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Well, Republicans are set to win the massive mid decade redistricting battle royale. But will it ultimately matter when it comes to the elections this November and onwards? Well, the answer is actually a bit more complicated than you think. I'm Josh Hatmer and this is the Josh Hatmer Show. James Blair is a name that you probably are not familiar with. We actually mentioned it briefly on yesterday's show in my conversation with Katie Pavlich. But in case you were not paying attention yesterday, or even if you were, James Blair is, is a deputy chief of staff in the White House working under Susie Wiles, essentially alongside Stephen Miller. There in the bowels of the Trump administration, James Blair is typically credited, as his deputy chief of staff title might indicate, he is typically credited as the quarterback of this redistricting game plan. And there was a fascinating article. I was going back and looking back at this just over the past day or so, there was an article from Politica. They came out this past New Year's Eve, so it was this past December 31, talking about the plot to redraw America. And it's like it's a black background, it's, oh, they're trying to make it out to be really, really scary there. They're deliberately, by the way, trying to play on this plot against America theme, which was the show that came out during COVID You might recall it there, this alternative history, what the Nazis won. So Politico trying to make this out to be oh, so scary, the plot to redraw America. So the, the upshot, the thesis of this long political article, which we didn't report on the time, but again, I was deeply enjoying really just licking my chops, going back and looking over over the past day or so is it says Donald Trump was confused. His top political aide, James Blair, arrived in the Oval Office one afternoon this April to pitch a novel gambit. Republicans could begin padding their narrow U.S. house majority well before voters went to the polls in November 2026. And it goes on and on. But here's the funniest part. The funniest part is that the working assumption of this political article was that this redistricting operation failed. So the subtitle of the article is How Donald Trump Launched a Redistricting Caper He Couldn't Pull Off. Well, here we are now just about four and a half months after Politico published this, or I guess five and a half months now to be more precise. And who's laughing now? Well, it's probably the Trump administration problem because they are going to come out the big winners. This at this point it is abundantly clear as we've been reporting there, the Republicans are going to pull off what some like Politico viewed as an inside straight. To borrow a poker analogy there, they have pulled off what many thought was the impossible and they are going to actually by some margin come out ahead in this back and forth. California is going to be the only major Democrat led state that is going to be able to successfully reach district in this mid decade back and forth iterative battle. And they only did so of course because they were able to put this proposition before voters to gut their so called nonpartisan independent redistricting commission there. Gavin Newsom was able to get to get that across. So that's California, be that as it may, but the rest of the country is going to come out on the Republican side of the ledger here. So in deep red Texas, Greg Abbott has netted at least five seats likely for Republicans. Again the, the exact nature of every redistrictioning is going to depend on the states. Every congressional district is different. The margins, the demographics, it's all going to depend on a district by district basis. But Texas likely netting five states here in Florida, where I live, a pretty safe four set majority for Republicans. And then you get into the Voting Rights act fallout. So just yesterday actually we had even more updates for this. It's a very fluid situation here. Again, recall a couple weeks ago we had the Louisiana case at the United States Supreme Court where the Supreme Court issues an utterly commonsensical and decades long overdue ruling, essentially saying that the Voting Rights act, which was passed as a, as a civil rights measure, it was a Martin Luther King Jr. Hallmark, the Voting Rights act of 1965, the Supreme Court says that no, you actually cannot use this statute which essentially exists to secure the franchise regardless of your race. You can use this, but paradoxically or ironically to discriminate on the basis of race. Who would have thunk? Pretty common sense frankly if you ask me. They essentially said that you cannot read section 2 of the statute to be in tension with the sweeping equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment which the Court just reiterated in the landmark affirmative action case three years ago. Now that it actually means what it says, that you can't discriminate on the basis of race. So the upshot is that all these Southern states, these states that were previously under the so called coverage formula of the Voting Rights act, that coverage formula which was the basis of The Shelby county versus Holder Supreme Court case 2013 there, all these Southern States that were subject to intense federal DOJ scrutiny. They had to get all their maps pre cleared by the DOJ there because of the admittedly horrific, horrific, immoral and sordid history of Jim Crow there. But the Corps finally now saying that no, the south today is not the South 1950, it is not the south of the segregated lunch counters, it is not the south of the Ku Klux Klan and even before that the Confederacy and so forth, there is a very different South. So nowadays the South, a lot of these Southern states have been trying to implement this Supreme Court decision by which they are trying to get rid of some of these presumptively unconstitutional black majority majority minority districts there. And just recently, yes, they in fact at the Supreme Court the Supreme Court passed a landmark, passed a landmark order, a short one paragraph order essentially saying that Alabama about as quintessentially Southern a state as it gets. Alabama, which absolutely had been subject to all this intense Voting Rights act era scrutiny there, that Alabama can now go ahead and essentially redistrict as they like. So Alabama had two black majority districts of their seven congressional seats there. And the court has essentially told them that you guys can indeed, you probably should go ahead and actually follow our Louisiana case and redistrict according to what we just said there. So Attorney General Steve Marshall, who is the excellent Attorney General there of the Yellowhammer State, he went on X and basically said that his job now litigating this is is successful for now and that Republicans in the state Capitol can and should go ahead and redistrict Alabama to be a 7 to 0 Republican majority. That is also on top of what just would just happen frankly over the past week in Tennessee, where Tennessee is looking to have an all Republican delegation as well. This is playing out all across the South, Louisiana, South Carolina, Los Angeles, lots of other states happening there as well. So you take all this Voting Rights act post Supreme Court fallout and you add that to Florida and Texas as well as some other states, North Carolina is actually having their own redistrictioning fight as well. It looks like Republicans are definitely going to come up here. By the way, speaking of Democrat efforts that are falling short, we've been closely tracking the Virginia litigation kerfuffle. So if you are a daily listener viewer of the Josh Hammer show, you heard here potentially first, if not first and very close to first, you heard from Ken Cuccinelli, the former Attorney General of Virginia and the former high ranking DHS official in the first Trump term. Cuccinelli came on the show recently, back when the litigation was pending, and predicted that the Supreme Court of Virginia would rule against the state constitutionality of this referendum that Abigail Spamberger and Virginia Democrats illegitimately put forward before voters of the Old Dominion. Sure enough, that's exactly what happens. Just last Friday. Last Friday morning, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled 4 to 3 against the referendum. So this is very chaotic, the aftermath. Last we checked in on this saga, last we checked in yesterday, Virginia Democrats were apparently considering their own nuclear option of trying. I don't know how legally this would purport to work, of trying to lower the retirement age. I guess do it retroactively of all of these sitting Supreme Court justices of the Virginia Supreme Court to basically say that you guys have to retire, trying to force over their maps there. It's not going to work. In fact, actually just yesterday, Abigail Spamberger, as well as the leader of the Virginia states and Democrats both said that this is going. We're not doing this there. Okay? So the map is there for now. Virginia now tossing a Hail Mary to the United States Supreme Court, which is fascinating, by the way. And some lawyers on Twitter noted that their application to the US Supreme Court had a pretty comical error, actually, where it says where you are trying to appeal to, and it should have said the Supreme Court of the United States, and they essentially forgot to copy and paste. And it still said Supreme Court of Virginia, which is just a hilarious error that presumably a paralegal should have caught there. And now the whole world has seen just how utterly stupid Virginia Democrats are. This is not going to succeed. It is a Hail Mary of an application to the Supreme Court there. This is a quintessential area of state law. And typically where there are issues of state law, and this is an issue of Virginia state constitutional interpretation, then the highest court will be the state Supreme Court. The feds will not get involved unless there is a federal constitutional issue. Jay Jones, the attorney general of Virginia who previously fantasized about murdering his political opponents, he is essentially arguing in this emergency appeal to the justice of the US Supreme Court, he is arguing that there is a federal issue, because it depends on what the federal definition of election is. I read it this morning, and as a lawyer, it is not particularly persuasive. It is actually pure, unmitigated gaslighting. It is just garbage and it's not going to pass muster. It will be rejected probably, probably post haste. So having said all that, then Republicans are going to win this redistricting battle and they're going to win by at least seven to eight seats and net probably double digit actually, when all said and done, especially with this Voting Rights act redistricting happening all across the South. So that leads us then to the question as to whether or not any of this is actually going to matter. Does any of this really matter when it comes to policy in the short term, when it comes to what actually comes out of the nation's capital, does it matter when it comes to who's going to control the speaker's gavel come January 2027? Is it going to be Mike Johnson or another Republican potentially, or will it be Hakeem Jeffries or another Democrat potentially there? Well, the betting markets, it seems to me, have not really done a whole lot to actually factor this in yet. So they've barely shifted. Actually, the Republicans odds of taking over the House or retaining the House have very narrowly, narrowly gone up over the past couple weeks since the Louisiana case at Supreme Court, but have really not gone up by much. They've gone up from about 16 to 18% to now they are standing at around 24%. This is all according to Polymarker, one of the most popular online prediction market exchanges there. Democrats, in other words, are still heavily, heavily favorite by the prediction markets to maintain the U.S. house come January 2027. I don't necessarily buy that. I presume what the, what the bettors, what the speculators and those who are putting money on the line, what they're getting at is that Trump's approval rating is currently sitting at a real Clear Politics average on net of 40.2%, which is 16.3% underwater. It clearly is not great. It has been going down a little bit there on the average. Again, it's just the average. So there will be some polls that are going to be better, some polls that are going to be worse there. I personally don't buy that. If I were playing the markets, which I'm not, if I were, I would bet frankly on Republicans, not because I viewed them as likelier than not to hold the House, but rather I view it as something close to a jump ball to a 5050 proposition there. And I think there is therefore an arbitrage opportunity. We might say there's. But what can Republicans best do to maximize their chances of retaining the House? Well, that is actually a more interesting question there, and it's one that we're going to analyze after a short break, folks. Stay with us through a short break. We'll be right back with more after this. Welcome back. So, as we just said, Republicans are currently an underdog to hold the House this November into January 2027. I don't really fully by that. I view it as very much a 50, 50 proposition there. But what can they do, what can the party do to maximize those chances to actually take advantage of this James Blair led play to redistrict America's maps that has been shockingly successful. Again, everything fell into place, everything. The Supreme Court of Virginia came through in a fourth year decision there. Texas came through. Florida came through. The Supreme Court came through in a big way with the Voting Rights act case. All the chips fell into line for this James Blair led strategy when it comes to trying to give Republicans the upper hand in redistricting. To be clear, that is definitely, definitely, definitely going to pay big dividends down the line, down the line when it comes to the maps in general, especially looking towards the 2030 census and will continue to be a broader exodus of seats from blue states into red states. But in the shorter term when it comes to trying to make sure that the Republicans capitalize on this this November, what can they do? Well, one of our working theses here on the Josh Hammer show is that Republicans do best when they run on broad stripes. You don't win elections against an insatiable leftist woke opponent like the Democrats are today by running as Democrats lite. This has been a tale for as long as I've been involved in politics and active in politics, which is say essentially my entire adult lifetime. Republicans run as Democrats light. They lose when they take bold stances on culturally relevant and salient political issues, especially those that poll in a 70, 30 or maybe even 80, 20 issue there. And they're on the right side of those issues, which they often are these days because Democrats are really that crazy when that happens. More often than not, Republicans are successful. Immigration is one such issue. Immigration is an issue that perhaps more than any other issue really won Donald Trump the White House back again in November 2020. It was the absolutely catastrophic southern border under the Biden Harris regime. That above all, more than any other issue, really cost that particular party control of the White House. So it was with that in mind that I was deeply, deeply pleased to see just this past week, Todd Blanche, who is the acting Attorney General of the United States, we are fans of Todd Blanche here on the show. Just on Friday, Todd Blanche and other DOJ officials actually announced that they are seeking to denaturalize at least 12 naturalized American citizens accused of crimes like murder, terrorism, trafficking, marriage fraud, identity fraud and possessing child pornography, among other things. This being reported by Breitbart News and plenty of others as well. Just to give you an example as to what one of these individuals looks like here. So one such possible denaturalized person would be 48 year old Ali Yousef Ahmed of Iraq. Of Iraq, that is, who entered the US in 2009 by claiming that he and his family were attacked by Al Qaeda. Turns out they weren't. This is fraud. This is immigration fraud. You can't do this there. If you secured American citizenship through fraudulent means, by the way, that includes if you got citizenship and you were naturalized and you were lying and you were lying about your allegiances, let's say that you actually are. You have allegiance to ISIS or Al Qaeda or Hamas and you lie about that on your paperwork there, or you took an oath illegitimately there. That's fraud. You should get denaturalized for that. I'd be calling for this for absolutely years. By the way, a lot of folks say, oh my God, if the Republicans do that, Democrats will just do that too. As if they're not already. Okay, this is the definition of bold stripes is leading with things like this, leading with things like the Safe America act, if it actually is somehow manages to pass when it comes to securing the franchise there. These are the bold issues. By the way, another crazy immigration related story that came out just out of California. Again, this is exactly kind of stuff that is the lowest hanging fruit possible for Republicans to best capitalize and maximize their chances of taking advantage of this redistricting, this massive boon in the congressional maps to retain the speaker's gavel there. Crazy, crazy story out of California. The mayor of Arcadia, California. This is a city, small city in Los Angeles County, Eileen Wong. She is now being charged by the DOJ for acting as an illegal foreign agent for China. Unbelievable stuff. Absolutely unbelievable. An illegal foreign agent for China is apparently the mayor of a city in Los Angeles county, one of the largest counties, if not the single largest county actually in the United States of America. The DOJ saying in a plea deal, and by the way, she pled guilty that this individual, quote received and executed directives from the Chinese government to post pro China content. Unbelievable. I mean, what is the extent of Chinese infiltration and co option of a process? Well, it's frankly a question that I expect will come up very much on this current trip that Donald Trump is set to be engaged in this week. So Donald Trump is going to be going to to China. He will be departing either today or tomorrow there for this much anticipated sit down between President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. They last met just about six, seven months ago or so in South Korea in Busan, where they essentially reached a truce of sorts, a standoff when it comes to the trade conflict and disagreement there of the tariffs when it comes to the United States and China. China has been ground zero of America's roiling trade debate for at least a decade, two decades now, ever since frankly, they ascended to the World Trade Organization and shockingly got most favor nation status due to idiots like Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden back in 2001. And this trip to China is also happening in the context, in the context of this where are we situation with Iran? Because we know that China and Iran are very, very close. China has been deeply active in helping Iran when it comes to trying to export some of their heavily sanctioned oil, potentially trying to evade United States Navy blockaded there on the port Iran there. China has been very helpful in helping Iran set up illicit financial institutions there. By the way, the latest with that is that Trump rejected the Iranian counter proposal. Then the Iranians rejected the Trump rejection of the proposal there. All along though, Trump, Trump Monday. Actually calling this thing garbage. Pretty delightful stuff. Let's go ahead and play this clip.
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Unbelievably weak, I would say. I would call it the weakest right now after reading that piece of garbage they sent us. I didn't even finish reading it. They said, I'm not going to waste my time reading it. I would say it's one of the weakest right now. It's on life support.
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Okay, so Trump not mincing words as his, as this is want, as Trump frankly often does. There great stuff there from President Trump there. So when will the hostilities recommence? Seems to me to be fairly imminent. On yesterday's show we call for that to happen actually during this trip to Beijing. What a power move that would be, what an absolute power move that would be for Donald Trump to recommence epic fury while going on the foreign soil of America's foremost geopolitical adversary, an adversary that is a major patron of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Michael Pillsbury of the Hudson Institute is one of my favorite voices when it comes to all things China. He's a former contributor to our op ed page over at Newsweek. Back when I ran that section, actually, Michael Pillsbury had some analysis over on Fox News when it comes to what to expect on Donald Trump's trip to China. Let's go ahead and play this clip.
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The president takes his relationship with Xi Jinping very seriously. He's going to still bring a team with him, other members of the cabinet. And sometimes in past summits, it's been in some of the memoirs, instead of himself saying to Xi Jinping, you know, you've done 10 bad things. You treat Tibet badly, you treat our farmers badly, he will turn to a member of the cabinet. In some cases it was Bob Lighthizer and say, Bob, why don't you give our complaints about trade? So then Xi Jinping and his team have to look over at Lighthizer, who in one case made almost a one hour long presentation of all the things you know. So that I think the president wants this summit to be a success. But the issue is who should come with him. Obviously, Marco Rubio, obviously Secretary of the treasury, obviously Head of Trade, Representative Jamison Greer. My recommendation has been for security issues for Taiwan and especially for Iran, the Iran war. He should bring Secretary of War Pete Hegseth with him and have the same kind of thing he done, he's done before. Turn to Pete and say, could you explain now you know what we're doing about Taiwan or about Iran or some other security issue? Because in my view, the summit will be both. It'll be traded jobs, soybeans, more Boeing aircraft, more exports. And the other side is the security part, the sensitive part that in some cases you don't read what happened for 30 years, for 30 years before the documents are declassified. So one side will see very easily the trade talks, but the other side, maybe we'll just have a brief comment like the two sides exchange views.
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So it's all on the line here. Trade, artificial intelligence, the laundering of currency. It's all there. It's all there. National security, the spy balloons, TikTok, it will all come up on this one. But again, the ultimate power move. The ultimate power move amidst the broader backdrop of this 21st century geopolitical great power competition struggle. Will this entry be an American century or a Chinese century? That's the defining question of our dueling civilizational clash. The best thing for Trump to do, especially with the lurking question of Taiwan always in the background of these conversations. The best thing to do, Mr. President, will be to relaunch the Iran operation. Show the Iranians what kind of garbage they sent to you and put it back right where it came from there. Do that on foreign soil. And frankly, Mr. President, you only go down as a even greater hero than you already are. Folks, a quick commercial break. We'll be right back with Congressman Brad Knott of North Carolina for a conversation on FISA surveillance. A fascinating conversation, I'm sure, when we come right back. Welcome back. So we cover, of course, all of the issues on the show, both the philosophical issues and the dates issues. And sometimes we like to drill in on what is actually happening on Capitol Hill. And today we have a guest who's joining us with a perspective because he is among them. He is a congressman today. That is Congressman Brad Knott. So Brad Knott is a freshman congressman from North Carolina's 13th congressional district. You can follow him on Xepnot K N O T T. Congressman, thank you for joining the Josh Hammer Show. We really appreciate it. I'm actually a former North Carolinian myself, so I very much appreciate representation from the Tar Heel states. Congressman, you've been at the center or close center, I believe, of the debate that kind of sort of recently happened, but is still transpiring in real time over the reauthorization of section 702 of the FISA act, which sounds very legal and very lawyerly, but this issue comes up essentially every Congress has been an issue basically as long as I've been covering politics. Can you explain for the viewers, listeners who may not be familiar, what exactly 702 of FISA is, why it is controversial and why we can't seemingly figure out currently what to do with it?
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Sure, I'm happy to, Josh, and thank you for having me on here. And just so your listeners know, I'm a former federal prosecutor that did organized crime investigations and trials all over the country. And this is one of those spaces. It's very difficult to break down into simple details. But I'll give it my best shot. Section 702 allows the intelligence community to have vast surveillance powers over foreign adversaries. It's called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The powers are so broad that they will necessarily sweep up American citizens correspondences as well. And if there is reason to believe that there is suspicious activity that is being furthered or that it involves American citizens, what degree of investigative authority does the intel community have before they go and search the database that involves American citizens? There's no question at all that FISA is important, that section 702 is vital to the national security. The only issue is how much authority do they have as it relates to American citizens data without any question, that is a seizure. Right. And when they go in and look at the data, whether it's who you're talking to on the phone, what duration are you talking, what, how much time, what frequency are you talking to individual persons or people you know any other type of specific metadata they're trying to extract from your digital footprint. In the law enforcement world, that requires a fairly high level of predication before a judge will grant you a warrant to go into that type of universe. Under fisa, you do not need that authorization. Under current law, the intelligence community can do it with no oversight. And yes, it can police itself, or so it says. It can monitor itself, or so it says. But the fight is, should there be this carve out before the data of American citizens is searched by the government?
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Congressman Brad Knott is the freshman congressman from North Carolina's 13th congressional district. Follow him on X Repk Nott. So, Congressman, I don't want to lawyer out too hard, but let's lawyer out just a little bit here. Because you're a lawyer. I'm also a lawyer by background as well. So I think back to my criminal procedure course in law school and I think back to some of the Supreme Court precedents on this. And if memory serves, there was a precedent from the late 1970s about a pen tap, a tap of phones. And in subsequent decades, the Supreme Court basically applied this Fourth Amendment precedent to the bulk collection of metadata. And the summation of this line of Supreme Court cases, again, a memory serves, please correct me if I'm wrong, is basically that current Supreme Court jurisprudence treats metadata. And again, that's not the actual substance of the underlying calls, for which you certainly need a more advanced warrant. But metadata would be the time of the call, the duration of the call, etc. I think Supreme Court precedent currently treats that as subject to a much, much lower Fourth Amendment threshold than the substance of the call. So do you believe that it should be the same standard for both the substance and the metadata? Is that the crux of this debate?
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No, you hit a very important issue here, and this is one of the issues. Josh, let me just back up a little bit. There is so much passion around this debate, but very few people will lower the temperature and actually engage about the mechanics. What are we actually talking about? What is seized under this authority, how is it searched under this authority, and what type of information is actually promulgated under this authority. And you hit a great point that there is a, there are varying degrees of standards based off of what data is actually seized and then searched. The highest form of intrusion under the law enforcement side, so when I was doing this as a federal prosecutor was a federal wiretap. You know, you have the technology in the law enforcement space to listen to live phone calls, text messages, real time correspondences, you cannot do that without extreme, extreme diligence to demonstrate the need for that particular type of search under the FISA application. And much of this is classified, so it's not quite as clear as a Title 3 wiretap that I just mentioned. But yes, there is bulk collection. No one's really questioning or scrutinizing the need for bulk collection of data as it relates to funding, foreign intelligence or our safety. The only issue is when you, when that bulk collection is refined into an individualized search. And we know that that information can be very personal, it can be very intrusive, it can be abused. There are hundreds of thousands of abuses that the intel community basically confessed to before some of the reforms that we agreed to last Congress were implemented. So yes, the bulk collection, that's not really the issue. It's once the bulk collection is in the database, how do you access it on a personal specific level?
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Okay, that is a very important distinction. I'm happy you made it because I think the viewers and listeners will be very well informed by that. Thank you very much for that. Again, Congressman Brad Knott, folks. You follow him on X repknot. He's the congressman for North Carolina's 13th congressional district. Congressman, let's zoom out and kind of philosophize a little bit here in our remaining time, if we may. This is kind of hitting at one of the most ancient questions, frankly, in all of politics, really kind of one of the oldest questions really among governments, implemented among men, which is this, this classic trade off, whether it's real or perceived, between individual liberty and security. And there's a whole spectrum of beliefs on this. Among the American founders, Thomas Jefferson was famous for arguing that he who gives up any security or any, any liberty for security, excuse, excuse me, essentially is a tyrant in waiting. There's. And then of course, there are plenty of other opinions on the other side of the spectrum. So I think most Americans, probably congressmen, are somewhere in the murky middle. But I'm curious, just for your to be clear, this is an hour long conversation, but in brief, I'd be curious kind of for your general thoughts on the parameters of that trade off, whether it's real or perceived, and then how it applies to this particular debate.
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Well, I couldn't agree more with Thomas Jefferson. I was a very aggressive prosecutor. I went for the maximum sentence possible if the people that I was targeting did not, did not cooperate with law enforcement. But with this particular instance, I could not be more in the camp of the separation of powers is what we're talking about right now, there is zero separation of powers. You have the intelligence community, policing itself. That's like saying, okay, sheriff's office, we're going to let the police department approve or disapprove of all of your actions. That's not how it works. Congress needs to needs to either be involved directly or, or have access to the mechanisms of FISA or an Article 3 court. This is not an individual exercise of the executive branch. The separation of powers is integral to preventing against abuses that we know occur. And that's the framework that we need to apply going forward into fisa.
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You know, FISA is a creature of statute. There's no FISA courts anywhere in the US Constitution. Far be it from that. In fact, it's really only created by congressional statute just over the past half century or so. And there's been an ongoing debate, frankly, for years and years and years as to whether or not FISA should be renewed at all. This entire system there. Many folks argue that it's outdated, frankly, from all ends of the spectrum. Actually, a lot of more libertarian folks say that this is terrible. Even, frankly, some more hawkish folks, like the Wall Street Journal editorial, would have long argued that this whole system is outdated. Anyway, I'm glad that we the people have folks like you, Congressman, on top of this. Just about a minute left here before I've got to let you go. Unfortunately, we're almost out of time. But before I do so, Congressman, what is perhaps one other issue that you are just really keen on right now? Because obviously it's a midterm election year and the odds are increasing for Republicans to maintain the House in light of redistricting. But what are you focusing on right now otherwise?
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Well, we've already made great strides with illegal immigration. And so my second main issue is regulation, the administrative state. Most people have no idea the reach of it. Most people have no idea how it protects power from a centralized Washington D.C. so peeling back the layers of the administrative state, getting power to the people, to the businesses, to the home builders, to the doctors, to the hospitals, as opposed to bureaucrats in Washington, that is a huge key to economic and personal freedom as we move forward.
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Amen. Great stuff. Congressman Brad, not following on X repknot. He's the Congressman for North Carolina's 13th congressional district. Congressman, we really appreciate the time. God bless you. And all the best to you. Thank you.
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C
Thank you. Thank you. Josh,
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A
Welcome back. So you probably don't think a whole lot about FISA surveillance, maybe, unless you are a true Ron Paul libertarian There but a fascinating conversation with a congressman, a former prosecutor who clearly knows a whole lot about this topic. By the way, I want to apologize. I actually misquoted our American founders. They're very unlikely, but I apologize nonetheless. I said that that quote that I was getting at was actually Thomas Jefferson. I was mistaken. Apparently it is often attributed to Thomas Jefferson. There it is. Apocryphal is actually from Benjamin Franklin. So what Benjamin Franklin actually said this happened a long time ago, gosh, in 1755, during the French and Indian War, at least on the precipice of the French and Indian War, as hostilities were building between the Brits and the French for control of colonial America. So Franklin apparently said, quote, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor. Nor safety. So that quote is often attributed to Jefferson. That's what I was very sloppy trying to do there. But apparently it actually is Benjamin Franklin. Now the congressman, Brad Knop clearly is deeply, deeply knowledgeable about this as a prosecutor. He worked on these issues there. I will say he is coming from a slightly more libertarian leaning perspective than I myself have on these issues. I do not agree actually with the sentiments. I'm a big fan of Benjamin Franklin. How could I not be? I love America. Who doesn't love Benjamin Franklin there? But this notion that he would give up liberty to purchase safety deserves neither liberty nor safety. I don't necessarily agree with that. Now in Franklin's defense, apparently what he actually said was giving up essential liberty. So he's saying that only if you have essential liberty to purchase temporary safety, that's fine insofar as it goes. If you're going to emphasize not giving up essential liberty to purchase temporary safety, I actually have no issue with that there. But this broader notion, this broader notion, and you can't. That there should be no trade off whatsoever between individual liberty, no matter how you construe it. And again, we're now beyond what Franklin actually said. But this notion that you can't give up any notion or any idea of liberty for the sake of the common good, for the common weal, for the health of the whole there at all. I don't accept that these are the trade offs that have defined politics for thousands and thousands of years. These trade offs between individual autonomy and individual liberty, or what you perceive to be individual liberty versus the thriving, the flourishing and just the general commonweal of the nation, of the polity, of the state, of the community, as the case may be, and it actually is more complicated than that because what someone might deem to be his or her liberty is going to have spillover effects. If you think that you have the liberty to chop off your prepudescent girl's breasts and then to parade her who thinks he's a him, around the town square, and to then put this out there as the quintessence of what it means to be a good parent in the 21st century, that's going to have cultural spillover effects is that though liberty, I don't think that's liberty. So that's a very extreme example there. But it just, it gets to this point that how liberty is defined is always going to be in the eye of the beholder. Liberty as was defined by the American founders actually had a much more specific definition. What the framers really meant by liberty was two things. One, it was intrinsic to an extent. Liberty was intrinsic insofar as meant freedom from arbitrary government action. That's fine insofar as it goes. I think we all agree with that there. But liberty was also an instrumentality. If you actually look at the Preamble, the Constitution, which I'm very fond of quoting, I love the Preamble. The Preamble, which of course precedes Article one and the rest of the Constitution there, it enumerates the ends of governments there. The Preamble of the Constitution, as I have noted for years now, is a common good, communitarian, nationalist document. It is not a hyper libertarian document. It reads, quote, we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. So a lot of common good type end goals there. The notion of a more perfect union, domestic tranquility, common defense, general welfare, these are not about exalting idiosyncratic conceptions of individual liberty. Okay, the notion that you can parade your transgender 9 year old whose breasts were cut off around the town square and that you have a First Amendment liberty right to do that there. No, that's not what the Preamble is getting at there. It's just not. Even moreover, the notion of securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, well really they're most interested in securing the blessings of liberty, the blessings of liberty. So here liberty is actually something more of an instrumentality, where you're trying to get to the blessings. In this view, liberty is only important or it's intrinsically valuable insofar as you use it towards noble, just and virtuous ends. So again, we're a little down the philosophical rabbit hole at this point. I don't want to spend too much more time on this, but I do want to just note that this notion of a trade off between liberty and security is one that goes back thousands of years in Western political thought there. And I think that this is something frankly, that is ultimately for our lawmakers exercising prudence and diligence to come to a conclusion there. But certainly when it comes to what the congressman said about metadata there, I don't find myself disagreeing a whole lot with that there. But when it comes to this broader security liberty trade off there, I think it's a slightly, slightly different conversation. That that is all I want to say on that front. I want to revisit something that has come up recently that I just found utterly staggering. So I mentioned at some point that 42% of Democrats apparently believe that the Butler, Pennsylvania near assassination from Thomas Matthew Crooks of Donald Trump in July 2024. 42% of Democrats apparently think that that was staged. I guess I think that is a Reichstag fire of sorts. Unbelievable stuff, by the way. Maybe, maybe, maybe at one point the American right was more prone to conspiratorial thinking than the left. I'm not really sure that's true. Honestly, what I'm saying, maybe it could have been the case. It is definitely not the case. In the year 2026, 42 freaking percentage Democrats think Butler was staged again. I presume they think Trump is Hitler and therefore this is like a Reichstag fire kind of thing. By the way, the reason I bring this up is because we now have a survey that asked Democrat voters the same question. When it comes to the recent attempt to kill Trump at the White House correspondents dinner, the number's a little lower, but still pretty high. One in four. Sorry, one. Four Americans think with stage one in three Democrats think it was staged. A third of Democrats think that the attempt to kill Donald Trump and or his cabinet members at the recent White House correspondents dinner at the Washington they think that was staged. How do you reason with these people? This one. The question is that I just always come back to how do we have a conversation with people like this? How do we engage in dialogue? What do we have in common with individuals like this? But the problem is that truth is in short supply. And the willingness to believe in truth, the acceptance of truth, the refusal to just blindly challenge truth or dogma because it is truth or dogma. And all of this I thought about in turn because of another recent thing I saw which came out of the Washington Post. There was an op ed in the Washington Post. By the way, the Washington Post is one of those papers undergoing not an ideological revolution per se, but they are certainly having some interesting ideological developments. Washington Post, which for years and years and years was just a total trash heap for the far left. That's why Mark Levin famously referred to it over and over again as the Washington Compost. They're now publishing a bunch of right of center op eds. And they had a recent right of center op ed from a Princeton professor named Gregory Conti, who is probably a leftist. But the op ed is right coded, let's call it. And it's right coded because he's complaining about a crisis of relig illiteracy on Ivy League campuses. This is a secular, probably a lefty at Princeton saying that there was a talk a few years ago at Princeton about religion and free speech that wasn't landing with the students. Finally this professor realized why the speaker had made repeated reference to the Ten Commandments and several students didn't know what they were. And the professor goes on to say that it's increasingly common in college campuses to encounter students who don't even know the difference between the Old and New Testaments or the difference between Catholics and Protestants. They can't recognize the biblical allusions in Lincoln's second inaugural address and Shakespeare and on and on, on there. And this may all seem disconnected to you. I think it's actually very connected. A society that is not rooted in truth is not going to accept the truth, that is not educated in truth, that doesn't have the civic virtues instilled in it from kindergarten through 12th grade through on. That is a society that is going to go down the conspiratorial rabbit hole. It will lose its ability to tell the difference between right and wrong and truth and lies. Right from left, fact from fiction, up from down, north from south. That is an unhealthy society, a society that is not going to end well, that will fail at making judgments like the all important trade off between liberty, security and the like. It all starts at basics, folks. It all starts with civics and instilling the eternal truths upon which this great experiment in order to liberty, yes, order, liberty ultimately depends, folks. Have a great rest of your evening. Josh Hemmer signing off for now. We'll be right back. As always, tomorrow.