The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome! It’s Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Thank you for joining me today. As always, great to be with you. We’ve got a lot to cover, including at the end of the program today, the last segment, I will give you a tribute to a great man, a man that I really admire. His name is Congressman Louie Gohmert. Louie Gohmert. You’re going to want to stick around for that one. And we will talk in a few moments with my friend John Zadrozny, who is over at America First Legal. And he sent me a bunch of prep material for this interview and it got me thinking. And we’ll also talk with Ted Malloch. He’s got a great fun piece in American Greatness.
But John Zadrozny sent me over his prep material because America First Legal has been really good at jumping in and fighting the Biden administration and their various either extra constitutional, extra legal efforts, or just changes to rules and things that are going on. So it’s been very interesting. But he also challenged me when we were talking, setting up the interview, and we will talk about this. I told him I would bring it up and here’s what you need to know today.
What you need to know today. What you need to know right now, today’s WYNK, is it is not a time for oversight. It’s not a time for only transparency. My friend Adam Andrzejewski, who’s such a good dude
and Openthebooks.com, their website is extraordinary.
They shine a light on spending, whether it’s California spending on all sorts of crazy things, teachers salaries in different places, governments spending, everything. It’s really cool. Transparency is really cool.
But transparency has led us now in many places, whether it’s the FBI’s problems, whether it’s the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security when it comes to the broken legal and illegal immigration problem. In other words, the broken legal system is that the people who get to this country illegally get into the legal system and then they get swept through by corrupted, small c corrupted. I don’t always accuse people of taking the money. I do accuse people of having gotten distorted reality. So we have a legal system that allows illegal immigrants to hit America, get in our legal system, and then get swept into the country and kept, swept and kept. Anyway, here’s my point.
What you need to know the time for oversight, the time for transparency, it will never pass. We should always have it because it shines a light.
But we are at the point where we need people who will be elected, who will win for office, who will actually reduce the size and scope of government.
In other words, desperately, we need a president and his cabinet who, when they’re confirmed as a cabinet secretary, they don’t say, yes. Now I’m going to get really good deputies. I’ll get three deputies and 1700 deputies, and we’ll have 4200 bureaucrats. Pick a department. Every one of them has grown. EPA, HUD, Education Department. They’ve all grown. And we get new cabinet secretaries who get Stockholm syndrome after they got the corner office of this cabinet. And they say, wow, look at this, how great this is. I’ll do this better.
No, we don’t need somebody to do it better. We need a director to come in and say, I’m asking you to cut my budget by 25%. I’m asking you to reduce my workforce by 25%. I’m asking you to roll back the regulations and the administrative power that has accumulated.
Roll it back. Take my power away. I want to be the least powerful cabinet secretary in history.
And if we have a president and cabinet secretaries that do that, they will find willing partners, by the way, in the states. So you don’t have to say, I’m going to cut back on all the regulations on X topic, let’s say it’s on some sort of land use or land management, the Bureau of Land Management, a huge regulatory framework, whatever it is, pick a topic. But the states can be a willing partner. So we’re not going to say, let the water get messy, let the water get polluted, let the land get destroyed. No, but the states can do it.
And so you get a partnership. But here’s my point. What you need to know is we’re past the point where you can reform the FBI. In my opinion. You have to not reform it. You probably have to eliminate it and start again.
And that’s happened, by the way. Things like the OSS started in the United States and became the CIA, for example. They can transform. You can change things dramatically. And I’m reminded of this.
My friend Alex Newman, who is such a great writer, especially on education. Crimes of the Educators is the book he wrote with Sam Blumenfeld. I mentioned it yesterday on my interview with Nina May. And Alex Newman for years would say, we can do it. We can reform our education system. Here’s what we need to do. Here’s how we do it. Here’s what we do.
And about four years ago, maybe five, I think it was four, he spoke at an event and he unloaded on how terrible the education system is. And he said for him, it’s past the point of no return. You have to get out of the schools. He said, they’re too controlled by the teachers union. They’re too controlled by, this is before critical race theory became so commonly understood. He had seen Common Core, he had seen other controls.
And my point here is we’ve come past the point where we say, oh, well, the FBI has a storied history, let’s reform it. No, I don’t think so. I think whoever’s in charge of the FBI next, whoever’s in charge of other agencies next, has to dramatically reduce the power. Dramatically reduce the power and scope of government.
And it won’t be easy, in large part because the Congress needs to get on board, especially the Senate.
It’s time. No more transformation elimination of departments and agencies and figure out how to do what needs to be done in a different department or a different way. That’s the only thing I think we can do and we’ve got to start talking about it. All right?
I got to run. We’ll be right back. John Zadrozny of America First Legal and then later Ted Malloch. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
