LIVE from Miami at YAF’s Freedom Conference

We have been told for a year you can't go outside, you can't talk to anybody, you can't see anybody, you can't have any holidays, you can't go on social media because if you go on social media, you're obviously going to be kicked off. You can't start your own social media platforms because that's a very very bad thing. You're going to be kicked off the Internet. But you know what, tonight, live in Miami, we are here with everyone. We're going

to be taking your questions. This is verdict with Ted Cruz. Thank you very much. Thank you to all the wonderful deefle in Miss Lam. Also thank you to everyone who is watching live right now on YouTube. We were going to be taking questions obviously from the people here at the Young America's Foundation Freedom Conference. We're also going to be taking questions from YouTube. If you want to ask a question, You've got to go to YouTube dot com

slash Yaff TV. You have to subscribe, submit your questions, make sure they're really really good questions, and then we will be answering them a little bit later. Want to thank as always the Logan family for sponsoring this event many other events for YAFF, and I want to thank all of you for being here. Senator, you must be so happy to be in Miami right now. You have just left a place that there's chaos in the house. There's chaos at the capitol. More broadly, the whole city

looks like Baghdad at this point. It's somehow Washington, d c. Seems even crazier and less pleasant than it usually does, and we get to be in Miami. The lunatics are running the asylum. It is absolutely crazy. I mean, we have fences everywhere, we have soldiers wherever you look. The entire place is locked down, and AOC is spending every day saying I'm being murdered. I don't want I don't know if we're gonna break news. Did you do it? Or are you an attempted murder urgent? I am innocent

of that particular chart good. I know there have been rumors for years and years about you. Although I will decline to give answers about northern California, and that's for your own protection, there is you know, I do feel in a way like this is deja vu all over again. One year ago. I feel like I've heard you say that before. One year ago. We started this podcast because we were at the last impeachment trial. Now it just

seems to happen every single year. We've got another impeachment trial, We've got all of these Joe Biden nominees coming up, You've got absolute madness going on in the House of Representatives. What is the insider of you right now? From Washington? Look, it's crazy on every front the House of Representatives. What did they do in the House of Representatives this week? You've got Nancy Pelosi driving it, But it really is AOC and it's the squad. It's their craziness that is

driving the agenda. So we spent much of this week with the House of Representatives talking about some tweets that Marjorie Taylor Green had sent in years past, because that

is the pressing objective. Next week in the Senate, we're going to spend the entire week impeaching a president who's already left the White House, and as a private citizen, right, it's Bunker's right because I'm actually glad you brought up the Marjorie Taylor Green of it all, because if I didn't see clips on CNN, I would have no idea who this person is. But it would seem that the Democrats are trying to contrive some kind of controversy out

of old social media posts. They're now voting to strip her of her committee assignments, and I just sort of think, even beyond any question about her, why am I supposed to care? This is the people's business. Aren't they supposed to be passing laws and actually working for the good of the American people. Well, look, I have not met her yet. I imagine I will at some point. She's a newly elected member of Congress. She's been in office all of a month, right, But as I understand it,

she said some pretty crazy things. And look, some of the things she said I certainly don't agree with. I don't think you should run around saying someone should shoot Nancy Pelosi in the head. I think threatening violence is not a good thing. But this entire circus was put forward because the Democrats in the media, they like to find somebody on the Republican side of things who said something really outlandish and then put together this entire kangaroo chord.

And I will say what they did this week. So yesterday the House voted and they stripped over committee assignments. That's actually a really chilling precedent. It is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time in history that any political party has stripped a member of the opposing party of their committee assignments. And this will not be

the last. You want to talk about a dangerous threshold across I'm reminded of being on the Senate floor in twenty thirteen when Harry Reid the Democrats used the nuclear option to lower the threshold for confirming judges, and more than a few of us told the Democrats you're going to regret this. Yeah, and you're going to regret this sooner.

I remember telling Amy Klobuchar and the Senate floor that night, I said, because you've done this, we will end up with more antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomas's on the Supreme Court because of this step you've taken. Right now and we saw that play forward. Listen. Once this threshold has been crossed, it's not hard to imagine maybe in two years suddenly Democrats say some freshman Democrats who say some crazy, outlandish things I know would be really hard to find

any I can't imagine. No, it's a level of escalation. And let make another point. Have you noticed that democrats and the media right now they're in high dungeon about how much they love democracy. Yes, they love democracy. Mind you, if there's one thing objectively that democrats do not love it as democracy. They despise democracy only every front. How do we know this because they don't actually want to let the people decide. So why did democrats want judicial

activist on the courts? Because on contested public policy issues, they don't actually want the voters to decide. Right, you know, on a question of abortion, they don't want voters in the state to debate about what should the laws be on abortion? And they don't They don't want to see all fifty states having different standards. They don't want to see drug laws decided by the states. They don't want

to see marriage laws decided by the states. They want to decree one rule for everyone, and you look at this Marjorie Taylor Green thing. One of the things that's striking is is what they stripped her or committee assignments for, as I understand it, or all things she said before she was elected, Right, So the voters had those in front of them and they decided to elect her. Look, if someone thinks she's nutty, there is a remedy in our system for that, which is the voters couldn't decide, Okay,

we want someone else. And it is amazing. As the Democrats are acting to stifle democracy, they are at the same time piously intoning I sure do love democracy. You know, this is such an important point. And I actually haven't heard other people mention this about the whole circus that's going on in the House of Representatives right now. There is this irony that they're talking about how much they love democracy, but then of course they want to stifle

the will of voters. But then there's this other aspect, which is, you know, the Democrats never go after their own members. As you alluded to, they might have one or two sort of kookie members, maybe more than one or two, and maybe a little bit more than kookie, And but they don't go after them. And this is something that I think a lot of us are seeing this week. Democrats have unified government. They already had the bureaucracy, they already had big tech, they already have the universities,

on and on and on. Democrats in this country seem much more talented at wielding political power, at actually getting things done than Republicans, who are sort of busy in fighting or losing the opportunities that have been given to them. Well, there's a reason for that, which is today's Democratic party as a command and control party. It is a party of authoritarians. It is a party of statists. Now that means they follow orders, they are collectivists. They are willing

to subject themselves to authority. Listen, on the right, what unites people on the right in a room like this. You'll have some people who are conservatives, some people who are libertarians, some people who are just lonely and looking to make friends. I mean, you'll you'll have a wide array. And by the way, those are not mutually exclusive. You can have some of all of that. But if there's one thing that unifies the center right, it is a

respect for the individual. It is it is an understanding that you can decide what you believe, you can decide how you worship, you can decide what you do with your life, you can decide what you say. All of that individual freedom. It's great, But then our problem is we can never get everyone on the same page because we're you know, hurting cats right is unfair to the cats. Now, do you think that the Democrats have given conservatives an opening?

Because this has always been a problem on the right. It's one of our strengths, but it's one of our problems. Is you know, you put a hundred conservatives into a room together, they will find the one issue that each of them disagrees with the other one, and so it's very how dare you say they won't. But do you think the Democrats have given us sort of an opening here because until the past couple of years, something like the American flag that was a symbol we could all

agree on. Right. You know, no person in their right mind, even if they're on the left, is going to campaign against the American flag until they start to do that, until they start to kneel in front of the flag or disrespect the flag or not stand for it. Do you think now conservatives have this opportunity to say, well, one thing that unites us is we want to conserve the place. You know, we like this place, we like our rituals, we like our local communities. Has the left

gone radical enough to give us that opening? It's probably what I'm most optimistic about is the crazies are setting the agenda. Their ideas don't work the next two years. Listen, they're gonna be a tough two years for our country because we're going to see right now, there's an anger. There's a la tree on the left. I mean, I mean there is a spirit where they're trying to destroy their enemies. Yeah, I mean it's like Robesphere setting up

guillotines in the street. I mean, they're objective. You look at impeachment next week. Impeachment next week is because they hate Donald J. Trump and they want to destroy him. They want to assault the earth. By the way, remember we're talking a minute ago about how democrats love democracy. What is their stated reason for impeachment. Well, if they don't impeach him and prohibit him from running again, he might run again, and you know what, those idiot voters

might vote for him. Now, you could be upset at that. I get that, yeah, but you don't get to claim you're defending democracy when the evil you're trying to prevent is the people might vote in a way you don't like. Well, And this is something ironic, also ironic with the Democrats. They accuse the right of upending precedent constitutional norms. The

country is going to hell in a handbasket. They are the ones who are who are again and again destroying precedent, as you mentioned, taking a Republican congressman off of her committees, impeaching a former president. To my knowledge, that has never been done. I would like if you wouldn't mind a little insider baseball here, because you know, Senator, you're looking pretty good. You're looking pretty sprightly. Thank you you are.

But I know somehow, you know, I'm the one who just had a kid, and you are getting less sleep than I am. You, so actually, in terms of delivering the kid, that one wasn't you. That was not I felt everyone kept making about my wife. I don't know. I felt like I was doing a lot of work in that room, but you, somehow were getting less sleep than I am. You basically pulled an all nighter last night in DC. You're then preparing for the impeachment impeachment

next week. What is happening? I mean, there is a lot going on that it seems so opaque to a lot of us. So last night we were on the Senate floor. We were doing what's called vota rama, and that went until five twenty five in the morning, So we were there all night. Got home, I went to sleep at six, got up at nine, so I had three hours sleep and flew to Miami. So if I nod off, just kind of nudged me midway through. So

what is vote arama? Look, the Senate for the past twenty years or so has been pretty rigidly controlled by whoever the majority leader is, and as a general matter, they stop really both sides from offering amendments. And we have really a rule by majority leaders on both sides. Either Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell are super senators because they shut down amendments. The Democrats want to do lots

of bad stuff. The principal procedural impediment they face in the Senate is the filibuster, the requirement of sixty votes to move forward on legislation. The biggest exception to the filibuster is something called budget reconciliation. Now that's a process. It comes from a statute called the Budget Act of nineteen seventy five, and it sets out a process for passing a budget. The budget is really the side show. What is important is by statute it only takes fifty

votes to pass and not sixty. So it's this big glaring exception to what otherwise is legislation that's got a clear a fillibuster. So the Democrats just took up their first budget reconciliation. We could see three budget reconciliations this year, all as vehicles to just pass bad laws they want

to pass. Ye, this was the first one. Under that statute. Though, senators can offer unlimited amendments, and so the way the majority leader stops a senator from offering an amendment is a procedural mechanism called filling the tree, where basically they offer all the available amendments so no one else can offer one. On reconciliation, you can't stop it. And so we had yesterday, I don't know, we vote on a

forty or fifty amendments and we just stood there. Now, what happened during most of the day is the Democrats were slow walking the votes, and so they were dragging it out. It was theoretically ten minute votes, but they'd take thirty, they'd take forty five. Then towards the end of it, we're all seated at our desks and we're doing faster votes, and each side gets up and gets to speak for a minute. Okay, And so look, if you're in the minority, which we are, it's a fifty

fifty Senate they are. It is the most narrow majority possible, fifty fifty with a vice president breaking the tie. What you try to think of when you're in the minority is what are votes that would really suck to vote on them here on the other side, because because you don't really have a chance of putting forth this kind of groundbreaking, substantive legislation for your own side, there's no way that's going to get through. It is forcing the

majority hates it. They don't want any of these voes, but it is forcing them to take votes they don't like. So a bunch of us filed a ton of amendments that we voted on them and voted on them, and a number of the amendments passed. Now here's a level of the kind of ridiculousness of the game. So so let me tell you three amendments that passed, and I actually wrote down the details. So three passed. One supports the Keystone pipeline, said Joe Biden made a mistake shutting

down the Keystone Pipeline, killing eight thousand jobs. That passed on the floor of the Senate by a vote of fifty two to forty eight. Every Republican voted for it. Joe Mansion voted for it. Democrat from West Virginia. John Tester voted for it, Democrat from Montown. A second amendment said that any stimulus checks that go out should not go to illegal immigrants. So that amendment passed fifty eight

to forty two. So I have to pause you there, Senator, forty two elected senators think that we should send our tax money to illegal aliens in the country. Look, forty of them might think we should send them only to illegal aliens. So this Democratic party is nuts. But Hassan, Hickenoper, Kelly, Mansion, Peters, Cinema, Stabeno, and Tester all voted for don't send them to le lands. And the third one was a vote in support of fracking, that we're not going to shut down fracking. So all

of these Republicans offered, fracking is a good thing. That passed fifty seven forty three. So Bennett Colorado, Casey Pennsylvania, Heinrich, New Mexico, Hick and Looper Colorado, Luhan, New Mexico, Mansion, West Virginia, Tester, Montana. So you might say, hey, that's great, those are three victories. Yeah, I'm sensing a butt. You know what the last thing we voted on is it's what's called colloquially a wraparound amendment, which is Chuck Schumer's

stands up as the very last amendment. It offers an amendment to strip out all of the amendments that we're adopted during the course of the night. It is literally a race every thing we just did for the last fifteen hours. Do you know what the vote was on the wrap around amendment? What fifty to fifty And we saw on that amendment to the very first vote ever cast by Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie

and strip out those policies. So, by the way, and look, this is this is one of many reasons people despise politicians. Why did these Democrats vote this way? Because when when Joe Mansion and John Tester go home. When John Tester goes home to Montana, says, I voted for the Keystone pipeline, a sure bub but then you voted against it about

about five hours later or ten hours later. It seems to me John Kerry like built a whole presidential campaign on exactly that I voted for it before ioted against it. But it's the ridiculous game where all of these votes were show votes because on the vote they cared about the party discipline vote. Every single one of them lines up and says, erase the amendments and go back to

the Bernie Bernie Sanders spend the poloza right. Well, you know, the fracking vote is interesting to me because you'll recall so long ago, a few months ago, on the campaign trail, Joe Biden said, come on, man, I'm not gonna ban fracking. Come on man, that really doesn't sound like Joe, No, not at all. No, it's not Kamala Harris, same thing. H'm not gonna ban fracking. And then of course they're gonna ban fracking. They're gonna ban all these sorts of things.

The amazing thing is PolitiFact would say you were lying when you said they were gonna ban fracking. Yeah, during the campaign, and now they'll say you're lying when you say they said they weren't gonna ban fracking. I know they're gonna they're gonna say I'm lying when I just read the PolitiFact from three months ago. They're gonna they're gonna need to fact check me on that as well.

But do you know my favorite PolitiFact? So twenty eighteen, I'm running for reelection for Senate and uh fellow ran against me, a guy named Beto Is he's that skateboarder. I think I saw him somewhere on the He jumps on tables. Um. So, when he entered the race, we decided, all right, we want to welcome him to the race with a kind, loving, gentle embrace. Um So we put out a parody song, and the song was based on if you're going to play in Texas, you gotta have

a fiddle in the band. Except the one we put out. We said, if you're gonna run in Texas, you can't be a liberal man. And so we hired musicians who were really quite good and had the whole thing, and it uh and you know it begins why by saying, and Beto wants those open borders and he wants to take our guns. We put this ad out, PolitiFact fact checks it. Fact check your song, my parody song. Do you know puff the Magic Dragon actually didn't live in

a land called Honely. No, it's an amazing thing. Wow, pants on fire, you know. But but they fact check it and they say it is literally pants on fire falls that Beto wants to take our guns. So fast forward to Senate race. We win, He loses minor detail. He goes to New Mexico and eats dirt. I don't ask me, I've been That's what he did. Um And then he runs for president as a Democrat. And the poor guy was so startled because his basse, by which

I mean the reporters. Ye who look when he was running against me, they were like groupies at a Rolling Stone concert, throwing their underwear at it. Literally right if they were underwear, Yes to Edgy, it's a podcast. You can say whatever you want. The instant he was running against Bernie and Kamala, the heroes of the left, the press turned on him and the poor guy was, what the hell just happened? It's utterly startled. But you remember at one of the Democratic debates he said, damn right,

I'm gonna take your AR fifteen. And then his campaign website began selling T shirts that's said on the front of them, damn right, I'm gonna take your AAR fifteen, at which point I couldn't resist jumping on Twitter and saying, hey, PolitiFact, when you fact checked my statement that Beta wants to take our guns and you said that was false, are you going to buy one of his teachers? Are? Yeah?

Do you can? I send you a link to his Shopify account because you know they did this to us today, Actually, politifant, no, I'm sorry. Was Snopes Daily Wire and my show at the Daily Wire, we ran this headline. It said, there's a report out that AOC was not in the Capitol Building during the riot on January sixth, and that was that was the whole headline, and we got a fact check mostly false, mostly Okay, So when it's mostly false,

they say what's true and they say what's false? So I said, well, let's let's just see what's true about this headline was report AOC was not in the Capitol Building or the riot. What's true, AOC was not in the Capitol Building during the riot. But what's false is she was in another building that was down the street. And you know that's in DC and so and you guys are mean, so therefore mostly false. You know, Michael, I just don't know why you will not honor her

individual truth. I recognize she was in her office when a police officer knocked on the door and asked her to evacuate. But if she lived that experience as a band of marauders sent by me came with murderous intentions, that is her truth. And by the way, you know what she said what you and I just did. She said, anyone that doubts her shared truth is guilty of sexual assault. Yes she did. She did say that she did it. She said, it's being like an abuser to question that

you know this. This actually raises one of the central questions were to talking about here at YAFF which is for a long time, I think every conservative of every generation in this room has known about the threats from big government. But there are other threats to our freedom from other big sorts of entities, big tech, which would be polit effect, big corporations which are signing up with all of these radical left wing groups and advancing them. Big big, big, big big is big bureaucracy, all of

these sorts of things. Looking forward, I mean, the conservative movement has come so far. Just think about YAFF, think about the growth of the Young America's Foundation. I mean, it's just unbelievable about all the people in this room, all the campuses that YAFF is on, the growth of so many conservative organizations. But now moving forward, it seems like the challenges are different. We're gonna have to start changing maybe some of our language, looking at these other threats.

Where do we go from here? I know so many people, we're all pretty happy to be together tonight, but we're a little bit down after the election, after the inaugration. What where do we go from here? We go towards truth and light and freedom. Look the great thing about eternal truths, they're always true. Our ideas work. Freedom works, free markets work, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, free speech, religious liberty, the fundamental liberties of humanity. It is right

and true. And just the next two years we're going to see wild eyed socialists trying to do enormous damage to this country. Their policies aren't going to work. They don't work. That is going to become evident. You know, I'll make a reference. This reminds me an awful lot of the late seventies. You know, Scott Walker and I are both almost exactly the same age. We were both killed in the late seventies. When Ronald Reagan was elected. I was ten when Reagan left the White House, I

was eighteen. It took Jimmy Carter to give us Reagan. It took the absolute catastrophe, the disaster of the Carter years. It took Jimmy Carter giving away the Panama Canal. Ye, it's funny, you know, that's an issue that people don't even really think about anymore. But what I mean, so much was happening during those years To set up the

Conservative took stagflation, enormous economic harm, misery, gas lines. It took the military being downgraded to a level that our hostages in Iran get get taken in captivity for four hundred and forty four days, and Carter sends out a military team to try to rescue them, and it crashes in the desert with no opposing fire, the abs calamity. It took Jimmy Carter putting on a sweater and saying, you know, we live in a world of scarcity. We

don't have the money to heat your homes anymore. So just put on a sweater and just accept malaise, malaise the new normal, you might say. And all of that train wreck is what prepared people for a sunny, optimistic governor from California who understood the power of freedom. We're in a moment just like that. We're in a moment where we will go through some darkness. But the answer to darkness is always light. I have to tell you, a senator, when I as they turn on the lights,

the light is here. When I asked you, where do we go from here, and you said, well, Michael, it's kind of like the seventies. I was feeling a little depressed. That did not sound great, But you're right. You get the seventies and then you get the eighties. I really hope Bell Bottoms don't come back. Although, to be honest, the eighties and depressingly enough, Michael, you're you're young enough not to remember. The eight was a glint in my

father's eye. I owned parachute pants. Yeah, no, it really was horrible. It was these like plasticy Scott, did you have parachute pants? Okay, these plasticky pants with zippers all over them. And I do not know why. And my father, who you know, yeah, Cuban American pastor. I would be leaving in high school that he'd be like, do you want to look like a bomb? I'd be like, yeah, that's I was a teenager, and that's what you say

to your dad. And thankfully we grow out of that, you know, center sometimes conservatives, I think we go into nostalgia, you know, history after a few drinks when we think about he right, the eighties were You've reminded me it wasn't all great. You know, there were some issues there as well. I do also want to remind everyone who's watching right now on YouTube, head on over to YouTube dot com slash yaf TV. We will answer your questions,

but only if they're good questions. If they're bad questions, we're absolutely going to ignore them. Subscribe send them in YouTube dot com slash yaf TV. I also, you know, we flew down here not just to talk amongst ourselves, as we often do. We want to talk to everyone who is out here at YAFF Freedom Conference. So let's do.

Let's folk some questions. Our first question for the Live Verdict program tonight comes from YAF TV YouTube subscriber Real Truth Cactus, who asks the fact that any private person can have their lives destroyed because of their social media lives is terrifying. What can private citizens do to protect themselves? You can't take that one all rights as the private citizen in this duo here, It's very tricky. It reminds

me of a question I get. Maybe we'll get it tonight, and I'm happy to get back into it, but I often get this sort of a question from students, which is, hey, Michael, how can I totally embrace my political views and be very honest about what I think and not cowtow to the liberal mob and tell my professor exactly what I think about is absolutely ridiculous anti American lessons and still get an a. I say, ah, you are asking for something that was never possible and never will be possible,

my friend. You want to have it all and everything. Everything in life has consequences. It's why we remember that we have to be why is as serpents and innocent as doves. Right. This is a very tricky situation that we're living in, and I can't just give you some kind of platitude and say, you know, speak your mind and be true to yourself and you will face no

consequences whatsoever. The one thing I can say, though, having never learned the lesson to my mouth shut, is you know, I certainly have spoken my mind, and I've gotten some lower grades because of it, and don't get invited to some fun parties because of it too. But I will say, from the times I have been honest about my beliefs. You don't need to be flamboyant about them. You don't need to be parading them around all the time. But when you're asked, you give an honest answer. I sleep

like a baby. It is. It is not worth your integrity to keep your mouth I do. I do like like I screamed, a very odd phrase. You're the father of a new boy. Is sleep like a baby? A peaceful image? Oh? It's one of My wife feeds me multiple times in the middle of the night. Pizza. It's great, absolutely fabulous, And that's why it's really why my answer is just get married and you'll have a much better life.

But it but it really, I do think it really is important in this way to have the integrity you will you will take a hit and you just have to deal with that. And being a conservative requires that you recognize reality and accept the permanent things about life. But it is worth it because in the end, all the cheap little thrills that you'll get by lying to

yourself and to others, I just don't think are worth it. Well, And let me add something to that on a different because I think you're right in school, and it is a challenge in school you have liberal professors. How you handle that. Both Michael and I experienced getting your grades clips substantially with professors from the left that didn't like what we were saying. And that's a hard challenge to

deal with. Let me give it a different aspect to that question, though, which is the social media component of it. You know, we're a different environment where everyone here is online, everyone here is connected, and what you say is recorded for all perpetuity. Yea, once it's on the Internet, it's for it never goes away. And I got to say, look,

our daughters ten and twelve. It scares the living daylights out of me that as they start to get an engagement, I think of the dumb ass things that I thought and said when I was fifteen and seventeen and nineteen, and I am so glad that they are not preserved for all alternative. They faded, They were dumb, and they were forgotten. Yeah, y'all are living in an environment where you don't get a second chance on that. And so I'd say be careful on that. Yeah, because it is

a smart Alec tweet, a smart Alec post. In five years at a job interview, you could find them pulling it out and reading it to you. And I try to explain that to you. Know, you want to make a joke, just humor, be fun and have a sense of humor, But ask yourself, do I want to see this five years from now? And if you don't, maybe don't send it out in to the world to be

there forever. Because because this is the other side of the integrity aspect, which is you don't want to hide your views and pretend to be somebody who you are not. But you also don't want to do something that you will be embarrassed about. You don't want to be doing something that you'll be ashamed of five or ten years later when you look back on it, and when your prospective employers look back on it too. Hi, my name's Trip Grayby. I'm a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

First of all, thank you both for being here. My question is, as you alluded to earlier, the Goop seems to be more divided than it's ever been before. And it seems as though since the election and since the riots at the Capitol, there's been a certain effort to purge Trump's skeptical Republicans from the party. Ben SaaS is

expecting a censure from the Nebraska Gop. Sydney McCann and Jeff Flake, Doug Doocey were censored by the Arizona Goop, and Liz Cheney was almost ousted from House leadership recently. So my question to you is do you think that there's a path forward for Trump's skep conservatives. Of course there is. I think there's a path forward for everyone who agrees on a shared set of principles and values.

You know Reagan. Reagan said, what do you call someone who agrees with you eighty percent of the time a friend? So look, we're at a weird divided time. Donald J. Trump is a unique individual and he inspires unique sentiments from virtually everybody. I do think some people have lost

their minds over how much they dislike it. He says and does things I disagree with, but he also has done a lot of things I agree with that I think we're good for the country, and I try to approach it as a reasonable person to say, Okay, when he's working for good policy that's good for the country, I'll work with him. When he's saying things that are not good, I'm not going to support that. There are efforts of purging on both sides, and we're seeing it

right now. And look, anytime you lose an election, there's a period of chaos, there's a period of reckoning that's fairly natural. And so you're right. There are those who are very strong Trump supporters that are saying get rid of anyone who isn't there are also those who are not fans of Trump that are trying to say get rid of everyone who was. I mean, we're seeing the purging on both ends. You know, I have this crazy view that I'd like us to win elections, and you

win elections by getting fifty plus one. So I'm not really interested in taking any significant chunk of the party in purging it. I am interested in finding shared values that bring us together. And right now, these emotions are raw, these emotions are people are worked up and they're passionate. Yeah, that'll fade as time goes on. Those divisions, there have always been divisions in the party. They've always been. You know,

it's interesting. I wrote a book last year called One Vote Away about the US Supreme Court, and one of the chapters in the book traces the history of the court, and it goes back to two nominees that were put on the court, and it goes back to the nineteen fifty two GOP convention and the nineteen forty eight GOP convention and the battles that were in the party, actually in nineteen forty eight, the battles that were in the party where you had you had Dwight D. Eisenhower, who

was the choice of the New England Moderates, and you had Robert was the choice of the Conservatives, and they were at each other's throats, and you read it and you just stop and laugh. I look, most of us weren't alive then, and the same battles that we see playing out somewhere. Okay, I got a few mean looks at it. But the same battles and tensions that we're playing out now, we're playing out then, and they're going

to be disagreements. And you know, some of it comes down to the difference between a parliamentary system and a two party presidential system. Parliamentary system, we could have a dozen different parties and everyone could pick a party of just people exactly like them who are left handed and ride unicorns unicycles, and you can all be hopefully not unicorns but unicycles. In a presidential system for two parties, you've got to stitch together a coalition that's sometimes uneasy,

that's sometimes difficult. So, yes, these tensions are real. II The having debates about who we are and what we stand for should be good. But I also don't think we win elections by purging major parts of our party. I think we win elections by growing our party and convincing the American people that our ideas are right. I love that point, Senator. It's a really, really great point because this is an issue that has come up in

the last couple of weeks. Should there be a third party for people who are I don't know, one type of conservative over the other. And of course, if there were a different party, that would immediately give Democrats every single office in the land. More or less. We saw this happen with Teddy Roosevelt gave us Woodrow Wilson and more or less destroyed the country. So you don't want

that sort of thing to happen. When Bill Buckley, in conjunction with this very organization, sort of cobbled together the postwar conservative movement. He brought together libertarians, traditionalists, and the religious right and warhawk democrats. And those three groups did not have a ton in common. They all hated the Soviet Union, libertarians because of the collectivism, the traditionalists because of the atheism, and the warhawks because of the imperial ambitions.

And they worked together and had an incredibly successful governing coalition. And now we're going to be debating a lot of these questions. Where do we stand on migration, what do we think that means in our national history? Where do we stand on corporate America? Where we spend all these

sorts of issues. I think it's easier to debate those things when it's not just a personality contest and a contest of who was right five years ago, when you're actually talking about those issues, and there's another issue on top of that, which is do we have the courage to do the things that the people give us power to do? Will we actually do it? Or are we just going to promise something on the campaign trail and then do something else behind closed doors. Those debates, as

you say, cent, those are all happening right now. That is perfectly normal, and you want to make sure you keep enough people together that you can still win elections. Our next Live Verdict mail bag question comes from yaf TV YouTube subscriber Derek Maker, who asks should Texas secede? You know, it's interesting that question is getting asked more and more. It is literally being debated in the Texas legislature.

I have a friend of mine from New England who actually flew down to Texas right before the twenty sixteen election. He was convinced Hillary was going to win and the world was going to hell in a handbasket, and he said Texas needs to secede. It's the only hope to save the union. And he was dead deadly serious. And I'll tell you what I told him then, and it's the same thing i'd say in the answer to that.

My answer is no, I don't believe Texas should secede because I think we have a responsibility to the country because I love America and I'm not willing to give up on America. I understand the sentiments behind it, I understand the frustrations as you look at lunatics running our national parties, running our institutions of government, it's frightening. And I will say, look, we're at a strange time in our country because our country is coming apart. We're living

in two universes, the left and right. And this is where technology, I think has had a really significant impact because with social media, with the Internet, the left listens to left wing news, the right listens to right wing news. If someone disagrees, you unfriend them. And we don't have

shared facts, we don't have the homogenizing institutions. You know, it used to be that you know, you would go you'd be a Democrat or Republican, but you'd go to church with your neighbors and there'd be some of both. You'd go to the rotary club and you would know people who were Democrats, you'd know people who were Republicans, and you discover that they didn't have horns and they

weren't monsters. I worry about our country that the reality of someone in Texas is very different maybe than the reality of someone in Seattle, where everything they're hearing, all of the reinforcements, all of the facts are skewed to one side. I think the answer it's incumbent on us. Listen, the media has given up on its task. You Walter Cronkite played a role of bringing people together, and he leaned left, but he wasn't a naked partisan the way

today's journalists are, to be honest. If we're gonna wait for CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times to fix itself, the country will be lost. The only way to fix it is to do what we're doing right now. It's one of the reasons I love podcast is because we could sit down and do a podcast any damn time we want, and put it out there and communicate directly, and by the way, every one of you can too.

You know, it's easy when you're young to think, well, gosh, you know, when I'm older, when I'm thirty, when I'm forty, when I'm established, then I'll have a voice. Then I'll be able to do something. Everyone of you has a voice right now. And not only that, your conservatives on college campuses. I mean, you are thick headed and stubborn as hell. That's great. You got them to a flaud

by calling them thick headed and stubborn as hell. That's very that's very oppressive, you know, on this question of Texit, I will defer to the senator from Texas if you want to ask me about tennis, sexit or something which sounds very very taudry. But if you want to ask me about that, I'm happy to answer. But that's a good point. Howdy, gentlemen. My name is Rhydolson. I am a senior Texas A and M University him as a lifelong Texan, I too, am a survivor of the twenty

eighteen hellscape known as Beatomania. So my question to you is, seeing as this is a current trend with you know, AOC becoming a basically a new celebrity, how do you fight the power of celebrity in future elections. It's a huge problem. It is a problem that stems back. I think you can go back really to the nineteen sixties. The left systematically took over the organs of the transmission of ideas. They systematically took over education K through twelve.

Education is almost uniformly left. They took over colleges and universities, They took over journalism, and they look over entertainment. They took over Hollywood. By the way of all of them, if I could get one back, I'd get entertainment back. If you look at the influence of movies and TVs, and by the way, sports and video games, all of them are dominated by the left. And so what they do is they make their folks celebrities and they treat them AOC and Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are all

the same thing. And the press and big tech. Oh be still my heart. She played a video game. Well hot diggity damn. You know. I was in the airport in DC getting ready to fly down to Miami today and I up to get a I wanted to die Doctor Pepper, but they didn't have one, so I got to die coke um. And I'm just looking at all the magazine covers and every magazine cover had Joe Biden smiling ear to ear, had him happy. Jill Biden there, well except for the Kamala ones where I actually think

she was glowing. I think they actually require like choir music to be played. Yeah, there's a loom on it. It's radioactive it you know, you know the Renaissance paintings where they put halos around. I mean it is, it's it's hagiography and it is designed to be and you know, you get questions, what's your favorite ice cream flavor? Scott? Did anyone ever ask you your favorite ice cream? It is?

And the entertainment world? All right, So this week I got in a Twitter beef with Carrie Ellis, who says rob Pirate, Roberts and the Princess Bride, which is my favorite movie? And mind you Okay, so this it was actually caused by Verdict. So I didn't pick this one. I picked a lot of them, but I did not pick this one. I was innocently minding my own business. Last Verdict we did, I talked about I went in a digression and I said, you ever notice how many

movie villains are rabid environmentalists? And I talked about Thanos and Avengers endgame who says there are too many people, they're consuming the resources, so I'm gonna snap my finger and half the people are going to disappear. And I've said that point several times before, but for whatever reason, some lefty saw it and lost his mind and tweeted it out and the thing went viral like crazy, and I actually took media matters the lefty group and I

retweeted them. I said, like, yep, that's what I'm saying. Listen to what the guy's saying. He's an environmentalist. He wants to kill half every person that lives. So Carrie Olle was got mad at that. Oh, there is a very cute thing on Twitter. Someone pointed out apparently I pronounce his name wrong because I say Thanos and it's Thanos Stanos. And they actually did a clip of like

twenty characters from the movie going Thanos Stanos. Thanos Thanos okay, guy with really fat fingers who can kill half the people on the universe. Uh So, Carrie, I was out of nowhere, blasts me and says, I don't know, puts that clip and says you're a moron. And by the way, everyone who made the Princess Bride. We all hate you, hate you, we all hate you. Um now, this is my favorite movie. I've seen this a lot of times,

and is it so happens? In my state office is a framed picture of Karrie out was dresses the dread Pirate Roberts, signed by right Alwis two Senator Cruz best wishes, all my best wishes. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, really, dude, Like really, Yes, you're a lefty actor. You're all lefty actors. Yea. And by the way, just because you're all lefty actors doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy movies. You know, if we only listen to conservatives, okay, no movies, no sports,

no TV. No, I'd like to hell with you. You don't own your art. I love your movie, even if you're a numbskull. But I did take a picture of the signed signed a picture that he had he had signed to me and apparently forgot about. And I just set the picture back and said, does this mean you want your picture back? And so he blocked me. He does pleasant never go against Ted Cruise when tweets are on the line, and never do it. Our final question

comes from the Live Verdict mail bag. Blake, who is a subscriber on YAF TV, asks Biden said he was going to follow the science, but what about his refusal to follow the science that says open the schools? Are he and Cuomo just on a rampage to hold onto the power they gained under COVID. Yes, thanks everybody. No, the left is really good at weaponizing language. They do it really well, by the way. We're not nearly as good at it. Science is one of their favorite words.

By the way, what they mean by science are the socialist policies they want to implement. The actual substance of the science doesn't matter. It's actually worth pointing out too. They have been using science in this way for over one hundred years. They actually radical left wing activists, following in the Marxist tradition, actually would refer to the science of history the science of politics. That is why, Actually when Bill Buckley started National Review, he said, we stand

athwart history, yelling stop. Because they knew that they knew the science of history, they knew where it was going to their terrible socialist utopia. So they've been they've been doing this for a long time. But they also don't care about science exactly. Science is a club to beat the masses into submission and obedience. So it it'll be clear. I am the son of two mathematicians and scientists. I

believe in science. Science actually matters. Now, how many of y'all remember the scientific method where you start with a hypothesis, you then test it with evidence, and you see to disprove it. So one of the things, right, let's take a couple of issues on science, climate change, the holy grail now of government control of every aspect of your life. A little bit of history. Nineteen sixties nineteen seventies, left wing politicians were saying, we are entering a massive period

of global cooling, a new ice age. The only solution is for the government to control the economy, the energy sector, in every aspect of your life. It follows naturally. Then there was a problem. The Earth wasn't in fact cooling like it was an interesting theory, but it just was wrong. So then fast forward another ten twenty years and you have scientists, many of them the same scientists, who come

up with global warming. That sounds different, sounds kind of like the opposite of the first one they had, but interesting and by the way you get the next wave of politicians and global warming. The solution is total government control of the economy, the energy sector, in every aspect of your life. Second, hold on here. But then they had another problem, which is that the Earth isn't warming. I mean, these guys can't win for losing. They just

keep blowing it. So we have satellites that are orbiting the Earth that are measuring the temperature, and for eighteen years they have measured zero statistically significant warming. So that a problem. They have these computer models that show it should be warming like crazy, and the satellites actually measuring the temperature say, well, it's not warming like crazy. They actually call this the pause. If you want to enjoy a bit of humor, you can google me and Sierra Club.

The head of the Sierra Club was testifying in the state and I asked him about the pause, and I said, do you know what the cause is? He said yes. I asked him what it was, and he refused to say. He simply refused to say. He refused to answer, And it's because And then did you notice think about it for a second, No one uses the term global warming anymore. It magically changed. And if you care about science. I want you to pause and think about climate change. It

is the perfect pseudo scientific theory. Why let's go back to the scientific method. This is a theory that can never ever ever be disproven. If you're mapping out the sets in which it is true, it is true and one hundred percent of the circumstances. If the climate gets hotter, the theory is correct. If the climate gets cooler, the theory is correct. If the climate gets wet, or the theory is correct. If the climate gets drier, the theory

is correct. There are no data, There is no evidence that can ever disprove a theory that stops changing, because well, yeah, the climate's been changing since the dawna time. If something is not susceptible to the scientific method, if it's not testable by data and evidence, its purpose is not science. And by the way, the solution to fix it. Hold on, I am gonna try to guess. Give me a second. Tell me total government control of the economy, the energy sector,

in every aspect of your lives. Okay, John Carrie flies on private jets to get environmental awards because he believes in this nonsense. No he doesn't. He believes in government power, and it has nothing to do with science. By the way, you'll also be told the polarized caps are melting. Here's a problem. There's more ice than the polarized capts today than their watch was ten years ago. Group a lefty scientist went down with a ship to an article to

measure the ice. They were told they did icebreakers. They said no, no no, no, it's all melting. They got stuck in the ice. When you bring this up, the supposed avatars of science scream denier. Let me tell you right now, denier is not the language of science. If you actually care about science, you don't speak that's the language of religion. Heretic the witch. Throw him in the water. If he floats,

he's a witch. That's for science. It's science. By the way, for any of your lefty classmates, if they want to pontificate on science, here's one question you can ask them. Just just very innocuously, tell me what is a Y chromosome? How dare you there's no hate speech on this podcast, Senator, You can not ask that we believe in scientists. Tell me what what is that thing I learned? You know, we've we've had a year of good podcasts, and now you're going to get us a deep platformed because you're

bringing up hate speech like our chromosomes. You know you can even you even see it in the White House press briefings. We heard this just over the past few days. Actually getting back to the specifics of that question, if you will, if you will indulge me, I would like to circle back. We have been told Biden administration, in what forty two executive orders since he's been inaugurated, three of them explicitly mention how important sciences and we need

to follow the science. Biden campaign done this. So he's going to more or less outsources his policies to these technocrats, these lab coat, exalted dictators who know how to run our lives better than we all do, right, unless it's politically inconvenient, Because just just a couple days ago, the CDC director said, no reason to keep the schools closed. We've got a lot of great data coming out shows that the virus is not spreading in any particular way

in schools. You don't need a way for teachers to get vaccinated. Send those kids back, educate them. Now, did you see the correction? Was there a correction? There was a correction. What was there was a fact check? Well, no, it's worse than that. The White House said she was speaking in her personal capacity in her so apparently she

wasn't a scientist. I guess this. Now she's standing at the frigging White House with the podium that says the frigging White House on it, and she's discussing a global pandemic and what the science says. But here's the problem. She doesn't lead a union that spends hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Democrats. That is very interesting, and so suddenly what she said became an inconvenient truth. It's a good book title, by the way, just because someone

should make a movie out of that. Because of course, these bureaucrats, these technocrats, Yeah, they might be in the constituency here that the Democrats want to appeal to, but they want to appeal to those teacher unions more. And the teacher unions say, science be damned, we're not going back to work. And that's going to be the line from the White House. It looks science is a wonderful thing, and by the way, we should embrace science as a

wonderful tool for human learning. But part of science is looking to facts and data and evidence and what works and what doesn't. Their policies don't work, they don't want to talk about whether their policies work. They instead want to behave it has become religion. Climate changes their justification for a total government control. But it's about socialism, it's about the state having control of your lives. And they are statists in their core. And I think we should

respond as happy warriors. You don't think we should just be furious and rip our hair out, because that's sort of what I'm tempted to do, is that No, no, we've got we've got to take a better attitude than that. Hey,

and things can change very quickly. Um. You know, one of my favorite clips is a great clip of Reagan at the White House and he's doing a White House press briefly and Sam Donaldson, who was an ABC News reporter, was pretty obnoxious and he was pounding Reagan and he said, mister President, you blamed the Speaker of the House, you blamed Congress, you blamed Democrats, you blamed everybody else. Mister President,

we have a lot of problems in this country. Don't you bear any of the responsibility for the problems we have in this country. And Reagan leans forward with a twinkle in his eye and he says, well, Sam, yes, yes, I do. I bear considerable responsibility because for many years I was a Democrat. And if you google the clip, it ends with Sam down Donaldson cracking up. Lad. A little humor goes along, even in an empire of lies.

To borrow our friend Andrew Plavn's phrase, even living this empire of lies, big government, big tech, big business, big everything colluding against us, A conservative consolation is that reality will I will reassert itself a little bit. In the end. We can count on truth. We do need to have courage, though that's the prerequisite for all of the other virtues. Seeing a lot of young, courageous conservatives in this room, seeing the strength of Yaff so happy to see Governor

Scott Walker now officially a president of Yaff. I think there's been such a wonderful, a wonderful decade upon decade upon decade here at Yeff, and I think we only have so much more to look forward to. Thank you also very much. This is Verdict with Ted Cruz. This episode Verdict with Ted Cruz is being brought to you by Jobs, Freedom and Security Pack, a political action committee dedicated to supporting conservative causes, organizations, and candidates across the country.

In twenty twenty two, Jobs Freedom and Security Pack plans to donate to conservative candidates running for Congress and help the Republican Party across the nation.