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Doug talks to Emerald Robinson, a fearless conservative journalist in America. (MACHINE GEENRATED) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. A weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today, we were blessed to have with us a first-time guest who was beloved in conservative circles for her truth, telling she is Emerald Robinson, a former white house correspondent for one America news network and Newsmax. She now has her own show on Frank Speech TV and has a large sub stack blog following. Welcome to the show. Emerald. Great to have you on. Emerald Robinson: Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. Doug Truax: Very good. So you've got this really interesting background, born a coal mining town. Your dad was a pastor. He ended up in journalism. So I always have for all the guests, we want to hear, you know, all of our viewers want to know, how did you get to where you are? Tell us a little bit more about that story, all that stuff. Emerald Robinson: Wow. Well, it definitely wasn't the conventional path. I didn't have the plan to end up in the white house press pool though. I always did. I went to school for journalism. I, my, my family tells me that. I said since kindergarten I was going to be a journalist, but I did sort of go the long way about it. I did theater and I, I went to Hollywood and things like that, diid some soaps. So that's often used against me, you know, by the critical corporate media. But yeah, I grew up in a tiny, tiny coal mining town in the mountains of Virginia on the West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee border. That felt a little bit more like I'm from Tennessee, probably even than Virginia. Cause it was just down the road. My daddy was a pastor of a tiny church that was just across the field to the left of my house, where I grew up and had a really lovely country upbringing. And then I, I left that small town, pretty young and headed for the, the big, like the, the different cities. And I was in LA for a while and I just realized that wasn't a fit for me. And I decided to get back to my education, which was journalism. And at first I moved into science and tech, every science and technology or a popular website at the time, I think it's now defunct, but it was called a red orbit.com. It was one of the top science sites at the time. And that actually brought me to Washington DC. So I didn't come to Washington DC to cover politics. I was one of the unusual people covering science and tech there, but then it sort of progressed because I mean, when in Rome, right, you're going to end up covering Rome and that's sort of how it happened. I didn't really want to stay in DC, but I met my husband fell in love and ended up taking a job with one American news and officially moving into a covering Congress. And then the white house. Then sure realized it was actually a pretty good fit for me. I really ended up loving politics and getting a little bit, you know, obsessed with it. Doug Truax: Yeah. Well, you're a truth teller in a world where there's not a lot of that going on. And it's interesting, you know, times that we live in, if you want it to be a journalist your whole life, and then you end up in this spot and you find, Hey, there's not a lot of people like me, they're telling the truth and it all kind of comes together. So that's, that's a, that's a really a great fit for you. So, oh, go ahead. You can say something. Emerald Robinson: Well, I just going to say it, I think because I did have the goal, like everyone else in that press pool with me, that was their ultimate goal. And then the next goal was to get a show on the network with ABC, CBS or Fox. And that just was never my goal. I didn't necessarily lay a path for this career. And so I've been, I find myself in a place that I didn't necessarily intend to be, but that, you know, suited me. And I think it's, you know, because God had a purpose. So I never though, I guess I wasn't different by, by design. It's just that I didn't have the same goals. And so then I, I didn't feel like I needed to compromise because you know, ultimately my, my goal was not the Fox or CBS. It was just being, you know, an honest person. Doug Truax: Yeah. It's, it's freeing when you get to the place where you're free, you're free because you're where you want it to be. And you're like, well, I don't, I don't have some additional thing I'm trying to get done here. So I'm just going to say it like it is. And you know, the truth telling kind of juxtaposed against the timid press Corps. Now, you know, we've watched the media kind of disintegrate and the press Corps and all this and Trump really pushed that whole thing over the edge. So just give us your take on why you think they're also timid nowadays. Emerald Robinson: I don't think they were, I don't think they're so timid as different from before. Really. It's just that Trump was like a flashlight. He exposed the rod that was already there and the fake narratives, it just came to light. More people were paying attention. He, that was probably his greatest legacy, honestly, out of all the things he did, it was the mosaic of not only the media, but our institutions like the DOJ, academia, Congress, he just, he just was a flashlight. And I would say that the media had long had problems. Is it getting a bit worse? Yeah. Just because there may be more overt about it. Cause there's no reason to really hide it anymore. I would say Doug Truax: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It's a, it's a new day and it's not the world we grew up in. That's for sure. And now it's, now it's a matter of, okay. Who's actually going to tell you the truth. When so many people realize that the people in the media they've got their own agenda and you know, I was thinking too about the time after the election and we'll see how much you want to share about this. But so we had right after 2020 Fox news was there, you know, kind of on the ropes, cause people are like, okay, what just happened here? And so then we get to this place of like, all right, are we going to, are we going to, are we going to have a new version of Fox out there? And so Newsmax kind of comes around and they were doing great, but they kind of lost their edge. So do you care to comment on how you see how you saw that playing out? Emerald Robinson: Yeah, so it was interesting because clearly we had soared after the election and just really took off as the audience grew exponentially because people were really starving for the truth. And there wasn't an outlet after Fox called Arizona to early in what was clearly some kind of play on the network and, you know, Arnold, Michigan, who was on the desk that night calling the election for them, he, he w he was questionable when they hired him anyway. So again, it was, you know, people guys were open and they realized, wait, bought boxes and what we thought they were. And it was a big opportunity for Newsmax. I think that it's very tough when you get that far, you get that much spotlight on you. They had not been used to having the kind of attacks that you get from the corporate media and from intelligence, the intelligence community, when you are being watched by so many people and your voice is influential. And it's tough to be that outlier, even if you are telling the truth and you have to make a decision when you get to that point, I had to make a decision when I got to that point, I get, you know, I got attacked all the time. I got called all kinds of crazy things, but you had to make a decision. What what's more important? Is it important to be accepted and to be afe? Or is it important to tell the truth and, and, and honor the truth and, and keep your integrity. Now, I will just say, cause I do have to be a little bit careful. I think that it was, they, they wanted to feel safe and look, you can get your license it's full and you can not get your, how they do. It really is that they just don't like you saw with the OAN recently one American news, they don't renew your distribution contract. And so essentially you, you're not being shown and that's, that's a big part of your business model. So I get it. But I often feel like if you're willing to and, and have courage, that there's always a way made. It's just having to trust that if you do that and the right thing, that it it'll in the end work out in the way that's supposed to, or for your good that God has for you, but that's tough for some people. And also you got to look, a Biden administration had already pulled people in already told outlets during the 2020 campaign cycle. That if you report on the hunter Biden laptop, if you report on the clear mental deterioration of the president, then handed a Biden, you're going to be frozen out of a white house. And a lot of these news networks want access. Ultimately it's about access Doug Truax: That's right. And then to go back to what you said a second ago, you have to ask yourself, are you looking for approval? Are you looking for the truth and to your credit, you've been sticking to the truth and it's been going well. I mean, every, every career right, has it's a here and there and ups and downs and stuff. But I think that, you know, that's, you know, that's why we're having you on because you tell the truth. And, and that's really important nowadays, especially as the next question I was to ask you in this whole woke world we're living in, and, you know, you've been taking the, taking the Republicans to task for a while on it. Even when, you know, there was a window of time where, well, we all kind of knew stuff was happening, but we weren't really awake to the woke stuff. And, and, and you were, so what do you think is going to happen though? Let's assume that, you know, don't, we don't want to get over confident like we do, but we assume we take back Congress. What do you see happening with regard to taking on the woke left from the Republicans? Emerald Robinson: Oh man, you know, I wish I could be more optimistic, but there is nothing that I've seen so far in covering Congress and DC. That makes me hopeful that even if Republicans takeover over both houses, that they will truly push for accountability and different issues, whether it be a Hunter Biden's laptop, corruption, Fauci I mean, maybe Fauci, because he is now such a safe figure to hit. Cause most Americans are tired of him. They do realize that there's clear corruption there and you would have Senator Rand, Paul, likely as this, that it helped chairing the Senate health committee. So there's possibility maybe on FAuci, but I, I, I tell you even some of these insurgent candidates and they were really great during their campaigns and they're really grassroots. They get to DC and they see just how hard it is to operate because they still had to play nice with Kevin McCarthy. They, they kind of, and then they ended up, you know, they want to get reelected and that ends up being the death of a true grassroots movement, right? When you care about getting reelected, instead of just doing what you got to do while you're there and given the time there. So I've seen too much of that. I'm not super, super hopeful. I tend to think there would be more strongly worded letters, you know, really, really good soundbites from Lindsay Graham on Hannity. So I'm not super hopeful. I just wish we had more Ron DeSantis' and you could just clone him and put him in different districts in different states. But unfortunately most of the GOP just doesn't have that spine. And honestly, a lot of them, it's not even that they don't have the spine. It's that they're just ideologically. They're not really far from the establishment. There really is just one party there. And they sort of play at being opposed to one another and maybe on certain issues, they're really opposed. It really comes down to taxation. Right. I mean, for Republicans, that's the hill they're always willing to die on its taxes. Doug Truax: Sure, sure. Yeah. That's a great point. The unit party thing, and I, you know, I'd be interested to get your take on how it was to, with the group that was legitimately conservative and they wanted to do great things. And then they saw Trump and Trump, you know, helped them stiffen their spine for awhile. But then we got into the whole, well, maybe he's a Russian agent and all that. And they, you know, then they started to cave on that. But I mean, there was a window of time. Once you agree though, that Trump was like, given all those folks like, Hey, this may be our time to stand up and actually do the right thing here. And then it, then it faded Emerald Robinson: Some of them. Yes. Some of them, but then a lot of them were still pretty obstructive to his agenda. And look, Mitch McConnell didn't do any favor to the Trump agenda or the Trump white house. He was one of the biggest obstacles in pushing for a lot of what Trump wanted to do. And I it's, you know, it's funny because honestly, one of the members of Congress who was most behind what Trump wanted to do and really generally liked what he was doing. And I think there's a pretty honest actor, and then, you know, I say out of all of them, he's, he's more solid than any Congressman I know there. And that's Thomas Massie for Kentucky. And remember that was the one Trump blasted so hard on the day that they were voting for the cares act and they were all, you know, COVID locked down at their homes and they didn't want to come back to DC and Massey like forced a quorum on it because he's like, this is a massive amount of money. This is going to affect our children for decades. You have to come vote on this. And Trump called him that he was grand standing show voting. Doug Truax: Right, right. Yeah. It kind of flipped on it, then it, yeah, no, that's a great point. I forgot about that. Yeah. Well that gets to, you know, back to what you're saying, you know, the unit party and the money and never let a crisis go to waste. And so it's just print a lot of money and shove it out the door and, and the, you know, the guys, somewhere down the road, after I'm done running for office, we'll take care of it. And speaking from somebody who's been living in Illinois for 20 years, it's, you know, we're on the, we're on the down slope of that now. So yeah. Yeah. It's tough, tough environment. So, so back to, to something you mentioned at the beginning, you know, your, your upbringing, your dad being a pastor and stuff. And so, so you clearly have a biblical worldview and, you know, that's that, you know, impacts everything as it should. So, but talk to that a little bit, how that makes you feel sometimes relative to some of the other journalists and you know, you're saying one thing that's super truthful and they're just looking at you, like, what are you talking about? You know? Right. So, Emerald Robinson: You know, it's funny. I mean, they they'll send out to gather the media and pretend like I'm crazy. But then when we were all in the room, I mean, they, it was funny because I would get a sense for them that there were sort of like, it was just a shock to them to have someone not care and just, you know, tell it like it is or be that truthful. And it was just sort of look at me sometimes like, wow, you know, cause they're, they were really trying to tell the line on what they said or what they reported and that they wouldn't get in trouble with the DNC. And so that they could get promoted, they could go to CBS or, you know, some of them were just pure activist. And I knew that sometimes they weren't reporting the truth, but they had an ultimate agenda that lined up with the DNC and the far left of the DNC. And so they did it, but I always felt like it was important to be very clear about the world view that I came from. And I, I wish more journalists would be whether even if they're not Christian, because at least, you know where they're coming from, right. What lens they're giving you the news through. And then I think Americans are smart enough to gauge for themselves, you know, to say, okay, well this is, you know, their, their, their point of view, but then gauge the information. And I think, you know, it's interesting because becoming a journalist in DC moving to cover politics actually really strengthened my faith. It made me feel bolder in my faith and more assured in it, even it grew me so much grew me so much in, in, in strength and, and, and boldness and having, and having to really have faith. But sometimes it was a little scary going up that when you knew you weren't like everyone else and knowing that you were going to get so criticized and it potentially, and you know, which ultimately happened to me, your contract would not be renewed, but I would initially feel that I would pray. There's a lot of times I would I'll call back home and I'd have my mom and my aunt gather and in prayer for me. And it always came through. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. Well, wouldn't you say though, too, that that added strength that you got, I mean, it's directly from God because at some point, right, everybody around you, you know, even a lot of people out in fly over country or praying for people to tell the truth and you know, you're right in the middle of a, of a, of a city that, you know, shifting morality, if there was such a thing back and back to your point about, well, just say what your worldview is, if it's not biblical. Okay. But then you're back to, you know, do you believe there is truth with a capital T you know, or are you just making this up every day? And then you're just looking for the approval of the people around you, so you can advance your career, which is what I see them. Like what you said, everybody's just acting, you know, sometimes a lot of these, a lot of these quote unquote journalists, they're just acting. So the unit party can keep doing what they're doing. Emerald Robinson: Yeah. There was actually one really good example of this. I thought one day in the briefing room and it was not too long after Biden taken office. And there was a reporter from, I believe it's called, has served a new service DNS. They were relatively new in the briefing room. And then there was one from the Washington blade. It was a blade or blaze. Yeah. It's one of those and it's, it's an LGBT outlet. And so two totally dimed, diametrically opposed, worldviews. Right. And these two outlets, they were trying to nail Joe Biden down on his stance on abortion. And so the conservative outlet had asked first, you know, when does he think life begins and try to really get, you know, nailed them down. It was the press secretary jen psaki she wouldn't answer. And then, so she went to the blade or blaze, whichever one it was, but that reporter, and he said, you don't know. Yeah. What is it? Because we're not sure either. So she got grilled from both. And there's a moment where everyone knows which side they're coming from, but they both want to get to the same truth. Like what, what does he believe? And we still didn't get the answer. Doug Truax: Exactly. Just move on. Right? Yeah. No, that's usually what happens. But, but that, yeah, to your point on that, I mean, everybody does want to know the truth, whether you admit it or not, you just, there there's truth out there and people want to want to find it. Yeah, for sure. So, well, Hey, you're telling the truth. We appreciate it a lot. I love all your stuff and just hang in there, you know, it's, it's the ups and downs of the career, but you know, people like you, it's going to go, okay. Right. Emerald Robinson: It's turned out to be a huge blessing working for Lindell TV. And it has been a joy. And I have, I feel like you have an even bigger platform. I have, I have even more freedom to cover what I want to cover. And you know, I do my sub stack it, it it's been really well received. And I feel like, actually I feel like actually my microphone was grown And it's must me. It's in a different arena. But I think this is where the landscape is heading. So I feel like God is just, could be a little bit ahead of the curve and I get to see my kids more. Doug Truax: There you go. It's a win all the way around. Right. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Hey, thanks for coming on. I'd love to have you back on some other time. Emerald Robinson: Absolutely. Doug Truax: All right. Thanks, Emerald. All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't forget that by working together and staying diligent, we can serve as can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. 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Doug talks to John Lott Jr., founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. (CHE GENERATED) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. Your weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and CEO of Restoration PAC. Today. We're blessed to have a first-time guest on John Lott Jr. Best known for his book. More guns, less crime. He's the guy that's used hard data over the years to really knock down liberal narratives. And he's still doing it because the liberals like Joe Biden are still attacking guns. So it's really great to have John to talk about this and this in this time that we're in. me to the show, John! John Lott Jr.: Thanks for having me on. Doug Truax: So you've got this incredible background on the gun issue, and this is just one of those narratives that, you know, in as conservatives it's, it becomes our opinion at this point, it's almost fact that the liberals take facts and just throw them out the window in support of their narratives. And it feels like the gun issue was the first one that went down this path. Is that kinda how you see it or what's, what's your history on, on how you view their take on guns? John Lott Jr.: Well, I mean, for decades, if you look at surveys, the one issue that's most divided liberals and conservatives has, has been gun control. I think if anything, that's just become exasperated. Even further recently, there were polls that came out at the end of last year that showed that while support for gun control was falling overall. And following among, I mean, it was already low for Republicans, but falling among independents, it was actually still rising for Democrats. You'd have something like 94% of Democrats want to have stricter gun control. And also he would notice just how extreme a lot of the claims were go. So you'd have 40% of Democrats would support a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns. Obviously it'd be talking about something around 80% or so that would support a ban on so-called assault weapons. Of course, Biden would include any type of semi-automatic gun as an assault semi automatic gun as a weapon. And some of his recent statements and 85% of handguns sold in the United States are semi-automatic guns. So, you know, it's, you look at something like surveys on, on gun registry. You have like a two to one support among Democrats for a national gun registry, two to one opposition to it among Republicans. But what's interesting is, is that the Republicans oppose the national registry because they think it would lead to eventual confiscation of all guns and by similar percentages, the reason why the Democrats supported national registry is because they believe it will eventually lead to confiscation of all guns. So, you know, it's, you know, the question is to some extent, why is there such a dichotomy there? I think there are a couple of reasons for it, but the most basic one is just who do you trust to make decisions? So I suppose kind of the analogy I could make is two views on healthcare. When that is, you know, Democrats don't trust individuals to go and determine what's going to be covered by their health care. You know, with Obamacare, the only decisions you had was the size of the deductible that you were allowed. Basically Republicans support a much broader array of choices for individuals to make. And, and the point is is that if you don't even believe people can properly choose what health insurance that they're going to get, are you going to rust them with web? And I think that's kind of the ultimate decision on whether you trust individuals to make decisions or not. Doug Truax: I was wondering too about all these labels they put on there, what's up with this ghost gun thing that Biden was talking about. I mean like this for most people, like, is this some new category that we've got to deal with now? John Lott Jr.: Well, I mean, ghost guns are privately built guns. People in north America have had privately built guns since before there was a country. The type of people who normally do that are kind of engineer types, who like to take around with different things with Biden left out in his discussion was that, you know, it's already, there are already many laws that deal with ghost guns. One of the laws is that if you make a gun and transferred or sell it to somebody else, it's a felony punishable by five years in prison. So, you know, the types of criminals that might have guns, and it's extremely rare, aren't the type who go and are building their own gun. They'd go and obtain it from somebody else. But, you know, I think there are a couple of points to make here. One is by once when he talks about violent crime, his entire focus is on guns. And you know, the problem is, is that over 92% of violent crime has absolutely nothing to do with, if you want to go and reduce gun violence, it's the same way you reduce this huge percentage of violent crime, which has been increasing. And that as you make it riskier for criminals to go on committed crimes, you increase arrest rates, conviction, rates, prison, sentence, legs, and that's not been the approach that Biden has taken. Doug Truax: And so now you've got this spilling out into the swanky neighborhoods. You know what, what's the, what's your take on what's going on in, in those situations? John Lott Jr.: Well, we just look through some numbers for Los Angeles county where over 37 months from January, 2019 to January, 2022, we looked at where the crimes were occurring by zip code in Los Angeles county. We linked it with the census data to get information on like immediate housing prices and the different zip codes or racial breakdowns or income. And it's really startling to see how the share of crimes has changed over just those 37 months. You see big increases in crime and in areas where you have high housing prices, like over $2 million for the median price. At the same time, the sheriff primes biomed crimes in four areas has, has fallen, you know, and property crimes like car theft and shoplifting has increased dramatically in the predominantly white, heavily heavy high-income areas have fallen. And the other, I think part of what's going on is you've had big changes in how California and Los Angeles approach CRI they made it so that it's not as risky for criminals to go and commit crime. And that I think explains why violent crime has been going up, but my own guests and more work needs to be done on this is that that drop and risk as pretty much occurred all over the place. But it used to be a lot riskier for criminals to go and commit crime in, you know, high income wealthy areas. And, and, and if it falls dramatically, it's fallen dramatically, even more in, in these, in those areas where it was particularly risky. So now criminals are, are moving out of the areas, which are kind of their home turf and to other areas. Doug Truax: So let's go back to this other issue too. So if this is such a issue for them, that this crime is going up and they're coming, why would they come out against guns even more now with crime, such an issue? It just seems so counterintuitive. We've got an election coming up, or maybe it's just a dumb thing that they're doing, but what's your take on why the Democrats would go down that path to, John Lott Jr.: Well, I think they, they don't want to blame their policies. So they have to blame some guns, an easy scapegoat, or they think it is. But you know, the irony is at the same time, they've made it very difficult for law enforcement to go and do its job. They want to make it difficult for private citizens to be able to go and protect themselves. And I think, you know, people, the reason why people have been buying a lot more guns. So for the last couple of years is because they've seen violent crime go up, they've seen violent crime go up in their neighborhoods and they are worried that people aren't acting to protect. And so they've realized that ultimately protecting themselves and their family depends on their own app. And so look, the types of rules that Biden wants to put forward, really aren't going to do anything to help solve crime, take something like the so-called ghost guns privately made gun regulations that he wants to have. He wants to have serial numbers on essentially all the different parts of, you know, before it was the firing mechanism and the mechanism that took a magazine that had to have serial numbers on them. But now, basically everything you could break a gun down into is going to have a serial number on it. And I think that's partly the point. They want to have the zero tolerance policy for any paperwork, mistakes, no matter how trivial, you know, they'll look at your paperwork over the last 15 years, whatever. And if they find something they're going to click out of business, just one mistake. Well, you know, having to keep track of what are all the different serial numbers for all the different parts of a gun. If you move a barrel from one gun to another, you're going to have to redo all the paperwork. They just want to try to make it more difficult for them to be in business. Just be one more mistake that might be possible for them to make, but serial numbers on crimes don't really work. I mean, maybe in the TV cop shows who something that does, but in the real world, you know, in theory, if a criminal leaves a gun at a crime scene and it has a serial number on it, and the criminal obtained the gun legally through some, you know, licensed dealer, then you could go and trace it back to the criminal and find out who committed the crime. There's big problems with that. One crime guns are very rarely left. The few times that crime guns have been left at the scene, the criminal is usually killed or seriously wounded. So you got them anyway. And the couple of times where they're not killed or seriously wounded the gun, isn't traceable back to the person who committed the crime because they didn't legally buy the gun through a licensed dealer. They got it through some black market or they got it from a drug dealer someplace. And so, you know, the reason why you see it on like TV shows like law and order and what have you. And then they usually bring in things like gun registry, which is even a step further is, you know, they got a half hour to solve crime. And so they go and bring it in and just say, well, you know, this solves a crime, but you look at even registration and licensing. There are plenty of places in the United States or a number of many way that have had registration licensing. And yet time after time, therefore could admit that they can't identify a single crime that they been able to solve. As a result of registration licensing, Y said, registration licensing since 1960, it's an island state. You would think it would be an ideal place to be able to go and use that type of system. But yet they can't point to cases that they've been able to solve. So, Doug Truax: And just the, the government overreach all the time. And to your point, they're going to try to find any reason they possibly can to get you to do whatever they want you to do. So last question for you in this, in this day and age, where we have so much government intrusion, what's your, what's your best advice you can give to, you know, patriotic Americans out there who want to protect their second amendment rights? What would you tell? John Lott Jr.: Well, I think they need to be well-informed about the issue so that they can go and push back on a lot of the claims because the media is constantly giving this information on this type of stuff. Not only in terms of what they cover. So, you know, for example, my guess is very few people hear about mass public shootings that are stopped from people that are legally have guns with, you know, the, the media rarely covers defensive gun uses just in general. We went through media coverage last year on it, and you may find the top five newspapers in the United States may cover thousands, literally thousands, many thousands of gun crimes. At the same time, the top five largest newspapers have carried a total of 10 defensive gun uses combined between the five papers. You know, I don't blame people who may think that they're, well-informed watch CNN and MSNBC and ABC, NBC, CBS, and read, you know, major newspapers who come away with the view that, well, you know, there are lots of gun crimes, you know, essentially zero defensive gun uses, you know, what's the harm for getting rid of guns. Let's just go and ban, you know, a few people would know that people use guns defensively about five times more frequent to stop crime. Then guns are used in the commission of crime. But you know, it's understandable to some extent if your editor, but a newspaper or something, and you have two stories that come across your desk, one case, a simple person, like a victim's been killed. And another case let's say a woman's brandished a gun. It wouldn't be a run runaway, no shots are fired, no dead body on the ground, no crime actually committed. You're the editor. Which one would you pick? Most people I would, I'm sure most people would pick the first story. Now we may hear about it from a newsworthiness standpoint, what's going to get people's attention. But if you care about it from a policy perspective, in terms of what's going to save the most lives, you know, you're going to care about both stories. And so, you know, that's just one out of many, many examples I can give you with regard to the media bias, but that's the reason why we have our website at crimeresearch.org, where we put together, you know, academic studies and other things so that people have an idea of the balance out there. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's a good, I would encourage all of our viewers to go check out that website, great book, great points you make on all this. And I think we all just need to, like you said, at the end here, just stay super informed on this and make sure we know where they're going with it so that we can do everything we can to, to prevent them from going that way, especially in this day and age. Well, John, thanks so much for coming on. Hope to have you back and really appreciate all that you've done over the years. John Lott Jr.: Thank you very much for sharing. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thanks so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media owner. Forget that by working together and staying diligently, conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant. Every morning in your inbox. Always free subscribe by texting first, right. to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSIGHT All caps. One word to, 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Jenny Beth Martin, leader and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. (MACHINE GENERATED) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. They were blessed to have with us, one of the founders of the Tea Party movement in America, Jenny Beth Martin, her organization, Tea Party Patriots is still going strong as our citizens. Again, grow more restless with the way government and our liberal institutions are robbing our freedoms and stifling our lives. Well, welcome to the show, Jenny Beth, Jenny Beth Martin: Thank you so much for having me Doug Truax: Great to have you. You've got this great storied career and I just want to go back, you know, put these two timeframes together. So it's 2009, your form and your organization, the tea party has taken off. Everything's going. And now we have today where there's a lot of angst out there amongst conservatives in particular. So what are the comparisons that you're seeing right now to 2009 to today? Jenny Beth Martin: Well, I think that there is a lot of anger and frustration, so that emotion, that conservatives feel is very similar to what they felt in 2009 and 2010. I think that there is a little bit of a difference. Now, back in 2009, we were so frustrated and we didn't know what we could do. So we took to the streets and, and had signs and we're protesting. But I think that in the last 12 years or so, we've learned a lot more about how we can put pressure on government, how we have a lot of people who are running for office. Now we have parents and other citizens who are engaged at the school board level at their local county commissioner city council level. And then I've been working with thousands of people from around the country who are working on election integrity. Doug Truax: Yeah. There's a lot going on and speak to that for a minute in terms of how you feel about the overall trajectory of the conservative movement, because, you know, you've made that comment about, well, back in the day, everybody got really upset and a lot of people didn't even know what to do, right. And so we're in a different place now. So talk to your perspective on, you know, overall organization and not just the energy, cause we all know that's there, but how, how, how we're kind of operationalizing this to, Jenny Beth Martin: Well, I think the big thing now is that there's been a lot of training over the years on how to get out the vote, how to run for office, how to contact your local elected official and people are doing that kind of work. And the, and the new people who are coming in, of course, they're learning how to do those types of activities. And then I think one of the biggest things that's different this election cycle than what we've seen previously is an effort among the grassroots to do everything they can to ensure the integrity of elections. And it's, there's a lot of learning and educating that is going into that because it's something that conservatives up until now really have not been engaged in. And in fact, really the Republican party has not been engaged in it because of a consent decree, the entered back in 1981 and they didn't get out of that until the year 2018. And so there's a lot of institutional knowledge over the decades about election integrity that does not exist. And we're trying to build that infrastructure now. Doug Truax: Yeah, you really are. And you're doing a great job. And I think that that's a great point as far as where we've been historically, I know living outside of Chicago and you know, you go through an election and you're like, well, it seems like maybe there was some fraud and some cheating there, but you know, we'll get them next time or something like that. There wasn't ever this concerted effort to look back at it and say, okay, well, was there anything wrong at all? Because the goal here is zero fraud. Not just the little, you know, not whatever it's zero. And so you're right. We just, over the years we have just not been that engaged. And so now we're at a place I know you've seen the numbers that, you know, the conservatives out there, they're still furious about the last election and they don't want to, but they don't want to bring it up necessarily in play company because you know, you might get, you might, so somebody might try to cancel you. So, so talk to that right now in terms of where we are in that space with, you know, you're having these events. And so many people are showing up. I know we are doing things and voter reference foundation and you know, we don't have enough seats for the people, want to hear everything here, all this stuff and how to get involved. So just talk to that, that contrast between the energy and people want to do stuff, but there's also that fear of what people might say about you or try to cancel you. Jenny Beth Martin: Yeah, there is a lot of fear that you might be canceled or even worse. The department of Homeland security issued a bulletin saying that if American citizens talked about certain topics, including election integrity, they might wind up being labeled domestic terrorists. Of course I'm, I'm, I'm summarizing that bulletin, but that's kind of the impression that people people have. So there's a fear about can't the cancel culture and a fear truly just about the Biden administration and government overreach. What we really try to do is address known problems that have been very, very well-documented when we're doing training with people. And that way, if they want to go and talk about it in polite company, they're, they're sticking to very hard provable facts about what happened in the past. And then we're talking about ways that we can can correct correct problems or maybe correct is not even the right word, but prevent problems from even happening largely by being engaged and showing up at election board meetings and, and becoming pull workers in some states it's called election officials are judges of elections, inspectors of elections, the people who actually work the polls and the precincts. So we try to focus not just on the past, but also what can be done in the future. And we, we try from our organization's perspective, a lot of our social media may not even be talking about the problems from the past, but just letting people know if they want to come learn how they can help ensure fair, free and secure election. So we have training for them available and we don't, don't wind up getting involved in a lot of those details online for exactly what you're talking about, that, that concern that we will be canceled. And we won't be able to reach the audience that we've built on our social media platforms. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's a good idea is make it very factual going forward. It's like, Hey look, some people say this about the last election. Some people say that, but I just know going forward in my precinct individually, I'm going to be a poll watcher. I'm gonna make sure everything goes exactly as it's supposed to go and who can argue with that. Right. We all just want the thing to go well. And just the, and if everybody would be a hundred percent confident on the other side, because we're not in a very confident place nowadays. And I think what you're doing is going to get everybody to that more confident space. Jenny Beth Martin: Yeah. I think that that's right. And in my state of Georgia, I'm doing training all over the country, but I think that Georgia is especially has, is uniquely messed up because in 2018, the Democrats did not believe the outcome of the governor's race and the elections from 2018 and 2020. We have that, that problem where Republicans don't believe the outcome of the election. And now we're about to have elections again this year. And I've talked to people all around the state of Georgia, regardless of political party. We just want to know that we can trust the outcome of the election. Once we vote. None of us, no matter what party you are, no one wants to lose an election. That is no fun at all, but we can deal with that loss. If we know that the law was adhered to, and that legal votes were counted. So all legal votes were counted, but only illegal votes were counted. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's right. I think there's the operational side of this right around the election and how it's actually run and who's showing up. And then the other side of it too, and I know you're, you're, you've seen what we're working on to vote rev.com, where we're basically putting the voter file online and let everybody take a look and crowdsource who's on there and who shouldn't be on there. And things like that. Because the other side of this, I think is if people are intent on committing some kind of fraud, if there's a higher degree of possibility that they're going to get caught, whether it's, you know, a poll judge or whatever, whoever's looking at that, or later from what we're doing online, that somebody might see, Hey, wait a minute, you wrote in two different places or there's not, you know, there's not 30 people living at this place or all that stuff. Then they'll, there'll be a, there'll be a less likely to go commit the fraud. And that's what we're really after here. Jenny Beth Martin: Yeah. I think that that is exactly right. And I think also it may not even be that people are thinking that they maybe they don't even intend to commit fraud. But I think that having this kind of information, like what vote ref has online, it winds up ensuring that people go and make sure that their, their voter registration records are up to date. And if they move from one state to another, I think we're going to see that people are much, much more likely to wind up following through and making sure their voter registration record was canceled in their previous state. And maybe they would not have done that in the past, but with so much transparency online, you don't want to be the person who, who did not take care of that. And then people think that, that you were doing something wrong. Even if it, if it wasn't deliberate, it just was an oversight in the middle of a move. Doug Truax: Yeah. Right. And so back to the confidence theme. So we want everybody to be confident in the election and do all these things. And everybody, I think as citizens, we all need to be much more engaged in our election process just in general to make sure it's right. But then you have political confidence. And so to kind of segue here, you know, the polls are looking good in terms of, for our side and, and bad because of the direction of the country. Obviously everywhere you look, everything's falling apart. So, you know, in your, in your conversations with, with your folks and when you're making the rounds out there on the country, are you getting any kind of semblance of a fear of overconfidence on our side that we might not, might not pull this out? Like we, you know, we think we should at this point. Jenny Beth Martin: Yeah. I have seen some of that. I hear people who, who remember how things looked in February of 2020, and president Trump was coming out of impeachment. He was not removed from office. The economy was booming. So from economic indicators in February, it looked really good. And then we had the pandemic and, and everything just turned completely upside down. And so I think that, and then we've got the situation right now with Russia and Ukraine, in addition to the econ, the economic issues and inflation that we have going on. But I think that those kinds of situations like Russia and Ukraine, they create a known set that you can't really account for. So I know that there are people around the country who are concerned that perhaps we might be a little overconfident and others who understand, even if it looks excellent right now. And even if it looks really good in September, we as conservatives still have a lot of work to do to make sure that we get the vote out and that we are swaying hearts and minds. So people understand that what we want for the country benefits all Americans. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. So talking about going forward, benefiting all Americans. So there's two types of people watching this broadcast, the folks that are already involved, you know, some of you may have met and they're out there doing the thing and there's other folks that aren't involved yet, but they know something's wrong and they need to work to, you know, fix the what's ailing our country here. So, you know, obviously this is an opportunity for you to give a blatant plug for your organization as well. But so what do you, what would you say to them, Hey, what's the first step? How do you go out there and get involved and, and, and what's that path going forward when you really want to do something for the country? Jenny Beth Martin: Well, I think that if, when I talk to people, if they want to know how to get involved right away at tea party, Patriots action, we have different action items for people to take every single week. And so I encourage people to go to our website, click on the take action button and they can find this week's most current call to action. But then beyond that, we encourage people to sign up for our email list, get involved on our social media. And then look for when we're going to be doing training is especially in, in the key states that had so many issues in 2020 with elections, we're doing a lot of training in those states right now for election integrity. And then if we're not hitting any of, if we're not hitting your state, then we urge people to still sign up because we are going to be doing training that will apply everywhere. Even if it isn't tailored specifically to, to the states, we were targeting, which are Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Doug Truax: Well, for such a time as this Jenny Beth, I mean, you guys have done a lot of work over the years and here we are, we need that. We need those boots on the ground, making sure that everything is done appropriately and properly and so that we can give back to confidence in our system and get our country back through. So thanks for all you've done over the years. And thanks for coming on the show today. Jenny Beth Martin: Thank you so much for having me, dad. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we can serve as can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant. Every morning in your inbox. Always free subscribe by texting first right to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to, 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Michael Betrus, researcher, and Brownstone Institute contributor. (MACHINE GENERATED) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax founder and president of Restoration PAC. Today we have a chance to meet another COVID19 era hero. Michael Betrus, Michael is a writer and researcher of public policy. He cut through the media censorship to publish a book and several well-read summations of lockdowns, and whether they worked, he also graded the governors on lockdown policies. Michael, welcome to the show! Michael Betrus: Thank you. Doug Truax: All right. So let's hear a little bit about your background, definitely what you were doing before COVID hit, because that's a, that's an important part. We're getting all the COVID stuff for sure, but like to get a little snapshot of your background Michael Betrus: Years or so, and, and, and also had, you know, a day job and what kinda got me into this was recreationally, I was following the cruise ships. There were two cruise ships that were quarantined off of Japan and California. And I I'd actually, I've been on one cruise ship and it was the one that was quarantined off California. And so I followed that with a little bit of interest. And if you remember, it was kind of covered, like it was the Bronco chase when it was pouring into Oakland and, and then nothing really happened. So I thought that was odd. You know, Wuhan had lockdown and, and, and it was getting a lot of attention. And then about two weeks later, the Imperial college released their model that predicted in a do nothing scenario. Like the cruise ships. We would have over 2 million deaths in America by summer 2020. So I took the Imperial college model inputs and plugged them into the demographics of the cruise ships. We should've lost 155 people on those two cruise ships and we lost 10. So I thought, wow, this is incongruent, right? It you know, it feels like the model was kind of off the rails. And then, you know, days later we locked down and had 40 million people unemployed. And that's what prompted me to write my first book Lockdowns on Trial and have done a lot of analysis on this ever since, and then wrote the second book, The Science versus The Lockdowns. Doug Truax: Yeah. So that's a, I have a similar story too. I happen to be in Utah when this all started happening and the numbers were coming out like what you were saying. And then, so I, they were putting the numbers of people in hospitals, in Utah. And then I, the number looked, you know, it's not, it's, it's an important number, but it looked kind of small. So I looked up the population of the state and I did the math on that. And I'm like, whoa, this is we're going to be fine. We don't need to freak out about this. But to your point, everybody had math all over the place. And nobody was really, you know, at the helm here saying, this is right, and this is wrong. This is the math we're going to go with. And so as you look back on this now, and we progressed into that window of time where, you know, as a conservative, I would say, Hey, don't give the government any power more than they already have. Obviously, what were you thinking as you watch this kind of roll through different states and everybody's got their different attitudes and, and you're thinking, I think that these numbers are wrong in general. Michael Betrus: Right? Well, so it's, it's really how we see the numbers, right? I mean, the numbers were, they kind of are what they are. I think they're, I estimated based on some analysis that the inflation on this is probably 30% or so. So if we've had a million recorded COVID deaths, that number is closer to probably about 700,000 in terms of dying from that, that's, that's a large number, right? That's bigger than the flu. That is, you know, there's no question COVID-19 is a pandemic. What's interesting about this though, is the underlying condition age stratification, right? What we did was we apply these one size fits all mitigation, things, methods, closing schools, restaurants, et cetera, but COVID, it really wasn't an equal risk to everybody. It was highly age stratified. If you, if you took the vulnerable people, if you took basically everybody over 65 and the people that were even overweight, we really didn't have a pandemic. That's a mathematical term. It's 7.4%, I think, of additional excess stats. And so by applying these one size fits all mitigations, and I tell you like the school thing is the mountain that I'm dying on over the us. I just can't believe we kept in certain states, you know, kids out of school for 17 months Doug, 17 months. And so, so, you know, we have these, these different policies across all these different states. The, you know, th the CDC never did any randomized clinical trials, not on therapeutics, not on masks, not unreal, really not on anything, but we do have great data samplings from states that had different mitigation methods. And so I would challenge anybody to look at at case hospitalization or death charts for any of the states, and then be able to identify from those, which were the states that had the tightest lockdowns, where it's highly correlated even more than age is the obesity percentage in the states. And that's just, you know, it's not a message that the CDC has, or the media has really communicated out as is the high risk of obesity. If you're not, you know, you know, very old and, and even I learned through this, right, I'm not a healthcare expert. I've I I've analyzed this from a data perspective. I didn't realize how important having a healthy lifestyle is to stave off things like this, but I'm a pretty fit guy. And I climb mountains for hobby, but I tell you, I'll, I'll always be watching my health from now on. Doug Truax: Yeah. Right. It opened her eyes to that side of it. But to your point about the CDC, and I've said this before on a show is like, I used to think for years, well, you know, we're a big powerful country and we've got this thing called the center for disease control. And if there's a problem, there's some really smart people over there. I think they got like 30,000 employees or whatever else, but there's some smart people over there and they're going to figure it out. They're going to do all these tests. I'm going to tell us what to do, and it's going to be great. We won't have to deal with this, you know, in this crazy way, like, we've read historically with these pandemics, but you're so right. It was just this narrow it down to who's most vulnerable. And let's really talk about doing the right thing for them first and foremost. And then everybody else will get to later. And to your point, if we were to do it that way, we wouldn't even been talking about the kids at all. And that's the hard part for me too, is this kid thing. And so, you know, I guess what you're saying is like, it's on the people who impose these things to demonstrate this actually works. So back to the schools, then have you ever seen any proof at all or anything that, you know, that helped in any way to do that to our kids for all those years or all those months? Michael Betrus: So what's interesting is that the prior to COVID the CDC and the WHO had created pandemic playbooks, and so COVID-19 would really fall under a high level category, two out of category one through five. So kind of think of it like hurricanes. And the assumption that would be made is that kids would be the primary spreaders of COVID or a pandemic influenza, because if you're a parent, you know, that, you know, kids are the primary transmitters of the flu, that's just real. And so what happened through this as the playbooks that recommended in a category to that possibly closing schools for three to four weeks at the time that there was a community spread, you know, there, the peak, these things come in waves and communities and staying isolated. If you're sick, that's obvious, that's good. That's a good one, possibly wearing masks in public, if you are sick or symptomatic. And, but, you know, the WHO even came out and said, there's a mechanistic plausibility behind the face masks. And what that means is that it feels like it should work, which it kind of does, but there wasn't any data. There was no studies prior to COVID and there really is aren't any studies after COVID that validated that doing masks did anything. And so we locked down schools for a very long time. Then we rationed it off where they had to social distance David's wives done some excellent reporting on how flawed that model was and some of those calculations. And, and then about two months ago, I did a, a study with a couple other guys from rational ground on this. And so we looked at the 10 or 12 states that had mask mandates in schools. And then we compare that to the 10 or so states that didn't have any that actually banned mask mandates. And so you would think that if, if you're a fan, if you're batting mat, if you've got a mask mandate, the results should just simply be better. It should be somewhat obvious. And so what we found was in the states that had a mask mandates, they averaged at the time that we were at our peak in the U S this was the first week of January. We had 4.2 pediatric hospitalizations per 100,000 in the mask mandate states in the states collectively. And these are millions, the sample sizes in the millions. And then the, in the states that banned mass mandates, the average pediatric hospitalizations were 4.9. So when you consider that the pediatric hospitalization inflation is at least 50%, that's not my number, that's that's numbers from other studies and, and possibly even the CDC. And so you're really talking about a rounding error between the two, if mask mandates work, it should be demonstrable, right. I don't know what that number is. It should be twice as much, five times, 10 times, but when you're talking about it being, you know, less than 10% or something accounting for inflation, it, it, you know, it just, it really invalidates a lot of these policies. Doug Truax: Yeah, it's amazing. And I think, you know, you made the point in your article, we'll get to grading of the governors here in a second, but you made a point in that article that I thought was really great is that if you impose these lockdowns, it's on you, whoever impose these locked down to prove that this worked better for you than it would have not by, by not imposing them. And there's been none of that. And that's why I'm so thankful. There's I think, you know, you're on the tip of the spear on this thing, but this whole piece of going into the data and looking at what actually happened, and putting aside the media hype on this, it's going to be a whole, there's going to be a whole wave of this going forward. And, you know, you're, you're the one that really set this off and I really appreciate you doing it. And so we'll, let's talk about the governors and the states. And one thing I want to ask you, and this isn't so much data. And so I'm just going to ask your opinion on this a little bit. So what is it about these governors then that say, well, you know, we're going to do all these things, even though there's no data behind it. And these other ones that say that they don't, and then they also happen to break down quite largely between red state governors and blue state governors. And then, so my thought too, on that is, is this coming down now to some politicians just wants you to feel better about this mentally and other politicians want to actually solve the problem. And so you have these groups of these lockdown people that just went crazy with no numbers, and they're just doing it primarily to make their population, you know, it's like a virtue signal. I want you to see that I'm trying to make you feel better all the time. Do you feel better? And if you do, let's just keep the masks on or keep doing all this craziness. So that's just my conjecture at a high level. W what are your thoughts on, on how you see that playing out? And it's almost like the motivations behind what these people are doing or we're doing, Michael Betrus: You know, if I knew the answer to that. So, first off, I want to say, you could read both of my books and see most of my interviews and not know who my voted for. Right. I, I didn't to say political or freedom oriented analysis. I tried to provide a lot of data and let the readers or viewers really kind of make their, just, you know, make their minds up. But it's highly correlated that that Republican led states had far less restricted, you know, restrictions or rules than, than Democrat led states. That's, that's just what it is. And Republican led states certainly had more kids in the classroom than, than Democrat led states. And so, you know, why is that w election implications freedom, you know, from my perspective, is this, isn't a freedom argument. It's a data argument. It's so it's a balance of risk and consequence locking kids out of school, right? There's if, if there were health benefits to that, you, you can make that argument. And if there weren't consequences to keeping them out where, you know, the loss learning and social development and, you know, athletics and activities, et cetera, you know, if you could, if there weren't those trade-offs, you know, it's a simpler argument, but there are trade offs in everything, right? I mean, it's all our policies that we have. Everything is about the greater good. And so, so what I found was in, in analyzing these different states and in my, my article grading the governors, which was a book excerpt too, is again, you can't find correlations between tight restrictions and COVID outcomes. You just can't. In fact, when you look at the age stratification and Florida's large population, and there, there may the second oldest population after main, but Main's a very small isolated state, Florida, anything less than number one is sort of a win for Florida, right. In terms of leading and COVID deaths. And, and they were right at the national average, you know, for exceess deaths, they're hovering right around California. And so we see in some places, is that in these tight restricted places, let's take California. They, they, they were below the national average and deaths, but they're right at. And at the time that I wrote did this analysis last year, they were far above the national average and access that. So you're trading off things, right? You can lock down everybody, but if they die from something else, whether it's missed healthcare or depression or overdoses, then what have you really gained? And so the, what I term lockdown to us, you know, it's sort of a balance between, for every two COVID deaths, we really had a lock-down death. And so then you start really looking at the trade-offs the lockdown dust, the average age was about 48 and the average age for a COVID deaths was hovering close to 80. And so, so in terms of life years lost, the lockdowns would probably cause more harm than COVID did. That doesn't mean, you know, I lost a relative to COVID in a care facility in Detroit, in the first wave in April. And I kept my 90 year old mom under wraps in Detroit, you know, for really two years now, having her keep a low profile because I, I do respect what COVID could do. It's it's really, these one size fits all mitigations. And so in the grading, the governors, the governors that I first off nobody would have gotten an a, but we're on a curve, right. We grade a kids on a curve now. And so we're grading governors on a curve, on a curve. I thought that Kristie Noemm and DeSantis, you know, they stood up, they resisted the lockdowns as much as probably was politically and media wise feasible Wyoming and Nebraska did a pretty good job. They kept kids in school. I think Wyoming kept kids in school more than any state in the country. The states that I thought were so poor at this, when you look at California and New York and Illinois and Michigan, these are states that have the tightest lockdown measures, and they really didn't have better outcomes than their neighboring states or, or the national average. And so, you know, there's a point when you have to, like, there's a lot of forgiveness that we can have for what happened in March and April. Right. I get it right. I mean, let's say there were unknowns. I, I didn't see the unknowns because of the data I was studying, but let's go with that. By summer of 2020, it was just painfully obvious that kids should all be in class with normal protocols. That just was obvious. And we just resisted it at night. You know, I think one of the things we'll end up evolving into this discussion is talking about the media implications, but that's where I really think this came from. I think the media drove so much fear and so much endorsement for like a, COVID a zero COVID type of environment that the governors had free reign. It didn't nobody help any, nobody in the media really held the governors accountable for collateral damages. It was all about zero COVID, right. It was like a race to see, you know, let's, let's mask everybody up, but, you know, five and then at two, and then, you know, I mean, it got to be crazy. And so fortunately we're on our way out of it. Doug Truax: Yeah. It got to be ridiculous. And, and also too, when you talk about the governors, I am a conservative, so I have an opinion about this, but you know, the Democrats are owned by the teacher's unions. And so that just prolonged everything. And even in the face of the common sense of it all. Cause I live in Illinois and I, and I saw it happen all the time. Michael Betrus: Actually. Let's, let's talk about that for just a second. We'll talk about the teachers' unions. One thing that's really amazed me through this whole journey is for example, I'm not a climate change expert. I'm really not. I have some opinions, but I'm not an expert on that, but I've become an expert over data. And if I don't know that anybody will ever see articles or studies where 97% of scientists agree. And so with all the data from COVID out there in the open, I'm surprised this is the, the mountain that everyone's died on and how much they've overplayed their hands. And so you look at teacher's unions and, you know, specifically you look at, you know, the big ones are Chicago and Los Angeles where the, the, you know, the two that made so many headlines for so many, you know, wanting so many things in order to, to go back to class. I just wonder, do parents know, like I live in Dallas, that kids were going to school with normal protocols, you know, they weren't actually distanced, they weren't wearing masks. You know, you take Florida. I wonder, I bet you, most parents in those communities, didn't dig into this enough to say, well, wait, they're all the kids, they're doing athletics and they're not wearing masks. And they're, you know, they're not. So you know, all the, all that stuff is normal and in these other states and nothing's happening, I wonder maybe. So why would the teacher's union? I can't understand this. I mean, I get, it comes down to money, but I'm surprised that this is the card they played with so much public data available. Doug Truax: Yeah. I think that there's a high level of confidence on that side, on the Democrat side, that a lot of people are not going to watch alternative media too. Like the mainstream, the typical mainstream, well, I even try to use mainstream media anymore, but this, you know, I think there's still a lot of people out there moderates in particular too. They're like, well, if I, you know, I can check CNN and it'll be okay, I'll figure it out. But to your point, if they're not even talking about what the, you know, the great news coming out of Florida or Texas or whatever else, I keep people in the dark and I was good. I'll go ahead. You guys say something? Michael Betrus: No, I agree. And so one of the, one of the pieces I talked about how in the media chapter of, of the lockdowns science versus lockdowns about that, it was the greatest campaign, greatest advertising campaign in history, right? And so you can't really blame people. It wasn't just CNN, right? Nobody hardly watches CNN, but you know, it was, it was almost dark things, social media, it was on Facebook and Facebook would ban things that, that, that, you know, sort of were aligned with some of the thinking that I'm talking about are opening schools, things like that. And, and so in a way, I don't, I don't blame people for wearing masks today. I, I don't, I try to educate them. That's really my charter on this. And people were afraid to send their kids to school or they feel like, you know, their five-year-old should get, you know, three shots. I more feel sympathy for those people who for, for not either being blessed with critical thinking or just getting access, easy access without having to go through all the research I've done to get that data Doug Truax: That is so kind of you, they have not been blessed with critical thinking. That's a good one. I got to remember that. Yeah. I just, I just, it's crazy to watch. And I think that there's also, you know, just in my, you know, you talk about social media and by anecdotal interactions and things like that. I think there's definitely a spot in here for, you know, the constant virtue signaling around, well, if there's one person out of a hundred, that's concerned about this, then we'll address the other 99 of us have to do this thing, you know, and it's just gotten out of control. And I just think it's so much people just giving up so much of their freedom in exchange for people, you know, the opinion of other people about, well, do you think I'm a good person and stuff like that, we just got this. We're going to dial back the virtue signaling and just be more critical about our thinking and bad things that happen in the world. Just like what you said about the pandemic. It was never going to go to zero. It's a viral, it's a, it's a respiratory viral infection. It's not going to go to zero. You just have to deal with it. But instead, you know, I dunno, it's been crazy. I was going to ask you to, oh, go ahead. Yeah. Michael Betrus: So, you know, on the virtue signaling and the masks, you know, I did, I opened up the book with a chapter called the science BC before COVID. And then I went into the science AC after COVID and then facemask science, BC, and AC. And so the, the reason that facemasks haven't worked is the pore size in a cloth or a surgical mask are 300 to a thousand times larger than a viral particle. I would challenge anyone, anyone, you know, I'll I put my house on it, but I'd easily put a capital girl gift card on it to, to show that that that mask mandates and wearing masks has resulted in sustained suppression of the virus. There's not a place in the world that that's happened. You know, you look at what's even happened in Hong Kong and, and South Korea lately and Australia a little bit ago. I mean, there just, isn't a place that you can point to, to say, oh, that worked, that worked and we should do that. And so I wish that I, you know, really, I wish that more people knew that. So they'd feel comfortable forget the politics out of this It's more peace of mind. It's feeling safe just to go on or a restaurant or to, you know, your kid's school or a shopping mall. Doug Truax: That's right. That's right. I've had a lot of the, you know, COVID doctors that I think are heroes on talking about therapeutics, you know, early on and the right drugs and things like that and how many lives they've saved. And it's just, it's, you know, they're depressing conversations in a way to your point. It's like, well, how many people died that didn't have to die because we were, we were doing things that didn't really make any difference. And we should have been looking over here, you know, back to what you said about the grading of the governors and all that. I mean, there's, there's things that worked and things that didn't, and the people that, you know, blocked down so hard that it's on them to say, well, what, where were you even getting this? You know? And if they can't come up with it, and that's the other thing I was going to ask you about too, is the data in general, you know, you made reference to, you know, people in the media, the media, and it's hard to figure out exactly what's going on. And if they would have known more, they would have, you know, acted differently. You know, what do you, what do you think about the suppression of data out there in the media or in the scientific establishment? I mean, you've got your hands on a lot of it, because that's what you do. You're a smart guy like that, you know where to go, what to do. W what did you look back on it? And, and even now the suppression of that data, you got any comment on that in terms of, you know, maybe it is too darn hard at this point for people to go out and just figure these things out. If they're not, if it's too hard to get. Michael Betrus: Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. I mean, you said that a lot of, a lot of suppression on this, so it's really like, how do you interpret the data? The data is all in front of us. It's just, how do you see it? I see it through a different lens, you know, about proportionate risk and balancing risk and consequence. Some people just see that through a different lens. You know, I thought it was a great comment, Jay, Bhattacharya made a, I think about a year ago or something, but, but he did, I think it was a round table with the Desantis and the other great Barrington declaration docs. And it got banned on YouTube. And I th I think he made a comment like, you know, I'd love to talk to the 24 year old intern that decided that what we were giving, you know, discussing was misinformation. And so it's a very surreal time that we've got so much suppression I've been blocked. I think only one of my interviews is of a block so far, but, you know, I try not to get too aggressive. I really, you know, again, my charter is to really educate people on this, but I tell you 84% or something of all the COVID news was negative, even when we had good times. And I documented this. And at the time that the EU was doing running around 55%, we were at 80, 84, 86%. And so again, you can't really blame people. Why we, the media chose to suppress so much that the tech companies, even, even today, I mean, I had, I had reviews of my first book blocked by Amazon for seven months. And I know this because I've gotten letters from readers from five different continents, you know, it's crazy. Like you get these people reaching out to you from all these different countries around the world that are thirsting for this information. And, and they would say, Hey, like Michael really liked your book a lot. And I just want you to know, I tried to do a review and here's the letter from Amazon, but they blocked it and said, if I try to resubmit it, you know, I, I might lose my account and this guy emailed me or emailed me and said, dude, I love your book. But like, I can't lose my amazon account. It's not, Doug Truax: It's terrible, isn't it? Yeah. It is a surreal time. And it's almost like, I don't know, going on a limb here, but it's almost like the big media executives who are also Democrats who might have an interest in getting mal ballots out in the mail and more people to watch their shows and get ad revenue are all kind of thinking the same thing over this window, period of time we've been, and it's just been, so it feels so corrupt, you know, and, and the lack of the free speech of what you're talking about, you know, here, here you are a guy you're just talking about the data and what you see in it. And it's like, no, no, we're not going to talk about that. That's misinformation, you know, it's like, oh, okay. And then, and that comment by Dr. Bhattacharya, I think is the right one. It's like, you know, yeah. What 24 year old intern is just making this stuff up now. And we gotta be real careful about this going forward. So last question then, so as, as we are going forward, what, what do you think? You know, we have our viewers and our listeners and they all want to, they're all thinking, oh, we got to avoid this next time. That's for sure. And so what do you think in terms of how do you keep things honest going forward? You know, tips when suddenly in the fall it's like, oh no, there's another variant. Everybody get in your, put your mask back on, you know, w what, what should, you know, our viewers in particular be looking for? Michael Betrus: You know, it's such a good question on where does the future go with us to forget COVID for just a second, but really in general. And so we've got trust in public health is fractured. I don't think anyone would really disagree with that at this point. I think even the CDC would concede that there's the public health trust is fractured. I think at this point, you know, we've got so many medical experts that have cried Wolf and jumped sharks through this process. And so on the CDC level, you know, we're going to need a leadership change. That seems pretty obvious. I'll a little bit of an admission or a big admission that some of the policies they endorsed towards just simply wrong, that they should have done a randomized control trials on therapeutics and face masks. You know, we, we, we, we did none of that. And, and so what I'd encourage everybody to do through this as, as again, it's like, I'm no expert right on climate change, but I'll probably do more research if this ever becomes a real active topic, because I I'll be more apt to want to gain my own knowledge. And so I think people should do some independent research look, you know, whether you're a conservative or a D or a liberal, I think it's worthy to fact check any complex thing with a couple of data points and perspectives from either side. And then you just need to think back, think broader. What really makes sense again, you can believe, oh my God, like we need to lock down schools and like our poor kids, and they're going to kill grandma, but you need to look back and say, okay, well, where is it happening? You know, a different policy happening somewhere else and what are those outcomes? And so, again, I think it comes down to critical thinking and, and what I've learned through this as a, there's a lot of people in power that, that some are really bright and, and some aren't, and maybe some that are, might have an agenda or something. So again, I think it's doing independent research as my recommendation for everybody going forward. Doug Truax: Yeah. Amen to that good old days, you got to go out there and figure it out on your own, and you can't rely on some media outlet to tell you what to do. So we're good. Well, Hey, Michael, really appreciate you coming on. Love the book, the science of lockdowns there, it's in the background to encourage all of our viewers to go out and get it. I know that we really appreciate all that you've done. And now that you're out there, I hope that a guy like you, next time we run into this, you get a lot more visibility right out of the gate so we can make sure we do the right thing. So appreciate, appreciate you coming on. Michael Betrus: Thank you. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting and serve the media. Don't forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America. First Right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting firstright, 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Dr. Mary Bowden, courageous COVID era doctor. (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. Your weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, president and founder of Restoration PAC Today we're blessed to have a first-time guest and one of our COVID heroes, Dr. Mary Bowden. Now during the pandemic, she was treating her patients with therapeutics and she wasn't listening to big tech, big pharma, big media, that the only thing you can do is the vaccines and no therapeutics. And for this, she got publicly shamed, but to her credit, she was very courageous and she stuck with it. So we're really happy to have her today. And we applaud her courage. Welcome to the show. Doctor we really want to go back to the beginning really when COVID hit and a lot was going on, you're seeing patients, you're doing your thing. You've got your therapeutics going. And then the medical establishment starts talking and doing maybe different things. So just take us back to that window of time and how that played out for you even give us the month so that we kind of know the context and what you were up against in that window of time. Dr. Mary Bowden: Right, So I say I'm an ear, nose and throat doctor. And I see a lot of people with respiratory tract infection. And I had patients coming to me who were sick at the beginning of the pandemic, and they wanted to get tested. And early on, you may remember it was very hard to get testing. And as an ENT, I was working with a slab called MicroGen DX. It was doing PCR testing for patients with chronic sinusitis. So it's a test that gives you information about bacterial infections in the sciences as a PCR test. And they came out with a saliva test for COVID. So I started using that on my patients and it was great cause I was able to get turnaround times and 24 to 48 hours is a contact free process. Patients can go to their car, spit in a cup and then leave the cup outside the office that there's no exposure risks. And so my practice kind of morphed into this COVID hub because I was able to provide testing when testing was hard to come by, then I had patients telling me, yeah, they would test positive and we'd say, okay, well go follow up with your primary care doctor. And as we all know, many primary care doctors either refuse to see patients, they shut their doors or they said, oh, you'll be fine. Just, you know, treat it like a cold. And if you get really bad, then go to the emergency room. Well, this was more than a cold and people were obviously getting pretty sick. So the first thing I tried to do, I purposely located my clinic in a strip mall because I wanted it to be easy in and out. I can't stand the whole parking garage thing when you go to the doctor. So I was able to provide breathing treatments and patients cars, and that started with that. And then I just started researching more and more things about what we could do to try to keep people from going to the hospital. And I basically sort of started adapted the FLC CC protocol and I've had a, you know, tweaked it a little bit with my own things and then also doing monoclonal antibodies. And so I became a testing center to a outpatient treatment center and most recently sort of the next best thing the hospital, because patients have become so worried about going to the hospital and either getting neglected or trapped or given medications they don't want to get. So I have been seeing patients who probably should be going to the hospital, but won't, and that's been very interesting because I've been able to help them much more than I would have previously thought possible by giving them basically high dose IV steroids, high dose, IV vitamin C in conjunction with, I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, if it will get banned, but that were, you know, other medications. So anyway, it's just been a gradual evolution that just sort of pivoted as needed in response to what's going on. And it's, it's, it's, it's been a whirlwind, but it's been very rewarding. Doug Truax: Yeah. Speaking of the whirlwind. So we're just grateful for doctors like you. So what was that like though, when it started to be like, Hey, you're not doing the protocol that we expect you to do. What was the media, the medical establishment, all those types of things. What, how did, how did that feel when all that started coming through? Dr. Mary Bowden: That's great. I, so I basically, I got into trouble because I sent an email just to my patients. So it was about 7,000 people on the email. And I was complaining about some things that I was seeing and that got me in the spot. It got me under the radar of Methodist hospital and Methodist started paying attention to what I was tweeting. And they didn't like the fact that I was tweeting against vaccine mandates and you know, talking about the potential benefits so that I word. And so they kind of went after me publicly. And you ow, prior to that, I was, I was known, you know, in a small group in Houston, but they put me sort of in the, in the, in the thrust me into the Publix spotlight and that, that was pretty bad. And since then, I've had no complaints against me to the medical board and, you know, I've gotten a lot of negative responses from the public, but you know, on the flip side, a lot of positive responses as well. Doug Truax: Yeah. How would you say that I'm always interested when people get attacked. I would just say that's balanced out in terms of the positives, people being appreciative, maybe even, you know, increased traffic to your, to your clinic, you know, how how's it, how's it played out over time in your mind at this point. Dr. Mary Bowden: Yeah. They go back and forth deciding, okay, is this how bad is this? You know, I'm very glad that I have helped people who needed help. And then on the flip side though, like it's had some personal problems, you have lost friends. And I mean, we all have, but I've, I've lost some friends that shocking to me. I had, I found out that one of my sons didn't get accepted to a high school. He wanted to because I was too controversial there's parties, I won't go to cause I just don't want to run into a lot of pushback or negative vibes at a party. So it's, it's, you know, it's a good, it's good, but there's also some bad. Doug Truax: Yeah, it's tiring. I get it. You know, it's like you get out there and you, you get out on the front edge of something and especially in your case where, you know, in your heart and your mind, you know, what's right. And you're going to do that for your patients. And then suddenly you get attacked for it. And, you know, people like you, we just really, really admire your courage. And I just wonder too, how many of your peers have you talked to that have told you privately that, you know, you're, you're, you're probably right. Or I wish I would have stood up more or anything like that. I'm always interested to hear if there's there's folks out there that are staying under the radar, because they're afraid to take some heat. Dr. Mary Bowden: Not that many. Doug Truax: I was hoping for more so. Yeah. No, I got it. Dr. Mary Bowden: Not totally hopeless, but not that many. Doug Truax: Yeah. Yeah. So, so in that regard, so like, it feels, so I'm just speaking to ordinary Americans, it feels like we went from, you can trust your doctor no matter what and hear, hear what they had to say, and they'll direct you to the right, right place too. There's protocols. Now there's the medical establishment. And you know, I like you talk to a lot of people that are now super distrustful of the whole thing. And so what, what do you, what advice do you give now to people, even if they aren't your patient, just to somebody you just met and they're saying things like this, what do you, what do you tell ordinary American citizens about the state of play and what they should do? Dr. Mary Bowden: Well, I, I would say first is you're looking for a primary care doctor. I would go to FLC cc's website and you'll find like-minded doctors. I think the direct primary care movement is to grow because of this and that that's physicians that don't contract with insurance companies or hospitals. They only work for their patients. So there, they can't be influenced by third parties. Now they're not all like-minded from what I can tell, but it's a good way to start. And yeah, I think there are going to be parallel tracks of healthcare. Now, you know, this is going to create two systems and, you know, if I had to get open-heart surgery, I, I don't think the COVID situation would be an issue, but it's for those every day sort of issues and the ongoing chronic care that I think you need to be particularly choosy about. And I think, you know, you'll, you'll, you'll find it if you do some research. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you're, you're dead on about where this is going. I was looking at your website and the way you're set up, like you said, you don't like the parking garages, so people just walk straight in and you take good care of them and do different things. And I think you said that you try to make sure when they walk out, they're feeling better and they got the medications and things like that. And then also the direct contracting piece in my, this is my political world in my entrepreneurial world, I do health insurance and we work with a lot of self-insured employers. And that direct contracting thing is a very big deal now. And because people are seeing what's happening, if you sign these massive contracts with these hospitals, you don't know exactly how this is going to play out, but if you can find the right places and you say to your 100 or so, or 150 employees, Hey, if you've got a problem go over here. And so what, talk to that a little bit, are you seeing more and more employers? I mean, as, as has your notoriety on some level helped you in that regard? I know I'm going to do everything I can to help in that way. Cause we do have Texas clients as well. So, but what's going on with that with you? Dr. Mary Bowden: Yeah. So I, I work with this company called Texas free market man medical management. I think this is, nah, it was Texas free market surgery, but then they've expanded and they basically send me patients who are all worked out to have some sort of ENT surgery, but because I can afford it, I, I can provide it for a more affordable price. They get sent to me and said, so that business is thriving. I don't, I haven't had any, from what I can tell, I haven't seen a dip in that and I love it because, you know, it's, it's easy. It's, you know, they've already been evaluated, worked up determined that they need surgery and they just come to me and then I get to do it. And you know, it's a win-win situation because I provide them with, you know, more efficient and more personable care than what they were receiving. It's more affordable for everyone. So I love that. Doug Truax: Yeah. And it's created the two systems, which basically comes down to affordability and quality of care. And if it gets easier for the patients to see all that, then it's definitely going to, it's going to speed it up. So last question, have you seen anybody that, how many patients have you seen that have come in that have basically gone to somebody else and they're not vaccinated and they have COVID and, and the people, you know, at the hospital and I'm just speaking from experience. I have a friend that went, it's not vaccinated, but he got COVID he's in the hospital. The doctor shows up in a basically is like, get them out of here. I don't want to see him. And so, you know, he ends up at a doctor in the suburbs of Chicago that takes care of him and basically says, yeah, you were about a couple of days from the pneumonia was getting so bad that you're probably gonna die. And, and, you know, he gets kicked out of the hospital because he's not vaccinated. So, you know, I, that was really eyeopening now. He's fine. It's all good. But I was just shocked that that's how this is breaking out too, on the, on vaccine status to Dr. Mary Bowden: Right. Unfortunately I don't have definite proof that this is happening, but I do hear it from patients. One thing that people should know is COVID kind of things start going badly around day seven or eight. So, and that you can intervene a day, seven and eight with high dose steroids, if needed. And that's what, how I've kept people out of the hospital. I've had people show up in my office with oxygen saturations in the eighties or low eighties. And you can, you can treat them as an outpatient with high dose. I think the high dose steroids really, and the breathing treatments really can save a lot of lives, but that day seven and eight is when things start to go badly. Doug Truax: Well, Hey, I just really appreciate all that you've been doing. I know it's been a tough road and we're, you know, folks like us are here for you and we'll do everything to, to promote what you're doing. And like I said, I looked at all your stuff online. It's a great clinic. I would encourage anybody in Houston that wants to go a different route to, to come and see you. And thank you for standing up and doing the right thing over this last window of time. Dr. Mary Bowden: Well, thanks so much for having me and letting me talk Doug Truax: Well, all right. That's our show for today. Thanks so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we can serve as can bring our country back to true greatness until next time, let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant. Every warning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting First Right to 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word 3 0 1 6 1.

Eighty bucks to fill up. Biden and Warnock did that.

Doug talks to Thomas Klingenstein, conservative scholar and board chairman of the Claremont Institute. (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative news show brought to you by restoration pack. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration . Today. We're excited to have a first-time guest who is one of America's foremost conservative thinkers. Thomas Klingenstein is chairman of the board of the Claremont Institute. He's a writer, a public speaker and playwright. He's the architect of the idea that America is in the midst of a cold civil war and conservatives better understand the terrain they're standing on. Well, welcome to the show Thomas. So great to have you on. Tom Klingenstein: Well, it's very nice to be here. Doug Truax: So I want to dive right into this concept that I mentioned a second ago, about a you're so articulate on this, this cold civil war that you believe we're in, that, you know, a lot of Republicans may or may not realize it, but you do such a great job in your videos and your speech. So just share with our audience, that concept and, and where you think we are with it today. Tom Klingenstein: I think that there is, we recognize that there's a divide Republicans as well as anybody else. And I think most people would think about it or would assess it as a serious divide. But I think it's more fundamental than just a divide or a greater than normal divide. I think it's actually a war and what makes it a war is different differences in ends. We have two societies which have different understandings of justice and so have different ends. You know, maybe the most simple way I could illustrate this is to say, I'm in New York. If we are New York together, you want to go to Maine. I want to go to Florida. There's no basis of negotiation. Those are two different ends. If we both want to go to Florida. Well, we could agree on means when to leave and how fast and what the route is, et cetera, or to give now in a historical example, before the civil war, the south had decided that slavery was a good thing, that all men were equal, but black men in like all good things. They wanted slavery to expand in the north, the course wanted to contract. So you can't expand and contract at the same time. Those are differences in ends, which is why in the civil war, we had a choice we could fight, or we could part ways. There were no other choices. So this brings us to the present. What is the end of our enemy? And I might stop a second to point out that our enemy doesn't have a name or an agreed upon name. And it's very, very difficult to fight an enemy that doesn't have a name. Sometimes people speak of identitarian as in identity politics or multiculturalism, or, you know, anti-racism, but we don't have agreement and we need to have agreement my name, which I wish everyone would adopt, but I'm not sure they will is woke communism. Now, what is the goal of woke communism? It is what I would call outcome parody. That is all the identity groups equally represented in all aspects of American society. For example, blacks represent about 13% of, of America. Therefore, under the woke comm thinking they should have 13% of the prisoners and senators and chief executive officers and high test scores and home loans and everything else you can think of. And of course, this is not blacks, but women and other identity groups. Now, the problem with this, the fundamental problem is that this understanding of justice outcome parody cannot exist with American justice because American injustice allows individuals to pursue their own understanding of happiness. And that will inevitably lead to outcome differences between men and women, between Asians and blacks and whites, because subcultures are different. They may have different talents. They have different cultures and preferences and so forth. So those two things, outcome parody, social justice, we call it and American justice just don't fit because the only way to move from outcome inequality, American justice to outcome a quality is by force. Just one example of what it means to achieve outcome equality is defunding the police. Now that sort of was a crazy idea that seemed to come out of the blue, but it didn't because it's part of an effort to bring down the percentage of blacks in prison, decriminalizing, certain laws failing to enforce others early release of those, again are not arbitrary. They are efforts which we could have predicted and we've been focused on and they are policies designed in this case to achieve outcome parody, equal representation of blacks in prison. And one could point to examples, including taking down statues, rewriting history and all the rest of it that are all pointed in the direction of outcome quality. So your choice here is tyranny again, because that's the only way you can go from outcome equality or inequality to equality, tyranny, or a free society. And just end where I started, I don't think Republicans understand this. They don't understand the severity of the problem and therefore they can not act accordingly. Doug Truax: Yeah. And I think that's a huge point is just, if you, if you don't even know you've got a problem, then that's a problem. And we're going to get back to that in a second. I just wanted to ask you too, you talk a lot about systemic racism and this is the way this is being, I mean, you're talking about the inequality and our, this is the way this is being foisted upon us. So how do you, how do you tell, what do you tell Republicans, conservatives? How do, how do they deal with the systemic racism accusations? They get thrown around everywhere. Now in order to push this woke communist agenda forward, Tom Klingenstein: Or let me just back up and explain the importance of systemic racism. If the woke comms can convince us that we are systemically racist, then we will agree to change the system. That's why convincing us that we're systemically racist is so important as is by the way, convincing us that we're about to be run over by white supremacist. Now, what should the Republicans do? What the most important thing they can do is just speak out and rebut without qualifications, that we're not systemically racist, that the police are not racist. Then America was not built on racism and the desire to perpetuate slavery as the 1619 account. Hasn't. So a lot of it is speaking up because it is speaking up our national leader, speaking up, allows other people to speak up. One of the important jobs of an elected official, particularly high level officials is to voice the concerns of their constituents to give their constituent voice, to say what they believe, but are intimidated from saying. And of course the problem here is most Republicans except Trump and a big exception are reluctant to rebut the charges of racism because of course they will be called racist. And that's obviously debilitating the one, there are many good things about Trump. One of them was he didn't care whether you called him a racist, it wasn't by the way, I don't think, but he didn't care. And he didn't care what the media said. And there's almost no one else in the political landscape who doesn't care. They may recognize that the media is corrupt still. They care. And that was one of the great virtues of Trump. He didn't care in the least, he didn't negotiate with the media. He didn't, you know, change what he said because of the media. He was just unequivocal and he was unequivocal in many things. And that's a great virtue in war. He didn't apologize for past racism. He didn't apologize for America generally. And in this moment when America is being attacked, when you're in a war, you don't apologize. Doug Truax: That's right. And I think that amongst the many virtues of his, I think the top one that got him to the place where he is today with conservatives, is this concept of in this war, the person at the top better, know, it's a war and better not care about any other outcome other than victory, because if you don't, you're going to lose. And I think people saw that in him. And I think that that's a, that's a really great thing for us to always remember, especially as conservatives as we go forward. And I want to talk more about the, the Republican base and where they are, where they aren't. I did, you did mention one thing though, real quick, and that was this tearing down of statues and critical race theory and all of these things. It really, I can remember a decade ago, this stuff didn't exist. And you know, here we are, it just kind of, you know, in the, in the grand sweep of history, this came on really fast. And so I I'm in no way giving anybody an out, we got to realize this is a battle of war that we're in and we got to fight it. And we got to speak up like what you just said, there's an element though. It's just, everybody's still taking it in. So how did this happen so quickly in your opinion, where did this all come from? These woke communists and their tactics, and how did it get to where we are today? Tom Klingenstein: Well, it, it, it originated as most noxious ideas do in the academy and it's been growing for a long time. What allowed it, I think to escape ivory, color cupboard walls was George Floyd and the riots, right as, as is frequently said, you know, you can't let a crisis go to waste. And so this was a tremendous opportunity to promote the woke com agenda, but by the way, it also, and this is very important. It revealed the WokeCom agenda in a way that at least the public has not seen. So BLM, for example, had in its mission before it was airbrushed away that it wanted to destruct to destroy the American family. Well, most Americans hadn't heard of that. And that by the way, is an element of achieving outcome equality defunding the police taking down statues, taking down statues is part of an effort to reformulate, basically destroy our history and make it conform with where the woke comms want to go. So I would say the answer to your question is it was grounded in the academy, but allowed to escape in a big way by George Floyd and the subsequent riots. Doug Truax: Yeah. And there's an argument too about the Wolf corporations getting on board with corporations, getting on board with the woke concept after the financial crash. And then they just been growing that attitude going forward because it lets them distract from any failures or lets the big tech guys keep censoring and things like that. And so it's, it's yeah, it's spreading, it's going everywhere. People are taking advantage of it as best they can. And I think it does go back to what you're saying too. If conservatives or Republicans are not speaking out against it, then it just keeps advancing. You know, and again, we're back to the war. You know, if the other side has declared war on you and you're not even, you know, acknowledging that, then they will just keep advancing into your position until you do finally say that's as far as you could come and no further. Tom Klingenstein: And I think you implied earlier, the greatest virtue of Trump was the, he let us know we're in a war. And as I heard you say quite correctly, you can't win a war. If you don't know you're in one. Now Trump may not have been able to explain it as, as he might, but he was, he recognized that we're in a war, he understands in a war, you gotta win that compromise reaching across the aisle is usually a fool's game. You can reach across the aisle when you win. But Trump understood the moral imperative to win so that, you know, people say about Trump, that he was very divisive. That's not true. What Trump was. He re he exposed the divide. We said it was divisive. Or our press said he was defensive, but I think that's not the way to look at it. Doug Truax: That's right. That's right. Yeah. He exposed a lot. And that is the most important thing I think he exposed. And if, yeah, if you don't know you're in a war you're going to lose. There's no doubt about that. So, so back to Republicans fighting, you know, I, I get the sense at times, conservatives will, you know, kind of flare up and fight this battle over here, you know, do a good job at this. Or, but there I there's this growing sense that there's a lot of them missing the bigger picture of this. So, you know, speak to that for a minute. I mean, what's the timeframe on this. If, if we are to get to a place where enough of the people on our side realize, wow, this is more serious than we thought, how long is this gonna take? And where are we currently? You know, I even think about the Congress, we've got 211 Republicans in the house and 50 senators, you know, what percentage of them actually get this concept? You know, that's kind of a scary thought. I mean, those are the types of things I'm looking for you to talk to in your opinion on that. Tom Klingenstein: Yeah. And you may be looking, but I'm not sure how an answer on it, but it's the number one thing I'm trying to do. Everything I'm trying to do is trying to explain to the Republican party that we are in a war. And here's how you ought to think about it. If you, if you can't think about it, right, as you say, if you don't recognize you're in a war, that's, that's the end of the game. But even beyond that, you have to understand your enemy, what it's trying to do and how it is going about what it's trying to do. I think Congress, the titillate people who were running for Congress, many of them are serious. Trumpsters I talked to a lot of congressmen. In fact, I get so many calls that I've stopped talking to them, but I talked to them enough to know that there are a lot or many who really understand the severity of the problem. They may not be able to articulate it in quite the way I do the way I think they ought to, but like Trump, they appreciate the danger we're in. I don't see many senators who do, and I would also add, and, and in fact, you know, within the conservative movement, perhaps the most fundamental divide is between those who think it's a war and those who don't, as you know, on the chair of the board of the Claremont Institute, a conservative, California think tank, and we are strongly on the side. In fact, we're leading the effort to convince people that this is a war, right? And they ought to think about it in a particular way, but there is a large portion of the conservative movement who don't agree. And by and large, those were the people that became never Trumpers. And I understand that because Trump is a wartime president, he might not have, he might not have been. I think it's quite likely he wouldn't have been an effective president in peacetime. You know, the analogy I draw sometimes is general grant, you know, a drunk or loose morals, but in war time, he was the only one that was willing to fight fighting was absolutely essential. So he was a great wartime general, what you, whether he would have been a great peace time. General is another question. And Trump too one has direct ignites that despite the limitations of Trump, his personality and his character, he's a war time president and he's got the grit and he's got the courage that's required in a war. Doug Truax: Right? Absolutely. And the virtue of exposing that is, is highest. I think you've said that a you're, you're looking to support him until you can find somebody with his virtues and less of his vices, but to your point in a wartime situation, a lot of times those vices come along with the right people. And it's just the way it's going to be. If you're going to win, you know, I think a patent and all that, you know, I went to west point, so I had all that military history stuff and yeah, that is often the case. And those guys, when the war is over, they don't, they're not appreciated as much, you know, it's the, it's the Winston Churchill thing as well. So yeah, we'll see what happens. And I think it just, we got gotta, you know, the work you're doing to call attention to this is wonderful. And, and, you know, you get the feeling when you watch your videos and hear your speech, you remain hopeful, you talk about Lincoln's quote, you know, the, the, the, the defiance and, and fighting it out. But you know, the erosion of a culture or a country or a civilization is, is a painful thing, a painful thing to watch, you know, for our country as we're going through this. So talk a little bit about why you're still so hopeful about our future as am I. And so I think our audience always wants to hear, you know, we all know the bad stuff a lot at times, but how, how, how do we stay hopeful in the face of this? And, and what's the best approach going forward here? Tom Klingenstein: First I would say if I were betting on this, I don't think I would bet on the side of we can defeat this, but that doesn't mean I don't have hope. I have a significant amount of hope part of it is, and this may not be so reassuring to your audience, but it's still, I think we're saying is there is always hope who would have guessed that we would have got a Donald Trump, a man who was I've said is particularly suited to the moment. And that was an example again, of, you know, what can happen. I think that, you know, the American people are beginning to push back against CRT, against changing our history and names and all the other things. And you'll notice that even the Democrats understand that the coms got ahead of themselves, and there are certain things that they were promoting destruction of family, for example, or a revisionist history. That was a step too far for Americans and Americans at some point are willing to step up and push back. So it's, Trump's base, I think, and Trump's base enthusiasm, which is partly what gives me hope. I mean, if you watch some of Trump's rallies, you know, he's not a, not a professor. Sometimes they make you cringe, but yet they give you hope and you know, the people there are profoundly pro American. And that's another thing about Trump. There was never any doubt. He never apologized for America's past no guilt, right? America was unequivocally good. And in fact, I hope this doesn't aggress too much, but if you want to think about in the most simple terms, the debate in this country at the moment, it is between those who think America is good and want to preserve it. And those who think it's bad and want to destroy it. And Trump unequivocally thought it was good. If you listen to his press conference is, is COVID press conferences. He basically made two points over and over and over because Trump is a good marketer. He said, the news was fake and America is incredible. It's scientists, it's military it's people. And of course Trump himself, but he expressed this unreserved unmitigated support for America at a time when America's basic goodness with being attacked. So again, it's, I think the American people that's my hope, but they need leaders. What they don't have now with the exception of Trump is a leader who can help explain what's going on and giving them guidance. So that's it's leadership that we need. Doug Truax: Right. Right. And I think that, that, there's lots of reasons to be hopeful. It's still a great country. I think it's still centered. Right? The media has got ahold of a lot of people right now. I like what you've done with the woke communist piece. It feels like to me, it's patriotic Americans versus woke communists kind of at the top of the, at the apex of this, on each side. And then there's a lot that falls down below that. And to your point, you got to stay hopeful and you know, you don't know exactly how it's going to turn out obviously, but you do know the right thing to do is to fight for it. And, and that's what you're doing. That's what we're doing. And I think it's what a lot of patriotic Americans are continuing to do because it's worth the fight. And, and Thomas, I appreciate everything you're doing. I think you're dead on and, and we're gonna do everything we can to make sure people see it more like you and your group sees it because that's the way forward. And, and thanks for all you're doing. And thanks for coming on today. Tom Klingenstein: Well, thank you for all you're doing and having me on. I appreciate it. Doug Truax: All right. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Tom Klingenstein: Good. Thanks again. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thanks so much for tuning in and for supporting and serve the media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right A new kind of news summary without liberal slant. Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe, by texting FIRST RIGHT to 30161 thats FIRST RIGHT all caps, one word Firstright to 30161.

Doug talks to Dan O'Donnell, Wisconsin election expert and radiohost. (MACHINE GEENRATED) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. The weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today, we are blessed to have a return guests from the all-important state of Wisconsin. His name is Dan O'Donnell, host of a popular morning talk radio show on Milwaukee on WISN 1130. He also contributes commentary and investigative pieces to the free market MacGyver Institute, an organization that we're a big fan of Dan, his tune as anyone regarding the 2020 election and how it was conducted in Wisconsin. So welcome back, Dan! Dan O'Donnell: Always my pleasure. All right. Doug Truax: So in Wisconsin, there's always a lot going on reports and media reports and everything. Everybody's writing up about everything over there. And, but lately we've got this retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, Michael Gablemen, with his report out. So give us your thoughts on that. I know you've written a lot about this stuff for the MacIvers we love all the things that you put out there by the way, but you're the expert here. Tell us what you're thinking about that report. Dan O'Donnell: Well, thank you. I, I would say Gablemen is probably the expert here. I've been following this for a long time though. And, and Gablemens report sort of ties together a lot of loose ends that I've been reporting on for going on two years now, almost since the election happened here in Wisconsin and the primary area of focus of Gablemens investigation was the influence of what we call here. Zuckerbucks, $10 million in funding that Mark Zuckerberg put into Wisconsin's elections from his center for tech and civic life. This was part of a $330 million grant that interestingly enough, Zuckerberg didn't use to try to support any candidate or political party, but he put it directly into America's election infrastructure. In other words, he was funding directly cities like Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, Green Bay and Madison here in Wisconsin, not coincidentally the five most heavily Democrat cities in the state and the five cities most critical for Democrats to win. If they want to have a prayer of winning Wisconsin, $8.8 million of the $10 million that went into Wisconsin, went into those five cities. And what Gablemen was able to demonstrate is that the clerks and the elections commissions in those cities were using that money as part of a massive get out the Democrat vote effort, get out the vote efforts are done by candidates. They're done by parties. They're done by political actors. They're not done by cities, just the act Gablemen said of those cities, taking money with the purpose of getting people to vote actually violates our state's election bribery statute. Doug Truax: Yeah. And so there you have it. They actually did that. And we're, we're finally calling them out in a report from a gay woman, super credible. I think even last time you were on the show, we were, we've all been talking about what's been happening. What had happened here with the Zuckerberg money and how appalled we all were with it. So finally some progress here and we're seeing what's going to happen, but you never know. You know, we had the situation that we're seeing county sheriff with the nursing homes and then the da takes a pass. So get us up to speed on that. Were you disappointed in how that played out? Which I don't mean to sound like I'm going to be cynical, but you know, I'm always hopeful that justice is going to be done, but in this case it sure looks like it, it wasn't done. So what's your take on that? Dan O'Donnell: Well, just to back up a second, the Racine county Sheriff's office investigated what it thought was massive fraud, excuse me, in a nursing home, in the town of Mount pleasant. And this happened because people whose parents were in that nursing home noticed, Hey, wait a second. My mom voted. She hasn't known who the president was since 1984. What this clearly showed was that people were from the nursing home voting either on behalf of the residents or essentially coercing them or in some way, influencing their vote. This happened dozens of times and the Racine county Sheriff's office said, all right, this is per se evidence of vote fraud. And the vote fraud was happening because our Wisconsin elections commission, the entity responsible for enforcing Wisconsin's elections laws simply didn't follow our election law here in Wisconsin. Voting in nursing homes can only happen through what are known as special voting deputies. There are two people who go into the nursing homes. One from the Republican party, one from the Democrat party, they're set by the city clerk's office and they help residents absentee vote. The reason for this is that no funny business can happen, right? If one special voting deputy is trying to cheat. The other special voting deputy will notice it well because of the pandemic. The Wisconsin elections commission said no special voting deputies are allowed in. That was in direct violation of state laws. State law says special voting deputies are the only ones who can conduct the vote. And in fact, nursing home staff members cannot. It's actually written in state law. If you work at a nursing home, you can't help with voting. Well, guess what happened? That was a violation of state law. The Racine Sheriff's department said, all right, because the elections commission, because these people in this nursing home to violate state law, the elections commissioners themselves, we're guilty of election fraud. Now of course the Racine county district attorney's office did not want to prosecute this and came up with, I'll be honest with you an excuse for this that I didn't buy that she lacked jurisdiction. Of course, our attorney General's office is controlled by a Democrat. Josh Kaul our attorney general. He declined to prosecute just a couple of days ago, Milwaukee county district attorney John Chisholm declined to prosecute, not surprising. We can't get Chisholm to prosecute murderers and carjackers let alone the Wisconsin elections commission. So yeah, it's definitely disappointing. And what the Gablemen report actually just uncovered was that this happened at more nursing homes than just the one that Racine Sheriff's department was investigating. In fact, this was likely happening in all five of the cities that got a lot of the Zuckerberg money. In fact, Gablemen alleged that in dozens of nursing homes that he looked at, there was 100% voter turnout by nursing home residents. I don't need to tell you that that immediately raises red flags. Doug Truax: Oh my gosh. And, and we look at this after the fact. And when we think about somebody taking advantage of our, our elders here, that the most of the people that should be protected in the name of winning an election. And then, you know, like what you just said, if you can't get people to prosecute, that's where elections have consequences and even worse than that is that people, you know, what it looks like they're cheating in elections. Those have even more consequences down the road. So hopefully we can get this back on track. And so getting back on track with, you know, getting back to the place where we need to be law and order, everybody trusts the system, there's all these reports floating around Gablemen and obviously is a big deal. What other reports out there in Wisconsin that people should be looking at that you think are the ones that kind of put the finger on what happened in that last round of elections? Dan O'Donnell: Well, our legislative audit bureau, which is a nonpartisan agency of the state, which was actually tasked with auditing the practices of the Wisconsin elections commission, as well as clerks in all of the 72 counties here in Wisconsin that was released last October. And it found multiple violations of state law, not the least of which was that our elections commission simply refused. It's legally required duty of cleaning up the state's voter rolls. There are hundreds of thousands of names that are still on the voter rolls that shouldn't be in addition policies were not followed with respect to what's known as curing a ballot. Remember absentee ballots were coming in by the tens of thousands to all of these cities, what the clerks were doing. If there was a mistake on the ballot envelope, the thing that the ballot obviously comes in supposed to feature the name of the voter, the signature, as well as the name and address and signature of a witness. Well, if something was missing, say the witness forgot to put his address down, state law says the ballot needs to be mailed back to the voter. And the voter is responsible for curing the ballot, fixing the mistakes, and then sending the ballot back into the clerk's office, the Wisconsin elections commission with no justification whatsoever from state law, back in 2016, started saying, oh, you, in the clerk's office, you can just cure the ballot yourself. You can kind of guess at what the ballot signature witnesses address might be. You can fill in the name yourself. You can fill in the voters, address yourself. In other words, you can make the ballot goods. So it can be counted even though under state law, it shouldn't have been counted. There were thousands of ballots that under state law should not have been counted in Wisconsin in 2020, but they were counted because again, the point was, do juice turnout as much as possible in these five Democrat cities. So as to give the likely candidate that those Democrats would be voting for Joe Biden, a leg up, in other words, what the cities were doing was working on Joe Biden's turnout efforts, not the Joe Biden campaign. Doug Truax: Yeah. How bout it, well, you know, Trump beats Clinton back in the day in Wisconsin, when nobody saw that coming and you better believe they're going to be coming to win Wisconsin, no matter what you throw in a pandemic. And then you got all kinds of opportunity for things to go wrong. And so I guess my big question for you, there's a lot, there's a lot to talk about here across Wisconsin, a lot of different things, but if they did still the election in 2020, in your opinion, what was the most likely way that they did it? Dan O'Donnell: The way I've heard it described by a political operative friend of mine was that the election was stolen fair and square. And what was happening was the Zuckerbucks were used in order to get turnout as much as possible. It wasn't one specific thing that costs Donald Trump, the election. It was the combination of all of it. Our Wisconsin elections commission ignored its own prior precedent, as well as the letter of state law by keeping Jill Stein or rather the green party. I forget how we something, the candidate of the green party in 2020 off the ballot, same thing with Kanye West, the rapper who remember ran something of a campaign for president in 2020, in 2016, Jill Stein was essentially blamed for costing Hillary Clinton. The state Jill Stein got about 20,000 votes. The green party therefore has about a 20,000 votes support base in Wisconsin. The green party allowed on the ballot. Joe Biden won Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes. In addition, all of these ways in which votes that shouldn't have been counted were counted. Ballot curing voters in nursing homes. Maybe they were voting for themselves. Maybe they weren't, but nursing home staff members and heaven knows who else were assisting them in voting because the Wisconsin elections commission was simply ignoring state law. If the election was stolen, it was because the elections commission acting in concert with the center for tech and civic life. And all of the groups that were deployed to Wisconsin actually took over the election process in the city of green bay. We're actively working to get as much Democrat turnout as they could in a pandemic. And Republicans didn't have nearly that same turnout machine laws were broken in the way that the people who are responsible for administering elections simply ignored the law and substituted their best judgment, which amounted to a partisan Democrat advantage. Doug Truax: Yeah. And your, your point about their best judgment is tied to their best judgment of how they can get their candidate to win. And when you have situations where you have the will to power, which these guys obviously have, and you lack morals, you'll just go do anything. And I think our place now obviously is to go and investigate. Some people are needing to go to jail because otherwise, you know, next time around, everybody's just gonna be thinking, well, we got away with everything last time. Let's double down on that and do twice as much this time. If we don't, if we don't keep rounding this up. So what based on where we are now and what you've seen and all the things that are out, what, what, in your opinion still needs to be investigated more thoroughly? Where should this all go to keep, keep it, you know, on this path of like getting everything discovered going forward? Dan O'Donnell: Well, selfishly, since I was basically the one in Wisconsin who first noticed all of the unlawful voting going on in nursing homes, in fact, it was just a couple of days after the election that a woman contacted me and said, my mother voted, she did not know who the president was. I told her story on the air and told her to contact her local law enforcement agency. She did. That was the Racine county Sheriff's office. That's what started that investigation. I was focused very heavily on nursing home fraud, because I believe that is actual fraud. That is the theft of the franchise. And that is the systematic disenfranchisement of our most vulnerable citizens here in Wisconsin, in his testimony before the Wisconsin legislature last week, or a couple of weeks ago, Gable men said he wants to audit every single nursing home, every single vote there across the state. To me, that's what should be done to figure out exactly who was voting in these nursing homes in these group homes that shouldn't have been voting, who in other words, actually had ballots cast in their name or cast without them ever, actually, knowing that to me is the most pressing concern Doug Truax: Because once we get to the bottom of that, then to your point, it's, that's a pretty quick step to say, Hey, this is illegal. And this is it's, it's obvious that something terrible was done here. So let's, let's get to the bottom of it. So as this continues to get exposed, just give us your opinion on how the Republicans are handling this in Wisconsin. They do it enough. They aggressive enough. I mean, I certainly admire your courage and your aggressiveness, but what do you think about them as a party and what they're doing? Dan O'Donnell: Well, this is an issue that's really divided Republicans here in Wisconsin. And a lot of that I think is unwarranted. And it's being stoked by the local and national media. For example, the big focus of Gablemen's 135 page report, extensive investigation. When it dropped in the Wisconsin, media was appendix to the five pages at the very end of the report in which Gablemen doesn't make the case for, but says it would theoretically be possible for Wisconsin to decertify its electors and reclaim its 10 electoral votes. I happen to disagree with that legal analysis. I'm an attorney Gablemens an attorney. That's what we're paid to do. We're paid to disagree, right? It's what reasonable minds can disagree about that. But the focus was all on de-certification. There've been about a half dozen major articles in, I believe it's rolling Stone magazine, Politico, vice news, the Washington post all on Timothy Ramthun who is a Wisconsin assembly member. Who's done great work on the issue of election integrity, but who has said, no, we need to decertify Wisconsin's election. Now are lawyers for the Wisconsin legislature have said, that's not possible. Once the electoral college votes, the vote is done, the votes are already cast, okay, you can call back the electors. What does it do? Right? There's no legal or constitutional mechanism for doing so. The reason that Ramthun who launched his governorship bid on the strength of his, his call to decertify the election. The reason that the media is so focused on him and a recent poll showed ramp thin at 5%, the candidates who are running for governor are being ignored in favor of this so that they can all be discredited. The Republican party has done as much as I would hope. There was a whole package of election bills that were up for a vote just last week and the most recent legislative session. They're good bills that of course are going to go nowhere because our governor, Tony Evers will veto them. And it was unfortunate that Ramthun instead of voting on those bills was actually at CPAC receiving an award. So it calls into question the seriousness there about actually changing things here in Wisconsin that said our assembly speaker, Robin Voss has taken a lot of heat and a lot of it is deserved, but he actually just extended the contract of Gablemen through the end of April. So that Gablemen could continue his investigation. The unfortunate reality is, is that until we get a Republican governor and a Republican attorney general who actually care about faithfully enforcing the laws of this state, nothing really is going to happen. Republicans can pass as as many laws as they want, they're going to get vetoed. So that's what I think the focus for all Republicans here in this state is, and that's getting Tony Evers getting Josh called the attorney general out of office. Doug Truax: Yeah, for sure. And I think that there's a miss understanding amongst Republicans now. And it goes to this concept of being demonized. If you say anything about the election, I think that the Democrats have done a masterful slash nefarious job of tying the January 6th piece to anything that anybody says now about the election. Then you're all the same thing. And that's this point you made about them going to the decertification comment and all that stuff. But I think that, and I've seen this in polling where a lot like 60% of Republicans are totally convinced. There was a lot wrong with this last election, but then you have the, then you have the leaders they're unwilling to go there because they're afraid of, you know, they may have been a little squishy even before this, and now they're even squishier because they're afraid they're gonna, somebody's gonna say something bad about them when ironically the number one thing they could do for their supporters and their base is to dig into this and to work it. Dan O'Donnell: Yeah. In fact, the number one issue for Republicans in Wisconsin is election integrity. And until we have that, there's a widespread belief that we don't have anything that everything else is secondary to that I think January 6th really did change the calculus both here in Wisconsin and nationally, because remember there was a lot of appetite for continuing the investigation into the election. Once January 6th happened that all changed. Remember there was no more debate about certification or anything like that. The electoral count was quickly certified in the middle of the night after the capital had to be cleared. And after that, you talk about Democrats doing a masterful job, a couple of hundred yahoos getting into the Capitol and acting like riotous Democrats for a couple of hours was made to be presented to the public like the biggest coup attempt in American history that they were actually threatening to take over the government of the United States. It was ridiculous when it was first starting to formulate as a narrative on January 6th. And it's ridiculous. Now this was a riot sure. In the United States Capitol, but it wasn't an organized coup attempt. But because that message over the last year has been repeated over and over and over and over in the media. And because any attempt to point out election irregularities, as a result of January 6th, social media has felt empowered to actually ban people, including the president of the United States from their platform. What does that do to a Republican who relies on social media for fundraising, for getting his message out there for the lifeblood of politics and that's the ability to connect with the voter base, right? So there is a huge, huge incentive to just sort of stop talking about this. And a lot of Republicans have, well, we want to move forward to 2022 that sort of the narrative, but it really comes from a place of, I'll be honest with you. A little bit of fear of the consequences about talking about the widespread vote fraud in 2020. Look, this is nothing new. I mean, read a history book for goodness sakes. Democrats have been engaged in boat fraud schemes since before there was a Democrat party. Okay. Since the early 18 hundreds with the formation of the Tammany hall political machine in New York to the gubernatorial election in Illinois, which was rife with fraud, there were dozens of indictments in the early 1980s, right? This has been a common thing. And this is why it's so important to continue to fight for it, regardless of the consequences, because if you don't fight for vote fraud, you're not fighting for your voters. And the most basic fundamental right. We have is the right to speak and be heard and pick our leaders through free and fair elections. If we don't have that, we don't have anything. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's right. And that's where I get the most head nodding. When we go out and talk about this as people get that concept on, on our side, for sure. You know, they have elections in authoritarian countries, they just know who's going to win. And you know, if we get to that place, it's over. And so we can talk all the issues we want and we're all infuriated about inflation and the Southern border and all these things. But if the Democrats have figured out now how to cheat and then beat us down so that we don't back when they do cheat, then we're going to, we're not going to make a comeback. And so, so this is it. We gotta, we gotta stand this ground. And, and you know, I, I appreciate your courage. You know, you've mentioned Robin Voss and all he's doing, I mean, that's in Gablemen, it was good to see this come through and we just got to keep talking about it and there's going to be lost to talk about, and I'm sure we're going to have you back on cause you, you know, a lot about it and you won't and you won't stop talking about it. So yeah. So thanks for coming on today, Dan, and, and appreciate all you do and love to have you back at some point in the future. Dan O'Donnell: Well, thank you so much. I'd love to be back. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting service media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting first right to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word 2, 3 0 1 6 1.

Dougs talks to Mark Weaver, political expert and author. (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. Your weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today. We're happy to once again, to have Mark Weaver on, a political consultant in Ohio who knows all about that state politics, and he's got great views on what's going on with the rest of the world. So we're super happy to have you back. Mark. Welcome. Mark Weaver: Thank you, Doug. Great to be here. Well good. Doug Truax: So before we get into the nationwide stuff, I just want to get your take on this Ohio Senate race. There's so much going on some big names, lots of people coming and going off of Fox and everything else. And so who better than you to give the rundown on what you think is going on in that race? Mark Weaver: Yeah, our Senator, Rob Portman said he was not running for reelection and we have many different candidates. Who've announced our former state party chair, Jane Timkin, J D Vance. Some people know him from the book. He wrote Hillbilly Elegy, Josh Mandel, our former state treasurer, Mike Gibbons. There've been several people in the race and it's really unclear. Who's going to win because the race is getting very close and president Trump has not yet endorsed. And that could be a key factor in this race. Doug Truax: So what do you think right now, as far as you can tell how you're handicapping this thing, how do you see a plan out? What's the timing on that? Mark Weaver: Well, our primary is supposed to be May 3rd, but we're having a little fight with the Supreme court and the legislature through the lines. And so, although the Senate race doesn't really matter what the lines cause the state is the state. It may change the primary election day. So whether it's May 3rd or later, it's going to be sometime in the spring. And it's really too early to say, who's going to win. Josh Mandel had been in the lead, but his numbers have been T eight down like Gibbons. Who's a businessman has been making up. Jane Timken. The former state party chair was recently endorsed by Rob Portman. And that has given her campaign some momentum. So it's one to watch. And obviously we want to win this primary with a strong candidate. The Democrats pretty much are coming up behind Tim Ryan, Democrat congressmen from the Youngstown area. Right,. Doug Truax: Right, right. I remember that guy from way back. I knew he was always angling at some point. So here's his chance and we'll see what happens there. But yeah, we definitely got to put up a strong candidate and what I think we've all been encouraged over the years to see Ohio trending more and more red, which is, which is great for everybody. So, so that's good. So turning to the national scene then, so here at Restoration PAC, we're always talking about the different issues. Obviously big ones around here and around the country, inflation, crime, you know, we've got the demonization of people based on their skin color. That's what we talked about a lot. There's a lot of other things going on the border. COVID still all that stuff. What do you think going forward now are going to be the big national issues that are going to be playing out? Mark Weaver: Well, I've done a lot of over the years and most times people aren't paying much attention politics. This year's going to be different. People have figured out in the last few years that bad government policy can get manually affect their everyday life. Though whether its mandates, where there shouldn't be mandates, shutdowns where there shouldn't be shut down or oh, government spending to the extreme, which creates inflation. People realize that when you elect the wrong people, you get bad policies. It's always been true, but it's more noticeable lately. As a result, we'll see a Republican red wave similar to what we saw in 2010. And if you're buying continues to make mistakes has been making, it might be the biggest wave in modern history. Doug Truax: Right? And we're seeing that with the inflation piece by itself too. I mean, there's so much going on, but inflation, it hasn't been a real problem like it is now for a long time. And so it's one of those things that just touches everybody all the time. It's hurting your friends, it's hurting your family. It steals your dignity in certain ways. Cause you were going to do this and now you're not. And you gotta admit that you're not. And just the instability it creates in our whole economy and the, and the impact it has on people. It's just, it's just an escapable. So we'll see where that plays out. And you know, what do you see in the future with the inflation piece? I, I don't see it. I don't see it moderating much at all. I mean, print trillions of dollars and just the, the pent up demand that was there and what an incredible blunder they've made here. Mark Weaver: Yeah. We all watched the video of his wife, President Biden Jr. And he acknowledged this errors in overspending and some supply that might've been the right direction to see some of the pooling, but he doubled down on the same kind of rock where we are he's demonized business, because it made them think that they be out there running their business prop businesses do, which allows them to create jobs and products and help us help us in America. Don't standardly, president Biden has doubled down on the sink kinds of policies. They gave us this information and I don't think anything short of an election is going to pay. Doug Truax: Right. Right. So that's where I am too. So I kind of know your answer a little bit to this next question. I just want to see if there's any outliers here. Is there anything they can do to salvage this in terms of where this is going? I mean, I don't want us to sound like overly optimistic, obviously about our chances. It's terrible that our chances are getting so great relative to the poor condition of the economy and everything else around the world. But from an election standpoint, that's the way this works out. But is there anything that, any advice that you'd give to the Democrats at this point, other than, you know, Hey, stop doing that piece with the inflation, for sure. Is there anything else that could salvage this in any way for them? Mark Weaver: Well, they are backpedaling away from whose policies they backpedaled. The markets might notice that, and that could think the markets and it could theme the inflation as well, but I don't think that's going to happen. The Democrat party is adaptive to it's far left. It's an anti corporate basis that anti middle class base, it's more interested in things like global than it is in investing in American domestic energy, like natural gas and fracking and oil brought from our own country or from North America. And so the more we see that done, the more we see attacks on the very people who could affect inflation and can inflect gas prices, the worst that's going to get, which is why I think only an election can solve the problem. Doug Truax: Right? The leftist took over all the policies from the universities. And let's just go ahead and just start rolling this stuff out and see what happens. And boy, are we ever seeing what happens? And this is, this is how it goes, like you said, it's going to happen an election. So the flip side of that though, is, you know, we want to make sure as conservatives and Republicans, we get this thing done and we don't want to blow it. So what, what advice would you give to our party that take, keep an eye on this. Don't overextend over here. You know, anything like that, that you have in mind at this point? Mark Weaver: Well, the best thing is you have to talk about what voters care about and what they care about mostly is economic issues. Our party must make the case for why Republican and conservative principles bring about better economics for everybody. So it brings about more jobs, more growth, lower taxes, lower inflation, lower gas prices. These are all Republican strong suits. Now, of course the culture wars are important, but that's not going to win this election. We need to win based on pocketbook issues. And along the way we can correct some of the far overreach that's affecting the culture. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's right. It's a good time to make some ground up on these things and show people what we're really about, because I think we really needed the country right now. That's for sure. So last question for you then. So as far as the Democrats go and their leadership over there, you know, to me, it looks like total disarray and chaos and not a lot of great people, you know, able to step up. And I think this is a function of, you know, the hyper leftist overtake of their party. But so anybody that you see on that side that could be a future leader for them that would, nobody's talking about right now. Mark Weaver: Well, sadly their most likely future leader is AOC. And I don't say that happily. She has millions of followers on social media. She, she has an attractive persona. She's particularly weak on policy. Logic is not something that's familiar to her, but for some voters that doesn't matter. And she speaks to a lot of younger voters. If she were to, for example, primary Chuck Schumer for Senate, it's entirely possible. She could win that primary. And it's entirely possible that AOC could be in the United States Senate. And from there, we all saw Barack Obama leap from being junior Senator of Illinois to, to president. So I'm not predicting that, but I'm saying she has a bit of the formula that Democrats need to pay attention. And for those of us who care about good governance, it's a scary thought. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's terrifying. But the upside right now, like we were just talking about is there is an outcome to all these policies that they've been advocating and we're feeling it as a country. And hopefully we get to a place where people just say, wow, AOC. She's just like the next version of that same stuff that we all hated for awhile. And we got rid of, so, you know, maybe we'll end up there. Who knows, but yeah,l we'll see what happens to keep an eye on that, but Mark really appreciate your insights. So it's super great to have you on, a super smart guy that we like here in front of, and appreciate you coming on the show today. Mark Weaver: Thank you, Doug. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll see you next time! First Right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe by texting FIRST RIGHT to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Robert Cahaly, one of the few accurate pollsters. (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. Your weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, president and founder of Restoration PAC. So today we're delighted to have our favorite pollster on Robert Cahaly We've had him on the show before, because he's right lot when most of the pollsters are wrong a lot. So Robert, welcome to show! Robert Cahaly: Not only is it good to be on the show. Doug Truax: Good, good. So thanks for coming well. So, you know, we continue to watch the president flail around and it's, it's difficult for us patriotic Americans to watch. And you know, here we are eight months out from a midterm. So what's the current state of play politically in the country from your perspective. Robert Cahaly: Yeah, there's a general lack of confidence in the Democrat brand. I mean, the the brand is really suffered. What's happened with Afghanistan, kind of started it where it just all kind of collapsed together. And people started to realize that everything they're doing is the opposite of what they want. I mean, that's, that's what we keep getting is that there's this, the government is in the middle of everything that we don't care about pushing, you know, using the right pronouns, a agreed agenda that raised their gas prices and people not to work. And the government isn't taking care of the things they ought to be taken care of. If you can, America strong, internationally people feeling safe in their homes, from crime, having their rights respected and being empowered to grow their families and their businesses. It's just the complete, the Democrats have all that hung on them. And that's why you see what you see now. Doug Truax: Yeah. And so my take on it, and I'd like to get your take. So when you watch a political party kind of imploding in that way, and it's so obvious to, you know, most everybody that God they're doing the exact wrong thing, like you said, is that just the echo chamber inside there with their base. And they're just kind of wrapped up in it and the donors and just the small group of people are just keep driving it that direction. Robert Cahaly: Yeah. I think that has a lot to do with it. There's a, there's a great deal of money that is used to on these campaigns and thunder party. And so, you know, most Democrats that are in like a swing district are faced with a choice. I can alienate my voters or I can alienate my funders. And it's an it very difficult choice then, you know, the Republicans are to blame when they don't make the Democrats face that joy. And we've seen that in too many elections in 2020, where they had that choice and they weren't faced it, but know that the Democrat party has an element, that fundamental element of it that is no longer the least bit in line with American mainstream. I mean, if anything, Pelosi and Schumer are trying to hold back a tab that is so much worse than they are. Doug Truax: Yeah. Which is terror, that's terrifying, you know, it's that bad. Yeah. So we're watching at restoration pack. We're always watching inflation and crime and this, you know, demonization based on your skin color and stuff like that. There's all these other issues. Obviously COVID-19, you know, foreign policy failures, you know, what are the issues that you're really watching most when you're going after you're polling nowadays? Robert Cahaly: Well, we see a lot when people look at the inflation, especially, and inflation, I guess in gas prices are tied up and they don't, they're not always traditionally that if they are right now, people just, what they're, what they're telling us is why is the government doing nothing to make this better? And when they put two and two together and they realized that some of the climate stuff is so far to the freedom that America not only whittled away, their advantage, you know, the American advantage in the domestic oil and gas production is being dissipated because we're not taking advantage of it, handing the stuff off the countries in the middle east, Russia, and it is causing them great harm. And they don't really understand it. Like this is an agenda that basically only America, maybe Western Europe seems to care about and China and Russia don't. So how does that fix the globe and about why is that making my life more difficult? That's what I keep getting him. America's, want clean air, clean water, and, you know, they don't want toxic waste, but they're not going to pay nine bucks a gallon to get it. Doug Truax: Yeah. Right. And that seems to be, to listen to the Democrats now, this whole concept of, well, you know, there's sacrifices to be made. So just sit down and shut up and make them, and we'll let you know when this, when you're, when you're done with your, with your sacrificing and yeah. That's just not going to fly. So, so is there any advice that you would give at this point to Republicans? You know, I I'm encouraged by what I see, but I've also just like the rest of us, you know, we've seen situations where it's like, wow, we have this opportunity and we blew it in some way. So, so what would you say to Republicans now that you know, are getting kinda like, I don't know, lack of a better term kind of giddy about the whole thing? Robert Cahaly: Well, recognize that you have a chance to actually win the majority's and there's two ways you win a majority and a close election, you run a bunch of candidates that are toward the middle, so you can win a few of those swing seats because the country's kind of at a middle place. And then there's the way you win a majority when you don't have to do that. And the first thing that Republicans need to recognize is this is not a year that you need to run a bunch of soft, moderate, Republican to win. This is a year that you're more conservative, Republican and win. And so don't squander this opportunity with image with the majority that's tied barely to people that you can't count on. It it'd be much better to have a majority of 25-30 Republicans that you can count on and 40 that you got to wonder about 20 of them. Yeah. Doug Truax: Right. That's a great point. So, conversely, is there anything that you would tell the Democrats at this point, is there any, is there any way to save this for them other than basically I guess just the, you know, coming out and being like, Hey, you know, while we, we had it wrong, we're going to focus on inflation and we're going to figure out gas prices and stuff like that. I mean, is there any path for them at this point to salvage this a little bit before the midterms? Robert Cahaly: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's up to Biden, but if, you know, if I was telling Bob and I say, Hey, you need to talk about the fact that while, while we won't, we want to, we want to protect the planet. We want to deal with climate change. The fact is until we get the whole world on board, it doesn't matter. And, and we're not going to have America suffer just so the rest of, to the rest of the world can keep on polluting. And that people in Europe have given up so much control of their energy. And what's happening in Ukraine is the cost. This is the cost of the green agenda. And, and what, what he could talk about is how we have good people who want democracy like America don't produce energy, that we will fail you without strings, and you're not going to have democracy. And then you're really not going to have people being able to choose what type of government they have. Therefore you're never going to get the green agenda that you want in the long run. So address that and also take a strong stand against China. You'd be surprised how fast the American public would rally and baseball and completely focused and fixated on restoring our economy as it relates to production of energy and dealing with China, with it, with an iron fist. I think you'd be shocked at how quickly the pulse would change for. Doug Truax: Yeah. We've had that conversation before about China is that I wanted to ask you, is there like one issue out there that, that you see a lot that people just aren't talking about enough? And if it is it, would it be China or is it something else? Robert Cahaly: China is one of the few places that you have Republican and Democrats almost always on the same page. Nobody is for China. Everybody realizes the growing threat they represent. I mean, it is literally a few corporate masters and no one else. I mean, if you're not a professional athlete, if you're not, you know, who's making money off countries that take advantage of people and, and, and engage in slavery. If you're not a, that focused on a Chinese market, then you're not about China. I hear it every day, Americans restaurant, they can't buy what they want. They're spending more and more time looking for products that are made in America when they go online and they really don't want to empower China anymore. They want the supply chain back. They want the medical supply chain back. They want anything related to defending the country back. So a focus on doing something about China is something that is, I think that if the Republicans would own that issue would be very uniting. I mean, look at the Olympics. It wasn't just Republicans not watching the Olympics because the ratings to be so bad, that was a lot of people. Doug Truax: That's right. That's right. And I think this whole concept around the COVID-19 and where it started, I it's just been so strange to watch it over the years now. It was just like, you couldn't really talk about the fact that China, you know, created this thing and let it go. And now we're getting to the other side, finally, the pandemic and, and that's, I think a lot of Americans are out there going, oh, wait a minute. These guys, what did they steal from us? You know, in terms of our, just our, our wellbeing over the last couple of years and just, you know, the people that you've known that died from COVID obviously, and even if you haven't just what we've been through, and then, yeah, you're right. Oh, the Olympics are still going on and they got Uyghur and concentration camps, and we're just like, acting like everything's fine. And I think that a lot of people are super frustrated with that. So we'll see how it plays out. If it's going to be an election issue coming up, certainly in the 24, would you say, Robert Cahaly: I think it's gonna be an election issue both times, because I think China's gonna make probably some moves. In probably on Taiwan. And I'll tell you what I tell anybody else. If you see China go after Taiwan, you better go out and buy a new car and a new computer that day. Cause it's going to be awhile before any computer chip. Doug Truax: Yeah. How about it? And then back to what you said about made in America, you know, and this is just that, that obsession with globalism, you know, and I I've said before, I think there's a lot of CEOs out there, these big companies that their grandparents who were part of the greatest generation, if they could see what they have done to this country, they'd slap them across the face. I mean, it's just terrible. What has happened over the decades of the farming out of everything that we've done in this country. That was so great in the, in the, in the name of just making another buck. And I think people are seeing that now, and it's really frustrating and we just let these guys do whatever they want. They get the Olympics and everything else. And, and, and that super aggressive, that hyper aggressive foreign policy, they had even leading up to here where their ambassadors were out. Just beating everybody over the head. It's like, they're trying to call us all down and you know, Biden's going along with it. And the Democrats are too. So I, I couldn't agree more. It's going to be a big deal coming up and as well as should be. And so last question then, you know, did the Democrats, do they have any bench left as far as leadership goes? I mean, are we just, you know, we're just left with, you know, Pelosi, Biden, Harris. I mean, what do you see out there for them? I feel really strongly great about where we're going as a party, but what do you see on the Democrats? Did they have anything out there besides Stacey Abrams potentially? Robert Cahaly: Oh, I don't know this Stacey Abrams of, is there a, is there best player? I think Stacy, everyone has been very defined more and more is coming out in Georgia. People are beginning to see a lot of what went down. I think the Lester is wearing off of Stacey. Didn't know him wrong. Stacey Abrams is a political, she isn't political operative, extraordinary. She is one of the smartest political operators I've seen in the Democrat party. She knows how to motivate people. She knows how to organize, but I think that this new face, a new direction has kind of worn off. And the last four years and people have kind of realized what else she might stand for things that weren't issues four years ago. You know, I would look toward the Democrats that some of the lesser known players that, that ha that aren't getting a lot of attention right now. I still think that Klobuchar is probably one of their stronger leaders out there who has not been completely destroyed in the media. And they have a few, but not very many. And, and, you know, even she has a lock wall, their problem is they haven't developed a bench. They haven't worried about legislative races. They haven't worried about winning so many things in the, and there people in Congress are just tired. I mean, it's freezing. So ever leaving. I mean, they w the Democrat party is making the same mistake that the major league baseball is beginning to make. If you start squandering your, your minor leagues, you're going to end up having a negative effect on your major league. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great analogy. And I think that, that if you start canceling your minor league players too, you know, I think that's the great thing about what's happened. That's Republicans have finally stood up and said, you know, we don't care about the media. You try to cancel me. I don't care. It's one of the great things about Trump. You know, he led the way on that. He's like, he just, he just ran right through it, but the left there's still cancel each other all the time. You know? So you don't get sideways with the squad over there. You know, they may enjoy your career, but, you know, let them have it, let them have it. I it's, it's, it's in some way, it's fun to watch so well, Hey, Robert really appreciate all the work you've done over the years and how accurate you are, and looking forward to this next season that we're headed into. And I hope you're, you're dead on again. Robert Cahaly: We're looking forward to it, Virginia and New Jersey this year were a nice preview of what's going to happen. And we, we, we're proud to lead the in both, both of those states in the poll. Doug Truax: Well, amen to that good stuff. All right. Well, thanks for coming on. Robert Cahaly: Thank you. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America. First Right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe by texting FIRSTRIGHT 2, 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Christopher Arps, President of Americans for Citizens Voting and communication professional and strategist. (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today. We're blessed to have a first-time guest and partner. We are glad to work alongside Christopher Arps. He's well-known as afternoon drive host of St. Louis news talk 1 0 1 0.9 and heads up a group trying to make sure only legal citizens vote in America. And those are just a few of us ventures. Well, Hey Chris, thanks so much for coming on the show today, Christopher Arps: Doug, Thank you for having me. This is a real honor. Doug Truax: Awesome. So give our viewers, you know, in a nutshell of how you got to where you are, you're a really busy guy, you got a lot going on. It's always interesting to hear how things started to kind of build up to where you are today. You know? Christopher Arps: I started like a lot of us did in politics at the grassroots level, I volunteered on a good friend state rep campaign and he ended up winning that he had ties to one of our senators who was running for election. At that time, I got a chance to work for United States Senator, later a presidential campaign, some local races. And after that, you know, I started my own consulting practice and somehow it ended up with me having a radio show. I knew Stan in St. Louis on Newstalk STL one-on-one 94 1, which I co-host from three thiry to six with the former Missouri speaker of the house, Tim Jones. Doug Truax: Yeah, so let's go right to that. So a great show and you know, you're right there in middle America and there's like a lot of things going on right now. We've got immigration. We got COVID, we got inflation, we've got critical race theory, take your pick. So I would just be interested, you know, what do you, what do you think your listeners are most fixated on these days? Christopher Arps: Well, I'll tell you one thing. That's a real hot issue in Missouri and really all across the country is the redistricting concerning congressional maps. Right now, Missouri has a six to a Republican majority in Congress, but there is a push among the conservative caucus in the state Senate to carve out a seven - one map, which would eliminate the democratic seat in Kansas city, Emanuel Cleaver. So there's a big kind of, in-house fighting among Republicans to get that map together. And so that's one thing our listeners are talking about, another thing which is happening in major cities all across the country is crime. St. Louis unfortunately is always number one or number two, when it comes to crime and murder statistics, we have a George Soros funded prosecutor, Kim Gardner, who thinks that our job is not to put criminals in jail, but to instead be a social worker. And I think the third thing is people are worried about the direction of their country and the president, Joe Biden. They're worried about his mental health, his physical health. And is he up to the job of leading the nation? Doug Truax: Yeah, lots of be worried about there. And that's one of those things. I just, you know, every time I see him give a speech or, and you know, the media is not covering it. So you've got to go different places where, you know, we know where to go and, and watch the real clips of it. And I think too, from our standpoint is, you know, we need to, we need to project strength as a country. And I know it's good for our national security, good for our economy, all these things. And I just get most upset because what's happening now is that the rest of the world is looking at us and seeing a lot of weakness there. And I think it bleeds over into everything. Christopher Arps: I think president Putin's actions and Ukraine and having military exercises and Belarus is a direct result of our hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan and leaving citizens and people that helped us over there. I think that has emboldened Putin. I think it is in Bolden, the north Korean leader, he's shooting missiles now into, towards Japan again. And I think also it's emboldings our enemies in the middle east, like Iran who are the major state sponsors of terrorism in the world. So we need leadership and I'm hoping that 2022 will be the beginning of that when we see a Republican takeover of Congress Doug Truax: And, you know, the Afghanistan thing, I think for me of the whole year, that was the most troubling to watch. And just being a former army guy, myself and knowing people that served over there, I didn't, I haven't been in for awhile, but you know, they served over there and all the sacrifice and then to just end it that way. I mean, Biden's just got a, an incredibly horrible track record of just terrible decisions. He's just a bad decision maker and a bad leader. And now he's got mad at, you know, health issues. It's just terrible. And a side note too. I saw last night, my, my classmate from west point, Chris Donnie, who's a, he's the, he's the division commander over at 82nd airborne. He was the last guy to get on the plane out of Afghanistan, which, you know, which, you know, for me personally kind of salvaged it a little bit like, well, that's, that's good. You know, Chris is leading the way, but gosh, what a terrible, terrible situation. So anyways, I, yeah, I'm with you, I'm just looking for a better day. And I think it's on the way, you know, everything's always changing, well, Christopher Arps: It's almost like a parlor game now to watch the polls, just to see just how low can Joe Biden go. Right. You know, I heard this morning on our network radio news that the real clear politics composite poll has him at like 39%. So when five, five or six polls have you that low and especially, you know, right. Entering the second year of your presidency, that's pretty bad. Doug Truax: Absolutely. And how many loyal Democrats are out there thinking they're going to vote for somebody else? And they won't tell a pollster that, so I don't know. It's just, yeah, it's crazy time. So, so you're a, you're a prominent African-American public figure. You know, we've got this moment where Trump was kind of like making a lot of headway in that community. And so, you know, what do you think has happened in there? Is there a, is there a break going on from your perspective of, of what you've seen over the years? I certainly hope there is, but I want to definitely, you know, get your take on it. Christopher Arps: I think Donald Trump was a big part of the break that we're seeing from African-Americans is the democratic party. President Trump got 20% of the African male African-American male vote, which is incredible. He doubled his percentage of the African-American female vote, I think from a three to 6%, 7%, something like that. I think where you really see a lot of gains and I would love to see my African-American brothers and sisters catch up with these gains are in this Hispanic community. We see polls recently showing that more Hispanics associate themselves as the Republican party than they do the democratic party right now. And we saw during this 2020 election where a lot of Hispanics in the counties that border Mexico voted a good influence when it comes to African-Americans and other minorities taking a different look at the Republican party. I think when he said during the campaign, what the hell have you got to lose? I think a lot of African-Americans said, yeah, whatever we got to lose. Doug Truax: That's right. Yeah. That's a, that's a good message. Cause they got to make a different choice at some point, and I've got 20 years now living in a Chicago suburbs. So, you know, you see all kinds of stuff when it comes to elections, when you live outside of Chicago and what goes on in the city and I give Christopher Arps: You actually seen a dead person vote Doug Truax: They're out there. Every, every election they're out there and I Christopher Arps: I guess zombies. Doug Truax: Yeah. Right. Exactly. I get most disappointed too, just, you know, from, you know, from a Christian standpoint to there's there's not all, but there's a lot of pastors in the African-American community in the city, they will basically, you know, take favors in or however they're going to do that from the Democrat party and then endorse them, even though they know in their mind and their heart, it's not the right thing to do. There's better choices. I mean, the schools are a mess, the crime, everything else, but it's kind of this, just this machine that keeps moving. And I just, I do get a little disappointed with, like I said, obviously not all by any stretch, but there's a number of, of African-American pastors in, in Chicago that are kind of like a little bit, in my opinion, on the tape. Christopher Arps: Yeah. Unfortunately in the African-American church has become an auxiliary of the democratic party. We really see that highlighted a, you know, a month or so before the elections, when the democratic politicians are in the churches at the pulpits, basically giving campaign speeches right from the pulpit. And we don't ever see any action from the IRS to take away any designations or anything like that. So I think a lot of people know that and I think that there are new breed of African-American pastors that are more traditional and adhere to conservative values. I think you're going to be hearing more of them in the coming months and years. Doug Truax: Yeah. I certainly hope so. And I agree with that and I, that's a, that's a great sign and, and we need to get there. So, all right. So let's move on to this organization. You're president of Americans for Citizen Voting. So I think a lot of our viewers may or may not be surprised that a non non citizens vote. So why don't you talk about that organization and what's you're up to there Christopher Arps: Well, I tell you, we started this organization in 2018, a friend of mine, good friend of mine, Paul Jacob said, Hey, did you know that there are, non-citizens voting in our country? And like 98% of Americans, 98% of Americans, I was like, you're crazy. You know, there's a, there's a constitution. There's no way that a non citizens are voting in our elections. And he showed me some examples of it. And from California to Maine and New Hampshire, where some of these municipalities were allowing noncitizens with green cards, they're here legally, but they are not citizens of our country yet. They're allowing them to vote in school board and municipal elections and me like many Americans out there think that it's wrong. We've done polling on this issue. And it's across the board, Republican Democrat, moderate, conservative, black, Hispanic, whatever it's overwhelmingly against non-citizens voting in elections. And so we are a grassroots advocacy organization. We work in a number of states currently trying to work with state legislator and grassroots activists to amend their state constitution from saying not that only the only United States citizens can vote instead of every citizen can vote. And what's happening is a lot of the people that want this to happen are using that every citizen can vote as a loophole because it's not telling you who can't vote. So we would like to help amend of lot of all our state constitutions, really to say only the United States citizens can vote in our elections, Doug Truax: Wait, so youre telling me the Democrats are using a loophole to gain an advantage in an election. I'm shocked. So yeah, it's so difficult. Yeah. When I first heard this Christopher Arps: And I hate to interrupt you, but I mean, it's not really a loophole. I mean, you know, you can, when it says every citizen can vote, most people with the IQ of a room temperature and with a little bit of common sense, knows that that probably pertains to American citizens and no one else. And the fact that we have to amend the constitution to say says that says a lot about the Democrats and how they really don't respect Americans common sense and their constitutional right to have only Americans voting in their election. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. It's that spirit of the law. I mean, everybody knows what that meant, but yeah, you're right. They just use it to their advantage. So, so, you know, we see more and more of that and you know, you and I are involved a lot of election integrity stuff and people were upset and still that's still going on. And so, and they've got all these issues now, and I don't want to get ahead of ourselves because we certainly know is as conservatives as Republicans, we can, we can definitely, you know, squander a victory on the way, but let's just, you know, say that in 23, we got the house and the Senate again, you know, what do you, what do you, what are you thinking? What do you, what are you looking for most from, from a majority like that? I mean, we're not going to the presidency obviously, but what, what are we going to, what do you want to see done at that point? Christopher Arps: Why the first thing that I would like to see on day one is the shoveling of the January six committees and all their related committees, put them in the closet where they need to be. And let's get along with conducting the businesses of America. Second, I'd like to see our nation become a exporter of energy. Again, like we were under Donald Trump instead of going to OPEC cup in hand, asking them to please pump out more oil so we can have lower gas prices. And I just would like to see, because we don't have much leadership in the presidency right now. And if we were able to take over the Senate and the house, that's two out of the three branches of government, maybe we can get some things done. You know, the president still has to sign that legislation. But if that legislation is popular with the American people, and this is a, and we're pushing this, then that may put pressure on them to sign legislation that you may not done with his having his own majority. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's right. And so it's a, it's a, it's a great thought to be able to get there, but you know, how, how it always is Chris. I mean, these guys will get there and they'll talk a good game. And one thing, what I always say around here too, is like, so if we have a candidate now who's been a politician. And they're saying all these things that they're going to do, you know, what have they done previously? It lead you to believe that they're actually going to execute on that thing when they get in. So, you know, with that being said, and we all know this happens, what do you see going forward? We take over, you know, how do we hold feet to the fire as conservatives, grassroots? What do we need to do right away to make sure they do everything they said they're going to do? Christopher Arps: Well. I think one, once whoever is elected, we, we tell them we're going to hold you to your promises. We're going to hold your feet to the fire. And if you don't come through or we don't see you making significant strides and efforts to pass what the passing agenda that we support, then you're going to be booted out. I mean, we've seen that in a sense here, these last few election cycles that have been kind of middle of the road that have switched between Democrat and Republican and that are up for grabs currently. I think you're going to see that spread more around the country, that if you're not doing what we want, we're, we're going to vote you out. And I hope, I hope that's what happens. Doug Truax: Yeah. We're all seeing, starting to see replays now, versions of, you know, January, 2017 where we're like, all right, we got everything. Let's make this happen. It's like, well, maybe Trump's a Russian spy. You know, everybody started getting weak-kneed and everything. I'm like, oh my God, let's do it. You know? So we'll see, we'll see what happens. So, but yeah, we'll, we'll definitely have you back on and we'll talk about how things are going and what you're doing and, and we'll, we'll all collectively hold their feet to the fire. Sound good. It sounds Christopher Arps: Excellent. And can't wait to have you on our show real soon. Doug Truax: Yeah. Very good. Thanks for coming on, Chris. Thank you. All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness. And so next week let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First Right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant every morning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting First Right. 3 to 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3 0 1 6 1.

In this episode of the First Right Podcast, Dr. Peter McCullough, a highly credentialed medical doctor, explains that 95% of deaths from COVID were preventable.

Doug talks to Dr. Peter McCullough, cardiologist and internist (Machine Generated) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today we are blessed to have one of the most important voices in America when it comes to COVID-19. He is Dr. Peter McCullough, a deeply credentialed doctor who is telling Americans that0 most of what they are hearing in the mainstream media about COVID is wrong. He is telling a troubling tale about collusion between the medical establishment, corporate media and big tech to prevent you from hearing the truth. All right, Dr. McCollough, thanks so much for coming on the show. Dr. Peter McCullough: Well, thanks for having me. Doug Truax: All right. So we'll get to the Rogan stuff in a second, but I definitely want to hear about your journey from the beginning with COVID, how you jumped in right away. You were one of the first guys, first guys in doing a lot of things, and then kind of how it progressed, up to where we are today. Dr. Peter McCullough: Yeah, I was in March of 2020. I was in a medical practice in cardiology practice, academic medical center in Dallas, Texas still am today at the same medical center. I had previously focused on heart and kidney disease as my major research focus. And when this hit myself and my division chief, we, we felt strongly motivated that we should do something to help out from our part. We weren't infectious disease experts, but we were good medical doctors and we could apply our scholarship. And so I applied for and won that one of the first FDA new drug applications to use hydroxychloroquine in large-scale and healthcare workers. And we demonstrated that that was beneficial. And then I moved on to work with the Italians to devise treatment protocols, to treat patients in order to avoid hospitalization and death and had the two seminal publications in 2020 demonstrating what the approach would be with using combined drugs, drugs to reduce viral replication, treat inflammation, and then treat blood clotting. And those papers became the most downloaded and cited papers for all of COVID-19. As an outpatient, there's now a protocols copyrighted called the McCullough protocol. It was copyrighted by Ben marble on my behalf for myfreedoctor.com, which used it. Ben just testified in the us Senate, as I did on January 24th, he's treated with his group over 150,000 Americans, high risk for COVID-19 he's only lost four patients. So it's extraordinary how effective early treatment can be. Absolutely. Doug Truax: And you have been on, on such the front edge of this, and we all really appreciate it. I think, as we've all kind of gotten to know you over this period of time, I think there's a lot of appreciation for your courage and obviously for your intellect. And so let's go back to December here, you get on the Rogan show and millions and millions of people hear all of this. I mean, you'd been doing other shows previously, but that's the viral side of this and it, and it took off. So just tell us how have changed for you since then, Dr. Peter McCullough: You know, through the course of the pandemic, I have now had two rounds of US Senate testimony, multiple state Senate testimonies that has been a frequent contributor in the hill in the first year, second year, frequent contributor actually have my own show in America Out Loud Talk radio, frequent contributor on Fox news, OEN, Newsmax, but the Rogan interview was something completely different. And when Rogan reached out to me, it took about a month to schedule. I was busy and I had prepared. So I had a base set of scientific slides that was already continuing medical education approved for, by a major scientific meeting in October. And I added to it with the peer reviewed literature, both in the preprint server system and in the national library of medicine. And when I went to the Rogan studio, I gave the slide set to his producers ahead of time, select figures. I opened up my computer. I found Joe Rogan to be very respectful. He asked good questions. He was intelligent perceptive the entire three hour interview. There were no opinions. There was no hyperbole. It was basically a presentation of the scientific data. And now the transcript has come out on the Rogan interview and the most frequently discussed topic was monoclonal antibodies, which are fully emergency use authorized. And I use a monoclonal antibodies practice every day. Joe Rogan had received them, his friend, Aaron Rogers, a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers had received them. So we had a lot of discussion on monoclonal antibodies. We also discussed other treatments used in the Macola protocol. So I mean the transcript indicates it was a very scientific discussion. I think what people were shocked with was the fallout from this fallout originally from, from Spotify and then other celebrities through Spotify, it escalated to the White House and the press secretary. And it's interesting because Spotify is a common carrier. You know, they carry the podcast for Robert F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and the Children's Health Defense is sharply critical of vaccines. And they haven't said a word about Robert F. Kennedy yet Rogan became a target in a sense. And it's been expanded now to things far beyond Rogan's interview with myself or Pierre Cory or Bret Weinstein or Robert Malone. Doug Truax: And so why do you think as you look back on it and to your point, it's very scientific, no hyperbole. Why do you think it was went viral Like it did Dr. Peter McCullough: Well it went viral, I think because Rogan's audience, you know, Rogan's audience with my interview, with the downloads, the reverbs, it was translated into multiple languages. It was three hours long previously. I think my longest was, was Tucker Carlson. I did the long program with Tucker Carlson today in his studio, but you know, three hours is a long time to fully vet a topic. And how careful Rogan is, is a journalist and his audience. His audience, the average age, I think is 24. These are, these are young people. They don't subscribe to cable TV anymore. They don't even know what Fox news is. So reached a whole new group of people and boy did it reverberate around the world. Doug Truax: Yeah. And I think it goes to, and I'd like to get your thought on this, about the truth of the matter. And that cohort that you're talking about, that generation is very perceptive of hypocrisy. And so when they feel it might be out there and people are being hypocritical, some of these things that they're hearing in the news constantly is like, this may not be real. And so when they watch your podcast, watch you talk and do what you do. They're thinking, okay, here's the truth. And then they start eating it up and it starts going around. I mean, that, that's how I feel that that's, that's kind of the state of play. I feel like we're in right now. Dr. Peter McCullough: I think you're right. I think on December 8th they heard the truth. It was one piece of feedback I received from a lot of people. So Dr. McCullough, you said you can't get COVID a second time. Well, as December 10th, we got the communication from the CDC and it became obvious. You could get Omicron once you've already had a prior variant. And fortunately I was on Fox news with Laura Ingraham and I said, listen, you know, here's an update. Omicron broke through a natural immunity, expect it. You can get a second case now it's very mild, very transitory. So like any good doctor and scientists with humility, you know, I quickly adapted to the data. I haven't stuck with a single quote narrative. That's been pointed out to be wrong because I've been careful to cite the science and other people in my circles have as well. What, what Americans are now starting to understand is our public health officials, as well as many media doctors have not. And they realize that the truth is starting to come through. Rogan was the big breakthrough. And my Lord, the January 24th, US Senate testimony that was five hours chaired by Senator Ron Johnson, I co moderated the committee. It was called COVID-19 a second opinion. We had dozens of practicing expert doctors who know how to treat COVID-19 inpatient and outpatient. We had PhD scientists, nurses, patients, attorneys. It was five hours of truth bombs. And I can tell you that was live-streamed that five hours has been condensed to a 38 minute highlight reel that's up on YouTube. And that is basically now combined with the Joe Rogan sets of interviews. I think really starting to break through to Americans, getting now a much more clear understanding of the truth regarding COVID-19. Doug Truax: And I think you touched on it a second ago, too, with the lack of humility. And I think most Americans will look at you and the people that you associate with and say very smart, very courageous, but humble, willing to say, oh, things have changed. I didn't realize that. And I think my opinion on this, as, you know, coming into a pandemic, I've always felt like, well, we're the United States of America. We have this cool thing called the center for disease control. And there's a lot of really smart people in there. And they're gonna figure it out if we, if the pandemic hits us and they're gonna work with everybody and doctors, and that's all just completely blown up now, because there's this lack of humility. There's a lack of, Hey, we had we had that wrong. We gotta adjust. We now hydroxychloroquine. Okay. We're going to revisit that. I mean, there was just a lack of humility coming through this. And I think, you know, a lot of times it got politicized obviously, but, but speak to that side of it a little bit, if you would, in terms of the, you know, people's kind of trusting in the health establishment, even meaning the federal government has this hierarchy, obviously that you know, is here to protect the people. And it just has been falling apart for years now. Dr. Peter McCullough: It's true. It got so bad that we actually heard from our national allergy immunology, branch director, a, you know, a division head at the NIH. It's not a terribly high position. You know, that person claimed to represent science, the entire field of science. And you know, all of us use the scientific method. We're humble in our presentation, we work in groups. What Americas saw was basically I think hubris and demagoguery and what they really needed to see was doctors working in teams. We should have always had teams of doctors and there should have been contemporary review. We should have been reviewing contagion control. That's one pillar early treatment, the second pillar hospital treatment, the third pillar, and then the fourth pillar being vaccination. We should have always had a monthly review on how all four aspects of the pandemic are going. And, and there are no stakes in the ground. You know, the, the stake in the ground that the FDA put out saying don't use hydroxychloroquine well, there was hundreds of studies that came out afterwards, demonstrating hydroxychloroquine did have a modest benefit. It was clearly safe. The stake in the ground that the NIH had, where the NIH said, ivermectin is only a horse dewormer, and there is no scientific evidence. Well, you know, there's now 70 supportive studies for ivermectin. Inpatient, outpatient has a bigger, favorable impact on hydroxychloroquine. So all these stakes in the ground is if the conclusion is known and there's no further discussion, every single time, these have been a mistake. Another one has been masking. You know, initially the idea of all masks are going to stop the transmission. Well, when we realized in the study suggests that mascular ineffective, there never was a second review where we said, you know what? We tried it, it didn't work. You know, let's, you know, for general public masking, let's go ahead and drop that idea, but never was any humility to understand when something worked or didn't work and then actually change course. Doug Truax: Yeah. Yeah. Big government came in. I feel like I'm a conservative. And we, we talk this way around here in terms of the government coming in and saying, be obedient, you know, put the mask on. And, and when the question is, will it, does this doesn't seem to work? Why are we still doing it? It's like, well, we tell, cause we told you to, and you know, this masking idea and this whole not changing course, especially with the kids, you know, and this was the ongoing place where we all are still, we have all these states now that, you know, finally I'm in Illinois and they lighten the load on the mask, but not in schools and all this stuff. And so what, talk to a little bit in terms of how early on did you see that? Okay. You know, you saw what happened in Italy, you knew who was going to be most susceptible to this. And then as a society, almost, we kind of said, you know what, we're just going to apply the same standard to everybody, no matter your age, no matter your situation. And you know, what at what point I kind of remember when I, this was dawning on me, like in the late spring of 2020, I'm like, why are we applying this to everybody when we need to really near it, narrow it down? What, what was your take on that? And how do you feel about where we are with the kids and the masking and all that craziness? Dr. Peter McCullough: In the spring of 2020, I was working with leaders from UCLA, Emory, Dallas, all around the country and the cortical network in Italy. And by June, when we submitted our paper, we already had risk stratification as part of the program for COVID 19, that everybody needed treatment, that it looked like it was going to be the high risk seniors. Those with multiple medical problems, young people had essentially a negligible risk. And so we knew that very early on, and I wanna say by summer or fall of 2020, the great Barrington declaration was proposed by leaders from Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, and the great Barrington declaration of which many, many scientists signed on to said, listen, let's just protect the elderly. That's where it's at everybody else. Let's, you know, have them be unencumbered with mandates and restrictions. And we'll protect our seniors to this day, 40% of the deaths, American deaths that happened. COVID-19 had been nursing home residents. The average age is 83. You know, the, the hyper-focus on children is way off base COVID-19 if it still has any risk to us in this society, it's our seniors, not our children. Doug Truax: Right? Absolutely. So the question I have for you then, so if, if tomorrow I get a positive COVID-19 test. What are you telling me to take? And where do I get the medications that you say to take? Dr. Peter McCullough: Right, Well, you can go to the truth for health foundation, truthforhealth.org, download the home treatment protocol, the McCullough protocol, and you can start to follow the steps. I encourage you to do it sooner than later. One of the first steps is to start nasal washes and we use dilute povidone iodine or dilute hydrogen peroxide over the sink, squared it up with the nose, sniff it back, and then spit it out. Do that twice in each side and gargle you do that up to every four hours at home, because we know that the Omicron virus, it largely stays in the nasal cavity. So it's very amenable because of its high replication rates to actually just killing the virus of the nasal cavity. So remarkably effective, everybody should have either povidone iodine, which is called betadyne about a $5 item online or hydrogen peroxide out of $5 item as well in the house, and be ready to go with the oral nasal washes. Beyond that, we have monoclonal antibodies for high risk patients. You don't look like you're going to be one of them, but we use sotrovimab the GlaxoSmithKline product. I just got called by a young, a mother of a young woman who has systemic lupus. And she's on a lot of medicines. I think she should get one of these antibodies and mother's scrambling right now, but we, you know, everybody should be calling around, finding out who's got them. You should push your representatives to make sure they're transparent on the supply chain for monoclonal antibodies. Then beyond that, we have oral antivirals. Hydroxychloroquine ivermectin. Now we have Paxil VOI by Pfizer, Mona peer veer by Merck. We use doxycycline azithromycin. In addition, we use in healthy snide throughout oral culture, seen throughout oral aspirin and then anticoagulants a higher risk patients. We go ahead and put them on prednisone as well. So all these drugs are freely available, should be prescribed by your primary care doctor. I think every patient ought to call their primary care doctor and say, listen, are you ready to prescribe the drugs for me? Are you ready to go on this? If you're not, who can you refer me to too many patients who have scrambled because the primary care doctors have just really been flat-footed I'm responding to COVID. Yeah. Doug Truax: That's great advice. So get, get prepared ahead of time. Cause you never know where your doctor's gonna land. Now it's a really strange time. And most people haven't been used to that their entire lives. They just assume that the best thing is going to be done and we're living in an age where it's not. And so last question for you then. So we'll see what happens more and more is coming out. The it just feels like a lot of bad decisions were made. It's hard to say how many people died that didn't need to die. Do you feel like at some point there's going to be accountability built into this for the people that have just basically, you know, showing the hubris and just weren't looking out for people like they were supposed to, are they going to be held accountable one day? Dr. Peter McCullough: They will. And I think justice will be served that the record now is so incredibly clear. Senator Ron Johnson's done a wonderful job in memorializing testimony into the Senate record. My current estimates are 95% of all the deaths could have been avoided with early appropriate treatment. And we could have avoided tens of millions of hospitalizations. And I think there will be a justice and people will be held accountable for that unnecessary loss of life and they inconvenience and the misery, and really the anxiety of being hospitalized unnecessarily. Doug Truax: Wow! Wow. That's really that's. I thought, I thought you were going to say something like that, but that's just, it's heartbreaking to think about it. And I am so thankful that it's been read into to the record and I like a lot of Americans are very thankful for you for your courage, for your intellect and how you've been sharing all this, and even what you shared today and really appreciate everything you've done and really thank you for coming on today. Dr. Peter McCullough: Okay. Thanks for having me. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness. And so next week let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First Right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant. Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe by texting f FIRSTRIGHT to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGTH All caps. One word to 3, 0, 1 6 more.

Doug talks to Rachel Bovard, senior tech columnist with The Federalist (Machine Transcribed) Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast, a weekly conservative new show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today, we were blessed to have first-time guests and one of the most important young conservative voices in Washington, Rachel Bovard, Rachel is so influential that the fake conservative columnist from the New York times, David Brooks labeled her and other young conservatives as terrifying in a recent column. All right, Rachel, thanks so much for coming on. Rachel Bovard: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Doug Truax: All right. So, so the David Brooks thing, even though he did say, I think he said you were charming and funny and things like that, he labeled you as terrifying. And so what's been the, what was your reaction to that? And what's kinda been the reaction around DC in, in your circles with that, regarding that, that article he wrote. Rachel Bovard: Well, I didn't see it for a while. I'm not a regular reader of the Atlantic, so I'm, I missed it when it came out. I got a few texts about it. I think Brooks made the sort of mortal sin of a hit piece, which is giving the subject, you're trying to mock too much airtime because it, I think it didn't make me sound that scary, to be honest. And most of the people I talked to were like, no, you, you know, I think he was trying to paint me as some sort of terror in a skirt and it didn't quite, I think it, I think it backfired slightly. Doug Truax: Right? Absolutely. Well, that's it? Yeah. It's always good to just kind of ridicule them back a little bit. Like, like what you're doing there. I think that's, that's wonderful. So, well, Hey, so you've got, I love, I love your posts. You're where you're at with the culture and, and the, and the party and everything. I think you're dead on in so many ways. We've been talking about cultural issues a lot around here lately. So what do you think conservatives are kind of doing right right now and what are we doing wrong when it comes to the culture? Rachel Bovard: Well, you know, I think a lot of conservatives are doing the right thing in pointing out that the culture matters because I think for a long time, the sort of emphasis of DCS, right leaning institutions anyway, were sort of to lean out of the culture. The culture is too divisive. You know, we need to focus on economics. If, you know, we just allow the mediating institutions to work. Everything will be fine. And maybe that was true at one time, but you know, the sort of institutions that we've always relied upon in civil society are completely captured by ideologies that we don't agree with. And I think if Trump's presidency showed us anything, it was that leaning into the culture war and standing up for the right of, you know, conservatives to speak, to have their own beliefs, to practice their faith that actually expanded the base.We have more voters in the Republican party because Trump emphasized those issues. He was probably a surprising vehicle for that for a lot of people, but, you know, he did that. He was fearless about it. And so I think keeping that momentum is going to be very important because generally speaking, when Republicans are in the majority, social conservatives are sort of like, nobody wants to talk to them, right? They are useful on the campaign trail. But when we actually get to Washington, nobody actually wants to listen to them or do what they have to say besides like the one pro-life vote a year. So I do think that we have to take conservative social concerns much more seriously. And, and the culture war generally, that is the word that matters. That's the war that's in front of us. And so we have to fight it on all fronts. Doug Truax: We were heavily involved in the Virginia race too. And you saw it there with Youngkin and that whole crowd, it's just like what you're talking about. People are super concerned about these things that nobody wants to talk about because they get beat down by the left. And then there's a great example of just politically it's in your favor because if a lot of people are concerned about it, you should be talking about it, Rachel Bovard: Right! No, and this is the thing like the, all the polls show this. And, you know, even, I think Gallup recently had a poll showing that the Republican party has the highest amount of identification in like decades. And it is because the left has gone so insane on the culture that it is actually driving people to the Republican party. And I think the mistake would be however, for the Republicans to think that it's because, you know, they've earned this support. No, they haven't. The left has just made it so unpalatable to be a leftist that they're coming to us for solutions. So if we don't provide them anything in the way of solutions, in the way of fearlessness, in the way of actually addressing the concerns that are affecting people day to day, this is not some like far off threat. This is at your child's school. This is at your church. You know, this is in your community. If people aren't the Republicans aren't willing to engage in those fights the way Glen Youngkin really leaned into it in Virginia, then we are going to lose all those voters that the leftist just sent to us. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. And I think they're going to continue sending them to us. I think it was a Victor Davis Hanson, I think, was talking about this one time. The fatal flaw with the left is that they have no limit. They'll keep going and going. That's the interesting thing about the spectrum of things on the right. We have, well, there's a place in here where even, you know, culture warriors, they'll be like, no, let's not go that far on this certain thing, but the left, they just go off into space, you know? And it's, it's an opportunity for us to point it out and to get some people back, but you're right. If we don't step up and say, yeah, we'll actually fight for this. Or if we just use it as a, as a political opportunity, I mean, you see that so often, you know, especially in DC and around conservative politics, like, well, let's just use it to get through the election. You know, that that's not fair. You're just, you're being disingenuous. Then if you just use it to get through the election, and I know you've kind of been calling out Republican establishment too about, Hey guys, let's step this up and talk about some real things that we're going to actually, you know, do after we get elected, not just the same old thing we've been saying for decades in the Republican party. Rachel Bovard: Right. Yeah. I think you're absolutely right in the sense that, you know, DCS, Republican, institutional elite, they love to use the social conservatives or the cultural war on the campaign trail, but they have no intent of actually addressing it. You kind of saw this with Kevin McCarthy's proposed agenda for house Republican majority in 2022. He's like the closest he got to the culture war was talking about a parent's bill of rights. Well, what does that even mean? And is it actually enforceable? Are you talking about putting something into law? Cause okay. Then I'm at the table, right? You've caught my interest, but if you're talking about like a resolution non-binding on anyone simply saying that parents matter, you got to do more than that. Right now. You gotta, you gotta give us better in this moment. Doug Truax: That's right. That's right. I always think, is it, is this just marketing to raise money and get some votes? Or is this something you really believe in and you're going to do so. Yeah. Well, so you, you write a lot about tech issues too. And so, you know, big tech and censoring conservatives. So, so in your opinion, having watched all this and to where we are at this point, what do you think is the best thing we could be doing next as conservatives to fight back? Rachel Bovard: So we have, I think at this point we have to legislate this, you know, a lot of us don't, didn't start at that point in the beginning of this debate, because we've always relied on these sorts of things that the conservative movement has always relied upon. Like if we build our own platform, you know, if we build alternatives, if we try to boycott these platforms, they'll get the message and they'll reform. But what I don't think we accounted for was just how ubiquitous these platforms are in controlling our daily lives. Like there is no way to get off Google if you live in the modern world, every app on your smartphone runs on Google. You know, Google is, you know, tracking you across the web. Even if you're not using Google search, we didn't account for these things. And in many ways that's sort of the classic story of innovation and America in many ways is that, you know, we have a lot of innovation. That's what we built our economy to account for it. We love it. But at some point when that innovation reaches a tipping point, when it starts to actually change the nature of our social discourse, to put parameters around what we can and cannot say, to change how we interact with each other, how we vote, how we search for information, then that's the time where we usually take that innovation and we incorporate it into our values and traditions into our legal framework instead of simply allowing it to shape us. And I think we are, that is where we are in this debate. I think what happened to Parler was so instructive on how, you know, our alternatives will not be allowed to succeed because the point isn't to have alternatives, the left wants to control everything that we do wherever we're speaking. Doug Truax: Yeah, totally agree. Big tech is way too big. And it's like you said, it's a big ubiq- ubiquitous it's, everywhere. And we gotta make sure we fight back as much as we can. But so I have one, I had Emily Jashinsky on the show. We had the same topic about it is kind of like, well, it's so big, where do you go to get news now? There's, you know, you have the mainstream media is just, you know the normal news organizations are just crumbling as an institution. It's just horrible. So what, what do you see out there, where are you going to get your news? What, when your peers are asking you, you know, what do you do and where should I be going to, to figure out what's really going on? What do you tell them? Rachel Bovard: Well, Emily and I both write for the Federalist, which I think is a great, is a Doug Truax: Great, Rachel Bovard: Yeah, not the Federalist, but, you know, I think a lot of my peers anyway, which I think is very encouraging are turning off cable news, and they're starting to go to, again, sort of that those niche outlets, the Federalist, the blue, you know, blaze media, daily caller, but also beginning to follow, you know, individual reporters that they trust on platforms like substack, you know, going to YouTube channels if they're not, you know, banned and Rumble, if they are, you know, I think people are beginning to seek out trust that they've lost in the normal outlets. You know, because I think COVID has, I think unmasked sort of the establishment journalism for being in many cases, just an arm of, of the managerial elite. It's a propaganda machine on so many fronts, and it's not actually providing that sort of critical inquiry and feedback that that's what we expect from reporters. And we expect from news, but there are individuals who are doing it that I think my peers learned to trust. They trust their reporting. They think they're honest. And so they're following those people wherever they go. You know, this is sort of the Joe Rogan effect in many ways. You know, why people listen to Joe Rogan because they think he's an honest broker. And so I think that trust that used to be in institutions is now actually transferring to individuals. And so that's a really interesting dynamic, I think, in the media landscape, Doug Truax: It's like, who can you trust? And I think like what you're saying, if you trust the channel, then you never know what they're going to put on there. And it is, it does go back to, they're trying to make, you know, make money through the advertising and get, just get you to stay and push and fear and come back. We'll give you some more fear and you'll, you know, you'll, you'll keep paying us, watching the advertising. And so on that, you know, you mentioned the COVID thing and, you know, we're, I feel like what's happened here just like in the last couple of days is we've kind of got to that point now. It's like, all right, let's start re-evaluating what happened over the last couple of years. And the Johns Hopkins stuff is out now. And, and, you know, I have my opinions about how things have happened, especially for the younger generation. I was surprised too, at how compliant the lot of them got right out of the gate. And so maybe we could start there with the COVID piece, which were you surprised in, in your generation, how, you know, it used to be, Hey rebellion is good, but now it's like, oh, tell us what to do and we'll go and do it. It was, I was just surprised by the whole thing. Rachel Bovard: Yeah. I was surprised as well. Although, you know, it's an interesting generational question because I'm on the elder side of the millennials, they call us the geriatric millennials and we came of age, right. With 9/11. So I was a senior in high school in 9/ 1, and that sort of shaped our generation into a very, you know, sort of patriotic country first in many ways, I wouldn't say that that has carried over to like the younger millennials or the gen Zs, but for my generation, that's how it was. And so we weren't necessarily predisposed, I think, to be like our government's definitely lying to us here, even though, you know, you had the specter of the Iraq war, which I think galvanized many of us, you know, with a public health crisis, your first instinct is to be like, well, you know, let me, let me take this seriously for a little bit, at least. But then I think it became abundantly clear, you know, for many of us anyway, like what was actually happening, which is that we completely lost our minds. That coherent risk analysis was just not possible for these people anymore. Right. But you know, on the flip side of it, I think you do see some younger people that, you know, this sort of panic porn or, or this like living in fear and inflicting that fear on others, that's been their whole lives. That explains the sort of fragility, you know, ethos that you see in a lot of universities, in many cases, the elite institutions groomed. I think that generation to be the COVID tyrants, that they are to be enforcing their feelings and their, you know, opinions informed or not on everyone else and calling it violence when people don't agree. And that is a very dangerous way to live in society, right? When you have a ruling class that has that attitude. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are and who you're even seeing oddly enough, like the old hippies join in. You've seen it from like Neil young and, you know, Howard Stern of all people, you know, they, kind of grew up to become the man and that is distressing Doug Truax: And it's that attitude about, well, the government says it, we're all going to be in this together and we're all going to do it. And if we just do the together thing, we'll all get by it. And you know, if you're not participating, you're going down then. And I just, I've been shocked about the whole thing. It's just been really, it's really been sad to watch. I, I feel like we've just had this generational piece now where, you know, if you're just going to, if you're just going to go any, anything against the orthodoxy, then you know, we're going to, we're going to beat you down. And I just, it's, it's a, it's a bad place to be. And so... Rachel Bovard: I think, because it's not even, we're going to beat you down, we're going to expel you from polite society. It's not even like weird, you know, odd. It's like, you can't live with us. It's, it's very, discriminatory Doug Truax: And you talk about how people grew up and with government and things. I, had the thought for a long time that, well, we have this cool thing called the center for disease control. It's like a whole federal agency, and they're really smart in there and they're going to figure it out. And you know, when we got into this pandemic, I'm like, well, let's, the CDC is going to come out with something. It'll be, you know, this is exactly what the data's telling us. This is what you should do. But man, it's just turned into a disaster and like thousands and thousands of people working over there, what are they doing? You know, it's like what happened in this, in this scenario? Rachel Bovard: Yeah. The, one of the most stunning revelations from the pandemic has been the incompetence of our public health infrastructure. And I think the they've leaned into that and competence, which, which I think has bred such distrust of public health officials that I think that's going to linger for at least a generation, maybe more. And I, and I have, I think somewhat dire consequences for public health in America, because they've just been so incompetent and never admitted fault or humility or, you know, anything in that situation because that's how you restore trust, right? You say, oh, we got it wrong. You know, now, you know, we don't crack down on speech. We disagree with, we try to answer it. Those kinds of things. We haven't seen any of that behavior from our institutions. And that, like I said, that's going to be one of the lingering effects of COVID is, is the distrust of those institutions. Doug Truax: Yeah. They were incompetent coming into it. And nobody really quite knew how bad that was. And then it got on full display. And then like you said, they wouldn't humble themselves at all and say, well, maybe we got this wrong. We need to go this direction. It's just the continual doubling down. And now we've got the situation with the inflation is rampant because the dumping of the money. And I mean, we just like, it's going to keep, that's another show. We'll talk about the economy and some other show, but, but Hey, I just appreciate all that you do with your you're very courageous in your writing and saying the things that need to be said and really grateful that you came on the show and I'd love to have you back sometime. Rachel Bovard: Thanks so much for having me. I'd love to come back. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we can serve as can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First right A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe by texting FIRSTRIGHT 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3, 0 1 6, 1.

Doug talks to Nicole Solas, a mom fighting against CRT. Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. The weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, Founder, and President of Restoration PAC. Today we are blessed to have one of the most courageous parents. We know Nicole Solas of Rhode Island. All she wanted was information about our kindergarteners curriculum. The school hit her with a $74,000 bill and the largest teachers union in America sued her but she's not backing down. She symbolizes moms and dads all over the United States who are rooting out harmful leftist ideology being fed to our kids. Well, hi, Nicole. Thanks so much for coming on today. Nicole Solas: I thanks for having me. Doug Truax: All right. So very interesting story. I know our viewers are going to want to hear more and more about this, but first, just tell our audience a little bit more about yourself and you know, what you were doing before all this happened and, and, , and what you're doing here lately. Nicole Solas: Well, I'm a stay at home mom from Rhode Island, and I asked my school if they were teaching critical race theory and gender theory. When I enrolled my daughter in kindergarten, just a stay at home, mom, I stayed home to take care of my kids. And, I've never been involved in politics before. I'm not some political operative, I'm just a mom. And when I asked my school this question, they told me that they don't call children, boys and girls. They refrain from using gender terminology in the classroom, and they embed the values of gender identity into the classroom in every grade at an age appropriate level, um, which was kind of shocking to me. And then for history lessons, they ask kindergartners what could have been done differently on the first Thanksgiving? Um, it's a ridiculous question. It's confusing - adults can't answer it. It's obviously meant to shame them for their American heritage. So when I learned this, my school then told me to submit public records requests for all of my other questions that I had about critical race theory and gender theory being taught in my school district. When I did my school district turned around, threatened to sue me in a public school committee meeting. And then after they decided not to sue me after harassing me for five hours in a school board meeting, the teacher's union, the largest teacher's union in America then did sue me for submitting these public records requests. So here I am, you know, I just wanted to know what was being taught and my public school districts attacked me and then the teacher's union attacked me and I'm here because I'm fighting back and I don't think parents should be bullied by their government or a special interest groups just because they want to know what their kids are learning in school. Doug Truax: Yeah, absolutely. It seems like a no-brainer, but here you are. And again I, as I mentioned in the intro, you're one of the most courageous parents that I've ever heard of. So kudos to you for that. It's really wonderful. So if you go back to the very beginning and you, and you think about when you did request that, did you have any, , mean, what kind of led to it? Was there any inkling that you had as far as like, okay, I've heard some rumors about what they're doing and then you, you looked online or was there anything before that moment or, or is this, you said I'm going to figure out what's going on here? Nicole Solas: Well, my first red flag was when George Floyd died, my school district sent out a message of solidarity to the community. That's what they called it. It was an email or a posting on their website where they pledged allegiance to black lives matter. They declared that the school was systemically racist, that they stood with Breonna Taylor and George Floyd that they use like very highly politicized, radical language. Like we must have radical empathy. We must take action now so that happened before I enrolled my daughter in school, she was a little too young and, it wasn't until I enrolled her that I said, I wanted to see if they followed through on all of these promises to be this politicized, radical school district and sure enough, they did. And they're attacking me for wanting to learn more about it. Doug Truax: Wow, so you stood up and so the, the side of this I'm always interested in too. So what's it been like amongst, you know, the other moms in the neighborhood and your social circle and all that stuff. What's been the reaction, especially after you've got this moment where you're like, you said, five hours in front of the school board and all that stuff, when it really gets out there, what, what's it been like? Nicole Solas: I have had an outpouring of support. I'd only lived in my town for about five years. I didn't really know anybody in town. And now I know everyone who is on my side in my town. You know, they say that when you're retaliated against for, you know, adding up to your government that, you know, you'll be, ostracized will be opposite happened for me. I have more friends and allies than I've ever had in my life. And this is just not in my town. This is across my state and across the country. So I really encourage parents to ask questions and stand up to their school boards that they think that they're indoctrinating their children with racialized propaganda, because people are going to find you and they're going to want to work with you. And just don't be scared if you're retaliated against, because that's the beginning that isn't the end. Doug Truax: That's right. It comes a little bit with the territory, but I would make a quick commentary on something you said there that, that you kinda, I'm sure it was a moment where you're like, well, I'm a little nervous about this, but I'm going to do it anyway. And so you have the courage to do it. And then on the other side of it, you find out that there's all these people that were thinking like you're thinking, and they basically are saying, well, I really appreciate you doing this. And that's been universally my experience from going from I'm an entrepreneur business world, some corporate America stuff. And then you kind of like, okay, well I feel this way. I have to say something about it makes me a little nervous to begin with, but on the other side of it, same deal. Everybody says, oh, I'm so glad you said something about that. Been driving me crazy. Somebody somebody's got to do something! Right. And so that's what they all start to call us around. So, and I've, I've heard that repeatedly from people that, you know, basically it's conservatives now, because the lefties are trying to beat us down all the time, but it's the same thing with you. You jump in and suddenly there's a lot of folks, just even in your, I'm sure in the very beginning, right around you, right. That were just like, oh, I'm glad somebody is finally saying something. Nicole Solas: Yes. Um, and you know, I was lucky because, you know, I didn't plan on getting sued. I didn't land on my school district attacking me. I was just trying to do my due diligence. So what I did and I recommend that other parents do this is I started a private Facebook group where I was posting evidence about what I was finding in my school district. And then I let people in, if I believe that they were there in good faith, you certainly don't want to let in any saboteurs who were going to try to, you know, destroy your Facebook group. But I was lucky in that I had already had a support group rallied around me before I was attacked. So when it came time to go to that, you know, show trial, school, board meeting, I already had people who, who knew what this was really about. And, that was just sheer luck that that happened. Doug Truax: Yeah, that's great. And, and you know, what it always is too. I found in, in this time we're living in is when you start to get into some transparency and you start to take some things that like, Hey, you know what, let's share this with everybody. And somebody says, whoa, don't do that. That's always problem number one. Or you know, evidence, piece number one, that there's a problem here. So let's just get this out, , more and more. And that's what this has been, right. It's just like, they didn't want anybody calling them out on what they were doing. And they just live in their little bubble of like, you know, we're going, gonna do next. We're going to do this pledge and we're gonna do this and then push this stuff at the kids. And they think they get it in their minds that, oh, everybody wants this. And everybody loves this. And no, they don't. It just takes somebody to say, let's be transparent about this. Right? Nicole Solas: Right. And you know, I, I think they knew that everybody didn't want it. And I think that that's why they are not being transparent about it when people are acting like they have something to hide, they usually do have something to hide. And the push for transparency, I think, has really highlighted that there really is something to hide if they don't want to be transparent about what our kids are learning in school. Let's remember that what our kids are learning in school, this is not CIA classified information. It shouldn't be a government secret. So there's no reason why the government should want to keep it a secret. Doug Truax: That's right. Well, we live in a highly politicized time and a lot of people in the education system, don't think it's education, it's indoctrination, and they're trying to get your kid over to where they are. And boy, we see a lot of terrible stories nowadays, and it's gotta be more and more people like you standing up against it. And so, total frivolous lawsuit, all this stuff. So what's the, what's the current state of play with the school board, elections. I mean, especially relative to, you know, all this, all these, kind of followers you have now, and supporters is there now, you know, it's like, Hey, well, here's what we gotta do. We have to find the elected officials and get the bad ones out and get the good ones in, who can then, you know, start making the changes. Top-down that need to happen inside the actual organization. Where's all that. Nicole Solas: Well, we certainly need people to run for school board. We need conservatives or just really just level-headed people to run for school board. But the key to a successful campaign is raising money. And the reason why leftists have infiltrated our local elections is because they have special interest groups like the teacher's union, giving them money for their campaigns. You need all that money to get the message out about you. And you know, what you believe in and who you are. And if all that money is being funneled to people that are supported by the teacher's union, that then sort of have these unspoken promises that they're just going to do the bidding of the teacher's union. When they get into office, then that's, that's a really, you know, big hurdle to overcome, but you can overcome it if you start campaigning now and you start planning now. So you know, we need to get over the fear of running and we need to know that our local school district is, is really where the power is at because they're holding our kids hostage and we need to take our kids back. Doug Truax: Well that's right. And then somebody steps out just like what we're talking about before has the courage to do it. And then it's you, your friends, or maybe it is you, but so are your friends or whatever else say I'm with you. And then you say, Hey, spread the word and give me some money. And you know, that, that point you brought up about the teachers' unions so we have a real problem in our country. I don't have any problem with unions in the private sector, commercial unions, you know, they have an adversarial relationship with management. They want certain things, management wants another, they have to fight it out. Maybe they get them. Maybe they don't, maybe the company goes out of business. You know, there's all these it's, the incentives are there for them to work it out, but you have government employees. And now we're talking about teacher unions, but, and that's the most pervasive side of this, but it does across, it happens universally now about around government employees, where they basically have said, well, let's just recycle some union dues that are basically taxpayer dollars, go to give them their comp. They take a portion of that. Like you just said, they elect the people. They want who to are largely Democrats, and then they just do what they want. And so now we're in a place where that beast is eating us, just like what you just said. And we have got to put a stop to that. We have got to start saying government employee unions are a really bad idea. Nicole Solas: Yes you know, the teachers union, especially that they're really just a pac. They use, dues so they can further political agendas and lobby their political agendas and then campaign for, candidates that are going to further their political agendas. Now unions, they, they have a right to bargain for fair or fair pay. You know, that's originally why unions, came to be. But now we have teachers unions that are creating curriculum for schools that is far out of the scope of what a union is meant for when it comes to public school employees. And that's something that we really have to start looking at either legally or politically by saying, we don't want teacher unions in our school. Um, in my town, it was particularly corrupt because we had a teacher union organizer on our school board. And then in other parts of Rhode Island, the teacher's union has infiltrated all parts of government they're in our municipalities. They have, teacher union organizers in the Rhode Island department of education. So it's literally like they've planted their spies in all levels of our society. And they continue to push their agenda, at all costs. Really? Doug Truax: Yeah! Yeah, that's right. But they, they didn't, they didn't think through one thing. And that is this, you start messing with the kids, you're going to have to deal with the parents and that's, what's happening now, the parents, this is the time of the parents. Right. And, you know, so be it let them suffer. They need to, because what they've been doing to the kids and now to you suing you and all this stuff, I mean, it's just crazy. It's just crazy. So back to the curriculum piece. So what's your estimation right now on how widespread this is across the country. Nicole Solas: Um, I mean, I know it's widespread. I don't know one state that, that isn't dealing with curriculum problems in their school. I'm, I'm talking to parents all over the country on social media. I've made really good friends with, with other parents that are fighting this and we're sharing our ideas on how to fight this. So, you know, this is not limited to your local school board, you don't feel alone if you think this radical school board of yours is trying to isolate you. That's just their tactic to make sure that you don't gain political power yourself to fight them. But you know, this really does all come down to the teacher's union because they're the ones that are pushing out this critical race theory curriculum. We saw all summer that first, they were saying they weren't teaching critical race theory. And then they were teaching it. They actually have black lives matter curriculum on their website. Um, they have money set aside to silence their debaters about critical race theory. So this is a full sledged political machine that is fighting little parents like me. You know, I don't have institutional power, but this teacher's union that has, you know, over $300 million. And that's just one teacher's union, the NEA, they're trying to say that just me, a mom at home is some sort of aggressor or someone who, who actually has the means to, to fight them. And you know, it's really a shame that so many people have fallen for that trick. So... Doug Truax: So that's right. How dare you, how dare you stand up to them is what this is coming down to. It's like we were in charge, get outta here. That's how, that's their approach to this? Well, on that front of far as the school board elections and stuff, I definitely keep us posted. We're pretty sizeable political organization. Now we do, you know, bigger races and states and things like that. We are, we talked around here a lot about school board, especially after Loudon County in Virginia. I mean, this is like, it's the time now where we've got to really start saying, who's, who's going to be running these school boards and we need to do what you just said to who's on there. Now have all these school board people, has anybody ever voted for a Republican ever, you know, and then, then it's like, well, what do they do for a living? And, you know, I think we just have been, you know, I know my kids are grown now, but even at the time going through, I was kind of like, well, school boards, you know, but it's a total, total different deal now. And we have, we have to be all over it. So keep us posted on that. But so the last question I had for you is, so what's your advice then now that you've gone through all of this and advice to other parents who are out there thinking, oh, I gotta, I gotta figure out what's going on. What were, what, what should they do? And, now that you've learned some lessons, how would you do it differently? That kind of thing? Nicole Solas: Well, now that we know that they don't like getting public records requests, you should definitely submit public records request. This is the, this is the only way that you're going to know what is going on in school of public records requests, is it public records law are in many states, most of them. And it's a way for you to legally compel your school, to answer your questions in Rhode Island. They have 10 days to get back to me with an estimate for information, or they can just give me the information for free if they have any integrity and professionalism, but usually they'll charge you. But this is a way that you can peek into what they're doing until we have what we really want, which is academic transparency. Academic transparency legislation is something that all parents should be pushing for. There comes a point where you have to stop fighting with your school district and you have to then go to your legislature and say, look, the public records, law doesn't work. Parents. Aren't getting their information. School is wasting money, giving us estimates that we can't afford, and we need sunshine on what's happening in school. Now this would require schools to post all of their curriculum, materials and activities online. So that way parents don't have to submit these public records requests. You can just go on the computer and see what your school is doing. I'm actually testifying in Arizona on February 1st to tell the legislators my story of what happened when I simply asked questions, then how the public records request process was a barrier to me and not a window. And I'm hoping that that will get the ball rolling in many other states to push for academic transparency. So that way parents can finally know what their kids are teaching and then make an informed decision on whether they want to enroll them in that school district or some other educational option, whether it be homeschooling charter school or private school. Doug Truax: Yeah for sure. And that transparency, you know, sunlight's the best disinfectant. You got to get it out there and see what's going on. We're doing a lot of work with the voter rolls around the country, and it's not easy, that's public information, but they don't want to give it up and they're going to charge you. But to your point, that's exactly right. They know once they get the idea that these people are never going to go away, they'll just put it up because they're not going to want to mess with it anymore, but we gotta, we gotta cross that line and it takes people like you. And we're going to this out to our audience obviously, and encourage our, our folks to go out and do exactly what you've been doing. But Hey, really great stuff. I really appreciate your courage, Nicole, and good luck out there in Arizona. And we're going to, you know, seek to have you back on and give us updates about how it's going. Okay, Nicole Solas: Great. Thank you so much. Doug Truax: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't forget by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First Right A new kind of news summary without the liberal slant .Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting FIRSTRIGHT to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Andrew Klavan, prolific conservative screenwriter and author Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right podcast. A weekly conservative news show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, founder, and president of Restoration PAC. Today is our great blessing to have one of the most talented conservatives we've ever had on the podcast, Andrew Klavan. Andrew's a prolific best-selling author of fiction and non-fiction books. He's also a screenwriter, an essayist, and a podcaster on the popular The Daily Wire platform. All right, Andrew, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Andrew Klavan: That's great to be here. Thanks. DT: So I would consider you the classic high functioning human. You have to book after book it's, you've got full-time jobs, SAS, podcaster, you know what, tell us about how you, how you managed all this. Where do you find the time to do all of these things? AK: You know, when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Raymond Chandler. He had a big effect on my life and on my work. And one of the things that Raymond Chandler great, great American mystery writer, obviously, and one of the things he wrote about, he said that you should, a writers should give four hours a day when he does nothing but write. And he said, you don't have to write, but you can't do anything else. Uh, and I took that advice very seriously when I was 14 years old. And I started doing that, uh, every day, whether I was in school or not, or whatever else I was doing. Uh, and it, it actually gave me a lot of discipline. And so I maintain that throughout my entire life. I wake up very early in the morning and I don't sleep much. And, uh, and I get to work and for four hours, at least I don't do anything but write. And, uh, that has worked out very well for me. DT: Wow. Well that explains it then. But you would have to like what you just said though, you don't get a lot of sleep too, so you gotta be, you gotta be prepared for that side of it too, but that's the old, uh, the Malcolm Gladwell, right? 10,000 hours, you do four hours a day. You're going to get to 10,000 pretty quick. And so you're, you're good at what you do obviously, and that's, that's a huge contributing factor. That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, AK: No, it really has worked out well. DT: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So, um, so culture, so you do a lot of commentary on the culture. It's, it's, uh, it's one of my favorite topics because I think it's the, I think it's the most important thing that's happening now and this, and this age that we're in. I think I know for, for my generation, I think we kind of took a lot of it for granted growing up, especially politically and just how things were kind of steady for decades. And now it's, it's all up in the air. And so talk, talk to you, what's your take on the culture now and, and how do you, uh, give advice to conservatives on how to, how to deal with the situation we're in and what's the best thing they can be doing at this point? AK: Well, the culture is really in a low point. And when I say that I'm talking about the arts, but also I think the general culture, which is the way we live and the things we think, and those things are related. Uh, the, the woke revolution has destroyed the movies, publishing, music. Uh, I think that right, it's very hard to find anything that's worthwhile, especially if it's made by young people. Uh, they now have staffing rules in Hollywood where you have to have 40 to 50% minorities in the room. Uh, no everybody is afraid to speak their minds to say what they really think. You know, you can just be canceled like that. And so what you're getting is this very stale, imitation culture. It's not really the arts at all. And the grand days we had for awhile, uh, the golden age of TV that we had when we have the Sopranos and the Shield and The Wire, and one great show after another, uh, those days are gone and they're not going to come back until, uh, we on the right start to contribute to the culture and start to compete. We're not going to change their minds. We're not going to change their business. We've got to start building our own businesses and compete. And the problem that conservatives have with the culture with the arts a lot of times is they don't understand the conservative art doesn't look like conservative life. I live a conservative life by my happily, married, devoted husband, devoted family guy, hard worker, as you said, all those things, but nobody wants to read about that. That's not what makes a story. A story is Macbeth. The story is murder. A story is adultery. A story is, is the things that we do that expose the human heart and those make for exciting stories. And also for, uh, stories of depth. If every story is going to be a sort of Christian candy land, uh, where everything works out well, because we have faith. And even if you die, you go straight to heaven is great. We're not going to be able to make good art. We're not going to be able to make art. That looks like life. The founders of this country, we're not watching Doris Day movies. They were reading Medea, they were reading Shakespeare. They were reading Sophocles. And that's how they had that deep, deep knowledge of the human heart that helped them to build a system in which our sins could actually work in our favor because we had all these power structures fighting with one another. So conservatives have got to loosen up. They've got to understand that the arts are not a place of certainty. They're a place of experimentation of culture criticism, uh, of all the things that the arts have always done, because if we don't contribute to the arts, and if we don't show people the reality of who people are, this continual drum beat, uh, that we can change our, our, uh, sex that we might just by thinking, uh, that we, that there is no moral order, uh, that there's no moral life, that there's no penalty for crossing the moral boundaries. All those things at the left have been selling for 50 or 60 years are going to become what people think is true and it's going to be ruinous. DT: Oh, and that's a great point. You made about this concept of, if we're going to get involved in this, there's, there's certain battles we're not going to win. Like in terms of people, we're not going to convince, you said that it's like, you have to recognize that we just have to get into it. And it's not the end. All of like one day, everybody's going to say, oh, you guys were right. And we're all going to change. You have to participate. Right. And, and, and that point that you made this a really great point about the founders recognize, obviously we live in a fallen world. And so you have to take that into account. You can, it's all going to be, you know, rainbows, butterflies all the time, no matter what you do. And so you have to be prepared for that and live in it. AK: Conservatives, know this when they're watching old stuff, because conservatives by nature, like old stuff. So if they're watching King Lear and the guy's eyes are put out on stage, they don't even blink. But if they're watching the Sopranos and they say, why all the bad language and violence well, because it's dealing with mobsters and that's the way they are. And that's going to tell us more about the human heart than a Doris Day movie. DT: You're making me feel a lot better. Yeah, absolutely. You're making, yeah. Right, right. You're making me feel a lot better about watching Breaking Bad twice, you know? Well, I'm from New Mexico. So I kinda, I relate to the whole thing too. So, so, uh, you're, you're this prolific writer, uh, lots of fiction. And non-fiction, so just talk us through in your four hours a day or more, how does that work flow? Uh, what does it look like when you're doing fiction versus nonfiction? What speak to that difference there? AK: Well, usually what I try to do is I try to do different parts of a project at a time. So if I'm writing a one thing, I might research something else because it's just too much to write through through an eight hour day. Uh, and, and, you know, I love writing fiction let last year, I guess it was because of the lockdown. All my speeches and appointments were canceled. And I actually wrote two short books, but two books nonetheless, and one was non-fiction and one was fiction and the nonfiction was just completely immersive. Uh, it was a very, very powerful, spiritual experience. It was a book about, uh, you know, reading poetry and the gospels, and that's going to come out in April, it's called The Truth and Beauty, and that's going to come out. And then the other book was just so much fun. I love writing fiction. I love telling stories. I love writing the crime novels that I write. And so there is a kind of different energy to it. Um, I have to usually do some very, very big rewrites on my non-fiction. I have a tendency to throw every idea on the table. Uh, my wife comes in, rolls her eyes and just cuts out half the book most of the time. Uh, whereas with fiction, I've gotten a little bit more expert over the years. I've done a lot of it. Uh, and I can usually get nail it pretty quickly. Uh, and, or at least know that I've gone off the rails. So it is very different. It's very different. I love them both, but it's, it's, it's slower to do nonfiction because of all the research involved DT: Well, and you got the, you got the wife factor. You gotta go that comes in and says, no, we're not. Don't do that. AK: I have the best writers wife youre supposed to have . They have to be without her, without her. I would be living in a dumpster. DT: Yeah. Maybe next podcast we'll have her on instead of you. We're good. We'll get it. We'll bring, We'll bring her in for sure. So, all right. Um, so, uh, this book, I haven't, I, I must confess I haven't read it, but it's, uh, so I'm a follower of Jesus. So you're the blessed of the most blessed of all people in my mind, a messianic Jew. So you've got this book, uh, The Great Good Thing: A secular Jew comes to Faith in Christ. So love to hear about that, how it was received, the story there. AK: Oh, it's been, it's been a wonderful, wonderful experience. It came out, I don't know, six or seven years ago, and it's still selling quite well. I'm still getting, um, a lot of people who call me and say, write me and say that it has moved them to seek for God in a new way. And I think one of the things that's so appealing to people about it is it's a 35 year journey. I was 49 when I came to Christ. And so I, I went down every possible false road. You can go down at sometime, you know, finding God made me so happy and finding Christ, made me so joyful. I sometimes turn to God kind of accusingly and said, why did you let me take so long? I know I'm a Jew, but why did I have to wander 40 years in the wilderness before you brought me into the promised land? And I think the reason that he wanted to do that, he wanted me to explore every wrong philosophy. And I think that it has been very moving to people because they see themselves. And it's so funny because I get letters all the time from people who say, you know, our lives are exactly the same, you know, I'm from Minnesota and I grew up a Presbyterian and you're from the east coast and you grew up a Jew, but our lives were exactly the same. And I think that that's the effect of, of having done so much wrong, uh, that anybody can recognize, uh, my path and their path. And, and it's been really gratifying to have that happen. DT: Yeah. That's wonderful. And that comment you made about why did it take so long that prayer? I was, I was 31 when I came to Christ and I've kind of same thing. Uh, but I also know, you know, you read how God dealt with the Jews and, you know, and Deuteronomy that, Hey, you wandered for 40 years, but you didn't, you didn't, uh, your feet, didn't swell. You, your sandals didn't wear out. You didn't go hungry. So isn't it the same kind of thing that you look back and you think God made all these mistakes, but God was still taking care of you along the way. AK: You know, one of the strangest things that happened when I finished my memoir The Great Good Thing was I looked at it and I thought, oh, like, God was so obviously they're almost present. I mean, there were tons, there were people whose names were Christian who moved in here and just all, all throughout, there was all this kind of a messaging going on. I didn't see it all until the book. And I thought like, oh, what an idiot? You know, he's, you know, he's kind of slapping me around. Well, what is that? I don't know. But it's, it's a lot more obvious in retrospect. DT: That's great. That's great. That's good to hear. Well, uh, it sounds like a great book. I'm definitely gonna take a run at it. Um, okay. So, uh, COVID and the handling of this crazy pandemic it's been, you know, you were talking a minute ago about how so much got canceled in your life last year. And, uh, you know, hopefully we're getting to a place where we're moving on, but, uh, you know, speak to your overall impressions of the pandemic. And then, uh, especially the angle of, do you think we were too compliant in general as we went through this? AK: Yes. I mean, you know, I think it took us by surprise in the sense that when it started, we didn't know anything, you know, and when you don't know anything, that's very frightening. We know there can be a terrible, a plague and people can die and especially vulnerable people can die. So at first, when they said they were talking about 15 days, uh, to make sure that the hospitals don't over get overwhelmed and that all made sense to me, I was not worried about that. Friends of mine said to me, you know, once you give the government that kind of power, then never give it back. They were right. I was wrong. We should have worried right away, the constant, constant drum beat of fear, uh, that, especially from the news media, which has just been absolutely shameful. And one of the most moments with the news media to my mind was when Trump, uh, got sick and he came out and he said, look, don't be afraid. Don't let it dominate your life. All the news people were like, that's a horrible thing to say, of course you should be afraid. Of course you should let it dominate your life. Well, no, no, this is not it. You know, like there are, you know, death is there for us all. We're all gonna die. Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to die now, but you have to live. You have to live. I just stopped after a while I retired from the pandemic. Uh, I got my vaccine vaccines. I believe in the vaccines. I don't believe in mandates, but I do believe that the vaccines were a good thing. And then I thought I'm done. I'm just done. And in that time I saw my grandson take his first steps. I saw, uh, you know, my, I went to my son's engagement party. I saw all these things that were life to me. And to tell me I should've missed those because I might get sick is to tell me that there's nothing more to life than being alive and that's insane. And so what I'm really disappointed in two things, I'm disappointed in the number of Americans who are not just hiding behind their masks and indoors, but are insisting that everybody else hide too, insisting that somehow it's selfish to live your life. I'm really disappointed in them. And I am super disappointed. I got to tell you. I'm super disappointed in the church. And when I say that, I mean the mystical church, I'm, I'm disappointed in the churches that shut down that said the government had the right to tell them not to worship, um, disappointed, especially for Catholics, by the way, who depend on getting the body and blood of Jesus Christ from their priest. Uh, you know, they just went home. They just went home and it was as if they, they themselves did not believe in the things that they were preaching. And I was really disappointed in that. And I think that it has revealed a lot of weakness, a lot of fear, a lot of materialistic assumptions that if we die everything's over and therefore life, you know, is the only thing there is. Um, it's been, it's been, uh, a sad incident. And the one thing that has saved us in this country is federalism. Uh, the fact that Ron DeSantis can run a country, run a state, uh, with common sense while New York goes down the drain. And that is just a good, that's the experiment, the laboratory of freedom, where we can see what works and what doesn't. DT: And that's why we're not Australia. Thankfully you've watched because I mean, that's what happens. It's like a state and they got complete control. Um, I couldn't agree more too, on that comment you were making about the, about the church. And I, one of the things I talked to friends about, and also pastors, as well as letting the government encroach way too much on the church, just in general, you know, you get the, you know, everybody's afraid for their 5 0 1 C3 status. Now, uh, Christian schools, we had some of this going on right here, where we are outside of Chicago, where it's like, well, the Christian schools, they didn't, they didn't play along exactly with mask mandates and everything else. And so immediately the state is like, well, we're going to pull your accreditation and all this stuff. So we have this extreme mixing now in different ways of the church and the government. And I think it was on full display when the government says everybody, including the churches, you got to do this. And they just went along with it. It was, I agree with you. It's very disappointing. AK: It really was. And it made you feel, I mean, what we believe in is supernatural in the sense that there's nature. And then there's something above nature where the moral universe is taking place. And it was as if they just ceased to believe in that. And it ceased to see themselves as outside the world, as something, as an alternative to the world. And I think that that's the effect of power. I think that the church in this country had power for so long that they got used to it. Uh, they want to be relevant. I go by churches that have black lives matter signs and gay pride signs up there. And my feeling about that is, Hey, believe whatever you want to believe, but do not tell me that the latest political movement is what the gospels are all about. Uh, you know, just, you can believe you can have any politics you want, but do not tell me that the gospels, uh, are endorsing that political stance, because that is not offering an alternative to the world. That's becoming the world. And I fear very much that many, many, many American churches have done that. DT: Yeah. It's the becomes the crossover into that relevancy. Like what you're talking about, which is oftentimes code for a, we got to grow the church and we've got to get more money in here. And, you know, uh, I just say, you know, do what God wants you to do. He'll grow it. If, if he wants it to grow, AK: That's bingo. DT: Stick to the plan, stick to the plan. So, um, so you got your Friday podcast on Daily Wire. The Andrew Klavan show. So you, I would say you're not the garden variety conservative with talking points, you know, you've got your own style and everything. So just talk us through how you would describe your podcast and, and you know, the format and how you, how you get your enjoyment out of doing it the way you do it. AK: Yeah, no, I love doing it especially now. And now it's once a week, it's, it's been much more, uh, I think it's a really rich show. I, you know, I'm really pleased with, with what I'm doing. What I try to do is I try to take a look at the, the gray areas and the big, the big picture I I'm not into. Uh, you know, I make fun of the left all the time, and now they've gotten so crazy. They're easy to make fun of, but I'm not making fun of the people who vote for Democrats. I understand that they have their choices and they have their points of view. And it's only serves the powerful for us to hate one, another black and white men and women, gays and straight. It only serves the powerful, if we're at each other's throats and Americans are so much more tolerant and so much more open-minded than our news media, our academies and our politicians. So what I try to do is just put everything in a real life context. Uh, yeah. Uh, is there a right and wrong? Yes, but is everything black and white? Uh, are we always on the right side? Is everything we think, right? No. And do we need to be angry all the time? No, we don't. So I try to look at things. Uh, first of all, I try to point out the things are kind of hilarious. I mean, you know, the corruption is, is funny in a way, because, uh, the human, we were made to be like the angels, but we're such clowns that it's kind of like, you know, watching history is like watching a guy in a tuxedo fall into a mud bottle. It's just funny, you know? And so I try and keep that, that, uh, very much in the forefront. I always say we're laughing our way through the fall of the Republic, but I also try to remind people that it's not enough to point out that the other guy is a jerk. You have to be saying something, you have to be offering a vision of life. It doesn't have to be a plan. It doesn't have to be a bill. Doesn't have to be a law. It has to be a vision of how it, what it means to live and what it means to live in love and what it means to live in joy. Because if, if politics is going to make you angry all the time, if it's just going to make you sour, uh, if, if it's just going to turn you into a, uh, kind of Twitter raving, you know, uh, lunatic don't do it, don't do it. Do something else. Think of something else, because you should be, this is it. This is our life. You know, there's a life to come, but this is the life here. You want to be a joyful. And when I say joyful, I don't mean happy. Uh, because sometimes sad things happen. What I mean is invested in life and believing in life. Uh, and so that's, that's kind of the thing I'm trying to get across. I talk about the culture. I talk about the arts. I talk about, uh, politics too, but all of it in the context of what your life is supposed to be like, uh, so that sort of the people are just not waking up every day and thinking, you know, I know, I know, you know how conservatives talk conservatives are always saying, it's over, it's done. Forget it. We're done. We're toast. It's finished. And I'm like, yeah. You know, we've been saying that for like almost 300 years now. Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe there's another, another day. Yeah. DT: Maybe we'll be okay. That's a great point. And I think that you're just calling people back to a place where we used to get to easier. I think that this time we live in with the, with the technological boom, and I always say, we've got to put our phones down and turn the TV off, go back to church, you know, turn back to God. You'll get back to what the reality. And I think that's what you're drawing people to. It's like, Hey, you know, life is not supposed to be this rage machine that you feel all the time. It's just, it's supposed to be some good, lots of good, you know, some, some good, funny moments. And, and, and they're out there. And I, and I like what you're saying too. And, and this is something I've always said about the political side at least, is that when they crossed that Rubicon and they just get ridiculous, it's time to ridicule the policies and, you know, that's what, you're good at that. Right. And that's why like the death of comedy and all that's going on right now, I'm like, oh, no, we can't do that because we have to have this space in here where it's just so great. Once they get to this place, you don't even really have to like, make a policy argument anymore. I mean, it's good to have a good alternative policy, but you can just be like, look at this thing. Let's all ridicule it together and laugh at it together. AK: And it is, it is really funny. I mean, sometimes I, you know, I, I'm a, I'm a writer, not a performer. So sometimes even when I read my own material on the air, I crack myself up because, because there's so nuts. I mean, there's, so this stuff that they believe, the stuff they're trying to teach our kids, it's so nuts. And I think all of that stuff falls apart in the long run. You just want to fall, it to fall apart sooner rather than later. But yeah, listen, you know, the thing that, the thing about life is sometimes it is tragic sometimes it's great, but it's, it's always beautiful. And I think that you can forget that very easily when you're screaming at the guy across the aisle. DT: Yeah, that's right. Gift from God. If you're going to live the way he wants you to live, you've got to think about it the right way and live it out daily. Well, Hey, I really admire all your work and it's a lot of work. So like I said, I that's, that's, it's amazing. It's, it's really good at what you do and, and really appreciate you coming on today. We'll keep track of everything that you're doing. Look forward to the next, what was the name of the next book you've got coming out? You said AK: It's called, it's called The Truth and Beauty. It's out in April. And you can pre-order it now, which is very helpful. If you feel like it's really DT: We'll do that. We do that. We got, we got podcasts books floating around here a lot, send them out to our friends too. So. All right. Good. Well, thanks so much for coming on Andrew. Really appreciate it. AK: It's a pleasure. Thanks a lot. DT: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America First Right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant. Every morning in your inbox, always free subscribe by texting FIRSTRIGHT to 3 1 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word to 30161 more.

Doug talks to Tony Heller, "climate change" debunker and scientist Doug Truax: Welcome to the First Right Podcast a weekly conservative new show brought to you by Restoration PAC. I'm Doug Truax, Founder, and President of Restoration PAC. Today we are blessed to have a guest that we've wanted to talk to for some time. Tony Heller is perhaps the nation's most influential climate change to bunker. Tony is an incredibly accomplished guy who does all this without any corporate or big money support. Well, Hi Tony. Thanks so much for coming on. Tony Heller: Yeah. Hi, it's great to be here. DT: It's great to have you here. So you've got this really interesting background, a geologist electrical engineer, master debugger, originally a, climate, global warming believer until you dug into everything. So it's really helpful. Just, just give our viewers a quick summary of your background and kind of how you got to where you are today. TH: Yeah, I started out as a geologist, um, out of college. Got my degree in geology. Um, did quite a few interesting projects at Los Alamos labs on volcano research. Um, I did nuclear waste disposal, geothermal energy, quite, quite a few different things, but I realized after a few years when the price of oil crashed in the early 1980s, that geology was kind of a hopeless profession. So went off and did other things. I worked as a wilderness ranger for the forest service taught school, and public and private schools for a number of years. TH: Then I went back to college, got, studied computer science in Northern Arizona university. Then I went to Rice University, got a master's in electrical engineering. And I worked on microprocessor design for many years and then branched out into graphics, um, got into software eventually, but my passion has always been science. So on the side I was, I was always interested in global warming. I was introduced to it by my boss at Los Alamos around 1980, and I was a true believer in it. And in 2001, they were, I was living in Colorado and we were having a terrible drought and I was coaching soccer in the city of Longmont, shut down the soccer fields. So I went to a city council meeting and told them, look with this global warming thing going on. This drought's just going to get worse. So you might as well just accept the fact that the fields are going to be in bad shape from now on let the kids play, you know, kids in Brazil plan and, you know, asphalt or dirt, and they've got great players. So they listened, they believed me and they opened up several soccer fields. So we were able to have her soccer matches, um, that year.And then of course the drought ended and, and over the next few years I started realizing that the trends were not going the direction they were supposed to Colorado was getting much wetter, um, and greener and getting a lot more snow. So I started looking into it and I, and I was horrified at what I saw about how the data was being handled by government agencies like NASA and NOAA. They were, they were abusing the data very badly. So I looked into it more and more. I just came to realize quickly that the total global warming thing was a huge propaganda campaign. And I became interested. Why? So it's been my passion. I had been working most of the time since then, but, I was probably been putting in, you know, average of six to 12 hours a day on this for the past 14 years and uncovered all kinds of astounding stuff. Now I realize the things, just a giant scam. You know, the things you hear now about global warming don't have anything to do with the reality. I got to know some very famous scientists like, Dr. Bill gray at Colorado State University, who is the leading, tropical meteorologist in the world. And also the guy who invented modern hurricane forecasting. And the horror stories, He told me about how he was mistreated by Al Gore. In 1993, when Al Gore became Vice President and he invited Dr. Gray to a global warming conference in DC and Dr. Gray responded, he'd be happy to come to the conference, but he does not believe her in Gore's theories. And he got his funding cut off. He'd gotten money from NOAA every, every year, since the 1960s. And then he got his funding cut off, never got another penny out of the government, and this is how they control the academic community. Everyone in the academic community knows that if you want to get government grants, you have to go along. And tow the line in, and there's only a few people who are bold or honest enough, or brave enough and have the ability financially to do it. Unfortunately, Dr. Gray was one of those. So he wasn't in, he was an incredible influence on me right up until his death five years ago. And, um, he's sorely missed. He was, he was in a giant of a man in every way. He was originally wanted to be a baseball player for the Washington baseball team, but he suffered a knee injury in high school and then ended up having to be a meteorologist and stuff well much to our benefit and much to yours. DT: And you have, uh, you have picked up where he left off in many ways, I suppose. And I got to tell you, I just I mentioned this to you before we started, how much I love the videos and, and any time I'm with somebody and we get into this climate piece, I always begin with, "so there's this guy, Tony Heller. And he has these great charts and these great videos." And let me explain some of it to you. And so I don't, you know, I paraphrase and do my best, but here we have you. So, so having said all that, we're going to let you in eight different charts. I got some slides we'll be running through, right, right. Quick here. And, uh, we'll, we'll keep going through them. As we discuss this, we're going to have you describe in eight charts, how this whole climate change thing is a fraud. So let's begin, this first one, uh, kick us off Tony. TH: Yeah, this one's my favorite. Um, this is a graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels measured at the Mauna LOA observatory in Hawaii, which is a very good location. It's at high altitude. It's, it's in the middle of the ocean. It's far away from any cities. So it's fairly accurate record of carbon dioxide levels. It goes back to 1960 and you can see how, um, the levels have been increasing over the past 60 years. Um, and, and increasing an upwards. It's an exponential curve upwards. And I've annotated on the graph. The red, the red annotations are mine. Um, all of the different climate agreements, going back to the Rio agreement 30 years ago, it's every year governments get together and they have these big climate meetings and they may call these big promises to cut back on CO2, but they've done nothing. They've accomplished nothing. They, the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase at an accelerating pace. And even the lockdown last year had no impact on the growth of CO2. So all these meetings they're having and they get together and they, they talk about saving the planet. It's, it's garbage, they're not doing anything. And they're just having boondoggles and nice places. It gives them good publicity. Gives them political cover. They say, they're solving this climate crisis, but they're accomplishing absolutely nothing. DT: It goes back to what you said a little bit ago about the funding. TH:Yeah. DT: And towing the line. And you know, we, around here, we call it big green and it's a massive thing now. And you got to, if you're going to participate and get your dollars, you know, you gotta, you gotta bend the knee, you know? And so that's what some of this is too. So, all right, let's go to the next slide. TH: Yeah. This graph shows, energy the proportion of energy being used by the world by different types. And you can see that coal oil and natural gas have increased tremendously and race in years. You know, we hear all this propaganda that fossil fuels are being replaced, but the exact opposite is happening. But if you look at the very top, there's a very narrow slice for renewables, which have hardly made any progress at all in recent years, you know, maybe add from 1% up to 3%. So 97% of the world's energy supply is not coming from renewables. It's coming from other sources, yet we constantly hear. This propaganda, that renewables are going to power the world. You know, we're going to be able to power the world with wind and solar, and it's complete nonsense. It's only producing 3%. If they're successful in shutting down fossil fuels like Joe Biden says would be a huge catastrophe. Literally billions of people would be dead in a matter of a few months because we depend on other energy sources to survive. You know, and we saw that in Texas, in February, their wind turbines froze up. They hadn't maintained their fossil fuel infrastructure properly. Huge amounts of people were without, without power. They didn't have electricity. The gas lines froze up and they've been building all of these lots of all electric houses recently. And in many places they're mandating that all electric.So when the power grid goes down, people are going to freeze and the, their government policies are leading us towards disaster. And it's based on a completely false belief that, that renewables are making a lot of progress and that they can successfully power the country and power the earth. And they can't, they're not reliable, you know, when it gets really cold or when it gets really hot, renewables tend to fail right at the worst possible times and Texas proved that in a very dramatic and deadly fashion, now last February. DT: Right! TH: You need the fossil fuels for reliability. DT: Right! It's just become like a big marketing ploy, almost in the subsidies and everything, again, back to the funding and the money and all that stuff. And then all the talk about what we're going to help the world. Well, you're not going to help, you know, India and some of these other countries that were, Hey, go to solar panels. It's not going to happen. They, they gotta, they gotta develop, like we developed and we gotta be smart about it, but this is, you know, it's fantasy land to talk that way. So I totally get it. All right, let's go to the next slide then. TH: So yeah, so this is shows on the left is Arctic Sea ICE. This one, these, these maps are the national snow and ice data center in Boulder chose Arctic Sea Ice on January 4th, 1991. And the, and the one on the right shows January 4th, this year, you can see there's essentially no difference. We have the same extent of Arctic ice. We had 30 years ago. So we ever every day in the news, if you, if you do a Google search for Arctic ice melt and you see the Arctic ice has disappeared, the polar bears are drowning, but it's not true. DT: Right! TH: There's, there's been no trend in Arctic sea ice over the last 15 years there wasn't there wasn't, there was a downward trend for awhile, but right now today, Arctic sea ice extent is the highest it's been for 18 years for this state. DT: Right. Again, the mass marketing and people just believing it. Uh, and, uh, here's the truth. Okay. So this is great. Next slide. TH: Okay. Yeah. So this is CO2 emissions, relative the relative change in CO2 emissions by China and the United States. And you can see the United States has been flat. It's actually down. It's been going down for the last 20 years, but China's emissions are skyrocketing. So we always hear, you know, we hear these claims from Democrats that we can control the climate. You know, if we cut back our CO2 emissions, um, you know, we can save the us has nothing to do with it. We're we're we only produce about 15% of CO2 emissions. China has got is their usages. Their production is greatly increasing. They're massively increasing their, their usage of coal. They're building hundreds of new coal-fired power plants. So the United States could disappear off the face of the earth, and it would have no impact on either CO2 emissions, indefinitely, no impact on climate. And John Kerry admitted this. He said that the U.S. doesn't control it. And without having China and Asia on board, the United States can't accomplish anything. DT: So once again, it's just a scam and we see so many of these leftists, they know this is true, but they're so afraid of the Chinese. And then they won't even admit that we're doing a great job of it. Uh, it's just, yeah, it's so frustrating to watch this happen. And, uh, you know, we're living through it right now with COVID don't wanna upset the Chinese. So, you know, it's like, okay, that's crazy. All right. Uh, moving on here to the next. Now we're going to really start getting into how this is kind of how the, the mechanics of this, how they're perpetuating this fraud. TH: Yeah. So there's, this graph shows United after this graph shows daily and average daily maximum temperatures for the United States going back a hundred years. And you can see there's been a downwards trend. The hottest years in the United States were during the 1930s, by far during the dust bowl, it was so hot and dry in the Great Plains and millions of people fled the great Plains and moved to California, which John Steinbeck wrote about in the Grapes of wrath. Unfortunately, high school kids don't read that anymore. So they don't know that part of history, the United States was much hotter 90 years ago. And temperatures have been trending downwards as a chosen the graph since then. DT: Yeah, absolutely. That's the reality of it right there. And then we're going to get into, so this is also the, um, that was the day to day data, which is the most accurate that you've said before. It's like, you have to look at what happens on a day-to-day basis as opposed to this, you know, when they start extrapolating into the months and the years and things like that. TH: Right. Well, yeah. Could you go back to the other graph for, for just, okay, so this is the actual measure, temperature data, right? This is all, this is all from NOAA. This is publicly available data, and it's, they've got about a little more, almost 1300 stations, um, in the United States. And this is their actual measure data, but the next slide is the data they relate to the public. What they do is they alter it before they release it to the public. So what they do is they tamper with the data and they turn that cooling trend into a longterm warming trend and it's fake. So this is what the public sees. They see this, oh, wow, we're heating up really fast in this hockey stick. But the data is fake. The actual data shows that we're cooling and they don't tell people about it. They don't tell people they're manipulating it. So people look at their graphs and they say, wow, this is the government. This is what the thermometer show, but it's not what the thermometers show. The thermometer show that the United States has been cooling in the United. And the reason the United States data is extremely important because we have, by far the best long-term temperature data in the world, um, we've had a very stable society, at least until recently, for, for the know, for the past 125 years, there weren't any wars fought in the United States. So there was great disruptions in other countries due to wars, but the United States, we got this wonderful day-to-day temperature record, which just doesn't exist in very many other places. You know, there's a few other countries that have very good records like Germany, Japan, and parts of Australia. But for the most part, there's a huge void over most of the planet. So the United States temperature record is critical. It shows cooling and they manipulate it to show warming, which is the story which the government agencies want to present. DT: Yeah. And I think that's the really interesting point that you made is that, that daily graph that's NOAA, that's that, you know, it's not you making this up. This is from the government readings of the stations. And I remember watching a video of yours too, where you kind of got into this, you know, the manipulation relative to, there's been a decrease in stations. And so they take what would have been as a station previously. It's not there anymore, but they insert their modeling onto that one that doesn't exist. And that's how they're starting to get it to go up. TH: Right. DT: Am I remembering that correctly? TH: Yeah, that's correct. So what they, they've lost about one third of their data since the late 1980s. I don't understand why, but stations are disappearing and some slight of stations don't report every month. And so what I've seen is that the, all of the warming they're creating in the over the last 40 years has been de to just making up fake data for those missing stations. They report data for every months wehether for all 1,281 stations, whether there was any actual data or not. And this data is, and for the stations that didn't report it's fake. And actually in recent years, it's almost half of the data is fake at this point. Yeah. DT: Yeah. That's right. So they're taking data that doesn't exist because they're not getting it in from certain stations and there, and being like, well, you know what, if we did get it in based on what we believe, this is what we think the temperature would be. And then there you go. And then they show that graph to everybody. So it's like, they're building the lie into the data. That's, they're extrapolating their lie into the larger data set. When the, when the smallest one, the most accurate one is relatively flat. TH: Yeah. Well, it's downwards actually right down with the idea of the actual data's down. Whereas, but they, they make, they, they assume that everything's warming half of the data is fake. So they just create this fake warming trend, which does not exist the whole thing's a total fraud. DT: Yeah. Well, again, thank you for doing this. So, I'm really, I was really, I knew this was a fraud and then I came across your stuff and I'm like, Hey, there it is good. So, all right, next slide. All right. Uh, so this is, uh, well, you can get into this. This is, this is the stations as well. Yeah. TH: So this, this graph shows the difference between the actual measured data between the raw data they report and the actual measured data. So you can see the temperatures in the past, like going back to 1920, they've called them about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. And last year they warmed at about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. So they've created three degrees of warming by tampering with the data. This is the data tampering you're seeing right here. So there's a completely fake three degree warming trend they've made over the past century, which doesn't exist. DT: Yeah. And you've even got some and even got some Republican and conservative say, well, you know, I think there's some, there's some warming going on. I don't, you know, is it, is it us or is it, is it just the globe or whatever, but even that you have to take a step back and be like, no, what is the real data say? And like what you just said a minute ago, it's going down reality. Yeah. TH: Yeah. It's the situation is atrocious and they can get away with it because they've got complete control over the press. DT: Right. TH: Um, you know, everyone in the press knows about me. The New York Times knows about me. They've written hit pieces about me. I testified at the, testified at the Washington State Senate. Um, in 2007 for 45 minutes, gave a very detailed testimony. All of the Seattle press was there. They didn't report on a single thing. They said all that they reported after that was climate denier speaks for 45 minutes in Olympia. I talked to a number of the reporters that I explained everything that was going on and they refused to publish anything. I said, and after that, the New York Times said he did a hit piece on me. And I kept trying to contact them that to correct all the things that they'd said wrong. And they were, they didn't, they won't talk to me again, hit pieces, you know, written on me all the time from CNN, lean a lot, lots of lies, all kinds of other things. They never talked to me. They want to talk to me because they know that I'll destroy their story. So they, they just it's. And, but the fact that they have complete control over the press means they know they can get away with anything they want and they just, and the climate stories are getting more and more ridiculous every single day. DT: Right. Right. So I just can't believe this Tony, they would come in with a preconceived notion. And if you don't fall in line with it, you're a denier. So that's, that's the way this works now. And I know it's a terrible time and we have a lot of guests on and talk about the state of the media and what the heck is going on here. And it's still just the lack of truth. And, uh, you know, we just got to keep hanging in there and, the truth prevails. And somewhere in there, people go, wait a minute, what's going on? And it's like, what you just said, they have to go further and further and get more ridiculous to propagate the lie. And so we've just got to keep working on the truth. So yeah, it's it's yeah. TH: And it's also social media, right. Um, Twitter know I was on Twitter for 12 years. They have been trying to get rid of me for years. They finally banned me about a month ago, without an, you know, they didn't provide any explanation. They didn't tell me what it was, but I know they've been trying to get rid of me for years, YouTube, regularly, censors my staff and locks me out for a week. Um, so, you know, they're just pushing people up other platforms which do support free speech. They're, you know, they're, they're destroying their own business by doing this. And it's an insane suicidal business model they're engaged in. DT: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is really great. I appreciate you doing all this. Is there anything else we didn't go over that you, that you want to coat? Wait, we got one more slide. I thought we were done. So let's uh, let's just, yeah. Okay. So this goes, okay, we'll go ahead. And this is the, uh, the downward trend here. TH: So yeah, so there's been all these news reports recently that, that, um, last year was the fifth hottest year on record in the United States. And it's complete nonsense. Uh, th this graph shows the percent of stations in, from NOAA in the United States, which reach 95 degrees Fahrenheit sometime during the year. And they peaked in 1931. And last year was actually among the lowest on record. So less and less of the United States has been getting very hot every summer. Um, and last year was among the lowest on record, but at the same time, the process claiming that last year we had record heat waves in the United States. And I made a video last night showing out totally fraudulent, that all thing was and went over in great detail about how much hotter the United States was in the past. DT: Yeah. And it's just, uh, the overall perspective on the whole thing is just lost. And I think that this goes to this idea now, especially, you know, you brought it up with the education with the younger generation. Sometimes it's difficult. It's like, no, nothing's more important than right now. Everything that's happening bad is to solve right now. It's like, no, no, no. Let's look at the history of things. Things go up and down and, you know, there's this other thing called weather that changes. And I'm always saying, you know, our weather person here in Chicago, they do their best, but often they're wrong about like tomorrow. So it's like, okay, we're going to predict that a hundred years. Exactly. What's going to happen. No, you're not. So, uh, I just, I just love what you do with the charts and the graphs. So, so that was our last slide that we have here. But anything else that you wanted to cover that we didn't, we didn't hit as part of the charts. TH: Yeah. I just wanted to throw in. So there's this problem, this belief that we're suffering the worst, most extreme weather is something which has plagued humanity for as long as there's people have been communicating. Um, I posted an article from 1947, yesterday about this belief that the world was warming up and it was from the U S whether we were explaining that it wasn't true. It just based on people's faulty memories, I've got another similar article from 1939. My favorite favorite ones from 1871 from the British press was imaginary changes of climate. And it goes into how every, according to people keeping records every month is the hottest driest, windiest, wetest worst ever known. And, and it's just based on miss people, exaggerate things. And if you go back to like the Salem Witch trials were probably largely based on the fact that there was a lot of bad while there during the little ice age. And it was blamed on witches was in, in Europe, they burned tens of thousands of witches at the stake in the 16th century for cooking the weather.The belief was that the bad weather of the little ice age was due to Pete, that climate change that was being caused by humans, which is exactly the same story we have. Now, it's the superstition that humans are causing climate change. DT: Yeah, that's right. And I just, uh, I covered this, uh, I think I had Eric Metaxas sign talking about his atheism dad, his new book, and it's a little bit of this, you know, the climate worship and mother nature and worship the earth and everything so well, you know, God made everything and he's in control. So we'll just have to see what happens. And we don't know exactly. And this is, it's great that you bring that up. I mean, that's what we all got to start saying more and more as, Hey, this has happened previously and we don't want to be associated with, you know, the same kinds of people that were, you know, Salem witch trials, right. And this is the same thing, you know, you're talking about, you know, what's going on with you and, and online and getting banned and stuff. And so, you know, it's not as bad, but the trend is not great with these people just pushing this lie over and over. So I appreciate your courage and, well, I appreciate you standing up and I'm just going to, we're going to do our best around here, Tony, to make sure all our viewers understand, you know, your deal and what you're about and make sure you get the stuff out. Cause the work you do is fantastic. And like I said, you know, you're not getting any corporate money for this or anything. You're just doing the, doing the right thing. So I really, really appreciate it. Great. Well, thank you. Well, I'd love to have you back on and uh, we'll keep everybody, we push out your stuff all the time and we'll, we'll direct everybody to your, to your website and all the great work you do. And, and just appreciate you coming on day. Have a good one. TH: Okay, fantastic. Thank you. DT: All right. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in and for supporting conservative media. Don't ever forget that by working together and staying diligent, we conservatives can bring our country back to true greatness until next week. Let's all keep praying that God will continue to bless America. First right, A new kind of new summary without the liberal slant every morning in your inbox, always free subscribed by texting firstright to 3 0 1 6 1 that's FIRSTRIGHT All caps. One word TO 3 0 1 6 1.

Doug talks to Emily Jashinsky, culture editor at The Federalist, about the changing communication and media trends in America today. Restoration PAC is a non-partisan political action committee that sponsors political activities advocating for policy changes and/or the election or defeat of candidates on the basis of time-tested conservative principles. Visit our website: https://restorationofamerica.com/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/restorationpac Twitter: https://twitter.com/restorationpac Instagram: https://instagram.com/restoration_pac/ GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/restorationpac

Doug talks to Pennsylvania State Senator and Veteran Doug Mastriano about election integrity and voter fraud. Restoration PAC is a non-partisan political action committee that sponsors political activities advocating for policy changes and/or the election or defeat of candidates on the basis of time-tested conservative principles. Visit our website: https://restorationofamerica.com/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/restorationpac Twitter: https://twitter.com/restorationpac Instagram: https://instagram.com/restoration_pac/ GETTR: https://gettr.com/user/restorationpac

Doug talks to Kenny Xu, whose new book "An Inconvenient Minority" zeroes in on the attack on Asian-American excellence and the fight for meritocracy.

Doug talks to financial expert Jeff Carter about his recent popular blog post about moving from a high tax state to a low tax state.