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Glenn's Show Prep

Gohmert on Bachmann: ‘Friends can disagree’

July 25, 2013
Wilson

Writer

Glenn spoke with Rep Louis Gohmert on radio today about the Amash amendment and why many Republicans including Bachmann voted against it. How does Gohmert explain so many of his colleagues siding with the NSA? Gohmert explains in the clip above.

Transcript of interview is below:

GLENN: Let's go to Louie Gohmert who is ‑‑ I would imagine, Louie, that you are as disappointed as I am to see the House reject the amendment to defund the NSA last night. Michele Bachmann surprised the heck out of me by giving a impassioned speech on the floor saying, "Well, you know, they are not actually saving any of your records. They are not saving any of your phone calls or your e‑mails." That's an out‑and‑out lie, is it not, Louie?

GOHMERT: Well, my understanding ‑‑ you know, Michele is a very dear friend of mine.

GLENN: Mine too.

GOHMERT: And I was hearing you earlier this morning. You were talking very glowingly and appropriately about Michele, but friends can disagree. And they are retaining the metadata, which is just a list of every phone number that everyone calls in the United States, calling inside or outside the United States. And when I say the leaked document from the FISA court where a judge would actually order that every single call made to every person, every phone outside the U.S. and inside the U.S., Glenn, you know, I've been a judge. I've been a chief justice. I couldn't believe that a judge would sign an order like that because there's this little problem with the Constitution. You have to specifically name a place, a person, what exactly is to be seized. And for a judge to just sign a sweeping order that says "Get everything from everybody." And we had a hearing last week and we had some people from the government there and I asked the question, you know, because they have the defense, "Look, it's just data. We don't know whose phone number is whose. And all ‑‑ we run these algorithms and look for patterns." Glenn, when they have every phone number and every phone number that's calls, I asked these guys, "Well, isn't it true that the other government, whether it's CIA, you have the right and the ability to use sources that the public can use to gather information? There's nothing wrong with you doing that, right?" "Yes." "That means you can go to the white pages for phone numbers, who has what phone number, and you can also do what anybody can do. You can go online, pay a fee and find out everybody's cell number if you want to. I mean, that data is available." And they said, "Well, you know, I guess we could." Yes, Glenn, they can get everybody's phone number. They can know who did what. And so if your government ‑‑ let's just say there was somebody that was a little paranoid and wanted to look at what they could do. Say they wanted to make a case against you after the fact of things that are completely untrue. Well, they can go back and say, "Well, you talked to this person and this." Yeah, but it had nothing to do with that. They can make a case against you. I mean, it becomes so much like a Kafka novel where you can't really fight this big spider that's just ‑‑ or octopus that's just taken over everything.

GLENN: So here are the names of some of the people that we respect, that voted on the, I think the wrong side. Michele Bachmann is one of them. Here are some of the others.

STU: Yeah, Darrell Issa.

GLENN: These are all good people.

STU: Yeah. Culberson was another one we were talking about earlier today. Paul Ryan was on the wrong side of this one, I think. Steve King on the wrong side of it.

GLENN: So how did that happen, Louie? What are they saying behind the scenes? What was their reasoning?

GOHMERT: Well, they are saying ‑‑ when you talk about people like Michele and Steve ‑‑ they are two of my best friends ‑‑ they will tell you behind the scenes what they say in front, that they were concerned that ‑‑ and I didn't realize ‑‑ actually I didn't realize Steve had voted against the Amash amendment.

GLENN: Yeah.

GOHMERT: But it is this fear that has been put in place, "Gee, we're finding out who terrorists are by this information." But Glenn, I have to go back to our debate over the law. I wasn't there when the PATRIOT Act passed and I wasn't there when FISA courts were created. They've been around for a long time. But I was there for the renewal, the extension. And I battled tooth and nail with my own Republican chairman who had put ‑‑ he had actually put Sunsets in the original PATRIOT Act so that, you know, we'd always have leverage to get information about what they were doing. And even under the Bush administration, getting information from the justice department was really tough. And that's how I ended up being able to convince a majority of the Republicans to put Sunsets on something in the PATRIOT Act extension because the chairman had bought into the Bush administration position that we don't need Sunsets anymore. And so we debated this and we got into the business about what is the purpose of having ‑‑ of their ability to surveil telephone calls and who you're calling, whether it's actually getting content or whether it's actually just getting what they call the metadata, the logs of who you called. And what we were told and the testimony all was to the effect that the only people who would have their phone information pulled were those who either made a call to a known foreign terrorist or somebody who's affiliated with a known terrorist group, or they got a call from one of those people. In fact, Glenn, I made the statement at one of our debates that, look, to my friends across the aisle that are so worried about the administration, you know, getting your phone records, under the bill it's very clear: If you don't want your phone records to be pulled, that data as to who you're calling, then when you call your foreign terrorist friends, use somebody else's phone. I thought that was pretty funny, cute, and a lot of people laughed.

GLENN: But they lied to you, did they not, Louie?

GOHMERT: Well, it turned out, no, you don't have a to call a foreign terrorist.

GLENN: Right.

GOHMERT: They are getting your phone information. And another thing that has really bothered me ‑‑

GLENN: Hang on just a second. Hold on. Hold on just a second. I want everybody coast to coast that is listening to understand that this man has so much credibility, that Louie Gohmert, a congressman who believes in many of the same things I do just went on national airwaves and said, "Look, the Bush administration lied to me. I was making the wrong case. I was told one thing and they lied to me about it, and the left was right about it and I was wrong." That's significant.

GOHMERT: Well, they weren't right about it, but the Bush administration was actually arguing that they would not do anything more than what the law provided and you had to have that Nexus with a foreign terrorist or someone associated ‑‑

GLENN: That's not true.

GOHMERT: ‑‑ with a terrorist group. And so I don't know, I haven't seen information, I don't know if the Bush administration, their NSA was gathering every single person's phone information, but ‑‑

GLENN: But it doesn't matter. I'm in a moment blaming it ‑‑

GOHMERT: ‑‑ what some of us talked about back in those debates was, gee, I remember them saying we do not have the capability to gather every single person's phone calls to everybody they call.

GLENN: And they do.

GOHMERT: But even if we did, they wouldn't do it. And this law does not authorize us to do that. And so you got Republicans to vote for it. I was just talking to John Conyers here on the floor. I'm in our cloakroom just off the House floor and we just finished voting and, you know, I was ‑‑ I gave you and Nadler and you guys so much grief over your positions and, son of a gun, you were right, except your administration that's pulling off this information that you thought the Bush administration would be doing.

GLENN: I don't think ‑‑ you know what, I don't ‑‑

PAT: Amazing.

GOHMERT: Something else, too, Glenn: I've come up with some Democrats over the last two days who voted against the Amash amendment who I was surprised voted against it because they were against giving the NSA any of this kind of power to start with. And they said, well, look ‑‑ one of them said, "Louie, let me just show you what we got from our leadership in the Democratic Party and that's why I voted no on the Amash amendment. It says right here very clearly the law does not allow us currently to gather anybody's phone information unless they have talked to some foreign terrorist or some member of a foreign terrorist group."

GLENN: So Louie ‑‑

GOHMERT: And I said, well, that is true, that is what the law says, but they are not following the law.

GLENN: Can I ask you a question? What ‑‑

GOHMERT: And so that's why some of the left who argued against, that said this kind of thing might happen voted against the Amash amendment. They were given the wrong information.

GLENN: So tell me this, Louie: Then why is it, what are they storing in the Utah data storage facility? What is it they are storing? Are they crisping lettuce in that?

GOHMERT: I don't know.

GLENN: I mean ‑‑

GOHMERT: It's huge, isn't it?

GLENN: It's ‑‑

GOHMERT: And I don't know, and probably if I did, it would be classified, but I really don't know it all, but I know apparently they are going to be gathering ‑‑

GLENN: Yes.

GOHMERT: ‑‑ every phone call that everyone has made.

GLENN: Exactly right.

GOHMERT: The logs for those things, and that is dangerous. But let me point out something else, Glenn and, you know, we talked about our open borders. And I'm telling you, for the amount of liberty we have to give up to have security is in direct proportion to how open our borders are. The more open our borders are, then the more we have to give up liberty to have security. And as you quoted Franklin, you know. He said those that give up safety for liberty don't deserve either one. That's ‑‑

GLENN: But I mean ‑‑

GOHMERT: That's where we are. We need to secure our border. We need to kick out people that overstay visas. And I still contend we should do nothing on immigration except pass a resolution. Mr. President, you secure the border as confirmed by the border states and then we'll take up a comprehensive bill, but not until then.

Now, back to Benghazi, back to the NSA spying, back to a total throw‑out of the Internal Revenue Code and revamping that system. Back to the things that are 60 to 70% popular with the American people.

GLENN: All right, Louis ‑‑ Louie Gohmert from Texas, congressman, I appreciate it and thank you so much. I'm running a little bit late but God bless you, man, and keep up the fight.

From Pharaoh to Hamas: The same spirit of evil, new disguise

Anadolu / Contributor | Getty Images

The drone footage out of Gaza isn’t just war propaganda — it’s a glimpse of the same darkness that once convinced men they were righteous for killing innocents.

Evil introduces itself subtly. It doesn’t announce, “Hi, I’m here to destroy you.” It whispers. It flatters. It borrows the language of justice, empathy, and freedom, twisting them until hatred sounds righteous and violence sounds brave.

We are watching that same deception unfold again — in the streets, on college campuses, and in the rhetoric of people who should know better. It’s the oldest story in the world, retold with new slogans.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage.

A drone video surfaced this week showing Hamas terrorists staging the “discovery” of a hostage’s body. They pushed a corpse out of a window, dragged it into a hole, buried it, and then called in aid workers to “find” what they themselves had planted. It was theater — evil, disguised as victimhood. And it was caught entirely on camera.

That’s how evil operates. It never comes in through the front door. It sneaks in, often through manipulative pity. The same spirit animates the moral rot spreading through our institutions — from the halls of universities to the chambers of government.

Take Zohran Mamdani, a New York assemblyman who has praised jihadists and defended pro-Hamas agitators. His father, a Columbia University professor, wrote that America and al-Qaeda are morally equivalent — that suicide bombings shouldn’t be viewed as barbaric. Imagine thinking that way after watching 3,000 Americans die on 9/11. That’s not intellectualism. That’s indoctrination.

Often, that indoctrination comes from hostile foreign actors, peddled by complicit pawns on our own soil. The pro-Hamas protests that erupted across campuses last year, for example, were funded by Iran — a regime that murders its own citizens for speaking freely.

Ancient evil, new clothes

But the deeper danger isn’t foreign money. It’s the spiritual blindness that lets good people believe resentment is justice and envy is discernment. Scripture talks about the spirit of Amalek — the eternal enemy of God’s people, who attacks the weak from behind while the strong look away. Amalek never dies; it just changes its vocabulary and form with the times.

Today, Amalek tweets. He speaks through professors who defend terrorism as “anti-colonial resistance.” He preaches from pulpits that call violence “solidarity.” And he recruits through algorithms, whispering that the Jews control everything, that America had it coming, that chaos is freedom. Those are ancient lies wearing new clothes.

When nations embrace those lies, it’s not the Jews who perish first. It’s the nations themselves. The soul dies long before the body. The ovens of Auschwitz didn’t start with smoke; they started with silence and slogans.

Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images

A time for choosing

So what do we do? We speak truth — calmly, firmly, without venom. Because hatred can’t kill hatred; it only feeds it. Truth, compassion, and courage starve it to death.

Evil wins when good people mirror its rage. That’s how Amalek survives — by making you fight him with his own weapons. The only victory that lasts is moral clarity without malice, courage without cruelty.

The war we’re fighting isn’t new. It’s the same battle between remembrance and amnesia, covenant and chaos, humility and pride. The same spirit that whispered to Pharaoh, to Hitler, and to every mob that thought hatred could heal the world is whispering again now — on your screens, in your classrooms, in your churches.

Will you join it, or will you stand against it?

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Bill Gates ends climate fear campaign, declares AI the future ruler

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The Big Tech billionaire once said humanity must change or perish. Now he claims we’ll survive — just as elites prepare total surveillance.

For decades, Americans have been told that climate change is an imminent apocalypse — the existential threat that justifies every intrusion into our lives, from banning gas stoves to rationing energy to tracking personal “carbon scores.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates helped lead that charge. He warned repeatedly that the “climate disaster” would be the greatest crisis humanity would ever face. He invested billions in green technology and demanded the world reach net-zero emissions by 2050 “to avoid catastrophe.”

The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch.

Now, suddenly, he wants everyone to relax: Climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” after all.

Gates was making less of a scientific statement and more of a strategic pivot. When elites retire a crisis, it’s never because the threat is gone — it’s because a better one has replaced it. And something else has indeed arrived — something the ruling class finds more useful than fear of the weather.The same day Gates downshifted the doomsday rhetoric, Amazon announced it would pay warehouse workers $30 an hour — while laying off 30,000 people because artificial intelligence will soon do their jobs.

Climate panic was the warm-up. AI control is the main event.

The new currency of power

The world once revolved around oil and gas. Today, it revolves around the electricity demanded by server farms, the chips that power machine learning, and the data that can be used to manipulate or silence entire populations. The global contest is no longer over barrels and pipelines — it is over who gets to flip the digital switch. Whoever controls energy now controls information. And whoever controls information controls civilization.

Climate alarmism gave elites a pretext to centralize power over energy. Artificial intelligence gives them a mechanism to centralize power over people. The future battles will not be about carbon — they will be about control.

Two futures — both ending in tyranny

Americans are already being pushed into what look like two opposing movements, but both leave the individual powerless.

The first is the technocratic empire being constructed in the name of innovation. In its vision, human work will be replaced by machines, and digital permissions will subsume personal autonomy.

Government and corporations merge into a single authority. Your identity, finances, medical decisions, and speech rights become access points monitored by biometric scanners and enforced by automated gatekeepers. Every step, purchase, and opinion is tracked under the noble banner of “efficiency.”

The second is the green de-growth utopia being marketed as “compassion.” In this vision, prosperity itself becomes immoral. You will own less because “the planet” requires it. Elites will redesign cities so life cannot extend beyond a 15-minute walking radius, restrict movement to save the Earth, and ration resources to curb “excess.” It promises community and simplicity, but ultimately delivers enforced scarcity. Freedom withers when surviving becomes a collective permission rather than an individual right.

Both futures demand that citizens become manageable — either automated out of society or tightly regulated within it. The ruling class will embrace whichever version gives them the most leverage in any given moment.

Climate panic was losing its grip. AI dependency — and the obedience it creates — is far more potent.

The forgotten way

A third path exists, but it is the one today’s elites fear most: the path laid out in our Constitution. The founders built a system that assumes human beings are not subjects to be monitored or managed, but moral agents equipped by God with rights no government — and no algorithm — can override.

Hesham Elsherif / Stringer | Getty Images

That idea remains the most “disruptive technology” in history. It shattered the belief that people need kings or experts or global committees telling them how to live. No wonder elites want it erased.

Soon, you will be told you must choose: Live in a world run by machines or in a world stripped down for planetary salvation. Digital tyranny or rationed equality. Innovation without liberty or simplicity without dignity.

Both are traps.

The only way

The only future worth choosing is the one grounded in ordered liberty — where prosperity and progress exist alongside moral responsibility and personal freedom and human beings are treated as image-bearers of God — not climate liabilities, not data profiles, not replaceable hardware components.

Bill Gates can change his tune. The media can change the script. But the agenda remains the same.

They no longer want to save the planet. They want to run it, and they expect you to obey.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why the White House restoration sent the left Into panic mode

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Presidents have altered the White House for decades, yet only Donald Trump is treated as a vandal for privately funding the East Wing’s restoration.

Every time a president so much as changes the color of the White House drapes, the press clutches its pearls. Unless the name on the stationery is Barack Obama’s, even routine restoration becomes a national outrage.

President Donald Trump’s decision to privately fund upgrades to the White House — including a new state ballroom — has been met with the usual chorus of gasps and sneers. You’d think he bulldozed Monticello.

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s ‘visionary.’

The irony is that presidents have altered and expanded the White House for more than a century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the East and West Wings in the middle of the Great Depression. Newspapers accused him of building a palace while Americans stood in breadlines. History now calls it “vision.”

First lady Nancy Reagan faced the same hysteria. Headlines accused her of spending taxpayer money on new china “while Americans starved.” In truth, she raised private funds after learning that the White House didn’t have enough matching plates for state dinners. She took the ridicule and refused to pass blame.

“I’m a big girl,” she told her staff. “This comes with the job.” That was dignity — something the press no longer recognizes.

A restoration, not a renovation

Trump’s project is different in every way that should matter. It costs taxpayers nothing. Not a cent. The president and a few friends privately fund the work. There’s no private pool or tennis court, no personal perks. The additions won’t even be completed until after he leaves office.

What’s being built is not indulgence — it’s stewardship. A restoration of aging rooms, worn fixtures, and century-old bathrooms that no longer function properly in the people’s house. Trump has paid for cast brass doorknobs engraved with the presidential seal, restored the carpets and moldings, and ensured that the architecture remains faithful to history.

The media’s response was mockery and accusations of vanity. They call it “grotesque excess,” while celebrating billion-dollar “climate art” projects and funneling hundreds of millions into activist causes like the No Kings movement. They lecture America on restraint while living off the largesse of billionaires.

The selective guardians of history

Where was this sudden reverence for history when rioters torched St. John’s Church — the same church where every president since James Madison has worshipped? The press called it an “expression of grief.”

Where was that reverence when mobs toppled statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant? Or when first lady Melania Trump replaced the Rose Garden’s lawn with a patio but otherwise followed Jackie Kennedy’s original 1962 plans in the garden’s restoration? They called that “desecration.”

If a Republican preserves beauty, it’s vandalism. If a Democrat does the same, it’s “visionary.”

The real desecration

The people shrieking about “historic preservation” care nothing for history. They hate the idea that something lasting and beautiful might be built by hands they despise. They mock craftsmanship because it exposes their own cultural decay.

The White House ballroom is not a scandal — it’s a mirror. And what it reflects is the media’s own pettiness. The ruling class that ridicules restoration is the same class that cheered as America’s monuments fell. Its members sneer at permanence because permanence condemns them.

Julia Beverly / Contributor | Getty Images

Trump’s improvements are an act of faith — in the nation’s symbols, its endurance, and its worth. The outrage over a privately funded renovation says less about him than it does about the journalists who mistake destruction for progress.

The real desecration isn’t happening in the East Wing. It’s happening in the newsrooms that long ago tore up their own foundation — truth — and never bothered to rebuild it.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Trump’s secret war in the Caribbean EXPOSED — It’s not about drugs

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

The president’s moves in Venezuela, Guyana, and Colombia aren’t about drugs. They’re about re-establishing America’s sovereignty across the Western Hemisphere.

For decades, we’ve been told America’s wars are about drugs, democracy, or “defending freedom.” But look closer at what’s unfolding off the coast of Venezuela, and you’ll see something far more strategic taking shape. Donald Trump’s so-called drug war isn’t about fentanyl or cocaine. It’s about control — and a rebirth of American sovereignty.

The aim of Trump’s ‘drug war’ is to keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

The president understands something the foreign policy class forgot long ago: The world doesn’t respect apologies. It respects strength.

While the global elites in Davos tout the Great Reset, Trump is building something entirely different — a new architecture of power based on regional independence, not global dependence. His quiet campaign in the Western Hemisphere may one day be remembered as the second Monroe Doctrine.

Venezuela sits at the center of it all. It holds the world’s largest crude oil reserves — oil perfectly suited for America’s Gulf refineries. For years, China and Russia have treated Venezuela like a pawn on their chessboard, offering predatory loans in exchange for control of those resources. The result has been a corrupt, communist state sitting in our own back yard. For too long, Washington shrugged. Not any more.The naval exercises in the Caribbean, the sanctions, the patrols — they’re not about drug smugglers. They’re about evicting China from our hemisphere.

Trump is using the old “drug war” playbook to wage a new kind of war — an economic and strategic one — without firing a shot at our actual enemies. The goal is simple: Keep the hemisphere’s oil, minerals, and manufacturing within the Western family and out of Beijing’s hands.

Beyond Venezuela

Just east of Venezuela lies Guyana, a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map a year ago. Then ExxonMobil struck oil, and suddenly Guyana became the newest front in a quiet geopolitical contest. Washington is helping defend those offshore platforms, build radar systems, and secure undersea cables — not for charity, but for strategy. Control energy, data, and shipping lanes, and you control the future.

Moreover, Colombia — a country once defined by cartels — is now positioned as the hinge between two oceans and two continents. It guards the Panama Canal and sits atop rare-earth minerals every modern economy needs. Decades of American presence there weren’t just about cocaine interdiction; they were about maintaining leverage over the arteries of global trade. Trump sees that clearly.

PEDRO MATTEY / Contributor | Getty Images

All of these recent news items — from the military drills in the Caribbean to the trade negotiations — reflect a new vision of American power. Not global policing. Not endless nation-building. It’s about strategic sovereignty.

It’s the same philosophy driving Trump’s approach to NATO, the Middle East, and Asia. We’ll stand with you — but you’ll stand on your own two feet. The days of American taxpayers funding global security while our own borders collapse are over.

Trump’s Monroe Doctrine

Critics will call it “isolationism.” It isn’t. It’s realism. It’s recognizing that America’s strength comes not from fighting other people’s wars but from securing our own energy, our own supply lines, our own hemisphere. The first Monroe Doctrine warned foreign powers to stay out of the Americas. The second one — Trump’s — says we’ll defend them, but we’ll no longer be their bank or their babysitter.

Historians may one day mark this moment as the start of a new era — when America stopped apologizing for its own interests and started rebuilding its sovereignty, one barrel, one chip, and one border at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.