Speaker 1: Welcome to today's podcast sponsored by Hillsdale College, All Things Hilldale.
Speaker 2: At Hillsdale dot edu.
Speaker 1: I encourage you to take advantage of the many free
Speaker 1: online courses there, and of course I'll listener to the
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Speaker 1: com or just Google, Apple, iTunes and Hilldale.
Speaker 3: Back to the Hugh Hughit Show. I'm guest host Kurt Schlichter.
Speaker 4: And if you were listening right now, right here on
Speaker 4: your radio dial er on the Salem News Channel app,
Speaker 4: you would have seen my next guest, Doctor Sebastian Gorka.
Speaker 4: He is the Deputy National Security Advisor for counter Terrorism.
Speaker 4: He is a close personal friend. I am very proud
Speaker 4: to welcome him to the Hugh Hewitt Show. Welcome doctor Gorka.
Speaker 5: Greetings, my dear friend, Happy new year. Just one small correction.
Speaker 5: Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Characterism.
Speaker 5: How is it to host my former show, Colonel Kay.
Speaker 4: Well, I hope I'm meeting your exact standards, doctor Gorka,
Speaker 4: and I'm glad to say that you haven't gone and
Speaker 4: activated this retired United States Army colonel and made myself.
Speaker 2: That was going to be my next thing.
Speaker 5: I mentioned stop playing foot see with US patriots inside
Speaker 5: the administration and playing with the idea of US reactivating you,
Speaker 5: because you know, I can text Pete Hegseth right now
Speaker 5: and I can say, hey, there's an old six who
Speaker 5: wants to get in the fight.
Speaker 2: So one more time.
Speaker 5: You played coquettish with that concept, and you may just
Speaker 5: have the dow on your doorstep.
Speaker 4: Oh well, you don't have to worry about me. You
Speaker 4: have to worry about Arena, and you've met her, doctor Gorka.
Speaker 3: We're friends.
Speaker 4: But I gotta say I am so proud to have
Speaker 4: a guy like you, just as an American because you
Speaker 4: have gone from a very public persona We don't hear
Speaker 4: anything from you except occasional updates on what you're doing.
Speaker 4: You are all business, and your business is killing terrorists.
Speaker 4: And my understanding is that business is good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The bumper sticker, my friend, is we are back in
Speaker 5: the business of counter terrorism. It started on day eight
Speaker 5: of the administration when we walked into the Oval office
Speaker 5: told the Commander in Chief as a leader vices walking
Speaker 5: around a freeman who Biden had been surveilling for a
Speaker 5: year and a half He looked up at us from
Speaker 5: the resolute desk and he said kill. That man got
Speaker 5: out his iconic sharpie pen marked the go box on
Speaker 5: the operational aord Is. Less than thirty hours later, I
Speaker 5: was in the situation room under the West Wing with
Speaker 5: my NSC colleagues, with the then National Security Advisor as
Speaker 5: we watched that leader of Isis be removed with extreme prejudice.
Speaker 5: That was eleven days into the administration. Since then, I
Speaker 5: can now report to you and our incredible Salem viewers
Speaker 5: and listeners, the President has neutralites is removed from the
Speaker 5: battlefield for good.
Speaker 2: Four one hundred.
Speaker 5: And seventy nine g huddists with American blood on their
Speaker 5: hands or who are plotting to kill Americans.
Speaker 2: That is outside of the Houthy campaign.
Speaker 5: That is outside of the incredible work of Dow, the
Speaker 5: Coast Guard Secretary Rubio, Stephen Miller, Governor nomat DHS who
Speaker 5: have been taking out with Pete Hegseth's direction, the drug boats, which,
Speaker 5: let me be very clear, the President mentioned this recently,
Speaker 5: every single one of those drug boats would cause the
Speaker 5: deaths of between twenty and fifty thousand Americans. Every single
Speaker 5: time we take one out, we are saving tens of
Speaker 5: thousands of lives. So yes, we are back in the
Speaker 5: business of protecting America and protecting her citizens.
Speaker 4: Kurt Ah Well, doctor Gorka, thank you and thank your team. Now,
Speaker 4: I know as a leader you are only as good
Speaker 4: as the people who work for you. And while of
Speaker 4: course you're not going to reveal their names, can you
Speaker 4: tell us a little about the kind of people you
Speaker 4: get to orchestrate in your symphony of righteous retribution against terrorists?
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is when you realize how blessed you are
Speaker 5: as a man. So yes, I'm responsible for counter terrorism
Speaker 5: for the most consequential president of the modern age, President Trump.
Speaker 5: But it only looks so good and the figures are
Speaker 5: only so incredible because of the team who works for
Speaker 5: me in the National Security Council.
Speaker 2: Our work is classified. I live skiffed life today. You
Speaker 2: are familiar with that.
Speaker 5: Yes, spending very wrong days in a secure compartmented information
Speaker 5: facility doing classified work. I have detail ees from across
Speaker 5: the government. I have a direct hire who is my deputy.
Speaker 5: But these I'm just going to say this, And if
Speaker 5: I had the good book in front of me, I'd
Speaker 5: swear on the b and I said this to the
Speaker 5: head of Hi. Everybody I know in government, every single member,
Speaker 5: every single director in my CT, my characters and directorate,
Speaker 5: is a rock star.
Speaker 2: Whether they've come from the Department of War, whether.
Speaker 5: They're from the intelligence community or other parts of the
Speaker 5: US government.
Speaker 2: You know, it's like the President.
Speaker 5: I give them, you know, a mission statement, I give
Speaker 5: them the concept of operations, and they just execute.
Speaker 2: I don't need to hold their hands. None of them
Speaker 2: is a prima dollar.
Speaker 5: And you know what's really rare in this stinking city
Speaker 5: you are fully aware of that is people without egos.
Speaker 5: None of my directors has an ego. All they care
Speaker 5: about is a mission and they are amazing patriots.
Speaker 4: Doctor Gorka, I'm going to keep you over into the
Speaker 4: break for our podcast viewers, So let's just take a
Speaker 4: quick pause and then we'll start up again with doctor
Speaker 4: Sebastian Gorka here on the Hugh Hewett Show. Doctor Gorka,
Speaker 4: we're back in the podcast portion. I still think like
Speaker 4: a kernel, what is the end state your unit is
Speaker 4: looking for to achieve by the end of twenty twenty six,
Speaker 4: in our words, one year from now, what do you
Speaker 4: want to be able to brief?
Speaker 5: Oh, that's perfectly put. So the end state is very simple.
Speaker 5: I have one metric for the President and for all Americans,
Speaker 5: whether they vote for President Trump or not, if you're
Speaker 5: a US citizen, if you're a US taxpayer. I want
Speaker 5: to make the five top jihadi entities in the world
Speaker 5: which are capable of and have the intent to execute
Speaker 5: what we call external operations, that's mass casualty attacks against
Speaker 5: US citizens on the mainland or elsewhere. I want to
Speaker 5: make them combat ineffective. I want to make them incapable
Speaker 5: of killing Americans in America or doing anything like in
Speaker 5: nine eleven. That is my very simple metric, and within
Speaker 5: a matter of months that could happen. We are on
Speaker 5: the casp of presenting the new US CANA Terrorism strategy.
Speaker 2: To the President.
Speaker 5: If he approves it and signs it, we will see
Speaker 5: the hammers of hell come down on these entities even
Speaker 5: more than they have in the last eleven and a
Speaker 5: half months, and we will look. Here's another metric, and
Speaker 5: it's kind of facetious, but it's true.
Speaker 2: I want to put people like me out of a job.
Speaker 5: There should not be a senior director of Canaterrorism in
Speaker 5: the NSC. In terms of other threats like China, like Russia,
Speaker 5: like Iran. We shouldn't be dealing with you know, rag
Speaker 5: tag jihadists in the most powerful building in the world.
Speaker 5: I want to suppress them until they become an irrelevance.
Speaker 2: That is my dream.
Speaker 4: Ah, doctor Gorka, that's a wonderful dream. You helped me
Speaker 4: out with my book The Attack, which postulate a mass
Speaker 4: terrorist attack on the United States of America. He gave
Speaker 4: me some great feedback on big picture stuff and also, Chris,
Speaker 4: I some of my description of AK forty sevens if
Speaker 4: I remember correctly. Let me ask you, though should have
Speaker 4: right now, because you know we've only had a year
Speaker 4: and we had open borders.
Speaker 3: For four years.
Speaker 4: How would you assess the internal threat in the United
Speaker 4: States of America And what can individual Americans do to
Speaker 4: ameliorate that threat? We got about thirty seconds.
Speaker 5: Yeah, number one, we are fixing it with the likes
Speaker 5: of Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Governor Ome. We are getting
Speaker 5: rid of the worst of the worst who are let
Speaker 5: into this country by Biden and Harris. But I will say,
Speaker 5: you are the first line of defense, so don't expect
Speaker 5: Uncle Sam to always be there to protect you. If
Speaker 5: you can do so where you live, do what I do.
Speaker 5: Get licensed, carry a gun, protect your family and your
Speaker 5: loved ones. But we are cleaning the mess up right
Speaker 5: now that we inherited from President.
Speaker 3: Auto Pen and doctor Gorka.
Speaker 4: Let me add go out, go find the Red Cross,
Speaker 4: learn urgency medical care, stop the bleeding.
Speaker 3: You can save lives.
Speaker 4: Doctor Gorka, thank you, and please pass on the thanks
Speaker 4: of this entire audience to your entire team, because you
Speaker 4: know that's what leaders do. Thank you so much, Doctor Gorka.
Speaker 4: Happy New Year, and God bless America.
Speaker 3: We're back on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 4: I'm guess Ho's church Schlickter, and of course that's the
Speaker 4: Plimsul Southern California's Oh Peter Case.
Speaker 3: And the Gang Rocket Gosh.
Speaker 4: I love this music and I love the chance the
Speaker 4: guest host the hu Hewit Show because I get to
Speaker 4: pick it and I also get to have my pals
Speaker 4: on and one of the guys. I listen to him
Speaker 4: every week, just like I listen to Hwit Show. He's
Speaker 4: on the Ruthless Podcast. He's one of the fellas. John Ashbrook,
Speaker 4: Welcome to the hu Hewit Show.
Speaker 6: Sared, how you doing?
Speaker 2: Happy New year, Happy New Year.
Speaker 3: I'm doing great.
Speaker 4: You guys on the Ruthless podcast have had an incredible
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five, haven't you.
Speaker 6: Well, it's been a whirlwind. I mean, it's hard to believe.
Speaker 6: We started out in January of twenty twenty five, and
Speaker 6: Caroline Levitt and President Trump were nice enough to let
Speaker 6: us ask the first question of any podcasters at a
Speaker 6: White House briefing. So it started with that and then
Speaker 6: continued through the summer. We had some great interviews, but
Speaker 6: a lot of laughs, and we've got more in store,
Speaker 6: I think for twenty twenty six.
Speaker 4: Well that was my next question. What are we looking
Speaker 4: at in the near future for the Ruthless guys? Are
Speaker 4: we looking at a Fox TV show? Because you guys
Speaker 4: have linked up with the premier conservative television network.
Speaker 6: Well, I don't know about that. I do know that
Speaker 6: what they asked us to do was just more of
Speaker 6: what we've been doing all along. And so we had
Speaker 6: a third show this year. Who knows what whether we'll
Speaker 6: end up adding another one in twenty twenty I guess,
Speaker 6: I guess we'll see. But I mean, we thought that
Speaker 6: we were going to head into January with our ongoing
Speaker 6: coverage of the Democrat Civil War. But this story out
Speaker 6: of Minnesota and Ohio and probably every other state, you
Speaker 6: can't you can't look away. I mean, this is the
Speaker 6: most insane thing I've ever seen in my life. And
Speaker 6: I mean a lot of people have been talking about
Speaker 6: this for years, but thank God for Nick Shirley. I mean,
Speaker 6: that guy really exposed something that at the right time.
Speaker 6: And I mean, you got a tip a.
Speaker 2: Cap to that guy.
Speaker 4: It was amazing. I mean, I've been guest hosting for
Speaker 4: four days. We're in the middle of a news desert,
Speaker 4: and I've been I've been milking the Somali scandal like
Speaker 4: a Wisconsin cheesemonger. So I mean, it just keeps giving
Speaker 4: and giving.
Speaker 6: It doesn't it it does, It doesn't. You can't make
Speaker 6: it up. The guy I was just talking to Dwayne
Speaker 6: a minute ago, and you reminded me about this guy
Speaker 6: who at a press conference today and said that we
Speaker 6: would like to cooperate, but all the papers were stolen,
Speaker 6: our financial records. You can't make it up.
Speaker 3: One of those maga burglars who comes in looking for
Speaker 3: your looking for your tax receipts, I'll show them.
Speaker 6: Man, it's you know, if it would be. It's you know,
Speaker 6: it's so funny, but also like that, it's just so
Speaker 6: much money. And all of us pay taxes every April
Speaker 6: fifteenth at gunpoint or would go to jail, So you
Speaker 6: send your taxes. You hope that the government bends them wisely,
Speaker 6: but clearly they're just dumping it down a money pit
Speaker 6: with these crooks who are who are just stealing so much.
Speaker 6: And also, you know, medicaid is for poor people who
Speaker 6: who need help, you know, and so they're stealing it.
Speaker 6: They're steal it from you and me, but they're taking
Speaker 6: it right out of the right out of the Mauths
Speaker 6: or the people who need it the most. And you know,
Speaker 6: you wonder why there are all these problems in Medicaid
Speaker 6: and they're you know, they are all these complaints that
Speaker 6: it's not working as well as it should or they
Speaker 6: don't have the funding they need. Well, now we know
Speaker 6: where a lot of it's gone. And I really hope
Speaker 6: that the Trump administration can put a stop to this.
Speaker 6: I really really hope I think they can. You know,
Speaker 6: they've got found like BONDI and cash Bit Talent, all
Speaker 6: them are on the case. But you know, you just
Speaker 6: know that this is going on in every single state
Speaker 6: in our country.
Speaker 4: Well, I think John Ashberg of Ruthless, I think this
Speaker 4: is just beautiful as a Republican because it hits them
Speaker 4: on you know, it hits them on every level.
Speaker 3: Right in the Gonads.
Speaker 4: It is attack on immigration because we've imported this this
Speaker 4: culture that's now eighty five percent you know well government
Speaker 4: dependent and is running these the giant theft rings we.
Speaker 2: Have, uh.
Speaker 3: We we have uh the.
Speaker 4: The the failure of welfare state on display for everybody.
Speaker 4: And we also have, thanks to uh Tim Waltz, an
Speaker 4: amazing display of the inability of Democrats to perform the
Speaker 4: basic blocking and tackling of government.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's like a win win win.
Speaker 4: If you if if we convened a council of renowned,
Speaker 4: uh cynical right wing consultants to figure out the perfect scandal,
Speaker 4: they would come up with this one.
Speaker 3: We're going to use. I mean, I figure we use
Speaker 3: this as.
Speaker 4: A stically a suppository for the Democrats all through up
Speaker 4: to the midterms.
Speaker 3: What do you think.
Speaker 6: I think it's a great idea. I mean, the truth
Speaker 6: is they are just really really bad at governing. Look
Speaker 6: at every single blue state in this in this country.
Speaker 6: Look at every blue city. You got crime problems, you
Speaker 6: have budget problems. You've got Democrats promising everybody everything and
Speaker 6: not delivering on any of it. And then people are
Speaker 6: stealing things right up from from under them, and they're
Speaker 6: just like, well, you know, maybe we should let them
Speaker 6: steal it and we shouldn't ask questions. There was a
Speaker 6: CBS reporter, I don't know if you saw this CBS
Speaker 6: reporter who came did a report from Minnesota, and he
Speaker 6: basically was like, well, I checked in with the government
Speaker 6: sources and they assure me there is no fraud.
Speaker 3: Well that's.
Speaker 6: What are you talking about, man, I mean the basic
Speaker 6: level of journalism. You're supposed to question what the government
Speaker 6: is telling you. But evidently when the Democrats says it,
Speaker 6: they take him at their word.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, they.
Speaker 4: Instead of speaking toe truth to power, they stuck the
Speaker 4: toes of power.
Speaker 3: It's it's it's disgusting. I mean, uh, we.
Speaker 4: We've got about a little less a minute left, Johnbrook,
Speaker 4: how do you think I think the economy's coming kicking back.
Speaker 4: I think America is going to hit another boom. I
Speaker 4: think we're going to do fine in the twenty twenty
Speaker 4: six midterms.
Speaker 3: What do you think.
Speaker 6: Well, I'm not super optimistic about the twenty twenty six midterms,
Speaker 6: to be honest with you, Although the more fraud that's
Speaker 6: uncovered in these Democrat run cities, the worse their brand
Speaker 6: that's going to look, and the better the chances for
Speaker 6: Republicans will be in terms of the economy. You know,
Speaker 6: I'm not the expert on that. I'm not as smart
Speaker 6: as not defent, but he's pretty smart and he seems optimistic,
Speaker 6: and he's made the case time and time again that
Speaker 6: when these tax cuts that were passed last year kicking
Speaker 6: at the beginning of this year, it's going to be
Speaker 6: like rocket fuel. And I really hope he's right, and
Speaker 6: I am willing to believe him because he knows a
Speaker 6: whole lot more about it than I do.
Speaker 4: Well, John Ashbrook of Ruthless, thank you for joining me
Speaker 4: on the h Hewitt Show. Please let Josh Holmes know
Speaker 4: that I am a supporter of his porn staff.
Speaker 3: I think it.
Speaker 4: Looks great, and everybody stick around because I'm guest.
Speaker 3: Knows Kurt Schlicker, and we got a lot more to come.
Speaker 4: There are trial lawyers, and there are trial lawyers, and
Speaker 4: this next guest is one of the latter.
Speaker 3: He's Ted Frank.
Speaker 4: He's the director of Litigation at the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute.
Speaker 4: You've probably seen him on the Twitter machine at Ted
Speaker 4: Frank ted fri ns k and he's a pal of
Speaker 4: mine who turned me onto Pinkerton's Barbecue in Houston.
Speaker 3: Ted, Welcome to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 2: My pleasure.
Speaker 7: It's a real honor to be here.
Speaker 2: Thanks. What happening.
Speaker 4: I know it's your first time on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 4: Can you I know your background, but in about twenty seconds,
Speaker 4: can you sketch it out for the audience so they
Speaker 4: know who's going to be giving him some insights.
Speaker 2: Sure.
Speaker 8: I'm an attorney that leads a conservative public interest law firm,
Speaker 8: the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute hll I dot org.
Speaker 2: We've bought against class action lawyers.
Speaker 8: We've fought against government overreach, especially California First Amendment violations,
Speaker 8: and we have some litigation now pending against left wing
Speaker 8: NGOs that organize disruptive demonstrations in the cities that block
Speaker 8: roads and keep people stuck in traffic for hours.
Speaker 4: So when people talk about law fare, you guys are
Speaker 4: the ones who counterattack.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 4: Oh well, there's no better defense than a good offense.
Speaker 4: And I say that as a guy who's primarily a
Speaker 4: corporate defense attorney. For years and years and years, ted
Speaker 4: people have been seeing what's going on in the law.
Speaker 4: It seems like organized resistance to Donald Trump among primarily
Speaker 4: Democrat appointed district court judges throughout the United States. You
Speaker 4: and I both practice in the practice or practiced in
Speaker 4: front of district court judges, and you know, normal people
Speaker 4: look at and think this is kind of weird. It
Speaker 4: doesn't sound right. You know, I practice there for thirty years.
Speaker 4: They're right, it's weird and it doesn't sound right.
Speaker 2: How would you.
Speaker 3: Characterize the last year of litigation?
Speaker 8: There seems to be special rules that apply to Trump
Speaker 8: that don't apply to other presidents. And we just have
Speaker 8: a number of district court judges that are making effectively
Speaker 8: lawless rulings and putting themselves in the position to rule
Speaker 8: the executive branch or control the military, or order planes
Speaker 8: to turn around, or order Congress to spend money that
Speaker 8: they've explicitly said they don't want to spend. We have
Speaker 8: one judge in the First Circuit who's now been reversed
Speaker 8: three times, not even by the Supreme Court, but by
Speaker 8: the First Circuit, which has one Republican appointed judge in
Speaker 8: the entire bench.
Speaker 3: What can.
Speaker 8: You know?
Speaker 4: The criticism is Supreme Court. It is, well, you're not
Speaker 4: acting normally. You're you're doing things that you know you're
Speaker 4: you're breaking down guardrails. And my response is, way, man,
Speaker 4: the guardrails are gone. The Supreme courts reacting to bizarre
Speaker 4: procedural and bizarre substantive rulings. And when you have to
Speaker 4: react to things that are weird and wrong, you can't
Speaker 4: do that by being the same way you were when
Speaker 4: there was some kind of coherence to it.
Speaker 8: I don't even think the Supreme Court is doing something
Speaker 8: all that different than what it's been doing for the
Speaker 8: last ten years. They're they're enforcing the law, they're calling
Speaker 8: balls and strikes. The administration doesn't bring every case before
Speaker 8: the Supreme Court. I think they're they're picking and choosing
Speaker 8: their cases and picking the cases.
Speaker 7: That are most likely to win. And even then they
Speaker 7: don't win all the time.
Speaker 8: And and uh often to the disapproval of Justice Alito,
Speaker 8: who's spoken out against what the Court is Last week
Speaker 8: in Trump the Illinois.
Speaker 3: Well, Trump vi.
Speaker 4: Illinois was a case involving the deployment of the National Guard,
Speaker 4: and I look at that, and.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a very.
Speaker 4: Textual based kind of decision with without a lot of
Speaker 4: concern for the practicalities. The practicality being that the President
Speaker 4: could just go, Okay, if I can't use that statue
Speaker 4: to bring up the National Guard, I just declare the
Speaker 4: Insurrection Act in effect and sending the active duty Marines.
Speaker 4: My objection, Ted Frank, is that you know, we are
Speaker 4: litigating things in a way they shouldn't be litigated, and
Speaker 4: it's going to lead to jarring and off putting results.
Speaker 8: I think that's right, and I certainly have some concern
Speaker 8: that there are people in the left that like it
Speaker 8: that way, that they're really working to tear down down
Speaker 8: the guardrails of the judicial branch as a check on
Speaker 8: the presidency in the hopes of discrediting it down the
Speaker 8: road for either court packing the next time they take
Speaker 8: the Senate and the Presidency at the same time, or
Speaker 8: for their own sort of constitutional crisis in disregarding the
Speaker 8: orders of the Supreme Court. Well, Ted Frank, And we
Speaker 8: actually have Harvard and Yale law professors that seem to
Speaker 8: think that this is a wise strategy in writing op
Speaker 8: eds claiming that the Court has discredited itself.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, once again a huge problem in our
Speaker 4: society is so many people and positions of authority within
Speaker 4: our institutions have never been in a playground fist fight.
Speaker 4: They seem, you know, when they start talking about, well,
Speaker 4: you know, we'll discredit the court and then we'll pack
Speaker 4: it and then well, and then what do they expect
Speaker 4: the Americans who who you know, filled the court with
Speaker 4: people who believed as they did, who went through the
Speaker 4: proper process, who won their cases, and are suddenly dispossessed
Speaker 4: of that political power that they earned fair and square.
Speaker 4: They're suddenly going to roll over on their backs when
Speaker 4: you change the rules.
Speaker 3: You can only pull so.
Speaker 4: Many blocks out of the Djenga tower before Article three
Speaker 4: comes crashing down.
Speaker 2: I think that's right.
Speaker 8: And you know, we hear the left talking about, oh,
Speaker 8: let's add six more Supreme Court justices, And in one sense,
Speaker 8: I like that, because my best chance to be on
Speaker 8: the Supreme Court is as appointed to the swing forty
Speaker 8: third votes sometime in ten years.
Speaker 2: But it really would discredit the court.
Speaker 8: Once you start saying, the Court is this political institution,
Speaker 8: and we will appoint people who will act politically.
Speaker 4: If they're going to act politically, then they're just a
Speaker 4: political force, and they're going to be treated as a
Speaker 4: political force to be defeated and evaded and countermanded. You know,
Speaker 4: you brought some up interest, You brought some interesting up
Speaker 4: to me. You are a litigator. You are a fine litigator.
Speaker 4: I know the difference between good ones and bad ones,
Speaker 4: and you are a shockingly good one.
Speaker 3: And would you.
Speaker 4: Ever consider being a disrecort judge? Would Donald Trump come knocking?
Speaker 8: They probably think my life expectancy is too short to
Speaker 8: do that. But I think I'm past the age where
Speaker 8: people get appointed to be judges in the twenty first
Speaker 8: in the yeah, in the twenty first century. But I
Speaker 8: you know, I'd be flattered to be considered to be
Speaker 8: a judge. I imagine i'd get some questions at my
Speaker 8: that they'd have a lot of tweets to pour through
Speaker 8: at my nomination hearing. But I I certainly wouldn't complain
Speaker 8: if if, if, if somebody envisioned that for me.
Speaker 4: Well, look there there are you know. Of course, we
Speaker 4: currently have nine Supreme Court Justices. I I hear some
Speaker 4: talk that perhaps Justice Alito may retire next year, maybe
Speaker 4: Justice Thomas.
Speaker 3: What what do you what?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: What do you think about that?
Speaker 8: I mean, certainly I hear the same rumors everybody else does,
Speaker 8: that that that Alito UH would would find it wisest
Speaker 8: to retire at the end of this term and.
Speaker 7: Uh be replaced while he knows that.
Speaker 8: There's a Republican Senate there to replace him and and
Speaker 8: not block.
Speaker 7: Or keep this seat empty. The rumors.
Speaker 8: I you know, I one thing I hear about Thomas
Speaker 8: is that he plans to do this as long as
Speaker 8: he's healthy and if he gets replaced. I don't know
Speaker 8: that he cares so much about the political nature of
Speaker 8: what would happen on his replacement. On the other hand,
Speaker 8: maybe he does, and he's looking to break Douglas's.
Speaker 7: Record and get replaced at the end of this term.
Speaker 4: Well, Ted, Frank, thank you for joining us on The
Speaker 4: Hugh Hewitt Show. I'm guest host Kurch Schlichter. Sticking around,
Speaker 4: We got a lot more to god.
Speaker 3: Welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 4: I'm guest host Kurt Schlichter, Senior commonist at townhall dot Com.
Speaker 4: Former trial lawyer, retired Army colonel, author of the new
Speaker 4: book Panama Read, the ninth in the Kelly Turbul series.
Speaker 4: It's a novel, It's fun, it's exciting. It was the
Speaker 4: number one political thriller at Amazon for a while. Panama
Speaker 4: read You need to go out and get it. I
Speaker 4: a is a conservative author. I came up with Andrew Breitbart.
Speaker 4: Andrew said, you guys, you gotta make your own culture.
Speaker 4: You gotta go do it. Don't complain about Hollywood, don't
Speaker 4: complain about the book industry.
Speaker 3: Go do it yourself. And I did.
Speaker 4: But there are some people who are taking the book
Speaker 4: industry by storm. And one of those guys is Tony Daniel.
Speaker 4: He is the editor in chief at ARC Press. You
Speaker 4: can follow him at at Tony Daniels seven seven seven.
Speaker 4: Tony was also my editor at Regnery for my last
Speaker 4: nonfiction book, We'll be back, Tony. Welcome to the show. Hey,
Speaker 4: how's it going, Kurt, It's going great.
Speaker 3: What's the mission of ARC Press?
Speaker 9: Well, basically, we're doing exactly what Andrew Breitbart said. He
Speaker 9: you know, he famously said politics is downstream to culture,
Speaker 9: and I always took that to heart. I've always been
Speaker 9: a fiction writer first and a fiction editor first and
Speaker 9: then got into nonfiction, and it just seemed like we
Speaker 9: had lost this ability around twenty ten or so to
Speaker 9: really come at to bring the beliefs of conservative, dumb etc.
Speaker 9: To the storytelling genre anymore, because it was being wiped
Speaker 9: out by wokeness and the whole twenty ten nastiness that
Speaker 9: happened to us. A few people managed to persevere, like
Speaker 9: you who old culture warriors fought through, but a little
Speaker 9: a generation sort of was stamped out and disappeared and
Speaker 9: they didn't have a chance to flower. And I wanted
Speaker 9: to provide that again. And that's part of the mission
Speaker 9: of arc Is is to bring back the possibility of
Speaker 9: telling long of writing long form stories, and for men
Speaker 9: and women to enjoy these, to get away from the
Speaker 9: video games and the nastiness of you know, online culture
Speaker 9: and sit down with a good book and read it.
Speaker 9: For I think that especially younger, younger guys and younger
Speaker 9: women just lack this. They almost don't even know it exists,
Speaker 9: and when they find it, it can transform their lives.
Speaker 3: Well, tell me, Daniel.
Speaker 4: One of the things I noticed dealing with other publishers
Speaker 4: because right Noor he was not my only publisher during
Speaker 4: the time, and observing from outside is so much of
Speaker 4: the traditional press now it's no longer the hard bitten editor,
Speaker 4: you know, chomping on a cigar with his red pen.
Speaker 3: It's these Maxwell Perkins exactly.
Speaker 4: It's these ssrright gobbling chardonnay wine women complaining that you
Speaker 4: don't have enough transsexual, lesbian Hindus who are differently abled
Speaker 4: in the stories. And all the stories are are things
Speaker 4: like you know, where the turtle cries at dawn and
Speaker 4: it's like, where's a man going to find somebody to
Speaker 4: read in this heap of woke garbage?
Speaker 3: You want to change that?
Speaker 9: Absolutely, We're you know, we're aiming at a at a male,
Speaker 9: regular guy audience. Now, of course guys read, they read, uh,
Speaker 9: they read thrillers, they read science fiction. They they like mysteries,
Speaker 9: hard boiled mysteries and police procedurals. And so we're coming
Speaker 9: at it from a genre sort of angle in order
Speaker 9: to give guys things that they actually like to read
Speaker 9: again instead of, you know, the publishing world has become this.
Speaker 10: This sort of.
Speaker 9: I don't know how you would say it. They they
Speaker 9: they are appendage of politics. They want everything has to
Speaker 9: be a left wing grievance, as as you know, interpreted
Speaker 9: by some of most of the editors have graduated from
Speaker 9: the Seven Sisters, went to New York and never had
Speaker 9: another job or another life. In fact, most of the
Speaker 9: editors in New York, you may notice, all have the
Speaker 9: exact same accent yes, which is yes exactly, so you're.
Speaker 2: Going to get the.
Speaker 9: And the audience has just skewed female and female of
Speaker 9: a certain variety over the last ten fifteen years, and.
Speaker 2: Men have just sort of been excluded.
Speaker 9: There's a few like you and like people like brad
Speaker 9: Or or Andrew Claven.
Speaker 2: Elroy is still around.
Speaker 9: You know, and car but we had sort of the
Speaker 9: generation of people that died that were great conservative based
Speaker 9: writers that came from the tradition, and they haven't been
Speaker 9: replaced at the rate that they once were. We've lost
Speaker 9: the community, and I think that, just like Andrew Breitbard,
Speaker 9: I'd like to try to re establish that storytelling, fiction, character, plot,
Speaker 9: and setting, not just political polemics, as important as that is.
Speaker 9: If you really want to take over and guide the culture,
Speaker 9: you got to come at it from art, because that's
Speaker 9: where the human feeling is expressed.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you've got and Andrew Andrew Breitbart made no bones
Speaker 4: about it.
Speaker 3: You've got to be good.
Speaker 4: It's it's not enough to say, hey, this book is conservative,
Speaker 4: you've got to buy it. You've got to like it.
Speaker 4: I don't do that. No, no guy I know does that.
Speaker 4: You've got to give him something there that they want.
Speaker 4: And I think, if I say so myself, I'm on
Speaker 4: nine Kelly Turnbull novels. I've sold hundreds of thousands of them,
Speaker 4: including the latest Panama Red, which you should go get
Speaker 4: on Amazon. But the secret is, and I get these emails, Tony,
Speaker 4: and I get these reviews where they go.
Speaker 3: Kurt, it's fun. It's not a painful duty. We haven't yet.
Speaker 4: When you read it, you have a good time. And
Speaker 4: let me let me ask you something here. Here's my
Speaker 4: my feeling as a writer. I think that your books
Speaker 4: should be all good parts. If it's not interesting, does
Speaker 4: it make a cool point? If it's not, or if
Speaker 4: it's not funny, you cut it out? Is that so hard?
Speaker 9: I think that's an excellent, uh, an excellent paradigm for
Speaker 9: for a great fiction book. I mean all all books,
Speaker 9: all great novels turn on character, plot and setting and
Speaker 9: you get those three things right, and you will.
Speaker 2: And if you are writing from.
Speaker 9: A perspective of real life, coming from something you know
Speaker 9: as a writer, you're going to interest readers in that
Speaker 9: and you're going to pull them in and it could
Speaker 9: be something like the thriller aspect of your books. But
Speaker 9: the truth is, I also think you're quite a good
Speaker 9: literary writer within there.
Speaker 3: Oh don't say that on the hack.
Speaker 2: I know, I hate, I know you got you.
Speaker 9: And like one of our art writers, Larry Correa, always
Speaker 9: talk about, you know, like that's just entertainment, but both
Speaker 9: of you guys have are have really top top not
Speaker 9: top lecks. You're really good at it, and and that's
Speaker 9: what you have to do.
Speaker 2: You have to go for that. When you're an editor.
Speaker 9: You have to find a writer that can deliver that
Speaker 9: to the reader, your other reader's representative when you're an editor,
Speaker 9: So you you.
Speaker 2: Look for that.
Speaker 9: You look for you look for somebody that can tell
Speaker 9: a story first and then and if it comes from
Speaker 9: tradition and a full understanding of life, it's probably going
Speaker 9: to be conservative, you know, just because that's reality, you know,
Speaker 9: and that makes the best books.
Speaker 2: And that's as simple as it is.
Speaker 9: But nobody seems to follow that that formula, but I
Speaker 9: intend to with the arc.
Speaker 3: Well with ark.
Speaker 4: Now we have our our press is going to be
Speaker 4: doing great things in the future. You've got a big
Speaker 4: book coming out from Larry Correa. My wife is a
Speaker 4: huge fan and uh I, you know it's all. It's
Speaker 4: been a pleasure working with you in the past, Tony Daniel.
Speaker 4: I urge everybody to go out and check out art Press.
Speaker 4: You find him online, see what they thought, and give
Speaker 4: him a shot and give that man in your life
Speaker 4: or woman a chance to read something that's not woke garbage.
Speaker 4: I'm Kirt Schlickter. This is the huge Hewitt show, stick
Speaker 4: around with got On Moreton.
Speaker 3: And this is a k.
Speaker 4: Dog in the white Beamur are about to put the
Speaker 4: hammer down on the Huehuet Show. I've guess it was
Speaker 4: kirch Slickter. One of my favorite people in the world
Speaker 4: is joining me now. It's Selena's Zito and she is
Speaker 4: a Washington Examiner columnist, the author of Butler. You can
Speaker 4: follow her at Zito Selena where I saw that she
Speaker 4: tweeted that convoy the CW McCall chest Night is what
Speaker 4: fifty years old in twenty twenty six, Selena.
Speaker 11: It is and I don't you know, I tweeted that
Speaker 11: I don't think people have an understanding of what a
Speaker 11: cultural impact that song had and then also spawned a
Speaker 11: couple of television shows and movies. But but but also
Speaker 11: people forget why because that was in the middle of
Speaker 11: the energy crisis, right, and truckers are being regulated to death,
Speaker 11: and they became this sort of symbol of these independent
Speaker 11: cowboys that were fighting the system. And they're they're also
Speaker 11: part of what started to shift in America in terms
Speaker 11: of trust in government, trust and institutions, and and it's
Speaker 11: just this one one of the many grains that changed us.
Speaker 11: But that song was big. But it's not even that
Speaker 11: the song was great. It's just that formed a community
Speaker 11: around it and a resistance and this sort of spark
Speaker 11: of independence that was really a cultural touchdown.
Speaker 4: I think you're right, of course, it was a bi centennial.
Speaker 4: This is the bi centennial plus point two five. There
Speaker 4: was another thing. The Cbee radio was kind of a
Speaker 4: early social media kind of thing because it.
Speaker 3: Was a way that people could communicate.
Speaker 4: That's what fascinated me, is a suburban kid about it,
Speaker 4: because you could just talk to regular people, and there
Speaker 4: were no gatekeepers.
Speaker 3: I thought that was really interesting.
Speaker 11: There was no gatekeepers. My dad had a Cbee radio.
Speaker 11: He was not a trucker, although at one time he
Speaker 11: was a teamster, but we used it. We communicated with
Speaker 11: my uncle who was a trucker. We took tons of
Speaker 11: road trips.
Speaker 2: You can.
Speaker 11: You can tell that's where I'd get my love of
Speaker 11: road trips from.
Speaker 2: But man, you just felt so.
Speaker 11: Empowered to be able to have these conversations, and it
Speaker 11: was a real sense of being part of something bigger
Speaker 11: than self.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was really kind of cool. Now it's being
Speaker 4: a kind of cool. You have had perhaps the coolest
Speaker 4: year of anybody in twenty twenty five not named Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: He had a number one best seller in Butler, which
Speaker 4: I high recommend. It's not just a story of the assassination,
Speaker 4: it's the story of the whole campaign and the whole country.
Speaker 4: So you also went bear hunting. So what's ahead for
Speaker 4: Selena's eto in twenty twenty six? How are you going
Speaker 4: to top that?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 11: Well, there's so many things that people do in America,
Speaker 11: And I'm sort of like Micro's little sister, right, I'm
Speaker 11: always willing to jump in and try something. I also
Speaker 11: went twelve hundred feet down in a coal mine and
Speaker 11: dragged poor Senator Dave McCormick along with me.
Speaker 3: Take that army guy.
Speaker 11: Yeah, worked in a steel mill for a day. Like,
Speaker 11: if I'm going to cover it, I'm going to do it.
Speaker 11: And that's that's sort of my motto. And if people
Speaker 11: don't follow me or don't read me, the way I
Speaker 11: approach recording is is to I don't fly, and I
Speaker 11: don't take the interstate. I only take back roads and
Speaker 11: I try to stay and learn from a community. But
Speaker 11: being on theund and basically just hanging out with people,
Speaker 11: most importantly listening to people. I think that that's missing
Speaker 11: in my profession. I'm not the story. I'm never the story,
Speaker 11: and so that's what I try to do when I
Speaker 11: tell the story of our country.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, Selena, I think I think what I'm
Speaker 4: gonna do is I'm see if I can reach out
Speaker 4: to some of my pals, see if I can get
Speaker 4: you embedded with some National guardsmen doing annual training for
Speaker 4: a day or two so you could see what these.
Speaker 11: Oh I've done that, I've been embedded on the border. Nice,
Speaker 11: I've embedded the Coastguard on fourth of July and there
Speaker 11: was a tornado that came and so by regulation, I
Speaker 11: had to get off the boat and I had to jump.
Speaker 11: And people have to understand, I'm five foot tall, so
Speaker 11: my end seem it's not that long. But they made
Speaker 11: me jump from the boat to the shoreline, which was
Speaker 11: about five feet.
Speaker 2: So there was that because I had.
Speaker 7: To get off the boat.
Speaker 4: Well, I well, I once sent Hugh Hewett to Kosovo
Speaker 4: for a week, which I don't know if he's ever
Speaker 4: forgiven me for. But in any case, Selena Somali daycare nightmare.
Speaker 4: First of all, I never was in daycare. My mom
Speaker 4: did the old fashioned seventies way. She gave me a
Speaker 4: key and said you're on your own kid. But with
Speaker 4: this this giant scandal, you actually talk to normal people.
Speaker 4: What are normal people? Are normal people talking about it?
Speaker 4: And if they are, what are they saying.
Speaker 11: What they're saying is we're not surprised if you are
Speaker 11: handing out money like that and you are too lazy
Speaker 11: to be accountable, and you're trying to appease a section
Speaker 11: of society so that they you then earned their votes.
Speaker 11: There's going to be a lot of people looking the
Speaker 11: other way when things happen, and I suspect we are
Speaker 11: going to find this out about a number of different things,
Speaker 11: not just the the Somali refugees. I think this is
Speaker 11: going and this was the last chapter in the in Butler.
Speaker 11: This is why Butler is so important, because it's not
Speaker 11: just about then, It's about now, it's about going forward.
Speaker 2: There is a true reckoning in my profession.
Speaker 11: I understand that, but I think there are a lot
Speaker 11: a lot of people looking, not looking, not questioning, not
Speaker 11: asking questions.
Speaker 2: UH in a lot of big.
Speaker 11: UH government aided charities that that need more scrutiny. Reporters
Speaker 11: nowadays are more interested in what's going to drive the
Speaker 11: most clicks. To me, the most interesting stories that I
Speaker 11: have done this year hardly got any click at all.
Speaker 11: But it didn't matter because they were really good, well
Speaker 11: reported stories. To me, it didn't matter. I'm sure it
Speaker 11: mattered to my bosses.
Speaker 2: They didn't matter.
Speaker 11: My job is to get in there and find out
Speaker 11: the story and then listen. And we've taken our focus
Speaker 11: off that as reporters.
Speaker 4: Well, Selena, we only got about twenty seconds left in
Speaker 4: normal America. How are people feeling about the economy. I'm
Speaker 4: feeling pretty good about it. But you know, I'm in
Speaker 4: Los Angeles, so it ain't exactly normal America.
Speaker 7: Well, so I'm.
Speaker 11: In western Pennsylvania, and the thing that's really big here
Speaker 11: is the development of AI data power centers and the
Speaker 11: energy need to dis serve it. That's creating a lot
Speaker 11: of good paying jobs.
Speaker 4: Well that's good to hear. Selena Zecho, Happy new year
Speaker 4: to you. I hope twenty twenty six is even better
Speaker 4: than twenty twenty five, if that's possible. I'm Kurt Schlickter,
Speaker 4: guest hosting for the Great Hugh at Stick Around Somar
Speaker 4: s gets out on stage at the Leering Center. They're
Speaker 4: cranking def Leppard and making it rain on. Kurt Schlichter
Speaker 4: here on The hu Hewitt Show, guest hosting rounding out
Speaker 4: twenty twenty five. It's been a great year. It's been
Speaker 4: an amazing year, and twenty twenty six is even going
Speaker 4: to be better. And let's welcome my next guess. He's
Speaker 4: my pal, Matt Betley. He is an occasional town Hall columnist.
Speaker 4: You can follow him at Matthew Betley. He's also an author,
Speaker 4: and you've got a new book coming out. I believe
Speaker 4: in April, right.
Speaker 10: Matt, I do Kurt First. Happy New Year's Eve, also
Speaker 10: known as Amateur Night.
Speaker 3: Wait, wait, well there's more.
Speaker 4: You are a United States Marine, as the sign behind
Speaker 4: your head tells the entire universe. You're also very open
Speaker 4: that you you had a battle with alcohol holism. You
Speaker 4: have been sober for a long time, and I think
Speaker 4: it's right night to talk about sobriety.
Speaker 2: No, I agree.
Speaker 10: You know, it's funny everyone talks about resolutions every New
Speaker 10: Year's Eve, and as we know, what like twenty five
Speaker 10: percent of them fail within the first couple of days.
Speaker 10: You know, sobriety is a lifestyle change. I've got seventeen
Speaker 10: years of it in March, and I'm very open about it.
Speaker 10: I talk about it at every opportunity I can. The
Speaker 10: reason being is if a guy like I can get sober,
Speaker 10: then anybody out there who's struggling with the same kind
Speaker 10: of problem can Because it was honestly one of the
Speaker 10: hardest things I've ever done, and that includes ten years
Speaker 10: in the Marine Corps. And I was very fortunate that
Speaker 10: I actually chose to use the military's outpatient program at
Speaker 10: Andrew's Joint Base Andrews to do it so and I'm
Speaker 10: still going strong.
Speaker 3: Well, let me let me ask you, Matt and I.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't want to dwell on it, because
Speaker 4: you know we I do want to talk about your
Speaker 4: new book coming out, but.
Speaker 3: Uh, just it.
Speaker 4: You know you when I have hung out and when
Speaker 4: we hang out, look, I drink alcohol. I will not
Speaker 4: drink around you. I think that would be disrespectful. Does
Speaker 4: it bother you when you're out with people and they.
Speaker 3: Drink, not at all.
Speaker 10: In fact, I recently joked that if when I was
Speaker 10: back in my drinking days, especially the heavy drinking days
Speaker 10: in the mid nineties, you know, you'd go to a
Speaker 10: bar and there'd be like the bikini gold Schlager or
Speaker 10: Jaegermeister girls like I could be in a room full
Speaker 10: of those people nowadays and it wouldn't even phase me
Speaker 10: for a second.
Speaker 2: So my foundation for sobriety is pretty strong.
Speaker 6: You know.
Speaker 2: I remind people once I got.
Speaker 10: Sober and stayed sober that if I weren't sober, I'd
Speaker 10: probably be dead.
Speaker 2: Unemployed, alone, or all of the above.
Speaker 10: Well, you know I have a very extreme Oh, go
Speaker 10: go ahead, well before, I have a very extreme personality
Speaker 10: and when I used to go out, we used to joke,
Speaker 10: especially in the Marine Corps, it was somebody's going to jail,
Speaker 10: someone's going to the hospital, something's going to be set
Speaker 10: on fire, or all three.
Speaker 3: And I can that's Friday night at the Army Barracks.
Speaker 4: Well, Matt, before we move on to your books, because
Speaker 4: I do want to talk about them. We've been talking
Speaker 4: a lot about books today and how important it is
Speaker 4: for books written for men about madly things. If somebody
Speaker 4: has someone in their life with an alcohol or substance problem,
Speaker 4: what can they do to help.
Speaker 10: The first thing they could do is if they know
Speaker 10: somebody like I who's been sober for a bit of time,
Speaker 10: they can reach out to a person they know and trust.
Speaker 10: But the other thing they can do is call alcoholics anonymous.
Speaker 10: There are anonymous phone lines where someone can guide you
Speaker 10: through those first steps. I will tell you that, you know,
Speaker 10: I had struggled with it for years, but it took
Speaker 10: me realizing I had a problem to actually commit to it.
Speaker 10: And I tried to quit before. But you know, it's
Speaker 10: it's that whole proverbial rock bottom. I hit mine, and
Speaker 10: thank god I did when I did.
Speaker 3: Well, you've got a great life.
Speaker 4: Now, you've got a career in public service, you've got
Speaker 4: a wonderful family, and you also have a new book
Speaker 4: coming out, and you have a history of books.
Speaker 3: Tell us about your new book.
Speaker 10: So the new book is called The Council, and it
Speaker 10: comes out in April of next year. And this book
Speaker 10: is probably the best thing I've written. It's a very intense,
Speaker 10: visceral story. I'm known for writing these roller coaster, action
Speaker 10: packed thrill rides, but this one, which is a rocket
Speaker 10: ride from page one, But it's really about a group
Speaker 10: of people who are all suffering from indescribable grief. They
Speaker 10: all lost loved ones to violent crime, sought vengeance on
Speaker 10: their own thought they got away with it, and are
Speaker 10: then blackmailed to form an assassination team to work for
Speaker 10: this organization to pay off their blood debt, and then
Speaker 10: things go horribly sideways on a mission in Mexico and
Speaker 10: next thing you know, they're all fighting for their lives
Speaker 10: against the same organization. Which is all I'll say about it,
Speaker 10: but it really hones, you know, Hammer's home the themes
Speaker 10: of grief redemption. What would you do if you're in
Speaker 10: this position. It's a very intense thrill ride for people
Speaker 10: who like that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: Well, you know, you've written books before. You have a
Speaker 4: whole other series of books, and they're traditionally published. It's
Speaker 4: getting hard to publish fiction that you know, it's action
Speaker 4: packed and focused on men. So much of it is
Speaker 4: focused on you know, I'm a young writer and acting
Speaker 4: as a professor at a college, and I have lots
Speaker 4: of feelings.
Speaker 3: There's my novel.
Speaker 10: Well, when I I decided to write, I actually said, okay,
Speaker 10: what would I sat down and wrote what I would
Speaker 10: want to read. And that's how my first book, Overwatch,
Speaker 10: ended up getting published with my Logan West series.
Speaker 2: At Simon and Schuster.
Speaker 10: And now I'm with Blackstone and they published this book.
Speaker 10: They published my life last book, The Neighborhood. But it's
Speaker 10: a hard business, you know what. There's a lot of
Speaker 10: things they don't tell you. They can promise you the
Speaker 10: moon and the stars, but the reality is is in
Speaker 10: traditional publishing, it's all about sales and that's it. You
Speaker 10: could be the most talented writer since Hemingway and it
Speaker 10: wouldn't matter if your books don't sell. I'm just glad
Speaker 10: that I'm still being published because I know a lot
Speaker 10: of people who can even get published, and it's it's
Speaker 10: a brutal, very brutal business, and it's not for the
Speaker 10: faint of heart at all.
Speaker 3: Well, but people love your books.
Speaker 4: The feedback that you get is incredible, as is the
Speaker 4: feedback I get, including on Panama read my novel.
Speaker 3: We all got to promote Baby, but the cancel.
Speaker 4: What have people been saying about the council. Now I've
Speaker 4: had a chance to I've had a chance to look
Speaker 4: at the cover. I haven't read it yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 10: No. We actually got a couple early reviews, and I
Speaker 10: was very happy to hear that one of the thriller
Speaker 10: sites that reviews the books coming out next year actually
Speaker 10: called it the leading contender for Thriller of the Year
Speaker 10: for twenty twenty six and this person had.
Speaker 2: Already read a bunch of them by a lot of
Speaker 2: the big name authors.
Speaker 10: So I was very flattered and humbled to get that
Speaker 10: because at the end of the day, yes, I want
Speaker 10: the book to sell well and I want to keep
Speaker 10: doing this, but it's all about entertaining the reader, and
Speaker 10: it's the readers who matter the most.
Speaker 4: Now, my books are the Kelly Turnbul series. They're explicitly conservative,
Speaker 4: are your books explicitly conservative or do they just get
Speaker 4: coded right wing because they're about like men doing manly things.
Speaker 10: No, so I intentionally kind of stay apolitical and my thrillers.
Speaker 10: In fact, in the Logan West series, I had a
Speaker 10: blue dog Democrat, which I'm not sure that exists anymore
Speaker 10: as the president. And I just you know, when I
Speaker 10: read a book, I want to be entertained. I don't
Speaker 10: want to be lectured to. Now you're the exception to
Speaker 10: the rule. You're as I told you, personally, you're the
Speaker 10: most successful self published author I know. And people love
Speaker 10: your stuff because you're an excellent writer and because it's
Speaker 10: infused with your sarcasm and pros. In my case, I
Speaker 10: just want people to have a good time and move on.
Speaker 4: Well, Matt Bentley, you have a great twenty twenty six
Speaker 4: to you and your lovely family. I'm sure we'll probably
Speaker 4: talk when I'm driving home up the four o five.
Speaker 4: Thanks for joinings like a Plan, Thanks for joining us
Speaker 4: on the Hugh Hwitt Joe And because as kirch Slicker,
Speaker 4: we still have more to come to stick around.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to America. I'm Hugh Hewett. I'm reminding everyone
Speaker 1: Angel Tree is underway. We only have a couple of
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Speaker 2: Hugh.
Speaker 3: We're back on a Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 4: And of course that bumper music is just like Honey
Speaker 4: by the Jesus and Mary Chain, one of the coolest
Speaker 4: songs of the eighties, which took place long before My
Speaker 4: next guest was born. Sarah Bedford is He is the
Speaker 4: Washington Examiner political investigative reporter.
Speaker 3: You can follow it Sarah C. Bedford. Sarah, Welcome to
Speaker 3: Hugh Hewitt Show.
Speaker 12: Hi, thanks for having me. Thank you for pointing out
Speaker 12: that I'm young in that intro.
Speaker 7: Love it?
Speaker 4: Have you ever heard the Jesus and Mary Chains? Just
Speaker 4: like Connie before?
Speaker 2: I hadn't, but I enjoyed it.
Speaker 7: Its beautiful.
Speaker 4: It's an incredible song. I have a long story about
Speaker 4: the first concert. Everyone else was goth I wore a
Speaker 4: Hawaiian shirt. It was amazing. Anyway, let's get to the
Speaker 4: let's get to the good stuff. Somalia Gate. How big
Speaker 4: is this?
Speaker 12: This story is so fascinating to me, and I think
Speaker 12: even if you set aside the immigration angle, and it
Speaker 12: is a crucial angle of this story, but if you
Speaker 12: just look at it as a welfare fraud story, you
Speaker 12: have working class people in Minnesota who are working really
Speaker 12: hard to afford their daycare bills. Childcare is enormously expensive.
Speaker 12: I know I have a one year old. It's a
Speaker 12: really big part of family's budgets. And so for a
Speaker 12: regular voter to see that millions of dollars are going
Speaker 12: for these warehouses to.
Speaker 2: Sit empty, to enrich a favored group of people, regardless.
Speaker 12: Of their race, that alone makes it an extremely potent story.
Speaker 4: Well, Sarah, I think this hits Democrats in three different places.
Speaker 4: It hits them on immigration, it hits them on welfare,
Speaker 4: and it hits them on the ability to effectively govern.
Speaker 4: I mean, it is a win win for Republicans, and
Speaker 4: I hope we use it as a suppository all through
Speaker 4: the next election cycle.
Speaker 12: Yeah, that last one is so crucial because Donald Trump,
Speaker 12: for the first time in my lifetime that I've seen
Speaker 12: in politics, had sort of made democratic governance a real
Speaker 12: live issue, when for a long time it's seems like
Speaker 12: sort of part of the background of politics, it was
Speaker 12: sort of acknowledged that crime was higher, things were more expensive,
Speaker 12: life was just a little bit worse in blue cities
Speaker 12: and states, and that was just sort of baked into
Speaker 12: the equation. And Donald Trump had made that a live issue,
Speaker 12: and that could increasingly be the case when you see
Speaker 12: things like this. Part of why it seems that Minnesota
Speaker 12: was unable to catch this level of fraud, and we've
Speaker 12: written about this recently at the Examiner this week, the
Speaker 12: people that Tim Walls appointed to run these agencies had very,
Speaker 12: very progressive backgrounds. The one who's overseeing the agency that
Speaker 12: runs the childcare subsidy program, she was on an anti
Speaker 12: racist steering committee her resume where she was like a
Speaker 12: woke liberal professor's dream. And the woman who ran the
Speaker 12: agency before her had been involved in resettling the Somalians
Speaker 12: that are in the first place through a nonprofit before
Speaker 12: she joined the state government. So these are people who
Speaker 12: have embraced woke ideology, and now you sort of see
Speaker 12: some of the fruits of that when this fraud went
Speaker 12: completely undetected by the people who were supposed to catch it.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 4: Sarah Bedford of The Washington Examiner, Yeah, the Democrats are
Speaker 4: upset about this, but so is your profession. Now, I
Speaker 4: assume you went to some sort of journalism school. Did
Speaker 4: they teach you that the right thing to do is
Speaker 4: get on the phone and call people or get out
Speaker 4: there and knock on doors, because that's what Nick Shirley
Speaker 4: seemed to have done, and he seems to be running
Speaker 4: circles around the established journalist professionals.
Speaker 12: His impact is really really impressive, and not least of
Speaker 12: all because there have been stories about fraud in the
Speaker 12: Somala community in Minnesota for years, and under the Bid
Speaker 12: administration there was a huge bust of a two hundred
Speaker 12: and fifty million dollar fraud ring as a result of
Speaker 12: excess COVID spending, and it never broke through in the
Speaker 12: way that Nick Shirley's one YouTube video has. Even though
Speaker 12: it was The New York Times, it was covered by
Speaker 12: the legacy media. It just shows the impact when you
Speaker 12: combine the visuals of those empty buildings with misspellings on
Speaker 12: the banners and stuff like that, that independent journalism has
Speaker 12: such a disparate impact. And again, this story really has everything.
Speaker 12: It's also a story about the decline of the legacy
Speaker 12: media in that they are not able to drive the
Speaker 12: narrative here.
Speaker 4: Well, Sarah, you're in Washington, you're a political expert. We're
Speaker 4: going into twenty twenty six. It looks to me like
Speaker 4: we're going to get the economy cooking again. And of course, I,
Speaker 4: as we discussed earlier, I grew up in the eighties.
Speaker 4: I remember the Reagan boom. I remember the first Trump boom.
Speaker 4: I think we're going to have another boom. We have
Speaker 4: about twenty seconds. How do you think the Republicans are
Speaker 4: going to do in twenty twenty six?
Speaker 12: History would say that they got an uphill battle, right
Speaker 12: that the Inn Party usually suffers in the midterms. A
Speaker 12: boom might blunt some of that, but it would take
Speaker 12: something like an economic boom to spare them from the inevitable,
Speaker 12: which is probably losses.
Speaker 4: Okay, all right, well, say Sarah Bedford of the Washington Examiner,
Speaker 4: the political and investigative reporter.
Speaker 3: You can follow her at Sarah with an H. C.
Speaker 4: Bedford, and you should stick around as we finished the year.
Speaker 4: If you're on the uhuite show, I'm guess it's kirch
Speaker 4: Schlichter here right now.