They're getting more and more in debt, and it looks a lot like us, and we look a lot like them, and none of it's good.

France is not one of my 10 top places to visit.

I, I, uh, have never been a France fan personally.

But, uh, I have to tell you, uh, what's happening in France is a sign of what is gonna be happening here.

We're not just in the same boat.

We are worse off than France when it comes to the percentage of our GDP that, that we have, uh, you know, debt to GDP ratio and, and annual deficits to D- GDP ratio.

Um, and France now is having riots because they're trying to make some cuts, and those cuts are painful, and people don't like the pain, and so they are expressing themselves in, in violent and, and dangerous ways.

70, 80% of us say we should be talking more about national debt 'cause it's a, it's a problem.

That's how you can identify the socialist movement.

Yeah.

Jake, it's really interesting.

Um, Marx, uh, sort of the, you know, the founder or the, or the thought leader in, in, uh, Marxism, communism, socialism, uh, w- was really, had strong objections to religion because people would believe in something other than government.

So on a philosophical level, it's true.

But on a practical level also, I, I just think that, uh, most of us, uh, have a faith, and the faith drives our thinking, not the government.

And, and so there, there's a big- There's a big gap, um, in America between people of faith and, and, and socialists.

That's the perception driving the socialist movement today, I think.

Uh

... socialists.

I was also, uh, the vast majority, uh, good solid people.

Um, really felt strongly about representing blue collar workers in their districts and unions and other groups.

Not necessarily with the same policies that I wanted, but I knew they were sincere, uh, about helping people within the American, uh, structure that we have, our, our government.

Um, you know, I can think of Jimmy Panetta.

His dad, Leon Panetta, um, uh, served in a number of positions in, in the executive branch for the Democrats.

Uh, talk about that a little bit.

Yeah

... um, in, in Democrat, uh, in the Democrat Party.

So, uh, it became more timely.

Um, really, the, the challenge is...

And, and obviously, we have a bipartisan bankruptcy.

Both parties have, have gotten us to this point, but the socialists want to spend at an even higher rate, and, and the programs that they're spending on are, are not programs that, uh, invigorate the economy.

And so, we've got to be very careful when we look at, uh, electing socialists to office and just how, uh, we can reduce spending.

Mm-hmm

Have we run out of Band-Aids? Have we run out of small temporary things, uh, to get debt reigned in? Are we now to the point where we've tried everything, it, it's now gonna have to be rip off the Band-Aid?

Well, no, I think there are some Band-Aids left.

Um, we, we will, we will limp along for a few years.

But the bottom line is in, in 2032, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out of money.

And the way that most people will try to fix that is to say, well, we'll just go into the general fund and pull more money out of the general fund to pay for the Social Security, uh, deficit.

And they, there won't be any money in the general fund to pay for that.

And so, uh, Social Security, Medicare are gonna be the big drivers in the near future.

Or do we just clean house? What do we do in the midterms?

You know, they can afford to go to college, but guess who's paying for all that? Do you think that that looks attractive to some of these people falling for this narrative? You know, when we look at Norway, Sweden, Denmark?

Well, when you look at those countries and they have 60, 70 percent tax rates between all their different taxes and you talk about a young person who's making, you know, very little compared to what they will be making later in life, it may look attractive.

When they start to get into their 40s and 50s, their peak earning years, losing 60%, 70% of your income doesn't look so attractive anymore.

And one of the realities in Sweden, I haven't really looked at Norway as – even though that's where my roots are.

I'm a Viking, Jake.

But in Sweden, they had to privatize their Social Security fund.

They could not keep going with their equivalent, their federal pension fund, because it was going bankrupt.

They may be the majority.

Yeah

... yeah, it's, uh...

I- it is a conservative state that is now being, uh, governed by a liberal, and I can't believe the legislature went also.

That's the, that's the real problem in Virginia.

So do you see maybe common sense Democrats beginning to, uh, separate from this? What, what do you suppose?

Yeah.

You know, if, if you go back 40 years, uh, or more, you see the Democrat Party was a, a blue collar union-led party.

The Republican Party, you know, had the values of a, of a Ronald Reagan.

How do you account for the rising support of such a tyrannical system that is completely incompatible with the United States Constitution, even with liberty itself?

I think there are a number of factors, Clay.

The first is our K-12 education system.

Very few students are being taught about the fall of the Soviet Union, about the tyranny in the Eastern Bloc countries as well as Russia, about what happened to Cuba under Castro and Venezuela under Chavez and Maduro.

uh so it's really a lack of education about the real world impact of socialism and then uh secondly i think it uh you know we are as a result of the socialist policies that we already have in place we certainly don't have a a socialist economic system in this country But we have had a lot of socialist policies in place.

And one of the ones that is certain at the forefront, there are a few, Social Security, Medicare.

But when you look at Obamacare, we are draining a lot of resources and we need to borrow money for that.

in my home state of kentucky there are other examples as well of course how do democrats leftists continue to shackle families to failing schools where the only goal is to keep tenured union teachers on the payroll rather than training up a generation of well-educated citizens how do we break that

How do you feel about it today, now that you're out of it and you're back, you're back writing books warning America? How could we ever tackle this problem if we have these sequestered gods among us who are supposed to be representing us?

us?W- well, we've gotta get off the sidelines.

And, and I say that to, to everyone in, in all arenas.

You know, people think, "Well, this is just too big.

It's happening in DC." It, it's not just happening in DC.

It's happening at school board meetings.

It's happening at town council meetings.

Are you still amazed at how Americans, the principle of our country, the right to your own opinion and the right to say it out loud, the kind of censorship we went through and how many of us are not mad the way I am?

What say you?

Well, it concerns me a great deal.

I laughed.

The last book I wrote was about big tech.

And big tech comes into Congress and says, the internet is just so dangerous.

You just can't believe the disinformation that will happen.

And we need government regulation.

But what's the biggest threat to America? Is it China? Is it open borders? Is it debt? Is it Islam? Is it socialism? Or is it all of it?

Do you think that that's how many voters see a congressman, that this is their chance?

do think that i think this is their chance i think if uh vice president vance had those words to take back he would probably take those words back he undoubtedly went off script in that situation i think what the price president should be talking about is the success at the border i think he should be talking about other successes that president trump can point to let the democrats talk about the failures but the bottom line is the people in congress voted for tax cuts they voted to support the president on the border Those are the things Republicans need to stand up and talk about, not a second chance or not another chance.

You've got two years of record, and that's what the voters are going to be making their decision based on.

What would it mean if Trump did that?

Well, I think it means a lot of different things.

One, it means that Europe has to step up and start spending money and start protecting itself.

It also means that we have troops that may not be in Europe but can react very quickly to support Europe.

I think it's a bad message in some ways because it empowers President Putin and it may even embolden President Putin.

And that spending out paces spending on military money.

Yeah, the significance of that number, the fact that we are now spending more to service our debt than we are to defend our country, is that every great country in the history of the world has started going down rapidly once that happens.

And so we have to recognize that we're at an inflection point, and if we don't turn this around, we're going to have real problems.

I smirk a little bit when you talk about the importance of spending on national defense, and it is important, but the Department of Defense is just as wasteful as all the rest of these agencies out there.

The answer to me, and I wish that President Trump would say this and just come right out and say this, is we need to cut to the bone all the waste in the Department of Defense and use that for new weapons systems, use that for training, use that to make sure that we are giving our men and women the very best in the military.

But I you know, the military has failed its own audit.

It audits itself every year and it has failed its own audit for 30 years.

Is that still a thing? Are we still examining how we're spending money and finding places where we're wasting it?

What's the best way to do that in your view?

Well, first of all, I'm not sure I agree with that completely because the bottom line is in order to win and show that it has crippled economies in the past, Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and others, you've got to have an educated electorate that understand all those coincidences, more than coincidences that have occurred.

But I think the Democrat Party is split.

I recognize a lot of frustration here.

My home state, the congresswoman from Denver lost her race to a Democrat socialist, and it took a lot of people by surprise.

And I think that the party is split, and that will benefit Republicans.

The best way to do it is to talk about what happens in party politics, where the extreme has enough votes to force those in the middle to do what the extreme wants.

Is this a system that can be fixed? And if so, what is the type of shock to the system that works?

Socialism doesn't work, does it, Ken? No.

No, it doesn't work.

And there's a long history of it failing.

And people point to places like Sweden and say, well, you know, there's a kinder, gentler socialism that we should look at.

Sweden actually had a system close to our Social Security system, a public run pension system.

system.

And they changed that.

How long have you been working on this?

You explain that to us and sure it played right out in the news this weekend.

Yeah, and one of the real problems with bond rates going up is that our national debt goes up even faster.

And that's when you know you're in the death spiral, because when you have to pay more to borrow money, You are paying not just the amount for salaries for the military and, you know, Social Security and all the other programs that we have.

But now you're paying a huge amount just to service the debt.

And as that interest rate increases, you're paying even more.

And so you have to borrow more.

And that is the downfall.

Was it that way when you were in the State House of Representatives in 2015 through 2024? Yeah.

How can we keep doing this, Ken?

Well, we won't.

Pretty soon it'll be $2.9 trillion or $2.9 billion and then $3 billion, and it'll keep going up.

Yeah, it's a serious problem.

And as we're seeing in Minnesota and California and so many other states, a lot of this money is just wasted.

And a lot of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, what the Congress likes to call You know, mandatory spending.

And we have got to deal with those programs.

So people are interested, even if politicians don't want to talk about it.

That plays out in every race.

Yeah.

And the advantage goes to the incumbent, clearly, because there's a ton of money.

The incumbent is in office and people, lobbyists and others who need to raise or who need a vote are going to donate to the incumbent.

So sometimes you get a self-funder that is challenging an incumbent and the money doesn't matter as much.

But the issue there, and it's almost 100% issue.

If people are happy with the direction of the country, with the direction of the state, with the direction of their community, they are going with the incumbent.

What did you see Tuesday?

Um, there were efforts made by, uh, President Biden regarding healthcare, and I don't think they panned out either.

No, they didn't pan out.

Um, and, and the reality is, uh, and everybody knew this, everybody knew this at the time, but Obamacare is a fiscal failure, an absolute fiscal failure.

You cannot have, um, middle-class people subsidizing the healthcare of less, lower middle-class people.

You cannot have, uh- ...

Obamacare work without a huge, and I'm talking hundreds of billions of dollars a year, in subsidies from the federal government.

Um, we, we knew it when it was passed.

The old president will say, "Well, that was my policies finally working." And the new guys'll say, "No, beginning in January things got better." There's gotta be some lag time in the numbers.

Has it?

No.

No, it hasn't done anything.

Uh, the way they deal with the homeless is, is to encourage more homelessness.

They, they have rent control.

They have all their, uh, uh, really anti-capitalist and, uh, anti-common sense programs that, that reduce the amount of housing that is affordable for people, and in the long run it creates more homelessness and, and the way they treat homelessness, much different.

You see cities that actually have, uh, homeless shelters and people can live there.

Are we getting a handle on it?

What is happening? We're tearing ourselves apart here, city by city.

You know, we are.

It's a great point, Jake.

And the United States, the public is divided on this issue.

But we've got to find some leaders that step above it and say, you know, the word amnesty is a swear word.

If you're running for office and you're a Republican and you're in a primary and someone says, well, Ken Buck believes in amnesty, you're in trouble.

You've got a lot of explaining to do.

I thought we got rid of this nonsense in 2011, but it's back.

How do we slip these into bills without public debate?

So the appropriations process is largely without public debate.

You know, they'll hold appropriations hearings and they'll invite agency heads to come in and testify about what they need.

But the appropriations bill is often a 3000 page bill that That is dropped on members of Congress the night before the vote.

So we'll get that bill at 7, 8, 9 o'clock at night.

And, you know, we're expected to read the 3000 pages before a vote on the bill at 930, 10 o'clock in the morning.

And that's really the challenge is trying to find those things before voting.

I mean, we go round and round, we hear it all the time, the deficit, deficit, deficit, but are we ever going to do anything about the deficit? Can we ever lower it? I mean, it's what, 30-some

morning.

Yeah, but yeah, I think what's really sad is in order to prevent fraud, you need to have higher standards for the people to qualify so that the fraudsters can't just apply for a student loan from a foreign country when they're not going to college in the U.S., or... apply for Medicaid benefits when they're not in the U.S. And so the Democrats are voting against those tougher standards to get in more identification.

And it's causing huge problems, especially in blue states.

We've got billions, over $9 billion has been identified in blue Minnesota and over $160 billion in California as the result of fraud just in the years 2020 to 2025.

Whatever happened with that? Is that even around anymore?

It is, but it's interesting.

When I heard about Doge, I was really excited, and I thought it was a great idea.

There's so much waste.

Mm-hmm.

We don't know what the agreement is, and we don't know whether either side is gonna live up to the agreement down the road.

So I, I think it's very difficult at this point to say that, uh, there, there even is an agreement.

There's a memorandum of understanding.

Um, a- as you pointed out, it's incredibly vague right now.

Uh, really, really don't know who is, uh...

You know, is, is Iran going to let inspectors have, uh, access to all their facilities? All these questions are unanswered.

Do, do you think that these terms are acceptable and distinct from what you called delusional, the 2015 JCPOA?

I'm seeing way too much of that, Ken.

Absolutely.

There are still some heroes and heroines left in the House and the Senate.

But more and more, the Trump brand is important, and so you don't want to cross the president.

Well, the whole way the country was set up is that there would be a tension between the legislative branch and the executive branch, and there would be oversight.

And that, in this instance, is real tough because when you have the opposing party in power— then there's oversight, then there's tension.

But when you've got the same party in power in both branches, it's difficult.

Give us, build the background, tell us what it is, what's going on, and why we should be concerned.

Why aren't you?

No, I'm not surprised.

You know, Thomas is a strong defender of the Constitution, and, uh, the president has a different view of executive power, an expanded view of executive power.

Thomas fought very strong for legislative power, and the two collided.

Uh, this president is all about making America broke again, and, and Thomas Massie is a fiscal conservative and wants to make sure that we don't overspend and that we make sure we live within our means.

And that is something that, uh, ha- has caused a lot of friction with this president, dating back to the first, uh, term that the president had.

Is the president prioritizing loyalty at the literal expense and figurative expense of winning?

I, I think he has time and time again.