretary of Information Extraction’ to Restore Transparency

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).In the next Congress, Johnson will become chairman again of the homeland security committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond.In this wide-ranging episode, we dive into the future of the Make America Healthy Again movement; what Johnson believes key steps are for the incoming administration to restore transparency, scientific integrity, and small government; and why Congress needs to retake its oversight authority.“Our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. ... We’ve got to fund government. But then once we funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. … What we passed, did it actually work?”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

As I'm meeting with them, we're talking about, you know, what's going to be our strategy. Now, I've said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint. We're nominated as the Secretary of Information Extraction. As I'm talking to these people, if I have one concern is they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of providing this information. As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I'm sitting down with Ron Johnson, Republican Senator for Wisconsin. In the next Congress, Johnson will again become chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security

and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond. Johnson has been a strong proponent of MAHA, or the Make America Healthy Again movement. What you need at the top of these agencies are people who have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do. You've got to win the political argument. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.

Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse, job numbers are a lot worse than previously forecast, and many Americans are worried about a coming recession. But there is one way to protect your savings. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your RRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the highest rated firms in the country with an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients.

If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free silver and a free safe on qualifying orders. Call 855-862-3377. That's 855-862-3377 or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text AMERICAN to 65532. Again, that's 855-862-3377 or text American to 65532. Senator Ron Johnson, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Thanks for having me. You've been a supporter, proponent of a number of the prominent Trump nominations for the

incoming administration. I guess I want to start, what do you see as the real promise of this administration? Well, first of all, I think the primary thing that President Trump promised in the campaign, in a macro sense, was he was going to focus on the working men and women of this country. What do they need to support their efforts? How can he limit the damage that government does to those individuals? Then, obviously, secure the border, make America great again, make America healthy again. I mean, those are all, from my standpoint, subcontexts of the overall effort,

is focus on the people that actually built this country and that we're going to need to rely on to make America great again. These are all big categories, right? But where do you see are the biggest pressure points, the biggest change that needs to happen? And is it even possible? Some people are asking this question. Well, I was saying earlier, if I have a mission as U.S. Senator, it's to wean as many Americans off the concept that the federal government can solve their problems. The federal government is singularly incapable of solving problems. It creates or exacerbates more problems than it's ever going to solve. Take a look at how it mismanaged the extracted earnings in Social Security

and spent all that money. It's gone, and now that trust fund is going to be depleted in the next 10 years. So the federal government was primarily designed by the genius of our founding fathers to protect and ensure our liberty and freedom, not crush it by over-regulation, over-taxation. And so to me, that's the main thing that President Trump is coming into office to do. That's what DOGE is all about. Take a look at how the federal government is crushing the American people, the people that build this country, and how can we get government off their

back so that they can do what they do best, which is utilize that freedom, which is the essential ingredient. It's what our ancestors used to build, you know, to dream and aspire and build and create this marvel of a country. You know, how can we unleash the entrepreneurial spirits, the creativity, the work ethic of the American public, and create incentives for people to get off the couch, reengage in the workforce, and help us rebuild this country. Let's talk about a few of the candidates. You've been a big supporter of the Make America Healthy Again idea, and that's a great slogan.

Bobby Kennedy, Jr., he used to be the Health and Human Services Secretary. What actually needs to happen there? We'll talk about this repeatedly as we go through this process, but I come from a manufacturing background where you're solving problems all the time. There's just a very well-defined process you go through in solving a problem. It starts with admitting you have one. Which is often times a very big step. The next crucial step is properly defining it. Once you've done that, now you need to start looking at the root cause.

What happens in Washington, D.C. is we generally start with somebody's solution. It's a completely flawed solution or it exacerbates the problem. And, you know, we look at scores. We look at, you know, the political realities. Can you get this passed? Who's going to vote for it? As opposed to, you know, let's go back to the basics. So when it comes to make America healthy again, I think you have to understand we have a problem. And I think the American people understand we do. You have this explosion in chronic illness. And again, if you and all you have to do is look back in history and take a look at the stats, whether you're talking about all the

autoimmune, I mean, the obesity, autism, these things have exploded. I'm almost 70 now. You look back to when I was a child, I'd never heard of things like lupus or autoimmune disease or autism, or I mean, never heard of any of these things. So the American people are asking the question, well, what has caused this? Now, people like Bobby Kennedy who have asked that question, positive theories, I mean, they get ruthlessly attacked because we held that, and I think you were there, you were certainly aware of the public event I held the end of September with Bobby Kennedy and Casey and Callie Means and a number of nutritionists that have social media platforms. Of all the excellent testimony, I thought the best snippet came from Dr. Chris Palmer.

He's a psychiatrist, does a lot of work on nutrition impact on mental health. And his statement was, to paraphrase, they, whoever they is, they don't want to discover the root cause. That's a profound statement, but it's 100% true. Because if we discover that something causes autism or something causes obesity or something is causing all this thing, that's going to disrupt mult-billion dollar business models. So those people who are engaged in those multi-billion dollar business models, they don't want to discover it. They don't want their ingredient or their activity to be implicated or proven to cause

all these ailments driving up our cost of healthcare. So what they figured out, that's kind of the basic definition of the problem. You have science that's been corrupted, and you also have these federal agencies who are tasked with protecting public health, thoroughly captured by the companies that they're regulating. I come from the private sector. I have no problem with big business. I mean, big business has done all kinds of wonderful things. Big ag culture has fed the world, okay? But they've also, because government grows, okay, government regulates, government probably over-regulates, and so these businesses naturally figure out, well, how can we survive in this environment

of over-taxation, over-regulation? Well, they go beyond that. I mean, they get smart enough to realize, oh, not only can we survive in this, but we can turn that regulatory agency to our advantage and to the disadvantage of our competitors. And when you're turning it to the disadvantage of your competitors, you're crushing competition, and all of a sudden the consumer gets crushed. So to me, the problem is government. You know, power, government is power. Power corrupts. And so that power has been corrupted. We need to uncorrupt it. And, you know,

Eisenhower warned us in his farewell address. I mean, the primary warning, the famous one, was against the military industrial complex, which we have not taken seriously. And it has led us in all kinds of foreign policy debacles. But the second warning was government funding of science and research. He said it would produce a scientific and technological elite that would drive public policy. Anthony Fauci, you know, Francis Collins, you know, what we saw during covid but i would go beyond that and say it corrupts science when you pay for research you're going to get the result you want and so fauci got the results he wanted and he doled out billions of dollars for research big pharma they're the ones funding the studies they're the ones that hold the data. Now, they've so corrupted the process, for example, in the Pfizer injection. They've so corrupted the agencies that it was the FDA

that went to court to delay the public revelation of the trial data for 75 years. Now, I'm sure Pfizer would have gone to court as well, but they didn't have to. The FDA did it for them. The FDA should have been all about transparency. They should have been releasing that trial data as they were receiving it, so that not only their experts could look at it, which I doubt they did, and that's why they're covering it up, but the medical community could have looked at it, and they would have whoa hang on here there are more deaths in the trial group than there are in the placebo group these deaths aren't being reported on time we now have evidence of myocarditis a few months into the general administration of these these injections but all that was hidden and they continued to try and hide it so again that it's it's it's the corruption of science and i think that's bobby kennedy's first task is to bring

integrity back to scientific research across the board and then we need to end the corporate capture of these federal agencies um and that corruption as well and that's a big task because we're up against as you as we all know from covid those of us who are fighting that same battle we're up against powerful forces these guys have all the money they control the narrative I mean quick aside I'll quit my filibuster here yeah I'm a private sector guy I was always I never would have thought I would come in you know on the side of banning Big Pharma from advertising. Because it's a free market.

I mean, that's their form of speech. But when I witness what Big Pharma is using those ad dollars for, it's not to push a drug. I mean, you see those ads. You have no idea what the drugs are for. You've had a bunch of happy people playing with their dogs at the beach or whatever. But then you listen to the 30 seconds. You don't listen to it because you tune it out. Of the unbelievably awful side effects of those drugs,

there's no way somebody trying to sell a product would run an ad like that to actually sell it, to convince somebody to take it. The only reason they spend billions is to capture the narrative. And that's what they did during COVID, which is why they were able to sabotage early treatment, which I believe left, you know, result in the deaths of unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people lacking early treatment, things like ivermectin that worked. Okay. So we've seen, you know, we have, we have evidence of it. I think the American people or a lot of them saw it. A lot of people had their eyes opened. And so that's why there's such a great deal of support for Bobby Kennedy's confirmation from the general public.

Now, again, the vested interest, they're going to come out of the woodwork. I mean, they are going to be relentless. And they're, you know, the people that are captured by them in the media, whether they realize it or not, they're doing their job as well. So that's, I think, going to be one of the more challenging ones. But in the end, I think Bob Buchanan will prevail because the American people, in a completely non-partisan way, supports what he's trying to do here. You know, the thought that came to my mind as you're describing what needs to happen, is it even like make the agencies great again or make government great again? No, please, no.

Make government small again. The genius of our founding fathers was they came from dictatorial monarchies, totalitarian regimes. But they realized, men and women, we're not angels. If we don't want to live in anarchy and chaos, we need some governing authority. But they realized that governing authority would be, by and large, something to fear. It had to be limited. It had to be contained, which is, again, the genius. They've developed this system of government.

We have three branches that were supposed to jealously guard their own constitutional authority and power. So that the other two branches wouldn't eclipse that their branch in terms of ruling the nation. And they also create a constitution that enumerated what the federal government could do. Unfortunately, particularly during the FDA's FDR's New Deal, the federal, busted out of those, the constraints of the enumerated powers. And now the federal government is massive. Congress, because a bunch of wimps that don't want to be held accountable, they've willingly over the decades given their constitutional authority over the executive branch.

So we don't pass conscriptive laws or prescriptive laws anymore. We pass these frameworks with a really nice name, like Patient Protection Affordable Care Act. Didn't either. It's like, here, administration, give us 20,000 pages. You fill in the blanks. You protect patients. You make health care affordable. Of course, they didn't do it. So from my standpoint, Congress has willingly given up a lot of its constitutional authority. We don't have three co-equal branches of government anymore. The executive is probably the most powerful combined with the courts. Congress is just a shadow of itself.

We've let our oversight authority atrophy. We don't enforce it. I intend to if I have support of my conference. Well, okay, so that's actually very interesting. Let's talk about that, because this is something that, frankly, isn't discussed as much prominently as we're looking at these various cabinet appointments and so forth. What is it that Congress needs to do to play its role, as you're describing, really? We need to really understand that our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. Yeah, we've got to fund government, but then once we've funded it,

we need to take a look at what we funded. Did what we passed, did it actually work? So, again, I'd be a big proponent of splitting the appropriation process in half or maybe even thirds and appropriate either six or four accounts a year and then spend the next two or three years or the next year or the following year doing oversight over what we appropriated. I mean, that would be a rational system here, okay? But we absolutely have to do far more investigations. We have to take that oversight capability seriously.

But evidence that we don't, I mean, I will become chairman of the permanent subcommittee of investigations. It is the premier investigatory committee, subcommittee of Congress. We have the strongest subpoena authority of any committee or subcommittee in Congress. I mean, the House has theoretically the same, but they generally have to go through the Speaker's office. I don't. If I decide to issue a subpoena, I notify the chairman of the full committee, which I used to chair, and then I just issue the subpoena. But that premier investigatory body has a huge

budget so i have five staff i i have five investigators now they're good they do a lot of really good work but five to do oversight investigations on a federal government that spends almost seven trillion dollars and employs a couple million people. I mean, it's literally a joke. Can that be changed? I hope so. But, again, as you well know, my areas of concentration have not really been all that particularly popular with my colleagues. I mean, for example, I couldn't get the support of all the Republicans on my committee when I chaired the full committee because I had to get a vote to get a subpoena to subpoena the Bidens. It was viewed as too political. I was accused of,

in public hearings, of misusing committee funds with my investigation of the corrupt Biden crime family. Now, had we been able to pursue that, had I gotten those subpoenas, had we gotten the documents we needed, history might have been changed dramatically. We probably wouldn't have the open border. Joe Biden probably would not have won the election. We would have obtained the Hunter Biden laptop well into 2020. Remember, McIsaac, when he turned that over to the FBI, the FBI on the way out the door said, it's our experience that people don't talk about these things, don't get hurt, don't get in trouble, whatever, you know, I'm paraphrasing.

When Senator Grassley and I issued our report at the end of September, which laid out, I mean, you don't need more evidence in terms of corruption in the Biden crime family. These millions of dollars coming in for only one purpose, you know, political influence, political corruption.

John Paul McIsaac offered us that laptop the day after we issued that report. He finally felt safe enough to offer that computer because he took the warning from the FBI seriously. Now, because we had obtained an unsolicited briefing by the FBI saying we were targeting Russian disinformation in August, that was a pretty odd story to us. It's like, well, I mean, that could be a Russian plant. I mean, who knows what's on that? So we did our due diligence. We're very thorough investigators. We did our due diligence. We went to the corrupt FBI. We said, what do you know about this? I mean, is this stolen

property? What do you know about it? Mum was the word. They gave us a runaround for weeks. Even though they had that laptop, they had authenticated it, they wouldn't tell Chairman Grassley and Chairman Johnson. They wouldn't tell us, we've got it. We took possession of it in December. It's authentic. There's no problem in you accepting that. That's what they should have told us the day we contacted them. They didn't.

So MacGyver got impatient, gave it to Rudy Giuliani's attorney, and he turned over the New York Post, and the rest is history. And then what's even, I think, the most important part of that story is the fact, then, that Anthony Blinken, our current Secretary of State, working in the Biden campaign,

used his contacts in the intelligence community, former Deputy CIA Director Mike Morrell. Hey, can you help us out here? Can you write a letter and cast doubt on this Hunter Biden laptop? So that's where that letter came from, signed by 51 former intelligence officials, said that that laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian information campaign. That letter was a U.S. intel information campaign, and it worked. It was the greatest example of election interference in my lifetime. Thoroughly corrupt and changed the course of history. So you would like to see proper oversight over the FBI going forward.

So tell me what you think about the process, confirmation process for Kash Patel. So I had this conversation with Kash, and obviously we worked with him when he was working in the Director of National Intelligence Office. And he helped us get documents, but we couldn't get all of them. But I think Kash, very intelligent, says he wants to concentrate on fulfilling the agenda, fighting crime, restoring integrity to the FBI, which means probably decentralizing it again. What has led to this corruption is they took all these decisions that used to be run at the branches, independent of political influence here in Washington, D.C. They moved people and the decision-making process to the political leaders of the FBI in Washington, D.C. So that corrupted the process. So what Cash wants to do is, again, go back to an FBI that has greater integrity, a single system of justice, not a dual system.

And from a standpoint of looking back, which we have to do, just open up the information, provide congressional committees with the information we need for our oversight attempts. And as we do that oversight, if we see criminal behavior, we can refer that criminal behavior for potential prosecution to the attorney general. I think that's a very common sense approach. Certainly delivers on President Trump's promise

when he said, no, our retribution will be success. You know, he's not looking back. Look what he did when he won first one in 2016, 2017. He announced, listen, we're not going to prosecute Hillary Clinton, although I think he could have successfully. You know, what she did was a crime. OK, I was investigating it. The minute President Trump said that we're not going to do that, that's what they do in third world countries, we're moving on. I moved on. We dropped our investigation, although with my five staff members, we're the ones that uncovered all the editing of the James Comey exoneration memo, where they turned grossly negligent, which was a criminal term, to extremely careless.

I mean, Comey actually wrote a memo that was very incriminating. It would have been very hard not to prosecute her. So anyway, that's the approach. And I think that's just going to be true for Bobby. I think Pete Hexeth, they're looking forward. They've got a big mess to clean up. They're going to clean it up when it comes to looking back and holding people accountable. I think they're going to clean it up. When it comes to looking back and holding people accountable,

I think they're going to pretty well rely on providing us documents, opening up their agencies, making them transparent, which is what the American people should expect, and then have Congress do our oversight work. I just need resources. So write your senator. Provide Johnson the resources he needs. That's interesting. So it would take a vote of the Senate

to strengthen the investigation subcommittee. Yeah, I mean, we need resources. Yeah, listen, I understand how the public is not a real fan of Congress. I'm not a real fan of Congress, okay? But we actually do need funding if we're going to do these things. I can't, as an investigatory body, compete with, let's say, the Mueller probe, where they spent, what, $30, $40 million exercising their lawfare? How much did Alvin Bragg spend? I mean, all these other these agencies, executive agencies, they's just got millions pouring out you know we're pretty constrained i mean again i i get i get less than a million dollars for my subcommittee now when i

was chairman i gave rob portman who was chairman of the supreme subcommittee a million bucks when i became the ranking member i lost the chairmanship you know we lost the majority i timed out of chairmanship uh you know gary peters didn't want me to continue my investigation, so he dramatically cut back the amount he allocated to his member. Now, Rob Portman didn't have to follow suit, but he did. So cut the budget of PSI. And it hasn't been restored by Rand Paul. So hopefully Rand will. You know, something just strikes me as I'm listening to you speak, it would be interesting for, I'm wondering to myself if these agencies, you were talking about how power is

inherently corrupting, right? Could it be possible that these agencies will actually ask for oversight? Because it doesn't seem like something that would normally happen, right? Oh, no, that's one of the reasons I'm very enthusiastic about these nominees. They are asking it. As I'm meeting with them, we're talking about what's going to be our strategy. Now, I've said publicly what President Trump really needs to appoint

or nominate is the Secretary of Information Extraction. As I'm talking to these people, if I have one concern, they may be a little bit too optimistic of how capable they will be of providing this information. I went down to Mar-a-Lago a couple springs ago, this was before President Trump was our nominee, really trying to determine,

did he have a full grasp of how his first term was sabotaged, undermined from within? I think he does. And I think that's, you're seeing that being reflected now in these appointments. That, of course, you know, the establishment here hates because these people are articulate fighters. That's what they don't want to see in these agencies that we you know trump needs people who can articulate what they want to do in these agencies that are willing to fight for it that aren't going to be you know tender flowers and wilt you know when they start getting criticized by by the

establishment which is the the legacy corporate media you know, something struck me when I was interviewing Seb Gorka the other day, which was that it seems to be like the president is picking, almost across the board, strong communicators for these roles. Do you agree with that? Yes, yes. And he needs them. I think people will, again, the establishment are going to look at, well, he doesn't have a background in X, Y, or Z. He can hire the expertise in X, Y, and Z. What you need at the top of these agencies are people who, again, have the willingness to fight, have demonstrated their willingness to fight, but can also articulate what it is they need to do.

You've got to win the political argument. I think that one of the greatest things that this Trump administration has going for it is the alliance now with, for example, Elon Musk. Conservatives, we've never had the vast bulk of the media telling the truth or certainly not promoting what we're trying to promote. We're always in conflict with the media. They're always doing everything they can to pick apart anything we want to do. Now, for the first time, it's going to be, I think, promoted what we need to do. The fact that we are $36 trillion in debt. The deficit is almost $2 trillion,

that we're spending $7 trillion and so much of it's being wasted. So now you've got an advocate like Elon Musk, who is, from my standpoint, a genius at organizing and efficiency. In conference, I've quoted his idiot index. Again, I come from a manufacturing background. This really resonates to me. What the idiot index is, is you'll take a look at a product and say, what is the raw material cost of this product? Let's say in this thing, it's 10 bucks. Well, and that thing costs a hundred dollars. Well, the idiot index is 10. You take the selling price versus the raw material cost. The higher the idiot index, just as an engineer, the greater opportunity for dramatically decreasing the cost. That's what we do here in America. We make things more efficient. You know, 100 years ago, what, maybe half of America was involved in agriculture.

Now it's a single digit percent. That's called progress. Now, I bemoan the loss of the family farm. I think we want to maintain that tradition, but we ought to celebrate the fact that we're not saddled with half of our population just figuring out how we can feed ourselves. We're a very small fraction of our population feeding the world, and the rest of us now can create all kinds of really great products and services that we all value. I actually want to come back to that in a moment. But how do you react to Senator Warren's assertion that there's too many conflicts of interest on Elon's side with respect to the future administration? I mean, the CFPB is her brainchild. I would say something, unfortunately, the Supreme Court didn't agree that it was completely unconstitutional.

She's a nice person to greet in the hallway, but her ideology is not what America wants to adopt. Maybe I'll ask the question differently. There are possibilities of conflict of interest. Who doesn't have a conflict of interest? Literally, who in the world doesn't have a conflict of interest? Literally, who in the world doesn't have a conflict of interest? I think they need to be exposed. Be transparent about the conflict. Be transparent about it.

Again, that's why, for example, campaign finance. I would allow unlimited contributions to a campaign. So it's accountable, but it'd have to be revealed immediately. I mean, as a candidate, you want to accept a multimillion-dollar contribution from one person. My guess is that'd be not working to your advantage in a campaign. The public would know about it. That's far better than the system we have right now, where those multimillion-dollar donations are going to the campaign committees,

where the real corruption occurs it's not the five or ten thousand dollar donations individual members that really cause corruption it's the million dollar the multi-million dollar donations going to the you know i'll say it like the senate leadership fund you know and and the democrats equivalent i mean those are the people that are at the table when these 1,500-page or 2,000-page bills are being written. I'm not at the table. I don't get to see these things until we're going to vote on, you know, classic example, the CR that we're going to be voting on the next couple of days. 1,500 pages. I have no idea what's in it. We'll get a summary, but know the uh corporate transparency act or whatever that thing was called um that was slipped into an ndaa it's an awful piece of legislation uh apparently i'm

hearing in this cr we're going to delay its implementation by a year why don't we just repeal it's awful it's been overruled by the court. Why is it awful? It's going to impose a regulatory burden on businesses. It's going to be crushing. Nobody wants to comply with it. There's no reason for it. It's such a government overreach, which is, I think, what the court ruled to stop its implementation. So Congress ought to recognize that we slipped it into one bill. Let's slip its repeal into this one well the the question i have is this i mean you're i'm from everything i'm hearing and everything i know about you you're a champion of transparency yeah but this transparency act

isn't about transparency that's what you're saying no not that is intrusive i mean transparency in government not ordinary citizens again Again, we have constitutional amendments protecting us against unreasonable search and seizure. I would consider this an unreasonable search and seizure where you've got to disclose all these things to the public. You're a private citizen. You're running a private company. You know, fellow citizens don't need to know everything about your business. That's that's an unreasonable search and seizure No transparency is about government What government is doing we need to be transparent?

So again, what government is forcing is an unconstitutional transparency on its citizens Well at the same time We're not going to give you information on how we arrived at that decision. We're not going to give you the data that you know We're forcing that farm-suit company to give to us. We're going to go to court, and we're going to delay the disclosure of that for 75 years, well after we're dead and gone. So, no, it's transparency in government, not forced unreasonable search and seizure of the American public.

You know, something I was thinking about earlier is, I became familiar over the past few years with the concept of subsidiarity and governance. Basically, the idea that you give the governance of any issue to the smallest possible unit that can handle it. I haven't heard this discussed. I have heard discussed by Trump, 10 regulations must be removed for any new regulation to be added. That's kind of up the ante. Yeah, we had the one-in-two rule. He exceeded that.

I think at one point, his chief of the arrival, Chief Assembly 1-22, gone for every one. I can't remember the exact figure, but it was massive. And to my mind, it was that deregulatory effort. Again, that doesn't mean remove all regulations. I mean, there are things the federal government should do. But because they do all these other things, they do what they should do very poorly, or they don't do them at all. But no, I mean, the vision of our founding fathers was a federated republic

of sovereign states, government close to the governed, where it's more accountable, it more efficient more effective so i mean schools i mean the education for our children ought to be occurring at the local level as much as possible funded at the local level and from my standpoint the only role the state ought to play in that is making sure that you know the funding is is equally distributed so all child has an equal opportunity in terms of good education. What roles does the federal government have in that? I suppose there could be some disparity in states, rich states versus poor states. Maybe there could be some leveling there. But otherwise, there should not be a Department

of Education. I hope that is one promise that President Trump delivers on, ending the Department of Education. But again, our form of government was supposed to be most governing occurring in the states and the federal government doing only a very few things that are enumerating the Constitution. That's why I have in my office stenciled on the wall the Tenth Amendment, which is impossible to memorize because it's written in 17th or 18th century prose. But it basically says the Constitution grants governing authority primarily to the states, to the federal government only as enumerated in the Constitution, very limited. The rest of governing authority should occur in the states, but the power resides in the people. So in the end, subsidiary, we are the sovereign, each individual citizen.

And federal government has formed primarily to ensure our freedom, protect our freedom, and protect us. Safety, security, secure borders, you know, defense of the nation. And local government, state government, I mean, they're there to actually protect our persons in terms of law enforcement. I mean, most laws, most criminal penalties should be state penalties. We've criminalized way too many things at a federal level. Shouldn't be involved that way. Leave it up to the states. You know, it's interesting about this protection. I'll just jump into this very briefly. We've been involved that way? Leave it up to the states.

It's interesting about this protection. I'll just jump into this very briefly. We've been covering at Epoch Times a lot of the Chinese Communist Party's attempts to silence its critics here in America. This goes under this rubric of transnational repression. I think the Biden administration is actually trying to tackle that somehow with some new approaches. But how should the government fit into it? I'll give you a few examples. One example is there's a young woman from Hong Kong who got asylum here in America who has a bounty on her head and lives under that rubric. We have all sorts of examples of what appears to be lawfare and utilization of media by the CCP against Falun Gong.

We have a whole bunch of different examples of this happening on the Chinese side, frankly, other nations even as well. So what role should government have in this sort of scenario? Well, again, it needs to protect the citizens of this nation and people that are under its governing authority, and that include people that are here legally. You know, we have laws against vigilantism. You can't be a vigilante and take the law into your own hands. So that means China can't send in its operatives here to enforce its laws so those operatives we should find them and arrest them and then in our foreign policy be very blunt in terms of gotta knock that off

you know quit stealing our stuff you know quit in you know quit sending over your extra legal vigilantes here uh can't do that and again china china's a problem uh the chinese people aren't again we were talking about that earlier too i mean i think our foreign policy has lost sight of the type of diplomacy we need to engage in in terms of recognizing respecting the people of these countries and pushing back against their governments that are doing things that are harmful to the world order. Now, the same, we can't impose our will. I mean, at certain points, say, okay, you're the governing authority of that nation. We need to respect that.

We're not going to go to war because you're not doing things the way we want you to do. We certainly can, for example, in world trade organizations, have alliances with other people that want to engage in world trade organizations, you know, have alliances with other people that want to engage in free trade and will push back against people who are violating trade agreements that are, you know, using industrial engineering and state power that are destroying industries in the rest of the world. I mean, that's a problem. That's one of the real problems we have with China is they're, you know, they're investing massively in things like, for example, steel production is probably the best example. Destroying steel industry throughout the world.

We all need to be able to make steel. We can't rely on only being able to. So that's a difficult issue to deal with. That's probably the best use of a tariffs in as intelligent a way as possible because tariffs are a real double-edged sword. There's a cost to implying them. You've certainly, I'm sure, been briefed on this, but this whole salt typhoon hack, we're incrementally learning more and more about how the Chinese regime has basically got open access to our telephone networks, to the point where we have to use encrypted apps

to not be listened to by the Chinese. That's not an act of war, apparently. I don't know what it is. Well, you call it an act of war. What's going to respond? Well, no, no. I'm asking. It seems extreme, right? That's what I'm saying respond so no no i'm asking i'm just i'm asking it seems no it seems extreme

that's what i'm saying china is a real problem okay um and there's no equivalency here whatsoever but you know in using all this technology we are giving up our privacy in in a massive way whether it's to the chinese government or whether it's to Google and to Amazon and everybody else. It's kind of the deal we've done. Now, if you don't want your privacy, don't use the technology. But very few people don't want to avail themselves of that. So I guess I'd say-

You and I included, I think. So I'm saying keep your nose clean. Certainly, I try and use the, don't put anything in a text or an email that you wouldn't want splashed on the New York Times. So I try and be careful that way. There's not an easy solution here, okay? There's just not. I mean, nuclear power.

It's a wonderful thing until it's turned into a nuclear bomb and destroys civilizations. Technology is like that. Marvelous benefits to technology. There seems to be always a dark side and a very destructive downside. And I think really a role of government, a role of civilization is how do we utilize technology where it doesn't destroy us? I mean, that dates back to the wheel, you know, and how they started using the wheel for these machines of war and stuff. I mean, it's that same conflict that's just ramped up to,

you know, higher and higher tech. When it comes to these kinds of, you know, I guess, you know, extreme violations of privacy and, frankly, security, because apparently the future presidents and vice presidents' lines were exposed and so forth, just as an example. Might a reaction be to put some holes in that great firewall of China that prevents the Chinese people from getting all sorts of information that the regime doesn't want to see. I'm just theorizing here. Again, there's no...

Don't accuse me of moral equivalency here, but my guess is we do a little bit of snooping ourselves. Yeah. So again, I think, again, we need to be honest. You know, one of the things I think we truly need to do is we need to retrospectively look at the results of our foreign entanglements, our foreign policy, you know, our wars, you know, go back and take a look at let's say vietnam okay what what was the goal there um what did it cost in human life for americans as well as for the vietnamese and loyations and you know everybody in southeast asia what it cost all sides what was the result i think you'd find out that you know boy that was a war we never should have involved ourselves in, and they'd just keep moving forward.

I mean, right now you take a look at Ukraine. I'm all for people seeking freedom, and I certainly understand those Ukrainians that would rather orient themselves to the West, but yet, to be honest, a lot of Ukrainians would rather be part of Russia. And we didn't recognize that reality. We used our enormous influence to pretty well foment the revolution of dignity, which, I mean, at the time, because we're not briefed properly by the State Department as a U.S. senator. You don't really understand that the true division is occurring in Ukraine, so you're all for the freedom-loving people.

Well, the result of that has literally been the destruction of Ukraine and pushing us toward, what, 90 seconds from midnight on the doomsday clock? Closer to World War III and the nuclear holocaust than I think we've been during my lifetime. That's not a good thing. You take a look at the disaster that the Middle East is. The destructions of, okay, totalitarian, sure, strongmen, sure. But now what do we have? Now we have chaos. We've destroyed so much. There's been so many lives lost. It's not a success. Listen, I'm pro-America. I mean, I think America's a great country because Americans are good people, but that doesn't mean that American leaders haven't led us in some really bad ways

and produced some horrible results that don't get reported on. So again, I think we need to take a very realistic view of what have we engaged in, what were our goals, what was the result, and right now I think you have to take a look. I mean, this, I don't think, I don't see how any unbiased observer could take a look at the current state of the world and say, now hey, the foreign policy we've been pursuing for decades under both Republican and Democrat administrations hasn't been basically a miserable failure.

Take a look at the promise we had. People were writing about the end of history, the fall of the Soviet Union. Why didn't we just accept Russia, try and integrate them as much as they wanted to be integrated into the west but we just had to keep pushing them and pushing them and pushing them uh it's true i mean gorbachev and baker sat down and you know the if it wasn't exact words i've read i've had the read out of their discussion in i think it's berlin It was certainly implied we weren't going to move NATO one inch to the east. We've moved it hundreds of miles. And then the final straw, which was very

well recognized, this was a red line for Putin. We just blew it off. We just ignored it. Having NATO in Ukraine. And so he reacted. And now Ukraine is a great deal destroyed, hundreds of thousands of lives lost, both in Ukraine as well as Russian conscripts. I take no joy in that. This has been an utter disaster. So I do hope, by the way, I think Trump is probably the least likely person to get us into war. And the example I use is, I asked him about this because I heard the story not quite right. But remember when I ran down one of our drones? And if you remember the time, the drum beat of war. I mean, we can't accept this. We got to retaliate. And we were basically at the 12th hour of retaliation when the president finally intervened goes okay hang on

here now what did that drone cost and you know the answer is a couple million bucks okay how many lives can be lost and i guess there's a few hundred and that's where i i heard like 150 but is a few hundred people and i think president trump very appropriately showed leadership he said you know i don't think a couple million dollar drone is worth that lost life and he pulled us back from the brink I mean that I told him that I said that

is the moment that I truly supported what you're trying to do here again I don't agree with anybody 100% of the time I disagree but that was the moment I thought, okay, no, this is a guy that I can trust being commander-in-chief because he wants to keep us out of war. And Bobby Kennedy talks about his uncle.

The number one goal of an American president is to keep the peace, not involve us in war after war after war. And, you know, again, you talk about, I said the overall message of the Trump campaign was focus on the needs and the desires of the American people who work, that have built this country. And part of those desires is don't send us off to war. Don't endanger our children. Keep us safe.

Don't have the world engulfed in flames and get us closer to a nuclear holocaust. Step back from that. And I think that'll take, it just takes a completely different outlook from what most of Washington D.C. is about. I mean, we got Mitch McConnell right now saying that we need to be, what is it, preeminent? You know, we've got to spend 5% of our GDP on defense. Listen, in normal times, I guess I don't think that's an unreasonable percentage, but these aren't normal times. We're $36 trillion in debt.

What are we going to spend it on? I'm all for spending money on defense of this nation to make sure that nobody would ever attack us. Do I want to spend money on platforms so we can project our power stupidly and actually create greater insecurity for this nation? That's the whole purpose of a retrospective look. We have what we've done, not only accomplished the goals we set out, not only created so much destruction, cost us trillions, has it actually made us less safe?

I would argue it has. I don't feel more secure today. So you're hoping this is the assessment that's done as part of the work of the incoming administration? Yeah, and that's why I think there's always been such resistance to Trump. He is such a threat to the established order of this place, of the military-industrial complex. Remember I said Eisenhower warned us about that. We haven't heeded that warning.

And we haven't heeded the warning about government funding of scientific research. We certainly haven't heeded his warning about plundering our children's future. So there were four warnings. I just gave you three. The last one was probably the most prescient, we spent the least amount of time on it. He said, we cannot allow global society to descend into a state of dreadful fear and hate that's where we are right i mean isn't that what drives all these policy decisions is is we create a boogeyman you know you you scare the american public you know there's some external threat so we can build up our military for the benefit of the military-industrial complex. We go to war. Read 1984.

That was all about you always had to be at war. You always had to rev up your population. You always had to be fighting something. You've got to fight climate change because CO2, a trace element that mankind is responsible for, is a fraction of what's naturally occurring. We have to be afraid of a buildup of CO2, spend trillions of dollars, you know, even bend the curve down. Again, it's all creating fear and then hate.

I mean, that's what identity politics is about. That's what critical race theory is about. Because if you get people to hate each other, you divide and conquer. So again, people should go back, it's 15 to 60 minutes long and listen to President Eisenhower's unbelievably prescient and wise farewell address, military death complex, government funding of science and research. Don't plunder, don't mortgage your kid's future, and step back from this dreadful state of fear and hate that we have in the world today. And that's what I hope Trump can do. I mean, he gets criticized. He's dealing with a tyrant.

Those tyrants are in charge of China and Russia and Iran and North Korea. I'd rather be talking to them than pushing them to the point where they have a misunderstanding of what our intentions are, where they end up hitting the button before we do. That's the threat. We've got to step back from that. It's interesting because he's also, in Trump 45, demonstrated this idea of peace through strength, of acting very consequentially. I think in Sebastian Gorka's language, surgically, to project American strength when it's needed. So let me talk about strength, though, because the first element of strength is economic strength,

prosperity, a strong country, a unified country. That's why for years I've been saying, quoting Lincoln, that a nation divided against itself cannot stand. So this division that's been sown, again, on both sides, but primarily by the left. Again, critical race theory, identity politics, the whole issue of transgenderism, where did that spring out of? All meant to divide us. A divided nation is a weak nation. A nation that's $36 trillion in debt is a weak nation. A nation that opens up its borders to all comers, including people who really threaten this nation, our adversaries coming into this country.

That's a weak nation. That's why the world's in turmoil today. When America is weak, the world's a dangerous place. But it starts and almost stops with economic strength and then using the economic strength to help other nations create opportunities for their citizens. I'm not opposed to importing products from people to help them create wealth for themselves. Now, I appreciate the fact that China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. That's a good thing. It's not a bad thing.

They've got to play by the rules. But I mean, when we're an engine of economic strength that helps drive the rest of the world to greater prosperity, that's how you achieve peace. So you have to take the broader picture here. I just, I don't want us at loggerheads with everybody. What we try to do is, how can we figure out how to get along? How can you recognize the other person's perspective? I mean, China, they've got a huge demographic problem now. They still need to lift millions of people out of just abject poverty. That's true around the world.

What can we do without harming our own American citizens, but how can we generously try and help build that prosperity to benefit us? Again, this should be a win-win situation. This doesn't have to be a win-lose type of thing. So look for those win-win situations, but have, again, have the broader perspective of peace through strength starts with economic strength, national unity, and don't rely so much on our military prowess. You know, Senator, something you said earlier about communicating with the people of nations, especially dictatorships, I think there's something, I guess, very significant there

in the vein of exactly what you just talked about. A final thought as we finish? Again, I think America is a great country because Americans, by and large, are good people. And to the extent that even when our government or our leaders are potentially hostile to a nation, I think where there's free information, it's very difficult to suppress all free information. I think most people in the world do recognize that Americans are good people. We've done so many good things. We've been so generous. Let's embrace that. Let our leadership in the world be driven by the principles that made this country great.

Our love of freedom and our desire to allow other people have the same kind of freedom, the same kind of opportunities, the same kind of prosperity that we enjoy because of that freedom. That's how we need to lead in this world. That's why we're a shining city on a hill. Not because we've got the biggest missiles and we can threaten people, we can take out governments with a massive strike.

People respect us because, again, we're good people. And this model that, again, is based on the essential ingredient of freedom, it's working. It has worked. And it's worked around the world. I mean, there are so many more democracies. There's so much more freedom today than there was 100, 200 years ago. That's because of the example we've set. So let's set that example and lead by soft power. The adventurism, trying to impose our will on other people, that's not the solution. Let's lead by example. Well, Senator Ron Johnson, it's such a pleasure to have had you on again. Thanks for having me on.

Thank you all for joining Senator Ron Johnson and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.