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

Welcome to the Tucker Carlson Show. It's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying, they can't die quickly enough, and there's a reason they're dying, because they lie. They lied so much it killed them. We're not doing that. At TuckerCarlson.com we promise to bring you the most honest content, the most honest interviews we can, without fear or favor.

Yes.

So he got stuck at a roast one time when we worked together in New Orleans, and had to take a leak, and it was on C-Span, and on the tape, which I have seen, he's sitting there and he's kind of shuffling in his seat, and all of a sudden he takes this water pitcher off the table and sort of, he takes a leak in the water pitcher.

Oh gosh.

So what is that thing? moving on your lapel, on your pocket? That's the debt.

That's my anxiety generator.

It's actually making me really anxious. Is that real-time?

Yes, so it's synced to Treasury, it gets the debt to the penny once a day, and then it looks at what the debt was a year ago, and it comes up with a rolling average debt per second, and it interpolates on weekends and holidays when the Treasury is not paying attention. I am.

So I think you're the only one who wants to know.

Yes, and I want my colleagues to know, and it's great to wear this thing in an elevator with like Adam Schiff, and he's got nowhere to look. I once caught a female congresswoman staring at it, and had to tell her my eyes were up here.

Can you say what it was, because I like-.

No, I cannot.

Oh, well, she's funny. That's very impressive. So what's the message of it?

The message is, this is urgent. It's hard to comprehend 14 digits of debt, but when you see the last five digits are moving so fast, you can't perceive them with your eyes, then you kind of understand, whoa, we got a problem here. I mean, it's $100,000 a second, roughly. So imagine we had this catapult, and we were launching cyber trucks once a second into the ocean. That's how much debt we're taking on continuously.

So maybe when it gets so big, it becomes something that you have to ignore. It's almost like if you fall off the wagon from drinking, you binge. If you fall off your New Year's diet, you just eat the pizza and the bread and jerry. It's like, why do you care? You know, you sort of go crazy, and it feels like we're there.

I am trying to make people feel very uncomfortable. I wear this on the floor of the house. Yeah. And people, literally, they'll press the button that says yay or nay. I've argued we should relabel the voting button.

It almost feels like it's so big that why even deal with it?

That's where we are. I think a lot of lawmakers are apathetic. They're like, well, we can't fix it. We're not going to fix it. We might as well indulge in it, and I'll see what I can get.

Well, exactly. Yeah. So where does it end?

Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency. And when we print more money, which we're doing all the time, the Fed is doing that. We're actually taxing the world. Everybody in the world who holds dollars gets like a 3% transaction fee. I say we're kind of like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3% because you're using that credit card.

And we're also sending a really clear signal, which is the dollar is not safe for you.

Right.

It's the reserve currency because it's a safe haven, because it's a stable country. It's the most stable country in the world, and we're not going to weaponize the dollar because that would be shooting ourselves. But suddenly we are.

And they'll tolerate like 3%, because we're not backed by dollars. We're backed by aircraft carriers right now. So they'll sort of tolerate that 3%. But one of the things we recently did in Congress, we passed something called the Repo Act, where we said we're just going to seize all of Russia's sovereign assets in the United States. Well, it turns out a lot of that is Treasury debt that they've agreed to buy so that they can hold dollars.

Why would, I mean, that seems like theft. Just like take a country's assets, I mean, that belongs to the people of the country, right? It's not just Putin.

It is theft. Like, it's immoral. But even if you're okay with the amorality or immorality of it, it's short-sighted, because eventually it'll catch up with us.

So, do any of the dumbos you work with understand that? Did you say, wait a second, if we do this, first of all, it's wrong, and if we're going to be a beacon of light and order and justice in the world, we should abide by those principles. But even if you don't care about the, even if, as you said, you're immoral, like it's self-defeating to do this. Do they understand that?

Some of them understand it, but it doesn't matter. They'll still vote for something like the Repo Act anyway, because it's popular.

And with whom?

With voters. They think, yeah, take Russia's money. Like, you know, let's take, yeah, yeah, that'd be great. Let's take their money and use it in a war against them. It kind of feels good.

Why are we in a war with Russia? I've never figured that out. Why Russia? It almost seems like they picked it off a map. Like, why would it be a war with Russia?

You know, what's interesting is, we were in Afghanistan and I was tracking this. I talked to the special inspector general, John Sopko, about twice a year about the money that was being wasted in Afghanistan. It was about $50 billion a year. And I was glad to see us get out of Afghanistan, but kind of like feathering the clutch and shifting gears, we just went from second gear to third gear. Because as soon as we quit spending $50 billion a year in Afghanistan, we started spending more than $50 billion a year.

But if you're, if, I mean, look, everyone who lives here wants to be proud of the country. I always have been. And I'm proud of its people still. But if your main export is death, you know, that, I mean, why?

It doesn't work in the long run. I mean, there is a blowback. We're engendering a lot of ill will. Look, 10 years ago, even more recently than that, the only way we could get to the space station was on a Russian rocket. Right.

But we're told that it's essential to our national security to do that. Do you believe that?

No, I don't see that. I mean, one of the reasons, like I said, the Biden letter said, well, we need to keep our industrial base strong. So let's fund all these weapons and send them over. But I don't see how it's strengthening our country. In fact, we're getting weaker by doing it.

So you've been, I think, the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes. How many votes have there been on this question? And where have you voted on them?

I've tried to keep track. There were something like 18 votes on Ukraine, and I voted against every one of them. since, like 2014,, when we started, you know, saber rattling. We do these non-binding resolutions, whereas, you know, Russia's evil, you know, whereas we support democracy. Now, even then, we knew that Ukraine was just corrupt as hell.

But, you know, like the most corrupt country in Europe by far.

Yeah. So I started, you know, there's been 16 or 20 votes on Ukraine. I've been against all of those. just in the last seven months. There have been probably 30 votes on Israel in the Middle East.

How many votes on the U.

Oh, maybe, maybe four show votes that, you know, where. we know they're going nowhere in the Senate. Look, we haven't named 30 post offices.

Why do you, because you hate Israel, or is there another reason?

No, because I'm against sending our money overseas. I'm against starting another proxy war. I'm against sanctions, because it's going to weaken the dollar. I'm for free speech. Like all of these resolutions run afoul of those things.

Tell us what the free speech part of it.

So recently they brought a bill to Congress and this was actually a binding bill, not a non-binding. resolution. Like this was going to have the effect of law and people would get, you know, prosecuted if they engaged in anti-Semitism on campuses. And the problem with this bill is they use some international definition of anti-Semitism on a website somewhere. My first question is, why don't you just put the definition in the bill?

You are the Congress, right? Right. We are the laws.

We should be. Instead, we're referencing a website that's not even, you know, hosted in the United States. And so. but so I went to this website and it's got a fairly short definition, but it's also got examples of things that would be considered anti-Semitism. And some of these are actually passages in the New Testament, if you will, would be banned by this international definition of anti-Semitism.

Or what if we just have different opinions and your opinion is now a crime? Right. I mean, even if it's abhorrent, even if it's wrong and stupid.

Yeah. It's still legal. It should be.

You may have come to the obvious conclusion that the real debate is not between Republican and Democrat or socialist and capitalist, right, left. The real battle is between people who are lying on purpose and people who are trying to tell you the truth. It's between good and evil. It's between honesty and falsehood. And we hope we are on the former side.

Oh, yeah. It passed with flying colors. But at least a few people woke up to this.

I mean, so, but the members of Congress who go to church on Sunday, who just voted to ban the New Testament on campus, make it illegal to quote from the New Testament, the Christian Bible, like. how did they square that?

I think their voters. let them get away with it. I mean, they don't have to square it unless they're.

But why would they want to do something like that?

Because there's a lot of pressure in Congress to vote for these things. And our Republican leadership thinks they're so smart. You know, we're in an election year and they want to bring up issues. They want to put them in front of Congress and make us vote on them, whether they're going anywhere in the Senate or not. And they want to split the Democrats.

So what's AIPAC?

AIPAC is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. And they didn't start out as a PAC in the sense of a political action committee, but now they have a political action committee. Ostensibly, it's a group of Americans who lobby on behalf of Israel. They're for anything, Israel. And they're a very effective lobbying group.

What did they whisper against you? What were they saying about you?

Well, they would do it through, for instance, churches, evangelical churches. They've got an organization called Christians United for Israel, where they sort of co-opted evangelicals. People think it's a grassroots movement. in Kentucky. It's actually a top down movement from AIPAC, so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got to support Israel, you know, no matter what.

So you get elected despite their efforts. And then what happens? Do you talk to them after that?

And by the way, let me just put a little footnote here. I'm not against Israel. I've never voted to sanction Israel. I've never said anything particularly critical of Israel, you know, other than, for instance, right now they're bombing. They've killed one percent of the civilian population in Gaza.

Yeah, you get elected 2012.

I vote my conscience, which they won't tolerate. So they ran with their 501c4 before they had a super PAC. They were running educational advocacy ads against me, saying that, you know, I'm bad on Israel. They didn't say don't vote for him. They just said he's, he's a bad guy.

It's a little weird, though, because, as you said, you're probably the only Republican in the House who hasn't done homework for them, who isn't on their side.

I don't know. I think they don't want one horse out of the barn. If one person starts speaking the truth, they're afraid it could be contagious, perhaps, or it's like a new car. They go to Mike Johnson and they say, we want a Cadillac, you know, Escalade with pearl white paint. And here's, you know, here's the rims we want.

What I find interesting is that it's not just that they disagree with your views, which they do. And I think they have an absolute right to disagree with anybody's views. We all do. But they've called you a bigot and they call you an anti-Semite and say you're a hater and try to destroy your character. That seems like a very different level of response to me.

They, there's no need to do that. I'm not anti-Semitic. I don't have an anti-Semitic hair in my head. Okay. It's, I mean, I don't like AIPAC anymore.

That's disgusting though. Isn't it?

You know, I guess that's your character.

They can, they can disagree with your views, but, but to call you like the worst thing you can be in America, like that's disgusting.

You know, I have a thick skin, and here's the good news, Tucker, my constituents aren't falling for it. Two weeks ago, I just had a primary and got 76% of the vote, with AIPAC running hundreds of thousand dollars of ads. So it's, it's not working against me. I, I think it's short-sighted on their, you know, on their side to do this. They're just burning money, but they're trying to make an example of me.

But they're also exposing their weakness.

I think they are. I think they've exposed a real weakness here, and, you know, it used to be just me voting against some of these resolutions, but recently, where they tried to ban passages in the New Testament, I think we got like almost two dozen Republicans who said, wait, hold on there.

Can I ask a question, though? Just a fundamental question. So the Biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating something called FARRA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, 1936-ish. It's been on the books for, you know, 90 years. And it's never been enforced ever until recently, until really the Trump era and Biden era.

They're not, but they should be.

Well, how, how can that, how can that be? How can they put Paul Manafort in jail, which they did on a FARRA violation, and a bunch of other people in jail on FARRA violations, but the largest and most effective and most feared foreign lobby working for a foreign government doesn't have to register under the law. That's insane.

Oh man, don't make me take their side, but I'll explain as best as I can what their argument is.

I mean, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we should take their side. I don't know.

Well, I'm going to agree with you at a second, but let me at least offer what I think is their argument. They would say we are Americans. You know, the members of AIPAC are Americans and that they have the right to free speech.

Paul Manafort's an American. Right, right.

Yeah. That, so there's. the good rebuttal is FARRA applies not to foreigners, to foreign agents of foreign principals, agents of foreign principals.

It's Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign governments.

So this is, AIPAC is exactly what FARRA is meant for. Now they would say, and we have a first amendment, right? Okay, well, I agree with you there, but we also have election laws and to the, it's disclosure, right? We're, they're not, FARRA doesn't say, you can't say. Thomas Massey's, you know, an ignorant hillbilly.

Represents a faction.

Right. They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction that, and they're using the imprimatur of grassroots that they've diluted or confused into bullying congressmen, and the NRA does that and farm bureau does that. I'm, I'm picking on some, you know, other right-wing groups here.

Well, for sure. And by the way, I think there are probably a lot of things that AIPAC is for that I'm for and farm bureau NRA, same thing, but it's, I just, the idea of a foreign government playing in our political campaigns openly.

Openly in that they are showing you they're doing it, but opaquely in that you can't track it because they're not registered.

Is there any other Republican who has your views on this?

Well, I have Republicans who come to me on the floor and say, I wish I could vote with you today. Yours is the right vote, but I would just take too much flack back home. And I have Republicans who come to me and say, that's wrong. What AIPAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my AIPAC person.

What does that mean? an AIPAC person?

It's like your babysitter, your AIPAC babysitter, who is always talking to you for AIPAC. They're probably a constituent in your district, but they are, you know, firmly embedded in AIPAC.

And every member has something like this?

Every, I don't know how it works on the Democrat side, but that's how it works on the Republican side. And when they, and when they come to DC, you go have lunch with them and they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them. So I've had like, that's absolutely crazy. I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my AIPAC person. And it's clearly what we call them, my AIPAC guy.

Why have I never heard this before?

It doesn't benefit anybody. Why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country? It doesn't benefit the Congressman for people to know that. So they're not going to tell you that.

It's, it's in, have you seen any other country do anything like this? Like Russia, Russia obviously determines the outcome of our elections. We keep hearing that. Does anyone have a Putin guy that they talk to?

Not only do they not have a Putin guy, they don't, they don't have a Britain guy. They don't have an Australian guy. They, you know, they don't have a Germany dude. Like. it's the only country that does this, that has somebody that like.

What's the trip like, do you know?

It's kind of like, I think, vacation-y, you go see the wall, you go see the, you know, the sites, things like that.

It's such a great, I must say it's such a great country. Jerusalem, especially. It's just such a wonderful place that that's got to have a big effect.

You go like swim in the Dead Sea. Yeah. Yeah. I've done that. Yeah.

Not on an AIPAC trip, but I would recommend it to anyone.

Are you sure it wasn't an AIPAC trip?

I paid for it myself. No, I mean, it's, it's just funny. I mean, I am like a legit lover of Israel, of the place Israel. I like the people and I love the food and like the whole thing is so great. Look, they have, they've, but that's distinct from the government of Israel, which is just a foreign government.

My, my sense is the people are very entrepreneurial, that they're publicly minded, you know, they care about their country, that, that they're generally good people, right?

That's certainly been my experience in trips there. for sure. It's great. It's just, that's, I mean, I think it's probably one of my favorite, maybe my all-time favorite place to go with my family, but that's just a completely different thing from taking orders from its government, right? I mean, right?

No, again, they'll say it's, these are American citizens who are, you know, coordinating all.

It's just, again, this is almost a rhetorical question, but in your whatever, 12, 14 years in Congress, 12 years, have you ever seen any indication that Russia is influencing election outcomes or candidates or members?

Not, not in a quiet way. Like, you know, they'll put out statements. Russia obviously has Russia Today, RT.

Yeah. I think it's been banned, but yeah.

I like, I think, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I'm a big fan, being from Kentucky, right? They realized that fried was, became sort of a pejorative and people didn't want to eat fried food. So they changed the name to KFC. So you don't have to say fried. Okay.

But you've never like in the cloak room or on the floor at dinner, you've never heard another Republican member say, I'd love to vote for this, but Putin doesn't want me to.

I have never heard that. You haven't?

What about China?

No, there's, I mean, unless it's a spy sleeping with a Democrat, there's some of that going on. Yeah.

But that's not, that's not in public. So how do you think, it's just interesting? because you're, you're clearly not a bigot. I think it's very obvious.

Well, they say that they don't want me to run statewide. They're worried that I'll run for McConnell's seat. And so they're trying to send me a message. That's what they would tell you. Um, but why, I don't know what the message is.

Maybe it's a little presumptuous to decide.

I've never said that I'm running for the Senate, right? Yeah. I, I'm pretty much disinterested in it, personally and publicly, but just in case they're running ads statewide. Now, mind you, there are six congressional districts in Kentucky, and I only represent one of them. They're running the ads in all six congressional districts, just in case.

Amazing. What do you think of Mitch McConnell after all these years of being in the delegation with him?

Um, he's a shrewd guy.

Yep.

He's quick. He's, um, let me, let me give you an example of how quick he is. So we had a Congressman, Jamie Comer, who's now chaired the oversight committee. He got elected in a special election, which means you come in, in the middle of a term and you have to boot up with no staff. And so it's, it's kind of, uh, you know, disorienting.

And that's such a perfect imitation.

And I wasn't supposed to speak, but I interrupted Senator McConnell, who was at the time, the majority leader. And I said, yes, Senator McConnell, he did take his first vote and I know he has no staff. So I advise Jamie, when you walk into the chamber, look at how I vote and then vote the other way, and you'll be just fine. And every, you know, 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke and they were laughing and as the laughter died down, McConnell goes, well, Thomas, I'm glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice.

Yes. Lower than Governor Beshear. Yeah.

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

Well-deserved, well-deserved. So I'm glad to hear that, because I like Kentucky and I think it's, it's voters are sensible. What do you think it counts for in the final months and years of his public career, his public statements that all that matters is Ukraine? Like, what is that?

I have no idea. By the way, I have so many fights in the House that I try to avoid every fight in the Senate that I can. You're trying to draw me in and I love you and I'll indulge these questions. But for 12 years, my strategy has been pick my fights in the House. Let, let Rand Paul and Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and, and, you know, J.D.

But do you, it's just interesting. Okay. Taking McConnell out of it and, and even the Senate out of it. But some of the committee chairman in the House, for example, seem like Ukraine is all that matters to them. And there's of course the questions you noted of donations from Lockheed, et cetera, the military industrial complex.

I don't. And, um, the hardest ones to understand are people like Mike Johnson, who used to be against the, you know, sending more money to Ukraine, but now that he's the speaker, he's like you said, he seems strongly convicted that, um, we should be sending money there.

Almost like it's a religious calling or something. I mean, it seems totally real to me. It doesn't seem fake.

I've heard the argument. I think it's immoral, but I've heard the argument that, oh, this is a great deal. We just spend money and we're grinding up Russia's, uh, capacity to wage war, particularly, lots of Russians are dying. And so we're told, that's, that's a good thing, you know, for since the cold war began, we've been taught that it would be good for Russia to be diminished, but they've gone so far as to say Russians dying, you know, to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say, is just such a great thing that we need to keep this, this thing, going. And my answer to that is why don't you tell us the Ukrainian casualties?

I've asked that very same question to Mike Johnson, actually directly.

They, um, because they have no other reference. And then here's what else happens, Tucker. When you go into a classified setting, like a skiff, you lock up your phone, you take off your Fitbit, you take every electronic device. They even make me take off my debt badge. What?

Yeah, I know. Do you feel naked?

I feel exposed. I mean, I do feel naked if I'm not wearing this. I've been wearing it for a year, every day of my life. Okay. Um, but they make you, they strip you of every outside reference.

So it's designed to produce Stockholm syndrome, it sounds like.

Yes. And when you get in there, they really don't give you classified information. I say there's three levels of classification in the SCIF. There's Facebook level, there's a Twitter level, and there's New York Times level. Like, and the New York Times level is the highest level of classification.

Have you ever heard anything? you thought was genuinely secret?

Occasionally, just a few times. And obviously I can't say what that is. But they slip up and commit candor occasionally in there. And you're like, whoa, I didn't know that. You know, nothing like what's at Area 51..

But occasionally you're just like, what do people think is at Area 51, by the way?

I don't know. I'm not a, no.

You guys passed this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and then they never disclosed anything. Yeah. What is that?

Not my area of expertise. Yes. Don't know.

But do members of Congress ever say, wait a second, we're a co-equal branch, we're a legislative branch. We have as much power as the president collectively. And you can't keep this stuff secret from us. You're not allowed to do that.

But see, like I have this in hearings all the time. They'll say, I'll ask the ATF director. This just, this happened just last week. Uh, Dettelbach or I'll ask Merrick Garland something or Christopher Wray. Like.

So is that the speaker who allowed that to happen?

Oh, he absolutely allowed it to happen.

So to what extent are members of Congress committee chairman leadership controlled by blackmail?

I really don't think there's much blackmail. Like. if there is, I'm not aware of it. I have people come up to me, you know, I travel around the country, Texas, and, you know, other states and speak to groups, food freedom groups, you know, first amendment, second amendment groups. Uh, and they come to me and they say, why did my congressman sell out?

How do you have, it's interesting. You, like people I've asked around. You don't seem to have any real enemies in the Congress. I don't even think AIPAC hates you. They just want you to obey, but it's not, it doesn't seem personal, right?

I have a mutation.

So you like people. Okay. Obviously, you're not some weird autist who doesn't care about other people. You like other people.

I love people.

I can tell, and your colleagues say that, but you also don't feel like you need to fit in right at the same time. Like, what is that?

It's a mutation, that chromosome, the like, the liking people and likeability chromosome usually has another gene on it right next to it, which is the need to be liked. And I'm missing the need to be like gene. I don't know what happened. I can go like on the cares act. Okay.

And I said, that's your face. Yeah.

Oh yeah. Well, like, no, it wasn't just one. It was like when he was done, there was a line of people. I was like stood there and they're all coming to hate on me. And, um, I was like, but what about the guy that's going to the grocery store and bagging your groceries and carrying them out to the car?

Yes. I've noticed.

So, anyways, these are the kinds of people who are supposed to respond in an emergency and they all wanted to stay home. They all hated me for, for recognize our constitutional duty. And, and Trump called me three times on the floor of the house while I was getting ready to make the motion to object. And I let it go to voicemail three times in a row, which is probably not good, but I couldn't leave the microphone because I was asking people, would you make this motion if I go to the restroom? And they're like, Oh, no, not me.

I've noticed.

But they realized this was a chance to make a statement. So they put a bill on the floor saying, Trump, you can't go to war with Iran without a vote of Congress, which is constitutionally obvious. So I had to vote for it. But I was only one of three Republicans to do it. So he remembered that time, but he didn't remember the fake Obamacare repeal and some of the other things that I was kind of, you know, deterred in the punch bowl on.

Did it change your views at all?

No, the president tweeted that I was a third rate grandstander. And this is before I got back to my seat. I go back from the speaker's lobby to go to my seat to get ready to make the motion. And one of the Congress was like, you better look at your phone, Massey. Look at your Twitter.

It's like, what?

Where did that come from? Have you seen my Christmas card picture?

What's your Christmas card picture?

Oh, well, it's a little infamous. No, I've actually seen it.

But I think it's the benefit of those who have not.

So, you know, I got my family together for Christmas and we got bluegrass instruments out. We play music together and we took a Christmas card picture with bluegrass instruments. And I said, hey, wouldn't it be kind of neat if we just like change these all out for machine guns and took a picture? And that was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity. But I had had a couple of medical margaritas one night.

The arch. It's a great picture.

The Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it. This is the head of the Church of England condemned my tweet. I'm like, oh, my God.

Are you an Episcopalian?

I'm Methodist. Good.

So you can ignore him. Yes. Yeah. He's a disgrace.

So so anyways, I you know, the press asked me, as I'm we're talking about the need to be like to Jane, right? If I had that, I would have been devastated that day. If I had needed to be liked, I couldn't have carried that through. And I walked out of that chamber. Everybody's hate me in the chamber.

So what happened to your relationship with Trump?

It. you know, I think he respects people that stand up.

Yeah. Even if I think you're absolutely right.

Disagrees with you. That's correct. And two years later, he did endorse me. No way. Yep.

Do you get along with him? OK, now? Yeah.

I mean, I did endorse Ron DeSantis, not out of spite or animosity, because we had already patched things up. just because I served with Ron DeSantis for six years. And he and I were really good friends. We talked about bills when he was in Congress. You know, he, he and I fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate congressional pensions.

Do you think, if you did run for, say, just pulling us out of a hat, but governor of Kentucky, do you think Trump would endorse you?

I don't know. You'd probably do some polling and see who was winning.

Fair, fair, totally fair.

I wouldn't turn down an endorsement.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's not. Are you at war with anybody in the Congress?

No, I get along with everybody. I mean, and people try to use this against me. You know, when AIPAC was running those ads that say I always vote with AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, you know. So I introduced an amendment and forced a vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles. that's mandated.

who don't know what you're talking about. New in new vehicles. This has been the case for years. They can be turned off remotely by the authorities, which is like the most North Korean thing ever to happen. That's what you're talking about.

Yeah. By 2026, every new automobile sold has to be able to turn itself off if it doesn't like you're driving.

How could anyone vote for something that evil? I don't understand.

Because again, they know it's that I'm right, but they're worried about, for instance, mothers against drunk driving or they don't have the bravery.

Wait, we just let in millions of illegal aliens who are allowed to drunk drive. Right. And Biden has told us that drunk driving is not a big deal. It's not grounds for deportation. Yeah.

I know. And but there may be, let's say, one constituent in your district who gets a hold of you and they lost a child to drunk driving, which is terrible. And they say, you know, you don't care about me if you vote for Massey's amendment. And, you know, they make that personal phone call. That congressman doesn't have the fortitude to say or knowledge to say, look, this technology can't work.

So she ran. It's interesting. I mean, obviously I don't like her, but I think she's talented. She, she is definitely talented, but she ran as a radical, as someone from the outside, which I'm, of course, very sympathetic to. But she doesn't seem to actually be that person.

Quite, quite frequently. But I had a funny moment. You know, this 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April. Well, the squad and I, I know this is going to be used in the next ad against me, this clip from Tucker. But I was the only no.

They literally sit together.

They hang out together. Yeah, they kind of it's really cliquish. Even, you know, the Freedom Caucus sits together. The Texas delegation sits together. There are different cliques.

They're too independent minded.

But so I go over to their.

This is just high school cafeteria.

It's high school cafeteria. That's what it is. And why would you again? They need to be liked, right? They don't want to sit next to people they don't like or who don't like them.

What did she say?

She laughed. She thought it was funny. I mean, she has a sense of humor. These people are humans. There are 435..

Well, they're also people. And if you can help it, you shouldn't hate people, period.

We've, we've formed coalitions on the First Amendment, on the Fourth Amendment, on war, sometimes like to eliminate cluster bombs, delivering cluster bombs, even though the Democrats almost to a person, actually to a person, want to give Ukraine more aid. Some of them are like, well, the cluster bombs, maybe we shouldn't do that. OK. And so you can form coalitions. So I try to do that when I can.

But why aren't there anti-war Democrats, since it was the anti-war party for like 40 years?

I don't know. And we've lost a lot of them on privacy and free speech as well. I think with Russia, you asked this before. There's. there's this element that I didn't answer.

But there but no one was considering finding any member who waved the flag of a foreign nation on the floor of the House of Representatives.

Right. And they were taking selfies of them with their foreign flags, too. And no, none of them got a phone call. Only I got a phone call because I exposed the humiliation. It wasn't just a humiliation of those of us in Congress.

Do you think any? I mean, the leader of Ukraine is not elected anymore. He, his term has ended. He's not having a new election. He's the unelected maximum power.

They're lying. Yeah, I mean, they know it. And the good news is some Republicans are waking up to it. Remember, when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, that even, you know, as soon as the war started, I was the only no. There was like this open ended promise in a non-binding resolution that said, well, give them whatever they need.

But most Republicans don't support it. So that means that your speaker, the Republican speaker, the House, Mike Johnson, is working for the Democrats.

Yeah, it's that simple. I mean, and that's one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate. Paul Gosar and I co-sponsored Marjorie's motion to vacate. There were ultimately 11 of us who voted for it.

Motion to vacate would be to fire him.

To fire Speaker Johnson, just like they had done Kevin McCarthy. Although I thought inappropriately and at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons, they did that to McCarthy. But here we had Speaker Johnson, who is doing all the things people were afraid McCarthy might do. They pre-convicted McCarthy for things they thought he would do. And here Mike Johnson came and did all these things.

Do you think he will be?

A lot of this depends on what the people want and if they can see it. Hopefully also Trump sees it, that Mike Johnson would be even worse than Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan put, while he was still in the, while we were still in the majority, Paul Ryan sent like a dozen CRs or omnibus bills to President Trump's desk because he didn't have any money for a wall in it. Like he had no intention of ever funding a wall. Paul Ryan did it, you know?

How did that happen? Do you have any idea?

The, uh, the Paul Ryan bit or?

No, well, Paul Ryan is a, you know, is a sinister person. I happen to know, but also, you know, not just kind of, not a genius and an ideologue at the same time, which is like a bad combination, dumb ideologues are the scariest. But Mike Johnson seemed like kind of a moderately conservative, kind of sincere, decent guy. You know, maybe he would babysit your kids and do an okay job. Unlike Paul Ryan.

Well, one of the things he claims, which I don't believe is true. And I have reason to say this is that he says he went in a skiff. Like he's had some 180 degree turns on, some things, like, for instance, whether you need a warrant to spy on Americans using the foreign intelligence surveillance act, 702 program, where he used to be on judiciary committee with me and Jim Jordan, trying to reform that, trying to get, he understood what it was. He knew completely what we were talking about. He's an attorney, too.

And I think FISA has been in place since 1978, since the seventies. So almost 50 years. And they couldn't give you one example?

Not one example. Now they also expanded it after 9-11 and to do the, the program to go against civilians, to spy on civilians. And, and actually that product came out of the judiciary committee. Here's another place where the speaker betrayed us. FISA 702 was created by John Conyers and Jim Sensenbrenner.

It's, it's shocking.

It is shocking.

So he said, you know, like end of civil liberties level stuff. So yes, yes, but it's not like he learned new information. The skiff.

No, he did not. I was there.

So what, so that's, so. that's the problem, right?

The fact that I was there, right. So that telling people on your show that I was there for three and a half hours and Mike, go, ask Mike Johnson. He'll say, yep, he was there three and a half hours.

So what is the truth? What do you think changed?

I think he's kind of a lost ball in tall weeds. They think he's in a position of power. He never imagined he would get to at this point in his life. He's not done anything in private practice or political arena that's prepared him for this. He took the job with a very small staff.

It's crazy. You said nothing he did in his life before this prepared him for it. Um, but that itself may be kind of a more charitable explanation, because I'm trying to be terrible.

I mean, I've got to go back to work with you for this.

So, just for those who don't know, you went to MIT, your high school girlfriend joined you at MIT. You married her whilst, while she was still there. And then together you started a company based on a very sophisticated invention that you came up with. Maybe the first of about 30 patents that you now have, you ran this company for a long time, then you moved back to Kentucky and a lot of things happened and you wound up running for Congress. So like, that's not the background.

Well, um, so nothing in the political arena, but in my private life, you know, I raised $32 million of venture capital and I swam with the sharks. Like I had lots of moral dilemmas in the course of creating that company. I could have taken money off the table and gone and done other things. But instead I felt a commitment to my staff and to other investors. I had investors who said, if you'll just shit can that guy you hired as president, we'll double our investment.

Like, so tell me about that. So you tell us about how you live and where you live. Cause, I think it's one of the most unusual things about you.

So I spent, um, you know, I grew up as a hillbilly in Eastern Kentucky.

What county?

Lewis County.

Lewis County. How many people in your town?

13,000 people, 13,000 cattle. It's a huge land mass. Um, and it's a great County. There's. it's one of the 21 counties that I represent.

Was it people from Kentucky?

I don't think so. I think they had one finger up and waving back.

You thought beeping was, Hey, Hey, there.

I mean, that's what we thought that little thing in the middle of your steering wheel was for. If you saw somebody and they couldn't see you through the windshield, just toot the horn. And then you'd throw your hand up and wave and they roll down the window. That's Bob. Uh, and if you didn't wave, I mean, you were pariah.

So, uh, why'd you move back to Kentucky?

After 10 years, you know, of, of doing it, it was, you know, we had three kids and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky, and we wanted to be near their grandparents. Like both of my parents were still alive. Both of my wife's parents were still alive. And you learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just, you know, trying to earn a living or whatever. And if you're lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that's where I think the generational stuff carries on.

So you built the house. Wait, who built the house?

I did like I, we had an ice storm and a lot of trees fell down.

How big is the property?

It's, um, 1500 acres.

And it's wooded.

It's all, almost all woods. Like, and it's too steep. I don't want you to think this is like valuable Iowa. No, no, no, no.

I know the part of the state.

Yeah. Pack your lunch. If you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge, cause you're going to be hungry by the time you get to the bottom, you're gonna be grabbing like tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding, but it grows trees and some of it is flat.

And, you know, in the bottom, but this is not plantation land.

No, these are hollers. Yeah. So, uh, in fact, interestingly enough, it's been a Republican County since the civil war, even though all the counties around it have been Democrats since the civil war, because the geography, because the geography, the topography, did not allow for consolidation of farms. Right. So there was no scale at which slavery made sense.

Yes.

And so that's the way people grew up. And, by the way, it's kind of libertarian. You know, I'll do my thing in my holler. You do your thing in your holler. That's right.

But Southwest Virginia is like this. West Virginia is like this. Yeah. Because the topography.

Right. It's the reason West Virginia was Republican and seceded from Virginia. So, by the way, half my family's from West Virginia and half my family's from Kentucky. My mamaw's, who's 97 right now, is still alive. Her grandfather was a union soldier.

From West Virginia.

From West Virginia. Yeah. She's still lives in West Virginia, but like we're not that far away from the civil war.

Oh, I know. I know.

You can talk to people who were alive when people who fought in the civil war.

I worked with a guy when I was at the newspaper in Arkansas, the guy I shared a desk with, Bob Salih from Texarkana, Arkansas. He said, I knew Confederate veterans. It's in my lifetime. I knew a man who knew Confederate veterans or civil war veterans. That's just absolutely crazy.

But my whole point of that was she's a Republican. She's been a Republican, my mamaw, since the civil war. And, like nobody marries into our family. If you're a Democrat, you got to go see mamaw and she'll either approve or disapprove. And she's been, had pretty good luck at sniffing out the Democrats.

So, so you had an ice store. There was an ice storm on your property. How does that figure into your house?

So I already had a bulldozer. So I got a winch so I could drag these trees out. I got a sawmill, cut these into timbers, built a timber frame house.

What kind of wood?

It's 17 kinds of wood, because we did whatever fell down in the ice storm. We've got Oak, yellow poplar, hickory, beech.

So hardwood.

Hardwood. Yep. And, um, then we wanted it to be self-sustaining.

How did she know how to timber frame?

I found a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee and I bought it now and I drove to Tennessee and took a one week class and we built a little shed slash cabin. And I'm, and I called my wife from a pay phone and I said, I want to do this. Like, instead of going to get a job, we had just ended, like, left our company after 10 years of working there and we'd moved back to Kentucky and I said, well, I'll just build a timber frame house.

Like full-time? Yes.

Woke up every morning, had my coffee and started chiseling away or going up in the woods and dragging more trees out that had fallen down.

So you, you built your house full-time, like as a job every day.

And this, and this is what our kids saw too. Like the flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek. We call it a creek.

Um, what do you mean? the flooring came out of the creek?

The, there are rocks in the creek that are flat, that they look like the stuff you buy at Lowe's. that's fake. And I'm like, Oh, this is what they modeled, the fake stuff after. We did this free. Let's just go pick it up.

Right.

I remember my son, he was like 10 years old. He'd traded some Yu-Gi-Oh cards. On the bus. And, uh, for this like, awesome, the best Yu-Gi-Oh card ever. And he showed it to us and was a little plastic thing.

Uh, wait, what percent of the timbers in the timber frame came from your property?

All of it. In fact, they never left the farm. Really? So? you milled it there, milled it there, chiseled it, there, made the mortise and tenons and the dovetails.

Yes.

I kept telling myself, look, farmers without calculators pulled this off 200 years ago. And so surely if I've got a computer and some, you know, electricity, I should be able to do this as well. Um, just dent of will.

But she'd been like a MIT educated, electrical engineer, software programmer, but not, uh, nothing, that scale.

Yeah. Nothing. I mean, the, the only thing I had built before, that was a tree house. Right. And even that didn't get finished.

So, but I mean, some of that stuff is very complex, like actually complex timber framing, some, some of the joints are difficult to cut and the design itself is, is complicated.

Yeah. You don't like, you have to plan it all ahead. You don't like hold the timber up there. Like you would, a two by four. Oh, we need a saw.

It's not balloon framing. Yeah. Totally right.

Or, oh, that 45 needs to be a 42 degree angle. Let's, you know, saw off a little bit more. You can't do that while it's, you know, you're up in the middle of the air on scaffolding, trying to get two pieces to fit together, it's actually, it's a fun math problem. So I enjoyed it, but there's something honest about it, because all the fasteners are wooden too. So it's one medium that you learn.

And once you realize that, and there are no metal fasteners in the frame.

Correct.

None.

I mean, we had to nail the floor to the frame and the walls on it, but the frame itself, no metal fasteners, and it's 46 feet tall.

It's 46 feet tall. Yes.

From the basement slab, which I timber framed the basement too. I still don't even know how to stick frame. Like, I'm like, well, I'm going to build one house. I'm going to learn one technology.

Which is the framing that your house is, if you're watching this. It's a stick frame.

It's stick frame. So I was like, well, let's build the basement timber frame too. And the dormers, like if you paid a company to build timber frame, they would stick frame the dormers.

Well, of course, or buy them and just bolt them on. Yeah.

Um, I, I timber framed. that. I'm just like, let's just be pure of the whole way. And there's, as an engineer, I thought, well, I want to build a house with timbers. I like how timbers look, but, but, you know, um, we'll just bolt them together.

So, so all the timbers came from the property. What about the stone? There's a lot of stone in the house. Yep.

We, we got some of it out of the Creek. We dug some of it out of the ground. All of the stone is from the property.

How did you dig it out of the ground? What does that mean? You started a stone quarry on your, on your own property?

In my front yard. It's now a pond. Uh, but I, there was an old logging road and the erosion had exposed this layer of rock and I thought, well, that layer of rock must go pretty far. So I started digging using a backhoe. I started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock.

And where were you living at this point?

We lived in a mobile home. Like we just pulled in a mobile home and we, I told my wife, we don't want to live in it for six months. We ended up two years in a 900 square foot mobile home with four kids.

No way.

It's, but I mean, it's actually not that bad. You get to know your family really well.

You can hear, it's like being on a boat.

Yeah. You try to go to the bathroom and if you're gone for more than five minutes, like the wall between the kitchen and the bathroom is so thin, you're just enjoying private moment there on the throne, trying to read a magazine about timber framing or something. Right. And you can hear the kids at the dinner table saying, where'd daddy go? Where's daddy?

Where's daddy?

And then they'd start trying to find daddy. Anyways, it was a good, comfy experience. And now we actually kept the mobile home and we leased it to deer hunters. Really? Yeah.

Do you have a lot of deer on your land?

We have, yeah. Trophy deer all over.