Voting is a foundation of democracy and key to American power, but also a process that can be ugly and divisive. In what many believe to be the most politically charged election period in modern history, Fran Racioppi took a few minutes to sit down with Congressman Rich McCormick, Representative for Georgia’s 7th district.
Representative McCormick shared his Elementary Issues of A, B, C, D, E: the American dream, the border, crime, debt, education and energy; why it’s dangerous to develop a culture of government giving, balancing compassion with security along our borders, and not hiding from the fact that America has real adversaries who seek to do us harm.
As a Marine Corps and Navy Veteran, emergency room doctor and former American Gladiator, the Congressman knows the importance of earning success and leading through adversity; character traits he has taken from his military service to the halls of Congress.
Join our conversation from Congressman McCormick’s Office. Follow us on social media, read the full episode on our website, then head over to our YouTube channel or your favorite podcast platform for all our election coverage.
Stand for something, or stand to the side.
The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are an official program of The Green Beret Foundation. Special thanks to the For Country Caucus for coordinating this interview.
The opinions presented on the The Jedburgh Podcast and the Jedburgh Media Channel are the opinions of our guests and creator and host Fran Racioppi. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Green Beret Foundation and the Green Beret Foundation assumes no liability for their accuracy; nor does Green Beret Foundation endorse any political candidate or any political party.
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Representative McCormick, welcome to The Jedburgh Podcast.
It’s good to be here. Thanks.
It’s good to be back on Capitol Hill. It’s been a couple of years since we’ve been here in the building. I appreciate you spending time with us so much. It’s day one back from recess. I know you got a million other things to do but you’re starting this session off by spending it with us. It is much appreciated. We want to send our thanks out as well to the For Country Caucus who set up this series for us. It is an awesome honor to be here. There’s a lot going on in the world.
Some serious-minded people need to address the issues. I’m looking forward to that. Hopefully, we can get past the rhetoric and get back to the meat of the matter.
That’s what we’re going to talk about. You represent Georgia’s Sixth District, so the North Atlanta area. You spent twenty years in the Military. You served in the Marines and then the Navy. You have all these helicopter pictures around your office.
First of all, we’re about to become the Seventh District. It got reapportioned. It is mostly the same district. We’re going to lose East Cobb. We’re going to lose Sugar Hill. We’ll pick up Johns Creek, Lumpkin County, and some of Hall County. It’s a great district, one of the highest GDP per capita districts. Homeownership is right in the top 10 of the top 25 schools in Georgia. It is a great district. It is very influential. It’s where Johnny Isakson, our former senator, came from. It’s where Tom Price, our former Secretary of Health and Human Services, came from. It’s where Newt Gingrich, our former speaker, came from.
He has been on the show.
It is a great district. I am looking forward to this election cycle. I am looking forward to addressing the issues that unite Americans and proceed us forward.
Here in Congress, you also serve on the House Armed Services Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, the Committee on Science and Technology, the GOP Doctors Caucus, and several others. You’re also an ER doctor. As if the Military didn’t give you enough stress for twenty years flying, you decided to then go on and become an ER doctor, which is one of the most commendable positions that are out there. You talk about seeing trauma. We talk about the Military all day and how much trauma they see. Going to an ER for a day, I want to ask you about that. We’re about 60 days from the 2024 elections. There are no punches being pulled in a lot of these races. We’re seeing that in the presidential race.
I was in the building a few years ago. I sat down right as the 118th Congress started with Representative Mike Waltz from Florida, your colleague from Florida, and also a fellow Green Beret. We talked about the excitement that was around this Congress that had the most veterans since the post-Vietnam era. There was this excitement that the decisiveness might get tamped down. In a lot of ways, I don’t know if that has happened. We’ve seen a lot of decisiveness in all these races.
I want to talk about the state of America, the top-line issues, and where we’re going. You started with Georgia, talking about your district. As you look at this race, the one you’re in in Georgia, and also the presidential race, how come Georgia has become a potential swing state, especially when it has leaned Republican for the last series of elections?
That’s a complex question. Let me break it down from where I came in. When I first ran for office in 2020, I had not ever been to a political meeting. I never went to a fundraiser. I didn’t know any politicians. I came out of nowhere and really didn’t understand the political landscape. It’s a miracle that I made a pass at my state senator who hadn’t lost in 33 years, had the endorsement of 11 to 12 mayors, had 1$ million in the bank, and knew everybody. There’s a reason that we won. It’s understanding what true politics are.
Especially in Georgia, you realize the diversity of the population. We have a huge population of African Americans. It is the largest in America. It is bigger than New York, California, and Texas. We have a huge foreign influx. We have over 1,000 Indian diaspora in my district alone. We have a huge Asian community. It’s very diverse.
People don’t realize how diverse the South is, especially Georgia. The opinions are diverse. The things that matter to people are diverse. A lot of people don’t know this about me, but I was Student Body President at Morehouse School of Medicine, a minority university. I was also an Adjunct Faculty at Morehouse College as well as Spelman Clark in Atlanta and Georgia Tech.
If you look at the youth population, what that implies to voting, and how we’re trying to win them over both with Turning Point #LouderWithCrowder and Ben Shapiro versus the left who, in my opinion, promises people the ideal things. When I say ideal things, I mean things for free. They’re like, “I’m going to give you your education for free.” That sounds great to anybody who’s a college student. They’re like, “I don’t have to pay back my student loans. That’s fantastic.” That’s buying votes with taxpayer money.
When you talk about the other issues in Georgia, we had a gubernatorial race four years ago that Governor Kemp almost lost to Stacey Abrams. The next one we had President Trump lost in Georgia, which surprised everybody, by a very narrow margin. It became notoriously famous, whether it be the 2000 Mules or the coercion that they’re accusing him of with Raffensperger, the Secretary of State.
In my opinion, I was part of that. I was told I won that night in 2020. I was told I won by a nonpartisan person who had done six prior elections and was a lawyer, and then I got a call at 2:00 in the morning saying, “We found 70,000 more votes.” I was like, “What do you mean you found?” They couldn’t explain it. They went back and forth during the night. As it turns out, we had no accountability. We still don’t understand what happened. It went from 1% up to 2% down.
Since that time, we had Governor Perdue and Loeffler lost in their runoffs after a special election win. We’ve lost two statewide races for Senate. We also had a very narrow victory in the gubernatorial race. Fast forward when Herschel Walker was running and the governor was running, the governor crushed it by seven points and Herschel lost. We’ve lost three Senate state races. If you think about it, Georgia is up for grabs.
The nice thing is you can say it comes down to the candidate. The governor won by 7% and Herschel didn’t. That means people are voting with their intellect. I love Herschel. He’s got great name recognition and is very much a football hero but maybe not the best candidate for what we’re looking for. This is why selecting the right candidate for Senate or governor is important in Georgia because people are paying attention. You may get past the primary but that does not guarantee a general win. That’s why it’s important when we talk about the presidential race and President Trump specifically that we address what people are going to be voting on.
President Trump did some amazing things for the African-American community if you look at the way he revised the whole legal system and jailing and if you look at the opportunity zones that exist. That primarily exists in Georgia probably more than any other state. The benefit to the African-American population is significant. That’s why you’re seeing males and business owners come over and start to vote a little bit more independently. However, there is a large Black female population that is resisting that.
It’s personality-based, which is unfortunate because, in the end, personality is not going to determine what happens to your children, what educational opportunities they have, what business opportunities they have, and what prosperity they have. That’s why I’m trying to get people to focus back on those things. We’re on the right side of history on 60% of the issues, the elementary issues A through E, A B, C, D, and E. A is the American dream, your God-given rights to a First and Second Amendment, lower taxes, less regulation, the things that make you thrive, create jobs, create tax revenue, and create prosperity in the nation.
B is Border. Everybody understands it’s an issue. C is Crime. There’s only one party that says it’s okay to walk out of a store with $1,000 of merchandise per day and that’s okay, and that should defund the police. D is Debt. There’s only one party that does not take that seriously enough. The Democrats have never ever cared about debt. They never address it. It’s going to ruin our economy. When you have that debt-to-GDP ratio, that skews us to the point where we’re no longer going to become the gold standard of the world currency. That’s coming if we continue down this road.
E is Education choice. That’s what won Youngkin in his race. That’s what won DeSantis his first gubernatorial race. It’s also what switched over the mayor in Dallas and what switched over Mesha Mainor in Georgia. She’s representing the AUC, the minority university. She switched from Democrat to Republican over that issue. E is also Energy. Cheap, affordable energy is what has driven the economy in the entire history of the United States. If you think about it, if you don’t have a good economy, nobody thrives. As Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business.”
You’ve said a few things here that are important to expand upon. You talked about paying off college debt. To me, that’s something that resonates because I served thirteen years in the Army after going to undergraduate and I paid every dollar of that. I finished paying that in 2020. I graduated in 2003. I then went to NYU for my MBA.
I went on the G.I. Bill. I went to vocational rehab. I have benefits that I had earned through service, through a 100% disability rating, back injuries, trauma to my eye, and medevac out of Iraq. Yet, we sit here and we’re absolving loans. We’re giving money. We’re increasing that debt. I want to get into immigration in a minute. We look at so many of these topics, and you’ve named them so well. A, B, C, D, and E. I wrote it down because I want to reference them later.
They’re elementary issues.
I think about education and those who are up for elections’ ability to educate the populace on this. I watch the news every day. We watch the nightly news as a family at dinner. Even my four-year-old son sits down and says, “Are we watching the news at the table?” We watched it. A lot of times, it’s depressing. What you see is folks who come on and get interviewed are not educated on the issues. You hear comments like, “I’m going to get free money.”
There was an interview with an illegal immigrant, a migrant, who was being interviewed about getting credit cards and going to work. Yet, we have people who are here legally, waiting for immigration status, who can’t go to work. The law doesn’t allow them to go to work. They can’t leave the country but they’re not being supported. How do we educate the populace? How do we get them to understand that these one-liners that you hear from candidates are not the crux of the issue? How do we do that when the media’s not working?
That’s the problem. It takes you five seconds to say, “I’m going to give you something for free.” Free education takes me five minutes to explain why it’s not free. It takes me five minutes to explain why it doesn’t benefit America, why it is not fair for all Americans to pay for some Americans, and why it doesn’t encourage people to be independent and to have value. You’re never given value in life.
This is my background as a youth minister and an ER doctor seeing anywhere from 1/4 to 1/3 of my patients with depression, anxiety, suicidality, and drug and alcohol abuse. They all have one thing in common. They’re self-consumed. You can see movie stars with all the money in the world, all the looks, and all the girls in the world commit suicide. Why are people depressed? You’re never given value by what you’re given. You’re given value by what you earn.
By giving people things, it doesn’t make them better Americans. It doesn’t make them better human beings. It doesn’t give them happiness. It gives them free stuff, which sounds great, until the next thing because you have to give them something else after that. The fact is the Democrats are never done giving away free stuff.
Let’s say everybody deserves a minimum wage even if they’re working. People are suggesting that you get paid if you’re staying at home because everybody deserves money. If I gave you everything and free housing too, guaranteed, they would have to come up with something new the next year because they got to have something else to give away. They know we’re going to fight them. It’s another talking point.
This is the problem. Is it the government’s responsibility to give you things for free? Is that why we formed our government? Is that what our constitution is based on? Is that what America’s greatness is all about? Of course not. It’s never been like that. They’re trying to make it like that. It’s called communism. We’re already in socialism. I’m going to face it.
We’re already redistributing income. We’re already doing the DEI thing openly. It’s like, “If you’re a certain race, you get in. If you’re not, you don’t. If you’re an Indian, too many successful Indians can’t come into this college. If you’re Black, we don’t have enough of you. You get to come into this college.” It creates racism, in my opinion, because you’re basing your opinion on the color of someone’s skin, not on the content of their character.
Ironically, the Military knows this. We hate to see it in the Military because quite frankly, I need to know whether you can keep up. I need to know if you got my back because I want to survive this mission. I want to go home and I want to kill the bad guy. That’s all I care about. I don’t care if you’re Black, White, or Asian. It doesn’t matter. We don’t care. We want to accomplish a mission. Most people don’t care what you look like as long as you can do the job.
If your business is benefited by diversity, guess what? You’re going to hire a lot of diverse people and a lot of diverse talents out there. That’s why Coca-Cola is very successful. It’s one of my hometown businesses. It has tons of diversity. I want to encourage diversity but not force it. Does that make sense? You’re seeing that we’re fighting some fights that don’t need to be fought. If we’re going to survive as a nation, we need to focus on the basics.
If you listen to the news and listen to the candidates who are out there, everything’s apocryphal. It’s a life-or-death decision. That is what you hear. It’s a battle between good and evil and right and wrong. You hear the phrase, “Democracy’s on the ballot. What’s going to be your choice?” Divisiveness is permeating so much of the conversation that we see out there, which, in many ways, is almost against the democratic principles that the country was founded on, which is, “You don’t have to be wrong for me to be right. We can have different perspectives. We have to come together and find a resolution.” Do you think we have become too divided?
Here’s what’s interesting. I love history. I’m reading a book on the rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Some of the rhetoric they were using at that time was, “We’re about to fall as a country.” The communists were coming. This was in the late 1800s. It was almost exactly the same rhetoric. It’s very ironic. When Thomas Jefferson went against John Adams, they were throwing around all kinds of horrible things about each other and it got nasty. That was the third presidential run.
We’ve had this since the beginning. It’s getting really bad where people are dueling. During the Civil War and stuff like that, it was horrible. If you’ve ever seen the movie Lincoln, some people would come up as lobbyists. As the guy was trying to explain, the guy was drawing a weapon to shoot at him. That’s how bad it was. Vietnam was in another era.
It comes, ebbs, and flows. Ironically, when one party dominates, we have more peace. It sounds weird. It’s not necessarily more prosperity but more peace because the other party is trying to fight but they have no power. When there’s more balance, there’s more volatility because you’re vying for control of the government, especially at this time. We’re in another time of divergence. You had it during the Civil War and the Revolution.
People forget that when we established this great country, 1/3 of the country wanted to remain loyal to the king, 1/3 of the country wanted to leave, and 1/3 of the country was neutral. That’s a great balance. It created a revolution. During the Civil War, our next great crisis, you had a divergence between the parties. One party was like, “We want slavery. We want independence to determine our fate.” The other party was like, “You’re going to remain in the union because that’s important to us as a nation. We fought a civil war over that.” The parties had diverged.
You’re having another divergence, in my opinion. The left has left the reservation. When John Kerry debated George W. Bush, it was the first time I ever paid attention to a debate. I came away because I wasn’t political. I was a Republican but I didn’t really pay attention to politics very much. I came away thinking, “There’s no difference between the parties.” I couldn’t figure it out. It was a competition of who could spend the most.”
Kerry would be like, “I’m going to increase stem cell research by putting this much.” Bush would be like, “I did that by record numbers.” Kerry was like, “I’m going to increase the spending on security of containers coming over here from other countries.” Bush was like, “I did that by record numbers.” Kerry was like, “I’m going to increase benefits for older people.” Bush was like, “While you Medicare records spending, I did that by record numbers.” It was a competition of who could spend the most money. No offense to George W. Bush or anybody else, but one would like, “I’m going to bring the troops home from Afghanistan on this date,” and one would be like, “I’m going to bring them home on this date.” There was no difference.
This time, there’s a massive difference. It used to be Obama ran on the premise that we had a Southern secure border. A sovereign nation, if you will. He was the chief deporter. He deported more people from the United States than any other president before or after. Look at him. Over ten million people came into this country illegally. The rhetoric again is, “I put a record number of border agents down there.” You had to process them. He calls them undocumented migrants. First of all, they’re very well-documented because you put a record number of people down there to document them. Secondly, they’re not migrants. They’re invaders. They came here illegally and we allowed them to come.
The two million that got away, the unprocessed ones or the undocumented ones, are not migrants. They’re invaders. They’re dangerous people because they evaded the due process. They could be terrorists or spies. They could be anything. We don’t know. When two million people came in, think about the consequences of 11 people on 9/11.
Think about 1 person and what they could do, and you let in 2 million. This is something that the parties are divergent. All those things I said, the A, B, C, D, and E, are populous items. 60% of greater Americans believe in those things that unite the Republican party, divide the Democrat party, and the people want. If you want to talk about winning an election, start there.
On the immigration topic because we went there, I want to go ask you a question about this because it’s important. I’m yet to hear an argument for the no-border policy. While I have you here and I’ve asked this question to a number of folks, what is the argument for an open border policy? I can’t understand it.
They keep on talking about compassion. This is what the Democrats say. They’re like, “Those poor people.” We’re going to be the poor people. There’s a reason that no Democrat has given away all their money. If you’re that compassionate, give away all your money and quit politics. Please, for the love of God, quit politics.
If you’re going to have a realistic conversation, you don’t leave your front door unlocked. You don’t invite strangers into your house. You don’t give away your money to everybody. As a matter of fact, I’d make the case that the Republicans are far more philanthropic than the Democrats when it comes to charities. That’s my studies. I could be wrong, but prove me wrong because we’re pretty generous. The more money that the government takes from you, the less generous you can be in your philanthropic endeavors.
Here’s the problem. When I support a charity, I get to determine where that money goes. I’m helping people with accountability. We’re not keeping them forever. We’re trying to get them out of poverty. When the government comes in, you’re trying to buy votes. You pick the winners and losers and they stay in poverty the whole time.
Look at the Black community. Look at what we’ve done to them. Talk to Black politicians, Black republican politicians especially, and ask, “What has the government ever done for you that has created success for your community?” I’d make the case, “They’re trying to keep you right where you’re at so you’re dependent on the government and you have to vote for the same people over and over again.” Why do we turn to the government to solve the very problem that the government created in the first place?
If you come here from Africa with no money, maybe you don’t even speak the language, and you have no friends, you can make $1 million within one lifetime because you’re in America. They do. I know people who’ve come here from Nigeria with dollars in their pockets and are millionaires. I know people who’ve done that from South America, Asia, Europe, and all over the world.
I know Romanians who’ve done that. I know people from Korea who’ve done that. I know people who’ve done that over and over. What other country is like that? Yet, we tell our African-American community as politicians, “You poor people. You can’t make it out of poverty. Therefore, I will prop you up and keep you right where you’re at.” Why not let them be millionaires? Why not encourage them and give them educational opportunities so they can even the playing field? We’ll see real success for our country and those communities.
How do we balance compassion with national security and economic policy? That’s an argument, I get it, whether you agree with it or not. The other side, the Republican argument, is as you’ve explained. We have two million undocumented people who’ve come into the country. We know that there are terrorists who may be among them. We’ve detained people who are on the terrorist watch. We have Chris Wray, the Director of the FBI, who has sat in front of you on the House Armed Services Committee and said multiple times, “Every red light is blinking.”
I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with every senior leader in the US Army Special Operations Command to have this conversation. I sat down with the Sergeant Major of the Army, Sergeant Major Mike Weimer, not long ago and had this conversation. Everybody’s opinion from top to bottom is this is not a matter of if. This is a matter of when. The biggest threat they see outside of the near peers that we’ll talk about in a minute, which are China, Russia, and Iran, is the open border. How do you balance compassion versus national security?
Have compassion for Americans first. This is our country. You’ll see an amazing number of Americans go to foreign countries to help people and to get them right. It’s very difficult to fix any country with a corrupt government. Quite frankly, we are corrupting foreign governments by purchasing illegal drugs, for example. We are never going to right the ship.
You could get a fence along the entire Southern border. You could have as many security guards as you want. You can kill as many drug dealers as you want and they’ll always be replaced as long as there’s a demand. It’s a trillion-dollar industry. I keep on telling people, “Do you really want to solve this problem like we did with smoking?”
We used to say to kids, “Don’t smoke or you get a stoma. You’ll get cancer.” Kids don’t think of it that way. They don’t think they’re going to overdose and kill themselves off of fentanyl even though 110,000 people in 2023 died of drug overdoses. They’re like, “It won’t happen to me.” Kids don’t think that way. If you teach them like you did with smoking that when you purchase cigarettes, you’re killing your grandparents because these evil companies are making a profit while they’re creating cancer in your elderly population, all of a sudden, it becomes a moral issue. All of a sudden, the kids didn’t want to buy it. It was not because of any other reason because they thought it was cool before, but it’s not worth the uncool part of killing your grandparents while evil corporations make a profit.
Imagine if we sold to the American youth, “When you purchase drugs, you don’t think you’re going to die. That’s fine. You don’t think you’re going to get hooked. That’s fine. You think it’s cool. That’s fine. You are supporting rapists, terrorists, child traffickers, and people who slit your mother’s throat for $1. That’s who you’re supporting. Every time you buy drugs, you’re overthrowing a government. You’re keeping Mexicans in abject poverty because they can’t fix their government because of the corruption.” It’s the same thing with Colombia and with other governments all across the world. You are supporting that by buying drugs.”
Think about how much corruption there is from drug money alone that we Americans export for $1 trillion. It’s crazy. That goes towards terrorism, rape, murder, and slavery. That’s what we’re doing. If you could right the ship in these countries and get them back on their economic feat, you’d see prosperity, and then we could be part of that. We’d benefit from that economically and also the immigration policy.
That’s why Africa is so backward too. Corrupt governments equal bad migration policies. That’s why we have to fight what’s happening in Brazil with that fiasco of an election that has them with a communist dictator. It’s the same thing with what happened in Venezuela. It’s the same thing that’s happening in several South American countries. That’s in the Western hemisphere. We need to re-apply the Monroe Doctrine. We need to make sure that we have our influence in the correct place.
Corrupt governments equal bad migration policies.
Don’t be isolationists because guess what happens? These people who say, “We shouldn’t be involved in Ukraine. We shouldn’t be involved in Taiwan. We shouldn’t be involved in Israel. We shouldn’t be involved anywhere. America first,” if you end up isolated, you’ll end up in war. You’ll end up invaded by a ton of illegal immigrants who don’t want to live in the country they live in. As Reagan said, “Isolationism never was and never will be the answer to expansionist, tyrannical governments. We need to stand up for what’s right.”
Let’s talk about national security in that vein. You sit on both the Tactical Air and Land Forces subcommittee and the Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation subcommittee. As a veteran, you know firsthand the cost of combat or the cost of war both in terms of our human capital and the financial burden that the country takes on.
We spent twenty-plus years battling, by most definitions, an inferior enemy. We can debate the run they gave us. We didn’t see what we would call a peer or a near-peer adversary. In the background, as we fought these proxy wars across Afghanistan, Iraq, and various other regions of the world, countries like Russia, China, and Iran became emboldened.
The pressure, in a lot of ways, was off them to build capability and build capacity. We’ve seen some of that capacity. It may not be what we thought it was. For instance, the Russians in Ukraine. We know, almost three years in, that Russia is still in Ukraine. We know China has a date in mind to go to Taiwan. We’ve seen Iran continue to arm proxy groups and the horrible atrocities that they backed and authorized on October 7th, 2023 as Hamas attacked Israel. The near-peer fight, a peer-to-peer fight, is very different from what American forces saw and fought over the years. In your mind, is America ready or prepared for a near-peer competition?
We’re not only just talking about twenty years. We’re talking about probably since World War II. We’ve been the preeminent power in the world. Even when Russia was challenging us during the Reagan era, we were far and away superior to them. Time has proven that. If you want to talk about the bad actors, North Korea is not really an actor anymore. They gave up their inferior weapons to the Russians, which tells you where Russia is. If you want to talk about what happened in Ukraine, realize that a ragtag third-rate Army took out half of Russia’s armor and 350,000 casualties. It’s pretty superior.
If you look at what’s happening around the world and how we’ve been caught, you’re right. We spent 20 years, $2 trillion, and 2,462 lives in Afghanistan to give back to the Taliban what we took from them. It’s pretty crazy, especially when we had won the war. Maybe you don’t like the result of the war or maybe you don’t think it is as stable as it needs to be, but we gave them a chance.
We had 2,500 people there. That’s fewer than we have in Spain. We’ve never fought a war in Spain, and yet we had to pull out for some political reason. I can say, “I pulled out of Afghanistan. How’d that go for you?” We lost more people in 1 day than we lost in 10 years. I take that very personally. That was the worst withdrawal of all time. First of all, not only was it the worst withdrawal, but I don’t think we should have withdrawn at all. I don’t care who says what.
I’ve talked to every secretary of defense that’s still alive at the Reagan Institute that participates in anything. It’s the same thing with secretaries of state and stuff like that. There is a reason for projected power. I’m a big Teddy Roosevelt fan. He is my favorite president of all time. He talked about projected Naval power constantly. No offense to the Army, but the ability to go anywhere at any time, touch anyone, talk softly, and carry a big stick, is an incredible leverage point.
There’s a reason that Russia is so preeminent in Africa, South America, and across the world even though they only have a $2 trillion economy. $2 trillion is the size of our Texas economy. We have a $27 trillion economy and we’re about as influential as they are in many parts of the world. That’s because they invest, scare people, and have a big stick.
That’s why we have to be careful about what’s happening with China. China’s paying very close attention to what’s going on in Ukraine. I promise you. It’s important that we have regional partners such as India, Japan, Australia, and even smaller countries like Thailand. Most people don’t realize Thailand is our oldest ally. We’re approaching 200 years. It’s strategically important when it comes to having friends in those areas.
When you talk about a developing nation like India, which has less than a $3 trillion economy but in 5 years, they’ll have greater than a $5 trillion economy because they’re increasing rapidly, they’ll be the third largest economy soon and they’ll be catching up to China. China is around $13 trillion to $15 trillion depending on who you talk to. We’re far and away above all that but we can lose it very quickly if you look at our meager growth rate and what that indicates for Military spending. We stay consistent in our Military spending on the percentage of GDP and percentage of our budget. China is crushing us in its advancements. They have 50 deep water ports that could produce their largest carriers and submarines. We have two. If we go to war, we have a lot of catching up to do.
People don’t realize how important strategically Taiwan is. 70% of the world’s wealth goes to that corridor. 70% of the world’s population is the Indo-Pacific command. You have 7 to 10 Armies there. It is a massively important part of the world. Taiwan produces 100% of our AI chips. It’s not forever, but right now, they do. If China takes over Taiwan, it will have a ripple effect that we have no idea how big it will be because AI will be the most transformational technology in our lifetime. We have a lot of work to do. It’s important not to think that we can huddle up in our country and think that nothing bad is going to happen anywhere else. That’s somewhat ignorant.
When I spoke with Newt Gingrich, and it has been a bit, his position is that this is an ideology. The ideology of the left versus right is that we live in a world where everybody likes each other.
It’s idealism. If I give you something, you’ll use it for good, not for evil. It’s like an axle factory. It’s like, “You won’t use it for your Military trucks, will you? Shake on it. It will be for farm vehicles. If I leave you alone with your nuclear program, it will only be for energy, not for weapons.” It’s that ideology or that idealism, if you will, that everybody’s good. It’s like, “If I’m gentle with you, you’ll be gentle with me.” It doesn’t work. It’s not reality.
We’re sitting here. It’s going to be the eve of 9/11. It’s the 23-year anniversary. What will it take for Americans to understand that these countries, Russia, China, and Iran, are not friends of America? In some of these countries like Iran, you go out and protest, “Death to Israel. Death to America.”
When in the history of America did we have tens of thousands of people in the streets talking about the end of Israel or the end of the Jewish people? They’re stealing the American flag in our Capitol while graffitiing all kinds of horrible things I won’t even say, and then burning. You’re stealing it, destroying public property, and then raising a terrorist flag on American soil and nobody does anything about it. That’s insane.
We have reached a point of ludicrously in our own capital. You mentioned Iran. We already talked about China. We talked about Russia. With Iran, if they were bigger, they’d be more of a problem. They’re the worst actors of all governments. They disseminate and encourage people to use the weapons that have killed American troops and we’ve done nothing about it. There is nothing of consequence.
Reagan is my favorite president of the modern era. Reagan, during the Libyan crisis, didn’t exactly take it easy on Muammar Gaddafi. As a matter of fact, he tried to kill him. He ended up killing his son. He sent a warning, “If you screw with America, the gloves come off. If you kill 1 of mine, I’ll kill 2 of yours. If you put 1 of mine in the hospital, I’ll put 1 of yours in the morgue.” Muammar Gaddafi came around and he said, “I want peace. I don’t want to mess with you guys anymore,” because he understands strength. Every country understands strength.
I don’t care if it’s Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis, Russia, or China. I don’t care who it is, but if you are producing weapons that are deployed against Americans and its allies, guess what I’m going to do? I’m going to go Reagan on you. I’m going to take out your city block. You want to produce those weapons that are going to be used against me? That’s war. That is an act of war. Do you want to be at war with the United States? Good luck.
I guarantee you that Iran is not ready for that. We destabilize their country. We encourage the rebels that are still out there to rise up against those people. Whenever the students rise up, we don’t do anything. I would destabilize Iran. I would destroy their capacity to produce weapons against the United States when they’re deployed against us. Guess what would happen? They would either become more friendly or they would go away. That’s strength. That’s what America’s known for. When you don’t show that, what happens? They become more emboldened. What have they done? They supplied our enemies with weapons that are killing Americans and killing our allies. Why do we put up with that?
That goes back to the question that you brought up a second ago. Why don’t we do anything about people running around our country yelling, “I am Hamas.” For twenty-plus years, we fought Al-Qaeda. Not for one second would we allow somebody to run through the streets of anywhere in the country and yell, “I am Al-Qaeda.” You would be arrested immediately. Yet, we have universities burning.
We have terrorist threats and activities and we’re doing nothing about it. Why? It’s because we’re weak and we’re scared. We can’t even define what a man is anymore without being attacked. This is where you come into the theory of relativism. This is why it’s very dangerous when a government replaces God, family, community, and churches. That’s exactly what communist governments do.
Do you want to see the absolute plan for communism? Take away people’s weapons so they can’t defend themselves. Take away their morality. In other words, the only morality that’s defined is what the government gives to you. They couldn’t determine what’s moral, right, and wrong. If your business gets to be open or closed, that’s fascism when the government controls your businesses.
What happened during COVID? What kind of excuses were used? You could not travel. Look at my Fauci hearings and what Fauci said when we exposed him. He was like, “That was out of context.” Bull crap it’s out of context. You said, “If you don’t do what we want, we’ll make your life miserable. If you don’t get a vaccination, you can’t travel. You can’t have your business doors open. You have to wear a mask.” Everything the government says you have to do because they’ll use fear against you. That’s how the Gulag Archipelago started.
From 1917 to 1957, 60 million people were killed in Russia. You use the government to make everybody scared of each other to the point where you are reporting on each other, which is exactly what people do. Walz, the vice president candidate, is setting up a hotline to report on people who didn’t do what the government told them to do during COVID. This is where we’re at. We have left the reservation when it comes to what made this country great.
You control your own risk. I could throw my family in the back of a wagon, go West, maybe starve, maybe freeze, maybe get killed, but maybe be highly successful, have my own land, and have my own right to survival. The pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. This is where we lost when we said, “The government has to take care of everything.”
The problem is it’s a self-licking ice cream cone. It’s never over. You always have something else that you have to give them or they’re unhappy. Everybody needs the government eventually because everybody’s poor. This is why when the more the government takes control, the more people are unhappy. They turn back to the government and say, “I want more.” They’re like spoiled little kids. It always ends up as a dictatorship because it’s the only way to keep control, and then you have killings. That’s what’s happening in Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, and Panama. You name it. This is just the Western hemisphere. I want to point this out because we need to realize that we are less influential than China in about half of the Western hemisphere. That’s scary.
I got to ask you about Special Operations Forces. When we look at the job of Special Operations Forces traditionally, they’re utilized to a high degree in declared combat. The job of Special Operations Forces, and I’ll speak specifically about Green Berets and Army Special Forces, is to operate what we call left of bang or left of conflict before the conflict.
If we do our job really well, we never see that peer-to-peer fight. The term near-peer exists forever because we’ve never allowed someone to reach parity with the US. As you look at the construct and the prioritization of the Military forces over the next 2, 3, or 5 years, where do you see Special Operations Forces going in the fight?
Special Forces, and those people who are reading know exactly what we’re talking about, are a force multiplier. We visited the first forces in Alaska and also the Strategic Air Command, which is a different approach to warfare. At one time in the post-World War II era, we thought that we could win all wars by air superiority or we could bomb everybody into submission. This is the false narrative that, “If I drop a nuclear bomb on you, we win.”
When we started going into guerrilla warfare with Vietnam, we had an evolution. Special Forces became more germane and much more applicable. Look at what they do to keep us from war or to eliminate bad guys who are force multipliers in their own right. Bad guys can also be very effective, especially in guerilla warfare. When you decentralize commands, it is very hard to pick them apart.
When I was with the Marines, I served with a group called 1st ANGLICO. We get attached to Army forces. I worked with 111th, 10th Mountain, and 82nd, and flew for 160th. We delivered SEALs in the 53 Committee when I was a pilot. I worked with a lot of those guys. As a matter of fact, SEALs almost blew me up in a tactical air control scenario. A flight exercise is a real thing.
When we talk about delivering a blow, which we shouldn’t be talking about, that’s one criticism I have about sometimes what we do, like Operation Pineapple and stuff like that. You do your job but you don’t grandstand. You never let the bad guys know what you did. We’ve gotten into this habit where everybody wants to make a movie and everybody wants to glorify what they did. We’re losing our ability to surprise people because we’re talking about what we’re doing. We never used to do that.
When I was in the Marines and we were attached to some of these units and stuff like that, we weren’t allowed to talk about things we planned that we didn’t even execute. People are talking about the details of how we killed Osama bin Laden. That’s crazy. We’re making movies about it with all the details right out there. We need to be more careful.
I love our Special Forces. The amount of training we put into it, the patriotism, the courage, the tenacity, and the sacrifice that these families make. I say families because the Military is a sacrifice and it takes its toll. If you look at the divorce rates in Special Forces, it’s off the chain. I was supposed to go to JSOC right after 9/11. One of the buddies I played rugby with said, “You’re going to love it. You’ll work with the best people in the world, but you’re going to get a divorce.” Every single person he knew was getting a divorce at the time because they were gone nine months out of the year. When you’re home, you’re working long hours. That’s the sacrifice. That’s the reality.
When we hear about those guys, we need to applaud them, encourage them, and try to create some sort of stability for them. Quite frankly, when you leave that organization, it can be very unhealthy for you too. A lot of guys pull the trigger on themselves because they lose their only driving force because their family is gone. Hats off to all the Special Operators out there. They’re doing their job daily that we don’t hear about that makes the difference in very real ways.
I only have a couple of minutes left with you. I want to ask you about leadership. You served twenty years in the Military. You became a physician. You’ve had these lessons that you’ve learned that I believe create perspective. You serve in the halls of Congress. What are the lessons that you take from the Military from being a physician to Congress? How has that shaped your perspective and the way that you lead and govern?
I’ll start by saying I wish it sucked more. I say that tongue-in-cheek because we always say in the Military, “Embrace the suck.” Why do we say that? If you want to be amongst greatness, look for adversity. If you’re looking for a warm bed, hot meal, and luxury, you’re not going to be dining with greatness. Maybe success, but not greatness, in my definition. The things that make us great and the things that make us who we are successfully are the challenges we meet.
When you talk about leadership, why do the Marines make their recruiting marks and nobody else does? Why do we have more stickers on the back of Marine cars than every other service combined? Why is that? Have you ever taken a pause to think, “Why doesn’t the Army have all of that?” When you make boot camp hard or when you make life hard, people take pride in their accomplishments. When you say, “I wish it sucked more,” that’s what molds you into the next great person when you face adversity and go to the next step. That’s why Special Forces guys take such pride in what they do because it was hard to do. It’s the same thing with the challenges we have here.
The thing that disappoints me is a lot of people are into messaging instead of accomplishment. It’s motion, not progress. I want to get things done. That’s why we’re top ten in legislative efforts. You focus on those 60% issues, those A through E issues. Protecting our rights, the American dream, Border, Crime, Debt, Energy, and Education, the things that make America great, realizing you have to pick your fights. Anybody who has kids or a wife understands you have to pick your fights. It’s the same thing with the Military and the Congress.
The good book says, “Count the costs. Don’t go to war before you know how strong the other Army is. Don’t start a building before you know how much it costs.” In the government, we do the opposite sometimes and we don’t look at the consequences. The worse things are, the more you’ll develop your character and the more you’ll develop your leadership abilities.
We don’t talk about presidents who served during peaceful times. You don’t even know who they are. As a matter of fact, you can look at the peacetime we had in America by not knowing the presidents. Nobody talks about the presidents who served easy terms. The only presidents we talk about served during tumultuous times when it sucked.
Do we want war? Of course not, but you have to be ready to step up to that. That’s why we talk about wartime versus peacetime leaders. Chamberlain versus Churchill. Reagan versus Carter. No offense to Carter, but peace through strength. Not by thinking that everybody’s going to behave, but by being prepared for the worst possible consequence is leadership.
Leadership is being prepared for the worst possible consequences.
I have one last question, a quick test question. The Jedburghs in World War II had to do three things every day to be successful. They had to be able to shoot, move, and communicate. Those are core foundational tasks and habits,
It’s maneuver warfare.
The development of habits is what allows you to be successful regardless of what you do. What are the three things that you do every day in your world to be successful?
First of all, I try to read my Bible every day to keep me morally grounded. It doesn’t mean I’m perfect. It means I’m striving to seek. I try to read. I try to educate myself daily. When I told you Teddy Roosevelt is my favorite president, he read a book a day. Sometimes, it was two books a day. It was crazy how educated he was.
Spiritually, mentally, and physically, you have to be well-rounded. If you don’t do some sort of exercise or do something, you will lose your edge. You have to have a balanced life. You have to surround yourself with really good people. My success is largely due to the people I’ve surrounded me with. I’m fortunate to have the ability to choose the right people, the loyal people, and the hard workers. Be your best mentally, physically, and especially spiritually and you’ll be alright. Remember that it requires a lot of grace
and goodwill because we all make mistakes. Be willing to make peace where you can, but bring strength.
Also, earn it. One of the resounding parts of this conversation is your points on value. We value what is earned.
That’s right.
Thank you for spending some time with me. You have a busy day ahead of me. You have a new session starting here. You have a lot of work to do as we run up to the election. Good luck with your election. We hope to have you again soon.
Thanks. I appreciate you.
