Shownotes Transcript
This is such a great Dems in disarray situation. It is. Dems infighting, Dems civil war. The Dems allowed these kids who are like rioting on college campuses and essentially just like push their platform so far to the left that they got creamed in this election that Trump just won. They're like, well, let's maybe let one of them be the vice chair. And this is what you get. There are political attacks that work. There are some that don't.
You know, look, the economy a little tumultuous with trying to work out some fair trade deals. Democrats spent like six minutes on this and they were like, let's go to El Salvador. Yep. And let's talk about primary old people.
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A very special Thursday for you, for you OG listeners to the Ruthless Variety Program. It's the way it started. Yeah. It's the way it started. Lean and mean. The OG. Smugglesworth and me giving it to you fresh and hot here on the Ruthless Variety Program. Our co-host on assignment, as one does, it's a busy time of year. It is. Everybody's doing different stuff. It's a busy time of year.
love them to death and welcome them back next week. But they're out for this one. So, you know, as we started four years ago, here we are. I think it's been a while since we've done this, by the way. I think it has been a while. It's definitely been years. But we are truly blessed with perhaps the best content we've had in a while. It's so good. We're talking like
All the hits. All the hits. Biden, his brain is cooked. We've got Dems in disarray and we've got Dems being like, but won't you help the poor illegals? Like, will someone not speak for the criminals? Yeah. And also show me your hog. Yeah.
Which for you OGs, you'll definitely appreciate that because that's kind of how we started. We're a little racy here. That is so good. But Show Me Your Hog refers to the DNC co-chair. Yeah. A controversial choice.
David Hogg? Is that his name? That's the one. David Hogg. This is the cat that's just like this left-wing lunatic who hooked his initial fame to gun violence and then went to Harvard and sort of
I guess self-promoted himself to like a speaker of young people. Yeah. Which if you, if the exit polls of the last election or any indication, not totally effective. Not listening to him at all. Yeah. Yeah. And they had like a couple of others, one of whom was not a U S citizens, it turns out and was like knocking up all kinds of different. So that's the thing is if, if the Democrats had turned to one of the like young influencers, it's a shame that they turned to hog.
Rather than that dude who was just like, what was that guy's name? I can't remember. The Biden influencer who just used his TikTok fame to just DM girls. Yeah. He was like, I am going to, he got paid by the DNC to just promote the Biden brand. And he was like, I'm a young person, young. It's important that we stay liberal and Biden or whatever. And then you find out after the election that he was like,
one, like, not even a U.S. citizen? So he was a citizen. He was born in Singapore and, like, somehow during that time he'd gotten citizenship. But the hilarity of him being this, like, because he was like, this election is about women. And when Kamala lost, he was like, I want to apologize to all the women of America because of the election. Not because, like, weeks later you find out he was just using his entire platform to just DM women all day. Which is like, dude, I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that. I'm not okay with you trying to like bring like Kamala Harris to the White House. The only authentic thing the guy's ever done is be a college student and trying to pick chicks up on Instagram. That's the only authentic thing he's ever done. But he was like, you know, he was sorting through the DMs and he was like,
thrown out the I respect all women stuff and they kind of gravitated towards that. Except for in his DMs. And then he's like, show me your nudes. Yeah. That literally was like his job. But sadly, the DNC chose to go with David Hogg instead of him. Show me your hog. Yeah.
Which is what we're doing here today. We've got that. We've got Chris Van Hollen, a senator from Maryland, who has long been amongst the most partisan Democrats in all of Congress, who has decided to draw a hard line. Yeah.
Not a single peep out of his mouth about the killing of Lake and Riley or like the mayhem that's gone on in cities across this country. The raping and pillaging of Americans based on like organized criminals coming over the border, illegal aliens into these communities and like horrifying things.
Everything. Not a single peep. But he has taken a hard stand. He is going to travel to El Salvador. Yeah. And he has done so. And we've got some stuff for you on that. He wants to free a guy who is the poor MS-13 guy. He wants someone to please look out for the gangs. Yeah. The illegal criminal gangs. Very underrepresented gangs.
And so he's going to provide his representational taste. We've got some variety. There's some salmon news. It's really good. Yeah. You're going to love all of that. And then we've got a great guest. Huge. Honestly, if you're unfamiliar with Grover Norquist, you need to become familiar because he's one of the most significant guests
political players in all of politics. That's not just Republican politics or Democratic politics. He's redefined the game, and how he's done it is focused exclusively on tax policy and what that does for the economy, what it does for a big government party versus a smaller government party, an efficient party. The kind of discussions we're having around Doge is the other side of the ledger. How much do they charge you?
the American taxpayer for the goods and services that they do not provide. And I was lucky enough to sit in on this interview. And the magic of Grover is he takes a subject, which sounds like such a snooze fest, like tax policy and makes it so entertaining, but also like, like everyone listening to this April 15th is probably the worst day of the year.
So I am so happy in the wake of that, we bring in Grover, who tells you exactly why you deserve to keep the money that you have earned with your hands and it should not be sent to you. Yeah. If you looked at what it was, the outflow was that you paid the federal government for absolutely nothing. Yeah. In the wake of that rage, here's Grover Norquist because you want to hear from him. I loved it. We all, we kind of went nuts. We had a great time. It was a great time. Excellent interview. Good interview. But we're going to start with Show Me Your Hog. Sure.
It's awesome. Yeah. So David Hogg, the DNC vice chair, very esteemed role. I have absolutely no idea what it is that you do as a DNC vice chair, but apparently he's redefined this in some ways. Democrats are known for their top-down sort of dictation.
to what they do to their voters. They're basically like, you have to have a senile old man who can't find his way out of the bathroom in the morning as your next president because we said so. And many people within the Democratic Party are like, yes, no problem. Show me your hog is not buying all of that concept. He wants to go in a different direction. This is news that, I mean, for your perspective at home, you're like,
Okay, I get it. Like they don't want a bunch of senile old people telling the rest of their base like who it is that they should support for candidacies. In D.C., this story is revolutionary. Yeah. Like this is a wild story that has shaken up the Democratic Party and all the press that follows it in a very, very big way because typically speaking, if you're working at the Democratic National Committee –
You can't color outside the lines. No. You're a cog in the machine. You're the Pelosi, Biden, Obama. Like, you just go down the line. You just follow the orders, and you kind of do it. Well, this cat, he's a younger dude. An absolutely insane individual, by the way. If you've heard anything he has to say, it's...
Like horribly offensive for one, but two, like he has no ability to relate to either young people or anyone across this country. But he's absolutely confident in what it is that he's saying. So what he's done has gotten printed up by Politico.
Big story. The story reads as such. David Hogg, a controversial Democratic National Committee vice chair, is pledging to upend Democratic primaries by funding candidates who will challenge, quote, ineffective, asleep at the wheel Democrats. He's going after incumbents. That's what that means. He's using DNC's money to go after incumbent elected Democrats, which is awful.
Awesome. So let me explain to you why that matters, right? So every political party, it doesn't matter where you're state-based, local-based, or federally, the national level...
The first goal is to ensure that you don't spend the hard-earned dollars of your donors on inter-party warfare. You want to win general elections. So the whole goal is to try to figure this thing out before you start having primaries because you don't want to spend all of your war chest electing people that ultimately are not electable. Yeah.
in a general election. We've had problems with this in the Republican Party. It's been a constant tug and pull. I will say under the Trump years, and I had a sort of formative role in the first Trump term, um,
Donald Trump played this exactly perfectly and got aligned with everybody very early where we didn't have a lot of this stuff. No shooting inside the tent. We only go after Dems. It gets much more difficult when you're the party out of power because the energy and you see this based on the Bernie rallies with AOC and everything else, the energy and the funding of a lot of the low dollar stuff.
is in this left-wing lunacy. Which is a huge point because they just reported FEC numbers. I think AOC raised... Like $10 million. In one quarter.
In an off year, which is... She's a rank and file representative. Which is to be interpreted as nothing else than a direct shot at Schumer. Yeah. That like, well, we want you to primary Schumer. And this plays right into that. So, yeah. So it plays right into a whole bunch of anxieties the Democrats currently have. It also incentivizes them to act even crazier. Get crazier. Get crazier, Dems. Which ties into our second story. So you're going to love the transition on this. Anyway, this cat...
says the move puts Hogg, now a 25-year-old, first gained national stature as an outspoken survivor of the Stoneman Douglas high school shooting. That's where you got to know him. He went to high school at that tragic shooting and then was like immediately parlayed that into going on CNN and MSNBC every day to talk about how all guns in America need to be banned. Right? Right.
There were other people that had different perspectives on that and continue to do so. But this guy is the guy the media followed. And also to make a quick comparison, you know, folks know Kyle, who is also a survivor of that horrific shooting, became known as like the conservative. Yeah. Outspoken person from that had better grades than
Better academic record than Hogg, but Hogg's the one who got into Harvard. He got into Harvard. So you can kind of see the tie-in to the larger discussion that we've had. But anyway, Leaders We Deserve is an outfit. It's one of these like super PAC type things, which Hogg co-founded in 2023, announced plans on Tuesday.
Mind you, he's the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee. He has an outside group. Your job as a vice chairman or a chairman or anybody who has any affiliation with a national party committee is to raise money for that building. Not David. Not him. No. Show me your hog. He says that he's got a plan.
to spend $20 million on safe blue Democratic primaries against sitting House members by supporting younger opponents. So he's like run right into the canyon of the Democratic establishment and said, okay, I just want young people. And young is like, okay. A young Democrat is like 80. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's young or not. It's crazy.
I know that. Yeah. Right. Anyway, so he's going to do all of this. It is met with absolute like people are panicked on the Democratic side. I want us to win the majority, he says, nor will it target members solely based on age. It's also hilarious that that was a huge concern for the Dems. Like, wait, is he going after all of you? Because that's all of us. I mean, it's true. It's so true. It's like, I don't know if a place for mom is the target.
But it certainly is a part of the conversation. And like the Pelosi's and the Hoyer's and the Clyburn's and all the people who run the Democratic Party in the House forever have to be shuddering about this. But ultimately, what he's getting at is an ideologically leftist point of view that has
literally no capability of relating to the center of his country whatsoever. This is such a great Dems in disarray situation. It is. Dems infighting, Dems civil war. The Dems allowed these kids who are like rioting on college campuses and essentially just...
like push their platform so far to the left that they got creamed in this election that trump just won they're like well let's maybe let one of them be the vice chair and this is what you get yeah i mean you're talking about a whole bunch of people who are vocal supporters of like a me too movement that just started arbitrarily uh attacking young men yep as if they didn't
have any rights in this country whatsoever. And they were like all fully behind it. The George Floyd movement burning down our cities and everything else. No attention to the actual fact pattern of any of this stuff. They just were like, yes, we
we should do that. And by the way, double mask at home. Make sure your three-year-old is in a double mask. But if you're rioting and if you're burning down police buildings, it's maybe a cure. Yeah, it might be a cure too. It might be a cure. You can't get sick if you're rioting.
Right. So that's like the perspective this guy brings. And now he's saying that he's going to primary incumbent Democrats. That gives you a good foundation for why it is that you're seeing Democrats lose their mind over completely insane stuff. Yep. Right. They get...
There are political attacks that work. There are some that don't. You know, look, the economy, a little tumultuous with trying to work out some fair trade deals. Democrats spent like six minutes on that. And they were like, let's go to El Salvador. Yep. And let's talk about primary old people. It's incredible. You know, because that's where the energy is. That is it. And David Hogg, show me your hog.
Is the guy who's behind all of this. I expect to have many, many updates on this because he's going to get involved. And I can't wait to see how it plays out. It's going to get ugly, real ugly. When we come back, Biden is back. Huge. If you guys didn't see this on Tuesday, we got a treat for you. It's amazing. Joe Biden...
I can't believe that he doesn't just go away. Just go away. He's old, right? I mean, the reason he got run off stage is because he can't actually perform in any way. Yeah. But certainly not under like a modern day appealing vision for the country. That doesn't stop this cat. We've got that when you come back. You're not going to believe the audio and video we have on this right after this.
He's Donald Trump's number one enemy in Congress, Chicago Senator Dick Durbin. And now Dick Durbin has a new scheme, a government takeover of your credit card. Today, consumers have thousands of choices in credit cards, all with equal, strong security.
But Durbin's plan is less competition and less security. And that means more risk for your credit and your identity. Tell Republicans in Congress, stop Dick Durbin's takeover of your credit card before it's too late. All right. So when presidents leave office, there's one of two ways to handle it. You can kind of handle it like George H.W. Bush handled it. Ronald Reagan handled it. Richard Nixon handled it.
Or you can handle it like Barack Obama handled it, where he's like, got to be a part of the conversation. You know, like the country has moved on. We're in a different place. Or, you know, you just sort of like have to self-promote.
Joe Biden has chosen the latter of these two. And it's amazing. I mean, we're not even 100 days in and this old bastard has gotten himself back in the headlines because he gave a speech. And if I'm getting this right, it was basically about the protection of Social Security, which I find so completely hilarious. Because if there's one criticism the conservatives have about the way that the Trump administration has approached our finances, they love Doge.
They love the tax stuff. If there's one criticism, it's like, you know, Trump ran his first ad saying I'm going to protect Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and all of those things like the entitlement program. And like for those of us who are a little skeptical about whether or not the next generation is ever going to see any of that if we're on the same trajectory, it's tough.
But it's one thing you can't accuse Donald Trump of being a problem with is Social Security. And like his entire speech was like, oh, they're threatening Social Security. Again, it's like a 1994 playbook for how it is that you beat an otherwise popular Republicans like, oh, they're going to take away your Social Security. And also the Biden folks had hyped the hell up.
out of this appearance where they were like, Biden's back, baby. Biden's back. He's going to give this speech. And for the past couple months, there's been this drama between the Biden camp and the Obama camp and the Kamala camp where Biden's people after the election were like, you know, Biden could have won. We got pushed out by these dams and Kamala and Obama, and they pushed us out, but we could have won. We could have done it. And so this was basically his first appearance in,
after all these stories yeah exactly right this is how we started clip one can't even hear him music's playing he's speaking he's literally giving a speech we deserve help you paid for most of it you know so for our audio only listeners that's not on us
They were playing like the Bruce Springsteen. He was an absolute lib. They were playing like this Bruce Springsteen, we take care of our own walkout music for Joe Biden. And he just like, you know, like zombie walks up to the podium. And then starts reading the teleprompter. You know, like as any normal person would do is, you know, you like wave and you give thumbs up until the music stops. And then you're like, and now I begin my speech. Biden just like zombie walks up while the music's playing, gets in the mic, he's like.
Thank you for being here. Here's what's like. He just instantly begins on the teleprompter, just like right off the bat. And then when the music cuts, he's like three quarters of the way through the first sentence. I mean, it's just like it's so it's perfect. He is that cook. It's absolutely perfect. But he had other rhetorical flourishes. You'll appreciate this one in clip two.
And I had never seen hardly any black people in Scranton at the time. And I was only going in fourth grade. And I remember seeing the kids going by at the time called Colored Kids on a bus going by. Uncle Joe dropping the hits. I mean, look, the one critique above all else is that he was from another time and place.
You know what I mean? Like how many Americans can relate to that statement? And he talks about it as though it's like a point of pride. It's like I grew up where we call them colored. Here's the thing, folks. I remember seeing the colored kids on the bus. I mean, dude, I'm not kidding. If you're not born before 1960, like all of that stuff, you look at it, you're like, what? What?
Like, what are you, what are you, who are you relating to? When the audience gets on, I'm like, tell them, Joe, let's hear this. Someone encourage this. And of course, this is hyped up. This is like comeback speech. Like all his folks have been pushing. This is like, this is going to be must see TV. Like MSNBC goes to this live. They're like,
Here we go. We're going to hit Trump. Like the amount of ink this was getting. You're getting news alerts on this of being like Joe Biden for the first time since the election is going to speak and he's going to hammer Donald Trump. And then he comes out and this is what you get. He's talking about like a just post-Reconstruction era of America. I mean, it is amazing that this guy –
His team made the argument that they're like, he's not too old. He's not like, you know, just a slice of 1950 that we're trying to just microwave and put in front of the American people again. Man, they're in a tough place. The funny thing about parts of this that I find like super interesting when you get into the ethos, because like there's no political professional. I don't care where you are on the ideological spectrum that will look at that and be like, wow, super relatable. Yeah.
What I find so interesting is like Democrats basically can't conceptualize what make America great means. Right. And it was part of the whole attack on Donald Trump in the first campaign and to a certain extent in the second and in the third. But but it was basically like what he means is a racist America.
Right. Where all cultures and genders are not accepted. That's what he means. Of course, that's not what he meant. And what he has outlined in Technicolor is a time and place when all Americans were in it together.
together and you had a government that was working on behalf of America and America only. And it's like a pretty easy concept to grasp. I understand why they pervert that for political purposes, because you can convince the, you know, 40 percent of like hardened Democrats of absolutely anything under the sun. And this is like the easiest, the lowest hanging of the fruit to do it. But
When you see something like that, it's like it's not that they chose that because it's the easiest, lowest hanging fruit. They actually think that today's electorate is like they want 1950 literally. They don't get the concept of.
America together, one fighting forward, trying to do the best for every American in this country. What they see is like, no, what were the conditions? What were the worst conditions of that era of time? And we need to speak to it. And, you know, I feel like the Democrats, quickly, just to put a wrap on this idea, they're stuck in this like Obama core idea of like, let's just hit the playbook of,
You have the candidate walk out to Bruce Springsteen, get in front of the podium, call Republicans racist, say Democrats are in this for the working class and get off the stage because that worked for them for a while. Yeah, it did. And then they, then the American people saw that. Wait a minute. Well,
Well, all the Democrat Party is essentially just like Hollywood and billionaires. Yeah, and and you've screwed this country and that that's why the playbook doesn't work and so when you try to like it looks so out of touch and weird and cringe and and strange because America has so clearly moved past that stupidity like this past election was such a rebuke of that era of garbage that just doesn't work and
And they're just so lost. They're like, let's just try playing it again. Let's see if it works. Yeah, totally. So, look, if you combine those two segments, you'll see that Hogg has a constituency. There are many people in the base of the progressive left who are like, show me your Hogg. And he's more than happy to do that. He's the one. And you can see based on...
the establishment that he's sort of trying to rebuke here in their standard bearer, Joe Biden, like why that has a constituency. Because if you have two highs and two here's, you look at that and you listen to it and you're like, my God, that couldn't possibly reflect this century of politics. But
What he's doing is trying to drive this even further off the left than Kamala Harris was able to, the champion of small business as she says. Oh, yeah, totally. You know, like he's trying to drive this into oblivion. Well, this guy is like, no, not far enough. And we're going to do a generational divide, too. So our question is.
Our question of the day, if you think about it, like who should he primary? Who should David Hogg target? Great question. Who should David Hogg primary? It seems to me like there's a lot of options out there, many of whom were parts of leadership. Remember, Nancy Pelosi is still here, folks. Yeah.
Like everybody thought she kind of retired a few years ago and then she reemerged when she was kicking old Joe out. Yeah. And like played a seminal role in that. But like she's still a voting member of Congress, of which I love the press corps being like, oh, the sage. Yeah. Yeah. That's Nancy Pelosi, I have to say. Is she a target? Is she a target? I mean, they tried priming her a cycle or two ago. It seems to me like she could be Schumer.
Who? Who should Hall go after? I mean, this is a great question. AOC could run against Schumer. That's the thing. And she's got the money to do it. You just don't know. Anyway, that's our question of the day. When we come back, we're going to read your comments from last episode. That question was, does the media bear any responsibility for their biased reporting and fueling political bias? I think that's obviously yes. You have a lot of comments we're going to get to right after this.
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Okay, so your comments, always very important to us, help guide us on the show. You got to like and subscribe, and when you do, we read all of it. And we go through everything that you have to say. Our question from last week is, does the media bear any responsibility for political violence issues?
We had a pretty clear takeaway from that, but interested to hear what you all think and consumers involved this. And to do that, we usually start with the voice, a voice not here. So we're going to have to start with you, Smugglesworth. Comment one comes from Stacy Oswald. And Stacy writes, the Democrats and their quote leadership, whoever that may be, are 100% responsible for the violence. They know their stenographers in the media will parrot whatever narrative they assign every morning. Chaos was yesterday's word.
They know the media will lie and cover for them at every turn by framing stories a certain way or omitting key facts. The, quote, journalists are too dumb to do this on their own. Bingo. That's it. That's a bullseye. I mean, our people are very smart, Spud. They are. They're very smart. Rob Anderson has comment number two that...
That's a much deeper and darker question than I feel some people think. I kind of agree with that opening statement. It is pretty sad. Like it's hard to actually wrap your mind around, but I think it's true. After following how mainstream media has operated over the last decade, I have thought long and hard on this topic. To keep this short, I'll sum it up like this. Where would the progressive left be today without a corrupt? Dude's digging deep.
Would they have the kind of influence over the amount of people that they do? Would they be empowered and bold? Absolutely not. There are many factors that are to blame for radicalizing the violence of a left-wing base. But the mainstream media is the glue that holds all of those factors together.
It would have fallen apart long ago without it. A fair and unbiased media would have ended all of this. No matter how much you loathe the mainstream media, you do not loathe them enough. That was brilliant. That was really good. That was really good. That's an all-star reply. Rob, hats off to not only that, but a concise packaging of it. And those questions that he asks...
Are the right questions to ask? I mean, when you understand from polling and from election results, even if you don't believe polling, election results will tell you. When you understand that there's like literally less than 20 percent of the American people who believe the crazy shit that these people are talking about on a day-to-day basis, and yet they have the share of voice that they do. It's insane.
Fair question. Yeah. Like, would they have the kind of impact? Would they be able to... I mean, this is what you're talking like. People you could fit in David Koresh's compound, if not for the amplification of it. It's good stuff. Why...
is the United States senator traveling to another country on behalf of an illegal alien, you might ask. You probably saw this story about the deportation of an alleged MSF 13 member in the wake of a bunch of deportations that went to an El Salvadorian prison. Well, there's a United States senator that has taken it upon himself to travel down there
and provide his freedom, wants to bring him back. We got a lot on that right after this. Did you know Original Medicare loses billions of taxpayer dollars each year to waste, fraud, and abuse? In fact, improper payments to hospitals and doctors are twice as likely in Original Medicare than in Medicare Advantage. Alternatively, Medicare Advantage offers seniors more benefits at lower costs, promotes better health outcomes,
All right, so Chris Van Hollen, he's a senator from Maryland, and there was a legal alien residing in Maryland who found himself much like...
the hundreds of other MS-13 gang members, violent convicted felons in this country who had been let out and allowed to stay in the United States, deported by the Trump administration. Now there's a court battle. Trump administration took a big win on their ability to dictate what constitutes national security. There was a piece of it that had to do with due process. The Democrats' response to this is,
was not to say that violent gang members in the United States are a bad thing and they have some quibbles with the process by which they've deported them, which would have been an argument that the high-minded amongst us would have. They were like, no, bring him back. Yeah, yeah. Bring him back. And Chris Van Hollen has actually embarked on a journey. Clip four, please.
I'm here at the airport. I'm about to board my flight for San Salvador. The goal of this mission is to let the Trump administration, to let the government of El Salvador know that we are going to keep fighting to bring Albrego Garcia home until he returns to his family. I hope to meet with representatives of the government. I hope to have the chance to actually see Kilmar and see what his condition is. But
We are going to keep fighting because this is a miscarriage of justice. Okay, hold on, hold on. Let me set the record straight. Kilmar, who he's talking about here, um,
Is not a legal resident of the United States. Nobody has disputed that. That is not in discussion. He is an illegal alien, resident of the United States, only in the fact that the law hadn't been enforced for decades. Right? The Trump administration decided, based on a campaign promise, they're going all in to try to get these people out of here. Now, he also has a criminal record. Here, while his, Chris Van Hollen's plane was in flight. Yep.
Some breaking news.
You'll notice, based on the coverage of this, they talk about him as a Maryland man. Which is such a disgusting lie, and I hate the media so much more for doing this when you have a guy who is, number one, here illegally, number two, had a violent criminal history, as this breaking note from DHS describes, and a previous court had established that he's a member of MS-13.
So this is who Democrat senators are fighting for. Two previous courts. And if you're not familiar with MS-13, the initiation is you've got to kill someone. Yeah. It's not the Cub Scouts, folks. It certainly is not the Cub Scouts. According to court filings, Garcia's wife sought domestic violence restraining orders against him, claiming he punched, scratched, ripped off her shirt, among other harm.
He's an MS-13 gang member, as has been described by not one but two courts. And the Maryland senator is like, this is my guy. I'm boarding a plane to bring him back. Referred to him as a constituent. It's insane. He talked about bringing him home. Home to where? Can I say, I want to say a little bit, though. So I can see where the senator from Maryland is confused. Yeah.
When he's like, this guy's a constituent. Because here's the thing. Part of Maryland is Baltimore, right? And folks, we've all seen The Wire. Jesus. So if you think about just like violent and dangerous people, you know, like murdering folks and this gang situation. It's a nice fit. You think about Baltimore. So it's kind of like. A nice fit. In a way, it's like, well, maybe he's just like a standard Baltimore dude out here killing people and shit. So he could be confused. To be clear, there are no allegations of him killing people. To be clear, everyone in Baltimore is dangerous.
But the point remains. Listen, so this Democratic senator, he went down to show solidarity. Which is insane. With this dude. Now, again, you're looking at a guy in Chris Van Hollen who has been amongst the most partisan Democrat representatives and now senators that this Congress holds. He's run the Democratic Senate campaign committee. He is just a run-of-the-mill hardline Democrat.
Now, when you put that sort of like political ambition up against the first two stories that we talked about, where the power within the Democratic Party is off the left-hand side of the map, there are primaries being threatened.
There is a road tour by Bernie Sanders and AOC. They're gathering tens of thousands of people, which are basically the only people left in the base of the Democratic Party. Like typically what happens when you get your ass kicked in an election is like the middle of the road people who are like open minded. They're like, I don't know if this is going to work for us.
And you're left with this small sliver of American society where like, no, the problem was you didn't go far enough. That when Kamala Harris went on the debate stage and said, I'm a champion of small business, that was the problem. Yeah. Like, hell no. Yeah. No, the problem was that you said you didn't say you weren't going to socialize the American economy.
Problem was that you departed from a 2019 promise on a debate stage in the primary. Where they all raise their hands up like, yes, every illegal, free health care, free college, free everything. Open your border, right? That's what they see the problem is. So enter Chris Van Halen into this discussion. Now, did he say anything about Lake and Riley? No. No.
Did he vote for the Blake and Riley Act? Did he spend any time visiting cities that had been ravaged by the criminal elements that illegal immigration brought to this country? Buildings being taken over in Colorado. No. Didn't speak word one to it. But he can get on a plane to El Salvador. It's insane. And this is just, this all creates this perfect storm of,
of a level of Dems in disarray and Democrat civil war and infighting. Like not just that we haven't seen our lifetimes, but this could be ever this. Like I cannot believe that after getting shellacked so hard in November, uh,
They're just like, no, not crazy enough. And we're going to see this insane cycle of Democrats going after Democrats, a Democrat civil war and Dems in disarray. I mean, no one has ever seen before. That's where we're headed. That's what this says to me. It's totally true. And there's another element that we've talked about a lot at the Variety program in that Democrats actually don't believe anything.
Yeah, nothing. I think Chris Van Hollen, if you were to just give him truth, Cyril, would be like, yeah, the guy should be out of this country. Yeah, it's obvious. You know what I mean? But he also knows where the power structure is within the Democratic Party, so he's willing to ruin your community in order to achieve that power. Isn't that disgusting? That's so insidious. That's the most cynical, disgusting part of all of this. Yeah, I don't think I'm overstating it. No, no. It's the truth. I think that is what it is. I mean, he sent a letter to the Honorable Milena Mayorga saying,
at the embassy of El Salvador, where he wrote with an urgent request for a meeting with the president of El Salvador to discuss the illegal detention of, quote unquote, my constituent. Yep.
Kilmer Obrego Garcia. Now, in order to be a constituent of Van Hollen, you need to be a United States citizen. That much has never been disputed. He is not a resident of the United States. Never has been. Never will be.
But yet a constituent is how he is framed. So what you're going through all of this, this is a 70-30 issue if you've ever seen one in terms of how people in the United States feel about illegal aliens, even tangentially. Yeah.
connected with violent gangs and the human trafficking, the drugs, the crime, the murders, the abductions, like all of the things that come around that. It's a 70-30 issue. He understands all of that. And yet. And still. Show me your hawk. It's insane. Show me your hawk.
Right. That's it. That that's basically what it is. So but who you know who lets the top off of all of this to tell you exactly where the theater is. Why don't we go to the House minority leader Jeffries to see a little clip of that in clip three. What if any power for people who are watching at home do you have what power do you have and other Democratic members to compel push the government to bring him home.
Well, we have the power to shape public sentiment. And at the end of the day, making sure that public sentiment in this case understands that the treatment of Mr. Braygo Garcia, you know, is unconscionable, unacceptable and un-American. And if it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. And it's going to be incredibly important for every member of Congress. Certainly, we plan to do this on the Democratic side, both in the House and in the Senate.
to intensify the pressure on the Trump administration. So this is such a full circle of everything we've covered in this episode, which is a goldmine in there. Number one, how crooked is a media that has Jen Psaki, the Biden spokesperson,
As the news person interviewing Hakeem Jeffries, who openly admits the only thing we can do is, you know, try to shape public sentiment. So they have no real power in any of this, which explains why you've got Chris Van Hollen making this like TikTok video that, you know, folks who are subscribed to our YouTube, you should subscribe. So I'm just being like, it's the TikTok video of where he's talking like, I'm going to go to El Salvador and I hope they'll meet with like the words going on the screen.
They see this as just like some TikTok joke. There's a cynical joke. It's theater. That's what this is. It's tricking that leftist, progressive socialist base that's showing up for AOC and Bernie to think that the whitest of white bread is...
And Chris Van Hollen is the guy. It's a Coachella Bernie, bros. This is the most cynical. And you know, like having spent an awful lot of time on Capitol Hill, like every United States senator looks in the mirror and they see the next president of the United States, like every single one. You know for a fact the senior staff over there is like, this is our ticket to ride. Here's how we're going to do it. 2028, bitch.
We're all over this. We just got to support illegal MS-13 guys who beat their wife. It's a small price to pay. It's not our kids that are getting killed by these maniacs. That's it. But if you listen closely, alliteration aside, hats off, Jeffries. Terrific use of the U throughout that interview. But what he said was, there's nothing we can do. He literally said, all of this.
The intent of it is not to produce any result whatsoever. So, like, I don't know if I'm somebody who is an elected politician and I'm like, oh, it's a 30-70 issue. This doesn't seem like a great place to engage. I would have to believe firmly that I could do something about it.
That's not what they're doing. No. He's trying to produce TikTok videos. He's like, let's do it for the clicks. Yeah. Do it for the clicks, which is, folks, I just want you to listen to this very clearly. That's your modern day Democratic Party. It's amazing. That's what it is. They believe in absolutely nothing.
The only thing is, don't show me your hug. I'm so excited for this Civil War. They're going to kill each other. It's insane. So good. So when we come back, we've got some variety for you. Salmon. You know how we like animal content? Fish content. We haven't done that in a while. We've got all of that right after this.
You've all seen it. Kids walking around puffing these watermelon and bubblegum flavored vapes with light up video games on the side. What's in them? Unknown. The dirty secret about this is that they're banned in China, but they're smuggled into America and sold illegally to kids. This is literally just another front in China's war on America, and it's targeting our kids.
Biden's FDA did nothing to stop this. But President Trump is different, and his FDA has a real opportunity to shut this down and protect our kids. And we all hope his FDA does take action. Paid for by a better tomorrow in America. Smugs, I love this story. Yes. I love this story. So salmon, you know, I mean, it's like everybody likes a delightful salmon. Yeah. Some preparation or another, you know, these are good things. Well, they're swimming faster.
And people are trying to figure out why. Well, there's an interesting article on this, that salmon are swimming faster due to painkillers that are dumped in the rivers, according to a study.
Wild salmon are swimming quicker due to painkillers and other drugs dumped into rivers and seas reveals new research. Traces of a sleeping pill shortened the time it took for juvenile salmon to navigate their way through two hydropower dams along their regular migration route that usually slow up the journey, scientists say. Levels of clobzam? Clobazam? Clobazam? Yeah, I guess that's a thing.
It's a medication that's often prescribed for sleep disorders. Also increased the river-to-sea migration, success of juvenile salmon in the wild, according to findings... Sleeping pills being performed against drugs is the first. Never heard of that one before. There's so much to that. They go on to talk about how basically the salmon have changed. And part of the reason that the salmon... I don't see a lot of explanation as to why we have a heightened level of sleeping pills in the water. Like, that's a...
That's maybe subject for a further investigation. I don't know. We should send Smash out there and just do some investigation. I'll do it. Fly fishing areas. Yeah. I mean, it's for the job. But they're quick. The chances of you catching one are very rare. That's the thing. I wish the fish I'm trying to catch fly fishing were on sleeping pills because they just love hitting the hook and bouncing, dude. It makes me so mad. But they're swimming quicker. I mean, so like fly fishing.
for starters a sleeping pill is somehow making salmon quicker it's the opposite yeah thing that they've got going on so you know apparently has a different reaction i mean amongst fish but we've dumped so many of these sleeping pills in the water that it's fundamentally changed the entire species but it kind of goes back to our whole thing which is like it's enhanced game you know and like i don't know if you get faster stronger fish do we
Do we care about this? I mean, here's the thing. If there's already that much sleeping pills in the water, next time I go fly fishing, dude, I'm just going to throw some in the water. It's like I'm out there for hours. I'm out there for hours. They'll hit the hook and they'll leave.
But if they have the opposite, if Clobazam... I think maybe it calms them down to them. It says that they navigate through hydroelectric dams easier. Oh, they're more focused. So maybe I think, yeah. Maybe I think maybe salmon on the regular level are super high-strung.
And just like confused and panicked. Yeah. Just like always in a state of panic that like literally take a chill pill and they're able to just like, you know, navigate it. Maybe this has like an Adderall like effect. Yeah. I think it might let them focus or something. Yeah. But I just want them like so dosed up that I can actually get them. Cause like, man, no one has fun if it's a full day out there and you don't catch anything. That's my takeaway. Tell them more.
Pill the more. And, you know, feel free to dump other drugs in to see what happens. Right? I mean, if sleeping pills make these things go faster, let's see what cocaine does. You know, maybe that slows it down too. I don't know. Go fishing in the Florida Keys. You do deep sea fishing. I love fishing. Anybody who grows up in Minnesota, if they're not a fisherman at some level, it's like not being a Vikings fan. Like you immediately have distrust.
involved love to fish i have not done it with the benefit of sleeping pills or like dynamite which i think would be another thing to deal with but but like you know the drug impact i think we need to find out more yeah we need this is a wild story it's a wild story this is a really wild story i think we need to find out how the sleeping pills got in the water because they just sort of accept this yeah this is a baseline like well you know how they're sleeping pills in water it's like are there
Can we back up? That's a problem. They blow through. They're like, because of all the sleeping pills, you know, all the sleeping pills in the water, they're quicker and they're more focused. It's like RK if you're listening. Forget the fish aspect of this. We need to focus on why the pills are in the water. Anyway, it's pharmaceutical pollution, they say. But, you know, I mean, it's worth looking into. That's our variety. Listen, prefacing our next guest.
And I cover this in the top of the interview. But like you need to focus on this stuff. If you're all worried about finances and you're worried about the state of the global economy, the American economy, how it affects your economic outlook. There's literally one guy who's just like nailed this stuff down in terms of what you can absolutely control with your federal government. And he's done in a lot of states with your state government taxes. We talk about all of it with Grover Norquist.
Well, taxes are a big deal these days. We're obviously facing what will hopefully be a successful reauthorization of 2017 tax cuts with some additions to it.
You also just paid your taxes. This is the ideal guest for the mindset a lot of folks are after having to pay those taxes. And there is only one guy, and I mean this sincerely. I'm looking at you directly in the camera. There is only one person on all of the planet that I absolutely trust on the issue of taxes because he's been doing it for decades successfully.
Grover Norquist, how are you, sir? I'm doing well. Good to be with you. It's so good to be with you. Listen, you're the author of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge. You started this whole movement. You showed me a remarkable graphic of what has happened to the success of Republicans versus Democrats in a period since this pledge has sort of been instituted as kind of the basics of being a Republican. It's all right there.
From 1932 to 1994, 62 years, the Republicans won control of Congress twice, once under Truman, once under Eisenhower. Republicans were the Washington generals. They were playing against the Harlem Globetrotters.
And they were allowed to pretend to be on the field, but they weren't. And yeah, we'd elect a president, but presidents can veto things so they can slow down big government. But otherwise, they start wars and have scandals. There's not much else for them to do. So...
Congress runs the country over time. Over time, Congress runs the country. 62 years, one party state. In 1994, in the reaction to George Herbert Walker Bush winning the primary over Dole, I take pledge, Dole you won't. All the candidates except Dole signed the pledge never to raise taxes. Mm-hmm.
And then he was 14 points behind Dukakis. You may not remember him, but before I emigrated to the United States, I used to live in Massachusetts. So he was the governor there. I do, and I remember the helmet. The helmet, the helmet.
He was 14 points ahead of the sitting vice president. And then Bush said, read my lips, no new taxes. Actually, what he really said was, the Democrats will come and want me to raise taxes. I'll say no. The Democrats will come back and ask me again to raise taxes. I'll say no. And then they'll ask again, and I'll say, read my lips, no new taxes. He understood that Democrats and taxes are like a young boy on a prom date saying,
They keep asking the same thing different ways. Amazing. And they keep coming back. And you have to say no, no, no. No, no, yes doesn't work. And he made the mistake of saying yes at the end of the day. And instead of being remembered as the guy who won the Cold War and kicked Iraq out of Kuwait without sticking around for 45 years, instead he's the liar who raised taxes because he raised taxes, because the Republican Party had become the party that wasn't going to tolerate that
So in 94, 96% of all the Republicans' House and Senate running signed the pledge never to raise taxes since. And there hasn't been a tax increase if the Republicans had the House or the Senate. There's been no tax increase that Republicans supported. And Republicans win both houses 60% of the time. Mm-hmm.
Democrats have won both houses for six years since 1994. I mean, it's just right there. Yeah, that graphic is the most compelling evidence I can see for what happens when your message is basically a promise to the American people.
I believe you are a better judge of how to spend your own money than a government bureaucrat. That's what it comes down to. It's amazing. And I also, look, in a previous life, I had to deal with you and your organization an awful lot as we dealt with tax implications and all kinds of different varieties of different ways. But you've always had a clarity about it. Yeah.
And that it's not just sort of a stagnant taxpayer protection pledge. It's actually looking underneath into the details, figuring out what is a net reduction for the American people, figuring out what's pro-growth over time. I mean, you've had a dynamic view of all of this, provided that when you're in power as a Republican, you're going to reduce taxes in one form or fashion. Yeah.
Incredible success, right? I think of 01, 03, the prevention of a lot of tax increases. Yes, that's a big one too. Which is just huge. Not getting killed. Yeah, right. With the Obama years or the last four with Biden, obviously the 17...
work by President Trump and his team and Congress, incredibly instrumental into the growth of the economy. And now here we are, we find ourselves in a situation with a Republican House, Senate, and a Republican president under President Trump, and we have this opportunity provided for us again.
What are your thoughts on where we're at? Well, the president campaigned and said, I want to take the tax cut that I got passed with the Republican House and Senate in 2017 and make it permanent out into the future indefinitely, not just 10 years, all the way out.
And he said that over and over again. He said, I cut tax rates for every single American who pays taxes, and I'm going to cut them for every American. He said that again during his State of the State address. He's made it clear. He wants to have all the rates go down back to where –
- To 17. - To 2017. And this is a very important promise he made. He was running against, in 2024, just five, six months ago, against Kamala Harris. She had one thing she was clear on about taxes. She was gonna let that top tax rate jump back up again.
So here we are. President wins the election. Despite being a champion of small business, as she told us all. Well, here she is. She wins. He wins the election. Trump wins the election. And now there's a handful of people inside the White House, anonymous staffers.
telling the left-wing press, oh, we're going to go and have a tax increase just like Kamala Harris wanted. Trump won the election, but we're going to go with Kamala Harris' tax policy. That's insane. Who are these jerks sitting in the White House telling the press about this? The establishment press loves to hear Republicans...
saying they're going to raise taxes. And this is a huge problem. Lunacy. The American people are hearing this. They're undermining the president's promise. He said this again and again and again, that we should have cut taxes all across the board. And for all people, he said, we're going to have an upper class, a middle class, a lower class. Everybody's going to get the tax cut. And all of a sudden, the staff's going, no, the president's a liar.
They did this to Bush. This is what Dick Darman did to Bush, destroyed his career, destroyed his place in history. And we've got some bozos in the White House doing this again. The president should find them, have a nice talk to them, and toss them out the window. I totally agree. The thing that strikes me is just so absurd about that. There's so many different areas where people try to pervert a populist America first agenda.
And best I can tell, they're just like liberal Democrats that try to take pieces of the populism to try to extrapolate out democratic policy. But at its core, one party believes that the government is too big as it is, that the American people send too much money and they spend it on stuff that doesn't particularly perform well.
on their behalf. And then there's another party that thinks you ought to send all of your money and they should just be able to control it. That dividing line, as you've talked about with the taxpayer protection pledge and everything, contributes more to the electoral success of the Republican Party than anything else that we have ever done. The Republican Party branded itself nationally and then later state by state.
We lost Colorado and we lost Virginia because those Republican parties did not brand themselves as anti-tax. But Ohio and Florida and some of the other taxes clearly did and went from Ohio and Florida being toss-up states to being very strong red states. And nationally, the modern Republican Party is the party that will not raise your taxes. We branded it the way Coca-Cola branded Coca-Cola. So you can go into the store, pick up a Coke,
You don't have to read the ingredients. You know what it is. You don't have to. Could I have a taste of this, Mr. Proprietor, before I take it home? You take it home. You go halfway through your bottle of Coke. You look down. There's a rat head in what's left of the Coke bottle. You say to yourself, you know, I may not finish all the rest of this bottle of Coke tonight. This looks different. And then you go on to unpopular on your website.
iPhone, and you show all your neighbors, okay? Instagram. Instagram. I'm sorry. I have kids. I don't have Instagram. You're on Instagram, and you show everybody the rat head in your Coke bottle. And now Coke has a problem because they didn't have quality control. Republican...
who vote for or support tax increases are rat heads in a Coke bottle. They damage the brand for everyone else. I totally agree. This group of kids in the White House who are telling the press that the president's going to betray the American people and that the president didn't mean it when he said he was going to cut everybody's taxes.
they're damaging the brand for others, for everyone, not just themselves. And I think it's kind of like Holmes said. They can't do this under the banner of trying to be populist or helping the working class. And Trump ran on this and brought it up numerous times during his campaign, which I think helped him tremendously, is the result of his 2017 tax cut, the vast majority of gains were among the working class. The highest gain in wages was among the working class Americans who benefited from that.
And if you take the top individual rate up, because we're only hitting rich people with it, right? That's the theory. They don't know anything. There's a letter, 90 different trade associations sent in saying –
please be aware, please remember, that that rate is what small businesses pay. That's what pass-throughs or subchapter S businesses pay. The Brick Industry Association, these are MAGA businesses here. Heating, air conditioning and refrigeration distributors, the roofing contractors, the beer wholesalers. This is Main Street. You drive down Main Street of a town. These are the businesses you see, and these are the businesses...
that raising that top rate would hit. These are the people whose jobs they would destroy. - Absolutely right. - It's easy to explain. If you have businesses like that, let's say the HVAC industry, and they get to keep more of their own money, they don't get taxed, you don't raise their taxes, they're like, "Well, if we're able to make more money, "we need to do more of it. "We need to hire more people. "If we can make more money doing this, let's expand. "Let's hire more people to do this. "Let's get more business going." But if you start trying to rob those people,
Well, it's an acceptance. The thing is, what's so particularly galling about this is in its acceptance of a false Democratic narrative that they have used against Republicans since the beginning. They've internalized it. Yes. And the idea that we have anybody on our team.
who accepts the notion that like for zero sum game, it's one is zero sum game or two, that the tax code is static, that you're when you lower taxes, you have a lower revenue number. Well, in history, it's never frickin happened. Right. Every time you have pro growth policies where you're lowering taxes, your revenue number goes up. And it was the same in 17. You just keep going through all of them. That's what happens.
How do you misunderstand that? Well, there's a second particularly dangerous idea that's been out there, and that is that we should get rid of BSALT, business, state, and local tax deductibility. These are when a company, whether a corporation or a pass-through company. Yeah, this is like they call the CSALT. Yeah, CSALT. But BSALT, because to make it clear, that also covers tax.
All businesses, not just incorporated businesses. And they want to get rid of it. So if you pay property taxes, sales taxes, business taxes at the state and local level, individuals can leave New York.
If you're an airline, what do you leave? If you're a railroad, what do you leave? If you're drilling for oil, how do you leave? This, to get rid of B-salt or C-salt, would be about a 2% increase in the corporate rate, which would kill jobs. Which is the hallmark of the 2017 Act, which was lowering the corporate rate and all the growth that came along with it. The two lies that the Democrats tell us, we're not going to tax anybody except corporations.
taxes on businesses are not paid by Mr. General Motors. Okay? There is no Mr. General Motors. John Motors is not paying those taxes. Johnny Motors. It's paid by consumers in higher prices, workers in lower wages, and that's about 70% of who pays that tax. Fewer jobs...
lower wages. And then if you do enough damage, the price of the company goes down and everybody who's saving for their retirement gets screwed. And rich people, this is something Elon Musk pointed out, if you're taxing somebody who's very wealthy and he's got a lot of money, he's already got two houses, okay, if you take a million dollars from him, what have you taken out of his stock portfolio? Not
This is the thing, and you'll have to pardon the expression, but for me, dumb fuckery is no better way to explain what we're talking about here. When you talk about taxing the rich, other than actors and athletes, do you know anybody who's filling out the W-2 for the ultra-wealthy in this country? Well, all the president's friends in...
football and baseball and all the sports. Those staffers who think they're doing the president a favor, when he goes to go out to have dinner with his friends, they can all be growling at him. Excuse me. That was me. My point is, it's like all investment income. Right? I mean, that's how the ultra-wealthy are
making the vast majority of their money. The idea that you take a marginal rate and apply it and think even for one second that who you're directing that tax increase on is the wealthiest of the Americans. You are like, you literally don't know basic math. Yeah.
No, no, no. You're hitting people who are trying to create wealth for their families, for themselves, for their businesses. As in the capital gains is tax. It's not a tax on rich people. It's a tax on people trying to get rich, trying to do advantage. And both of these suggested factors
tax increases. I mean, there's a lot of savings we could do in terms of spending. But most important is we just need to take the president's tax plan and do what he told the American people he was going to do, what he wants to do. And his staff evidently doesn't listen to his speeches. And just take it out and make it permanent. That level of certainty would be very helpful to the economy. He's doing some tough negotiating around the world on tariffs and so on. That's very bouncy for the stock market and things like that.
give the market and the American people and employers and employees some
certainty. What's my tax rate going to be? What do depreciation rates look like? Can I have expensing? What's my marginal tax rate? Let's fix all those things as the president wants to. And I'm just livid that just as we had Dick Darman submarine the president, we have some people at the White House who are having fun thinking they're masters of the universe. Nobody elected them to anything. And it's so simple because
You don't need to run into the kitchen and be like, okay, we have to come up with a recipe. When you look at what President Trump did in 2017, 2018, 2019...
This country's economy was on a rocket ship. I mean, it felt amazing. Every day you woke up, it was like, all I'm hearing in the news is that hiring has gone up. Unemployment has gone down. Americans are able to buy whatever they want. Everything was just rocking and rolling on cruise control. And to do that in a moment like this, where then it would give America such strong footing to negotiate with the world of like, look, we're solid. We're looking good. Yeah. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
And that is a solution in search of a problem. Why use left-wing rhetoric when... That's the thing that bothers me the most. I literally just get incensed by this. The adoption...
of like the New York Times editorial page in a Republican context is like an announcement. They lost, we won. Trump won. Stop talking like Kamala Harris. It was like three months ago, it was conventional wisdom. Everyone was like, well, it sounds like the Democrats and their ideas are dead. And now they're like, so let's give them a shot. Maybe a tax increase. What do you guys think? I just, I can't understand it.
It blows my mind. But I mean, look, one of the beauties of what you have created over decades with Americans for Tax Reform and the Taxpayer Protection Pledge and what you have done and just sort of being a part of the center part of this conversation for years is create a problem for people who don't see the world that way.
And it makes it – it gives voters an opportunity to see what's going on. Do I have one minute to explain this fun map? Yes. Yes, please. In the 50 states – or 57, one of those two. In the 50 states, there are eight states that have no income tax at all – Texas, Florida, Tennessee. And there are 15 states –
that have a flat rate, single rate tax. And the good news about a single rate tax is that it's very difficult to raise. I offer as proof of that Illinois, left wing, Democrat, Bolshevik. Plenty of people who would be interested in raising a tax.
Their top rate is under 5%. Yeah, that's wild. Because by Constitution, they can only have a single rate. So if they want to raise taxes, they have to look at everybody in the state at once and say, I'm going to steal all your money for my project. And all the little sisters of the poor are on the hook. Yeah, and they're going, we're not having this. And so the tax is less than 5%. It's not up there at 13, 14 with California or 11 in New York and so on.
But also a flat rate tax is easy to reduce. And this is what 12 states are doing now. They're moving to a single rate tax and then to zero. Because once you get to 5, 4, 3, 2, or 1 flat rate, to say we're now going to go from...
three to two. And if a Democrat gets up or one of those guys at the White House is trying to subvert the president and says, wait a minute, what about the billionaires? They say, well, we're all going from three to two. Billionaire two. We take envy out of the equation. Envy is not a political program. It's a sin. That's really good. I need that on a shirt.
This is where we have a real opportunity. And we're going to be in a state in a year, two years, where more than half of the states have a flat rate tax. So we can begin to think about a single rate tax at the national level. So these kids in the basement over at the White House are trying to undermine the president by saying let's raise the top rate. They think there's a desire for graduated progressive leaders.
Karl Marx thought the idea of a progressive income tax was a bad idea. One of his bad ideas. He had several. He had a bunch. And in point of fact, America is moving towards single rate taxes across the board. Well, it's evidenced by the state chart. I mean, everybody – Seven of those yellow states are in the last five years. Yeah. So it's not just like we've had them for a long time and they never got rid of them. Mm-hmm.
We are moving to single-rate taxes. By the way, Kansas just voted to go to a single-rate tax. Two-thirds both houses to override the Democrat governor's veto. South Carolina isn't listed yet, but they're in the process of going to a single-rate tax and then to zero. Did a press conference with the governor, the Senate leader, the House leader, and the two committee leaders. And they all spoke and said, we're all going to zero, we're going flat, and then we're going to zero. And my job was to say...
I've been a lot of these press conferences where I'm there with one guy who's a backbencher going, we'd kind of like to go to flat. Or maybe a committee chair. Now you've got the leaders. Or maybe just the governor, but nobody else. But this time, everybody in the state is there. And they're on the way. I mean, the secret's out.
I mean, it's just it's how many pieces of evidence do you need, whether it's electoral success, economic success, wages? I mean, like literally every single component of lower taxes makes sense to everybody except for this progressive left that has taken hold of the Democratic Party for generations. But but, you know, why we're flirting with this, I don't know. Let me ask you this.
Where ideally, and I think you just sort of outlined that, as you look forward, hopefully we get 17 done, we get some certainty here. Yes, yes. And we get this in the rearview mirror.
Next does it look a little bit more like the stat the state laboratories because you know I grew up in an era of Republican politics where when we had all three we were taking big shots. Mm-hmm. Yeah, right. I mean we rates are coming It wasn't a discussion about whether we keep rates We never had a discussion about like whether the status quo is what we're feeling it was always like how far can we get this thing down and
And it seems to me like what you're saying is the states are a good laboratory for this, and you're flattening things out, gradually lowering, taking some of those envy argument away, but also producing the kind of economic growth that justifies it. Yes, and the states have also learned something from what President Trump did in focusing on the corporate rate down. It's amazing that under Reagan and Bush, we understood to cut personal income taxes, but we didn't cut the corporate rate as much as we could have. When we did some, we took it down to 50 and then to 30%.
down to 34, which then was taken up to 35 by Clinton. Thank you. But then all the other countries in the world, Europe, went underneath us. China's at 25. We were at 35.
China's at 25. We were at 35. The European average is under 25. So stupider than France is not where you want to be. But it's where we were. And it was Trump who said, let's take 35 down to 15. Yeah.
And he couldn't convince the House and the Senate to make it fit. So we got to 21, which is a huge step forward. And he has said that he always wants to go to 15, which I think is a great idea and I think would be a great thing to do during his second term to get down to 15. Then we'd be really competitive and we'd be under China and under all the Europeans in terms of cost. We want to compete on lower tax rates, lower energy costs.
fewer regulations, less expensive government, not lower wages. Right. Right. That's a great point. Listen, and also dovetails super well with what we're talking about with trade imbalances and everything else. I think the president's going to win against his staff. I really do. I think the staff is not going to be able to snooker him. Yeah. One, I've been gratified to see just about every member of Congress that's grabbed a microphone saying I'm not interested in raising taxes on absolutely anything.
Listen, Grover, keep up the good work. You are a good friend of the program, but I really mean it. We owe, as a conservative movement, an awful lot to this gentleman because he has crystallized and clarified an economic agenda that has not only works, but politically it's super effective. Well, thank you very much. You got it. Thanks for your time. We've got more to do.
The next phase of our plan is to pass tax cuts for everybody. President Trump won on a promise to cut taxes to keep American businesses competitive. So why are some Republicans pushing to raise taxes? Our tax rate is already higher than communist China. The current BESOF plan is a tax hike on American business. And when business taxes go up, workers and families pay. Tell Congress, make the Trump tax cuts permanent.
Stop the B-Salt assault. I'm just a massive admirer of Grover. When I started in politics, there were basically like just a couple of boxes that you have to check, but they're very important boxes. His was one of them. Taxpayer protection. You have to. Right? You cannot be a Republican running for office without making a pledge that you are not going to raise the taxes on the people who just elected you.
Simple proposition. I never worked on a campaign where the candidate didn't sign that. It's a must. It's literally the first thing. You got to do it. Right? And he's pushed this for years. And then we went through a period of time during the early 2000s where they made him like the— Like, if you think about today, what the left does in terms of just shorthanding Elon Musk, that's what— Grover was the OG Elon.
In terms of like, if you don't think you can actually make an inroad by attacking the president...
You just Grover and request them and talk about how it's like perverse sort of. It's because they know that chart. It's when Republicans run on cutting taxes, they win. And that's like the worst thing for Democrats. Yeah. So they attacked him for years now because they don't want to lose and they want your money. Right. He's at the crux of everything they hate. And part of the reason why he's not a household name, as he was in the 2000s, is because everybody's given up on.
on trying to attack his effectiveness. He's been so effective for so many years at not only getting Republicans to sign this pledge, the electoral success that accompanies it, the economic growth that accompanies it, that we've all sort of understood innately that if you were a Republican...
You believe in supply-side economics. You believe in economic growth, and you believe in not taxing the shit out of the American people for products and services that they never receive anyway. This is the way. This is the way. And I don't think there's anyone over the test of time, and there's been a lot of great champions on this, who has done more to try to iron that in. Now, you heard he's concerned. Yep. He's concerned.
It's important that you all understand this and comprehend that, like, you know, the language of the left unacceptable when it comes to how much money the federal government takes out of your paycheck. And you may think that there is a it's not at you.
You may think like, oh, it's a millionaire's tax. Okay. Well, you know, here's the thing. People who make tens of millions of dollars a year have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank. They're not filing W-2 taxes. They don't care about marginal tax rates. They have investment. They don't care about it. It's all red herring to open the argument and concede the argument to a left who wants to protect and expand an entitlement state and make small businesses first.
and everyone you know second into making basically a socialist country. It is for real. I'm not being hyperbolic. No. And he did a perfect job of explaining it. It was a huge treat for all the listeners to have him on. Totally. Love it to death. Smug, we covered a lot. I think so. Show me your hog. Absolute banger of an episode.
Holmes? And thank you so much to our listeners. Thank you so much, Grover Norquist. Wonderful interview. And thank you so much to our listeners. Remember, subscribe and like the YouTube if you have not yet. So until next time, minions, keep the faith. Hold the line and own the libs. We'll see you Tuesday. Stay ruthless. Stay ruthless.