Jason Chaffetz: The Government In Many Ways Is On Autopilot.
Listen Below:
Transcript:
Guy Benson: We are joined now by Jason Chaffetz, FOX News contributor, former House Oversight Committee chairman, author of a brand new book, The Puppeteers The People Who Control the People Who Control America. Jason, welcome back. Congratulations on the book.
Jason Chaffetz: Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Guy Benson: And so walk us through this. You’re making an argument that just winning elections R versus D is only part of the battle because you write that the work of government and the inner workings of government is often done by people who are sort of anonymous and aren’t necessarily elected themselves. Powerbrokers who you say are invisible or maybe just not very well known to most of the American public. They’re the ones pulling the strings, setting agendas, creating incentives and effectively writing the rules and just, you know, getting in the win column in elections is fine. But unless you have a plan to deal with that class of people, then you’re leaving a lot of the power in the hands of people who might be hostile to our ideas. Just walk us through why you decide to write the book and why you think this phenomenon, whatever you want to call it, the permanent bureaucracy, the deep state, whatever term it is. Why do you think it’s so important that people think about it?
Jason Chaffetz: Well, and I appreciate that. Listen, through my eight years in Congress, I started to realize that the majority of what we were working on had nothing to do with how the bureaucracy and the money is spent. Let me give you an example. The debt ceiling vote was about less than 10% of the federal budget. 75% of the budget is mandatory programmatic spending, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and hundreds of other programs. So we don’t talk about the servicing of the debt. We don’t talk about national defense. And consequently, this discretionary. Even if you cut 100% of discretionary, you’re still in debt. And so you have to really, truly understand who’s calling the shots, because it ain’t Joe Biden and it ain’t Kamala Harris, but it is many managers. We follow the money and we follow the the actual people behind the scenes that do this.
Guy Benson : For example, who.
Jason Chaffetz: Like Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, for instance, if you look at the S&P 500, BlackRock owns at least 5% of 98 plus percent of the S&P companies. When Joe Biden took office and they decided to replace the economic adviser in Larry Kudlow, who had a deep, rich economic background, they replaced him with Brian Deese. Brian Deese is a climate activist. His background is BlackRock. That’s where he’s from. If you look at the Democratic Treasurers Association, for instance, at the state level, they will tout that they control over $1 trillion. They literally say in their documentation, it does not matter who’s elected in the White House, it does not matter who is elected to Congress. The efforts that we’re making with ESG, DEI, and all of these other social programs, we’re the ones to actually implement them.
Guy Benson: So let’s talk more about Larry Fink. He is someone who’s familiar, I think, to folks who are really hype focused on DSG, the sort of alphabet soup of concern. I think for a lot of Americans, that’s just gibberish. It means nothing to them. The acronyms don’t really matter, but they should, especially if you’re right of center. This stuff can be quite insidious. And Larry Fink, as you mentioned, who runs BlackRock, he was just on the stage the other day talking about how they use all of this money that they help control in order to force societal changes at the corporate level. Here’s what he said. That’s getting a fair amount of attention.
(Audio Clip of Larry Fink) Cut 27 At BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors. 54% of the incoming class are women. We added four more points in terms of diverse employment this year. And it is, you know, what we are doing internally is if you don’t achieve these levels of impact, your compensation could be impacted. Okay, we’re doing the same. And so it’s just you have to force behaviors. And if you don’t force behaviors, whether it’s gender or race or just any way you want to say the composition of your team, you’re going to be impacted. And that’s not just recruiting. It is development, as Ken said. And ultimately, it’s still going to take time. But I am just as much shocked as Ken is that we have not seen more opportunities and we’re going to have to force change.
Jason Chaffetz: Yeah, he’s exactly right.
Guy Benson: Translate that for us. What’s he talking about?
Jason Chaffetz: It means that the hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions of dollars that they control and manage, they are going to use their proxy voting. If you’re an average person who’s got a retirement fund, maybe you’re a teacher in California and you’ve got a retirement fund. What you don’t realize is that your proxy vote is being used on these corporations not to get a better rate of return for your own retirement, but to implement this Green New Deal. Let me let me segue into another person here, if I could, Guy. John Podesta, I think is one of the puppeteers. John Podesta is now in control of a fund that was created by the Inflation Reduction Act. They got 370 plus billion dollars in a green slush fund that they can implement however they want. Now, when they put it up as the Green New Deal and they were going to move forward on it, no way it could pass Congress, but it doesn’t matter because they just got the bill. There are all sorts of these slush funds we detail in the book how they use the apparatus of government to manipulate these companies into having to settle. And then when they settle, guess what? That money doesn’t go back to the victims. It goes to their their company of choice. They’re not for profit of choice. That’s how they fuel this.
Guy Benson: Run by their buddies.
Jason Chaffetz: Run by their buddies. And it’s incestuous. The government is many ways, guy. It’s on autopilot. It doesn’t matter when elections swing they wanted on autopilot. And that’s that’s the scary part here.
Guy Benson: Yeah. And I think some of this ESG stuff is especially concerning because you’ve got ideologues like Larry Fink bragging. Basically they’re doing social engineering through basically financial blackmail like or extortion. You will either do these left wing things that we want and get your score from us that matters for your compensation, for your financial well-being, or you will defy us and you could put those things at risk. Why do you think a lot of people are going to do? I mean, that’s that’s clearly the the coercion, basically the ideological coercion that he’s not he’s not being sort of secretive about. He’s bragging about it openly. All right. So you mentioned Fink. You mentioned Podesta. There’s other names in the book that are not unfamiliar. These are not totally anonymous, folks. Susan Rice comes to mind. Randi Weingarten comes to mind. But nevertheless, extremely influential, powerful people who aren’t elected that are effectively making massive decisions that affect millions of Americans all the time. Maybe comment on those two figures, if you would.
Jason Chaffetz: Yeah, in the puppeteers, I talk a lot about Susan Rice and what she’s doing. The president in March after he took office, put in place executive order 14019. This directed all of government to prepare to get out the vote for their and it literally says for their approved non-government organizations. It’s interesting because there are 600 departments and agencies that submitted plans all funneled up to Susan Rice to get out the vote and do what they wanted to do. And guess what? The there was a Freedom of Information Act saying, well, what are the plans that do that? And they will not release it. It’s in the courts. Biden is fighting it. He’s claiming executive privilege. But there are 2.2 million federal employees and untold physical facilities and resources going to support get out to vote to organization. That is 98 plus percent of the donations that are made in many of these departments and agencies. They go to Democrats.
Guy Benson: Democrats.
Jason Chaffetz: Yes. And so that is that is a key one. And she just left on May 26th. But there’s a reason why she was in place in what she did. And she’s part of the Obama, you know, apparatus that is there now with with Biden. And again, she just left. But this was her role was about changing the elections that coincided with with Nancy Pelosi’s H.R. one, her most important bill, changing how we vote, who votes, how to get out the vote and how to manipulate that vote. That’s that’s what the.
Guy Benson: Recently that that failed H.R. one and Pelosi’s watch, thank goodness.
Jason Chaffetz: But their guy they got the result anyway because they were able to do this executive order.
Guy Benson: And that’s through the back door with Susan Rice, who was perhaps most famous or exploded onto the scene with her famous full Ginsburg tour on Sunday morning shows lying about Benghazi, which, of course, you remember very well from your time in the House Oversight Committee. Before I talk about the Oversight committee just a little bit more quickly, Randi Weingarten, I think a lot of our listeners are familiar with her and her machinations and her influence, but it’s too important to just let it slide by.
Jason Chaffetz: She’s the head of one of the major, uh, unions out there for teachers. She controls about $300 million a year and at her disposal through some good work with Peter Schweitzer’s group. In the analysis, we are able to do through the Government Accountability Institute, which I’m associated with, we are able to find that they have totally morphed in their political operations. It was much more about getting out the vote, getting out against Trump, everything they hated about Trump, much less about, Hey, this is what we need to do to improve teachers lives. They have morphed into a political organization. We also have a little bit of a scandal. This thing about how she spent $3 million with some of Hunter Biden’s former associates at Rosemont Seneca, in order to get what ended up being counterfeit PPE, you know, the personal protective equipment. So we tell that story in the book as well.
Guy Benson: And the book is called The Puppeteer Is Jason. Briefly, let’s put on that oversight committee chairman hat. You’re watching what’s happening with one of your successors in that role, Congressman and Chairman Comer. He’s in this battle with the FBI and Christopher Wray. It seemed like they came to a detente briefly. And then we had this episode yesterday where they went in to look at this document. They wanted to and apparently it’s not compliant with the subpoena. So now it’s back to the whole the movement towards a contempt filing and a contempt vote upcoming. What’s going on here? Is Comer playing this well? What do you think?
Jason Chaffetz: He’s playing it exactly right. I think the key here is it’s an unclassified it’s not a classified document. He has every right to subpoena and they should cough it up. And over the last two weeks, the FBI has gone from denial of its existence to, oh, goodness. Oh, here, have a look. I think what will change before the end of the week, if I had to just guess, is that they’re going to allow all the members to view it, but that they won’t actually cough it up. That may be enough to pull them back from actually holding him in contempt. But I’m telling you that the non-classified document duly issued a subpoena on a case they say is gone. It they comer’s doing it exactly right. They’re over the.
Guy Benson: What and what’s the point here? Like, why is this document so controversial? Why can’t they just release it? I saw some some reporting that they’re worried that a confidential source could be in danger or whistleblower’s life could be in danger if too many people see this. What’s going on?
Jason Chaffetz: No. Look, the reason that you know, there are over the target is the FBI desperately doesn’t want people to see it. There’s no reason why you can’t redact the name. Nobody’s trying to get the actual name out of them. The concern is that the FBI has had this and that they did nothing with it. The reason we know there’s a very specific document is because a whistleblower went to Senator Grassley and said this is in existence very specified. Here’s the document, here’s the date, here’s what it says. He went to go inquire about it. And guess what? It is actually there it is for real. But I think the Department of Justice and the FBI is going to be terribly embarrassed that they did nothing to actually pursue it, contrasted with what they did with Trump. No information. And then they they went while they they spent millions of dollars pursuing that.
Guy Benson: Yeah, the whole Russia matter. And what we’re talking about here is this document at least purporting to show some implication involving the current president, Joe Biden, in a multimillion dollar bribery scheme. We don’t know how serious the evidence is or not, but apparently the FBI had some of it and did nothing with it. That’s the allegation. That’s the source of all this consternation around this potential contempt vote. And I guess we’ll see where it goes. I would like to see that evidence. Jason Chaffetz, our guest here on the show, his brand new book is The Puppeteers, The People Who Control the People Who Control America. It’s out now. Jason, good luck with the book. Thanks for joining us.
Jason Chaffetz: Thank you.
