Transcripts For CSPAN3 Floyd 20240704

Floyd brown is an author who has appeared many times on book tv and on cspan. His most recent book is, counterpunch an Unlikely Alliance of americans fighting back for faith and freedom. Mr. Brown, how many books have you written and whats the topics been . Well, so. I really got started writing books as part of the political cycle. My first book was slick willie why america cannot trust bill clinton, which i like to say was the book that spawned a genre because it was it was a book that was written before he was elected president. And so i did those for a while. But now, you know, as ive gotten a few gray hairs, ive started to do what i hope are more serious books that are reflective. Since 2008, ive been running western journal where we produce about 35 written articles a day about the news. And what i try to do is every three or four years is step back from that day to day process of writing the news and try and give some context to what is going on in the country. And politically. And thats what i tried to do with this book. Counterpunch was was was put some years in context. So what is your take on whats happening in the country . Yeah, overall, so i have lived through what i call for what republican wave elections in my lifetime. I came to washington as a young member of the reagan revolution. I met Ronald Reagan when i was 15 years old in 1980. I was in college. I worked in the Reagan Campaign in 1983. I graduated from the university of washington. I did all my belongings in the back of my mustang, and i drove to d. C. Because i wanted nothing more than to be part of what was then called the reagan revolution. And so that was a wave election where a whole group of people came to washington intent on changing what was going on. Since then, i was involved in 1994 running Citizens United. That was the huge contract for america wave election. And then, of course, tea party when the tea party came and the 2010 election cycle, i traveled all over the country with Andrew Breitbart and joseph fair and other people speaking at tea party rallies. And then, of course, i was involved in the whole maga wave election. So thats four major republican wave elections that have happened in in my adult lifetime, i believe 2024 is going to be another one of those wave elections. Is it going to be a maga wave election . So i dont really, you know, im not going to make a prediction as to whos going to win the republican nomination. Ive been in those before and im not in it now. But i believe that whoever the republican nominee is, whether its donald trump or Governor Desantis or one of the others, you know, i like to say 24 hours can be an eternity in politics because in 24 hours, things can pivot and change based on the events and, you know, if i had to say right now, i think donald trump is in the pole position to win the nomination and if he wins, i believe he will be elected president. But the truth is, is that i believe republicans are positioned for a wave election irrespective of who the candidate is. So floyd brown are those four wave republican elections that you just described . Did they move the political needle overall . Yeah, long term, but thats a great question. I think that they have been big waves that have hit the beach and like any beach, theyve sunk back into the ocean. None of them have really stopped what i would call the march of the growth of the size and scope of government. And i spend a lot of time in my book talking about what i call the unit party, which is the permanent establishment d. C. When i when i first came to d. C. And i was a young man as part of the reagan revolution, i had a mentor at the time by the name stan evans and stan, who had a huge, huge impact on me and my life. He told me in 99, probably 1987, he said, floyd, you know, before we came to washington, we knew this place was a cesspool. But now that weve been here a few years, you know, its kind of like a hot tub and that captures much of what happens when people go to d. C. And a lot of members that i helped get elected in 94, for example, for the contract or even as part of the tea party movement, they come to washington and they have Great Expectations theyre going to, you know, change the world and then they get there and and something kind of happens. Its its all of a sudden you have to start thinking, well, you know, im only going to be here two years unless i get reelected and if im going to get reelected, got to serve my constituents and i got to keep them happy. And then theyll get permanent staff. Most of the people that come to washington will get staff from other offices. Somebody will be a chief of staff for them who probably served as a deputy chief, a chief of staff for somebody else. And so they they they slowly start to realize, ive got to in order to be successful here, ive got to go along to get along. If i want to get a committee position, well, then ive got to join the the nrsc Fundraising Team and i got to start raising money and ive got to start giving to other members and and so this system is built so that in essence these same people who go to washington with all of this x treatment and idealism, they wake up ten years later and a lot of them have literally become what they went to washington to end. And it just that is a part of the systemic problem that america and its one of the reasons why government just keeps growing and growing and growing. Well, didnt you kind of contribute to that system a little bit with Citizens United . Well, you know, none of us are perfect. Okay. Thats one of the reasons why im a christian is because i need i need some grace in my life. The this the system is is is the system. And youre right, the the truth is, i believe the system is run by money and that over my lifetime, big money has gained more control each and every cycle over the system. And i, but i, i, im perplexed how to end that. As long as government is growing, the and this is true on both the left and the right, both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, irrespective of all the activists out there, are really controlled by a group of billionaires, both parties. And its because only their checkbooks are large enough to get to to run these campaigns. I mean, were looking at a senate race in this cycle in arizona thats going to be possibly more than 100 million. Well, when you think about that kind of money being spent in a senate race, its really only the billionaire heirs that can play in that kind of money. So it is it is a, i think one of the real problems america faces. And its why we have this really strange thing going on now with Robert Kennedy jr and donald trump over on the right. These people are echoing each other on the left and the right. And theres kind of a strange phenomenon going on in the country where both the left and the right are uneasy with the way big money is control along both of the political parties. Washington, dc yeah, there was a time in 2016 that a lot of the sanders voters went to donald trump. Yeah, well, and i think i mean, i think you can make a good case that Bernie Sanders should have been the democratic nominee in 2016 and that they literally used the mechanisms inside the Democratic Party to make hillary the nominee and i think that everybody on the right was shocked when donald trump became the nominee because he was a complete outlier. I mean, i in that cycle, i was working for Mike Huckabee and, you know, mike is a traditional republican candidate. And i would talk to him and i just remember having a discussion. And you remember after the big bombing in paris and, you know, there was this whole discussion about immigration. And i said i said, governor, you know, you really should look at calling a moratorium on islamic immigration. And and he said to me, he said, floyd, i cant i cant go there. Thats just thats a step too far. And i knew he wasnt going to win the nomination when later in that weekend, donald trump did just that, called for these limits on islamic immigration and that he he was he wasnt tethered to the the orthodoxy within the Republican Party and that allowed him to be different enough to break through in the primaries. So, you know, it its its really interesting to watch. But yet you know, it only took four years. And i would say, actually, Donald Trumps presidency, while he did achieve a lot of things, much of his agenda was frustrated in washington, d. C. And he he was like horatio at the bridge, one man fighting while the permanent government really never became maga. So its its its its theres really a lot of interesting things going on in the country. And thats why i like living outside of washington dc because i see them going on like for example, right now the Democratic Party stands on the brink of losing hispanics and they dont understand as they push deeper and deeper into these transgender issues. You got to realize new immigrants are in the Public School system. And, you know, the the the wealthier and in richer population, they can exit the Public School system. Hispanics cant. So they they sit there in calif and when when california jams down on them, trans gender ism for minors it is creating a huge problem for the Democratic Party. They may not understand it yet because theyre in washington and theyre isolated, but they they theyve got some real problem with some of their base voter groups, even black men are, i believe, up for grabs. These are the things i talk about. The Unlikely Alliance, the there are things changing and the political elites, they have the money but they they theyve got to stay on top of whats going on in the country or their coalitions are going to break up. Well, lets go to counterpunch, punch floyd brown. And i want to read a quote, although we arent at the point of munich in 1938, we are headed in that direction. Yeah, well, you know, the you know, i love america because. Ive been given so much by america and, you know, i come from blue collar roots, you know, both of my grandfathers retired from the Puget Sound Naval shipyard in bremerton, washington. I was born in bremerton. My father worked in sawmills. Okay. He he he started as a millwright. And through the course of his career, he became manager of a sawmill. And so, you know, i am from, you know, really a im a blue collar story and america has given my family opportunity and we have benefited. So much from it. But my is is are we going to allow people to be different around the country . The solution, i believe, to our problems is federalism. And, you know, california can be california. But let florida be florida. Let texas be texas. The cram down, whether its done by the right or the left, where they cram down these issues and say, okay, were going to do it. The same doesnt what state were going to run this out of dc everybodys got to be in lockstep. Yep, that isnt going work. And if they keep doing it, theyre going to break the country up. You spend a bit of time in your book with an unlikely naomi wolf. Yes. Who is she . Well naomi wolf is a feminist and she is i shouldnt say unlikely a surprise it. Yeah. Means well and and im good friends with a guy named eric metaxas. Eric went to yale with naomi. And as is friends from when they were were students. And the truth is, is somebody who is i think. Very, very you know, she believes in Health Freedom. Okay. Health freedom was something we always had in america until obamacare and most people dont realize this. You know hillary and the Clinton Administration tried to pass comprehensive Health Reform and they were stopped by the Drug Companies because. The Drug Companies had the power and the money to stop hillarycare. And thats who really paid the bills in order to defeat it, in order to to get obamacare. Barack obama went to the Drug Companies and cut a deal with him. And to get it through and, ended their opposition to obamacare and they were able to get it through and with obamacare, our Health Freedom was dramatically impacted. And so that has a lot of consequences that really played out during covid because during covid and i talk a lot about what i call the wealth extraction machine in the book, people dont realize the central impact of covid. Was it minted 40 brand new billionaires . Okay. And those 40 billionaires were minted because of choices by the government to to to be supportive of the vaccine policy. They suppressed therapeutics like ivermectin and and you know i myself i took ivermectin. I was subscribed to ivermectin when i had covid, and i was able to come through it using those therapeutics. And but but that was only because, you know im a im a different thinker, right . So i, i had so that i could get ivermectin. Most people didnt even know what it was. And and so the the truth is, is that Health Freedom ended. Naomi wolf, this person from the left has walked through a process where she became upset that she no longer had health, freedom. And its had a dramatic impact on her and her writing. She is probably one of the best writers in. Shes absolutely brilliant, shes thoughtful. Shes thorough. And as you can tell from my book, i love her. Well, you quote naomi wolf in your book. Yeah, this is a Naomi Wolf Wolf quote. So i read about mussolinis italy in the twenties, stalins russia and hitlers germany in the thirties. I read east germany in the fifties, czechoslovakia in the sixties, chile in 1973, as well as other latin dictatorships. I read about communist china in the late eighties, in the early nineties, violent dictators across political spectrum all do same thing key things. Control is control. In spite of this range of ideological, profound similarity his in tactics leap off the pages and thats naomi wolf and then floyd brown. Here is your tagline on these tactics now wolf identified are generally employed by all dictators each in their own way. They are being employed in america today. Yeah. And one of the real targets of my book is what im what i would call the the two tiered system of justice and decisions that were made early at the end of the Obama Administration in that really poison the Trump Administration and the the the these this this trump attempt by the elites to criminalize portions of what i would call open political dialog. And i really became. Sensitive to this because of western journal the story of western journal is i founded western journal in 2008, which was the year facebook opened to the public and i was one of the early adopt of facebook and Facebook Technology and by 2016, western journal was featured in the facebook newsfeed. 11 billion times, which led to over a billion page views on our website, western journal. We were the 60th largest website in america as a as a result of that and and trump got elected and all of a sudden everybody turned to Mark Zuckerberg and they said to him, how is it you let donald trump run wild, this platform and, you know, if if youre only stopped him, he wouldnt have gotten elected. And so they had they completely all of the algorithms they took western journals, traffic down a full 90 . And. You know, we built back and and were going to be fine. But the truth is, is i could see the they were using big tech big to control the debates and they hadnt been up until. 2016 and then and then on top of that, ive seen the weaponization of it. And i think twitter files which came out after my book but but probably would have been quoted extensively in my book, had had it come out earlier. It shows how the government was outsourcing censorship to, these big tech companies. And so those are the kind of controls. So i remember when i went to lithuania in during the time the baltics were getting free. And the first thing the lithuanians did was they went and took over the tv tower and that was because they needed to communicate the people. And so dictators always move to the media outlets. They move to control dialog. And so thats why been a defender of the First Amendment and freedom of speech and i believe everyone left, right, everyone should be in this marketplace of ideas and that people are smart enough to make decisions for themselves. So i am, i guess, almost a free speech. Maxim is i mean, i believe in free speech and and i always want to do whatever i can to to protect and defend speech. But facebook is a private company. It is a private company. Regulated. But but when the government was fact regulating what could be on facebook, we learned that through the twitter files. And so you had government agencies, had the fbi, you had the white house, you had state governor, you had secretary of state. You had people that were, quote, the governing elites telling these companies, were going to cause problems for you. You. Come to heel and you cancel these people. And so they canceled people based on their speech. And it happened to both the left and the right. But it happened more dramatically to the and it particularly happened to what i would call the Health Freedom movement during covid when they when they just wouldnt allow any debate, you had to accept the government or, you know, you were just basically canceled. You were canceled off all the platforms arms. I mean, shoot, i have my friend jim hof did the gateway pundit. They even canceled his insurance. So, i mean, canceled option is real social scoring is real in america. And if people dont realize it, then theyre going to wake up one day and find out it is in a subchapter in counterpunch h entitled why job number one is breaking up big tech you right tech is one head of the four headed behemoth along with wall street, the permanent state and the unit part right and i, i believe that i believe so people need to understand and this is something that that that i really realized after they brought western journals traffic down so low i hopped on a plane and went to washington dc. I met with the freedom caucus. I walked to the rayburn building, i walked to the hart building. These are buildings im familiar with. I was on the staff of bob dole. Okay. I you know, i know how to walk those buildings. Right. And i met with all of the key Decision Makers and i realized is that it doesnt matter. Republicans and democrats, were getting so much in the way a Campaign Contributions from big tech, from google, from facebook, from these companies, from apple, from microsoft, that there were no changes that were going to be made really to their, in essence, almost monopolies. You know, they so much benefit through their their limitations on liability i mean, if if somebody doesnt like what i write in western journal, they sue me and they have ive been sued and i deal with it. And so i have to i to work to be truthful and i have to work to to to make sure the content on there is accurate. And but, you know, facebook if they put something on there thats inaccurate, they arent held responsible like i am. And that is because of the exemptions that have been carved law by the us congress and and i believe if they would end exemptions and hold them accountable for their actions, then it would greatly improve the process. Frankly, i dont think anybody have an 80 market share in any business. Thats classic antitrust, right . And so i believe that, you know, google shouldnt have the share that it has in advertising on google shouldnt have the share it has in search. And these companies have been allowed to accumulate. Eight assets. I mean, facebook should never have been allowed to buy instagram and google have never been allowed to buy doubleclick. Well, that happened under a republican administrations. So this is not a republican or a democrat thing. This is Big Government likes big tech because of the two of them are very happy and very profitable. Together you spend quite bit of time in counterpunch also talking about due process and the patriot act. Absolutely i you know, when i look back my career, i own my failures and one of my biggest failures in my mind was supporting George W Bush when he went into iraq. If i had one decision that could have a do over, it would be i would not support these endless, endless wars. And and the republican administra tions that fostered them. People ask, you know, i speak all over the country. I travel the time, and they ask me why is it we havent won a war since eisenhower gave his speech warning about the military Industrial Complex . We havent won a war since that speech and to me, the answer is simple. The objective now isnt to win wars. The objective is to maximize profits for the military Industrial Complex. You know, you can go to a place like afghanistan and those guys can profit year after year after year for 20 years. And every year they gave us this false narrative. Things are changing in afghanistan were winning in afghanistan. Were win the hearts and minds. Afghanistan is are changing well now in hindsight we know none of that is true the world is not safer and so if i have anything that want to own it been my support in the past for the military Industrial Complex if i can go back i wouldnt support it the way i did conservative tend to support Law Enforcement has the fbi done a good job . Yeah. Well, so, you know, i think the fbi is is most institutions washington its all about the fbi. Okay. And with the patriot act, the fbi was given a whole lot of new things to do that it hadnt traditionally done. And as a result of that, i think our freedom is less. And i think that each and every one of us have paid a price for that. And, you know, some of my friends have paid a dear, dear price. And i think of general michael flynn, who someone that that ive known for a number of years, who, by the way, must people dont realize hes a life long democrat. Okay. General flynn, one of the reasons that he got his positions in the Obama Administration is because he was a democrat for years and years and years, hed always voted democrat. He he was a cultural democrat for decades. And and yet he was the person that targeted to to to just as the Trump Administration was coming in, because they didnt want the military Industrial Complex challenged, he lost his job with obama because he was challenging it. And you i love at one time, general flynn said to me, said, you know, if there were weapons of mass destruction in iraq, i would have known because i was guy they sent there to find them. He said, floyd, ive turned over every rock in iraq and there arent any weapons of mass destruction. So these are false narratives that were given year, year by republican, democrat administrations and only did one thing. They kept the military Industrial Complex in business and growing. So floyd brown whos doing the counterpunching . So the counterpunching is the Unlikely Alliance and you know my wife daughter is getting married in in october and shes marrying a guy by the name of chris escovedo. Okay. He is of mexican origin, but he grew up in california. So he he made he made the transit. And a few years ago, based on losing some family members in the in the opioid crisis, he made the transition to trump. My daughter met him working in the Trump Campaign to me he is an example of whats happening in the history. Anex all over the country include shooting in california and hispanics are not going to be a reliable demographic for the Democratic Party if they continue to push these hard core progressive antifamily policies. So thats one group, i think black are another and there are these i think asians are a third. Okay, asians, they love their families. Their families are very close in family oriented. People educate is really important to them. And so these are all constituencies that have traditionally been base bedrock for the Democratic Party. And that those rocks are cracking. And its its happening because of these Health Freedom policies. And its happening of of radical, Progressive Social policies. And so i see a an opportunity for these groups to come into the alliance with the Republican Party in new and different ways. So thats the Unlikely Alliance you, quote. Owen strachan and you can tell us in a minute who that is. Christians have spent too much time in the last 10 to 20 years trying to appease the world and show them that we are not that type of christian. We should always be seeking to the fruits of the spirit. We should always be seeking to speak truth and love. But we must also differentiate truth from, lies. We must destroy woke ideological speculations by operating through intellectual, theological and spiritual missions. Yeah, and really spiritual mission. So the the truth is, is that when you read my book, youll find at my core, i am a christian. Okay . And what, what people dont realize is, is that for the last 30, maybe even 40 years, the strategist and tactician of the left has been saul alinsky. And saul alinsky in book rules for radicals, which i have read, he outlines basically using division and divisiveness, ridicule and harsh messages to win political battles through basically dividing people and the right, in a strange way, adopted some of that. And and and i myself in some of my early days, adopted many of those same tactic. So if you go back and look at it, some of the things did against the Clinton Administration and what im saying now that the way for republicans and for conservatives and for christians to be successful in the political arena we need to actually adopt message of christ, which is a message of love. Its a message of forgiveness and its a message of inclusion and so at its core, i want to reach out to people. The counterpunch is rejecting alinsky and saying, you know what, when they punch us, were to love them back. And so its key to go into the Hispanic Community and go into the Africanamerican Community and to be with them and to love on them and to care for them, which is what christ would teach. And thats how well be successful with them. The author is floyd brown the book is called counterpunch, and unlike the alliance of americans back for faith and freedom, thanks for your time on book tour. Im pleased to be