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

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

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

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There was never a steel building that ever collapsed because of a fire. The vaccine injured. So these would be American citizens who obeyed their government and took a shot that they were required to take and then were injured by or killed by that shot. To date worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with COVID vaccine. 24% of those to date either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days. We're right now burning about a half a trillion dollars a quarter just to get us by into next year. That should shock everybody. And that's my whole purpose here. We haven't talked about the numbers. We haven't put this in context of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves.

And I'm just going to force that debate. So you told me something that made me laugh at breakfast in a dark way, which is that very few of the people you work with, your colleagues, whose job it is to appropriate money to run the U.S. government, have any idea how much they're appropriating? They don't know what the numbers are. Can you walk us through a description of the ignorance of Congress when it comes to numbers? So you want me to throw my colleagues under the bus? It's just like, I was amazed by what you told me. Of the dollars they appropriate, they know that. But that's only 25% of the budget.

The story I told you at breakfast is a couple years ago. This was after the COVID spending spree, but we continued on that spending spree. We were in the midst of an omnibus spending debate. And this is where McConnell was doing a deal with Schumer on a massive omnibus spending bill, and we were going to violate, for the first time, our conference's position on earmarks. You know, our conference's position is we do not accept earmarks. All of a sudden, the Republican Senator is going to be accepting earmarks. So I got up in front of the group.

I'm generally the skunk in the room or, you know, the, the, the kid who says the emperor has no clothes. I just asked my colleagues, Hey, anybody know how much we spent last year in total? Dead silence. I went out to the Washington press. By which you meant what we spent in total, the federal government,

what the federal government spent in total. No, just the bottom line. If anybody knew they didn't volunteer. And I went out to the Washington press corps, asked them the same question. And one of the reporters said, well, it's over a trillion dollars. Now, that's just discretionary spending.

That's about 25% of the budget. I mean, total spending. The answer is, I think, $6.3 trillion. Understand, the federal government is the largest financial entity in the world. We, in theory, are the 535 members of the board of directors. And nobody really knows in total how much the federal government spent because we never talk about it. And as that relates to the current- What a weird thing not to talk about, since that's your job. But that's how it's been set up. Discretionary, which we appropriate, and then mandatory.

That just gets spent. It's on automatic pilot. So it's out of sight, it's out of mind, and it's completely out of control. May I ask how that works? So I thought the Constitution gave the Congress the responsibility, the duty to appropriate the money. So Congress has written laws like the social security law, then Medicare and Medicaid, and they've turned, they call those entitlements. So it doesn't make, they're not annually appropriated. It's just, you set up a law

saying if you qualify, you get X number of dollars. So it's on automatic pilot. And there's no cap on that spending? No, none. You qualify, you get it. So whatever it takes. What has happened over the years is in addition to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, they've slid what should be, in my mind, discretionary spending into mandatory. And so I'm the guy that pointed out the conference again. Do you guys realize in 2019, other mandatory, again, not Social Security, not Medicare, not Medicaid, other mandatory, pretty well runs Social Security, not Medicare, not Medicaid,

other mandatory, pretty well runs the gamut of other appropriation accounts. That was $642 billion. Last year, fiscal year 2024, that was $1.3 trillion. This year, it's a little over a trillion. And that's pretty much, as far as the eye can see, according to CBO, a trillion dollars. So again, total discretionary spending is about 1.7, but they've literally slid about a trillion dollars now ongoing of other mandatory or what should be discretionary into what they call now other mandatory. A trillion dollars. And I don't think anybody was really aware of that either. So what's right now for 2025, or let's say 2024, what did the federal government spend total? So in 2019, total federal government spending was $4.4 trillion. Yes. This year, we will spend over $7 trillion.

So I remember somewhere around during the obama administration about when i got elected 2010 2011 we had our first trillion dollar a year deficit in 2009 you know i think it's 1.4 trillion and we stopped talking about hundreds of billions which used to move the needle to now trillions you know one two three four, 7, it just doesn't seem that much. $4,400 billion spent in 2019, $7,000 billion spent this year, projected to spend $7,300 billion next year. And now let's kind of bring this back to the debate that we're talking about on the one big beautiful bill. May I just one more bottom line number? Okay, so we're going to spend over $7 trillion this year. How much do we take in in tax receipts every year? About 5.1. So we've got a structural deficit of around 6% right now. CBO's projecting over the next 10 years. 6%. So

federal revenue will be, according to CBO, 18.1, even though it's about 17.1, but they're projecting that we're going to have an automatic tax increase next year. So they bumped that to 18.1. And federal spending is going to be about 23.4, 23.5%. So that deficit spending, where does that money come from? We borrow it or we print it. By the way, put this in even better historical context. In 1930, less than 100 years ago, the federal government spent 3.1% of our GDP. State and local governments back then spent 9.1%.

So that was pretty much the vision of our founding fathers, a limited federal government within the constraints of the enumerated powers and most governing at the point of the states, you know, state and local governments, where it's more accountable, more efficient, more effective. You know, we've blown that up. Now the federal government's spending close to 24%. State and local governments are over 16%. So now total government spending is about 40%. It's three times what it was back less than 100 years ago.

And I would argue, as government grows, our freedoms necessarily recede. Of course. Because government has more claim on your income, or they borrow money, which causes inflation, which is a silent tax. Do we have any sense of what percentage of the American population, 350 million or whatever it is in that range, are net receivers get more from government than they pay in my guess it's more than 50 percent and of course that's the that's the death knell of a democracy is when uh the population the voting public realizes they can vote themselves benefits at the expense of somebody else what and what they don't realize the expenses it's

costing them all because the massive deficit spending, because we're not taking enough revenue to cover the expenditures, that's what has eroded the value of our dollar. That's what caused 40-year high inflation. And that hurts everybody. So you think that most, at this point, your guess is most Americans receive more from the federal government, from government in all levels? Again? I shouldn't even say, because I haven't checked that figure. Yeah. My guess is probably more than 50%. I mean, when you consider all the entitlements, whether it's Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid,

and people say, oh, that's my money. Well, in some cases it is. Most people probably get more out of Social Security than they actually did put in. Certainly do that out of Medicare, certainly out of Medicaid. Nobody puts any money into that. That all comes out of the general funds. So we have food stamps. We have all these trillions of dollars worth of transfer payments.

Why is this not sustainable? You often hear it's not sustainable. What happens if it continues? Well, again, when I ran in 2010, we'd just experienced our first deficit in excess of a trillion dollars. We were spending about $3.5 trillion a year, 3.5. So it's more than double just since 2010? Yeah. Yes. We were $14 trillion in debt. I remember I announced in April of 2010, started my campaign in basically June 2010 doing parades. And what I would shout is, this is a fight for freedom. We're mortgaging our children's future. It's wrong. It's immoral. It has to stop. That was my campaign theme.

Again, we were $14 trillion in debt, spending $3.5 trillion. Now, we're almost $37 trillion in debt. We're spending $7,000 billion, $7 trillion. And CBO projects over the next 10 years, we will add another $22 trillion to the debt. That's what our projected deficits over the next 10 years is, $22 trillion. Again, that's assuming about a $4 trillion increase because taxes are scheduled to automatically increase. If those taxes don't increase, first of all, I'm not sure you get the full $4 trillion, but again, take $4 trillion away if we extend current tax law, which is I'm in favor of that. I don't want to increase anybody's taxes. But I don't think this is necessarily time to do additional tax cuts, particularly when those things aren't focused toward economic growth.

But anyway, so we are projecting deficits for the next 10 years of a minimum of $2.2 trillion, and I would argue that is a rosy scenario. And particularly when you take a look at what they've done with the one big beautiful bill, they're not seriously reducing spending to what I've been calling for as a pre-pandemic level. Again, the danger is spouting out too many numbers here. I just want to put this in perspective. President Obama, over the course of his eight years, his average deficit was $910 billion. Over the last, and I want to do this so I'm accurate, over the last four years of his administration, it was about $550 billion. Okay? So, half a trillion dollar deficit over his last

four years president trump came into office in his first three years the average deficit was about 800 billion dollars so he bumped up obama's four-year average from 550 to 800 then covid hit and we had a deficit of 3.1 trillion dollars just that one year. Now, what we should have done in 2021 when Biden came into office is we should have returned to a reasonable pre-pandemic level. The pandemic was over. We didn't have to keep... We had unemployment spike up to, I think, 25 million people, normal unemployment somewhere between five and six. But within a few months, it was around 11 and then returned to pretty much normal early in 2021 we didn't have to keep stimulating the economy but biden did biden averaged 1.9 trillion dollars per

year in deficit so obama when he left his last four years 550 trump before the pandemic a little more than 800 billion per year biden in his four years went up to $1.9 trillion. And now CBO is projecting, and again, a rosy scenario, that we'll be averaging $2.2 trillion over the next 10 years. So we'll take our debt from $37 trillion up to $59 trillion. And if we extend the current tax law, take away $4 trillion in revenue, roughly, add another $4 trillion. The spending cuts they're talking about, they're paltry.

$1.5 trillion, some of those are fake. Some of those are extended way out. They're offset by- How far out? 10 years. 10 years? Yeah. I mean, we'll spend the money up front for the border, for defense. So that also takes away from that $1.5 trillion in spending. So at most, we're maybe cutting spending $1.2 trillion. Part of that, a few hundred billion, I think, is student loan forgiveness, which the Supreme Court will probably

rule unconstitutional. We're not going to spend it anyway but they count that as savings so so much of the savings they're talking about in the one big beautiful bill is phony it's fake or it's in the out years where if republicans lose power democrats will just restore it but no matter how you slice it from my standpoint cbo's 22 trillion dollars of 10-year deficit is a rosy scenario. It'll probably be more than that. And what happens then is what's happening right now in the bond market. Interest rates are creeping up. You can't control that. If global creditors look at the United States as uncreditworthy, our 50-year average interest payment that we've paid on our debt is over 5%. So I think it's as high as 5.8. It's not the most exact figure. But right now we're borrowing

probably about 3.3%. That's been the average over the last 25 years, 3.3%. And that's kind of where we're at right now. If we increased that interest, if that interest expense increases to, or rate increases to 4.3%, add another $4 trillion in deficit spending. If it goes up to the 50-year average of 5.3, add about $8 or $9 trillion to the $22 trillion. So again, you go $22 trillion plus extending current tax law, add another close to $4 trillion. If interest rates start creeping up, and they are, just one percentage point, add another $4 trillion. So you can see very quickly you go from $22 to $26 to $30 trillion,

add down to $37 trillion, we're up to $67 trillion in debt. I don't think we'd ever hit that. I think something's going to happen. We'll have a debt crisis. We'll have failure in our bond auctions, spiking interest rates even more. And again, we're spending more on interest this year than we spend on defense. Here's an alarming statistic. Only 12% of Americans are metabolically healthy. That means 88% are not. It's not a healthy country. Friend of the show and Donald Trump's Surgeon General nominee, Dr. Casey Means, is working to solve that crisis.

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consider the devaluation of the dollar. I laid out, and we talked about this, my pre-pandemic options going back to 98, 2014, 2019. So a dollar you held in 1998 is only worth 51 cents today. Ouch. It's devalued that much just since 98? It's been cut in half. When I ran in 2010, that dollar is worth about 68 cents. A dollar you held during Obama in 2014 is worth 74 cents. A dollar you held just in 2019 is only worth 80 cents. So again, that is the devaluation of dollar. That's inflation. This is why everything is so expensive. Yeah, that's a silent tax. That's how you spend 300 bucks at dinner and you're like, I didn't even get drunk. Like, how did that happen?

That's the effect. Yeah. And that's why you had four-year high inflation. So that way I would consider the chronic debt crisis. It just continues. And it's the danger. We have not tamed inflation yet. We've tamed it, but we haven't conquered it. So I think that's always on the horizon, particularly if we continue deficit spend, particularly if the bond markets continue to react as they are, keep driving interest rates up higher, and you start increasing the amount of interest expense, crowding out other spending.

So an acute debt crisis would be where you have a bond market failure, like what happened to Greece. All of a sudden, you can't sell your debt. So you either print the money, which sparks another round of 40, 50-year high inflation, devaluing the currency rapidly. You know, we're not necessarily immune to hyperinflation. Other countries have experienced it. So a failure to sell your debt in a bond auction, what does that look like? You just put out your bonds and nobody wants them? Nobody buys them. And so again, the advantage the US has over any

other country is we are the world's reserve currency. So we can print dollars. So we can get by that moment, except for you're printing dollars and inflation is pretty easy to define. It's too many dollars chasing too few goods. So you just print all those dollars and again, the dollar devalues, the cost of your debt is lowered. Again, it's a silent way of addressing these massive deficits. How far away from a moment like that are we? I don't know. I would have thought we would have experienced it by now, but we've experienced it instead as, again,

40-year high inflation, the devaluation of the currency. I mean, I think that's pretty shocking when you take a look at that as a dollar, just 11 years ago, is only worth 74 cents. Six years, it's only worth 80 cents. That's an amazing level of devaluation. It's not even close to hyperinflation where you've got inflation rates of hundreds of percent. So when that crisis comes, what do you do?

Well, you have a great deal of turmoil in your society. It won't be pleasant. It's just what we need to try and avoid. And by the way, why I'm not in a full-blown panic, people like Art Laffer, economist of the Laffer curve, he does correctly point out America has enormous wealth. I mean, hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of wealth. So $37 trillion in relationship to hundreds of trillion dollars worth of wealth, that's manageable. It's just like if you're a billionaire, but you don't work, you can have some pretty large mortgages on homes, but you still have to generate some income to service the debt. And I think that's kind of the point we're making.

I mean, it's not irrelevant debt to GDP ratio. And we do have massive wealth, but we need to manage the cash flow problem here too, as well as just the pernicious impact of all these transfer payments, providing encouragement for people not to work. There's a great article written, I think, in 2017 by Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, our miserable 21st century, talking about how 20% of working- age men are permanently out of the workforce, on Medicaid, using the Medicaid card to buy opiate drugs to help finance their living. All those pernicious impacts of a society where we literally don't require people to work,

we actually incentivize them not to. To my mind, that's one of the biggest problems we have with the big welfare system. And you need mass immigration to fill the gap. Yeah, somebody's got to do the work. And we were talking earlier, when I first entered this political realm, going to dairy breakfast, the first issue I heard in Wisconsin was, we don't have enough workers. I come from a manufacturing background where for 20 or so years, you couldn't find enough people to work in a manufacturing plant, which is why I always kind of scratched my head. Listen, there are certainly products that we have offshored that we need to reshore,

you know, things that are strategic that impact our national security. But right now, I think our biggest problem is we don't have enough workers. If you bring all this manufacturing back to America, who's going to work the factories? And we certainly shouldn't be bringing back high-labor content product. I think you need to diversify your supply base. You can't be so dependent on an adversary like China. Spread it around. That would reduce your risk. So what you're saying, like the numbers you're describing are the bottom line numbers. This is not like higher math.

This should be obvious to everybody. What's the reaction been? Well, they just ignore it. Again, one of the reasons I'm digging my heels in as the one big beautiful bill comes over the Senate is we haven't had the discussion or the debate. The only number you heard about in the whole House debate here was $1.5 trillion, which sounds like a lot, right? I mean, $1.5 trillion in spending reduction. And of course, they're focusing on programs like Medicaid. The main problem with that is Obamacare, which is now called Medicaid expansion, alongstays to gain the system, putting at risk Medicaid for the truly vulnerable.

But that's all you really heard about. You don't ever put that in context. $1.5 trillion compared to $89 trillion spending over the next 10 years, it's barely a rounding error. We haven't been talking about the massive annual deficits. We don't talk about the debt. Why is the, I mean, when you were describing the progression of debt accumulation, it feels like it's been really rapid in a short period of time. Like the federal government spending almost twice what it was just the other day. Where's all that money going? How did that happen? What is that? Well, again, it was really sparked by the pandemic. Yeah, I'll give the Tea Party movement a fair amount of credit. You know, I ran because we

were mortgage-generating kids' future. We were running deficits for, you know, I think three years in a row over a trillion dollars. But once we got to town in 2011, we started having these budget debates. We had divided government. Obama didn't get everything he wanted. We did something called the Budget Control Act, which literally reduced discretionary spending for three years in a row until we learned how to weasel around it. So we pretty well flattened out federal government spending at about $3.5 trillion for five or six or seven years. And then the last couple of years of the Obama administration started creeping up. And then under Trump, it went from about 4 trillion to 4.1 to 4.4. And then it went to 6.5 and we've never looked back.

And the analogy I use there is I don't know of an American family, if they had an illness and they had to borrow $50,000 to pay for the medical bills, if that family member got well, you wouldn't keep borrowing $50,000 and spend at that level. But that's exactly what we've done. And like nobody other than, you know, I'm the first guy who wrote the Wall Street Journal article about we really need to return to a pre-pandemic level. It doesn't seem radical. And I've laid out options you know clinton obama trump cove covered pandemic this is just like a couple years ago so i mean what what biden

should have done i mean we had we overspent in 2020 and we first were talking about that cares act is like 750 billion dollars which you know i knew we had to do something fast and massive so markets wouldn't collapse but within like a week or two, that went up to like $2.2 trillion. We sent out direct payment checks to 166 million Americans three times, way late, way after unemployment had already returned from the 25 million person high. Again, 25 million people unemployed when normally you're at five or six we sent out direct payment checks to 166 million americans three times so we way overspent even in 2020 so you had trillions of dollars sloshing around the economy as you come into 2021 the economy is coming roaring back because you have all this pent-up demand and all these dollars sloshing around the last thing you should have done is add more fuel to the fire. That's what Biden and Democrats did. Again, on average,

$1.9 trillion of deficit spending over the next four years. We never came down off that $6.5 trillion. A little bit, 6.2, 6.3, but then started going back up again. And that's really the moment, that's when a bass boat suddenly cost $100,000. Or your car cost $90,000. You know, brand new Suburban is $80,000 or whatever. That's when the country became obviously unaffordable, I think, unless I misremember. Yeah, or your meal deal at McDonald's all of a sudden jumped from $5 to $10. When did that happen?

Yeah. I don't understand why there's no will to fix that. I mean, that seems like pretty basic macroeconomics in the Congress. Nobody's... I haven't heard McConnell say this, but I've heard the quote attributed to him, and this is the one thing I agree with him on. Show me one member of Congress who ever lost because they spent too much money. Yeah. There just isn't public pressure. There's not public awareness. We don't educate our young people. The news media doesn't connect the dots.

Why people can't afford things is because of massive deaths of spending, which sparked four-year high inflation, devalued the dollar. I mean, to me, it's pretty obvious. But normal Americans, they just get all surly about it. Okay, well, then let's meditate for a moment on the consequences of it. I asked, what happens when there's a debt crisis? Why haven't we had one yet? You said, we probably should have had one. I don't know why we haven't, but we're going to get one if we keep doing this. I said, what will the effect of that be? You said, massive instability in the society. What do you mean? Like, what will that look like? Maybe it

would awaken people to the threat if they knew what would happen in a debt crisis. Well, so if you're living on different transfer payments or different types of welfare benefits, you know, you may not get those. You know, you can't borrow more money, so you're going to have to take what money we spend on other government programs and we'll have to service our debt. You have to pay it off, unless we want to go into full default. And that's where you just say to Japan and China and Germany and everyone else who's bought those bonds, we're not paying. Yeah, which means you'll never float more debt. So you can't, other than print more money, which then creates even more hyperinflation.

So now people can't afford anything. Has anyone ever defaulted, any country ever defaulted on debt and just said, we're not paying, come and get it? Oh, I'm sure they have. But that's not common. I think it happens enough. But what always happens is, you know, countries like the U.S. go in there and we help them restructure their debt. I think that's happened numerous times. But no one's going there and we help them restructure their debt. I think that's happened numerous times. But no one's going to come and help us restructure our debt.

Nobody can. Again, we will lose our position as the world's reserve currency and we'll lose our ability to print dollars that people accept. I mean, it's a marvelous thing that we just print dollars. We can send them overseas and people will produce products and ship them over here. High quality products are pretty low cost. I think it's one of the reasons we've been able to keep inflation in check, producing all these massive deficits over the last couple of decades. Because we do import a lot of products. You know, we've got billions of people either on or underemployed around the world.

We provide the capital. You know, they produce the factories, they produce the goods. And then we just give them, you know you know paper it's fiat currency you know we print it we keep printing it and it's been working out pretty well at some point in time that that gravy train might stop and then i mean then you have like a total collapse of the current system. Yeah. Again, I can't predict. I'm trying to avoid it. It'll be painful. And who really suffers

are people at the lower end of the income spectrum that have no safety net. They don't have any kind of hard assets that will inflate with inflation. They'll just be destitute. A lot of them. Yeah.

In a country that has no kind of organizing principle or national identity where people are not as united as they were in, say, 1929. I had my comm staff put together a video. I asked them to find all these Republican leaders that have talked about balancing the budget. We have a spending problem. It starts out with President Trump saying saying in the State of the Union, I'm going to do something we haven't done in 24 years, balance the federal budget. Then every Republican leader, some form of, we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.

In those clips, we have Elon Musk saying, if we don't fix this, there won't be money left over for anything. And I think that's a pretty accurate statement. So how many people can you really trust? Well, if you think about it, probably not that many. Let's say you've got 20,000 Instagram followers. How many of them would show up at your house to help you if you had a crisis? Maybe about eight.

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It's one of the saddest things about this country. The country is getting sicker. Despite all of our wealth and technology, Americans aren't doing well overall. Obesity, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, all kinds of horrible chronic illnesses, weird cancers are all on the rise. Probably a lot of reasons for this, but one of them definitely is Americans don't eat very well anymore. They don't eat real food. Instead, they eat industrial substitutes, and it's not good. It's time for something new, and that's where masa chips come in. Masas decide to revive real food by creating snacks how they used to be made, how they're

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injury or you don't feel filled with guilt. You feel light and energetic. It's the kind of snack your grandparents ate. Worth bringing back. So you can go to massachips.com, Massa's M-A-S-A, by the way, massachips.com slash Tucker to start snacking. Get 25% off. We enjoy them. You will too. Tucker. Does this bill get us closer to fixing it? No, it exacerbates the problem. How can that be? Because we're not serious about returning to a reasonable pre-pandemic global spending.

We've picked a number out of the air, 1.5 trillion. It's totally out of context. It's not really related to the moment. It's missing the moment. Can I ask you, who came up with that number? Like, whose lie is that? I think my best guess is conservatives in the House, who I love, didn't want to be blamed if this thing failed. So they said, well, listen, in order for us to accept a $5 trillion increase in the debt ceiling, we've got to get at least $1.5 trillion in savings, spending cuts.

I don't think they were looking at the big picture. I think they just pulled a big – I criticized them at the time privately. I said, listen, you set the bar way too low, you guys. This is completely inadequate. They set the bar way too low that it should have been easy to meet it, quite honestly. But even that was difficult because they didn't go through what I would consider the right kind of process. So maybe we can shift in terms of what we have to do, what I'm trying to accomplish here and my digging my heels in.

Doge has kind of shown us what we can do here. We've never had a process to control spending in the federal government. We don't have a balanced budget requirement. I didn't realize this, just found out. Do you know they established the appropriation committees because the authorizing committees were big spenders? So the appropriation committees were supposed to be the control on the big spenders. Well, that didn't work. The Budget Control Act of 1974 didn't work. Simpson-Bowles didn't work. The Budget Control Act didn't work.

It did for three years, but then we weaseled our way around it. So what process could possibly work to control spending? Well, first of all, you have to know the numbers. You have to understand what a deep hole we're in and have a commitment to to address it but doge has pretty well shown us how to do it now i come from the private sector i i think we probably i probably spent more time either analyzing my department head budgets or my own overall company budget than congress in total spends analyzing the seven thousand000 billion budget of the federal government.

So Doge has shown us if you go line by line, contract by contract, you will discover and uncover spending that if the American public saw it, they'd be outraged by it. If you eliminated it, my guess is most Americans wouldn't even know it's eliminated. But the only people that would know would be the grifters who have been sucking down the waste, fraud, and abuse. The NGO community. So you have to go step by step. So that's why I've always been supportive of a multiple-step reconciliation process here. I was always recommending three steps.

First step, give President Trump the funding on the border, defense, bank, $850 billion of real savings, not make-believe, you know, now. And Lindsey Graham agreed to this $85.5 billion each year for four years to pay for the four years' worth of spending. And then extend that out 10 years, that gives you $850. That's more than half of what the House budget reconciliation supposedly gives us. Second step, I would just extend current tax law. If we would have been smart enough in 2017, had somebody like Chairman Crapo who really came up with this idea of let's just use current policy for taxes, then we can make this stuff permanent. You should never pass, in my mind, a tax law that automatically expires just creates all these fiscal cliffs and puts all kinds of uncertain uncertainty in the economy why do they do that

because we so this gets in real budget wonkery but for spending to score it you use current policy which means if a spending program ends if you want to to extend it, you score it based on, oh, it's going to be extended anyway, so it doesn't cost anything. For taxes, though, we use current law. So if the tax cuts are ending and you want to extend them, well, you're scoring that on the fact that they are going to end. So now to extend them, it's going to be a trillion dollar score. So then you got to pay for it.

And it's hard to pay for it. And so that's how it was all scored back in 2017, where if we would just use current policy, if we use current policy now, we can just extend current tax law and there's no score. And so that's really what we're doing now. But we have to recognize when you're comparing to the CBO budget, CBO budgets is assuming it does, taxes do increase and bring in about another $4 trillion worth of revenue. So that's why I say the $22 trillion in projected deficits is probably a rosy scenario. I mean, it seems like the core problems are just so familiar.

One is short-term thinking. And the second is the misplaced belief that you can see what the future will be. And both of those are like silly and unwise. Maybe are we bumping up against the inherent limits of the system? Well, I would say we're missing the focusing on the right thing. We had folks on spending. And the reason I say that is spending is pretty certain. Again, who knows what revenue you're going to bring in?

It's hard to predict. Spending, that's pretty easy to predict what that's going to be. Plus, I personally voted for President Trump because I wanted him to defeat the deep state. Yeah. You don't defeat the deep state by continuing to fund it at Biden's levels. Yeah, I know. So again, when you start talking about controlling the deficit, well, you can control the deficit by tariff revenue or selling the gold card.

That keeps funding the deep state. You have to focus on spending. And we've just gone through an unprecedented level of increased spending other than World War II. Just quick aside on that, we entered World War II spending 11.7% of our economy of GDP on federal government, 11.7. That got ramped up to 41% during the war. But by 1948, because we had responsible leaders, the greatest generation, that actually went down to 11.4% of GDP.

We returned to pre--war level spending. And we had a massive recession too. I mean, the war is over. Let's return to a reasonable pre-war level spending. We didn't do that during the pandemic. And that's what we have to do. We have to focus on doing, it's such a reasonable thing to do. It should have been done in 2021.

We didn't do it for four years, but now we're just pretty well accepting that we're accepting the fact that obamacare now called medicaid expansion is putting at risk medicare for the the truly vulnerable even though we all ran on repealing and replacing that and obviously failed in the first trump term but now we're all okay with it now we're not going to touch that because they renamed it are you are you kidding me well this this is but this is how it works. Like in 20 years, we'll be like, well, of course you have to protect trans kids.

You know, what seems crazy at first becomes accepted and then it becomes the hill to die on. It's just like your expectations change, right? So again, I'm trying to force the discussion over the real numbers. Okay. And again, 1.5 trillion I'm trying to force the discussion over the real numbers. Okay.

And again, $1.5 trillion in abstract seems like a lot, but we've really ramped up from 2019 to this year. That's over 10 years. That's $29 trillion of increased spending over 10 years. $29 trillion. And we're talking about cutting out 1.5 of that? Yeah, it's a joke. It's a joke. Because people don't want to cut it out. And so I guess that's my question. You said that the problem with democracy is once the majority figures out they can just steal money, then you're just like headed to the cliff and there's no pulling back. Are we there? Well, again, they're not stealing it. They just don't realize that how it's financed is by printing money and they can't afford things because of that.

Well, if you're taking other people's money at the point of a gun, it's called theft. Yeah. They try and tax it, but we're not taxing anywhere near enough. Right. No, right. So we're going to have to borrow $2.2 trillion for the next 10 years, every year, at least. But that's effectively a tax because it devalues the money in your pocket. So you're basically paying 10 bucks for a Big Mac and a Coke. Yeah, inflation is a silent tax. It's really nasty.

Do you have any hope? I'm not the world's greatest optimist. Yeah. I mean, how can you be? I fear we've passed the point of no return. The reason I'm digging my heels, and Tucker, I don't want to. I bet you don't. I really don't.

I mean, I'm not looking for it. Listen, I love what President Trump is doing. He is such a unique individual, unique political figure, unique president. He is doing things that only he would do. Nobody else would do it. And it's things that have to be done. Okay. So I'm so supportive of most of what he's doing. But this is a once in a lifetime opportunity here. We've never had such an unprecedented

level of spending. Returning to a reasonable level is just so common sense and not that hard. It's not going to be easy. But what I've done in laying out those pre-pandemic options, go back to Bill Clinton, 1998, when we actually had a surplus for the first time in 1969. I don't think we spent too little in 1969 or 1998. Obama in 2014 or Trump in 2019. There are three options. Leave Social Security, Medicare, and interest as they are. Spend what you need to spend. But for all the other outlays, you just increase them based on population growth and inflation. A very reasonable control, right? You end up somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5 trillion. Now, I would go back to Clinton, recognizing that 9-11 happened

after that. So you probably have to plus up defense. Although I'd like to hone how we spend our defense dollars. I think we talked about that earlier. I don't think we spend them well. But somewhere between $5.5 and $6.5 trillion. And then I've printed out the budgets, a couple thousand lines. And then go through those budgets line by line. And you just ask the question, well, this is what Clinton was spending,

fully inflated. Why are we spending this much more? Or this is what Obama spent. Or Trump. Why is it so much more? Explain yourself. Like I said, in business, this would be simple. Yeah.

I'd tell my manager that I said you could increase your budgets based on inflation and the number of customers you serve. You're 10% manager that I said you could increase your budgets based on inflation, the number of customers you serve. You're 10% above that, cut it. Kind of like, I don't care how you do it, just do it. Get back down to that level. To do it is so it doesn't harm our business, so it doesn't harm people's lives, but just do it.

Because what we were spending 1998, 2014, 2019, I think it's probably pretty adequate. And by the way, if you go through it line by line, there will be lines I think you look at, scratch your head and go, we probably shouldn't be spending anything on that. I think Doge has taught us that. So again, Trump, again, I think that was brilliant, what Trump and Elon did with Doge. But we haven't realized those savings yet. I think we stopped spending on contracts, but unless we set up and pass a rescission package on the discretionary end, and unless we take whatever they discovered in mandatory and eliminate that through the reconciliation process, those monies will just be sitting out there unobligated and some Democrat Congress and some Democrat president will spend it without even having to appropriate it. Can I ask about the defense budget? So it's in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars. We face no invasion threat. We never have. We're separated from the rest of the world by two large oceans. Our standing force is not that huge, actually. It's not like all that money's going to pay for soldiers and Marines and airmen.

Why are we spending that much on defense? We haven't won a war in 80 years. So, like, I'm a little, and I know that all Republicans are required to take the Liz Cheney position, you know, that's just great. Defense spending is just by its nature inherently good. But what is that? What's all that money going to exactly? We did not heed Eisenhower's warning. I think the military-industrial complex has way too much power. I would love, and we should do this, is we should go back, at least as far back as Vietnam, and analyze each one of these foreign entanglements, each of these foreign wars, and ask ourselves and gather some basic information.

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

Yeah. The finest among us. Well, I agree with that. People who love this country, who've stepped up the plate, willing to serve and sacrifice more than a million have paid the ultimate price so i i don't i don't even like saying this but the fact the matter is if you did that kind of analysis you wouldn't walk away very satisfied well but doesn't our respect for the men who died in military service require us to do that i think it does so if you would to do that i mean i was just recently in Hanoi a couple years ago. What wonderful people.

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

Afghanistan, Iraq. Syria. I mean, so, I mean, what have we accomplished with the Ukraine war right now? Oh, I know. We have actually solidified the relationship between Russiaussia and china and north korea and iran yes that's completely opposite of what our goals ought to be yeah so it's just not working i mean we have not accomplished these goals they've been they've been miserable failures how many people died in iraq based on that false intelligence you know the best book I read on Afghanistan

was written by special ops folks. And they basically made the point that we'd pretty well accomplish what we need to accomplish in Afghanistan before Tommy Frank ever put a boot on the ground. We said, hey, listen, you guys harbored Al-Qaeda. Don't do it anymore. Kind of punish the Taliban.

And that's probably where we should have left that. How many Americans lost their lives? How many, you know, Afghanistan citizens lost their lives? What did that cost? Again, it's almost incalculable. So a new report, which you may not have seen because it was suppressed, shows the abortion pill is 10 times more dangerous than the FDA claims. Not just dangerous to the baby that it kills, but to the women who take it. 11% of women who take the pill experience, quote, serious adverse effects. Why is it still on the market? Because it's abortion related and our leaders love abortion.

It'd be easy to turn that figure into a rant about abortion. But there's another angle to this debate that's not talked about enough. And that's into a rant about abortion. But there's another angle to this debate that's not talked about enough. And that's what a blessing babies are. People scoff about children like there's some kind of plague. But in reality, the exact opposite is true. On your deathbed, you will care only about your children. They are a gift unlike any other gift. They are the supreme gift. Our friends at Preborn understand this, and they're working around the clock to save as many unborn lives as they can. Their ultrasound helps guide thousands of future mothers to choose life through knowledge. And that's possible because people like you support them.

To help, simply dial pound 250, say the keyword baby. That's pound 250, the word baby. Or visit preborn.com slash Tucker. We are proud to partner with Preborn. Well, given all of that, and given that no one has ever been punished, no high-ranking military officer, I'm aware, has ever been punished for any of these failures. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was humiliating and costly, and it was just a disaster in every way. And the only guy who's punished is Stu Schiller, who's a Marine officer who points out that it wasn't a success, but the architects were rewarded. So given all of

that, why are we sending these people even more money? Again, it's the military industrial complex and you know there's some just basic metrics people use like percent of gdp spending on defense where we're kind of a low level and we should be you know we should be i mean we've got right now you know chairman of the armed services committee mcconnell they want to dedicate five percent of gdp to defense so where are you going to get that money yeah i realize we're kind of down to historic. So where are you going to get that money? I realize we're kind of down to historic low levels, but it's still a trillion dollars. Where are we spending it?

That's why I would have loved to have seen somebody like Eric Prince, who wrote an excellent article, Too Big to Win, become defense secretary and really take a look at, how are we fighting these wars? What do we need to do to defend America? Somebody said to me the other day, I was talking to an informed person about this grousing about it. Like, if you don't win a war for 80 years, why does your budget keep expanding?

And this person said, the real reason is America's industrial base is overwhelmingly military now. So actually, the only real thing we make are weapons. And so that's what that money does. I don't think that's necessarily true. There's certainly, again, you still have that industrial base. You spend a trillion dollars out of a $28 trillion economy, $29 trillion economy. It's a pretty good chunk, but it's not the majority of it. We make a lot of stuff. I think that's kind of a mistaken notion as well. Industrial production continues to rise here. Yeah, we don't have, again, we become more and more productive. That's a good thing. Again,

right now, we don't have enough workers to be manufacturing a whole lot more stuff. I mean, the last thing we should be doing is trying to attract high labor content product back to the U.S. We just don't have enough people to do it. Interesting. So that's probably like a Raytheon talking point then. I don't know. I'm just putting the basic numbers. I mean- Oh, that's interesting. So what happens to this bill? Well, again, what I'd like to do is split it into two parts. Do the, you know, quite honestly, what has to be done now. And that is provide the funding. I think they're asking way too much.

I point this out with Kristi Noem. They're looking for $46 billion for the fence, right? Or for the wall. Well, in the first Trump term, I can't remember the exact numbers. I think something 485 miles. We spent $6.6 billion. So that's like $.4 million dollars a mile now they want 46 billion that's built over 3 000 miles so i asked her square that circle for me

and she really didn't she was actually saying they're projecting 12 million dollars i was willing to give her 14.4 even though i even though I was in Israel when I was chairman of Homeland Security. They built their very effective fence for less than $2 million a mile. But lay that aside. So provide border funding. The price you have to pay for that is more defense spending. Bank the savings we can. Take the good work the House has done. Bank that savings extend

current tax law take an automatic tax increase off the table provide that certainty the economy bump up the debt ceiling for a year to keep pressure on us to come back and then do the big beautiful bill we'll consider president trump's tax proposals um so listen i'm all for no tax on cash tips can't collect it anyway, so why even try? And that keeps currency circulating through the economy as well. I think that's a good thing. I don't want to go to a government-backed digital security. So that's good.

I mean, the other tax proposals he promises to me in the campaign, they're not pro-growth. They're just going to reduce revenue. No tax on overtime. I ran a continuing shift operation. I think the one time and a half or double time is more than enough incentive. We all live under a tax system. Income is income. Why would we increase the regulatory burden on people who administer payroll to cordon off some of the overtime to don't tax it? I mean, just be a pain in the butt. Why doesn't everyone just pay the same rate? I don't understand that. And then everyone has skin in the game. Everyone has a better sense of what their government is

spending and on what, if it's coming out of your... And that suggests a kind of equality under the law that would be sort of nice if everyone was held... And I mean, nonprofits too. I think we should get rid of all nonprofits immediately. Why isn't Harvard's endowment paying taxes? Like, what is this? Why not just the same rate for everybody? Labor, capital, same rate. One rate. You can be a nonprofit by not making a profit.

I've done that too. I still pay taxes. No, honestly, I mean, if you're a university, a church, something like that, you bring in revenue, you spend it, you get kind of profit. You're a nonprofit. Yeah. So no, the other reason I wanted to split this into two parts is we need to take the time to go line by line, to do a doge impact on the entire budget, to find the outrageous spending, eliminate what

people won't even notice, but also to simplify and rationalize our tax system. We have a grotesquely complex tax system. Everyone's out grotesquely complex tax system. Everyone's out of compliance. Everybody's committing a felony unwittingly. Every single person, you, me, every other American. So simplify it, again, using basic principles. Don't try and socially and economically engineer the tax code. We're terrible at it. You're not that smart. So raise the revenue you need. Try not to do any economic or social harm. So that would imply a very simple tax system. They always say lower the rates, broaden the base. But I don't personally, I've done well in this country. I don't mind having a progressive tax

rate. I really don't. Certainly exempting a certain amount of income so people can live without having to pay tax and stuff. But within those confines, keep it as absolutely simple as possible. Now, one thing I know is there's nothing simple about simplifying the tax code. I mean, everybody's got their little tax break. And even right now, one of the reasons I'm not looking forward to this ordeal that's going to come about over the next couple of weeks as I dig my heels in is there are a lot of people that support President Trump who have supported me. They want ordeal that's going to come about over the next couple of weeks as I dig my heels in is, you know, there are a lot of people that support President Trump, that have supported me, they want no tax and overtime. By the way, if all you live on is social security, the chance of you paying

a dollar tax on that is almost infinitesimal. So we don't tax social security right now. But let's face it, if you have social security and you have income above that, I mean, why should you exempt some of your income? I think us oldsters have stolen enough from younger generations. I mean, you see the wealth transfer. I used to have a chart on this, but the transfer of wealth from young to old over the decades, it's literally immoral. It's immoral. So let's not- I've noticed. Let's not exacerbate that problem it's disgusting again if you're good if you can do something on tax again i don't think this is i don't want to increase people's taxes but i don't think this is a point

in time to be cutting taxes that aren't incentivizing growth again i don't i'd rather not be incentivizing you know again trying to use the tax code to try and come up with some way to incentivize growth. Just keep it simple, uncomplicated, rational. Income is income. Basic principles like wherewithal to pay. Approach all of these things with principles. The big problem in the House, what was the goal there? I would think the goal of this Republican budget reconciliation would be to reduce the deficits. Seems like in the House, the only goal was to pass one big, beautiful bill by Memorial Day. Great. You achieved your goal.

But you didn't solve our fiscal situation. You didn't even come close. Yeah, I mean, I'm not impressed by the people managing this in the House, I'm just going to say. So I'm not surprised. But it, of course, I'm not impressed by the people managing this in the House, I'm just going to say. So I'm not surprised. But it, of course, needs a Senate as well. Well, it needs presidential leadership. And he needs to get behind fixing this problem. Now, he said in the State of the Union he's going to balance a budget.

Fine. But I know in his mind he thinks he's going to balance a budget with tariff revenue. I'm sorry, tariffs are a tax. We're not quite sure who pays them. Whereas the foreign companies, the foreign countries, the U.S. consumer, again, the instance of tax is never particularly certain. But tariffs raise the cost of goods. For what? for what again i there's no doubt there's certain products uh high-end semiconductors pharmaceuticals rare earth minerals we got to be basic in those we have to produce these here just

from standpoint national security is there a better way of doing that than just generalized increasing of a tax which is what a tariff is, I would argue there probably is. How about this? We just give you a tax holiday for five or 10 years. Again, you've got a high-end semiconductor plant in a different country. We're not collecting the tax on it anyway. It's no skin off our, you know, what's to just, well, come on over here, produce that here. We'll just give you a 10-year tax. Talk to the people who are going to invest in it. What's it going to take? How long a tax holiday? What's reasonable? Incentivize it that way.

But don't incentivize it by mucking up our tax code or, I'd say even worse, things like the CHIPS Act where you pay money to grifters that don't really fulfill their end of the bargain. We're just not good at doing these things. The free market's not perfect, but it is the most efficient allocator of capital.

So, I mean, you provide somebody a tax holiday, and I think you can bring those things back. You're pretty good. Plus, permitting reform. If you want to do precursive chemicals for pharmaceuticals, I mean, you got to permit the refineries. You got to permit the mines if you're going to mine rare earth minerals and if you're going to refine those things. So again, we have to look at this, but it requires presidential leadership to go make the

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

I want to see this president succeed. How many of your colleagues in the Senate have your position on this? Well, it's interesting. There's a fair number that are coalescing around the number. And I've never really, I've laid out options, but I've never dug my heels in on a number for a pre-pandemic level spending. But I've laid it out, I think, logically enough. Most people are, you know, there's a pretty big group say that it should be no more than $6.5 trillion in the next fiscal year. So that implies about a $800 billion difference between what we're expected to spend, which would be about $8 trillion of spending reduction over 10 years. It's a long ways from the $1.5 trillion. Again, what I've always said is I need a commitment to return to a reasonable pre-pandemic level spending, realizing we have to get the votes, but maybe even more importantly, a process to achieve and maintain it.

And that's that line. Do the work, but it'll take time to do the work. But we need a commitment. I can't do it. I don't have access to all the information. We really need, and what I proposed in one of my Wall Street Journal columns was a budget review panel made up of senators, House members, staff of the OMB, Office of Management and Budget. I mean, those are the guys that know their stuff. And then have this as a review panel and bring up, just like in business, budget review meeting,

bring up the department heads with their budget gurus and stuff and explain it. Go line by line. Again, why are you spending so much more than a fully inflated Bill Clinton level or Obama or Trump? Explain yourself. Why should we be spending even a dime on this category right here? So you've got top lines within the federal government, more than 2,000 lines. Under each one of those lines, there's probably hundreds of lines between all those. So you've got a lot of work to do.

But it doesn't get done if you try and rush this thing through. And now by July 4th would be the goal for the Senate. So I want to break this up into two parts to give us the time to go through that budget line by line. Will you get it? Right now, I think I've got at least four that will dig their heels in and say, again, we want to see it succeed. We want to pass this. We want to pass something. We'll pass what must be passed now. Again, we've already set this up in the Senate with our budget resolution to provide the defense and border funding plus $850 billion in savings. Tack that onto the House where we extend current tax law and increase the debt ceiling.

By the way, that's going to be a massive amount. It should shock everybody what we're going to have to increase the debt ceiling for just to get us by another year. Probably be $2 to $2.5 trillion. Because we have to refill the extraordinary measures that you know the buckets they've taken from to extend the debt ceiling we're right now burning about a half a trillion dollars a quarter so you're talking you know if you extend in next year five quarters at half a trillion dollars that's 250 2.5 trillion dollars just to get us by into next year.

That should shock everybody. And that's my whole purpose here is we haven't talked about the numbers. We haven't put this in context of the big mess we're in, the deep hole we've dug ourselves. And I'm just going to force that debate. I'm not trying to be obstinate. I'll probably be accused of grandstanding. I don't want to do it. I'd rather not do this.

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This is where I've been so supportive. Why do they call it Rockefeller medicine? He's really one that really pushed pharmaceutical drug companies way back when. I don't understand the full history. But again, that's all petrochemical-based, chemistry-based. And rather than really focusing on health, it's all, we've got a pill for this. Here's an example. And I think this is true, but there was a debate in terms of what caused heart disease.

Is it too much sugar? Is it cholesterol? Yes. From the pharmaceutical industry standpoint, they had a drug to lower cholesterol statins so guess what they chose cholesterol the winner the winner because we've got a drug to manage that now um there are all kinds of emerging serious side effects of statins. One that I read about was sudden hearing loss. Guess who lost their hearing just like that?

Who? Me. Two weeks after I returned from Moscow, I just lost my hearing. Just like stepped out of the shower, and I lost my hearing, my balance in an instant. Like all your hearing? In my right ear. So you start researching all this. I mean, you know, NIH reviewed me because it thought it might have been Havana syndrome.

Yes. But as I got involved in the whole COVID and I got to meet all these doctors who had a second opinion that weren't going along with the narrative, that had the courage and compassion to actually treat COVID patients that took seriously the vaccine injured, it just connects you to just alternate opinions, alternate thinking. And one of them laid out the listed side effects of statins in one of them's sudden hearing. A lot of people were thinking it could be a main driver of alzheimer's but again they'll never admit it because that's a multi-billion dollar industry right do you think it's possible that um statins are responsible for dementia people are saying that i don't know i'm not i'm not a doctor not a medical researcher but my eyes have been open that's really scary right there if that's true true, that's, I mean, that's. I mean, people are making, are positing that.

I will say since I, so I took myself off statins. I've had a number of health conditions that just improved as a result. Seriously? Yeah. I was complaining for years, quite honestly. So they put me on statins when I went in for a CT scan and they saw calcium buildup on what they call the widow maker. But that's external. Now it can always bust through the arterial wall and cause real problems.

But I had a heart catheterization a couple of years ago. I woke up from that and go, man, I wish my plumbing was as clean as yours. So I don't know, was it because I was on statins all those years, but I know I was going being treated because I was having pretty severe dizzy spells, almost point of passing out frequently, you know, going up a step, whatever.

I took myself off statins. I under doctor's care. That's gone. I'll give you, I'll give you another one. This is, so I also, this is very personal.

This is strange. I'm getting into this, but it's a safe space. So I've always had acid ref personal. This is strange I'm getting into this, but. It's a safe space. So I've always had acid reflux for years. Okay. And so I was on everything. You know, Zantac and Prilosec and then Nexium, which by the way, were great in terms of relieving symptoms, but also have some pretty nasty side effects. effects so again you know reading these alternate opinions on stuff hydroxychloric no uh hydrochloric

acid has been known for decades to be a just evade the theory behind what causes acid reflux is you don't have enough stomach acid you're not you're not digesting the food properly. You're not providing the signal to the, I guess, sphincter muscle, whatever that closes your stomach off from your esophagus. So what you do to solve it is you introduce more acid in the form of a natural vegetarian-based product, and that's called hydrochloric acidchloric acid so i take one tablet now before my evening meal i miss it probably at least half the time i don't have it anymore so i don't take i don't take any of that stuff anymore this worked far better it's just completely natural it's complete it's completely opposite of what all these other patented patented drugs do

for you so it's just it's just hcl and they call it baiting or something like that but it's just an over-the-counter supplement and it's worked great i mean you would think given what i will get all kinds of guff for talking about this stuff but it's just because that's what that's what they do this is the well you just described your life improving your health improving and that's somehow a thought crime like it will be because the the pharmaceutical industrial complex again it's all about drugs that can can treat chronic illness which is why you can't talk about these things which is why they completely sabotaged the treatment of early treatment of COVID using things like hydroxychloroquine and, you know, particularly ivermectin, which I heard story because, you know, I was the tip of

the spear. I got all kinds of people calling me what doctors treat this. And so I heard the amazing stories of recovery recovery with ivermectin you know we will hold a hearing on this there's one attorney that uh got called in to sue a hospital because somebody's loved one was in the hospital and they were begging them to use ivermectin the hospital just refused so this lawyer went in there and sued was successful saved that person's life. So in the end, because he did this, I think he had something, this is a rough number, something like 200 families that he went to court for to force the hospitals to use ivermectin or budesonide or some of these other drugs, right? He won about half the cases.

Of those 100 cases, I think he lost two or a couple of patients. Otherwise, they all survived. Of the 100 cases he lost, they all died. Whoa. So you take a look at these hospital protocols. There's a great documentary, Vax 3, that really goes through this and just talks about the hospital protocols using remdesivir, which the nurses called run death is near.

The anti-foushee said this is the treatment, even though whatever study it was, they changed the endpoint from death to just days in hospital, which I don't think even that was true. The number of conflicts of the people reviewing that that were associated with Gilead, I mean, the WHO recommended against using remdesivir, and yet we still use it. I mean, you see what happened during COVID, thoroughly corrupt. And, you know, we just had our hearing on the signals on myocarditis, which they completely downplayed, hid for months on the COVID injection. So why are we giving any money to a system that not only fails to improve public health,

but actively conspires against it? I would say the primary reason at this point in time is because in 1997, Clinton, through regulation, allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise. And you look at those ads, you don't have any idea what those drugs do. But that's common around the world, right? Most countries allow that. No, only America and New Zealand allow that. I knew the eyes.

I know you did. Evoke that. So only the United States and New Zealand out of every country on planet Earth allow drug pharma companies to advertise. Right. On television. And so you take a look at those ads. I have no idea what any of those drugs are treating other than they allow dogs to jump higher and people to play around the pool. Make your wife hotter.

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

They're not selling those drugs. No, they are buying the narrative. i worked in the media my whole life and and that is and that is what we saw during covid i mean that's what completely opened up they're paying nbc and fox news and cnn and fcbs and everybody else not to criticize the covid shots i ran in in 2010 after i've given a tea party speech and two things I said, which my campaign guy said, never say that again, is I defended big oil and big pharma. I said, what, am I the only guy that likes a gas station every corner of the town because I run it down to empty, or am I the only one that wants a life-saving new drug?

By the way, there are wonderful drugs. For sure. There are, that we need, particularly in acute care. But we do need, and this is what, again, I give Bobby Kennedy and Trump so much credit for laying aside their political differences, joining an alliance to focus on a problem that they both agree that needs to be solved, and it's chronic illness. Bobby Kennedy says 75% of our healthcare spending is on chronic illness. And so I just laid out, I had a chronic condition, acid reflux, GERD, and kept treating with all these pharmaceuticals. They weren't cheap.

Prilosec, Nexium, they're not cheap. Alleviated the symptoms, but didn't fix it. I go to something that just is far cheaper, I think works better. I don't even have to take it every day. I think I've probably replenished the acid in my stomach, which declines with age. So, I mean, every other day I take one, if I remember, as an evening meal,

pretty well solved the condition. I have cured a chronic, I'm not treating it anymore. I was treating it with Prilosec and Nexium. I pretty well cured it. Now, I still take this because it's a digestive aid it's like you eat the right stuff why can't if if clinton allowed pharma to advertise allowed for me to buy the media which they did i can verify that since i worked there um why can't that be undone as easily well it can uh you ought to use your influence with president trump to make sure he supports bobby if he decides to do that but we should do that and again i'm a free market guy i mean i'm but we couldn't even have a debate about the most

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

and decide whether or not to take it, right? That would be the hope. Yeah. You know, I had a public event, and it was really based on your interview with Casey and Callie Means. And so we put that together. Bobby Kennedy showed up, and we had a bunch of social media influencers on nutrition. And one of the witnesses specializing, he's a psychiatrist specializing in

nutrition's impact on mental health, I think probably made the best little snippet of testimony. He said, you know, they don't want to know the root cause of chronic illness again who's they i remember listening to you asked that too is it what's that katherine uh wit or you just oh oh wonderful yeah wonderful woman yeah exactly you asked her who who are they yeah i asked that of my time myself all the time my guess is they attend davos whoever they are they're there. They're not invited to my house for dinner. But I thought that was a very interesting comment. They don't want to know the root cause. Because if they find out it is some pharmaceutical product or some pesticide or some herbicide or some toxin in our food,

that's going to disrupt multi-billion dollar business models. And those businesses are fully engaged in lobbying. They're fully engaged and have captured our regulatory agencies. I'm talking about, listen, government is power, right? That's a pretty good definition of government.

It's power. And as Lord Acton aptly stated, power corrupts. And so what has happened over the decades is these businesses, I have a great deal of sympathy for them being over-regulated by big government, right? But they're smart, especially the big ones. They got smart people there. So not only do they figure out how to survive with over-regulation,

they learn how to capture it. Of course. And then they promote it. And then they capture it for their benefit to the detriment of their competitors particularly smaller competitors and detriment of the american public and that is what has happened i would say across the board in government whether it's pharmaceuticals whether it's military industrial complex whether it's our big food that's in my mind that's the hope that that's what i want to see donald trump defeat and you first defeat it by exposing it People have to understand this is what's happened. But certainly what I learned, you learned, Bobby Kennedy learned during COVID, it is very difficult defeat back then what I called the COVID cartel. There's a powerful group of interests and they're not going away. Let's start with a really easy one. And those are the vaccine injured.

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

Well, just on VAERS alone, I think we're over 38,000 deaths associated with the COVID vaccine. VAERS is the federally created... Yeah, Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Yes, but that's adverse event reporting system yes so that's a but that's a government right reporting system now it's it's uh some conditions are mandatory to be reported but they're still not uh the two complaints about or you know hits on veyers is it doesn't prove causation but it also dramatically understates the number of adverse events because people just don't report them.

Sometimes you don't connect the dots. So on VAERS system to date worldwide, there's over 38,000 deaths associated with COVID vaccine. And 24% of those to date either occur on the date of vaccination or within one or two days. Wow. Yeah, I know someone who was killed by that. We saw these athletes dropping like flies on the field. You saw newscasters just toppling over from their anchor chair. And that wasn't reported.

You'd get it through social media. You might have a local news story, but there's no national news media that hopped on and say, what is happening here? No, because that wasn't real. It was all denied. Yeah. It was all denied. A lot of 23-year-old soccer players

have heart conditions, it turns out. Yeah. Yeah. It's all that exercise they do. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's horrible. So 38,000 globally just on VAERS. Is anyone keeping track of the injuries

and the chronic illness caused by those shots i think they're primarily calling it long covid now okay that's you know that's that that's their excuse and even those that are vaccine injured want to think it's just a long covid i mean nobody wants to admit that they maybe should have taken a little more time gotten a little more educated about this experimental COVID injection. They don't want to think there may be a ticking time bomb in terms of turbo cancers. But again, more and more evidence is coming out that in tumors, they find the spike protein. The spike protein as well as the modified RNA, it's not true mRNA. It does degrade very rapidly, circulating the body for months, possibly years.

Again, they're finding the spike protein in autopsied hearts, in tumors. We know from people like Kevin McKernan that there was DNA contamination. It can't integrate into the cell. Could cause cancer. Again, I hate talking about it because I know 70%, 80% of Americans got vaccinated. They don't want to hear about it at all. No, there's so, I hate talking about it because I know 70, 80% of Americans got vaccinated.

They don't want to hear about it. No, they don't. They want to just move on. That's why it's so difficult to hold people accountable for this. Well, here's an easy way to do it. So if I sell any product, a food product, for example,

and it turns out to kill people. Get sued. Exactly. So only the vax makers have this exemption granted to them by congress the shield and i i've never heard a real argument for why they should maintain that or why congress continues to protect them why but by the way so i talked to barbara low fisher who was the mom who really pushed that thing through that law itself does not provide liability this is the 1986 yeah it was regulations kind of the wink wink now now to get it passed that they

implement you know promulgated regulations that actually provide that uh liability protection and again that it wasn't it wasn't just for the three vaccines, I think, at the time that were on the schedule. It exempted all future vaccines, which has led to an explosion. Because, again, the greatest risk— There's no downside. Yeah, I mean, you just keep cranking these things out. They aren't tested in a true placebo-controlled trial. Sometimes the trial period, as meager as it is, only lasts for a week. It's shocking. This was Aaron Seery testified at our hearing last week, and he's expert at all this in terms of

the American public would be shocked at how little testing these vaccines actually receive. But you have this, it's almost a religion around the safety and efficacy of vaccines. I understand that. It's such an elegant solution, isn't it? Just a 100% safe shot in the arm and you never have to worry about that. The problem is just not true. Well, but let's say it is true. They're super safe. Peter Hotez is like a legitimate physician. He's telling the truth. He's not deranged. And okay, then prove it. Then hold them to the same standard that every other product that you buy,

certainly every product that's mandated by government is held to. And that's one that's backstopped by the courts. Right. Tort law. Like, I don't understand, like why would there be this one thing that's exempt from a process

that every other thing is subject to? Because there were so many injuries this one thing that's exempt from a process that every other thing is subject to because because there were so many injuries manifesting themselves before that law was passed that those manufacturers are going to be sued out of existence and again the the religion faith that these vaccines are just so crucial even though you read a book like dissolving illusions you realize the main reason most of these diseases were eradicated is because we no longer live in squalor right we have we have we have sanitation right okay so i mean you see the chart coming down here and then the vaccines start occurring here and yeah the tail goes out and we you know vaccines may have eradicated some

of these disease i don't i don't deny that but the main thing is we you know we actually improve sanitation and what we are ignoring now is treatment and that came out with covid it's like i mean i couldn't you know the reason i got into this is i'm chairman of homeland security i'm the only guy holding hearings on this stuff because none of this stuff makes sense so why are why are they just pillorying something like hydroxychloroquine i mean if, if it works, give it a shot. I mean, what's the harm? It's incredibly safe. Ivermectin.

But that was completely sabotaged all for the purpose of forcing this injection, what they called a vaccine, on everybody as a solution. Why aren't we talking about treating disease? Measles. Why aren't we talking about treating disease? Measles. Why aren't we focusing on treatment? Again, I'm telling these doctors, generally a very treatable disease. Just about any disease can kill you, okay? But a lot of diseases can be treated. We ought to be focusing a lot more, from my standpoint, on treatment as opposed to loading up our children, our infants,

with dozens and dozens of doses and not even asking the question. So, okay, have these been thoroughly tested? I mean, have we tested giving multiple vaccines at the same dose? I mean, every time you put a vaccine in somebody's arm, you're messing with their immune system. Why do we have all these autoimmune diseases nowadays? You know, what is causing autism i mean we're just not able to ask the question because to get back to my witness in that last event is they don't want to know and they attack anyone who asks including you um and i mean watching what's happened to you has really been the greatest of all wake-up calls for me because

i would say of the senators i know which is of them, you're like the most temperamentally moderate and accountant number-based, like not a wild-eyed radical at all, at all. And there are some crazy people in the Congress. You're not. You're the opposite. You like budgets and stuff. So if they're calling you a wacko,

they discredit themselves. That's just as an observer, my observation. Again, but that's what they do. So during COVID, quick story here. I was on a telephone town hall, and this is when Omicron was ramping up. And this is already by the time we've got a partisan split on COVID, right? I mean, Republicans don't wear masks, Democrats do. Republicans aren't freaked out by it. Democrats are. But again, I'm talking to these doctors. I know they were very concerned, for example, on Delta, that variant.

It was more difficult to treat. They had to double and triple the dose of ivermectin to have it actually be effective. So nobody knew what was going to happen with Omicron. I think people were thinking it looked like it was going to be more mild. I'm on a telephone in Town Hall with my constituents, probably a couple thousand, and I said, listen, take this seriously. COVID can still be a deadly disease. So whether you're vaccinated or not vaccinated, there are things you can do, vitamin D. You can gargle.

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

I mean, that was the... So, again, what they do... That was what Sununu said? Yeah, what they do... Really one of the worst people ever attempted politics. What they do is they discredit people. So then once they've done that, you know, whether as falsely as they discredit you, now you're discredited. So now next time, next thing that comes up that is true, that you're talking about,

oh, this guy, he's thoroughly discredited. This guy's discredited. He's discredited. He thinks Listerine is. That is what they do. Just like, you know, the CIA used the conspiracy theorist. Just call somebody conspiracy theorist and then don't have to listen to them anymore. This guy's obviously a nutcase.

So, no, I've lived this up close and personal. The problem is that it does make everyone into a nihilist. It's happened to me. I've tried and fight it. It feels like everything's a lie, so you don't believe anything. And you just don't go to the doctor, for example, which is where I am, or I know a lot of people like that. And that's, you know, you should probably go to the doctor. I mean, you know, get a checkup.

That's okay. But they've so devalued their own currency. They've so discredited themselves through lying and just the most evil kind of like blaming you for their problems that it's, I don't know, it's had all these effects on our society that I don't think we've even grappled with. Well, I try and tell established members of the medical profession that they ought to be concerned that a very large percentage of American people simply don't trust them anymore. Like at all. And that's not good. That's not good. You know.

Well, I think they're evil when i was when i was chairman of the european subcommittee on foreign relations we had i think gary kasparov come in and talk about russian disinformation yeah and i thought it was interesting because it's they're not russia is not trying to convince you of something with their disinformation they just want people not to trust anything that is the whole purpose of their disinformation. I feel like Albert Bourla did more to achieve that in the United States, the head of Pfizer, than like any Russian ever could. You know, Joe Biden did that. Susan Rice did that. I mean, all these people, they just lie right to your face.

And there's no recourse. So is there even conceivably a chance that Congress would repeal the protections that the vaccine makers enjoy? That'll probably be a stretch. Can I ask this? Where's the trial bar on this? The trial bar has kind of like wrecked America by encouraging lawsuits for like the most frivolous possible. I get sued all the time by people. I don't like what you said.

I'm suing you and you have to deal with it. They come to your house, process servers. And that's because the trial bar has gotten rich from this, from the tobacco, asbestos, all these shakedown, these totally fake money-making operations that they Morgan and Morgan with the ambulance chasing and all that. Why aren't they pushing for the repeal of the protections that vaccine makers uniquely enjoy? That's a really good question. So as somebody from the private sector, I avoided lawyers in the judicial process like a play. Me too.

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

I want those life-saving new drugs. It can't be a pinata party for lawyers. No, I agree. But it's got to be based on solid science. And that's why I really think the root cause, I mean, the thing that Bobby Kennedy must address is we have to restore integrity to science. You know, this is, you know, Eisenhower warned us about this in his farewell address. It doesn't get as much coverage, but public financing of science and research would lead

to a scientific and technological elite to drive public policy. I would view that corrupted. So when you pay for science, you get the result you want, whether it's climate change, whether it's vaccines, whether it's drugs and that type of thing. We need to restore integrity. Peer review is a joke. Peer reviewers are basically volunteering. So you'll get peer reviewers who might have a different paper themselves, and they just discredit that. So what is truth? So you have to restore integrity to science. There's got to be, like, everybody from opposing sides have to be at the table. You've got to make your data available.

Some of these studies are published. Nobody gets to see the data. So that, I think, is the first step that Bobby has to accomplish is try and restore integrity, particularly for government-funded science. Well, you tried the other day to raise science-based questions about pivotal events in American history 24 years ago, 9-11, and you asked a question that I think any honest person would ask, like, Building 7 was never hit by a plane. Why did it fall down in exactly the same way the first two towers did? That shouldn't be verboten.

So you ask that question i want to read the response from a republican in the house a new member called mike lawler i guess from new york uh and he said this i don't know if you know him you probably don't he just got there quote senator johnson should stop peddling conspiracy theories about the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history and one that forever altered the lives of so many of my fellow New Yorkers. Crap like this dishonors and disrespects the innocent lives lost, our brave first responders, and all families and survivors who still carry the pain of 9-11 each and every day. So I think Lawler was like in high school when 9-11 happened. He doesn't really seem to represent New York anyway, but whatever.

The point is, why would he attack you personally for asking like the most obvious question ever, one rooted in science, which is how did this happen? Like, what is that? I don't know. It sure hurt my feelings. I know you don't care, but I just thought, why Mike Lawler, who literally just got there, got a lot of problems in New York. Why is he mad at you for asking that?

You think he would want you to ask? What is so off base about that is the only reason I'm looking at this is because the then chairman of the permanent subcommittee investigation. Now, I'm chair, but, you know, Senator Blumenthal, he wanted to do this investigation on Saudi's negotiation with PGA. And, you know, he's doing it because he's from Connecticut and got 9-11 families. They want to know what Saudi involvement was. Yes, fair. I didn't agree with that. I thought this is a private sector negotiation.

Let them take care of that, okay? But he did it anyway. So leading up to a pretty well-publicized hearing, I started getting 9-11 family members see me in the hallway. They would literally in the hallway in Congress. And they would have a heavily redacted document they got from the FBI in terms of what the Saudi involvement was in 9-11, what we knew. And they asked me, can you please get this unredacted? We want to know what the government knows about these things. Now, this is 20-some years after 9-11.

It's probably about time. So in the hearing, I asked Senator Blumenthal, would you join me in requesting from the Biden administration this information from the 9-11 family? So, well, he had to. But the bottom line is I got down this road because the 9-11 families want to know the answer. And once I opened up that inquiry, now I started getting all kinds of information.

But, man, why is anything still redacted from 9-11? It was 24 years ago. It changed this country completely. Every American has – I mean, Lawler's right in the sense that it really affected every American why would our government continue to lie about it I can't answer the question all I can say is it raises my suspicion yeah and then when you start gaining again I'm I'm just as prone to everybody else going though that's wacko you confusing. But then you start getting the information and you start going, wow, is that weird? Building number seven, you see it come down and we've all watched because it's cool to watch.

These buildings being demolished, boom, just free fall. Well, the only way that happens is if you remove all of their supports at the same time. You blow them all out so that a building can really free fall. If it's collapsing something else, it's like, you know, you build like a fire and it collapses off to the side or something, right? So that was pretty strange. But, you know, the more documentaries I look at this stuff, the more information I receive, you talk to guys like Richard Gage, the head of the architects for 9-11 Truth. They feed you information, and you start asking a lot of questions.

And you just realize there's a lot here that simply has not been answered. And the firefighters want to know. There was never a steel structure building that ever collapsed because of a fire. Especially Building 7. We don't get a lot of buildings that commercial airliners run into. So you could be like, who knows? You're right. But Building 7 was not hit by anything.

It's actually quite a distance from the other towers. It's not right next door. It's hundreds of yards away, I think. And debris hit it and it caught fire. And then the whole thing collapsed, as we saw on camera. That was not even included in the 9-11 report. There's no mention of Building 7. It's like, anyway, the point is...

And you also have people, because they never explored explosions, but a guy named Graham McQueen researched this. He dug up footage you know, footage filmed at ground zero, 156 witnesses, you know, first responders saying they heard explosions before the buildings came down. So what is, I mean, there, trust me, there are a lot of unanswered questions. I mean, things you just can't explain that. So I'm not sure where it goes. I know you had Kurt Weldon on. He's got a lot of information on kind of the before and after.

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

There's a lot of power. So I'm interested in your evolution on this. So you said before Blumenthal, your colleague, Senator Blumenthal, from Connecticut, kind of raised this in a different way, you were not wondering what happened to Building 7. No. Don't think I've ever heard of it. Really?

Yeah, I figured the Twin Towers came down. I'm not a New Yorker. It affected all of us. We all saw them come down. We said, the world has changed. Yes. This changed the world. And it did. Oh, more than any other them come down. We said, the world has changed. Yes. This changed the world. And it did.

Oh, more than any other event in my life. Not for the better. No, not at all. Okay, this is a seminal event in our lifetime. And the fact that there's so many unanswered questions, that the Bush administration was so resistant to even a 9-11 commission, that the commissioners claimed that it was set up to fail, that you've got a Bob Kerry who's since passed said this is a 30-year conspiracy. I mean, I could go on and on. Senator Kerry said that?

Yeah. Of Nebraska? Yeah, the comment, comment. Receipts of Medal of Honor in Vietnam, by the way. He's kind of walking away and going, this is a 30-year conspiracy. What do you mean by that? Nobody ever found out. So, again, I'm just throwing out little snippets.

But as I said, it's amazing the questions that you see, the legitimate questions that have been raised that remain unanswered. That's all I can say. All I have is questions right now. I don't have any answers. I get it. But I just feel exactly the same way. I have no clue. I have no theory of everything in this at all. But my question is,

you just came with this cold, though. Yeah, no, this was not something that I was, you know, hankering to delve into. It's kind of like Bobby Kennedy, how he got involved in childhood vaccines. Yes. He was giving all these speeches on the environment, and all these moms would show up with their t-shirts. And, you know, he kept them at bay for quite some time until one of the moms found out where he lived, came to his house with a stack of science, which he knew how to read because he was an environmental lawyer, and said, I'm not going to leave until you read this. And to his credit, he sat down and read it. And further to his credit, once he read it, once his eyes were open, he couldn't close them.

As much as he probably wanted to, as much as he realized the morass he was stepping into, I can't close my eyes. I can't. And particularly with childhood vaccine injuries, it's bad enough with the COVID vaccine. The Ernest Ramirez lost his son. I mean, it's just heartbreaking. I mean, Facebook dissolving these groups that were the only lifeline for some of these vaccine injured, and they started committing suicide afterwards because they lost that connection that they didn't have before these groups. But, I mean, you look at the documentary just vaxxed, and you see these parents, and they have the video of a perfectly normal child, and they take them in for a well visit. So they get a vaccine. That night, they spike a fever, have a seizure.

Now they've got a 26-year-old son who is extremely autistic, can't verbalize, acts up. I mean, it's just horrible. And you see the stats where you go from— it's hard to verify the 10,001, but, I mean, we know by CDC's own hundreds to one to now 30-something to one. By the way, while they've actually narrowed the definition of autism, they didn't expand it, they narrowed it. What's causing that? And, you know, after the makers of Vaxxed went on a road trip with a, with a bus premiering

this thing and other parents would come up to the bus, bus. And so they started videotaping their stories and they got some like 10,000 stories of parents, almost identical. It's like perfectly normal child, got the video to prove it. Go in, you know, within that night or within days. You start looking at the increase in SIDS versus the increase of the, you know, vaccine schedule. Again, I'm not a doctor, not a medical researcher.

My eyes have just been opened up to how so much true, so much information, so many questions, probably the best way to put it, have just been suppressed. You can't even ask them. Anybody who does gets marginalized, vilified, discredited, and that's how they battle this. They don't battle it with the truth. In my public events, I always invited the federal officials. I always invited the executives from the big pharma. Come in and defend yourself.

This is an open forum. I'll give you plenty of time. I'll be very fair. Speak your piece. I want to hear from you. They won't do it. They will. I mean, Peter Hotez famously, Mr. Vaccine Pusher, gets offered what?

What was the final offer? Two point some million dollars? Sit down and argue with not a doctor, a lawyer. Yeah. You know, just debate RFK Jr. And he wouldn't even do it. What does that tell you? He's just calling people names.

So just back to 9-11 for a minute. You never really thought about it. Like most people, me too, I yelled at anyone who asked questions about it myself. So I'm sympathetic actually in some ways to people who don't want to hear it. But now that you've looked into it and you said you don't have a coherent theory as to what it was,

but you've got a lot of questions, which questions trouble you the most? Well, it starts with building seven. Yes. Where you look at that and it just, yeah, I mean, this is really weird. You know, it does come down just like a, you know, building demolition type of project.

You get a documentary of this Alaskan structural engineering professor that does a four-year study on it, pretty well debunks NIST's analysis. Again, you don't have to be a structural engineer to say this doesn't this really doesn't make sense when you start putting together at what temperature steel uh melts uh they had molten steel in the the twin towers and i'm not sure we had a number seven but if one column said one column expanded went off kilter and that's what brought the whole thing down, well, it wouldn't come down so symmetrically.

You wouldn't have a free fall. Then you get deeper into it and, you know, there's a thing. His name was Barry Jennings. He was there, went up there. They'd already cleared out Building 7, even though he went up there to their command center and somebody goes, get out of there. It was predicted, I mean, literally predicted to come down, even though, again, a steel structured building had never collapsed due to fire because they're protected that way. He heard explosions.

He had to, got down to the sixth flight, the sixth floor and had to go back up to eight because something had been blown out. Again, what? This building was not hit by an airplane. No, I mean, it was damaged, but even this says, you know, not significant damage to when towers falling. So, again, there's just so many things. I mean, you could spend quite some time.

I mean, the ash contains residual of both burnt and unburnt thermite, which is used to demolish buildings. And it's military grade. And there's nanoparticle thermite. And you have all these metal spheres that you only get these iron spheres with extreme temperatures. And, again, jet fuel burns at below, I think, 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. And, again, nothing's adding up. I mean, just structurally, just basic engineering, basic physics, it doesn't make sense. So I would like to, you know, NIST took years to conclude their report.

To just a layperson, it doesn't make sense, particularly when you listen to the structural engineering professor just nuke the explanation. They never looked at a plausibility of some kind of controlled demolition. They never put in their report all these reports of people saying there were explosions. There's just so much ignored. In fact, the Bush administration dragged their feet, obstructed, setting up a 9-11 commission. Again, I could go on and on and on and on. I don't have any answers. I just have a host of questions. Then if you were upset, if you were Congressman Mike Lawler,

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

isn't there my guess is because they are very effective at marginalizing and discrediting anybody who can answer questions but why would they want to hide the truth you have to know exactly what they're trying to hide to be able to answer that question i can't of all issues for mike lawler to be upset about, this one really caught my eye. Like, why are you mad about it? Again, you just got there. And you're attacking a senior senator who's thoughtful and sober and asking totally real questions. Who are you covering for exactly, Mike Lawler?

And by the way, it wasn't like I went out of my way and had an interview just on this. I mean, I was asked a question, probably wandered into a space I maybe shouldn't have wandered into. But again, I was just describing all the ways the federal government has lied to us. Yes. And I've been— You're part of the federal government, by the way. I've been targeted by the FBI's misinformation campaign on Hunter Biden's computer. I mean, they've given me BS briefings to throw me off the trail.

So I've seen this. Again, I didn't run for the U.S. Senate because I wanted to get involved in investigations. I ran because we were mortgaging our kids' future because I knew Obamacare wouldn't work. But you become chairman of Homeland Security. Within, immediately, you've got the Hillary Clinton email scandal that's in our committee's jurisdiction, federal records, plus for the oversight committee.

So you start to do those investigation and just one investigation, just more so than another, the same cast of characters, the group that, you know, Vindman and the impeachment inquiry of Trump. I mean, you just see it all. And your eyes are opened up to the total corruption of these federal government agencies. And you realize we've just been lied to over and over and over and over again throughout history, at least, you know, history that's recent in my past. I wonder why you haven't just ignored it like everybody else. I met you right in early 2011, right, almost 15 years ago when you first got there. You're a business guy from Wisconsin, very closely divided state. You didn't win by a huge margin. You never have won by, you never won by 30 points. So, you know, whenever you talk about something in public,

you're taking a bigger risk than say the Senator from Utah or South Dakota, because you could lose an election. I never in a million years thought you of all people would be the guy to like ask questions about 9-11 or the Vax or January 6th and a whole bunch of other issues. And yet you have been the only guy in a lot of cases to ask those questions. Why? Why are you doing this? Wouldn't it just be easier to talk about tax reform or something? I would ask you the same question.

You know, why have you been so instrumental in broadening the Overton window on some of these things? And, of course, the Overton window is all about this is what you can discuss without threat or without risk. But you got to go beyond that. Because I was part of the coverup and I feel guilty about it. That's why I'm trying to atone for my previous sins. That's the real reason.

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

I mean, I could not believe in that Milwaukee event I held in June 2021 where I met Breanne Dressen and Maddie DeGarryri and other vaccine injured, Cheryl Rutgers. Again, I was hoping there would be some measure of sympathy expressed by the news media. They would ask them their stories. Tell us about your experience. Now, the first question was, hey, Ken Rutgers, you just want to try and make money off of a lawsuit here? Is that why you're doing this? So you develop an empathy for these people. And then, listen, i'm not a new

yorker i wasn't impacted any more than the world was by 9-11 not anywhere like the firefighters who lost their loved ones or the 9-11 families but then they come up to you and they're literally begging you please i just i i want some closure here i i want to know what happened that the government's not being honest you combine that with the fact that i know the government just freaking lies to their teeth to the american public all the time which is outrageous it is outrageous okay so you know my eyes are opened somebody's got to do it i actually have a responsibility to do it now i'm chairman of the permanent subcommittee Subcommittee on Investigations. That's a responsibility.

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

So no, I mean, my life would be a whole lot easier if I just ignored this stuff. Yeah. What do your colleagues think? It's such a rebuke. I know you like them and they like you, and I'm not trying to cause you any problems, but kind of a rebuke to them. It's like the vaccine-injured show up at their offices, too. Yeah, that was actually, I encouraged the vaccine-injured to go because I like my colleagues. It's a collegiate place. So I said, show up.

Request and be pretty insistent. Meet with a sender. Meet with your house members, whatever. So they showed up in mass, and I really felt bad afterwards because they were treated horribly in many cases. Seriously? Yeah, horribly. Rudely. Staff only met with them, treat him rudely.

It was not a good experience for the vaccine injured. Again, I didn't witness it. I just heard the stories. All I can say is I felt terrible having encouraged them to do that, and it ended up being such a bust and such a negative experience in so many cases. And their only crime was following instructions from the U.S. Congress and the executive branch, just like doing what they were told to do. I mean, they were accused of the most absurd charge level at them.

They're anti-vax. I mean, Maddie DeGarry, her mother signed her up for the trial. Breanne Dressen, she signed up for the AstraZeneca trial. And what happened to them? Well, Breanne Dressen, she signed up for the AstraZeneca trial. And what happened to them? Well, Breanne Dressen, close to suicide. I mean, she couldn't be touched. I mean, she was sensitive to light. She has all these neurological problems.

Mandy Degary has a feeding tube. She was in a wheelchair. I mean, horribly. And in her case, the drug company said that she has a stomach ache, basically. That's how they reported it to their government reporting. This girl who'd been in the hospital dozens of times, her young life, I wouldn't say it's over, but it's not normal anymore. No, these people suffered horrible industries. I mean, Ernesto Ramirez, single parent, his son, I think 16-year-old son, somewhere around that age, it's his life, died suddenly.

Boom. And you just heard, again, you saw that so many times. And it's still being covered up because nobody wants to admit it. I mean, if you're a doctor and you push this or recommend it to your patients, you don't want to know that something you recommend or push on your patients might have killed them or resulted in permanent industry. Members of Congress who cut videos, you know, get the vax. You know, our federal health officials, the news media who relentlessly,

I mean, Stephen Colbert, you think he'll ever admit to vaccine injuries after he does his little skits with a little you know uh hypodermic hypodermic needles in background so no i mean that's the the whole problem is there's you've got an entire society that doesn't want to admit they're wrong including people who got the injection that don't really want to think about it, just move on with their life. By the way, to provide some comfort, I think they were definitely hot lots. I've written oversight letters on this. It looks like probably about 5% of the, 4% of the injections created about 80% of the adverse events.

I can't remember the exact percentages. Really? Oh, yeah. And so I write to the CDC that don't reply back. But it's just, to me, manufacturing, this is a process out of control. I mean, you've got, you really do. I mean, I don't have the stats right with me, but it's obvious there were hot lots here, which should provide some people comfort. I think about 75% of the vaccine lots, very few adverse events associated with it all.

I won't speculate why, they're hot lots but you write about them you lay out all the stats and the response i get from the cdc is we don't see any hot lots we don't see it's just like we don't see a safety signal well if you're not looking for it you're not going to see a safety signal but these people are in charge of public health. They're supposed to care. They were fully vested in this injection. This was the solution. They pushed it. They ignored the safety surveillance. I mean, the V-safe system.

This was set up specifically to track the safety of the COVID injection. 10 million people volunteered on their mobile device. Now, the questions they asked were pretty mild. They really weren't designed to really expose serious adverse events. They had a list of kind of mild symptoms, you know, irritation of the arm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The second part was a little bit more serious. Did you lose a day of work or school? Did you seek medical care?

That's as serious as it got, okay? But the results were shocking. And even more shocking, they hid it from the public for two years. It took Aaron Siri two years, suing the government, to release the results of the online mobile application vSaveData. The results were 25% of the people, of the 10 million people, 25% lost a day of work or school because their adverse event was, you know, they felt bad enough. 25%. 25%.

8%, I think 7.8% sought medical care. And I think more than a majority, two or three times. That's a reasonably, because I know people with adverse events that suffered and they never sought medical care so i'll get over it you know of course that's what the officials told us oh that just shows it's effective your arms burning up you know you're numb you can't you can't you know you can't walk well that's it's working. It's supposed to make you sick. It's working. It's medicine. Well, you remain cheerful and single-minded and I think underrated in many ways as a U.S. Senator. So I'm grateful that you spent all this time.

Thank you. Well, thank you. And again, I've been watching you. You know, I appreciate what you've done done the risk you've taken your career um i mean all the issues you know going to russia uh questioning what happened on on january 6th i mean all these things i mean you are and this is important you are expanding the overton window you are you are are helping expand what can be talked about. And the harm done because we haven't even been able to ask some of these questions. We haven't been able to discuss this. We haven't had the type of debate that we should have in this country.

You're a big part of that, and I thank you for what you've done. It's been easy and fun, but I appreciate it. Thank you, Senator. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people.

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