We all know that the deep state, the bureaucratic state, these entrenched government officials are really the ones pulling the strings. They're the ones guiding government. They're the ones working to weaponize government against US conservatives for political reasons. But who exactly are these puppeteers? My friend Jason Schafitz previously House Oversight Chairman, a Fox News contributor. Now he's a friend
and a colleague. He's at with a new book explaining who these puppeteers are, what they do, how they utilize and weaponized government against US conservatives in our interests, and also what we should do about it. We'll talk to him about his new book and what he learned in both working as a House Oversight Chairman and also in writing this book. Stay with us well, Jason, it's great to have you on the show. You're a friend and a colleague, so I'm happy to talk about this new book.
I didn't realize you already have a bunch of best selling books.
Yeah.
I can't believe it either. I mean, my English teacher is way surprised. Yeah, this is my fourth book. It's called The Puppeteers. The People Who Control the people who control America. And it takes, you know, a couple of years to put this together. It's heavily researched, and it just feels back who the people are and tells the stories and shows the flow of money, which is really what you got to figure out in order to figure out who's really pulling the string.
You call it the puppeteers. Who are the puppeteers?
So not only are.
They the administrative and bureaucratic you know morass that's out there, but there are also some very specific people like a Susan Rice or a Brian Deese or Randy Weingarten at the who's the head of the teachers union? You look at Blackrock and Larry Fink for instance. You know they control trillions of dollars and have said out loud they're very brazen about their objective to get in ESG and
DEI into all facets of America. Not only do they pull their their their strings and in the political apparatus, but they do it in corporate America. And and give you an example, Larry Cudlow was the economic advisor for President Trump. He hit it decades of experience in growing economies and being an economist and but when Joe Biden came in, he brought in Brian Deese. Brian Deese is a black Rock employee before that, he worked in the Obama administration before that, and and he uh, he's a
climate activist. He wasn't there to grow the economy. He was there to inject the Green New Deal, the DEI and ESG platforms into into the administration. So this is what we do. We peel it all back, and we show that and and it'll scare the living.
Daylights at you.
I mean, it sort of shows you too that like we don't really have a free market anymore. I mean, corporate America and the government are hand in hand. They're sort of one of the same these days.
Yeah, so in the puppeteers, that's a big part of what we're saying. You know, we just had a couple of weeks ago, we had this discussion about the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling, what do you I mean? The only argument was over less than ten percent of the budget. Most of it is mandatory programmatic spending, and not just Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, but it also has hundreds of other
programs involved in it. They just run on autopilot. And then the whole objective here with the democratic machine is to put government on autopilot so that it never gets touched. And that is the problem because then the corporate folks get ingrained in that to enrich themselves and move a social agenda. And that's like, for instance, the Inflation Reduction Act. Right, it could never sell the Green New Deal, so they came up with the Inflation Reduction Act. Because it's a crisis,
they're going to grab hold of that. It's set aside to three hundred and seventy billion dollars in a climate flash fund that is run by John Podesta. Who's John Podesta. He's Clinton's president, Clinton's chief of staff. He ran Hillary Clinton's campaign. It's not as if he's an expert on climate change or something. He's a political person who's ingrained in and tied and tied in with the Larry Finx and the corporate America.
That's who he is.
You talk about how our pensions are paying for the lefts climate agenda, you know, talk a little bit about that.
Yeah, one of the things we found and got our hands on. We have a really good state treasurer. There are some really good ones out there, But the Democratic Treasurers Association, it put out this twenty twenty two corporate Benefits Package. Nobody had really seen this document before, and I want to read something that they wrote in this.
They said state treasurers have the power to exert force nationally because they oversee trillions of dollars and have a direct line to Wall Street, Main Street and into corporate boardrooms. State treasurer's power will endure no matter which party controls Congress and the White House. No matter what happens in November, we will have the ability to ensure that climate risk is addressed, racial inequality and gender biases confronted, and protect
workers in small businesses. Well, they make the cases democratic treasurers. In some states they call it the comptroller chief financial officer. They control about two point five trillion dollars. So if you're a retiree, maybe you were a school teacher, maybe you work for the state of Illinois or California, maybe you were you have a four oh one K and it's managed by a Vanguard or.
Blackrock.
They're going to take that money, use the proxy voting to go into the corporate boardrooms and manipulate what these companies do. So you look around and say, wait, why are these companies all doing this crazy stuff?
You know that in the S.
And P five hundred, over ninety eight percent of the companies Blackrock owns at least a five percent stake, and so they have a control and manipulate by using your dollars. So if Lisa Booth has a four to oh one K or made some sort of investment, my guess is it's probably being ultimately managed by Blackrock and they're using that to push their green new deal. They're at their social agenda by using your dollars.
Okay, how much control did politicians really have then if everyone behind the scenes are the ones, you know, pulling the strings.
So here's the little story when I was in Congress, who's kind of legendary. A Member of Congress goes to meet with the cabinet secretary and the cabinet secretary wasn't there. It was just senior staff, and cabinet secretary wasn't intending to show up.
So the Member of Congress got up to.
Leave, and the senior staff said, no, no, no, we're here to meet with you. In the member of Congress says, look, I didn't come here to meet with the B team. I want to meet with the member via the Cabinet secretary. And finally the senior staff says, look, granted, we are the B team. We be here before you, we be here after you, and we be the ones to actually make the decisions. And I'm telling you, Lisa, that is so true. It is so true. This administrative bureaucratics state
they're going to do what they want to do. And if you look statistically, it's something like ninety five plus percent of the donations coming out of some of these departments and agencies when they do make a political donation now go to Democrats. For some departments and agencies, it's one hundred percent. These two, I think, are puppeteers that are moving the thing forward. We have term limits on members of Congress, or at.
Least we should, I should say, but we should also have them on the bureaucrats and the administrative state.
How hard is it to fire certain bureaucrats?
Oh impossible. It is.
Literally you could probably on two hands count the number of times.
That that happens.
I had to actually run, sponsor and pass a bill that said when you move from one department or agency that your record goes with you, Because some people would be caught doing some very salacious or just downright illegal things and they would just transfer them to another department and their record wouldn't go with them. And the unions and what they've done to protect their own it's what drives me crazy. Inspector General Horowitz at the Department of
Justice puts out a quarterly report. I still read these things. They make dozens upon dozens.
Of criminal referrals.
Not only do they not pursue and and you know, a criminal prosecution, these people don't even get a demotion or a demerit on their record. I mean, it's just it almost never happened.
I don't think it would surprise anyone listening that we have a bunch of criminals running government.
Well, there's some good decent people, but it's going to take a strong president to go in and blow out the political class, the ones who are the political appointees, and then has some major structural reform so that you can get in, serve your country, then get out the country you better served it. In the puppeteers, I advocate that we got to starve the beast if you keep feeding the beast with all this money, that is the power, and they know it and they keep doing it. That's
what ex trillion dollars are. Federal government is spending. Almost one out of every four to five dollars in the entire country is spent by the federal government. It's absurd.
Quick break more with Jason. I think the frustration for a lot of people is that it seems like neither party is really inclined to spend less. The fight seems to be more about what the money is spent on versus actually raining and the spending.
I totally agree with you, and as I said earlier in the debt ceiling fight, we were arguing over less than ten percent of the budget, most of its mandatory programmatic spending. So if you're not willing to address the ninety percent of the budget that's driving forward, guess what you end up with a debt that's right now we're paying about two billion dollars a day just in interest
on the debt. And then we have a bill that's out there where we say, oh, we're going to claw back one point nine billion dollars from the IRS, but they just got eighty billion and that doesn't even cover one day of interest payment. So don't tell me that we're moving the ball in the right direction. We're just getting the hole deeper and deeper.
But then, of course the conundrum is that if you go after that mandatory spending, you get killed politically.
Well, I think that's right, and until America actually demands it probably won't happen. I believe that we need a balance budget amendment in order to ultimately get there. Let the states decide if we're actually going to balance our budgets. But my argument is that while while Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security they have to have reform order to save them, what about all the hundreds and hundreds of other programs
that are on autopilot. This is what I think, as I point out on the Puppeteer's book, this is.
What the Democrats want.
They want a permanency, They want government that isn't swayed by a particular election. And now it's nearly impossible once the program's in place. I think Ronald Reagan talked about this to actually kill it. And they know that they created when Obama was the president and they had the House to send in the Presidency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and in puppeteers. I talk about this because it's funded not through Congress, not through appropriations by the American people.
It was funded through the Federal Reserve. And that's scary because then there's zero accountability, nobody elected in that process. Now it's in the courts, we'll see how that plays out, but I think it's unconstitutional. But that's what the Democrats vision of the world is. Government runs without Congress overseeing it.
Well, and it really underscores why our founding fathers and the founding generation wanted us to have a decentralized government to avoid the situation that we are in now.
Totally. This is the problem.
And when our as a percentage of our gross domestic product, when we're up at twenty two plus percent, those are absurd numbers that are unsustainable and the consequences, I mean, we're just headed towards financial ruin if we don't do that. But there are puppeteers that want to. They like it this way. They don't care, and they want power and they want money, and that's how they get it.
What role did the federal government play in ballot harvesting?
Well, this is one thing that the Puppeteers book also uncovers, it really exposes. And if there's one story in the book that you really want to have illuminated and understand it, you have to go back into March. After the President Biden has put in office and he issues Executive Order one for zero one point nine. He puts Susan Rice in charge of this and it directs all the departments, all the federals in like six hundred of them, departments and agencies to come up with the plan to get
out the vote. Now, it wasn't a get out the vote effort for everybody. It was for and it literally the executive order says for approved non government organizations. And we would love to see what the president what these six hundred plans actually advocate, but they're protected because our President Biden is claiming executive privilege and there's a Freedom
of Information Act request in the courts. He will not reveal what this is, but basically he wants to take all the federal departments, agencies, personnel, physical facilities to get out the vote. Well, when you have ninety five plus percent of certain departments and agencies donating to Democrats, guess what, it's a democratic machine, not open to Republicans or somebody other side of the aisle. How much money are they spending doing this? And why was Susan Rice in charge
of this and so adamant that it happened. This is a very scary part of how these puppeteers work and are leveraging our own tax taxpayer dollars against us.
I mean, Democrats are much better at weaponizing government and molding government to their interests and to fit their desires and narratives.
Is where they worship. This is their altar, is what they believe in, and it's working for them. They just want more of it. They just don't want to live in a world where an election can destroy that.
I mean, should Republicans then be better at doing the same, entrenching government with our own people, with our own desires, with the things that we want accomplished and done.
What I argue in the in the book The Puppeteer's Book is that we have to starve the beast, that we need to have this discussion with the American people because I think issue wise, we're on the right side, and you've got to start somewhere. You got to start clipping the wings somewhere somehow or otherwise. It's going to be forced upon us because of the financial ruin that we will have In terms of elections. I look, I wish everybody would just vote on the same day with
same information. Maybe it's two days show an identification. But you know, so much of this fight, Lisa, it's going to happen at the state level. Elections are administered at the state level. You got to fight this with your state legislature. As I articulated earlier, it's going to be these sleepy races like the treasurer's race or your attorney general race. It really is federalism that will kind of save the day. But people ask me all the time.
They probably ask you all the time, you know, what can I do? I read this book and I get depressed, and I get mad, I get frustrated.
What can I do? But we try to.
Offer solutions the book too, by saying these are the races that you should get involved with and engage with. You know, there's a reason why the Department of Justice is going after parents because parents are suddenly showing up at school board meetings and it's like, wait, what you're going to try to take control of this away from us. Of course they're going to fight you on that.
You know, but there's a school of thought then that we should respond in kind. You know, if they are going to target or people politically, then you know, perhaps they need to be on the receiving end of a department of justice that isn't aligned with them, or state attorneys or district attorneys in conservative areas going after democrats. Is it time to perhaps meet power with power.
I would argue that if you have the purity of what you're trying to do to defang government, I want to fight with every tool, not one hand behind the back. But I think if we've got to build these coal in masks and go out and get the job done so that, for instance, school boards are actually administered with parents first and foremost in their minds, that kids and parents.
We tell a story in the in the in the book on the Puppeteers about you know, this case where the school was working with a minor to go through the transition of you know, changing this person from one gender to another gender, but not telling the parents. I mean, this is how aggressive these people are. They really do believe this, you know, one thing I want people to be aware of. A new buzzword, if you will, that you got to be careful of.
Is called community schools.
Brandy Weingarten at the head of the Teachers Union, one of the big ones. She has some three hundred million dollars at her disposal. And Gavin Newsome has really helped lead the charge in California to develop community schools. Downs nice, right, a community school. Who's going to be against the community school? But they want the totality of the child, everything from their haircut to what they wear. They're going to give everybody a computer. Oh nice, they're going to give you
a computer. But it's really a money making scheme form because they're going to take the data of everything that twelve year old or ten year old is doing and sell the data so that they can follow this person and send messages and teach them about their democratic heroes. Not a actual American history and certainly not one with balance. That's what they're trying to do. They're really making a concerted effort, first and foremost in California to change education.
And Puppeteers spends a lot of time talking about these people they're they're grooming these kids and these parents to be an advocate for a community school, but it's a political ploy, Lisa to the endth degree.
Quick commercial break. More on the puppeteers. I think we've sort of lost purity as a country, and so I don't know, I don't know. I think to some degree we might have to have a little bit more muscular conservatism given the environment that we live in. I mean, you know, you've got certain states that are essentially sanctuary states for transgender you know children, right, they're like where they're going to try to keep their parents away from
the decision making. We're entering into a different era in my opinion politically, where you know, and even to your point about the federal government with the ballot harvesting, where even elections aren't really free and fair anymore, right, Like, the system is broken, and so I don't know if we have to, you know, kind of if we need to use new tactics in dealing with government and dealing with these people who who are evil my I mean, you're evil in my opinion if you want to encourage
children to mutilate their bodies and the name of transgenderism, I mean, that's an evil person in my opinion.
Yeah, no, I agree with you and I the world is changing. You know, it used to be when I kind of first started doing the political thing, I thought we were all fighting for the same thing, but we had a different way of getting there. I don't think that's true anymore. I think, unfortunately that's changed. I mean, the idea that we had to have a national dialogue, but I think is still ongoing about should we stand
for the flag and the national anthem. I mean, we just saw in the Capital students singing the national anthem and the Capitol Hill police coming over and telling them no because people would be offended. I mean, really, like, I never thought i'd see the day these types of things. So it is a scary world that way. I worry about my kids. I got grandkids. I'm enough out grandkids, and I worry about the world they're living in. And
so yeah, I think you're right. I like the way you say that, a more muscular conservative conservativism that gets after it and says no, let's take these fights head on for what there is and say no, we're not going to do that. It's a radical idea to think you're going to have men compete in women's sports. Let's have that discussion.
Yeah, absolutely, you know, and it's crazy too because I know that we sort of have parallel lives in the sense of, you know, I live in Florida full time, but I'm up in New York quite frequently, and you're in Utah. And you've you know, had to live in DC for periodically when you were in Congress, and then
also you're in New York quite a bit. So it's like you almost realize how different, you know, how we really do live in two different America is when you live in free states like we do, and then you go into these l it's just night and day, like just everything about it, right, Like you still have people walking around in masks, like you know, it's just a different world.
I think there's a reason why, you know, in Gavin Newsom's California, I mean, it's tragic, right. You see the homelessness, You see this like zombie apocalypse that, you know, walking around the streets, and then people fleeing.
They're losing a population.
And they're going to like you did, You're going to Florida, you know, and they're going to Utah and Idaho and in more freedom loving free states. I just hope that they don't change along the way too much, that the attractant doesn't change because they've moved from something they grew up with into something that doesn't work, like New York or California.
You cheered the House Oversight Committee. What did you learn in that experience? Was there anything that sort of shocked you about government or what did that kind of teach you about the way government works?
I think first and foremost, and I think Trey Goudy was my colleague. I probably spent more time with Trey Goudy when I was there during my time than any other person. Here are other people like, you know, Tim Scott and John Ratcliffe, I spent a lot of time with,
but Trey probably more than anything. And I kind of compared notes and said, you know, one of the biggest disappointments, and it was the lack of intellectual curiosity and honest reporting from the national media that these revered institutions of you know, the New York Times and the Washington Post had become political newsletters as opposed to an advocate, as opposed to calling balls and strikes and actually telling America
what's really happening in the battles of Congress. I grew up, you know, watching you know, Woodward and Bernstein and all the president's men, saying, Oh, wouldn't that be great to be the person uncover that. And then I realized they are the problem. They are not the solution. And then the other thing is this unequal application of justice. It really does. It bothers me. It scares me. The weaponization of government to move a political agenda.
I didn't think we would use that.
Against a whole political movement and parties, that conservatives would be so aggressively targeted. You know, I was chairman of the Oversight Committee. I had a Secret Service, literally the number two person that's secret Service issued a statement saying it's time to even the fight, and they had forty Secret Service agents dive into my background trying to find
dirt on me to publicly embarrass me. That when I got after the IRS and the lowest learner case and all that, and suddenly I have a hearing and I'm making inroads, obviously, and then I get an audit, you know a few days later. I just didn't think that happened in America, and it does, and I saw it firsthand, and it scares me.
Well, I didn't know that they went after you personally. I mean I knew that, you know, obviously you're going to get criticized, but I didn't realize that they had actually used government in that way against you.
Well, nobody reports it, That's the thing. The story comes out and then it barely gets a blip on the map, like, oh, yeah, well of course you're a Republican.
Have you ever noticed how anytime Democrats I had to do something wrong, the article is not about the wrong that they've done, the articles about how Republicans are pouncing.
It's like, exactly, it's so true.
It's like you know that they're taking political advantages and they're pouncing like they're the ones that that's wrong.
It's not that Joe Biden is deeply corrupped. The story is that we're pouncing on it.
It's exactly.
Never mind that there's a highly credible source that the government has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to and that is documented that they had a conversation about bribery as the vice president of the United States. That's not a story worthy of our Washington Post.
Come on, what shocked you? And right? I mean, because obviously you know a lot about government, you know, House oversight chairmen, you know, you were in Congress. You followed this stuff for a long time. In writing this book, specifically, what shocked.
You how brazen they were and the Puppeteers, you know, I didn't go into it thinking that the state treasurers had trillions of dollars. I didn't know that Blackrock controls at least five percent of ninety eight percent of the S and P five hundred companies, and that they were going to not only inject their personnel into government, but they were going to fuse it together with their corporate objectives. Like I didn't know any of that, and now I
look at it. One of the other illuminating things in the Puppeteers book that was there is this this whole idea that how you had the Department of Justice recently come out and say white supremacy is the number one threat to America. I had to really think about it, like, Okay, if there's if there's somebody misusing that, let's let's go after But is it really the number one threat to America?
The number one really?
And but you start to understand the political weaponization and why they need that in place in order to justify doing things that they would never be able to do otherwise, things like facial recognition and tracking you and following you, and ultimately to I think, have the goal of you know, issuing you a social score that they could put a stranglehold on the money, you could get loans, you could
take places, you could travel. I mean, we illustrate that that's what they do they do in China, but I see them doing that here in the United States. And that's why again, if you're to go pick up the Puppeteers book, I want to say, go over to the horror section. But at the same time, I worry that a lot of people who care about their country and the flag and everything else, they're all fighting the wrong fights, Like these are the fights that we ought to be fighting.
These are the things that.
Are the bigger, broader problems.
That's why I wrote the book.
It's sad too, because I think, you know, sometimes obviously hindsight is everything. Look, a lot of the stuff that happened, like the Patriot Act and things Post nine to eleven sort of laid the groundwork for giving government a whole lot of power that they you know, government has now abused.
They never let a crisis go to waste, right, they got to have something. That's why I think they're going after you know, white supremacy. And there's always something like, you know, we just had this this big smoke cloud come over the Northeast and it became all the news.
We we do was deal with smoke out west all the time, with forest fires. But they want to use that to come up with new mandates.
And you know in New York, you know you should should wear your mask, and we're going to have to fight climate change and oh, you were going to we have to do the Green New Deal.
See this is an example.
It's like they don't have a whole lot of respect for the competency and the thoughtfulness of the American people. They just think they can bulldoze right over them by taking every single thing and making it a political statement that ends up being more money, more taxes, and more control.
That's what that's what they want. And they've been highly successful. You can make an argument been successful for them.
Oh they've been really smart about it. Sadly, you know, we've kind of you know, Republicans are sort of been asleep at the wheel as they've sort of taken over the government and all these institutions, and now it's all sort of all the arrows are pointing in our direction, you know, Jason, before we go, lay out some solutions too, because I know you had mentioned that, you know, you worked on solutions in the book. What would you like
to see done. What do you think could actually be effective in protecting Americans against some of this stuff.
We have to illuminate the problem and understand where the fights are. Number Two, you've got to starve the beast. You have to get rid of that, and then you have to turn the tables on them. I conclude the book by talking about what Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia did. He took diversity, equity and inclusion and he changed it.
He said, oh, okay, we'll do that office.
And then they changed the name city opportunity and inclusion, and opportunity for them met something totally different than equity. And now Democrats are on their heels having to argue why equity is better than opportunity. And you look at that example and you start to realize states governors, attorneys general, state treasurers. This is where the fight can and will be and will be more more successful. Pull it out of Washington d C. Don't let Washington d C control that.
I illuminate another one where a Freedom of Information Act requests going way back to the Oklahoma City bombings was initiated in Utah as opposed to Washington d C. And guess what, Judge wattaps the federal judge there. That case is still open and the Freedom of Information Act because they aren't ingrained in the Washington d C bureaucracy. See that that does a lot to actually move the ball forward. So
the fight is winable. It just we have to understand what it is and then a different way of fighting.
I'm glad that you lay that out. That's important. Anything else you want to leave us with before we.
Go, Look the puppeteers, the people who control, the people who control. Why should America If you think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are pulling the strings, no, it ain't happening. They can put in another group and these puppeteers are going to be as strong as ever. And I think people intuitively know it, they just haven't heard the stories.
So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it. But after years of research in my perch in Congress as the chairman of the Oversight Committee, I have some insight that maybe most haven't had, and I just hope people take it to heart and have a chance to either listen on the audiobook or download the electronic version or read the hard copy. And I list I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it.
I really do.
Yeah, well, you've seen the corruption up close, your friend. It sounds like you're going to have another successful book on your hands. I was state attorney general, That's what I was thinking, I said, state attorney. I don't know. You know when you I'm sure this happens to you when you're on TV and stuff. You think of something and you can't quite find the word, and then later you're like, ah, crab well, Jason, it's nice to have
you on. I hope to see well. We'll be on our number together soon, so I'm looking forward to catch you up in person. Puppeteers, everyone go get it, Jason, talk to you soon, my friend.
Yes, I'll see you soon.
It was Jason Schaefitz, previously House Oversight Chairman, a Fox News contributor. He's a friend of mine, great guy. Him and his wife just a really amazing family. Appreciate him taking the time, joy and to come on the show. I appreciate you all at home for listening. O. Thank John Cassio and my producer for putting the show together every Monday and Thursday. You can listen throughout the week. Thanks for listening.