We're back with another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jasinski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr LST.
Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts as well. Today we
are joined by Jenny Beth Martin. She is the honorary chairman of the Tea
Party Patriots Action and she's also the host of The Jenny Beth Show. You
can find more information about a Tea Party Patriots at Tea Party Patriots dot org.
Jenny Beth, thanks for coming on the show. Oh, thank you
so much for having me. Yeah, let's start with actually, you have
launched a podcast just in the last year. We were chatting about this before
the recording started. Tell us a little bit about what you do on your
show, and you know what you found interesting about the podcasting medium now that
you're you know, doing it so regularly. Well, thanks. So we're
doing a one hour usually there are forty five minutes to one hour episodes,
and it's a single interview with either an activist or an elected official or someone
who is doing something that I think that that our activist at te pretty Patriot's
Action would be interested in. So we have interviewed five different border sheriffs.
I spent about three weeks down on the border and interviewed different border sheriffs,
and some of those one up being such long interviews that we turned it into
two episodes instead of just one. I did a ride along with Chris Cabrera
who's with the Border Patrol Union, and wrote along with him along the border,
and he was pointing out different things that he has to that he has
encountered. We have interviewed people in Washington, d see Congressman Andy Biggs.
We did a few people who run different organizations like Jason Sneed from Honest Elections
Project, and we also interviewed Steve Dace or Dace, who has his own
show and had a new film coming out. And I've just really enjoyed being
able to expand and not do the quick SoundBite, but get to know people
who I think we're making a huge difference in our country and make sure that
other people around the country get to know them as well. Yeah. I
love that. That's so true about podcasting. You can have much more expansive
conversations and dive into different things that maybe feel like tangents but are so interesting
when you get started on them. And I know you've been following obviously the
border for years and it's an issue you know very well. Was there anything
when you did ride alongs and interviewed all of these different stakeholders. Is there
anything that surprised you or you think there's anything in particular at the border that
you found like absolutely necessary to highlight when you were conveying some things about that
experience to your audience. Yes, in the past, the problem with illegal
entry into our country is that people are coming in outside of the normal entry
points, So they're not coming in through the regular check checkpoints as if you
will to get into our country, and they would come in through those areas,
but they'd often go underneath the bridge or go through the desert in different
places. Now, what is happening because of the way the Biden administration is
handling that. It's hard. I can't say border security because it's not.
There's nothing secure about what they're doing. But the way that they are handling
entry into our country, they're letting everybody in. It doesn't matter if you
should be here. It doesn't matter if you have all your paperwork, it
doesn't matter. Basically who you are. They're letting you in, letting you
claim asylum and get a court date for some time in the future, which
right now is anywhere from eight to ten or more years. And then you
tell them where you want to go, and you basically go anywhere in the
country on the taxpayer done now and INNGO maybe transporting you, but the NGO
is being paid by the taxpayers. So then when sheriffs and border patrol find
people who are coming in to the country not through an entry point, but
coming in outside of entry points, those are people who have either already been
expelled from our country. They're hardened criminals, they're involved in human trafficking or
drug trafficking, some sort of nefarious activity that they don't want to let the
United States know about. And then the most alarming thing is that there are
people who are flying to Central and South America from China and Iran and Russia.
And there are countries around the world, but countries that would be considered
special interest countries to the United States. They're flying in and then instead of
going through a border entry point, the cartels are helping them get on into
our country without the United States knowing that they are in our country. Now,
why is it that people from China or Iran or Russia don't want United
States officials to know they're in our country. That's very concerning to me from
a homeland security standpoint. And yet my orchist gets before Congress and says that
it's such a joke. He says, we have operational control of the border,
and yet the Secure Offences Act defines what operational control of the border is,
and he's just redefining it based on whatever he wants his own metrics to
be, sort of like how the administration redefines what is a man and what
is a woman. There is no security. We have wide open borders right
now. It's it is just astounding how how little law enforcement is actually able
to do, and for so many different bureaucratic reasons. It sounds like you've
talked to people from the Border Patrol Union who wish that they could have more
control over who's coming in now, but the administration makes that incredibly difficult for
them to do. Absolutely, and you will talk to you people who work
for the Border Patrol, who the border Patrol Union spokespeople are allowed to talk
publicly. Other people who work for Border Patrol may tell you things off the
record, or they'll tell their friends things, but they're not They're not allowed
to talk publicly about what's going on. And they all say, we just
have they do. We do not have a secure border at all right now.
None of it is secure, and they and everyone I have been following
this issue since two thousand and fourteen. We did a documentary back in two
thousand and fourteen called Border Seats of America. And the thing that I have
watched change over the years from the Obama administration to the Trump administration and now
to the Biden administration. Trump when he said we're sending people back, they're
not going to be able to come into our country and we are securing the
border, it sends a message to the rest of the world that we are
serious about who is coming into our country and we're going to follow our laws,
and that helps reduce the number of people who are attempting to come into
the country illegally. But with Biden, it's unlike anything they've ever seen.
The volume of people coming through the country right now is unlike anything they've ever
seen. It was not even like this under President Obama. Yeah, that's
an interesting point, and actually it's one of the things I wanted to ask
you about more broadly, but maybe just on this issue. For now,
the Republican Party and House Republicans in particular, I think are doing as good
a job as they possibly can without the Senate and the Presidency and control of
the vast sort of administrative state which really controls our border policy of Grilli Mayorkas,
and keeping this issue front and center, because as you know very well,
this matters to the grassroots of the Republican Party, it matters to the
average Republican voter. In fact that it matters to the average American a whole
lot. But it still feels to me like a transition moment for the Republican
Party. It still seems as though there are a lot of people that you
know, are still on the same page of that autopsy back in twenty twelve
that the RNC did trying to desperately trying to turn the page from the Tea
Party moment that you were so consequential in. And I wonder just your take
on how you think, you know Republicans have absorbed the lessons of recent years.
Is the establishment Republican Party paying attention. Do they understand how serious this
issue is in particular to average voters or are you still hoping to see much
much more from them? You know, you want to see more, But
I also understand how slim the majority is in the House of Representatives right now.
So every time that you can get the Republicans in the House of Representatives
to agree on something, for instance, the bill that they passed to secure
the border earlier this year, that is significant. I don't think that in
twenty twelve, twenty fourteen, twenty sixteen, you're going to get a bill
passed that would work on securing the border that would satisfy pretty much every different
contingent within the Republican Party. And then you wind up in a spot where
Numbers USA, for instance, comes out and says, this is the best
bill that we have seen for border security in years, and it just passed
with the Republican majority. So I think that they have learned some lessons,
and I appreciate that. I think that there are on the the House side
because they're up for re election every two years and their home more frequently and
they represent a smaller number of people than what happens on the Senate side.
I think that sometimes, not always, but sometimes the House of Representatives is
much more in tune with what their constituency wants. The Senate is set up
differently because you have elections every six years. They represent a whole entire state.
I think that the Senators don't understand quite as much as as a House
does what the base wants. The Senators, oftentimes, especially the Senate leadership,
tend to be a bit more out of touch with the base and much
more in touch with Washington, DC. Yeah. No, And on that
note, one thing that you've been following really closely is the unfolding saga.
Well, I mean, we're just on the heels of the third indictment of
Donald Trump, but this is a part of the unfolding saga of the government
being weaponized against the opposition party, the Democrats opposition party, and even you
know, some of the never Trump Republicans opposition party. Really it's two parties
and one at this point. And I wanted to ask Jenny Beth why it
is that issue resonates so much with the type of folks that tea party Patriots
is connecting with, you know, the grassroots kind of activist base of the
Republican Party, especially since Republicans were generally very trusting of the FBI, very
trusting of these sort of law enforcement bodies that had built up good faith with
Republican Party for a long time, and now people look and feel so betrayed,
especially again on the heels of this third indictment. Jim Jordan is releasing
actually as we're speaking, his Facebook files round four that show the FBI ostensibly
misleading the tech companies Facebook and Twitter that ended up suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop
store in October of twenty twenty. So again, why is this issue so
resonant? Well, I think first for me personally and for leaders within the
Tea Party movement, it hits very close to home because we were targeted by
the IRS, and the targeting began in late two thousand and nine, really
more in early two ten, and the IRS denied that there was targeting going
on. They said business it was just business as usual and they just had
a lot of nonprofit applications they needed to process. Yet we were being targeted.
Were our nonprofit applications for tax? Our tax status were being slow walked,
and when you would talk to a donor, they would want it,
especially if you're talking about a non tax deductible nonprofit donation to a five or
one C three, which would be like what most churches are and what the
American Red Cross crosses. So the money you write, the checks that you
write to those organizations, you are able as a donor to deductive from your
own your own taxes. Will you go and talk to somebody and they'd say,
well, are you tax deductible? Do you have your tax status?
And if you said no, they would wonder, what are you doing wrong?
Why isn't the IRS approving your tax status? You must be doing something
wrong. And really it was the IRS targeting us, but they were getting
up before Congress and saying, oh, no, we weren't. We're not
targeting anybody, so we look like the crazy people, and they were weaponizing
government against us. And eventually it came out on the Friday before Mother's Day
in twenty thirteen, and it came out that they were targeting us, and
there was never true accountability to the individuals who were responsible. The IR ultimately
did pay a settlement to tea party groups it was compared to the amount of
money it took to defend and to process all of the questions that they were
asking of all of us. It was nothing compared to the amount of time
and money involved in answering all of their questions. But they still as an
organization were accountable. But no individual was ever held accountable. And I said
back then, I said, if they're not held accountable, other people in
the government will think it is okay to weaponize the government and they can get
away with it. And that's what's happening right now, and it continues to
happen. It happened. We watched it happen from the twenty sixteen campaign and
the way that ultimately President Trump was spied on. He said that he was
being spied on. The government said no, no, no, that's not
happening. The media said that wasn't happening. Oh yeah, he was being
spied on. And and so that continued in the Russia Russia, Russia accusations
that he faced to the beginning of his presidency. It wound up that those
those did not pan out the way that the left and the mainstream media said
that they would. So and you had the intelligence agencies, working in the
Department of Justice, working against a sitting president, and that continued throughout his
presidency, and it's continued since then, and it continued during the twenty twenty
elections. So as you look at that just that broad timeline from twenty ten
until now, it's been going on for well over a decade against conservatives.
And I'm sure that as we look even further back in history, it was
going on before, just against people who are standing up and had had the
courage to stand up to the government and see things that the government did not
want to hear. So that's why it resonates with me so much. And
we can get into more of the details, but that's for me why it
just makes me so angry and I have little faith in the government institutions at
this point. Yeah, I was gonna say, that's actually fascinating because I
feel like Obama was the first I don't know how to say. It's like
maybe culture war president, and that he has his famous Pennsylvania campaign line about
people clinging to their God, their guns, and their religion and just actually,
in a weird way, reminds me of Peter Struck, who was part
of the FBI's operation to target Donald Trump in twenty sixteen with a hoax about
Russia collision, saying, you know, in this text to his mistress leagues
of page that he could like smell the Trump supporters in a Walmart. And
I wonder, Jane Beth, if you sense that in that original IRS targeting
there was a seed of that sentiment that was I think really expanding on the
left and in the Democratic Party and certainly in the media, this kind of
cultural contempt and this idea that we need to control the American people because they
can no longer be trusted to vote in their own best interests, to vote.
You know, they're they're a group of essentially ignorant, bigoted people,
backwards people that you need to be controlled by the sort of the state from
Washington, DC. Yes, it's sort of the we know better, we
trust us, we're the experts. We know what's best for you and your
life, and owe you, little peon person, bless your heart, pat
you on the head, pat you on the back, and shove you out
of the way. Well what we do, what we think is the best.
Well that's great if you don't live in America, but we live in
America, where every two years we get to change who controls the House of
Representatives. Every four years, we the people get to decide who can who
is going to be in the White House, and then every the Senate is
just sort of an ongoing basis because of the way that senators are elected.
It doesn't just up end everything every six years. But that that's how it's
supposed to be in America, that the people feel empowered to be able to
control what the government is doing. The government operates with the consent of the
people. But the experts in the bureaucracy in Washington, DC think that that
is not how it's done. And especially the bureaucracy, they aren't fired.
They keep on working regardless of who is elected. And I think that they
see that changes, especially changes in the White House. It's just a small,
inconvenient sort of a speed bump in the road for them. And I
think when it came to President when it came to President Trump, it wasn't
even a speed bump in the road for them. It just was, well,
we're not even going to pay attention to them. We're just going to
keep doing things the way we want them to be done. Because we know
best, and that text message from Peter Struck. Every time that I go
to Walmart, I think of the fact that he sent that. I can't
I can never go to Walmart and not think of that. I want to
be able not to, but I still think of it, and I go
to Walmart frequently, and it's just it's a contempt that they have for us
in the rest of the country. Who you know, the Walmart is right
around the corner, and you're going to go pick up your groceries, or
you're going to pick up whatever it is that you might need, your sunscreen
or whatever item it is, because Walmart basically carries everything and you do your
own shopping for yourself. And it's just absolute contempt for the people who are
paying the work all day long, to pay taxes, to pay their salary.
It's just disgusting and it's not how our country is supposed to operate,
and yet it is how country is operating. M Yeah, absolutely, and
that's sort of this I guess. I wonder a lot of people look back
on what was the Time magazine cover from maybe twenty fourteen of Rand Paul.
On the cover it said the Libertarian Moment something like that, and there was
I think some people in the Beltway missed why so many regular Republican voters were
drawn to the Tea Party movement and why so many regular Americans ended up voting
in Tea Party candidates. There was a sense among the American people already it
wasn't, you know, just about lower taxes, which were badly needed,
or you know, it wasn't just about limiting the size of government, although
that is obviously essential to reigning in the powers of people like Peter Struck,
but it was also the sense that things were getting darker, that the left
was poised to aren't using the levers of government in unprecedented ways. Am I
right? And that was that something you picked up on at the time,
those sentiments you shared at the time, And did the Beltway kind of miss
that? Yeah, they did miss it, and you are exactly right about
that. The fiscal responsibility aspect of the Tea Party movement and the libertarian movement
are very, very important, and they continue to be important today. What
we've realized over the last fourteen years is that even with when you are focused
on the fiscal responsibility aspect of it, you have to pay attention to the
constitutionality of what the government is doing. And if what the government is doing
is not constitutional, you're never going to be able to rein end the spending,
or it becomes much more difficult to reign end the spending. What people
want in the Tea party movement and the libertarian movement, and I would say
in the most recent parent parental rights movement and the anti COVID lockdown movement,
the common theme among everyone is they want the government to just leave them alone
and let them live their life the way they see fit. They don't want
anything from the government. They're not asking for handouts, they're not saying pay
for this, pay for that. They just want the government to leave them
alone. They know they have to pay taxes. They may see the taxes
are way too much, but at the end of the day, the most
important thing is just let me be free to live my life the way I
see fit, as long as I am not harming other people, and get
out of my way so that I can do that. And believe me,
if you let me do that, you'll give the taxes that you want and
we will have it will be a working relationship for everyone involved. People who
are elected to office do not know how to handle us because they're so used
to lobbyists coming to them who want something in exchange. They want a bill
pass that will give a certain group of people more power. They want a
law passed that will give another group of people more money somehow, either from
a subsidy or a kick back, or whatever it might be. They want
more money. And when we go to the government, we're saying we don't
want more money, we don't want any bills passed to give us preferential treatment.
We just want you to stop infringing on us, leave us alone.
And I even had a former member of Congress who I went to his office.
It may have been during the debt ceiling fight back in twenty and eleven
or one of the spending battles, I don't remember which one. And he
was on the Appropriations Committee, and so he wasn't voting the way I would
want him to vote. But we had a friendly relationship and I was able
to learn more about what was going on in the committee, and he would
listen to me and learn about what we wanted. And finally he just said
it was either him or his chief of staff. I don't remember which one.
Off the top of my head. But they just said, you know,
we don't actually know what to do with you because you're Everyone else who
comes in here is asking for money in one way or the other, and
you're not, and we don't know how to make you happy. And I
think that that is a common theme that the people in Washington, DC just
haven't figured out. It's that we don't want the government to give us anything.
We just want the government to leave us alone. And what the people
who are in Washington, DC, whether they are elected officials or bureaucrats,
they want more and more power for themselves, which means they have to take
freedom away from us, to a mass power and control over our lives.
And they want to make sure that they're giving money to different different groups of
people so that those people act. However, it winds up being a control
mechanism for them as well. And I think that is the thing that's so
many elected officials and certainly so many bureaucrats just cannot understand about the Tea Party
movement, about the libertarian movement, and even about the parental parental rights and
anti COVID lockdown movements. I was I was just going to ask actually about
that issue, the leave me alone and leave my kids alone question two.
That issue has exploded since twenty twenty in ways again people here in Washington,
DC totally did not anticipate, And I wanted to ask Jenny Beth where you
see that fitting in to sort of the average you know, Republican voters concerns
when they're going to the voting booth, because a lot of people say it's,
you know, people are voting on their material interests, those kitchen table
issues. I would submit, of course that what their kids are being taught
in school is very much a kitchen table issue, but obviously it's not involved
in sort of their checkbook, balancing their checkbook or their bank account. Where
do you think that fits and people sort of the larger scheme voters concerns.
I think that it is an absolute It is a massive concern to anyone who
has children from maybe not if it's a first child, maybe not that those
first two to four years before they get to school aged kids, because you're
a little bit insulated from what's happening in schools until they until they start start
going to school, but once they start going to school, all the way
through college years so that's it's nearly twenty years of your children's life. You
are focused on what's best for them. And from the moment your child is
born. And I had twins, so mine were born at the exact same
time, so that from the moment my children were born, I wanted to
protect them and make sure that nobody was going to do anything that would harm
them. And that is a parental instinct, right, So you want to
take care of your children and nurture and love them and care for them.
You send them to school thinking that they're going to get an education. At
least that's what we used to think. And at the beginning of the Tea
Party movement, I heard a lot about common Core, and prior to that,
with President Bush, there was there was some program that he did and
I didn't have children at that point, but but you heard these different things
that the presidents were doing, and it was changing a little bit about how
kids were learning in school. Well, it was alarming because they were standardizing
everything that the kids are learning without there being a lot of as much local
control. We realized when the world locked down and the classrooms wound up on
the kitchen tables or in bedrooms with doors that were open, and kids and
parents were passing by and hearing what their children were learning. Learning I use
in air quotes at school. It is not at all, but we expected.
It wasn't reading, writing, arithmetic, learning literature on learning history,
being able to recite quotes and or facts and be able to put things on
paper and know that you're actually learning things and being judged and graded on it.
Instead, it was such indoctrination that we began to worry about what kind
of education our children were getting, and we realized that a lot of what
was happening is that they were trying to prime our children and teach our children,
or indoctrinate our children to become activists on their liberal issues, rather than
teaching them what they need to know to survive, to be well educated,
critical thinking adults who can provide for their own families in the future. That's
why I want my children to have a good education. I remember when my
son was in ninth grade. I think we went to the school council and
needed to change something in his in what he was learning. Maybe it was
in tenth grade, so we're changing He was bored in math and we needed
to make math more challenging for him. And so we're talking to the counselor
about how we'd go about doing that, and my son ended up putting two
years of math into to one year so that he would be on a more
advanced track the last two years of college of high school. And the counselor
was seeing something like, well, he can kind of miss something with British
or not British literature, but whatever the literature class was. And she said
during that conversation, we don't do British literature anymore because nobody wants to hear
what dead old white men have to say. And I sat there and I
said, wait a minute, what did you just say? I said,
dead old white men. First, dead old white men wrote the founding documents
of our country, so we do care about what they have to say.
How can you say this in front of my white son. Why are you
saying that nobody cares about what men he's going to be a white man at
some point have to say, and what differences of me, what our races
right now? And I asked her all of that. I was shocked by
it. I documented it like I left. I left the counselor's office and
sent a text message to my team talking about it, and she said they
didn't care about Shakespeare and Plato. And first, Shakespeare and Plato are not
even that isn't they aren't both British British literature there, so it's completely different
times in writing. And I thought, this is so bizarre. I can't
believe she actually said this, and I documented it, and I thought it
was one off, like it just must be a counselor who is explaining things,
but it's just sort of one off. Well, then it's twenty happened.
I realized that it wasn't one off. This is happening all over the
entire country. And they don't want to teach Shakespeare anymore to anyone. They
don't want to teach the founding documents to anyone. They want to teach all
this new stuff that hasn't even withstood a decade of time, much less centuries
of time. And I just was blown away that it was happening everywhere.
And then it just gets worse and worse and worse, like the little things
that I would see that had to do with the LGBTQ agenda in my kids
public school. I thought it was just sort of one off incidents, and
then I realized that this is happening everywhere. It's all over the entire country,
and it is alarming, and it is something that we have to stand
up and push back against, not just because of the indoctrination, but because
if we don't make sure that our children and the future generation have a solid
educational foundation, how are they going to be productive adults. How are they
going to be able to adjust to the leaps and technology that are are we
are on the cusp of because of artificial intelligence. How are they going to
be able to have jobs and create in the future if they don't even know
how to think and don't don't know how to learn. Yeah, there was
an unfortunate rupture among the kind of Freedom Caucus group of people Freedom Caucus aligned
people in the House over the debt negotiations. And I know that's a couple
of months in the past, but it's it's been a persistent issue for you
know, Marjor Taylor Green and Thomas Massey and Jim Jordan, Lauren Bobert,
Matt Gay. It's that sort of group of House Republicans. What did you
make of how those dynamics ultimately played out. You know, Kevin McCarthy was
in a pretty tough spot, and like with the h as in his as
with his election as a speaker. I think the right rung some serious concessions
out of the right flank, the freedom of Coccus fists runk some concessions out
of him. At the same time, I understand the frustrations and now that
we're going ahead, looking into September where some of the stuff is going to
be ironed out yet again, are you concerned about the unity in the House
of Republican conference and what did you make of those dynamics as they played out
earlier this summer. I'm not concerned about the unity. They should be able
to have robust debate and at the end of the day pass legislation. But
you have to be able to debate it what And I I wasn't surprised by
how the dead ceiling turned out. I could have predicted it. I can
tell what we're going to see with the upcoming appropriations and spending bills were going
to wind up. It is my prediction that we will wind up with a
massive spending bill. Kevin McCarthy will get Democrat. So if he has to
pass it, and we won't have the kind of cuts and recisions that we
really should have, and government will continue spending money, and they will spend
even more money. I don't think that's right. It's not what I'm standing
for. It's not what I'm calling for. I've just watched this play out
so many times that it's like groundhog Day, and it doesn't matter who the
speaker is on the Republican side, they just continue to spend money. It's
very concerning to me that that happens, because they should be able to go
back and see, you know what, we are not going to fund anything
that puts boys and girls bathrooms in schools period. That shouldn't even be hard
to figure out and debate why. I guarantee you that is a decision that
the majority, supermajority of Americans would be okay with. Maybe the far extream
fringe people on the left would not be okay with it, but by and
large, this is something that all Americans are going to agree on. And
getting reducing our spending levels now that the COVID emergencies are over, I think
most Americans would say, yeah, you know, we need to be able
to do that, especially if they understood that these increased spinning levels are harming,
are causing inflation. So it's causing all the prices of everything to go
up, and it's and then to fight inflation, interest rates are going up.
So we're getting hit by this left and right at home. And if
we could reduce spending and that would help reduce inflation, I think people would
be would be happy with that, especially if you we're not trying to reduce
all spending. We just need to get back to a pre COVID level rather
than all this emergency extra spending that we have. There are other items that
that different people within the House Freedom Caucus are fighting for and standing up for.
But I think that they can find a few different items that they are
going to agree. We need to cut the spending on this. I think
we need to get rid of all of the woke And when I say woke,
im I am really focused on the transgender agenda that is going through the
military, and the constant di training that is happening through the military and through
through schools, the diversity, equity and inclusion training. They could defund all
of that they if they could find a few areas that they could defund that
the majority of Americans would be okay with. I think our country would be
better off. But I just don't think at the end of the day that
the House Republican leadership has the same kind of iron will that Speaker Pelosi had.
And Speaker Pelosi had that kind of iron will, and she got Obamacare
passed, and I think that it cost her the speakership in twenty ten,
but she was willing to risk that in order to get Obamacare passed. And
she came back in and she took up impeaching Trump, and she spent money
and she's still increased and got the things that she wanted funded even when Trump
was president and Republicans controlled the Senate. And on our side, we just
don't have the kind of speaker who who has that same kind of will that
that Nancy Pelosi has. And maybe that's better than Nancy Pelosi, because Nancy
Pelosi just pushes everything to the to the left so hard. Maybe it's better
not to have that, but I would appreciate somebody who had who had the
kind of will power to say we're going to say no, and we have
a majority here and we have power, and you're going to have to listen
to us because elections have consequences, and we run the House of Representatives now.
But the Republicans sometimes they are just they always seem to think you've got
to go to the right, I mean, not to the right, you
have to go to the middle to appease everyone. Rather than saying these things
that we stand for, our theme said if we go and communicate it to
our constituency, our constituency is going to agree with us. Actually, that's
a great place to get to the last question I wanted to ask, which
is are you optimistic you know after all of these all these years of sort
of toiling in the grassroots, seeing some Republicans really absorb the lessons of the
populist wave that's rattled the party. But also feeling is that the challenges are,
at least from my perspective, growing, when you look at Jack Smith,
and when you look at the fact that even as we're talking, we
might be expecting something to come out of Georgia this week in Fulton County day
Fanny Willis, it does feel like, you know, some of this is
really being ratcheted up. So Republicans seem to be at least in some ways
more ready to meet the moment, and then in other ways it seems as
though that moment is getting more and more grave. So are you a domestic
Jenny Beth that this can all be turned around? Let me address that in
two things. Let me address what I'm most concerned about, and then how
I am able to get out of bed every morning and keep fighting. And
because you have to be optimistic. If you're able to get out of bed
every morning and keep fighting and believe you can make a difference, I think
that the situation that we face right now is extraordinarily grave. I think what
is happening to President Trump is happening. It's just wrong. The indictments are
wrong. They are twisting the law to try to find a way to make
it stick so that they can use these indictments against to prevent him from running
or try to prevent him from being president again. The Department of Justice and
the intelligence agencies interfered with the twenty sixteen election, they interfered with the twenty
twenty election, and they are interfering with the twenty twenty four election. And
I think what is happening to President Trump will have a chilling effect among activists
and his supporters around the country. It doesn't mean that they won't still vote
for him, but they may not be as willing to stand up and talk
about why they support him to people who they don't know and trust. And
I say that because I'm hearing whisperers of that and little comments of it around
the country as I travel the country, and I heard the same kind of
thing. As we were being targeted by the IRS, people were afraid to
speak out because they were afraid they would be audited when we're being targeted from
the IRS, and they had every reason to be concerned about that because he
Party donors were six times more likely to be individually audited than the average taxpayer.
What is happening to Trump? It isn't justest that they're going after Trump.
They're going after everybody. We have seen electors in Michigan who have been
indicted. In Fulton County, Georgia, the electors may wind up being indicted,
or attorneys who worked for President Trump may be indicted. I'm hearing that
in Arizona they're now looking at what they might do to electors from twenty in
Arizona and there might be legal proceedings against them. They're doing the same thing
in Wisconsin. And this is to send a message, a chilling, chilling
message that it is one of intimidation. If you so much as question the
outcome of the election, we are going to go after you. You are
not allowed to do that. If you're on the right, if you're on
the left, you can question it, you can have alternate electors, you
can vote against the election results on the floor of Congress and chat and not
accept the electors, and no harm will come to you. But if it
happens on the right, you're not allowed to do that. And this is
about twenty twenty four. And I worry because I don't know. President Trump
is a very strong man, and he has a good added and I hear
people around the country say, but how much can one man take? How
much can one man take? And he just keeps standing for our country,
for himself, but also for our country, and I appreciate that so much
about him. And I think it's going to be even worse because there will
be an indictment from Fulton County, and I don't know if it will just
be Trump or if it will be Trump and other people, people who are
my friends in the indictments that are coming out of Fulton County, Georgia,
and it's it's very alarming, and I don't know how quickly the trials will
will move through in twenty twenty four, and I don't know what it's going
to do to the outcome of the election. So all of that concerns me.
I think it is in its stream abuse of power. I think that
even if President Trump at the end of the day, proves that he was
right in all of these short we're wrong, even if it has to go
through multiple appeals before you get to that point, it won't matter because the
damage could have been done, especially when we're looking at an election less than
a year and a half away. And that I think is a lot of
the reason why the left is doing this, and it's such a double standard.
They go after him for having classified documents, yet yet Vice President Pence
and President Biden, former Vice President bidenformer Senator Biden had classified documents from being
senator and vice president that he never should have had and they weren't stored in
a secure location, and that seems to be not a problem at all.
And Pence had documents, and he said, oh, yeah, well I
had the documents, but when they asked, I gave them back. Well
wait, why did you have the documents in the first place. You can't.
It's this double standard. And and Trump had the right with the Presidential
Records Act to be able to retain documents. And he also had the ability,
single handedly when he was president, to declassify documents. So even if
the Archives thought they were classified, perhaps they weren't because perhaps he had declassified
them. I don't know, but I'm just pointing out that that could have
happened. When it comes to the indictments. You just they're going after electors
who had who were saying, we want to be the alternate electors. Should
there need to be alternate electors? That happened with Hawaiian electors back in the
sixties, I believe, and we have a president for that in our country.
And just the things that are happening they're saying with President Trump with the
latest indictments related to January sixth, this is the things that they are complaining
that they are charging him with. He had a right question the outcome of
the election. He had a right to talk about it. He had a
right to call elected officials and express his concerns. As a candidate, he
had the right to do that, and he has a First Amendment right to
never accept the outcome, never to say he accepted the outcome of the election.
He has a First Amendment right to say what he wants, and they're
just trampling all over that. So I think we're in a very grave situation
that we've never have not seen in our country. Of course, we've seen
it in on Cuba, We've seen it in Russia, We've seen it in
the Soviet Union. We have Anthony blinkoln who recently tweeted that Putin had imprisoned
his political opponents and that that was bad to do. While they're sitting here
in America and trying to imprison political opponents of Biden. They're just they're they're
just right in our face about everything that they're doing, and they are so
confident with it. They think they can get away with it and that they
will succeed, and they can tell social media companies what to post, and
they can completely control the narrative, and the mainstream media won't ask the tough
questions. So all of that is just terrible. So how do I deal
with that and go, gosh, the country is just going is off the
cliff and there's no holding back and we're doomed. Here's how I deal with
it. Our country is greater than any single president. It's greater than any
group of people. We have survived so much in this country to even become
a country. We fought in a revolutionary war in order to become a country.
We fought in World wars. We had a civil war where people died
in order to end slavery in our country, and it divided families, and
yet our country came back together after that. We had presidents who are assassinated.
And I'm not in any way suggesting that any president should ever be assassinated,
not not any current president, any former president, and a future president.
But it has happened in our country, and our country has been able
to survive that, and we survive the civil rights movement, and contrary with
the left wants to indoctrinate our children with we are better off now than we
were then because we went through so much during that time. So I think
that we can survive this. So what do we do as individual activists?
Because we can't control who's going to be prosecuted. We're not going to.
Most of us are not going to wind up on a jury, and certainly
in Washington, DC, none of us will wind up on a jury.
It'll be a jury of people who all are anti Trump. But as individual
activists, we can work to secure elections by being poll watchers or work observers,
so you can observe what's happening in the polls, or you can work
the polls as an election official or an election judge, or a poll worker
poll manager, depending on where you live. They're called different things, but
you're able to work the elections. So those are things that activists can do
in twenty twenty four to help secure the elections. We can't we can't most
of us can't just go file lawsuits because we're not attorneys. But those are
things we as individuals can do. And so we have to secure elections,
and we have to win elections, and that means doing the voter id,
getting getting the word out, telling people why under a Republican president we would
be better off than we would be under a Democrat president. Why financially and
economically, it's going to be better for you and your family, better when
you go to the gas pump, when you're buying groceries, when your kids
are in school, if we don't have this radical leftist agenda running the executive
branch of our country, turning it into a family activities. So we're volunteering
and being very very engaged the voter ID voter persuasion, and then getting out
the vote and making sure that everyone goes and casts the vote so that we've
got we have the vote secured so we can win the elections. Securing and
winning that is my mantra and is what I'm focused on. And every time
I think, oh, it's so bad, what am I going to do?
Well, all I know is that we have to secure elections and we
have to win. And it doesn't mean that winning the election in twenty twenty
four, if we win, everything's going to be just to walk in the
park, because it won't be. It just means we have a fighting chance
to keep going and to make a difference. And then after that in twenty
twenty five, we're going to have to get the right kind of legislation passed
and make sure that the next president is cleaning out these bureaucracies and firing the
people who are causing so much harm to our country. Jenny Feth Martin is
the honorary chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. You can learn more about Tea
Party Patriots at Tea Party Patriots dot org. Sus the host of the Jenny
Beth Show, Jenny Beth, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me. Of course, you have been listening
to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emiljacianski, culture editor here
at The Federalist. Will be back soon with more. Until then, be
lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray right