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Sen. Jeff Flake Pens Blistering Op-Ed, Says GOP In Denial Over Trump

August 02, 2017
Staff

WRITER

A GOP lawmaker is speaking out against both the president and Republican leaders, saying that anyone who thinks the state of things under the Trump administration is normal must be in “denial.”

Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona has written a book criticizing not only President Donald Trump’s lack of conservatism but also the lack of principles among GOP leaders titled Conscience of a Conservative: A Rejection of Destructive Politics and a Return to Principle.

Flake turned his attention to Republican leaders who haven’t fought for conservative policies and seem to be pretending the tumultuous White House has been business as usual the past six months.

“It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued,” he wrote in an excerpt of the book published by Politico.

Tuesday on radio, Glenn agreed but expressed skepticism that any politician can be trusted.

“I’m politician-agnostic now,” Glenn quipped.

GLENN: And so where does this even fit? Have you seen the Jeff Flake -- you know, my party is in denial about --

STU: Yeah, it's amazing that, you know, this is -- it's an op-ed he wrote, which is actually a part of his book. Saying he's in denial about Donald Trump -- the party is in denial about Donald Trump. And he signed his name to it. There's been a lot of these comments that have floated throughout the media since he was elected from unnamed officials. This is --

GLENN: Now, Jeff Flake. I'm trying to remember where we lost track of Jeff Flake. When Jeff Flake sold his soul.

STU: We were not a fan of his stance on one of the gun bills, I remember.

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: And immigration.

GLENN: And immigration. Yeah.

PAT: Terrible on both.

GLENN: Yeah, he was really, really great. And then he started selling his soul to the party.

STU: To be fair, he still is good on certain things.

GLENN: Is he?

STU: Spending, he was good on.

GLENN: Was he ever for Trump?

STU: I would say he's --

GLENN: Agnostic?

STU: No, I would say he was more on the I'm not a fan of Trump side. He was more consistent on that. However, he was -- you know, public officials, particularly senators taking public positions against the president is pretty notable. It's not -- it's not as notable as if like one of his big allies came out and took him on. It's -- he's definitely on the side -- he's not a fan of Trump's.

GLENN: Our forbearers knew that keeping a republic meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors. They all knew people could not live and work freely and develop national institutions conceived -- conductive to freedom, except in peace with independents. So where should Republicans go from here?

First, we shouldn't hesitate to speak out if the president plays to his base in ways that damage the Republican's party ability to grow and speak to a larger audience.

So listen to that. I mean, he's putting his -- the party -- second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issue like free trade.

Populist and protectionist policies may play well out in the short-term, but they handicap the country in the long-term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for the institution and prerogatives like the Senate filibuster that served us well for more than two centuries.

We've taken our institutions conductive to freedom, as Goldwater put it, for granted. And we have to engage in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard-won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Well, it's nice to have you to the party, Jeff.

STU: You seemed almost dismissive. I almost got a sense that that was dismissive.

PAT: Really?

GLENN: I'm so done -- I'm so done -- I'm really so done with all of the politicians. I mean, honestly, should we have any politician on here? I'm politician-agnostic now. With the exception of very, very few.

PAT: You're not sure you believe they exist?

GLENN: Yeah. Yeah.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: No, I'm unfortunately -- I know they exist. I'm not sure how --

JEFFY: This is a struggle we've had for a while, right?

GLENN: I know they exist. I'm agnostic on how many good ones exist. I know one. I know Mike Lee. I would -- I would swear by Mike Lee. But what does that mean?

STU: I mean, there's certainly a few.

GLENN: Yeah, there are a few.

STU: There's no doubt.

GLENN: And I like a few of them. But the only one I know personally really well I feel is Mike Lee. And unshakable.

STU: And he has been --

PAT: Ben Sasse. We don't know him that well. But we know Ben Sasse.

GLENN: Ben Sasse? Yeah, I like Ben Sasse.

PAT: Like him a lot.

GLENN: I think there's several of them.

JEFFY: Louie Gohmert.

PAT: Yes.

GLENN: Yes. There's several of them. I'm not throwing all of them out.

PAT: Hank Johnson. His concerns for Guam.

JEFFY: That goes without saying.

STU: Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

GLENN: Okay. You guys aren't helping.

STU: But obviously there are some.

PAT: Yeah, there's a few.

GLENN: There are many there, and I hate to abandon them. But I'm just so done. I'm just so done with them.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: Why would I stick my neck out for any of you? Why would I endorse or help or anything? Because I don't know what you guys are going to do when you get in?

STU: You know, you're never going to know that. People are flawed.

GLENN: I know. I know. I know.

STU: The problem here is, the second you take that attitude or all of us take that attitude --

GLENN: Then you're done.

STU: -- then there is an unrestrained move to the dark side.

JEFFY: Yep.

STU: You have to have people who are at least standing up. And, you know, you get some things. And you lose a lot of them. You just hope to slow that roll a little bit towards the progressive side. That's really all you can do. But we can't -- it's like the Second Amendment. There was a time -- because I'm not a gun guy. I didn't grow up in gun culture by any means. Though I agree with the Second Amendment. And there was a time where I would hear some of the arguments, you know, made by gun advocates, and they were just -- they seemed almost irrational to me. Like, they were -- as a guy who has never dealt with guns. Like, why are you defending that kind of gun? Like, to me, on its face, without thinking about it deeply, it just kind of seems irrational. You're just defending anything that has to do with guns.

GLENN: Yeah.

STU: You have to defend anything that has to do with guns. Because the second you let them pass that barrier, they go to the next barrier. So you better stand up there and defend every single freaking thing.

PAT: That's right.

STU: Because the second they get past that wall, they are onto the next one. And they'll trample the next 50 walls past it. Wherever you set up your -- you know, your defense is where they will stop for the time being.

GLENN: Yes.

STU: So you better set it up as aggressively as possible.

The great switch: Gates trades climate control for digital dominion

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.

Antifa isn’t “leaderless” — It’s an organized machine of violence

Jeff J Mitchell / Staff | Getty Images

The mob rises where men of courage fall silent. The lesson from Portland, Chicago, and other blue cities is simple: Appeasing radicals doesn’t buy peace — it only rents humiliation.

Parts of America, like Portland and Chicago, now resemble occupied territory. Progressive city governments have surrendered control to street militias, leaving citizens, journalists, and even federal officers to face violent anarchists without protection.

Take Portland, where Antifa has terrorized the city for more than 100 consecutive nights. Federal officers trying to keep order face nightly assaults while local officials do nothing. Independent journalists, such as Nick Sortor, have even been arrested for documenting the chaos. Sortor and Blaze News reporter Julio Rosas later testified at the White House about Antifa’s violence — testimony that corporate media outlets buried.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened.

Chicago offers the same grim picture. Federal agents have been stalked, ambushed, and denied backup from local police while under siege from mobs. Calls for help went unanswered, putting lives in danger. This is more than disorder; it is open defiance of federal authority and a violation of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

A history of violence

For years, the legacy media and left-wing think tanks have portrayed Antifa as “decentralized” and “leaderless.” The opposite is true. Antifa is organized, disciplined, and well-funded. Groups like Rose City Antifa in Oregon, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club in Texas, and Jane’s Revenge operate as coordinated street militias. Legal fronts such as the National Lawyers Guild provide protection, while crowdfunding networks and international supporters funnel money directly to the movement.

The claim that Antifa lacks structure is a convenient myth — one that’s cost Americans dearly.

History reminds us what happens when mobs go unchecked. The French Revolution, Weimar Germany, Mao’s Red Guards — every one began with chaos on the streets. But it wasn’t random. Today’s radicals follow the same playbook: Exploit disorder, intimidate opponents, and seize moral power while the state looks away.

Dismember the dragon

The Trump administration’s decision to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization was long overdue. The label finally acknowledged what citizens already knew: Antifa functions as a militant enterprise, recruiting and radicalizing youth for coordinated violence nationwide.

But naming the threat isn’t enough. The movement’s financiers, organizers, and enablers must also face justice. Every dollar that funds Antifa’s destruction should be traced, seized, and exposed.

AFP Contributor / Contributor | Getty Images

This fight transcends party lines. It’s not about left versus right; it’s about civilization versus anarchy. When politicians and judges excuse or ignore mob violence, they imperil the republic itself. Americans must reject silence and cowardice while street militias operate with impunity.

Antifa is organized, funded, and emboldened. The violence in Portland and Chicago is deliberate, not spontaneous. If America fails to confront it decisively, the price won’t just be broken cities — it will be the erosion of the republic itself.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.