IHIP News - Not Afraid to Throw a PUNCH with Rep. Brendan Boyle

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Congressman Brendan Boyle lays out the strategy as we approach a second Trump presidency and the importance of staying in the fight.PRE-ORDER OUR NEW BOOK and find live tour dates + more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast Follow Us: I've Had It Podcast: @Ivehaditpodcast Jennifer Welch: @mizzwelch Angie "Pumps" Sullivan: @pumpspumpspumps Special thanks to @cnraun for the IHIP Theme SongSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Yeah, this election, I'll take it. I'll take winning by one point. No, look, I'm pretty lucky. I mean, I just got elected to my sixth term, and I'm someone who really struggled to get into elective office. I was the first Democrat to win my state house seat. And then when I was elected to Congress, I have a pretty Democratic district, but I had to run against the Democratic Party and the establishment when I won 10 years ago. I was a pretty big underdog. Actually, it was 32 points back in our first poll. So going through those experiences, I definitely don't take for granted the wins. So we you know, everybody's kind of traumatized right now out in the world, the tens of millions of us who voted for the Democratic ticket. And there's a lot of palpable anger that we see a convicted felon win the presidency and Jack Smith dismisses the cases. And then you see some of your colleagues, Nancy Mace, who's clearly a nut, psycho tweeting 300 times in 48 hours. The Speaker of the House, who's clearly a nut, who said that God told me I was Moses.

And everybody, I feel like everybody's just going along like this is normal. And I'm like, hello, these people are insane. So what is it like working with people that are so objectively insane? Well, if God said that to Mike Johnson, it just shows you my Lord and Savior has a good sense of humor. But look, I just want to take a step back for a second because I have seen this movie before. There is something about sometimes us Democrats, we lose an election and lose to an awful, monstrous person, but we lose by one and a half percent. And suddenly everyone wants to think that we've, you know, we lost the game a hundred to zero.

The other side, meanwhile, their guy last election lost by four and a half points and they thumped their chests, think they did a great job, think they actually won the race and run the same guy four years later. So yeah, it sucks to lose. I'm pretty pissed about it. I'm disgusted that someone like Donald Trump will actually be back, literally his inauguration will be returning to the scene of the crime that took place on January 6th. So I'm not minimizing this, but I also recognize that there's a reason why literally every party in power this year has lost, that the inflation crisis that has been experienced all around the world, including the U.S., was pretty rough on people, and especially working class people. I represent a pretty working class district, and it's unfortunate to see the swings, not just among white working class, but among Latino, African American, Asian Americans as well. And unfortunately, they ended up voting for a guy

who I think is actually going to make their problems a lot worse when it comes to the cost of living. That said, I think the introspection, if it can be channeled constructively on our side, will be positive, will regroup, and we will win back the House and hopefully the Senate in 2026 and then win back the White House in 2028. In the meantime, it's going to be a rough and tough two years opposing an administration that I think does have, frankly, a lot of extreme and crazy people in it.

I have a question for you. What we have talked about so much since the election is women voted against their own self-interest. The working class voted against their self-interest. You represent a largely working class district. You've always been a pay equality advocate, raising the minimum wage. How do we bring back the working class to the Democratic Party? What we've seen as kind of the working class has gotten hollowed out over a generation, we see increasingly people voting on culture instead of economics. I think as Democrats, our policies are clearly objectively about helping the lives of working and middle-class Americans. And the other side is about the top 1%. But boy, the other side is pretty damn good about getting people to vote on other things, on race, on cultural issues, on social issues. I mean, Donald Trump is no,

let's be honest, he is no Christian conservative, but he is good enough as a con man, he was able to play one on TV. So recognizing that another member of Congress, Mark Vesey, and I actually formed something called the Blue Collar Caucus to try to improve at least the way the Democratic Party is perceived, to recognize that a generation of talk radio and Rush Limbaugh caricaturing all of us as limousine liberals who look down our noses on working class people, that that sort of garbage that gets out on Fox News, gets out on right wing radio, gets out on social media. Unfortunately, let's give the devil their due. It's had a real impact and we need to address that and to combat it.

And we certainly don't need to do anything that plays into those stereotypes. So I feel like that the Republicans always play FU politics and we play integrity politics. And for good, bad or worse, and I think it's for worse, we live in ADD world where people are watching this on YouTube. It's a 10, 15 minute hot take TikTok. I feel like what the Democratic Party needs to do and what Trump did very successfully is you have these people, these working class people that have gotten screwed over by these policies year after year after year. They get up, they go to work, they come home, they watch Wheel of Fortune, they freebase Fox News, go to sleep, rinse and repeat. And Trump came out in 2016 and he was pissed. And he got this anger that the working class feels. And we try to make the working class feel

good. And I hate to admit it, but I think we're past that. The working class anger is very real, but we need to start directing where that anger needs to be and calling out. Mike Johnson claims that he's this big Christian and he's so pro-life, but when it comes to guns, he doesn't give a shit about saving kids' lives. Nancy Mace claims that she's this big Christian. She wants to do nothing about the sexual predators and Donald Trump's potential cabinet. But she's picking on, I guess it makes her feel like she's real tough, a real tough lady picking on a trans woman. And, you know, when I hear Jasmine Crockett, I'm like, yes, go queen.

Like, I want all of the house. I want all of you guys get Nancy, get Jasmine, get AOC, get you, and just fire and brimstone our message. I mean, I think that there is a public that is thirsty for this. When Kamala Harris and Tim Walz went out and they were calling everybody weird, we loved it. It's like, yes, we get to bully conservatives finally. It felt good because we've been so abused by MAGA

for so long because we feel or we care about not being dicks to gay people or whatever. And so I feel like if there was a unifying voice of a simple message, the Republican Party is lying to you. They use religion to lie to you. They're all hypocrites. It's insanity. And like, I think there's this vacuum right now that we're waiting for a group of Democrats to fill and then we can all come in and get behind it. But I feel like we're all out here in the ocean looking for a buoy. And there's this voice over here a little bit in this voice over here a little bit. And we're all waiting for someone to just guide us into the messaging to get us to the midterms.

Yeah, you know, I think just a couple of thoughts on what you were saying. First is, look, I went to college and graduate school to study this stuff. I believe in complexity and nuance. That said, campaigns aren't for complexity and nuance and 10-page answers to a simple question. In messaging, it needs to be simple, and you need to repeat it over and over and over. I also have to say, I mean, people can smell phony a mile away, so

I'm just who I am. When it comes to politics, I'm not afraid to throw a punch. And if someone throws a punch at me, I'll throw five back at them. So that is my attitude on things. If someone doesn't have that attitude internally or intrinsically, then I don't think they're wise to fake it. But I do think having more people who just run, who are authentic and are themselves and actually speak like most people speak, then I think that that frankly works better in campaigns. The second thought I would say is you're right that there are a lot of voices right now trying to figure this out and where we go from here.

That is natural when you lose a presidential election. But here's a hopeful note. I have literally seen this play out before. 20 years ago, at this exact moment, a few weeks after the election in 2004, it was my first campaign. I got my ass kicked. I lost. I was running against a long-time Republican state rep. I had to come back again and then win. No one was feeling good if you're a Democrat. We lost the White House by two points. John Kerry lost to George W. Bush. We had a terrible war going on in Iraq. Democrats also lost the House and the Senate,

and we were out of power of the Supreme Court. Might sound familiar. Democrats were thinking, oh my God, we're going to be in the wilderness for 10 years, 20 years. What's going to happen? Just two years later, a woman who wasn't well known at that time named Nancy Pelosi led Democrats to win back the House for the first time in a dozen years, win the Senate, which no one thought was possible. And two years after that, Barack Obama was elected president in a landslide and had a large congressional majority elected with him. So, yeah, it sucks right now. I'm not going to sugarcoat it.

But boy, I have seen elections swing one way and then the very next election swing the exact opposite way. So take hope from the fact we actually had been here before. And in that vacuum, new voices and new Democrats have risen that have actually led us to victory in the very next election. But about that 2004 campaign, because I remember it and I believe that John Kerry lost because he wasn't verbally tough enough. You had Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, deferments, deferments, deferments, call him out for the one thing that he had against them. He was a combat veteran, purple heart. And the nuanced messaging didn't work. So and I feel

like, you know, Bush was dangerous. There's no question. I couldn't stand him. I mean, I was devastated in 04. But Trump, I mean, this is a special case of a completely unhinged, unstable person that last night on True Social, his feelings are hurt at the New York Times. And this is a president of the United States who campaigns on this masculinity. I'm such a tough guy. I'm an alpha male.

Look at me and all my right wing media and my bros. And Maggie Haberman hurts his feelings and he devotes time to that. And so I want I want you, Congressman, I want you to get we need this. There are little blue dots and people all over the United States. When you see that map, people are craving, craving aggressive, unified language from the Democratic Party. And I think the message is, oh, you want to call us woke? So be it.

Call us woke. We don't like to pick on gay people. Does that make me a wimp? Then so be it, because I'm not going to bully people. And you know why I campaign for them? Because they're also working class people. You could have a gay child. You could have a trans child. It's not the government's business to pick on them. And so I think if we mix the messaging of what they call woke ideology, because I remember back in the day in 04 and 2000, I live in Oklahoma City. I've always been liberal. My friends are going, oh, she's a liberal. And liberal was like this bad word. Well, it's not anymore. They just

move the goalpost to woke. And so I think we just embrace it. Yeah. Call us woke. Is that your big complaint? At least we care about people. We don't like to bully people. Now, I think we just embrace it. Yeah, call us woke. Is that your big complaint? At least we care about people. We don't like to bully people. Now, I think we just need to see all of you guys like on the steps doing something because we're out here in these states and it's abysmal and people are like, what's going to happen? Are they there? Are they fighting for us? And so I'm just telling you from like the front lines, which is literally a blue dot in the middle of MAGA country, the people need this from the Democratic leadership in the House and the

Senate. We need to know that you guys are going to fight like hell every step of the way because people are terrified about what's going to happen. Well, first, I thought you were channeling Apollo Creed there with the I want you. I want you, Congressman. I was getting pumped up. But I will tell you this. I mean, whether it's John Kerry and the Swift boat ads in August of 2004, or Mike Dukakis in 1988, which is actually what led Bill Clinton four years later to even design the concept of the war room. Anytime you're attacked, you have to attack back swiftly and 10 times harder. And that's the way I've approached every one of my campaigns.

I probably lucked out in a way in that having to start out as a deeply underfunded challenger. I was running against a Republican machine, believe it or not, in the part of Philadelphia where I'm from, that used every sort of tactic in the book, often appealed to race. Going through that bare knuckle experience kind of is what taught me, and that was my education in politics, to deal with that and to be able to be tough enough and respond to it, which is actually a pretty good preparation for the moment we're in now. Democrats cannot back down to Trump. He did not win a mandate. This is one of the narrowest election victories in American history.

The tragedy is that most Americans agree with us when you go issue by issue. And I'm pretty confident that if we stand up to him, we fight like hell, very quickly, we will be able to turn this around and have some victories ahead. But I have to say, I mean, I serve with a number of great Democratic colleagues. That's not a group that knows about quitting. I feel pretty good about our ability to stay united in fighting the craziness that will be coming our way. I just had, I know you're in the House of Representatives, but what my biggest concern right now is the parade of sex offenders and Russian nationals that are being appointed to cabinet positions. What is your confidence level that the Senate Republicans will not confirm some of these most outrageous characters?

My confidence level that Senate Republicans will do the right thing? Is there a number below zero? I was afraid you were going to say that. Yeah, no, no. They have no backbone whatsoever. I mean, you know, maybe Susan Collins will throw us like a no vote when it doesn't matter. But no, I have no confidence.

Hey, listen, I was born at night, but it wasn't last night. That crowd is not going to stand up to Donald Trump at all. I mean, the people who were standing up to Trump, unfortunately, lost their primaries like Liz Cheney or up and retired. So it's a pretty small group. I mean, that is one difference, I think, between eight years ago and now. At least eight years ago, you still did have kind of normie Republicans who I might have disagreed with on various policies I thought were too conservative, but weren't MAGA folks. Man,

most of them are gone. So in that regard, I think things are going to be more difficult. And, you know, unfortunately, we're going to learn the hard way that elections have consequences when some of these completely nutty people like Tulsi Gabbard, I served with, her connections with people like Assad and Putin and other dictators around the world are truly worrying. So, you know, it is going to be a difficult two years. Yeah, it's going it's going to be really difficult. But again, I'm going to tell you, we want you, Congressman, to lead this. You're all we've got right now. You're the first politician we've had on since the election. And there is a a insatiable appetite to hear you guys fight and not pre-surrender to this in a very unifying way and start making the message aggressively that the reason that

all of these social issues and working class issues are combined is because they're all human beings. The dehumanization and the otherizing that these MAGA Christians do, it's got to be called out. This phony use of religion in places like this in Oklahoma, it's devastating. The impacts that when you have overtly religious politicians that campaign as such. A couple of days ago, our governor, Kevin Stitt, tweeted on X, Satan is trying to get a foothold in our state. And I'm like, this is- I saw that. I saw that tweet. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I thought he was talking about Alabama football coming to Oklahoma, like a vague reference. Yeah, I wish.

Because if that was the case, I thought it was pretty good. But I don't think that's what he was talking about, actually. And I know that there's this hesitation for politicians to talk about religion, but they already brought it in to the spectrum. And we're going to have to call out their hypocrisy on it to push it back out to provide a secular state because not everybody's a Christian. I'm not. I'm an agnostic atheist in the Bible bell.

I mean, I don't know if I'm a masochist or what. Probably there's a good argument to be made for that. But, you know, we have Jewish people, Muslim people, all sorts of this hijacking of religion and using it to emotionally blackmail people for their votes. That kind of language needs to be called out. I'm talking about, we call him Moses, Mike. I mean, that's just, it's embarrassing to people of faith that he acts like he has the moral high ground. It's embarrassing to my intellect that, and it's terrifying that he's like, you know, it's the president, vice president, and then him. I'm like, what are we, what are we doing here? Like, sometimes I feel like I just

want to drive through Washington with my arms up like this. What are y'all doing? What is going on here? Why do we have all these crazy people in charge right now? It makes me crazy. And then I envy my friends that are apolitical. They're like, I don't really watch the news. I'm not into politics. I'm like, oh, my God, that might be kind of nice.

But I can't. I've already crossed over and I'm in this news cycle. We know one of the things the exit poll showed, which I think was really revealing, is Democrats want a majority of those who get their news through mainstream sources, the traditional sources, local newspapers. Yeah, right. News that actually is fact-checked, sourced, traditional mainstream sources.

Trump won by 12 points among those who aren't paying attention to any of that and get their information from TikTok or different sources that really aren't fact-based or sourced. I think that is a new challenge that we as Democrats really have to adapt to. The other thing is, and this is something that's actually

kind of important to me, you brought up about religion and the way the right wing in this country uses that to imply or outright state, you know, people like me aren't good Christians. I actually am Christian, born and raised Catholic. I have to say it offends me, not just as a patriotic American, as a Democrat, but offends me as a serious Christian that the kind of stuff that they peddle, the hate, the kind of stuff that Donald Trump says is so contrary to actually the word of Jesus and the gospels. If any of them who are so busy telling you how holy they are and what great Christians they are, I wish they would take five minutes and actually read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. You know, Jesus didn't say, blessed be the billionaires, may they inherit

all the tax cuts. He said quite the opposite, actually. So that is something that I do push back on. I mean, I'm not someone who goes around to talk about religion to say, oh, look at how great I am. But I am going to push back on the sort of attacks that somehow you can't be, because I do hear this sometimes in Catholic circles, there are those who say you can't be a good Catholic if you're a Democrat. Bullshit. That is completely false. Frankly, I am voting in a way that's consistent with my faith.

And a lot of my Democratic colleagues are as well. So I think, and if you're not religious, that's great. That's completely right. You're no more or less American than I am. But I'm not going to take a disgusting person like Donald Trump. I mean, someone has been married three times and was busy with a porn star when his third wife was at home with their newborn child. And by the way, the real tragedy there is that she only got $135,000.

She was underpaid. See, this is, I like this,man. That's why you're my guy. You were, we here are shifting all of this onto you. You go get all your colleagues and get this message because we need it. We need you guys on the steps. We need for, we need something to get us to this inauguration. We need to know that there is no pre-surrender. I like it when you said bullshit. That's what we want. I mean, that's what the Democrats are just salivating for. I love it. And I can't thank you enough for your time. You always are welcome here. Anytime we have a great audience, the majority of our listeners are not from

Oklahoma, as I'm sure you could imagine why. But I think we probably have a lot more listeners in Philly than we do in Oklahoma City. But anytime you would like to come on, you're always welcome here to message the message that needs to get out to the people who get their news from the Internet. You're always welcome here. Get everybody together. It's you, Congressman. You are going to be our guy. You're our fighter right now.

Well, I want to thank you both for what you're doing. I really enjoyed it and look forward to talking to you again. All right. Thanks a lot. Thanks. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. All right.

Congressman Brendan Boyle, I've put a huge assignment on. I need for him to go rile them all up. I don't want to see them all on the steps of the Capitol united. And I want it to be a big bring it. Come on. We're going to try as hard as we can to resist this and get us to the midterms because people are craving hearing this and seeing a united front right now. And he seems like the perfect guy to do it.

He doesn't mess around. I know. I like it. Here's the deal. He's the first guy we've spoken to that has direct access to that. And I'm always going to remember it. He doesn't mess around. I know. I like it. Here's the deal. He's the first guy we've spoken to that has direct access to that. And I'm always going to remember it. So that's why I'm going to put a huge burden on Congressman Brendan Boyle. We'll do a little check-ins with him from time to time. We didn't think that message was strong enough. You didn't call Nancy Mace a complete

fucking nut. We're mad. All right, guys. We'll see you later. It's so entertaining to have the vape. So good.