Welcome to 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. Here's Here's the latest. Do you know James Carville? 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 shuffling in a seat. All of a sudden, he takes this water pitcher off the table and takes a leak in the water pitcher.

Oh, gosh.

What is that thing moving on your lapel, on your pocket?

That's the dad. That's That's my anxiety generator.

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

Yes. It 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.

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

Yes, and I want my colleagues to know. It's great to wear this thing in an elevator with 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. She asked me why I didn't make a belt buckle out of it.

Can you say who it was? Because I like- No, I cannot. She's funny. That's very impressive. 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 understand, Whoa, we got a problem here. I mean, it's $100,000 a second, roughly. 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. Now, there is some good news. I noticed last month it went down. And I'm like, Is my debt clock broken? Why is it going down? And then I realized, Oh, it's April 15th. Everybody's paying their taxes. The good news is we balanced it for a month. The bad news is April 15th is the only reason that happened, and now the debt's going back up again.

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 a bread and Jerry's. It's like, Why do you care? You go crazy. It feels like we're there.

I am I'm trying to make people feel very uncomfortable. I wear this on the floor of the house, and people, literally, they'll press the button that says yay or Nay. I've argued we should relabel the voting button, spend and don't spend. They're red and green if you got that far and can't read, I say it's like, Stop and go. But I've seen people press the spend button, then turn around and look at my debt badge and ask, Did it just go up? But I want them to realize there are consequences to what they're doing because they have been, I think, as you said, just ignoring it, putting it off to the side.

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. Where does it end?

Right now, we're able to finance it because we're the world's reserve currency. 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 a 3% transaction fee. I say we're like the credit card at the gas station that gets 3% because you're using that credit card. Well, we get 3% from inflation we cause because the world is using our currency, and we can do that as long as they use our currency. But I think it's going to end at some point. They're going to quit using our dollars as reserve currency. I I watched your interview with Putin, and one of the things, whether you hate him or not, one of the things he said that is true is when we sanctioned him, before we sanctioned Russia, 70% of their transactions were in US dollars. After the sanctions, it's less than 20% of their transactions are in US dollars. What we're doing with all these sanctions, ironically, we're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we sanction a country and say, You can't use our currency to have a transaction.

We're taking It's in our ability to charge them 3% for that transaction because when we print 3% more dollars, we're just taking that money.

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

They'll tolerate 3% because we're not backed by dollars. We're backed by aircraft carriers right now. They'll We're to 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. Here's the problem with that. When people see that we've seized their money that they gave us in exchange for these treasury notes, then other countries won't want to buy our debt. It's already happening. The The price of a long-term bond that the treasury puts out, it's already gone above 4%, it's like over 4.5%, and they don't want to buy them anymore because we probably wouldn't seize Great Britain's assets. But I could see a seizing China's assets. Why would...

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

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

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, 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. With whom? With voters, they think, Yeah, take Russia's money. Yeah, that'd be great. Let's take their money and use it in a war against them. It feels good, but the problem is it's not moral in the long run, and It won't work in the long run, even if you were okay with it.

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. 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 general, John Sopko, about twice a year about the money that was being wasted in Afghanistan. It was about $50 billion a year. I was glad to see us get out of Afghanistan. But 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 in Ukraine. There's a military-industrial complex. They call it the Defense Industrial Base now in the United States. They say they're hungry and we got to keep them fed. And since we don't have any of our own wars and we don't have a reason to deplete our stocks and our bombs and weapons that we have, we engage in these other things to keep them healthy and thriving. In fact, the Biden administration even made that argument in a letter to Congress for why we should do this supplemental of foreign aid to Israel, to Ukraine, to Taiwan. They made the argument that the defense industrial base needs to be strong, and so we need to spend this money.

And they I have a list of all the states in the United States that would benefit from this spending, and that's why they said we should do it.

But if you're... 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, that... I mean, why?

It doesn't work in the long run. I mean, there is a blowback. What's also wrong? 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. We had a collaboration with them. We were able to get to space that way, and now we don't. The bad thing in the Middle East, Israel is creating tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people who are going to hate the United States, and they're going to hate Israel also. But because we're giving Israel the weapons to do what they're doing, we're creating a lot of people who hate us in this country.

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.

You've been, I think, the lone Republican to dissent from a lot of these votes. How many 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 2014. When we started sabre-rambling. We do these non-binding resolutions, whereas Russia is evil, whereas we support democracy. Now, even then, we knew that Ukraine was just corrupt as hell. But- Like the most corrupt country in Europe by far.

Yeah.

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 and the Middle East. Thirty? Thirty. There were somebody- How many votes on the US border during that time? Maybe four show votes where we know they're going nowhere in the Senate. Look, we haven't named 30 post offices. Last month, we voted 15 or 16 times on issues related to Israel. I've been hit because I voted no on all of those. 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. All of these resolutions run the foul of those things, and that's why I can't vote for them.

Tell us what the free speech part of it.

Recently, they brought a bill to Congress, and this was actually a binding bill, not a non-binding resolution. This was going to have the effect of law, and people would get prosecuted if they engaged in anti-Semitism on campuses. 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? Why are you pointing to somebody's URL in a piece of legislation?

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

We should be. Instead, we're referencing a website that's not even hosted in the United States. 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. Some of these are actually passages in the New Testament, if you will, would be banned by this international definition of anti-Semitism. For instance, saying that Jews killed Jesus, which is in the Bible. He was not welcome among his own people. That would be anti-Semitism. If you engaged in that on campus or just offered that as a thought, let's say in a classroom, you would be anti-Semitic and you would run a foul of the Department of Education and some federal laws. There were other examples in there that were hard to believe. For instance, comparing the policies of Israel to the Nazi regime would be anti-Semitic. But the question is, what if their policies ever became the same? Is this a static definition?

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. That's why we created this network, the Tucker Carlson Network. And we invite you to subscribe to it. You go to tuckercarlson. Com/podcast Our entire archive is there. A lot of behind-the-scenes footage of what actually happens in this barn when only an iPhone is running. Tuckercarlson. Com/podcast. You will not regret it. So your colleagues, I think it passed, right?

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

But the members of Congress who go to church on Sunday, who just voted to ban the New Testament on campus, I think it's illegal to quote from the New Testament, the Christian Bible. How did they square that?

I think their voters let them get away with it. 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. Our Republican leadership thinks they're so smart. 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. They want to split the Democrats. They want to show that Republicans are united and then split the Democrats. That's one of the reasons they do it. Another reason they do it is there's a foreign interest group called APAC that got the ear of this current speaker and demanded 16 votes in April on Israel or the Middle East. We haven't had 16 votes in April on the United States in Congress.

What's APAC?

Apac is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. They didn't start out as a pack 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. They're a very effective lobbying group. They get in there. They try to get me to write a white paper as a candidate, for instance, for Congress. They almost get On what? On Israel. I wouldn't do it. They said, Why? I'm like, I don't do homework for lobbyists. I didn't like writing term papers at college. I'm not writing one for you.

What did they say?

They said, Oh, well, here, just copy-run Paul's term paper and put your name on it. We'll accept that. I'm like, No, I'm still not cribbing somebody else's homework to do homework. I'm not turning in my homework for you. What You're laughing, but you know what? I bet I may be the only Republican in Congress who hasn't done homework for APAC. What it is, it's conditioning. They want you to do something very simple and benign, and for them. They don't really grade your term paper. They just want to know that you'll do something for them. If you'll do something for them as a candidate, you're more likely to do something for them as a congressman when you get in there. My rift Started out in 2012 when I refused to turn in an Israel term paper.

How did they respond to that?

Well, they got in my race a little too late there in the beginning because it was hard to tell that I was actually going to win. When they saw I was going to win, that's when they tried to get me to do the term paper. They didn't have a political action committee at the time. They couldn't spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars against me at that time. It was just like a whisper campaign to try Hey, don't vote for him, blah, blah, blah. That's why. Because at that point, they sensed I wouldn't do what they wanted when I got the time.

But 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 co-opted evangelicals. People think it's a grassroots movement in Kentucky. It's actually a top-down movement from APAC, so that people who aren't even Jewish will feel like they've got to support Israel no matter what. Even if it's a secular state that funds abortions, they just forget that part, and we've got to fund Israel. They have networks, so it's more than just about the money.

You get elected despite their efforts, and then what happens? Do you talk to them after that?

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, other than, for instance, right now, they're bombing. They've killed 1% of the civilian population in Gaza. That's concerning to me. What do they do now?

You get elected 2012. Do you hear from them again?

I vote my conscience, which they won't tolerate. They ran with their 501(C)(4) before they a super PAC. They were running educational advocacy ads against me saying that I'm bad on Israel. They didn't say, Don't vote for him. They just said, He's a bad guy. I said, All right, well, you're not welcome in my office anymore. Because for years, I invited them into my office. Let's talk this through. Let me explain to you. I'm a libertarian-liening Republican. I don't vote for foreign aid for anybody. So don't be offended when I don't vote for your foreign aid. I don't vote for wars anywhere. So Don't be offended if I tell you that. I'm for free speech, even if it's abhorrent. We used to talk, but now they're banned from my office. The situation went from bad to worse. This election cycle, they spent $400,000 against me, $90,000 last fall running TV ads in my district and Facebook ads and whatnot, trying to equate me with the squad. Then this, most recently, in fact, as I'm speaking to you today, even though my election is over, they're still running hundreds of thousands of negative ads.

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. But that's okay. You're a libertarian-oriented Republican from Northern Kentucky. You're probably not going to single-handedly determine our foreign policy. I think you should, but you don't. Thank you. And you're not going to. Why do they care? Why not just let Thomas Massey be Thomas What's the massy in Northern Kentucky? Why the need to crush you?

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 Escalade with Pearl white paint. Here's the rims we want. Mike Johnson puts that bill on the floor. It passes with a unanimous vote, except for one guy votes no. I think they feel like it's a scratch on their car. They wanted a brand new car, and it got scratched by this guy named Massey. They were going to drive it over to the Senate and ask for unanimous consent. But now the senators just say, Wait, this wasn't unanimous in the House. Why should we do it unanimously in the Senate? It starts raising questions, and I think that's why they get mad.

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.

There's no need to do that. I'm not anti-Semitic. I don't have an anti-Semitic hair in my head. I don't like APAC anymore. I used to be neutral toward APAC, but I have no antagonistic feelings toward Jewish people. I am the last thing. I think I'm probably the least xenophobic person in Congress. I mean, these are the guys that my colleagues want to sanction everybody, declare them terrorist states, come up with these strongly worded resolutions. I don't vote for any of that crap. Unless somebody does harm to me, I'm not going to call them anything. I get called names just for staying out of all of this political posture.

That's disgusting, though, isn't it? I guess that comes character. They can disagree with your views, but to call you the worst thing you can be in America, that's disgusting.

I have a thick skin. Yeah, apparently. 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 APAC running hundreds of thousands of ads. It's not working against me. I think it's short-sided on their 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. 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 almost two dozen Republicans who said, Wait, hold on there.

Can I ask a question, though? Just a fundamental question. The Biden administration has put a bunch of people in jail for violating something called Fara, the foreign agent registration Act, 1936-ish. It's been on the books for 90 years. It's never been enforced, ever, until recently, until really the Trump era and Biden era. But the law requires people who lobby on behalf of foreign governments to register. It was that simple. This is the largest lobby, the most effective lobby in the United States on behalf of a foreign government. Are they registered with Fara?

They are not, but they should be.

Well, how can that be? How can they put Paul Manifert in jail, which they did, on a Fara violation, and a bunch of other people in jail on Fara 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.

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

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. The members of APAC are Americans, and they have the right to free speech.

Paul Manifort is an American.

Right. There's the good rebuttal. As far as applies not to foreigners, to foreign agents of foreign principles, agents of foreign principles.

It's Americans lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. Correct.

Apac is exactly what Fara is meant for. Now, they would say, and we have the First Amendment, right. Okay, well, I agree with you there, but we also have protection laws and to its disclosure. Fara doesn't say you can't say Thomas Massey's an ignorant hillbilly. You're allowed to say that if you want to, but we just want to check where your money is coming from. Tell us where it's coming from, what you're spending it on, and if you are lobbying on behalf of a foreign country. Now, to your point, they should be registered with FARA. This is what FARA is, is where there's a gray area, where it's American representing a foreign country. Let's look and see if you're getting any money from that foreign country. Are you a dual citizen with that foreign country? Are you being directed by, for instance, Netanyahu speaking to your group, advising you on your next move? Are you getting money from the military-industrial complex? Because to understand APAC, I think it's easiest to model them as a military-industrial lobby. Their biggest thing is they want more military equipment from the United States going to Israel. In fact, when they used to be allowed in my office, the argument they would make is, Oh, we're just stimulating the US military-industrial complex because every single penny of the 3.8 billion that they nominally get, now they're getting way more than that, but that Israel nominally gets goes to US military contractors.

Now, that didn't make me warm and fuzzy, but that is their argument. If you notice what they advocate for, I think sometimes they advocate for things that even Israelis wouldn't advocate for. I believe that. They would, I think, be okay with a war with Iran, like an all-out apocalyptic war with Iran, whereas there are people in Israel say, Whoa, hold on a second. We'd rather not have a war with Iran. But APAC does things that lead us in that direction. They're like what the NRA is to gun owners, APAC is to Israel, or what the Farm Bureau is to farmers, APAC is to Israel.

In other words- Represents a faction.

Right. They represent a faction, but usually a corporate faction. 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 picking on some other right-wing groups For sure.

And by the way, I think there are probably a lot of things that APAC is for that I'm for, and Farm Bureau, NRA, same thing. It's 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?

I have 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. I have Republicans who come to me and say, That's wrong what APAC is doing to you. Let me talk to my APAC person. By the way, everybody but me has an APAC person.

What does that mean, an APAC person?

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

Every member has something like this?

I don't know how it works on the Democrat side, but that's how it works on the Republican side. When they come to DC, you go have lunch with them, and they've got your cell number, and you have conversations with them. I've had- That's absolutely crazy. I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my APAC person. It's literally what we call them my APAC guy. I'll talk to my APAC guy and see if I can get them to dial those ads back.

Why have I never heard this before?

It doesn't benefit 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 congressmen for people to know that, so they're not going to tell you that.

Have you seen any other country do anything like this? No. 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 have a Britain guy. They don't have an Australian guy. They don't have a Germany dude. It's the only country that does this, that has somebody that Uniformly, I guarantee there's some spreadsheet at APAC where the APAC dude who's matched up with the congressman is there, and then all the congressmen's votes on the issue. Oh, has the congressman been to Israel? They pay for trips for congressmen and their spouses to go to Israel. I'm not the only Republican who hasn't taken the APAC trip to Israel, but I'm probably one of a dozen that hasn't taken that trip, and the other ones just haven't got around to it.

What's the trip like? Do you know?

It's, I think, vacationy. You go see the wall, you go see 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's got to have a big effect.

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

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

Are you sure it wasn't an APAC trip?

I paid for I'm not doing it myself. No, it's just funny. I am a legit lover of Israel, of the place Israel. I like the people, and I love the food, and the whole thing is so great.

But that's distinct from the government of Israel, which is just a foreign government. My sense is the people are very entrepreneurial. Yeah, totally. That they're publicly minded, they care about their country, that they're generally good people, right?

That's certainly been my experience in trips there For sure. It's great. 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.

Now, again, they'll say these are American citizens who are coordinating all.

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

Not in a quiet way. They'll put out statements. Russia, obviously, has Russia Today, RT.

Yeah, I think it's been banned.

I like, Kentucky Fried Chicken, of which I'm a big fan being from Kentucky, right? They realized that fried became 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. Russia Today changed their name to RT, so you don't have to say Russia. But there's a strong analogy there. But there are efforts. You'd be a fool to think that they're not trying to influence things here, just like we are there. We have, what is it, Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. We spend a billion dollars, well over a billion dollars on the foreign propaganda that's out in the open that we know about. There are foreigners spending money on propaganda over here as well. I don't want to say they're not involved, but people don't say, Oh, I need to go talk to my Russia guy.

But you've never 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. In my life.

What about China?

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

Yeah, but that's not in public. How do you think... It's just interesting because you're clearly not a bigot. I think it's very obvious. They've called you one, and they've spent millions of dollars against you over the years, and it has had no effect. You get reelected in the primary in the '70s. Why are they still spending against you in your state, statewide? Can you just continue to serve in Congress while disobeying?

Well, they say that they don't want me to run statewide. They're worried that I'll run for McDonald's seat, and so they're trying to send me a message. That's what they would tell you.

But why- I don't know what the message is. It's a little presumptuous to decide to get to B.

I've never said that I'm running for the Senate, right? 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 them. They're running the ads in all six Congressional districts just in case.

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

He's a shrewd guy. He's quick. Let me give you an example of how quick he is. We had a congressman, Jamie Comer, who's now Chair of the Oversight Committee. He got elected in a special election, which means you come in in the middle of the term, and you have to boot up with no staff. It's It was disorienting. So Mitch McDonald had an event for Jamie Comer on his first day in Congress. It was in a townhouse with 200 lobbyists. By the way, I'm never going to get invited to one of these now that I tell you the story. So Jamie's there and McDonald goes, I believe Jamie took his first vote tonight.

That is such a perfect invitation.

I wasn't supposed to speak, but I interrupted Senator McDonald, who was at the time the Majority Leader. I said, Yes, Senator McDonald, he did take his first vote, and I know he has no staff. I advised Jamie, When you walk into the chamber, look at how I vote, and then vote the other way, and you'll be just fine. 200 lobbyists thought it was a pretty good joke, and they were laughing. As the laughter died down, McDonald goes, Well, Thomas, I'm glad you and I are giving Jamie the same advice. Then It was a place just the walls almost-No, he's good. He's good that way. It was so funny. But I think it's time for new leadership in the Senate. I mean, he's obviously... It's way past time. This is just a fact. I'll say it. I'll get in trouble for saying it. I'm in races in Kentucky, so we poll things. We poll Trump's popularity, we poll the Senator's popularity. In case they get involved in your race, Senator McDonald's favorabilities are lower among Republican primary voters than our Democrat governor's favorabilities.

Seriously? Yes. Lower than Governor Bushier. Yeah.

Bushier is around 40% among Republican primary voters, and McDonald's around 30%.

Well deserved. I'm glad to hear that because I like Kentucky, and I think its 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?

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. Smart. Let Rand Paul and Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz, and JD Vance, Rick Scott, let those guys figure out the Senate, because I haven't been able to fix the House, so I'm damn sure not going to be able to fix Senate.

But it's just interesting. Okay, taking McDonald out of it 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. There's, of course, the question, as you noted, of donations from Waukid, et cetera, the military-industrial complex. But it almost seems messianic to me. It seems heartfelt to me. It seems sincere that they think that this is all that matters, winning this war against Russia. Do you have any sense of why they feel that way?

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

Almost like it's a religious calling or something. 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 We just spend money and we're grinding up Russia's capacity to wage war, particularly lots of Russians are dying. We're told that's a good thing. 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 to the tune of 300,000 casualties, they say, is just such a great thing that we need to keep this thing going. My My answer to that is, why don't you tell us the Ukrainian casualties? I have been in classified settings with CIA, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, not their assistance, but those people in the room, and they're bragging about how many Russians have died and been injured. I asked them how many Ukrainians have died and been injured. They claimed they didn't know. I mean, that's just a flat-out lie. They said they would get back to me, and they've never gotten back to me. Not only are Americans being fed propaganda about this war, Congress is being fed propaganda by our State Department and our Secretary of Defense and our intelligence agencies.

You can just ask a few questions in these classified hearings. If nothing else, my colleagues should be convicted of a lack of curiosity. They sit there and they believe everything they're told because these are supposed to be the authorities and they know things we don't. But you can expose them with two or three questions like, How many Ukrainians have died? And they refuse to answer that question.

I've asked that very same question to Mike Johnson, actually, directly. But I've also asked him and a number of committee chairman, just in personal conversations, do you believe your intel briefings? Because only a child would believe an intel briefing. Take it at face value. There may be truth in there. It may be largely true. But you're being spun. You're being manipulated. If you don't know that, then you're a moron. But they seem to believe them.

Because they have no other reference. 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 do feel naked if I'm not wearing this. I've been wearing it for a year every day of my life. But they strip you of every outside reference. Now, your staff is not allowed in that meeting either. Remember, congressmen, our primary roles are raising money, being friendly to constituents, putting on a good face, campaigning. Then once a day or Maybe twice a day, we roll in there and press the vote buttons based on what staff advises you. Well, when you go into a skiff, you don't have your smartphone, so you're not very smart. They start using acronyms that you don't remember what the acronym stands for. You can't just like, Okay, what What's the IDGF-BZ? I don't know, man. I must be stupid. But if you were in a regular setting, you just pull your phone out and like, Oh, okay, that's what that is. I know what that is. Then you also can't ask your staff a question while When you're in that setting, we have legislative staffers who handle certain specific areas. You can't bring them in. Then when you go back to the office, you can't tell them what you heard.

It's really quite an experience. It's a deprivation experience of any outside reference.

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

Yes. 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 Twitter level, and there's New York Times level. The New York Times level is the highest level of classification. You're getting to the good stuff when they're telling you what's in the New York Times that week.

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. You're like, Whoa, I didn't know that. Nothing like what's Area 51. But occasionally, you're just like, What do people think is it, Area 51, by the way? I don't know. I'm not- You guys passed this law, the UAP Disclosure Act of 2023, and then they never disclosed anything.

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. You can't keep this stuff secret from us. You're not allowed to do that.

But see, I have this in hearings all the time. I'll ask the ATF director, This happened just last week. Dettelbach, or I'll ask Merrick Garland something, or Christopher Ray. I've asked all them this, and they give you the same answer. It's long-standing DOJ policy not to comment on ongoing investigations. You know what? That's fine to tell a reporter, but you can't tell the branch of government that created you that, that funded you. You can't tell them that. That's That's why the omnibus was so disappointing to me, is the only way these three-letter agencies are going to come to heal is if we cut their funding in some specific area. I've joked we could just withhold one toner cartridge for one printer at the FBI They would come over with a whole binder full of information. But we can't even bring ourselves to deprive them of a toner cartridge. We put $200 million for a new FBI building in the omnibus bill. To their credit, Jim Jordan Jamie Comer didn't vote for that. They're chairman of committees, but they are completely frustrated with the fact that the FBI just thumbs their nose at.

Is that the speaker who allowed that to happen?

Oh, he absolutely allowed it to happen.

To what extent are members of Congress, Committee, Chairman, leadership, controlled by blackmail?

I really don't think there's much blackmail. If there is, I'm not aware of it. I have people come up to me. I travel around the country, to Texas and other states, and speak to groups, food freedom groups, First Amendment, Second Amendment groups. They come to me and they say, Why did my congressman sell out? I'll tell you, Bob was such a great guy. I campaign for him. I made phone calls. I put up signs. Then we sent Bob to Congress, and he votes the wrong way every time. Why is it? Do they have his kids in a basement somewhere? Does he have kiddie porn on him? What is it? Why did Bob go bad? I have to look him in the eye and say, Bob just wanted to be liked. There is a gene inside of congressmen. I think If you look for a common denominator, they like people and they want to be liked for the most part, and they're likable. If they're not likable, it's hard to get elected. Okay, so this self-select for likable people, but likable people want to be liked, and they're not surrounded by their wives and children who usually give them plenty of like.

When they're in DC, it's like, Who am I going to go to dinner with tonight? Well, I want to eat food with somebody that likes me. If you're not going to eat alone and you have to be liked, and you generally have to be liked to get elected to Congress, you better be liked. It's almost like kindergarten when somebody says, I won't be your friend anymore if you don't Give me your lunch. Congressmen fall for that. They're in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and they fall for that.

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 APAC hates you. They just want you to obey, but it doesn't seem personal. You don't seem to be a personal war with anybody. That's my take on it.

I have a mutation.

So you like people, okay? Obviously, you're not some weird autist who doesn't care about other 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 at the same time. What is that?

It's a mutation. That chromosome, the liking people and likability, the 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 liked gene. I don't know what happened. I can go on the Cares Act, okay? This was under President Trump, the 11th day to slow the spread of 15. They said, We're going to pass a $2.2 trillion package, and you all just stay home. It's dangerous. We'll just do it by unanimous consent. It was 11:00 PM, I'm sitting in my living room, and they send us this message, and I'm like, WTF? This is twice the size of the omnibus bill. This is going to cause massive inflation. The policies in it are going to cause shortages. If we don't show up to vote, we're sending a message to all 50 states that you don't have to show up to vote in this election. I was like, I got in my car and I drove eight hours. I slept one hour in a rest stop because I knew I had to be there by 9:00 AM. This was March 27th, 2020. Actually, the 25th is the day I got to Congress to stop it.

I got there and I said, It's not going by unanimous consent. I was literally sleeping in my wife's SUV, eating those peanut butter filled pretzels. I had a big jug of those. Those are good. Yeah. For my three days of nourishment, I'm sitting in an SUV eating that big tub of pretzels with peanut butter in the middle, just waiting for them to try to call it in session and sneak this bill past. They're like, Shit, Massey's going to do it. They loaded up congressmen. The airports were shut down for the most part. There were some planes coming from California. They only had two passengers, and they were both congressmen. They roll them all back to Congress. It takes them two days to assemble a quorum. Because they went to the parliamentarian, and they're like, Is there any way around this? And he's like, No, Massey's right. The Constitution requires a quorum. He didn't call me an asshole. But if one asshole just shows up, objects, and says, There's no quorum here. They brought every back. I go to the floor. Actually got a... Everybody was hating me. I mean, everybody. You know what it's like to be in a room of 430 four people, and they're all staring at you.

I had maybe 10 friends who were looking at me like, That guy is dead. We've never seen Harry Carey like this. They were worried for me, but the rest of them hated me. They would come up to me and say, I live with my mother, and when I go back home, you're going to cause me to take COVID to her, and she's going to die, and I'm blaming you for this. I said, Wait. You said that to your face? Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, It wasn't just one. It was like, when he was done, there was a line of people. I just stood there and they're all coming to hate on me. 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? Does he live with his mother, too? What about the trucker who's out there driving and interacting with people in order to get the goods to where you need to be? What about the nurse who's going to work every single day taking care of people? Is she going to kill her parents? Why Why are you special? They carved a hole in the side of a mountain in West Virginia for us in the case of emergency.

Yes. Well, the sad but realistic thing is now they don't have a place for us. We're so useless. It's like, Well, here's where we were going to keep them if shit hit the fan. But now we've realized they're useless. We can declare war without them in the event of a nuclear strike. They're just a rounding error. In the three branches, we can operate with Yes, I've noticed. Anyways, these are the people who are supposed to respond in an emergency, and they all wanted to stay home. They all hated me for recognize our constitutional duty. 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? They're like, Oh, no. Not me. I sat there. Finally, they yielded time for debate. I go off the floor and called the White House switchboard back. I didn't have his number. I was just like, If you want to tour the White House, you call the number I called, right?

The intern is like, Oh, is this Congressmancy? I'm putting you through to Trump right now. He comes on and goes, I'm coming at you like you've never seen. Never in your life before. Have you seen the way in which I will come at you? I more popular than you in Kentucky, and you know it. I'm backing your primary opponent, and you got to lose. I'm like, Oh, crap. I probably will lose. I mean, he had 95% popularity among my Republican electorate who I had to face in about eight weeks in my primary. I had a well-funded opponent, and here now, Trump was mad at me. He screamed at me for two or three minutes. I kept trying to talk, and he just screamed louder. Then he repeated it all. He goes, No, this is the second time you've done something like this. They took me out of it before, but not this time. Then, You're going to lose. He hangs up. The thing is, he thought it was the second time. I'd done that eight times since he was President. He just started realizing it's the same guy. The time before that was on war with Iran.

The Democrats were in the majority, and he had just vaporized Solomoni, and we were worried that he would attack mainland Iran without a vote of Congress. So the Democrats, actually insincerely, there aren't too many anti-war Democrats left. 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 and some of the other things that I was the turd in the punch bowl on.

Did it change your views at all?

No. The President tweeted that I was a third-rate grandstander. 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. One of the congress was like, You better look at your phone, Massey. Look at your Twitter. I turned it on. He's tweeting hard and heavy against me. He said, I should be thrown out of the party. Then the best one is, I'm chairman of the Second Amendment Cau. His third tweet was, He's terrible on guns. I was like, What? Where did that come from? Have you seen my Christmas card picture?

What's your Christmas card picture?

Well, it's a little infamous.

No, I've actually seen it, but I chose for the benefit of those who have not.

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 neat if we just change these all out for machine guns? And took a picture. That was supposed to stay on my phone for eternity. But I had a couple of medical margaritas one night. I don't do medical marijuana, but I had a few medical margaritas, and I looked at that picture and I thought, Well, that's a pretty good picture. It'd be ashamed if nobody ever saw it, and I tweeted it. No. I caught all kinds of hate for that. It's a That'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 gosh.

Are you an Episcopalian?

I'm a Methodist.

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

Anyways, the press asked me as I'm... We're talking about the need to be liked, Jean. 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. I walked out of that chamber. Everybody's hate me in the chamber. Nancy Pelosi called me a dangerous nuisance. Cnn called me the most hated person in DC. John Kerry called me an asshole or something. President Trump called me a third-rate grandstander. This is all in the course of a few minutes. I walk out of the chamber of the house, and the reporters sworn me like they do. I'm just trying to run back to the SUV with the pretzels with peanut butter in them and get out of there. The press said, What do you have to say for yourself? Your own president just called you a third-rate grandstander. I paused for a second and I said, I was offended. I'm at least second-rate.

What happened to your relationship with Trump?

I think he respects people that stand up.

Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

Even if he disagrees with you. Yes, that's correct. Two years later, he did endorse me. No way. Yeah.

Do you get along with him okay now? Yeah.

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. He and I fought over who was going to introduce the bill to eliminate Congressional pensions. He won, and I co-sponsored it. Now I'm the sponsor now that he's a governor. But I knew he was a good person, and he thinks things through, and he was smart, so I endorsed him. But because I call it natural immunity, I have Trump antibodies at this point. They may wear off at some point. I don't know.

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. He'd probably do some polling and see who was winning.

Fair. Totally fair.

I wouldn't turn down an endorsement.

Yeah. It's Are you at war with anybody in the Congress?

No. I get along with everybody, and people try to use this against me. When APAC was running those ads that say, I always vote with AOC, and Rachida Taleb, and Ilhan Omar. I introduced an amendment and forced to vote on eliminating the kill switch in automobiles that's mandated in 2026.

Thank you.

Yeah. Well, I was losing Republicans on that. I lost 20 Republicans. I knew I They needed some- Just to be clear, for the people who don't know what you're talking about, in new vehicles, this has been the case for years, they can be turned off remotely by the authorities, which is 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 your driving. I'm like, How do you appeal this conviction at the roadside? Maybe you swerved to miss a deer and pulled over for an ambulance and you got your kids in the car and it stops.

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

Because, again, they know 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.

Biden has told us that drunk driving is not a big deal. It's not grounds for deporting you. Deportion. Yeah. Mothers Against Drunk Driving, as far as I know, has said nothing about this.

Who cares what they I know. 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. They say, You don't care about me if you vote for Massey's amendment. They make that personal phone call. That congressman doesn't have the fortitude or knowledge to say, Look, this technology can't work. I really care about your child. I think driving is a scourge, and I want to fix it, but this is a false promise, and it's only going to increase the price of automobiles and give the government more control. So I'm going to vote with Massey. They don't have the courage to say that. Long story short, I lost 20 Republicans. I needed some Democrats, so I went over to AOC, who I get along with just fine. Don't hate me for saying that.

I don't.

And I said, AOC, they're running ads right now that say you always vote, or that I always vote with you. Just once, could you vote with me? Could you vote for my kill switch Which amendment since they're running ads the other way? And she did. She voted to defund the automobile kill switch.

It was for her. She Ran. It's interesting. I mean, obviously, I don't like her, but I think she's talented. She is definitely talented. But she ran as radical as someone from the outside, which I'm, of course, very sympathetic to. But she doesn't seem to be actually be that person. For example, on the foreign aid stuff, how often does she vote with you?

Quite frequently, but I had a funny moment. You know this 15 or 16 votes we had on Israel in April? Yeah. Well, the squad and I, and I know this is going to be used in the next ad against me, this clip from Tucker. But I was the only no, sometimes. Sometimes most of the squad voted with me, but I noticed AOC wasn't always there with me. I went over to the squad on the Democrat side of the aisle. Do they literally sit together? They hang out together. It's really clickish. Even the Freedom Caucus sits together. The Texas Delegation sits together. There are different cliques. The appropriators sit together. It's the military guys, the intel guys sit together. Sometimes it's by state, sometimes it's by click. A lot of the Congressional Black Caucus sits together. I can't get the Second Amendment Caucus to sit together. That's what I call it. They're too independent-minded. Too independent. But so I go over to their- But this is just high school cafeteria. It's high school cafeteria. That's what it is. 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.

I went over to the squad a few weeks ago, and I said, I told AOC for the squad, I said, We're going to kick you out if you don't keep voting with us more consistently. 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, I call goldfish in the aquarium. You have to get 218 of them to pass a bill. It doesn't benefit me to hate on any of them. On some days, they may vote with me. Well, they're also people.

If you can help it, you shouldn't hate people, period.

We've You can form coalitions on the First Amendment, on the Fourth Amendment, on war, sometimes, 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. You can form coalitions. I try to do that when I can.

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

I don't know. We've lost a lot of them on privacy and free speech as well. I think with Russia, you asked this before, there's this element that I didn't answer. It's a proxy against Trump for them now. In their file folders in their brain, Trump and Russia are in the same file folder. Yes. Even though that's a false narrative that's been dispelled long ago, it's still in their same file folder. When they see Ukraine is fighting Russia, they use that as a proxy for their hate for Trump, and so they'll vote for that. They did. They waved. I don't know if you saw this. They were waving Ukrainian flags after Mike Johnson put their bill on the floor and every Democrat voted for it. This was premeditated. Somebody had to go buy 200 Ukrainian flags and hand them out. I filmed it, which you're not supposed to do, but you're also not supposed to wave flags of other countries on the floor of the House. I'm like, All right, I'm going to expose this. I filmed it and I put it on Twitter to show the humiliation that Mike Johnson brought upon us by bringing the Democrat bill to the floor without any...

It was leveraged, too. Even if you're a Republican and you're okay with sending money to Ukraine. That's a leverage point. Do something for our country and require that as a condition of doing whatever that is. But he gave up all the leverage. I put that video on Twitter. Three days later, the Sergeant of Arms tracks down one of my staffers in Kentucky because we're no longer in session, and says he needs to delete that video from Twitter, or we're going to take a fine out of his salary, out of his Congressional salary. So my staff, he knew what I was going to do. He told me what they had just said. I said, All right, I'm retweeting it. Did you? Oh, yeah. And it got like 8 million views. It went from 4 million to 8 million. And then sometimes you just got to double down, and the speaker had to announce on Twitter that I wouldn't be fined for that.

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.

They were taking selfies of them with their foreign flags, too. 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. It was a humiliation of our country. I mean, It's one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and they got everything they wanted for them. The Democrats are waving the flag, the Ukrainian flag, even though they're in the majority, and we just have to sit there and take that. It was horrible.

Do you think any... I mean, the leader of Ukraine is not elected anymore. His term has ended. He's not having a new election. He's the unelected maximum power. In some places, we call that a dictator. And yet they're still hitting us with a democracy, pro-democracy talking points. Do you think... I mean, have they thought this through at all? Are they just lying? Like, what is that?

They're lying. I mean, they know it. The good news is some Republicans are waking up to it. Remember, when we started voting on these Ukraine resolutions, even as soon as the war started, I was the only no. There was this open-ended promise in a non-binding resolution that said, Give them whatever they need. There were only two other Republicans that joined me on this. But now we've got a majority of Republicans in Congress who are saying, Wait, they aren't using this money like we thought they were, and We're giving them money to fund pensions of retired politicians in Ukraine who were most certainly corrupt, and we're paying their pensions with this money.

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

Yeah, it's that simple. That's one of the reasons we went through with the motion to vacate. Paul Gossard 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 was doing all the things people were afraid McCarthy might do. They pre-convicted McCarthy for things they thought he would do. Here, Mike Johnson came and did all these things. He put an omnibus on the floor. He passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reupped that without warrants. Built the FBI a new building, and gave Ukraine all this money. What Marjorie and I and Paul decided, ultimately, is we needed to expose the Uniparty. Never before have you had Democrats vote for a Republican speaker, and that's why we forced to question. Nancy Pelosi voted for him. Hakeem Jeffrey went on national TV and said, Why would we want to get rid of him? He's given us everything we want. The Uniparty has never been so exposed as it was when we called that motion to vacate. I know some people got mad at us, said we shouldn't have done it, but it's a long game, which we certainly hope that he doesn't become speaker next January.

Hopefully, people have seen with Nancy Pelosi rushing to Speaker Johnson's aid that he's not the speaker you want when Trump wins the White House and we keep the majority.

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. While we were still in the majority, Paul Ryan sent a dozen CRs or omnibus bills to President Trump's desk that didn't have any money for a wall in it. He had no intention of ever funding a wall. Paul Ryan did. I think Mike Johnson is going to be similarly the same way. Basically working for the deep state at this point in the Uniparty.

How did that happen? Do you have any idea?

The Paul Ryan bit or- Paul Ryan is a- Change.

Is a sinister person, I happen to know, but also not Just not a genius and an ideologue at the same time, which is a bad combination. Dumb ideologues are the scariest. But Mike Johnson seemed like a moderately conservative, sincere, decent guy. Maybe he would maybe You sit your kids and do an okay job. I'm like, Paul Ryan. Then he immediately just becomes a tool of CIA and Jake Sullivan and the Biden administration. How did that happen so fast?

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. He's had some 180-degrees turns on some things, for instance, whether you need a warrant to spy on Americans using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 702 program. Well, he used to be on Judiciary Committee with me and Jim Jordan, trying to reform that, trying to get the warrant.

So he understood what it was.

He knew completely what we were talking about. He's an attorney, too, right? And he knows the Constitution. He knows this is required, but He claims he spent time in a skiff and he learned things. Skiff, that's a secure compartmentalized information facility or something. It's where we go. We have to leave our phones locked up, no staff in there. He claims he spent time in skiff and learned things that changed his mind. Here's the problem, Tucker. I was in the skipf with him. We had DNI, not just the current DNI, but the former DNI, John Radcliffe, Trump's DNI. We had CIA, we had FBI, we even had a FISA judge in there, and we spent three and a half hours. It was a four-hour meeting, and after three and a half hours, it was basically a PSYOP, where they were just trying to beat you down and do the things. I was like, This is ridiculous. They didn't give us one example of any time ever since FISA was created, that getting a warrant would have kept them from solving or preventing an act of terrorism. They gave hypotheticals, but they had no specific-I think FISA has been in place since 1978, since the '70s.

Almost 50 years, and they couldn't give you one example?

Not one example. Now, they also expanded it after 9/11 to do the program to go against civilians, to spy on civilians. 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. Conyers was the chairman and Sensenbrenner was the ranking member. What Mike Johnson said this year was, Well, even though the Judiciary Committee created this and is responsible for overseeing it, I'm going to let the Intel Committee bring the bill to the floor without warrants in it. It wasn't even their jurisdiction. They have jurisdiction over FISA as long as it's for the CIA, but not for the FBI. That was frustrating. It's shocking.

It's shocking.

It is shocking. He said- End of Civil Liberties level stuff.

Yes. But it's not like he learned He didn't send new information to Skiff because you were there. No, he did not.

I was there.

That's a lie.

That's the problem, right? The fact that I was there.

Telling people on your show that I was there for three and a half hours.

Go ask Mike Johnson. He'll say, Yeah, he was there three and a half hours.

What is the truth? What do you think changed?

I think he's a lost ball in tall weeds. I 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 prepared him for this. He took the job with a very small staff. He didn't have people to put in all positions on the field, and he had to accept a lot of suggestions in areas he didn't know a whole lot about, although he gets no pass on FISA. He gets no pass on Ukraine because, as you pointed out, he does, as you pointed out. He doesn't even know how many casualties have been incurred on the Ukrainian side. He's the second person in line for President after Kamala Harris. This is scary to me. He's basically getting moved around.

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

I got to go back to work with it next week.

Nothing in your life prepared you for this. Just for those who don't know, you went to MIT, your high school girlfriend, joined you at MIT, you married her while she was still there. 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 went for Congress. That's not the background.

Well, so nothing in the political arena. But in my private life, I raised $32 million of venture capital, and I swam with the sharks. 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 shitcan that guy you hired as president, we'll double our investment. I'm like, No, he's my partner. He helped me get to this point. I'm not going to abandon him. Good for you. I had experiences in life that... Then also just put my hands in the dirt on my farm.

Tell me about that. Tell us about how you live and where you live, because I think it's one of the most unusual things about you.

I grew up as a hillbilly in Eastern Kentucky. What county? Lewes County. Louis County.

How many people in your town?

Thirteen thousand people, 13,000 cattle. It's a huge landmass. It's a great county. It's one of the 21 counties that I represent. It's actually the poorest county per capita income that I represent, but it's the one I grew up in. It's very unlikely that the congressman for the district would come from the poorest county. I grew up as a little nerd. I love taking stuff apart because I was bored. There were no malls. You You couldn't ride your bicycle to any store. If you did, you didn't have any money. I had to find things to do at home. I took apart things, built things, entered science fairs, built robots, made it to the international science fair. It's a little hillbilly. Won an award from NASA there at the age 15. I won the high school-level awards. Got into MIT, never visited the campus, didn't really have the money to go visit it, but I read about it. There was no Internet. It seemed like a good place. I got there. I'd lived in a town of 1900 people all my life. I was there for six hours in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I crossed Massachusetts Avenue. They had a crosswalk and a stoplight.

I'd never really seen two of those things together. I'd seen crosswalks and stoplights. I walked through the crosswalk and a car honked, that short little Boston. I thought, Oh, my gosh. I've been here six hours and already run into somebody from Kentucky. I turned around and waved at the car as big as I could.

Was it people from Kentucky?

I don't think so. I think they had one finger up, waved back. People were like, That's not a true story. I said, Not only is it true, it took me a month to quit waving at cars to beat. It was just 18 years of conditioning.

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. Then you'd throw your hand up and wave, and they roll down the window. Oh, that's Bob. If you didn't wave, you were pariah. You were probably an ax murderer who was in our town, right? Or you were just an a-hole. I didn't want to be either, so I waved at that car in Massachusetts and kept waving for about a But anyways, long story short, as you said, I invented a virtual reality device that lets you touch three-dimensional objects, started a company, raised venture capital, did that for 10 years, moved to the live, free, or die state.New Hampshire.New Hampshire. My company was in Massachusetts. I couldn't move the center of gravity too far out of Cambridge. I got it up to 128 on Woburn, and then I commuted 40 miles every day. I could live in a state that let you have machine guns and old cars and cool stuff. Redneck sports. The best. The best sports.

Why did you move back to Kentucky?

After 10 years of doing it, we had three kids, and we wanted to raise them like we were raised in Kentucky. We wanted to be near their grandparents. Both my parents were still alive, both my wife's parents were still alive. You learn so much from your grandparents because your parents are really busy just trying to earn a living or whatever. If you're lucky enough to have a relationship with your grandparents, that's where I think the generational stuff carries on. Yes. I had a great relationship with my grandparents, so we wanted our kids to live in that environment. We came back, we bought the farm that my wife grew up on. We built a house off the grid. It runs on a wrecked Model S Tesla battery. It's been running continuously for six and a half years. You built the house?

Who built the house?

I did. We had an ice storm and a lot of trees fell down.

How big is the property?

It's 1,500 acres.

And it's wooded?

It's almost all woods. And it's too steep. I don't want you to think this is valuable Iowa- No, I know the part of the state you're in. Pack your lunch if you're on the ridge and you fall off the ridge because you're going to be hungry by the time you get to the bottom. You're going to be grabbing tree roots and stuff to keep from sliding. But it grows trees, and some of it is flat in the bottom.

But this is not plantation land.

No, these are haulers.

Yeah.

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. There was no scale at which slavery made sense. You basically, in your hauler, you only had enough land that your family, if you had enough kids, could farm.

Yes.

That's the way people grew up. By the way, it's libertarian. I'll do my thing in my hauler. You your thing in your hauler. That's right. If you need some help, let me know. I'll come over and help you.

Southwest Virginia is like this. West Virginia is like this. Yeah.

Because the topography. Right. It's the reason West Virginia was a Republican and seceded from Virginia. By the way, half my family is from West Virginia and half my family is from Kentucky. My maman, who's 97 right now, is still alive. Her grandfather was a Union soldier. Amazing. Isn't that crazy?

From West Virginia?

From West Virginia, yeah. She still lives in West Virginia. But we're not that far away from the Civil War.

No, 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 in the newspaper in Arkansas. The guy shared a desk with, Bob Salee from Texarkana, Arkansas. He said, I knew Confederate veterans. That'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 that was, she's a Republican. She's been a Republican, my She's been married since the Civil War. Nobody marries into our family. If you're a Democrat, you got to go see Mammal, and she'll either approve or disapprove. She had pretty good luck at sniffing out the Democrats. The Liberals? Yeah, the Liberals.

You had an ice storm. There was an ice storm on your property. How does that figure into your house?

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 wood?

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

So hardwood?

Hardwood, yes. Then we wanted it to be self-sustaining.

How did she know how to timber frame?

I found a I got a class on eBay for $500 in Tennessee, and I bought it now. I drove to Tennessee and took a one-week class. We built a little shed/caven, and I called my wife from a pay phone and I said, I want to do this. Instead Instead of going to get a job, we had just left our company after 10 years of working there, and we'd moved back to Kentucky. 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.

You built your house full-time, as a job, every day?

This is what our kids saw, too. The flooring for our kitchen came out of the creek. We call it a crick.

What do you mean the flooring came out of the creek?

There are rocks in the creek that are flat that they look like the stuff you buy at Lowe's that's fake. I'm like, Oh, this is what they modeled the fake stuff after. It's free. Let's just go pick it up. Now, we're paying ourselves about $3 an hour compared to if we had just gone to one of the box stores and bought it in terms of harvesting it. But our kids, I think, in addition to being with their grandparents, learned a big a lesson that, wow, mom and dad are growing our food. They are collecting the materials for the house here from the environment that you don't have to rely. Neighbors are good, though. We actually sent them to public school, and we let them ride the bus. It was only three miles away, but we figured the bus ride was important, too, because when you get to school, they separate you. But you've got, it can be, 15 terrifying minutes on the bus where you interact with everybody, right? I remember my son, he was 10 years old. He had traded some Yu-Gi-Oh cards on the bus for this awesome, the best Yu-Gi-Oh card ever, and he He showed it to us.

It was a little plastic thing. We're like, Well, did you want to take it out of plastic? No, he told me to leave it in here. We take it out, and it was a fake. He was so mad. But it turns out his dad had sold me a leaky bulldozer and said there was no leaks in it.

It ran in the family.

It ran in the family. The same kid who stiffed my son had stiffed me on this dozer.

But you learn these.

These are life lessons, right? They didn't lead a sheltered life. We grew up They grew up there.

What % 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 the dovetails.

It was a lot of work. Personally?

Yes.

How did you... Cutting a mortise and tendon, cutting a dovetail joint, these are, having done it, very difficult. How did you learn to do that?

I kept telling myself, Look, farmers without calculators pulled this off 200 years ago. Surely if I've got a computer and some electricity, I should be able to do this as well. It's just dent of will.

But she'd been like a-Electrical engineer.Electrical engineer, software programmer, but not a perpetrator.

Nothing that scale, yeah. The only thing I had built before that was a tree house, right? Even that didn't get finished.

But some of that stuff is very complex, actually complex. Timber framing, some Some of the joints are difficult to cut, and the design itself is complicated.

Yeah, you have to plan it all ahead. You don't hold the timber up there like you would a two by four. We need to saw two more. It's not balloon framing.

No, totally right.

Or, Oh, that 45 needs to be a 42-degree angle. Let's saw off a little bit more. You can't do that while you're up in the middle of the air on scaffolding, trying to get two pieces to fit together. It's a fun math problem, so I enjoyed it. But is there something honest about it? Because all the fasteners are wooden, too. It's one medium that you learn. There's no bolts, nails. It's all pegs. Once you realize that-There are no metal fasteners in the frame? Correct. None. We had to nail the floor. I got it. And the walls on it. But the frame itself, no metal fast structure. And it's 46 feet tall.

It's 46 feet tall? Yes.

From the basement slab, which I timber frame the basement, too. I still don't even know how to stick frame. 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 stick frame.

It's stick frame. I was like, Well, let's build the basement timber frame, too, and the dormers. If you paid a company to build timber frames, they would stick frame the dormers.

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

I timber framed that. I'm just like, Let's just be pure the whole way. As an engineer, I thought, Well, I want to build a house with timbers. I like how timbers look. Me too. But we'll just bolt them together. We'll use iron brackets. That's the best way to do it. But in the course of this one-week class, I came to realize, wow, if you just let go and make everything out of wood, it solves problems that you would create when you start using metal fasteners. Wood shrinks. It takes six or eight years for a big timber to fully dry out. How do you deal with metal fasteners and shrinking wood? Well, the metal fasteners can rip out. But if you build your fasteners out of wood, it can all work.

It moves together.

If you go to Germany, there's homes that are four or 500 years old to show that it can work.

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

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 own property?

In in my front yard. It's now a pond. But there was an old logging road, and the erosion had exposed this layer of rock. I thought, Well, that layer of rock must go pretty far. I started digging using a backhoe. I started digging the dirt off of that layer of rock, and I'm like, Wow, there are lots of rocks here. I almost giggled out loud when I shoved on that layer of rock with my backhoe and all these rocks started rolling out in front of the blade, and they looked like you could buy at the store. Why would I go buy them? I can just shove three tons of them out of here in a few minutes. Then I had people coming and visiting. Obviously, We looked like a bunch of weirdos building this timber frame house up on the hill, and people would come up.

Where were you living at this point?

We lived in a mobile home. We just pulled in a mobile home. I told my wife we'd only live in it for six months. We ended up two in a 900-square-foot mobile home with four kids.

No way.

But 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. 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 timberframing or something. You can hear the kids at the dinner table saying, Where'd Daddy go? Where'd Daddy? Where's Daddy? Then they start trying to find Daddy. Anyways, it was a good comfy experience. Now we actually kept the mobile home and we lease it to deer hunters. Really? Yeah. It's a double wide. It's full of deer heads and bunk beds now. The hunters call it the Lodge, which we find confusing. My wife calls it the Double Lodge since it's a double wide.

Do you have a lot of deer on your land?

We have, yeah, trophy deer all What do you charge to rent it, just in case people are interested? We were booked up. You don't want any weird internet people on your land. We were booked up. Yes.

Call ahead. How long did it take you to finish this house?

It's not finished. I've been criticized. In the campaigns, people try to use this against me. Some guy goes, He doesn't even have doors on all these rooms. He's some weirdo. Great. Well, we haven't made that door yet, right?

You're making the doors?

We have made a few of them, yeah. We're breaking down now and buying a few doors now that the kids are gone.

That was like your kids... Wait, so what year did you start? How long has this process been?

We started in 2003. We're- 21 years? 21 years. We've been off the grid that long, too.

When you say off the grid, what do you mean?

We're not connected to any public utility. Not electricity, not water, not sewer, not phone. The house is totally disconnected from everything.

Did you build those systems yourself?

Yeah. A lot of it's off-the-shelf stuff, but some of it's improvised. Field expedient. Like the Tesla battery, the car battery that runs the house. You can't buy that out of a catalog. You go to a junkyard and say how much you want for that wrecked Model S, and I'm like, I'll sell you the battery for 15,000.

Why can't you just buy the battery separately?

Tesla wouldn't sell me a powerwall. I tried to buy one for years.

Why?

Because it has to be connected to the grid for some reason. Their business model involves that. So I was like, All right, well, I'll get a battery. How much different can it be from the batteries in their car? So I drove to Lake Lanier, Georgia, with a little landscaping trailer. The battery weighs, I think, 1,200 pounds. But here's the funny thing. It's considered hazardous material if you pull it on a trailer, But if it's in a car, it's just fine. I hurried up and got back to Kentucky with the trailer. I don't have a HAZMAT license.

It was a wrecked Tesla Model S, and you pulled the battery out of it. Yeah.

What did you do with it? I just assembled it. I paid $15,000 cash. But this is probably 15 or 20 years. Hopefully, it'll last. I brought it home, took it apart. Actually, I made a YouTube video of this. What's funny I had these big rubber gloves that a friend who had worked on power lines, they were leftovers and he gave to me. In the YouTube video, I try to make sure I'm using big rubber gloves and stuff, and I did this fast forward of the this assembly of the battery. I forgot my two little boys are in there helping me, and they don't have the gloves on. They haven't earned the right to have gloves. Don't put stuff on the internet. I have a Tesla Model S, one of the The very first ones made, and I've got Friends of Coal license plates on it. In Kentucky, you can get Friends of Coal. It's a totally black-Coal? C-o-a-l. C-o-a-l, yeah. Sorry. Because in Kentucky, if you plug into the grid, that's likely where your electricity is coming.

I I think, yeah.

I'm driving this thing back from DC. This was when gas was getting close to $5 a gallon. It was over $4 a gallon. I stopped in West Virginia to charge my Tesla at a supercharging station, just to troll people on the Internet. I made I'm going to get a picture of my friends of coal license plate. I said, I'm just charging up with coal here in West Virginia. Within 30 seconds, I knew I'd made a mistake because somebody had zoomed in on the picture and my tags were expired. They started tagging the Kentucky State Police, my local Sheriff, the DMV in Kentucky. No way. They were trying to get me in trouble. I'm like, There's no way to stop this now. They were relentless. But then somebody realized they had been expired for 18 months. Then I'd actually made it a year without paying taxes and was maybe likely to get out of a year of taxes.

Well, it's your win then. Yeah.

But in Kentucky, I think they make you go back and pay the old taxes. Anyways, what I learned there is, search everything in the picture before you put it on the end.

Well, yes. Others with zesty or personal lives than you have learned this the hard way.

Mine is not very zesty. No, it doesn't seem. You've got enough to do. Minor tax evasion issue for you here. You don't have time to be too weird.

You get the Tesla battery back to your off-grid house, and what do you have to do? Because it's not made for this. It's a car battery.

It's a car battery. It's made to run 400 volts. All of my existing system was made to run on 48 volts, but there were 16 modules, each nominally 25 volts. I realized if you put two of those in series, you could make 50 volts. I put eight sets of two in series. I put eight parallel a paralleled eight sets of two in series. So I got 50 volts at a lot more amperage than what the Tesla car would normally draw. It was capable of doing that.

How hard is that to do?

Well, it took a few days, but it's lasted for six and a half years. I wouldn't advise doing this at home.

Why?

Put it in an out building. I mean, if it catches on fire, it's probably like chernobyl, that mini-series. Don't look at the reactor. God cannot put out. He created lithium ion, but he can't put the fire out if it starts. I would not attach it to your house.

Mine is like-Is it attached to your house?

Kind of, yeah. It's like a basement room that's not under the house. I don't want to get into everything under my house right now. My wife says our house is my science project, and she's the mouse. She doesn't mind that, but I keep re arranging the maze on the weekends when I come back DC, and then she has to find the cheese while I'm in DC. But she's more like the astronaut, I think, in a rocket. I think that's exactly right. She's the only- It's the same trust level required. Correct, yes. She trusts me while I'm in DC, and I trust her to fly the house while she's in Kentucky.

She's also an MIT graduate, so I assume she understands some of the stuff? Oh, yeah.

Although she would like to have just one thing in the house where if something went wrong, she could call somebody, but she can't. She's got call me, and then I walk her through it. By the way, it's good marriage security. If we ever broke up, or let's say she put something in my coffee and I didn't wake up the next day, she'd have a hard time running the house.

You put the nodules, which is basically just separate batteries, right? Yeah.

Okay, within the- Within the big battery. Then I put a computer on it, a Raspberry Pi, and I made a little graphic screen. The Raspberry Pi, using an Arduino, talks to the Can bus, which is a proprietary Tesla communication system. I use the battery management system that's native to the Tesla battery modules. If there's a nerd listening to this, this makes complete sense. They'll be like, Oh, well, why wouldn't you do that? Everybody else is going to be like, He's just BSing.

Did you have to add new software to this to run it?

I had to write software from scratch.

Yeah.

But it's fun. This is what I do. Look, I've been in Congress for 12 years. My brain has atrophied to the size of a walnut, actually to a raisin. It expands to a walnut if I can go home and do these projects. Then I go back to DC and it's back down to the raisin.

I believe that. I don't understand how these projects work, but I know what brain atrophy looks like, and I know that Congress induces it.

It's not a worm. It just shrinks.

How does it work?

It works great. We can run the air conditioner. For the first 11 years, we had lead acid batteries, and they didn't work that great. You had to add water to them. Oh, for sure. They put off hydrogen gas, which is explosive. They put off a sulfide gas that can kill you. Lead acids are batteries are bad, and they're over 100 years old. But by the way, I love solar panels. Republicans are like, they look at me like, You have solar panels? You have an electric car? Are you sure you're one of us? I'm like, Well, The solar panels are rocks that make electricity. They are amazing things. They take sunlight and turn it into something we can all use. I tell Republicans, you can hate the subsidies, you can hate the bailouts, you can hate the mandates. I hate all of those things as well. But don't hate solar panels.

Don't hate the technology.

Because it's actually given me and can give other people a license to be independent from the power.

Let's get specific about it. You have This Tesla battery that allows you to do everything a normal house can do. You can run air conditioning, you've got a dishwasher, you got a washer dryer, I'm assuming all this.

Four deep freezers, refrigerator.

Four deep freezers?

Full of peaches, beef, and chickens.

Running continuously.

Continuously.

So your power draw is significant on all those appliances, obviously, and the battery handles it fine. How much propane or how much diesel or would I assume you have a generator to recharge?

Backup generator that runs occasionally in the winter. But I keep every time-So your solar panels recharge the battery?

Yeah.

For nine months out of the year, the backup generator doesn't run except for its test run every Friday.

Yeah, exactly.

When we bust out the machine guns, who's in the driveway? Okay, back down to level one. That's just the backup generator.

So your electricity is... I mean, as long as you know how to operate the system, which apparently only you do, but if you can do that, then you're just living a completely normal life with electricity. Correct. How do you heat your house?

In one of the greenest ways possible. I think the whole carbon thing is a scam. Of course it's a scam. But if you do care about carbon neutrality, I wish we had more carbon. We need more CO₂. Periods in Earth's history, we had more CO₂ and plant life was doing better. We've seen plant life, we've seen the coverage of green on the globe increase as CO₂ levels go up, crop production goes up as CO₂ levels go up. But if you did care about I am using wood on my farm, like just trees that fall down. I'm not even going out and cutting a living tree. There's enough trees falling down. Deadfall. Deadfall. That if I don't get to them, the termites do. That's right. They turn them into CO₂ and methane. But I can get to them and cut them up and bring them to my house and burn them in a wood-gasifying boiler, which is super efficient. By the way, once you start cutting wood for heat efficiency, if you figure out a boiler is twice as efficient, and you can cut half as much.

Because anyone who's made it this far in the interview is probably interested in wood gasification. Can you explain what that is? How is it different from a normal wood-fired boiler or a wood stove?

Yeah, on a normal wood stove, you put the wood in there. It can be green. You light it on fire, you get it going, and then you control the air that goes to it to keep it from getting too hot. A lot of smoke comes out, especially when it's idling, because it's an inefficient combustion process, and it's at a relatively low temperature under, let's say, 1,000 degrees. But in a wood gasifying boiler, you get the fire started, and it basically turns the wood into charcoal and drives the gasses out of it into a secondary chamber that It's ceramic because it's burning at over 1,500 degrees. So some of the stuff that would-How do you get wood to burn that hot? You deprive it of oxygen at first and get it hot, and then you drive all the gasses off and you put more oxygen in in that secondary chamber, and it looks like it's burning gas. It'll be a blue flame, and then it'll turn into a yellow flame. It starts out actually-This is just oak, maple beach.

This is just conventional firewood.

I burn near wood, nearest wood to the house. Near wood?

I don't remember that.

Near wood. Yeah, near wood.

You burn soft wood in it?

You can, but the BT... Again, if you're doing this yourself, care about efficiency. If you look at the old timers, they were the greenest people on the planet. They didn't waste a thing, and they figured out the most efficient way to do things because it was minutes out of their lives. You start figuring out how to be more efficient when you're trying to be self-sustaining. On my Twitter bio, I used to say, and it may still say this on there, Greenest member of Congress. That doesn't mean I just got there and I'm green. I never got any of the fact checkers to come after me on that. Nobody wants to fact check me because I probably am the greenest member of Congress. Who has self-sustaining food, self-sustaining without externalities, right? Self-sustaining power, self-sustaining water.

You heat with wood. How much wood do you burn, would you say, a season?

The size of this table, maybe four stacks of wood, the size of this table.

This is about a cord. This is about a quart is 4 by 4 by 8. It's roughly that. So four quart a year. That's not much. That's impressive. How do you get hot water?

We've got three ways to make hot water. When our geothermal units running in the summertime, doing the air conditioning, it takes the heat out of the living room and puts it in the hot water tank. We have free hot water from May until September when the air conditioner is running. Then in the winter, when the wood boiler is running, that makes hot water. Then if there's ever not the air conditioner running or the boiler running, we have an on-demand, this is where we cheat, on-demand propane hot water heater that makes up the difference.

Amazing. But you could pretty easily set up a wood-fired outdoor. You could.

But in the summer, again, you get it for free from the air conditioning. I actually have a fourth way to make hot water, too. When we're not connected to the grid, a lot of people who have solar panels are connected to the grid. If they have extra power, they sell it back. I'm always depressed when I have extra power, my solar panels just turn off, and I'm like, Run around, turn on some lights. Turn on something. I don't want to waste this free electricity. I got extra hot water heater elements that run on DC so that when the sun, when our house is full, the first thing it does is it tries to charge the Tesla that's sitting in the garage. The Tesla is sitting there at half full, and it's my solid state breaker in my breaker box comes on and starts the Tesla charging. Then when the Tesla gets full and the house battery is full, I create hot water with the electricity. I've got a fourth way to make hot water. Hot water is almost as good as water. I mean, if you've ever gone without water, it's bad. But going without hot water is almost just as bad.

Yeah, I have experience with that. Yes. Where do you get your water?

I dug a well.

Dug, not drill.

There are lots of old dug wells on our farm, so I knew it could work. The way they would do it, they would dig a big pit. They didn't dig it just straight down. They dug a big pit. Then they laid up stones in a circle, the stones you see when you look in an old well. But then they backfilled the pit with stones. That extra area It becomes like a reservoir. Then they put dirt on top of that so that when a racoon poops an extra well, it doesn't necessarily go right into the reservoir. I did a very similar thing, but I hit bedrock and borrowed a friend's Jack Hammer and spent a day inside of that hole with a Jack Hammer trying to get even deeper through the bedrock. I finally took my friend's Jack Hammer back and said, Okay, that's deep enough.

What was the Jack Hammer like?

I mean, that's the best argument for public health wear. Sorry, that exists. Because I have a new appreciation for somebody that's running a Jack Hammer. Those would wear your body out quickly.

Really quickly? Yeah. Did you lose a crown?

I did not lose a crown.

Does the dug well work?

It works. One month out of the year, we're short on water. Yeah. August. Yes, August. How did you know that? Have you ever-I have a dug well.lived in this situation.

Yes, I have a dug well, so I'm aware of that.

But again, you can serve, right? Of course. If you're connected to city water and it seems what's on the other side is opaque to you, you just use as much as you want. What happens is during those peak periods, that's when the utility company has to work extra hard. That's when the price and the inefficiency goes way up, is in those peak periods when people aren't cutting back in response to the supply because the actual The cost of producing it isn't known. When you're making it yourself, it's known. But I've argued that water and electricity, especially when they come from utilities, should have variable pricing based on the cost at that very instant to produce it. Then you could have appliances not mandated, but smart appliances. If you're rich, you don't care when the price of power goes up. You don't know what it costs. You don't know what it costs. If you're poor and you got a little screen, it says the power just went up, you'll go turn it off. A hundred %. You'll say, We'll do the dishes tonight when it's cheaper. If you're middle income, eventually the market will respond to this and automate these things so that if you know the price of electricity, your appliance can know the price.

I don't want the utility company to know what you're doing with it.

Of course not.

But you can have these smart systems that make a lot more efficient use of our resources.

Because you're not connected to the grid, to any public utility at all. I mean, you're actually independent in a way that no one outside of Alaska I've ever met is. It sounds like you're not giving up anything. You're not living in a-Not too much.

There are some sacrifices. Like? Well, if it's cloudy for a lot of days and hot, we may turn the thermostat up just so we don't have to hear the backup generator run.

That doesn't seem like a crazy sacrifice.

There's some people, the instant they had to turn the thermostat at from '72 to '75, it was be, Screw it, I'm out of here. I'm going back to the grid.

But it means that the state has no control over your land.

Correct. Or me. When I go to DC, and they threaten me or try to bribe me. It's like, I know once Friday comes, I'm going to be back on my farm, and I don't need them. It's not that I don't want to do things for people. I help my neighbors, and my neighbors help me, and I want to do public service. But because I have this comfort level that I'm going to go back home to this, I don't need the job. We're self-sustaining. It gives you an extra dimension of independence, I think, when you're in DC.

What about food? Can they starve you out?

I don't think so. They can cut off my fish supply because we don't raise fish and we don't raise pork, but we raise chicken, We eat meat and eggs. We raise beef, and we usually raise a pretty good garden. I have an orchard. Peaches. Peaches. Lots of peaches. My first peach is going to be ripe here in a few weeks, and my last peach will be ripe in September. I've planted 14 kinds of peach trees, so they get ripe different weeks, and they taste nothing like the cardboard peaches you buy at the supermarket.

You don't need to leave, actually, your farm?

No. Are you trying to talk me out? I mean, this is a crisis I have some weeks. I bet. Oh, man, on Mondays, it's like you know you're going to get hit with a two by four as soon as you walk in the door in DC.

Is it weird? I mean, I guess what I'm struck by, I don't live off-grid, though I do have an off-grid camp, but the amount of skills you need to build something like that is really, really striking. You actually have to know how to do things, complex things. I mean, timber framing is another level, but electrical, plumbing, masonry, agriculture, heavy equipment operation. You can do all of that, obviously. So is it weird to be in a room with 434 people who can't do shit, who can't operate a micro? I mean, they're actually incapable, and maybe that's why they're in politics, so they can externalize their self-loathing. Is that weird?

I really don't think about it that much.

Good.

I don't think about it.

Where did you pick up plumbing skills?

My rule is buy three books for everything because you can go to a hardware store and buy a book on plumbing, but I don't trust one book, so you buy two books. Then if the two books disagree, what are you going to do? Well, you got to have a third book. I've got three books on plumbing, three books on wiring, three books on septic systems, three books on- You did your septic, too. Roofing, yeah. I get three books on everything.

And you read them?

And I read them. Then there's the code book, which is almost like international housing code thing that some municipalities have adopted and you have to abide by. I just look at that as a suggestion manual.

Do you think now we're way in the weeds? I don't know if anyone's watching, but they're four handymen, Carpenter, general contractors are four handymen Carpenter. General contractors is still in this. But do you think that code, which really determines how people live in this country, the code, it's all up to code, is it real? Knowing what you do about all those different trades, does the code protect people, actually?

It protects the contractors.

Well, I know that.

They help ride it. The unions do. For instance, the Roofers Union and the Plumber's Union, I think, have conspired to put as many holes in your roof with plumbing as possible.

Because- All the venting.

Yeah, all the vents. If you try to build a house to code, you're likely to have four or five perforations in your roof.

I've noticed.

And that keeps the roofers busy. They're guaranteed to get a call every few years to fix that leak. And it's also very expensive. It's fairly cheap to do roofing, but it's all the exceptions that cost money. And then if you're a plumber, that's one more thing.

Like all the flashing and all the... Every time you have an aperture in a roof, that's a vulnerability.

So my roof has no holes in it. I looked at this and I'm like, Well, that's a good suggestion, but who benefits if I believe what they're telling me?

So you vent your stove at the side of the building, not the- No.

No holes in my roof, no holes out the side. Have you seen that opera house in, I think it's Sydney, Australia? That famous opera. Is it Sydney or Melbourne? Sydney. Sydney Opera House. Yeah. There's no holes in that. There's bathrooms in there. How do they do it? They have the one-way admittance valves like you have under your kitchen counter. They have giant ones of those that work for the whole system. They're not to code, but I think that's stupid because why would I want to put a bunch of holes in my roof?

Well, I couldn't agree more. I'm interested in this topic.

Nobody else is now.

But for the four people who are, I've always wondered that why with wood stoves, where I live, everyone has lots of wood stoves. Some of them, I have wood stoves that vent out the side of the building next to a window and then do an L up. It's not quite as efficient because you got to turn in the run, but you don't have a hole in your roof. In a climate with lots of snow, for example, you don't want any holes in your roof. But how do you vent your furnace? House, for example?

That I just run in a typical flue, and it goes up in the chimney with my pizza oven flue, my wood cookstove flue, and my Rumford fireplace flue. I have four flues through the chimney. On the gable end? No, they're in the middle of the house. I put the chimney in the middle of the house because it's a big thermal mass, and I wanted to smooth out the changes in temperature in the house. And so there's where I did accommodate one hole in the roof. This is the chimney. Because if you put a big stone mass on the side of your house, there's no way to insulate it from the outside. By the way, let me say something. I know there are some women watching this wondering, I want to live in a house like that. That sounds like a lot of fun. Talk to my wife first. Occasionally, we have some crisis that I have to solve and become MacGyver. The first time I got elected to Congress, for instance, the day before I went to go get sworn in, the well pump failed. I'm like, I can't leave my wife and four kids at home without water.

We have a very unique well pump.

What do you mean by that?

I didn't buy the one at the hardware store, so you couldn't go replace it. I went down there- What did you buy? It's in a catalog somewhere. The engineer in me found the best one. Okay, it's not the most common one, but I had to fix it. What I did is I found one of my drills, like you drill holes with, and I took it down to the well, and I took the motor off the well pump, and I chucked the drill to the well head, because it's not submersed, it's off the side in a pump house. I wired this. It had an outlet on it, but I just wired it into the well pump wiring. The drill pumped water for our house-I believe that. Long enough for me to go get sworn in.

I've seen that. I've seen drills run winches. Yes.

Well, I forgot it was there. I did my Congress thing for- You had it on continuously? Yeah. Then the accumulator in the basement that controls the pressure would turn the drill off and on whenever it needed more water. Pressure. It ran continuously. I forgot about it. I just got busy. A year later, a freaking water quit working again.

Because the makita died?

Right. It was actually a Milwaukee hole. It was? The hole hog, one of those fishbrikers.

Yeah, you know I totally do what they handle on the side. Those are cool drills. Last night, I just want to end with this. Last night, we were having dinner, which was really one of the most interesting, confusing dinners I've ever had. But you It made reference to a story, but you didn't get a chance to finish it because I interrupted you. But about putting new plumbing in a county jail, I think. Would you tell that story? Yeah.

So quickly, I got into politics Because we were living off the grid, and I read this little newspaper, and it said they were going to raise our taxes to fund this cronyism in the county, the conservation district, which was building stuff for themselves and not for other farmers. They wanted to tax other farmers to help their farm. It wasn't really about conserving. Farmers are the best conservationists there are, so let's don't punish them anymore. Good call. I fought that tax, and then I actually fought zoning in our county. They wanted to zone our county. Zoning is to keep the smokestacks out of the cul-de-sacks. My county didn't have any smokestacks and didn't have any cul-de-sacks. Like the neighborhood in ET, that movie where the kids ride their bikes through the neighborhood. We didn't have neighborhoods like that. We didn't They need zoning, but somebody thought, if we zoned the county, that we would get prosperity because they saw all the prosperous counties had zoning. It's cargo cult.

Totally. It's like saying, We should import some homeless because then we'll have banks. Right. J. P. Morgan will move here because in Midtown, they're homeless.

I was fighting that and writing letters to the editor. Then finally, I quit fighting the guy who was doing all this. He's called the County Judge executive in Kentucky, like the mayor of the county. It decided to run against him.

You've never been in politics?

Never in my life. Also, there was this guy named Rand Paul who was inspiring, who was taking on the establishment. It was his first run for Senate, and it decided to get involved in his race, too. Just like with my house, I didn't go in partway. I went in all in on politics one fall. Actually, one spring because I had to win the primary, and Ran did, too. I actually did a fundraiser for Ran at my house when nobody I wanted to do a fundraiser for Rand Paul because he was running against the establishment. My house wasn't finished. We weren't even living in it yet. Sorry, little sidebar.

But you traipsed up from the Double Wide to the Funders.

Yes, we went to the Double Wide, and we said, For $100, you can come to our pizza party. I did have the pizza oven working. You built the pizza oven before the bedrooms? Yes. Priorities. That's right. Had to test it out, make sure it was inhabitable. The funny thing, too, we didn't have doors on the bathrooms at at the time. We had no doors. We did run to Loews the day before Rand Paul came and put a door on the bathroom. Good call. Because I was like, Look, this guy could be a senator someday, and he might need to go to the bathroom. We need something more than a curtain here. We call it the Rand Paul door on the bathroom. It's the one room that had a door from the very beginning. Anyways, by the way, also this was in January, and Rand is cheap as hell. He had a two-wheel drive SUV. I had to plow all my driveway so that he could get up there. The problem is it's gravel, so I had to plow all my gravel off, practically, just to get... For what it cost to upgrade to the four-wheel drive for Rand Paul, my gravel costs way more than that.

Anyways, I went all in on politics, helped Rand get elected in his primary. I was on the ballot the same day in 2010, the primary, May 22nd, 2010. Ran was on the ballot, and I was on the ballot. But I was running for this little county executive seat, trying to take a Republican out because he's trying to raise our taxes and bring in more government. I won the election, and it was the most terrifying thing when they handed me the key to the courthouse. It's a small town. If the janitor didn't show up to open the courthouse and start the boiler, which looked like the African queen. It was like... You had to kick it and do all this stuff to get it started. The Sheriff's office wouldn't be heated, the clerk's office wouldn't be heated, and my office wouldn't be heated if I couldn't get the African queen to start. Anyways, it was like the dog that caught the bus. I had promised I wouldn't raise taxes. I was immediately confronted with all these problems that had accumulated over the years in our county government. The jailer came to me, who's an elected official in Kentucky.

His name's Chris. He got elected the same day I got elected. He was all in on my, Let's reform this county. But he had some bad news for me. By the way, the state government had sold the county government a bill of goods. They said, If you'll keep our state inmates, we'll pay you $32 a day, and you'll make all kinds of money. The county was a million dollars in debt because this did not work out. I wasn't going to spend another penny on this throwing good money after bad. But we had 30 State inmates who go out and pick up trash and mow around the courthouse, and they get real sweaty. The hot water heater had quit working at the jail. The jailer, Chris, comes to me and says, Judge, they call me Judge, even though I'm not an attorney. He was the county judge executive. He said, Judge, I got some bad news. I said, what's that? He said, well, the hot water heater quit working on the state inmate side, and I can't mix state inmates with local inmates. You get murderers along with non-support from child- Totally in DUI cases. Yeah.

It's like, We can't have them taking showers together. This is not going to work. I said, Okay, we'll just buy another hot water heater. He said, Well, I tried that. I got a quote. We only had one licensed plumber in the county. I said, Well, what was the quote? He said, $12,000. I said, I mean, this is a small county.

For a hot water heater?

For a hot water... All of our property taxes together were $400,000. I mean, $12,000 for a hot... I'm not paying $12,000 for a hot water heater. You tell that guy to get lost. He said, Well, what are you going to do? I was like, I'll go buy one at the hardware store or something. I go look at this hot water heater to jail. It is not the kind you buy at the store. It's like a boiler, almost. It's fairly involved. It's got like inch and a quarter copper lines. It's not house of plumbing. But I had three books on plumbing. I felt fairly confident. I said, Well, if I can find one of these, I'll put it in myself. I got on eBay and I looked for this model. There was one, Buy it now for $5,500. I'm like, I can I saved the county like $6,500. I called an emergency meeting of our fiscal court, brought in the magistrates, noticed it to the newspaper, did it all legally, and made a motion to buy it now on eBay. Then I hit the button. I bought this hot water heater, they bring it in a tractor trailer.

I didn't pay extra for the lift gate because I had inmates. The inmates take this thing out of the tractor trailer, and we go in and we take the old hot water heater out. There were three inmates in that closet working on that hot water heater, just demolishing everything. They dragged that thing out of there, and I had to go in the closet with the inmates to put the new one in. I'm like, I only want one That's what I'm doing. I'm going to get an inmate in that closet with me. Fair. The hot water heater needs plumbed. I don't need plumbed. The other two inmates that were smelling pretty rank at this point, I said, You guys, go strip the old hot water heater. I want anything of value on that. Besides, you're in here for stripping copper and other things. You're good at that. They're like, We can do this, Judge. We know short iron is bringing this, 10 is bringing this, copper will bring this, aluminum. They could quote every price at the salvage. Seriously? Yeah. I leave the two inmates stripping the old hot water heater, and it had a computer on it and stuff.

I'm installing the new hot water heater. I noticed, for instance, even the plumber had left off this water trap that keeps gasses from escaping, like a safety device. I made sure to do it completely safe by the book or by the three books that I had. I come out of the closet. By the way, there's 30 inmates. I had to walk by the rec room that had a piece of glass, and they could all watch me changing this hot water heater. There's 30 inmates in disbelief with their hands and faces pressed to the glass. We have never seen a county judge executive get a callus on his hand or do anything. I go back out and the inmates said, We got everything of value. There was this hulk of an old hot water heater sitting there. They had stripped the copper, they had stripped all of the useful iron off of it. I said, Guys, you left the most valuable thing on it. They said, No, Judge. We've done this all our lives. We stripped these things. There's nothing on here that'll bring anything down at Livingston. That was the junkyard recycling place. I No, you left the most valuable thing.

I said, Come over here. They walk over and I said, You see this lime green inspection sticker? Get it wet and peel it off and glue it on the new hot water heater. Remember, I I used to hire the only licensed plumber in the county. They go, Judge, you could go to jail for this. I said, I'll have a hot shower, won't I?

You actually did that?

I did that. The only reason I'm telling you this publicly is this was... How long was it? Like 15 years ago or something? No, 14 years ago. I think the statute of limitations of practicing it without a license as a plumber on a public building It's probably expired. If not, the DOJ will be at my house as soon as this airs. But they have also since closed down the jail. Like a few years later, it was a good move.

Did they take the water heater with them?

It's on my bucket list. It may still be in there.

So what are they using it for now?

I think it's just vacant. Maybe they'll use it for drug rehab or something at some point, which would make more sense.

But did it work? Oh, yeah.

It booted up, the computer came on, and everybody got 30 inmates just waiting to take a hot shower. And it worked and worked and worked until they shut the jail down. That's incredible. But anyways, that set the tone. You could say, Well, you're the executive of the county, and you shouldn't I'm not going to be wasting your time on that. But I had four hours of effort in it, and I saved the county $6,500. I'm like, No, this is worth my time. It also shows the inmates like, Okay, we're buying you $1.50 launches. Instead of the $2 lunches now because we fired the crony who was doing the food system. Totally. They were less likely to complain when they saw that the judge himself was actually willing to change the hot water heater. But it also set the tone for the sheriff the county clerk and everybody else who sees that. It's like, Man, he is a cheap bastard. I'm not going to go ask him at the Nes fiscal court meeting for anything.

Why don't you tell the story to APAC and maybe they'll leave you alone? It's not personal. I'm not against you or your country. I just don't want to spend more money.

By the way, there will be some plumbing lobby against me next week after they see this.

Well, the one thing I know for a fact is that you will bravely stand up to the irate plumbing lobby.

I will. One more story about lobbies. I introduced this raw milk bill in Congress. Food freedom empowers small farmers. It's more nutritious. I thought there was nothing to hate about it. I got 20 co-sponsors. I put it in the hopper. I got my HR number. And that day, the milk lobby comes after me. They said there wouldn't be enough hospital rooms for all the children who were going to die from raw milk if my bill passed. This is weird. You've got a lobby going after its own product the milk lobby. So my wife saw all these things come up on her alerts on her phone, and she texted me. She was worried about me, and she said, Oh, Mg, I didn't realize the lactose lobby was this intolerant.

Oh, that's brilliant. You said that? That's pretty awesome. Thomas Massey. Thank you. Hey.

Thank you, Tucker.

Amazing. Thanks for listening to Tucker Carlson show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson. Com to see everything that we have complete library, tuckercarlson. Com.